Irreviews

And While We Were Here is about a couple staying on the Amalfi coast for two weeks while the husband performs in a classical ensemble. The opening 15 minutes is pretty standard “marriage on the rocks” stuff. American Kate Bosworth is married to a kind and decent-looking Englishman who is basically humorless, dull, self-obsessed, and who fucks like oil derrick.  She dreams of writing a book based on recordings she made years ago of her grandmother talking about the world wars in England, a project of which he’s basically unsupportive, of course. She wants more excitement in bed; he doesn’t. Well traveled ground.

But then she takes a day trip to the island of Ischia and the film suddenly comes to life in a very refreshing way thanks to Jamie Blackley, who plays the drifting nineteen year old American teenager, temporarily living on the island with distant relatives, who bumps into Kate Bosworth and basically starts following her around talking at her. It’s a really lovely performance by Blackley, who inhabits the character which such skill and effortless natural charm that you actually can believe that his stalker-like behavior would not only be tolerated by Bosworth, but would eventually win her over. What’s more, I found the dialog in this section consistently surprising – not stunning, but somehow nothing that was being said was quite what I expected to hear. When he finally makes his move, and she recoils, asking nastily “is this what you do, seduce women?” she receives the incredible reply “you need to be less serious,” uttered with a simultaneous naivete and sincerity that is shocking. This middle third of the movie came together wonderfully, and is extremely enjoyable – the blossoming of their friendship is like a breath of fresh air.

Unfortunately, And While We Were Here does not maintain the heights to which it has ascended. As the plot narrows in the last third the film, it remains tastefully done, decently written, and beautifully shot, but the dialog starts drying up a bit (never a good sign,) it starts riding its admittedly lovely score and images, and the various lines of dramatic potential quickly start resolving into what I found rather uninspiring ideas. And the film’s ending,while definitely crafted with much care, I found a tad disappointing.

Still, I would recommend this film, just to see the lovely middle section where Bosworth and the kid fall in love, and to revel in the film’s exquisite sense of place. I’ve seen many films shot in Italy, but its pretty rare to find a non-Italian film set in Italy that truly makes you feel like you do when you’re actually in Italy (certainly nothing comes to mind from the last five years;) I was amazed at how effective And While We Were Here was in this regard. Despite the film’s perhaps timid resolution, it’s still a lovely, gentle and interesting little film, well-made and well worth seeing.

And While We Were Here opened at Cinema Village this week, which means of course that it’s getting zero distribution. The 7:25 show was just me and a ninety year old couple. If you live in New York and you want to see this film, you’d better go today, as it will probably be gone by tomorrow!

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are a very underrated comic team, and their movies are bizarre, off-beat, edgy comedies with a golden heart. The World’s End is no exception – a bunch of 40-something guys attempt to complete a failed pub crawl from their youth, only to find that their old town is the spearhead of an alien robot invasion of Earth. Sounds every bit like a Simon Pegg film! And it certainly has its moments. The problem is it doesn’t really come together very well.

My take on Pegg and Frost is that Shaun of the Dead was just okay and Hot Fuzz was an absolute masterpiece. (I never saw Paul, the film about the alien.) The World’s End struck me as way closer to Shaun of the Dead than Hot Fuzz, in terms of sheer quality and impact. The main problems with World’s End are the story mostly negates the wonderful natural chemistry between Pegg and Frost, Frost is decidedly under-utilized in his character (and Pegg is a tad over-utilized in his,) the supporting characters are indistinct and under-developed, and I found the climax scene a bit tiresome and underwhelming.

I really wanted to like this film, but the most I got was a bunch of grins and chuckles. It’s still way more inventive than your average Hollywood comedy, however, and any fan of Simon Pegg’s writing should certainly give it a chance – when I saw it, the packed audience seemed to get a pretty big kick out of it.

Often on this blog I will differentiate between a film’s story idea and its story, usually to point out how great story ideas (which sell the movie) are usually completely wasted by lazy and cynical screenwriting. Well Closed Circuit takes this concept one further – its nominal story idea (closed circuit cameras are watching everything we do) is, incredibly, completely irrelevant to the actual story. They could have written and told this entire story without reference to a single closed circuit camera, and it would have lost nothing. It’s almost as if someone proposed doing a paranoid thriller based on the idea that government (and private) surveillance is completely out of control, and then months down the road, ten writing teams later, they found themselves sitting with a movie that had almost nothing to do with surveillance, and forgot to change the title.

This film is actually about governments prosecuting terrorist acts in secret – specifically, about how that’s a bad idea. Actually, that’s probably why they kept the “closed circuit” idea and ad campaign – questioning unaccountable totalitarian structures is downright un-American these days. The story is enjoyable, and pretty even (it does not fall apart toward the end,) but at the same time it does not leave you with a whole lot. The rhythm and content of the dialog is very TV-like, and the plot comes across as a compressed and simplified version of a (quite good) TV political drama. I walked away from Closed Circuit thinking it would have been a great Homeland-type TV show. But judged as a movie on a topic this rich with potential, the story simply lacked depth and texture, the dialog was rather limited, minor character development was ignored (hell, major character development was ignored!) and frankly the basic story was told no better than adequately.

I am very happy to see Rebecca Hall getting a starring turn, and she is, as always, really good. Eric Bana, an actor I really don’t care for, is actually pretty decent here. And for fans of Julia Stiles (I definitely count myself one,) don’t get too excited – she’s barely in the film and has almost nothing to do in her few scenes.

Closed Circuit is a good summer popcorn movie. Just don’t expect the world.

Ever since Kristen Bell’s glorious turn as Veronica Mars ten years ago, I have been waiting for someone to write this very deserving actress a fabulous movie to star in. As the years have gone by, I’ve dropped the “fabulous” part of that dream, wishing merely that she could land a non-supporting role in any somewhat dignified movie. The trailer for The Lifeguard promised that and more: a real, honest-to-goodness lead role for Ms. Bell in a gritty, interesting-looking indie film. And even though The Lifeguard opened at Cinema Village (not a good sign, at least in terms of its distribution,) I was quite excited to check it out.

Well, The Lifeguard is not quite the fantastic piece of cinematic art I was hoping for Kristen Bell. The opening five minutes flat-out horrified me – I kept thinking to myself “God, I hope the whole movie isn’t like this!” (luckily, it’s not.) And to my surprise, the film wound up featuring a disappointingly nominal lead role for Ms. Bell. She plays a confused 29 year old who moves back home to sort her life out, but the minute she gets there the story quickly drops the development of her character and focuses on developing the various supporting players around her – her friend in a troubled marriage, her closeted gay friend, and the weird skateboard punks she starts hanging out with, including her sexual relationship with their leader. The results are rather mixed – sometimes interesting, more often dull – but in either case the role did not play to Ms. Bell’s strengths, indeed, it hardly gave her anything to do at all. In fact, the way the film is written I’m not sure it really mattered who they cast in that lead role.

With that said, The Lifeguard is not a bad film. In fact, it kind of grew on me. It even had a basically happy ending – hell, just the fact that they wrote any ending at all puts it above a large chunk of modern indie films! The best thing about The Lifeguard is its very strong sub-theme of how leaving the city and moving back to your small home town is a very bad thing to do, and its exploration of this, while not super deep, was interesting and vaguely amusing. It also captured pretty effectively parents’ love-hate relationship with their kids. The supporting cast is pretty good, and features Mamie Gummer, who is so distinctive I actually recognized her from a marginal role in the horrible, nothing movie Twelve Thirty (2010.)

If you like gritty, unpretentious  indie films, or you like Kristen Bell, I recommend you Netflix The Lifeguard for a slow Sunday night. You could do a lot worse.

Short Review: Love Crime is okay; Passion sucks donkey balls. If you must see one, see Love Crime. But trust me, you’re not missing much if you see neither of them.

Masochistic Review: I went to see Brian DePalma’s Passion because it starred Rachel McAdams, who is generally a good thing in movies, and Noomi Rapace, who I seem to want to believe is a good thing in movies. The film wound up being so God-awful, and the prospect of reviewing it was so dreary and uninspiring that I decided the only way to make it palatable was to rent the French film of which it’s a remake – Crime d’amour (2010) – and try to figure out what the hell DePalma thought he was doing. Now that I have the ignominy of having in a span of 24 hours watched two different versions of this same questionable story, I can at least comment on their respective merits.

Love Crime is not a terrible film. But it’s not a good film either. Its story idea is okay – an exploration of female competitiveness in the corporate world between a rising star and her middle-aged mentor, competitiveness that crosses a line and turns violent. Its story execution is really mixed. On the plus side, it’s well-cast – Ludivine Sagnier and the always-wonderful Kristen Scott Thomas have a good physical chemistry, and the two supporting guys are very solid and effective in their roles. Also on the plus side is the minimal but decent dialog between characters (it does not add much depth, but it is well-judged to bring a modicum of realism to the somewhat far-fetched story,) and the fairly solid background structure of the film (the corporation is an effectively vague agribusiness outfit, of which details are kept minimal yet weaved into the story as needed.) On the negative side, the whole elaborate murder scheme is not adequately set up (in particular, Sagnier’s motivation is not believable,) and it’s overly long, drawn-out and surprisingly dull. Even the ending is rather drab.

So what did Brian DePalma choose to do with this base? He throws away the compelling middle-aged-mentor/rising-star relationship and replaces it with what can only be described as an empowered-bitch/retarded-pet relationship, between two women of the same age. Rachel McAdams is supposed to be a superstar EVP, but she acts like she’s in Mean Girls the whole time. Noomi Rapace acts and speaks like Lisbeth Salander the whole time! Clearly, something went terribly wrong in the direction of this film.

He then throws away the basically sound setting of Love Crime and replaces it with a ridiculous ad agency, basing the ladies’ duel entirely on a dubious video to sell mobile phones in which some chick walks around in tight jeans with the phone’s camera pointed out the back (this, we are assured by DePalma, is a work of advertising “genius.”) He makes the Daniel character a crazy lesbian, and he makes Philippe into a ridiculous and depraved sex-degenerate. He jettisons all the effective dialog from Love Crime, replacing it with pure crap. But he keeps the overly long and drawn-out murder investigation, throwing in a few superficial tricks of the trade to make it seem a little bit more exciting than it actually is. He then adds a silly, almost offensive musical score, designed to suggest that nothing you are viewing should be taken seriously, and he changes the ending into a half-assed homage to the artistic stylings of Melancholia.

But it gets worse! Passion positively reeks of the rotting corpse of the 1980s. DePalma is as bad as Woody Allen in his self-imposed time-warp. Someone needs to tell him: two women kissing each other is no longer “edgy.” Two people fucking in masks is no longer “risqué.” The appearance of a 10″ red strap-on is no longer “daring.” And lesbianism is no longer considered “deviant.” Wake up, Brian! It’s a whole new millennium, man.

Of course, I suppose you could argue that DePalma was trying to take a so-so, somewhat dull French murder movie and turn it into a piece of art, even if it meant making it a parody of itself. That’s fine as far as it goes, but if the result is dog shit, what was the point?

Europa Report is probably the best damn realistic space exploration thriller I’ve ever seen. It’s story reminds me a lot of the incredible historical tales from the initial western explorations of the source of the Nile, the interior of Australia, or the depths of the Amazon. It feels incredibly authentic in every way, most strikingly in how it gets across the sense of ineffable isolation the explorers feel. I found the film quietly gripping from beginning to end. The genera of science fiction action thrillers is a real black hole nowadays – it’s either gross out monster movies or cowboys and indians crap – so the sudden emergence of a film of this quality in this genera is extremely welcome news.

Europa Report is shot as documentary footage of a manned mission to Jupiter, launched to investigate its moon Europa for possible primitive life under its ice crust. In the beginning of the film (8 months into the journey) the ship looses contact with Earth, and the film proceeds to fill in what happened both before and after this event with video footage from the ship’s cameras, weaving in technical background information in the form of interviews with the leaders of the expedition back on Earth. It sounds like this narrative structure would prove rather clunky, but actually its execution of all this is somehow quite seamless.

The film involves a lot of science and engineering talk, but it is so well-written it never feels heavy and it very efficiently and painlessly keeps the viewer understanding all the technical aspects of what is transpiring. This allows the movie to hold constant dramatic tension without ever needing to manipulate the audience or take the story in any direction the slightest bit unbelievable – it unleashes the exquisite everyday drama of exploration, in a highly technical setting. This is a seriously disciplined movie, directed beautifully – you hardly feel like you are watching a movie at all. Very impressive stuff indeed.

Despite the film’s necessary emphasis on science and engineering concepts, it manages to also feature a wonderfully laid out cast of characters, who are developed amazingly well given how little time is devoted to it. A big reason for this is that the casting of the crew (all of them complete no-names) was absolutely outstanding, all of them turning in performances so compelling that you bond with each of them despite the relative lack of interpersonal dialog. It’s a true ensemble masterpiece.

Europa Report is a total breath of fresh air. It’s an outstanding and memorable movie. I highly recommend it.

All I heard from everyone about Fruitvale Station was that it was “depressing.” This summary really does the film a disservice – in fact, Fruitvale Station is crafted so skillfully, and which such obvious care, that the depressing ending of the film did not drag me down emotionally. This film is not grinding an ax. It is surprisingly pleasant and rewarding to watch.

The film opens with the actual cellphone footage of the shooting, and thus makes no pretense of building up to any kind of surprise. Instead, it focuses all of its energy on painting a very human and complete picture of the main character, Oscar, and his relationships with the various people in his life. In this, it reminded me very much of the simple, straightforward, dialog-driven indie films of the 1990’s. Because the characters are interesting and well-drawn, and the dialog is solid, all this “back history,” which is in fact the entire movie, is consistently interesting, and sometimes gripping in the context of the non-specific anticipation of the eventual ending. When we finally reach the denouement, one is struck not so much by the obvious and senseless tragedy, but by how much random chance influences, indeed shapes our entire lives. Instead of coming away thinking “God, what a bummer,” I came away from Fruitvale Station in a quietly contemplative mood. I wouldn’t call this film profound by any stretch, but I can say I didn’t expect anything half as thoughtful as it turned out to be. It’s a great film for those who are jaded by the postmodern downer shit that the indie film movement has evolved into.

I definitely recommend Fruitvale Station.

In a World has an charming innocence about it that’s a throwback to the good-natured indie films of the 1990. My wife and I both really enjoyed it. It’s quirky, funny, well-cast, and paints an interesting and amusing picture of the voice-over world. All the performances are good, as is the dialog. Most importantly, this film has a good heart, so much so that its occasionally bumpy execution tends to fade against the backdrop of its solid story concept and artistic intentions.

I don’t have too much more to say about this film, except to definitely recommend it.

The Spectacular Now has a fantastic trailer, which emphasizes the charisma of the two leads, and sells it as a teenage falling in love story, successfully hiding the film’s true core story line: a dreary and unrewarding tale about the destructiveness of alcoholism – basically the boy is an alcoholic who walks around drinking from a flask of whisky all day long, and his relationship with the girl is to turn her into an alcoholic too.

Once you fall for the trailer and go to see the movie, you immediately realize the dialog is far too weak and sparse to support any kind of significant character development, or a relationship story with any depth. They had the kids cast really well, but all they gave them to say is the superficial, disjointed and incoherent stammering of real-life everyday speech – this may produce some authentic-feeling moments of high school adolescence in the early parts of the film, but the charm of this quickly fades, and as with so many modern indie films this crumbling dialogic foundation spells doom to any narrative hopes beyond reality TV. At the very end of the movie, the filmmakers do make a strange, half-hearted attempt to create the illusion (there’s no other way to put it) that something actually happened in this film, but all it does is re-emphasize the fact that nothing did.

From its trailer, I though this film might wind up being this year’s Perks of Being a Wallflower. Instead, it turns out to be just another unambitious piece of indie trash. I highly recommend avoiding it.

I went to see Elysium because it seemed like it might be an interesting political allegory, and Matt Damon was in it (if there’s one guy in Hollywood who tends to pick decent scripts and good characters, it’s him.) What I discovered is that Matt Damon is completely wasted in the film because he plays a robotized near-mute for all but ten minutes of it, and the political allegory is wasted on an insulting and idiotic plot designed solely to set up a solid hour of loud, badly filmed, badly choreographed and hugely tiresome robot fighting scenes. The film’s characters are grating and uninteresting to the last, and every plot element is contrived to the point of absurdity. Moreover, I found the film’s sociopolitical ideas to be surprisingly reactionary – it depicts rich people as victims of their government, it depicts poor people as violent and immoral thugs who need the rich to save them, and it basically posits organized crime, coupled with the fantastical emergence of a crypto-religious savior figure, as the social vehicle to address and mitigate human suffering.

It’s simply embarrassing to compare Elysium to the identically-themed In Time (2011,) a film which Elysium clearly (and incompetently) rips off, a film which unlike Elysium was critically panned and universally ignored. They both feature core allegories in which rich people are so in control of everything that they basically live in another world, and everyone else is trapped in unending despair. Their plots are virtually identical: a common man rises up to challenge the system, somewhat accidentally and somewhat desperately. They also both feature the core narrative idea that humans are in some critical way now part machine. But the unheralded In Time annihilates Elysium in every conceivable way: story coherence, intellectual interest, emotional impact, dialog quality, casting, character development, narrative dexterity in dealing with futuristic concepts, and most of all the sophistication and relevance of its sociopolitical ideas and the cleverness and depth of its central allegory.

I should mention the only reason I’m being so measured in this review of Elysium is I don’t want to write a plot summary of this piece of shit, which is what I would need to do if I were to give it the ripping it deserves. But I will tell you this: my wife and I found this film unremittingly awful, and left the theater profoundly depressed and angry, feeling that we deserved our money back. You want to watch a Sci Fi allegory about our current society? Netflix In Time. The only thing you’re going to get from Elysium is a headache, and a lot of fucked up ideas.