Monthly Archives: August 2015

Listen Up, Philip

I recently watched Listen Up, Philip because for some odd reason I find Jason Schwartzman irresistible. Not that I like him. Upon reflection, I often find him quite intolerable, but still irresistible. It’s probably some positive reinforcement from his nearly ubiquitous presence in Wes Anderson movies, which I tend to love, as a rule. But outside of the Anderson oeuvre, I find Schwartzman to be a lot less easy to swallow. Anderson allows us to laugh at the pompous ass. In everything else, he’s just a pompous ass. And if an actor plays a pompous ass in 37 film and television credits to date (roughly), then maybe he’s not playing one, maybe he just is one.

And yet, I hardly ever miss a Jason Schwartzman film. Just in case, I guess. In case it’s secretly a Wes Anderson film? In case Bill Murray will suddenly pop out of his breast pocket, waving a polka-dotted pocket square? In case he loses his hipster facial hair and there’s no one else there to notice it? I really don’t know why, but I’ve observed this weird tendency in myself, so there it is.

Hence, Listen Up, Philip, which I managed to like despite itself. Because it feels like the kind of movie that defies you to not like it. It wants you to turn your nose up at it. It’s too cool for approval. There’s a great review of it over at Epileptic Moondancer if you care to check it out. As for myself, I’m going to discuss some particular traits that I found to be of note from director Alex Ross Perry

Unlikable characters. Holy unlikable in this case. It’s a huge risk to present a story with a protagonist the audience won’t like, because that’s how we’re supposed to connect with the story. We’re supposed to identify a bit of ourselves in the hero and experience the film through his or her eyes. If it becomes personal for us, then we care about the outcome, and we are engaged. But a main character who is thoroughly unlikable is a bit of a problem. Philip is neurotic and selfish and ungenerous and conceited: not the kind of guy you’d want to be stuck next to at a dinner party, so why willingly listen to him whine throughout a two hour movie? There’d better be a compelling reason. I’m thinking of movies like A Clockwork Orange, and Wolf of Wallstreet, and Mommy, where I loathed the main characters but still felt the stories were worth telling. But some people are totally turned off by characters they despise. Despicable as he is, Philip does teach us a thing or two about ‘success’ and ‘achievement’ and ‘asshats wallowing in their own shite’.
Heavy handed narration. I didn’t enjoy the narration in this movie. I tried to give it a chance because Philip is a writer and I felt that perhaps this was clever and meta if only I could get over myself. I never did. And it reminded me of other times I felt the narration got in the way. The Age of Adaline is probably freshest in my mind. And The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, if you can think that far back (2007 – ew). Both times I’d say that the narration lent nothing to our understanding and only took us out of magic of the movie. And we’re supposed to get lost in the story, aren’t we? With such abrupt narration we can be jerked right out of our reverie, and that’s a harsh reminder. But now that I’m thinking of it, there are times when I do like me some narration. Without mentioning Wes Anderson again, I’ll go with Ron Howard’s brilliant narration of Arrested Development. His little asides feel like fun thought bubbles or hilarious foot notes, and I always enjoy them. They feel organic, and enhance my enjoyment. And if you remember the opening sequence of Amelie – also some brilliant narration that sets a breathy tone for the movie. So that’s the difference. If a movie is relying on narration because the director needs to tell me what he has failed to show me, then narration bad. If the narration is like an elbow in the ribs to say, if you liked that, then get a load of this, then count me in.
Rotating protagonists. Philip is the main character in the first portion of the movie, but then we shift, abruptly, to the girlfriend he’s left behind, Ashley, played rather discreetly by Elisabeth Moss. Up until the switch, Ashley feels like a pretty negligible piece of the story. At the end of the film, she still feels this way. Her portion of the story is not very revealing, and almost completely severs us from the narrative that Philip’s been following. Perhaps it was just to give us a little space to breathe between all of Philip’s self-loathing and caterwauling, but I found it jarring. Lots of movies move deftly between characters, sometimes even between settings or between eras, but still manage to make you feel like it’s all part of a whole. This one just felt a bit broken to me. Philip must not be a very good writer if he can’t even maintain the point of view in his own story. But it does recast him as a pitiable character, so maybe this shift in focus serves to connect with him in some small way. The other interesting thing is that the narration is done by the same guy in both sequences. So who’s narration is this? The narrator does seem to side with Philip at one point, even though Philip is clearly the arse, and that can’t be coincidence. But what kind of device is this narration being filtered through? We never know, but are left to decide for ourselves.

So there you have it. I can’t tell you if this movie is good or bad, because it’s interesting and complex and probably that most awful of things – post-modern. You can decide for yourselves if this movies make you want to tear your hair out, or grab a bottle of pinot to discuss, or is to be avoided altogether. I must say that I do like a movie that takes chances, and that makes me think and evaluate why I’m having the feelings that I’m having. Is not liking a character, or a narrative tone, or a story arc, the same as not liking the movie? And is not liking the movie the same as it being bad?

Holy fuck.

The Avengers are playing somewhere, right?

Shaun the Sheep

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If you like stop-motion animation, Shaun the Sheep is worth checking out. If you happen to like stop-motion animation and fart jokes, well, this movie’s going to make you feel like a pig in mud. And if you don’t like stop-motion animation, ask yourself why, and see if Shaun the Sheep makes you squeal with delight. Because this movie is simply beautiful to watch.

Having tried to make a stop-motion re-enactment of the war of 1812 for history class one year, using GI Joes, I have an appreciation for how difficult it is to pull off something passable. Getting to a flawless finished product like Shaun the Sheep must be insanely difficult. The effort is all on the screen and it’s marvelous. This clearly was a labour of love for all involved at Aardman Animations.

As for the story, it’s strictly for kids, but the target audience is going to be as happy as a dog with two tails (as they were at our packed Saturday morning screening). The interesting thing is there are no actual words being used by any of these characters, it’s all just noise. Minions did a similar thing and did it well, and I’d say Shaun the Sheep one ups Minions because not even the humans speak English (which is ironic for a movie coming out of the UK) yet the story still seemed clear and easy to follow even for the younger audience members.

There are lots of laughs for kids here but fewer for adults. A few gags are universal (counting sheep in particular) but it seemed that the writers were just throwing the occasional bone to the expected parental crowd rather than trying to make this movie appeal directly to all ages. As Jay has mentioned in the past, that across-the-board accessibility expectation for animation is a product of Pixar’s excellence that didn’t traditionally exist. I won’t hold the lack of adult focus against Shaun the Sheep, because it’s a throwback by nature and as a kids movie it hits the bullseye.

I give Shaun the Sheep nine farm animal references out of ten.

Alien Invasions of Earth!

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One of the most iconic Hollywood images of the ’90s was, well…

I was 15 at the time and loved every minute of Independence Day. It was, if not the first, the most impressive alien invasion of earth that I’d ever seen. If you’ve seen the movie, you know the aliens lose. There are smarter aliens out there (and smarter writers than Dean Devlin) who know that if you attack us from the sky with lasers, it’s just going to piss us off. Hiding in plain sight and attacking us from within? That’s just crazy enough to work and it’s a theme in all three of my picks this week.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)– Some of the scariest movie aliens I’ve ever seen are plants from space that take control of a human hosts body. The catch is that, once they’ve got a hold of you, you need to fall asleep for the snatching to take effect. When I first saw this when I was in high school, I couldn’t imagine anything more scary or more relatable than having to fight off sleep to stay alive. This has always been one of my favourite sci-fi movies and, rewatching it this week, I couldn’t believe that I had visited one of the filming locations when I was in LA last month without even knowing it!

The Faculty (1998)– The modern-day king of B-movies Robert Rodriguez teams up with Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson in this nearly perfect union between witty and silly. A Breakfast Clubish mix of students from different walks of student life must fight for their lives and their community when they start to realize that their teachers are being controlled by body snatching aliens. Usher is the star quarterback. Jon Stewart is a nerdy science teacher. Salma Hayek is the nurse. This is the perfect movie to treat yourself to after sitting through…

Under the Skin (2014)– The alien doesn’t exactly hide in plain sight here. After all, there’s nothing plain about Scarlett Johansson. She cleverly uses her appeal though to lure men into her clutches though, with graphically aroused men continuing to walk towards her even as they are already starting to sink into her black pool of doom. Under the Skin is creepy as hell (check out Jay’s excellent review of the score) and not much fun. Alien invasion here is more a metaphor for… what exactly? I’m only about halfway there in figuring that out.

Inky Film

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It’s no secret that I love a man with lots of ink. It’s not much of a secret that I love women covered in tattoos too. So. Fucking. Sexy.

But movies rarely feature tattoos as sex appeal. Tattoos in movies often serve one of two purposes. Either they help us identify the bad guy or it helps “transform” a soft Hollywood heartthrob into a dude with edge (Jared Leto’s The Joker seems to be taking pages from both of these books). In fact, I’d bet Hollywood spends more time erasing the existing tattoos of its stars than inking some in. Too bad.

Ryan Gosling, I’m sorry to say, is one such softie. He’s got such a babyface that he’s more Mouseketeer than badass so it’s no surprise that in The Place Beyond The Pines he gets painted into character as a motorcycle stunt rider turned bank robber. Gosling and his friend Ben Shields designed the temporary tattoos that adorn his arms, torso, neck, back, and even his face in the movie. The tattoos represent a history of bad decision making for his character, and they also make him a literally marked man – when he walks into a packed church full of people in their Sunday finest, the contrast is unsettling.

Tom Hardy, on the other hand, doesn’t need much help to look like a beast, as he does in Warrior. Dude was fucking ripped. Like many MMA fighters, Hardy sported lots of ink in the movie, but the truth is, every last one of them was his own. And if you check out a shirtless pic of him more recently (and I suggest you do) you’ll see that his inked space has nearly doubled and he has no plans to stop the growing artistry across his chest, only to avoid getting any on his neck, because that would mean he’s “checked out.”

The tattoos on Guy Pearce in Momento are not his own. If you’ve seen the movie, then you know how integral to the plot they are: a man with no short term memory keeps helpful information tattooed on his body in his quest to find his wife’s murderer. The tattoos are complex and the makeup artists needed to get them precisely right each and every time. ”The tattoo outlines were put on transfer paper and then onto my body,” remembers Pearce. Each outline transfer would last about a week, and at the beginning of each shooting day, makeup would paint them in.

Brad Pitt in Snatch is another pretty boy that needs to be roughed up with some ink – and some terrible ink at that. Single-needle, homemade looking stuff with greenish ink, his religious-themed tattoos identify him and are the image of poverty itself. But hat’s off to the makeup artist who did them because they never run NO MATTER HOW SWEATY HE GETS.

Brad’s pal George Clooney sported some ink in a movie from 1996. In From Dusk Till Dawn, he plays a criminal, and we all know that criminals helpfully identify themselves with evil-signifying tattoos. For most of the movie, we see a bold piece of tribal tattoo snaking up from the collar of George’s shirt. Only toward the end do we get the payoff of seeing (almost) the whole glorious piece. If you think sitting still for tattoo application every day before shooting must be an ordeal, consider the removal: George’s work had to be removed with gasoline and a blow dryer at the end of each day.

The Night of the Hunter may feature the most famous movie tattoos of all time. Robert Mitchum plays a religious fanatic who marries a widow to gain access to her children, who know where their father’s misbegotten fortune is buried. Mitchum’s genius LOVE and HATE knuckle tattoos are used as props in his sermons and are a good representation of this unforgettable villain. This wonderful film is filled with rich symbolism, but it doesn’t take much to figure out what’s happening when the LOVE hand embraces and the HATE hand brandishes weapons. These tattoos belong in the hall of fame.

You can only have one favourite though, and I’ve saved the best for last. The Broken Circle Breakdown was one of, if not my favourite movie in 2012. It’s a powerful, fucked up film about a couple trying to survive the throes of grief. The woman just happens to be a tattoo artist and she wears her livelihood, and also her heart, all over her body. Veerle Baetens underwent extensive work in the makeup chair to perfect her character’s look and the director sought the help of a real-life tattoo artist to inspire and design all of the elements. The designs were tailored to fit the actor’s body and then laser printed on a special transferable paper that stayed in place for up to four days at a time. I love how the character uses her tattoos as a road map to her body, and her life. I love how she shows him all the names of ex-lovers she’s had covered up – beauty and realism all in one humble little spot.

And it fucking destroys me how hot she is.

What’s your favourite tattoo? Got any yourself? Ever seen a tattoo tribute to a movie?

***NEW ENTRY!***

Guess who just saw Southpaw this weekend!

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present for your consideration:

I particularly thought his forearm tattoos were sexy.

Oh man, apparently I need to find myself a lawyer who secretly looks like a boxer underneath his suit…

Movies: A Personal History

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Ben over at Views From the Sofa recently reviewed the first film in the Mission: Impossible franchise. For those of us in denial, that one came out back in 1996. 1996! This franchise is nearly 20 years old, and that makes me feel ancient. Remember how that recognizable Mission: Impossible music actually played on the radio for a while? That was bizarre. His post reminded me that I’d watched it at the home of one of my friends, who by the second film, in 2000, had become my boyfriend, and by the third film in 2006, was my husband, and by the fourth in 2011 was my ex-husband.

A lot of movies, the good and the bad, are loaded for us with what was going on in our lives at the time. Some movies we remember more fondly, some are guilty by association. Here’s a little look at some of mine, and if you wanted to jump in with some of yours, I’d be tickled pink. Particularly if you had nice memories that could usurp some of my ex-husband ones.

Night at the Roxbury: Matt and I had a laugh recently about this one when our coworker suddenly asked us, seemingly out of the blue, whether we’d heard of this one. Like it was a new movie we might not have seen yet. No indication that it’s a throwback from 1998. She’d come across it on Youtube, because she’d been listening to that head-nodding song from the soundtrack. Now, Matt and I happen to be the exact same age, which means we idolized SNL at the same time, and saw many of the same movies as a result. I remember seeing this one with a big group of my pothead friends at an ancient movie theatre called The Port in my hometown, a one-screener with a red velvet curtain and a balcony that was mostly condemned due to a drooping\flaking ceiling. The ticket taker complimented me on my feather boa (I know, all shots to the head right now would be totally deserved) and remarked that in 42 years of taking tickets, I had to be the first to prance in wearing one. And I probably had been prancing. Anyway, we laughed uproariously, as a bunch of kids who’d recently learned about putting shrooms in McFlurrys will do. Two or three years later, I was respectably employed by our federal government, which was hosting a “ball” to thank its dedicated employees. My friend Caroline and I watched as our respective boyfriends did the head-nodding thing to this song and agreed that this was bliss. We have both since ditched these boyfriends, thank fucking Christ.

(Also, I believe I owned that exact jacket that Will Ferrell is wearing. I may or may not have worn it with a feather boa.)

Mission to Mars: I cannot say that I saw this is theatres, but I did buy a ticket for it in 2000 and was sitting in a theatre while it played. It is the first and only movie I’ve fallen asleep at. I felt awful. I think I remember some weird stuff happening, but that could have been my fever dreams. I went home and puked up a Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich, the first and only time I’ve eaten Wendy’s. It turns out I had Mono. I was very, very sick, and I have held a grudge against this film, and against Wendy’s, ever since.

Shrek the Third: I was on a date and attempting to see this movie when fire broke out in the Scarborough cinema. I believe it was a grease fire at the concession stand Burger King. We were evacuated and made to stand about the parking lot for what felt like eternity before being given vouchers so we could see the movie again, elsewhere. Not only did I not see that movie ever again, I didn’t see the guy again either (he evacuated in an every man for himself kind of way, without so much as a glance over his shoulder to see if I had succumbed to the flames). I did however see Spiderman 3 with another guy that very night in Toronto, and guess what? That one wasn’t any good either. I have never revisited either movie.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: My best friend and I had meant to treat her young daughter to this movie but custody issues arose at the last minute, so Rachel and I saw this one by ourselves, wearing dorky 3D glasses. I think the movie was okay but what I remember most is seeing a preview trailer for Up. We thought it looked amazing and made plans to see it as soon as it hit theatres. Rachel passed away before that could happen, so its release really felt like a lesson in life goes on. Some plans never come to pass. It was difficult to watch and still is, but it’s actually about going on after the death of a loved one, and continuing to embrace life and its many adventures. I have, but I still hold that movie close to my heart, and it serves as a bit of a talisman.

Bronson

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Tom Hardy portrays England’s most notorious prisoner in a film that, through theatrical fictionalization, becomes an indictment of celebrity culture and a tribute to the cult of personality.

A young man named Michael Peterson robs a post office and ends up serving three decades in solitary confinement. How does this come to pass? Well it turns out that in prison, Peterson adopts a survival mechanism we in the business call “being a truly awful person.” He relishes his bad reputation and works at it, actively.

He fights prisoners and guards equally, Hardy often seen “lubing up” with war paint, aka, butter. A real problem prisoner, he’s sent to serve out his sentence, now doubled, in segregation. Upon his release, he takes up bare-knuckled boxing and a pseudonym more suitable to his ultra-violent alter-ego: Charles Bronson is born (again). A mere 69 days later, he’s back in prison and worse than ever, instigating some pretty crazy hostage situations if the movie can be believed.

The film does an interesting thing where it has these asides where Hardy appears to be in a one-man Broadway show, painted into the various characters we’re introduced to, proud as a peacock to show off his many crimes, his escalating violence (in reality, he is still imprisoned to this day). The surreal soliloquies are little bites peppered among a buffet of horrid reality. It reminded me of a freak show, though I suppose that’s the message colouring the medium (or was it the strongman’s physique, or the ringmaster’s mustache?) I wasn’t always sure what to make of it and felt it was probably a bit overstylized, but if nothing else it is trying to be genre-defying, and it is.

The film makes no excuses for inexcusable behaviour, which is fortunate, but still manages to leave some upset in its wake – that old art vs exploitation theme snakes its way into this movie, and it’s hard to shake. But it is firm in one respect: whatever the spectacle, Tom Hardy is undoubtedly the star.

___

On a related note, the real prisoner Charles Bronson was transferred to Parkhurst in 1976 after trying to poison the guy in the cell next to him. At his new facility, he met the Kray twins, who would become his lifelong friends – “the best two guys I ever met” (not actual good guys, of course, they were England’s mafia). Tom Hardy is about to portray both Kray twins in the movie Legend, set to screen next month at TIFF.

Fever Pitch

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Two years ago for Christmas, my niece gifted me with a book – The New York Times 36 Hours (150 Hours in the USA & Canada), a nod to my ADD approach to vacationing. I love seeing new places, and old favourite places, and I’m usually planning my next vacation on the plane ride home from my current vacation. This month alone, I’ve spent time in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Montreal, so we thought, why not one more?

Which is why we’re on the way to Boston! We’ve been to Boston before of course, and covered the major Boston highlights except for one glaring omission: Fenway. Although I did once declare to a befuddled waitress that I was one my way to Fenway. This was in Chicago, and I believe they pronounce their ball park “Wrigley”, but anyway, I digress. Our last trip to Boston was more football-centric, to be fair, but we always knew we’d be back, and after having so much fun watching the Giants win in AT&T park a few weeks ago, we were inspired to cross another stadium off our bucket list.

Which is why earlier this week I watched Fever Pitch – the awful American one. Okay, maybe it’s not so awful. I read the essay of course, an autobiographical recounting of Nick Hornby’s obsession with Arsenal football as a young man. They turned this into a movie in 1997, starring Colin Firth, and it sort of became a weird and delightful sporty romcom, about how his best girl had to compete against his best team. Then in 2005, that movie got the Farrelly brother Americanization treatment and it became a movie obsessed with baseball, and what team better to be obsessed with than the Boston Red Sox? It just so happens that the year they filmed it, 2004, turned out to be an incredibly seminal season for the Sox, and the Farrellys had to keep rewriting the script.

I have to admit this movie is not without its charms – Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore have some great chemistry (and well they should – Jimmy Fallon was the new Adam Sandler, and then Adam Samberg was the new Jimmy Fallon, and that’s where I lose the trail as I’ve no idea who the current Adam Sandler on SNL is, but I do know that all these guys work well together, and Drew has a surprisingly high tolerance for them). Surprisingly though, the Red Sox insist on stealing the show, and it’s unbelievably cool that they happened to be filming at precisely the right time. Upping the factor on the Boston love-in, the film cast real-life die-hard fans as seen in the previous year’s documentary Still We Believe: The Boston Red Sox Movie in various minor roles.

This film garnered no awards, and even angered some sports fans who felt this was just a chick flick wearing sheep’s clothing (or, you know, a Sox warm-up jacket), but it did earn Jimmy Fallon an honorary membership to the Red Sox Nation for playing Ben so convincingly in spite of being a lifelong Yankee fan. There’s something magical about that park and I look forward to experiencing it in person.