JimBell Blog

Easy Virture review

JimBell — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:39:24 GMT

Easy Virtue (2008) got a difficult reception, but the movie almost works. You’d think it would work. It’s a breath of fresh air—a Noel Coward piece of wit and satire is a pleasant change from grunting super creatures. It has a good director—Stephan Elliot’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) was a wonderful piece of Australiana. It has excellent actors—Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth, and others. The English country estate is gorgeous and the cinematography does it justice. So why didn’t the movie work?

This frothy movie doesn’t get good until it gets serious. The first half of the movie is all giddiness and fluff. Although some viewers might find this tolerable or even amusing, I found it tiresome and then inconsequential, so I was set to not watch the second half. Okay, so the rich English aristocrat brings home a sexy American divorcee and the snotty family doesn’t like her much. But then suddenly the mother yells at her immature son saying that he is blind, oblivious, a disappointment: He should be running the estate and know that it is bankrupt. This revelation is followed shortly by the father explaining to the inquisitive American that he is not a happy camper because he led the men of his village into WWI and brought none of them home alive. Now the comedy of manners has some bite. If the serious element had come earlier, we would have laughed more knowing the depths the social wit subtly manifested.

Just when you’re liking the movie, the ending sort of flops. There’s a preachy, old-fashioned, Agatha Christie-style wrap up and analysis which is out of place and should have been rewritten and reshot. And then in the final scene—I won’t give away the somewhat surprise ending—the ambiguity is entirely unproductive. So struggling through the overly loud music, and the mumbled upper-class accents was, in the end, not worth it, but a few judicious changes would have made Easy Virtue a substantial delight.

Duplicity review

JimBell — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:33:47 GMT

Duplicity (2009) is forgettable. You’d expect it to make an impression because with Tony Gilroy at the helm (Jason Bourne movies; Michael Clayton) and a fleet of top-notch actors . . . But even if we grant that it is a romantic caper film and not supposed to be substantial, it is still not a particularly good romantic caper film. Why?

Take the romantic part. Even though Clare (Julia Roberts) and Ray (Clive Owens) have some on-screen chemistry, what is the basis of their attraction? We don’t know. They are both professionals who lie for a living and work in the unsavoury field of corporate espionage. Should we care about them?

Take the caper part. We don’t know until well into the movie that there is a caper. At first it seems like industrial espionage; then, through a series of flash backs, we see that Clare and Ray are trying to pull a fast one. When the caper comes to a conclusion, it’s not what you expected. But this surprise ending is a cheat: You were given no hints, no chance to figure it out yourself. It was simply sprung on you, making it all that much more forgettable.

Easy Virtue review

JimBell — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:05:22 GMT

Amongst White Clouds review

JimBell — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:25:10 GMT

Amongst White Clouds (2005; documentary)—I don’t have much to say about this fine documentary except it is for a limited audience and I really liked it. This young guy (Edward Burger) is reading about Buddhism when he realizes that there are people out there living the life now that he is only reading about. So he learns Mandarin (yes), tracks down the hermits living in some mountains in China, and moves in amongst them—for years. I admire the dedication. With camera in hand, he interviews the different Buddhist monks living a mile or so apart in the mountains. I found their different versions of Buddhism intriguing. It is not that they are confused or uncertain or misinformed or eccentric, but, as the Buddha said, you have to find your own path, and they have, each one emphasizing a different aspect of the teachings. I also really liked the seclusion. Actually, not the seclusion but rather the way the monks handled the seclusion. It was an inspiration.

The French Connection (1971) review

JimBell — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 23:06:53 GMT

When I saw The French Connection (1971) years ago, I thought it was fantastic. When I rewatched it last night, I thought it was good but not that remarkable. In American film history, it holds a prominent place, partly as sparking gritty urban crime dramas. But how does it view in and of itself?

It’s probably worth mentioning, because we’d mention it for any film that never won a bunch of Academy awards, but the opening scene in France is incomprehensible. Some guy goes home and some other guy shoots him. Later we recognize the shooter as the accomplice (Marcel Brozzuffi) of the French drug smuggler, Alain (Frenando Rey). But we have to listen to the director’s commentary on DVD to learn that the victim was a French undercover agent.

The plot thereafter is easy to follow because it is largely a series of chase scenes, the most famous being Popeye Doyle’s (Gene Hackman) driving a “borrowed” car under the elevated train tracks as he chases the killer on the commuter train.

The strength of the film is its documentary style. Director Friedkin has a background in documentaries and was inspired by two European movies Breathless and Z which had a documentary look and feel. No sets were used, and the dirt and low light of New York creates a powerful sense of place.

The film is based on an actual case, and the Popeye Doyle in real life was an on-set adviser, and even appeared in the film. By sticking reasonably close to what went down, the film surprises with interesting details. For example, Doyle and his partner, Rosso (Roy Scheider), are having a drink in a well-known nightclub when they notice a young guy unknown to them spreading a lot of money around at a table with known gangsters. On an off-duty hunch, they follow him, and thus start the investigation that broke a major drug smuggling ring.

Director Friedkin tried to show the fine line between cop and criminal, a theme done much better in later movies such as Heat. It doesn’t work in The French Connection. Doyle appears to be an obsessive, brutalizing, racist cop, but we don’t get any insight into his character. Why is he obsessive? Not a clue. When he smashes people around and yells racist epithets at them during a raid on a bar, is he acting naturally or aiming for effect? Not a clue. The villain Alain appears to be a charming and cultured Frenchman, but we don’t know. He gives his young wife a gift, but we have no idea what motivated him. He dines in a fine New York restaurant, but we do not hear his conversation and so have no idea how to interpret this—extravagant decadence? or just another meal? or gourmet appreciation of the fine things in life? We also do not know what motivates the mastermind to smuggle heroin because he already owns a prosperous shipyard. The theme of the fine line between cop and criminal goes nowhere.

Still it’s a good movie with an energetic documentary style, a palpable inner city setting, and a dynamic and inventive sound track. It also gives a glimpse into police work before cell phones, GPS, and squads of human rights lawyers. It ends with shots of the criminals and how little time they did. It is not clear whether this is a film device or fact, but it is fact. It left me amazed at how much law enforcement work went into achieving a pyrrhic victory—a good chance there were behind the scenes payoffs.

Bringing Up Baby review

JimBell — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:05:17 GMT

It’s difficult to judge a screwball comedy such as Bringing Up Baby (1938) because it is screwball. The term comes from a baseball pitch popularized by Carl Hubble in 1934 where the ball travels in an unpredictable path. So you cannot insist on plot coherence. What is paleontologist Dr. David Huxley (Cary Grant) doing taking a leopard to New Jersey on the day he is supposed to marry his icy research assistant? You cannot demand realistic characterization. Why does Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), a beautiful, ditzy socialite, suddenly pick David off a golf course to be her future husband? You cannot even hold the movie to the genre standards of a “screwball comedy,” because the term has no agreed-upon definition. It is generally applied to certain films made from 1934 to the early 1940s. Mistaken identities often add to the chaos, but not in Bringing Up Baby. Because of the Great Depression, class is often an issue, but not in Bringing Up Baby. Rather this film features the classic screwball romance—a mismatch in temperament and wealth between man and woman, with the woman planning the marriage from the get-go. The film also features farce, placing the characters in ridiculous situations. For example, as the two leads exit the party, she steps on his tux tails and rips his suit, and he tells her to leave him alone. When she turns to go back into the party, he is standing on the hem of her dress and rips the back panel out of it. She, however, is in no mood to listen to a word he says and walks back into the party unaware that her undergarments are exposed. When she finally figures it out, he’s there to help her make a Chaplinesque exit.

In 1938, New York Times film critic Frank Nugent slammed the movie because it had no original jokes. But, again, who says the jokes in a screwball comedy have to be fresh? The bottom line is the movie has to make you laugh or smile or, at least, be quietly amused, and a lot of that humour has to come from farcical situations. Bringing Up Baby worked for me! Why?

The plot of a scatterbrained woman getting an good-looking nerdy professor to marry her avoids a couple of obvious pitfalls. She could be too scheming to be likeable, but Susan is so chaotic that she doesn’t really have a master plan of how to get her man. Katharine Hepburn was wonderful. I never realized how good-looking she was—and the outfits she wore made her look more attractive. She had a girlish charm that made it difficult to dislike her. As for her victim, he could have become nasty about how she was screwing up his orderly life, but Dr. Huxley soldiers on, never getting vicious, always holding onto the hope that things will work out reasonably. Just as I never realized how attractive Hepburn was, I never knew what a solid actor Cary Grant was. I had assumed he was another handsome face. I didn’t know he’d run away from home to learn his vaudeville chops with a touring acrobatic company, or that at 18 he’d left the company in New York to pursue a gruelling life of stage plays and third-rate movies before he finally hitting his stride in films such as Bringing Up Baby.

The comedy is not just monodimensional farce. There’s slapstick—she drops an olive, he steps on it and falls on his top hat. There’s madcap chaos—three people talk at once and the dog, George, starts barking. There’s sly jokes—Dr. Huxley is introduced at dinner as a big game hunter, and he quietly spends the meal getting up to look for a dog. As another example, Dr. Huxley and Susan have to calm the ubiquitous pet leopard by signing, “I can’t give you anything but love, baby,” when the leopards’ name is, of course, Baby, and the two singers who don’t get along are falling love. There’s situational jokes—just when Dr. Huxley and Susan lose Baby, a traveling circus loses its dangerous leopard. And there’s the abstract conceptual joke—a dignified, systematic man of science is reduced to a humbled, confused man in love. I enjoyed the whole thing from start to finish.

Tootsie review

JimBell — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:48:24 GMT

Tootsie (2008) is a wonderful comedy, but it is dated. Sydney Pollock does a great directing job, and the cast is superb. But the one joke gets a bit tiresome. An unemployed, idealistic, and obnoxious actor (Dustin Hoffman) gets a job on a soap opera by pretending to be a woman. Then it is one awkward situation after another. Although the actor, Michael, does grow, we don’t see it until the final scene where he says he was a better man as a woman than he was as a man. This wraps up the dated theme: So many men are sexist pigs, and they need to get in touch with their feminine side to become better. Michael is a womanizer (we hear), the TV producer is a sexist, and the star of the soap opera comes on to all the women. The kindly old gent who falls for Michael/Dorothy insists men should be men and women should be women—roosters don’t lay eggs. All the women are struggling with these unenlightened men.. Arguably, the biggest revolution in our society in the last half century has been in women’s rights, and the situation today is substantially different than when Tootsie was made a quarter century ago.

Dhamma Brothers review

JimBell — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 03:22:55 GMT

Dhamma Brothers: East Meets West in the Deep South (2008) achieves its purpose wonderfully, but I wish it had had a different purpose.

Director Jenny Phillips is a psychotherapist with a PhD in cultural anthropology who wanted to do something like the Peace Corps work she’d done in her youth. She got involved with the prison down the street from her practice, and she soon heard that a penitentiary in the deep south was going to try serious meditation with some of the hard-core inmates. Her purpose in making the film, I’d say, was to show that even the most violent offenders should not be warehoused but rather treated as human beings who happen to have been convicted of murder.

The documentary achieves its purpose by focusing on a small number of inmates such as OB and Grady. OB was part of a group young guys who wantonly shot at and killed people driving by. Although OB did not pull the trigger, he tried to protect his friends who did. When the offer of Goenka-style Vipassana meditation came to the prison, he says, “I was at a crossroads.” He was questioning lots of things, and after going through the 10 days of intensive meditation, he says he “slowed down” thus giving himself time to think before acting. Brief clips of his family reinforce the message that this is a decent human being who has paid 17 years for youthful stupidity but is now a guy who could make it on the outside.

Grady, who was drunk out of his gourd and driving the get-away car in a robbery where his two buddies stabbed a guy to death, knows he will never get out, so he wants his prison/home to be a better place to live. This, he comes to realize, starts with himself. He seems to truly incorporate the meditation practice into his daily living. Ingraining the deceptively simple concept that everything changes, Grady repeatedly says to himself, “It’ll be all right in a minute.” This stops so many negative reactions. Imagine if you said this and believed it. As a proponent of the meditation program, Grady says that, after 150 guys have been through the Goenka program, he can tell in the exercise yard whether an inmate has taken the course “by the way he carries himself.”

So we do get to know some of the guys and realize there is a big difference between “he is a murderer” and “he is a person who was involved in a murder.” Personally, however, I wish the film had explained the meditation program much more thoroughly. It is nice to know that these guys have changed for the better, but what exactly facilitated this change? The film does not explain where the Goenka method came from, creates the false impression that it is the same as Vipassana meditation (it is a small branch), and fails to explain what the guys do sitting on their cushions for 10 days. Worse, a glimpse of some of the charts taped on the wall of the retreat area have strange words and give the impression that there was a lot more in-depth stuff going on—but we never learn what it is.

It’s a film I won’t forget. As Jenny Phillips said on Oprah’s Soul Series, these guys are “human beings in great misery looking for solutions.” Ironically, their motivation for enlightenment is generally more fierce than yours or mine. I just wish the film had paid a lot more attention to the method that facilitated their transformation.

I've Loved You So Long review

JimBell — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:42:19 GMT

I’ve Loved You So Long (2008; France) is the story of how a woman released from prison after serving 15 years for a shocking murder slowly rehabilitates and fits back into society. Crucial to the process is her younger sister, Lea, who has to undergo some changes herself.

The main challenge the movie has to meet is how to get us excited about a woman who is clinically depressed, who is often described as not being there. It’s tough to make an interesting film about someone who isn’t interested in anything. I’ve Loved You So Long attempts to stimulate our interest in two way. One: Great acting by Kristen Scott Thomas as Juliette. Ironically, if she had acted sort of depressed, or depressed with suppressed energy, or lively but depressed about certain things, she would probably have been insufferable. But Juliette starts the film so seriously depressed that every fibre of her being is lifeless, even a puff on a cigarette perfunctory. Strangely, this is interesting. I started to ask how she got so depressed, how long would she remain like that, and would characters get sick of her even before I? But, two, Juliette begins to change in fits and starts. This is an interesting process, even when she has relapses. I don’t actually know how realistic this process is, but it feels realistic.

Unfortunately, few actors support Scott Thomas’s superb performance. When Juliette goes to her first job interview, the working class boss dismisses her when she admits to murder, but his response is formulaic and perfunctory. Although the scene initially builds his character as a busy, no-nonsense guy, his reaction to Juliette is to make a plot point that ex-cons have a difficult time getting a job. He could have looked startled and said, Why did you do it!? Or he could have looked business-like and said, You won’t fit into our operation. But he says unconvincingly, Get out! Another example? Much later in the movie, Juliette is participating in one of those friends-get-together-in-a-villa parties the French seem to love, when the inebriated host turns on Juliette at the dinner table. He is supposed to be drunk but does not sound or act drunk. His dialogue is convoluted and fakey as it wends its way to challenging Juliette to reveal her background. It’s just not the stuff I imagine as realistic, and the speech could be written more convincingly by many. More importantly, the sister, Elsa Zylbe4rstein, is excellent in the upbeat scenes but artificial in some of the serious scenes. When she picks Juliette up from the lonely airport, she is vivacious and engaging when she gives a bemused 4-sentence summary of her life over the last 15 years. You like this perky young woman. In contrast, the “heavy” scenes are strained. For example, when Juliette finally talks about her crime, Elsa Zylberstein plays the scene paint-by-numbers—no natural reaction, so spontaneity, no natural body language, etc. You start to watch the poor acting rather than the scene.

At the same time, some actors turn in excellent performances. Lea’s oldest daughter is perfectly appropriate for parents who are both professors. And Juliette’s probation officer (Frederic Pierrot) shows his veteran chops by presenting a perfectly believable cop on the edge.

But even if all the acting and all the dialogue had been excellent, the plot would still have been disappointingly predictable. Do you think the depressed murderer will lighten up? Duh. Do you think “talking about” the crime will turn things around? Duh. Do you think that she will move out of her sister’s into a place of her own? Duh. Do you think her sister’s husband will eventually allow her to baby sit? Duh. Most important, do you think that her murder will turn out to have major extenuating circumstance? Duh!

There is one aspect of the movie that was not predictable for me, and it was the strong point. Juliette’s parole officer was an eccentric guy who wanted to talk about himself more than listen to her. Yet he skimmed over talk of his ex-wife and how she sent the children for visits like parcels. He talked of fountains, water, and the Orinoco River. Then he quietly shifted meetings to cafes, rather nice cafes. There is a very nice scene where he is trying to get personal but he and Juliette simply do not connect,. I’m not sure why, but I think they are too involved in their own little dramas. When Juliette next reports, a new cop briskly tells her to sign and get visit over with. Juliette’s original parole officer has shot himself. Juliette goes home and lies on the bed. One of the drawbacks of movies is that we do not know what she is think. I guess you could say one of the strengths of moving pictures is that we have to guess what she is thinking. I’m guessing it was a turning point for Juliette. She had completely missed his requests for love because she was so tied up in her own ‘problems” and so sure everything in the world was worthless. This whole episode—a minor character unexpectedly kills himself—is the strongest part of the film because it eschews the stereotypical plot.

Wendy and Lucy review

JimBell — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 06:44:24 GMT

I really liked this movie--barely--but I would not expect a lot of other people to like it. Wendy and Lucy (2008), the story of a young woman and her dog, is unlikely to have much of an impact on your average movie goer. The plot provides little excitement: As one blogger cried, who wants to spend an hour and half watching some girl look for her bleepin’ dog!? Rather strangely, the central character does not provide much excitement either. We do not know who she is, what she has done, why she left Indiana or Illinois—we know zilch about her background aside from a depressing phone call she makes to her dismissive sister and brother-in-law. Nor does Wendy grow in any way that traditionally interests viewers.

Yet for some people--including me--this slow-paced picture about not much can pack a powerful punch. Unlike the many films which pander to their audience, this film does not reach out to you--you have to reach out to it. You have to find some way to identify with the lost young woman. Have you been alone and poor? I remember arriving in Adelaide at 6:00 in the morning with 20 cents to my name and wondering if I should steal a morning paper to find out what was going on in town. Have you been a vulnerable young female accosted? No, but I remember riding an old train where a young punk came into my compartment so many times I thought it best to pull out my switchblade to cut my cheese and bread.

For this movie, it also helps if you love dogs. It would help if you had one who dearly loved to fetch a stick. For the ending to have its full power, I think you have to appreciate ahead of time the powerful bond that can exist between person and dog. But also, as your heart is breaking, you have to figure out quickly what the film was all about. I was left asking, “What was the purpose of that film?” Five minutes later as I searched the web, it hit me. Without giving away the story, I’d say the film is about poverty and the fine line between being a member of society with an address and money and being down and out and off the grid. Director Kelly Reichardt said in an interview with Spout that the movie did not have a point but certainly had a question: “Are we related and do we owe each other anything? . . . Are we supposed to do anything for each other, or is it every man for himself?”

But even if you do figure out the purpose of the film, you may not have sympathy for the young woman. Why’d she shoplift when she had enough money to buy dog food? That’s were all the trouble started. Similarly, you might make short shrift of the director’s question. Of course we are supposed to do things for each other, and this girl probably had lots of help in the past and she got a reasonable amount of help in the present. What more can you expect? But a small number of people, including me, feel terrible for the young woman and would love to help.