THE BLING RING 7/7/13

Every film Sofia Coppola has directed is both romantic in a perverse way, and touchingly innocent. THE BLING RING zeroes in on our fascination with celebrity culture, but not of the “great” performers, but rather our adoration of the accessories/accoutrements that sheer beauty and glamour bestows on the “chosen” that grace the covers of tabloids and supermarket/ convenience store displays. I would call this phenomenon - “Stash/Splash” with its spill over marketing of an intoxicating lifestyle to those who covet a superficial “look” and sleek values.

Marc (Israel Broussard), an average looking teen is the new “kid” attending his first day of High School in an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood.  We discover early on that Marc has had a bit of a rocky educational history in his former high schools – nothing too serious – but Coppola is letting us know that this young man does not toe the “straight and narrow.” Like a wildcat sniffing a lamb, Rebecca, a lovely looking, predatory fellow student (an excellent performance by Katie Chang) immediately discerns a kindred spirit and the two become “best friends” each voraciously enthralled with celeb lore and the “bling” that blankets their lives.

Rebecca, the ringleader, who is fearless, desires what these “icons” have, and is determined to get what she wants, introducing Marc, her willingly passive partner into an exciting, seemingly benign world of  “trespass.” He works the computer and finds out when the targets/marks are out of town on promotional jaunts, and then they both break into these fabulous homes complete with rooms (not just closets) of over the top designer clothes, jewelry, shoes, etc. Both intruders assume that what they steal would never be missed. Soon we are introduced to a gang of girlfriends who rapaciously join the night invasions, each acting like ravaging foragers.

To complete the picture, we are given a glimpse into the family life of one of the members of the club whose name is Niki, played by Emma Watson the British actress known for her part as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter film series, doing a great impersonation of “Valley” girl patois. She lives with her new-age mother (Leslie Mann) and an “adopted” friend and fellow conspirator Sam (Taissa Farmiga); both girls are home-schooled and straddle innocence and marauding hunger for feverish experience. In one telling “teaching lesson” Niki’s mother projects an image of Angelina Jolie on the screen and asks the girls what they admire about her. They respond to her clothes, thinness, jewels, and most importantly her “hot” husband Brad Pitt.

THE BLING RING is more than just satire; it envelops us with a biting halo of truth pointing at America’s obsession with obtaining money effortlessly, and what such currency can purchase. I also kept thinking that Sofia Coppola is showing the flip side of the rap culture’s adulation and emulation of “bling” as evidenced by white upper class privileged youths. Except once caught the sentencing for transgressions are a whole lot “lighter” for one social class than another. Here Money talks.

FILL THE VOID 6/23/13

FILL THE VOID written and directed by Rama Burshtein, a native New Yorker who joined the world of the Hassidic community in Tel Aviv, gives us an intimate glimpse into this Ultra-Orthodox sub-culture in Israel – replete with beautifully composed close up images of their rituals, and codified religious laws, and the workings of the councils whose power over the lives of the community, particularly women is despairingly restrictive.

Girls from a young age are encouraged to get married and stay at home to procreate and raise children, as well as organizing and maintaining their households. The Rabbinical decisions in the “arrangement” of marriages, the “charitable” doling out of money, the resolutions of domestic and business conflicts, as well as the necessity of women to wear head coverings, etc. are similar to other Middle Eastern Fundamentalist cultures. The Hassidic men celebrate pivotal occasions, drinking wine and singing together– haunting mournful chants along with lively, uplifting melodies - while the women are sitting in a group, segregated, serving the food and cleaning up after them. Despite the realization that many women do have a commanding voice in the confines of their homes, I could barely contain my rage.

FILL THE VOID deals with the youthful anticipation of romantic love vs. a young woman’s feelings of (what can only be termed) “biblical” duty. We are privy to the negotiations that are employed in “arranged marriages”. Elders meet with the respective parents and determine financial dispositions, and the couples in question face each other to assess their compatibility for minutes, or (if they are lucky) up to a few hours– each one has a veto power; both can reject the choices that have been made for them, but that too has consequences.

The film’s opening shot zooms in on a lovely18 year-old girl/woman, Shira (Hada Yaron) racing to embrace her exquisite 28 year old, very pregnant sister Esther (Renana Raz) who arrives with her husband for the Purim Holiday festivities.  Unexpectedly this celebration turns into a tragic event, when Esther gives birth to a baby boy and dies in childbirth. Shortly after Esther’s death, her grieving husband a handsome Yochay Goldberg (Yiftach Klein) is encouraged by the powers-that–be to remarry in order to have a wife assist in raising the newborn child. When it is decided that he will be betrothed to a Belgium woman and leave Israel, the infant’s grandmother Rivka (Irith Sheleg,) Esther and Shira’s mother, is heartbroken and feels the best solution to keeping her grandchild in Israel, would be to devise a union between her tender-hearted, sensitive daughter Shira and the older widower.

The film focuses on Shira’s emotionally complicated response to marrying her ex-brother-in-law, and the feeling of responsibility to the newborn child and her parents wishes. I felt that those around this innocent young woman were selfishly heedless to the fact that Shira was in deep mourning for the anguished loss of her adored sister - an event that created an unspeakable “void” in her life. The ensuing depth of her bereavement is one that cannot be filled – the interchangeability of relationships is a complex question. I am not sure of the answer.

BEFORE MIDNIGHT 6/16/13

Despite the quick-witted repartee and theatrical dialogue, I am a great fan of Richard Linklater, the director of the Before Series - spaced almost 10 years apart: Before Sunrise (1995,) Before Sunset (2004,) and the most recent Before Midnight (2013.)  I also have been smitten with the wildly extreme individualized depictions in the film Bernie (2012,) and Linklater’s “digitally animated” Waking Life (2001.) Every movie Linklater directs is beautifully written and all are a rare breed in the filmic world – idiosyncratic characterizations overlaid with visual beauty and trenchantly intelligent talkfests.

Before Midnight begins with a disheveled Ethan Hawke playing Jesse, a successful American writer living in Paris with Celine (the beautiful Julie Delpy) he met 18 years ago on a train to Vienna – and the 24 hour impetuous period they spent falling-in-love only to end when Jesse returned to his life and wife in the USA; that is the essence of the first film in this trilogy - Before Sunrise.

They meet again by accident 10 years later in Before Sunset where Jesse is on a book tour in Paris promoting the book he wrote about their brief encounter. The spark is reunited. The same actors are in all the films making Before Midnight, the most recent incarnation, even more poignant, as life’s imprints are evident in their now older faces and bodies.

In Before Midnight we meet the 41 years old Jesse, a successful writer, at an Airport in Greece awkwardly saying goodbye to his self-contained, bit of a stranger, 14 year old son who is returning to Chicago (where he lives with Jesse’s ex-wife,) after vacationing with his father and Celine in the Southern Peloponnese. The dialogue is very natural and so familiar that I felt emotionally pierced by the ramifications of divorce’s radiating consequences, not only on the father and son but affecting the whole family dynamic. Goodbyes are always complicated and this particular one hits Jesse hard – realizing that his son is growing up without him a continent away, since he is presently living with Celine and his lovely twin daughters in Paris.

The difficulties in dealing with the banality of everyday family obligations,  the changing nature of love and sexual desire, replete with the contradictions and conflicts that time and responsibilities inflict on relationships are at the heart of the movies's lengthy, sometimes juvenile, often both boring and provocative conversations. Both Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are able antagonists – with lots of biting jabs and generalizations (some annoyingly tasteless) about the differences between male/female predilections. I often tended to side with the Ethan Hawke character feeling that Julie Delpy’s arguments were fulfilling her need for reassurance over reasonableness, with disappointingly oft-used “feminist” clichés thrown into the mix, but then wham! she would come through with a penetrating verbal jab which hit the mark - so the arguments ended up in the all-too-familiar male/female "deadlock/draw." 

And yet Before Midnight asks many questions about issues that many of us avoid discussing, doing so in a refreshingly comedic yet deadly serious way. Like life, we confront the unknown all the time. What the future will bring to this couple might be seen perhaps in 10 years time…or not. I am curious.

THE ICEMAN 6/1/13

How does one balance “family values” and the criminal mind? THE ICEMAN, directed by Ariel Vromen explores that schism, based on the true- life story of Richard Kuklinski, a mob enforcer for various Mafia families, aka “The Polack” who was indicted for killing 100 plus victims between @1954-1986 when he was taken down by an undercover officer in a drug deal on a quiet suburban street in Dumont, New Jersey. We get to see a lot of New Jersey – from Jersey City to the suburbs of Bergen County starting with Hoboken where the story begins in 1964. The clothes, cars, facial hair, and hair styles change with time, from his beautifully tailored suits to loud, brassy, too tight silk shirts becoming an indicator of the state of Kuklinski’s social/ monetary and mental status.

THE ICEMAN could be dismissed as another classic “film noir” movie, photographed not in black and white, but shot in subdued and shadowy colors; though at the onset of the movie, I kept thinking - okay this genre is too familiar - I have seen it played out many times before. BUT what makes this film so powerful and poignant is revealed in our initial encounter with a large lumbering, beefy, inarticulate guy – a beautiful in-your-face (accompanied by seeing–the-pores) close-up portrayal of Richard Kuklinski by the brilliant actor, Michael Shannon mooning over a slight, delicate, fragile, Jersey girl named Deborah (Winona Ryder finally given the opportunity to show her “chops” in a solid nuanced role) who becomes his wife. The visual body-type contradictions seen in this early frame echoes the plot's strange anomalies.

Nicknamed The Iceman – for freezing his corpses in an Industrial freezer so that the time of death could not be determined, Michael Shannon gives a powerful performance as a character whose only solace, loyalty and emotional ties are with the family that he has created with Deborah. Otherwise he is “cold” and hermetic sealed off from any other connections. The split between the innocence and “normality” of his upper middle-class family - his two lovely daughters go to Catholic school living an existence that is the opposite of  Kuklinski’s brutal childhood. The gap between his “day” and often “middle-of-the-night” jobs, and his “domestic” life is a difficult balancing act. The family is oblivious to the source of their comfortable circumstances and the children adore their adoring father – irony rules.

Ray Liotta plays the vicious Roy Demeo, Kuklinski’s immediate “boss” (in the Mafia chain of command), equally brutish displaying a ruthlessness needed to oversee merciless underlings. The relationship between the shark-like maneuverings in the under-world is contrasted to the steady hum of Kuklinski’s “conventional” reality, but that thin line is hard to keep separate, and is eventually punctured physically and psychologically as his complex world slowly disentangles.

A person who can murder with such ease and dispassion usually does not garner our sympathy, but Michael Shannon’s expressiveness is very seductive, and despite being termed “the iceman”, we penetrate his enigmatic veneer and catch a glimpse of how a childhood of administered pain can mold one into the hardness of stone…but rarely into a killer. In this case we have an individual who became a contract murderer, and he was really good at it. Richard Kuklinski died in a Trenton NJ prison in 2006 supposedly of “natural causes,” but that is debatable since he was scheduled to be a witness against the Gambino family in an upcoming trial.

FRANCES HA 5/26/13

Finding roommates in NYC, “the city of all possibilities” to share your space and often your innermost dreams and insecurities is the backdrop of the eccentric, sometimes annoying comic/tragic film FRANCES HA, directed by Noah Baumbach and co-written with Greta Gerwig who plays the Frances of the title. The Ha part will be wittily explained in the final frame. The movie is shot in a sepia tone – no color to distract from our fundamental human needs – finding a home, finding love and/or companionship, realizing our ambitions, and finding the economic means to do so, in this case preferably in the arts, covering the wide gamut of the “creative” spectrum. No character is a day-laborer - all come from the subculture of talented, yearning, touching on 30 year olds that populate our fair city moving from Chinatown to Washington Heights, and even dipping a toe into Brooklyn. But things are not always black and white – luminous grays make the city and its characters both more depressing and also more transparent.

We meet Frances (Greta Gerwig) and the beloved roommate  Sophie (Mickey Sumner) acting a bit bizarrely “mock fighting” on the streets of NYC, but then falling into one another’s arms in laughter. This scene encapsulates the intensity of their relationship as most adored best friends who can communicate, understand and accept one another – no “guy” intrudes on this special bond. NOT until Sophie announces that she is going to leave and move into another apartment with her boyfriend aptly named Patch. This shocking announcement leaves the loyal Frances at very loose ends. An aspiring dancer, and not a very good one, (but a much better choreographer,) she spends the rest of the movie wildly searching for a Sophie substitute – not only to live with, but to rekindle what was once a cherished kinship. Platonic vs. romantic love, the deeply affecting roots of each are explored.

My movie mate observed (and I agree with her) that Greta Gerwig is an actress who is always Greta Gerwig – like the Diane Keaton of Woody Allen films is always Diane Keaton. There seems to be a cult following for this lovely actress who through her body gestures proclaims contradictions. Tall, lithe, slightly awkward, and overtly “bouncy”– skipping and running like a gazelle along the streets of NYC, as if the sheer beauty of movement can overcome despair.

Throughout the film, Frances is so vulnerable, dependent, and oblivious to social cues, that I cringed and squirmed uncomfortably, watching how she talked too much, desperately searching to communicate – “searchers” who are too obvious are often avoided because they embarrass others – until she finally settles down within herself after a brief not-the-usual-kind of interlude to Paris. From being irritated with her character, I gradually, and surprisingly, found myself touched by Frances to the point of feeling tender affection for this fragile, oddball spirit, and was disconcerted to find that I was holding back tears.

Frances’ “coming of age” story involves a trip back to her family home in Sacramento where we experience her role as daughter with both parents (acted by her actual mother and father) in a caring environment, and a short but revelatory stint back to her Vassar College haunts. An oft-explored idea is revisited - sometimes we have to go away to come back and re-connect with our lives afresh.  I have known people like Frances who are earnest and ambitious, tender yet steely and ballsy enough to discern what is needed to take what little control they can over their lives. Director Noah Baumbach skirts the all-too-familiar tightrope of clichés to make FRANCES HA worth viewing.

THE GREAT GATSBY 5/11/13

I am NOT a Baz Luhrmann fan with his self-conscious overindulgence in excess. Lately I have been paying more attention to the opening credits (down to the fonts that are used) shown at the beginning of a film, giving me a glimpse into what I will have to look forward to for the next few hours. So from the start, my aesthetic taste was being tested as I inwardly cringed at a movie that straddled comedy and tragedy ending up being a burlesque parody.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby has been laying on my night table ready to be picked up and read for about a month, but if I were to judge the original book by this adaptation, I would toss it into the garbage. I love a unique literary voice – and language – but this flat lusterless cinematic interpretation could not be saved by the glitter and gloss which screamed out at us with every frame – no cake under all that icing.

Despite Director Baz Luhrmann’s cast of fine actors, they were unable to breathe life into this romantic fable of deception and obsessive love set in the “free-spirited” postwar 1920’s “Flapper Era.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, portrayed by Tobey Maguire, is the linchpin of the story that begins and ends with worshipful utterances about his mysterious, wealthy, ostentatious party-hosting neighbor - the flamboyant Jay Gatsby (a preening Leonardo Di Caprio,) who adores Nick’s cousin, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) a daughter of “old money”, married to a racist, womanizing “lout.”  The plot thickens when we find out that Daisy and Jay were once lovers  - the re-telling of an oft-told tale.

This film version of The Great Gatsby never convinced nor touched me. Why did Gatsby merit such fascination, unless it was the allure of the  Horatio Alger myth  reaching for the dream of America’s unlimited opportunities in a society that claims to eschew class distinctions?

If you love spectacle this is a movie for you. I found it visually boring and commonplace. 

THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST 5/6/13

Indian director Mira Nair’s new film THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST  based on Mohsin Hamid's novel short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, literally collides with current events and the ethos that perhaps formed the psychology of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. This is a movie about desire, disappointment and disillusionment between two worlds that are harder and harder to keep separate, hurtling towards one another with a speed that seems unstoppable. It is also about the “roots” of the formation of one’s basic ideology, and how “beliefs” can blossom and decay via explosive circumstances. We see the intersection of two vital individuals, each embracing their expatriate countries, whose lives are pulled in opposite directions, based on the events of September 11^th 2001 and their own personal collision course toward catastrophe.

The movie titles appear on the screen from the last letter of a name spelled in reverse – an indication of the back and forth in time and the cultural breakdown between two changing societies – America and Pakistan. We first meet Changez  (complexly portrayed by Riz Ahmed) in 2011, ambitious, and self-confident in a café in Lahore, Pakistan talking with an American journalist/author named Bobby (Liev Schreiber), a man ingrained enough in this region to speak fluent Urdu. Bobby is there to interview Changez about the recent kidnapping of a respected American professor in the school where the young man teaches. This abduction turns out to be the catalyst that moves the film’s plot, giving it a sense of tension while merging with the Pakistani protagonist’s interior and exterior moral conversion. Through the recording sessions we travel back ten years and experience this brilliantly original young man – a Princeton graduate complete with a lovely artist/photograher girl friend (Kate Hudson,) living a privileged life in his adopted homeland and his transformation into a “reluctant fundamentalist.”

Ten years before, Changez was a Wall Street analyst mentored by Jim Cross (a terrific Kiefer Sutherland) whose robotic body movements are in perfect synch with the conglomerate that he leads, its powerful global tentacles dug into corporations all over the world. We also are witness to Changez’s own ruthlessness in business and his indifference to the livelihoods of the workers his expediting cost-cutting decisions affect. Changez’s conduct propels him to greater success in his grasp for the “American Dream.” But everything changes after the horrific attack on the World Trade Center Towers, launching a xenophobic response from some of Changez’s colleagues as well as public service employees that he encounters on the streets of NYC and at airports while traveling for business. Racism, the abrogation of civil liberties, and profiling intrude on Changez’s idyllic corporate environment as well as his intrinsic values, and he eventually returns to Pakistan - too smart to be conscripted by any "terrorist" group though his political sympathies have been inherently altered.

Music and song – voices filled with longing and poignancy are also at the core of this film and contribute to its enigmatic surroundings. Contrasting visual environments - the dark and mysterious ambiance of Pakistan vs. the clear, brisk light of New York City felt too pat and obvious, but I was moved by the story of this sensitive young person whose life is shattered by unforeseen violence, and the impact it made on his belief system. I cannot help but think of the prisoners who have been locked up in Guantanamo Bay prison camps for 10 years and how those years of confinement, without a trial, have radicalized those who might have been innocent. The ideas in this movie are worth pondering over and over again. The tragedy continues.