Blue Jasmine

Depending on the Kindness (Enabling) of Strangers
or
Being Entitled to Your Opinion

Blue Moon/You saw me standing alone/
Without a dream in my heart/Without a love of my own/
Blue Moon/You know just what I was there for/
You heard me saying a prayer for/Someone I really could care for/
And then there suddenly appeared before me/
The only one my arms will hold/
I heard somebody whisper please adore me/
And when I looked to the Moon it turned to gold
Blue Moon/Now I'm no longer alone
Without a dream in my heart/Without a love of my own



Woody Allen's 21st century version of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," Blue Jasmine, is a contemporary version of the play's tragedy in an unsympathetic post-Bernie Madoff/Wall Street Bail-Out world, turning it into a moralistic comedy.  It may seem a little misogynistic to be so mocking to someone as Williams' Blanche DuBois who has suffered a cataclysm, but when the someone is as cluelessly entitled and myopic as Allen's Jasmine (nee Jeanette) Francis (Cate Blanchett), there is a very real glee to see them get their, as the term is used in The Magnificent Ambersons, "comeuppance."

It's a brilliant conceit, combining Allen's love for classic literature and forms, tossing his own hang-dog spin onto it, while, for once, being refreshingly contemporary—something Allen hasn't really done of late, as he's had a depressive's obsession with the past for the past couple of decades (no matter how fresh the cast may be).

Allen starts his film (after the standard black background with white credits backed this time by '30's depression era rhythm and blues) with an (unusual for him) CGI shot of a jet approaching the camera, sailing by and moving away.  Jasmine Francis ("I fell in love with the 'Jasmine.' 'Jeanette' has no panache") is on that jet flying from New York to San Francisco to move in with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins—her second film for Allen) for a fresh start after losing everything in her life.  They're both adopted and couldn't be more different (As Sally says "She got the good genes."); Jeanette is all high cheek-bones and au couture, while Sally is low class and all teeth, surrounded by Guido's and roughnecks. Jasmine has suffered a reversal of fortune as her husband Hal (Alec Baldwin) has been caught wheeling and dealing in real estate schemes, ending up in prison, and committing suicide.  Her extended visit delays Ginger's boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale) moving in with her and her two kids by Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), he ex-husband.  There's a bit of a sandpaper quality to Ginger and Jasmine's relationship; when Ginger and Augie were married, they lost a lottery nest-egg investing in one of Hal's "get-rich-quick" investment schemes, something Jasmine forgets when she drama-queens over her own plight, and dismisses entirely when confronted with it.

Jasmine (Blanchett) and Ginger (Hawkins)

So it rankles when Jasmine pulls a Mrs. Madoff and claims victim-hood about the money she's lost. Jasmine has no plans, no prospects, and there are hints of a nervous breakdown after she was found wandering the streets talking to herself.  Now, she's popping Xanax with a vodka chaser and barely keeping ahead of anxiety attacks and comatose fugue states as she barrels through the lower echelons of San Francisco, trying to latch onto opportunities.

She decides to go back to school, learning computers so she can go "into" interior design, taking a job at a dentist's (Michael Stuhlbarg)—for which she is totally ill-suited (anything with the words "customer" and "service" in any combination would be)—to fund the courses.  In the meantime, from her lowly status, she lords it over the family and friends she finds beneath her.  That meaning everyone.

The flip-side to this is that people still find her attractive, as she puts up a great, if shallow, front, speaking of her glory days—which segue into flashbacks of her privileged happy life, only to find that once the flashback has ended, that she's still carrying on the conversation inside the flashback, and whoever she was talking through previously has left.*  It's a clever use of flashback as psychosis, a clever, nearly invisible off-shoot of the film-star (played by Jeff Daniels) stepping out of the film in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Where Allen has been living in the past the last few films, Jasmine is doing the same thing, to her detriment, as, whether in flashback or real life, it comes back to haunt her and take her away from the present and any future she might aspire to.

It's a return to near perfect form without the tricks and conceits that Allen used (during his "earlier, funny" films) and nicely merges the bi-polar extremes of comedy and tragedy that the more mature filmmaker in Allen has aspired to.  It also feels less fussy and musty than the after-taste some of the lesser Allen films have left of late.  After a lifetime of making good films, some classic and some merely pedantic, and eschewing his earlier stylistic tricks, one wonders if, at the age of 78, Allen's best films might still be ahead of him and that's an exciting prospect.


Blue Jasmine is a Full-Price Ticket.

Jasmine in her "fugue" state

* It's a bit like the Larry David monologues-to-the-camera in Whatever Works, only there's no child around to ask "Who's that man talking to, Mommy?"

Green Lantern

"In Dullest Day, the Weakest Light..."
or
"Oa, the Humanity!"

When the silver-age of comics began in the late 1950's, the '40's age of super-heroes were being replaced with westerns, horror and science-fiction tales.  So, those earlier mystery-men were re-incarnated with sciency origins that no longer depended on mystic powers and a sense of right-and-wrong.  Befitting the times, the original Green Lantern was a railroad engineer, who happened upon a mystic rune that gave him extraordinary powers.  The modern GL was a test-pilot, bequeathed a magic ring by a dying alien who'd crash-landed his spacecraft while on patrol.  As the story progressed, the pilot Hal Jordan, found he had been made a part of an intergalactic police corps (based in no small part on E.E. Smith's "Lensmen" series and its "Galactic Patrol") led by a clutch of identical blue-skinned big-headed "Guardians of the Universe," who supervised the Corps on a planet in the middle of the Universe, Oa, where was built the Corps central battery from where all green power originated.  There are a lot of Green Lanterns, patrolling every corner of the Galaxy.  And they had two weaknesses: you had to recharge the ring or it would run out of juice after 24 hours, and it didn't work on anything yellow.

That's a lot of back-story.  Probably too much for one movie, and it pushes the credibility envelope that science-fiction movies can push before leaving general audiences in an anti-matter cloud of skepticism, if not downright derision.*  And the movie version of Green Lantern, written by a bullpen of the comics' writers crams enough emerald exposition to make any viewer green around the gills.  I know there are a lot of fan-boys out there who will probably cry crocodile tears if their favorite Lantern isn't in the movie (where's Ch'p?  And G'nort?), but it's only a two hour flick—you can't put the whole Universe (and Mogo) in it, though this one tries (Me, I just wanted to see that staple of Hal Jordan tricks—he can create anything he wants, and the thing he uses the most is a boxing-glove—I was not disappointed).

It took the rest of the movie to do that.  TMI is the least of this movie's problems.  As much as it pains me to say it, Green Lantern just isn't very good.  Casting is fine: Ryan Reynolds makes a great Hal Jordan, Blake Lively is merely okay as over-dependent on-again/off-again g-f Carol Ferris, and Peter Sarsgaard has a fun time screwing around with arch-villain Hector Hammond, affecting a John Malkovich whine before he turns into an über-brained cross between Joseph Merrick and Truman Capote.  Mark Strong does nice work as the devilish looking "bad" Lantern Sinestro.  And with that, it's a kick to see some of these characters brought to life.

But...it needs a bit of a power battery charge.  The pace is a little sluggish**—with all the global and galactic goings-on, there's a little too much Carol Ferris interaction for the movie's own good—she's not as integral as, say, Lois Lane is to Superman, and she never really came into her own as a character until she became a super-hero, too (don't ask), and it's not as if Blake Lively was demanding that she had more to do.  Fact is, the scenes between Reynolds and Lively are the worst of the picture, as they're stuck with Screenwriter 101 dialog*** and little chemistry between them to make it in any way interesting.****  The tone is just a little too proud of itself—the Corps is taken VERY seriously, even though that's the part that should have been the most fun, and although Hal Jordan has the most wise-cracks with his "fish-out-of-water" learning curve, this is the latter-day mythos Jordan, suffering from "The Marvel Curse" of being angst-ridden over some lack in his life, in this case "absent-father" syndrome.

And The Guardians are even worse useless ideologues than they are in the comics, their pretentious dithering and superiority making their scenes sound like they were transcripts from the U.N.

But, there's something else about The Guardians that solved the riddle of what bothered me about the movie from the start.  It's one of the darkest movies I've ever seen, as if it was a 100 watt movie projected with a 20 watt bulb (I saw it flat, so I can't imagine what the 3-D version, which is always less bright, must be like).  There is just no "brightest day" in Green Lantern. It's when The Guardians show up on their too-high-seats (that should give you a clue about them) and you can barely make them out—they look plasticine and animatronic, less life-like than the Lincoln at Disneyland.  But that's not the worst of it, the sight of the entire Corps must surely be impressive, but you get the sense that the crowd scenes are merely composed of randomly moving blobs, and the design of the main bad-thing, Parallax—a Guardian possessed of the essence of fear—looks like a particularly gnarly piece of Brillo-pad that's been set on fire, with a blocky Mt. Rushmore face in the middle of it.  It all points to one thing—the FX shots are substandard enough that the film-makers—partcularly director Martin Campbell, who directed (and invigorated) the two best Bond movies of the past 20 years had so little confidence in so many of these shots that the entire film has been desaturated to keep the bad shots from standing out from the good.  It's not all bad.  The FX-wizards did impressive work with the GL costumes (completely CGI) and the couple of Lanterns that we see well—Tomar-Re (voiced by Geoffrey Rush) and D.I. Kilowog (Michael Clarke Duncan)—some of the flying works, but the landings are a little rocky.  But the ring-constructs are kinda dull (that's the scripters' fault)...lasso's and jets and guns and...Hot-Wheels tracks???  If we're doing product placement how about beating people over the head with a bottle of Coke (label out)?  "The only limits are what you can imagine."  Earth is in trouble.  But the retailers should do fine.

But, I think the worst thing about Green Lantern is that nothing resonates, nothing inspires, nothing evokes a sense of wonder or service.  Nothing even made me crack a smile—except that the green energy coming from the most powerful accessory in the world is apparently painful (as well it should be).  As a fan of the comics who wanted it to be good, watching the movie was painful for me.

Now, if you would, please repeat after me Yojimbo's empowering adaptation of the Green Lantern oath:


"In dullest day, the weakest light,
the SFX might look all right.
To cure the need to see the sight
of comic-flicks...
Green Lantern might."

Because it's just a Cable-Watcher.

"Green Lantern ponders the Universal Question: "why is there so much yellow paint in the world?"

* The secret is to couch your sci-fi in legend or familiar genres—so Star Wars gets a pass because it borrows liberally from westerns, samurai movies and old sci-fi, but A.I. Artificial Intelligence featuring robot-mother-love, melted ice-caps and "the mechas will inherit the Earth" provokes superior chortling.
** But then, so's Hal.  A couple of times during battle scenes I was thinking, "This guy can jet across the Galaxy.  Shouldn't he be showing up now, before anybody gets killed?"

*** "Nice." "Impressive, isn't it?"  "I was talking about your dress."  Really?  Is that a line they use at Comic-con's?

**** The only interesting aspect to her is that she sees GL is Jordan almost immediately: "I've seen you naked, you think I wouldn't recognize you by hiding your cheek-bones?"  Good point.  Although he DOES lower his voice as is par for the course in superhero movies. 

The Twilight Saga: New Moon/An Education

"Women Who Run with the (Were)Wolves"

What is it about the "bad boys" that attracts good women? Is it that "girls just wanna have fun" and the wild ones are more capable of showing them a good time? Is it something deep in our alligator brains that says the more aggressive ones are the better mates for procreating, even if they're not the better mates for consistent fatherhood? Is it the female imperative to "tame" the wild stallion—"I can change him" is the common refrain. Is that inclination an argument against monogamy in the human instinct, that women gravitate towards undependable, albeit aggressively undependable men?

All good questions, but I doubt there's a definitive answer (and even if there was, would it do any good?) But it's a thought to bring up, in light of these two releases.

Poor Bella Swan. When last we left her she was stuck in Forks, Washington in a terrible movie.* "Twilight" even without the vampire trappings sucked—it bit and bit hard. The script was overwrought and silly and the direction murky and slip-shod with some of the lousiest special effects since cartoon bats. With the second movie based on the "Twilight" series, "New Moon" things improve a bit—the effects work while sometimes dodgy practically, in other places hits a fine note of creepiness. The murk problem has been solved and a good director, Chris Weitz (who started out co-directing "American Pie"—which pays off here with better school scenes—upgraded to "About a Boy," and helmed "The Golden Compass," where he seemed a bit out of his depth, despite overseeing a massive production), who makes this installment look like a "film," where the first looked like a dashed-off tele-movie.**

Bella's (Kristen Stewart) life is spinning out of control. Well, she's pretty much running in place, but Weitz's camera is constantly circling, circling, circling as she reaches her 18th birthday and worrying that she's getting older while the two men in her life, vampy Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and young pup Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner, who buffed up for the role—you should have heard the ladies in the audience gasp when he whisked off his shirt, which he does a lot in this film) are frustratingly youthful. Edward, despite being 109 years old, still acts like a moony 17 year old, and decides that in order to protect Bella from a blood-feud with a vicious vampire tribe, he's going to withdraw his protection and mope in some other part of the world. That illogical motivation is the desperate act of plot contrivance that sets the film in motion; blame must go to returning scripter Melissa Rosenberg (who does much finer, more devious work on "Dexter") and book-author Stephenie Meyer). It creates a Swan-dive into depression for the heroine, who in moments of danger is warned off by apparitions of her love-at-first-bite, as if he's a wispy Obi Wan (emphasis on the wan!) Kenobi (there is one nifty sequence where a risky motorcycle ride makes her see periodic visions of Edward pass by like "Burma-Shave" signs). She turns to Jacob for friendship and support and motorcycle repair skills and finds herself having feelings for him, which he reciprocates.

She should have got a dog, and in a way she does—Jacob becomes part of a gang (or should I say "pack?") of werewolves, who are secretly sniffing out vampires in the night. She sure knows how to pick 'em, or as one of the Forks folks says "(she's) good with weird." Edward's a vampire, Jacob's a wolf, and, at one point, Bella jokes she's afraid of becoming "a cougar." Love brings out the primal in all of us.

Based even more deeply around a "Romeo and Juliet" motif, things get more complicated in—Osilo lo dicono?—Italy with a possible judgement by the Vampire papacy—the Volturi—led by Aro (Michael Sheen) who has the power to make judgements on the life and death of vampires. The better production values of "New Moon" speaks to the casting of Sheen and Dakota Fanning as two of the Volturi, although one suspects that Fanning's part was more important in the book, as she's under-utilized here. It's interesting to see Sheen in a role that doesn't have much at stake, prestige-wise; he draws his considerable precision into a florid, vaguely threatening performance that induces cackles and dread. For the rest, Pattinson maintains the James Dean persona, they still photograph his pimp-roll in lethargic slo-mo—one suspects it will be a constant in the series—and he's an interesting kisser. Kristen Stewart has the tough role, carrying the movie throughout (one wants to say boldly as she's in almost every scene, but the performance is of flickering and quavering) although she still has the annoying habit of not looking her fellow actors in the eyes—their neck, their chest, their ass, anywhere but their eyes.

It's a big improvement overall, solidly presented with a minimum of squish and a slightly harder edge, the main weakness coming from Meyer's plotting.

"The Twilight Saga: New Moon" is a Rental.

"Wilhelm Alert" here.


David (Peter Sarsgaard) is not carnivorous, but he's no less predatory—a wolf in expensive clothing. Seeing Jenny (Carey Mulligan), 16 year old schoolgirl, soaked with rain and burdened with cello, he offers her a ride and finds a smart, pretty girl studying for Oxford, studiously sophisticated but inexperienced. She sees in him all the things she's learned in books lived day-to-day and she is soon besotted with him and his life. He treats her as a woman, takes her to Paris and Oxford, concerts, jazz-clubs, and art auctions and she's in a rush to live life, rather than read about it. And David is her entrée.

Jenny is his dessert.

Based on Lynn Barber's memoir with a screenplay by Nick Hornby, "An Education," like the character of David, impresses you with its pedigree. Directed elegantly but simply by Lone Scherfig ("Italian for Beginners"), it manages to rise above the smarm of the concept, and turn into a cautionary tale pursuing success and "the good life" at all costs. Jenny's parents, particularly her father (Alfred Molina, really good here) want her to crack her books so she can make something of herself, or at least something better than him. He's as swayed by David—by his success—as Jenny is, granting weekend travel privileges so that she can have the experience of the places he's never gone and aspired to. Oxford falls in priorities. Superficial concerns over-take a fall-back position. And for both father and daughter, the older beau is a means to both their ends.

But it's a short-cut, a diversion, and has the potential of switching back and landing you exactly where you started.

One walks out of the film impressed with its look, its sophistication, its cast (Sarsgaard is always dependable to appear in cut-above material, and Molina has his disappointments but is frequently fun to watch), which also includes Olivia Williams, Dominic Cooper, Rosamund Pike and Emma Thompson—Thompson delivers an anvil-thumping line with such flippancy, it's more devastating than if she'd belabored it, and Mulligan is a real find, sometimes suggesting a young Audrey Hepburn. But in the cold light of day the morning after, one's opinion drops precipitously. Ultimately, it's a million dollar budgeted Afterschool Special with fine English (and one American) actors, and more precisely, it's the B-story of "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" without the tragedy or irony of the rest of it. And one feels slightly hood-winked, reflective of the movie. Sure, it's getting great reviews and talked up for year-end awards, but it feels like a passing thing.

"An Education" it may be, but if feels like being held back, the lessons already learned.

Better stay in school, kids.

"An Education" is a Rental.


* To be completely factual, she was in Oregon substituting for the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. Now, they're in Vancouver, B.C. substituting for Oregon substituting for the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. The Oregon film board must be using Washington's play-book.

** To be fair, although nobody's talking about it, the budget for this sequel must be considerably higher than the first.

Rendition

Rendition (2007, Gavin Hood)

"Politics is personal".

Rendition by Gavin Hood is a story based around one of the most criticized tactics used by the Bush administration in their 'war on terror' - the removal of those suspected of terrorist activities to a location outside of the United States in order to avoid any of the remaining legal safeguards against extended detention and unlawful methods of interrogation. By setting this as a fictionalized account, we are meant to see the human face of those who are affected by this policy as well as those who employ it. The plot revolves around the detention of Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) and the attempts of his wife (Reese Witherspoon) to find out what has happened to her husband when he fails to return from a trip to South Africa. She tries to enlist the aid of an old boyfriend (played by Peter Sarsgaard), who is now an aide to Senator Hawkins (Alan Arkin), who attempts to intervene on her behalf with the head of US Intelligence, Corinne Whitman (Meryl Streep) until it becomes politically inopportune to do so. Whitman represents those that believe that what they do is worth the price that others pay for it:

Corrine Whitman: Honey, this is nasty business. There are upwards of 7,000 people in central London alive tonight, because of information that we elicited just this way. So maybe you can put your head on your pillow and feel proud for saving one man while 7,000 perish, but I got grandkids in London, so I'm glad I'm doing this job... and you're not.

Ibrahimi has been removed to an unnamed Maghreb country where he is to be interrogated by the local head of police, Abasi Fawal (Yigal Naor), supervised by a CIA intelligence officer, Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaall). To add another twist to the plot, Fawal's daughter, Fatima (Zineb Oukach) is having a relationship with a young jihadist, Khalid (Moa Khouas) who is planning an assassination attempt on her father's life.

Freeman, played with almost a complete lack of emotion by Gyllenhaal, has had no experience with the interrogation of prisoners but is less than impressed with the results of Fawal's methods.

Douglas Freeman: In all the years you've been doing this, how often can you say that we've produced truly legitimate intelligence? Once? Twice? Ten times? Give me a statistic; give me a number. Give me a pie chart, I love pie charts. Anything, anything that outweighs the fact that if you torture one person you create ten, a hundred, a thousand new enemies.

Hood gets good performances out of his actors and for two-thirds of the movie, we are engrossed in a thriller but then it seems that the Hollywood suits stepped in and asked for some kind of resolution that would leave us suitably outraged but not too complicit in the use of torture. Though it is probably true that there have been many prisoners quietly released from detention, it is hard to see it happening in the way that is shown here. Which is a shame after what has come before in the movie.

Garden State

"Garden State" (Zack Braff, 2004) A delightful little film, rude with detail, about a young aspiring actor who takes the occassion of a trip back home to attend his mother's funeral to stop taking anti-depressants. Zack Braff ("Scrubs") writes, acts and stars in "Garden State," and he's got to be pretty good, but he pulls off a perfect hat-trick without slighting any of those functions. Plus, he has a pretty good eye for camera-work, too, as his medicated section plays austere and sterile, but gradually becomes freer with subject matter and composition right to the last shot. Good cast, too. Natalie Portman is all charming neurotic tic as a Jersey girl, and Peter Sarsgaard turns in another seemingly effortless performance as the best of Braff's stoner-friends. Ian Holm is the tightest-wound of control-freak dad-shrinks, and there's a wonderful cameo by Jean Smart. The film loses its way briefly in the third act on a prolonged scavenger hunt, but wraps up nicely. Pretty damned good for somebody's first film!****

**** The topic of "Garden State" came up at a party recently and the reactions to it were extreme--love it or hate it. But the most vehemence--and a large reason to hate the movie was Natalie Portman. I thought she was great, more than redeeming herself for the "Star Wars" prequels, but a couple of women in the room not only thought she was horrible, but ruined the movie. ??? Really? RUINED the entire movie? In my opinion, they couldn't be more wrong. But, why would they think that? I think it's because she wasn't wearing the right kind of make-up. No, not Maybelline. Something like the make-up Charlize Theron wore to win the Oscar in "Monster," (besides the truly amazing performance, that is), or the false nose Nicole Kidman wore in "The Hours." And let's be fair here, the transformation of Daniel Day Lewis for his award-winning performance in "My Left Foot," or the weight and schlumpf George Clooney burdened himself with for "Syriana." So, word of advice, Nat', if you're ever gonna be taken seriously, think something disfiguring.