Movies

The Help: a waste of great actresses

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Viola Davis in THE HELP

Well, given the upcoming Oscars, I should weigh in on The Help and its four Oscar nominations.  Based on the well-received novel by Kathryn Stockett, it is the story of black maids raising white children amid the hatefully poisonous racism of 1963 Jackson, Mississippi.  Unfortunately, the film is overlong, plodding and wastes the talents of an unholy multitude of our greatest actresses.

I am told by The Wife that the characters in the novel are full and textured.  The problem with the movie is that the characters are cartoonish cardboard cutouts of real people.  Unfortunately, Stockett’s novel was adapted by director Tate Taylor, and he stripped any hint of nuance or ambiguity from virtually every role.  Octavia Spencer and Allison Janney play characters that have a mix of human virtues and foibles.  But the rest of the awesome cast – Olivia Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jessica Chastain, Cecily Tyson, Sissy Spacek, Mary Steenburgen and Emma Stone – must play either saints or bitches.

Davis and Spencer are nominated for acting Oscars, and I wish them well.  But here’s a baffler – Chastain is a brilliant actress who has delivered not one but FIVE superb performances this year (Take Shelter, The Tree of Life, The Debt, Coriolanus, Texas Killing Fields), yet she is nominated for the one role written so broadly that she is obviously acting (The Help).

Movies to See This Week

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George Clooney and Shailene Woodley in THE DESCENDANTS

The best films in theaters are the magical silent romance The Artist, Director Alexander Payne’s (Sideways) family drama The Descendants with George Clooney, Martin Scorsese’s revelatory 3D tale Hugo, the rockem sockem thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and the searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation.

I have also commented on Steven Spielberg’s War Horse,  the sex addiction drama Shame, the biopic The Iron Lady, the very odd fable Albert Nobbs, the feminist action thriller Haywire and Ralph Fiennes’ contemporary adaption of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick of the week is Drive starring Ryan Gosling, a stylishly violent noir tale unfolding on a brilliantly filmed canvas.

Coriolanus: a hero unsuited

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The actor Ralph Fiennes directs and stars in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.  The title character is a fierce and successful military leader upon whom is thrust political leadership that he has not aspired to and to which he is utterly ill-equipped.  It’s not going to end well, and that’s why they call it tragedy.

Coriolanus is devoted to the idea of Rome, which inspires his heroism in its defense.  But he despises most Romans and thinks it would be insincere to show them the least civility, which doesn’t bode well for his political career.  Fiennes does a good job playing Coriolanus, an oddball for whom “curmudgeon” doesn’t begin to tell the story.

Unfortunately, Coriolanus is propelled into the peacetime limelight by his ultra-ambitious mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and an able and well-meaning politician (Brian Cox).  Redgrave and Cox are splendid, and their performances are highlights of Coriolanus.  Coriolanus is well-acted, including by Jessica Chastain, the wonderful Irish actor James Nesbitt and even, surprisingly, Gerard Butler.

Fiennes the director has done well to set Shakespeare’s tale of ancient Rome into the present.  This story of war and politics comes alive in today’s world of cable television news, with its crawling captions and pundits, protest demonstrations and soldiers in Humvees.  By stripping away the swords and togas, Fiennes helps us recognize the ambition, personal stubbornness, political treachery and the fickleness of public opinion at the core of the story.  As Shakespeare probably wanted to, Fiennes is able to put his audience into realistic warfare.  Coriolanus was filmed in the Balkans and, indeed, Butler certainly looks like a Serbian warlord from the very recent past.

The problem with Coriolanus is that we admire Coriolanus’s high-mindedness less than we cringe at his social obtuseness.   But Fiennes (and Redgrave and Cox) have given us one of the best cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare.


DVD of the Week: Drive

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Drive is a movie that you haven’t seen before – a stylishly violent noir tale unfolding on a brilliantly filmed canvas.

Ryan Gosling stars as a stunt driver by day, criminal getaway driver by night.  He hardly talks and doesn’t emote.  Indeed, his character is listed in the credits as “Driver” and sometimes referred to in the dialogue as “The Kid”.  He is motivated only by his pursuit of adrenaline rushes and the opportunity to do something good for a vulnerable mom (Carey Mulligan).  Indeed, Gosling is superb.

But the real star of Drive is its Danish writer-director, Nicolas Winding Refn.  The film has a noir plot but Refn eschews the shadowy black and white of traditional noir for especially vivid scenes of Los Angeles.  For example, early in the film, Gosling enters a convenience store and the screen is filled with the garish colors of junk food packaging.  It’s one of the most artfully lit and photographed scenes in the last year.

Drive abounds in nice touches. While being hunted by the cops, Gosling’s driver is listening to both the police scanner and a radio broadcast of the Lakers game; unexpectedly, it turns out that there is an essential reason that he’s listening to the Lakers.

This movie contains some extreme violence – violence that is intentionally extreme for its effect.

The cast is excellent, with especially memorable turns by Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) and Oscar Isaac.

(I admired Refn’s 2008 Bronson, the story of a Britain’s “most dangerous convict” who parlayed a seven-year sentence into 34 years (30 of them in solitary) by repeatedly taking hostages and beating up the SWAT teams that rescue them.   Roger Ebert called Bronson “92 minutes of rage”.)

Drive has been nominated for the Sound Editing Oscar (but is up against some tough competition).

Movies to See This Week

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A SEPARATION

Some of the year’s very best films are in theaters now. I especially recommend these four:

The Artist: A magical romance given us through the highly original choice of an almost silent film.

The Descendants: Director Alexander Payne’s (Sideways) family drama is set in Hawaii and contains a brilliant performance by George Clooney.

Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s revelatory 3D tale of an orphan living in the bowels of a 1920s Paris train station who strives to survive by his wits, keep his independence and solve the puzzle of an discarded automaton.

Best Movies of 2011. Steven Spielberg’s War Horse has also been nominated for Best Picture.

I highly recommend A Separation, the searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama, but it’s a tough watch.  It’s a cinch for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

Here are my comments on some other current films, the sex addiction drama Shame, the biopic The Iron Lady and the very odd fable Albert Nobbs.

This week’s lightweight pick is the feminist action thriller Haywire.  My heavyweight pick is Ralph Fiennes’ very fienne contemporary adaption of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

I haven’t yet seen the Denzel Washington spy thriller Safe House, which opens this week. You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

A Separation: brilliant film, tough to watch

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A contemporary Iranian couple had planned to leave Iran for a better life in the West, but, by the time they have wrangled a visa from the bureaucracy, the husband’s father has developed Alzheimer’s. The husband refuses to leave his father and the wife leaves the home in protest. They are well-educated and secular. The husband hires a poor and religious woman to care for his father (and she does not tell her husband about her job). Then there is an incident which unravels the lives of both families.

This is a brilliant film. Writer-director Asghar Farhadi has constructed a story in which the audience sees and hears everything that happens, but our understanding of the events and characters evolve.  We think we know what has happened, but then other narratives are revealed.  Likewise, the moral high ground is passed from one character to another and to another.  It’s like Rashomon, but with the audience keeping a single point of view.

Much of that point of view is shared by the ever watchful teenage daughter of the educated couple.  She desperately wants her parents back together, views everything through this prism and is powerless to make it happen.  She is played by Farhadi’s real life daughter.

Religion towers above the action – and not in a good way.  It guides the actions of the religious couple into choices against their interest.  The Iranian theocracy restricts the choices of the secular couple and of the judges trying to sort everything out.  Almost every character is a good person who is forced to lie to avoid some horrific result otherwise required by the culture.

One final note:  it will be a lot harder to make an easy joke at the expense of American lawyers after watching the Iranian justice system in A Separation.

The realistic angst of the chapters makes this a difficult film to watch – not a light date movie for sure. But the payoff is worth it, and it’s a must see.

This film is on the top ten list of over 30 critics and is Roger Ebert’s top-rated film of 2011. It is a lead pipe cinch for the Foreign Language Picture Oscar.

Thunder Soul: funk pride

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This good-hearted  documentary is about a national champion high school stage band in the 1970s.  Because of the era, and because we’re talking about inner city Black kids from Houston, the backdrop is the Black Pride movement.  The key character is their band leader, Conrad “Prof” Johnson, who drove them to be technically proficient and flavored their music with his own funk compositions.  Thirty years later, the band members plan a reunion to honor Prof.  The band members are an entertaining bunch, and there’s plenty of footage from the 70s.  Thunder Soul is sure to be a crowd-pleaser and there are lots of great 70s Afros.

Thunder Soul won film fest awards but failed to get an adequate theatrical release, and is now available on DVD.

When Mitt Romney Comes to Town

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Imagine if Michael Moore directed a profile of Mitt Romney’s career as co-founder of Bain Capital. Well, the 28-minute short film When Mitt Romney Comes to Town is an even more devastating critique of Romney than a Moore film would be.

The storyline of When Mitt Romney Comes to Town is essentially 1) you are happily living in Middle America, working in a factory and paying your mortgage and your taxes; 2) Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital buys and then loots your company; 3) you lose your job and then your home; and 4) repeat several times.

Amazingly, the film was directed by Jason Killian Meath, a Republican media consultant and culture warrior. It is being shilled by a Newt Gingrich-friendly SuperPAC.

Meath’s film is heavy-handed and manipulative (as a Michael Moore film would be). Meath doesn’t have Moore’s sense of humor, but also doesn’t have Moore’s abrasiveness and self-righteousness, which makes his film smoother, more broadly accessible and ultimately more persuausive. In an appeal to Republican primary voters, Meath uses Reaganesque “Morning in America” music and imagery, and I don’t think that it’s an accident that most of Bain Capital’s victims in the film are White.

The oddest thing about When Mitt Romney Comes to Town is that it is not just an attack on Mitt Romney, but against the type of Vulture Capitalism tolerated or even promoted by all four of the current Republican presidential candidates. It’s sure to constitute a major thread of the Obama narrative against Romney or any other GOP candidate.

Here’s the entire 28-minute movie.

Blogging from Noir City: It’s Bad Girl Night!

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Gloria Grahame with Director Jerry Hopper on the set of NAKED ALIBI

Last night I had a great time at Noir City, the 10th annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival.  Noir City is spearheaded by the film noir expert Eddie “The Czar of Noir” Muller.  Its website also includes top rate film noir resources and merchandise.

Last night’s program was a double feature that is not available on DVD.  In fact, Universal went into its vault for the negative and made what is now the only print of Naked Alibi (1954) for this screening.    Naked Alibi  features Gene Barry as a seemingly regular guy with a violent and unpredictable temper.  Sterling Hayden is a cop from the “I’ll beat a confession out of him” school of law enforcement; Hayden’s obsession, without any apparent empirical basis, is that Barry is a cop killer.  They both vie for Gloria Grahame, a sexy saloon singer with a heart of gold.

Film noir is dependent on its femme fatales and Gloria Grahame may be my all-time fave.  Many of you remember her as the slutty Violet in It’s a Wonderful Life and as Bogie’s co-star in the drama In a Lonely Place.  The fact that Gloria was a Bad Girl in real life doesn’t hurt.  I thank Mark A. Clark and his great blog Film Noir Photos for the great photo above.

The second film was Pickup, a lively and cynical low budget indie from 1951.  The writer/director Hugo Haas made several of these films in the early 50s.  As usual, in Pickup, Haas stars as the middle aged sap in the thrall of a young hottie.  Two things make Pickup an absolute howl.  First,  Haas loses his hearing; when he unexpectedly recovers his hearing, he doesn’t let on that he can hear his trashy young wife and her beau plot to kill him for his money.   Second, Beverly Michaels plays the femme fatale so broadly, creating one of the most unashamedly selfish characters in screen history – a floozy totally devoid of empathy.  Only Ann Savage in Detour was a nastier noir villainess.

 

Movies to See This Week

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THE ARTIST

Some of the year’s very best films are in theaters now. I especially recommend these four:

The Artist: A magical romance given us through the highly original choice of an almost silent film.

The Descendants: Director Alexander Payne’s (Sideways) family drama is set in Hawaii and contains a brilliant performance by George Clooney.

Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s revelatory 3D tale of an orphan living in the bowels of a 1920s Paris train station who strives to survive by his wits, keep his independence and solve the puzzle of an discarded automaton.

Best Movies of 2011.  Steven Spielburg’s War Horse has also been nominated for Best Picture.  Roman Polanski’s Carnage is a fine comedy.

Here are my comments on some other current films, the sex addiction drama Shame, the biopic  The Iron Lady and the very odd fable Albert Nobbs.  Plus, I liked the lightweight feminist action thriller Haywire.

I haven’t yet seen A Separation or Pina 3D, which open this week.  You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.