Movie Review of OBLIVION and THE ATTACK by Howard Casner
Posted: April 25, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Ali Suliman, Anthony Gonzales, Darren Gilford, Joelle Touma, Joseph Kosinski, Joseph Trapanese, Karl Gadjusek, M83, Melissa Leo, Michael Ardnt, Morgan Freeman, Oblivion, The Attack, Tom Cruise, Ziad Doueiri | 2 Comments »Oblivion is the new Tom Cruise sci-fi blockbuster, a description that may seem triply redundant. Basically, it’s a bunch of “who didn’t see that coming” and a couple of “no real surprises there” and a few too many turnings to my friend and asking, “do you have any idea what’s going on here” (his reply, “I think so”, probably isn’t the sort of confident response the writers, Joseph Kosinski—who also directed, Karl Gadjusek and Michael Ardnt, were hoping for, though in their defense I don’t know whether I found the story hard to follow because it’s convolutedly written; or because I was so bored my mind kept wandering and I missed a plot point here and there; or both).
The basic premise has to do with some sort of yadda, yadda, yadda in which the earth it attacked by aliens and the moon is blown up making the earth uninhabitable. After winning the war the people of earth moved to…no, you know what? Forget it. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to summarize it. It’s just not worth it the money they’re paying me (okay, no one’s paying me anything, but it isn’t worth the money they would pay me if they were paying me, which they aren’t, so…).
Anyway, suffice it to say that our world is now one of those apocalyptic wastelands. But even worse, it’s now filled with bland characters saying bland things in a bland plot. I’d say the CGI is stunning, but we’re now grading on a curve and it’s no worse and no better than any other recent apocalyptic film (though I think the scenes of Cruise on a motorcycle speeding across the New York City desert looked a bit, well, cheesy to me). The thumping, thunderous music by Anthony Gonzales, M.8.3. and Joseph Trapanese may not be great or original, but it’s nice to have someone trying to create a little tension here. The production design by Darren Gilford includes a streamlined, glass house suspended in the sky (I’d say it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but this one is an engineering marvel). The cast includes Melissa Leo and Morgan Freeman for reasons as impenetrable as the plot (I hope it was for the paycheck).
The ending is a bit odd. For a movie that seems to want to hold up the uniqueness of man and the importance of their survival, it finales on the dubious moral note (and a rather offensive one to me) that the death of a man is irrelevant as long as he has a clone hanging around. It’s also borderline ludicrous since all I could think is “boy, is Julia…” (oh, right, uh, see, Julia is this character who..okay, she’s, uh…no, you know what, again, forget it, I’m not going to explain this part of the plot either), “boy, is Julia going to be surprised when all the other Tom Cruises show up”. I could also make a joke about Tom Cruise and clones and isn’t he one already, etc., but I won’t since that sort of humor is beneath me.
If you must see an apocalyptic movie, don’t see this one, see It’s a Disaster. Even if you musn’t see an apocalyptic movie, see It’s a Disaster.
What would do if you discovered out of nowhere and with no hint or clue to prepare you that your spouse was a terrorist. No, take it a step further. What would you do if he or she is a suicide bomber and has just killed a large number of people, including children? That’s the basic premise of the new, breathtaking drama, The Attack.
Amin Jaafari is a Palestinian and a secular Muslim fully integrated into Israeli society. He’s also a celebrated and well known doctor working at a major hospital. The story begins with him receiving the most prestigious award one can receive as a doctor. The next day, after a bomb explodes, he’s on the front lines in the ER, refusing to let even one child die. He’s a saint. No, the writers Ziad Doueiri, who also directed, and Joelle Touma are trying to do a little bit more here. Amin is a credit to his race. At the award ceremony he gives a speech Hattie McDaniel would have been proud of at the 1939 Oscars. He’s Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s coming to Dinner. And though you like and admire him, there is also something about this noble doctor that makes you squirm just a little bit.
And then it happens. After the blast and the hard day in the ER, Amin is called back to the hospital to identify a body; his wife, who is suspected of being the person who set off the bomb that sent all the people to the hospital that he saved. He’s then taken in for questioning, but eventually released when it seems clear he had no idea that his wife was involved in anything. The story is then about his trying to understand why his wife would do what she did.
The Attack is not a perfect film. It has structural issues. When Amin finds out about his wife, he has to go through the denial stage of death twice. First he has to accept that his wife is dead, then he has to accept that she did what the authorities claim she did. This slows the pacing down a bit because until he does that, he can’t go on his Citizen Kane/Mask of Dimitrios quest of going from person to person to find the answers he needs The result is a middle section that tends to stall for awhile. But the forward momentum soon recovers, grabbing you like the first part of the movie does, refusing to let go.
Amin is played by Ali Suliman who gives a masterful and deeply empathetic performance as the beleaguered doctor. By the end, his character is abandoned by everyone, both the Palestinians whose cause is not his cause, and the Israelis who claimed they would never desert him, but eventually make him realize that he will always be a Palestinian to them.
The Attack is a movie that should be seen. Oblivion is one that should not.
Tell me what you think.
Movie Review of IT’S A DISASTER by Howard Casner
Posted: April 18, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: America Ferrera, Blaise Miller, David Cross, Erinn Hayes, It’s a Disaster, Jeff Grace, Julia Stiles, Kevin M. Brenna, Rachel Boston, Todd Berger | 1,039 Comments »It’s a Disaster is what is called a mixed-genre film. Part of it is young urban professionals (yuppies) at play, a style of comedy/drama that became very popular in theatrical form as Off-Broadway began dying in the 1980’s and ‘90’s and that for reasons that completely elude me would sometimes win a Pulitzer Prize. The other genre is the disaster film, an appropriate, in many ways, pair of genres to cross since so often one would wish something apocalyptic would happen in a story like this so that the characters and the audience would be put out of their misery (oh, just think how much better Carnage would have been if only they had been hit by a meteorite).
The basic premise of the movie is that once a month a group of twenty/thirty somethings gather for a couples’ brunch at someone’s house. For this particular gathering, everything starts out as usual, but soon things start happening—you know, things, like…like losing cell phone and internet reception; losing electricity; and a neighbor dropping by in a hazmat suit who is about to tell them what is going on but just leaves when he realizes they were having a party but didn’t invite him since he was no longer in a relationship. Those sorts of things. And then the characters manage to find out that some group has exploded a series of dirty bombs all over the U.S. making it necessary for them to tape up all the doors and windows and wait…and wait…and wait.
The basic humor of the story is the type one usually finds in a dark comedy like this: the world is coming to an end, but the various characters can’t stop their own petty problems and issues with each other from becoming more prominent than what is going on outside the house (you know, we’re all about to die, but how dare you sleep with my wife type thing, and why do all the men I date turn out to be insane, and how about a three way before the end comes). Of course, when one thinks about it, this egotism at the center of the movie pretty much sums up the problem with most yuppie at play movies as it is. Here, the disaster only brings to the fore the self-centeredness of what is really going on at these gatherings. One of the darkest (yet funniest) scenes is what happens to the couple that are habitually late—you’re horrified, yet strangely more sympathetic to the people who arrived on time.
This is a first rate little low budget gem that is hysterical from beginning to end. The screenplay by Todd Berger, who also directed and plays the miffed, hazmatted neighbor, is one of those where two characters have only to exchange two lines and you know instantly their whole history together. To paraphrase Pauline Kael’s comments on the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera and Il Travotore, Berger does to the yuppies at play genre what should be done to the yuppies at play genre. He may have painted himself into a corner with the ending, but it’s still pretty satisfying. The acting is pitch ensemble perfect with a solid cast: Julia Stiles, David Cross, America Ferrera, Erinn Hayes, Jeff Grace, Rachel Boston, Kevin M. Brenna, Blaise Miller. For those of you making independent films, let this be a lesson as to what can be done without A-listers. And it has one of the most imaginative uses of classical music that I’ve come across in a movie in some time.
See it before it’s too late.
Tell me what you think.
Movie Review of UPSTREAM COLOR by Howard Casner
Posted: April 14, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Amy Seimetz, Shane Carruth, Upstream Color | 51 Comments »At one point, Kris, the heroine of the hypnotic new film Upstream Color, is on a subway with her new sort of, but not quite yet boyfriend Jeff when he starts making up stories about other riders. Thinking at one point he’s overreaching, Kris accuses him of being a bit too clever. It’s interesting that this description was delivered to a character played by the writer/director of the film, Shane Carruth, because there are times when the movie does become a bit too clever, perhaps, with a certain vagueness that may not always work in the film’s favor. I think it’s safe to say that Upstream Color is a movie driven more by images than clear narrative, with all the disadvantages and advantages that approach has.
Yet in spite of that, in spite of the disadvantages, Upstream Color is fascinating, riveting, what one would call a real page turner, if it was on a page. It’s one of the finest films of the year so far. It may be driven more by images, but those images are compelling and draw one into the movie’s odd little world with as dream like a quality as the various characters find themselves in at times.
The basic story revolves around a drug found in worms that when ingested (yes, the worm itself), makes the one who took it go into a sort of trance like state and do whatever they are told. Kris becomes such a victim and without her even knowing it, her victimizer has her remove every cent from her bank account; has her take out loans on her house; and has her reveal her secret hiding place of gold coins. And doing all this while she copies out pages from Henry David Thereau’s Walden (don’t worry, it may seem like a non sequitur-and in many ways it is; but at the same time, it’s an important part of the plot). This happens over the course of several days. When she comes out of it, she’s broke as well as fired because she missed work. And because she has no idea what happened, there’s nothing she can do and no one she can turn to. And that’s not all the horror she has gone and goes through.
But the drug also gives those who take it a sort of psychic ability so that when Kris runs into Jeff on a subway, they find themselves oddly drawn to each other. It’s obvious to anyone in the audience that Jeff was also conned in the same way. So the suspense boils down to, when and how will they realize that the weird things happening to them will lead them to what turned them into the people they are now? The plot is tricky, quirky, always surprising; it’s safe to say that you will rarely be able to predict what will happen next with scenes that at times are fascinatingly all over the place.
From a technical stand point, there’s little to argue with here. The acting is strong. Amy Seimetz, who plays Kris with a certain brittle strength, and Carruth, with a pouty James Dean look, are constantly puzzled and frustrated by their lives. They try to act normally, but nothing is normal anymore. And it’s not long before one is emotionally invested in their situation. They say little, but their eyes and expressions say much, and their courtship is an odd one—they seem constantly angry at each other, but seem unable to break up. They play their drama out against the constantly overcast and effective cinematography (by Carruth) and a moody, powerful score (also by Carruth—he also co-edited; I’m not sure I’d want to spend Christmas with him; he probably wouldn’t even let me put tinsel on the tree).
But there is also that narrative vagueness with scenes that are at times hard to follow and the constant appearance of a sound engineer and pig farmer (hey, it could happen) played by Andrew Sensenig (whose character actorly face is worth its weight in the gold coins in Kris’s hiding place) who keeps showing up for some reason. And I’m not convinced the ending really resolves things as satisfying as it might. In fact, the final scenes have something of the feeling of a David Lynch movie like Inland Empire where it comes across more as if the whole thing got away from the filmmaker and he couldn’t quite figure out how to bring all the earlier brilliance together.
In the end, I do think that Upstream Color has its issues. It comes dangerously close to falling into the category of such recent films as Stoker and Spring Breakers, where the narrative is either badly done or deemed unimportant, subservient to images for images’ sake, a questionable aesthetic choice. So I do believe Upstream Color is hampered by its distrust of a more solid and clear narrative (unlike Carruth’s earlier film, the compelling time travel movie Primer). At the same time, for all its issues, it’s still a far more fascinating film than most movies that are well made and are satisfactorily put together (like Lincoln and Argo and the recently released The Company You Keep).
A must see.
Movie Review of THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES, THE COMPANY YOU KEEP, EDDIE: THE SLEEPWALKING CANNIBAL by Howard Casner
Posted: April 11, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alex Epstein, Ben Coccio, Boris Rodriguez, Bradley Cooper, Dane DeHaan, Darius Marder, Derek Cianfrance, Eddie: the Sleepwalking Cannibal, Emory Cohen, Jonathan Rannells, Lem Dobbs, Robert Redford, Ryan Gosling, Shia LaBeouf, Susan Sarandon, The Company You Keep, The Place Beyond the Pines, Thure Lindhardt | 57 Comments »The Place Beyond the Pines is a movie that is greater than the sum of its parts. And there are three of them; parts, I mean. And that’s probably the first thing you should know. The writers Derek Cianfrance (who also directed), Ben Coccio and Darius Marder don’t really do that strong a job in preparing you for that so when the first part ends, you don’t really realize it’s just the first of three separate, but strongly connected stories and it can be a bit confusing for awhile until you figure it out (or unless you read reviews of the movie beforehand, which I didn’t).
The first part of the film concerns Ryan Gosling as a carnival motorcycle daredevil. When he finds out he has a kid he never knew about, he does what anyone in his position would naturally do: he quits to become a bank robber. Yes, it has about that much logic. In fact, when the idea of robbing banks is presented to him, all you can think is, what could possibly go wrong with this plan; I mean, it’s genius, man, genius. Actually, it is kind of. The MO Gosling and his partner use is quite clever and they could have gotten away with it for a long time, until something happens that shouldn’t have. But at the same time, this section is a bit too much been there, done that. It’s a fairly typical story of a petty criminal that works out the way stories about petty criminals generally work out in movies like this.
In the second story, Bradley Cooper takes over as an ambitious police officer who brings Gosling down and Gosling is out of the picture (no, I’m not spoiling anything—I think you really, really need to know that Gosling is only in the movie for a short period; and my revealing it isn’t remotely the same thing as telling people that Janet Leigh gets killed off in the first part of Psycho—okay, maybe I shouldn’t have revealed that about Janet Leigh, but you get what I’m trying to say). Anyway, this section is a bit more interesting, especially due to a cameo by Ray Liotto doing his psychotic bit as a dirty cop. At the same time, I also think this section is a little off because it doesn’t focus on Cooper’s relationship with his son, which is basically what the movie as a whole is supposed to be about, fathers and sons.
Then there’s the third story in which the two sons of Gosling and Cooper (doe eyed, pouty Emory Cohen and sharp featured Dane DeHaan) meet and this section is deeply moving and powerful and almost makes the first two parts seem better than they are. When the movie comes together here, it fills you with a sense of wonder and excitement as these two teenagers try to work out their fate without the benefit of knowing any of their true history, without the benefit of knowing they even have a fate. We know so much that they don’t which gives their actions even more meaning than the characters realize they have. And as the story works itself out in unexpected ways, there are times when the emotions are at times nearly overwhelming.
Early on in the movie The Company You Keep, Susan Sarandon, as a former domestic terrorist now in custody, tells ambitious reporter Shia LaBeouf that he is younger than she expected. When he thanks her, she says it wasn’t a compliment. In the same way, The Company You Keep is the Argo of this year. Before Ben Affleck says thank you, it’s not a compliment. There’s nothing that wrong with The Company You Keep except that the best thing you can say about it is that there’s nothing that wrong with it. It’s entertaining enough and rarely boring. But like Argo, it’s a movie that never really rises above what it is.
The story itself never exactly makes a lot of sense. Thirty years before, a bunch of radicals, including Robert Redford, went into hiding after robbing a bank in which one of them shoots and kills a bank guard. It’s all in protest of the Viet Nam War, but thirty years from 2013 is 1983 and the whole thing seems a bit out of whack with the space time continuum. And the logic of the whole story never really gets much better (by the time the movie is over, it’s a bit muddled just why Redford’s character went into hiding since he was never guilty, he wasn’t even at the bank—it’s sort of like the actor in him wanted to have his cake and eat it too—play a bad guy without ever playing a bad guy).
The basic cast is made up of the old guard versus the new. The ex-radicals are played by such luminaries as the aforesaid Sarandon and Redford, as well as Julie Christie, Richard Jenkins, Nick Nolte, Sam Elliot and the ubiquitous Stephen Root. Jesus, it’s like an episode of Murder, She Wrote, but filled with A list actors who are still working rather than B-list actors desperate for a job. Only Susan Sarandon really comes off well, with a mesmerizing scene with LaBeouf where she defends her role in the protests of the, well, I was going to say 1960’s, but with that space time continuum thingy, I’m not sure, but at any rate, she’s hypnotic and really delivers.
The young guard is made up of LaBeouf, Anna Kendrick and Terence Howard, and all I can say is that Kendrick and Howard need to get a new agent. Both are well respected actors with Oscar nominations, but if the best their managers can do is get them work playing second fiddle to LaBeouf, then drastic measures need to be taken. At the same time, LeBeouf, himself, acquits himself well. I don’t know what it is about him, but lately whenever I review him, I always seem to start with, he acquits himself well. I think it’s because I’m never really convinced he is cast right; but he’s a solid actor, and he carries the movie on his unbroad shoulders rather well here.
It would be remiss of me not to mention that there’s also the inbetween guard with Chris Cooper in a nice quiet performance as Redford’s brother and Stanley Tucci as a rather odd newspaper editor who doesn’t think that the FBI somehow obtaining a warrant to search a reporter’s apartment isn’t remotely a news story. I didn’t know how to react to that.
The screenplay is by Lem Dobbs and is often quite witty with a lot of clever dialog. It’s directed by Redford in his usual bland style.
Eddie: the Sleepwalking Cannibal (no, I’m not making that up, that is the title) is a horror movie about a painter who is blocked but gets inspiration after a ten year dry spell when his housemate, Eddie, a mentally slow man he has taken in, starts sleepwalking at night and eating people. The artist is so inspired by this muse (the violence brings out the creativity in him), that he starts manipulating Eddie to repeat his nocturnal activities. It’s Roger Corman material, but with more style, wit and marginally better production values. It’s a lot of fun and the story works itself out in a very satisfying manner. It’s ridiculous and silly, but that’s the point (at least I hope it is). The clever screenplay is by Boris Rodriguez (who also directed), Jonathan Rannells and Alex Epstein. The painter is played by Danish transplant Thure Lindhardt who, to his credit, manages to take the whole thing quite seriously.
Movie Review of ROOM 237 by Howard Casner
Posted: April 8, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Rodney Ascher, Room 237 | 869 Comments »The interviewees in the movie Room 237, a documentary in which a group of people reveal their subjective theories as to what Stanley Kubrick’s horror film The Shining is really about, basically fall into the same category as birthers; truthers; those that believe that Castro, the Mafia, LBJ, J. Edgar, etc. were responsible for the death of JFK; and those that believe that the moon landing never happened.
All right, you’re right. They’re not exactly like that (well, except for the one who believes The Shining is Kubrick’s way of letting everyone know that he faked the moon landing—or as he puts it, I’m not saying we didn’t land on the moon, I’m just saying all the footage is faked—my favorite line from the film). They’re much more benign. And amusing. I mean, trés, trés amusement. The one thing you can definitely say about this almost, but not quite mockumentary is that it’s highly entertaining. You will definitely not be bored.
But these fans of Kubrick’s film are in many ways just like their bigger time conspirator counterparts. Like those others, they believe they know something that no one else knows. That they are the chosen people who have been given special insight. That their interpretation is so obvious, once you put all the clues together (clues that take multiple viewings to find), they don’t understand why no one else simply cannot see what they can see. And like those other conspiracy nu…uh, enthusiasts, they tend to go to ridiculous lengths to prove their point: that The Shining is about the American genocide of Native Americans; that it’s a metaphor for the Holocaust; that it’s one sexual metaphor after another; or it’s that thingy about never really reaching the moon.
Oddly enough, these theorists aren’t totally devoid of interesting insight into the film. They actually do hit the mark on occasion. One points out an expression that Jack Nicholson uses here can be found in movies from Dr. Strangelove to Full Metal Jacket; others points out inconsistencies in the filming (like a chair being in one shot, then after a cut away, it’s not there anymore; or someone wearing a different pair of pants in the same scene; or a reversal in carpet patterns—even to the point where at times it may even be possible that the layout of the hotel changes from scene to scene); there’s an exploration of Kubrick’s use of dissolves and some interesting possible aesthetic choices there; there’s even the possibility that Kubrick had a thing for the number 42 and/or may have given an FU joke to Stephen King at one point.
Perhaps the neatest section, and it’s really neat, is when someone theorizes that the film has to be played backwards at the same time as it is being played forward. And using two cameras, the filmmakers do just that. And it’s truly neat. But not for the reason the person states; not because it gives any special insight into the film. It’s neat because, well, because it’s just, well…pretty damn neat.
The one theorist who comes closest to selling his approach is the one who believes that Kubrick was at an artistic cross roads. Kubrick had achieved everything he could achieve. Barry Lyndon, the theorist claims, is a boring film because Kubrick was bored. So the great artiste wanted to do something different. Fascinated by books on subliminal advertising and visits to ad agencies, he decided to be a prankster and have the film filled with brain washing type images. There’s something about this that makes a lot of sense (especially the idea that Barry Lyndon is a boring film—it is), until the theorist actually shows us an example (something about Barry Sullivan lining up with an outbox that makes him look as if he has an erection). At that point, you start snickering again.
And with that comes the issue I had with the movie as a whole. As the film goes on, the director Rodney Ascher doesn’t try to explore the reasons as to why people are acting like this or feel a need to find meaning in this film. Or why this film, in particular, may be ripe for the silliness recorded here. Instead, he turns it into a Maury Povich show where everyone in the audience laughs in superiority at the hicks on stage; or we become high school bullies picking on the nerds, geeks and drama kids.
And Ascher rubs it in. While the people drone on, the director counterpoints their statements with scenes from movies (mainly Kubrick films like Eyes Wide Shut, etc.) in such a way as to make the interviewees seem even more foolish than they already are. But in the end, Ascher doesn’t have any more insight than the people he makes fun of (can you say “irony”). And the movie becomes a bit uncomfortable.
For the record, I’ll put forth my own theory, which I call the Occam’s razor conjecture. The Shining has no real meaning, overt or subvert, because it’s really not that great a film, perhaps Kubrick’s weakest (depending on what you think of Eyes Wide Shut—I try not to, myself). It’s a film that feels like the director and writer took some source material and tried to mold it into something it wasn’t, but couldn’t come up with a satisfying substitution until finally everyone lost control of the whole thing and it became a big mess. And the reason people can come up with all these odd interpretations is because there’s nothing there in the first place. I mean, it happens. No artist is perfect. Even Shakespeare had his Titus Andronicus. For me, it’s the simplest explanation that is the most likely.
All comments welcome.
Movie Review of BLANCANIEVES by Howard Casner
Posted: April 4, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Blancanieves, Pablo Berger | 1,233 Comments »When movies moved from silent to sound, a number of critics and artists bemoaned it because they felt film would lose not just a visual quality, but also its feeling of realism (even though we actually hear in real life). When movies went from black and white to color, the critics also bemoaned it, again saying it robbed film of reality (even though, again, in reality we see in color). It eventually got to a point where you felt that these critics thought the reason movies were silent and in black and white was from an aesthetic choice rather than a lack of one.
Since then, quite understandably, the number of movies both silent and in black and white have greatly diminished, especially silent ones. Other than comedians like Jacques Tati paying homage to silent movie clowns, there has been Mel Brook’s 1976 Silent Movie, which was a about a director wanting to get support to make the first silent film in forty years; Charles Lane’s 1989’s Sidewalk Stories, a movie that was a commentary on communication; and of course, who can forget Michel Hazanavicius’ 2011 The Artist, about a silent movie star who refuses to go with the time and make talkies—though the movie becomes a talky at the end when the star gives in to the inevitable.
No matter what you may have thought of the above mentioned movies, you could at least come up with a reason as to why they were silent. In some way or another, it was a novelty and that was part of the point. Now we have writer/director Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves, a variation on the story of Snow White and Spain’s entry in the Academy’s foreign language film category. It’s also silent as well as in black and white. But for the life of me, I can’t come up with one convincing reason as to why, except that, well, I don’t know…the French did it? In no way does it add anything to the story or its impact (except to make us glad that movies are no longer silent since the lack of sound in the movie seemed to give the overall film a certain lethargy—let’s just say, it’s not the fastest moving of movies of late).
Blancanieves is basically divided into three parts of which only one, the middle one, works. The first is the origin story of our heroine. On the day her famous toreador father was gored by a bull and ended up paralyzed, she is born, but her mother dies in childbirth. The father refuses to look at her. His nurse, seeing a golden ticket opportunity, seduces her way into being his new wife and the daughter is raised by her grandmother. When her grandmother dies, the daughter goes to her father, but she is made into a slave by her evil-stepmother. Why is unclear. What most likely would have happened is the girl would have been shunted off to boarding school until she was old enough to marry into money, but that’s not what happens here. I know, I know. This is a sort of fairy tale, so I should take that into account. But I do think this lack of logic does suggest what is wrong with the movie—it screams out innovation and originality in the black and white and silent aesthetic, while showing little to no such innovation and originality in the screenplay (a common problem with movies lately, it seems to me).
Once the father dies, the girl is sent off with the chauffeur to be killed, but he miscarries, and she ends up alive, discovered by six little people (yes, only six, but this leads to a neat little MadMen joke about how marketing is more important than truth) who are a comic bull fighting troupe. She’s lost her memory, but her instincts take over and she becomes a marvelous toreador in her own right, bringing fame to the troupe until they call themselves Snowhite and the Seven Dwarves. This is the highlight of the story. It’s clever, exciting and after having to drudge your way through the first part, you’re finally sitting up in your seat.
But then the third part begins. The evil stepmother finds Snowhite and just as the toreador remembers who she is, our heroine bites into that poison apple and she goes into a coma. And then it gets really odd. Her avaricious agent, who for some reason doesn’t drop her and find others to represent, turns her and the little people into a cheap carnival side show act where people can pay ten cents to kiss her to see if she will awake.
And this is really where I had a problem. Now, okay, I know this isn’t rape. I do. No, I really, really do. But still, no…I’m sorry, but it sure felt like one step away from it. I mean, she’s in a coma for God’s sake, she has no control, and some slimy bastard is allowing men to pay to kiss her. Again, I’m sorry, but I thought it was kind of…well, I’ll say creepy to be polite, though that really isn’t the word I’m thinking of, and it just made me think of the scenes in Kill Bill where someone was paying a hospital orderly so he could have sex with the comatized Uma Thurman (though at least there we were suppose to be horrified rather than wistful, as we are to feel here).
And so the story ends, Snowhite never awakening, being taken care of by the one little person who loved her. It’s not a particularly satisfying resolution. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to take away with me. The original story is about how someone who is oppressed can be saved (in a somewhat anti-women’s lib way, perhaps, but still). But this movie is about how someone who is oppressed is then more oppressed when she tries for freedom. So what is the theme suppose to be: “why bother?” It’s an odd moral. At the same time, I’m not convinced that Berger really thought it through. It just seems an odd ending chosen for the sake of an odd ending, just like the black and white and silence seems like an odd choice for the sake of being odd. But I think there’s a difference between being odd for the sake of being different and in being original.
Movie Review of REALITY and THE WE AND THE I by Howard Casner
Posted: March 30, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alexandre Desplat, Aniello Arena, Jeffrey Grimshaw, Massimo Gaudioso, Matteo Garrone, Maurizio Braucci, Michel Gondry, Paul Proch, Reality, The Way and the I, Ugo Chiti | 10 Comments »Reality, the new movie written by Ugo Chiti, Maurizio Braucci, Matteo Garrone, and Massimo Gaudioso (God, I’m exhausted just from typing all the names) and directed by Garrone (all of whom also gave us the incredible true mafia movie Gomorrah) opens ironically with a God’s eye view of a fancy gold colored carriage with plush, red seats drawn by white horses gaily prancing down a road in Naples, the hooves almost perfectly timed to the delightful music composed by Alexandre Desplat (who else), music that almost sounds as if it could be found in any animated fairy tale. Then the carriage pulls through some gates and continues until it stops outside a gazebo. A footman opens the door and a bride and groom step out, walking to two boxes and releasing a covey of doves, proceeding on to join throngs of people in way too fancy outfits who are waiting for them at a reception. It’s a wonderful and mesmerizing scene. Exciting. Thrilling.
But after the reception is over, the people go home. They take off their spangly clothes, their false eyelashes, their nice suits, their make up and they get ready for bed, the women wearing old lady half stockings, the men in underwear and black socks, their aging bodies full of flab falling over their waistlines, until we are back to reality.
The basic story of Reality revolves around Luciano, a hard working fishmonger and petty crook (he has some odd con job going on that has people order pasta making robots and then reselling them). He’s just that kind of guy that everybody loves. He’s a great father, generous, gregarious. At weddings he dresses in drag and does a bit that always brings down the house no matter how many times the audience has seen it. A bit pompous, perhaps, and an attention junky, but, hey, no one’s perfect. And his world, his reality, is just right…until his children beg him to audition for Big Brother, the ultimate reality show.
In many ways, one shouldn’t empathize with Luciano. I mean, he wants to be on Big Brother, for god’s sakes. Who can feel for someone who wants to do something so petty and egocentric? But one does empathize with him. Partly because he’s so reluctant to do it at first and only goes through with the audition to please his family. But a great deal of the success of this movie has to be due to the incredible performance of Aniello Arena (in his movie debut of all things), who has eyes and a face that with a slight change of thought can tell you everything he’s thinking. And as he begins to buy into it, into the possibility of being on the show and the fame and fortune that can come from it, you see him slowly losing it, you see the paranoia grow, you see his psychological underpinnings crumbling. There’s something in his eyes that goes from bright to wistful and then dull in a split second that makes you want to cry for him.
However, before continuing on, no review of this film can be complete without talking about Arena’s story. He is not new to acting, just new to movies. He was once a member of the Italian mafia, a hit man who is in jail for killing three people. While incarcerated, he became involved in theater acting, ultimately traveling with a troupe where, whenever they reached a town, the non-prisoners would check into a hotel while he and his fellow inmates would register at the local prison. To act, he has been granted a sort of work-study release—he can only leave during certain times. Garrone wanted to use him as a hit man in Gomorrah, but the authorities thought that was just a tad too close to home. But now Garrone and the other writers have found a most amazing fit for this actor and the last sort a character you would think a former hit man could portray.
The movie grows gradually darker as another of the story’s irony grows: as Luciano watches Big Brother, becoming so obsessed he is glued to the set almost 24 hours a day, you come not only to realize how vulgar a show it is and how that, in certain ways, Luciano dodged a bullet by not appearing on it—it’s a show that’s insultingly far beneath him—you also realize, more and more, just how unrealistic the show is in comparison to Lucian’s life, or to anyone’s life, for that matter. In a way, Luciano gets his wish, another irony perhaps, in a sad, tragi-comedy of a finale.
A heartbreaking and surprisingly moving film.
The Way and the I is the new movie directed by Michel Gondry (the filmmaker trying to live down The Green Hornet and who has a penchant for using surrealism in his films—The Science of Sleep, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and written by Gondry, Jeffrey Grimshaw and Paul Proch (the last two being newcomers to the art of writing for the screen). The basic story follows a group of New York high school students as they take the last bus home on the final day of school before summer vacation starts.
At first, the movie is both fascinating and difficult and off-putting to watch. The vast majority of the characters are bullies, cruel pranksters, sociopaths in the making, if not there already. There is a reality to these characters, but they’re not pleasant to watch, especially since Gondry in many ways, doesn’t pass judgment or interpret them, but just lets them speak for themselves. And as many artists do, Gondry seems to find man’s inhumanity to man far more interesting and entertaining than the more optimistic and positive aspects of humankind—he tends to see this long bus ride, this very long bus ride, this extremely, incredibly long bus ride, as a remake of The Lord of the Flies (and who knows, maybe he’s right).
But in the end, the movie stopped going anywhere for me after awhile. One reason is the acting. Gondry employs an Italian neo-realistic approach here, using real teens in the roles (even the names of the characters are the names of the actors playing them). This has all the plusses and minuses of that aesthetic approach—sometimes a feeling of intense reality appears, at other times (a bit too often) the lines feel clunky and the characterizations come across as flat and bland. Another reason is that after awhile, the various stories don’t seem to really go anywhere and quickly feel repetitive and all on the same level. It becomes a bit tedious and even boring. In the end, the authors resolve various through lines and relationships, but more often than not, in rather familiar and formulaic ways, until what’s left is a movie that feels as if it is trying to be something new and original, but is ultimately just a bit too conventional with nothing that new or insightful to say.
Movie Reviews of SPRING BREAKERS, DORFMAN IN LOVE and GINGER & ROSA by Howard Casner
Posted: March 25, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alessandro Nivola, Annette Bening, Brad Leong, Christina Hendricks, Dorfman in Love, Elle Fanning, Elliot Gould, Ginger & Rosa, Harmony Kline, James Franco, Oliver Platt, Robbie Ryan, Sally Potter, Sara Rue, Spring Breakers, Timothy Spall, Wendy Kout | 8 Comments »There is a scene in Spring Breakers, the new bikini noir written and directed by Harmony (Gummo, Trash Humpers) Kline, where you think it’s all finally going to come together. In it, Alien, a white rapper/Scarface wannabe (a surprisingly amusing James Franco), plays a sentimental Britney Spears’ song on a white piano that overlooks the ocean while three of the spring breakers, model thin college students dressed in more than skimpy two pieces, sing along, dancing ballet like movements while holding assault rifles the NRA would be proud of, and wearing pink ski masks. It’s absurd, ridiculous, preposterous, unlike almost anything you’ve seen before, and you think, this is it, this is the moment when it all becomes something.
But it doesn’t. It just doesn’t quite make it. And in the end, that’s what the whole movie is. Ambitious. Daring. An unapologetic attempt to do things differently. And just one scene after another where you think it’s going to blossom, but never does, finally falling apart by the end in one big, flailing, frustrating mess.
Spring Breakers is a movie that starts out being about one thing and then changes horses in mid stream. It begins as a story about Faith, a college student who attends Christian youth meetings. She’s warned that Satan will tempt her, but God will always giver her the strength to withstand him. She’s not sure she buys it, but she can’t let go of it either. So when three childhood friends (who all ended up at the same college, which I thought was a neat trick, but sure, why not, let’s go with it) ask her to go on spring break, she agrees, even though she’s warned that the three friends are really sociopaths (and they are). And of course, they do what any group of proud sociopaths do before spring break: they rob a restaurant to pay for it (and get away with it to boot, but it’s the sort of movie where the police only show up at the convenience of the plot). And then on spring break, after a very, very, very, very, very, very (well, you get the idea) long time, they finally meet Satan, the aforesaid Alien.
The group describes themselves as miserable. But they’re not miserable because of their situation. They’re miserable because they’re, well, miserable people. But the movie is written and directed in such a way that you’re unclear Kline realizes this; you don’t know if he’s commenting on how self-deluded his characters are, or if he’s playing it straight. In fact, if I were to be perfectly honest, it reminded me of a screenplay I once gave feedback on and described as an incompetently written drama only to find out the author thought it was a comedy—I really couldn’t tell the difference. (At one point, Faith asks “why is this happening”—it’s hard to take someone seriously who is so self-deluded, but at the same time, I wasn’t sure whether I was or wasn’t suppose to take her seriously; I was the only one laughing in the theater).
So everything is set for a highly stylized, semi-satiric morality play. And then at the halfway mark, Faith leaves. She goes home. A very wise move on her point it must be said, but still, she never comes back. So if she isn’t what the story was about (as everything up until that point suggested), then was the point of the first part of the movie? Why did we even watch it? Kline actually does this two more times (changes the intent and direction of the story), until it feels as if he had no clear concept in the first place, that he didn’t really know what was going on and what he was trying to do. And the whole thing finally reaches an ending so absurdly ridiculous that one is just amazed at the preposterousness of it all.
I suppose that’s the point. But in the end, the finale is just one big long cliché. In fact, the whole movie is just one long cliché after the other. But Kline doesn’t do anything with them except present them at face value. He doesn’t comment on them. He doesn’t use them to make a point. He just treats them as if it is enough that they are clichés—which may be a bit too ironic and post modern even for me (sort of like someone copying the Mona Lisa so well you can’t tell the copy from the original and presenting it as an original work of art).
Spring Breakers is visually stunning. But it falls into the category of recent films like Stoker and On the Road and to some degree The Silence in which it feels as if the filmmakers think character, story, ideas are irrelevant. As long as it’s all told visually, that’s all that’s necessary. But the more I see of movies made like this, the more I’m becoming less and less convinced that a picture is indeed worth a thousand words.
At one point in the movie, Dorfman in Love, Dorfman (played by the cute and charming Sara Rue) is described as a cliché…a Jewish accountant. The description is half right. She’s a cliché, but not because she’s a Jewish accountant, but because she is a…well…cliché. A walking, talking, double taking cliché. In fact, one of the things that this light, breezy rom com has in common with Spring Breakers is that it is one cliché and formulaic contrivance after the other. And like Spring Breakers, it’s unclear whether writer Wendy Kout and director Brad Leong realize this.
Kout’s screenplay is sincere and well meaning. She shows all the appropriate empathy for her characters and the story fits all the correct troupes found in the more popular books on screenwriting. But it’s also a movie you’ve seen a million times before.
Dorfman in Love is about a woman whose journey is to find herself, to liberate herself from the stereotyped roles she’s been assigned, to free herself from the bourgeoisie trap she’s found herself in, to really discover who she is. But in this movie, that journey is basically defined as finding a boyfriend (at that point I almost tossed my hat up in the air and said, “That’s it, I’m outta here”). One of the oddest interchanges is when Dorfman’s father (played in an appropriately grumpy manner by Elliot Gould, though his performance, like so much of the acting, is a bit too on the nose) tells her he’d be happy once she is married and has children. This upsets Dorfman, though I wasn’t sure why since this seemed to be the goal she had set for herself as well.
Dorfman in Love is a movie in which the heroine is encouraged to be brave and take chances and really experience the world and have an adventure; noble goals, to be sure, but which, within the context of this movie, means taking the L.A. Metro rather than driving, and then walking around downtown (I suppose the demographic aimed at here are readers of Joan Didion).
There’s something about Dorfman in Love that is very reminiscent of Georgy Girl, Lynn Redgrave’s rise to stardom movie about another non-thin young woman looking for love. But while Georgy Girl is set against, and is a commentary on, the swinging sixties and the changing morality of the time, Dorfman in Love seems more set against the middle brow, urban middle class lifestyle reflected in off-Broadway plays of twenty to thirty years ago (plays that often won Pulitzer Prizes for reasons I never understood). Dorfman in Love just feels a bit dated.
The movie is bright, at times funny (the best line is when Rue runs down the street past some winos and one says to her “Change?” and she says, “I’m trying, I’m trying”). But perhaps the most ironic thing about it is that after it was over, I so wanted to go back and watch the anarchy and failure of Spring Breakers rather than the safe, works on its own terms, formulaic Dorfman.
Ginger & Rosa is writer/director Sally Potter’s touching and empathetic character study of Ginger, a young teenager growing up against the rise of nuclear weapons and the protests against them in 1962, England. It’s a milieu affected very deeply by World War II, even at that late a date. People still bear scars of that time. And the whole country still looks as if it is affected by the rationing (everything is bleak and everyone wears coats and heavy clothing whether they are inside or out).
There’s much to like here. The period detail is quite nostalgically wonderful and Robbie Ryan’s cinematography has an effective cold warmth to it (he’s also worked on such movies as Red Road, Fish Tank and The Angels’ Share). Elle Fanning (of Super 8 and Somwhere fame) is quite marvelous in the lead role. And the most interesting actors keep popping up: Christina Hendricks as Ginger’s long suffering mother; Alessandro Nivola as her not long suffering, but wants everyone to think he is, father; Oliver Platt and a sly minx of a Timothy Spall as a gay couple who are also Ginger’s godparents; and Annette Bening as a no-nonsense war protester (you kind of want to stick around just to see who else might put in an appearance).
The movie doesn’t always work as well as it might. It’s basically a chamber piece, a boulevard drama, but though it has many effective moments, it could use a bit more of the tension of a Henrik Ibsen/August Strindberg play. And the constant references to the threat of nuclear war and the end of the world never quite convince. I suppose the idea is that Ginger is spouting this outward conflict so she doesn’t have to face her inner and more immediate conflicts. But whenever anyone talked about the danger of the bomb, the lines never felt comfortable on anyone’s lips and seemed a bit clunky, more a distraction than an integral part of the drama.
But in the end, it’s a satisfying and often moving portrait of a young girl learning that contrary to appearances, life goes on and there’s always hope for a future.
Moview Review of ON THE ROAD by Howard Casner
Posted: March 17, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Amy Adams, Carlo Conti, Danny Glicker, Elizabeth Moss, Garrett Hedlund, Jose Rivera, On the Road, Sam Riley, Viggo Mortensen, Walter Salles | 5 Comments »The new movie On the Road is filmed with the energy and chaos of jazz being played by musicians on Benzedrine. It’s full of jagged rhythms and scenes cut together as if they were half improvised. It grabs you at first as does the beautiful period detail, with sets and costumes that fill you with a certain excitement the moment you’re confronted by them (production design by Carlo Conti; costume design by Danny Glicker).
But Benzedrine doesn’t last forever and On The Road quickly crashes into a hung over morning after because this story about members of the beat generation is also about a group of people who think they are interesting, but aren’t (almost never a good premise for a drama). Actually, it’s a little worse than that. It’s about a group of people that the screenwriter Jose Rivera and director Walter Salles think are interesting, but neither gives all that compelling a reason as to why we should think so too.
The movie, of course, is based on the popular cult novel of the same name by Jack Kerouac. It’s a sort of, kind of autobiographical tale in the best Wolfe/Proust tradition (all the names were changed, but apparently not to protect the innocent, because there was never any question as to who was really who in the first place). The story revolves around an aspiring writer Sal Paradise (Kerouac) who doesn’t have anything to write about. Into his life comes Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), introduced to him by Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsburg).
Dean first appears to our naïve little hero fully naked, opening the door having been interruptus in his coitus with his sixteen year old wife, Marylou (how Jerry Lee Lewis can you get). The idea, I presume, is to show just how free and uninhibited Dean is. But all it shows is the hypocrisy of the movie and how unfree and inhibited the production is: the confrontational in your face Dean is shown wearing that fig leaf that all movies like this use—he’s seen only from the waste up so as not to offend anyone watching from the safety of their auditorium seats (oh, the irony, the irony). To the filmmakers’ credit, they do a bit better with the bisexuality, but only by a bit.
Dean is suppose to be a symbol of someone who makes his own morality and lives life on his own terms, fully free of the shackles of 1950’s America. But I have two issues with this:
The first is that I saw no shackles. Sal lives in his mother’s apartment (apparently room and board free), with no real job to speak off, coming and going as he pleases, doing drugs, and if he’s not getting sex, it’s not because of society’s priggishness, he’s just not any good at the art of seduction. When these kinds of characters are portrayed in contemporary films, they usually live in their parents’ basement, playing video games and watching internet porn all day long. But I don’t think Rivera and Salles see the parallel. In actually, the only real symbol of the shackles these poor fellows must endure are the tickets they get from highway patrolman when they are racing down frozen highways at breakneck speed, often with the windshield encrusted with ice, robbing them of any visibility (gee, getting a ticket for exceeding the speed limit—those fascists).
The second issue is how this freedom of Dean’s is defined. Everyone wants to be Dean, but not because of an existential idea of liberation. They want to be Dean because he can get his sixteen year old ex-wife to give him a blowjob without his asking while he’s driving a car, even though she knows she’s going to be dumped when he returns to his present wife upon reaching San Francisco. They don’t want freedom. They want women to humiliate themselves sexually for them. And that’s just a whiff of the misogyny run rampant here.
To its credit, the movie ends not with Sal’s embracement of Dean’s credo, but with the realization that Dean is not a symbol of liberation, but an all out sociopath. At the same time, this realization leaves a bad taste in the way Sal is more than a bit of a dick in his last encounter with his erstwhile hero.
The movie as a whole is not helped by not being particularly well cast. Garrett Hedlund was building a nice career for himself with strong appearances in such films as the highly recommended Control and the not so highly recommended, but not a complete failure, Brighton Rock. But here, sad to say, he brings little to the roll of Sal. Sam Riley as Dean brings about the same. Neither seems to have the ability to do anything with the characters that’s not already there. And since nothing is there, well, you know, Q.E.D. and all that.
The supporting cast is filled with tons of cameos, most successfully Elizabeth Moss as a frustrated wife who doesn’t know how to fit into this insane world she finds herself trapped in (true to the nature of the piece, the other women tell her that giving blowjobs will make her happy), and even more successfully, Viggo Mortensen, who steals the show in a few scenes as Old Bull Lee/William S. Burroughs. It’s an amazing little snapshot, but part of his success might possibly be that his character is the only one able to cut through the bullshit and call Dean the sociopath he is (finally, you think to yourself). Amy Adams makes an appearance as the pre-manslaughtered by way of William Tell second wife of Burroughs, but she has nothing to really do and proceeds not to do it.
Walter Salles and Jose Rivera were responsible for the much more successful Motorcycle Diaries, a movie with some similar ideas, at least in structure. In that movie, likewise inspired by true events, a young Che Guevara and Alberto Granado also hit the road. But the difference is astounding. While Motorcycle Diaries is a moving and often powerful movie about two friends who come to realize the breadth of injustice in the world and that they must do something about it, On the Road is about two friends who learn, well, nothing really. Well, I suppose one could say that Sal learns how to leave a friend sick and dying in the cold while he goes off to exploit him for literary purposes, but I’m not sure I’d brag about that.
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