Category: Reviews

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

There’s something all those coming of age stories have forgotten over the years. For some, discovering what you love comes with a feeling of regret. How different would I be if I found all these great things sooner? Would I be smarter? Would I be more honest? Would I have put up with so much abuse? Where would my life be?

These are questions we should ask as teenagers, but for some it comes later than others, if at all. “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” shows just how difficult that can be for people so young. But because it celebrates youth, music, love, rebellion and discovery, it’s a film that allows us to see and understand the world a little better. It’s a rare film that can help us grow.

The movie is based off a cult teen novel of the same name, and although it only came out in 1999, the book has for some meant as much to contemporary youth as “The Catcher in the Rye” has for so long. With how defensive today’s kids are about adapting their favorite novels into movies, something with such a passionate following could not have been directed or written by anyone other than the book’s author, Stephen Chbosky.

Thankfully he has made his book into a film, and he’s made a lovely one. Rather than stage it as a collection of anonymous letters like his novel, the film follows many of the punches of a standard coming-of-age drama. It lacks the narrative simplicity of “The Breakfast Club,” the indie charm of “Juno” or the visual splendor of “Rushmore,” but it matches all of those in endearing characters, confident dialogue and timelessness. Continue reading “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”

Bellflower

I’m usually kinder to movies that have flimsy narratives if it can innovate visually. It deserves to be said then that what Evan Glodell and his team have accomplished is truly innovative. By literally building a camera from the ground up, they have created an aesthetic all its own, drawing from music videos, dusty and gritty sci-fi and stylized action montages. Their film “Bellflower” achieves a strikingly apocalyptic look that sadly the screenplay doesn’t earn.

It’s the story of two friends, Woodrow (Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson), who have a dream to build a flamethrower and demon roadster in the event of the apocalypse. They’re inspired by Mad Max, so its no wonder that “Bellflower” looks like a digital reimagining of “The Road Warrior” set in modern day suburbia.

Woodrow meets the tantalizing and free-willed Milly (Jessie Wiseman), who finds an adorable innocence in his clean-cut look and high-pitched whimper of a voice. But after hearing of his plan to build a flamethrower, she encourages his daredevil side, urging him on a spur of the moment trip across the country in his custom car that dispenses whiskey.

When their dream vacation ends, the pair return home, the flamethrower and death mobile are completed, and Milly cheats on Woodrow. This character drama charts the struggle of these immature characters living out a fantasy to deal with reality and adult emotions, and it does so in the gravest, most stylistic of terms. Continue reading “Bellflower”

Looper

“Looper” is a polished action sci-fi about time travel with enough stylish coolness, emotional depth and narrative elegance to be an instant classic.

Most time travel films fall flat because the rules of the sci-fi are so dense that they collapse under the weight of their own paradoxes. Rian Johnson’s (“Brick”) film makes the characters, their story and their psychology the most important parts, allowing the film’s rules to become an integral part of a well-oiled machine.

In the future, when the mob needs to dispose of a body, they use time travel to cover their tracks, sending a victim back in time to be murdered where the body can’t be traced. The hit men responsible for these killings are Loopers, people on a contract with the mob until a set time when that person is sent back in time to be killed by their past selves, thus closing the loop of responsibility.

The youngest Looper in 2046 Kansas is Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and he discovers that a new mob boss in the future is terminating all the Looper contracts. When his future self (Bruce Willis) comes back in time to be killed, he hesitates, and Future Joe escapes, launching him on a mission to kill the mob boss responsible for killing his wife by stopping him before he comes to power.

There are many ways this plot could veer and become something other than the accessible, exciting genre picture it is. Continue reading “Looper”

Sleepwalk with Me

Mike Birbiglia has made a living telling stories.

Failing to be a one-liner comic like Steven Wright, he started telling his life stories live on stage to sympathetic audiences. Later, his therapist told him to put all his troubling stories down on paper. “Put it on paper. Save it for later,” Birbiglia said on one CD, because his bright idea was to publish these stories on a blog called “My Secret Public Journal.” He finally was discovered by Ira Glass and obtained a segment on This American Life excerpting these stories as personal essays in the vein of David Sedaris. He even got a one-man show off-Broadway telling these same stories.

It was only a matter of time before Birbiglia decided to make a movie out of this life story.

The resulting film is “Sleepwalk with Me,” an indie comedy about a struggling comic with a serious sleepwalking problem learning to wake up and live a better life than the pathetic one he’s daydreaming through. It’s a good-hearted movie that transcends the limits of his stand-up because he allows the details of his sleep disorder to serve as a broader narrative of his life.

He starts the film addressing the audience directly as though he were in a Woody Allen comedy or John Cusack in “High Fidelity.” We know from the onset how anecdotal and autobiographical this film will be. His character’s name is Matt Pandamiglio, but that too is a personal joke, reminiscent of all the early performances he had where emcees wouldn’t even try to correctly pronounce his name and make him Scottish.

His girlfriend of eight years, Abby (Lauren Ambrose), loves him and not-so-subtly hints at getting married and having kids, but Matt doesn’t seem ready. He’s turned off by the fact that his parents seem like two oddballs and yet have been together for 40 years. Is this what marriage does to you? What if the only reason he’s getting married is because his girlfriend is the best thing in his life at the moment, not because he has any level of maturity or financial stability to make his marriage all it could be?

Birbiglia asks these big questions with a feather touch. When most movie protagonists talk about how lame their parents and family are, they do so with an air of cynicism, but in “Sleepwalk with Me” everybody is pleasant, if not a little pathetic. He makes this movie about finding your confidence by laughing at and embracing that pathetic side. Continue reading “Sleepwalk with Me”

The Master

Don’t blink. If you do, we have to start from the beginning.

This phrase marks the first time both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix truly communicate with one another in “The Master” and possibly the last time they really get inside each other’s heads.

They’re in each other’s control, both devoting their full attention. We, as an audience, can look away no sooner.

With “The Master,” Paul Thomas Anderson has made yet another film that demands intense focus and patience. But it rewards those opening their eyes with a vividly allegorical film about the lengths of human control, one with tour de force performances, hauntingly pallid colors and towering images of stunning depth and clarity.

We meet Freddie Quell (Phoenix) languishing over his peers at the end of World War II. Sprawled out on his ship’s upper deck, he looks like the giant in “Gulliver’s Travels” surrounded by swarms of shipmates way below hurling stones to wake him. He’s arrived at this point after a night of heavy drinking, enabled by a lethal cocktail of his own fermenting. This swill will get him into trouble later when it poisons an elderly farmer.

The incident sends Freddie running and hiding as a stowaway to the cruise ship of Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), a man who comes to be known to Freddie only as Master. He’s a writer, philosopher, doctor, but above all a man, as he says to Freddie, but more accurately he’s the leader of a growing cult movement called The Cause.

Maybe it’s because he enjoys Freddie’s swill, but Master sees potential, bravery and room for personal growth in Freddie. He takes him into his home, enlists him as a guinea pig for The Cause, performs “processing” on him and believes that through Master’s own guidance, Freddie can be helped.

Master and The Cause are both fictional versions of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, and the accounts of the film show the religion’s initial development in the early ‘50s. And yet neither this comparison nor the actual plot of the film give a great sense of what “The Master” is really about.

More so than a nihilistic condemnation of Scientology, Anderson uses this as a setting and metaphor for themes of sexual repression and the possibility of man. Continue reading “The Master”

The Words

Once upon a time, a man named Brian saw a movie. It was about writing and words. And wouldn’t you know? It was called “The Words.” Brian was very excited, as this was the first new movie of the fall.

But for a movie about words, it was not very well written, Brian thought. It had narrators and stories within stories. It had Dennis Quaid narrating as though he were a mother tucking in her child with a bedtime fairy tale. This was not a movie for smart people, Brian realized, but a bad movie without much to say and a cloying way of saying it.

This story was about Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper). His dream was to be a writer. But he wanted to support his girlfriend Dora (Zoe Saldana), who he loved very much. So they were married. And he wrote.

But Rory couldn’t make it as a writer. He spent years of his life writing his book, but still the rejection letters rolled in. Days passed. The rain fell. Wind rushed through the trees outside. And at long last, Rory Jansen took a day job. But we know Rory and Dora still loved each other, because the camera with a soft blue filter hangs above them as they lie peacefully in bed.

And then, Rory found a book in a suitcase. It was an unpublished manuscript. Maybe it was Ernest Hemingway’s lost first novel, but no. He read it, and he was entranced. Days later, he couldn’t stop thinking about that book. So he typed it up himself.

“He didn’t change a period, a comma or even correct the spelling mistakes. He needed to know what it felt like to touch it, if only for a moment.” When his girlfriend read it and believed it to be his, she asked him to publish it. “Rory Jansen had made his choice.”

He called it, The Window Tears. Yes, The Window Tears. It became the next great American novel. Rory was the toast of the literary world, and his life was good.

And then he met The Old Man. The Old Man (Jeremy Irons) told Rory that it was his novel Rory stole. The Old Man had a story too. It was even more melodramatic than Rory’s. It had love at first sight, a Parisian romance during World War II and even a dead baby. “But the words poured out of him. How could anyone not understand?”

But now we must return to Brian at the start of our story. When he saw “The Words,” he tried not to gag. He thought about writing himself. He would say that Bradley Cooper was a bad actor, and that the movie looked like it had been photographed on Instagram. But try as he might, the words just couldn’t come.

He thought about how the whole movie felt, with the narrator always saying the obvious and reading short, pretty sentences that even a child could understand. It went on and on. So Brian decided to write his own story. And he would use the exact language the movie had used throughout.

And he did. And he lived happily ever after.

1 ½ stars

The Queen of Versailles

The largest home in America, a mansion modeled after the French palace of Versailles that here is located within viewing distance of the Magic Kingdom’s fireworks, is currently languishing away, unfinished, and perhaps never to be, following the housing crisis of 2008.

What’s more, the estate’s owners, David and Jackie Siegel, feel that this level of excess and splendor in their home lives exemplifies the ideal American dream.

All of this really makes you wonder if the American Dream needs reconsidering.

Lauren Greenfield’s documentary “The Queen of Versailles” is a simultaneously critical and sympathetic portrait of how Americans cope (or fail to) with a change in lifestyle for the worse. It chooses the Siegels because they are both the most extreme of examples and yet the most familiar.

That’s why this film is called “The QUEEN of Versailles.” David Siegel himself is a wealthy billionaire and CEO of Westgate Resorts, the largest time-share corporation in America. Jackie is only a trophy wife of sorts and a former Miss America 20 years David’s junior. She could be little more than a prop in another documentary, or a monstrous housewife in a trashy reality show.

But Greenfield must’ve realized that Jackie is the humanizing figure in this family, a woman with an Engineering degree from Boston who chose a life in modeling and pageantry. She’s spoiled and further spoils her eight children as a parent, but she’s very likeable. Jackie is exactly the woman you’d want to give you a tour around the largest home in America.

Greenfield photographs at low angles stretching to eternity to gradually paint these people as American royalty without them knowing it, and then she shows them going to McDonalds just because they want to as a way of bringing the Siegels down to Earth.

Through this we’re able to understand and judge their often filthy lifestyle. With so much space in their current home, there’s an obscene amount of clutter. Carpet stains are everywhere, lazy kids lounge unimpressed with their mountain of toys they didn’t know they had, animals lay dead and starved in their tanks due to neglect, and dog poop even litters the hallways.

“The Queen of Versailles” shines by peering through this muck. The Siegels are the far end of the spectrum, but this somehow feels close to the middle class mentality as well. One friend of Jackie’s loses her home to foreclosure because she shares her friend’s insouciance, and even Jackie’s $5000 donation cannot save her.

Where the film doesn’t succeed as well is in the sympathy department. There’s a difference between feeling guilty at all the lives David has destroyed by being forced to layoff over 6000 Westgate employees, including almost all of their 20 family maids, and feeling cheated by the “lenders” and “bankers” who got them into this mess. Who are these mysteriously evil banking figures if even the 1 percenters refer to them as a blanket third person?

At the end of the day, “The Queen of Versailles” is an interesting film, not a trashy or scathing one, about occasionally delightful people. It makes you think more about your own life than the Siegels, despite all the glitz and glamour.

3 stars

Saving Face

No one can accuse “Saving Face” of being gun-shy.

Daniel Junge and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy have made a virtuous and brave documentary short about women in Pakistan who have their faces scolded with acid by abusive husbands.

It’s a culturally systemic problem that is as commonplace as rape is in America, and this film fearlessly looks these women in the face (or what is left of them) and carries them on a path to justice and cosmetic peace of mind.

These women have lost their beauty and even their identity in these attacks. Bulging lips, sunken eye sockets, blotchy red skin; “Saving Face” doesn’t sugarcoat their appearance because if these women have the bravery to be optimistic, smile, joke, laugh and even speak publicly, in Pakistan of all places, so should we.

The scarier faces are those of the doctor who has to maintain solitude as one of his patients recounts her horror story or the husband who lies while staring directly into the camera, claiming his wife went mad and poured gasoline on herself. The film captures these images with startling poignancy.

“Saving Face” takes a small step in telling the story of these women. Even though it should, it doesn’t fight a crusade for gender equality it cannot yet win. The mental and physical abuse this film exposes us to is enough.

“Saving Face” won last year’s Documentary Short Oscar for its winning, uplifting ending and for having the courage to show its face to the world.

3 ½ stars

Celeste and Jesse Forever

Romance and friendship are two different things. Just ask any of the girls who have rejected me over the years. They would agree that there isn’t much of a romance to root for in “Celeste and Jesse Forever,” least of all when the title characters are as wishy-washy and condescending as this.

Celeste and Jesse’s (Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg) clever charade is that although they’ve been maritally separated for six months, they still hang out together as best friends. They’re the kind of couple that’s so good together that they become insufferable around other people. They should be brother and sister, or they should have one of those couple pet names. Maybe Jeleste.

Jeleste rattle off hipster-y dialogue while they’re together and enjoy condescending and judging about nitpicky social faux-pas like cutting in line at the coffee shop or about talentless tween pop stars while still acting too cool for vegan food.

Their problems as a couple are quite simply that Celeste has a job and Jesse doesn’t. He starts dating and getting his act together, and she implodes very quickly.

But it doesn’t get deeper than that, nor does the film give us real opportunities to understand why they should work as a couple. They have great chemistry, and they can get drunk and have makeout sessions, but no discernible problems or emotions are brought to the surface. It ignores the issue that all their friends’ lives revolve around talking Jeleste’s relationship and that maybe it’s this self-centered, entitled attitude that’s creating problems for the pair of them at home.

Rashida Jones is the type of actress who can be likeable even when acting like she’s better than you, so in writing the part for herself, she helps put Celeste in a good light. But I wish the limelight veered more to the surprisingly deep pop star Riley Banks (Emma Roberts), to Celeste’s colleague and more than a gay friend Scott (Elijah Wood) or to Celeste’s new boyfriend Paul (Chris Messina).

“Celeste and Jesse Forever” is a movie that was nice to get to know, but I think we’d be better off just as friends.

2.5 stars

Lawless

There are enough movies about moonshining and the Prohibition Era as there were crime families getting rich off the swill. John Hillcoat’s “Lawless” is just another one of those burning cellar lights in the Virginia countryside, and it’s hard to see why this particular story is worth telling.

“Lawless” is a dusty, brown-looking film about the three Bondurant brothers in 1931 Virginia. The oldest brother Forrest (Tom Hardy) is a legend ‘round these parts because everyone believes he’s “indestructible.” He and his brothers make an honest living of dishonesty. Legendary gangsters roll in from Chicago with Tommy Guns, and they put up with it as part of their daily routine. Even the appearance of a ruthless federal officer (Guy Pearce) doesn’t seem to phase them, as they get richer, fall in love and live like kings.

It’s more of a character drama about people with different disciplines and convictions for violence than something with a stirring plot, but you wish they had more sense and purpose in life than to just start a blood war.

Hillcoat’s film is a super violent affair that glamorizes the bloodshed without pretense or reason. They slit throats, tar and feather bootleggers, cut off people’s testicles and walk blindly into gunfire, but the characters don’t act out of family values or morality, just a misguided sense of rage and maintaining a way of living. Continue reading “Lawless”