Gateway Cinephiles

Quick Review: Life During Wartime

2009 (USA)
Director: Todd Solondz
Viewed: August 29, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Memory, culpability, and above all forgiveness snake with python-scale brazenness through Todd Solondz’ Life During Wartime, a sequel (of sorts) to Happiness, his 1998 pitch-black slice of middle-class disillusionment (and, memorably, pedophilia).  Recasting all of the characters from that film, Solondz revisits the frayed, stymied lives of middle-aged sisters Joy, Trish, and Helen Jordan (here played by Shirley Henderson, Allison Janney, and Ally Sheedy) as they attempt to forget, move on, and start over.  Building upon its predecessor’s single-minded theme—You Hardly Ever Get What You Want—Life During Wartime gazes on the tangled, habitually dysfunctional lives of the Jordan clan and pointedly asks who we should blame for our miseries, and whether our offenders should (or can be) forgiven.  Solondz’s approach is his customary swirl of jarring frankness with comical anguish.  The forthrightness of the film’s aims lend it the aura of a morality play, as does its curious structure, which forgoes conventional narrative for a succession of linked set pieces, each one amusing and aching in its way, and each something of a self-contained short film.  Solondz’ despairing yet earnest sensibility remains an acquired taste.  Yet while Life During Wartime is unmistakably slighter and less bracing than its forebears, it also reveals a more disciplined and adroit filmmaker.

Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
2010 (USA)
Director: Edgar Wright
Viewed: August 16, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza)

There’s no denying that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World seems engineered to tap into the brainstems of Gen-Xers raised on The Legend of Zelda, tickling their nostalgia centers with a blend of hipster banter and sheer awesomeness until they submit, giggling with delight.  More broadly, the film presents a romantic comedy that doesn’t just name-check slacker cultural touchstones such as comics, video games, and indie rock, but earnestly drapes itself in their idioms and aesthetics.  Based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, and set in a wintery, shabby Toronto of indeterminate era—characters fiddle with their Nintendo DS Lites, but also visit CD stores (how quaint!) and wrestle with AOL dial-up—Scott Pilgrim follows the amorous travails of the titular character, an awkward twenty-two-year-old played by Michael Cera (a bit redundant, I know).   Director Edgar Wright previously showcased his droll wit and rapid-fire stylings in the genre-tweaking, deliriously funny Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, co-written with leading man Simon Pegg.  Here his writing partner is actor Michael Bacall (last seen playing separate characters named Omar in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds), but Pegg’s absence hasn’t diminished Wright’s facility for maintaining a cutting and relentless comic cadence while slathering on outlandish spectacle.

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Quick Review: The Kids Are All Right

2010 (USA)
Director: Lisa Cholodenko
Viewed: August 11, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print

It’s too much to assert that Nic (Annette Benning) and Jules’ (Julianne Moore) lesbianism is incidental to the emotional vigor of The Kids Are All Right, given that sexual and gender anxiety undergird many of the story’s conflicts, not to mention that the plot depends on it.  However, writer-director Cholodenko uses the upheaval generated when Nice and Jules’ teenaged kids seek out their biological father Paul (Mark Ruffalo) for the purposes of highlighting the universal qualities of middle-class, middle-aged families. The message seems to be, contra Anna Karenina (which the film alludes to), unhappy families all share the same gremlins: resentment, frustration, shame, jealousy, and emotional befuddlement.  There’s nothing especially cinematic about Cholodenko’s approach here, aside from one long, devastating close-up of Benning during a moment of traumatic revelation.  Fortunately, the nuanced performances carry the film, elevating dialogue that sometime strays into clumsy satire.  It is Cholodenko’s talent for finding the wry humor in the strangest places that is most endearing, particularly when it comes to human sexuality, which the film acknowledges is rarely explicable or neat.  It’s enough to make one forgive the faintly schematic character to the film’s narrative arc, or its mean-spirited racial digs and hippie-bashing.

Plenty of Memberships, Few Privileges

Up in the Air
2009 (USA)
Director: Jason Reitman
Viewed: January 16, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

Back in May 2008, I observed after a second viewing of the backlash-savaged Juno that Jason Reitman’s crisp, understated direction plays a crucial role the film’s success, and that it in fact called to mind the comedic work of Sydney Pollack.  I still stand by that statement, and by the film’s place as one of the most perfectly realized ensemble comedies of the decade, which I will readily defend with knife clutched firmly in teeth.  However, Reitman’s latest film, Up in the Air, serves primarily to highlight the bottled lightning quality of Juno, solidifying its status as a fortuitous confluence of direction, writing, and performance that may never again be approached by the parties involved.  Up in the Air boasts none of the focused, superbly paced comedic storytelling that characterized Reitman’s previous effort.  In fact, the characteristics that most define his direction here are a distressing lack of understanding regarding his audience’s sympathies, and a clumsy attempt to fuse two or three stories that do not function together as well as he imagines.  To be sure, George Clooney’s unfailingly magnetic presence renders the proceedings more tolerable than they would otherwise be, and the central romantic drama of the film is compelling stuff.  Yet these caveats only highlight the ill-advised and even insulting aspects of Up in the Air.

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Late to the Game: Funny People

2009 (USA)
Director: Judd Apatow
Viewed: January 7, 2009
Format: DVD – Universal (2009)

Funny People represents a distillation of the best qualities from Judd Apatow’s previous film, Knocked Up.  In this dark, meandering tale of second chances and human fallibility, the director employs both his ruthless pursuit of affecting emotional detail and the self-effacing vibe of star Seth Rogan (in his plush animal mode).  Meanwhile, the film jettisons the last Apatow outing’s retrograde sexual politics and ridiculously pat conclusion, resulting in a melancholy film that reveals the director not as an intrinsically comedic film-maker, but as someone interested in the absurdity of psychological landscapes.  Thus, Funny People, while hardly a barrel of laughs, is nonetheless perceptive, audacious, and weirdly charming.  Adam Sandler indicts his own career via a thinly-veiled alter ego character, and Leslie Mann’s performance devastatingly demonstrates how bright, bighearted people can make unbelievably stupid decisions.  Apatow’s focus on his characters’ feelings rather than the narrative is both a strength and a weakness.  Absent a conventional structure or a clear antagonist, Funny People spins off the rails a bit in the final half-hour, as the director searches for a way to conclude a story that has no end.  Still, the film proves to be an invigorating slap to viewers expecting yet another storybook conclusion.

Late to the Game: The Hangover

2009 (USA)
Director: Todd Phillips
Viewed: December 24, 2009
Format: DVD - Warner Brothers (2009)

Although hardly the Second Coming of raunchy comedies that the hype suggested, The Hangover establishes that the “lost night” high concept can work when executed with sufficiently nasty enthusiasm and held aloft by a cast willing to fritter around in its weirder crannies.  Call it, Dude, Where’s the Groom?  Director Phillips and writers John Lucas and Scott Moore at least understand the appeal of their pseudo-detective story conceit.  They maintain the focus on delivering unexpected gags right to the end, at which juncture nearly every plot point clicks into place.  (Very, dare I say, Shakespearean, that.)  Frequently, the laughs the films coaxes are guffaws of sheer disbelief, whether from a teacher swiping kids’ field trip money for the casino tables, or a naked Chinese gangster popping out of a car trunk.  The cast keeps things afloat, especially Ed Helms in clueless square mode and Zach Galifianakis’ unexpectedly effective space cadet shtick.  Too often, however, The Hangover errs on the side of gleefully gratuitous slapstick, when it isn’t indulging in sexist twaddle.  Helms’ ludicrously shrewish wife in particular is an offensive bit of caricature that serves as a convenient straw-woman for the film’s stale, contemptuous “Let Boys Be Boys” ethos.

Crazy, Just Like Me

Fantastic Mr. Fox
2009 (USA / UK)
Director: Wes Anderson
Viewed: November 29, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza Cinema)

Wes Anderson’s distinctive authorial signatures—the fussy, nostalgia-rich production design, the playful movements of his camera, the droll labeling of chapters and even shots–has at times been derided as a dollhouse aesthetic, more suited to playthings than real people.  It’s not a criticism I share, but there you have it.  One might say that Anderson’s latest feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox, responds to such objections by taking them at face value, as it was made using literal dolls. Well, stop-motion puppets, to be precise.  A more natural fit between a particular style of animation and a living auteur would be hard to imagine, as Anderson’s propensity for treating every shot as a tableau is given its most ebullient expression yet.  There’s something damn near perfect about the marriage of Mr. Fox’s old-school animation, which heartily embraces its aura of toybox unreality, to the director’s natural affinities.  Anderson is an artist who thrives on meticulous attention to detail and on making every shot count, and animation provides ample opportunity to indulge such impulses.

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Of Few Days, and Full of Trouble

A Serious Man
2009 (USA)
Directors: Ethan and Joel Coen
Viewed: October 29, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Is it even conceivably a coincidence that A Serious Man, which draws more candidly from the autobiographical outlines of Ethan and Joel Coen than any of their films to date, is also one of their most desolate and sobering meditations on human suffering?  The film brims with mordant wit and a plethora of grotesque, wretchedly amusing characters, but it doesn’t aspire to be a black comedy-of-errors in the mold of Burn After Reading.  Rather, the Coens have delivered a work of spiritual and mortal terror that manages to be both absurd and disquieting, a much closer relation to Barton Fink and No Country For Old Men than any of the brothers’ screwball pleasures.  In the hands of the Coens, the tribulations of a Jewish professor in 1967 suburbia become the stuff of hoary musings on misfortune, culpability, and the seeming uncaring cruelty of God.  Make no mistake: A Serious Man is a miserable film.  It’s also an exquisite example of the Coens’ unparalleled talent for blending the grim and the droll into a bewitching cinematic gestalt.

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These Rules Are For Your Own Safety, People

Zombieland
USA (2009)
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Viewed: October 8, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

In the wake of Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, a film that managed to be both achingly funny and rather vicious, it was probably a safe bet that another genuinely imaginative zombie horror-comedy would be a long time coming.   Happily, a scant five years later, Ruben Fleischer, in his assured feature film debut, delivers a zombie film that should make any aficionado of the genre stand up and whoop with delight.  There’s nothing particularly artful about Zombieland, which is exactly the creature it appears to be, no more, no less: the comical tale of a group of ragtag survivors at the end of world.  Is it unambitious?  Certainly.  It’s also damn funny and even occasionally exhilarating, if only as an example of film-makers uncovering fresh meat in a horror scenario nearly drained of its power by direct-to-DVD mediocrity.  Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who wet their beaks in television, don’t go looking for a new wrinkle to add to the zombie film’s now well-establish parameters.  Instead, they change the angle of their approach, throwing their sympathy behind the misfits for whom life in undead America isn’t an especially difficult adjustment.

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Late to the Game: Observe and Report

2009 (USA)
Director: Jody Hill
Viewed: October 7, 2009
Format: DVD – Warner Brothers (2009)

Had it portrayed Seth’s Rogen’s mall security guard, Ronnie Barnhardt, as a mere ridiculed sad-sack with an inflated sense of self-importance, Observe and Report might have been a much more forgettable feature, and also less problematic.  Director Jody Hill and Rogen both deserve audacity points for constructing a pitch-black comedy around a protagonist who is a  violent, racist, megalomaniacal date rapist.  And, indeed, most of the film’s distinctly uneasy laughs work because of Rogen’s fearless embracing of an appalling character, one so repugnant that his cluelessness engenders no sympathy.  Both Hill’s dialog and Rogen’s delivery are brilliant stuff, yet I hesitate to label Observe “entertaining.”  Like Burn After Reading, this is an unpleasant story about unpleasant people doing unpleasant things, and it will undoubtedly not be everyone’s cup of tea.  Alas, Hill lacks the Coens’ aesthetic mastery and their nose for cosmic absurdity.  While Observe succeeds as an exhilarating prodding of comedic boundaries, flabbiness creeps into the story as the film wears on, and Ronnie’s erratic demeanor alone can’t energize the proceedings.  Moreover, one is left wondering what Hill’s intentions were, particularly when Observe concludes with the contemptible Ronnie “winning” (in a fashion) and getting the girl.