tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80058672258660100142024-03-20T00:49:45.160-07:00PicturelandThe Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.comBlogger176125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-39306649060754237772019-09-30T11:17:00.003-07:002019-09-30T11:18:49.622-07:00Wild Rose <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.3857182.1554989524!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/box_620_330/image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="330" data-original-width="620" height="170" src="https://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.3857182.1554989524!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/box_620_330/image.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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"Three chords and the truth" reads the tattoo on the right forearm of Rose-Lynn Harlan. That fundamental recipe was coined by another Harlan, American songwriter Harlan Howard providing his abiding definition of country music in the 1950's. This is the sort of thing Rose Harlan would know, country music historian and aspirant that she is.<br />
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Unlike many a music enthusiast from the United Kingdom, Rose has a deeper knowledge of and feeling for American roots music than most Americans. One of the strengths of <i>Wild Rose</i> is that we are dealing in a fairly genuine country music here (not "Country & Western;" Rose bristles whenever anyone attaches that common old term to her singing), as opposed to the sort of bathetic sludge that tends to clog "country" radio these days in America. <i> Wild Rose </i>is like a deeply felt old country song, a bit careworn and certainly predictable. But thanks to Jessie Buckley, playing Rose with a bone-deep consistency, the film is as transporting as a reliable, familiar tune. </div>
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Yes, we all probably know where this is going before we settle into our theater seats. We first find Rose gathering her possessions - most notably some CD's and a wall map of Nashville, Tennessee - into a clear plastic bag as she prepares to leave a Stirling prison, after a one-year sentence for delivering heroin. There's a bit of fist pumping and well wishing from a couple of Rose's fellow inmates as she leaves her confinement, burdened as she is with an ankle bracelet. The young woman directs her considerable energy into freedom and towards her Mecca of Music City. As it turns out, the fairly predictable destination of <i>Wild Rose</i>, the "where," is a place of emotion and not geography. Where Rose Harlan physically comes to rest, much as the emphatic woman can ever rest, and the circuitous route to get there helps the film build a very difficult to resist payoff. </div>
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<a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSty2pD-4542ZoYbPbpwART_x8mIYN57GiP2EIHJIbpaeFP3G4Hsw" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="175" data-original-width="289" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSty2pD-4542ZoYbPbpwART_x8mIYN57GiP2EIHJIbpaeFP3G4Hsw" /></a>If the wool-thick Glaswegian accents aren't enough of an indication, it's clear that <i>Wild Rose</i> isn't a product of the American mainstream by how long the film allows its heroine to be unlikable. Not unsympathetic, but actually unlikable.<br />
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Predictable as the redemption may be, Rose Harlan comes out prison a single-minded and self-involved young woman. Not exactly music, country or otherwise, to the ears of her mother and two young children. Rose returns to Glasgow, enjoys a quick shag with a boyfriend in a public park and then walks her white cowboy boots to the public housing estate where her mother has been taking care of the kids during her confinement. The long-suffering mother has very little patience remaining for her daughter and her fanciful country music dreams. For their part, Rose's children are predictably troubled by her absence and return, the wee Wynonna (Daisy Littlefield) almost silent, the younger Lyle (Adam Mitchell) sometimes loudly acting out. </div>
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Burrowing deeply into a Scottish burr and playing the long put upon mother is none other than Julie Walters. If you've been watching Ms. Walters since her film debut in <i>Educating Rita,</i> lo those several decades ago (1983), you're quite aware of the authority and feeling she brings to these roles of English (or Scottish) working class women, rock solid, but often yearning for more than their circumscribed worlds allow. Such has been the case from her debut opposite Michael Caine, to the ballet teacher of <i>Billy Elliott</i> (2000), to <i>Wild Rose</i>, as well as several other roles along the way. Here Walters is strong and emotionally appealing as ever, as much a presiding spirit as a member of the film's ensemble. </div>
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<a href="https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1200x675/p076b9zb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="180" src="https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1200x675/p076b9zb.jpg" width="320" /></a>As her ankle bracelet won't allow night work and her country music club replaced her while she was in prison (at which news we get another blast of just how charmless can our heroine be when thwarted), Rose is forced to get a day job. Swept by the fairy dust of feel-good movie scripts, Rose lands at the posh suburban home of Susannah. Typical of Rose's thoroughly unchastened attitude post-release, she responds to this good fortune by slightly running amok in the mansion the first time Susannah leaves her alone, kicking back on one of the beds and guzzling from several bottles of pricey hooch.<br />
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Rose doesn't get fired for her unique approach to housekeeping and liberties with the liquor cabinet. Instead, Susannah and both of her children are quite taken with the brash newcomer to their lives. Just this side of fairy godmother perfection is this Susannah, thorougly admiring of her housekeeper's singing ability and encouraging of Rose's dreams. Susannah convinces Rose to record a song online and is well enough connected to make sure that BBC2 radio legend Bob Harris (one of several cameos in the film) hears it. "Whispering Bob" is also impressed with Rose and an invitation to London is proffered.<br />
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<a href="https://www.timeoutdoha.com/sites/default/files/tod/styles/full_img_sml/public/images/2019/04/24/Wild-Rose_2.jpg?itok=2Jtstw7C" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://www.timeoutdoha.com/sites/default/files/tod/styles/full_img_sml/public/images/2019/04/24/Wild-Rose_2.jpg?itok=2Jtstw7C" width="320" /></a>There are occasionally reminders that Susannah is of this Earth, as when we see her sitting on the steps outside her mansion smoking a joint. This near-perfect presence in Rose's life, appearing at just the right time is one of <i>Wild Rose's </i>greater stretches. At the same time, this does allow one to spend some time in the company of the fairly luminous Sophie Okonedo. So, there's that.<br />
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To it's credit, <i>Wild Rose </i>doesn't quite offer instant clarity and maturity on the part of the young woman and mother anymore than her journey to dream fulfillment is a straight line. Much as she seems to grow a bit into her role as a mother, Rose still leaves a hospitalized son behind to attend a birthday concert arranged by Susannah (for her 50th), an occasion that's to double as a kind of crowd-sourcing fundraiser for Rose.<br />
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The redemption comes, as it must, but with a couple of not entirely predictable bends in that dusty old road. These include the manner in which Rose finally gets to Nashville and how things transpire while she's there among the throngs trying to break into the country music business. Typical of <i>Wild Rose, </i>the trip to Music City doesn't go in either of the typical directions. At the same time, there's a rather calculated moment of emotional payoff that's pretty difficult to resist. Rose breaks away from a tour group at the Ryman Auditorium (the home of the Grand Ole Opry from 1943 - 1974) and steps onto the the largely vacant stage to sing Wynonna Judd's "When I Reach The Place I'm Going," a agreeable fiddler offering subtle accompaniment.<br />
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<a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT9_v6DqzOdAZC3KVpb57lk1UC-X_UxnmPPHh6Cg1UnYLGVG7Ndow" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="166" data-original-width="304" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT9_v6DqzOdAZC3KVpb57lk1UC-X_UxnmPPHh6Cg1UnYLGVG7Ndow" /></a><br />
As with Rose's early recording before Sophie and her children that would eventually get her that appointment with Bob Harris (another Wynonna Judd gem, "Peace In This House"), we see the main reason that <i>Wild Rose </i>delivers - it's scrappy, very talented star, Jessie Buckley. Both of those vocal performances echo the greater performance of Ms. Buckley throughout the film. There's ample power and brass, but also a gentleness and grace of both interpretation and expression that makes the whole soar. So she does, leading us gently into "When I Reach the Place I'm Going" before her voice fills the empty Ryman, a lovely rear perspective showing the building's stained glass (the Ryman was first built as a tabernacle) glowing in the distance.<br />
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<i>Wild Rose</i> is a film with both its heart and soundtrack in the right place. You might well know where it's going before it begins, but the rendering is so good you're likely not to care. Julie Walters and the rest of the able cast are like a sure backing band for the lead performance of Jessie Buckley. Her Rose is such a lived-in performance that one is carried right along to its very satisfying coda. Like any indelible tune that rises from the blood and bone of lived experience.<br />
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<br />The Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-271963488093038812019-04-11T17:49:00.000-07:002019-04-12T08:34:38.599-07:00Us<div style="text-align: center;">
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We have seen the red-jumpsuit-wearing, scissors wielding, disturbingly feral enemy and they are...us? So it does appear in the second film from the enormously successful Jordan Peele. Mr. Peele has given us another horror film of sorts, one in which the doppelgangers, the ones in the jumpsuits, are none to happy. And who can blame them, really? </div>
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For starters, this apparently large population of doppelgangers has been waiting. A long time. A pre-title sequence goes to some pains to let us know, both explicitly and with tokens of Reagan Administration America, that it's 1986. Like Josh Baskin in <i>Big</i>, little Adelaide Thomas (Madison Curry), wanders toward a mysterious, set apart attraction at a boardwalk carnival and much chaos ensues several decades on.</div>
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Adelaide enters a kind of funhouse called "Find Yourself." There's something of a Native American theme to this attraction, and we hear a Native American voice speaking as the little girl wanders into the building, before confronting her doppelganger amid a hall of mirrors. Is the Native American motif significant in a story that's supposed to be all about duality, aggrieved people tethered to their more fortunate brethren? Perhaps. But like so many elements in <i>Us</i>, it's just another signpost of significance leading us nowhere. </div>
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Time, like so many pesky elements of storytelling, is handled in a matter both fast and loose by Mr. Peele. We are indeed led to believe that the pissed off doppelgangers have been plotting their revenge, not to mention Hands Across America II since 1986. But what of this population of doppelgangers? Are they all related to people who unwittingly wandered into "Find Yourself" or perhaps similar funhouses? Might some of this population have been waiting longer? And how about the golden shears and the red jumpsuits on which they apparently got a volume discount? </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://images.complex.com/complex/images/c_limit,w_680/fl_lossy,pg_1,q_auto/tarrhfcrkqdqt348vhj1/us-family" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="453" data-original-width="680" height="213" src="https://images.complex.com/complex/images/c_limit,w_680/fl_lossy,pg_1,q_auto/tarrhfcrkqdqt348vhj1/us-family" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-size: small;">Don't you hate it when your nice day at the beach is spoiled when <br />a red-jumpsuit-wearing doppelganger family shows up in your driveway <br />that night? Just some of the tethered ones in <i>Us. </i></span></td></tr>
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Well, while the doppelgangers sort out matters of wardrobe and choreography, little Adelaide Thomas grows up to become Adelaide Wilson in the present day. Here, the welcome presence of Lupita Nyong'o. It's thanks to Ms. Nyongo's considerable talents that when Adelaide's so-called tethered character, "Red," appears at their suburban home, the doppelganger manages to seem more scary than Internet meme waiting to happen (of course, the film has inspired dozens of such memes by now). No small feat, as Nyong'o has to fairly belch out words staccato from the depths of her vocal register while maintaining a menacing glare from dilated eyes. But for a time, it works, as does <i>Us </i>in a limited way.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/styles/1200x680/public/2018/03/bettygabriel-getout.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="453" data-original-width="800" height="181" src="https://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/styles/1200x680/public/2018/03/bettygabriel-getout.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Betty Gabriel, so memorable in Jordan Peele's <i>Get Out </i>(2017). </span></td></tr>
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As was the case,
if more indelibly, in <i>Get Out </i>(2017), Peele does well with stark images, as
when the other Wilson family shows up. Cheap thrills are to be had with sudden
motion and sound effects, but silence and the static presence of something intent on malice is often more deeply unsettling. While the frightened, seemingly normal Wilson family cowers inside their well-appointed home, dad goes out to get rid of the
interlopers, first with reason, then brandishing an aluminum bat. Red, the momma
doppelganger, then makes a clicking sound and her version of the family fans
out for attack, clearly a well-drilled bunch. </div>
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When the
doppelgangers finally corner the Wilson family in their living room, they are
met with the question that any of us might proffer to an insurgent group of
alternative selves, distinguished by their simple if menacing fashion sense:
who ARE you? The answer? "We are Americans." So squeaks or belches Red. And why the goofy voices? one might ask. <i>Us</i> might have been more appropriately entitled <i>Why</i>? Or <i>Huh</i>? On the dubious scale of pretense, this isn't quite as bad as the protagonist in Andrea Arnold's (dreadfully overrated) <i>American Honey </i>(2016)<i> </i>exclaiming (from a convertible, no less), "I feel like I'm fucking America," but it's still pretty laughable. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/la-1551992339-f904ah5dhl-snap-image.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="800" height="201" src="https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/la-1551992339-f904ah5dhl-snap-image.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Batting cleanup for the Doppelganger All-Stars, Abraham! The<br />other Wilson family in <i>Us</i>. </span></td></tr>
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So, what of these squeaking, grunting (father doppelganger Abraham doesn't have much to say; men!) relentless Americans? Are they the lesser selves of the Wilson family? Or perhaps the unfortunate, less privileged version? Doppelganger D-Day occurs after the Wilson family return from the beach at Santa Cruz, the location of little Adelaide's no-so-funhouse adventure those several decades earlier.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Nice rock, huh? Elizabeth Moss in <i>Us.</i> </span> </td></tr>
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The family Wilson visit the Tylers while at the beach, the father of which family Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke in the double role of Gabe/Abraham) seems to compete in terms of worldly wealth. The Tylers, who happen to be white, are clearly a bit more crass, both in terms of behavior and conspicuous consumption. You might hear that<i> Us</i> is about race, class and other significant issues. The film seems to aspire to that sort of gravitas, while giving us all a good scare. Sadly, it's not clearly about anything.<br />
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One might be inclined to interpret aspects of the story in terms of one class unfairly elevated above another, or as parable in terms of the African American family unwise to get lost in the commercialism of the larger and generally more affluent population of white America. But <i>Us</i> short-circuits any deeper meaning with its own haphazard wiring of plot lines.<br />
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Of course, it looks pretty dire for the Wilson family when their fearsome doppelgangers show up and drag them all to respective corners, as it were. But wouldn't you know it? - the Wilsons are a pretty plucky bunch and all make an unlikely escape, reconvene and speed away from the house, daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) happy to take the wheel of the family's SUV. There's a kind of subsequent debriefing, during which this family in no way demonstrates the sort of post-traumatic doppelganger disorder that any semblance of logic would dictate.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://junkee.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Screen-Shot-2018-12-27-at-10.21.35-am.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="534" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://junkee.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Screen-Shot-2018-12-27-at-10.21.35-am.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Daniel Kaluuya in <i>Get Out;</i> Lupita Nyong'o in <i>Us. </i></span></td></tr>
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There was so much good, even brilliant about <i>Get Out</i>, that it was easy enough to forgive the film its reversion to horror movie conventions as it progressed...at least until the highly unfortunate feel-good conclusion (whether the decision of the director or imposed from the studio or others holding the purse strings). But that slightly jokey interval with the Wilson family feels like nothing more than a kind of break for the audience, lest they begin to grow truly unsettled...or perhaps just bored despite the carnage. It's not a playing with convention, but a succumbing to convention. It's the cement shoes of Hollywood. To see films that manage to coherently and artfully mix carnage, wit and social commentary, while still adhering to some semblance of logic, please refer to Edgar Wrights "Cornetto Trilogy," particularly the first two entries in the series, <i>Shaun of the Dead</i> (2004) and <i>Hot Fuzz </i>(2007)<i>.</i><br />
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We get to see the Tyler family a second time in <i>Us.</i> Alas, there's no sanctuary to be had amidst the comfort of Chez Tyler, because their own set of doppelgangers show up as well. Fortunately, this set of malicious Tylers has a good sense of dramatic timing and doesn't attack until Wilson family and the cameras arrive. Ready to do some heavy lifting, some murdering and being murdered, is the ever-versatile Elizabeth Moss, playing both Kitty Tyler and tether mother, Dahlia. As with the redoubtable Ms. Nyong'o, Ms. Moss manages to lend <i>Us</i> some temporary authority.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article14021121.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/0_Us.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="410" data-original-width="615" height="213" src="https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article14021121.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/0_Us.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I knew white carpet was a bad idea! Moss on Moss violence in Us. </span></td></tr>
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For whatever reason, it's clearly not only the Wilson family beset with tethered selves, but those obnoxious Tylers as well. And perhaps every family in California? In America? And what of the single, the lovelorn? Are they, like the virgins of horror films of old, to be spared? We are made privy to a news report on television that the menace is widespread, with accounts of further carnage and the strange forming chain of the red-jumpsuit-wearing figures. And here we begin to approach an M. Night Shyamalan level of absurdity and inadvertent comedy.<br />
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<a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/US_1.jpg?crop=900:600&width=300" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="800" height="162" src="https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/US_1.jpg?crop=900:600&width=300" width="320" /></a>A shame, because some of Mr. Peele's ideas, some of his images, do seem rich with possibility. With <i>Get Out</i>, he created a film of mainstream appeal in which thorny issues of race were not only front and center, but focused less on blatant racism than sinister appropriation, instances of which almost never enter the discourse of popular culture.<br />
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The obvious thing in <i>Get Out </i>would have been to refer somehow to common examples of white culture appropriating dress, language and music. This is somewhat true of the Tylers in <i>Us</i>, amusingly hoisted on that petard. When they desperately command their Siri-like device to call the police when their doppelgangers appear, the virtual assistant instead plays NWA's "Fuck Tha Police," a good bit of which we hear. In <i>Get Out,</i> Peele took such notions a step further with appropriations of the actual flesh and bones of African Americans and for a time married that conceit brilliantly with the framework of a horror film.<br />
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There's a moment in <i>Us</i> when Dahlia, the tethered one to Kitty Tyler, prowls about the house, menacing all in her path, including Adelaide. Taking a short break from the mayhem, Dahlia plays with a lipstick. Elizabeth Moss in this moment manages to convey a being both feral and child-like in her manic enjoyment of the ritual.<br />
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In such rituals, in similar matters of makeup, skin and appearance, there would seem to much potential for that deeper of level of meaning after which <i>Us</i> so frequently gropes but fails to grasp. There is not only the expectations placed upon women and their appearance, not simply skin colors over which people are divided, for which they're discriminated, but also the varying skin tones by which African Americans are judged and sometimes divided, from within and without. Lupita Nyong'o has spoken on the latter topic with some eloquence. But in <i>Us</i>, it's just another lost opportunity.<br />
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As <i>Us</i> stumbles into it's silly, subterranean climax, the problem isn't just a complete lack of logic, it's a film that can't even succeed on it's supposedly scary surface. Last year's <i>Mandy</i> from director Panos Cosmatos was not exactly a masterpiece. It became even more ludicrous as it tried to explain things...like its demon bikers for instance. While story is apparently not Mr. Cosmatos' strong suit, <i>Mandy</i> held one's attention to the gory end, thanks in part to the director's vivid, feverish visual sense and a classically wack performance from Nicolas Cage. With <i>Us</i>, we're left with only a lot<br />
of half-baked allegory and a final helicopter shot of red-suited doppelgangers inexplicably reenacting Hands Across America. Watch out for those wildfires, oh tethered ones! The real California can be much more scary than anything dreamed up in this film.<br />
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The only clear moral of the story here seems to be that when visiting those boardwalk or pier carnivals, those charming old attractions, best that we confine ourselves to the well-lighted midways, best to keep the little ones safe from the siren song of the mysterious fortune telling machine, the ominous fun house. How about a nice game of skee ball? Perhaps some Whac-A-Mole? That might be the best thing for all of us. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">And yet, it could have been far worse. The doppelgangers might</span><br />
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The Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-37621648017020221572019-03-22T07:41:00.000-07:002019-03-22T07:42:41.155-07:00The Favourite<div style="text-align: center;">
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What-ho! Yorgos Lanthimos down some dark, rich, reimagined corridor of English history? The Greek filmmaker has generally confined himself to the relative present. Much as he has charted out unique little worlds in his films beyond the obvious grasp of time or place, each has occurred in an astringently modern setting. You know - cars, electricity and whatnot. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Alps</i> (2011)</span></td></tr>
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And yet Mr. Lanthimos has followed his most punishing work, <i>The Killing of a Sacred Deer </i>(2017) with a kind of dark comedy set, however fancifully, during the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714). But this being Yorgos Lanthimos, his latest film is nothing so simple as black comedy or period piece. Through a fairly quick ascension of features - this is somehow only his seventh - Lanthimos has brought us characters that don't move side by side or passionately embrace so much as collide like bumper cars, even as they might be moving in for some needed bit of affection.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Dogtooth</i> (2009)</span></td></tr>
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In films like <i>Alps,</i> <i>Dogtooth</i> and <i>The Lobster,</i> characters find themselves amid all manner of absurd situations and behavior. They often speak to each other in dispassionate, straight from the id dialog. But for all the apparent absurdity, the weirdness of it all, the man's films are far more than exercises in style and archness. They hit so hard because there is something so piercingly human at the center of those strange orbits of plot and character. With <i>The Favourite,</i> there is on display one of the most absurd manifestations of humanity yet produced by history or fiction writer - the English aristocracy. Yorgos Lanthimos, as it turns out, is right at home.<br />
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The absurdity, the excess...the general fucked-upness of this rarefied world is made obvious enough in the initial scenes of <i>The Favourite. </i> Early on there is a race. Of ducks. A pack of howling aristocrats, beneath their ample wigs and rich furnishings root fervently as favorite ducks scamper over a makeshift race course on a hardwood floor. This while the country is at war with France and countless citizens are suffering, no doubt, various privations. What may well be cinema's first-ever duck race, Lanthimos captures in a slow-motion, duck-level point of view.<br />
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Earlier, we had seen Queen Anne take a blindfolded Sarah Churchill (Yes, that Churchill family; the cigar-chomping Winston was a descendant), Duchess of Malborough into a room where was displayed an impressive model of a palace the Queen planned to have built for her then-favourite. This, Blenheim Palace, the home to Churchills for generations. Lady Malborough demurs with flimsy vehemence and we find out just how attuned is this monarch to the affairs of state:<br />
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"My dearest Queen - you are mad! Giving me a palace. It is a monstrous extravagance. Mrs. Morley, we are at war."<br />
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"We won."<br />
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"Oh no, it is not over. We must continue."<br />
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Pronouncing those last, sharply clipped syllables is Olivia Coleman, presiding for the second time in a Lanthimos film. In <i>The Lobster,</i> she was the manager of the very unique hotel where guests either find a romantic partner or are turned into an animal of choice. With <i>The Favourite, </i>the delightful Coleman has gotten a major promotion to queen. It's a rich role in a film where there are three juicy parts for the women in leading roles. <br />
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And yet, the queen business is not all glamour, or even mainly glamour, as <i>The Favourite </i>would lead us to believe. One of the first occasions we see Queen Anne is in the fairly harsh appraisal of a profile shot, flesh of the neck and face already beginning to give up the fight. In a story in which we're witness to most every unattractive facet of the English sovereign, there's no more humbling interlude than when we see Anne greedily consuming sweets, only to vomit in turn, her face wearing remnants of the full cycle.<br />
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This queen is beset with a billowing sadness in addition to several physical maladies. We see her at times rage like a mad woman. At one theatrical moment of desperation she perches in an opened window a few floors above the ground, clearly waiting though she is to be talked down, which Lady Malborough does in her peremptory way, jerking the queen unceremoniously back onto the bedroom floor.<br />
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There's no more eloquent expression of Anne's miserable sense of isolation than when she's wheeled into a richly-appointed chamber at some point between dinner and post-dinner entertainment. She first observes with with some pleasure Lady Malborough involved in a comically elaborate dance with a man of the court. Already powdered and painted like a kabuki doll, the royal mien slowly sets into the deep sadness for which it seems to have been prepared. Coleman accomplishes this without seeming movement, the dark eyes glistening with tears, that mask almost imperceptibly hardening into desolation.<br />
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And yet, through the procession of the film's eight sections or chapters (With titles like, "This Mud Stinks," "I Do Fear Confusion and Accidents," "I Dreamt I Stabbed You in the Eye," etc.) we do get a fuller portrait of this queen and a display of Ms. Coleman's formidable talent.<br />
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Perhaps no where else does Anne seem simply a human being at her ease than in a scene where she speaks of her 17 rabbits to servant on the rise, Abigail, a cousin of Lady Malborough who had lost all standing in the world prior to her arrival (coated with that stinking mud to which the chapter heading alluded) at the queen's residence.<br />
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As it turns out, the rabbits are surrogate children, the number significant, matching the pregnancies that Anne had undergone without producing an heir (The rabbits might be a fancy of the script of Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, but the unfortunate Queen Anne did apparently survive 17 such reproductive ordeals). Although the queen first rebuffs the servant as an unsuitable substitute for her favourite, she warms to a kind of happiness as the calculating Abigail takes an interest in the furry ersatz royal children scampering about. Here a bit of sun and warmth in the generally harsh climate in which this queen exists. Also an indication that Coleman could merely charm us for two hours if she or the film had no grander ambitions.<br />
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Playing Abigail, a woman with a kind of Scarlett O'Hara "As God is my witness," purpose (veiled though it may be) is Emma Stone. To see Ms. Stone in a worthy role at this point in her career is like seeing a firework approaching the apex of its flight against a dark curtain of sky: brilliant, impossible not to gaze upon...rather life-affirming. And with this Abigail, eventually elevated by the queen back into the ranks of the peerage as the Duchess Masham, Emma Stone has stepped into a very worth role.<br />
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We are witness to some of the indignities of this woman fallen well below her born station: before he pushes her unceremoniously into that stinking mud a fellow passenger in the coach carrying Abigail to the royal residence first leers at her and then proceeds to pleasure himself before all riding in the small enclosure (and you thought your last ride on the bus or subway was a trial...); a fellow servant gives her a bucket with which to clean a floor without mentioning that Abigail's bare hands will be plunged into burning lye; and for the presumption of fashioning a poultice out of gathered herbs to soothe the Queen's gout-afflicted legs, she's whipped, before the sentence is commuted, as it were, when it's found the treatment actually works.<br />
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Trials indeed. None of which perhaps compare to being a young woman lost by her father in a game of whist. That episode Abigail recounts in typically matter of fact fashion, "The debt was to a balloon-shaped German man with a thin cock. Thankfully, I manged to convince him a woman has her blood 28 days a month." Abigail gains favor not only because of her skill as an amateur apothecary, but because Lady Malborough recalls that profligate father, who ultimately perished in a fire of his own setting, with some fondness. "I liked your father. He had charm to burn. Then I guess he did."<br />
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<a href="https://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/79/590x/The-Favourite-Olivia-Colman-cast-real-life-people-1013811.jpg?r=1539931110081" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="590" height="189" src="https://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/79/590x/The-Favourite-Olivia-Colman-cast-real-life-people-1013811.jpg?r=1539931110081" width="320" /></a>Canny though she is, Lady Malborough has a rival for the queen's affections before she quite realizes it. Just as Abigail's rifle shooting improves - we see two telling intervals with she and Lady Malborough blasting flung pigeons for target practice - so does her focus on the ultimate court prize.<br />
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Being the queen's favourite in this fictional court means not only wielding political influence and being a beneficiary of the monarch's largesse (you know, your own palace, that sort of thing), but sharing the royal bed. Typical of any Lanthimos film and particular to this screenplay originally written by Ms. Davis and worked over by Mr. McNamara (and possibly the director himself), the sexual triangle is more frank possibility than salacious plot device. It's a rare story of power in which men are relegated to secondary positions of influence by a barrier of female sexuality and alliance. And yet, since this is still all happening on planet Earth and within the English aristocracy, each woman is subject to her own rules of gravity.<br />
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The formidable Lady Malborough gets a very clear indication that the tide has turned when she creeps into the royal bedchamber one evening and discovers Abigail has usurped her in the queen's bed and affection. The upstart having come up (or down) in the world by not so accidentally falling asleep while the queen was away. When Anne returns to her chamber and naturally calls out this egregious bit of presumption, Abigail has to flee the bed, and Ms. Stone as the upwardly-mobile Abigail looks like a golden-haired figure from Botticelli, emerging not from a giant scallop but from the covers of the queen's four-poster bed. Come night, memories of that young flesh still fresh in the queen's mind, Abigail is summoned, ostensibly to minister to the queen's ailing legs, but, of course...<br />
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This whole, strange world unto itself Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan capture often in guttering natural (i.e., candle) light, all the better to throw dubious goings on into appropriate gradations of shadow. Ms. Stone, in keeping with the relative shapeshifting of her character, has her very eye color and skin tone rendered in strongly contrasting shades from one scene to another. At times, a wide-angle lens is utilized, not technically a fisheye, but one that lends the same broad, slightly distorted perspective. Cast as it is upon this world, the implication is clear: what is really more distorted, the perspective or the scene itself?<br />
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Consistent with both the sumptuousness and existential rot of the royal court, <i>The Favourite's</i> soundtrack features both the rich salvos of Baroque music one might expect, as well as well as a spare score by Komeil Hosseini. As the intrigue and the general madness ensue, there are solitary plinkings of keyboard, nervous plucks of stringed instrument, altogether like a dark night of the soul of some troubled chamber orchestra or quartet.<br />
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<a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRo6j5bCZNgrBjd-Yc_GVSoTrvBCTR9osuf9_oAqsqoZjTkFagy3Q" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="299" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRo6j5bCZNgrBjd-Yc_GVSoTrvBCTR9osuf9_oAqsqoZjTkFagy3Q" /></a>As with Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz has found herself very much at home in the films of Yorgos Lanthimos. Weisz is at her best playing to richly shaded extremes of sweetness or malice, something far more interesting than any sort of dreary virgin/whore dichotomy.<br />
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The woman actually makes goodness (think of her work in <i>The Lobster,</i> or Rian Johnson's<i> The Brothers Bloom</i>) appealing in a way that doesn't necessitate a prior lobotomy. And yet this same actor is entirely believable inhabiting characters whose ire should be avoided at all cost. Abigail realizes she's provoked that ire when she walks into the library one morning and Lady Malborough begins to hurl books at her ("Did you see the book of poetry from the Dryden fellow" - fling!). When Ms. Weisz subsequently utters the line, "If you do not go, I will start kicking you and I will not stop," Abigail believes her and so do we.<br />
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In the film and among the complex trio of women at its center, Lady Malborough is perhaps the most transgressive character in terms of behavior and dress. But even she exists on high perch of favor only as long as her monarch wishes it so. The shrewd and brazen Abigail manages to send Lady Malborough toppling and solidifies her place at court. But lest she forget herself, the ailing queen grabs her hair near film's end and forces her to minister the ever-troublesome royal legs.<br />
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Abigail might be the least sincere of the three women, but it's to the credit of the screenplay and Emma Stone that her likely calculated moments of candor and humility, offered along the way to Lady Malborough and Queen Anne, don't seem entirely false. What's clear in the scenes subsequent to Lady Malborough's banishment from court is that what might be left of Abigail's soul is succumbing to that rich and rotting atmosphere of court.<br />
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As for the queen, expressed in a brilliant final montage, she is buffeted by piercing and conflicting demands of monarchy, womanhood, mortality, loss, etc. How to find any identity and peace in such a such maelstrom, in such rarefied air? Fare thee well, struggling queen. As you were, Mr. Lanthimos.<br />
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The Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-82503433451714877002018-11-04T13:23:00.002-08:002019-02-18T09:07:13.608-08:00Can You Ever Forgive Me<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Things are not going well for Lee Israel as we meet her in <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i> The solitary New Yorker is fired from a copy editing job due to her two most distinguishing characteristics: a caustic personality and a glass of scotch on the rocks affixed to her hand with only slightly less permanence than her fingers. A strait-laced co-worker reminds her that food and drink aren't allowed in the office and the busybody is invited to fuck off. When a man asks her to repeat what she said, Lee does so with zest. The man, she realizes too late, is her boss, who summarily dismisses her. Ms. Israel finishes her drink, tosses the ice into a trash can and returns the glass to her purse, off to joust with an adversarial world on other fields of battle. </div>
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Loss of the no-doubt poorly paying job only exacerbates the already tenuous standing in the world of writer Lee Israel. Once there were magazine assignments (a profile of Katherine Hepburn, memorialized with a letter from the great Kate over Lee's desk) and biographies, one of which elevated her to the lofty clime of the New York Times best seller list. But as we find her in early-90's Manhattan, the marketplace has lost interest in the work of Lee Israel, including what appears to be a halting labor of love on the life of Fanny Brice. She's reminded of this by her agent (a welcome, well cast Jane Curtain) and with even greater indignity by a book store employee. The latter wants only a couple of the pile of books she attempts to sell for some needed cash and points to a remainder bin, presumably the fate her writerly output, when the indignant Lee reminds him that his store has actually carried her books. She, of course, exits in cloud of noxious retort and is banned from the store, the latest in a series of burned bridges. </div>
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As brought to bristling and sympathetic life by Melissa McCarthy, this Lee Israel is a woman barricaded inside herself, the only affection penetrating the barbed wire of her personality for and from her beloved cat. But when we see the kitty twice look upon proffered food (including a bit of shrimp purloined at the agent's party) with indifference, we know that this dark night is probably going to get a bit darker. Yes, even Jersey the cat is ill, but Israel owes too much money at the vet for the cat to receive care. What's a nearly penniless, desperate writer to do?</div>
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If you know the story of the real Lee Israel, you know that the writer became something of a master forger of literary letters and even a thief of real ones. Israel apparently sold upward of 400 such letters during her criminal years. In <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me, </i>Lee<i> </i>first, reluctantly sells the Hepburn letter to a kindly, interested bookseller (Dolly Wells), who tells her that the personal nature of the missive, the intimate details, really lend it its value. While stubbornly doing research on Fanny Brice in a library, Israel happens on a letter written by the vaudeville legend. The letter is slipped into that receptacle of most of her life's dirty laundry - her purse. It's doesn't fetch a lot of money because it turns out to be a perfunctory bit of correspondence, but by this point, an idea is born.</div>
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Many a perfunctory film provides us with a cheery montage of its protagonist getting their life together (to the tune of some mood-elevating pop song; seemingly half of such montages have bounced along with KT Tunstall's "Suddenly I See"...but that can't quite be true). There's nothing quite so obvious in <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me,</i> but there is a blush of relative prosperity for Lee Israel: back rent is paid up (she's even seen doling out her own muted kindness to the super's mother); there's medical attention and cat pharmaceuticals for the long-suffering Jersey; and when she meets her friend Jack at their common dive, Lee informs him that the first round is on her.</div>
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The recipient of this barroom (the NYC shrine, Julius') largesse is Jack Hock. Jack is a New York survivor. Only with charm, persistence and steadfast lack of embarrassment does he gain orbit of Lee's generally aggrieved life. And so a rather odd couple begin to drink away indoor amber afternoons, haunt Manhattan as mischievous spirits, and eventually team-up on Israel's trade in fake and stolen correspondence, a hustling business at which the bright-eyed Jack is a natural.</div>
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There is a kind of togetherness with these two misfits, but a love fest this is not, owing mainly to Lee's formidable barriers of fear and self-involvement. But when Jack shows up at her apartment door, beaten up, she tends to his wounds and offers him her couch (not for the first time, Jack is between residences).</div>
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These are New York characters, tough, explicit, hardened to brilliance or enmity, scorned and consoled by the city they probably would never imagine leaving.</div>
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So director Marielle Heller gives us the city, as with much in <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me</i>, with subtlety and understanding. She and cinematographer Brandon Trost glimpse a New York both familiar and speaking of the story's more particular hushed time and setting. The city, especially of those lost afternoons and twilights, seems seductive, gritty, enameled, inlaid with all sorts of flickering beauty and melancholy. </div>
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So goes the film's excellent, varied soundtrack. It's replete with wonderful voices from the likes of Dinah Washington, Patti Page, Jeri Southern...even the trumpet of California boy Chet Baker (who knew well the scorn and seductiveness of Manhattan). But none of these are given the usual volume and prominence, singing us toward some pre-directed emotional response. Instead this chorus murmurs and encourages in their way, presiding like guardian spirits. There's Blossom Dearie too... and whyever not. Perhaps the most moving vocal performance, this one front and center, comes from Julian Vivan Bond, singing "Goodnight Ladies," which the inimitable Bond prefaces with, "This next song goes out to all the agoraphobic junkies who couldn’t be here tonight.” The sparsely-attended end of set occurs at another venerated Manhattan watering hole, Joe's Pub. Lee Israel's response to the song is a relative flood of emotion, even if lost on Jack, perched wryly toward the back of the room. </div>
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We've been privy to all manner of light from Melissa McCarthy over the past couple of decades. There was the exuberance of the fresh-faced chef she played on the television series, <i>Gilmore Girls.</i> And post-<i>Bridesmaids,</i> of course, she's been a star, mainly through a series of comedies. The results have been mixed to say the least. </div>
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Some of her best comedic work actually occurred on Saturday Night Live, with a wonderful send-up of former White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer. The woman can certainly be funny when given good material, but she's got considerably more range than that. She's unwavering in her work in <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me</i>. As with so much good acting, Melissa McCarthy just is this unhappy woman. The raw defensiveness, the fear of rejection are almost palpable. The occasional beam of kindness or contentment all the more striking for their rarity, their arduous trip to the surface. </div>
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As unlikely as this role might seem for Ms McCarthy relative to most of her film work, even more unexpected is that she would be paired so felicitiously with Richard E. Grant. And yet this is one of the more moving relationships you might see in a film this year. Grant is a treasure. He can certainly inhabit fussy, elegant characters with the best of them. But Jack Hock is no English aristocrat. With apparent effortlessness, Grant's character in <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me</i> is charismatic, flamboyant, louche and thread-bare elegant. And even more than the duo of which he's a part, he's moving. </div>
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The final scene between Lee and Jack apparently took a great deal out of the actors. It's a kind of reconciliation between the two some time after the legal reckoning has come for Israel. They may relegate their respective complaints with one another to the realm of bygone, but like one of the fundamental rules of Seinfeld, there is no hugging here. They stay true to their characters as the film stays true to itself. </div>
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The reunion is no less affecting, in fact more so for it's lack of explicit emotion. It occurs none to soon, because we see Jack enter sporting a bandanna, likely to cover one or more lesions, and moving with aid of a walking stick. </div>
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Jack Hock, as it happened, was not a survivor, claimed like so many gay men by the dark tide of AIDS. It becomes explicitly clear at varying points in <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me</i> that Lee Israel is a lesbian and Jack Hock a gay man. Typical of the film's subtlety and the characters indelible selves (in which bravado plays its role), these are mere facts of life. The depth, the nuance, the pathos within pathos is there to be discovered beyond what is already compelling on the surface of this film. So too the barroom of Julius', apparently not so different than it was among a more forbidding Lower West Side of the early-1990s. You may know the importance of Julius' or Joe's Pub to the gay community (I certainly didn't), which only deepens the portrait of people and place.</div>
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Perhaps it is relatively well-earned, but there's a little uplift at the conclusion of <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me. </i> We see Lee, with a new feline companion, beginning work on what would become the eponymous memoir (which a New York Times reviewer described as "....a slender, sordid and pretty damned fabulous book about her misadventures."). It's the one time that screenwriters Nicole Holofcenter and Jeff Whitty lapse into something tidy, something more feel-good-familiar-American. It was, after all, about 15 years before Israel would finally complete and publish that memoir. Overall, it's a small lapse in an otherwise uncompromising piece of work. </div>
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Ms. Holofcener, often a director of her own screenplays, was once slated to direct <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me </i>(Julianne Moore was to star). The story bounced around the film business as these things tend to do and ultimately landed in very sure hands, those of McCarthy, Grant and the promising director Marielle Heller. Ms. Heller has only two features to her credit, including another uncompromising piece of work, the adaptation of <i>The Diary of a Teenage Girl </i>(2015).</div>
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Hopefully we'll be hearing much more from Marielle Heller. We need smart, compassionate, revealing stories that don't take the easy way out. Now more than ever. </div>
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dbThe Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-61818528499695656692018-08-06T11:20:00.000-07:002018-08-09T12:00:44.293-07:00Leave No Trace<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It's significant that one of the most moving bits of communication between daughter and father in Debra Granik's<i> Leave No Trace </i>is not an exchange of words. It an occasional clicking sound, an affirmation between the child and parent. It's a tolling of animal sympathy and understanding. A simple, eloquent expression of love beyond speech. </div>
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Delivering her third memorable feature film, Debra Granik wrote the script with her long-time creative partner Anne Rosellini. Their collaboration in the case <i>Leave No Trace</i> is a masterwork of understatement, if not blatant minimalism. Both father Will (Ben Foster) and Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), whom we first meet living secretly amid the lush vegetation of forested public lands somewhere outside of Portland, Oregon, tend toward the laconic in speech. Granik and Rossellini, like their characters, speak mainly when they have something important to say.</div>
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From this source, this minimal script like telling ripples on deep bodies of water, we are left in the very capable hands Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie. Mr. Foster is no surprise, much as he has generally labored as an ace character actor for most of his career, excelling as he's played men of quiet and not so quiet intensity. Such was the case in the excellent <i>Hell or High Water</i> (2016), Foster the more self-destructive of two Texas brothers robbing banks.<br />
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<a href="https://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2018/07/02/02-ben-foster-leave-no-trace.w710.h473.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="473" data-original-width="710" height="213" src="https://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2018/07/02/02-ben-foster-leave-no-trace.w710.h473.jpg" width="320" /></a><i>Leave No Trace </i>is based on the book <i>My Abandonment </i>by Peter Brock, itself inspired by a magazine article about a father and daughter living on public land in the Portland area. Ms. Granik doesn't bother with a lot of exposition, but takes us straight into the forest, straight into the story where we find the close-knit father and daughter going fairly expertly about their life. Foster and McKenzie apparently bonded in their primitive skills training, spending days learning how to properly wield knives and generally survive in the wild. </div>
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<a href="https://www.tvnz.co.nz/content/dam/images/news/2018/05/04/young-kiwi-actress-thomasin-harcourt-mckenzie-making-a-splash-in.hashed.5ef217e8.desktop.story.share.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="180" src="https://www.tvnz.co.nz/content/dam/images/news/2018/05/04/young-kiwi-actress-thomasin-harcourt-mckenzie-making-a-splash-in.hashed.5ef217e8.desktop.story.share.jpg" width="320" /></a>As for Thomasin McKenzie, she's a wonder. She's not so unlike a woodland creature - striking, alert-eyed, outwardly gentle but quietly tensile of being. As has become something of a pattern with Granik, she's essentially exposing the talent of a very promising actor to a wider audience (after Very Farmiga in<i> Down to the Bone</i> and Jennifer Lawrence in <i>Winter's Bone</i>). Ms. McKenzie represents at least the third generation of actors in her family, but there is certainly nothing overly-studied in her performance. Quite the contrary. As she and Ben Foster quite believably inhabit their forest home, so does McKenzie bring her character completely, flickeringly to life. It's all the more impressive for one so young (and still relatively inexperienced; McKenzie has done mainly television work in her native New Zealand), as so much of the acting of <i>Leave No Trace's</i> main characters is done with depth and changing weather of their eyes. </div>
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The relative idyll of Will and Tom is finally brought to an end, as it seemingly must. While the two sit down to a meal on one occasion, we see the father tap his daughter on the leg and say "drill." They instantly flee their campsite and go clambering up through the vegetation. But when it's finally not a drill, there's no hiding from the bloodhounds authorities bring into the forest, acting on the tip of a jogger who spied Tom while reading above a path. The father and daughter are separated for a time at some sort of social services agency. Typical of Granik's immersion into a subject, the people in whose hands Will and Tom find themselves are not generic, ruthless bureaucrats, but mental health professionals who do their best by the obviously unconventional parent and child, ultimately placing them at a rural home provided by a sympathetic tree farmer (a welcome appearance from veteran Jeff Kober). </div>
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As Will and Tom attempt to settle into this new domesticity, along with another period of calm amongst a fairly independent community in remote part of Washington state, we see a fateful rift develop between the pair. </div>
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"Want or need," Tom says to her father, who's put something of a treat into their shopping cart while they're stocking up in a Portland supermarket prior to their discovery. It's obviously a bit of verbiage between the two that has the solidity of code, which Grank and Rossellini manage to telegraph with little fuss. Applied to the efforts of the parent and child to run away from any conventional structure, it becomes clear that the father needs it while the daughter increasingly does not want it. "Did you even try?," Tom asks her father after they run from the home provided by the tree farmer, where the young woman had begun to establish some roots. Or as she later says to him, youthful integrity wrapped in ragged grammar, "The same thing that's wrong with you is not wrong with me."</div>
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The thing that is wrong with Will in the most specific sense would seem to be post-traumatic stress disorder. As with everything about this subtle storytelling, what ails this quiet man is not spelled out in any obvious or immediate way. It is quickly apparent that he prefers to live outside of society, but we don't necessarily know why. There is a brief, final jerk of awakening nightmare while he shares a tent with his daughter in the forest camp. The pounding of helicopter blades, the sound that rouses Will, certainly provides a hint. Some context, some confirmation, is later added when he visits a VA center in Portland (although he's merely seen walking around the facility).<br />
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These are writers, particularly Granik, who have been informed by their subjects, as with details like an exchange between Will and another inhabitant of the park, the two men sharing a few words and trading in the sometimes ineffectual ineffectual pharmaceuticals prescribed to Will. Such under the counter commerce sometimes occurring among those prescribed pain killers, methadone, etc.<br />
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Granik has said that one of the things that drew her to Ben Foster for the role of Will was his sympathetic portrayal of other military men on film (<i>The Messenger</i>, <i>Lone Survivor,</i> etc.). For her part, Debra Granik built her documentary <i>Stray Dog </i>around biker and Vietnam veteran Ron Hall. The director came to know Hall, who sometimes suffers from PTSD, in the making of <i>Winter's Bone</i> (Hall memorable as the formidable Thump Milton).<br />
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Debra Granik's immersion tends to extend beyond characters to the environment of which they are often inextricably a part. She used a largely Oregon-based crew to shoot forest scenes, people who understand the climate, beauty and even dangers of the place. <i>Leave No Trace</i> begins with a few forest postcards courtesy of Granik and her team - the whispering, waving vegetation, a spider's web heavy with dew and quivering in a light wind, etc. </div>
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<i>Winter's Bone</i> was shot without any sets, Ozark residents allowing Debra Granik the use of their homes and possessions in the film. It certainly added verisimilitude and would also seem to indicate the director's sympathy for her subjects and the trust that she inspires. <i> Leave No Trace </i>benefits from vital location shooting in Oregon and Washington and the use of non-professional actors, which is to say real people. As with <i>Winter's Bone,</i> there's a gathering where various people take turns at playing music, these people and their rituals so beyond the scope of our greater culture.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scenes from Debra Granik's <i>Winter's Bone</i> (left) and <i>Down<br />to the Bone. </i></td></tr>
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<i>Leave No Trace </i>is a film that could please very disparate constituencies. However, given its limited distribution relative to more thundering summer fare, it's no doubt being seen mainly by the (at least nominally) liberal Americans who haunt art houses. We're seeing people in this film who, for the most part, are very happy to live removed from big cities and the fleeting concerns of mainstream culture. These are people who might well detach themselves from the political process....and yet, we're also seeing people who might well have voted for the sitting president of the United States. Who knows? But if that did come up, if voting records could be scrutinized, how much less sympathetically might the audience of supposedly liberal viewers look upon these people?<br />
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A wise and focused woman, Debra Granik doesn't waste her time on politics. There is instead sympathy, compassion, insight. Such increasingly-rare qualities, along with a reverence and wonder at the extraordinary natural world to which we're made privy in <i>Leave No Trace.</i> Wherever they're set, Ms. Granik's films continue to mark out a desperately-needed demilitarized zone in our internecine culture wars. She beautifully tells her stories of struggling Americans, aided in no small part by actors like Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie. All you need to do is look in the eyes of these actors (as with the darkness in those of John Hawkes in <i>Winter's Bone</i>, the desperation in Vera Farmiga's in <i>Down to the Bone</i>), these people. There's no denying the life, the struggle, our common humanity. In doing so, hopefully we become more, or at least better human. <br />
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<br />The Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-35792176255040682772018-05-21T12:38:00.000-07:002018-05-21T12:38:00.716-07:00A Quiet Place<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">If you have begun to grow restive with the lapses in logic<br />in my film, please be very quiet. Director, co-writer and<br />wide-eyed paterfamilias John Krasinski in <i>A Quiet Place.</i></span></td></tr>
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A quiet place indeed, any movie theater (I'm extrapolating from my own experience at a small screening room at Chicago's New 400 Cinema, usually a lively neighborhood house) in which one might take in John Krasinski's <i>A Quiet Place</i> during its highly successful first run.<br />
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One of the points on which <i>A Quiet Place</i> impressively succeeds is immersing its audience into the experience and plight of the Abbot family, stepping very softly through some sort of post-monster-invasion American landscape in which drawing attention to oneself with any sort of noise can quickly prove fatal. So too does the audience almost breathlessly proceed through the film, especially the nearly silent early stages. While it is both unusual and extremely refreshing to be among an American film audience in which such a hush - nary a smart phone; virtually no resounding ruminant chomp of popcorn - prevails, <i>A Quiet Place</i> ultimately resorts to all manner of loud plot mechanism, clunking logic.<br />
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The near-silence that carries us well into the action of <i>A Quiet Place</i> is impressive. The scene is thus quietly and pretty effectively set, as with the film's initial sequence of the family quietly exploring the abandoned town near their home, raiding the pharmacy for needed medicine, the aisles of the store like the pavement outside strewn with leaves, cars abandoned along the main drag. Beyond the first incursion of invading aliens into the story that heralds the opening titles, <i>A Quiet Place</i> develops and manages to maintain its tension for a time. <br />
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The problem with monster stories is when and how much do we see of the supposedly terrifying thing in question. Familiarity might breed contempt, but it tends to negate fear unless a storyteller really knows what they're doing. The latter might be pulled off with a monster so starkly unexpected or scary that repeated encounters only enhance the dread, but that's a pretty rare thing.<br />
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What we have in <i>A Quiet Place </i>at first glance appear like escapees from the set of <i>Starship Troopers,</i> those lanky, pissed-off insects so nobly fought off by the well-clad Earthlings. Seen more repeatedly and up close, the blind menace are composed of creatures seemingly cobbled together from any number of horror and sci-fi tales, with heavy influence from the <i>Alien</i> franchise.<br />
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Mr. Krasinki also seems to have little confidence in audiences content to sit for long in the dark, if not the silence. As if the sign language and desperation to be quiet weren't obvious enough in the first scene, we see an out of date tabloid newspaper with the prominent headline, "IT'S SOUND!" Still, the first encounter with the diabolically soft of hearing monsters carries its shock and the writer/director brings it off with effective economy. We see how quickly and definitively human life might be snuffed out in this frightening new world.<br />
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Unfortunately, much as the story might jump ahead many months from that first foray into town and fateful blaring toy that draws one of the creatures quickly upon an Abbot child, it's only a few minutes before we're taken into the father's war room in which we literally see plot points spelled out. Adjacent to a bank of ham radios, from which Lee Abbot sends unanswered SOS signals, there is a whiteboard on which he has written, "What are their weaknesses?" And in case we missed that blaring old headline back in town, Mr. Abbot has also written what to avoid, lest one become alien brunch, "SOUND." In keeping with this subtlety, it wouldn't have been entirely surprisingly to have seen writ on the whiteboard, "DON'T GET EATEN! - BAD!"<br />
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<a href="https://images1.westword.com/imager/u/original/10148127/a_quiet_place_noah_jupe_millicent_simmonds_credit_jonny_cour.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://images1.westword.com/imager/u/original/10148127/a_quiet_place_noah_jupe_millicent_simmonds_credit_jonny_cour.jpg" width="320" /></a>Aside from the unusual quiet, our attention is held most effectively by the mother and daughter of the Abbot family. Millicent Simmonds plays young Regan Abbott. In her second film role (after last year's <i>Wonderstruck</i>), Ms. Simmonds not only informs the imposed silent communication of the Abbots with her own experience of deafness (she apparently helped to teach the other actors the American Sign Language with which they converse on screen), she also has one of those seemingly fully-formed, rich with experience adult faces that is worn all the more strikingly by a young person. <i>A Quiet Place</i> manages to benefit from Ms. Simmonds unique abilities (and stated more simply, by her good acting, quite expressive without being overstated) while placing her deafness in a context in which the world (and audience) in a sense come to her, not the conventional opposite. <br />
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The real backbone of the Abbot family and <i>A Quiet Place</i> is the ever-reliable Emily Blunt. As usual, Ms. Blunt is wherever the character and story need her to be, all in and thoroughly credible. As we see her in the early stages of the film and as the pressure buildings, she actually has the air of a person, a mother who's been operating in the heavy gravity off loss and danger for months which probably seem like years. Even short of Evelyn Abbot's most perilous moments, one can occasionally see a small vain bulge from Ms. Blunt's brow, the inward stress she's conjuring manifesting itself physically in a manner that's all too recognizable. Is Emily Blunt perhaps a slightly less phosphorescent Kate Blanchett, gracefully dispatching role after role? Perhaps. But taken entirely on her own terms, Ms. Blunt is aces. <br />
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Of course, even good actors have their limits. The action of <i>A Quiet Place</i> asks a dear amount from Evelyn Abbot and from the formidable Emily Blunt by extension. During the film's greatest assay at tension jacked into outright terror, Evelyn Abbot steps squarely on a nail (itself such an obvious, foreshadowed plot device that it might as well buzz neon red), is stalked by one of those aurally sensitive monsters and then has to deliver her own baby. </div>
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Much has been rightfully made of <i>A Quiet Place's</i> lapses, jaunty leaps and outright banishment of logic. You can read more detailed accounts of the absurdity elsewhere. Perhaps most prominent in this forest of the iffy story point looms the pregnancy itself. From what we're told, it's not difficult to determine that the Abbot's would have conceived their child many months after the alien invasion. This family, who only by their meticulous approach to quiet living manages to stay alive, who had seen one of their children taken away in an instant, presumably made a conscious decision to have a child. Now, maybe Evelyn and Lee Abbott are a couple of cockeyed optimists...or maybe what Evelyn self-delivers isn't infant Abbott so much as bouncing baby deus ex machina. And we won't even go into the speed of that delivery and Evelyn Abbot's quick physical recovery of form and all else. <br />
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Perhaps the boldest move Mr. Krasinski makes is acting opposite his partner, Emily Blunt. There's not a lot of nuance in the screenplay written by Krasinski, Bryan Woods and Andrew Form. The story's limitations along with those of the generally signed dialog tend to find Krasinski in a state of one-note earnestness. His eyes are dilated during moments of sturm und drang like speakers opened for maximum volume but communicating only a simple noise. </div>
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Beyond the blind but surprisingly agile (for sightless, ungainly creatures, they certainly navigate close spaces and basement steps quite gracefully) invaders, whom we get used to seeing, <i>A Quiet Place </i>also grows more wan as it settles into conventions of character. The Abbots pretty much fall to generational cliches of struggling but noble parents and children wise and capable beyond their years. </div>
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Compare, if you will, <i>A Quiet Place </i>to two superior films from 2014: Jennifer Kent's <i>The Babadook </i>and Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's<i> Goodnight Mommy.</i> Not only will you be more unsettled by those moviegoing experiences, each films dip into much murkier waters of parent and child relationships than <i>A Quiet Place </i>is willing or even vaguely capable of plumbing. </div>
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<a href="http://www.fullhyderabad.com/images/reviews/arts_entt/movies/english/overview/a-quiet-place.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.fullhyderabad.com/images/reviews/arts_entt/movies/english/overview/a-quiet-place.jpg" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="250" height="320" width="200" /></a>The farthest <i>A Quiet Place </i>strays from familiar family light is when young Marcus Abbot (Noah Jupe) asks his father if he still loves sister Regan (this owing to the pre-title mayhem resulting in the loss of brother Beau). Of course, the Abbot father remonstrates with great earnestness, only to be reminded that he should actually tell his daughter how he feels. When this affirmation comes at the film's climax, it's writ so large as to verge on the comic, Mr. Krasinki proving that it is possible to shout in sign language. </div>
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Given the general loss of dramatic momentum, <i>A Quiet Place</i> concludes better than you might expect, with a note that's part ambiguous, part defiant, the Abbot women armed for further alien onslaught. Even this involves Regan performing a feat of unlikely discovery, but at least we're left with the film's two strongest presences left to take care of the remaining dirty work. </div>
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<i>A Quiet Place </i>stakes out an unusually stark sonic canvas on which its dashes of sound and shock might all the more effectively splash. A rare silence often prevails. But so goes the relationship of film and audience as it does between two intimates, falling into and lapsing out of conversation. That silence is sometimes fertile, sometimes revealing. The meaningful, the revelatory, the frightening...even the profound might well flower into or invade that open space. Alas, sometimes it just means, that after too short a time, you realize you're listening to someone who just doesn't have much interesting to say. </div>
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The Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-34619931203511517962018-02-11T16:39:00.000-08:002018-02-26T10:22:39.187-08:00Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri<br />
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Three billboards with bold black letters in and an attention-grabbing orange field. These the work of grieving mother Mildred Hayes, goading local Sheriff Bill Willoughby and his police force to show more initiative in solving the rape and murder of her daughter seven months earlier.<br />
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Three films now for Irish playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh, each a kind of blazing billboard in its own right, full of provocation, contrivance, violence, heart and amusement. Yes, all of that. Audiences and critics have responded much more enthusiastically to the latest provocation of Mr. McDonagh than most of the residents of the fictional Ebbing, Missouri to those billboards of Mildred. And yet, skepticism of the film seems even more justified than the disapproval of Ebbing for Mildred's roadside gesture; which is to say - what's the point? <br />
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Accomplished both as a playwright and a filmmaker, Mr. McDonagh is, by his own acknowledgement, more comfortable in the role of the latter. Much as his plays are full of their own violence and provocation, theater, he lamented in a 2015 interview, "...is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be." Based on his body of work thus far, it seems clear the the edginess for which McDonagh hankers is not really a bold examination ideas.<br />
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When the aggrieved Mildred rents the long-dormant billboards near her home outside Ebbing, seemingly bold ideas are put forth and and additional violence (beyond that done to her daughter) ensues. The message of the billboards unfolds Burma-Shave-style over the three roadside cavases: "RAPED WHILE DYING...AND STILL NO ARRESTS?...HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY." Mildred, not one to shy from confrontation, ups the ante when talking about the local police to a reporter: "It seems to me the police force is too busy torturing black folks to solve actual crime." Subsequently, when an understandably concerned police chief visits Mildred, she favors him with "The time it took you to get out here whining like a bitch, Willoughby, some other poor girl's probably out there being butchered right now." </div>
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McDonagh, like his main character, betrays no diffidence when it comes to incendiary situations. Placed before us in "Three Billboards," we have the aftermath of great violence (and more to come), racism, police authority run amok and a mother bent not only on justice but possibly blind revenge. In the figure of Officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell and all his sharp edges), the member of the Ebbing Police Department most likely to torture people of color or anyone whom he happens to find disagreeable, we have a kind of awkward, chafing American male id, bristling with unaccountable anger. So much potential substance in "Three Billboards," and yet so little interest or ability to see it through.<br />
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One can certainly see why an actor might be thrilled to get a hold of one of McDonagh's scripts. His principals are asked to do a lot, allowed space to express quite a lot. There's usually much more fun, more challenge to be enjoyed in being bad on screen than good. Obvious enough. The problem is that these human fireworks frequently don't make sense, much as they do temporarily grab one's attention on their bright and crackling arcs. <br />
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Much as McDonagh's last two films (including 2012's <i>Seven Psychopaths)</i> do not begin to approach the originality and deft balancing act that was his debut film, <i>In Bruges</i>, there is a kind of progress at work in "Three Billboards." For the first time in McDonagh's work there is a woman front and center. <i>In Bruges</i> offered us only a fairly interesting bed & breakfast host, as well as a drug dealer with a heart of gold. The only female psychopath given screen time amid the massive sophomore slump that followed in <i>Seven Psychopaths</i> was seen briefly in flashback. But beautifully cast as the formidable Mildred Hayes is Frances McDormand.<br />
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We first see Mildred driving on a quiet stretch of road, hair down and casually clad in a light dress. As she takes notice of the disused billboards she has been passing for years, inspiration strikes. When next seen in the office of a local ad company, Mildred is dressed for business in coveralls with hair pulled back behind a broad bandana, looking not so much Rosie the Riveter as Rosie the Avenger.<br />
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Ms. McDormand is just the woman for the job. Unfortunately, as was the case with another much-lauded role for the actor, that of the pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson in <i>Fargo</i>, the job description is more than a little vague. McDormand is asked to create a character out of a few primary emotions - rage, grief, an abiding cantankerousness and occasional remorse - like motley bits fabric pinned to a clotheir's mannequin. She does her level best - and she's as absorbing in a given moment as ever - to animate what she's given, but it's hard to care about something or someone so patched together for mere effect. <br />
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The same can be said for Officer Dixon. He's the sort of guy when encountered in a bar might either hug you or punch you, but you're pretty sure it'll be the latter. The behavior of this man is all too real, all too familiar. The world roils with these angry men and America provides legions in its own disturbing variations. But the writer/director is only interested in the flashes of violence and contrasting pathos of such guys who don't normally know what to do with their emotions. There's certainly no sense of where the violence is coming from, nor even a realistic character in which the extremes make sense. <br />
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There's nothing wrong with trying to have a full sense of these characters, these man entrusted with this high profile job, a job with so much potential for things to go so very awry, due to circumstance, their own shortcomings, or both. But like his Officer Dixon, McDonagh gives us only violence or awkward embraces, not much insight in between. Chief Willoughby, we find out, charmingly swears in front of his angelic children, is very happily married to a beautiful wife, and...oh yeah, he's dying. We are made privy to an extended idyll which is the Chief's last day with his family before he kills himself to spare them his unpleasant and inevitable decline.<br />
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Woody Harrelson's voiceoover narrates a letter to his shocked wife, nobly enumerating the reasons for his bold act. We also hear him later in letters to Mildred and Officer Dixon. As for the latter, he tells his underling that he believes him to be a good man who's been soured by a run of bad luck. Again, nothing wrong with trying to understand these guys, but there's a simple mindedness and even detachment from reality here that makes something like <i>Crash</i> (and its own troubled cop played by Matt Dillon) seem subtle by comparison. And the chronic violence and misbehavior of police officers, particularly as it lands on people of color, is a bigger problem then some guys in badges going through a tough time. <br />
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For all its seeming verbal phosphorescence, for all the dark humor for which it has been lauded, "Three Billbaords" only rarely registers something more substantial than the thrusts of a shock value comedian. Perhaps the strongest reaction of the two audiences among which I've seen the film is to a line in a restaurant encounter between Mildred and her abusive (domestic violence, like virtually every other substantial issue in the story, is allowed to briefly flare for dramatic effect and then is tidily boxed up like it's nothing more than a prop) ex-husband, Charlie (John Hawkes). Charlie, whom we had earlier seen with his fingers pressed tight around Mildred's throat after an argument, admonishes his ex-wife, quoting his decidedly younger girlfriend, Penelope (Samara Weaving), "Violence begets more violence." Mildred's date, James (Peter Dinklage) responds, "Penelope said begets?" It's very funny, a very effective line. But really, it's McDonagh having set up a simple, one-dimensional female character and then knocked her down like a bowling pin. <br />
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The film's sharpest stab is perhaps a parry offered by Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones), who had rented the billboards to Mildred, drawing the ire of the prone to violence Officer Dixon. There's a bizarre barroom exchange between the two that is almost weird enough to have some beer-soaked versimilitude. Officer Dixon, we are surprised to observe, decides to explain to Red that in Cuba, homosexuals are openly persecuted.<br />
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"Do you know what they do to faggots down in Cuba, Welby?"<br />
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"Wow, that's left field....No, what do they do to faggots down in Cuba, Dixon?"<br />
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"They kill 'em! Which it might surprise to learn I am against."<br />
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"I'm not sure if they do kill faggots down in Cuba, Dixon. I know Cuba's human rights record is pretty deplorable when it comes to homosexuality, but killing 'em? Are you sure you ain't thinking of Wyoming?"<br />
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Now that's funny, the sharp, sharp edge of perfect irony, cutting also deep into the the heart of an American truth. It's reminiscent of what might be the only worthwhile scrap from <i>Seven Psychopaths.</i> There's an exchange between Sam Rockwell and Colin Farrel in which the former, an eager if deranged puppy nipping at heels of the hard-drinking screenwriter, Marti, played by Farrel, tries to give him a hard time, explaining that such a
penchant for drink is the legacy of the Irish: "The Spanish have got
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alcoholism," he says. "And what do Americans have?, Marti asks.
"Tolerance,"the Rockwell character deadpans. <br />
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Without stretching too far, one could argue that "Three
Billboards," even with all it's seeming appeals to liberalism, is
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status quo of American society. There's a reassurance about law enforcement - even if not quite the dangerous tendency toward sanctification of the police that has occurred post-9/11 - that is out of place here.<br />
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There's also in "Three Billbaords" a kind of savoring of vigilantism. Laugh, if you want at Mildred kneeing two uncooperative high school kids in the groin in succession - one a boy, one a girl; he's quite enlightened, this McDonagh. But more than a woman understandably distraught, Mildred strikes out like a wounded child in her pain, with no conception of repercussions. McDonagh tries to give Mildred's own disregard of the law and the well being of others the air of a holy war. He's actually done no more than give us a poorly drawn character who's no more than a tool for the screenwriter's bad instincts. And he's wasted a typically committed performance from Frances McDormand. <br />
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Ultimately, Mildred decides to join the redeemed Officer Dixon in hunting down the man both had thought might be the long-sought villain who raped and killed Mildred's daughter. Even when the hard-won forensic evidence exonerates the admittedly menacing drifter of the crime in question, the unlikely desperadoes decide to go after him anyway. No so unlike American foreign policy of the past 15 years or so; we're pretty sure you did something bad or are going to eventually, so we're going to take this big gun and fire first. <br />
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"Three Blllboards" gives us all of that dubious material and an interest in the marginalization and mistreatment of people of color that goes about as far as making the white people in the story (and in the audience) feel righteous. Exploitation would be another way of stating the matter. Mildred's co-worker in a souvenir shop, Denise (Amanda Warren) is present in the story mainly to offer a kind of "you go girl" to Mildred's effort to rattle the cage of the local police and later be jailed when Officer Dixon decides to get at Mildred through her friend. Darrell Britt-Gibson is Jerome, significantly playing a role that involves pasting Mildred's provocations on those billboards. Veteran actor Clarke Peters gets a few more lines as the African American chief chosen to replace Chief Willoughby after his suicide, his presence perhaps the least probable plot contrivance in a film full of them. <br />
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McDonagh's flirting with race issues is consistent with the social shortcuts in his execrable <i>Seven Psychopaths.</i> The fact that two of the psychopaths, Hans and Zachariah, have African American partners seems a case of throwing the races together, both for a kind of unlikely bonhomie and the appearance that something more bold and real is actually happening. It's as unlikely as the Brendan Gleason character having had an African American wife in In Bruges, murdered many years previous to the action of the film. That phantom person of color appears briefly in the story so the Gleason character can chastise a drug-addled little person for expounding on a race war to come.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Amanda Waren</span></td></tr>
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Adrift within their characters as written and embarking on a road trip to kill a man who clearly was not involved in the grisly rape and murder driving the story in "Three Billboards," the avengers acknowledge that they may be vigilantes with flagging interest in their vague reckoning. They seem rebels without cause or clue, whether from inadequate justice or just an indifferent universe. Mildred wryly says that they'll decide whether or not to follow through on the planned murder when they get there. </div>
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This final twist of plot is a relief which allows the audience to feel better about these troubled souls, themselves and the whole enterprise of the film. However, to really consider all that transpires before the unlikely road trip bonhomie between Mildred and Officer Dixon, you might think that the audacious Mr. McDonagh has lost the courage of his convictions. Or perhaps there never really was any conviction from the start. It's a wild ride in <i>Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,</i> but we, like the well-armed roatrippers, are on a road to nowhere. </div>
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dbThe Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-36662386502779175192017-11-12T12:28:00.000-08:002017-12-18T17:40:04.566-08:00The Florida Project<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Motel life. Bria Vinaite in The Florida Project </span></td></tr>
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Fuuuck you! Lest we miss these final, flagrant word from Halley (Bria Vinaite) in Sean Baker's <i>The Florida Project</i>, the director practically inserts his camera into roaring mouth of the young woman. This close close up is both typical of Sean Baker the director and Sean Baker the humanist. There's arguably not much admirable to be found in Halley, but Baker lets her speak, or shout her piece. This before <i>The Florida Project </i>at its climax spins off into high and sad irony like a firework into the night sky. </div>
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One of our best and most valuable filmmakers, Mr. Baker continues to present us with the travails of those scrapping at the edges of the American economy and society, or at least those generally beyond the interest of politicians, demographers and the like. Read many reviews of the <i>The Florida Project </i>and you will regularly be served variations on the word margin. True enough, many of the characters in Baker's half dozen features operate, in a sense, on the margins of our greater culture. And yet. As with the director's previous films, set in New York and Los Angeles, there are cites within cities, very different realities existing almost side by side, often sharing the same squares of sidewalk and strips of asphalt. The close but yet so far - from prosperity or just more comfortable illusion - nature of the lives in <i>The Florida Project</i> might be the writer/director's saddest variation yet on the theme. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">The leading ladies of Sean Baker's <i>Tangerine</i></span></td></tr>
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Baker has proven rather a scrapper himself. If you've followed the man's career, if you have seen most or all of his films, it's a bit jarring to hear Cool and the Gang's exuberant "Celebration" while the white script of <i>The Florida Project's </i>opening credits appear. The rights to the song may well have exceeded the entire budget of Baker's previous <i>Tangerine</i> (2015), famously shot on iPhones. </div>
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Some of the invention and immediacy of <i>Tangerine</i> was borne of necessity. Baker had something like <i>The Florida Project </i>in mind after his excellent <i>Starlet</i> (2012), but lacked the funding to go forward. So, felicitously, the world got <i>Tangerine,</i> the story of two transgender sex workers in one of those cities within a city, an alternative Hollywood both bleak and vibrant. The warm reception and relative success of <i>Tangerine</i> brought Baker the means to shoot on location in Florida and employee a couple of professional actors. </div>
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One of the pros is Willem Dafoe, himself something of an overlooked national resource. Dafoe is Bobby Hicks, manager of the Magic Castle Motel, where Halley and her daughter Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) proceed with an existence very much out loud, if a bit tenuous. And there's old Willem, lean as ever as the motel manager, seemingly put upon by the many demands of job, employer and motley guests. Bobby Hicks defaults to his own ample humanism behind a pretty flimsy veil of gruffness. But as any man who would survive in his position, he knows when to harden, as when dealing with a would-be pedophile who shows up on the motel property and takes too close an interest in Mooney and a few other oblivious children. </div>
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Dafoe falls as richly into character as ever. And as Bria Vinaite tells it in interview, the veteran actor was both generous with advice and admirable in treating his inexperienced colleagues as equals on set. It is with those callow actors that Sean Baker has excelled throughout his career. That ability says a lot about Baker's professionalism under even the most modest of filming circumstances. It also speaks to the trust he's won from people of very disparate backgrounds and his willingness to immerse himself into any environment that he's chosen to depict.</div>
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Baker is exceptional not only with the nonprofessional actors from whom he draws impressively natural performances, but the manner in which he sometimes finds those performers. As with one of the minor characters in <i>Tangerine, </i>Baker found Bria Vinaite online, intrigued enough by her Instagram feed to offer her a role in his film. </div>
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There's any number of moments in <i>The Florida Project</i> in which someone as new to acting as Ms. Vinaite could get passably by on attitude. But Halley is a deeply incised enough figure that Vinaite must do more than flounce her way from scene to scene, a whirlwind of long limbs, a breastplate of tattoos, a mane than that descends to washed-out aquamarine and a ready floe of rude verbiage delivered in hand-me-down cadence and accent.<br />
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You might not see many more affecting things on film this year than Halley's face, regarding Moonee as she enjoys a relatively lavish breakfast. Particularly down on their luck, Halley sneaks the two of them into an adjacent hotel so her daughter can enjoy a good meal at its buffet. It's a moment when Halley's bravado, almost as permanent as those tattoos, is almost entirely stripped from her. She doesn't eat, but simply watches her daughter savor the food that might as well be the product of another planet, served as it is daily a short walk from the pink Magic Castle where they reside. Baker has Vinaite look directly into the camera, and she manages the sad, sobered, immemorial mask of a parent who knows she is failing her child. </div>
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Like much of the juxtaposition in <i>The Florida Project</i>, Mooney is all childish abandon in contrast to her mother as she devours the offerings of the breakfast buffet. This just one of many scenes in which young Brooklyn Prince, a child actor from the Orlando area, shines and practically devours the camera amongst the raspberries and strawberries (not good to eat at the same time, she realizes), the pancakes and all else that make up her sitting.</div>
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<i>The Florida Project</i> does, in many ways, belong to Mooney and the talented 7-year-old who plays her. Baker has said that<i> The Little Rascals</i> was one of the influences for this story, which is framed by scenes of Mooney and friends running from one place to the next, just as the soundtrack returns to an instrumental version of "Celebration" at film's end. That <i>Little Rascals</i> element, the joy to be found in the hijinks of Mooney and the other motel children amid their hardscrabble lives lends <i>The Florida Project </i>its moments of charm and comedy.<br />
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<a href="http://filmmakermagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_2763.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://filmmakermagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_2763.jpg" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="180" width="320" /></a>These lighter moments in <i>The Florida Project</i> are not simply a matter of trying to leaven a pretty flat expanse of dough, it's a lesson Baker apparently learned from his leads in <i>Tangerine. </i> Tough though life on the streets was for his characters (and actors), the film's stars, Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez convinced Baker to include comedic anecdotes amid harsher realities, which speak, by extension to the characters' resilience and complexity. It's a common mistake of well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) directors - reduce a downtrodden person or people to sad creatures who can only sing the blues, and a single-note blues at that. </div>
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Much as he was working with a budget that could apparently pay everybody involved in T<i>he Florida Proeject,</i> Baker found out how a bigger army can be harder to marshal when he wanted to attack with the speed and relative invisibility of a film guerilla. </div>
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One of the ways in which Halley makes money is to buy knock-off designer perfume at wholesale stores and sell it to guests at more upscale hotels nearby. Baker's wanted to shoot Halley's attempts to sell the perfume to actual guests of the hotels and hopefully get signed releases after the fact. But he found it was very difficult to slyly observe any encounter between Bria Vinaite and an unsuspecting tourist while he had a fairly large crew lurked nearby. The director found his usual attempts at such spontaneity hamstrung by the needs of his continuity person and others on
the crew who needed to have a clear idea of what he planned ahead of
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Sean Baker's career has, after a fashion, paralleled that of filmmaker and film professor Ramin Barani. Like Baker's two New York-set films, <i>Take Out</i> (2004) and <i>Prince of Broadway </i>(2008), Bahrani's first two films, both essential viewing, involve stories of immigrants hustling to round up enough scraps from the city's massive economy to get by. As Bahrani graduated from <i>Man Push Cart</i> (2005) and <i>Chop Shop</i> (2007), to bigger budgets, he did so with with diminishing returns. <i>Goodbye Solo </i>(2008) is a lovely, aching transition from the heart and lyricism of Bahrani's New York immigrant films to those set in Iowa (<i>At Any Price</i>) and post-2008 Florida (<i>99 Homes</i>). With those two most recent films, there clearly was an attempt to construct bigger stories for a bigger audience, but the overheated plots left us with something not nearly as affecting as his earlier efforts.<br />
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In interview, Sean Baker has, on at least one occasion, likened his difficulties in making <i>The Florida Project</i> to those of Francis Ford Coppola with <i>Apocalypse Now</i>. Well...we'll forgive Mr. Baker, unaccustomed as he his with with a production of any size, for his lack of perspective. Had he attempted to shoot <i>The Florida Project </i>in, say...the Everglades...during a hurricane...while, perhaps...a small war broke out between locals....then, it might have been an apt comparison (if you haven't yet seen H<i>earts of Darkness, </i>which chronicles Coppola's struggles in making<i> Apocalypse Now, </i>see it at once).<br />
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Fortunately, Sean Baker survived his bigger production with no loss of insight, compassion and the sense of immersion we have seen with his earlier films. Drive around Orlando, not so far from Disney and those other theme parks, and you might half expect to see Halley and Moonee going about their lives. And in sense, that's probably just what you would see if you ventured into the area's less desirable weigh stations, where those sunny pastel colors sheath the cinder block buildings and lives therein in a thick coat of irony.<br />
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The beaten up Magic Castle motel room of the mother and child seems all too real. As Mooney and her friends roam between properties, you repeatedly expect something bad to happen. This might be from nature, maybe getting too close to an alligator from a swampy area which the kids traverse by means of a makeshift plywood bridge. Or there are the dangers from man that seem to lurk, in the form of the pedophile or unseen squatters at a nearby abandoned development, whose empty buildings stand like pastel headstones amid rising grass. Moonee and her friends don't find any of the transient residents of the abandoned buildings, but do manage to set one of them on fire, something that Halley films on her phone with glee, while noting that the unexpected blaze is better than the Internet. <br />
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Ultimately, Hallee's hustling takes a more dubious turn, and the real danger awaiting these lives finally washes in. You might well say the feckless woman brought this on herself and her child, but that doesn't seem to be the director's point of view. In the <i>Florida Project</i> and elsewhere in his work, Sean Baker offers only a compassionate and through examination of the lives he chooses to illuminate. Throughout his half dozen features, there are drunk white guys (his first film, <i>Four Letter Words</i>), transgender sex workers of color and quite a lot humanity in between, constituencies various of us might find appealing, off-putting, worthy of our defense or scorn. Unlike so many voices contributing to the cacophony of our culture, conservative and and liberal alike, Sean Baker seems concerned not at all with politics, just people. And isn't that refreshing? </div>
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Drive Route 192 through Kissimmee and Orlando, Florida and you'll see a good bit of tacky American past and present, illusion and reality, almost side by side at times, much as all of it tends to be colorfully clad. Director Sean Baker sends a devastated Moonee and a friend on a sad and fanciful sojourn at the conclusion of <i>The Florida Project.</i> It's like an earlier bittersweet trip arranged by Halley to witness Disney Fireworks from a good vantage point outside the boundary of the park. But Moonee and her friend make it this time, as that instrumental version of "Celebration" pipes with seeming triumph. And irony settles on these children, these lives, as ruthlessly as night. </div>
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<br />The Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-77874171262271791852017-10-05T16:34:00.001-07:002018-12-05T13:19:56.741-08:00Urania II<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cafe at the Urania National Film Theater, Budapest.</td></tr>
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While we still have our grand rail stations in America - Grand Central, Union (Chicago and Los Angeles), we would seem to have nothing like the above ground zeppelin hangar vastness of some of the great European rail portals. So it is with Budapest's Keleti Station. </div>
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<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dd/Budapest_Keleti_teto_1.jpg/1280px-Budapest_Keleti_teto_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dd/Budapest_Keleti_teto_1.jpg/1280px-Budapest_Keleti_teto_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Even in the midst of a journey of one's own, how peaceful it is to wander into such a barn of existential possibility. To sit on a bench adjacent to one of the platforms as if to board some train to a nearby suburb or far-flung city. To be still among all the slightly feverish coming and going. Until you are reminded that you have not had a proper meal yet this day and it is high time you go and find a cheeseburger. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Keleti Station, Budapest. </span></td></tr>
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Street scenes and images, Pest. <br />
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A lazy afternoon seems not out of place with the light if insistent rain. But with the evening, the conversation must continue. A panini restaurant along the Danube in Ujlipotvaros. </div>
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And then the Budapest Jazz Club. As at the Liszt, you understand not one word of the patter from the female singer, who's clearly either the beloved of the guitarist or seems eager to assume the role. But when most of the songs begin, the lyrics are in English. Even more than the words, you feel that the music flows imperfectly in an American language, arguably THE American language, jazz. The river formed at the confluence of the European and the African musical traditions. You know this language and you have heard it spoken much more eloquently, with much more insistent originality. But you don't exactly require Charlie Parker or John Coltrane, Dinah Washington or Sarah Vaughan, at the height of their powers. It's all pleasing enough, from the somewhat surprising arrangement of the Miles Davis by way of George Gershwin's "Summertime," to the lovely, surprising rendition of Radiohead's "High and Dry." <br />
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And can there be many more evocative experiences than a tram ride by night through an unfamiliar city - the lights, the weathered or the shining faces of these unknown buildings, the people about you in the tram car and wondering after the particular pathos of their existence? </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Erzsebetvaros, Pest. </td></tr>
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A particularly curious time to walk amongst Soviet kitsch when Russia is
exerting an increasingly malicious influence on world affairs. But the lure of Soviet Statuary and grand socialist gesture is fairly irresistible. And the trip to Memento Park, southwest of the city center, is a minor adventure in itself, a relay of Metro and regional buses. <br />
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The park is really about a half hour's work, even if you choose to check out (beyond all the looming statuary) the "barrack" across the road with its exhibit on the 1956 Revolution, carried out and suffered mainly by the very young of Budapest, as well as that cinematic classic, <i>Life Of An Agent,</i> about secret police training methods in Hungary (lots of useful information about breaking into flats and gathering damning information).<br />
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Back at the ticket office, adjacent to the well-abused Trabant, the "peoples' car," you ask the woman behind the the counter if all the Soviet martial tunes that play in a constant flow of ironic political muzak drive her crazy. Yes, she acknowledges, they do. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;">"Oh no, am missink last bus to Minsk!" For if films have taught us nothing else, they have taught us that foreigners speak charmingly broken English in curious local accents. Memento Park, Budapest. </span> </span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">How many fingers am I holding up, pigs drunken on the rotting fruit of capitalism?!!</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">"Shut the fuck up, Donny! V.I. Lenin. Vladimir Ilyich Ulanov!</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">While our knowledge of cyrillic is, shall we say, imperfect, the inscription would seem to read "And we shall raise our Soviet blankets! And they shall transform into great, socialist seals and devour whole the measly doves of peace!" Yes, we are pretty sure that's about it. Memento Park, Budapest. </span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Segments of a frieze once attached to a statue of Jospeh Stalin, until Papa Joe was yanked down by young revolutionaries in 1956. </td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Muvesz Cafe, Pest. </td></tr>
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Afternoon's gentility: grand cafe and then cocktails at the Gresham Palace (now the Four Seasons).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">The good life: a notebook, a pen and a Vieux Carre at the Four Seasons Gresham Palace, Budapest. </span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></td></tr>
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It didn't seem possible that you could face a Thursday in Budapest with less sleep than had been the case for its predecessors. And yet...with possibly two hours of sleep to your credit you have arrived, sadly, at your last day in the city. And like the alien nights, this is no time for sleep. <br />
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Into Buda and the Buda Hills! To be refreshed by the autumnal air and abundant verdancy! To submit, willingly, to some tourist ritual and partake of the area's charming variety of conveyance: the Cog-wheel Railway, the Children's Railway and then a chair lift down. But alas, the Cog-wheel Railway (officially, Budapest tram #60 for those keeping score at home) is out of operation for a few days. You first assay the 3.75 km climb by foot and until your tired body and not at all amused and somewhat asthmatic lungs say, "I don't think so." Actually, during your brief slog uphill along the single track of the Cog-wheel Railway, a car stops abreast and the older couple would seem to offer you a ride. But in your tired diffidence, you wave them off and slap shoe soles back downhill. <br />
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Well, Plan B. The Napraforgo utca modernist houses, a dash of Buda Bauhaus. This turns out to be a pretty good schlep in its own right, though mercifully over Chicago-flat terrain. And there is much of that Buda verdancy for which you have made this trip. The walk along Szillagyi Erzabet fasor is a kind of fall idyll. And amid this suburban ease you feel the tug of autumns immemorial, the season with perhaps the greatest undertow of opiate nostalgia. Here too, school children free from their day's labors, chattering in their way, eagerly affixing themselves to small groups. The illusion that it has always been thus and will always be. <br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Napraforgo utca, Buda.</span></div>
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Time in a foreign city, a different city than one's own, can truly be a fling. A heady fuck the consequences, 'let's do this thing" that leaves you spent and a little sad, all the more so for how well it all went. And then it's almost time to say goodbye. And it's quite tempting to do this preemptively, to recede into one's self defensively before it is quite necessary to do so. But no, despite the dark descending early and heavily into one's Erzsebetvaros courtyard, the night must be assayed, the relationship that has formed must be honored, the last dance must be allowed its time and place, <i>valse triste</i> though it may be. </div>
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Back to the grand Urania then. Down Dom utca, happening Erzsebetvaros seems surprisingly quiet this Thursday night. But when you turn toward the busy thoroughfare that is Rakoczi ut, you see that here, as in an American city, especially any college town, the young are out and hiving about favored bars on a Thursday night, getting a jump on the weekend ahead. </div>
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Where the throngs are not is at the Urania National Films theater, where you have arrived for a screening of T<i>he Beguiled.</i> When you go upstairs to the theater cafe, you have it to yourself until a young couple take their places at a table on the other side of the spacious room. Scarcely a half dozen take seats in the auditorium for the screening. </div>
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All of Sofia Coppola's films (we have not seen <i>The Bling Ring</i>) concern themselves, to one degree or another, with birds confined to their gilded cages. It seems that one of the criticisms of Coppola's most recent film is that it pretty well ignores the pain and politics of The Civil War. But that is largely the point. Beautifully, consistently spectral, whether within its plantation setting or among the mists and swoony vegetation of the Louisiana location, <i>The Beguiled </i>shows us a kind of husbandry perverse and run amok. Social ritual and repressed sexuality rotting on the vine. It actually seems of a piece with Ms. Coppola's father's portion of A<i>pocalypse Now,</i> that similarly spectral interval at the French plantation in the depths of Vietnam, equally rotting, incongruous and oblivious to its greater context. </div>
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Back out into the streets of Erzsebetvaros, past all the bars, some fairly bereft, others magnets of youthful attention. Their city and their time. Let us say goodbye without too much ceremony. Everything that has needed to be said has been said. Goodnight Budapest. </div>
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<br />The Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-21110887683804296442017-10-04T14:25:00.000-07:002018-05-22T11:23:54.313-07:00Urania<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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You learn, hopefully early on, that even in the midst of some great experience, there is abnegation, meaninglessness. There is sadness where you are supposed to find only happiness. Darkness that actually helps to define light, what have you. Yadda, fucking, yadda yadda yadda. </div>
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And so there are lost days, even autumn days aching with crisp perfection. Even days when you have all the riches of a new city at your feet. You don't sleep well and awaken late. Are held hostage by banalities and taunted by the hieroglyphs of foreign washer-dryers. By simple banking transactions which are rendered Byzantine in their necessary steps and several financial establishments. </div>
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But you are able to drift down to that nice stationers in tourist-thronged Belvaros. Jump on the 2 tram which runs along the Pest side of the Danube. Alight before the city's fairly stupendous Parliament which would seem to humble the Gothic pretensions of the English houses of parliament. And you do see Lechner's former Postal Savings Bank. This before you purchase a sampling of Hugarian alcohol - a small bottle of Unicum, some red wine of the region, a bottle of the country's legendary dessert wine, Tokaji, before trudging sleep-deprived back to your flat. </div>
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Easy enough to joke about in the light of day. But in an alien place, even a safe and well-appointed place, without the recourse to the oblivion of sleep at 1:00, 2:00...3:00 a.m. Even with all of that Unicum and Tokaji to your credit, glass after glass....Well, at such times, you find yourself confined to a kind of existential interrogation room. The stark light of the swinging light bulb is replaced by an almost absolute darkness. The buzzing of the light or the brutal questions or blows of the interrogator replaced by the beating of your heart, the only sound in the world. And you are profoundly alone. These are long, long hours my friends. </div>
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Sleep comes at some point on the heels of the dawn and you are mercifully cut loose from consciousness for a few hours. Awaken in somewhat better straits than was the case in the middle of the night, but still unsettled. What is called for is a visit to church. </div>
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As seems to be the case with all life's necessities in Budapest, the high cathedral is but a reasonable walk from your flat. This the Urania National Film Theater. A true cathedral of the motion picture. Every bit a movie palace. </div>
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Church. Heaven. Home. The Urania National Film Theater in Budapest. <br />
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And thank you sweet Jesus, Allah be praised and all other appropriate doxologies, but as you take a seat in this glorious place, you can't help but think about poor Annie Dillard. The brilliant Ms. Dilliard searching for a conventional god in her sharp and unconventional way as chronicled in her essay "An Expedition to the Pole," from <i>Teaching A Stone to Talk.</i> Poor Annie sitting in a Catholic Church, eager to consume all that ornate ritual and tradition, only to find presiding hippiness in the form of a singing group called "Wildflowers." So much for all the Latin and incense. </div>
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Thus you take your seat in the Urania for a matinee screening of, um...<i>Victoria and Abdul,</i> which might more honestly be entitled<i> How Vicky Got Her Groove Back.</i> Now, lest anyone get the wrong idea....you do, according to the strictures of international law, LOVE Judy Dench. You really do. And the film does take some pains to portray this queen as not only a keen woman but a real one, who by her own acknowledgement is gluttonous, cantankerous and several other unflattering things. And this is to some degree based on a real story.</div>
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This is, of course, Dame Judy's second time in the royal saddle playing the long-serving Victoria. <i>Victoria and Abdul</i> is something of a sequel, twenty years later, to <i>Mrs. Brown,</i> in which the lonely widowed queen enjoys the company of someone only slightly less suspect than an Indian, a Scot (Billy Connolly). </div>
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Well, <i>Vicky Gets Her Groove </i>back is perfectly high minded (Indians are people too), skewers the English aristocracy (have there ever been larger fish to blast within the limited confines of a barrel?) and is a film of some feeling....</div>
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And yet, we do have the specter of Simon Callow playing (and singing) Puccini. One feared, for a moment that it was Geoffrey Rush behind the unconvincing facial hair and ridiculous Italian accent. </div>
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One wonders, is Geoffrey Rush the Simon Callow of Australia, or is Callow the Rush of England? Discuss amongst yourselves.....</div>
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Where were we? Oh yes, Victoria, Victoria...'toria, Victoria (as the Kinks song goes). The talented Adeel Aktar is on hand to play Abdul's companion and mainly to serve as the film's comic relief and flypaper conscience. But for all its attempt at a kind of post-colonial sensibility, there is Abdul kissing the foot of a Victoria statue at film's end. Piffle like <i>Victoria and Abdul </i>reaffirms the absurd status quo even while it would seem to turn it on its fat ass.</div>
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And yet....the forgettable if insidiously easily-consumed film aside, there you sit in this grand place, mainly among elderly Hungarians enjoying their matinee. This kind of gilded, gothic (a kind of groin vaulting across the ceiling, massive mirrors that rise from floor level with ornate frames to converge in a pointed arch) movie palace. Seemingly a miracle to be here at all, all the more so when you consider events of the the past year. Lying on a gurney for upwards of six hours with your heart stopped, heart repaired like a malfunctioning carburetor. Well, you lived...you got out of the house, you wandered through Budapest, flew at 37,000 feet. Here you are. How strange it all is. Since it is your life, how much completely unearned privilege amongst the small doses of strife. </div>
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Let us go then and see what we can do with the rest of the day.</div>
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<br />The Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-15168159930903296142017-10-04T12:50:00.000-07:002018-05-22T11:29:10.690-07:00Muvesz<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Budapest is grand, frequently beautiful and fortunately a bit dingy in the best of ways. You are renting a flat on Csengery utca in a happening, somewhat scruffy area of the city known as Erzsebetevaros. Yes, it's a rather hip part of town these days. Yet your courtyard building gives away no secrets behind its stern and weathered edifice across the street from a vacant lot. The Airbnb flat within is outfitted with all the mod cons, yet the inner courtyard and stairwell could prove a credible location for a film decades if not a century past (replete with a stairwell and corridor to the street so dark of an evening they seem the perfect location for foul play).</div>
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A great city can paralyze with its choices. So first, decide on a great building and go there. The building in this case, the Geological Institute, designed by the great Odon Lechner, frequently called, if a bit reductively, "the Hungarian Gaudi." Lechner a bright light in the branch of Art Nouveau known in this part of Europe as Secessionism. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMMLognHZemOBz0awG3yxhyRAt2si-bEU8soTOCk3BsaeE9U7vq8TpZFCTb9r5vxUKotq43h7VM23ADD-XGQeaPb6dlMiDTsSh7AQUFhTqa9TlevObpPQexck7N_u3aI3Fe2s1y_d_bP5Q/s1600/IMG_0079.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMMLognHZemOBz0awG3yxhyRAt2si-bEU8soTOCk3BsaeE9U7vq8TpZFCTb9r5vxUKotq43h7VM23ADD-XGQeaPb6dlMiDTsSh7AQUFhTqa9TlevObpPQexck7N_u3aI3Fe2s1y_d_bP5Q/s320/IMG_0079.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Geological Institute and (right and below) The Museum of</span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Applied </span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Arts</span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"> by Odon Lechner. </span></td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqKvyRMUIiuZogvwaKDFI7bJnrJ5o7AILsKrGSeBJkIopBI9JQI1LhsGRNy6nVudXPoUI6thNaeZhshhMx5Y0hiGoHJ_Q_LCbiHZ7AjkuOVpQs5J360Fn9BwjtNyBcBpEK3PhdAKtPGfiP/s1600/IMG_0097.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqKvyRMUIiuZogvwaKDFI7bJnrJ5o7AILsKrGSeBJkIopBI9JQI1LhsGRNy6nVudXPoUI6thNaeZhshhMx5Y0hiGoHJ_Q_LCbiHZ7AjkuOVpQs5J360Fn9BwjtNyBcBpEK3PhdAKtPGfiP/s320/IMG_0097.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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Your first full day in the city, and after roaming around and gaping at Art Nouveau edifices, you finally alight for lunch at Bagolyvar, a traditional Hungarian place not far removed from the city park and zoo. Not quite so pricey as the neighboring Gundel, but still an unquestionably a formal dining experience. </div>
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The world may be getting smaller, not always in the best of ways. But the creep of homogeneity does have its sublime moments. As in this self-consciously elegant Hungarian eatery, replete with officious and well-bedecked waitstaff. You occupy the dining room with a couple of Japanese tourists, a group from France and several tables of older Hungarians indulging in this formality, this clinging to a more genteel past perhaps, this reverence for white linen table clothes and crisp service. And yet, the song coming through the speakers is, of all things, James Brown's "Try Me." Here we are. At the end of days? Beginning of other days? United, let us hope, by the genius of Mr. Brown. </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Faces of Art Nouveau in Budapest.</span><br />
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Surreal is probably the wrong word. It is certainly over-applied. Perhaps dreamlike, perhaps hyper-real. </div>
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So your attempts to describe the atmosphere in the surprisingly intimate great hall of the Liszt Academy, not so far from your temporary dwelling place in Erzsebetvaros. You sit among the predominately Hungarian audience for a program of Brahms, Beethoven and Rameau. The conductor, bedecked relatively modestly in some sort of grey, banded collar outer garment, provides a rather lengthy introduction to the evening's program. Fortunately, you understand not a word of Magyar and all of this is lost on you. But the old fellow is pretty cute and more than a little endearing in his almost rubbery admonitions to the orchestra, once the show gets going. </div>
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When it is all over, the appreciative crowd first provide the usual rising and cresting waves of applause. But then the clapping becomes rhythmic. "What is this, a football match?," you can't help thinking. It actually seems a bit fascistic, this insistent, rhythmic clapping. But you eventually join in. Because you want to acknowledge our moving attempts to provide our own divinity.<br />
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As pleasing as the performance was, it's not quite as good as a weathered art nouveau facade, the like of which can be found all over Erzsebetvaros and the rest of Budapest. Because upon such building faces can be found both our striving and our vulnerability. Whereas these expressions of high culture are both something fine but also an attempt at advertising, a Facebook "look at our grand lives" centuries before Facebook. And yet behind that advertising, behind that thin veneer is also vulnerability. So you clap like it's a football match and our team just scored the winning goal. </div>
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The grand hall of the Liszt Academy, Budapest. <br />
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Sunday morning in Budapest and the night was very scant in its allowance of sleep. Should you play the vampire and finally take your repose once the sun is visible through the windows, or make an early start out into the city? Surprisingly yourself, you do the latter. Pest is quite sleepy at 8:00 a.m., while you buy a weekly transit pass and make your first foray into the Metro. But the tourists across the Danube in Buda are early risers and swarming about the fanciful towers of the Fisherman's Bastion atop the castle hill. You pause for a moment to appreciate the view back across the river and then descend the steps. Fortunately, tourists, like zombies or lowing cows are easily lost. You proceed on a hard target search for breakfast, a branch of a Budapest pancake restaurant called Nagyi Palacsintazoja (say that ten times fast, or once for that matter). </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Happiness is sometimes such a simple thing. Two pancakes - one sweet, one savory - and espresso in Buda of a Sunday morning. </span></td></tr>
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Expressions of Art Nouveau in Vizivaros, Buda.<br />
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Really, what better place to spend a brilliant early autumn afternoon than at the cemetery? It's not exactly Pere Lachaise or Highgate, but Budapest's Kerpesi Cemetery is a fairly grand and pastoral expanse of land devoted to the vanity of erecting monuments to corpses. It truly is a lot of conceit and foolishness (stroll around Graceland Cemetery in Chicago and the profusion of obelisks is like so many phalluses, sadly swinging through eternity after some sort of significance), this setting aside of land and last-ditch advertising. But at the same time, such places are often welcome plots of peaceful green space in the midst of great cities. Pose pious, step gingerly or urinate upon the dead - it hardly matters. But while you're here, why not find the grave of worthy Antal Szerb, whose great <i>Journey By Moonlight </i>you are reading just now. But there's no finding Szerb, early to his grave courtesy of a World War II death march. But you do stumble upon the grave of one of Hungary's most esteemed poets, Endre Ady. You recite the two Ady poems you know and assure old Endre that he is, indeed (as the persona of one of his poems decrees) the "cemetery king." </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Grave of poet Endre Ady, Kerpesi Cemetery, Budapest. </span></td></tr>
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Even with the luxury of no looming work week, there's something life-affirming in the Sunday night visit to the cinema. Fuck the calendar, the week, the temptation to hunker down and give the usual routine your best energy. Yes, fuck all of that. Let's go to the movies. So, to the Muvesz Mozi (cinema), just adjacent to Erzsebetvaros on the main street along which run the 4 and 6 trams. </div>
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A charming place the Muvesz, with each modest screening room named after a director. You take a seat in the Bunuel room (no Bergman?) for <i>Lady Macbeth.</i> You've seen the film before, but are quite happy to be reminded what an eloquent, acerbic, stark piece of work it is.<br />
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You see the young bride, Katherine, (Florence Pugh), regarded as essentially chattel, the braids of her hair like woodworking detail in the stiff settee in which she is posed on more than one occasion. You see that even worse than being a woman in this world, there is the even more tenuous existence of a woman of color, the servant Anna (Naomi Ackie), whose silent scream after Katherine perpetrates murder on her oppressive father-in-law is perhaps the film's most eloquent moment. You see this Ms. Pugh, to this point only having worked in television, so eminently ready for a bigger screen. This, my friends, is an arrival, with exclamation points provided by the young woman's redoubtable eyebrows.<br />
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You enjoy this Sunday evening at the cinema for these reasons. And for the fact that nary a bright little screen can be espied for the duration of the film, despite the fact that Hungarians seem not much less attached to their smart phones than Americans. And for the fact that you walk home along the boulevard called Terez korut which becomes Erzsebet korut, passing the fast food restaurants and the closed shops. And loneliness opens before you like a window to chill air. And while you might long for warmth, you know that this coldness will conjure your blood. It too will make you feel alive. </div>
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dbThe Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-40569217272597451562017-07-30T10:11:00.000-07:002017-10-08T12:51:43.396-07:00Baby Driver<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>B-A-B-Y-DRI-VER!</i> Edgar Wright's sixth film has arrived in the summer of 2017 with all the insistence and irresistibility of a great pop song. Already in his splashy career the Englishman has written better tunes than this. And yet <i>Baby Driver</i> pulses with more precision and originality of expression than most of his contemporaries can approach at their best. Resist if you dare. As summer fare goes, fast, furious and not lobotomized is hard to pass up.</div>
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Wright has apparently had the notion for <i>Baby Driver</i> bouncing around in that energetic mind of his since the 1990s. You can see a version of the film's first scene in a music video for Mint Royale's "Blue Song" Wright directed in 2003. The super kinetic action is certainly a perfect fit for the writer/director's crisp editing, wit and inimitable unison of sound and action. </div>
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<i>Baby Driver</i> both charges from the start line and yet saves it feeling for character and emotion for a bit later. Here one of the way that Wright distinguishes himself from contemporaries and imitators; there is invariably a ghost in the high-octane machine. </div>
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Our young driver (Ansel Eglort), actually named Baby, seems both a mix of the wheelman ciphers from <i>The Driver</i> (a film whose influence transcends its actual quality; though there's no indication that it was an explicit influence on Edgar Wright in this case) and <i>Drive</i>, crossed with the adolescent bluff and sunglasses of Tom Cruise in <i>Risky Business.</i></div>
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When the trio of bank robbers (who make little attempt to hid their bad intentions with their edgy wardrobe choices; as if there's a shop tucked away in an Atlanta mall called Contempo Hood) are ready to exit their red Subaru WRX getaway car, Baby starts Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's "Bell Bottoms" and the game is on. While the heist is taking place, Elgort car dances, drums, lip syncs and even has the windshield wipers working in rhythm. </div>
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Of course, our Baby is cool under pressure and is ridiculously good behind the wheel. These but the first a series of heist and getaway conventions that Edgar Wright trundles into frame, tricks out and sends speeding in unexpected directions. </div>
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We find out in time that Baby's penchant for a constant soundtrack to which he grooves and drives is partially a cover for tinnitus that has afflicted him since a childhood auto accident that made him an orphan. Even after the first successful getaway, we see Baby on a coffee run through the streets of downtown Atlanta, treating the city, it's buildings and traffic as if they are props in his own music video. Fluidly though me may seem to glide through the world, Baby is also a menace on the sidewalks, drawing complaints and chagrined expressions from pedestrians and drivers alike for all the collisions and near-collisions that he causes. It's a charming bit of counterpart to his savant-like progress through the city as a driver. He might be dangerous behind the wheel, but he's clearly a menace on foot. </div>
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Wright plays fast and loose with another of the conventions of heist films, that of the criminal reluctantly (or not so reluctantly) agreeing to a last caper before he goes straight. Such is the situation of Baby, an avid driver but unenthusiastic criminal, particularly when he sees the violence that is logically visited upon victims, bystanders and even cohorts. Baby is responsible after one job for "sunsetting" a vehicle, driving it to a scrap yard and watching both car and fellow crew member crushed at once. <br />
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Baby find himself beholden to a criminal mastermind known as Doc, since the time he made the mistake of stealing Doc's car. And yet Baby is, after all, Baby. Hardly a middle-aged con trying to shuck a life of crime. For that matter, the relationship with the exploitative Doc turns out to be more complicated, have more heart that it appears at first glance. Playing Doc and given ample opportunity to skillfully chew through some scenery is Kevin Spacey. </div>
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One convention of the heist film sadly not updated in <i>Baby Driver</i> is the confinement of women to roles as either the enticement for the anti-hero to walk (or drive) the straight and narrow, or some sort of femme fatale whose involvement is going to mean trouble later (Which invariably is true; no good can come of mixing your criminal and personal lives. Take my word on this.). In the former careworn role enter the very fresh-faced Lily James. </div>
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Despite name badges to the contrary, Ms. James plays a waitress named Debora whom Baby meets while having a solitary meal at the diner where she works. Like most all of the action and relationships in <i>Baby Driver</i>, the charming pair's flirtation and courtship is impelled by the film's rich soundtrack. </div>
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When Baby first casts eyes on the winsome Debora, she's practically strutting her way into work, singing the chorus to Carla Thomas' "B-A-B-Y." Somehow, the music maven Baby doesn't know this namesake song, but he quickly addresses that gap in his collection by repairing to a record store and buying the vinyl. Later, Baby returns the favor by revealing to the waitress her own name song, T-Rex's "Debora." This conversation begins in the diner and concludes with the young couple back to back in a laundromat as the T. Rex song plays, one ear bud to each. Consider it a <i>Lady and the Tramp</i> moment for the 21st century. </div>
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Ms. James might be confined to the role of sun of female luring the male lead from his criminal winter of discontent, but she does it very appealingly. It says something about her range or perhaps the ultimate sweetness of Wright's script that James casts a far brighter light than she ever managed in multiple seasons of Downton Abbey as the vivacious Lady Rose. </div>
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There is nominal female involvement in the criminal action of <i>Baby Driver </i>in the form of Eliza Gonzalez as Darling. Ms. Gonzalez gets a few lines and is allowed to spray around a few waves of ordnance, but mainly she's the arm candy to Buddy (fake names only for these jobs, please). To enjoy a woman more front and center in the summer action, we'll pin our immediate hopes on Ms. Theron in the upcoming <i>Atomic Blonde</i>.</div>
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With Buddy, Jon Hamm adds another shade of darkness to his palette. As another of his criminal cohorts, Bats (Jamie Foxx, very good here) pegs him, Buddy is probably a Wall Street type gone bad (or worse...or would that be better?), on the lam with a woman he met in some den of vice, committing these heists to support a white powder habit. At Buddy's most desperate, Hamm makes him look quite the long-faced demon, eyes goggling slightly, trying to perceive the world through his own fog of malice, desperation and (ultimately) thirst for revenge. </div>
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All of Wright's films, at least those of those widely distributed, have involved some sort of battle royale. It's not a new development in <i>Baby Driver,</i> but the kick-ass climax is producing diminishing returns for the writer/director. When the last job goes wrong, after others are dispatched, it comes down to a desperate battle between Baby and the one-note Buddy. All of this prior to <i>Baby Driver's</i> somewhat storybook conclusion, told in jail-time separation montage for Baby and Debora. </div>
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Fortunately, prior to the big finish and the seemingly happy ending, Edgar Wright keeps his film humming, running and dancing as few if any can match. <i>Baby Driver </i>is stocked with a jukebox that would make a Jim Jarmusch soundtrack blush. This, apparently, not just a matter of the musical sensibilities of the director, but the impressive work of Steven Price in selecting and uncannily syncing the music to the action of the film. Thus, we have the pushing of ATM buttons, the clinking of glasses in a restaurant and much else - but not too much - occurring in perfect step with its soundtrack. If only <i>La La Land</i> had danced like this film. </div>
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<i>Baby Driver </i>pulses not only with an irresistible array of nuggets - Bob & Earl's "Harlem Shuffle," The Detroit Emeralds' "Baby Let Me Take You," Googie Rene's "Smokey Joe's La La" - and a dizzying breadth of genres and moods. Hence, an instrumental interlude from one of Damon Albarn's typically off-kilter Blur compositions, "Chemical World," the mad and accelerating keyboard line perfectly setting (and enhancing) the mood of the action about to go, as the English say, pear-shaped.<br />
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Earlier, another utterly inspired bit of keyboard appropriation, as Dave Brubeck's "Unsquare Dance" is heard while we see Baby playing air piano as a next heist is laid out by Doc. The use of music, especially evocative pop songs, can be a cheap and insidious thing. But it's hard to quarrel with music used this originally, not riding the back of some thundering emotion already in place within us, but managing to create something new out of the synthesis and send us off into new directions of appreciation. </div>
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<i>Baby Driver </i>also distinguishes itself by keeping all the outlandish action as real as possible. Such was the case a couple of years ago, with another refreshing summer blockbuster, George Miller's <i>Mad Max: Fury Road.</i> Miller used the term "in camera" to describe much of the stunt work on his film. The implication is that the action is real, created before the camera, not with some post-production computer wizardly, not the type of clearly fake action that is shoveled (and sadly eagerly consumed) down the throats of movie goers the year round. The driving is real in <i>Baby Driver.</i> Thanks to a veteran crew Edgar Wright is eager to credit, the film's chase sequences are vastly more entertaining than the far-fetched nonsense that often speeds about the multiplex speedway. </div>
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The little red cars speed. Our Baby and Debora are a mighty appealing pair. That great music plays and the body moves. Liken the films of Edgar Wright to human beings and you find in the case of <i>Shaun of the Dead</i> and <i>Hot Fuzz</i> limber frames, real heart and actual intelligence, with something to say about the state of modern England. <br />
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With <i>Baby Driver</i>, the heart is a little more cheaply come by. Our hero is an orphan after all (we call this pulling a Wes Anderson). And there is Baby's mute foster father, a kindly African American man who seems present to provide some easy racial bonhomie. And while the dialog occasionally crackles with wit, <i>Baby Driver</i> hardly approaches the heights of the two first two "Cornetto" films, or even the underappreciated <i>Scott Pilgrim vs. the World</i>. And yet, say all of that about this latest creation of mad Dr. Wright...say that the heart is lacking and the brain a little dim. There's still no denying the body is electric. Rock on. </div>
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<br />The Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-80725667793211561062017-07-27T11:57:00.000-07:002017-07-27T12:09:28.853-07:00Cinerama<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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If you find yourself in Los Angeles with no more pressing decisions than where you shall take your first meal of the day, which film you will see and where...if you are the beneficiary of this unaccountable good fortune, you better get out there and try to live the day as well as you can.<br />
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So you trail along the controlled jungle of your motel's courtyard, various of the guests placed about a metal patio table or contentedly prostrate in pool deck chairs beneath the strengthening sun. You pass through the vestibule of this establishment that could write pulp novels with what it has seen and emerge through the motel's curiously plantation-like facade (the face whitewashed, a broad expanse of porch and a row of imposing, unfluted columns). Into the the Los Angeles morning! Well, the late morning at least. </div>
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You emerge again from the Hollywood and Vine Metro station and decide as the day's voyage is beginning you will seek augury in the stars set into the walkway beneath your feet. This is all very exciting, but then the first star you espy whose name is spelled in gold within its pink star (it's like the whole thing was designed by somebody moonlighting from Frederick's of Hollywood) is Reese Witherspoon. You mean no disrespect to Ms. Witherspoon, but this is not quite the answer you were seeking in these stars. So you decide the next, yes the next star on which you focus will be the one. And sure enough, the next tacky pink star on which your eyes alight is that of old Joe Manciewicz. And you think, now we're talking. But then some time later your feet fall upon the star bestowed upon that cinematic giant, Bobby Flay. And you think, maybe this particular set of tea leaves should be the subject of a factory recall.<br />
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Down Hollywood Boulevard, you settle on an a Middle Eastern restaurant. As many, Jonathan Gold perhaps preeminent among them, have pointed out, numerous of the city's culinary delights are hidden in plain, banal sight in its strip malls. So it is at this joint, probably not quite distinguished enough for Mr. Gold, but who knows; the man gets around. Amongst all the movie popcorn, the gallons of soda and the seamy late-night fast food runs, you realize it's probably a good idea and occasionally throw your body a curve and deliver unto it a platter heaped with organic matter. Not just chicken schwarma, not just hummus and actual lettuce, but even little stalks of beets. Beets, for heaven's sake! You imagine an internal food monitor, generally inured to the flow of manufactured food and drink, practically startled out of his little chair at this unorthodox repast. Speaking in even, Spock-like tones, he says, "It would seem to be organic matter, but we can't be sure. Let us hope for the best." And indeed, you all have a lovely meal. </div>
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Sunset Boulevard is just a few blocks south on Vine, and yonder to the west is the unmistakable shape of the Cinerama Dome. You've never been, and this is to be the day. They're playing Wonder Woman in the dome because, well, everyone is playing Wonder Woman just now. So once more unto the breach with Ms. Gadot you will go. <br />
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But you've got time prior to the next cinema bum afternoon screening, so you wander around Hollywood along the streets mainly south of Sunset Boulevard. Moving west along De Longpre (which makes you happy just to say), you come to the bland police station at Wilcox. But across the street, predictably enough, is a bail bond establishment, perhaps several under one flat roof. This low-slung building, is a riot of old signs and enticements, extending above that flat roof and painted on its facade. Perhaps the strangest bit of juxtaposition here, considering form and fuction, is not the almost cheerful cacophony of the signs, but the row of Christmas lights hung along the eaves of the building.<br />
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Through the relative hush of this residential area, you also see examples of Los Angeles street signs you have never quite noticed before. This the generation that first appeared in the 1940's, with its no-nonsense, "just the facts ma'am" sans serif font on a navy blue field, called the shotgun sign, although they remind you more of a hand with a pointing index finger. <br />
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These neighborhood streets are rich with expansive flowering shrubs and trees, behind which can be found lovely, modest houses. These are mainly enviable bungalows, flatter than their Chicago brethren and sheathed in wood planks instead of brick. The attractiveness and variety of these bungalows sing a seductive song with which the Midwest bungalow can't quite compete; so it goes with the West Coast. The most encouraging thing here is scale. The size of the average North American dwelling (and this definitely includes our seemingly more civilized neighbors to the north in Canada) has increased radically since the mid-20th century. But here are houses low to the ground, not far removed from the street, modest in scale. Just a few feet from the next house. It all seems very civilized. But how one affords such civilization you still don't entirely understand.<br />
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They run a tight ship at the Cinerama Dome. A squad of polite young men sell you your ticket and offer directions around the corner to the dome proper. There, another well-groomed fellow, apparently the only one on duty at this modern cathedral of cinema, is happily drawn from the very small screen of his smart phone to take your ticket, sell you the requisite vat of diet soda and manage to say without any apparent irony, "Enjoy Wonder Woman."<br />
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Cinerama was originally a method of shooting and projecting film, three cameras or projectors at once. Just one of the salvos of the movie industry in the 1950s, desperate to compete with the insurgent threat of television. The triple film process was soon abandoned for the highly impractical method it was, but 70mm films were projected onto the originally 146 degree curve of Cinerama screens (not a continuous strip, but a series of narrow vertical strips carefully angled at the audience). There were once Cinerama theaters all over the world, purpose-built and adapted. Only a few remain, the Cinerama Dome (among the late, geodesic dome iterations of the theaters) among them.<br />
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Even with the pre-film walk, you have arrived some 25 minutes before film time, which makes you the only person in the dome when you step through one of its side curtains. How can this be? At this famous place, in the middle of Hollywood? You have never understood the reluctance of your fellow man and women to "leave the warm precincts of the cheerful day" in favor of a darkened theater, but it takes all kinds. So, you have the Cinerama Dome to yourself for a full 10 minutes until another sole male arrives (at which time you wonder, as he might well of you: a mere cinephile? devotee of old theaters? Woman Woman fetishist? all of the above?)<br />
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Eventually, about a dozen curious souls choose to shun the California sunshine in favor of the dark of the cinema. One of those polite young men comes out, mic in hand, prior to feature time and welcomes you to the Cinerama Dome.<br />
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And then, once more all the spectacle of Wonder Woman. This is the second time you have seen the entertaining if not terribly complex film. But if you can exit a theater of a summer's day after seeing one of these super hero extravaganzas without a splitting existential ice cream headache, you probably shouldn't complain. <br />
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You think you'll just stick around for while, enjoy the theater experience and then leave before Wonder Woman sprawls to the conclusion of its 141 minutes. But to your surprise, you stay until the victorious end. That Gal Gadot does light up a screen, be it Cinerama or something more humble.<br />
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You had walked around Hollywood earlier in the afternoon and thought about the wealth and the striving. You had noticed the banners hung from the poles of street lights asking for the consideration of Emmy voters in making their nominations. You had sat in this theater and considered the pressure to fill such places. Box office numbers pored over like holy writs.<br />
And well, you really like looking at Gal Gadot. As you were expected to in the calculus of movie capitalism. And you do anyway. So that was fun.<br />
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Not so far away up on Hollywood Boulevard is the venerable little watering hole The Frolic Room. And it would be a sin not to stop by for a drink or two on your way back to the motel. So once more out of the sun and into the shadows.<br />
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The relative hush of late afternoon is either a really sad or satisfying hour in which to do your drinking, sometimes both. The small room of the Frolic is not overrun as it can be of a night. There's a few young men at the far end of the establishment making the scene a little too loudly, as such young men are wont to do, but otherwise it's a few guys spaced around the nearside curve of the bar, a woman sitting near the entrance against the opposite wall, not drinking as yet, and our bartendress.<br />
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The young woman tending bar is slight of stature, cute in her square-framed glasses a bit incongruous relative to her scrappier wardrobe and short, slightly spiky hair. She hovers back and forth warmly and not without grace. The woman near the entrance has a slightly awkward though friendly introduction to a man who arrives, after having asking a previous patron if he was the man for whom she was waiting. Ah, the first date. The somewhat eager, halting conversation is quite familiar in its attempt to settle into comforting rhythm. Fare thee well, would-be lovers.<br />
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You regard yourself in the mirror behind the bar. This is not always the most satisfying of exercises, but you're not entirely displeased with what you see. The mere fact of this reflection is something.<br />
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Perhaps six or seven months previous, you had lain on an operating table for some six hours, your heart stopped. One leaky little heart valved stitched back into compliance. One other far more leaky valve replaced with something mechanical, leaving you with a pronounced ticking sound as that heart beats. Which it does, sewn back up as you were and dispatched like an automobile with a new carburetor. <br />
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Strange things, these wonders and banalities and striving. The desperate waste. And what mad luxury to ruminate on it all over a beer in a Hollywood bar of a late afternoon, when this is one of many choices at your feet. A second round seems appropriate. You summon that charming bartender. That California sun will wait. <br />
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The Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-35524119330623597462017-06-24T08:57:00.000-07:002017-06-24T11:48:52.447-07:00Palace<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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You buy a "Tap" card and proceed down into the Hollywood/Western Metro station. And you can't help thinking that sardined New York commuters would swoon to have this much room as they go about their rounds about Manhattan. </div>
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Yes, it's all quite tidy and comfortable as you take the Red Line downtown, emerging into the gentle light of early evening at Pershing Square. You walk down 5th street, a gentle serpentine through the homeless, or those that would appear to be homeless, lingering or drifting on the sidewalk. Like them, you gape briefly at the requisite film shoot taking place in an alley of the north side of the street. And then, across Main Street and into Skid Row - in Los Angeles, this is actually a legally defined area. Despite the city's decades-long attempts to clear the inhabitants of Skid Row like so much rubbish, a homeless population in the thousands persists. But where sanitizing government has failed, economics might well succeed. Downtown is gentrifying. And hell hath no fury like a real estate developer hungry for a new deal. </div>
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The King Eddy Saloon opens in its way onto 5th along the western verge of the neighborhood. There's been a bar on the spot for about a century. When prohibition arrived, the bar went underground in the form of a speakeasy (connected by tunnels for the sake of delivery to other parts of downtown; the L.A. Police were apparently in on the business). When the 21st Amendment was ratified in 1933, the bar came back upstairs and his been serving drinks almost constantly since. </div>
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As a sign of changing times, the King Eddy was sold a few years ago (in a rare embrace of the literal and ironic, the purchasing company was called ACME). You can't say what the joint looked like in days of yore, but the barroom - even with the door propped open - is a fairly dark, low-ceilinged cave of a place. Beyond the door ajar, there's only one window that admits of sunlight or an outside world. You assume the stylized name of the bar stenciled on the wall opposite you is probably one of the products of the upgrade. Branding, you know.<br />
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But of this Wednesday, The King Eddy has all the makings of a dive. Except maybe the divers. Appropriately, there are just three or four us to keep the bartender company. But we're a little too carefree, even for men drinking in the relative dark. The guy a few bar stools down restlessly gets up a few times and stalks out to the sidewalk. But he's far too harmless to be up to anything interesting. In its seedier days and with a more downtrodden clientele, the bar was apparently a major drug-selling location, the bathrooms serving as drop off/pick up points. But let's not get too nostalgic about that. The King Eddy is simply a good place to have a drink in the hush of early evening. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Life is out there, overrated though it may be. The King Eddy - 5th Street, Los Angeles.</span> </span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></td></tr>
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Back up the slight hill of 5th, you're back to Broadway after a few blocks. Broadway once the center of the city that now seems to sprawl center-less (not necessarily a bad thing). If you fancy old theaters, Broadway is something of a gaper's heaven, thick with grand palaces and smaller 30s and 40s (by which time the city's moviegoing center of gravity had been relocated to Hollywood, where Sid Graumann built his Chinese and Egyptian Theaters in the 1920s) houses. You're bound for a place somewhere between the extremes, the Palace Theater. </div>
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The Palace dates all the way back to 1911, explaining its relative intimacy. Even in the balcony, you feel close to the stage and screen. These details quite pertinent for what was originally a vaudeville house without a sound system, the Palace the oldest remaining theater from the Orpheum vaudeville circuit. </div>
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The grand old place is abuzz tonight as the Los Angeles Convservancy is hosting a screening, part of its Last Remaining Seats, which has been going on for about 30 years, screening films in these downtown theaters in which one can usually not gain access at all. Part of the thrill is not just the venue, but the film. Tonight, it's a decidedly obscure Cuban film called <i>La muerte de un burocrata </i>(<i>Death of a Bureaucrat</i>). As you road trip around the country to check old theaters where films are still screened, you're usually confined to the most thunderous and lowest common denominator of commercial fare. There's only so many times you can see <i>Captain America: The Winter Soldier </i>without making a drinking game out of the experience. </div>
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But we excited movie goers and city slickers are here for some real culture tonight. Whether that's going to include a film becomes a mater of some doubt as the preliminaries prove rather lengthy. The head of the Conservancy making her remarks, thanks the sponsors, etc. She hands off to someone else. He, in turn, fulsomely introduces a music writer, dressed to the nines, who's going to introduce the film. The music writer clearly enjoys the spotlight and proceeds to ramble in what he clearly thinks is an entertaining manner. He introduces, not the film, but a California guitarist who favors us with tunes from the man who composed the film's score, Leo Brouwer. Very nice stuff, but you've had a long day, which has included all manner of roaming, another film and several beers. Then the music writer returns to trod the boards with relish. The word interminable comes to mind. At long fucking last, some 45 minutes after the appointed time, the film begins. </div>
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Ah, but the cinema (quoting one of one's favorite poets, Rosemary Tonks). The film, by Tomas Gutierrez Alea, is worth the wait. Gutierrez, apparently loyal to Cuban Socialism during his life and film career, but frequently pointing out its absurdities and shortcomings, from <i>Death of a Bureaucrat </i>(though hardly his first film) to <i>Fresa y Chocolate</i> (S<i>trawberry and Chocolate)</i>, his penultimate film, that got some distribution in the U.S. (as did his <i>Memories of Underdevelopment </i>(1968). While Gutierrez may have been part of a larger Latin American movement in cinema that eschewed the glitz of Hollywood, D<i>eath of a Bureaucrat </i>is surprisingly polished with no apparent lack of production value. And for its obvious and affectionate nods to film comedy that preceded it (Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton), Gutierrez's film hums with considerable and original energy.</div>
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Regarding the fairly silly, "pastoral" murals along the side walls of the auditorium as you sprawl across a couple of balcony seats (you've got the Jimmy legs in addition to the general weariness), you think this is a pretty satisfying way to end the long day in Los Angeles. This even as you reflect upon the likely reversal (which becomes actual within days) of U.S. policy toward Cuba. The American president will say that Cuba's been benefiting too much from the relative openness of the previous few years. Hang tough, brothers and sisters to the south. I'd like to say that your lot will improve someday when your existence is no longer so directly determined by chest thumping men, regardless of political stripe. But I'm afraid you'll fare even worse when the real estate developers are set loose. </div>
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The Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-1968395602843923002017-06-18T17:27:00.000-07:002017-06-18T17:27:38.979-07:00Los Feliz<div style="text-align: center;">
A perfectly natural first outing when on vacation in Los Angeles is to explore the abandoned zoo in Griffith Park. Just as your first morning in the city some 15 years ago included an initial stop at the gift shop of the L.A. County Morgue. As the morning's tide of traffic relentlessly sweeps west on Los Feliz Boulevard, you're happy to be moving against the tide, up Crystal Springs Drive and into the arid, hilly expanse of Griffith Park. </div>
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Now the abandoned zoo is a good place to hike a bit, pic-a-nic, or leave your graffiti mark.</div>
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And while you're winding your way back to Los Feliz and Hollywood, why not loop around Silverlake, the actual reservoir that gives the neighborhood its name. On the eastern side, you'll find a much more elegant enclosure, the home and studio of the great Richard Neutra. The vision that the greater world has about post-war modern Los Angeles has more than a little to do with Neutra, who designed several of the famous Case Study Houses among many other structures in Southern California and elsewhere. </div>
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If you happen to being staying in a motel in East Hollywood that falls somewhere between charming and seedy (and along one side of which can be found an enclosure for the establishment's dumpsters, between which there some tree limbs and a scorched area on the cinderblock wall, all of which is creepily reminiscent of the similar mystery spot behind the diner in <i>Mulholland Drive</i>, where the monstrous figure lurked), you do have the advantage of the Hollywood Blvd./Western Metro station a mere stumble away. A slightly longer stumble east brings you into the heart of Los Feliz, on Vermont Boulevard, where the Los Feliz theater can be found. </div>
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The Los Feliz is a 1930's neighborhood house, sadly triplexed in the 90s. One might well prefer to venture to the nearby, single screen and by all accounts more lovely Vista. But the Vista is playing <i>Wonder Woman</i>, which you've already seen. The Los Feliz, on the other hand, offers <i>It Comes at Night</i> among it's trio of options. Among the small crowd who are clearly also not productive members of society at 1:30 on a Thursday afternoon, you take a seat at the back of the curiously shallow viewing room. </div>
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It seems like every film you've seen in recent years that has involved Joel Edgerton has been worth while in some way (You can say this partially because you didn't see <i>The Great Gatsby</i>). The talented Australian is a usually unique and quietly magnetic presence as an actor, as has recently been the case in <i>Black Mass</i>, <i>Midnight Special</i> and <i>Loving.</i> In each of those roles, he's a seemingly strong man much more interesting for his vulnerability. Of course, vulnerability is more interesting in general. Edgerton wrote and directed the underseen film, <i>The Gift. </i>He also wrote the <i>The Rover, </i>which starred the equally ever-interesting Guy Pearce.<br />
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It's Trey Edward Shults that actually wrote and directed <i>It Comes at Night,</i> much as the production company is named after another excellent film starring Edgerton, <i>Animal Kingdom.</i> Shults has made that rare thing - an American film, especially a horror film, that in no way lets its audience off the hook. The rigor and integrity of<i> It Comes at Night</i> remind one of another American director of little-seen films, Jim Mickle, especially his horror films <i>We Are What We Are</i> and <i>Stakeland.</i><br />
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Like <i>Stakeland, It Comes at Night</i> is seemingly post-apocalyptic. It is clearly post-something and the something is bad. <i>It Comes at Night</i> begins with closeups of an elderly man, gravely ill and marked by strange skin lesions. He's attended by masked and gloved people who we come to realize are his family: his daughter, grandson and son-in-law (Edgerton). Even as the dying man is taken out into the woods, laid in shallow grave and the lit afire, do we fully realize the nature of the relationship. The us and them in this story turn out to be the ones who are ill and the ones who are not, a demarcation which ruthlessly, even tragically, trumps all other ties. <br />
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The family who thus dispose of their elder male and later take in another family who have escaped the (apparently) pestilential city, happen to be of mixed race. This seems largely matter of fact; it doesn't seem an empty provocation. And yet it is interesting that the story comes at us often from the point of view of a young African American man, as was the case with one of the year's sensations, <i>Get Out.</i><br />
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So much is good and even unprecedented in <i>Get Out </i>(among the things go very right are many of its performances, including that of the lead, Daniel Kaluuya). Unfortunately, the film is delivered in a structure that not only follows some of the cliches of American horror films, it allows its audience a comforting conclusion. It is a sometimes scary, often revealing ride that drops you safely where you started. To it's great credit, <i>It Comes at Night</i> drives you out into the woods, instructs you to get out of the vehicle and leaves you there to consider your way back.<br />
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<br />The Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-37109254824125587802017-06-18T10:22:00.001-07:002017-06-19T16:17:04.874-07:00Cinefamily<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Yes, the California Days. An endless parade of perfection, replete with brilliant azure, served up almost daily. And the sunsets, of course. The twilights. Rendered by all manner of artist, most of whom, alas, might deserve to be starving. But rather less is said about night in the Los Angeles basin.<br />
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It's simply darker. Perhaps they just don't have as many streetlights as we do in Chicago, as are planted in Manhattan. But it's more than that. Darkness lurks and envelopes this place when you get clear of the klieg lights, actual and mainly figurative. Here where everything ever done by man and woman to defy age, gravity, climate...where the reversal of every unpleasant manifestation of life has been assayed. The desert night waits and crashes down, rendering all that hopeful, well-lit striving particularly futile, nightmarishly false. All of which makes fertile ground indeed for the poet that is David Lynch. That particularly American clash of darkness and light, innocence and seamy experience. <br />
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If a movie and movie house have truly taken you in, it's always a little jarring to emerge back onto the sidewalk or street. All the more so if you entered by daylight and emerge into the night on Beverly Boulevard. Particularly if you've just seen the charming East German/Polish take on science fiction entitled <i>First Spaceship on Venus.</i><br />
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Perhaps you are fortunate enough to be relatively free of time and obligation and have decided to see another film the same evening, practically around the corner on Fairfax Avenue. Having some time before that 10:30 screening at an establishment called Cinemfamily (formerly the Silent Movie Theater), you might alight in a bar on Fairfax, perhaps an exceedingly agreeable little joint called The Kibitz Room.<br />
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The Kibbitz Room is the bar attached to the famous 24-hour deli, Canters. On this particular Tuesday night, at this particular hour, it is an exceedingly agreeable place. The best bars seem happily stuck in a decorative time warp. So it is with the Kibbitz Room, all black leather of seat and booth, gold and black metallic latticework of screens between the windows that separate the narrow bar from the deli. It's seems like the 60s at its most restrained.<br />
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The two guys tending bar are friendly and eccentric in their way. When the older and more hirsute of the pair wanders to the juke box, his younger colleague say no more Hanson, that if he hears "MMMBop" one more time.....You get the sense that this exchange has occurred before, that they have their routine, their schtick, down. <br />
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But no, it's not that perfect example of bubble gum pop, it's the magic carpet of Paul Desmond's tenor sax leading us, along with Mr. Brubeck dinstinctly at the keyboard of course, into "Take Five."<br />
It's followed by some Charlie Parker and John Coltrane (the soprano sax years).<br />
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Even as the booths fill, there's a notable hush. Perhaps this has to do with the adequate but not overpowering volume of the juke box, over which no one feels the need to shout. But among seemingly comfortable mix of patrons, black and white, there's an almost cosmopolitan ease. You are privy to a few conversations, and there's nothing particularly sublime being uttered. And much as you're aware that this city is perhaps the world's leading producer of bullshit, of shrieking, self-satisfied stupidity, such is not the case in this bar at this moment. <br />
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The first drinks, the first time in a bar when everything seems just right tends to produce the desire to have your mail forwarded to the joint, to take up residency. Or conversely, never to return, lest all subsequent visits fail to live up to this first impression. As you step out onto to Fairfax Avenue shortly after 10:00 p.m., you're not sure which it will be. <br />
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Obviously, there was a fair amount of <i>Twin Peaks</i> fatigue by 1992. Despite the overwhelming success of the television series, Lynch's feature film consideration of the same central story did not make much money. When "Firewalk With Me" premiered at the Cannes festival, the reaction was apparently howlingly negative. Heard among the chorus of disapproval was none other than Quentin Tarantino, who offered this insight, "After I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at Cannes, David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different. " Take a moment to consider the profound irony of the statement and its source. <br />
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A youngish crowd take their seats - some conventional, fixed movie seats and lots of folding chairs - in the simple screening room of the Cinefamily. One young, blonde woman wears wings on her back, which will make sense if you've seen the "Firewalk With Me." With the traveling, the driving through L.A. traffic, the evening's previous film, the three pints of porter....you frankly struggle to stay awake through the 134 minutes of the film. And yet, how can you not? You are reminded just how good is Sheryl Lee in this film, how it easily it could have been ridiculous without her. You are reminded that David Lynch is a genius. And as you see again how the death of poor Laura Palmer played out, as you witness the black lodge denouement of the film, all you can think is "wow." <br />
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Oh, the little expeditions of the mind. Dare one say, of the soul. Whether the dark is of the Los Angeles variety, that of Chicago, or Walla Walla, Washington, it throws down its unseen barriers. You find there's an animal instinct to lay low, to cower. You push through it, out into the night, or you don't. <br />
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But when you do venture forth, despite the darkness, the enervation and leaden habit, there are the little victories to be savored. To be in an unfamiliar place in a largely unfamiliar city, to take a place in a crowd of moviegoers. You wonder in retrospect if they feel it, these kids about you, are alive in the moment. Or maybe the unheeded fragility of this freedom is integral to the gravity defiance of youth. <br />
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For your part, in the particular moment, you feel the little victory, the success of this ridiculously modest expedition. And you can almost weep at the sweetness of it. <br />
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If you land at LAX bleary-eyed, intensely sleep deprived and - to maintain this overheated tone - ravenously hungry after a jarringly early flight from Chicago, it might be your temptation to jump in your rental car and make a beeline to points north, Hollywood or wherever you might be bound. It might well be your temptation in such a state to throw your arms around the first drive-thru you encounter. Heaven knows your arms and your stomach are all too familiar with such dubious embraces (and yet if to love the drive-thru is wrong, perhaps we do not want to be right, a part of your mind stubbornly contends).</div>
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But if you proceed instead east and a couple of miles south through some of the working class neighborhoods of South Los Angeles, you might come on a Googie vision called Chips.</div>
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To sit in this impeccably operated joint of a weekday morning and have a large breakfast served to you, nary a hipster in sight amongst the clientele going quietly and happily about their business, to gaze out the ample plate glass onto Hawthorne Boulevard on one of those fine California mornings, sitting among the brash, jutting surfaces...is to be very happy and have greeted the sprawling city on the best of terms.</div>
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To continue this relatively gentle ingress into Los Angeles, you might also avoid the clogging artery of the 405 expressway and instead proceed north on La Cienega Boulevard, much as it will throw other culinary and aesthetic temptations before you, like Randy's Donuts.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Something went terribly wrong in this country when we stopped erecting giant roadside figures and foodstuffs. God bless America! Randy's Donuts - La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles. </span><br />
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Up La Cienega, along ravines east and west of the sinuous thoroughfare, you'll also see derricks going about their work, one of the many iconic cliches of the city and decades past, which has favored many a film set in Los Angeles as a shorthand of place and usually time. And yet there they are, like so much about the city - past and present, the real and the unreal superimposed upon one another. The derricks slowly plying their trade like those toy birds of perpetual motion set to plunge and return from some little reservoir of water, slowly and inexorably dipping, rising, dipping again.</div>
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If you find your place of sleep through all the traffic and infinite calls to the already overburdened senses, if you then sleep most of the late afternoon away, how better to enhance the sense of unreality, the heady cocktail of fatigue, displacement and, well, Los Angeles, then to venture back out for a night of film?</div>
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Even better that the strangeness be turbo-charged by an odd East German/Polish sci-fi extravaganza entitled <i>First Spaceship on Venus. </i> The discovery that Earth was visited and nearly destroyed by malicious Venusians in the early 20th century, prompting and international team of eggheads to zoom off to Venus in a ship called the Cosomostrator, which looks more like a pointy, souped-up candelabra than a spacecraft.</div>
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All of this occurring at the New Beverly Cinema. Charmingly stuck in a 60's/70's theater wardrobe of coarse, fairly tacky fabric draped over (presumably) cinder block walls in its broad auditorium. The New Beverly was saved from redevelopment by none other than Quentin Tarantino in 2007. In 2014, he took over the programming. Hence, the generally wondrous parade of nightly double features, projected from actual 35mm film. </div>
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Tarrantino's own film output might have veered yet again toward the masturbatory - <i>Hateful Eight </i>offered the seamy prospect of a flasher whipping it out and then sadly unable to get it up - but you have to hand it to the man for his advocacy of film, interesting careers salvaged from the Hollywood scrap heap and the extended life he has granted The New Beverly.</div>
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The mission to Venus mainly a success - some good men lost to the hostile environment - the Cosmostrator settles back to Earth. Each of the surviving scientists offer their words of wisdom. Some are too overcome to say much. Some impressive shocks of Eastern European hair bounce off into the sunset. A happy crowd of film geeks is discharged onto Beverly Boulevard and into the Los Angeles night.</div>
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dbThe Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-28251991570423535472017-05-03T07:29:00.001-07:002017-07-27T13:05:28.898-07:00Toni Erdmann<br />
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The man hardly needs face paint. Or a wig. Or fake teeth. He certainly doesn't need to appear as a nine-foot mountain of hair to make a strong impression. The shaggy bear that is Winfried Conradi (Peter Simonischek) is singular enough in appearance, in overall presence, to do without props. But what fun would that be? When an opportunity for mischief presents itself, when faced with an expression of bullshit, a moment of boredom or uncertainty, out come the antic teeth. At such times, the man's already considerable visage, replete with expressive potential - jutting jaw lines that sweep down to his emphatic chin like the prow of a great ship, dark eyebrows beneath the mop of grey hair of such variable and indicating personality that they should probably be credited among the cast of <i>Toni Erdmann</i> - at such times, that great face can be rendered comic, demonic, or any number of shades between. </div>
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<a href="http://static.goldderby.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/toni-erdmann-sandra-huller-peter-simonischek.jpg?w=640" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://static.goldderby.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/toni-erdmann-sandra-huller-peter-simonischek.jpg?w=640" height="180" width="320" /></a>Long though she has known him, Ines (Sandra Huller) isn't at all sure what to make of the face, the changing teeth and coiffure, the man behind (and beneath) the hair, the props, the mischief. For lucky Ines - she's Winfried Conradi's daughter. For his part, the father doesn't quite know what to think of his seemingly humorless daughter, determined as she is to succeed in the dubious world of international business. <br />
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No, the man is not actually Toni Erdman, much as the elder Conradi spends a good part of the film as the alter ego. We see numerous examples of the restless father's mischief through the early stages of the story. But it's for much of the second half of <i>Toni Erdmann</i> that he haunts his daughter's Bucharest life as the black-wigged Erdmann (when not clad as the towering, hirsute figure of Bulgarian folklore known as a Kuker). All of this amounts to a film of a surprisingly fleet 162 minutes. Like its title character, <i>Toni Erdmann</i> is expansive, slightly demented and more or less irresistible. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Maren Ade's first two films: <i>Everyone Else </i>(top) and <br /><i>The Forest For the Trees</i> (right).</span></td></tr>
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If you've seen either of the first two features of writer and director Maren Ade, you might expect some strife in Toni Erdmann's central relationship of daughter and father. <i>Everyone Else </i>(2009) has a seemingly mismatched young German couple on holiday in Sardinia. As tends to happen with such pairs, particularly outside the comfortable buffers of their normal lives, rifts are made all too obvious by all that togetherness and the occasional cropping up of adversity. There are the predictable fights, but in Ade's writing, even these take place in a telling sort of strugging couple's bad jazz, competing time signatures of two distinct individuals jarringly out of tune. The rencontres in <i>Everyone Else</i> also veer toward unexpected extremes of behavior (not to predictable violence) and outright goofiness. </div>
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<a href="http://www.athensvoice.gr/sites/default/files/field/articles/insert-images/324928-670178.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.athensvoice.gr/sites/default/files/field/articles/insert-images/324928-670178.jpg" height="192" width="320" /></a>The pain is more self-inflicted in Ade's first feature, <i>The Forest For the Trees</i> (2005). A somewhat awkward woman relocates to a new city to begin a new job and presumably a new life only to have all her efforts turn increasingly sour. Much as the story is largely about a lonely and woefully ineffectual high school teacher, there is an echo of <i>Toni Erdman's</i> near stalking, with the poor woman so desperately pursuing a friendship with a neighbor that the latter practically has to take out a restraining order against her. All the lonely people...sometimes they come from right across the courtyard. <br />
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Even in <i>The Forest For the Tree's</i> fairly bleak spiral, there is a final shot that hardly offers hope, but does with a near-poetic transcendence of reality seem to ferry its troubled protagonist homeward. It shows a writer and director able take a story line or scene in completely unexpected directions. Even within a certain inevitability of plot, Ade renders key moments in colors both strange and illuminating. <br />
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And yet, for those distinct and occasionally surprising notes of discord to be found in her first two films, who could have anticipated from Maren Ade the sprawl, bite, wit and moments of tenderness, the great leap forward that is her third film? <i>Toni Erdmann </i>is as audacious in conception as dimension. It might well have been two and a half hours of cacophony, but Ade makes it hum a prickling, irresistible music. <br />
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Not that the elements of <i>Toni Erdmann's</i> story are so original - the fractious relationship of grown child and imposing, embarrassing, personal-space-invading parent; the pleasure of seeing some uptight business type destarched. We've seen these things before. But implausibility after growing implausibility spring naturally from character. They amuse, even amaze, but don't put us off as if subjected to a parade of ridiculous conceit. Instead, Ade draws us further into her story and characters even as father and daughter play out their conflicts and occasional harmonies in such extreme and often hilarious ways. To compare the apparent contrivances in <i>Toni Erdmann </i>to the awkward moments in the films of someone like Alexander Payne (as in his most recent film, <i>Nebraska,</i> with it's own bumpy odyssey of parent and child) is to realize both the breadth and tensile strength of Ade's characters and story. What seems merely gimmicky in Payne's work is at once more outlandish and deeply felt at Maren Ade's deft and assured hand. <br />
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The elder Conradi is puckish from the film's first moments<i>.</i> He punks a poor delivery man, telling him that the package is actually for his twin brother who just got out of jail. His offense? Mail bombs. While the nervous delivery man waits, no doubt thinking that he's not paid well enough for this sort of thing, we hear an apparent exchange between the siblings before a similar looking bulk of man appears, this one sporting sunglasses, a black robe (open, course), handcuffs (one of his standby props) and a mysterious device around his midsection. The delivery man is made all the more nervous when the device "goes off." Not to worry says Winifried, it's merely a blood pressure monitor. <br />
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Not much time expires in <i>Toni Erdmann</i> before we also see Winfried in a ghoulish mask of white face paint with gaping black patches of mouth and eyes. Friends and family members whom he encounters are not surprisingly taken aback. When asked why, pray tell, this imposing man is walking about in such a manner, he responds that he's taken a job at a retirement home to send its residents more quickly to the great beyond. Winfried is often the recipient of confusion, disbelief, or a kind of troubled amusement from those made privy to his hijinks. Perhaps this has something to do with the stereotype of Germans not terribly fluent in the language of irony. Or maybe, beyond his admirably consistently inappropriate behavior, Winfried is that rare improv comedian who's actually funny. What more effective disguise than that? <br />
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<a href="http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/toni-erdmann-social.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/toni-erdmann-social.jpeg" height="172" width="320" /></a>As it happens, Conradi is actually thus painted for a school assembly. He leads his students on stage to serenade a colleague into retirement. You know...some bestow gold watches, others offer a choir of high school children painted like zombies; po-tay-to; po-tah-to. During the several scenes while he's in face paint, we see one of Toni Erdmann's emblematic embraces. Winfried carries his beloved, fading dog, who can hardly be bothered to walk from place to place; one shaggy salt and pepper beast lovingly hauls the other. Occurring as this does with Conradi looking a cross between The Joker and a very enthusiastic KISS fan, it's a perfect expression of <i>Toni Erdmann's</i> oblique moments of tenderness. Most movingly, Winfried sleeps on the patio of his home when the dog cannot be roused to come indoors. We see him arise in the morning, discover that the inevitable has occurred and then, like the wounded beast he is, pad off to a private place where he simply hangs his head. <br />
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The human exchanges in <i>Toni Erdmann</i>, up and down the generations, tend more to the biting than the loving, even the jokes carrying more brimstone than treacle. When the ghoulishly-painted Winfried visits his mother to deliver groceries (which she mainly rejects), she asks him why she he hasn't put his dog out of its misery. "I won't put you to sleep either," he responds. A lovely sentiment to keep in mind as Mother's Day approaches. When he he's left languishing in a Bucharest mall while his daughter helps a potential client's wife shop, he asks her "Are you really human?" with a slap in the face coldness. This in addition to his running joke about having hired a substitute daughter. It's not long before Ines takes her revenge, just prior (so she thinks) to her father's departure for home, "Do you have plans in life other than slipping fart cushions under people?....I know men your age who still have ambitions." <br />
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After their awkward leave taking, we see Ines break down on her hotel balcony as her father appears to begin his journey home. Beyond more obvious indications of dialog and action, much is suggested about this complicated woman by mere changes in wardrobe and setting. She looks like a kid knocking about the hotel in shorts and a long-sleeve t-shirt, all the more so while she cries from the balcony and then limps plaintively back inside. Then there is the relative armor of business clothes, even when she has to swap out a shirt with her uber eager to please assistant. Most surprising is the scene in which Ines appears in a short skirt and is braless beneath a form fitting top for something of a three-way with her colleague and a petit four. <br />
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Ines thinks her father has returned to Germany and even leaves a nice message in his voicemail. But when she meets two female friends, both in their way trying to navigate the same international waters, for dinner and drinks, she's stunned, shall we say, to encounter her dark-wigged father posing as a motivational coach by the name of...of course, Toni Erdmann. She's not going to get off as easily as she thought. <br />
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It is Winfried's intelligence and sensitive bullshit meter that are in some ways the heart of <i>Toni Erdmann</i>. All that replete, if sometimes overbearing humanity. As for the alter ego, Ade is shrewd enough to realize the figure is just crazy enough to make sense in the fertile field of absurdity that is capitalism. Is he really any more absurd than that other, famous Toni, the American motivational guru, Toni Robbins? <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Don't you hate it when you're having perfectly normal naked birthday part and a Kuker shows up? Sandra Huller and, somewhere beneath the hair, Peter Simonischek, in <i>Toni Erdmann.</i></span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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Ade certainly imbues <i>Toni Erdmann </i>with a rich, restive depth of character. It also show its intelligence and heart with the context of international business, globalization and its discontents. This occurs without any belaboring of points and flogging of self-righteousness.<br />
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Ines, lost in her own frustration, post-presentation, looks down from the window of the her bland conference room to people working in much less rarefied circumstances in some sort of shop below. It's a quick, telling bit of contrast, even as Ines regards the scene without any apparent sympathy or recognition. The same applies to her description of a Bucharest shopping center to her father, "It's the biggest mall in Europe and no one can afford anything in it." <i>Toni Erdmann</i> doesn't seek a heart of gold in its characters where they don't exist. Ines Conradi is neither particularly warm nor unfeeling. She's certainly got her hands full in a world in which being a woman doesn't exactly make the going easier. Her father may be more sympathetic to the working people they meet, but in his barreling tomfoolery, he inadvertently gets a worker at an oil rig fired. <br />
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Ade lets Ines be a real, flawed person in her context. There's perhaps no great depth, no artist waiting to climb out of the business clothing. But she's revealed enough to demonstrate both her vulnerability and the sometimes perverse expressions of her strength and exasperation. She fights back in sometimes surprising ways with her force of nature father, as well as her boss - after he prefaces a statement by saying "This will offend the feminist in you," she responds, "If I was a feminist, "I wouldn't tolerate guys like you, Gerald." And while it might not be deeply satisfying, she sets the sexual agenda with her colleague, Tim (Trystan Putter). He speaks of taking her "in every corner of the room" so she won't lose her bite. She instructs him to deflower a pricey confection, as she looks on and then mater-of-factly devours the product of this strange congress of man and marzipan. </div>
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Winfried Conradi might be the obvious heart and wit of <i>Toni Erdmann,</i> but when Ines is pushed to extremes, she provides what may be the film's most outlandish and memorable moments. When her father crashes a Romanian family's Easter gathering, he puts his daughter on the spot to sing a song to express their gratitude at the hospitality shown them. With her father accompanying her on a small keyboard, Ines surprises everyone by positively belting out a version of "The Greatest Love of All," as if competing very well on a Euro version of "Idol." This before she practically drops the mic and makes her exit. Thank you Bucharest! Good night! </div>
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Then there is Ines' birthday party, ostensibly a team-building brunch for her business associates. With the catered food and flowers impeccably in place, she struggles with her rather movement-restrictive dress. As she loses her patience with the garment, something seems to snap, and it's not the frock. The doorbells ring incites this exasperation. Finally, she pulls the dress over her head, tosses it aside and answers the door in panties and nothing else. The concept of the naked birthday party is born and gathers a bizarre momentum, if not the expected roster of guests. As Ines' pathologically eager to please assistant and boss join in we're already privy to a scene a bit unlike anything seen before. It's all quite memorable even before the Kuker shows up, presumably the father in this towering costume of hair and naked daughter regarding one another. Even before she pursues the creature when it departs, this in a relatively modest costume of light robe and bare feet down a Bucharest sidewalk. Ultimately, in a nearby park there is one of the more touching and unlikely embraces in cinematic history. </div>
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There may be some slightly greater understanding, some better-seasoned tolerance that exists between father and daughter at the conclusion of <i>Toni Erdmann </i>while's she's home to attend her grandmother's funeral. But there's no pat development of character. There's no revelation other than that we are likely to miss revelation when it shimmers briefly before us. It's not so much comedy or tragedy as ungainly, insuperable life. Maren Ade brings this sprawling duet home as well as she keeps it going - a brief coda at turns goofy, tender, frank, profound, understated and a little sad. <br />
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dbThe Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-28352245339261132382017-04-23T09:31:00.000-07:002018-05-22T12:17:21.979-07:00Personal Shopper<br />
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Not so easy living meaningfully in this material world. Harder still if you're alternately seeking out and haunted by restless spirits of whatever realms that might exist beyond our apparent everyday reality. Such is the quandary of Maureen (Kristen Stewart), going about Paris by motor scooter, given access to nether worlds of high fashion and spirits in limbo - each shimmering, alluring its way, each gaping with emptiness, even menace.</div>
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This is the second consecutive film from Olivier Assays - himself something of a restless, shifting spirit - in which which a drifting, nebulous presence draws its main character. In Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) it was the "Maloja Snake," a cloud formation meandering its sublime way through an Alps mountain pass by morning that draws a visiting actress (Juliette Binoche) to its presence. Both "Sils Maria" and Personal Shopper feature Ms. Stewart as a personal assistant to exalted women. Just as the former was written with La Binoche in mind, so was the latter written for Kristen Stewart, she the magnetic presence that arrests one through Personal Shopper's 110 minutes, however the film's plot and themes might fail to completely take form.</div>
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It's difficult to recall a film of recent years that so heavily leans on its star. Ms. Stewart is front and center in most every scene (save perhaps the film's most ambiguous interval, as characters corporeal and otherwise are seen exiting a hotel where the haunted Maureen has been summoned) and generally not having a lot of laughs. Hers is such a raw, ever-present performance that you want to check in with her after the film. Make sure she's okay. Perhaps give her a hug. </div>
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The actor and director make a natural, fluid team. Assayas, as ever, provides supple direction. Slightly detached perhaps, but never cold. Scenes are allowed to build to their level of drama or suggestion. Generally they are slightly truncated, kept brief with a fade to black (with a couple of notable exceptions). This is both eminently natural and highly effective as a means of storytelling, a logical ambiguity that is never milked. There's enough emotion, power in Stewart's performance without any tawdry lingering for effect. Clearly there is trust between the director and star.</div>
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When Stewart appears in the film, dropped off at vacated Parisian home, she's a cool but hardly imposing figure in her dark jeans and black leather jacket with fur collar, slightly unwashed hair swept up and over her head like a hipster pompadour. Viewed at any distance, it gives the impression of a kid waiting for a growth spurt, the young body yet to find proportion with its head. </div>
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But with this particular young woman, for every one part awkward, there are nine parts gracefully striking. Beyond Maureen's obvious physical appeal, which surely didn't hurt her in acquiring the rarefied position (and her slight physique allows her to both stand in for her model employer when she's late for a photo shoot and occasionally indulge in the taboo of trying on a piece of haute couture) or moving about in the precincts of fashion, there is a blend of the childlike and vulnerable with a quiet sense of authority that allows her to operate credibly in both of her strange and often forbidding worlds.</div>
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Ms. Stewart let's those contradictions breathe. Her voice has both a classic sub-soprano timbre that wouldn't be out of place in a film of the 1930's, married with an an angular diction that is all 21st-century. There is a kind of vibrato of unease that we've heard before from the actor, but never more frequently and effectively than is the case in <i>Personal Shopper.</i> The vulnerability seems quite natural to this tormented young woman and Stewart is present, real and often physically affected in the midst of every such scene of difficulty for Maureen. However, one need go back only as far as her previous collaboration with Assayas to see how differently she grappled with a seemingly similar role, attending on great forces (or personages) while balancing her own shifting personal existence. </div>
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Olivier Assays has been shrewd enough to see those apparent contradictions in Stewart and create a character, a space if you will, where she is free to "lose it" in her terms, without losing her sense of character: “I’d seen her in many films, but I always had the instinct that she could go much further,” he adds. “I tried to give her the message that it was OK to run, to be herself, to follow her instincts. She has this extraordinary combination of incredible control and simultaneous freedom. I have a hard time thinking of another actress who has a similar combination and who knows that well how to use it.”</div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We see Maureen's steeliness as she calmly handles representatives of fashion designers or a salesman at Cartier. So too as she enters that vacant chateau at the film's outset. Nothing is at first explicit, but we come to realize that she's awaiting some sign from her recently-deceased brother (who shared a heart defect with his sister that imposes even more uncertainty on Maureen's life). She's also trying to determine for the would-be buyers of the residence that there are no malevolent spirits present. She walks about the largely empty building, in which a growing feeling of dread is heightened by the sound of trodden old wooden floors, flung shutters and the creaking complaint of French doors jarred out of their long-frozen embrace. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Maureen encounters no visible spirits on that first visit to the shuttered building, much as there are signs - water left running, a cross darkening the old wallpaper high on a stairway wall. It's surprising to realize that most of this occurs not in the dead of night, but late afternoon into twilight, potentially the most chilling hour for a nervous stroll through fear and the unknown, enough retiring light present to really give those shadows a kind of liquid depth. But Maureen goes about her work in such a determined manner that you wonder if this slight figure of a person holds a fearless spirit. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Only during a later, second visit does Maureen actually see a ghostly figure. But it's not the brother from whom she's desperately awaiting a sign. The swirling figure of a woman materializes near her. We find out she's not so fearless after all. Maureen runs to another room where she cowers in child-like terror against a wall, hands over her head. Assayas makes a surprisingly and relatively brave choice with the vaporous forms briefly seen in the film, instead of defaulting to more common special effects. This, apparently, reflecting a greater interest in 19th-century "spirit" photography than the frame-jumping, sound effect pounding cheap thrills of most contemporary horror films. As for Stewart, this is one of those moments when she very believably loses it, whimpering as any frightened child (or adult) might. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The trouble with any ghostly "it," any supernatural presence in film, is maintaining tension once the thing is actually seen. Assayas' ghost doesn't entirely work, but there is a fascination that leaves a slightly chilling residue once the unsettled being vomits a cloud of ectoplasm and then swirls away. As for Maureen, she grabs her bag and runs for her life. The young woman's very relatable fear, coupled with her lack of pretense - she considers herself a medium but professes no great wisdom of supernatural motivations - is one of several instances where Assayas' writing and Stewart's performance combine to form this fairly mesmerizing character. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It is in the uncertain blend of menace from forces living and possibly not where <i>Personal Shopper </i> provides its most frightening moments. Maureen arrives at the Paris flat of her supermodel employer, Kyra (Nora von Waldstatten) to deliver some clothing and a few boxes from Cartier. When she gets no response to her call of greeting, Maureen goes into the bedroom to find a very ominous and dense stain of blood on the bed and more streaked on the floor. In the bathroom she finds what we expect her to find. As she begins to retreat from the flat in a daze, she notices a light at the back of the dwelling and a terrible banging, like the clean up work or warnings of further mayhem from some beast. Maureen actually begins to walk toward the danger, not away - allowing us that most enduring horror show audience experience, the temptation to shout "Get out!" - before survival instincts kick in and she flees the flat, the building and the area. </span></div>
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It is, presumably, either some supernatural being bang, bang, banging at the back of the dead woman's apartment, or her human murderer. Be it the latter, the chief suspect would seem to be her jilted boyfriend, Ingo (Lars Eidinger, also in <i>Clouds of Sils Maria</i>), whom Maureen had met on her previous visit to deliver fabulous frocks and trinkets. The slightly oily man had taken an interest in Maureen, inspiring a rare lapse into confessional conversation about her work and life. Shortly after this meeting, during a trip to pick up yet more designer clothing in London, Maureen begins to be badgered with texts from an unknown sender. Ingo is the obvious suspect here as well, but given that the sender of the texts seems to know her every movement and not be in any way physically present Maureen, in her harried state, is prompted to ask if texts are coming from another realm. Is it her brother? <br />
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This menacing text conversation plays out between two countries and a considerable length of time in <i>Personal Shopper,</i> broken only when Maureen, in fear and weariness, turns off her phone. The long digital pursuit ends frighteningly and masterfully with a series of undelivered texts veritably hurled at the woman - indicating that the sender is outside her building, is coming up, is on the landing outside her door; these having piled up while she briefly slept with her phone off. Skillfully as the sequence is handled, it seems at first blush a commentary on the ubiquity of smart phones; even while beholding the big screen we are sadly and inevitably drawn to the emptiness of the little screen. But this is really another instance of the director unafraid that the trappings of youth or modernity might compromise his art. Assayas is a man in his early sixties who makes very polished films. And yet, by no stretch of the imagination is this cinema du papa. The phantom texts are actually a very apt, even ghostly symbol of disconnection and uncertainty of the film's haunted main character and her lonely quest. <br />
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After she misses the increasingly-aggressive texts from her tormentor, Maureen is directed for a second time to a bland Paris hotel. Her first visit comes after a key card is left in her physical mailbox. On that first arrival she arrives and changes into one of her employer's garments, a particularly brilliant, spangled dress. It's not clear if she was instructed to thus garb herself or if this is a natural continuation of the conversation in which Maureen had confessed a desire to wear the clothing primarily because it is taboo. The presence of haute couture and the outposts of extreme luxury are not present in <i>Personal Shopper</i> merely so it can be pointed out how vacuous is this world. In one sense, these are simply the things and places that constitute this character's work. But there is also the obvious parallel of the realms of fashion and the supernatural, their allure as well as their emptiness, expressed with perfect, wordless eloquence when we see Maureen in that spangled garment. The dress shimmers, projecting an elusive, spectral light. The material and the metaphysical briefly flow as one. </div>
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With <i>Personal Shopper,</i> Olivier Assays continues his exploration of the indefinite. Which is to say life. The director's mercurial efforts move on with high style, admirable energy and curiosity. <i>Personal Shopper</i> doesn't quite materialize into greatness, but operates with the director's usual wisdom of prompting questions without a tidy and equal provision of answers. Knowing that life in all its forms goes on with or without us. </div>
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Much as she knows that the murderer has been apprehended, any sense of certainty or resolution continues to prove elusive to Maureen when we leave her in <i>Personal Shopper.</i> Traveling all the way to Oman to join her boyfriend, she is followed or at least joined by a spirit in limbo. Is it her brother? Does it mean harm? There is only more ambiguous, ominous banging. Fare thee well, Maureen. <br />
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Kristin Stewart, of course, moves in her own lofty realms. Much as her personal trajectory continues to arc into brilliant and populous spaces, here's hoping she continues, at least part of the time, to stray from the bright daylight of fame and security. <br />
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Paterson is everywhere in Jim Jarmusch's twelfth feature film. There is the title, of course. It is also the name of the film's bus-driver-by-day-poet-by-night-main character. The New Jersey City is the title and subject of the five-volume epic poem by William Carlos Williams, the poet and book(s) mentioned on several occasions in the film. As Paterson, the man (Adam Driver) walks to and from his bus garage in a warren of old industrial buildings, we see the city name spelled out across some venerable old brick on a clearly visible ghost sign. The driver's bus flows through the streets of the city as if conveyed through its very blood. Teem as it might with the real New Jersey City, Jim Jarmusch has, as usual, created a place that is of the world and mainly not. With this particular piece of work, at this particular time in America, that's not necessarily a bad thing. </div>
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Mr. Jarmusch's films often exist in a kind of reverie, but the dream, the vision, is an especially quiet and gentle one in <i>Paterson.</i> Existing within the reverentially-photographed actual city of Paterson, New Jersey is a kind of alternate universe. As usual, the writer and director relegates some of the more unpleasant realities of the Rust Belt cities (Cleveland, Detroit, Paterson) he's visited to the shadows. There's a veritable hush, both in Paterson's bus and the corner bar he visits once a night for a mug of beer. The nightly sojourns to the tavern occur at the blessing of his very supportive wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), at least partly because Paterson takes the couple's English bulldog, Marvin, along for the walk. </div>
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One evening, Paterson is hailed by four gang members cruising in a convertible. They inquire after Marvin and leave Paterson with the admonition, "A dog like that get dog jacked, majee." So goes the meeting of potentially menacing figures in Mr. Jarmusch's film. Paterson leashes Marvin outside the bar as usual and instructs him not to get dog jacked. Of course, no harm comes to Marvin. In fact, the film's one act of real mayhem is perpetrated by the dog himself on a notebook of poems (alas, the canine actor Nellie has not fared so well, dying subsequent to the shooting of the film, thus becoming the first pooch to be awarded the "Palm Dog" posthumously by film critics at Cannes). </div>
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Typical of Paterson' s lack of real unpleasantness is a scene at the bar in which lovelorn actor Everett (William Jackson Harper) pulls a gun in frustration at his continued rejection by his beloved, Marie (Chasten Harmon). When Everett puts the pistol to his head, Paterson wrestles it away only to find it's a toy. This is not of immediate consolation to Paterson, but reflects the ultimately benign nature of the action (or lack thereof) in <i>Paterson</i>. </div>
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<i>Paterson </i>is something of a week in the life of its title character and wife. The days begin with the couple happily sprawled in bed, filtered sunlight applying its caress. Paterson turns each morning toward a side table and consults what Laura calls his "silent alarm watch," which always seems to beckon Paterson between 6:15 and 6:30. The husband then begins his day with the warm ritual of kissing his wife (if only temporarily) awake, rousing her with a kiss on her back or along an exposed hip. The overhead shot of the sinuous spoon of bodies is reminiscent of a similar point of view on the vampire lovers in Jarmusch's previous feature, <i>Only Lovers Left Alive.</i> But in <i>Paterson,</i> there is a warmth and tenderness between a couple not really seen to this extent in the work of the writer and director. </div>
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Paterson is rich with the play of shadow and light, photographed by veteran cinematographer Frederick Elmes, a frequent collaborator of both Jarmusch and David Lynch. Early in the film we see Paterson through the very clean windshield of his bus, the cityscape passing over the man's thoughtful face, the montage of reflection reminding one of the recently-departed Abbas Kiarostami.</div>
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Paterson drives and dreams through his days, his work begun and covert writing in his bus cut short at the arrival of his comically woebegone supervisor, Donny (Rizwan Manji). Laura, a woman of somewhat pathological restlessness, spends her days creating patterned drapes, dresses, walls, etc. This leaves the couple's home looking very much like the scene of a Marimekko bender. Laura dreams of making it big, striking it rich, whether as a baker (cupcakes as crazy with pattern as everything else she touches) or as a country music singer, a dream abetted when Paterson (sort of) consents to her purchase of a "harlequin" guitar, which she sees on an Esteban infomercial. Paterson's slight chagrin at the cost of the guitar, or his hesitation over one or another of Laura's culinary creations (especially a dinner pie), is the closest thing we see to marital strife in <i>Paterson.</i> To the husband's credit and that of the film, Laura's own attempts at artistic expression are never mocked. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">This is just to say...the decoration is getting slightly out of hand.<br />Golshifteh Farahani and Adam Driver in <i>Paterson. </i> </span></td></tr>
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Adam Driver's face, so prominent of length and feature, is still a surface of considerable understatement in <i>Paterson.</i> Water, the rush of water, specifically the cataract of Paterson Falls, gets a good bit of play in Mr. Jarmusch's film, as it does in the epic poem of William Carlos Williams (one of the film's more charming moments occurs when Laura facetiously asks for a poem from Carlo William Carlos). And yet the visage of the film's main character is itself like some serene, welcoming, slightly remote body of water, more likely to subtly register another's breeze of emotion or action than to express his own. </div>
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Driver's performance falters only, in a sense, where it is written to do so. As he composes his rather straightforward verse, the words appear on the screen and we hear the actor's voice enunciating those words in the halting manner of someone thinking, or composing out loud. The most dubious of these poetic intervals occurs early on, when Jarmusch actually superimposes the words over the cascading Paterson Falls, veering toward visual expression more suitable to the Hallmark channel. Any film about a singer, a band, a painter or poet, depends, to some extent, on how credible is the art on screen. Lisa Cholodenko's <i>Laurel Canyon</i> succeeds partially because its make-believe rock band was composed of actual musicians (Lou Barlow and his Folk Implosion mates) running through some pretty solid tunes. In <i>Paterson,</i> as its title character produces his oft-literal lines and observances, as Laura exhorts her husband to copy his notebook lest these great poems are lost, the eyes tend to roll. </div>
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And yet, as the closing credits tell us, the poems we see taking form on the screen are actually those of Ron Padgett. For the previously uninitiated (like myself), Mr. Padgett is a long-established American poet, with 20 collections of poetry to his credit. This does nothing to improve the quality of the poems we see in <i>Paterson</i>, but that's hardly the point. What is most venerated in <i>Paterson</i> is not the final product, but the effort to make art, the striving. This is a point emphasized to our generally laconic hero while he's sitting on a park bench before those redoubtable falls. Disconsolate at the loss of his entire body of work at the droopy, destructive maw of Marvin the dog, Paterson is approached by a Japanese man (Masatoshi Nagase, in more young turk days, one of the stars of Jarmusch's Memphis-set <i>Mystery Train</i>) who turns out to be a poet, making a pilgrimage to the site of the Williams' epic. When this unknown man asks Paterson if he's a poet, the downcast bus driver demurs. Still, this beneficent visitor senses something in his young interlocutor and gives him a blank book, which he produces from his satchel. This somewhat magical encounter is pure Jim Jarmusch, utterly contrived and quite moving. </div>
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Like Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch tends to create worlds of his own on screen. As is too often the case with Allen, Jarmusch's characters sometimes jar in their contrivance, their inability to sound authentic when dropped into a real setting. This can be a perverse strength or a thudding weakness. In <i>Paterson</i>, within the quiet confines of its main character's bus, both we and the bemused driver are privy to conversations far more didactic than natural, catching us up on some local history: two boys talk about local legend Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the boxer wrongfully jailed for 20 years; two slightly older students later educate us about the Italian anarchist Giuseppe Ciancabilla, who settled in Paterson in 1898.</div>
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Much as their musical knowledge runs deep (Jarmusch's also spreads wide), both writers and directors sometimes present art as in an undergraduate survey course. There's hardly time in <i>Paterson </i>for the recitation of the poetic work that shares its name, but the Williams poem we do hear is one of his most commonly bruited, "This is Just to Say." Similarly, as <i>Eve in Only Lovers Left Alive</i> muses on her old vampire friend Kit Marlowe being the actual author of the plays and poems we attribute to Shakespeare, she recites what is arguably the most careworn of the Bard's 154 sonnets, good old number 116, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds...." So Woody Allen trots out E.E. Cummings' "Somewhere I Have Never Travelled Gladly Beyond" in <i>Hannah and Her Sisters</i> to help usher Michael Caine and Barbara Hershey into bed. </div>
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What keeps the films of Jim Jarmusch more vital than those of Woody Allen these days (which is perhaps to damn him with faint praise) is that the worlds he casts upon the screen are much richer, varied places than his fellow New Yorker. Beyond the facile mantle of coolness which is too blindly applied to his work, Jarmusch's curiosity and mix of discrimination and diversity, his very individual brand of erudition and hero worship both celebrate and add to the best of our culture. There's not a great deal realistic about the gentle, artistic household of Paterson and Laura, but it's a lovely and even inspiring vision. </div>
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At this particular time in the greater American culture, when, among even more ugly gestures, some of the small, fearful men (mainly) in our federal governments are gleeful at the prospect of defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Jarmusch's naked admiration for the written word, for the making of art in any form is particularly welcome. It's a point gently though powerfully made. To poetry then. To love and to waking up without alarm clocks. To inclusion and diversity and cupcakes woozy with patterned icing. To Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and the corner bar. To writing, to trying, to civilization. Bravely onward. </div>
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dbThe Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-63126768176597610902017-02-04T10:39:00.000-08:002017-04-12T07:05:00.557-07:00Manchester by the Sea<br />
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"Aw, fuck this." A succinct expression from the aggrieved Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) that serves to as both a venting of momentary exasperation and a more lingering, existential state of the man address. The frustration at hand is bad enough, attending to the dire errands that follow the death of his beloved brother in a Manchester-by-the-Sea hospital, which occurred while he was on the road from Quincy. But we already have a sense by this time that Lee Chandler's despondency and occasional flares of rage have a greater source than his brother's demise. There's a kind of iceberg of grief dominating this man's consciousness, the dimension and impossible edges of which writer and director Kenneth Lonergan will make us powerfully aware as <i>Manchester by the Sea</i> proceeds. </div>
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<i>Manchester by the Sea </i>is getting its share of attention as the generally-dubious reflection continues on the best films of 2016, not to mention a nod or two from that slow-moving old cyclops, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. There seems, at least, a consensus that this a serious, affecting, well-made piece of cinema. True enough. But <i>Manchester by the Sea</i> is arguably great, and deceptively so. <br />
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In <i>Manchester by the Sea,</i> Kenneth Lonergan utilizes what is a common enough story structure, wherein the person who has withdrawn from life is drawn back in, knocked back into human orbit by some unexpected collision of character, circumstance, or both. Lonergan both operates masterfully within the familiar framework and then casts aside the pat ending, that most familiar and beloved extension of the creaky framework to American audiences. This leaves his main character standing stage left at story's end, a bit like Jacques in <i>As You Like It</i>, unwilling to participate in the marriage ritual that so define the comedies. But Jacques was merely melancholy. Regarding the life about him, Lee Chandler will take a much deeper and shadowy place in the wings. <br />
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<a href="http://d279m997dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/2016/11/1122_manchester-hedges.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://d279m997dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/2016/11/1122_manchester-hedges.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a>Whatever has occurred in Lee Chandler's past, it's evident that his reputation has preceded him to Manchester. After the grim business of identifying the body of his brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), Lee has to find his nephew, Patrick (Lucas Hedges). Before he can do so, the second of <i>Manchester by the Sea's</i> series of flashbacks occur. The past tends to creep at Kenneth Lonergan's characters like a rip current. On this occasion, the sweep of memory is insidiously happy, as we see good times aboard the Claudia Marie, Joe Chandler's fishing boat. The older brother steers the craft, looks back bemusedly and occasionally interposes himself in the horseplay between Lee and the eight-year-old Patrick.<br />
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As Lee tries to track down his nephew, he speaks first to the boy's assistant principal, who tells him that Patrick is with his hockey team in Gloucester. After the brief and slightly fitful conversation ends, the assistant principal speaks to his assistant:<br />
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"Who was that on the phone?"<br />
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"That was Lee Chandler."<br />
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"<i>Lee Chandler</i>?"<br />
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"The very one."<br />
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We don't know what provokes this chorus wariness and disapproval. As we see Lee Chandler through the early scenes of <i>Manchester by the Sea,</i> he works as a custodian, doing vital and shit work alike at a Quincy apartment building. He responds to the lust and scorn of two female tenants with similar indifference. A woman who spills a beer on him for the sake of striking up a conversation in a bar gets no further. Only that same bar night, when the hinges of his anger have been adequately lubricated, do we see Lee take an interest in his fellow man. This a fistfight with two business types, who have made the mistake of sitting opposite the sullen man. Otherwise, there are just the lonely tasks of this solitary man, for whom repeated rounds of snow shoveling take on a Sisyphusian prospect. </div>
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There are women suffering in <i>Manchester by the Sea,</i> specifically the ex-wives of both of the Chandler brothers. But most of the film's time is devoted to the relationship of Lee Chandler and his nephew - generally gruff, but with its oblique moments of tenderness. The young man and the not-so-old man, each with his grief. Men both, neither adept at expressing emotions, neither able to escape what plagues them, much as the uncle faces the far more daunting prospect.<br />
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As for Patrick Chandler, there is no obvious and immediate breakdown. We first see him, after a little action, involved in a fight on the rink. This, perhaps, an indication of a troubled teenager who's going to act out far more dramatically once his uncle shares the terrible news. But neither Kenneth Lonergan's writing nor the emotions of young men necessarily veer toward obvious expression. Though clearly affected, Patrick doesn't break down. After some indecision - "What does he look like?" he responds when Lee asks him if he wants to see his father - Patrick makes his visit to the hospital morgue. It's a brief visit: barely in the door, he casts glance in the direction of his father's corpse and says, "Okay, thank you." </div>
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At the hockey rink, Lonergan's story and direction had provided an even more telegraphic and touching demonstration of young men and their emotions. When it's obvious that he's received bad news about this father, two of Patrick's friends skate over to console him. You'll rarely see a better metaphor of halting tenderness than when the goalie, still in full pads, offers his friend an awkward hug. </div>
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As feelings are shared, or not shared, as the case may be in <i>Manchester by the Sea,</i> there is also the matter of regional if not cultural difference when it comes to such matters. Here, the sometimes brusque, amusingly bellicose nature of conversation between Northeasterners. At the reception following Joe Chandler's funeral, Lee is hawked by family friend, George (C.J. Wilson):</div>
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"...You get some food?"</div>
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"I had some cheese." </div>
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"You had some cheese. Asshole." </div>
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"I'll get you something. Hey JANINE!" (this from George to his wife)</div>
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"Seriously, I'm not hungry." </div>
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"Never mind! Skip it! I said forget it!" (George to Janine)</div>
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"WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR A GODDAMN THING YOU'RE SAYIN'!" </div>
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So goes the polite, post-burial discourse at this Massachusetts gathering. There is also the more terse, understated form of this verbal sparring, as when Patrick inquires after his uncle's bandaged hand. </div>
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"What happened to your hand?"</div>
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"I cut it." </div>
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"Oh. For a minute there I didn't know what happened." </div>
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Kenneth Lonergan has a writer's eye for detail, especially those that glare in contradiction. This applies to those slightly incongruous shouts across a funeral reception, as well as the eddies of absurdity amid the flows of utmost gravity. After identifying his brother's body, Lee's departure is delayed while hospital staff look for the plastic bag containing Joe Chandler's belongings. Right along the margins of "Manchester's" central tragedy, there is the faltering attempts of EMS workers, repeatedly banging the florescent yellow legs of a stretcher against the back of an ambulance, so they can get an overcome Randi Chandler into the vehicle. So it goes, these seemingly cruel juxtapositions, as the brilliant blue sky that presides over that tragedy's morning after. </div>
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There's nothing flashy, nothing of the auteur about Mr. Lonergan's direction. There is instead a quiet sense of authority. Even what seem to be rote establishing shots, as with the several looks we get of Manchester from the vantage point of the sea are given a power they don't usually bear because of their context. As with the story's structure, Lonergan directs with the precision of a craftsman, investing long-established forms with unusual strength and insight. </div>
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Lee and Patrick Chandler enjoy a hard-earned bit of respite in <i>Manchester by the Sea</i>. After much argument about where Lee (made Patrick's guardian by his brother's will) and his nephew might reside, as well as the fate of the Claudia Maria, which Patrick hopes to keep despite the financial realities of the craft's maintenance, there is a relatively carefree cruise out on the cold waters. On this occasion it is Lee Chandler observing Patrick, crowding the wheel with one of his girlfriends. This while a few bars, a few warm rays of sun are felt from the Ink Spots and Ella Fitzgerald's version of "I'm Beginning to See the Light." </div>
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<a href="http://exclaim.ca/images/manchester.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://exclaim.ca/images/manchester.jpg" height="228" width="320" /></a>For Lee Chandler, the going is mainly rough in <i>Manchester by the Sea</i>. As if the man didn't have enough to face, the writer and director appears in the flesh to taunt him. Making a cameo as "Manchester pedestrian," Lonergan happens upon Lee and Patrick in the middle of one of many arguments:</div>
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"Patty, I swear to God I'm gonna knock your fuckin' block off!"</div>
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"Great parenting." </div>
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"Mind your own fuckin' business!"</div>
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<span style="text-align: start;">Patrick Chandler seems to possess a good measure of the emotional resiliency of youth. For Lee, there seems less hope. This he tries to explain to his ex-wife, Randi, during another chance encounter about Manchester. As she tries to apologize for harsh things she said during that darkest time in their life, as she expresses her love for Lee and her desire to have some semblance of a relationship, he can only offer the verbal equivalent of backing sadly away: "It's not that...I can't...I'm happy for you and I want...But - there's nothin' there....You don't understand." He manages to state the case with more clarity and finality to his nephew when he explains the arrangements for Patrick to stay in Manchester and be adopted by George:</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: start;">"I know. I mean, they're great....But why can't you stay" (Patrick)</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: start;">" Come on, Patty...I can’t beat it. I can’t beat it. I’m sorry."</span></div>
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There is first a party scene with Lee, Joe and a large group of friends, having a very good time until the wee hours of the particular winter's night until they're interrupted by an irate Randi. The gathering breaks up, if very loudly, oblivious to Randi, the children and anyone else who might be within earshot. </div>
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So, perhaps we're finding out that Lee Chandler was just "a fuckin' asshole," one of several deserved expletives that Randi hurls at her husband and his fellow merry makers that night. A further flashback shows Lee walking to a party store. We don't initially know the context for this late-night beer run. More curiuosly, it occurs to the accompaniment of Albinoni's "Adagio Per Archi E Organo In Sol Minore." Why this funereal piece of music paired with the mundane, if slightly unseemly act? But then, but then...a further flashback provides the horrible explanation and equally grave aftermath. </div>
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Kenneith Lonergan apparently tried to write the screenplay for <i>Manchester by the Sea </i>without flashbacks, but found that "It just seemed like a pointless march of misery." It's not such an unusual device these days, the flashback, the invasion of the past into the present of the narrative. It can certainly be a gimmick in the wrong hands. Rarely has it been employed with such power as it is in <i>Manchester by the Sea. </i> With this flood of the past there is performed by Kenneth Lonergan and Casey Affleck a kind of harrowing papier mache, revealing not so much the shape of the man but the impossible holes that remain. </div>
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The Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-77160743866008500892017-01-22T20:19:00.000-08:002018-01-28T16:21:12.158-08:00Certain Women<br />
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Kelly Reichardt does not go easy on her characters. Or her actors, for that matter. Audiences, accustomed to much more in terms of plot, resolution and the blatantly obvious, might well count themselves among the ill-used after sitting through one of Ms. Reichardt's half dozen feature films. All the same, the uncompromising Reichardt continues to solidify her place among the best American writers and directors. The three main characters in her latest film, the certain women in question, must take their small satisfactions where they can find them. For those of us watching the proceedings, there is 107 minutes of beauty and subtlety, the like of which one could hardly find elsewhere. I could have watched this film had it extended hours beyond its appointed running time. </div>
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As she is wont to do, Kelly Reichardt expanded upon short stories in creating her latest film,<i> Certain Woman.</i> The stories in this case drawn from collections by Montana native Maile Meloy. The three stories adapted for <i>Certain Women</i> are from Meloy's <i>Half in Love</i> (2002) and <i>Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It </i>(2009), titles whose ambivalence strike a harmony with most of Reichardt's work. Or perhaps a common discord. Either way, Reichardt found herself a kindred spirit in the Montana native.</div>
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The natural world is usually not far from Ms. Reichardt's restless characters and lean stories. In this case, the Montana landscape itself presides impassively in its otherworldly beauty. It also has every potential to isolate, as it does for one of those main characters, Jamie (Lily Gladstone), a young ranch hand working through a lonely winter job seeing to horses in the eastern extreme of the vast state. </div>
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Much as we are never long removed from the Montana landscape, by day or night in <i>Certain Women,</i> the director gave herself the task of working more on interior shooting. The most striking example occurs in the film's first scene (of action). A woman and a man are dressing after a lunchtime tryst. We see the legs of the woman, Laura Wells (Laura Dern) still in bed, working panties back in place (have there been many more expressive sets of legs in film history than the long, skinny limbs of Laura Dern?). Simultaneously, to her right, separated by a rather meaningful section of wall, we see a man, Ryan Lewis, (James LeGros) standing, pulling a long john top over his head. There's little sense of romance or even excited (sated) lust in this aftermath, but our friend with the great, wiry growth of gray beard makes sure there's no air left in the the balloon when he says, "I thought you had to be back at work."</div>
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The pleasures are fleeting for the trio of women featured in <i>Certain Women.</i> There's always the tug of practicality, the call of a job. In the case of Laura Wells, that job is of local lawyer. When she returns to her office after the non-lunch lunch, she's met by the client that won't end, William Fuller (Jared Harris).</div>
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Fuller has been out of work for months after a construction accident left him, with among other disabilities, compromised vision ("the lines are all squiggly" he says in response to Laura's wearied advice to "...go to the library. Read a book." after Fuller admits that his wife wants him out of the house). The former construction worker has no claim against his former employer since he accepted a small settlement after the accident. This a clear-cut legal opinion that the aggrieved man will in no way accept from Laura. When she arranges for a second opinion with a personal injury lawyer in Billings and he confirms her appraisal, Fuller accepts it with a resigned "Okay." "It would be so lovely to think that if I were a man and I could explain the law and people would listen and say okay," Laura says into her cell phone from a mall parking lot in Billings.</div>
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The person at the other end of the virtual wire is Mr. Lewis, he of the lunchtime roll in the hay. Laura's attempt to find some consolation is cut short by her indifferent lover, deciding that he needs to end the affair. Typical of Reichardt, this occurs not amidst the bang of recriminations, but with a whimper. "I just think maybe, I have my hands full," the man says. "Um look, I've gotta go," says Laura, hardly devastated. Or perhaps she's just distracted. Her personal albatross, Fuller, is homing toward her car after being unceremoniously ejected from his wife's vehicle. All of this our beleaguered lawyer faces by midday. And yet, the day and night ahead hold more absurdity and thankless work for the put-upon woman. </div>
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It's when <i>Certain Women's</i> roundabout arrives at the third of its lonely or longing women that it finds its most mesmerizing portrait. This the aforementioned Jamie, the young woman laboring through a solitary winter's job, attending to horses at a rural barn and living in a spare room at the facility. Her loneliness sends her off into the expansive darkness one night in a pickup truck. In the nearest town, she sees a few cars pulling into a school parking lot. Lacking anything more satisfying to do, she follows a small group into the building and takes a seat at the back of a classroom. This, she finds out, is some sort of course in educational law taught by an unsure, not at all thrilled to be there recent law school graduate by the name of Beth Travis (Kristen Stewart). Jamie, on the other hand, is very pleased that Beth is there. It's immediately obvious she's smitten with the reluctant teacher. </div>
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The second time we see the young lawyer, she does the rounds in her modest classroom in a gold sweater vest over a white long-sleeved top. There's such an unfashionable eloquence in this ensemble that it's as close as <i>Certain Women </i>gets to overstatement. Beth later expands upon her still tenuous financial position, actual or merely perceived, when explaining to Jamie in a local diner after class why she is making the almost impossible four-hour commute twice a week, which leaves little time for sleep on the class nights: "I was so afraid I would get out of law school and be sellin' shoes. My mom works in a school cafeteria, my sister in a hospital laundry. So, selling shoes is the nicest job a girl in my family is supposed to get." </div>
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The few evening classes where Jamie gets to see Beth - and it's quite clear the object of her affection could be expounding upon educational law, Euclidean geometry, or the practical uses of cow manure without any loss of interest on the part of the rapt woman at the back of the classroom - are oases in her otherwise arid existence. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-size: x-small;">With Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone above, examples</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">of the work of two painters that influenced Kelly Reichardt</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">in the making of Certain Women: Milton Avery </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(Walker By The Sea, left) and Alice Neel </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(The Whistling Girl, right).</span><br />
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With repeated instead of protracted scenes, Reichardt demonstrates the routines that are Jamie's life. Several times we see the barn door whisked open of a morning. On each occasion, there is a grand Montana peak in the background, the opening a kind of curtain rising, something of a revelation. Jamie's charges are usually waiting for that barn door to slide open, as is the furry Roomba of a dog that follows her, particularly as she rides a tractor across a snowy pasture to distribute bales of hay. At one unveiling of the day, we see a dark-hided horse approach the entry, snow upon its back. The detail, the grain of the snow is discernible against the black skin, as are the subtle variations in color of the landscape beyond, because Reichardt and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt chose to photograph <i>Certain Women</i> in 16mm, not on digital film as originally planned. Too much detail would be lost, the director realized not long into pre-production. A typically uncompromising decision on the part of Kelly Reichardt. </div>
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Surprisingly, the slightest of three lives observed in <i>Certain Women</i> is that of Gina Lewis. Whether this is simply a matter of time devoted to the character or the fact that there's not a great deal to reveal isn't immediately obvious. The surprise is that Gina is played by a seemingly underutilized Michelle Williams, who starred in Reichardt's <i>Wendy and Lucy</i> (2008) and <i>Meek's Cutoff </i>(2010). It might be the case that this is the character Reichardt was least interested in exploring, revealing. But even in this most elliptical of the three interspersed segments in <i>Certain Women,</i> the writer and director refuses to resort to a pat characterization. </div>
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"Listen. Let's you and I make an effort today. We're gonna be nice to your mom today, okay? Let's cut her some slack."</div>
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"Why? Is she sick or something." (This the indifferent Guthrie Lewis)</div>
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"No, she isn't sick....Because neither one of us would do very well without her." </div>
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The husband is the same man we saw in the the earlier scene, obviously finishing an affair with Laura Wells. This, along with Jamie's later appearance at Laura's law office, searching for Beth, the only common threads in the otherwise loose weave of <i>Certain Women.</i> </div>
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Much as Laura Wells and Beth Travis are lawyers, Gina Lewis, regardless of profession, is the odd woman out in the story and on the Montana landscape. We first see her in a navy jacket and Lyrca pants, hair neatly and obediently pulled back, an elfin alien pacing through the sere winter grass and scrub brush. She's very well put together for someone who just finished a run, but a somewhat guilty cigarette reveals that her communing with nature didn't dispel all the anxiety of a life of ambition. One of Beth's ambitions is to build a house on the site where she and her family are camping. Toward that end, she hopes to acquire a load of sandstone that rests on and in the land of the solitary Albert (Rene Auberjonois). </div>
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Gina and Ryan's visit to Albert expresses much more than the pathos of a man living alone at the end of his life, attention and memory coming and going. Both in Albert's home and in the couple's subsequent drive home, we see some of the good and bad in both Gina and Ryan, not to mention the obvious fissures in their relationship. When Ryan fails to finesse Albert toward agreeing to sell or give them outright the sandstone, at least to Gina's satisfaction, she shares her frustration when they're back on the road: "God, you really weren't helping me at all." </div>
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Gina gets the coveted sandstone. It could well be a symbol by which a storyteller, a director, mocks the woman, dismissing her as yuppie striving for an authenticity about which she has no idea, to which she has no right. But slight as both this character and portion of <i>Certain Women</i> would seem to be, both Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams are interested in expressing or at least suggesting all the humanity present. We last see Gina, drinking a cup of coffee and regarding the pile of relocated stone. This might be about as good as it gets for the driven woman, but there's enough repose to suggest a soul where a less compassionate view would suggest none. </div>
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Kelly Reichard's films are full of moments of repose, of revelation. They are not, however, replete with laughter. Like the five features that preceded it, <i>Certain Women</i> will not be mistaken for a comedy of any sort. And yet, there are small moments of absurdity, especially in the travails of Laura. After he gets confirmation that he has no claim against his former employer, Fuller breaks into an office building where his case files are housed and takes a security guard hostage. Haunting her even into her sleep, Fuller's exploits drag Laura from her bed when the police call her to the scene. Before she quite knows what's going on, she's on her way into the building to reason with her client. The fleeting moment of disbelief we see Laura Dern's face as she fits her clothes over a Kevlar vest perfectly express the absurdity of the situation and her relationship with Fuller. A quieter moment of incongruity had occurred earlier in the day, when Laura was eating lunch in a mall food court to escape her ubiquitous client, waiting in the car. She looks with an expression somewhere between bemusement and confusion as a Native American in full ceremonial costume waits in line at an Asian buffet. </div>
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The Native American presence in <i>Certain Women</i> is subtle, but perhaps not without significance. Aside from her first feature, <i>River of Grass</i>, all of Kelly Reichardt's films have been set in the west, mainly the Pacific Northwest, <i>Meek's Cutoff,</i> the most blatantly "Western" of them all. There emerged, perhaps by the second or third wave of Westerns in film history, a theme of the disappearing West, as if the American West was the first West, a kind of lost or vanishing Eden. One sees this in the films of Sam Peckinpah, among many others. It's usually white men leading this mourning. But peer through the scrim of encroached-upon wide-open spaces, and behind it's usually Sam or whomever else they mourn for.</div>
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Kelly Reichardt notions of place, of West, are more subtle, more complex. There's almost no stridency in her work, but the film's nearly static first scene would seem to bear its messages. At first there is simply a Montana landscape, of such dimension and almost infinite shadings of beauty that it appears to be a painted backdrop. The first sound heard is a Native American rattle (echoed in that mall where Laura eventually sees why the person in ceremonial dress is present). In time, a train whistle is heard and a freight crosses the frame right to left. Again, nothing obvious, nothing strident. But possibly an expression of the impassive, presiding natural world and man's transience. Something too perhaps about an order of arrival. </div>
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Jamie is allowed one moment of contentment, even joy with Beth. It's also a small moment of rapture for <i>Certain Women. </i> After their second class together, Jamie says that she has a surprise for her teacher. She's come to school on horseback. Beth is offered a ride to the diner and is so nonplussed that she accepts. Here, another moment of absurdity as the clap of hooves is heard on the asphalt of a Montana road and these two women are carried by horseback through the night. But this absurdity of the most lovely and unexpected nature. And very possibly one of the great moments in Jamie's young life. Alas, the would-be romance plays out as the lawyer's reticence has hinted that it will. When Beth finally gives up the class, Jamie makes the four-hour pilgrimage to where she works and lives. Once Beth's place of employment is determined, a parking lot conversation ensues, about as awkward and futile for Jamie as we might expect. </div>
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As ever, the weary woman must return to her work, in Jamie's case the the ranch and horses. When she begins to nod off on the interstate, it appears that a much more severe misfortune might be at hand. But this is a Kelly Reichardt film. There's no manufactured drama. Jamie's truck simply veers off the highway, levels a couple of fence posts and slows into the embrace of a field and its dried and browned vegetation, typical of the cold comforts that tend to await these certain women. At the same time, Jamie's unceremonious slide into unconsciousness and the waiting field is met by one of the rare occasions when <i>Certain Women's </i>score (by Jeff Grace) really manifests itself. As if to say, here too is a life of significance. </div>
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Maile Meloy's H<i>alf in Love</i> is a title consistent with Kelly Reichardt's embrace of ambiguity. It's also very much in the spirit of the give and take of the relationships in <i>Certain Women</i>. In each case - Laura and Ryan; Gina and Ryan; Jamie and Beth - one person seems more interested than the other. One does more of the pursuit while the other seems to have one foot out the door. So it tends to go. </div>
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The longing, the loneliness, the sense of dislocation (especially on the part of Jamie) in <i>Certain Women </i>is of a piece with the previous films of Kelly Reichardt, who tends to leave her characters in one sort of limbo or another. There's ample insight and empathy in her stories of Americans past and present. Usually these characters reside beyond the interest of marketers and politicians, but that's not always the case. It might be two men on a strange road trip, as is the case in <i>Old Joy</i> (2006). A vulnerable woman and her dog trying to get to Alaska, as we witness in <i>Wendy in Lucy.</i> A man and woman on the lam in Florida, when they're not really being pursued by anyone (Reichardt referred to it as “a love story without the love, a murder mystery without the murder, a road movie that never gets on the road.”), in the director's first feature, <i>River of Grass</i> (1994). </div>
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There is almost always movement in the films of Kelly Reichardt: characters drift toward and away from each other; unsurely in the direction of a goal; or just aimlessly on. The movement itself an expression of our ever unresolved longing. As rendered in the glimpses into the lives of these certain women, there's something deeply satisfying in the identification, in the clear-eyed appraisal. And there is the hush, the images of the land, the valuing of the lives at hand. </div>
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You want to go on following the lives of the characters in <i>Certain Women,</i> especially Jamie. Coming back to this beautiful, reflective film will have to suffice. As for the writer and director, you regard the work of this woman and you think, all of that intelligence and subtlety is going to get you absolutely nowhere. And for heaven's sake, don't stop. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Do you know this woman? You should know this woman. <br />Director Kelly Reichardt.</span></td></tr>
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dbThe Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-66211826690614814612017-01-18T12:39:00.001-08:002018-11-09T07:54:05.605-08:00La La Land<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There's a moment in Damien Chazelle's <i>La La Land</i> in which Sebastian Wilder (Ryan Gosling) strolls out along the Hermosa Pier by dusk and sings what may be the film's signature number, "City of Stars." The fact that the jazz purist Wilder shows up in Hermosa Beach, just as he and his struggling actress paramour Mia Dolan (Emma Stone) magically pop up all over the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles, is a bit of geographic chicanery one will readily enough grant the filmmaker. This clearly is the stuff of fantasy. The film is called <i>La La Land</i> after all (significantly, it's also more of a tourist or media moniker than one a native Angelino or anyone who really understands and loves the city would tend to employ), and Mr. Chazelle would seem to feel that he's produced an homage, if not a scion to the Hollywood musicals of yesteryear.</div>
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What's interesting about the brief pier interval and the tune, carried on Mr. Gosling's limited and yet distinctive baritone, is that it hints at a depth and a darkness into which<i> La La Land </i>only rarely dangles its reluctant toes. As the song begins, it actually sounds like something the actor - and not the soundtrack's composer, Justin Hurwitz - might have composed for the film himself. Mr. Gosling, along with Zach Shields (and the Silverlake Conservatory Children's Choir, reminiscent of those eager young North London choristers who abetted Pink Floyd with "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2") produced the self-titled <i>Dead Man's Bones</i> in 2009. The slightly haunting rise and fall of "City of Stars'" melody isn't so removed from the dark sonic carnival of Dead Man's Bones, but the music is by Mr. Hurwitz. The solid and reasonably nimble tunes (not so much the lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul) are about the only aspect of <i>La La Land</i> that lingers as one scene replaces the next, after the closing credits proceed.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Hey everybody, there's a sale at The Gap! Surprisingly happy commuters in Damien Chazelle's <i>La La Land</i></span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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Mr. Chazelle does not lack for energy or exuberance. We're introduced to the film's charming leads, as well as group of very limber commuters at the outset, which is clearly supposed to be a great, colorful opening fanfare, announcing a big film with a bang. There is a bang but it turns out to be a resounding blank. What's most impressive about this scene, which involved two days of shooting on a closed-down section of the 105/110 interchange in Los Angeles, as with The Blues Brothers and their pursuers running amok in Chicago, is the degree to which the film production is able to have its way with the traffic of a major city. Not so much the forgettable if energetic action we get on screen.</div>
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Before all of the stranded and very colorfully-clad commuters exit their vehicles and begin to dance, car surf and even skateboard with abandon, there is a proud, throwback announcement that what we're about to see will be presented in Cinemascope. A grand old tool it is, but you have to know how to wield it, how to fill that broad frame. There are stills from the two days of shooting (especially one with bodies aloft above cars and seemingly the vast city) that hint at the potential. Very little that happens in the real time of the scene registers in any memorable way. Mainly, it's a kind of happy, multi-cultural throwdown, the mere premise of which is supposed to thrill. </div>
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Elsewhere, Chazelle does better with foreground dancing and singing against the almost infinite Los Angeles basin backdrop. There are judicious long takes of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling doing their own dancing and singing, demonstrating a real chemistry, a pleasure at what they're doing and with each other. The limitations of the two leads with regard to the songs or fancy steps (particularly the often thin voice of Ms. Stone when it is plaintively on the verge of breaking) is actually a strength, something quite real amid all the make believe. </div>
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Elsewhere, and too often, Damien Chazelle continues to be a director without a strong sense of how to direct. This is true of relative throw-away moments as when we get intense point of view closeups of coffee making (Mia is a barista on what is supposed to be the Warner Brothers lot). We certainly are made aware that coffee is being made, but in <i>La La Land</i>, these are only empty gimmicks, rote 21st-century flourishes. Compare these moments to those of a far more original director, Edgar Wright. When the lads in <i>The World's End </i>(2013) queue up at one of bars along their epic pub crawl, we get seemingly similar shots of lager whooshing into glasses. But there, the procession of pints actually tells us something about the ill-advised single-mindedness of the endeavor, the excess. And there's even wit, as when flow of beer gives way to a prim stream of water for the teetotaler of the group. There's a sense that the director has actually thought about what he's doing. There's a point. </div>
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More significant than the capturing of coffee making, there is the filming of musical performance. For a man whose films scream, "I love jazz!," Damien Chazelle demonstrates no ability to film it with any style or insight. There's yet more of the herky-jerk, over-stimulated spectator at a tennis match point of view that so plagued <i>Whiplash </i>(2014). Fortunately, there's less of this manic camera swiveling in <i>La La Land</i>, but Chazelle's two directorial settings seem to be swing wildly or stare intently. Neither give us much feeling for the music in the apparent spotlight. </div>
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Whether the perspective is broad or close, the direction of Mr. Chazelle's first three features is rife with borrowed gestures, misdirected energy and little that resonates longer than a firework in the night sky. </div>
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What is true of direction also, alas, applies to script: nuance is clearly not a defining characteristic of Damien Chazelle's work. </div>
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There's more pontificating here about jazz purity, more nuggets of supposed jazz history offered up by the pianist Wilder. But before you swallow those morsels whole, be aware that the anecdote of which Chazelle and his characters made such hay in <i>Whiplash </i>- Charlie Parker nearly being decapitated by a cymbal thrown by drummer Jo Jones because his playing that wasn't up to snuff - was largely fabricated. </div>
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The view jazz we get in Mr. Chazelle's last two films, beyond their dubious presentation, is largely conservative and reductive. A crowd-pleasing enough proclivity, but hardly doing justice to an art form the director references and exploits to such lengths. There's a conversation between Wilder and a musical colleague, Keith (John Legend), in which the latter tells Wilder he's too much of a traditionalist, that jazz has stayed vital precisely because the greats broke with tradition. It's a good point, but offered by a character who we eventually see involving the keyboardist in a kind of carnival of musical schmaltz, with several watered-down genres at play, complete with superfluous dancers. An exacting discourse on the definition and progression of the genre is hardly required in such a piece of entertainment. But if Mr. Chazelle wants to keep expounding on the sanctity and definition of jazz, he should probably demonstrate a less superficial understanding of the art form. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Please, tell me more about this jazz music. Ryan Gosling and<br />Emma Stone in <i>La La Land</i></span></td></tr>
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Fortunately, the handsome and affable chagrin that is Ryan Gosling is not always taken up with these jazz-lite lectures. Despite the actor's somewhat mask-like good looks, something in the frequently waning gibbous of those ever-gleaming blue eyes has always been able to suggest hurt, disquiet, melancholy (never more so than in excellent <i>Half Nelson</i> (2006). The sun might be shining bright, but you get sense the clouds are never far away. All of which abets Gosling's (and Sebastian Wilder's) easy charm and adds at least a little needed depth the character as drawn sorely lacks. Already a musician, Gosling practiced for hour each day to be able to perform the demanding keyboard runs required of him in <i>La La Land</i>. Because, you know the jazz - it's fast, fast, fast, man! Go daddy-o! Uh, yeah. </div>
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Chazelle does well with his leads and he certainly can't go too wrong as long as his camera is trained on Emma Stone. Ms. Stone's performances have sometimes swung with the quality of her roles and films. There were early and strong indications of her particular charm in <i>Superbad</i> (2007) and <i>Zombieland</i> (2009). Served one of those sophisticated decades beyond her teen years roles in <i>Easy A </i>(2010), she handled it with zest and intelligence. In <i>Birdman</i> (2014), we found out she can hit pretty hard if given the weight with which to swing. With the lesser gravity of Mia Dolan in <i>La La Land</i> - why, the poor woman and her equally buoyant fella positively float into the night sky of the Griffith Park Observatory! - Emma Stone makes you wonder what a pleasure it might well be to observe her mature on screen. </div>
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<i>La La Land</i> is obviously a film for which place looms large. If one were given to such flourishes, one might even say that Los Angeles is something of a character in the film. Alas, it's not a character whose remarkable complexity and breadth <i>La La Land </i>begins to suggest. If your knowledge of the city was confined to images of Hollywood Boulevard, Rodeo Drive and maybe some grand old joint like the Grauman's Chinese Theater, the film's use of locations like Griffith Park Observatory, the Watts Tower and the Colorado Street Bridge in Pasadena might give you the idea you've gotten around the city a good bit. True enough, but only in the most narrow sense. </div>
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For a film that seems to want, among other things, to be about a place, there's just no hint of the darkness, as well as the teeming vitality, diversity (something at which <i>La La Land</i> makes conspicuous but fairly shallow stabs), even joy, that makes Los Angeles the extraordinary place it is. Even if you don't care to explore the desert darkness which has always been a part of the city ( and much as your time would be vastly better spent watching David Lynch's <i>Mulholland Drive</i> (2001) or <i>Inland Empire</i> (2006), reading Joan Didion's dispatches from and about the place), a film like last year's wonderful, even feel-good documentary <i>City of Gold</i>, about the food writer Jonathan Gold, will tell you more about the elusive metropolis than a hundred such films as <i>La La Land.</i></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Tourist time in <i>La La Land:</i> The Angel's Flight funicular, Colorado<br />Street Bridge and Griffith Park Observatory</span></td></tr>
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Mr. Chazelle is apparently a fan of the great Jacques Demy. This is evident in the film's color and exuberance, particularly that first freeway scene. Demy's wonderful musicals - The <i>Les Parapluies de Cherbourg</i> (<i>The Umbrella's of Cherbourg</i>, 1964) and <i>Les Demoiselles de Rochefort </i>(<i>The Young Girls of Rochefort</i>, 1967) most well-known among them - draw rather nakedly on Hollywood Golden Age musicals and jazz, among many other influences. And yet, for all the goofy jazz of "Young Girls, " for all the nearly laughable lyrics, for the intensely colorful near-opera that is "Umbrellas," there is something that connects, something that lingers. Something which <i>La La Land</i> tends to la la lack. With Mr. Chazelle there is simply a lot of sound and fantasia which signify nothing. One can't but help wonder if all the critics gushing about <i>La La Land</i> will remember a thing about the film in a year's time, in six moths. </div>
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For all their brightness, their seeming innocence, Demy's most famous musicals are all the more affecting for the emotional undertow, the darkness or melancholy chasing those characters (especially in "Umbrellas"). The director also made musicals that touch upon decidedly un-Hollywood subjects like labor rights, even incest. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Model Shop</i> (1969)</span></td></tr>
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Among Jacques Demy's non-musical films, there is the little seen <i>Model Shop</i> (1969). As he tended to do, Demy let a character from an earlier film (the main character from <i>Lola</i> (1960)) drift into another of his stories. But by the time we see Lola relocated to Los Angeles about a decade later, the relative optimism of the previous film is gone. There's actually a great, very brief scene in season seven of <i>Mad Men</i> in which we see Don Draper sitting alone in a movie theater, watching <i>Model Shop.</i> It's a fairly brilliant reference, not only of time and place, but one to a film whose mood of disenchantment is so consistent with the character watching it. Anyone who's watched <i>Mad Men</i> knows how seamlessly creator Matthew Weiner and his talented cast and crew combined seductive aesthetics with story lines that tended toward the dark side of American life. For his part, in his brief visit to Los Angeles (even if he did succumb to the cliche of his main character living adjacent to an oil derrick) Jacques Demy's glimpse of the city, 45-years-old though it may be, rings with more truth about the city and its main industry of make believe than <i>La La Land. </i></div>
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<i>La La Land </i>does at least represent a kind of progress for Damien Chazelle - it's not a very bad film; it's just not very good. It's vastly better than the director's first dancing and singing affair, the execrable <i>Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench </i>(2009<i>).</i> Even with its fantasy and flights of fancy, <i>La La Land </i>is certainly less ridiculous than the director's 2014 <i>Whiplash</i> (your average <i>Planet of the Apes</i> film is a good deal less ridiculous than <i>Whiplash</i>). One has to assume that all of these expressions of love, however uninspired - for singing, dancing and especially for jazz - are sincere. Unfortunately, all that love smacks of the mile wide and inch deep variety. Perhaps, to adapt the words of another jazz aficionado and shoveler of cheese, if you love something, you should set it free?</div>
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If <i>La La Land</i> leads a few people to watch or watch again <i>The Umbrellas of Cherbourg</i> or <i>The Young Girls of Rochefort,</i> it will have done some good. Check out those Demy films if you haven't yet had the pleasure. And while we (culturally) are supposedly discussing the best films of 2016, it seems quite criminal that we speak of the likes of <i>La La Land</i> and nary a word is being uttered about a film like Yorgos Lanthimos' <i>The Lobster</i>. <i>The Lobster's</i> deadpan style, muted colors and lack of resolution might seem like so many teaspoons of castor oil compared to <i>La La Land's</i> veritable box of sweets. But with it's audacious plotting, it's wit and the feat of making a film in the 21st century about our unquenchable yearning for love that is bracingly original, <i>The Lobster</i> soars, for film and audience alike, even as its character remain decidedly earthbound.</div>
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dbThe Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-80230665912862079102016-09-13T08:32:00.000-07:002018-11-05T19:34:35.783-08:00The Lobster<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It's a jungle out there, lonelyhearts. Or at least a forest. Which seems better than the hotel. But is it? And the city - it's a cold, cold place. But we all knew that, right? The options are daunting for the lonely in search of real connection, those who don't necessarily want to go it alone and for whom couplehood, as it so often presented, seems the least appealing choice of all. So goes the old story, rendered almost unrecognizably new by director Yorgos Lanthimos in <i>The Lobster. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>The Lobster</i> is writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos' first film in English, the first produced outside of his native Greece. Like his earlier <i>Dogtooth </i>and <i>Alps </i>(as well as <i>Attenberg,</i> by his colleague Athina Rachel Tsangari, a film in which Lanthimos deadpans his way through a secondary role), <i>The Lobster</i> sees human relationships stripped down to their basic truths and conflicts and given absurd projection, a kind of psychological caricature. <i>The Lobster</i> is what you could call a European production, co-produced by principals from five nations. Given that the United Kingdom is one of those contributors, one is reminded of another recent, absurd exercise in coupling and uncoupling. Oppressively careworn as it has become, Brexit sounds a bit like a Yorgos Lanthimos film. Alas, reality proves rather less entertaining and edifying. And beyond the control of rewind.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Mr. Lanthimos' fiction has lost nothing in its translation to English and its move to more liberally-funded international production. You'll read in some capsule reviews that <i>The Lobster</i> is a dystopian comedy. Given the generally impassive trudge of characters through the early stages of<i> The Lobster,</i> the muted mood and look of the film, the labels are understandable enough, if a bit facile. But really, there is a genre into which <i>The Lobster</i> more neatly fits. It happens to be a genre called The Films of Yorgos Lanthimos. The themes are relatively timeless, the dilemmas all too universal. And yet they find expression in a <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">paled,</span> parallel world that the Greek filmmaker continues to build for himself. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Our main character, our unhero<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">, </span>trudging through <i>The Lobster</i> is David (Colin Farrell). The somber David is escorted (through a generic urban landscape that is slightly reminiscent of Jacques Tati; only <i>Playtime</i> has now become Depressedtime) to a seaside hotel where color has apparently also retired to die a slow death. This while the body of his former relationship is still warm<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">.</span> In tow is a genial shepherd by the name of Bob (father and son pooches Jaro and Ryac, for the record), whom we find out is David's brother and a former visitor at the very unusual hotel. Meet your mate during your stay at this hotel and back to the city you go, into the connubial sunset. Fail to do so within 45 days and you are transformed into the animal of your ch<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">oosing</span>. Bob had made the obvious choice, as the hotel manager (Olivia Colman) informs David. His <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">designated animal </span>, on the other hand, a lobster - which he <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">select</span>s for lifespan, blue blood and unending fertility - meets with the approval of the manager: "I must congratulate you, the first thing most people think is a dog...which is why the world is so full of dogs." Thus begins, among numerous other accomplishments, <i>The Lobster's</i> disregard for all cute little human companions, canine and child alike. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Like those inducted into the military or getting serious attention in a hospital, new guests are stripped of their individual garments and left to slouch in relative undress after checkin. So sits David amongst a batch of new arrivals, including "Biscuit Woman" (Ashley Jensen, even more affecting and downtrodden than she was as Ricky Gervais' pal in <i>Extras</i>) and "Man With Limp" (Ben Whishaw). Mr. Farrell looks a kind of Groucho Marx negative with his glasses and jet, questioning eyebrows. David's slouch only exaggerates his paunch. One imagines Mr. Farrell having a very good time acquiring the extra weight. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">With us from the start of the film is narration provided by a character later to appear in the film (she intimates that David will eventually join her group), "Short Sighted Woman." This Rachel Weisz, speaking in kind of third-person flat. It's a tribute to Mr Lanthimos' rigor and Weisz's commitment to character that even this narration is consistent with the film's sometimes droll, generally saturnine tone. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /><i>The Lobster's</i> international cast, its matter-of-fact narrator and other characters, don't necessarily speak as if English is a second language. Consistent with the earlier work of Mr. Lanthimos, characters utter uncertain words and abortive sentences as if human communication itself were a foreign tongue. A particular sci<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">nt</span>illating <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">danc<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">e<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> floor exchange be<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">twee<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">n David and <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Nosebleed Woman after the latter has realized that she has bled on his white shirt<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">: </span> " </span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I'm sorry, I got the blood on your shirt<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">. </span>But don't worry, there are many ways<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span>to remove blood stain from clothing. <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span>One way is to wring the clothes to<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span>cold water, then rub in sea salt<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">. </span>Another way is to scrape the stain<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span>with cotton ball dip in ammonia<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">...." More <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">such verbal foreplay ensues. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>There are amusing if very dry exchanges in Lanthimos' <i>Dogtooth</i> in which the nearly adult children speciously name objects like the most hapless of language students, their ignorance reinforced by a father who keeps his wife and children confined to the well-appointed suburban compound. </span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Filippou grant the directors of the hotel no more grace with words, much as they demonstrate - completely oblivious to themselves - sarcasm. When two of the young hotel guests, Man With Limp and "Nosebleed Woman" (Jessica Barden) unite (Man With Limp pretends to be Man With Nosebleed), they are recognized at a hotel gathering prior to graduating to yachts moored in nearby water, the honeymoon quarters for those who successfully couple. Their benediction from the hotel manager seems a valentine to the consciously (and sometimes contemptuously) childless in the audience: "The course of your relationship will be monitored closely...by our staffs and me personally. If you encounter any problems, any tensions, any arguing that you can't resolve yourselves, you will be assigned children. That usually helps a lot." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Amplifying the irony which Mr. Lanthimos allows certain of his</span> characters <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">to</span> render with admirable deadpan consistency<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> is a soundtrack whose greatest feat of irony<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">, much like the film itself, <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">is a mix of audacity and precision which at key moments coalesces <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">to a<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">ctual<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">, deeply-felt sincerity.<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> There is an abundan<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">ce of fraught string quartet music<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> (Shnitke, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Shostakovich) u<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">su<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">ally accompanying the most <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">mundane of acts: the putting on of clothes, plying the aisle of a supermarket.<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> When we see the hotel <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">guests go on their first "hunt," stalking the renegade loners in the nearby forest, the darkly<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">-clad <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">hunter</span>s emerge from the bottom of the fra<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">me in slow motion to the open<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">ing glissando<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">s</span></span></span></span></span></span> of "</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Apo Mesa Pethamnos<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">"</span> (sung</span> by Danai<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">)<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">.<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> To this <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">graceful<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">, swaying old Greek lament</span></span> we see th<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">e slowed, awkward flight and p<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">ursuit,<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">faces juddering<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> ghastly as bodies stumble and careen<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">, silent screams and mouths aga<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">pe<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> at falls.<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> We see<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> "Heartless Woman" (Angeliki Papoulia)</span></span></span> exultant <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">he she rifle-butts a loner to the f<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">orest floor </span></span>and th<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">en deliver a right cross to her already bloodied face. </span> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Blunt <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">as the violence is as <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">delivered by </span></span>Heartless Woman,<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> this is certainly not Brett Easton Ellis (nor May Haron in the film version), serving us a co<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">ur</span>se of sociopathic homic<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">ide to a pairing of Huey Lewis and the News, as is the case in <i>American Psycho. </i> No, Mr. Lanthimos speaks (and sings) irony with the delicacy and fluency of a native. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Occasionally, the director does indeed allow concord between image and sound, those insistent strings slowing from ironic adagio to sincere lento or moderato pastorale. Such is the case during the unconventional, sub rosa courtship of David and Short Sighted Woman, one that takes place in a kind of beautifully absurd semaphore amongst the other loners, fingers, hands and swiveling heads serving as flags: "When we turn our heads to the left, it means 'I love you more than anything in the world.' When we turn our heads to the right, it means 'Watch out, we're in danger.' We had to be very careful in the beginning not to mix up 'I love you more than anything in the world' with 'Watch out, we're danger.'" </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Even during the moments of obvious irony in </span><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">The Lobster - </i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> image to sound, sound to image - there is something clutchingly universal in the absurd or mundane acts which resonate beneath the obvious incongruity of the music that accompanies the action. So it is with the flight of loners from those desperate to couple (each bagged loner wins the hunter an extra day at the hotel to stave off transformation to an animal). Who among us who has spent any significant portion of their adult life single has not felt oneself a threat to and occasional target of the nervous herd of the paired-off? Who has not felt anxiety amidst the plenty of the super market? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Prior to his sylvan romance with Short Sighted Woman, David manages to woo the seemingly unwooable Heartless Woman at the hotel with skillful indifference. The first salvo of cold disregard occurs at the expense of poor Biscuit Woman, sprawled on the bricks beneath the hotel, her second floor suicide leap having resulted not in instant death but unbearable pain (and presumably later death). This a promised jump after her attempts to attract David fail, blood and a telltale, forlorn atoll of biscuits about the woman's head to confirm what her screams indicate to everyone in earshot. David's commentary to Heartless Woman? A veritable love poem: "I just hope her pathetic screams can't be heard from my room. Because I was thinking about have a lie down and I need peace and quiet. I was playing golf and I'm quite tired. The last thing I need is some woman dying slowly and loudly." The canny David then seals the dubious deal by refusing to act when Heartless Woman later seems to be choking to death in a hot tub next to him. The Heimlich maneuver being for saps. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But they don't call her Heartless Woman for nothing. After a brief, heady romance consisting of alienating sex and frigid arm and arm walks (during which David further endears himself to his bride-to-be by kicking the shin of Mrs. & Mr. Nosebleed's little cherub of a conversation starter), David awakens one morning to find that the heartless one has dispatched his furry brother Bob from their lives with a brutality surprising even for her. When he finally betrays sadness, Heartless Woman not only calls off the relationship but takes him by the ear to the Hotel Director's office, causing him to flee and seek asylum among the loners. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Lanthimos has his share of fun with directors and would-be couples at the hotel. Guests are edified with a pantomime of a woman menaced by man when walking alone and then moving in triumphant safety in the arm of a partner - "Woman walks alone; woman walks with man." There is the matter of the ridiculous focus on the "defining characteristic," thus desperate Man With Limp occasionally having to bash his face against a hard surface so he and his paramour can bleed, nose by nose. And, of course, there is the use of those rifles mounted to each hotel room wall, with the allotment of 20 tranquilizer darts, which is detailed though not initially explained as Short Sighted Woman runs down contents of David's room.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Yes, there's a kind of dour hilarity in the simple-minded direction offered up to the hapless hotel guests. But Lanthimos really has fun with the loners, drilled with military rigor by Loner Leader (Lea Seydoux). In his initial briefing, David is told that he is welcome to take a place among the loners, but there are rules to follow. Talking is allowed, but no flirting. Dancing is okay, but..."We only dance by ourselves. That's why we only electronic music." That might be the joke of the year. All the more so when we later get the visual echo, the loners, together alone, thrusting their pale limbs into the night after a successful raid on the complacency of the hotel. Here, judicious silence to accompany the solo dancers, each moving in a solo dance club sanctioned by individual ear buds. More wit and pathos in this joke and reiteration than is be found in the whole of the ostensibly comedic and vastly overrated <i>Don't Think Twice</i>, currently improvising its way through the art house circuit. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Lanthimos drollery extends to other bits of visual deadpan, as when incongruous animals wander into the frame - here a Shetland pony, there a pink flamingo. The transformed and released former hotel guests enjoy arguably the most pleasant fate in <i>The Lobster. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Better a drifting llama or peacock in the forest where human beings are the most sought after game. The hunting parties from the hotel are no bargain. Neither the emotional winter of the loners. When Loner Leader begins to perceive the burgeoning romance in her midst, she chastens David by reminding him that he needs to find a suitable spot for his grave. "Don't expect anyone else to dig your grave for you or to carry your corpse." One's fellow loners might toss some dirt over you, but that' about it. Ah, the single life. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Don't get too nostalgic for your single days. Colin Farrell practices burying<br />himself in <i>The Lobster. </i></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Mr. Lanthimos is pretty rigorous himself, if ultimately more forgiving and - in his way - more fun. <i>The Lobster</i> could have contented itself with its fish in a barrel shooting party that is life at the hotel. But the writer and director illuminates and lampoons most every dark corner of our attempts to couple, be alone, simply be. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Short Sighted Woman suffers the wrath of the Loner Leader. Ultimately David and his rather more than Short Sighted Woman flee the forest for the city. Will David make a kind of leap, a desperate act and join the trusting woman, expectant at a restaurant table? Traffic slides in the background almost hypnotically. Two dump trucks would seem to move toward a kind of embrace as the screen goes dark.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">We moviegoers are not so unlike Short Sighted Woman. Sitting in the dark, hoping for the best. Likely prepared for worse. This world, of course, is so full of dogs. But occasionally, we get a <i>Lobster. </i></span><br />
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dbThe Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8005867225866010014.post-9368091588212842582016-02-13T13:04:00.001-08:002018-11-09T08:03:54.780-08:00Son of Saul <br />
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There are no establishing shots. No trains arriving at the gates of Auschwitz with their infernal box cars. No dates. No body counts. Instead, first-time director Lazlo Nemes places us right in the midst of the wretched business of the Holocaust. What we see and what we don't see is a product of the perspective of Hungarian-Jewish prisoner, Saul (Geza Rohrig).</div>
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The only bit of overview we are given in <i>Son of Saul </i>is a title card explaining the Sonderkommandos, work outfits at death camps composed of Jewish prisoners, often pressed quickly into service upon their arrival at the extermination centers. Saul is one such Sondercommando, very likely at the end of his tenure in the special unit (the translation of the term in German) in 1944. The end of that grim tenure means the end of his life. The Sondercommandos, the "bearers of secrets," were conducted to their own demise, usually within months, by their successors. </div>
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<i>Son of Saul</i> does begin in the midst of the ruthless cycle of the Sonderkommandos and the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. It's not so much that the film commences as if the camera is just turned on at some random point during Saul's time as a Sonderckommando. The camera is a kind of doppelganger to the Hungarian prisoner, often peering over his shoulder, just as often staring him in the face. That face is not quite impassive, not quite numb. But it is like an instrument asked to measure some powerful phenomenon one too many times, frozen in its last flash of activity. Thus, the brown eyes ever dilated, an unceasing aperture. The brow - Mr. Rohrig's imposing brow and piercing dark eyes are reminiscent of a young Peter Boyle - hunched in repeated questioning. The full lips just open, or just closed, having just arrived, just left some expression of incredulity.</div>
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The first long, masterful sequence is all the more harrowing for the lack of exposition. It's one of many unrelenting scenes of controlled chaos in <i>Son of Saul.</i> New arrivals are essentially herded into a changing room, directed toward pegs where they are instructed to hang their clothes after stripping. Saul, a red X on his jacket signifying his special status, wordlessly hustles the newcomers to the changing area and then toward what they believe to be a shower room. All the while, announcements can be heard urging the arrivals toward the shower, reminding them to remember the hook number where they've left their clothes, telling them to make haste lest the bowls of soup that await them get cold. Of course, the irony of those latter statements cuts horribly, invisibly through the air. </div>
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As soon as the chamber door closes on the victims, Saul and his coworkers go through the pockets of the left clothing for any paperwork or valuables. As we'll find out, the Sonderkommandos sometime take the dangerous step of pocketing (or placing in their shoes) pilfered items of jewelry, each "shiny" a piece of currency in the camp. Much as Saul and those in his unit have prescribed duties, it's not unusual for them to be be pulled away to some other morbid task. So it happens while Saul and the other Sonderkommandos about him are quickly removing evidence of the latest group of arrivals. He's called to press against the metal door of the gas chamber with others while those inside pound and cry out with rising desperation. There is eventually a nightmare cacophony, a crescendo, then silence. With virtually no hesitation, the Sonderkommandos must remove the bodies, the "pieces" as they are called by the presiding Nazis, pile them for delivery to the ovens and then scrub the gas chamber clear of excrement and whatever else remains.</div>
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By this most perverse stream of consciousness, Mr. Nemes and his co-writer Clara Royer reveal bits of information about the camp. There is the nearly constant, dreadful flow of humanity and all the tasks attendant to getting the victims in place and their subsequent disposal. Much as the movement of Saul and the story are nearly constant, we do observe the Sonderkommandos in stolen bits of respite, moments of conversation and conspiracy. We see their barracks, completely separate from other death camp inmates. As compensation for their dire labors, the Sonderkommandos enjoyed some measure of privacy, a more sustaining diet and even things like cigarettes, plucked from the clothing of those who would not need them any longer.</div>
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There is also a sense of the politics of the place, the give and take between units and an awareness that the often brutal Kapos must be given their deference or avoided altogether. Implicit in all of this is the cryptic nature of those politics to an outsider or newcomer. How quickly choices would have to be grasped which basically involve some previously unimagined compromise of humanity or almost immediate death. Obviously, it was a momentum that served the camps and the Nazis all too well. </div>
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Saul's particular momentum is diverted by a kind of miracle. After the first group of victims we see is cleared out of the gas chamber, a young man is found to be clinging to life. The work of murdering him is quickly and quietly finished. But something about the boy, perhaps his stubborn life force, awakens in Saul a last flare of rebellion. He decides that he must find a rabbi and give the boy a proper burial. His quest to find a rabbi will repeatedly imperil himself and others. It also threatens to compromise an uprising planned by the Sonderkommandos and Oberkapos of which Saul is expected to play a part. The closest thing Saul has to a friend in the camp, another Sonderkommando named Yankl (Attila Fritz), tells him late in the proceedings, "You have failed the living for the dead." Saul had earlier supplied his answer, "We're all dead."</div>
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To stop one of the camp doctors, Miklos (Sandor Zsoter), from performing an autopsy, Saul claims that the boy is his son. The doctor tells him that the boy's body is bound for the same place as the other accumulating dead, but acknowledges that Saul may return later and have a few minutes with the boy. Co-writers Nemes and Royer ground their story in concrete particulars: in force, brutality and desperation; in flesh and in ash. Matters of plot and motivations of its main character are like questions asked and left open-ended. Saul claims that dead boy is his son, although that doesn't seem terribly likely (Yankl in particular seems unconvinced). Even more ambiguous is Saul's determination to give the boy a burial consistent with the tenets Judaism. Is this an act of insistent integrity in the face of muderous repression? Does the sight of the boy, however he appeals to Saul, finally snap the Sonderkommando's wavering sanity? Is Saul's determination to give him a proper burial an act of madness.? </div>
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The close, fluid point camera work is provided by cinematographer Matyas Erdely. Wonderful though the Steadicam may be, it doesn't quite explain how well the photography is executed in<i> Son of Saul.</i> The demands of the shooting style dictated by Lazlo Nemes would seem to be as varied as they are constant. The camera work manages to convey the film and its main character's chaos, urgent sense of movement...the almost (or quite) necessary swiveling, visual paranoia. All of this accomplished without excessive movement, a "here I am" jerking of the camera merely for effect. While Mr. Erdely is receiving justified acclaim for his work, the seamless point of view that carries us through the film is also due in part to the equally fluid editing of Mattieu Taponier. Altogether, the technical accomplishment of <i>Son of Saul</i>, arguably greatest of its strengths, demonstrates a focused, accomplished collaboration.</div>
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Of course, the other major part of the equation, <i>Son of Saul's</i> impressive feat of collaboration, is Geza Rohrig's doggedly restrained work as our guide through the film's hell on earth. As a preparation for production, Mr. Rohrig was apparently filmed for extended periods of time at very close range. A New York-based Hungarian poet whom Lazlo Nemes apparently met while attending film classes at NYU, Rohrig is a performer with very limited acting experience. His previous credit was about 25 years prior to the production of <i>Son of Saul.</i> Like all with speaking parts in his film, Nemes cast someone who is a native speaker of his main character's language (there is a whispery babel of Hungarian, Yiddish, German, Russian and Polish in the film). Thanks to the familiarity with language, the preparation that brought about such an immersive, disciplined performance, Geza Rohrig is the dark beam, the summoning shadow leading us through <i>Son of Saul's </i>pell-mell. </div>
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Accomplished, unblinking and even diligent though it might be with regard to details and the inevitable truths of its story, <i>Son of Saul </i>has not gone forth entirely without controversy. </div>
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Perhaps most prominent of those offended by the perspective of <i>Son of Saul </i>was Manohla Dargis of the NewYork Times. Writing from Cannes, where <i>Son of Saul</i> won the Grand Prix, she reported that the film is "radically dehistoricized" and "intellectually repellant," that the reliance on close-ups "“transform[s] all the screaming, weeping condemned men, women and children into anonymous background blurs.” </div>
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Many of the death camp victims are in the background in <i>Son of Saul</i>, if feet to very inches away from camera and main character can be construed as "background." The body parts of the dead intrude into the frame, as do plenty of entire lifeless, naked bodies between gas chamber and crematorium. I don't believe anyone at the screening I attended misheard the screams of Jewish victims pounding on the doors of gas chambers as crowd noise from a football match.</div>
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Lazlo Nemes shot <i>Son of Saul </i>in 35-millimeter with a kind of classic, narrow aspect ratio. This shallow focus heightens the sense of the subjective, the close up on the desperate, peripatetic Saul. It's expertly done and certainly has a breathless quality about it. However, to be carried along the 107 minutes of Mr. Nemes' film without realizing that one is right in the dark heart of the Holocaust would seem to require some adjustment on the part of the viewer, not the film. </div>
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To read reviews of <i>Son of Saul </i>and any consideration of the Holocaust in general is to see the lexicon of tragedy dusted off and utilized anew. Words like unspeakable, incomprehensible, even ungraspable bob to the surface. For the sake of our actual understanding of the Shoah, genocide that preceded it and genocide that has all-too-predictably followed, perhaps it is time we start comprehending, start grasping. Set aside the "un" prefix and excise from the conversation that most obfuscating of words, evil. Go forth with words like fear, recurrence, all-too-human. </div>
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Time perhaps to regard the Holocaust not as an unapproachable monolith, but a darkness that must be penetrated and plumbed. Perhaps find one story, one strand and follow it. Determine the patterns, the bloody weave of history. Look clearly and bravely into it and ourselves. Toward that end, works like Lazlo Nemes' <i>Son of Saul</i> seem not only valuable at this point, but perhaps even necessary. </div>
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<br />The Moviegoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11659166646374047397noreply@blogger.com0