The Words

Once upon a time, a man named Brian saw a movie. It was about writing and words. And wouldn’t you know? It was called “The Words.” Brian was very excited, as this was the first new movie of the fall.

But for a movie about words, it was not very well written, Brian thought. It had narrators and stories within stories. It had Dennis Quaid narrating as though he were a mother tucking in her child with a bedtime fairy tale. This was not a movie for smart people, Brian realized, but a bad movie without much to say and a cloying way of saying it.

This story was about Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper). His dream was to be a writer. But he wanted to support his girlfriend Dora (Zoe Saldana), who he loved very much. So they were married. And he wrote.

But Rory couldn’t make it as a writer. He spent years of his life writing his book, but still the rejection letters rolled in. Days passed. The rain fell. Wind rushed through the trees outside. And at long last, Rory Jansen took a day job. But we know Rory and Dora still loved each other, because the camera with a soft blue filter hangs above them as they lie peacefully in bed.

And then, Rory found a book in a suitcase. It was an unpublished manuscript. Maybe it was Ernest Hemingway’s lost first novel, but no. He read it, and he was entranced. Days later, he couldn’t stop thinking about that book. So he typed it up himself.

“He didn’t change a period, a comma or even correct the spelling mistakes. He needed to know what it felt like to touch it, if only for a moment.” When his girlfriend read it and believed it to be his, she asked him to publish it. “Rory Jansen had made his choice.”

He called it, The Window Tears. Yes, The Window Tears. It became the next great American novel. Rory was the toast of the literary world, and his life was good.

And then he met The Old Man. The Old Man (Jeremy Irons) told Rory that it was his novel Rory stole. The Old Man had a story too. It was even more melodramatic than Rory’s. It had love at first sight, a Parisian romance during World War II and even a dead baby. “But the words poured out of him. How could anyone not understand?”

But now we must return to Brian at the start of our story. When he saw “The Words,” he tried not to gag. He thought about writing himself. He would say that Bradley Cooper was a bad actor, and that the movie looked like it had been photographed on Instagram. But try as he might, the words just couldn’t come.

He thought about how the whole movie felt, with the narrator always saying the obvious and reading short, pretty sentences that even a child could understand. It went on and on. So Brian decided to write his own story. And he would use the exact language the movie had used throughout.

And he did. And he lived happily ever after.

1 ½ stars

Rapid Response: Five Easy Pieces

“Five Easy Pieces” is one of the finest slices of Americana known to the movies. It plays more like passionate vignettes of a frustrated, disgruntled and misguided working class society.

It’s most tortured figure is Robert Dupea (Jack Nicholson in an Oscar nominated performance, but that goes with the territory I suppose), a former concert pianist who has abandoned his wealthy life to work on an oil rig. When we meet him, the camera has dirt lifted out of our eyes. The film’s abrupt editing and sound mixing emphasize that Robert really doesn’t know how he even got here or why he’s living this life. Maybe both he and his friend Elton (Billy Green Bush) think they deserve something better, but then even Elton isn’t good enough for the one he’s got, unexpectedly arrested by federal agents after robbing a bank over a year ago.

Robert’s dialogue and demeanor has all the markings of a temperamental American, petulant at his girlfriend for bowling gutters all day and giddy at being known as a “guy on TV.” Jack brings such untapped ferocity to his character, and rightly so. We find him so immersed in playing piano to blare out the horrible sounds of traffic, he doesn’t even realize he’s headed in the wrong direction, both literally and figuratively. He cheats on his girlfriend with two women, is quick to be indignant and finds both wonderful, stoic honesty and a harsh lack of feeling in conversations with his father and family. All of these elements somehow seem quintessentially American.

Maybe it feels that way because he’s surrounded by so many “filthy” pieces of “crap” who are “all full of shit.” The ones who don’t know better reveal their deep pains, or in Robert’s floozy friend played by Sally Struthers, her naked truth. “When I was four, just four years old, I went to my mother and I said, “What’s this hole in my chin?” – I saw this dimple in my chin in the mirror, and didn’t know what it was. And my mother said – get what my mother says – she says, “When you’re born, you go on a assembly line past God, and if He likes you, He says, “You cute little thing!” and you get dimples there. And if He doesn’t like you, He goes, “Go away.” So about six months later, my mother found me saying my prayers, and I was going, “Now I lay me down to sleep…” My mother says, “What are you covering up your chin for?” And I said, “Because if I cover up the hole, maybe He’ll listen to me.”

The others who think they know better, like a hitchhiker with extreme pessimism and hatred for the filth of mankind (Helena Kallianiotes), doesn’t even realize how hateful she is. Her biting attacks are so cold and disjointed, Director Bob Rafaelson jumps between them with quick wipes and country music smashed in the middle.

Doing this helps keeps “Five Easy Pieces” tumultuous and anecdotal. It allows for a famous moment like the “Chicken Salad Sandwich” scene to stand alone as funny and poignant, and yet it also finds room for a lovely vignette of family and emotion conveyed through a slowly beautiful 360 degree tracking shot purveying photos along the walls.

“Five Easy Pieces” is a film that, by its end, requires us to take a big long look in the mirror and consider seeking a fresh start. Maybe somewhere where its cleaner.

Do the Right Thing (1989)

Is “Do the Right Thing” a “black movie?”

Its director Spike Lee is an African American who has long made films about race and politics, is very outspoken about the lack of black actors and roles in Hollywood movies, closed this film with two quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and even made a biopic on the latter.

Hollywood knows how to market a movie like “Do the Right Thing” today, if it could even be made. And Lee has attained a label that colors (for lack of a better word) his films for better or worse.

But “Do the Right Thing” is non-partisan and unified in the way it depicts a whole melting pot of a community that doesn’t actually melt together, only simmers. Its blacks, Mexicans and Asians are no more admirable than the racist whites. Everyone shows hate and anger, but everyone has their problems and their reasons. No one party is strictly immune or antagonized.

The brilliance in Spike Lee’s film is that he led us to believe that this was a small-scale story about a misguided community, one he depicted with disappointment, but compassion, only to show chaos on a global scale. Like Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) blaring “Fight the Power” at all hours, Lee shouts his frustration with the country and the world. He doesn’t make a film about race but about how anger and hate begets more violence and destruction. And to really alert us to our hypocrisy, he does so with a film that is as aggressive and animated as society itself. Continue reading “Do the Right Thing (1989)”

The Queen of Versailles

The largest home in America, a mansion modeled after the French palace of Versailles that here is located within viewing distance of the Magic Kingdom’s fireworks, is currently languishing away, unfinished, and perhaps never to be, following the housing crisis of 2008.

What’s more, the estate’s owners, David and Jackie Siegel, feel that this level of excess and splendor in their home lives exemplifies the ideal American dream.

All of this really makes you wonder if the American Dream needs reconsidering.

Lauren Greenfield’s documentary “The Queen of Versailles” is a simultaneously critical and sympathetic portrait of how Americans cope (or fail to) with a change in lifestyle for the worse. It chooses the Siegels because they are both the most extreme of examples and yet the most familiar.

That’s why this film is called “The QUEEN of Versailles.” David Siegel himself is a wealthy billionaire and CEO of Westgate Resorts, the largest time-share corporation in America. Jackie is only a trophy wife of sorts and a former Miss America 20 years David’s junior. She could be little more than a prop in another documentary, or a monstrous housewife in a trashy reality show.

But Greenfield must’ve realized that Jackie is the humanizing figure in this family, a woman with an Engineering degree from Boston who chose a life in modeling and pageantry. She’s spoiled and further spoils her eight children as a parent, but she’s very likeable. Jackie is exactly the woman you’d want to give you a tour around the largest home in America.

Greenfield photographs at low angles stretching to eternity to gradually paint these people as American royalty without them knowing it, and then she shows them going to McDonalds just because they want to as a way of bringing the Siegels down to Earth.

Through this we’re able to understand and judge their often filthy lifestyle. With so much space in their current home, there’s an obscene amount of clutter. Carpet stains are everywhere, lazy kids lounge unimpressed with their mountain of toys they didn’t know they had, animals lay dead and starved in their tanks due to neglect, and dog poop even litters the hallways.

“The Queen of Versailles” shines by peering through this muck. The Siegels are the far end of the spectrum, but this somehow feels close to the middle class mentality as well. One friend of Jackie’s loses her home to foreclosure because she shares her friend’s insouciance, and even Jackie’s $5000 donation cannot save her.

Where the film doesn’t succeed as well is in the sympathy department. There’s a difference between feeling guilty at all the lives David has destroyed by being forced to layoff over 6000 Westgate employees, including almost all of their 20 family maids, and feeling cheated by the “lenders” and “bankers” who got them into this mess. Who are these mysteriously evil banking figures if even the 1 percenters refer to them as a blanket third person?

At the end of the day, “The Queen of Versailles” is an interesting film, not a trashy or scathing one, about occasionally delightful people. It makes you think more about your own life than the Siegels, despite all the glitz and glamour.

3 stars

Saving Face

No one can accuse “Saving Face” of being gun-shy.

Daniel Junge and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy have made a virtuous and brave documentary short about women in Pakistan who have their faces scolded with acid by abusive husbands.

It’s a culturally systemic problem that is as commonplace as rape is in America, and this film fearlessly looks these women in the face (or what is left of them) and carries them on a path to justice and cosmetic peace of mind.

These women have lost their beauty and even their identity in these attacks. Bulging lips, sunken eye sockets, blotchy red skin; “Saving Face” doesn’t sugarcoat their appearance because if these women have the bravery to be optimistic, smile, joke, laugh and even speak publicly, in Pakistan of all places, so should we.

The scarier faces are those of the doctor who has to maintain solitude as one of his patients recounts her horror story or the husband who lies while staring directly into the camera, claiming his wife went mad and poured gasoline on herself. The film captures these images with startling poignancy.

“Saving Face” takes a small step in telling the story of these women. Even though it should, it doesn’t fight a crusade for gender equality it cannot yet win. The mental and physical abuse this film exposes us to is enough.

“Saving Face” won last year’s Documentary Short Oscar for its winning, uplifting ending and for having the courage to show its face to the world.

3 ½ stars

Rapid Response: Father of the Bride (1950)

Vincente Minelli’s “Father of the Bride” plays like a This American Life essay. The dialogue’s descriptive, prose-like writing is observantly funny and amusing rather than ha-ha funny, but it finds a twist on the wedding movie genre by viewing it exclusively from one character’s perspective: Dad’s.

Spencer Tracy is probably the only person who could’ve played Stanley T. Banks, so thank goodness Minnelli outright begged him to take the part. His character is often wrong and jumping to conclusions about his daughter’s (Elizabeth Taylor) new boyfriend, but only Tracy could seem appropriately level-headed and convincing. His concerns aren’t rambling and idiotic but show how a father might genuinely feel and act as they quite literally give away the person in their life who means the most to them.

“She’ll always love us, but not in the old way,” Banks says as he watches his daughter stare longingly into the eyes of the handsome Buckley Dunstan (Don Taylor). “She’ll be tossing scraps.” This is Banks’s selfish view, but it’s not completely unwarranted. Her love belongs to someone else now.

We sympathize with him because Minnelli never leaves Banks’s side. Spencer Tracy is in every scene of “Father of the Bride,” and it’s funny because seemingly behind the scenes, the wedding that his family is planning has grown exponentially and all beyond his control. He doesn’t know how it all happened so fast, and neither do we. Minnelli suddenly places us in ungodly lavish sets and lets time and space rush by us in awkward wide shots and long takes. There’s one scene where the camera is placed looking out the front door as Banks stands in the hallway answering the phone. He can’t leave, but scurrying all around us and entering and exiting the frame from all four sides are dozens of movers and wedding planners turning the scene into chaos without any camera movement at all.

There’s a similar sensation when the wedding party rehearses the ceremony for the first time. The moment passes by in a blur. The camera is at a high angle looking down and trying to make sense of this whole fiasco, and the dialogue is all composed of carefully layered voices on the soundtrack that keep us from focusing on just one. The execution is tidy, but the feeling is of a big mess.

Best of all, “Father of the Bride” ends simply without a big moment of family love or a Stanley Kramer-esque speech delivered by Tracy. It’s just a calming conclusion to a long, hectic wedding.

Celeste and Jesse Forever

Romance and friendship are two different things. Just ask any of the girls who have rejected me over the years. They would agree that there isn’t much of a romance to root for in “Celeste and Jesse Forever,” least of all when the title characters are as wishy-washy and condescending as this.

Celeste and Jesse’s (Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg) clever charade is that although they’ve been maritally separated for six months, they still hang out together as best friends. They’re the kind of couple that’s so good together that they become insufferable around other people. They should be brother and sister, or they should have one of those couple pet names. Maybe Jeleste.

Jeleste rattle off hipster-y dialogue while they’re together and enjoy condescending and judging about nitpicky social faux-pas like cutting in line at the coffee shop or about talentless tween pop stars while still acting too cool for vegan food.

Their problems as a couple are quite simply that Celeste has a job and Jesse doesn’t. He starts dating and getting his act together, and she implodes very quickly.

But it doesn’t get deeper than that, nor does the film give us real opportunities to understand why they should work as a couple. They have great chemistry, and they can get drunk and have makeout sessions, but no discernible problems or emotions are brought to the surface. It ignores the issue that all their friends’ lives revolve around talking Jeleste’s relationship and that maybe it’s this self-centered, entitled attitude that’s creating problems for the pair of them at home.

Rashida Jones is the type of actress who can be likeable even when acting like she’s better than you, so in writing the part for herself, she helps put Celeste in a good light. But I wish the limelight veered more to the surprisingly deep pop star Riley Banks (Emma Roberts), to Celeste’s colleague and more than a gay friend Scott (Elijah Wood) or to Celeste’s new boyfriend Paul (Chris Messina).

“Celeste and Jesse Forever” is a movie that was nice to get to know, but I think we’d be better off just as friends.

2.5 stars

Rapid Response: Carrie

I’ve been unkind to Brian De Palma before.

But I was quickly informed that my blanket statement about De Palma’s lack of style in regards to “The Untouchables” doesn’t apply to his more well regarded masterpieces like “Carrie” and “Blow-Out.” Surely if I saw those I would be likely to change my mind.

Well no, I’m still wishy-washy about “Carrie,” De Palma’s early cult-horror classic starring Sissy Spacek as an abused teen with the power of telekinesis.

De Palma’s approach strikes me less as homage to genre filmmaking and more as him wallowing in overdone ideas without a distinct style of his own. He accentuates soothing facial features of certain women and teachers with delicate, foggy filter close-ups and wide shots and then amplifies the doom and gloom of religious persecution with ominous low angle shots and intensified soundtrack cues. The screeching violins of the “Psycho” score are incorporated not as a nod to Hitchcock but as a crutch every time Carrie uses her powers. He elicits a monumental performance from Piper Laurie as Carrie’s mom but bludgeons you with her presence due to its screechy, insane, sanctimonious tone, making for a truly delusional depiction of extreme Christianity.

What’s more, his way of building suspense is to just make a movie completely different from the one the movie will end up as. It’s all a manufactured element of surprise, one that’s been deadened and aged over time. He draws out the maudlin splendor and beauty of Carrie being showered with applause as the prom queen endlessly, only for it to transform into an avant-garde psycho-horror movie. It suddenly incorporates split-screen and deafening sound mixing to completely shift the movie’s trajectory, not gradually take you into the moment.

But the bigger problem I think stems from the fact that Carrie has no personality. She is so berated at school and by her mother that we know nothing of her interests, her quirks, her dreams or her desires. We feel only pity for her, and clearly so does the Robert Plant clone who ends up asking her to the dance. He doesn’t love her, but he genuinely has fun and wants her to have a good time, but little else.

He’s the one redeemable character in the film, and the remainder of the time is spent too heavily on the bitchy teenage girls and John Travolta going to parties and working out during gym class. It’s a hateful film right to the end when we read the graffiti label on the site of Carrie’s burial ground. We only care for Carrie because the rest of the characters are so exaggeratedly awful and because the pacing and tone is so melodramatic and maudlin that the movie is capable of surprising us with her range and power.

And yet when she unleashes all hell on her classmates, Carrie at that moment stops being a human whom we can sympathize with and becomes a demon. Her battle with her mother is an unfortunate epilogue.

“Carrie” is not the cult masterpiece I was expecting it to be. It continues to place me in a minority and forces me to take a staunchly contrarian stand on an otherwise respected director, but so be it.

Fall Movie Preview 2012

My approach to these movie previews seems to change about every season along with my anticipation for certain Oscar bait and my ultimate exhaustion with the summer. But I did manage to scrape together another 43 movies that are likely worth my time and yours, that is until I actually see them and change my mind.

Top 10 Movies I’m Excited For

The Master – September 14

“The Master” seems to carry a greater level of mystique than any movie slated to arrive this fall. Paul Thomas Anderson’s follow-up to “There Will Be Blood” has already covertly premiered around the country in 70mm (a format I’ll sadly probably never see it in), and although it’s clear the movie is about a PTSD Navy soldier meeting and inspiring an L. Ron Hubbard type, does anyone really know what it’s about or how it feels yet? The movie looks damned gorgeous, Joaquin Phoenix looks brilliant, and as perfect as “TWBB” is, PTA needed Phillip Seymour Hoffman back in his life.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower – September 21

The Millennial Generation needs a great teen movie that can be on par with something like “The Breakfast Club.” What better than the cult-teen novel “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” actually written and directed by the author himself? Emma Watson’s British and my age, but I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t adore her as a 16-year-old American. And it’ll be interesting to see “We Need to Talk About Kevin’s” Ezra Miller tackle a role that isn’t so… twisted, for lack of a better word.

Argo – October 12

Ben Affleck is quickly turning into a significant American director with how much award pedigree he’s earned with just two films. “Argo” could be his best yet. First reports from Telluride said that Affleck’s real life spy thriller about movie making is terrifically rousing and has big appeal.

Skyfall – November 9

Sometimes a Bond movie is only as good as its villain, and “Skyfall” has two great ones in Ralph Fiennes and Javier Bardem. Sam Mendes directing always sounded like something of a stretch to me, and the writer, John Logan (“Hugo,” Rango,” “Sweeney Todd,” “The Aviator,” “Gladiator”), is too. But hopefully it can’t be more forgettable than “Quantum of Solace.”

Lincoln – November 9

Oh, you really think other movies will win Oscars this year? That’s cute. “Lincoln” has a grand total of two screenshots made public so far, and Daniel Day-Lewis’s chances couldn’t go up if he dropped dead tomorrow. The remainder of Steven Spielberg’s cast to be outshined by Day-Lewis includes fellow hyphenated actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Jackie Earle Haley, James Spader, David Strathairn, Sally Field, John Hawks, Michael Stuhlbarg… the list goes on and on. He’s casting the entire friggin’ Civil War here.

Rust & Bone – November 16

Marion Cotillard could be sexy and beautiful even if she was a paraplegic killer whale trainer, which she is in “Rust & Bone.” This movie by Jacques Audiard (“A Prophet”) was the runner up at this year’s Cannes, and although it’s a French art film, it should have big, romantic, steamy appeal for wide audiences.

Les Miserables – December 14

“Les Miserables” remains the best musical I’ve seen onstage, and it’s a shame there really hasn’t been a properly decent adaptation of it. Tom Hooper’s (“The King’s Speech”) sweeping vista cinematography and intricate set dressing should fit the theatrical bill perfectly. And I’m aware that Anne Hathaway, Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe can all sing, but I’d love to finally see them do it.

Zero Dark Thirty – December 19

“The Hurt Locker” team couldn’t have picked a better subject to serve as a follow-up than the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. There’s some appropriate mystery surrounding this film as well, but the film is supposed to be fairly non-partisan. “Zero Dark Thirty” was made for only $30 million, so it could be yet another stirringly made war indie worthy of an Oscar.

Amour – December 21

Michael Haneke is currently at the top of his game. “Amour” won this year’s Palme D’Or, as did his previous film “The White Ribbon,” so this film is hotly anticipated for the art house crowd. It’s the story of two elderly music teachers, one of whom suffers a stroke and struggles to recognize her partner. Its two stars, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, have long histories in the French New Wave.

Django Unchained – December 25

The D is silent. It’s about damned time Quentin Tarantino made a Western. He’s been making movies that felt like them for so long, and now he’s made a movie that’s appropriately revenge-bent and seemingly awesome. Leonardo DiCaprio should work with just about every great director living today, but I’m glad he took time out of his work with Marty to play a racist Southern plantation owner. And God knows Christoph Waltz has been one of my favorite newcomers since “Inglorious Basterds.” This’ll make my Christmas Day. Continue reading “Fall Movie Preview 2012”

Christopher Nolan: Someone more than a man; a symbol

This is the first in my new series, 21st Century Masters, a collection of director profiles specifically on directors and their films from the year 2000 onward. With some exceptions, films made before 2000 are not the subject of these profiles. These are attempts to understand the legacy of filmmakers here and now, not of the past.

There are three steps to Christopher Nolan’s directing process.

  1. He shows you something ordinary, which it probably isn’t.
  2. He takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary.
  3. But you wouldn’t clap yet, because he has to bring everything back.

Conveniently, this is the same model Michael Caine explains in “The Prestige.” A good “magician,” he says, tries to do something new, but not everyone can. A good “magician” gives total devotion to his art.

This is Chris Nolan in a nutshell. He begins with a film that demands your patience and attention, one that feels gritty, realistic and serious but has a little something more. Then, he astounds with monumental twists, stunning special effects, sweeping vistas and a screenplay that ever so slightly bends what’s possible. But Nolan’s real game is in showing you how its all done. He arranges elaborate procedures for his characters with strict rules and principles for them to follow. Then they’re confined to boxy, talky and methodic scenes of dialogue to lay the exposition open for scrutiny.

By doing this in each of his eight films, Nolan has been able to take over the world. No director in the 21st Century has emerged as a more distinctive, important voice for film as a popular art form than him. Other directors have been more critically acclaimed and others have slightly larger box office receipts, but no other director to make his or her mark in the last 12 years has come close to uniting adoring fanboys and appreciative film buffs than Nolan.

Nolan’s films are about singular ideas. His legacy comes from getting modern audiences in the multiplex to obsess over their films, study them with scrupulous attention and adhere to them as important texts made to be discussed.

Like Batman himself, Nolan is a symbol more than a director. He currently has the clout to take on any project he pleases and the fervent belief by many that he can do no wrong. And if through his audience he can transcend the idea that his film is just a movie made for entertainment value, he can become a beacon for something better than what we have in the movies today.

“You take it away… to show them what they had.” Continue reading “Christopher Nolan: Someone more than a man; a symbol”