• Review: “The Great Gatsby”
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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: christina hendricks

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: “Detachment”

03 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

adrien brody, albert camus, blythe danner, christina hendricks, drama, edgar allan poe, james caan, marcia gay harden, sami gayle, tim blake nelson, tony kaye

“No Sub Left Behind”

Grade: C (SKIP IT)

HELL ISN’T RED.  Hell isn’t rocky nor is the inferno fiery and subterranean.  Hell, as Tony Kaye’s overwrought new drama, “Detachment,” would have us believe, is a public high school classroom somewhere in the greater New York area.  Few of us need to be reminded that high school can be a hateful place, but “Detachment” provides us with one substitute teacher’s perspective on the crumbling public education system in America today.   Adrien Brody plays Mr. Henry Barth and with his Modigliani mug – the pencil-thin head and nose thrice broken – gives his best performance in a decade.  “I’m a substitute teacher,” says Henry, “There’s really no responsibility to teach.  The responsibility is to maintain order and to make sure no one is killed in your classroom.”  And he isn’t kidding.  The students in “Detachment” kick, curse, leave their bras at home, kill defenseless animals in the gym, even commit suicide in public places.

The hyperbolic “Detachment” is a let-down for fans of Tony (“American History X”) Kaye but a sigh of relief for fans of Adrien Brody insofar as the leading man, since winning the Best Actor Oscar in 2002 for Polanski’s “The Pianist,” has followed a career-plan on loan to him from Nicolas Cage: win movie-acting’s highest trophy – and Brody is the youngest actor to do so at age 29 – and subsequently fritter your legitimacy away on cine-trash for the multiplex.  With the exception of that comical cameo as Salvador Dali in “Midnight in Paris” – “Rhinoceros!” – Brody has gifted us these god-awfuls: “The Jacket,” “Splice,” and “Predators.”  Yet he’s the sympathetic center of Kaye’s edu-drama, informed by Marcia Gay Harden (as Carol, the school’s principal) that “you will find many of your students functioning under their grade level.”  That’s understatement.  A faculty of great actors – James Caan, Blythe Danner, Tim Blake Nelson, and Christina “Mad Men” Hendricks – aren’t just underpaid teachers but zookeepers.  In one outrageous scene, Lucy Liu flies off the handle and tells a drop-out that her life will become a “carnival of pain.”  Henry’s life only worsens after 3:15: his grandfather repeatedly wets himself in a nursing facility, confesses to incest,while a prostitute named Erica (played by a cherubic Sami Gayle) whom he generously allows to live in his apartment keeps using that apartment as a brothel.  Kids, these days!

Kaye’s screed on how used-and-abused our teachers are in this country’s public schools is tarnished by over-the-top moments and distracting bits such as first-person testimonials – who exactly is Brody talking to in these interview cut-aways? – and animated sequences in which birds fly and towers crumble.  To give us a real sense of the existential hole in which Henry lives, Kaye opens his film with an epigraph from Camus and ends with a passage from Poe in which we’re heavy-handedly told that the House of Usher is really a metaphor.  “You’ve always been so closed off,” Henry’s grandfather says of Henry’s detachment.  “Why is that?”  Beyond Henry’s opaque character, everything in this film is over attached, pedantic and like Henry’s pupils, in-your-face.   A film with big ideas but excruciating execution, “Detachment” is not so much drama but diatribe.

Review: “Drive”

17 Saturday Sep 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

albert brooks, blue valentine, Brando, bronson, california, carey mulligan, christina hendricks, crazy stupid love, crime drama, DeNiro, drive, echo park, film noir, hollywood, los angeles, mad men, nicolas winding ref, oscar isaac, ron perlman, ryan cranston, ryan gosling, taxi driver, traffic, valhalla rising, vigilante

“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.

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