Archive for June, 2011

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop

June 23, 2011

Rodman Flender captures the exhaustion and exhilaration of life on the road in “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop,” a documentary chronicling the grueling two-month, 30-city tour that O’Brien embarked on after he severed ties with his longtime employer, NBC. The network’s 2010 decision to reinstate Jay Leno as host of “The Tonight Show” resulted in a p.r. fiasco for NBC and stirred up a media dust cloud of outrage against both Leno and NBC. For his part, O’Brien’s ouster from the show left him feeling angry, abandoned, humiliated. To add salt to those wounds, NBC stipulated that O’Brien could not appear on TV, radio or the Internet for six months after his departure.

As much to maintain his connection with his fan base and to keep his creative gears turning as to get his anti-NBC ya-ya’s out, O’Brien dives into the demands of putting his show together. Flender captures the banter between O’Brien and his staff along with rehearsals involving backup singer/dancers, O’Brien’s house band, his sidekick Andy Richter and O’Brien himself as they strut, jam, wail and wisecrack their way through a multi-media comedy-musical revue. “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop” is devoted largely to the tour itself, documenting in brisk, illuminating fashion the professional, logistical and physical challenges of putting on a road show.

Much of what Flender captures is genuinely funny. Some is flat-out annoying. Rating in the former is the rapport between O’Brien and Richter: Even in their off-hand moments, they’re hilarious together. You can’t manufacture O’Brien and Richter’s kind of comic chemistry; it’s there only in the most enduring and inventive comedy teams. And when he’s on a roll, O’Brien is a brilliant improvisational comedian – always has been – throwing out one zinger after another at anyone in his sights. Scenes in which he’s riffing with fans and backstage visitors like actor Jack McBrayer – who finds himself on the receiving end of an ad-libbed volley of O’Brien barbs – pack unexpected laughs.

Yet the culture of celebrity worship that Flender’s documentary reveals also brings with it the unfortunate side effect of alienating viewers. O’Brien comes off as the ego-driven ringmaster of his own traveling circus while his employees and followers come off as adulating sycophants. So much so that we get the impression that this merry, tight-knit band of industry professionals has found in O’Brien its winning lottery ticket – one that enjoys the fringe benefits of much media and public adoration – in a business where heartbreak and failure is one misfortune away. And these guys are clutching their ticket tight.

As the documentary’s title proclaims, Conan O’Brien can’t stop. If there’s a show on – on any stage or in any room – O’Brien has a compulsive drive to be at the center of it. We see how exhausted he is show after show, how he wrestles with pre-show anxieties and post-show exhaustion and subjects himself to endless self-scrutiny and -criticism. Through much of the documentary, he’s clearly drained yet he finds the will to power through it all. “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop” depicts a fiercely talented performer who has created – whether by his own labors or his celebrity status – a temple to his own cult. While the resulting spectacle may be distasteful in its egotism and indulgence, there’s no doubting the drive and devotion of a man for whom the world truly is a stage.

Grade: C+

Directed by: Rodman Flender
Written by: n/a
Cast: Conan O’Brien, Andy Richter, Jimmy Vivino, Mike Merritt, James Wormworth, Jerry Vivino, Mark “Love Man” Pender, Richie “La Bamba” Rosenberg

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Comedy, Documentary | 1 Comment »

The Names of Love (Le nom de gens)

June 23, 2011

In “The Names of Love,” writer-director Michel Leclerc employs a deft, whimsical touch in bringing together such weighty themes as family guilt, generational regret and finding true love in a world mined with racial and cultural politics. It’s a delicate tightrope that co-writers and Leclerc and Baya Kasmi walk but, in presenting issues of their own personal experiences as ethnic minorities in their native France, their screenplay is refreshingly honest and inventive. And considering that “The Names of Love” really has very little plot driving it, Leclrec and Kasmi create an engaging romantic comedy simply by virtue of their offbeat humor and appealing characters.

Family history is central to understanding this movie about mismatched lovers. Arthur (Jacques Gamblin), an epidemiologist who specializes in bird autopsies, is the son of Jewish mother, Annette (Michèle Moretti), a Holocaust survivor still haunted by the long-ago disappearance of her parents. Meanwhile, sexual spitfire Bahia (Sara Forestier) – who sleeps with right-wing men in order to convert them to her left-wing causes – springs from the union between an Algerian immigrant-father, Mohamed (Zinedine Soualem), and a liberally minded French hippie-mom Cécile (Carole Franck).

Both Arthur and Bahia have struggled with personal identity issues their whole lives – Arthur with the ripple effects of his mother’s guilt and Bahia with wanting to honor the struggles and social discrimination suffered by her hardworking father, a brilliant but self-effacing painter. It’s what made Arthur and Bahia who they are: While Bahia is a politically righteous, sexually charged dynamo, Arthur’s childhood pains have turned him into a stuffed-shirt who takes comfort in his job’s scientific predictabilities – though, in a refreshing twist, Arthur isn’t one of Bahia’s right-wing conquests; he’s a liberal socialist, the rational yin to Bahia’s volatile yang.

The description so far of “The Names of Love” may have the ring of a heavy Bergman-esque drama, but Leclerc’s movie is anything but. Kasmi and Leclrec’s plot goes through a wild array of witty conversations and slapstick set-ups, weaving these into a fabric of memories through with Bahia and Arthur each try to make sense of their past, how they became who they are, and, ultimately, why the two of them are so drawn to each other.

Gamblin and Forestier are both excellent in their disparate roles. Utterly natural as the buttoned-down yet easily flappable Arthur, Gamblin provides the perfect chemistry for Forestier’s spontaneous Bahia, given to political indignation and lots of nude shenanigans (including a scene in which she absent-mindedly leaves her apartment and hops on the subway, wearing nothing but her glasses). The supporting players, particularly Soualem and Moretti, are solid, providing Leclerc’s comedy with grace notes of soulfulness and pathos.

It’s a credit to the talents of his cast as well as to Leclerc’s ability to juggle comedy and drama that “The Names of Love” manages to be so winning a concoction. Moreover, what its script lacks in forward momentum, the movie makes up for with its sincere interest in human nature, its sense of fun and cinematic style as it jumps back and forth between the past and present to create a heartfelt homage to how love can truly bridge all our differences.

Grade: B

Directed by: Michel Leclerc
Written by: Michel Leclerc, Baya Kasmi
Starring: Jacques Gamblin, Sara Forestier, Zinedine Soualem, Carole Franck, Jacques Boudet, Michèle Moretti, Zakariya Gouram, Julia Vaidis-Bogard

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Comedy, Drama, Romance | Leave a Comment »

A Better Life

June 23, 2011

In “A Better Life,” an illegal Mexican immigrant named Carlos struggles to make ends meet as a gardener in modern-day Los Angeles. His son Luis, alienated and adrift, is a high-school misfit, a thug in the making. After borrowing funds from his sister, Carlos (Demián Bichir) acquires a truck and tools to start his own gardener’s business. The business offers Carlos a ray of hope, a way out of poverty for himself and his son. But no sooner have the clouds of despair lifted than Carlos’ truck and tools are stolen, leaving father and son in a desperate search through the city’s Latino neighborhoods to recover them. Along the way, the wayward Luis (José Julián) finds greater respect and understanding – for his past, his identity and his father – and we see the lengths to which Carlos will go to ensure a better life for his son.

The above recap places “A Better Life” squarely in the tradition of Latin-American immigrant coming-of-age and family dramas, along the lines of Gregory Nava’s “My Family” (1995). But where “A Better Life” has tastefulness and sentimentality it could’ve used emotional authority and cultural command. Director Chris Weitz and screenwriter Eric Eason aim for something akin to Nava’s brilliant “El Norte” and Vittorio De Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief” (a film with which “A Better Life” shares an obvious resemblance) but their film lacks their predecessors’ vitality and immediacy.

Lacking a close affinity for their characters, Weitz and Eason devote themselves to the mechanics of story beats, plot points and the three-act structure. And lacking an intimate understanding of the realities and nuances of Hispanic culture (particularly the hardships faced by illegal immigrants), they provide us with the stand-by generalities of hard living, barrio-style: We get immigration protests, tattooed gangbangers, police hostilities and laborers clamoring for work from drive-by employers.

It all feels processed out of a Hollywood notion of what Carlos and Luis’ world would be like; none of it feels authentic and distinctive enough for viewers to give themselves over to what Weitz and Eason are presenting. You don’t trust this film in the way you do Nava’s bleak Southern California or De Sica’s cruel post-War Italy or, for that matter, Scorsese’s evocations of Little Italy in “Mean Streets” and “Raging Bull.”

Similarly, in examining the devotion of a father to his son, the film is at a loss: We understand the alienation between Carlos and Luis, the father-son fights and, finally, speeches about sacrifice, but there is little intimate observation here, the stuff by which character is truly revealed. Time and again, Weitz misses key observational opportunities to get at the depths of a father’s love and the emotional dynamics between Carlos and Luis.

The silver lining is an excellent lead performance from Bichir. In the actor’s weary eyes and personable charisma rest the film’s emotional and spiritual resonance. Often, Bichir is filling in the gaps that Weitz and Eason seem unable to, for lack of sensitivity or familiarity with the world they’re depicting. As Luis, Julián is less sure-footed – but that too may be a symptom of the weaknesses in the film’s writing and direction – but his final scenes with Bichir, in which Carlos and Luis contend with a possibly tragic separation, are genuinely affecting. Bichir and Julián’s contributions, to a modest degree, make up for “A Better Life’s” shortfalls, instilling a measure of credibility the movie craves.

Grade: C

Directed by: Chris Weitz
Written by: Eric Eason
Cast: Demián Bichir, José Julián, Dolores Heredia, Joaquín Cosío, Carlos Linares

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Drama, Family | 1 Comment »

City of Life and Death

June 19, 2011

“City of Life and Death” is among the greatest war films ever made. Rich in humanist themes and absolutely unflinching in its depiction of the moral chaos and physical violence of war, Lu Chuan’s film about the Japanese occupation of Nanking in 1937 isn’t merely one of the year’s best films, it’s a powerful work of art and a testament to the expressive essence of pure cinema.

Inevitable comparisons will be made between “City of Life and Death” and Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan.” Chuan’s opening battle scenes between the Japanese invaders and a Chinese platoon – led by a stalwart patriot (Liu Ye) – have the complex staging, the realistic, you-are-there sound recording, and the frenetic yet coherent editing and camerawork that distinguished “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan.” Also, one can’t watch Cao Yu’s shimmering black-and-white photography here – especially the grimy, crumbling interiors awash in shafts of daylight – without recalling Janusz Kaminski’s concentration-camp sequences in “Schindler’s List.” Indeed, even at the level of story craft, Chuan shares Spielberg’s instincts in how to overlap and weave adjoining scenes together, thereby tightening the pacing and heightening their emotional impact.

But “City of Life and Death” is arguably a more mature work than either of Spielberg’s aforementioned Oscar winners. Spielberg’s movies – and, frankly, mainstream Hollywood movies, in general – telegraph their emotional cues so heavy-handedly that, as viewers, we too often feel bludgeoned into submission (this tendency has sunk many an otherwise worthy Spielberg effort). The emotional resonance of Chuan’s film, on the other hand, is low-key, more subtle; “City of Life and Death” doesn’t need to strong-arm its audience into deploring war and its inhumanities because that message reveals itself in the film’s naked presentation of events. Its quiet, understated quality allows viewers the freedom to process – morally and emotionally – the story’s unfolding horrors in their own personal ways.

To protect the thousands of survivors fleeing the Japanese siege, a group of Western ex-patriots in Nanking and their Chinese colleagues establish a Safety Zone. Chuan follows several of the Safety Zone’s inhabitants in their attempts to placate their aggressors, from administrators like Mr. Tang (Fan Wei) who, as a Nanking native, endures heartbreaking loss and humiliation, as well as refugees, particularly the women. The Nanking occupation is notorious for the rampant sexual victimization that soldiers inflicted on the women and girls, both Chinese and Japanese (prostitutes shipped in by the army), and a great deal of this film, rightly so, examines the barbarity and dehumanization of rape.

But in its desire to offer a mosaic of the Nanking saga, the film’s grand canvas can’t accommodate for deep evaluations of its characters – as compelling as they are – beyond their individual function in the screenplay. Characters are variously heroic, stoic, noble or tragic, and so we view them more as types rather than distinctive, nuanced creations. For instance, the storyline of Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi), a callow Japanese recruit horrified by his experience, involves him falling in love with a jaded Japanese prostitute, and, as such, never transcends the timeworn clichés of the naïf falling for the wrong woman. It’s such limitations that under serve Chuan’s otherwise ambitious vision.

What lingers, though, are not the film’s flaws but its masterful achievements. The power of Chuan’s film lies in the textures of its images and sounds – in the long passages of silently suffering faces, in the eerily peaceful images of the city’s streets littered with rubble and the dead, and in the long, almost-hallucinatory sequence in which Japanese dancers and drummers commemorate their victory. It’s in these moments that the story tells itself, and when we feel that here is that rare filmmaker who embraces the classical essence of the medium. Viewers wishing to learn more about the so-called Rape of Nanking should turn to Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman’s equally poignant, harrowing 2007 documentary “Nanking,” alongside which “City of Life and Death” makes an excellent companion piece.

Grade: A

Written/Directed by: Lu Chuan
Cast: Liu Ye, Gao Yuanyuan, Hideo Nakaizumi, Fan Wei, Jiang Yiyan, Ryu Kohata, Liu Bin, John Paisley, Beverly Peckous, Qin Lan, Sam Voutas, Yao Di, Zhao Yisui

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Best of 2011, Drama, Historical, Masterpiece, War | 1 Comment »

Senna

June 19, 2011

When setting out to make “Senna,” his documentary about the namesake racecar driver, director Asif Kapadia scored a major coup when he gained access to the entire Formula One archive. The footage that Kapadia unearthed turned out to be a goldmine revealing Ayrton Senna’s entire professional career, including races, meetings, press conferences and interviews (with Senna, his peers and closest associates). Together with home movies and broadcast excerpts from Brazil (Senna’s home country), Kapadia and his team have managed to create an astonishing tribute to the driver considered a national hero in Brazil, comprised entirely of already-existing footage. Indeed, “Senna” stands as a triumph of Kapadia and his collaborators’ knack for story craft and their ability to sort through a staggering volume of material and piece it together into a unified, powerful narrative.

The only contemporary elements recorded for the documentary are the layers of interviews that add context and commentary to the unfolding footage. As Kapadia charts Senna’s Formula One career from his 1984 debut to his tragic 1994 accident, we hear from motorsport journalists, including veteran Brazilian writer Reginaldo Leme, The Guardian’s Richard Williams, and former ESPN writer John Bisignano, along with professionals like Ron Dennis and Frank Williams, both of whom owned racing teams that Senna drove for, along with Alain Prost, Senna’s legendary rival. The remembrances they and several others – including Senna’s mother and sister – share provide richness to the characterization of Senna that emerges from the footage.

The man at the documentary’s center is rife with contradictions. A devout Catholic, Senna frequently cited his belief in God as his driving force and likened the experience of auto racing to spiritual epiphany. Off the track, Senna expressed deep concern for the impoverished plight of many of his countrymen, particularly the underprivileged children growing up in poverty (an end title informs us that a school founded in Senna’s name in 1995 has since educated 12 million Brazilian children). At the same time, Senna was no saint either. He enjoyed his lavish comforts (he even hailed from a prosperous Sao Paolo family) and his celebrity as he shrewdly cultivated his image, whether as a national hero, a wronged underdog or a boyish scamp. And Senna was not above the egotistical trappings of competition either, as his tense relationship with Prost (who won four Formula One titles to Senna’s three) bears out. In one sequence, Senna is accused of deliberately sabotaging Proust’s chances of winning a crucial race, and we note the undercurrent of bitterness that charge even their off-track interactions. As a result, we don’t like or dislike Senna so much as admire him for his confidence and talent.

Thanks to Kapadia’s exhaustive, illuminating use of Formula One archival footage along with Gregers Sall and Chris King’s skillful editing, “Senna” reaps maximum emotional wattage from every beat of its story. Because of the proliferation of video cameras during the ‘80s and ‘90s, the filmmakers luxuriate in a wealth of available coverage and camera angles to document every major event, complete with close-ups, reverse- and reaction-shots that have the visceral continuity of any made-from-scratch racing movie. Most spectacular is the extensive use of racing footage taken from cameras mounted just behind the drivers’ seats – it has the feel of an exhilarating video game, till we remember that this is real and so are the casualties.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Asif Kapadia
Written by: Manish Pandey
Cast: Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Frank Williams, Ron Dennis, Viviane Senna, Milton da Silva, Neide Senna, Jackie Stewart, Jean-Marie Balestre

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Best of 2011, Documentary, Sports | 1 Comment »

Film Socialisme

June 2, 2011

Jean-Luc Godard’s “Film Socialisme” is likely to be an unbearable experience for anyone other than for Godard himself and his most hardcore adherents. The veteran filmmaker has pieced together a prohibitively obscure, free-association polemic on his pet theme of politics– the politics of nations, races, religion, relationships, communication, gender, essentially the entire fabric of post-colonial civilization – and how it’s processed through the meat grinder of post-modern pop culture.

The first half of “Film Socialisme” takes place on a Mediterranean cruise ship and the second in and around what is presumably a family-run gas station. The visual texture of the first half ranges from the clean, crisp high-def views of sea, sky, the ship’s decks and cabins to the degraded surveillance-camera images found, for example, in a striking image of disco-dancing guests. Godard returns frequently to a collection of mysterious characters, young and old including a musician played by Patti Smith, a photographer, his companion and a number of suspicious men (the press notes suggests various identities for them, including war criminals and detectives).

On the ship, Godard alternates between vignettes of his characters and of the ship’s passengers, depicted as a piggish, unthinking herd of hedonists – stand-ins for Godard larger vision of our consumerist society.  Intertitles with different place names: Barcelona, Naples, Egypt, Palestine, Odessa signal montage sequences in which Godard mixes archival newsreel clips, excerpts from sword-and-sandal epics and original footage in poetic statements about oppression, injustice (Godard’s sympathy for the Palestinian struggle is obvious, especially in an intertitle in which white Arabic letters are superimposed by blood-red Hebrew letters) and historical revisionism.

The dialogue consists largely of disconnected observations. The accompanying subtitles do not aid our understanding. Instead, the subtitles offer another layer of Godardian agitprop as they simply abbreviate snippets of what’s being said into semi-intelligible, political garble: “space is dying,” “governments wrong,” “see before read,” “bygone landscapes,” etc.

The land-based half of “Film Socialisme,” set at the country gas-station, continues the visual style and graffiti-like use of subtitles as a father, mother, son and daughter exist in a state of ennui and communication breakdown while a pair of female TV journalists, a llama and a donkey linger on the property. The color-coding, the stylized gestures, the selection of musical choices on the soundtrack all recall Godard’s 60’s era experimentalism (think “Weekend” or “Pierrot le Fou”), but stripped of playfulness and vitality. What lingers now is the feeling that, with age, Godard’s cynicism has hardened and his vision turned inward. “Film Socialisme” shows no interest in connecting with an audience; it exists impassively as something to be observed more than experienced.

Godard’s cinema can be rigorous and galvanizing as anyone familiar with his 1960s output would agree. Forty years on, he’s as troubled as ever with our subservience to the world’s military-industrial-corporate nexus. And he’s still the same cinematic prankster that he was in the 1960s – toying with the clichés of genre and shattering formal expectations. But there’s a stark difference between “Vivre Sa Vie” (1962) and “Masculin Féminin” (1966) and something like “Film Socialisme”: The crucial element of exuberance that charged the early films is gone, replaced by a bitter, reactionary aloofness. It’s as if Godard took to heart his own declaration of the “End of Cinema” in his pseudo-Apocalyptic “Weekend” (1967) and retreated deeper and deeper into his own one-man bunker.

Grade: C-

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard
Written by: Jean-Luc Godard
Starring: Catherine Tanvier, Christian Sinniger, Jean-Marc Stehlé, Patti Smith, Robert Maloubier, Alaim Badiou, Nadège Beausson-Diagne, Élisabeth Vitali

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Documentary, Experimental | 3 Comments »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 481 other followers