Damsels in Distress: say it ain’t so, Whit

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What writer-director Whit Stillman does really well is bring us unto the world of old money Eastern preppies with their refined manners and their odd customs like debutante balls.  His well-educated characters have earnest late-night existential conversations in complete sentences.  Nobody else does this, and Stillman’s dialogue has always kept me wholly absorbed.  That’s why I liked his films Metropolitan and Barcelona so much.

What Stillman does not do well is absurdist film, like his current entry, Damsels in Distress, set in a Northeastern liberal arts college that is decidedly non-Ivy.  Indie film darling Greta Gerwig plays the seriously off-kilter leader of some coeds who are intent on rescuing fellow students from depression, fashion mistakes and bad hygiene, whether they want it or not.

While his earlier films were earnestly realistic, Damsels is way over the top.  The girls’ boyfriends are so stupid that one does not yet know his colors.  Gerwig’s character is so obviously disturbed that anyone, even a horny college male, would run the other way.

That means that the patter of Stillman’s dialogue must carry the day, and it fails him.  Gerwig’s two friends are one-note jokes – one profoundly stupid, the other profoundly suspicious – that aren’t that funny the first time.  There are lame body odor jokes.  The fraternity system uses Roman, rather than Greek letters – which is not the sidesplitter that Stillman may imagine.

For sure, there are some funny moments.  At the campus Suicide Prevention Center (the word “Prevention” keeps falling off the sign)  Gerwig offers a fellow student a doughnut, but then snatches it back after one bite when she discovers that he isn’t the suicidal one.  One student has adopted the Cathar religion, which he associates with a certain sexual practice.  But, over all, the movie is not funny.  Worst of all, it’s not engaging.

Analeigh Tipton, who was very good as the smitten babysitter in Crazy Stupid Love, does especially well again as a transfer student who falls under Gerwig’s wing.

My recommendations:  1) Stillman should leave the absurdism to Bunuel and 2) the rest of us can skip Damsels to watch Metropolitan and Barcelona.

Monsieur Lazhar: sometimes a kid needs a hug most of all

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A fifth grade class in Montreal loses its teacher in just about the worst possible way – she hangs herself in their classroom at recess.  Monsieur Lazhar is about how the kids face this trauma with their replacement teacher, an Algerian immigrant.  The school gets a psychologist to lecture to the kids, but bans them from otherwise mentioning the suicide in class – a rule designed to minimize the discomfort of the administrators and parents.  Meanwhile, the school’s zero tolerance rule against touching children means that the kids can’t get a reassuring hug.

The new teacher, Monsieur Lazhar (well-played by Mohammed Fellag), is a traditionalist who demands respect but with humor and compassion.  He also seems oddly ignorant of modern teaching methods.  Although mild-mannered, he is fiercely devoted to protecting the kids.  That devotion keeps him from sharing his own burden with the children, for we learn that he, too, has reason to grieve.

Monsieur Lazhar was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar and won Canada’s equivalent of the Best Picture Oscar.  The child actors are superb.  It’s an uncommonly sweet and powerful film.

DVD of the Week: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

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I loved the 2010 Swedish version (it was #8 on my list of the year’s best) and had very high hopes for this film by David Fincher (The Social Network, Zodiac, Fight Club).  Those hopes have been fulfilled and Dragon Tattoo made it on my list of Best Movies of 2011.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo tells the first part of journalist-turned-novelist Stieg Larsson’s Milenium trilogy.  The stories are centered on Larsson’s muckraker alter ego Mikael Blomkvist and the damaged and driven Goth hacker Lisbeth Salander.  Lisbeth is only 90 pounds, so she will lose a fistfight with a man; but she prevails with her smarts, resourcefulness and machine-like  relentlessness.  Lisbeth is always mad AND always gets even.

In top rate performances, Daniel Craig plays Blomkvist and Rooney Mara plays Lisbeth. Lisbeth is the key to the movie, and Mara comes through with a compelling portrayal – stone faced until she explodes into a cyclone of wrath.  The other characters are played superbly by Stellan Skarsgard, Christopher Plummer, Robin Wright and Stephen Berkoff.

Fincher is still operating at his best.   Remember – The Social Network is essentially about some annoying, immature geeks writing computer code and getting financing for a company – but Fincher made it rock!  Fight Club‘s desperate violence and Zodiac‘s whodunit relentlessness translated directly to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. So there couldn’t be a better director for this project than Fincher.  I’m looking forward to his versions of the next two chapters in the saga.

Fincher shot the film in Sweden and had made the country look and feel unrelentingly frigid.

The score by Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor is award-worthy and is a major contribution to the story.

Coming Up on TV: Wasp Woman

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Wasp Woman

On April 18, you can watch Wasp Woman (1960) on Turner Classic Movies.  This is notable because Wasp Woman, a slender, attractive woman wearing an insect mask, has made my list of Least Convincing Movie Monsters.  The owner of a cosmetics manufacturer became worried that she was aging out of her looks and injected some wasp material from her R&D lab.  She wreaked havoc until carbolic acid was thrown in her face, allowing her to be pushed to death from a skyscraper.

Coming Up on TV: Hot Rods from Hell

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Dana Andrews and his innocent family

Here’s a guilty pleasure that has earned it way into my Bad Movie Festival and you can watch it on Turner Classic Movies on April 17.  In Hot Rods from Hell, Dana Andrews’ (!) innocent family is terrorized by two teen punks and a punkette in the Mojave.  This 1967 movie has the odd feel of a 1962 or even 1957 film.

Watch Dana Andrews asking himself why he is in this movie, 23 years after starring in Laura and The Ox-Bow Incident.

The terrorizing hot rodders

Movies to See this Week

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Gianni Di Gregorio (right) and his wing man in THE SALT OF THE EARTH

The Kid with the Bike is an extraordinary film that tells a riveting story of unconditional love. It is emotionally powerful without being sentimental and is gripping without stunts and explosions.  It’s now topping my list of Best Movies of 2012 – So Far.  It may be out in theaters for only another week or to, so see it now.

The Hunger Games is a well-paced, well-acted and intelligent sci-fi adventure fable with excellent performances by Jennifer Lawrence and Stanley Tucci.

The Deep Blue Sea is well-crafted and deeply, deeply sad tragedy of a woman (Rachel Weisz) who loves too much.

The Salt of the Earth is a gently funny and insightful Italian comedy about men of a certain age.

In Footnote, a rising Talmudic scholar sees his career-topping prize accidentally awarded to his grumpy father. This potentially comic situation reveals the characters of the two men.

The searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation won the Best Foreign Language Oscar. The Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist is still playing in theaters.

I haven’t yet seen Monsieur Lazhar, which opens this week. You can read descriptions and view trailers of these and other upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick this week is The Descendants, a family drama with superb performances by George Clooney and Shailene Woodley.

The Salt of Life: men will be boys

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The Salt of Life (Gianni e le donne) is a gently funny and insightful comedy about a certain time in a man’s life.  In the lives of men who are not rich, famous or powerful, there comes a time when attractive young women no longer see them as potential lovers.  This is painful for any guy, and our contemporary Roman hero Gianni, with the help of his portly lawyer/wing man, sets out to deny that he has reached this plateau.

In a standard movie fantasy, some adorable young hottie would come to appreciate Gianni’s true appeal and find him irresistible.  But in The Salt of Life, the story is more textured, complex and realistic.

The Salt of Life  stars and is written and directed by Gianni Di Gregorio, just like the very fun Mid-August Lunch.  It is definitively a movie for guys of a certain age and the women who tolerate them, as well as the younger guys who will become them.

Sorry, no subtitles yet on the trailer embedded here.  You can watch the English subtitled trailer on IMDb.

 

SF Film Fest to show “Polisse” and “Oslo August 31”

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Two films on my Movies I’m Looking Forward To are coming to the San Francisco International Film Festival in late April.

Polisse is a reputedly riveting French police procedural about the child protective services unit.  It was a hit at Cannes and stars an ensemble cast led by Karin Viard (Paris, Potiche, Time Out).

In Oslo August 3, the Danish director Joachim Trier (Reprise made my list of the 2007’s best) returns to Norway with a slice-of-life about a recovering addict.

Find out how to see these films and others at the SFIFF here.

Here’s the trailer for Oslo August 3.

 

 

DVD of the Week: The Descendants

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In director Alexander Payne’s first film since Sideways, George Clooney seeks to care for his daughters in Hawaii after his wife is hospitalized, but then learns that she has been cheating on him.  That news sends him on a quest that he defines along the way.  To complicate things, his daughters are cooperative to various degrees.  The heat is turned up even higher by a potential land deal that could make Clooney and his many entitled slacker cousins wildly rich, but the deal’s deadline looms and he is pressured by his VERY interested relations.

The situation is promising enough, but Payne takes the story in unanticipated directions.   And, as you would expect from Sideways, there are many funny moments in The Descendants.

Clooney’s performance is brilliant.  Here, he does not play The Coolest Man on the Planet.  Instead, Clooney is a grinding workaholic who is so clueless about his kids that he doesn’t realize how clueless he is.  He is stunned by news of the affair that he never suspected.  Perhaps for the first time in his life, he must work through his situation figuring it out as he goes along.

Shailene Woodley’s performance as the older daughter is even more essential to the success of The Descendants. It’s not just that she perfectly plays a bratty teenager, but that we can see that some of her brattiness is hormonal and some of it is entirely voluntary and manipulative. Woodley had to convincingly play a character who is at times self-centered and shallow, but who can rally and reach within herself to serve as the family glue and support her dad and little sister.

The Descendants approaches being a perfect movie but for two things: 1) the daughter’s stoner boyfriend is just too oblivious to be credible among the other colorful yet completely authentic characters; and 2)  the audience can never believe that there’s any chance that George Clooney is going to allow bulldozers on thousands of pristine Hawaiian acres.  Still, almost perfect is pretty good.

Pete Smalls is Dead: see Living in Oblivion instead

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That’s the trailer for a movie I was really looking forward to – Pete Smalls Is Dead.  Quirky characters played by Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent) and Mark Boone Junior (Sons of Anarchy) embark on a comic adventure.  The rest of the cast is great: Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, Rosie Perez, Michael Lerner,  and Seymour Cassel.  Unfortunately, the writing fails the actors, and the movie just isn’t that funny.  I fell asleep and had to finish it the next day.

So instead, I recommend that you watch the trailer (much funnier than the movie) and then rent a really funny Peter Dinklage/Steve Buscemi movie – Living in Oblivion.  Real life indie director Tom DiCillo (Johnny Suede, Box of Moonlight) wrote Living in Oblivion about skating on the edge of disaster while making a very low-budget indie film.  Buscemi plays the indie director, who must deal with a narcissistic leading man (James LeGros), a low self-esteem leading lady (Catherine Keener), a pretentious and self-absorbed cameraman (Dermot Mulroney) and a dwarf actor with an attitude the size of Manitoba (Dinklage).  The screenplay is hilarious and the fine actors all nail their roles.  Watch and laugh.

LIVING IN OBLIVION