Archive for May, 2009

F for Fake

May 30, 2009

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Magic, painting, literature, filmmaking and so on, it’s all a big fake. A good fake is the crucial and decisive ingredient if an artist is to pull the wool over the viewer/reader’s eyes and achieve the illusion of an alternate experience. We revel in fakery, and celebrate the makers of fakery, whether they be magicians or filmmakers. In F for Fake, Orson Welles — the ultimate master of the fake (his radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds could be among the 20th century’s greatest fakes) an artist who used inventive devices in radio, theater, and cinema to seduce audiences into deeper realms of the imagination and illusion — contemplates the whole idea of Fakery. The notorious master art forger Elmyr de Hory and the equally notorious writer Clifford Irving, whose faux biography of Howard Hughes turned him into a tabloid sensation, are the subjects around which Welles pivots his wryly funny and personable essay on the testy relationship between illusion and authenticity, and between art and commerce.

Where do we draw the line between art and forgery? Does the fraudulent nature of what de Hory and Irving do so well automatically invalidate and diminish the value of their works, though as observers we marvel at the impeccable perfection of their forgeries? Welles’ essay isn’t striving for conclusions, but it entertains the notion of art as illusion with humor and self-reflection. That discursive quality in the film is also, to some extent anyway, its undoing, as Welles’s narration turns over and over on itself, one idea overlapping another, replacing or muddling the last, threatening to obfuscate the filmmaker’s entire enterprise. Sometimes we don’t know where to look or which of his observations to retain and take with us through the rest of this otherwise compelling journey.

Welles structures F for Fake as an extended monologue, a point-counterpoint speculation on how and why de Hory and Irving pulled off their respective fakes, so much so that they built success and fame out of their practice. The tone is clever and light, the editing at once whimsical and complex as Welles cross-cuts between his original footage and archival documentary footage of de Hory and Irving. That interplay makes F for Fake a surprisingly dynamic, constantly engaging experimental documentary, a personal essay that gives the viewer the feeling that he’s in Welles’s expansive company around a dinner table while he considers and pontificates on a pet topic. That in itself is a privilege, and reason enough to check out F for Fake, the filmmaker’s last and among his most cherished personal projects.

Grade: B

Directed by: Orson Welles
Written by: Orson Welles
Cast: Orson Welles, Oja Kodar, Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving, Joseph Cotton, Francois Reichenbach, Richard Wilson, Paul Stewarak

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Documentary | 1 Comment »

Milton Glaser: To Inform & Delight

May 21, 2009

Milton Glaser is so intelligent and articulate an artist and thinker that any documentary about him would have to be grossly inept for it to be anything less than likeable. Thankfully, we’re in smooth, sure territory in Milton Glaser: To Inform & Delight, Wendy Keys’s warm, affectionate portrait of the iconic New York City commercial artist. As a seasoned director of several tribute films for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Keys is skilled at biographical profiles of her subjects, and that facility serves her beautifully in crafting an in-depth look at Glaser’s art and career, as well as his work’s social and philosophical underpinnings.
Read it here…

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Best of 2009, Documentary | Leave a Comment »

Star Trek

May 15, 2009

STAR TREK

If you’re a Star Trek fan, then J.J. Abrams’ reboot of the Star Trek franchise will have its share of delights. These will come in the collective form of nostalgia: Fans may revel in the chance to re-visit beloved characters, worlds, stories, even sound effects. Remember that inexplicable, reverberating chirp that used to emanate from the bridge of the Enterprise in the show’s 60′s version? Well, you’ll hear it again in J.J. Abram’s update, and, hearing it early in the film, I admit to that frisson of pleasing familiarity, and I was glad that Abrams felt as warmly about those classic retro effects as I did.

Star Trek will also appeal to action junkies because the script by Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman gets most of its (warp) drive by shunting from one action scenario to the next. The plot involves that sci-fi chestnut: Time travel. After witnessing the destruction of their world, a rabble of Romulans travels back in time to wreak vengeance on Vulcans and Earthlings, both of whom they believe to be the perpetrators of their demise.

The Romulans’ time jump posits them moments before the birth of James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), fated to be captain of the Enterprise, whose life path becomes altered thanks to the Romulans space-time disturbance. In this altered reality, Kirk’s father promptly dies a martyr’s death as the spaceship he’s captaining confronts the Romulan menace, and Kirk henceforth grows up fatherless, lonely, and, all in all, your prototypical, psychically wounded rogue and reluctant hero-to-be.

Star Trek’s quantum reality conceit makes this not an origin but a pseudo-origin story, an alternate history of Kirk and company running parallel to Gene Roddenberry’s master plan. Does that make this Star Trek a cop-out? A cynical answer may be that the plot gave Abrams and Paramount free rein in formulating a re-branded, blockbuster-friendly — and I’ll say it, “dumbed down” — Star Trek for the global masses.

One by one, Abrams trundles out the other key players in the Star Trek universe: Spock (Zachary Quinto), nursing his push-pull relationship with his human half; Uhura (the striking Zoe Saldana), a brilliant spitfire with whom Spock shares undercurrents of romance; Chekhov (Anton Yelchin), who spouts his dialogue with a suitably broad Russian accent; Sulu (John Cho) who’s fencing background (duh!) is singled out as his trademark character trait; Scotty (Simon Pegg), the befuddled-yet-brilliant engineer; and “Bones” McCoy, the ship’s crotchety doctor, played by Karl Urban in an uncanny simulacrum of the character patented by DeForest Kelley. Watching Urban assay this role is such a joyous experience — if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then Urban is Kelley’s sincerest fan, and the rest of us are only too lucky to behold the actor’s impeccable resurrection of the good doctor. In likable performances, Pine and Quinto give us game approximations of the formative Kirk and Spock, each exhibiting essences of his character’s personality — Kirk’s lascivious bravado and Spock’s alternately hot-and-cold stoicism. For the Romulans, Eric Bana snarls and glowers in a fiery but one-note role as their leader Nero, baying for Vulcan and human blood.

Twined with the cat-and-mouse game between the Romulans and the Enterprise crew is the issue of Kirk’s assuming the captaincy of the Enterprise. Given Kirk’s rookie status, it feels contrived, yet it precipitously guns towards its own foregone conclusion — that, by the end of Star Trek, he will be ship’s captain. Kirk’s journey does offer the opportunity for Abrams to bring out Leonard Nimoy in a nifty cameo as the older, sage Spock — himself pursing the Romulans from the future — and here to stoke the flames of Kirk’s destiny. As the face-off with Nero arrives, I was both stunned and disappointed to note how it all looked and felt like a scene from Return of the Jedi or, worse yet, Revenge of the Sith — both lesser sci-fi’s from what I believe to be a largely lesser series.

As director, Abrams is of the comic-book school of character development. That is, he intersperses personality tidbits as a kind of ready-to-go seasoning over the casserole of chases and explosions that comprise the entire narrative framework of his pictures. Abrams and his writers’ are concerned, first and foremost, with running these iconic characters through their origin-story paces with the maximum of large-scale, effects-driven antics that nail down character traits, rather than explore the dynamics of these characters in any kind of serious, organic way. As appealing as they all are, these characters are eventually cogs in the larger machinery of the plot. The approach runs counter to the storytelling philosophy that went into Roddenberry’s series, in which plot was meant to serve, expand and enrich the characters’ understanding of themselves.

Don’t get me wrong: This is a skilfully constructed studio picture that boasts a casting coup on par with The Lord of the Rings’. While it underserves its source material, it more than amply provides a much-needed quotient of reasonably smart summer entertainment. It never transcends its own story the way the best Star Treks do (the series and the films), and falls short of the grander thematic ambitions that made Roddenberry’s vision so enduring and beloved. This Star Trek has something bigger on its mind. It smells like popcorn and sounds like a cash register.
Grade: B-

Directed by: J.J. Abrams
Written by: Robert Orci, Alex Kurtzman
Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Leonard Nimoy, Eric Bana, Bruce Greenwood, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Ben Cross, Winona Ryder, Chris Hemsworth

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Science Fiction | 2 Comments »

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

May 9, 2009

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In Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, documentarian Marina Zenovich takes an absorbing, incisive look at the life and career of enfant terrible Roman Polanski, the filmmaker responsible for such landmark art-cinema fare as Knife in the Water and Repulsion and such New Hollywood provocations as Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. Polanski is also the man at the center of what became one of Hollywood’s most notorious sex-crime trials, which resulted in his conviction, in 1977, of statutory rape of a minor — in this case, the 13-year-old girl who was modeling for him while he was shooting photos for a magazine spread. Polanski pleaded guilty to charges of rape and, while that mitigated his sentencing, it also opened an ugly, odious can of worms in the form of massive abuse and manipulation of the judicial process, and ushered in a horrendous ordeal in which Polanski dealt with both jail time and a judge who exploited the high-profile trial for gaining media celebrity status.

By pulling back to a wider view of Polanski’s past, his career, and the particulars of his background and circumstances, Zenovich gives us both a fascinating portrait of an often misunderstood figure, in a sense, constructing a documentary defense of his character, while leaving it to us to decide the verdict, i.e. whether or how much to place our sympathies with him. Wanted and Desired peels back layers of Polanski’s biography — the death of both his parents in Nazi concentration camps, his rise in 1960s European cinema circles and, subsequently, in Hollywood — to his marriage to Sharon Tate, which ended in Tate’s murder. That event spelled the end of Polanski’s honeymoon with life in America and with the American press.

While the sections that trace Polanski’s dissipated years, especially in 70s Hollywood, now feel stale and noxious — how many times are we going to hear about how hard Hollywood once partied? — it’s when Zenovich digs into the details of Polanski’s trial that her documentary gets its grip on the viewer and makes it utterly impossible to turn away. The trial and its aftermath were a travesty and a tragedy — Wanted and Desired eloquently points out just how much. Fearing that the judge — who’d already proven himself to be crooked — was not to be trusted, Polanski fled to France before the verdict was determined. (If this last bit of information was a spoiler for you, then you need to brush up on your recent Hollywood history.)

Fortunately for world cinema, Polanski’s career has flourished in Europe these past three decades (honors include a 2002 Best Director Oscar for his Holocaust survival saga The Pianist). And just as we’re about to close the book on what was a dark chapter in both Polanski’s life and in America’s post-60s pop culture, we remind ourselves that Polanski — for all the travails of his life — still did admit to something fairly seamy and appalling. How much slack do we give him when all’s said and done? Still, what was worse? The crime or the punishment? The fact that Zenovich succeeds in provoking these questions as she re-examines a traumatic episode in the eventful life of a confounding cultural figure makes Wanted and Desired an essential entry in Hollywood’s cultural chronicle.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Marina Zenovich
Written by: Joe Bini, Peter G. Morgan, Marina Zenovich
Cast: Istvan Bajzat, Steve Barshop, Marilyn Bishop, Madeline Bessmer, Pierre-Andre Boutang, Andrew Braunsberg, Richard Brenne

Posted in Documentary | Leave a Comment »

Adventureland

May 8, 2009

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“It’s funny because it’s true” has always been a handy and accurate adage in describing perceptive observational comedy. The humor doesn’t have to try hard to land its punchlines because it’s all grounded in easily identifiable but no less painful truths about day to day life. It’s this infinitely rich, varied, and, yes, truthful terrain that writer-director Greg Mottola sets up shop to tell his semi-autobiographical tale, Adventureland, about college grad James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) slumming it as a games concessionaire at a chintzy Pittsburgh amusement park. The year: 1987, a time that Mottola handily evokes with a power pop soundtrack fueled by such era staples as The Cure, Crowded House, INXS and, of course, Falco, whose “Rock Me Amadeus” becomes the target of a recurring, affectionate gag.

It’s the summer between college and the rest of his life and, too broke to join his friends on a summer-long European jaunt, James is stuck at the titular park — a kind of metaphorical limbo as James struggles to sort out his future. He’s a brainy, idealistic and romantic kid, but full of artistic and intellectual ambition. He’s still a virgin by default because the opportunity to close the deal with the girls he’s dated never presented themselves — okay, this kid may be too neurotic for his own good.

But at Adventureland, James falls like he never has for Em (Kristen Stewart), a co-worker — a saturnine beauty, adrift romantically and nursing bitterness towards her father for his past callousness towards her late mother, and towards his tawdry new replacement wife. Both unsure and afraid of what the future holds, yet eagerly faithful to its possibilities, James and Em strike up a solid friendship that soon wavers into a tentative romance. It’s complicated, though — it always is, right? — because Em is carrying on a sad, hopeless affair with the park’s married handyman and would-be musician, Mike (Ryan Reynolds) — the kind of cad whose good looks spare him from complete loserdom. Torn with jealousy, James tries straying with the resident lust object, Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), but, while Mike is clearly contemptible (he claims to have once jammed with Lou Reed, James’ idol, but is oblivious to the song “Satellite of Love”), he’s too pitiable for both James’ and us to level much scorn on him.

James’ journey is one of finding self-assurance through inner wisdom, not shows of bravado — a hard-won skill that the nerds among us perfect as we grow up. James develops a warm, charming rapport with his fellow young exile, Joel (Martin Starr), and it’s here, in the camaraderie among Adventureland’s underpaid, ennui-ridden employees — conversing through the haze of pot smoke, the blur of booze, and with a pop song on the radio or blaring through the park’s loudspeakers — that the movie mines its romantic and existential riches. Mottola’s cast is uniformly winning, especially Eisenberg, who’s maturing into an excellent and nuanced actor, and Stewart who gives Em equal parts sass and vulnerability. Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig provide the otherwise aching, wistful material a welcome off-kilter goofiness, and help counter less successful casting choices, like Reynolds, who’s got the swagger and the looks of the narcissistic Mike but none of the foxiness by which such characters prey and seduce.

What keeps Adventureland in the merely “very good,” rather than “excellent,” range is a combination of its unimaginative look and a second act that feel repetitious and earns its rewards with falsely amped up confrontations. On the latter score, James and Em’s on-again-off-again quasi-romance goes through the motions of jealousy and heartbreak once too often. Meanwhile, Mottola jumps the gun in portraying Em’s face-off with her parents — a long-awaited moment that still feels abrupt and melodramatic, full of fire, yet premature because their dynamics are underdeveloped.

While Adventureland may be among the year’s most pleasing comedies, it’s also among its ugliest looking films. It’s the same drawback that I found in the Mottola-directed Superbad — a sharp teen comedy with a saggy script and God-awful visual palette. The palette in both films is bleak, steeped in despondent browns, yellows, with washed-out reds and blues, with no attempts at visual experimentation that youth films — with their emotional and physical energy — demand (see Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together as an exemplar).

I understand that adolescence is messy, grimy, frequently joyless and ugly, and perhaps Mottola tries for an aesthetic approximation in his cinema. But, in the end, a flatly composed, uninteresting look is just that, and there is no aesthetic defense to justify it. I hope that Motolla develops more creative, inventive uses for lighting and camera is his future portrayals of youthful angst. On balance, though, Adventureland is one of the most honest, tender and heartfelt coming-of-age comedies to come along since Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005), which also starred Eisenberg. The movie’s rewards outpace its flaws by a mile and give us another reason to follow the career of a gifted young lead actor.

Grade: B+

Directed by: Greg Mottola
Written by: Greg Mottola
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Bill Hader, Matt Bush, Martin Starr, Kristen Wiig, Ryan Reynolds, Paige Howard, Margarita Levieva

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Best of 2009, Comedy, Drama | 2 Comments »

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