Tag: Julianne Moore

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

“Mockingjay – Part 2” is a fitting end to the Hunger Games franchise.

HungerGamesPosterHow do you have a Hunger Games movie without the Hunger Games? That was essentially the problem of “Mockingjay – Part 1,” the padded first half to the third and final entry in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games book trilogy. “Part 2” finds a way to retain that Hunger Games feel without the repeat of the arena setting, and it finds Francis Lawrence’s film back on track for a satisfying conclusion to what has been an otherwise stellar franchise.

The rebel organization housed at District 13 has rescued Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) from the Capitol’s imprisonment and brainwashing, but at the end of “Part 1” he tried to murder Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and is still suffering from the after effects of the brainwashing. Katniss hopes to bring him back to the real world while organizing a plan of attack to bring down President Snow (an increasingly excellent, understated and chilly Donald Sutherland). The rebel leader President Coin (Julianne Moore) wants to use Katniss as a symbol for the rebellion, but Coin may be plotting a way to kill Katniss and get her out of the way in the event of Coin’s inevitable takeover and rise to power.

All this has traces of the politicking that bogged down “Part 1,” but “Part 2” is far better at reaching those intimate, character driven pow-wows and moments of conflict. Watching and waiting for the film to get to the action, Director Lawrence keeps the audience of two minds, torn between a craving for excitement and Katniss’s want for peace. For the first time in the franchise “Mockingjay” makes the dividing line between good and evil less clear. Katniss comes to realize the people trying to kill her are not her enemy, every drop of blood lost has less and less meaning, and the impact of each on the audience stings more.

“Part 2” gives back the “Hunger Games” feel by trotting Katniss, Peeta, Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and her outfit of teenage Marines into the barren warzone of the Capitol. The streets are littered with “pods” or cleverly designed booby traps. Their unmanned nature makes each feel gamelike, with someone from above pulling the strings and all the rules being decided on the fly. “Mockingjay” toys with everything from stormtroopers, flamethrowers, machine gun traps, spotlights capable of disintegrating and even slimy, faceless zombies that resemble the pale monster in “Pan’s Labyrinth.” One incredible set piece has the team running from a growing pool of oil; touch the surface and you’re immediately impaled by spears of the liquid suspended above the ground.

“The Hunger Games” have always stood out in the creative use of deadly traps and special effects, but it’s also one of the few that goes so far above and beyond the YA novel boilerplate romance and “be yourself” mantra. The symbolism here is all on point, with Katniss literally becoming the “girl on fire” after an explosion, with the floating packages previously used in the games as relief now used as harbingers of death, and with the televised murders of children not just used for action but to implicate us as an audience for enjoying it.

The very first “Hunger Games” showed this was not a trifling franchise just for kids. Katniss is a character in grief and anguish, the world is always in disarray, and love triumphs, but at a cost. “Mockingjay” ends this franchise fittingly; the odds were ever in its favor.

3 ½ stars

Still Alice

Julianne Moore is a revelation in the modest film about Alzheimer’s disease.

StillAlicePosterThough most fictional movies are not trying to be documentaries, there’s a desire we crave for authenticity in characters, storytelling and habits. To make a truly “authentic” movie about a woman suffering from a disease or disability might not be much of a movie at all. People grow old and sick, and those affected try to adapt and move on.

“Still Alice” tells the story of a woman struggling with Early Onset Alzheimer’s, and it’s a modest movie without the added frills or melodramatic hooks of adversity, romance or history that attempt to turn a story about disability into a more traditional narrative. In that way, “Still Alice”, along with Julianne Moore’s impeccable performance, feels like the most authentic movie about Alzheimer’s yet.

So many disability movies involve characters that are defined by their disabilities. Watching “The Theory of Everything,” you’d be fooled into believing that all Stephen Hawking did in his life was have Lou Gehrig’s disease. And for the bulk of “Still Alice”, that’s all Alice Howland (Moore) is: a 50-year-old woman with Early Onset Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t delve deep into her past or explore her life outside of her family, but what Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s film does is tell the story of a woman who fears losing herself, both physically and symbolically. Alzheimer’s is just a means to that end.

Alice is a renowned professor of communication at Columbia College, and her life’s work of research is also her life. She’s a woman who thrives on her intellect and her family, and that seems to be enough. She goes running on campus and uses practically made-up words like “Hadj” to win at her Words With Friends obsession.

Alice’s very first mental slip-ups are so miniscule that you could miss them; her family certainly does. After one run on campus, the world around her turns into a blur, the camera spinning dizzily around Alice’s head. Moore’s breathing gets heavy, and the fear that Alice has no idea where she is sinks in.

In one very economical scene, Alice visits a neurologist and goes under a quick evaluation. In a static shot captivated with Moore’s plain, confident work, the camera never breaks, and we never see the doctor’s face. Such a long look seems to put our minds at ease, but it doesn’t stop Alice from testing herself in creative ways, writing words on a chalkboard to see if she can remember them minutes later, or posing questions to herself in notes on her phone.

When the news is confirmed, Alice’s bigger fear is passing the disease on to her children. Her oldest Anna (Kate Bosworth) is successful, married and about to have kids. Her middle son Tom (Hunter Parrish) is just through medical school. And her youngest Lydia (Kristen Stewart) has skipped college and is working to be an actress in L.A.

The whole family is intimate, conversational, understanding, and the movie focuses in on the pain Alice is feeling by making it clear how her disease impacts the life choices of those closest to her.

“I wish I had cancer,” Alice says in plainly cynical terms. With cancer, people understand. But with something like Alzheimer’s, it changes you, and it changes how people perceive you, she believes. “Still Alice” isn’t about the fight to beat the disease, but about how Alice maintains her resourcefulness, intuition and in turn her identity even as her condition worsens, be it in wetting herself because she can’t remember where the bathroom is, or in blindly reading Lydia’s private diary without realizing what it contains.

Why “Still Alice” must be valued above all is that it’s a movie with a middle-aged woman at its core who is experiencing challenges, hardship and emotional peril like a relatable human being. It passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors, and Moore proves to be a revelation, an every woman symbol when there are so few others in the movies. She can be witty, droll and confident but can also fall to pieces in an instant. And her work matches the tonal modesty of the film. Free of clear delineations of time, she goes through a slow, but radical physical transformation and feels convincing at every stage. And in a long career, it’s not a stretch to say this is possibly Moore’s best work.

There’s a sense that “Still Alice” could go further. The directors hint at tension between Anna and Lydia that if explored further could’ve complicated the family’s decision about what to do with their mother. And both daughters are served with devastating news as a result of their mother’s diagnosis, but the degree to which their lives change goes unexplored.

Further, compared to a film like Sarah Polley’s “Away From Her”, “Still Alice” lacks a romantic angle that could help elevate it in terms of cinematic storytelling. But what remains is hardly the shell of a movie, a character or a person; it’s still Alice.

3 ½ stars

Don Jon

The ideas in “Don Jon” are occasionally as thin as its meat-head protagonist, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt brings charm to the part.

After seeing something as gratingly powerful as Steve McQueen’s “Shame,” it perhaps occurred to Joseph Gordon-Levitt that for most, Internet porn is not as severe as a crippling sex addiction, and yet it’s prevalence suggests something much deeper about our culture.

This is nothing new. The think pieces about how it’s changing our kids’ perceptions about sex, relationships and what defines someone as attractive are everywhere. Vanity Fair wrote one just this week. The media has immense influence, and it most strongly affects those who already display a level of naiveté and arrogance.

That’s perhaps why the eponymous protagonist of Gordon-Levitt’s “Don Jon” is not just a narcissistic Jersey boy but also a lowest common denominator schmuck without much to his name beside his seedy browser history. In his attempt to make a film about addiction, media overdose and modern, self-centered personalities while still keeping “Don Jon” a swift, funny, 90-minute sex romp, Gordon-Levitt is somewhat grasping at straws, making the ideas in it as thin as the movie’s buff hero.

Yet JGL’s ability to make Jon disarmingly charming even as he’s playing the fool is what makes this indie comedy rise above the rest of the rom-com, media trash the movie condemns. Continue reading “Don Jon”

Rapid Response: Boogie Nights

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights” is a hilarious movie about sexuality while also being an interesting take on a genre picture.

When Hollywood struggles because YouTube thrives, so does the porn industry suffer as anyone can film themselves having sex. Not every porn star can be Sasha Grey and find work with Steven Soderbergh.

Strangely enough then, Paul Thomas Anderson’s breakout film “Boogie Nights” has renewed significance. It’s the story of the rise and fall of Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) as the veteran porn stars struggle to stay hard and horny as video tapes take movies out of the XXX theaters.

“Boogie Nights” isn’t really about porn, it’s just more open about its sexuality. (“Jack says you have a great big cock. Can I see it?”) The one-off joke is that this coming-of-age story of stardom and struggle is just the same even with a grindhouse quality filter. Anderson’s whole goal is not to make a genre picture but to make an art house movie that looks and feels like a genre picture. He did much the same thing with romantic comedies in “Punch-Drunk Love.” And it’s the reason why in “Boogie Nights’s” second half, the whole story seems to go off the rails when it becomes so drenched in painful and melodramatic self parody. The end belongs to another movie, and PTA finally acknowledges that shift with a 13-inch nod to “Raging Bull.”

Anderson wonderfully mixes style and kitsch here. The film has a vitality in its disco score that permeates the campy, referential ’70s vibe and carries through to the more depressing moments all bathed in jaded melodrama and cynicism.

His camera moves in ways that don’t intrinsically make sense, but they draw your eyes and your mind. Watch the camera crop out Burt Reynolds’s character to show Julianne Moore staring admiringly at the young, nervous Dirk. He doesn’t return the glance even though the camera does the same for him, and this is not necessarily a clue to her motherly infatuation with Dirk. But we’re captivated by the moment. The camera itself is alluring and sexy.

The early moments of the film are also plain funny as hell. Wahlberg was overshadowed by Burt Reynolds’s Oscar nominated performance (he turns into a sort of George Lucas of porn, and he’s capable of conveying a vision of porn that is simultaneously idealistic and perverse), but it’s refreshing to see Wahlberg when he was still the young Marky Mark posing for Calvin Klein. He’s been typecast in so many tough guy roles lately that it’s impossible to imagine him playing anyone like Dirk anymore.

John C. Reiley and Philip Seymour Hoffman are also riots. Hoffman especially is playing off type as an overweight, closeted gay man with an attraction to Dirk. As for Reiley, the camera stays put and lets him work. His best moment is when he asks Dirk how much he can squat, only to up Dirk’s ante by an absurd 150 pounds.

In the way you could argue we don’t have movie stars like Cary Grant and John Wayne anymore, we don’t really have porn stars like Dirk Diggler anymore. And for that matter, we don’t have other directors in America making movies the way Paul Thomas Anderson does anymore.

Game Change

When Sarah Palin first appeared on the national political stage, she struck me as someone straight out of a reality show or a Disney movie. She had such cartoonish and folksy charm that made her believe so strongly in the backwards, extreme right wing rhetoric she stumbled over that she couldn’t have possibly whined her way into the spotlight.

The HBO film “Game Change” is unkind to Palin, painting her as a teenage brat while confirming little more than I already suspected about the 2008 campaign.

It’s a movie that doesn’t provide behind the scenes insight as it does re-enact the story from an insider perspective. McCain is losing the election, he needs a bold move, and they take a chance on a nobody without properly vetting her. Palin (Julianne Moore) proves to be an incompetent nutcase, she goes rogue, they lose the election, and everyone responsible smacks their heads in embarrassment. End of story.

What we see of McCain (Ed Harris) and his campaign advisor Steve Schmidt (Woody Harrelson) are little more than reaction shots. “Game Change” is filled with sound bytes of McCain’s team saying, “She’s doing great!” or “Oh god!” This much seems obvious. It has nothing new to add, no contrarian viewpoint of people defending her or calling her bluff. Continue reading “Game Change”

Crazy, Stupid, Love

“Crazy, Stupid Love” is a rom-com salvaged by its cast but done in by a strange side plot.

Steve Carell is hoping to be a movie star after “The Office.” Ryan Gosling is trying to prove he can do more than simply dramatic method acting. Emma Stone wants to be seen as more than a kid. “Crazy, Stupid, Love” tries so hard to be generic and boilerplate, and there’s a sense the cast would simply not allow it. Continue reading “Crazy, Stupid, Love”

The Kids Are All Right

How long has it been since I’ve seen a “real” movie? “The Kids Are All Right” is as real as they come, being warm, funny, charming and smart all without an air of cynicism. The film’s characters are well-developed individuals, not predictable character types, portrayed through brilliant performances. It may sound ridiculous but there’s really nothing like it.

Director and co-screenwriter Lisa Cholodenko has created a story with miraculously authentic and normal people. It’s depressing that such a word like “normal” or “average” can sound so foreign when compared against the crop of summer blockbusters, clichéd rom-coms and gritty thrillers.

I cringe to tell you anything more about the characters other than they each have problems, flaws, passions, motivations and interests, but it’s the profile of a unconventional family of Nic (Annette Bening), Jules (Julianne Moore) and their two teenage kids, Laser (Josh Hutcherson) and Joni (Mia Wasikowska). The parents are a lesbian couple that have each given birth through the same sperm donor, and the kids, one heading off to college and the other a few years behind, decide they would like to meet their biological father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo). He becomes a sort of special friend and confidant who will create a few bumps on the road in the parents’ mid-life crises, the daughter’s coming of age as a young adult and the son’s discovery of another male figure in his life.

I could get into more specifics, but to do so would only diminish the natural quality and authenticity of these characters. It’s like attempting to describe what makes one of your best friends funny, amiable or flawed using only your words. Any description shy of an essay would be too broad and too typecast to actually capture the full range of individuality your friend has. Cholodenko’s film manages to sketch out those individuals perfectly through nothing more than sheer observation and experience.

It’s a real gift, because to diminish these fully invested performances with a flat script or bland character development would be a sin. Mark Ruffalo’s Paul is probably the finest example of this. Paul is a laid back, organic food grower and restaurant owner who dropped out of school, is just a little full of himself and is an instant charmer. But watch Ruffalo smile and struggle his way through some charmingly awkward moments in the screenplay and just try and say he is merely one of those things. His character is so much more, and we can sense why he has a hard time describing himself to his kids, why Nic has a hard time explaining her reasons for not warming to him and why Jules is drawn to sleep with him against all odds of her sexuality.

That last conflict I described embodies the running theme of lesbian relationships throughout the film, but again, to label it as a “lesbian movie” would be inappropriate. “The Kids Are All Right” respects us as intelligent enough to know that these marital problems have nothing to do with sexuality in general, but nor does it forget that such a couple is somewhat unique. And the chemistry of Bening and Moore makes it impossible to forget such a crucial fact.

But even the kids are treated as adults. Surely after 18 years of living with two mothers, young Joni would stop feeling insecure about the lack of a conventional family. Seeing his best friend wrestling with his dad may inspire Laser’s call to Paul, but he too is above the concern that would likely be a theme in a more conservative Hollywood film.

“The Kids Are All Right” is such an easy movie to love. It has funny and clever dialogue that never feels phony, and that is even truer of the characters. Like Nic, Jules, Paul, Joni and Laser, Cholodenko’s film is the perfect indie that’s one of a kind.

4 stars