Author Archives: Jay

What Dreams May Come

What a fucking movie, eh?

Chris Nielsen (Robin Williams) dies in a car accident and wakes up in an afterlife of his own making. The world he constructs is based on his wife Annie’s painting; everything is made of gobs of paint that squish beneath his feet as he walks and explode with colour when he grabs them. An old friend, Albert (Cuba Gooding Jr.), appears as his spirit guide, though he looks much younger than Chris remembers. It takes a little getting used to, but it starts to feel like home, especially when he reconnects with his children, who died years previously. The only thing missing is his precious Annie, but Chris finds out that the two will never be reunited. Annie committed suicide – she’s in hell, and there’s no coming back from hell. But Chris tries anyway, because heaven isn’t heaven without her.

What Dreams May Come is preachy even if you believe in this stuff, and if you don’t, well, it’s a hard message to swallow. We never get a glimpse of God yet we’re left wondering what kind of deity would kill all of Annie’s loved ones – her husband and both her children, in two separate accidents – and then judge her when the pain is just too much. It seems monstrous and unfair and is even harder to watch in light of Robin Williams’ own suicide.

PIX-1-WhatDreamsMayCome_1 But visually – well, even now, 20 years on, it’s unlike anything you’ve seen. While the heaven-scapes are vivid and sometimes downright magical, it may be the visions of hell that haunt you. Robin Williams tiptoes through a carpet of faces – anguished people buried up to their necks, barely more than the holes necessary for breathing left exposed. The faces are pale and full of yearning. It’s awful – and it’s really awful when there’s nowhere for him to walk but over them.

Colours can be quite dominant – a blue tree a sad link to Chris’s past, the bright yellow of an eternal sunset, the red flames of hell. What Dreams May Come was one of only a few films shot on Fuji Velvia (RVM) film stock. Velvia is a type of film used most frequently for still photography of landscapes and other subjects because of its very high color saturation. It is only rarely employed for cinematography, usually when special effects are required – and boy were they! But these shocks of colour always mean something, whether in the afterlife, of simply through a flashback.

The “painted world” sequence is glorious. By building upon computer software developed by technical advisor Pierre Jasmin, a team devised a method of applying paint strokes to moving images captured on film so portions of the movie look like a three-dimensional moving painting. There are brush strokes that looks like you could reach out and touch them – and your hands would come away wet if you did. Live-action scenes were turned into living paintings with the optical flow technique, by which you track every single pixel in a moving image – in the end, it amounts to a layering of perhaps 10 different depths onto one image. See below for a comparison, before and after the effect is added to a scene:

This film was both breath-taking and ground-breaking; many of the programs used had to be written specifically for the film. One of the most moving images is of a particular tree that almost serves as a connection between the soul mates, though one is living and the other dead.

Rendered using L-System software, a program for defining the algorithmic development of plants and branching structures, the tree was designed with thousands of branches and 500,000 leaves, all of which are blown off and scattered in the wind. It is spectacular and heart breaking to see.

What Dreams May Come won the 1999 Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

The Kids Are All Right

2 Replies

First of all, of course the kids are fine. Kids are resilient, not that having two loving parents has ever been a problem in the history of the world.

But it’s the parents we should be keeping our eyes on. Nic and Jules have been together a long, long time – since Nic (Annette Bening) treated Jules (Julianne Moore) in the ER for a sex injury. And that’s how their coupling goes: Nic is the serious, perhaps even controlling one, while Jules is free-spirited. In their years together, each has given birth using the same unknown sperm donor. Nic gave birth to Joni (Mia Wasikowska), who really takes after her (biological) mother, while Jules gave birth to Laser (Josh Hutcherson), who mostly takes after his. With Joni about to depart for college, Laser talks her in to searching for their biological father, the sperm donor. Enter Paul (Mark Ruffalo).

Now, Nic’s and Jules’ relationship has been stale for a while. Jules is in the middle of MV5BMTY2MDU4Mzg3N15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMjQyNDk1Mw@@._V1_SX1759_CR0,0,1759,999_AL_ starting up yet another business (landscape design) and Nic is barely tolerating the effort. But Paul’s arrival is completely destabilizing. Not only is their daughter moving away, they also feel like they’re losing their kids to a new, cool parent who has never had to discipline them or hurt their feelings. When Jules goes to work for Paul, it’s kind of the last straw. No wait: when Jules sleeps with Paul, that’s the very last straw.

Like any marriage,theirs has highs and lows. There are no histrionics; Nic is too staid, too reserved, too in control of her own emotions. Everyone is very, very sorry. So this is not about the drama, this is about who they are now, as people, as a couple. Julianne Moore and Annette Bening are such excellent actors that they can convey a 20 year marriage with an ease between the two of them that feels real and also effortless. Bening gets to show real range here, though her character plays things a little close to the chest. Moore is luminous as Jules and seems to really enjoy the freedom of playing someone so open and available.

Director Lisa Cholodenko is excellent at showing you a slice of life and making you feel like you’ve had the whole cake. An exceptional ensemble comes together to give this film emotional resonance. The couple is going through their own unique problems but their struggles of love, commitment, friendship, and family – those are universal. And in The Kids Are All Right, they’re memorably, endearingly executed.

A Witches’ Ball

2 Replies

Little Beatrix, age 12, goes to witching school. It’s like whatever the Harry Potter school is called, only without proper special effects, so the magic is mostly just stuff they can get away with rolling backward. It would be embarrassing if anyone in the film had a sense of shame.

Beatrix is in fact about to “become full witch” which does not involve a witch period as I first suspected. It means she passed her final exam (she made a dead rose come back to life) and will join her fellow new witches at a graduation ceremony just for MV5BZWI0OTczMTItNzFlNy00MjIwLThjYzMtNTIxODQ2ZDQ0N2Q3XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjI4Mzg5OTg@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,1497,1000_AL_ them – the 642nd annual Witches’ Ball, on Halloween night. She’ll graduate alongside her mother, who, being a non-witch, has just converted, and the bitchy witch who’s been bullying her at school for not being “pure blooded” enough or some such bullshit. Anyway, as class valedictorian, Beatrix receives her crystal ball ahead of the ceremony, for inspiration. And she immediately breaks it. Well, bitchy, witchy Jasmine does, but it amounts to Beatrix being in big trouble – possibly barred from witchery forever. So she enlists the help of a talking pumpkin (voiced by Weird Al) and her enchanted pet rat (voiced by NSYNC’s Joey Fatone) to solve an excessively lame set of riddles that will somehow mend her broken ball.

Even for a knock-off, made for TV (I’m assuming) kids’ witch movie, A Witches’ Ball is excessively mediocre. There are no production values to speak of, so instead I’ll just list some incontrovertible facts. The quest feels like an episode of Dora The Explorer. There’s a talent show whose sole existence is to provide an excuse for a wand-themed rap. The magic comes and goes at someone else’s convenience (definitely not mine). There’s a pop song that sounds dangerously like copyright infringement (Girls Just Wanna Rip Off Other Girls?). There’s an inexplicable adult-wide blind-spot where no grownup can identify bullying when it happens right in front of them. And perhaps most egregiously, there’s a lisp. I don’t know when we decided as a culture that no cute kid was complete without an inability to pronounce the letter R. I find it particularly offensive when a kid is forced to pretend to have a lisp. This kid is 12 years old – that’s not a cute lisp, that’s a speech impediment. Fake lisps are unforgivable.

Anyway, I frankly cannot fathom how you’re managing to celebrate Halloween without this movie in your life. Obviously.

Bend It Like Beckham

7 Replies

Jesminder, aka Jess, a good Indian-English girl and Sikh, defies her traditional parents and secretly joins a girls’ football team. There she meets her new BFF Jules and together they chase their common dream of moving to America to lay professional soccer.

Jules’ (Keira Knightley) mother is not too pleased to have a tomboy for a daughter, and she’s horrified to think Jules may be one of those lesbians (“All I’m saying is, there’s a reason why Sporty Spice is the only one without a fella!”) but it’s Jess who suffers the most from her parents’ expectations. She gets cultural, religious, and filial guilt and shame heaped upon her – her soccer skills even threaten her sister’s marriage, somehow.

tumblr_oisvumHTWr1u495o7o1_500

In 2002, this was a fun movie about female friendship and gender stereotypes. ‘A 2018 re-watch is not particularly kind to it. It feels dated. Very dated. Which is great, obviously. Even as we burn in our collective dumpster fire, at least we can look back to the cultural touchstone that is Bend It Like Beckham with just a touch of smugness that we no longer say things like “Mother, just because I wear trakkies and play sport does not make me a lesbian!” and (white man to Indian woman who was just called a Paki) “Jess, I’m Irish. Of course I understand what that feels like.” If you wondered what those sounds were the other night, that was me, winning the world cup in groaning.

I still don’t know what it means to “bend it” like Beckham but I’ve been imagining that he has a crooked penis. This was the movie that introduced American audiences to Keira Knightley, and I didn’t find her completely awful yet. Parminda Nagra was the real stand-out, as was the man who played her father, Anupam Kher, an illustrious and dashing Indian film star. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is even creepier than I remembered. Like, unmanageably, unforgivably, career-killingly (you’d think) creepy. I don’t want him in the same movie as anyone’s juicy, juicy mangoes. He’s nearly as terrible as the 00’s club wear these ladies are sporting. It’s like a fashion show of my biggest regrets.

Laters!

Tim’s Vermeer

3 Replies

Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch painted from the 1600s. He was only moderately successful in life. He painted mostly domestic interiors – in fact, mostly the same two rooms of a house, with the same furniture, and women inside them. Years after his death he was rediscovered and renowned for the astonishing use of light in his paintings. His great masterpiece is Girl With A Pearl Earring.

Tim Jenison is a very successful inventor and engineer – he worked in computer graphics and 3D modelling software. He’s also an art enthusiast who fell in love with Vermeer and traveled the world to stalk his artwork. And he came up with an interesting theory: that Johannes Vermeer mastered light by using the technology MagMag-Spring14-Film-TimsVermeer_2 available to him at the time. What’s that, you ask? And I’m glad you did. It’s astonishingly simple: a mirror. A fucking mirror. It becomes possible to project a living image directly onto a canvas and to match colour and light exactly. Exactly! It’s astonishing to see Jenison whip up an oil painting using this technique. So Jenison, who has a whole lot of money, decides to reconstruct one of Vermeer’s most-used rooms to see if you can reproduce one of his paintings. And Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller), a personal friend of his, becomes his documentarian.

Film critics love this movie, calling it entertaining, fascinating, and profound. And indeed, it is compelling to watch a millionaire and his latest obsession; the lengths he’ll go to, the time he’ll devote to simply testing out a theory when he doesn’t even have a horse in the race. Art critics, however, are less enamoured with the film, which makes sense. Jenison is, after all, sticking it art world. He’s taking talent and genius off the table and claiming that, given the right tools, anyone could reproduce a masterpiece. And while that’s heartening for those of us lacking in the talent department, I’m guessing it stings quite a bit for those trying to follow a calling, or make a livelihood out of it.

Possibly because I am not myself an artist, I don’t really feel like it takes anything away from Vermeer even if he did use technology. Is it less impressive that we landed on the moon because we used technology? Of course not. So maybe Vermeer was less an artist-genius and more of a genius-genius. Good for him. Good for figuring it out, for developing techniques that allowed him to paint light years beyond what anyone else was doing, then or now. Good for him for making beautiful, impactful, lasting artwork. And no one is saying this method is easy, or any easier, than any other kind of painting. It just allows for camera-like accuracy. The bottom line hasn’t changed, we’ve just maybe discovered that Vermeer was even more interesting than we thought.

Monster

4 Replies

This movie came out in 2003. I bought the DVD and watched it once and never again – until now. Fifteen years later, it’s as rough as I remembered.

Aileen “Lee” Wuornos is a hooker past her prime. She meets Selby at a bar one night and it’s the oddest case of love at first sight. Lee (Charlize Theron) is smitten, and self-centered Selby (Christina Ricci) loves the attention she lavishes upon her.

Anyway, girlfriends are expensive. Pretty soon Aileen has to start working the highways again. One night, a trick goes wrong. Not that they’re ever right, but more wrong than usual. A john drives her int the woods and beats her unconscious before waking her back up with sodomy. Oh god. I can’t believe I just described that scene so flippantly! It’s HORRIFYING and I’m traumatized and I’m coping by being weirdly light hearted about it. Anyway, Aileen is in a bad way, but what he doesn’t know and she does is that she’s armed. She manages to to break away just long enough to shoot (and kill) him.

Is it weird to describe murder as empowering? Aileen is unsuitable for any other kind of work and though she’d like to quit prostitution, she and Selby can’t quite partying, so it’s back to working truck stops, only this time she only uses sex as the bait, and then murders them for cash and cars. This becomes another one of her addictions.

Aileen Wuornos is a real-life serial murderer. A lot has already been said about Charlize Theron’s physical transformation to play her, so I’m going to concentrate instead on what an interesting character she is. I mean, there’s no denying that Aileen herself is a victim. She even convinces herself it’s a justification for her increasing blood lust. What she does is undeniably wrong but society had already left her in the dust. Where, exactly, was Aileen’s place? That’s what earned Charlize her Oscar. She didn’t try to excuse away her crimes, but she did find empathy for her. Theron is intense as hell in this movie. Her eyes shoot laser beams with such focus you’d think her life depended on it – and in fact, for Aileen, it did. A moment’s inattention could have cost her her life. But otherwise she’s not at home in her body. Theron prowls as Aileen, her shoulders curling, discomfort in her very posture. Her performance is one for the ages.

Director Patty Jenkins treats Aileen with compassion, and she might be the first to do so. Monster doesn’t feel exploitative. Aileen might have had the morals beaten out of her, but we haven’t, and Jenkins’ framing of her always keeps this in mind. The first time Aileen kills, it’s in self defense. Subsequently though, she kills for every time a man has done her dirty, and that’s a very long list. When a tiny sliver of redemption offers itself, Aileen is unequipped to take it. But Jenkins refuses to objectify her; she treats her humanely, which is possibly more than Wuernos ever got in life.

A Star Is Born (1937)

4 Replies

1937: Janet Gaynor & Fredric March

Esther, a debatably young woman dreams of Hollywood and accepts money from her doting Granny to make the move. Unfortunately, thousands of Grannies appear MV5BMTg5OTQ3ODgyOF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODQyNjQ5Ng@@._V1_ to be financing thousands of ingenues, and Hollywood is crawling with unemployed actresses. Esther is nearly down to her last dollar when she meets Norman Maine, a famous film star who eyes her both romantically and professionally. But as they fall in love and he helps her with her career, his own takes hit after hit. An unreliable alcoholic, Norman seems to have used up all the public’s good will.

Although a title card firmly denies this, it has been speculated that the story was inspired by the real-life marriage of Barbara Stanwyck and her first husband, Frank Fay. The character of Norman Maine is thought to be based on several real actors, including John Barrymore, John Gilbert, and John Bowers, who drowned off Malibu during the film’s production. This was the first all-colour film nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, and the first movie in Technicolor to be a critical and box office success. The muted colour palette helped, and so did the repeated jabs at the Hollywood machine. It was funny, and it cleverly avoided excessive melodrama. Esther’s ascent contrasts so starkly against Norman’s descent because the two are clearly in love, but it’s not enough to insulate them against the cruelties of Tinseltown. A true cautionary tale – I just wish Esther got to truly be the star in A Star Is Born, and that pesky Norman took more of a backseat.

As you know, this movie has been remade 3 more times – in the 50s, starring Judy Garland, and in the 70s, starring Barbara Streisand, and right now, starring Lady Gaga, in Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut. I find it a little ludicrous to cast the world’s biggest pop star as an unknown, and an “unattractive” one at that. When Babs did it, it meant something. Her beauty was unconventional, her ethnicity meant that she could have been overlooked. But her talented and fortitude shone through. Lady Gaga has already played the Super Bowl…so, let’s just say she’s a little harder sell. Even so, it’s getting rave reviews, and it’s headed for TIFF, where the hungry audiences will judge for themselves.

We Need To Talk About Kevin

8 Replies

Actually, we need to talk about Lynne Ramsay.

When a twisted movie comes out of the mind of Quentin Tarantino, we look at him and think – yeah, that makes sense. But Lynne Ramsay? You wouldn’t see it coming. But she does make these amazingly dark, fucked up films. And more often than not, she sticks kids into these movies, which makes them feel even bleaker, even blacker. She likes to make a film that is completely hers, and if she’s not happy, she walks (as she did with The Lovely Bones, and Jane Got A Gun) . She’s fantastically outspoken and she’s not afraid to leave a project if she doesn’t feel comfortable signing her name to it.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is adapted from the shocking novel by Lionel Shriver. we-need-to-talk-about-kevin-image-2 Tilda Swinton plays Kevin’s mom, Eva. Eva always struggled to bond with Kevin, who cried incessantly around her but was rather sweet with others. Can a baby deliberately antagonize his own mother? As a child, Kevin finds ways to blackmail his mother into getting his way. When Eva and husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) have a second child, accidents escalate and Eva becomes fearful of Kevin while his father can always excuse his behaviour. This fundamental disagreement puts a strain on their marriage. As a teenager, Kevin (Ezra Miller) commits a massacre at his high school, murdering many students. Eva transforms her life to support him in prison.

This story is the most fantastic, uncomfortable episode of nature vs nurture that we’ve ever seen. Was Kevin born “bad”? How early can we detect evidence of psychopathy? How early can a baby pick up on his mother’s ambivalence?

As his mother, Tilda Swinton steals the show. Of course, the events are her own recollections, offered in retrospect, so she’s the mother of all unreliable narrators. But is she wrong? Despite its title, this isn’t really about Kevin, it’s about his mother. She’s never been perfect, sometimes openly hostile, and we experience the film through her broken mind. Swinton is volcanic – so much bubbling underneath, perhaps ready to blow. It is criminal that she didn’t get an Oscar nomination. That she didn’t get the win.

But the most interesting and surprising thing about the film is that Ramsay takes our darkest society impulse – a child slaughtering other children, and ultimately marries it with themes of redemption. Just whose redemption is perhaps unclear as nothing is overtly stated. Kevin is failed by the system and possibly by his parents. Eva knew what was coming and failed to do anything about it. The film is so troubling it veers into straight-up horror at times, and Ramsay is always there, confrontational, unblinking. Her close-ups dare you to look away.

Postcards From the Edge

9 Replies

Director Mike Nichols helps Carrie Fisher brings her best-selling confessional novel to the big screen. Based on her own life (her mother is the fabulous Debbie Reynolds), Carrie writes about a middle-aged troubled movie star (another Oscar-nominated performance by Meryl Streep) who survives rehab only to be relegated to house-arrest with her overbearing, scene-stealing Hollywood-icon mother (Shirley MacLaine).

The thinly veiled rivalry between mother and daughter makes for some pretty unsettling confrontations. Fisher and Nichols are both Hollywood elite themselves, which means there’s plenty of in-jokes and winks to paper over the lack of depth in the plot. There are no real insights into addictions or family drama here, but there’s an emotional wallop that just may get you, if the sight of MacLaine’s shapely legs in a slitted red dress don’t get you first.

Melodrama has never looked so good: cinematographer Michael Ballhous does career-defining work here, while Nichols does his usual smug, detached thing over in the corner. Do either of these things save it from the inevitable clichés? Not really, but you’re more disposed to forgiving them.

If you can look past the scandal-free safety of the film, there’s a secondary cast to make up the difference: Dennis Quaid as the sleazy boyfriend, Gene Hackman as her demanding director, Richard Dreyfus as her sensitive doctor, and was that Annette Bening I saw? IMDB says you bet your balls it was! She’s whoring it up with cynicism and wit.

If you were a fan of the book, you’ll notice the film has lost its acerbic edge. It’s all about the comedy here, and even an almost-lethal trip to the ER for a good old-fashioned stomach-pumping can’t quell the chuckles. MacLaine and Streep shine through showbiz and show tunes, and if it’s a little shallow, it’s also a good dose of fun.