Documentaries about musicians are a stock craft: they often seek to set-up the usually deceased singer as an idol, a god, of righteousness and, if possible, piety and charity. Sometimes though it can go even worse as when a reel of facts and interviews unintentionally vilify the subject instead of vindicating him or her. "Last Days of Left Eye" really does niether and it does both; it is a scrappy film filled to the brim with messy presence that at times can prove powerfully graceful. The most potent ability to boasts is that capablity to reveal in tiny increments, or in quiet gestures, who Lisa "Left Eye" Lopez was.
Left Eye was most famous for her huge success as the "L" in TLC, one of the highest selling female bands of all time and one of brightest acts of the 90's. She was also famous for her controveries: flying off the handle on her bandmates and her boyfriend. After being cast off by her own decision, and having had her solo effort Supernova shelved after massive amounts of publicity, Lopez went to Honduras for a 30-day spiritual retreat. While there she filmed herself constantly. Whether she was swimming or divulging thoughts to the camera, she was constantly exposing herself. Her desire behind such a project - she wanted the world to know, really know, the real Left Eye - lends it a hypnotic confessional aura at times. Of course, while she was in Honduras she was also killed. It is her untimely death that lends the film much needed emotional gravity but it is her electrifying persona that lends it a core of towering skill as the rare film that brings to light a gnarled and complicated portrait of a woman destined, by sheer mastery of her many talents, to be a mega-star.
At turns witty and compassionate, at others cold and irreverent, Lisa Lopez is the perfect documentary subject and her character is even more real for having been caught on film in the most everyday acts. The footage that she directed herself has a stringent power as a heady cocktail of desperate self-awareness and searching need. The structure of the film around the film that is her 30-day trip is alittle more messy. Utiziling the expected information (her rise to stardom, her fights, her arson) as well as sweeping visuals of South America is a lofty idea and it works for the most part - especially when brought together with Lisa's insightful musings. Yet in the film's striving to trace the downward spiral of Lopez, it falters on numerous occasions. Slipping on the tricky issue of strange tribal doctors and then again with footage of her bitchy assistant, the final years of the singer don't play so much gloomy and symbolic of her coming doom (as intended) but rather as a mash-up of the wrong social circle and out-of-context footage.
Where it falters once in death though, it soars in life. As a celebration of human life it is a spell-binding movie. It's skillfull in the way, thanks in part as well to Lauren Lazin, it shows Lisa in the midst of her various examinations, teasing us with the thought that she's dead. And in the way that is splices her outrages with her heart and intelligence, it is wonderfully dynamic. Doesn't it, in the end, makes sense that such a professedly jubilant study of life would be amateurish when it comes to death? Ultimately though, by bringing us so close to such a momentous and vibrant existence, this documentary is a rousing success.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
The Remains of the Day: A
It is the rare novelist that can turn even the most mundane of life's events into a tale of resplendent force. Stevens, the central character in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, has been a butler for many years. He has served only two prominent masters: Lord Darlington (who owned the residence that Stevens currently works at, Darlington Hall) and Mr. Farraday - the man who hired Stevens after Lord Darlington's death. On a whim Stevens decides that he will inquire as to the employment status of a former housekeeper, Mrs. Kenton, and perhaps see if she is interested in returning to the grand old mansion. When given the leave to do so, he sets off on a five-day journey to bring him back into contact with a long lost friend. Along the way perhaps he will sample some of the famous sights that are visibile in his homeland but that he has never seen.
Ishiguro is writing solely with that narrative thread in mind. Or at least, it would seem so. Armed with as much wisdom and compassion as he had in 2005's chilling Never Let Me Go, his sublimely well-paced tale races off the page - as any good confessional does. Yet it isn't an outright confession you are reading. After all, the butler hasn't done anything wrong has he? The answer, the graceful climax that results, is what drives you through his slim tale of a man revisiting his past on an innocuous vacation drive. His memories are sometimes uproarious, others are cruelly repressed. he narrator's thoughts themselves are as flawed as the memories he reflects on.
It is an indelible force of a character that has been written into this manswervant and the author wields his presence with a virtuostic skill. The haunting outward supernatural element is missing from this masterpiece as it wasn't from Never Let Me Go, but the result is something infinitely more paramount. Kazuo Ishiguro has taken T.S. Elliot's famous quote "the world ends not with a bang, but with a whimper" and scrambled it all to hell, creating perfection in the process.
Ishiguro is writing solely with that narrative thread in mind. Or at least, it would seem so. Armed with as much wisdom and compassion as he had in 2005's chilling Never Let Me Go, his sublimely well-paced tale races off the page - as any good confessional does. Yet it isn't an outright confession you are reading. After all, the butler hasn't done anything wrong has he? The answer, the graceful climax that results, is what drives you through his slim tale of a man revisiting his past on an innocuous vacation drive. His memories are sometimes uproarious, others are cruelly repressed. he narrator's thoughts themselves are as flawed as the memories he reflects on.
It is an indelible force of a character that has been written into this manswervant and the author wields his presence with a virtuostic skill. The haunting outward supernatural element is missing from this masterpiece as it wasn't from Never Let Me Go, but the result is something infinitely more paramount. Kazuo Ishiguro has taken T.S. Elliot's famous quote "the world ends not with a bang, but with a whimper" and scrambled it all to hell, creating perfection in the process.
Fahrenheit 9/11: B+
There is a moment in Fahrenheit 9/11 that surpasses all others as the one that defines best Michael Moore's argument agaisnt Bush as President. A woman travels to Washington D.C. for a job conference and while she is there she decides to visit the White House. Not so irregular for most Americans but for this woman, it is different: he son was killed in Iraq. As she stands there before the barriers blocking her from coming any closer, she dissolves on camera. But it isn't just her grief that has overwhelmed her, it is a feeling of nauseating helplessness that has struck her the final blow. This woman, once a "conservative Democrat", has had the rug swept out from under her both as a mother and as an American. Moore's point, and one he drives home with outraged precision, is that she isn't the only one. That moment propels Fahrenheit 9/11 to a level that a populist filmmaker such as Moore loves to go to: a place where he can connect to us, with as minimal "media interference" as possible, his outrage. It is a moment that transcends the film.
It is sad then that this documentary didn't have more of those connections. Instead it is a collection of a wide variety of data sources - ranging from Senators to amputees to the Washington Post - that help build a case for why George W. Bush may just be not only the worst American President in history, but also the most dangerous. The chief evidence at work here, and it is compelling stuff, is how the Saudi royals (who can count a number of the Bin Laden family amongst them) have an inordinate number of ties to the Bush family and all of its friends. Billions of dollars have been exchanged between the two most powerful Saudi Arabian families, those being the Royal Family and the Bin Ladens, and the Bushes. Business ventures that George W. kickstarted as a young capitalist were driven into the ground by his ineptness and then magically - magically! - they were saved by investments handled by a previous Air Guard colleague of W.'s with the money of...guess who? The Saudis! And around and around the carousal goes. Without even mentioning the many other dubious connections that top administrative officials have had with, and in some cases still do have, with Saudi Arabia, Moore brings to light the vast web painted with blood and oil by the White House.
And still his vast arsenal of evidence has yet to dry up. Though Moore's other charges may prove less scandalous (e.g. Saudi Arabia actually had a link to Ossama Bin Laden), the method in which they are all spliced together forms a disturbing portrait of a man being ruled by many different masters. That man is our current President and on the list of priorities, America is at the bottom while perhaps attacking Iraq to appease a certain other Middle Eastern country, regardless of authentic reasons, is at the top.
At two hours, the film still finds time to include thoughts on the 2000 election as well as how the Defense Branch is running itself (or rather, being run by capitalists out to make a quick buck, as seen in a chilling speech at a conference of high powered American coporations entitled "ReBuidling Iraq"). The overall effect of this information and running commentary - Moore has never seemed more sarcastic and more infuriated - is enticingly dark and yet as an argument it's a bit one-sided...and cheap. The documentary needed to be more immediate and righteous. For every moment of our Commander looking dumbstruck on the morning of 9/11 there are out-of-context shots of Bush holding press meetings while golfing. This is a piece of slickly made ferocity that doubles as humorous polemic cinema but it spends too much time being glib.
It needed more weeping mothers and a little less gadfly fat white man.
It is sad then that this documentary didn't have more of those connections. Instead it is a collection of a wide variety of data sources - ranging from Senators to amputees to the Washington Post - that help build a case for why George W. Bush may just be not only the worst American President in history, but also the most dangerous. The chief evidence at work here, and it is compelling stuff, is how the Saudi royals (who can count a number of the Bin Laden family amongst them) have an inordinate number of ties to the Bush family and all of its friends. Billions of dollars have been exchanged between the two most powerful Saudi Arabian families, those being the Royal Family and the Bin Ladens, and the Bushes. Business ventures that George W. kickstarted as a young capitalist were driven into the ground by his ineptness and then magically - magically! - they were saved by investments handled by a previous Air Guard colleague of W.'s with the money of...guess who? The Saudis! And around and around the carousal goes. Without even mentioning the many other dubious connections that top administrative officials have had with, and in some cases still do have, with Saudi Arabia, Moore brings to light the vast web painted with blood and oil by the White House.
And still his vast arsenal of evidence has yet to dry up. Though Moore's other charges may prove less scandalous (e.g. Saudi Arabia actually had a link to Ossama Bin Laden), the method in which they are all spliced together forms a disturbing portrait of a man being ruled by many different masters. That man is our current President and on the list of priorities, America is at the bottom while perhaps attacking Iraq to appease a certain other Middle Eastern country, regardless of authentic reasons, is at the top.
At two hours, the film still finds time to include thoughts on the 2000 election as well as how the Defense Branch is running itself (or rather, being run by capitalists out to make a quick buck, as seen in a chilling speech at a conference of high powered American coporations entitled "ReBuidling Iraq"). The overall effect of this information and running commentary - Moore has never seemed more sarcastic and more infuriated - is enticingly dark and yet as an argument it's a bit one-sided...and cheap. The documentary needed to be more immediate and righteous. For every moment of our Commander looking dumbstruck on the morning of 9/11 there are out-of-context shots of Bush holding press meetings while golfing. This is a piece of slickly made ferocity that doubles as humorous polemic cinema but it spends too much time being glib.
It needed more weeping mothers and a little less gadfly fat white man.
Bowling for Columbine: A-
If I am allowed to use a few "gun" adjectives with which to describe Michael Moore's incredibly outraged, powerfully lacerating documentary then I will start with a simple one: scattershot. The film, at once an expose and a thought piece, throws an immensely large quantity of information at you. Some of it has been challenged based on their factual accuracy, but the vast majority of them stand as evidence against a nation that fascinated with it's "righteous" nature to break into spasms of violence. And at more than two hours, there are many bits of evidence. But don't think that Moore (contrary to what some believe) is out to rage against guns. No, instead he is here to make a piece of cinema that gracefully splices together all sorts of media (from animation to stand-up) in order to prove a disturbing point: that America isn't hopped up on guns, it's hopped up on the paranoia that necesitates those firearms.
Shot in Moore's infamous, one-man guerrilla style, Bowling for Columbine has that rare opportunity to target no one and yet question everything. Though he uses Columbine as a jumping point (and displays some shocking footage of the killing spree that went on there), Moore is more interested in all forms of gun violence and the question that must then go after that: why are we as Americans so content to just shoot each other?
The answers don't come easily and that proves the film's strongest point. Without picking out specific persons of power to blame (be they the K-Mart CEO or Charleton Heston), the documentary leaps from one inflamatory point of investigation to another, all the while revealing in its - yes, scattershot - way that what sets us as a country apart (other than our incredibly high murder rate) is our addiction to fear.
Though it may grow muddier from time to time, Moore's movie is scathing and heartrending. His ambush-interviews of Dick Clark and Heston prove powerfully telling of our gun culture and his hopped-up frenzied use of montages - some that explore the various political assasinations carried out by our government, others that serve as reminders of our latent attitudes towards gun sales - is hilarious and insightful. Ultimately though, insight takes a back seat to the real force behind Columbine: honest curiousity at what makes such a bloodthirsty culture tick. With guns blazing, Michael Moore is out to find the answer, both as a documentarian and a humorist.
Well versed in rabble-rousing theatrics, Bowling for Columbine, surely proves controversial and provocative but its message, the power that it wields with such gangly force, lies in its simple, probing nature. In its final climactic moment - the interview with NRA President Charles Heston that ends in him storming off - Moore gets you on his wavelength. Those final minutes tear away all preconceived notions of Michael Moore as a politician masquerading as a filmmaker and result in a culminating moment of pure, unrelenting, humanity and sadness. Afterwards I couldn't help to think: how many of those moments have been created by bullets in a haze of very un-American terror?
Shot in Moore's infamous, one-man guerrilla style, Bowling for Columbine has that rare opportunity to target no one and yet question everything. Though he uses Columbine as a jumping point (and displays some shocking footage of the killing spree that went on there), Moore is more interested in all forms of gun violence and the question that must then go after that: why are we as Americans so content to just shoot each other?
The answers don't come easily and that proves the film's strongest point. Without picking out specific persons of power to blame (be they the K-Mart CEO or Charleton Heston), the documentary leaps from one inflamatory point of investigation to another, all the while revealing in its - yes, scattershot - way that what sets us as a country apart (other than our incredibly high murder rate) is our addiction to fear.
Though it may grow muddier from time to time, Moore's movie is scathing and heartrending. His ambush-interviews of Dick Clark and Heston prove powerfully telling of our gun culture and his hopped-up frenzied use of montages - some that explore the various political assasinations carried out by our government, others that serve as reminders of our latent attitudes towards gun sales - is hilarious and insightful. Ultimately though, insight takes a back seat to the real force behind Columbine: honest curiousity at what makes such a bloodthirsty culture tick. With guns blazing, Michael Moore is out to find the answer, both as a documentarian and a humorist.
Well versed in rabble-rousing theatrics, Bowling for Columbine, surely proves controversial and provocative but its message, the power that it wields with such gangly force, lies in its simple, probing nature. In its final climactic moment - the interview with NRA President Charles Heston that ends in him storming off - Moore gets you on his wavelength. Those final minutes tear away all preconceived notions of Michael Moore as a politician masquerading as a filmmaker and result in a culminating moment of pure, unrelenting, humanity and sadness. Afterwards I couldn't help to think: how many of those moments have been created by bullets in a haze of very un-American terror?
The Road: A
In a desolate corner of the world, one imagines that Cormac McCarthy would be in heaven. Of course, his entire body of work – from All the Pretty Horses to No Country for Old Men – is indicative of his vivid power as an empath of the dead and dying. Nowhere else this year, or perhaps in many a year, will one feel the full power of his craft as in The Road.
The story is spare and ripe with poeticism. A father and his son wander through America searching for the coast. They head to the coast for reasons unknown and the world they straggle through is unlike anything else that has been written in a long, long while. Ash flies and piles in huge drifts that cover the countryside. Nearly everyone is dead and all of the vegetation along with it. Houses and cities have been burned (and in the greatest line of the book, a couple sits sipping wine watching the collapse of civilization) and the other survivors can be hardly called such. For those that are encountered they are all hungry, desperate for even a taste of food. Their food isn't of the natural variety, unless of course you think human flesh is natural. This is a world that isn't teetering on the edge of destruction, waiting for a savior (as in Stephen King's The Stand), it has fallen down that dark deep well of Oblivion and has festered there, sprouting a Hell on Earth.
Stripped of those unnecessary functions of writing – such as dialogue quotes and proper time and place as well as "proper exposition" – McCarthy has attained the visionary power of a prophet. On every page his powerful voice, vast catastrophic vocabulary, and unassailable position as Master Stylist of Cataclysm, all add up to a supremely unshakable imagining of the World at World's End; it has exhaled its last gasp and is now merely waiting for those final moments as the light slips away. And yet in this creeping darkness, hope. It is because in a most wise decision, McCarthy turns the entire focus of his idea to spin about the relationship that exists between the man and the boy, the parent and the child. Here is where his poetic pondering makes the most sense and the most indelible impression. It is the final piece of a puzzle that when arranged, paints a picture of society that is unsettling - and thinly hopeful - in every iota.
The final scene is restrained and a tad ingratiating in its quiet musing but it may be the novel's only flaw. The sheer meteoric impact that his nightmare will make in your mind is alone worth the price of purchasing this book. Be warned though: there is madness in the corners of this writer's midnight-black world.
Against The Day: A
As a reader - nay, a critic even - who took nearly four months in which to finish Thomas Pynchon's byzantine, labyrinnthe, massive novel Against The Day, I feel I stand on pretty good grounds in which to state: this is a difficult book. Filled with vocabulary that requires you to be both sharp and current, multi-national language usage (some of which, I'm sure, is purposefully incorrect), and references to a myriad of concepts ranging from the mystical to the mathematical - none of which date farther forward in the world timeline than the 1920's - the author is practically begging you to be at some point so frustrated with his book that you will leave it to gather dust on a shelf somewhere far, far away. In fact he would be the first to say that the reader is forewarned in picking up his book.
They should know of course, having had some previous experience with Mason & Dixon, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow, that Pynchon is famous for his incredibly dense, incredibly intellectual, incredibly murky writing. However, what he is also famous for (to those that bother to lift the heavy burden entailed, both physically and metaphorically, by picking up one of his novels) is his hilariously ridiculous humor, rapid fire exchanges, and those moments of brilliance so insightful they will make you wish he were a less difficult writer.
In his latest offering he takes on a subject perhaps more sprawling than nearly any of his other targets. He chronicles the lives of nearly a dozen characters over the course of roughly twenty-five years (those being 1893 to 1918). Each of his many creations does wildly different things - there are baloonists, spies, bisexuals, tranvestities, mystics, psychics, brothers, fighters, and capitalists - and yet they manage to converge on each other at times so random and constant that to say Pynchon is mocking Fate would be putting it lightly. But it isn't just Fate he is mocking. He's also poking fun at various styles of writing, historical accuracy, and all of current American politics. But as much as there is humor here (and trust me, Pynchon's stabs and parodies of life and culture are spot-on and immensely side-splitting) there is also a surprising amount of power and insight. You may be laughing wildly at such activities as "Anarchist Golf" and yet Thomas Pynchon's dialogue-free passage on the Great Chicago Fire will leave you speechless.
His stories are themselves also alternately theatrical, theoretical, fanatical, and grim. Here, a few samples: a trio of brothers try over a course of years to kill the rich man that killed their father, a girl goes off to see the world (and maybe the mother she never knew that is purportedly lurking some therewithin), several different revolutions occur, a sodomitical British Spy goes cavorting about the precarious political scene of Europe right before the Great War (and manages to be entangled in a threesome of both man and woman that provides a deliriously romantic near-end vision of sex and heart), a group of skyship pilots termed the Chums of Chance go flying to the sky doing nice and Boy Scout-y things, and a detective first chased out of Chicago finds himself enlisted by a mystical "darkness fighting" organization in order to satisfy demands made on him by people who may not even exist.
I feel it is necessary to say again that undertaking this book requires patience, for the author's endless indulgence in, well, indulgence, as well as enormous amounts of heart and mindpower. And yet if one is willing to undertake this ordeal, they will discover a work of near literary brilliance that has done what no other book I have read has done to date: envisioned the world full of menace and apathy and that the great tragedies that were to follow would merely grow out of that. In fact the greatest of world tragedies here is everyone's mad descent into a hellish and bloodthirsty system. That system is capitalism and to Pynchon, a wily liberal anarchist in his own right, it is the ultimate fall from grace. Yet he ends his creation on a hopeful note, suggesting that we need only to fall in love to start flying towards grace.
They should know of course, having had some previous experience with Mason & Dixon, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow, that Pynchon is famous for his incredibly dense, incredibly intellectual, incredibly murky writing. However, what he is also famous for (to those that bother to lift the heavy burden entailed, both physically and metaphorically, by picking up one of his novels) is his hilariously ridiculous humor, rapid fire exchanges, and those moments of brilliance so insightful they will make you wish he were a less difficult writer.
In his latest offering he takes on a subject perhaps more sprawling than nearly any of his other targets. He chronicles the lives of nearly a dozen characters over the course of roughly twenty-five years (those being 1893 to 1918). Each of his many creations does wildly different things - there are baloonists, spies, bisexuals, tranvestities, mystics, psychics, brothers, fighters, and capitalists - and yet they manage to converge on each other at times so random and constant that to say Pynchon is mocking Fate would be putting it lightly. But it isn't just Fate he is mocking. He's also poking fun at various styles of writing, historical accuracy, and all of current American politics. But as much as there is humor here (and trust me, Pynchon's stabs and parodies of life and culture are spot-on and immensely side-splitting) there is also a surprising amount of power and insight. You may be laughing wildly at such activities as "Anarchist Golf" and yet Thomas Pynchon's dialogue-free passage on the Great Chicago Fire will leave you speechless.
His stories are themselves also alternately theatrical, theoretical, fanatical, and grim. Here, a few samples: a trio of brothers try over a course of years to kill the rich man that killed their father, a girl goes off to see the world (and maybe the mother she never knew that is purportedly lurking some therewithin), several different revolutions occur, a sodomitical British Spy goes cavorting about the precarious political scene of Europe right before the Great War (and manages to be entangled in a threesome of both man and woman that provides a deliriously romantic near-end vision of sex and heart), a group of skyship pilots termed the Chums of Chance go flying to the sky doing nice and Boy Scout-y things, and a detective first chased out of Chicago finds himself enlisted by a mystical "darkness fighting" organization in order to satisfy demands made on him by people who may not even exist.
I feel it is necessary to say again that undertaking this book requires patience, for the author's endless indulgence in, well, indulgence, as well as enormous amounts of heart and mindpower. And yet if one is willing to undertake this ordeal, they will discover a work of near literary brilliance that has done what no other book I have read has done to date: envisioned the world full of menace and apathy and that the great tragedies that were to follow would merely grow out of that. In fact the greatest of world tragedies here is everyone's mad descent into a hellish and bloodthirsty system. That system is capitalism and to Pynchon, a wily liberal anarchist in his own right, it is the ultimate fall from grace. Yet he ends his creation on a hopeful note, suggesting that we need only to fall in love to start flying towards grace.
Employee of the Month: C+
Dane Cook, with his quick wit and scruffy mug, makes one charming blue-collar worker. What he doesn't make is a good cashier. At least, not good enough to beat the resident guru on the subject, Vince (Dax Shepard), and win the daffy "slut" who would sleep with any Employee of the Month - played of course by Jessica Simpson in a flight of geez whiz ma, I am smart enough to mock myself!. The story, as you can tell, hinges on alot of disbelief. In fact, you'll have to swallow alot but I tell - surprisingly - that it may be worth it.
Amy (the aforementioned Jessica Simpson) has a history of sleeping with each of her store's best employees. Her latest conquest has yet to be determined since she's just been tranferred but don't think that she doesn't have options! Both Zach (Dane Cook), the apathetic "cool guy", and Vince have their eye on her. The problem is that Vince has been EotM for the last 17 months and there is no way he's stopping now (nor should he since he's so insanely good at what he does). But you see, Zach has friends and a wierd grandma on his side. He can't lose! And of course what he wins is his pride back (from some vague and stupid economic tragedy that befell him 10 years ago) and the girl.
As movies go, I have seen "meet-cute-try-and-get-the-girl" romantic comedies that are better and far worse. Employee of the Month falls squarely in the middle. Why? Because the movie is funny and sweet...at least most of the time.
Directed by Greg Coolidge, the film turns the gargantuan Super Club into a world of wonder (opera singing janitors you say? indeed!). And the people that populate the world - Dax Shepard, Andy Dick, Tim Bagley, the midget from "Seinfeld" - are on the wavelength of such strangeness, even if the movie isn't always with them. It should have been, since they earn the majority of the laughs.
This romantic fable though is too cutesy for it's own good, too earthbound (and too stupid, as when it tries to ascertain the level of "cool idiocy" that was Pedro's claim to fame). In the end it's too average, too rote. I've seen a dozen like it and more that are better. As laughs go, it mildly delivers, and I had no trouble blowing 100 minutes watching it, but next time set the store in Oz. Still...Andy Dick is hilarious.
Before Sunrise: A
What is love? What is a soulmate exactly? Is it a stranger you happen to bump into on the street while running late to a meeting? Is is that fling you had back in college with that professor who so shifted your world that you've never viewed life the same since? Or is it simply in those moments when everything you are, everything you have, hangs on a few words from another person's mouth? Richard Linklater goes so far as to answer those questions and his answer is so powerfully romantic and winning that the very thought of it still sends me swooning.
The "story" is of two people: Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an American, and Celine (Julie Delpy), a French college student. I use air quotes because there is little resembling a conventional plot in this movie. In fact, there are rarely any more than two people at the focus of the screen at any given time. It is because Linklater, in a bold and refreshing move, is conjuring a visionary film based solely on the conversation between two perfect strangers as they wander through the night-life of Vienna. It can't last though (Jesse has a plane to catch and Celine must ride back to Paris) but for those brief minutes they have with each other they establish a rapturous connection and we as the audience are invited to share in it.
Ethan Hawke, in a feat of off-beat brilliance, establishes the tone of his character from the first moment. He is a flawed cynic: he can't quite think that love is dead and yet he has witnessed it being shot. His nervous torrents of soliloquiy are an open door into the psyche of human being, not a caricature. Likewise, Julie Delpy sculpts a portrait of womanhood that is cleansing in its bright-eyed vision. And as they walk, banter, and quip together, the camera follows in long flows of movement. Though perhaps this is a stroke of defiance against traditional romance movies, nothing here feels contrived. It is as lovely as a dream (and so if it requires a small amount of belief suspension, by all means). As explorations go of human contact, there are few so natural and so insightful.
Filled with hope and whimsy, but never naievete, Before Sunrise is a beckoning from one man of exceptional skill to his audience. He is asking us to ask ourselves, what is love? He already knows the answer and by expressing it so seductively, with such fresh normality, he has delivered a glorious triumph.
The "story" is of two people: Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an American, and Celine (Julie Delpy), a French college student. I use air quotes because there is little resembling a conventional plot in this movie. In fact, there are rarely any more than two people at the focus of the screen at any given time. It is because Linklater, in a bold and refreshing move, is conjuring a visionary film based solely on the conversation between two perfect strangers as they wander through the night-life of Vienna. It can't last though (Jesse has a plane to catch and Celine must ride back to Paris) but for those brief minutes they have with each other they establish a rapturous connection and we as the audience are invited to share in it.
Ethan Hawke, in a feat of off-beat brilliance, establishes the tone of his character from the first moment. He is a flawed cynic: he can't quite think that love is dead and yet he has witnessed it being shot. His nervous torrents of soliloquiy are an open door into the psyche of human being, not a caricature. Likewise, Julie Delpy sculpts a portrait of womanhood that is cleansing in its bright-eyed vision. And as they walk, banter, and quip together, the camera follows in long flows of movement. Though perhaps this is a stroke of defiance against traditional romance movies, nothing here feels contrived. It is as lovely as a dream (and so if it requires a small amount of belief suspension, by all means). As explorations go of human contact, there are few so natural and so insightful.
Filled with hope and whimsy, but never naievete, Before Sunrise is a beckoning from one man of exceptional skill to his audience. He is asking us to ask ourselves, what is love? He already knows the answer and by expressing it so seductively, with such fresh normality, he has delivered a glorious triumph.
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby: B+
In his domineeringly post-modern ironic way (there is a twinkle in his eye from the very moment that he starts in to one of his egomaniacle impersonations), Will Ferrell is a truly commanding stage presence. His performances may occasionally misfire (Anchorman, I'm looking at you), but his inner-spirit of jacked-up free-wheeling comedy shines through in nearly every frame of his movies. With his latest, and most blatant, star vehicle Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Will Ferrell has perhaps made the greatest movie of his career...or at least the funniest.
Written by Ferrell and directed by Anchorman header Adam McKay, Talladega Nights is a nearly hypnotic satire that in its very stabs of American Goodness, worships it. The movie succeeds because at the end, through all the ridiculous hoo-blah, you are rooting for Ricky Bobby, a NASCAR driver who Ferrell plays with all his old-quirks and some blazing new passion.
Ricky Bobby (Will Ferrell) is at the top of the NASCAR ladder (here it's overgrown from a mere minor American Sport to a near cultist fascination). He has a smoking hot wife (Leslie Bibb), two "adorable" (read: gutter mouth poets) kids, and a best friend (John C. Reilly) who is more than content to let him win every single race. What threatens to usurp him from his throne? The answer is two-pronged - and perfectly suited to an age where The O.C. has made irony ironic. It is a gay Frenchman (Sacha Baron Cohen) who knocks Bobby down to size but it also Ricky Bobby's inner-awakening, his veins are slowly coming to truly pulse with the old-fashioned American-ism!, that proves troublesome. The one-two punch is too much and Ricky Bobby leaves racing a sad sack of a man who's ever increasing bag of troubles are pulled of with sly panache by McKay.
Though his redemption is the plot of the movie, it his the sense that nothing here is truly being mocked - save for the utterly fake spirit of NASCAR coolness - that is the film's feel-good triumph. In the spirit of a Christopher Guest spoof, McKay and Ferrell are as much in love with their almost-always-funny jokes (and here in this oversized man-boy playground of plastic consumerism, everything is joke material for a good satire) as they are the impassioned hearts of their characters. In truly inspired trick after trick the movie manages to one-up itself in a dizzying uproar of laughter and glee. You may leave wishing to have tasted a more complete flake of a comedic treat, but I was pleased they took the trouble to bake it at all.
Written by Ferrell and directed by Anchorman header Adam McKay, Talladega Nights is a nearly hypnotic satire that in its very stabs of American Goodness, worships it. The movie succeeds because at the end, through all the ridiculous hoo-blah, you are rooting for Ricky Bobby, a NASCAR driver who Ferrell plays with all his old-quirks and some blazing new passion.
Ricky Bobby (Will Ferrell) is at the top of the NASCAR ladder (here it's overgrown from a mere minor American Sport to a near cultist fascination). He has a smoking hot wife (Leslie Bibb), two "adorable" (read: gutter mouth poets) kids, and a best friend (John C. Reilly) who is more than content to let him win every single race. What threatens to usurp him from his throne? The answer is two-pronged - and perfectly suited to an age where The O.C. has made irony ironic. It is a gay Frenchman (Sacha Baron Cohen) who knocks Bobby down to size but it also Ricky Bobby's inner-awakening, his veins are slowly coming to truly pulse with the old-fashioned American-ism!, that proves troublesome. The one-two punch is too much and Ricky Bobby leaves racing a sad sack of a man who's ever increasing bag of troubles are pulled of with sly panache by McKay.
Though his redemption is the plot of the movie, it his the sense that nothing here is truly being mocked - save for the utterly fake spirit of NASCAR coolness - that is the film's feel-good triumph. In the spirit of a Christopher Guest spoof, McKay and Ferrell are as much in love with their almost-always-funny jokes (and here in this oversized man-boy playground of plastic consumerism, everything is joke material for a good satire) as they are the impassioned hearts of their characters. In truly inspired trick after trick the movie manages to one-up itself in a dizzying uproar of laughter and glee. You may leave wishing to have tasted a more complete flake of a comedic treat, but I was pleased they took the trouble to bake it at all.
Breach: B+
I could spend this entire review detailing to you the various ins-and-outs of Billy Ray's linear jolt of spy thriller entertainment but there isn't much to say. Coming off of his well-recieved Shattered Glass, writer-director Ray has turned down the showy scimatics of a traditional popcorn fest for the slowburn of a lightning-rod drama or a searing thriller and succeeds at evoking niether of those in full measure. His tersely "dramatic" close-ups and obligatory "explosions" from the various agents at the FBI (played alternately with varying levels of candor by Laura Linney, Ryan Phillipe, and Dennis Haysbert) are about as innovative as a coffee-maker...or fire. It must be said that at the very least he gives the movie pacing. Yet it is the villian of the movie, Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), who provides the needed atmosphere of disquieting nihilism, unchained id, and sociopathic intelligence that sends the film flying upwards from by-the-numbers to edge-of-your-seat.
Chris Cooper used to be an actor I thought I knew. His turn in American Beauty was predictable (and predictably caustic) but nowhere in his resume is there a hint that he could do something like what he does here. Hanssen, an American intelligence officer who is being tailed by Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillipe) for being a "sexual deviant" (read: Soviet abetter), is given shades of a pathetic repressed beauracrat plus the snivelling snap of a Will & Grace-esque Jack. And on occasion he's so unpredictable that his every breath seems wracked with barely-held mania. Cross that with his hard line conservative politics and what results is something like Archie Bunker gone nuts; A man possessed of a vitriolic disposition so laughable in its quirks that by the end you haven't even realized he has truly terrified you.
Perhaps though it isn't so astounding for Chris Cooper to do something like this (surely to be one of the finest performances all year). One could even theorize he has been building to this his entire career and his one man hurricane force - his face paunchy and his eyes drowning in sadness, smarts, and self-righteousness - is the reward.
Without the energy of Cooper the film goes lax since the other actors seem almost to be in another, more rote film. Laura Linney fills perfectly those roles for which there really is no character. She stands there, grimaces cynically, and occasionally shows off a witty side. Ryan Phillipe on the other end exudes a singularly naieve, impatient power and almost manages to stand up against Agent Hanssen. Almost. I wish that Billy Ray had managed to create a more fully developed film from the supporting cast but then the question inevitably arises: without the director's narrow-minded focus on Hanssen, would Breach be such a breathless thrill every time Cooper tears through the screen? Maybe but then Chris Cooper would have less spotlight to shine in.
Chris Cooper used to be an actor I thought I knew. His turn in American Beauty was predictable (and predictably caustic) but nowhere in his resume is there a hint that he could do something like what he does here. Hanssen, an American intelligence officer who is being tailed by Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillipe) for being a "sexual deviant" (read: Soviet abetter), is given shades of a pathetic repressed beauracrat plus the snivelling snap of a Will & Grace-esque Jack. And on occasion he's so unpredictable that his every breath seems wracked with barely-held mania. Cross that with his hard line conservative politics and what results is something like Archie Bunker gone nuts; A man possessed of a vitriolic disposition so laughable in its quirks that by the end you haven't even realized he has truly terrified you.
Perhaps though it isn't so astounding for Chris Cooper to do something like this (surely to be one of the finest performances all year). One could even theorize he has been building to this his entire career and his one man hurricane force - his face paunchy and his eyes drowning in sadness, smarts, and self-righteousness - is the reward.
Without the energy of Cooper the film goes lax since the other actors seem almost to be in another, more rote film. Laura Linney fills perfectly those roles for which there really is no character. She stands there, grimaces cynically, and occasionally shows off a witty side. Ryan Phillipe on the other end exudes a singularly naieve, impatient power and almost manages to stand up against Agent Hanssen. Almost. I wish that Billy Ray had managed to create a more fully developed film from the supporting cast but then the question inevitably arises: without the director's narrow-minded focus on Hanssen, would Breach be such a breathless thrill every time Cooper tears through the screen? Maybe but then Chris Cooper would have less spotlight to shine in.
Stranger Than Fiction: B+
I've often wondered what it would be like for someone to sit down after viewing one of Charlie Kaufman's wildly clever, meta-within-meta films like Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and decide to adapt it to film. After thinking this idea I usually scoff with the knowledge that if nothing else, Kaufman's scripts are tighly coiled, well paced, metaphorical theories on existence that are second-to-none in both quality of structure design and originality. How could anyone think to interpret one of Hollywood's most talented screenwriter's? Apparently Zach Helm thought he was up to the task and the result is the infinitely pleasing, soft core romantic dramedy Stranger Than Fiction.
Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is a man almost too thin for existence. He lives his live by regulations too arbritrary for other humans to comprehend (he brushes his teeth an inanely high number of times). He lives completely alone. He likes being an IRS agent (for which he is vehemently despised by most everyone). His life is being narrated by a woman that, in his own words, "has an better vocabulary than me". That, and she is also predicting his imminent doom. So Crick, with the help of literary theorist, Professor Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), sets out to find out why exactly he is being picked off by the heavens and in the process...you know, find himself. Eventually he finds that the woman narrating is actually telling the story of his life. The woman is Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson, who here conjures a passionate, teetering-on-the-brink presence that is both the film's undoing and its greatest asset) and she is famous the world over for her beautifully written tragedies. Tragedies as in the main hero dies. Harold Crick is the main hero, and that isn't good.
Stranger Than Fiction was directed by Marc Forster, that previous alchemist of the warm-hearted and the treachly in Finding Neverland, with interesting gimmicks (computer panels illustrate at random his every move with numbers and strange, yet infectious, patterns) and an inviting color palette. And the performances themselves play nicely off each other. Will Ferrell, renowned for his energy, has turned his "straight-man" schtick into an art and manages to deliver several laughs. Maggie Gyllenhaal, as his enemy-turned-girlfriend Ana Pascal, is a woman whose wit and charm spring from a fiery well of nihilism. Dustin Hoffman and Queen Latifah, as Karen's assistant, play characters who are barely there and yet the time they inhabit is enjoyable (if only for the knowledge that you know they could do more). What remains then is the script.
Zach Helm frames the thing as an occasionally delightful, alomst witty, confection. He pulls out effective gags for aiming to hit the middlebrow and succeeding with his riffs on "wibbly wobbly" and such. As everything starts progressing, turning darker and possibly deadly, the inability for Helm to capture Kaufman's penchant for insane melodrama, that knack for piercing insight into a character's life, becomes more visible...and more irritating. The essential problems of the whole movie are summed up in its last few scenes. When told that her changed ending to Harold's story is just "good", Karen responds "I'm ok with good". Too bad then, since a film with such an interesting premise shouldn't have settled.
Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is a man almost too thin for existence. He lives his live by regulations too arbritrary for other humans to comprehend (he brushes his teeth an inanely high number of times). He lives completely alone. He likes being an IRS agent (for which he is vehemently despised by most everyone). His life is being narrated by a woman that, in his own words, "has an better vocabulary than me". That, and she is also predicting his imminent doom. So Crick, with the help of literary theorist, Professor Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), sets out to find out why exactly he is being picked off by the heavens and in the process...you know, find himself. Eventually he finds that the woman narrating is actually telling the story of his life. The woman is Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson, who here conjures a passionate, teetering-on-the-brink presence that is both the film's undoing and its greatest asset) and she is famous the world over for her beautifully written tragedies. Tragedies as in the main hero dies. Harold Crick is the main hero, and that isn't good.
Stranger Than Fiction was directed by Marc Forster, that previous alchemist of the warm-hearted and the treachly in Finding Neverland, with interesting gimmicks (computer panels illustrate at random his every move with numbers and strange, yet infectious, patterns) and an inviting color palette. And the performances themselves play nicely off each other. Will Ferrell, renowned for his energy, has turned his "straight-man" schtick into an art and manages to deliver several laughs. Maggie Gyllenhaal, as his enemy-turned-girlfriend Ana Pascal, is a woman whose wit and charm spring from a fiery well of nihilism. Dustin Hoffman and Queen Latifah, as Karen's assistant, play characters who are barely there and yet the time they inhabit is enjoyable (if only for the knowledge that you know they could do more). What remains then is the script.
Zach Helm frames the thing as an occasionally delightful, alomst witty, confection. He pulls out effective gags for aiming to hit the middlebrow and succeeding with his riffs on "wibbly wobbly" and such. As everything starts progressing, turning darker and possibly deadly, the inability for Helm to capture Kaufman's penchant for insane melodrama, that knack for piercing insight into a character's life, becomes more visible...and more irritating. The essential problems of the whole movie are summed up in its last few scenes. When told that her changed ending to Harold's story is just "good", Karen responds "I'm ok with good". Too bad then, since a film with such an interesting premise shouldn't have settled.
300: B
There is danger in indulging too far in either the storyline or the, how to say it?, surface of the film 300. It isn't that either aspect is particularly bad. No, the storyline - directed and co-written by Zach Snyder - is based on the ancient Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. The audience benefits well from the knowledge that as you watch 300 Sparta warriors, lead by their king Leonydus (Gerard Butler), slaughter an entire Persian Army, lead by god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), that this actually happened. At time it can be breath-taking. Then there are the effects, the costumes, and the actors. All of it seems to have a thick coat of CGI but that's ok. In even the most domestic of scenes (say, when a congressman confronts the left-behind Queen (Lena Headey) in an expansive courtyard under the ginormous sunset) your eyes will bulge and your heart will race at the sheer beauty of the world in which they live. That beauty is well-earned seeing as how it is based on Frank Miller's graphic novel of the same name (he here exec-produces).
But as there is much to enjoy in this movie there is much more to dislike. You see, nearly every time a Spartan opened his/her mouth what they were to say next, I didn't want to hear and when I did...I winced. This is because the script is so heavy-handed, so bombastic, that nearly half way through I had doomed this picture to B-Movie hell. There are the usual homophobic rib-ticklers (and they are perhaps well deserved: the Athenians were known homosexuals and in this Spartan paradise of gleaming abs, hard-as-stone twelve-packs, and barely any clothes on male or female there were sure to be more). And there is a lot of superfluous nonsense. Maybe Zach Snyder should have learned from Marie Antoinette that it's best if you don't talk so badly while dressed so well (when you are dressed).
Then the surfaces came through for me as Snyder's camera went swooping in fantastic slo-mo at just the right moments (namely as when blood is darting through the air like specks of dust to land innocently, even beautifully, on the armor of fellow warriors). Or when his warriors go surging in beautifully sparse fighting styles that send innumerable enemies crashing to the similarly beautiful dirt (I am a particular fan of the Spartans ingenuity as cunning tricksters as well as fighters). Or perhaps when the thespians themselves bellow certain lines with such operatic gustow that the screen started shaking and I followed, shaken by the thrill of it all. Gerard Butler, as the King, and Lena Headey, as his Queen, are possessed of such internal strength that their occasional lack of wit is forgiven. It is Rodrigo Santoro though, as the "god" Xerxes, who is most impressive. His small amount of time on screen is counteracted by the knowledge that every second of it is rich with his exotic, slightly ironic (for a person who might be a transvestite at first glance, he sure has a deep voice), persona.
But the time that Synder's direction, or the visual effects of the film, or even the actor's themselves spend inside your mind is inversely porportional to how long you'll remember it after you leave (in English: for all the 117 minutes you may be slightly astounded, you won't recall more than a few seconds of that a week later). There then is the chief fault of playing so well with Miller's surface artistry and bringing it so exquisitely to the screen. This is only occasionally a ride for the heart, because mostly your mind will either be wildly indifferent to this bombastic spectacle of blood and flesh or wildly enthralled at the innovative way in which it is executed.
But as there is much to enjoy in this movie there is much more to dislike. You see, nearly every time a Spartan opened his/her mouth what they were to say next, I didn't want to hear and when I did...I winced. This is because the script is so heavy-handed, so bombastic, that nearly half way through I had doomed this picture to B-Movie hell. There are the usual homophobic rib-ticklers (and they are perhaps well deserved: the Athenians were known homosexuals and in this Spartan paradise of gleaming abs, hard-as-stone twelve-packs, and barely any clothes on male or female there were sure to be more). And there is a lot of superfluous nonsense. Maybe Zach Snyder should have learned from Marie Antoinette that it's best if you don't talk so badly while dressed so well (when you are dressed).
Then the surfaces came through for me as Snyder's camera went swooping in fantastic slo-mo at just the right moments (namely as when blood is darting through the air like specks of dust to land innocently, even beautifully, on the armor of fellow warriors). Or when his warriors go surging in beautifully sparse fighting styles that send innumerable enemies crashing to the similarly beautiful dirt (I am a particular fan of the Spartans ingenuity as cunning tricksters as well as fighters). Or perhaps when the thespians themselves bellow certain lines with such operatic gustow that the screen started shaking and I followed, shaken by the thrill of it all. Gerard Butler, as the King, and Lena Headey, as his Queen, are possessed of such internal strength that their occasional lack of wit is forgiven. It is Rodrigo Santoro though, as the "god" Xerxes, who is most impressive. His small amount of time on screen is counteracted by the knowledge that every second of it is rich with his exotic, slightly ironic (for a person who might be a transvestite at first glance, he sure has a deep voice), persona.
But the time that Synder's direction, or the visual effects of the film, or even the actor's themselves spend inside your mind is inversely porportional to how long you'll remember it after you leave (in English: for all the 117 minutes you may be slightly astounded, you won't recall more than a few seconds of that a week later). There then is the chief fault of playing so well with Miller's surface artistry and bringing it so exquisitely to the screen. This is only occasionally a ride for the heart, because mostly your mind will either be wildly indifferent to this bombastic spectacle of blood and flesh or wildly enthralled at the innovative way in which it is executed.
The Black Parade: A
Think you know everything there is to know about My Chemical Romance, that hugely successful emo-metal band behind such tedious, drippy ballads as "Helina" and "Ghost of You"? I'm here to tell you that you ain't heard nothing yet. On this third studio album, a veritable explosion of talent (supposedly "made" as a debut album by MCR alter-ego The Black Parade), MCR has revamped their image to the point of deletion. In place of jet-black hair of lead-singer/writer Gerard Way is a new, shorn, bleached blonde 'do. That same theory of experimentation carries over to The Black Parade and what results is the glorious equivalent of a shot of Jack Daniels: it sears your nerves and leaves you with a slow, sinfully good burn.
Cosinder the opening tracks on the album (those that set the stage for the fall and death of the unnamed, cancerous protagonist). On "To The End", Way ravages and snarls his way through a claustrophobic melody about a suicide attempt at a wedding and his recklessness and abandon are addictive (say goodbye to the vows you take/the hearts you break/and all the cyanide you drank). Immediately following is a track so gleeful in its deprication of emo-rock that who isn't surprised it's entitled "Dead!"?
Evolving also is Way's talent as a frontman. His soulful mourning for a lost-lover ("How I Dissapear") and swan-song ("Disenchanted") tackle wildly different emotions and materials, two things above and beyond the nature of a regular "emo band". It is a testament then to MCR's power that they handle both with strength, compassion, intelligence. To say it is compelling to hear would be an understatement. The band's dense, dark, vibrant arrangements manage to astound as well. There is great arena-rock ("Welcome to the Black
Parade") and snappy, rollicking fun ("Teenagers") both in the same package.
The highlights of the album are unforgettable. "Mama" - our hero's letter to his hated, estranged parent - is so darkly hilarious, so emotional, so powerful that the moment that Liza Minelli shows up to contribute her husky voice it's as though all the stars have aligned. "The Sharpest Lives" exerts a smiliar enthrall. The crashing beats hook you from the start and the sociopathic charm ("Juliet loves the beat and the lust it commands/Drop the dagger and lather the blood on your hands Romeo") keep you there. And who could forget the song's middle feast? "Welcome to the Black Parade" is both a soaring tribute to "Bohemian Rhapsody" and a musical revolution all its own.
Hopefully, My Chemical Romance doesn't revert to it's old ways of emoting and soul-sobbing. After having a taste of what they can really do when they put their minds to it, I doubt I would be able to stand such tastless sludge. After hearing those parting words of the album ("Nothing you can say can stop me going home") though, I'm pretty sure that won't be the case. MCR, let us hope, has ascended to its place as a rock powerhouse.
Cosinder the opening tracks on the album (those that set the stage for the fall and death of the unnamed, cancerous protagonist). On "To The End", Way ravages and snarls his way through a claustrophobic melody about a suicide attempt at a wedding and his recklessness and abandon are addictive (say goodbye to the vows you take/the hearts you break/and all the cyanide you drank). Immediately following is a track so gleeful in its deprication of emo-rock that who isn't surprised it's entitled "Dead!"?
Evolving also is Way's talent as a frontman. His soulful mourning for a lost-lover ("How I Dissapear") and swan-song ("Disenchanted") tackle wildly different emotions and materials, two things above and beyond the nature of a regular "emo band". It is a testament then to MCR's power that they handle both with strength, compassion, intelligence. To say it is compelling to hear would be an understatement. The band's dense, dark, vibrant arrangements manage to astound as well. There is great arena-rock ("Welcome to the Black
Parade") and snappy, rollicking fun ("Teenagers") both in the same package.
The highlights of the album are unforgettable. "Mama" - our hero's letter to his hated, estranged parent - is so darkly hilarious, so emotional, so powerful that the moment that Liza Minelli shows up to contribute her husky voice it's as though all the stars have aligned. "The Sharpest Lives" exerts a smiliar enthrall. The crashing beats hook you from the start and the sociopathic charm ("Juliet loves the beat and the lust it commands/Drop the dagger and lather the blood on your hands Romeo") keep you there. And who could forget the song's middle feast? "Welcome to the Black Parade" is both a soaring tribute to "Bohemian Rhapsody" and a musical revolution all its own.
Hopefully, My Chemical Romance doesn't revert to it's old ways of emoting and soul-sobbing. After having a taste of what they can really do when they put their minds to it, I doubt I would be able to stand such tastless sludge. After hearing those parting words of the album ("Nothing you can say can stop me going home") though, I'm pretty sure that won't be the case. MCR, let us hope, has ascended to its place as a rock powerhouse.
The Black Donnellys: C+
In the fall of 2005, Paul Haggis wrote and directed a little drama called Crash. The film was a near brilliant exploration of race and prejudice and it garnered him huge amounts of attention both for dividing critics and audiences (insipid! incisive!) and winning Best Picture. I had hoped that Crash was only one peak in a long, continued stream of brilliance. With Haggis' latest effort (with seminal co-man Bobby Moresco) I may have to eat crow.
The Black Donnellys is built on the foundations laid by shows like The Sopranoes and Brotherhood. It says that blood and family can't exist without each other and really that the latter is the definition for the former and vice-versa. Well, Haggis (who wrote and directed the first two episodes and serves as exec. producer) has certainly proved there is blood...a lot of it (for network television). We've got bodies being pummelled by sledgehammers, little brothers beaten near to death, a villain with a literal (!) axe to grind, and lots and lots of guns. Where then is the family?
Centering on the four Donnelly Brothers - Sean (Michael Stahl-David), Kevin (Billy Lush), Tommy (Jonathan Tucker), and Jimmy (Tom Guiry) - the show makes vague gestures at family and such but it finds much more joy in stacking things up (blood-wise) to knock them all down. I can't disagree, at times it makes for enjoyable drama. And the writing isn't half-bad (though, again, from an Oscar winning writer I would have expected more). My problem exists then with Tommy, as the central character in this massive, muddled, Greek tragedy.
Jonathan Tucker plays him with nice, steely resolve but since his character (and really every brother) professes to such an ingrained sense of love and protectiveness for his brothers you'd think that it would materialize on screen, right? Wrong. Though the first episode fared better, this second one finds Tommy flailing around with his younger brother Kevin like a paranoid jerk. His every movement seems powered by anger and selfishness. Ok, so he makes token gestures of affection near the end but that can't near make up for a lack of central character.Where Crash skated by on it's gigantic cast (thereby bypassing any real need for love), here The Black Donnellys is drowning in its own stoicism. The brothers, Tommy especially, are still such horribly opaque characters that even if their hearts were breaking (over Sean's ICU hospital stay, over being sucked into organized crime) we don't get to see them often enough to care.
Gladiator: A-
Charming, fun, bloody. Those three words describe Gladiator, sure, but the funny thing is they only describe the first few minutes. Those minutes in which the Roman general Maximus (Russell Crowe) orders his men to destroy a barbarian stronghold for Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris). The battle that ensues is one of decadent combat - flame and physicality...basically a delicious explosion of everything that director Ridley Scott finds amusing in battle put together in only a few minutes of screentime. Don't be mistaken into thinking there is only blood here. No, instead Scott has managed to find poetry in the destruction and so sends the entire production on an upward-spiraling bent of near religous proportions. There isn't all rainbows and bloodbaths in Roman paradise however.
You see, the Emperor loves Maximus as his own son much more than he does his actual son, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) and so attempts to entrust upon the general the power to return Rome to a Republic (as it was originally concieved) by making this lowly warrior the next Caesar. Commodus doesn't take the news well and in a fit of glorious unchained id strangles his father as he embraces him. That only starts Commodus on the war path. After he has ascended to the throne of Rome he kills everyone that Maximus ever loved and thinks he has done the same to Maximus himself. Instead, Maximus had escaped and been sold into slavery and become a gladiator at the hands of Proximo (Oliver Reed). The new Emperor, hungry for blood, reinstates the gladiator games and so Proximo takes his legion of slaves to Rome...where "the Spaniard" (aka Maximus) quickly becomes the audiences favorite winner and so gains a battle with the Emperor himself in a rose-strewn arena that concludes the film's final act.
Ridley Scott has staged this "swords-and-sandals" epic with wonderful action and great fun but has also managed to elicit something from this film that few of his others have: an emotional center. Maximus, as the axis on which everything else turns, has a ripe, tragic motivation and the other characters benefit well from this. Put up against such a monolith of purity and righteousness the treacherous, broken Commodus gains dimension and the Senate for which Maximus is campaigning to save takes on the metaphor of Democracy itself.
Where the first half relied on stunning virtues made crystal clear in Maximus (to which Russell Crowe should be thankful, this is a role of a lifetime), the second is more rough: a psychosexual melodrama in which Commodus plays a delightfully sickening central role. Russell Crowe, his formerly puffy visage (in Michael Mann's The Insider) and body have been transformed into a handsomely muscular cut and his expressive performance gives light to his molten contempt. His presence on screen deserves only one word: glorious. This is the announcement of an up-til-now unknown coming out as both a personality and as a phenomenol actor.
Joaquin Phoenix conjures a powerful performance by creating a perverse air as a boy trapped in a man's body. He is an unchained id with a damaged conscience, to blinded by his own "rationale" to think outside of his tiny box of self-pity and world-hating. Connie Nielsen, who plays his sister (for who he has a creepy attraction) Lucilla, likewise nails her part; yet I wish the movie hadn't hinged so much on Lucilla's underdrawn character. And even those minor characters in the film are given rich presence by their performers.
Pulsing with strains of anything that has ever entertained Scott (e.g. fatherhood, brotherhood, masculinity, honor, power, love) and upheld by characters given snarling, pounding, intelligent voices by David Franzoni's fabulous script this is a movie that has everything you could ever want. It is a feast for the mind, eyes, and heart.
Wuthering Heights: A
Emily Bronte managed only to publish one book in her life before she died tragically on the moors of England. Her sole work, Wuthering Heights, is one of superlative writing and it brings the point home that had Ms. Bronte lived, she could have delivered even more perfection.
The story of Catherine and Heathcliffe is set in Victorian England on the moors. They were raised as brother and sister (even though Heathcliffe is adopted and completely dispised by their other sibling, Hindley) but as time went on their relationship bloomed from the platonic into the sort of soul-wrenching love that many a masterpiece has been written about. Wuthering Heights is no different. Catherine marries herself off to the Linton family (the Linton's having money and power, of course) and leaves Heathcliffe off to stew in a pool of his own poisoned love, self-pity, loathing, and vengence. When he finally does return to exact a price for his suffering, after nearly three years, his plan is almost delicious in its cunning and brilliance. Make no mistake however, Heathcliffe is as bad a man as his lover is a manipulative, scheming, vile woman.
What then empowers this book to such pained, grand proportions? What keeps it afloat in the story seas of melodrama and overripe dialogue? It is by sheer strength of talent that Emily Bronte holds every piece of her story together. Brought to life by her rich, witty pen Bronte creates a story that is (at it's roots) a tale of love gone so blindingly wrong that neither of it's victims are ever able to see again.
Full of violence, despair, imprisonment and death, Wuthering Heights is as near to an old-fashioned page turner as your likely to find in Victorian literature. Each character has a voice powerful enough to shake the very foundations of the modern novel at the time. After all, the intricate narration style by which the book was written wasn't exactly "cookie-cutter" at the time. Niether than was the bruise-black premise or the cutting emotional undercurrents. This "stuffy old novel" exhibits the striking power to exhilirate and horrify, thrill and delight on every page. Emily Bronte may not have set out to write a jubilant, magnificent celebration of love in all of its forms, (be they vile or pure..or in some cases both) but she succeeded at just that and she did it flawlessly.
Oscar Post-Show.
I think it goes without saying that last night's ceremony was full of all the usual Oscar trappings. There were the expected winners, the tiresome time fillers, there were the sublime moments pulled off by the sassy ceremony host, and (shockingly enough) there came a moment that I wasn't expecting: I had no idea what was to happen next. So to sum it all up for my dear, dear readers is my experience watching the grandaddy of award shows...enjoy.
To start off there was Ellen. As a comedian (and even as a lesbian) she is unmatched. Mixing though her deft, sensible humor with last year's acerbic and brilliant performance pulled off by John Stewart was no easy task and yet she managed to pull it off. She tripped up only once with a church-choir like dance number that went almost as quickly as she introduced it. To counterpoint that there were comic bits that were pure, 100% Ellen: her interview with the famous directors in the audience (Clint Eastwood + MySpace = Hilarious!), her last-minute vacuum sketch and her general unflappery as a genuine, talented screen presence. Here's to you Ellen, you're officially America's favorite new lesbian comedian!
Yet, I ask you: where would a host be without her material (and by that I mean the nominees)? Nowhere. So shuffle in all you talented actors, writers, directors, and the thousand other technical wizards that concoct glorious screen experience...you're being paged. In unusual fashion, the Oscars handled most of the technical stuff (from which they changed "Best..." to "Achievement in...") in the first 2 hours and started handing out the meat-and-potatoes awards in the last 2 hours. Pan's Labyrinth started off strong in it's several techincal nods but failed on it's two big fronts (Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay). Still, foreign cinema had a great night. They first recieved a film tribute and then, throughout the night, every other winner it seemed had only the best to say about the genius of Guillermo Del Toro (all of it true, mind you). As for the other technical nominees (Apocalypto, The Prestige, etc.), they didn't have the greatest run.
On the other front there was the expected (Jennifer Hudson anyone?), and the unexpected (Alan Arkin over Eddie Murphy?!). For the latter I was quite thankful as it changed up the night and it gave me reason to literally wring my hands with worry as Jack Nicholson called the Best Picture winner with Diane Keaton. The Departed here's to you; you managed to come from behind and destroy that predicted frontrunner monolith known as Babel (to who I apologize wholeheartedly...you deserved a better go, buddy)!
As for the other Oscar nonsense, the dancers "film poster interpretations" were quite entertaining. The sound effect choir was a quirky treat. The speechs never veered too far into irritation or camp. Oh and who can forget the Dreamgirls once again performing (Live! Bill Condon!) thier 3 nominated Best Songs? It was rapturous and fun...just like the film itself. Speaking of music, Melissa Etheridge pulled off a win for her An Inconvenient Truth song, and her blusey showing on the stage was none too shabby either. Speaking of Al Gore, that guy was everywhere and after 4 hours the jokes started to grate. Still, if one is going to represent a Vice-President over and over at the entertainment world's biggest night I'd rather it be Gore than Cheney. All in all I'd have to say that this year was a pretty solid mix of the engaging and the expected and as I drifted off to dreamland somewhere near 1 o'clock in the morning, I'd have to say that was just fine with me.
Mulholland Drive: B
Mulholland Drive: B Current mood: confused Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities
David Lynch is famous for being one of the few remaining directors completely willing to entertain his slightest fancy (be it even at the sacrifice of the audience's worthy attention). Such an attribute has helped him greatly with the creation of such things as Blue Velvet and the television cult phenom Twin Peaks. Here too, in Mulholland Drive, Lynch waves his wild brand of imagination like a wand hoping to cast his spell on us so strong that we won't notice that he has your card up his sleeve. I was reminded of this feeling over and over again watching Mulholland Drive. There are scenes of such rapt power that I was awed...and there are those that will leave you not only mystified but vengefully frustrated. But perhaps I should start at the beginning...
A woman in a black cocktail dress (Laura Elena Harring, an actress who really could only stand still and look pretty) is riding home in her limo when, suddenly, her drive tries to kill her. He fails, mostly due to the fact that they slam into an oncoming car, and the woman escapes sans memory up into the hills of Los Angeles (presumably, Lynch would have us believe, attracted by the glittering lights). There she meets Betty (Naomi Watts), a soon-to-be actress staying in Aunt Ruth's apartment. With Betty's help the women names herself Rita, off of a Gilda poster, and they set out to solve the Mystery. Sounds pretty linear right?
Wrong.
What ensues in their quest I can only classify in quick doses: a crippled dwarf (Michael J. Anderson) runs a black-tie mob, a hideous (and hideously terrifying) man sits behind the wall behind a well-lit diner, a movie director (Justin Theroux) is threatened by the dwarf's mob over control of his movie, and an underworld enforcer known as The Cowboy (Monty Montgomery) maintains a tight grip on an enthralling persona. Oh and Betty and Rita go through all sorts of Nancy Drew by way of Hitchcock scenarios to unravel just exactly who Rita is.
As I mentioned before there are moments of pop poetry genius, pure Lynchian freak-show magic. For example: Betty auditions with an aging matinee star and shocks the room and the audience by acing her role as a dirty dirty girl, then there is the after-hours club "Silencio" in which a women sings to the audience a well known pop song in spanish and collapses right at her climax...leaving us to the realization that the entire thing was lip syched. This later moment though signals the downward spiral of an otherwise enjoyable creepy pulp-noir. As Rita is left to open the blue box of personality and slide down into the rabbit hole of David Lynch's mind you can actually feel the entire movie go to hell. What remains is one pretty good impression of a flashing David Mamet card trick, a bloated metaphysical theory on identity, and a shiveringly good art thriller. I only wish then that the film had tried as hard to make sense as it did to astound. If only.
David Lynch is famous for being one of the few remaining directors completely willing to entertain his slightest fancy (be it even at the sacrifice of the audience's worthy attention). Such an attribute has helped him greatly with the creation of such things as Blue Velvet and the television cult phenom Twin Peaks. Here too, in Mulholland Drive, Lynch waves his wild brand of imagination like a wand hoping to cast his spell on us so strong that we won't notice that he has your card up his sleeve. I was reminded of this feeling over and over again watching Mulholland Drive. There are scenes of such rapt power that I was awed...and there are those that will leave you not only mystified but vengefully frustrated. But perhaps I should start at the beginning...
A woman in a black cocktail dress (Laura Elena Harring, an actress who really could only stand still and look pretty) is riding home in her limo when, suddenly, her drive tries to kill her. He fails, mostly due to the fact that they slam into an oncoming car, and the woman escapes sans memory up into the hills of Los Angeles (presumably, Lynch would have us believe, attracted by the glittering lights). There she meets Betty (Naomi Watts), a soon-to-be actress staying in Aunt Ruth's apartment. With Betty's help the women names herself Rita, off of a Gilda poster, and they set out to solve the Mystery. Sounds pretty linear right?
Wrong.
What ensues in their quest I can only classify in quick doses: a crippled dwarf (Michael J. Anderson) runs a black-tie mob, a hideous (and hideously terrifying) man sits behind the wall behind a well-lit diner, a movie director (Justin Theroux) is threatened by the dwarf's mob over control of his movie, and an underworld enforcer known as The Cowboy (Monty Montgomery) maintains a tight grip on an enthralling persona. Oh and Betty and Rita go through all sorts of Nancy Drew by way of Hitchcock scenarios to unravel just exactly who Rita is.
As I mentioned before there are moments of pop poetry genius, pure Lynchian freak-show magic. For example: Betty auditions with an aging matinee star and shocks the room and the audience by acing her role as a dirty dirty girl, then there is the after-hours club "Silencio" in which a women sings to the audience a well known pop song in spanish and collapses right at her climax...leaving us to the realization that the entire thing was lip syched. This later moment though signals the downward spiral of an otherwise enjoyable creepy pulp-noir. As Rita is left to open the blue box of personality and slide down into the rabbit hole of David Lynch's mind you can actually feel the entire movie go to hell. What remains is one pretty good impression of a flashing David Mamet card trick, a bloated metaphysical theory on identity, and a shiveringly good art thriller. I only wish then that the film had tried as hard to make sense as it did to astound. If only.
The Last King of Scotland: B+
All the hype is true, in fact everything you've heard about Forrest Whittaker's portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin is true.
In a year bereft of truly inspiring, morally challening, and rivetingly dark work (unlike like last year say, which was gifted with David Croonenberg's absurdly amazing A History of Violence) comes Kevin Macdonald's bloody biopic about Idi Amin's Ugandan regime...albeit not without it's own flaws. The flaws I feel however are crucial to the telling of the story. As adapted from Giles Foden's novel of the same name, the movie tracks an unnamed period of time (during the 70's) in the life of one Scottish doctor, Nicholas Gaffigan (James McAvoy), as he firsts boldy strides into to Africa (perhaps to save it) and then comes under the influence of the charming, savage Amin (Forrest Whittaker) himself. Savage you say? Where the novel was explicit as to the atrocities of Amin's reign, here we get parties and happy black people. And even Amin himself proves to be a warm and silly presence. Thanks to Peter Morgan's script and Whittaker's quicksilver timing, Idi Amin is more of a teddy bear than a gorilla. The potency of the movie then, is taken from his transformation. The movie attempts to convey both Amin's influence globally and his power personally and it fails at both, that's not quite the insult it should be however. As was said in the beginning, every flaw is crucial to the impact of the film.
At first Nicholas is taken in as one of Amin's "closest advisors", their relationship soon takes on the sheen of the unhealthy though. What emerges is a father-son dynamic built eventually more on hate and fascination than any real affection (although Whittaker's "sincerity" will give you chills). As Nicholas becomes more and more involved with Amin, he is completely blinded to the cruelness of him and is eventually complicit in the hundreds of thousands of deaths at the dictator's hands. The best part of the movie is it's ability to convey these two sides of Amin, how his charm was inexorable from his madness.
Reveling in the two wildly differing performances of its stars - McAvoy is completely convincing as the reckless, good-natured, naieve "son" while Whittaker turns in a performance that sets the screen on fire: His bullying, brutish, merciless and protective "father of his country" (by which he means both Nicholas and Uganda simultaneously) is an impassioned portrait of insanity and it's physical incarnations. Bloody and funny aren't perhaps words that would go together well in a movie but they fit together perfectly when describing someone as indescribable and wicked as Amin. The film surrounding him is as happy for his presence as it is sickened by him.
In a year bereft of truly inspiring, morally challening, and rivetingly dark work (unlike like last year say, which was gifted with David Croonenberg's absurdly amazing A History of Violence) comes Kevin Macdonald's bloody biopic about Idi Amin's Ugandan regime...albeit not without it's own flaws. The flaws I feel however are crucial to the telling of the story. As adapted from Giles Foden's novel of the same name, the movie tracks an unnamed period of time (during the 70's) in the life of one Scottish doctor, Nicholas Gaffigan (James McAvoy), as he firsts boldy strides into to Africa (perhaps to save it) and then comes under the influence of the charming, savage Amin (Forrest Whittaker) himself. Savage you say? Where the novel was explicit as to the atrocities of Amin's reign, here we get parties and happy black people. And even Amin himself proves to be a warm and silly presence. Thanks to Peter Morgan's script and Whittaker's quicksilver timing, Idi Amin is more of a teddy bear than a gorilla. The potency of the movie then, is taken from his transformation. The movie attempts to convey both Amin's influence globally and his power personally and it fails at both, that's not quite the insult it should be however. As was said in the beginning, every flaw is crucial to the impact of the film.
At first Nicholas is taken in as one of Amin's "closest advisors", their relationship soon takes on the sheen of the unhealthy though. What emerges is a father-son dynamic built eventually more on hate and fascination than any real affection (although Whittaker's "sincerity" will give you chills). As Nicholas becomes more and more involved with Amin, he is completely blinded to the cruelness of him and is eventually complicit in the hundreds of thousands of deaths at the dictator's hands. The best part of the movie is it's ability to convey these two sides of Amin, how his charm was inexorable from his madness.
Reveling in the two wildly differing performances of its stars - McAvoy is completely convincing as the reckless, good-natured, naieve "son" while Whittaker turns in a performance that sets the screen on fire: His bullying, brutish, merciless and protective "father of his country" (by which he means both Nicholas and Uganda simultaneously) is an impassioned portrait of insanity and it's physical incarnations. Bloody and funny aren't perhaps words that would go together well in a movie but they fit together perfectly when describing someone as indescribable and wicked as Amin. The film surrounding him is as happy for his presence as it is sickened by him.
Oscar Predictions.
As the Oscars are only a few weeks away (Feb. 25th for those of us that still live under rocks), I've decided to post my 2nd annual (whoot whoot) Oscar predictions. Now granted these aren't full proof (Crash anyone?), but they are mine. Enjoy.
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Oscar Predictions, 2007:
Best Adapted Screenplay -
Who should win: Alfonso Cuaron's sizzling script for Children of Men was a late holiday treat, and Patrick Marber's sense of humor turned Notes on a Scandal into a riotous good time. Still, it's William Monahan's powerfully poingnant, and equally humane, screenplay for The Departed that is most deserving.
Who will win: It's a tough call but since Babel wasn't nominated here, expect The Departed to take home the gold.
Best Original Screenplay -
Who should win: Quality wise, it'll have to be a three-way tie. Peter Morgan balanced media and morality in The Queen to stunning effect while Guillermo Arriaga intertwined massive continents and wildly differing cultures in Babel to come up with an impressive drama. And that other Guillermo (Del Toro) crafted a remarkably brilliant drama/fantasy in Pan's Labyrinth. Ultimately though, my vote'd go to Del Toro for going where so few writers have dared venture and returning all the more talented for it.
Who will win: Did I say Babel got nominated here? There is a chance though that Peter Morgan could steal the win and the little engine that could, Little Miss Sunshine, is sneaking up from behind even as we speak.
Best Supporting Actor -
Who should win: Mark Wahlberg and Eddie Murphy both turned in some career-revitalizing work and Alan Arkin was none to shabby as the coke-snorting gramps in Sunshine but I've fallen hardest for Murphy returning to the fast and furious star he was born to be.
Who will win: Again the spector of Sunshine hangs over this, just waiting at the chance of an upset but since Eddie won the SAG, I'll bet he gets the win here too.
Best Supporting Actress -
Who should win: Two Babel star's are nominated here (Adriana Barranza and Rinko Kikuchi) and who can forget those two white chicks gone great (I'm speaking of course of Cate Blanchett and Abigail Breslin)? Still, it's Jennifer Hudson's prowling, ferocious turn as divalicious Effie in Dreamgirls that is a stand-up-and-cheer performance.
Who will win: Did I mention Jennifer Hudson?
Best Actor -
Who should win: Will Smith is a shock in Pursuit of Happyness and Ryan Gosling has earned raves all year as his coke-addicted middle school teacher in Half Nelson, but Forest Whittaker's towering rendition of Idi Amin takes the cake.
Who will win: Forrest Whittaker has garnered nearly all the pre-Oscar awards and shows no signs of stopping now.
Best Actress -
Who should win: Apologies are in order to two of our greatest living actresses, Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren, but this year is the year of Dame Dench and her tour-de-force as an obsessed schoolteacher.
Who will win: All hail the Queen in The Queen! That means you, Helen Mirren.
Best Director -
Who should win: Though Martin Scorsese, Stephen Frears, Clint Eastwood, and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu all did admirable and admittedly difficult work on their films, it's Paul Greengrass (that rough-and-tumble guy behind United 93) who astounded me most and left me as deeply wounded as I was overjoyed at his work.
Who will win: There isn't a chance in hell that Martin Scorsese won't win, sadly though it'll be his first out of six nods.
Best Picture -
Who should win: Though I liked every nominee, and loved most of them (sorry Sunshine), I found The Departed to be the most thrillingly violent, and whip-smart fun I've had at the multiplex since Kill Bill.
Who will win: Letters From Iwo Jima's early, and intense, critical praise is probably what earned it a suprise nod (the same could be said of indie Cindarella Story Little Miss Sunshine). And The Queen could sneak in a few wins in other categories but not this one. Instead, it looks like a battle between The Departed and Babel, although with Babel's rocky pre-Oscar road it may be a tough one for them to win. Also Little Miss Sunshine's upset at the SAG's reeks of another Crash incident. In the end though, and with the not-so-soon-forgotten Globe win, Babel will take Hollywood's most coveted golden man.
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Well there it is folks, my favorites and industry favorites. Who should be cheering come that night in the Kodak Theater and who actually will be. As always, tell me what you thought.
See you Feburary 25th.
Ed Wood: A
Let me being with an image from Tim Burton's Ed Wood that I just can't get out of my head. Edward D. Wood Jr. (Johnny Depp), his girlfriend Kathy (Patricia Arquette) and there entire posse of freaks and geeks have just arrived to the world premiere of Bride of the Monster, Ed's insanely sclocky goosebumps-in-the-night picture. From nearly the moment they set foot inside the theater they are bombarded by projectiles from every single audience member, and the film hadn't even started. The nature of the attack lay more in the sheer force of awful that surrounded Wood and his work than the actual awful of the work itself (although that, if ever viewed intimately, was quite formidable as well). Such is the life story of the "Worst Director Of All Time": he lacked talent and he lacked standing, but he possessed personality.
It's personality that has inspired director Tim Burton, who is himself a conjurer of the occasionally wacked-out monster flick. Ed Wood was never taken for a true talent because he wasn't, but to say he was't a filmmaker would be a lie: he was more a filmmaker than perhaps any other autuer of his era, and very few have approached his level of love for the cinema since. Burton, working with grandly rough black-and-white film, has staged a dramatization of Wood's life that is so wildly enjoyable that you may forget entirely that what makes the whole thing work is indeed what powered the original Ed Wood: personality.
Johnny Deep himself was lost to such personality, dissapearing behind a strange Mid-west meets military sergeant accent and women's clothing (Ed Wood was an audacious and open tranvestite). Using such props, his madcap interpretation (and spot-on impersonation) of Wood is one of the goofiest, heartfelt performances of his career and he is only strengthened by the skill of Burton as a director.
Working from a script by writers Larry Karaszewsi and Scott Alexander, Tim Burton has achieved the ultimate synthesis of everything he admires in movies: the wild, the personal, the humorously off-beat, strange characters with sincere dreams. The final product is a thing of sublimely clever and passionate beauty, the perfect alchemy of the ridiculous into the great. Not only has Ed Wood been memorialized on screen, his sprit has been captured there as well.
Volver: B+
There is a cult in the world of cinephilia. It is a cult of almost obsessed devotees who's object of fascination is described as "exhilirating", "touching", "funny", and "colorful". I am talking about the Cult of Almodovar, those movie lovers in love with Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodovar. His movies, always stories of wild women overcoming wild obstacles, are hailed as masterpieces practically from the moment they set foot at your local Regal-plex. However there are those who find him overrated, a tad overdone, and quite heavy-handed; more a journeyman than a master.
After I saw his 2003 Oscar-winner Hable Con Ella (Talk To Her) I felt myself more in the latter camp than the former. His scripts, although occasionally sparkling with whimsical funny, seemed both leaden and solid. His characters - as much as he may shower them with quirks, melancholy and disease - were almost too strong for the audience, rarely did I feel a connection, an emotion with the protagonists. With Volver though, his 2006 Cannes Film Festival frenzy-inducing treat, I may just be persuaded to become a cultist.
Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) has a hard life. First her husband is killed, then she starts seeing her dead mother's ghost. All the while she's trying to take over a neighbor's restaurant while juggling raising her only daughter alone! Such a hard road eventually leads her to reconnect with her sister and mother, a plot device Almodovar is just in luff with. What emerges from
Raimunda's life is a muy bizzaro (and muy comico) melodrama. And when I say "melodrama", I mean it in every sense of the word. Certainly there are moments where I recalled Talk To Her, but here Almodovar has hit a new level of power over the audience...with a little help from Senorita Cruz, who here handles herself with such conviction that it pulls you past the times when her life rings false. It must also be said that Pedro Almodovar has smoothed out the pointless wanderings of his filmmaking so that even if Volver is not a great movie, it's a lot of fun to watch.
Notes on a Scandal: A-
There comes a point in Richard Eyre's spellbinding psycological thriller Notes on a Scandal where I was literally on the edge of my seat. That doesn't happen often. The tremendous power of the film must be attributed to two things: Patrick Marber's suprisingly excellent script, and the delicious screen duo-turned-adversaries that are Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench.
Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) is a newly minted art teacher at a public school in England. Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) is a spinsterly old fixture of the place. Sheba (shockingly!) develops a trist with a 15-year old jock, throwing away her nice comfy family. Barbara (shockingly!) reveals a steely obsession for Sheba that doesn't border on the insane so much as it does the sad (because it is so pitifully obvious that Barbara is a lesbian). Once Barbara has ensnared Sheba in her web, after catching her giving the jock a blo-job, she begins a quite cunning game of how far can I go? with not only Sheba, but with her own sexuality. As buoyed by Marber's toxic wit (although I do wish he'd have given the characters more texture) and director Richard Eyre's strong hand the movie is one of those nasty little things you can't take your eyes off of. It's crafty suspenseful movie making at it's most morbid, dark, pessimistic, and well made.
The performances themselves excel: Cate Blanchett, who has always wielded a sort of sleepy ineffability to me, here turns in a performance of delightful unpredictability. Bill Nighy, who plays her husband, managed to make me laugh and cheer in but one big scene, his only of the picture. But it's Dame Judi that left me breathless. She has tinkered in commanding stage presence and she has done bits of comedy in other things, but here....my oh my. Armed with a voice that could cut glass (she narrates all of the film with the disconnected and perversely depressed voice that only a psycotic could muster) and volcanic intensity, Mrs. Dench does the best job of acting I've seen all year.
Sorry to Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep, but as "Barb" Covett Judi Dench creates the most powerful character on screen this year, and probably the most terrifying. She's got bile in her veins and lonliness in her heart. The beauty of this movie is that it showcases both at every turn and doesn't stop to care that it won't warm your heart in the least, except perhaps at the prospect of such hilarious, riveting filmmaking.
Pan's Labyrinth: A
And the award for "Who Knew This Guy Had Talent??" goes to...Guillermo Del Toro! This is Del Toro's first nomination and it signifies that this monster-loving writer/director has all the makings of an amazing talent, that perhaps he should join the ranks of that other Mexican master filmmaker: Alfonso Cuaron (who exec-produced Pan's Labyrinth). This is yet another sterling late-release film I was unable to view before year's end.
The story here is one of almost banal simplicity: a young girl named Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her mother Carmen (Adriana Gil) go to live with Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez, the very vision of evil incarnate) in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Carmen is carrying Vidal's baby and it's quite clear that that's the only reason he married her in the first place. Ofelia herself spends hours reading while the Captain brutally executes guerrilla rebels in the hills around their military post. Ofelia, ever the bookworm, gets sucked into a fairytale where she is the princess of a long lost underground kingdom. In order to return there (and subsequently escape fascism and the evils it entails) she must complete three tasks as ordained by Pan (Doug Jones), a faun whose very syntax sends shivers up my spine. The tasks involve large fig trees, fairies, giant toads, and a demon known as the Pale Man (Doug Jones) that sits forever inert at a subterranean dinner table...waiting for his next victim.
All the while that Ofelia is scurrying about completing tasks and being wonderfully resourceful, there is a story of tragic insurgency going on in the "real world" (I use that because here, in this dark and disturbing myth, where does reality end and fantasy begin?). The captain spends days oppressing the village he protects while his maid Mercedes (Maribel Verdu, on loan from Alfonso Cuaron's Y Tu Mama Tambien) spends equally as much time secretly trying to thwart him. Indeed one of the film's many great climaxes occurs as Mercedes escapes Vidal's torture using only a small blade and her own steely resolve.
What Guillermo Del Toro has created is a terriying fairy tale and a twisted war story. The genius of his creation however is that he blends the two seamlessly. His intuition into Ofelia's imagination is so deeply felt, that it is impossible to tell whether she is the subject of her own mental sanctuary or whether she reallly is to be a Princess in her own secret kingdom. The fantastical imagery itself could have made this a great horror story but Del Toro is willing to reach deeper and come up with a film of shocking emotional ferocity. The word masterpiece is much to common for this movie, but it is most definitely Del Toro's masterwork. He's taken elements from everything he's ever touched (be it the monsters of Mimic, or the cracked characters of Hellboy, or even the atmosphere of The Devil's Backbone) and created one of the most inventive, rich, powerful spectacles of cinema I have ever seen. It shook me to my core and has haunted my dreams for days.
The story here is one of almost banal simplicity: a young girl named Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her mother Carmen (Adriana Gil) go to live with Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez, the very vision of evil incarnate) in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Carmen is carrying Vidal's baby and it's quite clear that that's the only reason he married her in the first place. Ofelia herself spends hours reading while the Captain brutally executes guerrilla rebels in the hills around their military post. Ofelia, ever the bookworm, gets sucked into a fairytale where she is the princess of a long lost underground kingdom. In order to return there (and subsequently escape fascism and the evils it entails) she must complete three tasks as ordained by Pan (Doug Jones), a faun whose very syntax sends shivers up my spine. The tasks involve large fig trees, fairies, giant toads, and a demon known as the Pale Man (Doug Jones) that sits forever inert at a subterranean dinner table...waiting for his next victim.
All the while that Ofelia is scurrying about completing tasks and being wonderfully resourceful, there is a story of tragic insurgency going on in the "real world" (I use that because here, in this dark and disturbing myth, where does reality end and fantasy begin?). The captain spends days oppressing the village he protects while his maid Mercedes (Maribel Verdu, on loan from Alfonso Cuaron's Y Tu Mama Tambien) spends equally as much time secretly trying to thwart him. Indeed one of the film's many great climaxes occurs as Mercedes escapes Vidal's torture using only a small blade and her own steely resolve.
What Guillermo Del Toro has created is a terriying fairy tale and a twisted war story. The genius of his creation however is that he blends the two seamlessly. His intuition into Ofelia's imagination is so deeply felt, that it is impossible to tell whether she is the subject of her own mental sanctuary or whether she reallly is to be a Princess in her own secret kingdom. The fantastical imagery itself could have made this a great horror story but Del Toro is willing to reach deeper and come up with a film of shocking emotional ferocity. The word masterpiece is much to common for this movie, but it is most definitely Del Toro's masterwork. He's taken elements from everything he's ever touched (be it the monsters of Mimic, or the cracked characters of Hellboy, or even the atmosphere of The Devil's Backbone) and created one of the most inventive, rich, powerful spectacles of cinema I have ever seen. It shook me to my core and has haunted my dreams for days.
The Illusionist: B
Every blazing glare levied, every soft sigh, every entrancing blur in The Illusionist feels at once rigid and intangible. There is a sort of romantic religiosity to the way that Eisenheim (Edward Norton) casts his hands majestically about seeking alternately to thrill the audience and ensnare them. Such feeling are at the core of Neil Burger's latest drama about the gaps between the mind and reality.
When Eisenheim was just a boy, he met a Dutchess to be (Jessica Biel). They shared a brief flare of up of adolescent lust and adoration and then she was swept from him on the power of Austria's 20th century class system. Years later he has returned to Vienna, triumphantly, with the ability to create the most entertaining illusions the city has ever seen. In a matter of moments he has set the audience a blaze, but it is only one person whose affection he seeks: that of the Dutchess, all grown up. Sadly the Dutchess is engaged to the cunning, emotional Crown Prine Leopold (Rufus Suwell) who has in his employ the chief investigator Uwle (Paul Giamatti).
Thus sets off a deadly game, a battle of love and will, of skill and perception, and ultimately one that vanishes like a puff of wind. As Leopold's interest in Eisenheim develops into obsession, as the Dutchess rekindles her fascination with the magician, and as Uwle is drawn further into investigating the mind of such a brilliant performer, Eisenheim stands back stone-faced watching it all.
There though is my sole problem with the film, and one that still nags me hours later. The first half of the movie had a sort of glorified magic to it, a pop romanticism with the way it treated Eisenheim's magic. The farther the movie goes on the more interested Burger, who wrote and directed the film, becomes in the emotional foundations of each character. Unfortuantely the emtional is of the wispiest sort and the whole production begins to lose it's once mesmerizing sheen. Though Edward Norton's gaze can burn a hole through the screen, the movie he's anchoring isn't worth the whole effort he gives out.
When Eisenheim was just a boy, he met a Dutchess to be (Jessica Biel). They shared a brief flare of up of adolescent lust and adoration and then she was swept from him on the power of Austria's 20th century class system. Years later he has returned to Vienna, triumphantly, with the ability to create the most entertaining illusions the city has ever seen. In a matter of moments he has set the audience a blaze, but it is only one person whose affection he seeks: that of the Dutchess, all grown up. Sadly the Dutchess is engaged to the cunning, emotional Crown Prine Leopold (Rufus Suwell) who has in his employ the chief investigator Uwle (Paul Giamatti).
Thus sets off a deadly game, a battle of love and will, of skill and perception, and ultimately one that vanishes like a puff of wind. As Leopold's interest in Eisenheim develops into obsession, as the Dutchess rekindles her fascination with the magician, and as Uwle is drawn further into investigating the mind of such a brilliant performer, Eisenheim stands back stone-faced watching it all.
There though is my sole problem with the film, and one that still nags me hours later. The first half of the movie had a sort of glorified magic to it, a pop romanticism with the way it treated Eisenheim's magic. The farther the movie goes on the more interested Burger, who wrote and directed the film, becomes in the emotional foundations of each character. Unfortuantely the emtional is of the wispiest sort and the whole production begins to lose it's once mesmerizing sheen. Though Edward Norton's gaze can burn a hole through the screen, the movie he's anchoring isn't worth the whole effort he gives out.
Broken Flowers: A-
It's a wonder that Bill Murray can't find a continual stream of nearly extraordinary work for the rest of his life. These last 10 years or so have been an almost incessant stream of both indelible characters and revelatory performances. From Wes Anderson's highly original The Royal Tenenbaums to Sophia Coppola's beautiful, solemn, romantic fable Lost In Translation, Bill Murray has affirmed his place among cinema's most powerful performers. Here, again, he amazes in Jim Jarmusch's story of an "over the hill" Don Juan named Don Johnston (Bill Murray).
As the movie opens, Don's girlfriend (Julie Delpie) is leaving him. At first he seems as though he may be dismayed and then suddenly you realize that he's probably just tired. After she leaves he finds an unsigned letter saying that he has a 19-year old son by an old flame. After consulting his munificent friend Winston (Jeffrey Wright), he sets off on a cross-country road trip to re-meet the four women that could have possibly fathered Don Johnston Jr.
First there is Laura (Sharon Stone), a vibrant and vibrantly sexy woman who probably only vaguely aknowledges the significance behind her daughter's name: Lolita. Next comes Dora (Frances Conroy), she of the anti-septic McMansion who sells "re-furbished pre-fabs" and has a husband who smiles alot. And by alot I mean "more than any other person on Earth". After her proceeds Carmen (Jessica Lange) who was once a lawyer and is now a pet communicator. Finally there is Penny (Tilda Swinton), a woman who's affection for Don is buried (if even it ever existed) under a mountain of unrestrained hate.
The beauty of Broken Flowers is perhaps in its emotional generousity. The further that Don moves back into his past, the more in love he becomes with the women he meets and the more unavailable they become. And indeed when all four women are imbodied by the natural sexiness and exceptional talent of Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy, and Tilda Swinton it's easy to see why. Bill Murray himself mixes his razor sarcasm and mastery of body language into a pitch-perfect performance. Though writer-director Jim Jarmusch's hipper-than-thou beat is alittle too cool for me this movie warmed my heart and entranced my mind. Perhaps Don didn't find himself, but he started looking.
Golden Globes Post-Show
Hollywood's second most important night has again been brought to a close. Last year it was to the appaluse of Ang Lee as he ascended the stage for Brokeback Mountain's Best Picture Golden Globe. Tonight, Alejandro Gonzales Innauritu was ecstatic that Babel won. Either way, and either year, there were good things, bad things, sad things, and ugly things. Here's what I have to say:
The Good: Jennifer Hudson won for her explosion of talent that was a performance in Dreamgirls. Eddie Murphy did the same for the exact same movie. Peter Morgan picked up a globe for his powerfully witty script for The Queen. Sacha Baron Cohen won a globe for his "performance" as dimbulb journalist Borat in Borat. Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren both one Best Actress globes and Mrs. Streep delightfully prattled on for about 5 minutes. Kyra Sedgewick upset everyone by garnering a globe for her performance on The Closer. Hugh Laurie's "speech" was great. Warren Beaty made a very long thank you ramble for receiving the life-time achievement award from Tom Hanks after his pretty neat video tribute.
The Bad: Jeremy Piven didn't manage to squeeze past the monolith that is Elizabeth I and pick up an award for his continually brilliant performance on Entourage. Some strange Happy Feet song by Prince picked up the win for Best Song, even though Beyonce's "Listen" was both better and more favored. Sadly, Prince was stuck in traffic at the time so he couldn't accept..thus provoking Justin T. to mock him. Warren Beaty made a very long thank you speech.
The Sad: The accepted winners were everywhere tonight (ex: Helen Mirren reigned over the entire thing picking up two globes and being mentioned by everyone and their mother who crossed the golden podium, Hugh Laurie won again). Will Smith couldn't pull a victory from the jaws of Forrest Whittaker for Best Actor. At least he'll get nominated. Babel won Best Picture, even though not only The Departed but The Queen also were higher in quality. Still, if Babel eventually takes that golden man for the same thing I won't be too upset. Oh and, Warren Beaty made a very long thank you.
The Ugly: Clint Eastwood, having just won for Best Foreign Film, mocked Jennifer Hudson's acceptance speech (which was amazing by the way). People were shocked and awed that television's freshman suprise (and most overrated thing currently airing) Ugly Betty not only won Best Comedy, but Best Actress for America Ferrarra. Where's the love for The Office,
Entourage, or even Scrubs?
Well that's it for me. If you agreed, disagreed, hated it, didn't read it or whatever tell me why. I'm always curious.
See you next awards analysis.
The Good: Jennifer Hudson won for her explosion of talent that was a performance in Dreamgirls. Eddie Murphy did the same for the exact same movie. Peter Morgan picked up a globe for his powerfully witty script for The Queen. Sacha Baron Cohen won a globe for his "performance" as dimbulb journalist Borat in Borat. Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren both one Best Actress globes and Mrs. Streep delightfully prattled on for about 5 minutes. Kyra Sedgewick upset everyone by garnering a globe for her performance on The Closer. Hugh Laurie's "speech" was great. Warren Beaty made a very long thank you ramble for receiving the life-time achievement award from Tom Hanks after his pretty neat video tribute.
The Bad: Jeremy Piven didn't manage to squeeze past the monolith that is Elizabeth I and pick up an award for his continually brilliant performance on Entourage. Some strange Happy Feet song by Prince picked up the win for Best Song, even though Beyonce's "Listen" was both better and more favored. Sadly, Prince was stuck in traffic at the time so he couldn't accept..thus provoking Justin T. to mock him. Warren Beaty made a very long thank you speech.
The Sad: The accepted winners were everywhere tonight (ex: Helen Mirren reigned over the entire thing picking up two globes and being mentioned by everyone and their mother who crossed the golden podium, Hugh Laurie won again). Will Smith couldn't pull a victory from the jaws of Forrest Whittaker for Best Actor. At least he'll get nominated. Babel won Best Picture, even though not only The Departed but The Queen also were higher in quality. Still, if Babel eventually takes that golden man for the same thing I won't be too upset. Oh and, Warren Beaty made a very long thank you.
The Ugly: Clint Eastwood, having just won for Best Foreign Film, mocked Jennifer Hudson's acceptance speech (which was amazing by the way). People were shocked and awed that television's freshman suprise (and most overrated thing currently airing) Ugly Betty not only won Best Comedy, but Best Actress for America Ferrarra. Where's the love for The Office,
Entourage, or even Scrubs?
Well that's it for me. If you agreed, disagreed, hated it, didn't read it or whatever tell me why. I'm always curious.
See you next awards analysis.
A Separate Peace: A-
Consider John Knowle's bleak and pointed novel A Seperate Peace much like descending into hell (perhaps a hell much like the one envisioned by Jodi Picoult in The Tenth Cirlce). At first everything at Devon School For Boys seems to hang in a kind of tranquil limbo. It is the summer before The United States officially declares it's involvement in World War Two and for two best friends, Gene and Phineas, that summer will be their last of fully realized peace.
Gene is a boy whose sole defining characteristic is his sarcasm and perhaps his all encompassing lonliness. Phineas is the kind of person that can dictate a crowd with almost astonishing ease. His natural grace and charisma create an aura that is almost entoxicating. As Gene would say, his very voice is music. Together the two of them go about, with "Finny" doing most of the going, rousing fellow schoolmates into doing genial acts of felony and whatnot. His rationale being that this is their last refuge from the outside world, without this merriment what reason is their to fight for civilization? Tranquility soon proves to be quite a facade however. Gene's jealously bubbles over more and more at Finny's every move and the am I/aren't I battles in his mind are powerfully realized by Knowles' pen. What starts out as jealousy eventually manifests itself in an act of cold, arbritrary violence that leaves its stain on the rest of the novel.
The ups and down that follow occur mainly between Gene, Phineas, and their conceptions of the outside world. Every tragic illusion of Finny's is brought to a hollow ripeness and every anger in Gene is brought to resolution. What they manage to create between them and impose on the world around them is a creation of fanciful rigidity. Try as they might they can't escape the cold hard truth. Gene can't escape his consequences and ultimately Phineas can't escape Gene's actions. This bleak, sweeping novel of darkness and tragedy is slow to build but stick with you, in part because of the thoughtful prose with which it was written. As I said in the beginning, abandon all hope ye who enter here.
Gene is a boy whose sole defining characteristic is his sarcasm and perhaps his all encompassing lonliness. Phineas is the kind of person that can dictate a crowd with almost astonishing ease. His natural grace and charisma create an aura that is almost entoxicating. As Gene would say, his very voice is music. Together the two of them go about, with "Finny" doing most of the going, rousing fellow schoolmates into doing genial acts of felony and whatnot. His rationale being that this is their last refuge from the outside world, without this merriment what reason is their to fight for civilization? Tranquility soon proves to be quite a facade however. Gene's jealously bubbles over more and more at Finny's every move and the am I/aren't I battles in his mind are powerfully realized by Knowles' pen. What starts out as jealousy eventually manifests itself in an act of cold, arbritrary violence that leaves its stain on the rest of the novel.
The ups and down that follow occur mainly between Gene, Phineas, and their conceptions of the outside world. Every tragic illusion of Finny's is brought to a hollow ripeness and every anger in Gene is brought to resolution. What they manage to create between them and impose on the world around them is a creation of fanciful rigidity. Try as they might they can't escape the cold hard truth. Gene can't escape his consequences and ultimately Phineas can't escape Gene's actions. This bleak, sweeping novel of darkness and tragedy is slow to build but stick with you, in part because of the thoughtful prose with which it was written. As I said in the beginning, abandon all hope ye who enter here.
The Royal Tennenbaums: A
There are many things to be said about the genre of family dramedy: it can bring you to tears (Terms of Endearment), it can bring you to smile (Little Miss Sunshine), or it can bring you to gasp (Running With Scissors). Never have I experienced a movie that did all three. Such is the power of Wes Anderson's ravishing, highly stylized film about a family of very smart, and very insecure, people.
In the beginning narrator Alec Baldwin (who never more wisely lent out his deadpan delivery) tells us of three extraordinary children: Chas (Ben Stiller), who was a financial wiz in his teens, Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), an acclaimed playwright, and Richie (Luke Wilson), a three time world tennis champion. They are all different (Margot's adopted, Richie is the favorite, and Chas is really really uptight) but each is bound to the other by the simple fact they are all "fathered" by Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman). Royal is a bad man, he was disbarred by his son for stealing bonds from him, he seperated from his wife Etheline (Angelica Huston) and children many years ago, causing all of them in their own way to desengrate, and he has lived in a hotel on credit for the past 22 years. On top of all of that he is selfish, unsentimental, and rude. One day he decides he needs to "reconnect" with his family so off he goes to live with them in a gigantic (yet at times strangely claustrophic) mansion. Such is the story of the beginning of the end for the Tenenbaum family, their friends, their spouses, their children, and all the other satillites that spin off of brilliance burning bright.
As envisioned by Wes Anderson, the world the family lives in is one that could almost be ours but is just slightly off. Take for example the taxis. Each one is run by Gypsy Cab Co. and each seems to manifest itself out of thin air right when needed. Indeed even the clothes are strange. Everyone parades around in matching track outfits, fur coats, heavy makeup, athletic headbands, and wrist scars from failed suicides. The sets are glorious and gloriously gaudy and the strength of Anderson's vision can be felt in every scene.
As written by Anderson and Owen Wilson (who also stars here as Eli Cash, an author of the lost-cowboy art) the movie is a droll piece of emotional high-wire. Every moment could have rung entirely too false, or smug. When Royal constantly reminds Margot of her adopted status in the movie it opens oppturnity for tragedy or comedy. They go for both, and suceed. The performances from such a wonderful cast are exquisite, isolated acts of strength and heart and every detail, down to the montage music, feels perfect. This picture is about times lost and love gained, about a world that never was but could have been, and about people who exist only in the so-ironic-it-isn't fable of Wes Anderson's making. Family, as the movie proves, isn't just a group of people, it is a world unto itself. A world filled with moments of utter sadness and reckless glee.
Akeelah and the Bee: B+
It has been said, by people both far more intelligent and famous than me, that you can accomplish anything you set your mind to. In Akeelah and the Bee, Doug Atchison's slightly heavy and pretty smart feel-good movie, one young girl pretty much lives that quote to it's fullest. That girl is Akeelah Anderson (Keke Palmer). She's 11, she's black, and she's from the south side of Los Angeles. All three of which stack the odds pretty heavily against her. She's the "brainiac" of her middle school and has the uncanny ability to memorize and recall words. Still, the continuous spotlight she's given when she displays her talents have her placed firmly in the "wallflower" category of the social stratospher. That is, until the day Dr. Larabee (Laurence Fishburne) arrives.
The moment he sees her flinging out words at her school's bee his eyes alight and from then on it's that continuous twinkle (both in his eyes and in the eyes of those around him) that managed to get me hooked on that elitist contest known as spelling bees. Plus, as it turns out, Keke Palmer can act. Guided by the strong support of Fishburne and Angela Basset (who plays Akeelah's mom Tanya) Palmer comes out with an enjoyable performance that anchors the movie. Though dealing in stereotypes to substitute for character development, Atchison's dialogue is fresh and fast. Also as a director his funky groove was the first of it's MTV-inspired kind to truly pull me under its spell.
Charming. Light-hearted. Smart. Up-lifting. All four of these words can describe Akeelah. What makes the movie so good is that it's filled with such a person's presence.
The moment he sees her flinging out words at her school's bee his eyes alight and from then on it's that continuous twinkle (both in his eyes and in the eyes of those around him) that managed to get me hooked on that elitist contest known as spelling bees. Plus, as it turns out, Keke Palmer can act. Guided by the strong support of Fishburne and Angela Basset (who plays Akeelah's mom Tanya) Palmer comes out with an enjoyable performance that anchors the movie. Though dealing in stereotypes to substitute for character development, Atchison's dialogue is fresh and fast. Also as a director his funky groove was the first of it's MTV-inspired kind to truly pull me under its spell.
Charming. Light-hearted. Smart. Up-lifting. All four of these words can describe Akeelah. What makes the movie so good is that it's filled with such a person's presence.
Children of Men: A-
Regretably, I couldn't see this one before year's end, thus the reason it never made it into my "10 Best Movies of 2006" list.
But it would have.
***********************
The poet Samuel Coleridge once wrote "hope without an object draws nectar in a sieve". As I watched Alfonso Cuaron's latest work of modern movie magic I was assailed with that line over and over (perhaps because it has such eerie resonance with the film). The year is 2027 and in war battered Britain no one has hope. Women have stopped making babies for nearly 18 years and all of humanity is slowly succumbing to the likes of mass terrorism and chaos. Of course the alternative, that being the almost fascist oppression of the British government and military, isn't much better. Then it all changes...in the span of one heartbeat.
Theodore Faron (Clive Owen) labors away at the Ministry of Energy, wasting his later years smoking pot with his friend Jasper (Micheal Caine, a hoot in Jesus hair) and not exactly ruminating on what is basically the end of all civilization. Soon enough though Julian Taylor (Juilanne Moore sizzling with chilly intelligence), his ex-lover and poweful rebel leader, has kidnapped and bribed him into getting a "fugee" across the borders to meet the underground organization "The Human Project" (reminding me of Lemony Snicket's equally shadowy and omnipotent VFD). He discovers though that this fugee, a woman named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), is pregnant. She is the first pregnant woman in nearly two decades. And soon her secret is out meaning everyone wants her and no one is willing to let her go.
Alfonso Cuaron, who directed and co-wrote the movie (which is adapted from a P.D. James' novel of the same title), has brought to life a dazzling dystopian thriller that will grab you and never let you go. Namely because his vision of a world none to far away is never so cold and futuristic as to suspend belief. Every detail reaks of misery and suffering boiling just beneath the surface and every camera shot evokes a world so like our own it has the power to take your breath away. By employing the split-second immediacy of movies like War of the Worlds and Saving Private Ryan, Cuaron has crafted an explosion of storytelling that is equal parts adrenaline and intellect. Though the ending, which doesn't really end anything, nagged at my brain, his vision still haunts me and the strength of his talent left me glued to my seat.
But it would have.
***********************
The poet Samuel Coleridge once wrote "hope without an object draws nectar in a sieve". As I watched Alfonso Cuaron's latest work of modern movie magic I was assailed with that line over and over (perhaps because it has such eerie resonance with the film). The year is 2027 and in war battered Britain no one has hope. Women have stopped making babies for nearly 18 years and all of humanity is slowly succumbing to the likes of mass terrorism and chaos. Of course the alternative, that being the almost fascist oppression of the British government and military, isn't much better. Then it all changes...in the span of one heartbeat.
Theodore Faron (Clive Owen) labors away at the Ministry of Energy, wasting his later years smoking pot with his friend Jasper (Micheal Caine, a hoot in Jesus hair) and not exactly ruminating on what is basically the end of all civilization. Soon enough though Julian Taylor (Juilanne Moore sizzling with chilly intelligence), his ex-lover and poweful rebel leader, has kidnapped and bribed him into getting a "fugee" across the borders to meet the underground organization "The Human Project" (reminding me of Lemony Snicket's equally shadowy and omnipotent VFD). He discovers though that this fugee, a woman named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), is pregnant. She is the first pregnant woman in nearly two decades. And soon her secret is out meaning everyone wants her and no one is willing to let her go.
Alfonso Cuaron, who directed and co-wrote the movie (which is adapted from a P.D. James' novel of the same title), has brought to life a dazzling dystopian thriller that will grab you and never let you go. Namely because his vision of a world none to far away is never so cold and futuristic as to suspend belief. Every detail reaks of misery and suffering boiling just beneath the surface and every camera shot evokes a world so like our own it has the power to take your breath away. By employing the split-second immediacy of movies like War of the Worlds and Saving Private Ryan, Cuaron has crafted an explosion of storytelling that is equal parts adrenaline and intellect. Though the ending, which doesn't really end anything, nagged at my brain, his vision still haunts me and the strength of his talent left me glued to my seat.
The Good Shepherd: B
In the spirit of using old quotes to describe new things, I'm offering one up to describe Robert De Niro's latest assured picture: the taciturn spy epic The Good Shepherd: "the kid's alright". Now you may be wondering why it is that I find the movie merely above average, instead of the sort of maniacle raving I usually reserve for Bill Condon musicals and Tim Burton films. The answer is a strange one because what I find to be the movie's biggest weakness is also, to me, it's most appealing feature. That being its secrets, its shadows, and it's wholly complete inability to reveal much of anything at all except in whispers.
Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) believed in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Maybe that's why he chose to become one of the few building blocks for the modern day CIA. Or maybe it's because he was dissapointed in his domestic life (his dissapontment being of course the by product of some other unknown event in his life). Or maybe it's simply a dramatic device. Whatever the cause it inspires alot of shadowy dealings with shadowy men while all the time events are spiraling about unseen and untold for most of the movie, or in some cases forever.
Now, what makes the above sound alot less like homework is the acting. Matt Damon turns in a killer performance as a man locked up (for what appears, no reason) inside his own head. In addition Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, Billy Crudup, and Robert De Niro himself all show up to alleviate, englighten, or in some cases muddle the already broken plot. What ultimately emerges though is a picture of the USA at war with itself and at war with nothing. Playing with shadows if you would and watching it all happen has a perverse, entrancing (though not enthralling) charm. The problem is that it all ends up being tantamount to dancing in the shadows with nary a hope of seeing the light.
Y Tu Mama Tambien: A
I must admit, I came into watching this movie alittle precarious. I knew only two things about it and they weren't great things to know: the first was that it contained enough sex to warrant it an NC-17 rating had it been made in America, and the second was that it was written and directed by Alfonso Cuaron, a person whose previous work (the book-to-film adaptiion Great Expectations) I despised. The moment the opening credits began I braced myself for a wildy erotic ride that would leave me cringing every other moment. It is almost nothing to say I was suprised. In fact I was blown away. This movie is so extraordinarily involving, so powerful, so sexy that it begs to be taken for what it is - a hot hot hot teenage road comedy - and for what it isn't - a raw, emotional, passionate character study.
When two friends, Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal), decide that a trip to the beaches of Mexico would be the perfect diversion while their girlfriends are off jetsetting in Italy they unknowingly embark on a journey of the mind, heart, and loins. They are also accompanied by an older woman, Luisa (Maribel Verdu) who is everything an older woman is in a movie - wise, affectionate, ineffable - and everything an older woman is not - sad, lonely, intelligent, and hormonal.
As envisioned by Cuaron, who co-wrote the script with his brother Carlos, their exploration of sexuality never veers off into pornography. It's frequent, but also vividly real: this is how real people are when they close their shutters, sip a martini, and hop into bed! The acting is equisite, the tone is lyrical, and the humanity is frank so how could this movie not beg to be viewed by everyone and anyone who has ever grown tired of "coming-of-age" movies? The audience may not always understand what is going on but it doesn't matter: what is happening isn't happening to us, it's happening to them, and trust me when I say what happens to them is breathtaking. I may have walked in unsure but I walked out ecstatic: this is sure to be one of my favorite films of all time.
When two friends, Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal), decide that a trip to the beaches of Mexico would be the perfect diversion while their girlfriends are off jetsetting in Italy they unknowingly embark on a journey of the mind, heart, and loins. They are also accompanied by an older woman, Luisa (Maribel Verdu) who is everything an older woman is in a movie - wise, affectionate, ineffable - and everything an older woman is not - sad, lonely, intelligent, and hormonal.
As envisioned by Cuaron, who co-wrote the script with his brother Carlos, their exploration of sexuality never veers off into pornography. It's frequent, but also vividly real: this is how real people are when they close their shutters, sip a martini, and hop into bed! The acting is equisite, the tone is lyrical, and the humanity is frank so how could this movie not beg to be viewed by everyone and anyone who has ever grown tired of "coming-of-age" movies? The audience may not always understand what is going on but it doesn't matter: what is happening isn't happening to us, it's happening to them, and trust me when I say what happens to them is breathtaking. I may have walked in unsure but I walked out ecstatic: this is sure to be one of my favorite films of all time.
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