The news that Valerie Plame is penning a series of female-centered suspense/spy novels with Sarah Lovett for Penguin USA is, on the one hand, something of a surprise, but also not at all. Not really. Having interviewed Plame on two separate occasions, I can report that she obviously has a deep and abiding interest in nuclear nonproliferation issues (the arena in which she worked before being outed by Scooter Libby and Vice President Cheney’s office), but also a grander appreciation and care for the huge things that can be accomplished with diplomacy, and how those carrots must be mixed with sticks. Her work should be smart, plugged-in, of the real and recognizable world, with all its complexities.
Charles Ferguson Talks Inside Job, MGMT and Human Nature
Director Charles Ferguson has made only two films, but brought a crystalline, depressing clarity to both the run-up to the Iraq War and, now, with Inside Job, the 2008 financial crisis that brought America’s economy to its knees. I caught up with the filmmaker recently for a few questions, on occasion of his movie’s DVD release. The conversation is excerpted below:
Brent Simon: So I thought I’d throw you a curveball to start — the MGMT song that ends the movie, “Congratulations” — how did that come about? The audience might be expecting something more known or up-tempo, to punch home their simmering rage in a much more direct fashion.
Charles Ferguson: We heard it and we liked it. We were told by their representatives, fairly late in the process of making the film, that MGMT had just recorded this song that was about the financial crisis, in a very elusive, indirect, poetic way. So we listened to it, both [myself] and producer Audrey Marrs, who actually has a background in rock music, was a punk rock musician a long time ago. We both loved it, so we tried to license it, and we did.
BS: Six or seven minutes on Iceland open the movie, which is like a bracing splash of cold water. How early did the film’s opening coalesce around that idea, that area of focus?
CF: I think that I had the idea to do that as soon as we filmed in Iceland. We spent a week filming there, and it was a very extraordinary experience for many different reasons. We got there just at the start of Icelandic summer, a short period of time where Iceland very dramatically changes from its very stark, dark almost lunar winter landscape to this very lush, green place. We got there just as that was happening, and so visually the place was remarkable, and the experience of interviewing people… some of the most extraordinary ones didn’t make it into the film. Ger Hartegg, who was the prime minister of Iceland during the period of the bubble, and responsible for much of the deregulation, and was indicted, was extraordinary. The experience that country had was such a triple-distilled, utterly clear, crystalline version of what happened in a much more complicated way over a much longer period of time in the United States that I thought it was a perfect introduction to the issues. And also, in film terms, it was very cinematic, beautiful and visually striking, so it just seemed perfect.
BS: You don’t inject yourself into the proceedings to the degree that Michael Moore does, but given that you’d made No End in Sight, which had received acclaim and attention, were you worried that word would get out and people wouldn’t want to talk?
CF: I was concerned about that, and it turned out to be true. Not primarily, however, because of the film. The primary reason that my reputation preceded me, and I’m sure that played a role in why some people declined to be interviewed was on the contrary my prior life as an academic. You know, I know Larry Summers, and he knows me, and I know Laura Tyson, and she knows me. I know quite a number of people in the Obama administration, and many people in the economics discipline, and also a number of senior people in finance. I know John Thain. He agreed to speak with me off the record, and we had many long conversations, but he and most of the other people who know me declined to be interviewed. And I think part of the reason is that they knew that I was a diligent researcher and wasn’t going to be afraid — that if I felt like I had to ask something, I was going to ask it, whether they liked it or not, and that it wasn’t going to be easy for them to get away. And I’m sure that’s why Larry Summers declined to be interviewed.
BS: This leads into my next question, which is that the film isn’t predicated on “gotcha! journalism,” and yet one of the biggest takeaways for me was that you’re asking informed questions, but there were a number of interviewees who seemed to be shocked at the very nature rather than even the content of the questions that you were asking. It seemed that they existed in a bubble where questions concerning a greater good for society weren’t being asked, or weren’t paramount in their minds.
CF: I did notice that. I was very struck by their reactions in these interviews, and the sense that I had was not so much that they were completely oblivious to the idea of ethical standards or the greater good — not that I felt they had behaved ethically, I think that they may have behaved extremely unethically and were aware of that fact — but what was surprising was that it was extremely clear that nobody had ever asked them about these issues before, nobody had ever asked them about their financial conflicts of interest, the academic economists in particular. And I was shocked that they were shocked. It was extremely clear that they expected to be deferred to, and they found it absolutely stunning that somebody was pushing them on these issues. And I gradually realized, in the course of doing all the interviews, that they had never been asked these sorts of questions, which again, I found stunning.
BS: How do you take a film like this and help sell it to an audience outside of those who maybe are the choir, who have a native interest in politics, government and/or documentaries?
CF: It’s important, because I didn’t make this film for my six finance-geek friends. I made the film so that hopefully people in the world can understand what happened here, and that people will come to realize that finance is too important to just leave to the financiers — that we all have to do something about this. And so that certainly guided the way that we made the film. I tried very hard to make the film clear and accessible, and keep jargon out of it. I also tried to keep the film non-political and non-partisan, and I think that we succeeded in that. And I also tried to make it a cool movie; I wanted it to look good, I wanted the music to be cool, I wanted it to be an interesting, enjoyable, compelling experience to watch this movie. That was the goal — to make it as accessible to as wide an audience as possible.
BS: It’s not a thriller per se, but the dramatic components within the film are fairly timeless — greed, overreach, hubris, all those good, big meaty things. Taking a birds-eye view, do you think it’s essentially a story about addiction and the atavistic nature of humanity, a story that just happens to be writ large? Some of them are criminals, but some can be fundamentally decent people whose… ethical missteps, let’s say, have a hell of a lot more impact than someone who’s working at a gas station skimming profits from their owner.
CF: (long pause) I think it’s complicated. Part of what occured was the result of rational self-interest and greed. That’s certainly part of the story. There’s another part of what happened here which is about a different part of human nature. One thing that struck me was how disconnected these people had become from the consequences of their actions. They had come to have so much money and power, and came to use their money and power in such very specific ways to place themselves in this bubble where they never felt the consequences of the actions and were never criticized. That’s why I put in the information about the private planes and private elevators, the paying for sex, the drugs, the huge quantities of money that insulated them from all of the things that you or I would experience if we tried to behave in an equally extreme way. If we got into a car here in Los Angeles and floored it and tried to go 200 miles per hour down the city streets, we’d cr
ash and the police would come after us. We couldn’t just do that. But these people, because of all of these things, there was nothing and nobody in the world telling them to stop. And then there’s something else — it was this kind of very primal, competitive, testosterone-fueled thing, which also people talk about in the movie. There’s this amazing line in the first Wall Street: “Mr. Gecko, how many yachts can you water-ski behind?” So why did they do it? Once they had the first $500 million, why did they keep doing it when this was going to be the result? And it’s something about human nature.
To purchase Inside Job on DVD via Amazon, click here.
Sucker Punch
A declamatory and utterly soulless piece of recombinant entertainment, Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch lands with a roar, and then spends nearly the next two hours making much noise, almost all of it married to balletic, CGI-enabled violence. A female-revenge fantasy that feebly tries to tweak gender expectations even as it relies wholeheartedly on them, the film is a miasma of glossy superficiality, and most characterized by a gaping emotional void where any sense of narrative engagement or rooting interest in its characters should be. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 110 minutes)
The Case Against Lucy Punch
It’s no great whoop to make a blog crush confession — there’s not really as much to get into when praising someone’s talents, charm and looks. What about the inverse, though? An almost irrational dislike of an established or up-and-coming performer, a hate-on unattached to any single particular film (and thus its hype)? For me, one such anti-crush is Lucy Punch, an English actress most people would still recognize by face rather than name, if at all.
The depth of her lack of appeal to me came rushing to the fore courtesy of a bit role in the recent Elektra Luxx, but Punch — courtesy of her turn on ITV’s Doc Martin and then a role in Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s buzz-heavy Shaun of the Dead follow-up, Hot Fuzz — has for a while now been a go-to scene-player for portraying boozy ditzes, stinking up scenes in movies like Dinner for Schmucks, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and Take Me Home Tonight. OK, granted… part of the problem is that she so frequently plays shrill and/or dislikeable characters, but Punch also has a look that’s… what, horse-ish, right? Just a bit. Broad face, big features, those too-light eyebrows. If Marilyn Manson were cross-bred with one of the chicks from American Gladiators, Lucy Punch would be close to the result, I think. She puts off a vibe is what I’m saying. It’s almost like an alarm/aversion pheromone.
This unfortunate fact, combined with her general overdemonstrativeness, has put her in the performer’s penalty box with me. Whenever I see her, I think, “Oh, here comes some vampy and/or obvious, grating choices,” and Punch has yet to disappoint. It’s not like she’s a lead or has any box office juice, either, so why does she keep getting cast? Are filmmakers really that hard up for comediennes?
Plastic Planet
Environmentally flavored nonfiction films are, to put it kindly, on the upswing. One of the more recent is Plastic Planet, a so-so offering that succeeds almost in spite of itself. Director Werner Boote’s film is a personal-journey documentary loosely in the vein of Mitch McCabe’s Make Me Young, which was a look at the $60 billion plastic surgery industry through the prism of her father, a onetime surgeon. Boote’s target of inquiry is plastics in general, and whether they are safe for human use in the degree and fashion that we have embraced. The director’s personal background — his beloved grandfather was a German manufacturing businessman who made his career in plastics — greatly informs his genial, rambling quest for answers.
Original music by the Orb helps give Plastic Planet an easygoing rapport, as do occasional animated segments featuring an avatar of the director amidst polyurethane pellets and molecule trains, even though the latter seem included out of some ill-informed sense of peppy obligation. Boote seems a true innocent, which is a quality not without its advantages, but often not particularly suited for pressing academic inquiry. To the degree that Plastic Planet succeeds, then, it does so almost in spite of its maker’s intentions rather than because of them.
The structure of the film doesn’t originally lay out a central set of questions to be answered, nor does it truly dig deep enough into Boote’s personal history to give his quest a stand-alone, seductive personality all its own. So the result is herky-jerky, and filled with stuttering asides that find Boote wasting screen time (flirting with a personal trainer at a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon’s office), or coming across as ill-prepared in various interview segments. When Boote gets out of his own way and turns the movie over to the hardcore statistical analysis of scientists, it blossoms in unsettling fashion, with worrisome details about polycarbonate baby bottles and how dangerous phthalates release from plastic products with repeated (but routine) use.
There are also some amazing and thought-provoking visual moments and details, as when Boote joins volunteers for the clean-up of a Japanese bay; trawls the deep sea with an oceanographer; and visits the world’s largest trash dump, in India, where “rag pickers” sort through the debris for the payoff of a handful of rupees per day. These moments, as well as the unsettling revelation that American food and beverage manufacturers are typically in the dark about the particular plastic content and ingredients of their packaging, help Plastic Planet achieve a roundabout emotional impact, despite much meandering and dawdling.
Housed in sturdy paper/cardboard, 100% green-certified sleeve from Oasis Disc Manufacturing, with 99 percent vegetable-based and eco-friendly inks, Plastic Planet comes to DVD presented in a 16×9 aspect ratio, with a stereo audio track, in English and occasional German, so hence with English subtitles. Its supplemental features consist of four deleted scenes, one of which features Boote eliciting understandable discomfort from a Mattel PR representative when he outbids her at a public auction for an old, collectible Barbie, and proceeds to try to get her to lick the doll, in a socially clueless attempt to get her to appreciate the difference in taste/smell of the older plastic. A DVD-ROM press kit and resource guide is also available if you slip the disc into your computer or laptop. Nice packaging in keeping with its environmental commitment gives this title a slight bump, but it does seem curious that there isn’t more Boote (an interview or commentary track) on the bonus slate, given the degree to which the film trades in personality. It isn’t available until April 12, but to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules
A peppy and energetic but not overly cloying tone aligns nicely with a clutch of lively and engaging performances in this smart, heartwarming follow-up to last year’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid, based on Jeff Kinney’s same-named series of books, which have sold a combined 42 million copies. Though characterized in fits and starts by the sort of overly demonstrative acting and tonal underlining one sadly comes to expect from so many family films, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules works as entertainment even for older audiences because its public humiliations of the familial variety are so relatable. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 99 minutes)
Alan Rickman To Join Colin Firth, Cameron Diaz in Gambit
News today from Crime Scene Pictures partners Adam Ripp and Rob Paris that Alan Rickman and Tom Courtenay have joined the cast of Gambit, based on the 1966 British caper comedy of the same name starring Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine.
Academy Award Winner Colin Firth is set to star alongside Cameron Diaz, with Michael Hoffman directing from an adapted screenplay by Joel and Ethan Coen. Said Ripp and Paris in a statement: “We are thrilled to have added two world-class actors to our already formidable cast. Alan and Sir Tom are the perfect additions to this classic comedic heist.” CBS Films recently acquired U.S. distribution rights; production begins in May, with no word yet on a
potential theatrical release date, though one expects early 2012 is a decent bet.
Potiche
French filmmaker François Ozon, freely adapting a 1980 stageplay by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy, sets his sights on women’s place in society and politics with the 1970s-set, screwball-tinged Potiche, its title native slang for an empty-vessel, eye candy spouse.
Catherine Deneuve, as luminous as ever even in her late 60s, stars as Suzanne Pujol, an intelligent but submissive housewife who, after the illness-related forced vacation of her patronizing, philandering husband, Robert (Fabrice Luchini), steps into his position as CEO at the umbrella factory her father started. She drafts her two adult children into the business; reconnects with an old paramour, union advocate Maurice (Gérard Depardieu); and soon showcases an unexpectedly strong talent for brokering happy compromise with disgruntled employees. When Robert returns, however, sparks fly over her place in the company, and household.
The same freewheeling (and classically French) view on human sexuality present in a lot of Ozon’s other work is at hand in Potiche as well — Suzanne is momentarily upset by her husband’s dalliances, but more by some of the specifics than the acts themselves, since she too has romantic secrets — yet it’s not as pronounced as in something like Swimming Pool or Water Drops on Burning Rocks. Issues of gender and class are explored, and past affairs and issues of paternity get trotted out, but the satire herein isn’t necessarily pointed. Rather, it feels a bit dutiful, even if smiling and fun. A confection loosely in the vein of Ozon’s more snappishly paced 8 Women, which also featured Deneuve, Potiche certainly isn’t an essential work, but it does feature a rather sublime ending for fans of its wonderful and legendary lead actress. (Music Box, unrated, 103 minutes)
Limitless
No offense intended, seriously, but Bradley Cooper is just a great jerk. In his best films (The Hangover, Wedding Crashers), he plays guys defined by a rakish self-centeredness and/or insincerity, and he does so with a correlative breezy composure that makes it look all too easy. With his pin-up looks (that tan! that smirk!) and ineffable lack of gradation, he’s a performer who elicits from other guys almost equally divided feelings of idealized affinity and jealous dislike.
And that’s fine, really, because all of that actually makes him a solid fit for the new thriller Limitless, in which Cooper plays Eddie Mora, a burned-out, would-be novelist who gets slipped NZT, a designer pharmaceutical which unlocks the allegedly unused portions of his brain and turns him into an indefatigable, self-bettering genius. With an awakened appetite for science, the arts and broader knowledge in general, Eddie picks up foreign languages and musical instruments in 24 hours, and turns several thousand dollars into $2.3 million in under two weeks as a day trader. The good times roll — at least for a while, until Eddie gets cut off from his drug supply and some nasty side effects pop up, threatening his relationship with his new energy baron mentor, Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro). Paranoia, blackmail and worse naturally ensue.
A story like this pretty much lives or dies on its cocksure, inner biorhythms, and director Neil Burger (Interview with the Assassin, The Illusionist) makes sure Limitless doesn’t get too bogged down in wonky, scientific specifics. Cooper isn’t necessarily wildly convincing as the sad-sack, stringy-haired loser in Eddie’s first incarnation, but once the movie gets past its set-up and gathers a considerable downhill momentum — partially achieved by putting Eddie in physical harm’s way, pursued by an oafish underworld type who gets turned onto the same drug — things become infinitely more intriguing.
Since it’s based on the novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn (a more abstruse title, no doubt), the movie has a fair amount of background detail, only some of which is gracefully integrated. As shoehorned within the parameters of a more conventional, big screen thriller narrative, Limitless‘ preoccupation with reintroducing Eddie’s estranged girlfriend, Lindy (Abbie Cornish), into the shenanigans is fairly misplaced — a diversion from what could be a much tauter, madcap character study. Despite both their shared past and her connection to Eddie’s drug source, Lindy doesn’t feel inherently wrapped up in his plight, but rather a tacked-on, “humanizing” sop for female audience members.
The movie’s wrap-up, too, only mildly satisfies, settling upon an end point which would have been an even more interesting third act pivot for further gamesmanship. Still, Cooper is a compelling anchor for this sort of material — you’re both rooting for him and weirdly, silently hoping for a bit of dark comeuppance, which makes for some intriguing inner tension. The key to enjoying Limitless is to just not take anything too seriously. (Relativity, PG-13, 106 minutes)
Silent Hill Sequel Gets Cast
Davis Films producers Samuel Hadida and Don Carmody announced today that
three of the most notable stars of Silent Hill, Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean and Deborah Kara
Unger, will return to join Adelaide Clemens and Kit Harington on the sequel, Silent
Hill: Revelation 3D.
Filming is just underway in Toronto, and as the sequel to 2006’s near-$100 million-grossing hit, Silent Hill: Revelation 3D is based on a screenplay by director Michael Bassett, who is joined by cinematographer Maxime Alexandre, production designer Alicia Keywan and costume designer Wendy Partridge. “It wouldn’t be the same without some of the original Silent Hill cast,” said Bassett. “Sean, Radha and Deborah’s return will certainly thrill fans of the franchise and compliment Revelation‘s stars, Adelaide and Kit.”
Added cinematographer Alexandre, who has made a career out of specializing in moody horror flicks and recently worked with Mitchell on The Crazies, “With the most advanced technology available — in particular the lighter, smaller and more flexible 3D Red Epic — we are able to take audiences deeper in the world of Silent Hill than they ever dreamed possible. Devotees will finally be able to enter this realm along side of Heather, Vincent, Harry and Rose, and experience the psychological horror and the fear of the unknown along with them.”
Elektra Luxx
Ever since Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling Boogie Nights captured the attention and imaginations of would-be auteurs, and probably even before, the world of pornography has held a special hold on a certain subsection of aspirant directors, who’ve populated their movies with strippers and porn stars, looking to beguile and titillate open-minded film audiences before the first flickering frame of their film has even appeared on screen. Such subject matter can sometimes be a lazy choice, indicative of a filmmaker thinking the heavy lift of audience investment lies more in the setting alone than any particular combination of characters and story. All of which brings us to Sebastian Gutierrez’s Elektra Luxx, a comedy which tells the tale of an adult starlet who’s gotten out of the industry and turned to teaching an annex learning class on bedroom prowess, the better to fund her dreams of starting her new life as a single mother.
Carla Gugino stars as the title character, which goes a long way toward making the film engaging. Early on, she meets a distraught flight attendant, Cora (Marley Shelton), who approaches her with a proposition: in exchange for the purloined lyric sheets to the last album of Elektra’s recently deceased rock star lover, Cora wants Elektra to seduce her fiance, in order to “cancel out” her own cheating. Elektra reluctantly agrees, setting in motion a chain of screwed-up events and mistaken identities involving a private investigator, Dellwood Butterworth (Timothy Olyphant), and a passel of other largely fringe-dwelling types.
While such a plot condensation makes Elektra Luxx sound like a madcap farce, in truth it’s a much more character-oriented comedy, with a porn writer, Burt Rodriguez (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who loquaciously waxes nostalgic about Elektra’s career in his basement web-cam shows, even as he angrily discourages his younger sister Olive (Amy Rosoff) from doing a solo video, and uncomfortably deals with the advances of local checkout girl Trixie (Malin Akerman), who delivers a series of pictures of herself to him. What do these characters, or a couple others, really have to do with Elektra’s plight? Not much, although some are interwoven, here and there. Mainly, though, they’re used to provide a sort of tableau backdrop to the film, rendering it a sort of pornland Short Cuts.
The films and jumbled, referential style of Quentin Tarantino bear mentioning, too, since Gutierrez also seeds his movie with spun-off asides and backstories, not unlike Pulp Fiction. The chief problem is that these bits are not smoothly integrated into the final product, or made to have forward-reaching consequences. The Kill Bill films, of course, used the pregnancy of Uma Thurman’s character as the powder to spark a wild revenge ride, but Gutierrez here seems to have only loosely integrated the heady wonder of her condition — and the loss of her lover — into the proceedings. He gives us neither enough of Elektra’s backstory and life as a porn star for the pregnancy to stand in stark contrast as a life-changing event, nor evidences this richly in a major shift in her behavior, or sudden rush of manifested anxiety.
At its core, Elektra Luxx feels like it was designed around the conceit of an on-the-mend porn star, with a couple other characters and scenes thrown in. Things just kind of happen, and don’t always have lasting consequences. These moments can sometimes be fun (Adrianne Palicki and Emmanuelle Chriqui have a blast as Holly and Bambi, a pair of vacationing adult starlets, one of whose feelings give way to something unexpected), but just as often tedious, like a wayward improv sketch.
The strength of the movie is the game ensemble cast, who uniformly give lively, engaging performances — a testament to Gutierrez’s touch with actors, certainly. But when its endgame ropes in a novelist, Rebecca Lindbrook (Kathleen Quinlan), who wants to get into business with Elektra, and a book-signing that brings several characters together and ends with frantic sprint to a hospital, well… it all feels like a telenovela run amok. And no, not necessarily in a good way. For more information, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 100 minutes)
The Resident
Gender-based clichés of fear get trotted out in The Resident, a goosing stalker thriller starring Hilary Swank that adds nothing new to the single-woman-in-peril subgenre. Swank by and large adequately conveys the juggled dual demands of steely, modern-day occupational professionalism and feminine vulnerability that such a genre exercise requires, but the script lacks any believable motivations, and additionally abandons too quickly any flirtation with significant misdirection. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Image, R, 91 minutes)
ExTerminators (Blu-ray)
I have a soft spot in my heart, I freely admit, for the wacky, New Age mania of Heather Graham, hence my interest in ExTerminators, a 2009 film starring her, Jennifer Coolidge and Amber Heard, and only now making its way to Blu-ray and DVD. A dark comedy of putative female empowerment, the movie dutifully winds up its laboriously colorful characters and sets its plot traps, and then pretty much charts a course of expected zaniness.
After an incident following a bad break-up with her
cheating boyfriend, Alex (Graham) is sentenced to 12 months of anger
management counseling, where she meets a group of small town Texas women
with similar stories of romantic woe, including Stella (Coolidge), the
owner of a financially troubled extermination business, and Nikki
(Heard), a dental technician with the face of an angel, the mind of a
sociopath and a big-time oral fixation. When the ladies band together to fight
back against the abusive lout husband of a friend (Joey Lauren Adams) from their counseling group, a deadly accident ensues. When their actions are subsequently taken as purposeful by their grateful friend, and rewarded with money, the women sense they may have stumbled across a niche business, even as Alex finds herself drawn to a handsome cop, Dan (Matthew Settle), investigating the case.
ExTerminators is the feature film debut of its chief collaborators, screenwriter Suzanne Weinert, who cut her teeth running Julia Roberts’ production company, and director John Inwood, who worked on Scrubs for many years, as both a cinematographer and director. There’s some measure of delight in a bit of the dialogue, but the tone feels a bit off, trying as it does to juggle a sunny optimism with a conceit that is darker, all under the banner of a visual style and scheme that is more or less straightforward and realistic. A lot of the smaller story details feel safe and cutesy (Alex hatches a cover-up plot based on her years of watching Law & Order), and there aren’t the sort of narrative surprises herein that are necessary to keep an audience invested in what is otherwise a fairly flat telling of a potentially raucous and/or subversive concept.
Housed in your typical Blu-ray case, the movie comes to the format in 1080p, enhanced for 16×9 televisions, with a DTS HD master audio 5.1 track that more than adequately handles the fairly straightforward aural demands of the title, if just a bit tinnily in its higher registers. Somewhat surprisingly, there isn’t even a chapter menu, and apart from a clutch of trailers that automatically play upon start-up, bonus material consists only a 27-minute gag reel which affords the chance to see line reading flubs and some of Coolidge’s improvisational riffs, including one about having sex with a man in a cricket costume. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Cinematic 3-D: Money Grab, or More Than a Fad?
In a nice cover story for the Weekly Surge, Roger Yale takes a look at the explosion in 3-D, and sources yours truly. It’s a solid read, touching on both the technology and the emotions and motivations driving it.
Every Day (Blu-ray)
Every Day, a workaday domestic drama from writer-director Richard Levine, is loosely
(very loosely) of the same genus as films like Smart People,
The Squid and the Whale and Running with Scissors, though pretty much
vacuumed free of all the more colorful angst and conflict those films
peddle. It sketches its characters humanely, but comes across as
exceedingly polite and pedestrian, never particularly willing to take a
strong stand one way or another. As such, it’s a shrug.
While his wife Jeannie (Helen Hunt) struggles in her role as a reluctant caregiver to her ailing, formerly estranged dad Ernie (Brian Dennehy), New York TV scribe Ned (Liev Schreiber) tries to negotiate a narrow professional pass, satisfying the sensationalist urges of his boss Garrett (Eddie Izzard) on a sexy medical soap opera serial. Mandated script fixes find Ned paired with coworker Robin (Carla Gugino), who provides characteristic temptation.
A film of pleasantly half-sketched familial noodling, Every Day
fails to satisfyingly connect not so much because of what it bungles in
execution as what it just never really tries to do — namely bring
substantive conflict to the fore. Lacking in any major catharsis, the
film perhaps angles to be chiefly a snapshot of the accumulated burdens
of life’s quotidian responsibilities, but instead merely comes across as
inconsequential. There’s no payoff of deep, hidden pain or fire-born resilience; in fact, there is not much honest dysfunction at all.
Everything is instead played fairly bland, and middle-of-the-road. Ernie is dying, but his grandkids seem to have little investment in this revelation. Several pressing conversations between characters — like how to broach the subject of an assisted care facility — are started and never really finished, and even a subplot involving Ned and Jeannie’s homosexual teenage son Jonah (Ezra Miller), who wants to attend a “gay prom” but ends up getting inappropriately hit on by an older guy, fizzles out a bit strangely.
The lead performances are competent but not particularly stirring. Gugino again proves herself fetching, while Miller (City Island) brings an appealing, uncomplicated honesty to Jonah — refreshing in an era when so many teen characters are rendered as little more than attitudinal bundles. Overall, though, Every Day feels lacking in defined dramatic stakes. The exact opposite of the outlandish stories Ned is asked to write, it is polite and genteel, but also ultimately yawningly pointless.
Housed in a regular Blu-ray snap-shut case, Every Day comes to the format presented in 1080p high-definition 1.85:1 widescreen, with an English language DTS-HD master audio 5.1 track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Its picture is sharp and free of any grain or edge enhancement. Bonus features consist of around 15 minutes’ worth of cast and crew interviews, the movie’s trailer and a collection of seven deleted scenes — decent inclusions all, but nothing built for repeat viewing. Visit your favorite brick-and-mortar retailer if that’s still your thing, or to purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Jane Eyre
A spare, visually foreboding and well acted adaptation of one the mainstays of high school reading lists, the latest version of Jane Eyre nonetheless struggles to consistently or cathartically dramatically connect, and comes across as a well put together but effectively inessential addition to the considerable canon of works derived from Charlotte Brontë’s celebrated novel of 19th century conflicted English romance. The invested presence of rising stars Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, however, guarantee the movie a solid arthouse run with much additional holdover ancillary value, as their respective profiles continue to rise in the coming years. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Focus, PG-13, 118 minutes)
The Sins of Madame Bovary
An Italian import from 1969, The Sins of Madame Bovary stands as one of the more famous offerings of star Edwige Fenech, whose flowing brunette locks, personable demeanor and large, expressive eyes made her a fairly natural screen presence in a string of romantic dramas, sex comedies and other erotic flicks from the 1960s and ’70s.
Gustave Flaubert’s often adapted 19th century novel provides the underpinning, and Fenech stars here as Emma Bovary, an aristocratic woman bored by her bourgeois life, and drifting out of love with her older physician husband, Charles (Gerhard Riedmann). As she daydreams of freedom and a grander life divorced from the formality of society life, a series of other lovers come into play.
Directed by Hans Schott-Schobinger, The Sins of Madame Bovary seems to take as inspiration for its production design template and visual scheme Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, so full of ornamentation is it. The scale isn’t the same, obviously, but it’s a signifier of Schott-Schobinger and cinematographer Klaus von Rautenfeld’s joint intent and efforts to play up the costume drama and play down the potential for sizzle, no matter the fame of their leading lady. For the most part this works… at least in the theoretical sense. The problem is, for all its surface lushness and attendant focus on feelings and manners, The Sins of Madame Bovary is still burdened by stolid performances and fairly leaden chemistry between the major players.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Sins of Madame Bovary comes to DVD divided into 12 chapters and presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an Italian language Dolby digital 2.0 audio track and English subtitles. The transfer is fairly solid, free of any edge enhancement but marked by a bit of grain here and there. The DVD cover slaps an airbrushed brassiere on this relatively famous photo of Fenech, and its supplemental features consist solely of a self-scrolling two-minute-plus photo gallery of film stills and international poster images. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here, or check Half.com or your other online retailer of choice. C (Movie) C- (Disc)
Spooner
A thinly imagined, stunted-guy, mumblecore-type love story starring Scream‘s Matthew Lillard, Spooner fritters away some charming low-budget production design and around-the-edges detail in service of a meandering narrative that doesn’t impart any meaningful lessons or engaging, smartly articulated revelations about the deeply held ambivalence of modern-day twentysomethings, for whom physical adulthood has brought no particular direction or clarity.
Lillard stars as the hapless title character, Herman Spooner, an introverted man-child and Monrovia, Calif., used car salesman who still lives at home with his mom (Kate Burton) and dad (Christopher McDonald). Seeking to shake their son from his routine, Herman’s parents set as a deadline his impending 30th birthday to finally get a place of his own. To top it off, Herman’s jerky boss (Shea Whigham) is putting pressure on him to up his poor sales numbers or face the chopping block.
Against this backdrop of looming doom, Herman happens upon Rose (Nora Zehetner), a girl whose car has broken down nearby. Forgoing all other priorities and commitments, Herman — an awkward wooer, to be sure — sets about trying to win Rose’s
heart, but by lying about his interests and station in life. To make matters worse, Rose breaks the news that she’s about
to leave for the Philippines, wrecking the seemingly one good thing in Herman’s life before it can even really get started.
If the word “pixie” didn’t exist, it would basically have to be created for Zehetner, who was delightful in the wicked, canted Brick, and here again exudes a guileless, kewpie doll prettiness that could find her easily cast as Audrey Tatou’s younger sister. Lillard, meanwhile, dials way back, and down, on his voluble swagger and charisma, showing intriguing flashes of beaten down vulnerability that belie his large, lanky frame. The beguiling chemistry between the pair is easily the film’s strongest selling point, though it sadly only arrives in fitful flashes.
The problem is that, kind of like the recent (but much more terrible) Waiting For Forever,
Spooner unfolds in an alternate, fantasy reality where girls swoon over de-masculinized awkwardness, and its makers additionally
assume this is will automatically tickle an audience pink. As directed by Drake Doremus — from a story by he and Lindsay Stidham, and a screenplay by Stidham — the movie never locates a convincing place of motivation for what is supposed to be Rose’s correlative ennui and emotional dislocation. Consequently, she comes across as two-dimensional, existing only in orbit and service to Herman’s narrative arc.
As written, she’s seemingly an idiot, too, though Zehetner admirably refuses to yield to this interpretation. When Herman shows Rose a picture of an apartment torn out of a magazine, and tells her it’s his place, she doesn’t blink an eye; later, he “flirts” by saying things like, “I could palm your head,” and, after she compliments his man-cave-type outdoor hangout, “I’ll build you [your own] fort, and put the plans in PDF format.” Rather than be creeped out by such disconnected, vaguely sociopathic chatter, Rose instead just accepts it blindly, at face value, with no comment or inkling that it might be unusual. Doremus and Stidham compound this mistake by having her acquiesce from the first moment of the pair’s meeting; Rose’s eyes always say yes to Herman, never no, so Spooner is devoid of much material drama, or even the quasi-emotional payoff of a sex scene, which would render Herman a more awakened adult character.
There’s a certain low, pulsing heartache in Herman’s swallowed, miserable loneliness, and how it’s warped his sociability, and the gangly Lillard actually has the chops to play something this depressive and inwardly directed. But neither the film’s writing nor its direction trust him enough to do so, and the nervous result is a blatantly false and pointless affair — a character-study dramedy that spends so much time trying to inject flickering positivity into the proceedings that it destroys any sincere chance at audience empathy with its lead character. For the film’s trailer, click here. (Moving Pictures, R, 83 minutes)
Scouts Honor: Badge to the Bone
Scouts Honor: Badge to the Bone isn’t the worst film ever made — not by a long shot — but there’s something in particular about serially mirthless comedies that temporarily irradiates any working recollection of what arguably may be more technically inept and woefully misguided cinematic efforts, and this broad, broad affair falls into that former category. And so while watching it, the movie just feels like it might be that terrible.
Written by Jesse Bryan and David Schultz, who also each costar, Scouts Honor centers on two dimwitted camp counselor brothers, David and Tim Appleorchard (Schultz and BJ Bales), who must circumvent the evil machinations of fellow brother Brandon (Chris Kattan) in order to win the approval of their father (Kip King, Kattan’s real-life dad) and inherit the camp from him at the end of the summer, when he leaves to rejoin his wife/their mother with a traveling circus. Because, God bless him (and I know this from fairly close personal experience), Fred Willard will show up for scale on any job, and read expository asides or fulfill whatever perfunctory wonky cameo needs your production might have, well… Fred Willard shows up and reads a bunch of discretely shot announcements over a P.A. system, goading the brothers Appleorchard into action. Physical contests of strength and endurance ensue, along with parallel love interests for the hapless chaps.
PR press clippings for Scouts Honor try to position it, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, as a willfully, knowingly moronic comedy, something so “insane,” “wacky” and gleefully dumb that it somehow circles all the way back around again to all-out funny. It doesn’t, honestly. Nowhere close. This is a series of bad sketch comedy scenes, strung together loosely into a narrative.
Look, I don’t mind dumb comedy, I really don’t. But this movie never rises to, let alone past, the level of improv comedy you and your buddies mustered when making middle Super 8 videos. It’s just pointless, and made worse by the retread-quality nature of the narrative proper. Chris Kattan is actually capable of good work, but here he trades only in volume, and it grates mightily roughly 25 seconds into the proceedings. Granted, Kattan is given nothing of substance with which to work, but he’s playing such a screaming jackass that when the film, at its merciful conclusion, refuses even to give him some sort of shaming comeuppance, it makes you a bit angry, in addition to just being bored and pissed off.
I’m racking my brain here, but apart from chapter selections and a motion-enabled menu, I don’t believe there are any supplemental features to the DVD release. I can’t recall with 100% clarity though, because the pitch of Kattan’s histrionics are clouding my brain and impairing my memory. Nonetheless, if you still wish to inflict this travesty upon yourself, Scouts Honor may be purchased through Amazon by clicking here. F (Movie) D- (Disc)
Take Me Home Tonight
The crushing ambivalence of young adulthood gets blended together to moderately winning effect with a colorful 1980s setting and a conventional tale of romantic pining set against the backdrop of a single evening of partying in Take Me Home Tonight, an energetic and smartly cast comedy. At times its outlandishness toes the line between the ribald and contrived, but lively interplay and a great, evocative soundtrack more or less consistently impose a mood of effervescent, if slight, amusement. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Relativity Media, R, 97 minutes)
Kings of Pastry
Whether it’s sports, dancing or eating, if there’s something that Americans like more than recreational activities and hobbies, it’s watching other people being forced to 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.
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, the competing 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 staging 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 punishing derision for preparer and taster alike.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Kings of Pastry comes to DVD presented in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Its bonus features are anchored by a five-minute interview chat with the filmmakers, which is nice but really too short to dig into the story behind the production with much substantive insight. Biographies of the crew are also included, but the best supplemental extras are a segment which follows Pfeiffer as he constructs a chocolate sculpture (complete with film reels), and a chocolate fashion show in which pastry school students mix clothes and desert in intriguing fashion. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)
You Won’t Miss Me Gets Return Engagement
Ry Russo-Young’s intriguing You Won’t Miss Me, starring Stella Schnabel, re-opens in Los Angeles at the Downtown Independent this week, on Tuesday, March 1. Click here for tickets and more information, here for my earlier review.
A Look at Potential Breakout Actresses of 2011
Over on her Forbes Girl Friday blog, I’m sourced in a piece by Meghan Casserly about potential breakout actresses of 2011, along with Fandango editor Chuck Walton. Who’s rising, who’s falling, and what input or say-so does the public have on Hollywood’s star-making formula? Read on, by all means.
Ted Hope Joins IndieWIRE Blogger Network
In another casting coup for IndieWire, Anne Thompson announces that independent film producer Ted Hope is being added to the blogger rolls over there, importing what one presumes is some version of his Truly Free Film website to a blog entitled Hope for Film. Hope is one of the brighter and more imaginative producers out there today, so good on him; it’s a win for the folks at IndieWIRE.
George Clooney: Anti-Genocide Paparazzo
In an age of Twitter-shortened attention spans, George Clooney is helping shine a humanitarian spotlight on Sudan in an unusual way, according to Newsweek — with a privately funded, publicly accessible satellite. Money quote: “I’m not tied to the United Nations or the U.S. government, and so I don’t have the same constraints. I’m a guy with a camera from 480 miles up,” Clooney says. “I’m the anti-genocide paparazzi.” Good stuff. And you have to admit, too, no one rocks the grey quite like him.