Tag: Peter Sarsgaard

Blue Jasmine

Cate Blanchett is stunning in “Blue Jasmine,” Woody Allen’s portrait of the have-more culture.

 

In a year filled with movies about the have-more culture, Woody Allen has laid bare how the upper half lives. Cate Blanchett is magnificent in “Blue Jasmine,” Allen’s dramatic “Streetcar named Desire” inspired portrait of a crumbling woman amidst infidelity, deceit and blissful ignorance.

I wrote recently about “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” how women in movies tend to keep their composure better than men when faced with a personal crisis, and Jasmine has this down flat. Jasmine is the ever so prim and proper housewife of Hal (Alec Baldwin), an obscenely wealthy businessman and trader who turns out to be a massive crook. She’s been driven out of her home to live with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) after Hal is arrested, and yet that complication doesn’t stop her from carefully micromanaging her life story such that she can stay in her protective bubble of wealth and stature.

Jeanette is Jasmine’s real name, but the floral connotation had a better narrative. She met Hal while “Blue Moon” played, but then even this appears to be a clever fabrication. Now she aspires to be an interior designer with a license she can obtain if she only figures out how to use “computers.” This will be perfect as it allows her to continue to adorn herself in glamour and luxury without having any inherent skills. Heaven forbid she bag groceries like her sister. Continue reading “Blue Jasmine”

Shattered Glass

Watching “Shattered Glass” makes me reconsider the importance I gave to all of my heated discussions in the newsroom. Here is a movie that treats human interest story telling with starry-eyed fascination and yet is so sympathetic and tepid without ever boiling down to the real story at stake.

The story of Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen) is well known by me and any of my peers who have taken a journalistic ethics course in the last 10 years. Glass was a young reporter for The New Republic, a Washington D.C. based political mag with a distribution that included Air Force One, who in 1998 was found to have either partially or fully fabricated more than half of the 40 magazine features he wrote. He had for some time duped his editors by showing only his hand-written notes as evidence for fact checking. But when a small online tech magazine stumbled across a story he did on a hacker infiltrating a major software company, it was revealed that the company, the people, the locations and all the details had been complete fiction. To cover his tracks, he created phony business cards and websites and even had his brother pose as a source.

Glass’s story is more interesting than the movie is. Not only has “Shattered Glass” managed to horribly date itself in less than a decade, it goes about portraying Glass all wrong. Continue reading “Shattered Glass”

An Education

There is a performance by Carey Mulligan in “An Education” that is so inherently charming that I would like to say it is the sole reason for the film going above and beyond as it does, give her an Academy Award for her work and move on. But Lone Scherfig’s film has a nuance to it that transcends boilerplate Oscar-bait becoming a wholly original work of art.

“An Education” is a British film in the early, pre-Rock and Roll 60’s of London. Jenny (Mulligan) is a senior in high school, top of her class, itching to attend Oxford, constantly nagged by her supportive but pushy father Jack (Alfred Molina), plays the cello, has a quasi-relationship with an equally nerdy and fastidious boy and is bored out of her mind. She lives in the type of household where a Latin dictionary serves as a suitable birthday present, and both her father and would-be boyfriend think highly of her enough to get the same gift. Continue reading “An Education”