Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
I haven’t seen it yet, but Cannes audiences loved this 5-hour biopic of the 70s terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and the film was bought by IFC and Sundance Channel. The Sundance Channel is broadcasting it in three parts, this Monday through Wednesday, October 11-13. Set your TiVos.
Many see this as a star-making breakthrough for its Venezuelan star Edgar Ramirez.
Howl‘s filmmakers made a risky choice that pays off and a safe choice that doesn’t. The risky choice is to make the film about a poem, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, not a conventional biopic of Ginsberg or a courtroom drama about the famous obscenity trial. This is risky because poetry is not embraced by the mass audience; in our culture, poetry makes opera look like NASCAR in terms of popularity. Yet the movie is at its strongest in the segments where James Franco’s Ginsberg reads from Howl. The poem Howl – with its pain, rage, alienation and rebellion – is the best part of the movie Howl. Snippets of Ginsberg’s life and the trial are placed about to give context to the poem.
The unfortunately safe choice is using animation to interpret the poem. The poem evokes powerful imagery in the minds of the audience. Here, the animation is very literal, so we see – and are distracted by – the images instead of thinking them up ourselves. Maybe the filmmakers didn’t think that the audience would accept the unadorned reading of a poem. Howl is a long poem, but the filmmakers do an effective job in delivering it to us in segments. The language of the poem is not a shocking today as it was in the 50s, but definitely gets your attention.
Franco is great. Jeff Daniels has a small juicy part, but David Straithern, Jon Hamm, Mary-Louise Parker, Bob Balaban, Treat Williams and Allesandro Nivona don’t have much to do.
The writer-directors here are Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, who made the Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk., which is one of the great documentaries and one of the great political films.
Don’t miss this brilliantly funny movie. It’s one of Preston Sturges’ less well known great comedies. Eddie Bracken plays a would-be soldier discharged for hay fever – but his hometown mistakenly thinks that he is being sent home a war hero. Hilarity ensues. All the funnier when you realize that this film was made in 1944 amid our nation’s most culturally patriotic period. It will be broadcast on TCM on October 10th.
Baby boomers will also appreciate crusty William Demarest (the crusty housekeeper in TV’s My Three Sons) as the crusty Marine Sarge.
Make sure that you see The Social Network. The birth story of Facebook is a riveting tale of college sophomores that are brilliant, ambitious, immature, self-absorbed and disloyal – and about to become zillionaires. It’s a triumph for actor Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland, Zombieland and Solitary Man), director David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing, Charlie Wilson’s War). It’s already on my list of Best Movies of 2010 – So Far.
I’m still pushing the hardhitting documentary The Tillman Story. Without strongly recommending it, I can say that The Town is a satisfying Hollywood thriller. You can skip Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger.
For trailers and other choices, see Movies to See Right Now.
My DVD of the Week, like The Social Network, is a classic send up of contemporary business history: Barbarians at the Gate. For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.
I’m featuring Hail! The Conquering Hero on TV this week. Other Movies on TV include Strangers on a Train, The Big Sleep and The Best Years of Our Lives, all coming up on TCM. Baseball fans might still be able to find Ken Burns’ The Tenth Inning on PBS.
In My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, Werner Herzog explores why an actor would re-enact a theatrical scene for real and kill his mother with the sword that he had been using for a prop. The short answer is because he was crazier than shit. This is based on an actual event. The generally intense and often creepy Michael Shannon plays the murderer, who has suffered a schizophrenic breakdown and is decompensating by the minute. The audience wants to tell his fiance (Chloe Sevigny) to run, not walk, away from him. His craziness is so immediately apparent, that there’s really no arc to the film, as we watch flashbacks from the prior year.
Shannon, who is now seen as the revenue agent in HBO’s fine Boardwalk Empire, is very scary. Incidentally, the movie belongs to that very small subgenre of films where Williem Dafoe (here the cop) does not play the creepiest character. Dafoe is also out-creeped by Brad Dourif, whose role apparently exists to show that entire family is crazy (like Arsenic and Old Lace).
I would rather recommend a great Michael Shannon performance in a much better film, Shotgun Stories.
The film had an extremely limited theatrical release early this year, but was not widely distributed. Available now on DVD.
The Social Network reminded me of another classic send up of contemporary business history: Barbarians at the Gate. Barbarians is the story of late 1980s corporate excess centered on the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. James Garner, Fred Thompson and Jonathan Pryce star as the duelling CEOs bouncing between corporate jets, boardrooms and must-be-seen-at charity galas with their egos and trophy wives. Barbarians at the Gate was originally broadcast on HBO and is available from Netflix.
The Earrings of Madame de… (1953): This is one of the great movies that you have NOT seen, having just been released on DVD in 2009. Max Ophuls directed what is perhaps the most visually evocative romance ever in black and white. It’s worth seeing for the ballroom scene alone. The shallow and privileged wife of a stick-in-the-mud general takes a lover, but the earrings she pawned reveal the affair and consequences ensue. Great Italian director Vittorio De Sica plays the impossibly handsome lover. TCM 10/6
The best and most entertaining movie of the Fall tells the birth story of Facebook, and may win Oscars for director David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing, Charlie Wilson’s War). It’s a riveting tale of college sophomores that are brilliant, ambitious, immature, self-absorbed and disloyal – and about to become zillionaires.
Let’s reflect on Sorkin’s challenge here; he is writing a screenplay about nerdy guys writing computer code and making it fast-paced, understandable, funny and even gripping. To compound his challenge, all of the main characters but one are extremely obnoxious, yet he makes us care about what happens to them.
Yet the most compelling aspect of the film is Jesse Eisenberg’s performance as Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg. Eisenberg’s Zuckerman has few social skills, less social aptitude and exactly one friend, yet creates a framework for other people to share scores and even hundreds of “friends”. Eisenberg carries the film with an especially intense performance of an emotionally remote character. Eisenberg has been underrated despite strong performances in Adventureland, Zombieland and Solitary Man. Here, it is impossible to think of another actor who could so vividly create this Zuckerman.
This is a uniformly well-acted movie. Justin Timberlake is terrific as Napster infant terrible Sean Parker. Armie Hammer is outstanding as both of the Winklevoss twins, the entitled, preppie wunderkinden. Rooney Mara nails her scenes as Zuckerberg’s soon-to-be ex-girlfriend. Douglas Urbanski (usually a producer) does a viciously hilarious impersonation of former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers.
One more thing: Fincher and Sorkin know how to end a movie.
This is Woody Allen’s latest comedy about romantic entanglements and human self-delusion. It is mid-level Woody – not as good as his recent Vicky Christina Barcelona or Match Point, but not completely unwatchable like some of his other recent work. To save you 90 minutes of your life and ten bucks: the character who comforts herself with ridiculously fatuous superstition ends up happier than those who are grounded in scientifically valid reality. Naomi Watts, Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin and Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire) all do their best with the material.
Tony Curtis has died. He was a very handsome and sexy guy, and the first half of his career was at the tail end of Hollywood’s Studio Era. As a result, he played the pretty boy leads in lots of mediocre action movies. He and first wife Janet Leigh (parents of Jamie Lee Curtis) made up one of Hollywood’s most glamorous couples ever.
But Tony Curtis could act if he got the right role, and he made at least three great movies. The fact that these movies come from three very different genres (screwball comedy, contemporary drama, sword-and-sandal epic) is a testament to his ability.
Some Like It Hot (1959): This Billy Wilder masterpiece is my pick for the best comedy of all time. Seriously – the best comedy ever. And it still works today. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play most of the movie in drag (and Tony is kind of cute). Curtis must continue the ruse although next to Marilyn Monroe is at her most delectable. Curtis then dons a yachting cap and does a dead-on Cary Grant impression as the heir to an industrial fortune.
Sweet Smell of Success (1957): This has Curtis’ most subtly acted role as a Broadway press agent who is completely at the mercy of Burt Lancaster’s sadistically nasty columnist. Many of us have experienced being vulnerable to the caprice of an extremely mean person – Curtis perfectly captures the dread and humiliation of being in that position.
Spartacus (1960): Once in a while, a grand epic is a really good movie , and Spartacus qualifies. Curtis plays a slave who is hit on by Laurence Olivier’s Roman patrician in a scene of BARELY implicit homosexuality. “Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral and the eating of snails to be immoral?”, Olivier leers from the bath. It was a gutsy scene for a studio actor at the end of the 50s.
