Irreviews

Austenland is so horrible it does not deserve a full ripping here on Irreviews. It’s so horrible, I didn’t even want to turn it off, feeling inexorably compelled to learn if it could actually get even worse (and it did, I might add!) It’s so horrible, I was speechless afterward, as well as depressed and saddened that things are so bad, role-wise, for Hollywood actresses, that someone like Keri Russell would even consider appearing in an abomination like this, let alone go through with it.

Setting aside the painful attempts at humor that dominate this entire film, Austenland might have almost been tolerable if they had not insisted on talking down to their audience all the way through. They made Keri Russell’s fixation on Mr. Darcy so over-the-top that she comes across as mentally retarded, and combined with the even more retarded Jennifer Coolidge (an actress who really needs to go away at this point), the place “Austenland” comes across like a camp designed to exploit people with developmental deficiencies. I think this is why you get such a queasy feeling while you’re watching this movie – you’re almost afraid to move, lest you attract someone’s notice as you indulge in the systematic humiliation of the most vulnerable and defenseless members of our society.

My criticism of this film is in no way meant to disrespect director Petra Costa’s pain regarding her sister’s suicide, which clearly comes across in this artistic processing of the event and its aftermath. I just found her artistic approach exasperating, ineffective, and frankly a bit indulgent. She’s in love with blurry images – people, streets, handwriting, everything is shot blurry, with weird, harsh lighting effects and a giggly camera, the whole length of the movie. This technique can be very powerful when applied sparingly, but a whole movie worth is simply grating and exhausting. I had to close my eyes toward the end of the film, because I was getting a headache from watching it.

The film’s narration suffers from a similar problem. It’s done as a kind of long, semi-poetic letter to her deceased sister, kind of like the tapes the sister used to send home to Brazil from New York. The problem is that it isn’t very informative or interesting, and her voice is not very sonorous, so unless you go into the film steeled to weep crocodile tears for Pertra Costa’s loss, the net effect is you’re slowly bludgeoned with this tiresome monologue that is weirdly-structured, does not evolve, is not terribly moving, and is on the whole rather dull; you want to grieve (to a certain extent) for the sister, but the film’s technique makes it surprisingly difficult.

Lastly, I felt the film’s score was a blatant rip-off of the score of Sideways. It’s never a good thing when the viewer’s attention is continually pulled externally in this manner.

Elena is obviously the kind of film that really appeals to a certain type of movie-goer. If you like the idea of unstructured narration, blurry, artsy camerawork, and a free-form approach to scripting and scene composition, by all means go for it. For everyone else, this 80 minute film felt like a 2 hour and 15 minute movie to me, 2 hours and 15 minutes of visual and auditory torture. I highly recommend that you avoid it.

Walking by IFC Saturday night, my wife spied Lucky Them, which was screening that evening with a Q&A afterward, featuring the director Megan Griffiths, the writer Emily Wachtel, one of the supporting actors, and Dick Cavett of all people (he was the moderator). So we instantly changed plans and darted in to the film, which was starting in 5 minutes. We’re very glad we did. It’s one of the few bright spots in a so far embarrassingly bad year of cinema.

Any film that lets the magnificent Toni Collette take a strong, sexy leading role and freely exhibit all of her copious talent is a very welcome film indeed! In Lucky Them, she plays a middle-aged music critic, mentally stuck in a haunted past, who is forced by her editor to find and interview a brilliant songwriter who completely disappeared decades ago, and who she had dated shortly before his disappearance. The screenplay is not super deep or super interesting, but it’s well-crafted, the characters are sketched beautifully, and there is a pleasing quirkiness and charm to the dialog and the unfolding story – it’s funny, human, and consistently engaging, with a very satisfying ending. The film’s direction is superb; it has an amazing sense of place, is paced well, and the supporting and incidental casting and acting is damn near perfectly realized. (My wife and I agreed it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a film that caught all the incidental characters so memorably, without ever calling undo attention to any of them – brava Megan Griffiths!) And Toni Collette’s performance is the kind of performance that should win major awards, but never does – effortless, nuanced, like she’s not even acting, a joy to watch. She’s certainly a front-runner for an award here at Irreviews, for what it’s worth.

If there is any problem with this film, it’s Thomas Haden Church. He’s an actor I’ve strongly disliked in everything since Sideways, and he was tolerable there mainly because his schtick was perfectly complimented (and rendered charming) by Paul Giamatti’s brilliant performance. My reaction to him in Lucky Them was somewhat mixed. I found his robotic presence and delivery a little too distracting for my taste, especially in the midst of natural, unaffected performances surrounding him on all sides. But perhaps because the role was specifically written for him, and perhaps because Griffiths drew a bit more humanity out of him than he usually gives, Church is fairly enjoyable, and even at times a bit endearing, as the weird and awkward rich guy Charlie who tags along on Toni Collette’s journalistic search. Maybe I should sum it up this way: the film is strong enough to survive his relentlessly monochromatic persona; I’m just not sure he adds very much to the film.

In the Q&A afterward, someone asked if it was difficult getting a film made with a forty year old female lead who actually looks forty years old; the answer was: “it’s almost impossible”, not that anyone should find that surprising. They mentioned that independent film is the only place you can commit such a sacrilege, but also alluded to the 12 year struggle to get this film made, and that’s with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward behind it! But what I find fascinating is there are more and more of these lovely little fringe movies attracting stars who are clearly just desperate to utter lines of dialog that aren’t humiliating. Lucky Them is a perfect example, as is The Motel Life, Hateship,Loveship, All the Light in the Sky, Afternoon Delight, and Free Ride, to name just a few recent ones. Things are so bad in Hollywood (and also in mainstream independent films) that a whole cottage-industry is coalescing, partly fueled by the needs of stars that want to do something more than play a cop, a criminal, a victim, or a machine.

I highly recommend Lucky Them. I don’t know what kind of distribution it’s getting (it’s at IFC, so probably none), but if you get a chance, go see it. You won’t be sorry.

I really wanted to like Belle. It’s a important historical topic, based on a true story, and features the always fabulous Tom Wilkinson. But its pacing problems (and the associated script problems) are so extreme and distracting that the movie was more than a bit tedious to sit through. Every concept, every scene, every line is dragged out in an almost agonizing manner, and the dialog – while perhaps not totally empty – is generic and dull enough to exacerbate the problem considerably: not only are they taking forever to say things, it’s not even that interesting when they finally force the words out of their mouths. I swear, with better direction they could have easily tightened this 104 minute movie down to 80 minutes, and probably improved it quite a bit.

As for the acting, Tom Wilkinson is really swimming up stream in this one; he brings as much gravity, warmth, and nuance as he can to the part, but his character is conceived and written very flatly, almost with the emotional weight of a minor character, and there’s only so much he can do to mitigate this fact. Gugu Mbatha-Raw (who was Tom Hanks little friend in Larry Crowne) is earnest and hard-working in the lead role, and Sarah Gadon (the uncrowned princess of costume dramas) is convincing as the beautiful but dimwitted cousin. But I’m getting a little sick of Penelope Wilton and Miranda Richardson, always playing the exact same character in every movie. And Emily Watson continues to strike me as an actress whose heart left her craft so long ago that almost any other actress in her role would be a vast improvement. The young men are all fine, but mainly as hunks of meat, since the script and structure of this film are so messed up there is a very low ceiling on all the performances.

I can’t really recommend this movie. It means well, but they desperately needed to tighten up the script and direction with an eye toward pacing and dramatic impact. Writing some interesting dialog would have helped too!

Finding Vivian Maier is an interesting documentary about a nanny who was secretly a prolific and talented photographer, whose work was discovered posthumously by an earnest and sensitive young man (John Maloof) who sets about bringing her work to the attention of the world. I mainly liked it because of her photography itself; they show a lot of her pictures (I wish they had shown even more) and they are beautiful pieces of art, almost to the last, endlessly mesmerizing to look at. The film is worth seeing just to experience the art of this strange and remarkable individual.

A lot of people who knew Vivian talk about her in the movie. But none of them knew her well, and what they have to say about her basically amounts to “she was a weirdo”. This is fine as far as it goes, but there was clearly more to say about the personality of this artist, and on the topic of deviation from the norm (which she personified in the extreme) and its importance to society. A brief comparison to a somewhat similar (but vastly superior) documentary like My Architect quickly reveals the shortcomings of Finding Vivian Maier. Your appreciation of Vivian is in the end rather superficial, limited to the simplistic notion that she had some kind of “mental disorder” that kept her from becoming famous. They do feature one artist-dude who is interviewed at length, but his remarks are mainly aimed at convincing the audience that she was a good photographer, something that is perfectly obvious from the very first photos shown in the documentary.

I left the theater aware that Vivian was a fascinating artist and character, but I also left aware that the documentary didn’t give me a whole hell of a lot in the way of substantive ideas on either her art or her character. Perhaps it was doomed to this by her secretiveness throughout her life, but I think the film was also consciously superficial. Dramatic tension is not established or held particularly well (in fact, the entire opening of the film seems a bit amateurish), and one sticks with the somewhat interesting but definitely repetitive interviews mainly in the hopes of seeing more of her pictures.

I would recommend Finding Vivian Maier, certainly. I just wish their exploration of her had been a bit more sophisticated and soulful.

The German Doctor is story inspired by the fact that Nazi fugitive Josef Mengele hid out Argentina for a while; here, he hides out with a family who runs an inn, without them knowing who he is, and slowly becomes involved in their lives. I usually find this kind of movie to be underwhelming, but The German Doctor is better than average in this regard, and is an enjoyable movie – fairly interesting, well-paced, and possessing an unusual and effective score. Àlex Brendemühl gives a superb performance as Mengele, and all the supporting and incidental casting is done very well. But the film still suffers from a lack of dialog, in part on purpose because they’re trying to capture the way Mengele was seen by the family, in part because the family doesn’t have very much to say to each other. As a direct consequence of this, many things in the film feel unexplained – the family and their history, the father’s doll making, and the German school that the wife and daughter attended, for example – and even though the story is fairly gripping in the moment, in the end it strikes one as more than a little contrived, something of a hollow shell designed entirely to showcase Mengele’s various psychotic tendencies.

As we approach the half-way point of this year, it has definitely been one of the worst movie years in recent memory. From this perspective, people should be running to see The German Doctor, as it’s quite a bit better than the crap that’s been trotted out so far. But it really doesn’t stay with you very well, intellectually or emotionally, simply because there’s not a lot of substance to it. I very much doubt I would ever feel the desire to watch this film again. But I would recommend it, if you like this kind of story – you could do a lot worse, right now.

I’m a big fan of Jon Favreau. He’s a good writer, a good actor, and has a good presence on-screen. In a comic era where most film comedians range from “mostly unfunny” to “completely unfunny”, Favreau actually is quite funny in a natural, undistracting kind of way. But most importantly, the stuff he tends to get involved in always has heart and dignity, and this is doubly true of his own writing (the cult classic Swingers, which launched and defined Vince Vaughn’s entire career, and Couple’s Retreat, a very underrated, critically lambasted film that really deserves an appreciation piece here on Irreviews). In Chef, Favreau plays a talented but stifled chef who destroys his career by getting into a internet flame war with a food critic, and who then returns to his cooking roots, in the process reconnecting with his estranged family and giving his professional life rebirth.

Chef is a basically sweet, enjoyable film that I found a tad long, labored, and unfocused. But I’m willing to admit that my partly negative assessment may have largely been a product of my mood that evening, which was strangely resistant to (and irritated by) the endless musical montage scenes of Jon Favreau cooking fabulous-looking food, montages which dominate the film from beginning to end. My wife loved all the food scenes, and talking about them afterward while walking down Broadway I found myself thinking that if I saw the film again, in a less cantankerous frame of mind, I would probably like them just as much as she did, and the whole film might have struck me quite differently. The story was light but wholesome, and while not super-funny, it did have its moments. The acting is good across the board, and it was especially nice to see Sofia Vergara playing a fairly normal, sane character for a change.

The central roll of Twitter in this movie highlights a general issue that deserves comment. I would like to throw out a challenge to Hollywood. I understand that nowadays all of humanity is attached to these devices which let us instantly communicate every thought our brains produce to the entire world via Twitter or other non-verbal channels, and therefore film might need some way to represent this rather uncinematic phenomenon. But there must be a better way to represent it than to have floating CGI Twitter windows floating over everyone’s heads in the films, and then having them turn into little blue birds that go flapping off with a happy little “tweet, tweet, tweet”. First of all, it’s just fucking creepy. It’s also disgustingly lazy to react to this phenomenon by corrupting the entire art form, turning films into an abstract visual language of group-think baby talk – “happy”, “mad”, “sad”, “eating”! Why do we even have to show people tweeting in films? We don’t show them taking a shit, do we? Or if we do show people tweeting, why does it have to be done as a cloying commercial for Twitter Inc., or as a careless depiction of human beings as an unthinking hive of consuming machines?

Twitter (and Vine) are featured so prominently in the film, one has to wonder if the entire movie was bankrolled by Twitter. Aside from this (which is unlikely to bother most people), Chef is reasonably entertaining film and it’s heart is in the right place. I would recommend it, with the caveat that the film will probably go down best if you really like at least two of the following three things: Jon Favreau, food preparation, Twitter.

Jodorowsky’s Dune  is a documentary about an elaborate but aborted movie project of the mid 70’s, in which psychedelic director Alejandro Jodorowsky embarked on a visionary rendition of Frank Herbert’s famous science fiction novel. Jodorowsky is still alive, and well-edited excerpts from several lengthy interviews with him form the central narration for the film, liberally supplemented with the recollections and opinions of many others who were involved with the project, as well as several film critics who attempt to provide a slightly broader perspective on the film and its importance. The documentary is immensely entertaining, probably the first really good film I’ve seen all year.

Jodorowsky is a fascinating character. He is clearly presented here as a creative genius of the highest order, but how much and what kind of a genius is he? It seems to me that the main creative achievement of this particular project was collecting together and inspiring various talented artists – H.R. Giger, Chris Foss, Dan O’Bannon – who were brought to Paris to live and work on this project, and encouraged to create an incredible, sprawling visual world (way beyond anything that’s actually in the novel) in the form of paintings and drawings of the various settings in the movie. He also had a guy named “Moebius” (Jean Giraud) drawing an elaborate storybook of every frame of the movie, together with the dialog. All this art was circulated through Hollywood in an attempt to secure funding, and it is these pieces of artwork and visual ideas that form the main legacy of the film, supposedly inspiring imitations in many subsequent science fiction films (the documentary’s evidence for this was quite interesting).

In other aspects, the Dune project seems decidedly less compelling. The film was going to be ten hours long, meaning he was really making a TV miniseries instead of a movie. Yes, he got Pink Floyd and some freaky French group that no one has ever heard of (Magma) to agree to score the film, but apparently not a single note was ever written, so this accomplishment is questionable. And Jodorowsky’s casting decisions, not withstanding the very entertaining and bizarre stories behind each one, seem quite remote from his stated goal of assembling a team of “spiritual warriors” for the film. Why was Salvador Dali the only person in the world who could play the emperor of the universe? Especially since that role was at most 5 minutes in the film, and Dali was going to cost half-a-million dollars, plus the forced additional casting of his non-actress “muse” Amanda Lear. Orsen Wells is basically bribed to take a role, so how spiritual could his involvement possibly be?! Mick Jagger apparently agreed, at least verbally at some party, but it’s totally unclear why Mick Jagger was needed. And the casting of his then-young son Brontis Jodorowsky as the character Paul comes across predominantly as an excuse to torture the poor little bastard – he subjected the kid to excruciating martial arts training, four hours a day, every day, for two straight years, at the hands of some nut-job, to get him ready for the role. It’s a period of life which Brontis clearly now remembers with considerable pain, resentment, and regret. Christ, couldn’t they just find a body double that already knew how to do all that shit?

Then there is the rendition of the novel itself. Little is said in the documentary about elements of the story actually occurring in the book. Instead, they focus on the ponderous Christian-psychedelic additions to the story – metaphorical virgin birth, crucifixion and resurrection – which although clearly important to Jodorowsky do seem to unnecessarily mar the original tale. And the re-envisioned ending, where the planet Dune becomes green and “goes out” to spread positive spirituality to the universe, is absolutely painful from today’s perspective, now that “spirituality” has become completely mainstream and commercialized as a palliative to keep average people docile and malleable to the depredations of the world financial elite. Honestly, in the end I found myself thinking that maybe it was a good thing that he never made this movie.

But all this notwithstanding, Jodorowsky’s Dune is one hell of fun ride. Jodorowsky is really amusing to listen to, and the entire story is captivating and strangely thought-provoking. You don’t have to be a lover of Dune to enjoy this film – you could hate the book and still have a blast watching the documentary. I very highly recommend it.

Hateship, Loveship is a sweet, strange little story about love and playing a tough hand in life. Kristen Wiig plays a sheltered maid who moves into Nick Nolte’s house to care for granddaughter Hailee Steinfeld, and though a bizarre chain of events and circumstances she winds up thrown together with the child’s drug-addicted, ex-con father (Guy Pearce). It’s based on an Alice Munro short story and despite this inherent limitation  (the movie totally feels like an expanded short story) they managed to craft a movie with more emotional content and character development than most modern indie films. The dialog is decent, and the characters (even the minor ones) traverse legitimate developmental arcs, especially Wiig and Pearce, who grow and develop in quirky but believable ways as they bring out the best in each other despite everything life has dealt them. None of this is super-moving, or super-interesting, but there is a humble earnestness to the story which is very pleasing and satisfying, and one comes away from this film feeling happy, refreshed and nourished, in a way quite similar to the effect of 1990s Indie Renaissance films.

The star of the cast is Guy Pearce, a marvelous actor who never really got his due. He brings great warmth and nuance to the complex character of the drug-addicted son-in-law, and his presence and performance make the whole film work. Kristen Wiig made somewhat less of an impression on me. I really like her as an comic actress, and although she did a fine job playing the role perfectly straight, her performance was a bit too understated, and she failed to communicate much about the character beyond her surface-level roboticness. The supporting cast is strong and winning, even though none of them have terribly much to do.

I’d recommend Hateship, Loveship. It’s a sweet little film.

I find this whole post-apocalyptic young adult movement – both the books and their movies – fascinating and troubling. On the positive side, these authors are actually writing interesting stories, with life-sized heroes and heroines, exciting plots, and complex and dark sociopolitical ideas. How can we complain, compared to the current mindless dreck coming out of Hollywood, or the empty, pretentious crap that dominates the indie scene? On the other hand, the sociopolitical ideas are really only developed toward supporting viscerally exciting action sequences, and since these stories are told from the perspective of children, they tend to adopt a somewhat caricatural view of adults and the adult world. So, on one hand these stories are fun and entertaining in a way that most action films aren’t, and on the other they are squandering artistic material, ideas, energy, and social outreach (millions watch these movies) for rather limited, largely financial, objectives.

Consider Divergent. It’s an entertaining story, a bit long perhaps, but entertaining. Divergent tackles the idea of human deviation from the norm in the context of a post-war society that has all people permanently slotted into one of five role-based factions – “brave” people (soldiers), “brains” (techies and scientist types), “peaceful” people (who are basically agricultural workers), “honest” people (it’s not clear what they do), and “selfless” people, who run the government. Like The Hunger Games, when children reach a certain age, society impresses itself on them, here giving them some crazy, drug-induced mental test that tells them what role they’re suited for, and they are torn from their birth families, which are replaced by the mechanized, abstract social families formed by the five factions. The main character (Shailene Woodley) finds out she’s among the tiny minority of humanity that doesn’t fit in any one group, an affliction known as “divergent”, and this causes trouble.

So here we have an elaborate and seemingly rich set-up, with all kinds of human themes available for potential exploration. But there is a slapdash quality to it all, and a glaring lack of depth in all areas. Its story ideas seem interesting, but they’re half-baked, and lead in rather prosaic, uninspiring directions. Character development is surprisingly shallow, given the amount of time devoted to it. Pacing is uneven – the “character scenes” are slow, simplistic, and marred by a certain juvenility, and then once the main storyline engages, the narrative races forward with alacrity, kind of like that Ashley Judd TV show Missing, mowing through ideas and plot points so fast the story starts to feel a bit like a blurred outline. The treatment of the film’s “science” is embarrassingly perfunctory. And most disappointing of all, the movie really has nothing to say about individuality, non-conformity, or human deviation from society’s norm. Sadly, “divergence” is in the end merely a technical plot contrivance – “divergent” individuals are only special because they are resistant to the crazy brain drugs that are inflicted on people throughout the movie.

As for the film’s human themes, they’re unsettling, and not in a good way. At least The Hunger Games had a theme that was clearly relevant to our current society: an isolated and neutered general population existing solely to support the elite sector’s lives of fabulous wealth and privilege. But how are we supposed to relate to the world of Divergent? There’s a foul, Christian / Tea-Party / Militiaman sentimentality here: the idea that politicians and government are evil, the idea that intellectuals are evil, the idea that the nuclear family is being destroyed by government social engineering, the idea that soldiers are the apex of human society, and the viewing of people as overly-simplistic moral types; either “smart” or “truthful”, but not both; “peaceful” or “fearless”, but not both. This worldview does not ring true to me in any way, and frankly smacks of the warped delusions of ignorant, hyper-reactionary elements within the American political spectrum. I could sort of see our world winding up like The Hunger Games, but I can’t see it ever winding up like Divergent, simply because it’s not based on an accurate and truthful understanding of human beings or human society.

So in the end, what can one say? Shailene Woodley makes an warm, appealing heroine, and Theo James (who will forever be the dude who died in Lady Mary’s bed) makes a good-looking hunk-a-junk for her to lust after. The story is diverting enough in the moment, but afterwards it strikes you as something dreamed up in an afternoon, with very limited goals in mind – to sell things to young girls who read, and to create another Katniss-type role in which to market some cute, appealing young starlet, in service of a blockbuster film franchise.