I have to say, Lionsgate never extended an invitation to see For Colored Girls, even if I was the only one holding out hope for the film as an awards movie for a while there. And Manohla Dargis’ review makes me wish they had… or that I had bothered them about it. I have no idea whether I would agree with Manohla’s take, but as is too often the case, the dismissive reviews in the trades read like outlets all too happy to be dismissive of a passionate effort.
Speaking of which, even though it’s not opening this weekend, I’d like to put my two cents in on Love & Other Drugs, which also got pummeled by critics who, in my opinion, were not really watching the movie they were being shown, but were too busy finding a way to disconnect emotionally from a surprisingly emotional film. It isn’t a Viagra sex comedy. it’s Love Story and Sweet November… combined with a Viagra sex comedy.
I got a very strong feeling that Zwick and Herskovitz were going back to the work that they didn’t quite hit out of the park in adapting Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago as About Last Night. Here, they get a lot of the raunchiness of Mamet, but in combination with a big melodramatic story that is, by its nature, very close to crossing the line into male-unwatchable mush… and they overcome the obstacles. And it’s not, as some would position it, just because we spend a lot of first act time with Anne Hathaway’s naked body splayed across the screen. It’s because of very smart writing and a truly awards-worthy performance by Hathaway. This kind of part has eaten up some really talented actresses over the years and Hathaway just grabs the whole thing by the balls, makes very decisive acting choices, and pulls rabbits out of her hat through the whole movie.
The only reason Love & Other Drugs isn’t a truly great film is the problem of Jake Gyllenhaal, an actor who I adored when he was younger and who has me more and more perplexed over time. On paper, he is a great choice. Young, dumb, and full of cum. But he needs to evolve in this story. And while he does okay with the role, you just never get the kind of light out of him that seeps out of Hathaway’s every pore. Ruffalo might have been the right guy, though he is a little older now. It could have been the role of Ryan Reynolds’ career, though we have never seen him quite hit this note. The one who might have turned this film into a classic would have been Michael Fassbender. The role is Jerry Maguire, in many ways. Cruise is now too iconic (and too old) to make it feel real.
I’m not saying this is a perfect film. It’s not. But it is a daring, challenging piece, and deserves to be seriously considered for all of its strengths, as well as the weaknesses. And when I look at Gurus and see that Hathaway has fallen completely off the chart, that’s a shame, because she glides through it with great assurance, no doubt supported by a strong director who helped her push and keep those boundaries.
Anyway… back to this weekend and the movies I have seen…
127 Hours kills. It’s just that simple. It’s like one of those sugar sculptures you see on Food Network in competitions. It can’t possible hold together, it is so precariously on the edge at all times. It’s going to crack. It’s got to shatter. But it holds together and brings you out the other end feeling good about a man’s (figurative) life, death, and resurrection.
ironically, I think that the skill with which Boyle & Co pull this thing off makes it look easier than it was. This is a movie that should be studied in future, especially with an eye to a strong directorial focus and a lot of use of techniques to keep it fresh – in collaboration with James Franco – within that strong idea.
Unless you have severe issues and watching a trapped person for more than an hour will given you a panic attack, I highly recommend this film to everyone, pretty much of all ages over 12. That might seem a little young to some, but has TJ Lavin gotten out of the hospital yet? I think Jackass is a lot of fun. But balance it out. Balance it out.
Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer is a very solid doc. Somehow, it feels like it would be incomplete without a look at Inside Job as well, in which Spitzer appears as an expert on the economic disaster of the last few years. It lends a balance. Client 9 isn’t, however, just about Spitzer’s spritzer. It is about the politics of taking down this one particular John in a world where this crime is the rule, not the exception. It’s about the hubris of the righteous. It’s about the long slow race that The Bad guys are willing to run to achieve their ends. It’s about all kinds of things.
Alex Gibney is one of our best documentarians. He shows us this again, here, with his skill, style, and meticulous attention to detail. (DP/30 with Gibney on Client 9 is here.)
Due Date is the latest from Todd Phillips, who turned from a director to a walking oeuvre with The Hangover last year. This film stinks of Trains, Planes & Automobiles in the ads, but its soul is much, much darker. And that’s why it works… and that’s why it doesn’t always work.
Essentially, Robert Downey, Jr plays a prick. His prickness is allayed by occasional bouts of decency and having Michelle Monaghan as a wife, back home. After all, how bad can he really be if he goes home to the natural sweetness that is Monaghan.
What I found myself wondering about with this character was not about his redemption, but about the weird space he inhabits, not bad enough to be BAD, not a jerk with a heart of gold… but also not a dozen other things he might have been. And my sense was that the interest Phillips and his co-writer had in this character was not making him any clear thing, but keeping him unpredictable and undefinable. Interesting. But even on Downey, who seems unable to fail in recent years, there just is no there there. Even though it was as clear as could be, I never really believed that getting home to his wife, whose due date is Now, was really driving him. I never really believed that holding his child in his arms that first time would change his life very much. I never really cared about this guy for a single second.
And Zach Galifianakis is a bit of a cipher in all his work. He is funny. In many ways, he is Richard Dreyfuss without the energy. But like Downey, he seems a bit like he is in his own movie here and Downey is just coincidental. So much of what he does here is just being the joke, however broad or nonsensical. Get the laugh, be the stooge, move on.
Thing is, the movie does make you laugh. And for that, it deserves credit. And in some ways, it is an experimental comedy, as though Phillips looked at Planes, Trains and said, “Let’s remake it, but let’s see what it looks like without a soul.” That is a daring choice. And with the impending baby and Galifianakis, they do have some soul in there. it doesn’t feel like gag-gag-gag, like something like Starsky & Hutch. But as almost none of the insane adventures really stick to the characters – aside from various kinds of dirt and torn clothing – it really is. And that’s where it gets to be a bit more interesting than, perhaps, it deserves to be.
Doug Liman’s Fair Game is a testament to the relentlessness of some smart liberals. I’m not going to drag it out and I hope to actually talk to Liman in the weeks to come about his process. What I got from this film was a director trying to make a thriller out of a BBC drama. One act of Valerie Plame, superspy, and her unsuspecting husband, Joe, the intellectual. Then she is exposed. Then the marriage suffers, but is reborn in very chatty righteous indignation against those who exposed her.
It’s hard to see pretty women and blown-dried men in nice suburban home with full access to the media as uber-victims. It just is. Yes, a great injustice was done and the law was broken in the vain effort to change the news cycle. It could not have been fun to live through. But walk down any block in New Orleans and you will find more than one significantly more compelling, tragic, dramatic story. So the only way to make a drama about comfortable people who are a little less comfortable because someone did something to them is to find an angle inside of that story that isn’t The Story. In some ways, Liman tried to do that with the first act. But that was only one act. Perhaps this is a story about being an insider and then the small push off of that core. Maybe it;s about media failing to see the importance of something…or seeing it from too personal a perspective. I don’t know. All I know is that the central story here is just not that heartbreaking. This is not to diminish or excuse… but we’re talking movies, not real life. Liman has real skill in upping the ante and making more of something that seem mundane or vice versa, putting a “that’s life” twist onto a real thriller. But this hill was a little too much of a molehill to make into a mountain.
