Inherent Vice (2014) - New York Film Festival 2014

Thomas Pynchon's work is usually described as unfilmable, though Inherent Vice is probably the most filmable of the bunch. It's one of Pynchon's California books, for one, which tend to be breezier and lighter, and it's among his shorter novels as well. A Southern California noir set at the beginning of the 1970s, we follow stoner detective Doc Sportello (played in the movie by Joaquin Phoenix) as he tries to crack a case given to him by his ex-lover Shasta (Katherine Waterston). Her current squeeze is a big-pockets real estate developer named Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), and Wolfmann's wife and her lover may be trying to have him committed to an asylum. The plot becomes more convoluted from there, involving murder, land deals, dentistry, and conspiracies enacted by outside players.

Two things are surprising about this adaptation:

1. Paul Thomas Anderson and his cast make Inherent Vice compelling and funny for the most part even when the plot goes by the wayside or becomes too hard to follow
2. Present-day Paul Thomas Anderson proves that Thomas Pynchon is unfilmable, but the younger Paul Thomas Anderson who made Magnolia might have been able to pull it off

Inherent Vice the movie is loose and breezy, but sometimes too loose and too breezy--a leisurely stroll vibe rather than a sprinting one--and while there are great moments and memorable scenes, I feel ambivalent about the whole of Inherent Vice. I don't know if it'll be rectified much by repeat viewings either. There's a shaky feeling I got after watching The Master that felt like I had to process the density of the material I'd just watched. With Inherent Vice, the shaky feeling had to do with a kind of lack of density to the material, and also a greater sense that Anderson missed so much of the layered textures that make Pynchon's writing what it is.

What Anderson's Inherent Vice excels at is a bleary, drugged-out feel, particularly at the beginning where the world seems hazy and Doc's general engagement with what's going on is low stakes. He shambles from his beach house, he shambles around various locales, his note-taking skills could be better when key evidence is around. Yet when he senses that Shasta's life is in danger and gets deeper into the interconnections of the Wolfmann crime plot, the filmmaking, like Doc, becomes more engaged. There's one paranoid car ride mid-film that gets the totally wigged-out feeling just right, both for the dopers (paranoid about getting busted) and for the cops (paranoid that these hippies are Charlie Manson & Company II).

Anderson punctuates much of the film with long takes and secretive conversations, the information mumbled or whispered conspiratorially to avoid prying ears, though sometimes to a fault. There's something off with the audio mix of the film, and many lines are either unintelligible or too muddy. This issue is most apparent with Doc's dialogue more than anyone else's (e.g., you never have a problem hearing Josh Brolin's straight-laced LA cop Bigfoot Bjornsen or Joanna Newsom's side character/film's narrator Sortilège), and while some of the indistinct dialogue is intentional and hilarious, the rest is problematic since the tone of the information is conveyed but the information itself becomes lost in the haze.

What's missing in the film version of Inherent Vice is a greater sense of texture, which is something that Pynchon excels at on the page. There's a surf band in the novel called The Boards and their sax player Coy Harlingen (played by Owen Wilson who's whispery in a good way) is part of the case Doc's working on, but we don't really get to hear any of that music. As far as I can tell, none of the fake songs by fake bands in the novel were recorded for the film (The Boards, The Spotted Dicks, Meatball Flag); life at Gordita Beach isn't really discussed either; Pynchon's various side trips that deepen or enliven the story (there's literally one flashback [acid] trip in which Doc thought he was a time-traveling alien named Xqq) aren't given their due.

In particular, the grander sense of conspiracy isn't quite there--the drugged-out paranoia, sure, but not the sense of larger political or systemic forces at work to subvert and exploit the inherent vice of the hippie generation. The dental metaphors tied up in heroin use and The Golden Fang are mostly subtext and unspoken in the film. I think the obsessives out there who are tuned in to the film's disillusionment about the 1960s will find some potent meaning in those dental metaphors regarding the death of that generation's optimism and the encroaching cynicism, consumerism, and anxiety of the 1970s.

Pynchon accomplishes these textured moments in a paragraph or a few paragraphs, and it's much easier to do in text. He's basically layering stories on stories--a kind of world-building as palimpsest (i.e., in this case, stories written on stories on stories). But that isn't to say this technique is impossible in film or a cinematic analog is impossible. Anderson shows he can do it in several scenes. A few of the long takes in Inherent Vice convey a sense of time passing, character history, and even a sense of disillusionment brewing for months (or years) in just a few minutes. There's a flashback to a kinder and more beautiful time in Doc and Shasta's lives when the desperation for drugs was high but so was their love for each other. That sequence, which plays out over Neil Young's "Journey Through the Past," is followed by Doc's visit to the same location in the present time. The changes in weather, lighting, landscape, and situation provide a cinematic equivalent of this palimpsest in just two adjoining scenes.

A memorable long take near the end of the film is a masterfully done cinematic palimpsest as well. A character tells Doc a story, and while that story about the past is told in dialogue, another story gets told through the careful and minor shifts in character blocking and the shot's composition even though it's a single take, and another story through the body language and the facial expressions, and another in tone of voice and wateriness of eyes, and then all of these stories are reconsidered given what happens in the climax of this long take; and a different context is lent to the texts of this scene in its final moments, and again in the shot that immediately follows this long take. It's these virtuosic conjunctions of composition, lighting, performance, and dialogue that reveal the filmability of what would otherwise seem unfilmable: in one scene, Anderson depicts the death of 60s idealism while doing a dozen other things simultaneously.

And yet for the most part I don't think the present-day Anderson is using the kind of cinematic grammar or cinematic sentence structure to sustain a semi-consistent narrative palimpsest. Oddly, I think of certain cinematic things in terms of sentence structure and rhythm. For example, the sentence structure of a Jackie Chan fight scene is different from the sentence structure of a Bruce Lee or Jet Li or Tony Jaa fight scene.

Present-day Anderson predominantly shoots Inherent Vice in a loose and slow style rather than a dense one, whereas the Anderson who made Magnolia was all about speed, control, and momentum as a means to create the narrative palimpsest. So much is conveyed about characters and character relationships in Magnolia in just its opening montage and its carefully contextualizing voiceover and the steady accretion of information that winds up in frame. While the main story of Magnolia takes place in the present of the characters' lives, so much about their past and the world they live in is communicated by the obsessive details, and it's done so quickly, or with an overt sense of impending. Obviously Magnolia is a different story than Inherent Vice, and yet Magnolia feels more overtly Pynchon-esque to me because of how packed and propulsive it is, like a Pynchon sentence at its best.

Then again, Inherent Vice has been dubbed "Pynchon Lite."

This all sounds like I disliked Inherent Vice, but that's not true. I liked it but felt a bit let down, and some of that may be due to the hype. I love Anderson's movies in general, and my expectations were high, especially when early reports of Inherent Vice suggested the movie was like Anderson doing The Big Lebowski, The Naked Gun, and Airplane! While there is some Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker influence in Inherent Vice, it's mostly garnish and not meal. Again, present-day Anderson's writing his comic sentences differently than the spoofs of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, and while there are a few phrases that are reminiscent of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, it's not really the same: the composition, pace, and approach to the zaniness is much different and Anderson is not as fast or frequent with the comic phrase in this film (think the firing and loading of a blunderbuss) as Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker (think a Tommy gun). I'm a bit surprised that many critics say Inherent Vice is so zany. It's zany in spots, it's weird in general, sure, but I think The Big Lebowski is much zanier and the Coen brothers do more Pynchon-esque things with their approach. Is it weird to say that I expected something much weirder and more psychedelic out of Inherent Vice?

I'll watch Inherent Vice when it comes out in December, sure, because there's this other theory brewing about the approach to the movie. It's based on Anderon's love for Neil Young. Anderson showed a clip of Young's 1972 film Journey Through the Past, which Young directed, during a conversation with Kent Jones of the New York Film Festival. It was a long take of Young silently smoking a joint and eating strawberries on a sunny day with his girl, and then he says something you can barely hear before they get back in their old car and drive off. The Inherent Vice soundtrack features two songs by Neil Young, whose work, as far as I know, doesn't appear anywhere in the book Inherent Vice.

So, like, hear me out: what if the movie Inherent Vice is like Paul Thomas Anderson's cover version of the novel Inherent Vice but done using the sentence structure of Neil Young's Journey Through the Past rather than Thomas Pynchon?

No, I am not stoned.

The Dance of Reality (La Danza de la Realidad) (2013)

Last Friday, Alejandro Jodorowsky was in New York for a special screening of his latest film, The Dance of Reality (La Danza de la Realidad), at MoMA. Years and years ago when he announced that he was making Santa Sangre (1989) at Cannes, a journalist said that Jodorowsky may be rusty as a filmmaker, to which Jodorowsky replied that a rusty knife can both cut you and poison you. At that time, it had only been several years since his previous film, Tusk (1980), a folly of a movie made in India that he's basically disowned. The Dance of Reality is Jodorowsky's first movie in 23 years. At best, this means the blade can cut deeper and may harbor a poison that festers; at worst, the blade crumbles from disuse and barely breaks the skin.

Marina Abramović (who was in attendance) helped introduce the film. She said that Jodorowosky's movies always struck her with such intense color, which was a fine counterpoint to the grayness of her surroundings in Yugoslavia. She closed by noting that there are two kinds of people in the world: the true originals and those who follow. Jodorowsky, she said, was a true original.

The Dance of Reality is an adaptation of the first chapter of Jodorowsky's autobiography of the same name. Young Alejandro Jodorowsky (played by Jeremías Herskovits) is introduced to us as a fraidy cat with long blonde hair, and he's terrified of clowns at the circus. Alejandro's father Jaime (played in Freudian/Jodorowsky fashion by the filmmaker's son Brontis) is a brusque Stalin loyalist who thinks his son is too effeminate. And then there's Alejandro's mother, Sara (Pamela Flores), who is gentle and matronly and busty. She belts out all of her lines like she's an opera singer, which is what Jodorowsky's mother always wanted to be in real life. Yet poverty forced the family into the toil of the working class. This class distinction is there in the introduction as a bit of filthy lucre fills the screen, a shimmering riposte to Jodorowsky's hometown of Tocopilla, which is colorful yet grimy. Whereas the coins seem unspent and merely hoarded, the buildings are lived-in and the paint glows through and because of the layer of dirt. Later, there's a golden shower on camera which provides a kind of succor that gold itself cannot. (It should be as ridiculous as the scene in Lee Daniels' The Paperboy. It sort of is, but it's also incredible because it's less about the urine and more about love, symbolism, devotion, forgiveness, transcendence, alchemy, womanhood... and yeah, okay fine, the urine too.)

The Dance of Reality, among many things, begins as a kind of comic musical, with songs and vignettes and tableaus of delight. I felt tears well up in my eyes as the young Jodorowsky wanders through town and meets the weirdos of his young world. Childhood is magic, and this Tocopilla is a place of wonderments. There's a bit of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine in the young Alejandro's joy over a pair of shoes, and even though the CG is spotty (though not bad for a $4 million independent film), the ambition and emotion of one sequence on the seashore overcomes the technological limitations. As these scenes from a surreal childhood unfold, the old Jodorowsky periodically shows up behind his child counterpart, commenting on the moment with a wizened perspective, and even saving his own youth from the despair that usually befalls sensitive children.

In addition to being a musical, The Dance of Reality is also a wistful look at childhood and a coming of age, a kind of exploration of class and race, a delve into the surreal family dynamics that helped mold the young Jodorowsky (and gave him the neuroses he's continually confronted in his work), and a glimpse at the political strife of Chile at the time. There is color, there is madness, and there is psychomagical beauty to what unfolds even when it does so unevenly.

Jodorowsky's previous films had a central character or central characters often on a kind of quest or with a shared goal, whereas The Dance of Reality, like life itself, doesn't have the clean narrative or obvious singular drive of an arc. There seems to be two different branches on this story tree: there's the son and there's the father. (Maybe it's just two different trees that are so close that their limbs intersect.) I expected that The Dance of Reality would be all the son's tale, but the middle of the film breaks from the whimsy of childhood to the failures of Jaime. It's almost a different movie; it's essentially a chronicle of another life lived.

I think this sense of unevenness is compounded by the fact that this is just the first chapter of the autobiography. A long life (or lives in this case) isn't resolved in a few years, and there are very few things in life that do get resolved anyway. Jodorowsky commented after the screening that if he lives to make the sequel to The Dance of Reality, it will be about writing poetry and being in a poetry club in his teenage years. (I believe the title would be something like “Infinite Poetry.”) As a teen, Jodorowsky hunkered down at his typewriter while his father berated him for being effeminate. So here's a conflict or set of conflicts--classic notions of machismo vs. the sensitive artist; the masculinity of the father vs. the femininity of the mother--introduced in one autobiographical film to be continued in another autobiographical film that has actually/already manifested itself as a quintessential element in Jodorowsky's previous films (i.e., El Topo, Santa Sangre).

While the rust of two decades is there, I don't think that diminishes the nature of the blade. The Dance of Reality still cuts, and can cut deep, and it cuts in a way that is uniquely Jodorowsky's--all sumptuousness and violence and aesthetic convulsions. I felt like I was reading an author's book of new and collected short stories, or listening to a recording of a band's reunion show where they play the hits and some new material. There are scenes or elements that immediately call to mind Fando Y Lis, El Topo, The Holy Mountain, and Santa Sangre: cripples, amputees, untouchables, circuses, objects aloft by balloon, the importance of arms, transvestites, a pentecostal/evangelical revival, brutal initiations into the ways of man, the strange pseudo-sexual bond between mothers and sons, etc.

And yet it makes sense that the film would be a kind of greatest hits. If every movie that Jodorowsky has made is autobiographical in some way--all art is autobigraphical given that the events of a life can be transformed and represented through a kind of aesthetic alchemy--his autobiography dips into that same well as his fictional works. All this time Jodorowsky's been talking about his life surrealy, obliquely, and metaphorically, and now he's talking about his art obliquely through his own autobiography, which takes on a surreal metaphorical power thanks to the transformative abilities of art. It's as if he's worked backwards toward himself, like the old man on film who appears behind his young-self with words of hope.

I don't feel like ranking The Dance of Reality against Jodorowsky's other movies, at least not yet. It'll take a few more watches to figure that out. All I can say is that I can't wait to watch the film again.

Some Highlights from the Post-Screening Q&A

Alejandro Jodorowsky mentioned that he plans to do a marathon tarot card reading at MoMA some time in the future. I am so there.

Jodorowsky did an impromptu tarot reading for an audience member simply by having him pick three numbers (which I cannot recall off the top of my head even though the person being read happened to pick the same numbers I picked in my head). Jodorowsky told the man that he has a star he is chasing, but there is something in his life is getting in the way (i.e., the card of the hanging man). Jodorowsky jokingly asked him what his relationship with his mother was like. He said that the man ideally would like to be a teacher. The audience member said he's a filmmaker, and Jodorowsky asked him if he's chasing after a woman who's as good as his mother. Jodorowsky ended by saying "Once you find that star, you will be able to make a good picture!"

Jodorowsky got pissed off at the first audience member who asked a question because of he was rambling and commenting about himself rather than engaging with Jodorowsky. At one point Jodorowsky interrupted the audience member and said (paraphrased), "WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION?! GET OUT OF THE WAY OF YOURSELF AND ASK ME A QUESTION!" The question was "Why does the world need to heal itself?" which was a thread brought up in conversation with Jodorowsky during the night. Jodorowsky seemed perturbed since the quuestion was a) already technically answered and b) self-evident. The world needs to heal itself because it's obvious it is very sick and things could be better.

Jodorowsky did some psychomagic healing in the Q & A. A woman with pain in her left leg asked what she should do. Jodorowsky said that pain in the left leg denotes pain from the mother (the right leg = pain from the father). Diagnosis: she should rub dirt from the Dominican Republic on her leg to heal herself.

A woman asked Jodorowsky why he does't have any female main characters in his work. Jodorowsly got a little defensive and brought up his Metabarons comics. (The comics are wonderful, by the way. If you haven't read any of the Jodoverse, check out Humanoids Publishing.) Jodorowsky then said that in Hollywood (and western storytelling), there are four kinds of male characters: the champion, the hero, the genius, and the saint. In this tradition, the four female characters are: the virgin, the mother, the whore, and the idiot. Jodorowsky talked about some women in his films often being healers and purifiers in some respects (as in the newest one), and then said that it's up to artists and consumers of art to demand changes in this set of patterns and to offer up their own art that breaks these molds as a response.

Jodorowsky said the first thing he does every morning is to check if his wife is by his side and then he makes sure he's still alive. (I like the way he ordered that.)

On the note of his wife who is roughly 40 years his junior (seen below), Jodorowksy said that the first time he met his would-be father-in-law, he was asked about his birthdate. Jodorowsky gave the date of his birth and his future-father-in-law said (paraphrased), "Good. I was born the day before you were. You're still younger than me, so I'm okay with this relationship."

Sea Hawk (1924)

Not an early version of the same story as the 1940 Errol Flynn film, this is based upon a novel by Rafael Sabatini who gave the world Scaramouche and the Captain Blood novels (one version does have Errol Flynn).

The film is the story of Oliver Tressilian. A well to do noble he is settled into a life of leisure. Disliked by his half-brother, he is framed for murder and then carried off to sea by scoundrels paid by his brother. Events take rapid turns as the ship Oliver is on is captured by the Spanish, he’s forced to become a galley slave, makes his escape during a sea battle, then becomes a pirate… and on and on.

A mix of romance and adventure, the film scores high points once the film gets away from the intrigue on land and gets Oliver onto the high seas. A rip roaring adventure with sea battles and action the film is truly spectacular and it’s easy to see why Hollywood movies were big to dos back in the 1920’s. Films rarely ever look this BIG.

While I’m not a fan of the soapy nature of some of the plot, and I wish it sprung to life a bit sooner than it does (it’s about 40 minutes in that it goes into overdrive) I still really like the film. It’s a rip roaring adventure of the sort that Hollywood doesn’t make any more, made at a time when it was just perfecting the formula.

Definitely worth seeing, especially if you are willing to be patient at the start. Out from Warner Archive, the film also plays occasionally on Turner Classic

A few thoughts on Les Miserables (2012)

I was ranting at Randi earlier today after I saw Les Miserables. She was a mused and kept saying this is why she wanted there to be an Unseen podcast, my occasional rants. Apparently she found what I had to say about the film amusing.

I should say at the top I've seen the show twice. Once when the show opened on Broadway, the second time when I was dating Randi. That second performance was as perfect a a stage performance as I've ever seen (and I've seen hundreds of shows). I also can sing,not well, but I can sing most of the songs. I know the show.

For those who don't know the plot of the film follows Jean Valjean as he is released from jail but can't find work. He finds god when a priest shows him kindness. He then blows his parole and changes his life. When the some one is taken into custody on the belief that the person is him, he reveals himself, but flees to rescue the daughter of one of his workers. Years later he runs head long into his old nemesis on the barricades as he trying to rescue the man his daughter loves.

Yea it's soap opera, but when done right it's brilliant.

Here, it's only occasionally done right.

Where do I begin?

The performances are okay. Hughe Jackman is fine, Anne Hathoway will get her Oscar, Amanda Seyfried is fine, Helena Bonham Carter is a non entity, Sacha Baron Cohen  proves that he is one of the most under appreciated actors working... Surprisingly Russel Crowe isn't bad. He's not as bad as people make out. The bad one, the truly awful one is Eddie Redmayne. Vocally he's awful....

The real problem is that the film is poorly directed. Whoever made the decision to film the singing live effectively killed the film from ever having a chance to work... because of how the singing was done they reduced the film to close ups, they made it claustrophobic. Its tight streets and rooms. Nothing feels real, its all sets. The epic nature of the story, of the stage play is lost because the film focuses on single people or perhaps pairs.

Look at One Day More, this sequence which has several groups all singing at the same time on stage and builds to a crescendo show stopping moment in the theater, crashes and burns on film. You have a shot of Jackman singing, followed by Cohen and Bonham Carter, then Crowe, then Redmayne then the students... and back again. The singing of each part is in a vacuum. If you listen you can hear that each piece as if these clips were separate and distinct. It doesn't feel like it was really one moment in time in several places. Any emotion is stripped away and the sequence which  moves you to tears feels like it was put together by a baboon.

Later on the sequence of Bring Him Home, where Valjean asks God to spare Marius dies because it's all close up of a pacing Jackman. Jackman's vocal performance is fine, the trouble is the camera moments and the fact it's only Jackman from the waist up makes it Jackman thinking about nothing much instead of pleading with the creator to save the life of the boy his daughter loves.

I know the film is not the play, but the film shouldn't feel smaller and less epic than the play. Yes there are some grand epic moments, the opening, some of the crowd sequences, but mostly the film are these tiny rooms or single people on a huge canvas.  On stage you felt you were all over France, in the film, you largely feel you're on a soundstage in front of flats.

Worse because we are largely watching single people just singing and not doing the film seems static and stagnant. In the theater the show ran three hours twenty minutes and never felt long. here the two and a half hours feel like an eternity.

Yes the film does work occasionally. Master of the House, though clumsy is a joy because the camera and the characters move around. Anne Hathoway's solo kicks ass and takes names.  And some of the spectacle is glorious. Most amazingly the one thing that never ever worked for me with the show, the final song,here is rendered into a moment that reduced me to tears and made my voice crack when I was describing it to Randi. As the cast singsDo you hear the people sing...Jean Valjean walks into a a square with a monstrous barricade where all the world has come together and the dead have returned. Its a purely cinematic moment that soars to the heights the rest of film never approaches. It's so glorious I can understand how some audiences were giving the film standing ovations.

On the other hand how the hell this film had been picked or even considered the best of anything is completely beyond me. Oscar?God I hope not.

Snow White (1937) New York Film Festival 2012

If you’ve never seen Disney’s first feature length animated film go see it.

If you’ve never seen it on a big screen go see it...and even if you have you should see it at the New York Film Festival since they are going to show it in the correct aspect ratio.

The film is a visual masterpiece and it changed animation as we know it.

Yes there were other animated features, and yes there were other people taking animation seriously and as a work of art, but Disney’s film altered the way that the vast majority of people the world over saw the art form. Honestly and truly animation could be something more than silliness for 7 or 8 minutes

Sadly Disney’s work was so over powering that very few people in the US could ever hope to compete with him with the Fleischer Studio going down the tubes after Gulliver and Hoppity didn’t do as well as they had hoped.

Go see the film

A confession- outside of the art, this film bores me to death. I find it long and draggy and way too simplistic even by disney’s standards. I think that it’s a beautiful movie but that’s about it

This plays Saturday morning at 10 AM at the New York Film Festival and you owe it to yourself to go.

Sunday Nightcap 9/2/12: Recent films, links and Tumblr

Labor day weekend and I'm not up to doing anything deep and meaningful.  Some updates in authorship were in the works but I'm too lazy to follow through. Instead some quick check ins with some recent films, links and random comments.

Before I get to films, I've found the passwords for the Unseen Films Tumblr page, and I've started to noodle with it.

It was down for about 14 months so most of you have no idea it existed. It was reposting what went up here at Unseen, but then the feed crashed and neither Randi nor myself got back to it. Anyway I found the passwords and it's active again.

I'm not going to lie, it's more than a tad jagged, I'm not sure what we're going to do with it. I've taken to reposting stuff from here as well as raiding things I find elsewhere on Tumblr. For the next couple of weeks its going to be test drive time so if you're up to it take a peak now and again and see what I'm doing. Its not being updated every day like this page so try it every few days.

What I'm hoping to do it use it for pictures. Depending on what happens with us at the New York Film Festival I may use it for something special.

Here's the page.

Okay on to recent stuff I've seen

I finally saw Dark Knight Rises. While I was less bothered by the changes to the comic, I found the film to be an incredible mess dramatically. Even if one wanted to consider it just a comic book movie it would be a mess. How can any film that starts chase in broad daylight and have it switches inexplicably to dead of night in the middle not be a mess? I expected better from Christopher Nolan. It's a not a terrible film, but its not the classic some have portrayed.  I'm working on a god awful and ungodly long piece taking it apart piece by piece and and scenes by scene. I had hoped to put it here but the frigging thing is way too out of control, especially since it's pulling in problems with the previous film. Its needs revisions and a calmer head and when I manage that, you'll get it.

Magic Mike is Steven Soderbergh's film based on Channing Tatum's days as a male stripper in Tampa. I don't get the film or why I should be watching it. It's okay but never connected with me. (What I want to see is a film based on the unlaundered stories.)

The Bourne Legacy is a related film to the Matt Damon films about Jason Bourne. It seems Bourne's quest to find out about his past caused his masters to freak out and wipe out every trace of the program. The problem is they mess up in taking out Jeremy Renner's character and he's soon on the run trying tostay alive and get enough meds to keep him going. Less action film than thriller (though there are great set pieces) this is a solid film. Sure it takes a bit to get going and it ends on a kind of cliffhanger, but it's an enjoyable film. My question, when's the next one?

The Watch is a middling science fiction comedy about the neighborhood watch stumbling on an alien invasion in a Costco. It just missed for me. with the balance between comedy, science fiction and action never working. It comes off as calculated in the extreme.

Never mind that Total Recall is a remake of a semi-classic(in some corners) science fiction film, its a mess on it's own terms. It's a film that is way too in love with it's notion of being a great looking science fiction. It looks like a Bladerunner knock off but without any real notion of a workable story (and revisions to the original that make it very much one thing). Wait for cable.

The Bachelorette is a funny film about three obnoxious women who are the in the wedding party of their overweight friend who they hold in a kind of contempt. As the wedding approaches they end up wrecking the wedding dress and are forced to deal, sort of, with the mess of their lives. I laughed, I cried, I couldn't understand why any of them were friends. Most everyone is so unlikable I didn't want to spend any time with them. I laughed...but I kind of hated myself for doing so.

And now some links:

Guillermo del Toro's Monsters

The Goodies in Conversation

The 7 Most Unintentionally Hilarious Movies of the Decade, by Rifftrax

Making Manos

Remarkable Meetings

Richard 3 is buried in a parking lot

Kubrick's One Point Perspective

Tribute to Jerry Nelson

And coming soon---This week we're going to take a look at the five series by Adam Curtis that we hadn't reviewed before. The week after come criterion titles and then who knows....

Asterix at the Olympic Games (2008)

Again, with the blazing speed and timeliness of Usain Bolt crossing the finish line, I bring you a review of a motion picture about the Olympics—this time 2008's Asterix at the Olympic Games. There's been three live-action Asterix films (with a fourth to follow next year); this is the third and by far the weakest, but there's still a lot of fun to be had with the timeless comic strip creations of René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. This one's loosely based on the twelfth book in the series, and was released to coincide with the 2008 Beijing Olympics. What better time then, than to review it...the week after the Olympics. I'm so sorry.

The plot's relatively simple: Asterix (Clovis Cornillac) and Obelix (the brilliantly cast Gérard Depardieu) battle Romans (and the rest of the Roman Empire) in the Grecian Olympic Games. It departs from the previous pair in the live-action Asterix series by creating a mostly-new script that incorporates rather than spotlights the original comic strip plot. It looks great: CGI and effects clearly benefited from a pricey €78 million budget, and there's great care taken to preserve the look and feel of the comic strips:



The movie adds a romantic subplot not present in the comics: the Gaul Lovesix has fallen in love with Irina, a Princess of Greece, played by the easy-on-the-eyes supermodel Vanessa Hessler.



Each of the live-action Asterix films has courted the dad audience by spotlighting an actress who is, to use the official motion picture industry technical term, babe-alicious: supermodel Laetitia Casta in Asterix & Obelix Take On Caesar and French model and actress Louise Bourgoin in 2013's Asterix & Obelix: On Her Majesty's Service (not to mention Catherine Deneuve as the Queen of England). And then, of course, there's the sight of Monica Belluci as Cleopatra in Asterix: Mission Cleopatra. Why, let's look at that sight now!



Don't worry, ladies, there's something in the movie for you too:



Okay, whenever you're ready, let's go back to Asterix at the Olympic Games. Take your time.

Critically panned but strong in European box offices, the film preserves many of the visual gags, dialogue puns, and epic visuals of the comic strip. It depends on a primary knowledge of the series' characters and the situation (well known throughout Europe), but an American audience unfamiliar with Asterix will find the plot easy to pick up.

Irina has been promised as a bride to the winning sportsman of the Olympics, so Lovesix (accompanied by his fellow Gauls) enters the competition, but Julius Caesar's jealous son Brutus (Benoît Poelvoord) plans to cheat his way to a victory. It's here the movie makes a misstep. Brutus is portrayed as a dishonorable buffoon—not as the wily but honorable warrior of the comic strip. Every minute the bumbling slapstick Brutus is on screen is a minute spent wishing Asterix and Obelix were back in the scene.

The whole Brutus/Lovefix/Irina subplot was created by the screenwriters for the movie, but its risk is in deviating too widely from the already sharp and well-timed comedy and adventure of the original comic strips. Ignoring the sharp pacing and plot rhythms of scripter Goscinny comes at a price—many Asterix aficionados consider the most recent Asterix strips, written by Uderzo following Goscinny's death, decidedly inferior to the rest of the series.

Not that you can't adapt an Asterix story fairly straight. I'm quite fond of Asterix: Mission Cleopatra, which is a mostly faithful and accurate adaptation in plot, dialogue, and visuals from its original source. Asterix at the Olympic Games could have benefited from the same treatment. The film runs two full hours, and shaving thirty minutes from it would have helped. Most of the third act, actually, which seems to last forever, could have been trimmed, not to mention a subplot of Brutus continually trying to murder Julius Caesar and failing each time with slapstick results. The ending of the film could have been trimmed severely too: it goes on longer than an entire village of hobbits jumping on a bed.

But all this is nitpicking. It's an Asterix movie, sacre bleu, and it has no other grand pretensions than to entertain, which it does in spades. The CGI work on the sporting action and the gorgeous vistas is impressive, and Clovis Cornillac (new to the role of Asterix) convincingly portrays the plucky little Gaul, and Gérard Depardieu is, again, exceptionally funny as Obelix. There's a lot of fun sports cameos (race car champion Michael Schumacher pops up as an Olympic charioteer), and prominent French actor Alain Delon plays Julius Caesar as straight as if he were doing Shakespeare's version.



So, the judge's final score cards are up, and while it's not a gold medal for Asterix at the Olympic Games, it's certainly a great deal of fun: light and inoffensive, enjoyable by both kids and adults, and an ideal introduction to one of the finest all-ages graphic novel series ever produced.

No Keeping Them Down: Girls For Keeps (Japan Cuts, 2012)

GIRLS FOR KEEPS (whose Japanese title is the Japanese phonetic representation of 'Girl') is something a little bit out of my comfort zone.  It’s a through and through chick flick that caught my curiosity because it is adapted from a novel by Hideo Okuda (whose infamous LALA PIPO shines an unexpected beam of light out from an extremely dark and raunchy societal landscape).  Before I get into the film, I’ll preface by saying that while my eyes were initially doing barrel rolls, it won me over with its strong performances and earnest pro-female proclamations.

The film starts with a sequence that is striking in its dead-on reference to Sex and the City: a loud boisterous voice-over from one of the main characters, Yukiko, about her love of fashion (sure to set off Carrie comparisons) is set to noticeably American contempo-pop music blaring in the background.  The movie’s focus on her and 3 female friends will likely draw even more comparisons to the seminal HBO show.  Be prepared, however, for some much appreciated wrinkles in the formula.  

What the women share in common is that they are in their 30’s, or in the case of Yukiko, 29 and almost there -- an important factor in what the movie depicts to be an extremely age-conscious urban Japan.  When Yukiko joins the other women, all with their own stories, at a restaurant for a birthday celebration, they decide to tell Yukiko that it is time for her to grow up in both her appearance and manner.  And so begins her soul searching over an image she has long been comfortable with, as well as each of the other friends’ stories, filled with struggles over work, family, and yes finding love.  

Along with Yukiko, a campaign planner for an advertising agency, there is Seiko, a recently promoted executive for a city planning and developing firm. Takako is a single mom whose mind is often occupied with doing right by her son.  And last of all, Yoko is another white collar worker who is conscious of the difficulty of landing a mate in light of younger competition, a situation that is made more apparent when she is assigned to mentor a very desirable (to all of the women in the office) new male employee.        

For the women in the story, the combination of their age and gender present one sort of challenge or another.  While Yukiko and Seiko both have long term relationships, they face the hardships of holding nominal influences in their jobs.  Yukiko finds that her designs are not taken seriously by senior members of her company.  She ends up reporting to a younger superior with something of a vendetta for the way she and other 30-something women dress in frilly clothes and refer to themselves as ‘girls.’  At the same time, she grows increasingly frustrated with a longtime boyfriend whose efforts to make her feel special are humorously lacking.  An impulse to demand more is met with the nagging voice of a co-worker that at her age, she’d be better off just settling for the relationship she has. Seiko is undermined by a system that does not take women seriously as leaders, to the point where her work is sabotaged by an arrogant male subordinate, while at the same time forced to watch a new female employee be trivialized in spite of her talent.  

While they occasionally see each other, lament, and give advice over their situations, the stories are really each one’s own.  Their struggles are documented through situations that at times are humorous, and others humiliating.  Yukiko, with the help of a livelier and more self-assured colleague, stands up for her vision of a critical fashion promotion, while at the same time putting up with her longtime boyfriend’s routines, slowly growing in her demands for better treatment.  Seiko navigates her increasingly hostile work environment, steadying her resolve for an inevitable boardroom battle to prove the competence of herself and a sympathetic subordinate.  Less in the foreground are the stories of Yoko and Takako, yet their tales also have poignant moments.  In one scene that bears a great moment of awkward humor, Yoko returns home after work to find her family clandestinely celebrating her younger sister’s engagement.  “You don’t have to hide it from me. I can find a mate for myself,” she insists as she open a beer, but the cracks in her resolve are apparent.  For Takako, a simple gesture like teaching her son to flip over the monkey bars is a testament to her devotion to her son, yet at the same time the fretting she does over this shows her insecurities over being an adequate parental presence in his life.

The further along the film goes, the more it sheds away the Sex and the City comparisons -- aside from the important common ground that this about strong, independent women.  All of them are, even the more bubbly Yukiko; if they weren’t, they would not be able to face the uphill struggles society has thrown at them.  A big distinction between this movie and its American predecessor is that there is no focus on saucy exploits here.  The protagonist in Girls... are not trying to get their rocks off.  Rather, they seek to establish a positive identity, equity in a world that sends an overbearing message that they should remain complacent in a marginalized position.  I can also say with certainty that, as little familiarity as I have with the Sex and the City franchise, I know enough about the movies to say that Girls... is far more grounded in reality.  No, here there are absolutely no trips to luxurious wedding parties held in Dubai.  

As far as performances go, Kumiko Asou (who was also in one of the big features of this year’s Japan Cuts, Love Strikes!) is captivating as a headstrong, indignant businesswoman. This is fitting, as her confrontation with an overwhelmingly chauvinistic foe makes her story the most emotionally charged of the bunch.

While it espouses a cause we can get behind, the movie is not without some factors to take into consideration.  For one, this is a decidedly pop affair, with moments that some might find overly sappy.  Considering Fukuda’s other written work, it leaves me wondering if there was not in fact edgier, less tactful dialogue to begin with that was later prettied up.  On a more technical note, In moving between four stories, there are long stretches of time dedicated to two of them, with the others left out of the picture.  It is enough to sometimes take you out of the loop of the other characters’ stories and lessen their impact.  In fact the original novel was structured as a set of short stories, so combining them into one may have been a challenge.  And all the while it must be acknowledged, the cuts back and forth between the crucial events in Yukiko and Seiko’s stories near the movie’s finale was masterfully and movingly edited together.       

In fact all of the main characters’ final resolutions and realizations struck a chord with me.  I was truly won over.  The more i think about the ground covered, the more impressed i am that from within a social climate that is still marked by serious imbalance, a film like this comes along to both entertain and address those issues.

Whether or not you can relate, Girls For Keeps offers a genuine look at the challenges and complexities of womanhood, while channeling a powerful shot of positive girl power. An unapologetic chick flick, proceed accordingly.

Girls For Keeps receives its international premiere (first screening outside of Japan!) as part of the Japan Cuts festival, taking place at the Japan Society, Wednesday July 18, at 7:30 PM.

Me on twitter = @mondocurry

Based on the Book: Tribeca Talks: Pen to Paper event 2012

Left to Right: Charlie Matthau, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, Donald Rice

The concept of watching books turn into movies has held much interest for me of late.  As major works such as Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Hunger Games have been adapted to the form of big screen entertainment, I’ve pondered how best to perceive them.  If there is in fact in some rule of thumb we could apply to determining their value as a reworking of another medium as opposed to just another movie.  Should cinematic shortcomings be overlooked in light of the value of bringing a worthwhile book into a more widely received medium?  Or should these works be raked through the coals for their lack of faithfulness to the original source material?  Considering the built in audiences they will bring to theaters, one might argue that it’s not unreasonable to see these projects as servants of the stories they purport to tell.  A more reasonable view may hold that these films should be judged entirely on their own merit, without a need for falling back on the printed source material to fill in the blanks when details do not translate on screen.

        I was naturally drawn to the entry of the Tribeca Talks Pen to Paper series, Based on the Book, which looks at experiences of adapting novels to the screen from the point of view of three very different directors.  Film critic Mark Adams moderated the panel, which took place in the open space of the Union Square Barnes & Noble’s third floor and was open to the public for free.  The large but cozy space attracted a full house, ranging from creative types in the film industry seeking advice on their adaptation endeavors to fans of the work by specific directors participating in the talk.

The event would not shed much light on the issue of how to receive large budget adaptations of major works, as this event focused on independent ventures being screened in the festival.  Two were world premieres:  Freaky Deaky, an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel directed by Charlie Matthau would receive its debut screening a few hours later at the School of Visual Arts complete with a red carpet reception for the film’s cas,t and Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, a 1930s period film directed by UK director Donald Rice.  The third film came from Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, who without question stood out as the wild card of the three, as he came to present his latest film Headshot, an adaptation of a noir influenced novel Fon Tuk Kuen Fah by Win Lyovarin.  The talk did, however, shed some light on directors’ varying attitudes towards transforming written words to moving images and the obstacles they encountered.  It also gave weight to the notion of film adaptations ultimately being unique creations taking on their own life independent from the stories that they initially sprang from.

The directors with panel moderator Mark Adams

        The idea of creating untarnished mirror images of the novels movies are based on was quickly dispensed with.  Each of the directors on hand spoke of aesthetic and logistical changes they made to the stories they adapted.  To bring Freaky Deaky to the screen, Matthau convinced Elmore to go along with a significant change in temporal setting, moving the story from some time in the 80’s to 1974.  The music, drug culture, and uninhibited attitude of that decade would prove to be a major element of the movie’s aesthetic.  Donald Rice “killed an aunt” realizing that unnecessary characters would clutter the screen, when the qualities of minor players could be combined into one.  Pen-ek, feeling perhaps the least attachment to the novel he reworked, kept only the opening and conclusion of the original work while changing everything in between.  Being taken primarily with the visual concept of a hit man who is shot and ends up seeing everything upside down, he felt little obligation to the rest of novel.  Reportedly, he continues to maintain a friendship with the book’s author, Win Lyovarin.

        Other editorial decisions that may not occur to the average moviegoer include the whether or not to use dialogue.  Matthau and his crew went back and forth on a witty line that did not seem to gel with the pacing, but ultimately left it in because of the laughs it would get.  Narration is another element that may be included to maintain the original voice of a novel, but for Rice, proved to be an idea that ended up on the cutting room floor.  He felt it was boring and spelled out details that were already apparent from watching the actions of the characters.

Freaky Deaky director Charlie Matthau

         
      Something all three directors shared was an attitude that once the idea for a film adaptation becomes a reality, it is its own entity, owing less to the original creation than some intransigent fans of the novel may expect.  Pen-ek suggested that once a film’s shooting begins, it is best to forget about the book adaptation aspect.  Rice expressed satisfaction at cutting away unneeded elements rather than trying to include as much as possible from the original novel in the film.  Some criticism was leveled at movies like Watchmen, which had potential to be amazing, but seemed to be too tied down to the original comic.  There was an overall sentiment that it is best to “let go of the book” and allow the “film (to) become its own thing.”

Pen-ek Ratanaruang, whose film Headshot is about an assassin who after being shot sees everything upside down 

        And what of the future plans of these directors in adaptations? Or in general?  Matthau teased his next project, The Sugar Shack, which promises a combination of Caddy Shack and The Full Monty.  Unsurprisingly, he expressed an open willingness to adapt more of Elmore’s works to the screen, as a likeminded attitude shared by himself and the crime novelist was made apparent during the talk.  He also talked about a recent interest in developing an adaptation for the novel Huge, by James W. Fuerst.  Donald Rice is working on a project based Ealing comedies from the 40’s and 50’s.  As for Ratanaruang, he is generally open to more adaptation work, it being easier than writing his own stories. Regardless of where the ideas for his films come from, the Thai director quipped that financial backers are reluctant to support anything that isn’t broad comedy with plenty of falling down.


Photo credits: Mr. C, Mondocurry