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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: bryce dallas howard

Review: “50/50”

03 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

50/50, 500 days of summer, adam sandler, angelica huston, anna kendrick, blog, bromance, bryce dallas howard, cancer, chemo, cruella de vil, dexter, dramedy, funny people, humor, inception, jonathan levine, joseph gordon levitt, noga arikha, patrick swayze, seth rogan, the help

“Spinal Trap”

REVIEW: “50/50”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

CANCER AND COMEDY aren’t as incompatible as one might think.  For centuries doctors worked from the assumption that the human body was comprised of four humors: phlegm, yellow and black bile, and blood. What’s called the humoural model (from fluid, or humon, in Greek and humor in Latin) dominated from the fifth century BC, with the work of Hippocrates, to the early twentieth century, the vestiges of which are now understood in terms of moods and temperament.  “English-speakers still have to humor the whims of a temperamental colleague,” writes Noga Arikha, author of Passions and Tempers: A History of The Humours, or “face a Monday with ill-humor, and remain good-humored throughout the week.”

But what about facing a stage-four spinal tumor with a sense of humor?  That’s the challenge facing Adam and indeed the larger dramedy based on his existential ordeal called “50/50.” Joseph Gordon-Levitt [“(500) Days of Summer,” “Inception”] plays Adam, a radio producer in Seattle, in a script by Will Reiser who himself battled and beat spinal cancer.  Adam gets by, and high, with a little help from his friends, chiefly Kyle (a sly and slimmer Seth Rogan), his hospital-appointed therapist (Anna Kendrick of “Up in the Air”) and smothery mother (an underused Angelica Huston).  When Adam informs her of his diagnosis over dinner, Huston shoots back: “I’m moving in.”

The film’s first frames feature Adam following all the rules: at 27, he exercises and patiently jogs in place at crosswalks while waiting for the light to change.  He’s smitten with girlfriend Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) who, as an abstract artist, fills his apartment with ugly canvases and worse, arrives an hour late at the hospital to pick him up.  Reprising her turn as Cruella de Vil in “The Help,” Howard tries her darndest to breathe life into a flat character in a film really about the bonds between men.

The emotional core of “50/50,” after all, lies in that fine bromance between Adam and Kyle.  Friends don’t let friends drive themselves to chemo.  And friends certainly don’t let friends shave their own heads, nor miss the opportunity to corral girls into sympathy sex.  “50/50!” exclaims Kyle, “If you were a casino game, you’d have the best odds.  And lots of people beat cancer.  That guy from ‘Dexter’ and Patrick Swayze.”  “Swayze?” Adam retorts, “That guy is dead.”  “Really?” Kyle backtracks, “Well, don’t think about him.”

Rogan’s casualness as a comic actor makes him instantly likable, and citing “night-blindness” as a reason to share Adam’s cancer-pot, he also reprises a role already seen on screen: 2009’s “Funny People” in which there, too, he nurses a terminal Adam Sandler back to life and laughter.   Directed by Jonathan Levine, “50/50” has none of that inferior film’s acerbic nihilism.  Instead, and in large part because of Levitt’s tenderness – listen for his larynx-shattering howl on the eve of a crucial surgery – “50/50” keeps its head high in the face of despair.  There’s a term for that tactic, by the way; it’s called “gallows humor.”

Cancer Sucks so Blog for a Cure:

http://www.blogforacure.com/

My “Bromance” review (“Funny People,” “The Hangover,” and “I Love You, Man”) from the _GLR_:

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

Review: “The Help”

25 Thursday Aug 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

1960s, alabama, allison janney, bryce dallas howard, comedy, crazy stupid love, don draper, drama, emma stone, injustice, jackson, jessica chastain, kathryn stockett, mad men, martin luther king, meryl streep, novel, octavia spencer, patriarchy, proof, race, racism, sissy spacek, straight A, summer movie, tate taylor, the help, the south, tree of life, viola davis, white

“Separate but Sequel?”

Movie Review: “The Help” (2011)

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

IN THE SPRING of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. was imprisoned for eight days in an Alabama jailhouse.  The crime?  Leading a peaceful protest against the institutionalized racism of the age otherwise known as segregation.  The result?  M.L.K’s masterwork “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” perhaps the second most important work of antiauthoritarian argumentation after that little-known piece of paper called “The Declaration of Independence.”  In a blend of aphorism and oratory, King writes of what he calls the “interrelatedness of all communities and states,” adding: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”  The part, in other words, infects the whole.

The part in Tate Taylor’s “The Help” is the kitchen or the nursery in any ordinary Southern house and the whole is the deeply racist and paranoid world outside.  The uniformed maids working long hours in those humid, white-owned spaces have grown bitter and resentful after generations of hardship.  Known euphemistically as “the help,” they’ve got a few stories to tell about the white women they’re forced to “Yes Ma’am” all damn day long.  All they need is a person in power to get the word out, to publicize their notes from the underground.  They get more than they bargain for when a brash white woman comes home, proclaiming: “I’d like to write something from the view of the help.”

Based on the much-anticipated film adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 best-selling novel, “The Help,” director Tate Taylor preserves Stockett’s sense that even the domestic sphere has something instructive to say about the world outside.  Set not in Birmingham but in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, the narrative unfolds inside a hermetically-sealed world of upper-class white privilege, one in which dessert forks and serving from the left still matter.  There’s Hilly (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), a veritable slave-master in a beehive who believes wholeheartedly that black maids should use separate bathrooms from whites, and Allison Janney as the cowardly mother of the film’s white heroine, Skeeter (the starlet du jour Emma Stone of “Easy A” and “Crazy Stupid Love”).  It’s not just Skeeter’s name that sets her apart from the vapid dilettanti of Jackson high society but Skeeter’s freckles, corkscrew hair, her literary aspirations, and her little interest in marriage and men.  When Skeeter returns home as an Ole Miss alumnus with a new writing job, her mother corners her about her unconventionality, worried that she’s having “unnatural thoughts” about the same sex.  “I read there’s a cure,” blurts a worried Janney, even a “brew tea” to make her more like Hilly and herself.

But Skeeter sticks to her guns and to the marginalized black help of Jackson, namely Aibileen (the indomitable Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer).  Davis earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for just eight minutes’ worth of screen time with Meryl Streep in “Doubt” (2008).   She has a fascinating face – deep and protuberant eyes always on the verge of crying – and alongside Spencer’s Minny, she’s the emotional core of “The Help.”  The two provide Skeeter with first-person accounts of their humiliations.  One of Skeeter’s questions, which we hear twice, is even sadder the second time: “How does it feel to raise white children while your own children are being raised by someone else?”  Unsure, or perhaps afraid, to answer, Aibileen can only stare at the portrait of her dead son (the victim of a racial hate crime) on her kitchen wall.   When the testimonials of Aibileen and Minny grow into Skeeter’s book-length exposé of white establishment, the joke is mainly on Hilly.

The film’s pace and performances are equally fine.  It’s refreshing to see Bryce Dallas Howard drop the usual blankness of her expression and relish in the bitchy malevolence of her role.  Her senile mother, played by a cat-eyed Sissy Spacek, garners laughs since even she finds her daughter’s racist airs repugnant.  On the narrative sidelines, perhaps, is the character of Celia (played by Jessica Chastain, the ethereal mother-figure in “The Tree of Life”) who, like Skeeter, sees no value in separate bathrooms and dining areas and relies on Minny (who is fired by Hilly for insubordination) to teach her how to cook and play the perfect wife.  The fact that she can’t get pregnant and that she’s viewed as a harlot by the in-crowd has driven her slightly batty.

By empathizing with Celia’s predicament as well as Minny’s, “The Help” smartly rounds out the various levels of subjugation at work in 1960s culture.  What’s worrisome about America’s nostalgic return to that era – thanks to “Mad Men” and its various offspring – is that the age of the skinny tie was, in reality, an age of wide disparity.  For every Don Draper in a skyscraper there were a million more Aibileens and Minnies.  The ditsy Celia is as much a victim as they are since all these women, white or black, are relegated to social roles that simply don’t fit.  The main deficiency of “The Help” is that it doesn’t do enough with this parallel form of oppression.  Too eager to please, the film loves to watch Hilly fall flat on her face over and over again, but in this respect, it can’t see the forest for the trees.  “The Help” misses the fact that racism and patriarchy are overlapping forces, which means that even the most villainous women are sometimes victims.

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