I Am Love

I really wanted to love this film. I bought tickets to the preview at the NFT with a discussion afterwards with Tilda Swinton and the director Luca Guadagnino. From what I had read, and from the film stills, it had all the promise of a Visconti epic coupled with the more Protestant sensibility of a Douglas Sirk melodrama. Precisely my fantasy of the perfect film (add Bunuel to this formula and you've got Almodovar?). The first half hour of the movie keeps the promise--all the exquisite details of the daily life of a wealthy Milanese industrialist's lavish lifestyle (Tilda Swinton plays his Russian wife) are lushly recreated. Apparently members of the Visconti family helped the set designers get everything just right and taught the actors which fork to hold and to ladle away--a certain Russian soup having a starring role in the film. But when for no discernible reason, Tilda falls for her son's friend, a budding chef, the film soon dissolves into an unappetizing gastro-drama, and the messy storytelling that follows is unconscionable. Non-enlightenment from post-film Q&A: Why is the wife Russian? In the original script, she was an American from the South but that presented too many logistical problems. What do all the flashbacks to her past add up to? Why do we never see any spark between her character and her young lover? Why does her daughter suddenly become a lesbian, cut off her hair, and move to London? Swinton explained that the choice to make the daughter gay was random, the hair-cutting a symbol of freedom--Tilda's lover will cut off her hair as foreplay--and only meant to show love's possibilities. All of these myriad script problems are set against a "throbbing"--Stephen Holden's term and he loved the film--musical score by John Adams, and framed within some fancy Hitchcockian camera angles, but the problems abide. The rest of the film was some kind of tasteless short-order job continuously using as ingredients pinches from the great classic Italian film directors: Visconti, Antonioni, Rossellini, Pasolini. And then came the most hilarious/excruciating sex scene in which a very graphic intermingling of bodies in several different sex acts is filmed in tandem with close ups of mating insects. This goes on for an inordinate amount of time just in case we don't immediately get the metaphor. But most nauseating of all is the banal moral message of the film: Carnal Sin, especially on the part of a woman, will inevitably lead to Punishment and Tragedy. Now, according to what was said in the conversation after the film, Tilda and Luca saw theirs as a film depicting the liberation of an oppressed housewife rather than a Catholic Church-inspired morality tale locating the source of all evil once again in female sexuality, but I'm afraid given the absurd event at the end of the film, there is really no other way to spin it. The daughter has become a lesbian, the mother has had extramarital sex, the family must suffer armageddon. I don't know why exactly but I expected way more of Tilda Swinton as a filmmaker. This project was almost ten years in the making suggesting an admirable perserverance. I'm not sure how it went so wrong, and from the reviews I am one of the few for whom it did so there's that. And I wonder at Swinton's urge to pull a Meryl Streep and learn Italian and Russian for the film. Therein, perhaps, lies the trouble. In the film, and in the discussion afterwards, the director and the producer/leading actor were inexplicably earnest, any underlying threads of irony, humor, playfulness strangely absent as they were from the film--something even the German Sirk knew how to make ample use of.

Invictus

Clint Eastwood knows how to make a solid film and this one is solid and inspiring and was thoroughly enjoyed by my rugby-playing family as well as my non-rugby playing self. I have always believed in sport as metaphor, and if not always a unifier or entirely beneficial to one's mental and physical health, often so. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 which effectively required equal funding for girls and boys sports in schools is probably the single piece of legislation since the 19th Amendment in 1920 to significantly change the lives of girls and women in the United States. All this to say that the premise of Invictus--Nelson Mandela as new President of South Africa does all he can to make sure the Springboks beat New Zealand's All Blacks in the 1995 World Cup in order to bring about something of a truce between South Africa's apartheid-riddled white and black citizens--is really great, and gave me a reason to mention Title IX, something I love to do any chance I get, and especially since women in this film are not exactly irrelevant but negligible. Was this a great film? No, but watchable and worthy. And by comparison it made District 9, also set in Johannesburg, look like a work of sheer genius (totally different genre but I have never been shy of criss-crossing genres--I don't even believe in genres actually). I now need to mention the excellent book this movie is based on: John Carlin's "Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Changed a Nation." Full disclosure: the author is represented by my neighbor and soulmate Anne Edelstein. (You get old enough and everything is connected.) So Clint pulled another decent enough effort out of his infinite bag of tricks (he makes Tim Geitner look positively lazy) and gives good message to boot. While watching the movie I, of course, barely focused on the rugby matches--which my boys tell me, and which I could never have told you since I don't even go to watch their matches, were well staged, but obviously staged. And I also couldn't tell you if Matt Damon's accent was any good, but it sounded good to me and he was all around convincing as a white South African professional rugby player--as was Morgan Freeman as Mandela. Instead, I focused on the film's title which is the title of a poem we learn Mandela recited to himself during his many years in prison in order to keep himself alive and which he then writes down for Matt Damon, the Springboks team captain, for inspiration before the fateful match. But I kept wanting to know who wrote the poem. Was it Stevenson, Tennyson, Browning? I never found out during the film since his name is never mentioned because he was no one famous. In fact, he was a Victorian poet called William Ernest Henley who went to his grave, like so many, believing he had failed in his artistic efforts. I assume the story of Mandela and the poem is true, but even if it isn't, I salute William Henley.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

Up in the Air

I really wish I had seen this on a plane. And not simply for the obvious thematic reasons. I am so much more forgiving of movies I see while on a plane. I'm so much more forgiving of everything--myself, my family, the food--while I'm on a plane. I think I might have even liked Juno and Thank You For Smoking a little better if I'd seen them on a plane. I was, in fact, avoiding seeing Up in the Air until I was on a plane, but then it was a Friday night and the kids were watching tv and the movie was playing as part of a Clooney double-feature with Good Night, and Good Luck (had already seen that one and loved it, and love George--he's my idea of a movie star, a combo of Clark Gable and Cary Grant, something his aunt Rosemary no doubt taught him) at our local independent cultural center which I like to support and, well, off I went. The film did begin magnificently. The opening credits were fantastic. The initial patter between George and Vera (a revelation!) was (almost) worthy of any '40s fast-talking-dame romcom. Anna Kendrick as the eager, fresh-faced professional without a clue, so spot on. This film was 100% perfectly cast and a perfect example of how casting is of dire importance. Without this very particular cast, the film should have gone straight to video. (Full disclosure: the fact that I have been to Sicily and shoe shopping with Mindy Marin, the casting director, has nothing to do with this opinion.) And then pretty soon it all began to head down hill, the amusing details of airmile aspirations and trenchant soliloquies by the laid-off keeping things aloft, but the impending nosedive was palpable. By the sister's wedding, the tour around the high school, the cold-feet pep talk, the plane, the movie, had crashed. (On second thought, maybe it's better I didn't see this on a plane.) The script was smouldering in Hallmark schlock, the edgy social commentary had morphed into a propaganda tool for the status quo, blandly repeating the Walmart-coated sentiments of love and commitment and pursuing your dreams--while the Corporatation makes off with the suckers', ahem, employees, hard earned loot. It made me want to puke. Why is it that someone as obviously talented as Jason Reitman cynically decides to make a career out of choosing charged "social issues"--smoking, teen pregnancy, unemployment--and pretends to have something to say about them but really is just using them to sell his films? For me, it's like throwing a kid with a terminal illness into a film simply in order to make your audience cry. Devoid of integrity, or worse. For the record, the book was better than the movie, and I spotted the author Walter Kirn, another acquaintance (such friends in high places!), in two scenes--looking a little bemused by the whole thing.

Avatar

I wasn't going to see this film. The trailer looked terrible, I hated Titanic, I was disgusted by the disgusting amount of money that was proudly being swirled about its creation and promotion. I was told again and again by friends and reviewers: "terrible story but the special effects are great!" and, finally, my best film buddy said convincingly, "we're not going for the content, we're going for the form." So, okay, I didn't entirely hate it while I was watching it. I kept thinking as the glowing jelly-fish things floated across the screen: What if Cameron had the genius of Victor Fleming and had given us the technologically innovative film masterpiece for our times? A short-lived fantasy. Almost any film by Hayao Miyazaki, and certainly Princess Mononoke, to which this film is clearly indebted, is far superior to this piece of, well yes, trash. I won't go much into the 3D thing because it makes me sick (I suffer from every form of vertigo known to humankind and then some), but somehow even with the glasses over my own graduated-lenses (I'm nearly blind), the effect was for the most part pleasantly surprising, more like snorkeling than freefalling. The script was indeed terrible and there was not one good performance--though it was interesting to watch Giovanni Ribisi and Sigourney Weaver giving self-consciously B-performances in an effort to salvage the idiocy of their task. Actually, the film itself, which I saw now over a week ago, I have mostly forgotten--and probably was in the process of mostly forgetting while watching. As is my wont, I paid special attention to the female gestalt and Cameron aquits himself better on that front than a lot of contemporary directors, but ultimately only insofar as it serves his PC agenda i.e. PC sells because it actually promotes the opposite of its MESSAGE (more on this anon). On the other hand, Hurt Locker, made by Cameron's ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow, (a far better film but will lose all the awards to Cameron, a fact that is explained by the MESSAGE of Avatar--but more anon) chooses to leave women out of her film, a viable response by the director to the perceived role of women in our society. I'm kind of on the fence about art as corrective. I think finally it's better for women that Kathryn Bigelow is making a film at all than that James Cameron is making a film that has an apparantly kick-ass female protagonist--who in any case is, let's face it, second fiddle to the male lead (can't remember either the character or the actor's name) who saves the day. So here's what I mean by PC sells and how Cameron has exploited the concept: the profound problem with films like this one which is ostensibly about good vs. evil, where the "good" values of respect for nature and your fellow creature are threatened and then restored, where the "victims" triumph (and here I'm paraphrasing my hero Muriel Spark), is that what this kind of "art" offers is the worst, most pernicious kind of surrogate absolution. We rise from our viewing chastened, but all the more determined ourselves to be an oppressor rather than a victim. Films like these actively encourage "the cult of the victim" which then necessitates an obliging cult of twenty equivalent victimizers. Avatar, then, is in some ways a criminal act, a criminally bad script that ultimately promotes criminal behavior in the guise of empathy for the downtrodden. It's today's equivalent to the very popular medieval church practice of selling indulgences to forgive our sins and encouraging us to go out and sin again. Exquisite hypocrisy that ensures Cameron and the like will fry in the sixth ditch of the eighth circle of Dante's hell--the only one, by the way, that I believe in. In the end, my film buddy, who in general is far more forgiving a critic than I, found the film even more insufferable than I did, and my two boys who were initially indifferent to seeing the film, felt soundly entertained, but remained indifferent. So much for form without content.
For a far better, far more comprehensive, informed, and entertaining review of Avatar check out Steven Santos' review: http://thefinecut.blogspot.com/2010/01/i-dont-see-you-james-camerons-avatar.html

Nine

Everyone told me not to go see this but the stars, so to speak, aligned and I went. After all, Italian cinema is my thing--so it seemed right that I should witness what a mostly American remake of one of the greatest films of all time might offer. While I sat watching the film in the splendiferous Ziegfeld cinema on 54th Street in Manhattan, (this did help matters slightly), at any given moment I couldn't decide if I should laugh or cry or leave. This film was so bad it almost became good by the sheer force of how perfectly bad it was. But ultimately it was just an excercise in butchery. In a nutshell, the film is a remake of a broadway musical (luckily I missed this) remake of Fellini's "8 1/2" about a movie director's creative crisis while trying to make his ninth film. Now the hubris and ambition of such a cockamamie idea is impressive, but how is it possible to make a movie about Italians, and about the heyday of Italian filmmaking, and do it without a modicum of irony and with a smothering of earnestness? What were they thinking? The levels of irony in Italian culture and the Italian national character are so deep, chronic and labyrinthine that perhaps we'd do better just to leave that aspect out? Let's not go there? And casting Daniel Day Lewis in the role of Marcello Mastroianni is tantamount to casting casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as Casanova, Jim Carey as Einstein. Daniel Day Lewis may be a Great Actor but self-doubt is just not in his repertoire and nor is the boyish charm of a rogue women adore to indulge. And just about everything else was wrong: the script, the set, the direction, the editing, the costumes, the musical numbers (even Fergie was a travesty! And I love her!). Nevertheless, it was diverting to watch so much extraordinary female talent and beauty make what it could out of such dreadful material. And each diva, though painful to watch, acquitted herself well, with Marion Cotillard (playing Giulietta Masina) taking the lead since her role was in many ways the easiest (wronged but stoic wife--who doesn't sympathize with that?). Oh and Judy Dench kept trying to save the day until she was utterly thwarted by her number about the Folies Bergere (and we know just how much the Italians love the French so if anyone had any questions as to the appropriateness of this song choice stop asking them now.) Other more pertinent questions I kept asking myself: Whose face was tighter Sophia Loren's or Nicole Kidman's? Did Penelope Cruz actually sing? (I think not.) How many unmemorable songs can fit into one musical? Could it be that Kate Hudson actually outshone all that Diva power? Wonders never cease. Need I mention that the film was blatently sexist and racist? Oh, I forgot, we're in a post-caring-about-those-things society.

The White Ribbon

This film by one of international cinema's most interesting filmmakers Michael Haneke, (Hidden, Code Unknown), is above all else absolutely stunning to look at. It takes place in a rural German village just before World War I and fulfills all my (facile but workable) beliefs about the creepy, evil nature of small town life, as well as confirms my philosophy that nothing ever changes, you reap what you sew, and truth is a matter of perspective. Unfortunately, his film (intentionally?) also fed into to my pre-conceived ideas about Germany and Germans, (even though I know this story could have taken place in any small village anywhere in the world), which I wish had been challenged not upheld. Luckily, Haneke's filmmaking is so delicate that the potentially worn-out ideas which permeate his film do not weary the experience but essentially become the movie. Filmed in an utterly gorgeous pellucid monochrome (got that from the BFI's film notes, who in turn got it from Peter Bradshaw's review in The Guardian), the film contains a shot that lasts for maybe three minutes that is an artwork unto itself: a peasant woman dies when she falls through the rotted floor of one of the Baron's farm buildings during the harvest. Her body is brought back to her humble dwelling and laid on her wooden bed which occupies most of a small room. The shot, which occupied perhaps 3 or 4 minutes of the film is made with a steady camera positioned just outside the door to the bedroom. All we can see is the wall on the far side of the room which is a mural of faded and chipped paint, and the lower quarter of the bed with the dead woman's feet which are being washed by another peasant woman. The husband abruptly comes into the frame, obviously seeing his dead wife for the first time, brusquely tells the foot-washing woman to get out, then stares for some time off-screen in the direction of his wife's face. If for nothing else, the film should be seen for this bit of footage alone which, in turn, should be put on a loop, framed, and hung in a museum. It is a trandscendent moment of superior filmmaking where the form reveals itself as capable of the greatest art.
There is a lot to say about this film but I suppose the issue I had with it is really my own--surpise, surprise. Inevitably a film made about creepy, evil German children and their even more creepy, evil elders set pre World War I will link ahead to the Nazis, Nazi youth, the Holocaust. I was not happy about this link--whether Haneke intended it or not--because it is entirely too facile an idea. If he's trying to present some sort of archeology of Nazism then his film, for me fails, on the conceptual level. Evil, perversion, the sins of the fathers (because here it is the men who are predominantly evil, the women complicit only by their passivity which, despite my positive female prejudices, hardly rings true) manifesting themselves even more hideously in the sons and daughters are things not unique to Germany. In the film, Haneke also sets up an opposition between the oppressive German and the more romantic, fun-loving Italian, a spurious and again, facile juxtaposition, (again upholding instead of challenging our preconceived notions of national identity) especially if you remember that Italy's relationship to fascism is long and enduring. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that the film felt very masochistic to me, and not in a good truthful way but more as a defense against truth--which is indeed Haneke's point, since the film is told in retrospect from the point of view of the school teacher. The how and why of the Holocaust will eternally evade us, but this film like so much art made about the subject, continues to evade the evasion, even perhaps in its attempt not to do so. Nevertheless, this is certainly one of the best films of the year.

Glorious 39

Romola, Romola, Romola! (Garai) You must get yourself a good film, something to launch you into that international stardom you deserve! This vehicle just isn't going to get you there. You are the best thing about this dreadful doesn't-know-what-it-wants-to-be, entirely-derivative-in-a-bad-way (Hitchcock, Polanski, Merchant & Ivory--what a cocktail!) piece of selloutuloid. Besides you, your clothes are the next most watchable thing about the movie but certainly not anywhere near on a par with, say, those in Broken Embraces or Bright Star. Bill Nighy and David Tennant exhibit the pitiful acting they are capable of but I blame the writer/director Stephen Poliakoff who should stick to tv. (I am not dissing tv. I actually think the best writing is happening for tv in this moment in time. His stuff for tv just works better.) A cameo by Julie Christie threw me for a bit as it took me a while to recognize her (still beautiful but this ageing thing is just too weird and awful) and her perfomance was as good as it possibly could be.
I saw this at the BFI (British Film Institute) with a question and answer session afterwards which couldn't save the evening but made it a little less of a total loss. Romola was articulate and adorable and falsely humble in that wonderfully British way. Poliakoff was terribly inarticulate going on and on about how the UK was a hair's breadth away from being a Nazi state in 1939 due to a strong push by the aristocracy towards appeasement (an excellent point/idea/subject here tragically thrown away to bad art), and Bill Nighy was the sophisticated ham we expect him to be.