DVD Review: Goodbye First Love

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

DVD Review: Goodbye First Love

Goodbye First Love
Directed by: Mia Hansen-Løve.
Written by: Mia Hansen-Løve.
Starring: Lola Créton (Camille), Sebastian Urzendowsky (Sullivan), Magne-Håvard Brekke (Lorenz), Valérie Bonneton (La mère de Camille), Serge Renko (Le père de Camille), Özay Fecht (La mère de Sullivan), Max Ricat (Le frère de Sullivan).

Goodbye First Love is about that particular blindness that only teenage girls seem to have. When you’re a 15 year old girl in love with a handsome, slightly older boy, it seems like you are completely blind to all his faults. Camille (Lola Creton) is a stunning French beauty who is head over heels in love with Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), who is 19. She’s only 15, but she spends all her time thinking about Sullivan. They argue often, he storms off often, she spends hours in her room crying, and then he comes back, his regular rakish self, and they make up all over again. Her mother doesn’t object to their relationship, but is still worried about her daughter. Why are you in love with this boy? All he does is make you cry, she asks Camille one day. “Tears of joy” is her only response. Try arguing with that.

The movie spans an eight year period, which Camille and Sullivan will mostly spend apart. During their torrid teenage affair, he decides to drop out of University and go backpacking through South America with his friends. “Don’t worry”, he assures her, “It’s only 10 months”. At first she believes the lie – hangs a map of South America on her wall, and tracks his progress with pins from wherever his letters are coming from. But then, as was inevitable, the letters start coming less frequently – they are at times obliviously cruel, and then stop altogether. Camille is devastated – but then moves on.

We meet her again, years later, as she’s studying architecture. She has cropped her hair short, and still pines, at least at times, for Sullivan. But gradually she comes out of her funk. She develops a relationship with one of her professors Lorenz (Magne-Havard Brekke) – who is older, wiser and yet still wears his hair long, like many middle aged men trying to convince themselves that he is still young. The two are comfortable with each other – and despite what we initially think – this is no mid-life crisis fling for Lorenz. These two do love each other – but it isn’t the type of love that rocked Camille’s being as a teenager. So when she runs into Sullivan’s mother one day, and gives her her new phone number, we know it’s only going to be a matter of time before Sullivan shows back up.

I couldn’t help thinking of the Twilight series when I watched Goodbye First Love. No, this movie does not have werewolves or vampires, but its main character shares the same delusion of what love is with Bella – the heroine of the Twilight saga. For both of them, love should be an all-consuming passion. But there is a key difference between these two – and that’s because writer-director Mia Hansen-Love understands how soul destroying that kind of all-consuming love can be – and how unrealistic it is. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert complains that the movie should be harder on Sullivan – even if Camille cannot see it, he really is a jerk – and unlike her, he doesn’t seem to mature as he grows older. But Hansen-Love makes her movie from Camille’s point-of-view – a point of view that cannot help but love Sullivan, despite all his faults. But the audience can see who Sullivan really is, even if Camille cannot.

Goodbye First Love gets deeper as it moves along. At first, it seems like this will be a nostalgic look back at young love – the type most people have, and although they get over it, they never quite forget. The film opens in 1999 in Paris, and sees everything as wonderful and romantic. It would not surprise me to discover that this is, at least partly, based on Hansen-Love’s own experiences – she would have been a few years older than Camille in 1999, but not much. And her first film, The Father of My Children, was also somewhat autobiographical.

But it’s when the movie jumps forward in time that it goes deeper than mere nostalgia – and romantic longing. Because when Camille and Sullivan reunite – and discover that same passion still there – the movie doesn’t swoon like it does in those earlier scenes – there is a sense of sadness in these scenes, and a feeling that these two kids need to grow the hell up.

The performances help a great deal. Magne-Håvard Brekke as the older man isn’t the pervy old guy after hot young flesh that we expect him to be – he’s kind, sweet, trusting and thoughtful. Sebastian Urzendowsky as Sullivan has some of that bad boy attitude that women find so appealing – at least as teenagers, but is also good at showing how less romantic that seems when you grow older. He’s not a million miles away from some of the young men in a Catherine Breillent movie, who always talk the young women in their lives out of their virginity – but is seen much more sympathetically than Breillent could ever conceive. Best of all is Lola Créton, who is perfect as the naïve teenager, and never loses our sympathy even as she makes mistakes later in the movie. She’s a beauty – and a future French star to look out for – a younger Marion Cotillard if you will.

 
Overall, I think Goodbye First Love is a fine little movie. It’s an improvement over The Father of My Children, which everyone seemed to like more than I did, and shows that Hansen-Love really is a filmmaker to watch out for.

DVD Review: The Expenables 2

DVD Review: The Expenables 2

The Expendables 2
Directed by: Simon West.
Written by: Richard Wenk and Sylvester Stallone.
Starring: Sylvester Stallone (Barney Ross), Jason Statham (Lee Christmas), Jean-Claude Van Damme (Vilain), Jet Li (Yin Yang), Dolph Lundgren (Gunnar Jensen), Chuck Norris (Booker), Bruce Willis (Church), Arnold Schwarzenegger (Trench), Terry Crews (Hale Caesar), Randy Couture (Toll Road), Liam Hemsworth (Bill The Kid), Scott Adkins (Hector), Nan Yu (Maggie), Amanda Ooms (Pilar), Charisma Carpenter (Lacy).

There is something almost comforting about a movie like The Expendables 2. This is a straight ahead action movie, with clearly defined good guys and bad guys, where rarely does a 10 minute stretch go by without someone being brutally killed (complete with gushing blood and exploding heads!) or something getting blown up real good. No one would really mistake The Expendables 2 for a really good movie – it doesn’t have a thought in its head, doesn’t really care about character development or believable dialogue (although it certainly does like quips after one of the good guys shoots a baddie) and whose morality is very simple – the Americans are good, and the foreign bad guys, who sound Russian for the most part, are evil. The Expendables 2 is a throwback to a much simpler time.

Is The Expendables 2 entertaining? I guess that depends on your definition of entertaining, but it you’re like me and have a soft spot for the muscle bound antics found in 1980s action movies, it can be entertaining as long as you don’t expect too much. From its opening sequence where Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) and his motley crew of mercenaries blast their way through countless bad guys in Nepal to save a Chinese billionaire, to its finale inside an airport, where the same crew – plus a few cameo players added in for good measure – shoot up an airport full of civilians (never hurting them, of course, just the bad guys), and the hand-to-hand combat finale between Ross and the chief bad guy Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme), The Expendables 2 doesn’t have a thought in its head other than how best to kill the bad guys, and splatter as much blood as humanly possible. If all you want to see is blood, guts, gore and explosions, than The Expendables 2 delivers the goods.

For me, I was somewhat disappointed. Stallone, who directed the first movie and most of the rest of his recent output (Rambo, Rocky Balboa) gives the director’s chair over to Simon West this time. West is not what I would call a good director, but he’s very good at staging action sequences, which is really all that is required of him. But personally, I (perhaps naively) thought that Stallone had matured a little in his old age – and was interested in doing slightly more in his late career efforts. Laugh at me if you want to, but his last Rambo movie is actually really good – and at least touches on some of the same themes as Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven – especially in what may just be the bloodiest shootout in movie history that ends that movie. Stallone, whose career has been built around his one man army characters killing a lot of faceless enemies, at least touched on the senseless carnage in that movie. And even in the original Expendables movie, there was an undercurrent of regret and sadness beneath all the blood and guts. While I’m certainly not arguing that Stallone reached the same heights as Eastwood did in his masterpiece – he didn’t even come close – what I am suggesting is that it appeared like Stallone was at least questioning the morality of his characters.

But The Expendables 2 is just straight ahead action. After the first one became a success, it seems like they wanted to cram in as many former action stars as possible into the sequel. Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger are back – and this time not just to talk – and the movie adds in Chuck Norris, and gives Jean-Claude Van Damme the opportunity to be the bad guy – and show that yes, he can still do high kicks. Most of the rest of the crew are back – although Mickey Rourke’s absence is felt, and I wish Jet Li had stuck around for more than what is essentially a cameo. And I quite liked the addition of Nan Yu as Maggie Chang – someone Stallone has to take along, but who gradually wins his respect. Women can kick ass too you know.

In short, The Expendables 2 is precisely what you think it is. If you have any interest in seeing the film, I have a hard time believing you won’t think you got your money’s worth from the film. If you want more than just an action film, look elsewhere. But if want to see Stallone et al kick ass again, then this is the movie for you.

DVD Review: Oslo August 31

DVD Review: Oslo August 31

Oslo, August 31
Directed by: Joachim Trier.
Written by: Joachim Trier & Eskil Vogt based on the novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle.
Starring: Anders Danielsen Lie (Anders), Hans Olav Brenner (Thomas), Ingrid Olava (Rebecca), Anders Borchgrevink (Øystein), Andreas Braaten (Karsten), Malin Crépin (Malin), Petter Width Kristiansen (Petter), Emil Lund (Calle), Tone Beate Mostraum (Tove), Renate Reinsve (Renate), Øystein Røger (David), Kjærsti Odden Skjeldal (Mirjam).

Oslo August 31 is about Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), who is a drug addict. He’s been living clean in a rehab facility for months now, and his time is just about up. They are even letting him go out for the day – to go to a job interview, so perhaps when he gets out of for good, he’ll have something to look forward to – something to keep his mind off the drugs. But he knows it’s hopeless. From the beginning of Oslo August 31, I knew how the movie was going to end – and so does Anders. He may not have seen how he screwed everything up with the drugs while he was still using, but now that he’s clean, he knows there is no going back.

Oslo August 31 is essentially made up of a series of conversations between Anders and others. When he first arrives in Oslo from the rehab facility, he has some time to kill before his interview, and drops in on his old friend Thomas. Thomas is married now, and has a couple of kids, but he is nice to Anders – but really has no idea what to say. He gives him sympathetic look, and meaningless platitudes of support, but they don’t really help Anders, essentially because Thomas has no idea what to say, do or how to behave when his old friend the drug addict shows up at his door unannounced. Do any of us? We then move onto the interview, which, predictably, doesn’t go too well. Anders is obviously smart and well educated, and he’s applying for a job at a shitty magazine, and he isn’t quite able to stop himself for insulting the magazine. And then when the interviewer asks him why there is nothing on his resume after 2005 things get even worse. I’m sure the rehab place prepared him for this question, but however they told him to answer it, it certainly isn’t the way Anders does.

The day goes on like this – a series of encounters Anders has with people from his past. He’s supposed to meet his sister for coffee, and then go onto their childhood home, which their parents are in the midst of selling, in part to help pay to get Anders out of trouble. But his sister is wary – and doesn’t show up, and instead sends her girlfriend to meet Anders, which angers him. And finally, it’s onto a party, where Anders knows he should not go, but he cannot help himself. Throughout the day, he calls his ex-girlfriend repeatedly. She stuck by him for years, but has now moved on with her life – and moved to New York. She never answers the phone, but Anders keeps leaving messages.

The best thing about Oslo August 31 is the lead performance by Anders Danielsen Lie. He looks like you would expect a recovering drug addict to look, but his performance is more than that. He doesn’t rely on the usual nervous ticks or increasingly anxious voice that many actors do when portraying an addict – someone either craving a hit, or trying really hard not to. He remains fairly calm. I don’t think he’s really falling apart, the way we normally see in these movies. That is because from the beginning of the film, his mind is made up. You could delude himself when he was an addict – or more accurately, when he was an addict, he didn’t have to think about the consequences of his actions. But now that he’s clean, he cannot live with what he has done.

It is true that many people are able to get and stay clean after being addicts. I bet you many of those have some sort of support system in place though – and Anders doesn’t. He was a spoiled rich kid, and while his parents gave him everything material he could want, they never gave him what he really needs. His friends don’t know how to behave around him – they are all either like Thomas, all awkward and well-meaning, or else they pretend nothing at all happened, and that Anders is the same old screw-up he’s always been. His sister is nervous about his coming out of rehab – and his girlfriend is gone, never going to return.

But Anders cannot, and does not, blame anyone else for what has happened to him. He knows the fault lie directly with himself.  And he sees only one way out. Oslo August 31 is a deeply sympathetic film about Anders. Directed by Joachim Trier, the film has a simple visual look – it basically looks directly at Anders throughout the movie. I was reminded of the films of the Dardenne Brothers who often position their camera to be looking directly at the characters face – or the back of their head – as if by looking long enough, they’ll finally be able to break through into their mind. In this case, what you would find is a sad, lonely man, who sees only one solution.

Movie Review: The Intouchables

Movie Review: The Intouchables

The Intouchables
Directed by: Olivier Nakache & Eric Toledano.
Written by: Olivier Nakache & Eric Toledano.
Starring: François Cluzet (Philippe), Omar Sy (Driss), Anne Le Ny (Yvonne), Audrey Fleurot (Magalie), Clotilde Mollet (Marcelle), Alba Gaïa Bellugi (Elisa), Cyril Mendy (Adama), Christian Ameri (Albert), Grégoire Oestermann (Antoine).

The Intouchables is a would-be inspirational movie that quite frankly left me cold. It contains two excellent performances, but they are shoehorned into the most obvious, cliché riddled, cringe worthy story imaginable. The film essentially trades on obvious racial stereotypes, that no matter how good the performances are, the film simply cannot overcome them.

The film stars Omar Sy as Driss, an immigrant to France from Senegal, who has just got out of prison where he spent six months for robbing a jewelry store. His Aunt, who raised him, no longer wants him in the house. He has nowhere else to go, nothing else to do – but he needs money. He doesn’t really want a job, but needs to have a form signed by potential employers that says he is looking for a job in order to continue to collect unemployment benefits. This is how he comes to apply to be a caretaker for Philippe (Francois Cluzet), a rich widower, paralyzed from the neck down due to an accident. He barges in, demands his form be signed so he can be on his way. Almost out of spite, Philippe hires him – and now Driss is stuck doing a job he never wanted.

But wouldn’t you know it, it turns out that Driss is precisely the kind of caretaker Philippe needs to loosen up and live his life again – and Philippe is precisely the employer Driss needs, to show him some responsibility so that Driss can become a productive member of society. At first, Driss seems hopeless – he doesn’t take the job seriously, he spends more time ogling Philippe’s beautiful assistant than he does caring for him, the staff eyes him suspiciously, and Philippe’s teenage daughter makes it clear she doesn’t want him around. But soon, Driss’ no nonsense approach, his wide, friendly smile, make fit in. And while Driss at first sees Philippe as a stick in the mud – an upper class, out of touch old man, gradually, he starts to see the real person underneath – the person who needs help.

I suppose a movie like this could work. Hell, it’s not a million miles away from a film like Driving Miss Daisy – although that film at least had the advantage of being set in the past, where the behavior of the old white person, and the younger black person, at least made some sort of sense. And Driving Miss Daisy never had scenes as ridiculous as when Philippe takes his first hit of marijuana (how often have the movie taught us that up tight people just need to start smoking up?), or a scene as insulting as the would be funny sequence where Driss puts on some Earth, Wind and Fire at Philippe’s uptight birthday party, only to have a bunch of square, old white people in tuxedos start busting a move on the dance floor.

It is somewhat amazing then that the two performances in the movie work as well as they do. Sy in particular is wonderful as Driss – yes, he’s playing a stereotype – the type of character Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor might have played in the 1980s (and apparently, Chris Tucker says he’s interested in the role for the upcoming English language remake – and that casting actually makes sense to me), but with even less dimension than those roles. But Sy works hard, and sells his character. It may well be a stereotype, but Sy plays the hell out of it. And Cluzet makes Philippe into a real person – not just another movie “handicapped” person whose courage we are supposed to admire. The two performances make what otherwise would have been an insufferable movie at the very least watchable.

 
Still though, I cannot say I really liked The Intouchables. Yes, apparently this is based on a true story (although how much is really true, and how much was made up for the movie is up for debate), but that still doesn’t mean I really bought the movie. The Intouchables is a film that has two gifted actors at the peak of their form – but the movie doesn’t trust them enough to give them more complex characters to play.

Movie Review: Lincoln

Monday, November 19, 2012

Movie Review: Lincoln

Lincoln
Directed by: Steven Spielberg.
Written by: Tony Kushner based on the book by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis (Abraham Lincoln), Sally Field (Mary Todd Lincoln), David Strathairn (William Seward), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Robert Lincoln), James Spader (W.N. Bilbo), Hal Holbrook (Preston Blair), Tommy Lee Jones (Thaddeus Stevens), John Hawkes (Robert Latham), Jackie Earle Haley (Alexander Stephens), Bruce McGill (Edwin Stanton), Tim Blake Nelson (Richard Schell), Joseph Cross (John Hay), Jared Harris (Ulysses S. Grant), Lee Pace (Fernando Wood), Peter McRobbie (George Pendleton), Gulliver McGrath (Tad Lincoln), Gloria Reuben (Elizabeth Keckley), Michael Stuhlbarg (George Yeaman), David Costabile (James Ashley), Walton Goggins (Clay Hutchins), Colman Domingo (Private Harold Green), David Oyelowo (Corporal Ira Clark), Lukas Haas (First White Soldier), Dane DeHaan (Second White Soldier), S. Epatha Merkerson (Lydia Smith).

I have seen a lot of movies about politics and politicians in my life – I’m a bit of a political junkie, and I like to see movies about those in power. But watching Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, I realized how few of those movies show how politics actually work – that shows the inner workings of politicians, and shows how they actually get a bill passed. Otto Preminger’s under rated Advise and Consent, which was about a confirmation hearing of a controversial Secretary of State nominee and Rod Lurie’s The Contender, about a confirmation of a controversial Vice President, delved into this somewhat – how politician’s corral the votes they need, and keep them in line, but neither of them go as far as Lincoln does. This is not a traditional biopic about Abraham Lincoln – there are no childhood scenes, no scenes of Lincoln as a young man as his politic views form. By the time the movie opens, Lincoln is already fully formed – he has just been re-elected President, the Civil War is on its last legs, and he wants to ensure that before it ends, he has gotten the 13^th Amendment passed – the one that bans slavery. If he waits until the war is over, he knows he’ll lose some people. But Lincoln only has a month to pass it. The lame duck congress has 64 Democrats who were voted out – and will now be looking for new jobs. If Lincoln can keep all of the Republicans in line – and get 20 Democrats to vote against their party – he can get the Amendment passed.

I like these types of “biopics” better than the all-encompassing ones – the ones that try to explain an entire person’s life in two hours, which is pretty much impossible. By concentrating on the last few months of Lincoln’s life Spielberg – and screenwriter Tony Kushner – do a better job at defining just what made Lincoln so special – you get to know Lincoln more intimately than you would in a more traditional movie. As played by Daniel Day-Lewis – who once again proves why the Time Magazine headline that proclaimed him the World’s Greatest Actor was right – Lincoln is a soft spoken, but passionate man. He was seen by many in his time as little more than a country bumpkin – he came from a dirt poor family, had almost no formal education, but he also had a great mind, and essentially taught himself everything he knows. He also a natural storyteller – as this movie brilliantly shows – as Lincoln is fond of going off on tangents, telling stories of his past, to illustrate the point about the present he is trying to make. I’m sure there will be a few people in the audience, who like Bruce McGill does in the movie, throws up his hands at one point and says “Oh no, you’re going to tell another story” and storms away. But it is in these stories when Lincoln’s humanity – and political genius – is most on display. He is able to draw everyone around him into his world – make them feel valuable and almost always, see that he is right, no matter what they thought before the meeting began. Day-Lewis plays Lincoln as a tired man – hunched over, almost constantly wrapped in a blanket to ward off the cold, the lines on his face getting deeper. Yes, as has been well established, Lincoln is a bit melancholy – but there is passion here. He believes in ending slavery, and he’ll do it anyway necessary.

The movie tells how Lincoln and his team were able to secure the necessary votes. He had to corral the Conservative Republicans, by appeasing the powerful Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook), by convincing them that he was going to end the war as quickly as possible, which is all they care about. He also has to appease the abolitionists in his party – led by Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), who not only want slavery ended, but total equality for Negros – which is pretty much the nicest thing African Americans are called in this movie. He then needs to get 20 Democrats on his side – so he hires three shady political fixers (James Spader, John Hawkes and Tim Blake Nelson), who will not exactly bribe these congressmen for their votes, but come fairly close to doing so. This is the tricky part, because the Democrats are led by some vile, racists in Congress, who will see anyone in their party crossing over as traitors.

Day-Lewis’ is not the only great performance in the movie. Sally Field is quite good as Mary Todd Lincoln – a little unstable, still grieving the loss of her son a few years ago, but also a little stronger than her reputation suggests. Tommy Lee Jones steals his scenes as Stevens – who is much more blunt in his wishes than Lincoln is, but also knows he’ll have to swallow some of his pride in order for the Amendment to pass – he will essentially have to lie in Congress about his true feelings and intentions. Jones is hilarious in some of his scenes, and heartbreaking in his final scene. But most often, there is a look of pure aggravation on his face – as he has to sit there politely and listen to horrible racists spout their vile beliefs, and mainly have to smile. Spielberg and Kushner have been criticized in some corners for not giving any African Americans bigger roles – for making the ones that do have roles rather passive, and not really showing the evils of slavery. This didn’t bother me because we already know the evils of slavery, and that is really outside the scope of this movie, and most African Americans at the time had to be somewhat passive – especially in mixed company – or they risked their lives. And the movie quite clearly does show just how racist elected officials – and the country at large at that time – really were.

Lincoln surprised me in many ways. Normally, we expect something more epic when dealing with historical figures, but Spielberg’s film is much more intimate than that. Most of the scenes take place in small rooms – with men hammering out deals, or in the House, where the debate rages on. Spielberg does the epic so well, that it surprised me how intimate this film is. Yes, there are speeches in the movie – and on a few occasions they are a little too on the nose – but generally this is a film about people talking, and yet the movie is thrilling. Not only that but Spielberg, who has a reputation of taking his “serious” movies too seriously, but this movie doesn’t do that. Tony Kushner’s screenplay is actually quite funny – and treats historical figures as people first, not merely as Very Important People.

 
Yes, Spielberg, who has always had trouble with endings, takes Lincoln a few scenes too long. There is a moment that would have been a perfect ending – that captures everything we know learned about the man during the course of the last two and half hours, and would have represented a perfect ending to the film. Spielberg ends the movie how audiences would expect him to, but he had the perfect ending right there in front of him. This is a small complaint though on an otherwise great movie – perhaps the movie America needs right after a rather nasty Presidential election.

Movie Review: Holy Motors

Movie Review: Holy Motors

Holy Motors
Directed by: Leos Carax.
Written by: Leos Carax.
Starring: Denis Lavant (M. Oscar / Le banquier / La mendiante / L'OS de Motion-Capture / M. Merde / Le père / L'accordéoniste / Le tueur / Le tué / Le mourant / L'homme au foyer), Edith Scob (Céline), Eva Mendes (Kay M), Kylie Minogue (Eva Grace (Jean)), Elise Lhomeau (Léa (Elise)), Jeanne Disson (Angèle), Michel Piccoli (L'homme à la tache de vin), Leos Carax (Le dormeur / Voix Limousine), Nastya Golubeva Carax (La petite fille), Reda Oumouzoune (L'acrobate Mo-Cap), Zlata (La cyber-femme), Geoffrey Carey (Le photographe / Voix Limousine), Annabelle Dexter-Jones (L'assistante photographe), Elise Caron (Corinne Yam).

What is one to make of Leos Carax’s Holy Motors? Does the film have any meaning whatsoever, or is it simply a series of surreal episodes that are not meant to add up to a coherent whole? There is a narrative through line to the film – but Carax makes no real attempt to try and explain what it all means. We see Carax himself at the start of the film, waking up, wandering around his small apartment, before opening a door with his finger – which has been replaced by a key, although one of the stranger looking keys I have ever seen. The door he unlocks reveals a movie theater – full of faceless people, staring motionless at a screen, with a very early silent film on it. Then we flash to Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), as he wanders done his long driveway, says goodbye to his children, and enters a limo, driven by Celine (Edith Scob). She informs him he has appointments all day. At this point, Oscar appears to be a banker of some sort, conducting business on his cell phone, but during the course of the day, his “appointments” will require him to be just about everything you can imagine – and this banker he appears to be, will make another appearance later in the film, but while Oscar is someone else. It won’t be the only time it appears like Oscar is more than one person at a time.

During the course of the film, Oscar will transform himself – in the backseat of his limo, which is cluttered with all sorts of stuff – into multiple different characters. He plays an old woman begging for change, a man working at first solo, and then with someone else, in a motion capture studio, a subterranean psycho named Merde who kidnaps a beautiful model (Eva Mendes), who essentially allows him to transform her into what he wants, a disappointed father driving his teenage daughter home from a party, an accordionist leading a musical parade, a murderer, the murderer’s victim, a man who runs into a woman from his past, and finally the husband and father of a very strange family. I suppose in between these episodes – when he’s in the limo with Celine – he is himself, but it’s certainly debatable if he even knows who that is any more.

Who is Mr. Oscar? It’s clear he’s some sort of actor, but whoever is hiring him for these appointments is never identified – I suppose in some cases, it could be the people he interacts with – all of whom know him, and he seems to know as well, although clearly, he is not the same person all the time – and there are those tricky situations where Oscar is two people at once, which always leads to one killing the other, or both killing the other, although Oscar always seems to be able to get up and walk away. Is Oscar acting for an audience? Are there cameras always just out of sight recording him? Who is Michael Piccoli supposed to be? He seems like some sort of boss of Oscar’s, and he isn’t exactly happy with him.

It’s probably better not to ask these questions, because the movie is not at all interested in answering them. Perhaps the whole movie is just an excuse for Carax to cram in as many different genres as he can into one movie – horror movie, crime drama, domestic drama, musical, thriller, comedy. Carax has not made a feature in more than a decade, so perhaps that is the only answer – Carax is making the movie to amuse himself. The movie is about movies – and acting – and about dreams, but beyond that, whatever you make of the movie, is up to you.

There are a few things that are clear however. The first is that no actor has been asked to do more for a film this year than Denis Lavant is asked to do with Holy Motors. He bounces around from scene to scene, from character to character, and does a magnificent job in every role he is thrown into, for however long he is thrown into it. It helps to that Levant is surrounded by great actors in most of his scenes – Scob, who finds nothing odd about everything that happens, Mendes, who was cast for her physical beauty, but allows herself to be used in an interesting way, Piccoli, so mysterious in his brief scene. Best of all, surprisingly enough, is singer Kylie Minogue who shows up as a long lost something (lover? wife? colleague?) of Oscar’s, and the two share a melancholy chat, before she launches into a beautiful, old style musical number/lament, that is perhaps the best moment of the entire film.

 
I’m not sure that this review will convince anyone reading it that they should go out and see Holy Motors – but they really should. Movies like this, which were once more common place, are now a rarity. Carax is a director whose name I have known for years, but whose films I had never seen (except for his short film as part of the Omnibus Tokyo, which features Lavant as the Merde character, and which surprisingly, I didn’t much care for). Holy Motors is perhaps the most singular film of the year. It may mean absolutely nothing – or it could profound – but whatever it is, I was drawn into its weirdness – and didn’t want it to end.

DVD Review: The Queen of Versailles

Friday, November 16, 2012

DVD Review: The Queen of Versailles

The Queen of Versailles

Directed by: Lauren Greenfield.

It would have been very easy to make a documentary that simply mocks David and Jackie Siegel. After all, the make it so easy. He is the owner of the large, privately owned Time Share Company in the world. When the times were good, they had more money than they knew what to do with, which is why they started construction on the largest, single family home in America, which of course, they modeled after Marie-Antoinette’s palace Versailles. It was going to cost $100 million, but hey, they had the money. When asked why he was building it, David Siegel simply says “Because I can”. That’s probably the only reason that actually makes sense. Before the market crash of 2008, the Siegel’s lived in a world that even most rich people in America could never dream of. And then, it all came crashing down.

It must have been somewhat tempting for filmmaker Lauren Greenfield to make a movie that laughed at the Siegel’s, who saw their (temporary) downfall as a deserved comeuppance for the couple who are so far removed from normal people that they make Mitt Romney look like the Regular Joe he tried so hard to pass himself as this year by comparison. And yes, there are a few moments in the movie where Greenfield cannot resist including, which will make the audience feel a little superior to the Siegel’s (the out and out funniest moment in the film is one of those – when Jackie rents a car at Hertz and asks the bewildered clerk what the name of her driver is). Overall though, the movie, while not overly sympathetic to the Siegel’s, doesn’t take too many potshots at them either. It is a relatively honest portrait of the two – if they don’t like how they come off in the movie, they really have no one to blame but themselves.

David certainly comes off worse than Jackie does. He seems unaware of the irony when he complains that about the greedy banks who tempted himself with so much easy money, that he could never hope to repay unless the market kept going up and up and up, and then shutting it down when he needed it the most. Isn’t that precisely what a time share company does? Does David not realize he has no one but himself to blame for all the debt he has amassed, since he basically paid for everything in cash, and then mortgaged it back to the banks, so he could get more money, so he could do the same damn thing all over again? During the course of the film, Siegel gets increasingly worn down by everything around him – the financial strain he has put himself, and his company in.

On the other hand, Jackie simply seems a little oblivious to what is going on. Her idea of cutting back is going to Wal-Mart and spending thousands of dollars instead of going to designer stores. She wonders aloud why the bailout money has filtered down to regular people, like herself. She is clearly a trophy wife, who laughingly admits that her husband – who is 30 years older than her – always said when she turned 40 he’d trade her in for two 20 year olds. She’s over 40 now, and he hasn’t done so yet – perhaps because she has given him 7 children – or perhaps because doing so would simply cost him too much money. Yet, I couldn’t hate Jackie – couldn’t just simply mock her as an airhead. She may be somewhat clueless, but she’s likable. She may not know what the hell she’s doing, but damn it, she tries hard.

It is easy to hate what the Siegel’s represent however. They are super rich, and if David had been a little smarter, even the real estate crash wouldn’t have almost sunk him like it did (he is apparently, back on track now, after finally doing what everyone told him to do for years – let the banks have the money pit that was his Las Vegas Time Share). Surely, there had to be somewhat more worthwhile they could have spent their money on rather than $100 million house, complete with a bowling alley, two tennis courts, 10 kitchens and a closet so large Greenfield mistakes it for a bedroom. Isn’t that money supposed to trickle down somehow? But Siegel, of course, plays by a different set of rules than the rest of us, as the movie shows. A childhood friend of Jackie defaults on her mortgage, and is in danger of being foreclosed on. Jackie sends her $5,000 to help her out, but it’s too late, foreclosure proceedings have started, and although her friend now has the money to pay what she owes, the banks won’t help her out. When you owe $5,000 to a bank, you’re nothing. When you owe them hundreds of millions, you’re too indispensable.