Howl (Three Stars)
U. S.: Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman, 2010
Howl is a film inspired by the great Beat poem by that great Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg — and if it‘s not a great Beat movie, then it‘s still a very good one, powerful and decent, and a passionate plea for the role of the artist in a sometimes destructive society.
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Machete
In this insanely hyperactive action flick, Robert Rodriguez delivers on the promise made in the faux “Mexsploitation” trailer that accompanied Grindhouse. It would be folly to attempt any synopsis of Machete, except to recall that Danny Trejo’s character is a former Mexican federal agent, seeking to exact revenge on the American druglord (Steven Seagal) who is responsible for the deaths of his wife and child. Since he’s in Texas, anyway, though, Machete accepts a contract to assassinate a rabidly anti-immigration senator (Robert De Niro). In fact, the assignment is a set-up.
Ostensibly, Machete has as large a target on his back as the senator. Unlike some movie anti-heroes, however, Machete isn’t invincible. If it weren’t for the assistance of some hard-core Chicanas (Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez) and a small army of low-riding homeboys, the local rednecks might have chopped him up with his own machetes and served him for dinner at the next Minuteman banquet.
Some critics have suggested that the trailer was the movie, only shorter. That’s probably true for fair-weather fans of grindhouse nouveau, but, loyal followers of Rodriguez and Tarantino’s oeuvre will undoubtedly have a blast. The action is non-stop, thoroughly goofy and well over the top. Like most contemporary grindhouse epics, too, appearances by actors familiar from other genres add much diversionary fun.
Besides De Niro, Alba, Rodriguez and Segal, who hasn’t appeared in a theatrical picture in years, the cast includes Don Johnson, Lindsay Lohan, Jeff Fahey and Rodriguez regulars Cheech Marin, Daryl Sabara, Tom Savini, Michael Parks and Rose McGowan. (Machete is co-directed by his fave editor, Ethan Maniquis.) It’s Trejo’s show, however, and his machetes of mass destruction are all one needs to recommend it. The only bonus feature of note is the deleted scenes.
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Dinner for Schmucks: Blu-ray
My limited knowledge of Yiddish slang precludes me from parsing the difference between “schmuck” and the more mundane, “moron,” at least for the purposes of this review. For as long as I can remember, the use of the word “schmuck” in mixed company was discouraged, if only because it also meant “penis.” Dinner for Schmucks was adapted from Francis Veber’s more subtle pleasure, The Dinner Game. In contemporary Hollywood, subtlety is for suckers.
The basic concept works for both pictures, though. A group of self-satisfied friends meet on regular basis for dinner. Each is required to bring a guest so insufferably pompous, maddeningly boorish or terminally stupid that he’s crowned that week’s prince of fools. This premise wouldn’t amount to much if, at some point in the movie, the fools didn’t turn the tables on their mean-spirited hosts, begging the question as to who’s the real schmuck. And, of course, this is exactly what happens.
Steve Carell has made a career playing these kinds of self-absorbed doofuses, and his nebbish IRS agent, Barry, is custom made for exhibition in the dinner game. Among other irritating habits, Barry collects dead mice for future use in historical dioramas. Paul Rudd plays Tim, an ambitious executive whose boss (Bruce Greenwood) demands he prove his mettle by participating in the game. Tim knows the hapless diorama maker is his ticket to promotion after running into him with his car while Barry’s picking up a dead mouse in the street. Little does Tim know how stiff the competition for the dunce cap will be.
Director Jay Roach doesn’t trust the material enough to forgo a clunky romantic contretemps between Tim and his spectacularly beautiful girlfriend, Julie (Stephanie Szostak). It provides more evidence of Barry’s clumsiness, but, otherwise, prolongs the wait for the dinner party. That said, Dinner for Schmucks is far more entertaining than other recent boys-will-boys comedies, all of which are founded on a stupidity contest of one form or another. Carell gets ample support from Zach Galifianakis, Jemaine Clement and Kristen Schaal (Flight of the Conchords), Lucy Punch and Ron Livingston. And, yes, the entertainment provided by the so-called schmucks is hilarious. The hi-def edition arrives with the featurettes, “The Biggest Schmucks in the World,” “The Men Behind the Mouseterpieces,” “Meet the Winners” and “Schmuck Ups,” as well as deleted scenes.
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Easy A: Blu-ray
In the absence of any better ideas, some screenwriters have found success by adapting classic works of literature for teenage audiences. Cruel Intentions was inspired by Les liaisons dangereuses; Emma begat Clueless; Shakespeare provided the fodder for Romeo+ Juliet, West Side Story, O, 10 Things I Hate About You and She’s the Man. Will Gluck’s wonderful teen rom-com, Easy A, was informed, at least, by The Scarlet Letter.
Rising superstar Emma Stone plays Olive, a hip, if little-noticed high school girl, who sees her life paralleling Hester Prynne’s in the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel. East Ojai High School may be the only public school in America where virginity is still something to which boys and girls aspire. In an effort to avoid one embarrassing revelation, Olive inadvertently sparks a rumor that leads her fellow students to believe she’s promiscuous.
After accepting more than her fair share of undeserved humiliation, Olive decides to profit from the misconception. In return for money, she allows closeted gay kids and other dweebs to use her as a beard. Despite the windfall, the ruse complicates matters with the only boy she wants to impress. Stone delivers writer Bert V. Royal’s waspish dialogue with great moxie and sympathy for Olive. The other characters are allowed to get in some licks of their own, as well.
I’m far from being a teenager, but I think Easy A was one of the best films of 2010, regardless of genre, and Stone’s performance is worthy of an Oscar nomination. True Grit star Hailee Steinfeld may already have nailed down the spot annually allotted an actress playing a teen role, though. Here, Stone gets plenty of help from Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson, as her bemused parents, hunky Penn Badgley, snarky Amanda Bynes, Thomas Haden Church, Lisa Kudrow and Malcolm McDowell. The Blu-ray package adds a great deal of bonus material, including commentary with Gluck and Stone; a pop-up trivia quiz; BD-Live connectivity; a making-of documentary; gag reel; audition footage; and featurettes, “The School of Pop Culture: Movies of the ’80s” and “Vocabulary of Hilarity.”
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Howl
Allen Ginsberg’s great primal scream of a poem, Howl, is at the center of Rob Epstein and Jeff Friedman’s film of the same title. As epic poetry goes, Howl is a million times less cinematic than, say, Beowulf, The Odyssey, The Canterbury Tales or, even, The Cat in the Hat. The filmmakers, though, use the debut reading of the poem as a stepping stone to other aspects of Ginsberg’s amazing life.
First, they dramatize publisher and book-seller Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 1957 obscenity trial. We’re also introduced to fellow Beats muses, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, who played key roles in the development of the poem. James Franco portrays Ginsberg with an eerie specificity, as he alternately reads Howl before an audience and tells the story of his life and coming-out to an interviewer. Finally, for better or worse, the poem has been animated by art director Eric Drooker. (It could easily exist as a stand-alone short film.) That’s a lot of material to stuff into a 90-minute bag, but Epstein and Friedman manage to pull it off in nimble style.
In our collective memory of him, Ginsberg sometimes resembles a harmless hippie Santa Claus, still worshiped by the counterculture as a founding father and accepted by the mainstream as a symbol of America’s “tolerance” of oddballs and rebels. As Howl points out, however, Ginsberg and his poem were the furthest things from mainstream in the mid-1950s. The Beats represented repudiation of post-war complacency and conformity, and, along with Kerouac, Ginsberg was its most visible diplomat. He openly celebrated his homosexuality at a time when it was illegal in most states and feared by a majority of Americans.
Beats and beatniks were ridiculed in the media for their shaggy appearance and despised by philistines for their taste in everything from shoes (sandals) to music (be-bop). Howl captures all that and more in documentary-like fashion. Franco is nothing short of terrific and he gets excellent support from John Hamm, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeff Daniels, David Straithairn, Alessandro Nivola, Treat Williams, Bob Balaban, Jon Prescott and Aaron Tveit. The bonus material adds several making-of featurettes and backgrounders, including a reading of Howl by a much older Ginsberg.
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Beautiful Kate
Apparently, Hollywood has a problem with incest. The negative reflex explains why it took nearly 30 years for Newton Thornburg’s perfectly adaptable novel, Beautiful Kate, to make the move from page to screen, and why it took an Aussie production company to make it. After Rachel Ward and Bryan Brown acquired the rights to the story, she moved it from Chicago to the “bush,” in Australia’s Flinder Ranges.
Its protagonist is a young writer, Ned, who’s been asked by his younger sister to return home to pay a final visit with his estranged father. Ned arrives in the company of a pretty bimbo, Toni, whose presence disturbs the uneasy calm enough to bring the family’s dysfunctional history back into focus. Through flashbacks, we learn of Ned’s illicit relationship with his sexually aggressive twin sister and how it resulted in a pair of tragic deaths. Even on his death bed, the old man is a brute. He minimizes everything in Ned’s life and blames him for the collapse of the family ranch. It opens wounds that never completely healed.
One of the most popular actors in Australia, Ward wrote and directed Beautiful Kate. By transferring the story to a remote outpost in the middle of nowhere, she was able to show how such isolation impacted on the lives of characters making the transition from childhood to sexual maturity surrounded by a herd of randy sheep. As twins, Ned and Kate already were closer than the average brother and sister, if only because their father’s ugly behavior forced them to take shelter in each other’s arms. To reveal any more would spoil too much of the movie’s surprises.
Ben Mendelsohn and Sophie Lowe are quite good as the star-crossed twins, as are Brown, Rachel Griffiths and Maeve Dermody in important roles. Ward shows great promise as a director of features. She succeeds in capturing the sense of desolation felt by the young characters, while also showcasing some of Australia’s great beauty. There are deleted scenes, interviews and background material.
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Ticking Clock: Blu-ray
Bitter Feast
Gun: Blu-ray
Haunting of Amelia
The new year brings with it a flood of direct-to-DVD titles that share a lust for blood and bizarre plot twists.
In Ticking Clock, Cuba Gooding Jr. plays an investigative reporter who specializes in exposing police ineptitude in murder cases. This doesn’t endear the writer to police when people around him start dropping like flies and he’s the most likely suspect. We know, of course, that the reporter didn’t commit any of the grotesque crimes, but become as suspicious as the police when the Gooding’s character argues that time-travel is the only logical way the real killer could have gone undetected for so long a time. It also explains how the reporter is the only person who can prevent even more murders. A word to the wise: mixing time-travel and mystery-solving only works when it involves Sherlock Holmes.
If you’ve ever wondered why more critics aren’t attacked by the victims of their snarky wordplay and harmful condemnations, Bitter Feast is the movie for you. James Le Gros plays a chef whose cuisine has been attacked unmercifully by a bitter food blogger and stands to lose his TV gig and restaurant because of the put-downs. In response, the chef kidnaps the writer and forces him to meet food challenges that would be simple, if it weren’t for the handcuffs and knife wounds. The worse the dishes are prepared, the more torture is inflicted on the writer. Look for celebrity chef Mario Batali in a brief performance.
Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and Val Kilmer make a formidable team in Gun, an extremely loud shoot-em-up set in Detroit. Jackson plays a thuggish gangsta’ out to control the illicit gun trade in the upper Midwest, while Kilmer is an ex-con looking for payback in the death of his wife. Director Jerry Terrero nicely captures the icy Rust Belt setting and the results of unharnessed fire power. Jackson’s story breaks little new territory, but moves along snappily. Less convincing is the thug’s boss, a sexy blond improbably portrayed by 23-year-old AnnaLynne McCord. To the directors go the spoils.
Haunting of Amelia (a.k.a., The Other Side of the Tracks) is a supernatural romance that can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be scary or sentimental. As such, it more closely resembles a Halloween special on the Lifetime network than a full-blown mystery or horror flick.
Ten years after a tragic train accident killed his girlfriend, restaurant employee Josh (Brendan Fehr) suddenly finds himself surrounded by people from his past. The anniversary of the accident coincides with a school reunion, so at least one of the appearances can be explained. The other visitor, an attractive brunette 10 years younger than Josh, takes a few more seconds to figure out. Haunting of Amelia benefits mostly from its woodsy Connecticut setting.
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Case 39
The always-welcome Renée Zellweger plays a social worker, Emily, assigned to the case of a little girl who was brutalized by her psycho stepparents. Too traumatized by the experience for another placement, the kid, Lilith (Jodelle Ferland), begs Emily to assume the role of foster mom. Predictably, little Lilith then begins to exhibit the same sorts of traits that might have caused her former guardians to stick her into an oven and turn on the gas.
Case 39 looks good, but, apart from some hideous deaths, there’s nothing really new here. Zellweger is joined by such fine actors as Ian McShane, Bradley Cooper, Cynthia Stevenson and Callum Rennie. The package includes 18 deleted scenes and featurettes on the special visual effects.
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Big Love: The Complete Fourth Season
Mannix: The Fourth Season
There’s thin pickin’s on the TV-to-DVD front this week. HBO sends out the fourth-season package of Big Love, during which Bill saved his son from bird-smuggling Mormon kidnappers, got deeper involved with casino intrigue and ran for political office. The polygamist’s decision to out himself in public causes much tension among the wives and prompts them to think and act for themselves, for once. The new season starts this month.
As played by Mike Connors (born, Krekor Ohanian), Armenian-American P.I. Joe Mannix was one of the most popular crimefighters in television history. This might have had something to do with the fact that he seemed like an average Joe, drove hot cars and got beat up a lot. His pretty African-American assistant, Peggy Fair (Gail Fisher), also is frequently put into harm’s way. The new set represents the fourth season in an eight-year run on CBS.
Dinner for Schmucks (Two and a Half Stars)
U.S.; Jay Roach, 2010
There are plenty of primo American comedy actors around right now; all we really need is the movies to put them in. Dinner for Schmucks, with its story courtesy of French buddy-comedy master Francis Veber, and its showcase roles for Paul Rudd, Zach Galifianakis, and that nonpareil doofus comedy king Steve Carell — almost makes it, but not quite.
By my unofficial and almost certainly inaccurate count, one third of the jokes work (including most of the ones involving Carell), one third of them fall sort of flat and one third muck and snicker around somewhere in the middle, before flying off into some weird outer-space of Hollywood schmuck-humor. That’s not a bad average, actually. Director Jay Roach‘s Austin Powers movies don’t always hit that mark.
Schmucks is an Americanization of that very funny Veber comedy, The Dinner Game. (The original French title was Le Diner des Cons which may translate more accurately as “Dinner for Assholes.“) Dinner Game is all about a mock and mocking get-together in which smug bourgeois business-creeps invite what they consider obnoxious losers (or their inferiors) to a dejeuner, indulge and secretly ridicule them, and then present a prize for the biggest schmuck, or most outrageous asshole. Of course, the tables get turned. Of course, the asshole and the bourgeois who invited him — Veber’s original mismatched dinner companions were anxious Thierry Lhermitte and the unusually annoying Jacques Villeret — wind up sort of liking each other.
Rudd and Carell play the bourgeois and the schmuck here , and they’re actors who work terrifically well together, as they already showed in Judd Apatow‘s The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Rudd plays Tim Conrad, a would-be exec success with a sexy-sweet art gallery girlfriend named Julie (Stephanie Szostak). Tim, who thinks he can impress Julie with money, is a nice guy whose naïve desire for winner status in a typical callous corporation full of well-dressed bullies, back-stabbers and ass-kissers, makes him easy prey to the invitation of his “con” of a boss, Lance Fender (Bruce Greenwood, with his world-class smirk) that he find a loser and come to party with the winners. Rudd is a perfect fit for a role like this: he‘s like a less nervous Jack Lemmon, crossed with a slightly dazed and confused Billy Crystal.
Carell‘s Barry — a repressed and goofily grinning IRS auditor whom Tim accidentally hits with his car — is too well-meaning and terminally nice to be called a real asshole. He‘s the ideal perfect loser though. Like Peter Sellers (whose eerie mastery of comic accents gives him the actor’s edge on everybody), Carell can go so deeply into comic self-delusion, that he pulls us all down there with him. And like Sellers, he‘s trapped in his own masks. Carell‘s characters’ fantasies about themselves (notably the self-infatuated boss Michael in The Office, who might love the idea of holding a Dinner for Schmucks) seem more real than the “reality” around them. Barry is repressed, seemingly friendless and emotionally needy, and he has such a yearning for a buddy that he tries to pay Tim damages for running him down. Once Tim makes contact with the smitten Barry, and over joys him by inviting him to dinner, he can’t shake him loose.
Barry also has a wild talent: he’s an artist/taxidermist who makes “Mouseterpieces,” in which stuffed mice are posed in little dioramas of classic artworks like Da Vinci‘s The Last Supper. These dioramas actually aren’t bad at all. They certainly indicate more talent than any of Tim‘s poisonously smug workfellows, a gang of jerks who probably would have seen the real-life Vincent van Gogh as the ultimate loser. I would have loved to see what the film’s Barry could have done with one of Brueghel’s peasant village paintings or with Bosch‘s “Garden of Earthly Delights.“
In fact, continuing the Sellers comparison, I’d have loved to see Carell taking a whack at Inspector Clouseau in a decent Pink Panther remake, with Steve Martin assuming his more natural role of Inspector Dreyfus.
Anyway, Roach here predictably inflates everything in Dinner Game’s deliciously wicked premise, into gargantuan proportions, laced with sentimentality. Tim recruits Barry for the party, alienating exactly the lady he wanted to impress: girlfriend Julie. Soon, he‘s knee-deep in schmucks, including himself, his bosses, and his stalker ex-date Darla (Lucy Punch). Julie is being chased by a randy phony of a voguish artist named Kerain (Jemaine Clement), whose favorite subject is himself. And the dinner party includes Tom’s mind-reading jerk of a fellow employee Therman (Galifianakis), along with the competing assholes..
Veber didn’t show the dinner. Roach and his writers, David Guion and Michael Handelman (The Ex) stage a real Fancy Feast in a mansion of a dining hall, and send their movie right over the edge. Still, Carell and Rudd are a nearly ideal classic smoothie-and stooge comedy team (in the tradition of Crosby and Hope, Martin and Lewis, or Abbott and Costello), and with Galifianakis around they make up two stooges and a smoothie.
The script isn’t structured very well and the jokes are erratic all the way through. In this feast of comics, there’s sometimes a famine of laughs. But the laughs are there eventually. I’ll bet there was a lot of improvisation on this set — and with Dinner for Schmucks gallery of stooges and smoothies, and Barry’s gallery of mouseterpieces, you get at least some of your comedy money’s worth.
By the way, I think Lisa Schwartzbaum is right and a more fitting title for this movie would have been “Dinner for Idiots” — which is the word used most often in the picture. What brought on the alternate title? Who knows? Perhaps these moviemakers figured nobody really knew the derivation of “schmuck.“ And perhaps they didn‘t want to risk offending the nation‘s influential and growing idiot constituency, which, judging from some of our nightly “news” shows, is poised to take over the U. S. congress. Well, if that’s true, I hope at least some of these spoilers and lawmakers and their “fair and balanced” cheerleaders win a well-deserved schmuck award or two. God knows they’ve earned it.
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Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (One and a Half Stars)
U.S.; Brad Payton, 2010
I wouldn‘t wish this movie — a parody of James Bond films starring animatronics or digitally-enlivened cats and dogs in comedy super spy roles — on my worst enemy. In fact, after the opening credits, a parody of Maurice Binder‘s floating Bond Girl credits with floating Bond Kitties, and right after the opening scene, where a cute little puppy starts photographing secret documents — I desperately wanted to leave.
No such luck. Soon the movie was happily introducing me to its photogenic, barking hero, Diggs, a well-meaning but over-enthusiastic police German Shepherd (voiced by James Marsden), whose cop-buddy Shane (Chris O‘Donnell) can’t save him for the over-punctilious force. Diggs though is rather oddly being recruited by the Central Intelligence Arf, or whatever it was, to fight the insidious Kitty Galore (Bette Midler). And Diggs is paired with ace spy, feline beauty and exemplar of dog and cat détente Catherine (voiced by Christina Applegate).
The writers’ chutzpah, or catzpah, knows no bounds. They’ve written a scene for villainous cat Mr. Tinkles, in which he’s strapped up in a cell like Hannibal Lecter, and they have a doggie role for ex-Bondsman Roger Moore, as tuxedo cat Tad Lazenby (last name in honor of the star of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service). I’m glad Daniel Craig and Timothy Dalton resisted their blandishments. But what about a cameo for Sean Connery as a Scottie?
Still I stayed, despite scenes that certainly amounted to cruel and inhuman treatment. At one point, a cat-loving little old lady was nearly buried in her own kitty litter. (Old people falling, by the way, is not a joke.) And Kitty Galore has been made hairless, so you actually sympathize with her. One question is never answered: How are all these chatty critters able to carry on long conversations without ever being spotted by humans? And, since Q isn’t around, who built all their gadgets? (Cats and dogs, remember, have no opposable thumbs.)
But let’s not be literal. No idiots, I trust, were harmed during the making of Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. Worse movies have been made. But words cannot really describe what I felt watching it (70 minutes shot to hell and the possibility of recurring kitty litter nightmares to boot.) I defy any reasonably hip five-year old to disagree with me. Perhaps though this movie will be the springboard of what now seems a badly needed adjunct of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Audiences by Animatronics and Animals.
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Charlie St. Cloud (Two Stars)
U.S.; Burt Steers, 2010
Mystical love stories about star-crossed teen lovers, and baseball-mitt pounding kid brothers from beyond the grave, aren’t my cup of saccharine-laced tea. But if you have to look at something like that, you could perhaps do worse than Charlie St. Cloud. It’s a ridiculous movie, but it’s also good looking, well shot in Pacific Northwest coast forests and shorelines. Its star/lovers are hot-looking too and also likeably flirtatious.
Professional cutie-pie Zac Efron (of the awful High School Musical movies and the very good but sadly ignored Me and Orson Welles) plays the title character: guilt-plagued Charlie McCloud. Amanda Crew is svelte and spunky boating enthusiast Tess Carroll. And that baseball-heaving ghostly kid brother, young Sam McCloud, is smashingly played by Charlie Tahan, a good kid actor who looks a bit like a youthful Steve Zahn, repainted by Norman Rockwell.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a movie that makes a lick of sense or impinges on the real world in any meaningful way, you‘re better off going back to “Inception” for another shot at the labyrinth, or waiting for some new ultra-realistic American indie.
Charlie St. Cloud is based on a novel by Ben Sherwood called The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, and it plays like something that might have slipped away from Nicholas Sparks on an off day. The movie begins with the brothers McCloud, poorer kids mingling with the smug smart-ass rich kids, winning a sailboat race and jumping and hugging each other in sunny freeze-frames.
SPOILER ALERT
It’s too sweet to last. Soon we’re introduced to their pretty single mom, Kim Basinger as Claire St. Cloud. And, all too soon, the brothers have driven off together in the night (Sam insisted on tagging along, which is a real danger sign), and gotten involved in a horrendous car-car-truck accident, one fatality and the temporary flat-lining of Charlie. He‘s saved by gabby paramedic Florio Ferrente (Ray Liotta).
But Sam isn’t gone. His spirit lingers on, pounding his baseball mitt in the nearby forest, and waiting for faithful Charlie, who has promised to meet his dead little brother every day for a game of catch and a catch-up confab. Nobody else can see Sam of course, which eventually leaves them wondering why Charlie is babbling so fervently to the air and the trees. (“I talk to the trees, but they don’t listen to me,“ as Clint Eastwood once memorably sang in Paint Your Wagon.)
Eventually, five years pass. Mom Claire has left Charlie and relocated. (I really wondered about her readiness to leave both her dead son and the living one.) And Charlie has gotten a job at the local cemetery so he can be near Sam and any other stray spirits who might materialize. He has a nearly incomprehensible Brit buddy named Alistair (Augustus Prew), and a crush on a fetching lass who shows up: a Kate Beckinsale-ish ex-classmate and dish named Tess, who makes a fuss about the cemetery flower arrangements. Waiting in the wings, is paramedic Florio, who has a message for Charlie
You may wonder why Charlie has been able to show up every day for that game of catch for all that time. I wondered myself. No sickness? No pressing engagements? No thunderstorms? What will the poor guy do when Tess on her boat gets predictably lost in a storm? Take a rain check?
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Will love survive the grave? Will we ever see a marquee pairing of Amanda Crew and Augustus Prew? Will Success Spoil Zac Efron?
Tune in tomorrow. Meanwhile, with Efron, staring mooningly at Tess and the camera, Charlie St. Cloud may please teen or ‘tweens still in full squeal over Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, and ready for a Zac attack or two — even if the guy isn’t a vampire, or even a werewolf. Boating enthusiasts and devotees of loves beyond the grave may also brush away a tear or two.
But how much can you expect of a movie with a paramedic named Florio Ferrente and a ghost with a baseball mitt named Sam?
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SOME SPOILER ALERTS
Classical symphonic music was made for the movies to celebrate. And I have to admit that Radu Milhaileanu’s The Concert may have earned an extra star from me simply because it climaxes with a fiery performance of Tchaikovsky’s great Violin Concerto, very plausibly mimed by stars Melanie Laurent and Aleksei Guskov, as the movie‘s world-famous French solo violinist Anne-Marie Jacquet and legendary Russian orchestral conductor Andrei Filipov, joining together with an orchestra of outcasts masquerading as the Bolshoi Symphony, for a melodramatic finale that brings down the house.
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The acting throughout Concert is pretty lusty too, a mix of comedy, drama and fervid sentimentality that tends to overwhelm you in the ways Tchaikovsky often does, but without Tchaikovsky‘s class or style. Or logic. Milhaileanu, who also made the well-regarded and moving heart-tugger Train of Life, here paints Filipov as a great conductor who was fired by Communist bureaucrats in the Brezhnev era for (it’s assumed) trying to protect his Jewish musicians. Now Filipov earns his meager living as a janitor at the concert hall, until one day he intercepts an emergency French invitation for a Bolshoi concert, and decides to recruit his old musician friends, to form a fake Bolshoi, get his old Commie nemesis and manager Ivan Gavrilov (Valeriy Barinou) to handle management chores, travel to Paris, hoodwink impresario Duplessis (Francois Berleand) and put on a concert with star soloist Anne-Marie — with whom Filipov has some mysterious past connection.
SPOILER ALERT
The Parisian trip is portrayed as a comedy of errors, and that both invigorates and somewhat hurts the film. How, after all, is this imitation Bolshoi going to put on such a great performance without any last rehearsals? I also had trouble with the fact that Filipov was portrayed as a great classic Russian conductor, and also a hater of Prokofiev — a great if sometimes dissonant composer who, after all, was a victim of the Soviet bureaucracy too.
END OF SPOILER
But the actors all play with humor, warmth and power, especially Laurent, Guskov, Miou Miou as Anne-Marie’s helper, and Barinov as Gavrilov, the fallen Brezhnevian bureaucrat and con artist who joins forces with his old time victim to reawaken the glories of the past. “The Concert,” like that fake orchestra, has its rough spots. But the movie, like the musicians, hits its crescendos, pours out those melodies and delivers in the end. (In Russian, French and English, with English subtitles.)
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8 ½ (Four Stars)
Italy; Federico Fellini, 1963
8 ½, Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece about a movie that can’t get made, and about Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), the writer-director who can’t make it, marked a revolution in the way we thought and wrote about filmmaking — or about the art of cinema, as the film‘s greatest admirers would now unabashedly prefer.
Guido, a character unmistakably modeled on Fellini himself. is an internationally renowned film auteur, working in the Cinecitta studios and an elegant spa on his new project — a Felliniesque film unmistakably modeled on 8 ½. (That name comes from the number of movies, including episodes and fragments of anthology films, that Fellini had made at that point in his career.) Guido has sets, actors, an army of technicians, studio time, some very nervous producers and right hand men (Mario Pisu and Guido Alberti) and a troupe of reporters, paparazzi and one scornful critic-advisor named Daumier (Jean Rougeul) nipping at his heels, but no completed script.
Instead, he has some fragmentary notes (which Daumier ridicules as the usual “Anselmiesque” egotistical potpourri) and a welter of satirical dreams and childhood memories that keep teasing and tormenting him as he skips from one meeting or screening to the next, trying to dodge questions and evade catastrophe.
Complicating matters further are the presence of both Guido’s wife Luisa (Anouk Aimee) and his mistress Carla (played by Sandra Milo, Fellini’s own longtime lover) and a bevy of attractive women (including Italian horror movie queen Barbara Steele), who keep arousing his libido or filling him with Catholic guilt. Luisa, accompanied by her sarcastic feminist friend Rossella (Rossella Falk) is increasingly fed-up. Carla, a childlike bosomy blonde with a taste for bedroom games and a weak constitution, is shunted aside. And the deadline when shooting must begin or the project cancelled keeps descending on Guido like black cloud swallowing the sunlight of his privileged, precarious life.
8 ½ of course is Fellini‘s version of that familiar nightmare — I’ve had it dozens of times — when we’re plunged into a final exam for which we haven’t studied or a stage play for which we haven’t learned our lines. And it’s pretty much what was happening to Fellini, as he started this movie, for which he also had a script that wasn‘t finished.
That makes 8 ½, in a sense, his most realistic film, the story of his own life and milieu as he lived it in the ‘60s. But it’s also one of his most fanciful and fantastic — a cascade of incredible, lyrical imagery, of “la dolce vita ” among the moviemakers, of luxurious hotels, healing springs, nocturnal streets, plush screening rooms, and a past full of oceanscapes, churches and De Chirico-like architecture. It was Fellini’s last film in black-and-white, beautifully lit and shot by the legendary Gianni Di Venanzo, who makes the whole film a symphony of sunlight and shadow. The movie is also graced with one of Nino Rota’s finest, most supremely carnivalesque and lilting scores. “I am Guido!” Fellini once famously remarked — and he might well have added “I am 8 ½!” (In English and Italian, with English subtitles.) (New 35mm print at Chicago‘s Gene Siskel Center.)
Michael Wilmington
July 29, 2010
We’re in the middle of the summer movie season and so far everything has been exactly what we would have expected it to be. No movie has been any better or worse than I would have assumed before summer started and I’ve yet to see something that has truly wowed me. There are still about seven weeks left of the season, though and there are projects on the horizon that might prove worthwhile. We’ll find out what’s good and what’s not in the coming weeks, but until then these are the questions I’m curious to find the answers to before the summer is over (more…)
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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?
So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.
And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.
There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.
I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.
So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.
But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”
My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher
“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.
~ David Simon
