A Million Little Parodies

Posted on May 12, 2008 by admin


Can we declare a moratorium on book reviewers’ mimicking the style of the book they’re reviewing? Although I seem to recall a scathing and amusing Valley Girl-esque critique by Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin’s piece in the Times this morning is a slog to get through, with its choppy prose, missing punctuation, missing words, and sentence fragments. Oddly, her review is pretty much a rave, ending with “That’s how James Frey saved himself.” Yes, that James Frey, of A Million Little Pieces and shamed-by-Oprah-Winfrey fame, currently profiled in Vanity Fair’s June issue. Everybody loves a story of redemption (except for, in this case, maybe Oprah?), but next time perhaps Maslin can tell it in her own voice instead of trying to imitate the writing, especially if it’s good writing. I don’t have strong feelings about Frey one way or the other, but I do believe Maslin should have let Bright Shiny Morning have its day in the sun, unshadowed by this confusing, counterproductive pseudo-Freyness. —MLM

Posted in Bright Shiny Morning, James Frey, Janet Maslin | Comments Off on A Million Little Parodies

Festival’s End: One Last Film, One Last Party

Posted on May 8, 2008 by admin

Above: Keith Haring’s “The Last Rainforest” © The Estate of Keith Haring. Below: Director Christina Clausen at Soho House.

The Universe of Keith Haring
Directed by Christina Clausen
90 minutes
From Italy, France

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Last Saturday evening, I attended a screening of Christina Clausen’s film The Universe of Keith Haring at the Soho House in NYC’s Meatpacking District, along with fellow bloggers Robert Rosen and Julio Malone, who’d met Clausen at a recent Tribeca Film Festival event. (The movie premiered at the festival on April 30.)

I had happened to overhear about a week ago, right before a T.F.F. screening of Squeezebox!, the novelist Jay McInerney talking about the ubiquity of Haring’s work in New York in the 80s, how you could hardly walk out of your building without seeing some freshly painted Haring figures on a wall, on somebody’s jacket, on a subway platform. I remember that too, especially, for some reason, his Christmas-greeting Madonna (the Jewish one, though Haring was friends with the other) and Child. I recall walking into the Christopher Street subway station and suddenly coming upon the deceptively simple curving lines that suggested a veil, a woman’s face, and the baby she was holding, all surrounded by Haring’s signature little lines, a bit like rays but more about kinetic energy—nearly every one of his creations, no matter how bizarre, seemed to be jumping for joy.

And there’s a lot of joy in Clausen’s film. Many people loved the wiry, bespectacled Haring, including his supportive family—he had grown up in the Norman Rockwell-esque Kutztown, Pennsylvania, but came into his own in New York—and close friends such as DJ Junior Vasquez and fellow artists Kenny Scharf and Yoko Ono. Haring was very much of his time, diving into the early-80s swirling underground scene of sex (the Baths), clubs (Paradise Garage and Club 57), and rock ’n’ roll (the B-52s). Through interviews, film footage—when Haring spray-paints a mural on a wall in record time, you can almost see those kinetic lines shooting out from his own body—and narration by Haring himself (courtesy of his biographer, John Gruen), Clausen does indeed capture his universe, even as it changed with the advent of AIDS. AIDS, of course, claimed Haring in 1990; he would have been 50 on May 4.

Over champagne at the cocktail reception that followed the screening, in a little bar area next to the theater, Clausen confided to a few of us her concern that the reaction to the screening seemed “cold.” But we assured her that instead the audience appeared to be stunned by Haring’s death (Scharf nearly breaks down when speaking of it)—no matter that we knew the fact of it—after getting to know him in this way. I asked Clausen, who is Danish but lives in Rome, if she’d ever met Haring. She said she hadn’t thought so when she decided to do the film, but while going through photographs for it she realized that as a high-school student she had once seen him. At a Copenhagen museum, where he’d come to do a mural, she locked eyes with him, in a way that she now feels was meaningful.

Who knows if that encounter planted the seed for Clausen’s film? I’m just glad to have had the opportunity to wander into Keith Haring’s poly-wondrous universe, even though I feel I’ve been there before.

________________________________________________________
The Universe of Keith Haring opens in theaters in mid-September.

Posted in Christina Clausen, John Gruen, Junior Vasquez, Kenny Scharf, Soho House, The Universe of Keith Haring, Tribeca Film Festival, Yoko Ono | Comments Off on Festival’s End: One Last Film, One Last Party

(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Prosthetic Limbs, Torture, and Beheading?

Posted on May 2, 2008 by admin

Hauser (John Cusack) walks through the troubled land of Turaqistan.

Tribeca Film Festival 2008, April 23-May 4
War, Inc.
Directed by Joshua Seftel
Screenplay by Mark Leyner, Jeremy Pikser, and John Cusack
With John Cusack, Hilary Duff, Marisa Tomei, Joan Cusack, Ben Kingsley, Dan Aykroyd, and Lubomir Neikov
106 minutes
From USA

By Robert Rosen

I wouldn’t say that War, Inc. is the best political satire since Dr. Strangelove—it’s too ragged and meandering for that. But in the same way that the Kubrick classic was able to provoke laughter at the notion of nuclear annihilation in the grim aftermath of the Kennedy assassination (and with the Cuban missile crisis still fresh in everybody’s mind), War, Inc. performs a miracle of its own: It fires off a barrage of one-liners and sight gags about prosthetic limbs, torture devices, and beheading videos that demonstrate the much overlooked comic potential of the endless War on Terror and the cabal of criminals who’ve transformed the United States of America into an outlaw nation.

Set in the Green Zone of a country called Turaqistan, in the very near future, War, Inc. shows us what the world might be like if the entire US government and military were completely under the control of multinational corporations.

Hauser (John Cusack) is a charming CIA hit man who settles his troubled conscience with straight shots of hallucinogenic hot sauce as he goes about the business of trying to assassinate a Middle Eastern oil minister (Lubomir Neikov) in town for a Brand USA trade show. Natalie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei) is a lefty freelance journalist on assignment for The Atlantic, determined to write an honest appraisal of the situation in Turaqistan. Marsha Dillon (Joan Cusack) is a foul-mouthed government operative who functions as Hauser’s office assistant. Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff) is a Britney Spears-like pop singer slated to perform at the trade show and to marry one of the dancers in her posse. The former vice president (Dan Aykroyd) is a corporate CEO who likes to teleconference while moving his bowels. And Walken (Ben Kingsley) is Hauser’s Strangelovian CIA boss.

There’s a lot going on in this movie—often subtly, in the background. You’ve really got to pay attention. But is it entertaining? That all depends on how funny you find the notion of a chorus line of Turaqistani amputees dancing at a trade show to demonstrate the latest in prosthetic-limb technology.

I didn’t think I could laugh at such a thing. But I did.

***½ (3½ Stars)

Posted in Ben Kingsley, Dan Aykroyd, Hilary Duff, Inc., Jeremy Pikser, Joan Cusack, John Cusack, Joshua Seftel, Lubomir Neikov, Marisa Tomei, Mark Leyner, War | Comments Off on (What’s So Funny ’Bout) Prosthetic Limbs, Torture, and Beheading?

The Unspeakable

Posted on April 29, 2008 by admin

Above: Emmanuel Jal returns to Africa and the vestiges of civil war. Below: The rapper, in concert, transforms horror into art.
Tribeca Film Festival 2008, April 23-May 4
War Child
Directed by C. Karim Chrobog
With Emmanuel Jal
93 Minutes

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

These days, we are overloaded on the horrors of the world. If we hear “Sudan” or “Darfur” while thinking “Iraq,” we’re likely to tune it out. And that’s why we need people like Emmanuel Jal, a former child soldier who has spoken the unspeakable, turning the depravity he has experienced, and even committed, into art. This film tells the story of Jal’s improbable, tortuous journey from birth in a rural Sudanese village in the early 1980s (he does not know his birth date) to his current life as an international up-and-coming rap singer residing in London. Weaving historical footage into Jal’s narrative—including film of Jal himself as a self-possessed, talkative child in a refugee camp—the director, C. Karim Chrobog, shows us the devastating effect of war on one family (just try not to cry when Jal’s sister, separated from him for many years, finally reveals her own story). The wonder is that Jal, who admits to having been at times suicidal, not only survived but found a way to transform his terrors to the benefit of us all.

The film, beginning with the opening scene of Jal rapping to kids in an African classroom, is gripping, and the music lifts it to another level. Though some of it is hard to take, Chrobog, the son of a diplomat, has created an important and necessary document.

Posted in C. Karim Chrobog, Emmanuel Jal, Sudan, War Child | Comments Off on The Unspeakable

Festival Quickies

Posted on April 27, 2008 by admin

Tribeca Film Festival 2008, April 23-May 4

In the anything-goes atmosphere of the club party Squeezebox, glam-punk performer Jayne County expresses herself.

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Squeezebox!
Directed By Zach Shaffer and Steve Saporito
92 minutes

Sometimes in NYC you don’t know what’s happening in your own backyard (that is, if you had a backyard). I live within easy walking distance of Don Hill’s—and have even sung there, at the publication party in 2000 for my fellow blogger Robert Rosen’s book Nowhere Man—yet missed the phenomenon known as Squeezebox, a weekly gay night now lovingly immortalized in Zach Shaffer and Steve Saporito’s colorful, kinetic documentary. Running from 1994 to 2001, the glam/sleaze/drag rock ’n’ roll event provided a home for self-described misfits and propelled a few to fame, such as John Cameron Mitchell, who developed his character Hedwig (of Hedwig and the Angry Inch) on the Squeezebox stage (the house band’s Stephen Trask was Hedwig’s composer/lyricist). Aside from the amazingly raunchy actions that went down there (beer-bottle fucking on the bar, anyone?), the event shattered a music and lifestyle taboo: gays liking rock ’n’ roll. Instead of lip-synching Judy Garland numbers, drag queens would deliver kick-ass Led Zeppelin tunes and affecting weepers like “Love Hurts.” But more than that, this was a party that wouldn’t quit, despite Rudy Giuliani’s best efforts to crack down on the city’s nightlife (apparently a threat to our quality of life, which begs the question, what quality without nightlife?). Listening to Theo Kogan (the Lunachicks), Miss Guy (the Toilet Boys), Mistress Formika (the sylphlike MC with whom you would not want to mess), Lady Bunny (who, with her signature stratospheric wig, out-Partons Dolly Parton), and even the novelist Michael Cunningham (The Hours), you can only wish that you too had been taken to the bosom, prosthetic though it may have been, of the crazy slutty mama called Squeezebox.

****½ (4½ stars)

Rym (Hafsia Herzi) confers with surrogate dad Slimane (Habib Boufares) in The Secret of the Grain.

The Secret of the Grain (La Graine et le Mullet)
Directed By Abdellatif Kechiche
151 minutes

A dour, conscientious Tunisian immigrant named Slimane, only semi-employed in the shipyard of a French port town. His raucous extended family. Their overextended dinner conversations and tearful hysteria. Your own urge to shout, as you might with your own family members, Stop talking with your mouth full! And, Shut up already!

Perhaps any impatience with this boisterous crowd only attests to the realism of scenes that include a quickie on a tour boat (the plot hinges on Slimane’s son’s philandering ways), young parents discussing their problems with diapers and potty training, expressions of wonder at the fish couscous cooked up by Slimane’s ex-wife (though no one says, “What’s your secret?”), a bank officer taking her time at nixing Slimane’s dream of owning a riverboat restaurant, and a gyrating sequence that puts the “belly” in “belly dance.”

With a breakout performance by the beautiful and beautifully down-to-earth Hafsia Herzi, playing the daughter not of Slimane but of his girlfriend, yet perhaps the one most devoted to him. And with the memorable line: “Out of respect for you and the couscous…” Winner of Césars (French top honors) for best picture, best director, best original screenplay, and best female newcomer (for Herzi).

**** (4 stars)

Insecure in his own Cairo habitat, Youssef (Amr Waked) contemplates that of some tropical fish in The Aquarium.

The Aquarium (Genenet al Asmak)
Directed By Yousry Nasrallah
111 minutes

Voyeurism, secrecy, mortality, fear—there is much that the esteemed Egyptian director Yousry Nasrallah wants to explore in this film. And there is so much good in it—mainly, the basic story—that you wish he had excised the bad. The latter includes the actors’ suddenly talking directly to the audience about their characters—I may be a purist, but once someone gets me into their created world, I’d like to stay there for the duration—as well as imposed visual references to political oppression and avian flu. Nasrallah seems to think we occasionally need reminding, as we watch his tale, that the world involves scary things (America being one of them, by the way, a disturbing but not surprising perspective). He should instead trust more in our interest in his two leading characters—Youssef, an anesthesiologist who likes to listen to what his patients say as they’re drifting off, and Laila (Hend Sabri), the host of a radio late-night call-in show in which people talk mostly about sex—and how their lives intersect. That said, interest might deepen if Youssef, who does appear to care for his dying father and his abortion-clinic patients, were less of an emotional mystery. Whereas we discover that the red-lipsticked Laila is one hot tamale under those staid suits she wears, Youssef remains too much like the inhabitants of the public aquarium with which he’s obsessed—a cold fish.

**½ (2½ stars)

A very watchful Isabella Rossellini, playing a spider, prepares for some Green Porno.

Green Porno
Written and Directed By Isabella Rossellini
15 minutes (all)

The other night I caught a couple of Isabella Rossellini’s eight very short shorts, collectively called Green Porno, in which she plays bugs and other “tiny critters” in the process of mating. It’s a hoot to see a world-renowned beauty wearing costumes such as a child might create (although probably better-fitting). As a firefly, her ass lights up, she gleefully tells us while demonstrating, and as a snail she has a giant foot, which she squashes into her shell along with the rest of her, anus on top (yucky things ensue). These witty pieces are showing in pairs before selected films and all together before My Winnipeg; they’ll also be available starting May 5 on Helio mobile devices and on the Sundance Channel website. Rossellini will discuss the making of the series at the Apple Store in Soho on Tuesday, April 29, at 8:00 p.m.

Posted in Abdellatif Kechiche, Green Porno, Hafsia Herzi, Hend Sabri, Isabella Rossellini, Squeezebox, Steve Saporito, The Aquarium, The Secret of the Grain, Yousry Nasrallah, Zach Shaffer | Comments Off on Festival Quickies

8/7

Posted on April 26, 2008 by admin

Philippe Petit dances between the Twin Towers.

Tribeca Film Festival 2008, April 23-May 4
Man On Wire
Directed By James Marsh
94 minutes
From UK

By Robert Rosen

Man on Wire, a compelling and very funny documentary about Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the newly constructed Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, on August 7, 1974, never mentions what happened to those skyscrapers 27 years, one month, and four days later. This isn’t a criticism; it’s just a peculiarity—because it’s impossible in 2008 to watch this movie and not think about September 11, 2001, especially if you’re seeing it at the Tribeca Film Festival, an event that rose from the ashes of 9/11; especially if you live about a mile from Ground Zero and heard the first plane fly over your house and collide with the North Tower; and especially if for the next three months not a day passed when you didn’t smell the toxic fumes that wafted from wreckage.

And it’s impossible to watch Man on Wire through the perspective of nearly 34 years and not think that if somebody were foolhardy enough today to try the equivalent (if there is an equivalent) of what Petit did in that innocent and long-ago summer, the result would be a very different movie, something more akin to Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay—but without the comedy.

Petit and his crew of merry pranksters were French, for God’s sake, and after casing and photographing the joint, they, with help from a compatriot on the inside, posed at various times as workmen and journalists, and using counterfeit IDs and uniforms, smuggled into the WTC a thousand-pound metal cable, a bow and arrow, and other assorted goodies to commit an act that the Department of Homeland Security would now classify as conspiracy to commit terrorism.

In 2008 the perpetrators wouldn’t have made it to the elevator—forget the roof. How naïve the “tight” security of 1974 looks in this age of perpetual war.

And how amazing that in an age when everybody who owns a cell phone is an amateur videographer, there’s no video or film of Philippe Petit dancing in the clouds, suspended on a wire strung between the tallest buildings in the world. There are only still photographs.

But none of this really matters because Man on Wire is spellbinding from beginning to end. A combination of home movies shot in France in the 1970s, contemporary interviews with the now middle-aged conspirators, newsreel footage, stills, and re-creations (including a seemingly gratuitous scene where Petit, upon achieving instant celebrity, makes love to a groupie in her loft and then feels guilty that he betrayed his girlfriend), Man on Wire seems more like a flick about planning an impossible bank heist—the participants call it a “coup”—which gives the film a dramatic tension rarely found in documentaries.

The perpetually entertaining Petit, who’s also an expert pickpocket, had dreamed of walking across a tightrope strung between the Twin Towers since he was 17 and saw a drawing of the yet-to-be-built WTC in a magazine in his dentist’s office—a moment amusingly dramatized in one of those numerous re-creations. As he waits for the construction to be completed, he warms up for the great feat by performing two other “clandestine” walks—between the towers of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and the towers of Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia.

The film then details the planning and training for the WTC walk, most of which takes place in Petit’s backyard in France—a military-style operation that looks as if it’s being conducted by the Marx Brothers (and Sisters). Some of Petit’s more memorable accomplices include his girlfriend, Annie Allix, whom he broke up with immediately after the walk; Barry Greenhouse, the mustachioed “inside man” who loaned Petit his ID so he could forge a few copies; David (aka Donald) Foreman, a New York musician whom Petit didn’t completely trust because, as Foreman says of the day he met the wire walker, “I smoked pot every day for 35 years; no reason to think I didn’t smoke it that day”; and Jean-Louis Blondeau, Petit’s oldest friend, who conceived of using a bow and arrow to string the cable between the two towers, and explains how he fooled the WTC security guards: “I put a lot of pens in my pocket. Americans carry a lot of pens, don’t they?”

My only regret about this film: the Petit Gang didn’t recruit me. I was most definitely available that summer. And I’d have joined them in the blink of an eye.

**** (4 Stars)

Posted in James Marsh, Man on Wire, Philippe Petit, World Trade Center | Comments Off on 8/7

Identity Theft

Posted on April 25, 2008 by admin

Diega Luna and Samantha Morton play obsessive Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe impersonators who meet in Paris.

Tribeca Film Festival 2008, April 23-May 4
Mister Lonely
Directed by Harmony Korine
Screenplay by Harmony Korine and Avi Korine
Starring Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, James Fox, Anita Pallenberg, Denis Lavant, and Werner Herzog
113 minutes
From USA

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe—two tragic figures (well, in Michael’s case, perhaps the jury is, so to speak, still out). Who would want to exchange identities with them? In Harmony Korine’s new film, Mister Lonely (and how great to hear uninterrupted that emotional Bobby Vinton song), we soon learn the answer: a young man and a young woman so unhappy with themselves that they choose to live full-time as their impersonations—along with a group of similar misfit/lookalikes that include the Three Stooges, Abe Lincoln, the Pope, Queen Elizabeth II (played by Stones muse Anita Pallenberg) and, natch, Madonna, all living in a castle commune in the Scottish Highlands with a flock of beloved sheep. Not unexpectedly from the director of Gummo, this bizarre setup begets many bizarre sights, such as the Three Stooges armed with rifles to fulfill a sad mission and a tiara’d Queen in bed with the Pope. The movie also has a parallel story involving an alcoholic priest pilot (Werner Herzog) and miraculously sky-diving nuns, which, though it has its charms and allows for exhilarating visuals, I found ultimately puzzling. But no matter: Diego Luna (Y Tu Mamá También) and Samantha Morton (fittingly zoftig here) are lovely and affecting as Michael and Marilyn, two peas in an odd pod who discover you can’t get away from yourself or life’s problems (in Marilyn’s case caused mainly by a sadistic “Charlie Chaplin”)—but find very different ways of dealing with that fact. And then there’s the egg song…

**** (4 stars)

Posted in Anita Pallenberg, Diego Luna, Harmony Korine, Marilyn Monroe, MICHAEL JACKSON, Mister Lonely, Samantha Morton, Werner Herzog | Comments Off on Identity Theft

He Just Keeps Rollin’ Along

Posted on April 24, 2008 by admin

Nearing 90, the Cuban pianist Bebo Valdés is still recording and performing.

Tribeca Film Festival 2008, April 23-May 4
Old Man Bebo
111 minutes
Directed by Carlos Carcas
With Bebo Valdés, Chucho Valdés, Leonardo Acosta, Omara Portuondo, and Fernando Trueba
From Spain

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

I think I went to see this movie to commune with my dad, who died 11 years ago. My father’s true loves were my mother, flying, and music, but the country of Cuba—not the least because of its own intoxicating rhythms—held a special place in his heart. He would travel there, pre-revolution, to go deep-sea fishing and nightclub hopping, and it’s very likely that one of the performers he caught was Bebo Valdés: the pianist extraordinaire who helped define the Cuban sound in the 40s and 50s, playing in bands—and sometimes acting as arranger and bandleader—in various hotels and, most notably, the legendary Tropicana nightclub.

It’s hard to imagine, what with current US-Cuba relations, that there was once a special Tropicana flight between Miami and Havana, ferrying Americans to the club and then back, with entertainers on board for a constant party. But so we learn from Carlos Carcas’s new documentary on Bebo, as everyone calls him, and his many musical and personal connections. We also find out about “Rocolas,” jukeboxes in Cuban bars that played American songs (looked down on by some local musicians); a mambo-type song form called the batanga that Bebo developed after working in Haiti (sadly, his recordings of it have disappeared); and Nat King Cole’s association with Cuba—Cole was the first black man to sing “love songs” there on TV, apparently a shock at the time, and he not only jammed with Bebo et al. but recorded an album called Cole Español.

Around the time my father stopped going to Cuba, Bebo, out of sync with Castro’s regime, fled the country. Leaving a woman who still cries when speaking of him, along with two ex-partners and several children, he went to Mexico and eventually landed in Sweden, where he found new domestic happiness but lost his previous musical fame. How he emerged from obscurity—winning two Grammys in 2002, at the age of 83—is part of the story Carcas tells, and in the telling we hear from old associates and from family members (his son Chucho is today also a famous pianist), most still in Cuba, as well as from his wife in Sweden, a land whose “pure air” Bebo credits with keeping him young, and one of the people responsible for his comeback, Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba (Calle 54).

These people share their memories of—and praise for—Bebo, called “Big Stallion” because he was “so tremendous,” in the words of a fellow musician. My favorite comment comes from one of his daughters, who in four decades has rarely seen her dad—he never returned to his native country—but understands what has always driven him: “I think my father breathes through his hands.” And I think my father, an amateur but spirited pianist himself, would understand that completely.

*** (3 Stars)

Posted in batanga, Bebo Valdés, Carlos Carcas, Chucho Valdés, Cuba, Mambo, Old Man Bebo | Comments Off on He Just Keeps Rollin’ Along

Welcome to the Tribeca Film Festival ’08

Posted on April 23, 2008 by admin

Lou Reed sings sad songs. Courtesy of Waterboy Productions

By Robert Rosen

One year ago we launched this blog to cover the Tribeca Film Festival, and now we’re back to do it again. Last year, most of our reviews were long and in-depth, offering detailed analysis of offbeat movies, usually from foreign countries. Some of the films we covered were Lady Chatterley, from France, Playing the Victim, from Russia, Dos Abrazos, from Mexico, The Last Man, from Lebanon, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, from Brazil, The Road to St. Diego, from Argentina, and The Sugar Curtain, from Cuba. Into this exotic mix we also tossed an American drama or two, like The Air I Breathe, and the romantic comedies Suburban Girl and Purple Violets.

I don’t know exactly what we’ll be covering this year, except that Mary Lyn Maiscott (who will also be blogging about the TFF Music Lounge for Vanity Fair) and I plan to go to as many movies as we can and write about as many as we feel like. Also, to cover even more films, for some we’ll use a short—really short—format, and, God help us, rate all of them with 1 to 5 stars (asterisks, actually). Though we swore we’d never do that, there are so many films to choose from, we think that a rating system will help you figure out what to see in a fast and easy way.

How brief are these mini-reviews going to be? Here’s an example, just to get the ball rolling:

Tribeca Film Festival 2008, April 23-May 4
Lou Reed’s Berlin
Directed by Julian Schnabel
81 Minutes

Left me cold…and depressed. I like Lou Reed, but not this much. For hardcore fans only.

**½

So, let us know what you think, ’cause we’re always happy to hear from you. And thanks to everybody from all over the world for reading us this past year.

Posted in Julian Schnabel, Lou Reed's Berlin, Tribeca Film Festival | Comments Off on Welcome to the Tribeca Film Festival ’08

In the Mood for Pie

Posted on April 3, 2008 by admin

Elizabeth (Norah Jones, in her movie debut) contemplates providing a stake for poker player Leslie (Natalie Portman), with a Jaguar in the balance.

My Blueberry Nights
90 minutes
Directed by Wong Kar Wai
Written by Wong Kar Wai and Lawrence Block
Starring Norah Jones, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz and Chan Marshall
From U.S.

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Remember the huge hypodermic needle in Pulp Fiction that John Travola desperately jabbed into Uma Thurman’s chest, bringing her back to life? For Wong Kar Wai’s new movie, that humungous needle is Natalie Portman, who injects a jolt of juice into My Blueberry Nights about two-thirds of the way through, just when you think you’ve been stylized, poeticized, and melodramaticized into a near coma. Portman, playing a gambler with a bad brassy-blond haircut, accomplishes what the likes of Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, and the esteemed David Strathairn cannot manage: she creates a believable character in the midst of a completely unbelievable story.

Portman, unfortunately, does not play the protagonist. Elizabeth—aka Lizzie, Betty, Beth—takes the form of singer Norah Jones, she of the obscenely creamy voice. I’m going to guess that Wong chose Jones—as opposed to, say, Courtney Love—because, while beautiful, she also has a childlike, innocent appeal. Not once but twice are we asked to contemplate, along with Law, who constantly smiles at her as though she were a baby or a puppy, her sleeping face besmeared with vanilla ice cream (though come to think of it, talk about obscene…). After being jilted (somehow that old-fashioned word seems right for this film), Elizabeth hits the road, waitressing and bartending her way across the country and sending postcards to Law’s Jeremy, a Brooklyn café owner, telling him all about the colorful people she meets. These include a cop named Arnie (Strathairn), who’s so in love with his estranged wife, the blowsy Sue Lynn (Weisz), that he drinks all the time, never pays his bar tab, and brutally beats up Sue Lynn’s new boyfriend. Somehow, this is all supposed to make Arnie extremely lovable and his wife totally contemptible. (It’s just that kind of movie.) Set against these broadly drawn characters, Elizabeth comes across as a tabula rasa, which would be okay if she weren’t quite so rasa. It’s hard to accept that someone this passive could muster up the energy to take all those buses and answer all those help-wanted ads.

Perhaps the movie is meant to be a fable of sorts. How else to explain this line (more or less) that Jeremy says to Elizabeth, both—isn’t it cute?—with bloody noses from different bullies: “You were on the subway? Why would you be on the subway?” As though no Brooklynite would stray from her own little corner, at least not when it’s shot so lovingly by cinematographer Darius Khondji. Indeed, the lush visuals, a staple of Wong’s, are almost enough to make the film worthwhile, if you don’t mind everything being fetishized—from pie à la mode to cigarette smoke. For some reason (those visuals?), everyone smokes in this movie, even the innocent Elizabeth and including Chan Marshall (whose Cat Power song “The Greatest” adds to the atmospheric effect), making a brief appearance as Katya, Jeremy’s ex-girlfriend. Fortunately, Katya speaks Blueberryse, the true language of Jeremy (though his comes with a botched Manchester accent). When she asks, “Sometimes even if you have the keys, those doors still can’t be opened, can they?,” he replies (with that goddamned smile), “Even if the door is open, the person you’re looking for may not be there.” Well okay, maybe that’s better than “I met a younger woman who gets me all hot when she eats ice cream.”

Part of the problem may be that this is Wong’s first English-language feature film (written with the mystery-novelist Lawrence Block). Certainly the Hong Kong director’s ripe style, in films such as In the Mood for Love, has won him many fans and accolades in the past. I’m just glad he had the good sense with My Blueberry Nights to cast Portman as Leslie, the wispy high roller who threatens to walk away with all the chips and most the movie.

Posted in Cat Power, Chan Marshall, David Strathairn, Jude Law, Lawrence Block, My Blueberry Nights, Natalie Portman, Norah Jones, Rachel Weisz, Wong Kar Wai | Comments Off on In the Mood for Pie