4/29/14: Dance Like You Mean It

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A Mighty Wind, Australia, Australian films, auteur theory, ballroom dancing, Barry Fife, Barry Otto, based on a play, Baz Luhrmann, Bill Hunter, Christopher Guest, cinema, Clerks, comedies, dancing competitions, feature-film debut, Film auteurs, film festival favorite, film reviews, films, Fran, Gia Carides, Golden Globe nominee, independent films, John Hannan, magical-realism, mismatched couples, Moulin Rouge, Movies, multiple award nominee, outsiders, Pan Pacific, Pat Thomson, Paul Mercurio, Peter Whitford, quirky, romances, romantic films, Romeo + Juliet, Scott Hastings, silly films, Sonia Kruger, Strictly Ballroom, Tara Morice, The Great Gatsby, ugly ducklings, upbeat films, writer-director

Everyone’s gotta start somewhere and, for writer-director Baz Luhrmann, that somewhere was Strictly Ballroom (1992), the quirky, film festival darling that launched his career. From there, of course, Luhrmann would go on to make ridiculously extravagant, lavish films like Romeo + Juliet (1996), Moulin Rouge (2001), Australia (2008) and The Great Gatsby (2013), films which seemed to be defined as much by their excesses and eye-popping production values as for their characterizations and storylines. Strictly Ballroom, however, still stands as Luhrmann’s most human picture: despite it’s silly, slapsticky energy, this is a modest little film about small-town people trying to realize their dreams, a relatable nugget that’s low on flash but high on energy and fun. Although Luhrmann would go on to “bigger and better things,” his follow-up films, to this point, have managed to be neither as human nor as charming as his debut. Sometimes, the simplest things really are the best.

As the title insinuates, Strictly Ballroom is about the world of competitive ballroom dancing or, at the very least, the Australian equivalent of said sport. Our dashing hero, Scott Hastings (Paul Mercurio), seems to have it all: ample talent; beautiful partner, Liz (Gia Carides); loving, supportive mother and father (Pat Thomson and Barry Otto) who run a dance studio; and the admiration of people like Barry Fife (Bill Hunter), the President of the Australian Ballroom Confederation. Scott is a champion and seems a lock to win the Pan Pacific Championship, the dance title that he’s had his eyes on for pretty much his entire life. Everything, it would seem, is coming up Milhouse for Scott…until, of course, it doesn’t.

During a dance competition, Scott and Liza get boxed in by Scott’s smarmy dance nemesis, Ken Railings (John Hannan) and his partner. Feeling trapped and in a panic, Scott loses his head and, instinctively, busts out some decidedly non-regulation, “modern dance”-type moves. His parents are stunned, the Ballroom Confederation is disgusted and his partner is in tears: how could Scott possibly do this to all of them? Feeling suddenly free for the first time, however, Scott refuses to back down, determined to win the Pan Pacific competition with his new-found moves, whether or not the judges, his family or his partner think it’s kosher. Scott finds a kindred spirit in Fran (Tara Morice), a beginning dance student who shares Scott’s disdain for the rules and seems more than a little sweet on him. At first, of course, Scott treats her like the vain, egotistical jerk he is: he blows off her initial request to dance with him with the haughty exclamation, “A beginner has no right approaching an open amateur.” Luckily for all involved, Scott eventually gets over himself and begins dancing with Fran, first in secret and then in public, to the massive consternation of his micro-managing mother.

Everything comes to a head at the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix (where else?), as the various dancers splinter and regroup in various iterations. Skullduggery abounds: Fife and Scott’s mom scheme to get him hooked up with Tina Sparkle (Sonia Kruger); Scott’s father and his friend, Wayne (Pip Mushin) scheme to thwart Fife’s plan to kick out Scott; Scott tries to win back Fran, after realizing his colossal idiocy and former partner Liz schemes to get away from Railings, who’s revealed himself to be an obnoxious drunk. As the madcap carnival swirls to a conclusion, all involved will learn the most important of life-lessons: it’s not whether you win or lose that matters but whether you had fun doing it.

As one of the films that helped kick off the independent movie surge in the early ’90s, Strictly Ballroom will always have a little spot carved out in the hearts of film fans. Unlike many films of that era (fuck you very much, Clerks), the film actually holds up fairly well today, coming across as a spiritual predecessor to Christopher Guest films like Waiting for Guffman (1996), Best in Show (2000) and A Mighty Wind (2003). Like Guest’s movies, Strictly Ballroom isn’t a particularly sharp or mean film: for one thing, the sweet romance between Scott and Fran is too front and center, while the dastardly machinations by the villainous Fife are too broad and silly to have much menace. It’s also clear that Luhrmann, for whatever reason, feels some genuine affection for his characters and doesn’t want to poke too many holes in them: even Scott’s mom, who can sometimes seem like a bush-league, dance studio Cruella De Vil, is given enough backstory justification to explain many of her more questionable actions.

I’ve never really warmed to any of Luhrmann’s post-Strictly Ballroom films (I haven’t even bothered to see The Great Gatsby, although I’ll get around to it some day), although I distinctly recall seeing Romeo + Juliet in the theater and thinking it was a good, but not great, retelling of the old chestnut. For the most part, I find Luhrmann’s films to be the very definition of “style over substance,” particularly the ridiculous excesses of Moulin Rouge!, although Australia is just as over-stuffed and silly, in its own way. Strictly Ballroom is a much more down-to-earth, character-based effort, however, possibly because it was an adaptation of one of Luhrmann’s stage plays. Whatever the reason, this is one of the few Luhrmann films where the actors don’t feel like set dressing, living props only around to show off the consistently impressive production design.

Strictly Ballroom is not, of course, a particularly original or unique film: it manages to hit pretty much every single beat that you would expect from this kind of light, romantic comedy, right down to the marginalized parent who swoops in at the eleventh hour to save the day. That being said, the film is still full of lots of fun, energetic moments: one of my favorite bits was the ridiculous smooth-jazz, instrumental version of Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time that scores the montage scene where Scott (unsuccessfully) auditions a small army of replacement partners. The film is full of nifty little touches like this, perhaps hinting at the overly busy, baroque productions that Luhrmann would later make his calling card. At the beginning, however, he was a quirky, slightly off-center indie filmmaker with a keen interest in exploring some of the odder inhabitants of his native Australia. He may have become a household name with films like Moulin Rouge but I can’t help wishing he’d give us another one like Strictly Ballroom, instead. There are already plenty of big, gaudy, loud films in the world: a few more with a little heart couldn’t hurt.

4/28/14: Not Enough for This Guy

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All Things to All Men, cinema, cops and robbers, crime film, directorial debut, Elsa Pataky, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, Gabriel Byrne, George Isaac, Julian Sands, Leo Gregory, Movies, Rufus Sewell, suspense, Terence Maynard, thriller, Toby Stephens, writer-director

I’m not ashamed to admit that I was pretty lost during the first 10-15 minutes of All Things to All Men, the feature debut from writer-director George Isaac. This isn’t the first time that I’ve felt lost during a film: watching Primer (2004) and TimeCrimes (2007) for the first time was like trying to build a nuclear reactor with Ikea instructions. I recall finishing Sauna (2008) and realizing that I’d “got” about half the film and let’s not even talk about Jodorowsky…I still don’t think I have any idea what Holy Mountain (1973) is actually about. This obviously wasn’t the first time I had been confused by a film and certainly won’t be the last time. It was, however, one of the few times that I can recall being confused by what should, on all accounts, have been a fairly standard cops vs robbers story. Was this some intricately plotted stumper, then, a multi-layered masterpiece of criss-crosses, double-crosses and sudden betrayals? Not so much, unfortunately: in reality, All Things to All Men is just a massively confusing, jumbled crime film that attempts to cloud its simple story with mindlessly kinetic actions, dreary locations and a never-ending procession of bland, similar characters.

Once the film finally settles down and begins to make a little sense, it breaks down a little something like this: Parker (Rufus Sewell) is a dirty cop and he’s jonesing to take down Joseph Corso (Gabriel Byrne), a local mobster with a junkie son (Pierre Mascolo) and about a million problems. Corso is practically a kinsman to Harold Shand, Bob Hoskins’ world-weary, can’t-buy-a-break loser from The Long Good Friday (1980): even as his professional world collapses around his ears, he’s still gotta put out the fires at home. Parker and his two partners, Dixon (Leo Gregory) and Sands (Terence Maynard), use Corso’s son to draw him into a highly confusing heist that involves the mysterious Riley (Toby Stephens). Riley is looking to avenge the death of his brother, Adrian (Gil Darnell), and he thinks Corso may have something to do with it. As all of these various characters collide and ricochet off each other, Dixon slowly begins to realize that Parker may just be a bigger threat to polite society than Corso could ever home to be. Parker’s superiors seem happy with his results (which are…?), however, and it’s “strongly implied” that Dixon should sit down and quit rocking the boat. What’s a dedicated cop to do, however, when everybody seems equally dirty and every exit seems to lead right back to the fun house?

As a crime-thriller, All Things to All Men is pretty standard, middle-of-the-road fare. The action scenes were shot a bit too kinetically for my tastes (ala The Bourne films) and everything was edited in the modern quick-cut, music video style that’s currently in fashion. There are a couple pretty great car chases, however, and the acting is consistently strong, if never extraordinary. As mentioned above, however, the film often collapses into much less than the sum of its parts. While the opening to All Things to All Men is a complete mess of poorly defined, muddy colors (all of the dark tones tend to blur together into one big ol’ blob) and confusing, quick-cut action involving largely anonymous characters, the rest of the film doesn’t look much better. If anything, the poor color correction and definition in the film makes it look extremely cheap, something borne out by the direct-to-video action sequences and standard-issue storyline.

It’s a pity, in a way, that there wasn’t more care taken with All Things to All Men: there are the bones of a pretty decent, modest crime caper here. Byrne does a good job as “The Merchant of the city,” who finds his world growing smaller by the minute and Stephens is just fine as Riley, our de facto protagonist. Julian Sands, the prolific genre actor who once made the Warlock prowl the earth, is good as Corso’s second-in-command, although I wish he got a little more screen time. I’ll admit that Leo Gregory didn’t do much for me as Dixon, the good cop trying to keep from becoming a bad cop: perhaps it was due to script issues but Dixon never felt like a fully fleshed character, more like the kind of archetype (the Serpico) that Issac’s felt his film needed.

All Things to All Men isn’t a terrible film but it is a hobbled film, prevented from becoming the decent B-thriller that it could’ve been by a combination of sloppy filmmaking and overly complicated plotting. With a tighter script and a better look, Isaac’s debut film would be a perfectly suitable way to kill part of a lazy afternoon. As it stands, however, there’s just not enough here to make this worth the time.

4/27/14: It Takes a Village to Raise a Curtis

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Aaron Jungels, Adele Parker, awkward kids, based on a true story, bohemian lifestyle, Breakfast with Curtis, cinema, coming of age, Curtis, David A. Parker, dramadies, eccentric people, feuding neighbors, film reviews, films, independent films, indie comedies, Jonah Parker, Laura Colella, Movies, Syd, Theo Green, Virginia Laffey, writer-director-actor, Yvonne Parker

Unless you happen to live atop a flag pole or at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, chances are good that you’ve had neighbors at some point in the past. Whether you tend to fall more on the Flintstones’ side (love thy neighbor) or the Sawyers’ side (brain thy neighbor with a mallet) is completely up to you, of course: personally, I tend to be Team Sawyer, so you’d best have an invite if you come knocking. For many folks, however, interacting with and getting to know their neighbors is an integral part of what it means to be a good citizen, a way of bringing humanity closer while strengthening the necessary social bonds that help us all pull together in times of crises. I get that…I really do. It’s always a good idea to know who lives nearby, especially if you’re the kind of person who relies on the kindness of strangers for things like lawn mowers, cups of sugar and hedge clippers. What if, however, your next-door-neighbors are a bunch of hippy-dippy pains-in-the-asses? In that case, you might very well end up with a situation like Breakfast with Curtis (2012), writer/director/actor Laura Colella’s most recent film.

The film begins “five years ago,” with the inciting incident that touches off the neighborly feud: young Curtis (Gideon Parker) throws a rock at his neighbor’s cat. Said neighbor, Syd (Theo Green) is a bit of a hippy hothead and threatens to crush Curtis’ skull. Needless to say, Curtis’ father, Simon (David A. Parker), isn’t thrilled with this plan and comes around to tell Syd and his wife, Pirate (Adele Parker) to stay the hell away from him and his family. Five years later, Curtis (Jonah Parker) is now 14 and he’s one of those stereotypically unhappy movie kids that never speaks, preferring to communicate by a complicated series of sighs and disappointed glances. He seems to be completely withdrawn from his family (and life in general, it seems) but this all changes (of course) when Syd has a change of heart and decides to try to bring Curtis into the fold via a videography project. As Curtis and Syd begin to spend more and more time together, the boy begins to come out of his shell and even (gasp!) smiles at one point…he’s cured! In the meantime, as Curtis is getting his life on track, Simon and his wife, Sylvie (Virginia Laffey), try to reconcile their former friendship with Syd, Pirate and their quirky housemates, Frenchy (Aaron Jungels), Paola (Colella) and Sadie (Yvonne Parker). Will Curtis be able to navigate the stormy seas of adolescence? Will Simon and Sylvie ever be able to recapture those fabled “Tequila Summers” of yore? Will Syd ever shut up?

Right off the bat, it helps to know a few things about the film. For one thing, the movie was shot in Colella’s own house and the characters are actually based on her own housemates and their (apparently) once contentious relationship with their own next-door neighbors. The cast is made up of a mixture of non-actors and professionals (at least to the extent that they’ve appeared in Colella’s other independent features), although the actual actors are playing different roles than their real-life counterparts. As such, the performances in the film tend to be a mixed-bag. Theo Green is a force of nature as Syd, resembling a slightly older, more disheveled Weird Al Yankovic but he’s pretty inconsistent: there are times when he’s able to bulldoze the audience into submission although, just as frequently, his delivery is awkward and halting. Jonah Parker isn’t given much to do, as Curtis, but there’s nothing particularly wrong with his performance: we’ve seen a hundred characters like this in indie comedies/dramas/dramadies over the past 15 years and Parker does no worse (or necessarily better) than the others. The rest of the cast, including director Colella, acquit themselves just fine, with one glaring exception: Yvonne Parker is absolutely painful as Sadie. Her dialogue tends to be trite and her delivery/performance is irritating and tedious, exemplifying the very worst aspects of non-actors in professional productions. While the other performances may be a bit unpolished, from time to time, Parker is consistently terrible.

Uneven performances notwithstanding, my biggest issue with Breakfast with Curtis tends to be its relative lack of focus and, occasionally, confusing story elements. For much of the film’s running time, it’s exceptionally difficult to get any real sense for who these characters are and how they’re all connected together. It wasn’t made clear until much later in the film, for example, that the people living in Syd’s house are actually several different groups: for a while, I assumed they were all related, which made some of the (assumed) sexual pairings come across as a little confusing, to say the least. I don’t mean to imply that a genealogy chart is required, of course, but the film seems to assume that we’re all on the same page from the jump, when I obviously wasn’t.

There are also story elements that seem rather undeveloped, sometimes to confusing effect. In one instance, a female visitor shows up at Syd’s house, is treated like a long-lost relative and seems to engage in a threesome with Frenchy and Paola, yet is never introduced or affects the film in any noticeable way. There’s also some unnecessary vagueness regarding the nature of Simon and Sylvie’s former friendship with Syd and the others: at one point, there seems to be a strong inference that they were all swingers. Were they? Does that actually have any bearing on the plot? Should it? As someone who not only strives to pay pretty close attention while watching films but also takes notes, I’m particularly confused by my inability to answer these questions. The only conclusion I can reach is that the answers were never provided. Small issues, perhaps, but the more time I spend confused, the less time I spent invested in the actual film.

Which, ultimately, is a bit of a shame, since the movie isn’t bad, even if it is rough. Everything has an amiable, shaggy-dog quality that makes it eminently watchable, even when it begins to come off the wheels. It would have been nice to have Syd say something profound, at some point (at any point, really), but Theo Green is charismatic enough that the character comes across as eccentric rather than haranguing.  Jungels and Colella have good chemistry together and there are plenty of charming scenes to be found (the “ladies-only” birthday party, where Frenchy dresses in drag, is a particular highlight and a really lovely scene, in general). I was also a big fan of the film’s color palette, finding the warm and primary color choices to be good ones, bringing a vibrancy to the proceedings that are sometimes lost in other indie films that favor drab tones and colors.

At no point, however, does the film ever seem to have any real forward momentum: the stakes are consistently low and there never seems to be any sense of “danger” whatsoever. Even the conflict between the neighbors seems to be largely forgotten after the opening: when Curtis’ parents find out that Syd wants him to help with his project, they both think it’s a great idea and encourage him to go for it. The Hatfields and the McCoys, they ain’t. In a cinematic landscape where these kind of coming-of-age dramadies are as numerous as grains of sand on the beach (I must have seen at least two dozen over the past three or four years), Breakfast with Curtis just doesn’t do enough to stand out from the crowd. It’s amiable and easy-going, sure, with a nice message and a good heart. Sometimes, however, that’s just not quite good enough.

4/26/14: Odd? No. Lame? Yes.

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Addison Timlin, Anton Yelchin, bad films, bad movies, based on a book, Bodachs, CGI, cinema, Clive Barker, Dean Koontz, diners, film adaptations, film reviews, films, Fungus Bob, Movies, Odd Thomas, Peter Straub, Phantoms, short-order cook, small town life, special-effects extravaganza, Stephen King, Stephen Sommers, terrible films, The Frighteners, The Mummy, The Sixth Sense, Van Helsing, Willem Dafoe, worst films of the year

We like to point to film adaptations of Stephen King novels/short stories as being prime examples of how difficult it is to translate the written page to the big screen but, if you think about it, none of the “old guard” horror authors have fared particularly well in Hollywood. King tends to be the most visible, due to the sheer number of his projects that have been filmed, but none of his peers have done much better. Peter Straub’s Ghost Story was turned into a decent slow-burner but the filmed version of Julia was kind of a mess. Clive Barker turned one of his best known shorts into the horror classic Hellraiser (1987) but follow-ups have been mixed bags, vacillating between so-so adaptations of Candyman (1992) and Lord of Illusions (1996) and unmitigated crap like Rawhead Rex (1986), Book of Blood (2009) and Dread (2009). And poor Dean Koontz…oh, Dean…

Of the established old-guard of horror writers, perhaps none have fared quite so poorly on the silver screen as Dean Koontz has. While King, Straub and Barker can at least claim a few successful adaptations of their best known work, there doesn’t seem to be much good that anyone can say about filmed versions of Koontz’s work. While Demon Seed (1977) may have functioned as a bit of histrionic, “so-bad-it’s-good” fluff, The Watchers (1988), The Servants of Twilight (1991), Hideaway (1995) and Phantoms (1998) all produced truly execrable films. In fact, Phantoms had the distinction of being one of the single worst films that I ever paid to see in a theater, as well as being one of the absolute worst films of 1988: quite an honor! Truth be told, I can’t really think of any filed adaptations of Koontz novels/stories that are anything better than “meh,” with most of them being dogfood. To this refuse pile, we can now add the smelly, bloated stupidity that is Odd Thomas (2013), a film that proudly continues the tradition of making unconditionally awful “product” out of Koontz’s decidedly low-brow page-turners. If anything, Odd Thomas is actually worse than most of the previous adaptations, resulting in something that’s akin to a Viceroy of Crap (nothing will ever unseat the howling, eye-gouging, terrible evil that is Phantoms, however, including that box of rocks Watchers).

As far as plot/story goes, consider this the drooling, inbred cousin to Peter Jackson’s far, far superior The Frighteners (1996) or a screwball retake on The Sixth Sense (1999), as envisioned by Pauly Shore. Odd Thomas (Anton Yelchin) is a short-order diner cook who also happens to be able to see dead people. He uses this ability to play “spiritual private eye,” as it were, or, as he eloquently puts it: “I may see dead people but by God…I do something about it!” Good for you, buddy. Odd has a spunky, pixie-girl girlfriend named Stormy (Addison Timlin), who’s basically a bored (and boring) Veronica Mars. He’s also got a long-suffering, overly patient police chief friend, Wyatt (Willem Dafoe), whose sole job is to sigh, shake his head and follow Odd’s lead. What’s this all spell, ladies and gentlemen? Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun, of course!

Odd has a tendency to see Bodachs, which are basically oily, CGI-critters that swarm invisibly around people who are about to engage in big-time violence. One day, Odd sees the creatures massing around a particularly strange customer, by the name of Fungus Bob (Shuler Hensley), a guy who looks like an unholy fusion of Tom Waits and Men in Black-era Vincent D’Onofrio. Since there are so many of the Bodachs hanging about, Odd figures that Fungus Bob must be one massively bad dude, maybe the baddest dude ever (so now the film is also ripping off The Prophecy (1995), which is miles better than anything found here). In order to prevent whatever tragedy is looming, as well as adding another notch to his “spiritual private detective” punch-card, Odd sets out to uncover the truth about Fungus Bob, with Stormy and Chief Wyatt in tow. Along the way, he’ll experience massive amounts of dramatic slo-mo, more CGI creations than you’re likely to see in an After Effects demo and a convoluted conspiracy that only goes undetected because it makes no sense whatsoever and the audience is provided with no clues to help figure it out along the way. Lucky for the main characters that they’ve read the script, otherwise they would be just as lost as us. The whole thing culminates in a shopping mall set-piece that was musty a decade ago before finishing up with a “tragic” twist that anyone who hasn’t fallen asleep by the film’s final twenty minutes will have had to see coming from a mile away. On the plus side, the film ends with an absolutely gorgeous shot of the city’s lightscape at night: my recommendation would be to forward to the final minute or so, check the shot out and call it a day.

Odd Thomas is one massive pile of glossy, CGI-soaked, over-produced, brainless crap. The editing is overly showy and obnoxious, full of needless quick cuts and so much cheesy slo-mo that it seems like every third shot is tinkered with. The acting is serviceable, although non of the principals look like they’re having a good time. While I’m not the biggest fan of Yelchin, I really enjoyed his performance in Charlie Bartlett (2007) and found him decent in another half-dozen films. He’s pretty much a non-entity here, however, possessing zero charisma and not much pizzazz. Addison Timlin, as Stormy, is consistently obnoxious, one of those “quirky” characters who would be repeatedly stomped into the dust in the real world. Poor Dafoe just looks sleepy and defeated, his performance carrying all of the gravitas of someone fulfilling their end of a losing best.

That Odd Thomas is a giant CGI-fest should come as no surprise, seeing as how Stephen Sommers wrote and directed the film. Sommers is a guy who’s practically synonymous with big CGI flicks: his resume, after all, includes such cinematic majesty as Deep Rising (1998), The Mummy (1999), The Mummy Returns (2001), Van Helsing (2004) and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009). What is surprising, however, is how lifeless and boring Odd Thomas is. Sommers previous films may be many things – loud, juvenile, silly, weightless, glossy, slapstick – but they’re rarely boring, zipping from one zany special effects moment to another mugging character actor. Perhaps his previous films benefited from more charismatic leads, like The Mummy’s Brendan Fraser or Van Helsing’s Hugh Jackman. Perhaps Sommers had little interest in the source material. Whatever the reason, Odd Thomas plays like a particularly deflated TV movie, something to have on in the background while you’re making dinner for the kids. The film looks (and plays) so flat that I have a hard time believing it ever played an actual movie theater, although it did, briefly, hit the festival circuit.

At the end of the day, Odd Thomas is a tax write-off, a cheap-looking “product” that seems to exist only to move digits from one column to the other. There’s no sense of love or craft here, whether from the cast or behind-the-scenes talent. If you want to see this kind of story done right, check out either The Frighteners or The Sixth Sense. If you want to see a better Sommers flick, check out The Mummy. If you just want to kill 90 minutes and a few brain cells…aw, fuck it…it’s not even really good for that. If you wanna kill some time and brain cells, go watch a Troma film. At least Uncle Lloyd and his merry band of pranksters know that they’re serving up steaming crap: Odd Thomas can’t be bothered to care one way or the other.

4/26/14: To Project and Swerve

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absurdist, Arden Myrin, auteur theory, bad cops, Best of 2013, black comedies, cinema, comedies, cops, cops behaving badly, dark comedies, Eric Judor, Eric Roberts, Eric Wareheim, favorite films, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, French cinema, French films, Grace Zabriskie, Harmony Korine, Marilyn Manson, Mark Burnham, Movies, Mr. Oizo, Officer de Luca, Officer Duke, Officer Holmes, Officer Rough, Quentin Dupieux, Ray Wise, Rubber, Steve Little, surreal, Terry Gilliam, Tim & Eric, Wes Anderson, Wrong, Wrong Cops

Quentin Dupieux gets me. He really does. If any filmmaker operating in our modern age can really be tuned in to my bizarre little wave-length, Dupieux is definitely it. While I may hold Refn and Wheatley in the highest regard, never having seen one of their films that I haven’t adored, Dupieux is the crackpot auteur who seems to view the world with my eyes. Beginning with Rubber (2010), the French writer/director/musician (he’s also Mr. Oizo, the French electro artist) has seen fit to depict a world that’s one part Lynchian suburb, one part dystopic wasteland and one part absurdist stage play. While 2012’s brain-melting Wrong serves to set-up the bizarre wonderland that’s finally unleashed in Wrong Cops, Dupieux’s newest is a completely stand-alone triumph, an absurdist nightmare that manages to be both hilarious and disturbing. Basically, Dupieux is up to his old tricks.

Whereas Wrong told a more linear, complex but, essentially, traditional (or as traditional as Dupieux can get) narrative, Wrong Cops functions more as a bat-shit crazy Pulp Fiction, wherein we are introduced to a disparate collection of characters who we then follow about as their stories eventually intertwine. In the case of Wrong Cops, we’re introduced to the titular characters, a ragtag collection of “law enforcement” personnel that are sort of like Police Academy filtered through It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, by way of Harmony Korine. We have Officer Duke (Mark Burnham), who has sex with transsexual prostitutes, delivers the pot he sells to locals by stuffing it in dead rats, carts around a “75% dead” body in his trunk and needlessly hassles a poor teen nerd who just wants to listen to his headphones (Marilyn Manson, in a role that must, literally, be seen to be believed…and yes…he is playing a teenage boy). We get Officer de Luca (Eric Wareheim), who holds yoga students at gunpoint in order to get their phone numbers and his partner, Officer Holmes (Arden Myrin), who uses her young son as bag-man in a money-drop involving the blackmail of a fellow cop. Said fellow cop, Officer Sunshine (Steve Little), has an active side-career in law enforcement-themed gay porn, a business venture which he’s managed to successfully hide from his adoring wife and daughter. Meanwhile, Officer Rough (Eric Judor), is just trying to make the best damn dance track that he can. There’s something missing, however, and Rough just can’t quite put his finger on it. Good thing that the “75% dead” guy (Daniel Quinn) has a thing for beats, though: with a little luck, he may just be able to give the cut the extra oomph it needs to secure Officer Rough a meeting with a top record exec. That is, of course, if he doesn’t bleed to death first. Throw in Eric Roberts as Duke’s drug supplier and Ray Wise as the group “who gives a shit” Captain and you got yahtzee, folks!

Like all of Dupieux’s films, Wrong Cops is easier (and better) experienced then explained. He has a particular skill with enveloping viewers completely within the reality of his films, something that Wes Anderson and Harmony Korine are both experts at. There’s never a point in the film, regardless of how strange, random or absurd, where the viewer is taken out of Dupieux’s reality: for my money, it’s one of the most impressive displays of world-building I’ve seen this year. The film has a sun-bleached, washed-out color palette and tone that recalls not only Rubber but, almost subliminally, Alex Cox’s outsider classic Repo Man (1984). I actually see several parallels with Repo Man in this film, not least of which is the almost mundane way in which the characters all deal with the strangeness massed around them. There was definitely this feel in Dupieux’s previous film, Wrong, but that movie was also a much more explicitly fantasy/sci-fi oriented project, as was Rubber. Wrong Cops, by contrast, is set wholly within a world that could, technically, be ours, albeit one in which everything was tweaked a few degrees…a world in which everything was just a little wrong, as it were.

Part of the joy with Wrong Cops, similar to watching exploitation films or anything by Lloyd Kaufman, is seeing just how bad things will get. As with everything else, Wrong Cops doesn’t disappoint on this count: things start bad and get steadily worse until the whole thing becomes a roaring tsunami of bad taste, bad choices, bad behavior and bad, bad people. Truth be told, there isn’t a single character in the film that you can truly “root” for, not one person who passes the sniff test as a “hero.” We spend the most time with Duke but he’s the furthest thing we’d want from a protector. Ditto Officers de Luca and Holmes, a potential sexual assailant, on the one hand, and a cop so dirty that she even “feeds” on her own peers, on the other. The closest we get to an “innocent” cop in the film is Rough who wins by default: he doesn’t really do anything terrible (outside of some hanky-panky with his neighbor’s married wife, that is) but he also doesn’t lift a finger to help anyone, least of all the poor dying guy sitting in his living room.

Films like Wrong Cops walk a very fine line: on one hand, they only work spectacularly well if they push the envelope as far as it will go. On the other hand, however, there a definite difference between crudity with a point (see Blazing Saddles) and crude-for-its-own-sake (see pretty much any Troma film). Earlier this year, I lambasted The Comedy, a hateful hipster-skewering/lauding film that also featured Eric Wareheim in a prominent role. In that case, I was never sure which side of the issue the filmmakers were actually on: more often than not, The Comedy seemed to be celebrating their terrible behavior, while also trying to half-heartedly tsk tsk it. There’s no such hemming and hawing in Dupieux’s film, however: he’s all-in on the various officers terrible behavior but he makes no bones about what unrepentant assholes these people are. There’s nothing to look up to, here, no sense of cool cats thumbing their noses at a square world: these people are part of the problem, not any part of the solution, and Dupieux knows it. He also, however, knows that they are a seriously funny bunch of misanthropes (similar to that lovable bunch of apes in It’s Always Sunny) and gives them plenty of room to work their funny magic.

And the film is funny. Very funny. Unlike the ultra-dry, high-concept Rubber or the wry, tricky Wrong, Wrong Cops is all loud, belching, farting id, the Sam Kinison to the previous films George Carlin. Perhaps this speaks more to my sense of humor than anything else (remember…Dupieux gets me) but I laughed my way through the entire film. Hard. There are so many great scenes in the film that picking out favorites is a little hard but there’s stuff that still makes me crack up, even as I type it now: Eric Wareheim’s hair getting blown back by a tornado of pepper spray from a decidedly bored wannabe “victim”; Mark Burnham tossing a drug-filled rat onto a diner counter like it was no big deal; Officers de Luca and Holmes walking into a murder scene and proceeding to raid the fridge, featuring the priceless exchange, “Aren’t you going to ask any questions?” “I do have a question: how old is this mozzarella?”; the record executive dismissing Officer Rough’s efforts with the revelation that he doesn’t think “anyone’s going to want to listen to music from a black, one-eyed, slightly monstrous DJ.” Wrong Cops is like a bottomless treasure chest, constantly spewing forth glittering new comedic jewels at frequent intervals.

The acting, across the board, is dead on. All of the cops are pretty much perfect but there isn’t a single actor/character in the film that feels off, regardless of how much/little screen time they get. Marilyn Manson, in particular, is utterly fantastic: he plays the part of David Dolores Frank with absolutely zero hint of his more famous day job and the result is a pretty realistic portrait of a hassled teen. It’s a brilliant, metaphysical move that should have been nothing more than silly sight gag (oh look: the Antichrist Superstar is wearing jeans and a t-shirt) but plays like an honest-to-god directorial choice. This, in a nutshell, seems to sum up the Dupieux method: treat everything, regardless of how absurd or meaningless, with the utmost respect. Dupieux may be a court jester but he’s a smart one, perhaps as smart as Terry Gilliam, in his own way.

As previously mentioned, the film looks great and the sparse, dry electro score compliments everything perfectly. Truth be told, I just can’t find anything to really dun the film for: if this was a baseball game, this would have been a home run, no questions about it. As such, I’m pretty much left with just deciding where the film fits into Dupieux’s existing oeuvre. I actually like it quite a bit more than Rubber, which is easily the most “difficult” film in Dupieux’s catalog, but not quite as much as Wrong. While Wrong Cops is a much funnier film than its predecessor, I also think it’s a slightly smaller film: Wrong was working with some truly mind-blowing concepts and metaphysics, whereas Wrong Cops is a peek into an insane world. By the time Ray Wise showed up in a role that couldn’t help but remind me of his turn as Satan in Reaper, I had begun to wonder whether Dupieux’s whole point was to plop us down into a kind of purgatory while his various characters continued their slow shuffle into Hell.

A sentient tire…a talking dog…a collection of the worst police officers in history…if there’s a method to Quentin Dupieux’s exquisite madness, I’ve yet to see it. This, of course, is what makes waiting for his next film so excruciating. At this rate, the next movie could, literally, be absolutely anything under the sun. That’s kind of terrifying, if you think about it, but that’s also pretty damn exhilarating. It’s what creativity should always be. It’s what the movies should always be. It’s why I’m still here…and it’s why you should be, too.

4/25/14: JGL Loves His Computer

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addicted to porn, Barbara Sugarman, Brie Larson, Catholic church, character dramas, cinema, Clint Eastwood, Don Jon, dramadies, dramas, eponymous characters, fantasy vs reality, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, Glenne Headly, internet porn, JGL, Jon Martello, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Julianne Moore, Movies, New Jersey, porn, pornography, relationships, Saturday Night Fever, Scarlett Johansson, sex addiction, Tony Danza, Tony Manero, voice-over narration, writer-director-actor

It’s always a dicey proposition when a beloved actor decides to makes his/her mark behind the camera. On one hand, who could possibly understand the methods and motivations necessary to elicit the best performances from actors than a fellow treader of the boards? There’s a special skill to directing actors, a skill that becomes even more impressive when one begins to take note of the numerous films, popular and otherwise, that feature serviceable (at best) acting. The modern Hollywood mode appears to be to distract from any basic flaws (storytelling, script, acting) by focusing on the showier, punchier details (special effects, fast-paced editing, bigger, better and louder everything). When a career actor throws his/her hat onto the directing chair, we usually (but not always) get films that focus on the characters and acting: a quick look through Clint Eastwood’s exemplary resume gives a good example of this. When current golden boy Joseph Gordon-Levitt made his directing/writing debut with Don Jon, a fairly modest little film about a porn-obsessed, body-building, mook looking for love in all the wrong places, I was hoping he would bring the same deft touch behind the scenes that he normally does before them. For the most part, JGL delivers the goods, even if the final result ends up being a little more “same-old-same-old” than I’d hoped.

A montage of highly sexualized female images from film, TV, cartoons and the internet jumps us head-first into JGL’s story about porn-addicted guys and the women who (try to) love them. A voice-over introduces us to the titular hero, one Jon Martello (JGL) who appears to have only four interests in life: masturbating to internet porn, picking up and screwing any living thing with lady parts, cleaning his house and lifting weights. That, as Porky Pig would stammer, is all folks. Frequent super-flashy cut-scenes and montages lay out Jon’s personal philosophy pretty clearly: real girls are great but they ain’t the real thing. You see, everything about porn is cooler to Jon than the actual act of sex: the positions are better, the people are hotter, the angles are better and nobody makes goofy “O” faces. Jon may pick up and bang a new club hottie every night but he always finishes the evening by slipping away from his snoozing conquest and spending a little one-on-one time with his fave XXX sites. As we come to see in pretty short order, Jon is obsessed with the ideal of everything over the reality: ideal sex, ideal body, ideal house, ideal everything. Real life, when compared to the air-brushed perfection of fantasy, just doesn’t rev Jon’s engine, as it were.

All of this, supposedly, changes when Jon lays eyes on Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson) in the club. She’s a “ten” in his book, even though his friends proclaim her to be “long game”: she’s way too “classy” for Jon and he ain’t getting her in the sack anytime soon. Not to worry, of course, because Jon has a little way to help keep his mind off of Barbara’s naughty parts. For a while, this seems like the best of both worlds, to Jon: he gets to romance Barbara as slow as she’d like while still indulging in his own pleasure on the side. Regular visits to the confessional help keep his conscience scrubbed clean (Hail Marys are all-purpose cleaners, it turns out) and Barbara even begins to insinuate herself into the rest of Jon’s life, getting him to enroll in night school and bring her home to meet his folks (Tony Danza and Glenne Headly). Thing’s just get better when Barbara decides that it’s finally time to take it all the way. Jon is thrilled but the sex ends up being just as unfulfilling as ever and he sneaks back to his laptop while Barbara snoozes. She ends up catching him in mid-act, however, which prompts a massive blow-up and promise from Jon that this was all a misunderstanding.

As Jon denies himself the self-gratification that he’s always relied on, however, he finds the rest of his life beginning to fall apart: he’s always pissed off, for one thing, which culminates in a nifty bit of road rage where he puts his fist through a car window. Big Jon may be trying to walk the straight and narrow but Lil’ Jon is the one who calls the shots and, in time, it’s inevitable that the whole flimsy structure will fall to the ground. After Jon learns about browser histories the hard way, he sets out on a journey of self-exploration that eventually leads to Esther (Julianne Moore), the older, philosophical, sexually-secure student in his night class who’s been interested in him for some time. In time, Jon will learn that sex without an emotional connection is just as empty as the internet porn he’s addicted to, forcing him to make some hard decisions. As Blink-182 once said: I guess this is growing up.

As a feature-film debut, Don Jon hits most of the right notes. The acting, as expected, is top-notch, with Tony Danza being a particular stand-out as Jon’s ultra-mook father, Jon, Sr. I’ve never been a fan of Scarlett Johansson, finding her to easily be one of the most irritating, over-rated non-actors in the business but I admit to really enjoying her as Barbara Sugarman. There’s an honesty and vulnerability to her performance that I’ve found lacking in everything else I’ve ever seen her in (with the possible exception of Lost in Translation) and it really helps to shore up the film’s (occasional) emotional disconnect. As always, JGL is a highly personable tour-de-force in the film but he doesn’t do much different with the role: this may be JGL as envisioned by the creators of Jersey Shore but it’s still noticeably JGL: good, old’ reliable JGL.

As a film, Don Jon is a bit more problematic. The quick-cut, fast-paced editing that makes an appearance at the beginning continues throughout the film and, to be honest, it gets old kinda fast. As a rule, I’m not a big fan of hyper-active editing unless it really fits the production (Fight Club and Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels being two of the best examples) and too much of the editing in Don Jon feels superfluous and unnecessarily flashy. The film also ends up being fairly predictable by the third act, mostly due to a softening of its core idea: despite all of the evidence to the contrary, Jon isn’t a porn addict…he just hasn’t found the right girl. While this may be fine and dandy for a stereotypical Hollywood happy ending, it seems to give short shrift to the film’s previous insights into addiction. In my opinion, it would have made for a much better, more powerful film if we could have truly seen Jon caught in the unhappy throes of his addiction, unable to pursue his own happiness due to his obsessions. As it stands, we get the equivalent of the nice guy who spends the entire film being unhappy with the popular girl only to find true love with the mousey librarian in the final scene. It may make for a “nicer” ending but seems to ring a bit false with everything that preceded it.

That being said, Don Jon is a good film with some genuinely interesting things to say (before it pulls its punches, that is). Some of Jon’s observations about the Catholic Church’s policies regarding confessions are both hilarious and spot-on (it seems to rely on a vague point system where masturbation and out-of-wedlock sex are each assigned different, seemingly arbitrary values) and there’s some great, messy energy to the home scenes involving his parents and (seemingly) mute sister. If some of this seems to unconsciously mimic similar scenes in Saturday Night Fever, it’s only because Jon Martello and Tony Manero are probably long-lost cousins. Julianne Moore, like JGL, is consistently good, although her character may have one quirk too many to be completely believable.

As a directorial debut, Don Jon is good but not great. While his focus on the acting results in some truly great performances, there’s a bit too much reliance on style and flash over substance which, combined with the overly conventional resolution, gives the whole production a bit of a “been there, done that feeling.” Nonetheless, I was a huge fan of JGL’s before watching the film and I don’t find my overall impression of him changed in the slightest: I still think he’s a hair’s breadth away from being a national treasure and I’ll eagerly await his sophomore effort.

 

4/23/14: When Fear is Good

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A Fantastic Fear of Everything, Alex de la Iglesia, Amara Karan, based on a short story, British comedies, British films, Bruce Robinson, Bunny and the Bull, Burke & Hare, childhood fears, Chris Hopewell, cinema, Clare Higgins, comedies, crime novelists, Crispian Mills, Decades of Death, Dr. Friedkin, eyeballs, fear, film reviews, films, Guy Ritchie, Hanoi Handshake Killer, Harold the Hedgehog, Hayley Mills, horror-comedies, I Sell the Dead, Kerry Shale, Kula Shaker, laundromats, Movies, paranoia, Paul Freeman, Quentin Tarantino, serial killers, SImon Pegg, Terry Gilliam, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Final Countdown, The Hendon Ogre, Time Bandits, voice-over narration, Wes Anderson, Withnail and I

There’s something about an “everything including the kitchen sink” approach to filmmaking that’s always appealed to me. Perhaps it was because Time Bandits (1981) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) were two of my favorite films growing up and neither of those films understood the words “restraint” or “over-indulgence.” Perhaps it’s because I developed an early love for Tarantino and Ritchie’s hyperkinetic, restless bullet-ballets: the former contorted his traditional narratives into fantastic new balloon animals while the latter never met a camera-angle, editing trick or musical cue that he didn’t love. When a filmmaker throws everything at the screen, and it sticks, the results can be some of the most thrilling, eye-popping cinema I’ve ever seen. I never tire of Wes Anderson’s immaculate miniatures-writ-large and if Alex de la Iglesia can sometimes be the model of restraint, he’s more often the device for delivering machine-gun-armed circus clowns and silver-bodypaint-adorned Jesus bankrobbers. I love small, quiet, subtle films, especially horror films, but it’s no coincidence that three of my favorite films of the past decade have been I Sell the Dead (2008), Bunny and the Bull (2009) and Burke and Hare (2010), all three of which throw so much material/effects/multi-media/razzle-dazzle at the audience that they’re almost endurance matches. While Crispian Mills debut film A Fantastic Fear of Everything (2012) may not be quite as perfect as the aforementioned classics, it’s just close enough to deserve a place with the pack.

After a truly dynamic animated opening sequence, we’re introduced to our hero, Jack (Simon Pegg), a children’s author who has decided to expand his horizons with a book about serial killers. Unfortunately for poor Jack, he has a tendency to be…well…afraid of everything and he quickly begins to obsesses about the various Victorian slashers, such as The Hendon Ogre and Crippen, that he researches. Even worse, he begins to think that insidious killers are actually after him, leading him to superglue a large kitchen knife to his hand. After his long-suffering agent gets Jack a meeting with the mysterious Harvey Humphries (Kerry Shale), a film producer interested in turning his research on serial killers into a movie, Jack must get over his intense agoraphobia and prepare to actually leave his house. After his usual laundry method (washing in the sink, drying in the oven) goes horribly awry, Jack must venture out to that most dreaded of public places: the laundromat. Not only have laundromats always been at the secret center of Jack’s endless phobias but there’s also a new killer nicknamed The Hanoi Handshake Killer running around. As Jack leaves his home, knife glued to hand, he must come to grips with the source of his childhood trauma, solve a local mystery and figure out whether he wants to stick with the hedgehog that made him famous or follow his dreams into the true-crime stories that haunt his dreams. Along the way, he might just find love. He also might get into an argument with a serial killer about the validity of The Final Countdown and hair metal vs gangsta rap, of course, but he definitely might find love.

Although it may seem overly reductive, perhaps the best “easy” descriptor of A Fantastic Fear of Everything would be Wes Anderson directing a Terry Gilliam film as envisioned by Guy Ritchie.   From the opening credit sequence to the closing one, AFFOE never sits still, spinning endlessly like a perpetual motion machine. Director/writer Mills (the son of actress Hayley Mills and member of Brit-rock band Kula Shaker), along with cinematographer Simon Chaudoir, have managed to craft a film that both visually and aurally inventive, hyperkinetic and fast-paced, yet inherently human and character-driven. This is no mean feat when there’s this much stuff flying around. At various points, we get super-stylized camera shots (the opening close-up of Pegg’s eye, which rotates out to make it seem as if he’s on the floor, yet is finally revealed to him by the wall, is nothing short of genius), nifty animated sequences (the paper-doll murder explanation is super cool and the claymation Harold the Hedgehog sequence is good enough to be its own short) and inventive use of sound (there’s a great moment where the sound begins loud and non-diagetic before becoming cracked and tinny as Jack walks into the launderette). The colors are all gorgeous and vibrant, looking like nothing so much as one of the aforementioned Anderson’s candy-colored epics.

In the pivotal role of Jack, Pegg is as reliably solid as ever. He manages to bring just the right amount of nice-guy restraint to balance out the bottomless ocean of neuroses that is Jack: too much in either direction and the character would be either insufferable or as bland as milquetoast. As such, however, we get some truly great Pegg moments, including the scene where he gives change to begging children, via used sock, through his mail slot or the aforementioned bit where he argues with his potential killer about whether hair metal or gangster rap was the more valid cultural entertainment. The rest of the cast, particularly Alan Drake as the daffy “community support police officer” Tony, are all excellent but this is truly Pegg’s show: he gets the most screen-time, by a yard, and relishes it.

There are a laundry-list of reasons this film shouldn’t have worked. For one thing, this kind of hyper-kinetic storytelling can easily dissolve into mush when done wrong: just look at Ritchie’s post-Snatch filmography (including Sherlock Holmes, please and thank you) or the brain-dead Shoot ‘Em Up (2007) for proof. Mills is a new, untested director coming from not only a famous family but a famous rock band: there’s no reason this shouldn’t have smelled and tasted like a vanity project. The actual plot (guy is afraid of everything, must get to meeting) is pretty thin and the final twist wraps things up in such a stereotypically happy, upbeat ending that it threatens to make everything before it seem like subtle parody, like a Jack Handey aphorism taken too far.

Against all odds, however, A Fantastic Fear of Everything works. And it works spectacularly well, if I might add. The script is sharp and clever, full of laugh-out-loud scenes, dialogue and ingeniously clever plot details. The animated sequences are all fresh and fit in perfectly with the rest of the film, as well as contributing to the overall themes of the film (how one’s imagination can imprison one, if not careful). The acting is uniformly top-notch and the cinematography and sound design are exemplary. Truth be told, short of a truly embarrassing scene where Pegg mugs along to a rap song (this is almost as nerve-gratingly mortifying as the worst moments of The Office) and some minor issues with structure, there really isn’t much wrong with the film. If you can handle a little silliness and some self-referential moments, A Fantastic Fear of Everything is actually a pretty smart peek into the issues that make us all the stupid little humans that we are. For my money, I’m more than willing to give Jack a place on Simon Pegg’s Character Wall of Fame and I’m more than eager to find out what Crispian Mills comes up with next.

4/22/14: Set the Way Back Machine to Groovy, Baby

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'70s films, '70s-era, AIP, American Independent Productions, Bullitt, cinema, crime film, drug smuggling, film reviews, films, gangster films, gangsters, heroin trafficking, Italian cinema, Ivo Garrani, mafia, Maurizio Lucidi, mean streets of San Francisco, Movies, race-car driver, Roger Corman, Roger Moore, San Francisco, Stacy Keach, Street People, The French Connection, Ulysses

When it comes to exploring new films, I like to let my instincts do the walking. Like some sort of mutant bloodhound, my nose is finally attuned to sniff out those cinematic delicacies that will most likely keep me entertained, if not actively jumping from my seat and thrusting devil horns into the flat-screen. Sometimes, the cover art can fire my imagination, leading me to wonder how much was made up by the artist and how much actually exists within the framework of the movie proper. Other times, I can be intrigued by a familiar name in the credits, some favorite actor “slumming” it in a B-grade effort to make some pocket cash. In a perfect storm situation, however, all of these disparate elements will align to make a previously unknown film into an absolute must-see. When I found out that Street People, a 1976 Italian gangster flick set on the mean streets of San Francisco, featured Roger Moore as a Sicilian/British mob lawyer and Stacy Keach as his best friend and champion race-car driver…well, let’s just say that the next move was obvious.

Following in the Italo-film tradition of spaghetti Westerns, Street People features an all-Italian cast, supplemented by Moore and Keach as the token Hollywood names. In many ways, the film is a very stereotypical ’70s Italian gangster film, filmed with gauzy flashbacks, double-crosses, conflict between the church and the mob, car chases, shoot-outs and familial drama. Moore, smack-dab in the middle of his residency as James Bond, plays the Sicilian/British lawyer Ulysses, tasked by his mob-boss uncle Salvatore (Ivo Garrani) with finding a missing shipment of heroin (hidden in a large crucifix, no less). Sal’s brother, Francis, is a cardinal and the theft of the crucifix/heroin, which included the messy murder of its guards, has put a black mark on the church. It’s up to Ulysses and his race-car drivin’ buddy Charlie (Keach) to get to the bottom of the mess and they’ll go from San Francisco to Sicily and back to solve the crime. Along the way, they’ll find out the truth about Sal and Francis’ relationship, the best way to send a message via fish and that every friendship is only as strong as its weakest link.

First of all, Street People is an absolute mess. It’s an awful lot of fun, don’t get me wrong…but it’s a complete mess. The narrative tends to jump all over the place, a problem which is only made worse by the frequent flashbacks. The flashbacks, themselves, tend to be so confusing and loopy (at one point, two characters seem to share a flashback in what must be the strangest attempt at economy I’ve ever seen in a conventional film) that they’re more fever dreams than plot elements. Combine this with the inherently thorny nature of the plot (it is, after all, supposed to be a mystery) and Street People often comes across as frustratingly vague. We always get the general sense of what’s going on (Ulysses and Charlie are looking for the drugs) but who they question, why they question them and where they go afterwards often seems arbitrary, as if we only ever get bits and pieces of any one scene. Chalk this up to the fact that the film was, most likely, re-edited when Roger Corman’s AIP company released it in America but, regardless, it doesn’t make for particularly smooth sailing.

As with other films of this era/ilk, much of Street People is decidedly low-rent, consisting of anonymous people pointing guns at either Moore or Keach, lather, rinse, repeat. The one exception to this, however, would have to be the films numerous and consistently impressive car chases. All of the car chases are thrillingly staged and executed, bringing to mind much more capable films like Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1971) but a few of them are particularly great. One scene, in which Ulysses and Charlie must maneuver in and around a group of hostile semi-trucks during a high-speed freeway chase is fantastic and recalls a similarly good scene in one of the Bond films (perhaps even one of the Moore bond films, which would be a pretty neat extra layer). While the rest of Street People is neither noticeably better (or worse) than the average Italian gangster pic of the era, with the exception of Moore and Keach, the car chases are always exemplary and certainly worth a look.

Although the rest of the cast is so generic as to become easily interchangeable (including the mob boss), Moore and Keach do just fine in the their respective roles. Moore brings a slightly hard edge to Ulysses, although he keeps enough of the Bond finesse to make him a pretty cool customer. This is a much different tough guy than Bond, however, and it’s to Moore’s credit that he doesn’t play him as a carbon copy of his more famous day job. Keach is a blast and a half, bouncing around the camera frame like a manic wind-up monkey. His dialogue is some of the most outrageously dated in the entire film (the moment where he tries to buy drugs with a plaintive, “C’mon, mama…don’t you jive me now!” is an instant classic, as is his warning to a close-mouthed informant that he’ll “Spread the word that you’re a turkey deluxe”) and Keach manages to steal any and every scene he’s in. Although he plays Charlie as decidedly subservient to Ulysses (an odd choice, considering how take-charge Keach normally is in films), the two have an easy rapport that marks them as genuine friends and makes their scenes together a breezy joy. It also makes the film’s “twist” conclusion a real head-scratcher but it’s certainly not the only narrative lapse in the film.

Overall, Street People is an easy film to sit through but a slightly more difficult one to completely appreciate. While the story is needlessly convoluted and downright nonsensical, Moore and Keach make a constantly delightful duo and there’s no shortage of action scenes to keep things humming along, as well as some genuinely great car chases to offer a little needed eye-candy. If you’re a fan of ’70s-era Italo-crime films, Roger Moore or Stacy Keach, Street People should definitely scratch your itch.

See it now, fool, before I tell everyone that you’re a turkey deluxe.

4/21/14: Hit the Lights on Your Way Out

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astronomers, astrophilia, benefits of sleep, cinema, circadian rhythm, city living, darkness, documentaries, documentary, Errol Morris, film reviews, films, Ian Cheney, Jack Newton, light pollution, melatonin, Morgan Spurlock, Movies, observatories, Sky Village, social commentary, technology, The City Dark, the night sky, urban vs rural

This modern world of ours provides us with a lot of necessities, along with plenty of unnecessary (but still nice) stuff. Whereas concepts like “wi-fi,” “streaming video” and “mobile devices” are things that many of us take for granted, it wasn’t too long ago (relatively speaking) that these ideas would have been more synonymous with fanciful science fiction than with real-world applications.  For most, however, any notion of looking backwards, to a less technologically advanced time, is more pointless nostalgia than anything else. The thought process always seems to be that any price we pay to advance to the “next level” (whatever that may be) is worth it: whatever we lose on a personal scale will be more than made up by the fact that we can now watch reruns of Cheers, on our phone, while we wait for the bus. There are more arguments, pro and con, than can realistically ever be examined in a forum like this. There is one thing, however, that should be plainly clear to everyone, regardless of which side of the “technology divide” you happen to fall on: our hyper-modernized, super-aware, technologically advanced society has cost all of us some of our humanity. Whether you find this troublesome, however, is a whole other issue. Documentary filmmaker Ian Cheney does and his thought-provoking documentary about light pollution, The City Dark, should make everyone stop and think about the ultimate price that we all pay to light our way in a frighteningly vast universe.

The documentary begins by introducing us to narrator/creator Cheney, a recent transplant from rural Maine to the bright lights of New York City. While growing up in Maine, Cheney was fascinated with the stars and astronomy, even going so far as to build his own telescope. Upon moving to the big city, however, he realized that he could see far fewer stars and, in some cases, he couldn’t see any at all. What, if any, impact does “losing” the night sky have on humans, he wondered: was this a trade-off that we could happily live with or were we giving up a vital part of our humanity? The City Dark, then, is his attempt to answer this question, as well as figure out his own conflicted views on the subject of mankind vs natural order.

Structurally, the doc is broken up into six sections, each of which deals with a different issue/aspect of light pollution: defining and giving examples of light pollution; fleeing over-lit urban areas for darker rural areas; the effects of light pollution on animals/nature; the effects of light pollution on humans; the reasons why humans use light; and possible solutions to this issue. This structure is very clear and well-defined, making it easy to follow the flow of Cheney’s research. There’s also a decent amount of time spent with each issue, making the film feel well-balanced. If nothing else, Cheney is obviously a filmmaker who knows what he’s doing, which is always a good feeling for an audience member.

There’s a good balance between traditional “talking head” interviews with various astronomers and scientists and Cheney’s own commentary. Unlike other indie documentaries about niche subjects like this, The City Dark is the perfect synthesis of more traditional documentaries and more open-ended, philosophical ruminations. There’s enough expert, scientific information for the doc to feel authoritative, yet there’s enough of Cheney for the doc to feel personal. It helps that Cheney has a very easy-going, pleasant personality: he’s the perfect host for something that requires a little personal reflection along with the historical record. This also helps make the film feel even-handed: although we definitely get the idea that Cheney is anti-light pollution, he goes out of his way to explain the factors that brought our world to this point, which are just as natural as the impulses that will need to get us out of it. There are no easy answers but it helps when the host refuses to take a hectoring tone: more documentarians should take note of this.

As someone who’s always had a twin love of bright, neon lights and the dark, starlit night sky, I found The City Dark to be immensely thought-provoking. The film is filled with some absolutely stunning imagery, including some of the most beautiful, chill-inducing shots of the night sky that I’ve ever seen. Couple this with some equally eye-popping views of the various lightscapes that are evident across the entire globe and The City Dark is never anything less than gorgeous to look at. Cheney is a more than capable filmmaker and I can’t help but feel that he’s the next Errol Morris or, at the very least, a more laid-back version of Morgan Spurlock.

In many ways, The City Dark is all about the continual, endless struggle to be human. Small, fragile, adrift in a vast ocean of night, with only the meager candles that we craft to light our way, humanity peers ever outward. While we light the way to make ourselves feel safer, Cheney makes the valid point that we may just be isolating ourselves more, cutting ourselves off from the natural world around us and relegating ourselves to a beautiful prison made of steel, glass and an infinity of brilliant lights.

 

4/20/14: A Mother Knows (Oscar Bait, Part 16)

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2013 Academy Awards, 86th Annual Academy Awards, Academy Award Nominee, Academy Awards, adoption, Barbara Jefford, based on a true story, BBC journalist, Best Actress nominee, Best Adapted Screenplay nominee, Best Original Score nominee, Best Picture nominee, Blue Jasmine, buddy films, Catholic church, character dramas, cinema, drama, film reviews, films, homosexuality, Judi Dench, Mare Winningham, Martin Sixsmith, Movies, multiple award nominee, nuns, Oscar nominee, Oscars, Peter Hermann, Philomena, road trips, Sean Mahon, Stephen Frears, Steve Coogan

In the hustle of bustle of awards season, when it seems that every film is bigger, more important and more prestigious than the next, it can be a refreshing break to sit down with something a little more modest, a bit quieter. The 2013 Oscar season was filled with lots of very big, very vibrant films, including American Hustle, 12 Years a Slave and The Wolf of Wall Street, but one multiple nominee stood out a little: the Steve Coogan/Judi Dench-starrer Philomena. Not only did Philomena tell a much smaller, more personal story than the other nominees, it managed to focus on character in a way that (in my highly biased opinion) was only matched by Nebraska and Dallas Buyer’s Club. It was also a bit of a David vs Goliath story, since everything about the film marked it as the scrappy underdog to the more established powerhouses helmed by Scorcese, Cuaron, McQueen and Payne. Like its subject matter, Philomena is the scrappy little newcomer that can – and does – get its day in the sun.

Ostensibly, Philomena is the true story of a woman looking for the son she gave up for adoption 50 years earlier. The woman, in this case, is Philomena (Judi Dench) and she’s forced to give her son Anthony up for adoption when he’s just an infant. Philomena, you see, has been sent to a nun-run home for wayward girls after her “indiscretion” with a local boy and the nuns make it plainly clear that it’s God’s will that the children be separated from their mothers as quickly as possible. Philomena’s best friend Kathleen (Charlie Murphy) loses her daughter, Mary, when the child is adopted and the nuns decide to make it a two-fer, throwing in young Anthony, as well. Philomena loses her son, without even getting to say goodbye, and spends the next 50 years wondering what became of him.

When Philomena’s grown daughter contacts disgraced former BBC journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) with the story, he initially blows her off. He doesn’t do human interest stories, after all, since he’s a serious journalist. Something about the story ends up resonating with him, however, and he sets off on a journey of discovery with Philomena, starting with the abbey in Ireland where it all began and ending in America, where they finally track down Philomena’s son. Revelations will abound, however, and the hot-headed Martin will gradually lose his patience with the frustrating “culture of silence” surrounding the Catholic church’s adoption practices of that era. In the end, however, this is Philomena’s story and she knows that forgiveness is the glue that really holds the world together. Will she ever find out the truth about her son? Will Martin ever land the big story that will put him back in the public eye? More importantly, will these two strangers be able to make a change in an unfair system?

As mentioned earlier, Philomena is definitely a labor of love: Coogan got the idea for the film after reading the original newspaper article and was involved in nearly every aspect of the film, including the Oscar-nominated screenplay. One of my favorite stories during this last awards season was the one where Coogan got the shocking phone call about his modest little film being nominated for multiple Oscars, including Best Picture. Stories like this, similar to the buzz that surrounded Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, serve as a wonderful tonic to the usual entertainment industry propaganda machine, adding a little human element to everything.

It’s certainly surprising to see Coogan attached to something so heartfelt but he ends up being the real revelation of the film. As portrayed by Coogan, Sixsmith is an incredibly well-rounded character: a complete, churlish asshole, yet filled with righteous indignation and good intentions. He makes a wonderful foil for Dench and their relationship is the real foundation of the film. At its heart, Philomena is a buddy road movie and those always live or die by the believability of the central relationship: by this rubric, Philomena not only lives but thrives. There’s something almost elemental about Coogan snarking his way through the minefield of contemporary society while Dench projects the sweet, naive air of a child. She’s nice to everyone, regardless of how much they spit on her, while he can’t seem to find anything good to say about anybody, including her. In one of the film’s funniest scenes, Martin makes a condescending comment about Philomena’s good nature that ends up saying as much about her as it does about him: “She’s told four people that they’re one in a million…what are the odds of that?”

If Coogan’s performance is a big surprise in the film, Dench’s is pretty much business as usual. Over the course of some 100+ roles and almost 60 years in the business, Dench was become synonymous with impeccable performances and her turn in Philomena is no exception. I do feel that Dench has got a bit comfortable over the last several years, since most of her recent characterizations seem to follow pretty identical arcs (there’s not much difference in personality between Dench’s role here or her performance in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, to be honest) but there’s no denying how effortless she is. Dench is the kind of performer who can energize anything and she invests the film’s various emotional beats with a spunky sense of purpose.

Ultimately, however, Philomena suffers from something that’s distinctly a filmmaking issue: as a whole, it lacks dramatic tension. Despite the trials that Philomena and Martin go through, the stakes never seem to be high enough, lending everything the feel of a slightly bittersweet made-for-TV movie. None of the film’s revelations really affect anything and the one that potentially could, the revelation of Anthony’s lifelong homosexuality, is deflated almost instantly: Philomena always knew that her son was gay, even if no one else did, so this isn’t news to her, even if it is to the audience. Philomena is such a wonderful, understanding person that, ultimately, this particular revelation couldn’t have any affect on her: that’s just not how her mind (or world) works. Likewise, the banter between Philomena and Martin never reaches a critical boiling point, even though Martin frequently acts like a privileged jerk. Like its titular subject, Philomena is such a thoroughly easy-going, good-natured film that it doesn’t seem particularly interested in rocking any boats. After all, the final confrontation is handled not with the tongue-lashing that we know is well-deserved but with the act of forgiveness that might prove impossible for many watching. Like the battered nun in Bad Lieutenant, Philomena forgives her oppressors, allowing her soul the peace it needs but robbing the audience of the easy gratification of retribution. It’s a mature, reasoned way to handle things but it does tend to make for a fairly even, uneventful story arc.

Since I watched Philomena after the Oscar ceremony, I wasn’t able to really consider it as I watched the telecast but the other nominees were definitely front-and-center in my mind as I watched it. How does Philomena compare? In many ways, the film is the epitome of “good but not great.” While Dench’s performance was typically good, I certainly don’t think it was better than Cate Blanchett’s turn in Blue Jasmine. Similarly, while I thoroughly enjoyed the film, it had nowhere near the impact of Dallas Buyer’s Club, 12 Years a Slave or Nebraska. It’s a much smaller film, obviously, much more of a Little Miss Sunshine than an event picture. The script, while quite good, was also overshadowed by Woody Allen’s script for Blue Jasmine, one of his best in years. If anything, I firmly believe that Coogan was robbed of a Best Actor nomination, finding his performance to be much more nuanced and interesting than Christian Bale’s turn in American Hustle. Provided Coogan keeps at the dramatic roles, however, I see no reason why he won’t (someday) be able to take a statue home for his troubles.

In many ways, Philomena is an absolutely lovely film (the scene where Philomena, Martin and Anthony’s boyfriend sit down to watch home movies brought tears to my eyes in the best, most non-exploitative way possible), filled with wonderful performances, some nice cinematography and a fairly unobtrusive score (also Oscar-nominated, for some reason). There are a few too many obtrusive flashbacks for my liking and the aforementioned lack of narrative tension tends to sap much-needed drama from the proceedings but patient audiences will find much to like here. Philomena may not have been the best film of 2013 but it was certainly one of the nicest ones. At the end of the day, can we really ask for more?