This is a repost of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami’s latest film after I saw it and reviewed it in October at the Chicago Film Festival. It’s in limited release now. 3 stars
Category: Reviews
Searching for Sugar Man
“How do you feel about knowing that you weren’t aware of something that could’ve changed your life?”
This was the question posed to the folk musician Sixto Rodriguez in the fascinating documentary “Searching for Sugar Man.” Worded a certain way, it’s a question usually directed at the guy who skipped out on his big chance or blew it altogether. For Rodriguez, he never even knew.
Rodriguez was a folk rocker based in Detroit in the late ‘60s with a poet’s spirit and Bob Dylan’s voice, but the people who saw him perform thought of him as a homeless drifter. He performed with his back to the audience in smoky bars down sketchy pockets of Detroit, and yet he got discovered and recorded “Cold Fact” and “Coming from Reality” in 1970 and 1971.
Maybe it was his Latin name or maybe it was overproduction in the backing tracks, but Rodriguez got a raw deal. One successful Motown producer who worked with all the greats said he was one of the most memorable artists he worked with, but the album probably sold six copies. Continue reading “Searching for Sugar Man”
Not Fade Away
There have been plenty of coming-of-age stories about kids who started a band and made it big. “Not Fade Away” is the movie about the kids who didn’t, but you would hope that you would at least be rooting for their success.
David Chase, the creator of “The Sopranos,” is making his film debut with this homage to the 1960s, and it’s a stylish, messy and musical look at a decade that shared all those attributes.
The film follows Douglas (John Magaro), a New Jersey Italian who hears The Rolling Stones on TV and decides starting a band is the life for him. He starts as the drummer in his group of friends playing blues covers and soon graduates to lead singer and head songwriter, winning the affections of his high school crush Grace (Bella Heathcote) along the way.
For a guy who admires the boyish, goofball charms of the Beatles and the effortless cool of the Stones, Doug and his band mates are shockingly unlikable. His demeanor is more modern hipster insouciant than hippie free spirit, and it gets in the way of the band’s talent and his romantic chemistry. Continue reading “Not Fade Away”
Zero Dark Thirty
At the end of “The Hurt Locker,” Sergeant William James returned home from his tour of duty and stood in the aisle of a supermarket, overwhelmed and lost. After all he had seen and done, what more did he know to do?
Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal have explored this dilemma yet again in “Zero Dark Thirty,” only now we’re at the center of a cold, revenge fueled manhunt for the most wanted man in the world, Osama bin Laden. Now that we’ve got him, what’s next?
“Zero Dark Thirty” is a stirring procedural drama that examines the more exciting, alleviating, gripping and harrowing moments of our decade long battle with Al Qaeda. And because it feels so thoroughly investigated by Mark Boal and so intensely staged by Bigelow, it is at the center of major controversy in the CIA and US Senate. But there is no nobility here. The film hardly advocates torture. Through depiction, not endorsement, it suggests that our revenge soaked victory may be more hollow than we imagined. Continue reading “Zero Dark Thirty”
On the Road
“On the Road” was well before my time. In fact, the names Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs mean significantly less to this generation of millennials. It’s not a book you necessarily read in high school anymore.
And yet the Beat Generation still holds a lot of importance for today’s young people. Kerouac embodied the simple question of “How are we to live,” and Director Walter Salles answers him with a film about picking up and going, finding ways to live through drugs, jazz, driving and lots of sex while leaving some of the things you love behind.
Both the book and the movie chart the adventures of the Kerouac persona Sal Paradise (Sam Riley), a free-spirited writer with a sense of adventure and daring. He’s motivated by Dean Moriarty (Garret Hedlund) and his girlfriend Marylou (Kristen Stewart) to travel the American open road, living and working on ranches and parking wherever there’s excitement. Dean is the kind of untamed, wild creature who acts on instinct and can survive at it much longer than you can. It’s his wispy, mysterious spirit that keeps the story going. They’re charting their journey as they go, and even the movie doesn’t know where they’re headed.
Sam Riley’s bouncing and flailing and Kristen Stewart’s free-form swaying to the tune “Salt Peanuts” in a New Year’s Eve party scene is vividly captured by a camera that jumps and dances just as freely. It moves aimlessly, but with alacrity and sexual energy. The editing too has a mind of its own, leaping and moving from spot to spot with sporadic attention, just caught up in all the timeless images and energy.
Salles then has created a movie as animalistic as its heroes, beautifully unorthodox and poetic at times and completely bonkers, clumsy and misguided at others. Characters evaporate from the movie, as does the little plot it sustains, but “On the Road” always has at least some direction, a journey for truth and meaning in life and not just being completely lost.
If “On the Road” doesn’t sustain its energy as hard as its characters try, it’s because what could match the rhythmic, stream-of-consciousness prose that made Kerouac’s book so iconic, and so unfilmable?
3 stars
Footnote
A professor seen in a stark, extreme close-up is eloquently screaming at an academic body as they threaten to revoke a prize they’ve given the professor’s father. It’s one of “Footnote’s” most intense moments.
But there’s an underlying joke, a footnote if you will. Director Joseph Cedar has put these people into a shoebox-sized room, one that requires people to stand and juggle chairs to even open the door. It’s hard to not see all this as Earth shattering when the stakes are so low.
The Israeli film “Footnote” is a clever, intellectual comedy with an enormous scale, but one that remains aware of how trivial it all seems.
It tells the story of a father and son academic of Talmudic Studies. The son, Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi), has just been inducted into the Academy of Israeli Sciences while his father, Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba), sits uncomfortably just off stage as he’s been overlooked yet again.
In two breathtakingly studious scenes, we learn how deeply Eliezer is jealous of his son and his accomplishments. We see it in the disturbed expressions on his face and the empty seat beside him during Uriel’s acceptance speech, and we see it again as a security guard both literally and figuratively asks Eliezer who he is and what he lacks.
You see, Eliezer worked all his life studying a version of the Talmud only to have his work made entirely obsolete mere weeks before he was ready to publish his findings. We learn all this in a deliciously exciting and stylized sequence that flutters through Eliezer’s and Uriel’s life story as though it were told on microfiche. We get juicy, encyclopedic details about each characters’ quirks, failures and achievements through animation, pop-up figures and an urgent, Bernard Hermann-esque score. It’s such a visually impressive sequence from a previously stately movie, you wouldn’t think it had it in it.
That’s the overall message behind “Footnote.” Beneath our surface level of understanding of people and things, there are interesting underlying footnotes of life that can provide for some of the most intimate and intense moments of rippling tension.
The whole film boils over into something magnificently exciting when Eliezer is awarded the coveted Israel Prize. He’s been rejected for the past 20 years and is overwhelmed. But the governing body made a severe mistake and meant to award the prize to Uriel.
It gets at the dilemma of trying to respect someone by following in their footsteps and being even better than them. Uriel has a devastating line to his own deadbeat son that reflects his own complicated emotions with his father: “I am a millimeter away from where I stop helping you and just want to see you suffer so I can gloat.”
The latter is the point where Uriel and Eleziel are at. The two are in such close professions and even share scenes, but we rarely see them exchange dialogue. Cedar gets at the underlying apprehension and hatred running between them as he establishes little academic games in which each one tries to prove who is the better researcher by best understanding the other. Rarely are films so in-tuned to the way academic study works.
So much of “Footnote” is wickedly smart and grave while maintaining an aloof sense of humor. It’s sad to see the film devolve into exasperated surrealism in its last 20 minutes. But maybe all academic study eventually gets beyond the realm of normal understanding.
3 ½ stars
This is 40
Do you finally become the person you were always meant to be at the age of 40? Judd Apatow is now 45, and “This is 40,” his fourth film, is him struggling with his mid-life crisis. Apatow is finally showing his colors as a filmmaker, and the result is an unfinished, messy movie.
Maybe that’s life, or more specifically marriage, full of incomplete projects, spontaneous and tumultuous emotions and a life that seems to go on forever. But there are rocky, yet healthy relationships and then there are relationships when it’s really best to just pull the plug.
Something about “This is 40” is missing. Apatow knows how to write a good script, and he can create effortless chemistry between Paul Rudd and Apatow’s wife Leslie Mann because he’s writing so close to the heart. But when the film is another jumble of obscure pop culture minutiae (is “Lost” still a thing?), hipster weirdness (Charlyne Yi?), stream of consciousness vulgarity, nonsensical cameos (Billie Joe Armstrong?) and overwrought drama, all of which were problems in his last film “Funny People,” the act just starts to get old. And if this is film is about anything, it’s that getting old sucks.
Rudd plays Pete, who is turning 40 in a few days, just around the same time as his wife Debbie (Mann). Debbie chooses to lie about her age under the pretense that she doesn’t suddenly want to start shopping at Ann Taylor Loft, just one example of how Apatow’s film likes to throw out “40 stuff.”
Even the vulgarity, not just the pop culture references, is slated at an older audience. Annie Mumolo gets a big laugh talking about how she can no longer feel anything in her vagina, as does Melissa McCarthy during the film and during the credits as she spouts profanity to the school principal in defense of her son, but none of it has the outrageous appeal of an actual set piece that we might’ve seen in something like “Bridesmaids” or even parts of “Knocked Up.”
Apatow even stages these scenes as clearly improvised riffing, constantly cutting away and back for individual punch lines without actually weaving the comedy into the narrative.
So as Pete struggles with a failing record label and Debbie attempts to discover how $12,000 is missing from her clothing store, “This is 40” wallows in the minutiae of white people problems. Having high cholesterol or playing iPad games in the bathroom for too long sometimes earns about as much weight as the revelation of a surprise pregnancy.
Important and interesting characters like Pete’s father (Albert Brooks) or Debbie’s personal trainer (Jason Segel) come and go. Discussions about money, health and romance erupt into enormous, mounting conflicts and then dissipate into inconsequential drama about pop music the next.
Apatow doesn’t capture the feel of a generation or being a certain age as well as something like HBO’s “Girls,” which Apatow produces. It’s full of lovely, funny and charming moments, but is it a movie you’ll want to live with and cherish when you’re Apatow’s age?
2 ½ stars
Rust and Bone
Ali (Matthias Schoenearts) is always OP. OP is short for operational, which in Stephanie’s (Marion Cotillard) terms means, if she’s ever looking for sex, he’s available. But clearly if this relationship is going to survive, Ali needs to be more than just functioning.
“Rust and Bone” is a film about incomplete people. They’re emotionally damaged and physically broken, and they need each other to mend. It’s a lush, powerful French romance recognizing that for as much as we love, we’re not always all there.
It begins by introducing us to Ali and his 5-year-old son Sam (Armand Verdure), both traveling without much money or a job to finally reach Ali’s sister Louise (Celine Sailette). He’s had to resort to theft and train hopping to feed his son, and the abrupt editing provides us with punctuated moments of fatherly care. He soon gets a job as a bouncer and meets Stephanie when she’s being harassed at his club.
Stephanie is a trainer at a SeaWorld in France, working with the killer whales in the stadium shows, but after a horrible accident in a scene so riveting you can hear a pin drop in the audience, both of her legs have to be amputated.
Director Jacques Audiard (“A Prophet”) handles this realization beautifully. It’s a long shot of Stephanie’s lonely hospital room, looking in from a door at a bed that looks as though something is missing from beneath the covers. She pulls back her blanket and her legs have disappeared, which is especially impressive considering the actress, the lovely Marion Cotillard, has legs that go on forever. They’ve been digitally removed, and Cotillard is miraculously convincing as a person hampered by this new disability.
For a while she seems lost in time and beyond help, the editing drifting slowly as she looks on emptily. Months pass and she calls Ali out of the blue to help her around. The two form a mutual bond built on friendship first, then sex, but it’s clear each needs the other more than they let on.
Schoenaerts gives a wonderfully unsentimental performance. Training as a kick boxer and participating in vicious back alley brawls for money, he’s intensely unpredictable. His personality reflects the movie’s tone. He’s harsh, ambiguous and abrasive, but he has a sense of humor, heart and energy. Stephanie goes through a rebirth of sorts when she’s dropped into the water to swim for the first time since she lost her legs, but it’s Ali who helps pull her out, showing the harried fatherly care of a person who doesn’t have any real responsibility to care for this human being, but feels obligated all the same.
“Rust and Bone” is cinematically stunning, often feeling like the visual tone poem “The Deep Blue Sea” tried to be. There’s a beautiful shot of Cotillard touching the side of an aquarium and being met by the nose of a killer whale, a perfectly elegant and symbolic statement about two unlikely beings forming a bond.
But through the use of pop songs and a grizzled, handheld cam in other moments, “Rust and Bone” is more grounded than some of the art house fare you could compare it to. Stephanie is occasionally surly and quick to lose her temper, and Ali is a deadbeat father who sleeps around and takes shady jobs. Both of these people are far from perfect, and although they both are mending physically, Stephanie with prosthetic legs and Ali in the gym, they still have a lot of mental growing to do.
4 stars
Les Miserables
There’s a big difference in seeing an actor’s face 50 feet high on the silver screen than seeing an actor just five inches high on a stage that’s a mile away. There’s definitely something to seeing and hearing that little person live, but there’s a lot of emotion and expression that we only get from the movies.
So part of the thrill of this new adaptation of the classic musical “Les Miserables” is in making the emotions of Jean Valjean and Fantine be as big as possible. Director Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech”) has put them in an appropriately sized film that feels epic but not overstuffed, but did he really have to make their faces so big too?
Simply put, “Les Miz” is frustratingly un-cinematic. It achieves images that the stage never could but stifles the possibilities of what a camera can do and what an epically proportioned musical can and should look like. At every moment it emblazons these characters in intense close-ups and very little breathing room. Try as Hugh Jackman might to parade around the room of a monastery, the camera follows him mercilessly, refusing to break from a centered close-up of Valjean’s ill-fated face as though the camera were attached to a harness around his chest.
Hooper covers his tracks by chopping the movie to bits in the editing room. The average shot length is infuriatingly short, but not in the excessive Baz Luhrmann way either; Hooper simply doesn’t know when to stay put.
He does however realize that there’s true wonder in seeing the whole cast belt out a medley of themes during magnificent pop opera numbers like “One Day More,” and this is especially true when we get the opportunity to see them on stage together. Why then should Hooper separate each individual singer into claustrophobic boxes? Why does he refuse to let multiple characters share the frame at once? Why must it look like we’re watching this whole movie on a stadium Jumbotron?
It gets nauseating and delirious watching something so jarring. The makeup and hairstyles are garish, the lighting is dark and muddy, and the camera captures Parisian alleys and sewers with Dutch angles and a quivering hand. It can be as punishing as watching Fantine (Anne Hathaway) drunkenly stumble around in agony during the “Lovely Lady” number.
You long for the firm hand and intricate medium shots Hooper used to excess in “The King’s Speech” and “The Damned United.” How did this director change so thoroughly between films? Now Hooper’s close-ups are so intensified, they’d be boring to look at if Anne Hathaway weren’t pouring her heart and soul into “I Dreamed a Dream.”
She, amongst the rest of the cast, really are the saving grace of “Les Miz.” Hathaway’s Fantine is really just a minor character in this epic revolution drama, but amongst all the moments each character gets to themselves, hers is by far the most memorable, her face convulsing in agony and her eyes too sad to even care the camera is so close.
Much of these gripes won’t matter much to most audiences. They’ll be swept up in the way I was upon first seeing a touring production of “Les Miserables” in London, invigorated and inspired by the story’s themes of commitment, honor and spirituality. But to those who pay attention to cinematography and editing, least of all in a treasured musical where these things matter most of all, “Les Miz” will feel mighty clumsy.
3 stars
Django Unchained
If “Inglourious Basterds” was really a Spaghetti Western in a World War II setting, then “Django Unchained” is really a Blaxploitation film in Spaghetti Western clothing. This could be frustrating in its own way, but it may be that “Django’s” intentional identity crisis is what makes it seem jumbled, messy, overlong and almost incomplete.
The ironic part is that this is true of every Quentin Tarantino film. He’s crafted an entire genre all his own in which the messy parts make the experience so damn fun. But Tarantino really was working up to the wire on “Django;” reshoots and last minute editing took place up until early December.
Yet to call “Django Unchained” incomplete makes it sound as though there’s something missing. That would be like having a German folk legend without a mountain; of course there’s one. What’s absent is the spark and allure that made “Inglourious Basterds” so infectious and invigorating.
Gone is the tingling suspense in the dialogue that suggested Hans Landa knew more than he was letting on or that ordering a glass of milk was a sign of an epic search years in the making.
Here in “Django,” the characters are more exciting and colorful than the story, and their dialogue is concerned with whether someone will snap at yet another instance of the N-word and ignite a “Wild Bunch” proportioned firefight. The details behind the motivations seem to be just a matter of circumstance.
Take The Brittle Brothers, a mysterious and vicious gang with a big bounty on their heads. Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a man gifted with his guns but more so with his words, wants to capture them badly, but he knows neither their whereabouts nor what they look like. Django (Jamie Foxx) however, does. Schultz goes through the trouble of freeing Django from a pair of slave owners and enlists his help, and the two dismantle the trio of brothers in no time. The brothers’ threat and their reason for being matters little.
The real story then is Django’s quest to reunite with his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). They discover through the uninteresting means of a logbook that she is the property of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the wealthy owner of the Candieland plantation. Candie is an avid lover of Mandingo fighting, in which black people brutally beat each other to death in front of adoring whites, and Django and Schultz’s plan is to impersonate wealthy buyers so that they can purchase Broomhilda out from under them.
Even Broomhilda is no one of consequence to anyone but Django. Broomhilda’s transaction could conceivably be handled civilly, but Schultz craves a good battle of wits, and Candie is a Southern Gentleman who just doesn’t want to be made a fool. Django is really just along for the ride.
That’s the problem with “Django Unchained;” in its current edited state, the plot too seems to be along for the ride. Tarantino squeezes juicy moments from the lot, such as Django’s garish blue outfit, some verbose wordplay by Waltz and a few gunfights scored to gangster rap, but they matter less than in the Westerns and Blaxploitation films they were inspired by.
Consider one of the film’s best scenes in which Candie places a skull of a black man on his dinner table in front of Schultz and Django. He eloquently preaches the pseudo-science of Phrenology to explain why black men are inferior to whites, wielding a hammer in a threat to bash some skulls both figuratively and literally. The moment is electric, but it’s a put on, isn’t it? It’s very convenient that Candie has a skull lying around, and he’s only doing it to be showy.
There’s also the moment where a posse of whites ride in brandishing torches and wearing pillow sheets to lynch Django. Just before their attack, one of several of the film’s spontaneous spectacles, he rewinds back to a hilarious routine in which everyone complains that they can’t see out of their sacks. Wouldn’t you say this scene almost intentionally interrupts the movie’s flow?
By the time Tarantino arrives at his exorbitantly bloody finale, he barrel rolls past it to remind you it’s not a Western but a Blaxploitation film, wedging in a torture scene, a director’s cameo and a new, less interesting villain. Something is definitely jumbled if the climax seems to have passed.
“Django Unchained” is like Candie’s belief in Phrenology. The science seems to all be there, and it’s captivating when you hear it, but there’s definitely something about it that feels wrong.
3 stars