Roscoe Writes

2011-11-28T16:04:00.003-05:00

HUGO

"Dream with me."

Martin Scorsese’s attempt to cash in on the family friendly big-budget 3-D extravaganza trend. The film centers on orphan Hugo, played with a surprising lack of charisma by Asa Butterworth, who keeps the clocks in a Paris train station wound and running accurately, and his quest to repair a broken automaton left him by his late father, stealing necessary bits of clockwork from a toymaker with a small shop in the station who turns out to be none other than the great filmmaker Georges Melies blah blah blah. There are subplots involving Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour, and a very weird performance from Sacha Baron Cohen as the station guard who occasionally brings the film to a halt. The film follows a terribly predictable trajectory until it turns rather jarringly into a lecture on the importance of film history and preservation, believe it or not, and just when you’ve gotten used to the sudden shift in the story it shifts back into Big Event Movie mode with an entirely predictable and deeply silly Big Action Scene that serves no purpose other than allowing Scorsese to cram in references to Hitchcock, M.C. Esher, and Harold Lloyd before going for a big ode to the magic of cinema and family friendly tear-jerker ending.

There’s some cool stuff, to be fair, especially some marvelous recreations of Melies’ style of filmmaking, with its outlandish painted sets, crazy costumes, dancing girls and overt theatricality. But it left me very very cold indeed. Like Del Toro’s outlandishly overpraised PAN’S LABYRINTH, it expects me to take more of an interest in the problems of its juvenile hero without ever going to the trouble of making me give a flying goddamn about the little wretch in question, and that's entirely the blame of Mr. Butterworth and ultimately Mr. Scorsese himself. Maybe a better child actor could have made him more interesting. If only the film had been made with a Freddie Highmore, Jamie Bell, or a Haley Joel Osment.

Well-intentioned, and I guess if it leads people to seek out the glorious work of the great Melies, well, it won’t have been an entire waste of time and money. And I'm thinking that Melies is himself a key to the film's slight successes and more drastic failures. The film never makes me really share the sense of Wonder that it works so strenuously to generate with all the big CGI 3D stuff and invitations to “dream with me.” It requires a different kind of filmmaker to get away with stuff like this, someone better able to tap into the real innocence and sense of wonder associated with childhood while still regaining his adult sensibilities, and I’m sorry to have to say that Martin Scorsese is quite simply no Georges Melies, or even Terry Gilliam any of the latterday followers of the great man. HUGO simply doesn't have enough of the life that animates even the least of the Melies films is wants to desperately to be a tribute to; it is just as mechanical as the big clocks that Hugo tends. There’s a terrific merry energy to Melies’ A TRIP TO THE MOON that Scorsese can’t manage to bring to the screen, settling instead for a sugary sentimentality that will certainly move a lot of people but started to infurate me, at least partly because it has so little to do with the very real magic of the real films created by Georges Melies, who created, among other things, what must be the first depiction of hilariously simulated same-sex analingus in movie history, in a remarkable little short called THE COURTSHIP OF THE SUN AND MOON.

I certainly don’t expect to see such things in a G-rated holiday extravaganza, but I don’t think it is expecting too much to get some of Melies’ sly energy in a film devoted, even if only in part, to his memory.

2011-08-24T15:53:00.001-04:00

TREE OF LIFE

Terrence Malick's latest got a lot of boos and bravos at Cannes, as well as the Palme D'Or. I pretty thoroughly disliked it. Malick is clearly aiming for big metaphysical emotional human-historical targets here, as he attempts to link fragmented scenes in the life of a dysfunctional family (Brutish Dad, Saintly Mother, Sensitive Son in 1950s Texas) with nothing less than the creation of the universe -- there's an extended sequence showing can only be the Big Bang, the formation of Planet Earth, single cell animals, dinosaurs, the lot. And it doesn't stop there: there's another sequence set on a beach where all of the characters from all periods of the film (except dinosaurs) are shown walking around while wearing white gauzy clothes, and there are fervently whispered voiceovers about grace and so on.

I didn't buy it for a minute. For all the magnificence of the cinematography and the carefully chosen classical soundtrack, all the emotive whisperings and ever-so symbolic symbolism, the only thing of cosmic significance on display in TREE OF LIFE is Malick's failure to bring this film to anything resembling meaningful life. Plenty of distinguished works have been loaded for the same bear Malick is aiming for: Joyce's ULYSSES, Faulkner's THE HAMLET, Wilder's OUR TOWN, Tarkovsky's THE MIRROR, O'Neill's LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, to name just a few, and I'm sorry but TREE OF LIFE falls very very short of being in their company, coming off instead like Tarkovsky-Kubrickified version of some 70s TV drama. My problems with the film aren't with the film's perceived "sincerity" or "seriousness," and I'm certainly not trying to come off as all hipper than thou. I've been deeply moved by lots of films, lots of books, lots of things in life in general. I found more honest emotional resonance, more sheer power and beauty, in the climactic incinerator sequence of TOY STORY 3, where assorted pieces of plastic and fabric join hands to meet their fate, than in the entire two hours plus of Malick's phony, bloated piece of kneejerk high-art weepy sincerity-porn.

Believe it or not, I've been an admirer of Malick's for a long time, since college when I was knocked out by a screening of BADLANDS, still for me Malick's best film. DAYS OF HEAVEN has its interest, but for all the visual beauty there's also the first instance of the preciousness that would overcome Malick later, in one of Linda Manz' voiceovers, when she out of the blue announces that she's thinking of her future, and wants to be an earth doctor, or some such -- it just brought the film to a halt, but it didn't last long. I saw THIN RED LINE on its first release as well, and was very impressed with it, up to a point. A recent revisit confirmed that, for me, the film just goes on for far too long -- the last half hour or so focussing on Jim Caviezel fell very flat for me, especially after the incredible tension of the middle section, which ends when the great Elias Koteas is transferred out of the unit. The trademark whispered voiceovers didn't cloy as badly as they later did, and the film's astonishing beauty was, for me, unprecedented in a war film.

I seem to like THE NEW WORLD a good deal more than most people. I didn't have problem with the slow pace, or the voiceovers, or much of anything in the film at all. It struck me as being one of the more profound timewarps in movie history -- it really felt like I was looking back through the ages at colonial America. What can I say -- I bought it, I went along with the leisurely pace and the radiant beauty and the film's lingering sadness. And Malick got a real performance out of Colin Farrell, which up to then I hadn't thought was possible, and he got one of the last watchable performances of Christian Bale.

Now to be fair, there were things about TREE OF LIFE that I did like. Mr. Malick did manage to depict the world of children really skillfully, I thought. The whole memory of the boy entering into the neighbor's house was the most remarkable thing in the film, I thought, the kind of nagging childhood incident that resists easy explanation. And the entire film is just flat out gorgeous. I keep remembering that one shot of a flock of birds against the sky, twisting in and out of assorted shapes -- the kind of astonishing thing that only Malick seems to be able to capture, that shows me something everyday in a way that makes me feel like I've never seen it before. I just wish the rest of the film had been of any interest to me at all.

2011-05-19T16:11:00.004-04:00

THEATRE IS HELL

Saw two of the most eagerly anticipated plays of the year in the last week, the National Theatre of Great Britain’s production of something called WAR HORSE, and Tony Kushner’s latest play, THE INTELLIGENT HOMOSEXUAL’S GUIDE TO CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM WITH A KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES.

WAR HORSE is the story of Joey, a British horse brought to life via lifesize puppets manipulated by clearly visible operators. Through some kind of theatrical alchemy, the operators disappear, and you get remarkably lifelike and interesting creations. Alas, that's about all that's lifelike and interesting about the show. Joey’s story follows a terribly familiar trajectory -- he is purchased by a familiarly vaguely disfunctional family (Sweet Dreamy Son, mother who is Loving But Firm, Drunken Boob Father), sold to the British Army for use in WWI, familiar confrontation with the Horrors Of War, reconciliation with Sweet Dreamy Son who had joined the Army specifically to track down his beloved Joey. I’m not giving anything away here, there’s no doubt whatever where the trite story is heading; there’s not a single narrative surprise from start to finish, other than at the extreme clumsiness of a lot of the story-telling. At one point about 30 minutes in, after a lot of straightforward Boy/Horse Bonding and family drama, church bells are heard, prompting one character to announce out of the blue:“Well, you know what that means -- the German Kaiser has refused to withdraw his troops from Belgium! We’re at war!” It pretty much goes along from there.

As if sensing the thinness of the story, the show’s creators have gone to great lengths to keep the action lively at all times, and they just plain go too far. WAR HORSE is, ultimately, just a big honking barrage of THEATAH!!!! Sets! Lights! Music! Puppets! Sound Effects!! Projections! Annoying Folk Songs From Some Broad With A Violin! Guys with Bird Puppets on Sticks To Wave Over The Audience! Big Serious Message! It’s like some insane collection of all the Biggest Moments from 80s British exports like LES MIZ and NICHOLAS NICKLEBY and CATS. For example, Joey has a battlefield encounter with a tank that will bring back fond memories of MISS SAIGON. And so on. For all the energy and flash, the show is best when it settles down for a bit and lets us just watch those wonderful puppet horses. There’s a marvelous couple of minutes where Joey and another horse named Topthorn run around the stage together and engage in some Equine Bonding. But it is back to sound-and-fury business before long.

But what really makes the show unforgivable, for me at least, is the High Solemnity that the show cloaks itself in. Everybody’s working very very hard indeed, and the expectation seems to be that you will be a better person when it is over. This is Serious Theatre, even Medicinal Theatre -- Art That Is Good For You. It can’t be a surprise that Steven Spielberg has already bought the screen rights. His film will doubtless a masterpiece of taste and restraint compared to this bloated self-important all-out assault of gimmicks that have all been done better elsewhere.

The title of Tony Kushner’s THE INTELLIGENT HOMOSEXUAL’S GUIDE TO CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM WITH A KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES doesn’t exactly suggest that anything as base as entertainment is in store. And by and large, it isn’t. The unwieldy title, which brings echoes of works by Bernard Shaw and others to mind, is as unwieldy as the play itself, which brings echoes of other works by Shaw and Chekhov and Marsha Norman to mind.

So Gus, a Brooklyn longshoreman labor organizer and devout communist, has gathered his family together to announce his intention to commit suicide. The assorted family members talk it over, and then talk it over, and then talk it over some more. There are lots of subplots among the assorted children and their significant others and a male hustler with whom one of the family is having an affair (don’t ask). To be fair, there are moments of real warmth and passion, and some splendid big scenes during which Kushner just lets loose -- everybody’s onstage at the same time talking at once, and thanks to some fine direction and some fine performances, it miraculously manages to be exciting rather than exasperating.

But not for long. Now I don't usually have a problem with big overstuffed works for the screen, the stage, or the page. Some of my favorite things are big overstuffed works for the screen the stage and the page. The problem is that Kushner is so busy making all of his 1001 Serious Points about Capitalism and Socialism and the Scriptures that little things like story and character and even plain old plausibility get forgotten about. Big scenes involving Pill and his attachment to a hustler and the problems created with Pill’s partner of almost 30 years don’t add much to the play, culminating in a long scene where both the hustler and the partner declare their love for Pill in long and agonizing speeches, and all I could do was wonder what on earth either the hustler or the partner ever saw in the self-pitying Pill in the first place.

Kushner overloads the play outlandishly. The cast of characters include two, count em, two theologians and an ex-nun. Gus’s children are all given cutely ever-so-symbolic nicknames like Pill (for Pier Luigi) and Empty (for Maria Theresa). The characters are all ferociously articulate and launch into long windy speeches at the drop of a hat -- it begins to resemble a version of Marsha Norman’s ‘NIGHT, MOTHER as written by the combined editorial staff of some humorless gay alternative weekly. And at three hours and 45 minutes long, the play is quite simply indefensibly overlong.

Is this the same Tony Kushner whose ANGELS IN AMERICA held me spellbound in a fine revival earlier this year? Damn right it is. And after seeing both parts of ANGELS back to back in a dazzling marathon (one that felt like it flew by in an instant, as opposed to the current play’s agonizing tedium) I can testify to what Kushner can do when he’s really cooking. With INTELLIGENT HOMOSEXUAL, Kushner is furiously boiling and stewing and roasting and stir-frying, but what winds up on the plate is not at all appetizing. I didn’t leave a tip.

2011-01-27T15:17:00.002-05:00

SHORT TAKES ON RECENTLY VIEWED STUFF:

BLACK SWAN
It goes like this: little Nina (Natalie Portman) is a ballet dancer who is up for the role of the Swan in a production of Swan Lake, and her Svengali-ish choreographer/impresario tells her that her dancing is technically perfect but emotionally frigid. This sends Nina very predictably over the edge, and anyone who has ever attended the movies at any time in the last 50 years should be able to see what comes next. Aronofsky & Co. try to shoehorn in some stuff about Nina being a perfectionist and there are vague hints about anorexia and self-mutilation, but Nina's real problem is quite simply that she's batshit fucking crazy. The movie tips its hand very early as to where it is headed, when Nina, while washing her hands, finds that flesh is peeling off her fingers, only to then realize that it was All In Her Mind. The whole godforsaken movie falls into place after that, and I had to sit there and listen to the gasps of folks who were actually surprised at the little plot twists that any sentient third grader should have seen coming (GASP! THERE'S NO DEAD BODY IN THE BATHROOM!!!!!!).

The movie aims for a high seriousness (and borrowed High Art Cred with the World O'Ballet setting) that it misses by miles, finally devolving into a flashy but cheap little horror flick for Lincoln Center donors who don't get out to the movies much, with lots of Flashy Editing and Special Effects for the easily impressed. At least we're spared the overt moralizing of Scorsese's SHUTTER ISLAND, with its Dachau flashbacks and prattling about morality, but Aronofsky's film collapses under its own solemnity just as completely as Scorsese's does. It comes off, ultimately, like Aronofsky found an abandoned Tracey Ullman sketch, didn't realize it was a comedy, and brought it to the screen as high tragedy.

Don't be fooled. BLACK SWAN is bogus crap from start to finish. But at least it is made with some energy, as opposed to--

TRUE GRIT
There's not a lot to say about the Coen Brothers' latest opus, because I just found it a bore. Very prettily shot by Roger Deakins, lots of things that they couldn't apparently do in the 1960s like graphic gunshot violence and some silly computer-generated rattlesnakes, and all that. I was bored senseless. No tension, not even the barest basic interest. An utter waste of time, resources and actors. Even the usually reliable Carter Burwell phones it in this time: his score consists of the hymn "Leaning On The Everlasting Arms" played and played and played and fucking played again. And of course it has gotten the usual raves and award nominations, the Coens having evidently inherited Clint Eastwood's cache of Blackmailable Material on American Film Critics & Oscar Voters.

SHOAH
Now we're talking. Claude Lanzmann's 1985 film SHOAH, all 9 1/2 hours of it, shown in a brand new 35mm print, and I did the whole thing in one day and was just blown away. A film about the Holocaust, which contains no historic footage or recreations, depending entirely on Lanzmann's interviews with survivors and others involved with the camps and the workings of the Holocaust itself. Astonishing, and heart-rending. I can't blame anyone for being scared off by the extreme length, and I'll cop to finding some of the interviews rather, shall we say, prolonged, but the film has a cumulative impact that is like nothing you'll ever see.

The film is more than just a batch of tear-jerking accounts of the daily horror. The film includes illuminating interviews with an American historian who gleans remarkable and revealing information from a simple train schedule, for example. One other sequence is among the most chilling moments in any film, play, or work of narrative art I've yet experienced: over footage of a truck driving through industrial areas, Lanzmann plays a simple voiceover reading a letter from a local German officer detailing the success of the local extermination programs, and giving some specifications needed for modifications for certain specific equipment and transport vehicles. The blandness of the language doesn't disguise the fact that he's talking about how large moving vans used to gas Jews need to be modified because the resulting corpses tend to congregate near the rear exit of the van, thus throwing the van off balance and making driving difficult. As the letter ends, the onscreen truck is shown to be manufactured by the very company that manufactured the killing vans in the letter, and is finally shown driving past the still thriving factory.

THE LEOPARD
A brand new restored print of Visconti's early 60s epic of family and history in a changing 19th Century Italy. This is at least the third version of this film that has been released in the last 20-odd years, and I'd always missed it, mostly because I have a severe allergy to Burt Lancaster's acting. What a fool I was. This new print is a marvel, as is the film itself. A big juicy delicious inter-generational saga, with politics, civil war, religion, hypocrisy, intrigue, love, lust, betrayal, the whole passion-desire-bloodshed-and-death kitchen sink, and miraculously it manages to keep its head, never getting too serious or too silly. Burt Lancaster, in his finest performance, plays the patriarch of a more than usually distinguished Italian aristocratic family, who is doing what he can to ensure his family's future endurance in changing times, while dealing with his own hot-blooded desires. Alain Delon plays Lancaster's charming nephew, and Claudia Cardinale lights up the screen as the lusty daughter of a local politician who you just know is going to be causing trouble as the film progresses. The film's main astonishment is a 45 minute ball sequence where the entire film comes together, everything is dealt with and summed up and I dare you not to be moved and impressed. If all great films were this entertaining...

2010-11-28T20:17:00.005-05:00

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEADLY BOREDOM

"Why the constant surprise?"

The final volume of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series has been brought to the screen, in the first of two films. HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS is one of the least energetic films in the entire series, and that's saying something after the last entry, H.P. AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE.

I'd enjoyed HALF-BLOOD PRINCE well enough, with some reservations. I then read J.K. Rowling's novel, and was just plain floored at how lame the film is in comparison with the book. The filmmakers seem to have gone very far out of their way to sanitize the book, to remove anything that might be too scary (scarcely a chapter of PRINCE goes by without news of a death or serious injury from Voldemort's forces) or, even more apparently frightening, anything that might show Harry displaying any disrespect to grownups at all. Very early in the novel, for instance, Harry has an extremely ugly encounter with Draco Malfoy's mother that basically ends with him shoving his wand in her face and begging her to make his day. Similar scenes with the useless new Minister of Magic, whom Harry (entirely justifiably) tells off in no uncertain terms are nowhere in the film.

Yeah, I know they can't cram everything into the movie. But those little moments are really crucial in showing Harry's increased sense of himself and his increased anger at the world in general, and in showing the general sense of messiness, of good characters who do things that they shouldn't, that characterizes Rowling's books (the ones that I've read, at least.) Add to that the total absence of the kind of energy that keeps the books such a delight to read, and some of which was actually present in the previous entry, ORDER OF THE PHOENIX. After reading Rowling's novel, I'm going to have to put the film of HALF-BLOOD PRINCE among the most disappointing films in the series, right next to DEATHLY HALLOWS.

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS continues director David Yates’ bizarre ongoing mission to deprive J.K. Rowling’s great mad characters and intricate stories of all the energy, for good and evil, that makes them such a delight to read at their best. Thus, instead of Pissed-Off Harry Potter, we get a merely Melancholy Harry Potter. The villains do a lot of portentous whispering and posing, with only Helena Bonham Carter going for mad scenery-chewing broke. The aim seems to have been to make the films more Capital-S Serious somehow, and the film suffers for it. The color scheme has been toned way down into a RETURN OF THE KING-esque permanent cloudy gray. The big climactic moments like the attack on a certain wedding and the infiltration of the Ministry of Magic fall very flat indeed -- there’s just no spark at all. Characters from the novels appear just long enough to remind one of their existence and emphasize how much has been cut from the story, which also means that name actors who have made great impressions in other installments appear just long enough to get paid and to remind you of better films (the criminal waste of such glories as David Thewlis, Timothy Spall, Julie Walters, Brendan Gleeson, and Imelda Staunton’s magnificent Dolores Umbridge is among the film’s worst offenses). The storyline feels both too long (those interminable scenes of Harry & Co. wandering in the greenscreened wilderness) and yet incomplete, somehow, as if even bigger chunks than usual are being left out of what is after all only half of the story, and there are a couple of elements that require some explanation, like that little shard of mirror that Harry keeps consulting periodically -- sorry, but what was that again?

This is all really unforgiveable considering the splitting of the story into two films. If they were just going to cut the storyline to shreds, why not just do it all in one film and get it over with? Well duh. They’ll make a fuck of a lot more money from two films than from just one, of course.

To be fair, there are highlights. A clever moment where assorted characters assume Harry’s identity and appearance offers some good laughs via CGI -- the sudden appearance of Daniel Radcliffe’s features on Emma Watson’s face is the film’s real comic highlight. The animated sequence explaining the film’s title is splendid, and there’s admirable chemistry among the three young leads. Ms. Watson and Mr. Radcliffe do their customary fine work, and it is especially nice to see Rupert Grint’s Ron Weasley finally showing some guts after all these years.

So in 8 months we’ll get Part II. I guess I’ll go. There’s one bit in the novel that I had been hoping to get a look at onscreen, between two of my very favorite actresses, a big scene that I know a lot of people have been looking forward to, based on assorted online postings I’ve been seeing. I hope that Yates Etc. will not fuck that scene up the way they’ve fucked up almost the entire first half of the story. My hopes would be much higher if Alfonso Cuaron were in charge.

2010-10-04T12:31:00.004-04:00

THE LAST COMMAND

"I was in the Russian Army, and this medal was worn on the left."

Josef von Sternberg's THE LAST COMMAND, recently released in a very nice DVD from the folks at the Criterion Collection, has a lot to interest a fan of classic movies. The film's star, Emil Jannings, won the first Academy Award for Best Actor for his work in this film (along with another performance in WAY OF ALL FLESH), and any chance to see any film by the brilliant von Sternberg, who is still woefully under-represented on DVD, can't be missed.

As the film opens, a rather battered and fragile Russian emigre (Jannings) in Hollywood is hired to play the role of a Russian general in what seems to be a war film. See, the director of the film within the film, played by William Powell, has specifically chosen Jannings' photo from a stack of stock actor photos. It gradually becomes clear that Jannings has in fact been a highly decorated general in the Russian army, and that some kind of humiliating payback seems to be in store, as assorted studio flunkies and even Powell himself lay on the rudeness. In an extended flashback, which takes up much of the film, it turns out that Powell had in fact been active in the Russian revolution and was tossed into prison by none other than Jannings himself. Jannings even had, it turns out, the bad taste to appropriate Powell's female partner in political extremism as his mistress, and it goes along from there.

Von Sternberg keeps the energy up at all times, and there's a lot of good fun to be had. The Hollywood studio system gets some good ribbing, and the comparisons between Movie Director and Military Leader are interesting and amusing. Unfortunately, the storyline just one step too far. The way that nobody seems to be affected by the cold of the Russian winter is one thing, I guess I can overlook a particular heroine flinging herself around outdoors in the snow wearing only a sheer silk dress because, well, they just do it so well. The deal breaker comes when the plot indulges in one flagrant flourish too many, a big outlandish tragic event that comes a good 20 minutes before the film returns to Hollywood for the requisite Big Finish, and which can't help but diminish, for me at least the BIG SCENE where Jannings gets one last chance to really go for broke.

Certainly enough of it works to make the film watchable. There's no denying the excellence of the performances, with Jannings negotiating the character's ups and more frequent downs beautifully. Nobody went to pieces the way Jannings did. More than holding his own is the great William Powell, whose hugely expressive eyes were never put to such great use in sound films. There's also the general splendor of the production itself, the beautiful black and white cinematography and really remarkable camera movement. Future viewings might make me consider whether or not von Sternberg was playing some kind of game with his audience, calling attention to the artifice of filmmaking with some of what goes on here.

If there are any future viewings, and I'll admit that I'm not in a big hurry.

2010-07-26T11:16:00.003-04:00

INCEPTION

"Insert Flap A And Throw Away"

INCEPTION is the latest gloom-a-thon from America's favorite purveyor of bloated bummers, Christopher Nolan, up to now the man most famous for leeching all entertainment value from the Batman franchise in BATMAN BEGINS and THE DARK KNIGHT. As even the doorknobs must know by now, INCEPTION follows a group of dream technicians (or does it?) led by Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) who take the assignment of planting an idea in the head of the heir to a big corporation (or do they?). To do this, they have to enter dream states themselves (or do they?), which has risks, most notably in the form of DiCaprio's late wife Mal, played by the magnificent Marion Cotillard, who seems to have a bit of a grudge against her husband, for reasons which become clear.

Or do they?

INCEPTION, or as I've started to think of it, INFECTION, is yet another in an apparently endless series of puzzle movies that keep getting churned out with appalling regularity, and is in fact the second one this year, after Scorsese's equally tiresome SHUTTER ISLAND. Where SHUTTER ISLAND kept the energy high with a parade of wackadoo plot twists and a manic High-Gothic style culminating in the Big Surprise That Was Neither A Surprise Nor Big, INCEPTION goes for a Chinese box/Russian nesting doll kind of narrative where, all together now, Nothing Is As It Seems. Except, of course, When It Is What It Seems.

And Maybe Even Then..

Unless Of Course...

The whole movie is like that. Look, folks, I have nothing against a good solid mindfuck. But INCEPTION is neither good, nor much of a mindfuck. I think that my mind would have been more readily fucked by this film if, quite simply, I had given a good goddamn about anyone or anything in it. Nolan spends a lot of time describing in chemistry-killing detail the terribly elaborate rules of the dream world(s) the film is going to occupy, and this dialogue, while admirably clear, isn't leavened by any humor or wit or even basic human warmth, which means that fine actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt start to sound like they're reading from tech manuals rather than communicating with other people. The fact is that despite the actors' best efforts, the characters remain resolutely two-dimensional, with Marion Cotillard's Mal being the single memorable exception, and it just became impossible for me to take much interest in the assorted cliff hangers and plot twists and set pieces as a result.

And I can't say that the device of the dream stuff really adds much to the movie, except about $170 million in CGI costs and the tedious level of Is It Real ambiguity that seems more designed to keep message boards and study halls buzzing for the rest of the summer than anything else. This film could have been made without the dream stuff, and we'd have had a tight corporate espionage thriller instead of the bloated episode of MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE tarted up with fancy CGI that we're stuck with. Basically, the dream stuff doesn't really add as much to the film as it really should, except to complicate the story and the storytelling needlessly.

And the dreams on display are rather tiresome affairs. It is established with typical clarity that the dreams the team enters have all been carefully arranged for maximum reality, so there's no danger of sudden eruptions of sexual energy (never ever an issue in a Nolan film anyway) or sudden bits of strange unexplained subconscious dream stuff, which pretty much cuts the balls off the whole dream thing from the getgo, as far as I'm concerned. Why bother setting most or even all of a movie inside dreams if things aren't going to go fucking berserk once in a while?

Well, whatever Nolan wants, Nolan gets, as controlled and ultimately boring as it is. And you know, I think I'd even have been willing to go with the flow, or at least found the film less of an ordeal, if the film wasn't sunk by Christopher Nolan's suffocating seriousness, the solemnity bordering on pretentiousness that sends his work time and again, as in BATMAN BEGINS and THE DARK KNIGHT, straight to the bottom of the ocean. Make no mistake: INCEPTION is a Serious Film here, one that deals with Big Ideas about Reality and Dreams and the Unconscious and Levels of Dreams and stuff like that. All of this is brought to the screen via plodding lifeless storytelling and by Serious Points that never for a moment convince except when they involve Marion Cotillard. Far greater and far more entertaining movies have played with these same themes without collapsing under their own tedious weight. See Gilliam's BRAZIL or TWELVE MONKEYS for films that, whatever their own problems, are made with wit and energy and most importantly a sense of LIFE that Christopher Nolan, for all of his technical brilliance, shows no interest in whatsoever. Nolan's films are D.O.A., and INCEPTION is the deadest of them all.

2010-07-02T09:00:00.002-04:00

TWO FROM POWELL & PRESSBURGER

"One is starved for Technicolor up there!"

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's romantic wartime fantasy A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH centers on a romance between a British fighter pilot (David Niven) and a young American WAC (Kim Hunter) stationed in England. The pair have bonded over the radio one night, when the pilot's badly damaged plane gets lost in a fog and he has to bail out, and she is the last voice he hears over his radio headset. His survival after bailing out minus parachute is, it turns out accidental. The heavenly spirit sent to collect him (Marius Goring) also got lost in the fog, causing all kinds of problems with the Celestial Bureaucracy, when the pilot declines to correct the error by dying, especially now that he has found love.

I don't want to give away too much, as a good deal of the fun of the movie is watching the story unfold. Make no mistake, there's a lot to like and admire about the movie, especially the really fine performances and the really delicious use of Technicolor. God this film is gorgeous to look at. Your TV isn't used to showing you pictures like this. The greens are greener, and those reds are really red: you've never seen fire like you see it in this film. The pictures just jump off the screen.

There's also certain playfulness to the film that is really engaging. The story may not feel entirely fresh to 21st Century audiences, but there are lots of neat little details to keep the attention engaged. At one point in the film time stops short, and a table tennis game is halted with the ball hanging in space.

I'll admit though that I can't quite make up my mind about the film. I have to say that I find the love relationship to be rather unconvincing, there doesn't really seem to be a lot of chemistry there between David Niven and Kim Hunter. And the overt propaganda elements of the film get frankly tiresome. A big scene toward the end about British/American relations (you'll know what I mean when you see it) just brings the film to a screeching halt, and the love conquers all ending (not a spoiler, trust me, there's never any doubt where the story is heading) feels kind of tacked on, somehow. I'm not sure I believe it. Bureaucracies, celestial or otherwise, aren't known for being accommodating. This is either a serious flaw or a niggling complaint, as you please. I'm feeling kind of churlish bringing it up. I guess I'm saying that the film bites off more than it can really chew: the filmmakers expect a charming romantic wartime fantasy about the Power Of Love to carry more metaphoric and thematic propaganda weight than it can really bear. It doesn't really detract from the movie, I guess, but it doesn't exactly help either.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP

"Very much. Not so much."

Having seen this film at various times over the years, I just don't understand the wild praise the film continues to get. BLIMP, made in 1943, is the story of uber-Brit soldier Clive Candy (the great Roger Livesey) and his adventures in the years between 1902 and 1943. His assorted romantic relationships are gone into, and his deep friendship with the German officer Theodor von Kretchmar-Schuldorff (the great Anton Walbrook) is really the core of the film. There's a lot about German British relations in the film, understandably, and some rather solid home truths are spoken on both sides, pro-British and anti-British as well as pro-German and anti-German. Apparently Winston Churchill tried to have the film stopped because of the positive depiction of a German officer.

COL. BLIMP is clearly aiming at being about England and the English the way that MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON is about America and Americans. There's no doubt in my mind as to which is the superior film (MR. SMITH wins by many many light years) but it could just be one of those weird nationalistic things: maybe I'm just too American to understand COL. BLIMP. And that's a shame, because I don't think that's what they had in mind. COL. BLIMP is not an easy film, by any means, there are a lot of complicated ideas floating around in it, most especially and currently relevantly about the proper way to deal with a war: how does a country that prides itself on fair play and a particular brand of decency deal with the very real threat of an enemy that just keeps refusing to co-operate? How dirty can a nation fight without compromising itself? The film never really gets around to answering these questions, as far as I can tell.

There's an uncharacteristic technical clumsiness to the film, which I really find unbelievable in a Powell/Pressburger production. At least two transitional moments in the film are handled what was probably intended to be an interesting and cinematic manner, and you can see what they're wanting to do, but it doesn't come off at all well. The most disturbing is the first flashback transition from from 1943 to 1902 (there's a framing device whereby the film opens in 1943 and goes back to 1902 to start Clive's story at the beginning). I won't bother describing it, but you'll know what I mean when you see it. It is the clumsiest bit of bad filmmaking a fine director ever put into a film, and I just can't believe they left it in -- surely they could have done another take or two or nine.

I'd be ready to forgive it a lot more if I didn't consistently find myself thinking that the film could be a lot tighter, that 20 minutes were being taken to establish what really could have been set up in less than 5. An extended sequence set during WWI just goes on and on, and even winds up with one of the lamest cliches ever put on film: two characters notice that the guns have stopped on Armistice Day, and the sudden silence is actually augmented with birdsong and the clouds actually lift a bit allowing some sunshine. No, really, that's what happens. Maybe I need to do some more reading on the film. Maybe I'm just missing something.

There are good things, in the film, of course. Roger Livesey's performance as Clive is most impressive, and Deborah Kerr, in her film debut, is admirable in her three roles. But the film comes most incredibly alive whenever the great Anton Walbrook graces the screen. There's none of the mad intensity of his work in THE RED SHOES or THE QUEEN OF SPADES in BLIMP; he's very quiet and restrained, for the most part, particularly in an extended single-shot monologue that is simply the most moving scene in Powell/Pressburger's filmography. If I continue to see the film time after time, banging my head against the wall trying to get a handle on it rather than dismissing it as a failure, it is because of Walbrook. I'd watch and listen to him read the goddamn phone book.

2010-05-20T09:53:00.004-04:00

METROPOLIS Restored

"I have recently seen the silliest film."
H.G. Wells on METROPOLIS

As you probably know, this new version adds about a half hour of new footage, in very scratched form, to the restoration released into theatres and on DVD a few years back. Sometimes this means that a few frames have been put back (so that a character is allowed to complete a motion interrupted by an intertitle, you'll see what I mean) and sometimes it means whole new scenes have been restored. For example, there's a scene where a group of children are being evacuated from the flooded undergroud worker's quarters. This scene is now extended with a very effective suspense device (I won't spoil it, but you'll know what I mean).

The one really essential addition, for me, is the restored sequence of Freder's fever dream, involving a mad sermon from a monk (an encounter with said monk is one of the scenes that is apparently lost for good) and visions of the whore of Babylon, intercut with the Robot Maria's naughty dancing in front of some amusingly aroused guys in tuxedos.

Another restored sequence involving a pair of minor characters adds nothing except some plot exposition. I had some hopes for this section, as one of the characters is played by a favorite of mine, an actor named Fritz Rasp who can always be counted on to be interesting.

I've got some mixed feelings about the whole thing. METROPOLIS comes from the period where Fritz Lang had not grasped the idea of the concept of the possibility of less being more. METROPOLIS certainly feels tighter than WOMAN IN THE MOON and SPIES, which just go all over the place, and METROPOLIS has a grand merry energy bordering on delirium that just can't be denied. Everything's a little too big, a little too much, and is often a lot too big, and a lot too much. This isn't always bad, but it isn't always good. The final battle between Freder and the mad scientist Rotwang, on the roof of a cathedral no less, can feel like one mad flourish too many, if I’m in the wrong mood. Mercifully, I was in the right mood both times I saw this restoration.

One thing that really stuck out this time is the exceedingly high quality of the acting, a pretty consistent factor in Lang’s films, and METROPOLIS has no shortage of interesting performances. I’ve always been a fan of Rudolf Klein-Rogge’s work, and his demented mad scientist Rotwang is a joy to behold, going from grand scenery chewing to restrained underplaying and back in the blink of an eye. The actor playing Freder has never been a favorite of mine: he always seems to be working too hard at embodying positive youthfullness: the eyes too bright, the smile too wide kind of thing, but he gets a couple of interesting moments where he’s allowed to just think onscreen, with assorted ideas and emotions crossing his face. And the great Brigitte Helm, as the film's two Marias, plays the virginal Pure Maria very nicely, never going overboard with the piety, but she really goes for broke as the Robot Maria, flinging herself into wickedness with an abandon that is always entertaining to watch. I do think Robot Maria's Extreme Wickedness goes a bit too far, though, especially when she's supposed to be preaching to a bunch of workers who've only seen the original Pure Maria, and nobody really seems to notice the difference between the two. It's like nobody noticing that Shirley Temple has been replaced with Lady Gaga.

Worth seeing? Definitely. It was worth it to see the film properly projected on a bigger than my TV-sized screen. I haven’t mentioned the brilliance of the design, the high quality of the production, and all that, as I’d imagine that most of the folks who bother to check this page out are already well aware of them. If it has been a while since you’ve seen METROPOLIS, then hell yeah, get your ass to the movie theatre or get the damn DVD.

2010-03-04T09:22:00.002-05:00

SHUTTER ISLAND

"I thought God gave us moral order."

Scorsese's latest has all the trappings of a big old genre blowout. All the trappings are there -- a missing person investigation set on an insane asylum on a more than usually isolated island, a terrible storm that cuts off all communications with the mainland, asylum staff with an agenda, asylum inmates with an agenda, and an investigating officer who seems to be having a hard time keeping his wits about him. Just the ticket for a great edge of your seat wackadoo thriller joyride. Woo hoo!

Alas, Martin Scorsese doesn't know from "woo hoo!" SHUTTER ISLAND is the latest and possibly the weakest (but probably not the last) of the BIG SURPRISE films, like THE SIXTH SENSE, THE USUAL SUSPECTS, MEMENTO, etc. I'm not bragging when I say that I saw it coming before the movie even started, simply by thinking about the fact that there is in fact a big surprise. I remember thinking, "Oh, man, it can't be THAT, can it?" And when it came to the Big Reveal, I started to think that there had to be more to it, right, there just had to be, Scorsese couldn't be settling for that tired old gimmick, really, could he, that couldn't be it?

And goddamn it to hell, it was.

Folks, M. Night Shyamalan himself would have passed on this script for being just too too too fucking obvious. And Scorsese himself doesn't help matters. Never the subtlest of directors, he just goes full-throttle here -- every scene is heavily underlined for maximum importance, and vast stretches of dialogue seem to be marked with an asterisk somehow: Ben Kingsley virtually holds up a sign saying IMPORTANT CLUE every time he speaks. It would work as a sort of affectionate parody of high gothic whodunit stuff, but Scorsese never seems to be in on the joke.

There's just nothing animating the movie, no fun, no idea that Scorsese was having us all on, a la Hitchcock's assertion that PSYCHO was a "fun picture." There's nothing in SHUTTER ISLAND to even approach that glorious little moment in PSYCHO, for example, where Anthony Perkins says, "My mother.. what's the phrase? She's not herself today." There's just no room for that kind of thing in Scorsese's solemn and increasingly joyless universe.

Solemn and joyless can have their appeal, of course. What finally makes SHUTTER ISLAND such an ordeal is the extreme heavy handedness with which Scorsese works overtime to add some perceived SERIOUSNESS to the rather silly contraption of a story. Flashbacks of the liberation of Dachau, no less, are liberally sprinkled throughout the film. There's some nattering about violence being part of the human condition, and a mention of God supplying a moral order. All it really ends up doing is highlighting the real silliness of the goings-on, and not in a good way.

OK, so there are good points. A flashback to Dachau contains a memorable scene about the horrors of war that seems to act as a rebuke to the grinning gleeful savagery of Tarantino's BASTERDS. The film is gorgeously mounted, the cinematography etc. are all perfection. The acting is mostly beyond reproach, with Michelle Williams and Mark Ruffalo turning in particularly fine work. Leonardo DiCaprio does his very best, but I have to say that I found his eternal golden youthfulness to be a major drawback in believing that he is supposed to have witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand. I'm hoping someone somewhere will explain the cameo from the great Elias Koteas, who appears all too briefly wearing what looks like Robert De Niro's Frankenstein Monster makeup. Is that Scorsese's idea of an inside joke or something?

It has to be said that SHUTTER ISLAND boasts the single coolest contemporary classical soundtrack since Kubrick's THE SHINING, from which Scorsese lifts at least one memorable cue. The soundtrack album is essential owning. If only the movie itself were even remotely essential viewing.

2010-02-01T12:57:00.000-05:00

A SINGLE MAN

Fashion mogul Tom Ford, in his film directing debut, turns Christopher Isherwood's sharp little "day in the life" novel into a "last day in the life" film. Isherwood's George goes about his day, a day like any other, filled with the thousand little indignities and annoyances that flesh is heir to. Annoying children from next door, condescending neighbors, (mostly) uncomprehending students in his literature class, etc. George's Englishness and his homosexuality give him an outsider's view on life in Los Angeles, and Isherwood acts as an invisible nameless narrator, supplying some good observation about George and his milieu. Isherwood's George isn't having the best day; he seems to be aware that he's just going through the motions, almost on auto-pilot, and it seems to have something to do with his recently deceased partner of 16 years, Jim.

In short, there isn't much plot in Isherwood's novel, and Ford can't be blamed for making George's seeming depression over the loss of his partner the focus of his film. Ford's George (played by Colin Firth, doing the best he can) is more than just bummed, he's actually preparing to kill himself. He leaves out the clothes he wants to be buried in, he prepares a series of Last Notes to assorted people, buys ammunition for the gun he keeps in his desk, and is shown throughout the day getting ready to check out once and for all.

Okay, well and good, not necessarily a bad notion in and of itself. The problem is Ford's need to make each scene, each shot, each bloody frame even, into a big display of every known cinematic technique, ranging from simple things like slow motion to the more advanced gimmick of manipulating the color saturation in the image to convey George's emotional state. One of the most tasteless moments in the film occurs in a bar when George is approached by a young man, cuing the color to go from muted but natural tones (George is Sad) to bright vibrant full color (George is Horny). It comes off less as an instance of an interesting use of color than as an instance of Directorial Authority Run Amuck. Clearly, this film is an expression of STYLE over anything as mundane as mere Life. Ford can't bear to show any disorder in the world he brings to the screen, every image is faultlessly composed and immaculately lit, hermetically created for maximum glossy photo-spread effect. Even a display of plastic pencil sharpeners in college bookstore is carefully arranged, with the little plastic items arrayed in precise color-specific rows. A scene of George unable to pull the trigger of the gun he has in his mouth, evidently out of concern for the damage he'll do to his surroundings, at first comes off as just a spectcularly ill-advised bit of black comedy, but unexpectely winds up being emblematic of the entire film. Suicide is one thing, but mess will simply not be tolerated.

There's more. It isn't enough for George to strike up an impromptu chat with one of his neighbor's children, whom he has unexpectedly met at the bank. The little girl has to have a stylish entrance, glimpsed in the reflection of an impossibly over-polished floor, followed by a slow shot travelling up her body from bottom to top, with music clearly inspired by Bernard Herrmann's score to VERTIGO on the soundtrack, yet. The entire movie is nothing but this kind of flourish, over and over and over, little nudges from Ford so we can applaud how "cinematic" his film is. The nudges start to bruise, before long, and the urge to nudge back can't be denied. The film feels completely unnatural and mechanical, so composed and created and finally phony that AVATAR comes off as a gay lark tossed off as an afternoon's merry diversion in comparison. It is difficult to give a damn about anyone in the film when they're just a bunch of carefully pretty immaculately groomed and dressed (and undressed) puppets. That this is true of even George's relationship with the late Jim (played by the pretty but useless Matthew Goode, who last annoyed as Ozymandias in WATCHMEN) is a particularly grave failing. The flashbacks we get of George and Jim together (reading in cozy domesticity, or sitting in carefully composed and overly styled B/W Bruce Weber-esque splendor on a picturesque outcropping of rock) are pretty standard romance novel stuff. There's no accounting for soul mates, I guess, but I think I'd have preferred not seeing Jim at all to the overly posed scenes we get here, which seem to have been cribbed out of an upscale gay magazine all-male resort ad.

It all just thuds and plods along, with a ponderous funereal air that really gets oppressive. The film hasn't gotten the complaints that BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN got, that it offers too negative a view of Homosexuality As Misery, but I doubt that A SINGLE MAN will get enough popular attention to warrant many complaints. I'm tempted to dismiss the film as TERMS OF ENDEARMENT for the Project Runway crowd. I have to admit that I was glad to see an actor of Colin Firth's abilities being allowed to carry a film, one at least nominally intended for grown ups. To be fair, Firth's scene where he gets the Awful Phone Call about Jim's passing is most impressive, by far the most memorable thing in the film. But even Firth's performance falls into the black hole of Ford's style, as closeup after closeup of George displaying Subtle Emotions become as cloying as the film they had, up until then, been the best part of.

2010-01-12T10:23:00.002-05:00

ROSCOE RATES

My list of the ten best of the decade. I've been messing with this for a while. It is what it is. I'm sure I'll think of others immediately after I post this. And shouldn't BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN be in the top ten? Anyway---

1. THERE WILL BE BLOOD
A big juicy movie that never falters and never bores and miraculously doesn't fall apart, and only grows with repeat viewings. Daniel Day-Lewis gives the performance of his life, a breathtaking descent into inhumanity and madness, painstakingly brought to the screen by Paul Thomas Anderson, in one of the biggest surprises of the decade.

2. THE LORD OF THE RINGS
All three as one film. My list, my rules. The thrilling epic that effectively put Lucas and Spielberg and Cameron in their place, and proving (as if it needed to be proven) that fantasy films needn't insult the intelligence.

3. SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET
Tim Burton singlehandedly shows the entire world how a musical should be made: carefully and with attention to the story and characters rather than cuisinart editing. Burton's heartbreaking bloody masterpiece demonstrates once and for all his consummate skill with actors as well as his brilliance behind the camera. His assured handling of the musical numbers "My Friends" and "Not While I'm Around" can stand with any of the greatest works in musical film, or in any genre period.

4. CHILDREN OF MEN
Alfonso Cuaron's adaptation of P.D. James' novel put the dys in dystopia, and vaulted him straight into Essential Filmmaker status. A thrilling picture of a world where no children are being born, and the hideous and all too familiar societal collapse.

5. TIME REGAINED
Raul Ruiz' devastating trip through Proust. It never descends into Famous Classics Illustrated re-creation, but wanders through the entirety of the seven novel sequence, picking up scenes here and there and managing to bring it all together into something beautiful and rare. It deserves to be better known than it is.

6. WONDER BOYS
From the Shamefully Overlooked file, Curtis Hanson's splendid comedy about a genially stoned novelist having the worst weekend of his life. Michael Douglas delivers his career best performance, with great support from Tobey Maguire, Frances McDormand and Robert Downey Jr. Lovely.

7. THE INCREDIBLES
FINDING NEMO and UP may have been more successful, but THE INCREDIBLES is the Pixar movie that made my decade, the one I keep watching with undiluted pleasure. Superheroes forced to live undercover in suburbia, dealing with a sinister threat. Great mad joyful fun, pure ecstatic delight in every shot.

8. THE NEW WORLD
Pocahontas and John Smith, via Terence Malick. Among the most profound timewarps in movie history -- you are there in colonial Jamestown. Malick isn't for everyone, the slow pace and whispered voice-overs can be a drag, but I'd advise anyone with eyes to see this one. First rate performances from Christian Bale and Colin Farrell, and from the radiant Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas.

9. AMERICAN SPLENDOR
The life of American comic book author Harvey Pekar, as embodied by Paul Giamatti. Documenting the thousand natural annoyances that Americans are heir to (standing behing old Jewish ladies in the supermarket checkout line, for example) a hardened cynic eventually realizes that life might not be so bad after all. Funny and moving and affirming, in the best way.

10. ZODIAC
Hoo boy. The film that made me convinced that hooded killers were hiding under my bed. David Fincher's examination of the hunt for the Zodiac killer in 1970s San Francisco. Obsession has never seemed so obsessive.

Honorable mention: BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, SIDEWAYS, HAPPY GO LUCKY, BRAND UPON THE BRAIN, THE HOURS, FAR FROM HEAVEN, IN BRUGES, MOULIN ROUGE.

2010-01-02T16:16:00.003-05:00

NINE

"If you talk about a film, you ruin it."

Ever the glutton for punishment, I saw Rob Marshall's film version of the musical NINE, itself a musical version of Fellini's 8 1/2. Full disclosure, not a surprise to anyone: I think Rob Marshall is probably the worst director alive. He has only two living rivals: Joel Schumacher and Zack Snyder, and one recently deceased: the unspeakable Anthony Minghella, who continues his vile influence from beyond the grave as the screenwriter of this film, a rare collaboration of two of the least talented film artists. The results are predictable. NINE is a disaster, plain and simple, except when the glorious Marion Cotillard appears onscreen, gracing the screen and the audience with her magical presence. If you can see this film without falling madly in love with her, you should have your head/heart examined.

The film/musical centers on Guido, a famed filmmaker who is having a creative/personal crisis, or something like that. There are all these women in his life played by assorted movie stars. The story just lurches along with none of the grace or speed of the Fellini film, or the merry energy of the original Broadway production of the musical. Marshall & Co. seem to realize that they can't just remake Fellini (even though they include big chunks of dialogue almost verbatim from Fellini's masterwork, without credit), and they seem to not be interested in just doing the musical as written, either, so they go with a grab bag of elements from 8 1/2, LA DOLCE VITA, and even borrows elements from Woody Allen's STARDUST MEMORIES (a running gag about how everyone loves Guido's earlier successful films) and the inevitable Bob Fosse, as Guido's studio-bound fantasies seem to be lifted right out of ALL THAT JAZZ.

It has come to this. Marshall doesn't just emulate Fellini. He emulates Fellini emulators. Marshall even lifts bits out of Tommy Tune's original Broadway staging of the musical, and one has to wonder exactly how much in royalties the Fosse estate is getting for the ongoing use of those bentwood chairs that Marshall just can't seem to function without. Saraghina's big number, "Be Italian," is staged with Tommy Tune's tambourines and the bentwood chairs from the "Lieber Herr" number from Fosse's film of CABARET, taking sheer plagiarism to heights undreamed of by Brian De Palma.

To be fair, part of the blame has to go to Daniel Day-Lewis, who is quite simply miscast as Guido. Not an actor known for displaying joy or even anything as base as mere fun, Day-Lewis lays on the earnest self-loathing with a trowel without any of the mitigating charm that would make his character interesting or even bearable. His opening song is hideously ill-performed and directed with typically Marshallian stupidity, the opportunity for Day-Lewis to display any warmth in the amusing "duet with myself" is missed as Guido performs the song while climbing through some piping for reasons that pass understanding. And Day-Lewis' big breakdown is skillfully performed, but it has no impact because there's been no sympathy built up for his plight. It seems to take Guido a long time to realize what has been eminently clear to even the dimmest sentient audience member: the guy's an asshole. And the interminable epilogue (2 years later, for God's sake) ends with a whimper not a bang.

There are some surprises to be had here, though. Marshall's usual Rusty Cuisinart Editing style is put on hold for a couple of songs, during which we actually get to see the performers sing. Marion Cotillard's performance of "My Husband Makes Movies" is done with a minimum of wackadoo editing; her pain comes shining through that gorgeous face and teary eyes in what is easily the film's highpoint.

What surprised me most about the film is the way that almost all fun has been leeched from the story, the characters, the songs, and the very fabric of filmmaking itself. NINE is a big fat downer of a movie, based upon one of the most joyful works of art ever created. I have to say that I detect the narcotizing influence of the late and unlamented Anthony Minghella (who shares screenplay credit with Michael Tolkin) in this particular tonal shift. Instead of Felini's joyful energy, which animates even 8 1/2's darkest moments, we get a sort of mournful malaise more in keeping with THE ENGLISH PATIENT or COLD MOUNTAIN than the glories of Fellini.

This is really unforgiveable in a film with delusions of being Fellini-esque. As painful as Marshall's monstrous CHICAGO is, it at least has energy -- the mad plot, the great score, even the outrageously caffeinated weed-wacker editing kept my interest as I watched the film through my fingers. NINE seems to be after a more serious "grown-up" vibe, but Marshall & Co., with their all-too-typical stupidity, miss one of the Maestro's most endearing traits: joy.

2009-12-03T12:40:00.002-05:00

ANTICHRIST

"Chaos reigns"

A gorgeous prologue, in sumptuous very slow motion black and white, showing a couple making passionate love intercut with their child leaving his crib and fallling to his death from an open window. The emotional fallout is understandably severe, and is explored fairly closely in Lars von Trier's latest film, the mysteriously named ANTICHRIST. The film has a much narrower focus than von Trier's other films, amounting basically to a series of therapy sessions between the unnamed He (Willem Dafoe in what might be his best performance that I've seen) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg, admirable in a tough role), the mother and father of the late child. She falls into a deep depression that lands her in an institution, and He, unhappy with the therapy she is getting, takes matters into his own hands (it is established that he is an experienced therapist) and brings her home. He soon decides to take her to their remote cabin in the woods, rather too symbolically named Eden, in order to confront her fears. There's a good deal of talk in what follows, and a good deal of supernatural goings on as well.

It turns out that there is Evil In The Woods. Von Trier seems to be simultaneously channeling the David Lynch of TWIN PEAKS (plenty of Lynchian rumbles and techno humming and oddly threatening trees and nature) and Andrei Tarkovsky (certain shots recall Tarkovsky's THE MIRROR and von Trier dedicates his own film to Tarkovsky's memory before the final credits roll). I can't deny the intelligence of the production, or the skill of the filmmaking and the performances. Moments of transfixing beauty and of real danger are conjured with an ease that Lynch and Tarkovsky would recognize as their own, I think. It isn't fair to dismiss ANTICHRIST as a bunch of acting therapy exercises strung together with some shock moments involving genital mutilation and some CGI talking animals, most memorably a fox that tells He that "Chaos reigns," but I have to say that the point of the film simply eludes me. There's just something missing. ANTICHRIST leaves a lot of questions unanswered, mostly about He's motivations. The biggest question of all being: why does He keep going with this mode of therapy, so completely isolated for so long, long after it should be abundantly clear that his therapy isn't coming close to working? I guess it is fair to assume some dark motive on He's part, but von Trier never gets around to making it at all clear, and such an important element of the film deserves considerably more clarification: it shouldn't be left as completely open as the issue of Rick Deckard's status as human or replicant in BLADE RUNNER.

2009-11-12T15:13:00.002-05:00

SATANTANGO

"I live to tango. Tango, tango. I live to tango. Tango. Tango."

A 7.5 hour film by Bela Tarr. Yes, you read that right. 7.5 hours long, in a screening at MOMA, that was supposed to be introduced by the director himself in person but wasn't. This wasn’t my first exposure to the film. I had attended one of the understandably infrequent screenings at the Museum of Modern Art a few years back, and simply fell asleep. The spirit was willing, the flesh was unable. I was impressed enough with what I had seen to acquire the US DVD release, which isn’t pretty: possibly the worst single non-homemade video transfer I've yet seen. The image isn't enhanced for widescreen TVs, which is a real drag and ultimately makes the film even harder to watch. A real shame, as the film features some of the most ravishingly gorgeous black and white cinematography I've ever seen, evident even in this cruddy DVD transfer. I watched the first two thirds of the film on my laptop during my flights to/from San Francisco for the Silent Film Festival, and watched the first two thirds of it, and was very impressed with those two thirds. I don’t really understand why I was willing to watch the film on a tiny laptop screen rather than our pretty good-sized flatscreen TV, though. So this screening represented my first exposure to the whole SATANTANGO experience.

7.5 hours. God. I actually watched a 7.5 hour long movie. I think the longest single film I’d seen before this was Syberberg’s OUR HITLER many years ago, which I saw when I was far too young and of which I have only very fragmented memories: an extended sequence about Hitler's valet and a man in an SS uniform delivering Peter Lorre's "I can't help myself!" speech from Lang's M being the main ones.

OK. So how was it? I liked a good deal of it. The seven hours don't exactly fly by, but there's some of the best filmmaking I've ever seen going on here. The story centers on a group of people who belong to what looks like some kind of farming collective, in what I guess is Hungary near the end of the Communist era. They seem to be living in borderline poverty. They are expecting a large sum of money which is to be divided amongst them, apparently derived from the sale of some cattle. The film opens with a sort of plot to steal the money. Bad news though: a pair of disreputable characters, Iremias and Petrima, are also on their way to the area...

Director Bela Tarr uses lots of long takes. We're not talking just long takes, but very very long takes indeed. And not Wellesian long takes, which are crowded with activity, but long takes showing someone walking along a deserted road, or even just sitting still, staring into space. There's one remarkable section showing someone referred to as a Professor who jots notes into a notebook about the locals when he isn't pouring brandy out of a bottle into a glass and then pouring water out of a pitcher into another glass and then pouring the contents of the two glasses into a third glass and then drinking the contents. It can get rather taxing after a while, expecially during one extended sequence involving a drunken dance in a bar, where Tarr seems to be pushing this kind of filmmaking, and my patience with this kind of thing, to the very very limit. About all that kept me going was the feeling that Tarr knew what he was doing, that there was a point to all this and that it was going to all pay off at some point.

And it largely does. The film is structured in an interesting way, as a series of intersecting episodes. There will be an extended sequence involving some characters, and then another sequence with another character will start, and at some point it will become clear that the actions of the second sequence are taking place at the same time as the first sequence, and the two sequences will suddenly intersect in an interesting and occasionally amusing way. Kind of like those glasses that get mixed together. A good deal of the fun of watching the film is finding the little intersections, the moments where the plotlines touch and move on. There's just no way to get these things on a first viewing, you're too busy getting and keeping your bearings.

I'm going to have to say that I think Tarr goes too far with the long takes. There are a couple of sequences that just go on long after anything is being gotten out of them; one scene in particular just never fucking ends, the drunken dance party in a pub with most of the cast dancing around, and it goes on long after it really could have stopped. I can't imagine anyone noticing or even caring if it were cut in half. Other moments like that, of people walking and walking or sitting and sitting or breathing and breathing could be similarly trimmed. Just because something can be shown for ten minutes doesn't necessarily mean that it bloody well SHOULD be shown for ten bloody minutes.

Ordinarily I'd brush that off as being a minor complaint, and on some level it is. Any film is going to have longeurs, but the sheer bloody length of SATANTANGO ensures some long longeurs. I'm not looking to turn anyone off from seeing the film, but I can't blame anyone who finds it just more than they want to deal with. It would be a shame to miss the film's best parts, though. The beauty of the black and white cinematography and the brilliance of the performances (there isn't a weak performance in the film, I've basically forgotten to think of them as actors playing roles) and the overall impact of the film make it worth the trouble.

2009-10-21T15:29:00.002-04:00

SHORT TAKES

Some short bits about stuff we’ve seen lately:

-- TWO FROM ANTHONY MANN --

THE FURIES, a Western from Anthony Mann with Barbara Stanwyck and the sublime Walter Huston and Judith Anderson and Beulah Bondi. Great randy fun, lurid and melodramatic and overheated, madly entertaining, kind of like Aeschylus’ ORESTEIA on the range. Gorgeous black and white location cinematography. Huston plays an Alpha Male cattle rancher involved in something of a power struggle with his daughter, played by Stanwyck in full Bitch Goddess mode -- there’s a lot of bickering and one-upmanship and barely contained incestuous passionate subtext. One glorious scene features Huston and Stanwyck bitching at each other, and you can feel the simultaneous hate and love these two feel for each other. You often feel that they’re just a couple of drinks away from consummating. The movie doesn’t entirely work, alas. It feels bound by some kind of Production Code rules keeping it from going as completely for broke as it would like to go: certain elements feel shoe-horned into the story to lighten the darkness a bit. You’ll know what I mean when you see it. But no quibbling can diminish the good tasty fun the film provides. I liked it a hell of a lot.

T-MEN

Another Anthony Mann, predating THE FURIES. T-MEN is a noirish cop thriller about the titular T-Men going undercover as part of an investigation into a counterfeiting ring. Again, some good gritty solid fun, but the real star here is the incredible black and white cinematography by the masterful John Alton. Even in the really cruddy DVD I got from Netflix, this film shines with a beauty that few contemporary movies can come near. If some of the film feels familiar, that’s because many shots have been used in assorted documentaries about film noir to illustrate the visual style associated with the genre. Worth seeing, by all means.

-- AND SOME THEATER --

MEMPHIS
A new musical, apparently 5 years in the making, set in 1950s Memphis detailing the rise of what was then called "race music." The kind of show set in the early years of rock and roll where a white guy walks into a black club and impresses everyone with how soulful he is, as a friend pointed out. That's only the first of the cliches on parade. We're soon treated to this little exchange, when Huey, the white guy in question, hits on the hot black female lead singer:

Hot Black Female Lead: You know how I know a man is lying to me?
Huey/White Male Lead: How?
Hot Black Female Lead: He opens his mouth.

No, really, she actually says that. There's even a poor black teenager who saw his father lynched by a white mob and hasn't spoken since, and you get no points whatsoever for figuring out that he's going to start speaking at a crucial plot juncture and that at some point later on someone will say something about how they wish he'd stop talking. The token efforts the show makes in the second act to do something with these exhausted plot and character tropes amount to too little too late -- the attempts fall as flat as the original cliches do.

The cast by and large does its best with this stuff, but all of their efforts are undone by Chad Kimball's appalling performance as Huey. He lays on the quirky country hickdom to such an extent that he winds up coming off like a spastic George W. Bush. It got to the point where I just couldn't look at him. A real shame, because Kimball was one of the reasons I was interested in seeing the show in the first place. I'd enjoyed his Milky White in the INTO THE WOODS revival, and his tiny role in GOOD VIBRATIONS was the sole positive memory I have of that catastrophe. Why on earth he's decided to make Huey into such an obnoxious ass completely escapes me. His relationship with the female lead never for a solitary second convinces: she could surely do better than that twitching poseur, whatever his status as a suddenly successful DJ/TV personality. She'd be better off without him, and she does wind up being better off without him, in fact. The play would be better off without him, too: it would at least not be agonizing.

SUPERIOR DONUTS

A new play by Tracy Letts, who won pretty much every award around for AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, a vast splendid avalanche of a play. DONUTS is much smaller, more of a chamber piece than a full out symphony. It centers on Arthur, the emotionally reserved owner/proprietor of the titular donut shop, and his relationship with Franco, a eager young African American man he hires to help out. Boy does that sound like the most cliched set up imaginable, but DONUTS breathes actual life into the potentially overfamiliar set up and characters, in ways that MEMPHIS is never able to approach. A great evening in the theatre.

2009-08-27T10:30:00.000-04:00

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

“Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein!”

Wildly uneven, Tarantino’s latest film veers from brilliant to banal and back again. I can’t say the film is a total catastrophe, and I certainly can’t claim it as anything like a complete success.

The titular Basterds don’t appear onscreen for a good half hour, indeed the best half hour in the movie, featuring Christoph Waltz in a star-making performance as SS Col. Landa, known as The Jew Hunter. Landa arrives at a farm in Nazi-occupied France and has an extended discussion with the farmer about the local Jewish population. Landa is all good humor and sleekly sophisticated pleasantry but with a definite air of menace; for all the surface bonhomie he’s clearly not a person to underestimate. This opening section is followed by some stuff with the Basterds, led by Brad Pitt in full “Look Ma! I’m acting!” mode, and it gives Tarantino a chance to pander to his fans with some icky violence and smart-ass gabbing.

The film settles down a bit when it decides to be about Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), the owner of a Paris movie theatre which has been chosen as the venue for the premiere of a new piece of Nazi propaganda. When it transpires that the entire Nazi hierarchy, Hitler included, is going to attend, Shoshanna hatches a plan to bring down the Third Reich. Col. Landa is involved in the proceedings, of course, as director of security for the event. Things progress from there, and it wouldn’t be fair to give away much more except to say that a large collection of films on nitrate stock plays a very important role.

Waltz’ and Laurent’s performances are far and away the highlight of the film, which lags pretty drastically when they’re not onscreen. And that’s a big problem. For a film by Tarantino, set during WWII about a series of plots to kill Hitler (British Intelligence has the idea to blow up the theatre, too, and there’s a lot of huffing and puffing and shooting and movie-referencing as they try to send an agent to contact the Basterds, and it just goes on and on and on, really, there’s just too much going on in this movie) to actually LAG is kind of remarkable.

But lag it does. And the fault is entirely Tarantino’s. BASTERDS is comparatively straightforward for a Tarantino film, lacking the chronological games of PULP FICTION and the KILL BILLs. The biggest problem with INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is the Basterds themselves, and pretty much everything having to do with them. Brad Pitt’s latest attempt at a performance gets very old very quickly. He juts out his jaw, squints a lot, and talks with a bad Southern accent, and he’s just unwatchable. The other bastards don’t fare much better, being little more than excuses for nicknames and barely sketched out backstories: none of them comes alive as an actual human being. Only one of the Basterds, Til Schweiger as Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz, is given anything of consequence to do, and he doesn’t get to do it for long. And certainly none of them carries anything like the emotional weight of Col. Landa or Shoshanna, or even the basic wacko interest of Daryl Hannah’s memorably wacked out eye-patch-wearing assassin in the KILL BILLs.

This might be the point, I guess. If I gave a damn about more of the people in the film I might find the brutal violence unbearable. And there’s the big problem with the movie, I think. It doesn’t quite know what it wants to do. I’m reminded of the problem that finally sinks SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, the apparently unresolvable tension between wanting to make a serious film about the horrors of war and the temptation to make a Really Bitchin’ War Movie with lots of planes and bombs and stuff. But where Spielberg panders to his audience’s survivor guilt and ends by wagging a finger in our collective face (“Earn This!”), Tarantino gleefully goes for bloody broke and uses the power of cinema to destroy the Nazis (quite literally).

Tarantino’s results are ultimately as mixed as Spielberg’s. I wasn’t as appalled by the Holocaust that Tarantino unleashes on his massed Nazi victims as I was by the final act of smirking deliberate personal torture that a grinning Brad Pitt perpetrates on a single character. There’s something about that last gesture that really turned me off the movie and those associated with it for not being as appalled as I am by it.

2009-07-20T12:37:00.007-04:00

HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF BLOOD PRINCE

“Shut up.”

I’ve posted on the Harry Potter Phenomenon (Here: http://roscoewrites.blogspot.com/2007/08/harry-potter-and-order-of-phoenix.html )and I’ll have to say that the latest film doesn’t do much to change my opinion of the films. The latest film continues the Weirdly Uneven quality that has characterized the series as a whole. The last film ORDER OF THE PHOENIX was made with some energy, as opposed to the film before it, GOBLET OF FIRE, which is a major snooze, as opposed to the film before it, PRISONER OF AZKABAN, which is by the far the finest film of the series so far, as opposed to the film before it, CHAMBER OF SECRETS, which is by far the weakest film of the series so far, as opposed to the film before it, SORCERER’S STONE, which was a good solid kickoff to the series.

Anyway. HALF-BLOOD PRINCE is kind of a letdown, and kind of not a letdown. The biggest problem is that there’s just not a lot of urgency to the movie, it just dawdles along at its own very very slow pace, which is a big surprise considering that the last film ended with the official recognition that the Dark Lord Voldemort has in fact come back from oblivion and is up to No Good. I’d have expected some kind of uproar about this in the magical world of the film, but no, there isn’t any onscreen. It is just business as usual for the gang at Hogwarts, the kids are having their growing pains and we get to watch some mostly amusing games of the he-loves-her-he-loves-her-not variety, along with the inevitable rumblings from the bad guys and a big climactic showdown. Somehow, though, the movie doesn’t feel like a total disappointment, as there’s enough good stuff to keep interest up. My favorite scene in the film takes place on an island in the middle of an underground lake, and is almost impossible to watch without extreme discomfort, not least because it all takes place in near total silence. So gripping was this sequence that it managed to hold a NYC multiplex audience spellbound: there was none of the usual audience noise that makes summer blockbusters such agony to sit through. The film is deliberately deliberate, in other words, despite the couple of big set pieces which almost serve to remind you that this is after all an adventure story.

This slow pacing is a marked change from the book, which I’ve just started and which is written in J.K. Rowling’s characteristically energetic prose. The book begins with a marvelously conceived chapter that didn’t make it into the film, which very cleverly manages to deliver a good deal of What Has Gone Before In Vols I-V while setting up a good deal of What Is To Come In Vol VI. Rowling is able to keep the proceedings consistently lively in a way that director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves never quite manage.

The film isn’t a total bore, of course. The story is engaging, to be sure, and the acting is of a very high standard. The great Jim Broadbent makes a long overdue appearance in the Potter Universe, and the three kids (Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint) all get their own little moments to shine in ways that they’ve only hinted at in the past. Radcliffe in particular gets a glorious little scene where Harry’s usual solemnity gives way to a chemically-induced cheer that is a joy to behold. Side note: they’re going to have to do something to explain Watson’s Hermione being so much in love with Grint’s Ron Weasley: her devotion to the character they’ve made into such a boob is increasingly unconvincing.

It looks like I really disliked the film, when I didn’t. Bottom Line: a deliberately told adventure story isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but a bit more consistent energy in the storytelling and filmmaking is definitely in order for the next two installments. I’ll go see them of course. I do wish they’d get Alfonso Cuaron back to tighten things up.

2009-07-17T11:43:00.002-04:00

SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL

For the first time, I made a major cross-country pilgrimage to see a film festival. This is what comes of having a job with a firm with a liberal vacation policy. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival has been on my radar for a long time for a couple of reasons: I love silent films and I love San Francisco and I love the Castro Theatre where the festival takes place. I didn't see all of the programs, there just being limits to how much I can take in. Here are some notes on what I did see:

THE GAUCHO
The opening night attraction was THE GAUCHO, a Douglas Fairbanks vehicle of great charm and energy. The story isn't much: Fairbanks plays The Gaucho, a notorious bandit leader who finds himself in a power struggle with a fascist-type dictator over control of a small town in Mexico which just happens to have a famous Lourdes-type shrine, complete with a St. Bernadette stand-in. There's a good deal of fun to be had before the inevitable Hollywood Silent Piety takes over, as Fairbanks cheerfully does a host of impossible things effortlessly. Not just the big wall-scaling stunts, either. The Gaucho has a running habit of putting a cigarette into his mouth, striking a match with his thumbnail, propping the match in his thumbnail, lighting the cigarette with the match in his thumbnail and flicking the match away (leaving an impressive trail of smoke), all with one hand in one continuous fluid movement that just defies description and must have taken weeks to master. Fairbanks seems to be having a grand old time doing all this, and his delight is infectious. The movie is almost pure pleasure. I liked it a hell of a lot, and the crystal clear print and live accompaniment by the Mount Alto Orchestra only added to the experience.

TREASURES FROM THE ARCHIVE
A program of odds and ends from assorted archives that wouldn't really fit into any particular program, some shorts, trailers and brief clips (some lasting only a few seconds) from films that don't exist anymore, introduced by the archivists who oversaw their restoration. A couple of amusing shorts, one with the memorable intertitle "Spurned By The Heiress, The Music Teacher Listens To The Arguments Of The Anarchist." A tantalizing couple of seconds from an otherwise lost film with proto-hunk Ramon Novarro were fun to look at, too.

BARDELYS THE MAGNIFICENT
A costume adventure in the Fairbanks style, starring the great John Gilbert, directed by the great King Vidor from a novel by Rafael Sabatini. Gilbert plays Bardelys, a 17th Century Casanova type in the court of Louis XIII who finds himself obliged to woo and marry a country virgin as part of a wager. Bardelys travels to the girl's family estate and for some reason takes the identity of a man he finds dying in a barn, and finds himself assumed by everyone to be the leader of an anti-royalist plot to overthrow the king, which plot involves the family of the girl he's supposed to be wooing. Don't be looking for plausibility here. Vastly entertaining, with some genuinely funny intertitles, a rarity in silent films. The movie dares you to take it seriously, and it was interesting to see it within 12 hours of THE GAUCHO. Fairbanks and Gilbert are both fascinating performers. Gilbert is by far the finer actor, actually creating characters onscreen, as opposed to Fairbanks' near-mugging. But the big climactic action sequence is clearly meant to be in the Fairbanks mode, and, despite some wonderful gimmicks it doesn't quite come off as handsomely as it might, largely because Gilbert simply lacks Fairbanks' astonishing ability to the impossible with ease. An entertaining bit of fluff, with a lovely performance by Eleanor Boardman as the object of Gilbert's affections. She plays a virtuous virgin without making her unapproachably pure, her occasional little grins add an amusing dimension to what could have been a real piece of cardboard.

UNDERWORLD
Directed by Josef von Sternberg from a script by the great Ben Hecht, an early gangster film that seems to have set the template for a lot of what came after. Hecht even uses great chunks of the plot of this film (for which he won the first Academy Award for best original story) in his screenplay for Hawks' SCARFACE. The plot centers on a rivalry between two gang leaders (exactly what their gangs do is never really spelled out), one of whom takes a down and outer under his wing and sets him up in some style. The refurbished down and outer, of course, falls for the gangster's moll, and it kind of goes along from there. This must have been pretty alarming stuff in 1927, but it felt rather tame now, and the similarities to SCARFACE are just too apparent for the movie to seem like much more than a footnote to the later film.

AELITA, QUEEN OF MARS
An early science fiction film from Russia. This has been on my radar for years, every now and then I'd catch a glimpse of a photo of some of the remarkable Futurist cubist type sets and costumes for the scenes on Mars, and had been expecting a kind of cross between METROPOLIS and BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, but got instead a rather tired Soviet propaganda piece, with some admittedly cool bits that weren't cool enough to alleviate the boredom. I fell asleep, and don't feel that I missed much.

OSWALD THE LUCKY RABBIT
A fascinating program of shorts featuring Oswald, Disney's cartoon star before Mickey. Well, the shorts were fascinating. The biggest drawback to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival were the people chosen to introduce the screenings, who occasionally went on too long without saying very much of substance or even interest. The Oswald program had the worst offender in Leonard Maltin, who took a lot of time to tell the audience what pretty much every one of us present almost assuredly already knew about the early history of Walt Disney, without ever once managing to be at all interesting in any way.

I did like the shorts, though. Fast and funny and above all lively. Cartoons at this period were usually pretty simple affairs, you were expected to just sit and appreciate the moving pictures of dogs and cats and mice. These shorts are not much different, but there are little moments that surprise, like an extended bit with a dog who is startled when his hot dog sceams in pain at each impending bite. The dog finally tearfully sets the bun down, and the hot dog runs happily away.

A wonderful festival, all around. I didn't make all of the screenings, but there were plenty who did. The same people seemed to be in the same seats at each screening I attended, clearly having stayed put between shows. I don't know if I have it in me to go quite that far, but the opportunity to see such great prints of these films, in such a great setting, with such an appreciative audience, is not one that I'm likely to pass up often. I think I'll be making this an annual trek.

2009-07-03T18:09:00.005-04:00

PUBLIC ENEMIES

No, not the Republican Party, although Christian Bale does a witty impression of George W. Bush as Melvin Purvis, the G-man assigned to solve the Dillinger Problem. It is kind of a clever idea, as Mann's film shows Purvis as borderline incompetent, but, like the rest of Mann's film, it is a clever idea that ultimately doesn't really add up to much.

Johnny Depp's work as John Dillinger is carefully observed if a bit remote, somehow. I just never really felt that I got enough of a sense of what makes him tick, or rather, I never got the feeling that what made him tick was interesting enough to carry a full length film. I could never quite shake my knowledge that Dillinger is, ultimately, just a criminal who finally winds up getting what is coming to him.

I'm finding it hard to find things to say about the film. I've seldom been so underwhelmed by a big event film. PUBLIC ENEMIES isn't bad, by any means. There are some memorable moments, like Depp's first glimpse of his future girlfriend, played by the glorious Marion Cotillard, from across a crowded restaurant. Their courtship is exciting and moving: they're the most interesting screen couple in a while. Billy Crudup has some good fun as a fussy J. Edgar Hoover, and Bale's Purvis, as noted, is an amusing riff on George W. Bush.

I think ultimately the film just wanders around too much. I appreciated the economy with which it was established that Dillinger is among the last of a dying breed: solo bank robbers are on the way out, replaced by the big business of the Syndicate who make as much money all day every day as Dillinger makes in one single robbery, without the attendant gunplay and hostage taking. If the rest of Dillinger's career and his pursuit by the (strangely ineffective) law enforcement forces had been handled as well the film would almost certainly have been a good 45 minutes shorter.

I lost interest, and started to think about other movies. Penn's BONNIE AND CLYDE manages to establish the economic ugliness of the Great Depression, and Hill's BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID generates genuine human interest in its characters in ways that PUBLIC ENEMIES simply never does. PUBLIC ENEMIES borrows liberally from both film (Dillinger tells a bank customer to keep his money, as Warren Beatty's Clyde Barrow does, and Cotillard has a line about not wanting to watch Depp die that echoes a moment between Katharine Ross' Etta Place and the Sundance Kid). I'd say that if PUBLIC ENEMIES had focused exclusively on one or the other side of the law, it might have amounted to something. As it is, it just kind of peters out.

2009-05-28T15:07:00.004-04:00

ROSCOE GOES BACK TO THE THEATRE

HAIR
A splendid revival of the classic tribal love rock musical. I’d never seen the play before, had only seen parts of the film, and hadn’t been very taken with the original cast album. We saw this production when it played in Central Park last summer, and were very taken with it. It has been moved successfully to Broadway in a theatre that is probably too large for it. Mercifully we had great seats, 4th row on the aisle, so we really got the full interactive experience. This is no ordinary musical: there’s not much of a plot, and the most potent romantic relationship seems to involve a young man and a poster of Mick Jagger. It is more of a revue of assorted songs and sketches hanging very very loosely together on the story of Claude, a young man who is having a bit of a crisis of conscience about the Vietnam war and his own impending draft into the army. The crowd of hippies Claude hangs out with is no merry band of psychedelic stereotypes. As directed by Diane Paulus, the Tribe is a bunch of pretty damaged people, a bunch of social misfits whose demands for love and peace are delivered with an enraged intensity that cuts deeper than merely flashing a peace sign and lighting a joint. Yeah, there’s a lot of fun in the show, but there’s method to its madness. I liked it a hell of a lot.

BLITHE SPIRIT
A mostly amusing revival of Coward’s comedy is mostly an excuse for Angela Lansbury to strut her stuff one more time as Madam Arcati, the daffy medium. There are some good laughs along the way from Rupert Everett (looking more than ever as if he had stepped out of a 1930s Arrow shirt advertisement) and Christine Ebersole as the ghost of his late wife. The show is pure fluff, there’s no doubt about it, but there was something uncomfortable about the proceedings, as Lansbury fluffed enough of her lines to make what should be pure bliss into an exercise in suspense: I shouldn’t sit there worrying about whether or not one of the great stars of the Broadway stage is going to be able to get completely through her lines. To be fair, she mostly gets through it, and her little preparatory dance around the room before starting her seance was a delight. It was okay, I guess, but I think I preferred--

GOD OF CARNAGE
An Albee-esque picture of the tensions lurking under the civilized veneer of the upper middle classes. Two couples have come together for an evening to discuss a schoolyard fight between their respective sons, and the drinks and revelations start flowing. There are some good surprises and some good mean fun to be had here as each single character eventually finds him/herself ganged up on by the other three. Playwright Yasmin Reza owes huge debts to director Matthew Warchus and the really outlandishly over-qualified cast including Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden, and the great James Gandolfini who has finally been given license to reveal his great comic acting chops. A great treat all around. Not the deepest evening I’ve ever spent in the theatre, of course, but it comes off like KING LEAR compared to---

THE NORMAN CONQUESTS – TABLE MANNERS
A lot has been made of this import from London of Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy of comedies that take place in assorted rooms of one house over a weekend, one room per play. The NY critics have fallen all over themselves to praise it in extravagant terms, and it can only be put down to someone backstage having compromising pictures of them all. Considering the feverish raves for this tired revival of this dreadful little play, played with a near-total lack of inspiration or even simple human interest, the photos must have been damning indeed, involving animals and even infants. I did something I’ve never done in all my life – I left while the actors were still onstage, while the play was going through its agonizingly unfunny motions. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

The story, such as it is, involves -- aw fuck it. It isn’t worth it. The show blows. It blows CHUNKS. Yeah, yeah, I haven’t seen all of it, and there are little bits of jokes in the first play that clearly serve to set things up to happen in the second play and I’m sure there’s stuff in the second play that will set things up in the third play, and I’m sure there’s stuff in the second and third play that set things up in the first play, and it would all make sense after sitting through all seven and a half godforsaken hours of all three godforsaken plays but there was nothing and I mean NOTHING about the first play that made me want to go anywhere near a theater where any Ayckbourn play is ever running anytime anywhere for the rest of my life. This latest bit of Brit Chic shit is the second big trilogy of plays by British playwrights to get the anglolingus treatment from the NY critics in the last couple of years, Stoppard’s more substantial but still underbaked “epic” COAST OF UTOPIA being the other. I’d suggest Ayckbourn, Stoppard and the assorted blackmailed critics all be tied to chairs and be forced to see—

OUR TOWN
in the devastating new revival playing Off-Broadway, which manages to be entertaining, thought-provoking and profoundly moving in less than one third the time the Brits take to be annoying, condescending and profoundly boring. Thornton Wilder’s relatively brief play quite simply kicks Ayckbourn’s and Stoppard’s bloated trilogies into the dumpster where they belong. OUR TOWN invites you to consider your place in the universe and the way you live your life, an unabashed celebration of life on earth. NORMAN CONQUESTS and COAST OF UTOPIA only invite you to consider their playwrights’ own alleged genius.

You know OUR TOWN, of course. This revival manages to get pretty much everything right. The play’s bitter elements never overwhelm the sweet moments, or vice versa. And there’s a marvelous little coup in the final act that breaks every rule that Wilder lays down for the performance of this play, and it only serves to reinforce the brilliance and power of those rules and this play. I can’t imagine anyone but Dick Cheney being unmoved by it. If you’re in NYC, you are doing yourself a gross disservice in not seeing it.

2009-05-12T14:22:00.002-04:00

ROSCOE GOES TO THE THEATRE

So the big theatre season is over. Here are some notes on some of the shows we saw over the past few months. More will follow---

MARY STUART – a new translation of the Schiller classic about Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I. A big deal Brit-production, with two imported British actresses in the leads: the sublime Janet McTeer as Mary, and Harriet French as Elizabeth. All in all, a pretty good show for the leading ladies who do their best with the roles, but there was just no getting past the “so what?” factor for me. This story has been told and told and told again, and usually better elsewhere. Ultimately, there just wasn’t enough here to make me feel any of the sympathy that Schiller wants me to feel for either Mary or Elizabeth. I never for a moment thought that French’s Elizabeth would lose a single wink of sleep after sending Mary to the chopping block, and McTeer’s Mary, while fascinating and a joy to watch, never made me forget that the dear lady was, in fact, getting exactly what she deserved.

EXIT THE KING – Ionesco on Broadway, with Oscar winners Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon. Rush stars as King Berenger the First, who is told by one of this queens (Sarandon) that he has exactly 90 minutes to live. He basically then lives out each of the assorted possible stages of dying, but this is no dramatization of Kubler-Ross. Rush makes Berenger’s shuffling off of this mortal coil a terribly funny and deeply moving experience, an all-out bravura display of every acting trick in the book, and it all works. Sarandon seems rather oddly miscast at first, but her choices get clearer as the play continues and it has to be said that Rush’s big final moments wouldn’t work without her. I’m very glad I saw this. Not to detract from this production at all, but I’d like to see another production, one that didn’t go quite so far over the top.

WAITING FOR GODOT – probably the show I was most excited about seeing this season. A revival of Beckett’s classic starring Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin, with John Glover and John Goodman. We wound up seeing this twice, as the first performance we saw felt very off-kilter. The first act was very bumpy indeed, with John Goodman in particular just seeming terribly lost. Then the second act went speedily and hilariously and movingly, it was almost as if the cast had all had a good strong cup of coffee at the intermission, or the director went backstage and kicked some ass or something. We saw it again a few weeks later, and were delighted. Goodman’s Pozzo was a treat to watch, all showy bluster but still able to navigate the stranger moments with real aplomb. No one has ever made such great theatre out of simply sitting down upon a stool. Nathan Lane’s Estragon was fine, as usual landing the laughs with ease but letting the really painful moments get away from him. I don’t think he’s in the same category as the great Bill Irwin, whose Vladimir is hilarious and heartbreaking without breaking a sweat. He accomplishes more by taking off his hat and putting it back on than most actors could ever think about doing given a dozen lifetimes. His mournful song at the start of Act Two, which Irwin has chosen to sadly sing to a down-tempo version of The Merry Go Round Broke Down, is one of the more haunting moments of the year.

More to come on HAIR, GOD OF CARNAGE, BLITHE SPIRIT, JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE.

2009-04-23T11:27:00.005-04:00

GREY GARDENS REDUX ALL OVER AGAIN

The original film by Albert and David Maysles is an unscripted direct cinema film about a mother and daughter who live in squalor in the titular collapsing mansion in East Hampton. The women are Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, also named Edith (they are referred to as Big Edie and Little Edie, respectively). The two women fight, worry over their cats, fight, worry over the city of East Hampton taking legal action to get them out of their cat and raccoon infested crumbling house, and fight. Little Edie is always complaining about the sorry mess her life has become. She wants nothing more (she says) than to get away from Grey Gardens and have her own life in New York City. There are some epic battles, most of which have clearly been fought and fought and fought again any number of times over the years. The Maysles film is not to everybody's taste. I've referred to it as being NO EXIT by Tennessee Williams, a thrilling and ambiguous and disturbing experience, and I've known people who think the film exploits mental illness, and others just can't stand all the bitching.

There seems to be a real little Beale industry popping up. Most of the reviews mention the Maysles film as being a gay cult classic, and the popular gay newsmagazine The Advocate published an article claiming the film as a rite of passage for young gay men. I'm not sure who these people are, I have to say. Few of the NYC gay men I know had ever heard of the film before the musical opened, and those who had heard of it didn't like it very much (exploitation, bitching). I don't remember the film being widely available on video (for a long time I owned the only VHS of the film that I'd ever seen, purchased from a video store that was purging unrented stock from their shelves) until the Criterion Collection DVD of the film was released. I'd guess this cult is only about ten years old.

There have been two major works based on the Maysles film. A Broadway musical in 2006 and an HBO film each added dramatizations of past events occasionally referred to in the Maysles film in an effort (not to say struggle) to answer the question that the Maysles film never brings up directly: what the hell is up with these two women? The musical was hampered by a lame score and even lamer book which made an ultimately ill-advised chronological decision. Act One was set in the late 1930s and centered on Big Edie Beale at the height of her popularity as a Hamptons hostess as her life starts to collapse around her, and Act Two centered on Little Edie Beale and her life in the crumbling mansion. Act One Big Edie and Act Two Little Edie were played by the same actress, and people just went nuts for the stunt, but it always felt to me that this approach cost more than it was worth. In dividing the performances this way I never felt that I learned enough about the women in the context of the play itself, which all too often resorted to easy musicalizations of major moments in the film (The Beales' Greatest Hits) and some really blatant bids for Sympathy for the Beales. The ugly deep sargasso swamp of these women's relationship was skimmed rather than seriously explored.

The HBO film, on the other hand, seems to get it all right. The Beales are played by two instead of four actresses, and manages to add biographical information about the Beales that actually create genuine sympathy for the ladies. The HBO film takes a more straightforward approach than the musical, simply cutting back and forth between 1970s Grey Gardens, where the Maysles Brothers are making their film with the Beales, and the Beales' lives in the 1930s 40s and 50s. Equal time is given to mother and daughter, and the train wrecks of their lives are clearly laid out, along with some real insight into their motives.

Jessica Lange is nothing short of brilliant as Big Edie Beale. She's able to evoke some real pity for the woman while never backing away from showing the total mama-monster. A fascinating and complicated performance. I wish I could say the same of Drew Barrymore as Little Edie. At 34, Barrymore is able to play the younger Edie with some skill and energy, but she's simply in over her head when it comes to playing Edie at 56. She does her best, and manages a couple of skillful impersonation moments when re-creating famous bits from the Maysles film, but ultimately it just isn't enough, layers of prosthetic makeup notwithstanding. She's just too young, plain and simple. Also, more damagingly, she simply isn't able to summon the breeding that Lange manages so effortlessly: simply put, she has no class at all, faded or otherwise. When the Maysles' Little Edie uses words like "apoplectic" she knows what she means, and she refers to someone as being "an artist from a very good family" without irony. Barrymore just can't simulate this kind of thing: she doesn't understand Little Edie the way Lange understands Big Edie.

The biggest problem I had with the HBO film is that it falls into one of the same traps that hampered the musical, the Re-creation Temptation. It gets to the point where the Maysleses and the Beales really deserve some kind of co-writing credit. Unfortunately, I just can't help thinking that the Beales and Maysleses are better writers. Too many moments from the Maysles film are shoe-horned in to the proceedings to satisfy the fans, whether in context or not. For example, one of the more telling moments in the Maysles film comes when Little Edie says that "(i)t's very difficult to keep the line between the present and past." Maysles' Little Edie drops this little bombshell, which is basically the entire film in a single sentence, in an otherwise innocuous exchange with their handyman about the assorted changes the estate has gone through over the years, while HBO's Little Edie delivers this line with High Seriousness straight into the camera after an argument with her mother so we can be sure that even the slowest viewer will GET IT.

Worth watching? Yeah, why not, you'll get to see Jessica Lange do some of her very best work. But nothing can substitute for the original Maysles Brothers film. Nothing can come near it.

2009-03-26T13:53:00.004-04:00

WATCHMEN

I don't pretend to be an expert on graphic novels. I read WATCHMEN a while back. I remember lots of splendid detail, every single panel crammed with lovingly chosen details that beg to be noticed, and a batch of characters whose backstories were interesting and elaborate enough for me to not mind the rather simplistic murder mystery plot (somebody is killing off ex-costumed heroes) at the story's core. The big climax seemed rather anti-climactic, a big statement about ends justifying the means or something, I couldn't help feeling that the creators had bitten off more than they could chew. But folks loved it, and continue to love it. Over the years rumored film versions were bandied about, including one from Terry Gilliam, but nothing ever came of it.

And now the movie is actually here, and I was simply dreading it. It is directed by the publicity-anointed "visionary director" Zack Snyder, who made the bizarrely successful and thoroughly evil film 300 two years back. WATCHMEN impresses occasionally with a simple competence that I wouldn't have expected from Snyder. There's a lot of crap to wade through, make no mistake, as our "visionary" packs on the "cinematic" stuff all over the place: he makes damn sure that each shot is a big showstopper. It isn't enough for Snyder to show a cemetery, he has to begin on a closeup of rain running down a statuary angel's face and then pull back and back and back through the wrought iron gate and all the way back up and out so we can see the hearse at the cemetery gates, with "Sounds Of Silence" on the soundtrack, yet. And Snyder's fondness for slow-motion hyperchoreographed fights and really revolting violence can make parts of the film difficult to watch without giggling or wincing. Make no mistake, the line between Serious Depiction of Graphic Violence To Make A Dramatic Point and Just Getting Off On The Sight Of Blood is crossed early and enthusiastically. And the nudge-nudge references to other films (certain scenes involving the the President discussing impending war are set in a mock up of the famed War Room from DR. STRANGELOVE, for example) don't really add much besides the satisfaction to a quick viewer of having Gotten It.

For all Snyder's slavish attention to stuff like this, there's something inert about the movie. I think that the film's biggest problem is pretty simple: it is hard to get terribly invested in the people being shown onscreen, largely because we never learn much about them. Big chunks of backstory are hinted at, but never really fleshed out satisfyingly; I imagine that the extra hour of footage apparently coming on the inevitable Director's Cut DVD will clarify a lot. As it stands now, though, only Jeffrey Dean Morgan's grinning sociopath The Comedian, Jackie Earle Haley's splendid Rorschach and Billy Crudup's CGI-enhanced Dr. Manhattan manage to generate much in the way of interest. The sections concentrating on these characters (Rorschach and the Dr. especially) are far and away the best in the film. Haley manages to project a very real danger out of thin air with his empty stare, and Crudup's sweet dreamy voice is a nice surprise. Alas, Patrick Wilson is left high and dry in his sputtering romance with the appalling Malin Akerman: I dare you not to be reminded of Andy Garcia valiantly trying to romance Sofia Coppola in GODFATHER III. Wilson and Akerman's slow-mo love scene, accompanied by Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is painful to watch.

And someone named Matthew Goode delivers the worst performance of the year and possibly the decade as Adrian Veidt aka Ozymandias. He seems to have graduated from the Gerard Butler School of Acting, where all lines seem to have been learned phonetically and all actors seem to be overcoming heavy accents or serious speech impediments or both. The character's solemn pronouncements seem rather silly when expressed in a bizarre monotone with bad diction. Goode is aiming for some kind of Dark Superman but comes off more like a luuded out Elmer Fudd.

I couldn't escape a degree of "so what" about the film, ultimately. This sort of thing has been done before. Films like Tim Burton's BATMAN RETURNS and Nolan's Bleak Chic reboot of the franchise BATMAN BEGINS and THE DARK KNIGHT have pretty well stripped costumed heroes of any romantic notions we might have had of them, and Nolan's films went out of their way to jam Big Themes into the mix. I'd bet that a good deal of WATCHMEN's thunder has been stolen by the incredible worldwide success of THE DARK KNIGHT in particular. WATCHMEN's big speeches are as lamely written as any in THE DARK KNIGHT, and I can't blame Patrick Wilson for being unable to make a line like "(w)hat happened to the American Dream?" provoke anything other than laughter, coming as it does from a man in an owl costume.

I was certainly not a fan of either of Nolan's Batman films, but they at least try to wrestle convincingly with the Big Themes they address. I can give Nolan and his pair of films an A for Effort that I just can't bring myself to give to that Snyder guy. All costumed hero movies made since WATCHMEN's publication owe a big debt to its pioneering example. What a shame that WATCHMEN itself has been brought to the screen in such lackluster fashion.

2009-03-16T14:52:00.004-04:00

TWO CLIPS

Didn't see MAMMA MIA!? Too concerned that your brain would atrophy? Not interested in watching America's Dowager Actress Goddess debase herself in a piece of material way way way beneath her?

Fear not.

The clips below are from a Comic Relief parody of the film by the sublime team of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French. They've saved you the agony of sitting through the movie. Part 2 is especially glorious, as Saunders takes down La Streep once and for all.

Part One---

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq-FX1ced8g

Part Two---

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuQhyEAAANk

You're welcome.

2009-02-26T09:43:00.004-05:00

THE BIG NIGHT

I'm a gay male New Yorker. I have to watch the Oscars. It's a rule. Your membership is revoked otherwise, I'd have to give back the toaster.

There seems to be a sort of "meh" feeling about the whole Oscar experience this year. And as far as the winners were concerned, yeah, I'll have to agree. Meh. SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE for Best Picture and Best Director, uh huh. Fearless Prediction: this will come to be seen as the 21st Century equivalent of ROCKY having won Best Picture and Best Director. SLUMDOG and ROCKY are entirely adequate little comfort movies but Best Pictures they are NOT. I was glad that MILK picked up two prizes, though, and Penn's and Black's speeches were by far the best of the night.

But it was soon enough business as usual, as the Oscars went back to the sweep mentality that had been notably absent for a few years, with SLUMDOG picking up awards for Most Editing among other things. And the winners for BENJAMIN BUTTON made some of the dullest speeches imaginable, which I guess is appropriate for people who made the dullest film imaginable.

But there was something else going on that night. Something so astounding that no one seems to have noticed it. Get this folks. The Academy award ceremony was not an embarassment. I think I'll say it again, as it seems to be escaping everyone's notice: THE ACADEMY AWARD CEREMONY WAS NOT AN EMBARASSMENT. The show was a lean mean award show machine, with a minimum of the nonsense (bad hosts, bad musical numbers, self-congratulatory montages) that they seemed to cram into the proceedings to make it all last as long as possible.

There were some missteps. That song and dance thing about how Musicals Are Back was just a drag, but it did provide a handy bathroom break. The Oscar Remembers montage was a disaster, ruined by sloppy camerawork and a need to keep Queen Latifah in frame. The device of past Oscar winners announcing the names of the acting nominees was a bit much. Yeah, they did it well, I guess, but it doesn't need to be done again. And the idea of running Best Picture nominee clips interspersed with great Oscar-winning films of the past resulted in one really deeply offensive moment, as the montage for MILK included shots from noted bigot Mel Gibson's noxious BRAVEHEART, one of the most blatantly homophobic major studio releases ever. It was like including a clip of BIRTH OF A NATION in a montage for RAISIN IN THE SUN.

But overall, it didn't suck. Hugh Jackman was a charming host. The awards were presented speedily, so speedily that I remember wondering what they were going to do to fill up the rest of the time. Even Jerry Lewis was gracious and above all brief during his little moment of Jean Hersholt glory. I didn't miss the performances of the song nominees one little bit, the little bite-sized performances were more than enough, but two of the three nominated songs (from SLUMDOG) were only tolerable in bite-sized pieces anyway.

I wonder if that is contributing to the Meh Factor that seems to be so prevalent. There was no shock, no surprise, no moment of Supreme Tastelessness to make this year stand out from the rest. It will be remembered, by me, as the year that Sean Penn got an Oscar he deserved and made a genuinely moving little speech, rather than as the year that little cinematic Big Mac with Special Curry Sauce won Best Picture.

2009-02-13T12:40:00.003-05:00

RADIOHEAD

This is possibly the coolest thing to happen at an award show in a long time. That's Tom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, backed by the USC Marching Band. Greenwood, by the way, wrote the score for THERE WILL BE BLOOD, one of the better film scores of recent years. Enjoy:

2009-01-26T11:31:00.004-05:00

OSCAR SCHMOSCAR

I'm an optimist. I keep hoping that these little gold bludgeons (in Jim Carrey's phrase: the Lord of All Knick-knacks) will finally go to the right, most deserving person. It seldom happens. This year, it seems less likely to happen than usual. After last year's entirely predictable triumph of the dullasdishwater NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN over the far tastier THERE WILL BE BLOOD, SWEENEY TODD and ZODIAC, and after the previous few years' senseless recognition of MILLION DOLLAR BABY and CRASH and others (THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING being the sole deserving winner in some time) I can finally say that I just don't give a damn anymore.

Aw, fuck. Who am I kidding? Surely not you. I do care. I care deeply. I love this stuff. This hideous award show horror. I do love to bitch and moan and complain about who wins and who loses and who wasn't nominated and what were they thinking and well what can you expect from the people who've given Clint Eastwood two Oscars for Best Director and Brad Pitt nominated for Best Actor Oh my GOD and ha ha they shut out THE DARK KNIGHT and Christopher Nolan so there might be some hope after all. Nothing provokes a good solid rant like the OSCARS.

So here we go, nominations rants.

Best motion picture of the year
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
“Frost/Nixon”
“Milk”
“The Reader”
“Slumdog Millionaire”

I've only seen three of the nominees: BENJAMIN BOREDOM, MILK and SLUMDOG. Well. It looks like SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE will win. One of Roscoe's Oscar Theories: Each Oscar Is A Reaction To Last Year's, which this year means that an easy piece of feelgood sentimentality (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE) will follow last year's easy piece of feelbad sentimentality (NO COUNTRY). I'm not entirely counting out BENJAMIN BOREDOM, as it does have a lot of what Oscar Seems To Like: epic storytelling, thwarted lovestory, big stars, no appreciable content but a clearly stated (more or less) message about something or other, and it does seem to inspire tears in those easily inspired that way. It comes down to this: will they want to give the Best Picture Oscar to a piece of relentless fluff about slumkids in Mumbai? How's that going to look in future Oscar montages? I can't see it going to FROST/NIXON or THE READER, because they've just gotten zero serious consideration from anyone anywhere. MILK would also seem to have a lot of Oscar bait (big true story, martyred leader, big cast, easily digested Big Message) but there's that pesky Gay Angle that will probably keep it from winning the big prize. Going by another Roscoe's Oscar Theories (the most useless of the nominees usually wins) I'll go with SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, with BENJAMIN BOREDOM a possible surprise. I'm not entirely counting out MILK, though, darker horses have won, and it might be a handy response to Prop. 8.

Performance by an actor in a leading role
Richard Jenkins in “The Visitor”
Frank Langella in “Frost/Nixon”
Sean Penn in “Milk”
Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler”

Well, who can say. I'd guess Mickey Rourke, based on all the hype, but I think there may be a significant population who just can't bring themselves to check off the box next to Mickey Rourke for an Oscar. I haven't seen the performance, largely because I just can't bring myself to look at that hideously disfigured face for the better part of two hours. I'd like to see Penn win, myself, but I don't think it is terribly likely. After all, Penn plays a gay man who actually seems to be possessed of some measurable levels of testosterone, and that never goes over big with Oscar voters who like their gay performances to be as queeny/girly/femmy as possible: Hurt in SPIDER WOMAN and Hoffman's CAPOTE. Ugh. Pitt. My non-nominated choice: Colin Farrell for his funny and moving turn in IN BRUGES.

Performance by an actor in a supporting role
Josh Brolin in “Milk”
Robert Downey Jr. in “Tropic Thunder”
Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Doubt”
Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight”
Michael Shannon in “Revolutionary Road”

I'd say give it to Josh Brolin, who actually had an actual supporting role, rather than Ledger who should be in the Best Actor category for what was for all intents and purposes the lead in that DARK KNIGHT thing. But Ledger will probably win, there's just no way to deny the brilliance of his work as the Joker, try as some might. I'd have liked to have seen Ralph Fiennes nominated for his total scary loon performance in IN BRUGES.

Performance by an actress in a leading role
Anne Hathaway in “Rachel Getting Married”
Angelina Jolie in “Changeling”
Melissa Leo in “Frozen River”
Meryl Streep in “Doubt”
Kate Winslet in “The Reader”

Don't know, don't care, haven't seen any of them, and without the sublime Sally Hawkins from HAPPY-GO-LUCKY it doesn't matter a damn. Toss it to Winslet, she's long overdue, and it would continue the Oscar tradition of honoring the Right Actor for the Wrong Role.

Performance by an actress in a supporting role
Amy Adams in “Doubt”
Penélope Cruz in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”
Viola Davis in “Doubt”
Taraji P. Henson in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
Marisa Tomei in “The Wrestler”

As long as it doesn't go to Taraji P. Henson, they can give it to the janitor for all I care. I'm betting it will go to Viola Davis in DOUBT, for what it is worth.

Achievement in directing
David Fincher -- BENJAMIN BOREDOM
Ron Howard -- FROST/NIXON
Gus Van Sant -- MILK
Stephen Daldry -- THE READER
Danny Boyle -- SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

It will probably go to Boyle, I guess. I'd say the most worthy of the batch that I've seen is Van Sant's work on MILK. Oscar-winner Danny Boyle. Hmmmm. Doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it?

Adapted screenplay
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Screenplay by Eric Roth, Screen story by Eric Roth and Robin Swicord
“Doubt” (Miramax), Written by John Patrick Shanley
“Frost/Nixon” (Universal), Screenplay by Peter Morgan
“The Reader” (The Weinstein Company), Screenplay by David Hare
“Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Screenplay by Simon Beaufoy

Couldn't care less. Probably SLUMDOG. Whatever.

Original screenplay
“Frozen River” (Sony Pictures Classics), Written by Courtney Hunt
“Happy-Go-Lucky” (Miramax), Written by Mike Leigh
“In Bruges” (Focus Features), Written by Martin McDonagh
“Milk” (Focus Features), Written by Dustin Lance Black
“WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Original story by Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter

Probably on balance the strongest single category. Who'd a thunk. I'd like to see IN BRUGES win, but it isn't terribly likely. I'd be down with MILK or WALL-E or HAPPY-GO-LUCKY winning, but I think they'll probably give it to MILK as a consolation prize for not giving it one of the big prizes.

And there you have it. I'll watch the show, I guess, but it just all seems to pre-determined now. SLUMDOG seems to be just cleaning up all over the place, like NO COUNTRY did last year. There's nothing really in the way of suspense.

And here's a gratuitous piece of anti-BENJAMIN BUTTONery:

The Curious Case of Forrest Gump - watch more funny videos

2009-01-09T16:45:00.000-05:00

2009-01-05T15:01:00.003-05:00

OUT NOW

Well, there's just not a lot out there that I'm at all excited in seeing right now. The big Oscar bait is flooding the theatres and I just couldn’t care less about a lot of them. Here are some thoughts about films I've seen and films I haven't seen.

DOUBT and FROST/NIXON -- sorry, just plain not interested. I saw both as plays on Broadway, and was extremely unimpressed with DOUBT and liked the fine performance of Frank Langella as Nixon. There's nothing about either film that really makes me want to shell out NYC movie ticket prices for them. They can wait for HBO, and even then I doubt I'll bother with DOUBT, because I just couldn't care less about it. Didn't like the play, am not interested in La Streep's take on the role, and I'm positively allergic to that Philip Seymour Hoffman person.

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY -- a tasty surprise from Mike Leigh. Sally Hawkins has been winning a good number of critics' awards for her performance as Poppy, an almost unquenchably positive woman living in London. Just because she's relentlessly upbeat doesn't mean she doesn't sometimes get pissed off, however. The film hasn't much of a plot, but I'm sure that repeat viewings will reveal a lot more going on than meets the eye. The film mainly consists of Poppy's interactions with assorted people: her roommate, her students, one young student who seems to be the victim of abuse at home, assorted members of her family, and most memorably a driving instructor named Scott. People have differing reactions to Poppy's surface breeziness, mistaking it for a lack of good sense or even a rebuke to their own ways of looking at the world. A fascinating group of character studies, not a dull moment in it. I'd love to see it again.

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE -- One of the best received movies of the year. Probable Oscar nominee, and almost certain winner of Best Adapted Screenplay. Saw it over the weekend. Annoyed the living daylights out of me. A mostly simple rags to riches story of a young man who rises from the slums to India to the final round of the Indian version of I WANT TO BE A MILLIONAIRE. There's a novel narrative gimmick. Having risen to the finals of MILLIONAIRE, the hero has been arrested on allegations of cheating, and the film consists mainly of his flashbacks as he recounts the story of his life to explain to the police how he has acquired such arcane information, before he can go on to the final round. Okay, cool. Neat idea, I'm down with that. The film is certainly well made, and the acting is beyond reproach.

It isn't a bad movie by any means. I just got really really really tired of the non-stop emotional manipulation at work. Director Danny Boyle loads on the MTV Editing (executed with a skill that has eluded certain other practitioners, by the way) and the loud music and fancy hand held camerawork and basically every possible device in his arsenal to Ramp Up The Emotion full blast. I'll admit that I had certain feelings while watching the film, but I wasn't having them because I was getting involved in the story or getting interested in the characters or having my own responses. I was having feelings because my Emotion Buttons were being pushed, and pushed, and pushed again. And then pushed again. Exactly when they started using a jackhammer on those buttons remains unclear to me, but it was about the time that I started to develop a bad headache. Only MAMMA MIA has worked harder recently to push each and every emotional button, over and over and over again, to the point where it ceases to mean anything.

It got simply exhausting, and I've seldom been so glad to see credits roll in my life. Again -- not a bad movie. Its heart is definitely in the right place. It is just pushy to the point of being irritating.

MILK -- I'd been avoiding it, afraid that I was in for a lot of Preaching to the Choir. I'm so glad to have been proven wrong. An all around excellent film, I thought, the kind of thing that makes me wonder why more movies aren't as generally good as this one. A good solid piece of movie, that proves that Message Movies needn't be insults to the intelligence, that emotional responses can be elicited without resorting to drastic SLUMDOG-type measures. The acting is across the board excellent. Sean Penn finally delivers a performance of real grace and humor along with the expected power and intensity: this is what happens when he finally plays a human being, I guess. And Josh Brolin's Dan White is splendid, a sad dumb clueless straight guy who just can't seem to understand why things don't go exactly the way he wants them to. You can just see him Not Getting It. I know there have been some complaints that the film rather sanitizes the story, but it didn't feel sanitized to me. The ugly little subplot with Milk's overly dependent boyfriend was sufficiently messy, it kept me from thinking that Milk was a just plaster Gay Saint.

2008-12-25T22:12:00.003-05:00

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

A strange choice for director David Fincher. There’s no denying the visual impact of his best work, but there’s also no denying the emotional coldness either. SEVEN and FIGHT CLUB are two of the most famous examples of Bleak Chic, films that revel in their own status as Hip Cynical Bummers. ZODIAC upped the ante a good deal, combining Fincher’s trademark visual finesse with a group of characters that seemed to have some connection to reality. BENJAMIN BUTTON seems to offer Fincher the chance to join the Major Director Club, to move from Chilly Technician to Soulful Visionary. Alas, it doesn’t work. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON has all the heart and soul and passion and warmth of Dick Cheney.

BENJAMIN BUTTON is the story of a man who ages in reverse. Born as a miniature version of an old man, an infant with gray hair and arthritis, he gradually gets younger as he gets older. He gets more limber, his hair gains color, and he basically becomes Brad Pitt (a mixed blessing, as it turns out). Benjamin’s journey from Youthful Old Age to Aged Youthfulness spans about 80 years from WWI to Hurricane Katrina, he witnesses assorted Big Events of the Century, and occasionally meets up with his One True Love Daisy, played by Cate Blanchett.

Comparisons with FORREST GUMP can’t be avoided, and BUTTON has GUMP’s screenwriter, one Eric Roth. GUMP and BUTTON are both set in a Louisiana where things like race and money are never issues. Benjamin’s youthful use of crutches to walk echoes Forrest’s “magic legs,” and the on-again off-again decade-hopping romance between Benjamin and Daisy is a replay of Forrest’s affair with the doomed Jenny. BUTTON has a strange symbolic hummingbird that implausibly shows up at strategic times, a la GUMP’s famous feather. Roth also tosses in elements of THE ENGLISH PATIENT, in a framing device showing Daisy on her deathbed having her daughter read Benjamin’s diary to her as Hurricane Katrina prepares to rage outside.

Think about it. A combination of FORREST GUMP and THE ENGLISH PATIENT.

Still with me? The movie aims hard at being a fantastic-type meditation on time, love and loss. All the signifiers of Hollywood’s version of Serious Cinema are there: luscious production values, cutting edge technology, Oscar-winning actors from abroad, distinguished literary pedigree, nearly three hour length and all that. The movie is a big fat piece of Oscar bait, perhaps the most blatant since the atrocious COLD MOUNTAIN. Fincher seems to have studied Anthony Minghella closely, as it happens: no film since Minghella’s passing shows his influence so thoroughly. There’s a total lack of passion and energy that the director of THE ENGLISH PATIENT and COLD MOUNTAIN would instantly recognize as his own, combined with that Mingellian Delusion Of Relevance that makes his films such agony to sit through. The film goes through its carefully orchestrated and arranged and computer generated paces, each narrative and technological cog clicking into place like the creation of the blind clockmaker in the film’s opening anecdote. Fincher, alas, is no visionary. He’s a mechanic, more interested in showing off his techno-toolbox than anything else.

The cutting edge technology is most particularly in evidence in the depiction of Benjamin’s reverse aging. They seem to have used a variety of actors of assorted sizes and added an aged version of Brad Pitt’s face to them where necessary. The results don’t really work terribly well, I don’t think, especially in the first half of the film where Pitt looks more like 70s singer/songwriter Paul Williams than anything else. Pitt doesn’t suffer alone. The process by which Cate Blanchett is made to look about 20 years younger than she is comes off like some hideous page out of Airbrushing For Beginners. These effects keep calling attention to themselves, at the expense of the characters and ultimately the film. It eventually settles down a bit, by the time that Pitt and Blanchett are supposed to be near the same age and can play their roles without techno-cosmetic assistance, when Fincher starts to load on the lingering closeups of Pitt’s astonishing beauty, but it is too little too late.

I’ll say it clearly, because nobody else will. At heart, the film’s biggest problem is right there on the poster and above the title. Brad Pitt’s alleged performance is a colossal bore, a great black hole that sucks the energy out of all that surrounds it. There’s a certain possible justification for some of it, I guess. Benjamin Button is after all a freak of nature. He is fully aware of his difference, and aware of how it might be seen by others, and a certain emotional reserve might be an interesting starting point for an actor to build a performance on. For Pitt, this reserve is the final destination, the beginning middle and end of his attempt at a performance. It isn’t just a matter of the digital tweaking to make him look older or younger. There’s just nothing there. His voice is a flat uninflected monotone. His eyes are unlit with any sign of life. Tens of millions of dollars worth of CGI aging technology and a battery of technicians can’t add life where Pitt doesn’t. Just watch what happens when the sublime Tilda Swinton appears onscreen with Pitt. She lights up the screen in a way that poor old Brad just can’t come near, and quite simply obliterates him. It could be argued that Swinton’s performance is also the one in the film least affected by CGI and latex, but it is more than that. She steals the film by sheer acting ability alone, showing more humanity in one single smile than the rest of the film is able to summon in its entirely indefensible three hour running time.

Life’s too short. Avoid this one. You’re not missing a thing.

2008-12-09T09:47:00.003-05:00

QUANTUM OF SOLACE

is a strange name for the latest Bond film: they should probably have just called it CASINO ROYALE II. The story picks up pretty much where CASINO left off (a certain amount of time does seem to have elapsed, but it falls into the Things You're Not Supposed To Notice category). There seems to be a good deal of disappointment in QUANTUM as a movie, and I can see why. Ultimately I don't think it is as good as CASINO ROYALE; it seems to have completely jettisoned the polish of CASINO in favor of a supposedly grittier feel, I guess in a bid for something like relevance. And it makes a degree of sense, if you take the reboot of the franchise as a kind of Bond's Progress from journeyman spy to cold-hearted killer: the progression from stylish blacktie casinos to desert wasteland can be seen to reflect Bond's own devolution from man to heartless killing machine.

I wish the plot had been a bit easier to follow, there were times when I felt like the parade of heavily-accented actors weren't exactly making things clear. And the film-making itself didn't help much. The film is made in that Hand-Held Camera/Weed Whacker Editing style that can work when done properly as in THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM but doesn't really come together here. The opening car chase confuses rather than excites because it takes too long to figure out what the hell is going on. I wasn't even sure who was chasing whom until way too late in the sequence. It gets really bad during a speedboat chase that simply makes no sense at all, a flurry of swish pans fast cuts and bad framing. A marvellously conceived sequence at an opera performance falls apart due to some frankly idiotic Artsy Fartsy Editing. It does settle down enough for the Big Finish to come off handsomely, but by then it is almost too late.

I'm being rather hard on the movie, I guess out of a sense of disappointment that so many bad decisions were made in its production. On the whole though it was an amusing entertainment, and it features a memorable Bond villain: Mathieu Amalric as Dominic Greene. The man leaves a trail, let's just leave it at that. And the sublime Jeffrey Wright gets a little more to do, but it still isn't enough. In one scene he regards Amalric's character the way he'd regard a shit smear on a new carpet. Little things like that make the movie bearable when the bad filmmaking threaten to undermine it all. More Jeffrey Wright, less editing, please.

If nothing else, QUANTUM OF SOLACE gave me the opportunity to look at Daniel Craig for a couple of hours my oh my oh bloody my. I do love to watch Daniel Craig, and not just because he's the sexiest man in current movies. There's something oddly amusing about him in action scenes, I find. Watch him casually but seriously unseat someone from their motorcycle or run straight through drywall and you'll see what I mean. That odd casual gravity he brings to the increasingly outlandish situations reminds me of Buster Keaton, there's an absolute conviction to what he does that is somehow comic. I remember thinking, in CASINO ROYALE, that when Daniel Craig runs, Daniel Craig bloody RUNS, there's just no doubt that he's going to catch whatever he's chasing.

I'll keep going to the films as long as he's associated with them. And I'm looking forward to the next one.

2008-12-03T14:33:00.003-05:00

PROP 8 -- THE MUSICAL

Watch this. Just watch it. And feel very culturally superior to the poor pathetic Mormons who don't quite realize yet what they're in for in the coming years.

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Props must go to Marc Shaiman etc. for this little stroke of nastiness.

2008-10-31T14:15:00.003-04:00

DOCTOR ATOMIC

"Could we have started the atomic age with clean hands?"

John Adams' opera DOCTOR ATOMIC asks the above question in its very first scene. It is a question that the play's protagonist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, ducks at first, but gradually finds himself having to confront. Most of DOCTOR ATOMIC centers on the roughly 12 hours leading up to the explosion of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, and specifically on Oppenheimer's crisis of conscience as the zero hour nears.

Alas, the production currently occupying the Metropolitan Opera in New York City manages to lose its way pretty thoroughly in a needlessly prolonged and almost entirely tension-free second act. I'm going to have to blame the director, one Penny Woolcock, a filmmaker who is making her theatrical debut with this production, for not ratcheting up the tension and making the characters live onstage as they should. Granted, the libretto doesn't do her any favors. Assembled by Peter Sellars from a variety of sources, the libretto is a patchwork taken from interviews, histories, and poetry. Some of the sources can be rather oblique: if I hadn't read the synopsis before the opera began, I would not have known that an extended love scene between Oppenheimer and his wife is made up almost entirely of poems by Muriel Rukeyser and Baudelaire. Other scenes involve a discussion on calorie counting between Oppenheimer and the general in charge of the operation.

Clearly, LA BOHEME this ain't. The first act progresses well enough, culminating in a marvelous aria from Oppenheimer, sung powerfully by Gerald Finley, taken from a sonnet by John Donne. Sung while standing quite literally in the shadow of the bomb, it lays out Oppenheimer's conflicts very clearly and movingly. Then Act Two begins, and the momentum simply evaporates. The test is delayed due to rain, and characters start dealing with what their development of the bomb might really mean. What might have been an opportunity for increased tension and soulful examination of motives turns out to be, quite simply, a bore. Ms. Woolcock has no idea how to move people around onstage, there are just too many scenes of people simply standing around onstage while the music plays. I started to wonder if someone had missed a cue or something. It definitely ruins the otherwise impressive final countdown sequence, played as the entire cast cowers together onstage, staring out at the audience.

It is worth noting that this is in fact the second full-blown production that DOCTOR ATOMIC has had. The first productions were directed by Peter Sellars himself, and I have a feeling he has a better handle on the material than Ms. Woolcock. The original production has been released on a DVD which I am going to have to check out shortly, just to see if Sellars' production solves the problems the opera presents. I've seen a few clips online that don't make me particularly optimistic. Maybe DOCTOR ATOMIC shouldn't be given a full production at all. I have a feeling that it might be more successfully mounted as an oratorio of some kind.

An oratorio presentation would put the attention where it belongs: on John Adams' music. I don't have the musical vocabulary to do it anything like justice, I'll just say that the score for DOCTOR ATOMIC seems to me on a first encounter to be one of Adams' finest accomplishments, along with his recent opera A FLOWERING TREE. I have no doubt that it will live a long life on my Ipod. Mr. Finley makes a very real physical impression as Oppenheimer, his cool certainty in the opening morphing gradually into anguished fear by the final moments. I have a memory of him leaning forward during the countdown, at an almost impossible angle.

I'll get the CD. If you aren't going to be able to see the production, don't lose too much sleep over it.

Here's a link to the Met Website, where you can see a trailer that makes the production look a lot better than it is:

http://www.metoperafamily.org/metupload/video/Atomic/hd.html

2008-10-21T10:55:00.003-04:00

W.

Sympathy for the Dubya

Oliver Stone's film W settles, in many ways, for a pretty easy depiction of W the man as Misunderstood Black Sheep who Just Wants Daddy To Love Him. This choice on Stone's part lets both W the film and W the man off the hook pretty thoroughly, and I simply don't understand the reasoning behind it. Stone's NIXON numbered Nixon's every nerve, sparing no one and nothing, showing me the shivering guilty little boy behind the permanent five o'clock shadow, and on some level it worked because it was apparently pretty well true. NIXON the movie managed to explain Nixon the man without excusing him, which can't be said of W the movie.

It has to be said, though, that NIXON the movie had a richer subject than W. the movie. Nixon's insane drive for power at all costs made for some fine drama, which W's bumbling fratboy who smirks his way to the top can't come close to approaching. There's nothing in W, for instance, to match the great shouting match between Joan Allen's Pat Nixon and Anthony Hopkins' frantic Dick. I'm tempted to say something about lesser actors for lesser Presidents, but there's more to it than that.

The most consistent attitude Stone takes toward W the man is bemused tolerant sympathy for Poor Lil' Ol' W. We also get W the Cunning Politician, sitting on a park bench rehearsing talking points with Karl Rove, and W the Zealous Convert declaring his politically convenient Christianity, and W the Clueless Boob refusing pecan pie because he's given up sweets in solidarity with the troops. There's some nice mean stuff in there, to be sure, but the edge is continually dulled by the constant return to W the Unloved Manchild. And Stone doesn't even bring up W's controversial and probably non-existent army career, the stolen 2000 election, or the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, issues that might more seriously lessen the sympathy Stone keeps whipping up.

Stone does manage a couple of odd moments. There's a dream sequence toward the end, set in the Oval Office. Bush Sr. is taunting W, they eventually come to blows, and W screams "Get out of my head!" and wakes up in a sweat. At first glance the scene is an embarassment, a film-student cliché, but on second thought it seems kind of appropriate for W to have such a pathetically obvious dream, one that any reasonably sentient being would be able to decode. I don't think Stone meant it as a satiric comment on W the man, but there's something oddly telling about it. The cry to "get out of my head" sticks out, because the film has never really gotten inside W's head in any meaningful way. Stone seems content to recycle the old stories without doing much with them, settling for some easy pop-psych cliches, of which this dream is the best and clearest example.

There's a second set of dreams or fantasies running through the film, more ambiguous and troubling. Every so often Stone cuts to W in an empty sports stadium, listening to cheers coming from absent crowds. There's something genuinely eerie about it, as opposed to the blatant obviousness of the Oval Office dream, a hint of the solitude that will in all likelihood envelope our man W when he's out of office and the crowds have moved on. In the final moments of the film, there's a loud crack from a ball hitting a bat. W. goes out to catch the ball, which never comes. The film's final shot is a closeup of W waiting for the ball, and waiting, and waiting…

I was reminded of the final moments of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, the last shot of Lawrence behind a dirty windshield, inscrutable as the film fades to black. Stone might have been trying for something similar here, but it doesn't really work with the film as it stands. With W the man, there can be no ambiguity. To paraphrase W himself, you're either with him, or against him. The fact that there has been no significant outcry from the Bush Administration should tell you how they feel about it.

2008-10-09T11:19:00.002-04:00

A RADIOHEAD VIDEO

I've been listening to Radiohead a lot lately. I like this video. The song is entitled RECKONER, and it is from their album IN RAINBOWS.

Find more videos like this on w.a.s.t.e. central

2008-09-18T12:15:00.004-04:00

HOBSON’S CHOICE and THE SOUND BARRIER

I saw two early films by David Lean last night. A neglected masterpiece in HOBSON’S CHOICE, and a justly neglected disasterpiece in THE SOUND BARRIER.

Charles Laughton shows off his comic chops in David Lean’s film of HOBSON’S CHOICE. He overplays, he underplays, he smiles frowns grimaces and walks into walls. It is a delicious performance in a delicious movie, one that I love almost every moment of.

Laughton’s Hobson, like a comic Lear, is having a rough time of it. His three daughters do most of the work in the bootmaker’s shop he owns, and there are mutinous rumblings. The two youngest daughters are entertaining thoughts of marrying local young men, and the eldest daughter Maggie (who is really the brains of the enterprise) is thinking that she needs some kind of life of her own. In a fit of pique, Hobson refuses to bestow dowries on the two marriage minded daughters. Maggie, bristling at Hobson’s characterization of her as an old maid, embarks on a briskly businesslike sort-of romance with the shop’s bootmaker, one Willy Mossop. And the fun begins.

The comedy is well-played for the most part, with a couple of alcoholic visions for Laughton and an extended Chaplinesque bit for John Mills’ Mossop being the only drags on the film. Maggie’s taking up of Mossop moves from being a mostly business proposition into one of the loveliest depictions of a loving relationship I can think of. These two are nuts about each other, and it is all done with great taste and no sentimentality at all. A particular shout out has to go to Brenda de Banzie, who is able to show both the strength to stand up to Charles Laughton’s thunderstorms and the tenderness to get Mills’ confidence going.

I’d been looking forward to THE SPEED BARRIER, and was deeply disappointed in it. The screenplay by Terrence Rattigan is a batch of cliches, and it would take better actors than Ann Todd and Nigel Patrick make it live onscreen. Ralph Richardson seems frankly lost as an apparently heartless industrialist who seems to have no problem sending young pilots to what might be their deaths in his quest to Break The Sound Barrier. Only Denholm Elliott, an impossibly young and attractive Denholm Elliott, manages to transcend his character’s blatantly cliched role as a Doomed Mis-Understood Youth.

The filmmaking is good enough, I guess. There are some well done aerial sequences, and a couple of really tense sequences. Lean’s camera and editing make the airplanes soar, but the actors are resolutely earthbound. There's nowhere the delight in filmmaking that characterizes Lean's best work, way too much of it is simply by the numbers. It is no shame to say that it isn't in the standard of Lean’s earlier GREAT EXPECTATIONS and BRIEF ENCOUNTER, to say nothing of HOBSON’S CHOICE which followed two years later. Nobody makes a masterpiece every time out, that's only fair. But in THE SOUND BARRIER Lean seems to be coasting, and it is not a pretty sight. It could have been made by any studio director for hire, which is about the worst thing I can think of to say about a film by David Lean.

Let it stay in the vaults where it belongs. Only the devout Lean completists need see it. And even they might want to reconsider.

2008-09-15T16:44:00.005-04:00

RIGIDLY DEFINED AREAS OF DOUBT AND UNCERTAINTY

David Foster Wallace, the author of the novels INFINITE JEST and THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM, as well as assorted story and essay collections, committed suicide over the weekend. I am just plain devastated. I’m not one to get too bummed out by the passing of people I’ve never met, but this one is really hitting me bad.

I can’t claim to be a total Wallace groupie. I’ve found several of his short stories to be nearly impenetrable, and one of his essays, entitled HOST about the talk-radio industry is, to me at least, simply unreadable: way too many typographic gimmicks and text boxes and footnotes that are supposed to mimic the tortured thought processes of a listener in a world full of media input but only get too much in the way. Another full-length work about the mathematician Georg Cantor is simply beyond my sphere of interest, and his first novel THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM really doesn’t hold up well at all on a second reading.

At his best though, in INFINITE JEST and assorted stories and essays like the immortal A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN, Wallace is a joy to read, smart and complex without being forbidding. His work made me glad I took the time to learn to read. His most accessible stuff, like A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING, shows a terribly intelligent and educated man, definitely more educated and brilliant than you or me or anyone we know, who is engagingly self-conscious about it to the point of embarassment. As brilliant as he is, he never seems very comfortable in his skin (I doubt this was affectation: he didn’t seem comfortable in his skin on the occasions I saw him read from his work) and this lack of snobbery can lighten what would otherwise be tiresomely high-minded: his description of his activities on 9/11 in a piece entitled THE VIEW FROM MRS. THOMPSON’S never condescends to the midwestern housewives etc. he is surrounded by. He’s not above the occasional grudge, though, see his annoyance with “poor pathetic Duane” in the same piece.

But there’s that INFINITE JEST behemoth, which I’ve plowed through 4 times and which was already on my radar for another reading later this year. I remember when it was first published, I found a display on a table at Barnes & Noble. The blurb was interesting, the book was attractive, I was thinking well should I or shouldn’t I, the last thing I ever really need is more books, especially big new books by authors I hadn’t really heard of, my home was and is a vast pile of books purchased that all too often sit there unread. As I stood there debating whether or not to get it, three separate people walked in off the street, came right up to the display of JEST, picked up copies and went straight to the cash register. Well okay, universe, I thought, I can take a hint, and I went ahead and bought the thing, making a mental note that I’d start it immediately and give it a serious shot, that it wouldn’t sit gathering dust until I’d really read a big enough chunk of it.

And within a few pages I was hooked, there was that tingling feeling that I’d really found something amazing. The book’s difficulties are well known by now, and I don’t just mean the footnotes and over-complex sentences. Wallace plays a lot of games with the chronology, it can often be too difficult to keep your bearings. I finished the book without a real idea of what the hell had been going on, but I knew that I had enjoyed almost all of it. I felt sure that there was a key somewhere, some little bit of information that I’d missed that would make it all come together, and I couldn’t wait to read it again, which I did the minute it came out in paperback about a year later.

And I found that I hadn’t really missed as much as I’d thought. There’s a lot of information that Wallace simply withholds, about a year’s worth of information about the lives of the characters in general and the main character in particular. I think Wallace plays fair, though. You shouldn’t turn the last page of INFINITE JEST feeling surprised that he doesn’t really tie up the assorted plot-threads into a neat and tidily Dickensian package. That particular penny should drop well before the final third of the novel starts. What matters is the ride itself, and it is an amazing ride, vastly entertaining and often hilariously funny. Yeah, there are some head-scratching questions remaining at the end of the book, but they are what Douglas Adams calls “rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.”

And that’s probably what we’re going to be left with, as far as answers to questions about his death are concerned. What more can I say? I’ll miss the hell out of a guy I never met.

2008-09-10T09:55:00.003-04:00

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS ROSCOE?

Uh, yeah, sorry about the lack of postings, for you three or four who still bother to check this page out. There hasn't been a lot going on, the summer has been dry as dust movie-wise and theatre-wise.

Things will be picking up soon. I just got a ticket to see John Adams' new opera, DOCTOR ATOMIC, at the Metropolitan Opera. I've been a fan of Adams' work for years and years, and try not to let a new work go by unseen/heard.

We'll also be seeing a revival of David Mamet's SPEED-THE-PLOW, starring the delectable little sexmonkey Jeremy Piven and the dreamy Raul Esparza, and a revival of a play by my favorite playwright Martin Mcdonagh, THE CRIPPLE OF INISHMAAN, to say nothing of Kristin Scott Thomas and Peter Sarsgaard in THE SEAGULL and John Lithgow and Dianne Wiest and the really just appallingly beautiful Patrick Wilson in ALL MY SONS. Add to that a David Lean retrospective and brand spanking new restored prints of THE GODFATHER and THE GODFATHER PART II, playing at Film Forum, and it is looking like a busy September/October.

I'll keep you posted.

MmmmmmJeremy Pivenmmmmmmmmmmm.

2008-07-19T20:53:00.003-04:00

THE DARK KNIGHT

“Do I look like a man with a plan?”

This film very definitely has a plan. A big plan. It wants to be taken Very Very Seriously Indeed. THE DARK KNIGHT is a follow up to BATMAN BEGINS, Christopher Nolan’s reboot of the franchise that had previously been destroyed by Joel Shumacher’s appalling entries, BATMAN FOREVER and BATMAN AND ROBIN, the films that became notorious for adding nipples to the batsuit. Nolan’s chief contribution to the series is a labored High Moral Importance, as Batman/Bruce Wayne struggles, oh so mightily, to live up to his father’s memory and banish crime from Gotham City. BATMAN BEGINS had a lot of nonsense about an assassin squad known as the League Of Shadows and some nattering about history and the decline of the west, but mostly the film was an excuse for bludgeoning an audience senseless, delivering brutal violence while shaking a finger in your face for enjoying it. It set a bold standard for sheer self-righteousness, even muscling in a reference to one of Bruce Wayne’s ancestors having been involved in the Underground Railroad. It didn’t even deliver an interesting villain, just Liam Neeson spouting mutilated Lucasisms about how you must become fear to overcome fear. All in all, there’s more fun in Auschwitz footage.

THE DARK KNIGHT doesn’t exactly lighten the tone, the occasional daylight scene notwithstanding. The story is terribly busy, too busy. Batman has been cleaning up the organized crime in Gotham City, and the Mob is getting unhappy. The Joker offers to lend the mob a hand. Okay, but there’s a lot of other stuff involving District Attorney Harvey Dent, some Mafia High Finance and a wicked accountant who knows where the money is buried and it clunks and thuds along, never more pointlessly than during a completely expendable sidetrip to Hong Kong. There’s a girl in there too, Maggie Gyllenaal taking over for the chick from the previous one, but basically, you just sit there waiting for more of the Joker.

I loved Heath Ledger’s Joker. He’s very funny and very shocking, going for an unbridled sadism that is unique in this kind of film, where villains are all too often too coy to scare, much less perform lethal sleight of hand with pencils. This Joker is the real thing straight out of nightmareland. It’s an oversize performance, one that manages somehow to match the oversize pretensions of the rest of the film. He's the driving life force of the movie, the pulse and energy of the film much more so than all the stunts and CGI. All the explosions and gimmicks never once impress as much as the sight of the Joker standing in the middle of a Gotham City street daring Batman to run him down, knowing he won't. He's even got a wonderful moment leaning out of a car window in the early light, enjoying the wind in his green greasy hair, a la Fredric March's Mr. Hyde ecstatically drinking falling raindrops. Ledger is also, by the way, the only actor who manages to put over the overt speechifying that mars so much of the rest of the film. When the Joker monologues on his ideas of chaos, he speaks with a demented conviction that poor Michael Caine’s ceaseless pathetic prattling about What Batman Means can’t come near. Gary Oldman and Aaron Eckhart manage to make something of their roles, which is more than can be said for Morgan Freeman and Caine, neither of whom have broken a sweat in years: their performances are strictly by the numbers and for the paycheck.

Someone should alert the authorities about the block of wood passing itself off as Christian Bale, getting roles and collecting paychecks. Yeah, I know, Batman/Bruce is almost inevitably played as a stiff. Sometimes for laughs, as Adam West’s hilariously pompous goodytwoshoes, or as Psychologically Damaged Goods by Michael Keaton. But no one approaches Christian Bale’s performance for sheer inertness. He just sits there and broods, or stands there and broods, or broods there and broods. Boy does he brood. Brood brood brood. Brood Bruce, brood. I found it impossible to do anything other than root for the Joker, who at least shows some signs of life. This lack of energy on Bale's part, and the nailing home of each and every Serious Point, are the least welcome holdovers from the first film.

THE DARK KNIGHT does go to some lengths to try to show us that there is after all something in Gotham worth saving. BATMAN BEGINS’ Gotham was a charnel house, a vision of urban hell akin to those in BLADE RUNNER and SEVEN, and it is hard to imagine why anyone would want to save it from the Joker’s chaotic demolition performance pieces much less actually live there. This at least partially explains the glimmers of hope that are shoe-horned into the plot, some bits of faith in simple human decency that were completely missing from DARK KNIGHT’s Bleak Chic prequel.

I can’t say I liked the film very much, except as a vehicle for Ledger’s Joker. I think I’ve finally outgrown this Batman stuff, except for Burton’s BATMAN RETURNS, to me still the only Batman film worth seeing, to watch Michelle Pfeiffer deliver probably the greatest performance by an actress in 90s Hollywood Cinema. It never gets stale, unlike the strained seriousness of Nolan’s movies, which fade from the memory almost immediately. They can do the inevitable follow up to THE DARK KNIGHT without me. Unless of course, they find something really interesting to do with Catwoman. Ha. Yeah, right. Not with this joyless batch of filmmakers.

2008-07-16T09:50:00.004-04:00

MAMMA MIA!

A Supposedly Fun Film I'll Never See Again

MAMMA MIA is a musical play that takes the songs of ABBA and plugs them into a story line. Simple enough, right? The story isn't much: a Girl lives on a Greek Island with her Mother. The Girl wants to marry her Shirtless Boyfriend, but wants her Father to attend the wedding. She doesn't know who her Father is, because her Mother isn't entirely sure who the Father was. So the Girl, unbeknownst to her Mother, sends invitations to the three most likely candidates, and FUN ensues. That's the plan, anyway. On Broadway, a certain degree of FUN did ensue. The show was mostly charming, it didn't take itself too terribly seriously (one poor actor had to sing ABBA's song SOS as if it was a serious relationship song and came off looking rather foolish) but hey it was over mostly painlessly. I didn't want to hunt down and kill everyone associated with it. And compared with others that have come since, like GOOD VIBRATIONS, MAMMA MIA comes off like PRIVATE LIVES.

So now there's a movie, with Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Stellan Skarsgard. A really good cast, by any standard. So what goes wrong?

The material is so incredibly feather light that everybody seems to work harder than they've ever worked before to keep it light. The vastly over-qualified cast seems so afraid of coming off as too good for the movie that they all over compensate: they play the FUN with a seriousness that quashes the fun entirely, and the SERIOUS moments are played with a level of honesty that the material just can't bear. The fun-induced panic that hovers around Meryl Streep is particularly oppressive: America's Dowager Actress Goddess lays it on like a CEO at an office picnic glad-handing the janitors. She hasn't worked this hard since SOPHIE'S CHOICE. And nobody else fares any better: the usually magnificent Julie Walters at one point steps into a small dinghy, and of course falls off into the water, but the process by which she loses her balance and falls in is so blatant and overdone that any slight amusement I might feel is quickly stifled. It becomes kind of a metaphor for the entire film: what should be effortless as falling off a boat becomes labored and obvious, too much damn work.

I could go on about the disparity between the obvious location shooting and the obviously studio-shot scenes, and Pierce Brosnan's really appalling attempts at singing (a male Marni Nixon was direly needed here). But I won't bother. I feel like I'm kicking a puppy here. An obnoxiously overcute puppy.

2008-07-14T12:32:00.001-04:00

IN BRUGES

"If I was retarded and grew up on a farm, it would impress me. But I wasn't, and it doesn't."

I saw a movie many years ago a first film that I thought showed great promise, about a group of criminals preparing to execute a heist. It was a fascinating movie, filled with very fine acting, a great twisty story, and a fine bitter aftertaste: it really felt like it was on to something about the real darkness lurking in the crime film genre. The movie was called RESERVOIR DOGS, and I couldn't wait to see what the director/writer would do next. Since then, of course, Quentin Tarantino hasn't really progressed: the genuine darkness of DOGS was replaced with the smirking hipness of PULP FICTION and the flat-out silliness of the KILL BILL diptych. Crime films in general have taken a decided turn for the worse post-PULP FICTION, all hip slick attitude and narrative gamesmanship: it took Steven Soderbergh to restore humanity to the mix with OUT OF SIGHT, a movie that seems to have slipped from the general radar.

Tarantino only comes to my mind these days when I see the work of Martin McDonagh, an Irish playwright and now filmmaker whose work I am becoming helplessly addicted to. McDonagh's play THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE is shocking and hilarious and vastly entertaining on the subject of the sheer stupidity of violence and the violent, exactly the kind of work I was expecting from the Tarantino of RESERVOIR DOGS. I saw LIEUTENANT twice on Broadway and started kicking myself for having missed his earlier work like THE PILLOWMAN. When I heard McDonagh was making a feature film, I started counting the days.

And it was worth the wait. Martin McDonagh's IN BRUGES is a fascinating little movie that managed to slip through the cracks when it was released earlier this year. It tells the story of two hitmen played by Brendan Gleason and Colin Farrell who are on holiday in Bruges. Gleason wants to sightsee, and Farrell wants to do anything but. There's a good deal of very entertaining bickering, Gleason and Farrell playing beatifully off of each other. It gradually surfaces that Farrell is dealing with a significant burden of guilt over a hit that went hideously wrong. It isn't long before a phone call comes from their boss (played by Ralph Fiennes with all the vicious madness that is so sorely lacking in his Voldemort) with some instructions. There's some fun involving a film being shot on location, too.

A reasonably alert audience member could probably forecast a good deal of what comes after, but McDonagh keeps the story lively and the talk livelier. There's a certain leisure to the storytelling that might keep folks wondering what the hell is going on, but this isn't a tightly constructed heist flick. These guys are on vacation, they're taking stock of their lives and aren't exactly happy with what they find. The action might slow down a bit here and there, but it does so in the interest of good old fashioned character development, in showing me who these people are and why they are doing what they are doing. I found it irresistible and even moving.

A cool little movie. I can't wait for McDonagh's next work. I'm counting, starting now.

2008-06-05T12:32:00.004-04:00

SEX AND THE CITY -- THE MOVIE

Carrie Bradshaw's opening narration in SEX AND THE CITY tells us that women come to New York in search of two things: labels (as in designer) and love. In that order. When I heard that narration, I knew pretty much what I was in for. Evidently the rampant psychotic greed that typified Carrie's adventures was going to be very much front and center. And I wasn't wrong: the labels came fast and furious and faster and furiouser.

What love there is in the film is largely distributed among the four women and their intimate relationships with each other, their bank accounts, their closets, their favorite department stores, their favorite designers, and their dogs, not necessarily in that order. There are some men in there too, but they are completely beside the point. Big and Carrie finally decide to get married, almost as an afterthought after a scene of apartment hunting that nets Carrie her dream apartment (paid for, of course, by Big). The impending nuptials prompts a Nero-esque orgy of wedding dress fittings and preparations that would have shamed Malcolm Forbes. Big feels rather understandably left out of the whole deal, and winds up bolting. Carrie must, with her friends' help, put the pieces of her life back together.

That's the main set up for the film, and it is Carrie's story, after all. As far as the supporting characters go, more questions are raised than are answered, and it gets very frustrating. There's nothing like equal time spent on the lives of the other three characters, and nothing like equal time given to their men, who don't register at all. Samantha's partner Smith has gone from being a hunk with a soul in the series to a mysteriously chilly cipher in the film. Charlotte's husband Harry is only shown so that we can all marvel at how wonderful he is. Miranda's husband Steve fares a bit better, but the only one of the men to get anywhere near the screen time that the ladies get is Carrie's partner Big, evidently named for the really astonishingly huge size of his financial portfolio.

Ultimately, Steve and Miranda's relationship is the only relationship in the film that seems to have any resemblance to life as it is lived by more than one percent of the human population since the beginning of time. It is also the most frustrating, because I kept wanting to know more about what had gone wrong with them, and the motives behind their behavior. But no, this isn't that kind of a movie. The movie sacrifices character development for fashion shows. On at least three occasions, the movie screeches to a halt for a display of some of the ugliest clothing ever, outfits that would only make sense worn by Divine in some abandoned Fellini film. But not as tasteful.

I can't help feeling that way too many of the problems faced by these characters could have been headed off at the pass simply if the people involved ACTED LIKE ADULTS. Yeah, yeah, the show is a sitcom/fairytale, and the movie follows that tradition, but both show and film keep pretending to be more than that, raising some fairly serious issues about relationships while resolutely ignoring others, and it never seems to be aware of the paradox. It wants to be a fabulous frothy cocktail of shopping and sexy punny talk AND a serious comic examination of the lives of women in the Big City. The balance between the triviality of a lot of their pursuits (cosmos and bars and $550 shoes, oh my) and the seriousness of their relationship issues is a precarious one. And occasionally the magic in the series worked. Miranda's often confused feelings for Steve, Samantha's growing attachment to Smith, and Charlotte's attempts to get pregnant were generally very interestingly and movingly handled. But it wasn't long before the scales would tilt back to the trivial: another dress, more shoes, another shopping spree...

My reaction clearly isn't typical. I just have a hard time relating significantly to the lives of people who spend $300 on a single throw pillow. A pillow, I might add, that winds up as a sex partner for a dog that doesn't realize she's been neutered, which seems like something of a metaphor for at least one of the female lead characters. At least Jennifer Saunders' ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS made a point of the thick-headedness of its heroine who steadfastly refuses to learn anything at all, while SATC, in general, wants us to applaud and admire these women who so often behave so badly while dressing so fabulously.

To be fair, the film seems to address some of the uglier issues of the series. Carrie's pathological self-centeredness, for example: it is to her credit that she finally does recognize her own selfishness regarding the whole outlandish wedding fiasco. But like all of the lessons learned by these characters, it vanishes in a shrieking orgy of self-congratulation and a dinner at a surprisingly unfabulous restaurant near City Hall, the only time I can think of where all of the characters appear onscreen together. The narration even tells us that we have to look past the labels to find the love, in what we're supposed to see as a reversal of the opening line. That little message is flatly contradicted by the film's final moments: the ladies are shown, without their men, disappearing into a fabulous nightclub, velvet rope lifted to accommodate their fabulousness, all attired in clothes so resolutely hideous that they can only be designer originals.

2008-05-28T12:14:00.002-04:00

IRON MAN

"Let's be honest, this is not the worst thing you've caught me doing."

Tony Stark, played with a hip insouciance by Robert Downey Jr., is a multibillionaire playboy weapons manufacturer industrialist. When he is captured by the very renegades his weapons are being used against, he gets some first hand realization of the reality of what his empire is built upon (i.e., violence death horror). He manages to escape his captors using a handbuilt suit of armor, and upon his return to CA decides to make some amends by streamlining the suit and becoming IRON MAN, defender and all that.

IRON MAN the movie manages the unique feat of being an entertaining comic book movie that doesn't suffer from Tortured Hero Syndrome. Yeah, IRON MAN's Tony Stark goes through some ugly times and all, but he isn't burdened with the Survivor Guilt and High Moral Quandaries of BATMAN's Brooding Bruce Wayne or SPIDERMAN Self-Pitying Peter Parker. Director Jon Favreau brings a light touch to the proceedings that is sorely missing from franchise films in general and the current incarnation of BATMAN in particular. We're not talking Lubitsch here, by any means, but the assorted mishaps attending Stark's development and use of the Iron Man outfit, and Jude Law's cool voice issuing from the improbably advanced computer aiding him in the process are genuinely amusing in a way that nothing in recent action franchise movies have been.

Good fun, for the most part.

2008-04-29T09:31:00.003-04:00

SATAN'S MULTIPLEX

MADEA'S FAMILY REUNION

Yes. I saw it.

MADEA'S FAMILY REUNION is one in a series of films by Tyler Perry. Perry made his name on the so-called chitlin circuit, producing and directing and starring in touring plays targeted at African American audiences. If you live in a big city you've probably seen TV ads for some of them, things like BEAUTY PARLOR, stuff like that. Perry's films have been wildly successful with African American audiences, while getting a good deal of contempt from just about everybody else. When I mentioned that I had seen the film, nobody could quite believe that I had actually bothered with it. (Full disclosure: it was a beautiful Saturday, I was in a shitty mood at not being able to think of anything to do but stay at home and watch TV, and lo and behold MADEA'S FAMILY REUNION appeared on cable.)

And yeah, it is a pretty lousy movie. The best that can be said is that Perry has surrounded himself with competent staff. The movie is slickly produced, certainly better than a lot of other films I can think of, and Perry has at least mastered the apparently difficult art of putting the camera where it needs to be so that we can see what needs to be seen. But his sheer competence (or probably more accurately, the sheer competence of his production crew) can't disguise the fact that the film is a predictable batch of dramatic family drama moments, easy enlightenment cliches, snappy one-liners, hand-on-hip payback moments, and racial empowerment platitudes.

For all the huffing and puffing and laughing and weeping and fighting and payback and abuse and one-liners, there isn't a single moment of recognizable messy humanity in the entire film. Everybody's got perfect teeth, everybody dresses perfectly and is always gorgeously made up, the eligible males are all dazzlingly handsome and conspicuously muscular, the elegible women are ravishing and slim. The characters are just barely one-dimensional, but with some rather devastating backstories that hint that something interesting could have been made of the people and film in the right hands.

The story, such as it is, involves two sisters. One is a Single Mother who is being pursued by Mr. Right and the other a Beauty being pushed by her Monstrous Social-Climbing Mother into a clearly ill-advised marriage to Mr. Wrong, a really abusive but fabulously wealthy and very handsome control freak. The Monstrous Mother is really monstrous, more than just a social climber. It is revealed that, years before the film begins, she was so desperate for comfort and security for herself and her daughters that she actually allowed a specific ex-Man In Her Life to have sexual relations with one of her daughters.

Oy, the drama. The relationship between the two sisters and their mother could have been elevated into something really powerful and interesting, in the hands of a talented writer/director. Unfortunately, Perry goes for the quick and easy Big Scenes For Actors kind of thing. Will Single Mom put aside her past emotional injuries and recognize Mr. Right for the Embodiment of Black Masculine Perfection that he all too clearly is? Will Beauty come to her senses and dump the Control Freak and tell off Monstrous Mom? Will Monstrous Mom reveal exactly why she is so Monstrous? Will everybody throw off the shackles of past oppression and be EMPOWERED? Will there be payback for all?

What the hell do you think?

Perry plays Madea, who is apparently related to the sisters and their mother somehow. She's a larger than life creation, a no-nonsense Gramma who dispenses Folksy Wisdom. When that doesn't work, when someone foolishly answers back or doesn't heed her, she quickly resorts to Ass Whupping. She's every elderly woman from your childhood who seemed to hold you to unhuman standards of behavior while threatening you with medieval torture if you disobeyed She's like Oprah crossed with Mike Tyson. When she isn't intimidating her singularly unimpressed Brother Man (also played by Perry) or having heart to hearts with the two sisters in her kitchen, Madea is helping a poor foster child she finds herself stuck with as punishment for breaking house arrest. No, really, that's what happens.

Yes, there's actually a Family Reunion, where more pro-family platitudes are served up, most emphatically by Maya Angelou and Cicely Tyson (God in heaven, Cicely Tyson!!) as matriarchs who twinkle for all they are worth as they Approve of the Good Chirren (the ones getting married and who are a credit to their families and their race) and frown and shake their heads and go "mmm mmm mmm!" as they Disapprove of the Bad Chirren (the ones who gamble and disobey and talk on the phone even after having been instructed not to). It gets really choking when Ms. Angelou even gets to deliver one of her poems at the film's climax. It goes something like this:

I tell you things you know already.
I tell them to you repeatedly.
I tell them to you in exagerratedly clear dic-tion.
I will repeat myself.
I will vary my emphasis to make sure my message gets across.
I will do it like this:
I will repeat myself.
I WILL repeat myself.
I will REPEAT myself.
I will repeat MYSELF.
Now that I have repeated myself:
Live happily ever after.
Live HAPPILY ever after.

And so on. My diabetic friends are warned to leave the room when she's onscreen.

There are plenty of other howlers. Mr. Right takes Single Mom to what seems to be some sort of open mike jazz/poetry/painting nightclub. He signs them up to perform, and she recites a poem entitled The Courage To Love. No, really, she does, with full jazz trio accompaniment, before an appreciative audience, while Mr. Right creates a spontaneous painting of her. I'm not making this up.

The actors generally do their very considerable best to put the cliches over. But they're mostly defeated by the sheer vapidity of the script. The big showdown between the sisters and their mother is particularly annoying, lots of tear-brimming eyes and tremblingly intense voices, the cliched acting matching the cliched writing. Here's one memorable bit of dialogue:

Single Mom (thinking that Mr. Right just wants her for sex): Every man comes around for something.
Mr. Right (exhibiting pure Christian manly virtue and decency): Some men come to restore.

Sometimes they're defeated by the apparent lack of a script: Madea's monologue advising Beauty to whup Mr. Wrong's abusive ass with a pot of grits comes off as improvised, and not well improvised. Tyler Perry is no Richard Pryor.

There are also some icky moments. One scene begins with Madea's Brother Man deeply moved while watching a scene from GOOD TIMES showing an abused young girl (played by pre-nosejob Janet Jackson) begging her mother not to burn her with an iron. His eyes fill with tears and he wonders aloud why anyone would treat chirren like dat. Shortly thereafter Brother Man is watching Madea putting down her own iron and whupping the foster daugher's ass for cutting school. The scene feels like an answer to possible criticism about Madea's gleeful readiness to resort to violence (she corrects rather than abuses, get it?) but what am I to make of Brother Man's getting all excited at the punishment, muttering strangely sexual things about something shaking like jello?

I guess this is in keeping with the air of cluelessness about the whole enterprise, including that title. MADEA'S FAMILY REUNION. Even spelled as it is, the name Madea carries some mythic associations about which Tyler Perry seems utterly ignorant. Maybe a second draft of the script was in order, one that addressed the discrepancy between the ceaseless platitudes about the Importance of FAMILY versus the fact that everyone's problems come from that same FAMILY that we're continually supposed to be running to.

2008-04-08T12:10:00.000-04:00

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

"Do you fear me, Rochefort?"
"Yes, Eminence. I fear you. I also...hate you."
"I love you, my son, even when you fail."

Charlton Heston died over the weekend. I have surprisingly mixed feelings about him. Yeah, his politics were generally repulsive, we know this. Yeah, he could suck big time. But we seem to owe him big time for Orson Welles' being allowed to direct the masterful TOUCH OF EVIL.

There is one Heston performance I like. I think he's splendid as Cardinal Richelieu in Richard Lester's films based on Dumas' THE THREE MUSKETEERS. His Cardinal is smart and wicked, running an entire nation at war while organizing plots to discredit the Queen of France. There is even one single instance, all the way at the very end of THE FOUR MUSKETEERS, where Heston displays something like a sense of humor. His recognition that he has been out-maneuvered, and a final little "go away, boy" dismissal gesture he makes towards D'Artagnan, are the most human moments I ever saw him deliver as an actor. Richard Lester did what no other director, not even Orson Welles or William Wyler, could do: he got Heston to deliver a sustained performance of intelligence and humor that lives onscreen.

Yeah, he could be as bad as everyone says he is. He seems to have been very willing to settle for the easiest, simplest solutions. When he plays noble, he plays NOBLE. When he plays angry, he plays ANGRY. When he plays happy, he plays HAPPY. And that's about it. He's the King Of One-Note Sincerity.

This can be seen most clearly in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, the great mad camp classic from Cecil B. DeMille. Surrounded by actors like Yul Brynner and Edward G. Robinson having a wonderful time chewing the scenery, camping up a storm, and apparently competing to see who can best get away with the outrageous overheated dialogue, Heston alone plays it not just straight but STRAIGHT. Robinson's Slimy Little Traitor and Brynner's Hunky Pagan Pharoah Ramses, for example, manage to hit something real and recognizably human for all their cartoonishness. Heston's Moses just can't compete: there's no joy or even basic humanity in him, either as a character or as a performance. Moses' reaction to Ramses' final capitulation, a loud solemn prayer of thanksgiving to the Eternal God, is written and played in such a way as to make you want an 11th Commandment about winning gracefully.

I almost forgive all the solemnity and High Authority when Heston parts the Red Sea. Not God, not the John P. Fulton's special effects men. Heston does it. The Red Sea parts because he damn well tells it to. I can't imagine it doing otherwise.

And I'll say it: Heston doesn't entirely suck in BEN HUR, a movie I seem to be alone in finding to be more than an excuse for a chariot race. While Heston is all too often acted off the screen by the likes of Jack Hawkins or the sublime Hugh Griffith, there are occasional arresting little moments of humanity that surprise. His amusement at Hugh Griffith's perfectly delivered joke about monogamy being "ungenerous" seems genuine and unplanned, a rarity for Heston. This may have been the result of working with William Wyler instead of De Mille, of course. There's a lot of gossip about the alleged "gay subtext" that uncredited script doctor Gore Vidal claims to have added to the relationship between Heston's Ben Hur and Stephen Boyd's Messala, which apparently was kept secret from Heston because he wouldn't have been able to handle it. It certainly seems that Boyd is playing that thwarted romantic vibe for all it is worth, while Heston settles for basic tears-in-the-blue-eyes joy at seeing a dear childhood friend. And there it is: no one would ever accuse Heston of adding an extra level or playing a subtext. He just couldn't handle it.

2008-03-18T15:32:00.005-04:00

ANTHONY MINGHELLA R.I.P.

So he’s gone. The director of some of the worst crap ever to soil the big screen: I understand his stage work was well-received, but then a monumental turd like THE ENGLISH PATIENT won 9 Oscars. I will never forget or forgive the time I wasted writhing through PATIENT and the unspeakable COLD MOUNTAIN. THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY at least has some moments largely involving the glories of Jude Law. But I cannot and will not forget that RIPLEY serves to reinforce more negative gayness-as-misery stereotypes than any film in my experience, transforming Patricia Highsmith’s darkly witty novel into a bloated two and a half hour Guilt Trip about a Fag Who Kills The Boys He Loves. It makes BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN look like THE BIRDCAGE. Although I can’t complain too loudly about a movie where Philip Seymour Hoffman gets his head bashed in.

Bye bye Tony. In purgatory you’ll be watching some good films (NOTORIOUS, THE GENERAL, SHOP AROUND THE CORNER, THE GODFATHER I and II) and realizing what crap your film work really is.

R.I.P. and all that. Better luck next life.

2008-03-18T12:45:00.001-04:00

MICHAEL CLAYTON

"Do I look like I'm negotiating?"

Watched it on DVD last night. Hadn’t had any interest in seeing it. At least now I can say that I saw all five films nominated for Best Picture Oscars this year, and Tilda Swinton’s winning performance. Otherwise it was pretty much a waste of my two hours.

The film centers on Michael Clayton, a bummed-out guy who works for a Big Old Law Firm, running around cleaning up messes, helping big clients get local representation when they’re involved in hit and runs, etc. Michael has some problems of his own: he’s a divorced dad, he has gambling problems and a bozo brother who has ruined a business that Clayton set up for him leaving Clayton holding the financial bag, and so on.

Clayton’s Big Old Law Firm is handling a Gigantic Multi-Billion Dollar lawsuit, representing a bunch of people who are suing a Big Old Chemical Company for damages having to do with a toxic pesticide. The Partner handling the Gigantic Lawsuit loses his mind, and Michael has to clean up the mess, which he soon realizes is a lot messier than he had imagined.

I’m breathing a lot more life into the film’s cliched storylines than the filmmakers manage to. It takes very nearly an hour for the two paragraphs worth of plot above to get established onscreen, believe it or not. There’s also a flashback device that feels rather like it was added post-production in an attempt to get some kind of energy into the proceedings, but winds up being counter-effective.

There’s no denying that the film overall is well-intentioned. It seems to want to transcend the legal thriller genre, to be more than just a bunch of courtroom/legalistic shenanigans, but it just doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to transcend the genre with. This is a Serious Movie, make no mistake. We get lots of sad character information about Michael Clayton, all of it grim grim grim, and nobody else seems any happier. There’s a lot of mood lighting and overcast skies and involved corporate legal jargon stuff. Even the obligatory Big Finish is muted, as Michael’s Triumph Over Corporate Evil nets him only a cab ride into an uncertain future. There’s just none of the life and energy (the entertainment value, in short) of even the most exhausted Grisham knockoff. I’m not saying I wanted shoot-outs and bizarro Tarantino dialogue, but I would have given a lot for the film to have been directed by a Sidney Lumet or a pre-OUT OF AFRICA Sidney Pollack.

The actors try their best to make all this work, with Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson being only the most recognized of the generally good cast. Even Denis O’Hare gets some good fun going as a pissed-off client, who inspires one of Clooney’s best slow burns. But without a director able to consistently keep the pacing lively and get some (metaphorical) blood flowing, MICHAEL CLAYTON is DOA.

2008-02-28T14:46:00.005-05:00

THERE WILL BE OSCARS

“I see nothing worth liking.”

Right, whatever. I can’t be surprised that this year’s Oscar telecast was the lowest rated ever. It had been so clear for so long that NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN was going to win the Big Prize that there was just no reason to watch. It certainly did continue the current Oscar tradition of honoring the Safest Picture rather than the Best Picture.

For my money, THERE WILL BE BLOOD was the best and most interesting and effective and memorable of the nominated films that I’ve seen. MICHAEL CLAYTON is the only one I haven’t seen, due largely to a long-standing allergy I have to George Clooney, way too much of whose performances seem to depend on him peering out from under those admittedly gorgeous eyebrows while he sets somebody straight about something. For the rest of my money, SWEENEY TODD was the film of the year. Tim Burton’s non-nomination as Best Director, and consequent non-win, is yet another in an apparently endless series of Irrefutable Proofs that these Oscar things are just a waste.

Worse movies than NO COUNTRY have won more awards. Of course, better movies than NO COUNTRY have won fewer. The whole fuss over the film continues to amaze me: what was the big deal? Don't get me wrong, a perfectly fine movie, easily the Coens' best film since RAISING ARIZONA, well made and acted, and with only glimmers of the stylish smartass nonsense that has made so much of the Coen Brothers work so chokingly awful over the years. I remember enjoying watching Tommy Lee Jones’ sherriff putting all the pieces together, and Javier Bardem’s performance as an apparently unstoppable hit man has really stayed with me. His final scene with Kelly McDonald as a potential victim who turns the tables on him is easily the film’s high point. Stylish but not too stylish, you could feel the Coens backing off from their usual excess in what was apparently intended as a return to the cooler style of their first film BLOOD SIMPLE but which, as with the surrealistically over-rated FARGO, ultimately comes off more as Bleak Chic.

It wasn’t long before I started to find the film's ongoing parade of carefully convoluted but not too convoluted events rather tiresome, and was ready for the end long before Tommy Lee Jones’ final Salute To His Father’s Memory. Was I really supposed to give a damn about that Llewelyn guy? And are the Coens really so shocked, shocked! to find that there is evil in the world? I think I might have shared their assumed horror if I’d seen a little more actual evil in the proceedings. I got more out of Tommy Lee Jones’ monologue about the casual murderer he sent to the chair; there seemed to be more of the abyss in that little bit of voice-over narration than in the plots that tie up the film’s running time. The fact that the evil in the film is consistently presented as being the actions of non-white non-Americans seems to have been overlooked in the rush to acclaim this movie a masterpiece, which reminds of the wild acclaim that seems to follow the films of Clint Eastwood. I have to say that I just don’t get it. I enjoyed the film well enough, I guess, but a masterpiece it just plain ain't. I don't think it has anywhere near the weight of Tim Burton's SWEENEY TODD, or the brainsmashing impact of THERE WILL BE BLOOD.

As for THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Basically, you get to sit and watch Daniel Day-Lewis hit bold new lows of human awfulness for nearly three hours, and impossibly it never gets boring. The action is lively and focused, as opposed to the Altmanathons of crisscrossing storylines and characters that director Paul Thomas Anderson has churned out before. Day-Lewis' performance as the impossibly driven Daniel Plainview is one for the ages, a harrowing picture of a man who has no loves lusts or appetites apart from the ruthless acquisition of oil properties, but who finds himself frantically trying to paper up certain emotional cracks when things don't quite go his way. There's a lot more to this performance than an extended John Huston impression. All in all, the film is a hugely ambitious, wildly exhilarating film that at first glance feels like a major statement about Greed and the costs thereof, sort of TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE without the bandits, and with Charles Foster Kane instead of Fred C. Dobbs.

But what exactly is it a major statement about? It doesn't necessarily have to be a Major Statement, I guess; it is certainly enough for it to be a beautifully executed portrait of a man so incredibly driven that he manages to destroy pretty much everything in his life, a la RAGING BULL. But there's none of the redemption that Scorsese manages to suggest in his film. BLOOD ends with a now-notorious sequence that feels somehow inevitable and tacked-on at the same time.

I can’t quite banish a certain distrust of the film. I’m concerned that I’m so dazzled by the very very high quality of the acting (not just Daniel Day-Lewis’, there isn’t a weak performance in the film) and the brilliance of the production itself that I’m missing out on larger problems that I’ll catch on to later. After all, THERE WILL BE BLOOD is the work of Paul Thomas Anderson, the Altman protégé/wannabe whose earlier films include the vile BOOGIE NIGHTS (a film that only gets more repellent with each passing year) and the epic self-indulgent compendium of Big Scenes for Actors-in-search-of-a-subject MAGNOLIA. If THERE WILL BE BLOOD is as good as I think it may be, it will be the biggest turn-around in a previously dreadful director’s work I’ve experienced since Fincher’s ZODIAC.

As for the show: I thought it was as close to ideal as we're going to get. Swifter, with none of the nonsense of irrelevant self-congratulatory montages and Chris Connelly leading in to each commercial break by telling us what we've just seen. I like seeing Robert Boyle get an honorary Oscar, and hope they keep going with honoring people behind the scenes with Lifetime Achievement awards.

And John Stewart can come back as permanent host, as far as I'm concerned.

2008-02-13T20:41:00.002-05:00

SUNDAY IN THE FRIDGE WITH GEORGE

"No life."

At one point in the chilly current British revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE, a pair of grossly conceived and tastelessly performed Stock Caricature American Tourists (complete with big fluffy creamy pastries) wonder aloud "Where's all the passion? This is supposed to be Paris." I was brought up short by the remark, as I had been wondering much the same thing myself. Whatever else there was on that stage, there was nothing in the way of passion, or even very much in the way of emotion at all.

The play is basically a pair of connected one acts. Act One centers on the painter Georges Seurat and his struggles to complete his painting SUNDAY AFTERNOON ON THE GRAND JATTE, while juggling a relationship with his model Dot. It takes place on a series of Sundays, as Georges sketches assorted people who wind up occupying places in his great work. Georges' relationship with Dot deteriorates because he can only concentrate on his work, she leaves him, and all that. Act Two centers on Georges' great grandson George, who is an artist himself and is having something of a meltdown of his own: his artworks are becoming sterile and repetitive.

As I remembered, the big problems with this show are pretty straightforward. In Act One it is perfectly plain that Georges and Dot do not belong together. The point is made over and over again that Dot will never come first with Georges, and that Georges is struggling with his feelings for Dot versus his need to work on his painting. I need to find something interesting and maybe even likable about these people if the first act is going to be anything other than a bunch of Dysfunctional Relationship Cliches. Also, the other little storylines of the assorted people in the park need to be played with some kind of energy, or they are just needless distractions. Act Two can just seem completely irrelevant except as a meditation on the difficulties facing artists today, trying to find funding, keeping work fresh and alive; you know, all those things that you just can't wait to see a Broadway musical about.

For this to work at all, you need to have really exciting people in the cast, and this revival simply does not have them. British actor Daniel Evans plays Georges Seurat like a particularly strident schoolmaster from the Harry Potter films, brisk and efficient with Teddibly Precise Enunciation; I kept expecting him to take ten points from Dot. His George in Act Two is just plain bizarre, all bright eyed and bushy tailed, like some giant over-eager chipmunk. Jenna Russell seems to have been directed to play Dot like one of the maids in MARY POPPINS: cutesy British sitcom "ooo-er guv" energy and not the barest whisper of anything even remotely resembling the slightest possible whiff of sexuality. There was not a single moment of chemistry between these two actors, and Dot's Act One pregnancy had me awaiting the arrival of Three Wise Men. And the rest of the cast, unforgivably in a supposedly major revival, fade into a blur of costumes, with only Michael Cumpsty standing out for the really first-rate Jim Broadbent impression he uses to walk through Act One.

All of this is terribly disappointing, especially to one who saw the original production which featured the sublime Bernadette Peters and such splendid actors as Dana Ivey, Nancy Opel, Charles Kimbrough, and Barbara Bryne. Even Danielle Ferland made an impression as the little girl. No one but no one in this production comes within several hundred miles of approaching the original cast. This is appalling but it must be said: I never ever thought I would compare anyone unfavorably with Mandy Patinkin.

And to make matters even worse: the orchestra for this revival has been reduced to a mere 5 musicians. What should be gorgeous is now merely tinny. And the vocals are no help, generally flat and uninspired. For my money there are few things in this world as beautiful as the great Act One closer "Sunday," but it simply didn't come together here. The singing was muddy, the lyrics were too often unintelligible, and what should have been a tear-inducing marvel was a flat combo of tableaux vivante and fancy digital projections.

As for the digital projections: they're pretty cool, yeah. The stage is basically a white box with some vaguely period French-looking design details, and through the magic of computer technology and the wonders of animation we can see Seurat's painting gradually come to life on the walls. Seurat-style rowers go by on the river, little animated dogs frolic on strategically placed canvases, things like that. It works quite well, for the most part, but it can start to get arch: at one point the real George pours a digital projection of himself a glass of champagne.

A shame, overall.

2007-12-30T17:15:00.000-05:00

SWEENEY TODD

"I've come home again."

Let me be clear. Tim Burton's film of SWEENEY TODD is magnificent. Funny, terrifying, deeply moving and deeply disgusting. I felt the way I felt when I saw RAN or TITUS or THE GODFATHER PART II or PSYCHO. I felt purged. I felt pity and terror. It is not everybody's cup of tea. It is the absolute cinematic embodiment of My Cup Of Tea. I love every single fucking frame of it.

I'd been dreading this film. I didn't know if Tim Burton had the real chops to make this film what it needs to be: a rip-snorting blood-gushing tear-wrenching High Musical Tragedy Slaughterhouse. Could Burton handle SWEENEY TODD, getting the right balance between Blood and Tears? His films tend to either really really work (EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, ED WOOD) or really really not work (BATMAN, MARS ATTACKS, PLANET OF THE APES) and sometimes both (BATMAN RETURNS, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, SLEEPY HOLLOW). SWEENEY TODD is his least compromised, most assured film to date. And it is also the single finest live action musical film made in, well, at least as long as I can remember.

Burton does what no other filmmaker of the current alleged Musical Renaissance has done: he has put the focus back on the characters, the story, and the songs. When Sweeney Todd sings the heart-rending ballad "My Friends" to his razors, Burton actually allows me to see Johnny Depp sing. And then he does something even more astonishing. He allows me to continue seeing Johnny Depp sing. And then, to cap it all off, he lets me see Johnny Depp sing with Helena Bonham Carter. Two people sing. At the same time. And you can see them both! Singing! Burton keeps the camera in tight, creating an intimacy that is quite simply lacking in the other recent musicals that have gotten so much attention. This is a film, after all, that is set in a series of small, cramped rooms: a barber shop, a pie shop, a basement bakehouse, an insane asylum rather than the series of showbiz stages, imaginary or otherwise, in CHICAGO, DREAMGIRLS, HAIRSPRAY, or PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.

Tim Burton is reminding the world of how to make a musical. There's none of the hyper-caffeinated gonzo MTVwannabe editing and incompetent framing that demolishes the sense and feeling of the songs in CHICAGO (really now, didn't that film look like the work of a blindfolded babboon?), or the fear of singing on display in DREAMGIRLS (where someone beginning to sing is a cue for a cut to a shot of the back of the singer's head) or PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (where the drapes get as much screen time as the actors), or the appalling miscasting that finally sinks HAIRSPRAY. Where these other films make the mistake of laying on the "cinematic" trappings of Attention Deficit Editing and Over-Ornate Camerawork, Burton strips it all down, creating a lean mean musical machine.

That isn't to say that the film is cinematically inert, though. There are plenty of fluorishes, including a wonderful opening credit sequence, a marvelous journey through nocturnal London, spectacularly gory throat slashings, etc. I mean, really, this is Tim Burton after all. Burton, however, knows when to go for broke, and when to back off and let me watch these people do their stuff. There are plenty of small spine-tingling pleasures, among them Sweeney's lovingly careful shaving of the area on Judge Turpin's throat that he is hoping to slash open. Just imagining what Rob Marshall would have done with a song like "Pretty Women" makes me nauseous.

Johnny Depp makes a splendid Sweeney Todd, the only actor I've seen apart from Len Cariou (the Broadway original) to capture the pain behind the rage. Helena Bonham Carter's Mrs. Lovett is a marvel, showing me a woman who grinds corpses into pie filling in one moment and whose eyes fill with tears over the fate of a young boy the very next. Alan Rickman's surprisingly dashing Judge Turpin and Timothy Spall's repellent Beadle Bamford work beautifully. Not the least of the performances comes from the young boy playing Toby, who delivers possibly the most moving "Not While I'm Around" I've ever heard. I hope this film banishes once and for all the complaint that Burton doesn't deal effectively with actors.

I could go on and on and on. I loved it. I'll leave it to you to discover the joys of the color scheme, the art direction and costume design, and all of the other elements I haven't got space to mention, because just when I get something down here a thousand other delights come flooding back to me. I can't wait to see it again. And again. And again.

2007-12-28T19:47:00.000-05:00

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT AUDIENCE-MEMBER

For years I have lived under a curse. The Bad Audience Curse. I've posted on this before. Whenever I go to the theatre or movies or any place involving mass spectation, I can always count on being surrounded by only the most annoying people. Plastic Bag Rattling Morons, Loud Talkers, Cellphone-Equipped Vermin, they all seem to seek me out. This is no fantasy. My partner has remarked, more than once, that he had never had such a problem with difficult audiences as he had when we started seeing each other. Over time I've come to mostly accept this as just part of my life, c'est la vie, hey, I wonder what I did in another life to get this curse thing.

The other night was the last straw. We had tickets to see a revival of Harold Pinter's THE HOMECOMING. Really great seats, organ-donor quality tickets. Bob and I, our good friend Scott and my brother. We settle in to our seats, the lights go down, the play begins. I gradually become aware of a very faint electronic sound, like a sustained beep that varied in frequency. It sounded like a smoke detector had gotten stuck somewhere in the building. As the play continued, the sound got gradually louder, and it became clear that it was coming from the gentleman sitting directly behind me, who was wearing a pair of those infra-red hearing device headphone things (it turned out later that the sound was feedback caused by his failure to turn off his hearing aid while using the headphones). The gentleman's wife at least once told him that the headphones were making noise, but he didn't do anything about it. He also managed to compound the electronic distraction by talking out loud, ruining one of the highlights of the play, when a woman takes a particularly symbolically loaded drink of water, by talking out loud, full blast, remarking on the similarity between the woman's behavior and his wife's family.

So there we were. Watching a play by an author famed for the importance of his SILENCES, being distracted by audience noise.

Over the years I have developed a way of dealing with the type of moron who disturbs at the theatre. I say politely but very firmly, "Excuse me, but (your plastic bags, candy wrapper, talking, etc.) is making a lot of noise. Can you please keep it quiet." At the intermission I and my friends let the gentleman know that there was a real problem. He was apologetic, got up and went to have the headphones adjusted, The lights went down, the problem seemed to have been dealt with. Then of course it started again, very faintly but gradually getting louder. The feedback continued and got more and more distracting. I turned around and asked again for him to deal with them, and it got better, and then got worse.

I was sitting there writhing, feeling like piano wire was being wrapped around my head. Finally the noise reached an unbearable level. I turned around and noticed that the old bastard had taken the headphones off, and had them in his lap. I snatched the headphones out of his hands, wrapped them in my jacket, and shoved them under my seat. The old bastard tapped me on the shoulder, offering to turn them off. I told him to just sit back in his seat.

And blessed silence reigned. I and my friends could concentrate on the final quarter of the play. But. 40 plus years of audience horror was demanding to be avenged. There was just no way I could let this go, it had been too serious a series of irritations. When the lights came up, I stood up and made a show of unwrapping the headphones and dropping them into the old bastard's lap. I told him that he owed me money, that he had completely ruined my enjoyment of the play. He was getting kind of flustered, clearly not being used to being called on his bullshit, and then I delivered the final stroke: "I hope that for the rest of your life, whenever you go to the theatre or to the movies, that someone does to you what you did to me this evening."

Glowing with self-satisfaction I left in a justifiable huff. I no longer have to worry about What Goes Around in this regard, as I have finally been the deliverer of That Which Comes Around, and it came around all over that old bastard. I have worked the curse through, it is now done and has been passed on to someone else who can spend the next couple of lifetimes paying it off. The Albatross of Hateful Audience Behavior is now rotting around the neck of a nearly deaf 87 year old bastard. Good riddance! Hello bold new era of blissful silence and proper audience behavior!

Yeah, right.

2007-12-08T08:45:00.001-05:00

THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER is amazing. I'd seen bits of it on TCM on occasion, but never really sat down and watched it until I saw it at Film Forum in an excellent print. It looked like it had beenshot the day before, very sharp and clean. I wasn't prepared for how really excellent this film is.

I knew thebasic outlines of the plot, the famous device of the pen-pal lovers who don't realize they know and dislike each other in real life. This was handled beautifully, with real feeling and humor byLubitsch, Sam Raphelson, and most especially the actors. I don't think I'd ever seen Margaret Sullavan before, and was very taken with her. James Stewart blew me away all over again. Neither one of them makesa single false move.

But the real surprise for me was finding the darker shadings in the story. This is not a sweetness and light romantic fantasy. Well,yes of course it is, but what am I to make of a sweetness and light romantic fantasy in which a long-established marriage goes belly up, driving the husband to attempt suicide, winding up hospitalized with a nervous breakdown? These darker elements are handled with an honesty and directness that never overwhelm the joy of the film, and don't come off as cheap attempts at seriousness, but actually serve to make the experience more profound and ultimately moving.

Frank Morgan's performance is flat-out brilliant, moving from comic bluster to genuine pathos. For his performance to have not been Oscar-nominated is, to me, one of the more grotesque oversights in Oscar history. A great film and a great movie, no more no less. The kind of movie that makes one look around and bemoan the current sorry state of cinematic affairs.

2007-12-02T16:29:00.000-05:00

BEOWULF

"I!! AM!! BEOWULF!!!!!!"

Yeah, right, okay. You're Beowulf, I'm happy for you.

It was inevitable I suppose, considering the incredible success of Peter Jackson's adaptation of LORD OF THE RINGS, that the American Fantasy Meisters would have to show that they can make big fantasy extravaganzas as well as any New Zealand guy. It was also inevitable that they would fail pretty drastically, considering the general immaturity of the American Fantasy Meisters, people who are, as I write, preparing yet another Indiana Jones film. Zemeckis' BEOWULF is a disaster, to be sure. But it isn't quite the disaster I was expecting.

The easy stuff first. The film is very very weird to look at. The much-touted motion-capture technology that is supposed to make the computer-generated characters more "life-like" is a dismal failure. Character motion is terribly stiff, facial expressions only occasionally register any sign of life. The characters look kind of like the actors providing the voices. That certainly seems to be Anthony Hopkins and John Malkovich, and a good deal of time has been spent on making a CGI version of Angelina Jolie's naked body. There's been some dickying around with their features and physiques, to be sure. The Beowulf figure looks less like the voice actor Ray Winstone and more like the actor Sean Bean (a memorable Boromir in Jackson's trilogy), but Beowulf's body is right out of your local video store's gay porn section. The lingering loving shots of Beowulf's muscular torso are worthy of the equally conflicted 300. I'm not really sure what they were after with Grendel. He looks like something that lumbered off a disturbed pre-schooler's sketch pad: Frankenberry as reimagined by George Romero. And what on earth am I to make of the fact that Grendel's Mother is shown to have not just a prehensile ponytail, but high heels as well?

The figures and faces just don't really work, they don't convey enough emotion or even just plain life. They flounce around a lot, to be sure, and there's a lot of activity, but there's something missing. I was reminded of Travolta's appearance in HAIRSPRAY, that he was plainly visible under a lot of unlifelike latex, he seemed weighted down with unexpressive dead weight. It all just seems off. Compare any moment of any character in BEOWULF with any single frame of Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis' Kong and you'll see what I mean. Ultimately, BEOWULF looks like a marginally more realistic version of SHREK. The technology is a failure, and I simply don't understand why any director would settle for such results. Does Peter Jackson own the only existing copy of the software to make convincing human/animal figures?

There are some cool 3-D effects, to be fair. There's one particularly cool scene involving a dragon's sudden appearance that was startling and very very effective. But way too much of it exists for the Whoa! 3-D! Whoa! effect, the "camera" goes to a lot of trouble to move around a lot to make sure the image is very very layered. One particularly elaborate moment is a long shot beginning in a rowdy hall and pulling back and back and back and back over hill and dale through forests and into a mountain lair where Grendel sits tearing his flesh in frustration over the noise.

Now for the weird hard part to write about. It has been a long time since I read BEOWULF, and I don't remember it terribly clearly. But I do remember that the story is a lot simpler than the story in this film, which adds a lot of other elements from other sources. Grendel's Mother comes off as a combination of Macbeth's witches, Morgan le Fay, and Mephistopheles. She makes a pact with Beowulf: in return for a specific golden cup and a night of good procreative sex (she needs to replace Grendel, after all) she will ensure that he reigns unchallenged and undefeated as king.

This sets up a very drastic switch in the film's tone. The schoolboyishly enthusiastic violence and sexuality (mostly latent homosexual during Beowulf's extended nude scenes, more overtly heterosexual during Angelina Jolie's notorious scenes) of the first half falls mostly away, and there's some nattering about the growing influence of Christianity and how it has affected the poor "hero" who now can't get any attention because of all the "weeping martyrs" that the Church is supplying. Poor hero, he's not getting any attention. Make no mistake. Beowulf has a need for attention that is downright Paris Hiltonian: when he arrives to destroy Grendel, he says in no uncertain terms that he is after glory, and glory alone. Little things like removing a pestilential evil from an undeserving populace are beside the point. So now we get King Beowulf feeling kind of bored and listless. Uneasy lies the head and all that. Then, to supply a big rousing finish, (Arthurian legend fans, get ready) his kingdom is threatened by a dragon, who turns out to be Beowulf's own son by Grendel's Mother, a la Mordred.

It seems that Mordred/Beowulf Junior can turn from Gorgeous Golden Youth to Dragon at will. Why Grendel couldn't pull this trick is never explained, nor are Dragon Boy's motivations for attacking Beowulf's people. Evidently being raised by a single Mom has left him with some serious Daddy Issues.

So the big climactic battle scene is Big, and Climactic, and Battle-y, in the manner of works by Hollywood Fantasy Meisters. Beowulf's very real guilt, his willing collaboration with the evident evil represented by the monstrous (if big-titted) Grendel's Mother, his responsibility for the deaths of a lot of his people at the hands of the monstrous offspring of his hellish pact, is mentioned but never really dealt with beyond one character's use of the phrase "The Sins Of The Fathers!!!" and the occasional furrowed Beowulfian brow. Okay, the point is made that Beowulf isn't humping his mistress as enthusiastically as he used to, nor does he sleep very well, but that's about it. We are meant to mourn the passing of the Great (Action) Hero and little things like moral ambiguity can't be allowed to be get in the way.

There is however one tantalizing final moment that hints at what the film has been rather desperately trying to be, and actually seems to think that it is: a serious exploration of the impulse to acquire power and use it, by fair means or otherwise, and the results of these impulses. Alas, that tantalizing hint remains only that, and is overwhelmed in the inevitable big Power Ballad over the end credits.

2007-11-10T20:29:00.000-05:00

BIBLEMAN -- DIVIDED WE FALL

"How could they do that to Mr. Funky?"

A DVD of BIBLEMAN -- DIVIDED WE FALL, an episode of a religious program for kids, came into my possession through the good services of my soon to be ex-good friend Kent, who demanded that I post on it forthwith. BIBLEMAN stars Willie Aames, who was on EIGHT IS ENOUGH and CHARLES IN CHARGE, as millionaire religious zealot Miles Peterson (Peter Son, upon this rock the church is built, get it?) who has:

1. A pair of protegees, one African American guy nicknamed Cypher and a white girl named, what else, Biblegirl. They've all got spiffy ill-fitting uniforms, featuring Biblical Superhero Accessories like the Helmet of Salvation and the Shield of Belief, and my personal favorite: the Shoes of Peace. The attempts to impose muscular definition upon Willie Aames' distinctly non-buff torso is among the most amusing elements of the show.

2. The full Bruce Wayne set up. A big mansion with what appears to be an extensive series of caves below it, filled to overflowing with "high-tech" impossible computer equipment.

3. An apparently endless series of ideologically loaded supervillains. The villain in DIVIDED WE FALL is known as the Wacky Protester. No, really. The Wacky Protester is a probably legally actionable ripoff of Jerry Lewis' Dr. Julius Kelp, with really hideous prosthetic teeth and ill-fitting clothes. There are some other villains as well: secular children's television programming, disobedience, and disrespect for authority figures, for example. One of the lowpoints of the episode is a gratuitous clip from a Saturday morning TV series called Mr. Funky's Wild Time, an inane animated comedy with vaguely anti-Semitic overtones.

DIVIDED WE FALL centers on the Wacky Protester's attempts to drive a wedge between the members of the Bibleman Team, so he can Divide And Conquer and take over Mr. Funky's Wild Time and use it as a mouthpiece for his own evil designs, which has something to do with destroying the Bibleman Team because um, well, who wouldn't want to destroy these guys? See, the Bibleman Team is never at a loss for an appropriate Bible quote, which they supply at the drop of a hat including book chapter and verse. They don't just do this blindly, though. Bibleman himself warns that they must take care that the Scriptural tags they ceaselessley use are "relevant to the situation, and they apply." They also engage in badly written banter, designed to show that you can have a sense of humor and be self-righteous, too.

The show is pretty idiotic on pretty much every level. It has PLAN NINE level production values. It borrows pretty blatantly from the worldly entertainments that it works so hard to denigrate. The whole silly thing would be hilarious and disturbing if it just wasn't so completely lame. I'd bring up how odd it is that the villains all seem to have New York connections (the characters on Mr. Funky's Wild Time and the evil computer Luci all speak with broad Noo Yawk Accents, and the Wacky Protester is from Hackensack) if I felt it was worth the effort.

But there's a problem. Like the equally idiotic 300, this idiotic Bibleman thing has a following. There is a Bibleman website, complete with Bibleman tour dates for the Bibleman Live show, and there's a list of Bibleman Personal Appearances at local Christian bookstores around the country. I guess I'm just way too insulated and corrupt, as a cinephilic gay man living in NYC, to understand how any even remotely media-savvy kid wouldn't collapse in hysterical laughter at the general ineptitude on display in BIBLEMAN -- DIVIDED WE FALL.

2007-10-24T20:12:00.000-04:00

BLADE RUNNER

"Gosh, you've really got some nice toys here."

Once again I have cause for gratitude for living in NYC, as NYC is apparently one of only two cities to have gotten full-out screenings on big screens of the (probably and hopefully last) Final Director’s Cut of BLADE RUNNER, which is coming out in a big old multi-DVD package in December. They've done a final digital clean up, erasing little problematic bits, like visible wires holding up supposedly airborned police cars, etc. They even added Joanna Cassidy's face to the body of the stuntperson who runs through all those big sheets of candy glass, and it actually works. I was worried that there'd be even more serious tinkering with the story, but no, Ridley Scott hasn't done to his magnum opus what George Lucas did to his. So BLADE RUNNER is back, its visual and sonic beauty undimmed and even enhanced, and its problems still unresolved and in some ways even magnified.

1. BLADE RUNNER really is something from a purely technical standpoint. It is one of the most gorgeously made films ever. And it really really really can only be appreciated on a BIG FUCKING SCREEN. DVDs of this film are a waste of DVDs. It is like LAWRENCE OF ARABIA or BRAZIL or 2001 or BARRY LYNDON in that regard. This cleaned up version looks great, sounds great, and is just a joy to behold, especially in these days of hand-held camera quick cut nonsense. And the recent big-screen engagement at the Ziegfeld is a marvel: crystal clear digital projection, great sound, goodness gracious me and mine, just an ecstatic orgy of sight and sound and gorgeousness and gorgeosity made cinema.

2. BLADE RUNNER is not a very good movie in pretty much every other way. Harrison Ford's performance is lackluster to say the least, he seems completely lost, veering from existential despair in one scene to low-comedy mugging in the next, and not in a good way. The character remains enough of a cipher for the director to be able to claim, 25 years after the fact, that he isn’t even a human being. The story is pretty well dumbed down from Philip K. Dick's remarkable novel DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, replacing Dick's satiric edge with a world-weary noir aesthetic that was really horribly cloying when the film was burdened with a tiresome narration.

3. It struck me this time that the movie's attitude toward women is not particularly positive. They are either replicants or repulsive. The only two (apparently) human women with speaking roles in the film are an aged Asian woman who gives Deckard information about snake scales and a thickset woman with an eyepatch who sells Deckard a bottle after he retires Zora. The three female leads are all replicants, all three of them are murderers, all three of them are used rather degradingly for sexual purposes. Zora is a performer in a sleazy nightclub whose routine involves a snake (“watch her take the pleasures of the serpent that once corrupted man!”), Pris is referred to as a standard pleasure model for military recreation. Rachael starts the film as a bold, confident woman, but her self-realization as a replicant is combined with a chilling descent into mechanization: she is finally turned into a sex toy with no will of her own. She can't even speak for herself during that really hideous rape scene (I’m afraid it can’t really be called anything else) and in her final appearance as she and Deckard run off into the elevator. Now this could be part of the point about the woeful way in which the replicants are treated, purely as things, but it never really comes across as the point, somehow.

4. Ridley Scott has gone on the record claiming that Deckard is a replicant, that he was always a replicant. And there are assorted little clues scattered throughout the film, to be fair, but they have always felt more like an attempt to draw a parallel between Deckard and the replicants he is hunting, more as an attempt to add some moral ambiguity to the story. There is one little clue that sticks out like a sore thumb, a waking vision that Deckard has of a unicorn, which is apparently intended as a piece of installed memory in Deckard's artificial memory banks, and I'm sorry but it is just plain bullshit. If Deckard is a replicant, Scott should have shot something somewhere to indicate this just a little more clearly than he does.

And anyway, if Deckard is a replicant the whole film goes out the window. It is like having Victor Fleming say that Dorothy is a witch, that she was always a witch. Actually, no, that really makes more sense, as Glinda seems to recognize some kind of magical powers in Dorothy ("Are you a good witch or a bad witch?"). Bottom Line: If Deckard is a replicant, Mr. Scott might have made it into an actual part of the film itself, not something that one can only recognize by reading an article in the New York Times 25 years after the film is released.

So what is the thrill of BLADE RUNNER? Well, for me it is purely the visuals and the soundtrack. I don’t “prefer” technique to story or emotion, by any means, but I’ll admit to being fairly susceptible to the seductions of pretty pictures on a big screen, and to needing some time to overcome the initial “whoa!” factor. My father pointed out to me many many many years ago that I am a sucker for spectacle, and I can’t entirely disagree. I’ll get carried away by the pretty pictures, I’ll admit it. I don’t think I’m as bad as I used to be about it. I could see through the pretty pictures in drivel like BARTON FINK and THE HUDSUCKER PROXY to the gaping empty derivative disasters that they are when they were first released. I still watch HUDSUCKER sometimes when it is on, just to look at the prettiness, and there is a lot of it, but the film is a train wreck. I’ll see a movie for the technique alone, hey, why not, but I ain’t going to pretend even for a moment that a film like BLADE RUNNER, as radiantly gorgeous as it is, is anywhere near a 2001 or LAWRENCE or NASHVILLE or or or or or or or, and could never be a RULES OF THE GAME or a 400 BLOWS or IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE.

2007-08-12T08:04:00.001-04:00

HARRY POTTER AND THE WEIRDLY UNEVEN FRANCHISE

"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

I haven't been entirely untouched by the Harry Potter phenomenon. I read the first book, and enjoyed it thoroughly as a good brisk read with some genuinely moving moments. I started the second book, and put it down when I found myself wanting some kind of literary Fast-Forward button. On the advice of my great friend Kent, I've started reading ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, and have been getting good fun out of it. I'd seen the first film in the theatre, largely out of curiosity, and mostly enjoyed it, but had missed the second one because I just didn't care. I finally saw it on DVD, and still didn't care.

I saw the third film, HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN, when it got a lot of glowing reviews, and I agreed with them all: it remains the best of the franchise, hands down, no question, period full stop. It is still the only film in the franchise to aspire to being anything other than a sort of cinematic Cliff's Notes. Alfonso Cuaron manages to capture the funky energy of Rowling's world, the messy little details and and the more than healthy respect for transgression, the willingness to occasionally do the wrong thing for the right reasons. I keep remembering the glorious charm used to activate a certain magical map: I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.

I keep wanting to slow the film down and look in the shadows for the little things that might be lurking (and they are there: at one point a tiny electric train can be spotted running through a big piece of astronomical machinery). Like the similar flourishes in CHILDREN OF MEN, these aren't slapped on to the movie in a desperate bid for attention; they feel completely integrated to the story, and help keep things interesting. This is no mean feat: the story is, when you think about it, pretty damned unwieldy. But Cuaron pulls it off, scoring some real triumphs along the way. A scene of panic in a room full of living paintings is particularly wonderful; there hasn't been anything like it in the series before or since. I mean really: Cuaron's film even features fascinating end titles.

Cuaron's film also features some of the most moving moments in the series, especially those featuring Daniel Radcliffe's scenes with David Thewlis and Gary Oldman. And any film that has glorious actors like Timothy Spall, David Thewlis and Gary Oldman onscreen at the same time, turning into animals, is my kind of movie.

My hopes were high for the next film,HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE, or as I've come to think of it, HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF NYQUIL. There's the occasional bit of largely computer-generated energy (one big scene involving a dragon is particularly impressive), but mostly it just lies there onscreen, never more lifelessly than during the big scene at the end showing the regeneration of Lord Voldemort, as played by Ralph Fiennes, who herewith wins my vote as the Least Terrifying Villain In Film History.

Rant: the Lord Voldemort in this film is a big fat pussy. He prances around in a Martha Graham shroud, with his head all shaven and his bad teeth and no nose, and I just sat there wondering what the fuck everybody was so scared of. This little nancyboy has the entire magical world so terrified that they daren't even say his name aloud? Why didn't Indiana Jones come along and just shoot him? He's a near total-waste. Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West would kick his sorry little ass. Darth Vader would pinch his fingers together and say "I find your lack of nose disturbing." Dr. Mabuse would glance at his watch and fire Voldemort for being late. Hannibal Lecter would eat him for a mid-morning snack. Tony Soprano would snap that pencil neck. Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestley would purse her lips over that outfit, and little Voldy would just evaporate. Lady Kaede in RAN would have Voldemort's head and balls, not that I really believe he has any, on a plate in nothing flat. A certain little boy in CITY OF GOD would etc. etc. etc. etc.

Who's to blame for this sorry state of villainy? Surely the director, one Mike Newell, who seems to be able to create engaging romantic comedies but is just out of his depth at getting fear flowing. Think about it. Compare this big scene in GOBLET OF BOREDOM with anything in Peter Jackson's LORD OF THE RINGS films, and you'll see the difference. The comparatively minor scene in FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING where the hobbits are attacked by the Nazgul on Weathertop is far more upsetting than this would-be apocalyptic moment, upon which a lot of the future of the franchise depends. It just flat out doesn't goddamn work.

So I was not looking forward to ORDER OF THE PHOENIX. I had made up my mind to wait for cable. But I literally had nothing else to do one Saturday afternoon, so I decided to check it out. I had a free pass, so why not?

ORDER OF THE PHOENIX puts the focus back where it belongs: the characters and what they do and why. Gary Oldman and David Thewlis make a more than welcome returns, with Oldman getting some particularly good scenes as Sirius Black. But the biggest impression is made by the sublime Imelda Staunton as Delores Umbridge. Umbridge is the teacher you had in grade school who worked very hard to appear very very sweet and couldn't be trusted in any way whatsoever, you know you had her, possibly as a guidance counselor. She's monstrous and marvelous, far more threatening and dangerous than Fiennes' flouncing Lord Whoopdedoo. A child sitting near me said about Staunton's character: "I hope she dies."

The Big Scenes are suitably big and effective, and the climactic battle between Fiennes and Michael Gambon almost makes up for the lackluster climax of the previous film. But the biggest scene of all, the biggest and most dangerous conflict takes place inside Harry Potter's head as he struggles to deal with the growing influence of Lord Voldemort's supposedly EVIL presence within him. That director David Yates manages to make this both convincing and effective makes me relieved that he will be doing the next entry, but not as relieved and excited as I'd be if Alfonso Cuaron were at the helm.

"Mischief managed."

2007-07-21T22:40:00.000-04:00

HAIRSPRAY

"Ah'm tryin' to ahrn in here!"

HAIRSPRAY is the best of the recent spate of musicals based on Broadway shows. That may not sound like the highest praise, but trust me, it is. HAIRSPRAY eschews, mostly, the atrocious Cuisinart editing and fatal miscasting that have characterized such recent horrors as CHICAGO, DREAMGIRLS, RENT and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.

Mostly.

So here's the good news: the movie has moments of real infectious fun. The story centers on Tracy Turnblad, a young girl in Baltimore in 1962, who is a rabid fan of the local TV program, The Corny Collins Show, a sort of Baltimore Bandstand. She manages to overcome prejudices based on her weight and low/no class origins, and winds up one of the dancing teen regulars on the show. Tracy is soon flirting with the hottest boy on the show, the tasty Linc, and lobbying to have the show's monthly Negro Day turned into outright integration, a position that puts her election as Miss Hairspray of 1962 in jeopardy.

The plot largely downplays the realities of the civil rights struggle as being the kind of thing that can be dealt with successfully by a good beat that can be danced to, and I feel kind of churlish even bringing the matter up. The real subject of HAIRSPRAY is the pure joy of music and dancing and stopping to sing a big song. There's a lot of good fun in the film, which includes most of the Broadway score intact, and a really catchy score it is. And for a change, the cast is up to it, with one latex-covered big-starred exception. Nikki Blonsky makes the most of her film debut, handling the singing and dancing with great aplomb. Michelle Pfeiffer is convincingly wicked as the monstrous station manager whose daughter is Tracy's main competition, and she even succeeds in making her signature song, "Miss Baltimore Crabs," one of the film's highlights. James Marsden, as Corny Collins, takes his million dollar smile and amps it up to a real vision of TV hyper-eagerness, one of the funniest running jokes in the film. Allison Janney can't be on screen for more than 5 minutes, but gets more laughs per moment than anyone else.

There are a lot of changes from the original John Waters film and the Broadway show, many of them for the better. The story feels a bit tighter and better organized, but I miss the sense of wild triumph that characterized the Waters film and the show on Broadway. The sexual charge is also missing: where Rikki Lake in the original and Marisa Jaret Winokur on Broadway made no secret of their intense physical desire for Linc, there's an odd chastity to the film's Tracy and Linc. They don't even really kiss until their big final embrace. The only convincing sexual charge in the film comes between a young black man named Seaweed and his white girlfriend, the "permanently punished" Penny Pingleton.

Okay, I'll just cut to the chase. I thought Travolta SUCKED, except for one big cool moment he has at the very end which seems to be cool enough to make everyone ignore how just plain DREADFUL he has been up till then. As Tracy's mother Edna, Travolta is almost but not quite entirely unrecognizable beneath what has to be the worst prosthetic makeup job in the history of prosthetic makeup. He also uses a really overdone accent that seems to be the way that some people in Baltimore might actually speak or might have spoken, but it just feels fake and overdone, like the makeup. I was reminded of Wallace Beery in GRAND HOTEL, who is the only person, in a film populated with German characters, to bother putting on a German accent.

There's more, alas. The screenwriter and director have updated the story to make Edna something of an agoraphobic with severe body-image issues, hammering these points home very clearly in a way that makes Edna more of an object of pity than anything else, and it just brings the story to a halt. They've also re-arranged the story so that Edna's rejuvenation doesn't really happen until the end of the story, where the show made it clear that Edna's rescue is complete purely by getting that fabulous makeover in the "Welcome To The Sixties" number, about a third of the way through the show.

I don't want to dwell to completely on Travolta, but he is a huge distraction. If they'd only been able to get a star of similar bankability who hadn't felt it necessary to wear hideously disfiguring makeup and adopt an outlandish accent, the film would have been nearly perfect.

2007-07-02T17:44:00.000-04:00

RATATOUILLE

You probably already know the basic premise: a rat with culinary talent winds up the secret genius in a Parisian restaurant. Not the most promising of ideas, right? Mercifully, director Brad Bird (THE IRON GIANT, THE INCREDIBLES) keeps the story lively and the characters interesting, but there's an intimacy to RATATOUILLE that was completely missing from Pixar's last outing, the dismal CARS. The epicurean rodent Remy's relationship with his human friend, the hapless chef's assistant Linguini, never descends into the kind of tired sidekickery that characterizes the SHREK franchise, and the little romance that develops between Linguini and his kitchenmate Colette doesn't feel shoe-horned into the story.

The animation, as usual with Pixar, is wonderful. The character animation is terrific, lots of wonderful little gestures abound. One little moment keeps coming back to me, a little shake of the finger that Remy delivers to himself when he remembers a missing ingredient to a soup recipe, a sort of "ah-ha!" gesture that beggars description. Think about it: they actually capture the look on somebody's face when they smell something delicious. And there's no shortage of Cool Big Scenes. There's a lot of fun to be had in watching Remy scurry through the kitchen, using ladles for a ladders and dodging giant cleavers, and a sequence involving Remy learning how to transmit his directions to Linguini by turning him into a sort of living marionette would have delighted Buster Keaton.

And so on. I liked the film a lot. A lot. The film is also just plain GORGEOUS. It doesn't go for the visual gusto the way that CARS did, with its lingering views of the car-inspired landscapes and neon-lit night scenes. The world of RATATOUILLE is different from any Pixar has done before, the light feels more like Vermeer than anything else. But there are plenty of gorgeous views of Paris, and some jaw-dropping camerawork, especially one particularly wonderful sequence following Remy's journey through the walls of a building, as he samples the goings-on in assorted apartments through holes in the masonry.

One thing about the movie is bugging me, though, and I don't want to go into too much detail about the plot lest I give away any dread Spoilers. The film seems to deliver a rather carefully worded rebuke to critics toward the end of the film, telling us that even the most sloppily created work of food (or art) is more important than any work of criticism written about that work of food (or art), and I'm sorry, I just don't see it at all. I'll need to see the film again to get a better handle on what it means in this regard.

Do I think you should see it? Absolutely. See it in a theatre with the best possible projection and sound. Go now.

2007-05-20T19:08:00.000-04:00

BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!

"Too Much For Guy!"

BRAND UPON THE BRAIN is the latest film from Guy Maddin, the Canadian auteur who specializes in making old-fashioned films. We were lucky enough to be able to see it with a live band, live Foley artists supplying sound effects, and a narrator (Edward Hibbert) who hit just the right note of fussy ferocity. I understand from a friend that Lou Reed fell asleep the night he was doing the narration.

And the movie was cool, too. One of Maddin's silent films, filled with cheap but effective effects and razor sharp editing, the kind of quick crazy stuff that they try to do in CHICAGO and fail miserably at doing. BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! is easily the best of Maddin's films, a fast and furious melodrama divided, old-time serial style, into twelve episodes. But it isn't all fun and parody games. The film is labelled A Remembrance In Twelve Episodes, and the main character of the film is named Guy Maddin. I have no way of knowing if there is any real connection between the events of the film and the events of Mr. Maddin's childhood (for his sake, I bloody well hope there isn't), but the added feeling of autobiography lends the film an intensity that has been lacking in Maddin's other films. There's a fresh manic quality to several scenes that lift them straight into serious nightmare territory. One in particular involving Guy's youth-obsessed mother and a surgical procedure with a corpse hits Oedipal territory that makes PSYCHO seem downright quaint.

The film begins with a character named Guy Maddin returning to his childhood home, a lighthouse on an otherwise deserted island that once also served as an orphanage run by Maddin's parents. Guy is soon flashing back to his childhood life on the island with his family. Maddin's mother keeps strict tabs on young Guy and his sister through use of something called an aerophone, and is obsessed with regaining her lost youth. Maddin's father is always at work in his lab on some mysterious project that seems to have something to do with the strange wounds on the back of all the little orphans' heads. A love triangle eventually develops between Guy, his sister, and a visiting detective investigating Nefarious Deeds on the island.

I was no stranger to Maddin's films before seeing BRAND. His films always have the look of older films, like one of those exploitation films from the 30s that occasionally surface, like the immortal REEFER MADNESS or MANIAC or MARIJUANA: WEED WITH ROOTS IN HELL. Films that have all the trappings of 1930s filmmaking, but with the surprising extra of nudity and drug use. Unfortunately, Maddin's films also have the drawbacks of those early 30s films: stodgy filmmaking and unfortunate performances. For all their visual beauty, they seem leaden.

All that changed around the time he made his short film THE HEART OF THE WORLD, a wondrous hyper-kinetic short in which Maddin seems to have abandoned the world of synch sound entirely. His camera was set free, his editing got sharper, the energy quotient was upped considerably, but more importantly, something seems to have been cut loose in Maddin himself as a filmmaker. His following features in this style (DRACULA: PAGES FROM A VIRGIN'S DIARY and COWARDS BEND THE KNEE) are very exciting, but in BRAND UPON THE BRAIN Maddin really goes for broke. Its a great show.

2007-04-28T07:57:00.000-04:00

THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY

"This is an eruption!"

Well, not really.

THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY is crime thriller starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. Hoskins plays Harold Shand, who we are told runs all of the organized crime in London. Harold is about to make the biggest deal of his life, one that will make him even more rich and powerful and even respectable. He wants to buy up and renovate some London waterfront property, and doing this seems to have something to do with establishing ties with the American mafia, representatives of which are visiting as Harold's guests. A couple of slayings and bombings in Harold's organization threaten to blow the whole operation, and Harold has to do some quick maneuvering to ensure that his empire will stay intact and on top while not scaring off the Yanks.

This movie should work like, well, gangbusters. It seems to have it all. A great gang story, a terrific script jammed with all kinds of interesting events and tasty near-blasphemy (the movie isn't set on Good Friday for nothing), great actors giving solid work, great gritty atmosphere, funky off-the-beaten-track London locations and some neat pre-Tarantino graphic violence that must have been deeply shocking when the film was first released in 1980. So why doesn't it work? Why wasn't I as involved as I should have been? The film seems to move along in fits and starts, there's never as much tension as there really should be, even Hoskins and Mirren seem to be rather oddly restrained.

They get their moments of course. Mirren's film work has always been oddly uneven, to me. In THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY she plays Victoria, Hoskins' wife and apparent consigliere. A classy and dignified woman who makes a fascinating foil to Hoskins' rougher diamond in the butch. They're a great couple, wonderful to watch, somehow you just know these two have the best sex ever. They really come together in one remarkable scene where she manages to calm him down from a howling rage attack. She punches and slaps him, finally grabbing his hands and staring him down.

But even this scene doesn't quite seem to work as well as it might. It felt like something was missing, that the actors were holding something back. I couldn't help thinking that another take, where Hoskins and Mirren really went for broke, was in order. It's like a really great rehearsal, a really great idea for a scene that needed more time to get the best out of everybody concerned, and that's pretty much how the whole movie winds up feeling.

This can only be the fault of the director, John McKenzie. It isn't fair to McKenzie to compare him to Coppola or Hawks or Scorsese or the Tarantino of RESERVOIR DOGS, but it isn't fair to me as a viewer to make me wish that one of those filmmakers had been in charge. There just isn't the level of tension and simple sustained interest in THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY that you'd find THE GODFATHER or SCARFACE or RESERVOIR DOGS or even in an average episode of THE SOPRANOS or PRIME SUSPECT.

And it is a shame. What could have been a masterpiece isn't.

2007-04-24T20:50:00.000-04:00

THE LONG GOODBYE

"Hooray for Hollywood"

I saw a new print of Robert Altman's THE LONG GOODBYE, his adaptation of Raymond Chandler's last novel, starring Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe. The movie is getting a lot of attention lately as an overlooked masterpiece, an attitude which I'm afraid I can only see as having more to do with belated respect for a recently deceased auteur than the actual quality of the film itself.

The story, such as it is, centers on Elliot Gould's Marlowe, who finds himself being investigated after helping a friend of his, one Terry Lennox, cross the border into Mexico. It turns out that Lennox is accused of murdering his wife, and stealing money, and nobody (the cops, some almost amusing reimagined-for-the-1970s gangsters) wants to believe that Marlowe knows as little about what's going on as he does. There's a major sequence involving Marlowe's aborted investigation into the doings of a rather unstable novelist and his wife (who, in typical Chandler fashion, are involved with the departed Lennox and his deceased wife) and so on and so on.

The plot isn't really the point. The point is Altman's personal filmmaking style, as idiosyncratic as any in movies. The delight in actors acting (both good and bad) and Altman's roving camera are what the film is really about, and there are some wonderful moments. A remarkable scene involving a character's late night suicide on the beach, wandering off into the blackest ocean imaginable, is like something out of Kurosawa, and there's a wonderful cameo by an actress who delivers one of the most moving depictions of fear I've ever seen in a movie.

Is there enough to make the film worthwhile? Yeah. See it once. You might want to see it more than once, as I do, mainly to watch Sterling Hayden's performance and to try to see if the plot makes any sense at all. The problem, as with a lot of Altman's films, is the smart-assery that he just can't seem to resist. Altman simply never met a cheap joke that he didn't love. That goddamn title song that keeps popping up over and over and over and over and over again, even as a tune played on someone's doorbell, starts as an intriguing joke on the idea of movie theme songs but eventually just gets annoying. And there's the allegedly ironic use of "Hooray for Hollywood" at the opening and closing of the film. Okay, it kind of works to call attention to the artifice of old Hollywood versus the allegedly updated more realistic film that Altman seems to think he's providing. But Altman's ending is more movie-friendly than Chandler's ending. Chandler's novel ends with a real cynicism and despair, a real non-Hollywood ending that Altman's smart-assery just can't come anywhere near.

Or did I miss the point?

2007-03-30T19:51:00.000-04:00

300

"This won't be quick. You won't enjoy it."

The Spartans, according to the film 300, were a bunch of Manly Men. Really Manly. And their women are really Womanly, which doesn't mean much except that when they aren't standing by their own Manly Men they are giving birth to more of them, who can be trained to be WARRIORS. Unworthy babies (evidently those who are not perfect physical specimens or who seem to demonstrate any interest in interior decoration) are exposed to the elements, meaning that these brave Manly Spartans don't have the decency or the nerve to kill off their own inadequate offspring.

And these are the people we're supposed to be rooting for: a race of people who pride themselves on being ruthless in battle but who leave their own unmilitary-worthy babies to the tender mercies of wild animals. Am I alone in thinking the Spartans were a bunch of scumbags that the world is better off without?

Probably.

300, based apparently on a well-known "graphic novel," tells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, during which a small band of 300 Spartans held off a whole bunch of invaders. King Leonidas, the leader of the Spartans, learns of the impending invasion of his lands by the dread Xerxes and his Persian hordes. Leonidas decides to take 300 of his Manliest Men to stop the invasion, knowing that he and his 300 are wildly outnumbered.

The rest of the movie is just one long battle scene with the occasional interruption for largely unnecessary plot complications, including a really gratuitous one involving Leonidas' wife who is holding down the fort at home while Leonidas is off hacking limbs. There's not a lot of surprise to be had in this story, but there is a lot to be offended at.

Make no mistake: 300 worships the White Male Military Man in a way that makes BIRTH OF A NATION look like an episode of DIFF'RENT STROKES. The Pure White Manly Bulging Spartans (always ensuring their abs are shown to best advantage) do battle against an invading horde that is:

1. Racially mixed. They're identified as Persians even though a certain sub-horde incorrectly known as the Immortals are dressed like ninjas carrying what look like samurai swords.

2. Largely anonymous. Faces are very seldom visible, as the enemy is usually shown wearing concealing costumes and masks, unlike the nearly nude and exceedingly toned Spartans.

3. Sexually Ambiguous. The God-king of the Persians, Xerxes, is like a gay-panicked director's feverdream. Covered from head to toe in jewelry and piercings, he's a RuPaul of the Ancient World. He actually flounces and wears eye makeup (think late '60s Barbra).

4. Physically Repulsive. The Persians seem to have a cottage industry in surgical experimentation. There's what looks like a mutated giant turned loose on the Spartans, and a horrifying sequence showing what seems to be a man whose arms have been replaced with axe blades to speed up the execution process. Further, the Spartans' ultimate defeat hinges upon their betrayal by a hideously deformed Greek character who had the bad luck to survive the Spartans' infant screening process, and who holds something of a grudge when Leonidas spurns his offer of service. Ultimately, physical perfection is the barometer to character for this film: virtue = tight abs and big pecs.

As far as the acting goes, more time seems to have been spent at the gym or in the makeup chair touching up abs than in rehearsal. Gerard Butler fulfills the promise he displayed in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. He sounds like he learned his lines phonetically, or is trying to overcome a very thick Scots accent or a serious speech impediment, or maybe even all three. The script doesn't help much, but altogether too many of his lines are simply shouted out word by word, as in "THIS! IS! SPARTA!!" And the time at the gym has paid off. No non-pornographic film in my experience pays so much attention to the male torso: big pecs, abs that do nothing but ripple. The cast is expected to do a lot of physical action, the battle scenes are really very choreographed, you can see the actors counting off in their heads "turn and flex and hack and flex and sever and flex and slash and pose and walk walk walk and pose."

All in all, an unbelievable movie. Scary and dangerous on so many levels. Unworthy of your time, except to scare the living daylights out of you at the state of a country populated with people who don't see this garbage for what it is.

2007-03-24T09:30:00.000-04:00

THE PIRATE QUEEN

Is a new musical from the creators of LES MISERABLES based apparently on real historical events involving an Irish woman who manages to overcome gender prejudice, gain the respect of the men in her clan, and become a pirate/freedom fighter. There’s a BIG SET, and there are BIG SONGS. There’s a lot of that Irish clomp-dancing that people just go crazy for, and that damned Irish-sounding flute/pipe thing that we’ve been hearing since “My Heart will Go On.” There’s about 45 minutes of plot blown up to fill 2 and a half hours, and enough simplistic nattering about female empowerment to fill a lifetime’s worth of Lifetime movies of the week. All this, and Queen Elizabeth I too.

The score is memorable, in the sense that it keeps triggering your memories of other songs. Echoes of LES MIS are all over the place, big power sung chorus numbers meant to inspire Big Feelings, and tender little power ballads that keep threatening to turn into “My Heart Will Go On.” One extended wedding celebration number sounds like a remix of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." Bits and pieces of EVITA and WICKED, and most bizarrely PACIFIC OVERTURES can be heard, and it doesn’t help the evening at all. I just kept wishing that I was actually watching EVITA and WICKED and PACIFIC OVERTURES and SOUTH PARK: BIGGER LONGER AN D UNCUT and BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and even LES MIS instead of THE PIRATE QUEEN.

The similarities to WICKED get to be rather pronounced, especially in the second act, as the focus shifts to the relationship between Queen Glinda/Elizabeth and Pirate Queen Elphaba/Grace. Bits of staging and certain lighting effects feel plagiarized from WICKED, as well as from LES MISERABLES (a scene of pathetic beggarly types swarming out of a trap door led the man sitting next to me to laugh out loud and say “Oh, no, this isn’t ripped off from LES MIS at all!”).

And what isn’t ripped off is often downright hilarious. A song entitled “Boys Will Be Boys” sung by the Pirate Queen’s brutish and arranged fiancé includes the deathless lyric “She’s confused about gender!” A later sequence involving the Big Bad British soldiers attacking a church during the christening of the Pirate Queen’s dear little newborn laddie is staged for Maximum Theatricality (Red Lights! Smoke! Chorus Boys With Spears! Choreographed Slow Motion Fighting!) and winds up inspiring Maximum Hilarity. And think about this. A “serious” theatrical production in the 21st Century actually contains the following lines of dialogue:

Impetuous Youth: I’ll make a woman of her!
Imperious Father: I hope she’ll make a man of you!

Simple fairness compels me to admit that there are some good things about the show. The sets are interesting, the lighting is interesting, the costumes are more than serviceable, if a bit too specifically intended to grab a tony for Costume Design. The cast does the very best they can with what they’ve been given, but you kind of wonder if they know how bad what they’ve been given really is. There’s a lot of head-tossing and noble posturing and grimacing to indicate suffering, and the British bad guys flick their capes a lot.

I could go on all day. In a nutshell, this is the kind of show your best friend’s mother will just love, never quite understanding why you’re laughing so hard at it.

2007-03-09T18:44:00.000-05:00

ZODIAC

"Here comes the Hurdy Gurdy Man, he's singing songs of love..."

Imagine a film that combines ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN with SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Now imagine a good version of that movie. Try. Okay. Now. That movie in your head is not just in your head. It is David Fincher's ZODIAC, and it is very much worth seeing. Much to my surprise.

You probably know by now what the film is about: the search for a serial killer, and all that. ZODIAC is not what usually passes for a detective thriller: that cliched parade of ugly murder scenes with occasional police interruptions culminating in a Big Finish with the killer vanquished until the almost-inevitable sequel. ZODIAC reverses this formula, giving us a parade of investigation scenes punctuated with occasional ugly murders. The investigation really is the thing in this film, and there are scenes of cops and reporters talking and going round and round what sometimes feels like the same material over and over. This is at least partly the point, as the main thrust of the film is the hold that the Zodiac begins to have on the people involved in the investigation, eventually turning into an obsession on the part of Robert Graysmith, played by Jake Gyllenhaal.

That this never gets dull is due in no small measure to Fincher's admirable cast. Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards, Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey, Jr., to say nothing of a host of other fine actors like Dermot Mulroney and Elias Koteas in smaller roles. I liked watching Downey and Gyllenhall together; their comedy-tinged scenes are the perfect foil to Edwards and Ruffalo's no-nonsense work.

I'd not been a fan of Fincher's earlier films, like SEVEN or FIGHT CLUB or THE GAME. They all just seem to suffer from serious Style-itis. Fancy editing and special effects and mood all over the place (the police in SEVEN seem to have no idea how to switch on a light), rather surprisingly predictable plots (anyone who thinks for a moment about which Deadly Sins have not yet been enacted will be two steps ahead of the cops in SEVEN) all combined with a feeling that some kind of never-clearly-articulated Big Message is intended (what the hell was FIGHT CLUB really about, anyway?). ZODIAC has what none of Fincher's other films have had: people I give a damn about, in a story I found interesting. The visual flourishes made sense (the Transamerica Tower assembles itself onscreen to show the passage of an extended chunk of time) and the mood-inducing touches actually worked. I found myself getting terribly upset at the approach of a car playing Hurdy Gurdy Man on its radio.

And I stayed terribly upset, even after the final credits rolled. I got a paranoid contact high from ZODIAC, one that had me jumpy and nervous and just generally creeped out all the way home. ZODIAC stayed with me in a way that few movies I've seen recently have.

2007-02-18T16:52:00.000-05:00

AGAINST THE DAY

"Are you kind deities? or wrathful deities?"

So I got the new Pynchon novel. In the weeks leading up to the publication date, I had been clearing my literary calendar, not getting too involved in anything too big or long. I’d re-read THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, for example, a good clear direct and above all short little book that was just what I needed. Then a few days before the Pynchon was released, I was killing some time in a chain bookstore and found myself checking out a series of detective thrillers by Ian Rankin, who’s been on my radar for quite some time now. I picked up one called RESURRECTION MEN, and soon realized that I’d been standing there reading the opening chapter and feeling no desire to stop. I went ahead and got the book, and was enjoying it a lot.

I managed to get my hands on a copy of the new Pynchon a couple of days early, an accommodating local indie bookstore offered to sell me the copy that was behind the counter. Evidently a staff person had gotten the book out early and had been paging through it. I started reading the book on the subway home, and have had an odd reaction to it. Basically, there are parts of it that I’ve liked a good deal, and there have been parts that I’ve not liked a good deal. I’ve come close to putting it down altogether a few times, but I know myself well enough to know that it would be better for me to complete one reading that I didn’t like very much than to stop completely. This way, if I ever decide to read the book again I’ll have a better chance of getting more out of it.

I’m not sure there is going to be a second reading, though. I’m just not feeling enough excitement about the book to make me terribly enthusiastic about going through the effort a second time. There are plenty of big old books that have made considerably more sense on a second or third reading, things like JR and DAVID COPPERFIELD (most of Dickens, actually) and INFINITE JEST and GRAVITY’S RAINBOW and MASON & DIXON, but all of those books had me in their grip in a way that AGAINST THE DAY doesn’t have me. I’m looking forward to being through with AGAINST THE DAY so I can move on to something just plain shorter.

I never did finish the Rankin book. It started well, but I was getting impatient with it long before I had to put it down to concentrate on AGAINST THE DAY. I’ve got a couple of other Rankins, and will be getting to them at some point.

I’m having to do some serious examination of my possessions. There’s just way too much stuff in that apartment. I overheard a woman in a bookstore discussing her personal library, and she said something that has stuck with me ever since, something about how you have to ask yourself if you own the books, or if the books own you. Soon after I did some pruning of my accumulated VHS tapes, and was brought face to face with the Folly of Pure Ownership for Ownership’s Sake. After all, how many copies of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE does one man really need?

FYI – I had four copies. On VHS. Taped from a variety of sources over the years.

I don’t have so many multiple copies of books, but I do seem to pick stuff up. Occasionally I purge long-unread stuff, like those copies of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE that seem to pop onto my shelves every few years when I decide that maybe I’ll give the book One Last Shot. I’m still not sure how on earth a copy of THE CELESTINE PROPHECY got onto my shelves, or even into my apartment, but it won’t be there much longer.

2007-02-15T20:47:00.000-05:00

THE COAST OF UTOPIA

“Just your ordinary nine-act play.” Robert Benchley in re: STRANGE INTERLUDE.

As SALVAGE, the third and mercifully final part of Tom Stoppard’s magnum opus THE COAST OF UTOPIA staggered to a close, Mr. Benchley’s words popped into my head, and I kind of smiled to myself. Apart from a few moments featuring Josh Hamilton and the sublime Martha Plimpton, there wasn’t a lot else to smile about.

Mr. Stoppard’s mammoth trilogy about the intellectual history of the 19th Century and the men who laid the philosophic foundation for the Russian Revolution starts well. The first play, VOYAGE, was a very entertaining evening in the theatre, stimulating and thought-provoking and moving. The acting was impeccable, and surprising. Billy Crudup’s performance as Bellinsky, the Russian literary critic who has a bad habit of putting his foot in his mouth was a revelation, a real change from the terribly stiff work I’d seen him deliver before. Ethan Hawke was having a grand time as the wildly enthusiastic Michael Bakunin, veering hilariously from one philosophy to another. Director Jack O’Brien keeps the action and the talk lively, and pulls off some wonderful little coups de theatre. If I found there to be a few too many blonde Bakunin sisters to keep track of, I didn’t let it ruin my evening.

What can I say? I liked it a lot. I didn’t feel terribly lost, considering the complexity of the play and the fact that I know next to nothing about Russian history. I seriously considered buying the T-shirt. I was looking forward to Part II, SHIPWRECK.

The first act of SHIPWRECK lived up to the promise of VOYAGE, but there were some danger signs, mostly involving casting. As the trilogy continues, one specific character begins to dominate, a man named Alexander Herzen, unfortunately played by an actor named Brian F. O’Byrne.

It would be no ordinary actor who can make this character engaging, at least as written by Stoppard. The role of Herzen is fiendishly difficult: lots and lots of long monologues that are supposed to explain complex philosophic positions and give lots and lots of historic background, interspersed with scenes dealing with mundane things like his wife’s infidelity and other domestic issues. And Mr. O’Byrne is simply not up to it. He is unable to make me give a damn about the man he is playing, or even to make me believe that he has a vague idea of what the hell he is supposed to be talking about. He might as well be reciting pi. I have never come so close to standing up and screaming at an actor to please shut the fuck up as when I sat writhing through O’Byrne’s unforgivably inept handling of the final scenes of the increasingly aptly entitled SHIPWRECK.

And it didn’t get better in SALVAGE. If SHIPWRECK was at least half interesting, at least until O’Byrne started jabbering, SALVAGE is a near-total failure. Ceaseless senseless oral diarrhea of historical data by O’Byrne, more characters introduced for a few minutes and then never heard from again, and less and less of actual interest. There’s the occasional sign of life provided by the return of Ethan Hawke as Bakunin (Hawke’s Bakunin is, by the way, the only character in the entire trilogy who gets convincingly older as time allegedly passes), Jennifer Ehle as Herzen’s housekeeper, and most especially by Josh Hamilton and Martha Plimpton as the writer Ogarev and his wife. Hamilton and Plimpton play the only interesting and engaging characters in this part of the trilogy. They actually seem to have an interest and affection for each other, and their interest in each other is infectious; you can feel the audience in the Beaumont start to react to something actually approaching energy on that stage.

It doesn’t last long. O’Byrne’s Herzen is soon gabbling again, and the play finally finally finally ends, with some ultimate gibberish from Herzen about how the important thing is to do the best you can in the period you’re in, and a really insulting final line: “There’s a storm coming.” Get it boys and girls? The storm of THE REVOLUTION!!!!!

There’s a sense of exhaustion to the proceedings, not just in the audience but onstage. Hawke and Ehle and Hamilton and Plimpton apart, the rest of the cast don’t register as clearly as they have in the earlier segments, at least partly because Stoppard is so busy trying to cram so much history into the play that the characters never come alive as anything other than names to be heard about once or twice and then forgotten about. Even the direction seems tired: the final tableau and musical flourish reminded me of nothing so much as Disney’s Hall of Presidents.

So that was it. Was it worth it? Yes and no. I’m glad to have seen it, certainly, but I can only say I enjoyed about half of it. My brother once described reading Norman Mailer’s big book HARLOT’S GHOST in this way: “The first 650 pages were wonderful.” I kind of feel the same way about THE COAST OF UTOPIA: the first 4 and a half hours were wonderful. That the remaining 4 and a half hours felt more like another 12 and a half hours is a big problem, one that Stoppard and O’Brien haven’t come anywhere near solving.

2007-01-22T21:25:00.000-05:00

PAN'S LABYRINTH

And now for something very much the same.

As long as this film centers on the vicious sadistic military Captain (a splendid performance by Sergio Lopez) and his relationship with his housekeeper, who has connections with the rebels who want to do him harm, this film is fascinating and horrifying and grimly funny. Unfortunately, for some bizarre reason, the director/screenwriter Guillermo Del Toro has decided to muddy this gripping story with some sentimental nonsense about a little girl and her interaction with some mythical creatures including a fawn, some fairies, and that creature you'll see in all the stills with his eyes in the palms of his hands.

See, the little girl's mother is the Captain's new wife. They're all in Spain during WWII, the Captain is a Fascist leader trying to wipe out a bunch of Communist rebels, and they're all living in some house in the middle of a forest that just happens to be infested with these rebels. The little girl, named Ofelia (get it?), is informed by a fawn (no, really, a fawn for Christ's sake) that she is a lost princess from another world, and that she has to pass three tests in order to prove herself worthy, and I'm sorry but I'm getting bored writing about it.

Forget about the little girl. She's probably the least interesting little girl who has every been expected to carry a movie and failed miserably. Her trials and tribulations have wowed a lot of people, especially the North American Film Critic Establishment (NAFCE) who have uniformly raved about this oddly tired and oddly unimaginative little film. The grownups, especially Sergio Lopez as the brutal but compelling Captain and Maribel Verdu as his housekeeper, are what the film is really about.

Lopez' Captain is a memorable villain, but he's more than that. Lopez never quite sinks into the obvious cliches of the psycho sadist. He trades them for a quiet conviction that is always convincing, never more so than during one memorable scene where he performs some emergency surgery on himself. Verdu's equally quiet and convincing performance is every bit Lopez' match. You just can't take your eyes off her, she manages to make every moment live onscreen.

So why are people falling all over themselves to praise this flick? Beats the hell out of me. PAN'S LABYRINTH offers some easy reassurance about transcending suffering, all wrapped up with a message of self-sacrifice and some stuff about escape through fantasy, and people just lap this stuff up. Now I don't mind me some reassurance about transcending suffering etc., but I just wish it had been done better. For a film about a girl's escape into fantasy to help her deal with the horrors of the real world around her, I much preferred Terry Gilliam's TIDELAND, a film that couldn't expect to be embraced by the kind of folks who are swooning over PAN'S LABYRINTH. And there it is, for me, in a nutshell. PAN'S LABYRINTH is a Terry Gilliam film for people who don't like Terry Gilliam films, who need the easy happy endings and reassurance that Gilliam relentlessly refuses to provide.

2007-01-01T18:08:00.000-05:00

CHILDREN OF MEN

"Bazooka." "I was just getting used to Froly."

CHILDREN OF MEN is Alfonso Cuaron's film adaptation of P. D. James' dystopian 1992 novel, set in a future where no more babies are being born and society is collapsing fast. Cuaron and his co-screenwriters pretty well jettison James' perhaps over-intellectualized story, keeping only the barest bones of the narrative, and creating a far more threatening world of terrorist attacks and generalized despair. An informed viewer will be able to catch echoes of Gitmo and Abu Ghrabe as well as of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR.

The new story centers on Theo Faron (Clive Owen), a low-level bureaucrat at the British Ministry of Energy. He is gradually drawn into an underground conspiracy to protect the only known pregnant woman in the world from the clutches of the pretty plainly untrustworthy government of which he is a part. This involves a series of increasingly hair-raising action sequences, including one ingenious sequence involving an escape and chase via a car that refuses to start.

Cuaron, whose HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN is the only one of the franchise worth seeing more than once, keeps CHILDREN OF MEN full of fascinating details (a kitten that gradually claws its way up Owen's pantleg, graffitti taken from Picasso's Guernica, lots of interesting animal imagery, including a reference to the cover of Pink Floyd's album Animals) that never seem shoehorned into the film for their own sakes, but seem designed to help keep the film alive, from sinking into a mass of genre cliches. Make no mistake, there is a lot more to this film than Spielbergian Big Set Pieces. It is interesting to compare the ending of CHILDREN OF MEN with the ending of Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS, to see the difference between a film that ends on a note of genuinely moving if qualified optimism, rather than sheer pandering knee-jerk sentimentality.

See it. See it now. Turn off your computer and go.

2006-12-25T19:50:00.000-05:00

DREAMGIRLS

There's a little secret about DREAMGIRLS, the famed Broadway musical that gave the world the classic anthem "And I Am Telling You I Am Not Going." A little secret that has only been shared by a small coterie of people. Simply put, that secret is this: DREAMGIRLS isn't really very good. A book that is a pretty tired parade of showbiz rags to riches cliches (guess what? Fame Isn't All It Is Cracked Up To Be) and a couple of pretty good songs. Under Michael Bennett's then-revolutionary staging, the show did supply a couple of goosebump moments (including "And I Am Telling You"), but my principal memory of DREAMGIRLS is of Jennifer Holliday throwing the single greatest temper tantrum in the history of live musical drama. She was electrifying. Not much else about the show was, though.

So it can't be a surprise that my hopes for the film were not high. Could Bill Condon, a perfectly competent filmmaker (KINSEY and GODS AND MONSTERS) work the cinematic equivalent of Michael Bennett's magic on this rather uninspiring material? Or would he follow the lead of the unspeakable Rob Marshall in creating the atrocious film of CHICAGO, easily the worst film ever released by a major studio, casting a bunch of non-singing actors, or worse, non-acting singers, shooting each scene from every possible angle but the correct one, and editing the whole mess with a rusty blender?

If DREAMGIRLS never quite hits the lows of CHICAGO, it doesn't entirely hit any new heights either. The characters are two-dimensional, at best, and the story remains trite and largely uninteresting, except for a couple of finger-snapping payback moments. The casting is mostly better than expected, happily, and thank God they can all sing. Eddie Murphy delivers the film's most assured performance: his musical numbers and his book scenes are equally exciting. Jennifer Hudson is getting a lot of Oscar buzz, and her "And I Am Telling You" is easily the film's highlight. The biggest surprise in the film is the comatose work of Jamie Foxx, who brings absolutely nothing to the film whatsoever, delivering the living definition of a one-note performance.

At least part of the reason for the remarkable impact of Hudson's "And I Am Telling You" is that it is the first (if not quite the only) time that Condon actually lets his cast sing for more than a second at a time. All of the other musical numbers are very heavily edited in the way of most recent musical films: there's a cut after every three words or so, from a closeup to a long shot, or to a high shot, or to something else to illustrate the passage of time/make some plot points, or basically to just about anything that will break the continuity of the song and remind you that you are watching a movie. Condon seems particularly fond of showing me the back of his singers' heads. God forbid we should just get a chance to watch somebody sing. Hudson's "And I Am Telling You" is a potent reminder of what musicals are all really ultimately about: the pure pleasure of watching people sing. Condon similarly lets Eddie Murphy's songs and Beyonce Knowles' performance of a new song entitled "Listen" stand more or less on the talents of his actor/singers rather than on his editor, and these scenes are by far the best in the film as a result.

Think about that for a minute: actor/singers who can actually sing. After the horrors of Woody Allen's misguided EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU and the aforementioned CHICAGO it is a real treat to hear people who know their way round a song get a crack at a movie, rather than Renee Zellwegger, Richard Gere, or that Gerard Butler person.

Worth seeing? Sure. Why not. See it in a theatre with good sound.

2006-12-16T19:45:00.000-05:00

INLAND EMPIRE

David Lynch's latest film, the first since the surrealistically over-rated MULHOLLAND DR. Clocking in at a completely indefensible 2 hours and 48 minutes, EMPIRE covers some of the same territory as MULHOLLAND: we're once again in a no-man's-land of narrative and cinematic tricks, where Nothing Is As It Seems To Be, and everything is as Lynchian as it can possibly be.

Insert that little sound of frustration and annoyance that Marge Simpson makes here.

The story, or stories, seem to center on an actress named Nikki Grace, played admirably by Laura Dern. Nikki is making a film, and finds that the line between herself and the character she is playing seems to be fading. We also find out that an earlier production of the film in progress (in Poland, for some reason) was halted due to the murder of the two leads. We get scenes from the film that Nikki is making, scenes from Nikki's life that seem to mimic the film Nikki is making, scenes from the earlier Polish production, and scenes from the life of Nikki's Polish counterpart which seem to refer to moments in Nikki's life and Nikki's film, and scenes that might be dreams, and a sitcom featuring humanized rabbits, and a lot of other stuff that will probably make sense with repeat viewings.

If there are any repeat viewings. INLAND EMPIRE doesn't quite sink under the weight of all the metacinematic trickery, but it never really takes off, either. Lynch does begin the film brilliantly,though. The old sense of effortless Lynchian menace, which he seems able to induce at will out of ordinary settings and with a few rumbling sound effects, comes across very quickly and excitingly. But then something else happens. What had been an exciting tingle of dread gives way to a familiar sense of the familiar, that I'd seen it all before. Elements of LOST HIGHWAY, BLUE VELVET, ERASERHEAD, even the red curtains from TWIN PEAKS, and unfortunately big chunks of MULHOLLAND all inform INLAND EMPIRE.

There's nothing particularly wrong with a director working on similar themes and ideas and motifs from film to film. But with Lynch it feels like he's just plain repeating himself. Nothing's being learned, nothing's being digested, just chewed over and over and over.

2006-12-09T16:59:00.000-05:00

SPRING AWAKENING

“I don’t do sadness.”

One day Bob called me over to the computer, sat me down, and saying, “Watch this,” played a video clip. About three minutes later the clip ended and I got up to find the reduced-price mailer I had gotten for SPRING AWAKENING, a clip of which Bob had just shown me. We saw the complete show earlier this week, and I’m having a hard time getting certain parts of it out of my head. In a good way.

The show is a musical version of Frank Wedekind’s apparently notorious 1890’s play, which has been banned off and on over the years. I’ve never read the play. Is the play banned because it dares to deal in a frank way with the sexual and emotional maturation of children, or because it lays the blame for what happens to these children squarely on the repressive trinity of Church, School and Home?

Anyway, the play focuses on a pair of schoolboys, Moritz and Melchior. Moritz is the school misfit, not unintelligent but rather clearly having a rough time with puberty: his hormones are really gushing. Melchior seems to be the school’s star, handsome and intelligent, clearly meant for Better Things. Moritz is being picked on by the school administration, Melchior begins a relationship with a young girl named Wendla.

The plot isn’t really the thing in this show. Anyone with any experience of narratives at all will be able to see where the story is going. What is at stake is the relentless energy and passion on that stage, the way that the screwed up hysteria of youth has been captured in a work of theatre that never condescends to the characters or to the audience. There’s none of the sentimentality or self-congratulation that mars RENT, no tacked-on pseudo-happy ending or self-righteous gabbling about the end of the millennium. A scene that evokes the ghosts of the past is powerful and harrowing and deeply moving, especially in comparison with a certain idiotic scene in GREY GARDENS.

Per Addison DeWitt: I am available for shouting from rooftops and dancing in the streets. (I thought that went out with Woolcott!)

Here's the clip.

2006-11-30T15:30:00.000-05:00

COMPANY

"Sometimes I see him looking, and looking. I just look right back."

We saw the new revival of Stephen Sondheim's COMPANY the other night. There's been a lot of buzz about this production, as it is directed by John Doyle, who gave us last year's revival of SWEENEY TODD in which the cast doubled as the orchestra, and features Raul Esparza who recently came out in the New York Times as being not entirely gay or straight or even particularly bisexual, but kind of ambivisexual, which is supposed to mean that he can relate to Bobby, the commitment-phobic hero of COMPANY. Mr. Esparza's Bobby is particularly effective, a lost soul navigating around a series of married Scyllas and Charybdeses. His final outburst, the song "Being Alive," is one of the more moving things you'll see in a theatre this year. He manages to be funny, sexy, charming, and yet still believably lonely. The cast plays their instruments ably, and they sing and act their assorted roles very well.

Maybe a little too well. The big problem with the show is the book by George Furth, which is basically a series of sketches of apparently unhappy or endearingly quirky married couples (including one married couple-to-be) as they interact unhappily or endearingly quirkily, while Bobby watches and wonders, "What do you get out of this whole marriage thing?" As my partner Bob said afterward, the problem with sketches is that they are sketchy. The book is never quite as good as it wants to be and thinks it is, and is often just plain dated. One scene involving Bobby and his scene partners getting sitcomishly giggly after smoking pot is right out of Love American Style, and there is an unironic use of the term "generation gap." The actors (under Doyle's direction) do their considerable best, but they may be working too hard, aiming for a "seriousness" that the material just can't bear. For example, the sketch ending Act One centers on Amy and Paul, who are just about to get married. The great comic song "Getting Married Today" is the highlight of the scene, and is pulled off gorgeously, but the scene soon turns very sour, as Amy displays more than sitcom-level nerves, finally calling off the wedding altogether, causing Paul to leave very near tears. Of course, in true sketch-comedy fashion, Amy comes to her senses and runs off to find Paul and go through with the wedding, but it just doesn't wash. Amy's terror-turning-into-rage and Paul's bemused tolerance-turning-into-despair are so vividly and painfully realized that I found it impossible to believe that the wedding would go on. Who on earth would marry Amy after that? There's "good and crazy" and there's "flat-out stupid."

That caveat aside, though, the production works beautifully, fluid and exciting during the musical numbers if significantly less so during the frankly underwritten dialogue scenes. (at least we're not treated to any visits from ghosts of the past) The set and costumes and lighting are excellent. The score is just amazing. I don't see how anyone with a functioning nervous system can fail to get goosebumps during that opening number, especially as staged by Mr. Doyle and performed by this cast. And the songs keep coming, "You Could Drive A Person Crazy" and "Barcelona" and "Another Hundred People" and "Side By Side By Side" and on and on, all inventively staged and perfectly performed.

Bottom line: see it. Just don't be surprised if you find yourself waiting rather impatiently for the next song.

2006-11-23T10:24:00.000-05:00

RULES OF THE GAME

"You're not a fool, you're a poet. A dangerous poet."

Film Forum is currently showing a new 35mm print of Jean Renoir's film. I've seen it three times in the past couple of weeks, and will probably squeeze in at least one one more trip.

I've been wracking my brain trying to put words to what it is that makes that movie so special, and I can't do it. I've tried to find writing on the film, and haven't been particularly successful. There's supposed to be a little BFI monograph by V.F.Perkins on RULES that has been delayed again and again and again. I know the usual line is to portray the film as a picture of French society just before WWII, and it certainly is that, but it isn't really that at all. At no time is anything as trivial as politics or current events ever mentioned in the film (which is very likely the point, of course). It's a picture of a bunch of people (of all classes) leading rather silly trivial lives with rather silly trivial mores. The series of ever-so-civilized affairs and social proprieties reveal how shallow the upper classes are, and the lower classes are not much better: at one point a chef mentions how he respects his boss for being angry that potato salad was improperly prepared, for having a palate sensitive enough to realize that the white wine was added after the potatoes had cooled instead of when they were piping hot. That's the sign of a real gentleman! And there are later events that show the real brutality lurking under the civilized veneer, too, and I don't mean just the still-horrifying hunt sequence.

The film isn't just a hatchet job, either. It is clear that Renoir, as director and screenwriter and actor, really loves these people even as he shows us how bloody awful they are. There are no out and out villains, and no out and out heroes. One character, the aviator Jurieu, is repeatedly referred to as a 'hero,' but the character is so unappealing in comparison with his opposite, the Marquis Robert de la Chesnaye, that the term doesn't really carry a lot of weight. And Robert is a fascinating character: an accomplished rake who has just cut off a long term affair because he wants to be worthy of his wife, and who has to deal with the fact that his ex-mistress wants him back and his wife isn't happy when she finds out about the affair that was common knowledge to everyone but her. What makes the film special is the way that Renoir is able to show me so thoroughly that, as his own character Octave says, "Everyone has his reasons."

The acting is pretty well perfect. Roland Toutain can't quite make me interested in Andre Jurieu, but this is more than made up for by Marcel Dalio's endlessly fascinating Robert de la Chesnaye. He puts a fascinating twist on his words that makes me wish my French was better so that I could really understand what he's doing.

One thing that keeps coming up, both in print and in the commentaries on the Criterion DVD, is the use of deep focus, which seems to have been revolutionary in France at the time the film was made, or at least which Renoir uses in a way that had not been typical in French films up to that point. And it is marvelous: repeat viewings show all kinds of things going on in all those rooms that can be glimpsed off in the distance, sometimes very important things.

There are lots of incredibly complex shots, with lots of very carefully laid out choreography of actors/characters. One in particular begins as a closeup of Christine, who begins to tell her assembled guests/the audience about her relationship with Andre. As she speaks, her husband Robert (Dalio) and Octave (Renoir) move into view behind her, reacting to her description of her friendship with Andre, clearly mocking her statments that she and Andre are just friends. As her speech ends, Dalio thanks her for her speech, and describes the upcoming delights of the week in the country, the camera moves to include the other guests, and there is a good deal of carefully worked out activity as the shot comes to an end. I'd be here all day if I described all of it, and worked out all of the ramifications of each move and gesture. An amazing shot, only one of dozens of similar virtuosity throughout the film. And Renoir's technique is never obtrusive, never calling attention to itself.

One more important thing. Part of the danger of reading/writing about RULES OF THE GAME is the impression that the film is a humorless solemn monster. Make no mistake: RULES OF THE GAME is one of the most entertaining of the films usually considered as "classics." See it. See it often. It repays repeat viewings like few movies I know.

2006-11-18T20:50:00.000-05:00

THE LITTLE DOG LAUGHED

We saw Douglas Carter Beane’s play this week. It provides an interesting counterpoint to the other big theatrical experience we’ve had lately. GREY GARDENS was a huge success Off-Broadway, much of the fuss centering on the female lead performance. If I can’t say I quite understand what the big deal is over Christine Ebersole’s performance in GREY GARDENS, I can certainly understand why people are so excited over Julie White’s performance as Diane, the Machiavellian Mephistophelian Agent From Hell. And similarly to GREY GARDENS, there’s not much else to make too much fuss over.

The play concerns Mitchell, a rising leading man with what Diane describes as a recurring case of homosexuality. In NYC to collect a rather improbable-seeming NY Film Critics Award for Best Actor, Mitchell hooks up with Alex, a young hustler. Alex and Mitchell hit it off, much to Diane’s dismay. Mitchell is clearly her star client, and if his gayness gets around he’ll be stuck in boutique projects for life.

The play is well-written enough. Beane can certainly get off good lines, and keeps the action rather lively. Unfortunately, none of the actors is operating at the same kind of near-operatic level of sheer outrageousness as White. She’s a grand Dickensian Giant, tearing into that role like a shark with a swimmer, great fun to watch even as you thank God in heaven that she’s safely on a stage rather than anywhere near your real life. But no one else quite comes alive on stage as completely as she does. The stage shouldn’t feel quite so empty when White isn’t around.

And later, on the way home, you'll probably find yourself wondering certain things. Like why the agent of a rising young actor who has just won the NY Film Critics Award never shows any concern about ensuring him an Oscar nomination. Or more importantly how we're supposed to feel about the elaborately happy ending arranged so beautifully by Diane: how happy is it really supposed to be? I found myself feeling rather queasy about the whole thing, and that may be the point. Or is it? I can't quite escape the feeling that a stronger set of actors being directed to get their characters across might have clarified a good deal.

2006-11-14T21:40:00.000-05:00

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LITTLE EDIE? -- GREY GARDENS the musical

A new musical based on GREY GARDENS, the film about a mother and daughter who live in squalor in the titular collapsing mansion in East Hampton has opened. The women are Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, also named Edith (they are referred to as Big Edie and Little Edie, respectively). The film is an unscripted snapshot of their lives, as the two women worry over their cats, fight, worry over the city of East Hampton taking legal action to get them out of their cat and raccoon infested crumbling house, and fight. Little Edie is always complaining about the sorry mess her life has become. She wants more than anything (she says) to get away from Grey Gardens and have her own life. There are some epic battles, most of which have clearly been fought and fought and fought any number of times over the years. The film is not to everybody's taste. One good friend says that he thinks the film exploits mental illness, and I've known others who just can't stand all the bitching. The film never answers assorted questions, the most basic of which is quite simply: what the hell is wrong with these two women?

The musical is split into two acts. Act One takes place in 1941, before the big party to announce Little Edie's engagement to Joseph Kennedy, Jr. Act Two is set in 1973, the year of the release of the film, and is based more specifically on the film itself. I personally preferred Act One, as it felt less like some kind of imitation. Christine Ebersole is getting a lot of worshipful attention for ther work as Big Edie in Act One and the now middle-aged Little Edie in Act Two. Elizabeth Wilson does a splendid job as Act Two's Big Edie. The rest of the cast is able enough, especially the actress who plays Young Little Edie in Act One. Her temper tantrums and budding neurosis set a very fine foundation for Ebersole to capitalize on in Act Two.

The score is fine, occasionally memorable. The book, especially in Act Two, hits on all the important bits from the movie, maybe too many of them. Big chunks of dialogue are repeated verbatim, and turned into song lyrics, to the point where I started to feel that some kind of co-author/lyricist credit for the Beales, to say nothing of the creators of the film, is in order. The emotional rollercoaster ride that Act Two's Little Edie takes is sincerely performed, but I couldn't escape the feeling that just a few too many lines and moments were lifted straight from the film, content and context be damned, just to make sure that the fans were satisfied.

There seems to be a cult around the film. I can't decide whether it is the kind of cult that surrounds ERASERHEAD, where people seem to appreciate an underappreciated but interesting and original work of art for its own merits, or the kind of cult that surrounds WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE and MOMMIE DEAREST, where the doings of madwomen are "camp." The musical seems to be trying to have it both ways. They want the show to be a serious examination of the lives of these two women, but they can't resist the temptation to add that most transparent of current Broadway devices: the late second act gospel number.

I'm not the kind of person who demands that adapters maintain absolute fidelity to an original work. I don't really care what they do, as long as it works. The team behind GREY GARDENS manage somehow to hit all the bases. There are moments lifted right from the film that work beautifully, there are moments lifted right from the film that don't work at all, and the same goes for the new material. Most of Act One works beautifully, to my mind, while the big second act number "Entering Grey Gardens" hits bold new lows of sheer theatrical BULLSHIT, as the ghosts of the past (I kid you not) appear wandering around the now-ruined estate. It looks like a community theatre production of Disney's Haunted Mansion. I'd expect something like this in DANCE OF THE VAMPIRES and GOOD VIBRATIONS, to say nothing of CARRIE: THE MUSICAL, but not in a widely respected and well-reviewed piece of musical theatre. I was so appalled by this number that I sat there in shock for much of the rest of the show, dreading what fresh horrors they might have waiting. Mercifully, nothing else quite sank to that level, but there was nothing quite good enough to entirely remove that bad taste from my mouth.

2006-11-05T17:13:00.000-05:00

SUNDAY, RATHER BORING SUNDAY

The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul

So it is Sunday. I went to see RULES OF THE GAME at Film Forum (gorgeous new print) and unfortunately couldn't quite unwind enough to enjoy it. There was an annoying static sound throughout the opening scenes, and then the obligatory fat bastard stuffing his face with candy bars and rattling each and every candy bar for maximum irritation. To be fair, the fat bastard did make an effort to be quiet after I politely asked him to keep the wrappers quiet. Mercifully the rest of the screening went off very well. I managed to get a lot of enjoyment out of the film, and will almost certainly see it again in the next week or so that it is there.

We're seeing BORAT tonight. I'll let you know.

I'm rather liking the new job. It isn't the busiest position ever. I basically answer the occasional phone, send the occasional fax, and forward the occasional bit of paper elsewhere. I'm veering back and forth between exhiliration and concern. On the one hand, I can't believe I'm getting paid what I'm getting paid for not doing a hell of a lot all day. On the other, I can't believe they're going to continue paying me fornot doing a hell of a lot all day. I've got enough of a work ethic to want to be busy, to not be ripping this firm off. But I don't get too worried. See, it goes like this:

I am 43 years old. I've been working in one job or another since I was 17, which means I've been a member of the workforce for 26 years. I've had very busy positions, for which I've been paid very little, and over the last 5 years there's been a good deal of HORROR in the two most recent jobs I've held. The first involved working for a boss popularly known as the Fat Disgusting Bitch (when not called the Fat Heifer, the Fat Sow, or my own favorite the Fat Disgusting Cunt). After almost five years of performing wonders for them (if I do say so myself, and I bloody well do) I left the job with the Fat Disgusting Bitch (long story, harassment on FaDiBi's end, threatened lawsuit on my end, I'll tell you if you're really interested and I can't imagine anyone really is) for a very interesting job with a very demanding boss (Control Freak hereafter). On my first day working for Control Freak, I was congratulated on returning from my first lunch hour: more than one of my predecessors had not. Working for Control Freak was certainly better than working for FaDiBi, but still with a disproportionate amount of stress. Control Freak has the kind of faith in ORGANIZATION and EFFICIENCY that only the deeply dis-organized and wildly in-efficient ever really have. My co-worker and I were effectively crippled by an unbelievable set of Processes and Procedures that wound up more of an impediment than anything else. Example: my To-Do list was (I'm not kidding) 75 pages long. When Control Freak laid me off I didn't exactly cry myself to sleep. By this time I was so emotionally drained by just the work I was doing every day that the prospect of temping was actually tempting.

I am going on here, aren't I? Long story short: I'm now getting paid 25% more than I've ever made for doing 75% less work than I've ever had to do. The occasional twinge of guilt remains both occasional and twinge-level; never more than a quick itch of guilt, easily scratched. I've earned a breather, and if a big firm wants to give me what amounts to an extended paid vacation, well, I'm not gonna say them nay.

Sue me.

I'll post on BORAT and RULES OF THE GAME later this week (RULES will require another viewing uncursed by static and candy wrappers). Bob and I are also seeing the musical of GREY GARDENS this week, which I'm simultaneously looking forward to and dreading terribly.

2006-11-02T07:28:00.000-05:00

BUTLEY

"Trouble for you, fun for me."

The word "fun" keeps popping up in Simon Gray's BUTLEY, but not in a good way. Ben Butley's idea of "fun" is rather like George W. Bush's idea of "democracy." Butley goes through the play abusing pretty much everyone he comes in contact with. The problem with the current revival of the play starring Nathan Lane is that the abuse comes through loud and clear, but there isn't much in the way of "fun."

The plot is pretty simple. Ben Butley (Nathan Lane) is having a bad day.His ex-student/roommate/colleague and probable boyfriend (the play is irritatingly vague on the exact extent of their sexual relationship) has found another man, and it isn't long before Butley's estranged wife shows up to announce that she's found someone else too. Butley's dazzling verbal assaults make it pretty clear why people are deserting him right and left. The only real questions are why they've stayed so long, and why they showed up in the first place.

And things go from bad to worse to worse still. Lane works very hard to show Ben Butley as a man teetering on the brink of an Abyss, about to descend into his Emotional Maelstrom, having his Dark Day Of The Soul. Butley's twice-repeated line that "our ends never know our beginnings" certainly doesn't apply to this production; Lane's Butley is a miserable wreck when he walks onstage, and he's a miserable wreck at play's end. To be fair, Lane delivers an occasionally exciting performance, showing us numerous shades of misery and anger and bitterness. He's never more effective than when he's being really really really nasty.

If there's anything missing, it is the excited wicked glee that animated Alan Bates' original performance of the role, which has been preserved in a very good film. Bates' Butley is, on some level, having the time of his life: he's never happier than when he's getting a rise out of someone, and his joy in being so naughty is infectious without ever obscuring the real pain the man is feeling. Bates' Butley is "fun" in a way that Lane's Butley never is, and Lane's performance suffers as a result. When they even go so far as to play the song Mad World ("I think it's kind of funny,I think it's kind of sad, that the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had.") to underline poor Butley's MISERY it is hard not to feel that they've just laid it on a bit too goddamn thick.

2006-10-15T20:04:00.000-04:00

THE DEPARTED

It is about two guys who are each undercover agents. Leonardo Dicaprio plays the cop working deep undercover for a gangster while feeding information back to the cops. Matt Damon plays the other cop who is supposed to be investigating that same gangster, while feeding information back to that same gangster.

They're doubles. Get it? That's about as subtle as the movie gets.

This film is being hailed by a lot of people as a dazzling return to form for Scorsese. What it really feels like to me is a return to straightforward storytelling. The film is leaner than Scorsese's last few films; there are fewer stylistic flourishes, that feeling that he is straining really really really hard to be as 'cinematic' as he can be. There's nothing in THE DEPARTED to match the big tracking shot through the bowels of the Copa in GOODFELLAS or the dazzling fight scenes in RAGING BULL or the games with color in THE AGE OF INNOCENCE and THE AVIATOR, etc. The characters and story are the stars this time out.

And this time I was actually moved to give a damn about them. Mr. Damon and Mr. Dicaprio do very good work, each coming apart at the seams most convincingly under the pressures of their respective situations. Dicaprio's work in THE DEPARTED shows all the tension and danger that his performance in GANGS so desperately lacked, and the darkness behind Damon's trillion-dollar smile has never been used to better effect.

So what's not to like? The fact that the film starts to feel rather by the numbers. There is a MILLER'S CROSSING factor, by which I mean that eventually it just becomes clear that everybody is double-crossing everybody else, and triple-crossing everybody else, and nobody can be trusted, and nobody is quite what they seem, and that rabbits will be pulled from hats (a series of incriminating recordings appears just a little too conveniently) in order to ensure big climactic scenes.

In a nutshell, the feeling that my time could have been better spent watching a few good episodes of THE SOPRANOS just wouldn't go away, especially when Jack Nicholson was onscreen. His showboat performance occasionally pays off, but all too often it just brings the film to a halt. Look boys and girls, there's Jack with a severed hand in a baggie! Look boys and girls, see how he's waving it around to get some Tarantino-style laughs!! And don't forget the big rat impression at Oscar time, y'all.

So the big question now: is THE DEPARTED sufficiently devoid of interest and content to snag Scorsese that long-deferred Oscar? I don't see how they can deny it to him this time. I'm glad that THE DEPARTED doesn't sink under the weight of Scorsese's 'cinematic genius' the way that GANGS OF NEW YORK and THE AVIATOR did, and that it is leaner and meaner and ultimately just plain better than either of his most recent pieces of Oscar bait. But all the lean mean just plain betterness of this film can't disguise the fact that it has absolutely nothing interesting to say.

And that final shot. I mean really. Just how stupid does Scorsese think I am?

2006-10-14T20:13:00.000-04:00

TIDELAND

Terry Gilliam's latest and possibly most audacious film opens with an intro from the director, telling us that some of us will love the film, some will hate the film, and that some of us won't know what to think of it, but that hopefully we'll have something to think about. I manage to fall somewhere in between all three categories: I love parts of it, have doubts about parts of it, and don't quite know what to think of other parts of it, but have found it hard to stop thinking about it.

TIDELAND centers on Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), a young girl in rather horrifying circumstances who, not surprisingly for a Gilliam hero, takes refuge in fantasy. She's clearly been left to her own devices a good deal; when not cooking up her father's latest heroin fix and preparing his needles she has rather elaborate conversations with a series of tiny doll heads. Upon her mother's death (some reviews have said from an overdose but it looks like accidental asphyxiation to me) Jeliza-Rose and her father journey to his mother's home in the country, which turns out to be a deserted husk of a house in the middle of a field of weeds. Eventually Jeliza gets involved with a neighboring woman named Dell (an alarming Janet McTeer) and Dell's rather extravagantly mentally damaged brother Dickens (Brendan Fletcher).

I can't really give away much more without giving away too much. A good part of the effect of the film is the flat-out surprise it generates. Certain scenes are literally jaw-dropping. Make no mistake: this is no genteel Focus On The Family-friendly fantasy. TIDELAND owes as much to Tobe Hooper as it does to Lewis Carroll. Gilliam makes it clear in his introduction that the film is about innocence and the resilience of children, and he may be understating. For Jeliza-Rose to make it to the end of the events of this film with anything like a semblance of a shred of sanity left calls for more than resilience and a refuge in fantasy: it requires flat-out Miraculous Intervention.

TIDELAND, like Gilliam's FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS and Linklater's A SCANNER DARKLY, will take more than one viewing to fully appreciate. I'm looking forward to seeing it again.

2006-10-06T21:33:00.000-04:00

NEW JOB

I started a new job recently, and haven't been able to post as much as I would like. Lots of new stuff to learn. I'll be back shortly. Here are a couple of bitesized recent things:

I went to a screening at the local IFC Center, a surprise screening of one of Terry Gilliam's favorite films with Gilliam himself appearing for a Q&A after the film. The film turned out to be TOTO LE HEROS, a not terribly interesting and surprisingly derivative film. Gilliam handled the Q&A very well, making one memorable comment about how he was considering suing Bush and Cheney for plagiarizing so much of BRAZIL, that we are basically living in his film now.

I saw BRAZIL last weekend at Film Forum. He's right. We are.

Bob and I saw THE ILLUSIONIST. An okay little movie worth seeing mainly to watch Paul Giamatti act pretty much everybody off the screen.

We rented THE LIBERTINE. Even my adoration of Johnny Depp couldn't make me sit all the way through it. When it pops up on cable, watch the first few minutes to see Depp's opening monologue, a monstrous and fascinating display of egotism and nastiness. It banished most of my concerns about whether he'd be able to make a convincing Sweeney Todd, all except worries about how he'll handle the singing. The rest of THE LIBERTINE is pretty dull, hitting bold new lows whenever a dreadfully miscast John Malkovich appears onscreen wearing the single worst piece of prosthetic makeup I've ever seen, a fake nose that sticks out like, well, a sore nose.

I've been on a bit of a Joseph Heller kick lately. CATCH-22, CLOSING TIME, PICTURE THIS, and GOOD AS GOLD one right after the other. I like CATCH-22 a lot. I can say with absolute confidence that at least one of my ex-jobs used it as their management guide, not realizing it is a satire. I had been planning on a re-read of SOMETHING HAPPENED, but it just didn't seem like the kind of thing to be reading when embarking on a new job. I switched to Michael Chabon's WONDER BOYS, a much lighter and friendlier read.

Bob and I also saw Twyla Tharp's new dance musical theatre piece, THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGING. An early preview, they're still making changes. The show is based on the songs of Bob Dylan, as MOVIN' OUT was based on Billy Joel's. This one isn't a straightforward ballet piece, danced to a live band and a singer. THE TIMES features characters who actually sing their own songs, a violently unpleasant man named Ahrab (get it?) who runs a circus, Ahrab's son Coyote, and a woman who seems to have something to do with the circus, and you can probably figure out where the show is going long before it gets moving. There's a lot of heavy-handed symbolism, in particular a reference to MOBY DICK that is just plain flat out inappropriate, but there's also a lot of equally amazing dancing. Songs like Mr. Tambourine Man come off particularly well. I hope they manage to iron out the kinks, and reconsider the name of a certain boat on which two characters sail off into the sunset.

2006-09-23T13:46:00.000-04:00

APOCALYPSE NOW COMPLETE DOSSIER DVD BLAST O-RAMA EXTRAVAGANZA.

I got the new DVD, which includes both the original theatrical release and the REDUX version, with gorgeous new transfers supervised by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and Coppola, and lots of extras. These extras are mainly remarkable for having never appeared on the initial DVD release of either version of this film. I’ll post more about them in the near future.

APOCALYPSE NOW is one of my favorite movies. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen it. I know that I stopped counting at 18 times during its original release in 1979. I would go to see it every chance I got, until I suddenly stopped. Screenings were becoming rarer, and prints were getting worse. I walked out of one particularly bad screening in the mid-80s, realizing that the appallingly bad condition of the print was beside the point, that I knew the film so well that I didn’t really need to see it again. I restricted myself to assorted videos/laserdiscs, which weren’t really enough but sufficed if I turned up the stereo really loud.

I still have the original programs they handed out instead of running opening/closing credits during the first runs, before it went wide. I read Eleanor Coppola’s book on the filming, entitled NOTES. As proof of my total bizarre devotion, I even managed to obtain (don’t ask how) an actual audience questionnaire from one of the original preview screenings, which asks some very interesting questions about, among other things, the sound effects.

Then along came APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX, which “restored” a lot of things that Coppola had been supposedly forced to leave on the cutting room floor. A reading of NOTES gave me a pretty good idea of what to expect, mainly an extended scene involving the Playboy bunnies who appear at a USO show, and a sequence at a French plantation in Cambodia. Other scenes were re-arranged: in REDUX the scene of the boat crew surfing to the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” comes later than it does in the original.

I remember being mainly glad about being able to see the film again on a big screen. I don’t think the added scenes add very much, and often detract a good deal. Robert Duvall’s Colonel Kilgore gets a marvelous new entrance, striding forth from a helicopter like the God From The Chopper, but is finally allowed to dwindle into a mere fool: an added scene of his voice being played over a loudspeaker begging for the return of his stolen surfboard is a serious diminution. Oddly, the most satisfying element of the new footage in REDUX is the opportunity to see more of Albert Hall, playing Chief, the captain of the PBR that takes Willard up the river. What was a well played minor role in the original is more fully fleshed out in REDUX, and a new funeral sequence for one of the character’s contains the one really moving moment in the entire film, as Chief hands Willard the flag from the bodybag and asks him to accept it on behalf of a grateful nation. Hall takes what could have been a mawkish moment (just how mawkish can be guessed from the atrociously sentimental electronic score playing throughout the scene) and makes it work.

More problematic however are the changes to Martin Sheen’s Capt. Willard. The original’s Willard is a damaged piece of goods who has been too far out and seen way too much while out there, and his growing identification with Col. Kurtz through the dossier he reads manifests itself in a series of scenes where he loses patience with the bogus “army business” he sees around him: after the scene with the small sampan, Willard refers to how the more he sees of them, the more he hates lies. REDUX’s Willard seems rather less tightly wound: he steals Col. Kilgore’s treasured surfboard and laughs about it, and later, after nearly punching out a supply sergeant who seems to be more interested in running a USO show than filling Willard’s order for the boat’s diesel fuel, he trades these same increasingly precious barrels of diesel fuel for some time with the stranded Playboy bunnies (the interminable scene that follows really should have stayed on the cutting room floor, or at best a DVD extra). He even unwinds enough to smoke some opium during a romantic interlude with the wife of a French plantation owner. REDUX’s Willard is more of a participant in the “lies” and his growing obsession with Kurtz and dissatisfaction with the “lies” thus feels less convincing.

I have to admit that I simply have no idea what the French plantation sequence is supposed to mean. It brings the film to a crashing halt, and contains the film’s only really blatant homage to another film: one shot of the plantation inhabitants appearing out of the fog is lifted, with an uncharacteristic clumsiness, right out of KWAIDAN.

The old magic still worked though. The Wagner-scored air strike, the sequence at Do Long Bridge, and the final sacrificial scenes are still dazzling pieces, potent reminders that when Coppola is really on, there is nobody who can touch him.

2006-09-09T18:07:00.000-04:00

SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP

Well. I had been planning on writing a review of the film UGETSU, which is playing in a new 35mm print at NY’s premier repertory theatre. Unfortunately, I am unable to tell you much of anything about the movie because the screening featured what is rapidly becoming the bane of my movie-going life: a pain in the ass little old woman with incessantly rustling plastic bags. A polite request to keep the bags quiet being simply ignored, I finally had to grab the plastic bag to get the old bitch’s attention and fiercely whisper to keep the bags quiet. I wasn't so irritated that I forgot to say please. I think I scared the hateful harpy into silence: there were only occasional and acceptable sounds from her direction for the rest of the film, by which time it was, alas, too late. The movie had been ruined. Evil old baggage. There's a special place in hell for her and all like her who annoy in theatres.

It isn’t like this is an isolated occurrence. I seem to be something of a magnet in this regard. My partner Bob told me that he’d never had such a problem with difficult audiences as he started having when we started seeing each other. Here are some examples:

A recent Kurosawa series had as a regular attendee an elderly Asian lady, a prototypical bag rustler. I had to ask her to keep her bags quiet at three separate screenings. I was finally thanked by another regular attendee who didn’t have the balls to do it herself.

A screening of HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN was ruined by a man with his children, who were all loudly rustling cheap plastic bags containing candy smuggled into the theatre from outside. Smuggling doesn't bother me. Why pay $4.50 for a soda when you can get the same thing at the Duane Reade on the corner for a buck? It was the noise that was a pain. Those fucking bags, in a stadium seating theatre, might as well have been rustling right in my eardrum. A polite request to please keep the bags quiet was answered with a loud “No!” (we let it go at that, and didn’t bother asking again). The charming gentleman wasn't as easygoing, though. At the end of the film he stood up and crushed a plastic bag over our heads. I managed to restrain myself from congratulating him on the fine example he was setting for his children, who all seemed cut out for a future asking strangers if they want fries with that.

A 3-D screening of DIAL M FOR MURDER was ruined by a gentleman who seemed to have been both a compulsive smoker and completely unschooled in the use of soap. He was sitting directly in front of Bob and me, and it soon became difficult to breathe. I had to wrap my scarf around my face by the end of the film. This was no ordinary stench. It had texture and body, and even impermeated our clothes and hair. We had to shower when we got home after the movie.

A screening of CAPOTE featured teenagers who loudly stomped into the theatre after the movie started, sat for a few minutes before realizing that they had wandered into the wrong movie and then loudly stomped their way out, and no less than three morons with cellphones. The third cellphoner actually answered the call and went into the first three rows of the theatre to talk. My heart was gladdened when about 3 people went up to her to tell her take the call outside.

A screening of THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING featured a pair of idiots in love with potato chip bags that could be plainly heard throughout the film, and who resisted numerous requests from numerous patrons to keep quiet. Someone finally shouted to them to let us watch the final 20 minutes of the movie in peace. Think about that. Someone actually drowned out THE RETURN OF THE KING with a bag of chips.

A play entitled 36 VIEWS was ruined by an elderly gentleman with plastic bags. The bags rustled and rustled and rustled, and numerous requests for silence were unheeded. At the intermission, everyone within a six person radius of the old man descended on him. Only the timely intervention of the house manager saved him from being torn limb from goddamn limb.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect people to sit in monastic silence throughout a movie or play or whatever. It is only natural to shift in your seat, or occasionally whisper something to your neighbor, or occasionally knock over a soda can, or something. Sounds happen. But to sit there rustling those goddamn plastic bags, or gab on your cellphone, or make idiotic comments in full voice over and over again is more than inconsiderate, it is just plain flat out rude. And I’m finding my patience for these morons to be getting shorter and shorter. Today I was briefly concerned that I’d frightened the old bitch behind me into a stroke, but only very briefly. Fuck her if she’s had a stroke, I thought to myself, at least she’s quiet.

2006-09-07T20:56:00.000-04:00

WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

I like the original version with Gene Wilder. I also like, with reservations, the new version by Tim Burton, with Johnny Depp. I recently read the book for the first time. Below are some kind of random notes:

The first film can be seen as a precursor of the sort of film that has become very common: a family film that adults can enjoy as well. The story is intact, but there are odd little poisonous moments that the kiddies just can’t seem to appreciate. What is a child supposed to make of Wonka’s advice to Mike Teavee: “You should open your mouth a little wider when you speak” (a direct quote from Carroll’s Red Queen to Alice in Through the Looking Glass) or the quote from Arthur O'Shaughnessy “we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.” And it isn’t just Wonka. Mrs. Teavee’s mis-identification of the tune on Wonka’s musical lock (Mozart, not Rachmaninoff) and the picture of Martin Bormann used to identify the Argentinian gambler who forged the last golden ticket are all out of place in an ordinary family movie.

Gene Wilder’s Wonka comes off as a weirdly charming mystery man. His first appearance is memorable, the halting walk with the cane and the sudden somersault show clearly that all is not as it seems. His excitement over Augustus Gloop's progress up the pipe is nothing short of sadistic, he pops candy into his mouth and quotes Oscar Wilde: "The suspense is terrible, I hope it will last." There's something harder to pinpoint, though, behind the jokes and veiled threats. A certain childlike quality, an excitement that pops up on occasion, as when he pauses before activating the Everlasting Gobstopper Maker to ask the kids, "Would you like to see?" He’s also certainly a grown up, as when he clearly rebukes Veruca when she claims that Violet has two of the eternal candies: “she has got one, and one is enough for anybody.”

Depp’s Wonka is a far weirder creation. His pageboy haircut and childish voice brought almost inevitable comparisons to Michael Jackson, which Depp denied, saying that he intended Wonka to be more of a kiddie-show host. And he’s right, upon repeat viewings Depp’s Wonka does seem to owe more to Fred Rogers, or more specifically, to a Robin Williams’ version of Fred Rogers than to Jackson.

The game:
The novel has no test for Charlie. It can be argued that no test is arranged for Charlie out of a lack of time: Charlie finds the ticket the day before the tour is scheduled to take place. But that's not much of an argument. There is no test specifically targeted at his weaknesses, because Charlie quite simply has none. He wins simply by showing up. He’s the last survivor of the tour, so he wins the prize, plain and simple. It is also shown very clearly and spelled out very specifically that the Buckets are in serious danger of literally starving to death. The novel is more concerned with setting up Charlie as a good kid, and then wiping out a bunch of rotten kids in entertaining ways. It almost came as a surprise to find myself thinking of the possibility of Charlie making it to the end simply by being more devious than the others, rather than more honest and decent and pure.

The first film adds the Everlasting Gobstopper gambit. Upon finding the Golden Tickets, a figure claiming to be Arthur Slugworth, a business rival of Wonka’s, appears to offer the children a deal: if the children smuggle an Everlasting Gobstopper out of Wonka’s factory and hand it over to him, they will get lots of money. The test seems aimed particularly at Charlie: the fake Slugworth promises lots of good food and comfort for Charlie and his family in return for the candy. Thus, when Charlie hands over the Gobstopper to Wonka at the end of Wonka’s frightening fake tirade, Charlie’s honesty is proven and he is worthy of winning the Great and Glorious Jackpot.

Burton’s film eliminates this particular gambit. As in the novel, Charlie wins the until-then secret Grand Prize (a trip in the Great Glass Elevator and the Factory itself), but he turns it down when Wonka won’t let Charlie’s family come with him. Some rather heavy-handed moralizing about the importance of family follows, and Charlie helps Wonka mend fences with his own father who has been shown in flashbacks to be a cold-hearted dentist who won’t allow the young Wonka to eat candy or pursue his dream of being a candy maker. After the reconciliation, we are told that Wonka repeats his offer, and Charlie says yes this time, on condition that his family comes with him, to which Wonka assents.

The final scene of the film is very curious: Wonka and Charlie arrive in the Bucket family home after a hard day’s work, Wonka is asked to stay for dinner, the table is spread with family dinner trimmings like turkey, side dishes, etc. The camera pulls back though a broken window, and it is revealed that the Bucket family home has been transported as is, holes in the wall and poor but honest squalor and apparently permanent winter intact, to the Chocolate Room in the Wonka Factory. This has always bothered me. Why the giant salt-shakers pouring snow over the house? Why is the great free-flowing chocolate river, a marvelous symbol of Wonka’s demented creativity, shown to be frozen over? Why are the Buckets kept living in that collapsing house? If Wonka can keep his factory extra warm for the Oompa Loompas, why does he make it cold for the Buckets? And where is Dr. Wonka in this sudden orgy of frozen domestication?

The problem is that the big Pro-Family message of the film has nothing to do with the film itself. Mike Teavee, Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt and even the apparently single-parented Violet Beauregard all come from families, too, and all are ghastly, largely because of the families they have who either encourage their worst qualities or do nothing to curtail them. Wonka’s own family life (elements of which are shoe-horned in to the plot solely to create a final reconciliation between father and son) has been a disaster.

That this works at all is largely due to the skill and warmth with which Burton has established that the Bucket family is a pretty cool bunch of people: Noah Taylor and Helena Bonham Carter manage to convey a real devotion to each other and to Charlie and to their parents, the grandparents who never leave their beds. These opening scenes of the Bucket family could be used to dispel any criticism of Burton’s skill with actors. The warmth and affection among the 7 members of the Bucket household are beautifully presented, without descending into Spielbergian Ickiness.

Credit must also go to Freddie Highmore, the frighteningly skilled young actor who plays Charlie. He is able to encourage sympathy without getting sticky, but even he can’t help sounding rather self-righteous and judgmental when he prattles on about his family and how they always make him feel better and all that.

I don't know if any of this really diminishes the film, or not. There's a lot to enjoy in Burton's film, but I don't think it comes near eclipsing the first version. I much prefer the simplicity of the original film's ending. When Wonka offers Charlie the warning about remembering what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted (he lived happily ever after, it turns out) I always get a little verklempt.

I like both movies. They've both got pros and cons. I'll always watch them. They're a permanent part of my library.

2006-08-27T21:02:00.000-04:00

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE

Much more than the indie-movie du jour. An intelligent, oddly moving little comedy. The set up isn't particularly promising: a little girl and her oddball family drive interstate to get to a low-level beauty pageant. But an intelligent script, good direction and a really good cast (remember when movies had those?) lift the rather cliched premise off the ground.

The father (Greg Kinnear) is vainly trying to re-invent himself as a self-help guru: we hear a lot about his 9-Step program to turn losers into winners. His philosophy (and lack of success marketing it) is wearing out his wife (Toni Collette). There is a son (I can't think of his name) who has taken a vow of silence until he can become a fighter pilot, and who is often shown reading Nietzche. Rounding out the family circle are a randy, drug-snorting grandfather (Alan Arkin) and the wife's brother (Steve Carrell) a gay man recovering from a suicide attempt, who tends to remind people that he is the #1 Proust scholar in the country. Little Olive seems to have come from some other planet, a dear little girl who manages to be appealing and touching and funny without ever once crossing the line into cliche. She'd convert W.C. Fields.

There's a lot of good fun in the film, largely the pleasure of watching good actors go to town on good parts, creating convincing family tensions and annoyances and then subverting them with equally convincing moments of real family affection. I'll admit to getting a lot of pleasure out of Steve Carell's slow burns and Bengal tiger-freezing glares, but he's an actor I get a lot of pleasure out of anyway. I think there are a couple of mis-steps in the screenplay and the direction; one unexpected side-trip into black comedy brings the film to something of a halt.

Don't worry about it. See the movie.

2006-08-26T16:44:00.000-04:00

Will Ferrell/TALLADEGA NIGHTS

I like him a lot. I like the air of comically clueless machismo he is able to project in films like ANCHORMAN. He is still the only actor ever to do a really convincing impression of George W. Bush, capturing the stupidity and the fratboy arrogance and the creepy lost-boy quality, the guy who is trying really hard to fit in. His Ron Burgundy in ANCHORMAN is terribly funny, a preening poser who actually believes that the name San Diego is Spanish for “a whale’s vagina” and who ends each newscast with those immortal words “you stay classy San Diego.”

What really distinguishes him from most of the other comic actors right now is his absolute conviction, the way he commits to these people and their outrageous behavior. I love that glorious meltdown in ANCHORMAN when his beloved dog Baxter is apparently killed, his helpless screaming in a telephone booth: “I’m in a glass cage of emotion!” His appearance in ELF, wearing a bright green elf jacket and canary yellow tights, is gloriously funny but oddly real: he doesn’t look silly. Ferrell is as grounded as Johnny Depp. Ron Bugundy is as complete as Capt. Jack Sparrow.

And when he goes for broke, he goes for broke. His Jacobim Mugatu in ZOOLANDER is never less than hilarious, making great comic moments out of the simplest of gestures: if Johnny Depp astounded me by being hilarious simply standing up in PIRATES II, Will Ferrell works a similar magic running strangely across an improbably large office space in ZOOLANDER.

He’s the anti-Buster Keaton. A big physical meaty presence, his body is hairy and undeveloped, exactly the body we’re all secretly afraid we’ll see when we look in the mirror. Keaton is graceful even when clumsy: his falls and stunts are dazzling. Keaton never ran the way Ferrell runs. I wish I was Buster Keaton, but I think I am Will Ferrell.

All that said, I can’t say I was terribly happy with TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY. I wanted to like it a lot, but found it oddly lacking in the inspired lunacy that made ANCHORMAN fun. It feels odd to be chastising someone for aiming higher, and I’m not complaining too loudly here. But TALLADEGA NIGHTS only occasionally takes off. The opening is promising, a very funny quote that gets even funny when the unlikely source is revealed.

I’m glad that they didn’t settle for an easy remake of ANCHORMAN. This film has a much grittier feel to it: it actually seems to be taking place in something like the real world, there are none of the talking dogs or animated dream sequences that characterized the earlier film. A good deal of it looks like it was shot on location, at actual race tracks with very real looking crowds.

There’s a moment in Heller’s CATCH-22 where we are told that Yossarian doesn’t see the point of athletic competition: it only means you can do something pointless better than anyone else. In terms of sheer pointlessness, few pursuits can beat NASCAR. Lots of cars drive round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round. The only thing funnier than the idea of grown adults taking part in this activity and calling it a sport is the pride they take in what can only be the most pyrrhic of victories: the flag waving, the sponsorships, the obscene amounts of money changing hands, and above all the Macho Posturing that Ferrell skewers so well.

2006-08-10T18:48:00.000-04:00

THE GENERAL

"If you lose this war don't blame me."

One of my favorite films was screened in a pristine print the other night. The audience, for a change, was great: very attentive andresponsive in the best way. All in all, the screening was a reminder of why I still go to the movies instead of restricting myself to video.

As for the movie, well, I love it. It is the Number One film in my personal Top Ten. Other films come and go, but THE GENERAL has been and is now and always will be at the top.

The plot couldn't be simpler. Train engineer Johnnie Gray's girlfriend won't see him anymore when he is unable to enlist in the Confederate Army (he tries, hilariously, but is not accepted for theperfectly intelligent reason that he is more important to the South as an engineer than as a soldier). About a year into the war, Johnnie's engine is stolen by a group of Northern spies. Johnnie gives chase, not realizing that his girlfriend is on the stolen train, now a prisoner. Eventually, he rescues the girl and recovers his engine and returns to the South, pursued by those who he had initially been pursuing. Johnnie manages to warn the Southern Army of a coming onslaught from the North, there is a big battle scene at the climax, and all ends well, and Johnnie is re-united with both his girl and his engine. That's pretty much it. The plot is a basic outline that supports aseries of gorgeous gags, each funnier and richer than the one before it. Intertitles are kept to a minimum, and I wouldn't be surprisedto find out that THE GENERAL contained fewer than the average numberof intertitles for feature-length silent films.

My eye was caught by the sheer scale of the battle scene at the end. It is one of the very best I've ever seen, on a level with the best of Griffith, Kurosawa, Lean or Coppola or Jackson. What is most remarkable about this scene is that Keaton's comic moments (and the comedy in the battle sequence is only centered on his actions) do not detract from the magnitude of the battle. He (and his co-director Clyde Bruckman) plays a rather high stakes game as a director, keeping the war serious and the comedy funny, and he pulls it off handsomely.

I have to say that something about the film has started to bother me, namely the whole issue of Keaton's Johnnie Gray as a Confederate. I'd always taken the fact that Johnnie Gray is joining the Confederate Army (the losing team, as it were) as part of the dark chill that can occasionally be felt in Keaton's work, like the straightforward shoot-out at the beginning of OUR HOSPITALITY, or the funereal fadeouts of COPS and COLLEGE. The realities of the then-current political situation in the South are never an issue in THE GENERAL, except that a Civil War starts between the North and the South (I don't remember if the words Union or Confederate are even used in the title cards.) It doesn't really try to deal seriously with anything except Keaton/Johnnie's skills as a train engineer and impromptu military tactician. But does not dealing with this give Keaton carte blanche? Would I be as ready to forgive Keaton if the film was set during WWII and Keaton was playing a German who isn't allowed to join the SS, and has to rescue his train from a bunch of Allied spies? And if I'm going to have a problem with GONE WITH THE WIND for pretty blatantly romanticizing the pre-war South (and I do) is it really fair to let Keaton off the hook?

THE GENERAL is far from unique in this regard. A lot of films and novels (BIRTH OF A NATION, GONE WITH THE WIND) set during this period show a willingness to gloss over the vilenesses of life in theSouth and to see a sort of nobility in their side of the Civil War,the once proud brought low and all that. If BIRTH OF A NATION is completely inexcusable, and I think it is, I think I can find some mitigating elements in GONE WITH THE WIND.

BIRTH OF A NATION engages these political issues head on, and of course makes a hideous racist hash of the whole thing. In BIRTH, African Americans were happy under slavery, dancing merrily for their white masters until the chaotic freedom comes and they decide they are as good as white folks and start to rape white women, thus creating a need for the Ku Klux Klan, the organization that "saved the South," and after white supremacy is restored, our White Hero and Heroine get to happily contemplate a future where they rule supreme and darkies know their place.

GONE WITH THE WIND is rather more circumspect, trying to have it both ways. The big problem with GONE WITH THE WIND is its sentimental nostalgia for the "South" as an institution, a sentimentality that is allowed to overwhelm the occasional reminderof that pesky issue of slavery. The film (I've never read the book) pretty shamelessly romanticizes the Old South, calling it a world that only wants to be graceful and beautiful (the opening scroll refers to a land of knights and their ladies fair). Of course, the characters in the film who wax thus are usually people whose opinions on the matter I'm not going to necessarily take at face value.

And there are some rather pointed reminders that all wasn't moonlight and magnolias. When Ashley Wilkes raises objections to Scarlett's hiring of convict workers, actually saying that he will not profit from the enforced labor of others, Scarlett bites right back with a reminder that he wasn't so particular about owning slaves. Ashley's rejoinder that "we didn't treat (slaves)" as brutally as an overseer of hired convicts treats his chained workers can, I think, be seen as an indication of how clueless he really is about the realities of the South that he longs to return to ("aworld that only wants to be graceful and beautiful"), and about life in general.

Clearly THE GENERAL is another order of film altogether. Both BIRTH and GWTW are rather self-consciously Epic – the stories span several years, the films are super-productions, etc. The main action of THE GENERAL encompasses about 48 hours (I'm not counting the year which passes via title card, or the opening scenes that take place in probably a single afternoon). There aren't any real pretensions to Griffithian size and scale in THE GENERAL, or at least no pretensions to a story with Epic Sweep and Grandeur. And of course, THE GENERAL is what some would call "just a comedy."

I think I'm just going to have to see this aspect of THE GENERAL as being part of what I sometimes think of as the Keaton Chill: how happy can we be at someone becoming an officer in the army that is going to lose, and lose big time? I'm not pretending to have all the answers here, and I'll admit that my grasp of Civil War history is pretty loose. This has just been on my mind a good bit lately.