Steve McQueen’s Shame offers the story of Michael Fassbender, a New York City something or other, who is a sex addict. We learn this because he flirts with women on the subway, engages prostitutes, and masturbates/watches porn morning, noon and night. When his unbalanced sister, Carey Mulligan, comes to visit, his equilibrium is shattered, either because she is nude in his apartment, she sleeps with his boss, or she references their childhood. No matter. This is the kind of film that is destined to have as a penultimate scene Fassbender on his knees, in the rain, with a “will he or won’t he crawl back into sex addiction?” finale.
Why is Fassbender this way? As Mulligan says, “we’re not bad people. We just come from a bad place.” However, that place is actually identified in the script as either Ireland or New Jersey. And that is the sum and substance of motivation, backstory or reason.
In place of exposition, McQueen provides pointless, overly showy scenes, including a long, several block Fassbender jog through the streets of NYC; a preposterous nightclub song by Mulligan (she sings “New York, New York” and sports a Marilynesque “Happy birthday, Mr. President” skintight dress); and, a ridiculous threesome with Fassbender and two women that is half Obsession by Calvin Klein, half Showtime soft core.
“I know how you feel, pal.”
My wife summed it up beautifully: “I don’t even think he was a sex addict.” Her comment is akin to watching Raging Bull and declaring, “I don’t even think he was a boxer.”
Also, Hans Zimmer should sue the composer, Harry Escott, who ripped his work off on The Thin Red Line damn near note for note.
The 1.5 stars are awarded because our good friend’s sister is in the picture and the movie looks great.
This critically-acclaimed 2011 release purports to be a psychological study of its protagonist, Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), who becomes a member of an upstate New York commune/cult led by the charismatic John Hawkes (nominated for an Academy Award for his role in Winter’s Bone). The film opens with Martha’s escaping the collective farm, though Hawkes and the other members of the commune (a motley assortment of women who serve him and a few young men) don’t do very much to stop her flight. Martha ends up 3 hours away, at the Connecticut lake home of her wealthy sister and her new husband. There, we learn of her ordeal through flashback (sexual abuse, violence, co-opting and subordination to the whole) while she struggles to adapt to life outside the cult. She provides tension to her sister’s household as she brings bad habits from the commune with her (swimming nude, curling up in the bed of her sister and brother-in-law while they are having sex, condescending to them about their lifestyle) and undergoes post-traumatic stress that manifests itself in panic attacks, wetting herself and refusal to discuss what happened.
All of which makes for a frustratingly monotone of a movie. Martha is treated with such sensitivity by her sister that you sympathize most with the husband, who has to endure a recalcitrant, moody weirdo in his midst without anyone ever saying, “What the hell happened?” Worse, while it is clear that Martha undergoes trauma, her behavior after she endures it suggests a person who was under the sway of the commune since childhood. In fact, Martha was there for two years. Also, the key to a psychological study is an explication of why Martha was lured into the life, but we get no clue as to what Martha was looking for when she voluntarily allowed herself to be part of Hawkes’ crew and scant information on what the cult is really about. Martha seemed shallow and dull in flashback and during present-day, she seems shallow, dull and jittery. Moreover, Martha says some very terrible things about and to her sister (“You’re going to be a terrible mother”), who has the patience of Job, suggesting she was a first-class turd even before she went to the commune. This is not conducive to empathy. Finally, the picture reveals a Manson-esque quality to Hawkes very late, which is awkward and unconvincing.
Another problem is Olsen’s performance. Yes, she does better work than her sisters ever did on television’s “Full House”, but it is still a one-note, amateurish turn.
Roberto Begnini’s Academy Ward-winning fable is in two parts. First, the love-at-first-sight courtship of a sweet and funny man and a beautiful schoolteacher, followed by a tale of a father’s love for his wife and son and the lengths to which he will go to spare them the cruelty of a Nazi concentration camp. Both halves of the film seamlessly meld, and the picture travels a road from sunny to tense to dire, with Begnini at the heart, lending dignity as he dances faster and faster.
Begnini’s film is neither historically accurate or particularly reality-based. Indeed, the half of the film occurring in the concentration camp could have taken place over a period of months, weeks or days, and Begnini’s character essentially creates a daily circus to shield his boy from the horrors that surround them, behavior not even Colonel Kilnk would have allowed. For this reason, Life is Beautiful came in for criticism from some quarters who believe that a Holocaust movie should not necessarily be the backdrop for a comedy, however bittersweet, and/or that Begnini trivializes and historically mutated the reality of Italian Jews during World War II.
Nuts. The overarching theme of the film is a father’s attempt to protect his son from death, both physical and spiritual, effectively conveyed in a respectful manner. Complaints of inaccuracy or improper tone are misplaced and rigid, as if there is some politically correct blueprint for a Holocaust film. Conservative film reviewer John Podhoretz recently followed this line, attacking the latest X-Men movie – which traces Magneto’s powers and philosophy to his treatment at the hands of the Nazis – thusly: “Genocide and supernatural powers don’t mix”.
Nuts to him too.
Shoah has been made. So too Schindler’s List and The Wansee Conference. Go see them, I implore you, and make your own judgments (and while you are at it, check out Enemies, A Love Story, which actually mines a Holocaust survivor’s post-trauma love triangle for a couple of chuckles). But don’t stilt artistic vision in the name of grim devotion to past horror.
These criticisms smack of paternalistic preaching that might make The Catholic Standard proud. Tarantino and Stone “glorify” and thus perpetuate violence. Lolita makes child molestation all the more probable. And Begnini’s work, according to Slate‘s David Edelstein, similarly offends: “Imagine Harpo Marx giving the hot foot to a pompous official, who takes out a machine gun and blows him away: That’s how cheap Benigni’s hash of farce and tragedy is. It’s a gas, all right.”
Edelstein earned his “I’m A Sensitive Keeper of the Grim Tenor of Concentration Camp Flicks” ribbon. And with that award goes a free ticket to Showtime’s offering, The Devil’s Arithmetic – Kirsten Dunst is transported from modern day history class, where she passes notes and ignores the teacher’s recitation of the the extermination, to a WWII-era Poland. Or The Twilight Zone, where Vic Morrow’s modern day bigot was carted off in a train headed, presumably, to Treblinka.
Controversy aside, the film begins in brilliant color but mutes to near-black and white as the story continues its necessarily sorrowful pace. I can say little about the direction as my eye was trained on Begnini. His performance as an unserious man at the most serious of times mirrors Chaplin (another person we could criticize – how dare he benefit from physical comedy while aping the creator of the concentration camp, Adolf Hitler). His carefree and whimsy is tested as he becomes separated from a rich life, his wife is torn from him, and every day becomes a struggle to personally survive and protect his son. Everyone else is quite good and the son is particularly affecting (the Italians get me every time – seeCinema Paradiso).
Former police officer Jack Nicholson is haunted by the murder of a little girl, so much so it tests his sanity. He finds the love of a good woman (Robin Wright Penn), who has a little girl as well, but he remains haunted and, as near as I can tell from this complete mess of a movie, goes insane.
Sean Penn directed this picture, which was released in 2001 (he directed another similarly dark mess of a movie released that same year, The Crossing Guard, so perhaps this was a phase). The film is clumsy, uninvolving and disconcertingly showy. Penn can’t just have a cop walk into a room without cross-cuts to the ticking clock and the face of a fat, stupid common clerk telling us something (but what?). Nicholson can’t drink at a Nevada airport bar without pointless flash cuts to whirring slot machines. Not only does all this jazz lead to continuity problems (Nicholson’s scotch miraculously becomes a beer), it is annoying.
The Pledge also demonstrates Hollywood’s disdain for the working class. Set in the flatland of Nevada, Robin Wright Penn, Sean’s then-wife, is a vessel of all Hollywood presumptions about regular folk. She plays a barmaid. She has a gnarled front tooth. She is a little dim. She wears a lot of flannel. And when her savior Nicholson comes to love both her and her daughter, we know that they will commune because . . . Nicholson fixes her tooth! I mean, let’s not take this working class thing too far. We can’t expect Jack Nicholson to have sex with woman with a gnarled tooth.
Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
Another problem? Penn uses top actors for single scenes, so each feels compelled to ACCCCCCCCCCCTTTTTTTTTTT! like there’s no tomorrow. Benicio Del Toro, Vanessa Redgrave, Mickey Rourke, Helen Mirren, they all emote for a brief, generally unnecessary scene, and boy do they make the most of it. Also, the little girl is killed on the day of Nicholson’s retirement party. If Penn directs a war picture, God help the character who shows his platoon mates a picture of the gal he has at home waiting for him.
That said, I was a big fan of Penn’s more restrained and mature Into the Wild, directed 6 years later, so I chalk The Pledge up to practice.
Baseball season is upon us, so a review of a Sam Raimi baseball movie (?) is apropos. Raimi, whose credits include three Evil Dead movies, three Spiderman movies, and Drag Me to Hell, proves a strange choice to helm a love story-via-flashback, as an aging starter (Kevin Costner) thinks on his love life while trying to pitch a no-hitter.
I am no Costner-hater. He is limited but does what he does well – affable, with a flash of anger and occasional stoicism. Get him outside his comfort zone (Robin Hood, JFK, 13 Days) and you got problems. But he was a fine, goofy golfer in Tin Cup and as the sweet but violent and repressed killer in Open Range. Here, he’s Tin Cup but replaces goofy with taciturn.
Costner is not the problem. In fact, his time on the mound is compelling. But when he gets to thinking about that woman of his – Kelly Preston (wife of John Travolta, poor thing) – things go to pot. Preston is thin, harpy and jittery, and her pitch is, “you need to settle down with serious people like me instead of living the life of a little boy.” Her case is not strong. Even though she has a nice daughter (Jenna Malone), it does not seem conceivable that a good-time, easygoing jock like Costner would be enticed by her invitation. And thus, the movie is undone (and at 2 hours and 17 minutes, very trying).
Postcript: this is supposed to be a baseball movie, and while I understand that athletes get injured in the off-season performing everyday tasks, Raimi has Costner slicing his hand on a router. A pitcher making $15 million a year is not working in the shed with his Black and Decker (hell, he is likely contractually prohibited from self-gratification).
The film also has the manager putting guys up in the bullpen while Costner, who is at the end of his career, IS PITCHING A PERFECT GAME for a team no longer in the pennant race!
Paul Thomas Anderson’s opus chronicles the American porn industry in the late 70s via the story of a loose family of weaklings, caught up in the speed, confusion and excitement of sex, drugs and fleeting fame in the bleaching sun of Los Angeles (Anderson took some license here, as the porn industry started in San Francisco and NYC, but his film requires that feel of promise and wasteland that is LA).
The patriarch is porn director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), and the story revolves around his LA retreat, a gaudy ranch-styled haven for his coterie of misfits. There are the young rejects: porn star and mother Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), her teen charge Rollergirl (Heather Graham), studs Reed Rothschild (John C. Reilly) and Buck Swope (Don Cheadle) and lesser stars Jessie St. Vincent (Melora Walters) and Becky Barnett (Nicole Ari Parker); the film crew (William H. Macy, Ricky Jay and Phillip Seymour Hoffman); the money men, The Colonel (Robert Ridgely) and Floyd Gondolli (Phillip Baker Hall); and a host of hanger-ons (club owner Luis Guzman and troublemaker Thomas Jane).
Into this world comes Mark Wahlberg, a young kid who works at Guzman’s nightclub and comes to the attention of porn director Horner after Rollergirl has an encounter with him and reports back his massive endowment. Horner offers the boy a place in the family. Wahlberg becomes Dirk Diggler, porn superstar, escaping from a toxic home to the warm embrace of pseudo-stardom in fuck films. In the world of porn, he finds acceptance, friendship and a certain form of celebrity.
Diggler is based on famed porn star John Holmes, and while Anderson doesn’t take Dirk Diggler down Holmes’s exact path of The Wonderland Murders and AIDS, the trip tracks close enough. Hubris and drugs take Diggler from the safety of Horner and his new family to the street, where he ends up turning tricks, beaten by punks, desperate to score drugs and nearly murdered by a psychotic drug dealer (Alfred Molina).
To a person, these people are none-too-bright, but they cleave together in a life that mirrors celebrity, though it is gaudy and flimsy, glitz on the cheap. They briefly flourish in a fantasy world within a fantasy world, where their work is deemed art, and their talent is certified as genuine. Despite the self-delusion, Anderson shows how the family actually provides support to these outcasts never found elsewhere.
The film is visually audacious and features several flowing scenes without a cut for long stretches, including a 3 minute opening scene which introduces most of the characters. Anderson’s filming of two separate parties at the Horner house is boundless and reminiscent of Altman’s opening scene in The Player as well as Scorcese’s casino scenes in Casino. The effect meshes with Wahlberg’s entrance on the scene, as he steps into a world where he is the golden child. You see the wonder – beautiful young people drugs, a swimming pool! and despite better instincts, you become intoxicated along with Dirk.
The screenplay by Anderson is authentic and resonant, evoking David Mamet, but without the showiness. A prime example is the discussion between Horner and Floyd Gondolli on the changing business of porn:
The music by Michael Penn is evocative of the time as well, and the cuts chosen for each scene are spot on, from Andrew Gold’s “Lonely Boy” (revealing Amber Waves as a mother) to the Beach Boys “God Only Knows” providing the coda for the characters, to “Sister Christian”, which now serves as a sinister song, as used in the film’s most harrowing scene, much like “Stuck in the Middle with You” after Reservoir Dogs.
Finally, the performances are uniformly stellar. Julianne Moore was nominated for best supporting actress (she was beat out by Kim Basinger in LA Confidential, a great film and a fine performance, but still, Moore was robbed). Burt Reynolds was also nominated and rightly so. Interestingly, after seeing a rough cut of the movie, Reynolds fired his agent for casting him in Boogie Nights, but Burt’s artistic choices have never been stellar. Wahlberg stands out, exuding the perfect blend of charm, wonder, cluelessness and want. Anderson is lucky Leonardo DiCaprio turned down the role to work on a little picture called Titanic. DiCaprio’s a fine actor, but he’s a little too savvy and wary. Wahlberg was perfectly open, trusting and innocent. The scene where his mother berates him as worthless and stupid, forcing him out of the house, is heart-wrenching.
This is a classic film of America sprawl, ascent, decay, and fall. One of my favorites and one of the top 20 ever made.
An engaging and surprisingly even picture about a simplistic, homophobic ex-NY cop (Robert De Niro) living in the same apartment building as a drag queen (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). De Niro has a stroke and needs the drag queen’s assistance as a voice coach (she teaches singing) so he can learn to talk again. This is two fish, different waters. You’ve seen it. But through the skills of Hoffman and De Niro, it works really well, and review of the picture allows a meditation on Hoffman. I remember him as the spoiled rich fink in Scent of a Woman, the unfortunate thief in the remake of The Getaway and the dunce with a badge in Nobody’s Fool. Even in such small roles, he resonated. Soon came absolutely indelible and brilliant supporting turns, as the closeted and adoring fan of Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights and rich visiting playboy Freddie Miles who smells a rat in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Leads came next, including a best actor Oscar for Capote, but Hoffman is in the club with Duvall and Hackman – he can play the lead, but he’s more often better in support or ensemble, be it the outrageous Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, the chilling priest in Doubt, or the stubborn manager Art Howe in Moneyball. He’s pitch-perfect and makes everyone around him better.
His role here is actually a very different character for Hoffman. He’s flamboyant, wildly emotional and central. These are easy roles to botch, but Hoffman communicates both the external vamp and internal insecure deftly (his hysteria as his boyfriend abuses him is particularly touching). He’s very moving, and De Niro (who is also good as the disabled grump) does not get in his way.
You can find this flick in the Scent of a Woman aisle, next to all the other “Young man taught life lessons by crippled mentor, but it looks as if the crippled mentor could learn a lesson or two as well” films. Except, this time, nobody says “Hoo-wa!” but rather, “Punch the keys!”
Al Pacino is played by Sean Connery, who plays William Forrester, a crotchety, haunted J.D. Salingeresque recluse who befriends a gentle student. His charge is a fresh-faced underclass kid (Rob Brown) who is attending a tony NY private school.
In both films, the nemesis is a priggish, empty-suit of an educator who does his dastardly deeds mainly out of insecurity and spite. The bad guy here (F. Murray Abraham) is actually really, really bad. Not only does he try to railroad our hero by accusing him of plagiarism (Brown is writing under the tutelage of Connery), he actually whispers to Brown, “Don’t ever embarrass me in front of my class again.”
In Scent of a Woman, the day is saved by the appearance of Pacino at the honors trial of poor, fresh-faced Chris O’Donnell. In this film, Connery makes the same entrance at the school, but instead of speaking up for the boy, he (SPOILER) slits F. Murray Abraham’s throat with an unseen dagger.
Okay, Connery doesn’t do that He pretty much does the same thing Pacino did, he just doesn’t say “Hoo-wa!”
By-the-numbers schmaltz, made just a little more bearable because director Gus Van Sant makes things visually interesting; rapper Busta’ Rhymes is around for a few yucks; and, Pacino is not in it.
It is hard to find a worse sports movie than the hackneyed and overwrought Remember the Titans, but after Glory Road, I was almost wistful for the homespun wisdom of Denzel Washington and the beatific look on Will Patton’s face as racial understanding dawns upon him.
No matter what you may think of the delivery of Remember the Titans, and I think very little of it, with a few exceptions, it hewed however loosely to actual historical events. There was a high school football team in Alexandria, Virginia. The school was recently desegregated. The team did get a black coach and he did make the whites sit with blacks on the bus and the team did win the championship. Sure, the film exaggerated racial tensions, but that much is to be expected. It can’t be “feel good” if at first we don’t “feel bad.”
Glory Road is every bit as maudlin and formulaic as Remember the Titans (both films were produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, blast Motown, show the trading of racial culture between young men in the form of dance moves, and teach us valuable lessons about what’s “in here”) but it is also a perversion of history that goes way over the line. Yes, 5 black men played on the 1965-66 Texas Western NCAA winning basketball team and yes, they were coached by Don Haskins. This much is true.
But it wasn’t that big of a deal. A decade before Texas Western won, the undefeated 1955-56 University of San Francisco team won the NCAA championship with a team that played four blacks — Bill Russell, K.C. Jones, Hal Perry and Gene Brown. In 1958, the coaches’ All-American team was all black — Wilt Chamberlain of Kansas, Oscar Robertson of Cincinnati, Bob Boozer of Kansas State, Guy Rodgers of Temple and Elgin Baylor of Seattle. In 1962, the University of Cincinnati started four black players when it won the NCAA championship. Loyola University of Chicago started four when it won in 1963.
We also have the sports announcer screaming, “Who ever heard of Texas Western?”
A lot of people. Texas Western was a regional third place finisher in the 1964 NCAAs.
So, that sucks, but it gets worse.
The reason 5 black players got the start (and 7 played) was mundane – Haskins thought they were the best players.
Not so in the film. Instead, we get some p.c. twaddle wherein Haskins tips his desire to make a statement to the team and the white players actually agree not to play so a larger societal point can be made.
How the screenwriter came to the conclusion that it was more edifying to make the achievement a gift from whites rather than earned by blacks, well . . . that’s for another day.
I had dinner with a critic friend, David Ehrenstein, around the time this picture was released. He said something to the effect of, “A movie about these people had not been done yet. It was its time.” He was right, but before getting to the film, I wanted to note that the folks who did publicity for Curtis Hanson’s follow-up to L.A. Confidential should have been lined up and shot. The previews portrayed the movie as a screwball comedy with a bespectacled Michael Douglas playing a wise and ultimately grating character, a classier Weird Science with a bigger star.
Wonder Boys is nothing as it was presented. Instead, it is a literate comedy of manners with the setting of higher education, and it is principally about the businesses of teaching and writing. Douglas is a professor working on his second novel (his first, a successful work, was published seven years prior), which has ballooned to a deathless 2200 pages. His agent (Robert Downey, Jr.) is en route to WordFest, a weekend of literary activities, to read the novel. In the meantime, Douglas is dealing with one peculiar but gifted student (Tobey Maguire), one gorgeuous student, who also happens to rent a room in his house and who is coming on to him (Katie Holmes), and the chancellor of the department, with whom he is having an affair (Frances McDormand). Bad thing upon bad thing happens, but within the very funny travails, Hanson develops strong relationships between the characters. He also gives more than a glimpse into the soul of writing and teaching, and Douglas actually grows, and grows convincingly, given what could have been events offered solely for their madcap nature.
The film also makes great use of the city of Pittsburgh, which has always deserved better than —
![Amazon.com: Glory Road [Italian Edition] : derek luke, jon voight, james gartner: Movies & TV](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51gJUcw1DeL._SY445_.jpg)
