Monday at the Movies - October 20, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  In the immortal words of the legendary Hank Kingsley, “It’s October, and we all know what that means.”

The ABCs of Death (2012) – Two enthusiasms of mine, readers of this blog will note, come together in The ABCs of Death:  horror and anthology.  Unfortunately, that’s about the nicest thing I can say about the 26 shorts alphabetized in The ABCs of Death, because there are at best one or two tolerable segments and a few memorable moments in what is otherwise an execrable mess marrying the worst excesses of torture porn to some of the poorest examples of visual narrative.  The shorts that work tend to be quite simple and straightforward, while it’s the high concept ones that fumble on basic principles of storytelling.  I won’t methodically track and evaluate each of the 26 shorts (the Wikipedia page is actually quite thorough in this regard), but I’ll single out a few.  A and B aren’t bad, doing basic Twilight Zone style twist endings on morality plays, while R and X are memorable for their intensely graphic gore (in one, a man’s flesh is sliced and developed into celluloid; in the other, body confidence leads a woman to take a turkey slicer to herself).  F is, if you can believe it, a five-minute joke about flatulence, while K deals with an unflushable turd – and I’m not exaggerating here when I say there is far too much surface-level toilet humor, even for a late-twenties male like myself.  (There is, and I’m not joking, even a short called “T for Toilet.”)  Even with a few tolerable shorts, The ABCs of Death is far far less than the sum of its parts, grating in places and downright dull in most.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Monday at the Movies - January 21, 2013

Welcome to the first “Monday at the Movies” of 2013!  (Somebody went to the movies a lot in January.)  This week, two features that elicited less-than-favorable reactions – though you may be surprised which one I enjoyed more...

Red State (2011) – Kevin Smith is a talented (if loquacious) raconteur, but I’ve never been a big fan of his movies; Chasing Amy is just okay, and Mallrats has its moments.  It just seems that Smith doesn’t have very much to say in movies filled with chattering.  With Red State, Smith approaches a theme – that extreme belief in anything, be it God or country, is dangerous – and then bludgeons you over the head with it.  Smith clearly has an axe to grind with Patriot Act-ers and the Westboro Baptist Church, but his disapproval of these groups is so unsubtle that (no joke) Smith actually cameos to shout “Shut the f--- up!” at a preacher.  The film imagines Westboro as Hostel-style torture pornographers, murdering local homosexuals and adulterers on the orders of Abin Cooper (Michael Parks).  The film escalates when Cooper’s church kidnaps a trio of teenagers before the ATF – led by John Goodman – bumble their way into a raid on the compound.  Red State is, surprisingly for Smith, quite violent, but there’s neither mirth nor menace in the bloodshed; instead, the movie plods along without any suspense or momentum.  The film is populated by many character actors – Goodman, Melissa Leo, Stephen Root, Kevin Pollak – but surprisingly the standout performance here is Michael Parks, surprisingly because Parks hasn’t really been acting when I’ve seen him team up with Quentin Tarantino.  As Cooper, Parks is equal parts charismatic and terrifying, subtle with a manic gleam in his eye; thanks to Parks, it’s not difficult to see how Abin Cooper could have acquired such power.  Parks’s performance, combined with an odd compulsion to see how this mess will all turn out, ends up redeeming the film and making it watchable, though faith in Kevin Smith as a filmmaker has yet to be earned.

V/H/S/ (2012) – I’m a sucker for a good horror film, only there are so few of them around that I almost always write off the genre as a dumping ground for most of what Hollywood would be unable to sell without some blood and breasts.  Paradoxically, one of my favorite movie experiences is watching a truly scary film with all the lights off, allowing that sense of dread to creep into my very being as the movie washes over me.  None of this was my experience with V/H/S, an amateurish-at-best attempt to capitalize on the dying craze of found footage.  The film revolves around a group of friends who break into an abandoned house to steal a videotape, allowing the film to take on an anthology format as we watch the tapes with the characters.  Perhaps using a dead medium like the VHS tape is a perfect analogy, because V/H/S is better off left in the basement with those moldering relics of a bygone era of home video.  There are almost no good scares here, only two memorable moments of palpable dread (a knife-wielding camerawoman and a haunted house with arms coming through the walls), and a cast populated by “fresh faces” so unskilled that their bad acting is entirely distracting.  You’d think that any anthology would have at least one redeeming entry (even the disappointing New York, I Love You, after all, did), but the rubbish acting, the unconvincing gimmick (why, for example, would a Skype call be on a VHS tape?), and the generally misogynistic tone make V/H/S an unredeeming waste of time.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

New York, I Love You (2009)

It seems that the older I get, the shorter my attention span becomes. Maybe I'm just a jaded filmgoer, maybe today's flicks have run out of pizzazz, or maybe I'm being overdramatic about the whole getting-bored-quickly thing.

At any rate, the beauty of an anthology film is that you only have to invest about ten minutes in any given story. New York, I Love You represents the second in what is apparently a franchise devoted to vignettes about love in important world cities. I was initially only aware of the first "Cities of Love" film, Paris je t'aime (which really ought to be reviewed herein), a film near and dear to the romantic in me.

Before I go any further, I should preface this review by noting that by definition an anthology of any kind is naturally going to be hit or miss. Even Paris je t'aime has a few duds in the bunch. But unfortunately New York, I Love You is primarily a batch of misses with only a few hits. In honor of the anthology format, I'm going to shake things up and review each short separately and then think globally, with the caveat that New York is much more fluid, with its untitled segments intersecting and mingling much more than in Paris.

Director Jiang Wen has the first segment, which stars Hayden Christensen as a thief who picks Andy Garcia's pocket. After being smitten by passer-by Rachel Bilson, Christensen finds out that his quick con on Garcia isn't as easy as it looks. This vignette starts off as a cliche, and the fact that Christensen can't really act doesn't help. But when Garcia and Christensen share the screen, there's something better afoot, with each trying to one-up the other in a game of wills.

Mira Nair directs a more romantic tale about two salespeople (Natalie Portman and Irrfan Khan) married to other people but who fall in love with each other regardless. This segment is unfulfilling, carried by solid acting but lacking any dramatic resolution beyond a clever use of visual language which suggests that these two will always love each other.

Shunji Iwai gets one of the most romantic parts of the film when he brings musician Orlando Bloom together with receptionist Christina Ricci by using Dostoevsky. Props on that one and on creating an ending to their story which feels neither forced nor hackneyed.

Yvan Attal directs two segments, both of which are marked by narrative twists and compelling dialogue which conceals something important beneath the surface. Both are set outside restaurants with their characters on smoke breaks; in the first of these, Ethan Hawke propositions Maggie Q about the inevitability of their romance based on one chance encounter, while in the second Robin Wright Penn plays a jilted wife looking for a change when she meets Chris Cooper and propositions him. The parallel is less pronounced than it seems.

Brett Ratner's segment is my absolute favorite in the film and really the only portion I'd consider rewatching at least once. After breaking up with Blake Lively, Anton Yelchin (one of my new favorites after Charlie Bartlett) agrees to take pharmacist James Caan's daughter to the prom. There's one catch - the daughter (Olivia Thirlby) is in a wheelchair. Don't be fooled; whimsy ensues, and Yelchin's big wish comes true. This one has a fabulous twist; if you only watch one segment, watch this one.

After appearing in a few interstitials, Bradley Cooper co-stars with Drea de Matteo in Allen Hughes's narrator-heavy story about a regrettable one-night stand. This segment flops because it doesn't quite go anywhere, and the ending is abrupt and inconsistent with all but the title of the film.

In the most puzzling segment in the film, Shekhar Kapur directs Anthony Minghella's screenplay about an opera singer (Julie Christie) who returns to a hotel in New York and has separate encounters with two bellhops (John Hurt and Shia LeBeouf). If anyone can make heads or tails of this segment, please let me know what you've decided, as I can't wrap my head around it.

Natalie Portman steps behind the camera to direct a segment about a father's (Carlos Acosta) day in the park with his daughter (Taylor Geare). This segment is cute and fluffy but ultimately forgettable. Portman does a fine job writing and directing it, to the extent that I'd be curious what she can do with longer material.

Fatih Akin directs an empty segment about a painter (Ugur Yucel) who falls for Chinese herbalist Shu Qi and then dies. Burt Young peeks his head in as Yucel's landlord. Huh? That's about all this segment amounts to.

Joshua Marston writes/directs the final full segment, in which Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman celebrate their 63rd anniversary. The dialogue in this segment is well-played and flows at a leisurely pace, but if you're looking for a conventional narrative you won't find it here. This segment feels very personal and personable, and it's a comfortable way to close the film.

Throughout, Randy Balsmeyer gives transition scenes which feature various characters entering taxicabs together; Emilie Ohana plays a videographer whose role in the film seems only to be to unite the characters. One interstitial in particular, though, is memorable, with Eva Amurri and Justin Bartha quarreling about how they never vacation together.

The DVD includes two deleted vignettes, one of them directed by Scarlett Johannson and starring Kevin Bacon as a New Yorker with a bad case of wanderlust. These deleted scenes, though, have rightfully been omitted, as they are entirely lifeless and protracted. Perhaps Ms. Johannson should stay in front of the camera looking pretty, which she's very good at doing if Iron Man 2 is any indication.

Taken separately, there is a fair amount to like about New York, I Love You, but taken together as a 103 minute film there is a lot of disappointment. The choice to more deliberately blend vignettes - Drea de Matteo visits James Caan's pharmacy, and Chris Cooper meets Maggie Q at a dry cleaner's - makes the film difficult to follow in points; it is often unclear where one story ends and another begins. This trademark of the first film is evident only in the film's most successful segments - Iwai's and especially Ratner's. On the whole, though, Ratner's segment is the only standout feature in an otherwise disappointing follow-up to Paris je t'aime.
New York, I Love You is rated "R for language and sexual content." This being a movie about New York, F-bombs pepper the dialogue; this being a movie about love, sex comes up in conversation and is depicted twice without any nudity to speak of.