souljoel

PBS, Ray Suarez, Chris Baker and Me

Chris Baker, director of executive communications for PBS, has also been blogging his ass off over on pbs.com. (Betty Alvarez is another excellent blogger over there.) His Engage Blog is totally awesome, very smart and informative and cool. They have a feature called Five Good Questions which I've been trying to participate in as much as possible. Each week they have a different guest who answers reader questions. The line-up is pretty great and the current Five Good Answers are from The NewsHour senior correspondent Ray Suarez, one of their best journalists. You can read his answer to my question and others here:

PBS Engage Blog

Keep up the great work, Chris!

MS .45

                                                                  

Abel Ferrara's Ms .45 is excellent. Just read about it in the Times this week, thought I'd give it a shot, and it is freaking excellent. Zoe Lund plays a mute fashion industry worker named Thana, toiling away sewing buttons and ironing skirts for a sporadically tyrannical designer in NYC. At the beginning of the film she is raped while walking home from work. She stumbles home only to find a burglar lurking in her apartment ... who also rapes her. She manages to dispatch him though (with an iron!), but she's apparently snapped. She drags him to her bathtub, chops him up into manageable pieces, wraps them in garbage bags and loads them into her fridge. She takes the rapist's .45 handgun and so begins a vigilante mission across New York, as she slays any dude who shows the tiniest bit of disrespect to her or any other woman in her field of vision.

I think what sets this apart from lesser chick revenge flicks (aside from the excellent casting of the beautiful and expressive Lund), is the device of Thana being a mute. This forces the director to find visual solutions for every scene. And the pace and look and editing of the movie are so tight and fast and concise that the story moves along with a sense of inevitable dread, giving it an air of the truly tragic and amplifying the horror at every beat.

I don't want to spoil anything here, so I'll just barely touch on the real clincher, a magnificent set piece near the end that takes place at a circus-like Halloween party for fashion insiders. It just gives you goose-bumps it's so incredible ... Just glorious film-making!

Pre-brunch

Drinking shandies with Brad (pictured) on the porch before we head to the Madison for brunch ... A lovely Sunday ritual!

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

                                                                              

This lovely, lovely movie is so refreshing, and I think it is the true "come-back" movie for Allen, even better than the startlingly good Match Point. It's easy-going, efficient, deceptively complex emotionally and intellectually. There is an underlying ennui to it, lurking beneath the sunny locales and breezy smiles of its protagonists. The principals are all fine, Johansson a little less so, but she plays almost more a type than a person. She is Cristina, half of the title best friend combo. Vicky is the rational, uptight one, Cristina the wild artistic one. When Bardem shows up with an indecent proposal for them both after an art show, the engaged-to-be-married Vicky is all against it, but Cristina jumps in head first and Cristina sort of tags along "to make sure Vicky doesn't get hurt". Even early on though we sense there is a passionate soul underneath Vicky's cool demeanor and soon enough the dashing Spanish artist indeed brings it out. As in Match Point, a moment of pure chance -- fate, if you like -- steps in and takes the story and its characters in a direction we might not have seen coming ...

The editing of this film just sings with a beautiful rhythm and a precision that's just breathtaking, not calling attention to itself but propelling the tale along at the brisk clip it achieves despite Allen taking his time in all the right places with some tonally exquisite conversation scenes in some of the prettiest vistas since Manhattan.

Highly, highly romantic and exciting and fun and sad. Andbytheway Penelope Cruz is fantastic and hilarious, too, didn't mean to leave her out!

The Hawk

That blurry thing on the lowest limb of the dogwood tree, just above the bird feeder, is a hawk. About thirty seconds after I snapped this pic he attacked a nest of birds in the bushes to the right. In our front yard. Scary. Brutal. Beautiful.

Encounters at the End of the World and Gonzo

Two newish docs screening in Memphis theaters right now are good but not great examples of the genre. Gonzo, the Hunter S. Thompson bio doc, falls prone to a common trap of bio docs: Just because the subject of your film is/ was a fascinating guy/ gal doesn't mean your doc will automatically be so. The first half of the film is peppy and entertaining enough, if rather predictable; but the latter half is a tad boring. There are MTV-style re-enactments of certain moments in the great journalist's life, sporadic readings of Thompson's work by real-life bud and on-screen avatar Johnny Depp. But these devices feel like icing on a cake that was taken out of the oven too soon. A little more research, a bit more delving into aspects of the good Doctor's life everyone isn't already familiar with would have gone a long way. And it is ALWAYS a mistake to try and achieve the chaotic brilliance of Thompson's writing in cinematic form ... unless you're Terry Gilliam of course.

Encounters at the End of the World is Werner Herzog at his best and worst. On the one hand, it is an expressionistic and highly subjective cinema-poem with gorgeous visuals, quirkily dark narration (almost in the vein of Mallick's Days of Heaven narration, voiced by a very pessimistic little girl), and subjects, both human and non-, which are as weird and interesting as Herzog himself. But on the other hand it sometimes rings a little hollow or false when we are shown yet ANOTHER pretty underwater (and ice) vista with MORE dissonant choral or string music to cue us to the fact of how weird and pretty and surreal the landscape is down in Antarctica. Like Gonzo, the flick feels just a hair half-baked. I was left with the impression that there was a great film here if only Herzog had delved a little deeper and edited himself a little more severely. It's good but there are moments when you feel he's kind of phoning this one in ...

3 great movies I've seen in the last 30 days

Reprise

There is a very specific and exquisite sort of suspense which propels Reprise forward toward its (anti-) climax. It's that uneasy-yet-delectable feeling of watching someone who's lost their marbles desperately trying keep it together. You watch the madness bubbling right behind their eyes as they traverse difficult social and emotional terrain, knowing they could snap and lash out at any moment, destroying others' lives or their own or both.

It is surely difficult to make a movie –– a visual medium -- about people who live their lives largely in the worlds of ideas and words. Writers, to be precise. But Joachim Trier, in his first film no less, pulls it off beautifully. The excellent performances of his leads are one big factor in this success. Another reason for this triumph is that he captures the youthful energy of his characters -- a vital component of this film -- within several crucial scenes and powerful images: intoxicated and ecstatic dancers at a party suddenly delight in the "snow" falling in the living room, feathers from a burst pillow being flung about by one bouncing partier; the unstable writer bicycling through bustling Oslo streets and closing his eyes (for nerve-wrackingly long periods of time) as he heads through intersections; the image of the same character treading water alone at the edge of the sea after his friends have all come ashore. These images and more keep the film from being too wordy, too literary, and make it a movie.

And Trier knows his movies. Reprise wears its influences on its sleeve. The (frequently unreliable) narration is a sardonic blend, Humbert Humbert meets Royal Tennenbaum. The editing evokes early Goddard or Soderberg, in his The Limey. The sound design is almost Lynchian, with industrial thrums and ominously incongruous noises bleeding over from one scene to the next, highlighting the fragile and potentially dangerous emotional states of our protagonists.

Reprise is essentially a coming of age tale, and the thing about these types of movies which is almost counterintuitive is this: for them to resonate with a lot of people, they have to tell a very specific story with very unique characters. If one tries to make the characters too broad, a film of this genre will fall flat on its face. In other words, it must be highly local to be highly universal. And Reprise delivers on this front ...

The Wackness

The Wackness is another coming of age tale, this one told with the help of lots of excellent hip-hop from the early nineties as opposed to the Norwegian punk and thrash metal in Reprise. Ben Kingsley is very funny. The photography of New York City and nearby Fire Island is lovely. And the story is elliptical but compelling, the meandering nature of the plot suiting the stoned characters to a "T". After all the hype this film has received none of this is surprising. What surprised me was the emotional resonance of the film. Wow. This is a good one. (Still at the Ridgeway, check it out.)

The Furies

This Anthony Mann western is recently available on DVD from the Criterion Collection. It is soooo weird and good. Barbara Stanwyck is incredible as the feisty daughter of rancher T.C. Jeffords (Walter Huston, in his last role), and it's hard to tell who she's more in love with, her dad (hmmm) or his ranch, "The Furies". Well, OK, it's the ranch. And she's willing to do anything it takes to make sure that ranch is hers when daddy meets his maker. This movie is "King Lear" meets Giant meets ... I don't know, some killer old film noir (of which you know Mann directed some of the best, including the awesome Raw Deal and Border Incident).  Really really fantastic.