Tag Archives: romantic

Review: “Silver Linings Playbook”

16 Sunday Dec 2012

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“One Flew Into the Cuckoo’s Nest”

Grade: B- (RENT IT)

FOR A GOOD while at least, “Silver Linings Playbook” is a film that is proudly off its meds and taking no prisoners.  Its opening has all the panicked pacing of a jailbreak and very nearly resembles one: Pat (Bradley Cooper) is being released from a court-ordered stay at a Baltimore mental health facility and he takes his friend and fellow patient (Chris Tucker) along for the ride.  Eight months earlier, Pat savagely beat his wife’s boyfriend after discovering the two in a shower with his wedding song – Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour” – wafting in the steamy air.  Hearing even three seconds of the love song will set him off and set him back on his road to recovery.  We want to see him well and when Cooper, who has a vulpine face, steadies his closely set blue eyes, he has a scrappy-boy look of desperation that cries out for his mother or at for a prescription refill. In terms of mental illness, “Silver Linings Playbook” endorses a dangerous diagnosis, as simple-minded as the eponymous Beatles song: all you really need is love.

Silver-Linings-Playbook-2Back in Philadelphia, Pat’s homecoming is met by his worried mother (Jacki Weaver) and Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro), an obsessive fan of the Eagles and sports bookie who has no other way of communicating with his wife and son except through professional football.  He keeps his remote controllers in a tidy row and thumbs a lucky handkerchief as he watches every game on the edge of his seat.  Apparently, madness runs in the family.  There’s also mental illness just around the corner, in the form of Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a policeman’s widow already popular with the local pervs for putting out.  Pat and Tiffany appear to be a match made in Halcyon and when the two cross paths at a dinner party hosted by Tiffany’s older sister Veronica (Julia Stiles), it’s a contest to see who can say the most outlandish thing or do the most impulsive thing to shatter any sense of civility and calm. They trade their experiences on different anti-psychotics as if they were vacation towns they’ve visited and walking Tiffany to the end of her driveway, Pat is invited inside for casual sex and slapped across the face in quick succession.  Both find that the other is useful in some way: Tiffany can help Pat get to his ex-wife, Nikki, who has placed a restraining order against him, and Pat can help Tiffany win a local dancing competition. To that end, she has converted her parents’ garage into a dance studio and once he agrees to train as her partner, she insists on daily dancing lessons.  This allows for the film’s pas de deux to take literal shape and pulling Pat in close, Tiffany brings her nose to his. “You feel that?” she asks of Pat. “That’s emotion.”

It’s sad to think that movie-goers born after 1988 only know Robert De Niro as theSilver Linings Playbook 2 paranoid patriarch in “Meet the Parents” and “Silver Linings Playbook” restores the actor to the realm of serious and sensitive cinema.  These same youngsters only know Bradley Cooper as the playboy ringleader in “The Hangover” and after such misfires as “Limitless” and “The Words,” he has finally found his mojo as a leading man. Yet “Silver Linings” runs off the rails in its last reel; it wants a happy ending and its lovers to ride off into the sunset when, in reality, people like Pat and Tiffany are missing the gene for Hollywood-like happiness.  There is no way that Pat’s therapist Dr. Patel (Anupam Kher) would attend an Eagles game with his face painted, nor come to Pat’s home like he’s one of the family, and the swanky Philadelphia hotel in which the dancing competition takes place is not the sort of place Pat Sr. would visit without criticizing his son for trading in his football jersey for a pair of dancing shoes.

I have to admit I felt a little like Pat who, earlier in the film, flies off the handle when he reaches the unhappy ending of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.  Enraged, he throws the paperback out an upstairs window, breaking it, and wakes his parents in the middle of the night to blast the novel for its depressing but decidedly realistic ending.  If only director David O. Russell (“Spanking the Monkey,” “The Fighter”) had taken a page from Hemingway’s playbook and not Hollywood’s.

Review: “Celeste and Jesse Forever”

01 Saturday Sep 2012

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“Love You, Mean It!”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

APPARENTLY IF YOU want to play a smart, complicated woman on screen – the kind Hollywood still has trouble conceiving – you have to write the role yourself.

That’s what Rashida Jones did, with a little help from her “Parks and Recreation” costar Will McCormack, to create the breakup comedy “Celeste and Jesse Forever.”  Not exactly a romance, Jones’ screenwriting debut is a charming and contemporary take on what’s become as common as matrimony itself: divorce (the amicable kind).  This film, which feels fresh and is stuffed with slang, centers on the neurotic Celeste: excessive exerciser, Facebook stalker, pot-smoking author of a book on declining American culture called “Shitegeist.”  If Celeste is an irritating character – deceiving herself that she’s actually over her ex – it’s because she feels relatably lifelike.

Directed by Lee Toland Krieger, “Celeste” was filmed in just 23 days for under $1 million.  Consequently, the performances have an honest, improvisational inflection as if the actors are actually friends.  That’s because they are: Jones and McCormack, who briefly dated in real life, would simulate sex acts using baby-corn and Chapstick when suffering from writer’s block.  Here, they have their fictional counterparts (Celeste and Jesse) do the same while in the car and at the wedding of friends Tucker (Eric Christian Olsen) and Beth (Ari Graynor), the latter of whom abruptly leaves a dinner because she objects to the divorced couple’s closeness.  There’s nothing but truth-telling in “Celeste and Jesse Forever”; “I go to yoga to meet girls” confesses Celeste’s love-interest Paul (the always dependable Chris Messina).  Namaste!

Andy Samburg (“I Love You, Man”) plays Jesse, an oversensitive visual artist living in Celeste’s spare room and suspended in a kind of romantic abeyance while the ink on the divorce papers dries. Ex-wifey is none too happy when Jesse  rebounds in a matter of months and, we’re told, “puts a baby in a lady.”  When Celeste phones Jesse to help her assemble an IKEA purchase, the two turn to red wine and reminiscing.  We all know where that leads.  Rewind to when we first met the hipster couple at the film’s opening and we’re not exactly sure what Celeste and Jesse mean to each other as they drive around Los Angeles, cracking inside jokes with their scorched-earth sense of humor.  Jesse reminds his soon-to-be-ex-wife that she dislikes the sight of architect Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall, that blasted tuna can of a landmark and an important metaphor for the couple’s romantic life: open and messy and, well, kinda’ lovely.

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…”

Review: “Moneyball”

28 Wednesday Sep 2011

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“Ball Street”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

“HOW CAN  YOU not be romantic about baseball?” queries Brad Pitt, as the wildcard GM of the Oakland Athletics, in this talky new sports drama called “Moneyball.”  That loquaciousness, and the surprising fact that most of the film’s action takes place not on the diamond but on conference tables, is due in large part to the snap-crackle-pop of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (sharing the credit with Steven Zaillian from a story by Stan Chervin and book, fully entitled Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis of “The Blind Side”).

It’s an ironic but endearing question from Billy Beane late in “Moneyball” because it was sheer number-crunching and player analysis not romantic notions of luck and discipline that led the A’s from a 5-3 loss to the pinstripes out East, in the Division Series of 2001, to an astounding comeback in the form of twenty consecutive wins years later.  It was Beane’s bean-counting that put the A’s back on the A-list of pro-baseball.  The grand notion of “Moneyball” is that when paradise is lost, it’s not regained but rebuilt from the ground-up.

After Beane loses outfielder Johnny Damon and heavy-hitter Jason Giambi to bigger and better teams, he likens his own to one big organ donor, farming out the heart and kidneys of the A’s to its competition.  But he swiftly rebuilds, much to the clubhouse’s chagrin, after enlisting the support of a Yale-educated economist named Peter Brand (played by the koala-bodied Jonah Hill).  (The brainy basis for Brand is Paul DePodesta, currently the VP for amateur scouting for the NY Mets; he and Beane theorized that walks are as important as home runs and relied on older and even injured players, and their patience at the bat, to succeed.  The script deftly introduces us to Scott Hatteberg, whose career as a catcher for the Boston Red Sox ended with a nerve injury, only to bring him back at a key and victorious moment.)   With aphorisms like “Baseball thinking is medieval” and “Pitches are like blackjack,” Brand helps Beane turn the game into a casino floor.  This approach is not without its detractors: an outraged scout who curses Beane out and the great Philip Seymour Hoffman as the A’s manager, Art Howe.  Seeing Hoffman, in a buzz-cut and starched white baseball jersey, is alone worth the price of admission.

“Moneyball” is entirely dependent on the work of two non-rookies: Sorkin’s script and Pitt’s intense focus. Pitt’s embodiment of Beane is the sine qua non of “Moneyball”; the film is really unthinkable without his cool grace under fire, when hiring and firing irate underlings, and his tenderness when interacting with daughter Casey (a guitar-strumming Kerris Dorsey).  An awkward scene in which Beane is forced to make small-talk with ex-wife (Robin Penn Wright) and her new husband while waiting for Casey to return home from a party provides some much-need pathos.

Sorkin, meanwhile, is the modern master of esoterica in light of the Beltway banter of “The West Wing,” the military and techno-politics of “A Few Good Men” and “The Social Network” (respectively) and here, in “Moneyball,” he and Zaillian reveal that major league baseball is not a far cry from Washington: money talks and walks in both realms.  Is it any wonder that another Yale grad, but just barely, George W. Bush, made that short step from the Texas Rangers to deranged foreign policy?

In the play-ball tradition of “The Natural” and “Hoosiers,” sports films that smartly transcend the track and field for something more meaningful, “Moneyball” flies because its pitch is way inside.