In The Answer Man, Arlen Faber (Jeff Daniels) is the hermetic author of Me and God, an internationally bestselling book that in the late 1980s redefined spirituality for an entire generation. On the eve of the 20th anniversary of his still wildly popular tome, a Q&A dialogue between the Holy Creator and a man wracked with pain, Arlen faces an editor (Nora Dunn) who’s looking for some public accessibility after indulging his seclusion for two decades.
In this crucible, Arlen’s back seizes up, and his sheltered life suddenly intersects with two people who slowly begin to erode his caustic worldview. First there’s Kris (Lou Taylor Pucci), a bookstore owner fresh out of rehab, and searching for both stability and meaning in life. Then there’s Elizabeth (Lauren Graham), a massage therapist and single mom who puts up a facade of progressive properness for her 7-year-old son — feeding him protein shakes and classical music as she herself sneaks cigarettes and rock ‘n’ roll — even as his behavior at school indicates he’s starting to feel the effects of his absentee father.
Owing to Daniels’ starring role as a cranky, screwed-up intellectual, first-time writer-director John Hindman’s film will doubtlessly spawn comparisons to Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, and there are some similarities between the two erudite works. Honestly, though, the point of comparison that first leapt to my mind was As Good as It Gets, another movie in which ingrained personality issues mark and color a fitful romance between an older man and a younger single mother. There’s also a pinch of Finding Forrester, in the reluctant bloom of a gruff flower kept too long indoors.
In the most immediate sense, though, there’s plenty of fun, philosophically-tinged pleasures all around the edges of this barbed, humanistic, romantic comedy, both in the dialogue and the tenor of its performances. There’s some smart, quietly affecting work from both Graham and Daniels, and Pucci gets to showcase a bit more of an adult sensibility than he has in movies like Thumbsucker and The Go-Getter. But The Answer Man will also connect with those who have a soft spot for “show-up-wounded”-type love stories, adult and otherwise. We are all hurt or searching, the film essentially posits, but it’s how we focus ourselves and help others that most defines us.
If there’s a substantive knock, it’s that the Hindman’s end game feels, in varying amounts, pat, rushed, and false. It’s not entirely cheaply cathartic, but portions of the movie’s finale don’t jibe with what we’ve been told about the deeply rooted spiritual impact of Arlen’s book, and overall it doesn’t quite work. Even The Answer Man doesn’t have all the answers, it seems. But that’s OK. Life is an imperfect journey. (Magnolia, R, 95 minutes)
The 1970 German sex comedy The Hostess Also Likes to Blow the Horn may have one of the greatest, all-time cheekiest titles of its under-respected sub-genre. A pleasure, then, that the film — a good-natured mix of ribald set-up, mock-offended patter and solid setting and production design — delivers on its promise, delivering an adult-themed tale that doesn’t aim to merely achieve blush at any cost.
Directed by Franz Antel, aka Francois Legrand, The Hostess… is set in Europe in 1814, against a backdrop in which soldiers scour the countryside for provisions both material and carnal. The story centers around bombshell redhead Justine Del Ber (Teri Tordai), a traveling French actress who thinks on her feet and escapes a sticky situation along with Ferdinand (Harald Leipnitz), a fellow actor. Together, they flee into the countryside, and seek refuge in the small burgh of Tursa. Overseen by the moralistic Baron Bierrechalet (Jacques Herlin) and his Committee of Decency, Tursa has taxes for everything — fornication, dancing, singing, drinking, bathing and even “previously lost virginity.” Plenty of people don’t like it, but seem powerless to overthrow the current system of governance.
Justine, though, has other plans. She and Ferdinand take possession of a local inn, change its name to The Innocent Lamb, and set it up as a mock-convent — a gathering place for everyone sick of the government’s incursion into their private lives. Ferdinand saves young Marika
(Andrea Rau) from the roving hands of the Baron’s lackey, and give her a position as chambermaid, and before long The Innocent Lamb is the hottest spot in town. While the Baron tries to find a noblewoman to marry, and consolidate his power, Justine and Ferdinand try to assist in the return of Count Valeriano Trenk (Glenn Saxson), the rightful heir to the area, who currently lives in Vienna. Later, Justine works up a scheme to trap the mayor in his own web of taxable behavior.
Co-written by Carlo Fuscagni and Kurt Nachmann, The Hostess… indulges in the sort of wild theatricality one might imagine, and is also powered by tongue-lolling, wolfish dialogue (sample: “I’ll let your britches down, but not you!”) that one can easily imagine in little thought bubbles alongside R. Crumb cartoons. Yet it also drops reference to the historical stageplay The Innkeeper, and generally does a good job blending behavioral comedy with a smidgen of historical satire. In fact, there aren’t many sex scenes, per se; most of the nudity is just a result of private behavior momentarily publicly exposed, and the bulk of it comes late in the movie, when Justine slips the Baron an elixir and rigs an “emperor’s new clothes”-type scenario. The cast is uniformly winning, and the production value fairly high, which helps mitigate some questionable visual framing. Rosalba Neri, Poldo Bendandi, Paul Lowinger and Paola Arduini also star.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Hostess Also Likes to Blow the Horn comes presented in anamorphic widescreen, with optional English subtitles and a motion-animated menu screen. Its only legitimate supplemental feature, however, is a 31-photo, self-playing slide show of production stills; some sort of historical contextualization, in the form of cast member/crew interviews or talking head analysis, is sadly lacking. Nevertheless, to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase via Half, click here. B (Movie) D+ (Disc)
The trailer for Surveillance, Jennifer Lynch’s first film since Boxing Helena, is online, and does a pretty job of selling the movie’s Rashomon-like, B-movie egg scramble of n’er-do-wells, corrupted authority figures and vengeful sociopaths. Maybe too good a job, almost. I mean, only in the sense that the trailer comes across as streamlined, hook-y and conventional, while the final product is — in keeping with the writer-director’s surname — a bit more wildly unhinged. Full review to follow later in the week, along with some interviews probably early next week, coinciding with its limited theatrical release. Surveillance is currently available via VOD, by the way.
Writer-director Matt Bissonnette’s Passenger Side had its world premiere at the L.A. Film Festival Friday evening, with a handful of boutique distributor reps in attendance amidst the three-quarters-full crowd at the Mann Regent in Westwood.
A low-fi, California-set road flick of indolent, occasional charm, Passenger Side centers on Los Angeleno Michael Brown (Adam Scott, above right), an exasperated copywriter/unsuccessful novelist whose birthday begins with a telephone call from his estranged, drug addicted older brother Tobey (Joel Bissonnette, above left, the director’s brother). Tobey is without car, and needs Michael’s help ferrying him around on a series of mysterious but apparently vital errands. To this end, Michael puts his nebulous birthday plans on hold to embark on a sketchy Southland odyssey that crosses paths with a randy transsexual, a drunken party girl, a desert-dwelling pie server, an immigrant with lopped-off fingers and all other manner of oddballs.
It may sound positively Lynchian, that mix, but Bissonnette (Looking for Leonard, Who Loves the Sun) is much more interested in the rhythms of honest, forward-leaning conversation, and constructs his movie as a snapshot of swallowed fraternal standoffishness, where obvious mutual regard has been worn down by the cutting winds of life, and each brother’s disapproval over some of the other’s choices. In press notes the filmmaker describes Passenger Side as being about “the complex bonds created when opposites are bound together by life, family and blood… and also about different ways that a life can be lived: from the supposed safety of the sidelines, or deep in the middle of the mess.” With that in mind, Passenger Side is in some ways a (much) more plugged-in companion piece to Gus Van Sant’s willfully meandering Gerry; here, though, it isn’t modernity or so much man’s relationship to nature itself under the microscope, but the accumulated baggage that comes with dreams gone off-track, and how that can warp decision-making and breed stasis.
The problem is that Michael remains too much of a cipher; with no backstory as arguably turbulent and self-destructive as Tobey’s addiction, we’re left to get bits and pieces filled in along the way. While Scott’s engaging performance mitigates this somewhat, there is the lingering feeling that he’s just somewhat of a grumpy jerk. A bit more (non-familial?) shading of his personality would have helped nail down the character more concretely.
There’s also a girl at the center of Passenger Side, but the manner in which she looms over the narrative — played for a big twist at the end — feels lacking, or perhaps just overly coy. Damningly, there’s also no sort of exacting chronological/topographical honesty or logic, which undercuts at least a bit the way the movie plays to a film-savvy crowd, either comprised of Los Angelenos or New Yorkers who know the City of Angels and surrounding areas at least a bit. Events unfold in Los Angeles, and see Michael and Tobey then drive to Glendale, to Joshua Tree, back to Los Angeles, to Long Beach, back to the San Fernando Valley, and then to Hollywood. Given the timeframe, this is something of a stretch. Also, at one point theoretically leaving the Valley, we see the pair instead driving west past Universal City, presumably because it provides a more scenic backdrop.
The film’s chief selling point is the rapport between Scott and Bissonnette, which is delightful — powered by the
sort of masculine-sardonic patter that disaffected brothers, either
real or in feeling/name, use to keep each other at arms’ length. Leaning on ex-Superchunk frontman and Merge Records co-founder Mac McCaughan as a musical consultant, Bissonnette also constructs a fantastically evocative soundtrack for the tape deck of Michael’s beat-up, mid-1970s BMW. It’s those details that give Passenger Sidethe weight of knock-about authenticity, even if one wishes its conversational patter were a bit more honed toward the end target at which it’s aiming.
For more information on the film, which screens again on Thursday, June 25 at 4:30 p.m. as part of the Los Angeles Film Festival in Westwood, click here.
I caught the music documentary It Might Get Loud earlier in the week, and yesterday interviewed director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth), as well as Jimmy Page and Jack White — who, along with U2’s The Edge, form the triumvirate of axe-men which the film takes as its subjects — for a feature piece a bit further down the line. Part compare-and-contrast piecemeal biography, part godhead gathering, the movie is in sum never less than in-the-moment engaging, even if there’s a lingering feeling that the moderator-less roundtable gathering that forms its spine could perhaps have used a bit more prodding or structure, to get at the marrow of exactly why and how even trite musical expressions sometimes achieve significant emotional lift-off. Nevertheless, music fans will jam on this title big-time, as the above trailer amply demonstrates. For those in the SoCal area, the film screens in the afternoon on Monday, June 22, at the Los Angeles Film Festival in Westwood.
The big, blustery physical comedy of Jack Black makes for a mostly amusing fit with Michael Cera’s quiet comedy of self-negation in Year One, a ramshackle banished-buddy picture which connects more on the strength of its scene-to-scene joke writing than a startlingly grand execution of its premise. Pushing far away from one’s brain any recollections of of historical or religious antiquity is of paramount importance given the historic license the story takes. Once that is accomplished, though, there’s airy delight in the mixing of slightly contemporized but socially inept consciousnesses with a primitive setting.
When oafish hunter Zed (Black) eats from the forbidden tree of knowledge and later accidentally sets fire to his village, he’s banished. Reluctantly accompanying Zed out into the wilderness is his reserved gatherer pal Oh (Cera, sporting a generally ridiculous wig that undergoes an unexplained metamorphosis three-quarters of the way through the movie); left behind are their respective crushes, Maya (June Diane Raphael) and Eema (Juno Temple). Discovering that the story of the world’s edge is false, the wandering pair comes across hothead Cain (David Cross), and bear witness to his murder of his brother, Abel.
Again fleeing, Zed and Oh come across Abraham (Hank Azaria) , who warns them of the sins of the nearby city of Sodom. This sounds like a great place to Zed, however, and so off they go, to partake of its pleasures. Once there, they again cross paths with Maya and Eema, who have been sold into slavery, as well as Cain. While Zed tries to devise a plot to free the ladies, Oh fends off the advances of the king’s creepy, flamboyant high priest (Oliver Platt).
Though somewhat similar in some of its targets to Monty Python’s Life of Brian or Mel Brooks’ sprawling History of the World: Part One, Year One is more assertively a hodgepodge of different eras, in this case commingling polytheism alongside Judeo-Christian Biblical stories separated by hundreds of years. Trying to hold onto and make any sense of the manner in which intersects chronologically factual human history or cognitive development is akin to swimming upstream into a headstrong current. It doesn’t help, either, that the movie can’t seem to decide whether Zed and Oh are accidental masters of their fate (upon arriving in Sodom, they briefly become royal guards), or habitual victims of circumstances and their surroundings. The sooner one relinquishes the notion that this is more than anything than just an unfettered spit-balling of widely generalized life in a dusty, bygone era, the more simply they’re able to appreciate the movie’s otherwise generally solid joke-writing and characterizations.
The lead performances certainly don’t differ wildly from the personas that the two actors have cultivated; Black plays a libidinal, instinctive chatterbox, while Cera trades in wallflower asides and nervous, awkward silences. In their juxtaposition and interplay, however, there’s something approaching a sincere freshness. This owes to age and demeanor, yes, but also size — something that director Harold Ramis isn’t afraid to exploit through both written material and physical gags large and small. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Columbia, PG-13, 96 minutes)
For those interested, Food, Inc. director Robert Kenner will be part of a live Twitter chat this Friday, June 19. It’s simple to participate; at 10 a.m. Pacific time, log in to Twitter, put #foodinc in the search bar, and hit enter. You’re now following the conversation. If you have questions, be sure to include the #foodinc tag.
A pure Oscar-bait type of movie, through and through — a period-piece drama starring awards-vetted actors, based on a respected novel, under the direction of an established filmmaker — Revolutionary Road centers on Frank and April Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, reuniting for the first time since Titanic), a young married Connecticut couple who, in the 1950s, have two kids and come to feel, each in their own way, irredeemably weighed down and oppressed by the monotony of suburban life they’ve default-embraced.
Neither Frank’s cushy, well-paying advertising job, nor a friendly relationship with neighbors Milly and Shep Campbell (Kathryn Hahn and David Harbour) can dull the tiny razors of ennui. In fact, over time, all that pre-formatted comfort and familiarity seems to be a big part of what wears Frank and April thin, and leads to the sort of emotional separation that eventually breeds infidelity. That the rest of the movie is generally paced like an ambling, summer night’s post-dinner stroll helps Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee Michael Shannon blow in and steal a number of scenes, based on sheer energy. He plays John, the blunt-spoken, not-quite-right son of Helen Givings (Kathy Bates), the Wheelers’ real estate agent, and when eschews social niceties and upsets the prim-and-proper conventions of the time and place during a pair of afternoon tea sessions, it’s like a welcome electrical storm in an otherwise uninterrupted stream of muggy, overcast but rainless evenings.
Look, without launching into a more intellectually robust dismissal, or re-posting my original theatrical review, which came under contract for an outlet with whom I do not have reprint rights, Revolutionary Road is an ornate, full-bodied drama in which all the proper levers of the craft of filmmaking are pulled, with earnestness and passion. Its artistic execution is pretty much unassailable. It looks fantastic, courtesy of cinematographer Roger Deakins, who expertly uses light to capture both the sunny charms and eventual sense of preordained suffocation of upper-middle class white America, circa 1955.
“And yet” — well, those are the two words I found hanging around in my head for almost the entire running time of the film, and long afterward. I never felt fully persuaded or caught up in the dramatic stakes of the movie, and DiCaprio, a fine actor, can’t quite ever wrap his mouth around curse words in convincing fashion. When he swears — especially in frothy rage, as he’s required to here — he sounds like a kid who’s wandered into a group of his older brother’s friends, and is trying to impress some girl via blustery badassedness. Mostly, though, Revolutionary Road is damningly hamstrung by a presented fork in the road — Frank and April entertaining the notion of ditching suburbia and heading off to France — that we as the audience know is never going to happen. It would be one thing if the story hit this beat and moved on, but the movie chews up an awful lot of ground peddling this non-starter of a twist. Consequently, I just felt far out in front of it, wondering — if one will permit the indulgence of a Simpsons reference — when the film and its makers were going to quit jerking me around and get to the fireworks factory.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Revolutionary Road comes presented via a gorgeous 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, with English, French and Spanish Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio tracks, plus optional subtitles in each of the aforementioned languages. A full-length audio commentary track with Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe kicks off the slate of supplemental features, and the pair have a nice rapport, sharing anecdotes and doling out major props to Deakins and the “happy accident” of capturing the loneliness beyond the characters, as rendered in flickering lights and a lakeside reflection on glass during a bout of automotive lovemaking.
Running just under a half-hour is a making-of featurette packed with insights from cast and crew, and some cool behind-the-scenes footage (over 200 extras being outfitted and handed reprints of commuter newspapers, and Deakins rigging up white sheets off of which to bounce light). Production designer Kristi Zea talks about the important selection of the movie’s house, albeit as if the notion of smaller domestic square footage in 1955 is a great shock to her. In mixed interview footage from the set and the movie’s promotional junket, Mendes, sometimes sporting a beard, sometimes clean shaven, describes the movie as a “tragic love story, set in the 1950s, but dealing with very modern concerns.” Winslet, meanwhile, says it’s “about marriage, and how honesty must be present in underpinnings.”
Of perhaps the most interest is the movie’s meandering path to the big screen, though. Producer John Hart played shepherd to the project, and Winslet initially read it over four years ago, when pregnant with her son. She began planting seeds with DiCaprio — plying him slowly, she says — and then pressured Mendes into taking it on. For his part, Mendes, who pulled in producers Bobby Cohen and Scott Rudin, and says he always loved the script, copped to needing to take some time to be extra sure of tackling the movie, because of the scrutiny involved in collaborating with his wife.
There are also five deleted scenes, including an argument in front of the kids while Frank is cutting the grass and, most notably, a scene in which a slightly buzzed Frank talks about a birthday he had during the war, and how he was sung to by an entire division. The quiet punch of the scene, underscoring the nodding suburban repetitiveness of Frank and April’s lives, comes when it turns out he told the same story previously, a year earlier. The film’s theatrical trailer is also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)
While its behind-the-scenes machinations are mined for laughs in another superlative film this summer, In the Loop, war is also very much at the heart of The Hurt Locker, a punishing, devastatingly well-made Iraq-set thriller with an implosive but no less powerful emotional impact. Eschewing the whirling, bird’s-eye helicopter shots of so many armed conflict flicks (this is most assuredly nota Tony Scott film), director Kathryn Bigelow tightens her focus in laser-like fashion, examining the effects of combat and danger on the human psyche.
Unfolding in Iraq in the summer of 2004, the movie opens on Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), part of a small, elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal squad specifically trained to handle the homemade bombs killing thousands of Iraqis and accounting for more than half of all American deaths in the country. A high-pressure assignment, the job leaves no room for mistakes, as they learn when they lose their team leader on a mission. When cocksure Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) takes over the unit, Sanborn and Eldridge are unnerved by what seems like his reckless disregard for both military protocol and basic safety measures. As chaos swirls around them, Sanborn and Eldridge try to come to terms with James’ behavior, even as it seems to endanger them during the dog days of their respective tours.
Based on the first-hand observations of journalist and screenwriter Mark Boal, who was embedded with a special Army bomb unit in Iraq, The Hurt Locker is scripted with such insight and tunnel-vision devotion to character that it could actually be retro-engineered as a stageplay and still retain much of its punch. This isn’t a big, swaggering conventional war drama; in some ways it’s almost incidentally one, save for the psychological toil of warfare under the microscope.
The wry, mordant banter of the soldiers is often revealing. “Aren’t you glad the Army has all those tanks parked there so if the Russians come along we can have a big tank battle?” one specialist asks his cohort. Yet Bigelow and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd — who similarly located the solemnity of courage and doom in United 93 — also find compelling shorthand images with which to seed their film, as with a hobbled cat limping along the dusty, war-torn roadside.
Through it all, there are set piece moments of exquisitely fine-tuned pressure-cooker tension, executed by Bigelow with a steely precision and skill that matches her protagonist’s on-screen bomb-defusing talents. One sequence finds James having to examine the body of a young boy that may have been booby-trapped; another scene finds him locating and disarming a hidden improvised explosive device, only to pull up a spider web of buried red ancillary wires, stretching 12 to 15 feet in every direction.
The Hurt Locker is perhaps most notable, though, for the manner in which much of its emotional impact lies outside the parameters of the picture and its contained, if ample, drama. Without giving away anything, suffice it to say that the film plays as a sort of tragic prequel to a post-traumatic stress disorder drama one might see five or six years hence. The greatest tragedy of war, you see, is that it isn’t really over when it ends. (Summit, R, 130 minutes)
In Nobel Son, Barkley Michaelson (Bryan Greenberg) is struggling to finish his Ph.D. thesis when his father Eli (Alan Rickman), a long-striding, socially artless, egomaniacal bastard, wins the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. While Eli and his wife Sarah (Mary Steenburgen), a forensics specialist and fellow academician, travel to accept the award, the former’s indiscretions, past and present, complicate matters. After a late-night hook-up with a kooky artist chick (Eliza Dushku), Barkley is knocked unconscious and ransomed by Thaddeus (Shawn Hatosy), a bitter young man who turns out to have a long-held grudge against Eli. Soon, Barkley becomes complicit in Thaddeus’ scheme, and eventually everyone gets in on the kidnapping, philandering and blackmail. And Pat Benatar is quoted… twice.
The other indie films of director Randall Miller (Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School, Bottle Shock) have, to various degrees, been intriguingly sketched if fitfully misguided character ensembles, up-and-down affairs in which fantastic scenes abut awkward and/or pointless ones. Nobel Son is Miller’s most processed work, most concerned with self-satisfied style over substance, and it’s a misstep in a different direction. The movie wants to be a pulse-quickening genre knuckleball, part Zero Effect, part Lucky Number Slevin, part dysfunctional family dramedy. But the tone isn’t at all a match with the material, no matter the gameness of an intriguing ensemble cast, and imprinted upon almost every frame in the movie’s 111-minute running time, under the electro-throb score from Paul Oakenfold and Mark Adler, is effort, with a capital E.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Nobel Son comes presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a complementary English language 5.1 Dolby digital audio track, and optional English and Spanish subtitles. The disc’s supplemental features are anchored by a chatty feature-length audio commentary track from director Miller, wife/writing partner/co-producer Jody Savin, cinematographer Mike Ozier and on-screen talent Dushku and Greenberg. There’s an awful lot of cross-talk here, and plenty of vacuous self-congratulation, honestly, but some of the anecdotes (the problematic fiberglass on the roof of the love scene between Dushku and Greenberg, for instance) provide a bit of amusement.
Three deleted scenes — which only further underscore a couple narrative points, including a twisty ending, in declamatory fashion — each come with optional commentary from Miller and Savin. Finally, a 14-minute making-of featurette includes interviews with Miller and some of the cast, notably Dushku, Rickman, Greenberg and Steenburgen, who notes that it’s easy to detest her screen husband given the manner in which Rickman so magnificently embodies Eli. Both red-band and normal versions of the movie’s trailer are included, along with a couple other trailers for 20th Century Fox home video releases. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B (Disc)
Full review goes live at midnight or so, but Year One is better than expected, at least based on the bulk of its TV advertising. Well, let me qualify that somewhat: the pairing of Jack Black and Michael Cera gives the movie some punch, and a pleasant enough vibe, and the joke writing is pretty strong. The story, about two wayward, primitive age villagers who embark on a weird sort of road trip, is unfocused, and kind of a mess, mainly because it doesn’t unfold in one discrete time period and there’s not a codifying interior logic with respect to what sorts of human inventions and modes of behavior with which its characters are and aren’t familiar. (Black’s Zed, when confronted with a woman who “likes girls,” responds with a blank smile that he doesn’t even know what that means; later, Cera’s Oh pointedly uses the word “gay” when explaining away to his crush an incident where he was caught rubbing oil onto the chest of a priest played by Oliver Platt.) Still, The Office writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, along with cowriter-director Harold Ramis, stuff the movie’s edges with an above-average amount of ADR riffs and other scene-capping quips. My favorite line might just be Zed, bargaining for his life after having entered a supposedly forbidden chamber and not being struck dead, trying to save Oh by dint of executive privilege, claiming, “Everyone knows the Chosen One gets a plus-one!”
Screen International‘s Mike Goodridge takes a nice swing at the new studio calculus of foreign theatrical gate when it comes to greenlighting certain films, using as a case study Angels & Demons, among a few other movies. This new slide-ruler will continue to play a more and more prominent role in Hollywood decision-making, which on a certain level has to mean even less support for original spec drama and comedy scripts, since — absent the pre-sale attachment of big stars and directors — there’s more X-factor variability in those types of production go-aheads.
It’s a happy 31st birthday to Emma Heming, aka Mrs. Bruce Willis, a leggy Maltese falcon if ever there were one.
I don’t know whether they met on the set of the perfectly awful Perfect Stranger — one of Heming’s few acting credits — or that’s a later gig Willis helped her get, but either way that’s not something they should ever really spend much time discussing. Which then begs the question: what do they discuss? How she was 10 years old when Die Hard came out?
The trailer for the remake of Fame is up now, on Yahoo, and it seems a fairly sincere and earnest thing, a reworking that can at least hold its head up in the company of Step Up 2 the Streets and its predecessor, and maybe even something like Rent. Yeah, at its core some of the same familiar aspirant-performer trappings that helped make the High School Musical franchise such a huge tween hit are there, but there seems to have been a concerted effort here to ground this puppy in the real world, or at least something approximating it. Gone are the fuzzy leggings and headbands — probably a good call. Good to see Charles Dutton grab some work, too.
I have no idea how this will do at the box office, but presumably distributor MGM has carved out a parcel of autumnal land to help woo school audiences. If nothing else, the Step Up movies (with their $114 and $150 million worldwide theatrical grosses, respectively), plus a so-so $24 million gross for spoof movie Dance Flick, prove there’s a teen-plus audience for performing arts school films, even if a lot of those teens probably made/make fun of overtly arty types at their own schools. Ahh… teenage contradiction and incongruousness. Fame releases nationwide on September 25.
From Los Angeles’ Outfest and the annual San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival to far beyond, and almost every corner of the globe, film festivals have been a notoriously friendly and receptive place for gay and lesbian cinema, generally speaking. It makes perfect sense, of course, given that most festivals’ charters include attempts at expanding social and cultural horizons. For those in large metropolitan areas, or who have the good fortune to travel to some of the major international festivals, there exists a panoply of screening options that extends beyond the normal “coming out” stories that casual mainstream heterosexual viewers might most associate with gay cinema.
Unfortunately, a lot of these movies — more interesting fare, but stuff that exists on the fringes — don’t receive theatrical releases beyond a handful of theaters, and must make their impression in the rough-and-tumble DVD marketplace. So what of the personalities behind some of these films? If their makers were better known, would they be storming the studio gates and cranking out transformative, socially inspired genre fare? Well… probably not (unless said fare involved a comic book figure), but the documentary Lavender Limelight attempts to throw a little publicity their way regardless.
Directed by Marc Mauceri and co-produced by Becky Neiman and Carol A. Ross, this candid, breezy, hour-long title goes behind-the-scenes in an effort to shine a spotlight on seven successful lesbian directors. The subjects: Rose Troche (Go Fish, The L Word), Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman), Su Friedrich (Sink or Swim, Hide and Seek), Jennie Livingston (Paris is Burning), Monika Treut (Virgin Machine, Female Misbehavior), Maria Maggenti (The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, Puccini for Beginners) and Heather MacDonald (Ballot Measure 9, Kiev Blue).
While the running time understandably doesn’t allow for in-depth explorations of their work, Mauceri folds in a bit of edifying biography, but mainly just steps out of the way and lets the filmmakers entertain with anecdotes about their blossoming adolescent awareness of their respective sexualities, growing up gay, and how in their view that shaped their outside inspirations, areas of interest and future techniques. Clips from the women’s work helps underscore their points, and obviously makes all the difference in the world with an educational/biographical offering like this. For those land-locked in the continental United States, and unable to dive headfirst into the arthouse theatrical offerings of New York City or Los Angeles, this title offers a valuable look at some of the personalities shaping the next wave of lesbian filmmaking.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Lavender Limelight: Lesbians in Film comes to DVD via First Run Features in 1.33:1 full screen. There are trailers for other First Run releases, but no further bonus features. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C- (Disc)
Hip hop, more than most musical genres, seems built on and around machismo, but of course there are plenty of gay fans of rap, too. It’s with that fact in mind that director Alex Hinton set out to shine a spotlight on the so-called modern revolution of “homohop” with his superb, festival-minted documentary Pick Up the Mic, which features gay, lesbian and even transgender emcees both rapping about issues important to them and talking about their place, collectively and individually, within a music world that still marginalizes them.
Shot over a three-year period in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston and even the Ozarks, Hinton’s movie captures the birth of the homohop movement, and chronicles its growth into a global if still somewhat understated and underground community of artists that has managed to thrive despite improbable odds. Rainbow Flava’s Deadlee and Dutchboy open the film, performing their radical, thumping ditty “No Fagz Allowed,” which seeks to wrest back control of the title-checked epithet in much the same way that urban trailblazers N.W.A. did with the word nigger a couple decades back.
Before long, though, we’re launched back to the late 1980s and early ’90s, and a thumbnail history of how homohop sprouted up in the Bay Area of Northern California. Current A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. Records head Matt Wobensmith talks about his move to San Francisco nearly 20 years ago, and the launch of his self-published ‘zine, Outpunk. After learning that he didn’t need to actually pay for all his publishing costs (a friend within Kinko’s would let the publishers of various fringe ‘zines run off free copies after closing time), Wobensmith expanded his operation a bit, and served as a sort of catalyst for the uniting of all sorts of gay men currently dabbling in various forms of indie and underground music. Combining their creative passion with his business acumen, a legitimate community was born.
Owing to the fact that their personal experiences often stand in contrast to many of their heterosexual rap brethren, gay rap, on the whole, has an understandably steep political and sociological bent, with everything from personal coming-out stories and lingering issues of prejudice informing the rhymes. Still, those thinking that was the end-all, be-all of homohop subject matter would be mistaken, as Rocco Kayiatos, lesbian rapper JenRo and others prove, sharing wild stories of dating and boozy hook-ups that would certainly rival any straight rapper.
At its heart, though, Hinton’s film has a sociopolitical streak, because homophobia continues to stain a lot of hip hop. In this vein, perhaps most interesting and eloquent is spoken word artist and Deep Dickollective emcee Timm T. West, who talks about many in the African-American community rejecting the tags of gay and lesbian as being too part of and associated with the dominant, mainstream culture, and instead referring to homosexual individuals as “same-gender loving” or “in the life.” This articulation of this perceived cultural split — with Ellen DeGeneres, Will & Grace and Queer as Folk for largely white audiences, but little to no correlative national mainstream figures for black gay and lesbian audiences — is an interesting thing to ponder, and makes one wonder if sub-cultural prejudices or detentes ultimately do more to advance overall equality for gays and lesbians. In a related strand, there’s also an interesting exchange where West gets hailed down on the streets of New York by a would-be rapper intrigued by the camera following West around; after a while it comes out that West is gay, and the dialogue that follows runs refreshingly counter to expectations. Just like much of Hinton’s film, overall, actually; one needn’t be a huge hip hop-head to enjoy Pick Up the Mic, such is the universality of its story of growth and connection.
Housed in a clear plastic Amaray case with a striking red cover, Pick Up the Mic releases to DVD next week; it’s presented in 1.33:1 full screen on a region-free disc, and comes with more than 40 minutes of deleted scenes. Included in this mix are several musical performances — perhaps most stirring being Deadlee’s “Suck My Gun” — but also a collection of coming-out stories from interviewees like Cazwell, Paradigm, QBoy and Soce. There are stories of parental arguments, screaming and tears, but perhaps most amusing is a story that evokes Anne Rice’s blood-sucking Lestat as triggering a moment of inwardly blossoming revelation. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; for more information on the film, click here. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)
Discussing the slow-drip revelations of steroid use in baseball with a friend recently, I made the point that if a professional athlete didn’t know what he or she was putting in their body (as Barry Bonds and now Manny Ramirez have each claimed, among others), it was only because they didn’t want to know. My friend agreed. If your livelihood depends on peak-performance physical fitness, knowing the details of any supplement you ingest takes on extreme importance.
That point is still valid, I think. And yet, watching Robert Kenner’s powerhouse, revelatory documentary Food, Inc., one comes to realize just how much of our diet is outside our personal control, almost no matter how healthy we aim to be. Unless you grow and locally source all of your own food, we are each, to varying degrees, prisoners of a system in which mega-companies like McDonald’s — to use but one example, since it’s the world’s largest purchaser of beef — can virtually dictate the terms by which cows are raised all across the United States. This means that even if you’re not pulling into the drive-thru for a Big Mac, you’re apt to buy ground beef from cows fed with corn, something they weren’t biologically designed to eat.
The astounding ubiquity of corn and its many spin-off uses, including high-fructose corn syrup (all deliciously subsidized by governmental policy), serves as the leaping-off point for Food, Inc., which features interviews with author-experts such as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), as well as forward-thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farms’ Gary Hirschberg and Polyface Farms’ Joe Salatin. Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been hidden from the pastoral fantasy — red barns, white picket fences, rolling green hills — American consumers have been, ahem, fed.
In the wake of documentarian Michael Moore‘s box office successes and Al Gore’s Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, politically agitative nonfiction works have a certain cachet they didn’t have a decade ago. Apart from its thought-provoking value in this arena, though, what helps truly distinguish Food, Inc. are three things. First, the polished sheen of its production; there’s just a pinch of the wry, pop vibrance of Super Size Me. Second, a counterbalancing optimism as to how to make positive changes. And third, true heart. In fact, the inclusion of a story strand concentrating on a Colorado mother who lost her two-year-old son to E. coli from a hamburger gives Food, Inc.a tangible emotional connection that a lot of mainstream dramas, let alone like-minded docs, simply don’t have.
In revealing surprising truths about what goes into the foods we eat and how they’re produced, Food, Inc. not only makes obvious links between our high-caloric modern choices and rising obesity, heart disease and adult-onset diabetes rates, but also the relative collective impotence of our government’s regulatory agencies, the USDA and FDA. In clear, concise terms, Kenner correlates how efficiencies achieved in food production and packaging are precariously built on a house of cards, since the trade-off comes via a food supply now controlled by an ever-dwindling handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health and the livelihood of the American farmer.
Perhaps most chillingly emblematic of this is Monsanto, whose genetic modification of a soybean resistant to the weed-killing chemical spray Round-up has given them a patent on the seed. With skull-crushing efficiency, including lawsuits and private investigator enforcers, the company has driven small farmers who don’t adopt their seed out of business, growing their market share from two to 90 percent in just over a decade. In a few years, it may be possible that regular soybeans won’t be domestically available at all.
No matter how much of a cinephile one is, it’s reasonable to say that only a handful of films in any given year might actually impact your life. And it’s a tough thing — to be interesting and progressive, persuasive and affecting, all in almost equal measure. And yet Kenner pulls it off. Food, Inc. certainly isn’t the sort of film that puts a feel-good spring in your step, but it appeals to both the head and heart in such a clear-eyed fashion as to make you want to take better care of yourself as well as those around you. And that’s a powerful thing. (Magnolia, unrated, 93 minutes)
Irish filmmaker Frank Kelly is only two directors away from the final bookings on his Twitter compilation film, to be shot simultaneously, on June 21, by 140 different directors. In true entrepreneurial fashion, though, he already has a design… and T-shirts, even. Should be interesting to see how this turns out; hopefully I’ll have an interview with Kelly shortly after completion.
Long story, but apparently the past week’s entries have to be manually re-posted, since I’m for the moment lacking code from other laptop. Sigh. I’ve made the determination that this doesn’t rise to the level of an emergency, though. Que sera sera. It’ll take more to ruin my weekend. Like a bullet.
Beware: the trailer for this fall’s Old Dogs, starring John Travolta, Robin Williams and Seth Green, is more than just unfunny — it steals a part of your soul. Seriously, it reminds me of Joaquin Phoenix’s line to Nicolas Cage in 8MM, about not being able to unsee things. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Water isn’t just something that sweeps in from the sky and swelling ocean, causing massive destruction in our port cities, it turns out. More than three decades after the landmark Clean Water Act, two iconic American waterways — the great coastal estuaries of Puget Sound and the Chesapeake Bay — are both in perilous condition. With polluted runoff still flowing in from industry, agriculture and massive suburban development, many scientists fear contamination to drinking water for millions of people, and the food chain in general.
This PBS Frontline documentary, running approximately two hours, examines the rising hazards to human health and the surrounding ecosystem, and why it’s so hard to keep our modern water clean. Director Rick Young knits together a compelling work, interweaving interviews, archival footage and newly collected comparative images. At the core of the movie’s success, though, is the fact that Young and co-writer Hedrick Smith do a good job of streamlining information in a way that imparts facts without losing viewers in a sleeve-tugging swirl of exclamatory, quantitative analysis. While addressing the growing list of endangered species also threatened by the rate and reach of man’s development and action, the film doesn’t come across as advocating for animals over or more than man; it presents a persuasive case for shared fate, which helps Poisoned Waters strike a chord across any mere political divide, at least with most reasonable minds.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Poisoned Waters is presented in 16×9 widescreen, with an English language stereo audio track that more than adequately handles the meager, talking-head aural demands of the program. Unfortunately, there aren’t the sort of get-involved bonus features that mark many other threatened-climate documentaries, like An Inconvenient Truth. Still, this far and away trumps most of the educational/scholastic viewing of my day; ergo, to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C- (Disc)
Well, it seems like an entire week’s worth of posts are missing. That’s decidedly uncool. Working to resolve and rectify that. Meanwhile, some information which might help expedite this is held hostage on old laptop. Major suckage all around, and a reminder again of how things are going to end for humanity, or at least modernity.
When it bowed in June of 2007, Army Wives had the twisted benefit of unfolding while things in Iraq were looking fairly grim. Owing to its topicality, especially for military families, the show quickly became the most successful original series in the history of the Lifetime Television network. Billed as a patriotic and thought-provoking serial drama, Army Wives takes place at fictional Fort Marshall in Charleston, South Carolina, and centers around five military spouses who share friendship, fellowship, secrets, home and heartache. It’s essentially a quasi-wholesome soap opera without a lot of wild surprises, but for the most part the series does a decent job — certainly better than it did in its initial run — of balancing the potentially sticky, at-odds acts of honoring the brave men and women it portrays with creating plausible, engaging dramatic storylines.
The show’s talented ensemble cast includes Emmy winner Kim Delaney, ex-JAG looker Catherine Bell, Sally Pressman, Brigid Brannagh, Brian McNamara, Commander in Chief‘s Wendy Davis, Sterling Brown and Drew Fuller. Fugate originated the series using as a blueprint Under the Sabers: The Unwritten Code of Army Wives, by journalist Tanya Biank, who also serves as a consultant on the show. Meticulous Grey’s Anatomy fans might also notice some of the shaping influence of executive producer Mark Gordon, who helps fussy up the edges of some of the show’s interpersonal relationships.
The first season acquainted viewers with the intertwined stories of four women and one man tied to career members of the armed forces. Married to earnest officer Michael Holden (McNamara) is the elegant, educated Claudia Joy (Delaney), who serves as den mother to a disparate group that includes Roxy (Pressman), a raucous, fun-loving bartender; radio show host Pamela (Brannagh), a surrogate mother trying to solve a financial crisis; dyed-in-the-wool conservative Denise (Bell); and Roland Burton (Brown), a psychiatrist whose most important patient is his PTSD-afflicted wife (Davis). Far from family and old friends, the five turn to each other for emotional support, companionship and advice, as their loved ones tackle the dangerous business of defending the country. Bound together by pressures familiar to many military spouses, they build a bond that sustains them through sacrifice, loneliness and unforgiving conventions of Army life. Specifically, Denise starts to loosen up and rebel a little bit, something that Roxy opening up her own bar certainly doesn’t put the skids on. Meanwhile, Pamela begins to fray under the stress of raising two children almost by herself, while also fretting over what she views as increasingly censorious micromanagement of her radio show.
Though it’s decidedly better shot than the first season, the framing, editing and musical cues used in Army Wives are still mired in conventionality. The clean lines of dramatic friction are well captured in the plotting over the course of 19 episodes, though, and the actors all bring a dedicated professionalism to their roles that convincingly showcases the burdens of sworn duty to one’s country, for soldier and spouse alike. Perhaps most surprisingly, it’s this macro-level on which the series most succeeds — catching you up slowly, then, in the day-to-day drama, problems and tribulations of its characters.
Housed in a clear plastic Amaray case with two snap-in trays that is in turn stored in an attractive cardboard slipcase, Army Wives: The Second Season comes spread out over five discs. The trays worked fine in protecting the discs for my set, but others may not be so lucky, as I’ve heard of complaints from folks about this type of packaging. The show is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional French and Spanish subtitles.
The set’s array of bonus material is quite impressive, starting with three full-length audio commentaries that allow writers and actors to share time and stories in warm, winning fashion. A collection of 13 deleted scenes with additional optional audio commentary from executive producers Deborah Spera and Marshall Persinger also comes with title cards, nicely, and three minutes of bloopers showcase a falling magnetic license plate as well as other production gaffes. Most engaging, though, are a series of featurettes that chart the lengths to which the production has gone to root its show and school its actors as much as possible in the realities of military life on the homefront. A 20-minute featurette looks at a March 2008 cast bus trip to Fort Bragg, and includes material with Angela Yates, a Family Readiness group leader who talks about deployment and return issues. There’s also footage from a 34-foot “jump tower” that the cast tests out. Two other, shorter featurettes, each running around 10 minutes, look at the material support provided by the Army and one of its entertainment industry liaisons, Todd Breasseale, as well as fluffier chats with the actors about their characters. Finally, five two-minute “Giving Back” segments nicely spotlight special gifts and wish-granting outreach that the cast took part in with some of their real-life, in-need counterparts. To purchase the DVD set from Amazon, click here. B- (Show) A (Disc)
