Julian Schnabel is an artist-turned-filmmaker, evidently preoccupied with the lives of other artists and writers: Jean-Michel Basquiat in Basquiat, Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls, and now Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Several years ago, this blogger designed Fine Line Features’ official website for Before Night Falls. But frankly, I had trouble working up the enthusiasm to watch a biopic (absolutely not one of my favorite genres) about a tetraplegic. But please do not be dissuaded by the admittedly depressing subject matter. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is utterly beautiful in every way, and moved this hardened movie blogger nearly to tears in the end.
Mathieu Amalric (who resembles a more symmetrical Thom Yorke) plays the real-life Bauby, a fashion magazine editor who suffers a stroke. He survives with “locked-in syndrome,” the proverbial fate worse than death: near-total physical paralysis but with full mental faculties intact. In the true spirit of a French film, Bauby is surrounded by beautiful women. No less than Emanuelle Seigner plays Celine, the estranged mother of his children. In a moment of bittersweet humor, the despondent post-stroke Bauby is partially consoled when he first meets his two utterly gorgeous physical and speech therapists (Marie-Josée Croze and Anne Consigny).
According to the DVD bonus features, screenwriter Ronald Harwood conceived of the powerful visual device of using the camera as Bauby’s point of view, simulating his sole means of communication: blinking. He is, blessedly, able to move one eye, and painstakingly dictates his autobiography letter by letter.
The soundtrack is excellent, including Tom Waits, Joe Strummer (a really great song, new to me, called “Ramshackle Day Parade”), and the best possible use of U2’s “Ultraviolet.”
I came late to appreciating Low, but they have since become one of my favorite bands. I was vaguely aware that trainspotting music critics had christened a genre to categorize bands like Low: slowcore, the distinguishing characteristics of which being playing very quietly and slowly. An overgeneralization, it turns out, but it never hurts to be famous for something unique. “Venus,” a free promotional MP3 from their expansive compilation box set A Lifetime of Temporary Relief given away on Amazon.com, lived in rotation on my iPod for some time, and finally convinced me to buy the 2005 album The Great Destroyer. I first saw them live in Brooklyn’s McCarren Park Pool in 2006, supporting Iron & Wine (whom I like well enough, but if you ask me it should have been the other way around). Even in direct sunlight, their music is beautiful and engrossingly enigmatic.
Director Sebastian Schrade’s documentary Low in Europe was filmed on their 2002-2003 tour of Europe, before they wrote and recorded my two favorite albums of theirs: The Great Destroyer and Drums and Guns. It’s part concert film and part documentary, but not enough of each. There are no complete musical performances included, and although the principals are all intelligent and interesting, the fact is the interviews are sometimes a little less than gripping.
The band first expresses their ambivalence about operating within the commercial music industry. They address their reputation for slow tempos and low volume with good humor; in their early days, they played really slow, in the fuck-you avant-garde spirit but not the loud ‘n’ sloppy letter of punk, to antagonize and challenge the audience. Their contrary nature extends to their personal lives: principal members Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, practicing Mormons and a longtime married couple, tour with their children and view it as a simplified and focused way of life. This came as something of a surprise to me, who feels perhaps he had a heretofore undiscovered prejudice that Mormons couldn’t be rock stars.
The heavily-documented Low can be further investigated on the three documentary shorts included with the A Lifetime of Temporary Relief boxed set, and on the forthcoming You May Need a Murderer, a new doc coming out June 3.
Helvetica (the documentary film) is not about Helvetica (the typeface), per se. Rather, it’s about the arts of graphic design and typography, their practitioners, and how they affect our daily lives.
Each luminary talking head has a different explanation of Helvetica’s appeal and longevity: neutrality, legibility, perfection (unlike more ornate typefaces, it is arguably comprised of the purest state of letterforms and can’t be improved), cleansing renewal (transitioning the tacky design of the 1950s to the bold and to-the-point 60s), problem-solving, soothingness, and just plain beauty.
Its detractors see its ubiquity as self-perpetuating, due to designers’ momentum, habit, and bad taste. The enthusiasm of the enthusiasts is infectious, but the movie doesn’t mock them or hold them up as objects of curiosity culled from a nerdy subculture (as does, arguably, The King of Kong).
Thankfully for its subject matter of graphic design, director Gary Hustwit presents a highly polished work full of excellent typography, motion graphics, and editing. This blogger bemoans the tendency of many documentaries (like Spellbound and Wordplay) to use their non-fiction badge as a press pass to excuse grain, sloppy framing, and poor sound.
We’d be lost without Helvetica… literally
I am a mostly self-educated web designer, not properly trained in the art and/or craft of graphic design. But I know enough to applaud the film for touching upon two of the biggest aspects of typography that every layperson should internalize:
Know your terms: Typefaces are designs. Fonts are particular implementations of those designs. There are multiple fonts based on the typeface Helvetica.
Arial is a poor Helvetica knock-off commissioned by Microsoft to side-step the expensive licensing fees. It is an abomination, a blight upon this planet earth, and should be summarily deleted from humanity’s hard drives. (q.v. The Scourge of Arial)
Finally, I must note a major disappointment: I rented Helvetica from Netflix, and the disc arrived emblazoned with a “Red Envelope Entertainment” label. Bizarrely, there were no signs of the extensive bonus features promised on the movie’s official website. Has Netflix begun releasing “not-so-special” editions of DVDs omitting the bonus features available on retail editions? I, long relying on Netflix to help keep my DVD shelves from groaning into a black hole of overconsumption, stamp my feet in frustration.
Jon Favreau’s Iron Man finds just the right tone for a superhero movie, pitched somewhere in the sweet spot between Spider-Man’s emotional melodrama and Batman’s grim vengeance. This blogger, a former lover of comic books (that stopped keeping up with them partly out of frugality, and partly lack of brain bandwidth), sees two high water marks in the recent surge of superhero-themed Hollywood feature films:
Sam Raimi’s first two Spider-Man movies captured the key themes that made Spider-Man such a popular and lasting character in the first place (seriously, find me a kid in the English-speaking world who couldn’t tell you all about Peter Parker). The comic book on its simplest level was a parable of the sometimes unwelcome changes that come with adolescence. Also key to Peter Parker’s teen psyche was his constant negotiation between his own happiness and responsibilities towards friends, family, and society. Please, let’s not discuss the painfully awful Spider-Man 3; those bitter wounds of disappointment are still raw, oozing, and infected.
Talk to the… nah, that’s too easy
The other comic book superhero franchise to translate well to the screen in recent years is, of course, Batman. Helmed by such mature, serious artists as director Christopher Nolan and actor Christian Bale, Batman Begins perhaps could not help but to turn out as well as it did. The comic book character was originally conceived as a lone vigilante avenger in the 1930s, descended into camp self-parody in the 60s, then reverted back to grim form in the 70s. The character followed a parallel arc in his movie incarnations: Tim Burton’s Batman films are dark and weirdly wonderful, Joel Schumacher’s are tacky and cheesy, and now Christopher Nolan has restored the franchise back to its gothic roots. Note that Heath Ledger as the Joker in the upcoming sequel The Dark Knight doesn’t actually smile!
Iron Man was heavily marketed as Robert Downey Jr.’s redemption after decades of louche behavior led to him becoming unhirable (or more accurately, uninsurable). Was Downey perfectly cast, or was the role tailored to suit him? If anything, from what little I know of the comics, the filmmakers may have actually toned Iron Man’s alter-ego Tony Stark down. Physical disability is a long-established theme in Marvel Comics’ stable of characters, take for example the blind Daredevil. Stark’s distinguishing characteristic was his bum ticker, but he was also famously an alcoholic prick. Do you think, perhaps, there’s a metaphor to be found in the character of a soulless munitions dealer who loses his literal heart but finds his conscience? Hmmm…
Djay da Pimp, Viola De Lesseps, Charlie Chaplin, and The Dude star in Iron Man
Jeff Bridges totally rocks a bald pate, and blessedly underplays his role as chief baddie Obadiah Stane. He’s the mellow voice of reason, sounding for all the world like The Dude with an M.B.A. That is, until he raises his voice for the first time, and the good times are over, man. Unfortunately, Gwyneth Paltrow (as the alliterative Pepper Potts) and Terrence Howard (Jim Rhodes) don’t fare as well. Paltrow, with little experience in the sci-fi effects blockbuster genre, is hysterically unconvincing at running away from fireballs in high heels (you can imagine her pouting “But Harvey said I don’t have to run from fireballs!”). Howard is just plain boring, with little to say or do.
Iron Man is quite enjoyable, provided you try to ignore the rather conservative gung-ho attitude toward the war on terror. It only disappoints at the very end, when it devolves into a CGI rock ’em sock ’em robot battle. It was inevitable according to the genre, and the natural trajectory of the plot, but still…
Martin Scorsese works almost constantly, even keeping busy with documentaries between each higher-profile feature film. But the frequency of his fiction films is far enough apart for them to remain much more hotly anticipated, and every year that went by with him being passed over by the Academy Awards only more firmly established his status as a Great American Director.
Despite finally being the occasion of his long-overdue recognition by the Academy, The Departed probably won’t be ranked among his more idiosyncratic and personal films like Mean Streets, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas (not to mention his still-underappreciated films about religious faith: The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun). The Departed is a remake of the 2002 Chinese thriller Infernal Affairs, and thus should actually be categorized alongside Scorsese’s other star-studded remake, Cape Fear. Both are undoubtedly stamped with Scorsese’s auteur touch, but still not among his most distinctively personal work.
So, Jack, what was Polanski really like?
Seeing the film for the second time, this time on the small screen, this blogger is struck by the extremely high energy and pace. Like Michael Mann’s Heat (itself an influence on Infernal Affairs), the story concerns the parallel narratives of a cop — or should I say “cwawp” — (Leonardo DiCaprio as Billy Costigan) and a criminal (Matt Damon as Colin Sullivan). But unlike Mann’s stately pacing, Scorsese keeps every scene remarkably short and frantically cross-cuts between the dual narratives. Were Marty and editor Thelma Schoonmaker chugging espressos in the editing suite?
So, Jack, what was Antonioni really like?
One aspect of the plot I still don’t fully understand: what exactly does crime boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) offer Colin to ensure such undying loyalty? It doesn’t seem enough that Frank provided minor charity to Colin’s struggling family in his youth. What does Colin really owe him?
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a powerful, electric return to form for the 83 year-old Sidney Lumet, director of such canonical classics as 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Network, and, uh, The Wiz?
Kelly Masterson’s screenplay tells the high-tension tale of a pair of wholly doomed brothers as a non-linear narrative from multiple points of view. Each jump in time and POV is accompanied by a thrilling editing technique I haven’t seen anywhere else but Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider: the current and subsequent scene ricochet back and forth in increasing speed until we’re hurtled through time into another fragment of the narrative.
A masterclass in blocking from Sidney Lumet
The movie is full of examples of a fine director knowing how to use the form to the story’s advantage. For one example of how the composition of a shot reflects the subtext of the scene, note how that whenever Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawk) plot their scheme in the bar, Andy physically looms over Hank and dominates the frame with his bulk.
The acting is great all around, including a devastating turn from Albert Finney as a bitterly disappointed father, and Marisa Tomei as a woman who cast her lot with two of the worst prospects on the planet. And in case you think Hawke and Hoffman are miscast as siblings, well… just watch.
Now that’s a good intro: Robert Neville (Charlton Heston) cruises through an empty city with the top down. It’s eerie, but he seems happy, grooving to jazz from his onboard 8-track cassette deck. But suddenly! Screech! Ka-pow! He brakes, produces a machine gun and fires at a fleeting humanoid silhouette. A striking montage follows of a desolated, deserted city.
Heston was once known as a liberal, and here his character entertains an interracial romance (with afro-licious Rosalind Cash) no more common in movies now than it was in 1971. Unfortunately, it’s now impossible to take Heston seriously, thanks to Phil Hartman’s classic mockery on Saturday Night Live and to Heston’s own Alzheimer’s-fueled descent into right-wing senility.
Interestingly, Heston’s oeuvre is dominated by dystopian sci-fi: Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, and Soylent Green form a trilogy of apocalyptic despair. Remakes of Apes (by Tim Burton) and Omega (Wil Smith’s I Am Legend) made him nearly obsolete even before he died. Can a new Soylent Green (which is, incidentally, much better than its reputation suggests) be far behind?
Shopping at the end of the world, like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead
Compared to the bestial vampires that populate I Am Legend, the creatures in The Omega Man are an intelligent, religious cult. They don’t attack Neville with technology (like, say, shoot him) simply because they choose not to.
As for entertainment in a time before VHS, the last man alive on earth is stuck with whatever happened to be in the theaters at the time; he screens the concert film Woodstock over and over. As for The Omega Man‘s own music, the orchestral jazz pop score is not just outdated, but bizarrely inappropriate.
The crucifixion pose at the end is a bit much. I didn’t expect much subtlety, but that’s laying it on a bit thick.
Lars and the Real Girl is warm, funny, and moving, but felt a little “screenplay” to me. Aside from the indie film cliche of The Small Town (which affords an isolated community of eccentrics and an economically small cast), it seems to be a precisely workshopped exploration of a simple compelling premise: a man falls in love with a sex doll. And yes, these particular models are, uh… real… and to Lars, even better than the real thing.
However, the fine script and performances really do sell the unlikely conceit. Ryan Gosling makes a potentially unappealing character very sympathetic, and indie queen Patricia Clarkson is so sublimely calm (watch her respond to each outrageous development in Lars’ life with a blink and a pause) that I suspect she would make a great shrink in real life.
If I were in a screenwriting class workshopping this script, I think perhaps I might point out one missing aspect: we see the town pull together to support Lars, but would they do so for just any citizen? I’m not sure there’s a sense of why they’re especially protective of Lars in particular.
As a true comedy auteur, Tina Fey’s acting has always come in tandem with her own writing. This double act has progressed from improv comedy at The Second City, to head writer for Saturday Night Live, to supporting player in the feature film Mean Girls, (for which she wrote the screenplay), and finally to executive producer and star of her own sitcom 30 Rock.
Baby Mama, written and directed by Michael McCullers, marks Fey’s first star turn in a project which she did not originate or write. Still, it certainly feels a lot like a Tiny Fey joint. Judging by the general tone and the chaotic improv of Fey’s partner-in-crime Amy Poehler, I suspect the two enhanced the production with a fair amount of script-doctoring.
Indeed, Fey’s character fits firmly in the public persona of Endearingly Neurotic Thirtysomething Single Girl established on SNL’s Weekend Update, as Ms. Norbury in Mean Girls, and as Liz Lemon in 30 Rock. The Tina Fey Notlash notwithstanding, she is evidently more grounded in real life, and married with a child. Meanwhile, the fictionalized “Tina Fey” is the idol of every girl with glasses and crush of every boy with… uh, glasses.
Fey must have an impressive rolodex, for like her flagship TV show 30 Rock, nearly every little role is Baby Mama is filled by a familiar face. When not being amused by alumni from The Daily Show and SNL, we’re treated to Steve Martin as a wild and crazy organic food magnate and Sigourney Weaver as an initially creepy but ultimately sympathetic fertility doctor. But personally, I wouldn’t dare make fun of Sigourney Weaver’s age, lest she come after me with a flamethrower or a space forklift.
Ridley Scott’s original Alien is one of the most effective and influential horror films ever made, and a personal favorite of mine, with no apologies. Its art direction and visual aesthetic were so far ahead of their time that pretty much only the hairstyles have dated, but the real keys to its longevity are its brains and depth of substance. No doubt there have since been dozens of dissertations on its gender themes and often overtly sexualized imagery designed by biomechanical artist H.R. Giger. Once you realize the portal to the crashed spacecraft is a giant vagina and the xenomorph’s head is an erect penis, you will never be able to un-see it.
But Alien‘s most unfortunate legacy is that it has forever melded the science fiction and horror genres in moviegoers’ expectations. Aside from the odd exceptions to the rule ranging from the parable-for-all-ages E.T. to the gut-wrenching social critique Children of Men, we now can’t have a horror film without a rubbery alien or a sci-fi film without eviscerations and gore.
Worst of all, the Alien franchise has been cursed with diminishing returns. Probably but not necessarily by design, James Cameron’s vapid sequel Aliens completely drained the core themes and subtexts from the original in favor of the mere spectacle of spaceships and bullets. Subsequent sequels achieved the rare feats of being by far the worst films of two extraordinarily talented directors: David Fincher’s compromised Alien3 (the only installment with the traditional numeral in the title) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s bizarre-but-not-in-a-good-way Alien: Resurrection.
Part of the problem is that there can be only a limited set of variations on the core premise. The original Alien found the right recipe on the first try: lone but nearly invincible creature vs. unarmed bunch of humans in claustrophobic environment = teh awesome. Most sequels multiplied the number of aliens only to find that their collective dramatic impact was lessened when all it took was a futuristic Colonial Space Marine’s rifle to dispatch one.
(l to r) The PredAlien and a Predator face off in Aliens vs Predator- Requiem.
Meanwhile, the less ambitious Predator franchise managed to only rack up a meager two installments. Perhaps their lesser appeal is attributable to what the Alien films got right; the “aliens” are not intelligent members of a society like the Predators, whose entire culture is based upon the concept of ritualistic hunting. Aliens are instinctual beasts that live to eat and (especially) to breed, so savage and animalistic that their species doesn’t even have a name.
The two spent properties found a new life together in the unholy crossover marriage Alien vs. Predator that began as comics and video games. Inevitably, they found their way back to cinemas as Hollywood attempted to reboot the cash flow with the first film in 2004. But this “new” series has already run out of variations on the core premise in only its second installment.
You wouldn’t know it, but there are some human characters in this film.
Believe it or not, AVP:R is the first Alien film set not only in the present day, but also actually on Earth. This time around we have a single Predator vs multiple aliens, with a variety of helpless human bystanders caught in the crossfire. Basically, the Predators screw up and accidentally seed Earth with a batch of aliens they had intended to breed as hunting stock. A lone Predator, perhaps fancying himself a sort of space age Mr. Fixit, attempts to whitewash his colleagues’ mess. He’s no sympathetic hero, however, for he doesn’t hesitate to take the pelt of a human as a trophy when the opportunity arises.
To go back to the aforementioned variety of helpless human bystanders: any decent screenwriter or producer (or, hell, anyone who’s seen a couple of movies) should have realized that there are three problems with this scenario: “variety,” “helpless,” and “bystanders.” The huge cast of human characters all remain underdeveloped. The lamest thread involves a bunch of so-called teenagers, obviously written by a screenwriter that was never actually a teenager. The only recognizable face (to this blogger, at least) is Reiko Aylesworth from 24, miscast as an Army soldier on leave. Her only purposes in the story seem to be to instruct the audience that guns work better if you shout while shooting, and to have someone on hand who might plausibly know how to fly a helicopter.
Mandible with care
AVP:R is so divorced from the six prior Alien films that there are only two tenuous continuity threads to link them. A Mrs. Yutani appears, presumably of the Weyland-Yutani corporation that, in the future, will operate under the secret agenda of locating more aliens as it strip mines the galaxy for fossil fuels. But perhaps the one true link to the original Alien film from 1979 is a sequence involving a chick stripping down to her skivvies. In the original, the truly badass Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) deservedly kicks back her heels and gets ready for a suspended-animation nap in her undies, but here all we get is a bland “hottie” stripping for her unlikely dweeb crush (an incidence of nerd wish-fulfillment that speaks volumes as to the maturity and life experiences of the filmmakers).
What should have been another major screenwriting red flag is the hugely unsatisfying ending. When the Predator, the closest thing the film has to a hero or protagonist, finally closes in on his prey, they go at it looking for all the world like two pro wrestlers in rubber suits. And then immediately… they’re both obliterated by a nuke. A small handful of the humans are only barely proactive and manage to survive untraumatized despite having watched all their families and loved ones killed.
So why do I keep punishing myself by watching each Alien sequel? I don’t ever again expect something as multilayered as the original, but I do keep thinking that these kinds of movies are supposed to be at best entertaining and at worst a little fun, and yet they always turn out torturously awful. AVP:R‘s best quality is its brisk 86 minute running time, even in its unrated extended DVD cut.
