Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Steel Cage Match: Pretty Woman vs. Mighty Aphrodite
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Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Ordinary People: Grief and Mourning in America
I never know what to do with my blogging self on 9/11. Being so very far removed geographically from the attacks eleven years ago, I never feel comfortable or confident talking about what that day meant, and still means, to me emotionally. I do feel not only obligated but called to do something to remember and process, and the way I remember and process is through movies. So.When scanning Netflix and HBO Go for something appropriate, I saw that Ordinary People had been added to the latter. It's a movie I have always meant to see and never crossed paths with until today, so I decided to postpone a 9/11 movie for the evening and watch that this morning. As it turns out, it was exactly the film I needed to see.
Ordinary People came out in 1980, so it obviously is not at all about the attacks or their aftermath. What it is about is trauma, and how horrific things happen to people who do not deserve it, and how much hard physical and emotional labor it takes to heal from profound loss. The movie follows Conrad Jarrett (a young Timothy Hutton who earned every inch of his Oscar, though it should have been for Best Actor rather than Supporting), a young man suffering visibly and gut-wrenchingly from depression and anxiety following the accidental death of his older brother. Conrad's attempts to manage, or in his words, "control," his rapidly deteriorating psychic state in order to protect his parents (Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore) grow increasingly unsuccessful and difficult to watch as he stops eating, sleeping, and interacting with his friends. The fact that he has recently attempted suicide clearly consumes his anxious father with guilt and concern, though his mother remains distant and seemingly uninterested in his breakdown. A moment of desperation leads him to a psychiatrist (Judd Hirsch), who slowly, painstakingly, and doggedly brings him out of numbness and darkness and enables him to imagine a life liberated from guilt and self-loathing.
This is probably the finest representation of the power of talk therapy that I've ever seen on film. Dr. Berger meets Conrad where he is, calls his bluffs, and never allows him to surrender to the stories that he has internalized about himself. As Conrad slowly allows himself to feel the pain of his unbearable loss, the implications of his burgeoning recovery reverberate through his grieving family. His newfound ability to articulate his rage and disappointment, particularly at his mother's coldness, does not result in any easy answers for the Jarrett family. Moore's Beth is increasingly threatened by her husband and son's desire to talk about the twin traumas that struck the family, and it becomes obvious that Conrad learned his earlier (unsuccessful and dangerous) coping strategies from her.
Though the film doesn't offer a happy ending, what it does offer is the belief that people can, with help, bring themselves back from the darkest places in their minds and hearts. And it demonstrates that those who reach out in pain and desperation will find arms to pull them up. And it argues that though the world can be cruelly capricious and astoundingly unfair, redemption and forgiveness and hope can find their way into hearts that have been broken wide open. I needed to be reminded of that today.
I also have to say that one of the people dearest to me was born on this day, which also helps me remember that there is always brightness and love to be found in moments that seem irredeemably dark. Happy birthday, Nat!
(New) Fall 2012 Television Programming
Are you as excited about fall tv as I am?!?! Probably not because I'm assuming you have better things to do. I do not. So because I don't, I decided to take a look at the new shows
rolling (some start tonight-check this handy link from CNN). If you don't like lists, TVGuide.com has a calendar. Oooo! Each network has a decent number of new shows and some in their back pockets for 2013 (aka mid-season). But for now, here's what's coming out:
Elementary** (I quite enjoyed it)
Go On** (Meh; hoping it gets better/funnier)
Revolution** (Actually not too bad; combo of other shows, kinda violent)
Arrow*** (BARROWMAN! The folks at Comic-Con LOVED it; also, if you're a Ninja Warrior fan like myself, he totally does the salmon ladder thing in the show!)
Beauty and the Beast** (Meh but I don't care; I'll still watch it)
Cult*** (THe folks at Comic-Con did not love this; like at all)
* Never heard of it until a couple of days ago
** I’ve seen the pilot
***Didn’t see the pilot but talked to people who did.
Monday, September 10, 2012
If. . . : The Anti-Harry Potter
The film details and satirizes the rigid class system that structures the unnamed boarding school the boys attend. Arbitrary rules and brutal physical punishment is doled out by senior "Whips," who also claim and exploit first-year boys as unpaid servants, with the hint of sexual servitude. The Whips step into the authority vacuum created by the faculty, who blithely ignore, and thereby sanction, the abuse. Most of the professors also demonstrate some brand of perversion, whether it be walking around naked in the boys dormitory or nearing orgasm while overhearing the House Master sing a hymn.
Mick and his two friends resist the Whips through verbal insubordination and offers of assistance to the vulnerable first-years. But after receiving a particularly brutal beating, Mick and his two mates swear a blood oath to avenge themselves on the Whips and the system that encourages and enables their sadism, with Mick ominously declaring "there is no such thing as a wrong war."
As Mick becomes more committed to violence, the film becomes more surreal, with the most unusual element being the frequent and unexplained appearance of an unnamed "Girl" who seems to embody all the freedom and ferocity that the school seems committed to squelching in its attendees. Notably, there are also some sequences shot in black and white, and after wracking my brain trying to figure out their significance (The unreliability of memory? The draining effects of oppression?), Wikipedia informed me that it was due to a) obstructing light coming through the huge windows and b) a lack of production funds. Awesome.
If . . . is the first in a trilogy of loosely connected Travis films by counter-culture director Lindsay Anderson. The conclusion, which I won't spoil for you here, manages to be simultaneously wildly satirical and deeply political, suggesting that the cultural cold war raging during the film's making was constantly on the verge of becoming hot. Bachelorette, THIS is how you do satire.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Bachelorette: Heather Chandler would eat this movie alive
As I've felt with so many movies lately, Bachelorette doesn't quite know what it wants to be when it grows up. The film swings wildly between hedonistic screwball comedy and a hero's journey of self-actualization, and doesn't quite capture either, though the former thread comes closest to success. The film clearly positions itself in the Girls Gone Gross-Out genre probably indoctrinated by Cameron Diaz's The Sweetest Thing but most recently, and successfully, realized in Bridesmaids. The idea that not just Apatovian man-boys but also women do drugs, have frank discussions about sex and actually inhabit functioning human bodies is one that shouldn't be as radical as it appears to be in modern cinema, but its time has come. So watching Kirsten Dunst, Isla Fisher, and Lizzy Caplan do coke, talk about blow jobs, and gag each other to revive from a Xanax overdose before their high school friend's wedding is, I guess, progressive?
But where the movie fails is in its scattershot and incomplete invocation of Issues like bulimia, abortion, and self-destructive self-loathing in order to force humanity onto its characters and an "explanation" onto their raunchy and shocking behavior. I think Bachelorette would have worked much better if it remained a feature-length R-rated situation comedy. The situation it chronicles--a Hangover-esque road trip around Manhattan to clean and repair the bride's dress the night before the wedding--lends itself to some amusing scenarios. But along the way, literally in the middle of the movie, it seems, someone decided that Dunst's alpha-bitch Regan, Fisher's cutesy dolt Katie, and Caplan's caustic and cynical Gena, needed to be damaged in order to be sympathetic or interesting characters. This is a mistake Mean Girls never made. So we get a string of third-act exposition (and clumsy romantic pairings) that reveal each girl's sorry past and lackluster present that is meant to humanize its trio of leads, but only makes the very real problems that are name-checked seem like simplistic excuses for bad behavior, rather than complicated phenomena particular to modern femininity. But why do we need these women be messed up in order to enjoy watching their exploits or excesses? I don't recall Knocked Up including a chunk of dialogue explaining that Jason Segel's dyslexia made him hit on married women. Or that Phil in The Hangover was abandoned as a child. Why are bad boys allowed to be just that, but bad girls have to be pathologized?
To return to my original question, if you want these girls to be bitches--and mean they certainly are, cruelly taunting their plus-sized friend Becky, the bride (Bridesmaid's Rebel Wilson, not given enough to do) both to her face and behind her back--make them bitches the way bitches are. Show the charisma, the desperation, and the verbal weaponry that mean girls wield to gather people close and then carefully slice them to ribbons. I never got a sense of why Regan is friends with Katie and Gena, or why Becky has chosen not only to remain in touch with this clique, but also make them bridesmaids at her wedding. And that seems to me like the more interesting, and potentially darkly funny, question--what is the glue that holds these narcissistic and consequence-blind women together? Heathers shows us why bitches are inherently interesting; Bachelorette tells us why they can't be just funny.
Foreign Parts: A Joint Effort
Those of you who know guest blogger Jonathan Alexandratos well, know that he manages to come across films that escape the radar screens of most of us. Hence Foreign Parts, a 2010 documentary that tries to capture a neighborhood that is slated for annihilation. It's sort of a pre-apocalyptic movie on a local scale. The neighborhood, shadowed by the Mets new stadium in Queens and anchored by a massive junk yard, is slated to be destroyed to make room for stuff like Best Buy and whatnot. This loss is a given. The people interviewed express a range of emotions about the imminent destruction of their neighborhood and livelihood.
Jonathan and I agreed that stuff changes, and that's not a bad thing. There is a botany to growing cities, and it means that places and environments have to die in order for a place to remain vibrant. But it is a bad thing to forget--to not document the people and lives that were and now aren't. And that's what Foreign Parts aims to do. And because (I hear) the film is such an unconventional documentary, less narrative and more impressionistic, and because Jonathan is creatively empathetic, he wrote his review as a poem. And here it is.
WHITE SPACE
Or
IF IPHIGENIA WROTE FILM REVIEWS
Or
A REVIEW OF FOREIGN PARTS
WRITTEN IN FREE VERSE
By Jonathan Alexandratos
To kill time between sacrifices,
Iphigenia watches documentaries.
One, Foreign Parts,
Set in Willet’s Point,
Comforted her in Tauris
By giving her misery a bonded bedfellow.
She watches,
As a 5’2” man in a Parka
Saws at the bowels of a steering wheel
And then drags it
Across a snow-covered scab
That doubles as a driveway.
A part she doesn’t know the name of
Goes clackety-clack along the way,
Sounding like all the seconds of a clock
That will never get ticked.
Iphigenia hates to be morbid about it,
But she can’t help but reference the spinal cords
Of prisoners, and heathens, and other entities “xeno-”
That have met the other side of the knife.
An old man worries that the AirTrain
Will trample on
And re-gash the landscape of his last 76 years.
He wonders, “Where are you gonna put the bulkhead!?”
He knows his vote doesn’t count
Because he never bought a computer
And therefore doesn’t get the emails
That change dates and times and the urgency of things.
He says “plane” instead of “plan”:
“What kind of plane do you have!?”
Or is it “plain”?
Iphigenia tries to choose her words carefully.
She never purchases WhiteOut,
For fear this will only give her permission
To make mistakes,
Thus embarrassing her, fatally, at the alter.
Possibly the same guy who decapitated that steering wheel,
Is the same guy who dances to the “Mister Softee” theme,
As the ice cream truck Dopplers from there to here and beyond.
He dances on the white part of the concrete
Flanked by two rivers of sludge
Even after the truck has long passed,
Its tracks thinned by the wheels of a small pushcart,
Making Iphigenia think the dance and the ice cream truck
Were just a happy coincidence,
And not evidence of some dry cause/effect relationship.
The mouths
Of a man and a woman
Give birth to albino ectoplasm
As the ponder the annihilation of their world.
Iphigenia reminds herself that Tauris,
Too,
Might someday be a shopping mall.
And that really would make ceremonial solemnity of the place
A great deal more awkward,
If it had to come with, say, a coupon.
Hasidim offer to do a mitzvah
And another mitzvah
And another mitzvah,
If that one doesn’t take.
The Taurians do not wear snow
The same way they do in Willet’s Point.
In Willet’s Point,
You can take a car radio,
And tune it to “I Wanna Be Sedated,”
And let the rims
And the tires
And the pleather
And the applefire red toolboxes
Do the rest.
A plane,
JFK or LaGuardia-bound,
Ripples through a puddle
That tells the brief story
Of a car
And a splash
And a street light
And the commerce that secures it
And the puny gasps
Of a coral road below,
The sound cutting through with a/
WHHHBBBBBBBZZZZZZSSSSS
Iphigenia reminds herself that she hates to fly
Ever since she flew Athena Air,
And was never offered any peanuts.
White marker –
Not chalk –
Counts off tires.
The numbers seem to carry great meaning,
Though they themselves seem meaningless.
E.L. Tires,
Who does not speak English,
stands in a row of doors.
One comes from an Intrepid.
One comes from a Camry.
One comes from a Maxima.
One comes
From a Taurus.
Together,
They seem to make a full car.
But the doors,
By themselves,
Move.
A forklift
Aborts a gas tank
From the trunk of a sedan.
Iphigenia
Straightens her hair
In the rear-view mirror
That she saved
After her first car
Which was a Fisher Price
Power Wheels
Barbie Jammin’
Jeep Wrangler.
A woman in Foreign Parts
Does likewise
In something similar,
Except it’s a more adult car.
The woman wants to look good
For her husband
Who just got out of prison –
He would have been back sooner,
But he argued with the guard,
Making the guard detain him
Until 2, instead of noon.
Iphigenia sympathizes with this,
As she hopes that,
If she were ever rescued,
Her hair might also be straight,
And not yet white.
But,
In the mean time,
Iphigenia waits
In the shadow of
Bob’s Furniture
Citibank
Sony
Budweiser
Izod
And the Home of the Mets,
Until she can distinguish between her letters
And the white space between them.
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Somewhere: Hit Girl in LA?
First of all, let me share that Sofia Coppola's Somewhere is the ideal movie to watch in a sinus-headache-induced fog. It's deliberate and meditative and has lovely lingering shots that give you time to contemplate not only how and why an invisible Bane mask has been put on your face, but also Coppola's relationship to, of all people, Luc Besson.While watching Somewhere, I kept thinking about the recent cinematic trope of very powerful, very damaged, young girls (think Kick-Ass, Hanna, Sucker Punch and Besson's The Professional, Colombiana, etc.--hell, even Hunger Games and the new Snow White, now that I think of it). Though Coppola's film can in no way be called an "action movie"--it would be much more in keeping with the movie's glacial pacing to call it a passive movie--I think there might be a connection between those heroines and Elle Fanning's Cleo. Her character interrupts the slow-motion suicide by malaise of her movie star father (a really good Stephen Dorff) and prompts in him a much needed existential crisis. Cleo's verbal and non-verbal articulation of her pain and fear at having two unreliable parents seems akin to the self-expression through aggressive physicality of Besson's orphans and the weaponized daughters of Kick-Ass and Hanna, but in a way that doesn't carry the same troubling equation of violence with self-actualization or feminism.
Come to think of it, Coppola's other films--The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette--also feature girls who wield power in this way, through a questing, questioning, but incomplete sense of self, particularly, in the first two films, in the lives of similarly uncertain men. I wonder if putting Coppola's work together with this trend of girls kicking ass could be a way to think through the benefits and limitations of how both models represent the possibility and treacherousness of young womanhood.
Apologies if this post asks more questions than it answers (like, for instance, did I even think Somewhere was any good?). It's totally the Bane mask's fault.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Lawless
I don’t like Shia LaBeouf.
My problem with him is his personality.
As an actor there is potential (aside from the Transformers movies) but
as a person I just wish he’d just keep his mouth shut. I kind of love the poster to the right. I say kind of because Shia is hanging his head in shame, which is great, but the hat is covering too much of Tom Hardy's face. Speaking of...
I really like Tom Hardy.
He’s one of those rare creatures that is equally good in action flicks as
well as period dramas. Plus he’s, like,
totally hot.
Lawless had the difficult task of getting me past the presence
of Shia LaBeouf. The inclusion of Tom
Hardy would cancel out a lot of my Shia-hating but there was no guarantee that
a violent drama about Prohibition-era bootleggers could rise above the
existence of LaBeouf. It did. Guess what else? I think LaBeouf did a pretty good job in
it. I was able to get past my dislike of
him as a person and remember that there is an actor in there somewhere.
Lawless is about the bootlegging Bondurant brothers of
1920s Virginia. Forrest (Hardy), Howard
(Jason Clarke), and Jack (LaBeouf) are busy making moonshine and trying to evade the
law. The "law" in this film is Special
Deputy Charlie Rakes played by an ΓΌber-creepy Guy Pearce minus some
eyebrows. Rakes is new to this part of
the country, having just left Chicago to come down to the south to put a stop to the production
of alcohol. The movie is fantastic and is filled with superb acting and extreme violence. Regarding the violence...you should be
forewarned. They don’t shy away from
pain in this film. My friend and I
happened to see it at a theater that serves food and alcohol. I’m really glad I chose to not to eat because
my food may not have stayed down. I can
usually handle movie violence but there were a number of times I closed my
eyes.
Lawless was well-crafted in every way. The acting was solid from the three brothers
as well as the women in their lives (national treasure, Jessica Chastain and impossibly
beautiful without makeup, Mia Wasikowska). Guy Pearce was pitch-perfect, even in a role
that was kind of a caricature of the typical, crooked lawman. Gary Oldman even popped up in a few scenes as a
notorious gangster who has also left Chicago for rural Virginia. He wasn't in it much but I'm glad to get a few scenes of Oldman whenever possible.
The story is one that we’ve seen before but is given a bit
more gravity since it’s based on actual events.
Get this, Nick Cave wrote it! The
Nick Cave musician guy from Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. Anyone?!?! They did "Red Right Hand." I know you know it. I had no idea he was a screenwriter. Anywhoodle, what I found most intriguing was how the
actors portrayed these characters.
LaBeouf did well as Jack, the bumbling, awkward, youngest brother. And I believed his journey through the
film. When Jack reached his highpoint in
the movie I was right there with him.
But really the best reason to see Lawless is Tom Hardy. He has a total of maybe 25 words but they’re
not needed. The man grunts his way
through the film and does it in such a way that you know what each grunt
means. The receiving end of many of
those grunts is Maggie, played by the fabulous Chastain. Maggie is new to town, having recently left…say
it with me…CHICAGO!
There were so many satisfying elements of the movie. I loved the pacing, which was done very well. I loved the few moments of levity that were
natural and a needed break from the violence.
I especially loved the way they lit the final scene between LaBeouf and Pearce. Both men were in shadow but you easily knew who was
who.
I don't think many people will make the effort to see this in the theater so I'm hoping it does alright when it's available to rent. Don't let Shia LaDouche, er, LaBeouf, keep you from seeing it.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Public Speaking: My Cocktails with Fran
Fran Lebowitz's name has always been familiar to me--perhaps it has something to do with her idiosyncratic personal style and wry speaking voice--but I haven't read anything she's written or really known anything about her. After watching Martin Scorsese's 2010 documentary starring Lebowitz, Public Speaking, I can say that's still pretty much true.That's not to say the film isn't immensely entertaining and (what a shock) well made. It intersperses a conversation between Scorsese (instantly recognizable through his voice and, I never realized this before, the back of his head), a mystery dude who appears only in profile and silhouette who is decidedly NOT co-producer Graydon Carter, and Lebowitz at Waverly Inn in the West Village (I had to look it up--I thought it was Sardi's) with clips of Lebowitz at speaking engagements and fairly bizarre and distracting bits of New York-based film marginalia. The latter element is probably unavoidable, given Scorsese's fetish for precisely that.
Though I didn't learn nearly as much about Lebowitz's life as I did from scanning her Wikipedia page after, I did learn a lot about how New York changed for a certain group of avant guard artists and intellectuals, of which Lebowitz was a member, from the 70s to the present, but particularly during the 80s. I learned that she holds essentialist views on gender, leading her to believe that whereas racism might end because it's a fantasy of difference, sexism never will because she holds that the hierarchy is biologically based and therefore impossible to overcome. I learned she's tight with Toni Morrison. And I have to say, I like this approach to the personal documentary more than a rote recital of major milestones in its subject's life. After all, listening to someone talk about something other than themselves is usually how we get to know people, so why shouldn't it work in this genre as well?
Above all, I was reminded that Lebowitz is really hysterically funny. I didn't agree with everything she said (um, the gender thing, as well as her insistence on an ontological distinction between gay rights and civil rights), but I sure as hell loved the wit and confidence with which she said it. I think we can safely add her to my galaxy of girl crushes.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
ParaNorman
I saw the panel for ParaNorman at Comic-Con this year and got really excited about seeing the film. In a slightly tangential side note, have you noticed the kids movies coming out (ParaNorman, Hotel Transylvania, and Frankenweenie) all have supernatural slants to them? Nifty. Anywhoodle, ParaNorman has been getting great reviews but not doing incredibly well at the box office. It got a respectable $14 mil its opening weekend but kids' movies usually do better. I wonder if the subject matter is keeping them home. It's a shame because subject matter (aka zombies) aside, it's a story that all kids should see.
Speaking of story, ParaNorman's is this: Norman is an 11-year old outcast who sees ghosts and is made fun of by everyone, even his sister. He's misunderstood by his father who just wishes Norman could be more normal. Norman's gift of seeing and conversing with the dead comes in handy because it's his turn to keep the town's witch at bay. On the anniversary of her death a story must be read at the place where she was buried to keep her quiet until next year and to keep the puritanical zombies in their graves. Unfortunately Norman isn't given all the pertinent information and the story doesn't get read in time. Norman, who knows that spirits stuck on earth have unfinished business, decides to get to the witch's real problem. Why does she keep bugging them? Norman, his sister, his friend, Neil, Neil's brother, and school bully Alvin band together to rid the town of its zombie problem.
There was plenty of humor and lots for the adults who usually escort kids to these things. Not me, though. I'm that creepy, old broad in the back corner of the theater with no kids anywhere near her. Actually I went with my mom so we were two creepy, old broads in the theater without any kids. One thing I got a kick out of was hearing what made the kids laugh and what made the adults laugh. The scene that made me laugh out loud was the reaction the puritanical zombies had when seeing what the world is like now:
I was impressed not only with the story but with the film making involved in this stop-motion animated film. I have little to no patience. I try to muster some for old people and little kids but beyond that I think things should be done (correctly) and quickly. I would be the worst stop-motion animator ever. I am truly amazed at what they do. If you've seen Coraline then you know how absolutely beautiful it can be when it's done well. And thanks to the good folks at Laika (who gave us Coraline and ParaNorman) we get to experience some truly amazing artistry on screen.
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