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Film Review

The long goodbye

Maria Poblet
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0
The long goodbye

arts@sfbg.com

Pierre Thoretton’s documentary L’amour fou opens with two clips of men bidding farewell. The first, from 2002, is of the French-Algerian couturier Yves Saint Laurent announcing his retirement in a moving and emotional speech worthy of his favorite writer Marcel Proust. The second is of Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s longtime business partner and former lover, eulogizing his departed friend at the designer’s memorial service six years later.

Thoretton’s film is suffused with goodbyes, many tender and candid, some portentous and rehearsed. To be sure, L’amour fou is a touching portrait of the powerful and tempestuous bond between Saint Laurent and Bergé, a bond that lasted close to five decades and resulted in one of the great empires of 20th century fashion. But it is also, alongside David Teboud’s two 2002 YSL documentaries, another entry in the hagiography of Saint Laurent, one cannily steered by Bergé as much as by Thoretton.

“Every man needs his aesthetic ghosts,” says Saint Laurent in his retirement speech. It is the 2009 exorcism of the various spirits that he and Bergé accumulated over the years — rare art deco furniture and décor; classical African and Chinese sculpture; singular pieces by Brancusi, Picasso, Mondrian, and Braque — from the Rue de Babylone apartment they once shared to the Christie’s auction block that provides Thoretton with a narrative around which to organize Bergé’s remembrances of things past.

Well-spoken and charming, Bergé still comes off as the punchy entrepreneurial foil to Saint Laurent’s dazzling but fragile genius. He can be both hyperbolic (praising Saint Laurent’s gifts) and forthcoming (discussing the designer’s demons). His penchant for grand pronouncements (“I don’t believe in the soul — neither in me or these objects”) is tempered by dark humor (auctioneers are “morticians of art”) and an occasional mischievous twinkle in his eye that suggests we shouldn’t take what he’s saying quite so seriously. Former muses Loulou de la Falaise and Betty Catroux are also interviewed but this is clearly Bergé’s show.

Bergé’s naturalness as a raconteur recalls Alicia Drake’s characterization of him in The Beautiful Fall (2006), her smart tell-all account of the high fashion demimonde of 1970s Paris, as a master rhetorician. Saint Laurent designed the clothes, but Bergé built the YSL brand. He knew the power of image. He saw the money in launching the Rive Gauche ready-to-wear line just as a new youth culture was shaking up the old guard, and spun perfume sales out of the controversy surrounding the launch of 1977’s Opium.

Bergé is still very much proselytizing the gospel of Saint Laurent, acting as figurehead for the house’s archival legacy and recounting its storied history, as he does here. In the end, though, the lavish parties, the jet-setting with the Rolling Stones and Andy Warhol, the gorgeously appointed properties in Morocco and the French countryside, and the staggering cache being boxed up in Paris for “the auction of the century” (which raised nearly $13.4 million in proceeds for HIV and AIDS research), are simply, as Bergé puts it, “how the money was spent.”

It is when Bergé describes sharing a quiet moment with “Yves,” or acting as caregiver during one of the designer’s frequent bouts with depression, or at the height of his drug and alcohol abuse, that he no longer speaks as a historian or businessman. Bergé’s register is of one who has loved deeply, madly even, and has fought greatly for that love. “I will never forget what I owe you,” he says to Saint Laurent during the funeral service and it is the lover’s prerogative that we will never truly know how much that is. 

L’AMOUR FOU opens Fri/20 in Bay Area theaters.

 

The night has a thousand eyes

Maria Poblet
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0
The night has a thousand eyes

arts@sfbg.com

Cheap genre films targeted for the drive-in or grindhouse aside, very few truly independent features were made in the U.S. before the 1960s, and those that were made seldom found an audience. As a result, most were soon forgotten — in rare instances rediscovered decades later, like the recently restored docudramas On the Bowery (1957) and The Exiles (1961), about Skid Row denizens in New York City and Los Angeles. Foreign films had a tiny theatrical circuit (albeit usually playing in cut and dubbed form), experimental ones none at all.

It was predictable, then, that a movie straddling pretty much all the above categories should have found no welcoming niche in the complacent 1950s. Elliot Lavine’s latest retrospective of noir and noir-ish oldies at the Roxie Theater, “I Wake Up Dreaming 2011,” is subtitled “The Legendary and the Lost,” terms that both apply to the film that kicks off the two-week series.

To paraphrase recent San Francisco International Film Festival guest Christine Vachon, behind every independent feature there’s a war story. Dementia (1955) is a good example of one little film that fought and lost — on every front save artistically, and perhaps in posterity.

Even by today’s standards, with our greater tolerance for “dark” and arty material, it’s an unclassifiable, commercially doomed proposition: an hour-long B&W nightmare in which an unstable young woman wanders empty urban streets, bounces from pimp to john to jazz club, commits acts of violence (or maybe just hallucinates them), and at the end simply disappears into the cosmos. (The opening and closing shots actually are of starry infinite space.)

Oh, and there is no dialogue, just a score by noted American composer George Antheil that uses wordless vocals by Marni Nixon (who later secretly provided the vocals for the famous leading ladies of 1956’s The King and I, 1961’s West Side Story, and 1964’s My Fair Lady) as a sort of human theremin. This very curious amalgam of noir, avant-garde, lurid potboiler and silent expressionism at various times brings to mind everyone from Roger Corman to Roman Polanski and Maya Deren. It was the first and last film for John Parker, about whom very little is known — save that he must have been gravely disappointed by the long road Dementia took to nowhere. (He would have been even more disappointed had he known years later his associate producer and cast member Bruno VeSota claimed Parker didn’t know what he was doing, and that he himself did most of the writing and half the directing.)

Shot in 1953 Los Angeles, Dementia was asking for it on many levels, with content not only bizarre and uncommercial but often downright offensive by the standards of the era. Its paranoid, unpredictably mood-swinging heroine (Adrienne Barrett, billed only as “The Gamine” — not exactly the ideal description for this character) wanders alone through the city’s squalid underbelly. A flashback to her childhood — staged in a cemetery, with living-room furniture amid gravestones — reveals mom was a sluttish harpy killed by a boozed and abusive dad, who was then stabbed by guess who.

Handed over to a fat “Rich Man” (VeSota) by a slick sleazeball (Richard Barron as “The Evil One”) who picks her up on the street, she stabs him too, pushes him out a penthouse window, and saws off his hand when it won’t let go of a telltale necklace. Pursued by cops, she ducks into a club where the jivey sounds of Shorty Rogers and His Giants suddenly turn her into a sleek chanteuse (albeit one we don’t hear) alongside bongos and hopheads. All this is shot with considerable noirish panache by William C. Thompson, who as Ed Wood’s regular cinematographer made some completely ridiculous films (notably 1959’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, with its own atmospheric cemetery scenes) look much better than warranted.

Barely releasable at 61 minutes, the completed film then found that threadbare length was the least of its problems. Shown to a succession of censorial boards, it was repeatedly deemed too unhealthy for public viewing, prompting critiques like “indecent, inhuman, lacking in moral and spiritual values, could incite to crime” and “grist for the Communist mill.”

Finally after over two years and 11 screenings of different edits for New York State’s board, it was cleared with an “adults only” stamp. Double-billed with a documentary about Picasso in A Unique Program of Psychology and Art, advertised as “the first American Freudian film,” it opened on one 1955 Manhattan screen to little notice. (However Parker’s friend, the great, soon-to-be late director Preston Sturges did call it “a work of art,” strangely noting “it stirred my blood, purged my libido.”)

Two years later Parker’s producer sold the movie — now cut to 56 minutes, with pasted-on purple narration spoken in spookhouse tones by then-unknown Ed McMahon — for rerelease as Daughter of Horror. Again it flopped, although in 1958 it would gain pop culture footnote status when a clip was used as what the onscreen audience is watching when they’re attacked by amorphous sci-fi monster The Blob.

It was as Daughter that the movie started gaining a little admiration in recent years, getting a boost from Re/Search’s first Incredibly Strange Films volume and finally a DVD release (with both versions) from Kino. Taken as good, bad, or just daft, it remains unique.

Other highlights in the Roxie’s “Dreaming” program include Dementia‘s co-feature, Robert Siodmak’s terrific 1944 noir mystery Phantom Lady; actor director Robert Montgomery’s 1947 Mexican anti-holiday Ride the Pink Horse, a sort of hard-boiled cinematic Under the Volcano; and a number of exceedingly rare lesser-known titles. Certainly the campiest of them are contained on May 23’s bill: 1956’s The Violent Years, a girl-gang movie featuring the inimitable dialogue stylings of the aforementioned Mssr. Ed D. Wood, and Dance Hall Racket, an unbelievably amateurish 1953 cheapie whose stars are none other than pre-fame Lenny Bruce and his stripper wife Honey. Inspirational line: “Big deal! I kill a guy and that makes me a criminal?!” 

I WAKE UP DREAMING 2011: THE LEGENDARY AND THE LOST!

May 13–26

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

 

Ride the lightning

Maria Poblet
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0
Ride the lightning

arts@sfbg.com

Since grunge broke, who hasn’t been fascinated by those unwashed, straggly-haired, flannel-clad legions who somehow were recast as Kurt Cobain’s minions? In reality they lurked on the sidelines of school functions and adolescent gatherings long before Nevermind, butt hanging from lips, back set to slouch, and coolly assessing everything against some maddeningly precise internal bullshit meter. If you thought all the entertainment was up onstage, you’ve got another thing comin’.

But whatever you called them — skids, stoners, dirtbags, headbangers, or heshers, according to the Urban Dictionary definition (“Reebok-wearing, mulleted person in acid-washed jeans and a Judas Priest T-shirt who, at the age of 28, still lives in his/her parents’ basement”) — these figures always seemed like the stuff of grimy, suburban legend because, unlike everyone at a certain tender age, they didn’t give a rat’s ass about what anyone thought of them.

That’s why Hesher director and cowriter Spencer Susser loosely modeled his title character after late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton. “He was someone who didn’t worry about what people thought of him,” says Susser by phone recently. “He wore bell-bottoms in the early ’80s, way after they were considered cool, and he got a lot of grief about it, but he was like, ‘Screw you.’ I think [the character of] Hesher is very much like that. [Burton] was never interested in being a rock star. He just wanted to make music — he was very pure in a way.”

Susser and cowriter David Michod (2010’s Animal Kingdom) have a feel for that independent-minded spirit — probably one reason Metallica allowed more than one of its songs to be used in Susser’s first feature film. Hesher itself also likely had something to do with it — if the intrigue with heavy-metal-parking-lot culture doesn’t do donuts in your cul-de-sac, then the sobering story, seen through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy, might.

TJ (Devin Brochu) has lost his mom, and her shockingly sudden, traumatic passing has sent his entire family into a tailspin: his father (Rainn Wilson) can barely rouse himself from his heavily medicated stupor to attend their family grief counseling meetings, while his lonely grandmother (Piper Laurie) is left to care for the wrecked menfolk as best she can. All TJ can do is try to desperately hang onto the smashed car that has been sold to the used car salesman and then the junkyard, even if it means riding his bike into traffic and incurring the wrath of a neighborhood kid (Brendan Hill) who gets between him and the crushed metal.

So it almost seems like a dream when he stumbles on and catches the attention of an aloof, threatening metalhead named Hesher (a typecast-squashing, perfectly on-point Joseph Gordon-Levitt), squatting in an empty suburban model home. Hesher threatens to kill him, then gets TJ into trouble with his pint-sized archenemy, and finally moves in, becoming his so-called “friend” and brand-new, unwanted shadow.

What’s a grieving family lost in its own tragic inertia supposed to do with a home invasion staged by an angry, dangerous malevolent spirit — one giant raised middle finger etched into his back and a stick figure shooting itself in the head on his chest? The man is a walking fail tattoo — with a supernatural talent for arson, an appetite for grandma’s home cooking and down-home nurturing, and an attraction to TJ’s awkward friend Nicole (Natalie Portman, who also produced the film).

Coming to terms with Hesher’s presence becomes a lot like going through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief: there’s the denial that he’s taken over the living-room TV and rejiggered the cable to get a free porn channel; the anger that he’s set fire to your enemy’s hot rod and left you at the scene of the crime; and finally the acceptance that there’s no good, right, or unmessy way to say goodbye — even if farewell means a beer-soaked, profanity-laced eulogy and walking the coffin past the strip mall. 

HESHER opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters.

 

Nothing was delivered

Andrew Lam
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0
Nothing was delivered

arts@sfbg.com

FILM A few wordless minutes into Meek’s Cutoff, we see a boy carving the word “LOST” into a log. You know then that Kelly Reichardt has made another movie about being stranded in America, this one a neorealist western. The year is 1845, and a three-wagon caravan is crossing the hardscrabble northwestern plains en route to the Willamette. The families have hired the rogue guide Meek (Bruce Greenwood) to show them the way, but he’s only got them low on water. The place we now call Oregon remains contested territory. There are dire murmurs that Meek may be a British agent, purposefully leading American settlers astray; Meek redirects this unease toward the prospect of race war. When the group captures a Cayuse man (Rod Rondeaux), the guide advocates hanging. Sanguine Solomon (Will Patton) maintains that they should keep him on to find water.

The distant shots of the men deliberating their best route — patent guesswork — could be from any of the three women’s perspectives, but we have little doubt the attentiveness belongs to Solomon’s wife Emily (Michelle Williams, reprising her role as Reichardt’s moral center). Millie (Zoe Kazan) is young and weak-minded (she falls prey to Meek’s fear-mongering); Glory (Shirley Henderson) is pious, pregnant, and reluctant to accept charity. Emily is skeptical of the wisdom of men.

Meek’s Cutoff is in large part about Emily’s being brought to action — first to try to earn the Indian’s trust by mending his moccasin, and second by holding Meek at gunpoint when he aims to fulfill his blood lust. Unlike the Indians in classical “progressive” westerns like Broken Arrow (1950), the Cayuse does not prove himself as the noble embodiment of liberal values. He remains wholly Other, and any perceived alignment with Emily is ultimately incommensurable. The film offers a clear moral preference for Emily’s stand, but Reichardt and screenwriter Jon Raymond’s loose chain of scenes — one imagines them as chapters with plainly descriptive titles, as in 19th century novels — neither rewards nor punishes such conviction.

After working with different cinematographers on each of her previous features, Reichardt has found a keeper in Chris Blauvelt: the slow, nearly psychedelic dissolves, distant views of riders approaching and lamp-lit conversations burnish this film with a newfound compositional integrity. Reichardt’s expressive sound design (a squeaky wheel is practically a character) and knack for staging muffled performances remain in evidence, but not everything works so well in Meek’s Cutoff. In particular, the title character’s transformation from charismatic braggart to hateful sociopath feels roughshod. By the time Emily has him at gunpoint, the scales have tipped. She’s too brave by half, and his monstrousness is similarly overstretched.

Yet one forgives this narrative convenience because Reichardt in other ways acknowledges the difficulty of mounting a western with a female protagonist. Gone are the telling gestures, close-ups, and music cues glinting through Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008); the oblique camera style shies away even from the minor pleasures of detail. These things have everything to do with the film’s torn attitude toward the genre: one in which key dualities of wilderness-civilization and individual-community are resolved by the arrival of a man who knows how and why to use a gun.

Williams submerges into the role as she did with Wendy, another marooned pilgrim, projecting tense defiance rather than magical iconography. Reichardt and Raymond cast the ideal of heroism still further adrift from any notion of destiny in their stand-still plotting of scenes. Meek’s Cutoff may be the antithesis of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — instead of a fantasy of fatherly love slicing through a postapocalyptic nowhere, here we have the struggle for the soul of a fragile community that may not survive, but is liable to be remembered.

MEEK’S CUTOFF opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters.

Dark slice of life

Andrew Lam
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0
Dark slice of life

arts@sfbg.com

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Despite the incredible current spread of festivals and formats by which art films can be exposed internationally, it’s still possible for masterful directors with considerable resumes to remain largely ignored outside their own country. Certainly that’s been the case with Agustí Villaronga, a fascinating Spanish director whose new film, Black Bread, is the latest in a career of superbly crafted films almost-commercial enough to gain U.S. release. Yet seldom quite enough.

Villaronga’s cinema is gorgeously cinematic, often historical, high in strikingly managed melodramatic content, sexually (often homoerotically) charged, frequently tinged by the fantastical, very interested in children’s perceptions of adult corruption. He’s a middleman between Luis Buñuel and Guillermo del Toro — less abstract than Buñuel, but evidently less accessible than del Toro, even if the ambitious Black Bread possibly got green-lit because in many respects it resembles del Toro’s international success Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).

Black Bread isn’t its director’s best work, though as usual it sports his aesthetic assurance, flair for alarming set pieces, and potency in juggling disparate tonal-thematic elements. It’s another very dark story — he’s never made a frivolous one — addressing sex, politics, and violent suppression toward both that manages to be expansive rather than claustrophobic, or simply depressing. It is, like many of his films, a great movie … nearly.

He started out, however, with a feature that was absolutely great, and could hardly have been more upsetting: 1987’s In a Glass Cage, about Klaus (Günter Meisner), a Nazi doctor who conducted World War II “experiments” on children. Years later, he is discovered hiding out by one of his surviving victims. Angelo (David Sust) is now an Angel of Death himself, committed to punishing his erstwhile tormentor by perversely reenacting his worst crimes — with the sickly doc, now helpless prisoner of a primitive “iron lung,” as captive witness.

Angelo invades Klaus’ home with alacrity, appointing himself sole attendant “nurse,” dispatching anyone who gets between him and his goal. This goal is a sadistic tables-turning that the pale, handsome-yet-ghoulish teenager wreaks upon his host family, to the extreme peril of its members and any unwilling “guests.”

Hitchcockian in their perfect storyboarded discipline, yet without his gloating chortle, the unforgettable set piece highlights of In a Glass Cage are excruciatingly tense, prolonged death-knells for characters Angelo chooses to eliminate. Yet there’s a terrible poignancy to the cruel proceedings.

After horrifying San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival audiences 25 years ago — there is a certain thread of malevolently closeted homoeroticism — this cult object remained long absent from North American access until a 2003 DVD release. It remains an astonishing peak in sick but brilliantly accomplished cinema.

Villaronga should have shot to the fore of international auteurs with that extraordinary debut. But instead he’s enjoyed just sporadic exposure and (I’d assume) a lot of frustration, given just four features realized in the near quarter-century since. Most are barely known here, if at all — 1989’s atmospheric if slightly overcooked fantasy Moonchild, 1997’s quasi-horror 99.9, or 2000’s The Sea, a sometimes shattering drama about three children who share a traumatic secret, then meet again as young adult patients at a sanitarium. All of them were arresting, however, and none were seen in the U.S. beyond a handful of festivals and (at best) extremely limited VHS or DVD exposure. (In a Glass Cage is showing at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room in May.)

Black Bread is, incredibly, Villaronga’s first theatrical feature in a decade. (He’s made the rare short, documentary, and TV project in the meantime, and is currently planning a miniseries about Eva Peron’s visit to Spain.) Based on a novel by Emili Teixidor, Black Bread is a complex narrative and stylistic hybrid blending history, homophilia-phobia, humanism, and horror, even more accessibly than before. It’s a festival crowd-pleaser that pretty much swept Spain’s Goya Awards in February, albeit sadly still no shoo-in for theatrical release hereabouts.

Largely about how childish emotions betray adult hypocrisies — a la To Kill a Mockingbird — the 1944-set Black Bread operates on several levels, all thorny but vivid. Their core is the bewildered perspective of almond-eyed Andreu (Francesc Colomer), an 11-year-old peasant child who witnesses a gruesome crime at the beginning, only to find his father (Roger Casamajor) accused by a corrupt Fascist mayor eager to scapegoat a former Republican rebel. Dad must flee, and Andreu is sent by mom (Nora Navas) to live with his grandmother and aunts until the heat dies down.

Cramming an epic agenda into 108 minutes, Black Bread encompasses roiling coming-of-age emotions, folkloric streaks, a few shocking revelations (including pederasty), and hints of fabulism in a nearby asylum-slash-death camp whose inmates include an angelic young man without (or possibly with) wings. It’s a terrifically orchestrated film, even if it feels somewhat overstuffed with ripe elements, almost over-accomplished in terms of slick showcase sequences — including a grotesque fever-dream of fag-bashing sadism — whose variably florid, stirring parts are less effective as a whole.

Still, those parts are often very stirring indeed, with excellent performances by the juvenile and adult actors. It’s a movie most viewers will find unusually rich in complication and artistry. Why Villaronga hasn’t had a half-dozen more opportunities to impress us over his skinny quarter-century output is anyone’s guess. But it’s surely everyone’s loss.

 

BLACK BREAD

Fri/29, 3 p.m.; Mon/2, 6 p.m.;

May 4, 9:15 p.m., $13

Sundance Kabuki

1881 Post, SF

www.sffs.org

Breaking point

Andrew Lam
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0
Breaking point

arts@sfbg.com

FILM When erstwhile Hitchcock (1948’s Rope, 1951’s Strangers on a Train) protagonist Farley Granger died last month, obituaries kindly forgot that hitherto he’d been judged as a limited-range pretty boy luckily cast in a few iconic films.

Beauty alone certainly can get you pretty far in Hollywood, now as then. But Granger’s big-lashed, puppy-eyed, dark-haired hunk had charms not strictly visual, notably a mile-wide vulnerability streak poignant in classic noir films like 1949’s They Live By Night and 1950’s Edge of Doom. He wasn’t that impressive an actor, or even an imposing personality like many golden age stars. But he communicated an attractive, soulful decency.

Similarly positioned is Keanu Reeves, who has managed a longer mainstream Hollywood ride while seldom escaping the perception that he hugely lucked out. He’s one of those actors spectacularly franchise-wealthy — due to those Matrix movies wherein his usual baffled solemnity was ideal — yet whom the public otherwise feels scant evident loyalty toward, and producers don’t know what to do with. Now that he’s aging out of his looks, can he transform into a character actor à la the similarly problematic Kevin Costner?

Maybe. Reeves played charming suitors in Something’s Gotta Give (2003) and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009), both very much supporting roles. He seems increasingly interested in indie films, which he surely doesn’t need to pay the rent. They generally suit him more than the myriad large-scale fantasy, action, or romantic vehicles that followed The Matrix (1999) and Speed (1994).

He’s certainly the best reason to see Henry’s Crime, a pleasant, middling, retro crime caper costarring frequently better actors at dimmer wattage than usual. Although uneven, Reeves still offers a turn equal to (if quite different from) his personal bests: as the second half of a stoner-goofball team in the Bill and Ted movies, and as Siddhartha in the good parts of Bertolucci’s silly Little Buddha (1993), which fully tapped a nirvanic tranquility behind his screen passivity.

Henry’s Crime is an old hat out of the Damon Runyon trunk, in which lovable crooks mix it up with hoity theatrical types and nobody gets hurt except (barely) the really bad guys. James Caan — who starred in similar enterprises during their post-The Sting heyday, particularly 1976’s excessively dissed Harry and Walter Go To New York — plays the veteran convict-conman who schools Reeves’ hapless Buffalo, N.Y., toll-taker Henry after our hero is slammer-thrown for an armed robbery he didn’t know he was embroiled in until it was over.

Upon release, Henry discovers the targeted bank and nearby theater had a Prohibition-era secret tunnel between them. Having already done the time, he figures he might as well do the crime by finishing the aborted bank job for real. He enlists local stage diva Julie (Vera Farmiga) as well as Caan’s parole-coaxed Max. Resulting wacky hijinks render Max a theater “volunteer” and Henry as Julie’s Cherry Orchard costar, all so they can access the walled-up passageway to the bank vault.

Much of this is ridiculous, of course, and not intentionally so. We can’t believe Henry/Reeves is a stage “natural,” for Chekhov or anything else (despite Mr. Ted having played Hamlet in 1995 Winnipeg). Caan and a solid support cast hit predictable notes; romantic interest Farmiga is atypically shallow in her admittedly stereotypical role. Yet her superior thespian chops seem to stir something in Reeves, who remains wooden at times but also flags a relaxed sweetness in their scenes and elsewhere. The climax is classic movies-getting-how-theater-works-wrong. But its contrivance functions to some extent because the lead actor convinces us it should.

Reeves is getting a tad jowly now, physique likewise surrendering to gravity. This could be great for him: he’s made his money already, maybe he can now surrender to being something more-less-other than a box-office behemoth. Costner managed it with The Upside of Anger (2005) and The Company Men (2010), while still playing the occasional lead (albeit in flops). The critical success he’s had as middle-aged losers after a run of critically disclaimed variably-superheroes could be Ted-slash-Neo’s own, if he’s willing to surrender glamour that much. He’d hardly be the first huge movie star to finally get some respect thataway. But he might be the (still) cutest.

 

HENRY’S CRIME opens Fri/15 in Bay Area theaters.

The joy of life

Andrew Lam
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0
The joy of life

arts@sfbg.com

FILM To say that Bill Cunningham, the 82-year old New York Times photographer, has made documenting how New Yorkers dress his life’s work would be an understatement. To be sure, Cunningham’s two decades-old Sunday Times columns — “On the Street,” which tracks street-fashion, and “Evening Hours,” which covers the charity gala circuit — are about the clothes. And, my, what clothes they are.

But Cunningham is a sartorial anthropologist, and his pictures always tell the bigger story behind the changing hemlines, which socialite wore what designer, or the latest trend in footwear. Whether tracking the near-infinite variations of a particular hue, a sudden bumper-crop of cropped blazers, or the fanciful leaps of well-heeled pedestrians dodging February slush puddles, Cunningham’s talent lies in his ability to recognize fleeting moments of beauty, creativity, humor, and joy.

That last quality courses through Bill Cunningham New York, Richard Press’ captivating and moving portrait of a man whose reticence and personal asceticism are proportional to his total devotion to documenting what Harold Koda, chief curator at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, describes in the film as “ordinary people going about their lives, dressed in fascinating ways.”

Press goes about filming Cunningham the way the photographer claims to capture his own subjects: “discreetly, quietly, invisibly.” Press, along with producer Philip Gefter and cinematographer Tony Cenicola (also a Times staff photographer), followed Cunningham for two years with no crew (after Press spent eight attempting to get Cunningham’s consent), tailing the photographer from uptown soirees to the runways of Paris fashion week.

Interspersed with Cunningham’s own sharp insights and footage of the photographer biking around Manhattan and throwing himself into oncoming traffic to get the perfect shot, are interviews with old friends and frequent subjects: Upper West Side grandes dames, fashion powerhouses, former editors, neighbors, and strutting peacocks. The loving accounts they share of encounters with Cunningham sing his artistic praises and unwavering kindness but stop short of revealing much about the man himself, save for his monasticism.

Cunningham famously lived for decades in a tiny studio apartment above Carnegie Hall filled almost exclusively with negative-stuffed file cabinets and an Army cot. His uniform is the cheap blue jacket worn by French street sweepers, augmented by a duct-tapped poncho in inclement weather. He rarely stops to schmooze, let alone sleep or eat. When a real estate agent shows Cunningham, who over the course of filming was evicted from his Carnegie Hall cell, the kitchen of the new apartment he will be relocated to, he genially scoffs, “What would I do with that?”

Cunningham’s disdain for the material and emotional comforts most of us take for granted might seem at odds with the worlds he documents (perhaps the film’s most shocking moment comes when Cunningham casually reveals he has never been in a romantic relationship). Fashion has become a hydra-headed beast of which street style, and the myriad bloggers who document it, have been completely swallowed by.

What Bill Cunningham New York makes clear, however, is that for this man, sustained by indefatigable reserves of passion and the ability to see what others can’t, the pursuit of beauty is not merely his chosen vocation; it has always been and always will be a calling.

BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters.

Looking glass love

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Looking glass love

FILM Abbas Kiarostami’s beguiling new feature signals “relationship movie” with every cobblestone step, but it’s manifestly a film of ideas — one in which disillusionment is as much a formal concern as a dramatic one. Typical of Kiarostami’s dialogic narratives, Certified Copy is both the name of the film and an entity within the film: a book written against the ideal of originality in art by James Miller (William Shimell), an English pedant fond of dissembling. After a lecture in Tuscany, he meets an apparent admirer (Juliette Binoche) in her antique shop. She remains nameless (and is referred to in the credits as “She”) even as she steers them toward their day in the country, though he doesn’t seem to notice.

Their dialogues really begin in the car (a prominent setting in many of Kiarostami’s films). We watch them talk for several minutes in an unbroken two-shot, amiably distracted by the windshield’s scrolling reflection of the street. They gauge each other’s values using her sister as a test case — a woman who, according to the Binoche character, is the living embodiment of James’ book. Do their relative opinions of this off-screen cipher constitute characterization? Or are they themselves ciphers of the film’s recursive structure? Kiarostami makes us wonder.

They begin to act as if they were married midway through the film, though the switch is not so out of the blue: Kiarostami’s narrative has already turned a few figure-eights, and the role-playing initially comes of a café matron’s unremarkable misunderstanding. What’s strange — and pointedly wearying — is how little this shift alters their quarrelsome dynamic. Experience bears this much out: in intimate conversation, hypothetical premises are no safeguard from genuine emotions; to the contrary, we often invent them precisely to uncap recrimination. If Certified Copy‘s game resembles an acting exercise, that makes sense too given that actors like Binoche are garlanded for channeling authentic-seeming emotions in contrived scenarios. The mismatched casting of Shimell (an opera singer, blocky as an actor) and Binoche (overreaching) underlines this reflective aspect of the film, as does Kiarostami’s deliberate compositional strategies (marked especially by recessional staging and doublings within the frame).

We’re not exempt from the character’s misconceptions, starting with the fact that Kiarostami plainly wants us to mistake Certified Copy for another kind of movie. Tellingly, two rare POV shots in the film turn on misperception and illusion. In the first, James watches a couple in a piazza. The husband appears to be shouting at his wife, but when he turns the cell phone is revealed. (After a brief introduction, the stranger, played by Buñuel regular Jean-Claude Carrière, tells James in confidence he thinks that all She really needs is a tender gesture — succinctly expressing our own desires as an audience). Later, She looks out the window of an empty trattoria on an idyllic wedding scene. Kiarostami cuts back to her brightened face, giving a little object lesson in romantic projection. (Earlier the café matron warns her, “It’d be stupid of us to ruin our lives for an ideal.”)

Taking Kiarostami’s bait, several critics have already deemed Certified Copy derivative of many other elliptical romances. The strongest case for an “original” comes of Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (1954). Rossellini also makes use of his leads’ contrasting nationalities and acting styles; the car enclosure is similarly emphasized in both films; and Kiarostami cleverly plays on Ingrid Bergman’s emotionally resonant walks through museums and ruins throughout Certified Copy. Of course Voyage to Italy‘s premise is reversed — a married couple acts as if strangers — but the real difference is that while Rossellini’s masterpiece realizes first-person feelings in a third-person approach, Kiarostami stays in the shadow of doubt to the end.

CERTIFIED COPY opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters.

 

Something wild

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Something wild

arts@sfbg.com

FILM There are few contemporary filmmakers who grasp narrative as an expressive instrument in itself, and even among them Apichatpong Weerasethakul seems special. Like other influential artists from the provinces — he grew up in the rural northeast of Thailand — Apichatpong has developed a sui generis style by rethinking the shape of the container. When the transitional cinema of 2000-10 is recalled, his shorts, gallery installations, and five primary features (let us now praise them: 2000’s Mysterious Object at Noon, 2002’s Blissfully Yours, 2004’s Tropical Malady, 2007’s Syndromes and a Century, and now 2010’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) will appear uniquely evolved.

For those yet unconvinced, it’s important to note that while Apichatpong is sometimes pegged as a critic’s darling, he’s also highly esteemed by other filmmakers. I think this is because he entrusts the immersive qualities of sound and image and the intuitive processes of narrative. Like animals, his films change form as they move. Their regenerative story structures and sensuous beauty betray a motivating curiosity about the nature of perception as filtered through memory, desire, landscape, spirituality, and social ties. All of Apichatpong’s films have a science-fiction flavor — the imaginative leap made to invent parallel worlds that resemble our reality but don’t quite behave — but Uncle Boonmee is the first to dress the part.

It goes like this: Jen and her son Tong visit her brother-in-law Boonmee at his rural farm. Every evening, his attendant Rai, a migrant worker from Laos, drains Boonmee’s failing kidney. Spirits gather for the dying uncle; in a wonderfully framed and acted long scene around the dinner table, he is met by the ghost of his wife Huay and his son Boonsong, who since disappearing into the jungle with his camera has taken the form of an ape creature with electro-red eyes. Back in daylight, Boonmee tours Jen around the farm. They taste honey together, and he tells her that he thinks his illness is karmic retribution for killing too many Communists in the forest.

Before Boonmee finally commits himself to the cradle of a cave, there are excursions to the past; to unnamed alternate realities (a fantastic interlude in which, you may have heard, a princess finds love with a catfish); and to dreams of the future. Back in the city, Jen and her daughter tally donations for Boonmee’s funeral. Tong comes to the door, only now he’s a monk. He wants a shower and something to eat — earthly things.

This is the gist, but not the grain. For that, you need the enveloping sound field of the jungle; the sly style of cutting that configures the jumps between worlds as if they were reaction shots; the day-for-night jungle saturating every inch of the frame; the many unenclosed shelters from porch to cave. These formal features are porous, as should be the film’s appeal. That the film won the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival was instantly claimed as a triumph for film culture (which it was), but Uncle Boonmee has something to say to those interested in Buddhism, installation art, Jung, astrophysics, experimental music, animism … I could go on. If that list makes it sound a very San Francisco-appropriate movie, that’s not wrong either.

Within the film itself, the central themes of transmigration and reincarnation are widened every step of the way. The supernatural visitations clearly echo the presence of illegal “aliens,” for instance, just as the monkey-spirits and omnipresent insects evoke the lingering memory of those massacred Communists troubling Boonmee’s final hours. And yet Boonmee feels nothing like a dutiful allegory, in part because its unordered clusters of association ensure many prisms through which to apprehend its compounded light.

Another is cinema. Apichatpong has explained that he conceived of Uncle Boonmee‘s stylistic shifts as a panorama of film history. Distinct passages recoup Thai costume drama, idyllic French verité, TV family drama, and Apichatpong’s own long take style. The transformations call attention to yet another medium, and work to crystallize two resonant aspects of cinema’s temps perdus: its disembodied nature and vicarious consummation of the past. Film has itself entered a Boonmee-like twilight, so when Apichatpong refers to Uncle Boonmee‘s spirit of lamentation in interviews, he’s talking as much about the vessel as the story.

But one need not decipher symbols to enjoy Apichatpong’s films — it’s a matter, rather, of sharing in his sensibility. Like all his work, Uncle Boonmee has a strong basis in Apichatpong’s own idiosyncratic personal history. But the film has the same relationship to autobiography as Mysterious Object at Noon did to ethnography. That film used the surrealist game of exquisite corpse as a model to interact with documentary subjects. Apichatpong traveled from city to country on narrative threads invented, elaborated on, and acted out by those appearing on camera. The premise is that the kernels of individual experience and insight can be followed to something like collective knowledge — that we might locate the self, in other words, between selves. None of the secondary readings are remarkable in themselves; it’s the connectedness that counts.

UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES opens Fri/4 at the Sundance Kabuki.

Choose or lose

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Choose or lose

arts@sfbg.com

FILM With its plentitude of female political stars, the Tea Party finds U.S. feminism at an interesting if inevitable developmental stage — wherein people who never would have gotten this far without liberationists’ path-clearing reject progressivism altogether. They no longer identify with a historically oppressed viewpoint, but rather from an angry, gender-neutral stance of entitlement allegedly stolen by cunning have-nots and slippery liberals.

They’ve never felt enough second-class citizenry to see gender as “the” issue. Yet right-wingers’ international panic button, “Islamic fundamentalists,” are also all about family values. Christian nations dominated world politics for so long it’s understandably hard for Westerners to grasp, let alone accept, that a different age-old faith looks set to control that discourse in our immediate future. (Buddhism, where are you? Oh yeah: busy ignoring all this.)

And the driving forces aren’t assimilationist, like those presumably nice folks whose mosque peacefully shares my Lower Polk neighborhood with a famous tranny nightclub and fire house. Rather, they are the pissed-off rank citizens, recruited by more privileged leaders to relatable activity outrage toward a deep disapproval of perceived Western moral decay. Just like Sarah Palin!

Does she see women’s issues as a significant concern? Most unlikely. She’s never been constrained by her family — more likely, as copious public exposure suggests, she’s been Santa-whipping its cadre of very stupid reindeer toward some destination, even if off a cliff (hello, Bristol, hello).

Palin would doubtless be horrified at the injustices dramatized in potent German drama When We Leave. It’s about Umay (Sibel Kekilli from 2004’s Head-On), who leaves a seriously abusive Istanbul husband with their young son Cem, seeking shelter from her Turkish family in Berlin. Initially welcoming, they grow hostile once the shame of her spousal abandonment ripples endlessly outward.

To keep Cem from being kidnapped and taken “home,” she eventually moves into a safe house. She gets a job, potential new boyfriend (the endearing Florian Lukas from 2008’s North Face), new apartment. But the pull of family is inexorable, and no location-shifting games are ultimately able to protect her.

Feo Aladag’s feature writing-directing debut goes out on a narrative limb with an improbable risk Umay takes at the two-thirds point. It strains credulity, but does heighten dramatic tension. It’s no spoiler to reveal that When We Leave‘s first moments reveal it deals with that near-unbridgeable cultural gap known as honor killings. Still, it might spoil something to say Aladag subsequently licks, seals, and otherwise pushes her emotional envelope to an excessively manipulated degree — D.W. Griffith himself might cry melodrama’s corn level exceeded.

Nonetheless, the real-world realities are more than real enough. Twenty years ago the 1991 Sally Field vehicle (imagine a world in which such things existed!) Not Without My Daughter struck many as suspect and kinda racist for dramatizing a real-life American woman’s attempt to flee her husband’s Iran with their child. Now When We Leave comes as no surprise.

Today, notions of the roles and rights of women in a just society differ painfully around the world, “developed” and otherwise. A basic tenet of U.N., E.U., and other bodies’ diplomatic interventions is that women be given equal rights — or at least legal freedom from domestic violence, rape, underage marriage, and other abuse. After so many decades of progress, it now seems the driving planetary political tide no longer pushes that-a-way.

When We Leave is a flawed drama that nonetheless underlines an increasing, confusing divide between ideological extremists “East” and “West.” How can we be on the brink of global chaos when both most-agitative sides basically agree women should be barefoot and pregnant? Excepting the exceptional women now in political power — too many are often silent, whether due to compromise or sheer denial.

WHEN WE LEAVE opens Fri/4 in Bay Area theaters.

Where were you?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Where were you?

marke@sfbg.com

FILM Amid the worshipful bromides that attended the 100th birthday of zombie Ronald Reagan on Feb. 6, gay blogger Joe.My.God. helped bring back to light a transcript of a 1982 press briefing Q&A session between Reagan administration spokesman Larry Speakes and journalist Lester Kinsolving. It’s the first known time that AIDS was brought up at the White House.

Lester Kinsolving: Larry, does the president have any reaction to the announcement — the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?

SPEAKES: What’s AIDS?

LK: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the president is aware of it?

SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.)

LK No, I don’t …

SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter.)

LK: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?

The answer, as the briefing spiraled into hysterics, was yes. It’s long been a source of bitterness that Reagan didn’t publicly refer to AIDS until 1987, after the disease had officially killed 20,849 Americans, been identified in 113 countries, and started to be “normalized” by the infection of young white children and closeted Hollywood superstars. But it was the laughter as gays lay dying that brought an angry population together, and that still rings in the ears of those who survived.

Reagan isn’t mentioned in David Weissman’s important and moving new documentary about San Francisco’s early response to the AIDS epidemic, We Were Here — although his communications director Pat Buchanan and Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell get split-second references, as does the heinous Proposition 64, the heroically defeated 1986 California ballot measure that could have led the way to quarantining gays. We Were Here isn’t a political polemic about the lack of governmental support that greeted the onset of the disease. Nor is the film a kind of cinematic And the Band Played On, exhaustively laying out all the historical and medical minutiae of HIV’s dawn. (See PBS Frontline’s engrossing 2006 The Age of AIDS for that.) There’s no mention of crystal meth, the Internet, the HIV denialist movement, protease inhibitors, depression, or survivor guilt. ACT-UP and the AIDS quilt are discussed only briefly. And you’ll find virtually nothing about the infected world outside the United States or the ongoing fight against the disease.

A satisfying 90-minute documentary couldn’t possibly cover all the aspects of AIDS, of course, even the local ones. Instead, Weissman’s film, codirected with Bill Weber and full of often astonishing tidbits, concentrates mostly on AIDS in the 1980s and tells a more personal and, in its way, more controversial story. What happened in San Francisco when gay people started mysteriously wasting away? And how did the epidemic change the people who lived through it?

The first question provides the narrative framework of the film. In the beginning, we’re introduced to five quintessentially San Franciscan characters, identified only by their first names: Ed, Paul, Daniel, Guy, and Eileen. As they tell their stories about how and why they came to San Francisco, and familiar-yet-still-striking archival photos of an unfettered 1970s Castro District fill the screen, you begin to realize Weissman’s impressive canniness in choosing to focus on these wise and almost preternaturally calm people, who turn out to be major players in the horror that slowly engulfs the film. (And We Were Here is indeed structured like a horror flick, with subtle early notes of discord foreshadowing the graphic images to come. The only thing missing is the screaming.)

Guy, for example, is Guy Clark of the legendary Guy’s Flowers in the Castro. He leads the story from the “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” era through the flower-bedecked funerals of the stricken — touching for a moment on the reaction in SF’s African American community — before bearing witness to a recent miraculous recovery, a man actually rising from a wheelchair to walk again. Other participants tell the stories of SF General Hospital’s groundbreaking AIDS Ward 5B/5A, the Shanti Project, Visual AIDS, and the “San Francisco model” of multifaceted, compassionate care for people with AIDS* before contemporary treatments became available.

The tales are well told and expertly woven together, as in Weissman’s earlier doc The Cockettes. Most of these people necessarily focused on the daily work of trying to help in order to stay sane. But where We Were Here really hits home is in its foregrounding of many unspoken or buried truths about that specific AIDS period that are in danger of being lost (one of which is that people who lived with HIV back then were often scaldingly candid about what was happening to their bodies.)

AIDS was annoying — it just went on and on. Participant Ed talks honestly about how he had to give up caring for patients out of exhaustion. AIDS got gay people where it really hurt: their vanity. The whole thing really fucked with your look. AIDS was bewildering. Suddenly people who had dropped out and run away to the Gay Mecca had to become medical experts, their recreational chemicals replaced with excruciating concoctions of exotic panic treatments. And women actually existed during AIDS. One of the most touching stories is about how the lesbian community rushed to donate blood.

The biggest act of emotional archeology, however, is the acknowledgement that some good came of AIDS. Not just in the well-known sense that it brought a marginalized community together and showed gay people as humans. It also personally transformed the narrators. Most of them found their calling, maybe lifelong satisfaction, during the AIDS crisis. We Were Here will affect viewers on a deep level, perhaps allowing many to weep openly about what happened for the first time. But it’s no mere sobfest. (My dead friends would have hated that.) It’s a testament to the absolute craziness of life, and the strange places it can take you — if you survive it.

WE WERE HERE OPENING PARTY with Rufus Wainwright Fri/25, 7:30 p.m., $25. Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF. Film plays the Castro Theatre through March 3. www.castrotheatre.com, www.wewereherefilm.com

*An earlier version of this article used the term “AIDS victims” to refer to those who had passed away from the disease. That term has a long and derogatory history, and still offended some readers, even when not used to refer to persons living with AIDS (PWAs), so we have replaced it above. It’s good evidence of how this film is re-enlivening debates. 

Life after death

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Life after death

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM “I like telling the story of life better than I do living it,” Spalding Gray explains in Steven Soderbergh’s And Everything Is Going Fine, a tribute to the late performer that cobbles together interviews and scenes from Gray’s trademark autobiographical monologues (including the award-winning Swimming to Cambodia, made into a film in 1987). Without using a narrator or any other talking heads, Everything emerges a poignant portrait — and a masterful work of editing, considering the man left hours and hours of storytelling behind.

“Behind,” that is, when he committed suicide in 2004. Everything doesn’t mention Gray’s death, but it looms over the whole movie, particularly since Gray — whose mother killed herself in 1967 — was fascinated by mortality. It’s hard to accuse Soderbergh of deliberately culling foreboding clips, since death (Gray’s mother’s, and fantasies about his own demise) was a theme the performer revisited obsessively.

That’s not to say he was totally without joy. He lights up when discussing his love of acting, sparked early in life and encouraged by a teacher who remarked on “Spud’s” excellent timing. Though he mostly kept to the stage (“I’m an inverted method actor. I was using myself to play myself. I was playing with myself!”), he did appear in several films — he met Soderbergh when the director cast him as a (suicidal) character in 1993’s King of the Hill; Soderbergh also directed the film version of performance piece Gray’s Anatomy (1996). The birth of Gray’s first child — a typically overwrought life experience since his baby mama wasn’t his long-term partner, but a woman he’d been having an affair with — turned the self-absorbed Gray on his head. He married his son’s mother and built a life with her, her daughter from a previous relationship, their first son, and their soon-to-arrive second son.

Though Gray did most of his monologues seated behind a desk, there’s a performance excerpt in Everything where he recreates his family having a spontaneous dance party to Chumbawumba’s “Tub Thumper.” It’s a transcendently playful moment, and the audience erupts into stunned applause when a grinning Gray shuffles back behind his desk.

But as Gray fans know, the famously morbid storyteller wasn’t demon-free for long: a gruesome 2001 car accident while vacationing in Ireland left him physically mangled and mentally shaken. Three years later, he took his fateful last trip on the Staten Island Ferry. With the blessing of Gray’s widow, Soderbergh took on the mighty task of telling his friend’s life story; like Gray, Everything‘s a downer, but moving, and not without thought-provoking after effects. 

AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE opens Fri/18 at the Sundance Kabuki.

Beige to the bone

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Beige to the bone

arts@sfbg.com

FILM What if The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) got so Parks and Rec‘d at The Office party that he ended up with a killer Hangover (2009)? What then, huh? Just maybe the morning-after baby would be Cedar Rapids — named for the determinedly downtempo, unpretentious Iowa city where the smell of cooked oats hung in the air and students from nearby Iowa City, like yours truly, communed regularly at the local arena to bang head to big boys like Metallica. Sweet. And likewise director Miguel Arteta (2009’s Youth in Revolt) wrings sweet-natured chuckles from his banal, intensely beige wall-to-wall convention center biosphere, spurring such ponderings as, should John C. Reilly snatch comedy’s real-guy MVP tiara away from Seth Rogen (Reilly would never pull a Green Hornet on us, would he)? Is this the every-bro coming-of-ager that last year’s Due Date wanted to be before stumbling on its own smugness?

Consider Tim Lippe (Ed Helms of The Hangover), the polar opposite of George Clooney’s ultracompetent, complacent ax-wielder in Up in the Air (2009). He’s the naive manchild-cum-corporate wannabe who’s never been on a plane, much less partied with the competition. Lippe never quite graduated from Timmyville into adulthood: he’s banging his seventh-grade teacher (Sigourney Weaver) and still working at the small-town insurance company in Brown Valley, Wis., that took him on as a teenaged file clerk when his mother passed.

So when his insurance company’s star employee perishes in an autoerotic asphyxiation accident, it’s up to Lippe to hold onto his firm’s two-star rating — bestowed on upstanding insurance peddlers with good Christian values — and make its case at an annual convention in Cedar Rapids. Life conspires against him, however, and despite his heartfelt belief in insurance as a heroic profession, Lippe immediately gets sucked into the oh-so-distracting drama — in the form of playful playa Joan (Anne Heche); buttoned-up roommate Ronald, whose sole guilty pleasure seems to be The Wire (Isiah Whitlock Jr. of The Wire); and the dangerously subversive "Deanzie" Ziegler (John C. Reilly), whom our naif is warned against as a no-good poacher.

Temptations lie around every PowerPoint and potato skin: be it bribery in the presidential suite, cream sherry debauchery in the atrium pool, crack pipes at sketched-out farm parties, or hot convention sex. As Deanzie warns Lippe’s Candide, "I’ve got tiger scratches all over my back. If you want to survive in this business, you gotta daaance with the tiger." How do you do that? Cue lewd, boozy undulations — a potbelly lightly bouncing in the air-conditioned breeze. "You’ve got to show him a little teat."

Fortunately Arteta shows us plenty of that, equipped with a script by Wisconsin native Phil Johnston, written for Helms — and the latter does not disappoint. If The Hangover‘s "Dr. Douchebag" didn’t win over comedy fans, then his all-in, affectionate portrayal of a man with a child in his eyes might, even while Reilly threatens to steal the show with his troublemaking party/fire-starter, the sad-eyed life of the office who’s loathed by the boss.

He, too, has a place amid Cedar Rapids‘ stalwart brownness, and face it, the ’10s are shaping up to be pretty darn brown. Camel is chic, wood-grain is the freak, tea parties are geek, and the reality of hum-drum office-park Carell culture has come to look kind of sexy from across a crowded recession, after such widespread unemployment. It follows that the blandest towns become the sites of transformation; the smallest victories for the most conventional of conventioneers, the stuff of authentically feel-good comedy. Cedar Rapids may poke fun at the flyover states, but it pledges allegiance to those denizens’ essential decency.

CEDAR RAPIDS opens Fri/11 in San Francisco.

Rise up and reflect

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Rise up and reflect

arts@sfbg.com

FILM A 10-part anthology film marking the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, Revolución derives most of its resonance from bits of Mexico’s landscape and cultural identity rather than head-on treatments of the revolution and its ideals.

However, this should only be read as a shortcoming if one approaches the film anticipating overt political or nationalist engagement. Instead, as might be expected from independent-minded, festival-focused directors such as Fernando Eimbcke (2008’s Lake Tahoe) and Carlos Reygadas (2007’s Silent Light), these 10 short films by Mexico’s most recognized directors and actors (Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna coproduced the entire project and directed segments) shape up in unexpected ways.

Taken as a whole, Revolución presents an ordinary, dignified, beautiful Mexico (in contrast to its increasingly violent image, courtesy of sensationalized news reports). Apropos to the diversity of the nation is the diversity of cinematic styles employed.

Patricia Riggen’s Beautiful and Beloved is a heartfelt and comedic story of familial duty leading to a small revelation. When a second-generation immigrant has to sneak the corpse of her father across the border to fulfill his wishes of being buried in Mexico, she is initially resentful. But something in her changes amid the massive funeral procession when she engages with her dad’s garrulous old pal. Beautiful offers one of the more conventional narratives in the film; it also includes the most direct references to the revolution and outlines an easily discernible conflict. Rodrigo García’s 7th and Alvarado, on the other hand, is a dreamlike juxtaposition of ordinary pedestrians and traditional horseback soldiers on the streets of a Hispanic area of Los Angeles.

Similarly, the three segments that portray celebrations in order to consider how the revolution is remembered today are all poignant yet quite distinctive from each other. Eimbcke’s graceful The Welcome Ceremony opens the film on a quiet, observant note by depicting a taciturn tuba player preparing for a concert that never happens. Reygadas’ This is My Kingdom is a vérité-style depiction of raucous outdoor activities that contrasts middle-class enjoyment with the rituals of the homeless who share the space. Rodrigo Pla’s vision, 30/30, may be Revolución‘s most cynical — it explores the dissonance experienced by Mexican Revolutionary general Pancho Villa’s grandson when he is both superficially honored and callously ignored at a centennial event.

REVOLUCIÓN

Thurs/10–Fri/11, 7:30 p.m., $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787
www.ybca.org

Que tristeza

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Que tristeza

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Whether or not they planned it from the beginning — though there was certainly grandiosity there at the start — Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga have been interesting as probably the first major narrative filmmakers to make post-NAFTA globalization their ongoing subject. The three-part Amores Perros (2000), while set entirely in Mexico City, found within it layers of society as remote from one another (if united in a fatalism, brutality, and one “accidental” twist of fate) as if they were continents apart.

Moving north into Hollywood funding and movie stars, the effortfully bleak 21 Grams (2003) again mixed up chronology, crisscrossing multiple story threads, and with big issues — religion, recovery, mortality — crossing literal and figurative borders. Babel (2006) went whole-hog, leaping from sunny SoCal and merely baked Northern Mexico to frenetic Tokyo and the Moroccan desert, finding or manufacturing crises everywhere, hang-wringing out questions you might boil down to “Can’t we all get along?” Or perhaps, to use the name of onscreen director Joel McCrea’s proposed pretentious magnum opus in Sullivan’s Travels (1941), O Brother, Where Art Thou?

These movies played God way beyond the ken of average auteurism, deus ex machinizing all over the joint to place actors in award-worthy emotional extremis and give us extended doses of that feeling experienced by characters in movies who shake their fists at the unforgiving sky and shout “WHHHHYYYY!?!!!” They were fairly humorless, highly contrived, and eager that you appreciate both qualities. They were also structurally ingenious, and in extended passages — like Rinko Kikuchi’s night on ecstasy and the Mexican wedding in Babel — purely cinematically dazzling. All these films speak to social injustice, the rising desperation that turns problem-solving violent, to connectivity (and disconnectivity) across cultures and economies. But what exactly director Iñárritu and scenarist Arriaga were saying was often much less persuasive, or clear, than the sheer bravado of their ambitions.

It was certainly hard to imagine one — intricately mapped screenplays, showily accomplished filmmaking — without the other. But the two indeed had a falling out after Babel, reportedly in part because Iñárritu (whose films are now “A Film By Iñárritu”) was kinda hogging the glory, downplaying his creative partner’s contribution.

So Arriaga wrote and directed 2008’s The Burning Plain, another elaborate multistory miserabilist exercise, albeit one that critics and audiences were catastrophically cold toward. Now Iñárritu is flying solo with Biutiful — oh, you just know that title is hiding a cruel irony — and it, too, is a problem.

Instead of weaving multiple story arcs in different locations to encapsulate man’s inhumanity to man circa now, he (working as scenarist for the first time, with Nicolás Biacobone and the late Armando Bo credited as cowriters) simply unloads several characters and continents’ worth of woe onto one continuous story. Or rather, one sagging man: Uxbal (Javier Bardem), a wearily hustling dude of all trades who seems to be keeping half of Barcelona’s marginalia afloat, if barely. He mediates between corrupt police who require bribes (then still fuck him over), illegal Chinese immigrant sweatshop workers who make designer purse knockoffs, the illegal African immigrants who sell them, and the bosses who just want him to exploit everybody faster and harder. It’s all falling apart even as he keeps slapping fresh papier-mâché on the teetering gray-market apparatus.

Meanwhile, he’s dad to two adorable young children and failed (but still trying) savior to their mother, who is bipolar with a vengeance. He’s also got a fuckup brother and various other satellites revolving around his warm but ebbing sun. Plus Uxbal can talk to dead people. You heard me. They generally tell him to inform surviving friends and lovers “Don’t worry, be happy,” which incites grateful tears. (Though nobody here is ever, ever happy.) All this and bloody urine too — no wonder our hero, reluctantly consulting a doctor, can’t quite believe the news he gets. Cancer? Terminal? Like, soon?!? As if he doesn’t already have enough on his plate. Now they’re just going to take the plate.

Biutiful dumps all this grief on Bardem’s shoulders and danged if he doesn’t just about hold up the whole movie, refusing to ham, marching through this two-hour Passion of Uxbal with enough wry dignity and palpable exhaustion to almost achieve credibility. Still, he’s a movie star, and that becomes one more way in which Iñárritu turns harsh “realism” into excess. This director is at his best in primarily visual set pieces, but his script here provides few such opportunities: the film flickers alive during an early police chase and a shocking later sweatshop discovery (though we’ve seen it coming). The scenes with Maricel Álvarez as crazy ex-wife Marambra are also effective because her character is complicated in ways that go beyond mere schematic usefulness in the movie’s overall whatsit of suffering piled upon suffering.

Biutiful isn’t a bad movie, but it attempts to mean so much there’s something painful in the degree to which it doesn’t move us as planned. Rather than making a universal statement about humanity at millennial wit’s end — with Bardem as Incredible Shrinking Everyman — Iñárritu has made a high-end soap opera teetering on the verge of empathy porn. He was better with Guillermo Arriaga, and vice versa.

BIUTIFUL opens Fri/28 in Bay Area theaters.

Bye bye blackbird

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Bye bye blackbird

arts@sfbg.com

FILM During the course of writing this review, I will at some point be ensnared by a sentence, reworking its syntax and flow across many notebook pages. For some of us, this is what writing is. When we praise commanding literary performances as great writing, we’re actually talking about reading. It’s not surprising that film portraits of artists usually only give us a mime of their craft; biography and circumscribed performance are shields from the crooked time of the creative process.

Pedro Costa made a rare “painters painting” movie of the French filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and now he has done another with Jeanne Balibar. The two films trail distinct voices: Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001) had the voluble Straub, whereas in Ne change rien Balibar speaks an obscure language of process (“Bring out the silences.” “This is fragile.”) that is outside the paltry domain of the conventional music documentary.

Costa forgoes exposition, and his stationary long takes require patience. Early on in Ne change rien, we watch Balibar work through a compact melodic phrase for more than 10 minutes. Stretched out of shape in this way, singing comes to seem distinctly of the body — equal parts athletic and spiritual exercise. Warhol’s unstinting camera is an obvious reference point for Costa’s staring-down-the-void, but while it’s true the Portuguese director doesn’t fear boredom, neither does he court it. He forgets the audience but gives us a greater taste of being for it. His tendency to black out vast portions of the frame makes a special kind of sense in Balibar’s recording studio; herein, both sound and vision register as isolated degrees of a larger frame.

Balibar’s appearance seems to change from one song to the next, and Costa’s signature shadows accentuate this disappearing act — we might call it seduction. Though the film shows us Balibar live onstage and training for opera — a different person almost — the heart of Ne change rien is in the studio, where we get to know a handful of songs as we would people (i.e., not all at once). A recording studio is not conducive to spectators; indeed, it can be difficult to remain engaged even as a participant. It is where musicians break their songs apart for the discrete elements can be recombined as a dynamic illusion of a single performance. Similarly to the Straub-Huillet portrait, Costa situates Ne change rien in an enclosed chamber of creative production while withholding the composite product assembled there.

We are left clinging to fragments, and yet the offhanded threads between shots (a repeated quip about movie sets, a cat) underscore the more resonant elucidations of the songs in construction. As Balibar circles a melody, so the tunes coil the sequences — no wonder they’ve been haunting my sleep. Late in the game of “Cinéma,” Costa cuts between guitarist Rodolphe Burger and the recording engineer listening to the full playback of the song and Balibar in a different room recording its vocal track (she hears what they do on headphones, but we hear her voice alone). This is the only time we see a piece of the outside world, and you will have to take my word that the window and her voice are one. At the end of Ne change rien, Costa cuts to the musicians in a backstage room flooded with artificial light. Graphically, the shot is the opposite of all that’s come before. The group runs through a lovely song we haven’t yet heard (“Rose”). The effortlessly unfolding time-frame of rehearsal is something new too. It looks a lot like grace. 

NE CHANGE RIEN

Thurs/20, 7:30 p.m.; Sun/23, 2 p.m., $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Woman on the verge

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Woman on the verge

FILM Sometimes a performance stands out and grabs attention for embodying a particular personality type or emotional state that’s instantly familiar yet infrequently explored in much depth at the movies. What’s most striking about Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine is the primary focus it lends Michelle Williams’ role as the more disgruntled half of a marriage that’s on its last legs whether the other half knows that or not. Ryan Gosling has the showier part — his Dean (the actor’s second bad husband in a month, following All Good Things) is mercurial, childish, more prone to both anger and delight, a babbler who tries to control situations by motor-mouthing or goofing through them.

But Williams’ Cindy has reached the point where all his sound and fury can no longer pass as anything but static that must be tuned out as much as possible so that things get done. Things like parenting, going to work, getting the bills paid, and so forth. Dean hasn’t just lost his antic charm; his act is now clearly a poor cover for basic incompetence. He is an obstacle, an irritant whose clowning, fits of pique, and perpetual failure to be useful have become the domestic equivalent of fingernails on chalkboard.

It’s taken a few years for Cindy to realize that she’s losing ground in her lifelong battle for self-improvement with every exasperating minute she continues to tolerate him. Williams’ bile-swallowing silences and the involuntary recoil that greets Dean’s attempts to touch Cindy are the central emotional color of Blue Valentine: that state in which the loyalty, obligation, fear, pity, or whatever has kept you tied to a failing relationship is being whittled away by growing revulsion. Cindy is quiet because if she were to stop bottling it up for just a moment, ugly final truths would scream out.

It’s only a matter of time before that moment arrives, though Valentine maintains suspense (and avoids turning into a dirge) by scrambling time — we see this couple at their start and end, the chronology a bit confusing at first. Their paths cross when she’s an aspiring med student and he works for a moving company. Scenes of their courtship are charmingly spontaneous but also a bit conspicuously actor-improv, the two stars trotting out cute unexpected skills (he sings like a 1920s crooner, she demonstrates how to memorize all the presidents’ names) that seem to be their own, not Dean and Cindy’s.

Making only his second narrative feature after 12 years of documentaries, Cianfrance has said he’d sat on Valentine‘s finished screenplay that entire span, so that by the time funding was in place he’d become “bored” with it. He now wanted the actors to use it only as a structural springboard for their own character insights and dialogue. (You have to wonder how credited cowriters Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne felt about that decision, particularly since they’ve barely been mentioned in all the film’s acclaim since the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.) That approach works better in the flashback scenes between Cindy and her problematic family (as well as Mike Vogel as her then boyfriend Bobby) than those with Dean, or his own with coworker Marshall (Marshall Johnson), which somewhat heavy-handedly spell out Dean’s need to belong to somebody.

But it pays off richly in Blue Valentine‘s present-tense majority, which finds several years’ passage has exposed rather than strengthened a commitment originally made under considerable duress. (Bobby’s carelessness had left Cindy pregnant at the worst possible time, allowing barely-known suitor Dean to rush in as rescuer. The scene in which she nearly has an abortion will strike many as the film’s most uncomfortably intimate — certainly more so than the two tame bits of mimed cunnilingus that initially won Valentine a ridiculous NC-13 rating.) Now the couple are settled in working-class suburban New England, with a modest house, an adorable daughter of about five (Faith Wladyka as Frankie), and a dog that has ominously been missing some hours.

Cindy works as a nurse in an area hospital; Dean appears to be a stay-at-home dad. But we immediately sense the extent to which his not handling that job very well compounds the exhaustion created by hers. Daddy is a great playmate, beer and cigarette already in hand at high noon. Ergo it seems like a fun idea that he and Frankie should jump on the bed to wake up mommy — never mind that her shift probably ended just hours before and her cries to be allowed more sleep sound desperate. Breakfast is another time Dad wants to play, heedless of the reality that a squirmy child must be fed and dressed in time for Mom to drop her off at daycare on the way to work.

His notion of a tension releaser is to insist that Frankie stay overnight with grandpa so her parents can “get drunk and make love.” Though Cindy insists, “I’m not going to some cheesy sex motel” (one that, further, will require she drive back two hours to work first thing the next morning), that is exactly the plan forced on her.

Said motel’s stupid fantasy “Future Room” (resembling a community-theatre USS Enterprise) becomes the stage for their marital Götterdämmerung. Cindy starts pounding drinks to dull the pain. Dean tries turning on the old wacky charm, prompting her comment, “I thought the whole point of coming here was to have a night without kids.” It’s downhill from there.

Blue Valentine is raw and uncompromising, if not quite great. It suffers from the fact that while we fully understand where Cindy’s coming from (particularly the horrors of her parents’ marriage, a model she’s determined not to recreate), Dean remains something of a blank. Gosling provides his usual detailed performance, but grasping the insecure failure Dean is now — and that she should have recognized from the start — doesn’t fully compensate for our having no idea how he got that way. A couple mumbled sentences about a missing mother and musician father feel forced. Like the actor’s role in All Good Things, Gosling’s Dean is trying very hard to impersonate the man he’d like to be. But in that film we glimpsed some formative void; here the void is structural, the character self-invention not a condition so much as an actor filling in a surface without getting beneath it. Gosling’s excellent stab at an underwritten part is also at a disadvantage in that Williams just about burns a hole through the screen. It’s hard to believe she spent years as a fairly interchangeable teen star and Next Big Thing before 2005’s Brokeback Mountain revealed a startling propensity for very serious, ordinary, long-suffering women doggedly bailing out sinking canoes.

Her range is as yet an unknown — next up is My Week With Marilyn (yes, Monroe), which might not sound a natural fit, though clearly she has the craft to go way past mere breathy sexpot imitation. As her very different role in Valentine underlines, she has an uncanny knack for capturing every nuance in essentially uncomplicated personalities. Cindy is probably the least colorful, exciting, or humorous major female role of last year by conventional fiction standards. Williams manages to make her very ordinariness completely engrossing.

 

BLUE VALENTINE opens Fri/7 in Bay Area theaters.

In a lonely place

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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In a lonely place

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM A lonely Ferrari zooms around a deserted track, over and over and over again. The opening scene of Sofia Coppola’s latest, Somewhere, is such an obvious metaphor that at first I thought the director was joking. Actually, she’s not: Somewhere is indeed a repetitious movie about a very boring, very ennui-laden individual, who happens to be a movie star with the marquee-ready name of Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff).

Now that you’ve been smacked over the head with metaphor, feel free to play spot the subtext: Johnny lives at Sunset Boulevard haunt the Chateau Marmont, legendary for its often-behaving-badly celebrity clientele. His life is an endless progression of blah (wake up, smoke, pop a Propecia, eyefuck and fuck random female admirers), broken up by job obligations — the tedium of a press conference here, the drudgery of a visit to the special-effects makeup studio there. Sigh.

Sorta like Bill Murray’s actor character in Coppola’s 2003 Lost in Translation, Johnny’s fame is approximately equal to Dorff’s. He’s had a steady career for the past 20-something years, with occasional high points (1998’s Blade, 2000’s Cecil B. DeMented) and interesting parts in smaller films (1996’s I Shot Andy Warhol), but nothing that elevated him to the A list. Mostly he’s known for appearing in throwaway titles and dating the likes of Pamela Anderson. One might be forgiven for assuming his home life quite resembles the bad boy he plays in Britney Spears’ “Everytime” video.

One might now suspect his home life resembles Somewhere. Can’t you imagine onetime hottie Dorff, well past scruffy and nearing haggard, hiring twin pole dancers to writhe along with Foo Fighters songs as he gazes on, barely registering amusement or a pulse? Coppola’s casting of Dorff is either totally inspired or totally lazy. We don’t know enough about the real guy, who is playing an actor much like himself, to know if he’s acting or not. Frankly, he’s such a blank, shallow canvas it’s hard to spend too much time wondering or caring.

Here’s another instance of subtext: would any director not as privileged as Coppola dare to focus on a character whose massive wealth can’t at all assuage his existential crisis? Money may not buy happiness, but it’s kind of hard to feel sorry for a guy whose depression plays out as he floats the day away at a luxury hotel. The pissy, anonymous text messages Johnny receives throughout the film (“Why are you such a fucking asshole?”) are either sent directly from his subconscious, or are a knowing nod to the feelings of the unwashed masses who spent all of Translation wishing evil on poor little rich girl Scarlett Johansson.

Fortunately, there is a bright spot in all this. Obviously Somewhere is Coppola’s “I have kids now and therefore will preach about the magical joys of parenting” film. Ergo, mostly-absentee dad Johnny has a kid, Cleo, a tween sprite played by the charming Elle Fanning. Cleo’s pretty blasé about the whole movie-star thing, but she is allowed a delighted squeal when she gets a peek at the swank-tastic hotel suite the pair is given during a promotional trip to Milan. She is the only meaningful thing in Johnny’s life, and the only interesting thing that happens in this glacially-paced, bellybutton-obsessed movie.

But, you say, Somewhere won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion (due to the film’s Italy scenes and Coppola’s Coppola-ness, perhaps?). Surely it must have some merit beyond Fanning and the middling, voyeuristic pleasures of seeing exactly what a movie star does on his free time? Divergent tones and motives aside, Somewhere isn’t that far from Joaquin Phoenix’s agonizing faux-doc I’m Still Here. Neither place is any place I’d like to visit again.

SOMEWHERE opens Wed/22 in San Francisco.

 

Fight club

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Fight club

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Late in Boxing Gym, a pungent documentary even for Frederick Wiseman, an old-timer says something wise to his friend while lacing up. The friend doesn’t see the point of analogies. Our man admits that some only work on an intellectual level, but insists that others make intuitive sense of abstraction — the right metaphor can make all the difference in getting a particular movement. It’s hard to imagine that Wiseman would still be making his films if he didn’t think the same held true for a motion picture sequence.

Good thing, since boxing has been made to shoulder an awful lot of Hollywood hooey. Not much has changed since Manny Farber, writing in 1949, decried fight pictures for being “tightly humorless and supersaturated with worn-out morality … pure fantasy in so far as capturing the pulse of the beak-busting trade.” Wiseman isn’t interested in the trade so much as the discipline — though the big time’s spectacular images are plastered around the old-school Texas club. And yet even if Boxing Gym shrugs at the competitive elements of the sport, Wiseman’s squat compositions tune in the unglamorous business of keeping your dukes up when tired — the kind of matter-of-fact physical truth professional actors howl for.

By releasing Boxing Gym immediately after La Danse (2009), Wiseman ensures his own comparisons. The choreographer-dancer and trainer-boxer tandems are aligned not only in fancy footwork (Wiseman’s too), but also in their mirror-stretched studios. There are differences, of course — one can’t help but think of the Paris Ballet’s fundraising efforts when Richard Lord, the dexterous trainer-manager of the gym, explains membership dues. Perhaps because Wiseman is not beholden to an institutional cycle of rehearsals and performances in Boxing Gym, it’s the purer distillation of a kinetic education.

Watch Wiseman’s films together, and you’ll realize that different spaces register silence differently. The filmmaker’s musical ear is richly apparent in Boxing Gym‘s gloved rhythms and concrete echoes, to say nothing of the entrancing pendulum swings of side-by-side workouts. As in La Danse, Wiseman emulates the concentration of his subjects, but here he also picks up on their loose camaraderie in conversations about joblessness, the joy of getting hit and, closest to the bone, the Virginia Tech killings. The gym is still a masculine space, but one in which women (and children) are a significant presence. For more on the evolution of gender and “training,” one might well consult the filmmaker’s own catalog: Basic Training (1971), Manoeuvre (1979), and Missile (1987). Wiseman’s gym is finally a gathering place, one with atmosphere and history (and hardly any headphones) — all the more reason to see it in a movie theater.

BOXING GYM opens Wed/22 at the Roxie.

 

Hollywood ho-hum

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Hollywood ho-hum

FILM Some mainstream filmmakers grow so encumbered by the industry-within an-industry they’ve become that they profess yearning for those “small, personal” projects they started out with — often vowing they’ll get right back there just as soon as they’ve finished the obligatory Behemoth IV: The Next Generation in 3-D. (Coppola actually did it; Lucas needs to stop saying he will until he actually quits finding new ways to commercially reanimate the charred remains of Star Wars. Meaning never.)

It is exceedingly rare to find a director who over the long haul has managed to make nothing but small, personal projects, particularly if they’re American and within orbit of Hollywood influence. How could you resist admiring such a person’s determination and purity of intent?

Well, there may be exceptions. For nearly four decades, Henry Jaglom has been creating “personal” movies like other people make home movies — privately, prolifically, perhaps indiscriminately. He uses the same stable of cronies, some short-termers and some long, as well as their homes (or his own) as settings. His method (or Method — he did train under Lee Strasberg) echoes the semi-improv, amorphous ensemble feel of Robert Altman movies like Nashville (1975), albeit in a manner that seldom transcends the bubble of participants’ very Hollywood-centric perceptions of reality.

These features no doubt delight those actively involved — their self-satisfaction is tumescent — but can become an exasperating bore for anyone else forced to watch. The last good movie Jaglom made was the uncommonly disciplined Last Summer in the Hamptons 15 years ago. His new Queen of the Lot doesn’t change its status.

After her second DUI, improbable action-flick star Maggie Chase (Tanna Frederick) is placed under ankle-bracelet house arrest. She chooses to spend it at the impressive hilltop manse of her manager, along with a vain married actor boyfriend (Christopher Rydell) and a posse of personal assistants. Then she moves to the equally expansive digs of said BF’s historied showbiz family, all either industry players or dedicated wannabes. There, Maggie finds herself attracted to her ne’er-do-well mate’s supposedly worse brother (Noah Wyle, so thoughtfully restrained you wonder how he strayed into such company).

This shrill, shapeless enterprise lurches from feeble satire to clumsy melodrama, never seeming more credible or necessary than another excuse for Jaglom’s pals to indulge themselves in public. The cast includes faces from the past (like Dennis Christopher from 1979’s Breaking Away), Jaglom perennials, several children of stars, and miscellaneous industry insiders. When exactly was it that Jaglom decided anyone on his dinner party list was automatically fascinating enough to play a “character” onscreen? His first four features, all flawed but interesting, at least tried to be about other people. Since 1984, with a couple exceptions, they’ve become like the windbag who clears rooms upon arrival, because no matter whom he talks to or about, the overweening subject will be the World of Me and Mine.

Playing a famous director here is famous director Peter Bogdanovich, who once was criticized for making indulgent movies that foisted then-girlfriend Cybill Shepherd on the public in unsuitable roles. Yet he never made films as insular and irrelevant as most of Jaglom’s. Nor did he ever showcase a talent as effortful, unappealing, and limited as Frederick, “discovered” when she wrote Jaglom a fan letter some years ago — having heard that anyone who flattered his movies might get cast in one. (She pretended to worship the unerringly titled 1997 Déjà vu, which she hadn’t even seen.) Is that a cute story — both director and actor never tire of telling it — or the symptom of an atrophied imagination?

Queen of the Lot is a sequel to 2006’s Hollywood Dreams, in which Frederick’s hysterical eagerness to please was somewhat apt for the role of a delusionally ambitious, alarmingly pushy Hollywood newbie. Now we’re supposed to believe that toxic figure has “made it.” This is the actress’ third starring vehicle for Jaglom; a fourth is imminent. This creative partnership demonstrates a judgment-impaired loyalty that is perhaps one part chivalry to nine parts WTF.

QUEEN OF THE LOT opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

Highbrow-beaten

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Highbrow-beaten

arts@sfbg.com

FILM It has been such a feeble year for movies overall that it’s easy to understand why The King’s Speech would incite near-rapture on the festival and Oscar-countdown beats. Films like The King’s Speech have filled a certain notion of “prestige” cinema since the 1910s: historical themes, fully-clothed romance, high dramatics, star turns, a little political intrigue, sumptuous dress, and a vicarious taste of how the fabulously rich, famous, and powerful once lived. Whether derived from literary classics or the historical record, they usually involve aristocracy and British accents, reflecting our perennial escapist jones for Old World gentility.

At its best, this so-called Masterpiece Theatre moviemaking can transcend formula — it would be stupid to lowball the merits of Merchant-Ivory’s Howards End (1992), Terence Davies’ House of Mirth (2000), or Stephen Frears’ The Queen (2006) simply because they’re exquisitely appointed, polite entertainments. At their less-than-best, however, these movies sell complacency, in both style and content.

The King’s Speech purveys a particular fantasy not unlike Cinderella‘s (or Twilight‘s): that of the unappreciated “commoner” whose very special qualities prove exactly what is needed by the remote, glamorous, extraordinary — but lonely and misunderstood! — prince or vampire or whatnot who plucks them from the madding crowd. Here, Colin Firth plays King George VI, forced onto the throne his favored older brother Edward abandoned. This was especially traumatic because George’s severe stammer made public address tortuous.

The special friend he acquires is matey Australian émigré Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush, mercifully controlled), a speech therapist whose unconventional methods include insisting his royal client treat him as an equal. This ultimately frees not only the king’s tongue, but his heart — you see, he’s never had anyone before to confide in that daddy (Michael Gambon as George V) didn’t love him enough. Aww.

David Seidler’s conventionally inspirational script and BBC miniseries veteran Tom Hooper’s direction deliver the expected goods — dignity on wry, wee orgasms of aesthetic tastefulness, much stiff-upper-lippage — at a stately promenade pace. Firth, so good in the uneven A Single Man last year, is perfect in this rock-steadier vehicle. Yet he never surprises us; role, actor, and movie are on a leash tight enough to limit airflow.

The stuffiness lifts when George, exasperated and egged on, lets loose a string of childish profanity, his priggish reserve dissolving at last. Absurdly, this sole moment of naughty-boy silliness earned The King’s Speech — a PG prestige picture if ever there was one — its R rating from our wise protector, the MPAA.

THE KING’S SPEECH opens Fri/10 in San Francisco.

Cash and Carrey

Andrew Lam
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0
Cash and Carrey

arts@sfbg.com

FILM You had to forgive most of the gay press for getting a little too excited over Brokeback Mountain (2005). Oh, no doubt it’s a great movie, or that the Oscar going to the fraudulent Crash (2004) said less about that film’s virtues than a skittishness that other movie stirred. But its excellence and commercial success induced widespread bouts of wishful thinking in the form of announcing new trends that never came to pass.

Five years later, there hasn’t been another mainstream American film in which a gay relationship is taken seriously and granted central importance. (You could argue for The Kids Are All Right, but that’s mostly a comedy, a big arthouse hit rather than even a modest mainstream one — and the fact remains that lesbians played by attractive actresses aren’t nearly as threatening to the sanity, morality, masculinity, and private parts of many Americans as gay men.) Nor has a single major movie star come out as gay or bi, despite the hilarity induced by excuses for such police-intervention activities as “offering a ride” to transgender sex workers at 4 a.m. or getting mugged while “walking the dog” in a well-known cruising park (also at 4 a.m.). In all these regards, television has leapt well ahead of the big screen.

Given typically imitation-crazed Hollywood’s failure to built on Brokeback‘s success — or see it as anything more than a fluke — the case of I Love You Phillip Morris is interesting for what it is and isn’t. It is, somewhat by default, the biggest onscreen gay romance (not including foreign and indie productions, which are always ahead of the curve) since that earlier film, even if it is (again) primarily a comedy, and one whose true-story basis provides the leavening element of stranger-than-fiction curiosity. (Nobody’s bothered by the gayness of movies like 2005’s Capote because we accept the otherness of real people too famous and/or peculiar to be relatable.)

What Phillip Morris is not, however, is a Hollywood or even American film, all appearances to the contrary. Its financing was primarily French — presumably because there wasn’t enough willing coin on this side of the Atlantic. Yes, not even for a comedy starring Jim Carrey. And for a while it didn’t even look like Phillip Morris would be an American release, even after it had played (and done pretty well) virtually everywhere else, from Europe to Latin America to Southeast Asia to frikkin’ Kazakhstan. The reasons (some legal) are unclear, but it seems pretty certain the aforementioned squeamishness around guys kissing and cuddling and diddling factored in — never mind that those guys are Carrey and Ewan McGregor.

Free at last, albeit without much fanfare, Phillip Morris proves to have a whole lot more in common with Steven Soderburgh’s The Informant! (2009) — true tale turned farcical caper, to diverting if mixed results — than to tragic Brokeback, even if love runs a rather sad, thwarted course here, too. We meet Steven Jay Russell as an uber-perky all-American lad — a nascent Jim Carrey — perhaps permanently warped at age eight by the discovery that he’s adopted. Nonetheless he proceeds along the road of dead-center normality, getting married (Leslie Mann manages to be both very droll and very Christian as Debbie), having kids, being a loveable Mr. Policeman, and fucking guys only on the QT.

A near-fatal accident, however, induces him to merrily chuck it all — he’s so nice the family can’t help wishing him well — and live life to the fullest by moving from Georgia to South Beach and becoming a “big fag.” He soon discovers that “being gay is really expensive,” or at least his chosen A-lister lifestyle is. Having been schooled by his adoption trauma, Steve figures if everything you think you know can so easily turn out to be a lie, why not becoming a fibbing superstar? He begins diverting funds from his corporate employer, amazed at what a chief financial officer position and a golf-playing, polo-shirt-wearing front can get away with. At least to a point — the point that commences several ensuing revolving-door years of cons, captures, prison stints, and ingenious escapes.

It is during one hoosegow stay that he meets the non-tobacco-related Phillip Morris (McGregor), a sweet Southern sissy who got there by sheer haplessness rather than criminal guile. Steven is an ardent, protective lover — if he’s also slippery as an eel, that’s at least partly because he thinks his lies protect those he loves — and Phillip is a slavishly adoring 1950s housewife who just happens to have been born with a penis.

Like The Informant!, Phillip Morris fudges the facts a bit for narrative convenience and strains at times for an antic tone that makes life itself a sort of genre parody. In his genius-IQ mind, does Russell see himself as the hero of a perfect if artificial sitcom-type world? Or does casting Carrey require the same sort of hyperreal gloss routinely applied to gimmick-driven vehicles like Yes Man (2008), Bruce Almighty (2003), and Liar Liar (1997), because he bends any context like a funhouse mirror? (Only once, in 1998’s The Truman Show, did that context meaningfully amplify his cartoonishness; and only once, in 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has he calmed down to ordinary human proportions.) Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, making their directorial debut after team-writing a bewildering trio of mainstream comedies (2001’s Cats and Dogs, 2003’s Bad Santa, and 2005’s The Bad News Bears), approach their fascinating material with brashness and some skill, but without the control to balance its steep tonal shifts.

Surprisingly, it’s in the “love” part that they often succeed best. While their comic aspects sometimes tip into shrill, destabilizing caricature — the excess that brilliant but barely-manageable Carrey will always drift toward unless tightly leashed — this movie’s link to Brokeback is that it never makes the love between two men look inherently ridiculous, as nearly all mainstream comedies now do to get a cheap throwaway laugh or three.

Russell’s scenes with AIDS-fallen first boyfriend Jimmy (Rodrigo Santoro) are very poignant. And the many more with McGregor, who plays white-trash nelly with an uncondescending delicacy that’s both amusing and wistful, are quite lovely. There’s one scene of them chatting in their prison cell — viewed overhead in bed, Phillip’s head in the crook of Steven’s arm — that’s so affectionately intimate you can see exactly why the movie took two years to get a U.S. release. Even the prior scene of Carrey riding a different man’s ass like a bucking bronco isn’t as half so threatening as this, an utterly unguarded moment with two famous faces that both happen to be male conveying a perfectly synched love.

I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS opens Fri/3 in San Francisco.

 

Dance fever

Andrew Lam
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Dance fever

arts@sfbg.com

FILM “Lose yourself,” ballet company head Thomas (Vincent Cassel) whispers to his leading lady, Nina (Natalie Portman), moments before she takes the stage. But Nina is already consumed with trying to find herself. Rarely has a journey of self-discovery been so unsettling.

Set in New York City’s catty, competitive ballet world, Black Swan samples from earlier dance films (notably 1948’s The Red Shoes, but also 1977’s Suspiria, with a smidgen of 1995’s Showgirls), though director Darren Aronofsky is nothing if not his own visionary. Black Swan resembles his 2008 The Wrestler somewhat thematically, with its focus on the anguish of an athlete under ten tons of pressure, but it’s a stylistic 180. Gone is the gritty, stripped-down aesthetic used to depict a sad-sack strongman. Like Dario Argento’s 1977 horror fantasy, the elegantly choreographed Black Swan is set in a hyper-constructed world, with stabbingly obvious color palettes (literally, white = good; black = evil) and dozens of mirrors emphasizing (over and over again) the film’s doppelgänger obsession.

Of course, none of this is out of line: the ballet at the center of Black Swan is, obviously, Swan Lake, in which a single dancer portrays both the White (good) and Black (evil) Swans. And in dance, mirrors are necessarily everywhere. Nina constantly stares at herself, and not just while practicing her steps. “I just want to be perfect,” she blurts out to Thomas, nervously lobbying for the Swan Queen role — made suddenly available due to the reluctant retirement of the company’s prima ballerina (Winona Ryder, feral and fierce in her few scenes).

See, Nina’s been with the company for four years, and though her talent is apparent, she’s made no waves (or friends, it would seem). All she cares about is dance, and she’s tunnel vision-enabled by her mother (a spooky Barbara Hershey), who babies Nina even as she blames her for monkeywrenching her own ballet career. Portman is 29 years old, and though she’s presumably playing younger here, Black Swan doesn’t pretend she’s a teenager. Thomas’ “visceral and real” (ahem) take on Swan Lake is Nina’s last chance to be a star before she’s too old to be in the running.

If you’ve seen Black Swan‘s poster or provocative trailer, you know that Nina gets the part — and it’s no spoiler to say that her already-fragile mental state gets just as much a workout as her muscles. Although: rarely has any film about ballet (an exquisite, graceful art form) so emphasized its day-to-day tortures, or exaggerated them, as Nina’s deterioration takes some unexpectedly gory detours.

Exacerbating Nina’s frustration is Lily (Mila Kunis), a brand-new addition to the company who resembles Nina in passing, but is otherwise everything the rigid, frigid Nina is not: a sexy, rebellious free spirit whose mere presence jams Nina’s brainwaves. (Not rocket science: Lily symbolizes the Black Swan; Nina, the White.) Naturally, they become frenemies. Lily is “imprecise and effortless,” according to Thomas; meanwhile, his loosen-up advice to the prim Nina is “go home and touch yourself.” The emphasis on masturbation is probably Black Swan‘s corniest conceit, though it does fold into the theme of Nina’s long-overdue awakening of her true self, sexual and otherwise.

As Nina, Portman gives her most dynamic performance to date. In addition to the thespian fireworks required while playing a goin’-batshit character, she also nails the role’s considerable athletic demands. (No need to play spot-the-dance-double, a game most thrillingly deployed during 1983’s Flashdance.) Portman’s intelligence and intense beauty can make it hard for her to seem like a real person onscreen, but as Black Swan‘s dread-filled bird, it all fits. It’s a career-elevating turn (and I suppose she’s finally off the hook for participating in those Star Wars prequels). Nina strives for perfection; Portman owns it.

BLACK SWAN opens Fri/3 in Bay Area theaters.

 

Darkest heart

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Darkest heart

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Claire Denis was raised in colonial Africa, and White Material is her third feature set in its wake (the first two were 1988’s Chocolat and 1999’s breathtaking Beau Travail). This new film is very much about Africa, compositing elements of several different “troubles” (child soldiers, a strong man’s militia, radio broadcasts fomenting violence) into an abstract of conflict. Between the dead-eyed rebels in the bush and the brutally efficient forces in town stands Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), a colonial holdout. She continues to work her family’s coffee plantation after the European men have retreated indoors, after a French military helicopter has dropped survival kits on her land (she curses “these whites”), and finally after the African workers have fled. “Coffee’s coffee. Not worth dying for,” one tells her before speeding off.

As the troubles mount, Maria buries the signs of encroaching threats — literally when a cow’s head rolls out of a basket of coffee berries. Her refusal to be terrorized is a trait we typically ascribe to male action heroes (the film would make an interesting double-feature with 2008’s Gran Torino), though Maria’s resolute blindness is its own kind of privilege in the African context. Her restless movements are starkly contrasted by the wounded still lives of three men: her slothful son Manuel, a nihilist nitwit; a shadowy colonial patriarch who doesn’t walk beyond the threshold of his house; and an equally mysterious figurehead of the rebel movement ailing in a plantation dugout (played to some distraction by Isaach de Bankolé). A woman’s tragic strength, a weak grown child, a downward spiral knotted by a complex flashback structure: White Material seems a bit like a postcolonial Mildred Pierce.

Unusually for Denis, the film is both a literary adaptation (cowritten with author Marie NDiaye and based on Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing) and a star vehicle for Huppert, whose stringy musculature is a nice match for Yves Cape’s lithe camerawork. The idea of Maria’s character already tends toward the parabolic, though, and all these different inputs can result in too much dramatic underlining. When Maria’s flashback first lands us in the liberating rush of a motorcycle ride, Denis’ handheld cinematography generates an ample rush — but then Huppert lets her hair down with a flourish, and we feel we’re being pressed too hard. The same is true whenever the child soldiers march to Tindersticks’ funereal score, or when the mention of white material (Maria’s cigarette lighter, for instance) ends a scene on an overly foreboding note. Far more effective are those dizzying moments when a freshly vulnerable Maria notices rebel girls wearing her clothes.

For all White Material‘s novelistic concessions, Denis’ subtle command of composition and rhythm as elements of narration is beyond doubt. Her use of the handheld camera remains preternaturally attuned to her characters’ pleasures and anxieties, and she is still quite capable of finding the most telling framing of a given power dynamic. To that effect, there’s a brilliant shot early in Maria’s flashback when her regular workers leave the plantation. She implores them to stay, but they ride off one by one in an indistinct line, remaining out of focus while her darting head weaves the bulk of the widescreen frame. The vacuum of authority is vividly realized in seconds of screen time.

White Material begins at the end, with unattached subjective images of someone searching the plantation house with a flashlight. The beam settles on certain talismanic objects (a photograph of a young woman, an African mask, an oxygen tank) before sliding across more of the obscure space. The tantalizing vision of scenes like these makes me wish White Material wasn’t so dutifully attached to its (admittedly fierce) star. But watching the film a second time, I found that the embers of repression came into better focus between the broad strokes of plotting. Intimations and symbols flash through a dusky storm that doesn’t need a name to rumble.

WHITE MATERIAL opens Fri/26 in Bay Area theaters.

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