Film Review
August 22, 2007 by JAN ALBERT
It’s the end of summer and if you’re ready for something a little more challenging than TRANSFORMERS, here are two startling new films from Brazil that will take your mind off how f-ed up our nation is.
IMAGES: COURTESY MANDA BALA (SEND A BULLET)
MANDA BALA (SEND A BULLET) Jason Kohn’s first film won the Grand Jury documentary prize at Sundance this year. It takes you far from the beautiful beaches of Rio and exotic revelry of Carnival depicted in tourist ads and plunges you into the fear and horror that has come to define daily life in Brazil’s largest city. Sao Paulo is a city (the third largest in the world) where the least fortunate citizens regularly emerge from the slums to exact revenge on the corrupt politicians and wealthy industrialists who make their fortunes off the backs of the poor by kidnapping their wives and children and demanding enormous ransoms for their return. As the film’s tag line puts it: “When the rich steal from the poor the poor steal the rich.â€
Kohn and his crew spent 5 years assembling an amazing cast of characters to depict Sao Paolo’s surreal food chain: the former head of the nation’s Senate who has been convicted of stealing millions from a government program meant to improve life in Brazil’s most remote Amazon villages but was nonetheless reelected by those districts. The wealthy manager of an industrial frog farm set up to launder the money stolen from the government program. A kidnapper who supports his family of 10 by abducting rich teenagers and cutting off their ears to urge their parents to pay ransom demands… a plastic surgeon that has become famous for inventing a cosmetic approach to replace the ears of kidnap victims…. A successful businessman who lives in constant fear of being kidnapped and so has spent vast sums to armor his bulletproof car and learn defensive driving techniques – a big business sparked into life to respond to the kidnap culture, along with the sale of private helicopters so the super rich can take off from the roofs of their penthouses and avoid street traffic, and microchipping, which enables tracking in the advent of a kidnapping.
Most unforgettable is the young woman nabbed outside a nightclub who describes how a young kidnapper practically passed out while cutting through the cartilage of her ear and how Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Birds, was playing on TV while they performed this butchery. That night, she dreamed that birds were picking at her ear. YIKES! I dare Wes Craven to equal that horror scene or the image of small kids playing in the slums, acting out kidnappings and stick-ups, instead of playing soccer.
Jason Kohn is a protégée of Errol Morris, whose imaginative touch has stretched the boundary of documentary filmmaking. Kohn has a gift for intrepid reporting, ambush tactics (like a sly young Mike Wallace!) when necessary, and vivid imagery. If the scenes of frog farm produce digesting each other to symbolize the revolting way human beings feed off each other are a trifle heavy handed, you won’t be forgetting them anytime soon either.
Manda Bala, which opens Friday, August 17th at The Angelica Theater, got me so interested in life in Brazil, that I went over to the Film Forum to check out LOVE FOR SALE, a haunting drama about a vibrant young woman who heads for Sao Paulo to seek her fortune, then slinks back to Iguatu, the desert wasteland that is her hometown.
HERMILDA GUEDES as Hermila (foreground) and GEORGINA CASTRO (background) as her friend Georgina, as seen in LOVE FOR SALE.
PHOTO CREDIT: STRAND RELEASING
I didn’t see Karim Ainouz’s first film, Madame Sata, which Film Forum premiered in 2003, but if there’s any justice in this world, this film will definitely launch the career of a major new director. With a complete economy of images and a minimum of dialogue, we get the whole picture within the first few frames. We meet Hermila in a home movie, carefree, radiantly happy, and in love. Then we cut to a close up of the still beautiful but somewhat drawn girl bumping along a dusty road on a crowded bus. The camera slides over to reveal a baby in her lap.
Hermila’s Aunt Maria and grandmother take her and her infant son in and a temporary situation becomes permanent after several weeks of public humiliation as the whole town watches her calling again and again from the only public phone and waiting in vain at the gas station for her 20-year-old husband to join her from Sao Paulo.
Using a combination of non professionals and theater actors in the main roles, Ainouz and his wonderful cinematographer, Walter Carvalho, capture the details of life in “nowheresville Northeastern Brazil†perfectly—Hermila leaning against the open fridge at her granny’s house to cool off, sucking on a piece of ice. The truck stop, the open air market, the sidewalk restaurant, the guys blowing up dust on the main drag with their scooters, and the disco. The camera loves Hermila Guedes, the beautiful lead actress, who is deeply affecting as she grimly washes cars, pumps gas, cleans motel rooms and goes back to the kind but passive loser she thought she had left behind as ancient history. We watch her growing more wan and bitterer everyday until she challenges her life sentence and plots her escape from Iguatu with an enterprising plan that shocks the whole town.
I loved LOVE FOR SALE. Go see it. You will too.
www.angelikafilmcenter.com
www.filmforum.org
~Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) & Love for Sale |
Posted in Movie Reviews | By Jan Albert | August 22nd, 2007, 1:23pm
Film Review
April 20, 2007 by JAN ALBERT
TEKKONKINKREET :
More than 10 years ago, Michael Arias read Taiyo Matsumoto’s cult-classic graphic novel, ‘Tekkonkinkreet’. Ever since, he’s dreamed of bringing it to life on the screen. Tekkonkinkreet is a play on the Japanese words for concrete, iron & muscle and the title is meant to symbolize the destructive power those elements have on the world of the imagination. This time, the world of imagination definitely triumphs. After 40 months in production at Tokyo’s Studio 4ËšC, Arias (who has lived in Japan for over 15 years), has created a beautiful story that combines cutting edge computer generated imagery with classic hand drawn character animation. It’s an intensely ambitious work of art that will feed your soul.
We are immediately plunged into a dizzying chase through “Treasure Townâ€, a futuristic city as densely imagined as (and deeply influenced by) anything in Blade Runner. We catch wonderful details on the smallest of street signs, even ashtrays, as two street kids, named Kuro (“Black”) and Shiro (“White”), lead a gang of boys trying to muscle in on their turf on a merry chase through underground tunnels and up into the air.
Kuro and Shiro live in an abandoned car and look out for each other as brothers. The only adults in their world are Yazuka gangsters who accept them as part of the firmament and a kind old street beggar who occasionally shares the public bathhouse. Making sure White, the smaller of the two, is properly dressed and fed, keeps Black focused and gives him a family to care about. For his part, White, a simple being, full of sunlight, keeps Black connected to the innocent child inside and tempers his anger at having to grow up way before his time.
Together, they’ve managed to adapt to this world that’s constantly shifting and changing around them in a resourceful and even, joyous manner. Then an evil real-estate developer (backed by extra terrestrial robots no less) starts to rip Treasure Town down around them.
Arias keeps the heart rending story that captured his imagination a decade ago at the center and surrounds it with a combination of CGI and beautifully hand drawn characters. Even the bad guys stand out; wonderfully quirky, world weary, hopeful, greedy, evil individuals with back stories and a growth curve. When some of these evildoers bite the dust, we are a little sorry to lose them. The lavish attention to detail will make viewers want to see the film again to catch all the goodies cramming every frame. Arias and his team took hundreds of photos of old world bathhouses, markets, abandoned amusement parks, and decaying street signs and sound designer Mitch Osias collected raw material in both New York and Tokyo to inspire the patina of Treasure Town. The icing on the cake is a great original score by the electronic music group, PLAID.
After Kuro and Shiro save each other’s lives countless times, they are finally, brutally separated and Shiro must battle the darkness within himself on a hellish black star in outer space. Curiously, this apocalyptic scene was the only section that fell a little flat for me — I think I may have been on sensory overload by the time we reached that point in the story– still, that’s a very small quibble about a film that I can’t wait to see again.
TEKKONKINKREET is the first film Arias has actually directed but he’s had a fascinating journey to this point. He taught himself programming and math and computer graphics for the most part; creating special effects for films like The Abyss, Total Recall and The Matrix, designing film titles and sequences for David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee and the Coen Bros., helping visual effects pioneer Doug Trumbull develop the Back to the Future ride at Universal Theme Park, inventing and patenting “Toon Shaders,” a software, which helped lend 3-D computer graphics the look of traditional 2-D animation in Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning Princess Mononoke and Dreamworks’ The Road to El Dorado, and collaborating with the Wachowski Bros. on Animatrix, an anime extension of the first great Matrix film.
And now, he has become the first foreign born director to helm a feature length anime film in Japan — a story as sweet and hopeful and dark and compelling as any Grimm’s fairy tale.
For more background on Tekkonkinkreet and Michael Arias, check out:
http://search.japantimes.co.jp – there’s a great photo of MICHAEL ARIAS here !
www.ozoux.com/eclectic/archive/2006/04/26/tekkon-kinkreet-trailer
www.tekkon.net/site.html
Michael Arias will introduce Tekkonkinkreet at The Museum of Modern Art on Thursday, April 25th at 8:30.
The film runs at MOMA through Monday, April 30th. For more information, call 212-708-9400
or www. moma.org
OTHER ARTLOVERS POSTS/TEKKONKINKREET:
~PHOTO: TAIYO MATSUMOTO, MICHAEL ARIAS, and ANTHONY WEINTRAUB
~PHOTO: MICHAEL ARIAS at MoMA SCREENING
~PHOTO: MICHAEL ARIAS ARRIVES AT MoMA SCREENING
~HOMEPAGE ARCHIVE/THE BOMB/ARTLOVERS
~Tekkonkinkreet |
Posted in Movie Reviews | By Jan Albert | April 20th, 2007, 11:35am
Film Review
April 16, 2007 by JAN ALBERT
TRUTH, JUSTICE & THE AMERICAN WAY AT THE MOVIES:
THE HOAX is a pretty good film that has a couple of great things going for it – A/ a great story and B/ a great performance by Richard Gere – yes, Richard Gere.
It’s about, as Al Franken might put it, LIES and the LYING LIARS who tell them. As it turns out, in this case, they’re not really such bad people – just wannabes reaching for their slice of the American Dream. It’s 1971, the dawn of the Watergate era, and far worse manipulators of the truth—the ones running our country and our corporations – will soon emerge.
The story, a true one, is the stuff of legend. Clifford Irving, a journeyman writer, frustrated by his inability to get major publishers to take him seriously as an A-list novelist, concocts a fantastic story they can’t ignore, and almost pulls off one of the most audacious cons of the 20th century. Although Irving’s only major book up to this point was called, FAKE!, which chronicled the career of the notorious art forger, Elmyr de Hory, (which might have given some people pause for thought), he somehow convinced McGraw Hill, the same publishing company that wouldn’t give him the time of day before, that world famous billionaire recluse, Howard Hughes, has anointed him as his biographer and authorized Irving to sell his memoirs. Soon, he is cashing checks for a million dollars and has got Life Magazine panting for serialized rights.
The film follows Irving as he pulls his best friend, a brilliant researcher, and his own wife, into the scam. It’s exhilarating to watch as this handsome charmer makes stuff up out of thin air and people he has always longed to impress buy it, hook, line and sinker. It becomes increasingly harrowing as the high stakes game spins way out of control, the players betray each other, and Irving can no longer keep track of his lies. Director Lasse Halstrom and screenwriter William Wheeler hint at manipulation by players way larger than these three, such as President Richard Nixon, and Howard Hughes himself (who hasn’t been seen in public for decades), emerging for just long enough to pull strings that will put millions more into his own bank account and send Irving and company to prison.
Details of this paranoid period, which sowed the seeds for our current reality of fake news, made up memoirs, and lies upon lies upon lies from our leaders — are skillfully layered throughout. Gere gets tremendous support from Alfred Molina and Marcia Gay Harden, but it’s really his show and he’s tremendously convincing. Gere goes deep within and way beyond the cocky sex appeal that’s been his stock in trade in the movies since he personified the “American Gigolo”. He brings real pathos to this entertaining guy who believes he “couldda been a contender†– a man simultaneously full of himself and hating himself. Richard Gere has always been a pleasure to spend an hour and a half with in the dark – if you catch my drift — but this time the complex man he caught on celluloid isn’t so easy to shake.
~The Hoax |
Posted in Movie Reviews | By Jan Albert | April 16th, 2007, 10:15pm
Film Review
April 16, 2007 by JAN ALBERT
BREACH is another true story of deceit, hidden lives and thwarted glory. Chris Cooper (Oscar winner for his supporting performance as an orchid thief in Adaptation and totally deserving of more awards for his performance here) is absolutely chilling as Robert Hanssen, the master spy who sold American secrets to the Soviets for 30 years and engineered the greatest security breach in US history before the Feds finally managed to out him in 2001.
Hanssen is no easy charmer like the Clifford Irving character in The Hoax. He is a middle of the road civil servant, a holier than thou, church going dude with a crucifix in his office and a dagger in his heart from having been passed over for promotion for so many years. He’ll teach them to pass over a genius. And so he becomes the worm burrowed deep in the shiny apple, eating away at the FBI’s computer networks, giving up American agents, and somehow justifying his choice as a necessary tough love lesson for a system that has become so blind to its own failings.
The film begins as a small team (led by the always stellar Laura Linney) gathers evidence to try to bring Hanssen down. Eric O’Neill, an FBI rookie from a deeply religious family is sent in to gain Hanssen’s confidence, posing as his new office clerk. Portrayed by a really solid Ryan Phillippe, the neophyte is alternately appalled and admiring as Hanssen intones the pillars that his FBI career should rest upon; “Faith, Family and Country.â€
Most of the action in BREACH is small. There are no mind-blowing car chases but director Billy Ray has crafted a truly nail biting thriller (Ray’s first film, SHATTERED GLASS, was another great tale of escalating deceit set in a newsroom. RENT IT!).
In fact, I’ll pay him the ultimate compliment: There were moments where the tension in BREACH was reminiscent of an Alfred Hitchcock classic. I genuinely feared for Ryan Phillippe’s well being at several points!
Two fascinating side bars: Socialite Nina Van Pallandt, Clifford Irving’s mistress and one of the people who betrayed his Howard Hughes scam to the authorities, ended up as a minor movie star in the after glare of the scandal, appearing with young Richard Gere in American Gigolo in 1980, and Eric ONeill, the real life character Ryan Phillippe portrays in BREACH, resigned his promising FBI career shortly after Hanssen’s arrest. He had seen enough!
check out the trailer:
www.breachmovie.net
~Breach |
Posted in Movie Reviews | By Jan Albert | April 16th, 2007, 9:56pm
Film Review
January 12, 2007 by JAN ALBERT
JAN ALBERT’S BEST OF 2006
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE – for breaking the long movie draught of 2006. This was the first beginning-to-end GOOD movie I saw all last year – quirky, beautifully cast, and laugh out loud funny. Not to oversell this small joy but it’s a great ride. I loved Alan Arkin as grandpa and the rest of the family is pretty great too.
THANK YOU FOR SMOKING – satire is a hard form to pull off. This one flicks off the ashes and strikes it just right. It’s politically sharp, well-observed and extremely witty. Aaron Eckhart has to be one of the handsomest guys ever to grace celluloid and makes the perfect villain/hero out of an all too plausible cigarette lobbyist. Rob Lowe is hysterical as a Hollywood dealmaker and a pre-Tom Cruise Katie Holmes is wicked as what passes for a working journalist these days.
DREAMGIRLS – The first movies I ever saw on the BIG SCREEN were when my father brought me into Manhattan for a double feature of Brigadoon and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, an introduction to the movie musical that had me from “the mist of May is in the gloaming.” I am a sucker for great movie musicals and director/writer Bill Condon has created one just as magical in its way as Carousel and West Side Story. There are kickass costumes, dynamic editing, and a great story – a thinly veiled look at the birth and heyday of the Supremes and Motown. The first rate cast makes the most of a pretty good score and superstars Beyonce Knowles and Jamie Foxx take a graceful backseat to simply outstanding supporting performances from Eddie Murphy (in a perfectly-timed tip of the hat to the Godfather of Soul) and Jennifer Hudson.
HALF NELSON – Hey, it can’t all be sunshine and lollipops! So far as I’m concerned, this small film contained the performance of the year – Ryan Gosling as a crack addict who somehow still manages to function as an inspiring high school teacher. Absolutely mesmerizing to watch, I could not catch Gosling acting-I just believed and felt for the person he created so completely. The film overall struck me as a little naïve but first-time director Ryan Fleck and screenwriter Anna Boden are to be commended for getting such a complex human being up on the screen – a self destructive man who nonetheless is a good guy with valuable stuff to offer.
LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA – We should all take inspiration from the ambitious work Clint Eastwood is turning out in his 70’s! In 2006, he gave us two films exploring the horrific WWII battle of Iwo Jima – one from the American POV and one from the Japanese side. I found Flags of Our Fathers a great idea (following the soldiers who raised the US flag on Iwo Jima back home for an orchestrated PR tour through the States to raise $ for the war machine) executed with a sledgehammer. It slams you over the head with its relentless bloodshed and brutal message, but I haven’t been able to get the way subtler LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA out of my mind. Despite the fact that the film is in Japanese and requires reading sub titles, I connected with all four main characters and their moments of truth. The stunning cinematography gives the film an otherworldly look of a washed out Hell on Earth, and the script structure, with flashbacks taking us back to the world these guys inhabited before fate brought them together on this God forsaken rock, scuttling like rats in a maze of underground tunnels, adds a depth and humanity that was missing in FOOF.
Maybe, it’s because the American story portrays the men literally as interchangeable cogs in the machine, (although Adam Beach stands out as a Native American GI trotted out for the big show) whereas Ken Watanabe and a few in his company emerge as noble individuals fighting a futile battle in the name of their government. Whatever the reason, I believe this film about man’s greatest folly will ultimately join LE GRANDE ILLUSION in the annals of classic anti-war films.
HOLLYWOODLAND – Catch up with this one on video. It came and went pretty quickly, but I thought it was a great little noir mystery that casts a spell and pulls you into the shady circumstances surrounding a childhood TV hero’s death. Rooted in the real life reporting of actor George Reeves death in 1959, it is nonetheless an act of imagination that keeps you wondering whether SUPERMAN jumped or was pushed. Adrien Brody has fun as a slimy low rent gumshoe and Ben Affleck’s own experience getting ground up in the glare of Hollywood’s star making machinery undoubtedly informs his extremely moving performance as a celebrity stranded by his own success.
BORAT – Horrible, vulgar, stupid/ hysterical, terrifying, brilliant. The idiot alter ego of Sacha Baron Cohen takes a road trip through the U.S. and exposes way, way more than you want to know about your fellow Americans. Not “very nice” but REALLY, you don’t want to miss it.
THE QUEEN – We all want to know how the other half lives and this film provides a really provocative look behind the palace doors during the stressful days following Princess Diana’s fatal car crash. Peter Morgan based his political and poetic screenplay on copious research and interviews, then took a leap of the imagination that transforms this film into something beyond documentary. His take on how Queen Elizabeth painfully transcends a lifetime of privilege and protocol to come to terms with a new prime minister, Tony Blair, and the public rage of her previously loving royal subjects is really eye opening. Helen Mirren inhabits Her Majesty in the same way Ryan Gosling takes on his character in Half Nelson (see above) and rightfully deserves to be crowned Best Actress at the Oscars this year.
THE DEPARTED – My all around most satisfying movie going experience of the year. A Shakespearean face off between good and evil and the twisted grey areas that lurk around both, set in Boston’s criminal underworld. Matt Damon and Leo DiCaprio are well matched adversaries; both great to watch, and all the supporting players, including Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Vera Farmiga, and especially Mark Wahlberg, have a blast with screenwriter William Monahan’s take no prisoners dialogue. The fact that the usually awesome Jack Nicholson is way over the top was annoying but not fatal. This is the kind of drama and great repartee I go to the movies for and Martin Scorsese, without a doubt one of the greatest film directors of the last century (I guess you can guess who my “best director” vote is going to), really knows how to serve it up.
A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION – I am not a fan of the gentle, folksy radio show this film is based on, but I adored the movie. It has all the hallmarks director Robert Altman was known for; overlapping dialogue from a huge cast of characters, fabulous long takes and fluid camera movement, and multiple points of view that create a unique chance for the audience to spy on a singular environment, in this case the behind the scenes and onstage doings involved in the very last live broadcast of a beloved institution, The Prairie Home Companion radio show. There is little to no dramatic tension, but somehow that doesn’t matter. Altman’s direction is so confident, so relaxed and loosey goosey, you just settle in and enjoy the sights and sounds. All the actors, including a radiant Meryl Streep, the divine Lilly Tomlin, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, Virginia Madsen, Kevin Kline, Maya Rudolf, et al, look like they are having fun and their bonhomie is contagious. Altman even makes a movie star out of PHC host, Garrison Keillor, who is charmingly bemused by it all. The intimations of mortality that hang around the edges of this going away party are doubly touching in light of Altman’s recent passing. Whether an angel in a white trench coat appeared to guide the great director to a heaven where he can kibitz with the likes of George Cukor, John Cassavetes, Billy Wilder and Akira Kurosawa we will never know, but he certainly went out on a high note.
HERE are some other movies I really liked in 2006:
LITTLE CHILDREN: This very literary, yet impressively cinematic adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s novel focuses on the special insanity induced by living in suburbia, where folks move “for the good of their children.”
While her husband is away at work during the day and pursuing his new passion for internet pornography at night, a bored mom with a Masters degree (Kate Winslet – absolutely wonderful as always) and a confused former High School football hero, (Patrick Wilson) left behind to take care of his son as his wife’s career in the big city takes off, drift into an affair. Meanwhile their community becomes obsessed by the presence of a pedophile (a searing performance by former child star, Jackie Earle Hayley, that feels so real it is actually painful to watch) who has been released into the custody of his long suffering but loving mother. The ties that bind parent and child and the profound ambiguity many women feel about being “good mothers” are frankly explored in this challenging film that will reward repeated viewings. In fact, I can’t wait to see it again. Todd Field is definitely a director to watch.
CHILDREN OF MEN & INSIDE MAN: a futuristic paranoid thriller full of atmosphere and an ingenious bank heist, both anchored by the terrific CLIVE OWEN.
BLOOD DIAMOND: A rousing, old fashioned, action-adventure story with a new age conscience. Set in contemporary Africa, Leonardo DiCaprio gives his all as a hardened player with a heart of gold, dodging machetes on the trail of the big diamond that will transform his life. Leo really comes into his own as a great romantic leading man in the grand tradition here and delivers a wonderfully satisfying performance that breaks your heart a little.
CASINO ROYALE: Bond is blonde and Daniel Craig does the series proud. Director Martin Campbell throws in everything but the kitchen sink — there are 2 or 3 action sequences too many and you can see some of the plot turns coming from a mile off, but there are lots of fun moments and the opening chase scene is a doozy – worth the price of admission alone.
MARIE ANTOINETTE: I thought Kirsten Dunst was endearing as the teenage queen bored out of her gourd and that Sofia Coppola really got her dilemma – a husband who didn’t want to have sex, a kingdom full of hateful gossips, and scads of money to burn on clothes and cake. She was clueless about the troubles in Paris and just trying to keep her head above water at Versailles. The storytelling was kind of clunky, but you really can’t fault the eye-popping visual treatment. I loved the Monolo Blahnik music video right in the middle!
THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA: A well done Hollywood comedy with an audacious star performance by Meryl Streep as a tough dame running a NYC Fashion bible like Vogue. Emily Blunt also makes a splash as her bitchy assistant.
INFAMOUS: Timing is everything and Douglas McGrath’s Truman Capote film came second – just a year after Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-winning performance, so it has been unjustly ignored. It is stylish, very smart, sobering, and a triumph in its own right. Toby Jones also does great things with the incomparable Tru and it’s fun to compare the telling of the same story in the two films. McGrath’s emphasis on how this artist sold his soul to the devil is haunting.
BOBBY: I wasn’t looking forward to seeing a film about Bobby Kennedy’s assassination but that isn’t what this film is about and so, it took me by surprise. Emilio Estevez has made a movie full of heart about a day in the life of the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. – the day when Kennedy won the 1968 California primary. Estevez has a great touch with actors and there are many wonderful cameos from Sharon Stone as the hotel hairdresser, Helen Hunt as an insecure trophy wife, Laurence Fishburne and Freddy Rodriguez as chef and busboy, Lindsay Lohan as a teen marrying a classmate against her parent’s wishes to help keep him out of Vietnam, and Ashton Kutcher as a dealer turning two young campaign workers on to their first LSD trip. Estevez is clearly fascinated by the palpable feeling of hope for the future Kennedy awoke in this wide variety of Americans and the film left me hoping for a return of that kind of feeling for the future of our nation.
VENUS &
MISS POTTER: Two lovely small surprises came at the very end of 2006. VENUS is the sentimental tale of an old ladies man and his last love, a crude, working class lass. Peter O’Toole is now in his 70’s, but looks at least 10 years older, due, one would hope, to a life of enjoying himself 24/7. He still holds the screen with the same one of a kind charisma he exuded as a dazzlingly handsome young star on the rise. He has a bunch of fine scenes with an old chum, played by Leslie Philipps and some good moments with Vanessa Redgrave, as his ex wife. O’Toole has an amazing voice but as with all great screen actors, he never needs to talk to get your attention, his face says it all and no one has ever had a face like this old pro.
MISS POTTER is also a very sentimental but rathuh special film done with impeccable taste. This one is about Beatrix Potter, the creator of Peter Rabbit and many other enchanting children’s books. It performs the great balancing act of hovering just above treacly, but never quite touching it. It is a small story (like Potter’s beautiful little books) but it sneaks up on you. Renee Zellweger has the wonderful talent of believing and trusting in her characters and truly investing herself in them. Her rapport with Ewan McGregor is what screen chemistry between co-stars is supposed to be all about.
And last but not least, that brings us to BABEL. Many moments from this very ambitious film stick in my head like still photographs — two young brothers playing with a gun on a desolate mountaintop in Morocco, an anguished American (Brad Pitt) alpha male trying to keep his temper and save his wife’s life via long distance telephone, a Mexican nanny (outstanding performance by Adrianna Barraza!) playing substitute mamma to two blonde children, wandering desparately through the desert separating Mexico and the U.S. with one of them in her arms, a deaf Japanese teenager searching for love and recognition, wandering through a disco with blaring music she cannot hear — they are all trying to make a connection.
I really admired Alejandro Gonzallez Inarritu’s first film, Amores Perros, detested 21 Grams and am on the fence about this one. Inarritu and his screenwriter, Guillermo Arriga, are also struggling to make a connection between all these disparate human beings and it felt a little forced. I got it, I got it — we are not so different from each other as we may believe.
The camerawork is absolutely unforgettable and this film deserves your time. Let me know what you think.
I look forward to catching up with the ones I missed, like L’Enfant, The Fountain, Sherrybaby & The Death of Monsieur Levascou and letting you know about the ones to come in 2007 – next up: LOOK OUT FOR PHILIP HAAS’S THE SITUATION.
(Contact JAN ALBERT at ophelia@angel.net)
~BEST of 2006 |
Posted in Movie Reviews | By Jan Albert | January 12th, 2007, 12:45am
JOSEPH CROSS and ANNETTE BENNING in RUNNING WITH SCISSORS
Film Review
November 7, 2006 by JAN ALBERT
IT’S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD:
RUNNING WITH SCISSORS is a cinematic ode to childhood that falls somewhere
between I Remember Mama and Mommie Dearest.
This is the perfect film for anyone who thinks they come from the most dysfunctional family
in the world. It will make you laugh a lot and realize that you don’t even come close.
Augusten Burroughs, whose crazy mother gave him away to her even crazier psychotherapist
to raise, holds that title. He survived his completely wacked out childhood to write a
best selling memoir that has now been turned into a movie.
RUNNING WITH SCISSORS is a first film for director Ryan Murphy, who
created the TV series, Nip/Tuck, which certainly sees the blend of humor and
pathos in the frenzied way we edit our lives and bodies and present them to the world.
Murphy and his set and costume designers (Richard Sherman and Lou Eyrich) have a blast
recreating the 1970’s fashions, rooms and scenes that surround young Augusten. It is pure
eye candy, beautifully rendered, from the platform shoes to the consciousness raising
sessions Augusten’s mother leads in their living room. Annette Benning really rises to
the occasion as a woman whose delusions of grandeur are at first hysterically funny,
then gradually become seriously disturbing and scary. If only the movie had followed
her extremely brave performance, it would have been a classic. As it is, it skims
the surface for the humor in the situation.
The supporting characters, brought to life by a perfect cast, all have their moments,
including Brian Cox as the quack doctor who offers to take Augusten off his mom’s hands
(so she can devote her complete energy to her analysis), Jill Clayburgh as his distracted
wife, and Evan Rachel Wood as Augusten’s closest friend, despite the fact that she tries
to use him as an electro-shock therapy experiment. Still, Joseph Fiennes is my personal
favorite. He’s come along way from Shakespeare in Love (in which he played
the besotted bard) to play the leather-wearing, 35-year-old “adopted” son of this strange
family who steals Augusten’s virginity at the age of 14. Fiennes somehow manages to
make the viewer care about this crazy cad and he delivers a poetry reading that I assure
you is worth the price of admission alone.
Joseph Cross portrays Augusten as a wry observer to the sideshow that
is his life rather than a participant, and maybe in fact that’s how he survived, by distancing
himself and pretending this was all happening to a character who merely shared his name.
Many kids in crazy families grow up fast because they must become parent to their own
parents, if you know what I mean. But as a movie viewer, after giggling with disbelief
at the series of unbelievable disasters Augusten endures, I wanted to dig in and pull
with him to escape and thrive, rather than experiencing it second hand. The film doesn’t
ultimately provide that kind of catharsis, but there’s a happy ending and it does send
you home smiling at the stangeness and resilience of human beings.
~Running With Scissors |
Posted in Movie Reviews | By Jan Albert | November 7th, 2006, 9:26am
GENE HACKMAN and AL PACINO (!!) in the 1973 film classic: SCARECROW
Film Review
November 1, 2006 by JAN ALBERT
Movie Night with JONATHAN LETHEM
Part of IFC Center’s Speical Guest-Curator Series,
with Director Jerry Schatzberg,
Thursday, November 9 at 7:30 pm
Award-winning author Jonathan Lethem will appear in person at the IFC Center Thursday,
November 9 at 7:30 to present a rare screening of SCARECROW, joined by
his special guest, the film’s editor, Jerry Schatzberg.
A 70s road-movie classic shot by the legendary Vilmos Zsigmond, SCARECROW
(1973) stars Gene Hackman and Al Pacino as two drifters, Max and Lion, who warily form a
friendship as they hitchhike across the country. The film won the Palme d’Or for Best Film
at the Cannes Film Festival.
Jonathan Lethem published his first novel, Gun with Occasional Music, in 1994.
He first garnered major critical and audience attention with Motherless Brooklyn (1999),
a tale of a private detective with Tourette syndrome, which won the National Book
Critics Circle Award. Among his recent works are The Fortress of Solitude
(2003), a semi-autobiographical novel set in late-970’s Brooklyn, and a collection of
essays, The Disappointment Artist (2005). In 2005, Lethem was named
recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship grant. He lives in Brooklyn.
Jerry Schatzberg was an established professional photographer, with work published in
Vogue and McCalls, before he turned to filmmaking. Among
his credits as a director are The Panic in Needle Park
(1971), The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) and Street Smart
(1987).
In the Movie Nights Program, the IFC Center turns over a theater to special guests
and lets them call the shots. Audiences can discover what some of their
favorite authors, musicians, artists and filmmakers would pick if it were Movie Night
at their house. Participants appear in person to share why they made their selections:
to acknowledge the brilliance of a timeless classic, spotlight an unsung gem, or defend
a guilty pleasure. Past guests include the filmmaker David Gordon Green, Slovenian theorist
and philosopher Slavoj Zizek, singer-songwriter-actor Will Oldham, director and
Monty Python alum Terry Gilliam, and French auteur Gaspar Noz.
Tickets for the evening are $12 general admission/$10 seniors.
Proceeds from the Movie Night benefit 826NYC, a nonprofit organization dedicated to
supporting students’ writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students
to write.
www.826nyc.org
IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas at West 3rd Street, box office: 212-924-7771.
For showtimes, advance tickets, and more information, visit ifcenter.com
~Movie Night with Jonathan Lethem/Nov 9 – Scarecrow |
Posted in Movie Reviews | By Jan Albert | November 1st, 2006, 5:07pm
Film Review
October 24, 2006 by JAN ALBERT
Film Lovers rejoice! The great movie drought of 2006 is finally over!
Now, there are so many good films flooding the theatres it’s hard to keep up.
Here are some pick hits in no particular order:
MATT DAMON and LEONARDO DiCAPRIO in THE DEPARTED
THE DEPARTED: A pure blast of testosterone! This is what you go to
the movies for – a cracking good story which picks you up and doesn’t let you go – the
big screen filled with nail biting tension and handsome guys behaving badly and nobly.
You’ve got Matt Damon playing a bad cop posing as a good guy and Leo DiCaprio,
(wound so tight he looks like he’ll shatter) playing a good cop burrowed deep in the
dastardly gang of a Boston mob boss, played by Jack Nicholson.
The three leads are surrounded by a truly awesome cast of supporting players who make
the most of William Monaghan’s blistering bravura dialogue, including Alec Baldwin,
Martin Sheen, Vera Farmiga, and Mark Wahlberg (yes, Marky Mark!), who all but
steals the picture from under the noses of all these pros in just a handful of scenes, as
a grandstanding bully boy, who nonetheless is on the side of the angels in this
Shakespearean tale that illuminates the large grey area that life really is.
Martin Scorcese masterfully orchestrates the action and keeps you at the edge of
your seat, waiting to see which of these good/bad boys will win the day. One
quibble: for a film that so masterfully observes the shades of good and evil in every
man, how come this excellent director and screenwriter settled for giving the female
police shrink torn between the two main characters, such a one note role to play?
This terrific film would have been even better if the woman’s part had been
as subtle and complex as the male characters! Still, all in all, let’s hear it for the BOYS!
Can’t wait to see it again.
HELEN MIRREN and JAMES CROMWELL in THE QUEEN
HELEN MIRREN RULES AS THE QUEEN: Well, here’s a movie with a
great part for a woman, and actress Helen Mirren exceeds even this devoted fan’s
expectations. She gives a restrained and truly riveting performance as Queen Elizabeth
during the tumultuous week following Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in 1997.
I saw this flick a few weeks ago and still haven’t been able to get it completely out of my mind,
which is always a good sign in an age where movie plots vanish from your brain cells
before you even leave the movie theater.
Screenwriter/playwright Peter Morgan has made a bit of a parlor trick of filling in
the imagined scenes and conversations behind the real world news we see in sound bites
on TV. Previously, he crafted a teleplay called THE DEAL, based on
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s relationship with his political mentor-turned bitter rival,
Gordon Brown. He is also the brain behind another current film,
THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, (now playing in theaters – review to follow),
which takes us behind the palace walls of dictator, Idi Amin, as seen through the eyes of the
young Scottish doctor who became his private physician. FROST-NIXON, the
forthcoming 2007 film, (written by Morgan & directed by Ron Howard) builds on the
famous series of interviews David Frost conducted with the American President.
In THE QUEEN, Morgan weaves in much of the real news footage we saw
again and again and again of Diana bemoaning “the 3 people” in her show marriage to
Prince Charles and the scenes of the British people arriving at the palace with tons of flowers
following Di’s untimely death, waiting with increasing fury for the royal family to appear
and show some emotion! Then the writer makes a great leap away from the facts as we know
them, to present a fully imagined portrait of the royal family under seige; a ruler who has
been carefully groomed to keep her feelings to herself since she ascended the throne as a
teenager and the modern young Prime Minister who helps bring her up to speed with
some 20th century spin control.
I have always admired Helen Mirren’s fearlessness as an actress, tackling everything from
Tennessee Williams to tough cop, Inspector Jane Tennyson, but this is an especially fine
moment. Somehow, she abandons all vanity and becoms the matronly, bad hat-wearing,
big black pocket-book-carrying queen. Without letting down the stiff upper lip altogether,
she conveys the confusion, stubborn pride, humility and pain, Elizabeth must have felt
at not being the crowd favorite at this strange turning point. She makes the Queen a
human being.
One of my all-time favorite actors, James Cromwell (Babe’s farmer dad, as well as the evil
bad guy in LA Confidential), is infuriatingly convincing as Philip, Queen Elizabeth’s
prig of a husband and Michael Gleason is fine as Tony Blair, shaking his head at the
complete cluelessness of the royals in the face of the public’s grief and scoring his first big
political points when he steps into the breach to hail Diana as “the people’s princess.”
Director Stephen Frears’ attention to visual detail and subtle ‘fly on the wall’ camera eye
keeps the viewer locked into this intriguing glimpse behind the throne, but the show rests
squarely on the shoulders of The Queen and Helen Mirren more than earns her crown
(and maybe the Oscar?? at award time).
GWYNETH PALTROW in INFAMOUS
TOBY JONES and ISABELLA ROSSELLINI in INFAMOUS
HAVE A MARTINI AND DON’T MISS INFAMOUS, even if you think you’ve
seen it all before: There’s a saying in the wonderful world of journalism from whence I come,
‘Give 5 writers (or producers or directors) the same story to tell and you’ll end up with five
completely different stories’. That’s what makes INFAMOUS, aka “the other
Truman Capote movie”, especially fascinating in my view. It comes just a year after CAPOTE
won Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar for his extraordinary performance in the title role.
Both films (which cover the exact same period in Truman Capote’s life – when he researched
and wrote his masterpiece, In Cold Blood were actually in production at the
same time. One can only imagine the groans and gasps this strange timing must have induced
in both camps and yet, after seeing INFAMOUS, I can report: there’s definitely
room in this world for two different takes on this incomparable character.
The two films are completely different in tone, CAPOTE was more explicit about
the way the nakedly ambitious Truman sold his soul for success – a deal with the Devil
he never stopped paying for. It touches on how a journalist manipulates the truth in order
to tell ‘his’ story, and how Truman came face to face with his “evil twin/dark brother”
when he met murderer Perry Smith in Kansas.
INFAMOUS is more taken with Truman’s legendary charm – how a
flamboyant Southern gay man with a strange and unforgettable voice used his formidable
wit and sensitivity to become the pet of Manhattan’s upper crust. He remarks to Babe or
Slim or another one of his “swans” (as he called the society ladies who took him to lunch),
– “I can alchemize my pain into art, but at what cost?” (and it cost him plenty when he later
betrayed their trust by using their life stories to propel his fiction.)
This is the Truman I remember seeing during my childhood on the Tonight Show with
Johnny Carson and thinking how great it was that there was room on this planet for such
kooky, unusual people who stood out from the crowd.
Both films spend a lot of time at the scene of the crime and it is fun to compare the
actors’ and directors’ choices. First of all, British actor Toby Jones, (he’s the voice of
Dobby in the Harry Potter films) is tiny, like Truman was. Personality-wise, I have no
idea if the role required the kind of stretch we saw Philip Seymour Hoffman make,
but Jones is quite wonderful in his own right. I thought Sandra Bullock was a
revelation as Harper Lee, (Truman’s childhood friend, who used his persona for the
character of Scout’s neighbor boy in To Kill A Mocking Bird) lovely and grave.
Likewise, Jeff Daniels (as the Kansas prosecutor Truman must woo to get access to his
story) and Daniel Craig as Perry Smith play their parts all together differently than their
counterparts in CAPOTE. INFAMOUS stresses the romance that
developed between the writer and the prisoner.
The way CAPOTE’s director, Bennet Miller, painted the stark, lonely landscape
got under your skin. INFAMOUS director/writer Douglas McGrath captures
the social scene of Christmastime in small town Kansas; the living rooms of the residents
who finally invite Truman into their homes to hear him tell how he beat Humphrey Bogart
at arm wrestling. McGrath and his production designer, Judy Becker, and costume designer,
Ruth Meyers, revel in Diane Vreeland’s famous red room, Manhattan’s chichi dining spots
and Truman’s satin sheets and velvet dressing gown.
Much of the characters’ dialogue is taken from their own mouths – as quoted in
George Plimpton’s 1998 oral history: Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends,
Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall his Turbulent Career. It would be
hard to improve on this stuff and Doug McGrath includes some of the best of it here.
Lastly, (really firstly!) INFAMOUS has one of the most stunning opening scenes
of any film in recent memory. Truman and Babe are at El Morocco, cocktails in hand,
enjoying a swinging number by a beautiful chanteuse (played to perfection by Gwyneth Paltrow,
who never reppears in the film after this scene!). She has the crowd in the palm of her hand,
then suddenly seems to lose her place in the song and stops for the longest moment, as the
audience holds its breath, wondering if the star has crashed to earth or will shine again.
That is the tightrope walk Truman Capote took and it is something to behold while it
lasts.
thoughts on: THANK YOU FOR SMOKING and RUNNING WITH SCISSORS to follow shortly.
~The Departed, The Queen, & Infamous |
Posted in Movie Reviews | By Jan Albert | October 24th, 2006, 3:16pm
Photograph by GLEN WILSON – Courtesy of UNIVERSAL
Film Review
April 24, 2006 by JAN ALBERT
AMERICAN DREAMZ
Opens April 21, 2006
I laughed alot at American Dreamz. Maybe I am relaxing my standards, but I think most critics were a little too tough on this genial little film, penalizing director/writer Paul Weitz (American Pie) for not going far enough.
I applaud him for even coming up with the idea of combining an American Idol-like talent show, the threat of terrorism, and the White House of George W. Bush into a comedy.
Briefly, the story centers around production of American Dreamz, the nation’s #1 TV show, and what happens when an Arab terrorist infiltrates as a contestant and the President of the U.S. appears as a guest judge to boost his plummeting popularity in the polls.
After an acid-tongued, sharp start, things get a little softer, but if the film doesn’t soar
throughout, there are still several priceless moments. I loved it when a terrorist watching American Dreamz in a desert tent via satellite, exclaims rapturously after watching their sleeper cell contestant warble “My Way”, – “he nailed it!”
Mandy Moore as a wanna be Idol with a heart of brass and Hugh Grant as the swarmy Simon Cowellesque-impresario of the show – 2 utterly self involved people who briefly need each other – more than acquit themselves, and the rest of the players (including Dennis Quaid as the President, dumber than a board but with the stirrings of a conscience and William Dafoe as the Karl Rove power behind the throne) look like they are having such a good time, it’s infectious.
For the film historians among you, compare this to Bye Bye Birdy, rather than The Americanization of Emily.
True, it doesn’t sink its teeth into this rich material the way a great satire like THANK YOU FOR SMOKING does, but it wins my vote for at least nibbling around the edges. I give American Dreamz a solid middle of the road B (an A to Universal’s promotion team for the film’s tag line — “IMAGINE A COUNTRY WHERE MORE PEOPLE VOTE FOR A POP IDOL THAN THEIR NEXT PRESIDENT.”)
Relax and enjoy it, then go home and read a newspaper like the President in the film does.
~American Dreamz |
Posted in Movie Reviews | By Jan Albert | April 24th, 2006, 12:15pm
Film Review
February 13, 2006 by JAN ALBERT
… entertaining, with lots of really interesting archival footage.
who gets to call it art?, a film by Peter Rosen
PLAYING AT THE FILM FORUM – LAST 2 DAYS !!! – ENDS FEB 14th – TAKE YOUR SWEETHEART !!
FILM FORUM
~who gets to call it art? |
Posted in Movie Reviews | By Jan Albert | February 13th, 2006, 3:15pm
