The Moviegoer

Precious: Based On The Novel "Push" By Sapphire: Tyler Perry's Welcome To The Dollhouse

2009-11-26T22:27:00.005-07:00

In her daydreams, Harlem teenager Claireece Precious Jones is beautiful; her ample body draped in furs and evening gowns, she attends film premières, dances in music videos, and gets her photo taken by high fashion photographers. Flashbulbs pop, music plays, cute boys fawn over her, and her face is radiantly happy. But those fantasies don’t last long before Precious is plunged back into her real-life identity as an obese, illiterate, self-hating victim, raped repeatedly by her absentee father and constantly abused by her psychopathic mother.

And as I watched the face of Gabourey Sidibe, who plays Precious, once again assume its customary expression of sullen impassivity, I couldn’t help but wish that director Lee Daniels had made a film about that other girl, starring that other actress, who is a genuinely vivacious, lively screen presence. That girl seems like a real person; Precious Jones, on the other hand, seems little more than a very large walking symbol of victimhood, a receptacle for abuse. Every time she starts to feel good about herself, her mother (played by the comedian Mo’Nique) comes along and literally wallops her across her head with a frying pan.

Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire (to call this film by its full, somewhat preposterous title) is a real oddity: part earnest social drama about social workers and inspirational literacy teachers and part Todd Solondz horror show. (If it gets nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, as many awards-season handicappers are predicting it will, it will surely be one of the more idiosyncratically shot and edited nominees since... gosh, I don’t know when. Shine? Darling?)

The film is not without a sense of humour — there’s a funny (albeit completely unbelievable) interlude where Precious imagines herself and her mother as the stars of Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women, still arguing furiously, only in Italian with English subtitles — but of all the items in his directorial toolbox, Daniels reaches far too often for the bludgeon. Mo’Nique gives a ferociously committed performance, to be sure, but the character’s grotesque behaviour soon settles into a dull, predictable groove. (When she dandles Precious’ Down syndrome baby on her knee for the benefit of a visiting social worker, you just know she’s going to literally toss the kid to one side the first moment she gets.)

Daniels fares better with the scenes set in Precious’ Each One Teach One classroom. The teacher, a beautiful, caring lesbian with the florid name of Blu Rain, is a bit too perfect to be believed, but Precious’ fellow students are a vividly drawn bunch — I especially liked Xosha Roquemore, whose character Joann has a great, sassy look (huge, funky eyeglasses, full lips always on the verge of bursting into laughter) and big dreams of working for a record label. I bet she’ll make it too; she seems pretty indomitable. Hearing these girls babble and gossip and read from their journals and heckle whoever’s doing the reading have a semi-improvised feel that comes as a huge relief after the scenes with Mo’Nique, which always end the same way, with Mo’Nique delivering another abusive monologue and Precious getting something heavy thrown at her. Maybe that contrast is by design, but boy, that doesn’t make those domestic scenes any less crudely manipulative. I mean, in one scene, Mo’Nique actually hurls a TV set at Precious’ head — right after she falls downstairs while carrying her newborn baby! (That whole scene is like a TV being thrown at your head.)

Is the film “poverty porn,” as some have suggested? I think it uses Precious’ degraded home life as a kind of spectacle, to give audiences a charge, but whether that qualifies the film as pornographic or just muddled in its thinking, I’m not sure. Daniels certainly isn’t above taking random swipes at other films that presume to explore the American underclass, though: in one scene, Precious asks the grouchy administrator at Each One Teach one how she’s been. “I don’t know,” comes the reply. “I went to see that movie Barfly last night? Piece of shit.”

Top Five Unfortunate Lessons Guys Learn From Wired's Article About The Twilight Saga: New Moon

2009-11-26T18:17:00.004-07:00

From Wired's "Underwire" blog: Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn From Twilight

(1) Female moviegoers are incapable of thinking critically or ironically about the entertainment they consume.

(2) Female romantic fantasies are psychologically sick.

(3) Degree of “scariness” is the only true measurement by which to evaluate an author or filmmaker’s use of horror tropes; using them as a metaphor for love or for teenage anxieties is, on its face, laughable.

(4) A bad movie marketed towards male audiences is forgivable; a bad movie marketed towards female audiences is a crime against culture that needs to be “taken down” in print.

(5) It is not contradicting yourself to expose a film for its sexist attitudes while presuming to “speak for” women in the most condescending language possible.

Humpday: Bi Anxiety

2009-11-26T16:13:00.006-07:00

Wow, my voice nearly gave out at the end of this one — I guess that's a sign of how enthusiastic I was about recommending Lynn Shelton's droll mumblecore comedy Humpday in this week's "Hidden Gems" DVD segment for CBC Radio. Besides being a welcome antidote to "gay panic" humour, it also inspired one of my all-time favourite headlines for SEE Magazine: "Zack And Murray Make A Porno."

Don't worry — the segment is entirely pun-free. Click here to give it a listen.

Me And Orson Welles: Mercury Probe

2009-11-23T18:35:00.005-07:00

I have never been on one of Richard Linklater’s sets, but it’s hard to imagine him doing what Orson Welles does in his new film Me and Orson Welles and yelling at the assembled cast and crew, “You are all adjuncts to my vision!” My impression of Linklater — formed by watching his best films, Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and Before Sunset — is of a director who’s the opposite of a control freak, someone more than happy to hand over large portions of his film to actors, musicians, even animators and trust them to make some huge creative decisions. The Welles we meet in Me and Orson Welles, meanwhile, is the world’s biggest credit hog, a man who isn’t happy being the director, producer, and star of his stage version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar; he has to have people think he designed the set as well. (He’d probably claim credit for the script if he thought he could get away with it.)

A backstage comedy? Set in 1937 New York? And starring Zac Efron? Me and Orson Welles is an exceedingly square project for a laid-back Texas hipster like Richard Linklater, but on its own terms, it’s a fun, albeit minor little picture that delves into a great, unexplored period in Welles’ life, when he was racing all over New York, putting on plays, acting in radio shows, and seducing every pretty girl who crossed his path, even with a pregnant wife back home. (This period supplied some of the best anecdotes in This Is Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich’s lively collection of Welles interviews. I’m sure all the stories are heavily embroidered, but it’s still a blast to hear Welles talk about how arriving at the radio studio for a live broadcast and being told moments before going on air what character he was playing.)

Christian McKay, an actor previously unknown to me, looks more like the comedian Joe Lo Truglio than Orson Welles, but he does a top-notch Welles imitation — the amused purse-lipped smile, the casually silver-tongued oratory, the ability to make every speech, every gesture, into a performance everyone in the room will want to pay attention to. There’s an amusing joke early on in the film where Welles spots a book with John Gielgud’s photo on the cover and wonders aloud if there’s a man alive more in love with the sound of his own voice.

That book is the property of Richard Samuels (Efron), a stagestruck teenager who hustles his way into Welles’ Mercury Theatre troupe just when they’re putting together their legendary 1937 modern-dress version of Caesar. Of course, when Richard joins them, the only thing legendary about the show is its level of disorganization — opening night keeps getting delayed, the company is running out of cash, and the cast is feeling a little crushed under the weight of Welles’ ego. But Welles is so confident and charismatic, so skilled at convincing everyone of the brilliance of his vision, that no one dares leave — least of all Richard, who gets two scenes as Brutus’ servant Lucius. In one, he even gets to sing, accompanying himself on the lute. (Actually, Welles can’t afford a lute, so they’re using a disguised ukulele.) In the process, Richard falls for Welles’ assistant Sonja (Claire Danes) and learns a thing or two about love, art, and Shakespeare in the process.

I am a total sucker for backstage comedies, especially the ones where opening night looks like it’s going to be a total disaster but miraculously turns into a triumph instead (that's pretty much all of them, right?), and sure enough, I fell for Me and Orson Welles as well. Efron’s fine in the male ingénue role, Danes looks very fetching in her ’30s blouses, and Eddie Marsan makes a strong impression as John Houseman — you believe Welles must be a genius, because there’s no way Houseman would have put up with working for him otherwise.

And even if it’s not the most daring film Linklater has ever made, it feels like it must have been a fun way to keep his creative batteries charged. Near the end of the film, Linklater shows Welles, flush with triumph, worriedly asking himself, “How do I top this?” Linklater is hopefully asking himself the same question.

The Musicgoer: Tom Waits' Glitter And Doom Live

2009-11-22T19:18:00.002-07:00

TOM WAITS
Glitter and Doom Live
(Anti)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

Tom Waits is one of the great live performers in music today, but he’s been curiously ill-served by his live albums: Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) suffers from a weak lineup of songs, while Big Time (1988) suffered from the same arty, alienating affectations as the film it accompanied.

But now, with Glitter and Doom Live, Waits fans have the live album they’ve been waiting for — and right from the opening number, “Lucinda/Ain’t Goin’ Down” (a medley of two songs from his Orphans compilation), this music has a loose, infectious energy that’s been missing from Waits’ last few studio albums. His growl is guttural as ever, but I had forgotten what a flexible and variable instrument it is — there are at least three different registers Waits can growl in, depending on the mood of the song, from the junkyard dog aggression of “Singapore” to the drunken, sentimental keen of “Fannin Street” to the nasal, half-senile twang of “I’ll Shoot the Moon.”

But wait, there’s more: a bonus disc of Waits stage banter — 36 minutes of animal trivia, tall tales, and shameless puns. (“Shrimp never give anything to charity,” Waits observes. “That’s because they’re shellfish.”) The official title is Tom Tales, but I like to think of it as Having Fun With Tom On Stage.

Vampires, Cyborgs, And The Men Who Love Them: Two By Park Chan-Wook

2009-11-22T17:04:00.004-07:00

The waiflike beauty looks up at the strong, handsome, silent man, who seems at that moment like the embodiment of every kind of forbidden love. Strands of long, dark hair in her eyes, she begs him to change her into a vampire like himself, so they can be lovers forever. He shakes his head and gives her a pained reply: “No.” He knows what torment it is to thirst for blood, and he would never inflict such agony on anyone, least of all on the woman he loves.

That scene that I’ve just described does not come from New Moon — psych! Fooled you, right? — but from Thirst, one of two recent films from Korean director Park Chan-Wook that I watched over the last couple of days. And I think I’m finally, belatedly, coming around to the commonly held view that Park is one of the most original genre filmmakers on the scene today, with a command of colour, camera movement, and special effects that’s on the same elevated plane as guys like Peter Jackson and David Fincher, and a feel for female characters that neither of those guys can match.

The protagonist of Thirst is an idealistic but disillusioned priest played by Song Kang-ho, who volunteers as a test subject for some kind of experimental vaccine in hopes of at last making a tangible difference in somebody’s life. Somehow, in a turn of events I couldn’t quite follow, the vaccine turns Song into a vampire — he acquires superhuman strength, a strong aversion to sunlight, and a condition that causes hideous blisters to break out on his skin if he doesn’t drink human blood.

At first, Thirst looks like it will concern itself with the moral dilemma of a priest who must kill others to stay alive. But the most fascinating character turns out to be Kim Ok-bin, who plays the wife of Song’s childhood friend Shin Ha-Kyun, a hopeless, sickly mama’s boy for whom she feels nothing but contempt. Kim and Song would be drawn passionately to each other even under normal circumstances, but Song’s vampirism adds an erotic charge to the situation that makes their passions pretty much uncontrollable and they conspire to drown Shin in the lake and marry soon after. (The story is based on Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, but it also feels like a Korean version of a James M. Cain story... crossed with True Blood.)

Kim gives an extraordinary performance; she starts out as a helpless victim, quietly suffering under the thumb of her impassive mother-in-law, in the habit of running down the street in her bare feet in the middle of the night just to feel a momentary burst of freedom. Then she’s a young woman in love — there’s a great sequence in Thirst where Song holds her in his arms and jumps from building to building, Park’s camera perched just behind Song’s shoulder and looking down on Kim’s giddy laughing face. (There’s a comparable scene in the first Twilight movie, but Park does an infinitely better job than Catherine Hardwicke did of conveying the giddy rapture of vampire love.) Then she’s a femme fatale, plotting her husband’s murder while also seducing Song into making her into a vampire too. And then she’s just a bloodthirsty force of nature, eagerly embracing her new identity as a vampire, poking a weird double-bladed weapon into her victims’ necks and marveling as the blood burbles out of the wound, literally like water from a drinking fountain. It’s one of the best “monstrous female” roles in recent horror movies, and Kim sells every moment of it with a physical commitment that is by turns feral and kittenish.

At 135 minutes, the plot of Thirst meanders more than it should, but the visuals are never less than inspired. (The scenes where Shin’s moronically grinning ghost keeps interrupting Song and Kim’s most intimate moments are both creepy and wildly funny.) Park always tries to find interesting ways of shooting even conventional scenes — just look at the fluid editing and camera placement of that first mahjongg game, for instance.

And the climactic sequence, in which Song and Kim meet their end, is beautifully conceived both visually and emotionally, with Kim resisting death, then gradually resigning herself to it as long as she can be with her lover.

* * * * *

But the film that really converted me into Park Chan-Wook fandom was his previous effort, a one-of-a-kind fable titled I’m a Cyborg But That’s OK. With its lack of violence (except for a couple of key scenes), it’s candy-coloured visual palette, and its risky, offbeat comic tone, it’s the odd film out in Park’s career — it’s hard to believe it’s the work of the same guy who made Oldboy — but it’s also hard to imagine another director making it.

It’s set in a mental institution, but the kind of mental institution you only find in movies (or more accurately, in animated cartoons), where the rooms are cheerful, the doctors are benevolent, and the patients are all charmingly quirky, childlike misfits — a man who only walks backwards, an old woman who thinks she’s a mouse. Our heroine is Im Su-jeong, who believes that she is a cyborg: she prefers to converse with “other” mechanical objects like radios and lamps instead of doctors, and at dinnertime she consistently refuses food and instead daintily licks batteries to recharge herself. (Her toes light up, one by one, in rainbow colours to indicate her power level.) If she doesn’t start taking food, she will die of starvation before she can complete her cyborg mission — but since her mission is to massacre every doctor in the hospital as revenge for their treatment of her mentally disturbed grandmother, perhaps they’re lucky her toelights are nearly out.

Because of the nature of her role, Im Su-jeong gives a more limited performance than Thirst’s Kim Ok-bin, but if anything, she’s an even more striking onscreen presence, with her wide eyes, her blonde eyebrows, and her unbelievably thick, doll-like mop of hair. It’s a mask of a face that can convey sadness, innocence, and psychosis equally well, depending on the situation, and in a couple of brilliantly executed fantasy sequences in which her fingers turn into gun barrels and her mouth unhinges like a ventriloquist dummy to spew out bullets, she’s like a mechanical angel of death, impassive, indestructible, terrifying, and kind of adorable too.

I’m a Cyborg But That’s OK is apparently Park’s only significant financial flop, and its weirdly whimsical tone is certainly not going to be to all tastes. (Big aside, grown-ups acting like children have always been a tough sell at the box office.) But I found myself genuinely invested in the relationship between Im and a fellow patient (played by the pop star Rain), who hatches a brilliant plan that may save her from starvation but not her increasingly dangerous delusions. Plus, I’ll say it again, Im has one of those endlessly fascinating, unearthly faces — like Tilda Swinton or Willem Dafoe or Samantha Morton — that a person could look at for hours without ever getting bored.

And Park’s virtuoso visuals don’t hurt, either — I’m a Cyborg contains several elaborate single-take shots that manage to dazzle you with their technique while still feeling effortlessly graceful. The movie does takes place in kind of a bubble — all the images and the characterizations are a cartoon version of the human world — and I wondered after watching it if Park was even capable of writing three-dimensional people. But then I saw Thirst and my concerns completely vanished. To me, Park now seems like someone who wants to keep pushing his films into bold, unpredictable new territory, and that’s really exciting. They’re kind of nuts and they’re certainly not for everyone... but that’s more than OK with me.

The Road: Visions Of Gehenna

2009-11-19T19:15:00.004-07:00

According to legend, Terrence Malick tried to shoot as much of Days of Heaven as he could at the “magic hour,” those brief, beautiful minutes of the day just after the sun has set but there’s still light in the sky. I don’t know what you’d call the opposite of the magic hour (the tragic hour?), but that’s the time of day when most of John Hillcoat’s The Road takes place. (The cinematographer was Javier Aguirresarobe, who has a very different movie opening this week: the Twilight sequel New Moon.)

It’s some unspecified number of years in the future, and the world has fallen victim to some unnamed global cataclysm that has wiped out all the plants and animals and turned everything else to ash. The only living creatures are a handful of human beings, most of them far from home, aimlessly wandering this landscape of mud and cinders and trying to stave off starvation. Some stay alive by robbing others, some have resorted to cannibalism, and some — like Viggo Mortensen and his 12-year-old son Kodi Smit-McPhee — try to abide by some semblance of a moral code even as they forage through the ruins of civilization, shivering in their trashpicked clothes, hoping that maybe, by some miracle, they’ll find a can of food somewhere that everyone else has overlooked.

I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy’s original novel, although I saw it with a friend who tells me that it’s a pretty faithful adaptation, give or take a few minor Hollywood concessions. I found I responded to it mostly as a thought experiment: if all the plants and animals were wiped out overnight, how would the devolution of the human race play out? On that level, I found The Road to be an unsettlingly convincing vision of the future: the bandits, the demolished homes, the mud that seems to have soaked through everyone’s clothes, right down to their bones. And that lonely image of Mortensen and Smit-McPhee at the “end” of their journey, huddled together on a grey, dismal beach under a piece of plastic sheeting, wondering if there’s another father and son on the other side of the ocean doing the same thing, hits just the right note of bleak yearning for the comfort of strangers. The scene that moved me the most, though, is the one where Mortensen and Smit-McPhee discover a piano in an abandoned beach house — something about the idea of art and music and all other forms of human beauty being lost forever just tears me up inside.

At the same time, I’m not sure what the point of a movie like The Road is, other than to watch numbly as the last few sparks of humanity fizzle out before you. I can handle a good cinematic bummer with the best of them, but there’s something so relentlessly grim and airless about this movie right from its basic conception that I found myself resisting it even as I admired the haunting images of crumbling highways and burned-out buildings, and respected the way Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall refuse to milk any moments for sentiment. (Although in the final scene, they do seem to be straining to supply a concluding note of uplift.) I get the feeling that McCarthy’s book would offer me a little bit more in the way of ruminations on the nature of survival and the legacy of the human race that go missing when you boil the book down to the essential incidents of the plot.

And even as I say that, I’m wondering if I’m being a philistine — isn’t one of the purposes of art, after all, to force you to confront difficult truths? And it’s true: partly because it envisions such an extreme, hopeless setting, The Road does make you feel the full, elemental horror of the possible end of humanity in a way that other post-apocalyptic stories don’t. (My God, even Omar from The Wire is barely hanging on, and if motherfucking Omar is having trouble surviving, what chance do the rest of us have?)

Simply getting a movie this bleak made and into movie theatres, I suppose, represents some kind of accomplishment. But unless it turns into one of those fluky movies, like The Passion of the Christ, that audiences connect with on some masochistic level precisely because they are so punishing, I can’t see The Road being an accomplishment that many people will share.

Not Quite Hollywood: The Tradition Of Koala-ty

2009-11-19T17:39:00.004-07:00

My "HIdden Gem" DVD pick this week for CBC Radio is Not Quite Hollywood, director Mark Hartley's high-octane documentary about the golden age of Australian exploitation movies. I tend to recommend a lot of movies about movies in these segments, and I don't know if that's something listeners find a little tiresome, but Not Quite Hollywood contains so many amazing stories and captures such a wild-and-woolly period of filmmaking history that I couldn't resist. I don't know how interested I'd be in watching a steady diet of these movies — especially the sex comedies, which look pretty dire — but when they're all edited down to 30 seconds of highlights, they can't help but seem pretty exciting.

And I do have a lot of fondness, personally, for one of the titles Not Quite Hollywood lingers over: Dead End Drive-In, which was the very last film to play the Hyland theatre in my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. Some of my favourite teenage moviegoing memories take place there, from its days as an arthouse cinema (allowing me to see everything from Betty Blue to a revival showing of Brian De Palma's Sisters on the big screen) to its later years as an exploitation house, where I once saw Trancers on Christmas Eve, perhaps one of my favourite movie nights of all time. Dead End Drive-In seemed like a fitting farewell to the old place — of all the movies in Not Quite Hollywood, that's the one I wound up feeling most eager to rewatch.

Meanwhile, you can click here to listen to the CBC segment. Enjoy!

The House Of The Devil: Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Marked For Death

2009-11-18T22:20:00.003-07:00

So many directors are remaking classic horror movies from the ’70s and ’80s, and yet it’s occurred to almost none of them to do what Ti West has done in The House of the Devil and come up with an original horror story but set it in the ’80s. In fact, judging from the scene in which the main character bops around to The Fixx’s “One Thing Leads to Another” (on cassette!), I’m going to precisely peg the film’s setting as early in the winter of 1983. With that one creative masterstroke, West removes his story from the world of cellphones, text messages, and irony and places it in the golden age of urban legends, of seductively eerie stories about Satanic cults operating in pleasant New England neighbourhoods, of serial killers with hooks for hands, razor blades in Halloween apples, and babysitters who find out the phone calls are coming from inside the house!

And in fact, The House of the Devil begins with its heroine, a young woman named Samantha (played by a pretty newcomer named Jocelin Donahue, who recalls such “perfect girlfriend” actresses from the early ’80s as Karen Allen and Brooke Adams) answering an ad for a babysitter. But when she arrives at her clients’ huge house somewhere out in the Connecticut boondocks, the husband (Tom Noonan) tells her there’s actually no baby — she’ll be taking care of his elderly mother-in-law while he and his wife (Mary Woronov) go out for the night.

Something doesn’t quite add up with his story — he insists that the mother is so private and self-sufficient that Donahue probably won’t even need to check in on her, but he’s also desperate enough to pay her $400, which is a ridiculous babysitting fee today, and even more so in 1983. And as a cash-strapped college student, Donahue can’t turn down that kind of money, so she swallows her misgivings and resolves to spend a few hours in Noonan’s big old creaky-spooky house. And did I mention it’s the night of a lunar eclipse?

It’s obvious from very early on that Noonan and Woronov are setting Donahue up as some kind of Satanic sacrificial lamb, but West holds back on providing just enough details to make every moment she spends in that house, prowling around half-lit corridors and slowly opening all sorts of squeaky-hinged doors, feel exquisitely suspenseful. I did some house-sitting when I was a teen, and there is definitely unusually unnerving about being alone at night in someone else’s home — even if you have their permission to be there. Factor in, as The House of the Devil does, the presence of some mysterious, unseen old woman who keeps making the floorboards creak and the plumbing moan, and you’ve got a total creepfest on your hands.

Aside from a couple of unconvincingly choreographed action beats during the climax, The House of the Devil also manages to deliver a satisfying payoff to all that ominous buildup... and the way West packs that payoff into the final three words of dialogue suggests a writer/director with a real flair for old-fashioned horror storytelling. I bet that if The House of the Devil actually had been made in the ’80s, people would still fondly remember it as “one of those movies that scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.” Luckily, it was made this year, so we probably won’t have to endure the shitty remake until at least 2029.

The Musicgoer: Connie Kaldor's Postcards From the Road

2009-11-17T18:16:00.004-07:00

CONNIE KALDOR
Postcards From the Road
(Outside Music)
** (out of 5)

There’s a fine line between eloquent simplicity and mere banality, between familiar shared truths and shopworn sentiments, and far too often on Postcards From the Road, singer/songwriter and Canadian folk festival mainstay Connie Kaldor can be heard settling for the latter. These are songs about how hard it is to say goodbye, how hard it can be to put your finger on why you love the people you do, how your life might have been hugely different if you’d chosen another path, and how nice it feels to be in love. All perfectly legitimate subjects for songs, of course, but Kaldor doesn’t ring any fresh changes on them. Love is like a mountain. It makes your heart flutter like a bird. When romance ends, it leaves a hole inside you.

Kaldor’s warm, supple voice can make even weak material sound good, but even so, I'm afraid there's very little on Postcards From the Road that's worth writing home about.

The Damned United: Football Antihero

2009-11-17T18:10:00.002-07:00

Peter Morgan is one of the few screenwriters who appears to have no ambitions to become a director, but whose scripts have such consistent themes that he practically qualifies as an auteur anyway. A typical Morgan script will dramatize a little-known footnote of ’70s history, and use that story as a springboard for pitting a cocky, callow, but likable young hero against a faded but still formidable legend. In The Queen, Tony Blair faced off against Queen Elizabeth; in The Last King of Scotland, a young doctor who had to square off against Idi Amin; and in Frost/Nixon... well, that one’s right there in the title.

In his latest film, The Damned United (and it feels right to call it a Peter Morgan film, even though Tom Hooper directed it), the two main characters will be less familiar to North Americans than to Brits. The cocky hero this time is football manager Brian Clough (Michael Sheen), whose leadership transformed Derby County from a laughingstock to contenders for the First Division title. His rival is Don Revie, the beloved manager of Leeds United, whose brutal style of play made them the dominant force in British football in the early ’70s. He also snubbed Clough during their first match against each other, and Clough has dreamed of revenge ever since. And so, when he’s hired as Revie’s replacement, Clough is more interested in repudiating Revie’s legacy than in winning games, or endearing himself to his new team.

And so the stage is set for one of the great fiascos in the history of British sport. Clough lasted a mere 44 days as Leeds’ manager before his poisonous relationship with his players and the Leeds fans resulted in his ouster... and cost him not just his friendship with his invaluable right-hand man, Peter Taylor but almost his entire sports career.

You don’t have to know anything about British football — God knows I sure don’t — to enjoy The Damned United. Morgan has always been more interested in character than setting, and he makes the film less a sports story than a study in bad management techniques. Michael Sheen, Morgan’s favourite leading man, is terrific as usual, especially in the scenes where Clough’s blinkered overconfidence gets the better of him. And with Timothy Spall as Peter Taylor, Colm Meaney as Don Revie, and Jim Broadbent as Derby’s tightwad team owner, the cast is practically an all-star team of ruddy-faced Irish and British character actors. Minor, but very entertaining.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox: Vulpine Intervention

2009-11-16T18:28:00.005-07:00

Every frame of The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s first foray into stop-motion animation, is so filled with wonders, you hardly know where to look. A book on a shelf, leaning against a TV set, titled Spices of the Jungle. A stalk of wheat worn in the breast pocket of a corduroy suit instead of a pocket handkerchief. A literal soapbox, which Mr. Fox climbs up on to make a speech. A painting in a badger’s law office that seems to suggest badgers fought in the Civil War. I think my favourite detail, though, pops up in the scene where young Ash Fox goes swimming with his cousin Kristofferson — if you look closely, you can see that the towel he’s drying himself off with was stolen from a hotel.

And Mr. Fox probably doesn’t feel a twinge of guilt about it. As voiced by George Clooney and embodied by a charmingly stiff-jointed armature of fur and wire, he’s a man who isn’t happy unless he’s pulling some kind of caper — preferably one with multiple phases, allows him to wear a bandit mask, and ends up with him dining on freshly killed chicken.

He’s a vulpine version of two previous Clooney roles, Danny Ocean from Ocean’s Eleven and Ulysses Everett McGill from O Brother, Where Art Thou? — a nonchalantly overconfident rogue, a little too much in love with the sound of his own voice, perpetually cooking up impossible schemes, but lucky enough to have a wife who keeps his most dangerous impulses in check. She’s named Felicity, she’s voiced by Meryl Streep, and she’s a fellow thief who demanded that they give up crime when she got pregnant. But in an eyebrow-raising moment (for a kids’ movie), we learn that Felicity was once a wild girl, “the town tart,” so perhaps she can empathize with her husband when he misses the old days when he could let his animal instincts off the leash. (Her hobby of creating landscape paintings of lightning storms suggests a woman still in love with the wild side of nature.)

The Fantastic Mr. Fox is based on a book by Roald Dahl, and it preserves his mordant sense of humour, especially in the characterization of the three scowling farmers Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, who become Mr. Fox’s mortal enemies when he begins brazenly raiding their chicken coops and ciderhouses. They are all pretty mean customers, but Bean (voiced by Michael Gambon) is the worst of the lot — he looks more like an undertaker than an apple farmer, and he even employs a giant rat (voiced by Willem Dafoe) as his head of security.

But The Fantastic Mr. Fox is also clearly a Wes Anderson movie, with the same meticulously framed sets, flat compositions, and beautifully chosen soundtrack music (this time, old Burl Ives records rub shoulders with The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys), the same distinctive tone of melancholy whimsy, and the same tension between moody sons and flawed father figures as any of his live-action pictures. I’ve been a big fan of all of Anderson’s pictures — even less beloved efforts like The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and the underrated The Darjeeling Limited — but I can see where his detractors are coming from when they complain about his arch tone and his fussed-over sets and costumes choking off the emotions of his stories.

But in The Fantastic Mr. Fox, that fussy, obsessive quality is inherent to the form, and a filmmaking style that might seem oppressive when live actors have to submit to it becomes thoroughly delightful when all the characters onscreen are puppets. Just seeing the fur on Felicity’s face “boil” as the unseen animators adjust her expression is captivating: you’re seeing something move that shouldn’t be able to, and if you’re like me, it’s all you can do to keep from clapping your hands with pleasure at every nifty magic trick Anderson’s team of animators so deftly execute. The animation is arguably at its most charming when it’s at its most artificial — the stiff yet spry dance numbers, or the cross-section, ant-farm shots of the foxes tunneling at top speed through the earth.

In the film’s final scene, Mr. Fox gathers his family — which, like the families in most Wes Anderson movies, is not limited to blood relatives — in the aisle of a supermarket and gives a speech that captures the full spirit of the film. It’s a tribute to, of all things, the pleasures of artificiality. He holds up a hybrid piece of fruit — an apple genetically modified so that the skin has a white pattern on it, a little like Christmas wrapping paper, and says, “This apple looks fake, but it has stars on it.”

The Fantastic Mr. Fox is fake too, just like all storybooks. But it has talking foxes in it. And flaming pinecones. And an electric train. And a badger who’s also a secret demolition expert. It’s the most instantly enchanting movie I’ve seen in many a fox-month.

The Musicgoer: The William Blakes' Wayne Coyne

2009-11-15T19:07:00.002-07:00

THE WILLIAM BLAKES
Wayne Coyne
(Speed of Sound)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

The Danish rock band The William Blakes may have named their debut album after the lead singer of The Flaming Lips, but judging from these 12 songs, Coyne is the least of their influences. The opening track, “Secrets of the State” conjures up memories of ’80s synth bands like Talk Talk and Blancmange, “Beginnings” has a room-filling sound that recalls The Arcade Fire (right down to the mid-song shout of “Let’s go!” just like in “No Cars Go”), and even on the track called “Wayne Coyne,” lead singer Kristian Leth frenetically quotes the “ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-se, ma-ma-makossa” breakdown from Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.”

It’s a magpie album, in other words, and even if it’s hard to get a firm grasp on the band’s true identity, Wayne Coyne has a big, lush pop sound that will pass the time until they figure it out. My favourite track is “On Fire,” whose mix of jaunty melody and apocalyptic lyrics compares favourably with Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere.” Originality is overrated, anyway.

Planet 51: Gleepnorp, We Have A Problem

2009-11-15T18:25:00.002-07:00

Most computer animation studios don’t actually aspire to be Pixar. Pixar turns out one entertaining, moving, visually spectacular, critically acclaimed, and ridiculously profitable animated film after another, and that’s a task no sane studio would ever assign itself. No, most fledgling animation houses would prefer to be Blue Sky Studios, the company that made Robots and the Ice Age pictures — formulaic, visually ugly cartoons that nevertheless made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office without even having to be any good.

Which brings us to Ilion Animation Studios, a new computer-animation factory that Sony Pictures has set up in Spain, and to Planet 51, their debut feature, an uninspired sci-fi spoof that will delight no one, but which will probably turn a modest profit in theatres before being promptly forgotten by everyone who sees it, and probably many of the people in the voice cast too.

The premise is a twist on 1950s alien-invasion movies: it’s set on a faraway planet that resembles the United States in the ’50s in every way, right down to the backyard barbecues, the black-and-white TV sets, and the rockabilly music on the jukeboxes — except the inhabitants have green skin, they ride in hovercars, and they keep miniature Giger-esque aliens as pets. (I forgot to check whether these creatures appear on the girls’ skirts instead of poodles.) But this peaceful world is thrown into chaos when a spaceship lands in the middle of town, and an “alien” emerges — actually, a square-jawed human astronaut named Charles (voiced by Dwayne Johnson). With the alien army looking to capture him, Charles convinces a teen named Lem (Justin Long) to hide him until he can sneak back onto his rocket and return to Earth. Low-grade hijinks ensue, as do several lame movie spoofs and a bunch of already-stale jokes about iPods, Facebook, and the macarena.

Even though he seldom appears in good movies, I’ve always liked Dwayne Johnson as an actor, but here’s he stuck playing an obnoxious character (think Buzz Lightyear without the charm) that prevents him from using any of his considerable natural appeal. Meanwhile, Lem — whose name appears to be an unwelcome tribute to the author of Solaris — is a thoroughly generic character, bizarrely more interested in asking Charles for romantic advice than getting information about life on other planets.

The most obnoxious scenes, though, deal with an alien hippie named Glar who keeps singing protest songs and organizing peace demonstrations. The last time we see him, he’s getting a Rodney King-style beatdown from some alien cops — a moment the movie plays for slapstick laughs. The tastelessness of that gag is the only thing about Planet 51 that pierces the stratosphere.

Amreeka: Falafel Immigration

2009-11-15T18:21:00.002-07:00

When divorced single mom Muna Farah’s application to emigrate from Palestine to the United States is unexpectedly approved, she balks at leaving her familiar surroundings, even as she knows it’s an opportunity she can’t refuse — if only for the sake of her teenage son Fadi, a bright kid who deserves a shot at a professional future that simply won’t be available to him if they stay where they are.

But soon after their arrival in Illinois, it appears that Muna may have simply traded in one set of indignities for another. True, she no longer has to endure the daily humiliation of being stopped at checkpoints on her way to work, but now she must put up with having to flip burgers for minimum wage at a White Castle. (It’s the best job she can find, even though she worked for 10 years at a bank in Palestine.) Also, the days immediately following the invasion of Iraq weren’t the best time to be an Arab in America — Fadi’s classmates nickname him “Osama” and even Muna’s brother-in-law, a successful doctor, has begun losing patients.

Amreeka is the debut feature from Cherien Dabis, a Palestinian-American writer/director who, judging from the closing dedication to her family, was inspired by her own relatives’ experiences adjusting to life in the United States. Dabis is at her best in the film’s first half, efficiently sketching in the mundane oppressiveness of being a citizen of an occupied country, and capturing how disorienting something as simple as shopping for food can be when you’re new to American life, and the nearest Arab neighbourhood is a 90-minute drive away. Nisreen Faour, who plays Muna, is very good in these early scenes, especially when she talks to prospective employers, her eagerness for work and her nervousness about her imperfect English making her seem clumsier and more overbearing than she really is.

It’s too bad Dabis doesn’t bring the same fresh eye to the second half of Amreeka, and settles instead into a predictable series of crises, arguments, and cross-cultural reconciliations, all leading up to a final scene in which Muna’s family (plus Fadi’s kindly Jewish principal, who’s taken a shine to Muna) gathers around the dinner table. Dabis certainly has her heart in the right place, but the image is a little too familiar, a little too ready-for-Sundance, to have much impact. I also could have done without the repeated, heavy-handed shots of the sign with the missing letters outside White Castle that reads “SUPPORT OUR OOPS.”

Still, Amreeka has a warmth and a fondness for its characters that’s easy to respond to, and it’s always a pleasure to see any film with Hiam Abbass (from The Visitor) or Alia Shawkat (from Arrested Development) in the cast. Dabis’ family should be proud.

Window-Peeper As Witness To History: An Interview With James Ellroy

2009-11-14T20:50:00.008-07:00

“Scripture-pure veracity and scandal-rag content. That conjunction gives it its sizzle.”

That’s how the narrator of James Ellroy’s stunning new novel Blood’s a Rover describes the 600 pages that follow — but that description would apply equally well to any of James Ellroy’s books, which include 13 novels, a few collections of short stories and reportage, and a memoir, My Dark Places, in which he describes his real-life investigation, nearly half a century after the fact, of his mother’s murder back in 1958.

Taken together, those books form a massive, bloody, secret history of Los Angeles — a town shaped by corrupt cops, sex criminals, power brokers, bagmen, gossipmongers, gangsters, and the occasional doomed noble gesture. Ellroy published his first novel, Brown’s Requiem, in 1981, but it was his seventh novel, 1987’s The Black Dahlia — an obsessive mixture of historical fact and densely imagined fiction — that was his true artistic breakthrough. As Ellroy’s plots got more complex (he claims the outline alone for Blood’s a Rover was 400 pages), his prose got more condensed: with 1992’s White Jazz, he adopted the terse, telegraphic writing style that has become his signature ever since: his 2001 novel The Cold Six Thousand is practically written in point form.

Blood’s a Rover concludes Ellroy’s most ambitious project yet: the sprawling “Underworld USA” trilogy, in which he moves beyond L.A. and tackles American history as a whole: Vietnam, black militants, Cuba, the assassinations of JFK and MLK, laced with outrageously funny cameos by Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon. But it’s also the story of Donald Crutchfield, a callow young dipshit with a dream of becoming a private eye, a thing for older women, and a habit of peeping into strangers’ windows. He goes sniffing after some stolen emeralds, and ends up with horrible scars, both literal and metaphorical. He’s based on a real-life detective, but he’s also perhaps the most autobiographical character Ellroy’s ever written.

Ellroy says the book is a work of genius and probably deserves the Nobel Prize for literature, but as an avowed “Tory WASP heterosexual,” he doesn’t expect to win it. He’ll have to content himself with having solidified his reputation as one of the greatest American writers alive — not bad for a man who, by his own admission, was once a homeless, panty-sniffing alcoholic.

I recently had the great pleasure of interviewing James Ellroy over the phone from Los Angeles. Here’s our conversation.

James Ellroy: Before you ask me a million questions, can I ask you something? Did the last hundred pages rip your heart out?

Q: It kind of did! I don’t want to give away what happens to anyone reading this interview, but the book shifts its focus from the men we’ve been following for 500 pages to a female character — and it’s heartbreaking in a way you don’t really expect from a James Ellroy novel. Was this book any harder to write than the two that came before it, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand?

JE: It was easier. It’s much more emotional. It’s less densely layered, and considerably less stylistically rigourous than The Cold Six Thousand. That was very much the critique of my ex-wife, the novelist Helen Knode. She said, “Listen, it’s a great book, but it’s too difficult stylistically.” Well, Helen and I got divorced, I had a nervous breakdown — which is where I got the character Dwight Holly’s nervous breakdown from — and I fell in love with a woman named Joan, and it kicked the shit out of me. I’ll never see her again, she’s moved on with her life. So this is the book you write when your world burns down and your women kick you loose.

Q: What made you want to make Don Crutchfield a central character in this story? He’s certainly not the character you’d bet would survive to the end.

JE: It’s the idea that the dipshit kid is the voice of American history. In reality, Crutchfield is 10 years older — I did all the peeper shit. That was me. I grew up in that neighbourhood, Crutchfield did not. He grew up in Culver City and fell under the wing of [private investigator] Clyde Duber and got to be a wheelman and follow people around in a souped-up car. I never got to do any of that stuff, and I could not have written the book without him.

Q: You have this very distinctive style: extremely complicated plots told in very simple sentences. Is that limiting at all as a writer?

JE: No, it’s liberating. It allows you to exposit more information at a greater clip. It requires more concentration on the part of the reader, though. You know, my girlfriend got me that book by Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it just seemed flabby to me. Flabby. I could see where it’s going pretty quick. Corporate intrigue. All corporations are evil. Paramilitary intrigue. A crusading journalist with a past gets together with a tattooed punk rock chick. I could see it from the get-go. You could not see Blood’s a Rover from the get-go, could you? I don’t want to write a fucking book you can see from the get-go. I have a significant readership for very, very difficult books, and I am proud of that.

Q: It’s an almost psychedelic novel at times. A lot of it takes place in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which allows you to bring in these images of zombies and voodoo hexes, you have people taking these mind-altering potions, and you have this image of the stolen emeralds running throughout the story, which are almost like the mystical treasure in a fantasy novel.

JE: It is my most deliberately iconographic book. It is my book about women, it’s my book about race and gender, you have the character of the gay black cop, who has this weirdly equitable relationship with a white racist cop. They like each other, in their psychopathic way.

Q: Do you think American history was shaped more by rational decisions — by laws, elections, leaders — or is it more the result of irrational forces — by emotions and hexes and bad juju and woo-woo, to use your words?

JE: Well, history is always held in check by the democratic process, which has served us very, very well. There are certain inequities in society, and as the world’s dominant power, America is almost always at war, as the new fellow in the White House is learning, despite his idealism. It might have been nice for him to turn down the Nobel Peace Prize, don’t you think? Anyway, back then, the races were coming together, everyone was bombed. I was bombed. I sense history percolating in the margins, and it took me many, many years to put together a book pertaining to it.

Q: Would you change the way history is taught in schools? Is there something kids need to know about American that they’re not getting from their teachers?

JE: Well, I’ll say this. We have a preposterous discourse going on in America right now of left versus right — all this bullshit. We have not had an American president who’s been an ideologue in my lifetime, except Ronald Reagan. If you look at American democracy, almost nobody is who you think they are if you look at them through the prism of popular culture. Roosevelt was willing to exclude blacks and women from the New Deal until Eleanor convinced him otherwise, which would shock most doctrinaire liberals. When he was governor of California, Ronald Reagan signed into effect the most permissive abortion rights law in American history. Try telling that to a liberal feminist! She will not believe you. People have very dumb ideas on politics.

Q: Would you call yourself a feminist?

JE: You know, my girlfriend, who is a brilliant woman, a journalist — she’s appalled by my politics. I’m right-wing. I’m conservative. But I’m a feminist. But I have reservations about abortion. I’m opposed to gay marriage, and she’s appalled by that. I believe in American military hegemony, on the grounds that we’d better rule the world or someone worse than us will. I’m more of an authoritarian than a permissivist. And I’m not a liberal, and that shocks people. Blood’s a Rover is a book about a bunch of right-wing goons who turn left-wing, and no one knows what to make of that.

Q: There’s a strong moral streak that runs through your books. What do you think of American culture in general? Are we in good shape?

JE: It’s depraved. It’s nothing but horror movies and teenage comedies about bombed-out kids on weed. I know this because I drive down Beverly Boulevard all the time and I can read billboards.

Q: Hasn’t it always been this debased, though? Isn’t pop culture always mostly junk? Or is this something new?

JE: There are actually a lot of iconic movies that I think stink. Like Chinatown. I think it’s full of shit. It’s bad mise-en-scène, contrived, full of plot holes. And nihilism of the worst sort. I’m thrilled they got Roman Polanski. Thrilled. My mother was raped and murdered. So there you go. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think you should molest children.

2012: Why Does Everything In My Life Have To Be Such A Complicated Disaster?

2009-11-12T23:49:00.005-07:00

Watch out, John Cusack! That plane’s going to fly off without you! If you don’t run faster, you’re going to fall into one of thousands of faultlines opening up right under your feet in Yellowstone National Park! What’s more, you won’t be able to give your ex-wife and your two kids directions to the secret mountain location where four super-arks are being secretly built, so that half a million of the world’s richest and most genetically superior citizens can survive the destruction of the world! You know, the one the Mayans (and a modern-day geologist in India) predicted but no one listened to? Goddammit, I’ll explain it all later, once you’re safe on the plane — assuming your wife’s new husband, the plastic surgeon, is able to pilot it properly, having only taken two flying licenses! There’s no time, John Cusack! That Russian billionaire you work for as a chauffeur — yeah, the former boxer — will leave without you if you’re late! Thank God you stumbled across that conspiracy theorist/blogger living in a trailer in the woods before the entire state of California slid into the ocean — otherwise, the only thing left of you would be that poorly reviewed novel you once wrote about Atlantis, the one that presidential geology advisor Chiwetel Ejiofor is currently reading. What’s that? You’re on the plane? Awesome — let’s find those super-arks!

I would probably have my movie critic’s license suspended if I said 2012 was a good movie, but a thicker, more amusingly preposterous slice of schlock would be hard to find. Part Earthquake, part Armageddon, part Titanic, part Twister, part When Worlds Collide, 2012 is the filmmaking equivalent of one of those Krispy Kreme chicken sandwiches, a shamelessly bloated two-and-a-half-hour festival of computerized destruction. I have to give director Roland Emmerich credit: even in a movie about the end of the world, he still finds plenty of opportunities for product placement.

Emmerich’s directorial tics are so shameless that I’m starting to find myself pleasurably anticipating them instead of rolling my eyes at them: the self-sacrificing father figures; the obsession with world landmarks crumbling in slow motion (in 2012, Rio de Janeiro’s “Christ the Redeemer” statue, St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, the White House, and the Randy’s Donuts outlet in Inglewood all get the treatment); the charming belief that audiences will happily watch millions of people get killed onscreen so long as those deaths are balanced out by a pet dog miraculously making it to safety.

And I haven’t even mentioned my favourite thing about 2012: the script was co-written by the guy who wrote the score for Aliens vs. Predator. My second favourite thing is that Oliver Platt will be one of the people helping to repopulate the planet. Good choice, humanity! My third favourite thing is that the Americans arranged to bring the Mona Lisa on board the super-ark — but arranged the assassination of the director of the Louvre. (In the same tunnel where Princess Diana died!) And my fourth favourite thing would be this hilarious fake trailer:

I could get angry thinking about all the money and energy that went into making this supremely stupid blockbuster, but why bother? Apparently the planet only has a couple more years left; it seems a shame to waste them being snide.

In The Loop: "We Must Climb The Mountain Of Conflict"

2009-11-12T16:30:00.003-07:00

Armando Ianucci's scathing political satire In the Loop is the topic of this week's "Hidden Gem" segment for CBC Radio, and it made me glad all over again that I chose not to work in politics, because if I had a boss even a fraction as terrifying as Malcolm Tucker, I would do nothing but cry in my cubicle all day long.

Viewed from the safety of my couch, however, In the Loop strikes me as arguably the best film of 2009 — and certainly the finest comedy. Click here to hear me explain why!

Moviegoer Diary: Winter Kills, The Box

2009-11-11T22:03:00.006-07:00

WINTER KILLS

Plot In A Nutshell
William Richert’s 1979 conspiracy thriller about the brother (Jeff Bridges) of an assassinated president who many years later uncovers his first clue to the identity of the killer.

Thoughts
I watched this one about a week and a half ago, and I really shouldn’t have waited this long to write something about it, because I find that already my memories of exactly how the pieces of the film’s conspiracy plot all fit together. But maybe that’s just as well: even when I was watching it, the film felt more like a series of entertaining but barely connected setpieces than a cleverly worked-out mystery. It’s based on a novel by Richard Condon, who also wrote The Manchurian Candidate — you remember that weird scene where Frank Sinatra meets Janet Leigh on the train and she talks about how her ancestors built this railroad and says things like, “Are you Arabic?... Let me put it another way: are you married?” In Winter Kills, it feels like director William Richert is trying to give every scene the same off-kilter feeling.

It makes for kind of a frustrating viewing experience, but a lively one. One moment, Jeff Bridges is getting shot at by an insane gazillionaire (Sterling Hayden) in an armoured tank; the next, he’s being attacked by a black maid, accidentally ripping her blouse off in the battle, and hurling her, bare-breasted, off a balcony. Nothing that happens really has any consequences — everybody Bridges talks to winds up dead, but Richert seems to regard this as a necessary convention of conspiracy thrillers and plays it for laughs. (Well, maybe not laughs, but at least for a quiet snicker or two as you relish the absurdity of it all.)

The zestiest performance comes from John Huston, who plays the Joseph Kennedy figure, a randy old sonuvabitch who keeps making hilariously unmotivated cracks about what he sees as Bridges’ insufficient masculinity. “Do you get laid?” he asks him bluntly, clearly unsatisfied with Bridges’ low number of sexual conquests. “You know how many times your brother got laid when he was in office? 1,072! And with a schedule like his!” (I associate this performance with the one Huston gave in Myra Breckinridge at the start of the decade — for an old guy, he sure had no problem running around on screen wearing nothing but a silk robe and some skimpy underwear.)

Winter Kills may not be a particularly suspenseful or scary movie, but as a comic-book spoof of Kennedy-conspiracy hysteria, it’s got some pretty audacious moments. And Anthony Perkins’ climactic speech — which he delivers flawlessly even though Bridges has broken both his arms! — is some kind of nutbar classic. It’s too bad Perkins didn’t do more movies; he really had a Christopher Walken-like gift for making every line reading special.

RATING: 3/5

* * * * *

THE BOX

Plot In A Nutshell
Richard Kelly’s 2009 mindbender about a cash-strapped couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) in mid-’70s Virginia who are approached by a stranger (Frank Langella), given a box, and told that if they push the button on top of it, they will receive $1,000,000... but that a stranger will die.

Thoughts
I just got home from seeing this film with my friend Collin, and we had exactly the same reaction: we didn’t think the plot make one damn bit of sense, but we were able to groove enough on its eerie mood to have a pretty good time anyway.

Does it sound shallow to say that the first thing I really loved about a movie was the wallpaper? Every room in Diaz and Marsden’s house has the funkiest wallpaper ever — I especially liked the brown-and-orange op-art pattern in their kitchen. But all the ’70s production details felt great: the TV sets, with their nearly square screens; the pre-digital clock radio; the old-school switchboards at 911 headquarters, all filmed in desaturated, brown-tinged ’70s-style dinge-o-vision. Kelly must have been in heaven when he got to recreate a NASA laboratory from 1976. Of course, you get the feeling that Kelly is much better at assembling little design details — like the dead, brown tooth he gives Celia Weston’s character or the top-secret government manual Marsden gets his hands on late in the film — than on putting together a coherent story.

Or am I just slow? I don’t want to give away any spoilers here, but neither Collin nor I could makes heads or tails of what the hell Langella’s motives were for half the stuff we see him do, or figure out which characters were helping him or working against him. A sequence with Marsden being chased through a library is pretty creepy (of course, walking through the narrow shelves of old libraries has always given me the shivers), but for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you why those people were chasing him, or what they would have done to him if they caught him. And there’s a scene at a motel swimming pool that’s even goofier than the similar scenes from Lady in the Water.

What can you do at the end of this thing but shake your head and hope that someday Kelly will hook up with a writing partner who can channel his ideas into something more controlled and disciplined (and who can gently break it to him that his references to Sartre’s No Exit aren’t as deep as he thinks). But I hope Kelly hangs onto his creative team: production designer Alec Hammond, editor Sam Bauer, and cinematographer Steven Poster have worked on all three of Kelly’s films, and seem tuned into his sensibility. I also like seeing actor Holmes Osborne turn up in all of Kelly’s films — a good luck charm, like that cross-eyed guy is for Jonathan Demme.

And hopefully Kelly will be able to convince Win Butler, Regine Chassagne, and Owen Pallett (variously from Canadian indie-rock powerhouses Arcade Fire and Final Fantasy) to keep writing scores for him, because their music for The Box is terrific — it’s reminiscent of those great, overheated scores Bernard Herrmann was writing at the end of his career, for Sisters and Taxi Driver. It's one of the few recent orchestral film soundtracks I'm actually tempted to buy. Hearing it is almost enough to convince you that The Box is as profound as it pretends to be.

Stray Observations

• Another thing I liked about The Box: the way it achieves the same effect Philip Kaufman created in his 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers — the way a normal setting can shift and suddenly seem thoroughly uncanny when you notice a stranger who won't stop staring at you.

• I also loved the scene where Diaz and Marsden have to mop up all the water dripping from their kitchen ceiling. It's the perfect bit of mundane comic relief after the film's most reality-warping scene, and it suggests that, for all his excesses, Kelly sometimes knows exactly what he's doing after all.

RATING: 3/5

The Musicgoer: Betty Davis' Nasty Gal and Is It Love Or Desire?

2009-11-08T19:11:00.003-07:00

BETTY DAVIS
Nasty Gal/Is It Love Or Desire
(Light in the Attic)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

Soul sister, sex goddess, funk icon, force of nature: Betty Davis recorded only four albums before dropping out of the music business, but no one who’s heard her voice will ever forget it. It’s less a voice, actually, than a gut-wrenching yowl, a defiantly unpretty sound like Etta James used to produce. It’s a soulful screech, a carnal cry that screams “Fuck me!” and “Fuck you!” at the same time. Now the Seattle label Light in the Attic has released her two final albums, Nasty Gal (1975) and Is It Love Or Desire (recorded in 1976 but never released), for the first time ever on CD, and if anything, they still feel ahead of their time, ferociously feminist and deeply, deeply funky.

“You said I was an evil witch!” she snarls on “Nasty Gal,” over top an angular funk riff. “You said I was an alligator!” — and she seems determined to live up to the accusations. Every syllable she sings sounds like it was torn out of her throat, with the ballad “You & I” (co-written by her ex-husband Miles Davis) serving as a rare moment of tenderness. What power! What passion! How did they keep this stuff bottled up for 30 years?

Pirate Radio: Sit Down, You're Boating The Rock

2009-11-08T17:30:00.003-07:00

The British ensemble comedy Pirate Radio tells a pretty familiar slobs-vs.-snobs story, but does so within an unusual historical setting. It’s 1966, British rock is at its creative zenith, but almost none of it is being heard on the radio — according to an opening title, BBC Radio was playing less than 45 minutes of pop music a day. The void was filled by pirate radio stations located on boats anchored in the North Sea; these stations may not have technically been breaking any laws, but, if you believe Pirate Radio, their irreverent content was enough to make the stodgier members of the establishment want to cook up some pretext for shutting them down anyway. Representing the shaggy, freedom-loving rock ’n’ rollers, we have Philip Seymour Hoffman, Nick Frost from Hot Fuzz, Rhys Darby from Flight of the Conchords, and Bill Nighy, looking regal and knife-thin in a tailored plaid suit. Representing the forces of repression, we have Kenneth Branagh as a bureaucrat with a weedy little mustache and his right-hand man, who is literally named “Twatt.” The deck is clearly stacked in rock’s favour.

Pirate Radio was originally released in Britain under the title The Boat That Rocked — about 20 minutes have been removed for the North American version, but having seen both versions, I can tell you that you’re not missing anything terribly important, basically just a few glimpses of nudity and some disposable musical montages. If anything, the cuts have turned a pretty baggy 135-minute film into something... well, still kind of baggy, actually, but with fewer group dance numbers to sit through.

Writer/director Richard Curtis (the powerhouse British comedy writer behind everything from Blackadder to Mr. Bean to Four Weddings and a Funeral) maintains a light touch for most of the film, and it’s only during the protracted climax that he starts laying on the “rock ’n’ roll will never die!” stuff a little thick. Up until then, Curtis is content simply to let us hang out with the DJs as they play records, goof off, and snog the miniskirted groupies they arrange to have ferried in every couple of weeks. In 1966, rock music was apparently such a powerful, forbidden aphrodisiac that even a DJ as mountainous as Nick Frost could get more action than just about anyone else on board.

Our ostensible main character is not so lucky, however: he’s the ship’s newest crewmember, a cute but shy lad named Carl (Tom Sturridge) whose job is to... uh... to try and lose his virginity, apparently, since that’s the only task we ever see him perform. Sturridge is kind of a nonentity — he seems to think it would be impolite to do anything that might steal even the slightest bit of attention from his co-stars — but I suppose in a movie like this, you need someone who isn’t trying to be amusing. He’s like the little bit of dead air between channels on the radio dial that keeps all the signals from overlapping.

It’s an uneven movie — a subplot involving Mad Men’s January Jones is particularly unconvincing — but after the carefully calculated sentiment of Love Actually, it’s good to see Richard Curtis doing something a little bit more sloppy and rowdy. It’s beautifully cast, right down to the smallest role (Francesca Longrigg, for instance, is hilarious in her single scene as Kenneth Branagh’s joy-starved wife), and it’s the second movie opening in Edmonton this week, along with An Education, to feature a perfect little cameo from Emma Thompson. I’m starting to wonder if every British film now requires her to drop by at some point for a visit. If not, maybe they should draw up some kind of regulation forcing her to. That’s the kind of government control of the arts even the outlaw DJs in Pirate Radio could support.

An Education: Teenage Girls, Beware Of Peter Sarsgaard

2009-11-07T15:42:00.002-07:00

An Education is the story of a 16-year-old girl who believes she is smart, but finds out too late that she is merely clever.

The girl is named Jenny, and she lives in suburban London in 1961. She doesn’t have to study too hard to get good grades in school, and she sees no reason why the rest of her life shouldn’t proceed in the same effortless manner. She is pretty but not frivolous, fond of spending long afternoons in her bedroom swooning to French pop records and dreaming of one day being that woman staring out from the album cover. She speaks excellent French, by the way, a talent that in her mind also marks her as being a cut above the ordinary; and when she smokes with her girlfriends, she takes care to hold the cigarette between her fingers in an especially elegant way. She doesn’t disrespect her teachers, but she clearly also regards them as a bunch of stodgy old drudges. Her father strikes her as a bit foolish too — and indeed, he is easy to make fun of, having groomed her since childhood for an Oxford education, but such a thoroughgoing creature of the middle class himself that he’s terrified of setting foot outside his neighbourhood. So one day, when a handsome older stranger offers her a ride in his car and begins flirting charmingly with her, Jenny is beyond thrilled — at last, someone has recognized the sophisticated adult she’s always known she was inside.

An Education is the story of Jenny’s romance with that smooth-talking singer, whose name turns out to be David, but even though David is more than twice Jenny’s age, it wouldn’t quite be accurate to call him a sexual predator. True, he doesn’t tell Jenny the entire truth about himself, and true, her inexperience does make it easier for him to dazzle her romantically than it would be with a woman his own age. (This is clearly a big part of attracts David to younger women — it’s implied that Jenny is merely the latest in a long line of schoolgirls he’s dated over the years.) But this is not a secret relationship, either: Jenny’s parents, charmed by David’s ways, even give it their blessing; and they are frequently accompanied by two of David’s friends, Danny and Helen. (Rosamund Pike is terrific as Helen, a woman wonderfully content with her own shallowness.)

What’s more, David introduces Jenny to all sorts of grown-up pleasures: nightclubs, art galleries, classical concerts. Helen gives her new clothes and a new hairstyle that transforms her into a miniature Audrey Hepburn, a look that comes in handy when David takes her, thrill of thrills, on a trip to Paris. Of course, it all can’t last: David is played by Peter Sarsgaard, whose droopy eyelid can’t help but seem like an unmistakable sign of David’s untrustworthiness. By growing up too fast, Jenny might actually be throwing her future away. She’s just clever enough to do some very stupid things.

Carey Mulligan, who plays Jenny, is 24 years old, but she convincingly passes for 16 — and even more importantly, she perfectly captures this girl’s intelligence and the way it’s given her a hunger for experiences that her drab surroundings simply can’t provide. She has a great speech where she tells her teacher (Olivia Williams, who’s spent about eight hours in the dowdying machine) how desperate she is to seize life now instead of waiting patiently like a good little girl and allowing herself to turn into an aging, dried-up nobody. Alfred Molina is superbly funny as Jenny’s father, and Emma Thompson contributes an impeccable cameo as the disapproving headmistress of Jenny’s school.

Sarsgaard is also very good as David, more sad than sinister, even if his character’s dishonesty is telegraphed a little too strongly. But that’s more the fault of screenwriter Nick Hornby, adapting a memoir by Lynn Barber. Like all of Hornby’s work, An Education is cleanly plotted, with a skillful balance of comedy and drama, and a keen sense of how hard romantic heartbreak can hit you when you're young. But it also feels a little lacking in substance — there’s really only one way to feel about anything that happens in Hornby’s books, and you can probably get everything there is to be gotten out of them your very first time through.

I hate to hold that against him, because I’m sure that effortless-looking simplicity is actually the product of a lot of hard work, but it also causes An Education to end on a note that’s disappointingly pat and neat, given the untidy subject matter. Then again, the movie is called An Education, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that it ends with a lesson.

Objectified: I Think That I Shall Never See A Poem As Lovely As My Swingline Stapler

2009-11-05T18:22:00.002-07:00

It's about time someone made a movie whose subject... is objects. Objectified is the new documentary from Helvetica director Gary Hustwit, and it's the topic of my "Hidden Gems" DVD segment this week for CBC Radio. Give your beautifully, ergonomically designed mouse a click here to give it a listen.

One correction: the film does not, as I claim in this segment, come out on DVD in Canada this Tuesday (November 10); its release date has been bumped back to November 17. Just goes to show you that objects can be perfect, but people can't.

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

2009-11-01T16:39:00.009-07:00

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, say, 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 level 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.”