Thursday, December 22, 2016
Xmas? Time for another crude comedy
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
A woman who defies easy explanation
Isabelle Huppert gives a masterfully self-possessed performance in director Paul Verhoeven's Elle.
From the outset, it's clear that Elle has little interest in characters who behave in recognizable ways.
In the movie's opening scene, for example, a woman is raped in her home by a masked intruder as her apparently indifferent cat looks on. Once her assailant has left, the woman neither calls the police nor completely unravels. She collects herself, and goes about her business.
Two things may help explain this oddly unexpected behavior. First, the woman is being played by Isabelle Huppert, an actress who seldom allows herself a predictable beat. Secondly, Elle is the work of director Paul Verhoeven, whose filmography has ranged from Dutch art house favorites of yore (Soldiers of Orange and Spetters) to whopping Hollywood commercial fair such as RoboCop and Basic Instinct.
I can't say that Elle made a great deal of sense to me, but I agree with those who find fascination in Huppert's uncanny self-possession.
Nearly everything that takes place in Elle goes against the grain of normal assumption. When Huppert's Michelle, who owns a video-game company with her partner Anna (Anne Consigny) evaluates a game the company is in the process of developing, she insists that it must have orgasmic payoff. She wants to satisfy her audience, and isn't about to let rape put her off her business game.
Based on a novel by Philippe Djian, the plot is cluttered with relationships. Michelle's sleeping with Anna's husband (Christian Berkel), a man who treats their sexual liaisons with arrogance and entitlement. Michele's mother (Judith Magre) pays a hunky young man for sex, and then decides to marry him. Michele's ex-husband (Charles Berling) is a failed writer who has taken up with a younger woman (Vimala Pons), but still seems dependent on Michelle. Michele's dim bulb of a son (Jonas Bloquet) works at a fast-food outlet, and lives with a pregnant young woman (Alice Isaaz) who couldn't be more obnoxious and who eventually gives birth to a child that clearly was sired by someone other than Bloquet's character.
A Christmas party attended by most of the characters I've discussed in the preceding paragraph tilts the movie toward satire and helps introduce yet another character, a stock broker named Patrick (Laurent Lafitte). Patrick and his ultra-religious wife (Virginie Efira) live across the street from Michelle.
Attracted to the hunky Patrick, Michelle plays footsie with him at Christmas dinner. Earlier, she had masturbated while observing Patrick through a large pair of binoculars as he and his wife put up a Christmas display, a creche composed of life-sized figures.
I haven't mentioned a backstory about a heinous crime, but there's no need. No more can be revealed about the plot without offering spoilers, but Elle generates curiosity in the way it mixes bizarre sexual gamesmanship and bruising violence for what, in the final analysis, may be a strained critique of bourgeois pieties.
Whatever you make of Elle, you'll probably agree with the critical consensus that Huppert -- considering her work here and in the earlier Things to Come -- has given two of the year's most intriguing performances.
In Elle, she comes across as an uncompromising force of a woman who dares you to explain her behavior -- and knows that you'll probably fail.
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
A lightweight space voyage
Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt play characters who find each other in the depths of space.
A major corporation has developed technology that's able to ferry people through space in a state of hibernation until they reach a new planet called Homestead 2. By the time they arrive at a place that's free of Earth's deterioration and crowding, they'll have been in a state of suspended animation for 120 years.
One hundred and twenty years of watching people sleep isn't exactly a promising movie possibility, so as we watch the new sci-fi romance, Passengers, we quickly learn that one of the ship's 5,000 passengers, a mechanic played by Chris Pratt, has awakened up from hibernation. Of course, there's catch.
Pratt's Jim discovers that a malfunction has brought him back to life. The rest of the crew and the passengers are still hibernating. To make matters worse, Jim has been jarred awake some 90 years before the ship is scheduled to arrive at its destination. He's doomed to spend the rest of his life alone while traveling to a destination he'll never reach.
Cue the panic. Cue the loneliness. Cue Pratt growing an unruly beard to show us that time is passing, and that Jim is losing his grip.
Jim tries to think his way out of his problem, but can't. Instead, he avails himself of some of the spaceship's amenities: a basketball court, a very cool swimming pool with a transparent bubble at its end, and a well-stocked bar tended by a witty and perpetually pleasant android named Arthur (Michael Sheen).
All of this has the makings of a dark space opera with existential overtones, but unfortunately the movie has other things in mind, namely romance and jeopardy.
After spending a year going crazy, Jim decides to take matters into his own hands. He'll wake up one of the other passengers, a beautiful woman whose background he learns from the ship's records.
Enter Jennifer Lawrence as a journalist whose major ambition was to find a great story.
Romance arises and ... well ... I won't say too much more about what happens. Let's just note that the on-and-off romance between Jim and his newly awakened companion feels more contrived than emotionally grounded.
Director Morton Tyldum (The Imitation Game) has some major toys at his disposal -- aside form Lawrence and Pratt. The movie's spacecraft (Avalon by name) is full of long corridors leading to a grand concourse where the 5,000 passengers are supposed to mingle once they've been awakened from their space slumbers.
The great awakening is supposed to happen four months before landing.
Watching Pratt and Lawrence adjusting to the fact that they're alone in space creates some interest, even if questions arise about how such a sophisticated vessel could have no backup for what might be its most important function: sustained hibernation.
OK, so credibility doesn't much matter during moments such as the ones in which Lawrence puts on her bathing suit and goes for a swim in Avalon's amazing pool or when Pratt dresses like a janitor and uses his mechanical skills to build things or when one or the other of them engages Arthur in banter.
Of course, at some point, Lawrence's Aurora will learn that she didn't wake up by accident, but was condemned to live and die on this ship by the man she's falling for. Then what?
All I'll say is that the movie doesn't condemn us to 89 years of hostility, but contrives to find ways to put the entire mission in jeopardy as it stumbles its way toward a conclusion.
Perhaps because they could think of no place else to go, screenwriter Jon Spaihts (Dr. Strange, Prometheus) and his cohorts introduce another character, a ship's officer played by Laurence Fishburne. His hibernation chamber malfunctioned, too, which means even bigger problems loom.
A laughable finale doesn't help to give this foundering space voyage the lift that it needed, and the movie delivers its message -- enjoy what you have rather than looking forward to where you're going -- with no more eloquence than you'd expect if such a statement were to fall out of fortune cookie.
Passengers doesn't stint on eye candy (both human and technical), but its enjoyable moments suggest that somewhere in the Avalon's 120-year journey, a smarter script might have found time to play with some of the bigger questions inherent in the movie's premise.
But like Jim and Aurora, Passengers is stranded in a world full of cooked up plot points and, at key times, a lack of gravity. One-hundred and twenty years of space flight presents a challenge for any writer, but this crew would have done well to pack some heavier thematic baggage for the ride.
Logic murdered in 'Assassin's Creed'
Big name cast takes a shot at a movie version of a video game.
I suppose these days nothing should surprise us, but I must admit that I was taken aback to learn that Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling and Brendan Gleeson all appear in Assassin's Creed, a movie derived from a video game about which I happily confess total ignorance.
Plotted to the max, Assassin's Creed revolves around a long-standing rivalry between The Assassins and The Knights Templar, opposing groups that vie for possession of the Apple of Eden, a gizmo that contains the genetic DNA code for free will.
Under the guise of promoting world peace, the Knights plan to use the apple to control mankind.
Divided between two time periods -- the present and 15th Century Spain -- the story begins by introducing us to Callum Lynch (Fassbender), a murderer sentenced to die by lethal injection. Lynch receives his punishment, but instead of drifting into oblivion, he mysteriously (perhaps even incomprehensibly) wakes up in a strange Spanish facility run by Abstergo Industries, which is presided over by Irons' Rikkin.
Rikkin's daughter Sofia (Cotillard) takes charge of connecting Lynch to a machine she invented. It causes him to explore his genetic roots by living as his 15th Century Assassin ancestor, Aguilar.
The Assassins, by the way, are an amoral group that pledges to use darkness to preserve the light. They'll protect the Apple of Eden by any means necessary.
And, yes, this is another movie that takes on conspiratorial airs, one more shadowy projection of the idea that somewhere unknown to us ordinary folks, the real drama unfolds.
There's a point to Cal's time travel: By becoming his 15th Century ancestor, Cal will be able to tell his industrial captors (a front for the Templars) where to find the coveted apple.
Forays into the past give director Justin Kurzel, who directed Fassbender and Cotillard in a screen version of Macbeth, an opportunity to pour on the action; the Spanish segments involve blurry battles in which the Assassins engage the Knights who are trying to wrest the apple from its owner at the time, Sultan Muhammad.
At this point, Cal acquires a female sidekick (Ariane Labed), who helps him kick butt. He also leaps off tall buildings, which -- I've read -- is a bow to the video game.
The movie's complicated conventions (often spelled out in mind-numbing expository dialogue) make it difficult to care what happens.
Some of Kurzel's imagery is strange enough to command interest, a gathering of 15th century clerics at which two Assassins are to be burned at the stake, for example. Moreover, Kurzel knows how to create menacing moods.
It occurred to me that the movie might be more fun as a cascading series of shadowy images, providing the actor's never opened their mouths.
The actors, however, do speak, treating the material as seriously as if they were doing Shakespeare, which -- come to think of it -- would have been a far better use of everyone's time.
It takes a while, but 'Sing' connects
I'm not going belabor Sing, a commercially potent bit of family entertainment with a decent amount of humor to carry it past its dull spots. This animated romp centers on a show-biz loving koala bear named Buster Moon (voice by Matthew McConaughey) who needs to raise money to save his beloved theater. To achieve his goal, Buster decides to sponsor a singing contest. As the result of a misprint, the winners think they'll receive $100,000. Poor Buster. He intended to award only a $1,000 prize. The plot makes room for a teeming cast of anthropomorphic animals such as a rat who croons like Sinatra (Seth MacFarlane) and a very shy elephant (Tori Kelly) who eventually unleashes a potent rendition of Leonard Coen's Hallelujah. Scarlett Johansson voices a porcupine punk rocker. We also meet a singing pig (Reese Witherspoon) who tries to juggle motherhood and a stage career, no easy task because she has 25 piglet kids. Then there's the gorilla (Aaron Egerton) who abandons his criminal father's ways to pursue a career on stage, but still longs for Dad's approval. There are more animals, but I think you get the idea. Sing makes use of many already popular tunes before arriving at a finale that pretty much rescues the whole enterprise. Director Garth Jennings (Son of Rambow) and his team don't offer animated perfection, but Sing ought to give Moana some competition for holiday viewing in a season that's running short on fun fare.
Thursday, December 15, 2016
Music and romance in 'La La Land'
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone star in an attempt to breathe new life into the Hollywood musical.
I liked it, OK? Now, let me tell you why the much-praised La La Land didn't totally lift my spirits, change my mood or otherwise transport me to heights heretofore unattained in the history of human movie watching. And, no, I'm not talking about some post-election funk that prohibits me from enjoying anything.
For me La La Land is a bit of an oddity, a movie I enjoyed (some of it immensely) and also quibbled with (often).
Director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) opens the movie with a dance number staged on an LA freeway exit that sets a snappy pace that defines the movie in its earliest going. Scenes feel carbonated, as if they're about to bubble off the screen.
The single-shot camera work of the movie's opening proves fun in a razzle-dazzle sort of way, but if you look at other elements (the music and the dancing), you may be slightly less impressed. La La Land feasts on candy-colored imagery and an unashamed reckoning with its musical predecessors.
La La Land centers on a romance between aspiring artists -- one a jazz-obsessed pianist (Ryan Gosling), the other an actress (Emma Stone) who has yet to make her mark in Hollywood.
Watching Gosling and Stone do a Rogers/Astaire-like number on a deserted street overlooking the city's lights proves a bit of a strain. They're both trying their best, but I've seen Fred Astaire and ... well ... you know how the rest of the sentence goes.
Of the two stars, Gosling seems the least likely to turn up in a musical. He's playing a character who dreams of restoring a jazz club in Los Angeles, and he's written a song for piano that becomes one of the movie's major motifs. Sorry to say, the tune sounds trite when compared to Gosling's character's purported heroes: Bird, Coltrane, et. al.
Eventually, Gosling's Sebastian is presented with the opportunity to join a successful band led by former pal Keith (John Legend), a musician who embraces a youthful audience and thinks that Sebastian's devotion to jazz might be a bit pointless.
By this time, Gosling's Sebastian and Stone's Mia are a couple; she urges him to join Keith's touring show, but in the end, regrets having encouraged him. She thinks Sebastian has sold out his art, and betrayed his avidity. Who's left to defend the purity of jazz?
Stone's Mia faces her own struggle. She finds herself humiliated at audition after audition, familiar scenes handled with aplomb by Chazelle. Sebastian encourages Mia to write a play, and stage it as a one-woman show. She does. No one comes. She heads back to her home in Nevada, but eventually achieves her dream, and becomes a star.
Will the romance between Mia and Sebastian survive all this career angst?
While pondering that question, you'll find trace elements of Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, Vincent Minnelli and Jacques Demy. But even if you don't catch the references, you'll get the feeling that Chazelle wants to meld old-fashioned movie magic with an upbeat sensibility that can play to contemporary audiences.
The stars of the movie are production designer David Wasco, art director Austin Gorg and cinematographer Linus Sandgren, whose work affords considerable pleasure in quiet sequences in which Stone's Mia simply walks down a dimly lit street or in a fantasy sequence set at Los Angeles's Griffith Observatory, which you'll recognize as a centerpiece location in Nicholas Rey's Rebel Without a Cause.
Chazelle uses the observatory's planetarium for the movie's most fanciful and charming sequence, which offers a helping of gossamer enchantment that can't help but make you smile.
Don't be surprised if Stone wins the best actress Oscar for her work here. To the extent that the movie has a true beating heart, it emanates from Stone, who has been given a showcase musical number -- a song that she pulls off with more conviction than vocal talent.
The movie's bittersweet ending isn't entirely satisfying, but we have La La Land, and it's possible to like it without totally surrendering to all of its carefully concocted charms.
The ordeal of an iconic First Lady
Natalie Portman stars in director Pablo Larrain's Jackie
The day of President Kennedy's funeral, I and several college pals were positioned directly across from the White House. We'd driven from New Jersey to arrive in DC in time for the somber spectacle. We saw the horse-drawn caisson that carried the president's flag-draped coffin. We heard the hollow sound of hoofs on concrete as the caisson rolled past. We heard the Navy band playing Chopin's inexorably grim funeral march. We saw the riderless horse, a backward boot in its stirrup.
We also saw dignitaries pouring out of the White House, where the funeral procession had traveled after leaving the Capitol: Jacqueline Kennedy, Bobby and Teddy, of course. But I most remember the diminutive Haile Selassie of Ethiopia walking next to the towering Charles de Gaulle, one of the world's great physical mismatches.
The deep sadness and magisterial pomp of the moment was so incredible, none of it felt real.
Somehow we sensed that the nation not only was burying a president, but its belief in a reality protected from extremes. From that moment on, we knew we could discount nothing.
All of that came flooding back to me while watching director Pablo Larrain's Jackie, a movie in which Natalie Portman plays the First Lady whose brave and composed public presence told the rest of us how we were supposed to respond to the unthinkable demise of a president we viewed as invincible and robust.
Larrain uses his camera to turn Jackie into a floating, near spectral presence while at the same time trying to make her as real as the presidential blood that spotted her pink Chanel suit, the one she wore with a pillbox hat. There's a near ethereal quality to Portman's performance, the sense of a woman in the midst of shock, grief and the isolation that came not only from losing a husband, but from living inside the Kennedy mythology.
The movie begins in Dallas and carries through to the state funeral that Jackie planned. Its story is built around a shop-worn contrivance. A journalist (Billy Crudup) travels to Hyannis Port, Mass. to interview Mrs. Kennedy at the Kennedy compound. I couldn't make sense out of Crudup's performance, which seems to lack a great deal of compassion for Mrs. Kennedy and which seems out of synch with the way the country responded to the events of November, 1963.
Mrs. Kennedy tells Crudup's character her version of the events surrounding the assassination. She sometimes reacts in revealing ways that she insists must be kept out of print. She's doing her duty to protect what she knew would become a legend.
The movie makes reference to a famous 1962 televised tour that Jackie gave of the White House in which she sounded doll-like and light-headed. It may help younger audiences to know that comedians used to make fun of Jackie's voice.
Larrain has gone to great lengths to replicate the interior of the White House; he certainly succeeds in creating a credible environment.
Alas, not all of the casting functions in the same way. John Carroll Lynch looks nothing like Lyndon Johnson. Peter Sarsgaard is even less convincing as Robert F. Kennedy. We see glimpses of JFK, who's played by Danish actor Caspar Phillipson.
These missteps are important because for the movie consistently to work, we must believe we're watching real people -- not half-cooked, shadow-play representations.
If there's a point here, it has to do with the notion that during the Kennedy days, the White House was regarded as a modern Camelot, a place where art was respected and people comported themselves with dignity and grace. It was the grandest of illusions, and Jacqueline Kennedy helped to create and sustain it.
There's unquestionable allure in getting behind the scenes -- in seeing a partly speculative account of what led to the moment when I found myself across from the White House.
But it's not always clear what Larrain is after: He gives us a scene in which Jackie meets with a priest (John Hurt), who advises her that the big questions with which she's grappling may be unanswerable. You also may feel you're watching what happens when a heretofore supporting player suddenly finds herself thrust into a central role in a very public drama.
At times, it also feels as if the movie is about the weight of emptiness inside Camelot after the king has died.
Jackie may be about all those things: I suppose Larrain wants us to think that Jackie knew that Camelot was an illusion but somehow managed to believe in it anyway.
Death, love -- and a waste of time
A strong cast can't make anything credible out of weepy Collateral Beauty.
Burdened by a whopping contrivance, Collateral Beauty -- a movie that wants to talk about unbearable grief and the need for human connection -- resembles a luxury passenger liner that sinks soon after leaving the dock.
The luxury reference has to do with the presence of an A-list cast featuring Will Smith, Kate Winslet, Edward Norton, Helen Mirren and Keira Knightley. They're all fine actors, but Collateral Beauty blows the opportunity for great ensemble work by putting the cast into one credibility-challenging or maudlin scene after another.
The story might be viewed as a fable grounded in what may have been intended as a plausible reality, the world of New York advertising.
Smith plays Howard, a hot-shot advertising executive who loses his six-year-old daughter to a rare form of cancer. Mired in grief, Howard completely shuts down. Not surprisingly, his near-catatonic state threatens the life of the agency he founded with his partner (Norton).
The plot's big twist arrives when Norton and two of his colleagues (Winslet and Michael Pena) decide to hire a trio of actors (Mirren, Knightley and Jacob Latimore) to visit the dejected Howard as the embodiment of three abstractions: Death, Love and Time.
Why Death, Love and Time? In the movie's prologue, Howard tells his staff that these are the vital ingredients in selling products. Moreover, since the death of his daughter, Howard has been writing and mailing letters addressed to Death, Love and Time. The letters give voice to Howard's anger at the way all three have betrayed him.
Howard's colleagues have two objectives: They want to save Howard from his depression, and they also want to have him declared incompetent. They'll then be able to sell the company, of which Howard is the majority owner, to an eager buyer.
To achieve their goal, this trio of ad execs also hires a private investigator (Ann Dowd) to photograph Howard talking to Death, Love and Time; the execs then will have these figures digitally removed so that it looks as if Howard is ranting to himself.
When it's not focusing on Howard, the movie doles out other forms of pain. Winslet's character wonders whether she hasn't sacrificed the chance to have a family by spending too much time at the office. Pena's character deals with a recurrence of a long-dormant cancer, and Norton's Whit worries about fixing the screwed-up relationship he has with his young daughter. She won't talk to him because he cheated on her mom.
Putting all of these fine actors into one movie must have seemed like a casting bonanza to director David Frankel (Hope Springs and The Devil Wears Prada). Too bad Allan Loeb's screenplay doesn't play to the cast's strengths: It falls to young Latimore to give the movie's most (and perhaps only) compelling performance.
If all of these actors weren't enough, the movie adds Naomi Harris as a woman who leads a group of parents who've lost children.
The drama comes to a head on Christmas Eve making Collateral Beauty an offering for the season that's intended to mix laughs, tears and greeting card wisdom. Who knows? It might have worked had Frank Capra tried it during the 1930s.
Today, Collateral Damage looks precisely like what it is: a concept that never develops into a real or convincing movie.
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
The story of a great actor
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