Tag: movie review

Trisha’s Take: Midnight in Paris review

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Midnight in Paris

Directed (and written) by Woody Allen
Starring Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Rachel McAdams, and more
Rated PG-13 for some sexual references and smoking

When I revealed earlier in the evening that I’d never seen an entire Woody Allen film, no less than five different people from all across the country (and Puerto Rico) and spanning in ages from younger than me to older than me were in shock. How is it that I, as a transplanted New Yorker, have never seen Annie Hall? Or Hannah and Her Sisters? Or even Mighty Aphrodite or Deconstructing Harry?

Believe me, I’ve wanted to. Back when I first moved to the East Coast, I rented Annie Hall on Netflix, and couldn’t finish it. My reaction at the time was this:

How am I supposed to cheer for Alvy Singer, a neurotic man who constantly puts down his lovers? He’s upset with his second wife for being so into intellectuals, and yet tries to get Annie to take college courses to become one.

However, I am not one to let one bad impression of a movie that came out the same year I was born keep me from seeing what writer/director Woody Allen brought with him to this year’s Cannes Film Festival. And unlike L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan (whose review I accessed yesterday but is dated with today’s date) who deliberately was coy with the details of the plot, I’m afraid I have to let loose with a ton of spoilers.

Midnight in Paris could be called a love letter to the capital of France, and it’s the same kind of letter I could have written, as I have also loved the idea of Paris ever since I was a teen in Madame Hornacek’s first year French class. The letter-writer in this case is Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) a successful Hollywood screenwriter of dubious quality who is working on his first novel. He and his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) have tagged along with her parents who are on a business trip. Neither Inez nor her parents seem to really like France all that much, but Gil is in love with the city, and specifically the idea that the best time to be alive was Paris in the 1920s.

Unsurprisingly, in a Somewhere in Time-style twist, Gil finds himself whisked away to 1920s Paris, courtesy of a vintage Peugeot which takes him to a wild and rockin’ party where he just so happens to run into F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and his wife Zelda (Alison Pill). And from there and over subsequent nights, he meets other such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), and Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody) who all in their own way reinforce the idea in Gil’s mind that he is not living the life that he needs to be living.

Other critics have remarked that as the surrogate “Woody Allen” character, Wilson’s Gil is not as neurotic or frantic as Allen himself would have portrayed him, and perhaps that’s what I liked about Wilson’s portrayal. At the same time, for someone who is experiencing something which a more normal person would call a hallucination, Gil is perhaps a bit too eager to throw himself wholeheartedly into the delusion. It doesn’t hurt that Inez, her conservative parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), and the former college crush (Michael Sheen) who just happens to be in Paris at the same time are portrayed in such a way as to make you wonder why Gil proposed to Inez in the first place or why he ever thought that he would be accepted by her family and friends. It’s a poor love match to start with, and even if their characters were hateful, McAdams, Fuller, Kennedy, and Sheen were such great antagonists that it makes it easier for Gil and the audience to want the magical fantasy to be real.

Other than that misstep in logic, the movie was written very well and conveyed its themes very clearly. I must warn you that it wouldn’t hurt you to bone up on who the cultural elite of the day were; otherwise, just as it was in the theater I was in, as people are introduced and names get dropped, you will not understand why the rest of the audience is laughing. Perhaps the best parts of the performances by Stoll, Bates, Brody, and more is that Allen lets them bite into their historical roles with relish, and by the time they’re done, there is very little scenery left. I was also pleased with the direction of the romance between Gil and Adriana (Marion Cotillard) because though it was predictable to start with, the way it resolved itself was more true to the story.

Above all, this movie is about not settling for what is easy and conventional, which is pretty easy for one to do if you have the kind of money Gil Pender or his fiance’s family has. For the rest of us who can’t afford to jet off to France for weeks on end, just watching this movie will have to suffice for now.

Midnight in Paris which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival over a week ago is currently only in Los Angeles and New York starting today. Whether or not it will come to a theater near you depends on how much people in your state (or country) like neurotic Americans in Paris.


Trisha’s Take: Arthur review

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Arthur

Directed by Jason Winer
Starring Russell Brand, Helen Mirren, Greta Gerwig, Jennifer Garner
Rating: Rated PG-13 for alcohol use throughout, sexual content, language and some drug references

For someone who started her blogging career on a movie site, there are quite a few gaps in my mental movie database.

Take almost any movie from the early 1980s, for example. As a kid, we didn’t have a lot of extra money to spend on such things, and besides, would you really expect conservative parents to okay a movie night that didn’t include a Disney film? As a result, I never saw the original Arthur with British actor Dudley Moore and could go into the screening of the remake starring Russell Brand without any preconceptions. [Editor’s note: Massive spoilers, ahoy!]

The story, by now, is somewhat familiar: In order to keep the family’s considerable charitable trust from losing investors, man-child playboy Arthur Bach (Russell Brand) is told by his widowed mother that if he wants to continue to have access to the vast fortune left to him, he must marry nouveau riche heiress Susan Johnson (Jennifer Garner). Meanwhile, Bach meets an unlicensed tour operator from Queens named Naomi (Greta Gerwig) who ends up being able to see past his boorish behavior, and the two fall in love. Bach doesn’t want to give up the money because it’s all he has known and it fuels his every whim. He also doesn’t want to marry someone he doesn’t care about and who frankly scares the crap out of him with her domineering ways. What is an eligible young Manhattan scion to do?

Even without knowing anything about the original, or that they made a sequel to it where Moore’s character is married to Liza Minelli’s waitress from Queens, you know that any romantic comedy is going to end with Arthur hooked up with Naomi and not Susan. It’s how the film gets there is what I’m examining in this review.

Immediately after the lovely and whimsical closing credits finished rolling, I knew I liked most of what I’d seen. Brand was charming, there were some fantastic lines of dialogue that got some great laughs in the screening audience I saw it with, and Helen Mirren as Brand’s nanny Hobson stole almost every scene that she was in.

It’s when I got home and started to think about exactly what I was confused about during the last climactic scene in the church that the whole movie fell apart. Early in the movie, we first see Jennifer Garner’s Susan standing next to Vivienne Bach (Geraldine James) at the charity dinner that Arthur misses because he’s too busy getting arrested by the cops for driving the Batmobile (Tim Burton era) into the bronze bull located near Wall Street. That’s where they first hatch the scheme to have Arthur marry her because she would provide a stabilizing influence for him and with her at the helm of the next generation of the trust, the investors would return.

The next time we see Susan, she is striding out of Vivienne’s office wearing an impeccable business suit, and laying down some expository background information which reveals that she and Arthur dated once, and then after a few months of sex, he never called her again. Shortly afterwards, as Vivienne goes over the plan with Arthur, we see magazine covers showing what an awesome woman Susan is for her equestrian accomplishments and charitable work with Habitats for Humanity.

Is it any wonder, then, that I thought that Susan was an executive with the firm who bent the rules once and dated her boss’ son? And that one of the reasons why she agreed to the plan in the first place was so that she could take control of it in a way that she never would be able to on her own? And that control and the fact that it would be a marriage of convenience is something that Susan and Vivienne already discussed?

Therefore, at the end of the movie where when Arthur calls off the wedding, Susan goes on her tirade, and Vivienne stands up for his decision, I had no earthly idea why Vivienne would have heaped so much scorn on Susan for saying her piece or why she would have suddenly decided that it would be better for Arthur to marry for love and not to keep his money. Even during the earlier scene where Hobson goes to intercede on his behalf, we never get any indication that Vivienne is starting to understand her own son or that she has never thought Susan’s intentions were anything but romantic; as such, her sudden change of heart at the wedding makes no sense whatsoever.

Otherwise, this was the perfect movie for Russell Brand to add to his filmography. Knowing now about how they chose to take this movie, he was the only person I could think of who could do this role justice. Perhaps, it’s because he is a media bad boy and is such a larger than life figure that it would be impossible to see someone else in this role. If I were his manager, though, I’d worry about him being typecast, unless that’s all he wants out of his career… and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Greta Gerwig as Naomi is cute and serviceable, but the problems I have with how they handled her character overshadow too much her actual performance. The choice of Naomi’s day job is just a little too improbable for a New Yorker, and that’s what tumbled my suspension of disbelief regarding her character. Granted, the film explains that her father receives a pension and that’s what’s helping pay for the apartment they share in Queens, but even outside of New York City, most struggling children’s book authors I know of have a spouse with a day job or have a separate steady day job themselves. Also–and this is a huge publishing nitpick on my part–most children’s book publishers prefer to hire illustrators separately from writers; this is something Naomi would have known if she’d cared to do a bit of research. (Also, the fact that Susan knew that the Bach corporation acquired the publishing firm who bought Naomi’s book? Is more ammunition for the “Susan is a Bach executive” argument.)

Despite my misunderstanding of Susan’s actual motivation, I still think Jennifer Garner made an excellent antagonist, even if she was only one by default. You could tell that’s the role they intended for her to play when she made a most unwelcome crack at Hobson which seemingly came out of the blue. She has a long way to go before she gets to the level of Bette Davis scene-chomping, but she was definitely a force to reckon with during her scenes.

Equally as forceful and deserving of her top billing was Helen Mirren in the role that fellow compatriot John Gielgud had in the original as Arthur’s most trusted companion, and Hobson’s gender swap is the most interesting innovation that director Jason Winer and screenwriter Peter Baynham brought to the remake. By choosing to emphasize Hobson’s role as Arthur’s “true” mother and contrast her way of taking care of him to Vivienne’s, it brought an interesting spice to all of their interactions. However, you never felt that Mirren was putting on a man’s trousers to play this role; it was hers from beginning to end.

Ultimately, it’s a real darn shame that these actors and others who performed well–including Nick Nolte as Susan’s father, Luis Guzman as Arthur’s valet Bitterman, and John Hodgman’s cameo as a cashier in Dylan’s Candy Bar–were stuck in such a dismal remake. As my former editor once said, remakes can be done well if they bring something new to the adaptation. All this brought to the table was an expired can of spotted dick.

Arthur is out in wide release now, but honestly, you’re probably better off watching the original which is currently streaming on Netflix.

Trisha’s Take: Mao’s Last Dancer review

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Mao’s Last Dancer

Directed by Bruce Berensford
Starring Chi Cao, Bruce Greenwood, Amanda Schull, Joan Chen and more
Rated PG for a brief violent image, some sensuality, language and incidental smoking

There’s an art involved in adapting a book into a movie. Stray too much from the source material and you run the risk of alienating the audience who already knows the story. At the same time, if you stick too closely to the book’s conventions you may not attract enough of an audience who wouldn’t normally be interested in the original work.

And if the book is based on true events, and is an autobiography to boot? All bets are off.

The plot of Mao’s Last Dancer is based on the autobiography by Chinese-born ballet dancer Li Cunxin, who following in the footsteps of such artists as Rudolph Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, defected to the U.S. in 1981. However, the story of the movie begins in medias res, with a 20-year old Li stepping foot onto American soil at the beginning of a student exchange program which places him deep in the heart of Texas, with the Houston Ballet.

I was a little confused by the first few opening scenes because it felt to me that perhaps there was a bit too much medias-ing going on as out of the entire entourage who met Li (played by Chi Cao as an adult) at the airport, the only person whose role I was certain of was Bruce Greenwood as Houston Ballet director Ben Stevenson; the other characters felt like random white people to me because I wasn’t certain of their names or connection to Li. Thankfully, names and relationships began solidifying as the story then flashed back to Li’s youth and his introduction to the Beijing Dance Academy (where Li is played first as a child by Wen Bin Huang and then Birmingham Royal Ballet dancer Chengwu Guo as a teen) to help to fill in the pieces we’re missing. These flashbacks are intercut with the action in the present as Li becomes more acclimated to American culture and as his romance with fellow dancer Elizabeth Mackey (played by Amanda Schull, whom you may remember as Jody from Center Stage) deepens, so does his renown with the company and resolve to stay in the U.S.

These true events of which contemporary Houstonians recall with pride took place when I was 4, and it’s something I don’t remember my parents ever speaking about with their adult friends. As a result, I was fascinated with the story of the political drama but found myself most drawn to Li’s transformation from village peasant to into dedicated dancer. It doesn’t hurt that he is inspired by two of his teachers, one of whom inspires by exposing him to contraband film of Baryshnikov’s work and the other who inspires by sparking his sense of pride and duty. You can’t have a biographical dance movie without some sort of training montage, and I hope that I’m not exposing a bias when I say that I’m glad that it looked as serious as the kind of training montage you’d see in a kung fu movie.

Australian director Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy) and screenwriter Jan Sardi (The Notebook) are to be commended for their adaptation of Cunxin’s book, treating all the major and minor players in this drama with an even hand. Even the Communist Party members who are only toeing the line are depicted fairly and it’s a testament to the strength of the story and the movie that even without clear villains it’s still a story that’s as riveting now as it was back then. Other critics have complained that there’s not enough political drama, but I really don’t think that was the point of the movie, and especially of a story like this. It’s all about the dancing, and I’m so glad that they spent so much time on that part of Cunxin’s story.

Ultimately, though, the movie does suffer from the same problem that all book adaptations do; even with a 117 minute running time, the movie only skims the surface of what is such an engaging story and narrative that the book was named the “Book of the Year” when it was released in 2003. Still, it’s worth seeing for the great performances and an education in what life was like before you were likely born.

Available in U.S. theaters on August 20, Mao’s Last Dancer is proof-positive that white chicks love a man who can dance. And wear tight tights.

Trisha’s Take: Cyrus review

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Cyrus

Directed by Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass
Starring John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, Jonah Hill
Rated R for language and some sexual material

Back when I had a Netflix account, I went on an indie movie-watching spree, and that’s where I encountered the concept behind “actor’s workshop” films for the first time.

For the people who aren’t acting or film geeks, I’ll explain. An actor’s workshop film is one where a bunch of actor who are taking classes together take what they’ve learned and make a movie out of it. The coolest thing, though, is that some of the best actors are always taking classes and workshops to hone their craft even further. Another thing I learned about was the mumblecore movement, wherein production is very low-budget, conversations are improvised, and the focus is on characterization over complicated plots.

Multi-hyphenate brothers Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass, who helped form the latter, seem to have taken the best of what’s cool about an actor’s workshop film, given it a mumblecore feel, and turned it loose into the world.

The plot to Cyrus is pretty simple. John C. Reilly stars as John, a divorcé who never really got out of the depressive funk that drove his now-ex-wife (Catherine Keener) away seven years ago. Strangely enough, they’re still friends—and may possibly also work together—and after she tells him that she’s getting married again, she tries to get him out of his rut by forcing him to go to a party. There he meets Molly (Marisa Tomei) who sees something charming in his sad sack and “drunk on Red Bull and vodka” exterior and follows him back to his place.

However, she doesn’t stick around in the morning, but instead leaves him a note. Intrigued but not scared off, John invites her over for a proper first date which is as romantic as it is charming… only to catch her sneaking out of his room at night. Her vague explanation doesn’t satisfy him, so John follows her back to her house where he meets the source of her secrecy: her antagonistic live-at-home 21-year old son, Cyrus (Jonah Hill).

The meat of the story is the interplay between John and Cyrus as the former starts to really suspect there’s something wrong with the latter and his acceptance of the new man in his mother’s life. Any other director or writer would have turned this premise into a horror film (a mirror universe The Stepfather, if you will) or a gigantically broad comedy (Problem Child) but writer/director/producers Jay and Mark Duplass have kept to their ‘core roots by walking that knife’s edge between the extremes.

The audience I was with was completely engaged with this movie and its dark humor, especially during the parts where you’re not really sure if the relationship between Molly and Cyrus is well-meant and completely platonic.  In contrast to something lead Geeking Out About movie reviewer Lyssa Spero would say to me after the movie, I think that the choices Reilly and Hill make in their depictions of their characters are spot-on and a great service to the lines as they were conceived and improvised. At the same time, Hill stands up to and stands on his own against the veteran Reilly, and th choices he makes in the confrontational scenes between the two of them are pretty amazing.

I’ll agree with other critics who after this film’s premiere at this year’s Sundance thought that while this was a great film, Marisa Tomei wasn’t given all that much to do. The focus here is between John and Cyrus and to add a little more dimension into Molly’s character would have made this a much longer movie.

I’ll also say that though I do appreciate the lack of steadicam to emphasize the fact that this was a largely improvised film, sometimes it bordered on a parody of the exercise. I will say that I did appreciate the oddly cut romantic monologues, even if Lyssa didn’t.

For being the Duplass brothers’ first mainstream film, this is quite possibly the best way one could have gone about doing it, and much kudos are due their way.

After having opened the BAM CinemaFest on June 9, Cyrus goes into wide release on June 18 in the U.S., September 17 in the U.K., and September 23 in Germany; it must not have been farcical enough for the French.

Trisha’s Take: Micmacs à tire-larigot review

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Micmacs à tire-larigot (aka Non-stop madness)

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Starring Dany Boon, André Dussollier, Nicolas Marié, Julie Ferrier, and more
Rated R for some sexuality and brief violence

When I was in the eighth grade, I was given the chance to either take a first year of Spanish at my school or to take a first year in French at the high school across the street from where I lived and where I’d eventually attend.

Impractical youngster that I was in Southern California, I chose French and for five years I was one of the more fluent speakers in my class, going as far as to win the silver medal my senior year of high school at French camp. Those classes were where I first saw or heard of classic French films like Jean de Florette, Le retour de Martin Guerre, and Au revoir les enfants (which apparently was an inspiration for Reservoir Dogs), and I thoroughly enjoyed them. Yes, even Les compères.

Alas, my ear for the language has diminished, but that still doesn’t mean that I’m not about to turn down the chance to see a movie by perhaps one of France’s great directors of the modern era.

Even before it made its debut at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival, Micmacs à tire-larigot was picked up by Sony Pictures Classics for a U.S. release, and it’s no small wonder why.

Just as in director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s first major hit Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, whimsy abounds in Micmacs in the form of a motley crew of homeless misfits who are tasked by the main character Bazil (played by Dany Boon) to help him seek his justice upon the arms dealers who were responsible for the death of his father and who supplied the bullet which lodged in his brain during a drive-by gone wrong where he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

That there’s a lot of grim scenes depicting the actual shooting or the fact that the first five minutes of the movie start with watching Bazil’s father accidentally trigger a landmine he was tasked to clear could be perhaps a continuation of the themes in A Very Long Engagement.

And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about “Leverage” while watching this movie because what unfolds after we meet the happy band of misfits (including such heavy-weight French and French-speaking actors as Jean-Pierre Marielle, Yolande Moreau, and long-time Jeunet-collaborator Dominique Pinon) is a series of heists featuring cobbled-together tools and a female contortionist.

Of course, each misfit has a quirky note about them that gives them their “speciality” and makes them integral to the smooth workings of the plans. Of course something goes wrong, and the crew has to work together to get Boon back once he’s been captured by the bad guys (who are played with such scene-eating relish by André Dussollier and Nicolas Marié that I feared there wouldn’t be a set left by the end of the movie).

If you’re looking for deep insights into why war exists, you’re not going to find them here. In fact, the movie could almost be a rejection of war, war-mongering, and the industries that help perpetuate the cycles of violence–but that’s just me trying to reach for a deeper meaning in a movie that really doesn’t need one.

I enjoyed every performance greatly, especially lead actor Boon’s. He portrayed well Bazil’s pride upon learning that he’s lost his job and apartment after being in the hospital for so long after the shooting, and I loved watching the bits where he had to do any bit of pantomime. I’ll admit that just like Bazil, I was flummoxed when Julie Ferrier’s tirade came out of the blue, but I don’t think that’s a function of her being a poor actor but perhaps a function of there not being enough room in the script to show her character’s changing feelings towards him.

In short, if you’re looking for a good, satisfying, and fun heist/revenge movie, you should definitely find Micmacs at your local theater.

Micmacs is going into limited release in the U.S. on May 28, but if you’re really that anxious, you could import the R2 DVD and contribute to the French GDP at the same time!