Category: Reviews Page 4 of 10

Early Preview Screening: Hippie Hippie Shake

On March 10, 2009

This is my first film post over at Row Three, a group film blog that I’m going to be writing for now. I’ll still do stuff here, don’t worry. Not like I was currently doing a lot anyway. And when I post stuff over there, I’ll link it from here.

Oz magazine was a leading publication of the 1960s countercultural underground press, using satirical humor, psychedelic art, and scathing anti-establishment political articles to critique the status quo of the time, first in Australia and then in London. Its envelope-pushing content and endorsement of the expression of free love in pretty much any form landed its editors in obscenity trials in both countries. After being acquitted upon appeal in the Australia trial (1964), main editor Richard Neville and editor/artist Martin Sharp headed to London in 1966 to recreate the magazine in the center of the countercultural movement. They were joined there by Nevilleâ€™s girlfriend Louise and other contributors, notably Germaine Greer, who would later become very well-known for her feminist literary critical work The Female Eunuch. By 1970, Ozâ€™s editors again found themselves indicted for obscenity and intent to corrupt minors.

The upcoming film Hippie Hippie Shake, adapted from Nevilleâ€™s memoir, focuses on London Oz from its inception (Neville and Sharpâ€™s arrival in London) through the obscenity trial. I saw the film at a work-in-progress preview, so it wouldnâ€™t be fair to give a definitive review on it at this point, but Iâ€™d like to at least give some impressions of the film as it is now. Most of the issues I had with the film were pacing and narrative issues – Iâ€™m interested to see if director Beeban Kidron (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) will be able to iron those out before the film is released (it currently has no release date set).

Read the rest at Row Three (and please make any comments about the film or review over there, too – thanks!)

Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

By Jandy

On January 12, 2009

In Film, Reviews

directed by David Fincher
starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton
USA 2008; screened 7 January 2009 at Laemmle Theatres

Benjamin Button is different than every one else. He was born old, and grows younger as everyone else grows older. Along the way he lives as an ancient-looking child in an old-folks home, with adoptive black parents, works on a tugboat before and during World War II, has a fling with a diplomat’s wife in Moscow, and carries on an on-again-off-again lifelong true love romance with childhood friend Daisy. As might be expected, this both ends sadly and takes a long time. Not that either of those things is necessarily bad. In fact the main part of the story is handled quite well, mostly well-paced, certainly well performed by Brad Pitt and especially Cate Blanchett, and generally solid.

Unfortunately, Button’s extraordinary story is framed by a present-day narrative of the dying Daisy having her daughter read Benjamin’s diary aloud to her. The film cuts back to this narrative throughout Button’s story, a device which really only works once or twice when certain major surprises are revealed. Beyond that, it’s fluff with little point beyond emotional manipulation. (Even more questionable is the threatening hurricane, which turns out to be Katrina – WHY?) The film would’ve been much tighter without it. Besides the frame story, there’s also another story old Daisy tells about a backwards-running clock, which obviously has a thematic tie-in, but basically never comes up again and has no real significance. I swear, people trying to make important, award-winning films need to learn to hire good editors.

The concept of the film is fantastic – as well as the obvious implications of Benjamin’s backwards life for his relationship with Daisy, the underlying questions of what it would be like to be thirty with the experience of a sixty-year-old (and vice versa) are fascinating. The film only touches on them briefly, and doesn’t try to get too philosophical about it, which is probably good. After all, the focus is the romance, and though it’s strange that everyone seems to just accept Benjamin’s situation with very few questions, leaving the more profound implications as implicit suggestions rather than explicit explorations is a more subtle, more evocative approach.

However, the film is ultimately more interesting in concept than in execution, which is a little disappointing because we’ve come to expect excellence in both from director David Fincher. Once in a while an especially well-lighted scene would remind me Fincher was directing (like the gorgeous shot of Daisy dancing in the silhouette), and one sequence in particular was brilliant on its own – the almost whimsical scene with the car accident. The problem is that the sequence doesn’t fit into the rest of the very standard, very non-whimsical cinematic style. I really would’ve liked to have seen the whole film done with this sort of imagination and stylistic flair. After all, it IS a fantasy.

Of course, Cate Blanchett is perfect, as she always is, in a role that calls for her to age from about 18 to over 60, while Pitt is more than adequate de-aging the same age range. (I don’t mean to sound like I’m dissing Pitt – he just isn’t given quite as much to do, given Benjamin’s general easy-going nature.) The make-up and CGI work is highly convincing, except it did get a little distracting as Pitt’s younger versions kept evoking his earlier film roles – “Look, that’s Pitt like he is right now! And there he is circa Fight Club! And circa Legends of the Fall! And hey, there he is in Thelma and Louise!” But perhaps that’s a failure of my own imagination.

Overall, I did like the film, but it’s easily a half hour too long due to the dumb framing device, and it’s more manipulative than I would like. And the fact that I expect more from Fincher doesn’t help. Above Average

New Release Review: Australia

By Jandy

On January 11, 2009

In Film, Reviews

directed by Baz Lurhmann
starring: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman
Australia/USA 2008; screened 29 November 2008 at AMC Theatres

I admit that I haven’t read many reviews of Australia in toto, but the snippets I have read and the general critical feeling indicates that most critics didn’t think it was very good. At all. And in fact, in many ways, they’re right. Australia is a mess. But it’s a gorgeous, sloppy, enjoyable mess.

Australia is not the great epic of the Australian people, or indeed, a great epic at all. It is not a particularly innovative piece of filmmaking. It is not indicative of a specifically Australian filmmaking sensibility, nor a very strong example of Baz Lurhmann’s own flamboyant filmmaking style. There’s a bit of a sense of failed ambition hanging about the film, because you can tell Lurhmann wanted at least some of those things to be true, especially the first one.

An English noblewoman travels to Australia to get her husband to sell his plantation there and return to England. Instead, her husband is killed and she stays on to run the plantation with the help of an Australian cowboy known only as Drover (because that’s what he is, a cattle drover). Meanwhile, she takes a young aboriginal boy under her protection. Lurhmann’s attempt to bring together a uniquely Australian family pulled from each of Australia’s roots (English, aboriginal, and outback drifters) is obvious to an extreme, which is part of why it fails as a national epic – it’s too calculated.

In addition to the overdetermined theme, the film suffers from tonal inconsistency. It can’t decide whether it’s a farce (the first half-hour is full of Luhrmann-esque quick close-ups and exaggerated facial expressions, as if he wanted to remind us that he’s the one who directed Moulin Rouge before settling into a much more staid style for the rest of the film), western, romance, war, family drama, elegy, social rights message picture, travel brochure or national epic. The western and war sections, especially, are so divisively separated that Lurhmann might have been better off making two films instead of one.

But even after that laundry list of defects, and I could think of more if I wanted to, I can’t get past how much I plain enjoyed watching the film, and I would go see it again in a heartbeat. It’s old-fashioned classic filmmaking in the Hollywood tradition. I hate to keep bringing up David Bordwell’s The Way Hollywood Tells It all the time as if it’s the only film theory book I’ve ever read, but it’s applicable here again – elements in the narrative are carefully placed so as to lead the audience to expect certain things to happen, and they do. So yes, it’s predictable, but satisfyingly so. Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman play their characters as larger-than-life mythic figures rather than real people, because that’s what they are. Kidman especially works in her role not because she turns in an outstanding acting performance (she’s done that far better in other films), but because she channels old Hollywood star quality so well when she lets herself.

I’ll grant you I’m a sucker for westerns, and I definitely loved that part the best – there’s nothing revisionist about it, and the first half of the film could easily have been made during the golden age of westerns, full of gorgeous vistas, sweeping music and laconic hero figures. Then, suddenly, World War II starts, and it’s almost a whole different movie, which I didn’t like quite as much as the western, though it’s not particularly bad.

So Australia is a mess, yes, trying to pack too many varied things into one film that never quite meshed into a cohesive whole. But it was a very comfortable-feeling mess, and I unabashedly loved watching it. As a compromise between knowing it’s nowhere near objectively good and my subjective love for it, I give it an Above Average.

[Weird side note – according to IMDb, the aspect ratio is 2.35:1, but I would’ve sworn I saw it in 1.85:1. Anyone else see it in the narrower ratio, or was I just on crack? I even made a note about it in my notebook at the time, that it seemed odd to shoot an epic in 1.85:1.]

Film Classics – Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

By Jandy

On November 9, 2008

In Film, Reviews

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

directed by F.W. Murnau
starring George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston
USA 1927; screened 8 July 2008 at the Silent Movie Theatre, Los Angeles

Let me just quickly tell you about me and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. It’s been on my see-soon list for years, as one of the most highly regarded silent films ever. Initially I added it to my Netflix queue, knowing it had been released on DVD as part of a Fox box set though not individually. Netflix apparently lost their copy or something and decided not to replace it, putting in the “unavailable” section of my queue instead. Plan B: Wait for it to come on during TCM’s Silent Sunday Nights or 31 Days of Oscar program. Several months later, it did, and I smiled and set my DVR. Which decided to flake and tape only the first five minutes. Foiled again. About a year later, I moved to LA and what should be showing at the local repertory cinema? Yep, Sunrise accompanied by a live band with an original score. And it was one of the best cinematic experiences of my life, so apparently the cinema powers-that-be just knew that I needed to wait and see it in a cinema rather than on DVD or TV. Thank you.

I’ve heard over and over that silent film had reached a heady apex of artistry by the 1920s that was shattered by the coming of sound and its attendant clunky equipment, but I’m not sure I ever fully believed in the poetic power of silent film as a fully realized art form until I saw Sunrise.Â I’d been impressed by individual elements of several silent films – the physical comedy of Buster Keaton, the pathos of Charlie Chaplin, the Expressionist oddness of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari -Â but never had I seen a film that combines the traditional qualities of silent film with a such a timeless sense of humanity and beauty.

The story is simple. A husband ignores his sweet but inconsequential wife in favor of a femme fatale (or vamp, since we’re in the 1920s) from the big city. The vamp convinces the husband to kill the wife to get her out of the way, but as he’s about to do this, he can’t and instead takes the wife to the city and they reconstitute their love. The very simplicity of the story, however, is what allows director F.W. Murnau room to exercise his Expressionist-influenced visual flair and create a dark, moody landscape for the characters to inhabit.

Near the beginning, the vamp coyly leads the husband through the wet and disorienting marshes near his farm, a scene ripe for interpretation by Freudian critics, let me just say. Similarly, the near-murder scene is overacted by both the husband and the wife, but Murnau uses the overdetermined silent movie acting style to great psychological advantage – out of context, the scene could easily be laughable today, but no one in the cinema was laughing. Later, the city is a bustling, dangerous place, showcasing the physicality and motion that silent films perfected before sound came and changed the game.

Though I’m far from seeing all the silent films available (which is still only a small percentage of the ones that were made), I feel fairly confident in declaring that Sunrise represents the epitome of silent film art. It’s not for nothing that it won “Outstanding Artistic Achievement” at the first ever Academy Awards – an award that was never given again. If you can see it in a cinema, do. Otherwise, keep your eye on TCM, as they do play it occasionally.

Film Classics: Mickey One

By Jandy

On October 8, 2008

In Film, Reviews

Mickey One

directed by Arthur Penn
starring: Warren Beatty, Alexandra Stewart, Hurt Hatfield, Franchot Tone
USA 1965; screened 19 September 2008 at the Silent Movie Theatre, Los Angeles

In the mid-1960s, Warren Beatty worked to push the envelope of possible leading man roles in Hollywood. Influenced by the anti-heroes and non-commital style of the French New Wave, he sought as actor and producer to move away from the typical pretty boy roles in bland films that other Hollywood actors were performing.

In the rarely-screened Mickey One, he plays a stand-up comic on the run from the mobsters who gave him his start and now own him. Such a plot sounds like the set-up for a farce along the lines of Some Like It Hot, but in the hands of Beatty and director Arthur Penn, it becomes instead a dark, paranoia-filled trip through the underbelly of the nightclub industry. It’s never entirely clear whether the mob is still after Mickey as he slowly returns to the stage, supported by Jenny, the girl who urges him that his fears are unfounded. The hints that they are may merely be in his head, transferred to the audience through our identification with him.

Unfortunately, Beatty and Penn don’t always get the tonal balance between American crime film and New Wave drama quite right. New Wave heroes project a devil-may-care bravado even over their inner fears – a confidence Mickey can’t even believably feign most of the time. He desperately wants to know who exactly is after him, why, and what he can do to either confront and eliminate them or escape them permanently; but he is too afraid to actually try to find out – until the end when recklessness overcomes even his paranoia. The only times the awkward tension between deterministic apathy and paranoid truth-seeking seems to work unequivocally are during Mickey’s comedy routines (including his impromptu goofing when he first meets Jenny). When he’s performing, his forced bravado and tormented anguish merge uncomfortably, yes, but believably, turning him into the chatty version of Truffaut and Godard’s quietly desperate characters – he just wears his desperation on the outside instead.

The difficulty of melding New Wave styles into American film stems, to some degree, from the philosophical differences between France and the United States in the early to mid 1960s. France had lost two World Wars (or won only with foreign aid after surrendering), undergone a painful conflict with Algeria, and was nearing the political upheavals of the late 1960s – combined with the influence of existentialism, the fatalism of New Wave heroes is not wholly unexpected. The United States was still riding the tail end of the post-war boom, and though American noir of the 1940s and 50s had its share of existential heroes, American films tend to be more optimistic. (And the 1960s mainstream Hollywood that Beatty was reacting against could be almost sickeningly optimistic.) Yet, it’s not an impossible feat – Beatty and Penn would incorporate New Wave style into a quintessentially American story perfectly only two years later in Bonnie & Clyde. So count Mickey One as a not wholly successful but still extremely interesting and worthwhile experiment on the way to the heights of Bonnie & Clyde.

*note: I’m sure there are other influences on Mickey One; Cassavetes seems probable. I use the New Wave because I’m more familiar with it, and sort of in love with it right now. Plus the programmer at the Silent Movie Theatre mentioned the New Wave in relation to Mickey One and Bonnie & Clyde, so I had it in my head while I was watching the film.

Above Average