Off the Red Carpet – Week of 10/3 – 10/10

I needed to find a way to write about the Oscars. I’m constantly seeing news and updates in everything I read and everyone I follow on Twitter, so I know what’s happening almost as soon as they do.

But I don’t live in New York or LA. I don’t have press access to early film screenings. I can’t do more than follow distributors on Facebook and Twitter to get the same updates the pros do.

I’m viewing all this second hand, from just off the red carpet.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t share everything I’ve heard, and that doesn’t mean I don’t have my own take on all that’s going on.

So what I’ve decided to do is start a weekly column where I round up all the Oscar news I’ve found relevant in the past week and share it with my own spin. It’s the least I can do.

Up Till Now

Since this is my first “Off the Red Carpet” column, I feel it’s necessary to catch everyone up on all that’s happened in the race so far.

“Amour” won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, making it only the second time a director has won with two consecutive films. Director Michael Haneke won with his previous film, “The White Ribbon,” back in 2008. That film was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, but came home empty handed. This one on the other hand is a contender for Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, Foreign Film and possibly more. It’s the story of an elderly couple of music teachers who is torn apart when one of them suffers a stroke.

The Oscar nominations have been moved up to the early date of Thursday, January 10, 2013, meaning that the nominations are in fact before the Golden Globes. This could prove troublesome for movies being released late in the year, but it’ll keep buzzy movies in the conversation just when they need to be.

David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” won the People’s Choice Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival, making it the new front-runner for Best Picture.

It’s pronounced “que-ven-zha-ne.” Get to know the name.

Seth McFarlane of “Family Guy” and “Ted” was selected as this year’s Oscar host. Yes yes yes, younger demo, he was good on SNL, Hollywood insider, blah de blah. Just please no racist “Beasts of the Southern Wild” jokes from a talking blender. Continue reading “Off the Red Carpet – Week of 10/3 – 10/10”

Summer Hours

When you walk through a museum and see an ornate piece of furniture on display, you read the caption and walk past, forgetting about it as soon as it leaves your sight.

But consider that this desk, vase or armoire used to sit in someone’s home. It used to hold treasured belongings and tie up the room. It used to mean something to someone.

“Summer Hours” finds meaning in our possessions. It’s a film about a family attempting to split up their mother’s belongings after her passing, and it gets at the subtle nostalgia, plans, bonds and emotions that exist in every family.

This particular French family has gathered for their mother Helene’s (Edith Scob) 75th birthday. They talk quaintly and the children play, but Helene needs to talk business. She pulls aside her son Frederic (Charles Berling) to discuss what to do with her belongings after she dies. This is never an easy conversation topic.

The big problem is that Helene is a wealthy art collector living in a massive French villa. She had a deep friendship with a famous French artist long ago and acquired many of his paintings and valuables. Frederic is the only one still living in France and the only one equipped to truly maintain the house after she’s gone.

But how do you get someone to care about an older person’s relics? Frederic has enough problems with his own kids, and now he has to look over the estate of a French artist he hardly knew. Despite her massive collection, the saddest truth is that Helene can’t give away everything. “There are a lot of things that will leave with me,” she says. “There are stories no one is interested in and things no one wants.”

Shortly after, Helene dies, and the family gathers again to manage her estate. Jeremie (Jeremie Renier) is starting a new job in China and is short for cash, and Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) is getting married to her American boyfriend and living abroad. Neither has the time or money to keep the house or many of the treasured belongings, and Frederic can’t buy them out. Most of it must be sold or donated to museums that are interested.

It’s a fight between nostalgia and necessity, between past and present desires. Everyone has their own plans, and in such closely knit families, it can be difficult and awkward when they don’t meet.

Director and writer Olivier Assayas finds that awkward tension in everything that is not said. In one pivotal scene, Adrienne admits she’s getting married, but the news lands like a dull thud because it casts the deciding vote in selling the house. We can sense so easily that Frederic is biting his tongue out of respect, but at the same time he has to show his enthusiastic, happy support.

“Summer Hours” has an elegant, episodic quality to it that encourages these actors and stifles any melodrama. It finds authenticity and meaning in even the most simple of moments.

3 stars

The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou

Wes Anderson is a very gifted filmmaker, but he might be completely lost if it weren’t for Bill Murray.

The title character of “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” is an oafish, selfish, narcissist who is impossible to like, and yet Murray, as he’s done before in films like “Groundhog Day” and others, makes the character palatable, funny and even just a little relatable.

It’s the story of a nature documentarian trying to fund and make the second part to his most recent film, in which a mysterious creature he calls a jaguar shark eats his longtime friend and companion. Now he intends to document the hunt for the shark out of revenge. At the premiere of his film, he meets Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), a man who claims to be Zissou’s illegitimate son. He and a pregnant journalist (Cate Blanchett) accompany Zissou on his most recent nautical quest.

Anderson’s films have been criticized as cold and without emotional entry points, and “The Life Aquatic” may be the start of that. It’s a film obsessed with its colorful kitsch, the regal mixed with the cartoonish. It has acoustic covers of David Bowie songs performed in Portuguese as its soundtrack, it has stop motion animation done by Henry Selick (“The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Coraline”) to provide unexpected visual gags and it has dry, uptight characters not making jokes but acting as self-parodies.

When Anderson pans across an intricate set with the fourth wall removed in “The Royal Tenenbaums” or in “Moonrise Kingdom,” he does so to provide context of the depth of family or the spirit of fantasy and discovery. Here, Zissou’s boat looks especially like a movie set, and it’s used as a one-off joke. Like Zissou’s own corny, dated documentaries, he uses it to make a statement about how this nostalgia has lost its kitschy charm and appeal over time and become just a joke.

That’s because for how colorful “The Life Aquatic” is, all of it feels so flat. None of the colors are bright, only soft yellows and blues, and none of the frames have depth, just strikingly picturesque framing in two dimensions.

And yet Anderson’s control over framing and tone is consistently and surprisingly brilliant. He can invigorate the film with a completely nuts scene of Bill Murray going badass on a group of pirates that have invaded his boat. He can make time stop in a nearly Kubrick-esque sequence of a helicopter crash.

All of these moments too scream Anderson. It goes without saying that every Wes Anderson film is so Wes Anderson-y, and no director does it quite the same.

3 stars

Anvil! The Story of Anvil!

If “This is Spinal Tap” were true, it might be a very sad movie. Considering that, “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” must be a ballad.

Anvil is an early ‘80s hair metal band that is so obscure that this documentary is now a pivotal part in their history. Although they toured with Bon Jovi, Twisted Sister, Poison and other up-and-coming metal acts and inspired many more, they were one of the few bands who failed to hit the stage of super stardom.

Now their lead singer, Steve “Lips” Kudlow” and drummer Robb Reiner are 50 and still together after 30 years and 12 albums (they’ve hit 14 since). They refuse to quit, and this rockumentary commissioned by VH1 and made by Sacha Gervasi, a former Anvil roadie, documents one disastrous tour and the production of their album “This is Thirteen.”

Consider just how pitiful their career as musicians is 30 years after their prime. Anvil is booked on a European tour in tiny bars across the continent, losing their way to the club, not getting paid by the owner and playing to sometimes as few as a dozen people, one caught sitting in a plush arm chair and headbanging in comfort.

If the movie didn’t make fun of them a little bit, this could be tough to watch. But Gervasi has some fun with the Spinal Tap comparisons. While at a festival, Lips spends the day glad-handing more famous rock stars backstage as though they should remember him. Then he realizes that the traffic of people leaving the festival sold out the train, leaving them stranded.

Gervasi even puts Reiner and Lips in a dingy diner together and asks them to reminisce about one of their first songs they wrote together. The two of them start singing and humming the tune in perfect harmony, so in sync with one another. It’s a beautiful moment. The song however is called Thumb Hang, named for the Spanish Inquisition torture technique.

The key thing to take away from “Anvil” however is that these are nice guys trying really hard. Yes they wore bondage outfits and played guitar with dildos once, but the way an AllMusic review described their sound was not innovatively aggressive but just overwhelmingly excited. Lips and Reiner are trying so hard to keep this dream alive, and it is a bit crushing to see them have to take telemarketing jobs to support it. In a way, this isn’t a rockumentary but a coming-of-age story 30 years in the making.

3 stars

Sweetgrass

Have you ever looked a sheep in the eye before? Has it ever looked back?

In “Sweetgrass,” one of the more peculiar documentaries I’ve ever seen, there’s one sheep that does suddenly notice our presence, and we become all the more aware of how it lives.

Sheep have this dumb, blank, clueless look on their faces, strikingly different from any childlike impression of them. Their “baaa” noise is a repulsive belching noise and their wool hides are stained an ugly brown with the exception of the painted on tracking number in green.

We see them making gigantic pilgrimages, traveling in a sea of white or a barrage of hooves past the Radioshack in town or down a Montana mountain that looks like it belongs in “Aguirre, The Wrath of God.”

They’re aggressively manhandled as ranchers sheer their fur, drag and whip around their newborns and force feed them milk through a syringe.

What are they doing? What’s their purpose? You look at them and then back at the herders taking them out to pasture, and you wonder if the human actions have any more meaning than these dumb animals.

Few of their words are put into any sort of context. Because these people are never identified or never asked any questions, all that we hear from them is just noise. One herder swears profusely at his sheep, his dog, his horse and this mountain, and he doesn’t get anywhere. “Fuckin’ dog. You’re as worthless as tits on a fuckin’ bull hog.”

One guy sits and struggles to put four short pipes together to make one longer one. What’s it for? Why does this task look so aimless?

These are the sights and sounds of “Sweetgrass.” It doesn’t seem to have a point, and it is very much a cinephile’s film, one that inspires meandering thought through its visuals, its sound and not much else.

And yet this is not some cinema verite movie. It gets in the face of these sheep, putting the camera in places that no human perspective can achieve. One long take is perched on the back of a truck pulling a wheel of grass and sod, laying it out randomly so the animals can feed. Another seems to be attached to the head of a sheep, in the midst of thousands and nowhere in particular to go.

Like the sheep at the start, you sit and watch with a blank stare, and it looks back.

3 stars

Rapid Response: Cape Fear (1991)

Sometimes you wonder when you’re watching “Cape Fear” if Martin Scorsese was making a remake of the 1962 horror movie or of “Vertigo.”

He’s got the Saul Bass title sequence, the Elmer Bernstein score channeling Bernard Hermann, Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum in minor cameos, stark fades into solid colors and a film that is intentionally pitched at a level of sheer insanity.

“Cape Fear” was not well received by critics upon its release. It was seen as yet another genre picture by a director capable of so much more, least of all immediately after the masterpiece that was “Goodfellas” a year prior. But it has a lot more style and personality from Scorsese than “The Color of Money” did, because Scorsese isn’t just looking to make a genre picture but a film with dark characters, heavy themes, strong cinematic references, big ideas and even bigger performances.

Robert De Niro is so effing brilliant as the sadistic ex-con Max Cady. It hearkens back to a time when De Niro actually, you know, acted. In terrorizing Nick Nolte and his family, he has this calming, charming, attractive eloquence that puts the rest of the family’s neurotic insanity into perspective. He pulls a lot from Robert Mitchum’s playbook for his performances in both the original “Cape Fear” and “The Night of the Hunter,” but he makes the character his own. He displays charismatic insanity and proves to be capable of surprising violence and intensity.

So thanks to his performance, Scorsese is able to go ape shit. Nolte, Jessica Lange and a young Juliette Lewis are all flawed, weak members of their own dysfunctional family, but ultimately they’re fairly thin, capable of going crazy with just a little prodding. Scorsese has them and us jumping at just the sound of a phone ringing, jolting the camera towards it and blaring its ringing aggressively. Later, Scorsese turns our world upside down and dangles us by a thread, with the camera in a close up of De Niro hanging from a pull up bar, his hair flailing wildly like the Joker in “The Dark Knight.”

This Max Cady character, what with his clever ability to never cross into territory of breaking the law, always finding ways to get one step ahead of Nolte and nitpick at his mind, the bible warnings printed all over his body and finally his superhuman strength against thugs and lighter fluid, he strikes me as more of an allegory about insanity than an actual person. But the sheer madness of the film’s final moments as Cady continues fighting and screaming against all odds even goes beyond the stretches of what could possibly be considered allegorical.

“Cape Fear” is possibly more exaggerated and intense than even something like “Shutter Island,” another Scorsese that veered from his comfort zone into the realm of madness. But it resonated with audiences as the 12th highest grossing movie of 1991 and earned De Niro his most recent Oscar nomination for Best Actor. It’s by far not the finest work from Scorsese but so indicative of how versatile an artist he has become in the modern day.

Don't Look Now (1973)

One of the longest and most simultaneously passionate and unsettling sex scenes in all of cinema is one between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in “Don’t Look Now.” It’s an emotionally charged scene of elegant love making, but spliced in between are shots of the two of them getting dressed separately. The images don’t belong together, but side by side, they show through creepy resonance how our lives exist in two moments. We have our memories and our often bleak visions of the future.

“Don’t Look Now” is an art-house horror classic. It’s a film that in its ether alone considers the unspoken sensations, feelings and emotions that surround death. Nicolas Roeg’s disjointed editing is strange on a narrative level, but it addresses these questions more fluidly and realistically than a standard melodrama ever could.

Sutherland and Christie play John and Laura Baxter, a married couple who has just lost their daughter by drowning in a pond behind their house. None of these images before her death are particularly pastoral. A red ball floats ominously in the scummy water, her brother runs over and shatters a piece of glass in the middle of a field, and a photo John is studying is stained blood red when he spills his drink on it.

We attain a sixth sense that something terrible will happen thanks to Roeg’s heightening of sound to something beyond diegetic. It’s as though the noises resound in our mind and not just on screen. These are sounds that will come back to haunt us.

In a jarring smash cut, we’re transported to Venice months after the incident. The Baxter son is at boarding school, and John and Laura are taking an extended work vacation to forget the past. Stray images of silverware or jewelry some how remind us of the tragedy, and we know that the Baxters must still be suffering. Continue reading “Don't Look Now (1973)”

End of Watch

The most obvious thing to notice about “End of Watch” is that the whole movie looks like it was put through a tumble dryer. Even in calm, dialogue driven moments, the found footage cinematography is as erratic, lopsided, messy and claustrophobic as any movie I’ve ever seen.

But “End of Watch” is an interesting film, one that rings true in its shoptalk and streetwise mentality. It’s a shame director David Ayer had to add this cinematic gimmick to a story and characters that already feel very real.

“End of Watch” is a buddy cop drama that plays more like behind the scenes vignettes in the vein of “COPS” than a typical genre picture. It follows two beat officers in South Central Los Angeles, Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Pena), on their day-to-day patrol as they slowly become the unsuspecting enemies of a prominent Mexican drug cartel.

Their immediate difference from most movie cops is their honor. The pair of them are exemplary officers, and an opening monologue by Gyllenhaal gives the job a new level of profundity that deems them more than protectors of the law. They go about their job with a love for their work, explaining how paperwork is the lifeblood of their career or showing respect for their superior officers. They address the camera directly about the procedure of a house call to the point that the film feels like a training movie. It is so much a movie about respecting an officer of the law that when Zavala fights someone man to man and lets him off easy, the movie gives us a scene of the same gangbanger saying that these cops are “straight up gangsta.”

And yet the common tropes associated with cop movies, like justice, honor and morality: all these things take a backseat to the idea that being part of the police is like being part of a family, a brotherhood.

More so than a cop movie, “End of Watch” is a bromance. Its best moments are casual, joshing conversations in the front seat of the cruiser between Taylor and Zavala about girls, the difference between Latinos and whites, sex stories and whatever else might come up between two bros. Gyllenhaal and Pena have such wonderful chemistry together. When they get in that cop car, they’re brothers. No one understands them better.

I think cops might see themselves in the camaraderie of these two characters, even if they don’t believe the extent of some of their crime scenes. Not all of the film is badassery. There are the moments inside the station and waiting for hours as the detectives wrap up that pepper these officers’ lives.

But then there’s that damned camera. Taylor pins two spy cameras to his shirt pocket and to Zavala’s, but the movie has cameras everywhere, on the dashboard, in Taylor’s hand, in the criminals’ hands, and all of them are jostled upside down and in every direction to no end. Later the film turns into a lame POV, first person shooter video game, and we’re denied a single, coherent wide shot or proper lighting. I hate that this is what digital cinematography has become. It’s not getting us any closer to reality by turning the camera on its head and not showing us what’s going on.

That’s what is so irritating about “End of Watch.” Ayer’s pacing is delicate and suspenseful, but he spoils the moment with his vigilante journalism style. His characters are likeable and true, but they’re occasionally insufferable frat boys without something more interesting to say than a string of four letter words (the movie probably sets a new record for f*ck and motherf*ckers). It’s the honorable cop story we should have but the indecipherable movie we shouldn’t.

2 ½ stars

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

There’s something all those coming of age stories have forgotten over the years. For some, discovering what you love comes with a feeling of regret. How different would I be if I found all these great things sooner? Would I be smarter? Would I be more honest? Would I have put up with so much abuse? Where would my life be?

These are questions we should ask as teenagers, but for some it comes later than others, if at all. “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” shows just how difficult that can be for people so young. But because it celebrates youth, music, love, rebellion and discovery, it’s a film that allows us to see and understand the world a little better. It’s a rare film that can help us grow.

The movie is based off a cult teen novel of the same name, and although it only came out in 1999, the book has for some meant as much to contemporary youth as “The Catcher in the Rye” has for so long. With how defensive today’s kids are about adapting their favorite novels into movies, something with such a passionate following could not have been directed or written by anyone other than the book’s author, Stephen Chbosky.

Thankfully he has made his book into a film, and he’s made a lovely one. Rather than stage it as a collection of anonymous letters like his novel, the film follows many of the punches of a standard coming-of-age drama. It lacks the narrative simplicity of “The Breakfast Club,” the indie charm of “Juno” or the visual splendor of “Rushmore,” but it matches all of those in endearing characters, confident dialogue and timelessness. Continue reading “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”

Bellflower

I’m usually kinder to movies that have flimsy narratives if it can innovate visually. It deserves to be said then that what Evan Glodell and his team have accomplished is truly innovative. By literally building a camera from the ground up, they have created an aesthetic all its own, drawing from music videos, dusty and gritty sci-fi and stylized action montages. Their film “Bellflower” achieves a strikingly apocalyptic look that sadly the screenplay doesn’t earn.

It’s the story of two friends, Woodrow (Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson), who have a dream to build a flamethrower and demon roadster in the event of the apocalypse. They’re inspired by Mad Max, so its no wonder that “Bellflower” looks like a digital reimagining of “The Road Warrior” set in modern day suburbia.

Woodrow meets the tantalizing and free-willed Milly (Jessie Wiseman), who finds an adorable innocence in his clean-cut look and high-pitched whimper of a voice. But after hearing of his plan to build a flamethrower, she encourages his daredevil side, urging him on a spur of the moment trip across the country in his custom car that dispenses whiskey.

When their dream vacation ends, the pair return home, the flamethrower and death mobile are completed, and Milly cheats on Woodrow. This character drama charts the struggle of these immature characters living out a fantasy to deal with reality and adult emotions, and it does so in the gravest, most stylistic of terms. Continue reading “Bellflower”