| 28 July 2010
Greenberg (Universal)
Release date: July 13
Standard list price: $18.49
If I were Roger Greenberg – the literate, perpetually disgruntled protagonist in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg – I would definitely be hand-writing a letter to Universal right about now that would go something like this:
Dear Universal Home Entertainment,
Eager to discover more about the motion picture featuring myself, I recently purchased your newly released digital video disc of Greenberg. But upon accessing the supplemental materials on the disc, I soon learned that the so-called “special” features were not special at all. Your DVD misleadingly advertises three featurettes on the back of its snap-case, withholding the vital information that the featurettes in question barely total two minutes each – and most of those miniscule durations are taken up by recycled clips from the film. Shame on you, Universal, for squandering an opportunity to provide in-depth analysis of this Criterion-worthy film in favor of lazily repackaging promotional fluff in the guise of three bonus features. Barring a dramatic change in your DVD production line, this will be the last Universal title I add to my collection!
Sincerely,
Roger Greenberg
But I’m not Roger Greenberg. Suffice it to say that the bonus features on Universal’s Greenberg disc are indeed pithy, generic and worthless, but the movie is worth owning no matter how bare-bones the DVD.
As the film’s irascible anti-hero, Greenberg (Ben Stiller) always has something worth complaining about, from the proliferation of horn honks in Manhattan to the leg room of his airplane seat, to the bland music piped through Starbucks’ speakers. Rather than let life’s little annoyances go, as most of us would, Greenberg writes letters to every person or company that has wronged him.
Like many characters portrayed by Larry David and Woody Allen before him, Greenberg is a privileged New York nebbish who may often be doing the right thing in principle, but his form and presentation are way off-base. As with Jeff Daniels’ pompous professor in Baumbach’s previous success The Squid and the Whale, I found myself agreeing with most of Greenberg’s observations while disparaging his woeful, elitist negativism. Walking a thin tightrope between enviably intelligent and disturbingly tactless, he’s a three-dimensional character more complex than those who dismiss him as simply an unlikable misanthrope, and Baumbach and Stiller deserve enormous credit for crafting this fascinating dichotomy.
When we’re introduced to Greenberg, he’s in a state of deliberate stasis. A former musician from a band he personally dissolved at the apex of its commercial breakthrough, Greeberg has just been released from a mental institution (his condition is never revealed, but depression, bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder are top candidates, not to mention crippling anhedonia), and he’s about to turn 41. Rather than confront aging with existentialist soul-searching (as Allen has done), Greenberg is postponing adulthood, maturity and the normalcy of midlife by “trying to do nothing for a while.” The opportunity to housesit in Los Angeles during his wealthy brother’s vacation in Vietnam provides Greenberg the chance to do just that.
Between meeting old friends from the band, building a doghouse for his brother’s pooch and, of course, mailing complaint letters, Greenberg begins to stumble through a relationship with his brother’s personal assistant Florence (mumblecore queen Greta Gerwig in a star-making turn), a beacon of life-changing joy next to Greenberg’s inherent dourness.
Equal turns authentically dramatic and wryly comic (To a guest at a party, Greenberg describes his life as “Middling – Leonard Maltin would give me two-and-a-half stars”), Greenberg is both an untraditional romantic comedy and an intimate homage to character-driven ’70s cinema whose depth and insights are large as its potential audience is small. Here’s hoping it has a strong cult afterlife.
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (First Run Features)
Release date: July 20
SLP: $20.99
You know Daniel Ellsberg as the policy wonk who worked under Robert McNamara in the lead-up to the Vietnam War and later released the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page secret history of the war, to the media and the U.S. Congress, risking imprisonment to discredit a dishonest war machine. This documentary by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith profiles Ellsberg before, during and after his pivotal security breach, focusing especially on his transformations from hawkish employee of the Defense Department to outspoken leftist gallivanting with anti-war radicals such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. It’s obvious where Ehrlich and Goldsmith stand in this interesting but hagiographic portrait – Ellsberg himself narrates about half the movie, and an advertisement for his website and blog are included in the bonus features. Still, the history contained in the film is especially relevant to our extreme political climate, when those who don’t subscribe to one party’s dogma are ostracized as traitors by the other side and when the media are more content to cover fluffy non-stories than speak truth to power. The Most Dangerous Man in America is a reminder that dissent is patriotic – and that the media’s job is to question government, not echo its talking points.
Barking Dogs Never Bite (Magnolia)
Release date: July 20
SLP: $24.49
The first feature by popular South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho contains none of the delightfully schlocky self-consciousness of his B-movie throwback The Host, nor any of the psychological complexity of his recent The Mother. Instead, this overambitious genre mash-up meanders into thematic and aesthetic oblivion, and it takes a trying 110 minutes to do so. Barking Dogs Never Bite is essentially about an unlikable, part-time college lecturer whose murder of a yapping dog in his apartment complex leads to a series of canine-related calamities and threatens his plans to become a fully paid professor. There’s also some overwrought nonsense about a dog-eating basement dweller, a haunted boiler room and a pet-loving bookkeeper who longs to thwart a high-profile criminal and thus make it on public television. The film is every bit as disjointed as it sounds. Barking Dogs Never Bite is also available in Magnolia’s three-disc Bong Joon-ho Collection (SLP $46.49), packaged alongside The Host and The Mother.
Mystery Science Theater 3000: Vol. XVIII (Shout! Factory)
Release date: July 13
SLP: $39.49
The latest installment in the never-ending quartets of Mystery Science Theater episodes features four new ones to DVD. The box set includes the Season Two entry Lost Continent, a schlocky adventure picture about a group of scientists who land on a continent populated by dinosaurs; Season Four’s Crash of the Moons, a hilariously nonsensical sci-fi yarn; Season Six’s The Beast of Yucca Flats, a silly scientist-turned-beast monster movie whose episode is perhaps more notable for the preceding short Money Talks, about a kid who gains financial advice from a poorly bewigged Benjamin Franklin; and Jack Frost, an antique Russian Cinderella story whose title character doesn’t even appear until the end of the film. Special features include new introductions by MST3K cast members Frank Conniff and Kevin Murphy and a “Look Back at The Beast of Yucca Flats.” Sounds like hours of varied, sardonic fun from the world’s best riffers.
Editor’s note: This story has been edited after posting to correct a factual error and incorrect image.
| 13 July 2010
Terribly Happy (Oscilloscope Laboratories)
Release date: July 13
Standard list price: $26.99
Following in the footsteps of Roger Vadim (…And God Created Woman), George Sluizier (The Vanishing) and Michael Haneke (Funny Games), Danish filmmaker Henrik Ruben Genz becomes the latest foreign-language director to remake his own movie in English with his latest picture, Terribly Happy. This itch to Hollywoodize previous successes is a curious tendency that is probably worth an essay in itself, invariably suggesting creative stagnation, acknowledgement of imperfection in the original work, the chance to pursue new ideas in an old context or some combination of these motivations. Suffice it to say that in the particular case of Terribly Happy – Denmark’s official entry in this year’s Academy Awards – a Hollywood riff on the story makes more sense than any of these others, because Terribly Happy is already rooted in traditions of iconic American cinema; it’s a film that’s foreign in language only.
Perhaps the most immediate genre identification is that of the classic American western, albeit a subversive one. The protagonist (and gradual antihero) of the film is Robert Hansen (Jakob Cedergren), the archetypal new marshal sent to clean up a corrupt rural town. He carries his own distressing emotional baggage – he was reassigned to the town after a violent domestic dispute – but compared to the area’s drunken, drug-addled, pockmarked denizens, Robert is a force of sanity and ostensible goodness, trying as he might to play things by the book. But he’s soon informed that the previous marshal, like many people in the town who didn’t play by its rules, “disappeared.”
The atmosphere of Terribly Happy is ominous, engrossing and sustained from the opening fade-in to the closing credit. The color-drained, barren tableaux of cows, mud and a forbidding bog provides a despairing context for the weird local color, including a shady doctor who shoots heroin (Lars Brygmann), a shopkeeper who locks children in storage compartments, and a little girl who pushes a stroller without a baby down desolate streets while her father (Kim Bodnia), the town’s intimidating kingpin, beats her mother (Lene Maria Christensen), the town’s closest approximation of a looker.
It’s through this prototype of the vulnerable, battered wife that Robert becomes entangled in his own sordid, bloody mess, calling to mind The Postman Always Rings Twice and the entire pulp-novel pantheon. Thus the film shifts from classic Western to classic noir faster than you can say “Anthony Mann,” while reinterpreting both Hollywood genres in a modern absurdist setting reminiscent of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet and, as many critics have already pointed out, the world of early Coen Brothers.
Like those directors’ best works, there’s an ironic smirk underneath the fatalistic terror of the practically predestined plot that many will find alienating. But I admire the film’s deliberate plunge into cult oddity, one that wears its cinematic references brazenly on its blood-stanched sleeve. Besides, beneath all the irony, there’s a bleakness no dark humorist could conceal. Robert becomes so hardened by his experience in the town – where it’s dump or be dumped in that hideous swamp – that the feeling you’re left with is fairly brutal and uncompromising, so much that no Hollywood ending could alleviate. Let’s hope Genz retains this atmosphere when he films his own Hollywood ending.
Everlasting Moments (Criterion)
Release date: June 29
SLP: $35.99
Shot appropriately in the faded sepia tones of turn-of-the-20th-century photography, Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments is a handsome memory film about the real-life Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen), a housewife locked in a repressive marriage to a violent drunkard in pre-suffrage Sweden, who finds a liberating creative outlet in a Contessa box-camera. Everlasting Moments is a novelistic personal narrative, but it’s also a sweeping look at Sweden’s social and political history in the early 1900s, refracted through the lens of Larsson’s camera and her ever-expanding family (in a sobering reminder of those pre-birth-control times, we see a pregnant Larsson repeatedly jumping off her kitchen table in an attempt to abort her seventh child). It’s an emotionally rich movie composed of tight, classical portraiture and little visual miracles, whether it’s a butterfly’s light reflecting onto the hand of a shopkeeper or a moving iris shot of Larsson, the unheralded photographer becoming, for once, the camera’s subject. Criterion’s two-disc, director-approved set includes an hour-long documentary about Troell titled Jan Troell’s Magic Mirror, a documentary spotlighting photographers from the real Maria Larsson and a featurette on the making of Everlasting Moments.
Lost Keaton (Kino)
Release date: July 6
SLP: $25.99
Unlike Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton never turned his iconic silent-film star status into an equally sensational career in the talkies. But this collection of “lost” shorts (if they’re lost, how are we able to see them?) debunks the popular wisdom that his career in sound cinema was a complete bust, and it’s due vindication for an actor I’ve always preferred over his main period rival. There are 16 shorts total here, shot between 1934 and 1937 and mastered from the archival 35mm source materials. The two-reelers, which run from roughly 15 and 20 minutes each, find Keaton exploring his comic ingenuity on the baseball diamond, the opera, the chemistry lab and much more, and the DVD also includes a musical montage of Keaton’s pratfalls and stunts titled “Why They Call Him Buster.” It’s a real gem of a set, and it coincides with the July 6 two-disc reissue of Steamboat Bill, Jr. ($26.99), also from Kino.
Pretty Bird (Paramount)
Release date: June 29
SLP: $14.49
This poor little dramedy about three men who attempt to design and market a rocket belt debuted at Sundance at 2008 and never found a distributor. Looking at its belated DVD release, it’s easy to see why; though it has some memorable characters and an appealing cast, its story is programmatic, never aspiring to anything more than going through the motions. Billy Crudup plays Curtis Prentiss, a delusional huckster and empty suit whose latest get-rich-quick scheme involves the development of a rocket belt, or jet pack, which has beguiled rocket scientists for decades. He culls his wisdom from corny self-help platitudes and tired Dead Poet’s Society dialogue; his lack of business acumen and decidedly unhip cultural references make him a pretty funny character until you realize he’s just doing Michael Scott from The Office. Curtis recruits old friend and mattress salesman Kenny (David Hornsby) to be the money man on the venture, and he discovers out-of-work rocket scientist Rick Honeycutt (Paul Giamatti in one of his more odious roles) to do all the work for what turns out to be none of the credit. Cue the requisite internecine conflicts and spewn invectives that accompany any story of greed’s corrupting influence in the face of potential profit. Actor Paul Schneider, who also wrote the script, directs for the first time, and he brings an unobtrusive, workmanlike style to the material. But still: been there, done that.
| 26 June 2010
Close-Up (Criterion)
Release date: June 22
Standard list price: $36.49
This two-disc Criterion reissue of one of the greatest – if not the greatest – films of the 1990s replaces the out-of-print edition from Facets, and hopefully a new crop of young cinephiles will discover it. Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami wrote and directed the film after reading a short magazine article about a man named Hossein Sabzian, who was arrested for impersonating well-known Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Sabzian convinced a family he was Makhmalbaf, and this being the pre-Google age of the late ’80s, they believed him. They even letting him live in their home for a few days after the promise that “Makhmalbaf” would shoot a movie in their house, with themselves as the cast.
Kiarostami soon found out Sabzian was no run-of-the-mill con man looking for money to steal; he was an obsessed moviegoer who felt a deep sense of himself in Makhmalbaf’s (and Kiarostami’s) films and relished the illusory power of living in the auteur’s shoes – and in his psyche. Close-Up is Kiarostami’s exploration/re-creation of the events leading up to, and including, Sabzian’s fraud trial, with the principal players all reprising, and reliving, their real-life encounters.
Part documentary, part dramatic reenactment, there has never been anything quite like Close-Up before or since its release, and that’s partly what makes it so special. It examines the manipulation of reality and the nature of the documentary film, and how people change and adapt in the presence of a camera. Sabzian is a character more worthy of our pity than our scorn, and Kiarostami treats the disturbed man with empathy and even understanding. After all, Sabzian’s rationale – cinephilia as justification for fraud – is almost romantic at a time of all-digital movie theaters, disappearing arthouses and dwindling art-film distribution.
The bonus features make this release an essential addition to your collection, even if you already own the Facets DVD. Criterion has a charming little habit of tossing compelling, unreleased early features from prominent directors on bonus discs with little fanfare – see Jim Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation and Richard Linklater’s It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow From Reading Books, on the Stranger Than Paradise and Slacker DVDs, respectively, and here they’ve thrown us a real gem: The Traveler, Kiarostami’s first true feature and a movie for which Sabzian, in his trial, confesses his love.
The black-and-white, verité-style film anticipates Kiarostami’s breakthrough feature Where Is the Friend’s Home? by focusing its narrative on a rural child’s quest, this time to earn enough tomans to steal away to a major soccer match in Tehran (you can also draw a direct line from The Traveler all the way to the similarly themed Offside, a masterpiece directed by Jafar Panahi; the best films about children in the world continue to be produced in Iran). Gently criticizing economic disparity and the unfairness of the world, The Traveler is an unabashedly inspiring movie in which the character’s journey is far more important than his destination.
Close-Up’s second disc provides more than 90 fascinating minutes of reflection and analysis from Kiarostami, Sabzian and Sabzian’s friends and neighbors: It’s a sort of documentary post-mortem of the world after Close-Up, divided into three featurettes. In the documentary Close-Up Long Shot, made six year’s after Kiarostami’s film, Sabzian remains a pitiful soul, but he’s filled with poetic insights. He candidly admits that “I let my love for cinema destroy my life,” just before the director’s camera lingers on a copy of the Koran that rests atop an instructional book about making movies on Super 8.
Sure enough, some time later, as Kiarostami recounts in a newly recorded interview featurette, Sabzian’s life would end at 52, and it was the cinema that killed him: He collapsed into a coma at a subway station on the way to meet film students who were to film him before he was to meet Kiarostami for a retrospective screening of Close-Up. With this grim endnote in mind, I’m left wondering if there has ever been a film that so eloquently expresses the immense power and influence of the very medium. Close-Up belongs at the Met and the Smithsonian as much as it does your Netflix queue.
Bluebeard (Strand)
Release date: June 22
SLP: $21.49
Admirers of Catherine Breillat know the French director as one of the cinema’s foremost purveyors of frank deconstructions of female sexuality and gender representation. That said, her latest film – an arch, emotionless rendering of Charles Perrault’s bloody fairy tale Bluebeard – may seem an unusual choice for the director. More straightforward than not, her terse adaptation lacks key Breillatian themes, namely the uninhibited sexuality that dominated even her repressive period piece, The Last Mistress. Bluebeard cuts between a poker-faced retelling of the 1697-set Bluebeard fable, about a young girl betrothed to an ogreish aristocrat, and a more modern depiction of two adorable French girls who discover the Perrault text in their mothers’ attic. The contemporary story has an appealing sense of comic spontaneity, even when its frequent interruptions desensitize us to the 17th-century drama and remind us we’re watching a movie –undoubtedly a deliberate distancing device on Breillat’s part. Bluebeard is, like much of Breillat’s oeuvre, more engaging as intellectual theory than entertainment. It’s an interesting work, but because it fails to provoke or subvert the gruesome folk tale in any way – feminist or otherwise – I couldn’t help but see it as a missed opportunity for the normally confrontational auteur.
Le combat dans l’ile (Zeitgeist Films)
Release date: June 22
SLP: $22.49
An esoteric soundtrack and luminous black-and-white photography mask a rather conventional story in French director Alain Cavalier’s stylish debut feature, Le combat dans l’ile. When abusive militiaman Clement (Jean-Louis Trintignant, The Conformist) is framed for an assassination attempt by the leader of his extremist political organization, he flees to Buenos Aires to kill the man. His wife Anne (Romy Schneider, Cesar & Rosalie), hiding in Paris, kindles a new romance with Clement’s old friend and modest printer Paul (Henri Sierre), who brings out the radiant stage actress Anne had long repressed. When Clement finally returns, he naturally wants his girl back, leading to a bloody duel between the two men. Released in 1962 at the height of the French New Wave, Cavalier’s film found itself lost to history amid the Godards, Truffauts, Malles and the other darlings of hip Francophilia. Its narrative and obligatory political ambience may come off as a bit rote today, but like many of those masters’ films, its formalism feels every bit as (post)modern as the day it was released.
Green Zone (Universal)
Release date: June 22
SLP: $17.49
There’s an inherent problem with Paul Greengrass’ Green Zone, and it’s not the shaky, adrenalized, faux-realistic camerawork that’s become the filmmaker’s signature (though viewers who succumb to frequent motion sickness might want to avoid this one, ditto to the director’s Bourne movies). The problem lies more in the screenplay, about a courageous whistleblower (Matt Damon) from the U.S. army’s team of WMD hunters who works to expose lies and corruption surrounding the Bush administration’s justification for war in the early days of the occupation of Iraq. Most of the chief characters have real-life counterparts who have been written about extensively in books such as Bob Woodward’s State of Denial and Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, the latter of which inspired Brian Helgeland’s script: Damon’s character is modeled after chief warrant officer Richard Gonzalez, Greg Kinnear’s inept Pentagon bureaucrat is clearly based on Paul Bremer, Amy Ryan’s muckraking journalist is almost certainly Judith Miller, etc. Because the story is based on such recent – and widespread – public knowledge, the amount of suspense, twists and dramatic tension is almost nonexistent; forget any chance of new revelations about the whole sordid affair. Still, Greengrass tries his darndest to turn Helgeland’s moral lecture on the war crimes of the previous administration into a straightforward action movie, and at this he mostly succeeds, despite scattered bouts of hand-cam incomprehensibility.
| 20 June 2010
Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt in Please Give.
There’s Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. There’s Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. And on the female side, there’s Nicole Holofcener and Catherine Keener: Film directors and the actors with whom they frequently collaborate.
Keener has been in all four of Holofcener’s films -- Walking and Talking (1996), Lovely and Amazing (2001), Friends with Money (2006) and her latest, Please Give, which opened over the weekend. In March, during the Miami International Film Festival, the two women sat down with Hap Erstein to talk about the film and their long-running collaboration.
Erstein: How did this collaboration begin for you two?
Holofcener: I saw her in a movie and I kind of stalked her, found her agent and gave her my script. She responded to it, we hit it off right away, but it took many years to get the financing. Then when we made the film, we became friends. I never planned to put her in all my movies, but I just couldn’t not.
Erstein: So as you gather material for the next movie, do you now think, “How can I make this a Catherine Keener character?”
Holofcener: Actually, if it’s a character that‘s somewhat based on me, I generally think of Catherine, because she’s definitely played me, as much as a person can play me in a movie. But I don’t start out that way. I definitely go with thoughts and themes that are important to me and then see who fits.
Erstein: Catherine, when you first read her script for Walking and Talking, you didn’t know her at all, did you?
Keener: Nope. But I was drawn to the writing and it made me think: I would love to hang out with this woman.
Erstein: So you certainly did not think this would become a long-term collaboration.
Keener: No, she didn’t have the movie financed or anything. She just said, “I want to make this and I want you to be in it if it happens.” And it wasn’t until a couple of years later that it happened. And it was quite a struggle to get me, to convince investors to go with me.
Erstein: What makes Catherine an ideal actress for your films?
Holofcener: It’s a really hard thing to describe, but, first and foremost, she’s really natural. She doesn’t have a movie voice, or a movie face, nothing’s fake. Of course she has good takes and bad takes like everybody else, but generally she is really natural, no mannerisms. She really listens, to me and to the other actors. She’s very present, she’s got a great sense of timing and humor, which is really imperative, because the material can be so serious and self-involved and self-conscious, but if the actor has a sense of humor, it gives it so much more.
Erstein: Do you think of her as a muse?
Holofcener: Yeah, sure, absolutely. I mean when I’m writing something and I hope that she’s going to be playing it, I think it helps make me a better writer, when I think about how she would say it.
Keener: And she is a muse for me as well, because when I’m reading (a script of hers) and I’m working for her, it just takes me to more creative places in my head.
Erstein: Do you feel more proprietary about making a film of Nicole’s, that you are more than just a hired hand in a movie?
Keener: No. I don’t feel any ownership at all. I’m still just her minion. (Laughs)
Holofcener: She still absolutely looks for my approval. She wants to make sure she’s doing it the way I want her to do it. She could have a lot more freedom than she takes.
Keener: I’m not interested in that, though. I like it this way. I think actors need directors. I know that I do.
Nicole Holofcener.
Erstein: Is Catherine playing a role that represents you in Please Give?
Holofcener: That character is definitely the closest to me compared to any of the other characters. I struggle with being a successful person with lots of money compared to everybody else.
Erstein: You don’t feel you deserve it?
Holofcener: It’s a struggle. It’s not that simple. Yes, of course I deserve it. If anybody deserves it, why not me, right? But the way it works is just so crazy and wrong. There are so many starving hungry people everywhere. I live in L.A. and they’re everywhere.
Keener: We live in expensive houses, but we can look outside and see so many people who are poor, disenfranchised.
Erstein: But you chose to set the film in New York, which is almost one of the characters.
Holofcener: I did that because the city was an important part of the story when I first created the characters and the situation. I really couldn’t imagine it anywhere else. I wanted that elevator, I wanted them to have to get in the same elevator, to have their doors right next to each other.
I tried to figure it in my mind in L.A., because I didn’t want to leave my kids, but it just wouldn’t work. It had to be New York. And I grew up in New York and that’s where this part of me came from.
Erstein: That reinforces a comment I’ve often heard, describing you as a female Woody Allen.
Holofcener: Y’know, I think it’s because I’m a New York Jew. Seriously, I think if I wasn’t those two things, you wouldn’t hear those comparisons. But then, I would be a very different person, and maybe I’d make different movies. I mean, if I were Cybill Shepherd, so many things would be different.
Plus I grew up watching and revering his movies. I remember seeing Manhattan and Annie Hall and Stardust Memories so many times, they have to be an influence, consciously or unconsciously. And having such neurotic, but really sympathetic, deep characters in everyday life. They have such problems in Manhattan, and it’s so absorbing.
Erstein: How do you develop a film? Do you collect ideas and characters until you have enough?
Holofcener: Pretty much. I have an idea, and then I think I have an idea for a couple of characters and if it lasts more than a day, I’ll sort of expand on that the next day and then after a few weeks if it still seems interesting to me, I just start writing.
And I don’t really know where it’s going to go when I start writing, but I like to have some idea of maybe the first few pages.
Erstein: The movie opens with shots of women having mammograms. That’s as close as I’ve ever been to seeing the test given.
Holofcener: Well, let me tell you, it’s really a G-rated version of a mammogram. They really flatten the boobs like a pancake. It’s so weird. I really wanted to do that, I wanted to show that it really hurts, but I couldn’t let that happen. In retrospect, I wish I hurt a couple. So you haven’t really seen a mammogram.
Erstein: Were those professional actors?
Holofcener: Those were actual, real boobs. They were extras, and they got paid as extras. I signed a thing that said their heads would not show in the same shot as their boobs. Like we might have used them again later that day on the street. The call for those extras asked for all shapes and sizes, mostly 50 and over.
Erstein: What ties all the characters in Please Give together?
Holofcener: I think that Catherine’s character and Amanda (Peet’s) and Rebecca (Hall’s) character have a similar theme, that they all want to be good and what that means for each of them is different. Because (Amanda and Rebecca) had a mother who abandoned them by killing herself -- I think children feel that that’s their fault that there’s something wrong with them -- and Catherine’s quandary is more contemporary, it’s more in her life right now, not necessarily a childhood wound. But the fact that they are going to be the people they want to be, sort of let off the hook.
Erstein: On behalf of pudgy men everywhere, I’m so glad that Oliver Platt (Keener’s husband) has an affair with Amanda Peet. But what is her motive?
Holofcener: I think that Amanda Peet’s character instantly envies Catherine’s character and looks up to her. Catherine has whatever Amanda does not have. Husband, children, money. Amanda doesn’t feel beautiful, although she is very beautiful. And I think having Catherine’s husband hit on her is the ultimate compliment. She’s desperate and lonely and insecure.
Erstein: Why do so many of your characters have self-image and assurance issues?
Holofcener: Characters that don’t have them are probably not very interesting. I mean, everybody has self-esteem issues in some areas, don’t they?
Erstein: Talk about the involvement of Sony Classics Pictures.
Holofcener: They financed the movie. They also financed Friends with Money. They didn’t even come to the set. I say, “Aren’t you guys interested?” They said, “We trust you. It’s all right.” And they don’t tell me what to cut or anything. It’s amazing.
The movie only costs $3 million, and it’s not my first film. My last film made them some money, although they were very hands off on the last one, too. I think once they decide to trust you, they just trust. And it wasn’t a great deal of money. I’m very, very lucky. I think I’m in a very rare situation.
I wish I could have shown more of the city. With more money and time, I would have more exteriors. I would have seen that the art department had a lot more money and time. To go really nuts on the furniture store. Or the apartment. But everybody was limited. But in the end, I don’t think it really mattered.
Erstein: Do you think of Please Give as a departure for you?
Holofcener: No, a departure for me would be a movie without a joke. Or a thriller. A highly stylized movie, something like that.
Erstein: Is it getting any easier to get your films financed and distributed?
Holofcener: No. But it’s still difficult. A lot of studios tell me they want to make my next movie, but when they see the script, they say, “Maybe not this one. We mean the next next one. The one that‘s going to make a lot of money. The one that I can really see on the page better than this one.”
You know, they want me to make a thriller.
| 09 June 2010
For My Father (Film Movement)
Release date: June 1
Standard list price: $22.49
I normally reserve the space for the largest review in this column to wonderful films that are worthy of your time, but occasionally a film so indefensible – so patently contemptible – will arrive on my doorstep that it prompts the need to vent for more than 150 words. For My Father, the latest installment in the usually reliable Film Movement line, is one such title.
“There have been so many films, documentary and fiction, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that, sight unseen, For My Father could seem like just another tired vision of this unfortunate problem,” says a Film Movement representative in the DVD's liner notes before explaining why the movie is better than all that. On the contrary: If only For My Father represented such a benign, forgettable homogeny with other movies about Middle Eastern strife, it could have been absorbed and digested without much criticism. For My Father is different, all right – but for all the wrong reasons.
Though shot in Israel and filmed in Hebrew, For My Father is as close to the art house as Transformers. The film opens on Tarek (Shredi Jabarin), a wannabe suicide bomber, being picked up by two terrorist buddies who strap explosives to his chest and discuss protocol – i.e., don't explode yourself until you're in a crowd of people, etc. Then comes the pep talk right out of a Hollywood action movie: “We don't have an air force, Tarek. If we had an air force, we wouldn't have to do this. You're our air force.”
Sounds trailer-ready, doesn't it? This kind of artificial nonsense also sounds disgustingly maudlin and completely inappropriate, but it speaks to Tarek's indecisiveness. According to the film's (il)logic, radical Islamic suicide bombers are just like you and me – they need a little coaxing. It's a big day, after all!
This scene is, unfortunately, of a piece with the rest of this ludicrous picture. The unintentional absurdity continues when Tarek's bomb fails, leaving him stranded in Tel Aviv while a local repairman fixes his doomsday switch. All the while, the jihadist thugs are on his case: They've wired a fail-safe cellphone to Tarek's body, threatening to activate his explosives remotely if and when he can't do the job himself. They give him 48 hours, during which time Tarek realizes that there's some nice people in Israel; he works under a kind shopkeeper and forms a friendship with an unorthodox and slightly retarded girl.
That a suicide bomber can, or would, ever have a “change of heart” and decide to embrace love rather than hate, is a dangerously naïve Hollywood fantasy whose rosy vision is insulting to everyone's intelligence – even suicide bombers themselves. Though Bill Maher lost a job admitting it, anyone who has done the most basic research about Islamic suicide bombers knows that these men are not hesitant, cold-footed cowards who would forego jihad at the slightest resistance. They are dyed-in-the-wool religious fundamentalists who would, in the name of Allah, love nothing more than to sacrifice their earthly bodies while obliterating their enemies so they can properly ascend to heaven and fornicate with 72 virgins.
For My Father suggests otherwise and, making the whole affair even more offensive, suggests so through a filmic grammar of Hollywood clichés – a pop song-scored lovers' bike ride, the sharing of headphones on the beach, Tarek's heroic dispatching of a ridiculous band of Orthodox thugs threatening his new girlfriend for not being dogmatic. The screenplay feels written by a Hollywood hack with no understanding of life in Israel, and we can only blame the translators to a point. This melodramatic pap is so utterly disingenuous that it makes me wonder if the whole thing isn't a joke played on us, the spectators – a kind of Israeli Lady in the Water, subtextually subverting stereotypes by obviously overplaying them to the point of parody. If director Dror Zahavi wants his film to have any credibility at all, I'd suggest he frame it this way.
Mary and Max (IFC)
Release date: June 15
SLP: $18.99
This claymation feature by Australian writer-director Adam Elliot has been a favorite at dozens of film festivals since its 2009 Sundance premiere, and it's easy to see why. Toni Collette voices Mary Daisy Dinkle, a lonely and peculiar girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne in the late '70s who, through a random search through a phone book, writes a letter to Philip Seymour Hoffman's Max Horovitz, an overweight, anxiety-addled New Yorker with Asperger's syndrome (has there ever been a character more tailored to Hoffman's outcast onscreen persona?). Thus a pen-pal relationship is formed, and it's as unconventional as the movie's style. The film's episodic script follows one letter with another, punctuated every now and then with Barry Humphries' gravitas-laden fairy tale narration; there is very little verbal communication between characters. An adult animated film all the way, Mary and Max explores some awfully dark terrain, from alcoholism and depression to obesity, suicide, electroshock therapy and oodles of death. But the bizarre, surrealist sense of humor and hilarious visual whimsy – recalling The Ricky Gervais Show – keep even the most morbid elements in comedic check. Ultimately, Mary and Max is a fine picture about friendship, forgiveness and overcoming fear and anxiety.
Cinema Pride Collection (Fox)
Release date: June 8
SLP: $44.99
Gays and lesbians have come a long way in the modern media, emerging from decades of showbiz demonization, caricature and insensitivity to claim their own radio and TV stations, film festivals and niche movie theaters. So it was surprising to learn that Fox's new Cinema Pride collection is the very first LGBT box set released by a major motion picture studio. The long wait for such a collection is most likely due to Fox's dragging its feet until it could tie the DVDs in with Gay and Lesbian Pride Month. It's smart marketing, and at least we have this set now. The 10-disc collection includes mostly worthy titles: La Cage Aux Folles and its lesser remake The Birdcage, Stephen Frears' wonderful My Beautiful Laundrette, The Children's Hour, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Bent, Boys Don't Cry, Kissing Jessica Stein and a couple of throwaway titles that probably shouldn't be included in any collection, LGBT or otherwise: The Object of My Affection and Imagine Me & You.
Collapse (MPI)
Release date: June 15
SLP: $16.49
American Movie director Chris Smith made this exhaustive interview film in the stylistic vein of Errol Morris' The Fog of War. His subject is Michael Ruppert, a police officer turned investigate journalist whose radical theories, published in his From the Wilderness newsletter, led to his marginalization from the mainstream media and, he says with pride, made him a personal enemy of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. But this eloquent, erudite conspiracist, doom prophet and major buzzkill foretold many catastrophes – mainly surrounding the 2008 financial collapse and its ripple effects –and he has profound observations about our overreliance on oil, the eventual demise of what he calls our “fiat currency” of printed money, our diminishing resources and our political structure, which he considers as antiquated as the Jurassic period. It's too bad Ruppert goes well beyond rational thought and into crackpot forecasting about shifting paradigms and our inevitable extinction as a human race (he deploys the word “perish” with newscaster gravitas) if we don't abandon our cars, grow our own food, pee on our soil, etc. It's a fascinating, endlessly watchable movie nonetheless, and Smith, to his credit, challenges Ruppert from time to time rather than let him bloviate.
