Irreviews

It might have been cute if the story was not so boring and unimaginative, and if they had bothered to make any of the characters likable.

Watching Mental in the Village East Cinema the other night I was happily transported back to the glorious 1990’s Indie Renaissance. Absent were all the deplorable obsessions of modern comedy – poop humor, slapstick routines that have been beaten to death, post-Seinfeld humor, completely predictable dialog, shamelessly ridden soundtracks, and above all: dreary stories, superficial themes, and crap, postmodern endings. In their place stood a reasonable facsimile of how great the indie movement was back then, a film so fresh and fun and completely unselfconscious that it is literally a breath of fresh air. It took three months, but 2013 has finally produced a good movie.

Back in the early 1990’s, P.J. Hogan made one of the earliest gems of the Indie Renaissance, Muriel’s Wedding. Mental is his modern reworking of the same themes: awkwardness, being different, parental scorn, musical obsession, coolness, conformity, and insanity. What’s even stranger is that he kept the same basic story structure. I swear to God the house in this movie is the same exact house used in Muriel’s Wedding. Instead of Porpoise Spit, the town’s called Dolphin Heads. In both films, the mother is crazy, the kids are all weird drifting slackers, and the father hates his family and is never home. Both films weave a particular musical motif into the story in the same humorously unifying way. And Toni Collette is the one direct link between the two films: in Muriel’s Wedding she plays the one child who escapes; in Mental she plays the crazy “nanny” who heals all the dysfunction.

I really have no criticism of this film. On one level, it’s a night of pure fun at the movies, a very rare commodity these days. On another level, the movie has a lot to say about being different in a highly conformist society, and about being accepted in such a society, and remarkably this never feels pasted-on. The comedy and deeper themes blend into a pleasing stream of very satisfying entertainment. Muriel’s Wedding was the same way; indeed, this kind of strange alchemy was quite common during the Indie Renaissance, but it is virtually non-existent today.

A word on Toni Collette. She is an amazing actress, one who never really got her due. She has incredible range, incredible facial control, warmth, charisma, and naturalness. She was remarkable in Muriel’s Wedding and she’s great here in Mental. And don’t forget her supporting role in About a Boy, in which she was absolutely superb. But beyond these few films, what of significance has she ever gotten the opportunity to do? I guess we should be thankful that she got any quality leading roles at all.

Mental: head right out and see it today! You’ll be happy you did.

It is becoming quite clear that French cinema is settling comfortably into aping the style of Hollywood blockbusters from about 25 years ago, and through this trying to eclipse the rotting corpse of Hollywood at their own game. As with so many past movie trends, this one started with a legitimately great move, Tell No One (2006,) that just happened to make use of certain elements of technique that had been cast aside by Hollywood filmmakers. And like past movie trends, what followed tended to emphasize Tell No One’s superficial features, rather than the features which made it great in the first place – its fabulous story, pacing, and the way its soundtrack was used in the film.

The thing is, the French are nevertheless succeeding – they are currently beating Hollywood at their own game, and beating them pretty badly in my opinion. When I think about the pure shit Hollywood is churning out now, movies so terrible I can’t even get excited about ripping them to pieces here on Irreviews, I find myself enjoying this new French movement more and more.

The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch is a perfect example. It is far from a great movie. It feels a little like an exciting modern TV show –  think Ashley Judd’s Missing, compressed down to 100 minutes. But I can’t remember the last big-budget Hollywood action blockbuster that was anywhere near as fun and engaging as Largo Winch. Yes, the story is compressed, but at least it has a fairly coherent and interesting story, one that remains interesting all the way through. As was common in Hollywood action blockbusters of 25 years ago, it pays just enough attention to dialog and character development to give the illusion of texture, and it features a warm, likable and unambiguously good hero. It features a relatively low-tech, retro approach to action sequences, and piles them on with abandon, freely ripping off great movies of the past (specifically: all the Bourne movies.) And instead of the grey and depressing postmodern storylines of today, Largo Winch revives the formerly popular narrative of the handsome, good natured hero who with a little help triumphs over adversity, a story-form which has tapped deep elements of the human psyche since antiquity.

The fact is, the above formula is good solid entertainment that doesn’t numb you or drag you down. It’s more than diverting – it’s just plain fun. It’s what Hollywood used to churn out, and there is a definite place for it, a need to be filled. The French have sized up the situation and are targeting their product to fill this exact void, and they are doing the same with other abandoned Hollywood devices (e.g. Rust & Bone, The Intouchables.) I would be happier if their aim was a little higher than this, but I must admit that any competently executed new movie is very welcome at this point.

If you are looking sadly at this spring’s crop of movies, and wishing there would be just one decently written action film, I recommend you Netflix The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch. If you are skeptical, think about it this way: how could it possibly be worse than what you currently have to pick from?

My wife and I really enjoyed For a Good Time Call …. On one level it’s just silly fun: two girls trying to survive in New York City start their own phone sex service. But it’s immediately evident how well-made this film is. The pacing of the film is excellent, and its execution of humor shows a lot more skill and confidence than what tends to pass for romantic comedy these days. The main performances are all crisp and funny (it was really well-directed.) The writing is quite good as well – in the midst of all the sex talk, 15″ dildos, and guys busting their nuts in all manner of locations, you have a sweet and satisfying story about female friendship, and you have a very positive statement about women growing personally, and about human sexuality itself.

This last point I can’t stress enough. Sexuality is absolutely vilified in our society, so how refreshing is it to have both girls unambiguously make good by traditional standards despite their enthusiastic involvement in phone sex? This film is the antidote to that critically-acclaimed but ridiculous and insulting movie Shame, which had nothing good to say about sex, sexuality, or women.

For a Good Time Call … is another example of a young actress (Lauren Miller) reacting to all the crap roles for women that Hollywood offers by writing her own dignified and funny movie with two good female leading roles – in this she now joins Rashida Jones, Brit Marling, and Zoe Kazan. All I can say is Brava, Lauren! Keep writing movies!

If you have a problem with sex, I suppose you might not like this film. Otherwise, I would say give it a try.

Shame is a ridiculous and insulting movie. It’s supposed to be about sexual addiction, but it’s really not – if it was, they would have made it at least somewhat realistic, and they would have written some dialog so you could understand the problems and issues related to such an addiction. Instead, we are shown a lot of different sexual activity, all with grandiosely negative connotations, and we are fed a highly manipulative and unconvincing storyline about how sex is bad and corrupting, and implying women are (by their very nature) complicit in this. It’s a sick piece of trash.

Michael Fassbender’s character is an undiscriminated mishmash of sexual acts. He jacks off at home, he jacks off at work, he looks at porn at home, he looks at porn at work, he does live-video sex at home, he uses hookers, he stalks women on the subway and chases them, he sexually harasses women at work, he gropes women in public, and he picks up women in bars and has empty sex with them. He even snorts coke so he can “go all night” with his hookers. And the film’s clear message is that these various sexual activities keep him from loving his sister, and from loving the average-looking and rather dull African American woman from his work, who asks him on a date.

Where do I even begin with this nonsense? The idea that a guy whacking off in his own house is dysfunctional is something right out of a 1950’s Catholic school! And his whacking off in the bathroom at work might be distasteful and illegal, but one can argue that he’s not hurting anyone. The portrayal of his porn habits is similarly silly. These filmmakers have him hiding skin-mags all over his apartment – apparently they are unaware that no one has bought a “skin-mag” for over a decade, because now it’s all free on the internet. They have him with a work computer chock-full of porn despite the fact that he shares a tiny office, and when he gets caught he quite ridiculously suffers no professional or legal ramifications, which conveniently frees him to experience more of the “private shame” these filmmakers are pushing. When his sister opens his home laptop and finds a live video-chat link to some bimbo, she gets a look on her face like she just found little girls chopped up in his freezer. 

So basically, his private sex life is like something out of the reactionary, paranoid fantasies of a couple of sexually repressed and religiously warped parents. But his public habits tell a completely contradictory story. This guy hires really expensive and gorgeous hookers, occasionally two at a time, and fucks them with a confidence and flamboyance not usually associated with little boys who hide skin-mags. He is a star-player at his high paying job, with good social relationships with his co-workers. And most importantly, he is smooth and adroit at picking up attractive professional women and getting them to happily do all kinds of sordid things with him. In his public life, he’s having a blast!

This is where the film really becomes confused and offensive: in its portrayal of normal women relative to his sexual habits. He stares at women on the subway like a lunatic rapist, and they get all hot and bothered, smiling back at him. He picks up young women in bars, drives them to areas of New York City where they would confidently expect to be murdered, and has wild-ass sex with them, with their full and enthusiastic participation. He walks up to a woman in a bar and starts fingering her right in front of her boyfriend, and the woman is totally into it; he then describes to the boyfriend all the extreme sex he’s going to later inflict on the guy’s girl, and while the guy is not very happy, the girl is clearly ambivalent.

And after a bizarre and sexless first date with the rather homely African American woman, he dramatically throws out all his skin-mags, and the next day he attacks her in the coffee room at work. What does she do? Instead of slapping his face and getting him fired, she gets sexually turned on (yeah, right!) and immediately accompanies him to The Standard in the middle of the work day, to have sex with him. Then, when he tries to mount her “missionary” – presumably to prove to himself he can be “normal” – he suddenly can’t get it up, and acts embarrassed. What does she do then? She leaves in disgust.

What kind of world are these filmmakers living in? In their portrayal of reality, the line between porn women, video women, hooker women, and normal yuppie women is weirdly non-existent. The normal women in this film apparently like to be harassed, groped, stalked and banged like whores by complete strangers. Thus his sexual habits are not a problem that interferes with his life in any way. Even his sexual failure with the African American woman is depicted as a strangely ambiguous event – maybe if he had just bent her over she would have been fine with him.

In fact, the only real “problem” in this film is his disconnection with his sister (who incidentally is also a raging sex-slut, like all the other women in the film.) So in the end, the message of this film runs something like this: His inability to discipline his sexual thoughts to a suitably Christian level of purity, and thereby resist the evil temptations of Woman, is wrecking his sense of family values. These filmmakers are like far-right religious whack-jobs who admire the sexual mores of Iran.

If you are thinking about watching this film, I’d watch For a Good Time Call … instead. Yes, it’s a silly comedy, but it’s a much more truthful and constructive depiction of human sexuality, and a much less warped depiction of women. Watching Shame is downright unhealthy.

Admission is so terrible, I don’t even know where to begin. I had just a few days before seen the horrible Ginger and Rosa, to which I went with somewhat hopeful expectations and from which I came away disappointed in every way. Well, I went to see Admission with almost no positive expectations, and I still came away totally devastated by its awfulness. So I guess that makes it worse than horrible.

This film is not the slightest bit funny or interesting. The characters and their actions make no sense, and the screenplay is random recyclings of hackneyed shit from other bad movies. The two stars (Tina Fey and Paul Rudd) are just thrown together for marketing critical mass despite the fact that the simplest screen test would have shown they have zero chemistry. The film’s message (upper-middle class white women must sacrifice their lives to motherhood to have any shot at happiness) is insulting to women and is further evidence of the relentless baby propaganda emanating from Hollywood. And lastly, the music sucks.

This is the first film that Paul Rudd could not save, but that’s no mark against him – nothing could save writing this bad.

And our cinematically horrendous 2013 continues …

I must say, 2013 is getting off to a really inauspicious start at the movies. It’s not just that nothing good has been released. These moves are so bad this year, I can barely find anything I’m even interested in seeing. But I got taken in by the fabulous trailer for Ginger and Rosa, which masterfully hides all the shortcomings of this boring and unsatisfying film (yet again, a trailer is a better “movie” than the movie it’s advertising.) So my wife and I headed to Angelika on a week night to give this film a chance. What a mistake.

I am so tired of these pretentious indie films with no dialog, no character development, no thematic development, ill-chosen and over-burdened soundtracks, and no ending. Every character in this film is an abstract mystery-person (with the partial exception of the father.) The central relationship between the two friends is basically undeveloped. The relationship between Elle Fanning and her mother is sketched minimally, but to little narrative effect. And the two gay guys and their weird friend are so undeveloped I couldn’t even tell you with any certainly who they were. As for the “political content,” it is non-existent. They do mention nukes and the Cuban Missile Crisis every now and then, but no one says anything the slightest bit interesting, and these concepts never relate to the central story in any meaningful way. All we get is Elle Fanning saying “the world’s gonna end,” over and over, and writing really bad poetry on the subject. Seriously, this whole aspect of the story (which was so emphasized in the trailer) is nugatory.

Which leaves us with the main plot: Elle Fanning’s father Roland starts fucking her best friend. In my opinion, this whole storyline completely backfired, because Roland was the only person in the film I liked. He was the only one who seemed remotely interesting or remotely real, and Alessandro Nivola at least brought a little warmth into this ice-fest. He also gives a pretty good performance, and has all of the (very few) good lines in the movie. It’s weird: the emotions and feelings of the girls are never explored, but Roland’s emotions and feelings are explored a little, and again this makes his character automatically more sympathetic. Anyway, since the filmmakers left this all so open, I feel totally free to enjoy the fact that his character finally found love with a teenager, providing him with a happiness which long evaded him.

My wife and I were discussing Elle and Dakota Fanning afterward. I think they are each in their own way a semi-irritating bundle of tics, but that Elle has superior warmth and emotional range, and thus more potential as an actress. With material this bad it’s hard to give an opinion on her performance in this film, but she does do some nice crying, and she does imbue selected moments of the film with a pleasant naturalness. The rest of this star-studded cast is embarrassingly under-utilized; in fact, I can’t even imagine how they got all these stars to appear in this terrible movie. 

After this film, my wife and I felt so emotionally and intellectually deprived, we went home and streamed (as a kind of novocaine) the pilot to an old TV comedy we never saw: Arrested Development (2003.) Comparing that pilot episode to Ginger and Rosa, I can report that the 30 minute pilot had superior character development, superior emotional content, superior dialog, superior socio-political content, and it accomplished all these things in one-third the run time of Ginger and Rosa.

Let’s hope 2013 gets turned around soon.

Quartet is an inoffensive little film that stubbornly refuses to be anything more than that. The main problem with the film is the script – character development is clumsy, the humor is sadly flat, and the intellectual content is kind of dull and unengaging. I also think the two leading men were cast wrong. Maggie Smith gives a bright and warm performance, but she does not have enough lines or an interesting enough character to really propel the film anywhere substantive. Dustin Hoffman’s direction is kind of average, no worse; again, it’s the script and story that holds everything down.

Things are pretty grim in theaters right now. If you’re in the mood for a sweet, goodhearted, light movie about music and old age, you might consider it. Just don’t expect too much.

A Late Quartet really surprised us, because so many critics and people we know had given it decidedly mixed reviews. It may not be a great film, but it was a really good, balanced film with no major flaws. The set-up was decent, dialog was pretty good, pacing was good, the performances were strong (Philip Seymour Hoffman really should have gotten a nomination for his performance – it was way, way better than what he did in The Master,) and it has an interesting story which reveals each character’s inner struggle quite effectively. They even did a decent job weaving musical details into the script to give it some texture. It’s not a super deep film, but it leaves you with a very satisfied feeling.

Ignore the critics – there’s no reason not to Netflix this one.

Lore is a film about life in Germany after they lost World War II, focusing on a family’s attempt to travel across Germany on foot to get to relatives. It excels at painting a picture of the desolation, hopelessness, and utter confusion as life is turned upside down by the occupying armies. It does this rather literally – the cast walks silently around a lot of bombed-out buildings, lonely forests and fields, and they scrounge around for food and transportation.

Lore does not have much dialog, so you really don’t get to know the characters very well. It’s painting a portrait of a situation in time and place, more than telling a story about people, and this makes the film feel a little slow and definitely limits its emotional impact to a rather abstract kind of appreciation. The camera work is a little distracting because the director is in love with the extreme close up – the back of a person’s heal from one inch away, the upper half of a cheekbone from one inch away, a person’s eye from one inch away. It gets annoying at times, but it was not bad enough or frequent enough to spoil the film’s good points.

Once you’ve seen Lore you would never need to see it again. But it is an interesting and fairly gripping dramatization of a piece of history that we don’t think much about. It’s at Cinema Village in NYC, so I can’t imagine it got very wide distribution, but if you get a chance to see it, I would recommend it.