Movies Kick Ass Blog

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans ***

2009-12-09T00:54:00.005-06:00

Director: Werner Herzog
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes
Val Kilmer, Jennifer Coolidge, Fairuza Balk, Brad Dourif
Michael Shannon, Shawn Hatosy, Denzel Whitaker, Xzibit
Shea Wigham, Irma P. Hall, Tom Bower

Lieutenant Terence McDonagh (Cage) is the kind of man that would drive a car from New Orleans to Biloxi, to deliver his father's (Bower) dog to his prostitute girlfriend Frankie (Mendes) while taking care of a young crime witness (Whitaker) and snorting cocaine.
He is also the kind of man who gives Nicolas Cage the opportunity to ensue in the kind of deranged brilliance few actors can achieve like he does, when he's given the chance.
His performance is an exercise in excess and contradiction: while investigating a massacre Terence seems more frightened of a couple of iguanas than drug dealing thugs armed to their teeth.
He roams the Big Easy with a hunch (due to a spinal condition that keeps him in constant pain) and tells everyone to fuck themselves if they come in between him and his plans, which usually involve getting drugs or money to pay his bookies.
At one point his superior reminds him "you can not get away with that cowboy shit anymore", emphasis on the anymore as Herzog contemplates how the always decadent, but once glorious city fell under the wrath of Katrina and became a boiling pot for crime and corruption.
He's not talking about New Orleans exclusively but about a whole world that is becoming known for the evils that lurk in unexpected places always pushing the boundaries.
A world that's saying to us "think I can't get away with this?".
It's because of this world that an authority figure like Terence can get away with raping a girl while threatening her boyfriend with a gun and a drug lord (Xzibit) is suspected of trafficking but not murder.
Herzog fills his movie with red herrings that hook us as we become fascinated by Terence's behavior.
With Cage, the German iconoclast creates one of the funniest characters to come out in the past decade, all while paying tribute to a genre that's dying precisely because we know now that the good guys and heroes rarely come in uniforms.
Their vision of the world might not be optimistic, but sometimes we just have to take them in whatever shape they come in.

The Ten Movies That Defined My Decade.

2009-12-08T22:03:00.006-06:00

5. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
(Peter Jackson, 2001)

When Sam (Sean Astin) and Frodo (Elijah Wood) decide they will leave the fellowship behind and go to Mordor on their own I couldn't believe it.
When minutes later the screen just faded to black and "directed by Peter Jackson" appeared my jaw fell to the floor.
Before entering the theater that December afternoon almost eight years ago, I had an inkling of what J.R.R. Tolkien's books were all about (although I'd ignored my father's advice that I read them since I was a child).
However I wasn't expecting for a movie cliffhanger to be like the ones on TV. Sometimes we have to wait a few months to know what our favorite characters will go through, but a whole year?
And when it had been this damn good!
Of course during the next two years I always attended the first screening of each chapter on the day of the premiere and in the meantime obsessed about the books (read the three and "The Hobbit" in a few weeks), the music and the Oscars they stacked.
I still am pissed about Ian McKellen losing his Oscar...
But the movies worked on more than a personal level, they reminded me of cinema's ability to take us back to a prime state of wonder, almost like being a child where you just can't believe what you're watching and are too fascinated to start wondering the machinations behind it.
The movies, not so surprisingly, became a sort of tradition in my house for half the decade. We would religiously watch the previous chapter(s) before going to bed and running to the theaters the next day to see the new one.
"The Return of the King" premiered here on a Christmas day (the only one of the trilogy they didn't open on the worlwide premiere) and it truly was the best present anyone-OK a film buff mostly-could ask for.
Now that the decade is over I look back and realize that most of the images I have from this movie don't correspond to the final, awards laden, chapter, but to its humble start which tremulously came to the world and changed it forever.

2009-12-08T17:55:00.001-06:00

(500) Days of Summer ***1/2

2009-12-08T00:48:00.006-06:00

Director: Marc Webb
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel
Geoffrey Arend, Chloe Moretz, Matthew Gray Gubler, Clark Gregg

When the movie starts we are warned "this is a story of boy meets girl. But you should know up front, this is not a love story."
The movie doesn't mean this out of a selfconscious attempt to re-invent the romantic comedy or be ironic, it says so because the actual dilemma at its center is that it doesn't really know what love is.
If you're not sure what something really is how can you talk about it?
The next ninety minutes are spent presenting two opposite views of what this abstract concept is.
We have Tom (a charismatic, revelatory Gordon-Levitt), a greeting card writer who is a firm believer in fate, romance and love at first sight. Then there's Summer (the lovely Deschanel) a cynical girl who's into being "casual".
Tom of course falls for her the minute they meet and despite her warning of not wanting anything serious they begin "something"...or not.
The plot then travels backwards and forwards during the title five hundred days as we see their relationship go from "friends only" to "hot shower sex" to pure hate and drinking binges.
Shaped from the delightful screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, the film often falls for conventional indie flick elements (quirkiness and retro band references abound) but it finds a personality of its own in the familiar.
It becomes a postmodernist dissection of relationships for this generation and the way it stares at us with a blank look upon its figurative face is, ironically, what makes it so sincere.
And it's clear that Webb and the writers might not have a clue about the way to define romantic love, but the whole movie is clearly infatuated with cinema.
From references to the New Wave, Fellini, "The Graduate" and a particularly cute Bergman tribute, this is terrific filmmaking.
Also, because like the relationship at its center it defies our preconceptions of how to define a movie. You can read it both ways.
It's fair of you to hate Summer and like Tom decide she's "an evil, emotionless, miserable human being, or... she's a robot". But also couldn't she just be straightforward?
In the same way, we can see Tom as a breathtaking romantic hero we all would be lucky to be loved by, but sometimes he comes looking off like a spoiled, immature brat and something of a psycho too...
"(500) Days of Summer" asks us why have we remained limited by the parameters that have jailed the romantic comedy for decades now.
Sure, it often commits some of its mistakes, but most of the time it's trying to open up its own path.
And how can you not fall for that?

The Ten Movies That Defined My Decade.

2009-12-07T16:35:00.005-06:00

6. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)

I had never liked martial arts films.
I used to think of them as the mindless entertainment that could only keep brutish, ignorant, heterosexual males occupied.
Then I saw this movie.
The minute Michelle Yeoh's character high kicks and then begins to fly I was in a trance.
With its sweeping mix of epic adventure, mythology and sweeping romance it redefined what I thought of as genre.
After watching this movie I became more open to genres I'd never even consider watching before.
Lee became a master of genre bending. Just see how his "Hulk" is more psychological drama than superhero flick and "Lust, Caution" is one of the greatest spy thrillers to arrive in the form of erotic essay.
When he delivered "Brokeback Mountain" he was again establishing his disdain for established cinematic rules by making a revisionist Western with tragic romance.
I think I'm the only person who didn't like that movie, but I respected what he was trying to do.
To me however "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" was his pinnacle.

35 Shots of Rum ***

2009-12-07T11:36:00.004-06:00

Director: Claire Denis
Cast: Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogue, Grégoire Colin

Like the tangle of railways featured in the opening scene, so are the relationships between the characters in Claire Denis' "35 Shots of Rhum".
We never know exactly where they're going or how they are connected, but the journey results strangely fascinating.
Denis concentrates on four characters: widower, train driver Lionel (Descas) who lives with his daughter Joséphine (Diop) and their neighbors, cab driver, Gabrielle (Dogue) and the mysterious Noé (Colin).
They live in a comfortable middle class apartment building, but it's clear they've created a world of their own within this space. We can see Gabrielle and Joséphine having conversations from window to window and Lionel entering Noé's apartment as if it was his own home.
The movie takes its time specifying the nature of the characters' relationships which makes for a strange experience (the relationship between Lionel and Joséphine even seems slightly incestuous sometimes) but it all has the greater purpose of making a point about transitions.
Soon it becomes clear that the movie is about two couples figuring out what they are about to become.
We learn that Gabrielle is Leonel's former lover and is having a hard time moving on and accepting that she's not his daughter's mother.
During one subtly painful scene we see her disappointment as she watches Lionel flirt with another woman.
Then there's Joséphine, who can't make up her mind about loving Noé or not. She behaves like a spoiled child and runs in fury when he tells her he's planning to move to another country.
Noé is a seductive mess; his apartment is the only thing he has left of his parents and his only "attachment" is a cat, whose awkward fate frees Noé to do as he wishes.
Denis plays with their relationships in strictly dialectic terms. We see how Jo is disappointed she will leave her saintly father for a chaos like Noé.
Gabrielle on the other side can't fathom how Lionel dares not to consider her family. It's also fit that both these characters work in transportation.
Lionel drives the train around the city and only seems to be alive when he gets a text message from his daughter yet he seems terrified of retirement. Gabrielle expresses how much she loves her job to anyone who cares to listen.
Their views on life are completely opposite and through details like these we can make out their complete histories in our minds.
We don't really need to know with exactitude to feel for them and enjoy their unselfconscious development.
"The less you know, the better I feel" says one character when confronted about their past. That might as well be the whole movie's motto.

The Ten Movies That Defined My Decade.

2009-12-06T17:35:00.008-06:00

7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(Michel Gondry, 2004)

Out of all the movies I have ever seen, very few have captured "falling in-and out of-love" like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind".
It's a movie that wears its heart on its sleeve, even if the rest of the outfit is completely loopy and strange.
Michel Gondry's interpretation of Charlie Kaufman's screenplay plays out like a stream of hippie consciousness with lo-fi settings and sci-fi straight out of a 50's B movie.
Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey (where is this man's Oscar?) give career best performances as doomed lovers Clementine and Joel who undergo a procedure to have each other erased from their memories.
The premise might sound like a Kaufmanian gimmick, but the truth is that the guy knows what he's doing.
His stories might not be easy to contain within a genre, but the emotions and humanity under all those layers of quirk and weirdness could rival neorrealism.
Watching this movie the first time I was confused most of the time, but I remember leaving the theater completely moved.
I had no idea why and I couldn't understand or relate to it. It wasn't until later when I too had an experience I wanted to erase from my memory forever that I understood what "Eternal Sunshine" had tapped so accurately into.
The pain, the bitterness, the joy, the fun...they all go hand in hand when you look back on a past love affair. The mind has a hard time with hierarchies.
When a movie plays out like a version of thoughts you've had, you know you won't want to forget about it.
This one did that for me.

Just Because.

2009-12-04T17:30:00.000-06:00

The Cove ***1/2

2009-12-04T12:18:00.009-06:00

Director: Louie Psihoyos

Movies are rarely as compelling, involving and heartbreaking as "The Cove". Louie Psihoyo's fascinating documentary takes us behind the dirty business of dolphin slaughtering and how it all could be stopped if the Japanese government closed a small slaughter house in Taiji-wisely hidden inside a natural cove-where over 23,000 dolphins are brutally murdered every year.
The purpose? To be mislabeled as, the more expensive and difficult to catch, whale meat and then be fed to Japanese children.
The problems? Besides the obvious inhumanity that goes beyond the slaughtering, dolphin meat contains high doses of mercury which can gradually lead to intoxication and severe health issues.
But the movie doesn't only appeal to us by tickling our self preservation (although that can easily do the trick), but also talks to our higher intelligence and encourages us to face the damages we've caused to our planet and how we perpetuate destruction.
We are reminded that dolphins are perhaps the most intelligent species living in our planet and makes an interesting point out of why we work so hard to communicate with aliens that might not even exist, when right here we are murdering a species we could learn so much from.
The film does a wonderful work injecting ideas that go beyond activism and facile manipulation, it even probes into why Japan even insists on whale and dolphin slaughtering when everyone else in the world is against it?
The filmmakers come up with the notion that it's a rejection against Western thought and perhaps one of their last attempts to cling onto their dead Imperialism.
Connecting the ideas we are forced to wonder if we aren't in fact killing dolphins because we are also clinging to our notions of cerebral supremacy? Is the slaughtering a subconscious manifestation of the very same idea that lies behind all those alien movies where a higher intelligence comes and destroys us? Or is this notion reserved for the Japanese alone who fear their culture is being exterminated?
This might be pushing it a bit too far, but really, how often do you start connecting dots in your head after a film is over?
"The Cove" also works as great entertainment. Psihoyos teams up with dolphin activist Richard O'Barry (who trained the original Flipper) and with a group of experts breaks into the cove in Taiji where they come up with truly horrific footage.
With O'Barry, the movie also makes for aching personal journey, as the man, now a senior citizen, recounts how much he regrets having captured the dolphins they used on "Flipper".
He tells us how one of the dolphins committed suicide in his arms because she could stand captivity anymore.
He worked capturing dolphins for ten years and has spent almost forty trying to undo his work. Talk about lifelong atonement.
"We tried to do the story legally" they say, when in fact this illegality is what makes it work so well as a thriller (they compare themselves to "Ocean's Eleven" but this is more Costa Gavras than The Rat Pack).
Curiously some of the equipment they use to infiltrate the slaughter house is made by Industrial Light and Magic, which created E.T. among other things.
We are reminded that we have the power to create amazing things and spark change, all we are missing is the will.

NBR Makes Its Picks.

2009-12-03T14:51:00.005-06:00

The National Board of Review announced its winners for 2009.

Best Film:
Up In The Air

Top Eleven Films (In alphabetical order):
An Education
(500) Days Of Summer
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Invictus
The Messenger
A Serious Man
Star Trek
Up
Up In The Air
Where The Wild Things Are

Best Director:
Clint Eastwood, "Invictus"

Best Actor:
Morgan Freeman, "Invictus" and George Clooney, "Up In The Air" (tie)

Best Actress:
Carey Mulligan, "An Education"

Best Supporting Actor:
Woody Harrelson, "The Messenger"

Best Supporting Actress:
Anna Kendrick, "Up In The Air"

Best Foreign Film:
A Prophet

Best Documentary:
The Cove

Best Animated Feature:
Up

Best Ensemble Cast:
It’s Complicated

Breakthrough Performance by an Actor:
Jeremy Renner, "The Hurt Locker"

Breakthrough Performance by an Actress:
Gabourey Sidibe, "Precious"

Spotlight Award for Best Directorial Debut:
Duncan Jones, "Moon"
Oren Moverman, "The Messenger" and Marc Webb, "500 Days of Summer" (tie)

Best Original Screenplay:
Joel & Ethan Coen, "A Serious Man"

Best Adapted Screenplay:
Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, "Up In The Air"

Special Filmmaking Achievement Award:
Wes Anderson, "The Fantastic Mr. Fox"

William K. Everson Film History Award:
Jean Picker Firstenberg

NBR Freedom of Expression:
Burma Vj: Reporting From A Closed Country,
Invictus,
The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellseberg And The Pentagon Papers

Top Ten Independent Films (In alphabetical order):
Amreeka
District 9
Goodbye Solo
Humpday
In The Loop
Julia
Me And Orson Welles
Moon
Sugar
Two Lovers

Top Six Foreign Films (In alphabetical order):
The Maid
A Prophet
Revanche
Song Of Sparrows
Three Monkeys
The White Ribbon

Top Six Documentary Films (In alphabetical order):
Burma Vj: Reporting From A Closed Country
The Cove
Crude
Food, Inc.
Good Hair
The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg And The Pentagon Papers

OK so they loved handing out awards this year.
All the Clooney and Eastwood love, no surprise, the NBR has always adored them.
It's odd though that "Precious" wasn't featured in any of their top tens.
Yay Carey Mulligan and "Up"!

The Ten Movies That Defined My Decade.

2009-12-01T20:32:00.001-06:00

8. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)

The first time I saw "Lost in Translation" I was with two friends.
"That was it?!?" one of them exclaimed.
"What did he tell her?" the other replied just as shocked when it ended.
The only thing they agreed on was how much it had sucked.
They also agreed that I must've been some sort of a crazy person for feeling so elated after watching this.
And in fact not even I was sure what had moved me so much about it. Why had I invested so much in the simple story of Bob Harris (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson)? Why had I been so fascinated by the moments when "nothing" happened and we just watched the characters watching something else?
Two days after I saw it, the movie won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar. If it had been up to me it would've also won Best Director.
It was Coppola who crafted something so delicate and bruising, so intimate and detached. You could also touch her influences during the movie: her story extracted out of a Wong Kar Wai journal, her sexy camera angles straight out of that Alain Resnais movie and well to mention Fellini would be too easy (considering "La Dolce Vita" is featured in one prominent scene).
But Coppola wasn't proving how well versed she was in the cinematic arts, she was declaring she had a voice of her own.
Extremely autobiographical, the movie is able to be both specific and very general. Maybe not all of us have been as deeply annoyed by Ms. Diaz as she was (Anna Faris gave by far my favorite limited performance of the decade) but almost everyone has had that moment when they feel just lost.
You don't even have to like the characters, for all I know Bob comes off looking very arrogant most of the time and Charlotte is a stereotype of mid-twenties ennui, but they transcend their facades and become beautiful archetypes that detail the saving capacity of love and the inexplicable bond created through friendship.
Who cares what Bob told her in the end? What's important is that they will never forget each other, they will live within one another even if they don't meet again.
With them Coppola beautifully captured the essence of spirituality and faith.
To this day I don't know of my friends "got" why I loved this movie so much, but I'm sure by now they also have been told things that help keep them warm at night.

Happy Birthday to Wood.

2009-12-01T16:48:00.000-06:00

"Whatever Works" may have not been a masterpiece but if I'm half as creative when I'm his age, I'll know I've had a good life.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs ***

2009-12-01T15:10:00.004-06:00

Directors: Phil Lord, Chris Miller

Just when it seemed that the computer animated market had been divided between the brilliant, timeless masterpieces of Pixar and the moneymaking, ludicrous pop exploitations of Dreamworks Animations here comes Sony Pictures with a movie that's quite a treat.
Based on the children's book by Judi Barrett and Don Barrett, "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" is a delightful satire that takes the best from both animated moguls' visions.
It tells the story of Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader) a scientist living in a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic known for its sardine industry.
All of his life he tried hard to create things that would make people's lives easier, but after failing constantly he finds his opportunity when the sardine industry dies.
People are left eating the remains of their unsold production and the whole town becomes sad and dull, "life became gray" as one of the characters say.
Flint comes up with a machine that transforms water molecules into any food you want (everyone wants junk food of course) and accidentally he aims at the sky causing a hamburger rain to come down and put smiles on people's faces.
Soon he's the town celebrity and he takes requests from everyone to fill the sky menu, but as it usually happens with excess, things get bad before long.
The clever plot works as a satire in two remarkable ways; children will notice that none of the foods featured include liver, soup or Brussels sprouts, instead the town becomes flooded with ice cream, pizza and giant meatballs.
They might not understand the nods to extreme consumerism and world hunger that adults undoubtedly will, but they might think after the movie that maybe living in a house made out of cake isn't as good an idea as they thought...
Grownups on the other side will have a feast with all the movie references (which are not particularly about current pop culture events, but about B movies, Irving Allen disaster flicks and "The Wizard of Oz"), the intelligent take on how it's not so easy to fix world hunger and above all with the brilliant voice cast.
Hader headlines an ensemble that includes the wonderful Anna Faris, the incomparable James Caan and even Mr. T. They all deliver splendid work that creates characters instead of just lending their voices to them.
It's in their everyman-and woman-ness that the film strikes its most tuned chord. Sure it's also insanely funny, sweet and even features a very complex Oedipal, well, complex at the center of it all.
Most interesting of all is the depiction of a colorful world filled with perky TV hosts, ambitious politicians that rely on charisma to gain power, people without food and jobs and governments that distract their people with shiny attractions...
Not so far from the world we live in huh?

Indie Kick-off.

2009-12-01T10:51:00.006-06:00

The Spirit Awards for independent film have announced their nominees today. Thus they kick start the happiest time of the year: awards season.
Among their top nominees are:

BEST FEATURE

“(500) Days Of Summer”
“Amreeka”
“Precious”
“Sin Nombre”
“The Last Station”

BEST DIRECTOR
Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, “A Serious Man”
Lee Daniels, “Precious”
Cary Joji Fukunaga, “Sin Nombre”
James Gray, “Two Lovers”
Michael Hoffman, “The Last Station”

BEST SCREENPLAY
Alessandro Camon, Oren Moverman, “The Messenger”
Michael Hoffman, “The Last Station
Lee Toland Krieger, “The Vicious Kind”
Greg Mottola, “Adventureland”
Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber, “(500) Days Of Summer”

BEST FIRST SCREENPLAY
Sophie Barthes, “Cold Souls”
Scott Cooper, “Crazy Heart”
Cherien Dabis, “Amreeka”
Geoffrey Fletcher, “Precious”
Tom Ford, David Scearce, “A Single Man”

BEST FEMALE LEAD
Maria Bello, “Downloading Nancy”
Helen Mirren, “The Last Station”
Gwyneth Paltrow, “Two Lovers”
Gabourey Sidibe, “Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire”
Nisreen Faour, “Amreeka”

BEST MALE LEAD
Jeff Bridges, “Crazy Heart”
Colin Firth, “A Single Man”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, “(500) Days Of Summer”
Souléymane Sy Savané, “Goodbye Solo”
Adam Scott, “The Vicious Kind”

BEST SUPPORTING FEMALE
Dina Korzun, “Cold Souls”
Mo’Nique, “Precious”
Samantha Morton, “The Messenger”
Natalie Press, “Fifty Dead Men Walking”
Mia Wasikowska, “That Evening Sun”

BEST SUPPORTING MALE
Jemaine Clement, “Gentleman Broncos”
Woody Harrelson, “The Messenger”
Christian McKay, “Me and Orson Welles”
Raymond McKinnon, “That Evening Sun”
Christopher Plummer, “The Last Station”

For a complete list of nominees click here.

I'm particularly thrilled about Gwyneth Paltrow and James Gray getting in for "Two Lovers", I was sure it would be one of those movies everyone forgets existed come awards season.
No Joaquin Phoenix? That's got to be a joke though...

The Ten Movies That Defined My Decade.

2009-11-30T23:22:00.008-06:00

9. Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000)

"Why do I love it so much?
What kind of magic is this?

How come I can't help adore it?
It's just another musical

No one minds it at all
If I'm having a ball
This is a musical"

-from "In the Musicals" by Björk

I had never seen a movie like "Dancer in the Dark" before I popped in the DVD that fateful day more than eight years ago.
Before it I thought that musicals were limited to being grand scale epics in Technicolor where everyone was a tune away from a happy ending.
Of course I'd seen "West Side Story", "Cabaret" and the likes, but even in their tragic finales there is always an ethereal beauty that at least leaves you with some hope.
But this one destroyed me.
I couldn't believe what poor Selma Ježková (Björk) had just gone through. A degenerative disease, a son who had inherited it, extreme poverty, a wrongful trial for helping a friend and the biggest evil of all was her extreme goodness.
How could we live in a world where good people suffered the most and how dare a movie not give them the happy ending they so obviously deserved?
Then again I obviously had no idea who Lars von Trier was. "Dancer in the Dark" opened up my eyes to someone who has become one of my favorite working directors.
His ability to be both irreverent and moving has fascinated me ever since. I now owe him some of the most memorable movie watching experiences of my life (I sat frozen in my seat after watching "Dogville" a few years later and am still uncovering the different layers hidden in "Antichrist").
I also owe this movie my endless love for Björk. Before this I liked some of her work, but just thought of her as the kooky woman in the weird "Ren & Stimpy" like video that had disturbed me so much as a kid.
But after watching how she committed with Selma I was astounded someone could give such a raw performance, I remember clearly thinking she had been inspired by Falconetti's performance in "The Passion of Joan of Arc" and how like her she would only deliver one medium changing performance.
Von Trier as I learned is definitely not for everyone, but those who give in to his vision are never unrewarded.
To this day his ability to push cinema forward, challenge our notions and extract brilliant performances out of his tortured muses is music to my ears.

Crush of the Week.

2009-11-30T23:05:00.000-06:00

Coco Before Chanel **1/2

2009-11-30T20:35:00.004-06:00

Director: Anne Fontaine
Cast: Audrey Tautou, Benoît Poelvoorde, Alessandro Nivola
Marie Gillain, Emmanuelle Devos

"Coco is extravagant" says Gabrielle Chanel (Tautou) when someone suggests she should start using that name instead of her own.
This reaction and defense towards simplicity might have described the career of the woman who changed the course of fashion in the twentieth century.
The house of Chanel became known for its sleek, simple luxury and even pieces from the latest collections include the essence of what Coco intended when she started designing hats.
Anne Fontaine's biopic, like most movies of its kind, relies heavily on the audience's conception of the famous person in question.
This also gives the actors playing them the liberty to interpret them as they wish before the time when they became famous.
In such a manner Tautou makes out of Coco a fierce, strong woman who had no problem saying the first thing that came to her mind while smoking a cigarette.
Long before she became the pearl and tweed clad goddess of fashion/Nazi criminal, Tautou creates her as a businesswoman.
During her youth we see her singing in cabarets, but actually just looking for a man to look after her. She strikes gold with the millionaire Étienne Balsan (Poelvoorde) who becomes her protector. It's in her stay in his manor where she also meets Englishman Arthur "Boy" Capel (Nivola) who became the love of her life.
And so the movie consists of scenes where Coco delivers potent one liners, wears men's clothes and eventually realizes she might just have a knack for fashion.
Fontaine remains absolutely reverential and reveals little about Chanel making the movie a rather lazy enterprise that relies essentially on the title cards that appear before the end credits.
Those who have no idea what Chanel accomplished will leave the theater feeling cheated and those knowledgeable of her career will just feel teased.
Tautou does her best to make this woman engaging, but her performance remains on a very superficial level and plays her like the rags-to-riches, by way of social climibing, heroines we've seen a million times before, as if she has forgotten she's playing the woman who once said that "in order to be irreplaceable one must always be different."

The Ten Movies That Defined My Decade.

2009-11-29T22:09:00.010-06:00

10. Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004)

In 2004 I turned 18.
Yes, it meant I could finally vote (and drink and smoke without feeling guilty).
But above all I remember it was about the vote. I have always been very politically minded and even if I'm not an American, I have always followed closely their government's moves. And how can one not when they exert so much influence over the entire world?
So yeah, here I was, with a brand new ID card and the notion that I could make a difference in the world. Presidential elections in my country were still one year away, but I made a personal cause out of endorsing the American Democratic party because well everyone knew George W. Bush was simply no good.
I wore a John Kerry pin to school and was very outspoken about my belief that the Iraq invasion had been a crime upon humanity.
And yes, living outside the States I was seen as a lunatic. It took me a while to understand that people see politics as something that happens when you vote.
Democracy to most is something external that affects them little and is over the morning after a new President has been elected.
Today more than ever I know this to be a lie.
Democracy isn't about who we pick or why we pick them, it's an organism that has to be nurtured almost every day of our lives. Democracy isn't about political parties it's about our values.
Most of the time they're not even about morality (that's way too ample a concept) but about basic humanity.
No other film this decade reminded us more about that than Michael Moore's controversial Palme D'or winner.
Sure Moore has made a mess about his latter choices-he seems to pick issues with the idea to polarize as of late-but back then he was just a man trying to make way for his voice to be heard.
The movie may have not aged well (read my original review here) and the ending is still one of the most heartbreaking to be put in celluloid, but the ideas behind Moore's discourse live now more than ever.
We have the right to be heard, the right to fight for change and the right to be treated with basic human dignity.
Now a citizen of a country living under a military dictatorship I am witness of how easy it is for those in power to trample us, to play with us and to disrespect us.
But as long as we believe in change not all is lost.
As an anecdote regarding the movie I will remember it most of all because of the struggles I went through to see it (read the whole story here).
When it premiered and was opening all over the world, the local board of censorship initially declared it would be banned in my country for being "propaganda".
The government was not only very conservative here, but some of its key members had direct ties to things Moore revealed in his documentary.
I was appalled that a bunch of right wing geezers were trying to restrict my viewing rights, so I looked up online at what countries near me the movie was playing in.
The nearest one was El Salvador and coincidentally my parents had to travel there for work around the time the movie was being exhibited.
I packed my bags, told people at school I was leaving the country to see a movie and rode in a car for almost two days to get to my movie.
Nobody and nothing, not even a repressive, restrictive government has the right to choose for me.
Especially not what movies I see!

The Ten Movies That Defined My Decade.

2009-11-29T21:59:00.007-06:00

With the end of the decade a mere month away, absolutely everyone has been delivering lists that comprise, or try to, the cinematic richness of the past ten years.
Even if most list makers are trying to establish what the best out of those movies made were, I have learned that delivering such definitive statements is not only egocentric but also useless.
Since they were created movies have been an oxymoron of sorts: group activities that turn into personal experiences.
Every time we enter a theater and sit there watching the projection on the screen with someone next to us, we're in a completely private world of our own.
It can be our wife, best friend, frenemy or complete stranger next to us, we're still leaving the cinema with a completely different perspective of what they just saw.
Therefore who am I to condemn someone for proclaiming "White Chicks" is the movie they will remember the aughts for?
With that in mind, my top ten list will not be about the best movies or even my favorites, but about those which will forever bring me memories of the post-Y2K craze.
I will write about one of those movies every day this week (click on the tag if you miss anything) I hope you will come along for the ride down memory lane with me and I'm dying to hear all about the ones that made the decade for you.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee **1/2

2009-11-27T22:45:00.004-06:00

Director: Rebecca Miller
Cast: Robin Wright Penn, Alan Arkin
Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Julianne Moore, Monica Bellucci
Ryan McDonald, Zoe Kazan, Mike Binder, Maria Bello
Robin Weigert, Shirley Knight

How do you engage an audience and make them become interested in a character? First you have them believe said character has qualities we want to discover.
Pippa Lee (Wright Penn) is "a mystery, an enigma..." says one of her friends (Binder) minutes into the film.
So check, we have something to unravel.
Then you go and try to solve said mystery by putting together pieces of a puzzle. Therefore we go back in time as Pippa narrates her life to make us understand where she is now.
And since we don't really know what it is exactly we're trying to discover we let the characters engage us.
We learn how Pippa (played by Lively as a younger version) ran away from home, escaping her lunatic mom (Bello) and passive dad (Tim Guinee). She ends up living with her lesbian aunt (Weigert) and her girlfriend (Moore) only to end up becoming addicted to pills and falling in love with-and marrying-a publishing editor (Arkin) who's thirty years her senior.
And this is where we first meet her, she's just moved in with her husband to a retirement community trying to find something new to do, while learning that she might be going insane.
Written and directed by Miller (who also wrote the book the film is based on) "The Lives of Pippa Lee" is obviously its creator's lovechild and as such Miller has trouble knowing what to tell, what to conceal and she doesn't want to give us a bad impression about the people she so devotedly wrote, re-wrote and directed.
Therefore the characters are actually very interesting, even if sometimes they're stuck with ridiculous dialogues and selfconscious quips, but there is absolutely no real plot to follow.
She just keeps inserting new elements (even if they're old because they're Dickensian flashbacks) to make her heroine more appealing.
One of those elements includes new neighbor Chris (Reeves) who more than not turns out to be an excuse for Miller to pull all her deus ex machina moves.
But even with all her tricks and stylistic juxtapositions Miller can never really justify what she's doing and the "many" lives of Pippa Lee are reduced to her being single and then married.
Working with Wright Penn as top accomplice ("to be perfectly honest I've had enough of being an enigma" she teases) they make an event out of what turns out to be a not quite fascinating life.
The actress is at her best, she's tender and loving with Arkin, she's motherhood personified with the actors who play her kids (Kazan and McDonald) and she does her best Marcia Cross when she has to share scenes with her neurotic friend (Ryder).
Underneath her undeniable sexiness and appeal Wright Penn is above all bewitching. Try to take your eyes away from her and you won't be able to.
If only the movie had something else to say (we often wonder why do we need to know about this woman's life) instead of settling for facile resolutions and awkward quirk, then we would have been in for a real treat.
Because as it is, the movie comes, goes and Pippa is still as much of a mystery to us when the movie ends. "I feel like this is just the beginning" she says in the last scene, but perhaps only Miller is willing to go on this journey with her.

2009-11-26T00:14:00.000-06:00

Funny People **1/2

2009-11-25T19:17:00.007-06:00

Director: Judd Apatow
Cast: Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann
Jason Schwartzman, Jonah Hill, Aubrey Plaza, Eric Bana

"Comedy usually is for funny people" says George Simmons (Sandler) and the usually in that quote is the keyword to best describe the mood of this film.
Judd Apatow's third film as a director takes an inside look at Hollywood, filtered through a comedian's eyes.
Simmons is a comedy superstar, in the vein of Sandler, who made a name for himself starring in raunchy adolescent oriented comedies and crass stand up routines.
He's a millionaire but lives a pretty lonely life. Things change for him when he learns he has a terminal disease and he tries to make things right.
Not in a Frank Capra way, but right by his own standards; therefore he hires a down on his luck comedian named Ira (Rogen) to be his assistant and also tries to rekindle his love with old flame Laura (Mann) who has a husband (Bana) and children.
Sandler, who rarely gets enough credit as an actor (because of his career choices mostly) makes George someone we have a hard time liking.
He's the kind of conceited superstar who thinks the world asks too much of him-he even sings it-and only reaches down from his Olympus when he needs something.
But Sandler also gives him a soul. He doesn't turn him into a fable character ready for a big change; even when the screenplay tries to make us see him with both pity and disdain, the actor makes George someone who won't give a damn about how we perceive him, until he needs an audience to turn his next movie into a blockbuster.
It's a brave performance because he's never afraid of showing his ugly side, which is most of it.
Apatow as usual gives the supporting cast great moments and Mann once again shines as the complicated Laura. Her kind of down to earth sexiness is incredibly appealing and this time around she plays someone we'd have no trouble believing existed.
Some of her choices are ridiculous, but Mann plays them out like a grown up (perhaps the only real adult in the movie). Rogen once again plays the sweet, slightly awkward sidekick and he's good at it, while Hill bores with his umpteenth take on the potty mouthed nerd.
Bana was a real surprise, he plays an Australian and when the movie wants us to hate him (he's the only character who isn't in show business and has a corporate job) we simply can't, because the actor makes us realize that even something a Hollywood star can find boring, can be dignified.
His comedic timing is ace and the dislikeability factor the screenplay attributes him comes only looking as a manifestation of how he represents people like Simmon's worst nightmares, both in and outside the movie.
He's very handsome, while the other guys often make jokes about their average looks, he's successful and he gets the girl they wanted.
And as an actor Bana is proving that you don't have to say "fart" and "cock" to make people laugh; his sarcasm might just steal more laughs than Sandler's funny voice shticks.
With him the movie reveals its weakest link because Apatow never stops to ask what it means to be funny, he has forgotten that comedy isn't a universal language.
He takes for granted that by thinking of funny we must be the kind of people who laugh at his' and Sandler's jokes.
With this unintentionally arrogant move he assumes that he is a fine comedian.
And he can be; but his kind of comedy has only gained importance during this decade and "Funny People" is an egocentric-slightly self critical- ode to himself and his newly founded reign.

The Limits of Control *1/2

2009-11-25T00:39:00.006-06:00

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Cast: Isaach de Bankolé, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton
Gael García Bernal, Hiam Abbass, John Hurt, Paz de la Huerta

Watching "The Limits of Control" two questions come to mind: does Isaach de Bankolé ever smile and what the hell was Jim Jarmusch thinking when he made this movie?
The stone faced de Bankolé stars as a hitman on some sort of a mission that has him traveling across Spain where he meets with strange characters that give him matchboxes.
Somewhere in between conversations about molecules, Rita Hayworth, bohemians and old guitars Jarmusch expects us to have an epiphany about existence.
What he fails to see is that he's the one who's going through an existential crisis and a plot-less movie will not help him solve it.
The movie plays out like a really bad dream (if Jarmusch was trying to pay homage to David Lynch he never reaches the fascinating creepiness and surprising universality of Lynch's stream-of-consciousness movies) with selfindulgent cinematography by Christopher Doyle who does capture beautiful images, that play like awkward Renault commercials.
The saddest thing is that Jarmusch is probably aware of how empty his movie is and often tries to justify himself in the silliest ways.
When a gangster (played by Murray) asks de Bankolé "how did you get here?" he answers "I used my imagination". This response plays more like "The Matrix" by way of "Sesame Street" than as a spark to make us reflect on how the whole thing might be a dream within a dream.
During the film's only interesting scene Swinton appears as a blond (Jarmusch references tons of film noirs here) with a movie obsession.
She tells de Bankolé that she likes movies where you don't know if you're having a dream or watching a film.
Jarmusch should've learned that sometimes dreams, like films, should be kept all to oneself.

I Want Magic...

2009-11-24T12:55:00.004-06:00

Dan Kois profiles Cate Blanchett and Liv Ullmann for "New York Magazine" (read article here) as they bring their production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" to the United States.
If there was a play I would kill to see it definitely would be this one, so I thoroughly enjoyed how Kois interprets the magnificent actresses involved in this production.
"One might call Ullmann an archaeologist and Blanchett an architect" he says as he explains Cate's flawless embodiment through imitation skills and Liv's introspective, quiet performances in Ingmar Bergman films.
I hear that tickets for "Streetcar" are practically impossible to get, but those of you in NYC, try as hard as you can so I can live vicariously through you.
Tickets and information here.

You, the Living ***1/2

2009-11-24T00:51:00.006-06:00

Director: Roy Andersson
Cast: Jessika Lundberg, Elisabeth Helander, Kemal Sener
Eric Bäckman, Jessica Nilsson, Leif Larsson

Set somewhere between comedy and tragedy, Roy Andersson's "You, the Living" is the second film, of a planned trilogy, where the director explores human emotions through a set of vignettes.
There's not much of a plot to follow; the film is made out of fifty individual scenes (mostly shot in one take) where different characters complain about their lives.
An angry barber shaves an arrogant costumer, an elderly man laments how his bank treated him while a large woman rides him and an alcoholic woman cries while she asks her mother why is she serving non-alcoholic beer.
All of them are fascinating to watch as they contain entire lifetimes and reflect them in a few seconds. Andersson doesn't need to come up with extended dialogues for them to convey what they are going through.
We can see it in their eyes, in their posture, even in their surroundings.
The movie makes us wonder where does it take place, not only because of its claustrophobic-but-fablesque sets (most of it is done inside a studio) but of the actual population Andersson thinks is going through things like these.
Nobody in the movie is happy and yet we find ourselves laughing at their misery. This can work in two ways, as the director makes us forget our own troubles while he entertain us or by making us realize how selfish most of our problems are.
How can we go on and complain, like the people in the movie, when there's a million people complaining at the same time?
The film's greatest scene has a young woman (Lundberg) at a bar upset because she failed to make an impression with the rock musician she has a crush on (Bäckman).
She pauses and then tells us how she dreamed they were married.
Unlike the other characters in the movie who tell us their dreams, the girl's isn't filled with bizarre trials, apocalyptic crescendos and electric chair deaths, but with music, romance and hope.
This scene with its light Buñuel oneirism makes for such a hauntingly beautiful impression that the Dr. Strangelove-ish finale won't be what leaves the theater with you.