Love Letters to Lee

After our dreary experience with Silver Linings Playbook, Brian and I felt wildly refreshed by another nominee for Best Picture (among other nominations which include Canadian composer Mychael Danna for Best Score).   On this Valentine's Day, we both have bouquets to toss at Ang Lee.

Brian's Review of Life of Pi

Life of Pi: An Appreciation

Care

I love seeing places I know in film. They feel like a secret shared between me and the movie, a whispered "We know this place, you and I." Here, Ang Lee uses recognizable locations in Pondicherry and Montreal in a way that maintains the integrity of the local geography alongside the imaginary geography of the story. He announces: Space matters and will be treated with care and attention to detail.

Depth

3D is a spectacle of depth attempting to deny the flatness of the screen. Objects are close or far. They are in front of or behind. In moments of frenzied action, Life of Pi uses 3D in this way. More often however, 3D is used to make empty spaces deep: air over flat water, light on rippled water. Space expands quietly offering room for thought.

Unexpectedly, during its most spectacular moments, the film arranges objects in the frame so as to flatten the image. A boat floats on a black pool of brilliant stars; or it floats in a field of buttery light, sky and sea indistinguishable except for the thin horizon drawn through the center of the frame. These moments of flatness are announced as a compositional strategy in the animal montage rolling under the opening credits, most memorably in the picture of a bird and the flowering branches of a tree. The 3D technology cuts the image’s foreground from its background, creating an illusion of depth, but the photography cancels that illusion by composing its subject in the manner of a silk painting.

The shallowness of objects pitted against the depth of emptiness. This strategy is thematic. It is also the only intellectual use of 3D technology that I have seen.

Love

The action of the story is both constrained and enabled by the geography of the lifeboat and raft. Distances between the raft and the lifeboat, between the front of the lifeboat and its back are crucial here. The 3D underscores the distinction, and here too, it is thematic. What after all is a dance between too close and too far if not a love story? And this film is about nothing if not love.

Two images capture that story for me. In the first, a tiger hangs to the edge of a boat by a claw, desperate and lost. A young man, ax in hand and desperate too to live, looks down from above and recognizes the tiger as real and alive and worthy of care. In the second image, a tiger sits in a boat as night falls waiting for the young man (who looks on from afar) to come back to their home. Between these moments is a story of generosity and kindness given freely until the giving becomes a habit and the habit a joy. That feels like a definition of love to me.

Happy Valentines Day.

Caitlin's Review of Life of Pi

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Poetry in 3D 

by Caitlin Murphy

Prose writers uncertain about cinematic adaptation would do well to trust their work to Ang Lee.  In Life of Pi, based on the novel of the same name by Yann Martel,Lee reveals again, as he did so strikingly in Brokeback Mountain, his deep integrity as a story-teller and sensitivity to source material.  What results is a film that is visually glorious, entertaining and profoundly moving.

Pi, an Indian teenager, is so named not as an allusion to math (we are told in playful backstory) but to a famous swimming pool in France.  He is voyaging to Canada with his family – and the many inhabitants of their former zoo – when a massive storm strikes.  As the sole human survivor of the shipwreck, Pi ends up sharing a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, and must devise ways to survive at sea with his impossible companion.  As anyone who’s read the novel knows though, Life of Pi is actually the story of this story, and an exploration of what it means for a story to be ‘true’.  In a framing narrative adapted from the novel, but adjusted for the film, a middle-aged Pi recounts his unbelievable experience to a curious writer who has heard of his tale and sought him out to hear it.   Filmed in Montreal, mostly in the old Port, these brief scenes add an extra little thrill for Montrealers.

To my delight, the film is populated with essentially unknown actors.  Having originally cast and filmed Tobey McGuire as the listening writer in the framing narrative, Lee eventually abandoned that footage feeling that McGuire’s star status detracted from the centrality of the story.  This strikes me as one choice among scads of smart others that Lee made to protect and priviledge Martel’s material.  First-time actor, Suraj Sharma, is compelling and forceful as Pi, especially given that he spends most of the film not only acting opposite a non-human, but opposite a non-flesh being even – 86% of the images of tiger Richard Parker were created with CGI.  To consider the amount of blue screen work this entailed for Sharma, and the resultant workout his imagination endured, is to find an evocative behind-the-scenes parallel to Pi’s own story.

At heart, like the novel, the film is not so much about survival, as about storytelling and faith.  We don’t tell ourselves stories because they’re true, but because they keep us intact.  Pi’s memory of his near-death experience serves as metaphor for the role of religion, but more generally his relationship with Richard Parker also stands in for impossible situations of all kinds and what we manage to do with them – an admission that life itself is essentially an untenable proposition, full of suffering, pain, loss and fated from its inception to end, that we negotiate as best we can.

At the ticket counter, I grumbled shelling out extra money because the film was in 3D, and even considered not seeing it.  In my limited exposure to the trendy gimmick, 3D has felt like a sad add-on meant to vaguely “intensify” the film-watching experience; usually no one has taken the time to think through what it’s actually supposed to be contributing to the film beyond its own ‘trippy’ effect.  Here, its use is so refreshingly elegant, restrained, and thematically relevant, that it actually felt integral to the story-telling.  The cinematography, heightened by the 3D effect, is so uniquely stunning that water, animals, stars, trees appear re-invented, served up new again.

Indeed, the film’s exquisite imagery made me feel like I’d been forgetting the sublime beauty of the natural world – suddenly an animal’s colours, stripes, movements, whiskers felt previously unseen or unimagineable.  Putting the audience in this naïve place of wonder is perhaps the film’s single greatest achievement.

Watching Life of Pi is to be reminded of how very much we have to marvel at.  Which could be a cheap, pat or cheesy lesson.  Except that it’s coming from Ang Lee, who is always doing something else altogether.

The More Things Change

Somehow, nearly 5 months have elapsed since the last reviews.  Shameful.  But as my original blog-buddy Brian and I discovered as we began our Oscar nom viewing checklist, there is always a ridiculously contrived and unsatisfying upside to every down.  Sigh.  Enjoy these dismissals of Silver Linings Playbook.

Brian's Review of Silver Linings Playbook

Genre in Bad Faith

by Brian Crane

So I wasn't going to watch Silver Linings Playbook. I'd seen the trailer and was pretty sure that it would be terrible. Then one day, I found myself heading to a theatre to watch this thing with Caitlin as part of our Best Picture screening list. Sitting down, I was genuinely confused: how could a trailer be so misleading? I quickly learned, it wasn't.

This movie is clearly a romantic comedy. But in what I take to be a bid for contemporaneity or seriousness, it makes a big deal about cutting through the bull, getting real, and addressing the problems of relationships today. The hard truth this film proposes is that a lot of us are sick, diagnosable, requiring accommodation. To know each other, the characters don't need to communicate. They just need to be brought up to speed on their case histories. And so, in scene after bathetic scene, we listen to unpleasant characters announce their diagnoses to each other as if these constituted personalities. "I AM" he says. "I AM" she says. "I AM" he says. And so on and so on. And who cares?

For all it's self-importance, this approach to character is much more simplistic than the approach native to romantic comedies of the classic 1930s sort. Watch Bringing Up Baby or The Philadelphia Story or It Happened One Night and you'll see movies about adults made for adults. They have happy endings, yes. But these movies earn those endings in complicated and emotionally complex stories that transform their characters and launch them forward into life. Nothing in romantic comedy--the cinematic genre most closely related to the theatre of Shakespeare--is simple or easy. It only seems that way because we want so badly for its faith in us to be true.

Silver Linings Playbook may believe its view of humanity is smarter and truer than romantic comedy's, but in the end, it can't pull off the picture it wants to paint. "I AM" plus "I AM" doesn't equal "we." And so in it's final moments, the movie generates the romantic closure it seeks by embracing (without avowing) the romantic genre it has worked so hard to repudiate. Out of the blue, this movie about him saying "I AM sick, that's just me," and her saying "I AM (not) a slut, deal with it," becomes a movie about a dance competition, one part Strictly Ballroom, one part Little Miss Sunshine. Untrained, outclassed and with all of the family's fortunes on the line (don't ask), the characters decide to try their best, dance their hardest, and in the end, against all odds, discover they can do it if they just let go and have fun. The family fortune is saved, and the two, now lovers, find each other and kiss in the empty nighttime streets, happy finally together.

I think this movie wants to update a genre. It wants to make those silly, old-fashioned movies take account of what we "know" today about human experience. How after all, if so much of what we feel and experience is actually symptomatic of illness, can you find love? It is telling (and reassuring) that the movie can't offer an answer any different than the established generic answer. That four-hundred year old tale of marriage delayed but achieved through work and conversation still rings true to our experience and aspirations. The tangle of diagnosis this film takes as our lot does not.

…and yet, all those awards and nominations…

Something in us wants to believe in the new story of sick people this movie can't figure out how to tell. And that's terrifying.

Caitlin's Review of Silver Linings Playbook

Like a Lead Balloon

by Caitlin Murphy

A few years back, the Best Picture Oscar category was expanded from a list of 5 nominations to a maximum of 10.  The change seemed to have merit:  create room for the less conventionally epic, the more comedically inclined, the smaller budgeted –  or otherwise just somehow humbler – cinematic offerings to enter the fray.  It’s a move that’s allowed the Oscars to embrace such gems as this year’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, which might otherwise have fallen off the radar.  But it’s also a move that’s backfired, letting in riff-raff like Silver Linings Playbook.  Written and directed by David O. Russell (The Fighter) and based on the novel by Matthew Quick, the film is a warmed-over rom-com that manages mediocrity at every turn.

Set in Philadelphia, the film opens with Pat Solatono (Bradley Cooper) being released from a mental health institution where he’s been staying since a breakdown 8 months ago.  He comes home to live with his football-obsessed father (Robert DeNiro) and snack-making mother (Jackie Weaver), armed with a new determination to always find life’s silver linings (why haven’t other bi-polar sufferers come up with this yet?).  Pat strategizes to re-establish his life, regain his job, and win back his wife (currently holding a restraining order against him).  Out for a run one day, he meets Tiffany, a sultry, recently-widowed 20-something, who’s been self-medicating with sexual promiscuity.  In exchange for getting Tiffany to hand-deliver a letter to his wife (not sure why the American postal service wouldn’t work), Pat agrees to be Tiffany’s partner for a dance competition.  And thus the bumpy wheels of the ‘romantic’ plot are put into crunchy motion.

In the vein of As Good as It Gets, the film attempts that awkward blend of actual mental illness (as opposed to mere personality quirk) with light romantic comedy, trotting out that old chestnut that true love can fix any noggin.  It seems the only recent revision to this rom-com narrative of “fucked up guy, meets redeeming girl who saves him from himself” is “fucked up guy, meets similarly fucked up girl, who saves him from himself.”  Equality at last. 

Pat’s behaviour though never quite feels ugly or complicated enough to do service to the reality of serious mental illness.  His capacity for violence is typically tied to ethical outrage:  his initial breakdown, for instance, resulted from discovering that his wife was having an affair and losing it on his romantic rival.  Well, who wouldn’t do that, right?  At least a bit.  And once he’s out in the real world again, the only time Pat’s violent rage re-surfaces is when he defends his Indian therapist from a bunch of racist football fans.  Awww.  

Focusing also on Pat’s father’s OCD-like behaviour surrounding his beloved football, as well as his own history of violence (he’s banned from stadium games), the film seems interested in suggesting that we’ve all got our own case of the ‘crazies’ and some are just more official than others.  But it’s a theme that never really gathers much momentum, and limply lies on the ground by film’s end.

To return to the Oscar noms, the film also somehow wound up in the undeservedly distinguished company of films like A Streetcar Named Desire and Who’s Afraid of Virignia Woolf with nominations in all four acting categories (leading and supporting).  Bradley Cooper, (who no matter what he does in his career I will always comfortably reduce to ‘that guy from The Hangover’) demonstrates precisely why he’s always expressing red-carpet bafflement to have found himself with an acting career.  His performance is so much fluff.  As for Jennifer Lawrence, I like her –  her husky voice, solid build, no-nonsense posture, Juliette Lewis-like snark.  She had me at Winter’s Bone and it will take quite a bit to undo that love at first sight.  But she’s wasted here.  One-note and predictable.

When Pat’s father loses a huge football bet that he wagered based on a rabbit’s foot faith in Pat, everyone rallies around to help him.  What follows is a long, sloppy scene in which the players plot out an elaborate parlay bet to win back his money by pairing up the results of a football game with those of Pat and Tiffany’s dance competition.  The scene was reminiscent of a bunch of squabbling screenwriters sitting around past midnight trying desperately to figure out how to ‘end this thing.’  And this is exactly what the film felt like far too often – watching what the filmmakers were ‘trying’ to do, the awkward plot-making machine churning away.

And the bow that ultimately wraps up this turd?  A boy-girl chase scene that ends with a kiss in the middle of the street.  Of course.   Like every other moment in Silver Linings Playbook, it’s precisely something you’ve seen before, or else something that vaguely stinks of it.   The entire film lacks texture and specificity, and when it does manage to scrounge some up, the results are so contrived and self-conscious, that it might as well have crept back to its sleepy den of cliché.

 

Of Buddies and Beasts

My original buddy, Brian, is back for this one and hopefully many more. We knew pretty little about Beasts of the Southern Wild going in, which meant for that much more to delightfully stumble upon. Enjoy!

Brian's Review of Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern wild is wonderfully strange and ambitious.

It's odd then to write about the film's influences. It can even look like avoiding a difficult film. Yet, watching it, I couldn't shake the sense that this movie was consciously setting itself in relation with two of contemporary cinema's most idiosyncratic and philosophical filmmakers: Terrence Malick and Werner Herzog. What's more, the film's final act seemed to offer an alternative vision of the world. So in a clumsy way, here is what I'm thinking about (still) in response to this movie.

First Malick, the more overt influence. In Beasts as in Days of Heaven, a young girl with a nearly incomprehensible accent narrates in voice-over a tale of adult relationships. Her voice is naive but philosophical. By narrating a story that is beyond her, she makes the relationships less familiar, more visible, and she comes of age. Stylistically, Malick's influence is strong: the subjective camera that parallels the child's point-of-view while maintaining one of its own; the lyricism of the imagery; the interest in natural landscapes; all of these are emblematic of Malick's recent films. The allegorical side-story of the prehistoric animals and the numerous handheld, shallow-focus close-ups could have come directly The Tree of Life. However, Beasts is very different from Malick's films in that it is less abstract, less sure that things will work out, less certain that God (of some sort) is in his heaven and all is well.

Second Herzog, a set of references that are more specific and less overt. In fact, I've wondered if they are there at all. But the more I think about them, the more I'm convinced that the final scenes of Aguirre: The Wrath of God are the proper context for thinking about the muddy, boat-centered lives of the people of the Bathtub. The only thing missing is monkeys. If you aren't sure what I'm referring to (or know and think I've lost it) watch this clip and this one.

I take the visual references to be plain. So the question becomes how Beasts' ideas about human life in a savage environment compare to those of Herzog's. It seems to me that Beasts flips the moral and ethical terms of Herzog's film on its head. Aguirre is mad, powerhungry and, despite all evidence to the contrary, confident of his superiority to the natural world. His death reveals his folly. In Beasts, the people on the boat are humble, generous and aim to live happily within the natural world. Their lives reveal an odd wisdom. The modern Aguirres (and they have become legion) live behind the levee, a concrete wall that pins nature in and drowns it. If Aguirre speaks to the danger of reaching impossibly high, Beast tells of the danger of sitting quietly in the world (but outside the system).

In the final act, I think the film leaves these sources behind and offers a very different and very old vision of the human condition. Here the concrete, unabstracted poor (who we see so little in contemporary film) live in a different world. Their lives are confusing because they are not presented as failed immitations of our own lives or as interestingly different lives that enrich our experience. They live lives that respond to, reject and denounce the sterile and, yes, lifeless choices we make every day. They are kings of their own kingdom, live their own lives. And life is a holiday. In short, they are carnival figures celebrating the return of physical life, nature, eating, drinking, sex, community, all the things we pretend we can buy at a market but can't. This vision is neither as complacent as Malick's nor as bleak as Herzog's, but it is no less philosophical and no less challenging. What it shares with these other films, however--and this is troubling, really troubling--is an oddly medieval anti-modernism.

As I left the cinema, these were the pieces of thoughts I had floating around in my head. They don't cohere much more now than they did then. But they interest me and hint at what makes this move one of the most exciting and smartest American movie I've seen in quite awhile.

Caitlin's Review of Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beautality
by Caitlin Murphy
 

Walking into Beasts of the Southern Wild, I knew about as little as one can know about a film before seeing it.  I had glimpsed the poster image.  And what I thought I saw was the back-lit silhouette of a long-armed alien.  The alien turned out to be Hushpuppy, a 6-year old black girl, running through the woods, holding fire-crackers, and trailing sparks behind her.  And from the film’s opening images – Hushpuppy alone, wearing boy’s briefs and rubber boots, playing in the mud and pressing little animals to her ear in attempt to hear their thoughts – I knew I was a stranger in an endearingly strange land.

Beasts of the Southern Wild, directed by Behn Zeitlin, who co-wrote the screenplay with his friend Lucy Alibar (based on her play Juicy and Delicious), is a sort of dark fantasy set off the shores of Louisiana in an area known to its residents, as “The Bathtub”.  Hushpuppy and her hardened father, Wink (Dwight Henry), live in separate raised trailers, surrounded by their animals (some pets, some dinner).  When a massive storm descends on them, “The Bathtub” is flooded; the few who remain alive join together, as survival become an even more brutal game. This impromptu family is also filled with caring and kindness though, and lessons abound about always watching out for the littlest ones among us.  As Hushpuppy intuitively knows with her animals – we must listen hardest for the voices we can’t hear.

The mise-en-scene in Beasts of the Southern Wild is itself a filmmaking feat.  With so many locations, so much water(!), and such crazily cramped and dilapidated spaces, the attention to detail is remarkably evocative.  One couldn’t help but wonder how much of the rich environments was already in situ and how much was staged.  And with half the cast hailing from Louisiana bayou country, the sense of place  in the film is intimately drawn and acutely felt.  The real-life images of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, as well as those of other recent disasters, of course, hang awkwardly in the air. 

The levee that separates ‘civilized society’ from “The Bathtub”, protecting it from the flood, serves in the film as a metaphorical divide between those aware of nature’s dominance, and those who naively seek to obliterate it.  And through Hushpuppy’s imaginings of massive icebergs crumbling, and pre-historic beasts grunting back to life, we are reminded that our sense of control over nature is illusory, and that we are heading for a painful wake-up call to that effect.  In this sense, a central tenet of the film seems to be, very broadly, that a reckoning is coming.

As the young Hushpuppy, the even younger Quvenzhane Wallis (her mother brought her to audition for the film at 5 years old, even though the call for actors said they had to be 6) is fiery, vulnerable, and eerily present.  Her father calls her ‘man’ and fervently drills into her his most treasured life-lessons– how to rip a crab apart (‘beast it!’), flex one’s muscles, and not ever ever cry – and Hushpuppy goes toe-to-toe with him just as he implores her to.   She doesn’t so much try to match others though, as she does to meet them.

In one of the film’s most striking moments, Hushpuppy scribbles images of her life on a cardboard box that she hides under, as a self-set fire threatens to engulf her in her trailer.  Having learnt about cave drawings at school, she wonders how she will be remembered, deciding that if her life can’t be saved, then at least her story can be.  She asks how her existence, her father’s, and their time in “The Bathtub” will be made known to outsiders and descendants.  And in this sense, Beasts of the Southern Wildis overtly political:  Hushpuppy marches against the tendencies of history and dominant culture to shore up some stories and let others wash away.  The film is an indictment of our strange ability to ignore so many real lives lived. 

Beasts of the Southern Wild is Court 13’s first feature-length film.  Clearly, like its heroine, the company is young, small and mighty.

 

New (England) Found Passion

Joel is someone I've known peripherally through arts circles for some time, which I guess properly lands him in the category of a contemporary.  How rich!  Knowing he's a writer, a blogger, and a guy who generally likes to throw his opinions around, I sought him out as a buddy.  Though we meant to hit up Woody Allen's latest offering, due to scheduling we wandered into Wes Anderson's instead.   Enjoy!

Joel's Review of Moonrise Kingdom

PUPPY LOVE IN THE MOONRISE KINGDOM:

joel fishbane

One day, some film class will study Moonrise Kingdom as the perfect representative of Wes Anderson’s oeuvre. Stylish and full of quirk, Anderson’s films feature wildly eccentric worlds that use absurdity as the window into the human condition. The results are usually varied. Style sometimes triumphs story in Anderson’s work and while the worlds are fun to visit, one doesn’t always want to stay for an extended period of time.

Caitlin's Review of Moonrise Kingdom

Ride on into Sunset
by Caitlin Murphy

It’s a testament to the iconic quality of Wes Anderson’s work that any filmmaker who even touches dysfunctional families, precocious children, or pasty, ineffectual adults, risks courting comparison.  Anderson’s got a patent on a particular brand of quirk, and he never strays too far from his bread and butter.  Though Moonrise Kingdom fits snugly in his library, it doesn’t quite earn its keep.

Absence and Hunger

After a horribly long hiatus from review-writing, I had actually secured myself a blogging-buddy; we planned to check out Tim Burton's Dark Shadows, but due to a scheduling mishap, ended up seeing The Hunger Games instead.  All good; surprisingly so.  But then my buddy and his review mysteriously went M.I.A.  So... as time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking into the future, I figure I should get my own review up at least before The Hunger Games sequel comes out.  Relevance is so fleeting these days.  If he shows up, I'll certainly add his voice in.  For now, hope you enjoy my solo flight into Penam.

Caitlin's Review of Hunger Games

Surprised and Sated
by Caitlin Murphy

I had made a vague, but deeply felt decision about The Hunger Games before I even walked into thetheatre.  Something about hating it.  My conclusion was based on a few previews, but also my sad suspicion that Jennifer Lawrence – who I’d adored in last year’s stirring film Winter’s Bone – was about to cash in her chips in yet another hyped-up book-to-blockbuster orgy. 

Sometimes it’s so lovely to be wrong.

Down, Down, Down

I'd been hoping for a long while to get my mentor-cum-friend, Sarah Stanley, to blog-buddy with me, but always felt badly adding more static to her already very busy brain.  Thrilled that she was able to join me for The Descendants.  Enjoy. 

Sarah's Review of The Descendants

A woman is water-skiing. The screen cuts to black and the credits and music that will dog us through The Descendants starts up. The opening shot is both stark and nostalgic: the face of a woman expressing an irrepressible joy from living a reckless moment perfectly. It feels like it is being shot by a loved one, the lighting is not quite right, the white balance seems off, the angle odd, a little too intimate somehow.

Caitlins Review of The Descendants

Ice Cream Headache
a review by Caitlin Murphy

If ever you are watching a film, and a character gazes out his airplane window and claims, in voice over narration, that it makes sense he lives in Hawaii because his family is like an archipelago – you are probably not in very good cinematic hands.

A 20th Review

From the moment I saw the preview for this next flick, I knew who I had to ask to buddy-blog it.  Ken is a family friend who has known me since birth, and he's a psycho-therapist, which always means for awesome dinner conversation, at least on my end, as I inundate him with questions:  "Okay, what really makes someone a psychopath?  And are psychopaths the serial killers or are those sociopaths?  Can you be a psychopath AND a sociopath?  What's transference again?"  It goes on.  He's great. 

Enjoy our takes on David Cronenberg's latest offering...

(Oh yes, and as per the heading, this is also the 20th film reviewed on this blog, which launched last February 6th.)

Ken's Review of A Dangerous Method

by Ken Ludlow

Early on during my first psychotherapy, which was psychodynamic but neither Freudian nor Jungian in the strict sense of those terms, I asked my seasoned therapist what the main difference was between undergoing a Freudian and a Jungian analysis. After a brief pause he replied, “Well, if a guy were to undergo a successful Freudian analysis he would probably still feel a bit nuts but he’d actually be doing quite well. If he were to complete a Jungian analysis he’d think he was one of the sanest men on the planet but he’d still be really nuts.”

Caitlin's Review of A Dangerous Method

A Sure-Fire Plan
by Caitlin Murphy

From the opening images of A Dangerous Method – the usually sedate Keira Knightley thrashing against the confines of a horse-drawn carriage, destined for an asylum – we are thrown into a world preoccupied with the tension between chaos and control; a world blinking its eyes open to the big, new ideas of psychoanalysis.  Directed by David Cronenberg, a man typically drawn to the dark, deep and disturbed, the film, though eminently watchable, is quite a lot subtler and safer than its title or director’s name might imply.