If New York cinema belongs to Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, no other British filmmaker of the past 30 years has chronicled London quite like Mike Leigh (Naked, Vera Drake, Topsy-Turvy),
whose renowned, hands-on style entails months of improvisatory sessions
to shape narratives and bring fuller personality to his often
working-class characters. His latest film, Happy-Go-Lucky, is centered
around Poppy (Sally Hawkins, above left), an irrepressibly free-spirited singleton
and primary school teacher marked by an unsinkable optimism — giggling
through back pain and offering up an endless stream of cheery
rejoinders and interjections, no matter the situation. When Poppy’s
bike is stolen, she signs up for driving lessons with Scott (Eddie
Marsan), who turns out to be her polar opposite — a cynical,
rage-filled bigot simultaneously repulsed and enchanted by his new
pupil. Just in advance of the film’s release, I spoke with Leigh about
his methodology, the surprise reception of Secrets & Lies in Japan,
and the fact that culture doesn’t stand still. For the full Q&A interview, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here. More from the interview to follow next week.
David Brooks nails the gear-grinding turmoil of the Republican party. To wit: “This year could have changed things. The GOP had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking ‘eastern elites.’ (Mitt Romney!) And John McCain picked Sarah Palin. She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch. And so, politically, the GOP is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.”
The new, full-length trailer for teen-vampire love story Twilight, releasing wide November 21, into that lucrative slot vacated by the latest entry in the Harry Potter series, is now online after an Access Hollywood (or was it Entertainment Tonight?) premiere, and I can totally see the appeal, even if some of the action seems nipped from 2006’s The Covenant, and Robert Pattinson’s ridiculous hairstyle seems curiously inspired by Billy Joel’s “Keepin’ the Faith.”
Adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s popular series of young adult novels, and directed by Catherine Hardwicke, it’s a Romeo & Juliet-type thing about an immortal bloodsucker and a regular human girl, with rampaging “bad vampires” and all the complications that presents. I’ve been told good things about the books — that they’re eminently readable, and not at all embarassingly done — and advance tracking for movie is huge, so I need to resign myself to the fact that I might be intermittently writing about this series for several years. This is great for Stewart, who’s turned in a variety of mostly good work since 2002’s Panic Room. Having not yet seen anything with Pattinson (who’s also a musician, in fall-back fashion), I’m a bit more suspicious… are there projects for which Shane West and Jared Leto are not available? OK, not fair. Pattinson’s a lot younger, I guess. Still… watch that ‘do, chief; a height of five-plus inches nudges you inexorably toward douche-nozzle status.
The runaway commercial success of 1998’s There’s Something About Mary and, the following year, American Pie, gave filmmakers and studio executives the creative license to shoehorn into R-rated comedies every gross-out gag involving saggy appendages and bodily fluids that could be conceived, no matter how convoluted the set-up. Misapplying the lessons of the aforementioned films — their tonal balance of, ahem, salty and sweet — teen movies for several years afterward became mostly just slapdash races toward forced outrageousness. Not so with Sex Drive, which may be the most reliably funny teen sex comedy since the original American Pie, and is certainly the most amiable, lived-in and casually self-assured film of its type in that time.
Lanky high school senior Ian Lafferty (Josh Zuckerman, above center) can’t seem to catch a break. Regularly humiliated by his job at a mall donut shop, he’s habitually shown up in the romance department by his younger brother and mercilessly taunted by his older brother Rex (James Marsden), who warns that his lack of a girlfriend may be a sign that he’s “getting gay.”
Actually, Ian has a crush: his longtime best friend Felicia (Amanda Crew, above left). Unable to make her see him as more than a friend, though, Ian engages in some heavy cyber-flirting, and hooks up with an out-of-town babe who seemingly can’t wait to get busy. Egged on by his wry, devil-may-care pal Lance (Clark Duke, above right), Ian “borrows” his brother’s prized vintage Pontiac GTO and, with Lance and an unwitting Felicia in tow, hits the road on a mission to lose his virginity. Car problems, a roadside carnival, trouble with the law, and encounters with both an Amish farmer (Seth Green) and some Amish youth-gone-wild all complicate the group’s journey.
Casting can totally make or break a free-spirited romp like this, and in Zuckerman, Crew and Duke, Sex Drive has a winning hat trick of fresh young faces. Marsden, meanwhile, continues his unlikely reinvention as a comedic player of consequence. Fresh off funny, engaging turns of different sorts in Hairspray, Enchanted and 27 Dresses, he plays frost-tipped Rex with a manic, swallowed rage that plenty of terrorized younger siblings will wincingly recognize.
Co-written by John Morris and director Sean Anders, the movie has an unusual source material pedigree (Andy Behrens’ book All the Way) for a teen flick, and it’s perhaps this fact that helps give it both a solid foundation and a forward-leaning energy all its own. There are broad moments, yes, but they’re both funny and well-integrated with the sort of muttered asides and comedy of self-negation that give one a deeper sense of identification with the characters.
A few of the characterizations seem to borrow a bit from other movies (Duke spins a variation on the zen sex master that Eddie Kaye Thomas did in American Pie), but Sex Drive also nails (no pun intended) the jumbled, hormonal fog of adolescence, when it was possible to pine, both strongly and blindly, for multiple people right in front of your eyes. And it does so by being gross only occasionally, when it actually fits the story. (Summit Entertainment, R, 105 minutes)
Hong Kong-born, San Francisco-bred director Wayne Wang was an influential part of the American independent film movement of the 1980s and ’90s, with movies like the groundbreaking Chan Is Missing, 1993’s unlikely hit The Joy Luck Club and Smoke. This fall, after a six-year, three-film detour into studio filmmaking, he returns with not one but two intimately scaled movies adapted from author Yiyun Li’s work: The Princess of Nebraska (premiering on YouTube on October 17), about a young Chinese college student (Li Ling) in the United States who leaves school to contend with an unwanted pregnancy, and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, in which a retired Chinese widower (Henry O) comes to Los Angeles to visit his only daughter, Yilan (Faye Yu). In advance of their release, I sat down with Wang not long ago at a Beverly Hills hotel; for an excerpt from the Q&A chat, from H Magazine, click here. More to follow from the interview in the coming days.
