Exhausting: Iron Man 3

“Iron Man 3” promises more than it delivers. Which is a pity, because its flashes of fine writing and genuine wit are solidly buried under the burden of bludgeoning, frenetic and often meaningless blockbuster action sequences.

This is one mother of a loud movie that bangs and bangs and bangs away at your ear drums. I guess that’ll be the pattern for the next few months as Star Wars, World War Z, Man of Steel, Thor etc flash into our retinas.

At the center of IM3 is the deeply subversive (because it’s based on reality) idea that the key bogey-man (a marvelously funny Ben Kingsley), the Mandarin, is actually nothing more than a false construct, an actor standing in for the darker, truly evil force that goes right up to the heart of power. Kingsley’s shift from a Bin Laden type bogey man to a down in the mouth cockney actor is probably worth the price of the ticket.

The movie also offers us a nice, mini buddy movie interaction between Tony Stark at his smartass cynical best with a kid (Ty Simkins), with whom he teams up to rebuild his exoskeleton armor.

That’s the good news.

And then there’s the tedium. As if the authors (Director Shane Black and Drew Pearce who we’ll hear from later this season with “Pacific Rim”) weren’t all that sure that they could carry through the original conceit of the image of evil v the reality of it, they throw in a bit of IM1, in which Stark, the mechanic, has to create the armor in a garage; they throw at us an offhand reference to drones as the Stark we see is either the man in the suit or a drone that looks like the man in the suit; and there’s an entire sub plot about a vice presidential bid to unseat the presidency, not to mention the sub, sub plot about Gywneth Paltrow’s relationship with a former flame, Guy Pearce as arch evil Aldrich Killian. Her sub plot about a former lover is not to be outdone by Stark’s sub, sub sub plot with his former lover, Maya (an under-utilized Rebecca Hall)

And then, you know, things explode, people fly about in slow motion, buildings crash into the ocean etc.

It’s long as well. Director Shane Black (who gave us “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang…and has now given us “Bang Bang Kiss Kiss”) has crammed so many story lines and villains into the plot that it takes a good two hours and more to kill them all off. He seems to have killed off Stark as Iron Man as well. Maybe Robert Downey Jr. was simply exhausted with it all and wanted out.

There really out to be a board of governors whose permission is necessary in order to be able to carry a sequel beyond two episodes. Batman managed to pull it off nicely, but it’s time for Die Hard to quietly retreat into the sunset and for X Men, now called Wolverine to be absolutely decommissioned.

Hits The Right Note: A Late Quartet

“A LATE QUARTET” is a delightful ensemble piece about, duh, a quartet. It centers around the sudden discovery by one of the musicians – cellist Peter Mitchell (an unusually low-keyed Christopher Walken) – that he has Parkinson’s, and can therefore no longer play. The quartet, which has achieved global fame, and has been together, interdependent on one another for twenty years, is severely threatened.

Over this period, like any good relationship, they’ve come to depend upon each other and act – or play – in perfect harmony.

The idea of the quartet is of course the microcosm of how couples or whole communities live together – dependently interdependent.

Peter, aptly named (the rock) is very much the gravitational center of the group and the shock wave of his revelation, with its intimations of mortality, is the catalyst for things to start falling apart. Second violinist, Robert (the typically brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman, soon to be seen in more populist fare – the second edition of “The Hunger Games”) is the first to crack open the status quo with his demand to be recognized as an individual – by sharing first violinist duties with Daniel (Mark Ivanir).

His need to express and assert his individuality is seen not only in his demands as a musician, but also in his relationship with his wife, Juliet (Catherine Keener), also a member of the quartet, and whose well mannered passion-free affection leaves him longing and lusting for something more. Enter Ms Passion, Pilar (a sizzling Liraz Chari).

Passion doesn’t stop with Robert (who is immediately regretful of his temporary lapse).

Daniel is seduced by Juliet and Robert’s daughter, Alexandra (a less credible, if sexy Imogen Poots), perhaps as a, somewhat juvenile, reaction to feelings of maternal abandonment.

Juliet herself has also had some sort of relationship with first violinist Daniel sometime in the past before pregnancy enforced some sort of domestic bliss with Robert.

It’s as though the minute they stop putting in the discipline and the practice that make them the finely tuned orchestra that they are, and start improvising, chaos threatens.

Yaron Ziberman’s beautifully written film, structured more like a play than a movie, explores the tension between the needs of the individual and the demands of the group; between control – playing the notes on the page – and freedom: playing from memory and passion.

It probes the very human need for self expression – which can be either selfish and destructive or, as art, and epitomized by the music of the group, a means of spiritual upliftment and grace.

Like the piece the group is rehearsing (Beethoven’s Opus 131, which has to be played without a pause so that the players are forced to adjust to each others instruments which will slowly drift out of tune) “A Late Quartet” looks at how we adjust to others and how we balance the responsibility to ourselves with our private passions, with our responsibility as social animals to others and their needs

It’s marvelously well-written, well acted and well directed. If for nothing else, go see it for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s nuanced brilliance.

 

Intense and Operatic: The Place Beyond The Pines

“The Place Beyond The Pines” is the first truly outstanding movie of 2013…just squeezing in before the onslaught of the blockbusters. This is a three-part story that all centers around an explosive confrontation between drifter Luke (a quietly convincing Ryan Gosling) and the steady good cop Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper).

We initially follow the narrative of Luke, a motorcycle stunt-man who is shocked into a sense of responsibility when he discovers that a casual relationship he’d had with Romina (Eva Mendes playing down her attractiveness, as a woman struggling to make something of herself) has resulted in a son.

Suddenly he realizes that his life has shifted from that of feckless drifter to father, with the demands that this new responsibility brings. With no other moral compass to act as a guide, Luke interprets fatherhood simply as the need to provide ‘things’ – a cot, various toys and trinkets. And herein lies his own test of character: his nobler instincts to live up to a sense of parental duty drives him to a course of action that is, sadly, determined by his darker, amoral side. Egged on by Robin (Ben Mendelsohn), his evil angel, he uses his motorcycling skills to turn to bank robbing. He cannot escape his drifter past, even if he tried.

The story suggests the kind of inevitability ahead of him (“if you ride like lightening”, Robin tells him, “you’ll crash like thunder”). It becomes distressingly clear that Luke’s life and character are formed of such stuff that no desire to rise to a higher realm of ‘responsible parent’ can trump the fate that his drifter soul has mapped out for him.

Character is fate.

If Luke is shocked into a sense of responsibility his past cannot live up to, Avery Cooper’s past on the other hand, forged by his strong relationship with his father, gives him a deep sense of resolve and a clear conscience-driven perspective.

Whereas Luke chooses the easier way of crime – the short-term, instant gratification of quick money, Avery is forced to confront crime, even as he becomes part of it. He finds himself briefly immersed in a corrupt scheme master-minded by the brilliant Ray Liotta (as crooked cop DeLucca). And it is up to his need to do the right thing that pits him against pretty much all his friends on the force. Avery, driven by a strong sense of guilt, has to fight his way beyond the corrupting influence of his clan to the place, as it were beyond the pines.

This is not to suggest that Avery is the unblemished goodie to Luke’s compromised baddie. Avery himself manages to do what’s right despite his own lust for power and influence. Luke wanted to cash; Avery wants the influence.

The third part of this trilogy concludes the balance between responsibility, conscience and parenthood when we meet their two children, now troubled teenagers, preparing to confront their own high noon showdown.

Mike Patton’s vibrant score adds to the operatic feel of this film; lends it the kind of gravitas Derek Cianfarance’s (who also directed “Blue Valentine”) directing and Ben Coccio’s and Darius Marder’s writing, deserves. Though Gosling, Evan Mendes and Bradley Cooper are the key protagonists in the drama, there really is a wonderful supporting cast that help lend the movie enormous stature and tremendous felt-life credibility.

Trashy: Spring Breakers

“Spring Breakers” follows the story of four sexy, bikini-clad college girls who, as part of that American teen rite of passage, spring break, break away from the sterility of college work and shared dorms to its hedonist antidote of drugs, sex and partying.

Things go wrong, they’re busted for a drug-related misdemeanor and are rescued by their knight in shining armor – a gold tooth flashing, hip hop spewing, gun toting, fast car driving, money splurging, hair braided James Franco as Alien, a low life gangsta drug dealer and pimp.

It is with him in his world of drugs and danger and death that the girls come into their own.

Perhaps writer/director Harmony Korine (who has given us such movie classics as “Snowballs”, “Umshini Wann”, “Act da Fool” and “Trash Humpers”) was suggesting that as day to day living becomes less and less inhibited (after all, you don’t need Florida spring break for sex, drugs and rock n’ roll) the need to escape to your own existential self (he makes heavy weather of the girls intoning that they’re really truly themselves at last) demands greater extremism.

Truly intense pleasure, he suggests, goes beyond the mere physical – sex and drugs – to the satisfaction of deeper desires – for them it’s money and power. In one scene, we see one of the girls (they’re mainly –deliberately – undistinguishable one from the next: three hot blondes and the religious one, who stands out for being brunette) writhing erotically upon a bed of bank notes and cooing, “ooh money makes my pussy wet”.

It is as two of the girls wearing pink Pussy Riot balaclavas shoot everyone in sight that they come… into their own. The essence of being American, it is suggested, eventually all comes down to money, guns and violence.

At least, that is what he would have us think.

It’s Mr. Korine’s excuse for ninety minutes of soft porn titillation. Not that I have anything against ninety minutes of soft porn titillation…just don’t dress it up as anything more. Which is why “Spring Breakers” is a profoundly dishonest film. Whereas Tarantino uses a B-movie palette to craft stories that are quite distinctly Tarantino-esque with that brilliant dialog he’s so well credited as demonstrating, this trashy film pretends to be using the grammar of the sexploitation beach and sex movie to make a deeper statement about the human condition.

When really he’s using the excuse of making a statement to revel in exploitation.

Despite its crudeness, James Franco was excellent and invested a sense of reality in a movie that had precious little of it. He needs a better agent that man.

 

 

Intelligent & Clever: IN THE HOUSE

“IN THE HOUSE” is an intelligent and cleverly gripping tale of obsession, voyeurism and creativity (which director Francois Ozon, who did the deductive “Swimming Pool”, would have us see as linked). Fabrice Luchini is Germain, who, like all the adults in the film is depressed and frustrated. He’s a teacher who, one day, sets his rowdy, generally uninterested class a project, to write about what they did that weekend. As he is reading out, sneeringly, to his wife (the ever outstanding Kristin Scott Thomas) excerpts of the expected rubbish his students hand in, he comes across a well-written story from Claude (Ernst Umhauer), a boy who sits silently at the back of the class.

Claude’s story tells of how, attracted by the middle class smell of the mother and the seemingly perfect bourgeois world of Rapha Artole, one of his classmates, he begins to insinuate himself into the life of the family. The short two page observation of what either actually happened or was fantasized as having happened, ends with the words, “To be continued”

Germaine and his wife Jeanne (Kristin) are gripped and, in order both to encourage a talented student and, like any reader of a tale, to find out what comes next, Germaine urges Claude to keep on writing. The boy becomes the Scheherazade to the Germaine’s, as his on-going story seduces them into its narrative spell, and like any good story, transports them away from their banal lives into the vicarious thrill of living through the lives of others – in this case, the lives of the Artole’s, Claude’s surrogate family/artistic creation.

We too follow, gripped by Claude’s evolving lust for Esther Artole (Emmanuelle Seigner as Rapha’s mother) which, as a manifestation of a sixteen year old boy’s obvious fantasy, may or may not have actually been consummated. Beyond this centerpiece of shape shifting creativity (as Germaine comments and offers suggestions, so does the story change) multiple other stories – layers of reality – emerge.

Jeanne’s story is of her failing art gallery (her major exhibition features pornographic blow up female nudes with the faces of dictators, symbolizing the dictatorship of sex, even as Claude begins his sexual conquest and as Jeanne questions her husband’s own sexuality) and may represent the failure of her own marriage.

Rapha Artoile Sr’s story hints at the immanence of his nervous breakdown, driven to distraction as he is, by an intrusive, disrespectful boss from China (paralleled in Jeanne’s gallery’s second major exhibition – featuring a pretentious Chinese artist).

Esther, Rapha’s wife is, like Germaine, an unfulfilled artist, but is initially made out, by Claude who we increasingly realize is an untrustworthy storyteller, to be simply a bored and vacuous housewife preoccupied with nothing grander than home improvement.

In other words, Claude presents us with one story, but through misdirection, we see multiple others.

“In the House” is at its heart therefore about how reality is observed and about how art enhances the acuity of our own powers of observation. For the centerpiece story (essentially the reality of a young man’s lust for an older woman) contains deeper truths despite itself, enabling us to observe and appreciate the less romanticized realities of the slowly destroying lives of the characters we meet in the film.

Only the French could give us a drama like this – wordily talking about art and its role in our lives, filled with existential angst and celebrating the beauty of women well past their Hollywood golden years.

Brilliant: The Hunt

“THE HUNT” IS the latest film from Thomas Vinterberg, a director who started out the Dogme movement with his breakthrough work, “Festen”. It’s a gripping, brilliantly told drama about a kindergarten assistant, Lucas (the outstanding Mads Mikkelsen who we know as Le Chiffre from “Casino Royale”, and who was also recently the protagonist in the superb “A Royal Affair”) who has been accused of improper intimacy by one of his –six year old – students.

The accusation is so startlingly outrageous that Lucas is stunned by it. The child is the daughter of his best friend and someone he was especially caring toward. That this tender, morally upright man could be accused thus by the child, aggrieved by his admonishment of her, is absurd.

Unlike “Doubt”, another film about accusation, “The Hunt” is not about doubt. It’s a study in group hysteria. There’s an immediate – and absurd – assumption that, despite all that’s known about him, even by the friends he’s known all his life, Lucas is assumed to be guilty by pretty much everyone, barring his loyal son and a friend.

These two are seen as the few pillars of reason in a world that has suddenly shifted to a dark side of irrational hate and fear.

In one hard to watch scene, he’s attacked in a supermarket by its employees who don’t want his ‘sort’ there. He’s shunned by the small, local community, even as their kids, reflecting the hysteria of their parents, fantasize about him having abused them in the cellar of his house. (And as it turns out, his house has no cellar)

“The Hunt” follows Lucas’ story as his life shreds. The movie begins with a deer hunt; we quickly realize that he has become the animal. He is the hunt.

For if Islamic Jihad is the terrorism that forms the backdrop of our modern lives, pedophilia has become its private counterpart. And, in a reaction to the decades (centuries?) in which pedophiles were allowed to get away with their abusive behavior, shielded by cassocks, fame and incompetent policing, nowadays the tendency is to assume that the accuser is justified.

The innocence of the child carries an assumption of honesty and easily overwhelms adult denial.

And this is the position that Lucas finds himself in. He is a lone figure trying to stand up to the zeitgeist of the times with its demands for blood and its assumption of guilt.

This is one of those beautifully well-constructed movies – every scene fits perfectly in place to establish context, illustrate character and allow the meaning of the story to unfold at its own tensely leisurely pace.

it’s a noir: The Paperboy

“THE PAPERBOY”, LEE Daniels’ latest work (he also gave us “Precious”), tells the story of two reporters – Matthew McConaughey as a slimy Ward Jansen and David Oyelowo (“Complicit”, “Lincoln”) as a faux Englishman, Yardley Acheman – who journey down to a hot, sweaty Southern swampland in search of an award-winning story and the truth: what they believe to be the wrongful imprisonment of one Hillary Van Wetter – a deranged, drooling John Cusak. Van Wetter is supposed to have disemboweled the local sheriff and is in death row.

They enlist the aid of Charlotte Bess, a highly sexed, bleached-blonde beauty (Nicole Kidman, steaming up the screen) who –for reasons that are never explained – has taken to corresponding with Van Wetter and has fallen in love with him. She becomes the central object of lust and desire, by the incarcerated Van Wetter and the Jansen’s young brother Jack (Zac Efron as an Oedipal stud, forever strutting up and down in his underpants, all hormones all the time).

The whole story is narrated through the memory of the Jansen’s maid, Anita (Macy Gray), a stoic figure who has managed to shoulder off racist abuse and simply carry on.

The search for the truth – set amidst the town’s close-lipped, prejudiced conspiracy of silence – is the movie’s central theme. Daniels introduces us to a world where the villains are as unattractive and unsympathetic as the protagonists and where, he suggests, the truth, never obvious, remains ever elusive and ambiguous.

All this in an atmosphere of sweaty (literally – as everyone sweats in the movie) lust and sex. In one, you could say climatic, scene Nicole Kidman reprises the “Basic Instinct” crotch shot as she titillates a shackled Cusak. The sex grows more and more debased as the movie heads toward its dark denouement, revealing as it goes, the grimy truths of Daniels’ characters.

Alfred Hitchcock once said that he chose Jimmy Stewart as often as he did in his movies because Stewart bought him ten minutes. By this he meant that Stewart’s persona was so well known and loved by the movie-going public that he came with huge positive affection…so as a writer, Hitchcock didn’t have to spend ten minutes creating a likeable film persona; Stewart bought him that. He could simply get on with his tale.

We saw this in “Arbitrage”, (even though this was just a passably average film) where Richard Gere is such a seductive personality that, even though we may disapprove of his character’s conniving, manipulative ways, he still manages to seduce the audience into rooting for him to ‘get away’ despite ourselves.

One of the problems with “The Paperboy” is that there is no Jimmy Stewart persona. The nature of the story demands this kind of obfuscation between truth and lies, good and evil. But Daniels so relishes showing us – exclusively – the nasty, seedy side of his characters (and we’re happy that McConaughey has finally moved away from gormless romcoms to playing seedy, which is his real métier) that he never allows us to empathize with anyone.

The result is a ‘caring deficit’. Basically, as an audience, we don’t give a shit about any of the people we’re spending this ninety minutes with; so that the emotional drama of the tale becomes seriously compromised.

Indeed, because he’s so intent on making his point about the hazy ground where truth and lies merge, the narrative truth of the story falls off the tracks. For as the story unfolds, there are multiple revelations and twists that take place. These make good intellectual/thematic sense – but they lack dramatic relevance. From a story-telling perspective, they become irritations and irrelevances; they contribute little to the plot.

Net, net, “The Paperboy” is a reasonably well-acted, seriously flawed, thematically overburdened movie.

It’s one, to be genre appropriate, I say “noir” to