Daily Archives: January 19, 2009

Henry Poole Is Here

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

His life in shambles, despondent Henry Poole (Luke Wilson)
buys an abode in the same suburban, tract-house Los Angeles neighborhood where he
somewhat unhappily grew up, amidst the constant din of his parents’ arguments. Quietly withdrawn, Henry just wants to stew in his own juices, and be left alone, but one of his new neighbors, the slightly nosy
but well-meaning Esperanza (Babel‘s Adriana Barraza), happens upon a stain on his newly painted, outdoor stucco wall that she believes is the face of Christ, and thus imbued with special powers. Henry regards this as a bunch of silliness, but more interactions with those around him — including divorcée Dawn (Radha Mitchell), whose eight-year-old daughter, Millie (Morgan Lily) has stopped speaking ever since her parents’ break-up — slowly draw him out of his insular shell.

Henry Poole Is Here is directed by Mark Pellington, a filmmaker with a deep music video catalogue (including Pearl Jam’s groundbreaking “Jeremy” clip) who’s always been a master of atmosphere and mood, most notably with The Mothman Prophecies. Here, though, he rolls the dice on a much more personal story, and succeeds in crafting what is overall a fairly affecting movie about emotional waywardness and the heavy psychological lifting of substantive interpersonal reflection. The target is smaller, but Pellington’s extraordinary skill at marrying artful image and emotional content help Henry Poole
avoid a lot of treacly downward drag, and elevate the emotional punch
of debut screenwriter Albert Torres’ script, which is enough of a blank
canvas to allow one to project onto it their own feelings of
forlornness. The only nagging demerit? There’s a plummy, surface quality to Wilson’s moroseness and sullenness; watching the movie, one thinks about the deeper reservoirs of swallowed sadness that someone like Ryan Gosling could have conveyed with this role, and how those extra pangs of despair would have provided an even greater catharsis.

Housed in a regular plastic Amray case in turn stored in a flat-faced (i.e., no raised text) cardboard slipcover, Henry Poole Is Here allows viewers the option of a full-frame or 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation, the latter of which obviously preserves the aspect ratio of its original theatrical exhibition. A Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound track anchors the audio options, and optional Spanish and English SDH subtitles are also included. A feature-length audio commentary track with Pellington and Torres underscores the deeply felt personal pull of the material for each man; they talk about the slight changes and tweaks from inception to actualization, and their feelings both about the collaboration in general and the themes the movie explores. Pellington is an especially intelligent and persuasive advocate for the work — smart and passionate, but not given to pointy-headed intellectual diatribes. He opens up a bit about his heartrending offscreen loss (his wife died suddenly, leaving him a widower and the single father of a three-year-old girl), and how therapeutic the movie was for him.

Further personal testimonials come in a solidly produced, 16-minute making-of featurette, which includes interviews with all of the primary cast and crew. Other special features include theatrical trailers for Henry Poole and three other Anchor Bay DVD releases, as well as two short music videos — one for James Grundler’s “All Roads Lead Home,” and another, directed by Pellington, for MySpace.com theme song contest winner Ron Irizarry. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) B (Disc)

The Other Awards Derby: Some Thoughts on Editing

Awards, Interviews, Musings

For the second year in a row, Michael Kunkes and Editors Guild Magazine polled recent Oscar-winning and -nominated guild members, along with a sampling of film critics, to gauge the prevailing award-winds in the three catagories of guild achievement recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: Best Achievement in Film Editing, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. My free-form thoughts:

“The Academy Awards for Sound and Sound Editing are seemingly frequently linked to brawny and/or fantastic movies — adventures that unfold in clamorous fashion, or at least require a handful of discrete tracks — while Film Editing Oscars are inextricably linked to Best Picture nominees. And there’s usually laudable work found therein; after all, the editing is a big part of the success of those films, commercially and critically. So while I think The Dark Knight can be justly lauded for its evocation of urban terror and lingering menace, other films, like Gus Van Sant’s Milk and Zhang Ke Jia’s gorgeously pieced together Still Life, also located telling visual rhythms and quieter aural palettes that no less summoned specific time and place.

To me, Slumdog Millionaire was mad and invigorating, on all levels of editing and mixing, down to the creative use of subtitles. A bit off the beaten path, though, Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married made a big impression on me. With its source music and at once casual and unnervingly intimate style, the movie conjures up — in refreshing ways — the tension and jocularity, joy and anxiety of large-scale familial gatherings. Similarly affecting was the sound and picture editing in Charlie Kaufman‘s Synecdoche, New York, which was integral in the creation of a world in which Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character manufactures an entire cityscape in an abandoned hangar, even as he ages and finds himself plagued by an undisclosed health crisis. Both of these films were, if you’ll excuse the invention of a word, grand tapestral efforts, which is to say thoughtful, carefully plotted affairs serving perhaps more esoteric masters.”
For the full, fully worthwhile read, including the thoughts of the estimable Myron Meisel and Wade Major, click here.