Blancanieves (***1/4)

Did seeing The Artist make you wish for another black-and-white homage to silent film? Look no further than this Spanish effort. Where The Artist tweaks silent-film conventions, this one plays it just about straight. Though still playful, if not quite comedic, at times, it’s mostly an old-fashioned melodrama, beginning with twin tragedies, continuing with a wicked stepmother, and winding up with (mostly) good-natured dwarves. As the title‘s translation suggests, it’s infused with fairy-tale elements…and bullfighting.

The key character, the long-suffering Carmen, is played by the appealing Sofía Oria as a girl and by Macarena García as a young woman. (Maribel Verdú, of Y tu mamá también and Pan’s Labyrinth, has a prominent role. This kind of slightly unreal story, set in the 1920s, is the perfect kind of story for a silent film. It’s didn’t grab me as immediately as The Artist (though in time), but it was almost as lovely to look at, with scenes set in a lush mansion, enormous arenas, and the open landscape. The score by Alfonso de Vilallonga is tremendously varied and truly carries the film along, and the ending, while not to every taste, is slightly mysterious, mostly surprising, and entirely fitting.

IMDb link

viewed at Ritz 5 7:35 pm 5/8/13 and reviewed 5/8/13

The Artist (***3/4)

As a child, one favorite of mine was Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie (1976), a nearly silent movie about a latter-day effort to make a silent movie. In its opening, this irresistible effort from Michel Hazanavicius — who’s French — goes Brooks one better in the movie-within-a-movie department by being a silent movie set at the gala Hollywood premiere of a silent movie whose star, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, star of Hazanavicius’s OSS 117 spy spoofs), is both onscreen and backstage. Hazanavicius has great fun confusing what’s happening with what’s on screen. Valentin’s accidental encounter with a young female fan, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), sparks her Star Is Born-style ascent as the sound era dawns. That revolution, which doomed many a real career, creates irony and pathos as Valentin (whose name recalls silent star Rudolph Valentino) resists adaptation and Miller embraces the change, the irony being that we, the audience, can’t hear her voice.

Far from being ponderous, Hazanavicius’s film playfully relies on our collective storehouse of Hollywood tropes to both celebrate and satirize movie history. The lack of audible dialogue creates humor that only works in that context, where imagination supplies what is missing. As does music. Even people who rarely notice a film’s soundtrack might notice its heightened importance here, and Ludovic Bource’s score gorgeously sets the mood, though it’s more representative of the early sound era, especially when it cops Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo theme for the climax. While never abandoning the comic overtones, Hazanavicius reminds us of how, even in its earliest days, cinema had the power to move us in ways different from earlier media.

IMDB link

viewed 10/27/11 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 12/22/11

Broken Embraces (***1/4)

Pedro Almodóvar continues to give melodrama a good name with this sometimes lighthearted effort that also pays tribute to his love of cinema. I could have sworn that Harry Caine (Lluís Homar, of Almodóvar’s Bad Education), the name of the blind main character, was taken from an old Hitchcock movie. It’s not, but is a pseudonym explained, along with the blindness, in flashback scenes that form the bulk of the movie. Penelopé Cruz (in her fourth film for Almodóvar) appears as the mistress of a powerful older man who’s financing a film with her in the lead and with Caine (aka Mateo Blanco) as director. Blanca Portillo, who appeared with Cruz in Almodóvar’s most recent film, Volver, plays Harry/Mateo’s agent and confidant. Danger and duplicity fuel the unfolding mystery, about which saying more would detract.

Almodóvar’s recent films radiate a kind of joy even when the situation is melancholy. It’s as if by giving voice to his characters’ emotionality he is celebrating humanity. In this case there is also the joy in moviemaking. He has seemingly stopped making full-on comedies—the film-within-a-film here operating as a sort of tribute to the old Pedro—but humor makes its way into this story too, as well as jealousy, romance, regret, and redemption. Balancing the dark themes, it’s figuratively and literally colorful. Broken Embraces isn’t particularly deep, but Almodóvar has a vivid way with his characters and stories, whose only formula seems particular to their creator.

IMDB link

viewed 1/23/10 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 2/7–3/1/10

Bobby (**1/4)

? Writer-director Emilio Estevez’s long-in-the-making labor of love features an all-star ensemble cast playing fictional characters who all wind up in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968, when Senator Robert F. Kennedy is shot to death following the California primary.

+ Without critiquing each of the half dozen or so storylines, I’d say that the two most noteworthy performances and/or characters are delivered by Sharon Stone, as an understanding hairdresser, and Lindsey Lohan, whose character is about to marry a young man (Elijah Wood) she doesn’t know all that well so that he can avoid going to Vietnam. Where an ensemble piece like this could easily descend into hokey melodrama, this is more like a slice-of-life film. For the doorman played by Anthony Hopkins, the day is mostly another occasion to play chess with an old friend (Harry Belafonte). For the boozy nightclub star played by Demi Moore, it’s another night of arguing with her manager/husband. Some of the storylines do intersect in unexpected ways.

- This is kind of like a highfalutin’ version of one of those disaster movies where we meet a bunch of characters, then twenty minutes later their cruise ship turns over or something and we get to watch them interact and try to save themselves. Only in this case, the beginning part is the whole movie and the disaster comes at the end, and then the movie just stops. Interspersed with the fictional events are historic footage of Kennedy, and the end is a montage of photographs of RFK at various ages, many also including JFK and Ted Kennedy. (This montage elicited a small cheer from the preview audience when I saw this.) If it hadn’t been for these insertions and the last ten minutes, the movie mostly could have almost as easily been set the day Martin Luther King was assassinated, or, for that matter, the day the Beatles released the White Album. It’s not that I think Estevez executed his idea poorly. It’s more like that, having watched this movie, the idea seems half-baked in the first place. Unless the storylines were truly going to be tied in to its ostensible main subject, then it just comes off as a cheap ploy to invest the story with significance. The only historical fact I learned from this movie was that the same day as the primary, Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale was trying to extend his historic streak of shutout innings. This provides the story for one character, a kitchen worker who has tickets to the game but is asked to work a double shift.

= **1/4 Maybe it’s just that I would have liked to actually see a movie about RFK himself, who would surely make a worthwhile subject for a feature film, but my impression was of some watchable moments adding up to less than their sum.

IMDb link

viewed at PFS screening

Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion (**3/4)

Perry’s comic “mad black housewife” returns, but mixed in with a romance and melodrama involving two of her nieces. The plot is trite but the characters are pretty good.

Madea was the title character of the critically lambasted but popular Diary of a Mad Black Housewife. As played by writer-director Perry in drag, she’s the same sort of comical character as Momma in the Big Momma’s House movies, except without an alter ego. She’s feisty but supposedly wise, although her solution to most problems seems to involve whacking somebody upside the head. But she—and her elderly brother, also played by Perry—are only in about a third of the movie. The other two thirds are taken up by her nieces, and these stories are straight soap opera, for better and worse. There’s the younger daughter (Rochelle Aytes), afraid to escape a fiancé (Blair Underwood) who beats her, and her older sister (a convincing Lisa Arrindell Anderson), afraid to believe that the ridiculously handsome bus driver who asks her out could be a nice guy.

The mixture of pathos and very broad comedy is mildly jarring. Judging by the guffaws I heard during the Madea parts, I probably thought a little less of the humor than some. The plotting is ordinary. But there were some interesting things, things you don’t see too often in typical movies. (Read: movies where white people have speaking parts.) For example, you probably don’t see an older woman beating a child’s behind, not played for laughs, anyway. You don’t see the romantic lead tell his date that he’s a Christian, or her telling him she’s staying celibate until marriage (and meaning it). You don’t see Cicely Tyson make an interminably weird speech about how the young’uns have forgotten family and black men need to be strong. Finally, you don’t get to see what must be the tackiest wedding since the Britney Spears-Jason Alexander Vegas quickie.

IMDb link

posted 9/11/13

Memoirs of a Geisha (***)

With softly lit sensuality, this beautiful version of Arthur Golden’s novel outlines the place and function, only partly sexual, of the geisha in Japanese culture and builds a decent plot around their conflicting desires, jealousies, and fears.

I’d kind of expected this adaptation of Arthur Golden’s novel to play on the stereotype of a stoic, selfless Asian, with the heroine bravely rebelling and trying to assert her individualism against a conformist culture. Happily, it’s not so. Directed by Chicago’s Rob Marshall, it replaces that film’s kinetics and quick cutting with softly lit sensuality, set to a quiet John Williams score. It begins with the tale of a girl sold by her father, and the people she came to know as her new family in prewar Kyoto. Zhang Ziyi plays the girl as an adult; her Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon costar, Michelle Yeoh, plays a mentor, and China’s biggest star, Gong Li, a nemesis. Though missing the ritualistic detail of the book, the film outlines the place and function, only partly sexual, of the geisha in Japanese culture. While the people in the story are not particularly deep, they are more than types, and they are different. Their conflicting desires, jealousies, and fears are the basis of the plot. You may not even notice that this plot is built around the thin edifice of a single meeting of a girl and a man (Ken Watanabe).

IMDb link

circulated via email 12/29/05 and posted online 9/20/13