• Review: “The Great Gatsby”
  • Review: “Mud”
  • Review: “The Place Beyond the Pines”
  • Review: “Ginger & Rosa”
  • Review: “Stoker”
  • Review: “Side Effects”
  • Review: “Mama”
  • Review: “Zero Dark Thirty”
  • Review: “Gangster Squad”
  • Review: “Les Misérables”
  • Review: “This Is 40”
  • Review: “Any Day Now”
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  • Review: “Silver Linings Playbook”
  • Review: “Hitchcock”
  • Review: “Lincoln”
  • Review: “Life of Pi”
  • Review: “Flight”
  • Review: “Skyfall”
  • Review: “Argo”
  • Review: “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”
  • Review: “Looper”
  • Reviews: “Arbitrage” and “The Master”
  • Review: “The Words”
  • Review: “Celeste and Jesse Forever”
  • Review: “Lawless”
  • Review: “The Campaign”
  • Review: “Total Recall”
  • Review: “To Rome with Love”
  • Review: “The Dark Knight Rises”
  • Review: “Moonrise Kingdom”
  • Review: “Magic Mike”
  • Review: “The Amazing Spider-Man”
  • Review: “Brave”
  • Review: “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”
  • Review: “Prometheus”
  • Review: “Snow White and the Huntsman”
  • Review: “Bernie”
  • Review: “The Dictator”
  • Review: “The Raven”
  • Reviews: “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”
  • Review: “Chimpanzee”
  • Review: “The Cabin in the Woods”
  • Review: “American Reunion”
  • Review: “Detachment”
  • Review: “The Hunger Games”
  • Review: “Casablanca” (In Re-Release; 1 Night Only)
  • Review: “Silent House”
  • Review: “Wanderlust”
  • Review: “This Means War”
  • Review: “Safe House”
  • Review: “The Woman In Black”
  • Review: “The Grey”
  • Review: “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”
  • Review: “Contraband”
  • Review: “Shame” and “Young Adult”
  • Review: “War Horse”
  • Review: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
  • Review: “Like Crazy”
  • Review: “Hugo”
  • Review: “The Descendants”
  • Review: “My Week with Marilyn”
  • Review: “J. Edgar”
  • Review: “In Time”
  • Review: “Take Shelter”
  • Review: “The Thing”
  • Review: “The Ides of March”
  • Review: “Dream House”
  • Review: “50/50”
  • Review: “Moneyball”
  • Review: “Abduction”
  • Review: “Drive”
  • Review: “Contagion”
  • Review: “The Debt”
  • Review: “Our Idiot Brother”
  • Review: “The Help”
  • Review: “Fright Night”
  • Review: “Beginners”
  • Review: “Crazy Stupid Love”
  • Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Monthly Archives: March 2013

Review: “Ginger & Rosa”

29 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

alessandro nivola, alice englert, annette benning, christina hendricks, cuban missile crisis, drama, elle fanning, ginger & rosa, jodhi may, oliver platt, sally potter, timothy spall

-Ginger-Rosa-2012-Posters-alice-englert-32604818-1181-886

“New Radicals”

Grade: B

IN LATIN, THE words for friend (“amicus”) and lover (“amans”) are derived from the same root – “amo,” which is to love. In Sally Potter’s “Ginger and Rosa,” a film about the highs and lows of female friendship, there is that same slippage between friendship and love. Elle Fanning (“Somewhere”) and Alice Englert play the title roles in thisGinger & Rosa sensitive, intelligent film set in London in 1962.  The adults around them are up in arms about nuclear arms during the anxious days of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  There’s the commanding Christina Hendricks as Ginger’s mother Natalie and Jodhi May as Rosa’s mother Anoushka.  They met in a maternity ward during World War II and their daughters have been besties ever since.  They share a bathtub and examine each other’s underwear like water-nymphs; they discuss existentialist philosophy with Ginger quering “Do you think Simone de Beauvoir has a bubbly personality?” and “Do you think there’s a ‘forever’?”

But is there really such thing as a B.F.F.?  Sexuality, integral to Potter’s coming-of-age tale, has the potential to ruin everything between them and Rosa’s sexual relationship with Ginger’s handsome father Roland (Alessandro Nivola) drives an understandable wedge.  ginger-and-rosa09There’s an excruciating scene on a boat – and we feel Ginger’s agony because of Fanning’s precise performance (not to mention her dead-on British accent) – in which Ginger can hear Roland and Rosa’s lovemaking in a room next door. She presses a pillow to her ears to deaden the sounds of sex and betrayal.  The secret affair is another ticking time bomb and the circle of activists and artists that surround her – her gay godfathers (Oliver Platt and Timothy Spall) and Annette Benning as their feminist gal-pal – threaten to find out that Roland is sleeping with his daughter’s lifelong friend.

Political liberals on film are usually portrayed as sexually incontinent, so are college professors (i.e. “The Squid and the Whale,” “Wonder Boys,” “The Life of David Gale,” “Smart People” – okay, I’ll stop there).  According to the movies, our beliefs in love, reform and pacifism must infuse a sex life that knows no bounds. Roland fits this stereotype to a T – “I’m not sure I’m father material,” he under-states – and we want to see him found out. The film’s resolution is rushed and its pace overall plodding.  Roland tells Ginger “You were born radical,” but “Ginger & Rosa” ends on a fairly conservative note with Ginger having learned one of life’s hardest lines: eros trumps philia every time.  This must be what The Smiths were getting at, in “Ask” from 1986, when Morrissey sang: “If it’s not love then it’s the bomb that will bring us together.”

Review: “Stoker”

19 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

bram stoker, dracula, horror, matthew goode, mia wasikowka, nicole kidman, oldboy, park chan-wook, stoker, wentworth miller

Stoker - 2013 movie

“American Gothic”

Grade: C+/B- (RENT IT)

A SURPLUS OF style, a dearth of drama, “Stoker” falls significantly short of its famous name.  The namesake of Park Chan-wook’s new film is Abraham “Bram” Stoker who was born in Dublin in 1847 during the Irish potato famine. He wouldn’t become a master of horror until he published his novel Dracula exactly fifty years later. Stokerstoker1f-1-web hardly invented the vampire legend – Byron’s private doctor, John Polidori, beat him to the punch with The Vampyre, his contribution to the same ghost-telling contest that inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1816.  What Stoker did was package a mixture of vampirism and eroticism that Victorians could truly sink their teeth into: an American edition of Dracula followed its English publication, and an abridged edition appeared in 1901.

The film “Stoker,” written by actor-screenwriter Wentworth Miller, has all of the goriness of Dracula but it moves more at a zombie’s pace than a real bloodsucker’s.  It centers around a melancholic girl named India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) in what is essentially Hamlet from a daughter’s perspective: India’s father Richard (Dermot Mulroney) has died a nicole-kidman-stokermysterious death upstate and his dashing brother Charlie (Matthew Goode) suddenly appears on the scene where he flirts with his widowed sister-in-law Evelyn Stoker.  She’s played by Nicole Kidman, who had long chosen risky roles (“Eyes Wide Shut,” “Birth”), and Wasikowska could be seen as something of her Aussie protégé (“Albert Nobbs,” “The Kids Are All Right”).  Over the course of “Stoker,” she has to transform from a shrinking violet into shrieking and violent and it’s a tour-de-force performance inasmuch as she appears practically possessed.  “We don’t need to be friends,” India tells her uncle coldly, “We’re family.”  At first, it appears as if Uncle Charlie is the evil influence until we sense that India is far from a passive receptor but something truly wicked.  She goes from girl to gorgon.

The shower scene in which India masturbates to memories of a recent killing is laughable – stupid even, but Wasikowska never wavers in her eerie embodiment of a girl metamorphosing into something horrible.  It’s a bloodbath in every sense of the Matthew-Goode-and-Mia-Wasikowska-in-Stoker-2013-Movie-Image2word.  South Korean director Park is best known for his “vengeance trilogy” (including “Oldboy) and his heavy hand, stylistically speaking, strangles the film, both in terms of timing – the opening credits needlessly hiccup and reset themselves – and storytelling.  What exactly is the story of “Stoker” and what relation does it bear at all to vampirism?  We live in the age of the vampire (“True Blood,” “Twilight,” “Let Me In,” et al) but Park’s family gothic adds nothing to the lore. It only takes, and in the process, drains your time and your patience.

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