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I’m not buying the premise of The Lincoln Lawyer (2011), all about a rich boy who, for some reason, beats prostitutes to a pulp. It’s a ho-hum legal thriller.
Marisa Tomei, Josh Lucas, Frances Fisher, Bryan Cranston and even Matthew McConaughey should all be put to better histrionic use.
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The Barbarian Invasions (2003), by Denys Arcand, offers a few characters from Arcand’s 1987 film, The Decline of the American Empire. The ’03 product could almost suitably be called The Decline of the Canadian Nation, but first things first.
Remy (Remy Girard), a middle-aged history professor and staunch leftist, has long loved women and good wine but is now dying of an unspecified illness. His wife (Dorothea Berryman), who spurned Remy long ago for his philandering, is now at his side, and so is his estranged son Sebastien (Stephane Rousseau), a “capitalist” (says Remy) who assesses risk for a London investment bank. Realizing what lousy care his father is receiving from the state-supported Quebec hospital he is in, wealthy Sebastien resolves to better the ailing sensualist’s last days by purchasing favors and privileges. To begin with, he acquires for him a private hospital room and also contacts Remy’s old friends to request a courtesy visit. After heroin is recommended as a painkiller for Dad, Sebastien seeks to buy some, and his instrument for this is pretty Nathalie (Marie-Josee Croze), a junkie who is the daughter of one of Remy’s ex-mistresses. Nathalie, incidentally, falls in love with Sebastien even though the latter has a fiancee–Gaelle (Marina Hands).
One of the “barbarian invasions” of the film’s perfect title is indeed that of the inflow of illegal drugs–Canadian police can’t stop it–but we learn before long that it also refers to what al-Qaeda did on 9/11. Could it not be true as well that the sensualism of the sexual liberationist era is a barbarian invasion? Arcand, with his focus on Remy, prompts us to wonder. And where there is sexual liberation there is leftism–in a Western democracy, anyway. Invasions is one of the very few fiction films I know that distrusts, however quietly, liberal ideas and tendencies.
Canada’s socialized medicine comes in for a beating, and the warm attitude Remy once had toward Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution he now considers utter “cretinism.” Although the former prof can’t help seeing the non-intellectual Sebastien, who prefers video games to reading, as representing a kind of barbarian invasion, he himself abjectly fears he has lived a life without meaning, one of wasted effort. But does a liberal-minded, secular society, the film asks, produce wasted effort too?
Secular? Yes. A Catholic priest tells Gaelle there was a precise moment in 1966 that the people in his parish stopped attending church, never to return. Remy travels to Burlington, Vermont for medical tests and when a pert hospital employee welcomes him and Sebastien to the U.S.A., the twosome sarcastically reply, “Praise the Lord” and “Hallelujah.” What we have here are French Canadians mocking what they know to be a potent force in America–religion–when they must visit this particular country for superior medical service. Arcand is concentrating on the profound secularism so cherished by the Left and so incapable of arresting . . . the decline of the Canadian nation.
There is a problem with The Barbarian Invasions in that none of its people is a truly respectable or honorable human being, although Sebastien’s nascent love for his father is something to be esteemed. The film’s sophistication goes only so far, but at least it’s there. It’s an intelligent comedy-drama, remarkably successful at blending domestic content with social criticism. . . Arcand’s actors do everything right, with plenty of quiet power emanating from Rousseau and Croze. In fact, quiet power is all over this film.
The Barbarian Invasions is in French with English subtitles.
(Photo above of Marie-Josee Croze.)
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Yes, there is teenage heartache in the 2011 Prom, but there is hokum as well.
Nova (Aimee Teegarden) crushes on a boy who’s uninterested in her and, what’s more, faces the total destruction by fire of the prom decorations she and others have fashioned at her high school. After the school principal forces a bad-boy type to help Nova re-do the decorating, the girl gradually draws close to the lad, which doesn’t exactly win her father’s approbation. Meanwhile, other kids at the school try, and sometimes fail, to find dates for the prom, even as others are reaching for a relationship stability they know can be easily denied them.
Thank goodness this is one teen movie that doesn’t accuse kids who are popular of being snobbish or patronizing. (Nova is class president.) Even so, Katie Wech’s script steps into trite Fantasyland even as it attempts to create some serious drama. Why would Nova think Jesse Richter (Thomas McDonell), the “bad boy”, is right for her? Why does a girl called Simone so readily agree to go to the prom with a morally unworthy boy named Tyler? (Interesting: Tyler is the ONLY morally unworthy character in the film, and he’s African-American.) Simone, after all, is loved by polite, nice-looking Lucas, one of the teens who aches for the aforementioned relationship stability.
A Disney movie, the profanity-free, sex-free Prom fails to be as convincing and as fresh as it ought to be. Teegarden (of Friday Night Lights fame), McDonell, Nolan Sotillo and many others are only passable in their roles, but at least they’re that. Danielle Campbell (Simone) and Kylie Bunbury are less than passable; they’re simply dull, although Miss Campbell has the advantage of being glamorously beautiful.
I’m not trying to discourage anyone from seeing this film, but I do consider it a weakling.
Cover of Crazy Love
Crazy Love (2007) begins with the murky vision of an injured person, which vision, or eyesight, is meant to be that of Linda Riss. The man who did it to her was her former lover, Burt Pugach.
A plain-looking New York lawyer with money, raised by a barbaric mother, Pugach fell hard for the nigh beautiful Linda in the late 1950s and started dating her. But, unknown to Riss, the skinny chap was a married lover, and his wife refused to divorce him. Linda broke it off, by and by getting engaged to another man. Mad Burt, however, was obsessed with Linda; he couldn’t hack the idea of losing her. If he couldn’t have her, neither would any other man: He hired a thug to throw lye in her face, an act which disfigured and largely blinded the young brunette. Now deeming marriage impractical, Linda urged her fiance to renounce their engagement, which at last he did. Pugach, meanwhile, was arrested, tried and sent to prison. The media coverage was copious.
In prison Pugach wrote and wrote to Linda, declaring his love. She paid no attention, but Linda was in decline, suitor-less, still a virgin. Finally Burt was freed. Can you guess what happens next in Dan Klores’s riveting documentary? That’s right: Linda takes Pugach back and the twosome are married. They’ve been married ever since–usually happily–albeit not without Pugach’s opting to have an affair and Linda’s sad nagging. Crazy love. Crazy life. It is clear that Linda Riss is neither insane nor stupid. Call her weak if you want to. To my mind, she was reduced to marrying Pugach, for no one else wanted her. And she apparently sought financial security.
What a movie! What’s wrong with it, though, is that director Klores is not sufficiently vexed by a man’s throwing lye in a woman’s eyes, AFTER, in point of fact, the man refuses to tell the woman he has a wife and that therefore their liaison is adulterous. In other words, he takes domestic violence–and sheer evil–too lightly. It’s good that his film isn’t moralistic, but bad that it has no moral resonance. What about the Linda Risses of the world who could never bring themselves to marry their Pugaches? They wear the wounds of severe violence and must always be alone. They have truly been victimized.
Cover of Scream Trilogy - Boxed Set
Scream 4 (2011) has Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell) returning to the town of Woodsboro only to start witnessing, darn it, a new crop of brutal murders at the hands of “Ghost Face”. The story here is stupid and there is so much carnage it gets tedious, but that doesn’t mean Wes Craven’s film is a loser. To me, it’s gruesomely entertaining and intermittently clever, as witness the doings at the teenagers’ horror-movie marathon. And if you don’t like the offensive publicist played by Alison Brie, well, screenwriter Kevin Williamson has no sympathy for her, that’s for sure.
Scream 4 is a deliberately self-aware horror flick (as was the first Scream; I didn’t see the other two), but self-awareness and graphic violence is not a good combination. There’s a certain cheapness about it.
One review I read declares that Craven’s movie has something to say. I disagree. It has nothing to say. It’s just there to entertain. Indeed, I’m glad there is absolutely nothing political about it.
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The Judd Apatow-produced Bridesmaids (2011) is a dandy comedy finally marred by sentimentality and the repulsiveness of the character played by Melissa McCarthy. Oh, and there’s also Kristen Wiig’s mugging as she enacts Annie, a nigh fortyish woman whose life goes to pot now that her bakery has gone out of business and her best friend (Maya Rudolph) is engaged to be married. Annie, you see, has neither husband nor actual boyfriend.
It would be unfair, however, to ignore the ardor in Wiig’s acting. She believes in what she’s doing; she ain’t lazy.
Bridesmaids is raunchy but not excessively so. And a great deal of it is certifiably funny, albeit Apatow can’t help imposing the most pointless scatology on the film in order to attract nasty-minded male viewers. Karina Longworth in The Village Voice knows there’s a rub here: “Comedy of humiliation is one thing; a fat lady shitting in a sink is another.” (The lady in the sink is Melissa McCarthy.)
Skillfully directed by Paul Feig, penned by Wiig and Annie Mumolo, the picture works pretty well as a middlebrow adult farce until its last 15 minutes. Then it’s chick-flick time.
Question: Did Wiig write the scene in which her character has her breast fondled by Jon Hamm?
