Showing posts with label 2009. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2009. Show all posts

Friday, September 23, 2011

The Hedgehog: Surprises concealed within

The Hedgehog (2009) • View trailer for The Hedgehog
4.5 stars. Rating: suitable for all ages
By Derrick Bang


The Hedgehog is a story about the transformational power of kindness.

Director/scripter Mona Achache’s delicate little drama — inspired by Muriel Barbery’s best-selling novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog — is just this side of a small miracle. It’s sweet, poignant, mildly suspenseful, funny and tremendously wise by turns; it’s also one of the most impressive balancing acts I’ve ever seen.
When Kakuro (Togo Igawa) invites Renée (Josiane Balasko) to dinner at his
apartment, she very nearly refuses; why would a cultured gentleman want to
waste time with a concierge? She quickly discovers that some people are kind
by nature, and that all people — even concierges — deserve to be happy.

One false step — one overplayed scene — and the story’s fragile, graceful structure would collapse like a punctured soufflé.

But Achache never errs. She guides this rather unusual coming-of-age saga with the skill of a master chef, coaxing rich, wholly credible performances from her three primary cast members. The result is as sharp, satisfying and bittersweet as the dark chocolate enjoyed by its title character.

The story, set in a French city — could be Paris; doesn’t matter — takes place in a massive building that houses five truly huge luxury apartments. The property is managed by a dumpy, grumpy concierge named Renée (Josiane Balasko), who handles all the scut-work and remains more or less invisible to the tenants who overlook her, much the way 19th century British aristocrats never acknowledged their servants.

Renée plays her role to perfection, and we gradually learn that this is precisely what she’s doing. She looks and acts the part of a dowdy janitor, and does so deliberately. But Renée has secrets, starting with a fondness for reading; she conceals an impressive library behind a closed door in her much smaller downstairs unit.

But although Renée is the title character — the prickly “hedgehog” — she’s not this story’s key protagonist. That would be Paloma (Garance Le Guillermic), a bored 11-year-old who lives in one of the lavish upstairs apartments. Paloma is disgusted by her wealthy, condescending parents, and disenchanted with her own existence; she’s a moody, deeply philosophical and amazingly artistic girl with neither friends nor passion.

And, so, she decides to kill herself.

Paloma narrates her story while making a movie of her whole, useless life; she films family members and fellow apartment dwellers with or without their consent. She also films herself, and thus informs us that when she turns 12 — in 165 days — she’ll end it all. The method will be easy; her manic-depressive mother — a woman more comfortable talking to her plants, than to people — has a ready supply of pills that will deliver a painless suicide.

Friday, January 29, 2010

A Single Man: Singularly compelling

A Single Man (2009) • View trailer for A Single Man
Four stars (out of five). Rating: R, and much too harshly, for nudity and mild sexual candor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.29.10
Buy DVD: A Single Man • Buy Blu-Ray: A Single Man [Blu-ray]


We spend our lives searching for precious moments of clarity: the shock of epiphany that may come, if we're lucky, a few times before we shuffle off this mortal coil.

The recognition that, at this precise instant, everything makes sense.
Much as he might like to, George (Colin Firth) cannot freeze this pleasantly
intimate moment with Charley (Julianne Moore), despite her desire that he do
so; he's not in a position to provide what she needs. More to the point, he has
an appointment with his own pending suicide.

George Falconer (Colin Firth) thought he had found his place in life, the universe and everything, thanks to a deeply satisfying 16-year relationship with his partner, Jim (Matthew Goode). Everything made sense. But in a flash, during a drive on a snowy road in an entirely different state, Jim lost his life in a car accident.

Months later, George still hasn't recovered from the loss. He fantasizes being at the crash site, and approaching Jim's body to give him one last kiss: a comforting bit of closure denied to George, because Jim's parents  who never approved of the relationship  restricted the funeral and services to "immediate family only."

Director/co-scripter Tom Ford, working with screenwriter David Scaearce, has turned Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel, A Single Man, into a beautifully constructed film with a captivating attention to detail. Much has been made of Firth's starring role, and deservedly so; it's an achingly melancholy portrait of a man who, much to his regret, can't hold himself together.

Ford brings his skills as a world-famous fashion designer to every frame of this film, which is composed with the skill of a master musician.

The film's most fascinating aspect, however, is its ingenious use of color: a technique not employed with such creativity since director Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. Ford and cinematographer Eduard Grau capture the mundane aspects of George's life with a washed-out palette: a muddy, sepia-hued filter that reflects the despondent cloud that poisons his brain.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Crazy Heart: A bit too crazy?

Crazy Heart (2009) • View trailer for Crazy Heart
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.28.10
Buy DVD: Crazy Heart • Buy Blu-Ray: Crazy Heart [Blu-ray]

Despite fine performances by Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal  and they're both exceptional  I simply could not get past the key plot point in Crazy Heart.

In no real-world scenario would an attractive and reasonably perceptive young woman such as Gyllenhaal's Jean fall for a slovenly, smelly, chain-smoking, burned-out alcoholic such as Bridges' Bad Blake.
Despite prudent instincts that silently scream advice to the contrary, small-
town journalist Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal) allows herself to be moved by the
seductive heat that radiates from her subject, aging country singer Bad Blake
(Jeff Bridges). Savvy viewers who watch the movie and then take a second
careful look at this photo will notice, however, that the studio publicists
cleaned Bridges up -- a lot -- before snapping this publicity still. In the film,
during this scene, Blake looks much, much seedier. (One assumes that's why
they call it "movie magic.")

It'd never happen.

She's in her late 20s, early 30s tops: single parent to an adorable 4-year-old son. Blake, at 57, is a shambling, falling-down, vomiting-as-a-recreational-sport career drunk.

No way.

Mind you, I hold this opinion despite being a guy who, in the usual Hollywood fantasyland style, would love to have somebody as cute as Gyllenhaal give me even a second glance when I hit 57. A good many of the women who attended last week's Sacramento preview screening were much more troubled, and quite vocal in their objections and disbelief.

Writer/director Scott Cooper's film is based on a novel by Thomas Cobb, who I'll assume dealt with this issue more persuasively. Maybe Jean's character is older in the book. Maybe Blake isn't quite that much of a wreck.

Whatever. On the big screen, it's an insurmountable hurdle.

So is the notion, a bit later, that Jean would trust her young son  absolutely the most precious thing in her life  in Blake's unchaperoned care. Again, no way.

Crazy Heart also suffers from deja-vu; we've definitely been here before, most notably with Robert Duvall's Academy Award-winning performance in 1983's Tender Mercies, which also concerned a washed-up country singer seeking redemption. Switch careers, and we again saw this saga played out a year ago, when Mickey Rourke impressed everybody so much with his starring role in The Wrestler.

That film also had a May/October romantic subplot, but with an important distinction: Marisa Tomei's career stripper was pretty down and out herself. She and Rourke were cut from the same cloth to begin with, and had been equally disillusioned by forever getting stuck with  to quote Marilyn Monroe, in Some Like It Hot  "the fuzzy end of the lollipop."

Thursday, January 21, 2010

The Lovely Bones: Broken

The Lovely Bones (2009) • View trailer for The Lovely Bones
2.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity and a very grim storyline
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.21.10
Buy DVD: The Lovely Bones • Buy Blu-Ray: The Lovely Bones (Two-Disc Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

Likening herself to a snapshot  a moment frozen in time  young Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), during her concluding voice-over in The Lovely Bones, laments that she was here but for a moment ... and then gone.

If only the same could be said of the film itself.
Susie (Saoirse Ronan) enjoys helping her father (Mark Wahlberg) with his
hobby of building ships in bottles, even as she playfully teases him about it;
he describes the way in which such a painstaking hobby instills the discipline
of seeing things through, and -- waving a hand vaguely toward shelves filled
with bottled tiny ships -- promises that "One day, all this will be yours."
His daughter, with a horrified glance, can't be sure it's a promise or a threat...

Director Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's grim novel  which Jackson scripted with longtime collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens  is a dull, dreary and dispiriting slog. It feels like a self-indulgent vanity project that got entirely out of hand. Jackson obviously wanted to make portentous statements about death and the despair of a human soul left with no means to take care of unfinished business ... but all this gets lost amid leaden pacing, irritating plot points and monotonous, hippy-trippy images of the afterlife.

Seeing this film immediately on the heels of Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus made for an interesting comparison. Both films are a mess, in different ways, but Gilliam's chaotic dreamscapes at least have the benefit of being relevant to his storyline. The luxurious realms in which Susie finds herself trapped, in great contrast, pointlessly interrupt the flow of a (potentially) more interesting narrative.

I'm reminded of old-style movie musicals, where the actors would break away from a dramatic moment, often quite jarringly, in order to launch into a song. You'll get just as irritated here, each time Jackson cuts to Susie's fixation with the same damned gazebo.

And it's a shame, because The Lovely Bones begins well. We're fully involved with these characters up to the moment Susie's life is snuffed, and quite horribly; things fall apart only later  and this is the bulk of the overlong 135-minute film  when the girl refuses to "move on," preferring instead to find out to what degree she can, or should, hang around and attempt to influence matters back in the mortal world.

Friday, January 15, 2010

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus: Warped reflections

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) • View trailer for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for violent images, sensuality and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.15.10
Buy DVD: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus • Buy Blu-Ray: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus [Blu-ray]


Terry Gilliam's imagination is both wildly, feverishly creative and oddly grungy; one gets the impression that he views dreams and nightmares as cluttered landscapes cobbled together by people who can't be bothered to tidy up their homes, let alone put any order to their deeply buried fantasies and fears.

This somewhat messy view of humanity goes all the way back to Gilliam's days with Monty Python, when (for example) he had much to do with the filthy, muck-infested depiction of medieval England in 1975's Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Ironically, the film has since been praised for the historical verisimilitude of its setting: far more realistic than the freshly scrubbed and impeccably garbed knights and ladies of so many Hollywood costume dramas.
Although Parnassus (Christopher Plummer, left) is inclined to reflect sadly on
the mess he has made of his life, an oddly solicitous Mr. Nick (Tom Waits)
rather charitably points out that things aren't that bad ... and besides, there's
always another wager to make.

Gilliam continued to focus on mankind's scruffier elements in his best big-screen fantasies, from the bedraggled heroes of Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, to the street people of his inner-city masterpiece, The Fisher King.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is no different. We can readily believe that the ageless Parnassus, long ago granted immortality, truly has traveled the world for centuries with the same dilapidated, horse-drawn carriage-cum-circus: a deceptively rickety affair that possesses a much larger interior than its weather-worn exterior would suggest.

Once upon a time, perhaps back in the 18th century, Parnassus and his traveling troupe would have dazzled average passers-by with a blend of juggling, acrobatics, sly subterfuge and a truly magic mirror that serves as a gateway to the more embarrassing  or nastier  parts of the human soul. But the good doctor hasn't updated his schtick since then, and the smirking, condescending denizens of our 21st century lack the childlike sense of wonder that would have left their ancestors rapt whenever Parnassus' wagon rolled into town. More's the pity, because the traveling show's true nature remains just as pressing in this modern age.

Countless generations ago, Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) bargained with the Devil, dubbed Mr. Nick (Tom Waits), for the gift of immortality. The Devil cheerfully granted this wish, because Parnassus hadn't anticipated the agony of eternal life, and of watching, over and over, as people he knew and loved grew old and left him.

We also eventually realize, thanks to the delightful subtlety of Waits' performance, that Mr. Nick sensed a kindred spirit in Parnassus all those years back: a worthy opponent for an endless celestial competition over the very nature of man.

Friday, January 8, 2010

The Young Victoria: Vivat regina!

The Young Victoria (2009) • View trailer for The Young Victoria
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG, for brief violence and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.8.10
Buy DVD: The Young Victoria • Buy Blu-Ray: The Young Victoria [Blu-ray]


If Jane Austen had written a factual novel about Queen Victoria's early years, it likely would have sounded much like The Young Victoria.

No surprise there: Screenwriter Julian Fellowes won a well-deserved Academy Award for his sly 2001 pastiche, Gosford Park, which felt like an impossible dream collaboration between Austen and Agatha Christie. Fellowes has a knack for meticulously interlaced ensemble drama and the delectable, tart-tongued dialogue that Austen employed so well.
Recently married and still working out how to behave with each other, Prince
Albert (Rupert Friend) and Queen Victoria (Emily Blunt) must set aside the
injured pride of a recent quarrel while making a necessary public appearance.

Fresh evidence is on hand in director Jean-Marc Vallee's tantalizing Young Victoria, which also benefits from Emily Blunt's accomplished and carefully layered starring performance.

Queen Victoria reigned for a jaw-dropping 64 years, from 1837 to 1901, during which time  as the saying goes -— the sun never set on the British empire. She championed the arts, ignored the customary aristocratic arrogance and developed relations with "the riff-raff" (read: ordinary citizens), and kept her nation stable during a time of great industrial and economic change.

We can well imagine that this grande dame might have looked and sounded like Blunt's portrayal here, because one thing is obvious: From a young age, Victoria had to have been quite waspish with those making meddlesome attempts to usurp her birthright. History proves this, because otherwise she likely never would have retained the royal power necessary to back up the authority of her crown.

Vallee's film is tightly compressed, detailing  as its title suggests  Victoria's life and career from just prior to her 17th birthday, to shortly after her initially tempestuous but eventually highly successful marriage to Prince Albert. Fellowes' focus concerns Victoria's need to retain, understand and consolidate her power, and the point at which  not that many years later  it becomes clear that she'll successfully do so.

And yes, those who've not recently dipped into a history book may be vexed by the spoiler unleashed in the previous paragraph, since this film teases us with respect to whether Victoria will succumb to the much more flamboyantly dashing advances of Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany), who becomes her first prime minister and, for a time, sole advisor.

But c'mon, folks; the London landmark is the Royal Albert Hall, not the Royal Melbourne Hall!