Monthly Archives: May 2012

CANNES REVIEW: Mud

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Mud
Directed by: Jeff Nichols
Written by: Jeff Nichols (screenplay)
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Tye Sheridan, Reese Witherspoon and Michael Shannon

American swamplands were a preoccupation of several films at Cannes this year, including The Paperboy, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Mud, the latest film from up-and-coming director Jeff Nichols.  Mud is the story of children who discover an outlaw living on a small island off the coast of their town.  They decide to help him reunite with his girlfriend and escape from the hired thugs who are after him.

The movie follows a fairly straightforward premise and is nothing really new in terms of structure.  Then again, neither was Nichols’ first feature, last year’s Take Shelter, which debuted to much critical praise and gave him the momentum to make this film.  He is a director of atmosphere and off-beat execution.  

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CANNES REVIEW: Cosmopolis

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Cosmopolis
Directed by: David Cronenberg
Written by: David Cronenberg (screenplay), Don DeLillo (novel)
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Sarah Gadon and Paul Giamatti

All this modern billionaire ever wanted was a haircut, though in Cosmopolis it becomes quite clear that he pretty much has everything else a person could desire.  David Cronenberg brings his typical visual menace to this deeply intellectual examination of the one percent, staging what amounts to little more than a series of conversations as increasingly intense verbal battles.

When Eric (Robert Pattinson) untints the windows of his hyper-modern limousine, we see an outside world that is coming closer and closer to collapse.  He of course is numb to everything but his own concerns, a simple haircut used to exaggerate how miniscule they are in relation to everything else.  As he talks (and talks and talks) to his girlfriend, his prostitute, his financial adviser and a myriad of others, it becomes clear that there is a pent-up frustration that is slowly being unraveled as the economy and his fortune near demise.

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CANNES REVIEW: On the Road

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On the Road
Directed by: Walter Salles
Written by: Jose Rivera (screenplay), Jack Kerouac (novel)
Starring: Sam Riley, Garret Hedlund, Kristen Stewart and Viggo Mortensen

Too much goes wrong in the movie adaptation of On the Road that what it does get right  is overshadowed almost completely.  In adapting Jack Kerouac’s classic Beat Generation novel, the time period is completely lost amid a cast of venerable modern actors who are cluttered together on the screen as if it would be a felony to exclude someone who was in the book.

At almost two-and-a-half hours, director Walter Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera do with this story what many other bad book adaptations do: they drag things on for too long.  I haven’t read Kerouac’s book, but as many people I know who’ve read it feared, his stream-of-consciousness writing style does not translate very well.  Much of the screenplay is very well-written, to be sure, but the complete lack of atmosphere drains them of much of their power.

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CANNES REVIEW: The Paperboy

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The Paperboy
Directed by: Lee Daniels
Written by: Lee Daniels & Peter Dexter (screenplay), Peter Dexter (novel)
Starring: Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey, Nicole Kidman and John Cusack

The morning screening of Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy was greeted with loud boos as well as sincere applause at Cannes, embracing the inevitable debate that will likely follow it when it washes up in the U.S.  It is a highly stylized look at 1960s Florida that transports the fashion and the social constraints without laying it on too thick.

Daniels’ directs the hell out of the movie, deconstructing the typical murder thriller plot into something that deliberately denies the audience a satisfactory conclusion.  There are scenes that wildly break the tone and stick out like a sore thumb, like a decidedly awkward, sort-of sexual early encounter between Nicole Kidman’s Charlotte and her imprisoned flame Hillary (John Cusack) during their visitation in front of his lawyers.

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CANNES REVIEW: Killing Them Softly

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Killing Them Softly
Directed by: Andrew Dominik
Written by: Andrew Dominik (screenplay), George V. Higgins (novel)
Starring: Brad Pitt, Scott McNairy, Ray Liotta and Richard Jenkins

Killing Them Softly is a blunt critique of modern American society set against the backdrop of the 2008 elections.  It takes place inside an organized crime syndicate whose true power is never really revealed.  What is revealed is that Brad Pitt is an enforcer, and that he is very good with a shotgun and telling people he’s going to kill them.

This movie is directed by Andrew Dominik, who also collaborated with Pitt in the much better 2007 movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.  Their latest endeavor is too vague to be revelatory and enjoys showing violence too much to say something with it.  It is highly stylized and wonderfully filmed, but ultimately empty.  It hinges on Pitt’s on-screen charisma, which is as in tact and tongue-in-cheek as always.

James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins and especially Ray Liotta provide terrific supporting characters in an otherwise weak men’s club of a cast.  Liotta takes one of the most brutal beatings in recent movie memory after it is suspected that he set up the robbery of one of his own illegal poker games.  In fact, it was two beginning lowlifes (Scott McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) looking for a quick pay day, as it often is in these kinds of movies.

Injecting snippets from coverage of the 2008 elections does little to heighten the story above its own self-made constraints.  Once the initial robbery occurs and the major characters are set up, it turns into Brad Pitt killing the various people involved with reckless abandon.  The only time the political angle pays off is in the terrific last conversation between Pitt and Richard Jenkins, where they discuss his payment for all the killing. Sure this scene ties together plot strands rather recklessly, but the whole thing seems thrown together rather recklessly.

Grade: C-

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CANNES REVIEW: In Another Country

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In Another Country
Directed by: Hong Sang-soo
Written by: Hong Sang-soo (screenplay)
Starring: Isabelle Huppert and Yu Jun-Sang

With all the serious, morbid narratives taking root of the festival imagination in places like Cannes, it’s refreshing to see an exceptional movie with a light touch and a very warm sense of humor.  In Another Country, from Korean director Hong Sang-soo, is exactly that.  It is the story of stories, an examination of how a narrative takes form and is altered and rearranged until it is the most effective.

A barely-seen Korean woman dictates these stories into a notepad.  All of them star roughly the same cast of characters, though their roles and importance often change.  Isabelle Huppert plays the main woman in all of them, always a wayward traveler in Korea looking around for a lighthouse and meaning.  There is also the woman she is staying with, an attractive young lifeguard and various other acquaintances along the way.

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On Location: Las Vegas

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Immersion is the essence of cinema. Nobody famous or important that I know of said that, but someone probably said something similar at one point. I’m not even going to Google it; that’s how confident I am. But there’s truth to it— a movie can be as much about its setting as it can be about its story. Engaging the audience’s senses by building a relationship between the story elements and the setting is an undervalued art achieved by only masterful art directors and storytellers. Think of how cleverly and subtly Tim Burton exploits the Florida suburbs in Edward Scissorhands to provide thematic contrast for his character or how carefully Ben Affleck pans the Boston sky for his cop and crime dramas.

The relationship works both ways. Their stories and styles also influence the way we perceive places we haven’t yet been, or places we visit. Imagine going to the Empire State Building without thinking of scenes from King Kong or Spiderman. The Twilight series may be unbearable, but look what its done to romanticize our image of the Pacific Northwest and boost tourism in the region. Our idea of the Vegas strip wouldn’t be the same without great casino films like these.

This has been my personal introduction to our newest series: On location. In this series we will pick an iconic place and look at the movies that shaped our idea of that place as well as how the movie portraits the setting. First up: sin city.

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CANNES REVIEW: Amour

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Amour
Directed by: Michael Haneke
Written by: Michael Haneke (screenplay)
Starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert and William Shimmell

Michael Haneke’s latest film is a good poster child for why mainstream movie audiences fear and avoid many foreign films; it is quiet, slow and relentlessly depressing.  After winning the Palme d’Or in 2009 for The White Ribbon, Haneke officially established himself as a “Cannes auteur,” a director whose latest work would forever and always have a place in the festival’s cannon.

Amour is wondrously, deliberately hopeless.  Its depiction of an elderly woman’s slow, painful crawl toward death after suffering a series of strokes is not peppered with melodrama or any sort of dramatic flourish.  Haneke seems to think this would make the situation too comfortable, too much like a movie.  The goal of this film is to show the situation in as realistic light as possible, but from a removed distance.

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CANNES REVIEW: Beasts of the Southern Wild

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Beasts of the Southern Wild
Directed by: Benh Zeitin
Written by: Benh Zeitlin & Lucy Alibar
Starring: Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry, Levy Easterly and Lowell Landes

Let’s get this out of the way early: Beasts of the Southern Wild is one of the best films in recent years, and it is one of the greatest encapsulations of childhood consciousness that I’ve ever seen on a screen.  It captures a specific American subculture in the Louisiana bayou so effortlessly that its moments of fantasy should feel out of place, but because it is filtered through the eyes of such a poignant and ferocious young girl, everything flows together wonderfully.

That child is Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), the daughter of a sick, widowed father  (Dwight Henry) who conjures up visions of gigantic beasts from folk lore to explain the destruction of her home and family.  She howls for her mother and glares at her dad when he yells at her, a wild thing in the vein of Max.

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CANNES REVIEW: Rust & Bone

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Rust & Bone
Directed by: Jacques Audiard
Written by: Jacques Audiard & Thomas Bidegain  (screenplay), Craig Davidson (story)
Starring: Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Céline Sallette and Bouli Lanners

The French drama Rust & Bone, from equally French director Jacques Audiard, assembles some of the most talented people in all filmmaking departments together to tell an emotionally and physically violent story about love and survival.  It could’ve so easily been Oscar bait if the writing and the performances weren’t so emotionally uncompromising.

Audiard made a huge splash in many film circles  in 2009 and 2010 with A Prophet, a  violent and uncompromising vision set at the genre crossroads of organized crime and prison films.  Rust & Bone, while still concerned with the loss of humanity and the repression of violent impulses, tells a decidedly weirder story about a homeless father and son and a whale trainer.

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