Month: April 2015

When Brian Bloom spots her, it’s purely love at first sight as he crosses the street toward the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. More a magazine-cover caricature than a character of the flesh-and-blood variety, Arielle (Berenice Marlohe, Skyfall) will consistently stymie this well-meaning but insipid rom-com.

She’s first of all French, we’re insistently reminded. The 5 to 7 of the title refers to the aren’t-we-sophisticated Gallic tolerance for regimented affairs within ostensibly healthy marriages, apparently conducted during dinner hours. However, the married mother of two is no more than a cardboard cut-out so we have trouble rooting for her.

Brian (Anton Yelchin) is hardly any more inspiring. Intended to hold up the American end of the bargain–a faltering moralistic yang to Arielle’s boldly glib yin, Bloom yields intermittent witticisms unfortunately copiously buttressed with banal proclamations. Arielle may fancy herself sophisticated but her tolerance for the sophomoric behavior of Bloom kills any confidence we have in her.

In a film where Arielle and her spouse’s respective lovers get invited to the same dinner party at their Upper East Side Bonfire of the Vanities-style townhouse it’s not enough to merely dangle absurdity. No, director Victor Levin also somehow feels compelled to include Julian Bond and Daniel Bouloud as dinner guests. Their presence adds absolutely nothing to the film except their names. And when Bloom, a struggling writer who receives a sudden break after meeting a hotshot young editor (Olivia Thirlby) at the dinner, then attends a totally phony-feeling celebration once the New Yorker accepts a story of his for publication, it’s real-life New Yorker editor David Remnick who miraculously appears in the film.

None of this excess is exactly totally out of place. Not when none other than Glenn Close and Frank Langella come marching into the film as Bloom’s Jewish parents. All bets are off once Close asks a waiter at the Carlyle Hotel if he could replace her uncomfortable chair–with a folding chair! Since he can’t, she informs him, “I’ll stand.” Which she actually does until the at-first devastating news hits her that her beloved son is having an affair with a married woman. Naturally, within a few minutes she’s planning on going shopping with her new pal, the French girl.

Langella is his usual excellent self in playing off both his eccentric wife and his equally bizarre son. Yet even he can’t save things, when (spoiler alert!) Bloom decides to ask Arielle to marry him. Here the film veers off to what seem like at least a dozen different endings. If Pinocchio were around, each subsequent climax would have challenged even his capacity for appendage swelling.

By the film’s very end, we’re asked to forgive its many screenplay difficulties in favor of a sentimental generalization: all great art can be attributed to suffering, specifically a love object in the artist’s past who has never been properly reconciled. Even if you buy that, this film does less to convince you it’s worth the struggle in the end and more to give you a serious shoulder shrug.

Bond Girl Goes Gong Girl….2.5 (out of 5) stars

The lowest point of the uneven True Story occurs when Jill Barker (Felicity Jones) pays an impromptu prison visit to accused murderer Christian Longo (James Franco). Longo is charged with unceremoniously offing his wife and three kids and stuffing their bodies in suitcases, which he then threw over a bridge. He also curiously impersonated Jones’s fallen journalist boyfriend, Mike Finkel, during his getaway in Mexico. Then, if you can believe it, Longo lured Finkel into visiting him in jail, which led to multiple conversations and eventual plans for Finkel to unleash a book on Longo’s plight.

Apparently, the scene where Barker visits Longo is entirely fabricated, with no mention of it in Finkel’s memoir, also entitled True Story. Her character is presumably raised into a more prominent sphere with the intention of alerting the viewer to a lack of satisfying emotional interaction between her and Finkel. She seeks an answer to the question of the real reason for his reaching out to Longo.

She’s not alone in her concerns. True Story cries out for a deeper portrayal of the inner life and concerns of Finkel, and for that matter, Longo, than are presented here. While the film is intermittently fascinating, it is more often frustrating.

Leaving aside the bigger question of why we should care about either of these men in the first place, attempts to figure out just why Finkel is moving in the direction he is, often go unsatisfied. The journalistic misrepresentation that got him booted from the New York Times was an apparent one-time sin rather than a serial pattern such as that of Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass. Thus one motive that might be considered is that which he declares to his wife: a scoop of the magnitude of Longo actually being innocent would be a big enough story to exonerate Finkel’s seemingly incontrovertible disgraced reputation. But is is hard to be sure other motivations might not be at work.

Finkel may be enamored with the idea of the two men obviously sharing a common public identity that belies who they really are. Or he may be more or less hypnotized by Longo’s commanding calm certitude. Does Finkel wish to exploit Longo? It’s a notion not out of line with his previous transgression where he created a false composite character for a NY Times Magazine cover story on slavery in present-day Africa. Director Rupert Goold and screenwriters Goold and Michael Kajganich either don’t have a point of view or they jointly wish to throw every possible theory against the wall and have the viewer choose. Hill does a well enough job given the circumstance. Franco shines. His portrays of Longo–erratically coherent and bracingly alluring–camouflages an inner emptiness.

So it’s easy to go for the idea that Finkel was simply vulnerable and Longo took him for a ride. Then he woke up to reality and, ironically, his book, thought to be dead, somehow still comes to publication. Finally Gold resorts to magical realism to somewhat let Finkel off the hook. OK, but if we haven’t built up empathy for him because we never got to know his underlying character, we leave the film essentially not caring.

A Fallen Journalist’s Microscopic Inner Life Crossed With A Possibly Murderous Con Man 3 (out of 5) stars

Clouds of Sils Maria contains an acting clinic and so much more. French director Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours, Carlos, Irma Vep, Demonlover) takes many chances with his solid, often wondrous, occasionally mystifying material. The viewer needs to do some work here but the rewards are plentiful. His screenplay is straightforward enough but teasingly opaque like the snake-like cloud formations he photographs so well in Sils Maria, a beautiful region in the Swiss Alps. The cloud formation portends bad weather, and it’s symbolism hangs in the rare mountain air with ravening doom.

Juliette Binoche, working primarily in English, has never been better, which ought to be cause enough for celebration. Her Maria Enders, a famous film actress who goes back to her theatrical roots amidst a challenging role decision, will linger in the memory. Yet she is nearly upstaged by a marvelous Kristen Stewart. Watching the two in turn harmonious and at loggerheads is a joy to behold.

Their many invigorating scenes reach a pinnacle when, in one of their rehearsals together, Enders and Valentine (Stewart), her personal assistant, their clashing viewpoints of the play are transcended by an exhilarating blending of fiction and fact. Enders has reluctantly agreed to play the older character of the same play that gave her breakout status when, at 18, she played the opposite main character, an ingenue. Increasingly, lines become blurred between the play’s text and the dynamic of Enders and Valentine’s relationship. As an exclamation point to this interplay, a mystery toward the end of the film takes us from what had been Gallic-flavored Bergman-territory swiftly into Bunuel-land, and just as swiftly, back out again.

Lindsay Lohan-like bad girl JoAnn Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz) is signed to the new version of the play to portray the younger character, taking with her the perceived baggage of a millennial popcorn-film star. Assayas begins to thrust an additional theme alongside the theme of the older film star who denies she’s aging. Enders, who has done blockbuster films of her own (she complains about not wanting to do another film where she’s hooked into wires) comes to an empathetic yet distanced appreciation of the young film star. Their final scene together provides a bleakly chilling, to-the-bone coda.

Assayas, with his penchant for fade outs just when a scene starts to contain some action, is a master here of the rich, engaging conversation–the longer, the better. Stewart, who,won the French equivalent of The Oscar (The Cesar) for this role is so natural she is scary. And Binoche is simply one of the few genius actors in film. Without her this virtually flawless gem is nearly unimaginable.

An Acting Clinic From Binoche and Stewart With Graceful, Daring Direction 4.5 (out of 5) stars

Proof that movies need not be cinematic to be potent, Unfriended contains basically one set: the desktop of teenager Blaire (Shelley Hennig). We find her online revisiting the suicide of her friend Laura Barns on the anniversary of her death. A flirtatious Skype session with Blaire’s boyfriend Mitch (Moses Storm) ensues until it is interrupted by three of their mutual friends barging in on their conversation.

Then they notice there’s someone else present on the chat. Who’s the nameless, faceless intruder who communicates exclusively in typed messages, they wonder? They first assume it’s a glitch and then a hacker until Blaire starts receiving messages from Laura’s Facebook page. When Ken (Jacob Wysockyi) summons security software to put an end to the shenanigans, things get a lot spookier. Throughout, things like the absence of an “Unfriend” option on a pull-down menu or a Gmail with no “forward” command provide beaucoup thrills.

Once the groups’ secrets emerge during a clever and suspenseful game devised by the increasingly ominous “Laura,” Unfriended
holds up an effective facade of the evils of cyberbullying. Posting an embarrassing video of a friend on YouTube can come back to bite you in the ass.

But beneath this fairly obvious message lies a rather sly critique of a more unique dilemma.
Digital technology has become a catalyst for peer pressure of heretofore unimagined levels of shame and confusion. Director Levan Gabriadze and screenwriter Nelson Greaves are highlighting modern technology’s ability to fester mistrust among friends while simultaneously enabling the very worst aspects of the kids’ personalities. Watching the group reveal and then violently react to secrets about each other above and beyond those pertaining to Laura at first seems like a mere over-the-top shriek-fest. Then it chillingly and fascinatingly becomes evident this horrific havoc wrought by a simple ghost trying to get her revenge jollies takes on a terror exclusive to a new age….Click.

Fun Terror On a Desktop….4 (out of 5) stars

The hits barely outnumber the misses in While We’re Young, Noah Baumbach’s latest offering. A New York City-based comedy of manners that focuses on Ben Stiller’s and Naomi Watts’ characters’ mid-life crisis, the film has much of the feel of vintage Woody Allen. Well, not quite. I can’t remember Woody Allen ever getting anywhere near as preachy as Baumbach does by the end of this film. So Baumbach (The Squid and The Whale, Greenberg, the underrated Margot at the Wedding) may superbly reach Allen levels here but his movie unfortunately stalls just when it might have amped things up a notch.

Fresh with insight, Baumbach’s screenplay has a professor and aspiring 44-year-old filmmaker, Josh (Stiller) and his unfortunately miscarriage-prone wife Cornelia (Watts) fight the emerging ennui of watching their best friends and new parents (Maria Dizzia and Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz) change into baby-centric mode. Into the couple’s new void enters a student of Josh’s. It doesn’t take much for aspiring documentarian Jamie (Adam Driver) and his wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried) to ingratiate themselves into Josh’s world. Suddenly, Josh and Cornelia are not only admiring but also imitating their younger pals’ behavior, much to the bewilderment of their older, now not so best friends.

Like Baumbach’s previous film, Frances Ha, we’re both treated to and asked to endure the idea of adults refusing to grow up. Sure, a lot of this depends on just how plausible Jamie and Darby come across. Yet given Josh and Cornelia’s basically empty life, the bar is set somewhat lower. Thus, the occasionally cloying and mannered tics of Jamie
and Darby amount to mostly harmless good fun.

An odyssey the two couples go on with a shaman-directed mescaline trip is merely a mix of amusing and bland rather than the egregious nonsense it could easily have become in lesser hands. But when Josh explains how he and Darby took their wedding vows “in an empty water tower in Harlem” Baumbach is pushing the envelope. Likewise, when Jamie refuses to google anything because “it’s better to just not know.” Unlike Josh and Cornelia’s heavy reliance on technology, Jamie and Darby go the other way. Their huge vinyl record collection is testament to this. But does Baumbach really need to add on a VHS tape collection and a manual typewriter? Precious. And those are the good parts of the film.

When things quickly become more serious and Jamie is found to be not all that innocent, we’re suddenly thrust into a world of the ethics of documentary-making. Despite a sturdy performance by Charles Grodin as both Josh’s father-in-law and former mentor, While We’re Young gets old fast, devolving into two former buddies unwittingly competing on who is actually more bratty. Then comes the histrionic denouement smack dab in the middle of Lincoln Center. What had been much of the time sharp observation fades quickly into unsavory excess.

Stiller and Watts maintain the creative sheen, but Baumbach needs to brush up on his Allen.

Decent But Not Upper-Echelon Baumbach … 3.5 (out of 5) stars