This may be my favorite Christmas movie, even though I’m not sure it rightfully belongs in the genre — for one thing, only about a quarter of the action takes place in the correct season, and the organizing event is as much the climactic World’s Fair as it is the central Yule. From a purist point of view, it can’t be called a great musical either, since about half of the songs were pre-existing standards dating to the early twentieth century and simply plugged into the narrative arc of a string of Sally Benson’s New Yorker short stories. But it is, I submit, one of the great family movies, looking back to The Magnificent Ambersons and forward to The Royal Tenenbaums, all of which films transcend their apparent artifice and get something importantly right about the frustrations and consolations of family life. One thing I notice, watching it again this year, is how selfish everyone acts: despite its reputation (probably on the basis of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”) as a sentimental tearjerker, all of the characters are pretty much out for themselves, looking to land their husband or advance their career or whatever, and relations within the family are at best strained and at worst competitive. The feeling of foiled privacy is the reigning emotional tone of the movie: everybody’s constantly on top of one another, wants something different, and is willing to mildly inconvenience someone else to get it. (I also enjoy the fact that seven-year-old Tootie, played by the terrifyingly focused Margaret O’Brien, is pretty much a budding sociopath, prone to causing major trolley accidents and knocking the heads off snowpeople.) And then there’s Minnelli’s utterly perfect sense of period detail, placing us in a very precise era and locale without overstating anything (and, of course, ignoring a lot: did you know at the 1904 World’s Fair they had human zoos?). If one wants one’s holiday classics secular, nonsupernatural, and slightly bittersweet, then accept no substitute.
by Evan Kindley | Source: Warner Video DVD
24 Dec 2008 8:37 AM | Comments (2)
There may be no better setting for a modern-day fairy tale than India, with its blend of grit and exoticism, tradition and booming modernity, extreme wealth and grimmest poverty. And Slumdog Millionaire is a fairy tale, albeit one whose traditional themes (good brother, bad brother; fated love; pauper to prince, for a start) are dressed up in a chaotic swirl of bright fabrics, crowded streets, and relentless sounds.
As you might expect from the man who brought us Trainspotting, the music in this movie is a powerful factor, adding to the near-sensory-overload of the faster-paced sequences (an early chase scene in the corrugated-tin slums of the city is a good example) and refusing to let the viewer pause long enough for any cynicism to set in. Even without a story to follow, I would have happily watched and listened as the scene-setting shots rushed by, in a sort of two-hour National Geographic music video.
But there is a story, and a cleverly structured one at that: Jamal is a contestant on India’s version of “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?” — and as a “slumdog” nobody, he is immediately suspected of cheating when he comes within a single question of the grand prize. Forced to explain his success to the police, he describes — in a series of lengthy flashbacks — how each answer was acquired, and in doing so tells the story of his life in the slums with brother Salim and young love Latika.
The connections between the story (a compelling one that mixes humour with some truly dark moments) and the game show questions are tangential enough that the gimmick never feels forced. The details are doled out slowly, with just the right mix of foreshadowing and suspense, and you (or at least I) really are left wondering about that final question until the last moments of the film.
Slumdog Millionaire is a loud, ugly, beautiful, colourful, chaotic, romantic yarn. I walked out smiling.
by Eva Holland | Source: 35mm Print
23 Dec 2008 11:46 PM | Submit Comment
A young Maurice Pitka – Mike Myers morphed into a tween courtesy of CGI – explains his parents’ occupations to Guru Tugginmypudha, played by Oscar winner Ben Kingsley. Prior to becoming missionaries, they were dog groomers. “So,” asks Tugginmypudha, “they were into doggy style before they got into the missionary position?” Of the hundreds of bad puns and old jokes in The Love Guru, it is this one that best illustrates the film’s sense of humor. The audience had already made the joke in their heads, but Myers insists on repeating it anyway as if asserting his control over the humor and only allowing the audience to laugh when clearly instructed to do so. The Love Guru’s most noteworthy trait is its insistence on hammering jokes into the skulls of its audience; refusing to let any pun die as Myers mugs into the camera to squeeze every possible laugh he can out of it. Despite the fervor with which the film attacks every joke, the whole thing seems rather halfhearted on everyone’s part, including Myers.
Yet audiences would have known none of this before seeing the film, so the reasons behind The Love Guru’s commercial failure are a mystery. Many of his comedies have been critically panned, so why this was the first time audiences decided to listen is unknown. The film’s failure is probably just as big of a mystery to the studio – local shops in my area had Love Guru Halloween costumes, indicating they expected another Myers’ cultural phenomenon a la Austin Powers. Comedy is a fickle animal; three years ago, The Love Guru could have very well been one of the most successful films of the year. It is a good example of the mob mentality of popular cinema, the way filmgoers arbitrarily decide that a film is good or bad sight unseen. Why were the pop culture references and scatological humor of Austin Powers loved by audiences while those same aspects of The Love Guru despised?
Is this the worst film of 2008? Not hardly; nor is it one of the worst of all time as some have claimed. I’m indifferent to Myers and I can’t really tell whether The Love Guru is any better or worse than any of his other films. It ranks about the same with me. As it is the end of the year, a lot of critics will spend a lot of time explaining why The Love Guru is horrible and why they’ve chosen it to be one of the “year’s worst.” I’d like someone to explain why it is any worse than his other mega-hits. Perhaps the public has simply grown tired of Myers’ shtick. We’ll have to wait to see if his next comedy — likely a film not very different from The Love Guru – is any more successful.
by David Carter | Source: Paramount DVD
21 Dec 2008 11:36 PM | Comments (5)
Roadie is the story of Travis Redfish, “the world’s greatest roadie,” and his misadventures following sixteen-year-old aspiring groupie Lola across the country. Stylistically the film is somewhere between the free-for-all comedies of the seventies and the cookie-cutter formulas of the eighties; occasionally flirting with transgression but always returning to rather forced scenes of emotional resolution. Meat Loaf turns in a likable performance as the slow but earnest Redfish, proving himself to be the capable actor most didn’t realize he could be until Fight Club and making the film watchable despite running about thirty minutes longer than it should. It is easy to see that Meat Loaf is trying hard to make the film a success; it was filmed during a low point in his musical career when he had completely lost his singing voice and was unsure it would ever return.
The film’s main appeal now is the same as it was when it was originally released: a odd collection of popular musical acts. Roy Orbison, Hank Williams, Jr., Asleep at the Wheel, Alice Cooper, and Blondie all perform, with the latter two acts having substantially larger non-musical roles. Blondie steals the film completely away from Meat Loaf and company and are easily the most memorable thing about Roadie. Firstly, they deliver an excellent cover of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” the best performance in the film and the only song shown in its entirety. Secondly – and far more importantly – Blondie gets into a fight with an all-midget band named Snow White. Nothing in Roadie, including a bizarre ending involving aliens, surpasses seeing Blondie fight a group of midgets.
by David Carter | Source: MGM DVD
21 Dec 2008 7:15 PM | Submit Comment
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is about a man who ages backward, his infantile body wrought with arthritis and wrinkled skin, who during the course of his life observes the physical degradation of everyone he knows. This mars against his inverse growth into youth, instilling in him an asynchronous naiveté at first – he loses his virginity, in his seventy-something body, at a brothel – and later a troubled responsibility: he can’t be both a father and playmate to a child. But more particularly, this film is about seeing Brad Pitt grow younger and handsomer until he becomes so young and handsome that it’s a marvel equivalent to the Apollo rocket, for example, launching toward the moon in the background of one particularly picturesque composition. This is largely the point, though; the film is very much a visual spectacle—the emotional core is tied to Benjamin’s visual discrepancy at any point in his life except the very middle: at 15/seventy-something he works on a tugboat in a body that looks like it can barely handle a walking cane, and in his sixties/late teens, he looks disarmingly boyish to one of his past loves. As visually splendid as the film is – and there are many moments in which the sensational concept fosters true tenderness – it’s blatantly derivative of Forest Gump. Really, it’s almost an identical film, which I imagine is an endorsement to most who’ll see this.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Warner Bros. 35mm print
18 Dec 2008 12:32 PM | Comments (2)
“Blaaaze of gloryyyyyy!”
The remarkable thing about Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy is how unsentimental it manages to be about a situation that seems to leave one no other choice for feeling. There’s really nothing to be learned from the story of Sid and Nancy: they were a couple of hopeless junkies who got thoroughly exploited by others, then tried to exploit themselves and failed. The fact that they did this in the midst of a historically significant pop culture maelstrom is really beside the point, dramatically; there’s just no getting around the fact that, if you stick to the principals, you have a very depressing and predictable narrative on your hands. Cox’s brilliant solution is not to open the story up to bigger meanings, or to re-mythologize the sordid details, but to tell the story straight while sprinkling the film with gags along the lines of the bits Richard Lester cooked up for the Beatles’ movies (Keystone Kops fast-motion, broad caricature, throwaway surrealism). But where there the gimmicks were just that, because the basic core of talent and charisma was so strong, here we have kind of a black hole at the center of all the frippery: Sid Vicious, whose very claim to fame was his nullity, his embodiment of the concept of “no future.” Gary Oldman’s performance is so good because he perfectly gets Sid’s peculiar form of grace: he’s not trying to think and failing, or doing it badly, he’s totally masterfully not thinking, reacting to the world as it presents itself to him on its surface, especially when it shows up bearing drugs. Courageously resisting the temptations of interiority, Cox keeps us at a distance from the couple at all times, filling the film with cynical spectators (Johnny Rotten, Malcolm McLaren, a speed dealer, a pissed-off black methadone clinician) who are disconcerted but don’t take Sid and Nancy seriously enough to interfere with them. Adopting this strategy gets us back to a basic truth about punk: that working-class despair was the raw fuel the movement needed to get itself going, after which the critics and connoisseurs took over and mostly did quite nicely for themselves. Cox’s great idea is to stick with the hopeless, to refuse the rush to significance, and to see what glimmers of art there still are.
by Evan Kindley | Source: MGM DVD
14 Dec 2008 2:19 PM | Submit Comment
Every crossover indie auteur got the chance to adapt their favorite “unfilmable” book in the 1990s: David Cronenberg did Naked Lunch, Terry Gilliam Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and, most ignominiously, Gus Van Sant had a crack at Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. I haven’t read the novel, so I’m not sure how faithful the film is — the dialogue is stilted enough to be verbatim — but by all accounts Van Sant’s version is quite a bit less high-spirited and satirical, more laconic and moody, than its original. Robbins’ book, like many another counterculture favorite, is a paean to the hitchhiker’s “freedom and movement,” but if Cowgirls resembles any other road movie it’s probably David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, which is about as claustrophobic and ungroovy as the genre gets. For the most part, then, Cowgirls is a botch, being dull and unfunny (I think it’s supposed to be funny) as well as pretentious as all hell. The parts of the film that might work are sabotaged by Uma Thurman’s awful, awful Southern accent; she’s much better when she stares silent and moony at some jabbering weirdo, an Alice in the American wonderland, which is thankfully most of the time she’s onscreen. The all-not-quite-star cast (Lorraine Bracco! Pat Morita! Crispin Glover! Roseanne!) is interestingly idiosyncratic, but nobody really registers as more than an oddity, and casting Rain Phoenix as Thurman’s love interest was a sentimental folly to rival putting Sofia Coppola in The Godfather Part III. (The film is dedicated to River Phoenix, who starred in Van Sant’s previous feature My Own Private Idaho, and died in 1993.)
Still, Cowgirls has a few claims to fame, as the world’s only lesbian Western (though it was a little literal-minded to get k.d. lang to do the soundtrack), a beautiful photographic record of the Oregon countryside, and the strangest film in Van Sant’s generally heterogeneous filmography. It also captures something interesting about The Sixties (well, technically the seventies: the novel was published in 1976 and set in ‘73), or maybe about the way a person of a certain generation tends to remember them: wistfully, sure, but also with a certain skepticism and overall feeling of disbelief. In this it anticipates Todd Haynes’ much more successful I’m Not There, which discloses the same weird mix of blissed-out and bothered, like the observations of the one semi-sober kid at a peyote party. The scene that best captures this affect comes towards the end, where Thurman watches fellow rebel cowgirl (played by Victoria Williams — remember her?) through a hole in her grilled cheese sandwich as the latter sums up her personal philosophy of life: “Don’t worry. Be happy. Be here now.” To his infinite credit, Van Sant doesn’t buy this (and neither should you): even bohos can call bullshit. But he kind of loves her for saying it anyway.
by Evan Kindley | Source: IFC Network Airing
11 Dec 2008 6:48 PM | Submit Comment
I’m always wary when a Hollywood heavyweight is listed as writer, director and star: it’s all too easy for a film to go off the rails when just one person, with a serious emotional investment in the project and no one likely to say “No” to them, is calling all the creative shots. But as pet projects go, Beyond the Sea isn’t bad.
Kevin Spacey obviously has a deep admiration not only for Bobby Darin, the subject of the biopic, but for the whole big band, Vegas nightclub scene. The venues of the era – the Copa, the Flamingo, and the rest – are re-created just as lovingly as the music itself. And though Spacey really has trouble pulling off the youthful Darin offstage (alluded to in the script, when someone tells Darin he is too old to play himself in his own biopic), for my money he does an impressive job with the performances and the songs.
That being said, I had trouble swallowing the film’s central gimmick: that the whole thing is a semi-fictionalized, half-dream-sequence film-within-a-film of Bobby Darin’s own biographical movie. The elder Darin, apparently playing himself, begins by raging around the set, and is only calmed by an encounter with the ghost of the younger Darin, or the actor playing the younger Darin, or a bit of both. This set-up frames the main action – Darin’s all-too-brief rise and fall and rise in show business – and interrupts periodically throughout.
I could have done without it. It’s a shame Spacey didn’t trust that the viewers would find Bobby Darin’s life, told simply, as fascinating as he himself obviously does.
by Eva Holland | Source: Lions Gate DVD
09 Dec 2008 3:15 PM | Submit Comment
A slight entertainment, but one of the only action movies I can recall in which the scenes bookending the action set pieces are actually better than the action set pieces. It’s a success in casting if nothing else. And speaking of the cast, did you know Jeff Bridges – in rare form as a villain – has what is undoubtedly the coolest website ever?
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: One of those tiny little screens on a trans-Atlantic flight
05 Dec 2008 5:34 PM | Submit Comment
Kelly Reichardt’s directorial signature is one of total nuance, as demonstrated here in an eighty-minute film about losing a dog. As with her debut, much of what happens here is harvested from silences and gestures, but this isn’t a film in which anything, really, happens. It’s better described as a tone poem on the counterbalancing between the futility and necessity of hope.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: DVD screener
05 Dec 2008 5:30 PM | Submit Comment
What strengths this film possesses rest entirely upon Mickey Rourke’s performance. Without it – or even with another actor in the title role (Nic Cage was reportedly, and unfortunately, considered) – this is all formula, a fatally predictable story we’ve seen told before. And it’s curious to find Darren Aronofsky in uncharacteristically restrained form; there’re essentially no visual analogues between this and his prior films. The Wrestler is also noteworthy as an indication of a recent trend in cinema I hereby deem Films In Which Marisa Tomei Gets Naked.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: DVD screener
05 Dec 2008 5:28 PM | Submit Comment
The story of Philipe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers is incredible. This walk is so visually and conceptually audacious that the still image of him seemingly floating between the Twin Towers is more than adequate in describing the event. Man on Wire is a thoroughly decent film, all told, but it is a rather elongated Greatest Hits compilation for Michael Nyman, whose old scores – specifically for The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover – are reprised throughout.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Discovery Films 35mm print
05 Dec 2008 5:27 PM | Submit Comment
Better-than-average take on the standard “urban-dance-as-life-changing-force” flick. This time around, a bright student returns to the old neighbourhood when her family can no longer afford her fancy private school – and some fierce step dancing, flavoured with a little class/gender-warfare, ensues.
Predictable but enjoyable. Fresh faces and a restrained script keep this one respectable.
by Eva Holland | Source: Paramount DVD
01 Dec 2008 11:07 PM | Comments (1)
It’s funny how most any “foreign” film seems to acquire a vague air of quality, how there’s almost an assumption that outside Hollywood, all movies are inherently better, born a step up the ladder. A “foreign” film comes with expectations – even when you’re a native of the same country that produced it.
At least, that’s the only explanation I can come up with for my surprise and disappointment, when I walked in to a theatre and found that Passchendaele, the most expensive Canadian movie ever made, was really nothing more than a fairly conventional war drama. Written and directed by, and starring, Canadian golden boy Paul Gross, it’s been hyped for months: its release, timed to match the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War, added an air of solemn authenticity to the build-up.
The story follows a veteran soldier as he sees the horrors of war, gets wounded, falls in love with a nurse, and promptly heads back to the front to rescue said nurse’s headstrong younger brother. It’s caught somewhere between “war drama with a romantic subplot” and “romance with a war-torn backdrop” – and the tension between the two genres can be awkward. The dialogue, littered with modern-day colloquialisms, can be jarring.
But for all that, it’s beautifully filmed (partly in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, and partly in a perfectly re-created wasteland of muddy trenches) and the battle scenes are as powerful as any I’ve ever seen. Seeing it on the big screen, within days of November 11, was a vivid reminder of all those ugly things we’re never supposed to forget.
by Eva Holland | Source: 35mm Print
01 Dec 2008 10:51 PM | Submit Comment
