Friday, December 31, 2010

One Minute Review (Maybe More like FIve Minutes) - The Blind Side (2 out of 5)

The Blind Side is the damnedest shame: a movie you so desperately want to like but ruins any chance at good faith around almost every corner. It's a film about serious issues and a powerful story that gets buried in golly-gosh-gee-shucks bubblegum sentimentality. If it didn't have so much white guilt it may have passed as a Tyler Perry vehicle.

The film is, of course, well made and well acted (although certainly not to any degree of justified awards recognition) and yet it's either too lazy or far too simple-minded to get to the real heart of the story. This isn't so much the story of a black man who is given an amazing chance; it's the movie of the white family who gives it to him. It's sad that, at what was then the beginning of 2010, Hollywood still can't tell a deeply felt, intelligent black story without the assistance of a white character to push things along.

Let's put it in context: would this film have been so easily made and widely distributed if Michael Oher was taken in by a black family? Would anyone care about the story if he was a white man in the same circumstances? The film never quite establishes (maybe it never quite figures out) whether we should cheer on Michael's success of a football player or pat the Touhy family on the back for doing such a good job by letting this man into their life. There's a scene in which Leigh Anne (Sandra Bullock) shows Michael to his new bedroom and he says he's never had one before. His own bedroom, she asks? "A bed" is his response. Then the film sneaks in one extra shot as Leigh Anne goes into her room and sits down for a brief second to contemplate this and the scene becomes less about the inherent sadness of this statement and more about how wonderful this woman is for giving this man a place to stay.

But what would happen, realistically, if Michael, not an idiot, but none too good at school when he is taken in, had sparked romance with the Touhy's teenage daughter Collins? Would they have allowed a romance to blossom? Would they have given their daughter away willing for marriage to this large black man? One suspects that the simplified, Leave it to Beaver, rich white existence that the family leads isn't as simple as this film plays it out as (is it ever?). George Orwell, as the legend goes, may have ridden the train car with the lowly proletariat, but drink of their water bottle he would not.

But now I've gotten out of context and diverted away from the fact that, outside of any social reservations, The Blind Side just isn't any good as serious drama. Like it's hero it's too wide-eyed and cutesy, like a love sick puppy, to ever offer up the serious payoffs that such material sound naturally gravitate to. When Michael plays his first football game the team starts off by getting pounded by their rivals. When Michael finally comes to he drives his mouthy white opponent all the way to the end of the field and pushes him over the barricade. Where was he going asks the coach. "To the Bus," Michael replies. "That guy had to go." They both share a big smile. Aho ho, what a card. God bless white southern affluence.

And then there's the son, SJ, played by Jae Head, a kid too precious for his own good, who is blond, has a face full of freckles, crooked kid teeth and can call upon funny faces whenever the script requires it. After a serious car accident involving Michael and the kid, Leigh Anne rushes to the scene, finds Michael on the curb, head clutched in regret. She spots the stretcher, blood stains the kid's clothes until the camera shows SJ looking up and joking about whether the blood stains will come out of his clothes. Good thing too, director John Lee Hancock almost let a serious emotion creep into the film.

And then it ends with a voice-over from Sandra Bullock who tells of a newspaper report of a black kid who was killed on his 21st birthday due to gang violence. All the papers focused on how good an athlete he was and how much potential he would have had if he had just gotten out. "That could have been anyone," says Bullock. "Even my son Michael." Yes it could have. Unfortunately not every black kid in the South has a rich white family to take them in and pay for all their dreams to come true. And I'd bet my last dollar that we'll never get a movie about that other kid.

I'll Probably East Lunch in This Town Again: A Tale of my Falling out with the Move Business (Part 2)

Check out Part 1 here.

Back then I used to strategically place my phone on the shelf beside my bed at night for it to charge in the event that some anxious HR person would call to discuss my experience with me early in the morning. Of course I would never answer it when it rung. I''m a night person. I do my best work at night and am at my clearest and most open-minded then too. Therefore, having no work or school to go to I got into the habit of staying up until 4 or 5 am and sleeping until 1 or 2 in the afternoon. It just worked for me. It probably wasn't the best idea. I should have been up and prepped for my job hunt every morning at 9:00am sharp but that just never worked for me.

The reason I never answered the phone then is because 1) if it was important they would leave a message and 2) I had once jumped out of bed to answer my cell phone about 6 months prior. I give my number out to very few people and get very few calls so I always used to figure that, if my phone was ringing it must be something important. It was some lady to call about some volunteer job that I had applied for but never really wanted. I was still half asleep and must have sounded to her to be either stoned, hung over or retarded (maybe a combination of all three). I struggled to complete coherent sentences to answer her routine questions and it must have sucked for her because I can't imagine it took her too long into our conversation for her to decide that I wasn't getting this job.

Anyway, whenever the phone rang I would wake up, listen to see if a message was left and then go back to sleep. None of my friends or the barrage of wrong numbers I got ever since changing to a Toronto phone number left messages so I knew that if a message was left it was either a job opportunity or a death in the family. Either way it could wait a couple more hours.

The number one proponent against my sleeping in was my girlfriend who still went to school and juggled a part time job every other day on top of that. So when my phone rang that Thursday morning at 9:00am and a message was left, she poked and prodded me until I rolled over and checked it. It was X saying he had some good news for me. I called him back. He told me of how both he and the girl he had hired came to a mutual agreement that she just wasn't the one for the job and now it was all mine. He didn't really ask me if I still wanted it. For all he knew I could be harbouring deep resentment against his going for a girl just because he thought it would give his company a new dimension. Served him right. But really, when movie people need something, they don't ask for it and deep down he must have known he was offering me something I really wanted.

He went into a typically long-winded explanation about what had happened and repeated about how the business isn't for everyone and other variations of the same material I had heard repeatedly to death already. He told me to grab a shower and some breakfast and meet him at the Starbucks. This seemed strange as I told him at both of our prior meetings that I had a car but I figured he knew what he was doing so I agreed to meet him there at 11:00am. I grabbed a shower and went to McDonald's for breakfast (now that I was a working man I could afford such little indulgences) and headed for Starbucks.

I had asked X if I needed to bring anything. He said only my laptop. Curious, but I made nothing of it, realizing now that these are maybe oversights that need to be made from a naive and over zealous small town boy going off to his first big city job, in the movie business no less.

I arrived at Starbucks early and went on my laptop. I blogged and Facebooked about my new found employment and waited patiently for X to show up. He arrived and we loaded into his old beater, which took us hurriedly to his house where his office resided. No one said this was going to be pretty. The house was a modest affair in a nice neighbourhood. It was roomy enough for him, his wife and his son, with a nice back yard (a luxury if there ever was one in Toronto). There was no air conditioning in it. I hoped it was more a matter of them being a naturly family as opposed to a film sales guy who couldn't afford such a simple luxury. The house had recently had work done to it and been painted and it was strangely empty. X explained to me that he and his wife had recently decided that they had too much stuff just lying around and therefore were in the process of getting rid of it all. Why bother having books when there are plenty at the library. Ditto for DVD's when Blockbuster stored so many of them for you.

He gave me the tour and showed me to his office. The office was a medium sized room off to the side of the house and beside the bathroom who's door didn't entirely close; something that kept me paranoid the entire time I worked there. The office had two desks. Well one desk and one large sheet of wood that was help up by two wooden signs that looked like they were swiped from a construction site. I don't bring this up in mockery, it was a large and sturdy surface that was just as good if not better than any desk could have been. My desk, in the other corner of the room, was covered in skateboard stickers and was completely bare. I set up my laptop on it, fired it up and sat down on the most uncomfortable wooden chair I had ever sat on. I wondered if his one-room-in-the-back-of-his-house company had a policy on ergonomics (to be fair he later gave me his chair to use which was better and on wheels but still hard and unpleasant on those hot sweaty days where only a single electric fan atop a high shelf gave us any relief).

X was in a hurry. He explained that he had worked night and day by himself for over a year building the company up and now he needed some relief so that he could focus more on taking business to the next level. What he had learned from the girl, whose name I did know but now eludes me, was that he is not an easy man to work with and that he sometimes takes for granted that he has been in this business for a long time and has a wealth of knowledge that not everyone else has. In hindsight he may have been prepping me for every time he displayed a condescending attitude towards my not knowing something off the top of my head, but at that time it was all just talk. I lasted in the business for almost 3 months. I now wonder what had gone down in this 3 days to have made that poor girl jump ship.

The reason for the rush was because X was going on a three week vacation to Vancouver the following week and had wasted 3 days already driving down a dead-end road. I had a lot to learn and not a lot of time to learn it in. The first task was to set up my e mail address. We used Outlook in order to manipulate a Google account into looking like a company e mail. The rule of thumb is that if someone from a company sends you an e mail from a Hotmail or Yahoo of Gmail account, they probably don't mean serious business. There was no reason for anyone to know that we were just 2 guys working out of a house with no air-conditioning because we approached everything as a serious business so we may as well look like one.

This process took hours to do with me Googling for tip sheets on how to get everything properly configured while X went about his regular tasks. That was fine. There was business to be done and I certainly didn't need anyone to hold my hand. Getting everything set up took most of the day. In between he showed me some things that he was working on but really, day one was all prep. We ended the day at around 7:00 pm and he drove me back to the Starbucks thinking I would be getting on the subway. I reminded him once again that I had a car. He wondered why I didn't tell him. I figured he had known since I had told him two or three times before and figured that he had a plan. We parted for the day.

Friday morning I drove right to his house for a 9:00am start time. We had a lot to do and it all needed to be done before he left for his vacation. It was more training. I arrived to a list on my desk and a long-winded lecture on how every day he starts by making a list of what needs to get down and stroking them off one at a time in order to best prioritize the day and to measure one's progress so that we would know where we start each day when we make a new list. Made sense. The day lasted again until 7:00pm (I was getting worried about these late days, but figured it was simply because we were trying to cram so much into so little). During the day he showed me how to send via courier, how to prepare screener packages, how to send "e-blasts" (mass e mails to companies about upcoming festival screenings or to advertise the availability of titles in certain regions) and so on. In between both days, during lunch of his deck in the back yard he lectured me again and again about maintaining a positive attitude and thinking like a winner and every other self help advice he had ever picked up.I smile and nodded. I was the young know-nothing and he was the wise old professional who had all the knowledge in the world to give. If it was the part he wanted to play, so be it, who was I to get him off his high horse and all this stuff, in spite of it all, made sense and seemed to have worked well for him.

At the end of the day X was feeling as though we were making good progress and I guess we had gotten to where he had wanted us to be. He gave me a box of screeners, some cash and promotional materials for if I needed them when he was away. We had also went through his sales list, pinpointed what companies he had given screeners to and during what market and checked off which ones I should get in touch with to follow-up over the next three weeks while he was away. I was to work half days. It was a good learning experience.

I started by going through the list and sending e mails to everyone who had been given a screener at Cannes, Berlin, AFM or any other lesser market. It was clear that X hadn't really been doing his job (there had been screeners given out from almost a year ago that had never been followed-up on) and he openly admitted this while we were going through the list the first time around (no wonder he needed someone new). The e mail addresses were collected off of Cinando, a site that is given free on a yearly basis to anyone who attends the Cannes Film Festival and is a large and useful database of company and contact information. It was my best friend for the entire time I worked there. X would check in periodically via phone to see how I was getting along and to have my tend to any miscellaneous business that may arise. You'd never know what kind of mood he would be in. Sometimes he was pleased and sometimes not. Sometimes I had done good work and sometimes I had made made mistakes, which, of course, would be given far more focus on than the good work (one day he was moody because I had gone out for lunch and when he called I did not have a pen on me to write down what he had to say). What can one expect from someone who has spent two days in the business and has a boss who can only be reached periodically. No matter, mistakes are to be learned from and frustration was to pass. After the first week we devised a list of companies that would be good to phone up and do follow-through with.

The phone calls were daunting. Because all of them were foreign, you had to divide your schedule up into knowing who to call at what time of the day. I knew I wanted to start with a territory where they would be guaranteed to speak English so I started with Australia (I was dreading those calls to Japan and the other Asian countries). My first call was a learning experience. It was SBS in Australia, where I talked to a nice and professional man. My method was to just jump right in: this is my name, I'm calling from this company about this movie, have you seen it?, okay bye. From B, the man I spoke with, I learned to not jump right in, make introductory small talk and don't make them feel pressured by jumping right into business. Fair enough. B had not seen the movie but informed me that he hoped someone would have by their weekly meeting and so he would follow-up by the next week. Another movie business rule: no one phones you back unless you have something they really desperately want and it wasn't like we were dealing with the work of the next Spielberg or Scorsese here.

I marked this information down on the sales log, set a date a week from now to follow-up again and went about my business. I wasn't a very good salesman at this point, just accepting that most of the people I called hadn't seen the movie yet but would make sure to put it on the top of their pile and get back to me. Alright, thanks, have a nice day; but hey I was talking to people and getting some feedback (most of them passes). This wasn't so hard after all. I even managed to find someone who wanted to make an offer...

To be continued... 

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Lest we Forget

For no discernible reason, John McTiernan's 2003 military thriller Basic popped into my head the other day. What was strange was that I had to stop whatever I was doing at the moment and place all of my concentration on pondering whether or not I had seen it. I knew that it was one of those movies that came out while I was in grade 12, a year in which I saw upwards of 10 new movies. It was a strange year for me. I had my regular 5 classes during that semester one of which was the drama production class so Romeo and Juliet ate up all of my spare time (I was Mercutio if you care to know) plus I was also doing an English class through correspondence because my high school had guidance counsellors whose last priority was providing guidance and so I was otherwise one credit short of graduating. Needless to say, watching new movies was not high on my priority list.

And then summer hit and for three straight months while University was still a distant concern, I played catch up. I had a girlfriend at the time who would tape me movies off of TMN (Canada's answer to HBO) which she had and I did not and so I juggled watching those while renting everything else to fill in the gaps. I also made a promise to myself that summer that I would rent everything new that came out on DVD that week as opposed to just the ones I had wanted to see as was standard procedure up until then. The greatest fear of any movie fanatic is to be asked questions about new movies and not having seen a one of them. I never wanted to be in that situation again.

Getting back on track, I finally decided that one of those films that had been taped for me and that I had watched was Basic. The thing was: I didn't remember a single thing about the movie. I'm generally pretty good in terms of long term memory and can usually walk away with something to remember almost every movie by even though I watch between 400 and 500 each year for the first time. However, nothing could bring back any memory of Basic. I knew it had John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson and was directed by McTiernan and I remember seeing ads for it on TV and especially an image of a darkened Jackson looming in a doorway (am I making this up?) and that I hated it, but what the movie was about, what happened and how everything was revolved in the end eluded me entirely.

There's been other movies since that I have mostly forgotten, which led me to ponder, just like if a tree falls in the forest for no one to hear, if you don't remember anything about a movie, have you actually seen it? Consuming so many movies, surely not all of them will be remembered, some rightfully so while others maybe not, and if a movie doesn't leave a lasting impression is that not more it's fault than ours? Of course, as is the case with the scenario above, sometimes I watch movies just to catch up, to say I've seen them and to increase my filmic vocabulary as much as possible. Maybe it all stems from that one fateful year where I decieded that, whenever someone asks about about a movie, no matter how great or insipid, I want to be able to say I have seen it.

But here's the problem, and the question I pose to everyone for debate (I haven't done one if these in far too long): should I have even wasted my time with Basic? Sure, I've seen it, and in the unlikely event that anyone ever brings it up, I'll be able to say "Oh yeah, I saw that a long time ago," but have I really gained anything other than to know that the movie was bad? It seems all I have is a blackout in my memory. It gets me one step closer to having seen McTiernan's entire body of work (and if nothing else I am a film history buff and therefore a director completest by association) but now I've given two hours of my life to a film that could have been spent with a better one; one I will remember. But then again, if I didn't see it, how would I know I'd one day forget it completely?

So what do you think. Is film completeism healthy or should we only base our time on consuming movies that appeal to us (I certainly had no interest is seeing Basic other than that I felt I should just to have seen it)? What do you do in situations like this? Are you the same way as me or do you think all this is insanity and a waste of time? Let me know.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Year in Review: The Best Albums of 2010

I don't usually write about music because, despite the fact tat I love music and it was my first love before movies, I don't really know anything about it insomuch as that I don't know how to talk about it in the intelligent kind of informed manner that I try to talk about movies. I take more of a 'I like what I like attitude' towards music. Regardless, Alex at Boycotting Trends, a blog that, if you don't already, you should be reading, did a music list and since I'm still working out the last few slots on my movie list (if the Academy has until February, I can take at least another week), here's a list of my favourite albums of 2010:

6) The Pretty Reckless - Light Me Up: Say what you will about Taylor Momsen, sure she was in one Gus Van Sant flick, but being a Gossip Girl star doesn't do much for her teen rebel cred, but she and her backing band sure know how to kick out some catchy jams. At a brisk 35 minutes, Momsen and crew crank out 10 short, catchy, punchy tracks that are a little bit The Runaways and a lot of pop rock attitude, with not a single dud in the bunch. It's unfortunate that we live in society that thrives on tabloid exploits, where Momsen usually finds herself front an centre, because, just looking at the music, this kid has a pretty bright future.



5) Mike Patton - Mondo Cane: Named after the 70s Italian exploitation documentary, Mondo Cane is singer Mike Patton's foray into Italian opera music and one more notch on his belt to prove that he can sing just about anything and get away with it. This time he uses his silky pop voice to croon out melodies that sit atop lovely orchestral compositions.



4) Avenged Sevenfold - Nightmare: Apparently AX7's newest disc started as a political concept album before the untimely death of their drummer Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan, at which point that scrapped that idea and wrote their darkest album in years. Giving up the poppy experimentation of their self-titled masterpiece, AX7 this time provide a tighter, darker and more thoughtful album than anything in their back catalogue. Still catchy as hell, the album benefits from having ex-Dream Theatre drum wizard Mike Portnoy behind the kit. There's one too many ballads towards the end but this is still AX7 at their most open and personal as they explore concepts of life and how easily it can be taken away.



3) HIM - Screamworks: Despite that fact that HIM more or less stick to a tried and true formula from album to album they still always manage to provide something fresh on each new outing. Here, moving away from the darker or more progressive tone of Venus Doom, HIM find themselves as poppy and infectious as ever, mixing 80s synth pop with their trademark goth romance style to create something that is both infectious and head bobbing. With newly found sobriety, frontman and mastermind Ville Valo seems to now be focusing on smaller details to bring songs to their maximum potential. Tighter and more vibrant than they have ever been, this is a career highlight for one of pop-metal's most consistent bands.



2) Far - At Night We Live: Far have always been the underdogs at what they do. Maybe it's because they do it just about better than anyone else around them. Back in the 90s, after getting away from sounding like a Pearl Jam cover band, Far perfected the style of "post-hardcore" (whatever that means), released two genre defining albums and then broke up all before the likes of Thursday, Boy Sets Fire and Thrice showed up to bring the genre closer to the mainstream. Now back, some will complain that the sounds of At Night we Live are too streamlined compared to their dirtier, heavier early albums, but what they have delivered here is their most focused, catchy and emotional album to date. From the almost Nu-Metalish rumblings of opener "Deafening" to the beautiful title track (dedicated to Deftones bassist Chi Cheng who is still in a coma after a car accident several years ago) Far are still doing it better than anyone else and not getting the respect they deserve.



1) Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - The reason Richard Pryor was the best stand-up comedian who ever lived was because, despite being hilarious, he was never afraid to put every bit of himself up on stage. He looked at the hurts, turmoils and tragedies of his life and managed to laugh at them and thus himself. From his health problems to run-ins with the law, personal problems and even his drug addiction that almost resulted in his death, nothing was off limits for Pryor, all great art, after all, does come from great suffering. Therefore Pryor was able to pull off an act that few ever achieve: he made comedy that was both meaningful and yet hilarious. It fulfilled the most basic fundamentals we expect from comedy and yet still left us with something to go home with and think about.

Kanye West's newest album succeeds for all of the same reasons. Kanye is the kind of man who begs you at hate him from strange Twitter messages, award show interruptions, talk show outbursts, political statements on live television, naked pictures sent to fans and general cockiness. And yet, unlike other mainstream rappers, West feels like he is the one who most desperately needs to work to stay relevant. Fame may have been handed to him but, unlike his contemporaries, he needs to constantly struggle to stay relevant and his boasting about himself and general air of self-importance thus seems sometimes less like arrogance and more like insecurity: he needs to tell himself he's good just as much as he needs to tell the world.

From all of this is born one of the best, most original, creative, indulgent and brilliant rap albums to ever come from a mainstream recording artist. Every track is fried off like a statement as Kayne takes all of his pains, trails and tribulations and throws them atop 70 minutes worth of starkly creative beats and rhymes. This is the album of a man who has nothing to prove but everything to lose. And like Pryor, he also manages to make something that is catchy, mainstream and enjoyable as a rap album. But this is more than that: it's a battle cry, a cocky strut, an apology and a revelation that all borders on transcendence as West proves to be in equal measures his own best friend ("Power") and his own worst enemy ("Runaway"). That an album this daring and original comes from a mainstream artist in a culture in which every other song on the radio sounds like it was created from top to bottom by a robot and where talent is a luxury not a necessity, is just proof of how important personality is in music. The bar has been set. Who dares try and cross it?

Thursday, December 23, 2010

One Minute Review- Kick-Ass (1 out of 5)

Kick-Ass is a dumb and ugly movie. It starts as a promising satire about teenagers and superheroes and why there are none in real life. A brilliant film seems to be blooming until the it gets bored with being insightful and moves into violent and reprehensible territory. This is a film that plays like the younger, less enlightened cousin of the great Watchmen adaptation. And I don’t mean that as a compliment.

Call me unhip, square, not with it, whatever, but the problem with Kick-Ass is not that it features teenaged superheroes (one an 11 year old girl) but that people actually die; in graphic detail no less. These kids are not superheroes, they are murderers out for vigilante justice. There’s something morally wrong about all this.

Maybe this is a perfectly accurate interpretation of what the comics the film is based on are like. I don’t know. But that director Matthew Vaugh thinks that this material is hip and funny is a complete miscalculation. Here Vaugh is hiding behind satire: as if, as long as the movie is laughing at itself, it can justify anything. That Vaugh does the best to make this all bright and hyper-stylized (too hyper-stylized at times) is credit to his talent and I hope one day a great action movie falls in his lap.

In reality then, Kick-Ass becomes just the thing the material should ultimately want to deviate from: a superhero movie. Except these superheroes kill and steal and are really no better than the criminals they put down. If the movie had actually been about Kick-Ass and his life as an amateur teenage superhero wannabe, well that could have been brilliant, sparkling satire. My vote is for Judd Apatow to helm the reboot a couple years down the line. As it stands it’s just a dumb, action film, filled with characters not developed enough to care much about, with the sad misfortune that most of them are also under the age of 16.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Black Swan (5 out of 5) + The Celebrity Connection: Natalie Portman

The story of Swan Lake: A princess is turned into a swan. True love is the only thing that can break the curse but her love is tricked and falls instead for her evil twin the Black Swan. The princess, who cannot live with the curse and cannot live without love frees herself through death. In a sense, this is the story that director Daron Aronofsky has been working his entire career towards telling. The film may revolve around the trails of a ballerina but Black Swan is no more about ballet than Requiem for a Dream was about drug abuse: it’s about a woman chasing an impossible dream outside of human grasp. That’s what all of Aronofsky’s films have been about.

One of Aronofsky’s great attributes is that he isn’t afraid to follow his characters unapologetically into their own oblivion and thus Black Swan isn’t so much a film as a memorizing thought piece constructed of ideas, fears, hopes and despair that doesn’t so much tell a story as ram headfirst right through a character’s psychological state as it dissipates under mounting pressure. Rarely has self-destruction been so haunting.

Natalie Portman stars as Nina, the naive, precious ballerina who lives with her overbearing mother (Barbara Hersey) who gave up a her own career and now lives vicariously through her daughter. Nina, having dedicated herself entirely to the perfection of her art wants nothing more than to be cast in Thomas Leroy’s (Vincent Cassel) newest rendition of Swan Lake. Leroy, a fierce, sexual, genius, knows that Nina can play the White Swan, but believes her to be too rigid in her perfection to play the Black Swan, who’s technique needs to be lose and seductive. 

The toying Leroy, maybe out of French masochism and maybe because he sees a buried sexual frustration, casts Nina in the part regardless. She is thrilled but practice is torture as she can’t quite nail the part: she is too frigid, too pristine and too desexualized for the Black Swan. Also along to torment her is the new girl Lily (Mila Kunis) who isn’t half the dancer that Nina is but is promiscuous and dangerous and has the dark allure of the Black Swan, a temptress driving Nina slowly towards the brink. There is also Beth (Winona Ryder), Leroy’s former star who has now been forced into retirement and is hospitalized after a (intentional?) car accident as well as Nina’s mother who shelters the girl like a child, keeps her away from all other outside pressure (sex, drugs, life) and gruelingly pushes her towards the perfection she never achieved.

Slowly all of the outside pressures begin to eat away at Nina, destroying her sanity as Leroy abusing her, molesting her, degrading her in order to bring out her inner Black Swam, pushes her, along with Lily, towards discovering her dark side. She is consumed by fear and hatred and sex and even murder as she begins having hallucinations of her being transformed into the Black Swan.

On the surface Black Swan appears to about the way an artist’s ego will slowly lead them into oblivion as they strive to find perfection and meaning in their art. That was, in a very different way, more or less what Aronofsky’s The Wrestler was about as well. However, by conveying Black Swan’s plot and by trapping it into a defined thematic explanation is to subvert away from the hectic, driving, narrative free fall that the film is. Like Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan is more experience than story (this is filmmaking as state-of-mind at its most forceful and, at times, unbearably painful), and is thus more a meditation of how we are slowly driven insane by reaching desperately to achieve the things that are least important in life: fame, money, recognition, perfection ect.

Thus, Aronofsky has always chosen the perfect mediums from which to explore these concepts: math, drugs, cancer, professional wrestling and now ballet: all areas that place value on superficial endeavours and distract from life's essentials: love, friendship, happy, happiness. These are the arts of self-destruction. He makes films about people who are exposed to a plane of their existence that is foreign to them, sending them spiralling into an obsessive state until they have cut themselves off from anything that could provide them solace.

What Nina finds is that to split a personality down and limit it to the influence of either black (Leroy and Lily) or white (her mother) is to create a weak emotional state in which, when one is introduced over top of the other, it will, like cancer, ultimately consume and destroy it’s counterpart. In Black Swan, Nina is ultimately on a quest to find perfection at any cost just to discover that perfection can only be achieved through a sacrifice more grand than anyone should normally be willing to make: a complete and utter sacrifice of the self.

And so Black Swan cannot simply be spoken about in terms of aesthetics, technique, acting, writing; the general pieces that comprise a film, which I have not done here, because it is more than film: it is emotion, expression, ideology and, above all else it is violent, unapologetic rapture. This is one of the year’s best films.

An now a related Celerity Connection:

Could Natalie Portman really be Dakota Fanning in Disguise?
You Decide.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Love and Other Drugs (2.5 out of 5)

One of Chef Gordon Ramsay’s most fundamental rules is that simplicity is key to creating a great dish. That’s kind of what goes wrong with Love and Other Drugs: it tries too hard to be too many things. It’s a good movie lost amidst a sea of variables that all go several different directions of nowhere. The biggest problem is that Maggie (Anne Hathaway) the lead female character has a disease and there is only one reason for any character to ever have a disease in the movies (emotional manipulation). If you can think of another you’re already way ahead of Love and Other Drugs.


Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a hotshot youngster. He’s the son of affluent parents, has a rich entrepreneur brother, and is an expert salesman selling cheap knockoff electronics where he divides his time between getting commission and getting the manager’s girl in the back room. Out of work he decides to pursue a career in the only entry level job in America that pays over 100K in the first year: the sale of pharmaceutical drugs.

It seems like a perfect fit for Jamie so he’s shipped off to Ohio to prove himself. The key is to go in to the doctor’s office, woo the receptionists and nurses, get your drug samples on the back shelf and charm the doctor into prescribing your Zoloft instead of the competition’s Prozac. If you’re good you attain the dream of getting shipped off to sell in Chicago.

Then, pretending to be an intern at one of the offices, he meets Maggie who has all kinds of problems, which right now includes a weird mark on her chest. She’s the kind of girl who’s young, too smart, too beautiful, talks like a second rate Woody Allen movie and has the first stage of Parkinson’s. Too bad for her. Too bad for the movie too. She’s mad after she exposes herself in the examination room only to find out he’s a drug rep not an intern. He asks her out. She rejects. He charms the nurse into her number and she accepts. A word of advice to all movie characters: if you meet a girl on a first date in a coffee shop that plays Bob Dylan in the background, she’s probably got baggage. This leads to a scene in which she psychoanalyzes him to his face as if she knows every trick is his con book. But so do we already, trapping Hathaway in a scene that talks like it's smart but walks like it's just treading water.

She doesn’t want a relationship because she’s, of all coincidences, already had her heart broken by another drug rep who just so happens to be Jamie’s biggest competition. Sure. He’s also emotionally reclusive because to him girls are sex not love. So they have sex, which works for both of them, many times, until Jamie decides he loves her and she decides, against her better judgement to reciprocate. This changes the movie from a light comedy to romance until she visits a Parkinson’s rally and realizes there are others just like her, around the same time that he realizes the worst is yet to come and if he ever wants to make Chicago (a strong likelihood after he gets the chance to start selling Viagra) he’ll need to ditch her or cure her, and the movie switches hats again into melodrama.

I’m pretty sure, if you know anything about the politics of screenwriting, despite all the shifts in tone, you can tell exactly what twist the story will take before arriving at its inevitable conclusion. What you may not anticipate is a pre-third act breather in which Jamie and his recently kicked out of the house brother, transported in from another movie altogether, are invited to a pyjama party by Dr. Stan Knight (Hank Azaria) and his oversized libido. The one demand: they bring the Viagra samples. Of all the sidetracks Love and Other Drugs takes this one is the worst. For a movie that feels long at two hours, a midway pajama party that ends in the hospital after a Viagra side effect takes hold, kills the tone, changes the mood to slapstick before materializing back into sap and achieves really nothing of any narrative significance. Did Zwick, a considerable talent, hold the scene so close to his heart that he simply threw it up in the air to see where it would land? There always seems to be at least one bad scene in even the best Zwick movies. He outdid himself this time.

That’s basically the entire movie, which runs back and forth and up and down the emotional spectrum until it arrives at it's end having achieved nothing much except filling 2 hours. A movie about a drug salesman could be good. So could one about a girl in the beginning stages of an incurable disease and sure enough both Gyllanhaal and Hathaway make a likable pair. They are cute and funny and believable together and left to swim in their own in an open sea of muted comedy and tired melodrama. There's nothing to prescribe that could have cured a movie like this, but like most prescription drugs that needs sales reps, another round of rewrites and one more trip through the editing room may have eased the pain a little. 

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

I'll Probably Eat Lunch in This Town Again: A Tale of my Falling out with the Movie Business (Part 1)

My writing is always influenced by what I am reading at the time. When it's fiction I'm more introspective, more willing to play with words in order to convey emotions. When it's non-fiction I'm more technical, direct and to the point, especially if it's a film related book. It seems then no surprise that while reading Julia Phillips' tell-all Hollywood memoir You'll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again that I would decide to write about the short summer that I spent within the movie business. In her book Phillips named names, which I won't do here. It probably wouldn't make any difference but you can never be too careful in this day and age.

As some of you know, sometime in July I wrote a post that declared I had finally snagged a job and it was at a film sales company in Toronto. I had had the job referred to me by K, a Toronto movie veteran and the man who I've been reading scripts for for over 2 years. It seemed like a dream opportunity. I got the call to interview some weeks after sending my resume. The man in charge (X hereon in) wanted to meet me the next day at a Starbucks on his side of town (Etobicko for the Toronto readers). The location seemed strange but I didn't think of it. After having spent almost 4 months of interspersed first interviews and rejection letters I was just happy that anyone wanted to talk to me. And it was a movie job!

I arrived at the Starbucks about 40 minutes early, 20 of which I spent collecting myself in my car in the parking lot, trying not to die with the air conditioning off. I'm like that. I'm paranoid about arriving to anything late and having to travel on the Don Valley Parkway doesn't serve that paranoia well. I know I can get downtown from my house in the afternoon in 20 minutes, I've done it many times. However this has never stopped me from departing 1/5 to 2 hours before the designated interview time. X obviously wasn't there yet so after leaving my car I took a seat inside by the door, making awkward eye contact with everyone who came through as if to silently ask if they were the one here to see me. At exactly 1:02 pm, 2 minutes after out scheduled meeting time, X pulled up in a beat up old standard BMW, well passed it's prime, bathed in a camouflage of rust. To me this guy was an insider. He could have come in rags and been pushing a shopping cart for all I cared. I was the dumbstruck kid staring into the window of the toy store, waiting for the invitation to come in and play. This guy had the golden ticket.

X started the interview by introducing himself and immediately put me on the spot. Why should you get the job was one of his first questions. Coming fresh off a year of studying HR I can tell you now that this is not good interviewing technique and will, 9 times out of 10, yield skewed results. I'm not making excuses for myself, just saying. So I answered the question, not well as I was nervous and thrown but an answer regardless. I tried to keep my composure.

The interview lasted almost an hour and a half and was comprised of very little actual interviewing. I answered questions about myself and my history and progression to the current moment but X mostly explained the company, which was 2 years old and came after he had decided to give up producing. I'd give you a list of credits but I don't know which highlights would impress more: working with Lorenzo Lamas or Kelly Brook's bare boobs.

X also droned on about his own personal philosophy, his history in the film business, his move to Toronto from Montreal, his own personal life lessons, etc. He would later constantly tell me that he was an obsessive reader who always tried to have at least one self-help book going at a time and. Coincidentally, he spoke exactly like a man who always had at least one self-help book going at a time.

We parted company. I was ecstatic to be one step closer to the movie business. The pay was garbage ($400 a week, no commission), unpredictable hours (9 till whenever the work is done), and absolutely no job security. Ever really. That's entertainment. I ate it up.

He told me that he would create a short list of candidates by Friday (this was Tuesday or Wednesday) and would call them back for a second round. I got a call Friday to set up another Starbucks meeting the next day. Once again I put on my shirt and tie and headed, way too early, for Starbucks where there wasn't really any interview, just him talking, explaining the business, going through the whole song and dance again and relying anecdotes from projects passed in which he saved the movie at the last minute. This is one characteristic of everyone who has ever worked on a film set, especially producers. No matter who they were or what they did, they were always the one who came up with the idea that saved the movie at the last minute and if A tells you that once upon a time he worked with B, B will probably turn around and tell that that once upon a time A worked for him. Just smile and nod.

It seemed like a waste of time but one of the first things movie people will tell you is not to waste anyone's time and then will turn around and waste the time of just about anyone within earshot. He was on a schedule this time though, having a speaking engagement at the Mississauga International Film Festival. It didn't prevent the meeting from going on for a whole hour but I didn't care; I wanted it even more now and I was all the closer to getting it.

I was told that X would have a decision made by either Sunday or Monday. I waited all Sunday with baited breath, telling myself I would get it, but no call. I waited all Monday with baited breath, telling myself I would get it, and at 5:00 pm the phone rang. I didn't get it. I was crushed. My dream job had  just slipped away and I had another rejection notch on my belt. It had come down to me and another girl and he went with the girl because he had this notion that most film companies have a female presence. Maybe it's a fair assessment. Essentially he saw too much of himself in me and needed someone to be more personable and social on the phone with potential buyers. He assured me that he saw the potential in me and that I would have a career in film if I wanted one and would help me anyway he could and even suggested that maybe I should consider getting into acquisitions. The conversation lasted a minimum of half an hour. He bid me adieu and told me that he would call me if anything happened. I prayed it wouldn't work out with the evil harpy woman.

He had been extra picky with his selection because he had essentially run the entire company by himself for a year and now he was looking for someone who would come in, learn the trade and stick it out for the long run. The idea being that after a year, you would have learned the ropes and would be well on your way to, if not growing within the company, then moving on to a better one. If nothing else I wanted the job because I imagined it as the first step in my new career away from HR and into the picture business. Just like they taught us in school, I imaged myself going in, gung-ho, affecting change, selling every film to anyone I talked to, going to festivals, crashing parties, building an internal network; you know, making a name for myself and becoming a big deal in the movie business. I think we all have those dreams when starting a new job until slowly realizing, not in all, but most cases, that that is just what they are: dreams. And now mine were taken away as fast as they had been dangled in front of my face like a carrot. I still had scripts and was still doing some volunteer Production Assistant work for K from home, but as it goes: one step forward two steps back.

That was Monday. Thursday morning, the phone rang...

To Be Continued....

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Unstoppable (4.5 out of 5)

Unstoppable is a rip snorting, hit-the-ground-running, peddle-to-the-metal kind of endeavour. It’s one hell of a thriller and maybe even the entertainment of the year. On paper it doesn’t sound like much but if what you’re looking for is speeding trains crashing through things as frantic people try to stop them before they strike complete disaster (and why shouldn’t you?), this one’s got just about all your bases covered. You really couldn’t ask for better.


Frank (Denzel Washington) is the old railway man who’s just been served his walking papers. As irony would have it, they come to him the same day that he is partnered up with some new kid Will (Chris Pine) who got the job, not because of his proven skill but because he is young, willing to take the pay and is related to the man who signs the cheques.

Will will be the conductor as the duo make their transport across Pennsylvania; those idyllic PA Mountains providing much of the film’s naturalistic backdrop. Meanwhile, at another yard, a train is sent off on it’s own after two morons, lazily break code in order to make their lives a little easier as one decides to jump out of his moving train to hit a railroad switch and sees the train drive off without him. Everything should be fine in theory, for the automatic brake should kick in, but of course, genius didn’t set the brake properly and the empty train barrels down the tracks at high speeds towards Stanton, and possibly the biggest disaster in PA history.

The advice of the station master (Rosario Dawson, providing so much presence from so little character) is to derail the train will which, to add insult to injury, just so happens to be carrying highly toxic and explosive chemicals. There is a large patch of open country before the train hits endless civilization in which to derail the beast but the brass don’t quite take to the idea of wrecking millions of dollars of equipment. Their plan instead of to have a senior railroad man come up from the front and slam on the breaks while a marine is brought in by helicopter to drop down, climb inside and hit the breaks. It doesn’t work much like that.

So the train barrels on towards catastrophe, destroying everything that is intentionally and unintentionally put in it’s path until Frank, with nothing to lose, decides that he and Will will chase the runaway backwards, catch it, hook it on to their breaks and save the day.

All of this is done with shameless glee by director Tony Scott, who, as with his past indulgences into excess, throws every trick in the book into the mix and then throws in the whole book as well. His camera spins and twirls and goes under the train and over the train and flies around the train with what seem like 100s of cuts per second. And yet unlike films like Man on Fire or Domino, here Scott feels like he has found a home for his aesthetic eccentricities. As the train barrels forward and his heroes barrel backwards after it, Scott manages to create real, clutching the hand-rails kind of white knuckle suspense. There is real danger here. Lives could be lost with one false move. Scott, by keeping thing hectic, never lets up on bringing that unnerving reality home.

Maybe that's because Will and Frank look like real heroes who are chasing a real train that is really out of control. If there are special effects at work here they are none that can be easily spotted by the naked eye. Thus all of the action feels plausible and for an hour and a half Tony Scott lets us know exactly what it might feel like to be in the midst of sudden death at top speeds. It’s an exhilarating ride. The film doesn’t pack the procedural punch of Paul Greengrass’ United 93 or The Bourne Ultimatum but he still manages to laugh in the face of big, dumb, artificial action movies and gives these kids a taste of how it’s really done.

Unstoppable doesn’t reinvent any wheels, doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done before even, but it does it so well that it hardly even seems to matter proving that, sometimes it’s not about breaking the trails, but knowing the old ones better than anyone else.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

One Minutes Review: The Promise: The Making of the Darkness on the Edge of Town (2.5 out of 5)

I believe in the power of not knowing. Knowledge may be power but ignorance is also bliss and you know how it goes. It always comes back to Fellini's 8 1/2 for me and those first 10 minutes (maybe the greatest ever put on film) as Guido leaves Earth and flies towards the heavens; the only thing connecting him to reality is the rope around his foot, held by his producer on the beach. I could look up how Fellini did it with a quick Google search but the less I know about it, the more special it is. It's kind of like a magic trick, which is amazing on the principle that something outside of human possibility has happened. Once the trick is explained and the reality is revealed, the magic is gone.

Maybe that's, on an intellectual level, one of The Promise's biggest flaws. The Darkness on the Edge of Town was one of Bruce Springstreen's greatest albums, which, by turns, means it was one of Rock's greatest albums. It's making is the stuff of legend: Springsteen rises to superstar status off the back of his breakthrough album Born to Run, struggles with the concept of being something (an icon) that he doesn't want to be, is embroiled in a legal battle with his manager that keeps him out of the studio for 3 years as fans anxiously wait to see what this boy wonder will cook up next, and so on. The Promise however, composed of old black and white studio footage as well as current interviews from The Boss himself and his E Street Band members only proves to make everything about that seminal album (so lean and stripped down compared to its predecessor) seem terribly normal: a bunch of guys in the studio jamming, recording, writing. How could a period of such mundane routine produce such a profound work? Maybe it's a question the film should have left well enough alone.

What's most interesting is Springsteen himself, who, unlike his image as being the working man's rock star, is quite and awkward and introspective, sometimes to the point of being pretentious. He rarely every looks towards the camera, preferring to divert his gaze to the floor more often than not, is quite, self-reflective and serious. Even on the moments when he cracks a smile or emits a laugh it seems to be one of insecurity and doubt as if he's still the awkward kid who never quite got around to realizing he's one of America's most valuable songwriters.

And the the film, aesthetically, is no more than a feature length bonus feature that record labels used to throw in on special edition albums when record sales were in a freefall. You can't fault the film entirely: someone as mythic and legendary as Springsteen could never be done justice, but you get to wishing that if it was only going to go halfway that it wouldn't have gone at all.

PS - Could Darkness producer John Landau actually just be Steven Soderberg in disguise? You decide.

Monday, November 8, 2010

One Minutes Review: Legion (1 out of 5)

What's remarkable is not how bad Legion is but how bad the reviews of were, in so much as that critics approached it like it was a serious film, up for some sort of serious consideration, to be judged with serious critical tools. Critics said it was too talky, it lost it in the third, it was silly, it didn't have enough action. Really? This about a film in which, I kid you not, angels from Heaven possess the body of humans and turn them into profanity spurting creates. It has a spider-like ice cream man for God sake. Have movies become so polished and lifeless that critics can't spot a true howler when they see one anymore?

In fact, Legion is the best kind of bad. Sure, it's garbage, but so is Troll 2 and I'd never warn anyone away from it. Yes, Legion exists in that special realm of serious film that approaches stupid with a straight face and doesn't even seem to know it. It's the kind of film that doesn't have a brain in it's head but still thinks it's good anyway. Under some sort of strange reverse logic, this may actually make the movie, I don't know, kind of good? It's certainly more interesting that those big, bland, polished, empty-headed turds. Did I mention the ice-cream man?



Why the human race is being infected with angels, which essentially make them into vampire zombies, is never quite explained. Neither is why everyone in the world seems to become possessed except the handful of characters who stay stranded in some diner in the middle of nowhere, among them Tyrese Gibson who approaches his zingers with the ferocity of stand-up comedy. How about this nugget after a strange old woman swears up and down, bites a man in the neck and crawls up a wall and across the ceiling: Dennis Quaid can't believe that the woman wasn't killed by the frying pan the knocked her over the head. Tyrese: "I don't give a f**k how long she been dead - the bitch just walked on the ceiling. She ain't staying in here." What about this one: when asked about the swarm of flies that mysteriously appears, "How am I supposed to know? You're asking me to explain the behavior of a muthaf**kin' pestilence?" Let's not even talk about the man hung upside down from a cross who explodes into a ball of toxic slime. What happened to his guts? Nevermind.

So yes, the movie is stupid, but it's that special kind of stupid that makes you grab your forehead in disbelief that such amateurism could exist in such sophisticated times. Oh yes, and Paul Bettany is an angel who comes to Earth to protect a child who could, for reasons known to no one, end the world, two guns at a time. Bettany will also star in director Scott Charles Stewart's next movie Priest as well. It's about a priest who disobeys the church in order to track down the vampires who kidnapped his niece. So there you go.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Mike's DVD Haul

As promised this will be my last Haul until Christmas. There should be seven titles within this set but I got hosed on a copy of Passolini's Teorema, which only had Spanish subtitles. This is of course a lesson to those who use Ebay. Read the descriptions before hitting buy:

Like any great filmmaker, Truffaut has those films that defined him. The ones that his name is always instantly associated with (400 Blows, Jules and Jim, Day for Night) and then there are those like The Soft Skin which not many people talk about. I haven't seen this one but since it has gone out of print I decided to scoop it up before the price gets to ridiculous highs.
David Mament, one of America's greatest directors, certainly one of the greatest of all screenwriters and playwrights. This isn't as good as House of Games but in typical Mamet fashion it weaves a complex web of mystery and thrills in a way only Mamet can. Steven Martin has maybe never been better.
John Sayles was on a hot streak in the 90s, making one great movie after another. This is one of those and one more off the list on my quest to own everything Sayles did (except Eight Men Out). Now if someone would only get City of Hope out there. Where's the Criterion Collection when ya need em?
Mike Leigh made one brillant film (Bleak Moments) and then dissapeared for many years, being lost in TV land. I have no idea if that TV output was any good as I've never seen any of it, but he certainly returned to feature film in a big way with High Hopes and hasn't looked back since.
Peter Greenaway is one of the most artistically challenging filmmakers out there. Whether or not you actually like his movies (it's hard) or just stand back and admire them, one cannot deny that he is a great and truely original filmmaker. This film is one of his most beautiful; a visual treasure. Anyone who thinks Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam are the definition of film style need get on this right now. So good you could watch it on mute and it would still be just as good.
I haven't seen this one but 13 Conversations About One Thing (by the same filmmakers) was one of the very best films of the decade so of course I needed to see their debute as well. This has been described as In the Company of Men with women. Good enough for me.

Hereafter (5 out of 5)

To believe in the afterlife is not necessarily to believe in God. It is, instead, to believe in anything other than nothing. That is, after all, the reason we believe in anything isn’t it: in hope that, no matter how things are now, there’s always something better just up ahead and around the corner? Some feel that death is what makes life important. If you think about it, depending on where you stand, it’s also what makes life insignificant. We live and then we die. It’s not glamorous. Maybe that’s why we need to believe in something after death: if this is it, most of us would probably demand a refund. That’s one of life’s little contradictions: the reality of death makes us live a little better while it also means that everything we do here is essentially meaningless. Sure, some could leave a timeless legacy behind but, all the same, at the end of the tunnel there’s only one choice and it’s the same for everyone. Hereafter, Clint Eastwood’s newest directorial effort isn’t much more profound than that, which is, so to speak, about as profound as it needs to be.

The film follows three people whose lives are all affected in some way by death. The first is TV newswoman Marie (Cecile de France) who, while vacationing is caught in a tsunami. By the time she washes up on dry land she is assumed dead but jolts back to life after experiencing a blurry vision of shadowed figures shrouded in bright light. The experience leaves her distracted and having visions of a possible afterlife. Her producer/lover tells her to take a break from work and write the book she’s always wanted to. However, so changed is she that her writing and research begins jeering toward exploring the possibilities of an afterlife.

The second is Marcus (played by twin brothers George and Frankie McLaren) who is taken away from his drug addled mother after the accidental death of his twin brother Jason. Put in foster care and seeking some kind of understanding on why his brother, the leader of the two, needed to die, Marcus travels from psychic to psychic, only to be handed cheap entertainment value and no real answers.

The final is George (Matt Damon), a man who, as a child, had a crippling disease which required surgery that left him dead for several moments on the operating table. After his recovery he was plagued by visions of the dead. He was diagnosed as partially schizophrenic and put on pills, which made the visions go away along with just about everything else as well. His brother Billy (Jay Mohr) makes him into a famous psychic until George cannot take it any more, gets a job as a labourer and starts taking cooking classes. Despite Billy’s belief that George should use his gift to help people, a life focused entirely on death is not a life at all to George who believes himself to be cursed by this burden that restricts him from forming any normal, meaningful relationships in his life.

It is then only natural that these three stories will all converge in one way or another. But this isn’t a film driven by plot gimmicks or convenient red herrings. Instead Eastwood and his writer Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) play it straight, weaving a subtle tapestry that looks at death honestly and thoughtfully. This isn’t a film about spirits or hauntings, it’s a subtle human drama about how death shapes our perceptions of life as Eastwood gently builds up questions about whether or not the afterlife even exists. Is everything a product of chance or fate? Does the ability to communicate with the dead provide proof of Heaven or God or is such an ability just a condition of the mind to begin with?

What is most remarkable about Hereafter is then the subtly yet depth with which Eastwood approaches his material: never resorting to pseudo-philosophy or providing answers to eternally unanswerable questions.

Many people will be turned off by this. The human mind has a natural reflex to instantly fill in the blanks and find artistic meaning in everything. “But what’s the movie about,” many will shout. It’s about one scene. I’ll describe it for you. Despite the fact that, because the movie has no twist or deep mystery to discover, this description hardly constitutes giving away anything important, I’ll still throw out a spoiler alert for those who have not seen the film.

The scene takes place between George and Marcus. George has reluctantly agreed to give the kid a reading in order to contact his brother. George acts as the medium but after a while loses the signal. “Where did he go?” The kids demands. “I don’t know,” replies George. It’s one of those brilliant Clint Eastwood scenes, so subtle that they could be mistaken for nothing and yet are still the heart of the film, concealing such dramatic revelation, in which the faces of two characters, both half obscured by darkness, are intercut. They are physically divided and yet symbolically singled, sharing, for one moment, a common metaphysical bond.

And that’s it, the truth of all three characters: “I don’t know.” That is, after all, to paraphrase Socrates, all we every really know about anything.

Monday, November 1, 2010

The Celebrity Connection: Chris Sarandon

These days Chris Saradon looks like this (like he could be an extra on a Pirates of the Caribbean flick). But once upon a time his locks flowed, his eyes gazed and his power of seduction was strong. He's best known as Prince Humperdink in The Princess Bride of the talking voice of Jack Skellington in A Nightmare Before Christmas, but back in the 80s, in horror movies like Fright Night and Child's Play he looked like, well:


Could Chris Saradon just be Eric Roberts in disguse? You Decide.

It's All Just a Little Bit of History Repeating



He probably wasn't the first or the last to put it in writing, but it was The Movie Snob who I first remember writing that just maybe Inception would save the movies, at least a whole month before it was revealed to the world. The idea/hope was that Inception, a big summer film, made from an original idea that was both exciting and challenging, would became a huge hit, ala The Dark Knight for it's director Christopher Nolan before it, and that would somehow open Hollywood's eyes to the fact that audiences are hungry for original films and not remakes of reboots of revisions or whatever the "it" word is. The argument was flawed (if anything had set this realization in Hollywood it should have been Avatar to have done so).

What the success if Inception, if it was to be a big hit, would ensure would be that Christopher Nolan would more or less have free reign to make just about whatever the hell he wanted (maybe he already did, explaining Inception being the black sheep of the summer '10 crowd). However, would it really teach studios anything? See Hollywood has a funny way of looking at things. In the wake of Paranormal Activity came a studio branch dedicated to films only under a certain dollar amount as if what made Paranormal Activity was how much it cost. So what would occur in the wake of Inception? Would we be showered with a slew of big movies with channeling ideas that made us think, didn't spoon feed us and left us hanging at the end with something to take home and mull over for weeks? Nah. What we will get is a slew of movies based on original ideas, original, of course, when compared to anything but Inception.

I first noticed it when the script for Rian Johnson's Loopers came through my inbox for coverage. The film, in pre-production now, is set to star Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt and Mr. Inception himself, Joseph-Gordon Levitt. To be sure, it is based on an original concept: criminals in the future send their enemies back in time where assassins in the past (present) are waiting to pick them off, therein eliminate all trace of them and completely disassociating themselves from the murder in the future. This is all fine and dandy until Levitt is sent to kill himself (Willis), thus closing his loop (giving him about 30 more years of life before kicking the bucket). I won't go into what happens.

Johnson's presence will indeed ensure that the movie is at least interesting, but like his Brothers Bloom, the film bites off more than it can chew and essentially writes itself into a corner that it has no logical or satisfying way that it can work itself out of. Maybe it will play better on film. However, while reading the entire thing, all I could think of was "Inception lite."

Then, not two weeks later, I was sent a script to cover called Tomorrow. The story begins mysteriously until revealing that it is about a man who must travel randomly back and forth through time to save his wife and child before they are murdered. Most times he fails but keeps on trying. Again, images of Inception danced through my mind. Again, the script wrote itself into a situation it couldn't possibly get out of logically or with any sense of satisfaction. Again a concept is killed in it's need to be "Inceptionalized"

I won't say anymore about these projects, but it's interesting to see this trend emerge. Seems Inception won't be saving the movies, it will just ensure that we get a truckload of other projects that try to reach Inception's level. Big suprise.

Monday, October 25, 2010

It's Kind of a Funny Story (5 out of 5)

When you think about it, despite a plot and conventions and actors playing characters in a story that feels more or less familiar by now, at the heart of It’s Kind of a Funny Story is the most cosmic of all human truths: life is hard, it sucks and it keeps going on until we die. If we’re strong we persevere until whoever or whatever decides it’s time to check out and if we aren’t, well, maybe we’ll check out a little early. What we have in the meantime, is a song or a picture, a movie, a best friend, family, pets, whatever little moments we cling to that remind us why life is good; why we go on, why we stand up and remember that life is a form of power and power can be used to make just about anything.

That’s about what Craig (Keir Gilcrist) learns after checking himself into the psychiatric ward of a New York hospital. Craig is 16 and feeling depressed and suicidal. His mom (Laruen Conrad) tries her best but is a little too fragile, his father (Jim Gaffigan) is a business man who wants Craig to get into a great school and follow in his footsteps and his kid sister is some kind of child genius.

Craig dreams of jumping off a bridge but instead of heading to one goes to the hospital where he begs the emergency room doctor to admit him to the psyche ward. There, he quickly realizes that, amidst the schizophrenics and the rest of the lot, maybe he doesn’t quite belong there and begs the heavy-handedly named Dr. Minerva (Viola Davis) to let him out because he’s got school, friends, and other stuff to do. She tells him he will be released after five days of observation.

Inside he meets Bob (Zack Galifianakis taking an effectively tender turn into drama) who seems relatively normal, doesn’t talk about why he is in the hospital and shows the kid around, introducing him to the rest of the gang and stealing scrubs for them so that they can go out and play basketball. Along the way he also takes a shining to Noelle (Emma Roberts) who hides scars underneath the sleeves of that Stooges T-shirt, but of course, when you’re sixteen, any girl wearing a Stooges T-shirt, no matter where you meet her, must be some kind of keeper.

As all of this progresses, while sitting in on group sessions and doing different workshops, Craig has his spirit awoken as he discovers himself to be an interesting artist and becomes the hero of a sing-along night. What’s depression when you’re 16, advises Bob in a scene where Galifianakis ceases to be a goofball and is reborn as a valuable dramatic actor: what he wouldn’t give to be young and depressed.

If all this sounds a little too cute and routine it isn't. It’s Kind of a Funny Story was written and directed by duo Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden who by now can be considered two of America’s leading young filmmakers. As with their Half Nelson and Sugar before, It’s Kind of a Funny Story takes a plot that sounds conventional and adds width and depth to it to reveal genuine human emotion. There’s no definite narrative course in Fleck and Boden’s films. Instead what we get are characters who are thrown into life’s shuffle and must make decisions and come to realizations on how they will take what has been given to them and make choices on how to deal with it. There are no happy endings in these films: only the realization by sad, beaten down characters that, yeah, life can suck, but it can also be good: what are you going to do about it?

As such, It’s Kind of a Funny Story works its way, not towards an ending, but to a truth about happiness and sadness and life and death and any other one life’s cosmic poles. It doesn’t, as so many Hollywood movies tend to do, pat us on the head and reassure us that everything is going to work out okay. It instead knows that, no matter how bad things can get, there is always solace to be found in that slice of pizza, in that cute girl’s smile or those Bob Dylan lyrics that, when we hear them, can change our lives for a second or two. Whether or not we want to realize it is another matter altogether. It's the heart of this film.

And then, above all, It’s Kind of a Funny Story never falls into the pit of becoming a comedy about mental illness. The film has been advertised as a comedy but it really isn’t. There are moments that are indeed funny, but that’s because people sometimes do or say funny things. And the psychiatric ward setting isn’t so much about making fun of mental illness as it a stage for Fleck and Boden’s life contradictions to work themselves out: it’s a place where people both find themselves and lose themselves. With that, It’s Kind of a Funny Story has the perfect title because it’s also kind of a sad story, kind of a happy story, kind of an uplifting story and kind of a heartbreaking story. All of the most meaningful stories are.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

The Sub-Criterion Collection?

Speaking of the Criterion Collection is like speaking of God or royalty to the purest of movie aficionados. So sacred and important is the Criterion Collection line of laser discs, DVDs and Blu-Rays that, many months ago, when I suggested that Oliver Assayas' Summer Hours was an odd choice for Criterion to release seeing as it was a minor film, one Sam Juliano got red in the face, threw personal attacks and made an overall ass of himself. Thus is Criterion.

But, as one Tony Dayoub enlightened me, titles like Summer Hours, Everlasting Moments, A Christmas Tale, Gomorrah and Che (none of which I personally think really needed Criterion treatment) were all the product of a joint venture between the company and IFC to release their films. My problem at the time with Summer Hours was not really with the quality of the film but that, with the price tag of a Criterion DVD, at 30 to 40 dollars, being so high, why put out films that are readily available on perfectly acceptable region one DVDs when there are hundreds of other films (both contemporary and classic, foreign and not) that have still never seen the light of day on region 1 DVD and desperately cry out for it? Where, after all, is Richard Linklater's Suburbia, Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, Eric Rohmers Autumn Tale and so on?

Now, seeing what Criterion has in it's line-up of upcoming releases, I further question if, just maybe, we film lovers are getting one step closer to losing one of our most valuable resources. At the time of the Summer Hours debate I embraced the pairing of Criterion with IFC because, if the company was releasing more mainstream DVDs and this meant that the prices of their more valuable upcoming releases would go down, well hey, I'm all for that. Now we're just waiting on those valuable releases.

I may be just worrying for no reason. In the past couple months Criterion has gifted us with Antonioni's Red Desert, returned Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout and Godards My Life to Live to us and rescued Ingmar Berman's The Magician from obscurity. But then that's four titles amidst a sea of upcoming releases that certainly don't make much sense to me. Sure, they are all great films in their own respect, but all, once again, exist on perfectly acceptable and affordable region 1s. Sure having something with the Criterion brand on it is certainly nice and, depending on what kind of film lover you talk to, may increase the overall value of the film, it just seems unnecessary when there's more important blanks to fill in the world of film history.

Look at the list of new and upcoming releases. Malick's The Thin Red Line, Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, Stanely Kubrick's anti-war masterpiece Paths of Glory, Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, Lars Von Trier's Antichrist, Chaplin's Modern Times, Guillermo Del Toro's Cronos, and the one that really got me scratching my head, James L. Brooks' Broadcast News.

The thing about all of these titles is that, they've all been available in North America at more than reasonable prices. Sure, some of them are out of print but still can be easily found. What's interesting is that they are all films that are associated with big name directors who have considerable pull within mainstream (albeit sometimes independent) film.

Thus begs the question, is Criterion trying to get away from bringing classic foreign and hard to find films to North American shores and instead concentrating on those films that still have enough cred to keep the brand relevant but that will sell more copies off the shelves? Now that Broadcast News ( a great film no doubt) will be out on Criterion DVD can the world expect a Criterion version of Terms of Endearment? As Good as It Gets? Spanglish even? Does the world really need them?

Maybe I'm just worrying for no reason or resentful that Criterion is in a stage where they seem to be releasing only films that I already have in some other version on DVD instead of bringing out films that I am dying to get my hands on. But then again, when Criterion starts releasing films like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Life Aquatic or Antichrist, that certainly, if unjustly, raises a touch of concern.

What do you think? Is it good that Criterion are expanding their horizons or is this the beginning of the end?