Change Your Image
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Reviews
I, Tonya (2017)
a story about class, gender, and violence
I didn't expect much from the film; I was not a Tonya fan or much of a fan of skating. But what this film reveals (to the accompaniment of the upbeat music of the period) is the class divide in the U.S. and the trauma of childhood emotional and physical abuse that devolves into spousal abuse. A victim of her mother, Tonya becomes a victim of her husband, and ultimately, a victim of the society in which she is always going to be the person who doesn't know how to behave, who walks around with seething aggression because aggression is all she has ever known. This is not the story of overcoming one's past to become a champion (as "Rocky" did), but the very real story of not being able to overcome the overwhelming burden of a past spent struggling against abuse from both her family members and a sport that demands a particular form of femininity from its athletes. The thrilling (and well filmed) skating scenes only serve to underscore the tragedy of Tonya's inability to escape her past and her identity; she is a sublime athlete with no chance of winning in this particular world. The film throws comedy into the mix in a way that makes watching bearable; the interruptions of the comic tone by the husband's sudden explosions of violence bring home to the viewer the terror of living under constant threat. We are told in the titles at the end that Tonya is now happily married with two children, but when she is interviewed, she calls out the interviewer and, by extension, the audience, for the injustice of her experience with the media circus. A thought-provoking, well acted and thoroughly entertaining film.
The Florida Project (2017)
a look into the horror behind the Disney facade
It is always interesting and sometimes amusing to read the reviews on imdb. No, this is not a film designed primarily for "entertainment." Though the setting is 100% American (and in some respects the very worst America has to offer), the pacing is more European. Sean Baker captures the colorful and tawdry carnival that typifies Disney-World-Florida and shows how the surface is a mere illusion of joy and happiness, with decay and degradation and poverty just inches below. At the same time, living parallel with the crumbling stucco facades and the relentlessly fake "Happiest Place on Earth," are scenes of tranquil natural beauty, a rainbow, kids who take joy in each other and share their single cadged ice cream cone more or less equally. There are flashes of human kindness amid all the destructive and bad behavior, moments in which the tough facade of a character like Halley cracks, and we see her grief at the loss of her only friendship. Otherwise the only reaction she can summon when crossed is anger. Baker accomplishes the film's revelations not with a clear story-line, but with a camera that follows the daily lives of the children who revel in all the trash (without any sense that it is trash) and the adults who struggle to survive in a world where they have little purpose. One of the more revealing sequences was the one in which the children enter the "haunted houses" (abandoned condos) and start destroying everything they find there, even as they fantasize about the houses being hundreds of years old, ancient palace ruins. Which they then proceed to set on fire. The houses are haunted, by the ghosts of the people who lost them in the recession and the failed dreams of the people who hoped to grow rich in building them. They were also cheaply constructed, like nearly everything in this supposed "paradise" project. It is after the setting of this fire that Halley's only friend, the mother of Moonee's best friend, cuts off both Halley and Moonee in order to protect herself and her child. And it is after this fire that Halley's life, already precarious, takes yet another spiral downward into prostitution (which she had earlier refused to engage in while a dancer), battery, and larceny. Ultimately this leads to the loss of her child to Child Protective Services, which in one way the viewer has to applaud... but Moonee's despair at losing her (yes, loving) mother and her friends and (yes) home forbids any sense of a good resolution. So Baker inserts a concluding fantasy escape into the world of fantasy that has been lurking at the corner of the film the entire time: Disney World. I thought the film was longer than it needed to be, and I barely got any sense of the humor that some viewers seemed to experience. But it was an intelligent, beautifully filmed, critically keen, amazingly acted film.
20th Century Women (2016)
moving ... a star turn for the actors
We have enjoyed a spate of wonderful, thoughtful films about real human relationships in the past month: Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, and now, 20th Century Women. Perhaps not every audience member will recognize the reality of this apparently eccentric cast of characters, but people who came of age in the 70s, particularly in California, will. And even those who didn't should be able to feel the real emotion of these exceptionally well-acted roles. Every one of the primary cast members offers a three-dimensional, psychologically deep performance. Bening is extraordinary as a woman in her fifties, unvarnished and beautiful, lonely and loving. Lucas Jade Zumann, as her young teen-aged son, seems to grow into his role as he grows up. Elle Fanning and Greta Gerwig are distinctly different women with depth and wit, and Billy Crudup plays his small role with a nuanced sincerity. I was not ready for the film to end. I can't believe that none of them was nominated for an Academy Award... but so it goes.
Moonlight (2016)
sensitive, beautiful, deeply moving
There are few movies that show the sensitivity of Moonlight; the boy who plays the role of the child Chiron is supernaturally good, as is the actor who plays the adolescent. Stand-out scenes include: a conversation at dinner when the child's protector, Juan, explains to him what "faggot" means, adding that he should never let himself be defined by others. The adolescent Chiron's upright posture and tensed muscles as he walks through the school, determined to wreak revenge on his tormentors. The conversation between the adult Chiron and his sorrowful, penitent mother. And the scene in the diner, when the love of Chiron's life makes dinner for him so tenderly. The possibility of love in the final moments of the movie do not close off the viewer's capacity to dream about what could take place in the future: are the doors finally opening for Chiron? Deeply felt and beautifully filmed.
Anomalisa (2015)
deeply depressing and frightening
From one of the opening scenes in a taxi, in which the protagonist is confronted with the mind-numbing, vaguely aggressive stupidity of the taxi-driver's conversation, to the awful, frightening scene in the hotel in which our anti-hero seduces a less than enthusiastic and (again) amazingly stupid young woman, we have an image of all human beings and our culture as utterly debased and meaningless. The film's top-notch animation reproduces lovingly all the details of the emptiness of modern life, from the perfectly formed ice cubes in the hotel ice-maker to the sex toys at the "toy shop" down the street from the hotel. One can read the film as the representation of one man's mental illness (as the name of the Fregoli Hotel, named for a neurological syndrome, invites us to do), but I see this idea as a red herring. This is not about one man's flawed vision -- it is a dark vision of our world the way the filmmakers imagine it, about how all of us are debased cookie- cutter products of a dehumanized culture. The film manages to be thoroughly boring and terrifying at the same time. Incidentally, women in the film are reduced to sex-doll status, which might be one reason why I had a hard time finding a single positive review from a woman on the IMDb site, and why the female viewers who pointed out the scary sexism of the film got shouted down by male fans of animation who identified with the protagonist's unhappiness.
Nebraska (2013)
an allegory for a dying culture
I have to say that I grew up in small-town Nebraska, and while Payne exaggerates some aspects of life there to the detriment of the region, there was enough unflinching honesty (in terms of images, language, and culture) to make me draw my breath in recognition of the film's daring. Payne (with his cinematographer) manages to capture both the magnificent beauty and the depressing ugliness of the area, the delicate feelings of some of the characters (the loving son and the fabulous newspaper editor) and the acidic bitterness of others (wow the mother is fantastic). To those who say the characters are unrealistic, I say: you haven't been there. I have older female relatives who could go toe to toe with the mother. And male relatives who look an awful lot like that array of guys in their chairs. What I see here is a question about how to heal some of the hurt and disappointment of life (including the disappointment of the fading one- time frontier). The answer is a tough one, provided by the son: just keep on being faithful and loving, when there doesn't seem to be anything to love. The big country is out there, and underneath all the tawdriness, it's still beautiful.
Lore (2012)
the psychology of genocide
Lore is neither a denial of the Holocaust nor a sop of sympathy to surviving Germans. Instead, this is a film that treats, often very subtly and wordlessly, the terrible ambiguities and uncertainties of a situation we have learned to understand as completely black and white and transparent. It also deals with deeply diseased family relationships as a source for genocidal thinking. One of the main points of the narrative is that the teenager Lore discovers that her father was a genocidal war criminal. The film handles this discovery wordlessly. But there is a very explicit set of gestures that explain precisely what she has seen: she first stands in a crowd of Germans forced by the Allies to confront photographs of mass murder in exchange for food (this is mentioned very briefly in an aside by an unknown character), then she notices her father in uniform in one of the photographs of mass murder; she touches the photograph, and the glue backing it adheres to her fingers. Later she tries to remove the traces of glue from her hand. She returns and removes the part of the picture where her father is standing. Because the film is wordless on this point, the viewer doesn't know whether this is because she wants to keep the photograph to remind herself of her father's role in the atrocities or to deny his guilt. But subsequently her younger brother exhibits a treasured image of their father in that same uniform and boasts that "Vati" (Daddy) is out fighting in Belarus (the site of many atrocities). Lore somehow acquires that photograph as well, and we see her put the two images of Vati in uniform together and bury them under mud and grass. That's how this film works, and by working this way, it manages to reveal the painfully mixed and contradictory motivations all real human beings have. It interests me that some viewers are not able to follow a narrative given in images.
It is the dynamic between Lore and her parents that I think is a key element to this film, and it has to do with how young people become genocidal, and what might make them break with their psychological training. There is an extraordinarily ugly relationship between the parents and between the parents and the children. It was part of the ideology of Nazi Germany to reward German women with medals for producing as many children as possible. In other words, it is entirely possible that a woman like Lore's mother (a fanatic lover of Hitler) would produce a brood of five solely in service of the Fuehrer. Her husband (whom she also seems to loathe for what she calls his cowardice in abandoning the family and the cause) is just a prosthetic husband. She deeply jealous of Lore for her beauty and her budding sexuality, and in the scenes we watch, she treats her children as inept servants. When Lore shuts her younger brother up in a cabinet and vilifies him in the cruelest terms possible for stealing food (when he is hungry), one understands that she is following the example of her own parents' authoritarian methods. Cruelty, a harsh authoritarian morality, and a lack of loving kindness were the daily bread of that household; this is reflected in Lore's behavior as "mother" to her siblings.
When the mother leaves the family, it is not for inexplicable reasons, as one reviewer implied. We see that the parents are both implicated in the crimes of the war, because they go to the length of destroying their library and documents. The parents are clearly thinking about Allied revenge (when the mother tells Lore that the Allies kill babies, and that's why the mother can't take her nursing infant with her, the viewer doesn't know whether or not she believes this herself). We know why the mother leaves, but not where she goes. She says she is turning herself in, but she may be fleeing to a safe house and taking up a new identity. The children would keep her from escaping her old identity, so they have to be jettisoned.
In the amazing scene toward the end of the film when the grandmother (also -- surprise -- a strict authoritarian parent) chastises Lore's surviving younger brother for eating without the proper table manners, Lore finally makes a break with her upbringing. She shows us that she recognizes the hypocrisy and lies of her parents' generation by intentionally eating "like an animal" in support of her brother, spilling milk on the table and lapping it from her hands. And then she breaks all the little kitschy statuettes, including the little deer.
And on the subject of the Jewish helper -- yes, his identity is ambiguous. But the fact that he is a camp survivor is made clear from his tattoo. That he has false papers is an important point; the regime was all about telling people who they were. When Lore understands that he is a Jew, she immediately tries to put him into the category "Jew" she has been taught: parasite, lecher. But he breaks out of those categories. He refuses to be the person she frames him to be. The fact that we as viewers are anxious to have his identity defined through "papers" puts us unhappily into the same position as the Nazis.
On the whole, this film could disappoint some viewers by not maintaining traditional story structure or temporal structure, by leaving significant things unsaid and unexplained, by avoiding some of the traditional scenes of war films (destroyed cities, fire-fights), by depicting American soldiers in a less than heroic or even congenial way. But if you are a film viewer with patience for non-mainstream filmmaking, this is a profound and beautiful (though sometimes brutal) look at disease.
Take This Waltz (2011)
questionable morality tale
There were things to like about this film: the camera-work and editing, for one. Aesthetically it was quite appealing. But the story-line was appalling. The female protagonist and her first husband are hopelessly infantile in their relationship with one another, unable to have a serious conversation about anything, including having children. Margot acts like a five-year-old in many of her scenes. She bounces between her somewhat cozy (if mute and babyish) relationship with her husband and the almost laughably dark and handsome artist stranger across the street like a super-ball on speed. Because she is so inarticulate and childish, the viewer can't really figure out what is going on in her head. If she knows. The artist just seems predatory, though he is supposed to seem romantic. The thing that really turned me off about the film was that the woman was set up to be a villain, as happens in so many narratives where the woman leaves her man. Poor poor hubby, who spends hours in the kitchen and is sweet and has a loving extended family. She gets the bright idea to try to "seduce" him while he is slaving over a hot stove (his work!) with boiling sauces in several pans, and then she is terribly hurt and angry when he doesn't just turn off all the burners and jump into bed with her. She is written as unreasonable, naive, and ultimately destructive, while hubby is written as a bit clueless but essentially a really nice guy. Then the drunken sister-in-law, who has just wrecked the car and is about to hauled off by the police, tells Margot that Margot is "stupider" than the sister-in-law, presumably because the sister-in-law (who can't stay on the wagon and is hurting her husband and little girl with her drunkenness) is at least staying in her marriage. Puh-leez.
Bridesmaids (2011)
how awful can it get?
I was listening to NPR (YES, the highly cultured NPR) and two of the movie reviewers on the air had this turkey in their top ten list. Now, this might say more about how bad the other films of 2011 were, so I will be generous and not attribute the entire blame to the reviewers. After hearing how funny and "unique" this film supposedly is, I went out and rented it for a good laugh. No laughs. Lots of cringing embarrassment at how these women humiliate themselves. Awful stereotypes. Bad writing. Really unattractive protagonist. I mean that both in terms of personality and in terms of appearance. Wiig looks anorexic in this film, nearly getting lost in the bridesmaid dress she wears, AND what about her hair? (Sorry to be so superficial, but it bugged me throughout. I mean, COMB it already.) I found Chris O'Dowd charming, but it is as if he wandered into the wrong movie. And this was written by women? It is so insulting to women -- to the heavyset "closet lesbian" (as another reviewer called her) to the poor poor little rich girl Helen to the wacky mother who goes to AA for the social aspect etc etc. Please spend your precious viewing time on something else if you haven't already been hooked into watching this catastrophe by misguided critics or friends...
Larry Crowne (2011)
disappointing
I am a Tom Hanks fan (Julia Roberts, not so much, but then I don't have the necessary Y chromosome). So I was ready to like this little film. I didn't expect much from it, but what I got was less than I expected. Wooden dialogue, unbelievable situations and characters and relationships, and one the worst-ever representations of teaching and the classroom environment. I am a teacher, so perhaps I was particularly sensitive to the clumsy efforts to show what it is like to work in a classroom. Julia Roberts' character a great teacher who changes lives for the better? Not really. Try drunk, cynical, angry, disaffected and generally unpleasant and ornery. You would have to be still blissed out from Pretty Woman to see anything redeeming in her. A final consisting of a two minutes' speech on potatoes? I hope not. The George Takei character was another unbelievable cardboard figure. The film both wants to say something sincere and real about the economic downturn and wants to entertain us on a very superficial level. In trying to do both, it fails at both.
Date Night (2010)
did not make for a fun date night
My honey and I went to see Date Night on a whim -- we wanted something light and funny. We got something turgid and unfunny. I love both Tina Fey and Steve Carrell -- I am a Thirty Rock and Office addict. So I tried very hard to laugh, and I succeeded in an early motorboat chase scene and in one little exchange the couple had about whether or not they ought to have sex that night (they don't, of course). But then things went downhill. I had seen the trailer and knew about most of the scenes that were supposed to be funny, so they lacked their punch. And I felt that the two stars had been put in script-straitjackets in terms of their lines and characters. I was bewildered by the large number of positive reviews here on IMDb when I first started to scroll through, but then as I read on, I found more and more people who had experienced the film as I did. It makes me wonder whether the positive reviews are front loaded in order to support certain films? If so, it's a disservice to the moviegoer. This one is a stinker... not the very stinkiest of the stinkers, but disappointing because of the star potential.
Into the Wild (2007)
missing the point by a mile?
I saw "Into the Wild" last night and have to regard it as one of the best American films I have seen, part of a tradition that reaches all the way back through American cinema with its early use of the Western landscape, but even further back into American literature, not only Thoreau but also Hawthorne and Emerson and Twain. Some viewers seemed to focus primarily on what they take to be the "stupid idealism" of the main character, who would have survived if he had only had a map or should have written to his parents. This is fiction, people, though based on a real story. Such comments remind me of readers of Huckleberry Finn who note that if Huck and Jim had navigated the raft reasonably, Jim would have been home free by page 76. Penn makes rather a large point of the pain inflicted by McCandless' actions, by the way. He also makes a point of showing how McCandless is young and at times, clueless. The film does not make a god of the protagonist. It does point up rather vividly how our culture, in its breathless and mindless pursuit of more building, more possessions, more detritus, and less confrontation with the real (the wild, both within and without) drove one young man (well, several, if you count Thoreau and Huck and countless literary others) out of society and into the open.
Let me sing the praises, as many others have, of the cinematographer who captured such awe-inspiring images of the wild and the savagery of our cities, of the young man whose body and mind and heart drove the action of the film (Emile Hirsch), of the supporting actors who offered such believable and moving performances (Hal Holbrook is unforgettable), and of the director who provided such a creative and powerful vision for his story. The film is long, but I would have gladly kept on watching.
Bridge to Terabithia (2007)
confronting reality
I took my ten-year-old son to see this movie and was quite moved by it. It dismays me to read the comments of viewers who feel that a film that deals honestly with such absolute realities of life in our world as bullying and death is not appropriate for children. Our children have to live with these things in their lives, and what better way to help them develop ways of understanding and coping than seeing others who come up with beautiful strategies for dealing with crisis and unhappiness? There is plenty of death and gore and violence of various kinds in films, even films meant for children, even animated films by Disney. But the unreality of many of these representations (or their callous representation of death and pain as laughable) renders them useless or offensive. This film tries to confront big issues from a child's point of view, and I thought it was beautifully done on the whole. Don't be deterred from taking your child because the movie is not as much a "fantasy" as it was billed in the previews.