Birdemic: Shock and Terror (Saturday, July 31, 2010) (86)

Birdemic is one of the worst movies ever made. It might be the worst movie I've ever seen in my life. Everything about it is terrible from the story and the script, to the acting, the editing, the sound and the special effects. There is no reason in the world to watch this film, and yet it was one of the most enjoyable movie-watching experiences I can remember in a long time.

In a recent piece in Harper's, Tom Bissell wrote about the film The Room as what he called a "post-camp cult film." That's the best description of Birdemic I can find. "It's so bad that it's good" is the general force at work here. Bissell beautifully explains the film as the "movie that an alien who has never seen a movie might make after having had movies thoroughly explained to him."

To describe the story that director James Nguyen wrote and directed is sorta silly, but I feel formally obliged to do it here. Rod works for an Internet sales company and one day bumps into hottie Nathalie in a diner at lunch. He asks her out and she says yes. They go out and fall in love.

At some point, totally unrelated to the romance, a flock of killer eagles begins attacking people in the Bay Area and killing them. Rod and Nathalie have to escape the terror from above and kill as many of the birds as they can in the process. Not to ruin anything (not that it matters if you know), but the birds ultimately give up and fly away for no reason. There's really no shock or terror in this at all.

The film is basically a re-hash of M. Night Shyamalan's terrible work from 2008, The Happening. In that, there was something weird where nature was killing people with wind and trees. In this, it seems nature is mad a humans for being bad to the environment, so it sends mad eagles to get the people. (By the way, if there was ever evidence that Shyamalan was a terrible writer and director it is that this movie - which is totally ridiculous - borrows the entire story, including small details, and it comes out totally silly.)

It it hard to explain how terrible every aspect of this film is. Aside from the silly story, every other technical aspect of the film is bad. The acting is beyond wooden (I'm guessing these are non-actors and maybe just Nguyen's friends), the editing is terrible, frequently cutting scenes off before they are finished. The sound is even horrible, cutting in an out as actors are speaking and leaving gaps of silence between visual cuts.

Maybe what makes the film so deliciously horrible is the special effect birds we see throughout the film. They look like birds you might have seen on a computer screen saver from around 1989. They don't move much and seem to hover in the air flapping their wings slowly, like giant, slow humming birds. Some of them are able to hang in the air without moving their wings, as if they were soaring, but also remain still as they do it. They are totally ridiculous and over-the-top.

It seems that this film, which was released in New York this past March, is already a cult hit. I saw it at a midnight screening where the audience was there to see something horrible and knew what they were getting (some of them might have seen it before, as they seemed to be laughing in advance of terrible things happening).

I'm not sure this would play well watching soberly in one's home. It's a bit like a really bad Rocky Horror Picture Show (there's even an amazing musical scene in a bar with a guy singing solo - though he apparently has invisible back-up singers and band). It looks like Nguyen is already working on a sequel to this film (The Resurrection). I look forward to that.

Stars: 0 of 4 (or alternatively "A Billion Stars")

I AM LOVE: The Film Babble Blog Review

I AM LOVE (Dir. Luca Guadagnino, 2009)







There sure is a lot of opulent dinner party preparation in this Italian drama. We see servants prepare food, line up plates, arrange seating, etc. under the supervision of Tilda Swinton as a Russian woman who married into the wealthy Recchi family, yet appears to be far from satisfied.




Swinton’s husband, Pippo Delbono, is distant and only business minded in the face of his father’s (Gabriele Ferzetti) declaration that he is passing his textile manufacturing enterprise to not only his son, but also his grandson (Flavio Parenti). This announcement is made, of course, at one of many formal dinner parties that dominate the first half of the film. 




A chef friend (Edoardo Gabbriellini) to Parenti enters the picture and sweeps Swinton off her feet with a sumptuous dish of prawns. This scene tries to be sublime, but it borders on the ridiculous – a shaft of light falls upon Swinton as she begins to eat, the music swells, and there are extreme close-ups of her face as the taste sensation overwhelms her. On a trip to Sanremo to visit her art student daughter (Alba Rohrwacher), who her mother knows is a lesbian, but is keeping her secret, Swinton runs into Gabbriellini and they begin an affair. 




Their budding romance has tragic consequences when it’s revealed at, yep, another fancy dinner gathering. After flirting with the mainstream and winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (for “Michael Clayton” in 2008) it’s nice to see that Swinton can come back to her art house home turf, but despite her character craft this is a overbearing self consciously artsy film with little soul. 




There is a sex scene that about sums it all up – Swinton and Gabbriellini make love in the woods, her pale skin (also surprising to see she will still do nude scenes – most of the time Oscars bring an end to that) intertwining with his as the camera cuts constantly away to the nature surrounding them.




Shots of insects and flowers are interspliced between shots of their carnal desires. It’s all a pretentious show-off that has no ambitions beyond empty imagery. I AM LOVE is sure to delight many lovers of Foreign and indie films for the same reasons it didn’t appeal to this reviewer. 




Its aesthetics alone will be enough to satisfy some movie goers, but the lack of pure emotional impact will definitely disturb others. Director Guadagnino made a film that desperately wants us to feel for these people, take in their lush environs, and luxuriate in their passions. 




Yet after 2 hours of all the luscious shots of well prepared delicacies that these people live off of, it was difficult to relate or empathize - the only real thing I felt was hunger.



More later...

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (Tuesday, July 27, 2010) (85)

The opening sequence of The Radiant Child shows a few title cards where director Tamra Davis explains how the film got started. She writes that she was a friend of Jean-Michel Basquiat in the early- and mid-1980s, and interviewed him in 1986. After the interview she put the footage aside for awhile not knowing what to do with it. When he died of a drug overdose in 1988, she decided to put the interview away and not use it. Recently she came back to the footage deciding she could do something with it now.

In this introduction, Davis leads us to believe that this film would be based on her interview with Basquiat, maybe leading us to new insights from the never-before-seen reels. What we get though is really nothing of the sort; this is a pure bio-doc, and a very good one at that. Through interviews with contemporaries, ex-girlfriends, art critics, downtown scenesters and friends, not to mention the 1986 interview, we see a very thorough and clear picture of this brilliant, troubled artist.

I am interested by the fact that in all the years I studied art history and have admired Basquiat's work - and felt very viscerally affected by it - I have always felt the need to "understand" it better. The mystery in the layers and layers of paint, images and text always bemused me; I wanted to get to a deeper level with the works, always feeling left somewhat on the outside. This film, in explaining who he was and how he worked, showed me that there is no real "deeper" understanding of this work. His work is almost purely emotional with touch points of (sometimes obscure) cultural literacy and identity peppered throughout.

At one point in the interview he speaks about how when he goes to paint, he turns on the television "for source material". This is totally revelatory to me. What might seem like a trite or cute line by a young artist working today, totally encapsulates how I would understand his work now. Yes, there are many levels to his work, but like with a television, there's a lot of stuff that is there that you don't need to worry about. His work is a cypher for the cultural world.

Davies employs a great soundtrack in the film, much of it being the artists and musicians who were in the same downtown scene that Basquiat was in (Blondie, the Velvet Underground), some being music of the era that might not have been downtown per se (early hip hop from the Bronx), and lots of be-bop, which Basquiat listened to constantly. The use of the bop here really underlines how much his paintings have in common with that style. That Charlie Parker or Dizzie Gillespie could improvise and chop up standards into smaller interesting bits is very similar to the technical and aesthetic qualities of Basquiat's work.

The film is really wonderfully directed. It moves along very smoothly and seems to tell his whole life story, getting into his psychology relating to his complicated relationship with his parents, showing how he came on the scene with tons of talent and no access and became a millionaire looking to become friends with the cool kids (Andy Warhol). Davis cuts the film beautifully, especially the montages showing his paintings and still photographs of him working in the studio.

I don't know why she started the film with this suggestion that it would use her '86 interview so much, because we really only get about 10 or 15 minutes of it at most (and most of it is not very interesting as he's clearly rolling on heroin during it). This documentary really is a great work of biography and is illuminating, even for an art lover like myself.

Stars: 3 of 4

A Smattering Of New Blu Ray & DVD Reviews

THE RUNAWAYS (Dir. Floria Sigismondi, 2010)

"Jail-fuckin'-bait! Jack-fuckin'-pot!!" - Kim Fowley as played by Michael Shannon. Not exactly. When this film came out last spring it cherry bombed at the box office. This absolutely by-the-numbers music biopic only comes alive when Michael Shannon is onscreen. 

As infamous record producer Kim Fowley, Shannon steals the film away from Kristen Stewart who does a convincing Joan Jett and an all angsty Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie. Despite the title Stewart and Fanning are the only members of the legendary '70s all girl punk band that the film chooses to focus on - you can count the lines Scout Taylor-Compton as Lita Ford has on one hand and Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development) as Robin the bassist barely registers. Ditto Stella Maeve as drummer Sandy West. 

West died in 2006, but you wouldn't know that from the film's ending wrap up of only Jett, Currie, and Fowley's fates. Still it's fast paced and filled with a lot of great music. In the mix of the Runaways greatest hits you get David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Sex Pistols, and weirdly Don McLean blaring throughout the movie. It will most likely be remembered for being the movie that Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning made out in, but if that's what your looking for, those scenes are blurry in a manner mistaken for artsy, and there's little emotional conviction to make anyone care. 

Overall THE RUNAWAYS resembles the VH1 produced rock biopics that dramatized Behind The Music episodes and rerun constantly on VH1 Classic. That undoubtedly will be where this ends up.

ENTRE NOS (Dirs. Gloria La Morte & Paola Mendoza, 2009) 

This Spanish drama, produced and distributed by IndiePix Films, was one that didn't visit Triangle area theaters, but is now out on DVD and available for streaming on Netflix Instant. Paola Mendoza plays a Colombian immigrant who in the opening scenes is left by her husband (Andres Munar) to fend for herself and her 2 children in New York City.

All she seems to have going for her is that she can make great empanadas, but she can't seem to sell those on the street corners so she takes up aluminum can recycling. It's a tale of struggle and hardhip loosely based on a true story that has several incredibly moving scenes. The strength of Mendoza's performance creates much empathy for the severe situations she faces. Sebastian Villada Lopez and Laura Montana Cortez as Mendoza's children also register highly. Though some of the suffering may discomfort some folks, this is definitely worth a rental.

MOTHER (Dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2009) This gritty yet crisp looking thriller from South Korean writer/director Joon-ho only came as close as Cary to the Galaxy theater last spring. When she believes that her slow daft son (Won Bin) is innocent of a murder he's accused of, Kim Hye-ja investigates the crime on her own.

The murder is of a school girl (Moon Hee-ra) who as the rumors say was very promiscuous and has a cell phone full of pictures of possible suspects. Hye-ja fiercely fights through the elements and, of course, gets more trouble than she bargained for. “Mother” is immensely entertaining with true feeling for its characters, particularly the admirable lead. It also looks beautiful on Blu ray.

PRODIGAL SONS (Dir. Kimberly Reed, 2010) Another film that didn't play in the Triangle - a documentary about and by transsexual film maker Kimberly Reed (formerly Paul Reed) who returns home to Montana to face family and friends. Adopted brother Marc, who has brain damage from a car accident, is a big obstacle as he's never accepted his sibling's sex change.

"I just wanted us to be able to move on, but before I knew it, we ended up exactly like we used to be." Reed says on her more than abundant narration. For the first 20 minutes or so it feels like a typical fish out of water/culture clash but when Marc finds out that his grand parents are none other than Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth things get considerably more interesting.

The take away amounts to more than that as we see Kimberly deal head on with his/her past rerunning old football footage and facing old photographs. Marc meanwhile has some scary outbursts which results in jail time. Film of Welles, mostly from his last film F FOR FAKE decorates the second half of the film in morbid tribute. A worthwhile yet disconcerting doc - PRODIGAL SONS is available on DVD and streaming from Netflix Instant.

A TOWN CALLED PANIC (Dirs. Stéphane Aubier & Vincent Patar) This French stop motion animation movie only played for a week at the Colony Theater in North Raleigh last spring which is a shame because it’s a fun absurd romp that deserves bigger audiences. Little plastic figurines, simply named for what they are – “Cowboy”, “Indian”, and “Horse” are the protagonists of this beyond silly plot involving 50 million bricks, thieving blue pointy headed fish folks, and a gigantic penguin robot.

As ridiculous animated features go it's way better than DESPICABLE ME.

PANIC has more than enough laughs and ideas in it to be worth and hour and 15 minutes of your time so see what too many people missed last spring theatrically as its now on DVD and also available streaming on Netflix Instant.

More later...

Mugabe and the White African (Saturday, July 24, 2010) (84)

The White African in this film is Mike Campbell, a farmer in Zimbabwe who grows mango on his large plot of land. He is fighting to keep his farm and trying to withstand the attacks and threats from local thugs who have been encouraged by the government to kick him and his family out. Campbell is fighting Mugabe in court in order to keep his land from seizure.


As part of Robert Mugabe's land redistribution program that began several years ago, white farmers are being rushed off their land in Zimbabwe so it can ostensibly be given to the poor peasants who live in the area. In actual fact, the white farmers are being beaten and terrorized in order to get them off their land. Once gone, their land ends up in the hands of local ministers, Mugabe supporters, judges, members of parliament and their families and associates. Because these people are not farmers, but just corrupt bureaucrats, they don't know how to grow anything on the land, further killing jobs in the already miserable economy.


There are actually two white Africans in the story. The other is Campbell's son-in-law, Ben Freeth, an equally tough young man who doesn't see how Mugabe's plans are fair or good in the slightest. Mike and Ben travel several times to Windhoek, Namibia for their trial at the Southern African Development Community's high court. Each time they go there, the Zimbabwean government postpones the case, and ultimately walks out of the court without presenting their side.


It is clear that Mugabe's land plan is illegal and racially bigoted and that if he wanted the white farmers out of his country he could have gone about it in a less violent and destructive way. It is also clear that Mugabe does not have a legal leg to stand on and that he cannot just void the land sales to the whites from years before merely on a whim.


The film is rather simplistic, however and somewhat disappointing. It relies on our emotional instincts, rather than explaining things to us with historical facts. It is much easier to show how scary the armed thugs are who constantly show up on Mike's farm, but it doesn't really explain why these particular guys are there. Throughout the film, I constantly wanted more information and more detail, and what I always got was more emotional heart-twisting.


For instance, Mike's lawyers explain that he bought the farm "after independence" (by which I gather they mean after 1965), though they do punt on the question of who he bought the farm from. If he bought the farm from another white person, it's not unreasonable to see that the blacks in the area might be upset by that. What we do see a lot is the bloody aftermath of white farmers getting beaten up by gangs of thugs. Of course this translates to us -but it is a rather cheap way of telling the story.


I don't mean to take the side of the thugs at all, but some more analysis of the situation would have been nice. Clearly the fact that Mike is providing jobs to hundreds of locals wheres the thugs who would take his farm would not is a compelling reason by itself to keep him around (aside from the human rights issues involved).


This is a good movie, but not a great movie. It does generally tell an effective and compelling chronological story. I just wanted a bit more here that I didn't get.


Stars: 2 of 4

Salt (Saturday, July 24, 2010) (83)

Salt is a totally ridiculous, recycled and dumb summer action blockbuster. There is absolutely nothing fresh about this film- I've seen it a hundred times before.


Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) is a CIA agent who one day interviews an ex-KGB general who says that she herself is a Russian sleeper agent who is going to kill the Russian president the next day in New York. Surprise, surprise, she escapes her D.C. office and runs up to New York by Bolt Bus (I'm not kidding... I wonder if she used the free wi-fi on board). There she seems to kill the Russian president and triggers a series of events that nearly lead to nuclear war (omigod - yes! Nuclear was with Russia is totally something that is going to happen tomorrow).


Her boss and main buddy in the CIA is Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) who doesn't believe she is a Russian spy and tries to defend her to all their spy buddies. At some point he has no choice but to admit that she probably is a spook, but then she gets away again and gets into the White House for a meeting with the President because she's dressed like a drag king (again- I'm serious). Now the question is will she start the nuclear war, will she kill the Prez or will she stay loyal to the United States.


It seems to me the only reason you would cast Jolie is because she's hot and gets you that vavavavoom t&a scene where she strips off her clothes or gets nekkid with some hot foreign dude. But for no reason, there is no sex to speak of in this whole film. And the film comes in at under 100 minutes, so it's not like they had to cut the sex scenes. I don't get that. Maybe director Phillip Noyce and writer Kurt Wimmer thought that would have been too cliche to put in. Instead they went with a movie about nuclear war with the Russians... in 2010.


The writing and direction in this film is so terrible it's surprising it was released at all. At one point when there is a gunman shooting at people in the White House (because, of course, you can attack the President inside the White House) a short bald man turns to the assailant and says, "don't kill me, I'm just the National Security Advisor." Really?! That passes for good dialogue in Hollywood these days? That's a joke of a parody of action movie dialogue. If you were making a movie making fun of dumb action movies, that line might be too silly to include.


Beside this, the action scenes are terribly done and totally unbelievable. For a moment I'll forget that one of the big action scenes takes place inside the White House where the secret service agents around the President are basically stuffed suits, no better at fighting than ninja movie bad guys (one karate chop to the neck and they out cold). One of the big chases is in New York, after Salt has apparently killed the Russian president and after she escaped the CIA in D.C. the day before. The NYPD (why they're involved is beyond me) take her in a police cruiser across the 59th Street Bridge for some unknown reason - but then get caught in traffic on the bridge, giving our heroine enough time to break some windows and escape. Again - really?! That would happen? That's even hard to believe in the world of dumb action flicks.


This film gave me nothing. The story is totally unoriginal with a few requisite dumb twists that are not all that surprising. The writing is terrible overall and the directing is laughable at best and horrible at worst. Who gives a crap about the acting? - it was lukewarm throughout (though why Schreiber has a southern accent in the film is bizarre and his execution is horrible). There is no reason to see this movie. It's not even stupid summer fun. It's terrible.


Stars: 0 of 4

Life During Wartime (Friday, July 23, 2010) (82)

This film is a follow-up to Todd Solondz's 1998 piece Happiness. I loved Happiness. I think it's fresh, hysterical and biting. This film has none of the power of the first and just feels like more stuff that was not good enough to make it into the earlier work. It is basically totally not funny and most of the jokes just come out as dull lines you'd say to somebody to gross them out.


Trish (Allison Janney), now-ex-wife of pedophile Bill Maplewood (Ciaran Hinds), is raising their three kids in Florida. Trish's loser sister, Joy (Shirley Henderson), is still not having any luck with men. Apparently she married Allan (who was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the last one, but is now Michael K. Williams - Omar from The Wire), though she wishes she married Andy (Jon Lovitz in the last, but Paul Reubens in this). Fancy sister Helen (Ally Sheedy) lives in a world of money, sex and coldness, and doesn't really have her stuff together either. All the characters deal with how to move on from their painful pasts and have happy futures.


In one scene, Trish comes back from a date and talks to her 12-year-old son Timmy about how great she feels and how when the guy touched her arm "it made [her] wet". He then asks, "are you still wet, mommy?" This is totally not funny and overdone. It has has the general cadence of Happiness, with none of the elegance. (I am reminded of the scene when Bill talks to his son Billy about his sick obsessions and his son asks him, "did you ever fuck me in the ass, dad?" and he answers, "No, with you son, I just masturbated.") The dialogue in this film mostly feels like a lines for cheap laughs, but nothing more interesting.


The film is not really a satire - because it doesn't really take aim at anything in particular. So what that everyone has pain and everyone is trying to deal with it? That is not really a jokey thing to laugh at - it's just a state of life. Besides, these people deal with their pain by ignoring it - by forgetting it generally. Undermining the whole point of the film. It's not about people struggling with forgiving or forgetting - it's about people who have forgotten pretending they still have an internal struggle... which they don't have at all.


Every scene seems to take five minutes longer than it should. Sometimes actors talk back and forth with one another and you forget what they're talking about because it's so dull and unimportant. The writing is really bad throughout.


I'm sure it's hard to cast actors in roles that the audience identifies with other actors, but I still feel like the actors here are just not as good - or not as good in their roles - as the actors in Happiness. Dylan Baker is much more sympathetic than Ciaran Hinds as Bill - and that is an interesting element in the first film (that you like Bill even though he's a monster). Jane Adams will always be Joy for me (in basically anything she does), so Shirley Henderson really doesn't have a shot here.


Mostly I feel that this film is just extra stuff that was left out of Happiness, for good reason, and cut together here to try to *say something*. What it says, though, is not really that interesting and doesn't make me really think more about the human condition or anything the way good satire can do well. It's just a bunch of bad jokes with no particular narrative.


Stars: .5 of 4

Farewell (Friday, July 23, 2010) (81)

Farewell was the codename the French intelligence service gave to a Frenchman living in Moscow in the early 1980s. This guy made contact with a disillusioned KGB general (Gregoriev)who felt that his country was headed in the wrong direction. Gregoriev began giving Farewell documents about the KGB spy apparatus in the West, who in turn passed them on the the CIA. At some point it became clear that Farewell and Gregoriev and their families were in some amount of danger. As an electrical engineer by trade, Farewell was never trained in proper protocols of espionage, so he made several mistakes.

I generally think that French filmmakers don't make good Hollywood-style action films and this doesn't do much to change my mind about that feeling. It is interesting that it's based on a true story (something that I had never heard of), but it is rather dull and slow-moving, as if it was a typical French drama.

Gregoriev is played by the great Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica. I know that he has acted before in things I've seen, but I don't think he's ever had such a big role. I think he's great. He's totally believable as a Russian communist who did believe in the Bolshevik dream, but now sees how repressive and counterproductive the Soviet regime is. He drinks, he screws, he has a loving family and adores his thoroughly modern teenage son. For me, Kusturica is one of the best things about the film. He lights up the screen and is a total natural (I hope he continues to act more).

The story is rather typical, even if it is real. There's not all that much intrigue here. OK - so it's a spy movie, that there are people following you and tapping your phone is totally typical, not specifically interesting.

Director and writer/adapter Christian Carion does a good job with the material (the film is totally harmless and good), but doesn't stretch very much. I think Farewell and Gregoriev might have been super important people in world history, but I never really see here how what they did is more important than any other spies in the world. I am told throughout the film that what they did was very impactful, but I never get a real visceral sense of this. I trust what I am told, but I wish I could have *see* it specifically.

Stars: 2 of 4

Around a Small Mountain (Thursday, July 22, 2010) (80)

I have written before about how much I've liked some of the new work by great French New Wave directors. That Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette are still working in their 70s and 80 is amazing by itself. Around a Small Mountain, sadly is not a wonderful film and suggests to me that Rivette might be on the way to losing his chops. It's wildly elliptical, with such a dull story that even if the narrative was clearer, it wouldn't even be that interesting.

One day Jane Birkin, Kate, is stuck on the side of the road with her SUV not running. A rich Italian man, Vittorio, pulls his Porsche up next to her and silently fixes her engine. He then drives off without any comment. She is pulling a circus tent as she works for a small troupe of clowns, acrobats and strongmen that plays through the the South of France. The Italian falls in with the circus, befriending the players in an effort to win Kate's heart.

Throughout the film, Rivette cuts several times to weird Brechtian sequences where the actors speak directly to us in the audience or have these weird mini-plays (on a stage with dramatic lighting) explaining background secondary stories. All of these seem like a bit much, as the whole film is so small, a good percentage of it becomes these meta-stories. They just didn't work for me.

I guess the story is rather sweet, if totally banal. The Italian man is rather lost in life, we have to imagine (though we find out almost nothing about him, really), and he feels safe and at home in the circus with other lost souls. I think my main objection is that the story never really develops very much. None of the characters grow or change and the fact that the story focuses on these particular scenes and days comes off as rather random. There is no real sense of forward movement or any kind of inertia.

It is clear that Rivette is a master. The Brechtian bits alone are daring and interesting (and I give all sorts of credit to any filmmaker who breaks rules). I just wanted a bit more. More of a story, more analysis of the characters, more of a conclusion. The film sorta ends with a silly open question that doesn't really go anywhere and this is frustrating more than thought-provoking.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

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CYRUS: The Film Babble Blog Review

CYRUS (Dirs. Jay Duplass & Mark Duplass, 2010)

“I’m like Shrek! What are you doing here in the forest with Shrek?” John C. Reilly jokingly asks Marisa Tomei after successfully determining that she’s flirting with him at a party. Although, or maybe because, she walked up on him taking a leak in the bushes it’s definitely a “meet cute.” * 

Reilly almost jeopardizes the moment by running back in the house when he hears Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” come on the stereo, drunkenly yelling “dance party!” Using his beer bottle as a microphone he sings along and tries to get others to join him.

When nobody does, Tomei saves the scene by entering the room singing and dancing along. Before you know it their previously embarrassed and snickering fellow party goers are right there with the couple singing and dancing along with them to the classic ‘80s synth pop song.

See? A meet cute.

Reilly is a divorced lovable lug of a guy who is still close to his ex wife (Catherine Keener) although she is about to get re-married. Reilly hasn’t dated in ages and it’s easy to see why he is instantly smitten with Tomei. The woman of his dreams though has a secret. Thinking she’s married he follows her one night and finds out what it is – she has a grown son (Jonah Hill) who still lives at home. 

Their first encounter Hill is polite and though he makes odd awkward jokes (“it’s great to finally have a new dad”) he seems to be cool with Reilly dating his mother. However clues start to form that that’s not the case like when Reilly wakes up the next morning and can’t find his shoes.

Over time more clashing occurs when Hill has panic attacks that Reilly suspects are faked. When Hill moves out then wants to move back in, Reilly confronts him and it’s obvious that the weirdness between them has now become war. 

Director brothers Jay and Mark Duplass take another step away from the “mumblecore” movement they helped found (their last one was their entertaining indie thriller “Baghead”) here by using name actors and a more conventional structure. Unfortunately they haven’t left behind sloppy camera work – the zoom ins and outs are overdone and the staging of many shots is shakier than shaky cam should be.

CYRUS has comic moments, but can’t really be considered a comedy.

Reilly and Hill may be Judd Apatow repertory players, but here they’re servicing a story that tries more for tears than laughs. Although it rarely gets either it’s a quirky diversion that may be worth a film goers’ time depending on whether they are a fan of the actors.

* Roger Ebert, who popularized the term, describes a "meet cute" as when "somebody runs into somebody else, and then something falls, and the two people began to talk, and their eyes meet and they realize that they are attracted to one another."

More later...

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (Saturday, June 18, 2010) (79)

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno is a fascinating French documentary that opens simply enough with a voice-over by co-director Serge Bromberg explaining how this work came to be. He says he got stuck in an elevator one day with a woman who was the widow of the great French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot. During their hours trapped in one of those tiny elevators in French apartments, she told him about the reels and reels of footage her long-deceased husband had shot for a film that was never released. This charming, intimate and unconventional approach pervades the film, showing us how this film was being made and how it ultimately fell apart mid-way though.

By 1964, Clouzot was one of the greatest filmmakers in the rich traditional of French cinema and was heading into the winter of his career. He became obsessed with his next project, a film called L'Enfer ("Hell" or "Inferno"), about a young couple where the wife is outwardly sexual and flirtatious with both men and women and the husband goes crazy as he thinks he wife is cheating on him. The central creative point of the film is that Clouzot wanted to show the man's inner turmoil and growing madness in a vivid way onscreen by using optical tricks and visual distortions, not to mention bizarre music that would give the same impression.

In order to do this, Clouzot spent many months working with photographers and artists shooting op-art pieces as well as visual and sound distortions trying to capture insanity for an audience. He worked tirelessly with costume designers and the actors to shoot tests and experiments all in the hopes of perfecting what were new techniques in visual communication.

At one point he decided that the film, which was shot in black and white, would have segments of color when the man started going mad. To heighten the drama of these scenes, he would invert the colors, so blue water would become red. In order to do this, he would have to make up the actors in blue and gray clothes and makeup so they would look naturally pink and lifelike in the inverse. As a result, much of the color footage we see has a ghostly gray palette.

This documentary is mostly a compilation of these screen tests and amazingly beautiful experimental material as well as interviews with Clouzot's technical collaborators (photographers, sound mixers, assistants, visual artists, electrical engineers, not to mention actors and friends).

One element that doesn't work as well and feels a bit unnecessary is that Bromberg and co-director Ruxandra Medrea use modern-day actors reading the film's script and acting out the story as a way to tell us what is happening in the narrative of the Inferno. I get what they are doing here and why they do it (it's nice to know the general outline of the story as we watch it), but it's a bit confusing and seems to be beside the point of the documentary. I think these segments could have been left out without any damage being done to the end product.

Clouzot was not a New Waver - he was from a time before that movement, from a golden age of French cinema with Jean Renoir and Jean Cocteau. But this film would have shown (and the footage we see does show) how he was aware of what the "younger generation" was doing in Paris at the time and how he was pushing the envelope of of traditional filmmaking to answer these cutting-edge newcomers. His response is utterly non-New Wave (and his process was so traditional he sometimes couldn't communicate with younger tech people on set) and at the same time totally fresh and innovative. Th footage we see reminds me of the last act (the trippy light show) of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (made four years later).

Ultimately Clouzot got lost in his own obsessive-compulsive spiral - effectively being driven mad by a film about a man being driven mad. I think the two directors of this film also run a bit off-track in the madness of the footage and rather lose track of the totality of the piece. The third act here is a bit sloppy as we see the Clouzot film is falling apart. We never totally see what happens and what ultimately runs the project into the ground.

There is unquestionably some amazing visual footage here, but I would have preferred a bit more structure to the documentary. That could have taken a very good work and made it great. Then again, the exact same could be said for the Clouzot film itself.

Stars: 3 of 4

Valhalla Rising (Saturday, July 17, 2010) (78)

I am a big fan of Nicolas Winding Refn's film Bonson from 2009. For that reason alone, I went to see Valhalla Rising, which looked like a big piece of shit in the trailers I saw beforehand. Well, I should learn a less and believe my eyes more than the past work of a filmmaker because this film is even more of a turd than I expected it to be.

There is basically no story here, but what I can best make out is that there is a guy named One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen), who is a tattooed slave in what might be England or Scotland or Scandinavia (with British accents) in the middle ages, who comes from a world of horrible violence. He escapes is current owners and kills them all. Then a young boy comes over and begins to follow him. At some point they meet a group of guys who are going to the Holy Land on a crusade. He follows them for awhile too. Then some more people die in extremely violent and bloody ways.

Throughout the story One Eye has weird fractured flashbacks to extreme violence he has seen in his life and visions of the world through a red filter (which I guess means something about blood). There is a lot of nothing going on too. We see people staring off into the distance blankly and then we see vast natural expanses or waterscapes with nothing going on. This gets pretty tedious.

The photography, by Morten Søborg is actually wonderful and looks very blue-green throughout. It is always foggy and gray, but there are glimpses of wonderful colors. If these plastic images don't do anything emotionally or story-wise, at least they look nice.

I really feel like I'm missing something with this film. It almost comes off as an art piece, more than a narrative, but I don't think that on purpose. I think it just has a bad script and bad execution without any of the poetry or beauty of his earlier work.

Stars: 1 of 4

Inception (Saturday, Jul 17, 2010) (77)

Inception is a complicated, but beautifully presented blockbuster that is a lot of fun to watch, but is a bit too clever and a bit too neat and tidy in the end. What we get is a very interesting puzzle-world where we follow three coincidental stories involving a group of people as they move between different layers of consciousness and dreams.

Dom Cobb (Leo Dicaprio) does what is called "extraction," where he is paid to go into people's dreams and steal things from deep inside their subconscious. He works with a team of people including an "architect" and a fixer. The architect designs the world that this "group dream" takes place in - the spaces and buildings of the world in the dream, so the extractor can interact with the subject in a more predictable dream space. The fixer is there to assist the extractor in anything he needs done inside the dream.

The dreamer subject would be unaware the extraction is occurring, but just think they're in a normal dream of their own. In order to go into the dream world, all the team members have to be sleeping and dreaming themselves - but, of course, this shared dream state is really their office... and it can get rather hairy.

As the extraction goes along, the subject gains more and more sense that the dream is not really their own. Their subconscious begins to put up boundaries so at some point all the people in the dream begin looking at the extractor and his team or actually fighting him (especially if that person has had training to guard against extraction - which rich and important people do). Ultimately the world of the dream, the world the architect has built, will begin to crumble, killing the people in the dream and waking them up (if you die in a dream, you wake up).

On top of this, sometimes the extraction requires going into a dream inside the dream, a meta-dream, for secrets that are hidden even deeper in one's brain. As the team goes to the second level the timing of the world slows down, so what is a minute in the real world, becomes five minutes in the first level of the dream, which becomes 25 minutes in the second level of the dream. The deeper dream level, the more unstable the architecture of that world is and more violent the people in the dream world become.

As the film opens, Cobb is working on an extraction from Saito (Ken Watanabe), a rich Japanese industrialist. On his team is his right-hand man and primary fixer, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Saito is testing their abilities and trying to find their weaknesses. It turns out he has a job for Cobb and his crew. He wants to make a business rival sell him the competing company. To do this, Cobb and his team must do the opposite of what they normally do. Rather than extracting an idea, they have to plant one - a process called inception.

Apparently this is something that extractors have worked but never achieved. It's the most powerful way of harnessing the power of dream control, but because of human psychology, it is very hard to do. Cobb and his team hire a new architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page) who is a gifted American student in Paris. They hire a "forger," Eames (Tom Hardy), whose job it is to forge documents in the real world, but also create fake devices in deeper dream worlds. They also hire a chemist who can give them a strong tranquilizer so they can sleep deep enough to get down three levels of dreams (an extremely unstable level of the psyche), Yusuf (Dileep Rao).

Everything goes swimmingly until Cobb's now-deceased wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard) haunts his subconscious and corrupts the dreams that he and the team share with the subject. As he tries to plant the idea of selling his company in the subconscious of billionaire Robert Fischer, Jr. (Cillian Murphy), he and his team have to fight Fischer's own defenses as well as the roadblocks Cobb and Mal put in the way. One unlucky twist is that if you die in a dream while under significant sedation, rather than simply waking up you drop into a deep world of "limbo" where you can live for decades with no hope of returning.

This is clearly a complex world filled with a long list of rules and contingencies to those guidelines. Every time you think you have figured out what is going on, there is another bump that re-confuses you. This method of storytelling also feels like a bit of a gimmick - that you're never really comfortable and writer-director Christopher Nolan always has three thoughts ahead of you. It's beautiful in the way a finely woven tapestry is, but it's a bit overdone. I think we would have been fine with a bit of a less baroque narrative. I think much of the detail and embellishment is showy and beside the main point of the story. (I fully realize this is a stupid argument on my part - that the story is complex is what it is... but it felt a bit like gilding the lily...)

Ever since I saw this movie, I have been trying to figure out if it's a really slick and smart movie or if it's just a gimmicky puzzle where once you figure it out, the fun is lost and it becomes pedestrian. It is a lot of fun and seems "intellectual", but I don't know how worthwhile it is. I tend to think it's more of a game that becomes humdrum the more you think about it. I don't think Nolan is really "saying" anything. I think it might just be fun and it's my mistake for making more of it than that.

The film is really great on a technical level. The look of the work is very smart, sexy and refined. Nolan works well with frequent collaborator, cinematographer Wally Pfister. The colors are generally subdued and frequently gray, brown and blue. This works well in a film about dreams(I can't remember the last time I had a dream in vivid color). The score by Hans Zimmer is really powerful and impressive. There are all sorts of non-musical themes that come along throughout, more sounds and noises than pure music. It's reminiscent of Michael Giacchino's score for the Lost television show or Philip Glass' brilliant score for Godfrey Reggio's Koaanisqatsi.

The costumes, sets and interiors are also sumptuous and felt particularly tangible and realistic. Every room was beautifully designed and every costume looked great (like James Bond, it's pretty awesome to get in a gunfight in a suit).I read one reviewer who wrote that its good that everyone has a unique costume - because it's not like the bad guys would go shopping together or have a bad-guy uniform. I agree with this.

Some of the CGI special effects were less crisp and clean than I would have hoped for. In one particular scene when Cobb is explaining "architecture" to Ariadne, he shows how things can explode. Sadly the exploding fruit and flower stands just looked like cartoons, shocking me back into my seat in the movie theater. I wish Nolan had used real effects with real explosions or redesigned this sequence differently.

(One weird thing is that the sound mix seemed off to me as the dialogue in many scenes was much too quiet compared with other sound effects and music. This made for a difficult experience, where I had to struggle to hear what the actors were saying. I don't ever recall this happening before. It's not a naturalistic use of low sound like in Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, I think it's just a mistake. For a while I thought it was a problem with my theater, but then I heard similar complaints from friends.)

One frustrating thing for me about the presentation is that even understanding how the time is decompressed the deeper you go into the dream world (which explains why you can have a really vivid dream, even though you're only asleep for a moment), there is not a consistent ratio of time from one dream level to another once they get into the inception phase of the story. According to the rules, there should be a lot more time in the second dream level than the first - and an even greater amount of time in the third level. Instead all the story-times seem to function co-incidentally with all the stories climaxing at the exact same moment. This was disorienting and a bit annoying. Don't give me a rule and then make an exception right away - and then not explain the exception.

There are a ton of detail questions left unanswered, and not to create mystery and intrigue, but just because Nolan seemed to not get to these issues. Most of these things don't matter too much (for instance: who is the company that Cobb works for and are there other companies who do this too?), but one thing that frustrated me is that Fischer seems to know a lot about extraction because he has been trained to fight it off in his dreams. Meanwhile, Ariadne has never heard of it and needs it explained to her (and to us). If extraction is so widespread in this world to the point that there are specific defenses against it, everyone should know about it. This exposes Ariadne as a clumsy cypher and a device for Nolan to move the story along. She really serves no other purpose than to poke and prod and ask questions. I think such information could have been presented better.

This film leaves me with a lot to think about, but almost all of what I’m considering relates to the narrative or the chronology of the story rather than the meaning behind those situations. There’s just not that much about why characters do things; it’s much more about what they are doing. This is ultimately is a rather shallow sandbox.

I'm pretty sure this is just a very clever and fresh heist movie and nothing more. Nolan clearly gives us a few small tidbits to use to spin off a whole other story and explanation of our own, but I don't think that's necessary. I think it's enough to read the film exactly as it is given: A rather Matrix-y action film that begins to question the borders between dreams and reality, but doesn't have an answer to that question.

I think it doesn't really go near anything Freudian or anything deep in terms of dream interpretation (which is amazing considering it's literally about dreams). I don't think it really takes a serious look at any deep issues, but just presents little slices of depth and moves on... for more spectacle. Perhaps a bit less polish and a bit more gritty realism would have been nice - but I guess that is simply not what this film is.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Kids Are All Right (Friday, July 16, 2010) (76)

The story of Kids Are All Right is so precious it's hard to write about without my heart and ovaries exploding into a million pieces (joking). Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) are a married lesbian couple in Los Angeles who have two teenage kids, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson). Each kid came from one one of the women being artificially inseminated in a clinic. Now that Joni is 18 and is about to move off to college, Laser wants her to get in touch with the sperm donor "father" so they can all meet.


Paul (Mark Ruffalo) is that donor and he's a now a highly sexed organic farmer and restaurateur in LA. His life has never totally become serious as he sleeps with whatever hot women is currently hanging around his businesses. When he's contacted by his offspring, he falls in love with the idea of being part of a family and immediately becomes a fixture in the lives of his kids. He hires Jules, who is trying to get a landscape business off the ground, to re-do his back yard. All of this does not sit well with Nic, who is only happy when she's in control.


To say the script is banal or unoriginal would be a huge understatement. We expect each plot turn almost exactly where it occurs and there is basically nothing more fresh to the story at all. More frustrating is the sloppiness of the writing and the reliance on over-written or nonsensical details to advance the plot (like how Paul is contacted by the sperm bank on his cell phone rather than in writing, which is good for the screen, but unrealistic - how did they get his cell number? Or how Nic and Jules are overprotective parents who say they shop at Whole Foods, but somehow don't know about organic foods).


(By the way, Laser is not a name. Laser is an acronym. Lazar is a Jewish name - like Lazar Wolf in Fiddler on the Roof - but Laser is dumb. I'm going to name my kid Nato... or Scuba... or Fifa.)

This is basically a super-trite Hollywood film wearing a button-up shirt and tie. I guess I'm supposed to be impressed that the normal family drama plays out over a "non-traditional" marriage, but I really don't care. There's nothing especially political about the film - to the contrary, Nic and Jules take on rather traditional masculine/feminine roles with Nic being the dominant provider and Jules being the submissive nurturer.


The acting between the mothers is good (actually its very good) - and also between the kids and their father - but I never really saw much of a motherly connection between the kids and their moms. Now that I think about it, there are not all that many scenes with the kids and the moms - most of the scenes are just between the moms, just between the kids or just between Paul and other characters. It's hard to make a movie about a family when the family is never in the same room together. The film is not really about the kids (as the title would suggest), but also not really about the parents either. It's sorta about family in that stuff happens in a family and people have to do stuff - but it's not really that interesting.


I think I mostly mind that the film rather comes from nowhere and goes nowhere - but makes us think that there's growth and development. Nic seems to be a cold bitch (I say that as an objective analysis and not to be misogynistic) who is basically never honestly happy. She never accepts Paul because she is threatened by him - but also because she has a dead heart. When he actually does something worthy of scorn, she continues to hate him - but for the wrong reasons and not totally fairly. She was never going to like him, so that he did actually mess up doesn't make her right to continue to not like him.


On top of this, the mothers are overbearing and that their kids respond, well, like kids, has nothing to do with the inception of Paul as a catalyst in their lives - it has to do with them growing up and seeing their mothers for what they are. Paul is basically totally unnecessary to this story as all the things that happen could have happened without him being around.


I object to repackaging a story I've seen a million times as something fresh and new - and **gay**. Give me something I've never seen before or give me something more traditional and interesting. I've seen this shit before and it didn't excite me the first time.


Stars: 1 of 4

Alamar (To the Sea) (Friday, July 16, 2010) (75)

Alamar is such an emotional film that it's rather hard to explain it with words. It is more a story about the simplicity of natural beauty and the emotional connections we have to it and to other people (wow- that sounds pretentious!). It's more or less a documentary about a father teaching his son how to catch fish in his home waters on the Mexican Caribbean coast. Jorge had his son Natan after some sort of torrid romance with an Italian woman on vacation. Natan lives with his mother in Rome, but this summer is visiting his dad and learning how to do the work that his father and grandfather do to make a living and eat.


I say "more or less a documentary" because there is clearly some sort of script the guys are sometimes playing off of and there are some actions done twice and captured in two different camera angles.


But that is basically it. There is no real narrative her other than a series of vignettes with Jorge, Natan and Jorge's father out on a boat catching lobster, barracuda and snapper. They sell some to a local fish buyer and some they keep to make fish soup and fish tacos.


The peace and serenity of the film is rather overwhelming. Director/Writer/Cinematographer/Editor Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio does a beautiful job of setting a gentle and lyrical tone throughout the film. He is certainly helped by the amazing scenery and other-worldly colors of the tropical water and skies. But he keeps the action, the sounds, the movements small, letting the natural tenor of the world there take over.


There is a lot of silence in this film (there is a minimal small score that is used rather sparingly throughout and not much dialogue either). Much of what we see are rather mundane shots of guys on a boat holding a line or in their cabin sitting and looking at the water. This is super relaxing and poetic.


There is not much to this film, but its beauty and simplicity is powerful. Its a great father-son story (even a multi-generational father-son story) that shows how one very patient, loving man teaches is son small lessons in quiet ways. He lets the boy use is imagination for some tasks but also gives him firm instructions for others. The emotional qualities of the film are beautiful. I don't think the film is really trying to *say* anything - it's just a simple document of the lives of a few people.


Stars: 3.5 of 4

INCEPTION: The Film Babble Blog Review

INCEPTION
(Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010)





The buzz has been building for Christopher Nolan's followup to the THE DARK KNIGHT for some time now, and it's certainly going to get bigger as audiences see for themselves what this incredible mind bender of a movie is all about. What it's all about I'm still working out, but I can say that it's a vivid visual feast that's one of the best films of the year so far. 

It's a difficult film to describe without giving away some of the pure pleasures of the plot so beware of Spoilers! Leo DiCaprio is a dream extractor - an expert in mind manipulation who deals in the underworld thievery of, well, parts of men's minds when they are asleep and dreaming. 

DiCaprio works with a team including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a "point-man" and a dream "architect" played by Lukas Haas. We meet them in the middle of a job inside of the dream state of Saito (Ken Watanabe) - a powerful Japanese business magnate.

Turns out Watanabe is auditioning DiCaprio and his crew for a bigger job involving "inception" -that is the planting of an idea into somebody's head through the dream world. 

For the job they need a new architect so through DiCaprio's professor father (the always welcome Sir Michael Caine) they are joined by a snark-free Ellen Page. DiCaprio also recruits the slick Tom Hardy to act as "forger" for the team. Dileep Rao rounds out the team as their chemist.

The target for their mind crime caper is Cillian Murphy as Watanabe's corporate rival who has the fate of his family's fortune in his hands upon his father's (Pete Postlethwaite) death. Much like in his last film, Martin Scorsese's SHUTTER ISLAND, DiCaprio is haunted by memories of his dead wife (here Marion Cotillard). Unlike SHUTTER ISLAND however here it's impossible to guess where it's all going.

Despite that it's crammed with a lot of action movie clichés - shoot-outs, automobile crashes, explosions, and there's even a sci-chase with machine guns - it never feels contrived. Its endlessly inventive dream inside of a dream inside of a dream scenarios are spell binding, and genuinely scary at times, and the towering worlds of the CGI crafted dream set pieces are overwhelmingly beautiful. Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister really outdid themselves on every frame. Likewise for Hans Zimmer who provides one of his most solid scores, one that swells and swoons at just the right moments.

I'll leave other critics to make comparisons to everything from METROPOLIS to the THE MATRIX because it's obvious that the decade it took to finish the screenplay Nolan has woven many influences and ideas into the framework. What wins out is the film threatens to burst out of the screen into real life - just like the most lucid dreams.

DiCaprio skillfully maneuvers through the action with a layered performance that's nearly as complex as the movie that's surrounding him.. Gordon-Levitt has a lot of screen time in his secondary role and he owns it - especially in the stressful yet seriously fun second half. 

In one of the best bits of acting I've seen from the actress, Page makes us feel the wonder of being able to create an entire world with intricate acrchitecture and the thrill of manipulating it to your own desires. At one point when she is learning how to structure a cityscape with thought, I really thought she was going to say: "Wow! This is awesome!" Because, well, it really is.

More later...

44 Inch Chest (Tuesday, July 13, 2010) (74)

44 Inch Chest is written by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, the duo that also write the clever Brit crime film Sexy Beast. There is a good amount of that earlier film in this (it is a story about the domestic lives of underworld wiseguys, there's a lot of talking about mundane stuff, the characters are clearly dark and dirty), but overall it lacks the brightness and joy of that first film.

This is a one-room play that I could easily imagine having been adapted from the stage to the screen (although I do think it's original). Colin (Ray Winstone), a criminal, is furious that his wife has decided to leave him for a younger guy. He panics and goes crazy tearing apart his house. His underworld buddies, Meredith (Ian McShane), Archie (Tom Wilkinson), Peanut (John Hurt) and Mal (Stephen Dillane) all sit with him around their clubhouse talking about his options (kill the guy who slept with his wife or let him live) and razzing one another. Ultimately they get the guy into the house and beat him up before talking more about other stuff.

There is almost no action in this film and it is super talky. It's a writers/actors piece with very minimal directing. The cast is clearly fantastic and they are all really good in their roles. McShane's character is gay, apparently, and he talks about fucking men and the relative sizes of their dicks. This is sorta funny, but is really just cheap, though his delivery is fabulous. John Hurt, who looks older than his 70 years, is very funny and and very good. This might be the perfect role for him now, as he gets to be old, cranky, drunk and swear a lot for it.

There is basically no violence in the picture, despite the crime world setting. By the time we see the guy who cheated with Colin's wife, he has already been beaten up and has dried blood caked to his face. This is certainly not nice to see, but it's interesting the way it's presented (this clearly is good work from director Malcolm Venville) so we only get the talking and shouting after the hitting, but not the action itself.

I think I wanted more out of this film. It's really not bad at all, it's just not what I expected. It's pretty funny and clever, I think it's just a bit boring. I like what it's trying to do, but I'm not sure I love the execution. It seems like a bit showy to have such a big cast and just have them talk the whole time in a single room. I guess there's nothing wrong with this, but I think it could have been more.

Stars: 2 o f 4

Revisiting AMERICAN SPLENDOR - R.I.P. Harvey Pekar (1939-2010)

"Am I a guy who writes about himself in a comic book? Or am I just a character in that book? If I die, will that character keep going? Or will he just fade away?" - Harvey Pekar as played by Paul Giamatti.



Shortly after hearing the news that cult comic book writer Harvey Pekar passed away yesterday there was a flurry of R.I.P. tweets praising the man, his work, and the 2003 biopic AMERICAN SPLENDOR. 



Since it's one of my favorite movies of the last decade and I've never written about it on this blog (Film Babble Blog started in 2004) I decided to take the DVD off the shelf and give it a tribute re-whirl. 



Taking its name from Pekar's autobiographical comic book series which dates back to 1976, AMERICAN SPLENDOR was a unique biopic in that while the subject is depicted by ace actor Paul Giamatti, Pekar himself appears in documentary style breaks in the storyline.






Husband and wife film making duo Robert Pulcini and Sheri Springer Bergman constructed with care a comic book aesthetic in which both Pekar and his dramatic doppelganger shuffle through animations, recreations of cartoon panels, and old videotape clips mostly from Pekar's infamous appearances on Late Night With David Letterman.






In the comic Pekar would often break the 4th wall and talk directly to us. The film runs with this concept as Pekar's narration enhances the film by adding meta commentary on the movie we're watching like when he says of Giamatti: "Here's me, or the guying playing me anyway, though he don't look nothing like me. But whatever." 



Pekar was a longtime file clerk and record collector who by chance befriended revolutionary cartoonist Robert Crumb at a yard sale in 1962. Crumb, meticulously portrayed by James Urbaniak, inspires Pekar to write his own comics. 



A rarity in a world filled with super heroes, Pekar's "American Splendor" comics centered on Pekar's mundane yet amusingly relatable life and gained a cult following over the years. Crumb and other notable artists illustrated Pekar's writing which made for a pleasing mix up of styles - something the movie adaptation excels at. Though Pekar says Giamatti doesn't look like him - he's as valid an embodiment as any of the comic book depictions.




In one of the most striking scenes Pekar (Giamatti) is taunted by his cartoon alter ego in line behind an old chatty Jewish lady at the grocery store. "You gonna suffer in silence for the rest of your life, or are you gonna make a mark?" Pekar becomes a folk hero in the '80s largely because of his appearances on Letterman. 



Over the course of a few years Pekar made 7 appearances on the popular program each time clashing more with the cranky sarcastic host. Pekar finally got kicked off the show because he bad mouthed GE (NBC's parent company) and said Letterman looked like a shill for them. Pekar was allowed back years later in the mid '90s but damage definitely had been done. Although the film shows real bits of Pekar's appearances, the most controversial one is dramatized with an actor (Todd Cummings) stepping in for Letterman. You can see the original clip here. 



The film is packed with jazz, soul, and rock which keeps it bopping from frame to frame. Its musical sensibility contributes to the feeling that its simply a riff on the world according to Harvey Pekar. That can be a risky approach but it's not a loose riff; there's not a wasted scene and the well written weight in the non meta portions makes it all fly. The scenes with Davis as Harvey's 3rd wife Joyce Brabner offset the trickier Pekar monologue material nicely. 



It's also a treat to see 30 Rock's Judah Friedlander do a pitch perfect impression of Pekar's friend Toby Radloff. Radloff also appears as himself along with the real Brabner - see what I mean about all the meta-ness? I've seen the movie several times so this latest re-watching wasn't necessarily revelatory, but it was very comforting like spending time with a good old friend again. Pekar was a hero to anyone who ever tried to make art on the side of a dreary existence in a soul deadening job.



The movie touchingly captures the begrudging spirit of a man who definitely did make a mark. In the booklet that comes with the DVD ("My Movie Year") Pekar says of the movie after seeing an early screening: "Wow, that was really innovative...the way they mixed acted portions and documentary footage and animation and cartoons. And double casting some roles. Great! They took a lot of chances and they all worked." 



Completely agree with you there Harvey. R.I.P. Harvey Pekar. 



Post note: I also highly recommend Pekar's comics. They are available in sweet anthologies that you can find at Amazon or wherever. "American Splendor: The Life And Times Of Harvey Pekar" and "Our Cancer Year" are essential reads in the world of autobiographical comic books.



More later...

Remember Me (Monday, June 12, 2010) (73)

Remember Me begins very well. There is a n'er-do-well kid Tyler Hawkins (Robert Pattinson) who bumps around Greenwich Village with a loser roommate drinking, working at the Strand and auditing classes at NYU. He and the roommate get arrested one night for talking back to a nasty cop and his rich dad (Pierce Brosnan) bails him out of the lock-up.


It seems he and his father don't get along well because his father is a sonofabitch and unloving. His family has been shattered by the suicide of his older brother several years before and all Tyler cares about now is his 11-year-old sister, Caroline (Ruby Jerins). When his roommate realizes that the daughter of the asshole cop, Ally (Emilie de Ravin), is a classmate of theirs, he gets Tyler to ask her out on a date, in hopes of getting revenge on her father. Of course the two fall madly in love with one another and their love story begins.


The script is pretty terrible. It's so recycled that you spend most of the film waiting for things you *know* are going to happen (like the big reveal when Tyler admits to Ally that he only asked her out to get back at her father, or the blow up when Tyler confronts his father for being a piece of shit). It's pretty awful.


Still, there are some moments in the film that I could only classify as *great*. After Tyler and Ally have sex, there is an overhead shot looking down at the two of them lying in bed (possibly an hour or so later). She rolls over to him and starts cuddling, and then they begin to go at it again. This might sound rather typical, but I gotta admit, I don't know if I've seen a frank sex moment like this in a long time (mostly on-screen sex is hot and then over and then a cut to the next scene). When real people (kids) have sex, they frequently cuddle after - and sometimes begin to go at it again.


As amazing as it sounds, the best thing in the film is the acting and the chemistry the actors have with one another. I have ranted in the past about how Robert Pattinson is a bad actor, but he is really believable and honest here. I totally bought that he is a semi-depressed kid looking for direction in his life. His loudest moments (like when he confronts his father about being a schmuck) are really good and reminiscent of Joaquin Phoenix at his best (or of Michael Shannon).


But more than his great performance is how he interacts with the other actors. He and Emilie de Ravin are absolutely magical together. They seem totally madly in love with each other. She's great too - though I only know her from Lost (where I thought she was generally overdone as the crazy Claire) and Brick (where she was good, but overshadowed by other more fantastic actors). Perhaps the most surprising acting comes from 11-year old Ruby Jerins. She's earnest and fragile and clearly very precocious. Her relationship with Pattinson is magnetic and fantastic. I look forward to seeing more from her in the future.


Of all the non-Americans playing New Yorkers here, surprisingly Brosnan (who I normally think is great) has the hardest time with his accent. He's supposed to have been born in Brooklyn, but his accent is somewhere between Ireland and the gutter. That's not the only problem with his character - he's totally ridiculously written. He's the worst father on earth and as a named partner of a law firm, is not able to get out of the office for a few minutes to go to his daughter's art show. This is so silly it's distracting. His character could have been a jerk without being this much of a jerk. This is just hard to buy.


But it does come back to the writing. The film has one of the worst endings in the history of cinema. It's cheap and ridiculous. There is no reason this couldn't just be a nice, if banal, love story. Instead it's a trite story with a horrible ending. How sad.


Stars: 2 of 4

WINTER'S BONE: The Film Babble Blog Review

WINTER'S BONE
(Dir. Debra Granik, 2010)






A chill can be felt in the opening scenes of this spare backwoods drama. We meet 17 year old Jennifer Lawrence, who looks a little like a rough edged Renée Zellweger, living with her mentally ill mother and 2 younger siblings (Ashlee Thompson and Isaiah Stone) in a humble home in the Ozarks.




Lawrence is told by the local sheriff (Garret Dillahunt) that her drug dealing father has gone missing after putting up their house for bond. If he doesn't make a court date in one week's time they will lose the house.

Lawrence is determined to find her father, dead or alive, no matter how treacherous and uninviting the terrain. 




Lawrence's father's meth head brother Teardrop (John Hawkes) warns her against sticking her nose in places it doesn't belong, but her fierce drive to protect her family keeps her going. "Talkin' just causes witnesses" she is told by Dale Dickey - just one of many scary folks she confronts on the trail.

It's a washed out and grim looking film and for the first half it's such a slow burner that a strong sense of the inevitable is impossible to shake. 




Unfortunately its grueling build has little in terms of payoff. There are several effective scenes, including a greatly played exchange with a military recruiter that reveals the full extent of Lawrence's character's naivety, but the chilling mood can't withstand the glacial pace.

Although it was based on a 224 page novel by Daniel Woodrell, WINTER'S BONE may have made for a better short film, but as a full length feature it feels stretched out with too many periods of dead air. 




It's a less than gripping non thriller that barely skirts by despite good performances by its cast (particularly the stoic Lawrence) and its stark cinematography by Michael McDonough. But if dead air and a hard to shake sense of doom are what you're looking for - WINTER'S BONE has it in spades. 






More later...