Sadly, hasn't been much I've wanted to see recently. First Man, about the first human landing on the moon, struck me as something that might be majestic on the big screen. The film stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong with direction by Damien Chazelle of La La Land fame.
The film begins excitingly with Armstrong piloting an experimental rocket plane perilously above Earth's atmosphere. Space exploration is dangerous. Armstrong tests a lunar lander and bails out before it crashes in flames. Pilot friends die regularly.
Armstrong was apparently a very cool, buttoned down customer, which made him a perfect for a job where composure under stress is paramount. As the dramatic focus of the film, however, his extreme self control leaves us without investment or eventually any interest. Structuring this film around Armstrong drained the blood out of what should have been an intriguing subject. Claire Foy plays the long-suffering wife trying to draw him out of his shell, but it's a losing battle. The film just never achieves momentum.
The Revenant
Spectacular elk ford sun dappled, teal colored icy rivers, snow melt drips from massive fir trees and mountain ranges stand against luminous sunsets. Landscape is character in The Revenant and makes an epic backdrop for Leonardo DiCaprio's hellishly grueling performance.
Set against this grand scenery and DiCaprio's astounding effort, the story and it's muddled themes appear pint-sized. Inarritu's script, which he co-wrote, chooses to delve into America's genocidal beginnings, but manages merely a trite ode to Native American wisdom. It's as if he'd never seen Dances with Wolves, Little Big Man or any other film that treats the subject less casually. If The Revenant was reaching for standard Eastwood-style revenge, the cursory attitude might pass, but the grandeur and scope of Inarritu's portrait of wilderness and DiCaprio's herculean effort signify an aspiration for deeper meaning. Man's ubiquitous savagery to his fellow men and women is hardly a satisfying or particularly novel morsel of truth in the age of ISIS and random mass shootings.
Its' easy to imagine an award for DiCaprio's performance and one for cinematographer Emmanual Lubezki. The film's depiction of nature is masterful, but it's unmatched by a compelling narrative. By the 2 1/2 hour mark we're dead sure Leonardo is going to exact revenge, but we're doubtful that it matters.
Carol
Independent films, even those starring Kate Blanchett, should give the audience a chance to participate in the film. The best do, the worst ape their bigger budget counterparts. Doused in a droning Phillip Glass style score and plastered with moody shots of rain drizzled car windows, Carol is out to guarantee maximum melancholy. It's labored; it's glacially paced. Melancholy soon begets ennui.
Of course the period dresses and cars are fabulous and Blanchett looks stunning, but the entire piece feels pinned under glass. Taken from a 1952 romance novel by Patricia Highsmith (famous for her murder mysteries), the film feels far outdated in its genteel treatment of genteel lesbianism. It was risqué for its time because it offered a lesbian story with a happy ending, but it's pure melodramatic hokum that requires Blanchett to choose between forbidden love and custody of her 4 year old. Paging Joan Crawford.
The Martian
1 1/2 subjective stars *
Despite being a cosmology and scifi fan, I didn't rush out to this one. Ridley Scott bummed me out last time with Prometheus (see earlier review) and I've come to accept that he's only as good as his material. This film hews fairly closely to the book its based on.
The Martian is realist scifi, no aliens, no time travel, but lots of armchair physics. And that's its beauty; Matt Damon's astronaut Mark Watney has to deal with the quotidian demands of a very long stay on Mars. Where to get water? Food? How to deal with the lack of atmosphere? Lack of heat? Things break and things blow up. Bring the Duct Tape might as well be the subtitle.
Along with the layman friendly science, I appreciated the way Scott handled the obvious theme. Being marooned on Mars, years away from Earth, magnifies Watney's loneliness and our sense of it exponentially. It plays out in stages. He's stoic and consumed with the need to survive, frustrated with setbacks and eventually accepts that he's likely to perish before any rescue attempt. Scott and his writers do a good job of keeping this understated and sometimes funny.
Mars is rendered beautifully and the film is shot with grandeur, but not grandiosity. I didn't see it in 3D, but someone did recommend that to me.
Hey wait, this is big budget, The Martian's gotta have some attempted heroics, fake CNN reports and ginned up suspense. Cliches in 2 1/2 hour film? Yes, got some, but I think Scott does a good job of having his cake and eating it too.
Black Mass
zero subjective stars
Hyped as Johnny Depp's return to relevance, a commentary on his pirate franchise and his mostly quirky recent roles, Black Mass gives Depp the opportunity to play an extremely evil real-life villain. As Jimmy 'Whitey' Bulger, a South Boston gangster with a relish for strangling, shooting and beating victims to death, Depp gets to do serious drama. Bulger had a childhood friend who became a local FBI agent and helped facilitate his rise from thug to kingpin. He also had a brother who rose to become a respected politician. A nice setup for a true crime gangster flick.
The cast is strong from Kevin Bacon as a lead FBI agent to Benedict Cumberbatch as a social climbing Boston politician. Still, this film is anchored by Depp's ambitious, bloodthirsty thug and it lives and dies on those terms.
In the first ten minutes or so my brother-in-law and I turned to each other and said "What's up with his eyes? He looks like a vampire alien." And I spent the rest of the film trying to determine exactly why with Depp's light blue contact lenses looked so sketchy. Makeup overkill.
That was a pain, but I could have overlooked it had the story unravelled more creatively. In this telling, Bulger's no more than a psychopathic robot. We're not privy to how or when he became homicidal and the few moments where he expresses genuine humanity don't make him any more cuddly. And that's the ultimate flaw, a main character without evolution. Nor do the writers throw in much fashion sense or music from the 70's and 80's, no disco boots or bad synth pop. The mood is somber. It's a gangster movie with brutal killings, intimidation and corruption; there's really nothing to do but watch Bulger kill enemies, and more often, friends for 120 minutes. Is Depp convincing as a killer? Yes, he's very unpleasant, but he's not really required to stretch much in this one.
Good performances, good direction, nice cinematography and very lackluster writing.
Ex Machina
Another in the metastasizing genre of films exploring artificial intelligence, Ex Machina is sharply written in places and beautifully shot. The special effects that render the female robot (Ava) are elegantly realized, suggesting a human skeleton encased in glass and light.
A mid-level employee (Caleb) at a Google-like corporation is seemingly picked at random to deliver a Turing Test ( a test of the ability of a machine to impersonate human traits) to the company's latest AI creation. Promptly delivered by helicopter to a remote bunker in what looks like Alaska (actually Norway), Caleb engages in a battle of wits with the company's megalomaniacal genius. Suffice it to say that Ava's gender is not accidental and the film begins to suggest a creepy take on the Pygmalion myth.
When I say creepy, it's creepy in the film and also of the film. Is this a film about AI or about duplicity between the sexes? Certainly it's both, which might have been interesting, but the AI part of the equation is more convincing than the films gender stereotypes. While the ending sugarcoats what has preceded it, appearing to give Ex Machina a feminist slant, too much garden variety misogyny has rolled under the bridge to make it palatable.
On the plus side, the acting is quite good, especially Oscar Isaac's turn as Steve Jobs on steroids. Ex Machina is shot very precisely and well edited. The main set, a camera infested high security bunker, all glass and concrete, is almost a character on its own. It is certainly a well made film and much of the dialogue concerning consciousness, human and otherwise, is sharp and interesting. What nags at me is the prime conceit of a male creator shaping his feminine creation. Not much of a brave new world.
Wild Tales ** (Two Subjective Stars)
Pedro Almodovar is listed as a producer on this Argentinian film and his fingerprints aren't hard to detect. Wild Tales is a collection of highly imaginative revenge themed stories that are steeped in black humor. From road rage to wedding parties run far off the tracks, the acting is uniformly good, superb in places, and the editing and choreography of some of the tales is honed to a fine edge. Highly recommended if your taste in amusement runs to the shady side.
Leviathan
Russian's entry into the Best Foreign Film category is a tale of moral putrefaction so it's no shock that the deepest rot has set in at city hall and the local Eastern Orthodox church. When an artist paints a target on priests and politicians, they had better bring either a fresh, or a very incisive eye to the fight. The director and co-writer, Andrey Zvyagintsev, brings some of the necessary to Leviathan, but he also delivers a ponderous grandeur that flattens his effort.
Set in a forlorn if majestic village near the Barents Sea and bathed in gloriously bleached cinematography, Leviathan suggests both nature's and God's mercilessness. Throw in some swirling Philip Glass and it's easy to overreach.
Against this backdrop, the film's characters are well realized members of the working class. They drink vodka like spring water, have meaningless sex, shoot at portraits of past Russian despots and seem predestined to early graves. It all feels like Russia fighting a gruesome hangover from communism. And some of this is wry and sad in a tangible way. A teenager hangs out in the ruins of a church learning to drink. A policeman knocks off a fifth of vodka and his wife asks nonchalantly if he's good to drive. Of course he is. And when they shoot at portraits of fallen leaders, one vodka swiller opines that Yeltsin is unworthy of the honor, having been such a small time dictator.
Leviathan's finer moments are eventually lost to the director's epic vision, which includes allusions to Job, political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the sea, whales etc. Oddly, the film was partially financed by the Russian Ministry of Culture, which wasn't pleased with the negative view of Russia in the finished product. Maybe that's progress; it wouldn't have seen the light of day under communism.
What We Do in the Shadows
A searing Kiwi documentary probing the pathos and eros of being vampire flatmates, What We Do in the Shadows is a bit Best in Show and a bit Anchorman. Four vampires of various ages, from young bad boy Deacon (139 yrs) to elderly, nearly embalmed Petyr (8,000 years) deal with the highs and lows of living a non-traditional lifestyle. None seem to have any technological skills (they watch a static tv screen). Most seem to favor Prince-style shirts and jackets when they go for a night out in Wellington. There are werewolves whose leader chides them for foul language (Don't be swearwolves!), bat fights and communal meetings about chores just like on MTV cribs. The werewolves, knowing in advance that their pants will rip off during the full moon, judiciously wear baggy sweats so they won't wake up au natural.
It's a great comedy setup and What We Do... delivers for the first 30 minutes. Since it's a mockumentary it doesn't, theoretically, require a plot, but the hilarity gets a bit thinner as the film winds down. Still great fun for those of you who think the idea is funny. You know who you are. Oh, there is a bit of bloodletting. Don't worry, it's tastelessly done.
INTERSTELLAR
Due to the Theory of Relativity, IMAX decibel levels and its galactic length, the average viewer of Interstellar will age .75 years faster than the non-viewer. When you're crossing the universe via wormhole, don't lollygag and don't lock the soundtrack at shuttle launch volume. I liked the movie, but needed cryonic sleep to recover from stimulation overload.
Too the good, director Christopher Nolan (Memento, Inception, The Dark Knight) went to great lengths to digest and imagine Einstein's Theory of Relativity at work. Earth is dying for some unclearly defined reason and we need a new world. A wormhole has appeared, mysteriously, and a few worlds at the other end look promising. I had fun trying to follow plot through wormholes, event horizons, tesseracts, artificial intelligence and morse code. Interstellar is a brunch buffet of scifi and melodrama and as such you usually know ahead of time if it's your virtual cup of tea. Us fans aren't stunned when the film's scientific logic eventually becomes unglued. "Let's slingshot ourselves around that black hole." Fine, I didn't always believe Star Trek either.
On the flip side, Christopher Nolan's screenplay stumbles into one wormhole that's no longer excusable. He can't write believable female characters. I don't expect (or desire) to see frail women mastering relativity and exploring space. We're not in Edwardian England, this is the future and the effect is jarring. Come on dude, hire a woman co-writer, they're out there.
The big failing of this film, however, isn't it's lousy female characters or it's humorously mystifying plot gyrations (see the blogosphere for more on that), it's the way Interstellar's soundtrack tries to hijack the movie. Shot extensively in IMAX, Interstellar features loads of breathtaking visuals, but someone didn't trust these to work without thunderous reinforcement from organs, strings and synthesizers. It's very often relentless. And since I'm writing subjectively, the music isn't good, it lacks nuance and any sense of discovery. Remember 2001: A Space Odyssey? Whether you liked it or not, the music worked and it felt new. Here the composer strains for that grandeur and achieves grandiosity. You may enjoy the film despite the soundtrack. I did, but yikes it was loud.
Under The Skin ** subjective stars
Beautifully shot on small, high end digital cameras, Under The Skin takes place in Glasgow and rural Scotland. That's the nominal location because this film takes place in mood, more than in space. Scarlett Johansson is an alien luring men to their deaths for sustenance, but if you're not into sci-fi don't let that meager, albeit creepy, plot line discourage you. What we're watching is life on Earth from the alien's point of view and Johansson does a nuanced job of making that real.
As she travels around in a van picking up men, the alien (and the viewer) are gradually immersed in the stunning beauty and strangeness of nature and humanity. My sister said the film was more of a poem than a film, by which she meant more experimental than narrative. That's partly due to the films slower pacing, more Euro than LA. Instead of plot turns, Under The Skin delivers story through a steady accretion of image and detail. Better known for the masterful gangster flick Sexy Beast, Jonathan Glazer chose to use unknown or non-actors in most of the subsidiary roles and often used hidden cameras to add to the film's documentary feel. Johansson and her victims appear in the nude, a handy marketing tool, but Glazer's focus is on physicality, not titillation. There's zero porn factor.
It's a visual poem about an alien's introduction to Earth. What stayed with me after the film was the beauty of the images and a feeling of wistfulness towards life on the planet.
The Hundred-Foot Journey 1 subjective star
*
What does this film have going for it beside the great Helen Mirren, the equally great though less famous Om Puri, idyllic French country locales, Indian and French cuisine, Bollywood music, light hearted comedy and romance?
An Indian patriarch, chased from home and restaurant by unnamed extremists takes to the European road in search of the perfect location for redemption. Family in tow, he finally settles in an abandoned villa opposite Helen Mirren's chic French eatery. Jealousy, cultural misunderstanding, loving omelets and beautiful scenery ensue.
To use a couple of tasteless phrases: It's a crowd pleaser and heart warmer.
I'd watch it again just for
the faces of Mirren and Puri.
Gone Girl
Although I briefly skimmed Gone Girl in the bookstore while it hovered at number one as best-seller, I forgot about it until the film came out. Then I avoided reviews because it was billed as a thriller and I didn't want to spoil the icicle-in-hell chance of actual thrills. For the first third of its considerable run time, Gone Girl does crackle along in a Hitchcockian vein of domestic bliss freezing over. Ben Affleck's is effective as an ethically challenged husband who may have staged his wife's disappearance.
Then the train jumps the track, the thriller ends and we drop into a weird battle of the sexes that feels spookily Reagan 80's. Without spoiling the surprises (you'll probably see the film on cable or a plane flight), I'll state the obvious: the plot beggars belief. Strangest to me in a best-selling contemporary novel is the shameless, ugly stereotyping of the female character. While the movie head fakes a he-said, she-said symmetry, Ben Affleck's clueless, philandering jerk is no dramatic match for Rosamund Pike's ice queen.
To the good, Gone Girl describes the living hell your life becomes if you are cursed enough to end up as tabloid fodder. The news vans descend and the vixen pundits of daytime TV start feeding on your entrails. The cast is sharp with especially well tuned performances from Tyler Perry as a celebrity lawyer and Neil Patrick Harris as a well heeled stalker.
I chuckled as the film bumbled along from on absurd plot twist to the next like some kind of psychotic vaudeville, but Gone Girl isn't canny or creative enough to be really twisted. And my chuckling was tempered by the realization that this book had been on the NYT best-seller list for months. I guess you can always put lipstick on a pig, if that pig is a beautiful controlling blond.
The Drop
Currently being hyped as James Gandolfini's last film, The Drop is moody crime drama from novelist Denis Lehane. Better known for Oscar winning Mystic River, Lehane's milieu is working class New England. The mood is always somber, portentous with the threat of violence on the horizon. I'm not a fan because I find the working class Lehane portrays to be white, humorless, nostalgic for good old Catholicism and predictable.
Annoyingly, Hollywood seems to find Lehane's stories real and they therefore draw big acting talent and budgets. Gandolfini doesn't stray far from his tough guy chops, but knowing he's gone certainly made me appreciate his burly menace, a certain sadness and his sense of humor. Tom Hardy does an adequate job, but his character, a mild, seemingly slow-witted sidekick with a very hard interior seemed robotic and ultimately a disposable plot device.
No new territory is mined here. There's a mistreated working class girl in need of a savior. People rip off gangsters, in this case the Chechen mob, and people get their just, bloody rewards. The acting and plot keep the ball rolling, the editing and camerawork is fine, but like Lehane's other explorations of human weakness, eventually I felt like I was eating a bread sandwich.
Calvary
The new Irish film Calvary turns on the premise that one of a priest's parishioners is threatening to kill him in a week's time in retribution for abuse at the hands of a now deceased priest. Good versus evil, belief versus doubt, retribution versus forgiveness. So far, so good. The clock is ticking.
The Ireland in Calvary exists trapped in limbo between modernity and the medieval. The Catholic Church remains powerful, despite the horrendous crimes committed by its Irish representatives, but there are also numerous atheists only too glad to spell out the Church's shortcomings. Brendan Gleeson, the stalwart irish actor, plays a world weary, but caring priest tending to a severely dysfunctional village. What's odd from an American perspective is the lack of mental health awareness. It's as if Ireland has missed Freud and antidepressants completely. There is one passing reference to finding 'closure', but a character dismissively states "that's something the Yanks do."
The sticking point here is that the film does a wonderful job of bringing the villagers and their familiar issues to the fore, but does a lousy one of fleshing out the priest's quandary. He can run and hide or stay and face the music. Brendan Gleeson is a great actor, with a tendency to appear languid on the surface all the while roiling beneath. He's fun to watch here, but his predicament never ignites. He seems almost content doling out doubtful wisdom, ambling to and fro among his flock. A neglected daughter is meant to give him motivation, but feels more like emotional window dressing.
Atheists and non-believers are almost psychotically cynical and despite the accuracy of their anti-Vatican barbs, the film is rooting for the priest. If pressed, I would venture that writer-director John McDonagh has a soft spot for Catholicism regardless of the pointed references to Vatican evil. The film drifts in and out of various characters' predicaments, but the point of it all is both hazy and leaden. The soundtrack reminds you that this is a portentous drama about morality, and the acting is uniformly good, but there's little narrative tension.
Brendan Gleeson is great, the film disappointed me.
Get On Up * 1/2
It couldn't have been easy trying to squeeze James Brown's life into a feature film. Born into poverty, domestic violence and abandonment in backwoods Georgia, Brown used his emotional pain to leverage his way to stardom and a prominent spot in the pantheon of American music. Watching Brown go through that experience is both exciting and sorrowful because one is continually reminded of the endless, degrading journey blacks have had to make from Jim Crow to the present. In the back of my mind were images of Ali, Nina Simone, Michael Jackson and a whole list of idols who struggled with 20th century racism.
Get On Up unfolds in contemporary, non-linear style, jumping to and fro in time and delivering a relatively nuanced vision of James Brown's already dramatic story. Mercifully, it's taken until now to get this project done; Hollywood would certainly have bollixed it up a decade ago. Some of the flashbacks are cliched and Brown's Jewish promoter doesn't evoke much interest as played by Dan Akroyd.
For the most part, the film deals glancingly with race, choosing to focus more intently on Soul Brother #1's rise on the charts and his personal demons. But reading between the lines of Get On Up with a knowledge of say, Ali's refusal to be drafted for Vietnam or Michael Jackson's pursuit of 'whiteness', you can't help but feel the weight of race on James Brown. Carrying that weight and the film, is Chadwick Boseman, who could easily get a nomination for not only mastering Brown's speaking voice and finesse on stage, but for always making The Godfather of Soul a vulnerable man. It's one of the best performances of the year.
From a musical perspective, the film fails to underline the importance of Brown's contributions to music. Not a living musician who plays hip-hop, rap, disco, r&b, soul, funk, jazz rock or all the myriad electronic offshoots stands clear of Brown's shadow. Brown's famous shout "On the one.." refers to emphasizing the first and third beats of a measure instead of the traditional second and fourth. Whereas many popular recordings from the sixties forward showcased wall to wall sound, lush strings filling any spaces, Brown's spare arrangements derive power from the silences. In one of the few musically relevant scenes, Brown lectures his sidemen, alerting them to the fact that whatever they play, they're playing drums. [For those interested in the development of Brown's musical genius and more about his idiosyncratic personality (he had his hair done three times a day) see "The One", by RJ Smith.]
Get On Up keeps Brown's electrifying showmanship front and center, where any James Brown bio should be. He's ordering purple suits for the band, checking his hair, rehearsing tirelessly and always watching the bottom line. Ultimately, the film is imperfect, trying to be all things to all people. It's part Hollywood bio, part realistic drama, part historical drama, part rip snorting entertainment.
More than usual Voyage Into Subjective feels especially subjective. James Brown is a musical idol of mine and his story, in some ways, parallels that of black America struggling to 'make' it against great, continuing odds. I was moved and saddened at the cost.
Venus in Fur ** 1/2
I'm pro sexuality in art, especially where it undermines perceived identity, so what the H, I had a good shot at enjoying Polanski's romp through domination and submission. And Venus in Fur was a jolly good time for me. Polanski's wife, Emanuelle Seigner, plays sharply off Polanski's brooding alter ego, Matheiu Almaric, who Americans will remember as Bond's Eurotrash nemesis in Quantum of Solace. Since this is a filmed play with one primary location, a theater stage, the acting has to click. So does the writing, which is playful, full of amusing double entendre, but backed by enough power shifts in the relationship to give the piece traction. Venus in Fur whirs along, questioning the balance of power between man and woman, actor and director, lover and object, writer and critic. Lighting, a few props and costumes, direction and judicious camera placement make Venus feel like a spacious film.
Quibble number one, a fairly minor one, is with the plot. Without spoiling the ending, I had a fairly clear idea of what was coming. The other quibble is more subjective and I'm not sure it's even fair. More entertainment than involving drama, Venus in Fur could have possibly been a bit deeper, had more at stake for its characters. It could even have been a bit more erotically charged - this is fairly tame stuff - although Polanski was directing his wife. Then again, that might have made it more Taming of the Shrew and less All's Well That Ends Well. I've ragged on Polanski over the last few decades for his mediocre output (Frantic, The Ghost, Death and the Maiden, The Ninth Gate), but I suspected the maker of Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion and Chinatown had better work in mind.
Ida *, Dance of Reality, The Rover
Shot in crisp black and white, Ida has the feel of a good short story lovingly transferred to the screen. The film deals with the aftershocks of the Holocaust in 1950's Poland when a novice to a convent learns about her heritage. I heard a fellow filmgoer complaining that it wasn't uplifting, but I found the spare, nuanced style and the shabbiness of communist Poland uplifting because there's little of the audience prompting we have in homegrown movies. It's a small film, well acted and beautifully shot.
Alejandro Jodorowsky is famous for a few over-the-top semi-surreal films made since the late 60's. If you've seen the films, you know why there are few of them and how hard it must have been to find the production cash. His latest film, Dance of Reality, is semi-autobiographical in the style of Fellini's Amarcord and there are moments when it achieves that dizzying balance between the mundane and the sublime. "I don't want to live in a world of dressed up dogs," says a dying anti-fascist with his last breath in the midst of the dictator's doggie costume contest. While this film apes Fellini's freak show tendencies, it feels dated and objectionable this late in history. Dance of Reality is chockfull of whores, drag queens and earth mother types that might have had (shock) value back in the day, but now feel as condescending as any other stereotype. I appreciate his attempts at subverting narrative expectations, but I wish he was better at realizing that goal. The documentary about Jodorowsky's attempt to make Dune, Jodorowsky's Dune, is far more entertaining.
Ever since his performances in Memento and LA Confidential, I've been waiting for another great Guy Pearce film. He can act and he's got those razor sharp cheekbones. The Rover is hyped as a dystopian revenge flick that takes place in the bleak outback of Oz. The film costars Robert Pattison of Twilight fame as a slow witted hick bank robber. Unfortunately, the whole exercise feels like a reboot of The Road Warrior sucked dry of fun. It's not a dystopia of excitement, but a dystopia of meaningless angst and violence. Nicely shot, well acted, humorless and empty.
As I watched The Double, stylistic and visual tidbits from other dystopian films hopscotched somewhere between synapses: the famous sign outside a suburban house in A Clockwork Orange that reads 'Home', the ominous televisions in Farenheit 451 and David Lynch's artfully creepy use of closeups. There's also a screaming crib from Rear Window. The references pile up and very soon you realize you're cataloguing and not watching.
That's unfortunate because the film delivers two very good performances by Jesse Eisenberg in the title role and some beautifully realized, steampunk-like interiors. The Double is visually rich and full of nightmarish DOS-style computers with blank keyboards, clanging elevators, dingy apartments and gloomy lighting. The stumbling block is the script, based on a novella by Dostoevsky about doppelgangers, that marches blithely off into Kafka land. Woody Allen, Steven Soderbergh and Orson Welles have trod here before with only Welles turning in a film that might be labelled successful. Richard Ayoade adds zip in the way of fresh insight or any particular suspense to the material, The Double clumps along, an earnest, albeit professionally produced, amateur screenplay.
Jodorowsky's Dune ** subjective stars
If you've seen a Jodorowsky film, there's a strong likelihood, for better or worse, that one of the visuals is tattooed onto your visual cortex. In my case it was dwarf sex in the Spaniard's psilocybin spaghetti western, El Topo, from 1971. Jodorowsky movies are provocative visual spectacles and grotesques from which realism has fled. I'm not a huge fan of his films, but I am an admirer of his chutzpah, his ability stick maniacally to his vision.
In 1975, Jodorowsky obtained the rights to film Dune, Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic. He attacked this project in typical style, hiring some of the best artistic talent to design the film's look and attempting to bring on a bizarre cast of stars including Orson Welles, Dali and Gloria Swanson. He hired Pink Floyd for the soundtrack.
In this documentary, Jodorowsky and a few of his compatriots recount the process of designing a phantasmagorical 14 hour version of Dune. One of the films co-creators claims that Jodorowsky mesmerized him onto the production, a claim easily reconciled with the inspired raconteur we meet in this film. He's a bit like 'the most interesting man in the world' from Dos Equis beer commercials. The crew eventually compiled a massive tome of intricate storyboards and shopped it around the major studios trying to scrape up some sorely needed cash. They'd already spent two million without shooting a frame. Hollywood wasn't buying, but the grandeur of Jodorowsky's failure make a beautiful testament to the creative power of passion. If you're into art making, film or otherwise, it's an engrossing ninety minutes.
