Category Archives: Movie

10-28-14 ****Bastard Out of Carolina

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Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison, Southern gothicBy Dorothy Allison – The West Windsor Library’s annual book sale is where I stock up on books I should have read a long time ago. Set in Greenville, South Carolina, this debut novel, published in 1992, was probably somewhat more shocking as a tale of parental oversight and abuse at the time, and so beautifully written it’s no surprise it was a National Book Award finalist. It remains a powerful and empathetic portrayal of class and gender differences in the 1950’s.

Prior to this book, Allison had published two volumes of poetry sharing the same main title, The Women Who Hate Me, and it’s interesting how she’s able to tamp that back and stay in the voice of the pre-teen first-person narrator, Ruth Anne Boatwright, whom everyone calls Bone, even as she reveals great depth and precision of language. Bone both lovingly and mercilessly describes the hard-drinking, violence-prone Boatwright men and the frustrated and hard-working Boatwright women. They may be poor—“trash” people call them and they call themselves—but they are tender toward Bone and her only thin protection against her mother’s new husband.

You may be familiar with the 1996 movie version of the novel, but I haven’t seen it. Anjelica Huston directed, and it starred Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ron Eldard, Christina Ricci, and Dermot Mulroney. Jena Malone played Bone. A 100% critics rating from Rotten Tomatoes!

Museum Hours

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Pieter Bruegel, Museum Hours, Jem Cohen

“The Peasant Wedding” by Pieter Bruegel (photo: wikimedia.com)

Quick Netflix queue check: Is Museum Hours on your list? (trailer) If you put it there because you’re looking for an alternative to the deafening noise and frantic pace of action movies, you have succeeded. This 2012 drama was directed by Jem Cohen, the award-winning creator of numerous films about punk rock musicians, including Patti Smith. I haven’t seen those documentaries, but I’m guessing the quiet and snail’s pace of Museum Hours is a significant departure that takes the meaning of “art house film” literally.

Not overloaded with plot, the film includes lots of footage of paintings and sculpture and people looking at paintings and sculpture, a 15?-minute art appreciation monologue on the work of Pieter Bruegel, the point of which was that, in the panoply of people he scatters across his canvases, he doesn’t direct the eye to any single place. You can pick your own center. Each person portrayed is potentially equally important, regardless of the putative “subject” of the work.

That seems to be the Cohen’s point, too. That the two characters—a woman visiting Vienna to attend her comatose cousin—and a museum guard she meets by happenstance, are two random people and subjects as worthy of exploration as anyone else. That’s my guess, anyway.

Only three real speaking parts, all performed superbly: the guard, the out-of-towner, the museum lecturer. Not the comatose cousin. Much of the movie was filmed in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. New York Times reviewer A.O. Scott gave it 5 stars and called it “quietly amazing, sneakily sublime.” Rotten Tomatoes called it “a mesmerizing tale.” Mesmerized, I fell asleep (briefly). Critics rating 94% — Audience: 59%. Like visiting an art museum without leaving home.

With Age Comes Apparel

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Advanced Style

The Stars of “Advanced Style”

Take New York Times street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, add some Joan Rivers, Oprah, and Dr. Oz, and you’ve got the formula for the documentary Advanced Style (trailer here).

Photographer Ari Seth Cohen profiles seven fashionable ladies “of a certain age” (60s through 90s) whose sense of color, textures, and bold accessories (clunky cuff bracelets, enormous earrings, and oversize rings and eyewear) he discovered on the streets of Manhattan. Amazing photos of one of them—Tziporah Salamon—are included in this 40+ Style interview.

The women all have a back story, and not everything in their lives is ideal, but they are at ease with who they are. As one woman remarks, “I do a portrait with clothing. I build; I construct.”

Through Cohen’s blog and book, also titled Advanced Style, the women have been noticed by the advertising world in campaigns for Lanvin, and, oddly enough, KMart.

While engaging and entertaining, the documentary devolves into one-line tropes about aging, such as, “Everything I have two of, one hurts.” But overall, it’s worth trying on.

Guest Blogger Jodi Goalstone writes the highly entertaining blog: Going Yard, Offbeat Baseball Musings, currently showcasing the great writing coming out of the unexpected victories by Kansas City and San Francisco.

Gone Girl: The Movie

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Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn, Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike(No spoilers!) I was so up for the Gone Girl movie (trailer) because the book was one of my “Best Reads of 2013.” The movie could have disappointed in so many ways, and it did not. According to the credits book author Gillian Flynn wrote the screenplay–here’s what she says about that–and in the few places the movie departed from the printed page, it didn’t make a big difference.

The acting throughout is terrific. Ben Affleck, is a natural playing everyman Nick Dunne caught in snares of lies. Rosamund Pike (An Education), amazing as Amazing Amy. In a radio interview director David Fincher said that after watching clips of so many actresses over the years, he can get a read on them and their acting tricks pretty quickly, but when he saw Pike’s clips, he couldn’t “read” her. It made him think she’d be perfect for the Gone Girl, and he was right.

Also liked Tyler Perry as defense lawyer Tanner Bolt and Kim Dickens (Treme’s chef Janette Desautel) as Detective Rhonda Boney. (By the way, do you know your spouse’s blood type?) Everybody’s manipulating someone, except maybe Nick’s sister Margo (Carrie Coon). The omnipresent TV talk show hosts commenting in the background are too realistically sleazy to be all that entertaining. The movie website is as Fox News might have produced it.

If you like a suspenseful story, you’ll like the twists and turns of this one. If you haven’t read the book, there’ll be more surprises, but even if you have, it’s an exciting tale. There remains a weak spot at the very end, but there’s so much else that’s laudatory, it’s easy to forgive. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 87%; audience score 92%. A lot of the reviewers, while giving it a pat on the back with one hand seem to want to stab it in the back with the other. They give, but then they take away. Puzzling.

The Trip to Italy

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Steve Coogan, Rob Bryden, Trip to Italy

Rob Bryden & Steve Coogan in The Trip to Italy (photo: sundance-london.com)

If you saw the well-received 2011 movie The Trip in which British comedians Rob Bryden and Steve Coogan (who surprised in his straight role as the journalist in Philomena) play themselves on a restaurant tour in northern England—neither one supposedly knowing a thing about haut cuisine—you know what to expect from The Trip to Italy (trailer). Both movies are edited versions of the pair’s television sitcoms, and both were directed by Michael Winterbottom. In Italy, they are doing the restaurant thing and pilgrimaging to places where the Romantic poets lived, died, and are buried.

Some critics prefer the earlier film, but I liked this one at least as well. For one thing, I knew not to feel like I’m on pause, waiting for the plot to start. There isn’t one. Or not much of one. In The Trip, the food scenes involved visiting posh restaurants with hushed, museum-like surroundings serving unbearably pretentious foams and essences and portions that might satisfy a wee fairy. It was funny, but it was more or less a single joke. Still, with these two, mealtime is never a bore. Coogan and Bryden make terrible scenes at every dinner, usually with their dueling impressions. In The Trip, there was a long hilarious sequence of each man’s “definitive” way to do Michael Caine at different ages. In The Trip to Italy, they take on a large cast, and we get The Godfather.

You have to listen closely because the jokes just keep coming, as the two plunge into various socially awkward situations, yet maintain a plausible fiction of two prickly friends on a simple driving tour. But beneath la dolce vita is a strong current of middle-aged angst and, as the movie progresses, an increasingly strong thrum of death—which culminates in visits to Pompeii and the giant ossuary that is Naples’s Fontanelle Cemetery caves. This juxtaposition sneaks up on you and makes their pursuit of life that much richer and more grounded. These aren’t just two overgrown showoffs on an expense account. Thankfully, Winterbottom has a light touch with all this, and you’ll walk away thinking you’ve seen a comedy. Rightly so.

The scenery alone is worth the price of the movie, and the glimpses of the Italian restaurant kitchens and their chefs at work—fantastico! I guarantee you’ll leave the theater wanting to drive right to the nearest restaurant—“how about Italian?” Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 87%.

Flammen & Citronen

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Flame and Citron, Mads Mikkelsen, Thure Lindhardt

(photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

Wandering the Internet, I found reference to this 2008 Danish drama (trailer) about Danish resistance fighters during the Nazi occupation. Flame and Citron being their noms de guerre, one for the man’s flaming red hair and the other for his having bombed the Citroën auto factory. Directed by Ole Christian Madsen.

The film is loosely based on two real-life and much-decorated fighters, Bent Faurschou-Hviid, played by Thure Lindhardt, and Jørgen Haagen Schmith, played by Mads Mikkelsen—looking, as always, like he just ate a bad oyster. They start their train of murders with Danish collaborators, in order to minimize German reprisals, but when they branch out, it gets complicated. Where are their orders coming from? Are they killing collaborators or innocent Danes? The ambiguity and hesitation they feel seems much more real to me than the Killing Machine assassins of so many films.

The fractures in human relationships and trust that occur in such pressure-cooker situations are not a surprise, and the denouement is over-long, but the movie is compelling and well acted. It was nominated for numerous awards, winning several. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 87%; viewers 82%. “To its credit, the film gives full weight to the confusion and ambivalence of war; the struggle for liberation from tyranny rarely looks so dubious,” said Colin Covert in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Movies on the Brain

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Natalie Portman, Black SwanGreg Miller’s recent Wired article about how movies trick your brain into empathizing with characters begins by describing the scene from 2010’s psychological thriller Black Swan. In this intense scene, Natalie Portman, playing a ballerina vying for the role of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, begins to believe black feathers are sprouting from her skin. “When people watch this scene,” Miller says, “their brain activity bears some resemblance to a pattern that’s been observed in people with schizophrenia,” according to neuroscientist Talma Hendler.

At a recent Hollywood event, Black Swan’s director, Darren Aronofsky, said he’d “be thrilled” if he gave audiences “a temporary taste of psychosis.” It may work that way through the activity in two brain regions shown by functional MRIs to be connected with empathy: one, she calls “mental empathy,” the classic, putting yourself in another person’s shoes feeling; the second, “embodied empathy,” is more visceral, the kind of weak-in-the-knees feeling I get when I see someone else’s cut or injury.

Having studied people’s reactions to emotional movie scenes, Hendler believes both types of empathy are important in shaping what they experience. Schizophrenics, however, tend to rely more on mental empathy. “It’s as if they’re having to think through the emotional impact of situations that other people grasp more intuitively and automatically,” she suggested. And in that scene from Black Swan, Aronofsky believes viewers’ minds mimic that, by being engaged in trying to figure out whether the feathers are real or Portman’s hallucination.

Aronofsky, known for his surreal and sometimes disturbing work, uses a filmmaker’s entire toolbox to shape the audience’s emotional reactions. He cited his film Requiem for a Dream, in which addictions cause the main characters’ lives to spin out of control (Ellen Burstyn received an Academy Award nomination). He began that movie with wide shots, graduating to tighter and tighter ones, “to convey an increasingly subjective sense of what the characters were experiencing. There’s always a theory of where the camera is and why it’s there.”

Le Weekend

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Lindsay Duncan, Jim Broadbent, Le Weekend

Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent in Le Weekend

Saw the previews for this movie (trailer) several times last spring, and it didn’t look promising. In it, two past-middle-aged Brits have a madcap weekend in Paris, fumbling around in their relationship, the wife mercurial—laughing one minute, enraged the next—the husband hoping for sex. They’re living high but low on cash, and full of petty irritations. For once, the previews were right. Plus they showed all the best barbs. How this ended up in our Netflix queue, I don’t know.

Still, the acting was flawless, with Jim Broadbent as the husband and Lindsay Duncan as his wife. A wonderful smarmy performance by Jeff Goldblum as a sycophantic fellow-academic who outs the fact that the couple’s lives are falling apart. Olly Alexander has a juicy part as Goldblum’s bored son. Another dinner party disaster, uncomfortable to watch, yet unbelievable.

Critics liked it. The Rotten Tomatoes reviewers’ rating: 89 percent, but audiences seemed more in my camp: 55.

****Mystery Girl

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Los Angeles, Hollywood

(photo source: farm9.staticflickr.com)

By David Gordon – This book
was a gift, so I knew nothing about it when I opened its pages and fell in love with its surprises. Funny, complicated, well-drawn characters—B-movie cinephiles—living on the tattered fringes of Hollywood. “Some things are inexplicable. The human heart is one. Los Angeles is another,” said the New York Post review. The story involves failed experimental novelist, abandoned husband, and tyro-detective Sam Kornberg’s search for Mona Naught, a woman of elusive identity and tenuous reality.

The first-person narrator’s voice, occasionally uncertain, is consistently insightful and entertaining. Here’s a description of a cemetery in Mexico: “a city of tiny palaces that the good citizens had constructed to house their souls, like elaborate birdcages or the dollhouses of spoiled girls, far more splendid than their own mortal homes. After all, we are alive a short while, dead forever.” That last tiny zinger is what makes it.

Or this unpromising exchange with the Korean housekeeper of his prospective employer, when she answered his knock:

“Warren?” she asked. “No, I’m not Warren. I’m Samuel. Sam really. Sam Kornberg.”

            “You show warrant?”

            “Oh, warrant,” I said. “I thought you said Warren. No, no warrant. I still don’t know what you mean.” . . .

“Norman?”

“No, not Norman either. I’m Sam.”

“No.” She spoke slowly, for my benefit, as if explaining a simple fact. “You are Mormon.”

“A Mormon? No, I’m not a Mormon. Sorry. Jewish, I’m afraid.”

Occasionally, the narration is interrupted by other narrators, with their critical observations about Sam and his shortcomings, which put his actions in a new light. Author Gordon, in a recent New York Times blog, describes writing as a “risky, humiliating endeavor.” No surprise, maybe that about his writing, the fictional Sam is skewering: “I myself could no longer stand to read these sorts of novels, the kind I couldn’t seem to stop writing . . . It seemed I had dedicated my life to a question whose point even I had forgotten along the way.” His detecting assignment from Solar Lonsky helped him find it again.

Age of Innocence

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Michelle Pfeiffer, Daniel Day-Lewis, Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton, Martin Scorsese

Michelle Pfeiffer, Daniel Day-Lewis in The Age of Innocence (photo: 2.bp.blogspot.com)

The Age of Innocence must be really over, as it’s a little hard to sit through. Watched the 1993 movie of Edith Wharton’s classic (read it free here) over the weekend (Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder, directed by Martin Scorsese (trailer). Miriam Margolyes’s portrayal of the grandmother with her—was it five?—ever-present fluffy lapdogs was terrific. Credits were beautiful, sets and costumes the same. Some family discussion here about whether I’d seen this movie before, and I thought not. Remembered nothing until the final scene.

Not much happens on the surface in this story of repressed passion (though I’d nominate Henry James’s The Golden Bowl—at 632 pages—for the all-time “not much happens” award), and it could happen a lot quicker. You know where the story’s going from your first glimpse of Countess Olenska (Pfeiffer) at the opera—Faust, by the way, the very definition of temptation. Wharton’s book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921, an emblem of how tastes change.

Nevertheless, the photography, sets, and people are so beautiful, they’re fun to watch . . . for a while. Perhaps Scorsese wanted to do something totally different than Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, and didn’t quite know where to stop the pendulum. Still, at the time, he said it was the “most violent” film he’d ever made. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating, 80 percent.