Month: January 2012

Even If you don’t know modern dance from “Modern Family” you should make a beeline for the limited theaters showcasing this landmark 3D documentary of Pina Bausch’s work. Almodovar fans (count me in) know Bausch’s work from her breathtaking opening scene in Talk To Her. Waiting to see this film without the 3D aspect is tantamount to listening to a new CD of your favorite band while someone plays it for you on the telephone. Director Wim Wenders went through the trouble of mounting his cameras on a crane, fer Chrissake, so you’d be right onstage like never before. There are those who think this even beats being there live. Least you can do is drive a few miles to experience what the 3D experience is ultimately capable of.  “Avatar” aside, this easily surpasses Herzog’s stellar Cave of Forgotten Dreams for insightful use of the technology.

Though Bausch’s life is left out of this particular movie, it’s the work that achieves an immediacy that wows. (Bausch insisted expository talking heads be banned from this documentary and it’s far better for it). “Cafe Mueller,” the piece in Talk To Her, is well represented here, as are three other pieces, all on the edge of the edge. Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” is done up with a stage full of peat. City sidewalks, trolley cars, open fields, and Wuppertal, Germany’s bizarre monorail system all serve as sets for the Tanztheater Wuppertal’s recreation of Pausch’s work. In “Vollmond” (Full Moon) a waterfall onstage textures into the space it surrounds as dancers angle their approach to confront it.

They are served up bittersweet since Pausch died at 68 a couple of days before filming was to start (and a mere five days after her cancer diagnosis). Her company ranges the gamut in nationalities and age. They’re far from ring all young people. In “Kontakthof” (Meeting Hall) dancers of retirement age share the piece with dancers young enough to be their grandchildren.

The company’s commonality is their devotion to her as if she were a saint. We’re given their tributes in between the grim yet amusing, often robotic, and always compelling choreography. Detractors of the film bemoan Pausch’s relative absence from the film. (Seems like complaining a world class chef’s meal is deficient because the chef didn’t sit down with you). In reality she lives and breathes through every scene. The film’s center of gravity seems virtually something supernatural. These dancers didn’t make it up themselves. They are wrung dry by their muse, as are we.

Never realized dance modern dance could feel this real.

9 modern dance 3D’s (out of 10)

A Separation turns real-life conflict into a sociocultural masterpiece. It unfolds with bursts of familial tension and ends up an overview of a society whose conflicting ideals express themselves in dramatic disagreements. All before the watchful eyes of an often disinterested court. Setting out to dissect an Iran where there are often no good choices, the Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign Film offers a Rashomon-like study of a domestic and legal dispute from several differing viewpoints, all as perfectly plausible as they are passionate.

Director Asghar Farhadi provides the viewer no easy angle or viewpoint, but rather allows our rooting interest to ricochet between Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moadi) as they argue whether or not to leave the country for better opportunities elsewhere for their 11-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the director’s daughter). When a more religiously traditional housekeeper and her husband enter into a battle with Nader and Simin over an incident that occurs while the housekeeper, Razieh, is caring for Nader’s Alzheimer’s-stricken father; our focus is allowed to shift fourfold. Class and religious differences between the more devout and much poorer Razieh and Hodjat intensify the conflict between the two couples while each marriage withstands and breaks down under the stress. We think we know who’s right one minute, then it changes, only to change yet again.

Underneath the proceedings is a growing understanding that laws are pretty much useless in settling human emotional problems. The judge who the couples keep facing is a relatively sympathetic character who himself is in over his head in such a strict system. Like the rest of the film’s characters, he has a dignity and a rationale that make it impossible to simplify his motivations. Instead, a complexity emerges that is quite stunning. And while there is expectedly no unifying conclusion, A Separation threads itself into an overtly apolitical tapestry that makes you feel you’ve just been a fly on the wall to the most intimate details of a nation’s very personal challenges. When Razieh (an amazing Sareh Bayat) calls a religious leader to check whether or not she’s allowed to change the soiled clothes of the man under her care, one can only look on with compassion. That she needs to hide her housekeeping activity from a husband who would not approve of her working in a single man’s home, is equally stirring. It is more important to Nadir that he have Termeh’s blessing before a game-changing decision than that he decide out of a more personal moral belief. Simin wants to get out of the country before it’s too late for Termeh but she wants her family intact. At film’s end, Termeh’s dilemma personifies not only the future but Iran’s starkly tumultuous present.

What sets A Separation apart, finally, is reflected in its garnering the rarest of rare Oscar nominations: one for Best Screenplay, a nomination which is hardly ever awarded to a foreign film. Full of surprises equally rare in a domestic drama, A Separation is no ordinary domestic drama: its characters’ plights cry out “universal” in every frame.

9.5 Intense Disputes Out of 10

Welcome to the hammy 9/11 fable about a real swell 11-year-old boy, Oskar, who deals with the loss of his likeable, earnest father (Tom Hanks) in the tragedy. A nerd of nerds, he conjures up a compulsive game on which to channel his grief into grandiosity. He finds a mysterious key hidden in a vase among Dad’s belongings. It has “Black” written on it (a name?) and before we know it our precocious and precious hero stealthily hoofs it across all five boroughs (he’s terrified, panic attack ridden, of the subways) in attempting to knock on the doors of all 472 Blacks listed in the New York phonebook.

Seriously.

If this sounds as simple-minded as Forrest Gump, it is. I’ve got no objection to an allegorical drama about 9/11, just this one. The novel by Jonathan Safran Doer on which it was based, while largely trashed by critics, has its proponents who assert it works better than the film by adhering to a more abstract framework. In the film, directed by Stephen Daldry (The Hours, Billy Elliot, The Reader), the story’s literal components are often flat and constantly held in relief against the kitschy backdrop. When Oskar finally boards a subway because his mysterious new traveling companion (Max Von Sydow) insists, we’ve already endured various people named Black who’ve opened their doors and their lives to Oskar but know nothing of the key. Von Sydow boards with Oskar’s grandmother. Oskar and she communicate by walkie talkie and he creepily can look right in her window since they’re across-the-street neighbors. Von Sydow (he’s excellent) doesn’t speak and instead writes notes and flashes his palms–one has a tattooed “Yes'” the other a “No.” Seems he’s had a tragedy in his life, too, and it involves Dresden.

Thomas Horn does a rather good job as Oskar. He’s the kind of kid who knows it all at 11 (the novel had him at 9) and he may have Aspergers. His energy and focus are unbound, his stability understandably off kilter. His mom (Sandra Bullock) looks the other way at his fierce temper tantrums and his overall shabby treatment of her. Of course he doesn’t tell her about his Black exercise and he also switches out the telephone answering machine so she is spared Hanks’ at first calm, then increasingly frantic messages from the World Trade Center as he hopes to speak with either of them. Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright in supporting roles, Bullock, and especially Hanks, as the perfect father who never talks down to the boy and mischievously devises clever games for them to play, all keep the proceedings somewhat compelling.

Newsreel shots of the stricken Twin Towers and the pandemonium on the streets are interspersed throughout, as are ghastly photographic images of those who dived out the windows that fateful day. This particularly interests Oscar, who looks back on that “Worst Day” as he calls it, with a meticulous obsession. Knowing how this kid is so smart, he’s probably already read 102 Minutes and seen United 93, the definitive book and docudrama chronicles of 9/11. His story, however, is more immediately about the sudden death of a father who he worshiped and his desire to keep his memory and presence alive in a big-time way. I felt the love alright. But the film’s twin morals–that it’s better to give than to receive and that it’s not the destination but the journey–feel far too snug and smug in the context of what is essentially a fancifully foolhardy conceit that ultimately falls short of the film’s huge task of dramatizing perhaps the greatest national tragedy of our lifetime.

5.5 Phonebooks and Answering Machines (out of 10)

Those poor parents!

Who are none other than John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster, whose 11-year-old son was slugged in a playground by the son of Kate Winslet and Christopher Waltz. We start out in Reilly and Foster’s Brooklyn apartment with an overly-cordial and cozy (mmm), above-the-fray march toward making amends despite the victim’s damaged teeth and pride. Carnage really gets going once the couples soon stray, revealing a thicket of ruthless, antisocial envy, soul-baring bickering, and class animosity (the Walter’s are more snooty/upper middle… Just saying….).  Soon the beneath-the-surface tensions start out “Couple vs Couple” in a battle that is more dramatic than Reel Steal (Didn’t expect that reference did you?) The fight eventually turn to “Spouse vs Spouse” and then “Men vs Women.”

Did I mention this flick is often hilarious?

Filmed by Roman Polanski from the Yasmina Riza French play turned into a Tony-award-winning Broadway play, Carnage is (despite its viciousness–no, in large part because of it) worth the bother.

Carnage is a layercake of emotions and pet peeves with a sweet outer portion gradually and enticingly peeled off to give way to an increasingly menacing sour core. The characters dramatic turnaround from polite to poisonous is brilliantly filmed by Polanski in portraying their marital discord (always hard to fathom from the outside) by getting inside their souls. He’s up to the challenge in filming a play that’s basically confined to one set. His camera’s point of view always seems to know just where to go for maximum effect–no small feat as opposed to an audience at a theatrical piece free to choose where to focus attention.

Yet it’s the acting in Carnage that shines. The actors make it easy to imagine these parents responding the way they do, despite their relatively limited personas. There’s a universality to them despite their specific identifiers as an art-collecting writer of a book about Darfur (Foster), a liberal poser with a blue-collar heart (Reilly), an attorney constantly on his cellphone (Waltz), and an inciting nervous Nelly (Winslet).

Those of us who haven’t seen the play can only wonder how much better Marcia Gay Harden was in the Foster role of Penelope on Broadway, or, heavens, the always superb Isabella Huppert in the French premier. Yet while the overly shrill Foster may comparatively lag the proceedings somewhat, it’s hard to imagine a better Alan (Jeff Daniels on Broadway) than Waltz, who virtually steals this film. Ditto Reilly’s Mike (James Gandolfini) or Winslet’s Nancy (Hope Davis). Nothing here on the order of the criminal casting of Gwyneth Paltrow in the film version of Proof instead of the remarkable Tony-award-winning Mary Louise Parker.

Polanski, on the heels of the savvy The Ghost Writer, has taken a bullying incident among kids as a catalyst for an admirably lean (only 80 minutes! That’s less than two episodes of Boardwalk Empire!) exploration of ostensibly normal marriages gone bona-fide exposed, dragging us through their stuff where we can’t look away no matter how ugly things get. The actors may be a superb string quartet but an embarrassed and amused Roman lurks in the background, ever the neutral observer.

8 Virginia Woolfs (out of 10)

I don’t mean to be a nitpicker but when a modern gospel movie needs to enlist Dolly Parton and Jeremy Jordan to annie up the box office you might expect inconsistencies in tone and intonation. (“ba dum dum ching”). In the annals of musicals out to sweep the widest commercial swath, Joyful Noise is particularly revolting. Regurgitating sitcom cliches (“Hey man, you’re on your third marriage and you have the same set of inlaws each time”), we’re marooned in a la-la land of mixed race relationships, (Jordan and the winning Keke Palmer), Sly Stone/Paul McCartney/Michael Jackson covers, and a catfight between Parton and Latifah that is so poorly staged it has all the personality of an open-mike-night sketch gone awry.

Characters in Noise serviceably mimic stereotypes that you would expect. One particular Latifah choir cohort beds down an Asian choir member who dies in her bed of a heart attack. Tifah then suddenly possesses a stigma about it that goes through three or four joke recycles before we’re done with it. Through that Jordan (“Toniiiighhhht Tonighhhht”) goes after Palmer, but her mom (Latifah) doesn’t let her date. Patton and Latinas are at odds over the direction of the Pacashau, a Georgia Sacred Divinity Church choir. Latifah favors straight buttoned-down gospel. Parton and her son (Jordan) want to rock out (with their ridiculously large old boobs out.) Guess whose side wins in the climactic competition performance? Come on…. Just try….

The stretches between the songs have all the character of shipping box filler popcorn. You like Dolly Parton? Me too. Seek out “9 to 5” or “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” You’re a fan of Keke Palmer? She’s regularly on TV’s “True Jackson.”
Then there’s the music. If you’re interested in gospel music, may I recommend 2011’s excellent documentary “Rejoice and Shout”? Where it pulsed with verve and soul at every turn, unlike Joyful Noise that putters into a jelly-like puddle.

3 Hallelujahs (out of 10)

“I don’t need to see things like this,” a disgruntled viewer was overheard commenting in the lobby after the screening of Angelina Jolie’s “In The Land of Blood and Honey.” Well disgruntled audience member, Jolie is strictly writer and director of this Bosnian language-English Subtitled film about the horrors of the Balkan conflict in the early 1990s. “Horrors” is not an overstatement and yet feels in many ways to be an understatement. Yet, finger-wagging that Jolie’s gone overboard in unnecessarily attempting to bludgeon the viewer with grueling defilement can be interpreted as a turning away from the portrayed brutality of ritualistic rape camps and the ethnic cleansing of Muslim civilians by Serbian soldiers. To do so is to closely mirror the behavior of the international community of nations in their too slow reaction to war crimes that saw 10,000 dead and as many as 50,000 women raped. (So there)

Granted, war is hell and this film depicts a particularly wretched hell of human extermination and degradation that may very well disturb our lady in the lobby and many other viewers. Some would have you believe Jolie breaks her neck to exaggerate, that she’s somehow the dupe of her convictions. Yet she gives the film a human center and those who want to have an idea about a war that many Americans had no clue about even as it was happening would do well to brace for a film that’s a brave and often well-crafted eye-opener.

Danijel, Serbian police officer and Ajla, a Muslim artist, meet in a nightclub and connect just before a bomb goes off, then are reacquainted after she, along with many other Muslim women, are rounded up and thrown in a camp. Now a Captain in the Serb army, he comes to offer her more and more protection from a situation where, when the women aren’t summarily raped, they are used as human shields in battle. Is he a compassionate captor or merely an exploitative player? Does their relationship, rooted in its prior history, transcend fierce ethnic loyalties? (His is transfixed since childhood since he grew up with a lout of an Army general for a father…Hers was an upbringing with a transculturally progressive slant). As Daniels risks the scorn of his father and fellow soldiers he is drawn deeper into a moral quandry. The film’s unexpected finale intensifies its earlier questions rather than giving any easy out.

Everything is relative in this world, especially the ratio of compromise to survival. What kind of love can occur between prisoner and captor that isn’t finally a victim of the surrounding madness of an inhuman war?

Angelina’s done pretty good here. What keeps In The Land of Blood and Honey from the first rank of films is a somewhat lack of cohesiveness that is more than made up for by its ability to rarely become unhinged in expressing a repugnant terror with hardly a false note. As to whether you “need to see things like this”–yeah you should.

8 shameful holocausts (out of 10)