The Sessions (***1/4)

The most notable thing about this small drama isn’t that the main character (John Hawkes) is severely handicapped, but that it so sensitively captures sexual inexperience from a male perspective.

That the story comes from a magazine article called “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate,” published by poet Mark O’Brien, explains the judiciously narrow focus of the movie. That its writer-director, Ben Lewin, whose primary credits are 1980s and 1990s Australian features, has captured O’Brien’s experience so ably may also have to do with Lewin’s having had, like O’Brien, childhood polio, though with less severe consequences.

In O’Brien’s case, the effect of the polio was virtual paralysis; yet, unlike a paralyzed person, he retained feeling throughout his body. One almost expects a handicapped character on screen to be feisty, as in My Left Foot, or cantankerous, like Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman. Perhaps the contrast between the boldness of personality and the physical passivity is appealing. But O’Brien has a gentle personality; he’s reluctant to fire his caretaker, who’s competent, but unpleasant.

Hawkes, who plays this gentle man, is clearly one who is really able to embody striking different characters. If I hadn’t seen the name, I’d have failed to recognize him from his creepy turns in Winter’s Bone and Marcy May Martha Marlene. As the surrogate, Helen Hunt has her best role since 1997’s As Good As It Gets; while she does not have the obvious acting challenge of playing a handicapped person, she embodies the matter-of-fact attitude and comfort level with nudity and sexuality that such a person would need to have.

It is in providing a kind of intimacy, not merely sex, that differentiates the surrogate from a prostitute, and this is best thought of as a movie about intimacy as well as sex. The disability and physical limitations are certainly presented, but Lewin underplays the tragic aspects of O’Brien’s existence. His unusual friendship with a priest (William H. Macy), with whom he has frank discussions that test the boundaries of traditional church teachings, is a frequent source of humor throughout the movie. The achievement of this movie is not to make O’Brien into an inspirational figure, but to make him seem normal.

IMDb link

viewed 10/3/12 7:30 at Ritz east [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/3–4/12

For a Good Time, Call… (***)

Being the story of women who start a phone-sex service, this has cheesy exploitation flick written all over it, but was a nice surprise. Actually, it resembles nothing so much as a romantic comedy about platonic friends. To be sure, there is actual romance in the story, but the main relationship is between the two women, one of whom is played by Lauren Miller, one of the two women who wrote the screenplay. The other one, Katie Anne Naylon, is the one with actual phone-sex experience, which explains both the attention to detail—the need for a second person to handle billing, for example—and the the reason the plot centers around a now-waning business.

Miller is the nice girl, and Ari Graynor the party girl she’s hated since college, but then their gay pal (Justin Long) sets them up…as roommates, and they need money, this being New York, and the apartment being surprisingly large, and so…. You expect sex jokes here, and there are, but the tone is salacious, not smutty. The callers, a couple of whom may be recognizable from other films, are the subjects of humor, as you might expect, but not the objects of ridicule. In fact, the whole thing has a good-natured sex-positive tone that I liked. An encounter with a disapproving religious conservative is one of the funnier parts of the movie. To be sure, there is no deep meaning here, and the climax, if I may use that word, is a strained parody of a real romantic comedy ending. But real comedy is here, too.

IMDb link

viewed 8/29/12 7:30 pm at Rave University 6 and reviewed 9/6/12

Turn Me On, Dammit (***1/4)

Movies about horny teen boys are legion in Hollywood, but the subject of teen female sexuality (and, to an extent, female sexuality in general) seems the province of Europeans. Provincial Alma (Helene Bergsholm), nearly 16, narrates this Norwegian comedy. Here’s mountains, here's meadows, she says; here’s her dull town that could be a small town anywhere with mountains and meadows. Alma lives with her mother, fantasizes about a boy, and sometimes calls a phone sex line to aid her fantasies.

If there is any common theme among tales of sexual awakening, it’s humiliation; in this case, a sexual matter makes Alma the undeserved object of ridicule among her classmates. Frank but not crude, this adaptation of a novel succeeds with deadpan wit and the palpable awkwardness and longing of many an adolescent.

IMDb link

viewed 10/30/11 7:50 pm at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/31/11

Margaret (****)

I suppose fans of HBO’s True Blood, or at least of Anna Paquin being in it, should be happy this sat on the shelf so long before getting a little-publicized release. The actress had had a few good roles since winning her Oscar in 1993, but not too many leads as a young adult. But I think had this come out around 2005, when it was filmed, it’s easy to imagine she would have been deluged with film roles that might have kept her off the small screen. The film also partly answers the question of what filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan, whose other movie was 2000’s terrific You Can Count on Me, has been up to since Gangs of New York (2002), on which he is one of the credited screenwriters.

Given its novelistic sweep—it has just one main character, Paquin’s, and takes place over only a few months, yet there is a lot of stuff stuffed into the film, which clocks in at 160 minutes—I’d want to ask Lonergan several questions if I could. But if I were to pick one, I’d be tempted to ask about one two-second shot in particular. This is after Paquin’s character—Lisa, not Margaret—a Manhattan high school student, tells a young man who’s called her that she isn’t in the mood to talk. Lonergan then cuts away to the suitor, who’s shown breaking down in tears. He’s a minor character who plays no part in the rest of the story. Maybe it’s only there to show what sort of boy she’s rejected. Or maybe it’s there because quite a lot of the film is about how people react to other people. But I kind of think it’s there because Lonergan wants to show us everything. This may have had something to do with why it took so long to finish the film.

If I were to tell you what the movie is about, I would say it’s about this young woman whose chance flirtation with a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) leads to a tragic accident. Yet it’s also about her relationship with her divorced parents (she plans to visit her father in California), her classmates (the Jewish Lisa and a Muslim classmate clash over foreign policy in history class), a teacher (Matt Damon), and a woman she encounters as a result of the tragedy. Mired in editing problems for years, the released version has been criticized for being messy, and it is.

IMDB link

viewed 10/19/11 at Ritz East and reviewed 10/19/11

Submarine (***1/2)

An affecting coming-of-age story set in Wales. The hero is teenage Oliver Tate, who like many an unpopular boy imagines himself the hero of his own movies. His object of affection (Yasmin Paige) is chosen, he tells us, for her own modest unpopularity, which makes her possibly attainable. She’s not the nerdy kind kind of unpopular but the edgy kind. They have a charmingly odd romance that involves lighting small fires and such, but, in the manner of many a teenage boy, it barely occurs to Oliver that there may be tender feelings behind her cool exterior. And so he hides his, which prominently involve worrying about his parents’ low-functioning marriage. The quiet, odd father is played by Noah Taylor, who long ago starred as the same character in a pair of equally good coming-of-age stories, The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting. The mother is always-good Sally Hawkins.

While maintaining humor throughout, director Richard Ayoade (adapting a Joe Dunthorne novel) evokes the drama of teenage existence with particularity as to character and setting (although the time, probably in the near past, is vague) and universality as to the feelings.

IMDB link

viewed 6/6/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/17/11

Easy A (***)

For those who loved the high school comedies of the 1980s and '90s comes an homage so sincere that the heroine tells us how she’d like her life to be like one. The archetypical—though not always optimal—high school movie stars college-age actors and revolves somehow around the themes of popularity and sexual awakening. The plot often turns on a main character undergoing some kind of drastic change that usually only characters in high school comedies undergo. Olive (Emma Stone), an unusually smart, virginal girl, undergoes a drastic change, but mostly insofar as her reputation is concerned. Perhaps reassuring to those who’ve paid too much attention to articles about teen “sexting,” being “easy” (for a girl) is still the source of shame in the age of social media, at least at Olive’s middle class California high school, which means there’s some tricky knot-tying to be done, script-wise, so as to have Olive embracing the literal scarlet letter (see the title) she wears. It does not make her popular, especially with the Christian youth group in the school whose snotty leader (Amanda Bynes, heroine of many a high school movie) functions as the stock villain.

Nothing about the plot or theme, including the romantic ending you can see coming an hour away, makes the movie stand above similar movies. While the Hester Prynne allusions and the silly youth group suggest a condemnation of intolerance, in other ways—like part where the youth group leader absurdly becomes buddies with Olive — the film muddies whether the other students are wrong to judge her or just wrong to believe the rumors. Apparently, as in all other teen movies, the moral is—spoiler alert (sort of)—“how shitty it feels to be an outcast.” Has Olive learned nothing from those old teen comedies?

No, what elevates the movie to slightly above average is that Olive has, and Stone gives her, a bit more personality, or maybe reality, than most similar characters. Meaning, partly, that she’s realistically brainy and genuinely witty, which is good since the plot overly relies on her narration. I also particularly liked Olive’s scenes with her teacher (Thomas Hayden Church) and her (non-dorky!) parents, played by and Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci. Their hip-couple banter is amusing without making them into caricatures of ultraliberal parenting. I say amusing; the humor is mild. “Remember to cross ‘watch The Bucket List’ off our bucket list,” is one of the funnier lines. Well, it was funny to me.

IMDB link

viewed 12/10/11 on DVD [Netflix] and reviewed 12/10/11

Youth in Revolt (***1/4)

Michael Cera plays Nick, not the Nick he played in Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist, but another in a series of virgin boys (see Arrested Development, Juno, Superbad) in this adaptation of C.D. Payne’s coming-of-age novel. Saddled with a loser-dating mom (Jean Smart) and a meek personality, Nick meets Sheeni (Portia Doubleday) on a holiday and is smitten. Screenwriter Gustin Nash (Charlie Bartlett) use a shared love of foreign film directors (he, Fellini; she, Goddard) and classic vocalists (he, Sinatra; she, Serge Gainesbourg) as an easy shorthand to depict their right-for-each-otherness. It’s one thing to have a 16-year-old be into Goddard’s Breathless (1960) and quite another for her to assume, upon first meeting Nick, that he’s heard of it, let alone seen it. But the movie is short and not about the falling in love; it doesn’t really have time to get far into its characters’ shared love of turntables and middle-20th-century culture, nor whether they are truly meant to be for all time. No, it is about the special impediments to the progress of young love, and how Nick overcomes them.

To surmount these obstacles, Nick imagines himself, as bold, devil-may-care François, who appeals to Sheeni’s love of French things, notably the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. Perhaps Nick is inspired by Play It Again, Sam, in which the imagined ghost of Humphrey Bogart inspires Woody Allen. The Nick-as-François bits account for only a few minutes of screen time, but do at least demonstrate Cera’s ability to play something other than the one-step-above-nerdy guy. Oh, and they’re funny. Lying and other misbehavior ensue.

IMDB link

viewed 1/5/10 at UA Main Street Manayunk (PFS screening)

Dare (**3/4)

An ego-shattering dressing down sets good girl Alexa (Emmy Rossum) to a do-it-yourself refurbishing that has repercussions for her loner pal Ben (Ashley Springer) and bad boy Johnny (Zach Gilford). Alan Cumming has a brief but memorable role as the sharp-tongued acting coach who tells Alexa, a prim high school senior in a posh Philadelphia suburb, that she can’t be great without having taken any risks in life. Her initial steps at doing so are somewhat comical and involve changing clothes, but that gives way to taking them off along with Johnny, who hadn’t previously noticed her. Ben gets jealous, though not in the way you might think. While Ben and Alexa are sexually inexperienced, Johnny is more emotionally inexperienced, and Dare is about these characters prodding each other into sexual and emotional entanglements for which they haven’t prepared. They surprised me too, so I won’t give much away.

Dare, expanded from a 2005 short, provocatively explores its themes, but is somewhat forced in its plotting. The events, particularly jock Johnny's transformation into sensitive new age guy, would be more believable if they weren’t compressed into an extremely short time span. Dare is a promising, lively first feature for its writer, David Brind, and director, Adam Salky, but would have been better if its dramatic conflict seemed to spring organically from the plot rather than the latter having, seemingly, been created to fit the former.

IMDB link

viewed 10/17/09 at Prince (Philadelphia Film Festival screening) and reviewed 12/4/09

The New Year Parade (***)

If you live in Philadelphia, where this drama is set, you know the parade in question is the Mummers Parade, where large string bands compete every year for prizes and prestige. Covering the twelve months in between the 2004 and 2005 parades, this somber feature debut by writer-director Tom Quinn looks at a parental breakup from the viewpoint of a musician and his teenage sister. Quinn makes a virtue of a low budget by shooting in a naturalistic style and making good use of South Philly location shooting. The actors, especially leads Greg Lyons and Jennifer-Lynn Welsh, match the low-key vibe. What the movie lacks in terms of fancy plotting it makes up for in authenticity and empathy for the characters, and although the fact that the father and son are members of a string band is not the only focus, it provides an element of novelty.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/5/09

Tetro (**3/4)

Right from the getgo, this movie gets your attention with black-and-white credits that look like something out of the French new wave. Only it takes place in Buenos Aires. Not what you expect from Francis Ford Coppola, the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, to say nothing of the 1996 Robin Williams dramedy Jack. Vincent Gallo, who once wrote, directed, and starred in the very entertaining Buffalo ’66 (as well as 2003’s notorious Brown Bunny), returns from near oblivion to star as the would-of-been writer sought out by a teenager (Alden Ehrenreich) looking for his brother. But the writer—now an underemployed lighting technician—wants nothing to do with any of his family, especially the father, a genius conductor played by Klaus Maria Brandauer in color flashbacks. (Coppola’s own father was conductor/composer Carmine Coppola.)

After 1997’s The Rainmaker, Coppola made no movies until 2007’s less-commercial Youth Without Youth, and this one is clearly also directed toward an art-house crowd. Even so, what starts out as a small sort of movie with three characters—the third being the live-in girlfriend, who insists on taking in the teenager—develops into a full-scale melodrama, complete with a scenery-chewing Ehrenreich nearly burning down an auditorium. Despite this, or maybe because of it, the big family-history revelations don’t pack the emotional punch intended. But the variation in moods, including light comedy at times, and the cinematic sweep of the end is not without its charms. It could be worth a look for those looking for something different.

IMDB link

viewed 7/1/09 at Ritz East (Landmark Theatres screening) and reviewed 7/9/09