Irreviews

What to Expect When You’re Expecting is the latest and most extreme example of Hollywood baby propaganda: the rising movement among mainstream Hollywood films to include scenes that push the idea of parenthood to a white middle-class which is no longer procreating. It seems like I can hardly watch a mainstream feel-good movie without some damn scene of a white woman giving birth while screaming her head off, who subsequently becomes overwhelmed with the feeling that her life suddenly and finally at long last has meaning, where before it was a nightmare of emptiness and sorrow.

What explains this nonsense? I think it is all somehow emanating from white racist paranoia of certain sectors of the American elite. Think back to the 70’s and 80’s. There were almost no instances of movies blatantly and simplistically glorifying the act of giving birth, or pushing the idea that the only way to have meaning in your life was to raise a kid. In fact, my memory is that the opposite message was seen quite often. Why the change? It’s easy: minorities are reproducing and whites are not, and rich, racist fucks are getting nervous.

Consider the message of this movie. All the white couples (with one important exception) have babies and are insanely fulfilled. The only white couple who fails to have a baby got pregnant out of wedlock – draw your own moral conclusions from that. The “brown” couple, on the other hand, they are not able to have a baby; they have to adopt one from Ethiopia.

Then there are all the white dads, who along with Chris Rock form a pack of lobotomized men who are, we are asked to believe, blissfully happy to walk around pushing strollers all day. These guys are so unbelievable they come across like demented caricatures from a Monty Python skit.

The only good thing about this film is Chase Crawford and Anna Kendrick. They are a superb screen couple, amazingly warm and talented, and someone should write a movie for them to star in all by themselves, preferably without any obnoxious baby propaganda.

I think The Sessions could have been a really good film without Helen Hunt. It is an interesting and occasionally moving story, the dialog was pretty decent, and the story was well-told, with good structuring and good pacing. John Hawkes is emerging as an amazing actor, and I am glad that he is now able to finally transcend all those “Teardrop” roles he was stuck playing. I’m not one to admire flashy Rain Man-type roles, but Hawkes really impressed me with the understated sensitivity he brought to his character. And William H. Macy is, as usual, warm and winning in a small but important role.

It’s Helen Hunt that drags this movie down. Her acting is distractingly self-conscious, she has extremely limited emotional range, she has extremely limited vocal and facial expressiveness, and she’s ice-cold on screen. It tells you a lot about John Hawkes’ formidable warmth and acting skill that he was able to prop up a dead weight like Helen Hunt to the degree that he did. But in the end, it was not enough. This story was all about the connection between these two people, and Helen Hunt just killed that aspect of the film before it could even get started. To see the magnitude of her failure, all you have to do is consider the palpable emotional connection between Hawkes and the two much more minor love interests in the story (played by Annika Marks and Robin Weigert.) Somehow these actresses were able to match Hawkes and generate some really lovely and memorable moments, despite the fact that they had almost no scenes and almost no dialog. I can’t even bear to think how good this film might have been with a really warm and talented actress (like Elizabeth Shue, Vera Farmiga or Robin Wright, perhaps) in the lead role.

I should point out that the film is still fairly enjoyable despite Helen Hunt. I actually liked it more than my wife did. But her presence definitely put a ceiling on its potential, and in the end you really feel it.

The quite long opening sequence of Twelve Thirty grabs you in a way that few opening scenes do. No title or credits, no music, just this strangely fascinating and consistently surprising conversation between two young kids, extended over several different locations. I confess, during this sequence I was considering the possibility that this film might be playing in the same league as Eric Rohmer, or certainly Richard Linklater or Tom Noonan. Silly me!

Twelve Thirty certainly sustains certain attributes of those filmmaker’s movies, namely constant dialog (with almost nothing else going on) and no music. But that’s where the similarity ends. After that interesting first sequence that seems to portend so many possibilities, the film actually becomes quite boring, the dialog instantly turning from entertaining to gratingly dull. The story has almost no coherence – first it’s about the young guy’s sexuality, then it’s about the second daughter and her Satanist friend, then it’s about the mother and her gay ex-husband, and then it finally settles on a quite lame and uncompelling father-daughter reconciliation tale. The only thread of connection binding this mess together is that the same characters appear in each segment, but their behavior is completely inconsistent, changing depending on whatever that segment calls for. So, in the beginning, the young guy is really gentle and articulate, then later he’s a savage date-rapist, and then finally he turns into Seth Rogan. The young daughter starts out as a dazzlingly confident, almost Rohmereqsue woman, then becomes a stupid, capricious, inarticulate modern teenager, and then settles on being a timid, almost mute daughter. It gets kind of insulting after a while that you are asked to just swallow all these senseless variations for no reason at all.

So we have here a film made up of 8 or so long segments of pure dialog, pasted together, each rather boring,  and each connected to the others only tenuously and unconvincingly. It’s like they had this one promising opening scene, and thought “okay where can we possibly go from here?” They settled on a really bad imitation of Richard Linklater’s writing. It really left a bad taste in my mouth.

The only value Twelve Thirty has is as an example of just how difficult it is to write a solidly good dialog-based movie, let alone a great one. It accomplishes the easy part: have the characters talk all the time. Beyond that, it doesn’t have a clue.

My wife and I saw The First Time in the only theater in NYC that is showing it – the disgusting AMC Empire 25 in Times Square. The tiny, filthy theater assigned to this film was nearly empty. While there, we met (sitting next to us) the grandmother of Dylan O’Brien, the kid who plays the male lead in the film, and we had a brief chat with her expressing our mutual disbelief that this delightful little movie could not get better distribution or better reviews from critics.

The First Time opens with a 20-25 minute conversation between the two leads, O’Brien and Britt Robertson, who meet each other in an alley outside of a drunken party. When was the last time you saw anything like that in a movie about teenagers in high school? Jon Kasdan (who wrote and directed) clearly has an old-school attitude about dialog, and it carries throughout the entire movie, so much so that I think the film compares more naturally to something like Before Sunrise than anything in the teenybopper genera. They certainly share the same basic theme: the more or less continuous story of the initial hours of a relationship between two young people who meet by chance, explored almost entirely through dialog. Maybe this is part of the film’s distribution problem. After all, how many people saw Before Sunrise, or have even heard of it?!

Of course, now that this comparison is on the table, certain issues come to the fore. Before Sunrise didn’t just have lots of dialog, it had spectacularly entertaining dialog, presented in a succession of incredibly original and memorable scenes, and delivered by actors (Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy) possessing astonishing warmth and charisma, and exhibiting fabulous chemistry together. It’s more than a bit unfair to compare The First Time to this masterpiece. Rather, I see The First Time as a transposition of the basic Before Sunrise formula to the world of generation Z high school experience, with a shift of emphasis from artistic flamboyance to emotional realism.

The result is a small, intimate, rather literal film. The dialog winds up being a slightly unstable mix of somewhat sophisticated ideas and the banal, semi-coherent stammering of average teenagers. This is not a bad thing, however; it feels very realistic, even charming at times. All character development, even the supporting characters (Robertson’s older boyfriend Ronny and O’Brien’s unrequited love interest Jane,) is done entirely through dialog. Since the characters are not very deep, neither is the dialog, but it is well-written. And it’s refreshing and unusual to see this approach taken within this genera, resulting in a film that is consistently interesting and which possesses a nice easy narrative rhythm.

The cast features a number of people that I already liked from small but exceptional recent films. The female lead, Britt Robertson, played Cara in Dan in Real Life, a film that I consider a modern classic. She is a good actress with a delightful presence and warmth on screen (she comes across like a combination of Juno Temple and Kay Pannebaker,) and she gives a very realistic and winning performance. Her co-lead Dylan O’Brien is a newcomer who is definitely channeling River Phoenix in Running on Empty for this role. His performance was perhaps a bit understated for my taste, but it was very earnest, and he and Robertson have a nice chemistry. James Frecheville (who starred in a little known favorite from a few years back called Animal Kingdom) is great playing the very interesting character of Robertson’s older boyfriend. And Dylan O’Brien’s confident, geeky friend Simon is played by Craig Roberts, who was the memorable lead in the fantastic little indie film Submarine; unfortunately, Roberts does not have much to do here, but it is still nice to see him.

When I reviewed Jon Kasdan’s first movie In the Land of Women, I pointed out that it was a pretty good film, but lamented that it possessed and squandered almost all the raw material it needed to be truly great, comparing it unfavorably with Eric Rohmer’s similarly-themed masterpiece Conte D’Été (1996.) In some ways, I think The First Time is a more artistically realized (if less ambitious) film than In the Land of Women. It has a more cohesive structure, it has better dialog and character development, and it is more disciplined and avoids the rather large mistakes its predecessor made. I don’t think it was ever in the cards for The First Time to be another Before Sunrise, however. Rather, it stands on its own as a very engaging and low-key film about teens falling in love.

I get the sense that most people will never have the chance to see The First Time in theaters, but be sure you Netflix it when it comes out. It was very unfairly snubbed, in my opinion.

Argo completely lived up to my expectations, and I’ve been impatiently waiting for this film to open for 6 months. It’s a fantastic movie, clearly one of the best this year, and it should not be missed on the big screen.

The high point of Argo, for me, was the opening depiction of the sacking of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. It’s lovely filmmaking, beautifully capturing the emotions and ominous uncertainty of the moment, and the entire sequence is paced damn near flawlessly. It was in this initial sequence where I first realized, to my delight, that Ben Afleck (whether consciously or not) has picked up some of William Friedken’s marvelous old camera techniques – like Friedkan, he makes everything look spontaneous and thrilling through his use of camera motion, zoom, and exquisite, unexpected angles. The shot through the moving car window of the guy hanging from the crane was classic Friedken. You really have to hand it to Affleck. In an era of unsurpassed laziness in film makers, he is keeping some of the classic art of filmmaking alive, and it really sets him and his films apart.

I might also point out that it was fucking ballsy as hell for Affleck to begin the film with narration from the Iranian point of view, explaining how the U.S. removed their democratically elected leader (Mosaddegh) in 1953, and installed the delightful fellow we know as “The Shah,” and describing the terrors The Shah brought on the people of Iran. How many filmmakers would have the courage to do that? Especially since I don’t think this information was essential to the telling of this particular story.

But it’s not just the opening sequence that shines. The film is tense and interesting all the way through. It has a lot of ground to cover, and it manages to do this while keeping the story tight and blending disparate elements effectively. The pace of the film never fails and the overall length of the film feels perfectly judged. Performances are solid across the board. Unlike most critics, I don’t have a problem with Ben Affleck the actor, and I suspect their tendency to denigrate his acting in light of his directing boils down to simple jealousy – jealousy that a pretty boy like Affleck can make films this good, put himself in them as the star, and then give a really good performance (and make himself look fantastic on screen, I might add.) It defies the laws of mainstream films, and they simply can’t stand it. I mean, Affleck is better in Argo (and in The Town) than George Clooney was in The Descendants, and they gave Clooney a freaking Oscar nomination!

So we’ve established that Argo is really good. But just how good is it? My initial feeling is that as wonderful as it is, it does not strike me as a timeless classic. For example, when I left the theater after watching Fair Game two years ago, I literally could not wait to see it again, it was so profoundly impressive; I’m not sure I will need to see Argo again, frankly. The story is broad and interesting, but it is not particularly deep. It’s an action film with a very linear plot, and limited time available for dialog, complex scene structure, or character development. (For example, Affleck’s character is pretty much a mystery man the entire movie, and the six stranded Americans come across as one simplistic block, never really emerging as independent personalities.) These lacking elements do not really hurt your enjoyment of the film, but it’s difficult for a film to be truly great without these fundamental building blocks.

To me, Argo compares favorably to The French Connection, another exciting action film based on a true story, with a fairly linear plot, plenty of suspense and thrilling action, limited dialog, and minimal character development. I think Argo is a bit better than The French Connection, because it’s a more interesting story that is more coherently told, it has considerably more dialog, and it has a much more entertaining spectrum of characters. Atmospherically I think The French Connection might have an edge (though not by much,) and one can argue that the aesthetic quality of the various chase scenes in The French Connection has never been equaled. But my point is that neither of these films can hold a candle to truly great films in this genera like Costa-Gavras’ Missing, for example, or Sidney Lumet’s All the President’s Men, or even a more modern classic like Fair Game.

Affleck made a wonderful film with the script he was working with. Could Argo have been truly great with a better script? I’m not sure the source material is deep enough to support true greatness, and any attempts to add more texture to certain parts might have disrupted the pacing of the movie and made it overly long. In the end I think Argo is perfect just as is it: an atmospheric, interesting, and thrilling action movie. Let’s leave it at that, and honor it as one of the year’s best films and more proof of Ben Affleck’s continually emerging skill and vision as a director.

Again, don’t miss it while it’s in theaters!

I don’t know anything about the TV show The Sing Off, or the world of modern a cappella music, so I can only react to this film as a typical teen music movie, blind to any injustice it may or may not be doing to the a cappella discipline as it exists now.  Pitch Perfect is far from a great film, but it is basically a fun film which I enjoyed way more than most of the stuff I’ve watched this year, especially crap that the critics actually liked (such as The Master.) Music movies, even if they are not great, are wonderful things simply because music is good for you. And it was nice to see a celebration of singing in particular, even if all the voices sounded a bit “processed” in a way that I could not quite put my finger on.

My main issues with Pitch Perfect are, first, they made little effort to develop characters in any way. They felt free to borrow all kinds of stuff from movies like Bring It On and Bandslam, but one thing they failed to borrow from those films was their attention to character development, which is what elevated them from silly teen movies to really wonderful films. Pitch Perfect is very much a Generation Y movie – emotionally it’s rather flat, and all the kids have that modern vapidness about them, almost like they’ve been lobotomized. Since the film’s main attraction is all the singing and dancing, it’s not a huge deal breaker, but it’s always disappointing when filmmakers take the easy way out.

My second issue with the film is that the musical numbers very much reflect the musical sensibility of modern pop music: all the songs in Pitch Perfect have the same soulless emotional tenor, plasticized timbre and completely uninteresting rhythmic structure, and all the singers have basically the same vocal style (call it pseudo blues belting, for lack of a better description.) It’s funny that they make such a big deal about that Simple Minds song, because the lead singer of Simple Minds would never get a record deal now – he’s too interesting and original sounding, he’d be stuck posting his mp3 files for free download on some internet site. Again, it was not a deal breaker for me – I can tolerate, and sometimes even enjoy, a certain amount of soulless modern pop music, and people who actually like the way modern pop music sounds will probably love the musical numbers. I will say that I think the best musical number was when Anna Kendrick takes over the group and they go out to the empty pool and sing that Just The Way You Are song – it’s a terrible, terrible song, but they managed to transform it in an interesting way.

But these gripes are mostly personal preference – music is what it is now, and kids are what they are now, nothing I can do about that! If you are looking for an uncomplicated diversion with lots of fun musical numbers, I would recommend Pitch Perfect.

The title of this review says it all, and it’s really a shame. This was a good story idea, and they had a very talented cast assembled. Hugh Lauire and the very underrated Leighton Meester had a really interesting on-screen chemistry as the leading couple. But the filmmakers just couldn’t be bothered to write a story or give any of the characters anything interesting to say to each other. Instead they lean entirely on badly written narration to tell you what everyone is thinking, feeling, and doing.

I’m not going to waste any more time on this – it’s just plain badly done.

I had no idea who Diana Vreeland was until my wife and I saw the lovely little exhibition of Vreeland “fashion art” at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice earlier this year. That experience made The Eye Has to Travel a must-see for us, and it did not disappoint. This is a very well-made documentary, with good pacing and a skillful balance of interview and visual footage. It benefits enormously from its use of audio taped interviews conducted very late in Vreeland’s life for her memoirs, footage which serves as a counter-point to the historical TV interview footage, almost like she is being interviewed for the documentary itself. They also do a great job getting across the beauty of her Harpers and Vogue layouts, and her ground-breaking exhibitions at the Met, without overloading the audience. I wish they had explained the direction Vogue went in after she was fired, so I could better understand her influence on society through fashion, but this is just a minor quibble. It’s a really enjoyable documentary.

Diana Vreeland was certainly a visionary of sorts. She willed the entire society in a very definite cultural and social direction, born largely from her own imagination and flights of fancy. The thing that really struck me about Vreeland was how refreshing it was to hear to someone talk who completely lacked the pretensions of book knowledge, who at the same time possessed a fresh and incisive mind capable of great creative imagination – it’s very fun to listen to her!

Everyone should check out Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel. (It’s playing at Angelika in New York.) It’s well worth it!

It is very rare to find a documentary that is timeless. Most documentaries are mediocre  and even the good ones are things you see once and never need to watch again. The last truly great documentary was My Architect (2003.) Ten years later, we have another: Searching for Sugar Man.

Here, all the very best possibilities of a documentary come together. The topic is fascinating, and the dramatic and aesthetic framing of the mystery of the artist Rodriguez defies criticism. The flow of information to the viewer over the course of the documentary is exquisitely done, as is the pacing and the choice of visuals and their interweaving with interview footage. This documentary should be studied for how it is put together. It is a masterpiece.

Then there is the music of Rodriguez, the marvelousness of which is also a big part of the documentary’s power. He really was a unique musical quantity; he sounds to me like a combination of Dylan, Jim Croce, and Donovan, but mixed with a decidedly more modern musical sensibility. As this would imply, there is a freshness to the songs that is rarely heard. Moreover, the songs are all quite distinct pieces of art, each remarkable in their own way, yet each clearly a part of a coherent overall musical vision. And on top of all this, he is writing about incredibly poignant topics: his experience among the desperate urban poor in Detroit, and conveying it in song with a mysterious loveliness; whereas someone like a young Bruce Springsteen dramatized (in a good way) the lives of the poor working class, this guy instead transforms it into a sort of gentle poetry. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything like it.

There is yet another magical feature to this story. The almost delirious adoration of Rodriguez in South Africa, contrasted with his complete anonymity here, is to me a beautiful metaphor for what has happened to popular music. Over the last 20 years, pop music stopped mattering to people, or perhaps more accurately, it stopped functioning as an emotional anchor for the population and instead transformed into a kind of supporting appendage to various visual media phenomenon. As this happened, all the soul (both musical and lyrical) drained out of popular music, in part because only a narrow range of musical and lyrical motifs fit music’s new role as a soundtrack to visual distraction; as a simple example, think about the kind of pop songs that are used in every effective movie preview of the last five years, how they all basically sound exactly the same. Rodriguez came to popularity during South Africa’s most repressive period, and his music became part of the lives of people who were dreaming of something better, became part of their lives in the old way – the music merged with the people themselves. Their passion for his songs through the decades echos the lost possibilities of popular music, flushed away perhaps forever by the greed of record companies and by a stampeding transformation in technology. The question of why people don’t really listen to music anymore is too big for this review, but Searching for Sugar Man gives a glimpse at least into why they used to.

If you are in New York City, be sure to catch it in theaters before it leaves (it’s still playing at the Village East.) Otherwise, Netflix it and enjoy this lovely work of art.