The Moviegoer

The Musicgoer: Lyle Lovett's Natural Forces

2009-11-01T18:11:00.001-07:00

LYLE LOVETT
Natural Forces
(Lost Highway)
** 1/2 (out of 5)

Lyle Lovett’s always been a hard one to read. He has a certain reputation as the hipster’s favourite country singer, too sly and strange to fit into the Nashville mould; but he’s also got a taste for cornball Texas swing — just listen to “Farmer Brown/Chicken Reel,” off his new album, Natural Forces, which repeats the line “I’m gonna choke my chicken till the sun goes down” about 50 times. Or is he somehow actually making fun of cornball humour? It’s hard to tell: that could be a smile on his face, or it could be a grimace.

It’s also hard to know these days if the less-than-prolific Lovett considers himself a songwriter or, as Step Inside This House and Smile suggest, merely an interpreter of other people’s material. Lovett had a hand in writing only five of the songs on Natural Forces, and most of those are tossed-off comic songs like “Farmer Brown” and “Pantry” (which inexplicably appears in two versions). The strongest track on this uneven disc is Eric Taylor’s stunning “Whooping Crane,” and maybe it’s no accident that its lyrics can be read as a metaphor for an artist in search of lost inspiration.

A Man Of Welsh And Taste: An Interview With Kenneth Welsh

2009-11-01T16:39:00.008-07:00

Here's something a little bit different: a profile of Canadian film/TV/stage actor Kenneth Welsh, which I wrote for SEE Magazine in Edmonton — he's in town as part of a production of Tom Stoppard's play Rock ’n' Roll. Welsh is a very respected, very busy, and very well-known actor here in Canada (he's a member of the Order of Canada, in fact), and American readers of this blog will probably know him best for his role as Windom Earle in the second season of Twin Peaks, and for playing the Dick Cheney figure in The Day After Tomorrow. He's also a very smart and personable interviewee, and I hope his warmth comes across in this interview. Enjoy!

* * * * *

Kenneth Welsh likes to tell the story of being a young man studying acting at the University of Alberta in the early ’60s and being taken aside by one of his instructors, Gordon Peacock. It was a short while before he graduated, and Peacock told him not to worry — he was going to be a success. “He said, almost jokingly, that I was going to make it because I had three good qualities: sex appeal, charm, and personal magnetism.” Welsh bursts into laughter. “He said nothing about my talent!”

Welsh turned out to have plenty of that, too. After getting his U of A diploma, he attended the National Theatre School in Montreal and from there carved out a successful stage career in Stratford and New York, appearing in the original productions of, among other shows, Brian Clark’s Whose Life Is It Anyway?, Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, and Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. Aside from a few stray CBC productions (including a tantalizing-sounding 1969 version of The Three Musketeers with Christopher Walken), Welsh did virtually no film or TV work until the late ’70s, when he was nearly 40.

But he’s more than made up for lost time — his IMDb page lists nearly 200 credits, everything from forgotten TV-movies to films by Martin Scorsese (The Aviator), Clint Eastwood (Absolute Power), and Woody Allen (Another Woman). He’s played Colin Thatcher, he’s played George Steinbrenner, and he’s played Dick Cheney (or at least a thinly veiled version of him, in The Day After Tomorrow). In the second season of Twin Peaks, he was Dale Cooper’s archnemesis, the brilliant, chess-playing madman Windom Earle. He’s in George Romero’s upcoming Survival of the Dead — he kills a lot of zombies, he says... but he doesn’t get away with it. And he’s in Edmonton this week to play Max Morrow, England’s most stubborn socialist, in Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll at The Citadel.

“I think I was very fortunate, in terms of my career, to have grown up in Edmonton,” Welsh says. “It was the city with the best theatre department in Canada — and was recognized as such across North America. I was lucky — it was right there, and I could not have gotten a better education.”

* * * * *

Welsh was born in Edmonton in 1942. His father managed a B&W Store here in the ’30s, then went to work for CN in the ’40s. Welsh’s memories of the city make him sound like a character in a W.O. Mitchell novel. “It was a great place to grow up,” he says. “It was not a large city. We could walk to school, and after school we’d play any game that used a ball. We’d skate in the local hockey rinks — I don’t know if they still have them, but at practically every corner they’d have a community rink. Inside the shack, there’d always be a wood stove — we’d gather around the wood stove, get warm, and go out for another skate. I just loved growing up there. Growing up under a prairie sky is one of the greatest things imaginable to me.”

Welsh says he went through a phase when he was 12 or 13 of buying movie magazines, but otherwise never gave much thought to becoming an actor until he was 15. His girlfriend at the time had told him that drama was “a snap course,” and so he enrolled in the class, looking for little more than an easy high school credit.

“Me and two of my buddies wandered in, in our leather jackets with our hair slicked back,” Welsh recalls. “The first play I was ever in was called The Yellow Jacket, a traditional Chinese play, and I was the fourth assistant property man. I’d come out in a little black beanie and a silk outfit and I had these things to do, like sprinkle snow over the lovers. And I got a few cheap laughs! And I got this sort of tingle up and down my spine — ‘This is really fun!’ The teacher was this guy named Donald Timm, who did all these unusual plays and always made you feel like theatre was theatrical and fun — he was the guy who got me launched.”

When he moved on to Bonnie Doon Composite, he continued to try out for plays. He got his first substantial role in something called The Silver Whistle, and got some more laughs there. “So then it came time for me to choose what courses I’d be taking at U of A,” Welsh says. “I was leaning toward engineering at the time — my best subjects were trigonometry, chemistry, algebra, things like that. But when I went down the application list, I came to ‘Bachelor of Arts and Drama’ and I checked it off, right on the spot. Right there in the classroom.”

Welsh doesn’t have any fancy explanations for his success. He’s had good agents, he says. Good friends too — his pal Robert Engels, for instance, was a writer on Twin Peaks and suggested him for Windom Earle. (Welsh had never even seen the show.) He’s also determined: “A will of steel,” he says with a laugh. He also thinks it’s helped that he’s a good auditioner, able to give a solid performance even at a cold reading. He went all out when he auditioned to play Colin Thatcher in the TV-movie Love and Hate, one of his breakout roles: “I had to fight for that one,” he says. “Colin was six feet tall and 200 pounds, and I am not. So I rented myself a pair of cowboy boots with three-inch heels, put on a sports jacket that was two sizes too big, and three sweatshirts underneath. ‘You want me to look big? I can look big.’ Sometimes you do outrageous things in auditions to make an impression that’s either going to get you the part or make them think you’re crazy.”

Welsh still considers the director of Love and Hate, Francis Mankiewicz, the best director he’s ever worked with. I ask Welsh if he finds he learns more working with great directors or great actors, but he won’t take the bait. “There’s no way you can define that one,” he says. “A really good director will not only help guide you through the play but also point out things that you can explore in yourself that you might not be aware of. On the other hand, being onstage with a really great actor takes you up a notch. If you’re onstage with Fiona Reid, says, you’ve really got to come there with your best suit on. She’s going to be giving it back.”

* * * * *

It’s no accident that Welsh mentions Fiona Reid: many of the most powerful scenes in Rock ’n’ Roll are the ones Welsh shares with Reid — as his dying wife Eleanor in the first act, and as his daughter Esme in the second. “There’s a heat between Max and Eleanor,” Welsh says. “Max lives mostly in his head; she asks him to give her something more than that, and he says he can’t. It’s one of the most amazing moments in the play. She totally exposes herself emotionally, she says, ‘I want what you love me with,’ and he says, ‘That’s it — that is what I love you with, there’s nothing else.’

“Stoppard has said that Max, as written, is a man who doesn’t express emotion much,” Welsh continues. “Well... sorry, Tom, but I have to disagree. He’s passionate about his political beliefs, he’s passionate about being a communist, and he loves his wife dearly, even as she’s dying, but he doesn’t express it sentimentally. He loves her on a deeper lover than a lot of men would, because he understands what she’s going through. He just doesn’t give in to the sentiment of it.”

Reading the script to Rock ’n’ Roll for the first time is a daunting task: even if you can sort out the huge cast of characters and chart their ever-shifting relationships over the course of 20 years, there’s still all the Czech history and the discussions of ancient Greek poetry to trip you up. If you’re like me, you can spend so much time getting a handle on the play’s intellectual concerns that its emotional content can zoom right past you.

“It’s a love story, really,” Welsh says. “Max is in love with Communism. He’s in love with his wife. Jan’s in love with Esme. Max ultimately gets together with Lenka. It’s all about relationships and what goes on between the people — if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be any good.”

And perhaps the most poignant romantic breakup in the play is Max’s ultimate renunciation of Communism. “Everyone’s favourite aspect of that philosophy — mine too! — is that phrase, ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ It’s the most humane tenet of socialism, and of course, it’s the one that failed the most spectacularly.”

Welsh lets out a short, bitter laugh. “You know, I grew up under socialism,” he says. “I grew up in Alberta! Under Manning, education was free. So I get it. I understand what socialism is. It’s so funny to look at the province now. I don’t know where it’s all gone.”

The Fourth Kind: E.T. Phone Nome

2009-10-31T16:17:00.005-06:00

The Fourth Kind doesn’t appear to have much going for it. It’s an alien-abduction thriller from a director, Olatunde Osunsanmi, whose only other significant film credit is the script for the forthcoming Smokin’ Aces 2: Assassins’ Ball. It stars Milla Jovovich, who’s spent the last decade doing Resident Evil sequels and junk like Ultraviolet. (She’s cast here as a hard-working Alaskan psychologist and single mother — already the picture has credibility problems.) And it works so hard assuring you that the story you’re about to see is 100 per cent true that you have to assume the whole thing is a hoax.

In fact, Osunsanmi goes so far as to film several scenes in split-screen, with actors like Jovovich, Elias Koteas, and Will Patton on side and what’s purported to be actual videotape footage of real-life psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler hypnotizing her patients on the other. (Sometimes he gets really fancy and splits the screen into four, six, even eight windows, like on 24.) It’s sometimes hard to tell what point Osunsanmi is trying to do in these scenes, except to make sure we note that his actors are saying their lines at exactly the same speed that the “real” people are.

And yet I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find The Fourth Kind to be genuinely chilling — even more so than Paranormal Activity, which makes a similar attempt to blur the line between horror and documentary, albeit with a lot less flash and a lot less money. And like Paranormal Activity, The Fourth Kind generates most of its scares by keeping the monsters offscreen. Here’s the set-up: Jovovich is trying to figure out why so many of her patients (who all live in Nome, Alaska) are suffering from sleeplessness and having the same disquieting nighttime vision of a white owl looking at them in the dark. They know it wasn’t “really” an owl, but that’s all they can remember. She tries to unblock their memory by putting them under hypnosis — but each time she does so, the patient freaks out, unable to articulate the horrible truth they’ve just seen. They die or kill themselves soon after.

So really, The Fourth Kind isn’t about aliens so much as it is the fear of... well, fear. The hypnosis sequences are like that terrifying monologue from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive — the one where the guy describes a nightmare he keeps having about a man living in the alley behind Winkie’s Diner, with a horrible face that he hopes he “never sees outside of a dream.” There are so many layers of fear going on in these scenes that they’re almost unendurable: the slow, slow buildup of dread as the characters tell a story whose conclusion even they don’t know; there’s the fear of some all-powerful other that can reach into our world at any moment and snatch us away; and there’s also the profoundly creepy thought that those creatures have violated us already, maybe while we were asleep, and that we simply can’t remember it.

Maybe this is just the kind of notion that really happens to push my buttons. Maybe other moviegoers will roll their eyes at the movie’s self-serious tone, or laugh at the snippets of Osunsanmi’s interview with the “real” Dr. Tyler (a shell-shocked, birdlike woman who looks distractingly like Jill Talley from Mr. Show). All I know is, hoax or not, I sat there in the movie theatre, dreading the moment when the movie would be over and I’d have to walk out into the parking lot, in the dark, and hopefully find my car before the aliens grabbed me.

The September Issue: Wintour Wonderland

2009-10-30T20:53:00.008-06:00

Grace Coddington’s heart is breaking.

Not over a man — in fact, the documentary The September Issue doesn’t tell us anything about her personal life (if indeed she even has time to pursue one) — but over the September 2007 issue of Vogue, the fashion magazine where she holds the title of creative director. She has overseen a beautiful spread featuring Hilary Rhoda and Coco Rocha, inspired by Brassaï’s images of Paris in the 1920s, and the photos have turned out exactly the way she hoped they would: backlit, in dreamy soft focus instead of the “pin-sharp” look that’s all the rage now, much to her dismay. But it seems every time she looks at the wall where the issue is being laid out, another couple of pages have been cut out of it. “I’m furious,” she tells the camera as she returns to her office. She’s not the type to throw things or raise her voice — if anything, she registers emotion by swallowing her words even more deeply — but you can deeply feel her frustration all the same. This is not a trivial matter: this is fashion.

Of course, Coddington is powerless to do anything about her spread because she works under Anna Wintour, the brilliant editor who’s been running Vogue since 1988, exerting enormous influence over the fashion industry and causing hundreds of underlings and assistants to quake in their shoes. Her most important project every year is the conception and production of the September issue — that’s the one the size of a phone book, the one read by some 13 million people and which sets the tone for what women will be wearing (or what they wish they could be wearing) for the next 12 months. The September Issue takes an inside look at the production of what was then the largest issue of a monthly magazine in publishing history: 840 pages, and Sienna Miller on the cover for some reason.

It’s fascinating to watch Wintour at work, pushing 60 but still girlish-looking in her sheath dresses and pageboy haircut, omnipresent cup of Starbucks coffee in one hand as she examines photo arrays and calmly rejects what to the untrained eye look like beautiful pictures. (Coddington grumbles at one point that in just a couple of minutes, Wintour threw out some $50,000 worth of her work.)

And yet, director R.J. Cutler is mostly unable to penetrate Wintour’s sphinxlike exterior — except for a couple of revealing moments where we sense her disappointment at her daughter’s lack of interest in becoming a Vogue editor. In another interview late in the film, she talks about her brothers and sisters, who are all involved in various social and political causes, and ruefully remarks, “I think they are very amused by what I do.”

But those moments of vulnerability are rare, and instead, Grace Coddington emerges as the film’s heroine — the second-in-command, the right-hand woman, the woman whose name nobody knows but without whom the magazine would probably be unable to function, loyal and hard-working, even as her creative vision is thwarted and frustrated at every turn. With the magazine going to press on Thursday, she’s the one who pulls together a brilliant last-minute reshoot on Wednesday — which, as it happens, contains one of my all-time favourite fashion photos, the one with Caroline Trentini, all in purple, ponytail flying, jumping in the air, and looking straight into the lens of a movie camera. I had no idea the cameraman in the photo was a member of Cutler’s crew, and Coddington was the one who insisted the magazine’s retouchers didn’t remove his stomach paunch. The woman’s a genius!

The Men Who Stare At Goats: Uncle Sam's Jedi Warriors

2009-10-30T16:04:00.003-06:00

Journalist Jim Ronson’s 2004 book The Men Who Stare at Goats told the bizarre story of Lt. Col. Jim Channon and his dream of creating the “First Earth Battalion,” an Army unit of psychically gifted “warrior monks.” If they were trained properly, Channon believed, these supersoldiers would eventually be able to walk through walls, survive in harsh environments on minimal amounts of food, and most importantly, subdue their enemies nonviolently, with nothing more than positive vibrations and a “sparkly eyes” greeting.

It’s the kind of story where you can’t help but say, “Wow, that would make one hell of a movie!” Someone must have exclaimed those very words within earshot of director/producer/George Clooney’s pal Grant Heslov, because the film version of The Men Who Stare at Goats is now in theatres. But here’s the problem. The people who heard about the premise of the book were looking forward to a movie about the improbable culture clash between U.S. military culture and the New Age thinking of Jim Channon. None of them were thinking, “Wow, someone should make a movie about this reporter guy!”

Unfortunately, that’s what Heslov has given us: the film’s main character is a reporter — here named “Bob Wilton” and played by Ewan McGregor — who, freshly divorced and deeply depressed, impulsively leaves his sleepy desk at an Ann Arbor newspaper to cover the war in Iraq. A fluke encounter at a Baghdad hotel introduces him to Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a former member of the First Earth Battalion who has come to Iraq on some kind of secret spy mission. Smelling a fascinating story, McGregor convinces Clooney to let him tag along, and as they bumble through the desert (spending most of their time either lost or kidnapped), flashbacks fill us in on Cassady’s experiences under the visionary leadership of Jim Channon — here called “Bill Django” and played by Jeff Bridges as a cross between his and John Goodman’s characters from The Big Lebowski.

It’s always fun to watch George Clooney in his off-the-wall comic mode, and I like the way he plays Cassady — who believes he can dissipate clouds with the power of his mind — as the most centred character onscreen. But his relationship with McGregor, which Heslov and screenwriter Peter Straughan place front and centre in the film, feels like a distraction from the most interesting part of the story — namely, the creation of “Operation Jedi” and the absurd rivalries that spring up between the various soldiers all competing to develop their psychic powers. Kevin Spacey gets several very funny reaction shots as a smarmy fellow recruit unable to hide his jealousy of Clooney’s talents.

One of those talents is “remote viewing” — the ability to see events transpiring from thousands of miles away. That’s kind of how you experience the story of The Men Who Stare at Goats: a curious string of events happening off in the distance. Still, it’s a likable little movie, and just amusing enough to be worth seeing. It’s more fun to stare at than a goat, anyway.

Tricks, Treats, And A Tremendously Creepy Little Girl

2009-10-29T19:29:00.005-06:00

It's a special Halloween edition of my weekly DVD recommendation segment on CBC Radio this week. The concept I went with was "fun horror movies suitable for viewing with a group of people on Halloween night," and the movies I chose were the anthology film Trick ’R Treat and the evil-child thriller with the crazy-ass plot twist Orphan. I realized after the fact that I probably should have thrown Drag Me to Hell into the mix too, but my pillowcase of recommendations was already pretty full.

Click here to listen. (And I apologize in advance for the way the first clip sounds; I think they accidentally hit two buttons at once and wound up playing two sound files at the same time. The music that you hear is not actually part of the movie.)

Good Hair: Oh, What A Tangled Web Of Weaves

2009-10-28T20:44:00.005-06:00

“A thousand dollars?” Chris Rock exclaims, incredulous. “A thousand dollars?”

“It starts at a thousand dollars,” comes the reply. “You can go as high as $3,500.”

Rock is talking to the owner of a black beauty salon about weaves, just one of the complex rituals of female African-American hair care that he explores in the amiable new documentary Good Hair. And the cost of the weave is only the beginning: as the salon owner explains, you’ll also need to come in every week or two to wash and condition it and every six weeks to get it retightened. A top-quality weave will require you to spend upwards of six hours in the chair, and some of the women Rock interviews in the film get a new weave every couple of months. One woman flew to New York from Colorado just to get her hair done. Some of the women in the film are actresses and models from whom you can expect a certain amount of diva behaviour, but plenty are ordinary black women who are somehow maintaining a hugely expensive hair habit on a working-class salary.

As a white Ukrainian-Canadian with no hair at all, all this came as stunning news. But Chris Rock seems just as stupefied. “Your clientele is more hooked on this than cocaine!” he tells the salon owner. He points to one customer, a schoolteacher, who’s been getting weaves for 10 years: “If she had a drug habit, she’d have been to rehab by now! Even a bad drug addict has periods of sobriety!”

Rock was inspired to make Good Hair, he says, when one of his young daughters asked him why she doesn’t have “good hair.” “Now where’d she get that idea?” Rock says in the voiceover. And so, he and director Jeff Stilson go looking for answers. He visits all sorts of beauty salons and barbershops; he travels to a factory in South Carolina that manufactures “relaxer,” the highly caustic chemical that artificially straightens black hair (upon spotting a vat containing 7,000 pounds of relaxer, he remarks, “This’ll last Prince about a month”); he travels to India, where much of the hair that gets turned into weaves is collected from Hindu temples; and he visits the Bronner Brothers Hair Show, a twice-yearly hair product trade show that culminates with the country’s top stylists competing in an over-the-top “hair battle” for a $20,000 prize.

Rock never quite answers his question from the top of the film — he seems reluctant to confront head-on the political implications of what it means that the vast majority of black women, even role models like Michelle Obama or Condoleezza Rice, are spending so much money to model their hair according to a white, European standard of beauty. (Good Hair’s chief spokeswoman for natural hair is actress Tracie Thoms, from Grindhouse, who notes how strange it is that simply keeping her hair the same texture as it grows out of her head is considered revolutionary.) He’s not an aggressive interviewer by nature, and he seems to enjoy the company of his subjects too much to condemn them.

But in his low-key, non-confrontational, very likable way, Rock does make his points: relaxers are incredibly unhealthy, weaves are outrageously expensive, and almost none of the corporations selling them to the black community are owned by blacks themselves. In perhaps the film’s funniest scene, he floats the theory that weaves are ruining thousands of black marriages — when black women won’t allow their men ever to touch their hair, not even during sex, should we be surprised when the men go running to white women? He may be onto something.

Even if Good Hair doesn’t quite feel like the definitive word on its subject, it’s still a great subject — and Rock knows it. He also knows when to stand back and let the images speak for themselves — for instance, during Derek J’s routine at the Bronner Brothers hair battle, which has to be seen to be believed. And he knows it would be futile to expect women to change their ways. As Ice-T notes at the end of the film, “Do whatever makes you feel good. If a woman ain’t happy with herself, she ain’t gonna bring nothing but pain to every-fucking-body around her.”

The Musicgoer: The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir's ...And The Horse You Rode In On

2009-10-25T19:47:00.002-06:00

THE SCOTLAND YARD GOSPEL CHOIR
...And the Horse You Rode In On
(Bloodshot)
**** (out of 5)

All right, granted: if you’re going to enjoy the music of The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, you need to have a taste for highly articulate songwriters wallowing shamelessly in their own romantic misery. There’s a song on this album called “Something’s Happening” whose chorus goes, “Oh my God, my life is so fucked up! / Oh my God, my life is so fucked up!” and another song called “Libertyville or Somewhere” whose chorus is “God, I’m not doing well! / Oh my God, I’m not doing well!” The first words out of lead singer Elia Einhorn’s mouth are “I hope that you catch syphilis and die alone!”

But if you’re going to write incredibly mopey, Morrissey-esque breakup songs, I’m happy to excuse you if they’re also as smart and funny and full of vivid details as these. Listen to Elia pour his heart out to his ex-girlfriend on “I Pretend She’s You” (while aping the melody to Pulp’s “Babies”): he starts out venomously, singing, “Oh Lee / I know you’ve got a boyfriend / Plays in a band even you’ve never heard of,” but it’s not long before he confesses that when he’s in bed with his new girl, “I usually pretend she’s you / ’cause I don’t know what else to do.”

The band’s fatalistic outlook on life was confirmed in the worst possible way last month when all six members were injured in a van accident; happily, they all survived, and hopefully they will celebrate having cheated death by recording many more songs about how miserable it is to be alive.

Coco Avant Chanel: Coco Puffery

2009-10-25T16:55:00.002-06:00

Coco Avant Chanel belongs to a small movie subgenre that I’m going to call the “priorpic” (at least that’s what I’ll call it until I figure out something better): biopics that restrict themselves to their subjects’ early years, before they did all the things that made them famous. And so, just as Backbeat told us about the early days of The Beatles when they were still playing shows in Germany, and The Motorcycle Diaries told us about the youthful adventures of Che Guevara, Coco Avant Chanel tells us the story of fashion icon Coco Chanel — and ends just as she’s opening up her first successful hat store in Paris.

After a brief prologue showing Chanel’s dreary childhood growing up in an orphanage, we meet her as a young woman (now played by Audrey Tautou), scraping out a career as a nightclub singer with her sister Adrienne (Marie Gillain). Already, there’s a striking contrast between Chanel’s dour personality and this frivolous career — she wants to be a success, but refuses to seduce or flirt with men in order to achieve it, and that tension between her independent spirit and her unavoidable dependence on male financial support will play out throughout Chanel’s early life.

For instance, she soon attracts the attention of wealthy industrialist Êtienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde), and cajoles him into allowing her to live in his country house. She lives there as his sometime lover, required, humiliatingly, to eat with the servants and stay out of sight from his “proper” guests. But her strikingly modern sense of style — simple, comfortable clothes, free of unnecessary adornments, set off by masculine cuffs, collars, jackets, and blazers — soon caught their attention anyway, and although it took a while for Chanel to become interested in fashion as a career, it’s clear that her philosophy of style, not her way with a cabaret song, was always her great creative gift.

The exemplar of female independence who lived for years as a wealthy man’s “kept woman”; the practical, sensible thinker who thrived in one of the world’s most superficial industries — Coco Chanel was a woman full of fascinating contradictions, and Audrey Tautou sets aside all of her abundant gamine charms to reflect Chanel’s often prickly personality. (The closing image, a flash-forward to Chanel at an ultra-glamourous fashion show, sternly inspecting each of the willowy models filing past her, then disdainfully absorbing the adulation of the crowd while sitting on a staircase, is particularly evocative. Has there even been a fashion designer with a less flamboyant personality than Coco Chanel?)

But Coco Avant Chanel is much less successful than its subject at breaking with tradition; despite its unusual decision to cut off its story early, “priorpic”-style, it still doesn’t amount to much more than another well-made, handsome-looking, slightly dull biopic tailor-made for awards season. One big problem is that the romance between Chanel and her lover Boy Capel (Alessandro Nivola) — whose sudden death in a car crash was the tragedy of Chanel’s life — never gets hotter than a low simmer. As movies about pioneering women go, Coco Avant Chanel is better than Amelia, but as Audrey Tautou vehicles go, I still prefer Amélie.

The Limits Of Control: The Limits Of My Patience

2009-10-24T16:26:00.003-06:00

Is it possible for a director to become too cool? Does there come a point in certain directors’ careers — I’m thinking of guys like Wim Wenders, or Wong Kar-Wai, or Hal Hartley — filmmakers whose easy access to the coolest, most glamourous international actors and the hippest, most cutting-edge musicians actually seems to be working against them. Directors, beware: if you ever find yourself in a sun-baked desert with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, shooting a script that’s fewer than 40 pages long, if your cast includes Gael García Bernal, Samantha Morton, Martin Donovan, Tilda Swinton, or a famous singer making their acting debut, get a hold of yourself: you’re trapped in a cool-movie bubble, and if you’re not careful, you’ll suffocate in there.

These thoughts were prompted by The Limits of Control, the utterly confounding new film from Jim Jarmusch. True, Jarmusch’s movies have always thrived on a degree of deadpan inscrutability, but this is ridiculous. You know those espionage thrillers where one spy says, like, “The eagles plays cards at sunrise,” and the other spy says, “The jackal sets fire to the castle”? The Limits of Control is like a spy movie where the dialogue is all codephrases.

Not that there’s much dialogue to decode: the nameless hero (played by the outrageously handsome, facially immobile Isaach de Bankolé) barely ever speaks. He’s some kind of bagman/assassin who’s come to Spain on some kind of vague, apparently quasi-illegal assignment that requires him to make contact with a series of flamboyantly dressed strangers in an outdoor café. He gives them a matchbox full of diamonds; they give him a different matchbox in return. Inside the matchbox is a piece of paper with coded instructions written on it; he glances briefly at the paper, then eats it. After a couple of days wandering the city, visiting art galleries, and practising tai chi, he meets another stranger and the routine — as well as key pieces of dialogue — repeats itself. How do all these people fit together? Why do these meetings have be conducted in this curiously formal way? And what’s up with that naked woman (Paz de la Huerta) who keeps appearing in de Bankolé’s hotel room? Jarmusch deliberately won’t tell us; it’s as if he wanted to strip the thriller genre down to its most basic elements — no plot, just MacGuffin.

That might sound like an intriguing concept in theory, and even in execution, it’s fun for a while simply to watch de Bankolé wearing a fantastic, shiny blue suit, exploring Seville, and walking in and out of a bunch of architecturally arresting buildings. But let’s be real: a little of this goes a very long way. I imagine everyone will have a different threshold for how long this pattern will continue to be interesting. For some, it will be 30 seconds, tops. Others may last half an hour. Me, I went about 10 minutes before I started fidgeting. But I think I’m on safe ground when I say that it is the rare moviegoer who will have the patience to put up with The Limits of Control for its full 116-minute running time. True, there’s an amusing Bill Murray cameo at the end of the movie if you stick around, but if it’s amusing Bill Murray cameos you’re looking for... well, there’s another movie currently in theatres that I think you’ll be much happier with.

"The More You Look, The Less You Know"

2009-10-22T15:44:00.003-06:00

What would be a good name for that group of Coen brothers movies that includes Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn't There, and their latest, A Serious Man — movies full of cryptic symbols and unreadable protagonists, and which play less like conventional stories than tantalizing riddles? I'm leaning towards "Coen koans," myself. (Or maybe "Koens"?)

Anyhow, in honour of this week's release of A Serious Man here in Edmonton, I chose The Man Who Wasn't There as the subject of this week's "Hidden Gem" pick for CBC Radio. Billy Bob Thornton is not exactly the CBC's favourite actor these days, but the movie is still well worth revisiting — if anything, it looks more and more like one of the key films in the Coen oeuvre. Click here to listen.

Dern Of The Century

2009-10-21T23:20:00.006-06:00

“God bless you,” a disembodied voice from Mission Control tells ecologist astronaut Bruce Dern in Silent Running. “You’re a hell of an American.”

Dern agrees with that sentiment — and so do I. When I started this blog, the slogan I came up with was “lively essays about film, many of which mention Bruce Dern for some reason,” a flip reference to the fact that two of my first entries discussed Coming Home and The Trip. I wish I could retract that slogan, or at least rephrase it in a way that didn’t suggest that only the kookiest circumstances could inspire someone to write about Bruce Dern. Because I love Bruce Dern — as I slowly catch up with his filmography, he’s turning into one of my favourite actors of the ’70s, along with Warren Oates. In fact, I more than love him; there’s something about his onscreen energy, his inability to disguise his anger and frustration and sense of injured idealism that I deeply identify with.

I’ve just finished watching two of his more interesting films from the early ’70s — the cult sci-fi film Silent Running and the lesser-known Drive, He Said — for the first time, and my admiration for his craft has only deepened. If Jack Nicholson, his friend and frequent co-star (not to mention the director and co-screenwriter of Drive, He Said) became a star by playing outsiders who played by their own rules, Dern’s onscreen persona was more unusual and poignant: the man who faithfully does his duty but gets no reward for doing so.

It’s one of Dern’s more unusual qualities that he can seem like a straight arrow and a restless countercultural figure at the very same time; he seems earnest and subversive in equal measure. In Silent Running, he disobeys his orders and kills his fellow astronauts, but you never doubt his idealism. (And he’s genuinely haunted by those men’s deaths — you get the feeling that’s part of the reason why he’s able to blow himself up at the end of the film even though much earlier he said he wouldn’t have it in him to commit suicide.)

“He can be fearsome, loathsome, or pitiful,” David Thomson wrote about Dern, “but he is neither calm nor condescending.” That lack of condescension is what makes Silent Running so affecting, despite its potentially cloying tree-hugging message and the actively cloying Joan Baez songs on the soundtrack. (Dern even treats the robot drones who help him maintain his spaceship like equals!) Given a role that could easy have turned messianic, Dern plays the character as a man who’s maybe a little carried away by his passions, but who’s really just trying to do the moral thing.

In Silent Running, the relationship between Dern and his fellow astronauts is like something out of gym class too: Dern is the sensitive nerd and the other guys on the spaceship are the jocks who love teasing him. So it’s interesting to then watch Drive, He Said, in which the tables are turned: here, Dern has a smaller, less complicated role as a college basketball coach trying to keep his star player (William Tepper) focused on the game and not the revolutionary politics taking place nearby on the campus. He tends Tepper like one of the trees in Silent Running — Coach Dern is no campus radical, but he’s willing to do what it takes to protect Tepper from harm.

But Dern’s relationship with Tepper is just a small part of 1971’s Drive, He Said, which devotes half its running time to Michael Margotta, playing a politicized student gradually driven insane by raging hormones, anger at The Man, and fear of being drafted. Almost nothing in this part of the movie plays convincingly, and the final sequence — in which Margotta strips naked, runs across campus to the biology lab, and dumps tray after tray of spiders and snakes onto the floor — is a big, silly misfire. (Margotta gives a very self-conscious performance, but of course, Tepper’s mumbly, vaguely De Niro-esque underplaying is just as self-consciously actorish, in the opposite way.) Nope — it’s Dern who gives the film’s most authentic performance, who seems simply to be occupying his character’s skin instead of standing apart from the action and figuring out the most charismatic way to play him.

Jack Nicholson does some interesting things in Drive, He Said, especially in the basketball scenes (although that may just as easily be the work of his four — four! — editors). There’s a restless, exploratory quality to this film that makes me wish Nicholson had directed more movies — his only other directorial efforts are the Western lark Goin’ South and the troubled Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes. But I wish even more that Bruce Dern had tried his hand behind the camera... if only to give me one more excuse to write about him.

Moviegoer Diary: Dillinger Is Dead, Paranormal Activity

2009-10-20T18:34:00.005-06:00

DILLINGER IS DEAD

Plot In A Nutshell
Marco Ferreri’s 1969 drama about a man (Michel Piccoli) who spends a quiet night at home cooking dinner, cleaning the gun he’s discovered in a closet (wrapped in old newspapers announcing John Dillinger’s death), and seducing the maid while his wife lies in bed with a headache.

Thoughts
What a difficult movie this will be to write about! I almost hate to say anything about it — it’s the kind of film that can almost be described (and completely spoiled) in a single sentence. The film is reminds me of the most is Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent, with its slow accumulation of domestic details that builds up to a shocking act of violence. And look! I’ve already said too much!

Darn... what’s left to discuss now? Maybe I can talk a little about Michel Piccoli’s nearly silent performance. One wonders how he prepared for this role, which requires him to hold the viewer’s attention even during the 10-minute stretch where he’s doing nothing more than sitting at the kitchen table dismantling a rusty revolver, periodically getting up to stir the sauce bubbling on the stove. Of course, it helps that the radio is on the whole time, playing a lively mix of Italian pop songs and American soul — there’s one bouncy song that I’m going to guess is called “The Moving Finger Writes” that I would love to track down. In any case, Piccoli comes across as comfortably bourgeois, fastidiously puttering around the kitchen, yet also childish in his fascination with this deadly new toy. (In one of the film’s visual masterstrokes, he decides to spraypaint the gun bright red and decorate it with little white dots.)

I’m not sure how we’re supposed to respond to Piccoli’s character. On the one hand, he’s peevish, immature, self-indulgent, sadistic, spoiled, padding around the house wearing just a pair of shorts, eating while watching TV — when he has sex with his maid, it seems as much out of boredom as desire. She’s like a toy he plays with briefly before losing interest and wandering off to find something else to amuse himself with. On the other hand, he gets rewarded at the end of the film with what promises to be a life of pleasure as he sheds his old identity and takes on a new job as the cook on board a luxury yacht. So is he a rebel escaping a stifling life of conformity (he makes a living designing gas masks!) — a John Dillinger figure who turns the tables on his “lady in red” and gets away scot-free?

Maybe both interpretations are correct: maybe Ferreri disapproves of Piccoli, but still must admit that he’s fantasized about doing something similar and so generously bestows a happy ending on him. Too bad Ferreri isn’t around anymore to tell me if my suspicions are correct — he died in 1997. The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.

RATING: 4.5/5

* * * * *

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

Plot In A Nutshell
Microbudgeted 2009 horror mockumentary from writer/director Oren Peli about a young man (Micah Sloat) who attempts to use his home video equipment to capture the demon that is tormenting his girlfriend (Katie Featherston).

Thoughts
I can’t deny it: Paranormal Activity made me jump. More than once. A couple of times, I even made a sound — and so did many of the other people in the theatre with me. I certainly admire the way that Oren Peli gets such a powerful effect out of such seemingly limited tools — really, little more than a static, grainy video image, a bedroom door opening and closing, and a few offscreen bumps and moans. He works through implication and suggestion. He painstakingly establishes a familiar, banal domestic setting, and then makes it seem suddenly terrifying as soon as the lights get turned off. It’s the Val Lewton approach to horror, transplanted to the age of home video. What I can’t figure out is why, even after being genuinely spooked by it, I still found Paranormal Activity kind of a shallow experience.

I think part of the problem for me is that Peli fails to provide any kind of explanation for what’s going on. It’s not that I can’t handle ambiguity in a movie, but Paranormal Activity keeps dropping all these clues — cryptic Ouija board messages, an old photo discovered in an attic, a website describing a similar supernatural event that happened to another young woman — that you expect are going to get tied up into some kind of explanation of why this demon is so attached to Katie and what he wants from her. I suppose the fact that the clues don’t add up, and that the demon’s behaviour is kind of random, adds to the film’s carefully cultivated air of verisimilitude, but I still felt frustrated by the randomness of it all.

Full marks, though, go to Sloat and Featherston, whose relationship never feels less than thoroughly believable and grounded and relatable. They are perfectly cast: both are attractive but not movie-star gorgeous; and they say a few amusing things to each other, but none of it sounds like cleverly screenwritten wisecracks. Mostly, they’re a pretty dull pair. As I walked out of the theatre when the movie ended — abruptly, without any closing credits — I figured half the couples in the audience looked like Micah and Katie, ready to return to similarly big, anonymous homes, the kind with more DVDs on their shelves than books.

Which begs the question again: why this banal house? Why this ordinary couple? Paranormal Activity delivers plenty of sit-bolt-upright shocks, but (for me, at least) no lingering sense of unease. I recover from shocks pretty fast — give me a creepy story, however, and it’ll stay with me for years.

RATING: 3/5

The Musicgoer: Califone's All My Friends Are Funeral Singers

2009-10-19T20:36:00.002-06:00

CALIFONE
All My Friends Are Funeral Singers
(Dead Oceans)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

The new album from Chicago post-rockers Califone is also the soundtrack to an as-yet-unreleased feature film written and directed by lead singer Tim Rutili — information is sketchy, but apparently it’s about a young female psychic living in the woods in a haunted cabin. I’m not sure how the song about film director Luis Buñuel fits into the narrative, but otherwise this music sounds like it would set the mood perfectly. There’s a lonely, Appalachian quality to a lot of these tracks, with the touches of mournful fiddle and melancholy banjo — but every so often, it’s like the ghost of some other album wanders through, like when something that sounds either like an old-fashioned radio tuner or a singing saw wafts through “1928” or a loud clatter of steel drums barges in on “Better Angels.”

I find my ear drawn to the background textures of these songs more than I am to Rutili’s drab, funereal vocals — I realize that’s the album’s title, but still! — but that’s not a bad thing. On this album, the wallpaper is the most interesting part. I hope that’s not true of the movie.

The Stepfather: Loco Parentis

2009-10-19T19:24:00.002-06:00

In both the original 1987 version of The Stepfather and the new remake, the title character gets to make a speech about the importance of family. In the original, the character is played by Lost’s Terry O’Quinn, who gives the speech a weird poignancy. Sure, he’s a traveling serial killer who has married into God knows how many families over the years, slaughtering them all when they fail to live up to his image of suburban perfection, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe what he’s saying; he really does yearn for a wife and a child who will be there to hug him when he comes home. In the remake, however, the character is played by Dylan Walsh, from Nip/Tuck; he voices many of the same sentiments about family, but none of them thaw his cold-eyed expression. That’s the big difference between the two movies: O’Quinn is playing someone who wants a family; Walsh is playing a killer just looking for an excuse to wipe out the entire household.

Okay, that’s just one of the differences. The 1987 film is one of the great hidden gems of the ’80s, even with its cheesy synth score — the script, by the late crime novelist Donald E. Westlake, wasn’t just cleverly plotted; it was also a sly satire on the dark underbelly of Reagan-era “family values.” It was about a man trying desperately to be “normal,” but whose mask kept slipping off his face. As for the remake... well, I can’t decide if director Nelson McCormick and screenwriter J.S. Cardone (who also made the couldn’t-be-duller 2008 Prom Night remake) simply missed the witty subtext of the first film or figured they could just as easily do without it.

Instead, they build the film around Walsh’s new stepson (played by Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley) and his growing suspicions that this new guy in his mother’s life, who refuses to have his picture taken and pays for everything in cash, is not who he says he is. Unfortunately, Badgley has apparently decided to give the most laconic performance in horror movie history, and his steadfast underplaying makes the script only seem more plodding than it already is. Amber Heard, as Badgley’s girlfriend, whose wardrobe consists almost entirely of bikinis and underwear, is the film’s sole source of visual interest.

The filmmakers even fumble the original film’s classic line, “Wait a minute... who am I here?” — Walsh swallows the final four words so that they barely register. Who is he here? No one to be frightened of, that’s for sure.

A Serious Man: The Universe Vs. Larry Gopnik

2009-10-18T18:56:00.003-06:00

A Serious Man, the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, must be the first movie to use the Columbia Record and Tape Club as a metaphor for the chaos of the universe. In arguably the film’s key scene, physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) gets a phone call from a Columbia sales representative, who tells him that his account is in arrears: he still hasn’t paid for his copy of Santana’s Abraxas. (It’s 1967.) Larry has no idea what the man is talking about — he never ordered Santana’s Abraxas. But that’s the point, the voice on the phone replies: the album was sent to him automatically. “But I didn’t do anything!” Larry shouts, with increasing agitation. “I don’t want Santana’s Abraxas!” But what Larry doesn’t realize is, that’s how the universe works: even if you don’t do anything, God is the kind of person who will still force you to foot the bill for Santana’s Abraxas. In fact, the people who don’t do anything are kind of His favourite targets.

The situation with the Columbia Record and Tape Club is actually the least of Larry’s woes. His hopes of getting tenure at the university are jeopardized by a series of anonymous letters someone is mailing to the tenure committee. A Korean student, unhappy with the F he’s received on his exam, is apparently trying to bribe Larry into passing him — although the kid’s behaviour is so inscrutable that Larry’s not even sure what to accuse him of. His unemployed (and unemployable) brother Arthur has moved into the living room and spends his hours draining a cyst on his neck and working on a grand mathematical theory of the universe called “The Mentaculus.” And his wife Judith has informed him, out of the blue, that she’s leaving him for Sy Abelman — and insists that Larry move into a motel while she arranges for a “get,” a traditional Jewish divorce.

The divorce, the cost of the motel, Arthur’s problems with the law, the uncertainty of his position at the university, the arrangements for his son’s upcoming bar mitzvah — it all puts a strain on Larry’s finances. But what’s causing Larry the most tsuris is a much more abstract concern: why him? He’s a good man, a loyal husband, a devoted father. He goes to synagogue every week. He gives generously to the community. Why has God singled him out for such suffering? Is he being punished for some reason? Or is there no meaning whatsoever to any of these events — is it just random gibberish, like the signal on his TV set, which keeps “coming in fuzzy” no matter how much time he spends on the roof jiggling the antenna?

At one point, Larry tells his class the story of Schrödinger’s cat and tells them that even if they don’t understand it, they’re “still responsible for it on the midterm.” Reviewing A Serious Man makes me feel a little like one of Larry’s students — it’s been four days since I saw it and even though I’ve barely penetrated any of this movie’s mysteries, I’ve still got to write down some cogent thoughts about it. A Serious Man belongs alongside Barton Fink and The Man Who Wasn’t There in the Coen brothers’ filmography: it’s a deliberately cryptic fable that you might be tempted to write off as meaningless if it weren’t for the way each scene is staged and photographed so impeccably. Each image, each line of dialogue, each performance seems so deliberate, so precisely what the Coens wanted, that surely it all must signify something.

Here are the theories I’ve developed so far. The Jefferson Airplane song “Somebody to Love” is a symbol for God’s love. Danny’s transistor radio equals man’s connection to God. Larry’s neighbour, who keeps encroaching on Larry’s property with his lawnmower, represents the erosion of faith in modern society. Larry’s other neighbour, a married woman with a penchant for nude sunbathing, represents the temptation of the flesh. Schrödinger’s cat equals our inability to know if we have earned God’s favour. Property lawyer Solomon Schultz represents false hope that the ways of man can solve our spiritual crises. Mike the school bully equals the unavoidability of God’s wrath. So does the hurricane. So does Santana’s Abraxas. Or maybe Cosmo’s Factory does. Now I’m getting confused. And the parable of the goy’s teeth, which Larry learns from his rabbi... well, can I get back to you on that one too?

A Serious Man has been widely hailed as one of the Coens’ greatest achievements to date. Myself, I wasn’t quite as enraptured by it. Certainly, its evocation of Jewish life in 1960s Minnesota is wonderfully textured, and Michael Stuhlbarg gives a resourceful performance in a passive, reactive, powerless role. I sure don’t regret seeing it. But is “mildly intrigued bafflement” really an ideal reaction to a piece of art? I find myself echoing the sentiment of the CIA bureau chief J.K. Simmons played in the Coens’ previous film, Burn After Reading: can someone bring this movie back to me when it makes sense?

"Wait A Minute... Who Am I Here?"

2009-10-15T16:13:00.004-06:00

There's one good thing that's come of this weekend's release of the haven't-seen-it-but-it-looks-kinda-terrible The Stepfather: namely, the long-overdue DVD release of the original 1987 version of The Stepfather, directed by Joseph Ruben, written by Donald E. Westlake, and starring the peerless Terry O'Quinn as Jerry Blake, the serial killer who'll stop murdering people as soon as he can find a family without any flaws.

The Stepfather is my "Hidden Gem" DVD pick this week for CBC Radio. I've wanted to talk about this movie for a long time, and now I finally found an excuse: click here to listen to the segment.

Where The Wild Things Are: You Make My Heart Sing

2009-10-14T22:16:00.003-06:00

Within the first 15 minutes of Where the Wild Things Are, we see Max, the film’s hero, cry — and not just once, but twice. And not a silent trickle of tears down a single cheek, but crying the way 11-year-old kids cry — without restraint, his mouth contorted into a grimace, as if the very act of crying itself, of losing control over his emotions, is terrifying. Max plays the way a real 11-year-old does, too: when a snowplow creates a huge pile of snow on the other side of the street, his first instinct is to burrow a hole through the centre and call it an igloo. He plants a “flag” on top of it made from a stick and a plastic bag. He wears tan corduroy pants, and they’re darker in the places where the snow has soaked through. Later on, he comes inside and lies on the floor under the desk where his mother is working on the computer, tugging with idle curiosity on the toe of her tan pantyhose. The soles of his socks are dirty.

These are the kind of details most films about children omit, and Spike Jonze is the rare director who seems to realize that while adults think childhood is cute, the children themselves don’t see it that way. When Max puts on his famous wolf suit, Jonze makes no effort to disguise the grime and the filth ground into the fabric. It probably smells terrible. Thank God this isn’t an animated film; Where the Wild Things Are needs to be grubby. The band of gigantic monsters Max meets when he runs away from home and sails across the ocean are beautifully tactile creations, with dry leaves in their matted fur, their toenails cracked and dirty, and grey snot leaking from their noses. Their claws are huge, but their bodies are all soft edges. They’re as gullible as children — when Max spins them a story about having once conquered a tribe of Vikings by blowing up their heads, they immediately decide to elect him their king. (Shades of The Invention of Lying!)

What a wonderful job Jonze’s team has done bringing Maurice Sendak’s illustrations from the original Where the Wild Things Are picturebook to life — the creatures’ huge faces have a three-dimensional expressiveness to them while retaining a certain two-dimensional stylization. (I love the heavy-footed way they run, their pot bellies slowing them down even further.) The voice casting is inspired all around: Catherine O’Hara is Judith, the self-professed “downer” of the group, who snipes at Max’s every decision; Forest Whitaker is Ira, her husband, who loves her almost as much as he loves putting holes in trees; Paul Dano is Alexander, a shy, goatlike creature whom nobody ever pays attention to. Best of all is James Gandolfini, who brings a weird mix of innocence and marblemouthed menace to Carol, the closest thing Max has to a kindred spirit among the wild things, but whose temper ultimately sabotages every friendship he makes.

I love the matter-of-fact style of dialogue Jonze and co-screenwriter Dave Eggers have created for the wild things — they sigh and shrug and mumble and fumble for words and say, “What do you wanna do?” “I dunno. What do you wanna do?” In some ways, they interact like old people sitting around a pool at a retirement village, but emotionally, they’re on Max’s level — prone to sudden enthusiasms and spells of wildness, but also easily wounded and apt to break things when they feel betrayed or frustrated. They build elaborate Gaudí-esque “nests” for themselves, then smash them to bits soon after.

People have speculated whether this rather peculiar movie, with its retro special effects, handheld camerawork, hipster soundtrack, will hold any appeal to kids. But at the screening I attended, the kids in the audience seemed completely enraptured — and in the scene where Carol shows Max an art project he’s been working on, the crowd reacted to their first sight of it with an audible gasp. I heard a lot of kids’ voices in that gasp, which was a heartening thing: it’s lovely to know that kids are still capable of such a visceral reaction to seeing a beautiful handmade object.

The most recent Slate.com Culture Gabfest begins with a discussion of Where the Wild Things Are, and the podcast’s regular host Stephen Metcalf, who never misses an opportunity to play the scold, had nothing but contempt for what he saw as a completely unnecessary expansion of a simple, near-perfect, 10-sentence classic. Now, maybe the film’s powerful undertow of melancholy nostalgia (“melancholgia,” as critic Matt Singer has dubbed it) has got me addled — and maybe all the kids’ choir music in Karen O’s score has softened up my head even further — but I honestly don’t get where Metcalf is coming from.

Maybe it helps that I never read Where the Wild Things Are as a child, so I don’t have any sentimental attachment to the material that would provoke outrage at the very idea of someone altering it. But I didn’t detect anything cynical about this project. I think it respects the intelligence of the kids who’ll be seeing it, and their capacity for wonder. I think the added scenes do a nice job of fleshing out the characters without losing the story’s essential strangeness. Come on — that surreal image of Max getting swallowed by one of the wild things and talking to her from inside her belly is going to be imprinted on the minds of every kid who sees this movie.

I know it’s imprinted on mine — and again, hooray for Jonze for covering Max in slimy mucus when the wild thing coughs him back up. This is a lovely, sweet, unusually resonant kids’ movie. I could eat it up.

The Musicgoer: Patton Oswalt's My Weakness Is Strong

2009-10-12T13:33:00.001-06:00

PATTON OSWALT
My Weakness Is Strong
(Warner Bros)
**** (out of 5)

There’s an interesting tug-of-war happening on the new CD from hipster-approved standup comic Patton Oswalt. On the one hand, he’s a new father who wants to become a more inspiring role model for his infant daughter — he wants to finally get in shape (or at least lose enough weight so that he doesn’t get winded just by saying long sentences), and he wants to become a less negative person too. But it’s a struggle: Oswalt’s cynicism is so ingrained that when he begins a text with the word “I,” his phone automatically fills in the phrase “I hate...” for him. (“The Oswalt family crest,” he says, “should be a pair of eyes rolling off to the side, a bag of Cheetos, and the word ‘fuck.’”)

At least Oswalt isn’t cynical about his audiences. His respect for our intelligence shines through in routine after routine, in the precision of his vocabulary as well as his determination to push his premises to higher, more outrageous levels of absurdity. Of course, some of his stories don’t need embellishments: his account of meeting a realtor to look at a house and interrupting an orgy is hilarious enough to stand all on its own.

The Musicgoer: The Mountain Goats' The Life Of The World To Come

2009-10-11T17:46:00.002-06:00

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS
The Life of the World to Come
(4AD)
**** (out of 5)

Every song on The Life of the World to Come is named after a Bible verse, and while the connections between the associated scripture and John Darnielle’s lyrics are sometimes obscure, there’s no mistaking the devotional, spiritual qualities of this disc. But it’s a disc that’s as much about doubt as it is about faith, sung by a man still searching for the pathway to heaven, not guiding others onto it. And Darnielle, whose voice is more than capable of hitting piercing street-preacher decibel levels, here sings so softly the album could have been recorded in a confession booth. That hushed delivery is especially effective on “Deuteronomy 2:10,” a song sung from the point of view of animals on the verge of extinction — Darnielle wrings surprising poignancy from the line, “There’ll be no more after me.” (There’s no Noah’s Ark on the horizon in Darnielle’s universe.)

Much like the Bible itself, Darnielle’s albums may be difficult to grasp as a whole, but they contain individual verses that are heart-piercingly wise and beautiful. (And quotable too!) To his many disciples — myself included — he does what Aaron did for Moses, speaking eloquently about emotions we don’t quite have the words to express.

Couples Retreat: Tropic Thudder

2009-10-11T16:23:00.004-06:00

Couples Retreat is a good example of a movie that fails the late Gene Siskel’s famous test — to wit: is this film as interesting as a hypothetical documentary of the same actors having lunch together? Considering that the cast contains some of the ablest comic performers in Hollywood (plus Malin Akerman), the answer is clearly an emphatic no. At the same time, I can’t summon quite the same level of vitriol against Couples Retreat as other critics. True, I don’t think I laughed more than one or two times. But with the first snowfall descending on Edmonton, I can think of worse activities than sitting inside a nicely heated movie theatre watching Vince Vaughn, Jason Bateman, Kristin Davis, and Kristen Bell spending a working vacation by the impossibly clear waters of Bora Bora. Of course, I can also think of much better movies these people could be doing instead.

Couples Retreat takes place on a Pacific island paradise run by relationship expert Monsieur Marcel (played by an amusingly self-satisfied Jean Reno). Bateman and Bell are a hyper-organized husband and wife who’ve come there to save their marriage, and they’ve dragged three other couples along in order to save money on the group rate, not realizing that the daily “couples skill-building exercises” mentioned in the brochures are mandatory. Which means that everyone — parents-in-a-rut Vaughn and Akerman, all-but-divorced Jon Favreau and Kristin Davis, and divorcé/much younger rebound girlfriend Faizon Love and Kali Hawk — must rise at the crack of dawn for yoga, New Age counseling sessions, and various other activities requiring the wearing of colour-coordinated robes.

It’s not a bad comedy so much as a lazy, flabby, complacent one — instead of fleshing out the particulars of these couples’ relationships, the script (which is credited to Vaughn, Favreau, and What Happens in Vegas screenwriter Dana Fox) contents itself with milking a yoga lesson scene for five minutes’ worth of gay-panic gags. Now, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing for a comedy to be a little bit on the baggy side; on the other hand, when you’re devoting five per cent of your movie’s running time to two characters playing Guitar Hero, that may be a sign that your screenplay could use some tightening.

Seriously... Guitar Hero? Is that really the wildest comic idea on Vaughn and Favreau’s minds these days? The only halfway-original performance in this film comes from British comic Peter Serafinowicz as “Sctanley,” the unflappable enforcer of the island’s rules. Like the silent “c” in the character’s name, he’s the only unexpected element in a film that’s otherwise as predictable as a package holiday.

Jumpin' Like A Real Live Wire

2009-10-08T11:36:00.007-06:00

I'm totally serious in this week's "Hidden Gems" DVD segment for CBC Radio when I say that Shock Treatment boasts one of the most irresistible collections of original songs of any movie from the last 30 years. This little-known quasi-sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show has its fair share of problems, but the music definitely isn't one of them; I've been listening to the soundtrack pretty much nonstop for the last couple of weeks and I still can't get enough of it.

If the sales job I do in this segment piques your interest, here's a collection of Shock Treatment clips various people have posted to YouTube that'll give you a fuller idea of just how much fun this score is...

It's great, right?

By the way, why doesn't Jessica Harper have a bigger cult following? There were a few years there where anybody making an offbeat musical made a point of putting her in the cast: Shock Treatment, Pennies From Heaven, Phantom of the Paradise. I suppose she's probably pushing 60 these days, but that's certainly not too late for some cool cable TV show to write a juicy role for her. Basic black shouldn't be the only thing coming back!

Dead Snow: Hungry For Power... And Brains

2009-10-07T22:33:00.005-06:00

I hate to disappoint you gore fans, but Dead Snow — better known as “the Norwegian horror comedy about Nazi zombies” — isn’t much of a movie. Yes, the plot involves Nazi zombies. Yes, the concept of Nazi zombies is indisputably awesome. No, I am not going to get dragged into a South Park “pirate ghosts/ghost pirates” debate about whether they’re Nazi zombies or zombie Nazis. But execution is everything when it comes to horror, and that’s where writer/director Tommy Wirkola falls far, far short.

Perversely, Wirkola seems almost proud of the creakiness of his film’s set-up: a gang of interchangeable (but uniformly unlikable) college students decide to spend their Easter break in a remote cabin in the woods, far out of cellphone range, where they get picked off one by one. There’s even a self-described “film nerd” in the group who pipes up with the observation that this is the same way The Evil Dead started — thankfully, he’s one of the first characters to get killed off.

Wirkola pads things out for an unconscionable 50 minutes before giving us our first decent glimpse of the Nazi zombies, whereupon the film finally kicks into high gear with a series of increasingly gruesome showdowns between the humans and the goosestepping ghouls. The zombies aren’t actually the least bit scary, but a few of them do get killed off in pretty colourful ways — in the most spectacular scene, a character winds up dangling from a cliff while holding onto a zombie’s unspooled intestines and trying to fight off another zombie holding onto him around his waist.

What are all those Nazi zombies doing in the snowy forests of Norway anyway, you ask? I wish I could tell you — the movie’s explanation of this obscure chapter of WWII history is a little foggy. And if you’re planning on seeing Dead Snow — for instance, at DEDfest next weekend here in Edmonton — you and your friends will have a lot more fun if you make your brains a little foggy as well first.

Moviegoer Diary: Eyes Of Laura Mars, Black Moon

2009-10-06T23:54:00.007-06:00

EYES OF LAURA MARS

Plot In A Nutshell
Irvin Kershner’s 1978 thriller about a fashion photographer (Faye Dunaway) who begins experiencing visions in which she sees the world through the eyes of the serial killer who is stalking and murdering her friends and colleagues.

Thoughts
Brian De Palma’s critics slam him so much having stolen his style from Alfred Hitchcock that it’s a little startling to watch a movie like Eyes of Laura Mars and realize there was a time in the late ’70s when directors would set out to rip off Brian De Palma.

At least, that’s what I thought Irvin Kershner was doing when I first saw this movie more than 20 years ago on TV — I remember reading a Pauline Kael essay in which she championed the film, expressing exasperation at people who wouldn’t take her advice to go see it. (To be afraid of Eyes of Laura Mars, Kael felt, was to be afraid of movies in general, and the outsize emotions they could provoke. I love Pauline Kael, but this was one of her kookier opinions.)

Anyhow, to get back to my main point, I realize upon rewatching it today that in fact, Eyes of Laura Mars (with a screenplay co-written by John Carpenter) was a rare attempt to do an American version of the giallo thrillers that had been so popular in Italy for more than a decade. All the ingredients are here: the glossy, glamourous setting (in this case, the world of high fashion and Helmut Newton-style art photography), the unseen serial killer, the amateur sleuth pursuing their own investigation of the killings, with just enough unexplained supernatural elements thrown into the mix to keep the audience off-guard.

All that supernatural business is the source of my biggest problems with Laura Mars. First, it’s never satisfactorily explained why Laura has such a strong psychic connection with the killer — there’s an intriguing scene where it’s revealed that Laura’s violent, decadent photographs have been unwittingly recreating old crime scene photos, but nothing really comes of that revelation, either. What bugged me most, though, is the staging of Laura’s visions. We’re explicitly told that when Laura has one of her Kill-O-Vision spells, she can no longer see her surroundings, but instead looks at the world through the eyes of the killer, who may be dozens of blocks away. But that isn’t how Dunaway plays these scenes — in one scene, she senses the killer is coming to kill her in her loft, whereupon she runs away at breakneck speed through an exit, apparently having no trouble finding the exact direction to flee. And in a particularly ridiculous scene, she gets a vision of the killer stalking her manager (Rene Auberjonois) while she’s driving — and she starts driving to his apartment to warn him. True, she does crash her car eventually, but she gets much farther than any driver could plausibly get while being blinded by visions of their best friend being brutally killed.

Still, Pauline Kael was right to recommend this movie, which is fun, trashy entertainment of a kind that rarely gets made anymore (although at the rate that Hollywood studios are remaking every horror movie from this period, it may be only a matter of time before a new version goes before the cameras). Faye Dunaway is a fascinating actress — even though she appeared in a lot of iconic pictures from the New Hollywood era (Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, Network), she seems fundamentally to belong to an older, more traditional style of acting. There’s a scene in Laura Mars where Dunaway makes a phone call while sitting on her bed in the middle of a gorgeous, immaculate bedroom where all the walls are lined with mirrors. It’s not a demanding scene emotionally, but there’s a certain stylization — a harmonization of your own glamour and the glamour of the set — that this kind of scene requires and which not a lot of modern actors can handle unironically.

So hooray, Eyes of Laura Mars. The photo shoot scenes, with gorgeous models wearing nothing but lingerie under their fur coats while wrecked cars burn in the background, make the movie worth watching all on their own.

Stray Observation
• For some reason, I have an especially clear memory of the Mad magazine parody of this movie — especially the drawings of Raul Julia and Tommy Lee Jones. Do I have some kind of Laura Mars-style psychic connection with Mort Drucker?

RATING: 3/5

* * * * *

BLACK MOON

Plot In A Nutshell
Louis Malle’s dreamlike 1975 film, set in the near future during some kind of armed war between the sexes, about a young woman (Cathryn Harrison) who has a series of odd, surreal encounters at a remote country estate.

Thoughts
I’ve checked out a lot of peculiar movies for these Moviegoer Diary entries, and Black Moon is one of the oddest of them all — especially since it seems so atypical of the rest of Louis Malle’s work. Coming between Lacombe, Lucien and Pretty Baby, it has the feeling of a table-clearing film, the kind of movie that puzzles even a director’s fans but which makes the next stage of his career possible. It’s Malle’s Schizopolis, his Gerry, his Inland Empire.

With its rural setting and its use of a female protagonist who may be imagining most of the things we’re seeing, it reminds me most strongly of Robert Altman’s Images — and I was surprised to realize that Black Moon’s star Cathryn Harrison was also in that movie. She has a strange energy as a performer that really works in the film’s favour — physically, she seems quite young and delicate, but there’s a steeliness in her eyes that makes you think she’s not as helpless as she looks, and indeed may be capable of nearly anything. I love the way she runs instead of walks nearly everywhere, and frequently winds up falling on her ass as a result. And I also adore how when she finally tracks down the unicorn she’s been chasing through the whole movie — yes, a unicorn — practically the first thing she does is insult it for not being slim and white like the unicorns in her storybooks.

I really haven’t the slightest clue what to make of Black Moon — of all the naked children running around herding pigs, of the (possibly incestuous?) relationship between the (possibly mute?) Joe Dallesandro and Alexandra Stewart, of Malle’s constant parade of disturbing breast-suckling scenes — but at least it’s baffling in a way that’s never boring.

Black Moon has also got to be some kind of landmark movie in the field of animal wrangling. This film contains a whole lot of scenes with animals — and not easily trainable animals like dogs and horses, mind you, but cats and snakes and pigs and turkeys and some kind of muskrat that gets creamed by a car in the very first shot. And Malle’s script requires them all to do very specific things — a cat has to walk across the keys of a piano, a pig has to lie placidly on top of a kitchen counter, hundreds of lambs and turkeys have to congregate in front of a country house. It’s very impressive! Also, there are multiple scenes featuring the biggest damn rat I’ve ever seen in my life, and the animal expert who could choke back their disgust long enough to train that creature has my undenying respect.

Stray Observations
• Cathryn Harrison is the granddaughter of Rex Harrison. Black Moon also gives an “additional dialogues” credit to Joyce Buñuel, the daughter-in-law of Luis Buñuel.

• Did the “war between the sexes” scenes in Black Moon inspire the similar plot turn in Bertrand Blier’s Calmos, which came out the following year? Or were all French directors in the ’70s convinced men and women would start shooting at each other any day now?

RATING: 3.5/5

Lorna's Silence: Quietly Devastating

2009-10-05T18:35:00.003-06:00

On one level, Lorna’s Silence is a movie about an immigration scam. Lorna Deda (Arta Dobroshi) is an Albanian woman who has agreed to marry Claudy, a Belgian junkie (Jérémie Renier), in order to obtain her Belgian citizenship; the idea is that she will then marry a Russian mobster in order to get him his citizenship and use her share of the Russian man’s fee for the down payment on a snack bar which she’ll run with her boyfriend from back home.

But underneath this complicated love quadrangle, Lorna’s Silence is really about exchanges of money. The first image of the film is of Lorna depositing some cash into the bank, and almost every scene after that involves some kind of monetary transaction: Claudy giving Lorna some money to buy medicine to ease his withdrawal cramps, Lorna collecting a bonus payment from her handler Fabio to compensate her for the hassle of dealing with Claudy’s addiction; Lorna attempting to give money to her in-laws but being rebuffed; Lorna setting up a bank account for an unseen character. Directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne don’t make a big deal about this motif, but eventually their point becomes clear: in a world where human beings are reduced to commodities, the most dangerous thing Lorna can do is behave as if human life has some worth beyond its immediate monetary value.

Take Claudy, for instance. It’s no accident that Fabio have chosen him to be Lorna’s sham husband — not only is he desperate enough for money to agree to the scheme, but as a junkie, he’s not likely to survive long enough to hold up Lorna’s marriage to the mobster. And when Claudy, inconveniently, decides to make a genuine effort to kick his habit instead of dying on schedule like he’s supposed to, Fabio casually remarks to Lorna that he can always arrange for Claudy to overdose. Junkies go cold turkey and then overdose all the time, he says; no one will find it the least bit suspicious.

But to what extent is Lorna a willing participant this scheme? That question is the true source of intrigue in Lorna’s Silence. While she mostly regards Claudy’s pathetic addiction with contempt — refusing even to wait around with him when he checks himself into the hospital for a detox — she clearly also balks at the idea of killing him. She even contrives some self-inflicted cuts and bruises so that she can fast-track a divorce under the guise of an abused wife.

As is their usual method, the Dardennes don’t give us any clues into Lorna’s state of mind except what we can extrapolate from her actions. Their visual style isn’t quite as oppressive as it was in Rosetta or Le Fils — you no longer feel as if the camera is sitting on the characters, bearing down relentlessly upon them every moment they’re onscreen. But that doesn’t make Lorna’s Silence any less tense or place Lorna in any less of an ethical vice grip. Arta Dobroshi is in every single scene of Lorna’s Silence, and she gives an unsentimental but nevertheless deeply sympathetic performance as a woman who has placed herself in a situation where she cannot afford the luxury of a conscience. (Late in the film, when Fabio’s henchman takes Lorna on a car ride, you don’t have to be a fan of The Sopranos to feel your stomach clench up with anxiety.)

In the end, it’s only when Lorna is stripped of everything — when money no longer matters or can help her — that we see her soul laid bare. With its thoughtful, subtle performances and powerfully moral perspective on human nature, Lorna’s Silence is more than worth the price of a ticket.