A simple, straightforward and sweetly dispositioned multi-generational dramedy without much thunderclap revelation, Michael Caine‘s Is Anybody There? marks the sort of solid, unfussy, character-rooted filmmaking that Hollywood studios have mostly abandoned in their pursuit of the latest hot-shit comic book or videogame property.
Set in 1980s seaside England, the movie tells the story of gangly 10-year-old Edward (Son of Rambow‘s wide-eyed, skinny-armed Bill Milner), whose parents have turned their small house into a retirement home. While his mother (Anne-Marie Duff) struggles to keep the family business afloat and his father (David Morrissey) copes with the onset of a mid-life crisis exacerbated by the proximity of a young assistant, Edward becomes increasingly obsessed with the ghosts and potential afterlives of the residents when they die.
Naturally, this hobby doesn’t exactly make him popular with the other kids at school. In fact, Edward’s existence is a relatively lonely one until he meets Clarence (Caine), the latest arrival at his parents’ home. A cranky, retired magician and bitterly grieving widower who refuses to give in gracefully to old age, Clarence butts heads with Edward, but soon notices that the boy is growing up even more fitfully than he’s growing old. As they begin to face life together, Clarence takes steps toward coming to terms with his past, while Edward curbs his obsession with the unknown. Along the way, both are reminded of what magic is possible when life is lived to its fullest.
Written by Peter Harness and directed by John Crowley (Boy A), Is Anybody There? seems made for a comfortable, rainy day double feature with 2003’s Secondhand Lions, another film in which Caine plays a somewhat irascible mentor to a precocious youngster. His performance isn’t ferocious or wildly theatrical, but instead just rather perfectly modulated. Unselfconsciously naturalistic, Milner exhibited a tremendous sympathy in Son of Rambow, and he doesn’t disappoint here, either. He serves as a believable foil to Caine, and the two have a pleasant chemistry, whether sparring or circling one another in quietly appreciative fashion.
As the movie advances, its one story-related reveal — the card up its sleeve, as it were — might become readily evident to those searching for a narrative pivot. In the end, that doesn’t matter, because of the smart way the film is put together, the full-bodied emotions granted each character, and a wild, bloody, darkly humorous magic trick gone wrong that wouldn’t have ever made the cut in a conventional Hollywood dramedy. Maybe it’s best to leave these sorts of micro-targeted tales to the indie peddlers, after all. (Big Beach, PG-13, 94 minutes)
CineVegas has finalized the complete lineup for its 11th annual festival, including Bobcat Goldthwait‘s World’s Greatest Dad as the closing night film, it was announced today by Artistic Director Trevor Groth. Starring Robin Williams, the dark comedy centers around high school poetry teacher Lance Clayton, who, after a freak accident, desperately tries to reconnect with his teenage son Kyle (Daryl Sabara), as well as a painfully adorable art teacher, Claire (Alexie Gilmore). Presumably, dogs are not fellated. For more information on the festival, which runs June 10-15 at the Palms Casino Resort and Brenden Theatres in Las Vegas, click here.
Of the five movies I’ve seen in the past 30 hours, three have featured bare female asses (or their thong-clad equivalent), four have shown lingering close-ups of said asses, and three have featured women asking men if they like their asses. (Smartly, all answered yes.) Curious, this grouping… clearly a developing trend to watch. Well, one can hope, at least.
Slightly screwy, unadjustable embed code aside, the dialogue-tree trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience (above) really shouldn’t have the start-up freeze-capture of the above two dudes, since it’s adult film starlet Sasha Grey who plays the high-end flesh-peddler offering the film’s centerpiece transactional attraction, but what are you gonna do? Pushing the notion of an hourly-rate comparison between Gray’s character and her boyfriend, a personal trainer, is a good tack, and not at all thematically irrelevant, since the movie underscores our shared societal obsession with money and security (are they the same?), all against the backdrop of a crumbling economy.
The film itself, which I caught earlier this week, is intriguing on a couple levels — more on it soon — but also kind of an unfulfilled premise. It works chiefly as a crystal-clear, extended metaphor for Soderbergh’s view of the (legit) film industry, but it also left me wanting more. From the hip, I’d slot it somewhere between Bubble (which I rather adored) and Full Frontal (which I rather didn’t) in Soderbergh’s recent dig-vid experimental canon.
Wait… Scott Caan has a book of photographs coming out? And it’s described as “raw photojournalism”? No offense, but the younger Caan never much struck me as an examined-life type of guy, what with all the general carousing and Playboy mansion parties. In fact, he once showed up at the Four Seasons, where he was staying, for early morning interviews for some film, I forget which, in a long silk robe and slippers, explaining in roundabout anecdotal fashion that he’d been at a pajama party the previous evening and forgot to bring a change of clothes… yeah, seriously. Oh, the book is “directed at art connoiseurs, young Hollywood voyeurs, fashionistas and street-obsessed youth.” OK, well that explains it, I guess.
A pants-crappingly important documentary about the monstrous problem of the United States’ national debt, director Patrick Creadon’s I.O.U.S.A. takes as its two crusading, point-of-entry subjects Concord Coalition executive director Bob Bixby and former U.S. Comptroller David Walker, both level-headed, entirely cool and collected Poindexter-types who could pass for affable branch managers at your local savings and loan. That’s important, and underscores the rational appeal of this alarm-bell non-fictioner: while it undeniably elicits temple rubbing and teeth gnashing in extra servings, I.O.U.S.A. doesn’t go for cheap partisan provocation.
As superbly elucidated in the bird’s-eye financial history documentary The Ascent of Money, also recently released to DVD, debt in and of itself is not necessarily a problem. But I.O.U.S.A., inspired by William Bonner and Addison Wiggin’s Empire of Debt, tells the story of a country, collectively, living a wildly unsustainable lifestyle. Faced with key deficits in budget, savings, trade and leadership, the federal government is critically overextended in many areas; increased foreign competition in the form of emerging economic markets only deepens our challenges. With the American economy already in shambles, 78 million baby boomers are expecting retirement benefits from their indebted federal government, and it’s these massive liabilities (approximately $7 trillion for social security, and another $34 trillion for combined Medicare commitments, including President Bush‘s prescription drug giveaway) that dwarf the actual debt, and push it to a staggering total of around $54 trillion.
Weaving together archival footage, economic data and candid interviews with Walker, Bixby, Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan, Paul O’Neill, Robert Rubin, Alice Rivlin, Paul Volcker and other titans of currency, I.O.U.S.A. offers a vivid and alarming profile of America’s financial status, a surefire path toward foreign policy being dictated solely by banking considerations. An effectively stitched together opening montage comprised of various State of the Union speech clips makes sure the audience immediately grasps that this isn’t a partisan hatchet job, despite the indisputable fact that Bush inherited a projection of increasing budget surpluses along with a $5.6 trillion debt in 2000, and took it to around a $10 trillion debt, and growing, at the beginning of this year.
Creaden (Wordplay) is skilled at being able to craft a compelling narrative from and around wonkish details, but he isn’t afraid to interject both real-world irreverence and anxiety into his work– in the form of interview snippets with average retirement-age Americans, heading back to work or fretting about their kids and grandkids — which helps humanize the movie, and make its seemingly too-big-to-tackle problem something relatable, if no less unnerving. Smartly, Creaden also contrasts consumer behaviors (as encouraged by governments); America’s conspicuous consumption is contrasted with a Chinese couple who work together in a factory and earn the collective equivalent of around $20 a day, yet save more than half of that income. As much as the widening manufacturer’s gap, it’s that difference in mindset that helps explain the $260 billion trade deficit with China in 2007.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, I.O.U.S.A. includes a slew of supplemental material, starting with a five-minute, direct-address update from Walker, recorded in early January 2009. An hour-long panel discussion from after the film’s premiere includes Walker, Buffet, Bill Niskanen, Bill Novelli and Peter Peterson, and Buffet and Greenspan also pop up in a separate “economic experts” section explaining why deficits matter. (Here’s a partial hint: the massive debt accrued after World War II, when it swelled to 122 percent of the gross domestic product, was owed to ourselves, courtesy of war bonds.) A special classroom-friendly section provides viewers with Volcker’s reading list. Five minutes of on-the-street interviews with ordinary Americans are counterbalanced by fiscal update information, a three-minute, data-laden slideshow, and the movie’s trailer. To order any DVD release from PBS Home Video, including this title or The Ascent of Money, call (800) PLAY-PBS or click here; to purchase the I.O.U.S.A. DVD via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) B+ (Disc)
Rotten Tomatoes’ lovely Jen Yamato has up an interesting sit-down interview with Bai Ling, who I have it on good authority will be washing cars tomorrow in the Los Angeles area to help promote the sure-to-be-awesome Crank sequel. (Possibly more on that later.) In characteristically breezy, self-confident and oftentimes free-associating fashion, Ling talks about her hard-charging lifestyle and her own wacky blog, the drubbing she took in China after Red Corner, and Southland Tales‘ infamous Cannes Film Festival premiere, among other topics.
Also, in unrelated news, Activision has launched its official web site for the videogame companion for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, tagged as a place where fans can log on and “join a global Transformers community to get the latest news, images, videos and developer insight about the highly anticipated videogame set to hit shelves later this summer.”
“Culkins are kind of like Bebe’s Kids… they don’t die, they multiply.” Sorry… but this was the thought that surged through my mind as I settled into Lymelife, another self-satisfied, allegorical tale of the gritty dark side of Northeastern suburban paradise and its attendant loss of innocence, all as peddled by Derick Martini, making his directorial debut. A sort of facile, surface-polished lesser entry in the canon of movies like The Ice Storm, The Chumscrubber and American Beauty, in which sensible and in some regards overly mature kids grapple with philandering and emotionally stunted adults, Lymelife is a bunch of discrete, thematically similar scenes in search of a cogent narrative punch.
Centering on two deeply troubled, dysfunctional families during the dog days of the 1970s, the film revolves around an awkward, sensitive 15-year-old boy, Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin), whose family life is ostensibly turned upside down after an outbreak of Lyme disease hits his community, spreading illness and paranoia. Scott’s parents — workaholic father Mickey (Alec Baldwin) and overprotective mother Brenda (Jill Hennessy) — are unhappy in swallowed ways bubbling just underneath the surface, and his older brother Jim (Kieran Culkin) is back on brief loan from the Army, and about to ship off for war. Complicating matters, Scott has fallen in love with his neighbor and longtime friend, Adrianna Bragg (Emma Roberts). Troubled in different ways, Adrianna’s less affluent family consists of her uptight mother, Melissa (Cynthia Nixon), who’s carrying on a not-so-clandestine love affair, and her father, Charlie (Timothy Hutton), who’s slowly slipping away from the effects of Lyme disease.
Derick Martini and his brother Steven, the writer-actors behind the winning, low-budget 1999 indie Smiling Fish & Goat on Fire, collaborated on Lymelife‘s script based on their own experiences growing up on suburban Long Island, but the movie feels too cute by about half, groomed for indie flick preciousness in certain scenes. Lymelife premiered, I gather, at the Toronto Film Festival, and truth be told it’s the warm bosom of a welcoming throng of international filmgoers that’s the best home for this decently acted but otherwise marginally disappointing domestic ensemble.
There’s something of a charismatic star spark from the young Roberts, particularly in the manner in which she captures how teenage females drive the bus of sexual experience, and set the tone for the vast majority of adolescent amorous encounters. But overall her performance is a hot-and-cold thing, a lot of which is admittedly dictated from a scattershot characterization that finds Adrianna admonishing and/or patronizing Scott one moment (“I can call your mom, she can bring you an icepack or a Yoo Hoo or something,” she says in an awkward, meant-to-be-serious moment, after a bully thumps Scott), and then flashing him her red bra in confessional booth the next.
The Martinis have a nice touch with some end-around, unexpected moments of interpersonal friction or personal introspection — there’s a great bar scene between Mickey and Charlie that ranks among the best scenes of passive-aggressiveness I can recall — but the Lyme disease-as-metaphor stuff doesn’t play, and they absolutely overreach when they aim for more overt emotional manipulation. These hamfisted instincts most reveal themselves in thunderously stupid and unrealistic behavior by cheating adults — bits crammed in to advance scenes, and feed revelation amongst minors — and reach their apex in a woefully misguided finale that feels like a straight-up gangsta rip-off of American Beauty, only without the balls of actual catharsis through bloodletting. (Screen Media, R, 95 minutes)
So MTV is reporting that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen willrun 147 minutes, or “four minutes longer than the original film,” according to Michael Bay. Which can only mean one thing — my prayers of an even longer, more drawn-out comedy bit where Shia LaBeouf‘s parents still think he’s masturbating, despite (or maybe even because of?) the lingering presence of giant robots nearby, have been answered!
Movieline launched in 1989, and was a snarky Hollywood lifeline for many of those flung across the country yet still hungry for smart, barbed film commentary and insightful, off-the-typical-beaten-path interviews with both up-and-comers and opinionated, loose-mouthed celebs. Now it’s baaaaack, entering a crowded online marketplace, don’tcha know, with a slew of newswire and review content, as well as a Q&A interview with Emily Blunt. Things will really take off once they get those old print issues catalogued, which really should have been part of any launch. And we’ll see how begging for “insider tips” plays out. Still, adjust your entertainment bookmarks accordingly… especially if Joe Queenan gets to make another movie.
As the floppy-armed kid at the center of the fanciful and inventive Son of Rambow, young Bill Milner made a solid impression, conveying the electric charge of a surging imagination. In his latest film, Is Anybody There?, Milner stars opposite Michael Caine‘s curmudgeonly retired magician as Edward, a kid obsessed with what happens to the patrons of his parents’ nursing home when they pass on. I recently spoke by phone with Milner; the conversation is excerpted below:
Brent Simon: You hadn’t acted before Son of Rambow — how did that come to be?
Bill Milner:
I never said, “I want to be an actor, that’s what I want to do with my
life.” I’d always planned on going to college and living normally, I
guess, but when the opportunity came up it was mad. I didn’t really
know what to expect, but now I’ve definitely been introduced to the
film industry, and I really like it.
BS: Like Son of Rambow, your new film is a period piece, but it’s very different in how it intersects and interacts with its period. Was that interesting to you?
BM: Yeah, David (Morrissey) had the bad haircuit. I think one of the reasons you don’t really notice that the movie is a period piece is because instead of it being about growing up in the 1980s, it’s more about remembering everyone’s life, in the past. So for most of it, it’s a lot about how the residents of the old people’s home lived. Unlike Son of Rambow, it’s more about death and having to learn to let go rather than living and growing up and having fun.
BS: There are actually some intriguing parallels to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, particularly as it relates to the notion of growing up in a nursing home, and the wisdom and knowledge that can be gleaned from older people. In real life, have you had the opportunity and blessing to spend a lot of time with your grandparents, or other older folks?
BM: I never met either of my grandfathers, but during the filming I did understand the idea of Alzheimer’s and going senile. But now, after seeing the movie, I realize it even more, because I have a grandmother that’s going a bit senile, and I think it’s a really important message to get across, what that does. So the movie is approaching a kid’s view on an issue in life in a really different way, which I like.
BS: What sort of hobbies do you have?
BM: Basketball is my favorite sport, and I also like animating a bit. I just recently started that, like stop-motion animation, and I’m really enjoying it. Now that I’ve been introduced to it, I always want to be involved in the film industry.
BS: How did that introduction come to be?
BM: My uncle writes for television. Other than that I really didn’t know much about the film industry. But from straightaway I was interested in not just acting, but other areas too — that’s what’s so great about it, there are so many different parts of the film industry, and all of them are so interesting and fun to explore.
BS: A lot of times, with films that have kids as central characters directors will talk about finding someone who’s just believeable for the role. For you, is there a lot of process, or work on character details, or is it more just about learning about the whole story and how your character fits into it?
BM: I think especially with this script that it was so good that you could really learn a lot from it — there was a lot about the character and what he’d been through, just by reading it. With help from the director, it was very easy to understand how the character was feeling, and the emotions he was going through.
BS: Why do you think Edward is so interested in ghosts, and the paranormal?
BM: Just because that’s what he’s grown up with. Instead of normal kids, playing sports or drawing pictures, he’s used to the morbid side of life. Say if you’re dad was a footballer, you’d be more interested in football; I think he’s interested in it because of the way his parents have brought him up. Most kids only encounter death when they’re 10 or so, or maybe later than that — they still don’t have much knowledge about what happens. But from a young age Edward has been pushed into this lifestyle, and so it’s his curiosity.
BS:Is Anybody There? also features a good bit of magic — did you pick up any fun tricks?
BM: I thought it was great, because loads of kids buy the magic sets and read the books, and get then two pages in and get bored, or they don’t seem to work, or they break. But I think learning these tricks was brilliant. I learned a lot. The disappearing card trick was my favorite; I like it because it’s so simple, and yet effective. Surprisingly, it didn’t take much practice. They said because I was young and still have nimble fingers that I handled it quite easily.
BS: He plays quite a gruff character in the film, but what was Michael Caine like on set, just talking to and hanging out with?
BM: It was quite nerve-racking finding out that you might be working with such a great actor, but when you actually meet him he’s so normal that you get on with him really well. He’s such a natural actor that I always felt really comfortable in his presence.
BS: Did you notice any major differences between [directors] Garth Jennings and John Crowley?
BM: They’re both brilliant directors. I think from Garth’s point-of-view, Son of Rambow was about kids being introduced to new experiences and growing up, and I am a kid growing up, and that was what we were going through at those very moments, so I think he taught us to go wild, and he made us feel really natural. I think John… instead of telling you what to do, he guides you without you really knowing. If there’s an emotional scene to do he’ll talk with you in the corner for just a moment. He understands the script really well and talks you through it. I think going over emotional scenes more than once is tough, and going over them more than four times is just hell. So I do like to know that when we’re about to shoot, you’re really into it, and know exactly what we’re going to do, because if you’re not too sure and you get something wrong it can be hard to go again. But being sad isn’t necessarily the hardest thing to do in acting. It might seem easier to look happy or excited, but it might not be easier to show that on screen, and actually feel that feeling.
BS: Is acting something you’d like to stick with as a career?
BM: In general the film industry is very fun, and I think being involved in any way with that would be great, really.
Tele-critic Sam Rubin, of KTLA here in Los Angeles, has dubbed Hannah Montana: The Movie “so far, by far, the best movie of the year,” per print advertising in today’s Los Angeles Times. Clearly someone hasn’t seen Dragonball: Evolution. Or Push. Or Polanski.
The AP’s Ted Anthony has an interesting take on the finale of Life on Mars, and the delicate balance forever demanded of Hollywood’s creative class — that Americans want tidy resolutions, but woe be the producer who makes things too tidy. This dovetails in semi-contrasting fashion with a piece I’m looking to place elsewhere, about movies more and more becoming about a collection of moments.
I won’t source this further at the moment, but I will say that it’s not at all frustrating when studios insist on making films available via only one all-media screening for a large subset of legitimate working critics, despite screening the film other times for online back-slappers. Or, say, when they obfuscate a screening situation through incomplete email responses and not communicating information in a clear and timely fashion. I love that, seriously. Can’t get enough of that.
With financial and credit markets in ruin, consumer confidence massively eroded, and the unquestioned belief in age-old economic precepts fundamentally shaken, the demand for basic, understandable answers about money, banking, lending and their relationships, both individually and collectively, to jobs and well-being in small cities and towns far-flung from world power centersis at an all-time high. Enter into the breach, then, the superb new documentary The Ascent of Money.
Based on the New York Times’ bestselling book of British-born Harvard professor Niall Ferguson (above), The Ascent of Money, produced last year, takes a prescient look at how money has evolved — from the concept of credit and debt in ancient times (Ferguson spends some time with Mesopotamian clay tablets noting grain and barley repayments) to the emergence of a global economy and the subprime crisis we face today. It’s a massive, overarching financial history tour, which I realize sounds drab and perhaps breathtakingly boring, but is in actuality just the opposite. An engaging host, Ferguson knows how to sprinkle in quick-hook linguistic asides (the root of credit is credo, the Latin word for “I believe”) and social-artistic parallels (he uses The Merchant of Venice‘s Shylock as an important example, noting how Christian laws against usury led to an understandable, correlative rise in the Jewish business class) with modern-day examples of economic strife, weaving a clear, sensible tapestry between past and present.
Running approximately two hours, the title finds Ferguson traveling from the Far East to Italy and even America’s Deep South — historic hot spots that gave rise to the evolution of money — to illuminate fundamental economic concepts such as banking, insurance, inflation and interest. As he traverses the world of money, Ferguson speaks with leading experts — including financier George Soros, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, financier Evelyn de Rothschild and World Bank Group president Robert Zoellick, among others — about the state of the world, both for established countries and emerging powers. From the rise of the stocks and bonds markets to sub-prime mortgages, from the housing bubble to the globalization of money and the concept of “Chimerica” — how the United States has, since 1981, gone from the world’s largest creditor to its largest debtor — Ferguson demonstrates that financial history is the essential backstory behind all writ-large history. It’s all enthralling… and a bit depressing, honestly. Particularly of note is information that underlines how bankruptcies, both corporate and personal, have become the defining characteristic of American capitalism.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Ascent of Money is presented in close-captioned full screen. Unfortunately, there aren’t any supplemental bonus features… or a secret cache of pre-bust Yahoo stock. C’est la vie, I guess. To order any DVD release from PBS Home Video, call (800) PLAY-PBS or click here; to purchase the DVD via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. A (Movie) C- (Disc)
A characteristically over-the-shoulder-to-reach-the-ass non-news item from MTV nonetheless hints at the possibility of a potential sequel for Anna Faris’ winningThe House Bunny, which couldn’t be the worst idea that production company Happy Madison has ever entertained.
Draped in the rich colors of African cloth, his trademark staff in hand and his dreadlocks wrapped regally around his head, Anthony B embodies all that it is spiritual and socially proactive about reggae music. For pushing two decades, this heartfelt dancehall artist has been steadfast in his mission to represent the poor and oppressed, using sharp lyrics to confront sociopolitical injustices and shine a spotlight on underclass issues and concerns. With 10 albums of his own, and guest appearances on a staggering amount more (almost 100) in the last dozen years, Anthony B has displayed a tireless work ethic matched only by his zeal for life.
Né Keith Anthony Blair in small town Jamaica, Anthony B grew up immersed in the thunderous chants and rhythms of the Seventh Day Adventist church, where he honed his soon-to-be signature vocals under the watchful eyes and ears of revivalist preachers and choral conductors. In his formative years, the artist also cleaved to the music of Otis Redding and the incomparable Peter Tosh, influences he would eventually fold into his own performance style. Eschewing glossy pop lyrics and empty braggadocio, Anthony B instead remained musically faithful to his roots, with songs built of spiritual consciousness and social conviction. And now he’s on DVD.
Captured using eight HD cameras and 48 tracks of audio, Anthony B: Live chronicles a stunning performance at the first annual Reggae Rising Music Festival in Humboldt County, California. Despite its somewhat chintzy cover art, the disc serves as both a wonderful keepsake for longtime fans and easy, engaging introduction to reggae newcomers. “Hurt Mi Heart” kicks things off, followed by “God Above Everything,”
“Fire Pon Rome” and “Row Mr. Fisherman.” The middle portion of the show
consists of “Trigger Happy Cowboys,” “Good Cop,” “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us
Now,” the forthrightly titled “Smoke Weed Every Day,” “Higher
Meditation” and “Water Pumpee.” Closing things out are the emotional
trifecta of “Tease Her,” “Raid Di Barn” and “In Time of Trouble.”
Superbly directed by Luke
Archer, the concert performance material — an evening set amidst the
legendary California Redwood Forest — is top-shelf, but what really helps give the DVD extra accessibility is the fact that it’s masterfully woven together with exclusive interview
footage of Anthony B discussing the backgrounds and inceptions of all the songs. Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Anthony B: Live comes remastered in
stunning Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound. B+ (Concert) B (Disc)
The first ever DVD release from the six-time Grammy Award-winning guitar great, José Feliciano: The Paris Concert spotlights the versatility of the Latin crossover sensation’s instrumentof truth, and his skill at evoking new feeling from familiar old tunes.
Filmed in high definition at the New Morning club on August 5 of last year, José Feliciano: The Paris Concert has the ability to woo fans both old and new — those familiar with Feliciano, and those who perhaps don’t yet know him but still appreciate honest musical craftsmanship. Backed by his solid five-piece band, Feliciano kicks things off with “Chico and the Man,” followed by “Crazy Heart” and a smooth version of “Billie Jean.” The rest of the set list is comprised of: “Como Fue,” “I Got a Woman,” “Rain,” “Bamboleo,” “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” “Higher Ground,” “Oye Guitarra Mia,” “Beyond the Sea,” “Affirmation,” “Cherry, Cherry,” “Porque Te Tengo Que Olvidar,” “Money,” “Oye Como Va,” “Purple Haze,” “Sunshine of Your Love,” “Que Sera” and “Light my Fire.” As one can surmise from that track listing, Feliciano dabbles effortlessly
in different genres, mixing flamenco, pop, blues and bossa nova with hearty fistfuls of jazzy undertones. The most interesting thing is that none of these inclusions feels particularly far afield, like a naked stab at relevance. Almost all the songs are engaging interpretations, with “Higher Ground” and “Oye Como Va” serving as particular standouts.
Housed in a clear Amaray case that helps spotlight a two-sided, full-color sleeve, and presented on a region-free disc in 16×9 aspect ratio, José Feliciano: The Paris Concert comes with English language stereo PCM, Dolby digital 5.1 and DTS audio tracks. The video transfer is superb, and crisp throughout, but there are unfortunately no supplemental bonus features. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A (Concert) C- (Disc)
It’s the summer of 1987, and James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg, below left), an uptight comparative literature grad from Oberlin, can’t wait to embark on his dream tour of Europe with his best friend. But when his parents renege on the trip’s subsidization, James has little choice but to get a job, and spend his last summer before grad school at a seasonal amusement park operated by a loopy young married couple (Saturday Night Live‘s Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig).
Forget about German beer and reefer-infused philosophical discussions, museums and pliable French girls — James’ summer will now be defined by screaming kids high on cotton candy, soused patrons scheming to score giant stuffed pandas and an old elementary school acquaintance always trying to punch him in the balls. Lucky for James, he makes a quick friend in Joel Schiffman (Martin Starr), a droll, pipe-smoking game booth worker who helps initiate James into the absurd conventions and rituals of theme park life. He finds an older mentor in the park’s maintenance guy, Mike Connell (Ryan Reynolds), a local heartthrob due to the rumor that he once jammed with Lou Reed. And yes, James even inches closer to losing his virginity, discovering love — or at least concentrated lust — in the form of two co-workers, the captivating if slightly withdrawn Em Lewin (Kristen Stewart, below right) and dance-happy, carefree Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva).
Fresh off helping deliver a hit with Superbad, writer-director Greg Mottola returns to the big screen with his first original script since his 1997 debut, The Daytrippers. Adventureland is rooted in biographical torture (Mottola worked at a Long Island amusement park while attending Columbia University), a fact that comes through in the winning construction of the movie’s slightly off-kilter tone. Even if he’s unable to wrangle the otherwise lovely and charming Stewart’s eyes-askance lip-nibbling, or bring Eisenberg’s mannered tics fully under control, Mottola has a keen sense of detail, a deft touch with dialogue and smart taste in the casting of myriad supporting players.
One of the more intriguing elements of the film — something hinted at and flirted with in the script, but never fully and explicitly embraced, especially by the actors — is the sense that it’s an exploration of Ms. Right Now vs. Ms. Right Right Now, if that makes sense. As appealing and largely engaging as it is on the surface, Adventureland could have struck an even deeper and more thrillingly subversive chord by tapping into the idea of one (smart) kid’s randy summer in heat — the notion of a young, sensitive guy’s quest to unburden himself of his virginity while still sealing the deal with someone who he can hold a conversation with.
The product of a warped home life with a recently deceased mother and an even more recently remarried dad, Em is a hot, vulnerable mess, which comes through in her serial acting out with Connell. Other than the fact that they both seem to be generally restless, pointed toward New York City and of above-average intelligence, though, there’s little that realistically binds James and Em. Even Mottola seems bored with their interactions, sticking them together and pulling them apart in a somewhat arbitrary fashion that gives the movie a fitful rhythm. These two don’t seem like a match made forever, basically. Unfortunately, Adventureland never wholly digs into that potentially provocative mutual-use premise, and Eisenberg’s Woody Allen-lite shtick isn’t hormonally charged enough to match James’ predicament.
In the end, though, this is all criticism relative to what Adventureland gets right. With its easygoing, lived-in charms and nice supporting performances, certainly there’s a lot more good than not in the movie. It’d be an entirely suitable flick to lose your teen/twentysomething coming-of-age cherry to, in other words. (Miramax, R, 107 minutes)
Casting about late one night a couple weeks ago for a DVD which possessed some human substance but was also not imperative that I review immediately, I popped in John Sayles’ 1980 directorial debut, Return of the Secaucus 7, and found myself transported back to a time of considerably more hair, as well as discerning and engaging judgments about what it meant to be a childless thirtysomething couple — or, egads, even single — at the close of the 1970s.
Sayles, the writer-director behind such films as Passion Fish, Lone Star and Sunshine State, has been at the forefront of the independent film movement for almost a quarter-century — so long that it’s easy to forget that at the time of this release, there wasn’t actually much of a theatrical market for indie films, apart from a handful of four-walled special screenings. Predating The Big Chill by several years, Return of the Secaucus 7 covers some of the same terrain — old friends getting back together and all that — but is a more hopeful and in many ways honest portrayal of young adults grappling with the real world, and the changes it inherently brings for themselves and their relationships.
In the film, seven old friends (Mark Arnott, Karen Trott, Jean Passanante, Maggie Cousineau, Bruce McDonald, Adam Lefevre and Maggie Renzi) reunite a decade after their radical college days for a dramatic, poignant and revelatory weekend. It’s not necessarily pitched as a big-deal, capital-R reunion, though; they’ve been getting together, in various combinations, with new lovers and the like, each summer at the same cramped, small town New Hampshire house for the past several years. This time, though, there’s been a break-up by a longtime couple, which means the possibility of fresh romance for one guy, a would-be singer-songwriter. There’s also a couple of high school teachers, longtime steadies; a nurse; and a Senator’s speechwriter worried about how her pals, including an ex-flame, will respond to her slightly stuffy new boyfriend (Gordon Clapp).
Conversational charms abound, but Return of the Secaucus 7 scores — however fashion-dated and cramped its setting — mostly because it’s honest about friends’ judgments of one another (e.g., “I love him, but he’s a fuck-up”) while also nailing the tinged but not always emotionally overblown differences in communication between men and women, and the slight manifestations of classism present in the way young parents interact with singletons, and townies with those who’ve moved away to bigger cities. Mostly, watching the movie, one gets a sense of Sayles’ affection for the commingling of careful planning and found, on-the-fly delights. While some story strands are more interesting than others, and the performances range from amateurish to engagingly naturalistic (an almost comically younger-looking David Strathairn pops up, proving definitively that he wasn’t cultivated in arrested middle-age from Sam Waterston’s rib), Return of the Secaucus 7 grows on you as an ensemble piece because of the recognizability and relatability of its subjects.
Housed in a regular Amaray case, Return of the Secaucus 7 is presented in 1.33:1 full screen (more on this in a moment), with a Dolby digital soundtrack and a feature-length audio commentary track from Sayles. Anyone who’s ever talked to, read or listened to an interview with Sayles knows that the guy is erudite, knows his shit, but is also — with just a little proper coaxing — an affable “guy’s guy,” and that combination makes this commentary track among the most informative that I’ve listened to recently. He talks a lot about the movie’s five-week, 16mm 1979 location shoot, but also finds a way to interweave specific anecdotal details (horses in the background of one shot, for instance) into broader points that inform the body of his work — like how to take advantage of “production design already done for you,” as he puts it, or avoid ADR looping, especially with children or actors working with an accent.
Without seeming to work from notes, Sayles’ memory is sharp. He explains in reasonable fashion how — at a time before the Sundance Film Festival — he felt it was inconceivable that Return of the Secaucus 7 would be seen by a wide audience in theaters, so it was composed for television, which leads to plenty of pan-and-scan scars in its DVD presentation. He also gives good anecdotes; a dead deer that appears roadside in the film is made up of a mounted deer head and a duffle bag stuffed full of clothes. At around the one-hour mark, Sayles finally touches on explicit comparisons to The Big Chill, but for most of the time he talks generously and intelligently about his collaborators (including composer Mason Daring), his own small supporting role, the film’s themes, its production, and how it fits in with his other work. Oh! He also talks about the copious male asses on display in the movie’s skinny-dipping sequence (a tweaking of female-nudity conventions, he argues, but one that doesn’t entirely hold water, within the narrative), noting, tongue-in-cheek, “I believe this was the last time I appeared naked in one of my own films.” Finally, there’s also a trailer for Sayles’ Casa de los Babys and a 12-minute featurette which cross-cuts film clips with addtional sit-down reminiscences from Sayles and his longtime partner, actress-producer Renzi. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B (Disc)
Director Richard Kelly shares the new poster for The Box (Warner Bros., October 30) on his MySpace page, and correctly notes the one-sheet’s Hitchcockian vibe, the unnerving red stripe drawing one’s attention to a shadowy figure. The tagline beckons properly, too: “You are the experiment.” No notes; like a classy woman, this sells itself nicely while still maintaining an air of mystery.
Will & Grace made Eric McCormack a star. In Alien Trespass, a Matinee-style homage to classically cheesy science-fiction flicks, he plays noted astronomer Ted Lewis, who gets possessed by Urp, an alien marshal trying to track down a rubbery, marauding blob in his custody after they crash-land on Earth. I spoke with McCormack recently about the touchstone inspiration of various old movies, whether people have stopped assuming he’s gay, the future of TNT’s Trust Me, and how kids — including his son — say the darnedest things. For the Q&A, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.
An actor and comedian given to shrewdly observant romanticizations of laziness and over-indulgence, both personally and societally, Jim Gaffigan has a keen sense of and appeciation for language, which helps him flirt around the edges of a joke, so that he’s never really dependent on pure repetition to milk a laugh. The highly anticipated follow-up to his platinum-selling Beyond the Pale, Jim Gaffigan: King Baby finds the Indiana-born comedian wrapping up his 2008 tour with a final night in Austin.
A portion of King Baby, which runs around 70 minutes, takes aim at food, from the spelling of bologna (and inclusion of olives in some varieties) to mood dining and the plasticine decor of fast food restaurants. Bowling also gets quite a bit of run (“No one’s ever jealous when they find out you went bowling…”), though clearly from an affectionate place. But Gaffigan is just as also likely to pivot from a seemingly rich topical stomping ground and take it in an unexpected direction. A run on camping (“If it’s so great, why are bugs trying to get into my house?”) gives way to an extended bit about bears, and the ludicrous advice of playing dead if attacked by one (“As if bears have some ethical code!”). Gaffigan also riffs memorably on hammocks (“Ever get in a hammock with someone else? You’d better be dating them, because it looks like you’re trying to start a family…”); while delivered at a comfortably conversational pace, other observational jokes are nicely sprinkled throughout, and seem like quick-hit cousins of some stand-alone, deadpan Mitch Hedberg lines.
Holding this all together is Gaffigan’s tremendously sympathetic nature and demeanor. Scattering his set with whispery, high-pitched asides that serve as self-effacing buoys, Gaffigan comes across, in the very best sense of the phrase, as workman-like. This means the jokes at his own expense (“Look at him — his head is huge! It could be a mascot… for Mormons!”) aren’t desperate or keening — sad attempts to win over audience sympathy and cheap yuks. No, instead, they flow freely, and sincerely, from his own sense of humor and laidback personality. Watching Gaffigan’s set, he seems to retain a (Midwestern?) core decency born of the principal that reward deserves to be met with continued effort, and opportunity with appreciation. That he’s funny is indisputably a given; he also seems like a fundamentally good guy, too, which makes him even more endearing.
Housed in a white, regular Amaray case, King Baby is presented in widescreen format, with English language stereo and 5.1 surround audio tracks. Unlike many other stand-up comedy titles, King Baby comes a solid slate of supplemental bonus features, including a never-before-aired British interview, meet-and-greet footage from Atlanta, extra material from the Beyond the Pale tour, an XM/Sirius interview and all sorts of extra material, which targets neighbors, Gaffigan’s inner monologue and the Transportation Security Administration. To purchase the disc via Amazon, click here. A- (Concert) A- (Disc)
