The Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl (Thursday, September 30, 2010) (125)

Manoel de Oliviera made The Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl when he was 100-years old (he's now 102). He started making movies in the 1930s in the silent era and is still working today. None of this really really means anything significant, but it's impressive as hell - especially considering how good a movie this is.


More than anything, this is a visual pleasure to behold. Oliviera's use of color, texture and scale is absolutely masterful, making this one of the most beautiful works I've seen in a long time. Based on a short story by Jose Maria de Eca de Queiroz, the 19th Century Portuguese novelist, this movie basically plays like a short story at only 64 minutes long. And like a good short story the economical use of dialogue, explication, detail and atmosphere is the key here.


Macario is a young accountant who works in his uncle's fabric store. At work above the shop one day he looks out the window and sees a girl in the window facing him across the street, Luisa, keeping cool by waving a fan on herself. At first he notices the fan, but then he notices the girl. She's only a few years younger than he is and is absolutely gorgeous. Immediately he falls in love with her.


After meeting her and meeting her family, he wants to ask her to marry him, but his traditional uncle doesn't want her to distract him from his work. The very conservative man feels that it is inappropriate for the two to date and also worries that he is not very good at his work and throwing a woman into his life might make him make more mistakes. He must prove to his uncle and to Luisa's family that he is a good, honest man who can take care of himself financially and use good judgment.


One thing that is a bit surprising about the film, but something that I really liked, is that the story is basically not updated at all from the old-fashionedness of the short story. We basically are watching a 19th Century story played out in modern times. The very mannered acting and dialogue underlines this point and shows how that much has changed in the world in the past 200 years, still some similar things remain.


There is a gorgeous quality to the photography here (by Sabine Lancelin) that has incredibly rich colors in each and ever shot - turning each set-up into a beautiful painting. This is not super intense colors, like you might find in a Fassbinder film, but rather single bold colors that fit in naturally to the other tones of a room or landscape. In some cases it's just a simple yellow curtain by the window in the corner, in other cases, it's the pinkish tone of a building exterior.


It seems like as much time went into showing amazing textures to us as well. One of my favorite elements in the film is the nearly-tactile travertine frame around the window that Luisa stands in. This beautiful texture meshes amazingly with the plaster wall of the building that surrounds it. Making this whole set-up even more wonderful size of the window (almost bigger than human-sized) and the frame the window creates within the overall shot. It's a simple thing, but it's absolutely gorgeous. If this were a painting in a museum it would be a masterpiece.


There is an interesting element of memory and idealization in this film that is very important. We see many wide-angle shots with incredibly deep focus. This reminds us of how deep memories go and how for Macario beautiful things (beautiful girls) can be idealized and remain perfect forever.


I appreciate how small and gentle this film is. It is technically tremendous but also has a beautiful, simple story as well.


Stars: 4 of 4

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ANIMAL KINGDOM: The Film Babble Blog Review

ANIMAL KINGDOM (Dir. David Michôd, 2010)

At the center of this Australian crime drama is what seems at first to be a very unlikely protagonist.

James Frecheville portrays a Melbourne based teenager with dead eyes and bad posture who we meet as he awaits medics to tend to the body of his dead mother – a victim of a heroin overdose.

Frecheville is less interested in his mother’s death than he is a game show on television. He calls his grandmother (Jacki Weaver) in hopes of having a place to stay.

Weaver welcomes Frecheville into her home which also houses her 3 sons – Ben Mendelsohn, Sullivan Stapleton, and Luke Ford.

The brothers, along with their friend Joel Edgerton, are armed robbers and drug dealers. The police stake out their one floor shabby home around the clock.

Mendelsohn is the most menacing of the family – the second he appears on screen entering from the darkness, one knows that he will be the source of deadly discomfort later in the film.

As retaliation for the killing of one of their family – the brothers ambush and murder 2 police officers which bring on the investigation by Melbourne's Armed Robbery Squad led by Guy Pearce as a mustached detective without a corrupt bone in his body.

Frecheville has only one bright spot – his girlfriend Laura Wheelwright. When Mendelsohn eyes her though, we get another strong sense of dark foreshadowing.

Director Michôd brings out piercing performances from his cast. Frecheville proves himself worthy as a disaffected kid on the verge of manhood having to get a hold of his life’s direction in the face of the brutality of men like Mendelsohn.

Pearce, as the only “name” in the movie, has a few particularly affecting moments – especially in a monologue that explains the film’s title.

As the family matriarch, Weaver pulls off a creepy yet somehow endearing presence. She lives on the hugs from her sinner sons, and she hints at a not so innocent past of her own.

ANIMAL KINGDOM is a gritty bleak exercise in uneasiness that at times may feel impenetrable – especially with the thick drawl of the accents – but it’s never dull and every scene has an eerie edge that remains long after the film’s cutting conclusion.

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Made in Dagenham (Monday, September 27, 2010) (124)

Made in Dagenham has been described as the British version of Norma Rae, and that's basically exactly what it is. The film follows the story of Rita O'Grady, who in 1968 led a strike by the women in the Ford factory in Dagenham, England to get equal pay for their work. The plant was one of the biggest in the world and the center of Ford's European production center.

The 140-or-so women who worked there were considered unskilled laborers for their work sewing vinyl seats for the interiors of all the Ford cars produced in the factory. With such a classification, they were paid less than people with semi-skilled or skilled titles. The problem, however, was that even if the women got the semi-skilled designation, they would still be paid less than men at the same level.


O'Grady (played by the bright and sunshiny Sally Hawkins), with the help of her union organizer, Albert Passingham (Bob Hoskins), got the women to strike for several months, ultimately resulting in a shut-down of all car production at that factory, as they couldn't complete cars with no interior seating. O'Grady had to deal with the constant onslaught by male factory workers who didn't see the labor issue similarly as well as a growing friction with family and friends. Her loving husband Eddie (Daniel Mays) struggles with wanting to support his wife and her causes and feeling emasculated that she is the boss of the house (and keeping the factory idle as well).


This is a very nice story filled with all sorts of wonderful tearful moments where women assert themselves and demand equal pay, but it is banal and somewhat lifeless. O'Grady is a very important woman in world labor history, to be sure, but there's not much here other than some rather dull history.


To make matters worse, the script, by Bill Ivory, is much too long and complicated and the directing, by Nigel Cole, is rather styleless and badly done. The film should have been been no more than 90 minutes, rather than the 113 that it clocks in at. There is a lot of time wasted on side stories, like the lady who led the women's section of the union before O'Grady and how her husband is an dusty old war vet, or the hot-stuff young woman who is a symbol of '60s sexual liberation while trying to fit into the old factory mindset.


Cole really does a terrible job of letting us know exactly what will happen to characters three scenes ahead of time. When one character gives a passionate speech about how proud he is of the women strikers, it is clear in context that he is going to die in the next few minutes. The most upsetting is that once the women's demands are basically met and the Minister of Labor (who is a lady) agrees to a pay hike for them, we get a horrible back and forth between O'Grady and the Minister about the clothes they're wearing - because they might be important union and labor people, but at the end of the day, women just love talking about clothes. Ugh.


These things are not all that terrible, though. The film is OK and not brilliant - but not terrible. It's not as good as Norma Rae, because there's just too much going on, but it's nice and inoffensive.

Stars: 2 of 4

Enter the Void (Sunday, September 26, 2010) (123)

I only know writer/director Gaspar Noé from his 2002 film Irreversible, which got a lot of attention at the time for it's unusual structure and the very, very violent rape scene with Monica Bellucci. I guess I was prepared for Enter the Void to be a difficult film, but I could have never expected what I got. Watching this film is a totally arduous experience. Noé uses bright, flashing lights and odd focus tricks, unusual moving cameras, sudden and loud noises and some of the most direct sexual and violent material I have seen in recent years. Beneath these elements, the film is rather dull as the underlying story is banal and difficult to connect with.

The basic story is of American loser and waistoid Oscar who lives in Tokyo for some amount of time. At a certain point he begins to deal drugs in the expat clubbing community. His younger sister Linda visits him and falls in with a Japanese pimp. Ultimately when a drug deal goes bad, Oscar is killed by the Japanese vice squad. From there we see backwards, how Oscar got to that point, and forwards, about what his sister does after his death.

The main focus of the film is the unusual points-of-view of each of the three acts. The first act (about Oscar dealing drugs and getting iced) is interestingly shown from his subjective point-of-view - as if we were looking out of his eyes and hearing in voice over his internal thoughts. There are some clever camera tricks use here (like when he looks in a mirror at one point). When Oscar takes some drugs, we go into his brain to see what he is "seeing" internally - which is basically some trippy psychedelic stuff reminiscent of the third act of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mostly this is showy and annoying (it's basically a long hand-held camera shot with some Windows 95 screen-saver computer animation in the middle).

The second act is told from behind Oscar's head (sorta like the shots of Olivier Gourmet in the Dardenne Brothers' Le Fils). We are following Oscar as he goes about doing and dealing drugs and fucking all sorts of whores and girlfriends (heckuva life, buddy).

The last act seems to be from the point-of-view of Oscar's spirit or soul (ugh, even writing that makes me sorta sick). Everything is shot from above with a very "floaty" camera. We go through walls and fly around the city from one sinful location to another seeing what Linda after he's gone. Not to ruin anything, but we get to go into Linda's vagina as she's having sex and see her male partner's penis pushing toward us and ejaculating. Uh. I don't know what to say about this, other than it's totally unnecessary and pretty fucking dumb.

But that's really the whole movie. Oscar and Linda are really boring characters who are never sober and have nothing to say of any interest (there's a back story that they were orphaned when they were young when their folks died in a bad car accident). Their expat friends are lowlifes. The drug stuff is boring and only style with no substance.

I got rather motion sick watching this, with all the moving cameras and drug-addled views of the world. There is a recurring thing where Oscar remembers the car accident that killed his parents - which means that at just about any moment there could be a tremendously loud and sudden car crash into the middle of the screen (just in case we were getting comfortable in our seats as we're getting jizzed on by gigantic cocks). The script structure is just as showy and unnecessary as the drug visions and camera work. Big deal that it's not linear. That makes it annoying, not interesting. I guess I give Noé credit for being brave enough to do what he wanted to do - I just didn't particularly like it.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS: The Film Babble Blog Review

WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

(Dir. Oliver Stone, 2010)

Spoiler Alert!: This review gives away a number of key plot points because, well, I just don’t care.

Last year I wrote that a sequel to Oliver Stone’s seminal 1987 WALL STREET was one of 10 sequels to classic movies that should not happen. Despite that I had a tiny sliver of hope inside that the controversial director might pull off another timely indictment of America’s financial system.

Sadly, the return of Gordon Gekko to the silver screen is no such film. It’s as unnecessary a retread as BLUES BROTHERS 2000, which incidentally also began with the prison release of a major character.

In 2002, Michael Douglas as Gekko, 67 years old with his lion's mane of hair now gray, walks out of Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison after serving 8 years to find nobody waiting for him. The camera circles his head to let this sink in.

The film flashes forward to 2008 and for a while it’s Shia LaBeouf’s movie. LaBeouf is an ambitious trader – think Charlie Sheen in the first film but with more ethics – engaged to Douglas’ activist blogger daughter (Carey Mulligan).

LaBeouf’s mentor (Frank Langella) at his firm commits suicide after rampant rumors cause the company’s stock to crash.

Josh Brolin, as an old school Gekko-ish hedge fund manager, is suspected by LaBeouf as being the source of the rumors. Going behind Mulligan’s back, LaBeouf consults with Douglas who wants to be close to his daughter again.

Mulligan wants nothing to do with her father. She blames him for the overdose death of her brother and she’s vehemently against the Wall Street world which makes it hard to believe that she’s surprised to find out that her fiancé is a “Wall Street guy”.

LaBeouf wants to avenge Langella, make a name for himself, and sincerely help a renewable fusion-energy company run by the always nice to see Austin Pendleton – in the same manner that Sheen wanted to help out his father’s ailing airline.

Upon learning that Douglas set his daughter up with a Swiss trust fund worth $100 million, LaBeouf finds himself caught in a web of convoluted double crossings.

Stone uses every visual trick up his sleeve to shape this material – at a point in one of several flashy montages full of split screens, tangled neon cable news ticker tape, and computer animation I felt like I was trapped in a MSNBC hall of mirrors.

The problem is that what made the first movie great is that Gordon Gekko was not a redeemable character. He was a symbol of corporate evil and a necessary one, for there are horrible fiscal creatures out there that destroy thousands of people’s lives with no remorse.

If Gekko truly isn’t a sociopath (as his daughter calls him early on), but a visionary that predicts the economic collapse in 2008 and can be won over by a disc containing his future grandson’s ultrasound – what does he symbolize now?

Douglas’s Oscar winning performance of Gekko in the first film was named by AFI as number 24 of the top 50 movie villains of all time in 2003. After his defanged depiction here that number will surely drop next time they update the list.

It’s understandable that Stone and Douglas wanted to revisit this terrain, but with its predictable plot and pat happy ending this is more than a missed opportunity – it’s a failed follow-up of epic proportions.

One of the only enjoyable elements is the soundtrack provided by David Byrne and Brian Eno. As the first film ended with the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”, this one obviously tries to match the mood with a fine selection of the duo’s collaborations. When these melodies appear it’s the only time that this film feels anywhere near the league of the original.

Beyond that, WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS (awful title) has little point to it, except maybe to unleash a bunch of new Gekko-isms on the public.

Of the many so called pearls of wisdom the slick slimy Gekko spouts - “Idealism kills every deal” – sticks out. By sparing us the true cutthroat nature of the beast in favor of trite sentimentality, the deal is definitely dead as a doornail here.

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Howl (Sunday, September 26, 2010) (122)

Howl is a multi-form film about Allen Ginsberg around the time he wrote his masterpiece poem and about the obscenity suit that was brought against the publisher for it. Apparently, we are told, the dialogue all comes from interviews with Ginsberg and the courtroom transcription from the trial.

There are four threads that mix and cut through this piece. In one we see Ginsberg (played by James Franco) in his apartment in 1957, about two years after the piece was published talking to an interviewer (in color). Another one is the courtroom (in black and white) with David Strathairn as the prosecutor, Jon Hamm as the defense attorney and Bob Balaban as the judge. There are several "literary experts" brought to testify about the value of the poem and whether or not it is obscene. In another thread, we see (again in black and white) Ginsberg (again Franco) reading the poem to a crowded nightclub with his crushes Jack Kerouac and Neal Casssady and his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky looking on. The final section is an animated expression of the poem playing out with Franco's voice (as Ginsberg's voice) reading the poem on top.

The impressive thing about the film is that it presents the entire poem in a way that becomes rather easy to understand through all the different ideas that swirl around it. Just as you hear one section in the animated part, you see a discussion of that part by the courtroom "experts" and then see Ginsberg explaining it himself to the interviewer. Sometimes his stand-up reading of it gives more tone to that section, so we once again understand it better.

On top of this, we see a good amount about who Ginsberg was at the time. He was a very sad gay man who was constantly in and out of mental hospitals. We get the sense that he was sent to these places not necessarily because he needed it, but because he was weird and gay and many doctors didn't know how to deal with him (he might have had some anxiety disorders, though he was never particularly crazy). We see how his love for a few men (straight men) like Kerouac and Cassady was a painful burr in his side through much of his 20s. He was able to hook up with them once in a while, but never felt that he got the same love he gave them.

This is a very interesting movie and a very clever, creative presentation. I have always appreciated the poem, but always found it a bit cumbersome and dense. The formal elements of the film help to break down the wall I've always had with the piece and make me appreciate it more. In the end, though, it is very small and just about a single poem. That's a bit unfair of me to say, I know, but it doesn't have a tremendous amount of depth beyond some interesting insights in to Ginsberg's life.

Stars: 3 of 4

Buried (Saturday, September 25, 2010) (121)

Rodrigo Cortes' Buried is a great example of a tremendous idea that is terrible executed and how the end result is pretty horrible. The film opens with a black screen and a some panting and fumbling from a man. After a few agonizing minutes (it might actually only be a few seconds, but it feels like it's going on forever) a Zippo lighter is lit and we see a man (Ryan Reynolds) who is tied bound and gagged in a shallow coffin, dirty and bleeding. He screams and tries to push is way out, but he seems to be buried under sand.

After a few minutes a mobile phone rings near his feet. He reaches down to grab it and misses the call. He begins calling numbers he knows: his wife in Western Michigan; 411 information; the FBI field office; the company he works for. He is a contractor in Iraq, a truck driver, and it seems that his convoy was hit by an IUD. He blacked and and all he knows is that now he is where he is. (We find out later that it is October 2006.)

Ultimately he gets a call from the kidnappers who tell him they need $5million by 9pm or they will let him die in the coffin. It is about 7:30 at this point. He calls the State Department and they put him through to a hostage negotiating team in Iraq and a guy who can help to find him or at least try to calm his nerves. It seems he's not only running out of time on the clock, but his phone is running out of batteries and he might also be running out of air.

The premise is great and sorta reminiscent of a clumsy Hitchcockian idea (actually the poster and the opening titles are clearly inspired by Saul Bass and give a very Hitchcockian feeling even before the film begins). But the execution of the film is nothing even close to Hitch. At nearly every turn Cortes makes bad decisions and goes more for the shock/thriller aspect of the story than the interesting psycho-terror-drama aspects of the story that Hitch would have certainly enjoyed more. Basically the script is full of cheap gags and a bunch of unexplainable details.

At one point Reynolds is told by the hostage helper guy that he should conserve his phone battery life by putting the phone on a sound ringer rather than a vibrate. He doesn't do this- and for no particular reason. Later he takes a brief nap and wakes to find a black snake in his pants. Huh?! How did a snake get in his pants? We see the snake slither out of a hole in the side of the coffin (a hole that was never there before) - so are we to believe that the snake came into the box, found the leg of his trousers, went up one side and then down the other side and then out the hole again? Smart snake!

I am impressed that the entire film takes place inside the coffin with the camera only on Reynolds for 95 minutes and doesn't get particularly dull, but this feeling is tempered by the absolute idiocy of most of the writing. Reynolds frequently gets furious and yells a people he calls when they don't understand the situation he's in. I totally get that he's frustrated and panicky, but at some point shouldn't he figure out that he can get more help if he's calm than if he's worked up?

I would love to see this done again with a better script. Screenwriter Chris Sparling clearly has horror movies on his mind more than good suspense films and I think this does the film a disservice. I know this concept can be done better.

Stars: 1 of 4

DVD Review: LOUIE BLUIE

LOUIE BLUIE (Dir. Terry Zwigoff, 1985)

"She sauntered over to me and she says 'You're Armstrong. I know you're Armstrong. But you're not Louie Armstrong, that Louie. You're just plain ol' Louie Bluie, that's what you are.' And so I used the name to record under later." - Howard Armstrong

Last month the Criterion added to their esteemed collection CRUMB - Terry Zwigoff's classic 1995 documentary about legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb.

The same day, August 10th, a lesser known Zwigoff film, his 1985 debut doc LOUIE BLUIE, also got the deluxe treatment and that's very good news for fans of the blues, comic art, and hilarious tall tales that just might be true.

"Louie Bluie" is the nickname Howard Armstrong (1909-2003) - a fiddle and mandolin player who recorded in the late '20s and '30s who is also known for his amazing artwork of various mediums.

Armstrong sits down with friends (mainly guitarist Ted Bogan) and tells wonderful stories about his youth filled with colorful phrasing and sharp wit.

Zwigoff's subject picks on Bogan for being a dog towards women and he picks with Bogan on several jams which give this delightful doc a toe tapping rhythm between anecdotes.

There's not much of a narrative here, but it hardly matters as the material and music are so good.

When Zwigoff zooms in on Armstrong's art, we can see why this old time musician appealed to the '78 collecting, comic book loving director.

Armstrong started drawing when he was a child capturing himself, family members, various other folks and scenes from his Tennessean birthplace.

Armstrong's art is astounding - whether it's created by crayon, paint, or ink squeezed from crepe paper. At one point he shows a friend his "Pornography Bible" - a thick bound book of art and text about sex that Armstrong keeps under lock and key.

Armstrong: "I have to keep it locked up to keep the man from locking me up."

LOUIE BLUIE is only an hour long but it's an hour very well spent with a fascinating funny and terrifically talented man who should be better known.

If you want more there's a little over 30 minutes of "unused footage" featuring more music and amusing stories.

Other bonus features include an illuminating Zwigoff commentary and a stills gallery that is really worth paging through if only to see more of the "Pornography Bible".

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Blu Ray/DVD Review: CALVIN MARSHALL

CALVIN MARSHALL (Dir. Gary Lundgren, 2009)

Alex Frost as the 21 year old title character has big dreams of playing Major League Baseball.

Frost is a student at a fictitious college in Oregon who has tried out for the school’s Junior College team (the Bayford Bisons) for 3 straight years only to be told by the scruffy coach (Steve Zahn) that he again didn’t make the cut.

Frost has a hard time taking no for an answer so he tells people (including his aunt and her boyfriend played by Jane Adams and Andrew Wilson) that he has a hand injury and has to sit on the sidelines until he heals.

Meanwhile while covering girls volleyball for a local cable access sports show, Frost meets Michelle Lombardo as the uber-skilled star of their school’s team.

Lombardo believes Frost to be the baseball star he claims to be and a romance develops.

Frost is able to weasel his way back onto the baseball diamond by way of adding his name to a faked computer printout of team members. Although angered by this, Zahn begrudgingly admires the kid’s ambition and love of the game.

Zahn’s performance as a once promising baseball player who never made the big-time owns this cute, but inconsequential little indie. His Coach Little is a extremely amusing boozing womanizer who tries to impress whatever woman he’s just picked up with the same lines usually under baseball field lights late at night.

Otherwise CALVIN MARSHALL follows a tried and true formula – one in which a delusional underdog gets the girl, loses the girl, yet still learns big truths about himself and life by the time the credits roll.

Frost, at times resembling a young John Cusack (SAY ANYTHING era) has an earnest tone which makes him appropriately sympathetic.

There is sweetness to the courting scenes between Frost and Lombardo, but the film takes no chances with their arc and that deflates the sentimentality of its conclusion.

The forced predicament of Zahn putting the moves on Lombardo behind Frost’s back doesn’t help things either. The film presents these generic story-lines as just obstacles that can be overcome by big speeches.

Those who have lamented unfulfilled dreams of sports glory may be touched by CALVIN MARSHALL more than I was, but for a non-sports guy who still often likes baseball movies – because of a superb turn by Steve Zahn and its likeable spirit - it just barely makes the cut.

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Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Friday, September 24, 2010) (120)

OK - so this film is the sequel to Oliver Stone's 1987 movie Wall Street - but rather than calling it Wall Street 2 (or Wall Streetest?) Stone gave it a long title that basically means nothing. I never considered money to be able to sleep, so that now I find out it never sleeps I'm sorta like, "No duh, dude". Oh - and this movie is set during the 2008 Wall Street collapse, because, you know, there were greedy people then who made a lot of money on things failing and stuff. Ugh.

This is a pretty complicated story, so bear with me. Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf) works as a trader in an investment house that is basically Lehman Brothers. His father-figure and mentor is and old guy named Louis Zabel (Frank Langella) who also has a seat on the New York Fed Board (or something). His company is going down the tubes because of toxic assets and the Board is trying to help him sell it. Ultimately he jumps in front of a subway train and dies. Jake, a bit lost and sad because his girlfriend, Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan - yay two Carey Mulligan movies in a row!), is out of town working on her blog.

Jake meets Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas again) when he's on a book tour and gets to talking to him. It seems Winnie doesn't like her dad because he's an asshole and was locked up in jail when she was growing up. Gekko wants to get back with his daughter, so he makes a deal with Jake that he will help Jake take down Bretton James (Josh Brolin), a guy Gekko says led Zabel to kill himself (and also a guy Gekko himself had dealings with in the Bud Fox days). There are a bunch of crosses and double crosses and proposals and bankruptcies and pregnancies and nothing all that incredibly exciting.

This is really one of the worst scripts for a movie I can remember in a long time. Every line sounds like a canned cliche ready-made for a fortune cookie - not that that was not the case with the first Wall Street movie ("who am I?," Bud Fox asks looking off his midtown balcony).

The acting here is also pretty terrible, from LaBeouf, Douglas, Mulligan, Brolin, Langella - everyone. Because Stone is such an egomaniac, he has himself in two small cameo moments as well as Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter. (Was that a deal to get good press from VF? Ridiculous.) In the most surprising performance, Susan Sarandon, as Jake's mom who is under water on three houses on Long Island (Get it?! Oh, I get it!) is terrible and ridiculous beyond words here. She has a silly New Yawk accent and looks jittery and unhinged. Very sad.

Somehow Stone thought that we would forget what city the movie was set in, as every single scene begins with helicopter overhead shots of Manhattan (in the day, at night, downtown, uptown, midtown). It's really dumb and amateurish.

The only mildly good element in the film is that most of the music is from David Byrne's last album "Everything that Happens will Happen Today". It's weird to credit a director for using music from a two-year-old album, but it is good stuff and sounds better than the dialogue, so I guess we should be grateful.

Other than the use of old music, there is nothing good here. It's a sequel that is so dumb it ruins whatever good memories I have from the original (which was, honestly, not all that brilliant either). It would be like making a sequel to Citizen Kane if Rupert Murdoch were to die. I'm not interested in how you can oversimplify financial info, Oliver. Just tell a good story. I don't care that you think you once created this Harry Lime-like super-villain; Gordon Gekko is at best two-dimensional and not very interesting (if anything, Bud Fox was the interesting character in the first film, not Gekko). This is basically just big-scale public masturbation by Stone and not worth ever watching.

Stars: .5 of 4

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CAIRO TIME: The Film Babble Blog Review

CAIRO TIME (Dir. Ruba Nadda, 2010)

Patricia Clarkson is a very busy actress these days.

Last Friday 3 films opened in the Raleigh area featuring the 50 year old petite blonde – LEGENDARY, EASY A, and this starring vehicle CAIRO TIME.

It’s the quiet and subtle story of a woman on vacation alone in the city of Cairo, Egypt since her husband’s work as a UN official keeps him away.

She promises him from the phone in her hotel room that she will “save the Pyramids” – that is wait to visit the landmark until he arrives.

A colleague of Clarkson’s husband – a suave English speaking Egyptian (Alexander Siddig) offers to show her around the city and there is a definite attraction between the couple.

Their repartee is both witty and unsettling as Clarkson seems very fragile and an unspoken allusion to the true state of her marriage haunts the air around them.

There’s not a lot of polished photography here, but with such locations that is forgiven. Clarkson, though unable to swim and afraid of the water, takes a boat ride on the Nile with Siddig and the beauty of the setting mixed with the thoughtful tone is a good example of the overall feel of this film.

Clarkson delivers a wonderfully natural performance that resonates throughout the film. Siddig (best known for playing Julian Bashir on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) seems to be enjoying himself as this charismatic character.

The spare cast also includes Amina Annabi as a former lover of Siddig's many years estranged.

Spoiler Alert!

There is flirtation between Clarkson and Siddig, but this is not a film about infidelity. It’s about the intensity of shared time. When Clarkson visits the Pyramids with Siddig which she later doesn’t tell her husband, the moment is intended to be as arousing as if they had fallen into bed together.

It’s reminiscent of the ending of last year’s AN EDUCATION in which the young protagonist (Cary Mulligan) didn’t tell a new date that she had been to Paris before. Her previous time in the city of love was omitted for personal, possibly empowering, reasons.

Some might consider that still a form of cheating, but since we only see a silently suffering Clarkson and we learn nothing about Clarkson and her husband’s (who only briefly appears at the end played by Tom McCamus) background except their professions - I believe that it’s understandable that she needed some private empowerment of her own.

More later...

Never Let Me Go (Sunday, September 19, 2010) (119)

I will be very careful here with the film Never Let Me Go, as I never read the highly regarded book and don't have any emotional connection to the story, beyond what I saw on the screen. I will say that one thing that baffles me about the film is that the trailer totally gives away the entire story and even some important details that are only revealed in the last ten minutes. I really don't know why they did this - I don't think knowing major plot points going into the thing enhanced my viewing experience. Mostly I was just waiting for these revelations to happen, thinking the whole time that somehow the trailer was cut in such a way that it was not as straightforward as the marketing department made it look. Alas the film was exactly as simple as the trailer.

The story here is about an orphanage for kids who we quickly find out are part of a national organ donation program in Great Britain (in some alternate space-time universe). They are all clones of people living in the world and the idea is that they will be able to donate three or four organs before their bodies expire and they die. The story follows three kids, Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightly), who are friends and sometimes lovers. Tommy and Ruth hook up early, though Kathy and Tommy probably have a closer connection. The three remain friendly for about a decade until they grow up and grow apart.

The structure of the story is pretty simple: The first act has the kids in their school, Hailsham; then the second act has them moved to a sort of half-way house where as young adults they live in a cottage in the countryside preparing to either become organ donors or caretakers of organ donors (like Kathy, who will also donate her organs ultimately); finally the third act has them out in the world either getting cut up for their organs or helping others.

Throughout the film they are constantly looking to see if they can find the original person whose genetic material they are based on. This connects to the rather boring theme of whether or not they have souls and whether or not they are real people (or simply organic things that grow organs for transplants). I gotta be honest and say this was not at all compelling or at all original. This could have been some SciFi film from 60 years ago about whether or not a robot was human because it too had some sort of emotional life. Who cares?

Director Mark Romanek's work here is really pretty terrible as he telegraphs the emotions and the symbolism of each and every moment with the most ridiculous objective correlatives. We see garbage blowing in the wind just after Ruth goes on a long rant about how they are "modeled on trash and garbage" (oh - I get it!). When Kathy feels isolated in the cottage, we see her in big, wide shot sitting alone in the middle of emptiness. Ugh.

There is the root of an interesting discussion here - a post-modern question that comes up in the first act (and rather fades away by the end) about what is the nature of these kids existences if they are just created to be destroyed. They are given only certain amounts of information about their situations and are given a very limited language set to better control them. This is very similar to what Giorgos Lanthimos does in Dogtooth, but it's a lot simpler and dumber. By the time the film ends, it doesn't really matter that there was this interesting opening.

This is an interesting concept for a story, but it's done so ham-handedly and so boringly that it's really not all that interesting. On top of this, if you watch the trailer, you basically see the entire film - and that's only two minutes long! There is almost no depth in this film and no real emotional interest in the characters. Ruth is always a bitch; Kathy is always a smart geek who is emotionally distant; Tommy is sorta dim and child-like. They are like this as kids and they remain like this as adults. They don't grow at all. Maybe this is what the story is about - being denied the tools of socialization, they are emotional outsiders. But that's not really all that interesting either.

Stars: 2 of 4

Kings of Pastry (Saturday, September 18, 2010) (119)

Kings of Pastry is a fun documentary by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus about the preparation and competition to become a Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (or MOF) in pastry. It is basically the highest honor a pastry chef can achieve and the competition is one of the hardest imaginable. It's a lot like the Food Network Challenge show - with gigantic wedding cakes and insane sugar constructions - but much bigger and more important. The final competition takes place over the course of three days and as it occurs only every four years, the chefs prepare for months and months for it.

The main person we follow is Jacquy Pfeiffer who runs the French Pastry School in Chicago, but is originally from Alsace. He is a very warm and charismatic guy who has spent his life working with pastry and is surrounded by MOF winners in his work (two of his colleagues have the blue, white and red collar already). We see him producing some of the most magnificent sugar and chocolate treats in his test kitchen while testing out the taste, timing and execution of his desserts. He then moves his operation to his home region in France where he works in the kitchen of an old friend just a few weeks before the competition.

We also meet young pastry chefs Philipp Rigollot and Regis Lazard two of Pfeiffer's competitors (although, I guess they're not really competitors as there is no limit to how many winners there are and each man is able to win... they're really just other chefs trying to win the title).

We see all the crazy things they have to do to win and all the stress they are under to be perfect on the three days of the challenge. We see one chef's hopes of success all but crash on the ground when his sugar sculpture creation (which stood almost five feet tall) shatters and falls apart. He begins to cry as it will not be for another four years that he could try again.

There are a bunch of rather lazy and silly things that the directors do here that I don't like. One thing is that the film opens in Paris with a pretty banal shot of the Eiffel Tower as seen from the top of the Grande Roue in the Tuileries. Not only does the shot look like it was taken on a tourist's Flip camera and is so deeply trite, but the film has almost nothing to do with Paris - the competition takes place outside of Lyon (there is some dinner that Sarkozy throws for the winners that we see at the beginning, but that's it). Are we that dumb that we can't understand "France" without seeing the "Eiffel Tower"? It's pretty annoying.

This is a sweet (no pun intended), but not brilliant movie. At most, it should be seen on DVD and not in the theater.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Town (Friday, September 17, 2010) (117)

The Town is Ben Affleck's latest Boston-based crime/action film and much like his last film, Gone Baby Gone, it is adapted from a novel by him (and a few others). Having not read the (Prince of Theives by Chuck Hogan) it is hard to say whether what is wrong with the script is Affleck's fault or if some of the problems are also in the novel. What is clear is that this is a decent film with a really bad, facile script that I've seen a million times.

Part of the problem with the film is that there are just too many parts to the story. Doug (Affleck) is a bank robber who lives in Charlestown, Boston, a neighborhood known for producing some of the most prolific thieves and criminals in the area. He and his best friend Jem (Jeremy Renner) along with a few friends have a successful operation, knocking off banks in the Boston region. At one point when a robbery goes wrong they kidnap bank manager, Claire (Rebecca Hall) only to let her go a few blocks away. Once they discover she lives around the corner from them, Doug moves in to romance her and try to find out what she saw of them during the stick up. Of course the two fall in love and begin dating.

Meanwhile the gang is being pursued by FBI agent Adam Frawley who is hot on their heels, but always comes up just short. He basically has no leads on them, but they make his job easier and easier by continuing to rob places under his nose. There are a few other sorta dumb and unnecessary plot items: Blake Lively plays Jem's sister who has had an on-again-off-again thing with Doug and has a young kid who is maybe Doug's kid, but probably isn't; Pete Postlethwaite is some sort of mob/gang boss who organizes the robberies and then hands them off to Doug; Chris Cooper plays Doug's dad who is in jail also for robbing banks.

Mostly this is just a really messy story with way too much going on. At it's core, it is pretty dull fare that is not all that interesting. Doug is hiding his identity from Claire in a pretty pitiful way - and we watch knowing that at some point the truth will come out and ruin the relationship. There is a thing with the "one last score" that Doug and Jem will run before Doug retires from his criminal life and moves to Florida where he can spend his stolen money alone. Ugh. (Oh - and sorry to ruin it, but the last score is in Fenway Park - possibly the holiest place in Boston. Nothing like being careful. What a dumb mess.)

I think the acting is pretty good throughout the film, despite the silliness of the story. Rebecca Hall is very good and pretty sympathetic. We see her getting bamboozled into her relationship with Doug and know that she's just a victim of her own situation. Affleck is also good, though his character is much more straightforwardly dull.

The film moves pretty well, but is just so recycled that it becomes frustrating. Did Doug never watch movies as a kid and see that the "one last score" is never as easy as it sounds? If he doesn't have that perspective and I do, why do I have to watch him making the same mistakes I've seen hundreds of times before in other movies and books?

Stars: 2.5 of 4

THE TOWN: The Film Babble Blog Review

THE TOWN (Dir. Ben Affleck, 2010)

“From the acclaimed director of GONE BABY GONE” goes the trailers and TV spot for this new crime thriller that don’t happen to mention that Ben Affleck is that said acclaimed director. For despite the fact that he’s slowly been gaining respect and career clout over the last several years, Affleck is a name still associated with box office poison like GIGLI and PEARL HARBOR.

GONE BABY GONE was indeed a strong directorial debut, but this much larger production is even stronger. "The Town" is about a crew of expert thieves from a one-square-mile neighborhood in Boston that the opening titles tell us is “the bank robbery capitol of America.”

Affleck, Jeremy Renner (THE HURT LOCKER), Owen Burke, and Irish rapper Slaine make up the crew who we meet in creepy green Skeletor masks and dark hoods in action at a downtown Boston bank. They take an employee hostage (Rebecca Hall) as they make their getaway.

They release the blindfolded Hall not too long after with Renner taking her driver’s license and threatening her life if she talks to the FBI.

Which is exactly what she does - in a traumatized state to an agent played by Jon Hamm (Mad Men). Hamm is determined to bring down Affleck’s crew: “This is a not-screwing-around crew, so find me something that looks like a print ‘cause this not-screwing-around thing is about to go both ways!” he exclaims.

The trigger-happy Renner wants to eliminate Hall since she is a potential witness that could bring them down, but there’s a little problem: Affleck may be falling in love with her.

That started with Affleck following Hall and talking to her at a laundromat. He couldn’t resist turning the charm and she almost immediately took to him.

Affleck, of course, wants out of the life of crime but don’t you know it – the crew + an elderly neighborhood florist who has Godfatherly powers (Peter Postlewaite) wants him to pull another major heist.

Everything comes to a head when…oh, I should stop with the spoilers because the best part is seeing how this all plays out. There is heavy artillery, many deaths, and a bunch of vehicles are wrecked if you want to know if it has plenty of action, but its concern for the characters is what drives it.

Even with a number of tough guy clichés and a certain percentage of implausibility in the last third, Affleck’s adaptation of Chuck Hogan’s novel “Prince Of Thieves” is a superb heist film with a compelling emotional core.

This is largely due to its cast who makes this material work. Affleck’s Boston accent is impressively un-annoying and he plays pathos much more convincingly than in the past.

Hamm hasn’t completely shed the skin of the ultra smooth Don Draper, but his confidence in what could have been a standard by-the-book Fed role nicely contrasts with that of the attitude of the crew’s thug-like lo tech methods.

Hall does a lot with a very little of a character – the woman caught in the middle of a boys club’s row. She has cute chemistry with Affleck and the fearfulness is felt in her restrained shakiness. Renner is one note but he plays it well and it’s all that’s needed from him in this tightly plot.

Chris Cooper as Affleck’s prison lifer father is in one especially effective and necessary scene, and there’s also Blake Lively as a boozy bar floozy.

THE TOWN may not be another crime epic on the scale of HEAT or THE DEPARTED, but it’s a major work by a guy who next time - with hope - will have his name up front in the advertising.

More later...

I'M STILL HERE: The Film Babble Blog Review

I'M STILL HERE (Dir. Casey Affleck, 2010)








The question – is this a hoax or a real depiction of an artist’s very public breakdown has been circling this film since a certain appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman in 2009.

A bearded shaggy haired Joaquin Phoenix donned a black suit and baffled everybody especially the host (“I don’t come to your house and chew gum”) with what seemed like a drugged mumble distracted from the spotlight and oblivious to the audience’s laughter.

“Joaquin, I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight” Letterman quipped as the segment ended and within minutes the clip was a viral sensation with folks all over the internets asking “WTF?”

The answer some clung to was that it was all a prank – Phoenix was pretending to abandon acting and become a rapper and his brother in law Casey Affleck was going to film this transition for a “mockumentary”, right? Well, sort of. 

“I’m Still Here” follows Phoenix around as he goes through misguided motions and we get so little insight into him that whether it’s a prank or not doesn’t matter. He’s a mess and so is this film.

See Oscar nominated actor Joaquin Phoenix snort cocaine! See him surf the internet! See him chew out an assistant for selling information to a tabloid! See him awkwardly try to talk Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs into producing his awful rap songs! See him fall off the stage! See him diss Danny DeVito! See him vomit! See him…you get the idea.

One thing that’s odd, in a movie of numbing oddness, is that there are often subtitles for scenes with possibly inaudible dialogue, but there’s not for any of Phoenix’s rapping performances which are often intelligible.

At first I thought we may benefit by reading what’s he’s rapping, but now I think the film makers may be doing us a favor. It’s a pointless rambling documentary but what’s worse is that it’s not funny.

If Affleck and Phoenix are pulling a prank, they don’t seem to be having any fun with it. So much of it seems to be about Phoenix’s suffering and not knowing what to do next.

Apparently now Phoenix is up for some new roles and is not retiring from acting, but I believe that at one point he was sincere about quitting. He seems to have taken the idea of an alternate career – rapper – seriously too. Years from now this poorly made boring documentary (not a “mockumentary” mind you – it’s not clever enough for that) will be thought of as an odd unwatchable side note and Phoenix will be back in the spotlight as an actor.

I’m glad Joaquin Phoenix is here, but next time I hope he plays to his strengths – that is his impeccable acting skills and we’ll forget this dismal diversion.

More later...

Dragon Ejder Savaşları - Kore Filmleri

Oyuncu Kadrosu: Jason Behr (Ethan) , Amanda Brooks (Sarah) , Robert Forster (Jack)

MACHETE: The Film Babble Blog Review

MACHETE (Dir. Robert Rodriquez, 2010)

One of the most successful elements in Robert Rodriquez and Quentin Tarantino’s little seen double feature GRINDHOUSE was a smattering of fake trailers. They were funny and totally authentic recreations of ‘70s drive-in fare with the titles “Don’t!”, “Werewolf Women Of The SS”, “Thanksgiving”, “Hobo With A Shotgun” * and “Machete”.

Now MACHETE is a real full length “Mexploitation” film with many of the same actors with re-stagings of shots from the phony trailer. Danny Trejo plays the title role – a crusty ex-Federale badass who is hired by a shady Jeff Fahey to assassinate a corrupt senator (Robert De Niro) running for office on a platform of severe anti-illegal-immigration laws.

Trejo soon finds out that he has been set up and goes on the lam. With the help of Michelle Rodriguez as a taco-truck lady/revolutionary warrior and Jessica Alba as a saucy immigrations officer, Trejo set outs to track down those who did him wrong.

A nice collection of B and C-movie actors like Don Johnson, Cheech Marin, and Steven Seagal put in nice supporting turns but Lindsay Lohan as Fahey’s air-headed daughter is a really odd choice for this kind of material.

MACHETE boasts enough in-your-face action, explosions, and blood to make THE EXPENDABLES look like ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS, but it’s still not that great of a movie.

It seems that Rodriquez (and co-director/co-writer Ethan Maniquis) just can’t give up the GRINDHOUSE. It’s a genre that would be mostly forgotten if wasn’t for film geek film makers like Rodriquez and Tarantino (and in my area – the Triangle in N.C. – if not for the awesome “Cinema Overdrive” series at the Colony Theater in Raleigh), but their new fangled takes on such seedy exploitation don’t really seem to be catching on.

And again this begs the question – what is Lindsey Lohan doing here? She spends half her role nude then she’s dressed as a nun with a gun. None of it does much for the movie so I’m really stumped by her presence.

Some of the material in this movie and its tacky tone is fun at first, especially the opening, but it grew really tiresome as the body count grew bigger. Machete, the character, is just not that interesting. Trejo performs the actions with a stoical grace, but if you take away the slashing mayhem, but there’s nothing really there.

Maybe that’s a strange complaint because the men in the movies that this is a loving tribute to didn’t really have deep personas either. They were dolls thrown around or sliced and diced. They were movies that were all about pure cheap thrills.

At a budget of $20 million MACHETE is not so cheap though it tries to disguise that with fake scratches and bad splices. It should’ve just stayed being a 2 minute fake trailer for a nonexistent bad movie. Now that bad movie exists.

* Next year "Hobo With A Shot Gun" will also get the full length film treatment. Let's see how that will work out for them.

More later...

I'm Still Here (Sunday, September 12, 2010) (116)

It is important to note before I start this post that I saw this film on September 12, 2010 thinking it was a legitimate film about a man's mental and professional collapse. I didn't write about it immediately and by September 17, 2010 or so, it was clear that the film was a hoax, an art piece, a stunt. Now a week or so after that, I have to analyze the film that I viewed knowing that somehow what I saw and how I reacted were part of a bigger project. One could argue about whether or not this is fair, and I think this debate is very interesting. I think the whole process of this film is interesting, not only what we see onscreen, but the reactions to it in the press.

I'm Still Here is ostensibly a work of non-fiction directed by Casey Affleck about his friend and brother-in-law Joaquin Phoenix during 2008 and 2009 as he tried to transition from an actor to a rapper. Phoenix's life is falling apart during this time as his music career is not coming together they way he would want it to and he begins to lose his grip on normalcy, not shaving for weeks (and looking more and more rugged and homeless as a result), snorting cocaine off the asses of prostitutes, performing a terrible show in Miami and vomiting after a fight with a belligerent audience member. It was during this time that he notoriously went on the David Letterman show and had a career collapse while promoting the beautiful film Two Lovers.

The film is in fact is a pseudo-documentary where everything we see is part of a set-up and not real. Phoenix and Affleck conceived of the whole thing (though there was certainly some improvisation) and many of the most uncomfortable moments (like the Letterman thing or a weird scene where Ben Stiller tries to get Phoenix to play the buddy in his film Greenberg) are either written ahead of time or conceived of with the participation of the other people. (I clearly don't know what went into every scene and there has to be some fooling of people along the way. Phoenix's publicist clearly is not in on the joke as her reaction after the Letterman debacle is just too real; I'm not sure Diddy is in on the joke as his reactions are also too painful, uncomfortable and hilarious to be fake.)

Throughout the film as we see Phoenix fall deeper and deeper into a black hole there is a constant question of what Affleck is doing letting these terrible things happen to his friend. Why is he staying mostly behind the camera and not coming out to help his friend and lend him a hand. This might be one of the biggest tip-offs that the film is not totally what it seems. But just as you start thinking Affleck is being a cruel enabler watching his friend fall down a cliff, the last 10-or-so minutes of the film are a rather beautiful quiet sequence where Phoenix goes to Panama to visit his father. With no dialogue, this scene conveys emotion, sympathy and compassion in a way most young filmmakers are not able to do. For me this segment was so convincing that it led me directly into the "believing it" camp.

But considering it's not real, credit has to go to Phoenix for one of the best performances I've seen in awhile. He is totally disgusting physically and socially and totally believable. Throughout the piece, Phoenix is constantly defending himself from people who think he's faking it (of course he was) and he deals with this very well - as if he was really a man going through a life crisis that nobody believed was real. Affleck also does a great job of placing enough doubt in the first part of the film to make us ask the question "is this real?", as a way of doubling down the prank. I had trouble accepting that the film was a hoax as I felt Affleck did too many things that a director would only do if the story was real. I couldn't get past the fact that the film was so self-aware that it was just a fake.

Now that mainstream reviewers are aware of the hoax, many of them are very angry with the situation. I think this is an interesting lesson in how the Hollywood media machine makes "hits," and how reviewers covet their "access" to early screenings of movies. That the announcement came after basically all the major reviews had been written, but before many people in the world had seen it is interesting - and basically a big Fuck You to the reviewing establishment. There certainly were a handful of reviewers who thought the story was too weird to be true, but I would chalk those up to lucky guesses as I think there is simply not enough evidence in the film to know that for a certainly that the piece is phony. I think many reviewers now are upset that they were fooled and are letting this affect what they say about the picture rather than looking at the merits of the piece itself. Do they not think a well-executed hoax is an impressive feat?

I am also interested in what this film tells us about our media culture and our obsession with so-called "reality". Everything from Twitter and Facebook to reality TV comes down to the fact that we expect everybody to be available at all times. We don't flinch as much as we used to at a man who is clearly suffering onscreen (or convincingly playing like he is). That we can watch him do some of the most disgusting things we've ever seen onscreen (like having a friend shit on his face as a prank) is just par for the course these days. We have all become voyeurs complicit in the evisceration of a man and his career.

The title, I'm Still Here, reminds me of Todd Haynes' biopic of Bob Dylan, I'm Not There, which told his story with multiple actors playing different aspects of the musician's life and mythology. Here we get one man with multiple aspects of his character (a jerk, a frightened kid, a friend, a phony musician, an artist) and we don't know what is real and what is fiction anymore. Clearly what we see is not "real", but are there not some honest moments hidden in there somewhere?

Stars: 3 of 4