Archive for Movies & TV

Monday Movie Review: Margot at the Wedding

October 6, 2008 / / 5 comments

Margot at the Wedding (2007) 6/10
After a long period of estrangement, Margot (Nicole Kidman) arrives at the famiy home to attend her sister Pauline’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wedding to Malcolm (Jack Black).

A character study, particularly a study of an unpleasant character, is a tricky thing. A happy ending can betray whatever truth the character has revealed, an unhappy ending can be melodramatic and artificial, while a non-ending is (though trendy) potentially unsatsifying.

Margot at the Wedding reminds me of Half Nelson, an understated study of a drug addict that kind of goes for non-ending. The thing is, in Half Nelson, there’s a level of character movement, and also some conscious choices about non-movement, that make us feel we went somewhere.

There’s a lot that’s very powerful about Margot at the Wedding, but ultimately, it goes nowhere.

Margot is a woman of almost astonishing meanness. She is a bad mother to thirteenish Claude (Zane Paris), to whom she blurts every inappropriate thing you wished mothers would never say. She is comfortable calling her son a “jerk” and an “asshole,” telling him how bad he looks, whining to him about how he treats her, and then pushing him away when he seeks forgiveness.

Late in the movie, Pauline suggests that Margot has Borderline Personality Disorder, which actually makes sense, because Margot is really so incomprehensibly awful.

As the family spends time together, they relax into a conversational style that is unique and odd. This is right; families have that style. They sound like themselves and outsiders don’t understand. The sisters crack up hysterically over something that seems unfunny. They leave things unexplained. At one point they say “Poor Becky” in unison about their sister. We never learn why.

And that’s okay; a movie can have these unanswered questions, these gaps. Because it’s a family portrait, and families, even over-analytical ones like this one, don’t explain themselves to themselves. They don’t say who Becky is or why it’s sad about her.

But there’s supposed to be a payoff. A movement. When the film ends, we’re supposed to know that something shifted, or that there was meaning to it not shifting. And in the end of Margot at the Wedding, I basically felt like an unpleasant person was staying unpleasant, and any shift was just her lying to herself about her functionality like she always does.

The acting all-around is very good, very believable and gentle, although really, they simply must stop casting Kidman as an American; sooner or later her accent always slips. Was there no excellent American actress for the role? It’s stupid.

Monday Movie Review: The Times of Harvey Milk

September 29, 2008 / / 3 comments

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) 8/10
This documentary tells the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay city official elected in the United States. Opening with his assassination, the movie goes back to his life, focusing on his time in San Francisco politics, which ended with his assassination (along with Mayor George Moscone) by Dan White. The film examines the aftermath of Milk’s death, including White’s “Twinkie defense” trial and its results. Directed by Rob Epstein.

I think the most important thing to remember when watching The Times of Harvey Milk is that it was made in 1984, a mere six years after the events depicted. It was made before AIDS was known about by anyone other than epidemiologists. Before gay marriage existed as a political issue. The people interviewed in the movie have had only a short time to gain any perspective on their experiences and their loss. It also explains the hair.

It’s as if the film is two time capsules; the capsule of San Francisco in the 1970s, the beginning of a flamboyant Gay Rights movement, the birth of Castro Street as a gay cultural center, and the high cost of this kind of openness. As well, the capsule of speaking openly as a gay activist to a filmmaker in 1984; neither of these times exist anymore, both are worth looking at.

One interesting thing about watching a documentary is that it allows you to look at your own perceptions and memory. I was a teenager in the 70s. I remember that someone named Harvey Milk was killed. I remember there was a “Twinkie defense” murder trial; I did not remember they were the same murder. I remembered nothing about peaceful or violent demonstrations either. Yet these were important events, and you and I are living in a world very much touched by these events. Harvey would have been proud.

The use of news footage, interviews, photographs, and home movies is well-done. Watching the film is seamless. The film is honest about Milk’s flaws; his combativeness, restlessness, and temper. It is honest about the flaws of gay activists in general; it doesn’t try to portray riots as a good thing, although it is sympathetic to the frustrations that led there. The net effect is kind of adulatory, but the details are not.

Unfortunately, “missing’ footage is not addressed. Early on we learn that Milk’s partner was named Scott Smith. Thereafter, Smith disappeared. I assume he declined to be in the movie, but the film would have been improved by saying so. Is he alive or dead? Was he still Milk’s partner when Milk was killed? Was he at the candlelight vigil that night? The movie doesn’t say. And as you can see, it really stuck in my craw. It dangled, unspoken. People have partners; life is shaped by that. There was a partner for a split-second, and then whoosh, he was gone. In a movie about gay life and about the profound effect of coming out of the closet, that’s too big an omission. An explanation should have been offered.

Anyway, that’s minor. This is an amazing piece of history that too few people know. Rent the movie now, before Milk comes out.

Monday Movie Review: Kinsey (another re-run)

September 22, 2008 / / Comments Off on Monday Movie Review: Kinsey (another re-run)

I have a Netflix I’m pretty excited about, but I had to watch the Emmys for my other blog, and I had a lot of personal stuff to deal with, so I never watched a movie. Here’s another rerun. Sorry about that.

Kinsey (2004) 8/10
Biologist Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) decides to focus his research efforts on human sexuality.

Kinsey is an interesting and complex movie. On the one hand, it’s a biopic, making an effort at telling the truth about work that was a breakthrough, and paved the way for an entire field of research. There was no such thing as sex research when Kinsey started, which is why he started, appalled that even the most basic questions about what constituted normal or usual sexuality could not be answered.

In another way, it’s a character study, taking quirky and difficult personalities and looking at them dispassionately. Kinsey is abrasive, disconnected from human feelings, self-important, and pedantic. His wife, Clara (Mac) McMillen (Laura Linney, in a radiant performance), can only be described as an odd duck. By comparison to Kinsey, she is warmth itself, but she, too, is awkward and disconnected, and could not possibly fit in with most people.

The Kinseys had what we’d describe now as a polyamorous relationship, at least at times. It seems most reviewers look at this movie and describe Mac as patient and long-suffering. Not unlike the way that most people describe women in polyamorous relationships, which they assume benefit men and impose upon women. But it seems pretty clear that both of the Kinseys are negotiating difficult emotional and sexual terrain, making mistakes, hurting themselves and each other, and finding some sort of way through. The interpersonal experimentation was probably inevitable in an environment where people were suddenly talking about sex when no one else did. Ultimately, they were also photographing and filming sex, and unsurprisingly, they could not remain dispassionate on the subject of arousal.

The third view of this movie is as a polemic about sexual secrecy, and here I find it most compelling. Kinsey reminds us of a world in which teenage boys were told they would die from masturbation, and were tortured and humiliated to prevent it. Where a woman could believe that “babies came out of navels” until her wedding night, and her husband could believe that oral sex caused infertility and must be avoided at all costs. For all of the flaws in Alfred Kinsey’s methods and sampling, he was a warrior against ignorance. He understood that sexuality was a basic human need and expression, and that to be confused and lost and afraid in regards to it was wrong. In our current era of abstinence-only “education” and purposeful misinformation about birth control, it is worth remembering the kind of world that the far right is trying to revert to.

Monday Movie Review: There Will Be Blood

September 15, 2008 / / 4 comments

There Will Be Blood (2007) 5/10
Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an oilman who will let nothing stop his drive towards success. He develops a lifelong adversity with a preacher (Paul Dano) who has enormous over a town where Plainview wishes to drill. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.

This was me giving P.T. Anderson one last chance. I didn’t like Boogie Nights, and I half-liked Magnolia (a beautiful mess if ever there was one), so this was Anderson’s last hurrah for me. Critics have said things like There Will Be Blood is his “most realized work” or whatever. To me it felt, in many ways, less recognizably Anderson: less histrionic until the bizarre final scene, but also less populous.

Part of the problem with this movie is there are no people in it, and no life. No one is living a life. No one makes love, eats, weeps, interacts, plays. It is a one-man show with a second man add-on. Daniel Plainview exists in a vacuum, and nothing breaks in to show us why we care about watching him for endless hours (and dear Lady, does this movie go on forever or what?). Daniel’s son, H.W., is a cipher, then he’s a deaf cipher; he’s never really a little boy. Plainview gives an early speech about the importance of families, but we see no women except peripherally, and few children.

I was strangely unimpressed with Daniel Day Lewis. I realize there is something blasphemous about impugning his God-like Acting Talents, but his Daniel Plainview didn’t draw me in. It was a less exciting performance than Gangs of New York, it was inhuman in its studied quality. Maybe that’s the point. Who knows?

I was looking for some kind of statement, it all seemed like it should have been symbolic; Capitalism vs. Religion or something, but no one in the film cared about those symbols, and ultimately I felt the movie failed as a vehicle of communication. I was told that the book it is based on, Oil by Upton Sinclair, is more or less a screed on behalf of socialism. And fine, I can see Anderson wanting to change that, but he should have changed to something. The symbols here are left dangling, like leftovers in the symbolism clearance department.

The cinematography is much-praised, but it was a dark, smokey, bleak film, and not the beautiful bleakness of John Ford’s Monument Valley. It felt like the landscape expressed the overall misery of Paul Sunday’s (Dano) flock, of Plainview’s life, of the movie itself.

Ultimately, it felt like wasted time. Now I know what “I drink your milkshake” means. So what?

My thoughts on the first episode of Fringe

September 10, 2008 / / 4 comments

Eh.

I was sort of not-wowed, and then the following dialogue happened:

First guy: What do we do now?
[pause]
Second guy: Now, we wait.

Jesus fuck. No seriously, I had an urge to take pen to paper and list everywhere I’d heard that before.

I’m supposed to be into this shit? Become obsessed? The preview made me think “rip-off of Threshold.” Threshold was a sci-fi show that didn’t take off, and got cancelled mid-season, but I really liked it. Carla Gugioni, Peter Dinklage, Brent Spiner, Charles S. Dutton, alien invasion. I thought it was really intelligent. And I could see all these parallels, based on the preview. Well, Threshold was better. More compelling, scarier, with a more interesting assortment of characters. Hell, even the stiff pseudo-acting of The 4400 was better than this!

One more week, maybe, and then I’m done.

Monday Movie Review: Jesus Camp

September 8, 2008 / / 4 comments

Jesus Camp (2006) 8/10
Documentary: Evangelical kids attend a Pentacostal summer camp, where they are taught to preach, receive the Holy Spirit, and reject Satan.

This is some weird shit, and it was really important to me to get past that. I am, after all, a member of a really weird religion, and if someone took documentary footage of a Pagan summer festival, they could certainly make it seem like we were crazy people believing in stupid things. So the fact that Pentacostals, fairly uniquely among Evangelicals, believe in speaking in tongues, prophecy, and laying on of hands is not enough to make me look askance at these people.

But there’s a lot more going on. In fact, the whole package. The whole damn world of everything that reasonable people should be afraid of. Let’s start with the anti-science home schooling. Science is stupid. Not just evolution, science. So ask yourself, if these people take over like they’re trying to, where will the next generation of doctors and engineers and researchers come from? If that was the only thing scary, it would be plenty scary.

The indoctrination is everywhere, about everything. These kids have outings that are “prayer walks.” The nine year-old dancer tries to insure that she dances for God and not “for the flesh,” and all the children are whipped into a frenzy about their own hypocrisy, and weep for it. One girl prays to Jesus before letting go of her ball while bowling. It really feels like their every waking moment is filled with Jesus, and no moments are just there.

Which is just fearful. The whole religious movement feels fearful to me, as if they’re afraid that if they stop praying to Jesus for one damn minute, the whole house of cards will fall down.

Central to this story is Becky Fischer, a preacher who specializes in preaching to children, and the head of the summer camp. She is fervent and joyful; she truly believes in her mission and speaks with remarkable frankness; about “using” children, about teaching them a fanaticism comparable to the Islamic terrorists who teach children to blow themselves up. Christian children, she says, should also be willing to sacrifice themselves for God. She isn’t preaching violence, but after all, some Christians are, and if you teach that this level of fantacism and martyrdom is good, it’s only a very short walk.

I was struck, early in the film, that Fischer, a very large woman, preached about how some people are too fat and lazy to fast for God or really serve God. It struck me as typical of the lack of self-reflection and the disconnection encouraged in this sort of religion. Ironically, the film ends with Ted Haggard, preaching before his downfall, showing the same lack of self-reflection, the same disconnection. This wasn’t the intention of the film, which didn’t know at the time how Haggard would fall, but it’s kind of inevitable, as I’ve written before.

The filmmakers choose to let the Pentacostals, both adult and children, speak for themselves, and shows them pretty much how they choose to be shown. Although many things they say can be shocking or offensive, it doesn’t appear to be because of manipulative editing. The subjects are given the opportunity to consider what they’re saying, think it over, and say it at some length, it’s never a quick clip with no context, and I don’t feel there was anything lurid about it. The shock, if the viewer experiences it, comes only from the truth.

Rather than argue with the Pentacostals, the filmmakers provide a liberal Christian radio host (Mike Papantonio) for contrast. Some reviewers have said that this is a heavy-handed way of introducing counter-point, but the filmmakers, on the director’s commentary, said they cut it in after filming was done because otherwise the movie felt kind of flat; it needed tension. And I think it works.

At less than an hour and a half, Jesus Camp seems overlong. It feels like it’s going on and on and on about this point of view. I guess I would have liked more characters, or more than one group of preachers, or something. But it’s a strong film, very well-made, and I am again grateful to Netflix for making documentaries something we can all see more of.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

September 5, 2008 / / 5 comments

This is one of the most delightful montages I’ve seen in a good long while. It is the loving work of Vertigo’s Psyche of And Your Little Blog, Too (my favorite blog name ever).

I could go on for minutes and minutes about how intelligent and surprising and fun it is, but just watch it.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Monday Movie Review (rerun): Murderball

August 25, 2008 / / 2 comments

I haven’t seen a movie in more than two weeks, what with the Olympics, the Arthur, the life in general. I feel like I’m in limbo. So to tide you over, here’s a repeat of one of my earliest reviews on this blog, of one of my favorite movies:

Murderball (2005) 9/10
Quad rugby (“murderball”) players are followed from the World Championships in 2002 to the Paralympics Games of 2004. Quad rugby, or wheelchair rugby, is played by quadriplegics in specially-adapted and reinforced chairs. (Documentary)

In the movies, people in wheelchairs are a finite number of things. They are tragic, uplifting, inspiring, angry, brave, hopeful, or heartwarming. In Murderball, they’re guys. (Women in wheelchairs are seen only peripherally in the film.) Specifically, they’re guys on a sports team. In fact, if you want to generalize, they’re more typical of what you may think about athletes than of what you may think about the disabled. They’re interested in playing hard, proving themselves, partying, and picking up girls. They pull pranks, they roughhouse, they boast. They’re guys.

In a way, I realized, this is an obvious and overlooked aspect of quadriplegia. Many such injuries are acquired in typically macho ways: Extreme sports, bar fights, pranks gone wrong, drunk driving, war. We see the way that the injured have to rebuild their self-image, and nothing makes more sense than that they rebuild the macho part as well.

The basic story follows two men. Mark Zupan is one of the stars of the U.S. quad rugby team. One day he was out partying and fell asleep, drunk, in the back of his friend’s pickup truck. Later his friend, driving drunk, and with no idea Mark was in the back, crashed the truck. Zupan was thrown sixty feet and hung onto a tree in a canal for thirteen hours until someone heard his cries for help. We meet his girlfriend, we attend his high school reunion, and ultimately, we meet the driver of the pickup truck.

Joe Soares had childhood polio. He was a star of the U.S. team for years. When he was cut from the team (a coach says simply that age slowed him down) he sued, unsuccessfully, to get back on. Now he coaches the Canadian team and the rivalry between his former and current teams runs deep. We meet Joe’s wife and his son. The younger Soares is interested in music and academics, not sports, which creates tension between the two.

We also meet a recently injured man, Keith, who is first learning to face his injury. We follow him from the early days of rehab, through a meeting with Zupan at a presentation on quad rugby, where Keith is excited by the freedom and strength he feels in the rugby chair.

Murderball is a masterful film. The editing seamlessly carries you through a huge range of facets of the lives of these men. Just writing this up made me realize how very much I’d seen. We are educated about spinal cord injury, we traverse family relationships, sexuality, competition, guilt, friendship, family, remorse, anger, and play. The competitions are exciting, there’s humor, there’s even heartwarming stuff. We are allowed to draw conclusions without being pushed.

The meeting with Keith brought up the eternal question about documentaries; who are the documentarians, and what are they doing? Clearly, the filmmakers arranged for Zupan to make a presentation where Keith would be present, but how did they pick Keith in particular? How did they decide he would ultimately be excited about quad rugby? Did they follow several recently injured people in the hopes that one of them would be? These are the sort of questions I wish documentaries in general would answer.

Monday Movie Review: Not

August 18, 2008 / / 18 comments

Olympics!

Michael Phelps won eight gold medals. Holy shit. Some of those races were like dreams of what races should be. Holy shit.

Because let’s not forget American swimming: Natalie Coughlin is so cute I want to take her home and buy her pretty things. And Rebecca Soni is a Jersey Girl! Yay Jersey! ‘I’m from Plainsboro, New Jersey, and I didn’t bring a date, but I won a gold medal.’ Yay! And Dara Torres!

Guo Jingjing is the best diver I’ve ever seen. She’s like a picture of diving that got all the imperfections airbrushed out.

Usain Bolt. Holy lightning, Batman!

I haven’t even mentioned the gymnastics.

But you know what? Women’s super-heavyweight weightlifting. Fuckin’ A.

So, I haven’t actually watched a movie.

Michael fucking Phelps, man.

Monday Movie Review: Moonstruck

August 11, 2008 / / 4 comments

Moonstruck (1987) 10/10
Loretta (Cher) accepts Johnny’s (Danny Aiello) marriage proposal, and then Johnny immediately flies to Sicily to be at his mother’s deathbed. He asks Loretta to look up his estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage) while he’s away, and persuade him to attend the wedding, but an attraction between Ronny and Loretta could upset the wedding plans.

Oh my Gods, do I love this movie. I am helplessly unable to channel-surf past it should it catch my eye, and so this weekend I watched it for what? The fifth time?

I love everything about this movie. I love the interplay of familial love with romantic love, and I think that’s very rare in romantic comedies. Only a handful of romances actually care what happens after the first kiss. Moonstruck is about romance, about being swept away by passion and romance and moonlight, but equally it’s about what happens next, about commitment and spending a lifetime. Most of all, it’s about how to balance the two, how to find a life with both.

Loretta’s father, Cosmo (the wonderful Vincent Gardenia), is having an affair. It’s a tawdry little thing, full of Cosmo blowing smoke about how intelligent and wonderful he is, and his mistress oooing and aaahing in a way that a wife doesn’t do after thirty years. Gardenia is a riot at this, by the way. His wife, Rose (Olympia Dukakis, in her Academy Award-winning role), suspects but says nothing (although she certainly expresses anger like a pro). In an extraordinary scene, Rose flirts with a man she meets, but does not act because “I know who I am.” That exchange, peripheral to the plot, is crucial to the meaning of the film; knowing who you are is how to commit to marriage.

The other theme is, of course, romance. But not romance because it feels good, or is pretty:

Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn’t know this either, but love don’t make things nice—it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!

It has always been remarkable to me that this comedy, this apparently light-hearted bit of fluff, leaps into such huge themes. Ronny also says he cares more about being with Loretta than about whether or not they burn in hell. And this is not a small thing. This was the philosophy of the Troubadours, a mystical love that transcended conventional spirituality by challenging God and placing love above sin.

The climatic scene takes place at the opera (La Bohème). It’s only with this past viewing that I realized the film itself is meant as a kind of opera, and some of the ridiculous, overblown dialogue (which totally makes me giggle) is operatic. Seen as an opera, the broad strokes of the plot and interactions have double meaning, both comedic and dramatic.

I should mention, in case you haven’t seen the movie, that this is all enormous fun; sexy, silly, romantic, and just totally entertaining. Moonstruck is, to my mind, one of the greatest romantic comedies ever filmed.

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