take shelter

Take Shelter by writer / director Jeff Nichols is a cinematic attempt at capturing these uneasy American times by focusing on the mental deterioration (or just psychic apocalyptic visions?) of a blue collar Ohio construction worker named Curtis (played by Michael Shannon).  His wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) has a small needlework business.  Both are trying to make ends meet and are caring for their young hearing impaired daughter (Tova Stewart).  Curtis becomes increasingly paranoid from violent, unsettling dreams and hallucinations which leads him to curious decisions like taking out a lavish bank loan to build a fallout shelter in the backyard.  Because his mother (Kathy Baker) suffered from schizophrenia, Curtis is worried this may be happening to him as well.  The movie clumsily juggles between being a serious movie about mental illness and an almost-horror movie (CGI flocks of birds) about paranoia of fantastical doom.

While Nichols shows some visual flair, the film is a study in bland America.  The dream sequences are the best assets--including a great shot of a dripping-wet Chastain about to pick up a knife--but all of them become increasingly repetitive.  What ends up being the scariest aspects of the movie are the struggles of everyday life: insurance, gas prices, losing work.  They are reminders of what most of us have to go back to after leaving this picture.  Shannon is certainly believable but I felt a bit detached from his performance, especially in a calculated, overwrought meltdown scene.  Detached would describe Chastain's character who doesn't respond with much urgency to her husband's bizarre behavior.  Both are interesting actors and do the best they can with the stilted material.  In a minuscule part as a therapist, I found Lisa Gay Hamilton to be the most authentic and a breath of fresh air.  The film has some relation to Polanski's vivid Repulsion, Aronofksy's Black Swan and Steven Spielberg's epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind where an every man goes to great, odd lengths to get to the bottom of his obsessive visions.  And while there's much to admire with what Nichols can do on a small budget, for a two hour film about dread, it doesn't offer much thrill.  There is little going on with the soundtrack (the sparse score is derivative) and it arrives at a frustratingly weak conclusion. Disappointingly it ends up being too restrained, an overlong Twilight Zone episode, almost Shyamalan-lite.

moneyball

I like that Moneyball is an unorthodox sports movie about an unorthodox way to assemble a team.  Both have mixed results, but in the end, are a success.  Brad Pitt inhabits washed-up major leaguer Billy Beane who runs the scrappy Oakland A's.  When the team loses to the multi-million Yankees, and a few of its top players, Beane decides to make a risky move--hiring brainy Yale-grad Peter Brand (Jonah Hill).  Beane and Brand build a new roster based not on the usual criteria but upon the statistics of player behavior.

Baseball fans and readers of Michael Lewis's Moneyball may know what happens along the way, but it was a particular thrill for me not to know, so I won't spoil it.  The highs and lows are all masterfully handled by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zallian's script, a good cast, and director Bennett Miller (Capote).  Miller's Capote was a somber, appropriately cold, almost clinical study of a writer's ethics.  It's hard to believe that the same director made this warm, uplifting movie.  Both films show Miller's elegant craftsmanship, an ability to spotlight good performers, and a knack for the biopic.  Sorkin's dialogue is appropriately less grandstanding than the computer geek banter in The Social Network but still has lots of funny moments (David Justice complaining over paying for soda is one of them). Interestingly enough, the brainiest characters, Brand, is also one of the quietest.  The film is less snappy too, with a simpler structure and almost languid pace.  In one of his most charismatic performances, Brad Pitt displays his character's bouts of frustration, isolationism (he barely tunes into watch or listen to the games), and his charm.  I've gotten tired of Hill's doe-eyed pothead shtick but here Hill is finally given a character that shows he can be an insightful, emotional human being. Aided by a script that knows what to do with them, the two make a memorable team.  The rest of the cast is believable including Philip Seymour Hoffman as the coach, Stephen Bishop as an aging but tough Justice and Chris Pratt--stunned and nervous at being one of the new picks.  Even if the movie runs long and even if I found Beane's daughter's song is a little too cloyingly perfect, the movie is one of the more interesting and compelling sports movies this non sports fan can think of.

-Jeffery Berg

drive

The title and marketing campaign for Drive as a rousing action flick may be misleading.  I hardly remember the car chases (for those looking for that, Bullitt or Fast and the Furious might be a better watch) but the mesmerizing, gloomy throb of director Nicolas Winding Refn's film is unforgettable.  Perhaps because I'm gay I relished all the idiosyncratic details: Ryan Gosling's shiny satin synthetic coat is emblazoned with a scorpion and like Tippi Hedren's mint green suit skirt in The Birds, it becomes more and more encrusted with gore as the film wears on. I related too to that shimmery soundtrack of French electropop. And I felt a sort of joy looking at that Risky Business-inspired hot pink cursive font in the main titles, backed by Kavinsky's pulsing "Nightcall" (appropriate to the storyline: the male voice in the song has a machine-like vocoder in a minor key, the female voice is softly reverbed in the major).

Ryan Gosling plays an unnamed character (dubbed in many reviews as The Driver), a stunt driver for Hollywood action flicks who also moonlights as a getaway driver.  Carey Mulligan plays his neighbor and sudden love interest.  Her husband (Oscar Isaac) is about to get out of jail and reunite with her and their young son (non-annoying child actor Kaden Leos).  Gosling soon gets embroiled into a botched heist and an East Coast mob.

Handsome, stoic, deep-voiced Gosling usually oozes with sympathy and charm even when he's playing empty losers.  This is a perfect role for him and his laconic sensuality. His glum-eyed machoness is both physical (those big biceps and shoulders) and also emotional.  I love the way he is able to display nervousness--the way he sweetly breaks when he accepts a glass of water from Mulligan and the way he sweats and shakes with both fear and menacing determination wielding a hammer above a victim's head.  Besides Gosling, Refn provides a sort of memorable ragtag cast. Albert Brooks, a much missed presence in film, is an unlikely slimeball who flourishes with persuasion and sharp objects.  Ron Perlman's Jewish mobster is a blatant caricature made somewhat sad (he notes at one point that his family still treats him like a child).  The scenes with Mad Men's busty Christina Hendricks are so tensely directed, I wasn't too distracted by the fact that she's a de-glammed Joan (though her casting seems to be a little bit of a part of the film's kitsch).  Only Mulligan seems a little out of sorts--too sweet and pretty for her Denny's uniform (she still hasn't been cast right since her glowing performance in An Education) but she's able to believably carry the emotions of her character.

Refn's work is often stunningly tense (and gory... violence seems so sanitized by CGI in American films these days that the comic gore here is often shocking).  The gore and suspense saves it from being slick retro cheese.  Refn's Drive has a myriad of influences from the wandering, impotent male action pictures of the 70s to the dirges of John Carpenter and Michael Mann to Steven Soderbergh (Soderbergh's music collaborator Cliff Martinez provides the eerie score). And often Refn defies expectations (a final showdown is not as climatic as one would think... an operatic murder of a more minor character on a beach under the sweep of a lighthouse is more arresting).  The script by Iranian scribe Hossein Amini (who penned the 1997 adaptation of The Wings of the Dove) is pretty spare, never Tarantino chatty.  Before those divine main titles, the film opens in a stunner of a nighttime getaway sequence that doesn't have much dialogue at all except for background chatter (the clashing voices of a police scanner and a radio broadcast of a Dodgers game).  The dialogue may be a bit bland for those who favor mouthier vigilante pictures like Taxi Driver.  Yet Refn's play with gloss, substance, silence and sound is some of what makes Drive so controlled and so seductive.


-Jeffery Berg

catching up with some films of 2011

Trust - Consider me surprised that David Schwimmer has directed such a deft drama.  The plot is a bit Lifetime-melodrama: 14-young girl Annie (well-acted by Liana Liberato) becomes victim of a sexual predator from the net.  Family breaks down and father (Clive Owen) becomes more and more manically obsessed with revenge while mother (the always naturally good Catherine Keener) tries her best to connect with her distraught daughter.  The best aspects of the film--including Liberato's portrayal, the ambivalent nature of Annie's hookup, the bland, matter-of-fact presentation of her predator--are deeply unnerving.  Too often though, the script is a bit clunky; Owen's psychological breakdown and his job as a developer of provocative tween ads are a bit contrived.  Schwimmer seems to pay homage to one of cinema's best family dramas--Robert Redford's Ordinary People.  Both are set in wealthy Chicago suburbs, have sympathetic counselors at the helm (here, Viola Davis in another thinly-sketched part that doesn't demand enough of her skills as an actor), show the effects of tragedy on a family in low-key style, and end with fathers crying and coming to terms in cold backyards.  Trust is not nearly as complex of a jolt as Redford's film but it's still an unsettling, often compelling cautionary tale.

We Were Here - David Weissman & Bill Weber's (The Cockettes) quietly elegiac documentary traces the devastation of AIDS in the San Franciscan gay community in the 1980s and 90s.  The film's sensitive interviews of five people who survived a terrible era are powerful.  By focusing on such a small group of individuals and the details and accounts of their lives (a poster with pictures warning of a new "gay cancer," wrenching drug trials, a flower man's witnessing of death and trauma of those around him) makes the film an arresting and important testament.

Hanna - Joe Wright's (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement) Hanna is a bit of thin-skinned schlock but it's also an entertaining tale of Finnish-bred assassin (Saoirse Ronan) on the run from wicked witch agent (Cate Blanchett).  Reminiscent of Firestarter (another film with another wickedly powerful blonde girl on the lam), the movie owes much of its atmosphere and fun to its offbeat European settings, the pulsating Giorgio Moroder-inspired Chemical Brothers score and a campy Blanchett.

teen night

About as deep as twee-pop, The Myth of the American Sleepover follows an array of suburban Michigan teens navigating crushes, parties, and first kisses.  Even if the film lacked an emotional payoff and reminded me too often of American Eagle ads, in his debut, David Robert Mitchell impressively blends multiple story lines together and confidently establishes a quietly dreamy, late-summer mood.  The spare dialogue and earnest, awkward performances (especially an expressive Claire Sloma as a short-haired, pierced lipped girl with a lifeguard longing) work well.  If the experience of Sofia Coppola's Somewhere and Marie Antoinette was about the claustrophobia of the privileged, Mitchell's Myth is a much deeper meditation on the claustrophobia of teenagerdom and the difficulty to communicate desire.  Mitchell aptly makes small, uncomplicated moments seem grand (Sloma's decision over kissing her lifeguard on a water slide is one of the most poignant scenes). The film's most interesting character, and perhaps the easiest one for adult audiences to relate to, is an older brother of one of the teens who suddenly becomes obsessed with linking up with younger twins from his high school theater glory days.  The idea that "he can't have both" is a nicely drawn conceit.

There is something wistful about the movie and the way it left me, especially since it doesn't really seem to pertain to today's Facebook, text and chat obsessed culture (diaries, letters, and writing phone numbers on hands, arms, and scraps of paper are all largely symbolic motifs).  I was often perturbed by the restless, long haired girls in the row in front of me, intermittently in the glow of their cell phones but they added to the viewing by contrasting what this film pines for.

Interview with the film's director David Robert Mitchell in Black Book

nightmares

After watching Body Bags, Jerome and I partook in another anthology horror schlock-fest Nightmares.

Nightmares is a quartet of blissfully 80s morality tales (don't smoke, don't play too many video games, don't lose faith in God and if you're married, learn to get along).  Cristina Raines features in the first entry with a late night Marlboro-craving that outweighs the potential of getting nabbed in the California hills by an escaped mental patient.  The moonlit atmosphere is well-wrought (spooky imagery of her white station wagon on desolate streets) but the twist is laughable and abrupt.



A pre-Breakfast Club Emilio Estevez makes a believable video game addict in "Bishop of Battle."  There's an unnecessary but amusing opening where bandanna (and hair net)-donning tough guys make bets over winning Pleiades. Estevez takes a bus to Fox Hills Mall and becomes obsessed with winning Bishop of Battle (and out-muscling its taunting neon green villain).  He ends up breaking into the arcade after hours and dueling it out virtual reality style... the results are fairly predictable.

Perhaps the best and most complex story, "The Benediction", follows a priest in a Lilies of the Field-like setting who has lost his faith and is attacked by a black pick up truck (think Duel, Christine, and 1977's The Car).  That Satan is embodied by this truck, with its glinting roof lights, is somewhat unsettling.

Only wide-eyed Veronica Cartwright can muster such superlative horrified reactions as she plays a housewife in a rat-infested house in "Night of the Rat."  This entry is derivative of Of Unknown Origin, but not as dark, with a flimsy conclusion that endorses filial bonds.

Too intense for network TV (though these standards are less strict now), Nightmares was given a Universal Studios release.  Overall the production values are pretty shoddy (though the Xanadu-like visual effects in the arcade battle was reportedly costly) and the tales are fairly unoriginal, but all in all, this is a fun, pretty tame anthology horror flick.

body bags

Last month Karen G. listed some retro horror favorites. One of them, From A Whisper to A Scream is an entertaining 80s anthology film.  I'm into those now, so while perusing World of Video, my friend Jerome recommended Body Bags.  We rented it on VHS and had a lot of jump scares and laughs.

In the first tale, simply titled "The Gas Station,"  Alex Datcher plays a newly employed attendant on an unsettling night shift.  The finale is a bit over-the-top but the believable, low-key atmosphere (similar to what John Carpenter did best with Halloween) delivers creepy goods.

Carpenter is less successful in the cheesy Rogaine-gone-wrong "Hair" which features one odd cast: Stacy Keach, Sheena Easton, Debbie Harry, and Burgess Meredith.  There's a misplaced keyboard jazz demo score, clunky dialogue, and mood-killer lighting.  But the morbid special effects, wacky, Twilight Zone-inspired story and that bizarre cast make it fun.

Tobe Hooper plays it pretty straight "Eye" which has mustached Mark Hamill as a baseball player who gets unfortunate eye surgery after a car wreck.  Hooper's intense flashbacks are the tale's most effective moments.  A de-glammed Twiggy as the concerned wife is pretty amusing. There are plenty of optical allusions to the Bible.

In "The Morgue," the film's bookend segments, Carpenter is loose with lots of unfunny wisecracks about cadavers.  It's kind of sad that this never did get the Showtime series it planned to have (a would-be relative of HBO's Tales from the Crypt).  I'm so grateful to Jerome for finding this hilarious little made-for-cable horror gem.

the person behind the camera

Mike Mills' (Thumbsucker) background as a graphic and commercial artist shapes the visual wonder in his brilliantly crafted and emotionally deft new film Beginners. In some lovely moments, strung along with Ewan McGregor's (one of his most sensitive and best performances) voice-over, Mills collages images in RedOne: a trash bag against a black background, a soon-to-be-cancelled credit card (the banal debris of death oft-ignored in movies), or a quarter, or the colors of the rainbow flag, or magazine ads ("this is what sadness looked like" in a particular year). It isn't necessarily important to know Mills's background, but it does add an interesting layer to the film. "This filmmaking style is really me," he notes, "I went to art school, not film school, so I have that language. I think like that, but you don’t have the nerve to ask to do it in a feature. I do think I was in a life crisis when I wrote the film. My second parent had just died, I was 38 years old. I wasn’t at all sure that the world would let me make this film. But it’s the film I’ve always dreamed of making. I put all the elements of my life into the film." Beginners is knowingly cinematic (the winningly adorable terrier in the film has subtitles), sometimes coy, but a very moving memory mood piece of starting over in many different ways.

Ewan McGregor is Oliver, an affable artist living in Los Angeles, grieving his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer in another flawless performance) who had shortly before his death, came out of the closet. At a costume party (the West Coast version of the sort of soiree upper class Brooklyn brownstone artist types might throw... Mills is married to Miranda July after all), decked out as Freud, Oliver meets Anna (the gorgeous, indelible Melanie Laurent who proves her breakthrough turn in Inglourious Basterds was no fluke) in Chaplin drag. Anna, unable to speak due to laryngitis, charmingly and movingly flirts with Oliver via notepad. The film moves back and forth through this budding romance and Oliver's memories of his father's last days. Mills is adept and confident in not changing film stock--something that keeps the unusual structure of the film kinetic and keenly alive. Mills, Plummer and McGregor's exquisitely subtle reactions are particularly poignant in showing Hal's earnest and exhilarating journey as a newly out man in his seventies. Hal dates a younger man (Gordon Visnjic, who does his best with one of the film's weaker characters), binge-shops at Staples and bookstores, stuffs envelopes for a gay congressman, has movie nights with gay friends (to revel in a revolution he missed out on by watching of all appropriately earnest things, The Times of Harvey Milk), and dons a dated, Boys in the Band kind of fashion: scarves, a purple sweater (Oliver continuously mixes up what clothes were worn in the important life-changing moments). Both Hal and Anna remind Oliver of his late mother. Played wonderfully by Mary Page Keller, the strength, suffering and intelligence of Oliver's mother comes through in some of the films most marvelous moments (the droll and quirky ways she behaves in an art museum, for instance).

Movies often lose the person behind it: the facade of cinema is literally pointed out to us when Anna and Oliver, in their favorite used bookstore haunt, flip through the unhappy endings of Hollywood's glamorous legends. The story of Beginners seems like it could exist nowhere else but Los Angeles (the film's detour to New York is abruptly thwarted just to start anew again in California) and it realizes that closeted men can dwell in cosmopolitan areas too (a cinematic f-you to some people who griped that Brokeback Mountain's Ennis and Jack would have been happily-ever-after had they just moved to San Francisco). Much credit goes to the remarkable editing by Olivier Bugge Coutté and the beautiful photography by Kaspen Tuxen. The score and the carefully chosen piano rags give the film a wistful and timeless Woody Allen patina. The nonlinear fashion may prove a bit of a strain for audiences and the enormous emotional depth of Plummer's performance may overshadow the subtleties of those around him. I am happy though to see a film that doesn't lose the person behind it: Mills and his cast and crew have created a stirring elegy.

-Jeffery Berg

NPR interview with Mike Mills.

Musical inspirations for Beginners.