Tag Archives: blue valentine

Review: “Like Crazy”

15 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”

Review: “Like Crazy”

Grade: C+ (Rent It) 

THERE’S A REASON why the romance “Like Crazy,” from director Drake Doremus, has been hanging around the multiplex long after its October release: it’s artful and earnest, and while “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn” fills two to three auditoriums a night, zombifying the nation, there’s a smaller, simpler love story just around the corner.  It’s from the young director who brought us “Spooner” in 2009 and “Douchebag” in 2010.  Doremus’s latest, “Like Crazy,” picked up the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic feature at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and while it’s hardly a perfect film – nor is it very crazy – it does contain some tender moments.  What’s not to love about a girl who drinks whiskey, reads e.e. cummings, and a boy who shares her love of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” and gives a handmade chair as a gift (the inscription reading, underneath the seat, “LIKE CRAZY”)?

Sorry, Twi-hards, no bare-chested werewolves here: instead, Mr. Doremus, shooting in hand-held digital and without a script, gives us Jacob and Anna.  Anton Yelchin (“Fright Night”) plays Jacob, a furniture designer living in Santa Monica, and the fresh-faced Felicity Jones (“Brideshead Revisited,” “The Tempest”) plays his English idol.  The two meet at UCLA and during a class presentation, Anna discusses the history of journalism.  Talk of “alternative narratives” inside the classroom alerts us to the film’s interest in non-conventional storytelling.  Whole portions of the pair’s love affair are left out, along with actors who are sometimes shot out-of-view.  The trouble arises when Anna violates her student visa by staying the summer, an innocent mistake that creates a world of legal troubles for the couple.  She returns to London and the two are condemned to that agonizing oxymoron of an emotional state known as the “long-distance relationship.”

“Like Crazy” is preoccupied on every level by the relation between propinquity and distance, past and present.   When Jacob visits Anna and her parents (the charming Oliver Muirhead and Alex Kingston) in England, he feels the pressure of time since any long-distance affair is love on the clock.  Where Jacob and Anna eventually wind up, “Like Crazy” doesn’t ultimately tell us, and the lack of resolution after a final shower scene – reminiscent of a finer love story, similarly interested in alternative narratives, “Blue Valentine” – smacks of directionlessness.  Lacking a real ending, or even the suggestion of the couple’s fate, “Like Crazy” circles the drain in its final minutes, unsure of where it should flow.  Mr. Doremus’s romance is trying to break your heart, but it stymies more than it satisfies.

Review: “My Week with Marilyn”

26 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Good-bye Norma Jean”

Review: “My Week with Marilyn”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

“MY WEEK WITH Marilyn” – not to mention this year’s Oscar for Best Actress – belong to Michelle Williams (“Blue Valentine,” “Brokeback Mountain”) for her luminous embodiment of Marilyn Monroe or, as she was known in 1956 (the year in which Simon Curtis’s new film is set): Mrs. Marilyn Miller.  That was the year of Marilyn’s third marriage, this time to playwright Arthur Miller, which was a significant victory for American eggheads since the century’s greatest sex symbol had left Yankee Joe DiMaggio for the author of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible.  It was also the year in which Monroe crossed the pond to costar with Britain’s leading Shakespearean actor, Laurence Olivier, in “The Prince and the Showgirl.”  In many ways Olivier’s heir, Kenneth Branagh plays the great thespian, disappointed and angered by Marilyn’s ineptitude on set.  It’s the ultimate clash between English modesty and American super-stardom, and exasperated by Monroe’s acting coach (Zoë Wanamaker) and her many lapdogs, he barks: “Teaching Marilyn to act is like teaching Urdu to a badger!”  Olivier is gruff, arrogant, caked in makeup, and when he drops an F-bomb upon Marilyn entering the room, she asks in her characteristic breathiness: “Oh, they have that word in England, too?”

Based on his memoirs The Prince, The Showgirl and Me and My Week with Marilyn, both by British filmmaker Colin Clark, the film follows a 23-year old Colin, recently hired as a third assistant director on Olivier’s picture.  As Colin, freckle-faced Eddie Redmayne (“The Good Shepherd,” “Savage Grace”) goes all weak-in-the-knees upon meeting the bombshell though he quickly becomes something more to her, both the shoulder-to-cry-on as she feuds with Miller and yet another man whose erotic veneration Monroe needed as badly as the air she breathed.  Apart from Colin, the only other Brit pleasant to her on set is Dame Sybil Thorndike (played by another Dame, Judi Dench), who speaks to the film’s major conceit – the paradoxical pleasure and pain of unrequited love – when she tells Colin “First love is such sweet despair.”

Screenwriter Adrian Hodges (“Tom and Viv”) has a light touch here, well-suited to the both the source material, “The Prince and the Showgirl,” and the fact that Marilyn let Colin close but not too close.  A splendid scene follows an off-set excursion to Windsor Castle where Colin’s godfather, Sir Owen (Derek Jacobi), provides the pair with a private tour of the royal family’s library.  Once skinny-dipping ensues, director of photography Ben Smithard (“The Damned United”) lingers over their bodies with suitable sparkle and softness.  To reach that Marilyn-like glow, Williams reportedly required three hours of hair and makeup each morning and it shows: she radiates but also breaks your heart. “My Week with Marilyn” transcends verisimilitude to dramatize the fact that Marilyn’s off-screen role was just as laborious and ill-fitting as her onscreen persona; we get the sense that she’s trapped by expectations as sound stage bells ring and crazed fans crush in around her.  After a lovelorn week, Marilyn moves in close to Colin for a final kiss, whispers the line “Thanks for being on my side,” but after that, it’s goodbye Norma Jean.

Review: “Drive”

17 Saturday Sep 2011

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Auto-matic for the People”

Film Review: “Drive” (2011)

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

 

REVENGE, THEY SAY, is a dish best served cold.  Even colder when served at midnight in the mean streets of Los Angeles, or so “Drive” from Danish director Nicolas Winding Ref (“Bronson,” “Valhalla Rising”) would have us believe.

After the film’s anonymous protagonist (played by Ryan Gosling) sees his friends victimized by ruthless gangsters (Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman), he swiftly avenges their deaths in the film’s final twenty minutes, a stunning finale reminiscent of a very obvious influence here: the vigilante bloodbath known as “Taxi Driver” (1976).  But Gosling, fresh from the one-two punch of last year’s “Blue Valentine” and his comic turn in “Crazy Stupid Love,” smartly eschews a recycling of DeNiro to breathe new life into a young, marble-mouthed Brando, an über-cool Hollywood stunt driver by day and criminal getaway driver at night.

Before the pink cursive credits roll – oh yes, Mr. Ref is a stylist and “Drive” is part music video, part urban nocturne (the best shots, in fact, of the City of Angels at night since Michael Mann’s “Collateral” of 2004) – the film’s opening demands that you fasten your seat belt as Gosling’s driver escapes the LAPD with two masked gunmen hiding in his backseat.  It’s not the high-speed car chase we’ve seen a thousand times before but a vehicular game of cat-and-mouse, a chess game on squealing rubber tires.

We get to know the driver’s softer side when, inside his Echo Park apartment building, he attracts his married mom of a neighbor, Irene (played by the always-restrained Carey Mulligan) and fills in for her  husband, who’s behind bars, and takes a special liking to Irene’s small son.  “What do you do?” Irene asks.  “I’m a driver,” Gosling replies.  “Like a limo driver?”  “No, like in the movies.”   There’s a brief period of paradise – the trio drives the city’s empty culverts, á la “Terminator 2” but slowly and in the sunshine – before Irene’s husband named Standard (Oscar Isaac) returns home.  That homecoming presages the fatal breakdown of virtually every relationship in the film: the driver’s bond with Bryan Cranston as a grease monkey known as Shannon, Standard’s with Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks as a double-dealing grifter, and Perlman’s with Brooks (playing against type as a diabolical ringleader).  When the driver doesn’t shake his hand, explaining “My hands are a little dirty,” Brooks shoots back: “So are mine.”

In keeping with the film noir of “Drive,” Ryan Gosling reveals what could be called the black leather interior of his complicated character.   It’s as sleek and stinging as the scorpion emblazoned on the back of his blood-stained jacket.  The pace of this little ultraviolent gem may not be fast and furious – at times, it’s closer to rush-hour traffic on the 101 – but “Drive” is sure to pick up more than a few passengers on its road to cult status.

Review: “Crazy Stupid Love”

08 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Isn’t It Bromantic?”

Grade: B (RENT IT)

IN CASE YOU hadn’t heard, the feet are the windows to the soul.  At least, the opening shots of “Crazy Stupid Love,” in which we see various couples engaged in playful games of footsy under restaurant tables, suggest as much.  The credits come to a screeching halt with the first sight of Mr. and Mrs. Weaver’s feet which, removed from each other and planted firmly on the floor, say a lot about their moribund marriage.  Worse, Cal Weaver (played by Steve Carell) is decked out in suburban dad-wear – khaki pants and New Balance sneakers – and unbeknownst to him, his wife has slept with a coworker (Kevin Bacon).  Yes, the thrill is gone for Emily Weaver (played by Julianne Moore) though she’s not sure she wants the single life either.  When the two can’t decide on a dessert, Cal suggests they simultaneously blurt out exactly what it is they’re craving.  But Emily doesn’t exude baked Napoleon, as Cal might have hoped, but “I want a divorce.”  How a good-natured guy like Cal can rescue and restore his marriage becomes the premise which “Crazy Stupid Love” pursues with entertaining results.  This is another comic success from “Bad Santa” writer-director team Glenn Ficarra and John Requa who, in 2009, debuted with the underrated “I Love You Philip Morris,” the story of a gay conman (Jim Carrey) who only has eyes for Ewan McGregor.

After free-falling into newfound bachelorhood after twenty plus years of marriage, Cal lands in a posh nightclub packed with beautiful and available women.  He becomes something of a dreadful fixture in the bar, however, as he drinks too much and bores strangers with the details of his breakup.  Carell’s delivery is pitch-perfect as we watch an inebriated Cal talking (slurring) to himself: “You know what word isn’t used much any more? Cuckold!  I was cuckolded by my ex-wife!  She made a cuckold out of me.”  And just as Cal becomes a social car-wreck from which you can’t look away, Jacob (Ryan Gosling) steps in to remake this lonesome loser into the Casanova he knows Cal has hiding inside.  In his crisp collars and tailored suits, Jacob isn’t just a clothes horse but a sartorial stallion.  Gosling is also like licorice for the eyes and even Cal is seduced; the two develop a deep and enduring bromance.  When he meets Cal at a LA shopping mall, Jacob throws Cal’s sneakers over the balcony before shepherding him through a new-clothes shopping spree, assuring him that Emily will rue the day she ever left him.  This is the capitalistic ethos personified: the road to romance runs right through your wallet.

The banal title notwithstanding, “Crazy Stupid Love” will charm you in large part because of Carell’s anxious everyman antics and the smirking ease of Gosling’s performance.  It’s good to see the latter lightening his pallette after last year’s pathos-laden “Blue Valentine.” The script is also layered with charming though familiar subplots. The Weavers’ preadolescent son, Robbie (Jonah Bobo), for example, has made a religion out of his babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton) who is too infatuated with her employer Cal to notice.  Coincidences multiply in “Crazy Stupid Love,” which is cleverly plotted by “Cars” screenwriter Dan Fogelman, but perhaps too much so in the film’s final moments.  Set at a backyard BBQ, the resolution feels like a sitcom where loose ends are tied together too tightly.  Still, in a summer cinemascape occupied by Smurfs and penguins, it’s refreshing to see a romantic comedy aimed at grown-ups as crazy and stupid as we may be.

For my “Bromance Flix and the State of Dudedom” (2010 Film Review of “The Hangover,” et al) see:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/’Bromance’+Flix+and+the+State+of+Dudedom.-a0216644249