Wednesday, January 11, 2012
A whole new world
By Edward Copeland
It's hard to know where to begin describing a funny little gem such as Cedar Rapids. Certainly, more hilarious movies have been made. Granted, comedies boasting even bigger and more amazing ensembles entertained me during my moviewatching years. With the exception of Midnight in Paris though, no 2011 film has made me laugh more frequently than Cedar Rapids — then again, the last reputed comedy I saw was Bridesmaids and perhaps I just longed for something written by someone who knew how to structure a comedy and set up jokes to finally remove the taste of that piece of shit from my mouth.
Ed Helms, late of The Daily Show but a regular on The Office and charter member of The Hangover movie franchise, stars as Tim Lippe, a sheltered 34-year-old insurance agent in Brown Valley, Wisc. Tim lost his father at a young age and then his mother in his late teens. Bill Krogstad (Stephen Root), the owner of Brown Valley Insurance, thought he saw in Tim someone who was "going places," so he brought him into his agency, but Tim has never taken off. Roger Lemke (Thomas Lennon) is his company's star, bringing the agency back the coveted "Two Diamonds Award" from the annual AMSI insurance convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for three years running.
As Krogstad anticipates Lemke attending and bringing a fourth consecutive award back to Brown Valley Insurance, Roger drops dead — of autoerotic asphyxiation no less. Krogstad can't attend himself because one of his daughters picked the weekend of the convention to get married, but he fears that rumors of the cause of Lemke's death could ruin their chances since the president of AMSI, Orin Helgesson (Kurtwood Smith), brings a moral and religious component to insurance. That makes the innocent Tim the obvious replacement.
Tim isn't completely innocent. He's currently engaged in his first affair with his seventh grade teacher Macy Vanderhei (Sigourney Weaver), but he's never flown on a plane and hasn't been to a city the size of Cedar Rapids. Krogstad gives Tim some tips, the most important being to avoid another insurance agent named Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly).
Once Tim arrives at the hotel hosting at the convention, he gets hit left and right with the shocks of "the big city." He's approached by a hooker named Bree (Alia Shawkat, better known as Maeby Funke of the much-missed Arrested Development), though Tim fails to realize what she's offering. The desk clerk's request for a credit card imprint also knocks him offguard, but that's nothing compared to what happens when he gets to his room an an African American answers the door!
He calls Macy in a panic, but fortunately it's just another insurance agent attending the convention. Even better, it turns out to be one of Tim'a assigned roommates, Ronald Wilkes, and he's portrayed by Isiah Whitlock Jr. That makes it absolute heaven for fans of The Wire because if Whitlock's name doesn't ring a bell, he played the hilariously sleazy and corrupt state Sen. Clay "Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeet" Davis. Phil Johnston's screenplay even has two references to The Wire that Whitlock has said were in the script before he was cast.
Of course, they end up with a third roomie — the man Krogstad warned Tim about — Dean "Deanzie" Ziegler himself, who helps guide Tim to Sodom and Gomorrah's location in Cedar Rapids — or does he? At one point, Ronald asks Deanzie what's wrong with him. "What isn't wrong with me? I talk too much. I drink too much, I weigh too much. I piss people off," Ziegler replies. When Reilly really goes all in for a comedy, he truly dives in and he's hysterical. Ziegler definitely doesn't like how Helgesson tries to impose religion on the insurance business. "There's a separation between religion and insurance. It's in the Constitution," he insists.
The fourth member of the convention's comic quartet comes in the form of Anne Heche as Joan, nearly the female Ziegler. I didn't realize she was in Cedar Rapids and didn't even recognize her at first, but she's funny as hell too. Helms, Reilly, Whitlock and Heche combine to create an awesome comic foursome.
As if they weren't enough, Cedar Rapids also gives us the already mentioned Weaver, Root and Shawkat as well as Helms' former fellow Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry and Mike O'Malley. I must make special mention of Kurtwood Smith. His role in Cedar Rapids isn't the funniest, but it's amazing how I always think of him as a comic actor now since I stumbled upon reruns of That '70s Show and the only reason I'll watch is the great comic work done by Smith and Debra Jo Rupp as the Forman parents. Such a switch from the days when he always seemed to be a great out-and-out villain as in RoboCop or Robert Sean Leonard's overbearing dad in Dead Poets Society.
The performers bring Johnston's first filmed screenplay to life (he's received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for it and Reilly is up for supporting actor, though I might have opted for Whitlock). Director Miguel Arteta keeps the zaniness moving (everyone involved in the turd that is Bridesmaids should watch this to learn how to make a comedy). Arteta sure has an eclectic resume, having directed episodes of TV shows as dissimilar as The Office, Ugly Betty, Six Feet Under and Homicide: Life on the Street and features such as Chuck and Buck and The Good Girl. Cedar Rapids definitely ends up being something he should take pride in having made.
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Labels: 10s, Homicide, John C. Reilly, Sigourney Weaver, Television, The Wire
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Monday, July 18, 2011
This Time It's War
By Damian Arlyn
In 1979, Ridley Scott unleashed one of the scariest, goriest and greatest sci-fi/horror films ever made. Alien was a huge box office hit that turned its virtually unknown lead actress Sigourney Weaver into a major motion picture star and its primary antagonist, an intelligent and extremely deadly creature called the xenomorph, into an iconic figure of nightmares. For years 20th Century Fox had wanted to make a sequel to Alien but it took a 30-year-old Canadian by the name of James Cameron to finally make this a reality. Cameron's resume at the time consisted primarily of special effects work on films such as Escape From New York, Battle Beyond the Stars and Android as well as the screenplay to the hit action blockbuster Rambo: First Blood Part II. His directorial debut (Piranha II: The Spawning) had been a bust but his sophomore effort, a sci-fi thriller called The Terminator which he also wrote, was incredibly successful. Nevertheless, Fox was still taking a bit of a risk turning one of its most potentially lucrative franchises over to such a relatively untried filmmaker. The gamble, however, paid off as Aliens was premiered in theaters 25 years ago today and proved to be one of the most exciting summer movies ever released, a benchmark in the area of special affects and a standard by which Hollywood sequels would be measured for decades to come.
Aliens chronicles the ongoing story of Ellen Ripley, the sole surviving crew member of a ship called the Nostromo which was plagued by a nasty alien critter who systematically eliminated every single one of her companions. At the climax of the previous film, Ripley dispatched the unpleasant baddie and entered hyper-sleep (along with the ship's only other survivor: Jones, the cat) hoping to be picked up in a matter of weeks. As the sequel opens, Ripley is indeed found but soon discovers that it is 57 years later. In the interim, the planet where Ripley's ship picked up the alien had been colonized and Earth has recently lost contact with the colonists. Ripley is sent, along with a unit of tough-talking, ass-kicking space Marines, to investigate the cause where they find, no surprise to Ripley, a whole army of those terrible monsters and one lonely little girl named Newt who has managed to stay alive by avoiding them. Before the film ends, Ripley, Newt, a Marine named Hicks and an android named Bishop manage to blow up all the aliens, escape in a ship and go into hyper-sleep just as Ripley did at the conclusion of Alien.
One of the many things that makes Aliens work so well is the fact that, although it does a fine job continuing the story set in motion by Alien, it is a very different kind of movie from its predecessor. Ridley Scott's film was, first and foremost, a horror story in a futuristic setting. It was an outer space version of Halloween where the mindless, soulless killing machine on a rampage was a horrifying extra-terrestrial instead of a
mask-wearing, knife-wielding psycho and the victims were a crew of interstellar truckers rather than a group of doomed horny teenagers. Cameron had the wisdom to understand that while a sequel should provide a similar viewing experience for its audience, it should also be its own wholly distinct product with its own style, vision and set of strengths and weaknesses. Sequels that simply re-hash everything done in the original might make a lot of money, but they rarely become classics. Intent on not just doing a carbon copy of Scott's masterpiece, Cameron decided to go for pure, unadulterated thrills. Thus, by changing the tone, amplifying the action and quickening the pace, Cameron ensured that his film would satisfy moviegoers' expectations for a visceral experience while still establishing his own unique vision. If Alien was the haunted house, Aliens is the roller coaster ride.The cast is uniformly good. The anchor of the film is, of course, Ripley and Sigourney Weaver manages to instill her with the same hardened, no-nonsense tenacity seen in the first film. Though perfectly willing to
show fear, Ripley always was able to act in the face of incredible danger and that quality serves her well once again. This time around, however, she is allowed some emotional vulnerability in her dealings with the young Newt (played decidedly non-precociously by Carrie Henn), to whom she becomes a sort of surrogate mother. In a scene that was cut from the film's theatrical release (though restored for the home video "special edition"), we learn that Ripley actually has a daughter, who had passed away while Ripley was in hyper-sleep. Apparently Ripley had promised her that that she'd be home in time for her 11th birthday. It is unfortunate that this scene was deleted because not only does it add an extra level of dimension to Ripley's character but it helps to explain the psychology behind the relationship Ripley forms with the orphaned girl.A pre-Mad About You (and even pre-My Two Dads) Paul Reiser plays the sneaky company executive who plans to bring a live specimen back to Earth — further pushing the concept established in the first film that greedy, power-hungry corporations are willing to sacrifice their own low-level employees — with just the right amounts of charm, odiousness and evil. Lance Henriksen plays the android Bishop with a pitch-perfect unemotional demeanor and yet seems to have even more warmth and humanity than Reiser's cowardly villain (he also has one of the film's best scenes involving a table, a hand and a knife). The rest of the cast is basically comprised of the Space Marines. It's very easy in a "combat" picture to make all the characters look and sound so alike that they are virtually indistinguishable, but Cameron and his actors avoid that trap here by giving each grunt his/her own distinct look and personality. The ones that stand out most in the memory, however, are probably Hicks, played by The Terminator's Michael Beihn (who was a last-minute replacement), the buff but sexy Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) and the comically afraid, though at times somewhat annoying, Hudson (Bill Paxton) who spends most of the film complaining and freaking out. If there is one weak spot in the film, he would be it.
Though it still was relatively early in Cameron's career, many of the elements and themes that would characterize much of his later work were already beginning to take shape in 1986 and can be found in Aliens. Firstly, his dependence (and some would say over-dependence) on technology. Not only do all of Cameron's
films push the boundaries of special effects techniques, but all seem to focus to a large degree on hardware, machinery and industrialization (even the period piece Titanic spends an awful lot of its three-hour running time discussing, debating, and exploring the mechanical inner-workings of the ship itself). One of the film's most memorable set pieces is the climactic battle between the queen alien and Ripley. Forgetting for a moment that this particular piece of equipment would make a noticeable re-appearance in Avatar, the image of the all-too human Ripley engulfed in the massive power-loader serves as a perfect symbolic representation for Cameron's ruminations on the progressive fusion of man and machine. It also provides the film with one of its most iconic pieces of dialogue ("Get away from her, you bitch!"). I didn't see Aliens in the theater as I was too young (although it did become the first R-rated film I ever watched on video), but I suspect that line was probably greeted with thunderous applause.Furthermore, his environmental conscience, though not as heavy-handed as it is in films like Avatar and the special edition of The Abyss, is nonetheless present. It's no stretch of the imagination to speculate that had humans never attempted to explore and/or inhabit the alien's planet to begin with, none of the tragedies seen in any of these films would've ever happened. Finally, his simultaneous worship and criticism of the military. There is little doubt that Cameron admires the Marines in the film and yet, despite their excessive boasting, their inability to perform is highlighted even more by Ripley's extreme competence. By the time Cameron gets to Avatar, the military have flat-out become the bad guys.
Aliens went on to gross more than $85 million at the box office and actually earned, among other categories, an Academy Award nomination for best actress (a rarity for that genre of film). Weaver may not have walked away with the statuette, but the film itself won best visual effects and best sound effects editing. Many have even hailed it as one of those rare Hollywood sequels that actually surpasses its original. I personally don't agree with that as I think both films are equally excellent for the kinds of movies that they are trying to be, but whether you prefer Scott's dark, disturbing scarefest or Cameron's raucous, intense thrill ride, Aliens certainly remains endlessly exciting and thoroughly entertaining to this very day. It also, for better or for worse, helped cement James Cameron as a force to be reckoned with in the motion picture industry.
Game over, man.
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Labels: 80s, Cameron, Movie Tributes, R. Scott, Sequels, Sigourney Weaver
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Monday, January 10, 2011
Peter Yates (1929-2011)
As a director, the Hampshire, England-born Peter Yates embraced a wide range of genres in the stories he brought to the silver screen, running the gamut from police thrillers to science fiction tales, from relationships dramas to beautifully rendered American slices of life, earning four Oscar nominations along the way, two for directing and two for producing. Yates has died at 81.
Though he began his career as an actor, Yates found his greatest fame behind the camera. He started doing second unit and assistant directing work on such notable films as Sons and Lovers, The Entertainer with Laurence Olivier, The Guns of Navarone and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. He made his feature directing debut in 1963 with Summer Holiday, a musical romance starring pop star Cliff Richard. The following year, he turned to comedy with a film called One Way Pendulum.
For much of the mid-1960s, he worked in television, directing episodes of The Saint starring Roger Moore and Secret Agent starring Patrick McGoohan.
He returned to features in 1967 with a dramatization of the Great Train Robbery called Robbery, but it was the film he made in 1968 that made his name: Bullitt. Starring Steve McQueen as a San Francisco cop, Bullitt still contains one of the famous chase scenes in movie history, thanks largely to the hilly environs of its setting.
His next film couldn't have been more of a departure. In John and Mary, Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow play two people who meet at a bar, have a one night stand and then spend the next day getting to know one another.
In 1971, he helmed Murphy's War where Peter O'Toole played the title character, the sole survivor of a ship attacked by a German U-boat during World War II who washes up on an island and plots how to take out the U-boat all by himself.
With Robert Redford as his lead, 1972's The Hot Rock took Yates into the heist genre. With a script by William Goldman adapted from a Donald Westlake novel, Redford gathers his crew to steal a big diamond from a museum at the behest of an African doctor who wants it returned to his homeland. The problem: Every time they get it, they keep losing the damn thing and having to steal it again.
Yates filmed a crime classic the following year when Robert Mitchum starred in The Friends of Eddie Coyle. The next year, Yates went in a completely different direction again with the Barbra Streisand comedy For Pete's Sake.
Comedy was still on his plate in 1976 with Mother, Jugs and Speed about the competition between private ambulance companies which brought together the unusual trio of Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch and Harvey Keitel. The next year, he submerged himself with the adaptation of Peter Benchley's thriller The Deep.
His next film though, at least as far as I'm concerned, will be his legacy and remains his best. It brought him those first two Oscar nominations as he filmed Steve Tesich's brilliant script Breaking Away, a film that is as great today as it was the first time I saw it, if not better. He even served as executive producer for the short-lived television series of the movie.
Even though Tesich wrote the screenplay for his next film, Eyewitness, and it starred William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver, the film was a better idea than a movie and bit of a letdown. However, nothing could prepare for his next release, the monumentally silly sci-fi monstrosity Krull in 1983.
Fortunately, he had another 1983 offering to get the taste of Krull out of one's mouth and it earned him those final two Oscar nominations. The Dresser really was an actor's movie (literally) more than anything else as it told the story of an aging and dotty Shakespearean actor (Albert Finney) and his dresser (Tom Courtenay) who more or less serves as his protector. Both Finney and Courtenay were nominated as well.
Following The Dresser, Yates made several films, but nothing to equal those from the early portions of his career. There was Eleni with Kate Nelligan, Suspect with Cher, The House on Carroll Street with Kelly McGillis and Jeff Daniels, the wretched An Innocent Man with Tom Selleck, Year of the Comet, Roommates with Peter Falk and D.B. Sweeney, The Run of the Country with Finney and Curtain Call with James Spader.
His final two projects were made-for-television adaptations of Don Quixote and A Separate Peace.
Even with some dogs on that resume, Yates produced a helluva body of work and an eclectic one at that with several titles that will last for generations.
RIP Mr. Yates.
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Labels: Dustin Hoffman, Falk, Finney, Jeff Daniels, Keitel, Mia Farrow, Mitchum, Musicals, O'Toole, Obituary, Olivier, Redford, Sigourney Weaver, Streisand, Television, William Hurt
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Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Where have you gone, Paul Brickman?
By Edward Copeland
Two films. Two wonderful films are all that Paul Brickman has directed for the world. The first was the smart teen sex comedy Risky Business in 1983 that launched the career of Tom Cruise and the second was the equally good dramedy Men Don't Leave, which was released 20 years ago today in 1990. That's it. It's how it was waiting between Kubrick or Kurosawa projects toward the end of their careers or, if you are so inclined (and I'm not) being impatient for a new Terrence Malick offering after Days of Heaven, though now he seems to have picked up his pace.
No one speaks with bated breath about Brickman. Though he has written or co-written two scripts in the past two decades: Clint Eastwood's True Crime in 1998 and the NBC 2001 miniseries Uprising about the (thanks to Peter Nellhaus for catching that I'd typed the wrong article here originally) Jewish revolt in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II (You can't say his subject matters aren't eclectic), I still feel his absence. Until (or unless) Mr. Brickman graces us with another of his own projects, we'll need to keep celebrating the two gifts he's given us, especially the underrated and neglected gem that turns 20 today.
Nothing in Brickman's pre-directing career as a screenwriter prepared the world for his deliverance of two works
of near perfection, separated by seven years, that couldn't be more dissimilar. He wrote The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, one of the ill-conceived sequels to the original 1976 classic, in 1977. That same year he wrote the screenplay for Jonathan Demme's Handle With Care, which alas I have not seen. Released a few months after Risky Business in 1983 came William Friedkin's troubled production Deal of the Century starring Chevy Chase, Sigourney Weaver and Gregory Hines and though Brickman got sole screenplay credit, it included uncredited work by Robert Towne. Despite that, Brickman alone gave us Risky Business and then, working with Barbara Benedek who wrote the screen story and co-wrote the screenplay, the remarkable Men Don't Leave which I salute today.Men Don't Leave tells with humor and pathos what happens to a nuclear family such as the Macauleys when they are hit by an unexpected rupture. As the film opens, they are family of four: father John (Tom Mason), mom Beth (Jessica Lange), teenage son Chris (Chris O'Donnell) and youngest son Matt (Charlie Korsmo). As young Matt says in a brief opening narration, when he has those moments when the family are together, "Then I was saved." John
is a home builder. In fact, he's not even done with the family's own homestead as plastic covers the unfinished kitchen wall. In a sly joke in the movie's first few minutes that I'd either forgotten or slipped by me on previous viewings, dad takes the kids to a movie which Chris describes as being about a fat kid "who hasn't done it" so his friends hire him a prostitute and then hide in a closet and watch. Quickly realizing the film might not be something his mother would approve of, Chris tries to pass it off as "educational." John tries to assure Beth that it's no big deal and was harmless before eventually relenting and admitting "It was shit." If it's a reference to Brickman's previous film (In the early going, Thomas Newman's nice score even has echoes of Tangerine Dream) or, more likely, the many awful movies lumped in the same genre, it's just a brief moment of levity before the real story starts. A call takes John away before dinner can even be served because of a problem at the construction site. A little while later, it's not John who returns, but a police officer with the news that John has been killed in an accident at the site. The four now are three.I've never been the biggest fan of Jessica Lange as an actress (though I'm downright charitable when compared to how fellow ECOF contributor Josh R feels about her). I think she
has won two Oscars for roles she didn't deserve to win for in Tootsie and Blue Sky, but didn't get a nomination here for Men Don't Leave which, in my opinion, is the best work she's ever put on film. She's completely believable as the small-town housewife. Her portrayal of a woman being forced to keep her family intact when burdened with unexpected debt and the loss of the love of her life while adjusting to a new city when the family is forced to move to Baltimore where a job awaits her, plays as achingly real and heartbreaking, with just the right mixture of humor, sadness and, when it is called for, even indignation. Watching Beth, in a state of shock, trying to navigate the maze of a hospital after getting cold directions from a nurse as to where to go to identify John's body, Lange really delivers the goods. Brickman helps her as well with his dizzying direction in this sequence, even returning to it in a flashback.
Beth's uncertainty as to how to react to John's death extends to the boys as well. The stoic Matt tells her he won't cry and wanders through groups of mourners with a plate of food some man gave to him. Chris tries to hold it in because he thinks it's the right thing to do, though he lashes out a bit at times, as when he discovers that Beth has put the truck up for sale, a truck he feels is rightfully his and that she has no right to sell no matter how deep their money problems are. When Beth first suggests the idea of moving to Baltimore for a better job, neither child understands why she just can't get a better job where they are. When Chris catches Beth with a cigarette, he chastises her like a parent would, asking her if she's trying to kill herself, something that has a deeper meaning now in a one-parent household.
Despite the kids' misgivings (as well as her own), Beth and the family relocate to an apartment in Baltimore where they begin to encounter new people who will become important parts of their lives. An accidental meeting
in the building elevator thanks to a prank by Matt leads to a lengthy ride for Chris and a woman who appears to be a nurse (the always quirky and wonderful Joan Cusack in one of her very best performances). After the elevator finally gets to the ground floor, Chris makes a point of explaining to the woman that his little brother was the one who had pressed all the buttons and it wasn't him. He just wanted her to know that he wouldn't do something like that. Cusack is intrigued. "Why do you care what I think?" Cusack possesses such a unique talent and brings such a special quality to nearly every film she's in, that it's a shame that she doesn't work more, but it's understandable how she's difficult to cast consistently. She's one of a kind, be it here or in Broadcast News, Working Girl, In & Out or School of Rock, she's always a welcome addition to the movie in question.Beth meets her new employer at the job that was arranged for her in a bake shop/catering service run by Lisa Coleman, a divorced, chain-smoking bitch-on-wheels (Kathy Bates, who actually won the best actress
Oscar the same year for Misery) who didn't plan to train someone on the job, but reluctantly agrees to hire Beth anyway and immediately starts barking orders for what she needs her to run and fetch for her at the nearby grocery. Beth's determined to keep smiling' through, though you can sense the misgivings lurking beneath the surface of her new situation, though she eventually starts baking her own recipes at home and bringing them in to sell. Her first delivery doesn't go especially well as she hauls a large lunch basket up and down the stairs of a building, losing many pieces of fruit along the way, to feed lunch to a group of very unusual musicians who use, in addition to more typical instruments, typewriters and egg beaters. By the time she reaches them, both she and the basket collapse, but one of the musicians (Arliss Howard) comes to her aid and invites her to their performance.
At his new school, the always understated Matt doesn't have much to say when the teacher asks all the kids in class to share their summer memories since his is particularly painful. He does make a new friend, Winston (Corey Carrier), but unfortunately he is going to turn out to be a bad influence, showing Matt how to shoplift candy from stores. This leads to learning to break into homes and steals their VCRs and sell them to a guy named Mike (Kevin Corrigan), who likes to remove the dialogue from porn but keep or add musical soundtracks such as the theme from Rawhide. Matt sees this as a way to raise money to buy lottery tickets in the hopes he can buy back his mom's house.
The thrust of Men Don't Leave concerns the process of moving on and with the loss of a lifemate or a parent, no stores stock road maps, no clocks show timetables and life certainly doesn't hit the pause button to stop
other events from interferring in the time one needs since every single case is a unique one and Brickman and Benedek's script paints this beautifully without being maudlin but with the right mix of humor and sadness but, more importantly, the palpable pulse of truth. In other hands, the relationship that develops between the 17-year-old Chris and the adult Jody (Cusack) could play as sleazy or unreal, but it feels completely plausible here thanks to Cusack's performance. Jody might not be a nurse (in fact, she's an X-ray technician), but when she says she likes to help people, you take her at her word. Who knows how long her romance with Chris will last once the movie ends, but no matter how it ends you get the feeling that it will wind up being a positive force in his life at a crucial moment.
Understandably, Beth isn't thrilled that her teenage son is sleeping with an older woman, but then she finds trepidations about most aspects of her new life. She's hesitant to begin any sort of relationship with the musician Charles (Howard, a great actor who is almost as rare a sight as his wife Debra Winger), but yet she's clearly attracted to him and finds a need for his emotional support. Chris disapproves at first, especially when he thinks he's bringing Beth home too late following a
concert, prompting Charles to ask, "Is your father this rough on all the guys?" When they do actually have a real date at her apartment and he moves in for a kiss, Beth resists, telling him that having an affair is not high on her list of priorities. Charles reassures her about the relationship that, "If it can't be physical, let's go bowling." At one point, she shows up at the divorced father's door and says nothing more than, "I'm very sad." Charles tries his best to be a comfort and they even begin to kiss until a poorly timed nosebleed gets in the way. She also tires of Lisa's barked orders and finally snaps one day when Lisa tells her to run and get her something, telling her if she wanted someone to run, she should have hired a thoroughbred. Lisa fires her and Beth's unraveling really begins. Matt, despite his new criminal life, always tries to be the good son, but watching Winston's full and fun family life with both a mother and a father, starts longing to live there and even runs away to spend the night there.Beth takes to bed for days and despite the best efforts of Matt and Chris, they can't seem to get through to her. Since she's essentially cut off contact from the world, a desperate Chris even goes to visit Charles,
begging him to come see her, assuming that the way he acted was the reason he doesn't come around anymore, but he can't stand seeing his mom so sad and alone and she was happy when he was around. Charles and a friend do their best, coming by to serenade her through the door, but though Beth is on the other side listening, it fails to get her to respond. It takes Jody, the woman sleeping with her son, the woman she hates, to get through to Beth, simply because she refuses to take no for an answer, dragging her out of bed, pushing her into the shower, pouring coffee down her throat and talking with her. Jody tells her of a story Chris told her about John carrying Beth around a park when she broke her foot and she hoped to have someone love her that much someday. If someone loved me that much and he died, Jody says, "I'd be so sad, I'd get very tired.Of course, it's often the person who is the quietest who really needs the help and that turns out to be Matt who turns up missing. They eventually get a call and find that somehow he made his way back to their
old house in their old town, where they find him sobbing in the little house his dad helped him build. His mom reassures him that he doesn't always have to be such a good boy. Through tears, Matt says, "I want to see him again — just one more time," a sentiment that anyone who has ever lost anyone dear to them can relate to completely. The family returns to Baltimore again and Beth resumes baking goodies, which she takes to Lisa to sell on consignment. In a soft moment, Lisa tells her that while it's hard to have been left alone with two kids, when Lisa's husband divorced her two years ago, it's even harder to have been left alone. I don't know which is harder, but I do know that Paul Brickman has left movie lovers in the lurch by only leaving us his two gems. What are you waiting for, Paul? Please sir, we want some more, especially if they are as great as Men Don't Leave.Tweet
Labels: 90s, Cruise, Debra Winger, Demme, Eastwood, J. Lange, K. Bates, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Malick, Movie Tributes, Sigourney Weaver, Towne
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Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Dances with delusions of grandeur
By Edward Copeland
There's a certain freedom that comes with being able to see and write about a film long after it's been dissected to death, especially a blockbuster such as Avatar. I don't have to waste time on the plot, I can just get to the critique and James Cameron, be prepared: both barrels are loaded.
Now, since my physical limitations prevented me from seeing Avatar in the theaters, I didn't get the 3D experience. Not that I think it would have changed my opinion of the lousy movie that I finally saw on DVD. Perhaps
the 3D glasses were laced with a hallucinogen that made people believe they were enjoying themselves. I do understand why Cameron chose 3D, since the story and screenplay for Avatar barely register as one dimensional, he had to do something. I was shocked to see in the end credits that the great actress CCH Pounder also was in the film, but who the hell she played I have no idea. I assume one of the Ewoks — I mean Navi. What does puzzle me is that I read that the film was shot in scope (2:35:1 aspect ratio), but, for some reason, the DVD has been reconfigured to 1:85:1. It wouldn't have made my viewing experience better, but it did make it even less like theatergoers saw and for no good reason that I can discern. It's a puzzling decision by Cameron, supposedly such a stickler for the visual look of his films, to allow, but I don't have enough interest to go searching for the answer since the film would suck in any aspect ratio.Granted, I was no fan of Titanic, but at least it had mostly top-notch actors from top to bottom giving Cameron's insipid dialogue more life than it deserved. In fact, I always said it could have been a truly great film if it had been a silent movie. Cameron also had a true story to help guide him as he tacked his ridiculous fictional one on top of it. (Billy Zane is chasing Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet around with a gun as the ship floods! I hope he doesn't shoot them! They might drown! I guess the sinking of the ship just wasn't suspenseful enough by itself.) Still, if you want the best film telling of the Titanic story, that title still belongs to Roy Ward Baker's 1958 classic A Night to Remember. Avatar only has Sigourney Weaver and the usually reliable Giovanni Ribisi (sadly trapped in a stock role) trying to hold up the acting end for the entire bloated film, which is otherwise populated by uncharismatic lightweights and Stephen Lang as a bad guy Marine colonel who comes fully armed with every cliche a military stereotype will need at his disposal.
Many made the comparison of Avatar's story to Dances With Wolves, but what really came to my mind was Willow, which borrowed heavily from every legend, myth, story and movie it could get its hands on. Just a short list of references I scribbled while watching Avatar: the aforementioned Dances With Wolves, the video game Joust, the
speeder bike chase in Return of the Jedi and the Ewoks in general, This Boy's Life, The Last of the Mohicans, Platoon (minus Oliver Stone's subtlety), RoboCop, Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (though I'd have preferred to hear Tone Loc singing "If I'm Gonna Eat Somebody (It Might As Well Be You)" over James Horner's cloying score) and even Cameron's own Aliens. At one point in the film when one of the Navi says, "No more talk," I knew he meant it was time to fight, but there was part of me that hoped the film was about to become that silent movie I dreamed of for Titanic to spare me from the rotten dialogue and frequent shouts of "Nooooo!" as the good humans witness some new atrocity. You would think that perhaps on some level Cameron's message of protecting natural resources and ecosystems would touch me given my current level of outrage over the disaster BP has inflicted upon the Gulf of Mexico and beyond, but then again, the news does a much better job at getting me worked up over that than this terribly written, overlong movie assembled from bits and pieces of other, better films ever could.Of course, what exactly is this mineral that the corporate bad guys are so eager to harvest anyway why are they allowed to use Marines to obtain it? As far as I know, it could be what Claude Rains kept in his wine bottle in Hitchcock's Notorious. By the way, when is this film set and who and what kind of president gave a corporate shill such free rein over the military for their company's pursuits (not that it's outside the realm of possibility)? When we get to the climactic battle between the Ewoks/Navi and the Marines, aren't the Marines just following orders? Should audiences root for their deaths and injuries?
Enough about Avatar. I really have nothing more to say about this equivalent of a roadside con man's very expensive miracle elixir that was sold to gullible millions. I want to discuss James Cameron himself. It is easy to see how he rose to prominence. His writing-directing projects started out as solid. In fact, he made some of the all-time best action films such as The Terminator, Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, films where the thrills moved the pictures along so fast that the dialogue hardly mattered. However, within this period there were signs of his supreme suckiness as a screenwriter. He authored Rambo: First Blood Part II and made what, in its own way, could almost be called his underwater Avatar, The Abyss, the first real evidence of him taking himself way too seriously in a movie that I largely forgot about as soon as I left the theater. I think Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio got CPR at some point, though they may have just been trying to wake her up. No one offered to do the same for me.
He also wrote the muddled mish-mash Strange Days for his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow, who continues to grow and garner acclaim as a director without ever stumbling upon a good screenplay. The film he wrote and directed that really showed he should stick with what he was good at was when he tried to mix action with comedy in the dreadful True Lies and ended up with a misogynistic misfire loaded with myriad ethnic stereotypes as well as Tom Arnold.
Then he really became obsessed with special effects and his own self-worth with Titanic, thanks to the Oscars and legions of teenage girls with too much time on their hands. Compare him to another filmmaker who can't write dialogue worth a damn, George Lucas. Lucas can at least tell a story and, as flawed as the Star Wars prequels are, Lucas never tries to pass them off as important or works of art. He's there to play with his expensive toy box and make entertainment. Cameron enjoys playing with his toys just as much, but he suffers from the delusion that the films he makes are IMPORTANT. Lucas' films turn out to be the equivalent of high-tech serials with lousy dialogue. Cameron's last two films, especially Avatar, turn out to be pompous crap with delusions of grandeur AND lousy dialogue without any storytelling sense. Whether his movie turns out for better or worse, George Lucas is a storyteller. James Cameron just wants to show off technology. Lucas has found the proper venue in movie theaters. Perhaps Cameron should be strutting his stuff at one of those preview conventions they hold in Las Vegas to introduce the latest in high-tech gear.
Now, I'm sure Avatar defenders will claim I'm just writing this to be a contrarian for contrarian's sake, but I honestly cannot fathom how anyone who truly loves film can sit through this hokum and think it stands up as a great movie on any level unless standards have been lowered to the point that cool visuals are enough. Perhaps I'm too old-fashioned a movie lover, but I don't care how stunning the images are if it's really only stunning wrapping paper masking a box with no gift inside.
I had neither the time nor the energy to try to find an interview with Cameron to answer a question I've long wondered about: Has he ever mentioned that he had any cinematic influences, important movies or favorite filmmakers? All I can ever find is his obsession with integrating science with filmmaking. (I guess that's why he's found favor with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.) Call me a film snob if you must, but I'm always going to prefer directors who love the medium itself, not the gadgets. It would explain his shitty scripts. He could care less about the story and dialogue — he's too busy concentrating on the technical wizardry. Perhaps Errol Morris can create a documentary on Cameron called Slow, Expensive and Out of Control.
Cameron has predicted that eventually all films will go 3D (it's the new colorization!), but all films don't need 3D. Will they go back and retrofit movies for 3D like they did with the Clash of the Titans remake? Who is up for that 3D Pretty Woman? Hell, let's go further back. I think 3D is what Mrs. Miniver always has needed. (I know the new 3D isn't the same as the old, but I can't help but think of John Candy on SCTV every time I hear about it.) A few years back, hack extraordinaire Michael Bay tried to spread the rumor that he was the illegitimate spawn of the great director John Frankenheimer. I wonder if the truth is that Bay actually was created in a lab by Cameron.
James Cameron, I challenge you. For your next film, let someone else write your screenplay and go small. If you really believe that you have become that important an artist, you must know that you can make a film about a subject you care about on a small scale without a gargantuan budget, 3D or CGI run amok. Remember how simple The Terminator was and how much better it still is when you compare it to Titanic or Avatar? You've broken box office records galore and made yourself a very wealthy man. You can get away with making a small project. Do a movie that has absolutely no need for anything besides a good script, good actors and good direction without gizmos and eye candy to distract the moviegoer. Prove me wrong about you. I dare you. Show your bona fides as an artist not just overpaid tech support.
BONUS: I couldn't find the specific SCTV clip I wanted, but here is an example that is just as funny, especially when you consider that the 3D trend has more to do with taking more of your money than making quality movies.
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Labels: 00s, Cameron, DiCaprio, Hitchcock, Lucas, Oliver Stone, Oscars, Rains, Sigourney Weaver, Star Wars, Television, Winslet
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Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Herzog Week: Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht
By Edward Copeland
In a featurette on the DVD for Nosferatu, Werner Herzog says that it was the first time he attempted a pure genre film and boy did he pull it off. He also felt some responsibility, remaking what he considers the first great German film something that, in actuality, he did twice, making both English-language and German-language versions (on the commentary, Herzog prefers the term reversioning). I only watched the German version and it may well be the best screen telling of the Dracula story I've seen put on celluloid.
Of course, the reason Herzog made two versions was the international nature of his cast and as a result many of the actor's voices were dubbed by others in both versions. The great French actress Isabelle Adjani plays Lucy Harker, but since she spoke neither English nor German, another actress voiced her part in both versions.
The same was true of the Frenchman Roland Topor who plays Renfield, though the dubbed cackle would make Dwight Frye proud even though Herzog claims never to have seen the Bela Lugosi version. Klaus Kinski as Dracula and Bruno Ganz as Jonathan Harker could do their own voices in both versions.
Herzog, as a German child born during World War II, felt that there was no German forefathers in his immediate generation to look back to, so he and other aspiring filmmakers went back to their cinematic grandfathers like Murnau who made the silent Nosferatu in an effort to find their way to connect to German culture that didn't involve the horrors of Nazism.
Kinski's makeup, which took four hours a day, is patterned after the look Max Schreck had in the silent classic and his subdued performance boosts the creepy element that Herzog builds. What's particularly amazing for a vampire film is how much is not shown. Only a single drop of blood appears on screen throughout the entire film, yet it doesn't do anything to lessen the horror, though I'm not sure horror is the proper word.
There aren't scares as in your typical vampire story; Herzog's film concentrates on moods and atmospherics and really succeeds better than other movies that take the easier paths to spooking the audience. Kinski's Dracula contains a bit of a tragic figure within his horrific monster body, longing for the ability for human emotions such as love or even the desire just to die.
All the classic characters get a bit of a twist. Ganz's Jonathan Harker starts out as the would-be hero, out to save his wife before becoming a zombified figure shaking in a corner. Walter Landegast's Van Helsing isn't the fearsome vampire hunter of some versions, but just your average doctor who believes in science and pooh-poohs the superstition when Adjani's Lucy tries to warn him of the vampire in their midst.
Lucy changes the most. It's somewhat ironic that this version premiered in 1979, the same year that Sigourney Weaver first became Ripley in Alien, because Lucy is the character that pretty much takes charge when it comes to trying to stop Dracula.
Now, she doesn't do some Ripley-style asskicking, but it is an interesting take, especially within her village, which has been hit by the plague and provides some unusual sequences where Lucy tries to enlist help only to find the living citizens drinking and celebrating what they assume will be their last dances.
As I've dived into Herzog for this week's project, I've found his body of work to be more eclectic than you'd think while still showing some of his signatures within the different films. Of all those I've viewed, Nosferatu may be my favorite Herzog so far.
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Labels: 70s, Foreign, Herzog, Lugosi, Murnau, Sigourney Weaver, Silents
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Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Catching up is hard to do
By Edward Copeland
At this time of year, I go into moviewatching overdrive, trying to see things I missed as well as all the new releases flooding theaters both wide and limited. As a result, I just don't have the time or energy to give all of them full-fledged reviews. This doesn't mean some of these aren't good, just that I don't have much to say about them.
Broken English
Nominated for a couple of Independent Spirit Awards, Broken English is the writing-directing debut of Zoe Cassavetes, though Parker Posey is the main attraction here. Posey's performance as single woman in New York approaching her 40s is one of the best she's ever given and she has some fine support from Drea de Matteo as her unhappily married friend. Still, the movie itself is a mixed bag.
Crazy Love
One of the many idiosyncratic documentaries to emerge of late, Crazy Love recounts the story of a New York tabloid sensation dating back to the 1950s when an obsessed lawyer named Burt Pugach decided that if he couldn't have the woman of his dreams, Linda Ross, no one would. As a result, he hired some men to toss lye in her eyes, blinding her and eventually sending him to prison. The tale only gets more bizarre from there but co-director Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens tell an excellent story about a romance where love truly was blind.
The Namesake
The latest film from Mira Nair has a lot going for it as it tells a multigenerational story of an Indian husband and wife who relocate to the U.S., where their American-born children have little use for the traditions of their parents' homeland. The performances, especially by Irrfan Khan as the father and Kal Penn as the grown version of the son he named Gogol, make the movie better than it is. In some ways, even though it concerns different countries, there are parallels to the story of The Kite Runner, and while The Namesake is better than that film, it still fails to truly come together in a satisfying way.
Once
Charm can only get you so far and that's how I felt about Once, the Irish pseudo-musical about a busker/vacuum repairman and a Czech immigrant who pursue a musical partnership while dancing around the idea of a personal relationship. Glen Hansard and Marketa Iglova are good and John Carney's film has a lot going for it, but it ends up feeling slight and forgettable.
Starting Out in the Evening
Yes, Frank Langella is excellent as an aging literary lion, struggling to pen a new novel after a long dry spell. The others in the cast (Lauren Ambrose as an ambitious graduate student, hoping to write a thesis on Langella's character and Lili Taylor as Langella's daughter) are excellent, but the movie itself doesn't get close to reaching the heights that its actors do. Taylor's storyline in particular seems as if it's filler, padding out the running time of what would be a much shorter film. Langella deserves the praise he's received, but the movie is another story.
The TV Set
This satire about the compromises made in the pursuit of show business glory, particularly TV's pilot season, seems overly familiar with so many other films and TV shows that have covered the same material. You can almost write the film yourself as it goes on. David Duchovny stars as the would-be creator of a new series and Sigourney Weaver does a variation on her character from Working Girl, transplanting her to the entertainment industry. Nothing is really bad about Jake Kasdan's film, it just seems like leftovers.
Waitress
It's difficult to watch Waitress and not to think of the tragedy that befell is writer-director-co-star Adrienne Shelly before the film even opened. On top of that, some of the would-be Southern accents are pretty bad, especially in the beginning. Eventually though, the charms of lead Keri Russell and her supporting cast (particularly Andy Griffith) won me over, even if Jeremy Sisto's character as an asshole husband is drawn so broadly that at times it detracts from the tone. Sisto's character isn't just a jerk, he's a jerk who verbalizes ahead of time every time he's going to be a jerk. He should have been more show, less tell. Still, overall, Waitress ends up being a pleasant diversion.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Ken Loach's film won the Golden Palm at Cannes in 2006 and while it's stunning to look at, this tale of the early days of the Irish Republican Army never succeeded at grabbing me, despite good performances from Cillian Murphy and Pádraic Delaney as brothers with differing views on the path to independence from Great Britain.
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At this time of year, I go into moviewatching overdrive, trying to see things I missed as well as all the new releases flooding theaters both wide and limited. As a result, I just don't have the time or energy to give all of them full-fledged reviews. This doesn't mean some of these aren't good, just that I don't have much to say about them.
Nominated for a couple of Independent Spirit Awards, Broken English is the writing-directing debut of Zoe Cassavetes, though Parker Posey is the main attraction here. Posey's performance as single woman in New York approaching her 40s is one of the best she's ever given and she has some fine support from Drea de Matteo as her unhappily married friend. Still, the movie itself is a mixed bag.
One of the many idiosyncratic documentaries to emerge of late, Crazy Love recounts the story of a New York tabloid sensation dating back to the 1950s when an obsessed lawyer named Burt Pugach decided that if he couldn't have the woman of his dreams, Linda Ross, no one would. As a result, he hired some men to toss lye in her eyes, blinding her and eventually sending him to prison. The tale only gets more bizarre from there but co-director Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens tell an excellent story about a romance where love truly was blind.
The latest film from Mira Nair has a lot going for it as it tells a multigenerational story of an Indian husband and wife who relocate to the U.S., where their American-born children have little use for the traditions of their parents' homeland. The performances, especially by Irrfan Khan as the father and Kal Penn as the grown version of the son he named Gogol, make the movie better than it is. In some ways, even though it concerns different countries, there are parallels to the story of The Kite Runner, and while The Namesake is better than that film, it still fails to truly come together in a satisfying way.
Charm can only get you so far and that's how I felt about Once, the Irish pseudo-musical about a busker/vacuum repairman and a Czech immigrant who pursue a musical partnership while dancing around the idea of a personal relationship. Glen Hansard and Marketa Iglova are good and John Carney's film has a lot going for it, but it ends up feeling slight and forgettable.
Yes, Frank Langella is excellent as an aging literary lion, struggling to pen a new novel after a long dry spell. The others in the cast (Lauren Ambrose as an ambitious graduate student, hoping to write a thesis on Langella's character and Lili Taylor as Langella's daughter) are excellent, but the movie itself doesn't get close to reaching the heights that its actors do. Taylor's storyline in particular seems as if it's filler, padding out the running time of what would be a much shorter film. Langella deserves the praise he's received, but the movie is another story.
This satire about the compromises made in the pursuit of show business glory, particularly TV's pilot season, seems overly familiar with so many other films and TV shows that have covered the same material. You can almost write the film yourself as it goes on. David Duchovny stars as the would-be creator of a new series and Sigourney Weaver does a variation on her character from Working Girl, transplanting her to the entertainment industry. Nothing is really bad about Jake Kasdan's film, it just seems like leftovers.
It's difficult to watch Waitress and not to think of the tragedy that befell is writer-director-co-star Adrienne Shelly before the film even opened. On top of that, some of the would-be Southern accents are pretty bad, especially in the beginning. Eventually though, the charms of lead Keri Russell and her supporting cast (particularly Andy Griffith) won me over, even if Jeremy Sisto's character as an asshole husband is drawn so broadly that at times it detracts from the tone. Sisto's character isn't just a jerk, he's a jerk who verbalizes ahead of time every time he's going to be a jerk. He should have been more show, less tell. Still, overall, Waitress ends up being a pleasant diversion.
Ken Loach's film won the Golden Palm at Cannes in 2006 and while it's stunning to look at, this tale of the early days of the Irish Republican Army never succeeded at grabbing me, despite good performances from Cillian Murphy and Pádraic Delaney as brothers with differing views on the path to independence from Great Britain.
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Labels: 00s, Documentary, Musicals, Sigourney Weaver
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Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Whatever It Is, Kill It.
By Josh R
I am writing this brief preamble after having already completed this piece, because the nature of following paragraphs requires something in the way of explanation. I started out with every intention of writing a review of La Vie en Rose. The best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray, and that’s not what I wound up doing. So for those expecting a critical discussion of the film, you’re not going to find it here — the film itself is not summarized or barely even discussed. Somewhere midway through the writing of this piece, my instincts pulled me in a different direction, and it became about something else entirely. Call it righteous indignation, bile or just plain whining — whatever it was, I was overtaken by the spirit (in the evangelical sense), and for whatever it’s worth, here is what the spirit had to say:
The hardest thing to place is the walk.
Most everything else about Marion Cotillard’s bizarre, fussy performance in La Vie en Rose — allegedly a biography of legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf, but really more of an extended drag act with subtitles — strikes an instant chord of recognition. The exaggerated overbite makes her a doppelganger for Strangers with Candy's Jerri Blank, the kooky creation of demented satirist Amy Sedaris. In the Comedy Central series detailing the exploits of a reformed crack whore going back to high school, the character’s aggressively protruding chompers were intended as a sight gag; in La Vie en Rose, they’re meant to be taken seriously. The voice — a guttural hiss that shifts into an adenoidal, nails-on-a-chalkboard shriek when Edith loses her shit, which she frequently does — is pitched somewhere between The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum and the cartoon hag in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (when she laughs she goes “heh heh heh”). The stoop-shouldered, saucer-eyed look, accompanied by a strenuous sucking in of the cheeks, which Cotillard affects for her representation of Edith in her 20s, is pure Marty Feldman circa Young Frankenstein. Again, it should be mentioned that when Feldman played Igor, his faces were intended to draw laughs — here they’re done with such wormy sincerity that they suggest Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl, trying to look as pathetically undernourished and bedraggled as possible, in order to maximize her profit margin soliciting change from guilt-ridden passers-by.
But it’s the walk — comprised of many different components, none of which appear to have been executed without a certain degree of intense physical pain — that had me stumped for the better part of the film’s interminable 140 minute running time. With the aforementioned posture, which can only be described as Quasimodoesque, Cotillard has added this spasmodic jerky little gait that resembles nothing to be found in the realm of human motion. She looks a bit like a bobblehead doll walking on eggshells, which seems at once mechanized (like an automaton on a theme-park ride) and strangely Muppet-like. After a while, I concluded that what it reminded of me most was Sesame Street's Grover, mainly owing to the swaying motion that accompanied the convulsiveness. My mother, who is completely ignorant on most matters relating to pop culture, surprised me about midway through the film by hitting the nail on the head. “Yoda,” she crisply ventured, and with a note of thinly veiled disgust, as we watched the older Edith clumping her way across the screen with the twitching laboriousness (or laborious twitchiness, if you like) of an overburdened pack horse on a bad acid trip.
In fairness, I need to say that I am not particularly familiar with Edith Piaf, beyond having listened to a selection of her recordings. Having no real sense of the physicality of the real-life woman, I am prepared to allow for the possibility that she did indeed look, sound and act like a troll. Performances in celebrity biopics are inevitably based in mimicry, and it is obvious that Cotillard is mimicking someone — or something. I must duly stipulate that never, in my 20-some years of moviegoing, have I ever witnessed a more heavily stylized piece of acting in a film that was clearly intended as an exercise in realism. In a fantasy-based film, such as a Lord of the Rings or that Tom Cruise turkey Legend (with that creepy little hissing blue-elf thing, which the actress also occasionally evokes), it would make a modicum of sense. La Vie en Rose does not fall into that category, and Cotillard’s approach does not suggest anything even remotely resembling that which might be drawn from the realm of recognizable human behavior. It’s as she’s on a mission to make Faye Dunaway’s Joan Crawford impersonation look like Liv Ullmann in earth mother mode.
If you detect a note of anger in my tone, it’s because I have been of late incredibly disturbed — and genuinely saddened — by the tendencies of many Oscar-obsessed bloggers to bash Julie Christie’s work in Away from Her as means of promoting what they perceive as the superiority of Ms. Cotillard’s achievement. As those who follow the awards season are doubtless aware, Ms. Christie has bested Cotillard in many key contests leading up to the big Oscar showdown. This has sent Gollum’s partisans careening into red alert mode; I’ve read an alarming number of posts, some penned by bloggers whom I admire and respect, that take the tack of disparaging Christie’s work as an offensive strike against the prospect of her winning. This is nothing new — I’ve been guilty of voicing my disdain for films and performances with more vehemence when it becomes clear that they’re on a collision course with golden glory — but I’m perplexed and troubled by the rationale that serves as the basis for the Christie attacks.
Anyone who’s read my previous pieces on this blog knows where I stand on the prevailing wisdom about what constitutes great screen acting. There’s a school of thought which holds that the measure of greatness lies in the extent to which an actor can disappear into a role — not just by inhabiting it simply and naturally, but through techniques involving extreme physical or vocal transformation. In order to give a great performance, an actor needs to get as far away from themselves as humanly possible, to the point where their peers can say, with a note of awe in their voices, “I forgot I was watching Charlize Theron.” Above all, the effort needs to be visible — the unforced naturalism of previous generations of actors has become anathema. Champions of Cate Blanchett — a talented actress whose studied, controlled approach of late has won her widespread acclaim while leaving viewers such as myself mostly cold — would cite her chameleon-like ability to assume any physical or vocal characteristic under the sun as proof of her genius. The thought and care and intense preparation that have gone into each performance is always made explicit. Contrast that with Julie Christie, who breathes life into her role with such effortless simplicity that she hardly seems to be acting at all — she is that woman, gradually slipping away into the haze of Alzheimer’s, as opposed to giving a showy, strenuous representation of how the disease ravages the mind, body and soul.
I try to be tolerant and respectful of people whose opinions differ from my own — I actually served as the referee during a heated debate that occurred between friends two night ago over the merits of Tim Burton’s adaptation of Sweeney Todd — but these people need to shut the fuck up. Their attitudes represent everything that is glib, facile and wrong-headed about the popular standard by which acting is evaluated — which holds that style is substance — and their short-sightedness is slowly but surely contributing to the ruination of the cinematic art form. They’re breeding a generation of actors who will favor shtick and mimicry over honesty and feeling, and that’s a fucking shame. It’s acting as pyrotechnics, in which big, flashy special effects will have taken the place of subtlety and nuance. If one likes that sort of thing, then that is the sort of thing one likes; I'll take the other.
So now that I’ve gotten that rant out of my system, let’s dispense with the petty insults (the Muppet references, et. al.), and see what it all boils down to. There was not one moment of Ms. Cotillard’s performance, or the messy, slipshod film fashioned haphazardly around it, that rang even remotely true for me, in any way, shape or form. For all I know, the actress may have been drawing from a place of genuine feeling — but the performance is so mannered, so stylized, so forced in its execution, that the emotional truth that may or may not be fueling it never pierces through the thick, hard shell of artifice that contains it. I can’t imagine that the goal was to make Edith Piaf as repulsive and grotesquely un-humanlike as possible, but that’s the practical effect of the actress’s approach. You keep waiting for Sigourney Weaver to show up with a blowtorch gun and blast her to smithereens. The people who love this performance — and there are many of them out there — regard it with something verging on awe. As do I…albeit for entirely different reasons.
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I am writing this brief preamble after having already completed this piece, because the nature of following paragraphs requires something in the way of explanation. I started out with every intention of writing a review of La Vie en Rose. The best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray, and that’s not what I wound up doing. So for those expecting a critical discussion of the film, you’re not going to find it here — the film itself is not summarized or barely even discussed. Somewhere midway through the writing of this piece, my instincts pulled me in a different direction, and it became about something else entirely. Call it righteous indignation, bile or just plain whining — whatever it was, I was overtaken by the spirit (in the evangelical sense), and for whatever it’s worth, here is what the spirit had to say:
The hardest thing to place is the walk.
Most everything else about Marion Cotillard’s bizarre, fussy performance in La Vie en Rose — allegedly a biography of legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf, but really more of an extended drag act with subtitles — strikes an instant chord of recognition. The exaggerated overbite makes her a doppelganger for Strangers with Candy's Jerri Blank, the kooky creation of demented satirist Amy Sedaris. In the Comedy Central series detailing the exploits of a reformed crack whore going back to high school, the character’s aggressively protruding chompers were intended as a sight gag; in La Vie en Rose, they’re meant to be taken seriously. The voice — a guttural hiss that shifts into an adenoidal, nails-on-a-chalkboard shriek when Edith loses her shit, which she frequently does — is pitched somewhere between The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum and the cartoon hag in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (when she laughs she goes “heh heh heh”). The stoop-shouldered, saucer-eyed look, accompanied by a strenuous sucking in of the cheeks, which Cotillard affects for her representation of Edith in her 20s, is pure Marty Feldman circa Young Frankenstein. Again, it should be mentioned that when Feldman played Igor, his faces were intended to draw laughs — here they’re done with such wormy sincerity that they suggest Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl, trying to look as pathetically undernourished and bedraggled as possible, in order to maximize her profit margin soliciting change from guilt-ridden passers-by.
But it’s the walk — comprised of many different components, none of which appear to have been executed without a certain degree of intense physical pain — that had me stumped for the better part of the film’s interminable 140 minute running time. With the aforementioned posture, which can only be described as Quasimodoesque, Cotillard has added this spasmodic jerky little gait that resembles nothing to be found in the realm of human motion. She looks a bit like a bobblehead doll walking on eggshells, which seems at once mechanized (like an automaton on a theme-park ride) and strangely Muppet-like. After a while, I concluded that what it reminded of me most was Sesame Street's Grover, mainly owing to the swaying motion that accompanied the convulsiveness. My mother, who is completely ignorant on most matters relating to pop culture, surprised me about midway through the film by hitting the nail on the head. “Yoda,” she crisply ventured, and with a note of thinly veiled disgust, as we watched the older Edith clumping her way across the screen with the twitching laboriousness (or laborious twitchiness, if you like) of an overburdened pack horse on a bad acid trip.
In fairness, I need to say that I am not particularly familiar with Edith Piaf, beyond having listened to a selection of her recordings. Having no real sense of the physicality of the real-life woman, I am prepared to allow for the possibility that she did indeed look, sound and act like a troll. Performances in celebrity biopics are inevitably based in mimicry, and it is obvious that Cotillard is mimicking someone — or something. I must duly stipulate that never, in my 20-some years of moviegoing, have I ever witnessed a more heavily stylized piece of acting in a film that was clearly intended as an exercise in realism. In a fantasy-based film, such as a Lord of the Rings or that Tom Cruise turkey Legend (with that creepy little hissing blue-elf thing, which the actress also occasionally evokes), it would make a modicum of sense. La Vie en Rose does not fall into that category, and Cotillard’s approach does not suggest anything even remotely resembling that which might be drawn from the realm of recognizable human behavior. It’s as she’s on a mission to make Faye Dunaway’s Joan Crawford impersonation look like Liv Ullmann in earth mother mode.
If you detect a note of anger in my tone, it’s because I have been of late incredibly disturbed — and genuinely saddened — by the tendencies of many Oscar-obsessed bloggers to bash Julie Christie’s work in Away from Her as means of promoting what they perceive as the superiority of Ms. Cotillard’s achievement. As those who follow the awards season are doubtless aware, Ms. Christie has bested Cotillard in many key contests leading up to the big Oscar showdown. This has sent Gollum’s partisans careening into red alert mode; I’ve read an alarming number of posts, some penned by bloggers whom I admire and respect, that take the tack of disparaging Christie’s work as an offensive strike against the prospect of her winning. This is nothing new — I’ve been guilty of voicing my disdain for films and performances with more vehemence when it becomes clear that they’re on a collision course with golden glory — but I’m perplexed and troubled by the rationale that serves as the basis for the Christie attacks.
Anyone who’s read my previous pieces on this blog knows where I stand on the prevailing wisdom about what constitutes great screen acting. There’s a school of thought which holds that the measure of greatness lies in the extent to which an actor can disappear into a role — not just by inhabiting it simply and naturally, but through techniques involving extreme physical or vocal transformation. In order to give a great performance, an actor needs to get as far away from themselves as humanly possible, to the point where their peers can say, with a note of awe in their voices, “I forgot I was watching Charlize Theron.” Above all, the effort needs to be visible — the unforced naturalism of previous generations of actors has become anathema. Champions of Cate Blanchett — a talented actress whose studied, controlled approach of late has won her widespread acclaim while leaving viewers such as myself mostly cold — would cite her chameleon-like ability to assume any physical or vocal characteristic under the sun as proof of her genius. The thought and care and intense preparation that have gone into each performance is always made explicit. Contrast that with Julie Christie, who breathes life into her role with such effortless simplicity that she hardly seems to be acting at all — she is that woman, gradually slipping away into the haze of Alzheimer’s, as opposed to giving a showy, strenuous representation of how the disease ravages the mind, body and soul.
I try to be tolerant and respectful of people whose opinions differ from my own — I actually served as the referee during a heated debate that occurred between friends two night ago over the merits of Tim Burton’s adaptation of Sweeney Todd — but these people need to shut the fuck up. Their attitudes represent everything that is glib, facile and wrong-headed about the popular standard by which acting is evaluated — which holds that style is substance — and their short-sightedness is slowly but surely contributing to the ruination of the cinematic art form. They’re breeding a generation of actors who will favor shtick and mimicry over honesty and feeling, and that’s a fucking shame. It’s acting as pyrotechnics, in which big, flashy special effects will have taken the place of subtlety and nuance. If one likes that sort of thing, then that is the sort of thing one likes; I'll take the other.
So now that I’ve gotten that rant out of my system, let’s dispense with the petty insults (the Muppet references, et. al.), and see what it all boils down to. There was not one moment of Ms. Cotillard’s performance, or the messy, slipshod film fashioned haphazardly around it, that rang even remotely true for me, in any way, shape or form. For all I know, the actress may have been drawing from a place of genuine feeling — but the performance is so mannered, so stylized, so forced in its execution, that the emotional truth that may or may not be fueling it never pierces through the thick, hard shell of artifice that contains it. I can’t imagine that the goal was to make Edith Piaf as repulsive and grotesquely un-humanlike as possible, but that’s the practical effect of the actress’s approach. You keep waiting for Sigourney Weaver to show up with a blowtorch gun and blast her to smithereens. The people who love this performance — and there are many of them out there — regard it with something verging on awe. As do I…albeit for entirely different reasons.
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Labels: 00s, Blanchett, Cotillard, Crawford, Dunaway, Foreign, Julie Christie, Musicals, Oscars, Sigourney Weaver
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Tuesday, June 12, 2007
This Time, The Accent's on Action
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of the Action Heroine Blog-a-thon being coordinated by Nathaniel R. at The Film Experience Blog.
By Odienator
Meryl Streep is many things: She is to accents what Lon Chaney was to faces. She is the most nominated actress in Oscar history. She is equally at home in comedy or drama, and she's sometimes too mannered in both. She was not, however, anybody's idea of an action hero. Both Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton had cornered the market when The River Wild came along, so casting Meryl as the action heroine was a bit of stunt casting akin to asking Kate Hepburn to beat someone's ass with nunchucks. Imagine Bette Davis flying through the air while a huge explosion went off behind her, followed by her doing a somersault while holding the two guns she'll use to blow away the villain mid flip. As she lands, she'll look at the bullet ridden body of her nemesis, shake her head and say "Peter, Peter, Peter!" This seemed less preposterous than casting Meryl Streep as an action heroine.
Director Curtis Hanson has been known for making odd casting choices that somehow paid off. Before he put Kim Basinger in L.A. Confidential and after he put freaky French femme fou Isabelle Huppert in The Bedroom Window, Hanson cast Streep as Gail, the feisty mom who takes her son river rafting for his 10th birthday. Her former life as a river guide, coupled with her missing Deliverance when it was in theaters, gives her the false notion this is a good idea. She is joined by her workaholic husband, Tom (David Straithairn), who originally turned down her invitation. Their family bonding adventure turns into a nightmare when she runs afoul of Wade (Kevin Bacon) and Terry (John C. Reilly), two thieves who have stolen a large sum of money.
When Wade falls overboard and nearly drowns, Tom saves his bacon. Wade repays him by kidnapping Gail and her kid, forcing her to help the thieves escape with the stolen loot. To succeed, Gail must navigate through a treacherous rapids section known as the Gauntlet, a stretch of water as violent and terrible as the Clint Eastwood movie that shares its name.
Once the action kicks in, Streep silences any doubt that she can hang with the Big Girls. With her slightly dieseled arms, she paddles through the Gauntlet assisted by Robert Elswit's cin-tog and Jerry Goldsmith's score. Though the outcome is never in doubt, seeing Streep in an action sequence apparently doing her own stunts adds a level of suspense and excitement to the proceedings. Even though the film takes some of the action out of the hands of its heroine, there is still enough to make Streep credible. She also gets to handle a gun, something every action heroine from Pam Grier on down should have the opportunity to do in her film.
Perhaps the flimsiness of the plot prohibited Hanson from casting a known action film actress in the role. One look at Weaver or Hamilton and you knew they'd immediately ram an oar into the villain's orifice. While they may have been better at outrunning aliens and cyborgs turned politicians, Streep was more masterful at handling the shadings of family tension that make up the majority of The River Wild. Watch how her subtle, girly reactions to the younger Wade's flirtations turn into outright hatred of the character when he puts her family in danger.
The one thing Gail has in common with her sisters in action, Ripley and Sarah Connor, is using her maternal instinct as the catalyst to kick ass. This notion seems quaint nowadays, with younger characters such as Lara Croft and Keira Knightley's babe from that Disney Ride movie putting a boot to booty just for the thrill of it all. Gail doesn't get into as many fights or set pieces as her contemporaries, but the character does enough to be allowed entry into the Women in Action Blog-a-thon.
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Labels: 90s, Bette, Blog-a-thons, Eastwood, John C. Reilly, K. Hepburn, Keira Knightley, Kevin Bacon, Sigourney Weaver, Streep
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Monday, March 12, 2007
Deja Tru
By Edward Copeland
Poor Douglas McGrath. Taking an oral history of Truman Capote's life by George Plimpton as his starting point, he set out to make a movie that focused on Capote writing In Cold Blood. Unfortunately, there was another little movie called Capote about the same time period percolating and it managed to get to a boil faster and earned its star, Philip Seymour Hoffman, a well-deserved Oscar for best actor. McGrath's version, Infamous, came out the following year and was inevitably compared to the much-lauded earlier version. It's a shame because while both movies are good, Infamous actually is the better of the two.
In Infamous, the role of the famous writer/social gadfly goes to British actor Toby Jones. It's a tough call on who wins the Capote battle between Jones and Hoffman. Jones certainly looks the part more than Hoffman and his imitation really is a more accurate one, but I think Hoffman gets underneath Truman's skin a bit more.
Still, Infamous as a movie is better than Capote. While Capote tugged more emotionally, Infamous has sharper writing, more wit and though I liked Clifton Collins Jr. as killer Perry Smith, I think Daniel Craig's portrayal in Infamous is vastly superior.
Collins played the killer too softly and with too much delicacy. Craig makes Perry a hardened killer without sacrificing his character's complexity or making it difficult to see how Capote falls for him. To see the same basic story told in two different ways in such close proximity to each other actually is quite fascinating.
Whereas Capote used such washed-out color that it almost appeared black and white, Infamous embraces color vibrantly, only slowly washing out the images as the film turns darker. It also benefits by the inclusion of "testimonials" by people playing figures in Capote's life such as Diana Vreeland (Juliet Stevenson), Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver) and Bennett Cerf (Peter Bogdanovich).
Of course, there is one other pair of performances to compare: The battle of the Harper Lees, and I think Catherine Keener in Capote bests Sandra Bullock in Infamous, if only because her role seemed more fleshed out in the first film and Keener didn't try to tack on a Southern accent.
While I think I might give a slight edge to Hoffman's portrayal, this is no slight to Jones, who really should have been considered for this year's best actor prize. Still, I was pleasantly surprised by how much more I enjoyed Infamous than Capote. Though it's been more than a year since I've seen Capote, Infamous to me seems to paint more clearly the slow unraveling of Truman Capote the man than the earlier film did.
In a way, it's like the tortoise vs. the hare except, unfortunately, in the film industry, it's nearly impossible for the tortoise to prevail. One thing this double-barrelled look at this period in time has accomplished, at least for me, is a desire to re-read In Cold Blood.
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Poor Douglas McGrath. Taking an oral history of Truman Capote's life by George Plimpton as his starting point, he set out to make a movie that focused on Capote writing In Cold Blood. Unfortunately, there was another little movie called Capote about the same time period percolating and it managed to get to a boil faster and earned its star, Philip Seymour Hoffman, a well-deserved Oscar for best actor. McGrath's version, Infamous, came out the following year and was inevitably compared to the much-lauded earlier version. It's a shame because while both movies are good, Infamous actually is the better of the two.
In Infamous, the role of the famous writer/social gadfly goes to British actor Toby Jones. It's a tough call on who wins the Capote battle between Jones and Hoffman. Jones certainly looks the part more than Hoffman and his imitation really is a more accurate one, but I think Hoffman gets underneath Truman's skin a bit more.
Still, Infamous as a movie is better than Capote. While Capote tugged more emotionally, Infamous has sharper writing, more wit and though I liked Clifton Collins Jr. as killer Perry Smith, I think Daniel Craig's portrayal in Infamous is vastly superior.
Collins played the killer too softly and with too much delicacy. Craig makes Perry a hardened killer without sacrificing his character's complexity or making it difficult to see how Capote falls for him. To see the same basic story told in two different ways in such close proximity to each other actually is quite fascinating.
Whereas Capote used such washed-out color that it almost appeared black and white, Infamous embraces color vibrantly, only slowly washing out the images as the film turns darker. It also benefits by the inclusion of "testimonials" by people playing figures in Capote's life such as Diana Vreeland (Juliet Stevenson), Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver) and Bennett Cerf (Peter Bogdanovich).
Of course, there is one other pair of performances to compare: The battle of the Harper Lees, and I think Catherine Keener in Capote bests Sandra Bullock in Infamous, if only because her role seemed more fleshed out in the first film and Keener didn't try to tack on a Southern accent.
While I think I might give a slight edge to Hoffman's portrayal, this is no slight to Jones, who really should have been considered for this year's best actor prize. Still, I was pleasantly surprised by how much more I enjoyed Infamous than Capote. Though it's been more than a year since I've seen Capote, Infamous to me seems to paint more clearly the slow unraveling of Truman Capote the man than the earlier film did.
In a way, it's like the tortoise vs. the hare except, unfortunately, in the film industry, it's nearly impossible for the tortoise to prevail. One thing this double-barrelled look at this period in time has accomplished, at least for me, is a desire to re-read In Cold Blood.
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Labels: 00s, Bogdanovich, Books, Capote, Daniel Craig, Keener, Oscars, P.S. Hoffman, Sigourney Weaver
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Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Durang me, Durang me, Ought to take a rope and hang me
By Edward Copeland
Hang me from the highest tree/Good Lord have pity on me. At least that's how I felt after enduring what takes the title of the absolute worst Robert Altman feature I've ever seen. Altman's 1987 screen adaptation of Beyond Therapy is beyond help — wasting a talented cast that includes Jeff Goldblum, Julie Hagerty, Christopher Guest, Tom Conti and Glenda Jackson in perhaps the worst idea for a play-to-film transfer ever by filming playwright Christopher Durang's equally abysmal play Beyond Therapy to the big screen. Back when the great Frank Rich reviewed theater for The New York Times, he summed up many of the problems with the movie when he reviewed the Broadway transfer of the play in 1981.
"Some day, I swear, the explosive comic brilliance of Christopher Durang will erupt on Broadway. The only question is when. ... (I)t didn't happen last night, when Mr. Durang's latest play, Beyond Therapy, pretty much wilted of its own volition at the Brooks Atkinson."
Both the play and Altman's film allege to be a farce of dysfunctional Manhattanites trying to find love and themselves through personal ads and psychiatry. Goldblum plays Bruce, a bisexual looking to explore hetero life, and Hagerty plays Prudence, a woman "who hates homosexuals" but keeps going back to Bruce anyway. In the middle is Bob, Bruce's gay lover (Guest, developing the prototype for his Corky St. Clair character in Waiting for Guffman) and on the sides are Bruce and Prudence's less-than stellar therapists played by Jackson and Conti, in an awful Italian accent which his character at least admits is a put-on late in the film.
I hate to keep leaning on Rich, but his review of the play said so much that's wrong with Beyond Therapy much better than I ever could.
"It contained some hilarious jokes, uneasily tied to a bland, dramatically amorphous romance ... Yet, for all the hard work, the final result is unchanged. We still don't care whether Bruce ... and Prudence ... ever get married or not. ... At the same time, however, the therapy gags are defeating: like too many jokes in this play, they compromise the credibility of the figures at center stage. ... Mr. Durang's jokey, throw-away rationalizations for this odd courtship provide no enlightenment.
Nor do the other lines fill in the blanks in these people; the playwright never summons up the passion for his leads that he does for their doctors. We're repeatedly told that Bruce must learn to take emotional risks, that Prudence must learn to accept people's imperfections. Both characters are apparently lonely and want children. And that's it. Otherwise, this is a colorless, if whiny, pair who keep coming together and splitting apart as aimlessly as billiard balls.
They remain empty, anonymous vessels for arbitrary one-liners.
Yet the real disappointment in "Beyond Therapy" is the script...
Even though Altman pitched in with Durang for the screenplay, no evidence that it helped appears on the screen. The most positive things I can say about Beyond Therapy is that it's short. I did chuckle once when Bob blames Bruce's exploration of his straight side on seeing that movie Sunday Bloody Sunday with that "English actress" who is of course Glenda Jackson, already trapped in this movie.
This isn't my first encounter with a wretched work by Durang — I had the misfortune of seeing his play Sex and Longing on Broadway with Sigourney Weaver and it remains the single worst Broadway production I've ever seen. I've not seen Durang's more acclaimed works, but based on these two, my guess is that either he peaked early or that his reputation was overblown to begin with. The only performer to emerge unscathed in Sex and Longing was the great Dana Ivey, who somehow managed a great performance in the slop of a script she was performing, something unfortunately none of the cast of the Beyond Therapy film were able to accomplish. I don't know what attracted Altman to film this piece of dreck, but I do think it's telling that it's one of the few DVDs of an Altman feature that contains neither a commentary track by the director nor a featurette where he talks about the film. Maybe Altman knows it's better to let this one slip away. Now that I've seen it, I'm inclined to agree. I guess I really have been too hard on Quintet, Ready to Wear and Dr. T. and the Women.Tweet
Labels: 80s, Altman, Jeff Goldblum, Sigourney Weaver, Theater
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