Category: likey

In one scene from the latest film by Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardender), the lead character (played wonderfully–did you expect anything else?–by Julianne Moore) descends into darkness in search of the most basic of human needs: food. The darkness is actually the basement storage of a grocery store. The power has been out in the city for weeks, and everyone has been forced to fend for themselves. Why? Because everyone is blind, that’s why. No one knows how it happened, but thousands (if not hundreds of thousands worldwide) have lost their sight and are wandering the streets, directionless and without hope. Except our unnamed heroine. Continue reading Blindness, or: afraid of the dark

Saw the Express with Jeff last week, and have just finished up both series of Spaced with Kris, and they seem complementary experiences: heavily referential but more parroty homages than parody, attuned to the finer points of myriad pop cultural details iconic and not-so, each devoted to character more than plot, and equally invested in the many pleasures of forgetting forward motion to let said characters chatter and get wasted and circle around their intense emotional relationships with one another.

Both have been pumped up but I found them pleasurable, occasionally brilliant but not all that, even as they were always good company.

Blah di blah. My review is boring. I’d contemplated throwing out some noodling about a generation of filmmakers who commit to reflexivity yet avoid a kneejerk irony or detachment… but I’m feeling no burn to do so. It’s kind of neat that the adoring recreation of, say, a few shots from Tarantino are not just the filmmakers showing off but actually serve the characters–who shape themselves via such associations. And Spaced, in particular, can brilliantly weave such allusions into plots that explore and expand upon these characters’ worlds — the show deploys parody, but the parody’s not its own raison d’etre.

And now that I’ve casually used French, I bid you adieu.

biopics are tricky. they can go on and on, and always teeter on the edge of lacking a narrative focus. life, of course, has no narrative focus whatsoever, which is why we invented stories. this is a story of personal and familial disintegration set in the 40s or 50s on the australian frontier. the protagonists are middle european immigrants. romulus, playes by eric bana, is a loving father and doting husband with a boyish face and an appropriately indomitable work ethic. he’s a generous and forgiving man who always does the right thing and will captivate you. franka potente plays his wayward wife, a woman who cannot stay away from relationship with other men but is welcomed at the farm with open arms whenever she makes her way back. raimond is their only son, a 9 year old with blue eyes and a terribly earnest-sweet face whom the first-time director chose wisely to make the moral and psychological center of the film. the actor is terrific. he portrays the easy joyfulness and the dead seriousness of childhood with heartbreaking facility. Continue reading romulus, my father

This HBO flick, directed by Bob Balaban, has some just astonishing, low-key acting — Ralph Fiennes seems to disappear into so many different kinds of roles, despite his rather singular looks. Here he’s a slightly-campy butler hired on by the lonely harridan tycoon Doris Dukes (an equally great Susan Sarandon). The movie is perversely unstructured, in ways that I like; it resists the beats and tempo of the three-acts we’re so used to in movies, it jumps from time to time, there are rarely big moments of crisis or conflict or catharsis. Instead, it burrows under the skin of each character through the prism of their strange, hard-to-categorize relationship.

This isn’t going to keep you on the edge of your seat, but the acting alone kept me engrossed. There’s a scene about mid-film in a hothouse, as the two late at night repot some orchids, where not much is really said and nothing truly plot-shifting happens, that is about the finest acting I’ve seen in some time. After seeing Fiennes tear off a hock of ham with glorious pleasure in Bruges, it was amazing to see him take the same techniques (a shifting of his physical carriage, precise and intimate movements of hands and eyes, a use of his voice that in pitch and rhythm gives us more information about the character) for a wholly different kind of act.

We recently saw two very good films that zero in on people in pain. In The Savages, there’s a scene where Philip Seymour Hoffman, having wrenched his neck during a game of tennis (and an argument with his sister Laura Linney about his idiocy in his relationship with a woman), stands with his head bound up in an absurd weighted contraption, meant to “balance” him. Linney looks on and laughs, and he can’t help it–bursts into giggles, too. And ‘though the pain doesn’t go away, not the nerve in his neck nor the loneliness of their lives nor the anguish of their family history and current reality (dad sinking into dementia, and needing to be put in a home), the laugh reframes the pain as less a personal blight than something the two share. Continue reading Pain is funny. Or funnyish.

A gothic manor house located in a particularly beautiful, particularly remote spot on the Spanish coast is purchased by a woman who lived there decades before when it functioned as a Catholic orphanage. She and her husband, along with their six-year-old son, work to restore the home and transform it into a school for mentally disabled children, but when her child starts communicating with unseen forces and soon vanishes into thin air, the past finds a way to eerily push itself into the present. This film is creepy and atmospheric and evocatively affective–perhaps due to the fact that it’s plot ingeniously appropriates and recontextualizes the story of Peter Pan. There is a set piece about twenty-five minutes in that is stunning, and the ending’s perfect balance of the uncanny and the mythic will break your heart.

I was dubious and this will definitely not appeal to all tastes, but I was completely enchanted and moved by this Capra-esque fantasy firmly rooted on the planet earth by smart, unadourned, emotionally resonant acting choices. Lars (an understated Ryan Gosling in a charming and warmly human-sized performance) suffered extreme trauma as an infant and the result, twenty-seven years later, is that he severely lacks interpersonal relationship skills. When he purchases a life-sized, sex doll for companionship, literally convincing himself she is real, his brother wants him packed off to a mental institution. His sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer) takes a different tact and soon the entire town rallies around Lars’ relationship with “Bianca.” None of this should work. None of it! The potential for treacly, saccharin-laced whimsy is undermined by a no-nonsense approach and a cast of characters straight out of an E. Annie Proulx novel (the original screenplay by “Six Feet Under” scribe Nancy Oliver was nominated for an Academy Award). The first act is a bit forced (give it a little time) and the ending, befitting the genre, is telegraphed from the next state, but the plot twists keep you engaged and even surprised.