“Olive Kitteridge” is probably the best film I have seen in a year now. It is based on Elizabeth Strout’s book which won its author a Pulitzer prize for literature. This is one of the rare cases where everything – literary
material, script, acting, directing, music – is in such perfect sync and of such high quality – that the mere pleasure of watching is added on top of experiencing and understanding the drama of the characters. The sentiment is just the right amount and the wittiness – just the right degree.
And even though Frances McDormand’s acting has some excess of curtness and a programmatic element in it, it balances well with the melancholic coolness of Bill Murray and the soft presence of Richard Jenkins. Lisa Cholodenko demonstrates once again a superb taste in choice of material and actors and a deep understanding of the human condition. Thie film is just excellent. Nothing is overstated and nobody is spared yet a gentle forgiveness and despair dominate the ending – a mix that is true to life and lacking in fake “uplifting” messages. It’s a matter of “can you handle the truth” to really enjoy it…
Category: Film
Film: Maps to the Stars, 2014, Directed by David Cronenberg
Can’t quite figure out the source of David Cronenberg’s appeal. He has a claim to originality and intellectualism but everything I have seen from him is pretty mainstream, plus snobbish and murky when it comes to a film’s intellectual message. Quite often, his films border on the tasteless and kitschy. “Maps to the Stars” is a perfect example. (Other past works could serve as an illustration as well – “The History of Violence”- tasteless and banal with one of the worst performances by William Hurt. But also, isn’t Vigo Mortensen, Cronenberg’s favorite actor, one of the most tacky actors alive? He looks like a hairdresser or a pimp or a child molester…Actually, “The History of Violence” looks like something shot by Verhoeven…)
Anyway, why is “Maps to the Stars” such a bad movie? It desperately wants to be a satire (and does it in a hysterical way, matching only the hysterical performance delivered by Julian Moore as a crazy-bitch-Hollywood-actress). The satirical intention is stuffed into a tacky, soapy plot about an incestuous family with murderous tendencies. They are rich and famous but tragically deprived of normality.They talk to themselves, they are suicidal, violent, they whimper in their bathtubs, smoke like maniacs or display other similarly “original” signs of “inner suffering”. The so called “satire” is so trite and literal – e.g. Julian Moore’s character is insanely happy when a tragedy befalls her competitor-actress because she gets to play the role she was after… How flat and unimaginative…Every scene in this film is as contrived and square as this little example.
If you are looking for a real satire of Hollywood, check Robert Altman’s “The Player,” of course…
But once proclaimed an “intellectual,” David Cronenberg will stay one, I suppose, as long as he makes claims to this status either by talking about psychoanalysis, Jung, Burroughs, or quoting Paul Eluard. Though the products he manages to churn with Canadian state support, are not quite intellectual.
Film: God's Pocket (2014) Directed by John Slattery
Actors’ directorial debuts tend to get snubbed – especially if the actor is a handsome man or a pretty lady. Examples abound. John Slattery’s debut which he co-scripted with Alex Metcalf is based on an eponymous novel by Pete Dexter. The film feels like drama in its first half but then its genre gets confusing as dramatic situations are resolved violently in an absurdist manner reminding of the devices of the Coen brothers (Blood Simple). The social layer of the film is still prominent but it is stylized and deviates towards the lurid with its “metonymic” settings switching between the pub, the funeral bureau, industrial sites… The problem with the confusing genre stems from the novel itself – Pete Dexter’s writing favors the sensational and the salacious over meaning and structure. “The Paperboy” (2012), also based on a novel of his, was a cinematic disaster.
Given that, Slattery was actually able to convey more than the literary basis of his film – the picture oozes a kind of melancholic desperation which his low class characters couldn’t possibly articulate.
Film: Boyhood (2014), Written and Directed by Richard Linklater
The film is a typical Linklater project — sensitive, over verbose, overwhelming with dialog, and laden with banality philosophical conversations. But this is how people articulate their lives and human self-insight always touches on the banal.
I loved the film and its lighthearted but also melancholic message that “growing up” is actually the content of one’s life. The main character’s parents were growing up together with their son and their life was as confused at the end as it was in the beginning. Going off to college does not put an end to Mason’s “boyhood” as he was well aware. It is just a “next step” in his life as it is in his mother’s life – only marking different stages. For the mother it is the realization that there might be less “next steps” left.
The fact that the film was shot over a period of 12 years with the same cast and we see the physical change the characters go through – the phases of “mutation” from cute, through puberty-ugly, to weird and uniquely beautiful – is crucial for the message of the film. The gradual building of one’s individuality, the formation of self, illustrated by physical change, lends truth to the film and makes acceptance of its philosophy on a visceral level.
Film: The Counselor, 2013, Directed by Ridley Scott
Cormac McCarthy, the author of the screenplay, is a graphomaniac. The proof is in works like “All the Pretty Horses”, “The Road” and finally – this film which helps highlight all the symptoms of the condition. Even a skilled director like Ridley Scott could not pull out a cogent ‘story’ not to mention some sense out of this pretentious textual mess. What do you think of this piece of wisdom: “When it comes to grief, the normal rules of wealth do not apply. Because grief transcends value. A man would give entire nations to lift grief off his heart and yet, you cannot buy anything with grief, because grief is worthless. What the …?!!! What does this mean? Nothing. It’s a strаin of the mind of a pseudo-philosopher and pseudo-writer who is desperately trying to be original…I should rest my case only after this quote but can’t help mentioning the drug lord citing the poet Antonio Machado. Not that it can’t be done, but Mr. McCarthy does it in a dumb way.
“No Country for Old Man” was a good movie only thanks to the Coen brothers who wrote the screenplay.
Film: Runner Runner, 2013, Directed by Brad Furman
After a streak of very bad movies, it was a relief to watch this one. The movie is not great, but it is skillfully written and well-acted. Its plot is a variation of “Wall Street” and “Boiler Room” – with the same main male characters in the trio – ambitions, entrepreneurial, and smart college drop-out, a mentor, a father. The details differ but the moral is the same – greed is not good. The dramatic quality of the two older films is better. The latest version is more entertaining than anything else. Some very snappy dialogue (written by Brian Koppelman and David Levien) contributes to the pleasure.
Film: "Labor Day", 2013, Directed by Jason Reitman
The film is based on some very bad novel and it is mind-boggling that Jason Reitman would try to resuscitate it. The result is so poor that at certain points, when the plot defies any logic, it turns into its own parody. Examples: mother is given her baby (whom we just saw being still-born) all dressed up and pretty?! ; father roams the pubs, baby in hands, looking for his no-good wife; convict and lonely mother mix together sugar and peaches with their bare hands in a scene, reminiscent of Ghost’s famous pottery scene…
The author of the terrible piece of “non-literature” is Daphne Joyce Maynard, the woman who became famous for being briefly involved with J.D.Salinger and tried to capitalize on that writing about his exploitation of young women, or was it the opposite, him being exploited by young women…
The sad thing here is that Jason Reitman was very desperate for a script, and that eventually he exhibited such a bad taste in choosing/writing this one. Early success, as J.D.Salinger points out, is treacherous.
TV: Happy Valley: BBC Drama Series, 2014 Directed by Euros Lyn, Sally Wainwright and Tim Fywell
The script (Sally Wainwright) has some of the ingredients of a soap opera – a child born of rape, his mother committed a suicide, the grandparents have problems accepting and raising that child, the latter exhibiting some violent tendencies. The father of the child is a brutal criminal but has a soft spot for the child, etc.
On the other hand the series’ plot revolves around an accountant, a looser-character reminiscent of the insurance salesman Lester from “Fargo.” This, and some of the dialog help distinguish the series from a soap-crime series. The directors are quite good but they could have been more thrifty with the flashbacks. The flashbacks, in their case, are just illustrations of what is going on in the character’s mind, which is always a symptom of helplessness to express a psychological process in alternative ways. In other words, the viewer should be able to deduce what is going on in the character’s mind via different, purely dramatic, subtle devices.
Good performances by Sarah Lancashire and Steve Pemberton.
Film: Chef (2014) Written and Directed by Jon Favreau
What a poor, pathetically weak script! I thought Jon Favreau was cool but with his last creation he shattered that impression .
The dialogue feels like its sole purpose is to provide linking between a series of product placements and occasionally resembles an interactive Twitter or Vine tutorial. The movie is classifiable as “comedy” only because it is NOT a drama or a tragedy but it cannot squeeze out a single laugh from a person with an average sense of humor. There is some bad acting there as well, quite understandably, since there is nothing to act.
If you want to watch a smart and entertaining foodie movie, the best so far in my opinion is “Dinner Rush” (2001), an independent feature film, written by Brian S. Kalata and Rick Shaughnessy,
and directed by Bob Giraldi.
Film: Nebraska. Director Alexander Payne, 2013
A little bit of a disappointment delivered by a favorite director… This is not “About Schmidt”…far from it. It lacks the drama, the surprise, the painful realization of a wasted life catching up shockingly with an unsuspecting Schmidt. In “Nebraska” the main character is too senile, too confused to be able to experience or sustain a drama. Actually, we don’t know if he is capable of experiencing anything. Impossible to identify with him. All the characters are predictable cliches. The black and white vision seems like a whim – carries no meaning. It oddly reminds of a Bogdanovich film without a Bogdanovich message…Bob Nelson’s script does not rise above the anecdotal. Overall – it seems like Payne took the path of least resistance and tried to do tell a story that he already knows how to tell.
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