Coming soon: Adventureland

I saw this last night and adored it. I'm on a deadline right now, so more to come, but for the moment just wanted to share one of my favorite lines: "You can't avoid everyone you've fucked up with."

DVD: Then She Found Me

I actually had a lot of fun checking out Blockbusters when we were in Florida. At one time, a membership at a movie rental place (a place you actually have to go to, and browse) was a must. Now, with Netflix, it seems so passé….I don’t mean to sound snotty. It’s just that I’m so computer dependent now---services like Netflix, Fresh Direct, and Diapers.com have made my disorganized life so much easier. It’s hard to imagine voluntarily taking more time to do something I can do online.

I do occasionally go to Alvin’s Alley, the goofy rental place—half antique store, have DVD/VHS rental—on 9th between 22nd and 23rd. They have almost everything, even the very obscure. And they’re always willing to dig it out of a back recess of the store. Plus most of the people who work there are the nerdy movie types who’ve actually watched everything in the place and are happy to chat movies or make a recommendation. (And they’re only a block away.)

But a suburban Blockbusters is a different deal. What shocked me more than anything was that they have stuff that’s still in the movie theaters, or just recently out of them. I had NO idea. In other words, it’s possible to do some pretty sophisticated and current viewing with just the aid of a little suburban store. It was, I must say, a pleasant surprise. I mean, I love Rachel Maddow, but sometimes (a lot of times) I don’t want to think, I want to be entertained.

Anyway, I was looking for something I’d wanted to see, but missed. Looking, I might add, while occasionally disentangling Henry from a rack of DVDs, or pulling three bags of gummy bears out of his enthralled little hands. Once he scared the cr*p out of me by utterly disappearing and not answering when I called, thus raising the specter of myself on national T.V., begging for the return of my son, who I lost while checking out the current releases in the video store. I’m sure people would be VERY sympathetic.

But I was spared the humiliation. I found him. (Gummy Bear aisle again.) And I also found “Then She Found Me,” Helen Hunt’s directorial debut (she also co-wrote the screenplay, which is based on a novel by Ellen Lipman), which I wanted to see when it was out in 2007.

I wanted to like it. I like Helen Hunt. She’s a capable actor who, I think, knows what she’s doing—as an actor, anyway. But I guess there’s more to directing than that. My assumption was that someone who has been in the field as long as she has would get it, but there’s clearly more to it than having been in a zillion films since you were a teenager. In fact, one of my thoughts, after watching this movie was “Wow, I guess Ron Howard really has a unique talent.”

At any rate, here’s the plot: April (Helen Hunt) gets married at 39 (or possibly late 38, it’s not spelled out), to Ben (Matthew Broderick), a fellow grade school teacher. We learn, shortly thereafter, that she herself was adopted, and desperately wants to have a biological child. She and Ben have been trying, we discover (about ten months into the marriage), but to no avail.

Helen’s adoptive mother, Trudy, keeps telling her to adopt. To which April responds that she wants the biological connection, that she always knew there was a difference in the way Trudy looked at her and Ben (April’s brother, not adopted). Trudy glares at her, tells her there’s no difference, but April is adamant. There is, and she’s having a baby biologically, come hell or high water.

Then hell and/or high water arrives. Ben decides the marriage isn’t for him after all, Trudy dies, April discovers she’s pregnant after a round of goodbye sex with Ben, and April’s biological mother, Bernice (played by Bette Midler), tracks April down. Oh, and April meets a guy, Frank (Colin Firth), who’s very charming, for the most part, but also very fucked up after having been left by his wife to raise two kids on his own. Phew.

The tagline for this movie is: “Life can change in a heartbeat.” April certainly experiences a lot of changes. And I think, in the end, we’re to take away the idea that our hearts often have a greater ability to love and take risks than we give them credit for. It’s our fears of the heart’s limitations, not their actual ones, that get in our way. But, frankly, I’m digging, based on the last minute or so of the movie. Because most of this movie is a mess that doesn’t lead much of anywhere.

It’s possible that Hunt just can’t get past relatively surface, quick-to-resolve sitcom scenarios at this point. Because no character really totally makes sense. And no storyline really goes much of anywhere. When you see Helen Hunt, Colin Firth, Matthew Broderick and Bette Midler in a movie, and it still can’t come together, you know it’s because there’s just crap writing underneath it all.

Maybe Hunt should have skipped the writing credit and just gone with a tried and true screenplay. But I suspect that Hunt, who had a baby at about 40, was trying to do something personally meaningful here. No harm in that. But…it kind of sucks to have done that when the movie, well, kind of sucks.

Things that particularly bothered me:

*Hunt is distractingly gaunt and aged looking in this movie. She can’t be much above 40, but she looks 50, and she’s all bony and hunched over. I know there’s pressure to be thin in Hollywood, but God, she looked AWFUL.

*Colin Firth’s character…charming in stereotypical Colin Firth way, but there’s one outburst scene from him that made me think his character was irretrievably fucked up, mean and awful…though that was not, I think, what you were supposed to take away from it. I think you were supposed to think the outburst was endearing and honest. But….yikes. Psychotic is more like it.

*The non-exploration/resolution of the there’s no difference/there is a difference between a biological and adoptive relationship. I think in the end you’re supposed to come away with the there’s no difference attitude. But though this question is the premise of the movie, they don’t explore it at all. Okay, there’s one weird scene with April and Ben in which he talks about how hard it is to be the biological child…. embarrassing at times, he tells her. And…that’s the end of that exploring.

*Paul also felt that the music was strangely paired with the scenes….I didn’t notice this so much, but he’s much more attuned to music than I am. It kind of did feel like Hunt chose music she liked, more than music that fit the scenes, though.

And there you have it. High, or reasonable hopes, not such a great movie. Oh well. I wonder if she’ll try it again.

DVD: Rumor Has It

Okay, normally I wouldn’t be caught dead watching a movie starring Jennifer Aniston. No offense to Jennifer, but her presence in a movie connotes adjectives like dumb, surface, and cute. (Okay, I’m willing to bet she’d find that summary a tad offensive. But what can I say? It’s true.)

But, here we were in the Florida rental, Henry in bed, limited cable…and no Netflix. We turned the place upside down and found a few DVDs the owners had left, the most palatable of which was “Rumor Has It,” the 2005 flick, directed by Rob Reiner and starring Aniston, Kevin Costner, Mark Ruffalo, Shirley MacLain, Richard Jenkins and Mena Suvari.

Here’s the plot summary: A young woman from Pasadena realizes that her now-dead mother both knew (and slept with) the guy who was the inspiration for the character, Benjamin, in “The Graduate.” And she wonders if she might be his daughter. (And whether her grandmother, played by MacLain, was Mrs. Robinson.) The rest of the movie is Aniston trying to figure out the truth.

It’s cute. In fact, it was better than I expected it to be. Shirley MacLain is good for a laugh or two, as usual. And there’s a bit of physical comedy from Jenkins, as Aniston’s father, that left us laughing out loud for a good five or ten minutes.

In short, if you’re ever stuck in a beach house with nothing else to watch, I wouldn’t suggest that you, say, play backgammon instead of watching this movie.

Two Lovers

It made a lot more sense for me to work than to go to a movie last Friday. I mean, I’d just gotten back from a month in Florida, I’m way behind, and I’d hired a sitter for the day. Isn’t that a scenario that spells catch-up?

But I woke up hearing the sound of tires on wet streets, and rain pattering the window. And it was gray out. It was a day, in short, that just screamed buy a bagel, a ticket, and a huge Diet Coke (in that order) and settle into a nearly empty theater. So, I did. Bliss.

(Bliss except for the peculiar, slightly dead-in-the-eyes, afternoon movie-goer ahead of me at the concession counter, who peppered me with questions as we waited…I let some distance accrue between us as we both made our way to the same theater, to make sure he wasn’t going to suggest we sit together. Shiver.)

So, Two Lovers, a movie that was suggested by several other movie fans.

It’s a lover’s quad, I guess. On the one hand, there’s the depressive, and, in her words, “fucked up,” Michele, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, and her boyfriend, the much older, cringe-inducing, married-lawyer boyfriend, Ronald (Elias Koteas).

And then there’s Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), the oafish, endearing, slightly unstable son of Jewish immigrants who own a dry cleaning business in deep dark Brooklyn. Leonard’s heart was broken by his former fiancée, who ditched him (I’ll let you find out why). He’s home with his parents after a stint in an institution, trying to put his life back together.

He seems like a hopeless case, frankly, until he finds himself in the spotlight of a woman’s gaze—at which point he turns into an endearing clown who wants to please, amuse and entertain. And he does. The transformation is striking. And though it’s jarring, Phoenix makes it believable. Here is a man who comes alive at the prospect of love.

Leonard is torn between Michele, whom he’s technically friends with, but really pines for, and Sandra, the beautiful daughter of family friends, who doesn’t give off even the slightest whiff of crazy. Obviously Sandra is the right choice. Even Leonard knows that, occasionally blowing off Michele’s histrionics to focus on Sandra.

But crazy, as many of us know (okay, maybe just those of us with a checkered relationship history) has a strange allure. And, of course, it’s Gwynie, who looks like Gwynie in a photo shoot for Harper’s Bazaar for most of the movie. Kind of hard to turn your back on that, I imagine. Plus she’s needy in a way that lights up that male I’ll take-care-of-you gene. (Leonard lights up the female version of this gene in Sandra.)

The performances in this movie are really good. I loved Isabella Rossellini as Leonard’s mom. She didn’t need dialogue. It was all in her beautiful, worried, aging face. Phoenix is great. (I really do hope he hasn’t gone off the rails.) And Gwyneth seems to have a knack for depressive characters. (Though, with the exception of a gum-smacking, big hair club scene, she seemed a little too pretty and polished to me.)

It’s a solid movie, though a bit like an emotional horror flick (“Oh, no, don’t go in the basement/answer Michele’s call!”) Nowhere was I as horrified, however, as at the end—which, I lift my hat to the director, James Gray—I could not predict.

I think what troubles me is that I don’t ultimately know what it all MEANS. Is it, I thought, as I left the movie (after checking that dead-in-the-eyes was gone) about the lies we tell ourselves, and the compromises we accept, in love and relationships? Or is it merely a portrait of some hapless attempts at love?

Either way, it rang unnervingly true.

Apologies....

(This was the pier in Deerfield Beach, Florida. We spent a lot of time taking walks on it, checking out the pelicans, and seeing what people were catching.)

Hi all. I was away all of March in Florida without a close movie theater (or sitter, even if there had been one). To make matters worse, my internet access was spotty. Which is more of an explanation, I suppose, than an apology, for why this blog has been so quiet of late. There WAS, however, a Blockbusters nearby....(boy did browsing those aisles recall junior high school) so I did some good renting. And I've seen two movies this week, so there'll be more activity soon.

The Quad Newsletter

Remember I mentioned The Quad, and Elliot Kanbar's email newsletter in an earlier post? He always summarizes what's playing at the theater, and ends the newsletter with an interesting commentary. Here's this weeks offering (and p.s. I think he's right about all of them):

THE LAST WORD (AT LAST) ABOUT THE OSCAR WINNERS. Matt Damon recently remarked that "the only way to judge movies is at least 15 years down the line. You'll be able to see if the films and performances endured, divorced from the heat of the race and the craziness of the costly Oscar campaigns".

The magazine "Entertainment Today" launched an extensive survey asking Academy members: " In the last 15 Oscar races would you vote today for the same performers and films who won then?" Here are some answers including some of my own.

I think it should have been:

RALPH FIENNES ("Schindler's List") over Tommy Lee Jones ("The Fugitive") for Best Supporting Actor. 1993.

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN over "Shakespeare In Love" for Best Picture. 1998.

CATE BLANCHETT ("Elizabeth") over Gwyneth Paltrow ("Shakespeare In Love") for Best Actress.1998.

KATE WINSLET ("Sense and Sensibilites") over Mira Sorvino ("Mighty Aphrodite") for Best Supporting Actress. 1995.

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS ("Gangs of New York") over Adrien Brody ("The Pianist") for Best Actor. 2002.

SEAN PENN ("Dead Man Walking") over Nicolas Cage ("Leaving Las Vegas") for Best Actor. 1993.

EDWARD NORTON ("American History") over Roberto Benigni ("Life is Beautiful") for Best Actor. 1998.

David Denby on the Oscars--and why the picks were off

I'm just catching up on New Yorkers, so I'm late in remarking upon this...but David Denby's piece in the February 9/16th issue, entitled "Curious Cases" really nails it. Below are a few of my favorite observations....but click on the link and read the full piece. It's worth it.

-As you may have noticed, 2008 was not a great year for movies. There was nothing comparable to the hair-raising "There Will be Blood," or the ravishing "Diving Bell and the Butterfly," or the sinister "No Country for Old Men," from 2007. Even so a nod for best picture could have gone to more deserving movies, such as Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married," which settles down into a revelatory examination of a family's anguish and joy; or "Happy-Go-Lucky," Mike Leigh's startling look at the power and the limits of goodness....

-The total of thirteen nominations for "Benjamin Button" has to be some sort of scandal. "Citizen Kane" received nine nominations, "The Godfather: Part II" eleven, and this movie, so smooth and mellow that it seems to have been dipped in bourbon aging since the Civil War, is nowhere close to those two.

-Boyle has created what looks like a jumpy, hyper-edited commercial for poverty--he uses the squalor and violence touristically, as an aspect of the fabulous.