Hipsters (Thursday, February 16, 2012) (11)

Do you sometimes feel like there are too few musical-comedies in theaters? Do you wish they were more political and historical in content... but not about the French Revolution? Did the death of Josef Stalin make you want to get up and sing and dance? Well, if you answered yes to any of those then Valery Todorovsky's film Hipsters is the movie for you!

A brief note for the youngs: There was a time about 60 years ago when the term "hipsters" was used to describe people who saw themselves as separate from the rest of society, who looked down their noses at "normal" people (sometimes called "norms"), who distinguished themselves by listening to music you never heard of and had a sartorial style and hairstyles that norms might think of as embarrassing. No, they didn't live in Northern Brooklyn, but in Moscow in 1955.

Such is the setting for this story of rebellion and youth. As the film opens in Thaw-era Russia, there is a dance party where hipsters are listening to American rock, jazz and R&B music and another group of square kids, party members, comes in to break up the fete. The deputy of that group is Mels (Anton Shagin), who is a future leader, but also really interested in the style of the hipsters he's harassing. By chance he meets hot blond Polly (Oksana Akinshina) and falls in love with her. He then decides he will let his hair down (that is, put it up into a pompadour) and become a hipster to try to have a chance with Polly.

This is a very Jacques Demy-style musical, with big choreographed numbers that grow out of every-day life. We see factory workers dancing as they do their work and just about all the songs are about sex and kids being in love or being told to straighten up by their narrow-minded folks. Todorovsky does a wonderful job of using color (and hair) to highlight characters and actions so we can easily tell which side people are on and who is a friend (a bit like Quadrophenia as well, with the two waring sides of hipsters and norms rather than mods and rockers).

At times the subtext is a bit overdone, as we are beaten over the head with the concept that this American music is particularly black and that it is tantamount to sex (yeah - no, I get it - be-bop is like sex - the montage of dancing to the music and screwing is unnecessary). Still, this is a nice and fun film, generally well put together and rather clever about the intersection of these historical moments (the rise of rock music and the Thaw). The last number is a bit too much (a bit reminiscent of the "What the World Needs Now is Love" song at the end of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) with all the youth from all times singing together about peace and love, but it's musical-comedy, so it does tend toward overstatement.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Declaration of War (Friday, February 3, 2012) (6)

It's long been an easy thing for people to say that some new young film talent in France is "the next Godard" or "has the feeling of early Truffaut," so when hearing such a thing about Valérie Donzelli and her film Declaration of War, I basically ignored it. And yet, the film really does have the feeling of the first generation of New Wave fare in the first part of the 1960s.

There's something about the brightness and joy of the experience of watching the film, the post-modern taking of film conventions and magnifying them, that's totally reminiscent of such films. Just like how Godard and Truffaut were cinephiles who enjoyed the game of making movies and inserting hundreds of allusions and jokes in them, it's clear that Donzelli is a very keen movie watcher and a talented artist.

Billed as being "based on a true story," the film was co-written by Donzelli and her frequent collaborator Jérémie Elkaim (who also co-starred in her last film, Queen of Hearts - available on DVD and worth watching) and would seem to be their own story of love and pain. The film opens with Juliette (Donzelli) taking her young son to the hospital where he gets an MRI. We then see a flashback to her in a club several years earlier where she met Romeo (Elkaim) (silly or not, the name joke is straight out of Godard). The two have a passionate affair that ends in her getting pregnant and them getting married.

All of a sudden, these two thirty-somethings have to be grownups and take care of serious stuff, whether they like it or not. At some point their young baby starts behaving strangely, and after a series of frantic doctor visits, it seems he has a brain tumor. They must grow up even more in a short amount of time and see what all this stress does for their relationship.

Donzelli has an interesting on-screen persona (I say this based only on the two films of hers that I've seen). She's basically a French Zooey Deschanel, light and bubbly, not against singing or crying for no particular reason; a cool chick you feel like you might know or might want to know. (Granted, many people hate Deschanel, and they might hate Donzelli as well... all I can say to these people is that you're jealous and clearly hate joy.)

Perhaps a more apt comparison, however, in the world of independent film is Miranda July, at least from the point of view of being cute and relatable and technically interesting. In many ways, this film feels like a "what if" sequel to July's The Future (what if Sophie and Jason had stayed together in that film?). This is a story about young people enjoying freedom until it gets serious and then not totally having the tools to deal with reality.

There is a risky and interesting musical number in the film, that really shouldn't work but does. Unlike Queen of Hearts, which is a Jacques Demy-esque musical comedy, this is really a light drama with a single song in it.

Throughout the film, Donzelli punctuates moments with rather daring and interesting filmic devices, such as iris-ins and third-person off-screen narration (again, another ode to Godard, who might have been paying homage to a Dassin or someone like that). It's all very fun and quirky. In one sequence, as the young family is rushing to the train station to catch a train for Marseilles to see a doctor down there, Donzelli and editor Pauline Gaillard give one of the most amazing left-to-right hurry-up sequences I can remember in a long time. It's really beautiful. I really appreciate such bold efforts, if for no other reason than so many movies are so goddamn boring, at least this is an effort at something clever and new.

This is a much more serious, real-world-based story than Donzelli's previous film and I think her style works wonderfully here. I look forward to seeing what she will do next, perhaps a return to sentimental musical fare or maybe a deeper journey into this more serious world of formalist drama.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Country Strong (Saturday, January 8, 2011) (1)

Note: This film had a limited release in 2010 for award consideration, but never played in New York City until this weekend. The New York Times ran their review of it on Friday, January 7, 2011 and as a result, I consider it a 2011 release.)

I was hoping this movie would have some good country music in it and be sorta trashy and fun to watch. It did have good music, but most of it was only partial songs and the story was mostly trashy and not really fun, so I didn't get what I wanted at all.

As the film opens, we see Kelly Canter (Gwyneth Paltrow) in a rehab clinic outside of Nashville. Her orderly is Beau Hutton (Garrett Hedlund) a hot wannabe musician, playing bars in and around Music City. The two have become friends (and maybe more) over the months she's been in the clinic. Her husband James (Tim McGraw) is her manager and wants to get her back out and on the road as soon as possible.

James sets up a three city tour for her to get her legs back and signs up Beau (who she says is her sponsor) and a young country-pop starlet Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester, Blair from Gossip Girl) to open for her. The four of them go on the road, first to Houston, then Austin and finally in Dallas. As the tour goes along (I mean, it couldn't be all that long, right? It's only three shows!) lots of stuff happens when different people have sex and Kelly proves to be not totally recovered.

It was frustrating to me was how writer/director Shana Feste used music throughout the film. This is a music movie. It's not really a movie about mental health or alcoholism (as much as those appear here). It's a movie about the business of Nashville... and the music is the business. But all we ever get is the first few bars of the songs and, maybe if we're lucky, another bit of the song later. Why she couldn't have treated the songs like full works that might help move the story along or give us insight into stuff is beyond me. (I now realize how well Scott Cooper mixed music with story in last year's Crazy Heart.) On top of this, she has Tim McGraw in the film in a particularly non-singing role. I guess it would be confusing to have him as a singer and Kelly as a singer (because then it would be like his marriage to Faith Hill), but it would have been better for the soundtrack, to be sure.

What was even more frustrating is that the big title song, Country Song, that Kelly sings at her big show in Dallas, is total country pop junk. By the point in the film when we hear it, Beau has already waxed poetic about the good ol' country music he grew up with (Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Waylan Jennings, Patsy Cline) and how cross-over stuff is silliness. He and Chiles performed their amazing duet Give in to Me and we love their old sound. But what we get from Kelly is junk. (Interestingly, that YouTube clip is a full version of the song that is not in the version of the film that I saw... I saw the first few lines and then there was a cut to some stuff happening back stage and then a cut back to the end of the song. Seeing it now complete, I realize it's a really, really great song.) Feste underlines the point her character makes, but seems to do it without knowing what she's doing. Her heroine is singing exactly the stuff that her hero is saying is junk... but she's doing it positively. Weird.

The script is easily the worst part of this movie. It jumps around from place to place with no explanation and never really has a good focus. At some point in the middle it seems that the tension is built on not knowing if Beau will end up with Kelly or Chiles... but this doesn't feel very important. It almost feels like Feste started writing a bunch of scenes, but never had a bigger outline and didn't know exactly how she's get from one to the next. (Also, someone has to explain to me how Kelly and Beau got on that damn train in Austin and then got off and back to town all in one day. That was weird.)

This movie would have been a lot better if it was just about Beau and Chiles. He's the emotional core of the film (Hedlund is really great as an actor and a singer) and he's the one we identify with. It could have been a movie about the duo on the road, put together against their wills but over the days they grow to fall in love. The whole Kelly part was unnecessary and a waste of time.

The whole movie is really not great, but it was nice to be introduced to Garrett Hedlund and to find out that Leighton Meester might have a career outside of Upper East Side soap operas (she's really good!). I wish there had been more music and I wish the script had been better. I'm glad for the one duet... at least I got that.

Stars: 2 of 4 (it would have been fewer stars without the one song)

Nowhere Boy (Wednesday, May 12, 2010) (41)

This is a movie by studio artist Sam Taylor Wood about the young John Lennon (Aaron Johnson, recently of Kick-Ass) in his mid-teen years in Liverpool. He is a good looking young lad, interested in girls and rock 'n' roll. He lives with his aunt (Kristin Scott Thomas) and uncle in a nice middle-class area. One day he meets his birth mother, Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), who gave him up when he was a little boy. She is a bright, young, sexy woman who is overjoyed at being reunited with him.

The two have an instant connection over their shared love for American R&B and rock music. John subsequently meets a young Paul McCartney and George Harrison and has an instant musical bond with them too. They begin to play shows as the Quarrymen and gain a local following. As this is happening, John is fighting an internal battle over his true feelings for his mother.

There are a few different stories in this film. One is certainly John's musical journey from English skiffle to American R&B to blues and rock. His mother teaches him how to play the banjo and guitar (sorta weird, because I believe the fingering is different on both) and he picks them up with little trouble.

There is also a story of John as a rather reckless young man searching for direction and identity in the world. He goes from being a bad-boy in school to being a rock star and taking on more and more responsibility. His relationship with his aunt, who has become a mother to him, of course, grows over time too. Their relationship is strained by the arrival of his mother (her sister) and they work to see eye to eye about their bond.

The most unexpected part of the film is the suggestion that John had a very specific Oedipal crush on his mother once he met her at age 16. I certainly knew that John's childhood was rather emotionally strained (being abandoned by his mother in the arms of his aunt), but I never would have expected that he had any anything other than a totally typical relationship with his mother once they reunited. I also have no idea if this is merely Taylor Wood's interpretation of the story or if there is documentary evidence of such emotions.

My main problem with a bomb like this is that I don't know what to do with it. Does this information help me better understand him as an artist? Did it change how he saw women and romantic relationships? Her certainly had an unusual relationship with Yoko (one could even say that she became a mother figure to him), but was that just co-incidence and the result of being scorned as a child, or was it more Freudian?

Unfortunately there are so many layers to the story here that this ends up being simply another item about him. I felt that the psychological aspects of this relationship was never really examined and this Oedipal idea was really just a descriptor - like the fact that he had brown hair and liked to play guitar.

Taylor Wood does a decent job with the unfocused script of Matt Greenhalgh. This is her first major feature film and she definitely has an interesting visual style and vocabulary. One of the nicest parts of the movie is the use of colors and how the palette changes through the story. The film starts out rather typically in the dark grays, blues and browns of industrial Liverpool. John's aunt is a stern woman who wears heavy cardigans and dark-colored wool.

His mother, on the other hand, is light-colored, fresh and colorful. She has bright red hair, wears bright red lipstick and colorful sweaters and dresses. Perhaps this is a bit too overt (and rather contrived), but it is a nice visual touch, I think. I really shows the world he's coming from and the world he is moving to - and helps convey the eroticism he sees in his mother.

There is much too much in this film. Between the music and the history and the psychology, it is hard to keep straight what we are supposed to be learning in the movie. I get that there was tension between John, Paul and George from the first time they met. I get that they were all musical geniuses. I get that John felt abandoned and unloved (and that this was a major part of his relationship with Paul who had lost his mother years before). But why do I care about it all? This feels more like a grocery list of things rather than an examination of John. All of these details are presented to us, but basically nothing is analyzed or dissected.

I frequently feel that bio-pics about people before they were famous are rather useless and mostly just historical masturbation by the creators. The reason I care about John Lennon is because he was a great songwriter and singer. I don't really care that he was a typically anxious teen. That's not all that interesting.

If you want to tell a specific causal relationship story - that, say, John wrote music about lovers because he lost his mother - then do that. But don't show me details of a person's youth and then not connect them to his later life when he became famous. That's all I feel that we get here.

Stars: 2 of 4

No One Knows About Persian Cats (Sunday, April 25, 2010) (32)

This is a small movie about two twenty-something musicians, a man and a woman, who live in Tehran and want to get a permit from the government to perform in public and get their passports and visas so they can tour the world and play outside of their country. They are young rockers, not very different from young people in any country. They love music of all kinds and want to be able to enjoy it away from the government censors.

There is not a heck of a lot of plot in the film - basically you have the musicians trying to get their government documents and working with one musician after another to convince the authorities that they are safe and can be trusted. They work with one musician who has his visa, thinking that if they're in his band, they can get their documents too - but that doesn't work. Then they work with two women who are traditional Persian folk singers, hoping that if they have more than one female voice, the government will have less of an issue with their band. This doesn't work either.

As time goes on and they collaborate with more and more artists, they create a beautiful texture of musical and creative diversity in and around Tehran. The variety of styles is not different from what you would get in Williamsburg, Brooklyn or the Lower East Side. There is alt-indie-Rock, hip hop (in Farsi, but with a strong West Coast influence), traditional Brel-like French chanson (again in Farsi) and more straight-ahead singer-songwriter fare.

The music throughout the film is absolutely amazing. What director Bahman Ghobadi does brilliantly is to have the musicians meet their band-mates-of-the-day and start playing music, while he cuts to background, documentary footage of Tehran during the day and night. There is a quality reminiscent of Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisquatsi here where the documentary footage gets tied to the music in a way that both the visual and the audio seem almost tied together. (Since seeing the movie, I have bought the soundtrack and can say that the diverse range of music is amazing just to listen to without any visual aide.)

This whole film is as much an ode to Tehran and it's creative energy as it is a narrative story. The fact that the story has this mumblecore-like non-structure helps underline the point that this is about freedom. Not freedom in a trite political sense - but freedom to think and breath and move and create without the bureaucrats telling you what to do. This film is saying that Iran is basically the same as Brooklyn - and would be considered exactly that were it not for the current oppressive regime. But the politics here are underneath the surface - the film is really about how art has no boundaries and is non-partisan. It's a lovely tale along the lines of the 2007 film Once - but with a much stronger focus on music and less on story.

Stars: 3 of 4 (4 of 4 for the music alone)

The Princess and the Frog (Tuesday, December 22, 2009) (203)

As a tribute to their classic 2D animation history, Disney made The Princess and the Frog, its first animated film to focus positively on primarily African-American characters (no comment on Song of the South here). The style is indeed reminiscent of classic Disney films, like Cinderella, Snow White and Beauty and the Beast, however this one lacks almost all of the charm and magic of those.

Tiana is a poor daughter of a New Orleans seamstress who dreams of opening a Cajun restaurant when she grows up. Her friend is Charlotte, the white daughter of the richest man in town (I'll clearly ignore the racial undertones here). Prince Naveen, a mysterious dark Europeanish royal, comes to town and meets with a voodoo witchdoctor who swindles him, turning him into a frog. Tiana meets the frog and is convinced that if she kisses him, he will become a prince again, but instead she is also turned into a frog - voodoo's a bitch, ain't it! The two frogs have to go into the woods to find another voodoo witchdoctor lady to turn them back to their human forms.

Typical of Disney animated features, the film has a bunch of music and songs in it (composed and written by Disney mainstay Randy Newman). Sadly none of these songs are memorable at all, even though there is a nice effort to include New Orleans styles of zydeco, jazz and blues. As I watched these songs, I think I mostly felt that they were a nice efforts, but just not as good as recent Disney fare (Under the Sea, Be Our Guest, Hakuna Matata).

Mostly, the story is pretty dull and stretched out way too far. Froggy Naveen and Froggy Tiana spend close to half the movie in the woods on the way to the good voodoo lady with almost nothing important happening. There is so much set-up to the story (Tiana's dream of a restaurant, Charlotte's greedy family, Naveen being swindled) that when the story finally kicks off, it's almost over.

There's another thing here, which is a bit more sensitive, which is the fact that it is the first major feature that Disney has done with primarily African-American characters. To me, it rides the delicate edge of being rather culturally insensitive too closely. That Tiana has to be the poor daughter of a domestic and that her best friend is rich and white might be historically accurate, but feels rather racist considering in a Disney fantasy world people of any color can be anything - why does the one black movie have to be so tied to historic Southern culture?

That the film takes place in New Orleans and features voodoo so prominently is also a bit too much, I think. Again, why can't black people live in a wonderful dream world of castles with good witches and bad witches? I think in an effort to combine political correctness with real-world based fantasy, Disney went a bit too far - or not far enough. I don't know why, after so much success with Brothers-Grimm-esque fairy tales Disney had to turn a story on its head and divert from the traditional Frog Prince story.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Nine (Monday, December 21, 2009) (201)

Nine is a movie musical based on a Broadway musical based on Fellini's classic film 8 1/2. The story is pretty straightforward and pretty close to the original. Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a giant in the Italian film industry who is set to begin his latest film project (he's based on Guido Anselmi from the earlier film, who is in turn based on Fellini himself). As production is about to begin, Contini does not have a script and as he sets to write it, he looks back on his life as a boy, a man, a celebrity and a lover of women. As he reminisces, he looks back on the important women of his life. (Even though I always thought there were eight-and-a-half women in the Fellini film, here I can strangely only count seven women - so I guess the title means nothing actually).

Considering the scope and structure of the film, this is really a show for the performers - and the cast is pretty star-studded. Contini's wife is played by Marion Cotillard, the rising French star (look out Audrey Tautou!); his mistress is played by Penelope Cruz; his leading lady and artistic muse is Nicole Kidman; his most-trusted advisor and costume designer (really?!) is Judi Dench; his mother is Sophia Loren; some gypsy whore woman who taught him about sex is Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas; some American Vogue editor is Kate Hudson.

Generally the acting is pretty good. Day-Lewis is good as always (is he ever less than good?), but I don't think the role makes him stretch all that much. Each woman is in the film for a few scenes as almost none of them interact on screen at the same time. As a result, they mostly come on for a song and maybe a brief talking scene and then exit. Kidman basically doesn't come in until the film is almost over. Cotilard and Cruz are both pretty good with the limited parts they have. I think Cruz's role might be a bit more simple, as a scorned mistress, but she is generally good.

Kate Hudson and Fergie give easily the two worst performances of the film - and their two songs are both totally dumb. Fergie comes in as a homeless-looking whore who once upon a time introduced Contini to sex. Her not-very-showstopping song, Be Italian, suggests that in order to be a good Italian man, you have to screw a lot - and screw a lot of women. I am not all that into her voice and her casting seems more about getting a pop star onscreen than anything else. She looks like an evil witch an is sorta hard to watch.

Hudson is an actress I have never understood. I have never thought that she was ever all that good. She had a big role, I guess, in Almost Famous, but since then has not stretched too much, and has basically been blond and skinny (I don't think she's all that pretty). Here she's in way over her head and totally embarrasses herself with Day-Lewis (who, of course is seamless). Her character is *totally* unnecessary (she sings a song about how she likes Italian movies - who cares) and she looks rather fat (sorry - but she lost one of her two traits listed above).

As a musical, the biggest problem with this is that you never see a whole number run through all the way once. Every time the characters break into song, there is a cut to an almost-deserted sound stage (Contini's empty mind/memory, I guess) where they dance around the multi-layer set. As they are singing in some astral plane, there are then several cut-backs to the present, wherever Day-Lewis and his women are living in our world. This structure is very choppy, clearly, and frustrating when all we want is to hear the music. In the end, none of the songs are all that memorable or emotional, because we only get several-second snippets of them before they are cut away.

Director Rob Marshall has emerged in recent years as *the* director for film musicals, after scoring big with Chicago (which I found pretty dull). I do not like his style, which I think is generally too complicated and too full of stuff. He has his roots in Broadway and it shows in his movies where everything is very big and showy. The best thing about Nine is the skeleton of the story that comes from the original Fellini work. It is not terrible, but it is not great. It is fun enough, but just not exciting at all.

Stars: 2 of 4

Crazy Heart (Saturday, December 19, 2009) (197)

Every few years there's a movie that comes out with an actor in the autumn if his career that critics and Hollywood folks go nuts about because it is some sort of magnum opus, encapsulating his whole life and career and showing that old people are talented too. (The really sick thing is that this situation almost always happens with men and not women - I guess because actresses can't get much good work past 60. Sad.)

Twenty-some years ago, it was Paul Newman in The Color of Money (a highly underrated film that deserved more awards and acclaim than just the attention it got for Newman). A few years ago, everyone was talking about Frank Langella's performance in Starting Out in the Evening (meh - overall a very bad imitation of Philip Roth). Last year, of course, everyone was buzzing about Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler (I am not a big fan - I think his performance is ok - but the film totally blows).

This year, the movie *everybody's talking about* is Crazy Heart and Jeff Bridges' *wonderful, amazing, fantastic* performance. I think the film is a big snoozer and though Bridges is good in the role, he is not better than good and all the praise is probably due to the easy story it is for lazy editors to assign than for anything he gives onscreen.

Bridges plays Bad Blake, a drunk, hard-living 50-something country music has-been. He's a musician's musician who has written some fantastic songs in his career - some of them made more famous when sung by other stars. When we meet him, he's on the road in the Southwest on a bar tour through all the back-woods one-horse towns his agent can book him into.

When he gets to Santa Fe, the bar owner asks him if he would do an interview with his niece, Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Bad agrees and meets her in his motel room. He's drunk and sticks of cigarettes, but for some reason she likes his roughness. The two fall into a brief love affair. He continues to live hard - hopefully not around her young son - and she continues to look blindly at his clear faults. The movie goes on in predictable ways as a typical 'one-last-shot-omigod-can-the-old-fogey-turn-his-life-around' story.

My main problem with the film is the script, which fluctuates between totally unrealistic and complete Hollywood cliche. It is never clear why Jean falls in love with Bad. He's sweet, for sure, but he's disgusting. There is no reason to think that she's so down-on-her-luck that she would go for such a man - and that she has a son and tells us all the time that she doesn't want to make more mistakes with her personal life, it seems like a bit much that she would let her guard down in such an extreme way. (Honestly, the thought of Gyllenhaal and Bridges having naked sex is stomach-turning to me.)

The dialogue is really terrible and the story is ridiculous. Writer/Director Scott Cooper adapted the script from a book by Tomas Cobb (that's supposed to be pretty good, though I have not read it). At one point toward the end of the film, there is a scene that you feel coming from a mile away, but you hope won't happen because you've seen it about 150 times before in other movies - but it does happen. Ugh! It's just plain lazy and dumb. Are we really at a point when writers, directors and audiences are so immune to miserable banality that we eat it up and ask for more? It seems like much of what happens would lead to a failing grade in a screenwriting class (no comment on the Independent Spirit Award's nomination for Cooper's script)

The acting throughout is good. Bridges is good - but I'm not sure he does all that much. He looks exactly like Kris Kristofferson (interestingly, Kristofferson is also a very talented songwriter whose songs are also better known than he is) and drinks whisky and chain smokes - but we don't get a lot of range in his performance. Gyllenhaal is also good, though again she doesn't do all that much with the part. Colin Farrell is good as Bad's more handsome, more successful protege - and if that's his real voice singing, he should switch to country music, because it's great!

The music throughout the film is wonderful - much better than the movie itself. T-Bone Burnett does a fabulous job with the songs that feel like old classics, even though we've never heard them before. I would buy a Bad Blake album, if only the guy really existed. I would have much preferred a movie-long concert instead of a dumb movie that I had seen before. I don't know why Burnett is not getting more credit for his songs here - he deserves basically all the positive attention for the film.

Stars: 1.5 of 4