I love animation, and not just for the reasons that most geek-culture folks in their twenties and thirties do. Sure, the ability to create entire new worlds, to tell stories that can't be told in other media, and to use an unreal but beautiful and artistic aesthetic are part of it. But while I'll argue that animation isn't just kid stuff with the best of them, I must admit to liking that it is. Half of these movies are delightfully G-rated; and while that isn't a virtue in and of itself, I don't mind spending an hour and a half watching a funny movie without the use of swearwords, bathroom humor, and anything but the mildest of innuendos. I've taken issue with people describing something as lowest common denominator as a perjorative before, since it doesn't mean exactly what people think it means. But, then again, the people who use that phrase are focused on the "lowest" rather than the "common" (and the they probably couldn't tell you what a denominator is).
Wallace & Grommit is LCD; it's something that everyone should be able to enjoy because it doesn't exclude anybody. I'll probably recommend it to the Weatherbee girls next time I see them, for instance, even though they're 25 years my junior, they should enjoy it. I imagine my grandparents would too. That's common ground.
The lesson? English majors and other critical types shouldn't try to appropriate math terms, and us science/math nerds shouldn't try to write criticism. Especially not after midnight.
(Of course, if I adjust my clock now, before going to bed, it'll say 11:30, but it's still really after midnight, as the time doesn't change until 2am).
Porco Rosso
* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 August 2005 in Jay's Living Room (Unwatched DVDs)
Hayao Miyazaki is a giant. If most people with some knowledge of the medium had to write up a short list of the most important animators in the history of the field, he'd likely be on many, many lists (my top five would run Windsor McKay, Walt Disney, Osamu Tezuka, Miyazaki, and John Lasseter, in chronological order). The trouble with such a reputation is that when one comes upon a movie that is merely very good, the temptation is to focus not on how fine a film it is when compared to its contemporaries, but how it falls short of the master's other works.
That's terribly unfair. I admit, I don't love this film the way I do Castle in the Sky or Howl's Moving Castle, but that's mainly due to the extended fistfight that serves as the climax. It's exhausting and punishing - I don't think I can remember another animated movie where the characters looked so painfully bruised by the end - and I wanted the final big set-piece to be something aerial. The tagline on the DVD was "Pigs Can Fly", after all. So, I wasn't terribly fond of one aspect of the film, but there were many others that I did rather like.
Start with the character designs. The title character's is striking, of course - a humanoid pig with fully articulated (though gloved) fingers and french mustaches peeking out from under his snout, dressed in a trenchcoat and snazzy aviator sunglasses. But the fully-human characters are nice as well - mechanic Fio is all soft curves that highlight her femininity and youth without over-sexualizing her, while old friend Gina is more angular, given a hint of femme fatale, but not too much, since her main characterization is that of someone who has taken wisdom from an adventurous youth but has mostly settled down. Meanwhile, the villains look suitably distorted; not quite monstrous, but wearing their badness on their sleeve.
Then there's the whole overall feel of the movie. Like many of Miyazaki's films, it takes place in a fantasy world, where not only are there air pirates, but a man can be cursed to look like a pig and not arouse too much notice, despite being the only anthropomorphic animal on the island, but is also grounded in a real time and place. It's clearly the 1930s Mediteranean, with the threat of the upcoming war hanging over everything, and flight about to move from being the domain of a few adventurers to being a major military and commercial concern. It's not completely melancholy, or even mostly so. There's plenty of exciting aerial action, including a wonderful sequence where a group of orphan girls prove not to be the sort of frightened hostages the pirates had expected. Porco Rosso is kind of slow-paced compared to many American adventure movies, in that it's not continuously trying to top the previous set-piece, but it makes its adventurous moments count.
I'd like more. But I'm greedy that way.
Valiant
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 September 2005 at AMC Chestnut Hill #5 (first-run)
As an audience member, there are certain things I have an almost Pavlovian reaction to. John Cleese's voice, for instance. It's got a humorous sneering tone, and has been associated with so many funny things, that I start to laugh as soon as I hear it. This, apparently, holds true even if the lines he delivers as an English pigeon captured by Nazi falcons are nowhere near as funny as what he did in Monty Python.
There is, in fact, a ridiculous amount of great English voice talent on this movie - Cleese, of course, along with Ewan MacGregor, Ricky Gervais, Tim Curry, Rik Mayall, Jim Broadbent, John Hurt, and Hugh Laurie - whose actual accent already sounds strange after just a year of regular exposure to him playing an American on House. And why not? It's a slick-looking British production with a clever concept thats appealing in perhaps being something their kids would like and taking place against the backdrop of World War Two, justifiably a source of pride for the British people.
As such, Valiant has nothing to be ashamed of. For every awkward "Charles de Girl" groaner, the film offers up a bit of charm, or adventure, or understated bit of patriotism. A bit at the end where Hugh Laurie's pigeon treats his escape from certain death as no big deal seemed especially amusing. And it hits the right note for its young primary audience, with Ewan MacGregor's undersized, underestimated title pigeon succeeding against odds because of his small stature. The movie's alsoshort enough to not wear out its welcome.
One thing that did seem odd, though, was how empty the movie sometimes felt. It's not a film about anthropomorhic animals, but one set in our world with cartoonified creatuers who build their homes out of things discarded by humans. Valiant even makes a speech about how "they" built the great cities where the pigeons roost. But we almost never see any around, even when the camera pulls back for a shot of an eerily empty London. I don't know whether it was a creative choice or a decision not to spend processor power on things that ultimately don't effect the movie much, but it creates a strange effect - many of the environments well are out of proportion to the characters, but there's no frame of reference to what would fit. Strange-looking.
Corpse Bride
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 September 2005 at AMC Fenway #13 (first-run)
I like animated films to have a specific aesthetic, and use abstraction and worlds designed from scratch to make every frame an expression of some thought rather than just an attempt to replicate the real world. And there's no doubt Corpse Bride does that, with its big heads and tiny limbs, and different color schemes. If anything, it perhaps suffers from knowing this a little too well.
Corpse Bride is the story of Victor van Dort (voice of Johnny Depp), whose nouveau riche parents have arranged a marriage to the daughter of the local nobility. It's a sound transaction, one which will elevate the van Dorts' profile and the Everglots' liquidity, and that Victor and Victoria Everglot (voice of Emily Watson) are actually as well-matched as their names is an unexpected bonus. However, when Victor drops the ring during a break from the wedding rehearsal, a peculiar series of events leaves him bound to Emily (voice of Helena Bonham Carter), a young woman murdered on her wedding night who pulls Victor over to the "other side".
Read the rest at HBS.
Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2005 at AMC Fenway #13 (first-run)
How good is the Wallace & Gromit movie? It's so good that Ralph Fiennes is funny for perhaps the first time in his life. It's so good that what is basically the same joke is still funny the third time it is used. It is, in short, just as good as you would expect a Wallace & Gromit movie to be.
For those not familiar with the pair, Wallace (voice of Peter Sallis) is a cheese-loving inventor and Gromit is his dog. Gromit is, as animated canines are wont to be, the brains of the operation, though he doesn't speak. Their current project is a humane pest control service, helping their neighbors rid themselves of rabbit infestations in the weeks leading up to the village's annual giant vegetable competition. Trouble is, the bunnies are eating them out of house and home, so Wallace tries a new invention to try and curb their veg-destroying urges. Of course, these things never work right on the first try...
Read the rest at HBS.
Next up: The Lightning Round!
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Boston Fantastic Film Festival

One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong...
Ned didn't quite apologize for how horror-centric this year's edition of the BFFF was, but it had a lot of horror. He may have been looking directly at me when he mentioned there wasn't much sci--fi to show this year. I think the only stuff that really classified as non-horror was The Muppet Movie and Mindgame, but you get what's available. I'll readily admit reading Ain't It Cool and seeing what sort of nifty stuff Austin's first Fantastic Fest was getting tended to tick me off.
Still, this is a fun festival. It didn't escape my notice that it's shrunk another day since last year, although it still had roughly the same number of movies, with only Marebito, Muppets and Mindgame doubled up. The screenings I went to, especially the Muppet one, at least seemed well-attended, unlike last year's Darklight disaster. Anyway, part of making sure there's a Fourth BFFF is supporting the Brattle, so go to their website, buy stuff, make a donation, or at least check up what's coming up soon.
Creep
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 October 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Boston Fantastic Film Festival)
Stephen King once said, and I'm heavily paraphrasing, that terror is the finest, most exquisite of human emotions, and what he aims to create in his writing - but, when he can't attain that, he'll go for the gross-out. Christopher Smith, the writer/director of Creep, may not have had that exact plan in mind, but it's the path he winds up following.
After an opening with two public works inspectors finding a previously unknown tunnel (and something sinister within), we're introduced to Kate (Franka Potente), a German lass living in London, leaving one party for another by way of the Underground. She rests her eyes for a moment on the platform, and when she wakes up she finds herself locked in until morning. She's not alone, though, which is a rather mixed blessing - the homeless couple is alright, even if they're junkies and not particularly helpful, but the co-worker who seems to have followed her (Jeremy Sheffield) intends rape and the deformed thing on a killing spree (Sean Harris) is even worse.
Read the rest at HBS.
Trapped by the Mormons
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 October 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Boston Fantastic Film Festival) (projected video)
I suspect that the dialogue in this 2005 version of Trapped by the Mormons is taken nearly verbatim from the original 1922 film apparently aimed at keeping the Latter-Day Saints out of Britain. I don't know how effective it was as propaganda, but if what I suspect is true, then it was probably an unintentional camp classic. This new edition is trying for the camp effect, but is much more successful than most films that take that route.
The story mirrors that of the original - young Manchester lady Nora Prescott (Emily Riehl-Bedford) is engaged to be married, but sinister Mormon recruiter Isoldi Keane (Johnny Kat) uses his incredible powers of Mesmerism on her, luring her away from her paralytic father with the intent of adding her to his hare - after all, not only is polygamy allowed by Mormonism, it's mandatory, even if Isoldi's wife Sadie (Monique LaForce) is traveling as his sister. But Nora's fiancé Jim (Brent Lowder) hasn't given up, and along with a detective "late of Scotland Yard", plots to rescue her.
Read the rest at HBS.
Marebito
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 October 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Boston Fantastic Film Festival)
The activity of the horror fan is peculiar. They seek out things that frighten them, things that make little sense. It's fun to be scared, they say, but generally what is meant is that it's fun to be scared when you can rest relatively assured that you're safe soon afterward. The protagonist of Marebito is looking for things that scare him, too, but I don't know if he's really having fun.
Masuoka (Shinya Tsukamoto) is a freelance cameraman who on his way home sees a man commit suicide, plunging a knife into his eye as though he's seen something terrible. Wanting to know what it is, he retraces the man's path through the tunnels underneath Tokyo, going deeper until he finds an underground world with its own mythology and rules. He finds a young girl (Tomomi Miyashita) chained to a wall, naked, and brings her to the surface. He calls her "F", and finds her to be lethargic and unwilling to eat or drink anything - although it turns out he hasn't been trying the right things.
Read the rest at HBS.
Reeker
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 October 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Boston Fantastic Film Festival) (projected video)
Reeker is a genre movie that totally rests on great execution. Fans familiar with the genre will recognize its pieces, its concept, its final twist. Movies like that can feel perfunctory and lackluster, or they can be easygoing, fun, cinematic comfort food. After all, if you know the structure and outline, you can ride along, appreciating the cleverness of the surprises and enjoying the fun details. Reeker is one of the fun ones.
Five college students get together for a ride share to a rave. They are Trip (Scott Whyte), a fun-loving, irresponsible type who just made off with far more ecstasy than he paid for; Nelson (Derek Richardson), his slightly more grounded friend; Cookie (Arielle Kebbel), a giggly little blonde thing; Gretchen (Tina Illman), the responsible South African girl supplying the car; and Jack (Devon Gummersall), her boyfriend's blind (but sweet) roommate. When Gretchen finds out about the drugs, she turns around to ditch Trip at the diner/hotel they last passed (dropping him by the road in the desert would probably kill him), but it's mysteriously abandoned, they're out of gas, and there's no phone reception. They'll just have to wait out the night, but unfortunately for them, this isn't the kind of movie where such a situation leads to truth-telling and changing relationships; it's the kind where gruesome killings are announced by a foul odor.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Muppet Movie
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 16 October 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Boston Fantastic Film Festival)
There's a moment at the end of The Muppet Movie, as the credits roll, that illustrates the reason for the lasting appeal of these characters (and this film) perfectly. Kermit the Frog, amid all the chaos and popcorn being thrown in the theater during the movie's first screening, walks up to Fozzie Bear and assures him that he was, in fact, funny (Fozzie had been worrying about that before the film started rolling). It's not just that this sort of interaction creates the impression that these obviously artificial characters have an exterior life. What Kermit does is an act of simple kindness and friendship that could easily go unnoticed amidst the gleeful anarchy, but that's always been Jim Henson's way - he had a knack for being decent and gentle without being stodgy or patronizing.
For those who have not seen The Muppet Movie before, it's about a singing, dancing frog (Kermit, performed by Henson) who is told of a studio holding auditions for frogs and decides to make his way to Hollywood to become rich and famous and make people happy. Along the way, he meets up with others who share the same dream - comedian Fozzie Bear (performed by Frank Oz), plumber The Great Gonzo (Dave Goelz) and his chicken girlfriend Camilla, actress/model Miss Piggy (Oz), piano-playing dog Rowlf (Henson), and the Electric Mayhem Band - and is menaced by french-fried frog-leg restaurant entrepreneur Doc Hopper (Charles Durning), who aims to have Kermit as his spokesperson or his lunch.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Collingswood Story
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 October 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Boston Fantastic Film Festival) (projected video)
The high concept for The Collingswood Story is obvious - a horror story told completely through the characters' conversations with each other via webcam. This is not, in and of itself, a bad idea - stories told in the form of letters or diary entries have been around for centuries, Orson Welles saw the potential of combining this technique with mass media in his War of the Worlds broadcast, and The Blair Witch Project was a huge hit. Unfortunately, The Collingswood Story doesn't work nearly so well as those other examples.
Part of the problem is that it tries to cross media. Every shot in the movie is of a computer screen, although director Michael Costanze will often remove the faux Windows desktop after a minute or two, "zooming in" on the actual webcast. This makes for very static images, with half (or more) or the visual real estate relegated to a non-changing border, and the actual picture being one person sitting relatively still within the webcam's field of vision. Occasionally, we get an insert of a visual e-mail sent from one character to the other, but those aren't much better, being just shots through the front windshield of her car. This might work if we were actually watching these files on a computer screen, perhaps after hunting them down as in [i]A.I.[/i]'s famous promotional game, but in a theatrical environment (or even in the living room), we expect more dynamic composition and camerawork, rendering the movie inert. The occasional cut to strange, demonic flashes in the last act shakes things up a little, but also breaks form.
Read the rest at HBS.
Three...Extremes
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 16 October 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Boston Fantastic Film Festival)
Two of the three directors of horror anthology Three...Extremes are relatively well known in the American art-house/cult scene: Takashi Miike has become almost synonymous with Japanese "extreme" cinema with his prodigious output and willingness to put just about anything on screen to shock and disturb the audience; Park Chan-wook has gained critical acclaim for his fantastic JSA and his so-called "vengeance trilogy". As good as their segments are, though, it is the lesser-known Fruit Chan whose film will likely leave the strongest impression.
That film, "Dumplings", leads off the package, and if you can make it through this one, you probably won't have a whole lot of trouble with the other two. During the screening's introduction, we were told that someone passed out during this film's screening at Fantasia. My experience wasn't that extreme, but right around when it first became obvious what was going on, I noticed I was reacting differently than I do to most "horror" movies; rather than twisting my face and looking away, I was hunkering forward, because I may need to purge my stomach contents soon and wouldn't want to get that on the people sitting next to me. I didn't actually throw up, but the last time I movie hit me like that was with Irreversible. That feeling is real horror, not mere fear or disdain.
Read the rest at HBS.
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Alex de la Iglesia: Crimen Ferpecto, Accion Mutante, La Communidad, 800 Balas
The Brattle did an Alex de la Iglesia series last weekend, and it's the kind of series that makes me a fan. I only saw four of the six films screened - I saw Day of the Beast at the Coolidge's horror marathon a couple Halloweens ago, and didn't feel like seeing it again as part of a double feature with Perdita Durango, or seeing Durango on its own. Besides, it was my birthday (the big $20 in nerd terms), so I was of course pre-occupied with trying to get a single cupcake at the supermarket, which proved to be impossible, and watching the Red Sox crush the Yankees without staying up until 2am. Still, three of the four movies I saw, I liked quite a bit, and the fourth is worth seeing.
Anyway, this provides a nice segue for Brattle stuff.
First: They need money; there's talk of ending repatory programming there if they don't get some donations, and that would be a terrible thing. Here's a link to their page of ways to extract money from people. If you've ever been there, you know it's a cool place; get yourself a T-shirt, poster, or discount card. If you've got friends or family in Boston, give them a gift membership (I mean, if you live in the Boston area yourself and love movies, you're already a member, right?). Or just make a donation; it's tax-deductable.
Second: The Boston Fantastic Film Festival starts tonight, and runs through the weekend. Perdita Durango ran as part of the festival last year, though there's no de la Iglesia stuff this year. I saw about a third to half of what's playing in Montreal this summer, and can strongly recommend Ju-On: The Grudge 2 and Mindgame, liked R-Point, and will subject myself to Izo again if someone makes a $500 donation to the Brattle in my name. I shouldn't have to recommend The Muppet Movie, it is a bona-fide five-star classic and the chance to see it on the big screen should be treasured. Everything I haven't seen, I'm looking forward to - Marebito, Three...Extremes, Creep, Trapped by the Mormons. I'm hoping like heck that Ned managed to get Mindgame on film, since it's eyeball-bustingly gorgeous and I only got to see it on projected video at Fantasia.
Anyway, onto the reviews.
Crimen Ferpecto (aka Ferpect Crime or La Crimen Perfecto)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 30 September 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Mutant Action!)
Some American theaters are running this under the name "La Crimen Perfecto", which strikes me as a perfect example of underestimating both the film and the audience. The wordplay in the film's title translates easily enough, and gives the audience a clear idea of both the film's content and its offbeat tone. If someone standing at the ticket booth can't grasp the title, maybe they're just not the audience for this gem.
The crime will eventually be committed by Rafael Gonzalez (Guillermo Toledo), the handsome fellow who runs the women's wear department in Madrid's Yeyo megastore. He's a consummate salesman, and greatly enjoys the company of the beautiful young women who work in his section, but across the hall is his archnemesis, "Don" Antonio (Luis Varela), a dour, joyless man who runs menswear. They're locked in a competition to be manager of the entire floor, which, as Rafael tells us, is the path to company junkets, stock options, a seat on the board, wealth, and power. A scuffle after the position is awarded, however, leaves Don Antonio dead, and Rafael the obvious prime suspect if he doesn't find a way to dispose of the body. Enter Lourdes (Monica Cervera), the one woman in his department he hasn't bedded (she's rather homely). She's a witness, but will help dispose of the body and keep quiet if he gives her some of the attention he gives the other girls. And makes her the new women's wear manager. And fires the girl he was just flirting with. And... well, soon Rafi is in a sort of prison without walls, subject to her every whim. Something will have to be done, and he's already got blood on his hands.
Read the rest at HBS.
Acción Mutante (aka Mutant Action)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 September 2005 at the Brattle (Mutant Action!)
Alex de la Iglesia's recent movies, things like Ferpect Crime and 800 Bullets are peculiar, off-center entertainments. The closest American analog I can think of is Sam Raimi. And like Raimi, his early works are as delightfully strange as they are obviously low-budget.
"Acción Mutante", in the film, is the name of a group of unattractive and disabled terrorists who strike back against the attractive people who control society. With their leader Ramon Yarritu (Antonio Resines) in jail, though, they tend to screw up on a regular basis. Once Ramon is released, they set about on a new mission - to kidnap beautiful heiress Patricia Orujo (Frederique Feder) and hold her for ransom. The kidnapping becomes a bloodbath, the kidnappers turn on each other, and the hostage develops Stockholm Syndrome.
Don't let Pedro and Agustin Almodovar's names in the credits as producers fool you; this is no classy art film. You've got your basic cheap special effects, black comedy galore (a dare you not to laugh at news footage of MA taking out an aerobics class), and gore, gore, gore. Blood and body parts all over the place, really, and that's after considering that the kidnappers are already on the grotesque side. This is the kind of film that is all about grabbing attention. It doesn't really need to make a whole lot of sense, so long as it keeps the audience cringing or laughing at the latest outrageous thing thrown at it, and if people with the money to mount larger productions say, hey, this de la Iglesia fellow has style, so much the better.
In fact, once you get past the concept, the spiffy opening credits, and the catchy theme music, the whole thing is actually rather silly. None of the characters are really motivated to do anything that they do; they just act on authorial fiat to get the audience to the next scene of outrageous violence. Along the way, there's great amusement to be had at the empty-headed pretty people at Patricia's party - Enrique San Francisco as "Luis Maria de Ostalaza, the outraged groom" made me laugh very hard just by looking stupid - to Ramon's eye-rolling annoyance at Patricia's declarations of adoration, as if this sort of thing has happened to him before. And the bloodletting is staged in an entertaining way, much of it transpiring on a spaceship set that is sort of beautiful in its cheapness - Caro/Jeunet grimy but also sort of retro-cool.
In the end, Mutant Action amused me much more than it probably had any right to. It's right on the border between "deliberately campy" and "overcoming its budget", and the messiness of its script annoyed me. It's got the exuberance of a young and talented filmmaker breaking into the scene, which is not only exciting, but also interesting once you've seen the man's later, more polished, films.
La Comunidad
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 October 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Mutant Action!)
The first thing one notices about La Comunidad is the eye-catching title sequence. I, personally, think that the Oscars should have an category to recognize a great set of opening credits (call it the Saul Bass Award), and further feel that if they did, Alex de la Iglesia's films would regularly be contenders. The stark, red-tinted stills of Carmen Maura and the accompanying shrieks set an ominous mood, but the way they move back and forth across the screen implies that de la Iglesia's trademark wit will be in supply.
Ms. Maura plays Julia, a middle-aged realtor showing an apartment in Madrid. The building appears kind of run-down and there's no parking, but inside it's fantastic. She invites her husband over to make use of it while she has the keys, the ceiling cracks open, and an investigation of the apartment above uncovers a rotting corpse in a disgusting environment. Further investigation uncovers a fortune in cash. But while finding the money may not have taken much effort, getting it out of a building filled with suspicious neighbors is something altogether more difficult.
Julia is no heroine; she's as selfish and conniving as anyone else in the movie, but we can root for her because she (at least initially) is a mere opportunist, with nothing particularly premeditated about her misdemeanors. She's probably too old to be described as "plucky" but not so old as to have stopped dreaming, even if her husband's sense of adventure is as frustratingly dormant as his libido. She's no kind of master criminal, but Ms. Maura gives us a sense of both the character's panic and her resolve, and it helps us get into her corner.
There's a nifty Ira Levin feel to the apartment's other inhabitants - some are peculiar individually, especially a guy who hangs around his apartment in a full Darth Vader costume, but most seem normal enough, if not terribly gregarious. When aggregated, though, the community as a whole is downright unnerving. It's a classic set-up, with an outsider shoved into a society she doesn't understand, with no help immediately available because of the insular nature of the place and her own less-than-legitimate standing. de la Iglesia and regular co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarria use it to crank the tension up while putting in plenty of humor.
Another set of filmmakers might have been tempted to make a political allegory out of this; it'd be, perhaps, the European thing to do. You can find such themes if you want to look. A theme of oppression, perhaps, or people from outside the community plundering the poor natives. You can play with the idea that democracy becomes tyranny when "majority rules" is the only moral principle. These filmmakers, though, appear to understand that films can collapse under too much metaphor, and when it comes down to brass tacks, La Comunidad isn't about making a statement, but about delivering thrills and just enough laughs to surprise. The rooftop chase that makes up much of the final act, for instance, has no ideology, but is tautly constructed, with some fantastic helicopter shots and a genuine sense that these people, who are not used to chasing or being chased, could in fact fall a great distnace to their deaths at any moment.
The end result is maybe not as incisive or insightful as it could be, but it is pretty darn exciting, which for my money is far more important. That's not to imply it's a stupid movie, just that it's more interested in straight-on thrills and twisted comedy than satire.
800 Balas (800 Bullets)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 October 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Mutant Action!)
The Western remained popular in Europe longer than it did in America, and stayed more potent as well. I'm not sure they lasted long enough that they were still being cranked out in the early 1990s, which this film's timeline would seem to imply, but maybe. And if not, that's not really a point worth any demerits, even if this is a film about the collision between fantasy and reality.
Carlos Torralba (Luis Castro) is a handful, the sort of pre-teen that makes his mother Laura (Carmen Maura) wish for a guiding hand in his life. She's less than pleased, though, when he seeks one out in the form of his never-before-mentioned grandfather Julian (Sancho Gracia), a former western stuntman who now plays the sherriff in "Hollywood, Texas", a tourist attraction built out of an old Western movie set, where paying customers can see an old west shootout enacted for them live. Carlos skips out on a school trip to find him. Julian tries to send him home, then grows fond of him. Laura tracks him down, then sees the beautiful land on which the financially failing attraction resides as the perfect place for her firm to build a resort. An outraged Julian rallies his confederates to fight back - with live ammunition!
It's kind of ridiculous, and at a few minutes over two hours, a little too sprawling. The relationships between Julian, his wife, Carlos, Laura, and her late husband, are merely strained, not terribly complicated. The other players at Hollywood, Texas are colorful, but thin. And in some ways, the stunt show almost looks too good - for something that's supposed to be a failing concern, it looks awfully slick and well-staged. In some ways, this helps to make the fantasy of living in a Wild West town in Almeria more seductive, for both Carlos and Julian, but seems incongruous when the reality of the situation must be confronted. It also seems to speak ill of the area's police force that a few crazy guys with six-shooters and no actual hostages are able to hold a SWAT team at bay for so long.
For all the thinness and implausibility of the story, though, the cast grows on you. Sancho Garcia's Julian may be a self-deluding old fool, but he's one with passion and flair. He's a man living a dream, so wrapped up in a fantasy that he can't quite handle it when reality intrudes, but there are moments where he is able to clearly remind us that his happy life is also an exile. Camen Maura, so excellent in the director's La Comunidad, plays the fun-ruining mother. She's the type who comes off as a villain when your age has just reached double digits, but is in fact mostly overwhelmed by the challenges of both a small child and a successful career. Luis Castro is quite charming as a somewhat obnoxious city kid who is swept away and awe-struck by the imaginary world of Hollywood, Texas. Angel de Andres Lopez, whose role as either a local prostitute or a woman playing a prostitute in the show (or quite possibly both) isn't particularly important to the story, still grabs the audience's attention ; she's got some charisma (and by "charisma", I don't just mean "a great body highlighted by exceptional breasts and no apparent resistance to doing nudity", although, yeah, that's a big part of it).
For all the film's well-staged set pieces and pleasant characters, though, it never achieves the same levels of delight as director Alex de la Iglesia's other features. This may be deliberate; he and co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarria are in a very character-based mode, asking the audience to identify with the people on screen rather than just enjoying the anarchy, as is their usual m.o. It's not quite conventional, but it's more sentimental than their usual work.
Nothing inherently wrong with "sentimental", but de la Iglesia isn't nearly as good at it as he is at "crazy". 800 Balas is at its best when it's crazy, but that doesn't happen often enough.
Next up: BFFF stuff and animation.
Anyway, this provides a nice segue for Brattle stuff.
First: They need money; there's talk of ending repatory programming there if they don't get some donations, and that would be a terrible thing. Here's a link to their page of ways to extract money from people. If you've ever been there, you know it's a cool place; get yourself a T-shirt, poster, or discount card. If you've got friends or family in Boston, give them a gift membership (I mean, if you live in the Boston area yourself and love movies, you're already a member, right?). Or just make a donation; it's tax-deductable.
Second: The Boston Fantastic Film Festival starts tonight, and runs through the weekend. Perdita Durango ran as part of the festival last year, though there's no de la Iglesia stuff this year. I saw about a third to half of what's playing in Montreal this summer, and can strongly recommend Ju-On: The Grudge 2 and Mindgame, liked R-Point, and will subject myself to Izo again if someone makes a $500 donation to the Brattle in my name. I shouldn't have to recommend The Muppet Movie, it is a bona-fide five-star classic and the chance to see it on the big screen should be treasured. Everything I haven't seen, I'm looking forward to - Marebito, Three...Extremes, Creep, Trapped by the Mormons. I'm hoping like heck that Ned managed to get Mindgame on film, since it's eyeball-bustingly gorgeous and I only got to see it on projected video at Fantasia.
Anyway, onto the reviews.
Crimen Ferpecto (aka Ferpect Crime or La Crimen Perfecto)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 30 September 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Mutant Action!)
Some American theaters are running this under the name "La Crimen Perfecto", which strikes me as a perfect example of underestimating both the film and the audience. The wordplay in the film's title translates easily enough, and gives the audience a clear idea of both the film's content and its offbeat tone. If someone standing at the ticket booth can't grasp the title, maybe they're just not the audience for this gem.
The crime will eventually be committed by Rafael Gonzalez (Guillermo Toledo), the handsome fellow who runs the women's wear department in Madrid's Yeyo megastore. He's a consummate salesman, and greatly enjoys the company of the beautiful young women who work in his section, but across the hall is his archnemesis, "Don" Antonio (Luis Varela), a dour, joyless man who runs menswear. They're locked in a competition to be manager of the entire floor, which, as Rafael tells us, is the path to company junkets, stock options, a seat on the board, wealth, and power. A scuffle after the position is awarded, however, leaves Don Antonio dead, and Rafael the obvious prime suspect if he doesn't find a way to dispose of the body. Enter Lourdes (Monica Cervera), the one woman in his department he hasn't bedded (she's rather homely). She's a witness, but will help dispose of the body and keep quiet if he gives her some of the attention he gives the other girls. And makes her the new women's wear manager. And fires the girl he was just flirting with. And... well, soon Rafi is in a sort of prison without walls, subject to her every whim. Something will have to be done, and he's already got blood on his hands.
Read the rest at HBS.
Acción Mutante (aka Mutant Action)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 September 2005 at the Brattle (Mutant Action!)
Alex de la Iglesia's recent movies, things like Ferpect Crime and 800 Bullets are peculiar, off-center entertainments. The closest American analog I can think of is Sam Raimi. And like Raimi, his early works are as delightfully strange as they are obviously low-budget.
"Acción Mutante", in the film, is the name of a group of unattractive and disabled terrorists who strike back against the attractive people who control society. With their leader Ramon Yarritu (Antonio Resines) in jail, though, they tend to screw up on a regular basis. Once Ramon is released, they set about on a new mission - to kidnap beautiful heiress Patricia Orujo (Frederique Feder) and hold her for ransom. The kidnapping becomes a bloodbath, the kidnappers turn on each other, and the hostage develops Stockholm Syndrome.
Don't let Pedro and Agustin Almodovar's names in the credits as producers fool you; this is no classy art film. You've got your basic cheap special effects, black comedy galore (a dare you not to laugh at news footage of MA taking out an aerobics class), and gore, gore, gore. Blood and body parts all over the place, really, and that's after considering that the kidnappers are already on the grotesque side. This is the kind of film that is all about grabbing attention. It doesn't really need to make a whole lot of sense, so long as it keeps the audience cringing or laughing at the latest outrageous thing thrown at it, and if people with the money to mount larger productions say, hey, this de la Iglesia fellow has style, so much the better.
In fact, once you get past the concept, the spiffy opening credits, and the catchy theme music, the whole thing is actually rather silly. None of the characters are really motivated to do anything that they do; they just act on authorial fiat to get the audience to the next scene of outrageous violence. Along the way, there's great amusement to be had at the empty-headed pretty people at Patricia's party - Enrique San Francisco as "Luis Maria de Ostalaza, the outraged groom" made me laugh very hard just by looking stupid - to Ramon's eye-rolling annoyance at Patricia's declarations of adoration, as if this sort of thing has happened to him before. And the bloodletting is staged in an entertaining way, much of it transpiring on a spaceship set that is sort of beautiful in its cheapness - Caro/Jeunet grimy but also sort of retro-cool.
In the end, Mutant Action amused me much more than it probably had any right to. It's right on the border between "deliberately campy" and "overcoming its budget", and the messiness of its script annoyed me. It's got the exuberance of a young and talented filmmaker breaking into the scene, which is not only exciting, but also interesting once you've seen the man's later, more polished, films.
La Comunidad
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 October 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Mutant Action!)
The first thing one notices about La Comunidad is the eye-catching title sequence. I, personally, think that the Oscars should have an category to recognize a great set of opening credits (call it the Saul Bass Award), and further feel that if they did, Alex de la Iglesia's films would regularly be contenders. The stark, red-tinted stills of Carmen Maura and the accompanying shrieks set an ominous mood, but the way they move back and forth across the screen implies that de la Iglesia's trademark wit will be in supply.
Ms. Maura plays Julia, a middle-aged realtor showing an apartment in Madrid. The building appears kind of run-down and there's no parking, but inside it's fantastic. She invites her husband over to make use of it while she has the keys, the ceiling cracks open, and an investigation of the apartment above uncovers a rotting corpse in a disgusting environment. Further investigation uncovers a fortune in cash. But while finding the money may not have taken much effort, getting it out of a building filled with suspicious neighbors is something altogether more difficult.
Julia is no heroine; she's as selfish and conniving as anyone else in the movie, but we can root for her because she (at least initially) is a mere opportunist, with nothing particularly premeditated about her misdemeanors. She's probably too old to be described as "plucky" but not so old as to have stopped dreaming, even if her husband's sense of adventure is as frustratingly dormant as his libido. She's no kind of master criminal, but Ms. Maura gives us a sense of both the character's panic and her resolve, and it helps us get into her corner.
There's a nifty Ira Levin feel to the apartment's other inhabitants - some are peculiar individually, especially a guy who hangs around his apartment in a full Darth Vader costume, but most seem normal enough, if not terribly gregarious. When aggregated, though, the community as a whole is downright unnerving. It's a classic set-up, with an outsider shoved into a society she doesn't understand, with no help immediately available because of the insular nature of the place and her own less-than-legitimate standing. de la Iglesia and regular co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarria use it to crank the tension up while putting in plenty of humor.
Another set of filmmakers might have been tempted to make a political allegory out of this; it'd be, perhaps, the European thing to do. You can find such themes if you want to look. A theme of oppression, perhaps, or people from outside the community plundering the poor natives. You can play with the idea that democracy becomes tyranny when "majority rules" is the only moral principle. These filmmakers, though, appear to understand that films can collapse under too much metaphor, and when it comes down to brass tacks, La Comunidad isn't about making a statement, but about delivering thrills and just enough laughs to surprise. The rooftop chase that makes up much of the final act, for instance, has no ideology, but is tautly constructed, with some fantastic helicopter shots and a genuine sense that these people, who are not used to chasing or being chased, could in fact fall a great distnace to their deaths at any moment.
The end result is maybe not as incisive or insightful as it could be, but it is pretty darn exciting, which for my money is far more important. That's not to imply it's a stupid movie, just that it's more interested in straight-on thrills and twisted comedy than satire.
800 Balas (800 Bullets)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 October 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Mutant Action!)
The Western remained popular in Europe longer than it did in America, and stayed more potent as well. I'm not sure they lasted long enough that they were still being cranked out in the early 1990s, which this film's timeline would seem to imply, but maybe. And if not, that's not really a point worth any demerits, even if this is a film about the collision between fantasy and reality.
Carlos Torralba (Luis Castro) is a handful, the sort of pre-teen that makes his mother Laura (Carmen Maura) wish for a guiding hand in his life. She's less than pleased, though, when he seeks one out in the form of his never-before-mentioned grandfather Julian (Sancho Gracia), a former western stuntman who now plays the sherriff in "Hollywood, Texas", a tourist attraction built out of an old Western movie set, where paying customers can see an old west shootout enacted for them live. Carlos skips out on a school trip to find him. Julian tries to send him home, then grows fond of him. Laura tracks him down, then sees the beautiful land on which the financially failing attraction resides as the perfect place for her firm to build a resort. An outraged Julian rallies his confederates to fight back - with live ammunition!
It's kind of ridiculous, and at a few minutes over two hours, a little too sprawling. The relationships between Julian, his wife, Carlos, Laura, and her late husband, are merely strained, not terribly complicated. The other players at Hollywood, Texas are colorful, but thin. And in some ways, the stunt show almost looks too good - for something that's supposed to be a failing concern, it looks awfully slick and well-staged. In some ways, this helps to make the fantasy of living in a Wild West town in Almeria more seductive, for both Carlos and Julian, but seems incongruous when the reality of the situation must be confronted. It also seems to speak ill of the area's police force that a few crazy guys with six-shooters and no actual hostages are able to hold a SWAT team at bay for so long.
For all the thinness and implausibility of the story, though, the cast grows on you. Sancho Garcia's Julian may be a self-deluding old fool, but he's one with passion and flair. He's a man living a dream, so wrapped up in a fantasy that he can't quite handle it when reality intrudes, but there are moments where he is able to clearly remind us that his happy life is also an exile. Camen Maura, so excellent in the director's La Comunidad, plays the fun-ruining mother. She's the type who comes off as a villain when your age has just reached double digits, but is in fact mostly overwhelmed by the challenges of both a small child and a successful career. Luis Castro is quite charming as a somewhat obnoxious city kid who is swept away and awe-struck by the imaginary world of Hollywood, Texas. Angel de Andres Lopez, whose role as either a local prostitute or a woman playing a prostitute in the show (or quite possibly both) isn't particularly important to the story, still grabs the audience's attention ; she's got some charisma (and by "charisma", I don't just mean "a great body highlighted by exceptional breasts and no apparent resistance to doing nudity", although, yeah, that's a big part of it).
For all the film's well-staged set pieces and pleasant characters, though, it never achieves the same levels of delight as director Alex de la Iglesia's other features. This may be deliberate; he and co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarria are in a very character-based mode, asking the audience to identify with the people on screen rather than just enjoying the anarchy, as is their usual m.o. It's not quite conventional, but it's more sentimental than their usual work.
Nothing inherently wrong with "sentimental", but de la Iglesia isn't nearly as good at it as he is at "crazy". 800 Balas is at its best when it's crazy, but that doesn't happen often enough.
Next up: BFFF stuff and animation.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Previews I'm just getting around to: Hustle & Flow, Junebug, Asylum, The Thing About My Folks, Pretty Persuasion
Free previews are easy to find. There's usually two or three in every issue of the weekly alterna-rag, and one every other day or so in the daily papers. You may have to go someplace and pick them up - and try to get ahead of all the other moochers - but sometimes you just stumble onto them - I think I found passes for Asylum when I was looking for ice cream, and I've found others in a pile with the CSNs and such outside the comic shop.
In fact, for a while I had enough passes and things lying around my cubicle that my co-workers seemed to think the studios treated me like a real critic and sent me passes. Not yet, guys.
Although I wouldn't complain.
Hustle & Flow
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2005 at Loews Bosotn Common #7 (Preview)
I'll give Craig Brewer some credit - he made me like Hustle & Flow, despite nearly all of my personal preferences advising against it. My thoughts about its individual elements run the gamut from "disinterest" to "disdain". But go figure; even if he and his cast don't quite make me care about a pimp who would be a rapper, that the characters were able to grab my interest is a victory in itself.
DJay (Terrence Howard) is a Memphis pimp, but not a particularly prosperous one. He's got three girls in his stable, but with Shug (Taraji P. Henson) pregnant with his child, Nola (Taryn Manning) a less-than-high-end country girl, and Lexus (Paula Jai Parker) belligerent (and having recently given birth herself), he's all too aware that things aren't exactly getting better. A couple brief discussions give him an idea, though: Arnel (Isaac Hayes), a local bar owner, mentions that local success story Skinny Black (Ludacris) will be having a party at his bar. And a guy he knew in high school as "Key" (Anthony Anderson) is doing some work as an audio engineer. Well, DJay used to rap in the same places as Skinny, and not many thought Skinny was that much better. If DJay could make a demo, and slip it to him...
Read the rest at HBS.
Junebug
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 August 2005 at Landmark Kendall Square #2 (Preview)
There are any number of good things to say about Junebug. It's got interesting things to say about art and the art business. It's a great demonstration of how both the tensions and affection within a family, and the reasons for them, often go unsaid and misunderstood by outsiders. It features an unusually even-handed look at the uneasy co-existence of urban and rural America. But when all is said and done, even all of its other fine qualities blend together as a footnote to one thought: That Amy Adams, she deserves some sort of award.
We don't meet Adams right away; we first encounter Madeline and George (Embeth Davidtz and Alessandro Nivola). She's a gallery owner in Chicago; he's her new husband. They've traveled to South Carolina so that she can meet with an "outsider artist" who happens to live near George's family, whom she's never met. Ms. Adams plays Ashley, the literally barefoot and pregnant wife of Geroge's brother Johnny (Benjamin McKenzie), both of him still live with his parents (Celia Weston and Scott Wilson).
Read the rest at HBS.
Asylum
* * (out of four)
Seen 17 August 2005 at Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Preview)
Asylum is a "bad decision" movie, where the lead character makes a near-constant string a poor choices, but the audience is expected to sympathize because her poor choices are made as the result of passion, while the people she's turning away form are gray martinets seemingly incapable of giving affection. And, of course, Natasha Richardson has the sex appeal going for her, too, and I think we're supposed to look at this movie set in the late 1950s/early 1960s and say, ah, it's tragic that women in that time were expected to repress their sexuality and the only way this vibrant creature could find any sort of release was with one of the inmates at the mental hospital where her husband was employed.
The film fails because it never manages to sell this to us as a tragedy. This is partly because it doesn't establish a strong sense of time and place - tweedy 20th century English melodramas do tend to run together, and Laurel and I wound up figuring the exact timeframe by reading a gravestone toward the end of the picture - so a present-day audience may wind up looking at Ms. Richardson's Stella Raphael and saying "if you're so unhappy, divorce his ass and move on, and if you can't bear the thought of work, examine your priorities or at least seduce someone who be able to do more to keep you in the lifestyle to which you are accustomed than an escaped mental patient who killed his wife!" Maybe not those exact words, but at some point, you'd like to see the protagonist do something that's not utterly stupid.
Working around the idiot plot, it's a competent enough little movie. There's a nicely stuffy atmosphere, and director David Mackenzie does a fine job illustrating the tedium that must be slowly killing Stella. The supporting cast is as good as one expects for a British period piece, with Marton Csokas somehow managing to be smolderingly repentant, Hugh Bonneville perfectly believable as the sort who looks at a wife as a sort of servant, and Ian McKellen as reptillian as one could desire. Gus Lewis is okay enough as Stella's son, although not really enough of a character that we wish him well for any reason other than "he's a kid".
"Competent" isn't really saying much, though, is it? There's not much that could be done to make a movie based on this story better, but what's the appeal of this sort of story of self-destruction, where there's not even anything instructive about the suffering?
The Thing About My Folks
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 August at Loews Boston Common #2 (preview)
I don't hate Paul Reiser, no matter how much my brother Matt and I mocked him the day of the preview. He's a guy who's useful in a small part, but he's limited. As an actor, his range runs from "whiny" to "smarmy". He's also the writer on this movie, and it's the same sort of observational humor as his stand-up - "it's funny because it's true" - which I tend to find rather weak. All it's got going for it is familiarity, and it never really is able to surprise the audience enough to deliver many laughs.
Not that it's purely a comedy; it's a road movie where Ben Kleinman (Reiser) and his father Sam (Peter Falk) tool around upstate New York after Sam's wife up and leaves without notice. And while they're driving around randomly, there's the inevitable talking about Sam's failings as a father and husband, Ben's insecurities, and their family history. Paul Reiser is whiny. Peter Falk is crochety. And he farts. As we all you know, only a few things are guaranteed comedy gold, and old guys farting? What more could you want?
The Thing About My Folks is sweet and harmless and boring. I don't think that wanting to give the audience warm fuzzies must inevitably lead to a dull movie; it's the trading over well-worn territory that does that. This is just another movie about an adult son trying to connect with his elderly father, and in trying to make something everyone could relate to, Reiser never put much in that was unique. We wind up just marknig time until the inevitable teary scene in the hospital where everyone realizes how much they really, really love each other.
On a note that has nothing really to do with the movie, I will give Reiser some credit for sometimes seeming as irritated as me at the people who come to a preview/festival with Q&A, raise their hands, get recognized, and then just ramble on and on. Granted, his method of dealing with this was almost-impercepitable sarcasm while mine was banging my head back onto my seat saying "ask a frickin' question" through gritted teeth. As gratifying as it is to know that you liked Columbo or Mad About You or, hey, even The Thing About My Folks, the guests have limited time, and your long-winded sucking up is potentially displacing an actual interesting question and answer.
Pretty Persuasion
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2005 at Loews Harvard Square #3 (preivew)
When I first saw the trailer, I admit, I thought this was a Jena Malone movie. She and Evan Rachel Wood look really, astonishingly, similar. The difference, apparently, is that Ms. Malone's movies tend to be less cynical than Ms. Wood's.
Here, Wood plays the sort of teenaged girl that primarily exists in the nightmares of older men: Genius IQ, highly attractive, and absolutely no concern over right and wrong. I imagine that this is a common nightmare among high school teachers, but also something that doesn't happen nearly as often as the media would have us believe. But, hey, movies about monsters are more compelling than movies about people who do something foolish on a whim and are no match for the authorities who are trained to handle their likes. And Wood's Kimberly is a compelling monster. She's got a knack for saying terrible things in a way that can be taken as not being actually malicious. She's got a rotten, scummy father (James Woods) to whom one would assign more blame if her actions weren't so thoroughly calculated. And at times, the audience can relate to her problems: We get her antagonizing a trophy-wife stepmother and receiving mixed messages from a boyfriend, and what at first seems to be a casual lie turns out to be surprisingly true. The spoiled brat who becomes a total sociopath over basic teenager stuff is almost a cliché, but in Wood's hands it's more.
Kimberly is easily the most complex and interesting character, but by no means the only watchable one. Her "friends" and partners in crime - Elisabeth Harnois as the blonde, perky, not so bright Emily and Adi Schnall as demure new student Randa - are types but well-realized ones: It's funny but also sad to see Randa's innocence be chipped away, and Emily would probably be a normal kid removed from this situation - the goofy one in the gang, probably self-centered in the way teenagers are, but likable enough once you got to know her. James Woods is hilariously reprehensible as Kimberly's crass, bigoted drunk of a father, and Jane Krakowski is amusing as a TV reporter who only thinks she's opportunistic and ambitious. The weak link linds up being Ron Livingston as the teacher who is the target of the girls' wrath. He is in some ways a deserving target, but he's Ron Livingston, one of the most charisma-free actors working today.
Black comedy is a tricky thing to do. I don't think there's any subject that should be categorically off-limits, but there are certain things, like sexual misconduct between a teacher and student, where you've got to have a darn good joke. A lot of the jokes are pretty good, but the film falters when it tries to make the leap from twisted humor to moralizing - where do you draw the line one which twisted things are funny and which aren't? Also, while Kimberly is believably brilliant, it's in part because pretty much everyone else is rather dim, or too easily manipulated. It's one thing to be cynical about how easily everyone can be played, but another to rig it that way.
It's a nice little black comedy, if that's not a contradiction in terms. It's only really sunk by the unfortunate need to demonstrate that its heart is, in fact, in the right place If you're going to go for the throat, don't stop until it's well and truly ripped out.
In fact, for a while I had enough passes and things lying around my cubicle that my co-workers seemed to think the studios treated me like a real critic and sent me passes. Not yet, guys.
Although I wouldn't complain.
Hustle & Flow
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2005 at Loews Bosotn Common #7 (Preview)
I'll give Craig Brewer some credit - he made me like Hustle & Flow, despite nearly all of my personal preferences advising against it. My thoughts about its individual elements run the gamut from "disinterest" to "disdain". But go figure; even if he and his cast don't quite make me care about a pimp who would be a rapper, that the characters were able to grab my interest is a victory in itself.
DJay (Terrence Howard) is a Memphis pimp, but not a particularly prosperous one. He's got three girls in his stable, but with Shug (Taraji P. Henson) pregnant with his child, Nola (Taryn Manning) a less-than-high-end country girl, and Lexus (Paula Jai Parker) belligerent (and having recently given birth herself), he's all too aware that things aren't exactly getting better. A couple brief discussions give him an idea, though: Arnel (Isaac Hayes), a local bar owner, mentions that local success story Skinny Black (Ludacris) will be having a party at his bar. And a guy he knew in high school as "Key" (Anthony Anderson) is doing some work as an audio engineer. Well, DJay used to rap in the same places as Skinny, and not many thought Skinny was that much better. If DJay could make a demo, and slip it to him...
Read the rest at HBS.
Junebug
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 August 2005 at Landmark Kendall Square #2 (Preview)
There are any number of good things to say about Junebug. It's got interesting things to say about art and the art business. It's a great demonstration of how both the tensions and affection within a family, and the reasons for them, often go unsaid and misunderstood by outsiders. It features an unusually even-handed look at the uneasy co-existence of urban and rural America. But when all is said and done, even all of its other fine qualities blend together as a footnote to one thought: That Amy Adams, she deserves some sort of award.
We don't meet Adams right away; we first encounter Madeline and George (Embeth Davidtz and Alessandro Nivola). She's a gallery owner in Chicago; he's her new husband. They've traveled to South Carolina so that she can meet with an "outsider artist" who happens to live near George's family, whom she's never met. Ms. Adams plays Ashley, the literally barefoot and pregnant wife of Geroge's brother Johnny (Benjamin McKenzie), both of him still live with his parents (Celia Weston and Scott Wilson).
Read the rest at HBS.
Asylum
* * (out of four)
Seen 17 August 2005 at Landmark Kendall Square #4 (Preview)
Asylum is a "bad decision" movie, where the lead character makes a near-constant string a poor choices, but the audience is expected to sympathize because her poor choices are made as the result of passion, while the people she's turning away form are gray martinets seemingly incapable of giving affection. And, of course, Natasha Richardson has the sex appeal going for her, too, and I think we're supposed to look at this movie set in the late 1950s/early 1960s and say, ah, it's tragic that women in that time were expected to repress their sexuality and the only way this vibrant creature could find any sort of release was with one of the inmates at the mental hospital where her husband was employed.
The film fails because it never manages to sell this to us as a tragedy. This is partly because it doesn't establish a strong sense of time and place - tweedy 20th century English melodramas do tend to run together, and Laurel and I wound up figuring the exact timeframe by reading a gravestone toward the end of the picture - so a present-day audience may wind up looking at Ms. Richardson's Stella Raphael and saying "if you're so unhappy, divorce his ass and move on, and if you can't bear the thought of work, examine your priorities or at least seduce someone who be able to do more to keep you in the lifestyle to which you are accustomed than an escaped mental patient who killed his wife!" Maybe not those exact words, but at some point, you'd like to see the protagonist do something that's not utterly stupid.
Working around the idiot plot, it's a competent enough little movie. There's a nicely stuffy atmosphere, and director David Mackenzie does a fine job illustrating the tedium that must be slowly killing Stella. The supporting cast is as good as one expects for a British period piece, with Marton Csokas somehow managing to be smolderingly repentant, Hugh Bonneville perfectly believable as the sort who looks at a wife as a sort of servant, and Ian McKellen as reptillian as one could desire. Gus Lewis is okay enough as Stella's son, although not really enough of a character that we wish him well for any reason other than "he's a kid".
"Competent" isn't really saying much, though, is it? There's not much that could be done to make a movie based on this story better, but what's the appeal of this sort of story of self-destruction, where there's not even anything instructive about the suffering?
The Thing About My Folks
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 August at Loews Boston Common #2 (preview)
I don't hate Paul Reiser, no matter how much my brother Matt and I mocked him the day of the preview. He's a guy who's useful in a small part, but he's limited. As an actor, his range runs from "whiny" to "smarmy". He's also the writer on this movie, and it's the same sort of observational humor as his stand-up - "it's funny because it's true" - which I tend to find rather weak. All it's got going for it is familiarity, and it never really is able to surprise the audience enough to deliver many laughs.
Not that it's purely a comedy; it's a road movie where Ben Kleinman (Reiser) and his father Sam (Peter Falk) tool around upstate New York after Sam's wife up and leaves without notice. And while they're driving around randomly, there's the inevitable talking about Sam's failings as a father and husband, Ben's insecurities, and their family history. Paul Reiser is whiny. Peter Falk is crochety. And he farts. As we all you know, only a few things are guaranteed comedy gold, and old guys farting? What more could you want?
The Thing About My Folks is sweet and harmless and boring. I don't think that wanting to give the audience warm fuzzies must inevitably lead to a dull movie; it's the trading over well-worn territory that does that. This is just another movie about an adult son trying to connect with his elderly father, and in trying to make something everyone could relate to, Reiser never put much in that was unique. We wind up just marknig time until the inevitable teary scene in the hospital where everyone realizes how much they really, really love each other.
On a note that has nothing really to do with the movie, I will give Reiser some credit for sometimes seeming as irritated as me at the people who come to a preview/festival with Q&A, raise their hands, get recognized, and then just ramble on and on. Granted, his method of dealing with this was almost-impercepitable sarcasm while mine was banging my head back onto my seat saying "ask a frickin' question" through gritted teeth. As gratifying as it is to know that you liked Columbo or Mad About You or, hey, even The Thing About My Folks, the guests have limited time, and your long-winded sucking up is potentially displacing an actual interesting question and answer.
Pretty Persuasion
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2005 at Loews Harvard Square #3 (preivew)
When I first saw the trailer, I admit, I thought this was a Jena Malone movie. She and Evan Rachel Wood look really, astonishingly, similar. The difference, apparently, is that Ms. Malone's movies tend to be less cynical than Ms. Wood's.
Here, Wood plays the sort of teenaged girl that primarily exists in the nightmares of older men: Genius IQ, highly attractive, and absolutely no concern over right and wrong. I imagine that this is a common nightmare among high school teachers, but also something that doesn't happen nearly as often as the media would have us believe. But, hey, movies about monsters are more compelling than movies about people who do something foolish on a whim and are no match for the authorities who are trained to handle their likes. And Wood's Kimberly is a compelling monster. She's got a knack for saying terrible things in a way that can be taken as not being actually malicious. She's got a rotten, scummy father (James Woods) to whom one would assign more blame if her actions weren't so thoroughly calculated. And at times, the audience can relate to her problems: We get her antagonizing a trophy-wife stepmother and receiving mixed messages from a boyfriend, and what at first seems to be a casual lie turns out to be surprisingly true. The spoiled brat who becomes a total sociopath over basic teenager stuff is almost a cliché, but in Wood's hands it's more.
Kimberly is easily the most complex and interesting character, but by no means the only watchable one. Her "friends" and partners in crime - Elisabeth Harnois as the blonde, perky, not so bright Emily and Adi Schnall as demure new student Randa - are types but well-realized ones: It's funny but also sad to see Randa's innocence be chipped away, and Emily would probably be a normal kid removed from this situation - the goofy one in the gang, probably self-centered in the way teenagers are, but likable enough once you got to know her. James Woods is hilariously reprehensible as Kimberly's crass, bigoted drunk of a father, and Jane Krakowski is amusing as a TV reporter who only thinks she's opportunistic and ambitious. The weak link linds up being Ron Livingston as the teacher who is the target of the girls' wrath. He is in some ways a deserving target, but he's Ron Livingston, one of the most charisma-free actors working today.
Black comedy is a tricky thing to do. I don't think there's any subject that should be categorically off-limits, but there are certain things, like sexual misconduct between a teacher and student, where you've got to have a darn good joke. A lot of the jokes are pretty good, but the film falters when it tries to make the leap from twisted humor to moralizing - where do you draw the line one which twisted things are funny and which aren't? Also, while Kimberly is believably brilliant, it's in part because pretty much everyone else is rather dim, or too easily manipulated. It's one thing to be cynical about how easily everyone can be played, but another to rig it that way.
It's a nice little black comedy, if that's not a contradiction in terms. It's only really sunk by the unfortunate need to demonstrate that its heart is, in fact, in the right place If you're going to go for the throat, don't stop until it's well and truly ripped out.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Punt
The idea of the blog is to review everything I see, but various festival-type things and work and just slowing down is keeping it from happening. And, there's other stuff I want to write while this falls out the back of my brain, so it's time to recognize that I won't catch up any time soon. So, over the next week or so, I'll be doing capsules to catch up. Any regular readers who want to see one of these subjects expanded, drop a comment and I'll look at expanding to full reviews.
The (planned) line-up:
Previews I didn't get to writing up until after the film had come and gone:
- Hustle & Flow, Junebug, Asylum, The Thing About My Folks, Pretty Persuasion
Oldies but (mostly) goodies:
- Sabotage, The Duelists, Elevator to the Gallows, The Shining
Henson & heirs:
- Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, MirrorMask
Boutique-ish stuff:
- Broken Flowers, November, The World, Lord of War
I ♥ Rachel McAdams:
- Wedding Crashers, Red-Eye
Animated!
- Porco Rosso, Valiant, Corpse Bride
Daring Escapes:
- The Great Raid, The Tunnel
Wasn't Paul Rudd going to be a romantic lead, not a wacky supporting character?
- The 40-Year-Old Virgin, The Baxter
Big-time Imax:
- Magnificent Desolation, Sharks
Alex de la Igleseas:
- El Crimen Ferpecto, Accione Mutante, La Communidad, 800 Bullets
See, 31 behind? Never getting caught up, especially with the baseball playoffs and all the good stuff at the Brattle. And the midnight kung fu stuff starting back up at the Coolidge. So capsules for now, but I'll take a couple requests.
The (planned) line-up:
Previews I didn't get to writing up until after the film had come and gone:
- Hustle & Flow, Junebug, Asylum, The Thing About My Folks, Pretty Persuasion
Oldies but (mostly) goodies:
- Sabotage, The Duelists, Elevator to the Gallows, The Shining
Henson & heirs:
- Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, MirrorMask
Boutique-ish stuff:
- Broken Flowers, November, The World, Lord of War
I ♥ Rachel McAdams:
- Wedding Crashers, Red-Eye
Animated!
- Porco Rosso, Valiant, Corpse Bride
Daring Escapes:
- The Great Raid, The Tunnel
Wasn't Paul Rudd going to be a romantic lead, not a wacky supporting character?
- The 40-Year-Old Virgin, The Baxter
Big-time Imax:
- Magnificent Desolation, Sharks
Alex de la Igleseas:
- El Crimen Ferpecto, Accione Mutante, La Communidad, 800 Bullets
See, 31 behind? Never getting caught up, especially with the baseball playoffs and all the good stuff at the Brattle. And the midnight kung fu stuff starting back up at the Coolidge. So capsules for now, but I'll take a couple requests.
Friday, September 30, 2005
Serenity
So, I did, in fact, get to see Serenity Tuesday night. Met up with Laurel at the theater, after a bizarre confrontation with a bus driver in Waltham - guy spoke so quietly I couldn't hear him, and told me to get off the bus despite my trying to pay the fare, since I'd tried to get on the 505 bus with a mere bus pas. Always works on the 553/554/556/558, but apparently not that one, even though they all go to the same destination. I would write a letter to the MBTA, but I was able to get on a 553 about ten seconds after being ejected from this one, and I saw a free movie I'd been anticipating therafter, so I wasn't in an angry mood afterward. Still - weird.
I liked the movie. Laurel liked the movie. I own the Firefly box set and Laurel's never seen the show, so take the small sample size for what it's worth, but I still look at that as a good sign that the movie will appeal to a diverse crowd, maybe do well enough for a sequel. I hope so, if only so that we can see more of the things I really liked about Firefly.
Firefly as always a dark show, but it frequently had moments, or entire episodes, built around whimsey. By the last act, it was pretty often life-threatening whimsey, but the fun came from more than the one-liners. Serenity is also more conventional than Firefly; the creepy men wearing blue gloves and carrying a device that makes everyone around them bleed out have been replaced with a sword-weilding assassin. We get a canonical explanation of the Reavers, which fits a plot but doesn't convey the existential dread of them simply being people who went mad when confronted with the vastness of space. The Western trappings are almost completely dispensed with, aside from Mal & Kaylee's manner of speech.
Of course, we also get Sarah Paulson, if only as a hologram recording for one scene. That makes me happy. And the final act is pretty darn great, incorporating Twilight Zone and Night of the Living Dead trappings to pretty good effect.
All the "better than Star Wars" people can just shut up, though. It's not up to any of those movies, either in terms of big ideas or big visuals. Whedon can write better dialogue, but Lucas can direct a better space battle, and build a more complete world. And, just out of curiosity: Where are all the Chinese people in Whedon's world where everyone speaks Mandarin and all the signage is dual-language?
So, I'll recommend this for most everyone, but the really great stuff was done in the series. The EFC/HBS review:
Serenity
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 September 2005 at Loews Boston Common #2 (preview)
Universal Studios wants the Star Wars money. Or at least the Star Trek money. And who can blame them? Those franchises have been making their owners money for decades, spread across multiple media and company divisions, even when longtime fans were loudly complaining that the last good entry came twenty years earlier. Highly disappointed that Van Helsing and Chronicles of Riddick did not become juggernauts, their next move was to acquire a property that already had a rabid fanbase that could be mobilized, and thus Serenity was (re)born.
That franchise was Firefly, a high-quality but under-watched television series from the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that sold a truly impressive number of DVDs for a show cancelled for lack of viewers. The movie picks up some months after the end of the series, quickly recapitulating its setting (500 years in the future, in a solar system with dozens of terraformed planets and moons), backstory (brilliant young doctor Simon Tam broke his sister River out of a top-secret government facility and they join up with cargo ship Serenity's crew of former rebels and thieves), and relationships (young ship's engineer Kaylee is sweet on Simon; captain Malcolm Reynolds and former passenger Inara couldn't get past their disdain for each other's work to act on their attraction). Even before that's out of the way, the story kicks off, with the Alliance sending a new top-secret operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to bring River (Summer Glau) in. Meanwhile, River is growing ever more unstable, predicting an attack by Reavers (think cannibal pirates) and suddenly snapping and wiping the floor with an entire bar full of people before uttering the name "Miranda". From that point forward, the chase is on - both to evade capture, and to learn who or what Miranda is..
There's more than a bit of Han Solo to Nathan Fillion's "Mal" - both are smugglers with no love for the present regime (but no immediate intent to fight it) and penchants for sarcasm who carry torches for women above their station. A one-time soldier on the losing side of a civil war, he's full of bitterness and mistrust; there's plenty of shattered ideals hiding behind his simple, homespun speech. Fillion's task is to make Mal easy to underestimate, even after we've seen him take the hero's role. His accent is somewhere between Irish and Southern, he stumbles in his speech, and isn't physically imposing, so even as the audience learns more about him, we're not certain he'll step up until he is.
Ejiofor, on the other hand, plays a relatively simple man of action, but he's still one of the more convincing examples of his character type - the intelligent man willing to commit atrocities for his cause. He's good in his action scenes, looking trained and focused compared to his opponents, and he radiates a calm professionalism compared to Mal's excitability. Even more impressive is Summer Glau as as River. Her dance training likely helps during the fight scenes, and her face is tremendously expressive, especially when called upon to be frightened or haunted. This is a girl whose brain has been severely traumatized to give her her abilities, and Ms. Glau shows us both her damage and some hints of who and what she used to be
The rest of the cast is... plentiful. Serenity suffers a bit from a syndrome that has plagued the last couple Star Trek series, where a ship requires certain jobs be filled, but filling them all leads to a crowded cast, many of whom wind up underused. The pilot (Alan Tudyk), first officer (Gina Torres), doctor (Sean Maher), engineer (Jewel Staite) and weapons guy (Adam Baldwin) are very much support staff, only intermittently important because of how they relate to Mal and River as opposed to what work they can do. Certainly, they get some fun lines - especially Baldwin and Staite, who play iterations of the blunt-but-not-bright type and sweet/cute/nerdy girl that writer/director Joss Whedon includes in every project (so he'd better get them right by now) - but one can't help but think the ship's crew could be streamlined a little. Also present are Morena Baccarin and Ron Glass as former passengers/crewmates to be used as hostages or sanctuary (as the need arises) and David Krumholtz as eccentric information broker "Mr. Universe".
Having all these characters and backstory makes the film a bit sluggish in the early going, as we're filled, though more amid plentiful action than obvious exposition dumps. Ironically, his compositions for a 'scope movie are much more cramped than what he's shot for television, and the color palette is relatively muted, as well. Whedon he proves to be no George Lucas in terms of setting up a space battle (though Lucas is no Whedon in terms of putting amusing words in his characters' mouths). But the story picks up a good head of steam as it goes along, and by the end, there's no doubt it has the audience hooked. The final act has a great "last stand" feel to it, with Mal having earned the ire of two fleets and the crew incredibly outnumbered and outgunned, and it looking very much like they could all perish, Universal's hopes for a franchise be damned.
If it sounds like I'm down on the movie, it's because I was a fan of Firefly and occasionally found myself noticing what was missing. A friend who had never seen that series and isn't necessarily a one for sci-fi had an absolute blast with it, and I'll be all over the DVD when it comes out. It looks pretty darn good for a limited budget, too.
It's good stuff, and I hope it connects with an audience enough for us to get another movie in a couple year's time.
I liked the movie. Laurel liked the movie. I own the Firefly box set and Laurel's never seen the show, so take the small sample size for what it's worth, but I still look at that as a good sign that the movie will appeal to a diverse crowd, maybe do well enough for a sequel. I hope so, if only so that we can see more of the things I really liked about Firefly.
Firefly as always a dark show, but it frequently had moments, or entire episodes, built around whimsey. By the last act, it was pretty often life-threatening whimsey, but the fun came from more than the one-liners. Serenity is also more conventional than Firefly; the creepy men wearing blue gloves and carrying a device that makes everyone around them bleed out have been replaced with a sword-weilding assassin. We get a canonical explanation of the Reavers, which fits a plot but doesn't convey the existential dread of them simply being people who went mad when confronted with the vastness of space. The Western trappings are almost completely dispensed with, aside from Mal & Kaylee's manner of speech.
Of course, we also get Sarah Paulson, if only as a hologram recording for one scene. That makes me happy. And the final act is pretty darn great, incorporating Twilight Zone and Night of the Living Dead trappings to pretty good effect.
All the "better than Star Wars" people can just shut up, though. It's not up to any of those movies, either in terms of big ideas or big visuals. Whedon can write better dialogue, but Lucas can direct a better space battle, and build a more complete world. And, just out of curiosity: Where are all the Chinese people in Whedon's world where everyone speaks Mandarin and all the signage is dual-language?
So, I'll recommend this for most everyone, but the really great stuff was done in the series. The EFC/HBS review:
Serenity
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 September 2005 at Loews Boston Common #2 (preview)
Universal Studios wants the Star Wars money. Or at least the Star Trek money. And who can blame them? Those franchises have been making their owners money for decades, spread across multiple media and company divisions, even when longtime fans were loudly complaining that the last good entry came twenty years earlier. Highly disappointed that Van Helsing and Chronicles of Riddick did not become juggernauts, their next move was to acquire a property that already had a rabid fanbase that could be mobilized, and thus Serenity was (re)born.
That franchise was Firefly, a high-quality but under-watched television series from the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that sold a truly impressive number of DVDs for a show cancelled for lack of viewers. The movie picks up some months after the end of the series, quickly recapitulating its setting (500 years in the future, in a solar system with dozens of terraformed planets and moons), backstory (brilliant young doctor Simon Tam broke his sister River out of a top-secret government facility and they join up with cargo ship Serenity's crew of former rebels and thieves), and relationships (young ship's engineer Kaylee is sweet on Simon; captain Malcolm Reynolds and former passenger Inara couldn't get past their disdain for each other's work to act on their attraction). Even before that's out of the way, the story kicks off, with the Alliance sending a new top-secret operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to bring River (Summer Glau) in. Meanwhile, River is growing ever more unstable, predicting an attack by Reavers (think cannibal pirates) and suddenly snapping and wiping the floor with an entire bar full of people before uttering the name "Miranda". From that point forward, the chase is on - both to evade capture, and to learn who or what Miranda is..
There's more than a bit of Han Solo to Nathan Fillion's "Mal" - both are smugglers with no love for the present regime (but no immediate intent to fight it) and penchants for sarcasm who carry torches for women above their station. A one-time soldier on the losing side of a civil war, he's full of bitterness and mistrust; there's plenty of shattered ideals hiding behind his simple, homespun speech. Fillion's task is to make Mal easy to underestimate, even after we've seen him take the hero's role. His accent is somewhere between Irish and Southern, he stumbles in his speech, and isn't physically imposing, so even as the audience learns more about him, we're not certain he'll step up until he is.
Ejiofor, on the other hand, plays a relatively simple man of action, but he's still one of the more convincing examples of his character type - the intelligent man willing to commit atrocities for his cause. He's good in his action scenes, looking trained and focused compared to his opponents, and he radiates a calm professionalism compared to Mal's excitability. Even more impressive is Summer Glau as as River. Her dance training likely helps during the fight scenes, and her face is tremendously expressive, especially when called upon to be frightened or haunted. This is a girl whose brain has been severely traumatized to give her her abilities, and Ms. Glau shows us both her damage and some hints of who and what she used to be
The rest of the cast is... plentiful. Serenity suffers a bit from a syndrome that has plagued the last couple Star Trek series, where a ship requires certain jobs be filled, but filling them all leads to a crowded cast, many of whom wind up underused. The pilot (Alan Tudyk), first officer (Gina Torres), doctor (Sean Maher), engineer (Jewel Staite) and weapons guy (Adam Baldwin) are very much support staff, only intermittently important because of how they relate to Mal and River as opposed to what work they can do. Certainly, they get some fun lines - especially Baldwin and Staite, who play iterations of the blunt-but-not-bright type and sweet/cute/nerdy girl that writer/director Joss Whedon includes in every project (so he'd better get them right by now) - but one can't help but think the ship's crew could be streamlined a little. Also present are Morena Baccarin and Ron Glass as former passengers/crewmates to be used as hostages or sanctuary (as the need arises) and David Krumholtz as eccentric information broker "Mr. Universe".
Having all these characters and backstory makes the film a bit sluggish in the early going, as we're filled, though more amid plentiful action than obvious exposition dumps. Ironically, his compositions for a 'scope movie are much more cramped than what he's shot for television, and the color palette is relatively muted, as well. Whedon he proves to be no George Lucas in terms of setting up a space battle (though Lucas is no Whedon in terms of putting amusing words in his characters' mouths). But the story picks up a good head of steam as it goes along, and by the end, there's no doubt it has the audience hooked. The final act has a great "last stand" feel to it, with Mal having earned the ire of two fleets and the crew incredibly outnumbered and outgunned, and it looking very much like they could all perish, Universal's hopes for a franchise be damned.
If it sounds like I'm down on the movie, it's because I was a fan of Firefly and occasionally found myself noticing what was missing. A friend who had never seen that series and isn't necessarily a one for sci-fi had an absolute blast with it, and I'll be all over the DVD when it comes out. It looks pretty darn good for a limited budget, too.
It's good stuff, and I hope it connects with an audience enough for us to get another movie in a couple year's time.
Monday, September 26, 2005
I may get to see Serenity early
Which is exciting, because I am looking forward to it, if not quite so much as I was looking forward to Revenge of the Sith. Hey, I'm old-school. Since this is a potentially packed weekend, what with the films of Alex de la Iglesia at the Brattle, the return of the Midnight Ass-Kickings at the Coolidge, WizardWorld Boston, the frightening monthly need to extract rent from my roommate, and, of course, an exciting birthday (I turn 100,000 in binary!), it's a potentially packed weekend for this movie-loving nerd. I'm kind of surprised that there don't appear to be any Serenity guests at WWB, actually - you'd think they could get someone for opening weekend. Unless it's supposed to be a surprise.
I liked Firefly, quite a bit, even if I didn't get all angry and take it personally when Fox canceled it: The show was a longshot, neither pilot/premiere was quite perfect, and people were turning away even before baseball started. I was happy to get the DVDs when they came out and liked seeing Whedon & Minear re-use the cast whenever they got the chance. Sometimes it worked (Gina Torres on Angel), sometimes it didn't (Nathan Fillion on Buffy), and I feel terribly foolish for not having watched the Jewel Statie episodes of Wonderfalls yet (I mean, I traded my copy of Serenity #2 with someone else in the comic shop so I could get the Jo Duffy cover featuring the lovely Ms. Staite).
Oh, what is Serenity, you ask? Well, here's a synopsis helpfully provided by the Universal/Grace Hill Media PR people that are apparently in charge of deciding which bloggers get to watch the movie early and which of go home to watch the Red Sox game and fight the crowds during the weekend:
More, of course, at The Official Website.
I'm expecting a good movie, but - and this probably marks me as a bad fan - none of the trailers have blown me away. The uniformly deadpan delivery worries me, since one of Whedon's occasional weaknesses is making characters sound the same, and the "second pilot" for Firefly initially didn't impress me not because I thought it was confusing without the original pilot being aired first (a hugely overplayed complaint), but because everyone seemed to have the same wiseass voice.
But, I won't know if I've gotten in until tomorrow night. Since the consolation price is coming back home to watch the Sox, I can deal.
I liked Firefly, quite a bit, even if I didn't get all angry and take it personally when Fox canceled it: The show was a longshot, neither pilot/premiere was quite perfect, and people were turning away even before baseball started. I was happy to get the DVDs when they came out and liked seeing Whedon & Minear re-use the cast whenever they got the chance. Sometimes it worked (Gina Torres on Angel), sometimes it didn't (Nathan Fillion on Buffy), and I feel terribly foolish for not having watched the Jewel Statie episodes of Wonderfalls yet (I mean, I traded my copy of Serenity #2 with someone else in the comic shop so I could get the Jo Duffy cover featuring the lovely Ms. Staite).
Oh, what is Serenity, you ask? Well, here's a synopsis helpfully provided by the Universal/Grace Hill Media PR people that are apparently in charge of deciding which bloggers get to watch the movie early and which of go home to watch the Red Sox game and fight the crowds during the weekend:
Joss Whedon, the Oscar® - and Emmy - nominated writer/director responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE, ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war, who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the closest thing he has left to family –squabbling, insubordinate and undyingly loyal.
More, of course, at The Official Website.
I'm expecting a good movie, but - and this probably marks me as a bad fan - none of the trailers have blown me away. The uniformly deadpan delivery worries me, since one of Whedon's occasional weaknesses is making characters sound the same, and the "second pilot" for Firefly initially didn't impress me not because I thought it was confusing without the original pilot being aired first (a hugely overplayed complaint), but because everyone seemed to have the same wiseass voice.
But, I won't know if I've gotten in until tomorrow night. Since the consolation price is coming back home to watch the Sox, I can deal.
B-Movies: Man with the Screaming Brain, Stealth, Cobra Woman
I don't know if any of these are actually "B Movies", which I gather were sort of like B-sides to singles, stuff used by theaters to pad out a double feature, especially when included with newsreels, cartoons, and other shorts. It's simply become code for "cheap, generally not very good genre movie", whether that movie is meant for theaters, television, or video.
I see Man with the Screaming Brain comes out on DVD next week, along with Alien Apocalypse, which has been sitting on my Replay since February, since I planned to watch it with Matt. I think I'll clear some space, buy the DVD, and await the inevitable borrowing the next time he comes over.
Also, I see Stealth has a 2-disc edition, which shocks me - they had to spend money on those extras, and is that really going to increase demand that much, unless it's "all the raw footage we shot of Jessica Biel in a bikini"? I re-iterate that that may be a fun one to rent and watch en espanol, enjoying the full force of the pretty pictures without the stupid words.
And, since it looks like HBS is still a little behind in my weird titles being added to the DB, more full-text reviews in the blog. Hey, makes me look more like a genuine blogger, right?
Man with the Screaming Brain
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 July 2005 at Coolidge Corner #2 (Midnight Madness)
There are a lot of screenplays that don't get made, and not just because the writers don't have the proper connections. Consider the case of Man with the Screaming Brain, which writer/director/producer/star Bruce Campbell has had kicking around for nearly twenty years, roughly since Evil Dead 2. In that time, he's done a lot of decent work on television and film while friends and collaborators Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert have gained power and influence in Hollywood. Campbell built something of a fanbase, too, but it wasn't until last year, when he signed a two-picture deal with the Sci-Fi Channel, that he finally got to make this movie. And although many fans were excited to see Screaming Brain finally get made, the truth is that it languished in development hell so long for a reason: It's not very good.
Sure, expect this story to be good is probably asking a little much. Campbell plays William Cole, an American business man in Sofia, looking to invest in the city's infrastructure. Along for the ride is his spendthrift wife Jackie (Antoinette Byron). Their ex-KGB cabbie Yegor (Vladimir Kolev) takes them through the gypsy section of Sofia, where they run afoul of Tatoya (Tamara Gorski), and ex-girlfriend of Yegor's who attempts to seduce William - and, when that doesn't work out, kills him. And Yegor, for good measure. But wait! Doctor Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov (Stacy Keach) has a theoretical process to combine two brains in one body! And his assistant Pavel (Ted Raimi) has built a primitive, shambling robot that a human brain could be transplanted into!
I like Bruce Campbell, and had reason to hope for good things here: He's a funny guy, more likely to err on the side of overacting than woodenness, and the plot of the film plays into one of his strengths. I imagine most people who have seen Evil Dead 2 would agree that Campbell is, in fact, quite good at the slapstick bit where two different minds are attempting to control his body, leading to a spirited fight with his own hand. He was also pulling in some decent talent - Ted Raimi won't make anybody's A List anytime soon, but he's got the same "good B-Movie guy" rep as Campbell, and Stacy Keach has some decent credits as well. Joseph LoDuca was part of the Renaissance Pictures gang with Campbell and the Raimis, and though Sam Raimi has mostly worked with Danny Elfman on recent films, I'd generally take LoDuca's scores over Elfman's recent work.
So you'd think, with a group of people who know B-movies inside out and have shown the talent to do higher-profile work, Campbell would be able to target what makes for a fun, rather than tiresome, B-movie and do it. This, sadly, doesn't happen. Part of it, I think, is that this material has been with him for twenty years, and perhaps he's too attached to the fairly primitive story that he wrote when he was young and inexperienced, just changing names when the filming location changed from expensive Los Angeles to eoncomical Bulgaria when it could have used a major overhaul. But that's not all; too often, the movie seems to be missing the excitement that can make an objectively sub-par movie into a guilty pleasure, the "if we don't put our all into this, we may never get a chance to make a movie again" energy. It's like watching a AAA baseball team which is filled with guys who have bounced around the minors or who just didn't make the cut for the big-league team. You can't really accuse anybody of dogging it, but you'd almost rather watch the AA team: They may be raw, but they're enthusiastic.
Not many raw but enthusiastic folks here. Campbell is playing a sarcastic, difficult-to-like ugly-American type, and the audience can't ever really get behind him. Kolev's Yegor isn't interesting, either, so we're never terribly interested in who's going to gain control of Cole's body. Jackie's a pretty standard character type, too, and Ms. Byron doesn't infuse her with a whole lot of individuality. On the plus side, Tamara Gorski is at least lively in her character's psychosis. Ted Raimi adds a goofy Eastern European accent to the combination doofus/put-upon assistant character, which is sort of his specialty. Stacy Keach, meanwhile, gives a clinic on how to properly mail in a performance - he puts what seems like zero effort into it, but his lines are generally entertaining, at the very least.
This isn't the first time Campbell has been in the director's chair, although his previous efforts have mostly been episodes of television series. And this looks like TV; it's very workmanlike direction, keeping the focus squarely on the action in the middle of the screen, not doing anything particularly interesting with composition, and a lot of the banter - whether it be Cole talking to Yegor's disembodied voice or with other characters - seems stiff. To be fair, Man with the Screaming Brain is made for TV, having received a brief theatrical run courtesy of Anchor Bay figuring his fans are good for some midnight show money. Still, made-for-television and direct-to-video movies have gotten better since this was first conceived. If Campbell had made this in the 1980s, it might have seemed like enjoyable campy cheese; now, it's just sub-standard.
I wanted to like Man with the Screaming Brain, I really did. And I still kind of enjoyed it, but I couldn't ever shake the feeling that I should have been enjoying it more.
Stealth
* * (out of four)
Seen 18 September 2005 at Flagship Cinemas Quincy #3 (second-run)
W.D. Richter's got a lot of uninspiring stuff in his filmography. I didn't realize this; I, like I imagine most people who noted his name as the writer of Stealth, immediately thought of him as the screenwriter for the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or his involvement with quirky films Buckaroo Banzai (director) and Big Trouble in Little China (writer). But check out IMDB; he's got plenty of credits that will indicate that yes, he does have a movie as unimpressive as Stealth in him.
Stop me if you've heard this one: The pilots of the U.S. Navy's next-generation stealth aircraft find themselves potentially out of a job when the next-next-generation plane is revealed to be flown not by a pilot, but by an artificially intelligent computer capable of learning and going thoroughly haywire when struck by lightning. Since "EDI", left to its own initiative, will start World War III, pilots Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas), Kara Wade (Jessica Biel), and Henry Purcell (Jamie Foxx) are forced to intercept. Unfortunately, the lightning strike that scrambled its priorities didn't erase what it had learned, so it's going to be a tough one to stop. And, of course, this doesn't take into account the inevitable people who find it more imperative to safeguard the program and secret than protect the pilots.
Read the rest at HBS.
Cobra Woman
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 September 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Special Engagements)
It's heartening to see new 35mm prints struck and distributed for movies that are not classics. It's important to remember that name-your-favorite-decade wasn't some sort of Golden Age of Film from which the art form has devolved, but a time period that had good flicks and bad; it's just that the best ones are the ones we remember, restore, buy on video and book at rep houses. At the same time, though, if we're going to preserve some of these less-than-shining moments in American film history, they might as well be entertaining in their tackiness like Cobra Woman.
As the movie starts, it's a joyous time on Harbor Island - Ramu (Jon Hall) and Tollea (Maria Montez) are to be married the next day. At first, it's not seen as a big deal when curious youngster Kado (Sabu) encounters a blind and mute merchant (Lon Chaney), but the next morning he is gone, having taken Tellea. That's when her adopted father (Moroni Olsen) tells Ramu where he found Tollea - the infant girl had been hidden on his boat when he was mysteriously sprung from prison on Cobra Island, where the law says all outsiders must be put to death, even if they arrived accidentally. Ramu, of course, decides to sail to Cobra Island and rescue her. Kado stows away. On the island itself, the Queen (Mary Nash) tells Tollea that she is Tollea's grandmother, and Tollea must take the position as the High Priestess, for her twins sister Naja (Montez again) and the High Priest Martok (Edgar Barrier) are bleeding the people dry with their religious fanatacism.
This is basic pulp adventure stuff, and that description leaves out the volcano, into which the natives are sacrified, and the chimpanzee sidekick. We encounter all of it in a compact seventy-five minute running time. Writers Scott Darling, Gene Lewis, and Richard Brooks throw every South Seas adventure trapping into the mix - Kado and Ramu even find their escape briefly delayed by quicksand - and they're lucky to have a director as good as Robert Siodmak and pretty Technicolor photography. The way I figure it, something doesn't become a camp classic (which Cobra Woman arguably is) by simply being so awful that folks laugh at it; it's badness that sticks out like a sore thumb among competence, tempered by the realization that these folks are, in fact, doing the very best they can, and are blissfully unaware that their project, by most objective measures, stinks.
Take leading lady Maria Montez. The "Caribbean Cyclone" had a fantastic body and no issues with showing it off within the limits of the Hayes Code. She was not only a bad actress, though, but she was a bad actress with a thick accent that doesn't match anyone else on the island where her character supposedly gew up and makes her dialog hilarious when it's comprehensible. And this movie's producers decided to cast her in a dual role! And to see her dance... It's awful, but since nobody seems to have any concept of her limitations, it's worth some jaw-dropping disbelief.
Frequent co-stars Jon Hall and Sabu (they did a series of Technicolor adventure movies for Universal during WWII) aren't quite so flamboyantly awful, but they (like Chaney) have pretty thoroughly physical parts - running, jumping, punching, climbing, swinging on ropes, that sort of thing. Sabu, unfortunately, gets stuck speaking broken English, sounding like a simpleton. He has a sleepwalking scene where I managed to completely miss the point; I thought Kado was supposed to be just fooling around, not really having a prophetic dream.
Uncredited is the chimpanzee who demonstrates unusual sewing ability, at least for a chimpanzee. Which is indicative of the sort of pure escapism this movie has. Oh, sure, there may be a line in there about how dangerous religious fanaticism can be, but don't read too much into that: It seems to apply more to people climbing the Thousand Steps to throw themselves into the volcano as opposed to, say, killing every outsider who comes to the island. But it does have an exploding volcano, pretty royal handmaidens in tube tops and high heels, people swinging over pits filled with sharp metal obects, and costumes that are minimal enough for both men and women to enjoy the scenery.
Sure, there's also a truly lame cobra puppet and a nonsensical plot. But I was entertained. They were trying hard enough for me to forgive the flaws and enjoy what was, in fact, enjoyable.
I see Man with the Screaming Brain comes out on DVD next week, along with Alien Apocalypse, which has been sitting on my Replay since February, since I planned to watch it with Matt. I think I'll clear some space, buy the DVD, and await the inevitable borrowing the next time he comes over.
Also, I see Stealth has a 2-disc edition, which shocks me - they had to spend money on those extras, and is that really going to increase demand that much, unless it's "all the raw footage we shot of Jessica Biel in a bikini"? I re-iterate that that may be a fun one to rent and watch en espanol, enjoying the full force of the pretty pictures without the stupid words.
And, since it looks like HBS is still a little behind in my weird titles being added to the DB, more full-text reviews in the blog. Hey, makes me look more like a genuine blogger, right?
Man with the Screaming Brain
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 July 2005 at Coolidge Corner #2 (Midnight Madness)
There are a lot of screenplays that don't get made, and not just because the writers don't have the proper connections. Consider the case of Man with the Screaming Brain, which writer/director/producer/star Bruce Campbell has had kicking around for nearly twenty years, roughly since Evil Dead 2. In that time, he's done a lot of decent work on television and film while friends and collaborators Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert have gained power and influence in Hollywood. Campbell built something of a fanbase, too, but it wasn't until last year, when he signed a two-picture deal with the Sci-Fi Channel, that he finally got to make this movie. And although many fans were excited to see Screaming Brain finally get made, the truth is that it languished in development hell so long for a reason: It's not very good.
Sure, expect this story to be good is probably asking a little much. Campbell plays William Cole, an American business man in Sofia, looking to invest in the city's infrastructure. Along for the ride is his spendthrift wife Jackie (Antoinette Byron). Their ex-KGB cabbie Yegor (Vladimir Kolev) takes them through the gypsy section of Sofia, where they run afoul of Tatoya (Tamara Gorski), and ex-girlfriend of Yegor's who attempts to seduce William - and, when that doesn't work out, kills him. And Yegor, for good measure. But wait! Doctor Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov (Stacy Keach) has a theoretical process to combine two brains in one body! And his assistant Pavel (Ted Raimi) has built a primitive, shambling robot that a human brain could be transplanted into!
I like Bruce Campbell, and had reason to hope for good things here: He's a funny guy, more likely to err on the side of overacting than woodenness, and the plot of the film plays into one of his strengths. I imagine most people who have seen Evil Dead 2 would agree that Campbell is, in fact, quite good at the slapstick bit where two different minds are attempting to control his body, leading to a spirited fight with his own hand. He was also pulling in some decent talent - Ted Raimi won't make anybody's A List anytime soon, but he's got the same "good B-Movie guy" rep as Campbell, and Stacy Keach has some decent credits as well. Joseph LoDuca was part of the Renaissance Pictures gang with Campbell and the Raimis, and though Sam Raimi has mostly worked with Danny Elfman on recent films, I'd generally take LoDuca's scores over Elfman's recent work.
So you'd think, with a group of people who know B-movies inside out and have shown the talent to do higher-profile work, Campbell would be able to target what makes for a fun, rather than tiresome, B-movie and do it. This, sadly, doesn't happen. Part of it, I think, is that this material has been with him for twenty years, and perhaps he's too attached to the fairly primitive story that he wrote when he was young and inexperienced, just changing names when the filming location changed from expensive Los Angeles to eoncomical Bulgaria when it could have used a major overhaul. But that's not all; too often, the movie seems to be missing the excitement that can make an objectively sub-par movie into a guilty pleasure, the "if we don't put our all into this, we may never get a chance to make a movie again" energy. It's like watching a AAA baseball team which is filled with guys who have bounced around the minors or who just didn't make the cut for the big-league team. You can't really accuse anybody of dogging it, but you'd almost rather watch the AA team: They may be raw, but they're enthusiastic.
Not many raw but enthusiastic folks here. Campbell is playing a sarcastic, difficult-to-like ugly-American type, and the audience can't ever really get behind him. Kolev's Yegor isn't interesting, either, so we're never terribly interested in who's going to gain control of Cole's body. Jackie's a pretty standard character type, too, and Ms. Byron doesn't infuse her with a whole lot of individuality. On the plus side, Tamara Gorski is at least lively in her character's psychosis. Ted Raimi adds a goofy Eastern European accent to the combination doofus/put-upon assistant character, which is sort of his specialty. Stacy Keach, meanwhile, gives a clinic on how to properly mail in a performance - he puts what seems like zero effort into it, but his lines are generally entertaining, at the very least.
This isn't the first time Campbell has been in the director's chair, although his previous efforts have mostly been episodes of television series. And this looks like TV; it's very workmanlike direction, keeping the focus squarely on the action in the middle of the screen, not doing anything particularly interesting with composition, and a lot of the banter - whether it be Cole talking to Yegor's disembodied voice or with other characters - seems stiff. To be fair, Man with the Screaming Brain is made for TV, having received a brief theatrical run courtesy of Anchor Bay figuring his fans are good for some midnight show money. Still, made-for-television and direct-to-video movies have gotten better since this was first conceived. If Campbell had made this in the 1980s, it might have seemed like enjoyable campy cheese; now, it's just sub-standard.
I wanted to like Man with the Screaming Brain, I really did. And I still kind of enjoyed it, but I couldn't ever shake the feeling that I should have been enjoying it more.
Stealth
* * (out of four)
Seen 18 September 2005 at Flagship Cinemas Quincy #3 (second-run)
W.D. Richter's got a lot of uninspiring stuff in his filmography. I didn't realize this; I, like I imagine most people who noted his name as the writer of Stealth, immediately thought of him as the screenwriter for the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or his involvement with quirky films Buckaroo Banzai (director) and Big Trouble in Little China (writer). But check out IMDB; he's got plenty of credits that will indicate that yes, he does have a movie as unimpressive as Stealth in him.
Stop me if you've heard this one: The pilots of the U.S. Navy's next-generation stealth aircraft find themselves potentially out of a job when the next-next-generation plane is revealed to be flown not by a pilot, but by an artificially intelligent computer capable of learning and going thoroughly haywire when struck by lightning. Since "EDI", left to its own initiative, will start World War III, pilots Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas), Kara Wade (Jessica Biel), and Henry Purcell (Jamie Foxx) are forced to intercept. Unfortunately, the lightning strike that scrambled its priorities didn't erase what it had learned, so it's going to be a tough one to stop. And, of course, this doesn't take into account the inevitable people who find it more imperative to safeguard the program and secret than protect the pilots.
Read the rest at HBS.
Cobra Woman
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 September 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Special Engagements)
It's heartening to see new 35mm prints struck and distributed for movies that are not classics. It's important to remember that name-your-favorite-decade wasn't some sort of Golden Age of Film from which the art form has devolved, but a time period that had good flicks and bad; it's just that the best ones are the ones we remember, restore, buy on video and book at rep houses. At the same time, though, if we're going to preserve some of these less-than-shining moments in American film history, they might as well be entertaining in their tackiness like Cobra Woman.
As the movie starts, it's a joyous time on Harbor Island - Ramu (Jon Hall) and Tollea (Maria Montez) are to be married the next day. At first, it's not seen as a big deal when curious youngster Kado (Sabu) encounters a blind and mute merchant (Lon Chaney), but the next morning he is gone, having taken Tellea. That's when her adopted father (Moroni Olsen) tells Ramu where he found Tollea - the infant girl had been hidden on his boat when he was mysteriously sprung from prison on Cobra Island, where the law says all outsiders must be put to death, even if they arrived accidentally. Ramu, of course, decides to sail to Cobra Island and rescue her. Kado stows away. On the island itself, the Queen (Mary Nash) tells Tollea that she is Tollea's grandmother, and Tollea must take the position as the High Priestess, for her twins sister Naja (Montez again) and the High Priest Martok (Edgar Barrier) are bleeding the people dry with their religious fanatacism.
This is basic pulp adventure stuff, and that description leaves out the volcano, into which the natives are sacrified, and the chimpanzee sidekick. We encounter all of it in a compact seventy-five minute running time. Writers Scott Darling, Gene Lewis, and Richard Brooks throw every South Seas adventure trapping into the mix - Kado and Ramu even find their escape briefly delayed by quicksand - and they're lucky to have a director as good as Robert Siodmak and pretty Technicolor photography. The way I figure it, something doesn't become a camp classic (which Cobra Woman arguably is) by simply being so awful that folks laugh at it; it's badness that sticks out like a sore thumb among competence, tempered by the realization that these folks are, in fact, doing the very best they can, and are blissfully unaware that their project, by most objective measures, stinks.
Take leading lady Maria Montez. The "Caribbean Cyclone" had a fantastic body and no issues with showing it off within the limits of the Hayes Code. She was not only a bad actress, though, but she was a bad actress with a thick accent that doesn't match anyone else on the island where her character supposedly gew up and makes her dialog hilarious when it's comprehensible. And this movie's producers decided to cast her in a dual role! And to see her dance... It's awful, but since nobody seems to have any concept of her limitations, it's worth some jaw-dropping disbelief.
Frequent co-stars Jon Hall and Sabu (they did a series of Technicolor adventure movies for Universal during WWII) aren't quite so flamboyantly awful, but they (like Chaney) have pretty thoroughly physical parts - running, jumping, punching, climbing, swinging on ropes, that sort of thing. Sabu, unfortunately, gets stuck speaking broken English, sounding like a simpleton. He has a sleepwalking scene where I managed to completely miss the point; I thought Kado was supposed to be just fooling around, not really having a prophetic dream.
Uncredited is the chimpanzee who demonstrates unusual sewing ability, at least for a chimpanzee. Which is indicative of the sort of pure escapism this movie has. Oh, sure, there may be a line in there about how dangerous religious fanaticism can be, but don't read too much into that: It seems to apply more to people climbing the Thousand Steps to throw themselves into the volcano as opposed to, say, killing every outsider who comes to the island. But it does have an exploding volcano, pretty royal handmaidens in tube tops and high heels, people swinging over pits filled with sharp metal obects, and costumes that are minimal enough for both men and women to enjoy the scenery.
Sure, there's also a truly lame cobra puppet and a nonsensical plot. But I was entertained. They were trying hard enough for me to forgive the flaws and enjoy what was, in fact, enjoyable.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Documentaries: March of the Penguins and A State of Mind
PENGUINS! Everybody loves penguins!
March of the Penguins (La Marche de l'Empereur)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 July 2005 at Loews Harvard Square #3 (first-run)
A few weeks ago, a message board I frequent spawned a topic along the lines of "why are people spending money on a nature documentary? Don't they know that they can get this sort of thing for free on cable?" One of the interesting points of view in this discussion was that held by the people who said they would watch it for free on Animal Planet, and they'd spend more money to see a version half as long on an IMAX screen, but couldn't see the point of just seeing it as a regular movie. This saddens me, because it's well worth the ticket price, and all that seems to be keeping people out is genre prejudice.
The source of the film's appeal is so simple that one wonders why there aren't more high-profile nature documentaries - giving people a chance to see something extraordinary in an immersive environment. Sure, IMAX would be more immersive, but those gigantic cameras would be a real pain to haul around Antarctica and might be more likely to spook the birds. And while this type of film is more frequently seen on television than in multiplexes, that's a shame, because nature documentaries are among the types of films that benefit most from being seen on the big screen: You may be seeing the same pictures and hearing the same sounds, but it is a different experience to have the theater be a secondary presence around the edges of the film than to see the film through a portal in one's own living room.
Read the rest at HBS.
A State of Mind
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 September 2005 in the Coolidge Corner Theater's Screening Room (Coolidge Selects) (projected video)
Watching A State of Mind, two contradictory impressions of the people of North Korea went through my head. The first was that they were people like any other, and the ones we see are intelligent, hard-working, warm, and friendly. For the most part, they are exactly the kind of people one would desire as neighbors. The second impression is that they are part of some kind of quasi-religious cult, with the entire country serving as the planet's largest cult compound.
Scant few films have been made about North Korea, at least compared to films that use it as a generic villain, and this one initially purports to be less about the country itself than about one of its newer traditions, the Mass Games. The Games are a stunning pageant, combining music, gymnastics, and animated mosaics in a display that celebrates Communist principles. We follow two young Pyongyang girls, 13-year-old Pak Hyon-sun and 11-year-old Kim Song-yun, who spend hours after school each afternoon training for the Games, an event which happens once or twice a year, and carries great prestige because president Kim Jong-Il may be in attendance. The training is intense, and may all be for nothing if the school's group is not selected to participate in the pageant. But being selected is a great honor, and one the girls will work hard to merit.
Read the rest at HBS.
March of the Penguins (La Marche de l'Empereur)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 July 2005 at Loews Harvard Square #3 (first-run)
A few weeks ago, a message board I frequent spawned a topic along the lines of "why are people spending money on a nature documentary? Don't they know that they can get this sort of thing for free on cable?" One of the interesting points of view in this discussion was that held by the people who said they would watch it for free on Animal Planet, and they'd spend more money to see a version half as long on an IMAX screen, but couldn't see the point of just seeing it as a regular movie. This saddens me, because it's well worth the ticket price, and all that seems to be keeping people out is genre prejudice.
The source of the film's appeal is so simple that one wonders why there aren't more high-profile nature documentaries - giving people a chance to see something extraordinary in an immersive environment. Sure, IMAX would be more immersive, but those gigantic cameras would be a real pain to haul around Antarctica and might be more likely to spook the birds. And while this type of film is more frequently seen on television than in multiplexes, that's a shame, because nature documentaries are among the types of films that benefit most from being seen on the big screen: You may be seeing the same pictures and hearing the same sounds, but it is a different experience to have the theater be a secondary presence around the edges of the film than to see the film through a portal in one's own living room.
Read the rest at HBS.
A State of Mind
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 September 2005 in the Coolidge Corner Theater's Screening Room (Coolidge Selects) (projected video)
Watching A State of Mind, two contradictory impressions of the people of North Korea went through my head. The first was that they were people like any other, and the ones we see are intelligent, hard-working, warm, and friendly. For the most part, they are exactly the kind of people one would desire as neighbors. The second impression is that they are part of some kind of quasi-religious cult, with the entire country serving as the planet's largest cult compound.
Scant few films have been made about North Korea, at least compared to films that use it as a generic villain, and this one initially purports to be less about the country itself than about one of its newer traditions, the Mass Games. The Games are a stunning pageant, combining music, gymnastics, and animated mosaics in a display that celebrates Communist principles. We follow two young Pyongyang girls, 13-year-old Pak Hyon-sun and 11-year-old Kim Song-yun, who spend hours after school each afternoon training for the Games, an event which happens once or twice a year, and carries great prestige because president Kim Jong-Il may be in attendance. The training is intense, and may all be for nothing if the school's group is not selected to participate in the pageant. But being selected is a great honor, and one the girls will work hard to merit.
Read the rest at HBS.
Monday, September 19, 2005
Boston Film Festival, Day Five: Swimmers
Missed Day Four, since even bailing out of work at 4:20,I couldn't get to Boston Common in time for Long Distance (grumble gumble one show Monday at 5:30 grumble grumble), and I figured Prime would play for < $10 within a few months; after all, it's a Universal picture with Uma Thurman and Meryl Streep. Of course, this was the line of reasoning that led me to skip Miramax's Fifth Wheel with Ben Affleck and Denise Richards a few years ago in favor of the astonishingly awful Edges of the Lord, but I was tired.
One thing about the cast of Swimmers: I ♥ Sarah Paulson and wish Warner would release Jack & Jill on DVD. That's all.
Swimmers
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 September 2005 at Loews Boston Common #17 (Boston Film Festival)
There's a neat question not quite articulated in Swimmers but which is at the heart and tone of the story: When is the worst time to lose the thing you do best and perhaps love most?
For 11-year-old Emma Tyler (Tara Devon Gallagher), that thing is swimming, Her narration describes how swimming is like flying through the water, and it's immediately obvious that this is her thing, which is why it's like a knife in the gut when midway through a meet she just suddenly sinks, having to be pulled out of the water and rushed to a hospital, where we find out that a blood vessel in her ear has burst, and she'll need expensive surgery to retain her hearing, let alone be able to swim again. That could be trouble, since her father Will (Robert Knott) has just run his oyster-and-crab fishing boat aground, cutting off the family's main source of income and leaving Will with a lot of unaccustomed time on her hands. Soon after, a troubled young woman returns to town after a long absence: Merrill (Sarah Paulson) draws the attention of Emma's policeman brother Clyde (Shawn Hatosy) when he thinks he's caught her trespassing, though it is in fact her house.
Movies with young protagonists invite additional scrutiny because their central performance has to display a level of skill normally associated with adults, or at least experienced actors, but also communicate the innocence and confusion of childhood - which the obtaining of experience tends to obliterate. The filmmakers appear to be lucky to have found that in Miss Gallagher, who is new enough to merit an "introducing" credit (though she is also one of the students in Mad Hot Ballroom, filmed after this picture), but appears to be capable enough to carry much of this film on her shoulders. It helps that she's not called upon to replicate stereotypical wide-eyed joyful innocence, which often comes off as saccharine; instead, she makes Emma sort of dour and observant, but not always capable of comprehending what she sees. She doesn't smile often; she's more likely to have that look of intense concentration that kids sometimes get when faced with a tricky task (or the need to ignore adults).
Robert Knott and Cherry Jones are very good as her parents. It's a somewhat familiar set-up: Father Will loses his livelihood and has a hard time adjusting; mother Julia holds the family together when he doesn't bounce back very quickly. There is, of course, drinking involved in Will's inability to cope, but Knott doesn't make him into a lush or someone who is gaining any kind of obvious escape by it. Rather, he's using it to fill time, and when we see him buying another 24-pack of beer, our reaction isn't necessarily that he's becoming a danger to himself or his family, but that that's money that could go toward his daughter's surgery. Julia, meanwhile, is practical about choosing her spots for confrontations. They play a believable older couple, one that has long catalogued and adapted to each other's faults and moods.
The other major player is Sarah Paulson's Merrill. She's a fairly screwed-up young woman, appearing half-crazy when we first meet her. But Clyde remembers her from high school (she was a senior when he was a freshman) and Emma's a nosy kid with too much time on her hands now that she can't swim. Merrill's pretty and mysterious and kind of scary, and for people who have spent their whole life in the same small town, that's a heck of a draw. It's nice to see Ms. Paulson in a more meaty role than the romantic comedy she's spent most of her career doing, and it's a nice performance - even though, in many ways, her character is the film's darkest and most despairing, she can't be too scary. This would be a different movie if we worried too much about Emma when the younger girl comes to visit; instead, we worry about Clyde. Shawn Hatosy plays the middle Tyler child as the sort of guy who can be cut down by his 11-year-old sister and is going to be in way over his head with a woman of Merrill's baggage. He's a simple man, disappointed that Will taught oldest brother Mike (Michael Mosley) the trade instead of him. Mike is Clyde's opposite; when he and Clyde go out looking for their father one night, we see Clyde's quiet sense of duty while Mike's cynicism irks us, even if it's partially justified.
The film is set in Oxford, Maryland, where writer/director Doug Sadler spent his youth, and all the details feel right. This isn't a film about a fishing community feeling the pinch, but it's an important component: We feel the family's quiet despair when there don't seem to be other options, or Will doesn't know much else. There's something very alien and off-center about the scene where Will's working in a hardware store. I like how he shoots the waterfront with affection but doesn't romanticize the blue-collar environment. The empty swimming pool in Merrill's back yard is a constant reminder of what both she and Emma have lost. And I particularly like a dinner scene where Emma is inexpertly using her hammer to crack open her crab, and it's an amusing thing going on in the background until the situation gets a bit more contentious, we see her get that look of concentration until she's pounding away angry. It's a nifty sequence, full of good character stuff from the adults and Miss Gallagher. The only really big misstep Sadler makes, I think, is the narration; Tara Gallagher's accent feels off and it seems to undercut how she doesn't totally understand what's going on.
The narration's just a few minutes out of the movie, though, and I like most of the rest. The local color adds to the realism without making the story feel only relevant to these people.
One thing about the cast of Swimmers: I ♥ Sarah Paulson and wish Warner would release Jack & Jill on DVD. That's all.
Swimmers
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 September 2005 at Loews Boston Common #17 (Boston Film Festival)
There's a neat question not quite articulated in Swimmers but which is at the heart and tone of the story: When is the worst time to lose the thing you do best and perhaps love most?
For 11-year-old Emma Tyler (Tara Devon Gallagher), that thing is swimming, Her narration describes how swimming is like flying through the water, and it's immediately obvious that this is her thing, which is why it's like a knife in the gut when midway through a meet she just suddenly sinks, having to be pulled out of the water and rushed to a hospital, where we find out that a blood vessel in her ear has burst, and she'll need expensive surgery to retain her hearing, let alone be able to swim again. That could be trouble, since her father Will (Robert Knott) has just run his oyster-and-crab fishing boat aground, cutting off the family's main source of income and leaving Will with a lot of unaccustomed time on her hands. Soon after, a troubled young woman returns to town after a long absence: Merrill (Sarah Paulson) draws the attention of Emma's policeman brother Clyde (Shawn Hatosy) when he thinks he's caught her trespassing, though it is in fact her house.
Movies with young protagonists invite additional scrutiny because their central performance has to display a level of skill normally associated with adults, or at least experienced actors, but also communicate the innocence and confusion of childhood - which the obtaining of experience tends to obliterate. The filmmakers appear to be lucky to have found that in Miss Gallagher, who is new enough to merit an "introducing" credit (though she is also one of the students in Mad Hot Ballroom, filmed after this picture), but appears to be capable enough to carry much of this film on her shoulders. It helps that she's not called upon to replicate stereotypical wide-eyed joyful innocence, which often comes off as saccharine; instead, she makes Emma sort of dour and observant, but not always capable of comprehending what she sees. She doesn't smile often; she's more likely to have that look of intense concentration that kids sometimes get when faced with a tricky task (or the need to ignore adults).
Robert Knott and Cherry Jones are very good as her parents. It's a somewhat familiar set-up: Father Will loses his livelihood and has a hard time adjusting; mother Julia holds the family together when he doesn't bounce back very quickly. There is, of course, drinking involved in Will's inability to cope, but Knott doesn't make him into a lush or someone who is gaining any kind of obvious escape by it. Rather, he's using it to fill time, and when we see him buying another 24-pack of beer, our reaction isn't necessarily that he's becoming a danger to himself or his family, but that that's money that could go toward his daughter's surgery. Julia, meanwhile, is practical about choosing her spots for confrontations. They play a believable older couple, one that has long catalogued and adapted to each other's faults and moods.
The other major player is Sarah Paulson's Merrill. She's a fairly screwed-up young woman, appearing half-crazy when we first meet her. But Clyde remembers her from high school (she was a senior when he was a freshman) and Emma's a nosy kid with too much time on her hands now that she can't swim. Merrill's pretty and mysterious and kind of scary, and for people who have spent their whole life in the same small town, that's a heck of a draw. It's nice to see Ms. Paulson in a more meaty role than the romantic comedy she's spent most of her career doing, and it's a nice performance - even though, in many ways, her character is the film's darkest and most despairing, she can't be too scary. This would be a different movie if we worried too much about Emma when the younger girl comes to visit; instead, we worry about Clyde. Shawn Hatosy plays the middle Tyler child as the sort of guy who can be cut down by his 11-year-old sister and is going to be in way over his head with a woman of Merrill's baggage. He's a simple man, disappointed that Will taught oldest brother Mike (Michael Mosley) the trade instead of him. Mike is Clyde's opposite; when he and Clyde go out looking for their father one night, we see Clyde's quiet sense of duty while Mike's cynicism irks us, even if it's partially justified.
The film is set in Oxford, Maryland, where writer/director Doug Sadler spent his youth, and all the details feel right. This isn't a film about a fishing community feeling the pinch, but it's an important component: We feel the family's quiet despair when there don't seem to be other options, or Will doesn't know much else. There's something very alien and off-center about the scene where Will's working in a hardware store. I like how he shoots the waterfront with affection but doesn't romanticize the blue-collar environment. The empty swimming pool in Merrill's back yard is a constant reminder of what both she and Emma have lost. And I particularly like a dinner scene where Emma is inexpertly using her hammer to crack open her crab, and it's an amusing thing going on in the background until the situation gets a bit more contentious, we see her get that look of concentration until she's pounding away angry. It's a nifty sequence, full of good character stuff from the adults and Miss Gallagher. The only really big misstep Sadler makes, I think, is the narration; Tara Gallagher's accent feels off and it seems to undercut how she doesn't totally understand what's going on.
The narration's just a few minutes out of the movie, though, and I like most of the rest. The local color adds to the realism without making the story feel only relevant to these people.
Saturday, September 17, 2005
Boston Film Festival, Day Three: Four Lane Highway and Johnny Slade's Greatest Hits
None of the Boston film festivals seem to attract much interest outside the area. That's not necessarily a bad thing - showing a local audience movies they wouldn't otherwise see - but it's tough to guage reactions when the crowds often seem entirely composed of family and friends. Sure, Johnny Slade's Greatest Hits sold out, but not because of any particular buzz, other than "I know someone in that movie!". There were a lot of local connections for Touched, too. Wannabe was nearly deserted, and a good chunk of the audience for When Do We Eat? were Roswell fans excited about seeing Shiri Appleby. Four Lane Highway wasn't exactly packed, nor was Swimmers.
Boston probably won't ever be an influential film festival - it runs concurrently with Toronto, although Slamdance has gained some notereity as an alternative to Sundance - but the audiences for these films suggest that not only is Boston not drawing outside audiences, but the locals are only seeing studio previews or things of local interest.
Four Lane Highway
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 September 2005 at Loews Boston Common #17 (Boston Film Festival)
Four Lane Highway is the kind of independent film that appeals to the independent film fans as a clique. Its characters are almost all artists of some sort; it's all about relationships and personal weakness rather than about facing some challenge from without. Part of it takes place against the backdrop of a New York "scene" (in this case, the art scene, but the specifics aren't terribly important). It's the kind of film that gets most of its audience at festivals, after which the audience falls all over themselves to say how great it is that there are true artists out there making smart films about people. And they're right; it is nice for this kind of film to get made, even if this particular example is not exactly exceptional.
Sean (Frederick Weller) and Lyle (Reg Rogers) are educated, articulate men of around thirty who live in a small Maine college town and mostly put their brains to use chatting up college girls. As Sean is leaving making his way off campus one morning, he sees a sign about a former faculty member's gallery show in New York. This artist is his former girlfriend Molly (Greer Goodman), who left him two years ago. He decides to drive to New York to confront her, or see her work, or something. Lyle tags along, and we flash back to how the relationship started and how it fell apart.
This is, for the most part, an actors' movie, and leads Weller and Goodman are excellent choices for their roles. They're good-looking, of course, but not model-pretty; a fair amount of Goodman's expressiveness is derived from the lines around her eyes. She's often a better actress than she at first appears, with her early line readings seeming sort of flat, or a little bit more heartfelt than they need to be. It's the style of acting one might associate with the theater, but also somewhat appropriate because we first see her in Sean's flashbacks, and I imagine that in those we're often seeing an idealized version of her - or at least an idealized pest, when she tries to convince him to start writing again. She becomes much more nuanced and natural when we meet her in the present day.
Weller (not the one in Robocop) plays the character we spend the most time following, and Sean's an interesting enough specimen. Sean is a blue-collar guy partly by choice and partly by default, and he hits the combination pretty much spot-on, projecting an uncomplicated image but able to pull out the intellect when necessary (and even then, when he explains why he doesn't particularly like sculpture to a snotty art writer, it's not using big words, but making a strong argument). He makes a perfectly miserable drunk, which is appropriate. He communicates feelings well, which is the most important part of the job for this role.
Decent, but somewhat less impressive, are Reg Rogers and Elizabeth Rodriguez as the roommates. These are characters that exist mostly to give the principals someone to talk to (or, more often, lectured by), although they also serve as surrogates by which director writer/director Dylan McCormick can talk about addictions. Rogers's Lyle is an alcoholic, constantly with a drink in his hand, and though he's usually the cheerful, friendly type of drunk, he's a pathetic figure. Too much of the last act of the movie, when we really should be concentrating on what's going on with Sean and Molly, is spent on him being taken to task, hitting bottom, trying to get help, etc. Indeed, Drink seems to be the root of all evil in the film's latter half, as Lyle crashes, we see that Sean was drinking during most of the times things went wrong with Molly, we're told his no-good father was a drunk, and the bartender who has kicked the habit solemnly tells us that it isn't the solution to one's problems. There's nothing wrong with a pro-sobriety message, but if Sean's drinking was the main problem in the relationship, that's not very interesting; and if not, then that's a lot of late-movie time spent on a secondary issue. In contrast, the promiscuity of Rodriguez's Sasha is hit just often enough to be distracting, but never amounts to much other than her looking at a passed-out Lyle with a look on her face that says "wow, in my own way I'm as pathetic as him!"
So if the conflict doesn't arise from the drinking, what is its source? Apparently, Molly's conviction that Sean isn't reaching his potential because he hasn't written in years, because he fears being unable to live up to his famous-writer father (who told Sean that his first story was only published as a curiosity, since he's the son of the man who wrote "Four Lane Highway"). The trouble is - we are never given any reason to believe that Sean is any kind of gifted writer. We don't read his writing, or hear it read; we just see him freeze up when asked to tell his nieces a story. So, if the audience is thinking "damn, woman, just accept that not everybody is some kind of artist and leave him alone! No wonder he feels driven to drink!", isn't it kind of pathetic that he's crawling back to her two years later? What should be evidence of growth and maturation looks a bit like spinelessness. Perhaps even worse, it's not Molly's confidence that spurs him to change, but something which, if he really had matured, wouldn't have so much of an effect.
As much chemistry as Weller and Goodman may have - and one does get a warm fuzzy when seeing them together during the good times - it's not really a relationship worth rooting for. It should be, but the fairly major miscalculation of spending more time on drinking than writing sabotages a potentially very good movie. It's a shame, because it's well-shot and acted, with both the New York and "Maine" (actually Chatham, NY) locations nicely chosen. McCormick has a knack for showing how fine the border between homey & comfortable and run-down can be, both in the New York trendy lofts hidden behind grafitti and how Sean's house looks when he's with Molly compared to after she leaves.
So, it's not a particularly good movie about relationships and people, but it doesn't outright stink.
Johnny Slade's Greatest Hits
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 September 2005 at Loews Boston Common #17 (Boston Film Festival)
Johnny Slade's Greatest Hits gives the appearance of being a sketch of some sort stretched to feature length. The credits include mention that star John Fiore created the character of Johnny Slade, although Larry Blamire is credited with the screenplay. Watching it, I could imagine how it worked - Fiore comes out as Slade, sings a silly song, banters with the audience a little, and so on. It's kind of a good bit, especially since the songs aren't bad at all. Once you get Johnny off the stage, he's out of his element a bit, but he's also likable enough that the movie actually does a bit better than avoiding being a chore.
Johnny Slade (Fiore) is a Boston-area lounge singer who refuses to sing anything but his own compositions, which are eccentric. He plays to empty houses and occasionally cuts an album on a vanity label, and is considering hanging it up. Then, one day, he's offered a new job out of the blue - headlining at a classy new club. The only hitch is that he has to sing a song written by the reclusive Mr. Samantha (Vincent Curatola) every night - songs which don't make any sense, but seem to correspond to the next morning's crime news. Soon, he figures out what's going on, but he can't just get out: Samantha's men, the Irish mob, the FBI, and sexy club owner Charlie Payne (Dolores Sirianni) all know what's up, and stopping could be hazardous to his health.
It's a thoroughly preposterous story, of course; the plot has as many holes as a thing with a great many holes. The characters are all, initially, sort of obnoxious, but they soften as the movie continues - a little fear does wonders for Johnny's cockiness; Samantha comes to enjoy writing his goofy lyrics (although Johnny doesn't like the idea of being considered a joke); and Charlie takes a shine to Johnny. We learn a little more about them, and hearing that Johnny works blue-collar jobs between gigs softens him a little. He's just trying to chase dreams, as is his agent Jerry (Richard Portnow), who would really like Johnny to hit it big so that he can get rid of the used car lot.
What makes Slade work as well as it does, I think, is that unlike most expansions of a character bit (if that's what this is), the title character plays the straight man most of the time. Sure, his songs are silly, along with the album covers we see in the opening credit montage - "The Soda Fountain of Love" is especially double entendre-rific. When he's dealing with the mobsters and feds, he tends more toward "last sane man in the city". It's not a great performance, but Fiore also writes most of his own songs, and is a surprisingly appealing leading man. Not bad for a guy who has made a career out guest-starring on Law & Order and The Sopranos.
The rest of the cast seems to be mostly composed of New York's B-list and local Boston guys. Portnow gets more than a few funny moments, as does Curatola as the oily, bad-tempered mob boss hiding out in a ridiculously small office (it's nigh-impossible for Fiore's Slade to fit into the chair on the other side of Samantha's desk, since there's no room to pull it out). Dolores Sirianni makes both an entertaining foil and love interest for Slade. Also amusing is Jennifer Blaire as Angela, a textbook mix of sex appeal and psychosis working for the Irish mob.
Ms. Blaire is undoubtedly in the movie in part because she is married to the film's writter director, Larry Blamire. Blamire's IMDB biography lists him as primarily being a playwright, but he's worked in film before. Unfortunately, his previous film is The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, a painful failure to recreate the campy atmosphere of 1950s monster movies. In a way, Johnny Slade is another attempt to do deliberate camp, with Slade's songs being corny by design, much of the plot being composed of bad clichés, and a thug's deliberate attempt to create a catchphrase (although I admit, the idea of a guy atually making an effort to end every sentence with the phrase "like a f---ing monkey" is a good parody of characters who beat a phrase to death). As with Skeleton, though, the jokes and plotlines are all fairly obvious and straightforward, stuff a clever twelve-year-old with the right pop-culture background could have come up with. It works better here, since everyone involved is trying to make a good movie, as opposed to trying to get you to laugh at how bad it is, but the double meaning of the title is about as clever as the movie gets.
That doesn't count against it; there's some genuine talent in its cast of character actors given larger roles, and they execute fairly well. I wonder, though, whether I'd love it in a regular screening, as opposed to a packed house that included a lot of family and friends of the local cast and crew. Laughter is contagious, after all, and this is a crowd well-predisposed to like the film.
Boston probably won't ever be an influential film festival - it runs concurrently with Toronto, although Slamdance has gained some notereity as an alternative to Sundance - but the audiences for these films suggest that not only is Boston not drawing outside audiences, but the locals are only seeing studio previews or things of local interest.
Four Lane Highway
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 September 2005 at Loews Boston Common #17 (Boston Film Festival)
Four Lane Highway is the kind of independent film that appeals to the independent film fans as a clique. Its characters are almost all artists of some sort; it's all about relationships and personal weakness rather than about facing some challenge from without. Part of it takes place against the backdrop of a New York "scene" (in this case, the art scene, but the specifics aren't terribly important). It's the kind of film that gets most of its audience at festivals, after which the audience falls all over themselves to say how great it is that there are true artists out there making smart films about people. And they're right; it is nice for this kind of film to get made, even if this particular example is not exactly exceptional.
Sean (Frederick Weller) and Lyle (Reg Rogers) are educated, articulate men of around thirty who live in a small Maine college town and mostly put their brains to use chatting up college girls. As Sean is leaving making his way off campus one morning, he sees a sign about a former faculty member's gallery show in New York. This artist is his former girlfriend Molly (Greer Goodman), who left him two years ago. He decides to drive to New York to confront her, or see her work, or something. Lyle tags along, and we flash back to how the relationship started and how it fell apart.
This is, for the most part, an actors' movie, and leads Weller and Goodman are excellent choices for their roles. They're good-looking, of course, but not model-pretty; a fair amount of Goodman's expressiveness is derived from the lines around her eyes. She's often a better actress than she at first appears, with her early line readings seeming sort of flat, or a little bit more heartfelt than they need to be. It's the style of acting one might associate with the theater, but also somewhat appropriate because we first see her in Sean's flashbacks, and I imagine that in those we're often seeing an idealized version of her - or at least an idealized pest, when she tries to convince him to start writing again. She becomes much more nuanced and natural when we meet her in the present day.
Weller (not the one in Robocop) plays the character we spend the most time following, and Sean's an interesting enough specimen. Sean is a blue-collar guy partly by choice and partly by default, and he hits the combination pretty much spot-on, projecting an uncomplicated image but able to pull out the intellect when necessary (and even then, when he explains why he doesn't particularly like sculpture to a snotty art writer, it's not using big words, but making a strong argument). He makes a perfectly miserable drunk, which is appropriate. He communicates feelings well, which is the most important part of the job for this role.
Decent, but somewhat less impressive, are Reg Rogers and Elizabeth Rodriguez as the roommates. These are characters that exist mostly to give the principals someone to talk to (or, more often, lectured by), although they also serve as surrogates by which director writer/director Dylan McCormick can talk about addictions. Rogers's Lyle is an alcoholic, constantly with a drink in his hand, and though he's usually the cheerful, friendly type of drunk, he's a pathetic figure. Too much of the last act of the movie, when we really should be concentrating on what's going on with Sean and Molly, is spent on him being taken to task, hitting bottom, trying to get help, etc. Indeed, Drink seems to be the root of all evil in the film's latter half, as Lyle crashes, we see that Sean was drinking during most of the times things went wrong with Molly, we're told his no-good father was a drunk, and the bartender who has kicked the habit solemnly tells us that it isn't the solution to one's problems. There's nothing wrong with a pro-sobriety message, but if Sean's drinking was the main problem in the relationship, that's not very interesting; and if not, then that's a lot of late-movie time spent on a secondary issue. In contrast, the promiscuity of Rodriguez's Sasha is hit just often enough to be distracting, but never amounts to much other than her looking at a passed-out Lyle with a look on her face that says "wow, in my own way I'm as pathetic as him!"
So if the conflict doesn't arise from the drinking, what is its source? Apparently, Molly's conviction that Sean isn't reaching his potential because he hasn't written in years, because he fears being unable to live up to his famous-writer father (who told Sean that his first story was only published as a curiosity, since he's the son of the man who wrote "Four Lane Highway"). The trouble is - we are never given any reason to believe that Sean is any kind of gifted writer. We don't read his writing, or hear it read; we just see him freeze up when asked to tell his nieces a story. So, if the audience is thinking "damn, woman, just accept that not everybody is some kind of artist and leave him alone! No wonder he feels driven to drink!", isn't it kind of pathetic that he's crawling back to her two years later? What should be evidence of growth and maturation looks a bit like spinelessness. Perhaps even worse, it's not Molly's confidence that spurs him to change, but something which, if he really had matured, wouldn't have so much of an effect.
As much chemistry as Weller and Goodman may have - and one does get a warm fuzzy when seeing them together during the good times - it's not really a relationship worth rooting for. It should be, but the fairly major miscalculation of spending more time on drinking than writing sabotages a potentially very good movie. It's a shame, because it's well-shot and acted, with both the New York and "Maine" (actually Chatham, NY) locations nicely chosen. McCormick has a knack for showing how fine the border between homey & comfortable and run-down can be, both in the New York trendy lofts hidden behind grafitti and how Sean's house looks when he's with Molly compared to after she leaves.
So, it's not a particularly good movie about relationships and people, but it doesn't outright stink.
Johnny Slade's Greatest Hits
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 September 2005 at Loews Boston Common #17 (Boston Film Festival)
Johnny Slade's Greatest Hits gives the appearance of being a sketch of some sort stretched to feature length. The credits include mention that star John Fiore created the character of Johnny Slade, although Larry Blamire is credited with the screenplay. Watching it, I could imagine how it worked - Fiore comes out as Slade, sings a silly song, banters with the audience a little, and so on. It's kind of a good bit, especially since the songs aren't bad at all. Once you get Johnny off the stage, he's out of his element a bit, but he's also likable enough that the movie actually does a bit better than avoiding being a chore.
Johnny Slade (Fiore) is a Boston-area lounge singer who refuses to sing anything but his own compositions, which are eccentric. He plays to empty houses and occasionally cuts an album on a vanity label, and is considering hanging it up. Then, one day, he's offered a new job out of the blue - headlining at a classy new club. The only hitch is that he has to sing a song written by the reclusive Mr. Samantha (Vincent Curatola) every night - songs which don't make any sense, but seem to correspond to the next morning's crime news. Soon, he figures out what's going on, but he can't just get out: Samantha's men, the Irish mob, the FBI, and sexy club owner Charlie Payne (Dolores Sirianni) all know what's up, and stopping could be hazardous to his health.
It's a thoroughly preposterous story, of course; the plot has as many holes as a thing with a great many holes. The characters are all, initially, sort of obnoxious, but they soften as the movie continues - a little fear does wonders for Johnny's cockiness; Samantha comes to enjoy writing his goofy lyrics (although Johnny doesn't like the idea of being considered a joke); and Charlie takes a shine to Johnny. We learn a little more about them, and hearing that Johnny works blue-collar jobs between gigs softens him a little. He's just trying to chase dreams, as is his agent Jerry (Richard Portnow), who would really like Johnny to hit it big so that he can get rid of the used car lot.
What makes Slade work as well as it does, I think, is that unlike most expansions of a character bit (if that's what this is), the title character plays the straight man most of the time. Sure, his songs are silly, along with the album covers we see in the opening credit montage - "The Soda Fountain of Love" is especially double entendre-rific. When he's dealing with the mobsters and feds, he tends more toward "last sane man in the city". It's not a great performance, but Fiore also writes most of his own songs, and is a surprisingly appealing leading man. Not bad for a guy who has made a career out guest-starring on Law & Order and The Sopranos.
The rest of the cast seems to be mostly composed of New York's B-list and local Boston guys. Portnow gets more than a few funny moments, as does Curatola as the oily, bad-tempered mob boss hiding out in a ridiculously small office (it's nigh-impossible for Fiore's Slade to fit into the chair on the other side of Samantha's desk, since there's no room to pull it out). Dolores Sirianni makes both an entertaining foil and love interest for Slade. Also amusing is Jennifer Blaire as Angela, a textbook mix of sex appeal and psychosis working for the Irish mob.
Ms. Blaire is undoubtedly in the movie in part because she is married to the film's writter director, Larry Blamire. Blamire's IMDB biography lists him as primarily being a playwright, but he's worked in film before. Unfortunately, his previous film is The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, a painful failure to recreate the campy atmosphere of 1950s monster movies. In a way, Johnny Slade is another attempt to do deliberate camp, with Slade's songs being corny by design, much of the plot being composed of bad clichés, and a thug's deliberate attempt to create a catchphrase (although I admit, the idea of a guy atually making an effort to end every sentence with the phrase "like a f---ing monkey" is a good parody of characters who beat a phrase to death). As with Skeleton, though, the jokes and plotlines are all fairly obvious and straightforward, stuff a clever twelve-year-old with the right pop-culture background could have come up with. It works better here, since everyone involved is trying to make a good movie, as opposed to trying to get you to laugh at how bad it is, but the double meaning of the title is about as clever as the movie gets.
That doesn't count against it; there's some genuine talent in its cast of character actors given larger roles, and they execute fairly well. I wonder, though, whether I'd love it in a regular screening, as opposed to a packed house that included a lot of family and friends of the local cast and crew. Laughter is contagious, after all, and this is a crowd well-predisposed to like the film.
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