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Review: “Casablanca” (In Re-Release; 1 Night Only)

21 Wednesday Mar 2012

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Grade: A (SEE IT)

HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU, KID.

Yet 1942’s “Casablanca” (winner of three Academy Awards, including Best Picture) isn’t a kid anymore.  Tonight, to celebrate the film’s 70th anniversary, Turner Classic Movies will screen, for one night only, a digitally re-mastered edition of the classic World War II romantic drama and mainstay of Top 10 Classic Films lists.  “Casablanca” isn’t just the perfect film; it’s an iconic collection of top-shelf actors (Bogie, Bergman, Rains, Henreid, Lorre), a superb script, perfect pacing, music, melodrama, comedy…say when!

If you can’t visit Rick’s Café Américain tonight, be sure to rent a copy, which is just as well: TCM’s screening includes an introduction by Robert Osborne and commentary by that senile satyr otherwise known as Hugh Hefner (hardly worth the price of admission).  The observations of Osborne are surely worth taking in, but at this point, “Casablanca” and its basket of quotable sayings have already worked their way into popular culture: the misquoted “Play it again, Sam,” “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” (which cleverly comes at the film’s ending), and of course, “We’ll always have, Paris.”  Fortunately for film buffs, we’ll always have “Casablanca” for five, fine reasons on which you can rely:

  1. SPANNING THE GLOBE.  There are arguably thirty-five nationalities represented in “Casablanca,” the most cosmopolitan classic of all time.  At a surprisingly modern pace, it moves from Vichy-occupied Morocco to Paris with talk of America, Germany, and Bulgaria in between.  Not only are Rick and Ilsa different nationalities, united by their hatred for the Gestapo, the interracial closeness between the couple and their portable musician, Sam (played by drummer Dooley Wilson) is also forward-thinking for its time.  “Casablanca” transcends most, if not all, geopolitical borders.
  2. MAX STEINER’S MUSIC.  Described by Louis as the “most beautiful woman to ever visit Casablanca,” the luminous Bergman plays Ilsa Lund, a Norwegian ex-lover of club-owner Rick Blaine.  It’s the music that transports her and the house pianist Sam whose take on the 1930s song “As Time Goes By” sends her into a forlorn dream-state.  Enter an enraged Rick, saying “Sam!  I thought I told you never to play that –”  From there, the score by Max Steiner moves to melodramatic orchestration but incorporates bits and pieces of “As Times Goes By.”  Still, that wasn’t enough to win Steiner an Oscar for Best Original Score that year.  But that’s okay, Steiner also lost after writing the music for that little picture called “Gone with the Wind” (1939).  Heard of it?
  3. LOVE AMONG THE RUINS.  One of the many charms of “Casablanca” is that intelligently intertwines wartime politics and romance.   When the film went into general release in January of 1943, Americans already knew the city’s name because of the Casablanca conference, a meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill; the Office of War Information kept the film from troops stationed in North Africa, worried that it would stir up resentment toward Vichy supporters.  “Your business is politics,” Rick tells Captain Louis Renault and his cohorts, leaving the table.  “My business is running a saloon.”  The irony, however, is that as hard as he tries, Rick just can’t keep politics at bay since a war-time, international romance is inherently political.  During the France flashback sequence, Bergman tells Bogie: “With the whole world crumbling, we picked this time to fall in love.”  “Yeah,” Bogie mumbles, “it’s pretty bad timing.”
  4. FOR LOVE OR VIRTUE?  The major conflict of “Casablanca” resides in Rick’s last-minute decision: in the famous and final plane hangar scene, gauzed in fog and especially beautiful in black-and-white, the boozy club-owner in a white tuxedo must hang onto the woman he loves or help her and her husband, a Czech resistance leader, escape Morocco (with the Nazi noose tightening) in order to continue the collective fight against Hitler?  Alongside another World War II dilemma, “Sophie’s Choice” (1982), there’s forty years before, Rick’s choice in “Casablanca.”
  5. LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION!  Directed by Hungarian-American Michael Curtiz (“Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “White Christmas”), “Casablanca” is that rare film in which production , plot, and performance are all perfectly matched.   Amazingly, Warner Brothers, in the early 1940s, pumped out a picture nearly once a week and Curtiz’s classic was just one on the assembly line.  And yet  “Casablanca” is the exception; like fine wine, it just gets better with age.  Naturally, this film has a phrase for that, too.  As Sam sings, it’s “You must remember this/as times goes by…”

2011 Best Actress: Davis or Streep?

20 Monday Feb 2012

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“THERE IS NO such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher famously remarked.  There is, however, such thing as the Oscar and soon, five leading ladies – Glenn Close, Rooney Mara, Michelle Williams, Viola Davis and Meryl Streep – will get their chance to pick up the golden calf of the film-acting world.  Having just caught Streep as British Prime Minister in “Irony Lady,” I have good reason to predict that her competition, Viola Davis (“The Help”), will pick up her first gold-guy next Sunday night.  There are five reasons why, in fact, Davis will triumph one week from tonight:

  1. It’s the Movie, Stupid:  By now you’ve likely heard or read that “Iron Lady” (directed by Phyllida Lloyd, from a script by Abi Morgan) is less than a perfect film.  Actually, it’s a scrambled egg of a story and one that talks out of both sides of its mouth: heroizing its steely subject while also humiliating her.  Ruling for eleven years, Mrs. Thatcher was a polarizing leader who became the first prime minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812-27 to win three successive elections.  What “Irony Lady” does, cruelly so, is reduce her to a lady who irons (laundry) and talks to the spectre of her beloved husband.  As Dennis Thatcher, Jim Broadbent keeps popping up like a cross between Marley’s Ghost and a jack-in-the-box.  Even more confounding is that a biopic which features Maggie protesting, “I cannot die washing up a teacup,” actually ends with Maggie washing a teacup.  The GOP would practically combust if a film ostensibly about Ronald Reagan condensed his achievements to sound-bites and portrayed him as the Madman of Simi Valley, wandering the hallways in his pajamas and crying out for Nancy.
  2. Been a While, But Streep’s Got Two Already:  Streep is the Madonna of cinema.  Yes, she’s nearly a decade older than the Material Girl but she’s a ruthless impersonator and proof that indeed women can command the stage and screen over the age of fifty.  Yes, it’s been a while since she sealed the deal – her first Oscar Nomination, for “Deer Hunter” in 1978, is as old as I am, and her two wins followed in quick succession (for “Kramer vs. Kramer” in 1979 and “Sophie’s Choice” in 1982) – but she’s the most-nominated living movie actress and may remain so, at least until the performance and the film are better matched.
  3.   Aibileen as the Heart of “The Help”:  Coincidentally, Davis earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for just eight minutes’ worth of screen time with Meryl Streep in “Doubt” (2008).   Davis has a fascinating face – deep, protuberant eyes always on the verge of crying – and she’s the emotional core of “The Help” who provides our white heroine Skeeter with first-person accounts of her race-based 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.  A movie is only as good as the memories it leaves you, and that singular scene stings the day after.
  4. Is Davis Drama’s Version of Melissa McCarthy?:  The other estrogen-driven ensemble film of 2012 is “Bridesmaids” and the unforgettable supporting member of that cast, Melissa McCarthy (as the frisky Megan), has been repeatedly singled out, even for a Best Supporting Actress, as the stand-out of the ensemble.   The Academy may want to honor the baby, though not the bathwater, by elevating Viola Davis above all others, honoring a perfect performance in a less than perfect film.
  5. Always Bet on Black (Unless You’re Oscar): It’s jaw-dropping to think that only one black woman has won movie-acting’s highest achievement: that’s Halle Berry in 2001’s “Monster Ball.”  Yes, 2001, in a film in which the late Heath Ledger co-starred.  Been a while, indeed.  Last year’s “The Help” is only the third film in movie history to feature black nominees for both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress and made Davis, alongside Whoopi Goldberg, the most nominated black actress with just two nominations (Streep has an astounding 17 nominations, not to mention 26 Golden Globe nominations).

Note to Oscar: help yourself and give the gold to Viola (“The Help”) Davis!

Postscript: The 2011 Oscar for Best Actress went to Streep.

 

Best Picture Prediction: “The Artist”

28 Saturday Jan 2012

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“Silence Please!”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

I CAN THINK of plenty of reasons – five, in fact – that “The Artist” collected a total of ten Oscar nominations for February’s ceremony and why it’s a likely Best Picture winner.  The only film, nomination-wise, from 2011 to outdo “The Artist” is Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo,” another nostalgic crowd-pleaser similarly interested in the advent of cinema and the rising tide of talkies in 1927.  In a class all its own, however, Michel Hazanavicius’s silent black-and-white film is a valentine to vintage Hollywood and shines for these five, fine reasons:

  1. Best Actor nominee Jean Dujardin as matinee idol George Valentin and Best Supporting Actress nominee Bérénice Bejo as starlet Peppy Miller.  The two form a fast friendship early on in “The Artist” and moving in opposite directions, Valentin can’t make the leap from silent film to talkies whereas Peppy becomes the 1920’s version of Hollywood’s it-girl.  It’s staggering to think that Dujardin and Bejo needn’t even speak to create chemistry as memorable as this.  In one dazzling sequence, Valentin sees only her legs below a screen and begins to match the pep in Peppy’s step; in another, the two cross paths on a staircase right out of Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” (1950), equally obsessed with megalomaniacal actors from a bygone era.
  2. Uggy the Dog!  If Dujardin and Bejo aren’t already the year’s most attractive duo, there’s scene-stealer Uggy as the leading man’s loyal friend.   It was a busy year for Uggy, who also appeared in “Water for Elephants.”  He’s now ten years old and, according to owner Omar von Muller, retiring after the Oscar ceremony.  Animal tricks are about as low-brow as it gets but when Uggy plays dead in “The Artist,” it’s a metaphor for his master’s demise.  Plus “The Artist” transports us to the era when a pooch walking on his hind legs had audiences enthusing: That’s entertainment!
  3. The sudden sound in the dream scene.  Give me any vociferous action movie from 2011 – yes, “The Green Hornet” or “I Am Number Four” – and the number one most startling moment on film last year is the sudden intrusion of sound into “The Artist.”  I know that the cardinal sin of any creative writing class is to end a story with the ol’ it-was-only-a-dream line, but here, the eruption of a dog barking, a telephone ringing, and human laughter echoes the film’s exuberant heart.
  4. Everything’s a metaphor.  In the hands of a lesser director, “The Artist” would run out of steam if the plotline weren’t so universal.  But Hazanavicius gives us a movie-within-a-movie with Dujardin sinking fast in quicksand.   Given that he’s stuck in the age of silent film in a city that would like to bury him, the metaphor is obvious enough.  Isn’t the film itself a comment on the perils of resisting change?  “I’m not a puppet!” Valentin declares, “I’m an artist!”
  5. Finally, a feast for film geeks.  As Valentin’s driver Clifton, James Cromwell recalls the hired help, again, from Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” while the score by Ludovic Bource reverberates with echoes of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” composer Bernard Herrmann.  There are traces, too, of “Citizen Kane.”  Music is, of course, vital in a film without dialogue.  Dartmouth professor James A. W. Heffernan once wrote “movies speak mainly to the eyes,” but “The Artist” speaks to the eyes, ears, and heart.

The Best and Worst Films of 2011

02 Monday Jan 2012

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THE BEST FILMS OF 2011:

1.       “Midnight in Paris” (written and directed by Woody Allen) – Whoever thought you’d someday utter the words “Woody Allen” and “magical” in the same sentence?  After all, it’s been a long time since his “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985).  America’s greatest living filmmaker gives us not just his biggest box-office hit in forty years but the longest running movie of 2011.  A delightfully literary meditation on time travel and the Lost Generation.  No one can assemble a cast like Allen; Owen Wilson channels Allen without parodying his jokes and gestures in the City of Lights.

2.      “Drive” (directed by Nicolas Winding Refn) – This ultra-violent vehicle for Ryan Gosling, as the anonymous “Driver,” is a rough patch of LA noir, vicious and thrilling.  It also solidifies Gosling as the most versatile leading man to watch – politically mercurial in “The Ides of March” and a sartorial stallion in the comedy “Crazy Stupid Love” – in 2011.  “Drive” is on track to become a lasting cult favorite.

3.      “Take Shelter” (dir. by Jeff Nichols) – A harrowing meditation on paranoia and climate anxiety with the indomitable Michael Shannon (a sure-fire contender for the Best Actor Oscar) as an Ohio man coming apart.  Jessica Chastain (“The Help,” “The Debt”) was the ingénue of 2011, giving here, as a foil to her bubbly Southern belle in “The Help,” a restrained performance as the wife of a man either mentally ill or clairvoyant.  You decide.  Another powerful psychodrama, set in the heartland, from the writer-director of “Shotgun Stories.”

4.      “The Tree of Life” (written and directed by Terrence Malick) –  It appears only the “little things” in life matter to Malick (“Badlands,” “The Thin Red Line”).  His moving meditation on childhood, love, family, dinosaurs, Texas, the cosmos that had Americans demanding a refund must be worth the price of admission.  Believe it or not, in 2011, many movie-houses had to enforce their NO-REFUND policy for those left dazed and confused by 2011’s only poem-on-film (also the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes).  Costar Sean Penn even admitted that he had no real idea what Malick’s movie is about.  Actors!  Like any thoughtful work of art, it demands a lot from its viewer, but this tree’s roots stretch far and wide.

5.      “Bridesmaids” (dir. by Paul Feig) – Sure, it’s the female “Hangover” – replete with scatological slip-ups and crudely sexual candor – but “Bridesmaids” will get you to the church on time and, potentially, buzzed on the drive there.  Kristen Wiig dropped the over-the-top personae she brings to life on “Saturday Night Live” and surrounded herself with a hilarious ensemble cast that turned the chick-flick genre on its head.  That image alone of Wiig riding the automatic gate to Don Draper’s love pad is comic gold.

6.      “The Descendants” (directed by Alexander Payne) – After reading George Clooney boast to Rolling Stone that he’d be “surprised” if “The Descendants” didn’t go on to become a Best Picture nominee, I went into a showing of Alexander Payne’s new dramedy with my critical force-field up.  Yet its achingly honest tone and gallows humor eventually win you over.  Clooney’s light is less intense than newcomer Shailene Woodley as his truth-telling daughter.  The family bonds forged here feel real rather than Hollywood hokum.

7.      “Beginners” (dir. by Mike Mills) – It’s hard to believe that the man who, nearly fifty years ago, played Georg van Ludwig Von Tropp in “The Sound of Music” has the gumption, not to mention the joie de vivre, to play a newly widowed man who belatedly comes out of the closet.  Playing Plummer’s son, Ewan McGregor is on hand to scratch his head and find love (and roller-skate) for himself.  Mike (“Thumbsucker”) Mills based the comedy on his father’s own coming out and cancer.  A more cross-generational cancer comedy than the also entertaining “50/50.”

8.      “Young Adult” (dir. by Jason Reitman) – After stumbling with “Jennifer’s Body,” Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (“Juno”) reestablishes herself by drawing up the virtually unlikable Mavis Gary, a “prom queen psychopath bitch” (lovingly described by a fellow native of Mercury, Minnesota unhappy to see her back in town and trying to break up a marriage).  Theron embodies another kind of “Monster” while Patton Oswalt delivers the laughs as a self-described “fat geek” who shares the most surprising love scene of ’11 with a wine-stained, cutlet-wearing Theron.

9.      “Hugo” (dir. by Martin Scorsese) – While contemporary Steven Spielberg stretched himself thin with “The Adventures of Tintin” and the mawkish “War Horse,” Martin Scorsese focused his attention – his 3-D attention, no less – on his first children’s film.  “Hugo” has a timeless feel, capturing the hurly-burly of an urchin inhabiting the walls of a Parisian train station and the advent of the motion picture in the age of Georges Méliès.  Is there anything Martin Scorsese can’t do? Oh, that’s right: comedy (see, or don’t see, his “After Hours” of 1985).

10.     “Moneyball” (dir. by Bennett Miller) – After last year’s “The Social Network,” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin hits another home-run with Brad Pitt  as Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane.  Even a sports-phobe like myself could connect with a script this dizzy with details and  dialogue for grown-ups.  It’s probably time Pitt picks up his first Best Actor Oscar and why not for a willful film that venerates all of you who think outside the box – or better yet, the diamond?

THE (VERY) WORST FILMS of 2011:

1.    “Abduction” – Sorry, Twi-hards, but Jacob Black of the Twilight Saga film series committed a serious error here in the lobotomizing tale of a kid raised, unbeknownst to him, by secret agents.  Lautner is far from ready for his close-up, Mr. DeMille.  He has the vacant, Neanderthalic gaze of Kim Kardashian’s short-lived husband, Kris Humphries.  If only “Abduction” had felt as short as that marriage.

2.    “In Time” – A perfectly acceptable script from Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca”) was marred by the calling-it-in acting style of Justin Timerblake who, like Taylor Lautner, is best kept in the chorus.  Costar Amanda Seyfried resembles a dyspeptic goldfish as she and Timberlake chase across rooftops, trying to beat the clock in “In Time.”  An acting malfunction.

3.    “Shame” – For some inexplicable reason, Michael Fassbender is being praised for playing a Manhattan professional addicted to sex in the impotent “Shame.”  Never has sexuality been so boring, characters so undeveloped, and a narrative so negligible as in Steve McQueen’s self-serious sophomore effort.  If the audience isn’t laughing derisively by the time Brandon descends into an inferno of gay bars and Sapphic three-ways, they’re not paying attention.  I returned to the lobby to dispense liquid butter directly into my eyeballs to blur this nightmare of a “drama.”  Shameful, indeed.

4.  “I Don’t Know How She Does It” – The one-note Sarah Jessica Parker fails to mix it up a bit (again) in this wannabe feminist twaddle.  Parker plays Kate Reddy, a finance executive juggling professionalism and pampers.  If only Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha had helped with babysitting duties, we might not have had to once again sympathize with the saccharine sentimentality of white woman bourgeois guilt.  Far from a breadwinner, this is a bread-loser that confirms the old adage that indeed you can’t have it all.

5.  “Trespass” – What was Nicole Kidman thinking to team up with the execrable Nicolas Cage and hit-or-miss director Joel Shumacher (“Dying Young,” “Phone Booth”)?  Cage plays a businessman and diamond-dealer victimized, alongside wife Kidman, during a sadistic house invasion.  If it’s pointless violence you’re after, “Trespass” has more than enough gore to go around.  If you play this loudly in your house, your neighbors will likely call the police due to its vociferous gunfire and relentless female shrieking.

In a year belonging to Woody Allen, it’s worth remembering a line from “Annie Hall” (1977).  (It’s a classic older than I am with insights immemorial.)  In the following, replace “television shows” with “movies,” especially the soulless “Trespass”:

Annie, in California: “It’s so clean out here.”

Alvy (Allen): “They don’t throw their garbage away. They turn it into television shows.”

Review: “Take Shelter”

03 Thursday Nov 2011

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“Fall Out Boy”

Review: “Take Shelter”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

OSCAR SEASON IS upon us and the great Michael Shannon as Curtis in John Nichols’ nerve-wracking new film “Take Shelter” shouldn’t lose his seat amongst the usual suspects – DiCaprio, Clooney, and Pitt – when the 2011 Academy Awards convene next year.  Whether he’s playing Nelson Van Elden, the repressed Protestant and Federal Prohibition agent on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” or the wild-eyed prophet in “Revolutionary Road” (2008), Shannon is hands-down the most electrifying actor on screen today and “Take Shelter” is his tour-de-force.

But Shannon will also break your heart in part because this brilliant examination of mental illness in an age of American anxiety refuses to pin him down as either a schizo or a Tiresias.  Either way, his family and neighbors begin to worry when Curtis LaForche, a faithful husband, father and hard-worker in his heartland community, begins to build a panic room out back.  “Missed you at church this morning, Curtis,” says a neighbor to which he replies flatly (his mind, in this film, always someplace else): “I’m thinking of cleaning up that storm shelter out back.”

What prompts his growing panic are hair-raising nightmares in which his dog Red bites him, his deaf daughter Hannah is snatched by shadowy figures, and his wife Samantha (this year’s ingénue Jessica Chastain) menaces him with a kitchen knife.  The unifying theme in all of Curtis’s dreams is persecution: ominous storm clouds rolling in and swaths of dive-bombing birds like Hitchcock’s birds except on Prednisone.  After checking out Understanding Mental Illness from the local library, he visits his mother (Kathy Baker) whose own paranoid schizophrenia led her to a lifetime inside a health-care facility.  “There was always some panic that took hold of me,” she tells Curtis, “people listening to me.”  Like mother, like son?  You be the judge.

Yet “Take Shelter” isn’t exactly a thriller as it aims ultimately for the kind of ambiguity normally forbidden on the big screen.  As director Nichols (who also cast Shannon in 2007’s “Shotgun Stories”) recently explained: “We carry a lot of anxiety and fear and stress about our lives and the world around us staying on track and I thought that was something a lot of people could identify with and I thought it was worth making a film about.”  Worth it, indeed.  Are Curtis’s portentous dreams the work of a madman or an everyman prophet?  Only the film’s dazzling last scene points toward a possible answer and like Shannon’s wrenching performance, it’s impossible to shake.