The Woman in the Septic Tank (***)

The first ten minutes tell the story of a slum dweller who, unable to feed her seven children, sells one to a pedophile. Comedy gold! Actually, as the narration (“scene 36,” “Mila looks confused” and so on) makes us aware, these are characters invented by middle-class hipsters who think such poverty porn will be awards bait at Cannes, maybe even the Oscars. I should mention this all happens in the Phillipines.

The rest of the film follows the two guys making the film and their female assistant as they drive to  meet their potential lead actress (Eugene Domingo, playing herself as well as “Mila”) and scout locations around a notorious dump. Meanwhile, they debate casting, whether making the unfortunate sold child a boy would be edgier (and thus more likely to earn awards), and so on. We see the same story rerun with a different cast and in different styles — docudrama, weepy melodrama, even a musical, with pretty good songs. Ms. Domingo’s explanation of the “three styles of acting” is a highlight.

This is 87 minutes of lightly satirical fluff, especially enjoyable if you like movies. Even if it’s it in the service of comedy, all the storytelling variations gives a real perspective into fimmaking. I also enjoyed hearing the way the characters fluidly elided between English and Filipino. But everything else about this, a big hit at home, is a reminder that film is a universal language.

IMDb link

viewed 10/28/2012 at Ritz Bourse [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/28/2012

My Week with Marylin (***)

In 1956, the 30-year-old Marilyn Monroe traveled to England. Then at the height of her stardom, she was there with her newest husband, Arthur Miller, to make a romantic comedy with Laurence Olivier, later released as The Prince and the Showgirl. Like Me and Orson Welles, this adaptation of diaries by Colin Clark is about a big star seen through the eyes of a young showbiz aspirant. But Welles was never uncertain of his own gifts, whereas Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams), at least as portrayed here, was confident in her stardom, but not of anything else. Welles tries the patience of his acting company with his arrogance, Monroe with her insecurity. She arrives late on the set and flubs her lines. Olivier (Kenneth Branagh), who’s directing the film, cannot hide his impatience, whereas young Colin (Eddie Redmayne), hired as a third assistant director but actually a gofer, can’t hide his infatuation. Her acting coach, Paula Strasberg, is there to prop up her confidence and further irritate Olivier.

Both Williams and Branagh are credible, which is especially good in Williams’s case because, without seeing Monroe as a star, one might simply see her as childlike and immature. Olivier is inclined to the latter view, though he recognizes her onscreen presence. As Colin puts it, Olivier is a great actor who longs to be a movie star, and Monroe is a star who longs to be an actor. Both have dramatic personalities that make this a pleasant, though minor, film.

IMDB link

viewed 10/29/11 at Prince Music Theater [Philadelphia Film Society screening] and reviewed 10/29/11

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (***)

If you know someone’s trying to exploit you, are you still being exploited? That’s the question Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) asks of both himself and the audience in this, his third documentary feature. Spurlock’s thing is to make movies that are about both a serious topic and himself. Or, to explore what one marketing consultant describes as his “mindful” side and his “playful” side, both at once. This worked best in Super Size Me, which told us, or reminded us, how bad fast food was for you while depicting what would happen to someone—himself—who ate nothing else for a month. Applied to a weightier subject, like terrorism and world piece, the approach made for the amusing but shallow Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?

Here, Spurlock has found a subject—product placement—that’s explored in the very process of making the movie. Essentially, the movie is the director going around seeking sponsors for the movie, right up to the one million dollars for the above-the-title sponsor, whose name I haven’t included in my review, but the clever conceit of naming rights, as so many sports teams have discovered, is that it makes even the unpaid media, even the general public, participants in the marketing process. Very clever, just like the way Spurlock works in references to and examples of his sponsor’s products even as he interviews people like Ralph Nader delivering a counter message. We the audience are in on the joke, and it’s funny, but does this excuse the fact that Spurlock is nonetheless delivering a corporate message to a captive audience?

Besides Nader, Spurlock has a few other experts and celebrities, even Noam Chomsky, to offer their takes on the ethics of product placement. He indulges his playful side by making a running gag of a shampoo whose gimmick is that it’s intended to be used on both horses and humans. My preference would have been for a little more on the “mindful” side of the equation. Surely there must be some actual research into the efficacy of product placement versus other forms of advertising, or the effects of advertising on our product choices generally.

Spurlock does tell us that $412 billion gets spent in the United States on ads and marketing each year, and it’s fair to wonder what we as a society get for it, and how it changes our preferences. I think we’d be much better off without most advertising, and at least one metropolis has made a small experiment in that direction. Peripheral to the theme of product placement as it may be, perhaps the most fascinating part of the film for me was the side trip to São Paulo, a city of ten million where all outdoor ads have been banned. Does anyone really miss them?

IMDB link

viewed 4/20/11 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/20 and 4/21/11 and 4/24/11

Waking Sleeping Beauty (***)

The young adults who grew up on Disney films like The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, and Toy Story may not realize that there was a time when it looked like the animation studio founded by the late Walt was threatening to fade into irrelevance. Movies like The Fox and the Hound (1981) scarcely seemed on par with classics like Snow White and held little appeal outside the youngest viewers. An attempt at something darker, The Black Cauldron (1985), alienated that same demographic and lost money. This documentary unearths vintage footage from the period after that to tell the story of the Disney Animation Studio’s renaissance. In this period, the studio expanded its output, moved into the computer animation that now dominates, and released several of the most successful animated films of all time.

IMDB link

viewed 3/31/10 at Prince Music Theater [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/30/10

Nine (**3/4)

A look at the principal cast—Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Sophia Loren, Kate Hudson, and Fergie—might lead one to suspect that the title refers to how many Oscars they’ve collectively received, but that number is actually seven. (The late Anthony Mingella, who co-wrote the script, won one as a director.) The title is a play on 8½, the classic Federico Fellini film adapted first into an Italian play, then a 1982 Tony-winning musical with songs by Maury Yeston. There are a dozen songs, including three new ones by Yeston.

It took me ten minutes to recall that it was Day-Lewis in the role of Guido Contini, a great Italian director modeled on Fellini, and not some Italian actor. (He speaks English, like everyone else, but with an accent that even comes through when he sings.) Contini is a vastly popular figure who has, however, had a couple of recent flops and can’t come up with a story for his newest film, despite the fact that pre-production is already well under way. Cotillard has the second largest role as his sweet, cheated-upon wife. Writer’s block is the storyline, but the theme is all of the women in Contini’s life: his mother (Loren), his mistress (Cruz), his leading lady (Kidman), his costume designer (Dench), his childhood object of lust (Fergie), and an American journalist (Hudson). All of them appear in the first musical production, a fantasy sequence involving a bevy of skimpily clad women on what’s supposed to be a film set.

Nine follows the sci-fi films 9 and District 9 into theaters in ’09. It would be unfair and too easy to say that Nine is “by the numbers,” but the storyline feels overfamiliar, or at least the infidelity theme does. It is more correct to say that the film is “for the (musical) numbers,” which are elaborately staged and surprisingly well sung by the actors, who are generally not known for singing. Of course, Fergie is the exception, and belts out “Be Italian” with fervor. Yeston’s songs are wordy rather than clever or elegant, but are very descriptive of the storyline. A couple of them stuck in my head. All in all, though it might be obvious to say, this is a movie for lovers of big, fancily costumed musical production numbers. I am not such a person, but I still loved director Rob Marshall’s previous musical adaptation, Chicago. That was, in a way, just as much about moviemaking as this, since it was really a parody of a gangster movie, and the clever songs worked well with that kind of storytelling. Here the mixture of frothy production and serious themes tends to underscore how little is actually being said.

IMDB link

viewed 12/26/09 at Ritz East and reviewed 1/2/1o

Tropic Thunder (***)

Compared to the year’s other action parody, there are pluses and minuses. Pineapple Express was a stoner comedy-thriller that evolved into almost a straight action movie. Tropic Thunder keeps a fairly even balance between action and comedy all along. Neither of those genres tend to emphasize character, so unlike Express the roles are all pretty flat. You don’t care much about them, not the egotistical star (Stiller), the drug-addicted Eddie Murphy-Dom DeLuise hybrid (Black), or even the Method-acting, blackface-wearing, Richard Roundtree-channeling Aussie (a sensational Robert Downey Jr.). But they’re often funny, and the movie ends before it runs out of things to make fun of.

Watching Downey’s character explain to Stiller’s why his movie Simple Jack failed was a highlight.

IMDB link

viewed 2/25/09 on DVD

For Your Consideration (***1/2)

? Christopher Guest, creator of the mockumentaries Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and Waiting for Guffman, parodies the movie industry along with his frequent acting collaborators such as Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Jennifer Coolidge, Parker Posey, Harry Shearer, Bob Balaban, etc. The plot revolves around a group of actors who excitedly react when their little independent film starts to generate Oscar buzz. Along the way, the characters poke fun at the insecurities of actors, the celebrity culture, the Hollywood publicity machine, commerce-minded studio execs, film critics, and so on. This isn’t a mockumentary, but used a similar process of improvising dialogue. (Guest and Levy share the writing credit.)

+ Even though this movie isn’t a great departure from previous Guest films, I think somehow all the fictional titles and documentary trappings in the other films somehow pointed up the artificiality of the gimmick. Although I’d kind of liked Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, there was a preciosity that detracted from my responding to the actors as real characters. In this case, that issue wasn’t there, plus everything being mocked is familiar to anyone who’s ever picked up a copy of People or Entertainment Weekly or watched Entertainment Tonight. ET gets a fairly direct skewering, with Fred Willard and Jane Lynch as the celebrity-whore co-hosts. As in Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, Willard is the most over-the-top character, but his role as idiotic TV interviewer seems like only a mild exaggeration and fits right into the story. Worth the price of admission are the scenes of Home for Purim, the movie-within-a-movie that the characters are supposed to be filming. The movie is a World War II melodrama about a long-estranged daughter finally returning to her Southern small town for the holiday, only the holiday is a lesser-known Jewish holiday rather than, say Christmas, and the daughter has turned out to be a lesbian. It’s probably even funnier for people from a Jewish background, who will get the reference to kreplach and the Yiddish bits, but the scenes really work because of the way they mix the clichéd plot and dialogue with the less familiar elements.

- Even though the plot is about the Oscar race, there’s no parody of an actual awards show, or any reference to all of the other awards (Golden Globes, New York Film Critics, etc.) that proliferate at year’s end. Seems like a missed opportunity. The end of the movie’s a bit lackluster.

= ***1/2 Fans of Guest’s other films will definitely want to see this one. For those who haven’t seen them, this is as good an entry point as any. While I mostly chuckled to myself at Best in Show and Mighty Wind, I laughed aloud at this one.

IMDb link

This Film Is Not Yet Rated (***1/4)

 ? Ever wonder about how movies get rated? This documentary looks at the process from start to finish. Filmmaker Kirby Dick submitted his own film and even hired a private detective to learn about the somewhat secret process employed by the Motion Picture Association of America. In addition to decrying this secrecy, Dick makes several specific criticisms of the MPAA ratings. He argues that, when deciding between an R rating and the box-office-poison NC-17 (or an R and a PG-13), independent films are treated more harshly than studio films, gay sex more harshly than straight sex, female sexuality more harshly than male sexuality, and sexual content more harshly than violence. Film clips and interviews help make these points. The interviewees include directors such as John Waters, Kimberly Pierce (Boys Don’t Cry), and Trey Parker (South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut).

+ The movie pretty easily proves its points. Parker, for example, notes that the MPAA refused to tell him how to cut his independent film Orgazmo to avoid an NC-17 rating, but was willing to do so for the studio-made South Park. Even more interesting is the look at sexuality on film. Implicitly, the subject is not only the ratings system, but morality. Why are more films rated NC-17 for sexual content than violence? Even as American movies have become more violent over the last few decades, serious depictions of sexuality have probably decreased (even as comic portrayals, such as in the American Pie movies, proliferate).

- The significant portion of the movie devoted to the detective and her attempts to learn the identity of the MPAA ratings board members is not uninteresting, yet adds little to the arguments made in the rest of the movie. Some of that time might be better spent looking at the one element it somewhat neglects: the audience. For all I sympathized with Dick and the filmmakers he interviewed, I couldn’t help but continue to think that, for the most part, the rating system does reflect the values and beliefs of a majority of the public. The point is implicitly acknowledged a couple of times in the movie. It’s never made sense to me that parents would worry more about nudity and sexuality than violence, but it seems that they do. And is anyone surprised that gay sex would be seen as more objectionable than straight sex?

= ***1/4 Recommended not only for anyone interested cinema as art, or in censorship issues, but for people interested in the ways society projects its values.

IMDB link

viewed at PFS screening

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (**)

A farcical “making of” documentary about the nonexistent movie version of a classic novel. Star Steve Coogan is likeable and often funny, but the concept quickly wears thin.

This movie bears a bit of explaining. The short version is, it’s a fake “making of” documentary about a movie that wasn’t actually made. We see parts of that movie, an adaptation of the “unfilmable” 18th-century (real) literary classic The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. In these scenes, Steve Coogan plays the title character (and his father). Like his counterpart in the novel, Coogan as Shandy narrates his own life. In one funny bit, he disparages the performance of the child actor playing his younger self. But for most of the movie, Coogan plays Coogan. Should you see this film, it will help you to know that in the UK he is well known for playing a fake TV talk-show host called Alan Partridge who has real guests (akin to Martin Short’s Jiminy Glick). Here he’s a fake Steve Coogan in a real movie. (An Alan Partridge movie looms on the horizon.) Other people, such as Yank Gillian Anderson, play themselves too in the mockumentary portion, but others don’t. For instance, Kelly McDonald, as the mother of Coogan’s child, is called Jenny. This all sounds very clever, and it is, even if the funniest scene echoes There’s Something About Mary. If this sounds like your thing, I shouldn’t dissuade you from seeing it. But whenever I saw Coogan acting pompous on screen, I was reminded that it was actually Coogan modestly poking fun at himself, and pretty soon, for me, the lack of a real storyline wore thin.

IMDb link