Movies

Elena: a vividly dark peek into contemporary Russia

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Elena is a superbly crafted film that vividly peeks into a dark, very dark contemporary Russia.  Directed and co-written by Andre Zvyagintsev (The Return), Elena is the triumph of drama over melodrama.  There is an absolute minimum of on-screen action and no histrionics at all, yet the story simmers throughout.

Zvyagintsev builds the story upon his characters.  It is set in a toney apartment in a quiet upscale Moscow neighborhood, home of Vladimir and Elena.  Vladimir is pushing 70 and rich.  I doubt that any softies got rich in post-Soviet Russia, and Vladimir is a hard man, devoid of sentimentality except for his estranged daughter.   Late in life, he has married the working class Elena, his one-time nurse, now in her 50s.  They have a comfortable, frank, affectionate and practical relationship.

Both have adult children from previous marriages.  Vladimir’s daughter Katerina has no use for her father, but he subsidizes her lifestyle of perpetual partying.  Vladimir and Katerina finally share a moment, bonding over their shared cynicism.

Elena’s nogoodnik son Sergey lives in a hard scrabble suburb and embraces his chronic unemployment with alarming indolence.  His equally lazy and selfish teenage son, having an indifferent high school career, is now facing the dreaded Army unless someone can bribe his way into a college.

Elena is desperate to rescue her grandson from his self-inflicted predicament, but only Vladimir’s money can help, and Vladimir despises Elena’s trashy and shiftless family.  The movie is built on this conflict, and it is Elena’s story.   As Elena, the actress Nadezhda Markina reveals Elena’s affection, desperation and determination with her eyes, face and movements.  Perfectly framing Markina’s outstanding performance by isolating it, Zvyagintsev delivers the film in a series of long shots, with terse dialogue and a spare soundtrack. There is no expository dialogue explaining the plot or swelling music manipulating our reaction.

Elena is a dark movie that asks its audience to invest patience, thought and energy – so it’s not for everybody.  Elena is also one of the year’s best films, and an extraordinary example of a very pure breed of filmmaking.

Oslo August 31: authentic, but why?

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The Norwegian drug addict Anders has been clean and sober after ten months in rehab, and has earned a day pass for a job interview in Oslo.  In rehab, he has had plenty of opportunity to take stock of himself and the impact that his drug habit has wreaked upon his disappointing career and upon his family and friends.  Anders concludes that the best response is to take his own life.  First, he takes advantage of his day pass to seek out his best friend and his own family.

Oslo August 31 is well-crafted and utterly authentic.  But, why was this movie made?  What is its contribution to art or entertainment or our knowledge or our experience?  Where is the payoff for the audience that makes the grim inevitability worth ten bucks and 95 minutes?

There’s one particularly spell-binding scene with superb sound design.  As Anders is waiting for someone in a cafe, he eavesdrops on the other patrons.  As he glances from table to table, we hear the conversation of each set of diners.  It’s very cool.

Unusual for a film about drug addiction, Oslo August 31 depicts only one instance of hard drug use – and that injection is not to get high.

The Danish director Joachim Trier previously made Reprise, a wonderful film about sanity and the creative process in which two young novelists send in their manuscripts at the beginning of the film, just before one suffers a psychotic breakdown.   Reprise was #4 on my list of Best Movies of 2008.

Rock of Ages: juke box heroes have some laughs

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The Broadway musical Rock of Ages comes to the screen – a love story of hopeful young performers set on the seamy Sunset Strip in the age of Journey, Styx, Bon Jovi and the ever popular Whitesnake.  It really doesn’t matter that there is only a barest shred of a plot – this is a musical, after all, and we just need an excuse to break into song.

The two young leads are fine, but the laughs come from the impressive crew of supporting actors: Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Russell Brand, Paul Giamatti, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Mary J. Blige and Bryan Cranston.   Cruise self-mockingly plays an Axel Rose type rock star, only more unreliable.

The inspired musical production numbers are staged ironically (there’s no other way to do a Quarterflash song).   You haven’t really heard Foreigner’s I Want to Know What Love Is until you’ve seen Tom Cruise really selling it.  At one point, Brand’s rockers belt out We Built This City in a duel with Zeta-Jones’ pastel clad church ladies singing We’re Not Going To Take It.  All lighthearted and funny; it’ll be a good DVD/stream pick in a few months.

The Intouchables: a crowdpleasing odd couple comedy

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The Intouchables is the second most popular movie of all time in France – and it’s easy to see why.  It’s an odd couple comedy that’s a real crowd pleaser.

A very, very rich French aristocrat has become a quadriplegic due to a hang gliding accident and hires a Senegalese good-for-nothing street hood as his caregiver.  The plot, really just a series of set pieces, mines familiar territory as the poor guy learns about living in a mansion (see Down and Out in Beverly Hills) and revitalizes the rich guy’s zest for living.  But it’s really well done and very funny.

The rich guy is played by the great Francois Cluzet (Tell No One), who gives a tremendous performance using only his head and neck.  Omar Sy plays the poor guy and actually edged out The Artist‘s Jean Dujardin for France’s top acting award last year; that’s hard to figure, but Sy is very funny in The Intouchables.  Overall, it’s a very satisfying comedy.

 

DVD of the Week: The Locksmith

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Somehow, this comedy gem never earned a theatrical release, despite winning the low budget award at Sundance.  A decent guy is serving out his drug sentence and has a day job as a locksmith on work release.  He is determined to keep his nose clean and not get in any more trouble.  He meets a kooky gal, who – despite his resistance – introduces all kinds of chaos into his life.  The Locksmith was originally titled Homewrecker.

If it had been released into theaters, I think that this working class comedy would have become a real crowd pleaser.  Fortunately, it’s now available from Netflix.

Prometheus: striking sci fi with a tinge of horror

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Prometheus is a striking and well-acted sci fi adventure with a horror film tinge.  What you want in a sci fi movie is cool alien worlds and cool alien creatures – and, for that, it’s hard to top director Ridley Scott, who made the classic sci fi thrillers Blade Runner and Alien (as well as Gladiator, Thelma & Louise and Black Hawk Down).

In Prometheus, there is a space mission to find out if a species of aliens created us and returned to their world in another solar system.  The mission successfully finds the answer, finds the aliens and finds some terrifyingly lethal space monsters.

Don’t think too much about the premise.  The movie is a little ponderous when it drills down to the existential questions here.  We’re far better off enjoying the cool visuals and just rooting for the good guys to escape the space monsters.  And the space monsters are damn scary.  The final sequence, however,  makes the inevitable sequel all too obvious.

If you’re looking for a girl that can take a licking and keep on ticking, you can’t do any better than to cast Noomi Rapace, the star of the Swedish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series.  As the lead scientist on the mission, Rapace needs to survive a an impressive series of perils, including an alarming self-surgical procedure.

Michael Fassbinder is even better as an android with punctilious correctness and insincere charm, which some reviewers have compared to the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Idris Elba (The Wire) is also notable because he plays the commander of the spaceship more as a tugboat captain than Captain Kirk.  Guy Pearce plays the elderly mogul who is financing the mission; distractingly, he is apparently wearing the same makeup as Dustin Hoffman did to play 121-year-old Jack Crabb in Little Big Man.

Sci fi is not one of my favorite genres and I won’t recommend it as a “must see” to a general audience, but if you’re a sci fi fan, then by all means, see Prometheus.

3D or not 3D?  If you’re gonna see Prometheus, I’d recommend forking over the premium and seeing it in 3D, especially for some scenes in which Fassbender’s android activates some floating holographic images in the alien HQ.

Your Sister’s Sister: a promising premise and a superb performance wasted

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Your Sister’s Sister wastes a promising premise and the talents of three good actors, one of whom gives a superb performance.

A young man (Mark Duplass) is grieving a loss and his friend (Emily Blunt) suggests that he spend some time at her family’s remote island getaway cabin.  Unbeknownst to them, her sister (Rosemarie Dewitt) is already staying at the cabin.  The guy and the sister get drunk on his first night at the cabin, and the friend shows up unannounced the next morning.  Each of the three does not know a key fact about the other two.  So far so good.

In fact, it’s an excellent dramedy for two-thirds of the movie until the sister bursts out with something like, “I wouldn’t have [spoiler] if I knew that [spoiler]”.  At this point, writer-director Lynne Shelton runs out of creativity and resorts to the dreaded musical interlude, in which each of the characters stomp or bike through the rainy Northwest as the music swells to set up an ending that drew loud derisive hoots from the theater audience.

Too bad, because the actors are very good.  Mark Duplass plays the smart, talented, underachieving, goofy and sweet big lug usually played by Jason Segal or Seth Rogen.  Emily Blunt plays the sarcastic, funny, smart, vulnerable and adorable cutie usually played by Emily Blunt.  But Rosemarie Dewitt creates a wholly original and utterly authentic character that looks like a real person, someone we know in real life.  All of her actions and reactions are completely authentic, whether she’s drinking way too much tequila, pondering her failed relationship or tasting her own vegan pancakes.   Dewitt was also very good as Rachel in Rachel’s Getting Married, and her performance is so good in Your Sister’s Sister that I can’t wait to see her on screen again.

Coming up on TV: Fat City

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Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges in FAT CITY

Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting the under appreciated Fat City (1972) on June 18.  Stacy Keach plays a boxer on the slide, his skills unraveled by his alcoholism. He inspires a kid (a very young Jeff Bridges), who becomes a boxer on the rise.  Keach and Susan Tyrrell give dead-on performances as pathetic sad sack barflies.  Tyrrell was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

The great director John Huston shot the film in Stockton, and Fat City is a time capsule for the Central Valley in the early 70s.

Fat City has made two of my lists: Best Boxing Movies and Best Drug Movies.

Susan Tyrrell in FAT CITY

Moonrise Kingdom: wistfully sweet and visually singular

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In the wistfully sweet and visually singular Moonrise Kingdom, two 1965 twelve-year-olds fall into profound platonic love and run away together, with a cadre of sadly weary adult authority figures in comic pursuit.  Director Wes Anderson has had some quirky hits (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore) and some quirky misses (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), but he’s always original.  This is a hit.

While very funny, the story is deeply sympathetic to the children.  As Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com put it,

Yes, Anderson’s principal subject, and arguably his only subject, is the collision between the emotional lives of adults and children and the paradoxical tragicomedy it can so often produce. But if Anderson’s adults yearn for the comparative simplicity of childhood while his children long for the big, important feelings they believe (wrongly) go with growing up, that in itself is a distinctly adult perspective.

We know that we’re watching something unique from the very first shot, in which the camera swivels to show each room in a home as family members enter their spaces and define their relationships to each other.  As The Wife, pointed out, we look into the family home as would a child looking into a dollhouse.

In a year that is especially rich with able child film actors, the kids here (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayman) are excellent.  Bruce Willis, Ed Norton, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand are also very good as the sad, burnt-out adults.  Tilda Swinton and Harvey Keitel show up briefly in broad comic roles.

Since Moonrise Kingdom is set in 1965, Baby Boomers will appreciate the Mad Men moments –  a portable record player,  a coonskin cap and adult indifference to a kid simultaneously holding lighter fluid and a flaming torch.  The girl’s books have cover art typical of the era’s quality young fiction (a la A Wrinkle in Time).

This is an excellent movie – and one that you haven’t seen before.