Balcony Blues

With his third film released in this country, Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi continues his growth in stature and deserves to be included among the very best international auteurs. The brilliantly absorbing About Elly was filmed two years before Farhadi’s Oscar-winning gem A Separation (2011) and withheld from domestic distribution until now. Like A Separation and The Past (2013), About Elly also acutely deals with tough ethical choices within the confines of social codes of behavior, and the whole idea of traditionalism versus modernity in a rapidly changing society. It’s also one hell of a suspense film with all around terrific acting.

A group of middle-class urban couples and their young children take off on holiday to a villa on the Caspian Sea. One of the wives, Sepideh (an excellent Golshifteh Farahani), implores her child’s kindergarten teacher, Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti) to come along. Elly may be less progressive than the couples, who spontaneously dance, break out into song, and play a savvy game of charades. Also along is a recently divorced single male friend of the group. Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini) is on holiday from Germany, where he’d gone to live with his ex-bride. The group makes little effort to downplay their collective wish to match up the two young singles.

Elly seems mysterious and she keeps insisting she can only stay one night. Sepideh also seems one to hold onto secrets. She fails to tell the group she hasn’t actually rented their villa for the entire weekend. Still gleeful, they move to a shabbier place without windows or beds. The ever present sea, remarkably captured by cinematographer Hussein Jafarian seems to overrule any possible despondency. It hardly seems like a usually intense Farhadi film since any possible ominous undertone beneath the group’s frolicking is barely present.

Farhadi then brings about a breathtaking tone shift. The less known about the events that transpire the better. The transformation of the characters from carefree to inculpating, from innocent to guilt-ridden, is nothing less than masterful filmmaking. Ordinary events immediately gain an extraordinary nature. Faced with no easy decisions, the couples portray both individual identity crises and a more tradition-bound group dynamic. As if that weren’t enough, an underlying political symbolism presents itself. One where the past and the emerging present are perhaps irreconcilable foes.

Down By The Ocean (All Is Not As It Seems)….5 (out of 5) stars

Never at a loss for finding ways to disappoint us, Hot Pursuit is utterly devoid of a basis in anything resembling reality. Unfortunately, a comedy depends of plausibility every bit as much as a drama. Thus, this new Reese Witherspoon/Sophia Vergara female buddy flick becomes fatally unfunny almost as soon as it begins.

Officer Cooper (Witherspoon) or “My Little Pony,” “the pencil-top gnome,” or “the tiny little weird robot” as Daniella Rivera (Vergara) will come to call her, is assigned to escort the blustery Rivera, wife of a mob associate, to testify against her husband’s boss. The police protection she provides is every bit by the book since Cooper spends much of her screen time monotonously reciting various numerical police codes.

Then there’s the running gag that every time the two women run into a TV or radio report about themselves, the on-air reporters list Cooper’s height as progressively shorter and Rivera’s age as increasingly higher. It was almost funny the first time but director Anne Fletcher runs the joke into the ground. Similar to the police codes bit, just about everything goes on too long or crash lands into a cliche. Fast-talking Cooper becomes a veritable cartoonish motor-mouth once Rivera’s convertible blows up, sending the many kilos of cocaine hidden in the car into the air and into Cooper’s lungs.

Unfunny comedies are rampant these days but repellant ones are a rarer breed. Something about two usually fine actresses slogging through material this lame thwarts even the virtually automatic laughs Vergara can eke out of almost any role with her eyes closed. It’s not even as if Witherspoon and Vergara wrangled a paycheck at the expense of compensating for the lack of quality mature women’s roles theses days. They both executive produced so they have themselves to blame.

Odd Couple Sputters While Audience Cringes….1 (out of 5) stars

Trying to come off as simultaneously cynical and warm-and-fuzzy, D-Train succeeds somewhat tantamount to a flat tire. Starting with an insipid premise, and scaling new heights in screenplay vapidness, the new Jack Black vehicle possesses a jittery, shifting point of view and a horrid plausibility quotient. Its main character, Dan Landsman (Black), part schizoid and part sociopath, is a low self esteem schlub who tries to make up for being a high school nobody by taking the reins as the chairman of the 20th Class Reunion Committee. It’s an admittedly vainglorious job title yet Dan seems to have somehow seized the position rather than have gotten elected to it. After all, he’s so unpopular the rest of the committee avoid inviting him for post-meeting drinks. His idea of witty banter is miraculously even dumber than Will Farrell’s in Get Hard.

Even dumber is Dan’s boss Bill Shurmur (Jeffrey Tambor), who is somehow duped by Black into thinking a huge business deal is in the works in Los Angeles. The running gag is Bill is a total Luddite regarding online technology. First time directors Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel stretch this already flimsy idea into basically making Bill a total idiot. You see, Dan needs to go to L. A. to recruit the high school cool guy, Oliver Lawless (James Marsden) for the reunion and he needs to get there without his wife knowing he’s a lunkhead who would take a mission of that sort so seriously. So he lies to his boss about a fictitious deal. Only Bill decides to come along on the trip, too. All of which is some strange shit since he also decides to do absolutely no due diligence whatsoever on the impending deal. If you’re starting to get the idea that this film resembles a queasy train wreck, you’re not far off.

Black, who fairly recently has done some of his very best work (Richard Linklater’s excellent Bernie), has a yeoman’s job to attempt to keep the screenplay from showing its true colors. He fails as miserably as the rest of this production. And now for the SPOILER:

Dan, the pathetic victim of much high school wrath, receives revenge of sorts when he not only convinces Lawless–now an L.A. actor–to hang out with him but also to attend the reunion. He also gets swept into a sexual alliance with Lawless, and it’s from here on the film quickly goes off the rails. Lawless also impersonates the CEO from the fictitious deal, too, so the business deal scam suddenly preposterously takes on a new existence mainly as a backdrop for Dan and Oliver’s bickering. Days go by and Bill thinks the deal is still on. Ha ha.

Deciding to go with the least honest denouement wins the film no further favors. It goes from almost thoughtful edgy to Disney-esque cliche in no time flat. Dan is, in turn, wimpy love struck, vindictive jilted lover, and, finally, mature, lesson-learned wise man–presto! The film’s title is also a quandary. For lack of a better, it may have something to do with Dan’s 14-year-old son’s overcoming his trepidation about taking part in a threesome. Or it may not. For that matter, D-Train may just suck. Or it may suck on multiple levels priming itself for year-end Ten Worst Lists ….I’m thinking the latter.

Jack Black wastes his time (and ours) …. 1 star (out of 5)

“What will happen to me if I fail your test? Do you think I might be switched off?” asks the lovely and stone-serious android Ava. Her examiner Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), startled by her comment, need not look any further in answering his own question of whether Ava possesses a self-awareness, and perhaps, a consciousness. To the delight of the viewer, the apparent answer to Caleb’s question spawns a deeper level of intriguing puzzlement . What are Ava’s intentions and motives beyond self-preservation?

The forceful catalyst for Caleb’s search for truth is his ubiquitous (through surveillance) boss and mentor, Nathan. Director Alex Garland’s excellent screenplay teases with the additional dilemma of whether Nathan is actually an objective scientist intent on discovery or a genius gone mad or a little bit of both.

Oscar Isaac, in a flat-out fabulous performance, plays Nathan with an edgy, jaded charisma. Nathan always seems a step or two ahead of Caleb. From the outset, he does not appear to be playing this experiment by the book. The hard-drinking, self-assured Nathan is clearly intent on giving Caleb a maze of sorts to figure out. The puzzle at hand will also include Nathan as more than a dispassionate observer. Yet figuring him out is a relatively easy for Caleb next to figuring out Ava. Her stark advances contain an eerie ambivalence. Alicia Vikander, trained as a ballet dancer, brings a stunning screen presence as Ava. She’s an actress to definitely keep an eye on.

Ex Machina is a thinker’s paradise next to most films on the subject of artificial intelligence. Screenwriter and novelist Garland, in his first film directing, presents an amazing visual style and a patient, deliberate sense of pace. The film’s impactful twists are arrived at organically, with a heavy dose of plausibility.

Ex Machina never loses its footing in favoring the cerebral over the sensational. In many ways an anti-action film, it takes its time presenting its case for the questions at hand. Image by image it nails its commentary yet adroitly avoids sounding too academic. With a first film this good, Garland stakes out a place in imaginative cinema that should keep stimulating for a long time.

An Edgy Provocative Classic .. 4.5 (out of 5) stars

Complaining about Avengers: The Age of Ultron may be as futile as complaining about the weather, but next to the first film in the series, the new installment is a dull cloudy day compared to its relatively sunny predecessor. Basically a non-aficionado who merely dabbles in the Marvel world, I identified with the deer-in-the-headlight gaze of the film’s two new rather indistinct characters, the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who often seem lost. Hankering for a kick-in-the-pants approach similar to the refreshing Guardians of the Galaxy, I was treated instead to a $250 million banging and whirring replete with an overly dense plot and copious artificial intelligence gobbledygook (For the real thing in A. I., rush out to see the excellent Ex Machina).

Sadly, it’s most interesting character, Vision (an excellent Paul Bettany) doesn’t appear until three-quarters of the way in, and despite the film’s 141-minute length, his screen time is curtailed. Instead, director Josh Whedon makes sure his central characters get plenty of screen time: Captain America, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, the. Black Widow, Hawkeye. The all-star cast all do a credible job of portraying their comic book counterparts. What’s missing is the film has little soul. It almost seems like a parody of a clunky, stiff, overly serious superhero film.

While the witty bantering from the first Avengers is still present, with the exception of the steadily reliable Robert Downey as Tony Stark/Ironman, the quips often seem forced. It’s somewhat moving when the Black Widow Natasha (Scarlett Johannson) and Hulk Bruce Banner (Mark Rufalo) stake out an oddly unrequited romantic thing. Natasha’s matter-of-fact mix of seduction and tender patience with Banner’s reluctance possesses a plausible haltering rhythm. Yet even here the half-baked, inert tone of their conversations suggests Whedon’s real goal is sacrificing what might have been any real substance in their relationship for the laying of the groundwork for a sequel.

And now for the obligatory, “But if you’re a Marvel freak, go ahead and see this and knock yourself out.” You may even find Ultron (the voice of James Spader) a fascinating character. His ability to replicate himself insures he hangs around awhile despite the dire danger he presents to the human race. All these superheroes are indestructible, right? Maybe, but all the characters in the Marvel Encyclopedia are not as omnipotent as The Marvel Franchise itself. With the Avengers: Age of Ultron the proceedings have become downright labyrinthine, and not a little patronizing.

Bring The Red Bull….2.5 (out of 5) stars

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