4.26.2010

Greenberg (Baumbach 2010)

Greenberg - **1/2

                At times poignant and at times hysterically funny, sometimes even simultaneously, Greenberg, Noah Baumbach’s latest is somewhat less of the sum of its parts, falling short of his two excellent previous films The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding. Here, Baumbach has created an interesting protagonist and doesn’t know quite what to do with him, letting him wander the cleverly paralleled sprawls of Hollywood and his own psyche until the film decides its going to settle on treacly and clichéd “let go of the past/its never too late to grow up” palabum . One of the characters actually says to the protagonist that it’s never too late “to embrace the life you never planned on.”
                Greenberg (Ben Stiller, quite good), you see, was once part of a cool band (The Magic Markers!), but when they got offered a record deal he ended up shooting it down (how much he intended to do that remains ambiguous) and now he’s a 40-year-old carpenter who’s recovering from a nervous breakdown. So when his rich developer brother and family take a working vacation to Vietnam he decides to watch their house and their dog and “do nothing for a while” and just find himself, man. In the meantime there’s Florence (Greta Gerwig), the Greenberg’s au pair who, at 25, really shouldn’t be having a midlife crisis quite so soon, and the dog gets sick and Greenberg reunites with all his old friends from back in the day, man, and he’s just finding himself, you know?
                So Greenberg is an antisocial and hugely immature jerk who is completely unable to take criticism, and Ben Stiller makes his relatively sympathetic, which is good. The bigger problem is the Florence character, whose motivations are unknowable behind Baumbach unempathetic writing and Gerwig’s performance; the film fails the Bechdel test, and Florence ends up being something like the inverse of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the Pixie Dream Girl on Lithium, maybe. Her character is mostly bewildering, and ends up being little but a disappointing foil for Greenberg’s Journey To Maturity ™.
                Baumbach shoots his characters in profile a lot, especially in the car, watching the endless roads of Los Angeles blur by behind them; Harry Savides shoots the film with his trademark gorgeous naturalism, giving more credibility than deserved to tropes like Greenberg’s fixation with a Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man at a dealership. I’m being pretty harsh; the film moves well, has lots of great moments (I particularly enjoyed Greenberg’s drug-addled rantings at a party of 20-somethings), and almost gets to what it wants to be. In the end, though, we’re left wondering exactly why we care.
(Seen at the Landmark Bethesda Row)

4.20.2010

SOTD Sleigh Bells Ring Ring

I first heard Sleigh Bells "Ring Ring" on the XM/Sirius station "XMU" in the context of the surprising popularity of Sleigh Bells at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, TX.  At first, I was skeptical, the sound was so thin, this lady was singing about braces and having a heart but I left it on, because, something about it was catchy.  Now, like a lot of other indie music, three or four listens later and I am hooked on the easy mellow uber catchy beat and breathy melodic lyrics that seem to be about nothing in particular except the mercuric experience of being a sixteen year old. 


What do you think?

The Ghost Writer (Polanski, 2010)

The Ghost Writer (Polanski, 2010) - *1/2

SPOILER ALERT


                Well-shot, well-acted, well-edited, well-designed, well-directed – all it needed was a story that wasn’t a pointless mish-mash of microwaved 70s conspiracism and ripped-from-the-headlines liberal porn. Sadly, that’s all The Ghost Writer ends up being able to offer, tossing away good talent after bad screenwriting, reinforcing what I call the Travolta-Kidman corollary – there is no correlation between talent and taste.
                Adam Lang (an A+ effort from a fundamentally miscast Pierce Brosnan) is this ever-so-slightly-parallel universe’s Tony Blair, a beleaguered former British PM, a once-charismatic renewal figure hounded out of office for being an American lapdog, is now holed up on his tiny island modernist mansion slaving through his memoirs while the ICC works its way towards charging him for participating in rendition. His ghostwriter, tragically, drowns, so its up to Our Hero, apolitical professional ghostwriter (Obi-Wan McGregor) to fix Lang’s crappy books while negotiating his spurned wife (Olivia Williams, great in a terrible role), assistant/mistress (Kim Cattrall), the anti-Lang protestors, the media, and etc etc. Strange things happen, real-life parallels pop-up (the Condi look-alike!), dastardly conspiracies are uncovered (Tom Wilkinson!), you can probably write the rest yourself (and it might have been a better flick).
                The Ghost Writer fundamentally reveals itself during a key late-film twist involving an assassination. It’s one of the few things the film leaves at least the slightest bit ambiguous (and the scene is shot brilliantly by Polanski), but the implications get at the heart of what the film is about, dredging up The Parallax View, Capricorn One, and their cohort to drive its point home with a sledgehammer. Those films were (to varying degrees) great in large part because they captured the zeitgeist of an era; The Ghost Writer tries to graft today’s events onto yesterday’s zeitgeist to get an inert object of only technical interest. The world is a more complicated place, and we know too much; the blindingly simple and obvious conspiracy posited by the film (and the face-palmingly faux-cynical forced ending) is more laughable than anything else. Finish by assuming a wisecrack about the real ghost writer this film needed.

(Seen at the Shepherdstown Opera House)

A Prophet (Audiard, 2009)

A Prophet (Un prophète)
***



Jacques Audiard's A Prophet is far too long, sometimes a bit confusing, and in the end predictable and formulaic. Worse than that, despite also sweeping the César awards, it doesn't rise to the same dizzying heights of emotion, whiz-bang storytelling and the challenging spiritual ambiguities of Audiard's previous film, the glorious The Beat That My Heart Skipped.



And yet. A Prophet moves willfully towards a destination that perhaps I should have described less as predictable than inevitable; as the moment-by-moment tension grows more tight, the realization slowly dawns that Malik (Tahar Rahim), the prisoner without family or friend, past or people, will ascend to the top of a power hierarchy that extends far beyond the jail in which he is held, by the end almost nominally. A lesson without didacticism, an "issue" film without a whiff of preachiness, and a moral film without "good" or "bad" guys, A Prophet is an at-times spellbinding march through the criminal system in France - not merely the de jure criminal justice system of arrest, trail, imprisonment and parole, but the de facto system of gangs and bribery, networks and hierarchies, drugs and murder. Taking place over years, even shifting demographics tilts playing fields in the claustrophic but never truly insular world inside the prison walls.

 

 None of the characters are sociopaths, none ciphers or cookie-cutters (Audiard loves his supporting cast); but none end up vibrating with the fierce urgency of Romain Duris' Thomas Seyr, something that saps A Prophet of some intensity compared to its predecesor. Nevertheless, a film very much worth seeing, and a film very much worth chewing over, A Prophet will probably linger, slightly unpleasantly, like a bad memory half-forgotten, an aftertaste impossible to quite wash away.

 (Seen at the Landmark Bethesda Row)