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Mad Men

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

There are Robert Rodriguez movies where the exuberance and inventiveness and laziness and indifference to coherence gel into something amusingly off-the-rails (Desperado, Planet Terror); and then there are the movies where the alchemy is less rewarding: the result occasionally amusing, insufferably pleased with its cuteness, and ultimately redundant, boring and annoyingly pointless (some of From Dusk Til Dawn, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and any of his kids movies). Machete, curiously co-directed with frequent editor Ethan Maniquis, is a bit of both, essentially a mid-tier Rodriguez picture.

Rodriguez once had a shot at being more than a ridiculously prolific self-referential B-movie hotshot. El Mariachi, despite famously costing virtually nothing, is disciplined and intense, a sweaty little genre cheapie that anyone should be proud of; and Roadracers, the Showtime made-for-TV movie that saw Rodriguez tending to frivolities such as tone and performance, is potentially even better. Rodriguez is clearly capable of more, but he’s wily enough to have established a career and reputation where his shoot-first-write-never aesthetic is generally cheered.

This tongue-in-cheekiness cancels Machete – a spin-off of the justifiably popular fake trailer that appeared in Grindhouse a few years ago – out. Rodriguez is aiming for a mythic quality here; a modern Mexican equivalent of the blaxploitation pictures of the 1970s, but that doesn’t mesh with the self-conscious jokes and intentional ineptitude. Pictures like Shaft or Coffy weren’t shot through a filter of irony; the crudeness was a necessity (like El Mariachi) not fashion statement, and the hunger and fury were unshakably real.

Rodriguez mostly wastes a great camera subject in Danny Trejo, a real ex-con and longtime character actor who exudes a natural, weathered, compelling authority. The set-up is promising: Trejo’s Machete is a Mexican day laborer, once a federale who was screwed over by the law in cahoots with a prominent drug dealer (Steven Seagal), who finds himself forced to assassinate a corrupt Texas senator (Robert De Niro) for shady dealings on the U.S./Mexican border. There are a few of the expected double-crosses, and so Machete is on the run, snuffing out the responsible parties still pursuing him. In films such as Heat and Sherrybaby, Trejo has revealed himself to be more than a presence; he has gravity and soul, an instinct for what he offers and what he’s doing. But Rodriguez can’t get beyond the most obvious smirky tough-guy banalities. Machete doesn’t register as an icon, because the character, or the larger issues of Mexican exploitation and government hypocrisy, clearly mean nothing beyond the money shots.

Which might still work is the money shots were especially memorable. The action, though, is mostly rhythm-less, a step back from the exuberant low-fi stagings in Desperado, or even in the underrated Planet Terror. The script, such as it is, is one of Rodriguez’s worst: there are about three bad guys and three hot chicks too many, and so they all take turns exchanging the same dull exposition. Rodriguez can be funny, and this picture is no exception: the mock promotional ads for the senator have a satirical zing, and certain roles deliver (Shea Whigham, Don Johnson, Cheech Marin, and especially Jeff Fahey). But there are just as many dud roles (Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Alba, De Niro, Seagal) and so the pleasurable bits and pieces don’t add up to anything; you begin to resent the unending circle jerkiness of it all. Many of the movies informing Machete had an underlying need, real sweat, a tension created from desperation and limitation, that sometimes allowed for a subtext greater than the sum of their parts. Machete will work with some buddies over a few PBRs, but it’s mostly shit in a vacuum that offers the condescension of rich people playing poor.

Harry Brown is another revenge picture with an aging killer that owes its existence to ancient cliches, but there’s a difference. The director, Daniel Barber, lends the stale material a grimy intensity, particularly in a legitimately great sequence where the titular character (Michael Caine) pretends to buy guns to initiate his inevitable rampage against a gang of heroin dealers who killed his last friend. The scene is obviously meant to be taken as Harry’s descent to Hell, and Barber plays the scene much longer than we expect: he extends, extends, extends, until the tension is nearly unbearable, we know this old man among diseased ghouls is pressing his luck. The scene erupts in (effectively abrupt) violence, and builds to a verbal punchline with Harry scolding his prey as he finishes him over collapsed marijuana plants. In most vigilante pictures, this would be a laugh-out-loud red meat zinger, here it only adds to the depravity.

Michael Caine has been a legend for so long that praise doesn’t really mean anything in regards to his work anymore, but, trust me, he’s good here: wounded, damaged, sick with rage and heartache and impotence. But Caine doesn’t deny Harry his charisma, the magnetic qualities; this isn’t a labored eye-an-for-an-eye bit rife with self-pity. The picture is ultimately a disappointment because it doesn’t stray far enough from what David Edelstein calls its fascist/reactionary tendencies, and the ending is a dud, but Barber, unlike Rodriguez, at least gives his legend his due, allows him his dignity.

Posted in 2010, Action, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

Beautifully Alone

Saturday, September 4th, 2010

The George Clooney project has primarily been an attempt to resurrect the angry, ambitious films of the 1970s, a seemingly magic time when the divide between “pop” and “art” movies was less tangible. Clooney has been partially successful: he only works with the most respected filmmakers (or the occasional promising newcomer), and the resulting pictures are generally well-intentioned and well-crafted, usually some of the best generally mainstream entertainments of whichever year they are released. I say partially successful because the films don’t entirely reside in “right now”, their 1970s nostalgia limits their timeliness and their personality: the movies tend to be more about “weren’t the 1970s movies awesome!” than the climate of today. This is an issue with quite a few of our noteworthy American filmmakers (a notable exception are The Coens, and they began as movie-movie jokers too.)

But the 1970s tunnel vision of our name directors is a hash for another day. I bring it up at all because Clooney’s newest vehicle, The American, exists for the same reasons, and Clooney, to his credit, has basically admitted as much in interviews. The American is a familiar fusion of high art and low genre, a formula art-genre picture. I usually use that term – “art-genre” – dismissively, because I normally sense that the creators of these sorts of pictures are deluding themselves: serving formula disguised as an instantly minted masterpiece. But I don’t get that vibe from The American, I think it knows exactly what it is.

The American is another picture about a lonely assassin rapidly approaching a point in his life that could be described as being over the hill. The assassin, of course, is seen in a botched or troubled situation in the beginning, and this, of course, prompts him to enter into a precarious scenario that is meant to be his last job. The assassin, usually, finds himself comforted by an impossibly beautiful woman, which is more believable than usual because the killer is, himself, either impossibly handsome or impossibly charismatic and debonair, with money, of course, being a non-issue. The American is unavoidably in the school of Le Samourai, and a number of other fatalistic existential noirs where everything is beautifully hopeless.

Clooney, at his most Clooney-ish (Out of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven) is a suave, glamorous bad-boy prankster who gives performances that exude more than a bit of conscious self-satire (which is a roundabout method of self-congratulation). Clooney has been compared to Cary Grant a number of times, but his strategy is more reminiscent of Warren Beatty in that the text of his “star” performances seems to be “yeah, I know I’m a lucky sonofabitch, and I know you love me anyway”. Like Beatty, Clooney likes to occasionally toy with that, to turn everything down to a simmering suggestion where the tampering down of his persona is meant to evoke something more timeless and existential. The American is one of those roles in the tradition of Clooney’s underrated performance in Solaris. Clooney doesn’t do much here that you haven’t seen before, but he’s more confidently open and matter of fact. There’s a great bit, one of Clooney’s career best, when he realizes that his Gorgeous Opportunity for Personal Salvation and Self-Actualization (Violante Placido), a prostitute he’s been seeing as a client, is asking him out for real. Clooney’s half-step, his disbelieving half-swallow, is worth seeing the picture for alone.

The movie, directed by Anton Corbijn (Control), also mercifully spares us most of the clutter inherent in the assassin-on-the-run scenario. The American is about soaking in the Italian countryside and the bodies of the young women; it is also about the minute details of putting a weapon together (which is a refreshing deviation from cliché: Clooney’s last job is one of construction, not on-the-site execution). I have read a few comparisons to Antonioni, but Corbijn isn’t that committed to his character’s state of mind at the expense of plot. Antonioni was a master of an atmosphere that told the real story at hand; Corbijn is very assured with wonderfully (and occasionally extremely) composed shots that let us feel our way around familiar territory.

This picture uses – in the tradition of these lonely hunter movies – gorgeous people, gorgeous scenery, gorgeous clothes, and movie situations as stand-ins for universal loneliness and confusion. Most of us feel the American’s detachment, his depression, his alienation, at least some of the time. This genre blows those feelings up into a vehicle that gives us the ideal embodiment of those frustrations: these troubled, seemingly unearthly, people act out a more exciting version of our tedium and uncertainty. Movie killers aren’t merely bored, they’re trapped in an existence that invites words such as “ennui”; words that sound more than a tad overblown when applied to a lonely Friday of drinking beer and watching cartoons and maybe, after a number of those beers, calling a hook-up you barely knew anyway. Corbijn and Clooney have made a strangely touching movie out of spare parts.

Posted in 2010, Crime, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

Working-Class Heroes

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Actor/co-writer Will Ferrell and director/co-writer Adam McKay have a habit of making movies that promise better ones. Anchorman is a broad absurdist comedy with shards of gender resentment; the picture seems to want to blossom into something more ambitious than its’ already-assured status as the next Caddyshack, but it’s ultimately more or less content to color within the lines. Talladega Nights is more clearly split in sensibility; there’s that long, much-discussed Sunday dinner scene with the crass product placements and the shouting and the ridiculous Jesus outbursts; and there’s those occasional intrusions into the film by (pretend) sponsors. Step Brothers is the most rambunctious, insane, and complete of the duo’s projects, but it never quite finds a target or a focus (clearly partially the point) even if it is still one of the better mainstream comedies in the last several years. A movie, I might add, with which I completely missed the point of the first time out.

The general preoccupation of these movies, besides creating varying ever-escalating opportunities for Ferrell and company to blow their tops, is the hostility that men and women tamper down in order to function in society. The point of these pictures is that that hostility is unleashed; Ferrell and his ensembles, relying on considerable improvisation, wallow in the confusion and self-consciousness and self-absorption that consumerist society encourages. This is most apparent in Step Brothers, with the intentionally overt references to the Cheesecake Factory, to Dane Cook, to Bed, Bath and Beyond. The happy ending of Step Brothers, which I initially took to be straight-forward, is, it now seems to me, meant to be ironic. Ferrell and John C. Reilly are delusional losers who, near the end, pick a different delusion in order to function more conventionally in mass society. Yet, every successful character (most memorably Ferrell’s brother’s wife) is painted as deranged and miserable, with a clock ticking over their heads toward the inevitable implosion.

The Other Guys is Ferrell and McKay’s most successfully conventional movie (though Ferrell isn’t officially credited as screenwriter this time). This movie proves that these guys can, from start to finish, make something that looks like a mainstream all-star movie, with three clearly defined acts with action beats that, while not especially memorable, are at least in league with most of what constitutes action these days. The picture is more clearly “blocked”, with more mind paid toward shots looking like shots. There’s less turn-the-camera-on-see-what-we-get spontaneity this time, most of the jokes play as if they were scripted, then rehearsed, then delivered.

Yet again, The Other Guys suggests potential for a movie that doesn’t quite materialize. The picture is initially meant as a parody of buddy cop action movies, a premise that’s, of course, as unoriginal by now as the subject of the parody itself. The Other Guys opens with a predictably loud, hyperbolic chase, with two rowdy badasses (Samuel L. Jackson and The Rock) smashing and grabbing and destroying half the city to bring down what turns out to be minor perps. Most of the first act is awash in promising jokes that don’t quite land their targets. Jackson and The Rock are too obviously posed as fascist hunks, particularly Jackson, who is entirely incapable of a performance these days that isn’t pitched to the rafters of a theater somewhere on one of the outer rings of Saturn. At first, you think that the scale here – the largest McKay has worked on – has mooted the team’s sensibility. Everything is played obvious and too buddy-buddy, including the casting of the supporting cops, which includes that one seemingly senseless, brain dead lug from the terrible tazer scene in The Hangover.

Then Jackson and The Rock leave the picture (in another promising gag that doesn’t quite pay off) and we see that the buddy cop thing is misdirection. The Other Guys are Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg; one a dweeb content with the paperwork (seen as the bitch work), the other a bad boy cop himself disgraced by a screw up (yet another promising joke that doesn’t quite work). These misfits find themselves with a case that could potentially sweep them into the limelight, to the place once occupied by Jackson and the Rock, and it is here that the movie somewhat takes off. The Other Guys is, like the other McKay/Ferrell movies, about repression and barely-checked outrage at the status quo of society, it is about our media addictions, with jokes on the inferiority complex of online writers, the physical discrepancies between people who look like Ferrell (a lot of us) and people who look like Wahlberg (not nearly as many), and the humiliating jobs that supposed bad boy cops have to take on the side (another Bed/Bath reference), among others. The picture, in short, is meant as a parody of the desperation the recent economic collapse has caused, a parody of the fame/regular guy caste system. (It is certainly no coincidence that the villain, played by Steve Coogan, is a Bernie Madoff variation, or that one of the best, most uncomfortable, jokes involves one of his henchmen supposedly killing himself.)

We see what the new found McKay (kinda) polish could build toward: contrast; a picture that opens conventionally and slowly unleashes the old Ferrell madness, which would seem crazier with a normalcy effectively established as counterpoint. Sadly, The Other Guys, a PG-13, never quite goes far enough; you keep counting the great-on-paper jokes that should be allowed to mutate into something more outrageous and thematically complete. Ferrell’s character turns out to be a hidden madman, a great idea that, again, gives the actor contrast, a starting point, a course. Ferrell is a dwarfed regular guy, a regular guy with dimensions of survival and self-preservation and canniness that Wahlberg doesn’t grasp. Ferrell, in a gag that does pay off, has an inexplicably beautiful wife (Eva Mendes), as well as a parade of ex-lovers who aren’t over him. The idea goes with the Jackson/Rock riffs in the beginning, as well as with the businessmen who are screwing everyone over – this is a little guy empowerment thing, a somewhat self-loathing parody of a guy enjoying the baubles of celebrity with nary an explanation (I wish they hadn’t delivered an explanation at all, but that joke works too.) The partners, over the course of the movie, switch places: Ferrell is the sexual aggressor, Wahlberg is the emasculated one with a woman he can’t quite get.

The picture is eventually a tribute to the anonymous working-class, and while that jives with everything that comes before, you wish that Ferrell and McKay hadn’t been so forgiving. You wish that a great sex joke between Mendes and Ferrell, with him screwing her while she’s dressed as her mother, would be allowed to grow wilder and wilder. You wish that Ferrell and Wahlberg’s wonderful performances had been allowed to reach full lunacy. You wish that Michael Keaton, who is every bit as good as you hope as the police captain, had been used in more original ways. You want, after four movies worth of implication, for these guys to throw the pop-cultural hand grenade that they seem to be capable of throwing. The Other Guys, still amusing, at least shows that McKay and Ferrell now know how to dress a wolf up in sheep’s clothing.

The Eclipse is an easy movie to overlook, but I wouldn’t recommend it, it has a modesty that is becoming and ultimately rather poignant. That has a lot to do with Ciarán Hinds and writer-director Conor McPherson’s treatment of him. The Eclipse is one of those movies where a bereaved man mostly performs quiet tasks while being quietly bereaved. The difference between this and any number of “mysterious tragedy long ago” pictures is Hinds’ containment, his refusal to pity himself. Hinds’ character, Michael Farr, lost his wife sometime in the past. He’s also a failed writer working a visiting-writers’ workshop in a small seaside Irish town; which means he also has to weather the casual superiority and entitlement of the visiting writers. Michael doesn’t pull any of the tricks you expect him to: he doesn’t pester the writers to look at his work, he doesn’t hint, he doesn’t cry in his room once he’s all alone at the end of the night in order to assure that we get it. He tends to his work, he tends to his daughter, and you can tell that, to him, his dull sort of bored lack of happiness is a relief from the pronounced unhappiness of his past. You grow to admire Michael, who has moved beyond notions of self-entitlement. He’s bravely parred of expectation.

And that pulls you toward him, you sense that he’s reached a point that deserves reprieve. The picture eventually becomes a kind of ghost story, with Michael seeking a visiting supernatural writer’s advice, and McPherson’s quiet, calm, command of mood takes you in. This is a supernatural picture with a sense of the every day, so the appearances of the ghosts feel like an actual intrusion, which is unusual for most horror films announcing themselves as horror with a capital H. Michael Farr is one of the most purely likeable characters I’ve seen in a movie this year; and, in the irresistible ending, he gets to, as a Peckinpah character once said, “enter his house justified”.

Everyone in The Expendables tries to enter their house justified. This is a Sylvester Stallone movie, which means there’s a lot of lame self-congratulatory humor disguised as self-deprecation. You know this picture by now: it is a Dirty Dozen animal with a bunch of past-their-prime stars invited back for another round of back-slapping, knife-throwing and gun-firing: in addition to Stallone, there’s Mickey Rourke, Eric Roberts, Dolph Lundgren, Steve Austin, Randy Couture and, for relevance, the younger Jason Statham and Jet Li. In an exceptionally lame cameo, there’s also Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis.

I will be forthcoming: I could only make it through an hour of this thing. If you feel that should disqualify me from weighing in, then I understand and hope you still steer clear of this movie in case you haven’t already checked it out anyway. I am somewhat usually sympathetic to Stallone’s shtick, I admire his clever ability to stay in the game, but The Expendables is one of his worst pictures…ever. (Yes, I’ve seen Cobra.) Dull, ineptly staged, Stallone takes himself too seriously to stage a simple blood bath, he wants you to feel for these cliches, to miss the meat-head, sexist, politically pathetic action movies of the 1980s. There are a few moments that are passable in comparison to the rest of the picture: Rourke gets to do his bit where he rambles on for minutes about nothing in a way that’s ludicrous and still sort of cool. (It’s his version of Brando’s late career nonsense authority.) Statham, the only real actor in a prominent role (Rourke, from what I can tell, is just a walk-on), somehow convinces you that this somehow means something to him. But this picture is the pits, a condescending effort by a rich star to throw red meat to what he sees as his beer-swilling rube audience. The Expendables are faux working-class.

Posted in 2010, Action, Comedy, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

Sex Panic

Monday, July 12th, 2010

One of the more effective ways of wriggling out of responsibility for bad behavior is to outwardly atone for it, to admit it, to display remorse, to beat everyone to the punch. This is one of the chief defenses of the bullshitter and the con artist, and they probably more than half the time fool themselves just as well as they do friends and family. It’s a way of expediting forgiveness, which ultimately means these overtures of atonement are more often than not self-serving. A show.

Michael Douglas plays such a bullshitter in the new Solitary Man, which is ultimately just as self-deceiving. The idea is that we watch this character, a variation of the classic Douglas “greed is good, pussy is better” womanizer, as he sinks lower and lower: refuting more optimistic stories of redemption. The character this time is Ben Kalmen, a washed-up-once-great car salesman ruined by a scam that went publicly belly up. He’s short on money and influence, he’s nearing the other side of the hill, and he self-medicates with Dewers and a steady succession of increasingly-dangerous one night stands: some are (kinda, surrogate) relatives, some are friends of family, some have connections that could prove to most unpleasant should they be crossed.

Douglas gives great Douglas in Solitary Man; few actors have his self-awareness or his control. Douglas has never, for my money, been “brilliant”, but then he’s rarely been embarrassing or uninteresting either – his roles are usually somewhat self-congratulatory self-satire – but he’s a wizard with an entendre, and he’s funnier and looser than most ladies’ man actors consciously revisiting potentially semi-biographical material. He has a clipped line reading that snaps that ultimate “fuck off” at whatever his target may happen to be, and he navigates the tricky territory of the comedy of self-pity like the most talented of foot soldiers, his steps are always just right and he never blows up.

But the movie does, it comes down with a bad case of Douglas-worship, and that manifests itself in unoriginality and lazy sexism. The women in Solitary Man – with an exception or two we’ll get to in a minute – are a typically disappointing non-issue, and they fall into two categories of male fantasy: the sexy Mother Earth Den Mothers, here played by Susan Sarandon (of course) and Jenna Fischer, and the sexy, brittle, power-playing vipers, played most prominently by Imogen Poots and a particularly terrible Mary-Louise Parker. The Den Mothers tell Ben he’s troubled, reassure him, slap him on the wrist just enough to satisfy obligations and little more, and the vipers sex Ben up and terrorize him, in order to honor the checks-and-balances of insincere male sexual guilt. It is unthinkable in Solitary Man that the women would be partially responsible in Ben’s escapades, just as it is unthinkable that Sarandon, seemingly in pause until Ben returns to her, might have a fling or two herself, even if she’s the more physically inviting of the two (Sarandon, still gorgeous, still vivid and talented, needs to turn the next round of these condescending stereotype roles down).

The picture has consistently sharp, funny, nasty dialogue, and it flirts with a few implications that could make it more than just another feel-good middle aged movie with delusions of reality. The first is that Douglas, without the implication of wealth, might be out of luck with at least a few of the women, but, as this would compromise the Douglas mystique, isn’t allowed to go anywhere. The second is that Douglas’ self-serving, inhuman, survival of the fittest philosophies are actually correct, more in sync with real life than the nourishing clichés voiced by the conventionally domestic characters on the sideline. This doesn’t go anywhere either, because Solitary Man wants, like most movies, to tell us that we’ve made the right decision to settle down and have children and take a job we despise. It’s another picture telling us its ok that we’re middle class saps, because once-successful people – despite enjoying spoils beyond our imaginations – are more miserable than we could hope to be. (In other words, they’re outdoing us even in self-loathing.) The ending is laughably pandering: is the picture really willing to write off a decade of indulgence and selfishness with a lame medical issue that wouldn’t be out of place in a particularly galling TV movie of the week?

Solitary Man is a crock, but there are two scenes that hint at the better movie directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien let get away from them. Discovering his latest indiscretion with a friend, daughter Fischer tells Douglas that that’s it, he’s consistently damaging the family and he’s out if he doesn’t get help. Douglas, exposed, infuriated, swallows his contempt and tells Fischer that that’s her choice. The bitterness, the hatred for someone you love standing up to you, is real, and this moment is Douglas’ best acting since Wonder Boys. (Fischer is quite good too.) The second moment is near the end, between Douglas and the terrific Olivia Thirlby. He’s black-out loaded at a college party, she’s a girlfriend of a de facto protégé, and their subsequent, inevitable exchange gives the picture a charge of the sexual reality it has otherwise mostly avoided. Douglas, for this one moment, is allowed to be pathetic, ridiculous, and inescapably alone. He’s human.

I Am Love is transporting in its brave ludicrousness. It’s another rich fantasy, but the picture has the good manners to know it and admit to it – to revel in it. Its one of the oldest of old chestnuts: the story of a wife of a powerful man who discovers orgasm upon meeting a wrong-side-of-the-tracks commoner. The rich wife is Tilda Swinton; the commoner Edoardo Gabbriellini, a struggling, apparently brilliant cook, also the best friend of Swinton’s son as well as generally sensitive salt-of-the-land hunk. The picture toys with concerns of loss of identity as result of globalization (there’s a vivid speech by the elder near the beginning, a long moment that concludes the opening sequence) but I Am Love is really a gorgeous melodramatic Italian weepy, with an ending that’s a reverse of many of the put-upon woman martyr movies of the 1940s and 1950s (usually with Joan Crawford). Swinton is intense and startling (as usual), her skin flushes with engulfing desire and heat. The movie gets a little old near the end, it’s all music and catastrophe and hyperbole, but it’s a pretty appealing five course meal…if all the courses were chocolate cake and red wine.

Posted in 2010, Drama, Reviews | 1 Comment »

Role Playing

Saturday, April 24th, 2010

I saw Kick-Ass last week and am just now writing about it because a. my work ethic is, best case, spotty, and b. the picture was bad in ways so irritatingly typical I got angry every time I sat down to think about it. The picture, co-adapted (with Jane Goldman) and directed by Matthew Vaughn, is another superhero movie where a wimp discovers something beyond himself and gets the ludicrously sexy girl-next-door (I’m always in the wrong neighborhoods, it seems) and stops the ludicrously obvious bad guy in the bargain.

Kick-Ass’s theoretical catch is that it’s a satire of the wish-fulfillment clichés of superhero movies, particularly (randomly) of Spiderman (which strikes me as odd, as those pictures are as accomplished and reputable as any in this current glut), and that it will treat the superhero fantasy as it would play out in a “real world” of actual consequences. The dweeb-hero (Aaron Johnson), who eventually dons a ski-suit and comes to call himself the title, is unusually unappealing and self-absorbed. The picture makes no bones about his motivation, which is to get laid and famous. In theory (again, that word) that’s promising, as the recognition of the tunnel-vision of nerds is something that the superpowers movie desperately needs, but the first act of this picture, the act that really goes to pains ensuring we dislike Kick-Ass, is unwatchable in its flippancy (the hero’s mom dying is an, unfunny, joke) with blunt, tedious profanity that’s meant to shock us for being uttered by kids and good guys. And it is shocking, for people unfamiliar with Paper Moon, South Park, Takashi Miike, hundreds of other movies, or actual comic books. The violence isn’t more “real”, it’s simply more unpleasant. We see Kick-Ass bleed, we see Kick-Ass have unsentimental, horny sex, but he still lives, and he stills enjoys all the unlikely, in the end sentimental, desserts of the typical superhero movie. Kick-Ass is a superhero movie, not for nerds or casual audiences, but for those insecure folk who want the same entertainment along with edification for consuming something “subversive” and “dangerous” and “artistic”.

Kick-Ass encounters a pair of other, more legit, superheroes – Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit-Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) – who’re after a Mob Boss (Mark Strong) for reasons that are surprisingly typical given all the pretense of irony. The picture perks up with the intro of these characters. We assume that the subversion we’ve heard of might refer to Kick-Ass’s realization that he’s just a cocooned, privileged, media-fed zombie, and that other people have real problems. We also assume, briefly, that Kick-Ass will be brutally dispatched of, and that the picture might jarringly switch gears to characters who have prepared and suffered more – but, no, the entire point of the picture is to rip-off, by my approximate count, every high body-count movie since at least De Palma’s remake of Scarface (for those keeping score at home, I also counted True Lies, Kill Bill, and The Professional among the “homage”). Treating a superhero as if he’s in the real world apparently means that he has to settle for an armed-to-the-gills rocket pack over self-propelled flight. Some have called Kick-Ass smart, some have been righteously indignant, they’re both wrong: it’s just another apathy wallow in the recent tradition of Observe and Report and The Hangover. Cage, Strong and Moretz are admittedly three reasons to see it (Cage is incapable of insincerity, God bless him), but three isn’t, in this case, enough reasons. Note to filmmakers: acknowledging a cliché is not the same as transcending it.

With the exception of his marvelous Sweet Hereafter, I generally find Atom Egoyan’s films a bit of a chore to get through (admittedly I only see one of roughly every three). Egoyan’s pictures are mostly well-meaning, well-acted, unconvincing, and boring as all get out – he’s a talented and intelligent man who seems to care too much, and who seems to think his stories through too much – they generally aren’t pictures but term papers. I will take this sort of movie over a fraud like Kick-Ass every time, but one can’t help but picture the pictures that could be if Egoyan tapped his inner bad boy a little, let go a little. I didn’t expect much from his newest, Chloe, a remake of a French film unseen by me, but I went because I was curious to see Julianne Moore again (I’ve been skipping her pictures as of late) and I was curious as to how a romantic liaison between her and Amanda Seyfried would play. Yes, I was curious for the reasons a straight guy is curious, but I was also interested in their chemistry, it is such a marvelously weird pairing, and I was also interested to see how the aggressively earnest Egoyan would do with an erotic thriller, especially after the not-very-good-but-enjoyable Where the Truth Lies.

For an hour, Chloe works pretty smashingly. Egoyan seems to be reveling in the role of an art-house director merely telling a story. Chloe is a woman’s thriller, and, like Unfaithful, or Orphan, it is rooted entirely in the anxiety of its central female character – and everything that happens, little or outlandish, is an extension of that anxiety, which is brought about over the woman’s guilt over two things: her feelings of inadequacy, and her evolving sexual desires, which are changing because of her feelings of inadequacy. You don’t “buy” a number of things that happen in Chloe (Seyfried’s prostitute is way too attractive to offer curbside service for one) just as you don’t “buy” anything much that actually happens in Orphan. But Seyfried makes sense as a corrective to Moore’s feelings of doubt. Moore feels old, she feels that she’s getting plainer as her husband (Liam Neeson) grows sexier, and in Seyfried she sees two things: redemption of her own flesh, and a chance to fuck her husband again as they first did, which are basically one in the same anyway. Moore suspects Neeson of sleeping around, and so, by being complicit in his adultery, she becomes a player in his life again.

This isn’t subtext but text. Chloe is a well-paced series of appealingly quick, blunt scenes: Neeson flirting with girls in front of Moore, their son having obvious sex almost in front of Moore (the plot eventually comes to encompass this sexual anxiety as well – of the son’s newfound sexual drive), Moore propositioning Seyfried to test Neeson, Seyfried’s own manipulations, etc. Egoyan’s patience and care pay off here: his considerable empathy toward Moore’s misery makes the picture hot, because we’re in her head as her fantasy life is gradually realized; and the big humdinger scene with Moore and Seyfried getting it on is as moving as it erotic. Seyfried, of course, becomes preoccupied with Moore, which is the logical progression if we are to take this as an older woman’s fantasy: her internal weighing of the pros and cons, of everything that can happen.

And then the picture goes to Hell in a fashion that recalls Malle’s Damage. I have a challenge for directors making pictures with sex/family themes: end one, just once, without killing anyone. Just as Chloe has drawn all of its players in, just as we are in Egoyan’s hand, ready for the explosion, for the redefining of everyone’s role in the family, the picture writes itself out of a corner with the age-old death-that-makes-everything-better. It’s, as it always, a disappointing cheat.

Still see it. This is Moore’s best work since The End of the Affair, she’s movingly bare (the picture could almost be seen as a conscious reaction to the last decade of dour, dull Moore roles) and Neeson, in a (purposefully) underwritten role, still has that gravity, that wonderful way with implication. Seyfried is out of her element here, she’s a little light for the role, but that works in the picture’s psychological favor – you feel this is the prostitute that Moore would yearn for.

Posted in 2010, Action, Drama, Reviews | 1 Comment »

Wearing It Well

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

Pierce Brosnan is a switch-hitting movie-star/actor – Hugh Grant is another – who uses his handsomeness as implicit satirical barb. The joke of a number of Brosnan performances is that he’s every bit as self-absorbed and mercenary as his getting-better-with-age looks imply. This attitude syncs with the world view of many of Roman Polanski’s movies, particularly his mysteries (Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Ninth Gate); as the punchline of many of his pictures is the obviousness of their solution: the clearest explanation is usually correct, but everyone still misses it, they’re distracted by their own self-absorption and wishful-thinking and need to over-complicate. Brosnan, with his what-you-see-is-exactly-what-I-am self-critique, is an ideal embodiment of Polanski’s cynicism, which isn’t tedious because we see how amused Polanski is; the director has a gift for making futility funny.

As former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, under investigation for suspicious involvement with the torture of suspected terrorists by the CIA (an allusion to Tony Blair), Brosnan carries a little more weight in the middle than usual and subtly undermines his own authority as a self-reliant star; his Lang is a charismatic cipher that’s more than a little vulnerable and lost, and this is never more obvious than when Lang is, of course, at his most blustery and self-impressed. Stars pretend to challenge their vanity all the time, many of them never seem to be happier than when gaining or losing weight for an Oscar, but Brosnan doesn’t rub your face in it – he’s a good looking man playing a good looking man whose perhaps limited usefulness has begun to reach its potential end. That, in its quietness, is sadly somewhat daring for a movie star. This is Brosnan’s best performance since the terrific, under-seen, The Tailor of Panama.

The rest of the movie matches him; you watch The Ghost Writer with the simple, exhilarating pleasure of knowing that every single scene is played in exactly the right tone and held for exactly the right amount of time – and that everything on the surface is a casual, resigned parlor game. The picture is, by general definition, a “political thriller”, but that conjures thoughts of bloated, convoluted, earnest messes. Polanski’s picture is another of his domestic power plays in restricted spaces, in this case, the Langs’ gorgeous, creepy vacation hideaway somewhere off the East Coast. The house, as others have written, is a character in itself (I love Glenn Kenny’s observation that the Langs’ residence is everything the sterile, nearly sci-fi environment of Branagh’s remake of Sleuth wanted to be) and the place has, with masterly Polanski suggestiveness, the air of a hard, too-geometrically “right” piece of art that looks as if it could actually hurt you. Images of Lang’s “ghost”, the titular writer assigned to oversee his memoirs played by Ewan McGregor, sitting in front of windows revealing vast expanses of gray, insinuating nothingness have the kind of light, under-the-skin eeriness that was sorely lacking in this year’s earlier Shutter Island. The plot only makes as much sense as it needs to, and the final twist doesn’t quite have the bite that seems to be intended, but Ghost Writer is still mid to top-shelf Polanski, with wonderfully pared, nasty dialogue, and other sly, confident performances by McGregor (the first to deliver on the benefit of the doubt extended him for fifteen years), Olivia Williams, Tom Wilkinson, and, yes, Kim Cattrall. I wish the picture had a little more sexual heat, but that might not even be appropriate anyway; sex is just more procedure for these characters, like the formal dinners or the press conferences. The only element of common life that’s discussed with any passion here is the booze.

Noah Baumbach is a very talented filmmaker, and I’ve enjoyed, to varying extents, all of his pictures; but he could stand to learn that it isn’t always soft-soaping to occasionally allow characters to authentically enjoy themselves and one another – even the most miserable can, by decree of odds, experience a great kiss, or a really good hamburger, or, God forbid, love that isn’t tainted by hypocrisy. Baumbach is so obsessed with undermining platitudes that he over-compensates and winds up with something equally false in the other direction. I thought this worked in the overly reviled Margot at the Wedding, because I took the picture as a parody of the lies we sell one another at get-togethers, particularly weddings. But Baumbach’s new picture, Greenberg, isn’t a parody of anything – it is meant to be taken as a more or less straight (yet qualified) exploration of L.A., as well as an attempt to inject a contemporary movie with the loose threads and more novelistic, misleadingly rambling, structures of 1970s pictures such as those made by Hal Ashby, Paul Mazursky, and the Irvin Kershner of Loving. But Baumbach can’t get beyond a theatre of redundant, uncomfortable sequences in which, to quote one of the characters, “hurt people hurt people”.

That said, Greenberg is still one of Baumbach’s best pictures, and it’s nice to see a director look to the 1970s cinema for more than a chance to strip-mine the ironically beautiful grain aesthetics. Greenberg isn’t just pretty (though it is pretty), it structurally resembles 1970s mid-life pictures in allowing characters to just hang out. The opening credits sequence is particularly quiet and evocative: of terminally insecure/vulnerable Florence (Greta Gerwig) singing along with Steve Miller as she runs errands for her employer, a rich family that means clearly more to her than just a paycheck. It is established – in a few appealingly quick, lucid early scenes – that Florence looks at this as her family, particularly in her poignant concern for the house pooch.

Ben Stiller’s Greenberg is the black sheep of the family, and he moves in to house sit while everyone else (except Florence, who isn’t family when it really counts) ships off to Vietnam for reasons that are probably related to business. Greenberg, of course, falls into bed with Florence, allowing Baumbach another of his pictures in which every taken-for-granted convention is quietly dismantled with awkwardness and resentment. As I said above, it gets a little old, but the actors are vivid and impressive, and they shake up Baumbach’s scheme. Stiller doesn’t play a “prick” but an actual prick recovering from a stay in a mental institution that was probably more justified than everyone acknowledges. Unlike a number of comedians playing serious versions of their persona, Stiller doesn’t go dull and plead for pathos – his line readings are consistently surprising, and his physical acting is somewhat extraordinary (he’d fit with the Lang house). I’ve seen Gerwig in three or four pictures, and I still can’t tell if she’s an actress yet, but she is certainly a presence, a wonderful correction to our movie society of falsely confident robot starlets. She’s, to risk hyperbole, one of the truest embodiments of a woman in her 20s that I’ve ever seen. Gerwig seems to be chemically incapable of the sort of detached, big-boobied snark that rules the female roosts these days, and a number of her scenes here are jarringly raw…and right. The “girl sings a song in a bar to show us her tortured inner self” bit has been used in nearly every movie featuring a girl with a tortured inner self, but it’s actually effective here because Gerwig shows us what’s at stake, that private inner flesh that Greenberg will either release or destroy, or, more likely, temporarily release and destroy.

There are two other very good performances: by Rhys Ifans, who is heartbreaking in a simple role, and by Jennifer Jason Leigh, another actor chemically incapable of emotional subterfuge. Greenberg has quite a bit to recommend it, but it feels trapped; and a great late sequence, a party scene, shows us the movie that Baumbach otherwise allows to get away from him: we see that Greenberg’s bitterness and hostility play well with the younger generations, as they mistake his desperation for confidence (as Florence has been). That’s an interesting observation that the movie should have run with, and it would’ve imbued Greenberg’s numbing brow-beating with a much needed tongue-in-cheek quality that would also let the air out of the pompous self-pity of most youth movies. Baumbach needs to let go, or at least take a cue from Polanski’s cynicism and relax a bit. Polanski makes checking out look glamorous, that might be dangerous but it’s also a good night at the movies.

Posted in 2010, Comedy, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

11.

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

“Thematic trilogy” can be a too-convenient justification for a director to essentially make the same movie several times (such as the Iñárritu/Arriaga collaborations), but Park Chan-Wook’s three revenge films—Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance—do, however, play as a trilogy with a unified arc, though it may not have been the arc the filmmaker intended. Throughout the films there is a crystallization of Park’s formalist intentions, the sluggish unevenness of Mr. Vengeance eventually paving the way for the slick polish of Lady Vengeance.

Mr. Vengeance is, technically, the “worst” movie of the trilogy in that Park doesn’t seem to have as much an idea of what he’s after, though it is still the most interesting. The film plays that contemporary neo-Kubrick game of trying to transcend clichés with a pace that’s so tediously deliberate you wish the director would just get on with it. Mr. Vengeance is one of those fashionably under-edited, under-covered films where seemingly every scene is a numbing master shot that’s twice as long as necessary, with blocking that too consciously tips us off to the director’s inventiveness.

For the first half, you don’t register the story, which could’ve been powerful (we’re invited to sympathize with characters who will ultimately, accidentally, commit the most unforgiveable act in the film), just shots: We don’t feel a father’s torment as he’s interrogated by the police following the killing of his daughter, we admire the showy staging, which places the father’s face off-screen to the right while he sits in a van that frames the cops investigating a field through its open door. A deaf character’s sign language is occasionally subtitled against black screens for no other reason than to be “cinematic.” Two characters can’t merely sit in a bed together, there has to be a huge object in the foreground separating them, pummeling a point—their alienation—that we’d already gathered for ourselves. These images are oppressive enough alone, but taken with the sound design (all portentously amplified subterranean noises, it could be taking place in the stomach of a whale), it’s maddening, and familiar.

Mr. Vengeance does eventually come to life 70 or so minutes in, when Park finally gets to the film he actually wants to make (and stops apologizing for it with art-house dodges). The film boils down to what you expect: two parties destroying one another out of a twisted obligation to seek closure and justice, but the folks on both sides—the kidnappers (Shin Ha-Kyun, Bae Doona) and the aggrieved father (the terrific Song Kang-ho)—are somewhat recognizably frail and misguided, and the ultimate payoff is admirably pathetic and gross. Mr. Vengeance is the rare revenge picture that authentically makes the act unappealing, which would be refreshing if weren’t for the insecurities and awful black comedy (there are a number of sick touches that don’t work, most famously the ridiculous moment with the father witnessing his daughter’s autopsy, and a bit with a bunch of kids masturbating to sick wails they mistake for cries of ecstasy).

This is an excerpt from a larger piece now up at Slant Magazine, which can be found in the Elsewhere portion of this site.

Posted in 2002, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

8.

Friday, March 12th, 2010

I saw L.A. Confidential in my home town theatre when I was maybe seventeen. I wasn’t that versed in noir at that point, I had seen a few of the obvious – Chinatown, Double Indemnity, Touch of Evil – but hadn’t gotten into the nitty-gritty yet, and I’m really still doing that now. I remember seeing it with my older younger brother, and both of us loving it, particularly the juicy/literate tough guy patter, the performances of Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Danny DeVito, Kevin Spacey, Kim Basinger, James Cromwell (everyone really, even future TV-pretty boy Simon Baker makes an impression in a brief bit), and the well-staged, occasionally startling bursts of gunplay. I’ve revisited L.A. Confidential several times throughout the years but it had been awhile, and I wanted to see if my few years of writing and more serially watching movies had changed my view of it. The answer is: a bit.

Co-writer (with Brian Helgeland)/ director Curtis Hanson has always been a clever maker of B-movies such as The Bedroom Window, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild; he’s sturdy, professional, unpretentious, and his pictures are well-paced and well-staged. The relief of a Curtis Hanson movie is the knowledge that the filmmaker knows what he’s making and, while he isn’t condescending, he isn’t laboring to pump his genre pictures with pregnant, half-assed meanings (anything Bryan Singer has made since The Usual Suspects, for example; The Dark Knight, for another). But professionalism has its price, and that price is personality. You watch L.A. Confidential, and wonder how someone could make a movie out of Ellroy this cut-and-dry. L.A. Confidential is a mystery without any mystery, and the characters, who’re supposed to be trapped and resentful and tormented, are pretty obvious types, marching dutifully to the third act finish-line, which is, in this case, the biggest insult of the picture.

I never liked the happy ending, which has investigators Ed Exley (Pearce) and Bud White (Crowe), saving the day from a corrupt administrator (Cromwell) who is using his position to take over the criminal empire that has been scattered after its Big Kingpin’s imprisonment. One sees Cromwell coming a mile away, because a. you know his “dirty side of the law” speeches to Exley have to have a pay-off, and b. because there isn’t really anyone else to be the bad guy. The reveal of Cromwell’s true loyalties is a show-stopper though (and still shocking), and the business with “Rollo Tomasi” has a wonderful dime-store pulp irony – it could have come from a particularly shrewd 1940s thriller.

But the problem is that the kind of material Hanson is playing with here isn’t meant to be so straight-forward, even in the times when the good guy did ostensibly win (the underrated Hanson picture In Her Shoes is the kind of usually soft/sentimental material that benefits from his clarity). Noir (which L.A. Confidential isn’t, exactly) traffics in the horror movie idea that we are all guilty, that we’re waiting for the thing that reveals us to be the animals that we’re barely disguising. Noirs have blurry, intangible evil at their sidelines that might leave a little residue. I have voiced a number of doubts with Nolan’s Dark Knight over the last few years, and the picture is wildly undisciplined and over-explicit, but those are the trade-offs of obsession. Nolan isn’t a clean, nice, considerate professional. He aims all over the place, and while the results can be maddening, certain things stick. Dark Knight isn’t, technically, as “good” a movie as L.A. Confidential (and, I still prefer L.A. Confidential) but it comes closer to the spirit of noir and of Ellroy: which is that, the more you find out, the more you know you don’t know. Gotham has this hidden rot that stays with you; Hanson’s 1950s L.A., which is ripe for those implications, doesn’t. You truly feel at the end of L.A. Confidential that all of the bad guys are dead. (Though there are individual moments that reach their full potential, such as Exley’s manipulation of a group of black kidnapers, or Spacey’s flirtation with a groupie at a sound stage.)

That said, if L.A. Confidential is, ultimately, a polished studio product, then it is the way to have your polished studio products. The script still snaps; the pace is a model of one-incident-propelling-another storytelling; the performances are all essentially perfect, both individually and collectively (as a coherent ensemble); the shootouts are crackerjack; and the 1950s L.A. setting (courtesy of, among others, ace cinematographer Dante Spinotti) is the surreal movie factory of our dreams. One would be tempted to wish that Hanson had Nolan’s obsessive drive; or that Nolan had Hanson’s common sense and basic filmmaking coherence, but those qualities seem to be rare in the same person – one has to take an interesting director for the good and the bad.

Posted in 1997, Crime, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

7.

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

It’s nice that Otto Preminger now seems to be seen as the filmmaker he clearly was: a deft producer who also happened to be an excellent director who frequently snuck subversive attitudes and jabs into his pictures. Anatomy of a Murder is probably my outright favorite Preminger picture: it has a brilliant Jimmy Stewart performance that’s, in its way, every bit as wily as his work in Vertigo, potentially career best work by George C. Scott as Stewart’s rival, and a confident tone of barely checked survival-of-the-fittest anarchy.

The joke of Anatomy of a Murder, which follows Stewart’s nearly retired attorney as he defends a murder suspect (Ben Gazzara) who is clearly guilty, is that the folksy, old-school lawyer is the calculating slickster, and that the villain, primarily personified by Scott, is, by default, the hero, not that either seems to much care who happens to be in the right. The picture is a long (nearly three hours) big dick contest between two brilliant warriors of the courtroom who’ve seemed to pick the battle itself out of a hat.

That running time could be awfully laborious for this sort of thing, but Preminger’s slow burn, long-take, tracking-shot approach eases you in and effortlessly commands the entire enterprise: Anatomy of a Murder is a model of how to “open” a play up in a fashion that’s organic to the material; and the attitude here is darkly funny and ruthlessly modern, more modern, in fact, than most of the “uplifting” courtroom tales we see today. Preminger’s trial isn’t about the truth, but the delivery.

Posted in 1959, Drama, Reviews | 2 Comments »

6.

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Watching Jeff Bridges shamble, bearded and bellied, through Crazy Heart a month or so ago reminded me of Kris Kristofferson in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which in turn reminded me of one of the most beautifully “right” song placements in director Martin Scorsese’s career: of Alice (Ellen Burstyn) and her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter III) driving down the road listening to Elton John’s “Daniel” on the car radio. I had remembered this as traditional shorthand: of a pop song emphasizing a moment of quiet empowerment for characters that were, until this point, stuck. It turns out that I had remembered it somewhat incorrectly, as Scorsese was a little more original and truthful: alternating between silent medium and long shots of the lonely, quiet, desert road and close shots in the car with the song playing. Most directors would allow us a more omnipotent perspective so we could seamlessly enjoy the song betweens cuts, but the jarring, disruptive stop-n-start of “Daniel” says quite a bit with just a little: these two are on the road, but aren’t escaping anything – with the little, every day banalities of life such as traveling with a bored child all but inescapable.

There are all sorts of touches like this in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which is basically a 1940s/1950s “women’s picture” with a current of shaggier 1970s irresolution. The sensibilities shouldn’t cohere, but Scorsese and writer Robert Getchell (who would write the 1990s update of Stella) are unusually playful – their characters are notably weird oddballs bouncing off of one another. The picture follows the 1940s/1950s scheme – mother suffers a number of bad men (usually for the child) until finding (or not finding) the right one – but lets human bits bleed through. Those older pictures – which had a habit of featuring Stanwyck or Crawford or Davis – usually reflected a guilty man’s view of women: as saints. Burstyn was a guiding presence on Alice though, and she gives the picture a less condescending dimension (until the end): her Alice is allowed to be eccentric too. (I love how she twists a line that goes somewhere to the effect of “Don’t be rude to your mother who just bought you a cheeseburger.”)

Alice is primarily a duet between Burstyn and Lutter, and it’s to the picture’s credit that Tommy is one of the most realistic, and authentically irritating, children I’ve ever seen in a movie. Tommy isn’t troubled, he’s troubled, an intelligent boy lashing out; shaken by the discovery that life is flawed, dangerous, capable of upturning. Alice and Tommy play out a routine frequent to broken families – they treat one another as buddies, confidants, making matters of discipline confusing – you can tell Alice doesn’t buy her orders any more than Tommy. (There’s a wonderful, telling line from Tommy near the end of the picture, in reference to his friend played by Jodie Foster: “She’s not mature, she’s nice.”)

There are memorable bump-in-the-road episodes (particularly one featuring a volatile Harvey Keitel), and the picture has an editing rhythm that’s clipped and nervous – the scenes are nipped before their proper conclusions, at least until Kristofferson enters the picture in the last third, and cools everything with his distinctive brand of containment and non-actor effortlessness. Kristofferson is a relief from the palpable (and admirably convincing) economic anxiety of the picture, but he also turns Alice too far in the direction of formula – you don’t buy anything that happens in the last twenty minutes.

Is it blatant wish-fulfillment, unintentional sexism? Yes, because the picture gives Alice everything it pretends she doesn’t need, and sentimentally accepts her desire to be a “singer”, which everyone else can see is absurd. Are Scorsese and Getchell being meta? Potentially (and the Wizard of Oz opening suggests that), but I think they were most likely interested in making a formula picture patterned after ones they liked, and were content to make one that updated the types without seriously challenging them. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore has tension between the sensibilities of the differing eras and between the characters, it is well-performed, and it has Scorsese’s expressive, amazingly empathetic camera (he has a very distinctive curved-sideways pan, also in Mean Streets, that conveys a character’s glance towards someone he’s put out with) but it still fades…pleasantly yet somehow disappointingly. There’s enough in the picture to warrant more. Still, one misses a Scorsese this raw, this spontaneous.

Posted in 1974, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

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