The first forty-five minutes or so are slower than expected (there’s a lot of musty exposition to wade through and all is delivered via solemn arias, duets and trios). This, I thought, was for fans of Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, Stephen Sondheim and Dante Ferretti only (OK, so that’s a pretty big group of fans and they were being well-rewarded, but still). Then the blood starts to flow (and flow) and the mood grows darker, more macabre, more wickedly comic, and the narrative’s original melodramatic leanings give way to something best labled Jacobean revenge tragedy. I’m a fan of Hal Prince’s 1979 staging–which can be found on VHS and DVD here and there–with its Brechtian flourishes and its larger than life Grand Guignol gestures; but Burton strives for something more intimate, more interior, less stagy. Poetic justice has no room in Burton’s version of Sondheim’s musical and, therefore, sweet sailor Anthony Hope and Judge Turpin’s “pretty little ward” Johanna are somewhat minimized in order to focus more specifically on Sweeney Todd’s obsessive desire to avenge the destruction of his family. The film has its share of flaws, but I think it may be one of Burton’s greatest achievements. The stunningly beautiful, stunningly grotesque, stunningly bloody final tableau may be Burton’s most compassionately horrific image ever committed to celluloid.
Author: jeff
Two-Lane Blacktop
I’m surprised how much I liked this film; its fanciful reification of American myths as played out by three car jockeys and a hippie drifter girl on the homosocial backroads of early-seventies America is both nostalgically evocative and comically addictive. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson can’t act their way out of paper bags, but the script doesn’t really ask much from them. They eat, sleep and shit car-talk; the scenes they occupy are so pure, generically speaking, they’re apt to put you to sleep. The film’s heart and soul, however, belongs to the trickster/mythmaker “G.T.O.” As played to perfection by Warren Oates, this character is a slippery, mercurial, American original, and Oates races away with the film. While Oates’ iconic character may attempt to steal fire from the gods, he’s also haunted by a nagging rootlessness. “If I’m not grounded soon, I’m going to go into orbit” he cautions himself. It’s a moment both touching and ludicrous, yet Oates makes you believe.
I’m Not There
Caught an early screening of the new Todd Haynes film tonight. I’m thinking I should have taken a few notes. Haynes is deconstructing the bio-pic from every angle while urgently demystifying the mythologies swirling around a mercurial artist like Bob Dylan . . . and it mostly works, up to a point, though the thing is messy and insidery (hell, I have no idea who Sara Lownds is). It didn’t help sitting in an audience full of Dylan purists (it is Minnesota after all) who hung on every slippery yet iconic image Haynes was willing to offer up. Still, I’m not going to call it a mess nor do I think it is overtly intellectual. As you’ve probably heard, Haynes cast six actors to take on his vision of “Bob Dylan;” there’s the eleven-year-old black kid singin’ the blues and riding the trains, the twenty-year-old poet (Dylan as Rimbaud), the intensely politicized folk singer turned Christian evangelical, the plugged-in rock-n-roll asshole, the celebrity movie star misogynist, and the runaway cowboy hiding out from the law. Variations on Alan Ginsberg, Jean Baez, Lownds, the Beatles, and Edie Sedgwick also move in and out of the scenes. Haynes lovingly quotes Fellini, D.A. Pennebaker, Godard, seventies style talking-head documentaries, Sam Peckinpah, Conrad Hall, and others. Ultimately, the film appears to be an insightful meditation on race, power, identity, celebrity, America, war, sex, conformity, freedom, etc., but mostly the film sounds a discordantly pessimistic note as it interrogates the notion that any artist can and/or should be held responsible for advocating social justice and inciting social change. Haynes’ Dylan is a supremely narcissistic chameleon unwilling and perhaps unable to speak for any generation. If you want to keep a low profile, never create anything one of the Dylans remarks to the camera. Embedded within the act of creation are the seeds of destruction . . . and it’s the destruction, man . . . it’s the destruction that’s blowing in the wind. The times, they don’t seem to be changing one damn bit.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Caught Ken Loach’s latest, which won the 2006 Palm d’Or at Cannes, and was surprisingly disappointed (I like Loach’s work). It’s not that it’s a bad movie necessarily (it is, uncharacteristically, gorgeous to look at), but it is just so earnest and prosaic, pedantic even (obviously, when it comes to the Irish “troubles,” there are absolutely no shades of grey for Mr. Loach). Cillian Murphy, still too pretty for his own good, plays a young medical student preparing to leave his home in County Cork and head to London for residency training. It’s 1920–six years after the Defence of the Realm Act banned any public meeting which threatened British security–and on his last day on the Emerald Isle Murphy participates in a game of pick-up field hockey which is interrupted by the nastiest “Black and Tan” soldier this side of Voldemort. Let’s just say the British are very, very bad and the Irish “freedom fighters” are stubborn angels with dirty faces. Still undeterred (his masculinity threatened by his older brother), Murphy (and the audience) must undergo a second act of extremely distasteful abuse/torture at a train station the following day before Cillian comes to his senses, gives up his education and joins the IRA. There’s lots of fighting and blood and death and betrayal (including the 1921 signing of the Anglo-Irish peace treaty) before Murphy’s character is quickly martyred and the end credits roll. Oh yeah, there’s also a love story involving a red-headed gal named Sinead. Perhaps if I hadn’t recently watched Martin McDonagh’s absurdly comic, hyper-violent short “Six Shooter” (which takes the extreme piss out of Irish narratives like The Wind That Shakes the Barley), I might have been more inclined to buy into Loach’s overtly romanticized history play, but Barley is a film I just can’t recommend.
Hairspray
Sublimely naïve yet boisterously entertaining, Hairspray may be the best movie musical since Grease. Its celebration of human tolerance, cross-cultural communication, desegregation, and interracial romance may be simplistic, but it is a simplicity enhanced by a light-hearted irreverence and a collection of infectiously toe-tapping show tunes by Marc Sherman (South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut). Adam Shankman stages everything with eccentric, enthusiastic flair (he directs and choreographs). No slice and dice MTV-style editing here, but a loving tribute to what makes the American musical great: strong material, excellent acting and singing, soaring highs and a climatic set-piece that made me want to dance in the aisle (don’t worry Arnab, I didn’t). Sure it lacks John Waters’ squalidly romantic nostalgia for the Baltimore of his childhood, but that doesn’t mean Hairspray–a campy, magical confection for all tastes–isn’t a supremely confident work of pop culture.
I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry
Everytime I see the trailer for this film I feel the fury of righteous indignation (“that’s not how anybody should roll in anybody’s house” I scream to myself); I even want to boo the screen but I haven’t. Nathan Lee’s review in the Village Voice, however, is a hoot and a smart rejoinder to straight gentiles like myself. And Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor get credit for a rewrite, which is interesting, but probably not interesting enough for me to see the film. Still, Nathan Lee rocks!
Paris Je T’aime
Viewed this with the wife a couple of days ago, and it truly caught me by surprise. Whimsical, silly, fantastical, heartbreaking, glorious, honest and joyful, Paris Je T’aime is a delight. At two hours these eighteen short films/vingettes (each shot in a separate arondissement) almost beg to be watched on DVD, but there is something to be said for seeing them all at once as there is only a couple of duds (surprisingly, Alphonso Cuaron turns in a particularly banal sequence), a number of enjoyable throwaways (often built around a comic anagnorisis), and many true gems. Continue reading Paris Je T’aime
Knocked Up
Nobody’s posted on this one yet so I’ll give it a go. It is really hard to dislike this movie, though I did feel a bit let down after the comic delights of The 40 Year Old Virgin. The laughs are generous, the pacing a bit sluggish and the premise is ludicrous at best. Basically, a hot girl picks up a beta-male, they have sex, he repells her with his immaturity the following morning, and eight weeks later she discovers she’s pregnant. Fair enough; high concept. But then something odd happens. The script asks us to believe these two should automatically fall in love because there’s a baby on the way. Sure, you go to a rom-com for happy endings and without some conflict the climatic scenes lack proper generic decorum, but Knocked Up asks us to believe that two characters who have had one somewhat unfortunate evening and are about as compatible as cheese and chalk would be holding hands and picking out gynaecologists together as if that’s what happens. Basically, I wanted these two to fall for each other despite themselves (as if by accident after a series of carefully scripted scenes in which major obstacles and ah ha moments merge into something fresh and believable, love finds a way), and I guess that’s what the film thinks it’s doing but it is not. That being said, I would like to return to this idea of the film’s generosity. Continue reading Knocked Up
A Mighty Heart
Based on Mariane Pearl’s account of her husband’s brutal murder by al-Qaeda operative Sheikh Omar Saeed, this is one of the best films I’ve seen all summer yet it is quickly disappearing into the late summer night as threequals, talking rats and John McClane gobble up audience attention. That’s too bad, because A Mighty Heart is a smart, well acted and directed police procedural that is very tricky about playing into and interrogating the spectator’s desire for justice and revenge (not to mention Western privilege). Sure, you know what’s going to happen, but the power of the film is in the details. At times disorienting, this film (shot in Winterbottom’s trademark documentary style) rarely slows down but carries the viewer into the discombobulating world that is Pakistan, cutting back and forth from Pearl’s affluent home (a makeshift headquarters for her and her associates as they wait for information) and the chaotic streets, restaurants and apartment buildings of Karachi where police search incessantly for witnesses and criminals. Continue reading A Mighty Heart
A Couple of Monster Movies (with subtitles)
So, I don’t want to rain on Anthony Lane’s parade, but I’m not sure I get all the love flowing toward Bong Joon-ho and The Host. It’s an entertaining genre movie, for the most part, and it does stretch generic conventions in unique ways, but I’m not entirely sure it adds up to a coherently good film (and it could have benefited from a few more judicious cuts). If you want a good monster movie, this ain’t it (I’d recommend Carpenter’s The Thing, Spielberg’s Jaws, and Dante’s–with caveats to John Sayles–Piranha). If you are interested in a film about a histrionic dysfunctional family who band together over the loss of a loved one while traveling in a van, well . . . insert your own Little Miss Sunshine plug here. If you like your foreign films to couple wall-to-wall action with an incisive critique of post-industrial, post-Cold War national identity, I’d say Beckmambetov’s Night Watch is the better, more entertaining, more culturally engaging genre flick (as Reynolds’ enthusiasm seems to suggest when he pointed us to the trailer for part two of that trilogy). If you like narratives about the ironies of miscommunication in a digital world, I’d say pop The Departed (or even Infernal Affairs) back in the DVD player. I guess I’m saying I’m not the fan I thought I would be and that’s too bad . . . I’ve been tracking this film with great enthusiasm for well over a year. It’s a solid film but nothing I want to see again with any zeal (though there is a lovely moment over dinner where a missing character’s presence is so deeply felt, she finds her way into the mise-en-scene . . . I wanted more of that and less of everything else). I also think the film has some gender issues worth examining, particularly in the way a “changeling” appears to make everything a bit more ok in the film’s final moments.
Monster movie number two? Continue reading A Couple of Monster Movies (with subtitles)