The Great Bazy

Visit The Film Experience where I discuss the sure to be controversial trailer for The Great Gatsby. Kanye and Fitzgerald! How dare he?

Sheet-y Saturday.

Anyone would've assumed that whenever talking of The Great Gatsby the first image that would come to mind would be that of well, Jay Gatsby. Leave it to the brilliant genius that is Baz Luhrmann to reveal that the focus of his attention will in fact be Daisy, played in his movie by the astonishing Carey Mulligan. Here's the thing, Carey has one of those faces that inspire awws and heart shaped gestures, however she has never felt like a true "woman" in the sense that her ethereal beauty rarely allows her to become a fully sexual being. The Carey we are presented in this poster though has a different pair of eyes (kudos to the makeup department as this will surely be yet another Baz beauty extravaganza) eyes that seem wiser. However the real question is why did Baz choose to hide Leo's unarguably more recognizable face?

Share your thoughts!

Sheet-y Saturday.

Where we take a look at posters for upcoming features.

I am the first to criticize Hollywood's laziness in re-releasing their classics in 3D but I'm also the first to jump overboard just to show how much they love Titanic. This is the movie that made me fall in love with the idea of movies as things that transcend time and space. My tastes may have become more sophisticated since, give me a break I was 11, but I still defend this movie's corniness whenever people attack it.
See this poster for example, the ridiculous pink skies and the ship in movement, suggest something straight out of a bad Asian hologram postcard or a cheesy karaoke video, but there is something about the tacky embossed logo, or the doe-eyed looks in Leo and Kate's faces that just goes "click". It's sigh inducing and nostalgic all at once.

How do you feel about this re-release?

J. Edgar *½

Director: Clint Eastwood
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts
Judi Dench, Josh Lucas, Ed Westwick, Jeffrey Donovan, Denis O'Hare

Somewhere between his cross-dressing and legacy as one of the most controversial figures in 20th century history, J. Edgar hoover might have been a fascinating man; however you can't tell this judging by Clint Eastwood's biopic.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hoover as a young idealist man, all the way to the eccentric, paranoid creature he turned into towards the end of his life. The film's framing device is having Hoover dictate his biography to several typists (among them Westwick in full Chuck Bass mode), highlighting his feats and hinting at events in his private life that make us wonder if they are part of said framing device or slips in Eastwood's uneven narrative.
Shot in absolute darkness by Tom Stern, who foregoes the chiaro in chiaroscuro, the film feels like if it wants to hide things from us because it's not even sure how to tell them or if it's even allowed to tell them. We see Hoover as a young man taking charge of the newly created Bureau of Investigation, trying to solve crimes as famous as Charles Lindbergh's (Lucas) baby being kidnapped and taking credit for arresting famed gangster John Dillinger.
Throughout the film there's a sense of conflict between the screenplay and the filmed result and this makes sense because the screenplay was written by openly gay writer Dustin Lance Black who, with reason, tries to push the film's gay agenda by stressing out Hoover's infamous love of cross dressing and his strange relationship with Clyde Tolson (Hammer). There is of course nothing wrong with revealing aspects of a public figure that might've been unknown by most people, but to do so when the film being made is an homage to old studio filmmaking only works out in disastrous ways.
You get a sense, because of the film's structure, that every time Hoover's homosexuality is hinted at, Eastwood immediately "denies" it with something more "macho" and has him abuse someone or explode in a political tantrum.
The performances don't really help convey any coherent message either with DiCaprio mumbling his way throughout the running time, Hammer being eaten alive by his ridiculous old age makeup and Dench as Mama Hoover not even trying to come up with a decent American accent in her Shakespearean mama-wolf portrayal.
With its conflicting ideologies, excessive running time and preposterous selfimportance, the only person who comes up truly revealed in J. Edgar is its director, who despite a productive run as one of the most iconic American heroes is revealing signs of sad, albeit expected, senility.

Inception **

Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy
Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, Dileep Rao, Cillian Murphy
Tom Berenger, Pete Postlethwaite, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine

Inception gets wrong everything that film noir got right. Perhaps, because in its attempt to create something groundbreaking and original, while obviously referential, it forgot that complexity and depth are often found within simplicity.
Nolan alludes to some of his idols like Stanley Kubrick and Michael Mann to come up with an ambitious facade that reveals deep inside there wasn't much to be said after all.
To put it in a blunt analogy, the movie is the equivalent of receiving a beautifully wrapped package for your birthday only to realize it contains socks.
Inception takes place in a future where corporate espionage has moved to the next level. Instead of sending spies into the companies; ideas and thoughts are stolen directly from the minds of its creators.
Using a machine and a series of sedatives, these dream thieves are able to navigate the minds of people and access hidden information. They create entire dreams, populate them with characters and other tricks to invade the person's subconscious.
But these dreams are made out of different levels and contain all kinds of rules that make this much harder than one would think.
This process is called "extraction" and Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) is the go-to-man for these kind of jobs. Of course he has a dark past that led him to this line of work; in his case it's his tempestuous relationship with his wife Mal (Cotillard) and the fact that he's a fugitive who's been trying to make it back home for a while.
One day Dom receives a unique request from powerful businessman Saito (Watanabe), he doesn't need information, he needs "inception", to implant an idea inside his main competitor's (Murphy) mind.
Inception is some sort of urban myth, few people think it can be done, and Cobb reluctantly takes on the job after Saito promises he will clear his charges and make sure he gets back home safe.
To proceed with the heist, Cobb recruits Arthur (Levitt), his main partner and logistics man, Eames (Hardy) a clever impersonator capable of taking on anyone's personality in dreams, Yusuf (Rao), an experienced chemist who provides the sedatives and Ariadne (Page) an architect meant to design the various levels of the dreams.
The plot then moves like your regular heist movie and just like one, pulls cards out of its sleeves to make every twist and turn feel like the ultimate thrill. The thing about Inception is that it's so in love with its own grandiosity that it forgets to have any fun.
By providing certain rules that regulate the dream world (and are sure to become part of geek boy lexicon like the dialogue in Fight Club) the screenplay tries to conceal the fact that Nolan isn't capable of handling different levels of existence in the way Robert Altman did (without the fantastic sci-fi aid mind you).
One of the major elements about the dream world is that as the characters go down one level, time changes. This gives Nolan the opportunity to push slow motion to the limit and come up with some nice looking photographic tricks that make less obvious the fact that Nolan's eyes were bigger than his creative stomach. He tries to inject complexity into pausing action.
Because honestly nothing really happens during these time swifts which usually require the characters to fall asleep in order to work.
The whole movie actually functions on a paradoxical premise: we get the rules but they don't make much sense.
Sure, one could say that sci-fi allows its creators to bend reality and push the imagination but what are we supposed to think about a movie in which the characters are so faithful to the regulations of the world they inhabit, when the screenplay is constantly telling us to take a "leap of faith". Is this leap meant to make us ignore the plot holes in Nolan's writing?
How then, one might wonder, is it possible for the characters to keep secret from each other when invading someone else's mind?
If they are all in one person's subconscious and get to travel together from mind to mind, wouldn't it make sense that they all knew what the other was thinking? To go into these kinds of questions would make the movie fall like a house made out of playing cards and perhaps it's better to give Nolan the benefit of the doubt.
Yet even if it wasn't for the lackluster writing, Inception is doomed by its exhaustive and exhausting attempt to seem clever.
Nolan draws from film noir to come up with the whole plot. We have the "last job", the "man without a past", the femme fatale and other basic elements that made up the film style.
However noir was effective because it took place in a universe where dreams didn't exist, where people became archetypes trying to rediscover humanity.
In films like The Maltese Falcon ("the stuff which dreams are made of") and Out of the Past we saw human decay being explored in such a unique way that we saw the stories take place in locations that seemed real but we knew were representations of larger themes.
These movies about detectives, prostitutes and disloyal crooks were actually studies of the pathologies found in society and explorations of the implications popular culture was beginning to have on the collective psyche.
Yet talking about them, it's hard at first to see them for more than what they are. Inception on the other side, takes these stories into the location they were actually taking place in (the human mind) and by overexplaining them ironically robs them of their entire oneiric qualities.
Film noir is dream-like, Inception somehow is not.
Added to this, we have to wonder about the reality suggested in the world where Inception takes place. Nolan never bothers in suggesting there are any sort of ethical implications to what the dream thieves are doing.
We have to wonder if more people in this world are aware that this exists. Without this it's almost impossible for this technique to feel menacing. How can someone fear what they can't fathom possible?
The movie lacks a feeling of threat that goes beyond what the characters are going through. As personal as the subconscious they're invading might be, there is still a body that owns it and is presumably regulated by things like the law and societal rules.
Why then does the movie forgo all this and tries to trick us by making it seem as if it's only these characters who exist in the world (even taking into account some plot twists, it would still be rather limited to stick to such a facile theory).
It would be easy to dispute almost any element about the film's structure but the one thing nobody can deny is the lack of coherence in the dichotomy between mind and emotion.
We are constantly reminded by the characters that as logical as dreams may seem, they are ruled and commanded by feelings.
It's even one of the main points in planning the heist.
When it comes to executing this though, the movie falls apart disastrously even if a lot of the characters are constantly talking about emotions.
"What do you feel?" asks Mal, in what should've been the movie's emotional center. Instead of making the audience shed a tear, this scene just proves how disconnected the movie is from its own speech.
As if Nolan too chose to forget a truth he once knew...or maybe just lacks the directorial skills to aim at both mind and heart.
Not that there's anything wrong with it, in fact Kubrick made a career out of the purely cerebral, Nolan perhaps should also stick to what he knows best.
Sadly because the movie doesn't have the emotional core it refers to so much, we are denied the opportunity of watching either an entertaining heist flick or a tragic romance.
But not everything about the movie disappoints. The action sequences are interesting although their reminiscence to the Batman flicks and Insomnia make it seem like all these characters dream of are Christopher Nolan movies. It would've been interesting to see him play with these landscapes in a more surrealistic way, perhaps not pushing it all the way into whimsical territory like Hitchcock and Dalí did but at least toying a bit more with all the fuss about how in dreams you can build whatever you want.
Then there's Marion Cotillard who not only gets the film's most interesting "character" but also makes Mal so rich and complex that an eventual plot twist will leave us scratching our heads in awe. Watching her walk with the elegance of Marlene Dietrich while the world, literally, falls apart around her is watching an actress at the height of her powers. There is nothing she can't do.
The same can not be said about the movie, which proves that the more you talk about ideas doesn't mean you are particularly enlightened.

An Analogy (For Those Not Into the World Cup)

Watching Lionel Messi play under Diego Maradona's guidance is the sports equivalent of:



or

Shutter Island **1/2

Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley
Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, Elias Koteas
Max von Sydow, Ted Levine, Jackie Earle Haley, John Carroll Lynch

The opening scene in Shutter Island contains the entire movie; the Paramount Studio logo fills the screen while an ominous string music fills the air. Then all of a sudden the title cards appear, with no dissolves or fade outs. Seconds later we see U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) head over a toilet, suffering an extreme bout of sea sickness.
He cleans up, fixes his tie and goes outside where he meets his new partner Chuck Aule (Ruffalo) as they approach the title island (an Alcatraz like fort that harbors an asylum for the criminally insane).
In the old fashioned typography of the credits and the musical nod (which reminds you of something Franz Waxman would've done) Martin Scorsese declares his film will be a throwback to classic noir, gothic and horror films.
But for those paying enough attention, he also gives away the film's plot-and polarizing twists-direct and indirectly (those caring to find out in advance need to do no more than psychoanalyze the concept of vomiting and get creative after an apparent continuity error).
It can be said that because of this effect the film is arguably spoiled for those seeking a mystery flick and also ruined for those seeking a psychological study who instead of being rewarded with a complex whodunit get a facile howcatchem.
Scorsese, who's always been a precise filmmaker, has trouble conveying both predominant aspects of the film and while he obviously has a lot to say (the whole movie is filled with infinite movie homages and references) he tries to say it all at once.
This is evident in the convoluted plot, adapted by Laeta Kalogridis from a novel by Dennis Lehane, which shows us the investigation the marshals conduct in the island (the mysterious disappearance of a patient played by the excellent Mortimer) but also tries to convey the troubles inside Teddy's mind (related to the death of his wife, played by a beautifully creepy Williams) the extent of which also involves WWII traumas and HUAC conspiracies.
Soon the plot has trouble finding its way, if any, among the constant new information we receive; this somehow never really deepens the mystery but makes the film drag, as people who know what's coming undergo an endurance test and those unaware of the twists are drowned by the intense, but vague, dream sequences.
Therefore the film is at its best, when along with editor extraordinaire Thelma Schoonmaker and director of photography Robert Richardson, Scorsese indulges the audience with the power of his images.
There are scenes, involving surreal dreams and flashbacks, that go to places he's rarely visited since The Last Temptation of Christ; places where Michelle Williams bursts into flames and Nazi soldiers are executed in front of the frozen corpses they originated.
Some of these moments achieve the kind of beautiful nightmare qualities David Lynch has become an expert at and while giving Marty mostly new territory to explore, fail to click within the whole.
If one of the purposes of Shutter Island was to blur the division between reality and imagination (or to study if there is any when it comes to specific human perception) Marty's obviously more into one than the other (deciding which is which brings yet another dilemma).
For someone with Scorsese's kind of attention to detail, we also wonder why would he give the audience clues about the mystery and then forget to keep up the game.
The best element of the film is arguably Leonardo DiCaprio who gives one of his richest performances letting himself fall completely into whatever the movie is (he works that final line to the extent that he convinces us we saw a much better movie). He's obviously onto something no one else is and creates an affecting portrait of fear, passion and confidence about to shatter.
He is excellent in moments where other actors might've exaggerated and seeps into the brooding essence of someone like Robert Mitchum (appropriate given Out of the Past hugely shaped the feel of the film), his interaction with the superb, if somehow underused, cast is revelatory.
There's a scene with Clarkson that probably would've made a much more interesting film and his moments with the Vincent Price-like Kingsley and the perversely calm von Sydow, both playing asylum doctors, are spellbinding.
As a whole the experience of Shutter Island can be reduced to a paraphrase of the film's closing scene and lead us to wonder if a so-so Scorsese movie is worse than no Marty at all.

Marty and Cecil.

The Hollywood Foreign Press has announced Martin Scorsese will receive the Cecil B. DeMille award for lifetime achievement at the Golden Globes ceremony in 2010.
This honor will come as a great compliment for Scorsese's two Golden Globe awards for Best Director, which he won for "Gangs of New York" and "The Departed" (he was also nominated for "Raging Bull" and "The Aviator" among others).
With the release next year of "Shutter Island", which teams him up with his fave new collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio, the prolific filmmaker is set to continue collecting accolades and honestly it was about time they showered Marty with every award out there.
The Academy Award winning director turns 67 next week.
Read the full story here.

Love Don't Live Here Anymore.

Revolutionary Road ***

Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet
Kathy Bates, Michael Shannon, Zoe Kazan, David Harbour
Kathryn Hahn, Richard Easton

The suburbs have been the mythical creature of innumerable films; it's within the picket fences and tree lined roads where some of the darkest machinations behind American culture have occurred.
Seen by the cynical as the place where dreams go to die, the notion that anyone who holds esteem towards these values is a killer robot or an alien has spoken more about the people who say it, than their actual discourse has done for them.
But when we are invited to view them under a critical light in a context that includes several other variables instead of just one accusing finger, the suburbs can turn out to be much more complex than we'd imagined.
And to explore this ambiguity seemed to be the intention of Sam Mendes' "Revolutionary Road", an adaptation of Richard Yates' cult novel about the Wheelers, Frank (DiCaprio) and April (Winslet), a couple who moves to the suburbs where they find their dreams crumbling before their eyes.
Frank works as an "executive" in a city based company where not even he's sure of what he does, while April stays home looking after the house and their children.
They socialize with the neighbors which include real estate agent, the gossipy Mrs.Helen Givings (an excellent Bates), her son John (Shannon) who has recently been released from a mental institution and the Campbells, Shep (Harbour who does miracles with the little scenes he's given) and Milly (Hahn).
The Wheelers find comfort in their knowledge that they're above everyone else. That the executive lunches, martini breaks and egg salad sandwiches are just a waiting room for the grand life they have ahead of them.
But when April realizes they are slowly giving in to convention, she takes action and comes up with a plan for them to move to Paris where she will work while Frank "finds himself".
Early on the film announces it will be mostly about marital problems and for this it becomes a showcase for its two lead actors who are phenomenal.
DiCaprio, ever more maturing, imbues Frank with the kind of fear only lessened by the fact that you may have seen it in people you know.
His eagerness to please and a sense of "deserving" everything promised with post-WWII America, but not getting it or at least not in the way he expected, touches on a sensitive part of you.
With April, Winslet goes for earnestness avoiding the melodrama one would come to expect from a hysterical housewife. She throws tantrums and most of the time sparks up fights she knows she shouldn't be holding, but there is something remarkably human about April that makes these things comprehensible, maybe the fact that a sense of emasculating her husband is one of the only things that make her feel alive.
Her eyes often wonder "how did we get here?" and her nuances are what give April the soul the movie never obtains. Talking to a friend she confesses how "she wanted in" not escaping and in the same scene she goes from moving and confessional to raw and sexual without us expecting it.
Eventually we wonder if April is putting on a performance all the time. Winslet taps into this element to make us doubt our very surroundings.
DiCaprio and Winslet convey this angst beautifully and turn "Revolutionary Road" into the movie that chronicles the implicitness other dysfunctional suburbia films have taken for granted.
Shannon's character then comes and questions everything about the Wheelers in a way nobody else dared to, think of him as a contemporary viewer interceding for all who have doubts about why people choose these lives.
Because if there is something true about the film is that its themes are as relevant as ever. John whose insanity might receive a milder diagnosis nowadays, has so many questions that he can't contain them and Shannon holds up remarkably well, given how other actors would've dealt with this character.
He represents a rage that most would opt to hide and in his final scene creeps under your skin and gives the film what ultimately becomes it's one undeniable truth.
Mendes crafts a work that is easy to admire, giving it a nice structure and an adequate pace, if the symbolism is nothing too new (enough with the pastels and light! Give us a film about suburbia inspired by German Expressionism!), it's talking to us in the only terms the director knows how and this is perhaps because even he's unsure of what he's trying to say.
The director puts out a troubling representation of traditional values, that nevertheless offers no option. It's like a window to hell from inside a burning house.
If he gets one thing right is the idea that the one thing humans can share is their misery, especially in the last scene where he tries to send us away with an ironic wink at a how it all will become a vicious cycle, but feels more like how Frank is described at the beginning of the film "a smartass with a big mouth" or camera in this case.
Throughout the film something that remains constant is the carelessness for the children, they are barely featured and the characters themselves' are rarely asked for opinion.
They appear purely as accesories and perhaps without trying Mendes makes the most lasting impression with them.
By not taking them into account he makes their consequent story the only one we're dying to hear.