Monday, November 09, 2009
Is research that hard?
By Edward Copeland
Whenever I complain about anachronisms or factual inaccuracies in a movie, some people think I shouldn't be taking the film in question so seriously. However, I can't help it. If a feature really has me under its spell, that kind of goof breaks it immediately and it's hard to recapture that spirit in the middle of the movie. Granted, Lymelife wasn't really wowing me anyway, but as the inaccuracies added up, it just added to my distaste for the film, despite its talented ensemble cast.
Before I start ranting about the anachronisms and inaccuracies, I feel it's best to talk about Lymelife itself. There's the oft-repeated Tolstoy quote about all happy families being the same but all unhappy families are different, but I swear movies, particularly indies, try their damnedest to put that author's truism to the test.
Lymelife is the directing debut of Derick Martini, who co-wrote the film with his brother Steven. Based loosely on his own experience, it stars Rory Culkin as 15-year-old Scott Bartlett, facing an array of growing pains in 1979 Long Island. His parents Mickey and Brenda (Alec Baldwin, Jill Hennessy) have a tense relationship, especially, as far as Scott knows, over Mickey's grand plan for a large housing community while Brenda yearns for their life back in Queens. Scott's older brother Jimmy (Kieran Culkin) is in the Army and about to be activated for an overseas engagement. At school, Scott is the victim of bullies and longs for Adrianna Bragg (Emma Roberts), who views him as nothing more than a friend (and who hasn't been there).
Adrianna's life isn't going much rosier. Her mom Melissa (Cynthia Nixon) is unhappy and the breadwinner of the home, secretly sleeping with Mickey since Adrianna's dad Charlie (Timothy Hutton) is unemployed because he's been diagnosed with Lyme disease. (On a personal note that rang true, he mentions that at one point in the diagnosis process, doctors thought he might have multiple sclerosis. Before I was diagnosed with M.S., they ruled out Lyme disease as a cause of my problems.) As a result, he spends much of his free time in the woods with a rifle stalking deers he blames for his fate, though he's got more problems than just his illness. If a gun is introduced in the first act...
The cast all performs more than ably, though at times Hennessy lays her New York accent on a bit too thick. Once again, it's truly amazing what good actors the younger members of the Culkin brood, particularly Kieran, have turned out to be given what a mugging ham their older brother Macaulay was in his heyday.
Now, back to the rant. According to the IMDb, Derick Martini was born in 1975 and Steven Martini was born in 1978, meaning the brothers were 4 and 1 in the year the film was set, made clear that it's 1979 by a brief TV shot of the taking of the U.S. hostages in Iran and in a collection of train tickets. Since the press notes say the story is semiautobiographical, why did Martini choose to make it a period piece and, more importantly, why not make certain he got the facts of the period right.
There are little things. Scott has a collection of Star Wars figures and at one point in a hybrid of Travis Bickle and Han Solo, is shooting a laser pistol at his mirror at "Lando." I played this back twice to make sure I wasn't mishearing Greedo, but no, he's calling out Lando, the character played by Billy Dee Williams in The Empire Strikes Back who wouldn't be introduced until May 1980.
Other anachronisms could be nitpicked, but it's a huge inaccuracy that just pulled me out of the picture. Scott's brother is being activated as part of the U.S. effort in the Falkland Islands war. Now, maybe many of you have forgotten that war, but it was between the British and Argentina, it took place in 1982 and the U.S. was not involved in it whatsoever.
Maybe the Martini brothers were too young to get the facts straight, but the movie had two executive producers, including Martin Scorsese, and six producers, including Alec Baldwin, who helped get Lymelife made. Why did none of these people, who could mentor these young filmmakers, step up and say, "This is a giant goof about the Falkland Islands war." I know a lot of them are old enough and smart enough to know the real story and since this was a low-budget indie, they weren't just there for a paycheck. So why shirk their responsibility to help these young men?
Having just finished watching the first two seasons of Mad Men, which is meticulous in its details of real events, down to the day, it comes off as laziness when you see such blatant indifference to the facts in a film such as Lymelife.
Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is ignorance and though many advise you to check your brains at the door for movies, that applies more to crap such as Transformers. When you're trying to be real, why be so careless as to allow things to break that reality?
Labels: 00s, Scorsese, Star Wars
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Friday, November 06, 2009
The harder they fall
By Edward Copeland
As documentary filmmaking became more and more interesting, and profitable, in the past few decades, the more old-fashioned "talking head" documentary tend to be a subject of mockery, but that is more or less the form director James Toback uses in his film, though he only has one head and it is a large and recognizable one: Mike Tyson, who is surprisingly self-critical and open as he gives a first-person recounting of his rise and fall in Tyson.
Toback tries to shake things up at time, almost to the point of distraction, with split screens which work fine when one shot is Tyson today and the other is other footage but which seems silly when the screen is filmed with three or four different shots of Tyson speaking to the camera at the same time.
That's a minor criticism though for what proves to be a surprisingly compelling film. Granted, this only contains Tyson's viewpoint, so there aren't any other witnesses to the events to back him up or disagree, but Tyson is so open to admitting his own flaws, that it almost feels unnecessary.
I've never had much of an interest in boxing and while this is certainly no When We Were Kings, it is fascinating to hear Tyson explain what would prompt someone to bit another boxer's ear off. The tale overall is a bit of a sad one and you can't help but think that if his original manager Cus D'Amato had lived a bit longer, perhaps Tyson would have been able to avoid the inevitable fall since D'Amato definitely kept him grounded and focused.
The documentary doesn't miss any of the tabloid moments that surrounded the former heavyweight champ though when he speaks of his rape conviction, he puts most of the blame squarely on the accuser. I have no way of knowing what happened in the hotel room but I remember at the time that his trial happened in the same time period as William Kennedy Smith's rape trial and the two were such a study and what the difference in having good defense lawyers make. At the time, I remember Tyson's lawyers basically saying, "She had it coming because she went back to his room" and painting him as a monster, yet in the documentary, Tyson never gives it to his lawyers.
Still, you ultimately feel sympathy for an athlete who had so much skill at what he did, made a fortune and then squandered most of it, including his love for the sport, though at least he seems to find some kind of peace as a family man now, even though he still seems as if he's a man-child more than someone in his 40s.
Labels: 00s, Documentary
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Monday, November 02, 2009
12 сердитых людей
By Edward Copeland
I sure hope the estate of Reginald Rose or whomever owns the rights to 12 Angry Men got some sort of payment from the makers of the Russian film 12, because there is no question that the film is an unequivocal remake. Sure, there are some changes, but most of the story has merely been transplanted to Moscow, even the easy availability of supposedly unique knives. Director Nikita Mikhalkov's film does enough different to make the story seem fresh, but its length hampers the enjoyment.
Of course, 12, which was one of the Oscar nominees for foreign language film in 2007 though it didn't get a U.S. release until 2009, doesn't have the advantage that all the American incarnations of 12 Angry Men have in that most of the cast are made up of performers familiar to U.S. audiences, giving them a leg up to separating the characters. 12 can't quite differentiate as well. Even when you start to realize which one is the doctor, etc., part of it still plays in terms of Sidney Lumet's 1957 feature version, picking out the Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb stand-ins.
What really lengthens Mikhalkov's film and seems unnecessary are the flashback scenes fleshing out the story of the defendant. It really steps on the directorial flow of Mikhalkov, who also plays one of the jurors. Still, it's much better than the film Mikhalkov won the foreign language Oscar for, Burnt By the Sun. 12 wants to be story of a justice system struggling in post-Soviet Russia. There isn't a suitable jury room adjacent to the courthouse, so the jurors make their decision in a rundown school's gymnasium, complete with leaky pipes and asbestos falling from the ceiling.
Accused of murder is a young Chechen man who was adopted by a Russian soldier when his father was killed in Russian-Chechen combat. It does allow for a bit of the hatred between the Russians and Chechens to rear its head (along with some anti-Semitism between the jurors), but the scenes really do nothing to add to the deliberations, especially shots of the defendant spinning in dance in his jail cell as if he were Billy Elliott.
12 Angry Men is such a warhorse, that it almost always can work and this version, written by Mikhalkov, Aleksandr Novototsky-Vlasov and Vladimir Moiseyenko, does have a nice twist in the final stage of deliberations, focusing on what life will be like for the young man, that almost makes 12 reach a higher level of artistry. Unfortunately, it's such a long, predictable drive to get there.
Labels: 00s, Foreign, Henry Fonda, Lumet, Remakes
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Thursday, October 29, 2009
A well of tradition to draw from
By Edward Copeland
Something happens to the best filmmakers. Even when they are good, once they delve into their own ethnic or societal upbringing, they achieve a deeper greatness, whether the film in question is explicitly autobiographical or not.
Steven Spielberg finally seemed to grow up once he made Schindler's List, even though he'd made great films before that. Martin Scorsese and Ingmar Bergman hit high watermarks early because they didn't delay those explorations. Other filmmakers such as Brian DePalma remain hollow ciphers with little interest in self-examination (or beyond making a couple of interesting film sequences per film).
Though No Country for Old Men showed a new step forward for the Coen brothers, A Serious Man is their first film that openly addresses growing up Jewish in late '60s Minnesota and it is unlike anything they've made before, displaying a maturity unseen in their work while still being great and entertaining.
After opening with a short Jewish fable set in the European past, A Serious Man settles into its Job-like tale of Lawrence Gopnik, a college physics professor in 1967 Minnesota who tries to lives a good life until realities he was completely oblivious to start striking him one after another as his son's bar mitzvah approaches and he's due to learn whether he will get tenure at his university.
Michael Stuhlbarg plays Gopnik with a sense of wide-eyed disbelief at the array of misfortune the befalls him. For some reason early in the film, he momentarily struck me like Bryan Cranston's Walter White on television's great Breaking Bad, but Gopnik isn't that complicated nor terminally ill and he certainly isn't going to become an aspiring drug kingpin. Early in the film, the phrase "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you" appears on the screen and that appears to be Gopnik's approach except for a slight breakdown here or there.
When his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) suddenly announces that she wants a divorce so she can have a ritual Jewish marriage with their friend and widower Sy (Fred Melamed). Sy is an unusual man, wanting to be unusually compassionate and cooperative to Larry while he busts up his marriage. The Gopniks' two children seem disinterested in what's going on with the teen daughter trying to gather cash for a nose job and the son more worried about lousy TV reception for F Troop and money he owes his pot dealer.
Larry doesn't have it much better at his job. As he awaits the tenure decision, he's told that someone is sending anonymous notes questioning his moral turpitude and he's being harassed by a South Korean student and his family who feel that he's been harassed because he's flunking physics and Gopnik won't change his grade or accept his bribe which he may or may not have given the professor.
All of this sends Gopnik on a spiritual journey, embracing his Judaism in a way he never has before, trying to find answers to the all these questions. The Coens keep their own points-of-view close to their chest. You can't be sure if they find all this religiosity silly, if they are viewing Larry's travails from the viewpoint of God or if they take his search seriously.
Whatever the Coens' real-life take, A Serious Man works. In Broadcast News after Albert Brooks' character's disastrous try at anchoring the weekend news, he starts laughing when he describes it to Holly Hunter, explaining that, "At some point, it got so off-the-chart bad, it just got funny." Larry Gopnik never feels that way, but the audience of A Serious Man certainly will as its tone is humor of the darkest shade.
The Coens always have been strong filmmakers, but at times their tendency toward showiness got in the way, especially when the films in question were some of their lesser efforts. There is very little of that here as they do yeoman work on what may be the best screenplay they've written. They're aided ably by frequent collaborators such as composer Carter Burwell, cinematographer Roger Deakins and that phantom film editor Roderick Jaynes.
The entire cast, composed mostly of familiar faces and unknowns, all do good work. Of the supporting cast, I'd single out Melamed and George Wyner as one of the rabbis Larry sees. However, the film revolves around Larry, and the relatively unknown Stuhlbarg pulls it off. His performance is a wonder with so much contained in his face which reminded me of Harold Lloyd. The Coens were smart to place their faith in him to anchor A Serious Man because I can't visualize the film working with another actor as Larry Gopnik.
Labels: 00s, Coen Brothers, DePalma, Ingmar Bergman, Scorsese, Spielberg
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Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Drag Me to Hell: the tortured home viewer's cut
By Edward Copeland
Whenever a film hits DVD with the "director's cut," I'm always torn. Should I watch the theatrical version and write about that, since it's what people saw in the theater, or go with the unrated version. With Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, I toyed with the idea (assuming I liked it) of watching the theatrical version first, which was rated PG-13, and then watch the unrated, unneutered version and compare the two. The best laid plans... Unfortunately, the first DVD that arrived kept freezing and skipping about an hour into the theatrical version. I did all the usual tricks to no avail and then assumed it was a bad disc before mailing it back for a replacement.
When the second disc arrived, the same thing happened, so I tried it out on a portable DVD player, but it didn't solve the problem. Then I noticed something on the screen where you picked between the unrated and theatrical versions: small print indicated that the theatrical version might have problems playing on some DVD players. So, I switched to approximately the same part of the story in the unrated version and finished the film. Therefore, the cut of Drag Me to Hell I saw really was one of my own invention.
Despite the technical problems and my own self-editing hodgepodge, I found Drag Me to Hell quite enjoyable. It's not campy in the way Raimi's early horror forays such as the Evil Dead series was, but Drag Me to Hell is a more straight-forward scarefest about Christine Brown, a sweet young loan officer (Alison Lohman) who makes the mistake of turning down the third mortgage extension to the wrong old gypsy and gets an awful curse placed upon her. Christine's inner, sympathetic instincts might have been to give the old woman (Lorna Raver) to pay what she owes, but her boss at the bank (David Paymer) discourages it and Christine is hoping for a promotion. Given the economic disaster our country has been facing, watching the movie, even though you know Christine doesn't deserve what she gets, you can't help but think it what fun it would have been if some of this country's foreclosure victims, tricked into subprime loans, had been well-versed in the dark arts and taken similar evil action against soulless financial institutions.
Christine does have a smart and attentive professor boyfriend (Justin Long) but she has problems beyond the gypsys's curse to contend with his snobby parents and in addition to her bank boss who still treats her as a secretary while dangling that promotion and a rival loan officer (Reggie Lee) who is after the same job and will sink to anything to steal it out from under her.
Most of the scares in the script by Raimi and his brother Ivan get to be predictable but Sam Raimi's direction moves the action along at such a swift pace that many of the frights catch you by surprise anyway. Lohman, who was so good in the underrated Matchstick Men, really has to carry the film and she does so admirably. Her transformation from sweet and well-meaning to angry, vengeful and willing to do anything to anyone and anything to rid herself of the gypsy's plague is played with great aplomb.
Drag Me to Hell won't go down in history as one of the all-time greats in the horror genre but it's certainly leagues above much of what has passed for good efforts in that field in recent years.
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Monday, October 26, 2009
Class of 1984 blog-a-thon
By Edward Copeland
Joe Valdez at This Distracted Globe is having film bloggers across the Internet take an Orwellian look back at the films of 1984. Because I like to do as little work as possible these days, I'm recycling my post from earlier this year marking the 25th anniversary of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension.
Labels: Blog-a-thons
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Sunday, October 25, 2009
Lou Jacobi (1913-2009)
His face is much more familiar than his name, but to some extent that is to be expected for a character actor with as lengthy a career as Lou Jacobi, who has died at 95.
He made his Broadway debut in 1955 in The Diary of Anne Frank as Mr. Van Daan, a role he repeated in the 1959 film version. His other Broadway work included Woody Allen's play Don't Drink the Water. He worked with Allen again on film playing the secret transvestite in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask.
The size of Jacobi's roles varied from single scenes to more significant parts in film and on television. In movies, he appeared in Irma la Douce, Cotton Comes to Harlem, Little Murders, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, Arthur, My Favorite Year and I.Q. Perhaps his best or most notable recent film role was as the cranky and stubborn uncle in Barry Levinson's Avalon, holding a grudge over when a Thanksgiving meal was served.
Jacobi's episodic television work was fairly prolific ranging from multiple appearances on the anthologies Love, American Style and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour as well as series such as Barney Miller, That Girl, St. Elsewhere, Cagney & Lacey, The Dick Van Dyke Show and many others. One of my personal favorites is an episode of Sanford & Son titled "Steinberg & Son" where Fred sues when a TV series appears obviously modeled on his life about a junk dealer and his son only the junk dealer is Jewish and played by Jacobi. In one memorable scene, Redd Foxx's Fred gives Jacobi's Steinberg tips on how he should react to the sitcom's version of Aunt Esther.
RIP Mr. Jacobi.
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