Change Your Image
alexinaus
Reviews
Ruthie and Connie: Every Room in the House (2002)
More than Gay Pride
This wonderful documentary was recently aired on late-night Australian public television, itself a veritable coup. Informative, insightful and loving, it is also hard-hitting, confrontational (especially about the continuing struggle for equality in partner benefits, marriage rights, etc.) and not the least bit sentimental. Bravo to these two brave ladies, and to the well-paced filmmaking. Favourite moment - Florida ruminations of a room full of 70-something Brooklyn Jews, accents somewhere between Jackie Mason and The Nanny. A long-standing friend, seemingly modeled on ZsaZsa Gabor, proclaims "Ruthie and Connie...they have the best relationship of us all!"
Sweet Sixteen (2002)
Scotland the Sour
Ken Loach returns to his socially conscious kitchen sink roots with Sweet Sixteen. This, his newest film, is cultural examination of life, that of the underclasses of Greenock, a Clydeside dump outside of Glasgow.
Fifteen-year-old Liam (played admirably here by 17-yr old footballer Martin Compston), an eighth-year school dropout, is an energetic, two-bit hustler of stolen cigarettes. His no-hoper mother is in the slammer, due to be released one day short of his sixteenth birthday. Liam is determined from that day forward to have what he believes to be a normal life, bugger the odds. He resolves to get enough money together to move her out of her council flat and into a trailer, albeit with a reasonably scenic view. This will require, among other things, ₤6,000.
Not exactly easy, especially when the people that surround you could give genocide credibility. But Liam, if restricted, is ambitious. Mum's trashbag boyfriend is a micro dealer, and Liam, egged on by his best friend, the pathetic Pinball (beautifully realised by William Ruane) steals a decent stash and elbows into the smack business. He is promptly making what he thinks is real money.hell, he's fifteen, after all. He cuts in on other dealer's turfs, passes a Goodfellas-like initiation and is adopted by first-class mobsters; the cash rolls in, people get upset, relationships break down, corpses appear. One can easily envisage the ensuing maelstrom; Sweet Sixteen is nothing if not predictable. The downward spiral to the denouement, on Liam's birthday, is told with confronting, if slow-moving, realism.
Cinema is all too rarely used as a medium for social change, or even social consciousness. Three generations after John Ford's seminal The Grapes of Wrath, can you name one dozen `conscious' films on that level? Loach's work, for all its weaknesses, admirably attempts to fill in the gap. His first major effort, Cathy Come Home (1965) directly affected British law regarding the homeless. The portrait of a teenager in trouble, revisited here, is the theme of his best film, Kes (1969). He continued at length in this `socio' vein, but his film forays into politics have often left a lingering bad taste, to say nothing of some second-rate films. Fatherland (1986) outwardly pits the then totalitarian East against the capitalist West of Germany, as seen through, of all things, the music industry. Carla's Song (1996) plods into similar preachy territory; a refugee from Nicaragua winds up in Glasgow and reveals her previous agonies. (Based upon how he portrays Glasgow, I'd opt for Managua and the death squads). His best recent work was probably the sentimental My Name is Joe, in which two Glasgow thirtysomethings, at the bottom of the food chain, find love. His eleven minute segment in September 11, a reminder that 11 Sept 2001 was the 28th anniversary of General Pinochet's coup of the Allende government in Chile, is admirably constructed, but is the sort of sophomoric political rant, in this case rabidly anti-American, that is best left to film students.
Loach's strength is really as a director of actors, and this is the power of this film. (He would probably be an excellent theatre director.) Many are untrained newcomers, from the depressed areas of Western Scotland, and many are probably too young to even see this film in the theatre. Loach turns up the energy to a fair level of teenage exhilaration. These kids have brains, streetsmarts, guts and dash - when robbing his sleeping grandfather, a complete degenerate, Liam pinches the old fart's dentures for good measure. The short segment when the kids really have things rolling (they commandeer a take-away pizza joint as a front for Vespa smack deliveries) has urgency and thrill. There's real talent here - in addition to Compston and Ruane, watch out for Annemarie Fulton, another newcomer, as Chantelle, Liam's sister. This is one of the strongest performances in the picture; she is clearly an actress of inherent talent.
In an exceptionally strong scene, Liam, new to the dealing game, is jumped and robbed by a trio of thugs. He audaciously and admirably claws back his supply, punching his way to dignity. This is a pretty common scene in flicks involving drugs and mobsters, but the effect here is unique, due to some strong camera work and the strength of Compston's no-holds-barred performance. It is not only touching - for one brief moment, we have cinema.
Sweet Sixteen is scripted and acted in the broadest possible regional dialect, which is saying a fair bit. It was decided in the UK to show subtitles for the first fifteen minutes only, thus jarring the audience into realising that this too is English. Well, barely. In Australia it is shown with subtitles throughout, which is a welcome, necessary bonus. It only accentuates the cultural alienation.
Loach's work is indeed honest and natural, but it is far from cinematic. There are minimal camera tricks, nominal music, and one wonders if a cinematographer was even employed. But with anticipation and shattered hopes, he does indeed convey what the world must be to a teenager. The adults (drug mandarins, bank managers, Liam's odious elders) seem as if they are from a different planet; the film is so clearly intended to be from the kid's perspective. We are shown with the dreams, inanities, absurdities, body language, filthy mouths and wonderful humour of fifteen year olds. Accolades to the three teenagers in the leading roles; their performances will no doubt keep the bums on the seats until the end.
In terms of social consciousness, Sweet Sixteen hits all its marks. Something must be done. We have known that the rusted hell of industrial Scotland has existed for quite some time; Loach reminds us that, under the onslaught of drugs, entire generations are lost. However, at the end of the day, Loach as a filmmaker, does not fully serve his theme. Although it is welcoming to see aspects of the realist tradition of De Sica, Truffaut and the like alive outside of Iran and China.all things considered, Sweet Sixteen has the pace of a second-rate BBC documentary, and less of an impact.
A direct contrast, and of course unfair comparison, can be made with Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream. Here, two films, one excellent and the other remarkable, give us confronting worlds of heroin-addicted kids, the marginalised and the hopeless, in the grandest style of broad, exciting, confronting cinema. One does not exit these films saying, `something must be done'; one can barely speak. As the credits roll on Sweet Sixteen, as Liam celebrates his birthday, we do indeed say, `something must be done.' About pics like these.
Respiro (2002)
Breathe Deeply
In Emanuele Crialese's lyrical drama Respiro, the sky is gorgeous. The sea is gorgeous. The harsh landscape is gorgeous. The children, even when they are behaving like little monsters, are gorgeous. The lead actress is gorgeous. There is so much obvious and intentional gorgeousness about this picture that we have to dig far down, past the scene painting, to find the story.
Although subtitled Grazia's island (Grazia is the lead role, magnificently realised by Valeria Golino), Respiro could have well been called "Scenes from rural Sicilian life", as the scenography, cinematography and tableaux-like imagery seem as important to the director as her thin narrative line. Respiro's locale is Lampedusa, a tiny island far off the west coast of Sicily. About the same latitude as Malta, this place is about as remote as it gets - Tunis is closer than Palermo. It can be safe to say that Italian time here has pretty much stood still for decades; this is Italy of de Sica and Mascagni, not Fellini and Prada. The men go out to sea, the children play, women pack fish, old black-clad crones meddle and the languid summer air of total boredom hangs down from the cloudless sky.
The story is fairly typical, the type that a few great (and many, many average) Italian filmmakers have been serving up for the last three generations - life in the sun drenched rural, ritualistic and tribal south and the saga of one village denizen who dares to break the moulds. How long since Cinema Paradiso?
Grazia (incidentally, the name means "grace" - get it?) is a loving, rebellious humanist - she loves her children, she loves music, she loves swimming in her panties, she loves the Vespa-propelled wind in her hair and loathes the suffering of any living creature. She does not love to cook, or put on rubber wellies and plastic smock to pack sardines. This high-spirited recklessness is just a bit too much for this dusty place and she is duly deemed mad. Golino, who acts in four languages and has had decent parts in Leaving Las Vegas, Immortal Beloved and Frida, is a joy to watch. There is not a moment forced or unnatural about her performance and this is saying a fair bit, considering her several mad scenes. She conveys brilliantly the purgatory of a loving woman who wants more, but knows neither what it is nor how to get it.
After two incidents (one just a bit lusty, the other bordering on a bit off) it is decided by the meddling crones and village busybodies to send Grazia off to a sanatorium in Milan, which might as well be Mars. She will have no part of this and her 13-year-old son hides her in a secluded cave. Her ensuing escape, seclusion and discovery offer us some more gorgeous imagery and displays the motherly bonding quite well. Yes, the imagery does go a bit down the obvious, biblical, redemptive female roads, but it well handled. Water, which has played quite a large role in the director's concept, stars in a few more scenes. It also features in the film's ending, which is spiritual, gorgeous and inconclusive in the same breadth. Love and human devotion may win, but this gal is not going to be packing sardines for much longer!
The movie, considering the almost rudimentary story line, is incredibly rich. The smallest characters are well defined and there is wonderful juxtaposition between formal Italian and the coarse regional dialect. Much of the cast is so natural you could believe them to be locals. The essence of life in such a village is well captured and the relationships within a family are well explored as well. And there is enough of the magical landscape of the place to make you want to board the next Alitalia jet. For a visit, that is.
Lovely & Amazing (2001)
Not Lovely, Not Amazing
Contains spoiler The genre of "chick flick" has its most recent entry in Nicole Holofcener's Lovely and Amazing. Like many of its predecessors, this film succeeds in presenting a world where men are either marginalised or eliminated. Where it does not succeed is making us empathise with any of these women, or the total mess that they make of their lives. Although indeed originals, Holofcener's women seem derived from some mish-mash of Oprah, post-feminist angst and All My Children.
This mess begins with the appearance of Jane Marks (Brenda Blethyn, here playing a well-fed Californian with her customary skill), a divorced mother of three very different daughters, preparing for Lipo. Two of the daughters are physical (if not mental) adults, Michelle (Catherine Keener) and Elizabeth (the fine Emily Mortimer). Bringing up the rear is Annie, Jane's newly adopted black daughter, whose biological mother is/was a crack addict, and who is eight years old. The liposuction proves complicated, and while Jane recuperates the drama centres on how the adult daughters fare without their mother, with the prosect of losing her, and with caring for their younger, troubled sister.
Michelle is an "artist" who spends her time creating meaningless knick-knacks to fill LA's myriad gift shops. Several vendors wisely reject her (for example) hand-painted wallpaper, and she often storms out in foul-mouthed rages. Her increasingly alienated and ignored husband, Bill (Clark Gregg), who installs top-end personal sound systems, is furious at her refusal to contribute to their family income or get some grip on reality.
They have a young daughter whose delivery, by a painful natural childbirth, has provided Michelle - the fallen Homecoming Queen, incidentally - with her principal topic of self-obsession. She eventually takes a job in a one hour photo shop, and screws that up by responding to the adolescent libido of her boss, gangly 17-year-old Jordan (Jake Gyllenhaal). She is vulnerable enough to his flattery and angry enough at her husband and life to respond.
Elizabeth Marks is an actress, or someone attempting to get cast. The film opens with a photo shoot, showing her in a louche dress exposing her nipples, revealing her insecurities in the opening lines. Later, rejected for lack of sex appeal for a part in a soap with the handsome, vain Kevin McCabe (Dermot Mulroney) Elizabeth allows him to seduce her. Afterward, in the films most interesting scene, she demands to pose nude so he can deliver a tooth to toe rap sheet on her physical imperfections.
The scene is superbly played and almost painful to watch. Where he wants to praise her modest charms and looks, Elizabeth cajoles him to find greater and greater flaws. Drained, he responds that he too is unhappy with his body, his trainer has encouraged bulk instead of lean hard muscle. These two deserve each other! (I'll be interested to see what post-post feminist film critics make of this scene one generation from now.)
As the film plods along, Michelle gets herself into an ugly mess with her boss, Elizabeth breaks with her steady boyfriend Paul, and Annie, clearly absorbing more and more of the Mark's neuroses, grows fatter and fatter. Sassy, smart and dry, Ms Goodwin's performance here is one of the few joys of the pic; one hopes we see more of this talented young actress.
Nicole Holofcener has directed many episodes of the cannonical Sex and the City. This is a challenge to credulity, as nearly all of the energy, verve, wit, polish and insight signifying that show are absent here. The dialogue is indeed intelligent, and it is well-tuned to the banter of women's relationships, but more profound issues affecting women seem to be addressed in a half hour episode of SATC than in this ninety-minute chunk of cinema. Although at times smart, observant and candid, plot lines soon thin out, smaller characters are reduced to gross caricature, and the overall feel of the film seems, at times, downright amateurish.
Lovely and Amazing is neither.
Moonlight Mile (2002)
A mile per hour
Spoilers Brad Silberling's Moonlight Mile is an intensely personal film. When one becomes aware of its genesis, it becomes all the harder to contextualise.
In 1989, up and coming starlet Rebecca Schaeffer was blown away by an obsessed stalker. Murdered at 22, Schaeffer didn't accomplish terribly much; her claim to fame is the watchable late-80s sitcom My Sister Sam. She would score immortality, posthumously, because she was engaged to hot young TV director Brad Silberling, just about to hit the big screen.
His first feature was the charming, black-around-the-edges Casper, far better than the banal cartoon. Silberling followed Casper with the appalling schmaltz-fest City of Angels, an adaptation of Wim Wenders' magical Wings of Desire, closer to abortion than to remake. Now a name and a box office draw, he was primed to make his autobiographical elegy.
On a grey morning in a grey Massachusetts town, a sombre young man, uncomfortable in a suit and tight new shoes, prepares the family pet his breakfast, dog food heaped with Pepto-Bismol. The dyspeptic golden retriever, suggestively named Nixon, belongs to Ben and JoJo Floss (Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon), and their household is preparing for the funeral of their daughter Diana. The young man was her fiancé Joe (Jake Gyllenhaal); he is now being quasi-adopted as Ben's new business partner and the son the Flosses never had.
Messages are pushed from the onset; Ben instructs the Rabbi not to mention God in the upcoming service. On the unpleasant limousine ride to the cemetery, kids play baseball and ride bikes, people wash their cars, teenagers pash, a bride and groom leave a church. The waiters at the reception gossip while the dog vomits, JoJo grieves and Joe hyperventilates. God is absent, Life goes on, get it?
A few days prior, Diana was waiting for her father in a luncheonette across the street from his offices, newly re-signed "Floss and Son". The pink wedding invitations are in the post, something important is in the air, and Ben is late. Diana is caught in the crossfire between a waitress and her deranged boyfriend: the waitress takes two bullets to the head and lives. Diana does not.
She is to be avenged by crusading DA Mona Camp (just ignore that one) well played by an under-used Holly Hunt. The upcoming trial will be agonising; Joe will stay in town. (In reality, the DA on the Schaeffer trial was Marcia Clark, who later went to fame for not convicting OJ Simpson. With this in mind, Hunt makes all the more interesting casting choice.)
Joe soon, inevitably, finds another girl, in this case a caring, blond postal worker named Bertie (Ellen Pompeo). Her saloonkeeper boyfriend Cal is MIA three years in Vietnam, and she moonlights in the bar that is, ostensibly, hers. She holds on to Cal's memory in denial, refusing to move on, and the parallel between her condition and Joe's is gratingly ideal, if not blatantly obvious.
Pompeo, in her debut feature, has the charm and talent to just about triumph over her limited character and her underwritten material. There is more than a hint of the vulnerability of Michelle Pfeiffer; Pompeo's welcoming eyes, warm smile, stringy blonde hair and pale, freckled skin seem perfect for her characterisation. Even when tested with bad dialogue, saccharine scenes or contrivances, her work is honest and direct. This is an auspicious debut of a talented actress; here's hoping she is not typecast as a working-class dishpan blonde.
Somewhere between the first ten minutes and Bertie's entrance, on cue to the title song, we realise this is a period flick - to be imprecise, sometime in the early '70s. (Moonlight Mile was the last ballad on side B of the Stones' Sticky Fingers album and, yes, it's gorgeous.) The production design has no grasp on the audience, and this era should be just a little more obvious, right? Although the emphasis is clearly on browns, greys and wintry drear, the flat costumes and dull sets grate quickly.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays his role with a dreamy-eyed, muddled boyishness that seems closer to late puberty than adulthood. Although honest and earnest, he appears swimming in his tweeds. His performance also fronts as both a chemical and stylistic imbalance with Hoffman and the other seasoned artists. One of the film's high points, a meeting with Joe, Ben and a blustering big dealer (played delightful tongue-in-cheek by Dabney Coleman) touches on a Coen Brothers note that is, unfortunately, not sustained. Remember that Mr Hoffman went to stardom in The Graduate, playing a very different Ben, a young man in a not-so-distant era lost in a sea of his elders. Now listen to "Commercial Real Estate!" in Mr Coleman's sepulchral moo, ringing a reverential bow to "Plastics!" in the older film. It's a wonderful touch, but the energy does not transcend. Coleman and Hoffman's characters have blood in their veins, Gyllenhaal tepid tap water.
Hoffman's work is, of course, first class. No actor of his generation (save Al Pacino) plays a common man better. And Ben Floss is your classic, simple small town man, in a relationship of convenience, at odds with his daughter, emotionally crippled. This is just the sort of bloke who collapses hardest when an event like a child's death strikes; Ben still manages to go to work, answer all ringing telephones, pat mates on the back, and slowly disintegrate.
Sarandon, ever the pro, gives JoJo her all. She is the sarcastic, groovy writer to Hoffman's late middle-aged fart, sneaking cigarettes and Scotch, mocking the ghastly neighbours. Her presence is the films greatest strength and weakness - Sarandon has played these roles many times before and, frankly, she is simply too large for them now. Her presence and power are so great you cannot keep your eyes off of her. It seems bizarre indeed that this urbane gal is married to a real estate agent in a two-bit town; JoJo's explanation of why to Joe is the film's best (and best written) moment. Great opportunities are lost; a further scene with Mr Gyllenhaal has a tempting sexual subtext, it leads to nowhere. The grief stricken JoJo gets herself soused and hungover; the ensuing battle with Ben is the only time the film catches fire.
There are inconsistencies in the filmmaking that stem past continuity fubars or a script that needed at least ten more rewrites. Mundane scenes come and go. Potentially interesting subplots are left dangling; there are enough lost opportunities for five features. No attempt is made for local colour, and a New England coastal town would have one colourful vernacular. The Flosses are secular Jews ("Floss" means "raft" or "to flow" in German and Yiddish. go figure) for no other apparent reason than the subject was; the only detectable Jewish moment seems to be in their love of take-away Chinese. The cinematography is a big worry - although some fine panning shots of the downhearted town evoke Edward Hopper, lighting, shadow and overall colour have a quality that emphasises the obvious. However, regarding the music, Silberling fills the film with some great B-side period music, and avoids cheap rock/cinema clichés.
Much of this mess can be excused because it is Silberling's third feature. To criticise his closing stance on crime, grief and forgiveness is dangerous inasmuch as it is near autobiography; but some ethical posing is altogether reprehensible. The moral ruminations of the death penalty are hinted at, there is a drama-less courtroom scene, the woeful accused appears, and the woman he was attempting to kill. Detail will give away the conclusion, but the moral denouement is that Diana had her brains blown out, and that's ok. Love, live, forgive. life goes on. The ensuing, pseudo-redemptive, music-drenched ending will have many reaching for their Kleenexes; a barf bag is suggested. The dog had the right idea all along.
Personal, carefully made in places and featuring some fine performances, Moonlight Mile seems like a period mishmash of Ordinary People and In the Bedroom, regurgitated by the Coen Brothers, with an extra helping of B-grade schmaltz for good measure. Rebecca, rest in peace.