Category / Film

by Edward Champion

Review: Did You Hear About the Morgans? (2009)

morgans

Sometime ago, I attended a screening for Did You Hear About the Morgans? I apologize for the lateness of this review. I have been occupied with more important things, such as clipping my toenails. I wish I could review this film properly, but that would be a bit like putting together a 4,000 word essay devoted to one man’s case of athlete’s foot. The upshot is that there is truly not much to recommend about this film, although I have seen worse films and this braindead offering served as a diversion between deadlines. It was possessed of nothing and permitted my mind and spirit to become actuated, seeking fun and greater things.

I should probably note that Susan E. Morse, fired by Woody Allen sometime after The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (possibly one of the key reasons why Allen’s more recent films have been less than stellar), edited the film. But aside from this, I leave the readers to do the detective work and track down the cast and crew. They are, for the most part, not worthy of having their names repeated here. But I do feel bad about what happened to Susan E. Morse, even though Woody Allen needs her more than Morse needs Woody Allen. What follows are some of my random notes taken throughout the film. This is what is known as a lazy review. But since the filmmakers have been extraordinarily lazy in putting this film together, it makes considerable sense for me to afford it the same level of disrespect. The collected notes will provide content for this site while I do interesting things (such as clipping my toenails) and it may be of some use to those who, for whatever reason, are still on the fence about seeing this movie:

Phone call against black. Long-winded. Premiere boutique. Real estate firm in this economy? Nonsense. Ice sculpture disaster.

“The perfect combination of classic architecture and understated elegance.” — some statement explaining this film?

Speaks French. Pregnant. Skyline shots. A black hole. Park Avenue? Really? 1991 fantasy. Not the New York I know. Not the New York Woody Allen knows. Hugh Grant tired. Sarah Jessica Parker tired, but peppy. Jackie and Andy. Assistants. Two assistants. More interesting than leads. Needless class warfare. Columbus Circle. “There is now a galaxy named Meryl.” — she’s still interested in this guy? He’s an attorney? Really? “Can you please stop being so agreeable.” Why not just punch someone?

He slept with someone else. A little less love for a while. Many years. Preposterous murder subplot. Really, this kind of crime in the East Side? Did the writer even visit here?

Keeping safe. Big black guy. Scrawny white guy. Unfunny racist joke. Real estate. T-shirt. Sent a police officer up. Shot. Shouting. I long for Preston Sturges.

Couple across the street looking through window. Liked this the first time in Ghostbusters, possibly before. “There’s an emergency.” Gay subtext in shower. Attorney with loads of free time in New York? Yeah, right. “I’ve had bagels in other parts of the country. I don’t even like Connecticut.” Such appeal! Will the killer shoot these snobs?

“If you want to lie, you’re out of options.” Manichean approach. Couple acts like they are in their twenties. Was that original script before getting Hugh and SJP?

A week at most. Sam Elliott kicks ass. Mary Steenburgen kicks ass. But why is there no chemistry between SE and MS? Wyoming. Cliches. City Slickers-style music.

Taxidermy. Encounter with a grizzly bear. Shouldn’t he be writing this down? Bargain Barn. “It’s huge. I had no idea.” But New York has Costco! Big guns. PETA. People for Eating Tasty Animals. Heard that joke in redneck bowling alley in early 1990s. Stilted blocking. Trapped.

One room. One witness at a time. Ten years ago. John Wayne and Clint Eastwood mostly. Cliched DVD selection. A computer. Make a quick call. There’s a code.

“Look, Paul, I know how hard you’re trying.” Not hard enough.

“And I don’t trust you anymore.” Paul or screenwriter?

Rodeo Round-Up magazine. All meat in the fridge. Who plays the assistant? “I’ve never turned my oven off.” “I thought I could actually keep my cells dividing.”

“I feel my organs shutting down.” “I can’t breathe. The air’s too clear.” Grizzly bear. Spraying him in the eyes. “I’ve always dreamed about Chicago.” “Laughter really is the best medicine.” Thank you, but I’m waiting to laugh.

307-179-9048. No 555 in telephone number?

Fertility experts. Stuttering Hugh. He’s in his forties and he’s still stuttering? Four Decades and a Funeral? I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Apology to audience?

“Without him, I’m superfluous.” Oh please. Someone get bell hooks on her ass.

Shooting at the audience. “This is nothing. You should see how long it takes for her to order dinner.” Quicker than this movie?

“I think I have a welt.” Too much typing, Mr. Screenwriter?

Chair — moving inside the house.

“I am told that it is the only place.” Remington 270. “I called around and got a table near the mayonnaise.” New York neurotics. Wilford Brimley smoking. Cast as a badass! Beat them up, Wilford! Liberals in town: “Thirteen, not fourteen, and we know who they are.” People take trucks in this town? Truck return policy? “I Googled her.” — one of several modern references placed in at last minute, if script sitting in drawer.

Smells like a burrito. Need a will. Stun gun. “It is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.” Which Shakespeare sonnet is this again?

Wait a minute, he’s British and been in New York all this time? Google Maps. Google paid someone?

“Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” Hypocrisy. Second big rock as landmark. Joke now told four times, still not funny.

“You risked your life for me. That’s so nice.” Barf.

by Edward Champion

Review: Nordwand (2008)

nordwand

It’s safe to say that Nordwand (known as North Face in the States and presently hitting the film festival circuit, to be followed by a rolled out release) is a better movie than Clint Eastwood’s The Eiger Sanction. Yes, the 1975 film has a few decent mountain climbing scenes. But it also has such preposterous moments as George Kennedy convincing Eastwood to carry beer in his backpack as they climb a mountain, so that he might guzzle the cans at the top. Eastwood’s climb up the treacherous north face of the Eiger mountain is, oddly enough, not too dissimilar from the one chronicled in Nordwand, although Nordwand is based on real-life efforts. And you could look up the names. But then you’d know the ending. And that wouldn’t be very fun.

Harsh snow, wintry weather, avalanches, attempted rescue by railroad station. The perfect ingredients for mountain cinema and a regrettable reminder that you can step inside the theater in the winter, but you won’t shake yourself of the snow. So much for escapism. But Nordwand proves to be considerably more engaging than The Eiger Sanction, K2 (which featured a whiny Michael Biehn), and Vertical Limit (which featured a whiny Chris O’Donnell)– in large part because there is a race between Austrians and Germans at the heart of the storyline, thereby making this climb — at least on the German front — one of national pride (and considerable stupidity). But since the two main mountaineers we root for don’t whine, as their American counterparts do, we are all too happy to cheer them on.

The events, of course, are set during Nazi Germany. It is May 1936 — the year of Leni Rifenstahl’s Olympia and the beginning of Nazification. Rifenstahl, as we know, got her start with mountain films. And we certainly know that it’s 1936, because one German offers this mood-killing explanation for why the Germans wish to climb the North Face before a festive crowd: “The pride of facing a challenge, whether it be sports or politics.” Jews have been stripped of their civil rights, but you wouldn’t know it watching this film. The newspapermen sent to cover the spectacle are more interested in “the spirit of the German conqueror in battle with the mountain. That’s what makes a story.”

Nordwand does make a good story, in part because many of the mountaineers die and we even get to enjoy fingers freezing up and people shrieking in agony. I don’t know how much of the mountain climbing in this film is real and how much of it is fake. Frankly, I am presently too lazy to check. But it seemed convincing enough for me. One admires the spirit of the sensible and experienced Austrians, the film’s protagonists. They offer some pretty nifty side swinging moves that I can’t imagine any whiny American trying on a indoor rock wall. The Germans are determined to commit folly in the name of the Fuhrer. While this is certainly their right (as characters, that is), I was slightly disappointed that there wasn’t more nationalism drenching through clinched teeth. But my desires were somewhat placated by a rather splendid mountain cake wheeled into a banquet room.

Overall, I enjoyed Nordwand and can recommend it to those who like German mountain films, which are less whiny and more interesting than the ones that come from America.

by Edward Champion

Review: A Single Man (2009)

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Colin Firth’s swooning fan base has long accepted the unlikely heartthrob as an endearing bumbler. Firth has often played the sensitive (and quietly sensible) romantic populating both mainstream romantic fare (the Bridget Jones films and Love Actually) and projects that are considered highbrow by way of artistic association (Pride and Prejudice‘s Mr. Darcy or Girl with a Pearl Earring‘s Vermeer). Atom Egoyan was one of the few filmmakers to scrape away at Firth’s squeaky clean archetype in the underrated Where the Truth Lies, giving Firth a raw and dark character suggesting a grittier and seedier version of The Importance of Being Earnest‘s Jack Worthing.

But none of these performances — as good as they are — has quite permitted Firth to summon up the totality of his talent. Market forces, content to give the people what they want, have consigned Firth to a curious upper middle-class ghetto. Firth’s characters often cling to a steady yet shaky authority, largely because they have occupied some station for too many years. Firth has atoned for these limitations with a smooth vocal command and an almost Mitchum-like commitment to movement, counterbalanced by a somewhat uncertain gaze. (The “I like you very much just as you are” moment in Bridget Jones’s Diary comes immediately to mind as an example of Firth doing his best to defy cliche.) But this pigeonholing hasn’t always allowed an interior glimpse. Firth has perfected the nice guy. But nice guys often have more internal demons than they’re willing to impart. It’s too bad that so many screenwriters, paid very well to adhere to formulaic conventions, fail to express this in their labor.

I have quietly hoped that some talented filmmaker would figure Firth out, or that Firth might obtain enough clout to headline some pet project, permitting those delayed demons to roil in a more complicated role. Indelible British actors often find Hollywood at some point in their careers, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are completely understood. (Exhibit A: Malcolm McDowell.) The people in charge are, after all, more concerned about the coffers than with human complexities. And I never would have imagined that fashion designer-turned-filmmaker Tom Ford would be the guy to push Firth to the limit.

A Single Man is one of the year’s best films. And it’s not just because Ford has given Firth a perfectly attuned role, permitting Firth to stockpile Professor George Falconer’s grief behind restrained grimaces and meticulous domestic action within a quite literal glass house. For A Single Man is also cinematically committed to George’s isolation. George’s heartbeat drowns out the soundtrack. He never quite sees a person head on. The secretary with the bobcut who gives one of George’s students his home address is filmed in slivers, and George replies, “You have such a lovely smile.”

It helps immeasurably that Ford’s working from very good source material (Christopher Isherwood’s fine novel) and that Ford is smart enough to make this his own. When George addresses his students in class, he sits before them on the desk, with three cameras cutting left, center, and right — as if George is some kind of fashion model being photographed on a platform. But to some degree, he is. His academic role is the only thing he has left after losing his partner, whose funeral he isn’t even permitted to attend (“family only”). Ford’s dramatic tactic is an eccentric yet effective perspective, reminiscent of the way that the vanilla-minded Steven Spielberg found a way to channel drug addiction through fatherhood in Minority Report

It also helps that we have been given a vision of the early 1960s that, for once, doesn’t call attention to its time period. Sam Mendes’s disgraceful adaptation of Revolutioanry Road didn’t understand that real people lived and wrestled with serious decisions. (It’s possible that Ford may have had Mendes’s American Beauty in mind with one of his other interesting visual tics. Whenever George feels something close to happiness, the gray visuals brighten up a bit. This isn’t as distracting as it sounds, and it’s more understated than Mendes’s now dated CG flowers.) The much acclaimed Mad Men understands this better, but feels the need to cram some “shocking” measure of its characters against contemporary standards. Can the characters really be defiling women like that? The more important issue is why Matthew Weiner cannot simply let these flawed characters act without the enforcement of moral judgment.

But Ford lets George live without such constructive qualms. We feel his loss. We feel his sadness. George is often kind, as we expect a Colin Firth character to be. But with grief comes a mess of forgivable solipsism in his willingness to light a man’s cigarette, bring over a bottle of liquor, or swim in the ocean to prove that youth hasn’t entirely expired. If George died right now, would he be okay? It’s a question echoing from happier days in the past, but one that the audience remains constantly aware of. The film’s commitment to George’s perspective causes us to be deeply locked within his being, but it also pulls off the difficult trick of making us sympathetic to those trying to get George back into the land of the living. This group includes a Spanish stranger and George’s best friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), who has also negotiated the line. We know this by seeing the way she lives now: aging, smoking, drinking, applying makeup, bombarding George with calls.

The film’s willingness to celebrate life, and the connective failings of single people of all stripes, propels it well beyond a one-note exercise and inures it from Weiner-style judgment. It is to Ford’s credit that he injects some humor into the morbid mix, for grief is never entirely tragic. There’s an overeager gun store owner, and some physical comedy involving a suicide and a sleeping bag. Life isn’t some “I wish I knew how to quit you” melodrama that makes us feel tolerant, liberal, and morally superior. It’s a little girl who doesn’t understand what her father means by “light in his loafers,” but who sees the possibility in a sad man sitting in a bank. A Single Man invites us to see that possibility too, both within its mise-en-scene and in the more important world before our eyes.

by Edward Champion

Review: The Road (2009)

theroad

In 2006, an incalculable number of retroussé-nosed snobs — most possessing little understanding or appreciation of speculative fiction — were justly charmed by Cormac McCarthy’s YA novel, The Road. It was a common weakness for such ostensibly erudite essayists as James Wood to not comprehend that McCarthy, like nearly every other speculative fiction author, was extrapolating his own values of fatherhood and manhood onto his fantastical canvas. Functional illiterates, without even an elementary knowledge of the exciting New Weird and steampunk movements then in full bloom, raved that The Road was “unlike any book you’ve read in a long time,” and that sentiment was certainly true if your grasp of speculative fiction extended no further than a Ray Bradbury story read under duress in a high school haze. But McCarthy’s novel — simple yet effective in its execution — went on to earn the Pulitzer Prize and was even selected by the middlebrow television queen, who proudly gushed to McCarthy that he looked just like he did on the back of the cover.

I am happy to report that The Road, in its cinematic version, lives up to this wanton accessibility. It lacks the apocalyptic punch of 1984’s Threads or 1982’s The Day After, and is far from bleak and depressing in its approach. But a liberal parent may very well argue that this family-centric film is fun for the whole family. I couldn’t help but wonder at times whether Viggo would coo, “Good night, John Boy,” under the acid rain of family values. The film does possess a streak of humanity comparable, at times, to 1983’s Testament, particularly since it is securely anchored by Viggo Mortensen, who conceals an effective bundle of husks, rasps, and laconic remnants within his spindly, half-starved frame. (He even delivers McCarthy’s contractions without apostrophes. This is a dedicated lead actor.) Joe Penhall’s adaptation is relatively faithful to the book, reproducing much of the narrative moments and the dialogue (although on film, the mind’s eye begins to see the question marks forming around lines, somewhat sullying McCarthy’s intent). There’s also gruff narration from Mortensen reading much of McCarthy’s prose, which I’m not sure was needed. Flashback moments involving Charlize Theron as the mother come perilously close to needless audience spoonfeeding.

But then McCarthy’s book was, in its own way, altogether too geared for mass consumption. One moment from the book, bearing the telltale indicator of a corporation wheeling over a rusty shopping cart of money, has been lovingly reproduced on screen. But director John Hillcoat and Penhall shouldn’t be held entirely accountable. They have indeed been true to the book, rendering every line of the following exchange:

He withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca-Cola.

What is it, Papa?

It’s a treat. For you.

What is it?

Here. Sit down.

He slipped the boy’s knapsack straps loose and set the pack on the floor behind him and he put his thumbnail under the aluminum lip on the top of the can and opened it. He leaned his nose to the slight fizz coming from the can and then handed it to the boy. Go ahead, he said.

The boy took the can. It’s bubbly, he said.

Go ahead.

He looked at his father and then tilted the can and drank. He sat there thinking about it. It’s really good, he said.

Yes. It is.

You have some, Papa.

I want you to drink it.

You have some.

He took the can and sipped it and handed it back. You drink it, he said. Let’s just sit here.

The stuff of literature! A book and a smile! And a film and a smile.

On the big screen, the thinking audience member, troubled not only by this product placement coming at the expense of verisimilitude, notes that warm and unrefrigerated Coca-Cola nestled for so long would surely have gone flat. (Indeed, the subject was argued about on Metafilter.)

The apocalypse’s visual elements involve tilted telephone poles, burned out office parks, skeletal remains, bituminious detritus, and frequent flickers of past civilization (paintings within a gutted out church, portraits in houses) cannily mirroring the father’s desire to “carry on the soul” and stay “one of the good guys” in a landscape populated mostly by cannibals. Alas, the sordid cannibalism doesn’t include the book’s infamous roasted baby, which China Mieville rightly called “a little bit camp.” We do see bloody bathtubs and sinks, a basement populated by living human meat, and chops and screams in the distance. But Delicatessen and Eating Raoul this ain’t. This grisly stuff should jolt or horrify, as it does on the page. But the film’s cannibals are more or less actors daubed up with grease who wear trucker’s caps. The intent is to depict humanity debased by desperate impulses, but it comes off like a cheap shot at red staters.

Still, some of the film’s pulled punches are redeemed by the solid performances (Kodi Smit-McPhee is good as The Boy) and a sound mix that knows the value of silence and knows when to intrude with creepy creaks. Robert Duvall’s presence as the old man is quite welcome and possibly more of a humanizing influence than the character’s appearance in the book. And while David Edelstein has pooh-poohed the film’s seeming “monotonous” quality, I must commend the film for the same reason. (Then again, it’s doubtful that Edelstein paid much attention. He claims that “having Mom lurch off is quite an evolutionary statement,” but failed to note Molly Parker’s presence at the end.) This is a film about process. Surviving in a wasteland when there’s no real reason to survive — other than the nebulous idea of “going south” — is one of the film’s (and the duo’s) reasons for being. It also helps that the father is, as the flashbacks and the incident with the thief reveal, hardly a flawless and glowing patriarch, and that his mistakes don’t necessarily coincide with the conditions.

Make no mistake: This is a feel-good apocalypse movie. And while the film is more entertainment than art, it’s just loose enough to provide any number of comparisons to the present economic shitstorm. Because of this, I suspect it may perform quite well at the box office.