Nicole Holofcener, whose filmography consists of Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing, and Friends with Money, is the sort of director whom reasonable film critics would like to force into indentured Hollywood studio servitude, if only the Hollywood studio system would accommodate her talents. (It’s no coincidence, sadly, that all of her movies have been financed independently.) Her work is character-centric and engaging, low-key without sacrificing its steady hum of liveliness and quiet wit. Her movies sometimes pivot on what could in lesser hands be characterized as melodramatic turns, but she counterbalances this with a smart attention to detail. In short, she has a finely honed sensibility that injects her work with recognizable humanity — something that a lot of even adult-pitched mainstream Hollywood product lacks, especially in its self-defeating quest to more readily identify with only either drama or carefree laughs.
Holofcener’s latest film centers in part around a pair married Manhattanites, Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt), who are parents to a teenage daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele). Together, they operate a successful secondhand furniture store shrewdly stocked with trendy estate sale items. Planning for the future, Kate and Alex purchase an option on the apartment next door in order to expand their two bedroom apartment. Their only problem is the cranky old lady, Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert), living in it by herself, and the indelicate fact that they’ve got to wait for her to die.
Andra is mostly cared for by one granddaughter, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall, above left), a sweet-natured radiology technician, and scorned by her other granddaughter, Mary (Amanda Peet, above right), a callous and self-centered spa clinician thrown for a loop by the fact that her last boyfriend for some reason dumped her. (She’s the dumper, never the dumpee, you see.) Things become more complicated when these two families’ lives intersect, resulting in a dramedy that’s billed as being about love, death and liberal guilt.
The simple, brilliantly calculated shock of Please Give‘s opening, a matter-of-fact montage of mammograms, gives way to interactions that are of a piece with writer-director Holofcener’s three other films — talky, urbane ensemble flicks that pry quiet but deeply sincere smiles and laughs from an audience, and just as often showcase hushed moments of pinprick vulnerability. Holofcener’s touch with actors is so superb, and her ear for smartly calibrated revelatory dialogue generally so acute, that one feels like they could trip along forever with these characters. Kate’s emotional frailty (she gives charitably to homeless people and wants to volunteer, but is overwhelmed with sadness on the occasions she does reach out) is deftly contrasted with Andra’s deteriorating physical condition. It’s heartening, too, that Abby is a very much a real teenager, with splotchy skin, shifting motivations and interests, and fitful swings of mood. Holofcener crafts believable characters, and then lets them rub up against one another in interesting ways.
If there’s an easy knock on Holofcener’s work overall, it’s that her chosen focus is hopelessly bourgeoisie (though Lovely & Amazing undercut this argument rather convincingly), and out of step with a large swath of what modern American audiences would find dramatically compelling or humorous. (A running deadpan joke about day-tripping out of the city to “watch the leaves turn” reinforces this view, in its very whitebread, New England specificity.) The only other false notes — small qualms, really — come when Holofcener tries to nakedly advance the plot, or color in tragic backstory. These bits feel forced, like some sizzle added to sell the steak. Otherwise, though, Please Give is a wry, absorbing and beautifully observed snapshot of free-floating malaise and burgeoning hope. In gazing both outward and inward in equal measure, it encourages more human engagement and connection, which is always a good thing.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Please Give comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of its theatrical exhibition. Audio options consist of Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks in English, French and Thai (!), with optional subtitles in English, Spanish SDH, French, “regular” Spanish, Korean, Mandarin Chinese and Thai. Supplemental bonus features consist of roughly four minutes of outtakes, a 12-minute behind-the-scenes featurette that includes on-set and EPK-style chats with cast and crew, and a separate eight minutes worth of material with Holofcener that is OK, but also leaves something to be desired. A bit more of a comprehensive overview of Holofcener’s canon would be nice; she’s not a “name” filmmaker to many, sadly, but she really should be. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) B- (Disc)
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A Delight For Those Whose Daddies Never Loved Them
The trailer for director Josh Sternfeld’s Meskada (Red Flag, December 3), starring Nick Stahl and Rachel Nichols as detectives whose investigation into a small town murder leads them into an adjoining burgh with dark secrets, is online and available for viewing, and I’ll say this: it looks to be a delight for young female meth addicts, and/or those with daddy issues. Stahl, Norman Reedus and Kellan Lutz all belong to that subset of recessed- and bleary-eyed knuckle-draggers that so delight girls looking to fill the void in their heart born of an absentee father. These three guys could be freshly showered and dressed in designer suits, but still look a bit beat-up, boozy, damaged, dangerous and, let’s be honest, reeking of cigarette smoke.
The Taqwacores
If there were ever a movie designed to make Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin simultaneously crap their pants — pairing all the extreme edginess of an online Mountain Dew commercial with the ethnic “otherness” of a weekend’s cab rides in Manhattan — it would probably have to be The Taqwacores, about a group of young, punkish, fornicating Muslims trying to reconcile their religious beliefs and personal freedoms in a country that isn’t always as welcoming of diversity as its electorate claims.
Co-written and directed by Eyad Zahra, the movie, opening tomorrow in New York and November 12 in Los Angeles and Orange counties, centers on Yusef (Bobby Naderi, above left), a first-generation Pakistani college sophomore who moves into an off-campus house in Buffalo. There, he meets a motley crew of fellow Muslims, and their home becomes a community magnet for Friday prayers as well as music-fueled weekend partying.
Like Holy Rollers, The Taqwacores makes at least some sincere attempt to reconcile an honest faith born from a more orthodox religious sect with the bristling, more hormonally oriented energies of youth. Jettisoning any sense of structure from Michael Muhammad Knight’s novel, though, Zahra pumps up the jittery jump-cuts and opts for surface laughs and tension, not trusting the ability of the material to nervously build to a more natural climax.
The result often feels less “real” or believable, and more like a stumbling collection of characters tilting at windmills, peppered with moments either designed for raw provocation (one character needling another about masturbation and tampon use, another bellowing, “I’m so Muslim I can say, ‘Fuck Islam!'”), or that read as overly telegraphed issue statements on gender equality, sexual identity and the like. And yet there’s undeniably a natural pull to the movie, in large part because of a charismatic supporting performance from Dominic Rains (above right) as Jehangir, the mohawked, reconciliatory chieftain of this colorful clan. Amidst all the willful din and clatter, he smashes stereotypes quietly. (Strand, R, 83 minutes)
11/4/08
Billed as a “participatory documentary,” a work-in-progress, nonfiction snapshot assembled and edited by Jeff Deutchman, 11/4/08 chronicles a day around the world, leading up to the presidential election of Barack Obama. The film, which premiered earlier this year at the South by Southwest
Festival, screens tonight in Los Angeles at the Laemmle
Claremont 5, Monica 4-Plex, Playhouse 7, Town Center 5 and Sunset 5 theaters, and
is available this week across various digital download platforms, including iTunes, AmazonVOD,
CinemaNow and more.
Two weeks before the election of Obama, filmmaker Deutchman
asked friends and acquaintances all over the globe to record their experiences of the 2008 Election Day, a day that in many ways had an impending sense of being “historic” before any history at all had even really taken
place. After collecting footage from a combination of passionate amateurs
and acclaimed independent filmmakers — the latter group including Margaret
Brown, Joe Swanberg, Benh Zeitlin and Henry Joost, one of the co-directors of Catfish — Deutchman then went about working up a vérité narrative that skips to and fro, offering an impressionistic, bird’s eye view of the groundswell feeling of momentous change against a sometimes humdrum backdrop of workaday domesticity and regular hustle-and-bustle.
Ostensibly, the film’s chief selling point is that it trades in emotionality rather than some sort of strict, imposed-from-on-high narrative. It depicts idealistic volunteers in St. Louis and Austin working to turn their states
blue; voting lines in Chicago snaking around the block; and young kids, in Alaska and elsewhere, who seem invested in
the election results. One Los Angeles participant even films his cell phone as he talks to his gobsmacked mother, who ran into Bill Clinton while going to cast her vote.
There’s a sort of plebian engagement and value in these collected snapshots, but they don’t really fit together in any compelling fashion. The chief problem, of course, is that, removed from the rarefied air of a historical Democratic primary and general election campaign, the United States is still (and probably even more so) in a place of retrenched partisan grenade lobbing, so any and all attempts 11/4/08 makes at grabbing or inducing joy feel hopelessly leaden, stacked up against the real world outside. Apart from the Republican Party’s unwillingness to engage in any reasonable partnership of governance, and Fox News’ typical idiocy and still ongoing smear campaign of hysterical pitch and volume, Obama is saddled with the crushing reality of very real problems — a tattered economy, small business enmity, and a war in Afghanistan that is dragging on and possibly widening, to name but a few.
While some Stateside anecdotal bits are fascinating (an Indiana canvasser relating the shared story of a voter who believes Black Panthers will actually be killing people at the polls), and others still emotionally tangible and relevant (an African-American volunteer talking about friendships formed during the campaign), the film is most successful when it moves away from mere moment-in-time noodling, and tries to connect both rhetoric and action to the actual deeper feelings and motivations driving them. By and large, this means when the film casts a glance across the Atlantic Ocean, where expatriates and foreign citizens alike express their opinions on the election. Women in Switzerland note that it is “young people who build the future,” and a gentleman in New Delhi talks about the enduring power of America’s ideals.
It’s this material that most provides important context. Political partisans on the far right may regard the aura of hope and optimism attached to Obama’s election as false, misplaced or foolish, but it was certainly real, and no less ridiculous than clubby, rallying blue-hairs feeling safe and sentimental about their country (and their place in it, specifically) when Republicans were ringing up presidential wins in five out of the previous seven contests. In clinging to the notion that Obama was or still is an avatar, and only an empty vessel for the mantle of “change,” there is a fundamental failure to acknowledge and respect his considerable intellect and political gifts, certainly, but also recognize and embrace the dream of American possibility — the dream children need to carry forward in the world, which is in turn actually a worldwide dream. It’s a snapshot of why we matter, essentially — a robust, living example of American exceptionalism. For more information, click here. (Film Buff/Consensual Cinema, unrated, 70 minutes)
A FishbowlLA Chat: LAFCA Voting and Awards in General
I recently did an e-interview with FishbowlLA’s Richard Horgan regarding both the forthcoming LAFCA Career Achievement honoree vote as well as the state of the awards season in general, and now it’s an item at Media Bistro’s FishbowlLA site. Check it out, if interested.
Adrien Brody Seeks Injunction to Stop Giallo’s Release
So Adrien Brody is suing in an attempt to stop the imminent DVD release of Dario Argento’s Giallo, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Interesting stuff. How many other actors don’t walk if their compensation deal falls through? And really, though, just as a sidebar, shouldn’t someone on his management team be on top of this, you know, before the week of release? Feel free to drop an Amazon “release alert” into the mix. Some will knock Brody for his post-Oscar choices, but he’s pretty much the definition of adventurous and honorable to me. Even if the film doesn’t work (I’m thinking chiefly of you, The Jacket), he’s always interesting, and totally present.
Movies.com Looks at Cheapest, Most Successful Films Ever
The ranking system will perhaps be a bit arbitrary to some, but over at Movies.com, Jeff Otto takes a look back at nine of the cheapest and most successful independently financed films of the modern era. Zeitgeist influences all, no doubt, from Clerks and Swingers to Napoleon Dynamite and Paranormal Activity, and proof that complacency born of abundant resources is often the enemy of imagination.
The Secret of Kells
Directed by Tomm Moore, with a co-directing credit assigned to Nora
Twomey, The Secret of Kells was a surprise Oscar nominee in the
Best Animated Feature category last year. While the movie will never be
mistaken for a popcorn-audience blockbuster, its deserving recognition
by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences does show a
heartening willingness to embrace and reward the different possibilities
of the medium.
The story is set in medieval times, and centers around young, orphaned Brendan (Evan McGuire), who lives in the Abbey of Kells, a remote Irish outpost. There, under the watchful eye of his uncle, Abbot Cellach (Brendan Gleeson), he dutifully helps work to fortify the abbey walls. Joyless and stern, Cellach is obsessed against preparing for the impending attack of Viking marauders, who are later represented as faceless intruders with garbled voices. But grand adventure beckons for Brendan when a celebrated master illuminator, Aidan (Mick Lally), arrives from a foreign land carrying a legendary but unfinished book, The Book of Iona, brimming with amazing artistry as well as secret wisdom and powers.
To help complete the magical manuscript, Brendan breaches the abbey’s walls for the first time, heading into the forest to pick a batch of special inkberries for Aidan. There, he meets a mysterious shape-shifting fairy, Aisling (Christen Mooney), who saves him from wolves and also discloses painful secrets about her own family and childhood. When Aidan reveals that both his failing eyesight and the additional lack of a special, lost charm prevent him from completing his text, Brendan, with the barbarians closing in, gets a chance to showcase his own latent artistic vision. While he cannot completely save his village, Brendan and Aidan escape with the book, and eventually get a chance to strike a blow for the power of enlightenment.
The Secret of Kells is not first and foremost a conventional hero’s journey, or even a rigidly structured tale. (In fact, it takes a digressive bit of third act wandering to push it over the 75-minute mark.) The story here is a fable, and best thought of as a carriage through which to ravishingly realize a tangential moral lesson. And on this front, the movie succeeds wildly, capturing in aggregate the heady pleasures of surging imagination and artistic pursuit perhaps more vividly than any animated film of the past five or six years.
Visually, the film is something truly special — idiosyncratic without being flashy, informed by all the curlicued borders and ornate (some might say ostentatious) craftsmanship of medieval lettering the same sort of which are featured in Brendan’s tome. It is a style that suits the material quite well, rooted in a juxtaposition of geometric shapes and a dazzling array of colors. Some of the background compositions are a mini-cubist delight, and the abbey’s coterie of scribes, with their hunched necks and disproportionate bodies, reflect the skewed, looming perception of adults that adolescents often have. Moore also does a fascinating thing with light, sometimes indicating the flickering play of through-the-clouds sunlight with transparency, meaning little fragmented bits of the forest “shine” through Brendan when he goes to get the inkberries. It is small details like this that make The Secret of Kells so rapturously engaging.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, The Secret of Kells comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and 2.0 stereo audio tracks and optional English subtitles. Its ample slate of bonus material clocks in at over two hours, including a nice feature-length audio commentary track with Moore, a clutch of storyboards, concept art and pre-production sketches, and behind-the-scenes material from the movie’s voice-recording sessions. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) B+ (Disc)
Happy Birthday, Sharon Leal
It’s a happy 38th birthday to the attractive and entirely pleasant Sharon Leal, who almost makes one want to stop sighing deeply and/or punching themselves in the face while watching Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too? Almost.
New York Times Love for Brad Schreiber’s Jimi Hendrix Book
Brad Schreiber gets a deserving double-shot of love from the New York Times for Becoming Jimi Hendrix, his collaboration with Steven Roby on the younger years of the guitar godhead. David Kirby drops the proper Sunday book review, while Steve Coates also weighs in, praising the tome’s rare photos, and offering up a special slide show. And again, the Amazon link, for purchases.
Score
Radley Metzger is generally acknowledged to be one of the more stylish and successful purveyors of 1970s erotica, a filmmaker who specialized in assaying the flickering embers of anything-goes sexual adventurism, more along the edges of suburbia rather than hippiedom. Though New York-born, he often shot his movies in Europe, and therefore brought to bear a certain élan and foreign arthouse sophistication upon the porno chic subgenre that a lot of his crank-’em-out contemporaries simply lacked. His 1972 film Score, heretofore unavailable on DVD and Blu-ray in its uncensored, longer form, represents an interesting if not altogether successful branching out on his part.
Believe it or not, Score is actually based on a 1971 off-Broadway play that starred a then-25-year-old Sylvester Stallone. Adapted for the screen by Jerry Douglas, the film version moves the action from Queens to a sleepy seaside villa, where a married swinging couple, Elvira (Claire Wilbur, above right) and her photographer husband Jack (Gerald Grant), bored with the lack of erotically charged conquest in their trysts arranged from magazines’ personal ads, make a bet to see who can most quickly seduce a shy young newlywed couple, Betsy (Lynn Lowry) and her ecologist hubbie Eddie (Cal Culver, above center). The rub (ahem) is that the liberated couple are bisexual, so — after using telephone repairman Mike (Carl Parker) as a warm-up appetizer to loosen the grip of Betsy’s Catholic school upbringing — Elvira sets her sights on Betsy, while Jack eyes Eddie. Booze, weed, kinky dress-up costumes and amyl nitrate get trotted out, and the inhibitions of the younger couple eventually fall away.
The opening and closing narration is more than a little ridiculous (“Once upon a future time, in a lush land of pleasure, in an enviable state of affluence, bordering on the state of decadence to the north and the state of euphoria to the south, in a city of leisure…”), and it doesn’t quite jibe with the exploitative nature of Score‘s conceit, even if Betsy and Eddie are proven to be willing players in their own corruption. Also, Jack and Eddie’s un-ironic use of “buddy” recalls South Park‘s Terrence and Phillip in its over-the-top frequency of use. Still, there’s no small amount of amusement to some of the dialogue (Jack, in early evening small talk: “How do you think we’re going to do in the Olympics?” Eddie: “Oh, I don’t know.” Jack [sotto voce]: “Thank God it’s not going to be one of those evenings…”), and Metzger seems to have an intuitive grasp of how sexually persuadable or suggestible a certain subset of twentysomethings are, when pitched a good, hard line of bullshit. Fashion changes, but that score remains constant, it seems.
Other than that, the most interesting thing about Score, of course, is that it features not the sort of lesbian canoodling that one expects from the sexploitation genre (well, it does, but not solely), but instead explicit male homosexual scenes, in contrast to its fairly demure sapphic simulations. This was something of a departure for the genre, and certainly an act of at the very least artistic provocation, though its maker denies this in the bonus material interview. Though it’s comedically inflected (and features a winkingly ironic ending), the film itself is kind of a claustrophobic, mid-tempo push, and its psychedelic-infused love scenes (Metzger and cinematographer Frano Vodopivec shoot into mirrors and use all other manner of distorted lens gimmickry) never achieve much real titillation, beyond the aforementioned academic curiosity/notoriety.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with a striking orange cover and photograph of Lowry, Score comes to DVD in a 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation from Cult Epics, divided into 12 chapters. The restored high-definition transfer is fairly solid, all things considered, with extremely little in the way of grain or edge enhancement, and only a very few intermittent splotches. Far less stellar is the English Dolby digital 2.0 mono soundtrack, which features a soundtrack that frequently overwhelms the dialogue. An audio commentary track with Metzger and film historian Michael Bowen anchors the slate of bonus features, and it’s interesting to hear the filmmaker discuss both certain production hardships (having to move part of the production’s Croatian shoot from a separate studio location to the cast and crew’s hotel) and how he filmed the movie’s most explicit scenes without ever really knowing if they would even be included in the final cut of the movie. (Two versions ended up being released.)
Other supplemental material consists of an 18-and-a-half-minute narrated production featurette with loads of fascinating on-set footage, and a separate, 19-minute-plus interview with Lowry, in which she gamely recounts everything from her casting and Metzger’s admonitions to the cast to stay out of the sun (he wanted to avoid tan lines) to her rocky relationship with Wilbur (after her costar found out she was making less money, and reacted bitterly) and Parker’s off-set “rehearsal” attempts to separate her from her panties. Rounding things out are preview trailers for Score, as well as two other Metzger productions, Camille 2000 and The Lickerish Quartet. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) A- (Disc)
Tamara Drewe
Directed by Stephen Frears, and adapted from Posey Simmonds’ graphic
novel (which was itself inspired by Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding
Crowd), Tamara Drewe unfolds at an English countryside writer’s retreat
run by philandering mystery novelist Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam)
and his dutiful wife Beth (Tasmin Greig), where the return of a former
local (Gemma Arterton, below), who with a bit of plastic surgery has
transformed herself into a bombshell magazine columnist, sets off a chain of professional jealousies, love affairs and teenage infatuations —
the latter in the form of two scheming 15-year-olds who act almost as a
sort of Greek chorus for the movie.
Frears is an accomplished director who trusts heartily in his casting instincts and so, as to be expected, there’s good group work here from the actors, including Bill Camp, as a constipated academic and would-be Hardy biographer. Somewhat to its detriment, though, Tamara Drewe isn’t really about… well, Arterton’s Tamara Drewe. It’s instead a rangy, noodling ensemble piece which could have used a bit more of a streamlined narrative vision and scope. Plenty of the characters are colorful, including the horny drummer (Dominic Cooper) of an ascendant rock band, but they don’t always fit together in convincing ways, and Frears’ loose-limbed film, while warm and fitfully witty, feels consistently and steadfastly like less than the sum of its parts. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 107 minutes)
Inside Job
It’s difficult to exaggerate the impact of the global financial meltdown of 2008, a tsunami that, if we were lucky, a lot of us felt as a pinch or a slap. The additional wallop that Charles Ferguson’s revelatory new documentary Inside Job packs comes from what it augurs for the future, and how it reveals the collapse to be both at once a crime of greed and an entirely systemic (if sadly preventable) failure, a de-pantsing of American capitalism to the rest of the world.
The word “empathy” was derided in some quarters of political discourse when President Obama mentioned it in 2009 in the context of a necessary ingredient of a Supreme Court justice, but clearly there isn’t that sort of honest feeling for constituents and the public at large in so many of those charged with protecting the interests of average Americans. Narrated by Matt Damon and told in breathtakingly concise, calmly reasoned strokes, the ire-evoking Inside
Job makes this abundantly clear. In his follow-up to No End in Sight, Ferguson rivetingly connects the dots on the shadowy financial derivatives world and a subprime lending market that swelled to over $600 billion, over one-fifth of all lending in 2006. It all adds up to a corporate-friendly dance party on the backs of retirement fund pensioners and others who can least afford it. The thing that’s most irritating, however, is the sort of shock, befuddlement and indignation at the exceedingly reasonable, base-level questions Ferguson puts to various voices of the status quo in the film. Clearly, their plan is just to dance until the music stops. For more information on the film, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 105 minutes)
A Look at LACMA’s October Film Foundation Tribute
Over at Debra Levine’s Arts●Meme, Doug Cummings engagingly previews LACMA’s October weekend series, which includes Leave Her to Heaven, Beggars of Life, Shadow of a Doubt and Cloak and Dagger, as part of a 20th anniversary tribute to the Film Foundation.
Paramount Gives Critics a Stick in the Eye
Confirmation today that Paramount, despite junketing the former movie this past weekend, will be screening neither Jackass 3-D nor Paranormal Activity 2 for critics. Weak sauce, especially when you could pick up a few “friendlies” on the Jackass flick. If I’d known this, I would have arranged to just crash one of the junket screenings.
Down Terrace
“Mike Leigh meets The Sopranos” is the not entirely inaccurate production-notes shorthand for this British kitchen-sink drama, which stars real-life father and son Bob and Robin Hill as Bill and Karl, middle-management-type sectional chieftains of a crime family struggling to keep their business together as, over the course of a hectic week, infighting and hazy rumors of a police informant in their midst threaten to unravel it completely.
Simpleton Karl (above right, a sort of scruffy, neutered, blue-collar
cousin of John Oliver, physically at least) suffers
his father’s serial disrespect and baiting, and doesn’t do much about it. But when he brings home pregnant
girlfriend Valda (Kerry Peacock), it really doesn’t go over well with either of
his already frazzled parents, including mom Maggie (Julia Deakin). As they press him to cut her lose, Karl’s spine stiffens, coinciding with a series of decisions by Bill to “drain the swamp,” as it were, and methodically eliminate long-time henchmen and allies who might be the potential mole.
Co-written and directed by Ben Wheatley, Down Terrace starts off slow,
impaired by impenetrably thick accents and a misguided, unnecessarily
claustrophobic visual scheme. Opening things up a bit — with wider shots to better give a sense of the movie’s drab domestic settings, which serve as ironic counterpoint to its criminal mischief — would have done small wonders for the movie. Still, for fans of certain British TV crime serials, and particularly those schooled in the cinema of Shane Meadows, Down Terrace eventually takes hold as a passable
slice of darkly humorous, stakes-free entertainment — its narrative
pivots, in which ratcheted-up paranoia gets seriocomically spun off in
homicidal directions, employed in purely functional fashion, against a
backdrop of colorful familial bickering. If anything about this domestic
brood rings true, though, seek counseling immediately. For more information on the film, click here. (Magnet, unrated, 89 minutes)
Carlos Smokes, While Shooting
I’ll be getting more into Olivier Assayas’ Carlos, the three-part, five-hour-plus drama about pro-Palestinian activist turned opportunistic mercenary/terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (played by Edgar Ramirez) that’s unfurling on a variety of platforms in different iterations this October, in the coming days. But I submitted to the full Carlos experience this past Friday — with only two brief intermissions — and one thing that immediately struck me was that there are perhaps more cigarettes smoked in the full-length version of this movie than in the combined product of Hollywood for the past five or six years. Like, seriously. Straight up.
Assayas doesn’t so much fetishize the act itself (see David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, for instance), but neither is this just a case of one or two characters chain-smoking. All the characters seemingly smoke. There’s variety, too — angry smoking, nervous smoking, post-coital smoking, bored smoking, flirtatious smoking. And they don’t just hold cigarettes incidentally and passively, these folks, like someone absentmindedly rubbing their temple or adjusting their glasses. They draaaag, they put in the effort, really. There seem to be more cigarettes smoked in Carlos than Mitch McDeere drops crumpled $20 bills in The Firm. Which, for anyone who remembers John Grisham’s original text, is probably in the neighborhood of about 10,000.
Kings of Pastry
Whether it’s sports, dancing or eating, if there’s something that Americans like more than recreational activities, hobbies and interests, it’s watching other people compete in those arenas. When it comes specifically to baking and cooking there are, by my last count, 4,752 shows on the Food Network and other cable channels about culinary competitions and/or niche specialties, so it comes as no great surprise that a high-stakes dessert competition would get the full-fledged documentary treatment in the form of Kings of Pastry, opening this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall, Town Center 5 and Playhouse 7.
Co-directed by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, the film focuses on the prestigious Meilleurs Ouvriers de France competition (Best Craftsmen
in France), held, like the Olympics, only once every four years. The sixteen finalists, French-born pastry chefs all, gather in Lyon for three intense days of mixing, piping and sculpting everything from delicate chocolate confections to six-foot sugar sculptures in hopes of being declared one of the best by President Nicolas Sarkozy, and winning a coveted blue, white and red-striped collar — the culinary elite equivalent of a green Master’s jacket in golf, or an Academy Award in cinema.
The film predominantly charts Jacquy Pfeiffer (above), co-founder of
Chicago’s French Pastry School, as he journeys back to his childhood
home of Alsace more than a month before the event to practice for the contest. Two other finalists are
profiled in the film — Regis Lazard, competing for the second time after a crucial drop of his sugar sculpture the first time, and Philippe Rigollot, a chef from
Maison Pic, France’s only three-star restaurant owned by a woman.
During the grueling final competition, chefs work under constant
scrutiny by a squad of master judges, and subject themselves to the critical palates of some of the
world’s most renowned chefs, who evaluate their elaborate pastries. Finally, in a twist that will likely ring familiar to anyone who’s paused on the Food Network for more than five minutes, these pastry marathoners must complete their race against the clock by hand-carrying all their
creations, including their fragile sugar sculptures, through a series of
rooms to a final buffet area without shattering them.
Filmmakers Pennebaker (Monterey Pop, Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back) and Hegedus (Startup.com) are experienced “name” documentarians and established collaborators (The War Room, Down the Mountain), but they seem to coast a bit here on the exclusivity of their secured access to the never-before-filmed event, largely eschewing probing questioning of its subjects and their unique world in the name of an uninspired, point-and-shoot style that rivals Sarah Palin for its lack of inquisitiveness. The selection process for the finalists? Not addressed. Other competitors outside of the aforementioned trio? Not addressed. The number of designated winners? Not addressed. The specifics of the chefs’ job duties and backgrounds, and how that might either advantage or disadvantage them in certain areas of the competition? Not addressed.
So it’s a sign of the artistry on display that Kings of
Pastry, after a slow start, eventually matures (ripens? comes to a boil?) into something not only engaging, but actually also kind of poignant. The film showcases the extraordinary level of skill and nerve required to tackle the competition, certainly (as well as practice: Pfeiffer sweats out time trials with his coach, while Lazard’s wife notes that his basement kitchen is his true home), but it also
highlights how luck plays a part in things too. (Taste and artistic merit scores are
still subjective, after all.) That makes the culmination of the competition, with its failures and inspirational elevations, something to which everyone can relate. The biggest tangential takeaway, however, is how and why European chefs will always remain, collectively, a cut above their American counterparts — the exactitude required is immense, and Stateside notions of masculinity don’t allow for this much attention to be paid to food of any sort, without much derision. For more information on the movie, click here. (First Run, unrated, 84 minutes)
David O. Russell Inks for Next Project, Inducing Sighs
Really? This is what we’ve come to? Using the advance awards buzz for The Fighter (Paramount, December 10) as a pole vault, David O. Russell has signed on for his next writing and directing project, in the form of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, “based on the bestselling PlayStation 3 videogame.” That’s the depressing news from The Wrap. Look, I understand everyone’s gotta eat, but I hate to see interesting, idiosyncratic directors dive into virtually indistinguishable videogame franchises. So I ask: is there anyone that thinks they can, with a straight face, make a case regarding Russell’s deep and abiding passion for the source material? Because if so, folks at Columbia Pictures will eventually be needing you to work up some press notes for the movie.
Stone
The Hollywood studio system, almost by its very nature, tends to stifle
and suppress the urge for big screen rumination. In action and horror
films, of course, there’s hardly any precious time for reflection, but
even outside of the lucrative genre realm rarely is there a mainstream
American movie where emotional fumbling or a lack of certitude seems to
define all of the main characters. Audiences desire more rigidly defined
journeys, and don’t want to see the inherent unsettledness of life,
it’s thought.
Directed by John Curran, from a script by Angus
MacLachlan, Stone quietly challenges some of those assumptions. It’s not
wildly esoteric or steeped in unrecognizable metaphor, but Stone is a
film largely (though not entirely) devoid of typical dramatic markers
and signposts. Starring Robert De Niro and Edward Norton, it’s a meditative work about people awash in latent unhappiness, coming up from the mud, and slowly pawing their way to a place where they might (but just as likely might not) be able to get out of it.
Moral crisis, and the flickering possibility of awakening, is at the center of Stone. The film unfolds on the economically depressed outskirts of Detroit, where parole officer Jack Mabry (De Niro), a hard-drinking, introverted Episcopalean, is counting down the days to retirement, which will put him at home more and exacerbate tensions with his long-suffering wife Madylyn (Frances Conroy). Reviewing the case of Gerald “Stone” Creeson (Norton), a cornrowed ex-addict who’s already put in eight years out of a 10- to 15-year sentence for setting a fire to cover up the murder of his grandparents, Jack finds himself on the receiving end of, alternately, flattery and spiteful rage and negativity. Stone needs to convince Jack that he’s remorseful and reformed, but seems caught somewhere in between a sincere, be-what-may roll of the dice and darker impulses.
Part of that negative energy involves Stone’s seemingly devoted wife, Lucetta (Milla Jovovich). In the beginning, they seem to have about as healthy a relationship as one can imagine for a couple physically separated for so long, but as the date for Stone’s hearing draws closer, fissures and tears develop. Outwardly, Madylyn and Lucetta seem to have little in common, the former having channeled her marital frustrations into religion, and the latter characterized by a sunny proactivity and sexual frankness. Both, however, are women that have suffered the sins of the men in their lives, albeit in radically different fashions. It’s here, as Lucetta flirts with and then makes a special proposition to Jack, that the film flirts heaviest with convention — another story of a married man succumbing to sexual temptation. But, even as boundaries are irrevocably crossed, Stone does not content itself with charting expected waters.
Curran has put swallowed domestic misery under the microscope before — both in We Don’t Live Here Anymore and The Painted Veil, the latter on which he teamed with Norton — and here he’s again fascinated with the varying impulses of man, especially when they awaken to the fact that there’s no longer any shared beliefs or purpose tethering them to their loved ones. What is love without commonality, in other words? This deeper psychological investment in action is paramount to Stone‘s adult appeal.
The performances here are all something special, too. For all his scholarly adroitness with book-read characters, Norton
can also breathe wonderful three-dimensionality and humanity into greaseballs and fringe-dwelling types, which he does here. Jovovich,
meanwhile, is great at conveying Lucetta’s swallowed, almost snake-y female
power. It’s different than mere sexual aggressiveness, but a cousin of the
same, and powered by an inner heat to which men respond but also frequently
kind of fear. De Niro, seemingly invigorated by material that asks more of him, also brings his A-game.
An honest appraisal of Stone cedes points for novelty of effort over execution that is solid if not always constructed for cathartic payoff. It’s a shame that the material built around Stone and the intrigue of an in-prison epiphany — is it real, feigned, or somewhere in between? — doesn’t connect more strongly. While bearing witness to a brutal shanking seems the emotional tipping point for Stone, Curran depicts the manifestations of this stirring with a gauzy indistinctness that — if true to the blissed-out, relaxed nature that sometimes flows from religious awakening — is at times a bit maddening. Admittedly, this is tough terrain, since Jack is the only person off whom Stone can bounce these changes, and their interactions are governed by a certain structure, but they feed into a feeling that quietly lingers — that at times the character of Stone has an oppositional-literary feel rather than that of a full-bodied man.
Still, these criticisms take only a bit of shine off of what is otherwise a thoughtful and bracing story of ethical compromise and moral ambiguity. It’s been a long time since the traces of French filmmaker Robert Bresson have been detected in a mainstream Hollywood work, but the ascetic, tightly focused nature of its scripting and telling mark Stone as unmistakably his progeny. It’s a slow and fairly willful psychological seduction, but Curran’s film is still a fascinating work, often times as much for what lies around the edges and in the interstices as for what actually unfolds on screen. (Overture, R, 105 minutes)
Porno
A Latin American erotic import from the early 1980s, Porno bills itself as “three incredible tales of five insatiable women,” and an “uncut, unbridled” film that it “beyond your wildest dreams.” In reality, it’s a meandering softcore triptych, in which much stuffy, didactic dialogue is laboriously worked through, with a few weird, gonzo flourishes tossed in for effect.
Co-directed by David Cardoso (who also costars), John Doo and Luiz Castellini, the film weaves together three thematically linked (one supposes) but otherwise discrete tales. The first is your fairly standard lesbian seduction/rebuffing, in which a pair of co-eds thumb through some erotic literature and magazines, and work their way, after a discussion of intact hymens, to the shower. The second involves a committed couple, shower voyeurism, and a nun’s habit. The final segment, easily the strangest, is a bizarre portrait of distorted desire that could easily stand to be (no pun intended) fleshed out to stand-alone feature-length, if only it were placed in better hands. In this portion, a man and woman — each with their own problems with intimacy — submit to some gameplay, which eventually includes a grasshopper. Yes, like… a living grasshopper. The guy places it on the woman’s stomach and close to her nether regions, which drives her wild. I like to imagine that this enormously befuddled some Brazilian teenagers who surreptitiously caught the film back in 1981.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Porno comes to DVD presented in its original full frame aspect ratio of 1.33:1, with a Portuguese language Dolby digital mono audio track and newly translated optional/removable English subtitles. The transfer here is solid, free from any edge enhancement or artifacting. The film is partitioned into 13 chapters, but otherwise has no special features. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) D (Disc)
The “Real Journalism” Train Has Left Station
I’ve had this conversation a couple different times now with a couple different sets of old-guard journalists, and it rarely gets any less exhausting or more productive. Here’s the thing: It doesn’t matter what Philip Roth thinks the iPad says about the future of reading, or whether you can comprehend why your neighbor would cancel their newspaper subscription, or whether one individually believes the more conversational nature of blogging and/or online film criticism and (gasp) actual interaction with readers is not “real” or “legitimate” journalism, and its practitioners are ergo wholesale frauds and idiots. The dominant mechanism for 21st century news and entertainment conveyance has been decided, and it is not print. It will continue to exist, but that train has left the station. So, professionally speaking, you’ve either got a ticket and are on board or you will not make it to the next town.
Scrubs: The Complete Ninth Season
Created by Bill Lawrence, Scrubs premiered in October 2001, and quickly distinguished itself as an airy, slapstick-laden, effervescent delight, the perfect whipsmart antidote to both the self-seriousness of other hospital-set small screen shows and America’s post-9/11 anxiety and ennui in general. While it never quite had the full zeitgeist snap of sexier NBC sitcom hits like Friends and Seinfeld, the series was nonetheless a reliable and consistently funny performer, launching Zach Braff to stardom as well as affirming the comedic gifts of any number of bit players, from John C. McGinley to Neil Flynn, as, respectively, the show’s gruff mentor and demented janitor, both of whom long nursed antagonistic relationships with Braff’s daydream-happy John “J.D.” Dorian.
After failing to get re-upped by NBC following its eighth season, ABC picked up the series for an aborted run, but their hearts never really seemed in this rebooted “Scrubs 2.0.” And it’s somewhat understandable, actually, as the reformed Scrubs never could seemingly decide quite what it wanted to be. While McGinley and Donald Faison each reprise their roles, most of the series’ original players have moved on (Braff returns in a half dozen of this set’s 13 episodes, embarking upon a characteristically misguided career as a short-term teacher at the med school), making for an awkward and sometimes jarring mash-up of old and new.
The joke writing is still above-average (analog clocks are derided as “old people clocks,” and Faison lectures his young charges that being a surgeon “isn’t about the glamor, the money, or even making a great mix CD for the operating room”), thanks to Lawrence’s guiding hand, and the retention of a handful of staff writers. But something always feels off, starting with the casting. The rebooted Scrubs is built around a new group of interns. Lucy (Kerry Bishé) is the wide-eyed innocent — a narrator and stand-in for the audience, very much in the mold of J.D. Tomboyish Denise (Eliza Coupe) and Drew (Michael Mosley), a previous med school washout, are the romantically intertwined couple, and Cole (Dave Franco) is the cocky, focus-stricken jerk. Maya (Nicky Whelan) and Trang (Matthew Moy) also pop up in ill-defined roles in slightly more than half the episodes. None of the performers really pop and draw you in, either in sympathetic fashion or courtesy of bravura and/or standoffish “bit” energy, as McGinley, Ken Jenkins and Robert Maschio previously did in the show’s earlier incarnations. Though his character is purposefully meant to grate, Franco in particular — a shaggy, low-rent/goofus version of his older brother James — becomes wearying quite quickly, always demonstratively playing the most obvious emotion in a scene.
Housed in a regular, clear plastic Amaray case with a snap-in tray, in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Scrubs: The Complete Ninth Season comes to DVD presented on two discs, with a Dolby digital audio track. In addition to a two-minute “Live From the Golf Cart” stunt bit involving some minor characters, there’s also a peppy two-minute blooper reel in which plenty of pastry is tossed about, and Braff gets frisky with a costumed raccoon tail. Creator Lawrence then pops up in an adjunct video screen for optional commentary during the disc’s presentation of deleted scenes, complaining good-naturedly about how a half-hour sitcom is really only 20 minutes and 41 seconds. There is also a six-minute featurette about some of the old cast members passing the torch to the new cast (Braff jokes about it being the Muppet Babies version of Scrubs), with plenty of back-slapping interview tidbits interspersed throughout. It’s a fine one-time watch, but there’s nothing of real substance here — much like the series’ wrap-up, sadly, which ends with a whimper in the form of “Our Thanks,” an episode in which the med students are tasked with coming up with kind words to say to the families of those who served as cadavers. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Show) C+ (Disc)
The Rig
Budget horror thriller The Rig has a good setting, but little in the way of top-shelf or even moderately sustained engaging execution, alas. When a tropical storm forces an offshore drilling company to evacuate non-essential personnel from their Gulf Coast oil rig, the small but experienced crew left behind hunkers down to ride out the fury of Mother Nature. Their routine is interrupted when a crew member goes missing, and
an extensive search proves futile. Slowly, rig boss Jim (The Devil’s Rejects‘ William Forsythe) and his crew discover that a deadly
creature is stalking the crew, eliminating them one by one. Surrounded
by nothing but raging ocean with no hope of escape, the roughnecks must
survive the stormy night with an unrelenting force of death hunting them
down.
Directed by Peter Atenscio, and boasting special effects from the team behind Aliens vs. Predators: Requiem, The Rig deserves credit for not tipping over into crazy, over-the-top CGI, unlike a lot of its direct-to-video brethren. Yet neither does its general emphasis on practical scares reveal a fantastically imaginative mode of suspense storytelling. There’s a quite nice sense of space and atmosphere, but David Twohy’s Below better conveyed tension through watery isolation. Many of the supporting characters come across as two-dimensional, and time spent detailing their stalking and bickering means that the powers of dramatic engagement that Forsythe’s mustache boast are not given their full due. For those still interested, the film also stars Stacey Hinnen, Serah D’Laine, Art LaFleur, Marcus Paulk and Dan
Benson.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, The Rig is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English and Spanish SDH subtitles. Bonus features consist of a feature-length audio commentary track with director Atenscio and producer James D. Benson, a 10-minute behind-the-scenes featurette that gives details on the movie’s location shoot, and trailers for the film and a couple other Anchor Bay releases. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C (Disc)
Bill Burr: Let It Go
Having first gained notoriety for his recurring role on the second
season of Chappelle’s Show, Bill Burr was actually the first comedian
to perform on Conan O’Brien’s short-lived version of The Tonight Show, and is still a regular performer on The
Late Show with David Letterman. Representing the culmination of material he developed through 2008 and ’09, his new concert special Let It Go finds Burr, trading in what he deems his own brand of “uninformed observational logic,” mixing hilarity with honesty, in often self-eviscerating fashion.
Directed by Shannon Hartman, and captured from a set at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, the hour-long Let It Go finds Burr in top form, riffing in irascible fashion on his many disgusts. Watching a woman eating multiple Egg McMuffins and then wipe her face with the bag leads Burr to conclude that he’s pro-swine flu (“We need more plagues”). Burr, who is also on tour
this fall with his new show, You
People Are All the Same, then talks about his girlfriend’s love of all holidays, and pondering suicide as a means to escape the off-the-cuff commitment of making a pie for Thanksgiving. His funniest material, though, shrewdly attacks the differences in the sexes. Burr talks about liking to watch his girlfriend watch Oprah Winfrey, and he amusingly lays into the false difficulties of motherhood (“Women are constantly patting themselves on the back for how difficult their lives are, and no one corrects them — because they want to fuck them!”). Those sniffing a strictly misogynistic sensibility, however, get an amusing surprise when Burr turns his guns on men: strokes at 55 years of age, he asserts, come from five decades of stupidly suppressing the urge to hug puppies, admit kids are cute and the like.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Bill Burr: Let It Go comes to DVD presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track. Bonus features on the disc consist of outtakes and a couple excised bits, as well as material from and about Burr’s popular Monday morning podcast. Bill Burr: Let It Go is also available via digital download, incidentally, but to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Concert) C+ (Disc)