 |
Archive for May, 2011
Sunday, May 22nd, 2011
 This is a long film festival with a short awards ceremony. Just under two weeks of moviegoing culminates in less than an hour of tears, laughter, and shortness of breath. And that was just the aftermath of the Lars von Trier press conference on Wednesday. For now, the 64th Cannes is known as the year a great director became an ideological "Die Hard" villain. But who can say how history will frame it: The year nobody agreed, the sequel?
Which is not to say there were no popular favorites. On the last Sunday, the festival re-screens the 20 movies in the main competition. It's like a market day, where you -- the general public and assorted badge-holders -- can see what that the trades, your friends, and whoever you follow on Twitter have been talking about. It's the most fun day of the 12. All you're really doing is going to the movies. This morning, several hours before the closing ceremonies, hundreds of people and I went a little mad for seats to "The Artist," a comedy set in Hollywood that the director Michel Hazanavicius has done as a silent movie about a prideful actor facing obsolescence with the advent of talkies. He discovers an actress, falls in love, and has the most adorable terrier.
 I arrived early enough to get a seat, which failed to stop anyone from crawling over me to snag one of his. There were sprints and musical chairs for seats, 4x100-style, about the Debussy Theater. That lasted a good 10 minutes. Once the movie started, the mood changed. You could hear the sound of rapt attention -- and not only because no one speaks. (There were far more silent movies in and around the main competition.) The audience seemed to love this charming but severely overlong movie (100 minutes!). Beforehand, over-the-top things were said about the French funny man Jean Dujardin (pictured above; all the photos are Agence France Presse) who plays the movie's star -- or is it "star within a star"? I'd just like to know why no one's talking about the dog.
Posted in Movie News | No Comments »
Saturday, May 21st, 2011
 The documentary filmmaker Bruce Ricker (that's him on the left, with Clint Eastwood and Quentin Tarantino) was like a Saul Bellow character. Not outsized and overwhelming, like a Herzog or Henderson or Humboldt, but one of those smaller, unswervingly colorful supporting players who bump around the edges of Bellow's books, sometimes a bedeviling presence, more often benignant. Single-minded and vigorous, they manage to combine street smarts with the immaculate innocence only the truly idealistic possess. Put another way, they're guys who know how to play the angles while themselves remaining resolutely non-Euclidean.
Bruce died last week, at 68, after a long battle with pneumonia and other health problems. He was a man constantly on the go. He had to be. A dedication to documentary film is no recipe for success in this culture. Ditto a dedication to jazz. And being dedicated to each at the same time? That's tying both hands behind your back, not just one.
Posted in Movie News | No Comments »
Saturday, May 21st, 2011
 A few days ago I commented that I sensed journalists and moviegoers weren't all talking about Lars von Trier's backhanded anti-Semitic comments during his press conference for "Melancholia." We weren't, really. It's the been the fallout: the festival's decision to deem him persona non grata; von Trier's ongoing, very public search for a shovel magical enough to get him out of this hole (he's quit drinking, he's not Mel Gibson, he's truly sorry)l the condemning statement released by Zentropa Films, von Trier's own production company; and the distancing objection of his younger, slicker countryman Nicolas Winding Refn, whose father has edited some of von Trier's movies and who is here with a better titillation ("Drive") than von Trier's, made in a country (the United States) that von Trier's fear of flying will always keep as an object of risible conjecture for him.
That, of course, is how von Trier managed to make one perceptive but generally loathed movie about America (2003's "Dogville") and one about American slavery ("Manderlay") that is simply imaginary. No matter how contrite he is, von Trier is a showman and provocateur who has a habit of burrowing himself beneath people's skin. For the Cannes Film Festival, his personal thoughts on Hitler, the Nazis, and Jews were particularly unwelcome -- the kind one censures -- because France is a country that takes talk of the Holocaust gravely seriously. Von Trier suggested as much in comments he allegedly made after the festival banned him.
The war, the Occupation, the Holocaust, not to mention the Resistance have shown up, to some extent, in all kinds of French movies ("Night & Fog," "Army of Shadows," "The Sorrow and the Pity," "The Last Metro," "The Story of Women," as a very short but very good beginning). A new one, "The Round Up," opened in France last year and comes to the Unites States this summer.
This year one of the strangest such movies is in the main competition. It's called "This Must Be the Place," it premiered yesterday, I saw it this morning, and while it's neither at all French -- its writer and director, Paolo Sorrentino, is a fanciful Italian visualist -- or set during the war, you can see why the festival felt compelled to invite it. It's the sort of quirky doodle that manages to back into the gravity of its subject matter and even then only partially, with one, late disturbing image. With all due respect to the misapplied talents of Sorrentino, the movie is also here because it stars Sean Penn. Penn wears a plume of teased black hair, white face paint, eyeliner, and lipstick that make him look like kabuki Jeff Spiccoli on Robert Smith night at Edward Scissorhands High.
Posted in Movie News | No Comments »
Friday, May 20th, 2011
 |
|
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides - The Cast
Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Rob Marshall, "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" captures the fun, adventure and humor that ignited the hit franchise--this time in Disney Digital 3D(TM). Johnny Depp returns to his iconic role of Captain Jack Sparrow in an action-packed adventure. Crossing paths with the enigmatic Angelica (Penelope Cruz), he's not sure if it's love--or if she's a ruthless con artist who's using him to find the fabled Fountain of Youth. When she forces him aboard the "Queen Anne's Revenge," the ship of the legendary pirate Blackbeard (Ian McShane), Jack finds himself on an unexpected adventure in which he doesn't know whom to fear more: Blackbeard or Angelica, with whom he shares a mysterious past. The international cast includes franchise vets Geoffrey Rush as the vengeful Captain Hector Barbossa and Kevin R. McNally as Captain Jack's longtime comrade Joshamee Gibbs, plus Sam Claflin as a stalwart missionary and Astrid Berges-Frisbey as a mysterious mermaid.
Directed by: Rob Marshall
Starring: Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Ian McShane, Kevin R. McNally, Astrid Berges-Frisbey, Sam Claflin, Geoffrey Rush |
Posted in Movie Trailers | No Comments »
Friday, May 20th, 2011
 |
|
Conan O'Brien Can't Stop - Trailer
After a much-publicized departure from hosting NBC's Tonight Show - and the severing of a 22-year relationship with the network - O'Brien hit the road with a 32-city music-and-comedy show to exercise his performing chops and exorcise a few demons. The "Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour" was O'Brien's answer to a contractual stipulation that banned his appearance on television, radio and the Internet for six months following his last show. Filmmaker Rodman Flender's resulting documentary, Conan O'Brien Can't Stop, is an intimate portrait of an artist trained in improvisation, captured at the most improvisational time of his career. It offers a window into the private writers room and rehearsal halls as O'Brien's "half-assed show" (his words) is almost instantly assembled and mounted to an adoring fan base. At times angry, mostly hilarious, O'Brien works out his feelings about the very-public separation with comedy and rockabilly music, engaging in bits with on-stage guests such as Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and Jim Carrey, duetting with Jack White and sweating out manic Elvis Presley covers with his band and back-up singers. We see a comic who does not stop -- performing, singing, pushing his staff and himself. Did Conan O'Brien hit the road to give something back to his loyal fans, or did he travel across the continent, stopping at cities large (New York, Las Vegas) and remote (Enoch, Alberta) to fill a void within himself?
Directed by: Rodman Flender
Starring: |
Posted in Movie Trailers | No Comments »
Thursday, May 19th, 2011
Aside from being an immensely lucrative theatrical hit machine, Walt Disney Pictures is also a bastion of direct-to-DVD sales. The studio has been able to brand its hallmark films so well that it occasionally churns out less-expensive sequels to its large franchises that are produced specifically for home entertainment. These sequels are often cheaper, less accomplished, and paltry in comparison with their theatrical counterparts, but are competent enough to entertain their core audience of young children and provide a steady cash flow for the company.
These straight-to-video sequels are generally for animated films such as Aladdin or The Lion King, but Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides seems like an apt live-action candidate for the Disney direct-to-DVD library. The only problem: it is being released theatrically. The film is a lazy fourth installment of a series whose financial potential is probably still high but whose creative juices were drained after two tacked-on sequels to the quirkily charming and creatively visceral 2003 original, The Curse of the Black Pearl. On Stranger Tides, with its pedestrian visual structure, lack of spicy humor, and plodding, by-the-numbers storyline, feels like it was made for a less ambitious format. They could have packaged it as a silly side flick called The New Adventures of Captain Jack and made out like bandits (pirates?) in DVD and Blu-ray sales.
Johnny Depp once again reprises his legendary characterization of Captain Jack Sparrow, the wobbly, effeminate, rock-god of a pirate that is solely responsible for re-igniting the cinema's love affair with swashbuckling adventure. And truthfully, he is still great -- the film would run on fumes if not for Depp's injection of wicked verve. In On Stranger Tides, Sparrow is the film's sole focus, with the film freed of the Orlando Bloom-Keira Knightley romance that started as charming but grew wearisome with each subsequent installment. But in actuality, that romance, tired or not, brought a certain gravity to the earlier Pirates films, a human counterpoint to Captain Jack's loony antics. With nothing to ground the film, we are left with a screenplay that allots for plenty of Sparrow-isms but very little character development. In between uninspiring action sequences and interminable plot exposition, it just seems like Depp is prancing about for the camera with no goal other than to goof off.
The story in which Depp prances revolves around the search for the mythical "Fountain of Youth" -- everyone wants to access it, and Captain Jack knows how to find it. The point and purpose of said fountain might seem self-explanatory, and yet the film becomes so bogged down in its mythological minutiae that we never feel the weight of the discovery, nor understand its power. That wouldn't be so offensive if the movie attained the same level of sparkling quirkiness as did the original, but instead it is more cumbersome and less engaging than even the two previous sequels, Dead Man's Chest and At World's End.
Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio try their best to develop characters with chemistry. Captain Jack leads the way, and is given a capable female foil in the form of Angelica (Penelope Cruz), a former flame who is also in search of the Fountain of Youth. They find themselves on a ship commanded by unscrupulous rogue Blackbeard (Ian McShane), who may or may not be Angelica's father. The three mistrusting shipmates set out to reach the Fountain, while Captain Jack's old foe, Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), stays hot on their trail. While they exchange cheeky verbal bon mots in a fashion similar to the previous films, all of the characters feel strained, and the story they inhabit feels like stale leftovers.
It's important to mention that On Stranger Tides is also the first film in the series not to have Gore Verbinski at the helm. While Verbinski was busy pairing up with Depp for the brilliant and beautiful Rango, directorial duties for this film were handed to Rob Marshall, who makes Broadway adaptations like Chicago and Nine look dazzling, but whose talents don't yet extend to big-budget action-adventure. His work is nothing if not wholly competent -- safe, serviceable, and utterly pedestrian.
The same could be said for the rest of the film. Familiar characters appear on screen and the same Hans Zimmer score plays over every scene, but the magic from the earlier films is missing. Sadly, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides feels like an unnecessary grab at bonus box-office dollars, a paycheck movie for all involved -- even for Depp, who still digs into his iconic role with vigor, but who may need to hang up his boots after this.
Posted in Movie Reviews | No Comments »
Thursday, May 19th, 2011
Things seem just a little bit different as Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen's 41st feature and his first shot entirely in the eponymous City of Light, gets started. The staple jazz-tinged opening credits are interrupted for an extended sequence of lovely but not-quite-postcard-ready images of the streets, waterways, and monuments of Paris and, when the credits resume, the jazz has subsided and we hear two distinctly American voices bickering. "You're in love with a fantasy," says a female voice that ends up belonging to the radiant yet odiously over-privileged Inez (Rachel McAdams), who looks out on a pond that may have inspired Monet. "I'm in love with you," calls back her fiancé, Gil (Owen Wilson), a successful screenwriter and aspiring novelist who dreams of walking the tight corridors of the famed city in the rain. Blind nostalgia is Gil's drug of choice, and despite being on vacation with his soon-to-be wife's parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy, beautifully cast), the studio-approved scripter is covertly considering a post-nuptials move to France. To Inez, Gil is merely swept up in the romanticism of the city and she refuses him even the most minor of indulgences, even openly scolding him when he disagrees or even slightly disturbs Paul (Michael Sheen), an old friend, traveling professor, and unerringly obnoxious intellectual. When Paul offers to take Inez dancing, Gil takes the chance to walk the streets under cover of night, ending up at the steps of a cathedral as the grand bells strike midnight and a car full of drunken Parisians pulls up in a decidedly anachronistic automobile. Already a few glasses of wine in, Gil obliges them and is immediately flung back into the heyday of Parisian culture, circa 1920. Roaming around in the post-war salad days, Gil is privileged to hobnob with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), drink with Hemingway (Corey Stoll), trade philosophies with Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody, obviously having some fun), even get a few notes on his unpublished novel from Gertrude Stein, lovingly played by Kathy Bates; Cole Porter sticks around just to sing a few bars of "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love." In the morning, however, it all goes back to normal, prompting return trips that make Inez and her parents suspicious enough to call in a private eye. Following Gil proves impossible, allowing the soon-to-be groom to pitch to Luis Bunuel and romance Picasso's latest muse (Marion Cotillard), who has her own romance for the late 19th century. Gil inevitably falls for Cotillard's wandering flapper, erupting in a confluence of fantasies at famed Maxine's after a can-can show but Allen has not gone completely soft on us. Allen's previous film, the severely underrated You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, ended warmly on two spiritually inclined, elderly lovebirds while faux-intellectuals, atheists, misogynists, and philanderers seemingly were given their cosmic punishments. For Allen, it seemed like a grand gesture made sincerely towards a contingency that he showed little more than pity or disdain for beforehand, and Midnight in Paris continues in the vein of that film. Less schematic and thematically dialectic than a great deal of the director's late work, Midnight in Paris eschews the pleasures of nostalgia and delusions, but also suggests that they evolve from a great internal displeasure, in this case Gil's suspicions of Inez having an affair with Paul and not loving him all that much. Not that Gil has been strictly devoted to Inez: When not applying his aw-shucks brand of seduction to Picasso's mistress, he can be seen flirting with a young woman at the local bazaar (the enchanting Lea Seydoux). He even chats up a guide at the Rodin Museum, played by France's first lady and former super model Carla Bruni. As much as Cotillard is a fantasy, Inez represents an illusion of what a grounded, successful man should seek in a wife and, by extension, in life. In other words, the fantasy Allen, who wrote his own screenplay per usual, sculpts for Gil offers the would-be novelist both a luminous escape and a mirror to lend insight into his connubial predicament, which includes entering into a family of overindulged snobs and Tea Party supporters. Shot by the great Darius Khondji, Midnight in Paris celebrates the timeless allure of the City of Light to the cinematic image without apology but it never goes as far as to overstate that allure. The same can be said about its attitude towards cultural idols, who show up here stripped of their great artistic weight and are presented as lovefools, eccentrics, macho bullheads, and, in the case of Bates's Stein, a sort of mother superior to the whole lot. (Indeed, the film is an ipso facto parody of the sacrosanct attitude given many biopics of heralded artists.) And Allen finds himself a strong proxy in Wilson, who hasn't responded this well to a director since traveling to India with Wes Anderson in The Darjeeling Limited. Allen's trip to Paris doesn't resonate with the immense emotional complexities that Anderson's film did but his fantastical bit of time travel brings out a startling generosity and humanity in Allen that has only been seen in glimpses recently. Fantasies are as much tied to our personal desires as they are to our sense of mortality, but if Gil's concluding walk over a rainy bridge with a lovely young woman is any indication, some things defy even the unforgiving specter of time.
Posted in Movie Reviews | No Comments »
Thursday, May 19th, 2011
The possibilities and ramifications of infidelity get a thorough workout in Massey Tadjedin's moody romance Last Night. As both halves of a seemingly unhappy couple spar on the same night with potential affairs, this perfectly fine scenario settles too easily into an underperformed exercise in what-if. The promise of the film that this could have been is continually receding to the horizon the longer it goes on.
A well-attuned Keira Knightley, acquitting herself better than almost anybody else on-screen, plays Joanna, a writer who's published one book but has since settled into a defeatist cycle of doubt that keeps grinding out mindless fashion journalism while avoiding getting back to her real work. Her husband Michael (Sam Worthington, taking a break from battling aliens and mythological monsters) is a real-estate developer surprisingly not portrayed as a heartless philistine.
The film opens on an argument the two have after coming back from a work party where Joanna spots Michael's voluptuous co-worker, Laura (Eva Mendes), fawning all over him. They go back and forth, Michael's protestations of ignorance as to Laura's carnal intentions seeming willfully naïve. Then Michael heads off for a presentation in Philadelphia - with Laura, no less - leaving Joanna to stew in guilt (thinking she was wrong-headed about her husband) and writer's block in their smartly decorated Chelsea loft.
The film's more romantic interests come alive when that morning Joanna runs into an ex-boyfriend of hers on the street. Alex (Guillaume Canet) is a Parisian writer who shared a brief and flaring kind of affair with Joanna not long before she married Michael, somebody she never told her husband about. Now her husband's far away, she's maybe looking for a way to get even, and Alex is there on the street, smiling wistfully at her and asking what she's doing later. Tadjedin says a lot about Joanna's temptations just in the two sequences of her getting dressed - first for the party with Michael (toss on a sweater, makeup in the cab), second for dinner with Alex (good lingerie, heels, nice dress, long and lingering makeup application in the mirror). The filmmaker slips in a number of small observations like this throughout the film, but acute as they are, it's not enough to make up for some severely underwritten characters.
For all the film's bifurcated structure - Joanna secretly on the town with Alex while Michael boozes the night away with an increasingly seductive and manipulative Laura - it's obvious that Joanna's is the story that Tadjedin wants to tell. Michael and Laura's subplot runs mostly on autopilot, with his character coming off as little more than a chisel-faced blank. Similarly, Tadjedin doesn't give us much to hang on to with Alex, who spends most of the film in quietly grinning contemplation of Joanna, who he is unashamedly trying to woo away. The only male character of interest here is Truman (Griffin Dunne), a publishing friend of Alex's who parachutes into the film to provide some long-overdue edge with his bonhomie, needling questions, and the sly wisdom of a man whose current wife is clearly not his first nor his last.
Last Night pulls viewers in unexpected ways, which is more than can be said for most films of this kind. Its cool-toned visual palette is refreshingly free of the usual hip-Manhattan cliches, and the paralleling stories of fidelity tempted are heavier with anxiousness and worry than seduction. It will be exciting to see where Tadjedin goes next, but as well-executed as so much of it is, this is an exercise in suspenseful romance that doesn't quite know where to go with its story, or how to ensure that we will care much one way or the other.
Posted in Movie Reviews | No Comments »
Thursday, May 19th, 2011
 |
|
Straw Dogs - Trailer
David and Amy Sumner (James Marsden and Kate Bosworth), a Hollywood screenwriter and his actress wife, return to her small hometown in the deep South to prepare the family home for sale after her father's death. Once there, tensions build in their marriage and old conflicts re-emerge with the locals, including Amy's ex-boyfriend Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), leading to a violent confrontation.
Directed by: Rod Lurie
Starring: James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgård, Dominic Purcell, Laz Alonso, Willa Holland, James Woods |
Posted in Movie Trailers | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011
You can't tell this just by looking at the type, but the fact is that I'm not writing this from home -- I'm writing this on the road, where I am currently on tour promoting my book. Touring is fun, but it also takes up most of the brain, leaving it incapable of thinking up big meaty column subjects. You know what that means: to the mailbag!
First question:
A couple of weeks ago, you posted a column about upcoming films and whether you were looking forward to them or not. Do you think it's fair to grade films like that, when you haven't seen them yet?
Sure, because I'm not grading the film itself; I'm grading whether, based on what I know about the films, they are ones I think I want to see. These two things are entirely separate. Is it possible that a movie that I'm not looking forward to will surprise me and I'll end up loving it? Sure. Not only is it possible; it's something I'd be happy to have happen. Conversely, there are movies which looking interesting to me that will disappoint when I get around to seeing them. That's the nature of expectation. It's something everyone does -- and something every movie studio tries to manipulate. All the trailers and posters and advance stories
about the films are designed to make you hungry to see it. If a
movie studio is going to go out of its way to try to influence my
opinion about a picture before I see it, I feel perfectly fine in having an opinion in the first place. Like any opinion, it could be wrong in
the long run. But in the meantime, I'm okay having it.
Next question:
When will superhero movies just die? I am so sick of them.
They'll die when people stop going to them, which is something they don't appear to be doing, given Thor's solid $60 million-plus debut and decent hold for a second weekend. Alternately, they'll stop when the movies become too expensive to justify, which is a real possibility, since the budgets regularly top $100 million before marketing. We've already seen the Spider-Man franchise scale back with a cheaper director and star and a (relatively) smaller budget, but not every superhero film will lend itself to downsizing.
There's also another option, which is that we'll see the end of the superhero movies when Hollywood exhausts the A-list stable of both the DC and
Marvel universes and starts trying to build blockbusters off of marginal or second-string heroes. It's one thing to aim for a half-billion in box office with Batman; it'll be another thing entirely to try to do it with, say, Nightwing. It's not impossible, but
that's not the same thing as saying it'll be a sure bet.
Final question:
Last week, you talked about things film can teach you about writing novels. What doesn't film teach you about writing novels?
Well, lots, actually. Films are visual media, so there's no real need, generally speaking, for films to focus on description. A film can show you in a few frames what an author might take several pages to describe
-- the proverbial picture being worth a thousand words. Film's also generally not good at getting into the heads of characters, and, while it
offers a form of omniscient narrator, the form takes shape via the placement and use of the camera, not (necessarily) via the skill of the writer. All of these things are useful for a novel writer to know and implement in his or her writing, and film's not going to be a way to learn these things.
None of this is particularly
surprising; filmmakers and novelists overlap in terms of their skill sets and focus, but there's lots in each case that is not applicable in the other. It's why being a great author is no guarantee of writing a great (or even good or fair) screenplay and why so
many wonderful screenwriters fail badly when they put their hands to
long-form prose. They're disciplines that require work and effort
to get done, and the more time you spend on one the less time you have
to spend on the other. Usually, you have to choose which you like more.
There are exceptions (The Princess Bride's William Goldman stands out as one), but they're called "exceptions" for a reason.
Posted in Movie Reviews | No Comments »
|
|
|
