Author: jeff

Gorgeous Degradation

It’s hard to like a film about a broken-down, narcissistic head-banger with a special gift for sentimentalism and self-destruction. Having the character played by Mickey Rourke doesn’t make it any easier. I’ve always thought of Rourke as something of an oddball, and Darren Aronofsky has provided him the perfect character to both rehabilitate and reify his superfreaky aura. The first forty minutes of The Wrestler burn past with a searing, nearly anthropological furor. I have to admit I was initially enthralled by this portrait of a sub-culture that would ordinarily leave me more than cold. The writing is lean, raw and intense, the acting honest and risky, and Aronofsky utilizes hand held cameras to give the film a DIY, Def Leppard-worthy, visual punch. Shortly thereafter the film settles into something more recognizable and less surprising, but that’s to be expected I guess. Rourke is good, maybe even great. Marisa Tomei is also really good.

Curious Indeed

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a stunning technical achievement in filmmaking. In some ways it is a valentine to the grand pleasures of movie making, but director David Fincher has put his computers to use on a haunting, emotionally resonant, and deeply satisfying story full of heart and soul and loss and love. It’s a movie star movie—a sweeping, epic, Hollywood romance—and one of my favorite films of the year. Continue reading Curious Indeed

Un film de Arnaud Desplechin: Un conte de Noël

Full of heart and bile, whiskey drenched and reeking of cigarettes, A Christmas Tale hurls the viewer headfirst into a sprawling, gloriously messy, bourgeois comedy populated by a likeable, charming though often irascible, family full of sad-sacks, philosophers and self-obsessed neurotics. There’s the matriarch, Junon (Catherine Deneuve), a dragon lady who exudes maternal warmth when necessary; her husband Abel, who works diligently to keep the peace; their oldest daughter, Elizabeth, a successful playwright who banished her irredeemable younger brother, Henri (Mathieu Amalric), six years earlier; and the baby of the family, Ivan, whose puppyish contentment belies his own fading youth. Hovering above all is the ghost of young Joseph, the first-born son who died from leukemia at age six (Henri was conceived in hopes that his placenta would heal his dying, older brother). These folks, their spouses and children, gather together for a Christmas celebration tinged with dry-eyed melancholy. Junon has recently been diagnosed with leukemia and needs a donor match for a bone-marrow transplant. Thus, much to Elizabeth’s chagrin, Henri returns to the fold. Continue reading Un film de Arnaud Desplechin: Un conte de Noël

Short Takes: Three Films

After voting for Obama, I drove over to Minneapolis to see Happy-Go-Lucky (so as to avoid the internet and CNN). Mike Leigh’s latest functions as a kind of yin to Naked’s yang, centering on a truly happy woman who carefully and successfully negotiates the angry, xenophobic, violent, unfair world that streams around her. Sally Hawkins delivers a lovely, quirky yet believable performance. Her Poppy may be happy but she’s no flake. An elementary school teacher who has traveled the world with her best friend and flatmate Zoe (fine, grounded work by newcomer Alexis Zegerman), Poppy likes to party about as much as she enjoys taking the piss out of life’s rude awakenings. The film opens on one such event when her bike is stolen and Poppy is forced, for the first time, to learn how to drive. It is her driving lessons with Scott (Eddie Marsan channeling David Thewlis) that provides the main thrust of the dramatic action. Continue reading Short Takes: Three Films

Slumdog Millionaire

Danny Boyle’s much ballyhooed film is a crowd pleasing tale of star crossed lovers searching for connection on the busy streets of Mumbai. Simplistic and sentimental, the dramatic action, which jumps back and forth in time throughout, cribs generously from a variety of sources: Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the musical Annie, Bollywood, Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick, Fernando Meirelles’ City of God, and Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay (with an odd nod to August Strindberg’s Miss Julie). The story centers on Jamal, a young Muslim boy, and his older brother, Salim, both orphaned after a violent attack by ravaging Hindus (or so I’m left to assume). A third youngster, the lovely and beautiful Latika, joins the brothers and soon the melodramatics kick into high gear. As a young man some fifteen to twenty years down the road, Jamal works his way onto “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire” (or “Kaun Banega Crorepati,” which appears to be a cultural phenomenon throughout southeast Asia), and the film is structured around how this young, uneducated “chai wallah” utilizes his “hard knock life” as a tatterdemalion to answer enough questions to potentially win 20 million rupees on national television. Each question triggers a flashback and so forth and so on. I’m doing my best not to give too much away except my mild disappointment in this thick slab of populist entertainment.

One could argue that Slumdog Millionaire chronicles India’s economic ascent during the age of globalization, but the film’s lurid portrait of India is painted in oversaturated hues. The film itself is visually busy—unnecessarily so. Everyone is corrupt, filth and degradation cover all most surfaces, and idealistic young love is a crap shoot at best. One thing that intrigued me is that Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy seem to extol western virtues throughout, celebrating a “pick yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality that privileges individual will over the community. Perhaps such notions are also celebrated in India. I’ll be curious to hear what others have to say.

MILK

Although the events depicted occurred thirty years ago, Gus Van Sant’s Milk feels culturally fresh and politically relevant—a new film for a new American order about a community organizer preaching for hope and change. Milk is a bio-pic but it avoids many if not all of the genre’s pitfalls by focusing on an eight-year period in Harvey Milk’s life, specifically narrowing in on the anxieties and community tensions surrounding the controversial 1978 vote for the Briggs Initiative, otherwise known as Proposition 6, a law that, if passed, would ban gays and lesbians and anyone who openly supported GLBT rights from teaching in the California public schools. This, if you are old enough to remember, was one of orange juice fascist Anita Bryant’s (the Ur-Sarah Palin but also one of the first celebrity voices of the nascent American culture wars) efforts to rid America of degenerates in order to “Save Our Children” from the “homosexual agenda.” Now there’s a bio-pic worth making, but I’ll leave that to John Waters. Continue reading MILK

Quantum of Solace

James goes rogue like Sarah Palin
I sat through 100 minutes and man I am a ailin’

But seriously . . . noisy and incomprehensible, the new Bond film can’t be recommended. It seems to have something to do with South American water futures and a clandestine shadow organization–a nefarious agency of evil hitherto unknown to MI6, the CIA, and, for good measure, the KGB. It’s a cold, impersonal film without a jot of wit or humor or even, god forbid, joy (Bond is in full-tilt revenge mode and the Bond “girl” is surly not sexy). Still, it moves at a fever pitch, and most (Chris) won’t mind suffering through the swift ninety-nine minutes. There was a cool sequence that took place during a mammoth, postmodern production of Puccini’s Tosca, and I did appreciate Forster’s eye for catchy architecture, but that’s about all I got.

Rachel Getting Married

HTM!!! Imagine Robert Redford’s Ordinary People–hopped up on steroids—colliding into a three-day “One World” music festival (you know: Peter Gabriel, Amadou and Mariam, Beausoleil, Damon Alburn, Jorge Ben, Clube Do Balanço, Manu Chao, Daft Punk, Toots and the Maytals, Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba, and, yes, TV on the Radio). I’ve grown highly suspect of movies about white people living in seven million dollar Connecticut estates; all this east coast, upper-class, boho bonhomie starts to scratch away at my spleen. No matter how many virtuous, upstanding people of color Jonathan Demme pours into the frame, Rachel Getting Married is still an over-the-top American tragedy about white people in carefully appointed rooms. That being said, Anne Hathaway gives a stunning, transcendent, raw and emotional, career-changing performance. It’s the best acting I’ve seen on the big screen since Daniel Day Lewis drilled for oil. If only Jenny Lumet had toned down the dramaturgical dead ends and shrill histrionics and Demme had exiled the great majority of his buddies and family members to the catering tables (I kept expecting Spalding Gray to return from the dead), the film might have settled in on a potentially lacerating evisceration of family dysfunction . . . but no, this is a world where Robyn Hitchcock sings songs in the backyard during a reception best described as a coalition of rainbows . . . I’ll take Margo at the Wedding, thank you.