Rapid Response: Belle de Jour

Belle de Jour is one of the sexiest, yet also most curious and thought provoking movies about sex, romance, fetishes and everything in between.

You’re in a room debasing yourself, embracing your wild, animal nature and your behavior is completely out of your control. And somehow, you can’t bring yourself to leave, no matter how much it all hurts.

That plot synopsis usually describes Luis Bunuel’s masterpiece “The Exterminating Angel,” but it also fits one of his later gems, “Belle de Jour.” In it, a woman named Severine (Catherine Deneuve) finds herself taking a job at a brothel and assuming the name Belle de Jour after finally being fed up with her unexciting marriage. It is one of the sexiest, yet also most curious and thought provoking movies about sex, romance, fetishes and everything in between. Those nuances within “Belle de Jour” are what make it such a classic; lots of movies have played on the outliers of love, but Bunuel digs deep into that unheard of middle ground.

The film’s curiosity builds from the first scene, in which Severine imagines a carriage ride in the forest with her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel). Once out of earshot of their mansion, Pierre strips off her clothes and orders the drivers to whip her naked back, then rape her. It’s that masochistic urge that moves her, despite her reluctance, to the brothel. Only under pressure and stress can she perform, despite knowing how much it hurts. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Belle de Jour”

Rapid Response: Rock 'n' Roll High School

The Ramones’ “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” succeeds as a dopey cult film because it created a sense of rebellion without making it seem like a big deal.

After last week reviewing “Billy Jack,” I’ve taken a further dip down my father’s movie nostalgia trip with the cult teen movie “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School,” a Roger Corman produced B-movie built around The Ramones. No, it’s not exactly “A Hard Day’s Night,” but then The Ramones weren’t exactly the Beatles either. This musical comedy is as rightfully low-brow and fun as the band.

Sometimes you watch movies and wonder where some of these cliches come from: the extremely snooty principal, the dorky music teacher who only likes Beethoven, the freshman who gets put into a locker, the fat, disgusting hall monitors and the thick-headed football star with a great head of hair. They’re all here in spades, and it’s notoriously stupid.

Rat Scalper

After a while however you begin to realize the movie isn’t exactly smart, but at least realizes how dumb it is, bringing back completely absurd gags in which rats explode from hearing rock music and human-sized rats who attend the Ramones concert anyway. There’s also the grin worthy “Rock-o-Meter” and the “scalper” selling tickets to the show. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Rock 'n' Roll High School”

Spring Breakers

“Spring Breakers” is a grotesque monster movie of excess and vapidness, but it shows that these feelings of release are ugly, horrific and human.

The babes, the bros, the booze, the beaches, even the boobs; they all start to look the same after a while. In party after party, they’re all such identical cookie cutouts that you begin to wonder if anyone who rages this hard and this nonstop could even be called human.

That’s the premise of Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers,” a grotesque monster movie that slows these celebratory, MTV montages to a lurching, ugly snail’s pace and repeats them ad infinitum. Korine didn’t make this film to shock and desensitize kids, but he didn’t make it for parents to get a horrific peek behind the curtain either. It’s the idea that after so long, being showered in beer doesn’t look too different from being showered in cocaine and hundred dollar bills.

I don’t think Korine means to indemnify any actual spring breakers by labeling them all monstrous criminals. He did after all have to throw this dream party in order to film it into a nightmare. It’s the mindset that goes along with it that is the problem. Spring break is treated by most as an escape from the doldrums of reality, and Korine brands it further as a scary way for teenagers to “find themselves.” Continue reading “Spring Breakers”

Rapid Response: New York Stories

“New York Stories” is three interesting, if flawed vanity projects from some of the best directors living, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola.

How come filmmakers don’t make love letters to Chicago? That’s the movie I want to see. There are already enough odes to New York, and even in 1989 when Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen together made “New York Stories,” a collection of three short films taking place in the city, the three of them had already made movies in which the Big Apple was a vital player. None of these are as good as “Taxi Driver,” “Mean Streets” or “Manhattan,” and yet all three are at least interesting, if flawed vanity projects for some of the greatest directors living today.

New York Stories Life Lessons

“Life Lessons”

“Life Lessons” is so clearly a Scorsese film before the title credits even roll because of the stylization that dominates the film. Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” is blared at us as the camera lunges away from an abstract painting and swivels and edits with alacrity. It strongly asserts the magnetic, but strange relationship between the artist Lionel Dobie (Nick Nolte) and his young assistant Paulette (Rosanne Arquette). She’s returned to New York from a vacation in Florida even though she’s assured Lionel she is leaving and never coming back to him, a sure sign of how people may be reluctant to return to New York, but it always seems to call them back. Continue reading “Rapid Response: New York Stories”

Rapid Response: Dumbo

“Dumbo” is a film about growing up and doing the thing you never thought possible. It’s not as iconic or daring as some of its counterparts, but it proves that even when Disney was average, they were still lovely.

Although Walt Disney Studios had a lot of clout after the release of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the company was a lumbering giant plunged into financial hardship with the box office failure of both “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia” during the war. Like in the movie “Dumbo,” the big top needed a sweet, weird and tiny little hero to save the day.

“Dumbo” was little more than Disney’s cash cow (or elephant) when it was released in 1941. The movie was made cheaply, and at only 63 minutes long, was notoriously short to be released as an A-Picture. And although it’s an adorable film, you can see it doesn’t have the same nuanced, dark edges as its earlier, more innovative counterparts.

Rather, “Dumbo” is pure storybook fantasy intended for the littlest of toddlers. The colors are prominently primary and bright, the words “Florida” are written on an overhead view of the state, and a train yelps and jumps along with cartoonish creativity more befitting one of Disney’s original shorts.

Thankfully then the subject is ideal for young children. Without too many words on the whole, “Dumbo” familiarly visualizes for kids and parents the stages of early development as seen from a toddler’s eyes. Little Dumbo has double vision and instant love at the first sight of his mother, Mrs. Jumbo. We see him taking baths, scurrying in fear of the rain, and being laughed at for reasons he can’t comprehend. Even the WASPy elephants who spend their afternoons cattily gossiping may be familiar sights for a child of the ’30s and ’40s. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Dumbo”

Rapid Response: Slap Shot

George Roy Hill’s “Slap Shot” is a much smarter and interesting film than its cult status gives it credit for.

As far as cult comedies about hockey go, they don’t get any better, funnier, likeable or thought provoking than “Slap Shot.”

I say that non-existent comparison because for a cult comedy about hockey, “Slap Shot” is hardly as low brow as its scenario suggests. Director George Roy Hill (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Sting,”) inserts more ideas into the opening moments of “Slap Shot” than a similar film would dare shake a hockey stick at.

The title credits role in front of a ratty American flag hanging in a gymnasium as a chintzy band plays The National Anthem in the background. Before long, the social commentary, not the hockey or violence, is brought to the forefront as blue-collar Americans are losing jobs and housewives are on the brink of snapping.

Somehow, Paul Newman is perfectly cast as the aging hero, a man whose face in the late ’70s was the embodiment of a worn American everyman rather than the distinguished, old age movie star he would become. He’s thrown into a world where everyone wears their hatefulness and vulgarity on their sleeve. The movie is unabashedly despicable in these early moments, i.e. a little taboo and a little racist, and it only proceeds to get worse as the mentally challenged goons employed as cheap team ringers end up abusing every player on the ice. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Slap Shot”

Rapid Response: Billy Jack

The ’70s cult film Billy Jack operates on a strange double standard of violence and a progressive hippie mentality. This brief analysis touches on why the movie can’t have it both ways.

I find it odd that a movie can claim to have been a precursor to both cinema verité and the “Death Wish” franchise. “Billy Jack” was a cult film from 1971 that spawned a number of sequels thanks to its gun-slinging, hapkido expert title hero as well as its progressive agenda. And yet the uber-violence that comes from characters who otherwise claim to be pacifists is a bizarre double standard the movie doesn’t really account for.

It’s a good example of how even an interesting film the ’70s has proved to be more problematic, dated and poorly emblematic of the time period than something from an older generation. The movie foregrounds racial persecution with your typical assortment of one-dimensional hicks who are casually hateful of minorities and have fun with it (there’s an absurd scene inside an ice cream parlor where a white teenager pulls a ladle of flour from thin air and proceeds to pour it on the heads of the Native Americans in the store), but it also stinks of the obstinate hippie type who seem to be posing more problems than they are mending. A teenage girl at the film’s center is brought home from Haight-Ashbury to inform her father that she has hepatitis, a rotted tooth, has not eaten in two days and is six weeks pregnant from an unknown father and has the nerve to be snarky about it.

“Billy Jack” struggles with its tone because its writer, director and star, Tom Laughlin, has an equally disjointed approach to his filmmaking. The dialogue before an equally clumsy fight scene reminds of campy, vigilante B-movies and other token badassery, while the scenes inside the progressive school or at a town hall hearing rely on candid, fly on the wall storytelling to a fault. The cinema verité approach is so transparently obvious here that it in fact takes away from the characters’ profundity and reality. They’re archetypes plucked from documentaries shouting late ’60s talking points and causes from off microphone, not fleshed out characters who we would accept in the hands of someone else.

The movie advocates that in the end, a rifle may be more powerful and effective than the law in the pursuit of justice, which is a troubling thought on its own, but “Billy Jack” certainly can’t have it both ways.

 

Ben-Hur: Not a movie, but an event

“Ben-Hur” has not aged well, but watching it still feels like an event. It works because it shamelessly, un-cynically embraces its bigness.

Well scratch “Ben-Hur” from the list of super long movies I’ll eventually get around to seeing. I finally watched all 222 minutes of it. That just leaves “Intolerance,” “My Fair Lady” and “Giant” as 3-hour plus AFI 100 titles that will be buried in my Netflix queue for another few months or years.

But the reason you really have to watch “Ben-Hur” is because even today, watching it feels like an event. I rented it from the library on Blu-Ray because I decided, “This was the weekend I’m finally going to do it!” I was going to sit and listen to the six and a half minute Overture of unabashedly gigantic swells in Miklos Rosa’s score and just be wowed by something. I don’t think I felt that way when I popped “Persona” in the DVD player last week.

Here is a movie that shamelessly, un-cynically embraces its spirituality and its bigness. It lacks the nuance and adventure contained within something like “Lawrence of Arabia,” but in its straight-forward approach it attains that feeling of epic grandeur at every moment.

Director William Wyler ultimately agreed to do the project because he wanted to “Out DeMille Cecil B. DeMille.” “The Ten Commandments,” which also starred Charlton Heston, was a big success a few years earlier, but “Ben-Hur” was significant because it was the movie that would ultimately save MGM from bankruptcy (or at least until quite recently). The movie was the fastest money-maker of all time and was second only to “Gone With the Wind” at the box office. Continue reading “Ben-Hur: Not a movie, but an event”

Somebody Up There Likes Me

The indie “Somebody Up There Likes Me” is a deadpan comedy that doesn’t get points for feeling and looking insincere.

Bob Byington’s indie film “Somebody Up There Likes Me” doesn’t look like a student film on accident. His characters never age, with decades and major life events going by as though they’re stuck in a moment of youthful absent-mindedness.

It’s a snide commentary about the human condition and a clever way to save a buck on makeup, new actors and expensive cameras. But it doesn’t give the movie a pass to both look and feel insincere.

Consider Max (Keith Poulson), an awkward 20-something who has gone through a failed marriage, is so cheap he steals conciliatory flowers from a grave, and is a difficult, condescending waiter at an overpriced steakhouse. He’s insouciant, cracks wise, is generally clueless and refuses to mature until it’s much too late. He has a wife he gets along with (Jess Weixler), a younger babysitter willing to have an affair with him (Stephanie Hunt) and a best friend with whom he’s built an empire of pizza and ice cream shops (Nick Offerman).

But what does he care about? Why is he always deadpan? Why is every response that comes from his mouth punctuated by an awkward silence and a sneer? Is being immature the same as being a jerk?

It’s this mentality that separates Byington from his equally deadpan and droll counterpart Wes Anderson. Although it goes without saying that Byington is not the stylist Anderson is, Byington’s film lacks the pathos that would make his characters endearing.

At no point do they seem to notice their not quite dreamlike but not quite realistic world is full of bright lights, colors and cartoon clouds. They even seem to forget a magic, “Pulp Fiction” style suitcase that might otherwise make their lives a whole lot sunnier.

What will you learn from “Somebody Up There Likes Me?” The world is pretty, you’ll have sex and make a lot of money, but someday quickly you die. At least you’ll have a few laughs in between.

2 ½ stars

Side Effects

Steven Soderbergh’s movie “Side Effects” may just be his last film. Hopefully that’s not true, as this coldly clinical, but limp conspiracy thriller would be a disappointing way to end a great career.

“Side Effects” is supposed to look like a Zoloft commercial, correct? Steven Soderbergh’s film, which I hope is not his last despite his hints, sustains a flat, picturesque aesthetic resembling a medicine ad in a magazine or on TV. It’s designed to make the characters appear phony or untrustworthy, but the unfortunate side effect, for lack of a better term, is that the whole film falls limp in the process.

That you can’t trust these people or their actions is about all the hint I can give you without treading in spoiler territory. It involves the months after Martin (Channing Tatum) has just been released from a white-collar prison to his wife Emily (Rooney Mara). His presence, though loving and supportive, causes her to try and commit suicide shortly thereafter. A doctor named Jonathan (Jude Law) agrees to release her from the hospital on the condition that she come in for treatment and therapy, both of which will eventually lead to Emily’s mental breakdown, a lawsuit, some jail time and a conspiracy.

“Side Effects” is a film about the unexpected consequences of trying to do good. We look for a fix, or a cure, and more problems are borne out of it. Jonathan will drive himself insane trying to mend this problem he’s created in Emily, and he’ll eventually become a slave to his own medicine. Continue reading “Side Effects”