Natalie Portman won the Best Actress Oscar for playing a ballet dancer who competes for the role of a lifetime. Her obsession with perfection is at once the key to her potential triumph and her potential ruin. Barbara Hershey brilliantly plays what we first see as another smothering stage mother, but soon learn to be something even more disturbing. Vincent Cassell (Mesrine) captures the charisma of the swaggering dance master who pushes the ballerina mercilessly. Portman’s dancer has the fragility of a porcelain teacup, and, as she slathers herself with more and more stress, we wonder just when, not if, she’ll break. The tension crescendos, and the climactic performance of Swan Lake is thrilling.
Fresh from The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is another directing triumph. In fact, parts of Black Swan are as trippy as Aronofsky’s brilliant Requiem for a Dream.
James Coburn and James Garner in The Americanization of Emily
Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting the 1964 The Americanization of Emily on April 7. Set in England just before the D-Day invasion, The Americanization of Emily is a biting satire and one of the great anti-war movies. James Garner plays an admiral’s staff officer charged with locating luxury goods and willing English women for the brass. Julie Andrews plays an English driver who has lost her husband and other male family members in the War. She resists emotional entanglements with other servicemen whose lives may be put at risk, but falls for Garner’s “practicing coward”, a man who is under no illusions about the glory of war and is determined to stay as far from combat as possible.
Unfortunately, Garner’s boss (Melvyn Douglas) has fits of derangement and becomes obsessed with the hope that the first American killed on the beach at D-Day be from the Navy. Accordingly, he orders Garner to lead a suicide mission to land ahead of the D-Day landing, ostensibly to film it. Fellow officer James Coburn must guarantee Garner’s martyrdom.
It’s a brilliant screenplay from Paddy Chayefsky, who won screenwriting Oscars for Marty, The Hospital and Network.
Today, Americanization holds up as least as well as its contemporary Dr. Strangelove and much better than Failsafe.
Reportedly, both Andrews and Garner have tagged this as their favorite film.
One of the “Three Nameless Broads” bedded by the Coburn character is played by Judy Carne, later of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.
This delightful French farce of feminist self-discovery is the funniest movie in over a year, and another showcase for Catherine Deneuve (as if she needs one). DeNeuve plays a 1977 potiche, French for “trophy housewife”, married to a guy who is a male chauvinist pig both by choice and cluelessness. He is also the meanest industrialist in France – Ebenezer Scrooge would be a softie next to this guy – and the workers in his factories are about to explode. He becomes incapacitated, and she must run the factory.
Now, this is a familiar story line for gender comedy – why is it so damn funny? It starts with the screenplay, which is smart and quick like the classic screwball comedy that American filmmakers don’t make anymore. And the cast is filled with proven actors who play each comic situation with complete earnestness, no matter how absurd.
Director Francois Ozon, best known in the US for Swimming Pool and 8 Women, adapted the screenplay from a play and has a blast skewering late-70s gender roles and both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Gerard Depardieu plays the Communist mayor, who is both the husband’s nemesis and the wife’s former fling. Two of the very best French comic players, Fabrice Luchini and Karen Viard, shine in co-starring roles as the husband and his secretary.
Catherine DeNeuve has heard it one too many times in Potiche
Potiche opens this week, and this delightful French farce of feminist self-discovery is the funniest movie in over a year, and another showcase for Catherine DeNeuve (as if she needs one). The Music Never Stopped is a crowd-pleaser, especially for Baby Boomers. Certified Copy is a well-acted puzzler of an art film.
The best holdovers in theaters now are the combo thriller/love story The Adjustment Bureau and the fun and unpretentious comedy Cedar Rapids. Nora’s Will is a wry family dramedy, which is also now playing on HBO Signature as Cinco Dias Sin Nora (Five Days Without Nora).
I’ve seen Potiche, which opens April 1. It’s a delightful French farce of feminist self-discovery, the funniest movie in over a year, and another showcase for Catherine DeNeuve (as if she needs one). DeNeuve plays a 1977 potiche, French for “trophy housewife”, married to a guy who is a male chauvinist pig and the meanest industrialist in France. He becomes incapacitated, and she must run the factory. It’s smart and quick like the classic screwball comedy that American filmmakers don’t make anymore.
Jane Eyre also releases April 1. I’m not on the edge of my seat waiting for a Bronte bodice ripper, but many of my readers are. Stars the excellent Mia Wasilova from Alice in Wonderland and The Kids Are All Right.
Carancho: Well, they have ambulance chasers in Argentina, too, and that seamy world is the setting for this sexy and violent noir thriller. Stars Ricardo Darin of The Secrets of Their Eyes and Nine Queens. Won Un Certain Regard at Cannes. Will release widely on April 8.
Hanna is a paranoid thriller starring Saoirse Ronan as a 16-year-old raised in the Arctic Circle to be a master assassin by her rogue secret agent father (Eric Bana), and then released upon the CIA. She is matched up against special ops wiz Cate Blanchett. Hanna is directed by Joe Wright (Atonement, The Soloist). Releases April 8.
Poetry: This is the story of a Korean grandmother who goes to a poetry workshop and begins to understand the real characters of the people she lives amongst. Highly praised at Cannes. Releases widely April 8.
Restless: Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Milk, Paranoid Park, Last Days, Elephant) directs (from IMDb) “the story of a terminally ill teenage girl who falls for a boy who likes to attend funerals and their encounters with the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot from WWII.” The girl is played by the very promising Mia Wasilova, who had a tremendous 2010 with The Kids Are All Right and Alice in Wonderland. Releases April 8.
In a Better World/Haevnen releases April 15. This won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture. It was directed by the great Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier (Brothers/Brodre, After the Wedding, Things We Lost in the Fire). A Danish do-gooder returns from Africa to face family problems with his estranged wife and their vulnerable, bullied son.
The Princess of Montpensier: This film, admired at Cannes, is an adaptation of a well-known short story about a young woman who is forced by her father to marry – but not the man she loves. It is set in late 16th century France amid the French religious wars. Look for it on April 22.
On April 2, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting the 1951 Korean War movie The Steel Helmet. It’s a gritty classic by the great writer-director Sam Fuller, a WWII combat vet who brooked no sentimentality about war. Gene Evans, a favorite of the two Sams (Fuller and Peckinpah), is especially good as the sergeant.
Ripped from the headlines, this is the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson story with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. We already knew the story of Joe Wilson exposing the Bush Administration’s false WMD pretext for the Iraq war, and the White House striking back by outing an American covert intelligence operative – Wilson’s wife, Plame. But this film adds two more dimensions to the story.
First, this screenplay is based on Plame’s book, and the first act chronicles Plame’s exploits as a CIA officer. She indeed ran undercover operations. The depiction of real life, contemporary spycraft is even more thrilling than a fictional spy movie.
Second, the story also explores the excruciating pressure on the Plame/Wilson marriage. Joe is an able and principled guy with a little too much testosterone. His short fuse leads him to act impulsively to pick a fight that has even more severe consequences for his wife. In principle, Joe is right, but Valerie’s career is ruined, her family’s safety is threatened and her social life is shattered; she is both scared and resentful. And at the moment that they are under the most unbearable stress, each of them wants to react by moving in an opposite direction. Will the relationship survive? This dimension – a study of an adult relationship – makes this film much more than a typical history.
Abbas Kiarostami, the critically acclaimed Iranian-born director, presents us with a puzzle set in beautiful Tuscan hill towns. An apparently unacquainted man and woman spend the day together. Then they pretend that they are married. And then they seem to have been long (and unhappily) married.
So after watching the film, one may ask if the couple was married and only pretending not to be at first? Or did they instead start pretending to be married and just get more realistic toward the end of the film? Or do different stages of the film depict different realities? If you need to know what is going on in a movie and why, this is not a good choice for you.
The couple is played by the Juliette Binoche, and the British opera singer William Shimell. They are excellent. Binoche won the Best Actress award at Cannes for this role.
Christop Walz in his Oscar winning role in Inglorious Basterds
Roman Polanski is currently in post-production with his newest film Carnage, based on the popular comic play God of Carnage by the French playwright Yasmina Reza. God of Carnage won the 2009 Tony for Best Play. It is the story of two couples whose sons have tangled in a schoolboy row; the couples meet to discuss the matter, but the discussion keeps veers off into bickering and rants.
In Polanski’s movie, the couples are played by John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster and Christoph Walz and Kate Winslet. On Broadway, the likes of Jeff Daniels, Marcia Gay Harden, James Gandolfini, Hope Davis, Christine Lahti, Jimmy Smits, Dylan Baker and Lucy Liu cycled through the roles. Daniels has played both male roles and Harden won a Tony for Best Actress.
Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Pianist) is one of the greatest living directors. With last year’s The Ghost Writer, Polanski proved that he’s still on the top of game. So I’m looking forward to this one, too.
Here’s a crowd pleasing movie. Parents find their long lost adult son in a hospital, suffering from a brain tumor that has erased his much of his memory (and all of his short term memory). A speech therapist discovers that the son’s personality is sparked by music that he remembers from his teens. The father and the son have been estranged since the son left after an argument between them. The father finds that he can reach over the memory disability and re-connect by learning the son’s music.
The son’s music is all from the period 1964 to 1970 – and this music is another character in the film. Dad leaves behind his Big Band sensibilities to embrace Bob Dylan, Donovan, Steppenwolf, Crosby Stills & Nash and, especially the Grateful Dead. Baby Boomers and Dead Heads will really enjoy this movie from the music alone. Indeed, the Dead’s Bob Weir and Mickey Hart have been out supporting the movie.
The film is a showcase for the excellent actor J.K. Simmons, who plays the father. Simmons is always very, very good (Juno‘s dad, getting fired in Up in the Air and on TV’s Oz and Law and Order). Here, he plays a guy who is secure in his own righteousness, but then sees and accepts his own responsibility for the estrangement, and whose love for his son motivates him to make some big changes. Lou Taylor Pucci is excellent as the son. Julia Ormond does a good job playing the speech therapist.
Now I generally hate “disease of the week” movies. Really hate them. But here the real story is about the relationship between father and son, and the rebuilding of the bond between them. The memory disability, along with their past and the father’s initial stubbornness, is just another obstacle to their communication.
The story is based on an actual case described by Oliver Sacks in his essay The Last Hippie.
