The Hip Opinion

The camera loves Michelle Williams, in My Week with Marilyn (2011), and the film loves Marilyn Monroe.

Miss Williams enacts Monroe in all her fragility and irresponsibility.  At first I thought she lacked vocal appeal, but as the film went on, she improved in that area and provided authenticity and sophistication to boot. 

Simon Curtis’s movie is a gentle humanistic piece (with humor) about Monroe’s acting stint for Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in England in the mid-1950s.  MM turns adulterous (as she did with Yves Montand) by starting a brief kissing affair with Olivier’s assistant, Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), who has stars in his eyes.  A true story, this.  Like Billy Wilder, et al., Olivier discovers it’s Time To Endure The Goddess as he proceeds to make his picture, for Monroe is pronouncedly unreliable.  And of course she is a damaged goddess.

The film runs out of steam in its last few moments, but not so much that I began to dislike it.  (No, sir.)   Adrian Hodges’s script is quite intelligent.  There is a well-known cast, though not everyone in it shines.  The best performances come not only from Williams but also from Judi Dench, Michael Kitchen and Derek Jacobi.   

My Week With Marilyn (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

China’s Zhang Yimou is a great film director, but House of Flying Daggers (2004) is no Ju Dou or To Live or Not One Less.  These films are gripping successes, whereas the ’04 effort is a mildly serious entertainment with the absurd action of the cheap 1980s Hong Kong fare.

It’s ingeniously made, visually spellbinding, but Zhang should not have gone the Crouching Tiger route.  Purveyed is a sagging story about the female member of a rebel group, the House of Flying Daggers, and the guardian captain who is in fact a government agent.  A flatly superficial period piece, it belongs to a genre which isn’t big enough for Zhang.  Lovely women, particularly Ziyi Zhang, are too Amazon-like, as physically superhuman as the men, and we wonder how it can be that both men and women here are even destructible.  Their martial arts are god-like, you see.  The climax is as nicely, darkly tragic as the climaxes of many other Zhang films, but it hardly prevents Daggers from being a bold nonentity.

House of Flying Daggers (Shi mian mai fu) (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

In addition to being very foul-mouthed, Jake Kasdan’s The TV Set (1997) is an obvious, not always credible, and eminently unfunny satire on the squalid thinking we’ve witnessed for years in the television industry.  In many ways it’s the poor man’s–no, the loser’s–Idiocracy.

Cover of The TV Set

Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011) is not quite as good as his Sideways (2005), but better than all his other films.  It partly concerns when the knowledge about other people ineluctably oppresses the heart and mind, and when such knowledge is withheld for other people’s good.  Adapted from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, it is superbly put together with smart, appealing cinematography, compassion without heavy pathos, and acting that deepens the proceedings.  This last emanates from George Clooney, Beau Bridges, Shailene Woodley and a splendid Judy Greer.

(The photo is of Alexander Payne.)

Image by Pink Cow Photography via Flickr

Eminem, in 8 Mile, plays a Detroit post-teenager who dreams of becoming a rap singer, who both has black friends and receives hostility from blacks who don’t like his career intentions.  For all its hokiness it’s a good movie, chiefly because of its depiction of working-class life in an American city.  Scott Silver’s script is fragile, but Curtis Hanson directs it with flair and know-how.  Eminem’s acting is hollow but the other performers shine.  E.g., Mekhi Phifer  is urban tough but nonthreatening as one of Eminem’s friends, he who asserts he intends to square things with the Lord but never gets around to it.  Kim Basinger gives a nicely complex performance as the white rapper’s mother, and the late Brittany Murphy effectively plays, er, an affable slut.  It’s not much of a role.  It is not even clear that Silver is aware she is a slut.

Another problem: the obligatory embarrassing sex scene.  And another: rap music.  The one Eminem rap song I have heard in its entirety struck me as trivial and unfunny, and the tripe spewed out in 8 Mile is no better.  One wishes we had Duke Ellington and Scott Joplin around to teach this white kid a lesson. 

Image via Wikipedia