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.
