Michelle Pfeiffer was an Academy Award nominee for Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons (1988), for which screenwriter Christopher Hampton took home a statuette. But I don’t expect literary adaptation lightning to strike again with Cheri, which is based on two novels by Colette.
Poised somewhere between The Queen (2006), High Fidelity (2000), The Grifters (1990), and My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) at the top of Frears’ prolific film and TV career and Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005) and Mary Reilly(1996) at the bottom, Cheri has all the externals you’d expect from a costume drama set in 1920s Paris. Photographed by the gifted Darius Khondji (Se7en), the stately homes and bountiful gardens could fill a week of HGTV programming. A go-to composer of the moment, Alexandre Desplat (of The Queen, and one of my favorite recent scores, The Painted Veil), has contributed lush music. If anything breaks through with end-of-year awards voters, it’ll be the sumptuous costumes of Frears veteran Consolata Boyle, which wrap around co-star Kathy Bates like so many exotic tents. And there is the luminosity of the 51-year-old Pfeiffer, as Lea, the belle of the Belle Époque.
Lea is a retired courtesan, comfortably ensconced in the home all those years on her back with rich and powerful men bought her. Regarded suspiciously by polite society, the courtesans live in a world of their own, sipping champagne and gossiping, which gives Hampton a chance to drop witty Wildean epigrams into the dialogue. One of their number, Madame Peloux (Bates), has an incorrigible, bed-hopping son, Fred (Pride & Prejudice co-star Rupert Friend), who is nicknamed “Cheri”—and proves very dear indeed to Lea, who claims the 19-year-old as her lover. Their passionate relationship ends when Peloux decides she wants grandchildren, and marries off Cheri to an eminence’s daughter. To Lea’s secret delight, marital bliss eludes the foppish Cheri. But the child-man decides to grow up, forcing painful reckonings. (more…)
Spike Jonze has given us more pleasure than most other filmmakers, just in smaller doses. Like this:
And this:
And of course this:
A Spike Jonze short film of Maurice Sendak’s pint-sized classic Where the Wild Things Are might have been solid gold. (An animated short was produced in 1973.) But Jonze has attempted a full-length, live-action version, which makes no sense. Then again, on paper, Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002) didn’t make a lot of sense, either, but he and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman conjured movie magic from them. There was hope. (more…)
Hot on the heels of his new novel Juliet, Naked is Nick Hornby’s screenplay for An Education. Though the writer’s name is a selling point for the film (a rare honor for a lowly scribe) don’t expect the pop- and sports-obsessed musings of the movies based on his books About a Boy, Fever Pitch, and High Fidelity. Based on a memoir by Lynn Barber, this one’s about a girl. And what interesting company 16-year-old Jenny (Carey Mulligan) proves to be.
An Education takes place in 1961, just before London started to swing. From the start, the movie is excellent at signifiers: The period production design (Andrew McAlpine), art direction (Ben Smith), set decoration (Anna Lynch-Robinson), and costume design (Odile Dicks-Mireaux) all show a proper, if mildewed, English reserve, and the lighting, by John de Borman, has an uncanny restraint, as if it too is being rationed. Conservatively raised by parents Jack (Alfred Molina) and Marjorie (Cara Seymour), Jenny would seem to be far from the epicenter of the cultural earthquake that would collapse the fifties into the sixties. But she’s a little braver, and more precocious, than her schoolmates, to the occasional dismay of her teacher, Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams), and the institution’s headmistress (Emma Thompson), who see her as Oxford material.
However, the enigmatic businessman who gives Jenny a ride home one day in his Bristol roadster, David (Peter Sarsgaard), sees her as something else. At least twice her age, and Jewish to boot, David is enchanted by his slightly thorny rose, who is in turn captivated by his stories of Paris and his familiarity with the worlds of art auctions, nightclubs, and racetracks. That David’s business partner, Danny (Dominic Cooper, from Mamma Mia! and The History Boys) and Danny’s girlfriend, the sexy but scatter-brained Helen (Rosamund Pike), are a rougher sort, and that the nature of their business is on the shady side isn’t too worrying. Jenny’s hooked, and so, to her surprise, are her parents, who buy the couple’s white lies, figuring that her association with a worldly type who brags about his friendship with C.S. Lewis can only improve her chances of getting into Oxford. (more…)
Writer/director David Mamet and co-star William H. Macy have a good time reminiscing on the commentary track that accompanies the Criterion Collection edition of Homicide (1991). This “cop movie that didn’t want to be a straight-up cop movie,” and started as an adaptation of a novel that was soon abandoned, is the third of the playwright’s films, following 1987’s hard-edged House of Games (also on DVD from Criterion) and the gentler Things Change (1988). Whatever it is—“I’m paid to write it, not read it,” Mamet growls—the movie is one of his more compelling, and makes a timely reentrance on the scene, given its relation to the “Jewish vengeance” pictures Defiance and Inglourious Basterds.
Those are set during World War II, or, rather, the fact-based Defiance is; Tarantino’s unspools in the multiplex in his head. Filmed in Baltimore (before the like-named TV show got there), Homicide unfolds in Mamet-land, that semi-realistic place where everyone has a “thing,” and if your thing collides with someone else’s thing you better look out. It centers on police detective Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna, the star of Mamet’s prior films, here with a wounded face and manner like slightly bruised fruit), whose “thing” is being a stalwart first-through-the-door cop. But the overt racism of black FBI agents trying to take down an elusive drug dealer (Ving Rhames) and the institutional prejudice of the force (Macy is his best friend, a member of the Irish old guard) get him more personally involved in the routine murder of an elderly Jewish candy store owner—whose past includes running guns for Zionist causes. Gold’s assimilation offends the proprietor’s family and colleagues, who close ranks around him. But he wants to know more about their “thing,” which draws him into a noir-ish hive of archaic symbols and anti-neo-Nazi activity. (more…)
The 47th annual edition of the New York Film Festival kicks off tonight at Lincoln Center. Except for last year’s paternity leave I’ve attended every one since 1994. Back before I acquired grown-up responsibilities I’d see (and pay for) upwards of half of the annual selections, spending weeknights and entire weekends at Alice Tully Hall during its two-week run. I remember getting up early one Saturday to see a splendid four-hour Japanese drama (Eureka—which was sepia-toned, no less), then sitting happily through three more movies—and doing pretty much the same thing the next day. I may have even fit a commercial release or two at the nearby multiplex during breaks.
The good times. Ed Wood at midnight. Vertigo, Playtime, and the 2007 restoration of Blade Runner in 70mm. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and numerous other movies with the creative personnel in attendance, seated feet away from me in the cheap seats (the ones closest to the stage and podium). Discovering prominent international filmmakers like the Dardenne brothers—The Son was the film of theirs that really knocked me out. Hooting at Gaspar Noe’s putrid I Stand Alone—he did stand alone, before the most hostile audience I’ve seen.
If there were an easier way to access the year-by-year festival lineups online, I’d stroll down memory lane for an entire column. (One more: My sympathy for the unemployed protagonist of the film Time Out, when I was in the same unhappy boat.) That’s one bone I’d pick with the festival, whose archiving could use work. Then again, there are memories I’d rather block out. Like the snide questioner who asked Boogie Nights writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson how much the film cost, to which he shot back a temperature-lowering “Was it worth it?” when Anderson replied $15 million. The audience questions in general tend to be migraine-inducing, particularly when asked in three parts—but I have to say that the Q&As after festival press screenings, with professional journalists raising their hands, aren’t always that much more enlightening. Then of course there are the many tepid-boring-bad movies I’ve paid an escalating price for, from $8 fifteen years ago to $20 today; I’d regret them more if I could summon them from the web and actually recall them. (more…)
In the HBO/BBC co-production Into the Storm, a visibly moved Winston Churchill (played, in an Emmy-winning performance, by Brendan Gleeson) screens his favorite movie, That Hamilton Woman (1941), for guests. Churchill is said to have a hand in its production, whose intent was to rally an isolationist America to Britain’s side as World War II ravaged Europe. It’s also beloved by the venerable film critic Andrew Sarris, who claims to have seen it 80 times. And it earned a spot in Danny Peary’s outstanding three-book overview, Cult Movies. So what’s special about That Hamilton Woman?
A typically fine Criterion Collection disc gives a few answers—though the booklet essay by Molly Haskell is silent on her husband, Sarris’, affection for the picture. It’s unabashed propaganda, so much so that only Pearl Harbor and America’s entrance into the war spared producer/director Alexander Korda from a Senate subcommittee investigating the interventionist influences that were attempting to sway public opinion. That New York audiences cheered its anti-appeasement and pro-war sentiments, allegedly penned by the prime minister himself, made a strong case for the government. But the film is leavened by a classic romance, actually two—the one onscreen, between the dashing Admiral Lord Nelson and the irresistible Lady Emma Hamilton, and the one off, between stars Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Both were steeped in adultery, though the movie, mindful of Hollywood censorship, minimizes the facts of the historical affair—Hamilton’s extravagantly checkered past has been tidied up, and the inconvenient truth of their out-of-wedlock daughter ignored.
Having married in 1940, Olivier and Leigh were off the hook, but just barely, as audiences knew. Romantically involved since Korda paired them in his earlier Fire Over England (1937), the two became major movie stars in 1939, Olivier in Wuthering Heights and Leigh in…well, do I have to say? (Look for it on Blu-ray in November.) That Hamilton Woman, their third and last collaboration onscreen, was a honeymoon project for them. (more…)
Add to your list of national crises the death of the American movie star. The obituary was written as soon as the summer grosses were in. Digital effects, franchising, and cartoons are the engines of boxoffice success this year, a familiar story. You have to go down to the current No. 10 slot to find a truly star-driven movie in a CGI-free context, and that is The Proposal, with a long-in-the-tooth Sandra Bullock wringing a few last dollars from romantic comedy.
Sandra, I loved you once, peaking somewhere around 1995, but girlfriend, you’re not growing. And I know you know it. And you know your audience knows it, too. You fooled them once this summer. But having to discover All About Steve, at your age, is as much a chore for them as it is for you. (“This finding-out-about-love shit again,” I imagine you muttering as you report for duty.)
How you, and all the other gals—and all the other guys, for that matter—must envy Meryl Streep. At age 60, with an astonishingly flab-free 32-year career in film, TV and theater behind her, and Katharine Hepburn-type longevity clearly ahead of her, Streep is at the top of her game, as an actor and as a genuine movie star, that rare performer who can get butts into seats without gimmicks. How does she do it? It’s simple—she plays real people uncannily well, and we respond to that knowingness.
I caught up with Julie and Julia, her latest hit, the other night. Writer-director Nora Ephron was correct to split the movie’s structure between her Julia Child and the blogger (rising sort-of star Amy Adams, her co-star in Doubt) who’s emulating her. Child was pretty much a happy, unconflicted personality, and happy, unconflicted personalities don’t make for good biopics. The critics were wrong—while I wish the movie weren’t as shapeless as it is in places, and that Adams’ scenes didn’t smack of manufactured crisis, I didn’t want more of Child. I got what I wanted, and that was Streep busting through Dan Aykroyd’s infamous parody (which Child loved, and which is shown in its entirety in the film) and the subject’s peculiar mannerisms to get at the marrow of the matter. The way Child responds to later-in-life husband Stanley Tucci’s declaration of love on Valentine’s Day, the way she masks her pain when sister Jane Lynch writes that she’s having a baby, the unstated heartache of her life (“I’m so…happy,” she exhales), her quiet whoops at finally having her cookbook published…that’s what I wanted to see, and I saw it so clearly through her acting. Wisely, Ephron doesn’t make a big deal of Child’s prowess in the kitchen and indulge in food porn—the point is that if you apply yourself, like Julia and Julie, you, too, can master the art of French cooking. It’s not Iron Chef. It’s a discipline, and Ephron knows we’ve come to see her star practice her craft. (more…)
As you might have heard, the Beatles albums have been remastered, in a format called “CD.” (“Compact disc,” right? I owned some of those back when I had hair.) Not that you would know from this site—Popdose has done a lousy job covering this.
Actually, as you well know, Popdose has been on the leading edge of the new Beatlemania. I’m just bitter: When I misidentified Mae West’s version of “Twist and Shout” as a “Beatles cover” I was thrown under the bus as our magical mystery tour meandered through all the hoopla. But no Blue Meanie can stop me here.
This week we look at Beatles movies. No, not A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, or Yellow Submarine, which by Popdose law you have to watch at least once per year. Nor Let It Be, which I haven’t seen in its entirety. Has anyone since before those DCs, I mean CDs, were introduced? The boys won Oscars for their song score, beating out the fearsome competition of The Baby Maker, A Boy Named Charlie Brown, Darling Lili, and Scrooge. Did recipient Quincy Jones hand-deliver the statuettes, or simply put them in the mail to the fractured four? Whatever—speaking words of wisdom, this is the time to free Let It Be.
I really wanted to include a clip from the 1976 curiosity All This and World War II, which sets Fox-owned footage of the conflict to Beatles covers in a desperate bid to win over the kids and the “nostalgia” audience that was hungry for the next That’s Entertainment! Only in the 70s, folks. But the movie is presumably such a seething mess of rights issues that not even the copyright banditos want to touch it. With a little help from my friends at YouTube, then, my focus is the non-Beatles movies JPGR worked on. (more…)
It’s Labor Day Weekend, and if you’re like me, you’re off to the movies. What to see: The unstoppable Sandra Bullock in another romantic comedy? Gamer? Hmmm…maybe a double feature, the unstoppable Sandra Bullock in another romantic comedy andGamer? (What the heck is Gamer? Doesn’t a sequel to The Crow usually fly into this spot?)
No, you’re not like me. But I’ve got news for you: I’m not like me, either. Drag me to hell: I’m not gonna sit on my ass in some multiplex when the best weather of the season has arrived at the 11.5th hour. I’m going to sit outside and taunt the kids who have to go back to school on Tuesday—man, I hated Labor Day Weekend when I was a kid, knowing that the school bus was going to pull up like Charon the ferryman to escort me back to Hades.
Summer. It was good, now it’s dead. And it’s time to reflect on the corpse.
Boxoffice-wise, the top five films of the season were the Transformers and Harry Potter sequels, Up, The Hangover, and Star Trek. I saw the last three. (In a simpler time in my life, say any day before Aug. 25, 2008, I would have seen them all. The franchises got the boot.) And they were good. Well, The Hangover and Star Trek were good; I can’t say I got down with Up, which struck me as minor Pixar, not out-of-gas Pixar like Cars but a little thin. Still, I’ll buy the DVD—except for Cars, I have them all, even Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo—and give it another spin. (more…)
A 201-minute Belgian film described as a “domestic 2001” could inspire reams of pretentious criticism, but I found Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) pretty easy to relate to. Dielman, a widow, lives a narrow, routine-dominated existence, given over entirely to domestic tasks and responsibilities, which over the course of three days we observe in real time. She makes the beds, cooks the meals for her and her mopey teenage son (whose questions about his father and other niggling subjects she deflects), minds a neighbor’s baby, and does the shopping. Between 5-5:30pm she turns a trick, to keep the finances afloat. One day, she finds herself with a free hour, with nothing to due but ruminate—and her carefully regimented life crumbles.
As a stay-at-home dad with various tasks to complete on any given weekday, Jeanne, I hear you. (I prostitute myself by writing DVD reviews). How things change; I was in no way the target audience when the film premiered. Directed by the 25-year-old Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman was written by Danae Maroulacou, produced by Evelyne Paul and Corinne Jenart, edited by Patricia Canino, photographed (strikingly, in the unforgivably tight spaces of Dielman’s apartment) by Babette Mangolte…80 percent of the crew were women, at a time when the film industry was almost exclusively male. The star, Delphine Seyrig (from Last Year at Marienbad, which bends time and space in different ways), was an ardent feminist, committed to exploring the life and contradictions of the non-working woman. I doubt anyone realized that the next generation would breed John Dielmans.
Gender politics aside, the film can be appreciated for the sheer chutzpah of its craft. Think Tarantino goes in for long takes? Watch—and watch, and watch—as Dielman goes about her daily drudgery, including the unsexy sex. (more…)
As you might have heard, the Beatles albums have been remastered, in a format called “CD.” (“Compact disc,” right? I owned some of those back when I had hair.) Not that you would know from this site—Popdose has done a lousy job covering this.
