Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Have to be cautious mixing some medicines
By Edward Copeland
While Love & Other Drugs ultimately peters out, it starts out fairly well and accomplishes something no other film I've seen ever has: It displays Jake Gyllenhaal in a role that for the first time made me think he might actually have some charisma and more than just very limited acting abilities.
Set in 1996, Gyllenhaal stars as Jamie Randall, the oldest son of a well-to-do doctor and his wife (George Segal and Jill Clayburgh, who appears in a single scene in her second-to-last film role) whose only success seems to be wooing women into bed. His younger brother Josh (Josh Gad, whose character seems to have been dropped in from another movie), is a schlumpy nerd who has managed to accumulate wealth of his own through development of some sort of technology and even landed a wife (though the two quickly separate) and outshines Jamie as a result.
After Jamie loses yet another job, dad hooks him up with Bruce Winston (Oliver Platt), one of the main pharmaceutical reps for Pfizer and soon Jamie's out pitching Zoloft to physicians in a battle with the rep for antidepressant competitor Prozac, Trey Hannigan (Gabriel Macht). Jamie turns out to be a natural, transferring his seduction skills from romance to prescription pills. The trouble comes when one of the doctors he's courting (Hank Azaria) treats a patient named Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway) and the two begin a funny and torrid fling, even though she's also seeing Trey. Jamie's Pfizer career really takes off when they release Viagra to the market and who would be better to hawk that product?
Director Edward Zwick, setting aside for at least one film staging the exact same battle in different costumes and different eras, does pretty well in the early portions of Love & Other Drugs when it works on a frenetic, comic level. However, Maggie also suffers from early onset Parkinson's, so when the movie takes its more serious turn in the later stages, that's when it starts getting bumpier.
Thank heavens for Hathaway, who is able to bridge both sides of the story well. She's really developing into a talented actress. She's great in her early scenes as the sex-obsessed woman who's more of a commitmentphobe even than Jamie. When the film takes its turn, while the movie doesn't handle the tonal shift that well, she's rather good at not overplaying her increased Parkinson's symptoms or becoming overly dramatic. She's still the character she created when she first entered the film.
Gyllenhaal, on the other hand, doesn't make that transition so easily. As I said, Love & Other Drugs marks the first time he's impressed me when he's playing Jamie, the charming rogue. It's a different side of Gyllenhaal than I've seen before and when he's in that mode, he's good. Gyllenhaal always has seemed like a colorless void to me, even when he's in a great film such as David Fincher's Zodiac, a fine but overrated movie such as Brokeback Mountain, where Heath Ledger blows him off the screen, or the nightmare memories brought on by the words Bubble Boy.
That side of the actor kicks in again when Love & Other Drugs takes its more maudlin turn and Jamie becomes a lovesick man discovering ethics and concern for a woman he loves. When the movie shifts in that direction, the empty, bland Gyllenhaal rises again. The last portion of the movie would be unbearable without Hathaway there to bail parts of it out.
Based on the book Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman
by Jamie Reidy, it feels as if there could have been two separate films made from this material successfully. Exploring the world of the pharmaceutical industry and the lengths they go to to make doctors push their products alone would make a helluva movie and a love story about a horndog torn over giving up his womanizing ways for someone he knows is only to get sicker could make a touching tale as well. Even if this whole package mostly is true though, it just doesn't mesh very well.
We do learn one thing: Jake Gyllenhaal can play a certain type of part well without being a gaping bore. Now if he can find a part he can do that in that lasts the length of the entire film.
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Labels: 10s, Anne Hathaway, Fincher, J. Gyllenhaal, Zwick
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Monday, February 28, 2011
I'm a partner in an abusive relationship
By Edward Copeland
It's not easy for me to make this confession, especially to the masses around the world in cyberspace, but it's true. I have been involved in a relationship that has gone on now for more than 30 years. I've taken steps to sever my ties with it, because it's not healthy, but I keep crawling back, no matter how many times my partner abuses me. I can't even call my feelings love anymore. It's just habit, bordering on obsession, and because my partner was there for me during a few years of dark times, I can't sever ties completely, even though each year she treats me worse and worse. Her name is Oscar and after last night's debacle, I felt compelled to issue this plea for help.
I took a big step last year, when the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, under constant pressure from ABC and its parent company Disney kept making idiotic changes to the award to try to boost rating and attract a more youthful demographic. When they doubled the best picture nominees to 10 and, even worse, kicked the presentation of honorary awards, usually the broadcast's highlight, to a nontelevised dinner in November, as they tried to deny that film history began any earlier than the Reagan administration. Similarly stupid moves by the other awards I follow, the Tonys for Broadway and the Emmys for television, prompted me to write the post A pox on all your award shows. I swore I would no longer promote any of these awards. No predictions, surveys, etc. I've been pretty good at keeping my word.
However, that temptress known as Twitter sucked me in and actually created a more bearable way to watch the travesty. Since I'm bedridden anyway, I could watch the show at the same time I snarked to the world about the ceremonies as they went on. Honestly, the Twittering has become more satisfying than the shows themselves, which I had a bad feeling about when they announced that the hosts would be James Franco and Anne Hathaway. Huh? I started to get sucked in though when every critics' group and even the waiter and florists selected my choice for the best film of 2010, The Social Network, as best picture. I thought for the first time in a long time Oscar might actually pick my choice as best film as their best picture. Then that evil man known as Harvey Weinstein reared his head for the first time in a long time as his company released The King's Speech, which suddenly started scoring guild wins. First, it took the Producer's Guild Award, but they are flaky (they picked Little Miss Sunshine), so I wasn't concerned. Then, Tom Hooper (who I imagine most people still can't pick out of a lineup) won the Director's Guild Award for The King's Speech. As my friend Josh R said last night, his mother could have done a better job directing The King's Speech and she doesn't know how to program the VCR. It's worth noting that before this film, Hooper's work was almost entirely on television and TV directors make up a majority of DGA voters now. Weinstein, being the grade-A asshole that
he is, reportedly told Scott Rudin, one of the producers of The Social Network, that he can go ahead and win the critics' awards, he'll take the big one. When the Screen Actors Guild handed out its awards, The King's Speech won ensemble, which people keep mistakenly equating as a picture prize when it's an acting prize and when their history is that their ensemble prize has not gone on to win the Oscar more times than it has. (The count is now 9 to 8.) Since it is an acting prize, it should have lost based on Timothy Spall's awful performance as Churchill and casting Guy Pearce as Colin Firth's older brother when the actor, only seven years younger, looked as if he could be Firth's son in some scenes. Having never sold my soul to Satan, I have no idea how these deals work, but Weinstein has been getting away with it for a long time. Remember when he used his talent to push quality films such as Pulp Fiction and The Crying Game? What happened to that Harvey who now bullies and buys his way to victory with middlebrow mediocrities such as The King's Speech, a Harvey who has so little respect for the art that he is cutting one small scene of profanity where the stuttering royal repeats the "F" word so he can get a PG-13 rating and, presumably, bigger audiences and more money. Come on Satan, when are you coming for him to pay up for his deal with a suitably long sentence in Hell?Then came Oscar night. Resolved that Harvey would get his way, I didn't even put much though into predictions like I used to. I just didn't care anymore. I started to get excited though, despite the fact that the show itself was a bore. Category after category where I predicted The King's Speech, it kept losing. Could this be? The Social Network started winning. No, this was just an elaborate trick. The only solace I could take was that The King's Speech did not win the most Oscars. It tied with Inception with four wins, though all of that film's prizes were technical ones. The King's Speech took best picture, but it will be one of those forgotten winners, and the inexplicable director winner Tom Hooper will follow in the footsteps of winners Delbert Mann, John G. Avildsen and Michael Cimino and never be nominated again. Further, I fear the man who should have won, David Fincher, will now win at some point for a film that he won't deserve to win for. That's the way this abusive wench works.
Now on to the broadcast itself. I do have to give it some kudos. FINALLY, after years of my complaining, they muted the audience microphones during the In Memoriam segment so you didn't hear the audience applauding at different levels as if it were a contest for who was the most popular dead person. The show seemed to
have no structure, rhyme or reason. Anne Hathaway seemed eager to please but James Franco appeared stoned most of the time. I've suggested this before. Why do they need a host? Just have an announcer introduce presenters and hand out the awards. Has anyone interested in the Oscars ever decided to watch or not to watch based on who was hosting? Think how much time you'd save without a host. The Billy Crystal bit resurrecting Bob Hope seemed fairly pointless, as did that bit where they had characters from films appear to be singing songs (I forget the phrase already. I guess this is a common YouTube game. I believe a better name would be Timewaster). Speaking of songs, it's high time that that category go the way of title writing. There aren't that many (if any) original movie musicals being made any more and very few of the songs end up being integral to the films, instead being relegated to playing over the credits as you leave the theater. This category once had a point, just like when they had a reason to divide cinematography into color and black and white divisions. However, that day has long since passed. Kill it. Also, kill the ridiculous pre-show, which they expanded to 90 minutes this year for some reason. How about cutting that and staring the show earlier. Use the extra time to bring back the honorary awards, which have provided most of the best moments in recent years. The worst news was when they announced that ABC renewed their contract to carry the Oscars through 2020. All the changes they've forced on the Academy have been for the worse. They need to realize: NETWORK TELEVISION IS DEAD. They will never regain the ratings they had when there were limited viewing audiences. They need to stop trying to cater to youthful demographics and viewers who won't watch and to the movie geeks like me who will. They have to accept that the Oscars are niche programming. Honestly, I think the best solution is to have people such as me who actually give a damn about movies and film history produce the show and keep the clueless away. After a night like last night, I think I might have to go to a shelter for abused Oscar spouses. Think your ratings drop now? See what happens if you lose us. The Oscars are about movies, but quality? Reflecting the best No. They are a long ad for an industry, a trade show for its worst habits where sometimes, the deserving accidentally win. Film lovers can love film without taking this annual pummelling from this serially abuser.Tweet
Labels: Anne Hathaway, Awards, Colin Firth, Criticism, Disney, Fincher, Franco, H. Weinstein, Oscars, Pearce, Television
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Tuesday, June 08, 2010
When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead
By Edward Copeland
Honest — I hadn't planned to bash more on Avatar, especially this soon after I wrote my review lambasting Cameron's Folly last week, but I really see little way to avoid bringing it up as I discuss Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. Godard famously said that the best way to criticize a film was to make another one and since that option is not available to me, I often find that it's illustrative to compare what one film does well to show how another film fails and that is the case here, even though I can't truly say that Alice in Wonderland itself is a good movie, but it did excel for me at most of the things for which I feel Avatar earned undeserved praise.
Don't get me wrong: Overall, I don't think Burton's film is a particularly good movie, but it held my interest because somehow he found the formula to make his style-over-substance approach mesmerizing in a way that I found Avatar just tedious. Though, as in the case with all 3-D features, I'm unable to see them that way, Alice in Wonderland is the first case where I could visualize what that would have been like even though I didn't have glasses, special equipment and I wasn't in a movie theater.
Part of the reason for this I believe is the vibrancy of Burton's imagery, where he uses a vast array of colors and imaginative characters and sets to bring his fantasy world to vivid life. It seems to leap off my television in a way that the monotonous color schemes of Pandora and the military headquarters did not in Avatar.
Still, despite my praise for that part of Alice in Wonderland, I can't say the film itself really works. The premise of this finds a much older Alice (Mia Wasikowska) escaping a boring matchmaking garden party in London and once again falling down the rabbit hole where she finds herself in Underland with no memory of her previous visit as a little girl. All the same characters are there: The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), The Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), etc., but she doesn't seem to recall any of them.
The plot seems to be a bit of a muddle, a mixture of the original tale with an expansion of new strands, as Alice must don armor to face off against the Jabberwocky to restore the crown from the evil Red Queen to the White Queen (Anne Hathaway). In fact, the battle may be better staged than any of the by-rote scenes in Avatar only with the added plus of wonderful color schemes beyond the eventually dull blue, green and camouflage. It's also helped by having characters such as the Hatter, the Queens and the others (some voiced by greats such as Alan Rickman and Stephen Fry) usually assorted with the story, even though Lewis Carroll takes the credit. There's a reason those characters have stood the test of time since the 19th century. I doubt people will even know who Jake Sully is next year, let alone decades from now (I had to consult IMDb just to remember the Avatar character's name).
While I can't say I'd want to sit through Alice in Wonderland again, I can't deny it held my interest thanks to its phenomenal look. It gave me wondrous things to gaze upon and a sense of a truly vital imagination at work behind the camera, even if my mind began to wander elsewhere.
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Labels: 10s, Anne Hathaway, Cameron, Depp, Godard, H.B. Carter, Rickman, Tim Burton
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Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Can We Skip the Reception?
By Josh R
There are moments when I get why people — specifically, the sort of people who exult the virtues of “the heartland” — can’t stand all us crackpot, bleeding heart, hippy-dippy liberals. I had one of those moments watching Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, ostensibly a film about dysfunctional family relationships but really more of a patchwork paean to multiculturalism and progressive left-wing attitudes, and a rather self-congratulatory one at that.
As the title suggests, the film takes place at a wedding — not just any wedding, mind you, but the kind that would send an over-the-hill ACLU lawyer still pining for the glory days of Ann Arbor into fits of ecstasy. The bride is white, the groom is black, the guests represent every color and creed under the sun, the theme is Indian (as in: the bridesmaids wear saris and the wedding cake is adorned with the figure of a large spangled elephant), and the guitars and tambourines are out in full force. Seemingly every musician and performance artist from within a 12 mile radius of Ulster County has been recruited to participate in the nuptial festivities — this means we hear everything from reggae music performed on kettle drums to modern indie folk rock to wailing Yoko Ono types. Basically, it’s Woodstock with place settings and a good champagne. Now, all of this might make sense in a film that was sending up the pretensions of liberalism as a cultural attitude, but Rachel is enacted with an entirely straight face and without a trace of irony. The kids who are too cool for school (but took tons of critical theory courses) are showing us how hip and evolved they are, and patting themselves on the back for it. As someone who’s been to a few Williamsburg coffee houses in my time, I can tell you that a little of this particular brand of self-absorption goes a long way — and is fairly intolerable in large quantities. By the time the Brazilian Carnivale dancers in feather headdresses arrive to form a conga line, I would have welcomed a canned recording of Karen Carpenter singing “Close to You” as if someone had tossed me a life ring.
The plot of Rachel Getting Married is virtually beside the point; it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the movie Demme really wanted to make was a concert film, until some savvy producer badgered him into padding it out with an actual storyline. Kym, played by Anne Hathaway (with badly cropped hair and raccoon-eye makeup to let us know she’s edgy, misunderstood and has tons of emotional baggage), is a recovering druggie just sprung from rehab to participate in her sister’s wedding. Old wounds are reopened and administered with heaping spoonfuls of salt en route to the big day, as Kym must confront the sins of her past and her unresolved feelings toward her nearest and dearest. Hathaway is fine in what seems like a foolproof role for an actress aiming to show that she can stretch. It’s one that’s been played so many times that it contains very little surprise at this point, and to be honest, the performance doesn’t have a fraction of the depth or originality that, say, Jennifer Jason Leigh brought to Georgia. Whenever a squeaky-clean good girl takes on an edgy bad girl role, critical hosannahs are never far behind; Hathaway is not a bad actress, but Rachel Getting Married doesn’t reveal any new wrinkles to her talent — and really, given what an attention-grabing role it is, it doesn’t really represent much of a risk for her. Better is Rosemarie De Witt as the titular bride, although the character is outlined in such vague terms that there really isn’t very much she can do with it. Lagging far behind the women is Bill Irwin, a very fine stage actor whose performance as the father is a bit too ingratiating to be entirely convincing; Anna Deveare Smith is thoroughly wasted in the role of the sympathetic stepmother.
The most interesting performance in the film is given by Debra Winger as Abby, the curiously detached mother who has withdrawn from her family to such an extent that her appearance at her own daughter’s wedding has an uncomfortable air of formality. Abby is hardly the emotionally barren, tightly wound bitch from Ordinary People — it is clear that she still loves her daughters, and still feels the tug of the parent-child bond; she has simply compartmentalized her feelings to such an extent that she can no longer comfortably acknowledge them. Winger could do wonders with this role — frankly, she does small wonders with what little she has — but is both criminally underused and badly betrayed by the film’s editing. The most loaded scene in Rachel Getting Married is the inevitable confrontation between Kym and Abby; Demme abruptly cuts away from it before it’s reached a natural conclusion, leaving both the actresses and the audiences high and dry. Ultimately, I’m not sure drama has very much place in Rachel Getting Married — it would detract too much focus from the kettle drums, the Bollywood decor and the conga line.
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Labels: 00s, Anne Hathaway, Debra Winger, Demme, J.J. Leigh
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Saturday, December 23, 2006
Prada, Prada, Prada
By Edward Copeland
It's been said that clothes make the man, but this year it certainly seems to be the case with many movies that performances make the film and acting most definitely gives the surge to an otherwise so-so comedy in The Devil Wears Prada, particularly a trio of turns by Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci, that make the whole enterprise worth watching. Unfortunately, the lead role in the movie belongs to Anne Hathaway and though she can't really be blamed, her part is so colorless and her motivations so mystifying, that it's no wonder the characters who surround her are able to practically blow her off the screen.
Hathaway plays Andrea Sachs, an aspiring journalist living in New York with her aspiring chef boyfriend (Adrian Grenier, in another role whose every scene makes the viewer start tapping their feet in impatience for the interesting characters to come back). For some reason, Andy (as her friends call her) decides that a good path to writing success would be to apply for a lackey position with a viper named Miranda Priestly (Streep), who runs one of the world's top fashion magazines. Why should Andy choose this career path? Is it desperation? Has she been out of work for a long time and needs any paying gig? Beats me. Andy has no interest in being a clotheshorse or pencil-thin — until suddenly she does.
Her sudden turns in the movie seemed motivated more by the clock on the wall than anything written into the character herself and, unfortunately, Hathaway offers little by way of fleshing Andy out. Then again, what is Andy but a vehicle for meeting the real stars of the film, particularly Streep in what may be the comic highlight of her career as Miranda. She's cold, calculating and just when you think it's a one-note turn, she'll show you another layer to Miranda — but not for long.
Tucci also gets some good screen time as the magazine's long-suffering art director Nigel, who does the Extreme Makeover on Andy. The other fine performance comes from Emily Blunt as Miranda's No. 1 assistant, who tries to be as ruthless and heartless as her boss, but just can't quite cut it, even as Andy is unwittingly pulling an Eve Harrington on her.
If not for that troika of thespians, there wouldn't be much to recommend about The Devil Wears Prada, which goes on far too long for as light a vehicle as it is, but it's worth it if only to see Streep, Tucci and Blunt shine. That is all.
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Labels: 00s, Anne Hathaway, Streep, Tucci
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