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.