Bright Star

Bright Star, written and directed by Jane Campion (The Piano), is visually lovely, but as a cinema experience it disappoints. The film is composed of a stream of pastoral scenes set in a country estate in Hampstead, England in the early 1800s—an ongoing collage of beauty. Soft breezes that come in through the window and blow wisps of hair around the heroine’s face, joyous walks on the heath, flowers in the tall grass, snow on the grounds. But all this cannot overshadow the stops and starts of the movie and the feeling that it is going nowhere. You find yourself waiting for the story to kick in and flow, but it somehow never does.

Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) and her family live next to the poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his mentor, Mr. Brown (Paul Schneider). The amorous feelings that Fanny and Mr. Keats have for each other are apparent moments after the film begins. But we are to understand relatively quickly that society’s rules regarding income and station prohibit the two from being married. In spite of that, the two refuse to exist apart. And she becomes his muse. They take walks together on the grounds, gaze at each other longingly, and sometimes they speak to each other through the lines of Keats’ poems. But if the goal was to depict a longing that is full of passion and desire, Bright Star misses.

For those of us who enjoy Keats’ poetry, it’s a treat to hear the lines spoken so well against the sumptuous and romantic background of the countryside and softly lit interiors. And it’s pleasing to observe the fashions of the times—the detail in its ruffles, crocheted shawls, gauzy sleeves, and elaborate hats. But don’t be surprised to find yourself ready for the end of the movie anytime, rather than savoring each moment like you are likely to have done watching Ms. Campion’s exquisitely sensual film, The Piano.

Shot by Greig Fraser, it is indeed the visual aspect of the movie that is Bright Star’s best part. Nature is the match for Keats’ romantic verse and letters to Ms. Brawne. Mr. Whishaw is believable as a frail poet who is plagued with a sense of failure and who loves Fanny in spite of what society tells him he cannot do. Ms. Cornish is lovely in her portrayal of Fanny—crisp, pure of heart, witty and a flirt, but unflinchingly devoted to her Mr. Keats. But to compare the depth of this performance to the one she delivered as Candy in the movie of the same name, where she played a young addict opposite Heath Ledger, we see what is perhaps missing in the movie as a whole. We are not taken in. We do not go inside the characters. What should be fire is warm at best, in spite of what we know is supposed to be the passionate, though unconsummated love between the two main characters. We are too easily able to maintain a distance from them. Nothing takes hold of our emotions for the two hours we spend in the movie theater. Rather, we leave our seats easily, exit the theater and go about our business.

Fish Tank

Slice of life and riveting, Fish Tank takes you inside the grim life of a girl who lives in a rough housing project in England’s Essex. It’s a reality show—but not the kind you see on TV. This kind is the real stuff. And it’s poetry. Beautiful. Gritty. And incredibly sexy.

Not unlike a fish tank where the creatures that swim around can see out, but are trapped within, the housing project is inhabited by people with disenchanted lives—girls who swear with the same rapid-fire fluidity as their moms and dream only of performing on rock videos, young men who emulate rap stars and two-bit criminals, their parents trapped in the confines of lost dreams or continuing delusions.

Mia (Katie Jarvis) is 15, finds escape from the drab, trapped existence she leads by dancing to hip-hop tunes and drinking booze whenever she can get her hands on it. She’s angry and wants everyone to know it. She screams and squirms, greeting most of what she encounters with personal resentment. Mia is friendless, intolerant of life around her. She was kicked out of school for reasons that are not revealed in the film. But we can easily guess why—she’s a rebel with a loud mouth and fierce exterior. When her mother, Joanne, played with unflinching realism by Kierston Wareing, asks her, angrily, "What’s your problem?" Mia responds in an outpouring of hatred and frustration, “You’re my problem.”

Mia spends much of her life moving about, angrily observing life around her. Her refuge, or temporary escape from the confines of the apartment she shares with her mother and younger sister, Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths) is going to the vacant apartment upstairs. There, wearing a hoodie and sweats, she moves in sync with the beat of rap songs she listens to from her portable CD player. Her face is mostly expressionless as she looks out the window to the world outside. Her vista seems endless. As she dances, her ponytail sways back and forth, as do her large hoop earrings. Her gaze far-reaching and unsmiling, Her hopes and dreams wordless, but resonant nevertheless.

During one of her walks into an area not far from where she lives, she spots a white horse tethered by a chain and metal lock. The area is bleak, a wasteland of trailers, dry grass. Mia’s sense of justice and the kindness she feels toward the horse is somehow a metaphor for her own life. She wants to set the horse free.

Mia is a girl with a jagged edge. A problem and obvious annoyance to her mother who seems more like a skanky older sister, Mia seems to have a certain wisdom her mother doesn’t share. When Connor, the mother’s hunky boyfriend, enters the picture, the household changes. The mother curtails her incessant badgering of her daughter. Mia is visibly taken by Joanne’s boyfriend, played so well by Michael Fessbender (Inglourious Basterds). He exudes the natural charm and irresistible sexiness of the character, as well as an element of wholesome caring, so missing in the household before his appearance. But it’s clear from early on that he has more than a wholesome interest in his supposed girlfriend’s daughter.

There is a scene where Connor takes Joanne, Mia, and her younger sister on a car ride in the country. He is taking them out of the ‘fish tank’ and no one reacts to it with more enthusiasm than Mia. When Connor plays “California Dreamin’ “ performed by Bobby Womack, we see Mia in profile, the wind from the partially open car window playing with her hair. Her expression is softer than before. There is even a hint of a smile. We catch Mia ever so subtly moving her head in time with the beat of the song. She likes it. Connor catches the look in the rearview and there is a moment shared between, a faint and tantalizing glimmer of sexuality that passes between the two that we know is a promise of what is to come.

The story moves with the swiftness and ease of a gently, sometimes turbulent flowing river. The cinematography by Robbie Ryan is breathtaking at times—not only in terms of moody skies that accentuate the feeling of the moment but in the angles. One such instance is when Connor puts Mia, who has passed out on her mother’s bed, to bed in Mia’s own room. His actions in her bedroom are seen from her viewpoint through the crook of her arm. And then we see her from the reverse angle, as if from Connor’s p.o.v.

Fish Tank is a true work of art and is the latest movie from Academy Award-winning British writer and director Andrea Arnold (Red Road), who won the coveted Palme d’Or for her film this year.

It is the film debut of Rebecca Griffiths, who plays Mia’s younger sister, Tyler. Ms. Griffiths plays her character with all the ferocity and angst of a child who, while struggling to survive in the adult world she finds herself in, seems to know on some deeper level to what degree she is being robbed of her childhood.

But the film belongs to Katie Jarvis in the role of Mia. It is her first acting role. A remarkable performer, Ms. Jarvis lives and breathes the life of Mia with an intensity that makes it seem she isn’t acting at all, but rather revealing the naked truth of who she is to the camera. Like the best screen actors, she conveys everything through her eyes. The story goes that Ms. Jarvis was discovered on an Essex train platform. She was having an argument with her boyfriend.

Darren Aronofsky’s 1998 film, Pi

Shot in black and white reversal that achieves a contrast so stark, it’s almost painful to watch, the film focuses on a number theorist, Max Cohen (played by Sean Gullette, a film school buddy of director Aronofsky) who stands in front of a bathroom mirror and methodically draws a small circle on a designated part of his shaved head, then proceeds to drill a hole into it. Max’s mathematical genius is in great demand--by a Wall Street firm that believes he holds the key to the stock market and a group of Hassidic Jews who believes his work will lead to the true name of God. But in the end Max doesn’t want his genius. He wants to be “normal.”

The film, the result of a 28-day shoot with virtually no budget, won Aronofsky the 1998 Sundance Film Festival award for best director. Another friend from film school, Eric Watson, was the cinematographer for the film. Aronofsky wrote the script from a story by Watson, Gullette, and himself.

Pi plunges you into a world that is uncomfortable, creepy, the same kind of everyday “horror” that is depicted in Aronofsky’s later work, Requiem for a Dream (where Watson was also the cinematographer). In both films the main characters are under siege. Max endures crazed rabbis and cloying stockbrokers running after him, mercilessly picking and tugging at his incredible mind. He’s a man who is never at ease.

Max can relate only to his computer and occasionally seeks the understanding of his mentor, Russian mathematician Sol Robeson, played by Mark Margolis (Alberto in Scarface). Robeson has been pursuing the same calculation as Max all his life, but even Robeson tries to get Max to calm down, warning him that his very life is at stake.

Max is obsessed with patterns, the patterns he sees in everything—from shells to numbers. He believes that math holds the key to the universe—that by figuring out the mathematical pattern inherent in everything, he can understand everything. He’s a person who lives in his mind—his private heaven and hell.

The genius of the film is Aronofsky’s ability to make you feel what Max feels. It’s shot from the p.o.v. of the protagonist. Although you're on the other side of the celluloid, you don’t feel safe. It's if you're inside Max, feeling his vulnerability, his aloneness, and the bittersweetness of his genius. You feel his doleful desire to connect with the rest of the world, not as an intellectual oddity, but as one of “them.” And yet you find yourself not wanting him to give up his genius just to be “human.”

The wobbly film footage, achieved by hand-held camera, along with a dark, hypnotic and sometimes disturbing musical score by Clint Mansell lures us into the subterfuge that is Max’s world and makes it tortuously alive. The grainy high contrast images and repetitive music riffs stab at our insides and bring us into how it feels to be Max Cohen, a man who suffers seizures that attack him without warning and leave him drenched and helpless on the floor. When he drills the hole into his head, is it to remove the seizures or to remove the genius? Does he know that one is related to the other?

His dark existence is reminiscent of that of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man in the novel by the same name. It’s one of constant agonizing and isolation from the rest of the world. Max’s life is spent primarily in the confines of his dingy New York apartment in the company of his homemade mainframe computer. Hour after hour he transfuses his computer with his own sweat and genius, dedicated to calculating the true Pi and the pattern within the figure, believing that the pattern is the source of all patterns in the universe. As viewers we are sucked into the vortex Max finds himself in, spiraling down further and further into a dark, oppressive place where all he seeks is the world to leave him alone so that he can commune with it. In the end, he’ll do anything to be “normal.”

Interesting sidenote:
Although the drilling into the head, among other things, is a fictional event, the character of Max may be based on the Chudnovsky brothers (David and Gregory). Born in the Soviet Union near Kiev, the brothers got their PhDs in math from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Gregory was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder of the muscles, myasthenia gravis, which led them to Paris and then USA for help.

In the early nineties in a rundown apartment near Columbia University in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the brothers rented two supercomputers with which to calculate Pi and essentially lived off the income of their respective wives. Gregory, who needed assistance even to stand, did everything from his bed. Eventually the brothers built their own supercomputer from mail order parts in the apartment. The machine burned 2000 watts of power and ran day and night. In a March 2, 1992 article published in New Yorker, author Richard Preston wrote that the brothers were afraid to shut it down, because it might die. “[They call] their machine m zero. It occupies the former living room of Gregory's apartment, and its tentacles reach into other rooms.”

Gregory was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in mathematics. Thanks to the additional money from the fellowship, the brothers were able to upgrade their computer and they went on to set world records in calculating Pi with 480 million, 1 billion, and 8 billion digits.

Inglourious Basterds

From the moment the film begins, with the thumping soundtrack of a spaghetti Western going full blast and the words "Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France ..." superimposed on the screen, we know we’re in Tarantino country.

Film noir, Western, epic Hollywood, black comedy, you name it--Inglourious Basterds is Tarentino’s lovesong to the cinema.

An intricate fantasy of Jewish revenge against the Nazis, the story demonstrates the essence of what makes a movie a movie—situations and people looming larger than life on the screen. With Tarentino, everything is exaggerated—sometimes to the point of outright farce, as with Brad Pitt’s character. But that’s part of the fun.

As you move through the fabric of the story, you engage in something fantastic, something you know can’t be entirely real (it’s a movie afterall, and we never forget that for an instant); and yet in spite of the implausibility of many of the events, you willingly play along, because you wish that somehow that’s how it could have been. Sweet, sweet revenge. In this pumped-up, pseudo-reality, it’s just as Andre Bazin, noted French film critic, once commented. “The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.” This is what draws us to the cinema. And Tarentino plays it for all it’s worth.

It’s 1941 and a group of Jewish-American soldiers during World War II are spreading fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis in sordid retaliation for the horrors of their deeds. Headed by Aldo Raine, a non-Jew from Tennessee (performed with obvious amusement by Brad Pitt), who insists on receiving no less than 100 scalps from each of his soldiers, the group relishes what they do. And they’re good at it. The ultimate revenge sought by the soldiers intersects another plot of revenge—this one cleverly and selflessly engineered by a Jewish French woman, Shoshonna (played skillfully by Melanie Laurent) in retaliation for the death of her family.

Tarantino’s love affair with the movies is evidenced throughout the film--from the sight of Leni Reifenstahl’s name displayed on Shoshonna’s cinema marquis to Pitt’s character, Aldo Raine, whose name is a slight alteration of that of the famous 1950s’ actor, Aldo Ray. And there is Tarentino’s masterful use of classic cinema technique--extreme close-ups and longshots, inventive angles, and dramatic use of lighting and color, (especially red). Add to this an eclectic and killer soundtrack, which Tarentino considers as important as any other ‘character’ in his movies. Rather than sticking to 40s music, Tarentino brings his signature style to the soundtrack and makes it more contemporary. Who else could mix “Green Leaves of Summer”, Ennio Morricone, and David Bowie’s “Cat People.” And throw in a voiceover by Samuel L. Jackson explaining the combustibility of nitrate film.

Tarentino tauntingly drags out the moments. The result in a number of scenes is an atmosphere so tense that you feel yourself being questioned, forced to think on your feet, knowing that the wrong answer can cost your life and that of others. Such a scene takes place in the beginning of the film when Colonel Hans Landa visits the home of a French dairyman, Perrier La Padite, in search of Jews.

Christoph Walz’s interpretation of the ruthless Nazi Colonel is nothing short of brilliant and will no doubt win him an Oscar nomination at the very least. He gives Landa the smooth charm, intelligence, and finesse of the educated Nazi stereotype, the guy we can almost like, but know we can't. Because beneath the smooth veneer is the cold stealth and determination of a hawk chasing a rat. Denis Menochet’s portrayal of La Padite is elegantly underplayed. While seemingly polite and at ease with his unwanted “guest,” La Padite's eyes speak to us of the thoughts and fears he tries so desperately to keep hidden.

Although there are other moments in the film that delve beneath the surface to reveal characters with more than two-dimensional substance, you never see the kind of raw depth to human relationship like the one between the Uma Thurman and David Carradine characters in Kill Bill. Love so deep it surfaces beneath the hate. Hate so deep it manages to obliterate the love.

In Inglorious Basterds we assume the scene with the dairyman is setting the stage for the rest of the movie. But it takes a different turn, becomes a different genre. For Tarantino, World War II seems to exist as a convenient vehicle for setting good guys against bad guys--a variant of the American Western. As beautifully crafted as the film is, it’s more of a comic strip come to life, where the audience needs to fill in the blanks between each frame.

That said, Inglourious Basterds is a rich tapestry of broad stroke acting, black comedy, as well as stunning and haunting imagery—even in the midst of outlandish fantasy. The movie is so entertaining that you can’t wait until you find out what happens next, but simultaneously want to stay in the moment, because you don’t want the movie to end. And in spite of its 152 minutes, it doesn’t feel too long.

Written and directed by Quentin Tarentino with cinematography by Robert Richardson, the movie also features Eli Roth, who is disappointing as Sgt. Donny Donowitz, and the lovely Bridget von Hammersmark, who is convincing as the 40s film image of a German actress/spy.

(review appears on Oscar Frenzy)

Seraphine

There are many reasons why we go to the movies. From vicarious experience to total escapism to whatever else. Some movies are so disposable we barely remember the name, let alone the subject matter or who played in them. Seraphine, about the visionary artist Seraphine Louis, also known as Seraphine de Senlis (1864–1942), offers us a host of movie delights that will hardly be forgotten. Visually beautiful with soft images of the French countryside, the film is rich in texture of all sorts--from the grasses that sway in the breeze to the dark fabric of Seraphine's large skirts and dirty weave of her tattered shawl as she climbs the hill to one of her favorite spots beneath a large tree overlooking the vista she adores.

You can almost feel the heat and smell the sweat emitting from Seraphine's Rubenesque body, as she scrubs her employer's hardwood floors with near violence. Late into the night in the confines of her small apartment atop a long flight of stairs, this frumpy and irreverent housekeeper by day accompanies her feverish nocturnal painting with impassioned singing, seemingly unaware that people below may be trying to sleep. Using her thumb and a paintbrush to add color to her canvas, she kneels beside it, hovering over her work. She works amidst pots of paint that she has concocted from local plants and blood, surreptitiously extracted from meat cooking on the stove of her mistress' kitchen.

Her obsession resides somewhere between religious fervor and madness. But it is her naivete, her complete abandon to the creature that she is that endears her to us. And there are the paintings themselves--brilliant swirls of color, repeating patterns--flowers and plants of the countryside rendered in larger than life 'naive' representation.

Perhaps even more than any scene in itself, it is the eyes of the amazing actress Yolande Moreau that capture our attention. She manages to convey the innocence, religious fervor, and mischievous childishness of the character of Seraphine as well as her candid and open nature. Blue and slanted upwards like butterfly wings, her eyes give us entrance into her world, her painting, and her devotion to her art.

We watch the process of her painting, the way she lovingly and steadfastly adds a bit of color, rubs it in, so in love with her painting that sometimes she falls asleep by its side as if it were her lover. But in spite of the beauty of the film, along with the exquisite score by Michael Galasso, the two-hour film feels like it's a half-hour too long. Several scenes continue beyond where they should have ended--as if the artist--in this case, the director Martin Provost, didn't know when to stop adding more color to the canvas.

Séraphine was an untrained artist, 'discovered' by Wilhelm Uhde, a prominent German collector and dealer who was part of the artistic circle in Paris in the early 1900s and played a prominent role in the career of Henri Rousseau. He was one of the first to recognize the genius of Pablo Picasso and George Braque and he exhibited their works in his gallery in Montparnasse. He happened to see an early painting of Seraphine's and it was under his patronage, although interrupted for many years by his inevitable need to leave France during the war, that her work reached prominence.

Directed by Martin Provost, Seraphine won a total of seven César Awards (the French Oscar), including Best Film, Best Original Score, and Best Screenplay.

Notes On A Scandal

In Notes on a Scandal Dame Judi Dench seizes the screen and doesn't let it go. Her performanc of Barbara Covett reveals to us a complex and rather pathetic history teacher in a London high school, whose cold and calculated life is spent in quiet loneliness and desperation. Ms. Dench reminds us, as she does in all the roles she plays, what great acting is--the ability to play a character from the inside out, without comment or restraint.

Barbara Covett is a lonely old spinster, a self-described battle ax, who the students dislike intensely but whose authority is never questioned. When the new art teacher, Sheba Hart, played beautifully and with great sensitivity by Kate Blanchett, joins the faculty, Barbara takes more than casual notice. She begins writing about her in detail in her most current notebook, which we soon learn is the latest of an ongoing collection of notebooks where she unlocks her life and reveals her innermost secrets.

Barbara preys on Sheba, getting the younger and beautiful woman to trust her--especially after Barbara discovers Sheba having sex with one of her 15-year-old students, Steven Connolly (Andrew Simpson), and promises to say nothing to the headmaster in exchange for the promise that Sheba will break off the affair. And of course now Barbara has her in her power. The older woman uses her knowledge of a potentially damaging secret to manipulate a friendship, even when it starts to reveal the older woman's obsession and malevolence.

Dench's performance is so believable that we can see tiny, almost imperceptible shifts in her expression as she moves through feelings of desire and joy to twinges of self-conciousness, jealousy and hurt. Her eyes change in shape and hue as her emotions glide from one thing to another. Sometimes they take on the frightening appearance of snake-like slits of evil. At other times we almost feel sorry for this dreadful and solitary spirit.

Ms. Blanchett's portrayal of Sheba is a powerful match for Dench's performance. She is soft and flexible as compared to the hard, steadfastness of Barbara. Her movements are liquid. Her skin is porcelain as compored to the lined face of a woman who has most assuredly never or rarely known the touch of sensuality.

Barbara zooms into Sheba's household like a bird of prey, snatching what is good and light, twisting and turning it between her talons, and finally, releasing it to the ground--bleeding and in pain.

Notes on a Scandal was nominated for an Academy Award and adapted from the 2003 novel of the same name by Zoe Heller. Patrick Marber wrote the screenplay and the film was directed by Richard Eyre. The soundtrack was compsed by Philip Glass.

The Wrestler

Watching The Wrestler is like watching a documentary about a wrestler who happens to be Mickey Rourke. That's how real it is. Mr. Rourke has said that when he initially read the script for The Wrestler, he didn't want to play the character, because it touched too close to home. But then he knew he had to play him, for that very reason.

Rourke is so over-the-top brilliant in this film that you can't help but smile and shake your head in amazement at what Rourke, the actor, manages to do. You're inside Randy. You know him, you feel what he feels, see what he sees. His sorrows, his realizations, his amusements, and desires sear their way inside you and go home with you after the show. Randy the Ram is not a character in a movie, not some kind of ridiculous inflated cartoon you can simply dismiss. He's a real man who leaps out at you from the silver screen just as he leaps onto his opponent in the ring. He's a man who laughs and cries and suffers, who walks out into the ring like a proud warrior embracing the sweet seductive lure of the crowd. And you see him clinging to something, something elusive, something lost, something he may not be able to get back.


The gut-wrenching blows he takes and even invites in the ring are nothing compared to the heart-wrenching blows he endures in 'real' life. And you wonder if you should look away. You're embarassed for him, for yourself. His soul is so naked on the screen.

Wrestling itself isn't the story; it's a vehicle. The real story is about a man who had something and lost it and who is trying to rebuild his life, but in the process he gets in his own way. As his own daughter tells him in a starkly painful scene, "You're a fuck-up." So he goes back to the only thing he knows, a place where in spite of unrelenting physical brutality, his emotions don't get hurt. "Out there" is the only place he gets hurt, he tells Cassidy, the strip club dancer played brilliantly by Marisa Tomei. It's the crowd who loves him, the crowd who doesn't hurt him and ultimately he sacrifices himself for that crowd, which is where he finds true solace.

Evan Rachel Wood plays Randy's estranged daughter, Stephanie. Ms. Wood plays the character with the utmost sensitivity and grace. We watch her carefully, afraid to miss the moment we anticipate, where she will remove a stone from the wall she has built around herself to protect her from the hurt put there by her father. When, tenderly and shyly, almost like a new lover, she rests her arm on his as they walk through what is now an abandoned amusement park, we want everything to be OK again between the two of them. We want, like we so often do in our own lives, to be able to take things back to an earlier time when what is now broken, was not.

The role of Cassidy could have easily have been played as a stereotype--some hard-assed hooker type with a soft spot for the hunky wrestler dude with long, stringy, dyed-blonde hair. But the way Ms. Tomei plays her, she is far from only that. Ms. Tomei reveals the character by shifting in and out of nuances that demonstrate the many sides to Cassidy. She parades her sensual body across the floor, writhes on the pole with frank, down-and-dirty sexuality, flicking her mane of hair around like angry flames. And all the while as we watch her, it seems she's totally there--as engrossed in her display of sexuality as she makes it appear. The atmosphere is a smoke-filled strip club in a seedy part of town, where the men pay to see what she's only too willing to show them. But there's a whole other person inside her that she keeps way more hidden than her body. And that's the part that Randy is after.

The Wrestler is a movie that does what good movies are supposed to do--transport you, take you to another place from where you usually live. And like a good movie also does, it takes you into realms of your own psyche, people you know or knew, and you perceive and understand all of that in a different way, with greater depth perhaps. An experience I would even call cathartic.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky, who also directed the brilliant and disturbing Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler drew a fair amount of attention this year, including an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for Mr. Rourke. And although Sean Penn was awarded the honor for his inspired portrayal of Harvey Milk, Rourke's no-holds-barred performance topped it, and showed everyone that he was solidly "back in the ring"--not merely as a worthy contender, but as a real champ.