Azazel Jacob's first major(ish) film was Mama's Man in 2008, an interesting atmosphere piece, in a style that is rather a corollary to mumblecore (mumbleish you could say). It is very rough around the edges (on purpose) and tells the very sad story of a man in a sort of mid-life crisis, moving back to his parents' small apartment and regressing to adolescence while avoiding his own wife and family across the country. I found the film interesting from a style point of view, but ultimately difficult to watch and impossible to connect to because the story never really moved much.
Jacob's newest film, Terri, is a vast improvement on that first work. He maintains the interesting scruffy style of the first, but gives it just enough story (though still not very much) to move our emotions and sympathies. It's a good movie, much better than most, but is still stuck in such a weird place that it's hard to work around a few elemental parts of it.
The film opens with Terri (Jacob Wysocki), an obese giant of a teenager sitting naked in the bathtub of his uncle's house where he lives. This is a terrible, dirty, messy house in the Valley and Uncle James (Creed Bratton... Creed from The Office) is a 50-something man suffering from dementia who is highly medicated and not much of a caregiver to Terri. Terri walks to school through the woods, is laughed at by all the kids he sees on the soccer filed, is called terrible names (one kid calls him "garbage dump") and gets mocked in class with the tacit approval of the teachers who don't seem to care about much of anything.
One day he's ordered to the office of the assistant principal, Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly), who tells him they can have a weekly meeting to talk about stuff and help him out. Mr. Fitzgerald says he was a freak as a kid too and that kids laughed at him, but he survived and can help Terri get through it. Terri seems to get along fine (though he's very sad) but he accepts the offer and they two start an interesting, funny relationship that helps to give Terri a boost of self-confidence.
What is hardest for me about this film is that there seem to be two separate tracks of the story that exist simultaneously and never totally get resolved or bump into one another. That is, Terri's home life with his uncle is incredibly sad (and by incredibly say, I mean really, really, really sad) while the relationship at school with Mr. Fitzgerald is sorta goofy funny (as John C. Reilly does very well). I really enjoy both parts independently, but they don't meld well and never really feel like they fit in the same film. I should also say that although they're both done well, neither one is particularly fresh; the home stuff feels very much like the recent trend in movies for showing the "shitiness" of life (see: Hesher, Super, Observe and Report) and the school stuff is very much like the gonzo, biting comedies that have become rather fashionable (see: East Bound and Down, Win Win, Cyrus... in fact Reilly's character here could be the same guy as in Cyrus).
But Jacobs does have a good eye for the look of the film and a good sensibility for actors. There is a scene near the end of the film where Terri and some new friends "experiment" with whiskey and his uncle's pills. I have to say I have possibly never seen a more realistic-feeling drunk/drug scene, let alone one with young actors who probably have little experience with such vices themselves. It's a great job on the actors' parts and a great job of direction. Wysocki is really great throughout, never mugging for the camera, always maintaining a proud exterior even when he's crumbling inside. He really seems like a kid from next door. I think it's a pretty difficult performance, because one's instinct would be to go very hammy and play up the fat thing, but Wysocki avoids that and goes quiet and natural. His performance is largely heartbreaking and very easy to identify with (as I was a ridiculed, misfit kid in high school with a fresh mouth who was mocked by classmates and never defended by teachers).
There is a nice scene in the middle where Mr. Fitzgerald tells Terri that life is generally rotten and that we are all here just trying to "get by". He says that people are shity and make mistakes, but that you have to ignore most of that and just keep living. Although perhaps heavy handed, this dialogue sums up the story and structure of the film. There's no real resolution; it's just about a few weeks in a weird kid's life. He will survive high school (we all did... barely) and keep moving along. He makes mistakes and pays the prices, and then has some small successes. It's a very sweet movie.
Stars: 3 of 4
28 Haziran 2011 Salı
25 Haziran 2011 Cumartesi
THE TRIP: The Film Babble Blog Review
THE TRIP (Dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2010)
The best parts of this eccentric comedy featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, as fictionalized versions of themselves is when the pair try outperform each other's impressions of British celebrities, especially of Michael Caine.
There's some other stuff happening too, as they travel the North English countryside from one Bed and Breakfast Inn to another on a restaurant tour Coogan is writing about for The Observer. Coogan is on an unhappy break from his girlfriend (Margo Stilley), who was originally supposed to go on the trip, and Brydon, who is going in her place, has a new wife and child that he's leaving behind for this week-long excursion.
There's angst about aging, career paths, and flawed friendships, much of it poignant (though maybe a bit slight), but it's the hilarious dueling imitations that make the movie.
Coogan, who is a bigger star internationally than Brydon, carries a considerable amount of mental baggage around as he suffers the fool he thinks his aggravating partner in whining and dining is.
Brydon has a glibber, more laid-back demeanor than Coogan's crank, but he's obviously blanketing a bunch of insecurities under his charming ability to do an impeccable Hugh Grant impression, among many others.
THE TRIP was edited together from 6 episodes of a BBC program which explains its over-long length (107 min.) and it's disjointedness, yet it contains enough laughs and genuine emotion to carry you through.
Having previously worked together in a lot of projects (24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE, TRISTRAM SHANDY, lots of British television), Coogan and Brydon have a great naturalistic energy in their largely ad-libbed exchanges.
Aesthetically, the scenery is pretty, but very grey toned (it is England, of course), and there are a nice amount of delicious looking shots of fine food.
But, as I said before, it's those funny as Hell impression-offs that make me rate this movie so highly. For the record, although it's really close, I think Coogan does the better Michael Caine.
More later...
The best parts of this eccentric comedy featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, as fictionalized versions of themselves is when the pair try outperform each other's impressions of British celebrities, especially of Michael Caine.
There's some other stuff happening too, as they travel the North English countryside from one Bed and Breakfast Inn to another on a restaurant tour Coogan is writing about for The Observer. Coogan is on an unhappy break from his girlfriend (Margo Stilley), who was originally supposed to go on the trip, and Brydon, who is going in her place, has a new wife and child that he's leaving behind for this week-long excursion.
There's angst about aging, career paths, and flawed friendships, much of it poignant (though maybe a bit slight), but it's the hilarious dueling imitations that make the movie.
Coogan, who is a bigger star internationally than Brydon, carries a considerable amount of mental baggage around as he suffers the fool he thinks his aggravating partner in whining and dining is.
Brydon has a glibber, more laid-back demeanor than Coogan's crank, but he's obviously blanketing a bunch of insecurities under his charming ability to do an impeccable Hugh Grant impression, among many others.
THE TRIP was edited together from 6 episodes of a BBC program which explains its over-long length (107 min.) and it's disjointedness, yet it contains enough laughs and genuine emotion to carry you through.
Having previously worked together in a lot of projects (24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE, TRISTRAM SHANDY, lots of British television), Coogan and Brydon have a great naturalistic energy in their largely ad-libbed exchanges.
Aesthetically, the scenery is pretty, but very grey toned (it is England, of course), and there are a nice amount of delicious looking shots of fine food.
But, as I said before, it's those funny as Hell impression-offs that make me rate this movie so highly. For the record, although it's really close, I think Coogan does the better Michael Caine.
More later...
23 Haziran 2011 Perşembe
CARS 2: The Film Babble Blog Review
CARS 2 (Dirs. John Lasseter & Brad Lewis, 2011)
CARS and its new sequel opening today, CARS 2, are the most commercial and formulaic films of all the Pixar productions. But that doesn't mean that they suck - no, they are both fairly entertaining animated kids flicks. It's just that this new entry in the franchise has a major problem that can be stated simply: too much Larry the Cable Guy.
Way too much.
As Tow Mater, the rusty redneck tow truck friend to Owen Wilson's Lightning McQueen, Larry the Cable Guy (man, I hate typing that - he'll be LCG from here on) has been promoted to the lead character here.
LCG gets mistakenly caught up in a secret spy mission involving Michael Caine as a British agent Aston Martin model (obviously 007-ish), and his partner in espionage Emily Mortimer, also a sleek European car outfitted with snazzy gadgets.
Meanwhile, Wilson is competing with John Turturro as an arrogant Italian race car in the first World Grand Prix to determine the world's fastest car. This takes us to the gorgeously rendered locations of Tokyo, Paris, and London which often distracts from the flimsy predictable plot. And, oh yeah, Eddie Izzard voices a army green SUV billionaire who's promoting a green gasoline substitute fueling the vehicles in the Grand Prix.
So Caine and Mortimer with the scrappy help of LCG work to take down the bad guys trying to discredit the threat to traditional gasoline. If you can't guess the identity of the mysterious villain way before it's revealed then you're probably not paying attention.
That, or Pixar has succeeded in dazzling you enough that you don't care.
LCG was fine in small doses in the first CARS, but its a major malfunction to make Mater the central dominant character. His one note bucktoothed presence grated on me in every scene, and the tired premise of his dumb luck reeks of comic desperation, which is very surprising in a Pixar film.
No Pixar palette should ever attempt to balance the likes of Michael Caine and Larry the Cable Guy (felt I should type it out this time).
As I said, CARS 2 isn't awful, it's just awfully average for a Pixar film. There are some fun sequences, but after the heights of the last several years (RATATOUILLE, WALL-E, UP, TOY STORY 3) this sequel feels like treading water.
And with its over abundance of country bumpkin crap via one of the un-funniest and irritating comedians of all time, it barely keeps afloat.
Oh yeah, there is a amusing TOY STORY short called "Hawaiian Vacation" before the movie so that, at least is one discernible plus.
More later...
CARS and its new sequel opening today, CARS 2, are the most commercial and formulaic films of all the Pixar productions. But that doesn't mean that they suck - no, they are both fairly entertaining animated kids flicks. It's just that this new entry in the franchise has a major problem that can be stated simply: too much Larry the Cable Guy.
Way too much.
As Tow Mater, the rusty redneck tow truck friend to Owen Wilson's Lightning McQueen, Larry the Cable Guy (man, I hate typing that - he'll be LCG from here on) has been promoted to the lead character here.
LCG gets mistakenly caught up in a secret spy mission involving Michael Caine as a British agent Aston Martin model (obviously 007-ish), and his partner in espionage Emily Mortimer, also a sleek European car outfitted with snazzy gadgets.
Meanwhile, Wilson is competing with John Turturro as an arrogant Italian race car in the first World Grand Prix to determine the world's fastest car. This takes us to the gorgeously rendered locations of Tokyo, Paris, and London which often distracts from the flimsy predictable plot. And, oh yeah, Eddie Izzard voices a army green SUV billionaire who's promoting a green gasoline substitute fueling the vehicles in the Grand Prix.
So Caine and Mortimer with the scrappy help of LCG work to take down the bad guys trying to discredit the threat to traditional gasoline. If you can't guess the identity of the mysterious villain way before it's revealed then you're probably not paying attention.
That, or Pixar has succeeded in dazzling you enough that you don't care.
LCG was fine in small doses in the first CARS, but its a major malfunction to make Mater the central dominant character. His one note bucktoothed presence grated on me in every scene, and the tired premise of his dumb luck reeks of comic desperation, which is very surprising in a Pixar film.
No Pixar palette should ever attempt to balance the likes of Michael Caine and Larry the Cable Guy (felt I should type it out this time).
As I said, CARS 2 isn't awful, it's just awfully average for a Pixar film. There are some fun sequences, but after the heights of the last several years (RATATOUILLE, WALL-E, UP, TOY STORY 3) this sequel feels like treading water.
And with its over abundance of country bumpkin crap via one of the un-funniest and irritating comedians of all time, it barely keeps afloat.
Oh yeah, there is a amusing TOY STORY short called "Hawaiian Vacation" before the movie so that, at least is one discernible plus.
More later...
BAD TEACHER: The Film Babble Blog Review
BAD TEACHER (Dir. Jake Kasdan, 2011)
If you've seen the trailer for this crude Cameron Diaz classroom comedy, you've already witnessed all the best lines and all the relevant plot-points. But since none of that stuff was that great to begin with, it's quite a tiring task to make it through this 90 minute mess of a movie that has maybe 3-4 solid chuckles in it.
Daez plays the foul mouthed, hard drinking, pot smoking, gold digging, and completely immoral title character who gets dumped by her rich boyfriend (Nat Faxon) at the beginning of the movie. She has to return to the job she doesn't give an "F" about, as the movie's tagline goes, teaching at John Adams Middle School (JAMS).
Diaz gets through the day by putting on DVDs for her students of movies about teachers (STAND AND DELIVER, LEAN ON ME, DANGEROUS MINDS, etc.) while she drinks from mini liquor bottles or sleeps at her desk.
As the school's gym teacher, a smirking Jason Segel clearly has the hots for Diaz, but she's got her eyes on a Justin Timberlake as a nerdy substitute teacher. Lucy Punch plays a goofy goody two-shoes rival colleague of Diaz's, who is also after Timberlake's affections.
The sloppy narrative concerns Diaz trying to raise money for breast implants. That's right, that's the plot. She puts on a sexy car wash complete with a rock video (or beer commercial) style montage. She steals standardized test answers so her class can get the highest scores and she can receive a large cash reward. She, uh, does wacky corrupt stuff for her own selfish purposes - you got it, right?
Unfortunately, precious little of this is funny. Diaz doesn't really bring anything but the bare minimum effort to her role, Timberlake is likable but not believable, and only Segel seems to have the right laid-back approach to this lazy lackluster material.
BAD TEACHER feels like a series of deleted scenes on a lame comedy's DVD special features menu. The kind you watch and think 'I can see why they cut that. Because it didn't work.'
That pretty much sums it up - much like its superficial protagonist, BAD TEACHER rarely works.
More later...
If you've seen the trailer for this crude Cameron Diaz classroom comedy, you've already witnessed all the best lines and all the relevant plot-points. But since none of that stuff was that great to begin with, it's quite a tiring task to make it through this 90 minute mess of a movie that has maybe 3-4 solid chuckles in it.
Daez plays the foul mouthed, hard drinking, pot smoking, gold digging, and completely immoral title character who gets dumped by her rich boyfriend (Nat Faxon) at the beginning of the movie. She has to return to the job she doesn't give an "F" about, as the movie's tagline goes, teaching at John Adams Middle School (JAMS).
Diaz gets through the day by putting on DVDs for her students of movies about teachers (STAND AND DELIVER, LEAN ON ME, DANGEROUS MINDS, etc.) while she drinks from mini liquor bottles or sleeps at her desk.
As the school's gym teacher, a smirking Jason Segel clearly has the hots for Diaz, but she's got her eyes on a Justin Timberlake as a nerdy substitute teacher. Lucy Punch plays a goofy goody two-shoes rival colleague of Diaz's, who is also after Timberlake's affections.
The sloppy narrative concerns Diaz trying to raise money for breast implants. That's right, that's the plot. She puts on a sexy car wash complete with a rock video (or beer commercial) style montage. She steals standardized test answers so her class can get the highest scores and she can receive a large cash reward. She, uh, does wacky corrupt stuff for her own selfish purposes - you got it, right?
Unfortunately, precious little of this is funny. Diaz doesn't really bring anything but the bare minimum effort to her role, Timberlake is likable but not believable, and only Segel seems to have the right laid-back approach to this lazy lackluster material.
BAD TEACHER feels like a series of deleted scenes on a lame comedy's DVD special features menu. The kind you watch and think 'I can see why they cut that. Because it didn't work.'
That pretty much sums it up - much like its superficial protagonist, BAD TEACHER rarely works.
More later...
17 Haziran 2011 Cuma
Even the Rain (Friday, June 19, 2011) (46)
Iciar Bollain's Even the Rain tells the story of a Spanish film crew who show up in Cochabamba, Bolivia to shoot a movie about Christopher Columbus and Bartolome de las Casas. The crew is filled with liberal actors and artists, including director Sebastian (Gael Garcia Bernal), who all agree that the natives were treated badly by the Spanish explorers, but they are a bit less aware of the sociopolitical situation they find themselves in contemporary Bolivia.
It seems at the exact time of the shooting of this movie, Bolivians are getting upset at the government's agreement to sell water rights to private overseas companies. One of the leaders of the "free water for all" movement is Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri), who has been cast as the Indian chief in the film. On top of this, the reason the film is shooting in Bolivia, and not, say, the Carribean where Columbus actually landed, is because they can get very cheap labor there. They're exploiting the people of contemporary Bolivia the same way the Spanish exploited the Indians in the 15th and 16th Centuries.
This all sounds like a very straightforward moral tale about parallels between contemporary times and early precolonial times, and it is. There really isn't that much depth here. Everything is spelled out very clearly in broad moral brushstrokes. At one point, the producer talks on the phone with some financier in the States and says how happy he is to be able to pay the extras $2 a day. Of course Daniel overhears this, and he totally understands the producer because he used to work in the States himself and speaks English. Oh - burn! You see the producer is embarrassed and Daniel is upset.
Toward the end of the film, the story turns into a commentary on civil-disobedience and rioting. It turns into Hotel Rwanda or The Last King of Scotland: lots of overturned cars, fires and hurt children who can't get to the hospital. The problem is that to this point the film has been such a mishmash of political story lines that you get confused about who is doing what to whom and who is responsible for it.
As much as we want to make the moral equivalent between the Spanish explorers, the Bolivian government and the Spanish film crew, it's a false connection. Water rights are a major concern in Bolivia (they have been from Che Guevara to Evo Morales); rioting by people against the government can be dangrous, but film crews who hire extras for $2 are not really the problem in this context.
I couldn't help but think about Werner Herzog as I watched this film and how he used Cochabamba as one of his headquarters when he shot Fitzcarraldo. He had an deep respect for the Bolivian people and understood issues like fair pay, water rights and keeping peace. Not only is this a movie about filmmakers who do the opposite, but it also seems to have been made by a writer/director who never learned Herzog's lessons. For him, the respect was absolutely endemic to shooting the film and he took it for granted; for Bollain it seems like "respect" is enough of a concept to center a story around. It's not really, because it's so banal.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
It seems at the exact time of the shooting of this movie, Bolivians are getting upset at the government's agreement to sell water rights to private overseas companies. One of the leaders of the "free water for all" movement is Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri), who has been cast as the Indian chief in the film. On top of this, the reason the film is shooting in Bolivia, and not, say, the Carribean where Columbus actually landed, is because they can get very cheap labor there. They're exploiting the people of contemporary Bolivia the same way the Spanish exploited the Indians in the 15th and 16th Centuries.
This all sounds like a very straightforward moral tale about parallels between contemporary times and early precolonial times, and it is. There really isn't that much depth here. Everything is spelled out very clearly in broad moral brushstrokes. At one point, the producer talks on the phone with some financier in the States and says how happy he is to be able to pay the extras $2 a day. Of course Daniel overhears this, and he totally understands the producer because he used to work in the States himself and speaks English. Oh - burn! You see the producer is embarrassed and Daniel is upset.
Toward the end of the film, the story turns into a commentary on civil-disobedience and rioting. It turns into Hotel Rwanda or The Last King of Scotland: lots of overturned cars, fires and hurt children who can't get to the hospital. The problem is that to this point the film has been such a mishmash of political story lines that you get confused about who is doing what to whom and who is responsible for it.
As much as we want to make the moral equivalent between the Spanish explorers, the Bolivian government and the Spanish film crew, it's a false connection. Water rights are a major concern in Bolivia (they have been from Che Guevara to Evo Morales); rioting by people against the government can be dangrous, but film crews who hire extras for $2 are not really the problem in this context.
I couldn't help but think about Werner Herzog as I watched this film and how he used Cochabamba as one of his headquarters when he shot Fitzcarraldo. He had an deep respect for the Bolivian people and understood issues like fair pay, water rights and keeping peace. Not only is this a movie about filmmakers who do the opposite, but it also seems to have been made by a writer/director who never learned Herzog's lessons. For him, the respect was absolutely endemic to shooting the film and he took it for granted; for Bollain it seems like "respect" is enough of a concept to center a story around. It's not really, because it's so banal.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
THE TREE OF LIFE: The Film Babble Blog Review
THE TREE OF LIFE (Dir. Terrence Malick, 2011)
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This is sure to be the most debated film of the year.
Just a cursory glance at internet message boards shows that while some people are labeling it “pretentious crap,” another thread of folks are calling it “one of the best movies ever.”
Consider me in the latter camp.
For his first film since THE NEW WORLD in 2005, the none-too-prolific Terrace Malick (BADLANDS, THE THIN RED LINE) has made a non-linear epic of incredible photography, lavish reconstructions of astrological history, and classical music.
It’s an overwhelming work that obviously a lot of people simply won’t get. I myself am still trying to piece it together, but I think I get it. I think.
Through beautifully fleeting imagery, we follow Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain as the parents of three sons in 1950s Waco, Texas. One of the sons dies, the cause of which is never explained, and the family is in mourning with Chastain asking the Heavens: “Lord, why? Where were you?”
Malick attempts to answer that question by going back to the beginning of time in a mesmerizing series of shots of thick engulfing clouds, glowing globules of every color, shining light, fire, flowing lava, etc.
History comes alive via CGI, and we even get to spend a little time with a few dinosaurs.
The visual thrust of all of this is stupefying; it’s like Malick is actually trying to capture God on film.
I’m really not sure if he succeeded, but that a film maker would try so hard and in some flashing moments appear to get so close is amazing to behold.
The timeline catches up with the ‘50s family again, as we see the boy who died being born. A strict disciplinarian, Pitt practices tough love on his boys (Hunter McCraken, Laramie Eppler, and Tye Seridan) while Chastain offers nothing but unconditional motherly love.
The vivid cinematography by four-time Oscar nominee Emmanuel Lubezki is astounding. Whether it’s exploiting the lush splendor of nature or zeroing in on the characters in emotional despair, the camera is always moving, exploring the space of every frame.
Close-ups are handled in a manner I haven’t seen in a film in ages. Even when the boys join a roving group of trouble making pre-teens, a feeling of isolation around McCracken is felt. His misguided desire to fit in with the window breaking, animal abusing brats is captured in the restless energy of the camerawork.
As the troubled eldest son Jack, McCracken is arguably the protagonist. His angry brow dominates the screen as he grows to resent his father. It’s a spare yet piercing performance – a noteworthy film debut.
An older version of Jack is played by Sean Penn, a businessman in the modern world still suffering over the loss of his brother and estranged relationship with his father. Penn’s part is one of the film’s only weaknesses. Penn, who gets more grizzled looking every movie he makes, mainly broods with his presence threatening to stop the film’s immersive flow.
As the last third becomes engulfed in surrealism, Penn is seen, suited up, wandering around a desert landscape. These images are pretty, but ultimately superfluous.
Many moviegoers (and critics) are going to be baffled by THE TREE OF LIFE. It’s a challenging and dense work that comes off at times like STAND BY ME filtered through the Kubrickian kaleidoscope of the last ten minutes of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.
To me it’s not just a massive breath of fresh air during this sequel saturated summer, it’s a near masterpiece about life, death, the universe and everything.
In other words, here’s the year’s first major contender for Best Picture at the next Academy Awards.
More later...
This is sure to be the most debated film of the year.
Just a cursory glance at internet message boards shows that while some people are labeling it “pretentious crap,” another thread of folks are calling it “one of the best movies ever.”
Consider me in the latter camp.
For his first film since THE NEW WORLD in 2005, the none-too-prolific Terrace Malick (BADLANDS, THE THIN RED LINE) has made a non-linear epic of incredible photography, lavish reconstructions of astrological history, and classical music.
It’s an overwhelming work that obviously a lot of people simply won’t get. I myself am still trying to piece it together, but I think I get it. I think.
Through beautifully fleeting imagery, we follow Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain as the parents of three sons in 1950s Waco, Texas. One of the sons dies, the cause of which is never explained, and the family is in mourning with Chastain asking the Heavens: “Lord, why? Where were you?”
Malick attempts to answer that question by going back to the beginning of time in a mesmerizing series of shots of thick engulfing clouds, glowing globules of every color, shining light, fire, flowing lava, etc.
History comes alive via CGI, and we even get to spend a little time with a few dinosaurs.
The visual thrust of all of this is stupefying; it’s like Malick is actually trying to capture God on film.
I’m really not sure if he succeeded, but that a film maker would try so hard and in some flashing moments appear to get so close is amazing to behold.
The timeline catches up with the ‘50s family again, as we see the boy who died being born. A strict disciplinarian, Pitt practices tough love on his boys (Hunter McCraken, Laramie Eppler, and Tye Seridan) while Chastain offers nothing but unconditional motherly love.
The vivid cinematography by four-time Oscar nominee Emmanuel Lubezki is astounding. Whether it’s exploiting the lush splendor of nature or zeroing in on the characters in emotional despair, the camera is always moving, exploring the space of every frame.
Close-ups are handled in a manner I haven’t seen in a film in ages. Even when the boys join a roving group of trouble making pre-teens, a feeling of isolation around McCracken is felt. His misguided desire to fit in with the window breaking, animal abusing brats is captured in the restless energy of the camerawork.
As the troubled eldest son Jack, McCracken is arguably the protagonist. His angry brow dominates the screen as he grows to resent his father. It’s a spare yet piercing performance – a noteworthy film debut.
An older version of Jack is played by Sean Penn, a businessman in the modern world still suffering over the loss of his brother and estranged relationship with his father. Penn’s part is one of the film’s only weaknesses. Penn, who gets more grizzled looking every movie he makes, mainly broods with his presence threatening to stop the film’s immersive flow.
As the last third becomes engulfed in surrealism, Penn is seen, suited up, wandering around a desert landscape. These images are pretty, but ultimately superfluous.
Many moviegoers (and critics) are going to be baffled by THE TREE OF LIFE. It’s a challenging and dense work that comes off at times like STAND BY ME filtered through the Kubrickian kaleidoscope of the last ten minutes of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.
To me it’s not just a massive breath of fresh air during this sequel saturated summer, it’s a near masterpiece about life, death, the universe and everything.
In other words, here’s the year’s first major contender for Best Picture at the next Academy Awards.
More later...
MR. POPPER'S PENGUINS: The Film Babble Blog Review
MR. POPPER'S PENGUINS (Dir. Mark Waters, 2011)
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Isn't Jim Carrey too old to be doing this kind of movie?
A decade ago it seemed like Carrey was moving towards a more thoughtful phase in his career based on work based on work in such fine films as THE TRUMAN SHOW, MAN ON THE MOON, and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND. However at the same time the man still had, and still has, a fondness for doing broad commercial crap, which is exactly what MR. POPPER'S PENGUINS is.
In what must be screenwriting leading man character archetype #1, Carrey plays a divorced corporate big wig, who loves his kids (also still loves his ex-wife), but is too business-minded to be in touch with his soul. So a crate coming from his recently deceased globe-trotting father containing a penguin in it will, of course, melt his cold heart, right?
Carrey comically protests the penguin and calls everyone he can think of (Antarctica, animal control, the zoo, etc.), but then another crate containing more penguins arrives, and his kids (Madeline Carroll and Maxwell
Perry Cotton) love them so the put-upon protagonist makes his Park Avenue pad into a winter wonderland.
Carrey's shtick is always giving everybody hip snappy nicknames as he glides though films, so it comes in handy naming the penguins: Captain, Lovey, Bitey, Nimrod, Stinky and Loudy. The birds can be fun to watch, but as a large percentage of their antics are via CGI it's more and more cringe inducing than cute.
Angela Lansbury is in the thankless role of the potential client Carrey is trying to score for a big real estate deal, and guess what? The penguins get in the way, particularly in a silly set-piece that turns the Guggenheim into a massive seabird slide.
That's actually one of the better scenes, as the film is bogged down in schmaltz and poop jokes. And I mean, a lot of poop jokes. Enough to make the "poop picnic" in JUDY MOODY seem positively understated.
Clark Gregg as the movie's villain - a creepy animal control guy who wants to take the penguins for his own supposedly evil purposes is a considerably contrived element, but in this fluffy formula he fits right in. Entourage's Carla Gugino as Carrey's ex-wife basically just shows up on time for her standard issue lines.
With it's icy subject matter, I wondered why MR. POPPER'S PENGUINS wasn't earmarked for a Christmas season release, but maybe since it's really all about the air-conditioning people seek during the heat of summer, it's probably a great marketing move.
Carrey, who's pushing 50, apparently sees himself as a post-modern Don Knotts - that is, a family friendly funny man caught in outlandishly wacky situations - and that's fine, but he's got the chops to shape his career better.
This at least proves that he's a good actor, because you've got to have talent to act like bland cash-in kid's crap like this isn't beneath you.
More later...
Isn't Jim Carrey too old to be doing this kind of movie?
A decade ago it seemed like Carrey was moving towards a more thoughtful phase in his career based on work based on work in such fine films as THE TRUMAN SHOW, MAN ON THE MOON, and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND. However at the same time the man still had, and still has, a fondness for doing broad commercial crap, which is exactly what MR. POPPER'S PENGUINS is.
In what must be screenwriting leading man character archetype #1, Carrey plays a divorced corporate big wig, who loves his kids (also still loves his ex-wife), but is too business-minded to be in touch with his soul. So a crate coming from his recently deceased globe-trotting father containing a penguin in it will, of course, melt his cold heart, right?
Carrey comically protests the penguin and calls everyone he can think of (Antarctica, animal control, the zoo, etc.), but then another crate containing more penguins arrives, and his kids (Madeline Carroll and Maxwell
Perry Cotton) love them so the put-upon protagonist makes his Park Avenue pad into a winter wonderland.
Carrey's shtick is always giving everybody hip snappy nicknames as he glides though films, so it comes in handy naming the penguins: Captain, Lovey, Bitey, Nimrod, Stinky and Loudy. The birds can be fun to watch, but as a large percentage of their antics are via CGI it's more and more cringe inducing than cute.
Angela Lansbury is in the thankless role of the potential client Carrey is trying to score for a big real estate deal, and guess what? The penguins get in the way, particularly in a silly set-piece that turns the Guggenheim into a massive seabird slide.
That's actually one of the better scenes, as the film is bogged down in schmaltz and poop jokes. And I mean, a lot of poop jokes. Enough to make the "poop picnic" in JUDY MOODY seem positively understated.
Clark Gregg as the movie's villain - a creepy animal control guy who wants to take the penguins for his own supposedly evil purposes is a considerably contrived element, but in this fluffy formula he fits right in. Entourage's Carla Gugino as Carrey's ex-wife basically just shows up on time for her standard issue lines.
With it's icy subject matter, I wondered why MR. POPPER'S PENGUINS wasn't earmarked for a Christmas season release, but maybe since it's really all about the air-conditioning people seek during the heat of summer, it's probably a great marketing move.
Carrey, who's pushing 50, apparently sees himself as a post-modern Don Knotts - that is, a family friendly funny man caught in outlandishly wacky situations - and that's fine, but he's got the chops to shape his career better.
This at least proves that he's a good actor, because you've got to have talent to act like bland cash-in kid's crap like this isn't beneath you.
More later...
15 Haziran 2011 Çarşamba
Midnight in Paris (Wednesday, June 15, 2011) (45)
Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris begins with a five-minute montage of the beautiful sights and parks of Paris. I'm not sure you knew this, but Paris is a very pretty city; there are lots of nice buildings and some lovely parks there. (Strangely, Woody's shots have no people in them... I guess he likes the places more than the people... well, they smell, I guess.) To say this opening is an allusion to the intro to Manhattan, would be to miss the point of this movie.
When basically every scene of a film is taken from one's own oeuvre, they stop being allusions and start being tedious, uninspired, self-promotion. There is nothing fresh in Midnight in Paris, aside from the fact that it's set in Paris and not New York (or London). This is a dull movie with a bizarre, simplistic moral lesson.
Gil, (Owen Wilson) is the Woody character here, is a screenwriter about to marry Inez (Rachel McAdams), a WASP with two super WASPy paretns. They are all on vacation in Paris while Inez's dad finalizes a business deal. Gil, the only cosmopolitan screenwriter in history to have never been to Paris, talks nonstop, mostly about his love for old-timey Paris, when great writers and artists mingled in jazz clubs. One night, when wandering the streets at midnight, he is picked up in an old car and dropped off at a party in the 1920s where he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald and Cole Porter. Somehow Gil is living between the two time periods.
Over the course of several nights he meets basically everyone who was living in Paris at that time, Hemmingway, Picasso, Bunuel, Dali, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Tolkas, Josephine Baker and Man Ray (to name just a few). They help him "finish his novel" and come to realize what is really important in his life. During the daylight hours, meanwhile, he goes on field trips with Inez or avoids her as his heart changes regarding.
Gil is basically like every other nebbishy Woody character you've ever seen on screen. There are brief moments where Inez and him meet Paul (Michael Sheen), a guy who she had a crush on in college, an his girlfriend Carol (Nina Arianda). These scenes are pulled almost verbatim from Crimes and Misdemeanors, where Woody hates Alan Alda and everything he has to say.
I would compliment Wilson on his performance, but it's become so cliche to have a non-Woody actor playing Woody, that I don't think it takes much talent to do - it's basically just an impersonation blessed by the subject (deeper levels of self-obsession). I will say that Arianda is actually really funny and, after seeing her recently on Broadway in Born Yesterday, I can say she really does have something great going for her. She's probably the highlight of the film... and she's in three scenes for about eight minutes.
We never really see much of Paris after that opening montage. Most of the film is shot at night and on sound stages. I'm not convinced this is as much the love letter to Paris that many are making it out to be. It's sort of a love letter to the mentally limited who think that the best time is never now, but always in the past.
Assuming Gil comes to the conclusions he comes to after deep reflection (and not actually talking with Hemmingway), it's an admirable thing. But why then does Woody have to frame it in such a banal context? When was the last time you saw a character of Woody's creation have a deep moment of self-reflection or self-anaysis? Why does he have to put the agency for Gil's changes in the hands of others? Why is Gil with Inez in the first place? They seem to have nothing in common.
I've almost totally forgotten this movie already. The narrative is so silly, it could have been written as a children's book, and the lessons to come out of the story, could have been given by anyone with a rooting interest in Gil's happiness. The style is as flaccid as Woody has been in the last two decades. He really should retire and stop wasting our time.
Stars: 1 of 4
When basically every scene of a film is taken from one's own oeuvre, they stop being allusions and start being tedious, uninspired, self-promotion. There is nothing fresh in Midnight in Paris, aside from the fact that it's set in Paris and not New York (or London). This is a dull movie with a bizarre, simplistic moral lesson.
Gil, (Owen Wilson) is the Woody character here, is a screenwriter about to marry Inez (Rachel McAdams), a WASP with two super WASPy paretns. They are all on vacation in Paris while Inez's dad finalizes a business deal. Gil, the only cosmopolitan screenwriter in history to have never been to Paris, talks nonstop, mostly about his love for old-timey Paris, when great writers and artists mingled in jazz clubs. One night, when wandering the streets at midnight, he is picked up in an old car and dropped off at a party in the 1920s where he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald and Cole Porter. Somehow Gil is living between the two time periods.
Over the course of several nights he meets basically everyone who was living in Paris at that time, Hemmingway, Picasso, Bunuel, Dali, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Tolkas, Josephine Baker and Man Ray (to name just a few). They help him "finish his novel" and come to realize what is really important in his life. During the daylight hours, meanwhile, he goes on field trips with Inez or avoids her as his heart changes regarding.
Gil is basically like every other nebbishy Woody character you've ever seen on screen. There are brief moments where Inez and him meet Paul (Michael Sheen), a guy who she had a crush on in college, an his girlfriend Carol (Nina Arianda). These scenes are pulled almost verbatim from Crimes and Misdemeanors, where Woody hates Alan Alda and everything he has to say.
I would compliment Wilson on his performance, but it's become so cliche to have a non-Woody actor playing Woody, that I don't think it takes much talent to do - it's basically just an impersonation blessed by the subject (deeper levels of self-obsession). I will say that Arianda is actually really funny and, after seeing her recently on Broadway in Born Yesterday, I can say she really does have something great going for her. She's probably the highlight of the film... and she's in three scenes for about eight minutes.
We never really see much of Paris after that opening montage. Most of the film is shot at night and on sound stages. I'm not convinced this is as much the love letter to Paris that many are making it out to be. It's sort of a love letter to the mentally limited who think that the best time is never now, but always in the past.
Assuming Gil comes to the conclusions he comes to after deep reflection (and not actually talking with Hemmingway), it's an admirable thing. But why then does Woody have to frame it in such a banal context? When was the last time you saw a character of Woody's creation have a deep moment of self-reflection or self-anaysis? Why does he have to put the agency for Gil's changes in the hands of others? Why is Gil with Inez in the first place? They seem to have nothing in common.
I've almost totally forgotten this movie already. The narrative is so silly, it could have been written as a children's book, and the lessons to come out of the story, could have been given by anyone with a rooting interest in Gil's happiness. The style is as flaccid as Woody has been in the last two decades. He really should retire and stop wasting our time.
Stars: 1 of 4
12 Haziran 2011 Pazar
Super 8 (Sunday June 12, 2011) (44)
Super 8 is J.J. Abrams' ode to Spielberg movies of the 1970s and 1980s, E.T. most specifically. Unlike those film though, this movie has no charisma from its actors or alien. It has a bunch of explosions and nothing exciting or interesting. It's a weird stealth blockbuster, where the moment you leave the theater, you forget what you just saw.
The title of the film comes from the fact that it is set in 1979 in some small Ohio town where there are a group of kids who are making a zombie movie on a Super 8 camera. The main kid, Joe (Joel Courtney) is the son of the deputy sheriff and he's sad because his mother just died (this background is really just noise, because it has nothing to do with the story). The female star of the movie is Alice (Elle Fanning), the school hottie who Joe has a thing for.
When they're shooting a scene outside, they see a big train crash (which goes on for a Passion-like 10 minutes... like, enough already. We get it. It's loud and explosive). Then there's an alien who goes loose in their town banging into things and stealing people, and then the Air Force comes in and locks down the area. Joe and his friends decided they're gonna find the alien (that the Air Force can't find). I'm already asleep. Wake me when we get to the teary alien farewell.
The major problem here is that we never really know what the hell the alien is and why we should care about it (hint: it's got eight legs... get it!?!). It is more than raising the curiosity or tension - it's just frustrating. All we see is that people are snatched up by a weird tentacle/arm thing (see: the first episode of Lost where the pilot is taken out of the plane by Smokey) and a bunch of stuff is blown up and pushed around. I think it's not until the end of the second act that we get a sense of what the thing looks like, and then it's moving around the whole time (it seems to have the vagina dentata face typical of post-Alien, post-Predator monsters). What's worse, we get the whole story told to us in an audio cassette near the end. So at that point we should all just pack our things and go home.
Worst of all is that Joel Courtney has absolutely no screen appeal and is totally forgettable. I guess it's hard to cast kids, but this one is a dud. Fanning is fine. There is almost no meat in her role, but the does well in the one scene where her character is acting. All of the characters are written so broadly there's not much anywhere for them to dig their teeth into.
Aside from being a movie about an alien monster who wants to go back home, this movie has nothing to do with E.T. and is much closer to Shyamalan's laughable The Happening. It's a loser and more silly than compelling or scary.
Stars: 1 of 4
The title of the film comes from the fact that it is set in 1979 in some small Ohio town where there are a group of kids who are making a zombie movie on a Super 8 camera. The main kid, Joe (Joel Courtney) is the son of the deputy sheriff and he's sad because his mother just died (this background is really just noise, because it has nothing to do with the story). The female star of the movie is Alice (Elle Fanning), the school hottie who Joe has a thing for.
When they're shooting a scene outside, they see a big train crash (which goes on for a Passion-like 10 minutes... like, enough already. We get it. It's loud and explosive). Then there's an alien who goes loose in their town banging into things and stealing people, and then the Air Force comes in and locks down the area. Joe and his friends decided they're gonna find the alien (that the Air Force can't find). I'm already asleep. Wake me when we get to the teary alien farewell.
The major problem here is that we never really know what the hell the alien is and why we should care about it (hint: it's got eight legs... get it!?!). It is more than raising the curiosity or tension - it's just frustrating. All we see is that people are snatched up by a weird tentacle/arm thing (see: the first episode of Lost where the pilot is taken out of the plane by Smokey) and a bunch of stuff is blown up and pushed around. I think it's not until the end of the second act that we get a sense of what the thing looks like, and then it's moving around the whole time (it seems to have the vagina dentata face typical of post-Alien, post-Predator monsters). What's worse, we get the whole story told to us in an audio cassette near the end. So at that point we should all just pack our things and go home.
Worst of all is that Joel Courtney has absolutely no screen appeal and is totally forgettable. I guess it's hard to cast kids, but this one is a dud. Fanning is fine. There is almost no meat in her role, but the does well in the one scene where her character is acting. All of the characters are written so broadly there's not much anywhere for them to dig their teeth into.
Aside from being a movie about an alien monster who wants to go back home, this movie has nothing to do with E.T. and is much closer to Shyamalan's laughable The Happening. It's a loser and more silly than compelling or scary.
Stars: 1 of 4
11 Haziran 2011 Cumartesi
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS: The Film Babble Blog Review
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (Dir. Woody Allen, 2011)
At first glance, Owen Wilson looks like an unlikely Woody Allen surrogate.
Yet in Allen's best film since VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA, it's an inspired piece of casting that works. Wilson puts real effort into the character of Gil Pender, a Hollywood hack screenwriter who wants to give real writing a try, and finish that difficult novel he's been tinkering with for months.
On vacation in France, Wilson's fiancée (Rachel McAdams) accuses him of romanticizing the past - particularly Paris in the '20s, an era he would most like to live in. Wilson clashes with McAdam's conservative parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), and her friends including a wonderfully snobby Michael Sheen, so he takes off on a walk around the city taking in the sights.
At the chimes of midnight, an old timey car pulls up, and the drunk passengers plead with Wilson to get in. After some hesitation, he joins them.
Somehow this takes him back to, you guessed it (or saw the trailer), Paris in the '20s. It's a rollicking party of an era where everybody he meets is famous figure of the arts. At a party, with piano accompaniment by Cole Porter (Yves Heck) no less, he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and his wife Zelda (Alison Pill).
There's also Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway, Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein, Marcial di Fonzo Bo as Pablo Picasso, and the best one of all: Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali.
Wilson meets a fetching model (Marion Cotillard) who he falls for on the spot. So every night back in the present, he makes the excuse to McAdams that he wants to go out on a walk, and goes back to hobnob with history. The predicament of choosing the past over the present becomes a sticky one, as there's the possibility of another love in the form of Lea Seydoux as an antiques dealer "in the now."
There's a wonderful wit and whimsy to how Allen plays this all out. It's his warmest film since, uh, I can't remember when.
In other words, it's the most satisfying Woody Allen film in ages.
Wilson's delivery of Allen's choice one-liners is infectious, and he quotes from the greats, such as Faulkner's "The past is never dead, It's not even past." convincingly enough to make one forget the man-child of "Hall Pass" from earlier this year.
The film is at its most radiant when it's in those sequences set in the past. In a neat little twist, Cotillard dreams of living in the 1890's; turns out everybody has their dream era.
One personal thought is that I wish the Woodman would've filmed this in black and white. It's not just because the opening montage of shots of Paris was strongly reminiscent of the opening of MANHATTAN, I feel like B & W would've brought out something more in the photography, the depictions of both present and 20's Paris, and the performances of the people playing historical personalities.
As I said that's just a personal quibble. I'm just an aficionado of the man's B & W work so don't mind me.
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS isn't gonna to make me rearrange my top 10 Woody Allen movies, but it's a lovely lark that I predict even non-fans would enjoy. I think most people can relate wishing for a simpler more inspiring time to live in, and I think they'll be greatly amused with this simple and inspiring story.
More later...
At first glance, Owen Wilson looks like an unlikely Woody Allen surrogate.
Yet in Allen's best film since VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA, it's an inspired piece of casting that works. Wilson puts real effort into the character of Gil Pender, a Hollywood hack screenwriter who wants to give real writing a try, and finish that difficult novel he's been tinkering with for months.
On vacation in France, Wilson's fiancée (Rachel McAdams) accuses him of romanticizing the past - particularly Paris in the '20s, an era he would most like to live in. Wilson clashes with McAdam's conservative parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), and her friends including a wonderfully snobby Michael Sheen, so he takes off on a walk around the city taking in the sights.
At the chimes of midnight, an old timey car pulls up, and the drunk passengers plead with Wilson to get in. After some hesitation, he joins them.
Somehow this takes him back to, you guessed it (or saw the trailer), Paris in the '20s. It's a rollicking party of an era where everybody he meets is famous figure of the arts. At a party, with piano accompaniment by Cole Porter (Yves Heck) no less, he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and his wife Zelda (Alison Pill).
There's also Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway, Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein, Marcial di Fonzo Bo as Pablo Picasso, and the best one of all: Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali.
Wilson meets a fetching model (Marion Cotillard) who he falls for on the spot. So every night back in the present, he makes the excuse to McAdams that he wants to go out on a walk, and goes back to hobnob with history. The predicament of choosing the past over the present becomes a sticky one, as there's the possibility of another love in the form of Lea Seydoux as an antiques dealer "in the now."
There's a wonderful wit and whimsy to how Allen plays this all out. It's his warmest film since, uh, I can't remember when.
In other words, it's the most satisfying Woody Allen film in ages.
Wilson's delivery of Allen's choice one-liners is infectious, and he quotes from the greats, such as Faulkner's "The past is never dead, It's not even past." convincingly enough to make one forget the man-child of "Hall Pass" from earlier this year.
The film is at its most radiant when it's in those sequences set in the past. In a neat little twist, Cotillard dreams of living in the 1890's; turns out everybody has their dream era.
One personal thought is that I wish the Woodman would've filmed this in black and white. It's not just because the opening montage of shots of Paris was strongly reminiscent of the opening of MANHATTAN, I feel like B & W would've brought out something more in the photography, the depictions of both present and 20's Paris, and the performances of the people playing historical personalities.
As I said that's just a personal quibble. I'm just an aficionado of the man's B & W work so don't mind me.
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS isn't gonna to make me rearrange my top 10 Woody Allen movies, but it's a lovely lark that I predict even non-fans would enjoy. I think most people can relate wishing for a simpler more inspiring time to live in, and I think they'll be greatly amused with this simple and inspiring story.
More later...
Film Socialisme (Saturday, June 11, 2011) (42)
I must begin to say that when i started writing this blog two years ago, I never thought i would be able to review and write about a film by Jean-Luc Godard. This is a real treat for me.. Too bad the film is such a dog. Woof.
Watching Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme is not an enjoyable experience. It's a lot of frenetic cutting, there is footage from all sorts of cameras, including old-style analogue video, digital, celluloid and camera phones. Most of the film is in French, though we also hear English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic and Greek... and almost none of it is subtitled. In fact the subtitling seems to be specifically directed by Godard as well and he really only translates the gist of what is being said, so that long dialogues are reduced to several key nouns and adjectives, sometimes compounded into a linguistic gumbo gobbledygook.
It seems that Godard is making a comment on the nature of film to mislead and control and the bourgeois nature of contemporary cinema. This is so banal it's offensive (to say nothing about the bourgeois irony of making a movie that costs money and saying that people with money are out of touch).
There are three distinct parts to the film that have specific themes and styles. The first, takes place on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean where you see a bunch of Euros going around on holiday from port to port (North Africa, Spain, Egypt, Greece, Ukraine). There is a mix of documentary stuff and a weird narrative story about a rich business owner and people who don't like him. There is very little here that makes sense other than the general idea of "industrial capitalism is bad". Feh.
The second story, the most traditional in structure, is about a family who owns a gas station in France where there is a documentary crew filming them and they are being compelled to close the pumps. They discuss their lives and feelings. The final part is the most abstract where we go from city to city around the Mediterranean and see how they have changed over the years and the relative highs and lows (and revolutions) in each.
I imagine there are some Big Themes throughout the three parts here, but without a crib sheet it was almost totally opaque. Ever since about 1968 (when the student protests in France affected him politically and aesthetically) Godard has made movies that are more and more non-narrative, abstract and difficult to understand. I guess there's some merit to sitting down and trying to understand the meaning here, but it doesn't really interest me. (This is me saying about contemporary art, "so what? I don't get it.") And I guess that is really what this is. It's an art film, and experimental movie. It's not a narrative story. It has more in common with late Makavajev films like Sweet Movie (a boat that has some revolutionary significance) and Gorilla Bathes at Noon, than Breathless. The symbolism is important. The subtitles are important. The frenetic style is important. It's just that none of it is interesting or easy to watch and enjoy.
Stars: 1 of 4
Watching Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme is not an enjoyable experience. It's a lot of frenetic cutting, there is footage from all sorts of cameras, including old-style analogue video, digital, celluloid and camera phones. Most of the film is in French, though we also hear English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic and Greek... and almost none of it is subtitled. In fact the subtitling seems to be specifically directed by Godard as well and he really only translates the gist of what is being said, so that long dialogues are reduced to several key nouns and adjectives, sometimes compounded into a linguistic gumbo gobbledygook.
It seems that Godard is making a comment on the nature of film to mislead and control and the bourgeois nature of contemporary cinema. This is so banal it's offensive (to say nothing about the bourgeois irony of making a movie that costs money and saying that people with money are out of touch).
There are three distinct parts to the film that have specific themes and styles. The first, takes place on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean where you see a bunch of Euros going around on holiday from port to port (North Africa, Spain, Egypt, Greece, Ukraine). There is a mix of documentary stuff and a weird narrative story about a rich business owner and people who don't like him. There is very little here that makes sense other than the general idea of "industrial capitalism is bad". Feh.
The second story, the most traditional in structure, is about a family who owns a gas station in France where there is a documentary crew filming them and they are being compelled to close the pumps. They discuss their lives and feelings. The final part is the most abstract where we go from city to city around the Mediterranean and see how they have changed over the years and the relative highs and lows (and revolutions) in each.
I imagine there are some Big Themes throughout the three parts here, but without a crib sheet it was almost totally opaque. Ever since about 1968 (when the student protests in France affected him politically and aesthetically) Godard has made movies that are more and more non-narrative, abstract and difficult to understand. I guess there's some merit to sitting down and trying to understand the meaning here, but it doesn't really interest me. (This is me saying about contemporary art, "so what? I don't get it.") And I guess that is really what this is. It's an art film, and experimental movie. It's not a narrative story. It has more in common with late Makavajev films like Sweet Movie (a boat that has some revolutionary significance) and Gorilla Bathes at Noon, than Breathless. The symbolism is important. The subtitles are important. The frenetic style is important. It's just that none of it is interesting or easy to watch and enjoy.
Stars: 1 of 4
Hesher (Saturday, June 11, 2011) (43)
Spencer Susser's film Hesher is a really difficult but totally fun experience. It's one of the darkest comedies I've seen in a long time and it's also one of the most disturbing. It's a ode to anarchy and the shitiness of life.
T.J. (Devin Brochu) is a high school underclassman whose mother recently died in a car accident. He doesn't have any friends and he and his father (Rainn Wilson) live with his grandmother (Piper Laurie) in her tired house in the Valley. One day on the way to school he stops by a housing development and throws a rock through the window, not knowing that there's a degenerate metalhead, Hesher (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sleeping inside. When Hesher is subsequently kicked out the squat, he shows up at T.J.'s house and moves in (after threatening T.J. with a plant clipper).
T.J. is harassed at school by a bully, and one day, he's chased into the parking lot of a grocery store. There he's defended by Nicole (Natalie Portman), a down-on-her-luck twenty-something whose life also sucks and is in a permanent rut. T.J. falls for her (she's at least 10 years older than he is). Aside from living with his family, Hesher mostly enjoys making T.J.'s life difficult, inciting the bully to further acts of violence, mocking him and his crush on Nicole, cozying up to his grandmother and father. Au much as T.J. hates Hesher and wants to get rid of him, he likes the attention he's getting and appreciates that Hesher's the only person in the world who give a crap about him.
I keep feeling this movie is a lot like that '80s Matt Dillon movie My Bodyguard - but much darker and more cynical. Hesher is T.J.'s bodyguard, but as he is an anarchist, he doesn't ask for anything in return and doesn't totally care about anyone. He seems to be hanging around T.J. because it's something to do. He's not really teaching him any lessons or helping him out at all. He's just really bored and the family is so damaged (dad's on anti-depressants and gran is sorta old and loopy) that they don't tell him no. There's a definite Existentialist streak here... Hesher never moves along... there's nothing to be done.
Aside from that, this is a shockingly violent, frank movie. There's one scene involving those plant clippers that's so gross I get sick thinking about it now. There's lots of fire and drinking and puking. It's all a bit funny (though not really as out and out comic book gonzo as in Super).
The film has that 'tired brown' look that lots of movies have now. Every interior is filled with tons of crap. The clothes that everyone wears are out of fashion. Nat Portman wears granny glasses and looks particularly unwashed (one problem is that Portman is simply too good looking that even wearing bad clothes and with bad hair, she's still hot; whatever the inverse of "lipstick on a pig" is what is going on here: bad glasses on a hottie; it doesn't totally work), to say nothing of Gordon-Levitt, who raises dirty to a new atmosphere.
The two lead performances, Gordon-Levitt and Brochu are both fantastic here. Brochu doesn't say much and mostly looks sad, but he's very powerful and his constant misery is great. Gordon-Levitt is great and doesn't go too far with the silliness of the role (which is possible when playing a character with a tattoo on his torso of a stick figure shooting his brains out and one on his back of a big hand with a middle finger). He's almost non-verbal, he's so drunk and sick the whole time. He's really great.
On a scale of from sick to funny, this falls somewhere closer to a horror movie than a rom-com. It really is one of the funniest things I've seen in awhile (thought much of that has to do with Gordon-Levitt's impeccable performance). This is a weird movie because it's so dark that its resolution almost is washed away by the pain and horribleness of the rest of the story... but it's really interesting and I really like what it's getting at.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
T.J. (Devin Brochu) is a high school underclassman whose mother recently died in a car accident. He doesn't have any friends and he and his father (Rainn Wilson) live with his grandmother (Piper Laurie) in her tired house in the Valley. One day on the way to school he stops by a housing development and throws a rock through the window, not knowing that there's a degenerate metalhead, Hesher (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sleeping inside. When Hesher is subsequently kicked out the squat, he shows up at T.J.'s house and moves in (after threatening T.J. with a plant clipper).
T.J. is harassed at school by a bully, and one day, he's chased into the parking lot of a grocery store. There he's defended by Nicole (Natalie Portman), a down-on-her-luck twenty-something whose life also sucks and is in a permanent rut. T.J. falls for her (she's at least 10 years older than he is). Aside from living with his family, Hesher mostly enjoys making T.J.'s life difficult, inciting the bully to further acts of violence, mocking him and his crush on Nicole, cozying up to his grandmother and father. Au much as T.J. hates Hesher and wants to get rid of him, he likes the attention he's getting and appreciates that Hesher's the only person in the world who give a crap about him.
I keep feeling this movie is a lot like that '80s Matt Dillon movie My Bodyguard - but much darker and more cynical. Hesher is T.J.'s bodyguard, but as he is an anarchist, he doesn't ask for anything in return and doesn't totally care about anyone. He seems to be hanging around T.J. because it's something to do. He's not really teaching him any lessons or helping him out at all. He's just really bored and the family is so damaged (dad's on anti-depressants and gran is sorta old and loopy) that they don't tell him no. There's a definite Existentialist streak here... Hesher never moves along... there's nothing to be done.
Aside from that, this is a shockingly violent, frank movie. There's one scene involving those plant clippers that's so gross I get sick thinking about it now. There's lots of fire and drinking and puking. It's all a bit funny (though not really as out and out comic book gonzo as in Super).
The film has that 'tired brown' look that lots of movies have now. Every interior is filled with tons of crap. The clothes that everyone wears are out of fashion. Nat Portman wears granny glasses and looks particularly unwashed (one problem is that Portman is simply too good looking that even wearing bad clothes and with bad hair, she's still hot; whatever the inverse of "lipstick on a pig" is what is going on here: bad glasses on a hottie; it doesn't totally work), to say nothing of Gordon-Levitt, who raises dirty to a new atmosphere.
The two lead performances, Gordon-Levitt and Brochu are both fantastic here. Brochu doesn't say much and mostly looks sad, but he's very powerful and his constant misery is great. Gordon-Levitt is great and doesn't go too far with the silliness of the role (which is possible when playing a character with a tattoo on his torso of a stick figure shooting his brains out and one on his back of a big hand with a middle finger). He's almost non-verbal, he's so drunk and sick the whole time. He's really great.
On a scale of from sick to funny, this falls somewhere closer to a horror movie than a rom-com. It really is one of the funniest things I've seen in awhile (thought much of that has to do with Gordon-Levitt's impeccable performance). This is a weird movie because it's so dark that its resolution almost is washed away by the pain and horribleness of the rest of the story... but it's really interesting and I really like what it's getting at.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
10 Haziran 2011 Cuma
The Trip (Friday, June 11, 2011) (41)
So the story with the movie The Trip is that it began its existence as a six-part TV show in the UK called The Trip. At some point it was cut down to it's current length of 107 minutes and was released as a feature film. What we have now is a very funny mocu-comedy with no structure that runs a bit too long... because it's really just too short.
The story is that Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (if you haven't watched BBC-America or small Brit comedies, you won't know them) go on a trip of Northern England to eat at the excellent restaurants, experience the cozy inns and visit the historical sights up there and write about it all for a magazine. The idea was that Coogan would take his American modelesque girlfriend on this trip as a romantic getaway, but because they're on the splits he asked his sometimes-buddy and former colleague Brydon to join him. It's shot like a mocu-comedy - which is to say it's basically a narrative story shot like a documentary (of course, a comedy not a drama).
Along the way the two annoy one another (and us) constantly. Coogan is totally self-absorbed, sad about his love life and the direction of his career and upset that he's not fucking his girlfriend nightly; Brydon does impressions non-stop (he particularly loves Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Hugh Grant), has a pretty great life and is basically a nice guy... aside from the incessant annoying impressions.
This is a comedy along the lines of the uncomfortable situational things like The Office that are popular in the US and UK now. If you hate uncomfortable silences, nonstop inane blather and don't know every movie that's been released in the past 15 years, you might not like this.
The biggest problem, of course, is that it really should be a 90-minute movie, if it's not a 6-part TV show. It moves along with no real structure and no sense of where they're going or how long it will take (implied internal time flow of a movie should not be underestimated). I happen to really like that just about every night Coogan has a sad reflective moment where he realizes he's not very happy (I like tension like that in a comedy), but it's utterly unnecessary in the context of this film, if it's not going to be played out longer. It would be a good aggregate 20 minutes that could be further cut out.
I am really interested to see the TV show now. What's good in the cut movie version is really enjoyable and very funny and I'm sure that the 65 minutes that was cut out is just as good.
Stars: 3 of 4
The story is that Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (if you haven't watched BBC-America or small Brit comedies, you won't know them) go on a trip of Northern England to eat at the excellent restaurants, experience the cozy inns and visit the historical sights up there and write about it all for a magazine. The idea was that Coogan would take his American modelesque girlfriend on this trip as a romantic getaway, but because they're on the splits he asked his sometimes-buddy and former colleague Brydon to join him. It's shot like a mocu-comedy - which is to say it's basically a narrative story shot like a documentary (of course, a comedy not a drama).
Along the way the two annoy one another (and us) constantly. Coogan is totally self-absorbed, sad about his love life and the direction of his career and upset that he's not fucking his girlfriend nightly; Brydon does impressions non-stop (he particularly loves Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Hugh Grant), has a pretty great life and is basically a nice guy... aside from the incessant annoying impressions.
This is a comedy along the lines of the uncomfortable situational things like The Office that are popular in the US and UK now. If you hate uncomfortable silences, nonstop inane blather and don't know every movie that's been released in the past 15 years, you might not like this.
The biggest problem, of course, is that it really should be a 90-minute movie, if it's not a 6-part TV show. It moves along with no real structure and no sense of where they're going or how long it will take (implied internal time flow of a movie should not be underestimated). I happen to really like that just about every night Coogan has a sad reflective moment where he realizes he's not very happy (I like tension like that in a comedy), but it's utterly unnecessary in the context of this film, if it's not going to be played out longer. It would be a good aggregate 20 minutes that could be further cut out.
I am really interested to see the TV show now. What's good in the cut movie version is really enjoyable and very funny and I'm sure that the 65 minutes that was cut out is just as good.
Stars: 3 of 4
SUPER 8: The Film Babble Blog Review
SUPER 8 (Dir. J.J. Abrams, 2011)
Having grown up during the golden age of Spielberg (i.e. the late '70s-early '80s) I was immediately in tune with the vibe Abrams was going for here. It helps that mood and tone that SUPER 8 is set in a small mid-western town in 1979, and centers around a group of pre-teen kids.
Joel Courtney, who's never acted in a movie before, stars as a shy model building C-student whose mother is killed in an accident at her factory workplace. His grieving father (Kyle Chandler) is the town's deputy, and for obvious reasons things are strained between father and son.
Courtney's pushy friend (Riley Griffith) is making a super 8 zombie movie, and with a small crew of kids, including fire-works crazy Ryan Lee, klutzy Zach Mills, and geeky Gabriel Basso, they sneak out late one night to work on it.
Griffith invites Elle Fanning to play the lead character's wife, and because she has a car, to the excitement of Courtney who has a crush on her.
In the middle of filming on the platform of an old rickety train station, a freight train comes nosily down the tracks. Griffiths wants to get it on film citing "production values," but Courtney sees a truck racing towards the train, and then there's a ginormous crash, completely derailing the engine and all the compartments in a series of fiery explosions. The kids escape unharmed, well, one claims he was "scraped", and recognize the driver of the truck as one of their school teachers.
They frantically leave the area when a bunch of shadowy men with flashlights descend on the wreckage.
That's the set-up, and it's a great one. From there a entertainingly tangled narrative involving a military cover-up, a budding romance between Courtney and Fanning, and, yes, a mysterious alien creature that was in one of the train's compartments unfolds.
A wide-eyed sense of wonder coupled with cynicism about government misinformation effectively evokes the atmosphere of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and E.T., which is no surprise as Spielberg produced, and the film is a collaboration of Amblin Entertainment and Bad Robot Productions.
Like with his STAR TREK reboot, Abrams shows that he has a great grip on face-paced storytelling. As the movie lays out all its alien cards, the proceedings get a bit predictable, but the compelling craft on display never falters.
Abrams also gets the Spielbergian sentimentality down. No other recent sci-fi CGI blockbuster lately has had this much heart.
It's a promising debut for Courtney, who endearingly captures the awe in this tale of how kids can outsmart the authorities, figure out a complex conspiracy, and help an alien get back home.
As for the rest of the cast - Fanning brings poise to a standard damsel in distress part, the set of smart- alecky kid are perfectly cast, and Chandler infuses his troubled cop character with intensity.
However, Noah Emmerich as a U.S. Army representative is standard one note villain. He still kind of fits here because it's a common theme in this genre that the real bad guys are the government powers that be, not the aliens. Sure, there's a lot of killing at the claws of the creature, but that's because of military mistreatment and wrongful imprisonment, you see?
With a nice blend of nostalgia, emotional pull, and incredible special effects, SUPER 8 is as touching as it is a lot of fun.
Any be sure to stay for the end credits. I'm not going to tell you why, but trust me - you won't want to miss it.
More later...
Having grown up during the golden age of Spielberg (i.e. the late '70s-early '80s) I was immediately in tune with the vibe Abrams was going for here. It helps that mood and tone that SUPER 8 is set in a small mid-western town in 1979, and centers around a group of pre-teen kids.
Joel Courtney, who's never acted in a movie before, stars as a shy model building C-student whose mother is killed in an accident at her factory workplace. His grieving father (Kyle Chandler) is the town's deputy, and for obvious reasons things are strained between father and son.
Courtney's pushy friend (Riley Griffith) is making a super 8 zombie movie, and with a small crew of kids, including fire-works crazy Ryan Lee, klutzy Zach Mills, and geeky Gabriel Basso, they sneak out late one night to work on it.
Griffith invites Elle Fanning to play the lead character's wife, and because she has a car, to the excitement of Courtney who has a crush on her.
In the middle of filming on the platform of an old rickety train station, a freight train comes nosily down the tracks. Griffiths wants to get it on film citing "production values," but Courtney sees a truck racing towards the train, and then there's a ginormous crash, completely derailing the engine and all the compartments in a series of fiery explosions. The kids escape unharmed, well, one claims he was "scraped", and recognize the driver of the truck as one of their school teachers.
They frantically leave the area when a bunch of shadowy men with flashlights descend on the wreckage.
That's the set-up, and it's a great one. From there a entertainingly tangled narrative involving a military cover-up, a budding romance between Courtney and Fanning, and, yes, a mysterious alien creature that was in one of the train's compartments unfolds.
A wide-eyed sense of wonder coupled with cynicism about government misinformation effectively evokes the atmosphere of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and E.T., which is no surprise as Spielberg produced, and the film is a collaboration of Amblin Entertainment and Bad Robot Productions.
Like with his STAR TREK reboot, Abrams shows that he has a great grip on face-paced storytelling. As the movie lays out all its alien cards, the proceedings get a bit predictable, but the compelling craft on display never falters.
Abrams also gets the Spielbergian sentimentality down. No other recent sci-fi CGI blockbuster lately has had this much heart.
It's a promising debut for Courtney, who endearingly captures the awe in this tale of how kids can outsmart the authorities, figure out a complex conspiracy, and help an alien get back home.
As for the rest of the cast - Fanning brings poise to a standard damsel in distress part, the set of smart- alecky kid are perfectly cast, and Chandler infuses his troubled cop character with intensity.
However, Noah Emmerich as a U.S. Army representative is standard one note villain. He still kind of fits here because it's a common theme in this genre that the real bad guys are the government powers that be, not the aliens. Sure, there's a lot of killing at the claws of the creature, but that's because of military mistreatment and wrongful imprisonment, you see?
With a nice blend of nostalgia, emotional pull, and incredible special effects, SUPER 8 is as touching as it is a lot of fun.
Any be sure to stay for the end credits. I'm not going to tell you why, but trust me - you won't want to miss it.
More later...
9 Haziran 2011 Perşembe
JUDY MOODY AND THE NOT BUMMER SUMMER: The Film Babble Blog Review
In 1996 former Raleigh resident, and former member of local favorites the Connells, John Schultz made one of my favorite independent films: BANDWAGON, about a fictional struggling indie band.
Since then Schultz has been mainly making kids movies like LIKE MIKE, WHEN ZACHARY TAYLOR CAME TO TOWN, and ALIENS IN THE ATTIC.
That family film streak continues with JUDY MOODY AND THE NOT BUMMER SUMMER, based on Megan McDonald's "Judy Moody" children's book series, which I had never heard of before since I'm 41 and don't have any kids.
Okay, so I'm not in the target audience for this movie.
I'll still proceed - Jordana Beatty plays the precocious title character, who's cute but often hyper-irritating as she bounces from frame to frame , spouting out self consciously hipisms like "rare" in place of "cool," and plotting every activity with charts in a control freak manner that even annoys her close friends.
After their teacher Urkel (I mean Jaleel White) dismisses class for the summer, 2 of Beatty's friends take off - Taylor Hender to clown camp; Garrett Ryan to circus camp.
Beatty is stuck with the nerdy Preston Bailey who gets in the way of racking up those "thrill-a-delic" points our heroine imposed on her chums.
Then there's Parris Mosteller as Beatty's brother Stink, who wishes to spend the summer tracking down Bigfoot, because reports indicate he's in the area.
Their parents (Kristoffer Winters and Janet Varney) leave for a emergency trip (I can't remember why or where), and Aunt Opal (Heather Graham) arrives to take care of the kids.
Graham is a free-spirited artist (she calls herself a "guerilla artist" but that's hard to believe), and Beatty takes to her immediately.
Beatty's Judy Moody exhausting antics in spastic scenes full of harmless destruction disinterested me to the point of wondering about Graham's character. I kept thinking a dark side that she was running away from would be revealed (addiction, abusive relationship, something sinister), but then I caught myself - what the Hell kind of movie did I think I was watching?
This isn't catching up with an aging Roller-Girl! This is a loud and brightly lit kid's romp in which the only thing close to edgy is poop and vomit jokes.
I really feel out of my element writing about this movie. The kids at the preview screening were howling with laughter, while every tired gag made me roll my eyes. But again, this isn't a movie for me.
It's a disposable candy wrapper of a movie, that I bet kids will outgrow right after seeing it. Schultz seems to have found his niche making such teenybopper tripe. I'm sure it pays the bills, but when I think back to his promising debut BANDWAGON, it just doesn't seem right.
At least Connells fans who take their kids to it will enjoy trying to pick out lead singer Doug MacMillon's cameo (MacMillan has appeared in all of Schultz's films).
That's all I got out of it anyway.
More later...
7 Haziran 2011 Salı
Tuesday, After Christmas (Tuesday, June 7, 2011) (40)
Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas opens with a man and a woman in bed talking after sex. They chat about mundane stuff like the length of his toes and the towns where they're from for about 10 minutes and it is all shown in one-take. This, of course, is a typical scene from the so-called Romanian New Wave. There is very little cutting and a minimal amount of camera movements or changes of focus; there is no score, there are no special effects, almost everything is shot in interiors with unchanging lighting.
Unlike previous RomWave films (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days; 12:08 East of Bucharest; The Death of Mr Lasarescu) the world of this film it totally contemporary and filled with the same new and expensive stuff that we would see in North America or Western Europe - elegant cars, Apple laptops, iPhones, clean dentist offices. This world looks much more like Paris than the Bucharest of Police, Adjective (I don't know if this is a thematic decision saying that contemporary Romania is not what you've seen in recent movies. I don't know enough about contemporary Romania or how accurate those other films are.)
Unlike those other films, however, this one doesn't really have much of a plot. Paul (Mimi Branescu), the man in the opening scene, is a married father in his late-30s who is having an affair with Raluca (Maria Popistasu), the woman in that scene. She's actually his daughter's dentist, and is more than a decade younger than he is. She enjoys the time the two of them spend together and never asks him to leave his wife Adriana (Mirela Oprisor) to date her officially. Paul has other ideas, and decides to spring the news of the affair on Adriana just before Christmas, making the holiday, which they spend with his parents, incredibly difficult.
What is really wonderful about this film is that it doesn't have any of the political/social commentary that you find in a lot of the RomWave films, this is just a slice of life drama, a story about regular people doing what people do. There is as much content in what we don't see onscreen as what we do see. The title refers to the day after the holiday when Raluca is supposed to return to Bucharest from her parents house out of town - the day when Paul and Raluca's life together will begin. But we never actually get to this day as the film ends on Christmas Eve. The suggestion is that we never ultimately know what happens on that day. Paul has rashly forced his will on his wife, daughter and mistress, without considering the effects it will cause.
One of the most emotionally searing scenes in RomWave for me was in 4 Months during the dinner party where we see Otilia sitting at a table with people talking nonsense while she is thinking about her friend, Gabita, getting an abortion from a monster of a doctor. The long, long take with a static camera and wide-angle lens makes us fidgety in our seats wanting to move on to the next break. In Tuesday, we get this discomfort at almost equal level during a sequence when Paul and Adriana take their daughter to Raluca for a dentist appointment. It's clear that Raluca is in terrible emotional pain, but can't show it, for fear of tipping Adriana to the relationship. Again here we see it with a static shot from across the exam room, nervous at the unblinking, voyeristic quality of the shot.
But I think Muntean actually goes a bit farther than his RomWave colleagues by using lenses in a magnificent way. The first part of the film is shot mostly in tight shots with normal or wide-angle lenses, giving a naturalistic quality to the action. There's actually a beautiful rack focus in the first scene that switches from Paul to Adriana and back as they talk. At the point Paul tells Adriana about his affair, there is a switch to longer lenses, making certain action in the foreground seem intimate and close and separating us (and the actors) from the out-of-focus background. This wonderfully mirrors the isolation they feel respectively and is a visual reminder that Paul changed his life and the lives of his loved ones (including Raluca) irreversibly.
There's a wonderful motif that runs through the film of gifts and gift giving. Considering it's Christmas, the adults are all excited to be buying gifts for the daughter (there's a funny sequence where Paul and Adriana have to buy themselves gifts that will be given to themselves by his parents). In many ways, Paul sees his confession to his wife as a gift to Raluca - but it's a gift she might not want. One could see the lush life of these Bucharesters and the lavish gifts they exchange (the daughter gets a snowboard from her parents) as a commentary on the way Romanians have embraced capitalism after years of communist misery, though I think the film works well without such political dialectics.
This is possibly the most small-scale, intimate and subtle RomWave film I've seen, but I think it ranks in the top tier of the class. The acting, particularly by Branescu and Popistasu is wonderful, and the direction by Muntean and script by Muntean, Alexandru Baciu and Razvan Radulescu is nuanced and elegant. It has a beautiful look overall and a very interesting storyline.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
Unlike previous RomWave films (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days; 12:08 East of Bucharest; The Death of Mr Lasarescu) the world of this film it totally contemporary and filled with the same new and expensive stuff that we would see in North America or Western Europe - elegant cars, Apple laptops, iPhones, clean dentist offices. This world looks much more like Paris than the Bucharest of Police, Adjective (I don't know if this is a thematic decision saying that contemporary Romania is not what you've seen in recent movies. I don't know enough about contemporary Romania or how accurate those other films are.)
Unlike those other films, however, this one doesn't really have much of a plot. Paul (Mimi Branescu), the man in the opening scene, is a married father in his late-30s who is having an affair with Raluca (Maria Popistasu), the woman in that scene. She's actually his daughter's dentist, and is more than a decade younger than he is. She enjoys the time the two of them spend together and never asks him to leave his wife Adriana (Mirela Oprisor) to date her officially. Paul has other ideas, and decides to spring the news of the affair on Adriana just before Christmas, making the holiday, which they spend with his parents, incredibly difficult.
What is really wonderful about this film is that it doesn't have any of the political/social commentary that you find in a lot of the RomWave films, this is just a slice of life drama, a story about regular people doing what people do. There is as much content in what we don't see onscreen as what we do see. The title refers to the day after the holiday when Raluca is supposed to return to Bucharest from her parents house out of town - the day when Paul and Raluca's life together will begin. But we never actually get to this day as the film ends on Christmas Eve. The suggestion is that we never ultimately know what happens on that day. Paul has rashly forced his will on his wife, daughter and mistress, without considering the effects it will cause.
One of the most emotionally searing scenes in RomWave for me was in 4 Months during the dinner party where we see Otilia sitting at a table with people talking nonsense while she is thinking about her friend, Gabita, getting an abortion from a monster of a doctor. The long, long take with a static camera and wide-angle lens makes us fidgety in our seats wanting to move on to the next break. In Tuesday, we get this discomfort at almost equal level during a sequence when Paul and Adriana take their daughter to Raluca for a dentist appointment. It's clear that Raluca is in terrible emotional pain, but can't show it, for fear of tipping Adriana to the relationship. Again here we see it with a static shot from across the exam room, nervous at the unblinking, voyeristic quality of the shot.
But I think Muntean actually goes a bit farther than his RomWave colleagues by using lenses in a magnificent way. The first part of the film is shot mostly in tight shots with normal or wide-angle lenses, giving a naturalistic quality to the action. There's actually a beautiful rack focus in the first scene that switches from Paul to Adriana and back as they talk. At the point Paul tells Adriana about his affair, there is a switch to longer lenses, making certain action in the foreground seem intimate and close and separating us (and the actors) from the out-of-focus background. This wonderfully mirrors the isolation they feel respectively and is a visual reminder that Paul changed his life and the lives of his loved ones (including Raluca) irreversibly.
There's a wonderful motif that runs through the film of gifts and gift giving. Considering it's Christmas, the adults are all excited to be buying gifts for the daughter (there's a funny sequence where Paul and Adriana have to buy themselves gifts that will be given to themselves by his parents). In many ways, Paul sees his confession to his wife as a gift to Raluca - but it's a gift she might not want. One could see the lush life of these Bucharesters and the lavish gifts they exchange (the daughter gets a snowboard from her parents) as a commentary on the way Romanians have embraced capitalism after years of communist misery, though I think the film works well without such political dialectics.
This is possibly the most small-scale, intimate and subtle RomWave film I've seen, but I think it ranks in the top tier of the class. The acting, particularly by Branescu and Popistasu is wonderful, and the direction by Muntean and script by Muntean, Alexandru Baciu and Razvan Radulescu is nuanced and elegant. It has a beautiful look overall and a very interesting storyline.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
6 Haziran 2011 Pazartesi
DVD Review: RUBBER
RUBBER (Dir. Quentin Dupieux, 2010)
This film opens in a California desert on a road with wooden chairs strewn about. A car drives up knocking some of the chairs over. It parks in front of a man with a tie (Jack Plotnick) holding groups of binoculars by their straps with both hands.
Another man, dressed as a police officer, gets out of the trunk of the car, gets a glass of water from the driver, and walks towards the camera. The cop, played by Stephen Spinella, addresses the audience: "In the Stephen Spielberg movie E.T. why is the alien brown? No reason."
Spinella asks several more nonsensical questions about movie premises, like in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE why don't we see the characters go to the bathroom?," each time concluding "no reason." He states that this film is "a homage to the 'no reason.'" There's no arguing with that.
We then see a small crowd of people who each are passed the binoculars by Plotnick. The people point their binoculars out into the desert, some wondering out loud about what knid of film they're going to see.
So far, so weird.
From a distance the folks watch as a inanimate tire half buried in the sand, comes alive, pulls it self out of the ground and, shakes itself off and rolls down the road.
That's right - a tire comes alive and heads out over the desert terrain. It figures out that it has the power to blow up bottles and cans, then the heads of animals and on to humans, so it goes on a killing spree starting with the residents of a flea bag hotel.
There the tire, named "Robert" in the credits, but never said out loud in the movie, watches a lot of TV while the people in the desert sleep and start to starve.
The next morning Plotnick drops a turkey on the ground and a disgusting scene of the crowd members tearing it apart ensues. A wheelchair bound almost unrecognizable Wings Hauser refrains from eating the turkey which turns out to be a good discussion as its poisoned.
Spinella, thinking the audience is all dead, starts to call off whatever this experiment is, telling people they can go home. When he finds out Hauser is still alive - it's back on. Whatever this is.
Roxane Mesquida also appears as a woman who's either just passing through the area or in cahoots with whoever is running this perplexing project.
For all its meta posturing, RUBBER feels like an excuse to blow up a bunch of prosthetic heads. There's some gratuitous nudity of Mequida in a shower scene, commented on by the crowd of course, which at least I could see the point of.
I couldn't see the point of any of the rest, even as an exercise of non-explanation. Dupieux displays a fluid visual style, but its in the service of an unfleshed premise that lacks wit, and relies too much on cheap semantics.
I wish Dupieux had just stuck to the story of a killer tire and lost all the film-within-a-film rigmarole.
He could've kept Spinella as the cop on the trail of the tire; it's a role that reminds me of the George Hardy doofus hero character in TROLL 2, a film that oddly has more imagination than this one.
The answer "No reason" is actually apt here for I have no reason to recommend RUBBER.
Special Features: Interview with Quentin Dupieux, Interview with Stephen Spinella, Interview with Jack Plotnick, Inteview with Roxane Mequida, RUBBER Teaser Camera Tests, HDNet: A Look at "Rubber", and the Theatrical Trailer.
More later...
This film opens in a California desert on a road with wooden chairs strewn about. A car drives up knocking some of the chairs over. It parks in front of a man with a tie (Jack Plotnick) holding groups of binoculars by their straps with both hands.
Another man, dressed as a police officer, gets out of the trunk of the car, gets a glass of water from the driver, and walks towards the camera. The cop, played by Stephen Spinella, addresses the audience: "In the Stephen Spielberg movie E.T. why is the alien brown? No reason."
Spinella asks several more nonsensical questions about movie premises, like in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE why don't we see the characters go to the bathroom?," each time concluding "no reason." He states that this film is "a homage to the 'no reason.'" There's no arguing with that.
We then see a small crowd of people who each are passed the binoculars by Plotnick. The people point their binoculars out into the desert, some wondering out loud about what knid of film they're going to see.
So far, so weird.
From a distance the folks watch as a inanimate tire half buried in the sand, comes alive, pulls it self out of the ground and, shakes itself off and rolls down the road.
That's right - a tire comes alive and heads out over the desert terrain. It figures out that it has the power to blow up bottles and cans, then the heads of animals and on to humans, so it goes on a killing spree starting with the residents of a flea bag hotel.
There the tire, named "Robert" in the credits, but never said out loud in the movie, watches a lot of TV while the people in the desert sleep and start to starve.
The next morning Plotnick drops a turkey on the ground and a disgusting scene of the crowd members tearing it apart ensues. A wheelchair bound almost unrecognizable Wings Hauser refrains from eating the turkey which turns out to be a good discussion as its poisoned.
Spinella, thinking the audience is all dead, starts to call off whatever this experiment is, telling people they can go home. When he finds out Hauser is still alive - it's back on. Whatever this is.
Roxane Mesquida also appears as a woman who's either just passing through the area or in cahoots with whoever is running this perplexing project.
For all its meta posturing, RUBBER feels like an excuse to blow up a bunch of prosthetic heads. There's some gratuitous nudity of Mequida in a shower scene, commented on by the crowd of course, which at least I could see the point of.
I couldn't see the point of any of the rest, even as an exercise of non-explanation. Dupieux displays a fluid visual style, but its in the service of an unfleshed premise that lacks wit, and relies too much on cheap semantics.
I wish Dupieux had just stuck to the story of a killer tire and lost all the film-within-a-film rigmarole.
He could've kept Spinella as the cop on the trail of the tire; it's a role that reminds me of the George Hardy doofus hero character in TROLL 2, a film that oddly has more imagination than this one.
The answer "No reason" is actually apt here for I have no reason to recommend RUBBER.
Special Features: Interview with Quentin Dupieux, Interview with Stephen Spinella, Interview with Jack Plotnick, Inteview with Roxane Mequida, RUBBER Teaser Camera Tests, HDNet: A Look at "Rubber", and the Theatrical Trailer.
More later...
5 Haziran 2011 Pazar
Colors of the Mountain (Sunday, June 5, 2011) (39)
I can see why some people would really like the Colombian film The Colors of the Mountain by Carlos César Arbeláez: it has a bunch of cute kids (including two albino kids!!), they play soccer and their lives are being upset by FARC-like guerrillas. It's all sorts of sentimental claptrap that many go in for. Sadly, the film is just these things and had no real emotional movement and not much of a plot either.
Manuel is a 9 year-old boy who loves playing soccer with his friends in his remote village in the Colombian mountains. His father is a poor, apolitical farmer, a good man and a careful, concerned parent. One day when the boys are playing soccer, the ball gets kicked far away to another hill where the guerrilla group in the area (something just like the FARC, though the name is never really mentioned) has placed a bunch of land mines. The boys are very sad that they won't be able to play anymore because they're not allowed to go retrieve the ball.
Meanwhile, Manuel's father is trying to avoid the guerrillas who are recruiting in the area. They demand that he show up at their meetings, but he always finds a way of avoiding them. He's worried that if he joins their militia he will be a target of the government army's raids into partisan villages.
All these politics fly over Manuel's head, and all he's concerned about is getting his ball back. As more and more of his classmates are pulled out of his one-room-schoolhouse school, he seems entirely oblivious to the pain and worry the adults are going trough.
There is some nice, subtle style that Arbeláez puts into the film, like how the colors of the mountains (see: title) are rich and beautiful at the beginning of the film and turn to gray and dull as the military conflict intensifies. This elegance doesn't really come through in the narrative, where we see things from Manuel's point of view, so details about the situation are totally obscure.
I appreciate that this is what Arbeláez is going for - rural guerrilla war from the point of view of a kid who can't be bothered by such things - but as a story-telling technique it's very frustrating. Considering I know there's a conflict, I would like to know who the players are in it. Are both sides, the guerrillas and the army, equally bad? Does Manuel's father prefer one side or the other? Why are they fighting?
It's very hard to watch a movie where we know important things are happening in the background, but the main point of interest is a kids lost soccer ball. I don't think it's a very effective way of showing the misery of living in the midst of a guerrilla war. It's just precious and treacly.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
Manuel is a 9 year-old boy who loves playing soccer with his friends in his remote village in the Colombian mountains. His father is a poor, apolitical farmer, a good man and a careful, concerned parent. One day when the boys are playing soccer, the ball gets kicked far away to another hill where the guerrilla group in the area (something just like the FARC, though the name is never really mentioned) has placed a bunch of land mines. The boys are very sad that they won't be able to play anymore because they're not allowed to go retrieve the ball.
Meanwhile, Manuel's father is trying to avoid the guerrillas who are recruiting in the area. They demand that he show up at their meetings, but he always finds a way of avoiding them. He's worried that if he joins their militia he will be a target of the government army's raids into partisan villages.
All these politics fly over Manuel's head, and all he's concerned about is getting his ball back. As more and more of his classmates are pulled out of his one-room-schoolhouse school, he seems entirely oblivious to the pain and worry the adults are going trough.
There is some nice, subtle style that Arbeláez puts into the film, like how the colors of the mountains (see: title) are rich and beautiful at the beginning of the film and turn to gray and dull as the military conflict intensifies. This elegance doesn't really come through in the narrative, where we see things from Manuel's point of view, so details about the situation are totally obscure.
I appreciate that this is what Arbeláez is going for - rural guerrilla war from the point of view of a kid who can't be bothered by such things - but as a story-telling technique it's very frustrating. Considering I know there's a conflict, I would like to know who the players are in it. Are both sides, the guerrillas and the army, equally bad? Does Manuel's father prefer one side or the other? Why are they fighting?
It's very hard to watch a movie where we know important things are happening in the background, but the main point of interest is a kids lost soccer ball. I don't think it's a very effective way of showing the misery of living in the midst of a guerrilla war. It's just precious and treacly.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
2 Haziran 2011 Perşembe
X-MEN: FIRST CLASS: The Film Babble Blog Review
X-MEN: FIRST CLASS (Dir. Matthew Vaughn, 2011)
Right off the bat it's clear that Matthew Vaughn is a much better fit for the X-MEN movies than the previous directors (Brett Radner and Gavin Hood respectively). A strong opening sequence set in a concentration camp in Poland in 1944 shows Vaughn getting the edgy tense tone right in introducing a captured kid (Bill Milner) who has untrained telekinetic powers.
A sinister Kevin Bacon plays German Scientist Sebastian Shaw who recognizes the powers the boy has, and kills his mother (Éva Magyar) in an successful attempt to unleash them. Meanwhile, a young boy (Laurence Belcher) encounters a young girl (Morgan Lily) who's broken into his Westchester County, NY mansion's kitchen. She can morph her form into anybody's with her true body being all blue and spiky, while he can read people's minds.
They live together as brother and sister, growing up into James McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence as the movie shifts to 1962. After witnessing supernatural activity in Las Vegas involving a never aging dapper Bacon and his crystalized co-hort Emma Frost (January Jones), CIA Agent Moira MacTaggart (Rose Byrne) seeks out McAvoy, because of his expertise on mutation.
So the mutants hook up with the CIA (who take a little convincing), and are stationed in a facility to train under the supervision of Oliver Platt who's never given a character name. The concentration camp kid, now grown up into Michael Fassbender, tracks down Bacon to his yacht at the same time McAvoy does, but Bacon escapes in a souped up submarine.
There's an amusing recruitment montage with McAvoy and Fassbender rounding up other mutants which is slickly cut with '60s style and a Burt Bacharach-esque bounce to the soundtrack.
A sizable stable of characters is assembled including Nicholas Hoult, Álex González, Caleb Landry Jones, Zoë Isabella Kravitz, and Jason Flemyng, with the film juggling them capably. The film's second half concerns the crew confronting the Cuban missile crisis with Bacon's sinister Shaw, who's a mutant himself, being the one responsible for the missiles' transportation from Russia.
Like in all these comic book epics, the climax is an overblown battle. It's an explosive spectacle with battleships filling the sky full of warheads.
Oddly, it feels like the influential touchstones of this movie are the STAR TREK reboot, and INGLORIOUS BASTERDS; it's an origin story intertwined with an alternate history scenario, and I was surprised at how much of it worked.
X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is a better than average summer sequel (actually prequel) that despite being cluttered with clichés, cheesy moments, and bad dialogue (Bacon even says "come with me, and you'll live like Kings...and Queens" at one point) offers a fair amount of fun.
The CGI is consistently top notch, as is the set design (I loved the complete replica of the War Room from DR. STRANGELOVE), and there's a satisfying sweep to the storyline.
Particularly in the passion of Fassbender's performance, the confidence of McAvoy, the angsty energy of Laurence, and Bacon having a ball with his Bondian villain of a role, it's an incredibly effective cast.
On the minus side, some of Hoult's mannerisms as Laurence's possible love interest are annoying and his origin as "Beast" is undercooked, the young recruits are obnoxious, and January Jones never seems to be all there, but as she's clad in white lingerie when she's not crystalized, she obviously wasn't hired for her acting ability.
Regardless this breathes fresh air into the franchise, especially after the lackluster X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE.
With this classy and exceedingly entertaining effort, consider the series rebooted.
More later...
Right off the bat it's clear that Matthew Vaughn is a much better fit for the X-MEN movies than the previous directors (Brett Radner and Gavin Hood respectively). A strong opening sequence set in a concentration camp in Poland in 1944 shows Vaughn getting the edgy tense tone right in introducing a captured kid (Bill Milner) who has untrained telekinetic powers.
A sinister Kevin Bacon plays German Scientist Sebastian Shaw who recognizes the powers the boy has, and kills his mother (Éva Magyar) in an successful attempt to unleash them. Meanwhile, a young boy (Laurence Belcher) encounters a young girl (Morgan Lily) who's broken into his Westchester County, NY mansion's kitchen. She can morph her form into anybody's with her true body being all blue and spiky, while he can read people's minds.
They live together as brother and sister, growing up into James McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence as the movie shifts to 1962. After witnessing supernatural activity in Las Vegas involving a never aging dapper Bacon and his crystalized co-hort Emma Frost (January Jones), CIA Agent Moira MacTaggart (Rose Byrne) seeks out McAvoy, because of his expertise on mutation.
So the mutants hook up with the CIA (who take a little convincing), and are stationed in a facility to train under the supervision of Oliver Platt who's never given a character name. The concentration camp kid, now grown up into Michael Fassbender, tracks down Bacon to his yacht at the same time McAvoy does, but Bacon escapes in a souped up submarine.
There's an amusing recruitment montage with McAvoy and Fassbender rounding up other mutants which is slickly cut with '60s style and a Burt Bacharach-esque bounce to the soundtrack.
A sizable stable of characters is assembled including Nicholas Hoult, Álex González, Caleb Landry Jones, Zoë Isabella Kravitz, and Jason Flemyng, with the film juggling them capably. The film's second half concerns the crew confronting the Cuban missile crisis with Bacon's sinister Shaw, who's a mutant himself, being the one responsible for the missiles' transportation from Russia.
Like in all these comic book epics, the climax is an overblown battle. It's an explosive spectacle with battleships filling the sky full of warheads.
Oddly, it feels like the influential touchstones of this movie are the STAR TREK reboot, and INGLORIOUS BASTERDS; it's an origin story intertwined with an alternate history scenario, and I was surprised at how much of it worked.
X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is a better than average summer sequel (actually prequel) that despite being cluttered with clichés, cheesy moments, and bad dialogue (Bacon even says "come with me, and you'll live like Kings...and Queens" at one point) offers a fair amount of fun.
The CGI is consistently top notch, as is the set design (I loved the complete replica of the War Room from DR. STRANGELOVE), and there's a satisfying sweep to the storyline.
Particularly in the passion of Fassbender's performance, the confidence of McAvoy, the angsty energy of Laurence, and Bacon having a ball with his Bondian villain of a role, it's an incredibly effective cast.
On the minus side, some of Hoult's mannerisms as Laurence's possible love interest are annoying and his origin as "Beast" is undercooked, the young recruits are obnoxious, and January Jones never seems to be all there, but as she's clad in white lingerie when she's not crystalized, she obviously wasn't hired for her acting ability.
Regardless this breathes fresh air into the franchise, especially after the lackluster X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE.
With this classy and exceedingly entertaining effort, consider the series rebooted.
More later...
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