Month: July 2012

Spoiler: beware of quiet, knife-yielding, humiliated damsels with a class grudge. Or maybe you’d rather sit through Winterbottom’s new film, Trishna, based on the Thomas Hardy classic Tess of the D’eubervilles. Its star, Frieda Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire), is very photogenic and has an alluring if distant screen presence. You’ll also get a real feel for India, where the film takes place, that will make the recent The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel seem like a mere postcard in comparison. Shot on location in Jaipur and Mumbai, Trishna is Winterbottom’s third adaptation of Hardy and modern India would seem perfect fodder for a tale of socio-economic cultural comparisons.

Winterbottom (see his excellent Road To Guantanamo and the recent The Trip) fashions a story about a woman from a lower caste, Trishna (Pinto), being swept off her pauper feet by a rich guy who is not only from a higher social plane, he’s not even fully Indian. Only they must sneak and hide their love, which comes well-earned for Jay (Riz Ahmed), who chases after Trishna at great distances more than once. He seems to always show up to rescue her, no matter the circumstances. Once he literally swoops her onto his motorbike just before she is in danger of getting attacked by two ominous men. The film has a habit of cutting to travelogue-style lush scenes of India’s teeming cities or the lush gardens of a plush hotel (owned by Jay’s father) where Jay sets up Trishna with a job. Winterbottom, who wrote the screenplay, has a problem of covering for his inexpressive lead characters with such embellishment. Is he merely accurately expressing Trishna’s diffident deference to Jay, or hiding behind it? A lot of the film meanders with the inertia of the two leads’ non-chemistry. We’re given a somewhat good feel for the oppression of Trishna, at first by her circumstances, and then eventually by Jay. It doesn’t hep a key scene involving Jay’s initial seduction of Trishna occurs off-camera. Then late his movement from great-guy savior to deviant scumbag seems to come out of nowhere, or, more specifically, one (quite understandable) blunder from Trishna that causes Jay to overreact in a way that would have seemed a lot more credible if we’d been given more character development and less atmospheric fluff.

For what it’s worth, Winterbottom also went out of his way to make the film flat in terms of eroticism; he spares no forthrightness after Jay loses his cool and becomes a meaner lover near the film’s conclusion.
All in all, even a misfire from Winterbottom has its moments. It’s a shame they’re couched in what can only feel like filler. The film, listed at 108 minutes, seems at least a half hour longer. There’s only so much scenery we can soak in before we’re on overload, waiting for a character with at least minimal emotional depth to emerge. In Buddhist lore “Trisha” stand for the second noble truth, that of thirst and craving, which cause suffering. Here Trishna’s thirst and craving are barely seen, and even rarer, felt.

2.5 noble truths (out of 5)

The amazing thing about Canadian actress Sarah Polley’s sophomore film, Take This Waltz, is we identify with its main character, a terrific Michelle Williams, when we could just as easily have been repulsed by her.

“Life has a gap in it… You don’t go crazy trying to fill it, like some lunatic,” says Williams’ sister-in-law, Sarah Silverman. Silverman’s advice falls on deaf ears. Williams faces the plight of a contented gone complacent marriage threatened with the emergence of a third party. Though she’s careful and deliberate at first, Williams breaks stride with cookbook author Seth Rogen despite their cooing babytalk and comfortable insults produced from years of trustworthy, easy camaraderie. In the end, Williams’ faith in the contented marriage and subsequent intoxicating infatuation achieve a parity that flattens into a similar unfulfillment. The moral sure seems to be to change yourself from within before looking outside yourself.

Inventiveness here outweighs artifice, but not by a whole lot. On the one hand, a nonverbal funhouse ride scene screeches with meaning and resonance. On the other, a taken aback Williams, upon meeting her new beau, a rickshaw-bearing free spirit, Luke Kirby, announces she’s “afraid of being afraid.” A surprisingly expressive Rogen, upon learning of Williams’ extracurricular stuff, is given an uninterrupted, solo, jump-cut focus. Later, an is-it-real/or-is-it fantasy elongated sex scene includes group sex that doesn’t add up, exposition-wise. It seems self-indulgent. Fresh on the heels of her excellent first film, Away from Her, Polley here ups the ante in the risk-taking department. Though not all pays off, it’s refreshing to see a young director break such ground. Her ability to bring to life the little things that occur in relationships is astounding.

Now to Williams. Wendy and Lucy. Blue Valentine. My Week With Marilyn. Meek’s Cutoff. Now, Take This Waltz. She’s probably our finest film actress these days, period. And her expressive nuances are the major reason we hang with her character here in all her indecisiveness. Some have questioned use of the throwaway 80s Buggles hit,'”Video KIlled The Radio Star” in the film. It underlines the aforementioned funhouse ride scene and is later reprised. It’s simultaneously about the archaic and the new. Taken in conjunction with a moving scene in which Williams and Silverman shower nude with female members of an older generation, it all makes sense. The older women comment on Silverman’s “gap” statement with, essentially, a shrugging “everything new gets old.” Deal with it, Polley is pleading.

3.5 Everything New Gets Old Blues Riffs (out of 5)

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a strong drink for fans of pure unadulterated cinema. The strength of the human spirit, the irrepressible bond between a father and daughter, and the cycle of life and death itself are the themes of this unforgettable Katrina fable starring the stunning Quvenzayne Wallis. Wallis, all of six years old during the filming, beat out 4000 girls who’d answered flyers announcing the lead role of Hushpuppy. (Still five and displaying the same moxie she does in the film, she lied about her age to qualify, then completely blew away the producers in the audition). Most of the actors, including Wallis, hadn’t previously acted a day in their lives.

The film has no conventional plot and needs none. Its style blends the movie’s many powerful and often colorful elements into a film equivalent of a John Coltrane jazz ensemble. It outdoes the similarly abstract Tree of Life for emotional depth by presenting a more grounded vision of the human condition while somehow capturing both the joie de vivre of the Delta lifestyle with the wring-your-hands desperation of victims of Katrina. We get to know Hushpuppy and her dad, Wink, in a visceral, intimate way. They are real people set against the in-your-face backdrop of the mythopoetic “Bathtub” (a 9th Ward-like downtrodden area), not the impressionistic sketches of Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain in Tree of Life. Yet both films afford us a rare glimpse into the eternal questions.

Can you say Oscar and Quvenzayne in the same breath? She’d be the youngest nominee ever, yet I can’t think of a performance in years that so utterly sideswiped me. Her screen presence seems at times eerily unearthly. Judging from interviews, apparently her uncanny instincts led the director Benh Zeitlin as much as she was led by him. Equally impressive, Dwight Henry (in real life a New Orleans bakery owner) portrays Wink by drawing from his own experience in surviving many hurricanes while raising three kids of his own.

Hushpuppy and Wink fight the elements, their rescuers, and each other while ensconced in a shack on stilts or floating on a vessel made of a truck bed and oil drums. Their community, defiant and self-reliant, strut their resolve through music and merriment as some of them, refusing to relocate despite the impending storm, turn their houses into arks. Hushpuppy, who often speaks to animals in code, calls The Bathtub “the prettiest place on earth.” Quite aside from her efforts at self-preservation, she provides the film’s moral compass as well as its innocent victim. Her focus and bravery are unparalleled.

Winner of the Palm d’or at Cannes and Best Film at Sundance, Beasts of the Southern Wild, shot on Super 16, is a technical marvel from the lush shots from cinematographer Ben Richardson to the rich yet delicate score composed by Dan Romer and Zeitlin. The 29-year-old Zeitlin’s first feature is a one-of-a-kind wonder that will surprise, charm and confound you. It may even, and I don’t say this lightly, make you swell with pride at the power of cinema to transform our self awareness.

5 Hushpuppies (out of 5)

Stuck in a slump of late, the irrepressible Oliver Stone comes out guns-a-blazing in Savages. Based on a Don Winslow novel, the film conjures up the finger-in-your-eye, 80s version of Stone now pushed even further cutting edge with an up-to-date sensibility. Especially the violence, which while extreme, somehow never seems gratuitous. And especially the humor, which feeds nicely off the opposite natures of our two heroes.

One guy is an ex-Navy Seal and Iraq war veteran with a cold mien and nerves of steel, Chon (Taylor Kitsch, John Carter/Friday Night Lights.) The other, a dredlocked botanist who grows marijuana with a 33% THC content and moonlights doing charity work in Africa, Ben (Aaron Johnson, Kick-Ass, Nowhere Boy). Together they share a successful drug enterprise in Laguna Beach, and a girl, Ophelia (Blake Lively), who calls them “the Buddhist and the baddest.” An open menage a trois cements a bond between the three, who suddenly find themselves the target of a hostile takeover by a Mexican drug cartel, led by a classy Salma Hayek, and fronted by the cynical and loco Benicio del Toro, in a career performance.

Stone’s achievement breaks down into multiple successes. He manages to bring out front his arrested-adolescent penchant for rubbing his audience’s face in the most giddy and deranged circumstances. Then we laugh together at what would be prurient if it weren’t also so damn plausible. The situation surrounding Mexican drug cartels, no laughing matter, is so nuts that what might seem like a mock-hyper violence is only a put-on until the 10,000 deaths per year tally hits home (also see the excellent Mexican film, Miss Bala, from earlier this year.) Then we laugh not because it’s easier than crying, but because even a villain as completely batshit crazy as Del Toro comes off as ultimately a realistic character rather than a caricature. And what better contrast than to have a pansy-assed but totally lovable Ben swept up into all this? Or a flower child type like Ophelia, who in a pivotal scene with Hayek, in which “O,” as she calls herself, while free associating all philosophical namby-pamby, is asked by Hayek, “Do all American talk like this? Do you ever think about your future?” The drug lord chick never seemed so adult.

It’s no accident the word “savages” here refers both to the ruthless drug cartel guys, and Americans with no cultural values, depending on who’s doing the finger-pointing. Del Toro calls the the gringos “Cheech and Chon.” Stone both wallows in the muck and finds gallows humor in it. If the film weren’t as entertaining as anything I’ve seen this year, I might have been able to find fault. As is, it’s the third really good film this year dealing with various stages of innocents dragged into the drug wars (besides the aforementioned Miss Bala, see the forthcoming Swedish flick, Easy Money).

Stone’s getting the most out of the three young actors here is topped only by his throwing down veteran scene-stealers like Del Toro and John Travolta, whose scene together seethes with raw tension. Travolta, who coincidentally offscreen is in dire need of some positive PR, conveys a coolness and a subsequent desperation with equal skill as he plays a crooked cop. Emile Hirsch is around as a highly amusing financial whiz who launders Ben and Chon’s considerable cash. Damon Bichir, fresh off the excellent A Better Life, is one of Hayek’s guys. Savvy character actor Shea Whigham plays a lawyer who gets both his kneecaps shot by a sick son-of-a-bitch posing as a landscaper. It’s relatively one of the film’s tamer scenes.

It all feels like classic cinema, with a dash of guilty-pleasure, quasi-Scarface spice thrown in (Stone wrote the screenplay for Brian DePalma’s Scarface). As Tony Montana might say, “You wanna play rough?” In Savages, both sides play as rough as can be imagined. The difference here is since no one is shielded from vulnerability and the stakes and methods are light years beyond those simpler days, the 2012 version of the Oliver Stone cartoon just got chillingly real.

4.25 “You Wanna Play Rough?”‘s (out of 5)

Ted trades on the natural dissonance of juxtaposing a buddy flick/rom com with a misogynist, homophobic, narcissistic trash talking toy bear. The result is very often hilarious, occasionally flat. Ted, the bear voiced over by director Seth MacFarlane (The Family Guy) wins you over with high-cred believability, a spot-on don’t-give-a-shit Boston accent and irreverence galore. No comment’s too crass or raunchy for this dude, and even his having sex with a human (Jessica Barth) seems entirely in context.

It all makes sense once you get to know Ted. Bestowed as a gift to a very young, lonely John, Ted shocks John one day by speaking directly to him. The subsequent scene usually would have the talking teddy bear clam up once John’s parents are in the room, but here the brazen bears actually talks to them as well. Pretty soon he’s going on the Johnny Carson talk show and becomes a full-fledged celebrity…Cut to 25 or so years later and a grown-up John (Mark Wahlberg) and Ted hang out smoking bongs and discussing the early 1980s flick, Flash Gordon quite a bit. John works in a rental car agency but he’s done pretty well by himself in landing Lori (Mila Kunis) as a live-in girlfriend. Only she’d rather have the rascal bear take a hike. He gets his own place and a job in a supermarket. After which John still hangs out with Ted every day, often cutting out of work. Climax one happens when Sam Jones (NOT the ex-Boston Celtic) of Flash Gordon fame shows up at a party of Ted’s same night John is dutifully accompanying Kunis to her boss’s important gatherings. Climax two occurs at Fenway park of all places after a subplot involving a devious Giovanni Rabisi and his overweight and creepy son (Aedin Mincks) blows up unexpectedly into thriller territory.

Wahlberg hasn’t been this good since The Departed. Make no mistake acting opposite a, er, teddy bear, is no mean feat to begin with. Plus this all could have gone very wrong very fast. MacFarlane keeps Ted so provocatively smutty and could-care-less that any wince-inducing moments fade into the overall hilarity of this guy. The computer animation outdoes itself. There are endless cultural references and cheap shots at celebrities, and the cute and cuddly Wahlberg/Kunis stuff nicely offsets the unabashed obnoxiousness anytime Ted opens his mouth. Mostly wearing its outrageousness well, Ted’s waverings into inanity ought to be overlooked.

We moviegoers need deep laughs like this far too much to quibble. Given the state of most comedies these days, let’s take all we can get and not look a giftbear in the mouth.

8 Crude and Nasty Funnies (out of 10)