Victoria Olsen's Blog, page 4

OK

There’s much to love about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) — from the performances by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet to the screenplay by Charlie Kaufman– but here I’ll focus on how director Michel Gondry makes a happy ending out of this scene: two lovers in a hallway on the verge of ending it for good.  By this point in the film we have ridden their rollercoaster too, watching Joel and Clementine as they start and restart their relationship. The film tracks them along two parallel paths occurring over two different time periods, before and after they had their memories of each other wiped out in an experimental new procedure….

We’ve seen some of this scene before, but nothing ever happens exactly the same way twice. Clementine is still “not a concept,” and her analysis of their emotional patterns is spot on. But when Joel says “wait… just wait” you can see them thinking and feeling, if not remembering exactly. In an odd way the film seems to argue that memories must be cherished, even when they are painful, but it also affirms that there is something beyond memory, like whatever it is that draws Joel and Clementine together again and again. Their connection was not entirely lost when their memories were erased — and as they start over here “OK” becomes  a real happy ending. They earned it.

Moving Vehicles

The pacing of this opening is terrific — from stillness to speed, from horizontal to vertical motion. The camera is a vivid, dynamic character right from the start. It’s Danny Boyle’s early film Shallow Grave (1994) and you can tell he will go on to make movies with lots of moving vehicles….

If one were to hypothesize about what makes Danny Boyle’s films his own, though, one would probably start with their situations. In the films I’ve seen–Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, Sunshine, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire, and Millions– he puts ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances to see what happens. This draws great performances from his actors, and in fact the character development in his films is swift and clear, if not always subtle. The scene above introduces the characters very economically– with the nameplate on their door. In 28 Days Later we meet our main character as he wakes up to a post-epidemic London. We see the deserted city through his eyes — making a familiar cityscape terrifying just by emptying it.

These are formal pleasures too — like the juxtaposition of a bright fashion billboard still hovering over civilization’s ruins in 28 Days Later. There may be no consumers left in London, but when our four survivors loot a grocery store they are overcome with nostalgia for materialism. The film strips them of everything they knew and had, becoming literally darker and darker. Still, it wrests a modestly happy ending from the countryside, in another

beautiful shot of a single word spelled out on a lush green field. These complicated happy endings, that manage to develop organically out of extreme situations, are another hallmark of Boyle’s form and content.

Beatrice + Benedick 4ever

The New York Times film section does a nice series called Anatomy of a Scene where they have directors talk through one scene in their movies. Despite the fact that Joss Whedon has mocked the conventions of DVD commentary, he does a great job talking us through the scene below from his Much Ado About Nothing. The film is charming and this clip explains why (love the “blankie cam”!) but also why the narrative as a whole is so successful. In addition to having great source material (ye olde Bard), Whedon takes care to think about each scene as part of a whole: what comes before and after this, how this scene of Beatrice’s duping can be differentiated from Benedick’s. These are questions of sequence, timing, and storytelling.

In the meantime, the film looks beautiful in grainy black and white, with soft lighting. It’s refreshing that the Renaissance language doesn’t upstage the production: Whedon’s attention to formal composition and camera movement subtly play down the pretensions that often come with Shakespeare adaptations. This is a film first, not a piece of theater. He’s wise to leave the location and back story vague, and not to force any updating into the dialogue even though the setting is contemporary. It all works surprisingly well, in part because the actors are so relaxed. Even the monologues feel natural.

One of my favorite moments, though, occurs at the very end, when Beatrice and Benedick’s reconciliation is threatened by the unmasking of the plots to dupe them into falling in love. They start to fall back into their old defensive sarcasm when Claudio and Hero appear on the balcony above them with two love notes Benedick and Beatrice have written secretly for each other. When they throw the papers over the balustrade, the couple fights to catch them and then devour each other’s words. Why are these written texts– sonnets? billet doux?–more trustworthy than the words they speak? Because it’s Shakespeare, and the spoken word is just play.

Demography is Destiny

What do critics love about the new Netflix series Orange is the New Black,  exactly? I read Emily Nussbaum’s review in the New Yorker and expected something quite different (ie. better). The first episode seemed thin and sensationalist. The cutting back and forth between the yuppie white lady (played by Taylor Schilling) entering prison and the past history that landed her there was effective exposition but emphasized a simplistic worldview over and over: lesbianism is radical behavior with “consequences,” love easily smooths over all obstacles (like a criminal secret), demography is destiny…. If the show proffers a wide range of lesbian characters it still seems to argue that class and family origins tell you everything you need to know about a person.

The best part of the series for me was the opening credits, cut to a new song by Regina Spektor called “You’ve Got Time.”  A quick succession of partial close ups whiz by, showing women’s faces of all shapes and colors. It’s a surprising start to what turns out to be a pretty conventional show overall, despite the setting and sexuality (guess what? we only get to ogle the perfect “TV titties,” as a character describes them). The opening and the lyrics to the song suggest a more open-ended sense of the ties that bind and separate women. I presume (hope) the show will address these as it (inevitably) shows our heroine growing into a better person though her encounters with Others. That conclusion seems inevitable, and depressing, already.  In the meantime I’d like to see her thinking, pausing, reflecting more– instead of instantly making yuppie-face and gasping at all the indignities she has to put up with in prison. No shampoo! The show means to mock her for that, but it’s an easy mark. As Spektor sings, “taking steps is easy, standing still is hard.” Perhaps the show’s only (and over-) serious voice, a yoga-teaching inmate, will get to preach that in a later episode.

A Mind Diseased

 

There’s a novelty element to the latest Macbeth on Broadway: the play is set in a mental hospital and Alan Cumming plays a patient who acts out all the roles. It’s a tribute to the production and performance that you cease thinking about that novelty while sitting in the theater, immersed in the pathos heightened by this setting. We learn nothing about the “main” character, the patient, but much about Shakespeare’s characters.

After all, Macbeth does lose his mind during the course of the play. He turns from a man afraid to consider murder to one who can slaughter a whole family. The voices and visions all find an uncanny home in this production, and the directors can be economical in suggesting them. The weird sisters and the visions of ghosts and bloody daggers appear organic in this context and so the production doesn’t bother with many special effects. It uses surveillance cameras and three TV screens to show close ups of Cumming that exagerrate his strangeness and the disorienting action.  Cumming’s impersonations are all implied with a few gestures or simple props: a blanket turned into a cape for MacDuff, a baby doll for Malcolm, and even more simply, a shift in voice and body language for Lady Macbeth. You can see from the clip above that Cumming doesn’t play Lady Macbeth broadly, so to speak, but saves the melodrama for the lines themselves.

By the end, when Macbeth reaches his elaborately foretold fate, the interpretation of reality, the sense of sense-making, has become crucial to the play as a whole. Macbeth was led into his tragedy by one weird sisters’ prophecy and he is brought down by another one. But in both cases he reads (or misreads) the prophecies very literally: he will be king, Birnum Wood will never move to Dunsinane Castle, no man is not born of woman. His literal interpretations of his visions are equally destructive, and seem to suggest a “fatal flaw” in the old terms of character analysis — or madness. It is this inability to understand and interpret the reality around him, to be instead driven by an urgent inner reality, that makes Macbeth, the play and the character, tragic.

Double Feature

The end of the year is a good time to catch up with missed movies. Critics start listing the year’s best and they are often available for rent by now. Thus I started working on Dana Stevens’s 10 best list from Slate, which included many films I hadn’t seen. On New Year’s Eve I went for a double feature of Queen of Versailles and Looper.

 

Stevens cites Looper (directed by Rian Johnson) as a miss, and she’s right. The film seemed a mess to me: the editing random, the plot incoherent, the look inconsistent. You can see from the trailer above how much the movie tries to squeeze in as it jumps from diner to cornfields, from time travel to telekinesis. It doesn’t seem sure of its sci fi premise (introduced by a voiceover that disappears by the end of the film) or its visual style. The scene in the diner between the young and old Joe is one of the best in the film in part because of its clear focus. Suddenly the film pauses to reflect on its own cognitive puzzle: the older Joe (Bruce Willis) “knows” what the younger Joe (Joseph Gordon -Levitt) is feeling and thinking, even what he will do, but the scene maintains its tension anyway because their knowledge of each other (themselves!) is still incomplete and opaque. The older Joe describes the past as fuzzy, only becoming clear as it happens. It’s a wonderfully subtle interaction between two otherwise under-performing actors and a disappointing director.

 

Stevens does include the documentary Queen of Versailles on her list and that turns out to be a surprisingly complicated and nuanced portrait of an American dream. Beautifully directed by Lauren Greenfield, the film begins with billionaires David and Jacqueline Siegel building “Versailles,” the largest single-family home in America, and ends with their desperate attempts to sell the half-built mansion after the collapse of the real estate market in 2008.  The trailer above doesn’t do justice to the subtleties of the film, though you can see the incisive commentary in juxtapositions like Jackie declaring to a group of employees “look at the bright side! at least you may not have to clean this house!” and the quick cut to a Filipina domestic making a face. Even there, though, the director shows Jackie’s own complicated sensibility. Jackie, rightfully the heroine of this story, is a fascinating creature full of undisguised desires and super-sized needs. She is less a monster, though she behaves monstrously at times, than she is an uncensored, exaggerated version of the rest of us — average Americans responding to the cultural values surrounding us. We want to own our own homes (a desire that Greenfield shows David Siegel exploits in his time-share business); they want to own a palace. We want to “feel rich,” as David declares; they want to live like royalty. By lucky timing, the film ends up ironically revealing the poverty of our cultural imagination: with unlimited resources all we can desire is much much more of the same.

Anna loves Alexei

The conceit of Joe Wright’s new film adaptation of Anna Karenina is a rich one: that the fashionable world of 19th century Russia is itself a stage set, where opening a door turns one location into another and characters can suddenly become viewers. That is what happens in the clip below as Anna (Keira Knightley) attends the races to watch her lover, Count Alexei Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), compete. But these races occur inside, on a narrow piece of stage in front of a painted backdrop. The horses thunder by and we shift briefly to a vague and darkened outdoor setting as Vronsky and his rival trade the lead; then a stumble and Vronsky is thrown over the edge of the stage and into the pit with his horse.

The scene is significant to the plot because Anna can’t control her instinctive response to her lover’s accident, and screams “Alexei!.” It is a scandal to display her adultery in public, and it is a lesson she needs to learn again at the opera later in the film. She reveals herself to be shamelessly out of control of her body as she stands and shrieks. Meanwhile, though, the scene is equally interesting for stretching the conceit past its conventional boundaries. The horses on stage look like toys to us and the audience until we see Vronsky cracking that whip, now in close up. But that realism is fleeting and suddenly we as well as Vronsky are thrown back into the claustrophobic space of melodrama. Most of the film occurs either on stage, backstage, or in the audience, with only a few breaks to watch farmhands at work or children at play in fields. The film ends with Anna’s children running through tall grasses and it is no surprise when the camera pulls back to show the whole field perched on a framed stage and overflowing into the orchestra seats. Wright (and screenwriter Tom Stoppard) show us quite literally how few options Anna had to escape her situation.  In that sense they make her ending as inevitable as the recurring image of train wheels.

Because We Could

One of the worst offenses a film can commit, in my opinion, is to present smart characters and then make them act stupidly. It betrays our trust– “but you said….!”–and often ruins the story it was intended to prop up. This is one of my main complaints about Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012), the long-awaited prequel to Alien (1979). Scott populates a spaceship with the world’s best scientists and crew and then has them act like idiots. They touch things they shouldn’t, assume alien creatures are friendly, and generally make every mistake a first-time watcher of Star Trek would know to avoid. Frustrating!

 

To be fair to Scott, this is a screenwriting problem. Scott is known as a visual innovator and this film does have exquisite art production and cinematography. But the story doesn’t hang together. It is supposed to dramatize the lead scientists’ zealous search for our human origins. As in the clip above, they want answers to the “big questions” like “who made us” and “why?”  But those questions are then treated quite literally: to “meet one’s maker” is a metaphor, but Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), the scientist in the clip, seems to mean a literal face-to-face. The robot David, impressively acted by Michael Fassbender, seems a lot smarter and more sophisticated than the top scientist: he is already disillusioned with his creators and this scene just confirms his opinions. We too are disappointed: the effort to make the movie tackle “serious issues” turns into farce. While Holloway intends to ask big questions he has only lame answers: “because we could” and “anything and everything.” The best exchange in the scene is the laughter between the two: Holloway laughs wildly, where David just smiles briefly because he is supposed to. It is a scene highly reminiscent of one between Roy Batty and Dr. Tyrell in Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), when creature and maker do come (tragically) face to face. The relationship between man and his maker clearly fascinates Scott, but here it is expressed in random generalizations like “don’t all children want their parents dead?”  Succession has become problematic — as well it might for a prequel appearing over twenty years after its beloved parent….or is it child? There is some serious ambivalence here and it shows in the uneven execution.

Where’s the Beef?

Despite Channing Tatum’s dancing and Steven Soderbergh’s skills, Magic Mike (2012) is a flabby movie. It has none of Soderbergh’s typical narrative pacing or visual style. Soderbergh seems to be coasting: establishing we’re in Tampa by showing boats and bays and patio furniture through car windows. He shoots the drug-addled sex scene in cliched slow mo, with hazy, off-center shots, and shifts between black and white and color. The dialogue too often seems improvised, as in the scene below that goes on too long and can be anticipated by any viewer long before Adam (Alex Pettyfer) gets the point.

 

Other critics have written that the film sags between dance sequences and indeed it does seem to exist to string those together. But the material doesn’t have to be weak. A better script could have made more drama out of Mike’s (Channing Tatum) dreams, or between the unsettling varieties of self esteem that come from being a sex object. There is an effective scene at the end in which Adam, the newest stripper at Magic Mike’s club, thanks Mike for making his dreams come true: three months ago he was nothing, he says, but now he’s got money and women and confidence. It’s a subtle moment and Tatum does a good job of communicating Mike’s slow realization of how he too was once that kid and how he led him(self) away from bigger goals. The film is never condescending toward the strippers’ world, which does give these men something valuable and isn’t simply a station on the way to bottoming out. It’s something to see sex and the sex industry treated both playfully and respectfully, but to really due justice to this complicated material they should have worked harder to make a better movie.

Patrimony

I was misled about The Descendants, Alexander Payne’s critically-acclaimed release of 2011. It was represented as a tragi-comic film about family dysfunction– the typical clueless dad and rebellious daughters– but it’s really a sort of  ethical examination of the ties between people and places, between generations in a particular location. That makes the title, which baffled me, more coherent. The one-sentence summary of the film might go like this, then: Matt King, a wealthy Hawaiian landowner, struggles to figure out the significance of his family’s ties to the land and each other, ultimately realizing that he had taken both for granted.

 

Payne is a moralist and George Clooney turns in a remarkable performance as Matt King, an everyman who behaves badly but has a stubborn core of decency. Much is made of the film’s driving plot device: Matt’s discovery that his dying wife had been having an affair and his insistence on finding the man. Clooney allows himself to look ridiculous as he fumbles one interaction after another. Early in the film (see above) he is a comic figure, easily trounced by his precocious children, but he grows into the quiet dignity shown in the last scene (below). With the mother gone, the new family of three sit on a couch facing us, watching a film as we watch them. Payne couldn’t be clearer here that we are supposed to identify with this family and learn from their experience. The film they watch was inaudible when I saw the movie but this clip makes Payne’s last dry point clear: The March of the Penguins is also about paternal caretaking and the existential struggle to provide for the next generation. When Matt and his eldest daughter gaze upon their family patrimony of prime Hawaiian coastline and reminisce about camping there, the youngest daughter pipes up “what about me? where will I camp?” Matt had thought of that land as being something his ancestors had given him, without realizing that he was an important link in the chain between past and future. Matt gradually assumes an active role in his complex ecosystem, and the simple sharing of ice cream and blanket in the last image becomes symbolic of moral and emotional growth.