'Couture' skims the fashion world

  

 Director Alice Winocour takes us to Paris for fashion week in Couture, a movie that tells three loosely related stories, one featuring Angelina Jolie.

 Perhaps you can already sense a problem. By having to switch the movie's focus from one character to another, Winocour loses the opportunity for in-depth looks at any of them, and Couture becomes more of a skim than a revelation.

  Jolie plays Maxine, an American director of an indie  horror film who's been invited to make a short opening film to kick off fashion week. 

   Eighteen-year-old Ada (Anyier Anei), an inexperienced, long-legged model, has been chosen to lead the parade of models that will open the show. Ada arrives in Paris from Kenya, where her family lives having fled wars in Sudan. 

    Finally, we meet Angele (Elle Rumpf), a make-up artist who's writing a book about her experiences in the fashion world. 

    Each of these characters faces different problems and opportunities. Maxine's participation in fashion week may provide her with a major career boost. 

   Ada must overcome shyness and fear as she enters a highly competitive and demanding business. 

   Angele wants to write successfully, to use her experience as a source of reflection.

   A health crisis adds to Maxine's anxieties. Early on, she receives a call from her doctor in the US. He insists that Maxine immediately see a French specialist. It turns out she has breast cancer. The news about her diagnosis worsens throughout the course of the movie.

    Following Ada provides an opportunity for Winocour to sketch the lives of young models, some of whom have already become cynical high-fashion veterans.

     Eventually, parts of Angele's book are heard in a voice over narration. Presumably meant to add arty flavor, they can sound a bit pretentious.

     Couture easily could have focused only on Jolie's character. Maxine’s issues become the movie’s most evocative and also do more to highlight complexities about women and their career paths, one of the movie's interests.

   Strong casting and a potentially rich setting aren't entirely wasted, but the resultant effort shortchanges the movie's major characters without finding enough meaningful ways to mingle their stories.

'Maria' needed some operatic heft

 

  When Maria Callas died in 1977 at the age of 53, the New York Times obituary called her "the most exciting opera singer of her time." 

 Director Pablo Larrain's Maria presents Callas at her height only in flashbacks when the singer recalls previous triumphs. Known for Jackie and Spencer, the Chilean-born Larrain tends to focus his biographical efforts on well-known women at low points in their lives. In this case, Callas faces an artist's worst nightmare: diminishing powers.

   Larrain's abbreviated biopic hits few high notes as it chronicles the final days of an artist who already has begun to fade; tormented by inexorable decline, both Callas and the movie lose spark.

   In Maria, Angelina Jolie plays Callas, who's living in Paris, where she occasionally meets with a pianist in hopes of regaining her voice. The pianist (Stephen Ashfield) refuses to coddle her. He knows she's done. She knows she's done, but our emotions aren't summoned by the magnitude of Callas's loss.

    By this time, Callas was popping pills and ignoring the physician who told her that if she kept pushing to regain her vocal prowess, she'd kill herself. She disregarded her doctor’s advice and suffered a fatal attack. Larrain opens his movie with Callas dead on the floor of her apartment, her body mostly hidden by a sofa. 

    There are two stars of Larrain's film: Jolie's Callas and Callas's lavish apartment, the Paris abode where she lives with her housemaid and cook (Alba Rohrwacher) and her loyal butler (Pierfranceso Favino). Favino's Ferruccio cares for Callas despite her sometimes excessive demands. He may evoke memories of Erich von Stroheim in Sunset Boulevard.

    Jolie brings regal aloofness to the role of a woman whose life began in poverty and ascended to the upper levels of celebrity, wealth, and artistic recognition. She was known for being “temperamental,” but some of the more publicized turmoil in her life (getting fired from the Met, for example) are omitted in this telling.

        Several of Larrain's flashbacks depict Callas's relationship with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), the shipping magnate who eventually dumped Callas for Jaqueline Kennedy.

       We see scenes of Callas's difficult girlhood. The mother she grew to hate made Callas and her sister (briefly played as an adult by Valeria Golina) provide diversion for German invaders during the Nazi occupation of Greece. Thankfully, the movie refrains from showing us how carnal these diversions may have gotten.

       Larrain makes structural mistakes, the worst of which involves having Callas interviewed by a TV journalist (Kodi Smith-McPhee) who's making a film about the great singer. Really? Haven't we seen enough of this worn out conceit?

       I’m not saying Maria isn’t watchable. Mixing black-and-white and color footage, cinematographer Ed Lachman creates a somber beauty of a movie, and the musical selections, some of which reportedly blend Jolie's voice with Callas's, create moments of majesty.

       Clips of Callas singing on YouTube make it clear that she performed with a heightened level of passion few could match. Larrain's film could have used some of the singer’s operatic sweep, a sense that it’s riding a tragic wave as it hurtles toward its inevitable crash. 

         And one more thing: Given its subject, the movie might better have been titled Callas. There are many Marias, but there was only one Callas. No offense to anyone who goes through life with that same surname.

    

Who knew? Peter Pan and Alice were siblings

 

      We may not have reached a post-racial moment in reality, but the movies have found one in Come Away, the screen's latest storybook mashup. 

     Director Brenda Chapman assembles a strong cast as she builds her story around characters from two major tales: J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

     Chapman's multiracial cast centers on two children from the Littleton family: Peter (Jordan A. Nash) and Alice (Keira Chansa).  Chapman's storybook movie includes a fair share of dark moments, beginning with the drowning death of a third Littleton child, the whip-smart David (Reece Yates).

    Initially narrated by the grown Alice (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), we first meet the happy Littleton family with Mom (Angelina Jolie) and Dad (David Oyelowo) presiding over a joyful brood. 

   The arrival of Mom's sister (Anna Chancellor) signals oncoming trouble. Chancellor's Eleanor believes that Jolie’s character has married beneath her status. Rather than pursuing a conventional occupation, Oyelowo’s Jack builds models of sailing ships. 

     As the story progresses, we also learn that a long-standing gambling problem has saddled Dad with debt.

      To further complicate matters, young Peter blames himself for his brother’s death. On the eve of David's departure for an elite boarding school, Peter persuaded his older brother to join him in a game that leads to David's drowning.

     Chapman, who won an Oscar for directing Pixar’s 2012 Brave, does a fine job bringing the movie’s fantasy elements to life. An overturned rowboat becomes a sailing ship when the kids pretend to be pirates. Chapman wants us to see the world through the eyes of the movie's children.

      As is the case with many such fantasies, the theme involves assertions about the primacy of imagination, the suggestion being that the transition to adulthood involves a whole lot of pain.

      Packed with incident and plot, Come Away touches many bases and makes room for appearances from such veteran actors as Michael Caine, Derek Jacoby, and Clarke Peters, all of whom sound wildly different notes in Chapman’s sweeping tale, which turns out to be a prequel to more familiar stories involving both Peter and Alice.

      The screenplay tilts more heavily toward Peter, emphasizing his insistence on remaining a boy, an enchanted state that  enables him to avoid the tribulations of adulthood that afflict his parents.

       I’ve never understood the appeal of perpetual childhood, but Come Away suggests that an unbridled imagination remains the key to freedom. 

      Chapman can’t fuse all the movie’s varied ingredients and Dad’s encounter with the man to whom he owes money (an impressive David Gyasi) probably gives the movie one plot thread too many. 

    Still, at its best, Come Away stands as a nicely realized bit of fantasy filmmaking that, like all the best such movies, isn’t afraid to peer into forbidding corners.

Angelina Jolie returns as Maleficent

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil: a mixed and not entirely successful offering.

Let’s start at the end. Before it’s done, Disney’s Maleficent: Mistress of Evil indulges itself in a mega-helping of Disney cuteness that’s designed to please those who love their movies served with heavy doses of syrup, the kind that leave audiences with a corn-fed glow.

In this sequel to the commercially successful first edition, Angelina Jolie returns as Maleficent, the witch who detests humans -- aside from Aurora (Elle Fanning), the human daughter she raised. Maleficent has inviting ruby red lips, but you wouldn’t want to dance cheek-to-cheek with her lest you be impaled on cheekbones that jut outward like ski slopes.
In this edition, the creatures of the moors (fairies, mushrooms, and trees that spring to life) are threatened by the human kingdom where Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning) is scheduled to marry Prince Philip (Harris Dickenson).

The early, amusing part of this second helping plays like a fairy tale version of Meet the Parents. Maleficent opposes the marriage but agrees to have dinner with the royal family: good King John (Robert Lindsey) and his not-so-good wife Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer).

With prodding from her faithful, shape-shifting companion Diaval (Sam Riley), Maleficent does her best to be civil. Jolie shines when Maleficent struggles to suppress her venomous impulses.

The original movie went big on revisionism. The sequel follows suit. Most of the time we find ourselves rooting against the humans, whose destructive ambitions reach full bloom in the person of Queen Ingrith. Pfeiffer delivers her lines with as much sarcasm as she can muster. But because the dialogue isn’t all that good, the impact of the Queen Ingrith's archness feels dulled.

En route to its happily-ever-after, the movie sets off a war. Wounded as she flees that early-picture dinner, Maleficent is rescued by another winged creature with horns. Chiwetel Ejiofor's Connal presides over a cave-dwelling civilization of creatures who look like Maleficent but don’t have her super-powers.

Some of these creatures -- notably the war-mongering Borra (Ed Skrein) -- are fed up with living in exile from treacherous humans. They want to make war on the residents of the palace. The pragmatic Conall opposes such engagement, acknowledging that humans severely outnumber the non-humans.

If a fairy tale movie threatens a great battle, it surely must deliver one. Mistress of Evil whips up a CGI-fueled spectacle in which the fairy tale creatures are attacked with a concoction made from flowers that ...

Never mind. Nothing here makes a great deal of sense, but director Joachim Ronning mounts the final assault on a large scale as the humans threaten to pull off a fairy genocide.

So, to what does all this amount?

Another mash-up. Part cartoon, part action movie, part romance, and part fairy tale, Maleficent doesn't quite stake out enough turf in any of those categories totally to succeed. But it's been tailored to please its audience and probably will.

You either can view that as an accomplishment or a capitulation or (as I do) a mixture of both.

Still, when you get right down to it there’s this: Pfeiffer’s Ingrith is no match for Jolie’s Maleficent. That means every moment Jolie's off-screen (and there are too many of them) leaves us eager for her return.

Do we really care whether Aurora and Philip are able to marry or would we rather look at Maleficent with her majestic wings, flowing horns and towering cheekbones? You know how I’m voting.

Another marriage on the rocks

Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie Pitt in a slog of a movie.

By the time, By the Sea -- a numbingly arty movie written and directed by Angelina Jolie Pitt -- begins its second hour, you may find yourself wishing that Jolie Pitt, who appears in the movie with real-life husband Brad Pitt, would descend from what appears to be an Olympus where the gods do nothing but suffer. Remote, aloof and in possession of some astonishing hats, Jolie Pitt's Vanessa is emotionally walled off from husband Roland (Pitt), a writer who -- as is usually the case in this sort of movie -- is blocked. Roland and Vanessa arrive at a French seaside resort to get away from it all, but wind up doing what characters inevitably do in overly arty movies: They bathe in their pain. Vanessa specializes in meaningful stares. Roland drinks heavily. Eventually, Vanessa and Roland wind up observing the sexual play of the honeymooners (Melanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud) next door. Thanks to a hole in their hotel room wall, Roland and Vanessa become peeping Toms. The story hinges on a dark secret that Vanessa harbors and which you probably will guess within minutes. By the Sea has the exasperating feel of a movie that's trying so damn hard to be profound, it forgets to have something say.

Trying to escape the bonds of tradition.

Jolie Pitt may have overreached in By the Sea, but she deserves credit for executive producing Zeresenay Mehari's Difret, the story of Hirut (Tizita Hagere), a 14-year-old Ethiopian girl who's kidnapped and raped so that she can be forced into a marriage with her abductor. Hirut, who shoots her captor during an escape attempt, faces a murder charge in a male-dominated culture. Based on a true story, Defrit focuses on the efforts of a persistent attorney (Meron Getnet) to save young Hirut from the death penalty. The filmmaking is rudimentary, but Hirut's story stands as a powerful cry against deeply rooted traditions in which women too long have been subjugated.

Surviving the hardships of war

Angelina Jolie directs Unbroken, an intermittently powerful effortt.

Louis Zamperini led a large and amazing life. As a runner, Zamperini participated in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. As an Air Force bombardier during World War II, he was shot down and -- along with two others -- spent a grueling 47 days lost at sea.

One airman died at sea: Zamperini and the other airman were rescued when their craft ran into a Japanese war ship.

Additional hardship followed. Zamperini was taken to a Japanese prison camp, where he spent two years being abused, tortured and tested.

Author Laura Hillenbrand told Zamperini's story in a 2010 book she called Unbroken, A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption.

Now, Angelina Jolie has adapted Hillenbrand's book for the big screen, and the resultant movie works best in bits and pieces. Zamperini's story becomes the basis for an inspirational tale, complete with an epilogue about the importance of forgiveness.

That epilogue was inspired by the fact that Zamperini eventually returned to Japan where he met with some of the soldiers who had tortured him, something we're told with end-of-picture title cards and footage of the real Zamperini, who died earlier this year at the age of 97.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It has taken a quartet of screenwriters (Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson) to whip this sprawling, but slightly one-dimensional material into shape.

The movie proceeds in chunks built around the major experiences in Zamperini's life -- from a mildly wayward boyhood to the end of the war.

Jack O'Connell, an actor of great avidity, gives vibrant life to the adult Zamperini, who came from a tight-knit Italian-American family.

O'Connell, who gave one of the year's most astonishing performances in the British prison drama Starred Up, again uses his physicality and spirit to create a character of near-preternatural focus.

As a young man, Zamperini (played by C.J. Valleroy) didn't begin to find himself until his older brother (John D'Leo) pushed him into track and field competitions. Zamperini subsequently became a high-school track star in his hometown, Torrance, Ca.

We learn about this after an exciting and scary opening combat sequence in Zamperini's B-24, a plane that came to be know as "the flying coffin.''

Jolie and cinematographer Roger Deakins give us a feeling for what it must have been like to fly in one those planes, how terribly exposed crews must have felt when they encountered enemy aircraft.

After his plane is shot down, Zamperini and two surviving comrades (Domhnall Gleeson and Finn Wittrock) drift at sea in a life raft, battling the elements, sharks, hunger and thirst.

The movie's prison-camp section revolves around Zamperini's on-going confrontation with brutal Japanese camp commander played by singer/songwriter Miyavi.

Throughout the torture segment, Jolie underlines Zamperini's heroic status as a man of indomitable will. Half story and half salute, the movie completes Zamperini's conversion from a character into an icon. We start to lose the man behind the symbol.

Unbroken is well-made, but it leaves one wondering precisely why Jolie wanted to tell a story that -- for all of Zamperini's trials -- doesn't really bring a new perspective to material that many other movies already have covered.

Jolie's intermittently powerful World War II drama never quite breaks the mold from which one expects it to be cast. Zamperini lived an amazing life: Jolie's rendering of that life gives us exactly what we expect.

'Maleficent:' A new take on an old tale

Sleeping Beauty for the 21st century -- beautifully crafted, but not always captivating.

Angelina Jolie can be positively wicked as Maleficent, an aggrieved fairy seeking revenge against the king who stole her wings.

Maleficent, of course, is the title character of Disney's reworking of the Sleeping Beauty story, a tale the studio told in a classic helping of 1959 animation.

With her cheek bones built to harrowing heights by make-up whiz Rick Baker, Jolie flashes predatory white teeth and keeps a cool sense of menace about herself.

She's striking and also a bit freaky looking in headgear that gives her a devilish pair of horns.

Director Robert Stromberg, production designer on movies such as Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful, creates an encompassing visual environment while telling the Sleeping Beauty story in a way that gives it a bit of feminist spin -- and provides us with the inside scoop on a story we thought we knew.

Early scenes introduce us to Maleficent as a child (Isobelle Molloy), a happy fairy girl who establishes a relationship with a human, a boy named Stephan (Michael Higgins).

Stephan will grow up, discover ambition, and steal Maleficent's wings, thus enabling himself to become king of the humans and forcing his childhood flame to turn toward evil.

The Sleeping Beauty of this tale -- Elle Fanning's Aurora -- is a smiling, blonde-haired girl who seems carefree and guileless -- and not nearly as intriguing as Maleficent.

Aurora's father, of course, is the grown Stephan. As king, Stephan (Sharlto Copley) insists on keeping his daughter away from the palace until after her 16th birthday.

To that end, Aurora is raised in a secluded forest cottage by three comically addled fairies (Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple and Lesley Manville).

All of this has to do with the vengeful curse that Maleficent put on Aurora at her christening: In a fit of icy rage, Maleficent condemned Aurora to prick her finger on a spindle at age 16. She'd then fall into a death-like sleep from which she could be roused only by the kiss of true love.

It's just here that the story takes an unexpected turn, about which a little must be said.

During her time in the woods, Aurora develops a relationship with the watchful Maleficent, and the movie raises a question that generates interest without much suspense: Will Maleficent stick to her guns or will she soften as she gets to know Aurora? How bad a badass is Maleficent really?

The tale seems to have been calibrated to maximize CGI: There are many odd-looking creatures, some of whom may a bit scary for the youngest kids.

Stromberg does a nice job with a character named Diaval, a crow that Maleficent transforms into a variety of different creatures, all of them charged with doing her bidding.

Some movies are pure stinkbombs; others are total winners; still others are decent in their way, but may not scale the intended heights.

That seems to be the case with Maleficent, a movie that engages fitfully and flies high at times. Beautifully crafted as it is, Maleficent doesn't consistently provide the desired level of captivation.

'Salt' is peppered with non-stop action

Angelina Jolie is armed and dangerous in Salt.

Angelina Jolie kicks much butt in Salt, a thriller about a CIA agent who's accused of being a Russian spy, and, as a result, spends most of the movie on the run. If you like improbable action -- no, make that impossible - action, you'll get your fill and then some from a movie that moves with Road Runner speed.

At one point, Jolie's Evelyn Salt leaps off an overpass onto a speeding semi-truck, and that's just the beginning of the sequence. The movie features feats no mortal could accomplish without either winding up in a coffin or a full body cast.

Salt? She takes a licking and -- as an old Timex slogan put it -- keeps right on ticking.

You can't believe a minute of this action, but the exaggeration can be fun, and - for the most part - director Phillip Noyce handles the mayhem with the kind of old-pro efficiency you'd expect from the man who directed Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, but who most recently has taken a sabbatical from Hollywood with small movies such as Catch a Fire, The Quiet American and Rabbit-Proof Fence. This time, Noyce abandons the logic that rules the physical world, and allows the action to rip as Salt tries to evade capture by two CIA colleagues (Liev Schreiber and (Chiwetel Ejiofor), fine actors who do what's required of them; i.e., they add seriousness and tension to a script that's not afraid to go over the top.

The screenplay puts Salt in jeopardy when a Russian defector (Daniel Olbrychski) turns up in Washington, and names her as a sleeper agent, timely stuff given recent news stories about Russian spies in our suburban midst. Salt denies any involvement with the Russians, and takes off in hopes that she can clear her name and save her scientist husband, who has been snatched by the very same Russians.

For a while, it looks as if Noyce has pulled off a nearly impossible feat, dropping mega-tons of fantasy action into a realistically presented environment. Cinematographer Robert Elswit has decided to keep the images on the dark side, and the movie has a brooding quality that suggests more importance than the story ever really earns.

I read somewhere that Salt resembles a Bond movie. Maybe a little, but the best Bond movies had winking humor, something that's lacking in Salt, a thriller with conspiratorial flavor that includes a new theory about the assassination of President Kennedy.

The dour mood probably is understandable. Much of the Bond humor involved 007's taste for high living, martinis and women. Evelyn Salt has no time for pleasure. She's interesting because she's not like Bond. She operates in a universe that's morally ambiguous. She's also motivated by personal concerns the likes of which seldom troubled Bond.

For most of the movie's fast-paced 100 minutes, Jolie looks deadly and dangerous, and some of the action is exceptionally well done. I had a white-knuckle moment when the script called for Salt to climb from window ledge to window ledge as she tries to flee her pursuers.

I happened to see Salt at a preview screening at which the film broke. During the time it took to get the screening up and running again, I asked my wife where she thought the plot was headed. She guessed right, which suggests that some of the key developments are not rife with surprise.

If you're a stickler for credibility, you'll want to steer clear of Salt, which is geared for a season in which we're asked to suspend disbelief as freely as we sometimes offer gratuitous advice. And given its pedal-to-the-metal approach, it's hardly surprising that Salt leaves the door open for a sequel. The way Jolie handles the action, it's likely we'll see one.