Rock and roll is full of legendary figures who flamed out young, victims of their own success. This is one such (fictional) story, but told from the viewpoint of the girlfriend left behind. Elly (Toni Collette), left with only a cryptic note, has had ten years to wonder whether Matthew Smith jumped off a bridge (the prevailing theory) or simply disappeared (hers). She’s stayed at the same job, writing barely read stories about little-known musicians for a Seattle magazine in the Rolling Stone mode. To keep that job, she agrees to try to find Smith and write a story about it.
The resulting film is a mixture of road movie, comedy, romance, and character-driven drama, and most of that works pretty well. The love interest and charm is provided by actor-musician Ryan Eggold (The Blacklist). Thomas Haden Church, playing a wealthy eccentric that Elly once dated, supplies much of the comedy and road-trip repartee. An example of his eccentricities is his habitual drink order, a “clean glass,” a bottle of water, and a whole lime. Another is his broad distaste for music.
Smith, who has left behind one album (curiously, Elly has an LP, not a CD of it) beloved by a large cult, is the empty hole that Elly’s life, and the story, centers around. And we do, more or less, find out what happened to him, but you’ll know way ahead of time that this is one of those journey-not-the-destination kind of stories. It’s a very pleasant journey indeed with Collette and her costars, but the climax is still a bit underwhelming. When a movie is structured like a mystery, it’d be nice if we actually cared more about that mystery and found its solution satisfying.
IMDb link
viewed 6/27/14 6:30 pm at Roxy and posted 6/28/14
Showing posts with label writer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writer. Show all posts
Friday, June 27, 2014
Friday, January 17, 2014
The Invisible Woman (**3/4)
I had great expectations for this story of Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes) and his mistress, Ellen Ternan (Felicity Jones), but found it stiff and formal. Ternan, an aspiring actress, was just 18 when she met the 45-year-old Dickens; he cast her in a play he had co-written, in Manchester. She was still living with her mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) and two sisters, while he was celebrity across the English-speaking world. It was 1857.
The film, with a script by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady, Shame) and directed by Fiennes, takes its inspiration from the book of the same name by Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin. Fiennes uses a flashback structure to contrast the 1883 Ternan, by then married and directing children in a Dickens play in seaside Margate, and the earlier version. It doesn’t help that Jones, though a fine actress, looks pretty close to the same age in both sets of scenes.
Mainly though, the relationship at the heart of the story seems relatively passionless except when the two characters are talking about his work, of which she had been a devoted reader. The film could use more establishing scenes and dialogue between the principals, more lust, and fewer pregnant pauses and lingering shots of domestic scenes. A music score might have been used more effectively to underscore the unspoken feelings. It is understandable that a young woman would be awed by a handsome, charming man whom she revered, understandable that he would be attracted to a pretty 18-year-old, but it’s not always apparent. The husband-wife relationship is clearer. Mrs. Dickens was a nice woman without an intellectual connection to her husband. I appreciated the way the film was sympathetic to all of its characters, but in some ways it makes them seem bloodless.
IMDb link
viewed 1/23/14 7:05 pm at Ritz Bourse; posted 1/23/14
The film, with a script by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady, Shame) and directed by Fiennes, takes its inspiration from the book of the same name by Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin. Fiennes uses a flashback structure to contrast the 1883 Ternan, by then married and directing children in a Dickens play in seaside Margate, and the earlier version. It doesn’t help that Jones, though a fine actress, looks pretty close to the same age in both sets of scenes.
Mainly though, the relationship at the heart of the story seems relatively passionless except when the two characters are talking about his work, of which she had been a devoted reader. The film could use more establishing scenes and dialogue between the principals, more lust, and fewer pregnant pauses and lingering shots of domestic scenes. A music score might have been used more effectively to underscore the unspoken feelings. It is understandable that a young woman would be awed by a handsome, charming man whom she revered, understandable that he would be attracted to a pretty 18-year-old, but it’s not always apparent. The husband-wife relationship is clearer. Mrs. Dickens was a nice woman without an intellectual connection to her husband. I appreciated the way the film was sympathetic to all of its characters, but in some ways it makes them seem bloodless.
IMDb link
viewed 1/23/14 7:05 pm at Ritz Bourse; posted 1/23/14
Friday, January 10, 2014
Her (**3/4)
The premise of Her — man falls in love with operating system — is both intriguing and goofy. Written and directed by Spike Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are), it uses a nominally sci-fi premise to explore the meaning of love. In its vision of the near future, not unlike the present day, everyone walks around talking into electronic devices. Also, men get divorced and are lonely, like cubicle jockey Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), who composes, and dictates to a computer, apparently heartfelt letters that others pass off as their own. (One imagines the reactions of widows realizing that their monosyllabic husband’s exquisite love letters were the words of another.)
Twombly walks out of the office dictating to a cute little device that made me think of a foldable mirror that might be kept in a purse, but in this case reads emails to him. But a new operating system, simply called OS1, has been invented that will interact with you as never before. It comes with paper directions and, in what seems like whimsy in a movie that is not whimsical, asks Theodore a few random-seeming questions, then emerges with the voice of Scarlett Johansson, naming herself (itself?) Samantha, just because she (it?) likes the name. (OS1 gives you the choice of a male or female voice, but not a gender-ambiguous one.)
What this reminded me of before I saw it was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which also explored love and identity with a nominally sci-fi premise. However, where that movie was funny and kinetic, this movie is deliberate and earnest. It is occasionally funny, but not often. Once, during a sex scene, it is unintentionally funny. Virtually so, anyway. At other times, it’s the cinematic equivalent of listening to other people’s love letters, like the ones Theodore invents. The sincerity can be almost cloying at times.
It’s not that I mind a serious or even somber movie, but a lighter tone might have helped sell me on the idea that a human would not mind the absence of a body, or that an artificial intelligence that thinks fast enough to read hundreds of books in seconds would not be bored by a human. The latter point is, in fact, addressed eventually, and Jonze certainly does make you think about what it means to love, about loneliness, and about how we will interact with our computers in the future. This is mostly about the first two questions, using Twombly as the experiment. The other significant characters in the film are his soon-to-be ex-wife (Rooney Mara) and his office friend (Amy Adams), so there is only a glimpse of a vision of what true artificial intelligence might mean for society. I can see the reason for the movie’s acclaim; it has a depth to it, and a stylistic unity. But, I still liked Robot & Frank better.
IMDb link
viewed 2/6/14 6:55 pm at AMC Cherry Hill; posted 2/9/14
Twombly walks out of the office dictating to a cute little device that made me think of a foldable mirror that might be kept in a purse, but in this case reads emails to him. But a new operating system, simply called OS1, has been invented that will interact with you as never before. It comes with paper directions and, in what seems like whimsy in a movie that is not whimsical, asks Theodore a few random-seeming questions, then emerges with the voice of Scarlett Johansson, naming herself (itself?) Samantha, just because she (it?) likes the name. (OS1 gives you the choice of a male or female voice, but not a gender-ambiguous one.)
What this reminded me of before I saw it was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which also explored love and identity with a nominally sci-fi premise. However, where that movie was funny and kinetic, this movie is deliberate and earnest. It is occasionally funny, but not often. Once, during a sex scene, it is unintentionally funny. Virtually so, anyway. At other times, it’s the cinematic equivalent of listening to other people’s love letters, like the ones Theodore invents. The sincerity can be almost cloying at times.
It’s not that I mind a serious or even somber movie, but a lighter tone might have helped sell me on the idea that a human would not mind the absence of a body, or that an artificial intelligence that thinks fast enough to read hundreds of books in seconds would not be bored by a human. The latter point is, in fact, addressed eventually, and Jonze certainly does make you think about what it means to love, about loneliness, and about how we will interact with our computers in the future. This is mostly about the first two questions, using Twombly as the experiment. The other significant characters in the film are his soon-to-be ex-wife (Rooney Mara) and his office friend (Amy Adams), so there is only a glimpse of a vision of what true artificial intelligence might mean for society. I can see the reason for the movie’s acclaim; it has a depth to it, and a stylistic unity. But, I still liked Robot & Frank better.
IMDb link
viewed 2/6/14 6:55 pm at AMC Cherry Hill; posted 2/9/14
Friday, December 20, 2013
Saving Mr. Banks (***1/4)
The name Disney conjures up beloved images for children everywhere, and for many of their parents. Yet the terms Disneyfication and Disneyization)
are generally pejoratives, used, as Wikipedia puts it, to “describe
the processes of stripping a real place or event of its
original character and repackaging it in a sanitized format. References
to anything negative are removed, and the facts are watered down with
the intent of making the subject more pleasant and easily grasped.” This
usage post-dates the death of Walt Disney himself, and so would not
have been used by P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson). But surely the words
describe what she feared would be done to her Mary Poppins novels, which
Disney (Tom Hanks) was keen to adapt into a musical.
As played by Thompson, Travers is the embodiment of the term “no-nonsense,” or possibly rude. In an early scene, Travers tells her London solicitor that she does not like being treated like a “neonate,” and Thompson is among the actresses who can most credibly utter such a phrase. However, the solicitor points out that her royalty checks may not be enough to maintain her comfortable home, and so, against instinct, she agrees to work with Disney, who had pursued the rights to her work for two decades. So anxious is he to make the movie that she is allowed script approval, providing her with a gigantic bargaining chip. In a boon to her future biographer, she insists on recording her sessions with screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and songwriting brothers Robert and Richard Sherman (B.J. Novak, Jason Schwartzman).
Battles over matters great (would the film be a musical?) and small (would the titular Mr. Banks character have a mustache?) provide the drama, and some comedy. For the pathos, interspersed with the 1961 Hollywood sequences are several sequences set in 1906–1907 Australia, with Colin Farrell as the doting father of the future author. Left out is virtually everything in between. I’m not crazy about facile links between adult behavior and indelible childhood circumstances. The script seems to imply that adult Mrs. Travers can’t abide the sight of pears simply because she associates them with an unpleasant memory over 50 years earlier, which seems false to me, but to its credit it’s usually less heavy-handed. Still, the most entertaining sequences are the ones that pit the proper Mrs. Travers (a running thread is the her annoyance at being called “Pamela”) against Disney, the writers, her gregarious driver (Paul Giamatti), and the occasional airline employee.
It’s perhaps ironic that what Travers feared would happen to her greatest character would happen to her as well. In reality, though indeed a spinster, she was a woman of many enthusiasms beyond tea, the only one she appears to admit to in this film. What art owes to history is another debate, and knowing that Travers adopted a twin (refusing to take his brother), a fact obliquely referenced in the film, does not alter its quality one way or the other. However, a film about a curmudgeon who finally succumbs to the charms of a cartoon mouse is a different film than one about a complicated woman who so rues her Hollywood experience that she never allows a sequel. Saving Mr. Banks is the first kind of film, but makes enough nods to being the second type that it does not seem sickly sweet. To paraphrase a song made famous by the film, it merely provides a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.
IMDb link
viewed 12/24/13 7:30 pm at Roxy; posted 12/26/13
As played by Thompson, Travers is the embodiment of the term “no-nonsense,” or possibly rude. In an early scene, Travers tells her London solicitor that she does not like being treated like a “neonate,” and Thompson is among the actresses who can most credibly utter such a phrase. However, the solicitor points out that her royalty checks may not be enough to maintain her comfortable home, and so, against instinct, she agrees to work with Disney, who had pursued the rights to her work for two decades. So anxious is he to make the movie that she is allowed script approval, providing her with a gigantic bargaining chip. In a boon to her future biographer, she insists on recording her sessions with screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and songwriting brothers Robert and Richard Sherman (B.J. Novak, Jason Schwartzman).
Battles over matters great (would the film be a musical?) and small (would the titular Mr. Banks character have a mustache?) provide the drama, and some comedy. For the pathos, interspersed with the 1961 Hollywood sequences are several sequences set in 1906–1907 Australia, with Colin Farrell as the doting father of the future author. Left out is virtually everything in between. I’m not crazy about facile links between adult behavior and indelible childhood circumstances. The script seems to imply that adult Mrs. Travers can’t abide the sight of pears simply because she associates them with an unpleasant memory over 50 years earlier, which seems false to me, but to its credit it’s usually less heavy-handed. Still, the most entertaining sequences are the ones that pit the proper Mrs. Travers (a running thread is the her annoyance at being called “Pamela”) against Disney, the writers, her gregarious driver (Paul Giamatti), and the occasional airline employee.
It’s perhaps ironic that what Travers feared would happen to her greatest character would happen to her as well. In reality, though indeed a spinster, she was a woman of many enthusiasms beyond tea, the only one she appears to admit to in this film. What art owes to history is another debate, and knowing that Travers adopted a twin (refusing to take his brother), a fact obliquely referenced in the film, does not alter its quality one way or the other. However, a film about a curmudgeon who finally succumbs to the charms of a cartoon mouse is a different film than one about a complicated woman who so rues her Hollywood experience that she never allows a sequel. Saving Mr. Banks is the first kind of film, but makes enough nods to being the second type that it does not seem sickly sweet. To paraphrase a song made famous by the film, it merely provides a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.
IMDb link
viewed 12/24/13 7:30 pm at Roxy; posted 12/26/13
Friday, November 29, 2013
The Great Beauty (**)
“A feast for the eyes” (or senses) and “a love letter to Rome” are the two obvious accolades that came to mind as I watched this lengthy Italian drama, and, sure enough, a Google search revealed both phrases as frequently used descriptors. They’re phrases one might well use on a thinly plotted mood piece such as this, were one trying to compliment it. Or one might compare its auteur, Paolo Sorrentino, to his revered countryman, Federico Fellini. In any case, Sorrentino has a flair for the visually arresting. Whether in long shots of singing nuns in ancient edifices or dizzying close-ups of dancers in a club, as in two lengthy opening sequences, he gives you the sense of being a voyeur. In more than one scene, characters intently watch others for the simple delight of observing. And that is what this film is like.
At the center of all this is Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), who at 65 is undergoing a self reevaluation. The author of one acclaimed novel in his younger days, he’s made his living since then with celebrity interviews and profiles of weird performance artists. Lots of scenes open with incongruous shots of, say, a nude woman hitting her head against a wall. Jeff himself is a voyeur by both profession and inclination. As to why he has never written another novel, he says it’s because he like to party too much. Not married, he spends his days as a younger man Mike, hanging out in clubs, picking up much younger women, sleeping late, and so on. In the course of several days, he does all of this, has off-kilter conversations with his housekeeper, and meets with old friends.
Parts of this film grabbed me, as when Jep forces his interview subject, the naked head-banger, to explain her meaningless. But this is a self-contained scene; it exemplifies the sometimes brutally candid approach to life but is not a significant plot point. After a succession of such disconnected segments, the movie began to seem long. Also, I don’t necessarily mind a weird movie, or one that mixes in some fantasy sequences, but this movie at times has a kind of studied weirdness that put me off. An example is when Jep gets into an elevator and asks the man next to him about his suit, but the man says nothing. In another segment, Jep delivers a sermon on proper funeral etiquette while watching his love interest try on dresses in the distance. Maybe he’s talking to her, maybe to the audience, maybe to himself, but this seemed odd for the sake of oddness. We are all voyeurs when we watch movies, hoping to see some version of truth, and this movie struck me as a version of something else.
IMDb link
viewed 1/15/14 7:30 at Ritz Bourse; posted 1/20/14
At the center of all this is Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), who at 65 is undergoing a self reevaluation. The author of one acclaimed novel in his younger days, he’s made his living since then with celebrity interviews and profiles of weird performance artists. Lots of scenes open with incongruous shots of, say, a nude woman hitting her head against a wall. Jeff himself is a voyeur by both profession and inclination. As to why he has never written another novel, he says it’s because he like to party too much. Not married, he spends his days as a younger man Mike, hanging out in clubs, picking up much younger women, sleeping late, and so on. In the course of several days, he does all of this, has off-kilter conversations with his housekeeper, and meets with old friends.
Parts of this film grabbed me, as when Jep forces his interview subject, the naked head-banger, to explain her meaningless. But this is a self-contained scene; it exemplifies the sometimes brutally candid approach to life but is not a significant plot point. After a succession of such disconnected segments, the movie began to seem long. Also, I don’t necessarily mind a weird movie, or one that mixes in some fantasy sequences, but this movie at times has a kind of studied weirdness that put me off. An example is when Jep gets into an elevator and asks the man next to him about his suit, but the man says nothing. In another segment, Jep delivers a sermon on proper funeral etiquette while watching his love interest try on dresses in the distance. Maybe he’s talking to her, maybe to the audience, maybe to himself, but this seemed odd for the sake of oddness. We are all voyeurs when we watch movies, hoping to see some version of truth, and this movie struck me as a version of something else.
IMDb link
viewed 1/15/14 7:30 at Ritz Bourse; posted 1/20/14
Friday, November 8, 2013
Kill Your Darlings (***)
Daniel Radcliffe has already played a number of non-Harry Potter roles, and his role as beat poet Allen Ginsberg should further assure that he won’t be typecast. I quickly forgot about wizards as I watched him essay the role of the Jewish, Paterson, New Jersey-reared Ginsberg, off to Columbia University to discover his literary talents and his rebellious side. There, during the war years, he meets Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), an impetus for both the creative and destructive impulses. And, possibly, a murderer. The killing in question may be known to those who know about Ginsberg (and, if you don’t, I suspect you won’t be seeking out this film) and is revealed at the start of the film, though not the victim, or the reason.
The first half of the film is jazzy, like beat poetry. In one scene, Carr and Ginsberg seem to magically stop time in a club. Director John Krokidas employs a lot of montage scenes to suggest the magical haze that enveloped the two young men. In some scenes, William Burroughs (Ben Foster) appears, weird and druggy, years before his own infamous involvement in a killing. Later, they hang out with a new friend named Jack who’s at Columbia on a football scholarship. This of course turns out to be Jack Kerouac, who’s been at sea but not, as yet, on the road. They pull pranks. They invent a new artistic movement (called “new vision” the term “beat” yet to be coined) before producing any significant work. Young Allen learns of the older man (Michael C. Hall) who has been pursuing Carr, and discovers his own sexuality. Late in the film, Ginsberg calls Carr a “phony,” but that was my own impression immediately. So I found him an annoying, pretentious character—no fault of DeHaan—and was happy when the film reached the more heavily plotted stage in which there is betrayal, heartbreak, and the killing. Allen has to decide whether to help his friend, who’s been arrested.
This well-acted drama is for those curious about the birth of a movement, or for those who like to be reminded that the men (women being bit players in this movie) who create the future were once unformed young persons playing at being adults.
IMDb link
viewed 11/13/13 7:25 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 11/13/13 and revised 11/14/13
The first half of the film is jazzy, like beat poetry. In one scene, Carr and Ginsberg seem to magically stop time in a club. Director John Krokidas employs a lot of montage scenes to suggest the magical haze that enveloped the two young men. In some scenes, William Burroughs (Ben Foster) appears, weird and druggy, years before his own infamous involvement in a killing. Later, they hang out with a new friend named Jack who’s at Columbia on a football scholarship. This of course turns out to be Jack Kerouac, who’s been at sea but not, as yet, on the road. They pull pranks. They invent a new artistic movement (called “new vision” the term “beat” yet to be coined) before producing any significant work. Young Allen learns of the older man (Michael C. Hall) who has been pursuing Carr, and discovers his own sexuality. Late in the film, Ginsberg calls Carr a “phony,” but that was my own impression immediately. So I found him an annoying, pretentious character—no fault of DeHaan—and was happy when the film reached the more heavily plotted stage in which there is betrayal, heartbreak, and the killing. Allen has to decide whether to help his friend, who’s been arrested.
This well-acted drama is for those curious about the birth of a movement, or for those who like to be reminded that the men (women being bit players in this movie) who create the future were once unformed young persons playing at being adults.
IMDb link
viewed 11/13/13 7:25 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 11/13/13 and revised 11/14/13
Friday, June 7, 2013
Before Midnight (***1/4)
Among 2004’s least likely sequels was Before Sunset, a nine-years-later reuniting of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), the couple who shared one intense night together in Vienna in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. The ending of that movie — spoiler! — left it ambiguous as to whether the couple would stay together. Right on schedule, nine more years having passed, this movie tells us that what we wanted to happen did. (Incidentally, having seen the other two is not a prerequisite to this
film, which deftly fills in the relevant details. The screenplay is
credited to Linklater as well as the two leads)
There are, more or less, four acts. First is the car ride, after Jesse, a writer, leaves his
son at the airport. We quickly learn that that the son lives in Chicago
with his mother, that Jesse and his ex have a bad relationship, and that
the airport is in Greece, where Jesse and
Celine continue vacationing with their twin daughters, who are conveniently
sleeping for most of part one, leaving their parents to chat. Just like the other installments, the movie is all talk, little action, so they chat a lot. They live in Paris, so Jesse laments that he can only see his son in summer. Is he just feeling guilty, or guilt tripping Celine?
The difference between the first two movies is that, even when Jesse and Celine disagreed, the discussion was hypothetical, philosophical. Act two, in which they discuss love and sex with the literary types they’re staying with, is much in this mode. Act three finds the couple exploring (so, some nice scenery of ancient ruins and architecture), but mostly talking, including the light-yet-heavy subject of whether they would be attracted to each other if they’d just met.
The minor spat of the beginning becomes the seed of the more intense final act, which is most different from anything in the other two movies, just as the idealization of a brief encounter is different from a relationship. I didn’t mind that, and in fact liked the last part best, having been a little anxious for the discussion to get where it was going before that. However, I did think that I might have preferred that the couple’s disagreement be of the sort that could be blamed equally on either party. In fact, I think most people will think one is more at fault.
In any case. this installment lacks the fairy tale quality of the other films. But it has the same verisimilitude that makes these people seem like a real couple, though Hawke’s edgy vibe is different from Delpy’s cool one. So, I’m marking my calendar for 2022, in case Linklater and his two leads decide that Celine and Jesse aren’t done talking.
Friday, October 12, 2012
Seven Psychopaths (***)
I am pretty sure of this: Like the alcoholic and aspiring screenwriter played by Colin Farrell, Martin McDonagh, the writer-director of this comedy, came up with the title first. The fictional screenwriter has only a couple of ideas, like one about a Buddhist psychopath, but he also has the advantage of a helpfully nutty friend (Sam Rockwell) and some real-life events to inspire him. Whereas McDonagh, I think, largely made all this stuff up, which shows he has quite an imagination, but also that much of what passes here strains credulity.
As with In Bruges, McDonagh’s previous effort, or even more so, I felt too aware of the attempts at cleverness, though possibly I laughed more anyway. The Ferrell character dreams of creating a movie about psychopaths that’s nonetheless “life-affirming,” and so does McDonagh, I imagine, even though he’s mostly trying to be funny. The story largely revolves around a dognapping ring. Rockwell’s character is caught up in it, and so is another one played by Christopher Walken. Their dognappers’ victims include one of the psychopaths, played by Woody Harrelson. Harrelson’s character doesn’t hestitate to prey on the weak, or to pretend to kill someone just for a gag, but his quest is the return of his beloved dog, Bonnie, for whom his heart melts. So there’s the life-affirming part.
McDonagh does some of the same mixing of creative plotting, oddball characters, and arch dialogue that Quentin Tarantino employs with much less visible patchwork. Nonetheless, it would be difficult to have such colorful actors as Harrelson, Rockwell, and Walken in the same movie and have it be forgettable, or humorless. And, in fact, McDonagh meets his own challenge by coming up with an original conclusion, or a couple of them, actually, that’s dramatically satisfying, though “life-affirming” would be stretching things.
As with In Bruges, McDonagh’s previous effort, or even more so, I felt too aware of the attempts at cleverness, though possibly I laughed more anyway. The Ferrell character dreams of creating a movie about psychopaths that’s nonetheless “life-affirming,” and so does McDonagh, I imagine, even though he’s mostly trying to be funny. The story largely revolves around a dognapping ring. Rockwell’s character is caught up in it, and so is another one played by Christopher Walken. Their dognappers’ victims include one of the psychopaths, played by Woody Harrelson. Harrelson’s character doesn’t hestitate to prey on the weak, or to pretend to kill someone just for a gag, but his quest is the return of his beloved dog, Bonnie, for whom his heart melts. So there’s the life-affirming part.
McDonagh does some of the same mixing of creative plotting, oddball characters, and arch dialogue that Quentin Tarantino employs with much less visible patchwork. Nonetheless, it would be difficult to have such colorful actors as Harrelson, Rockwell, and Walken in the same movie and have it be forgettable, or humorless. And, in fact, McDonagh meets his own challenge by coming up with an original conclusion, or a couple of them, actually, that’s dramatically satisfying, though “life-affirming” would be stretching things.
viewed 10/4/12 7:30 at Rave University City and reviewed 10/5-12/12
Sinister (**1/2)
A decent start to this one from Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose). The familiar element: a family moving into an old house, where a writer (Ethan Hawke) hopes to be able to finish his latest true crime novel. His wife (Juliet Rylance) is supportive in one scene and threatens to leave him in the next. But it’s the unfamiliar element, a batch of home movies with murders on them, that makes him a little crazy. (Which sorts of fits the movie into the batch of recent horror films involving found footage, camcorders, and/or otherwise crude-looking visuals.) And the way he keeps hearing noises, noises his wife and young children never seem to hear.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I have trouble suspending my disbelief when it comes to horror movies. To my mind, if your movie involves the supernatural, keep the supernatural elements to a minimum. So, where I lost interest was where the symbols expert (Vincent D’Onofrio) came on to explain some ancient mythology I never heard of and what it means. To me this is just lazy screenwriting because it lets you explain anything. (I think one reason people like vampire and zombie films is because there are known rules for these beings.) I won’t give away the twist, but the explanation for it pretty much amounts to, well, because it’s pretty creepy.
IMDb link
viewed 10/9/12 7:30 [PFS screening] at Ritz East and reviewed 10/10–12/12
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I have trouble suspending my disbelief when it comes to horror movies. To my mind, if your movie involves the supernatural, keep the supernatural elements to a minimum. So, where I lost interest was where the symbols expert (Vincent D’Onofrio) came on to explain some ancient mythology I never heard of and what it means. To me this is just lazy screenwriting because it lets you explain anything. (I think one reason people like vampire and zombie films is because there are known rules for these beings.) I won’t give away the twist, but the explanation for it pretty much amounts to, well, because it’s pretty creepy.
IMDb link
viewed 10/9/12 7:30 [PFS screening] at Ritz East and reviewed 10/10–12/12
Friday, August 3, 2012
Ruby Sparks (**3/4)
Pity the artist who falls in love with his own creation. This is another take on the Greek Pygmalion myth, which inspired George Bernard Shaw. The artist in this case is Calvin (Paul Dano), a one-hit-wonder novelist with lots of acolytes, but no friends unless you count his dog (prominently featured), his brother (a wry Chris Messina), and his shrink (Elliott Gould). I’d thought maybe the writer’s block plot was inspired by the attempts of the film’s directors, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, to follow up their six-year-old hit, Little Miss Sunshine (whose zany tone is no guide to this). But no, it’s a first screenplay by the doll-faced lead actress, Zoe Kazan; her eponymous character springs fully formed (well, almost) from Calvin’s imagination, just as he wrote her, and, after the expected how-did-this-happen-is-she-real-am-I-crazy machinations made-to-order girlfriend.
Somewhat funny in predictable ways, the movie takes awhile to get to the more interesting part, where Calvin gets to a dark place and realizes he cannot have the perfect girlfriend when he himself is a narcissistic child. Compare a movie like Adaptation for a more original, twisted take on writer’s block. (Although, as plots about blocked writers whose stories come true go, it certainly beats the hell out of Alex & Emma, which succeeded only in convincing me that the main character was a hack.) Barring that, it would’ve been fun for Kazan to write more bizarre character transformations for herself. All Calvin has to do is type it, and Ruby becomes it, which is too much power for anyone, but Calvin’s a little too nice to truly exploit this plot point. Still, it’s fun when he/Kazan does. Not a gem, this Ruby, but a reasonable first effort for its 28-year-old screenwriter.
viewed 7/9/12 7:30 pm at Ritz East [PFS Screening with directors and stars in attendance] and reviewed 7/9/12
Somewhat funny in predictable ways, the movie takes awhile to get to the more interesting part, where Calvin gets to a dark place and realizes he cannot have the perfect girlfriend when he himself is a narcissistic child. Compare a movie like Adaptation for a more original, twisted take on writer’s block. (Although, as plots about blocked writers whose stories come true go, it certainly beats the hell out of Alex & Emma, which succeeded only in convincing me that the main character was a hack.) Barring that, it would’ve been fun for Kazan to write more bizarre character transformations for herself. All Calvin has to do is type it, and Ruby becomes it, which is too much power for anyone, but Calvin’s a little too nice to truly exploit this plot point. Still, it’s fun when he/Kazan does. Not a gem, this Ruby, but a reasonable first effort for its 28-year-old screenwriter.
viewed 7/9/12 7:30 pm at Ritz East [PFS Screening with directors and stars in attendance] and reviewed 7/9/12
Friday, June 3, 2011
Midnight in Paris (***)
Peripatetic in old age, Woody Allen has made a romantic comedy Europe’s most fabled romantic city. But it’s the past, specifically the 1920s, that Gil (Owen Wilson) romanticizes. Engaged to a modern girl (Rachel McAdams), he’s writing a novel about a nostalgia shop, hoping to wean himself from his lucrative Hollywood screenwriting career. But his vacation becomes a very literal nostalgia trip when he’s transported, again literally, to the era of Cole Porter, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Porter’s performance (or that of the actor playing Porter) of his own composition “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” and other clues suggest that it is 1929.
Despite the highbrow trappings, what this is really like is Woody’s version of all of those body-switching comedies that appear every so often. Gil stays in the same body, but experiences a different time. He learns, more or less, the same lessons, though. Of course, it helps to enjoy the movie if you have any affinity for the famous figures of old, and particularly if you can remember such slightly lesser lights as the filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Woody doesn’t work hard to set up the premise, and I have no idea how authentic the portrayals are. It doesn’t matter; they’re just there to be amusing celebrities, like all of the folks Tom Hanks runs into in Forrest Gump.
Forrest Gump had an emotional arc to it too, though, whereas this stays strictly on the light side. It is far less deep than Hanks’s own body-switching comedy, Big. It succeeds by virtue of a cute premise, not the paint-by-numbers execution of the premise. Even before Gil meets a sweet 1920s artist “groupie” played by Marion Cotillard—Gil’s use of the term “groupie” confuses her— it’s obvious that he and the fiancée are a lousy couple. Gil himself is an amalgamation of the ornery characters Allen used to play and the boyish ones Wilson usually does. Otherwise Allen sticks with the sort of upper-middle-class and wealthy, sometimes pompous, intellectual characters who populate most of his recent films. Allen does do one clever thing with the time-travel premise. He nicely indulges his love of early jazz in the soundtrack. And he lovingly depicts the city of Paris, especially lovely, as Gil would argue, in the rain, notably in a long, loving montage that sets the mood during the opening credits. Classy fluff, this one.
viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/22/11
Despite the highbrow trappings, what this is really like is Woody’s version of all of those body-switching comedies that appear every so often. Gil stays in the same body, but experiences a different time. He learns, more or less, the same lessons, though. Of course, it helps to enjoy the movie if you have any affinity for the famous figures of old, and particularly if you can remember such slightly lesser lights as the filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Woody doesn’t work hard to set up the premise, and I have no idea how authentic the portrayals are. It doesn’t matter; they’re just there to be amusing celebrities, like all of the folks Tom Hanks runs into in Forrest Gump.
Forrest Gump had an emotional arc to it too, though, whereas this stays strictly on the light side. It is far less deep than Hanks’s own body-switching comedy, Big. It succeeds by virtue of a cute premise, not the paint-by-numbers execution of the premise. Even before Gil meets a sweet 1920s artist “groupie” played by Marion Cotillard—Gil’s use of the term “groupie” confuses her— it’s obvious that he and the fiancée are a lousy couple. Gil himself is an amalgamation of the ornery characters Allen used to play and the boyish ones Wilson usually does. Otherwise Allen sticks with the sort of upper-middle-class and wealthy, sometimes pompous, intellectual characters who populate most of his recent films. Allen does do one clever thing with the time-travel premise. He nicely indulges his love of early jazz in the soundtrack. And he lovingly depicts the city of Paris, especially lovely, as Gil would argue, in the rain, notably in a long, loving montage that sets the mood during the opening credits. Classy fluff, this one.
viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/22/11
Friday, April 1, 2011
Certified Copy (**1/4)
The minimalist Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami uses his first feature shot outside his home country to examine the meaning of “original” in art. One of the two main characters has written a book questioning why we want art to be original at all. If we like a painting, why does it matter if it is a duplicate? Discuss. And off we go as the English author (opera singer William Shimell) spends an afternoon with a French antiques dealer (Juliette Binoche), in Italy. The woman has a young son, who in one of the earliest scenes badgers his mother for french fries and generally tries to push her buttons as they sit down for a bite. Their conversation exhibits a playfulness nearly absent from the rest of the movie, which, plotwise, simply involves a man and a woman driving through Tuscany to a quaint town, walking, sitting, and, above all, talking.
Unlike many of Kiarostami’s other films, it isn’t quiet and contemplative. Binoche flutters effortlessly between French, Italian, and English, while Shimell has an easier time, as the author doesn’t speak Italian. Despite the location shooting, even the scenery takes a back seat to the dialogue. While they drive through the countryside, Kiarostami has the camera focused on the windshield with the lines on the road reflected between their faces, a metaphorical dividing line made literal.
The discussion of art flows into the personal, but in an abstract way. The last, I don’t know, 40 minutes of the movie are an extended extrapolation of a mildly amusing segment in which a café owner misunderstands the relationship between the two. This goes on far past the point where it would seem natural. Anyway, if you want to watch a couple of people have a pretend argument for half an hour, this may be your film. Maybe it’s a real argument along with the pretense, but it doesn’t matter. There is nothing that explains why these near-strangers who don’t seem to be having a good time together keep at it. If I were either one, I would’ve gotten in the car and driven back. Any movie is a pretense of reality, but this never lets you forget it.
IMDB link
viewed 10/16/10 at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/16?/10
Unlike many of Kiarostami’s other films, it isn’t quiet and contemplative. Binoche flutters effortlessly between French, Italian, and English, while Shimell has an easier time, as the author doesn’t speak Italian. Despite the location shooting, even the scenery takes a back seat to the dialogue. While they drive through the countryside, Kiarostami has the camera focused on the windshield with the lines on the road reflected between their faces, a metaphorical dividing line made literal.
The discussion of art flows into the personal, but in an abstract way. The last, I don’t know, 40 minutes of the movie are an extended extrapolation of a mildly amusing segment in which a café owner misunderstands the relationship between the two. This goes on far past the point where it would seem natural. Anyway, if you want to watch a couple of people have a pretend argument for half an hour, this may be your film. Maybe it’s a real argument along with the pretense, but it doesn’t matter. There is nothing that explains why these near-strangers who don’t seem to be having a good time together keep at it. If I were either one, I would’ve gotten in the car and driven back. Any movie is a pretense of reality, but this never lets you forget it.
IMDB link
viewed 10/16/10 at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/16?/10
Friday, November 5, 2010
Tamara Drewe (***)
A small-town setting is a good way to bring together a collection of characters, and a newcomer is usually the best way to stir up some plot among them. Tamara is that character, a duckling-turned-swan journalist who’s returned to the English village where she unhappily grew up. A good Cinderella story is nearly irresistible, and irresistible is what Tamara (Gemma Arterton) has become since her recent nose job. Tamara is not so much the lead character as the one around whom all of the action revolves, though she’s a nice role for Atherton, recently the female lead in Prince of Persia. This particular village is a writer’s colony, currently populated by a pompous, adulterous mystery novelist (Christopher Hitchens lookalike Roger Allam) and his wife, an American with writer’s block, a pair of mischievous teen girls, and the guy who dumped the teenage Tamara. Soon enough, there’s a rock drummer. And there’s cows, lots of cows.
Based on a series of comics by Posey Simmonds, in turn based loosely on Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd—the American writer is a Hardy scholar—the light comedy is directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen, Dirty Pretty Things, High Fidelity). Neither farcical nor subtle, it’s a pleasant romp about a few people whose lives need sorting out. You’ll hardly notice it takes two hours to do so, even though what needs to be done is pretty obvious from the start. No, this won’t be the film at the top of Frears’s résumé. Tamara Drewe is neither Hardy nor hardy fare. It’s more like a piece of candy whose familiar taste makes it no less pleasing.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/10/2010
Based on a series of comics by Posey Simmonds, in turn based loosely on Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd—the American writer is a Hardy scholar—the light comedy is directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen, Dirty Pretty Things, High Fidelity). Neither farcical nor subtle, it’s a pleasant romp about a few people whose lives need sorting out. You’ll hardly notice it takes two hours to do so, even though what needs to be done is pretty obvious from the start. No, this won’t be the film at the top of Frears’s résumé. Tamara Drewe is neither Hardy nor hardy fare. It’s more like a piece of candy whose familiar taste makes it no less pleasing.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/10/2010
Friday, October 8, 2010
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (***)
Divorced-after-40-years Helena (Gemma Jones) deludes herself with the assurances of a psychic. Her ex-husband (Anthony Hopkins) deludes himself with a much-younger woman. (Lucy Punch, getting a good deal of the laughs here.) Their daughter (Naomi Watts) and son-in-law’s (Josh Brolin) marriage threatens to similarly fray as they each ponder taking up with someone else, she with her art-gallery boss (Antonio Banderas, he with a neighbor (Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto). Everyone’s looking for something better, even if it’s something that just looks better.
Woody Allen’s latest takes its title from the clichéd advice of a fortune teller, and though fortune tellers really can’t predict the future, that doesn’t keep his London-set ensemble film from being clichéd or predictable at times. But only a little. Both the comedy and the drama are light — this is neither as funny or dramatic as Vicky Cristina Barcelona, his most successful movie of the last decade. The ending isn’t much, and the narration is intrusive, like Woody couldn’t figure out a better way to move the story along. But the plotting seems more believable than in his last one, Whatever Works (which had an even less likely May-December romance). And what Allen almost always does well is create characters who are simply interesting, and gets excellent actors (Watts especially here) to play them. Brolin plays a writer who’s run out of ideas, but it seems Allen never will.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 10/27/10
Woody Allen’s latest takes its title from the clichéd advice of a fortune teller, and though fortune tellers really can’t predict the future, that doesn’t keep his London-set ensemble film from being clichéd or predictable at times. But only a little. Both the comedy and the drama are light — this is neither as funny or dramatic as Vicky Cristina Barcelona, his most successful movie of the last decade. The ending isn’t much, and the narration is intrusive, like Woody couldn’t figure out a better way to move the story along. But the plotting seems more believable than in his last one, Whatever Works (which had an even less likely May-December romance). And what Allen almost always does well is create characters who are simply interesting, and gets excellent actors (Watts especially here) to play them. Brolin plays a writer who’s run out of ideas, but it seems Allen never will.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 10/27/10
Friday, February 26, 2010
Ghost Writer (***)
Roman Polanski’s thriller is like a video version of a middle-brow novel of the sort that consumes that portion of the bestseller list not consumed with diet books, polemics, and memoirs. Maybe like one written by Robert Harris, whose novel he helped Polanski adapt. I’m not meaning to insult the movie, just saying it’s lighter fare than Oliver Twist or The Pianist, the director’s last two films. But it’s easy to like, so long as you’re not Tony Blair. Blair is not the name of the character played by Pierce Brosnan. He’s supposed to be some other recent ex-prime minister who’s accused of shipping off terrorist suspects for some CIA-approved torture. Come to think of it, foreign-policy conservatives may not love the movie either, since the idea that it’s okay to do that is never entertained. The only questions are what the prime minister did, and how soon Ewan McGregor is going to dig around and figure it out.
McGregor is the title character, who gets hired to finish the prime minister’s memoirs when the original writer dies in an accident. Sorry, an “accident.” Although Polanski, unable to work in America or the UK, could have set the movie in Europe, he fairly successfully re-creates the atmosphere of London and Martha’s Vineyard, where the prime minister shares a compound with his intelligent and mysterious wife (Olivia Williams) and his assistant (Kim Cattrall). Most of the movie take place in the US.
The plot skirts skirts the edge of the plausible, and probably goes over it, but doesn’t insult your intelligence. At the very least, it’s a thriller whose thrills don’t depend on car chases and explosions, and one that delivers a surprise or two.
IMDB link
viewed 3/24/10 at Ritz East and reviewed 4/6/10
McGregor is the title character, who gets hired to finish the prime minister’s memoirs when the original writer dies in an accident. Sorry, an “accident.” Although Polanski, unable to work in America or the UK, could have set the movie in Europe, he fairly successfully re-creates the atmosphere of London and Martha’s Vineyard, where the prime minister shares a compound with his intelligent and mysterious wife (Olivia Williams) and his assistant (Kim Cattrall). Most of the movie take place in the US.
The plot skirts skirts the edge of the plausible, and probably goes over it, but doesn’t insult your intelligence. At the very least, it’s a thriller whose thrills don’t depend on car chases and explosions, and one that delivers a surprise or two.
IMDB link
viewed 3/24/10 at Ritz East and reviewed 4/6/10
Friday, February 5, 2010
The Last Station (***)
Leo Tolstoy was the celebrated 19th-century Russian writer of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. And that is all I knew about him. But it turns out he lived into the 20th century, concentrating his energies on furthering his social philosophy, which is not deeply discussed but seems like an ascetic, Christian take on Marxism. His foremost ally in this was Vladmir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), a deadly earnest man seemingly more dedicated to Tolstoyan ideals than the great man himself. His foremost enemy was his own wife, played by Helen Mirren. Her attitude toward his ideals recalls a line in Mel Brooks’s History of the World Part I. Told that “the peasants are revolting,” Harvey Korman as the French King Louis XIV says, “You said it. They stink on ice.” But her real source of ire seems to be Tolstoy’s plan to rewrite his will to waive future royalties and leave his works to the Russian people.
The movie is based on a novel by Jay Parini, so there is also a love story, not that of Leo and Sofya, but that of a would-be Tolstoy acolyte (James McEvoy). McEvoy seems to have made a specialty of playing naive men undergoing learning experiences (that Idi Amin was evil in The Last King of Scotland, that life was unfair in Atonement, that he was a pussy in Wanted, and so on). He functions as the fulcrum between the two camps warring over Tolstoy’s soul (and copyrights), although Sofya is clearly the more sympathetic character. This is thanks in part to Mirren’s beautiful, emotional performance, but also because director Michael Hoffman pushes our sympathies that way. She may be a mercenary, but at least, he seems to say, she’s not a stick in the mud like Chertkov. As for Tolstoy himself (Christopher Plummer), he’s a kindly supporting character in his own drama.
IMDB link
viewed 3/3/10 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/?/10
The movie is based on a novel by Jay Parini, so there is also a love story, not that of Leo and Sofya, but that of a would-be Tolstoy acolyte (James McEvoy). McEvoy seems to have made a specialty of playing naive men undergoing learning experiences (that Idi Amin was evil in The Last King of Scotland, that life was unfair in Atonement, that he was a pussy in Wanted, and so on). He functions as the fulcrum between the two camps warring over Tolstoy’s soul (and copyrights), although Sofya is clearly the more sympathetic character. This is thanks in part to Mirren’s beautiful, emotional performance, but also because director Michael Hoffman pushes our sympathies that way. She may be a mercenary, but at least, he seems to say, she’s not a stick in the mud like Chertkov. As for Tolstoy himself (Christopher Plummer), he’s a kindly supporting character in his own drama.
IMDB link
viewed 3/3/10 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/?/10
Friday, October 16, 2009
New York, I Love You (**1/4)
This is something you don’t see so much but seems to be becoming a little more common. It’s an omnibus film, a compilation of short films built around a theme. Lately there have been a few where the theme is a city, a recent example being Tokyo!, a three-films-in one release. Actually, New York Stories did the same sort of thing back in 1989. But this is closer in conception to Paris Je t'aime; both feature parts crafted by a number of writers and directors, loosely strung together as a feature.
So you get eleven different credited directors, some of whom wrote the segments also. The film is dedicated to the late Anthony Minghella, who wrote a segment featuring Julie Christie and Shia LaBoeuf in which the actress plays a singer. Like many of the segments, there is a twist ending, though for the most part they feel kind of forced. Possibly worst is the opening segment, in which two randomly placed-together strangers turn out to both be brilliant pickpockets, hamming it up to impress a woman. Like the city at its worst, it seems smug and false.
Besides the singer, there are a painter, a photographer, a composer, an actress, and a writer. No one is a banker or a slum dweller or a celebrity (well, maybe the singer is), but a lot of real-life celebrities play the characters. Orlando Bloom is the composer, Ethan Hawke the writer. James Caan plays the father of a wheelchair-bound girl who pays a kid to be her date. Either funny or crude, it will probably divide viewers the most. Natalie Portman appears in a Mira Nair-directed segment in which she plays a Hasidic Jew who’s about to be married, and also directs one about a father getting mistaken for his lighter-skinned daughter’s male nanny.
It’s a cliché, but the film adds up to less than the sum of its parts, with a so-what framing device sort of bringing them together. Except for the last segment, with Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman as a long-married couple walking in Brighton Beach, the movie doesn’t so much evoke the city as seem to serve as a clearinghouse for some experiments and small ideas by local talent. You can, in fact, make even a ten-minute segment compelling, but nothing here is anything more than mildly diverting.
IMDB link
viewed 10/13/09 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/27/09
So you get eleven different credited directors, some of whom wrote the segments also. The film is dedicated to the late Anthony Minghella, who wrote a segment featuring Julie Christie and Shia LaBoeuf in which the actress plays a singer. Like many of the segments, there is a twist ending, though for the most part they feel kind of forced. Possibly worst is the opening segment, in which two randomly placed-together strangers turn out to both be brilliant pickpockets, hamming it up to impress a woman. Like the city at its worst, it seems smug and false.
Besides the singer, there are a painter, a photographer, a composer, an actress, and a writer. No one is a banker or a slum dweller or a celebrity (well, maybe the singer is), but a lot of real-life celebrities play the characters. Orlando Bloom is the composer, Ethan Hawke the writer. James Caan plays the father of a wheelchair-bound girl who pays a kid to be her date. Either funny or crude, it will probably divide viewers the most. Natalie Portman appears in a Mira Nair-directed segment in which she plays a Hasidic Jew who’s about to be married, and also directs one about a father getting mistaken for his lighter-skinned daughter’s male nanny.
It’s a cliché, but the film adds up to less than the sum of its parts, with a so-what framing device sort of bringing them together. Except for the last segment, with Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman as a long-married couple walking in Brighton Beach, the movie doesn’t so much evoke the city as seem to serve as a clearinghouse for some experiments and small ideas by local talent. You can, in fact, make even a ten-minute segment compelling, but nothing here is anything more than mildly diverting.
IMDB link
viewed 10/13/09 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/27/09
Friday, October 2, 2009
The Invention of Lying (***)
Years ago I read a novel called The Truth Machine by James L. Halperin that brilliantly extrapolated the results were a foolproof lie detector ever to be invented. This movie comically turns that premise on its head. Instead of lies being always detectable, no one thinks to tell one. Which, in turn, means that if one is told, no matter how absurd, it will not be detected.
It begins with a date. The gentleman, Mark, tells the lady, played by Jennifer Garner, that she is pretty. She tells him she’s just masturbated, and that he is sub-nosed and chubby. Since Mark is played by Ricky Gervais, this is true. Yet this begs the question, if lies cannot be told, does this require telling every truth? (It does in Liar Liar, somehow.) Is there something that actually requires the lady’s mother, when she calls, to ask a question to which the answer is, “I won’t be sleeping with him tonight. Nope, probably not even a kiss.” Apparently not, because other scenes show characters revealing truths that they were perfectly capable of not speaking for years earlier. And why, if such harsh truths are spoken routinely, does Mark’s boss hesitate to carry out his intention to fire him?
And if she was going to have to be telling him that she’d just masturbated beforehand, might not she have avoided doing so? But then, perhaps embarrassment over such things would be bred out of such a society. On the other hand, wouldn’t they stop asking each other “How’s it going?” when they really didn’t want to know? Some other tidbits are funny, but not really what would be likely in even a non-lying society. A Pepsi ad slogan is “When they don’t have Coke.” Mark’s mom lives in a place named “A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People.” Wouldn’t nursing home still work?
Having said that, I love presentations of hypothetical realities, even imperfect ones, and much humor comes from watching how people behave when the plot frees them from the need to observe social norms. As the title promises, most of the plot proceeds from when Mark realizes he can make up things. The funny part is not that he is able to tell lies, but that doesn’t even need to explain even ones that seem transparent. Of course , his ability to do so hinges precisely on everyone else’s credulity. In other words, he succeeds because no one else has a bullshit detector, and in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The lies are not the source of bliss; ignorance is.
Simultaneously, I found the film clever and illogical. In this world, Gervais’s narration tells us, even fictional films would be seen as lies, yet hypotheticals—what would you do if you could change the world?—are apparently not. However, the ability to conjure up a what-if scenario is the ability to imagine something that isn’t true. And if people would not lie, then surely they would make mistakes, and thus say things that were not true, and so the liar might yet be caught, and thought delusional. Yet there are not even words for true or false in the world of this movie.
The clever part is there, though, because Gervais is the cowriter and codirector (with Matthew Robinson). (In his prior star vehicle, Ghost Town, he just acted.) For once, he himself plays the nice guy, but in the movie’s best scenes, as in his series The Office and Extras, the humor comes from unintended cruelty, like how Mark’s love doesn’t want to be with a guy whose children will be chubby and snub-nosed. Some people have criticized the character for being too shallow to be a worthy love interest, but I think the point is that even good people have this side, only hidden. Nonetheless, when Mark tells her how kind she is, the supporting scenes are missing, and Garner’s twin facial expressions—adorable smile and look of bewilderment, won’t convince you that she’s Mark’s ideal woman.
Too much of the last third is devoted to what ends up being a conventional love story, and is less funny. I would have rather seen how, say, politics would be in a world without lies, but I suppose a world with honest politicians would be so unlike ours that to show it would only highlight the tenuous premise. So no politics. But what Gervais suggests about the role of God in such a world is the most provocative thing about the film.
IMDB link
viewed 4/17/10 on DVD [Netflix] and reviewed 4/18/10
It begins with a date. The gentleman, Mark, tells the lady, played by Jennifer Garner, that she is pretty. She tells him she’s just masturbated, and that he is sub-nosed and chubby. Since Mark is played by Ricky Gervais, this is true. Yet this begs the question, if lies cannot be told, does this require telling every truth? (It does in Liar Liar, somehow.) Is there something that actually requires the lady’s mother, when she calls, to ask a question to which the answer is, “I won’t be sleeping with him tonight. Nope, probably not even a kiss.” Apparently not, because other scenes show characters revealing truths that they were perfectly capable of not speaking for years earlier. And why, if such harsh truths are spoken routinely, does Mark’s boss hesitate to carry out his intention to fire him?
And if she was going to have to be telling him that she’d just masturbated beforehand, might not she have avoided doing so? But then, perhaps embarrassment over such things would be bred out of such a society. On the other hand, wouldn’t they stop asking each other “How’s it going?” when they really didn’t want to know? Some other tidbits are funny, but not really what would be likely in even a non-lying society. A Pepsi ad slogan is “When they don’t have Coke.” Mark’s mom lives in a place named “A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People.” Wouldn’t nursing home still work?
Having said that, I love presentations of hypothetical realities, even imperfect ones, and much humor comes from watching how people behave when the plot frees them from the need to observe social norms. As the title promises, most of the plot proceeds from when Mark realizes he can make up things. The funny part is not that he is able to tell lies, but that doesn’t even need to explain even ones that seem transparent. Of course , his ability to do so hinges precisely on everyone else’s credulity. In other words, he succeeds because no one else has a bullshit detector, and in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The lies are not the source of bliss; ignorance is.
Simultaneously, I found the film clever and illogical. In this world, Gervais’s narration tells us, even fictional films would be seen as lies, yet hypotheticals—what would you do if you could change the world?—are apparently not. However, the ability to conjure up a what-if scenario is the ability to imagine something that isn’t true. And if people would not lie, then surely they would make mistakes, and thus say things that were not true, and so the liar might yet be caught, and thought delusional. Yet there are not even words for true or false in the world of this movie.
The clever part is there, though, because Gervais is the cowriter and codirector (with Matthew Robinson). (In his prior star vehicle, Ghost Town, he just acted.) For once, he himself plays the nice guy, but in the movie’s best scenes, as in his series The Office and Extras, the humor comes from unintended cruelty, like how Mark’s love doesn’t want to be with a guy whose children will be chubby and snub-nosed. Some people have criticized the character for being too shallow to be a worthy love interest, but I think the point is that even good people have this side, only hidden. Nonetheless, when Mark tells her how kind she is, the supporting scenes are missing, and Garner’s twin facial expressions—adorable smile and look of bewilderment, won’t convince you that she’s Mark’s ideal woman.
Too much of the last third is devoted to what ends up being a conventional love story, and is less funny. I would have rather seen how, say, politics would be in a world without lies, but I suppose a world with honest politicians would be so unlike ours that to show it would only highlight the tenuous premise. So no politics. But what Gervais suggests about the role of God in such a world is the most provocative thing about the film.
IMDB link
viewed 4/17/10 on DVD [Netflix] and reviewed 4/18/10
Friday, September 4, 2009
World’s Greatest Dad (***)
There are two Robin Williamses, one the manic comic who gained fame with Mork and Mindy, and the other the Oscar-winning star of serious dramas such as Awakenings, Good Will Hunting, and One Hour Photo. I never found his zaniness all that funny, and his comedies have tended to dreck like License to Wed and Death to Smoochy. Now he’s teamed up for a comedy with writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait, another former stand-up comic I was never wild about. (I’m not one for annoying voices either.) So what do you know, this is pretty decent.
It’s a little more edgy than many films Williams has done. He’s the well-intentioned single dad to a teen (Daryl Sabara of Spy Kids) who’s truly obnoxious, and not in a snarky, Ferris Bueller sort of way, but in a creepily sex-obsessed, nobody-likes-me sort of way. Right when it seems like the movie is going to be about Williams’s milquetoast, teacher/unpublished author trying to bond with this hard-to-love boy, it turns into something else. It would be a disservice to give away the key plot point, but it gives the middle-aged man an unexpected way to achieve his literary ambitions, and the boy an unexpected, and probably undeserved, reassessment by his classmates.
From a comic drama it becomes an almost over-the-top satire of American culture at its shallowest. If you don‘t mind the change in tone and some crudeness (i.e., Dad discovering his son’s autoerotic habits), Goldthwait and Williams have created a fairly funny look at perception and self-perception.
IMDB link
viewed 8/11/09 [screening at Ritz Bourse] and reviewed 9/10/09
It’s a little more edgy than many films Williams has done. He’s the well-intentioned single dad to a teen (Daryl Sabara of Spy Kids) who’s truly obnoxious, and not in a snarky, Ferris Bueller sort of way, but in a creepily sex-obsessed, nobody-likes-me sort of way. Right when it seems like the movie is going to be about Williams’s milquetoast, teacher/unpublished author trying to bond with this hard-to-love boy, it turns into something else. It would be a disservice to give away the key plot point, but it gives the middle-aged man an unexpected way to achieve his literary ambitions, and the boy an unexpected, and probably undeserved, reassessment by his classmates.
From a comic drama it becomes an almost over-the-top satire of American culture at its shallowest. If you don‘t mind the change in tone and some crudeness (i.e., Dad discovering his son’s autoerotic habits), Goldthwait and Williams have created a fairly funny look at perception and self-perception.
IMDB link
viewed 8/11/09 [screening at Ritz Bourse] and reviewed 9/10/09
Friday, August 7, 2009
Julie & Julia (***1/2)
A good movie can make you look forward to what’s coming even though you already know the ending. In this case, we know that Julia Child (Meryl Streep) will go on to teach generations of Americans to cook with her Mastering the Art of French Cooking and, later, her pioneering cooking show on public television. And we know that Julia Powell will more or less achieve her goal of completing all 542 of the recipes in Child’s book in a year, and blogging about it, or else they wouldn’t have gotten Amy Adams to play her in a movie, would they? Unlike some other movies that alternate storylines, I was equally happy watching either one of the two that form this Nora Ephron confection.
Ephron, who most recently wrote and directed the not-bewitching Bewitched (2005) has written the semi-classic When Harry Met Sally, but in follow-ups such as Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail has proven better at crafting dialogue than compelling characters. This is mostly remedied here, since the film is an adaptation of memoirs by Child and Powell. It also helps that Meryl Streep plays Child. To watch Streep in her previous movie, Doubt, and then this is to seemingly watch two different actresses. Streep is smaller than the six-foot-tall woman she plays, but nonetheless captures the gangly movements and unusual voice that would later become famous. Her dour nun in Doubt probably wouldn’t have liked Child, who clearly reveled in sensual pleasure. And not just of food, as the charming scenes with her diplomat husband (Stanley Tucci) show. Depicting their life in France in the 1950s, the movie shows something even rarer on film than in real life, a happy couple who, in the course of the movie, never even bicker. The conflict comes from trying to get her book published, even though we know she’ll eventually succeed.
Meanwhile, in the latter-day scenes, Powell struggles in a Queens apartment with recipes for forgotten dishes like aspic, with Child as her inspiration and muse. These scenes are sometimes funny without getting too cute. As the real Julia Child showed, mistakes happen in the kitchen all the time. Unlike most of today’s cooking shows, Child left them in, and that was part of the appeal. So it is here. I suspect many people will like the flashback scenes better, since Child was such an outsize personality, but both of these women are sort of inspirational. That’s a word that usually frightens me away from a movie, because the people so described are usually too perfect to truly inspire. Yet here are two women figuring out their lives and making mistakes. On the other hand, Ephron and her cast and crew make hardly any. It’s a near-perfect soufflé of a movie, light but substantive.
IMDB link
viewed 6/17/09 (screening at ritz Bourse) and reviewed 8/7–8/09
Ephron, who most recently wrote and directed the not-bewitching Bewitched (2005) has written the semi-classic When Harry Met Sally, but in follow-ups such as Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail has proven better at crafting dialogue than compelling characters. This is mostly remedied here, since the film is an adaptation of memoirs by Child and Powell. It also helps that Meryl Streep plays Child. To watch Streep in her previous movie, Doubt, and then this is to seemingly watch two different actresses. Streep is smaller than the six-foot-tall woman she plays, but nonetheless captures the gangly movements and unusual voice that would later become famous. Her dour nun in Doubt probably wouldn’t have liked Child, who clearly reveled in sensual pleasure. And not just of food, as the charming scenes with her diplomat husband (Stanley Tucci) show. Depicting their life in France in the 1950s, the movie shows something even rarer on film than in real life, a happy couple who, in the course of the movie, never even bicker. The conflict comes from trying to get her book published, even though we know she’ll eventually succeed.
Meanwhile, in the latter-day scenes, Powell struggles in a Queens apartment with recipes for forgotten dishes like aspic, with Child as her inspiration and muse. These scenes are sometimes funny without getting too cute. As the real Julia Child showed, mistakes happen in the kitchen all the time. Unlike most of today’s cooking shows, Child left them in, and that was part of the appeal. So it is here. I suspect many people will like the flashback scenes better, since Child was such an outsize personality, but both of these women are sort of inspirational. That’s a word that usually frightens me away from a movie, because the people so described are usually too perfect to truly inspire. Yet here are two women figuring out their lives and making mistakes. On the other hand, Ephron and her cast and crew make hardly any. It’s a near-perfect soufflé of a movie, light but substantive.
IMDB link
viewed 6/17/09 (screening at ritz Bourse) and reviewed 8/7–8/09
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