Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me

The recently deceased Elaine Stritch is profiled beautifully in this film about the last year of her life.

At the start of “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me,” we see the legendary Broadway actress strutting down Manhattan city streets in a giant fur on her way to a rehearsal. She crosses the street and yelps theatrically. An actress she’s worked with recognizes her on the street and Stritch’s comment is “This business sucks.” As the camera follows her, it edits and darts down the street at the spitfire speed of her voice.

Even if you are not familiar with Elaine Stritch, you know this woman. Her poise and the way she is depicted here defines her as a star and a woman who has seen it all. Chiemi Karasawa’s documentary profile is less interested in Stritch’s storied past and more in how she carries herself in the here and now.

“Anyone aging gracefully really knows something,” Stritch says. Having just passed away less than a month ago, not long after this movie was first released, Stritch really did have it all figured out, and yet she was no less afraid of death or any less human. She makes for a wonderful character study not because of her history but because of who she was in 2013 in the last year of her life.

And what we see is a documentary that may as well have been directed by Stritch herself, even if someone else was behind the camera. Always aware of the ins and outs of show business and forever concerned with her image and putting the best show forward, she scolds the cameraman for getting too close (“This isn’t a skin commercial!”) and demands reshoots when he seems to be a mile away.

In fact the film is so selective that it doesn’t bother with its own version of narrated or edited history; her memory will do just fine and be told more theatrically than any editor could muster. Her ability to think on her feet and always play for laughs or an emotion echoes on stage and off. “Shoot Me” mostly follows Stritch during the production of a one-woman show in which she sings the work of Stephen Sondheim. She’s performed these songs dozens if not hundreds of times over, but at this age and this stage in her career, she’s a different actress. “It’s hard enough to remember Sondheim lyrics when you don’t have diabetes,” she jokes during rehearsal. Karasawa plays that lapse of memory for a strong callback later when on stage she visibly forgets her lyric, but manages to turn it into a charming moment of truth and storytelling for the audience.

Not everyone is a Broadway fan or may not even be familiar with Stritch’s resume, but “Shoot Me” is loaded with amusing anecdotes and witty to tender commentary from Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin and another recently departed legend, James Gandolfini.

“She is a molotov cocktail of madness, insanity and genius,” a friend says about Stritch. “Shoot Me” gets at that perception with its own confection of ingredients and stories as well as its own sharp tongued look at a woman so deserving of the attention.

3 1/2 stars

Mood Indigo

“Mood Indigo” is too mired in whimsy to have any sort of drama or conflict and is too fixated on fantasy to be truly amusing.

Perhaps just as great a cliche as the indie that takes itself way too seriously is the indie romance full of way too much fantastical whimsy. The director of “Mood Indigo,” Michel Gondry, is one of the pioneers of this style of 21st Century filmmaking with his film “Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind,” an enduring masterpiece of the 2000s. While he may never recapture the magic of that film, Gondry has returned to his roots in France to adapt a French classic with a story so silly and inventive that it just begs to be liked. “Mood Indigo” unfortunately teeters on charming and insufferable and can’t find solid footing up in the clouds.

“Mood Indigo” is based on a novel by Boris Vian, but this is Gondry’s world, one in which every mundane object in existence has been transformed into a mechanical cartoon of unnecessary complexity and charming artificiality. Telephone operators work on conveyer belts sending messages on typewriters, pet mice are actually tiny people dressed in costumes scurrying around tubing throughout a house, cooks fight to grab eels out of pipes and reach through TVs to add an extra pinch of salt, and our protagonist has invented a piano that makes cocktails based on the melody you perform. Continue reading “Mood Indigo”

A Most Wanted Man

Anton Corbijn’s adaptation of the John le Carre novel lacks the slow burn of “The American” or visual intricacy of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”

The best spy movies are built on their gray area, the thorny nuance of corruption, deceit and betrayal that keep the wheels turning and our minds guessing. “A Most Wanted Man” is all gray area, with a criminal without a plan or motive, a spy without authority or intentions and a government without regard or patience. Anton Corbijn’s film based on John le Carre’s novel is so densely plotted and hazy that it’s tough to see out the other side.

In Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last complete starring role, he plays Gunther Bachmann, a spy for the German government in Hamburg leading a team of terrorist insurgents so secret that even his unit isn’t officially recognized. For all intensive purposes, they do not even exist. Bachmann’s target is Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), a wealthy Muslim philanthropist he suspects is directly funneling money to Al Qaeda under the guise of his many charities.

When a half Russian and half Middle Eastern refugee named Issa Karpov (Girgoriy Dobrygin) shows up in Germany, his focus changes. Corbijn carefully leads us down a rabbit hole into believing he’s an imminent terrorist threat, but a wrinkle shows up in the form of the German lawyer Annabelle (Rachel McAdams). She shows us there may be reason to trust him, as he’s looking for asylum from the Russian government and is seeking a banker (Willem Dafoe) who may be of help.

“A Most Wanted Man” is easier to follow than the remarkably deep and jargon filled “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” another le Carre novel, but Corbijn’s film too is one of constant exposition. The talking is endless, the surveillance goes on behind closed doors and the action never truly starts. Continue reading “A Most Wanted Man”

Boyhood

Richard Linklater filmed actor Ellar Coltrane over 12 years.

“Boyhood” isn’t a movie; it’s a time capsule. Filmed over 12 years, Director Richard Linklater has done the remarkable and captured a life in progress. It’s the themes of every adolescent, coming of age story rolled into one journey. This is a movie that you feel you can live inside, and one that feels like it could continue forever.

Linklater’s idea seems simple and high concept on paper. Let’s make a movie watching a 5-year-old age to 18. Let’s have him deal with family, childhood, puberty, life choices, romance, sex, and let’s watch it unfold in real-time. Let’s take the adolescent life lessons that come packed into a few months, weeks or a single day in movies like Linklater’s own “Dazed and Confused” or “School of Rock” and apply them over the course of a lifetime.

The remarkable challenge though is that it’s never been done. To make a single film over such a lengthy period of time, to wrangle actors year in and year out and to take the time to watch a person grow presents enormous challenges.

“Boyhood” has an uncanny sense of self and time, one in which the machinations of the movie are as unpredictable and volatile as life itself. It remarkably captures the culture and the feeling throughout the 2000s, understanding ramifications about the movie’s present, despite the impossibility of predicting their relevance in the future. Linklater remains true to his characters and is perceptive to their growth years after their lives and the culture around them have been rewritten.

There has been remarkable hype surrounding “Boyhood”, but it’s a fact that never in the history of cinema has a movie been so in tuned to how we grow, how we change and how life happens around us, simply because never before has a director devoted as much time and patience to his subjects as Linklater does here. Continue reading “Boyhood”

Rapid Response: Wait Until Dark

Movies are filled with heroics. Lucky losers manage to stop the bad guys, damsels in distress turn out to be badasses and the heroes of the world seem to have no limits.

“Wait Until Dark” is a movie that challenges our dependence on others for survival. It crafts suspense based on the protagonist’s limits and what she’s really capable of.

Adapted from a single room stage play by Frederick Knott, “Wait Until Dark” stars Audrey Hepburn as Suzy Hendrix, a blind woman highly dependent on her husband and her young neighbor for going about day to day activities, who is caught up in a ruse by gangsters wishing to take advantage of her disability. They suspect a doll filled with heroin has gone missing inside Suzy’s home, and they invent a story and sneak around her blindness to cajole her into turning it over. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Wait Until Dark”

2001: A Space Odyssey – An Unusual Epic

Watching that opening, rarely is something so grandiose, so unironically epic, and something that has been lampooned and parodied to death still capable of conjuring up feelings of magnificence. “2001: A Space Odyssey” is one of the few movies remaining with this unspeakable power in cinema.  People may argue about their favorite Stanley Kubrick films, but there are few that so fully demonstrate his mastery in just a few moments.

“2001” left so many audiences in 1968 floored. It was a movie unlike anything anyone had ever seen and perhaps still is. Upon watching the film for the third time, “2001” in many ways is decidedly not what one would associate with a modern epic, or even an Old Hollywood epic. Its images have scope and size, but how much of the film earns its resonance in the way even Kubrick copycats have conditioned us to expect today?

The opening goes against the grain completely. Kubrick shows us empty, still images that let us know this is Earth, but not an Earth we know. Apes appear and interact at the Dawn of Man, and the traces of humanity we see are the first hints of fear, boredom, curiosity and most terrifyingly of all, aggression.

When the music cues again, it doesn’t invoke melodrama but that of discovery, violence, genius and evolution. If Kubrick knew anything it was that these themes needed to be portrayed on as large of a canvas as possible if they were to mean anything. Continue reading “2001: A Space Odyssey – An Unusual Epic”

Rapid Response: To Kill a Mockingbird

Some film classics are time tested for their greatness, if not more beloved and significant now than upon their release; others are great by association.

The film adaptation of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” may just fall into the latter category, the book that everyone read in high school, followed immediately by the movie everyone saw in high school. Maybe it gets some holiday TV time, and the book is so indisputably a classic that it’s hard to see the movie as anything else.

It’s possible then that Robert Mulligan’s film gets a few passes it perhaps doesn’t deserve. The average, casual movie watcher can lump “To Kill a Mockingbird” in on their lists of black and white movies they’ve actually seen along with “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the first part of “The Wizard of Oz”. It was nominated for Best Picture in 1962, losing to a real classic, “Lawrence of Arabia”. And Gregory Peck won the Oscar for Best Actor, years later also taking the American Film Institute’s title for the greatest American movie hero.

But does it actually do anything especially great? An easy analysis might say no. This is Old Hollywood through and through, full of toothless, folksy charm and Hays Code-friendly gestures of racism and violence. “To Kill a Mockingbird” only achieves the social and racial poignancy by riding the coattails of its richer source material, and even then it’s very much rooted to its times.

To play along the racial language, the touches of greatness in “To Kill a Mockingbird” are more than skin deep. Continue reading “Rapid Response: To Kill a Mockingbird”

Snowpiercer

Joon-ho Bong’s “Snowpiercer” is a challenging, polarizing and disturbing action sci-fi with big real world parables

To paraphrase Jon Stewart, the end of humanity won’t come because of an asteroid or the apocalypse but because of the moment when a brilliant scientist declares, “It works!”

In the dystopian, sci-fi action movie “Snowpiercer,” humanity has agreed to release an experimental gas into the air to scale back the effects of global warming. The process works too well, and the world is plunged into an ice age unfit for life on Earth. 17 years later, the only remaining humans on Earth live on a perpetually moving train, one that circles the Earth each year.

Given these conditions, how quickly would you imagine humanity would slip back to its basest nature? How soon would the world start devouring itself? When would martial law be declared? When would society deteriorate?

“Snowpiercer” is a bleak, violent and surreal look at the broad, caricature of the human condition. Director Joon-ho Bong’s film makes a bold and blunt allegory about the way the world works, and amid the beautifully photographed action sequences and garish, even humorous depictions of the human class system, he finds little worth liking. Continue reading “Snowpiercer”

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Apes; they’re so much like us. They start off as promising, cute, smart and full of life, and it isn’t long before they’re dropped into the grim reality of the real world.

And so it goes with ape franchises. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” was an unexpected gem, a film that served as a prequel on a technicality but was entirely its own story. The use of unrivaled motion capture visual effects was enhanced tenfold by the film’s careful knack for suspense, its crafty long takes and tracking shots, its creative action scenes, the wordless expressions of pathos and so much more.

“Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” could no longer be the somewhat whimsical and fantastical story and still be the dark and serious, world-impacting epic the blockbuster crowd expects. The apes have learned much from man, modeling even their most conventional stories in every way. Continue reading “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”

Rapid Response: Chasing Ice

The debate over climate change is an issue of perception, not of facts and figures. This is the argument made by James Balog, a climate scientist and longtime nature photographer. There’s a flawed sense that climate change simply doesn’t exist because you can’t see it, he explains.

“Chasing Ice” is a documentary about perception and about images. It’s a gorgeous looking overview of nature at the top of the world and a new, practical way of viewing science and global warming threats that skeptics for years have dared to ignore.

Two years since this film has been released, Balog may view the climate change debate as less of one of perception and more of sheer insolence and extreme partisan politics, but this film holds up as very hard to argue with.  Continue reading “Rapid Response: Chasing Ice”