Category: Reviews

Blue is the Warmest Color

For a lesbian romance and art film with controversial sex scenes, “Blue is the Warmest Color” feels very normalized.

 

Beyond “Blue is the Warmest Color’s” length, its country of origin, its intimate aesthetic or its controversial, NC-17 lesbian sex scenes, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme D’Or winning film feels hardly like an art house movie at all. It’s groundbreaking in the way that this love story of two lesbians, a subject so often embroiled in politics, oppression and hardship when seen in the movies, can feel so ordinary.

“Blue is the Warmest Color” is a life story, a story of a relationship; it’s a romance, a coming-of-age teen drama, a tale of a woman’s journey or just about as close to a genre movie as you can get. That Kechiche and his two actresses, Adele Exarchopoulous and Lea Seydoux, get at this story with such honesty is good enough; it doesn’t have to be a “gay” movie.

The film follows the relationship of 17-year-old Adele (Exarchopoulous) and college art student Emma (Seydoux) over several years, exploring their intellectual chemistry, artistic and political forays and every inch of their passionate lovemaking.

The much-buzzed about sex scenes in question are so vivid, so steamy and so clear in depicting their naked bodies that it imbues the whole film with vigorous physical intensity. The first of three such scenes lasts for over seven minutes, forming a complicated web of body parts and arousal that leaves little to the imagination. Short of calling it pornography, the film in reference to these scenes could easily be called “Tangled Up in Blue.”

And yet their story itself is not as complex. Adele is a girl just discovering her sexuality. Her gossipy friends tell her that a hot senior has a crush on her, and when the two talk together on a bus, their conversation feels familiar. He plays guitar, she “likes everything” when it comes to music, they go out and share a few laughs, and when they finally have sex in a scene quite similar to those with Emma, if Adele is missing something, it’s not for a lack of physicality.

What Adele is missing is something intangible, and Kechiche will spend the course of three hours trying to piece together what that is. Some may criticize the film’s length, but then relationships take time. Continue reading “Blue is the Warmest Color”

The Counselor

Ridley Scott’s “The Counselor” is too strange to be sexy, alluring or memorable.

“The Counselor” spoils easily one of the most memorably bizarre scenes in a studio drama this year. In it, Cameron Diaz takes off her panties, clambers onto the hood of Javier Bardem’s Ferrari and proceeds to dry hump the windshield. Bardem refers to the distinct visual he receives from the front passenger seat as “like a catfish.”

Bardem calls it too odd to be sexy, and he’s right, but Director Ridley Scott plays it for laughs because he’s not sure what to do with writer Cormac McCarthy’s scene either.

This is McCarthy’s first original screenplay following multiple film adaptations of his novels including “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road.” He’s written a drug cartel drama in which women, morality, paradoxes and regret take a prominent role while a mysterious, never seen evil pulls the strings in the background.

Scott however shoots “The Counselor” like it’s “American Gangster.” It amounts to a clunky thriller reduced to tedious conversation pieces, a nonsensical plot and unclear motives or forces trying to create suspense. Continue reading “The Counselor”

The Unknown Known

Donald Rumsfeld comes across as a real character in Errol Morris’s “The Unknown Known.”

Errol Morris must have been ecstatic at the opportunity to interview Donald Rumsfeld for his latest film “The Unknown Known.”

The man, despite his politics and his unique perspective on his actions and the history he helped lead this country through, is a one-of-a-kind showman, infectious in front of interviewers and cameras. He discusses national policy of the gravest of circumstances with paradoxical double speak, and he seems to end each turn of phrase with a disarmingly knowing smirk.

And yet Morris must also have been surprised to talk with Rumsfeld simply because in some ways, he’s been at the root of Morris’s work for the last decade. After “The Fog of War” and “Standard Operating Procedure,” Rumsfeld can finally give Morris not the answers he’s looking for but the perspective straight from the horse’s mouth.

In some ways, “The Unknown Known” is Morris repeating the style and the work he did in “The Fog of War,” jumping down the same rabbit hole with a different Secretary of Defense. And yet in another, this is Morris doing what he does best, composing an incisive and tense documentary capable of near damning revelations and understandings of perspectives. Continue reading “The Unknown Known”

Enough Said

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is perfect in “Enough Said.”

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the master of awkward conversations. In nine seasons on “Seinfeld” and beyond, she demonstrated a level of nuance, charm and etiquette in even the most ham-handed, despicable and uncomfortable of moments. She’s done so with a signature guffaw and a smile that looks amicable to her addressee and forced and in agony to everyone else.

“Enough Said” is Louis-Dreyfus’s first real film role in quite some time, and it’s a shame she doesn’t do indie films like Nicole Holofcener’s more often, because she takes everything that has made her an iconic actress and built the most pathos filled role of her career. Given the casual complexity of the screenplay, it’s likely this is a romantic comedy that wouldn’t be possible without her.

Louis-Dreyfus plays Eva, a divorced masseuse about to send her daughter off to college. At a party she meets both Marianne (Catherine Keener), a potential client, and Albert (the late James Gandolfini), a potential boyfriend after the two find they have a little in common.

The rub is that Albert and Marianne were once married, and now each confides in Eva how much they hate the other as she grows to be their true friends.

The first virtue of Holofcener’s screenplay is that it allows this fact to pass by unexplained to the audience and to Eva for quite some time, and we’re allowed to see Eva and Albert develop as a couple with real chemistry before the coincidence drives them apart. Continue reading “Enough Said”

All is Lost

“All is Lost” is a purely cinematic story of a man versus nature in a journey for survival. Robert Redford is masterful.

There’s an especially tumultuous scene in “All is Lost” where Robert Redford is braving a storm on his yacht. The waves toss the boat upside down and Redford is carried along with it, shoved down beneath the ocean surface and drifting aimlessly, free of coherent direction or space. He lunges for the banister as it’s about to rock right-side up, and when he comes out the other side, he shows a momentary sense of uncertainty as he orients himself. “Did that really happen,” Redford seems to say. “Is all of this really happening?”

It’s one surreal moment in this otherwise quietly powerful and grounded film by J.C. Chandor (“Margin Call”). With “All is Lost,” Chandor and Redford together have made an intelligently provocative and tense movie about survival, free of the pretension, the spirituality, the philosophy and most notably the dialogue that detracts from such a story’s purity.

Redford plays a nameless sailor on a one-man yacht 1500 miles off the Sumatran coast. We meet him as he’s jolted awake by water pouring into his cabin. A shipping container has punctured the hull, and now fixing it is the only thing on his mind.

Redford silently responds to this crisis with practical, measured alertness. He dons an athletic, movie star presence but is worn beyond his years. Redford the character seems to inhabit all of Redford the actor and director’s iconography and battle scars through the decades, his face lined with wrinkles and his eyes showing concern but not panic.

At first the accident is little more than a hiccup. Radio, gear and backup equipment is all damaged, and although he can get the hole mended, his faith in his patch is shaken. The man of the elements that he is, everything changes in Redford’s eyes as a storm approaches. Chandor follows Redford up the sail in a massive crane shot and swivels back to reveal the looming terror of the storm. Continue reading “All is Lost”

CIFF Review: The Missing Picture

Rithy Panh’s documentary is a harrowing artistic statement but is without an emotional core.

“The Missing Picture” screened as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened. It does not yet have an American release.

For Rithy Panh, the memories that haunt his mind belong only to him, not to history. The images he sees exists nowhere else, and in order to be rid of them, he needs to create them, throw them to the wall and display them for the world.

In his documentary “The Missing Picture” it is noble that he’s done so. Panh’s film is harrowing and artistic, but the medium in which he has chosen to convey his message is impersonal and cold. “The Missing Picture,” the winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes film festival, has grand ambitions, but it is a dreary slog without an emotional core to grasp.

Panh lived through the Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia in which hundreds were killed in a genocide because of the Communist government’s social ideas. They operated on the ideology that a shared agricultural system complete of rice pickers would eliminate class, corruption and poverty in their utopian society. The reality was famine, drought, a lack of medicine or resources and deaths throughout the region.

But the images that exist from this period are largely propaganda films. The images do not match up with the history, and Panh’s memories are merely figments. What he’s done with his film then is acknowledge that what he remembers is unique, that there is no truth, “there is only cinema,” he says. Continue reading “CIFF Review: The Missing Picture”

CIFF Review: Le Week-End

“Le Week-End” is a brisk and alive comedy that bares some similarity to “Before Midnight.”

“Le Week-End” screened as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened. The movie will be released in America in March 2014.

 Film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote in a tweet that Lindsay Duncan’s character in “Le Week-end” would be the splitting image of “Before Midnight’s” Celine if only she was 15 years older and British. Not only is Roger Michell’s film on the realistic trajectory for where Jesse and Celine might end up two films from where they are now, “Le Week-end” crackles with the intelligence, realism and charm of Richard Linklater’s masterpiece of a trilogy.

And yet unlike “Before Midnight,” Michell’s film dares to make philosophical expressions of love and marriage into something other than talky and dour. It’s a brisk comedy with a spark for life and lunacy, and it hits a perfect note of authenticity between the chemistry of its two leads.

Jim Broadbent and Duncan play Richard and Meg Burroughs, a married couple of 30 years on vacation in Paris for their anniversary. Upon arriving at their dingy shoebox of a hotel, Meg immediately storms out and grabs a taxi to a luxurious Paris institution, doing so with a superficial, yet lovingly sophisticated confidence to always get her way.

Richard tags along like a sheep dog, at first appearing only concerned about money the way all cliché old men do in the movies. But after they’re well settled in and he’s stopped caring, he reveals that he’s been forced into retirement after an off-color comment about one of his students.

It’s just one of many complications in their marriage, one that leads Meg to question whether or not after 30 years she still wants to be with Richard. They bicker over their deadbeat son and why they don’t have sex anymore, but they do so with a sly, witty understanding of one another that shows at least why they belong as friends. Continue reading “CIFF Review: Le Week-End”

CIFF Review: The Motel Life

“The Motel Life” is a bleak melodrama with touching animation sequences that serve as a fantasy.

“The Motel Life” screened as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened.

A young man named Frank is telling a story to his older brother Jerry Lee as he lies in a hospital bed. Graphic novel style animation and pencil sketches illustrate his fantasy. They’re pulpy, even gratuitous fantasies about fighter pilots, Nazis, ravenous polar bears and supermodels, but it’s tender and gives both brothers a moment of escapism. This story represents not the men they were, the men they are or the men they aspire to be, but it gives them a reason to keep telling more stories like it.

“The Motel Life” is their story. It’s an indie melodrama, and a sadly bleak one at that, but it’s a movie that against all odds tries to find a reason for these poor souls with no luck, ambitions or prospects to keep living.

Both Frank and Jerry Lee (Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff) lost their mother when they were just teenagers, and the loss forced them to live on the road with no money. Now as adults, their misfortune hasn’t relented. Jerry Lee has one leg after a train accident, and after a drunken evening he stumbles into his Reno motel room to tell Frank that he’s just run over and killed a kid riding a bike. He’s about to kill himself, but instead shoots himself in his bad leg and sits in a hospital bed just waiting for the cops to find out his dirty secret.

Frank lives vicariously through his brother, telling him stories and finding money to keep them going, but he’s a hopeless alcoholic vomiting blood each morning, and he turned away from the only girl (Dakota Fanning) who ever loved him. Now he spends his days trying to earn money to get Jerry Lee out of the hospital and reunite with his lost girlfriend. Continue reading “CIFF Review: The Motel Life”

CIFF Review: Philomena

“Philomena” is based on a great true story, but it makes a mess of its main characters and its storytelling method.

Philomena

“Philomena” screened as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened.

What makes a great story? Most people think it’s just a good plot; juicy twists and surprises are all it takes. “Philomena” and the real life story behind Martin Sixsmith’s book is filled with teen pregnancies, evil nuns, gay Republicans, death, reunion, comedy and religion; it’s got it all.

But Stephen Frears’s film muddles the characters, the ideas and the storytelling style that would help make it great. It’s a mess of tones and loosely fleshed out philosophies on faith and forgiveness that keeps “Philomena” from working as either a detective thriller or as a journalistic investigation.

Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) was a BBC News broadcaster forced out of a job after a scandalous quote about burying the news was wrongly attributed to him. Looking for work, he decides to take a human interest piece centered on the elderly Philomena Lee (Judi Dench).

Lee spent her teenage years living in a convent, and after accidentally becoming impregnated, the nuns made her atone for her sins by giving away her son to an American family when he was just a toddler, forbidding her to search for her son or reveal she even had one.

Sixsmith isn’t so much moved by her story or by Lee as he is intrigued that it’ll make for juicy copy. He takes Lee to Washington D.C. to search for her son, only to dig up a conspiracy surrounding how little they can discover. Continue reading “CIFF Review: Philomena”

CIFF Review: My Sweet Pepper Land

“My Sweet Pepper Land” is a Middle Easter film that borrows from Western influence.

“My Sweet Pepper Land” screened as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival where it won the Golden Hugo for Best Film. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened.

Most of the Middle Eastern films to make their way overseas are inherently tied to their heritage and their cultural landscape. But that doesn’t mean some of their films ignore American influence. “My Sweet Pepper Land” may be about a border dispute town in a country trying to rebuild, but it’s a Western at heart, complete with a sheriff, bad guys, a standoff and shootout. It’s a surprising combination and an unexpectedly good film.

Hiner Saleem’s film is set in Kurdistan shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It opens in an awkwardly grim and darkly comedic opening in which this newly democratic country is conducting their first hanging. It’s an embarrassing display in which the man is left standing on a leftover ballot box from their election, the rope stretches to where he can tiptoe before breaking altogether, and an employee is brought in to tug in an attempt strangle him faster.

The scene has little to do with the main plot, but it sets the stage for how “My Sweet Pepper Land” plays; it’s a lightly politically charged film with rough edges and a bit of deadpan comedy. It’s a combination that doesn’t always work, at the expense of deeper nuance for both the characters and the turbulent conflict. Continue reading “CIFF Review: My Sweet Pepper Land”