Month: August 2012

The ultra-talented French actress Julie Delpy continues to grow most impressively in her new film 2 Days in New York, which she directs, and which co-stars Chris Rock in a much more than comic role. Rock plays Mingus, who lives with Marion (Delpy) and each of their two kids from other relationships. The situation is a doozy: Marion’s dad, sister, and sister’s boyfriend (who’s also an ex-boyfriend of Marion’s) visit New York to attend a gallery show of Marion’s photographs and to meet Mingus. They all hole up in Marion and Mingus’ small apartment. Cross-cultural chaos ensues.

The film’s a small riot. Frenzied, hilarious shenanigans follow Marion’s father Jeannot (played by Delpy’s real-life father Albert Delpy), her sister Rose (Alexia Landeau, who cowrote the screenplay with Delpy), and the boyfriend Manu (Alex Nahon, also co-credited with the screenplay). They all co-starred in Delpy’s 2007 prequel 2 Days in Paris, where an American boyfriend (Adam Goldberg) descends into the family’s inner sanctum. Here they invade America. The uber-earthy, often outrageous Jeannot arrives at the airport with unpasteurized cheeses taped to his body, Rose walks around the apartment in various states of undress, and Manu is about as gruff and inappropriate as a Sasha Baron Cohen character. Rock’s character changes from an immune doesn’t-bother-me to a frustrated center of gravity going askew, to a guy who complains in monologues to a cardboard cutout of Barack Obama that’s a life-size piece of furniture in his study. Finally Mingus, who’s a Village Voice writer and radio talk show host, resorts to describing his significant other’s crazy family to his radio audience. Comics who can play the serious role (Robin Williams, Adam Sandler) bolster their acting repertoire while often surprising their fans. Here Rock plays it three-quarters straight and it’s perfectly nuanced. The Franco-American tensions are mussed up even further given Rock’s additional fish-out-of-water role as a black boyfriend.

Marion tries to keep her family in tow as they proceed to spread havoc in Marion’s building and elsewhere. She has her own photography show to worry about and there’s an odd auction which I’ll leave undescribed except to say it eventually involves Vincent Gallo, who plays himself (wait, doesn’t he always?) A scene with Delpy and a particularly persnickety art critic ends poignantly if chaotically. Dylan Baker’s around as a neighbor caught in Rose’s web of possible seduction.

America and France, comic opposites framed by the additional presence of a Chris Rock. There would be plenty here if Delay left it at that. She manages, however to tie in a warm and effervescent turn to the more serious once she brings to the film the unexpected theme of the passing of her mom, the French actress Marie Pillet. The more serious Delpy reached a crescendo in the excellent Richard Linklater films, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, the latter which Delpy co-wrote the screenplay. Here she manages to combine madcap Woody Allen-esque comedy with the candor of self-realized semi-biography. Delpy, who now lives in L. A., keeps a dual citizenship. Amidst the laughter brought on here there lurks an outside-the-box approach to filmmaking, full of a robust duality all its own.

4 Wild Francophiles (out of 5)

Celeste and Jesse Forever’s notion of what it means to lay out a romantic comedy may not coincide with your own. Despite successful scenes, the film is an illustration that merely finding an innovative approach to a hackneyed genre does not necessarily produce a fresh nor particularly cohesive result.

A film starring Rashid Jones and Andy Samberg, Celeste profiles a couple on the way to divorce court who are still very much codependent. Some novel stuff is offset by essentially a thin, erratic screenplay that too often veers off into loose-limbed detours. Jones’ reluctantly reenters the dating game after Samberg suddenly decides to marry a one-night stand who got pregnant. Her reactions are amusing and insightful at first, then run out of gas the more they’re repeated into the ground. The couples’ wear-it-like-a-placard friendship survives throughout the film and actually seems to intensify the more Samberg moves into his new relationship and the more Jones’ life gets complicated. A side story involves Emma Roberts as a teen starlet for whom Jones’ employer serves as publicist, and Jones at first as an “older woman” adversary and eventually as a nurturer/babysitter. A scandal that erupts involving a suggestive graphic in an important ad she places is about as believable as the tooth fairy. But at least Jones has a job. Her reluctance to bear the slacker Samberg’s kids is cited by her as reason for the breakup. Enough to make you flinch a little but it doesn’t help Samberg is about as emotive as a ramen noodle. When he finally stands up for himself it’s as if the Red Sea is parting. Our shock doesn’t last long. Before we know it we’re off to several scenes with co-screenwriter Will McCormack playing an amusing pot dealer friend to Jones, and Elijah Woods playing the obligatory gay co-worker/confidant.

Not all is shabby with this hard-trying effort co-written by Jones (the daughter QuIncy Jones and Mod Squad’s Peggy Lipton). Chris Messina (recently of Ruby Sparks, where he plays Paul Dano’s brother) is along for the ride as a guy who admittedly takes yoga classes to meet women. Yet he demonstrates a patient fondness for Jones and actually shows her a good time.

Good times are infrequent in Celeste and Jesse Forever. The void is occasionally filled with surgically precise snapshots of the actual emotions and nuances of a breakup between two people still very much in love. Too often, though, the scalpel goes flying off into a waiting room of ads with hidden penises, bimbo teen millionaires, and a patchwork of new cliches replacing the old ones.

2.5 Wispy Contrivances (out of 5)

White trash dolts. Trailer park narcissists. Total loop jobs.

Welcome to Killer Joe, William Friedkin’s new NC-17 noir that’s as demented as a hyena on acid, yet strangely perceptive and chillingly funny.

What happens when an ignoramus (Thomas Haden Church) and his grandiose if equally ignorant son (Emile Hirsch), throw all morals out the window and decide to off their respective ex-wife and mom for the insurance jingle? Can you say crude to a welldone pulpy? Think something might go wrong after they hire creepy detective and moonlighting hitman Matthew McConaughey? You have no idea. Keep your eye on Gina Gershon, Church’s current wife, and let the sick action flow. Church’s daughter (and Hirsch’s sister) Juno Temple, enters the fray as human “retainer” for the deliberate and ultranasty McConaughey.

Friedkin keeps his tongue in his cheek no matter how depraved and outrageous things get (no small feat). You’ll laugh with him, not at him. You don’t direct The Exorcist and then subsequently forget how to do shockjng with just the right remove. Here the sum of the glaringly blunt individual parts impacts with something extra. Call it a giddy look at a substrata of America that is all too ripe for the picking. Or, if you must, a pessimistic commentary on the bane of evil that permeates our lives. You’ll have the time of your life if you can stomach it.

Based on Tracy Letts’s (Pulitzer-winning August Osage County) play, there’s a not unpleasant stagy quality to the proceedings. It’s as if Lars Von Trier woke up one day and decided to do Raymond Chandler and turn the violence hose up several notches. Friedman keeps things eerie and sinister without clobbering us. He refuses to paper over in the slightest the wrongheaded foibles of a family run amock. Yet his seriocomic sweep miraculously wrestles control where none seems possible. Ever ready to spin out of control, Killer Joe’s characters’ basest of instincts become unhinged as we watch incredulously. It veers into areas simultaneously foreign and familiar, providing now a knowing if jolting shudder, then a nervous and not unsavory laugh.

4 Loop Jobs (out of 5)

Searching for Sugar Man, the story of Sixto Rodriguez, a Dylanesque musician discovered in his native Detroit in 1968, is a saga almost too fantastic to be believed. Faded into near-total obscurity after two album releases, Rodriguez’ records make a huge splash in the anti-apartheid community of early 1980’s South Africa of all places. He becomes a folk hero with all the appeal of an Elvis or the Beatles.

Only for a long time he never knew it. The information flow in and out of the essentially fascist South Africa of the time, was practically nonexistent. Censors there actually took to scratching the vinyl grooves of a particularly anti-authority song on one of Rodriguez’s LP’s. Yet the cult surrounding Rodriguez’s records, initially believed to have been started by a smuggled copy, flourished nonetheless.

This first time documentary by Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul ably swings back and forth from Detroit to Capetown. Generous samples from Rodriguez’s first two LP’s, Cold Fact and Coming To Reality (both originally released on Sussex Record) pepper what is essentially an unravelling of the great mystery surrounding Rodriguez’s rediscovery. Rumored dead after setting himself on fire onstage, lo and behold his adoring fans’ delight when he is actually found to be alive and well and working as a laborer in Detroit!

His initial tour of South Africa in the late 90’s, where he played to six sold-out stadiums, is rendered from the point of view of his worshipful fans. A parallel to the Beatles gig at Shea Stadium isn’t that outlandish ….Yet our filmmaker deprived us of much of any live footage during that concert. You can’t help but wonder was he hiding something?

Another elephant lurks in the room as well: why not an iota of information on Rodriguez’s apparent total creative hiatus for 25 years? Did he write ANYTHING new? And these three grown daughters who are interspersed through the film: why not a single word about who their mother was? What we get instead is an exploration of the money trail, or actual total lack of a money trail concerning any royalties owed to Rodriguez. An interview with Sussex founder and former Motown Records executive Clarence Avant pretty much puts to rest the absurdity of the dream that anyone would care two shits about honoring a 30 year old contract on a defunct record label. Avant is snarling and huffy but his words sum up the raw deal musicians have gotten over the years, especially during the decades depicted here.

Not that Rodriguez cares a lick. One of the main beauties of his story is how he gives away to family and friends nearly all the money earned in subsequent successful tours of South Africa. Also content to continue living in modest digs in working class Detroit, he ultimately comes off as a near saintly figure.You’ll want to know more, a lot more, about him after viewing this film. Start with the reissues of his recordings on Light In The Attic Records. One of his producers, Steve Rowland, comments in the film that the Rodriguez song “Cause” may be the “saddest song I’ve ever heard.” Them’s big words! Yet the infectious, authoritative melancholy of these songs most reminds me of that take-to-a-desert-island Van Morrison classic LP, Astral Weeks….Rodriguez will appear on David Letterman on August 14 and he’ll gig at World Cafe Live in Philadelphia on October 28.

4 Resurrected Legends (out of 5)