Irreviews

Yesterday, I caught the opening of Little Birds at Angelika Film Center. Little Birds is one of those indie films that is admirably gritty and realistic without being terribly interesting or deep. I’m not saying it’s not a good story or that it’s not enjoyable. I think it is worth seeing. But it’s somewhat limited by the approach it takes to its material.

Juno Temple and Kay Panabaker play two hopeless teenagers living in a trailer park at the edge of the known world; seriously, the locations filmed in this movie are reminiscent of Antonioni’s Red Desert, that’s how bleak and otherworldly they seem. The girls wander around horrifically barren and God-forsaken landscapes, and then return each evening to their highly dysfunctional and unpleasant homes. Eventually, they meet a bunch of skateboard losers from LA, plying their trade in an abandoned pool, and so bleak are the girl’s lives they decide to follow them back to LA, where lots of things happen.

It’s a nice little story, but it is held back by that old bete noir: lack of dialog. They paint a reasonable enough picture (could have been done better) of the girls’ hopeless lives to make their journey seem plausible, but when they get to LA they simply ramp up the bleakness without exploring anything at all. Neither girl’s character is very well developed, they don’t really talk to each other once in LA, and they don’t really talk to the boys either. Thus the story degenerates into the sentiment: “God, I hope nothing bad happens to them!” Which is not a terrible thing, it’s just to say that this film is not trying to make any grander statement about life, friendship or growing up. The film does have some nice images in it, but these are offset by a heavy-handed and unappealing score.

It is nice to see that Kay Panabaker has recovered from her painful role in the execrable remake of Fame from a few years ago. Panabaker has a lovely and warm image on screen, while also being able to pass for “ugly;” thus she has a near perfect presence to play the sensible and repressed but emotionally appealing best friend in duos like the one in this film. Her acting is a tad stiff in places, but I’m nitpicking, and anyway, playing opposite Juno Temple basically fixes any small problems in her performance. Panabaker brings a really nice energy and realism to her role.

Juno Temple continues to amaze. She is incredibly natural, emotionally flexible, has wonderful control of her facial expressions, and breathes freshness into every scene. I just hope she avoids being pigeonholed into roles like this (crazy blond chick on a downward spiral,) as I think she has way more in her. This role is a bit beneath her, truth be told.

The three guys are all solid and seemed very real to me, especially the “smart” leader of the group, who reminded me of many such evil characters from my abominable years as a teenager. Even the guys playing the pervs were really good.

Little Birds is a solid and enjoyable little film. I have no idea how wide its release is (Angelika is probably the only place in America it’s playing,) but you can always Netflix it when it finally comes to DVD.

My wife and I caught this on opening night at the Union Square Theater. It’s 90 minutes of high-speed bike riding in New York City traffic. If you are into that, you will probably love this movie; if not, you might still find it diverting because of the sheer amount of action you are presented with.

Premium Rush has a very simple storyline, crafted entirely to yield different chase sequences, and it has a somewhat entertaining villain played by Michael Shannon. It has a few laughs scattered about. I found the action a bit underwhelming after a while; there isn’t much variety in the various chase scenes, and even though they are fun to watch, there is nothing spectacular about them.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt definitely elevates this film. He’s a fun actor with a good presence and a good voice. He glues the film together pretty effectively – without him in the lead role, I think it would have been really forgettable.

Premium Rush: enjoyable, as long as you go in with the correct expectations.

I honestly couldn’t tell you why I watched this thing. Chalk it up to temporary brain death. I had a lot of time to think during this film, and I found my mind wandering to the following topic: have I ever watched a film this bad in its entirety? The answer is I actually watched one in its entirety that was worse: Synecdoche, New York (2009). In comparing the two, Mirror Mirror’s few merits come to the fore. At least the chick playing Snow White looks a bit like Jennifer Connelly used to look, and Julia Roberts (the last of the old-time movie stars) is always kind of fun to watch, and every once in a while she delivers a line that sounded good in the preview. Sure, the film’s comedy was painful, the heartfelt emotion was painful, the action scenes were painful, Nathan Lane was painful, the dwarfs were painful, and the autotuned music video over the credits was REALLY painful, almost to the point of tears. (The lyrics: I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, in love! In love!) But unlike Synecdoche, New York, at least I didn’t feeling like killing myself once the film was finished. I just felt numb.

So it’s maybe the second worst movie I’ve ever watched in its entirety.

I figured Gone would be your typical brain-rot teen thriller type of movie. It really surprised me with how well put together it is, and my wife and I were pretty shocked at how much this movie exceeded our expectations. To be sure, Gone has its limitations – it is most definitely a light formulaic thriller. But it’s a well done light formulaic thriller, a genera that is basically 99% disappointing crap.

Gone is like a version of The Fugitive (another well-done light formulaic thriller,) except it’s a gorgeous young blonde running around, evading the police and solving a mystery. Its pacing is very good, and amazingly it holds its dramatic tension all the way through to the ending. The individual scenes and characters that Seyfried encounters on her journey of research are pretty well-conceived and well-written, and her character is fun to watch, even if her high level of evasive maneuvering seems at times a touch unrealistic. It is a very efficient film; there’s not much filler at all. It’s even shot well, and the score is not half bad.

The big reason Gone holds it together in its final third is the scene with the phone conversation between Seyfried and the strange guy. It’s a surprisingly riveting piece of cinema, so much so that I found myself thinking “this kind of film should really not be getting this good here at the very end.” The guy’s voice and delivery are superb, and the writing is good enough to give you the creeps while at the same time seeming very believable. Even in the film’s climax, the pacing does not slow, and the filmmakers do not succumb to the usual hackneyed cliches, obnoxious grandiosity, or overly drawn out action sequences. It’s all played pretty straight, right to the end. You don’t see this much anymore.

I’m not saying this film is great – far from it. I don’t think I would ever feel the need to watch it again. The cops are kind of cardboard and the story, while interesting, is a bit linear, certainly not deep. Seyfried, whose performance is more than decent in this film, is not the kind of actress that can make gold out of lead. But Gone is fun and satisfying, and has many nice qualities. It’s well worth Netflixing, in my opinion.

Mao’s Last Dancer is quite well done for what it is. I don’t love this kind of thing, generally speaking, but I found this enjoyable. The story is not super interesting, perhaps, but it does manage to hold your attention. It’s pretty even handed about the communist / capitalist thing, siding against communism (insofar as the main character does) but stopping short of presenting them as evil buffoons. Pacing is decent, and the dialog is not bad, limited mainly by the subject matter. I do wish the dancing had been filmed better, however – the dance scenes come across a bit flat and unimpressive somehow. The use of occasional slow-mo in the filming of these scene definitely did not help matters.

I always liked Bruce Greenwood, who in this film plays the director of the Houston Ballet, Ben Stevenson. He is very warm on screen, and he does an excellent job with this character, so excellent that he holds certain weak sections of the film together with his presence and acting skill. Amanda Schull is a personal favorite of mine from her performance as the lead in Center Stage, a film that I have long felt is drastically underrated. I’m sure Schull is a fine dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, but she is also a surprisingly decent actress (in this performance, she’s as good as Amanda Seyfried, at least.) And she still looks great, 10 years after Center Stage. I’ll never understand why she did not become a film star – maybe she wasn’t that interested, who knows? Anyway, it’s wonderful to see her years later in this quality supporting role, which she handles with her usual naturalness and earnestness. The fellow playing Li Cunxin was pretty convincing in a role that could have been hammed up.

I recommend Mao’s Last Dancer. It streams on Netflix, so there’s no reason not to give it a try!

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was, in the 1979 Alec Guinness BBC miniseries, translated to film as perfectly as anything I’ve ever seen. Compared to that masterpiece, this remake is a dumbed-down comic book. I’m not just being outrageous for effect here, I mean this literally: this new version is laid out just like a comic book. Each scene is consciously framed and stylized to emphasize certain simplistic images, the characters are somehow filmed to look a bit like comic book drawings, and the amount of dialog in each scene is kept minimal, often just a few lines. This approach may be fine for actual comic books, which you can page through with alacrity, but in the context of a movie it is exceptionally boring, especially since the images they pick to emphasize are so uninspiring. For example, they keep returning to an image of a bunch of files slowly riding upward in a mini glass elevator, floor after floor after floor; you don’t even know what’s in the files!

The story lumbers forward driven by unsophisticated, obvious plot devices and motives, all of which are sad simplifications of the amazing original story. They basically replace the delicious interlocking web of motives and circumstances with a linear tale revolving around the psychology of homosexuality, which to me was unimpressive and felt very tired. In addition, all the happenstance and surprising turn of events in the original story are here expunged in favor of unambiguous and immediately digestible events. I guess they figured that modern audiences could never follow the original story, and maybe they’re right. Or maybe they felt that the real story could never be done in a 2 hour movie, which I do not necessarily agree with. Think about how much information was packed into a film like Costa-Gavras’ Missing (1982), for example. If you know what you’re doing, and are willing to write dialog, and are capable of writing really good dialog, a tremendous amount of ground can be covered in two hours or so. With these filmmakers, this possibility is a non-starter.

As would befit a comic book approach, there is no set up and no character development; nothing is explained, no one is even introduced. You are never told who Bill Haydon, Roy Bland and Toby Esterhase are or what they each do, and it’s not entirely clear that Percy is the leader of the four of them. For the first three-quarters of the movie, these characters barely speak, and there certainly isn’t any dialog between the other characters, describing them or concerning them. They are simply presented as abstract quantities, “suspects,” and great attention (and on-screen time) is paid to filming them in ways that make them visually appear shifty and evil. But given this, how on earth can you even care about or feel any suspense regarding the search for the mole? They are emotionally interchangeable widgets, so who cares which one it is? In the original story, all four are very different characters, each with wildly different personas, different possible motivations, and each with a different history with Smiley. This movie, on the other hand, resembles a T.V. game show: they keep flashing images of the 4 baddies in front of you, as if to remind you “Which one will it be?” as George accumulates facts. It is exceedingly feeble, to say the least.

When I say “George accumulates facts,” I’m being overly kind. All the fascinating digging that George and Peter do in the real story in order to figure out what is going on is completely missing here. Rather than a dark and twisting path, here we have a well-lit superhighway: George gets the list of people Percy fired (all two of them,) interviews them, and they tell him the story; there’s nothing interesting about it. George doesn’t even have to think, really. I guess this is convenient, because with no dialog how would we ever know what he was thinking?

The lack of set up for the four suspects applies equally to George and his team. Peter’s character is a complete blank – you don’t know what he does, or what his history is with any of the other characters. All you are given is a scene where he is yucking it up with Bill Haydon in Circus headquarters. But in reality, Peter was a complete outcast, not at all welcome at Circus headquarters. Without this background, there is no real suspense when Peter has to break into the Circus to steal information, and hence these scenes fall so flat they come across almost like filler. Even Peter’s interrogation by Percy is a dud, not only because Peter’s character is so poorly constructed (for example, they omit that Peter’s nerves are suspect ever since the mole blew all his agents,) but because they also gutted the provocative ambiguity of the original Ricki Tarr story, without which the interrogation doesn’t really work. This is a pattern that repeats itself throughout the film: the filmmakers keep scenes that in the original story depended on prior plot elements that they have eliminated or changed, and even stranger, they don’t seem to realize it, or care.

As for George Smiley himself, Gary Oldman’s performance is, in a word, horrendous. It’s like a parody of Chance the gardener in Being There. Of course I should not entirely blame Oldman, because he is obviously just giving the director exactly what he wants. Whereas the George of the original story had passion, flaws, self-deprecation, cleverness, deviousness, a sense of humor, and a certain charm and grace, this George is just a face, really. An ugly face, attached to a robot. His past is a blank and he’s emotionless: he’s a robot solving a mystery. Everything human about him is out the window, with the strange exception of Anne, his wife, and this results in another laughable example of mismatched story lines. They simplify Anne’s infidelity to eliminate George’s associated psychology (he’s a robot, after all,) and then at the end they present it as Karla’s idea, unaware that their reconfigured version no longer makes sense with the story that Karla’s wanted to freeze George into inaction. Idiots!

The casting is pretty horrendous across the board, actually. They’ve cast that little homunculus Toby Jones, one of the least talented and least charismatic actors in existence, an actor who’s enough to make me avoid whole movies just so I don’t have to look at him or listen to him, as the charismatic schmoozer Percy Alleline, dynamic father figure to the other suspects. They have Ciarán Hinds right there, a much better choice for Percy, but he’s stuck playing Roy Bland, who if you got up and went to the bathroom at the wrong time you might think is mute. Toby Esterhase is supposed to be a charming Hungarian eccentric, but David Dencik plays him as a sullen, retarded teenager. And Colin Firth is a disaster as Bill Hayden – he’s way too warm and vulnerable. Bill Haydon was an cool, electrifying star player, worshiped and feared; That’s not Colin Firth, I’m sorry.

As for the casting of the other characters, Peter is too young and too much of a dandy, Jim Prideaux is too metrosexual, Control is too bland, Oliver Lacon is too undignified, and Jerry Westerby (really, Sam Collins) is too much of a doofus. Tom Hardy was well-cast as Ricki Tarr, but the Ricki Tarr character is so bungled that Hardy’s performance goes for naught.

My recommendation is that you Netfilx the phenomenal 1979 Alec Guinness BBC miniseries. Don’t bother with this, unless you want to be perversely entertained by how badly something like this can be executed.

I’m not sure what to make of Dirty Girl. It’s far from great, and I’m not sure I would watch it again (I might,) but enjoyed it way more than I expected to. It has a certain infectious, quirky style running through the entire film, a style that stops just short of being corny but at the same time is somehow totally earnest – I can’t think of an apt comparison right of the top of my head. The way the bag of flour (the kids’ baby from a class project) becomes a “person” over the course of the story is a perfect example – it takes some serious artistic discipline to do this kind of thing and have it remain charming for the entire film and not cross over into pure silliness. The film is so low-key and human that the various problems with the narrative start to recede, and you get swept up enjoying the fun, good-natured, slightly odd story.

Dirty Girl is about two teenage kids dealing with alienation who run away from their dysfunctional families and over the course of the film find a certain solace in each other. Because it is set in the 1980’s, the characters actually talk to each other (instead of staring into their fucking phones like zombies,) and the soundtrack in the film is fun, emotional and transporting (no autotuned robo-chicks singing about self love and positive thinking.) The dialog is pretty good, better than decent, and the two main characters traverse interesting story arcs in the course of the film.

It helps that the film has strong, charismatic leads: Juno Temple has a really interesting screen presence, nice emotional range, and the ability to fit herself into roles without calling undue attention to her craft – she has the makings of one hell of an actress. Newcomer Jeremy Dozier is also really good, and the two have a good chemistry. All the supporting actors are solid, especially Dwight Yoakam as the completely disgusting father of Dozer, and Tim McGraw (who has an incredibly warm presence) as Temple’s long lost father.

They overplayed the finale a bit (it was still cute,) but other than that I found it a surprisingly captivating little film. I highly recommend Dirty Girl!

My wife and I caught Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry at IFC the other night, and we enjoyed it. I would not call it a great documentary – it lacks a certain depth, cohesiveness and beauty that the very best documentaries have – but it was a decently-done and fairly interesting portrait of the Chinese dissident artist, and his struggle in his homeland against state oppression.

I came away from this movie with a new appreciation of the possibilities of Twitter, and new concerns as well. My experience with Twitter thus far leaves me with the impression that it is little more than a dedicated conduit for everyone’s verbal diarrhea; most of what is said on Twitter really does not need to be said, ever, and that includes all the “comedy” on Twitter. Weiwei uses it differently, as a subversive, real-time artistic tool, a way of uniting people in an emerging way of thought. In his art he is obsessed with communication, and it shows in his tweeting. It’s maybe the closest thing I’ve seen to the grandiose notion that Twitter will eventually evolve into some kind of a meta-intelligence.

I found myself thinking about his blog, the one that the Chinese government shut down, wishing that he was still blogging so I could read it – he posted 1-2 articles a day when the blog was active, and spoke of how blogging enabled normal people to shape public thought, previously dominated entirely by the media (commercial or state.) Now by necessity he is limited to Twitter, but I find I have no desire to follow his Twitter feed. Am I meeting the limits of my generation? Twitter reaches more people faster, but are real-time sound bites a legitimate evolution from traditional forms of communication and discourse. Can reasoned, sustained thought survive Twitter? And can the world actually be changed though it? I think Weiwei thinks so, and his recent dissident work (and this documentary) invite internal debate within all of us. It is this, rather than the particulars of latter-day communist oppression, that I found fascinating.

But Twitter looks impressive in this documentary in part because the situation Weiwei faces is pretty one-dimensional. If the Chinese government was smart, they would get on Twitter and drown him out, not with their stupid crap, but with perversions of his stuff. False statements, false events, false personas, false information, false allies, false critics. They would corrupt the channel of discourse, just as is done in the United States mass media, so that it becomes impossible, or simply too onerous, for average people to recognize the signal from the noise. But the Chinese government is not smart, and there is a really good reason for this. In an open society like ours, you have to work much harder to control the thoughts of the population; that is why the propaganda we Americans are subjected to is so sophisticated that most people in our society wouldn’t even know what you were talking about if you brought up the subject. As far as Americans are concerned, we are not as a people subjected to propaganda – “propaganda” is something communists (and maybe Nazis) do. But communist propaganda is really primitive and feeble, largely because communist leadership has the available option of maintaining control by simply making people they don’t like disappear, or shutting them up with straightforward brutality. They pretty much shut Weiwei down using these techniques, but this will only galvanize people even more behind his ideas, just as Weiwei in part rode the imprisonment of concurrent dissidents to his position of popular influence.

Think about the earthquake tragedy that Weiwei takes up as a cause célèbre. The communists are really slow-moving targets for Weiwei, because they simply deny the tragedy, enabling Weiwei to galvanize public thought pretty easily. In a similar situation in America, he would never get away with that, because it would not be denied. Instead, certain parts of the truth would be hung out to manipulate the initial perception of the event in the general population, thus creating a much murkier situation to combat. Weiwei’s obsession with outing the truth would quickly be made to look like the bizarre, OCD proclivities of an internet whack-job, and the deep sleep of most Americans would be completely undisturbed.

I actually think that a documentary like South of the Border is much more important for Americans to see than Never Sorry. Americans need to look forward not backward, and they need to worry more about their own roll in the world. In fact, I worry that documentaries like this simply keep American intellectuals (the target audience for this film)  mentally stuck in the 1950’s. In our society, “communism” is a straw man concept, wielded to keep people ignorant and distracted, and I feel the documentary’s   manipulativeness just reinforces this. Communism does not have a monopoly on unfairness, brutality, unaccountability or lack of humanity in this world –  in the U.S. we just do it with more style and more pizzazz.

I’m not belittling how fucking awful it is over there. (On leaving the theater, my wife says to me “One good thing about that documentary is I now feel perfectly fine about never going to China.”) Weiwei’s aspirations for China are laudable and important, of course. But watching a film largely aimed at how stupid and wicked communists still are just seemed a little quaint to me. I think this was in large part because Weiwei (and the documentary) really didn’t have very much to say beyond this – for example, what does he think China should become, post-communism? From my perspective, Weiwei’s struggle, as important as it is, is way behind the historical curve.

But don’t take my word for it. See Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry and make up your own mind. It is definitely worth seeing.

(One last note: Weiwei’s cats are fabulous! Even if you couldn’t give a crap about China or his politics, you could see the film just for the cats and come away happy.)

My wife and I saw The Sound of My Voice a while ago, at Sunshine Cinema, in a near-empty theater, a short while before the movie exited ignominiously. I guess the audience for this film – the few dozen Brit Marling fanatics, and people who have been duped by a cult fraud of some kind and somehow escaped back to the real world – was just not large enough to keep it going. It’s too bad, really. The Sound of My Voice is a really good film, and in my opinion a very important film.

I’m not a Brit Marling fanatic, exactly, so clearly I went to see the film for reason number two: personal experience with a charismatic fraud. I’m came out of the theater a bit of a Brit Marling fanatic, however! I feel she is one of the bright new lights in cinema right now. Marling’s Another Earth was remarkable, and while Sound of My Voice does not quite equal that film in terms of overall impact, it is still a interesting and well-done movie. It all flows from Marling, who wrote the movie, and delivers a wonderful performance. In the very grim landscape of current movies, Brit Marling is definitely a shining star of hope. Don’t miss anything she does!

Here’s what is so great about this film. It’s easy to make a film about an over-the-top cult; anyone can do that, hell, Wanderlust did that. What Marling did is make a film that captures how charismatic frauds really operate. I feel this is an important contribution to our society given the pervasive and pernicious influence in the United States of the cult of positive thinking and the incredible number of internet frauds who are supposedly are in the business of helping people “realize their dreams,” but who are actually in the business of systematically impairing and breaking down their client’s critical thinking apparatus, instilling in them what might be called a positivity trance, and linking it directly to sizable monthly payments from the client to them!

I have had brief but direct experience with a classic fraud of this kind; I’ll spare you the details, except to mention that it involved positive thinking / “law of attraction” based business coaching. I can tell you that Marling captures beautifully many of the techniques used to manipulate people and break down their rationality. They very explicitly target audiences that they know will be susceptible. They purposely have an extended process by which people have to clear certain hurdles to gain access to the group. They always begin with telling “their story,” in which they stir emotions in a way that beings to undermine their audience’s sense of reality. They build a seductive sense of community by playing everyone off each other skillfully and nefariously. They use aggression and humiliation alternated with empowerment rhetoric to crush critical thought. And the moment anyone figures out their game, they immediately shove them out the door, so as to not corrupt the trance state of the remaining people. The various scenes with Marling and the group demonstrating each of these techniques are done simply and honestly, and are in my experience extremely realistic.

I also have tremendous respect for the ending of this film. On the surface, it seems like the ending is intentionally ambiguous, but then we realize that in the process of watching the fraud operate over the course of the film our ability to think critically about the situation portrayed has actually been developed a bit, and it retrospectively becomes clear that the shocking incident between Marling and the young girl does in fact have a completely rational and obvious explanation: namely, that the group had been researching and studying the young girl for a long time, just as they had extensively researched and studied the couple themselves (as portrayed in the film’s opening footage.) Most films nowadays are pretty damn intellectually feeble, so to experience this kind of realization as an aftertaste as you leave the theater is indicative of some really fine writing, in my opinion.

I very highly recommend The Sound of My Voice!

And I should mention that Brit Marling  has a film coming out called The East about a person who infiltrates an Anarchist group, and which features not only Marling, but the amazing Patricia Clarkson and the long lost megastar-that-never-was Julia Ormond! In Marling’s hands, I expect this to be nothing less than fabulous. Be on the lookout for it!