Friday, January 20, 2012
Idealism, disillusionment go hand in hand
By Edward Copeland
After watching Ryan Gosling transform himself into one bundle of tics after another in torturous dramas such as Blue Valentine and lame attempts at quirky comedy such as Lars and the Real Girl, what a tremendous relief to see Gosling once again deliver a great, relaxed performance and do it in the best American political drama in years.
The Ides of March marks George Clooney's fourth time in the director's chair (Leatherheads slipped my mind and I never saw it). Clooney, as he did in the superior Good Night, and Good Luck., also takes a supporting role and co-wrote the screenplay with Grant Heslov. Beau Willmon, who wrote the play Farragut North, upon which The Ides of March is based, also contributed to the movie's script.
Gosling stars as Stephen Meyers, an idealistic 30-year-old campaign adviser to Gov. Mike Morris (Clooney) who is closing in on the Democratic presidential nomination. Stephen shows real talent for what he does, but he's still young enough that he'll only work for politicians in whom he really believes. Meyers hasn't worked in the game long enough to develop a pragmatic, cynical shell like Morris' campaign director Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) or Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), the man running Morris' last real rival for the nomination, Sen. Pullman, ahead of the crucial Ohio primary.
Someone says to Stephen at one point something similar to a moment from the great fourth season of the HBO series The Wire. The chief of staff for Baltimore's recently defeated mayor has a drink with the campaign adviser of the man who won the office as they watch him go back on a pledge on the bar's TV. The ex-chief of staff tells the adviser, "They always disappoint you in the end."
For those who haven't seen The Ides of March yet, I'll let you learn on your own in what way Clooney's seemingly perfect candidate doesn't live up to Stephen's standards and what choices he makes as a result, though other twists complicate Stephen's decision.
I haven't had the chance to see Drive yet, but this film demonstrates a return to form by Gosling, who I feared would be lost forever in a realm that confused mechanized existential angst with actual acting. Gosling produces some terrific moments of perfect stillness where he doesn't even need dialogue to convey Stephen's thoughts as opposed to Blue Valentine where you wanted to strap his limbs to a table so he'd stop being so fidgety.
Of the four jobs that Clooney performs on The Ides of March, his efficient direction with some interesting shots (including a great closing one) probably ranks on top. He's good as the governor, but it's the type of role he can do in his sleep.
The rest of the cast performs as well as you'd expect them to do. In fact, Hoffman and Giamatti could have swapped roles and the movie wouldn't have skipped a beat. Both actors play these types so often and brilliantly, it isn't as if either will spring surprises. Marisa Tomei gets some nice moments as a New York Times reporter. Evan Rachel Wood fits nicely as an intern on the campaign whose father happens to chair the DNC. Jeffrey Wright doesn't get enough to do as an ambitious senator dangling his delegates in front of both contenders and Jennifer Ehle gets completely wasted as the governor's wife.
The Ides of March belongs to Gosling, Clooney's direction and the screenplay in the end. We've had many good political satires in recent memory, but I can't recall the last time someone produced a good political drama as a feature. The Adjustment Bureau was good, but it had that Philip K. Dick element that took it out of the realm of the realistic, so I don't think it counts. The best recent one might have been about Italian politics, Il divo.
The Ides of March doesn't quite rise to the level of the greatest political dramas or thrillers such as The Candidate, the original Manchurian Candidate or The Last Hurrah, but it's the best in quite some time. If The Ides of March has no other legacy, at least it has returned Ryan Gosling to a career in acting,
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Labels: 10s, E.R. Wood, George Clooney, Giamatti, Gosling, P.S. Hoffman, The Wire, Theater, Tomei
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Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Mirror, mirror in the sky
By Edward Copeland
With Another Earth, you're never quite certain what direction the screenplay by director Mike Cahill and lead actress Brit Marling plans to take you. Given the title and the opening moments that detail the approach of a planet which seems to be Earth's twin, you might suspect that a low-budget sci-fi tale is warming up — then Another Earth takes a sudden twist and you realize that it has a much more human story to tell about guilt and redemption and the new planet exists merely as a subplot and metaphor.
When we initially meet Rhoda Williams (Marling), she's a successful high school student celebrating her acceptance to M.I.T. when news comes over the radio about the sudden approach of a planet that resembles Earth in every way. As the inebriated teen takes her eyes off the road momentarily to gaze into the cosmos, she misses a stoplight and slams into another vehicle, killing a mother and her young son and placing her husband (William Mapother) in a coma.
Flash foward four years and Rhoda finishes her prison sentence (though her identity remained secret since she was a juvenile at the time). Rhoda works as a janitor at a school (Wes Anderson regular Kumar Pallana plays one of her co-workers) while she follows the news on what has been named Earth 2, including a contest offered by a superrich entrepreneur for a free trip to the planet. She begins researching what happened to the surviving husband, who eventually came out of his coma. She discovers his name is John Burroughs, once a successful composer and musician who also taught music at Yale.
Rhoda summons enough courage to go to his door with the intention of apologizing for what she did, but she chickens out at the last moment and claims to be from a cleaning service offering a trial of their service which Burroughs accepts. Her cleaning becomes a regular gig, though she rips up the checks he gives her. A warm relationship develops between the two, making it even more difficult for Rhoda to share her horrible secret.
More research on Earth 2 reveals that the planet doesn't just look like Earth, it appears to be an exact duplicate, containing the same people, places and things present on the original and the doppelgangers behave exactly the same until they become aware of their twin's existence. The revelation point for Rhoda's secret comes when the essay that she wrote for the contest wins. She shares the news with John, who insists on a celebration — though during the triumphant dinner, Burroughs pleads with Rhoda not to go to space and Rhoda decides to come clean.
Another Earth doesn't break any ground and the film's trajectory isn't hard to predict, but Marling and Mapother give good enough performances to make this quiet film work. It doesn't have anything new to say about guilt or redemption and Earth 2 plays as if it's an excuse to make its simple story seem fresher than it is, but Another Earth doesn't commit any sins that make you roll your eyes or feel as if you've wasted your time.
Marling's solid turn as Rhoda proves all the more impressive given that she co-wrote and co-produced the film as well. Mapother also does nicely in a role unlike anything I've seen him in before. I remember him best as Marisa Tomei's abusive jerk of a husband in In the Bedroom. Checking his credits, it seems he's spent most his time in episodic television, including a recurring role on Lost.
Another Earth isn't a great film, but it does have its moments and I've certainly seen worse.
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Labels: 10s, Lost, Tomei, Wes Anderson
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Monday, July 26, 2010
George Costanza's Dream Comes True in Cyrus
By Eddie Selover
A couple of years ago, watching Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, I was seriously offended on behalf of Marisa Tomei for her having to participate in some fairly explicit sex scenes. The problem wasn’t Tomei, who looks more devastating than ever in her 40s. The problem was that she was in bed with the last actor on earth who should be seen unclothed (even a little bit): Philip Seymour Hoffman. Though Hoffman was great as always, the physical disconnect between them made it impossible to suspend disbelief... she was acting all turned on by him, and man, that was some acting.
Now, three years later, here is Tomei cast as a “sex angel” to the lumpish, skeevy John C. Reilly in Cyrus. She hasn't had a relationship in years, the movie would have us believe, but she's attracted to Reilly. Uh-huh. To add insult to injury, she also plays the mother of the spectacularly bloated and unattractive Jonah Hill. The unlikelihood of either of these gentlemen getting anywhere near a woman like Marisa Tomei isn’t the main problem with Cyrus, but it was the one that irritated me the most.
Reilly plays John, a film editor who has been divorced for several years and lives alone in a messy apartment, eating junk food and staring at his computer screen. As with the heroes of so many of today’s slacker movies, whether mumblecore or not, John is a slovenly loser with no looks, physique, hygiene, money or career prospects… and who yet manages to have giddy, happy sex with a hot woman who responds to his sincerity, or basic decency, or something. Cyrus opens with John’s unbelievably non-acrimonious ex-wife Jamie interrupting him in the middle of masturbation; later he meets Tomei while peeing in some bushes. Are these the sorts of moments that bring hot women into a man’s life? Only in the minds of male screenwriters who have spent way too much time staring at their computer screens.
So John and Tomei’s Molly hook up, and things are going great until he meets her son Cyrus. Fat and beady-eyed, Cyrus is an antisocial lout who has an unhealthy Oedipal obsession with his mom and no intention of sharing her with a boyfriend. (Hill, by the way, looks more like the child of Danny DeVito's Penguin than that of Marisa Tomei, but let it go.) The first third of the movie is standard comedy-of-social-awkwardness as this situation is set up, but as John moves closer, and eventually into Molly’s house, Cyrus begins a passive-aggressive campaign to break up the relationship. For a while, with the handheld camera moving through the bluish darkened rooms of the house, it’s like a horror movie, and you half expect Cyrus to pop out with a knife like Norman Bates. Then for the last third, the movie makes another shift in tone, and goes all soft and sensitive as we see how much Cyrus is hurting, and he and John forge a tentative reconciliation.
This is one shift too many for the audience, whom I felt were ready for something darker and edgier. There are suggestions of an incestuous relationship between Cyrus and Molly — she spends the night in his bed when he’s upset, he uses the bathroom while she’s showering, etc. But these scenes don’t go anywhere, and Molly is ultimately portrayed as a sane, sweet earth mother who has evidently played no part in making her son a borderline psychopath. Like Mildred Pierce, her only sin is loving her child so much that she’s blind to what a monster she’s created. Or hasn’t created. Again, these are screenwriter contrivances — everything that happens in the movie is for an immediate effect and has no grounding in psychological truth.
The performers are left to make the movie work, and it must be said that Reilly almost pulls it off. He’s a very likable actor, maybe because of the glints of suffering in the little raisin eyes set too close together in his doughy face. We’re with him all the way, and when Cyrus begins his campaign of lying and manipulation, we want John to come up with some clever strategies to beat the little bastard at his own game. But although the movie makes a couple of feints in this direction, evidently the writer/directors Mark and Jay Duplass aren’t up to writing a battle of wits. In fact, much of the movie was improvised by the performers, and several scenes have that repetitive, vamping tediousness that improvisation gets when there’s no inspiration behind it.
Catherine Keener fares particularly badly — she has now officially tilted her head, squinted compassionately and laughed unexpectedly in one too many movies. She plays Jamie, the ex who dumped John several years previously, but still hangs around solicitously, trying to get him to socialize and find happiness in a new relationship. Uh-huh. Cyrus is like a loser’s daydream in which he doesn’t have to change a thing about himself: everybody loves him anyway. Even Marisa Tomei.
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Labels: 10s, DeVito, John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill, Keener, P.S. Hoffman, Tomei
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Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Not down for the count
By Edward Copeland
On one episode of TV's M*A*S*H, Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester remarks that he does one thing at a time, he does it well and then he moves on. In a way, that applies to Randy "The Ram" Robinson in The Wrestler as well, only he can't move on because wrestling is the only thing he's ever done well, even though he's far past his prime.
Recent evidence would make you think that might be the case with Mickey Rourke, who plays Randy, as well. With the exception of being the best part of Sin City, he's toiled for decades in mediocre films, small parts or odd appearances that made moviegoers ask, "Is this the same guy who was so great in Diner? Angel Heart? Barfly? The Pope of Greenwich Village? What the hell happened?"
The scars show on his face in The Wrestler, but Darren Aranofsky's film also uncovers that a great actor still breathes beneath the bruises. It's 20 years since The Ram's heyday and while he still draws fans at smaller wrestling circuits, he has to make ends meet by working at a supermarket.
The closest thing he has to a friend is a pole dancer (Marisa Tomei) he occasionally pays for a lap dance. When some bad health news changes the outlook for Randy's future, he looks to make amends by reconnecting with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and charting a new course for himself.
Aranofsky tells a tough yet tender slice of life in The Wrestler, with nothing that resembles the man who made Pi and Requiem for a Dream. In perhaps the most brilliant shot of the film, Aranofsky pays homage to Scorsese's tracking shot in Raging Bull as Randy hears the growing sound of the crowd in his head only to come out not to the arena and the ring but the grocery's meat department.
Tomei and Wood both are good, but this is Rourke's show from beginning to end. Comebacks happen often, but few seem as deserved or as worthy of adoration as Rourke's. Let's just hope it continues beyond The Wrestler. We missed you, Mickey.
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Labels: 00s, E.R. Wood, Mickey Rourke, Scorsese, Tomei
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Friday, November 09, 2007
The Devil's Reject
By Odienator
Quentin Tarantino can teach Sidney Lumet a thing or two about directing. And yes, my subject and object are in the proper places in that sentence. For better and worse, the short, meteoric rise of QT ushered in the still-active era of movies being told out of sequence, or in multiple and parallel flashbacks, for no reason whatsoever. Tarantino usually is able to pull it off because his direction embraces the fractured narrative, builds upon it and uses it to his full advantage. It's as if the film knows the flashbacks are coming or its sequence is out of order, and it adjusts accordingly without breaking its hold on the viewer. It doesn't announce FLASHBACK in giant capital letters. That's the lesson Sidney Lumet could learn from QT, because in Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, whenever the amateurish screenplay decides to go backward, Lumet announces it with incredibly annoying Pokemon-style screen flashing. It tosses the viewer right out of the movie.
Sondheim wrote "you gotta have a gimmick" and while that always works for strippers, it doesn't always work for film. Lumet builds tension so carefully in some scenes that the sudden announcement of flashbacks let all the air out of the balloon. Compare this to his devastating use of flashbacks in The Pawnbroker. There is absolutely no reason for the story to be told in this fashion, outside of sheer laziness and the screenwriter's knowledge that his script, if told straight, would have been no different than 8,000 other scripts with this same story. Yet Lumet's direction is so good at times that I felt he could have made this work without the gimmicks. The screenplay would still be just as derivative and unbelievable, but we would have been too busy being strangled by suspense to notice. This film just doesn't build the way it should have. It stops and starts like a traffic light-ridden NASCAR race. The herky-jerky back and forth gives far too much time to contemplate the numerous questions that derail the film's hold on the viewer.
In the screenplay chapter of his must-read book, Making Movies, Lumet writes:
This is a very telling paragraph from Lumet. Is this film's construction a blatant attempt to stave off predictability without losing inevitability? And is this the reason why so many movies have flirted with the "off-balance" device of the non-linear gimmick? I really don't see much difference: if it's inevitable, then you can predict it's going to happen. This isn't as bad an idea as slowing down and hacking up your movie until the viewer can meditate on how illogical the story is.
Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the financially strapped eldest son of Charles (Albert Finney) and Nanette (Rosemary Harris). Between his drug addiction and his golddigger trophy wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei), Andy's wallet is screaming for help. To silence the noise, Andy has also been stealing money from payroll. Andy's younger brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) has money problems of his own: he can't pay his child support and his angry ex-wife Martha (Amy Ryan) is threatening him with court action. When he can't pay for his daughter's trip to The Lion King, he allows himself to be taken in by Andy's plan to help them both achieve hakuna matata. They decide to rob their Mom and Pop's Mom and Pop Jewelry Store — or rather, Andy decides Hank should do it — so that they can get quick cash and their parents can collect the insurance money that will result from the robbery. "It's a victimless crime," Andy says, using that bullying, manipulative manner we older brothers employ so well.
Of course, the robbery goes awry, and the primary reason for this is that Andy is, to use the film's love of the f-word, a fucking idiot. Hank's an idiot as well, but Andy knows not only this fact but also how wimpy Hank is in general. He assigns Hank the job, telling him to use a fake gun, and Hank instead gets a more hardened criminal (Brian F. O'Byrne from Frozen) to pull the job. Suffice it to say, the crime's not victimless, and O'Byrne winds up as dead as the victim he shoots in the heist.
As the brothers' world comes tumbling down, they make one inevitable mistake after another. They have to deal with Hank's ineptitude and Andy's horse addiction, their father's compulsive desire to find out who robbed his store and caused the carnage, the secrets that threaten to tear their fraternal love apart, and the women who drive them to do and say the darndest things. It sounds compelling, but the film's construction is far too distracting to be effective. And the questions that arise just nag at the viewer in the dark. Are these guys really in that much trouble that they need to resort to a jewelry heist? Why not Andy instead of wishy-washy Hank? How did Andy suddenly morph from Pillsbury Yuppie to Chuck Bronson? Why would Hank rent a car, effectively creating a paper trail, to do a robbery? If you have that much dope and dough in your house, wouldn't you have something besides a punk-ass revolver? Wouldn't an autopsy show that you smothered someone to death? Why steal from your job's payroll box when you know you're being audited? Why didn't the job call the cops on Andy? I could go on and on.
A film such as Before the Devil Knows You're Dead needs the kind of suspension of disbelief continuity of a film like To Catch a Thief or the film I wish this movie could have been: Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan. On occasion, Lumet reaches for the greatness he is known for, which makes the film's overall failure even more frustrating. Watch how he visually constructs an outdoor scene between Hoffman and Finney. Just the placement of the characters alone speaks volumes, making the stilted dialogue that pollutes the scene completely unnecessary. Observe how he visually plays out the scenes that depict Hank's criminal seduction by Andy. The robbery itself has incredible tension and an almost existential visual quality; it's as mean and lean as the rest of the film thinks it is.
Lumet's biggest failures usually stem from a lousy script or miscast performers (I'm looking at you, Miss Ross, in The Wiz). Before the Devil Knows You're Dead has both. Until his last reel gunplay, which does not work at all, Hoffman is a credibly smarmy creature with daddy issues and a wife he (correctly) thinks is out of his league. Ethan Hawke is so woefully miscast that it's painful to watch him. Albert Finney is wasted, but Rosemary Harris is interesting and far more credible with a gun than her cinematic son. Michael Shannon leaves an impressive mark on his limited screen time, as does Amy Ryan, and O'Byrne brings an expert's menace to his sacrificial role that can be used as a measuring stick for the brothers' amateur night at the criminal Apollo.
Marisa Tomei's character is one note and should have been accompanied by Whodini's "I'm a Ho" every time she appeared on the screen. Her sole purpose in the film is to show the naked body far too many critics are panting over, as if they've never seen tits and ass before. These are the same critics who have the nerve to be offended by the sex scene between her and Hoffman that opens the film, as if his far-from perfect (yet oddly film critic-like) body ruins their Tomei spank-bank entry and offends their sensibilities. I saw it as a harbringer of the film's dysfunction: it's superbly shot and visually arresting, but the content of the scene itself is not worth watching. Interestingly enough, it's the one stand alone scene in the picture (i.e., we don't know where it fits in with the rest of the timeline, short of assuming it comes before the film's story). It also tells us everything we need to know about the characters without saying a word.
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Quentin Tarantino can teach Sidney Lumet a thing or two about directing. And yes, my subject and object are in the proper places in that sentence. For better and worse, the short, meteoric rise of QT ushered in the still-active era of movies being told out of sequence, or in multiple and parallel flashbacks, for no reason whatsoever. Tarantino usually is able to pull it off because his direction embraces the fractured narrative, builds upon it and uses it to his full advantage. It's as if the film knows the flashbacks are coming or its sequence is out of order, and it adjusts accordingly without breaking its hold on the viewer. It doesn't announce FLASHBACK in giant capital letters. That's the lesson Sidney Lumet could learn from QT, because in Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, whenever the amateurish screenplay decides to go backward, Lumet announces it with incredibly annoying Pokemon-style screen flashing. It tosses the viewer right out of the movie.
Sondheim wrote "you gotta have a gimmick" and while that always works for strippers, it doesn't always work for film. Lumet builds tension so carefully in some scenes that the sudden announcement of flashbacks let all the air out of the balloon. Compare this to his devastating use of flashbacks in The Pawnbroker. There is absolutely no reason for the story to be told in this fashion, outside of sheer laziness and the screenwriter's knowledge that his script, if told straight, would have been no different than 8,000 other scripts with this same story. Yet Lumet's direction is so good at times that I felt he could have made this work without the gimmicks. The screenplay would still be just as derivative and unbelievable, but we would have been too busy being strangled by suspense to notice. This film just doesn't build the way it should have. It stops and starts like a traffic light-ridden NASCAR race. The herky-jerky back and forth gives far too much time to contemplate the numerous questions that derail the film's hold on the viewer.
In the screenplay chapter of his must-read book, Making Movies, Lumet writes:
"In a well made drama, I want to feel: 'Of course — that's where it was heading all along.' And yet the inevitability mustn't eliminate surprise. There's not much point in spending two hours on something that became clear in the first five minutes. Inevitability doesn't mean predictability. The script must still keep you off balance, keep you surprised, entertained, involved, and yet, when the denouement is reached, still give you the sense that the story had to turn out that way."
This is a very telling paragraph from Lumet. Is this film's construction a blatant attempt to stave off predictability without losing inevitability? And is this the reason why so many movies have flirted with the "off-balance" device of the non-linear gimmick? I really don't see much difference: if it's inevitable, then you can predict it's going to happen. This isn't as bad an idea as slowing down and hacking up your movie until the viewer can meditate on how illogical the story is.
Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the financially strapped eldest son of Charles (Albert Finney) and Nanette (Rosemary Harris). Between his drug addiction and his golddigger trophy wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei), Andy's wallet is screaming for help. To silence the noise, Andy has also been stealing money from payroll. Andy's younger brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) has money problems of his own: he can't pay his child support and his angry ex-wife Martha (Amy Ryan) is threatening him with court action. When he can't pay for his daughter's trip to The Lion King, he allows himself to be taken in by Andy's plan to help them both achieve hakuna matata. They decide to rob their Mom and Pop's Mom and Pop Jewelry Store — or rather, Andy decides Hank should do it — so that they can get quick cash and their parents can collect the insurance money that will result from the robbery. "It's a victimless crime," Andy says, using that bullying, manipulative manner we older brothers employ so well.
Of course, the robbery goes awry, and the primary reason for this is that Andy is, to use the film's love of the f-word, a fucking idiot. Hank's an idiot as well, but Andy knows not only this fact but also how wimpy Hank is in general. He assigns Hank the job, telling him to use a fake gun, and Hank instead gets a more hardened criminal (Brian F. O'Byrne from Frozen) to pull the job. Suffice it to say, the crime's not victimless, and O'Byrne winds up as dead as the victim he shoots in the heist.
As the brothers' world comes tumbling down, they make one inevitable mistake after another. They have to deal with Hank's ineptitude and Andy's horse addiction, their father's compulsive desire to find out who robbed his store and caused the carnage, the secrets that threaten to tear their fraternal love apart, and the women who drive them to do and say the darndest things. It sounds compelling, but the film's construction is far too distracting to be effective. And the questions that arise just nag at the viewer in the dark. Are these guys really in that much trouble that they need to resort to a jewelry heist? Why not Andy instead of wishy-washy Hank? How did Andy suddenly morph from Pillsbury Yuppie to Chuck Bronson? Why would Hank rent a car, effectively creating a paper trail, to do a robbery? If you have that much dope and dough in your house, wouldn't you have something besides a punk-ass revolver? Wouldn't an autopsy show that you smothered someone to death? Why steal from your job's payroll box when you know you're being audited? Why didn't the job call the cops on Andy? I could go on and on.
A film such as Before the Devil Knows You're Dead needs the kind of suspension of disbelief continuity of a film like To Catch a Thief or the film I wish this movie could have been: Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan. On occasion, Lumet reaches for the greatness he is known for, which makes the film's overall failure even more frustrating. Watch how he visually constructs an outdoor scene between Hoffman and Finney. Just the placement of the characters alone speaks volumes, making the stilted dialogue that pollutes the scene completely unnecessary. Observe how he visually plays out the scenes that depict Hank's criminal seduction by Andy. The robbery itself has incredible tension and an almost existential visual quality; it's as mean and lean as the rest of the film thinks it is.
Lumet's biggest failures usually stem from a lousy script or miscast performers (I'm looking at you, Miss Ross, in The Wiz). Before the Devil Knows You're Dead has both. Until his last reel gunplay, which does not work at all, Hoffman is a credibly smarmy creature with daddy issues and a wife he (correctly) thinks is out of his league. Ethan Hawke is so woefully miscast that it's painful to watch him. Albert Finney is wasted, but Rosemary Harris is interesting and far more credible with a gun than her cinematic son. Michael Shannon leaves an impressive mark on his limited screen time, as does Amy Ryan, and O'Byrne brings an expert's menace to his sacrificial role that can be used as a measuring stick for the brothers' amateur night at the criminal Apollo.
Marisa Tomei's character is one note and should have been accompanied by Whodini's "I'm a Ho" every time she appeared on the screen. Her sole purpose in the film is to show the naked body far too many critics are panting over, as if they've never seen tits and ass before. These are the same critics who have the nerve to be offended by the sex scene between her and Hoffman that opens the film, as if his far-from perfect (yet oddly film critic-like) body ruins their Tomei spank-bank entry and offends their sensibilities. I saw it as a harbringer of the film's dysfunction: it's superbly shot and visually arresting, but the content of the scene itself is not worth watching. Interestingly enough, it's the one stand alone scene in the picture (i.e., we don't know where it fits in with the rest of the timeline, short of assuming it comes before the film's story). It also tells us everything we need to know about the characters without saying a word.
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Labels: 00s, Amy Ryan, Finney, Hawke, Lumet, Michael Shannon, P.S. Hoffman, Raimi, Sondheim, Tarantino, Tomei
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Thursday, January 18, 2007
Watered-down Bukowski
By Edward Copeland
The works of the late author Charles Bukowski are certainly an acquired taste, but for a chronicler of a certain class of people low on the economic spectrum and high in blood alcohol level, Bukowski wrote many a great tale. Bent Hamer directed and co-wrote with Jim Stark a film adaptation of Bukowski's novel Factotum. Starring Matt Dillon as the Bukowski surrogate Henry Chinaski, Factotum disappoints.
The film moves at a snail's pace and for a story that presumably exists in the realm of society's underbelly, everyone seems particularly clean cut, and despite the conspicuous consumption of alcohol, no one ever appears inebriated.
Dillon has proved himself to be a fine actor and he gets support from the great Lili Taylor and, briefly, Marisa Tomei but Factotum doesn't seem to go anywhere.
It's as if they wanted to do Bukowski but had no grasp of what that entailed. Furthering hampering Factotum are the great memories of Barbet Schroeder's Barfly, 20 years old this year, with its great love it-or-hate it performance by Mickey Rourke and perhaps the last really good screen work by Faye Dunaway.
Barfly, with an original screenplay by Bukowski, captures many of the same elements as Factotum, but does so with realism, humor and pathos. Skip Factotum and seek out Barfly. You'll be glad you did.
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The works of the late author Charles Bukowski are certainly an acquired taste, but for a chronicler of a certain class of people low on the economic spectrum and high in blood alcohol level, Bukowski wrote many a great tale. Bent Hamer directed and co-wrote with Jim Stark a film adaptation of Bukowski's novel Factotum. Starring Matt Dillon as the Bukowski surrogate Henry Chinaski, Factotum disappoints.
The film moves at a snail's pace and for a story that presumably exists in the realm of society's underbelly, everyone seems particularly clean cut, and despite the conspicuous consumption of alcohol, no one ever appears inebriated.
Dillon has proved himself to be a fine actor and he gets support from the great Lili Taylor and, briefly, Marisa Tomei but Factotum doesn't seem to go anywhere.
It's as if they wanted to do Bukowski but had no grasp of what that entailed. Furthering hampering Factotum are the great memories of Barbet Schroeder's Barfly, 20 years old this year, with its great love it-or-hate it performance by Mickey Rourke and perhaps the last really good screen work by Faye Dunaway.
Barfly, with an original screenplay by Bukowski, captures many of the same elements as Factotum, but does so with realism, humor and pathos. Skip Factotum and seek out Barfly. You'll be glad you did.
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Labels: 00s, Dunaway, Mickey Rourke, Tomei
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