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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: jude law

Review: “Side Effects”

17 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

catherine zeta jones, channing tatum, drama, jude law, psychology, scott z. burns, side effects, steven soderbergh

side-effects-film

“Happy Pills”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

IF INDEED STEVEN Soderbergh is retiring from filmmaking with “Side Effects,” his last film will be as perverse a spectacle as his first, 1989’s “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.”  (The 50-year-old Atlanta native says he wants to pursue painting full-time.)  At 26,Side-Effects-Viral-Site-Jude-Law Soderbergh became the youngest director to win the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes.  He has made more than twenty-five feature films since then, and “Side Effects” is a devious doozie of a psycho-drama to go out on.  It’s also the first good film of 2013.

“Side Effects” centers around a depressed twentysomething named Emily (Rooney Mara) whose husband Martin (Channing Tatum) has just been released from prison after a four-year sentence for insider trading.  “I can get us back to where we were,” _MG_6630.CR2the jailbird pledges, “I promise.” Mara, in a Linda Blair haircut, mopes around their Manhattan apartment, unable to put on a happy face.  When she deliberately crashes her car into a wall, she invites the scrutiny of a British psychiatrist named Jonathan Banks (Jude Law) who offers her a veritable pharmacopeia of anti-depressants.  Halfway through “Side Effects,” Mara finally smiles and it’s the result of a powerful pill called Ablixa. Its side effects include somnambulism, crying jags, and suicidal ideation. Dr. Banks is earning 50 thousand annually as a pharmaceutical consultant for Ablixa, and when he bumps into Emily’s previous doctor (played by Catherine Zeta Jones) at a conference on ADHD, the two swap stories and a few happy pills Jones’ character has at the bottom of her purse.

And just as “Side Effects” begins to look like a critique of our chemical culture, screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (who wrote Soderbergh’s “Contagion” as well) twists the plot into something else entirely.  It reshapes itself, in the Hitchcockian mode ofside_effects_still18_catherine_zeta_jones murder and double-crossers, and forces us to shift our attention, and our sympathies, from Emily to Dr. Banks in a maze of deceit and trickery. There is something old-timey about the film’s representation of lesbian women, as duplicitous man-haters, and it’s difficult to discuss further without spoiling the film’s secrets, but the payoff is appreciable.  We can only hope that Soderbergh puts down his paintbrushes and returns to the directing chair before too long.

Review: “Anna Karenina”

19 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

aaron taylor johnson, alicia vikander, anna karenina, atonement, dario marianelli, drama, joe wright, jude law, kelly macdonald, kiera knightley, matthew macfadyen, olivia williams, sarah greenwood, tolstoy, tom stoppard

Anna Karenina

“To Russia with Love”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

IN 2011, THE WORST movie on the experience of shame was “Shame,” a prurient and pathetic mess of a film on the putative perils of sex addiction.  In 2012, the best film on the psycho-sexual nature of shame is “Anna Karenina,” Joe Wright’s third adaptation of a literary gem (after “Pride and Prejudice” and “Atonement”) with an exquisite Kiera Knightley again front and center.  If you liked Jennifer Lawrence as Tiffany in “Silver Linings Playbook” and her feminist refusal to feel ashamed of her hyper-sexuality, check out her literary antecedent: Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, the Mary Magdalene of St. Petersburg. In her new book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain writes that shame can be socially useful.  In one study, participants looked more kindly upon those visibly embarrassed by driving away from a car accident or spilling coffee on someone.  Shame signifies a concern for others.

Anna Karenina_004-001.rBut shame can be socially disastrous as well.  “I’m not ashamed of what I have done,” Anna tells her lover Vronsky, having left her husband for the dashing young Count, “Are you ashamed for me?” The Count, dressed ironically in white throughout the film, is played Aaron Taylor-Johnson. He has seductively large, wet eyes and a handle-bar mustache; he’s under the thumb of his imperious and unkind mother (Olivia Williams).  Tolstoy tells us that a “hot blush of shame spread all over [Anna’s] face” for “she knew what had stopped her, knew she had been ashamed.”  The cuckolded Karenin, meanwhile, is a repressed fellow who surprisingly never rages against his wife for her adulterous passion.  He’s played by Jude Law in collars appropriately buttoned up to the chin.  Tolstoy writes that Karenin refuses to feel jealousy because of its shamefulness: “Now, through his conviction that jealousy is a shameful feeling, and that one ought to have confidence, had not been destroyed, he felt that he was face to face with something illogical and stupid, and he did not know what to do.”  But that’s precisely Karenin’s problem and why he’s so undesirable to his wife: he refuses to feel anything.

For those of you who skipped Russian Lit., Tolstoy’s tome from 1877 is aAaron-Taylor-Johnson-and-Alicia-Vikander-in-Anna-Karenina-2 behemoth of a novel on a whole range of topics: love, disgrace, faith, forgiveness, capitalism, Christianity.  Did I leave anything out?  Levin (played by Domhnall Gleeson) occupies a parallel plot in the novel; he’s Tolstoy’s ideal Russian man who, in the novel, says things like “You know that capitalism oppresses the workers. Our workmen the peasants bear the whole burden of labour, but are so placed that, work as they may, they cannot escape from their degrading condition […] And this system must be changed.”  He pursues Kitty (Alicia Vikander) with an open heart, which contrasts Anna’s brother Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen) who betrays his wife Dolly (Kelly Macdonald) with the governess.  At the film’s start, Anna travels to her brother’s home to console her sister-in-law and implores Dolly to forgive her brother.  It’s a foreshadowing of Anna’s own affair with Vronsky and the forgiveness she will seek from her husband and Russian high-society.

AnnaKareninaTitleThe screenplay, which is an exercise in compression, is from playwright Tom Stoppard who had distilled Leo Tolstoy’s novel to the bare essentials. (He’s on sacred ground here: Dostoevsky, Nobokov, and Faulkner all regarded Anna Karenina as a flawless work of fiction.)   The production design is by Sarah Greenwood who hinges all of the action on a stage.  This is a wise move and in creative keeping with the theatricality of Tolstoy’s novel.  It also highlights the performative nature of shame and that as Anna succumbs to her adulterous passions in public, all eyes are on her and her inevitable demise. Dario Marianelli, whose ingenious music for “Atonement” relied on ticking typewriters and pianos, provides another stunning score. Everything should add up here, but this “Anna Karenina” stands, like the stage, at a distance. It’s lovely to look at but somehow doesn’t engage us as emotionally as one might hope.

“I’m a bad woman,” says Anna at one point in the film and we’re not sure whether to pity or praise her.  It all ends tragically, of course, but that’s Anna’s particular cross to bear.  She’s as daring as she is doomed.  Now ain’t that a shame?

Review: “Hugo”

09 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

a trip to the moon, asa butterfield, ben kingsley, chloe grace moretz, george melies, goodfellas, hugo, hugo cabret, jude law, let me in, lumiere brothers, martine scoresese, robert richardson, sacha baron cohen, taxi driver

“Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On”

Review: “Hugo”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

WHAT DO YOU get when you combine Martin (“Mean Streets,” “Raging Bull”) Scorsese and Brian Selznick’s 2007 children’s book about a twelve-year-old orphan named Hugo who lives behind the clocks in Paris’s Gare Montparnasse?  A kid gangster in a beret who, “Taxi Driver”-style, flashes his handgun while asking repeatedly: “You talkin’ to me?  You talkin’ to me?  Well, you must be talking to me cuz I’m the only one here”?

Nah, you get the most miraculous children’s film of 2011, and in large part because Hugo Cabret (a soulful Asa Butterfield) is the only one there, pathetically so, though post-war Paris buzzes all around him.  Little Cabret is a ragamuffin whose clockmaker father (Jude Law) has left him all alone inside the walls of this bustling metro.  Reminiscent of the famously long and unbroken tracking shot in which Henry Hill enters the Copacabana nightclub in “Goodfellas,” the camera glides through the human traffic inside the Montparnasse.  Hot on Hugo’s trail is the station manager (a mustachioed Sacha Baron Cohen) and his Doberman Pinscher named Maximilian; the two police the station and send Hugo scurrying, mouse-like, back inside the building’s walls.

Beyond the film’s resplendent opening sequence, shot kaleidoscopically and from a child’s point of view by cinematographer Robert Richardson, a mystery soon emerges when the automaton left to Hugo by his father needs a heart-shaped key to activate itself.  Enter Isabelle, the goddaughter of a curmudgeony toy-shop owner inside the station played by Chloe Grace Moretz (the vampiric girl in the best horror movie of the 2010s: “Let Me In”) who embarks on a quest not just through Paris’s cinemas and film libraries but through film history itself.  The two go tripping through the images of early moving pictures: trains steaming toward the screen that make movie-goers jump out of their seats, trick films such as “Le Voyage Dans Le Lune” (“A Trip to the Moon”) of 1902, with its iconic rocket-in-the-eye-of-the-moon image and Venuses in lobster claws.

But makes “Hugo” really tick is that it’s also a loving splash of historical fiction.  Though Isabelle calls her godfather Pappa Georges, he is, in fact, an legend in hiding:  the film-pioneer Georges Méliès (a stern Ben Kingsley) now living incognito and hiding, like his nemesis Hugo, in plain sight.  After Hugo steals from his toy-shop, Méliès swipes Hugo’s notebook, replete with Da Vinci-like blueprints, in return.  The year 1895 was something of an annus mirabilis for Méliès (1861-1938) since, just after Christmas, it was the first time the Paris public saw a film projection.  Alongside the Lumiére Brothers, Méliès pioneered the new medium of moving pictures, but by the early thirties, had shriveled into the tedium of domestic life.  When Hugo and Isabelle set out to discover the secret past of “Pappa Georges,” they enter the rabbit-hole of movie history, a fitting journey for the first true family film from Mr. Scoresese (whose efforts to preserve and restore classic films are well-known).  Restoration is what this film is about: finding the heart to activate the automaton, an obvious analogue with the stuck-in-time Méliès, also much in need of revival.

Speaking of his father, Hugo tells Isabelle rapturously: “He went into a dark room and saw a rocket go into the eye of the moon.  The movies are a dream in the middle of the day.”  That’s a pretty apt description “Hugo” itself; he’s the little horologist that could.

Review: “Contagion”

13 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

blog, blogosphere, camus, CDC, cliff martinez, contagion, dickens, elliott gould, erin brovovich, fall movies, final destination, griffin kane, gwyneth paltrow, jude law, kate winslet, laurence fishburne, marion cotillard, mary shelley, matt damon, medicine, metaphor, oceans 11, steven soderbergh, the last man, the plague, thriller, WHO, WW II

“Cover Your Cough”

Film Review: “Contagion” (2011)

Grade: B (RENT IT)

“BLOGGING ISN’T WRITING. It’s graffiti with punctuation.”  This from Dr. Ian Sussman (played by Elliott Gould), an epidemiologist scrambling to find a vaccine for the pernicious pandemic known as MEV-1 in the new thriller, “Contagion.”

The blogosphere will certainly admire the fact that the object of Sussman’s invective – a San Francisco blogger named Alan (Jude Law) – is one of the lucky few completely immune to the plague.  Then again, Alan is a sleaze who capitalizes on the crisis by exploiting his readers’ panic  (Too bad I’d need a global epidemic to gain that kind of readership!)  In a Dickensian stroke, Alan’s last name is Krumwiede (pronounced “Crumb-Weedy”) and he’s as slimy as the infection himself.

Before Krumwiede comes on the scene, however, society as we know it quickly unravels after business exec Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns from Hong Kong to her home in Minneapolis.  Husband Mitch (Matt Damon) is devastated when she and son Clark (Griffin Kane) quickly succumb to an illness as inexplicable as it is fatal.  It’s a cool and crestfallen performance from Damon, shot in the oceanic blues favored by director Steven Soderbergh (“Erin Brockovich,” “Oceans 11”).  Watch as his reaction hardens from disbelief to fury as an emergency room doc tells him both his wife and six-year-old son are dead.  The pathogen in “Contagion” doesn’t just infect; it ravages.  With its rapid incubation phase, and 2.5 million dead in just 26 days, MEV-1 makes SARS look like the sniffles.

To the rescue is a team of experts including Kate Winslet (as Dr. Erin Mears of the CDC), Laurence Fishburne (as Ellis Cheever), and the marvelous Marion Cotillard (as Leonora Orantes of the World Health Organization).  One of the numerous subplots involves Leonora’s abduction at the hands of an Asian family man who holds her hostage until his villagers are given the cure.  After a no-nonsense Winslet is shown an empty stadium for treating the sick, she replies: “Good.  Now give me three more just like it.”

Where “Contagion” succeeds in terms of pacing – composer Cliff Martinez provides an electronic score of blips and bleeps, which sounds like call-waiting on Mars – the film never transcends a purely base and biologic level.  The greatest explorations of contagion on page aren’t as modern as you might think.  Mary Shelley’s The Last Man may have been set in the future, but it was published back in 1826 while La Peste (or The Plague) of Albert Camus followed the Second World War in 1947.  What those two novels share is the alertness to contagion as something more than simple transmission.  Yes, a germy handshake can be a weapon, but it’s also a tie that binds.

However slick and satisfying, “Contagion” is more interested in building (then swiftly dissembling) the puzzle-like structure of a medical mystery than it is in the plague as some kind of meaningful metaphor for interconnectivity and a world flattened by travel and globalization.  “Contagion” will make you afraid, but it won’t make you think, and stripped of the idea that illness is always a metaphor, it metastasizes into some soulless installment of “Final Destination” where you end up waiting on the next character to die.

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