Pamela Zoslov's Blog

In the Family

2012-01-25T06:51:00.000-08:00

Patrick Wang's In the Family was rejected by 30 film festivals before making its premiere at the Hawaii International Film Festival and being distributed independently. The film, a remarkably stirring drama about the changing definition of “family,” has some technical peculiarities that may have kept it from initial consideration: it's long (nearly three hours), glacially paced in the early scenes, and some of the camera work is decidedly eccentric (actors shot at the edge of frames or moving out of frame). And yet the story is so powerful that these concerns are swept away; it draws you in and never loosens its grip. The film has been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award.

Set in the small town of Martin, Tennessee, the story centers on a gay couple, the soft-spoken Joey Williams (Wang) and his partner, Cody Hines (Trevor St. John), who are raising Cody's precocious 6-year-old son, Chip (Sebastian Banes). When Cody dies in a car accident, Joey, known to Chip as “Dad” (his natural father was “Pop”), finds himself in a battle with Cody's sister Eileen (Kelly McAndrew), whom Cody had named as Chip's guardian. Cody's family, whose mistrust of Joey – based on their non-acceptance of Cody's gay relationship, and perhaps also on ethnic prejudice – remove Cody from Joey's house, leaving Joey, with the support of his friends, to find a way to reunite his family, despite the fact that the law does not favor his position.“You do not have a child custody case,” says one of the many lawyers who refuse to take his case.

Much of the film's power resides in Wang's sensitive, naturalistic screenplay, which effectively illustrates the everyday domestic life of a nontraditional family -- extraordinary for its sheer ordinariness. Cody, a math teacher, and Joey, a talented architectural designer, have a dedicated interest in young Chip's development. Chip is fond of dragons, so “Pop” Cody helps him research them online, while “Dad” Joey fashions him a special wooden block depicting each day's dragon. (Any child would be lucky to have two such attentive dads.) The acting, too, could not be better. Wang, a stage actor with a low-key manner and incongruous Southern drawl, is wonderfully sympathetic, and classical actor Brian Murray is superb as the retired lawyer who agrees to represent Joey in his improbable case. The scene in which Joey stands up to harsh deposition questioning about his background (he was an orphan whose foster parents also died), and his reasons for wanting to fight for Chip, is quietly shattering. -- Pamela Zoslov

The Iron Lady

2012-01-25T06:39:00.000-08:00

Last week I had the opportunity to review two films about Western European political leaders – The Conquest, about the rise of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep as erstwhile British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Of the two, the Thatcher bio, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, is the more satisfying dramatically, yet neither film provides a complete picture of its subject's politics and importance. Where The Iron Lady does excel is in its sensitive portrayal of the experience of dementia. Having suffered a series of strokes and suffering from memory loss, Thatcher, 86 and frail, now seldom appears in public.

Admittedly, the prospect of another impersonation of a famous doyenne by America's anointed top actress, Meryl Streep, was not an attractive one. But, as it happens, she is superb, particularly as the aged Mrs. Thatcher, whose husband, Denis (the excellent Jim Broadbent), regularly consoles, cajoles and encourages her, even though, as her daughter, Carol (Olivia Colman), points out, he has been dead for years.

The familiar, loving interaction between Margaret and Denis' ghost is a clever framing device, launching a series of flashbacks as the intermittently lucid ex-PM sorts through her late husband's possessions. Abi Morgan's imaginatively structured narrative uses inventive avenues for recollection; for example, while autographing copy of her book, Margaret inadvertently signs “Margaret Roberts,” her maiden name, which launches a flashback to the her girlhood days as the daughter of a grocer in Grantham. (Her father owned two stores and was mayor of the town). Young Margaret (Alexandra Roach), mocked by her better-heeled classmates as she sweeps up at the shop, wins a place at Oxford, from which she emerges with fully formed conservative ideology – free market economics, anti-union, anti-Socialist – and a burning political ambition. Margaret's father was a Liberal, but the film's , the narrative offers no insight into the origins of her views. A Thatcher biography reveals that she was influenced at Oxford by Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, a 1944 work that argued that government economic intervention is a precursor to authoritarianism. Though she was not a strictly doctrinaire Conservative (she supported a bill to decriminalize homosexuality, for example), she also was known, while serving as Education Secretary, for denying schoolchildren free milk.

Her determination impresses young, bespectacled Denis Thatcher (Harry Lloyd, who is Charles Dickens' great-great-great-great grandson), who asks her to marry him. She happily accepts, and the couple enjoy a comfortable life. (Denis, a wealthy businessman, financed his wife's studies for the bar and her political career; the film doesn't mention her early career as a research chemist and as a barrister specializing in tax). The two become the parents of twins, Carol and Mark, who are shown as children running helplessly after “Mummy” as she drives her fancy car away from the family estate and toward her Parliamentary career. Before she agreed to marry him, Margaret warned Denis that she refused to be simply a housewife – like her mother, presumably – and did not intend to “die washing a teacup.” (In a moment of sad irony, a later scene has the aged Margaret, all alone, washing out a teacup.) In her old age, Margaret is depicted as still proud and tough – she haughtily rebuffs her doctor's inquiries about her health and state of mind – the story allows her some sentimental reveries: her lifelong courtship with Denis is punctuated by the couple dancing to “Shall We Dance?” from their favorite musical, The King & I. Margaret also has a penchant for Bellini's opera Norma.

The film takes us on a newsreel view of British history from 1959, when Mrs. Thatcher was elected a Member of Parliament – not the first female M.P., as the film implies – through her turbulent reign as Britain's first woman Prime Minister, beginning with her election in 1979 and ending with her resignation in 1990 after she lost her Conservative Party's support. (The film implies that she disappeared from politics, when actually Thatcher served as a Member of Parliament for two years before retiring at 66.) These were tumultuous years for Great Britain; Thatcher is shown responding to labor unrest (with harsh anti-union measures), IRA hunger strikes and bombings, including one that struck the Brighton hotel where she was staying, and the war with Argentina over the Falkland islands, which boosted Thatcher's flagging popularity at home. Her legendary intransigence toward the Soviet Union, alongside her ally Ronald Reagan, earned her the nickname “The Iron Lady” from a Soviet newspaper.

While the film capably depicts Thatcher's famous absolutism – denouncing labor unions, the social welfare state (and its “culture of dependency”) – what is missing is a ground-level view of how Thatcherism affected people in the UK, many of whom were left unemployed and dispossessed by her economic policies. Her legacy is still being debated, but her impact on popular culture is clear. Without Thatcher to protest against, there would likely have been no British punk music. Unfortunately, the soundtrack contains none of the era's iconic Sex Pistols, Jam or Clash songs, but it does include “I'm in Love With Margaret Thatcher,” a relatively minor-league 1979 song by Michael “Haggis” Hargreaves (“I'm in love with Maggie T.!”).

Streep is fine, even if occasionally calling to mind her portrayal of Julia Child, and Broadbent is a pleasure, though jarringly different in appearance and accent from Lloyd as the younger Denis. The prosthetic aging makeup is tastefully done, in contrast to the bizarre work in last year's silly J. Edgar. The film is skillfully constructed, but it suffers from the problem of all biopics that attempt to portray a significant life against the backdrop of history. In the attempt to cover the life and the history, either or both will suffer. In this case, it's the history; we learn more about the lady than about the interesting times in which she served. -- Pamela Zoslov

Susy's Soup

2011-12-26T06:51:00.001-08:00

Feature about Susy's Soup, a downtown Cleveland place that has since become a favorite of ours.

By Pamela Zoslov

“It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it,” said the prominent food writer M.F.K. Fischer. That philosophy is fully embraced by Susy’s Soup & Deli, a casual downtown eatery that has been serving comforting, piping-hot homemade soups for nine years, the last two and a half at its present location Tower City. The house-made soups, along with specialty sandwiches on fresh-baked bread, fresh salads, chili and breakfast wraps, have customers lining up out the door –- and why not? It’s hard to imagine anything more satisfying than a bowl of chicken and wild rice, chicken paprikash, chicken dumpling, creamy tomato tortellini, black bean, Italian wedding, minestrone, lobster bisque or clam chowder. To a true soup lover, the very names are ambrosial.

Diners are drawn to Susy’s by the soup and sandwiches, but the attentive service, unusual for a casual lunch spot, keeps them coming back. After a customer picks up his soup, a member of the Susy’s team brings their sandwich or salad to the table. “We do everything with love,” says general manager Dave Long. “We want to be the best at what we do. We work hard, over a hot kettle all day. We use good-quality ingredients, and the bread is baked fresh every day.” The soup is made one kettle at a time, the flavor then locked in with a “quick chill” process. Healthy food is a priority; everything on the menu is made without MSG or preservatives, and vegetarian, fat-free and gluten-free options are available.

Susy’s was founded 12 years ago by Michael Sharpe, an owner of Cleveland’s popular Sharpy’s Subs in the 1980s. He wanted to shift his culinary focus to soups, and after searching for a name for the new venture, decided to christen it after his young daughter, whose name provided a nice alliteration and represented the restaurant’s “family” feeling. The first Susy’s Soups was in North Olmsted; the restaurant then took up residence in the Park Building on Public Square before accepting an offer to open on the fountain level of Tower City. (Susy’s also has an Express location in the Halle Building.) The long lunchtime lines attest to Susy’s success. “In a bad economy, we’ve had consistent growth,” Long says.

While soup is paramount, the salads, chili and sandwiches – corned beef, smoked turkey, Reubens, chicken salad — have a devoted following. “The most popular is our grilled cheese,” Long says. “People get addicted to it.” It’s made with provolone, cheddar and American cheese, melted on tasty fresh bread from the Western Reserve Bread Co. Susy’s also has a busy catering business, providing crock pot soups, deli trays, wrap trays and box lunches for events large and small. With all the changes happening in and around Public Square, Susy’s, currently open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., may also add dinner hours.

Susy’s is guided by a love of Cleveland and a strong belief in giving back to the community with extensive charitable work. “We don’t really publicize our charitable work,” Long says, but notes that the restaurant’s outreach efforts include a monthly feeding for Laura’s Home, the City Mission shelter for women and children in crisis, supporting St. Malachi’s, donating 40 gallons of soup to feed a youth group of 400 and participating in the annual Market Under Glass benefit for Harvest for Hunger. “That stuff is really fulfilling,” he says. “We see ourselves as part of the community, part of Cleveland’s rebirth,” Long says. “We’re trying to do something good.”

Fulfillment also comes from the simple everyday act of providing good food for people. “It’s the small things – knowing that we can make a small difference in people’s lives every day,” Long says. “We don’t like to call them customers. We call them ‘friends of Susy.’ We treat them as our friends.”

Phil the Fire

2011-12-26T06:37:00.000-08:00

A profile of Phil Davis, owner of Phil the Fire restaurant in Cleveland.

By Pamela Zoslov

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” He clearly never imagined the determination of Phil Davis, founder and proprietor of Phil the Fire, the restaurant that introduced Cleveland to the Southern homestyle delicacy chicken and waffles –- a unique combination of golden-brown fried chicken atop thick, cinnamon-spiced Belgian waffle, topped with butter and syrup. Phil the Fire –- a nickname based on the Peabo Bryson song “Feel the Fire” –- took Davis from a dazzling rise to a devastating fall, followed by a seven-year sojourn in the desert of legal troubles and a low-paying job loading boxes in the middle of the night.

The journey began in 2001, when Davis began serving Sunday brunch in the basement of The Civic in Cleveland Heights. His chicken and waffles became a sensation, and Davis opened Phil the Fire restaurants at Shaker Square and downtown. Then, fatefully, he relied on the promises of an unscrupulous hedge fund manager, leading to the loss of millions of investor dollars and the closing of Phil the Fire in 2004, followed by a rash of lawsuits. “In January 2004, I was a local quasi-celebrity, and within a week went from being the toast of the town to the talk of the town,” he reflects. “That was very humbling, because when your fall from grace is very public, you have nowhere to hide.”

During those dark days, Davis underwent a period of personal growth. He worked out a plan to repay his debts and spent time caring for his daughter, Machiah, now 10, all the while keeping in mind a line from his mother’s favorite poem, "Invictus": “My head is bloody, but unbowed.” He spent endless hours in the kitchen perfecting his recipes, and drew upon his business-school training to launch new inventions -- including “the world’s smallest microwave” — and plan how he would do things better if he could reopen Phil the Fire.

Davis’ second act began in August, when he opened the new Phil the Fire restaurant at the Fairfield Inn in Beachwood, a warm, inviting space that serves up Davis’ signature “comfort food for the soul” – rich, flavorful dishes based on the Sunday brunches his parents, Alberta and Sherman, cooked when he was growing up in Cleveland. The location is one Davis had long been interested in. “I’d always been a big fan of this area, and when I walked in, it just felt like, this is it – this is the space I’ve been dreaming of.” The new restaurant enabled Davis to bring back two of the original Phil the Fire chefs, hire a savvy general manager and create 125 jobs. “That’s a great feeling,” he says.

When Phil the Fire reopened with an all-day Sunday brunch, it was as though it had never closed. People had been yearning for another taste of Phil’s chicken and waffles. “The support, love and warmth we’ve received have been overwhelming. We’ve had people drive in from Columbus, Ashtabula, Canton. We’ve served about 10,000 people in the first month. We’ve had people create special memories here – wedding anniversaries, birthdays — one man proposed to his fiancée in that room over there. It’s humbling and overwhelming. If I had to wait seven years for anything in life,” he says, “This would have been it.”

Davis made a conscious decision to limit the menu to “what we do best.” That means that aside from chicken and waffles, there are such mouthwatering favorites as the creamy Three Cheese Mac N Cheese, fresh collard greens, buttermilk pancakes, rotisserie chicken, fried salmon strips, broiled salmon and catfish (blackened, fried or broiled), as well as Phil’s signature desserts: Mom’s Famous Double Butter Peach or Apple Cobbler, Pecan and Sweet Potato Pie and Sweet Potato Pecan Pie. As the weather grows colder, the restaurant will offer hot gumbos and a fireplace for people to gather around.

Every dish has what Davis calls a “signature flavor,” and he is meticulous and demanding of his staff about achieving it. he says. “We cook everything from scratch. Everything is fresh, not frozen. We honor the food.”

But food is only one part of the Phil the Fire picture. “I asked the staff, what do we sell here? Memories. This food evokes memories, like the scene in the movie Ratatouille where the critic tastes the ratatouille and it takes him back to his childhood. This food is a daily reminder of the things I grew up on, and a way to honor the memories of my mother and father.”

The restaurant business is a tough taskmaster, but Davis says it’s addictive. “It’s hard to get out of your system. I’m here 20 hours a day, but this is easy. I love to cook, I love to serve. It’s a labor of love. I’m just having a ball.” The entrepreneurial Davis has plans to capitalize on his brand with a line of Phil the Fire prepared comfort foods and Phil the Fire restaurants in other cities.

After only one month back I business, Phil the Fire is already a destination spot. “People are saying, “Let’s meet at Phil’s,” he says. “This is something you can’t buy. Things like this keep me going.”

I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive (Je suis heureux que ma mère soit vivante)

2011-12-08T14:25:00.000-08:00

Review by Pamela Zoslov

Nancy Verrier's book The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child caused a considerable stir when it was published in 1993. Verrier's thesis challenged the idea that loving and caring adoptive parents can overcome the trauma experienced by a child who is separated from his birth mothers and given up for adoption. According to Verrier, “the resultant experience of abandonment and loss is indelibly imprinted upon the unconscious minds of these children, causing that which I call the primal wound.”

Verrier's Freudian-derived thesis is vividly illustrated in I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive (Je suis heureaux que ma mère soit vivante), a 2009 film written and directed by Claude Miller, a veteran French director, and his cameraman son, Nathan. Based on a true story, the film tells the story of Thomas Jouvet, a teenager who rebels against his well-meaning adoptive parents (Yves Verhoeven and Christine Citti) and searches for his birth mother. The movie toggles between the present day, as Thomas gets in trouble for fighting in school, and his harrowing early childhood, when he and his younger half-brother, Patrick, were left in the casually negligent care of their mother, Julie (Sophie Cattani). So careless a mother is Julie that she leaves 4-year-old Thomas in charge of his infant brother while she takes off for days with a friend. Not surprisingly, the authorities remove Thomas and Patrick from Julie's chaotic home, and she is compelled to give them up for adoption; Annie and Yves Jouvet adopt both boys, changing Patrick's name to François.

Despite the Jouvets' loving care, the primal wound remains unhealed in the teenage Thomas ( Maxine Renard), first seen on a beach holiday with his parents. Angry and resentful of the Jouvets (“You're not my real parents!”), he wrangles his birth mother's address from a reluctant registry official. He knocks on the door to Julie's suburban flat but runs away when she appears, newly married and happily pregnant.

At 20, Thomas (now played by Vincent Rottiers) is seemingly better adjusted and working as an auto mechanic. His relationship with his mother is improved; his brother, François (Olivier Guéritée), is a sanguine teenager with no interest in hearing about his birth mother. Thomas again visits his mother, now divorced from a wealthy man and raising her young son. He approaches her rather like a suitor, with chocolates and flowers in hand, a hallmark of the unusual, strangely sexualized relationship that develops between them (Julie is only 17 years older than her son). The play of emotions on Cattani's face as Julie searches for her feelings for her revenant son. – she doesn't even ask about Patrick/François, as Thomas chidingly reminds her -- is wonderfully subtle, and Rottiers' resentment of his mother's neglect and loving indulgence of her new son, feel quite real. Thomas, confused in an Oedipal way, tells his adoptive mother he has a “girlfriend,” and Julie uses Thomas as a convenient babysitter and a confidante, inflaming his ancient anger by telling him about men she's dating. His mother's sexuality is front and center in the mother-son relationship, replicating the fateful pattern of years ago.

The narrative's stark, almost documentary quality, makes the paroxysm of violence that erupts at the film's climax especially seem especially shocking, yet as inexorable as Greek tragedy. With strong, realistic writing and persuasive acting, the film elicits sympathy for all of the characters – the grievously wounded Thomas, the devoted but helpless adoptive mother and the father descending into dementia, and Julie, who could never be the mother Thomas needed.

The Man Nobody Knew

2011-12-08T14:21:00.000-08:00

Review by Pamela Zoslov

The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby belongs to that category of documentary in which a son tries to make sense of the life of an ambiguous or emotionally distant father (Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect is another). Carl Colby, son of former CIA director William Colby and an experienced documentary filmmaker, has assembled a fascinating collection of interviews and historical footage to solve the mysteries left unsolved when the body of his father was found in 1996. Retired from the CIA, the 76-year-old Colby, a skilled boater, had apparently drowned in a canoe accident. An impressive roster of speakers, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Donald Rumsfeld, Brent Scowcroft and journalists Bob Woodward, Seymour Hersh lend insight into Colby, “The Company,” and the CIA's role in the world.

Some of the most interesting insight comes from the younger Colby's interviews with his mother, the classy and articulate Barbara Colby, who narrates the history of their family. We hear the story and see photos of Bill as a young World War II army officer, eager for action, and as an early recruit in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA. He was part of a select force that parachuted behind enemy lines, earning a Silver Star; he led a sabotage mission in Norway to thwart the Germans by destroying railway lines. Carl Colby says his father was “the coolest character I ever knew.” His father then graduated from Columbia Law School, practiced law in New York, then moved to Washington to work for the National Labor Relations Board.

Taciturn by nature, Colby was well suited to the spy game. The true nature of his work was unknown to his family, even his wife, who says she did not know when her husband moved from the NLRB to the CIA. Much of Carl's childhood was spent in Rome, where Colby was stationed in the 1950s, allegedly working for the State Department but actually directing covert operations to support the anti-Communist Christian Democrat party. A devoutly Catholic family, the Colbys reveled in their life in Rome and close connections with the Vatican.

They moved to Saigon in 1959, at the cusp of the civil war in Vietnam and the United States' involvement. Colby, under a State Department cover, was in charge of supporting the Diem government, and the family became close with the president, his brother and their families. Diem was an autocratic U.S.-installed Catholic leader known for persecuting Buddhists. Colby's mission was to help fortify Vietnamese citizens against the Viet Cong insurgency. The Colbys were shaken after Diem's assassination in an apparently U.S.-backed coup in 1963. After a relatively idyllic stay, the Colbys left Saigon.

Vietnam would continue to haunt Colby. On a return assignment in 1968, he headed the notorious Phoenix Program, a counter-terrorism effort that became a program of indiscriminate torture and murder of suspected terrorists (often just hapless people hauled in for a cash bounty). Under Phoenix, more than 40,000 Vietnamese – many of them women – were tortured and killed, and the details of the killings are quite grisly. In an article on Phoenix, Noam Chomsky quotes K. Baron Osborn, a veteran of a covert intelligence program in Vietnam: “I never knew an individual to be detained as a VC suspect who ever lived through an interrogation in a year and a half, and that included quite a number of individuals.” During confirmation hearings in 1971 for the CIA director position, Colby denied that Phoenix was an assassination program, and claimed that most of those killed were “members of military units or while fighting off arrest.” According to Chomsky, those claims are “contradicted by all nonofficial testimony on the subject.”

The movie suggests that Phoenix strayed from Colby's original intentions and became a monster; the claim deserves more objective examination. What is certain is that Colby remained troubled by the outcome in Vietnam. In Lost Victory, a book he wrote after retirement, he argued that South Vietnam could have survived if the U.S. had continued its support after the Paris Peace Accords.

This fascinating, richly detailed documentary is both a history of Colby's career and a psychological journey in which Carl tries to discover who his father was and what his culpability was for the bloodbath of Phoenix and for other dark exploits of American intelligence. “My father lived in a world of secrets,” Carl says in voice-over narration. Barbara Colby knew so little about her husband that his announcement that he wanted a divorce came as an utter shock. (Colby was later remarried, to a CIA colleague.) Carl's bitterness about his father is still evident. “I'm not sure he ever loved anyone,” he concludes. Bill Colby was a shadowy, inscrutable figure, even for a career spy.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter of Colby's life came during his rocky tenure as CIA chief was when he testified before Congressional investigative committees with unprecedented candor about the activities of the CIA – displaying the so-called “Family Jewels.” Colby was a devout Catholic, and the film speculates that his frankness was motivated by a desire to expiate his (and the Agency's) sins. His well-intended openness alarmed Washington's elites, and on the advice of Henry Kissinger, President Gerald Ford replaced Colby in 1975 with George H.W. Bush, a man who knew how to keep a secret.

Did Colby have a heart attack, as the coroner ruled, during that fatal canoe trip? There is speculation that he was murdered or committed suicide. Though not mentioned in the film, Carl Colby has said that a fortnight before his death, the elder Colby called him to ask forgiveness for being an absent father to Carl's sickly sister, Catherine, who died in 1973. When Colby's body was found, a picture of Catherine was in his pocket.

Anonymous: Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays?

2011-10-28T07:48:00.001-07:00

The latest salvo in the unending war between the Stratfordians, who believe William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the true author of the Shakespeare plays, and the Oxfordians, who claim they were written by Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, comes from the unlikely hand of Roland Emmerich (Independence Day), a director better known for action than for literary history.

John Orloff’s script, a bizarre mélange of Elizabethan politics, gossip and soap opera, posits that de Vere (Rhys Ifans), a literary genius and onetime lover of the now aged Queen Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave), was compelled by his noble station to conceal his splendid playwriting behind a “front.” A dodgy, functionally illiterate actor, William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall), accepts the offer, extorts a generous pension from de Vere and, in a nasty distortion of history, kills Christopher Marlowe when that playwright learns the truth.

There are some merits in the often laughable drama, particularly in the staging of the plays themselves, but the story descends into a fever dream of botched history, imagining, among other things, an Oedipal relationship between Oxford and Elizabeth. Its vituperative attitude toward the man from Stratford, portrayed as a drunken, whoring wastrel, does little to advance the cause of the Oxfordians. – Pamela Zoslov

(Originally published in Cleveland Scene.)

Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness

2011-10-28T07:44:00.000-07:00

By Pamela Zoslov

The Yiddish language, a fusion of German, Hebrew, Aramaic and Slavic languages, is often dismissed as merely a source of folklore and colorful insults (my favorite among those my mother taught me translates to “You should grow like an onion, with your head in the ground”). Yet Yiddish, spoken by an ever-diminishing population, is, in linguist Dovid Katz’s words, “a language whose everyday words…continue to burn with ancient passion, humor, and psychic content that have come down the line of generation-to-generation language transmission, from antiquity into the 21st century.”

The history of Yiddish is an underlying theme of Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, Joseph Dorman’s earnest documentary about the Yiddish-language author best known for the Tevye the Dairyman stories, which inspired the Broadway and Hollywood musical Fiddler on the Roof. Sholem Aleichem (“peace be upon you”), the pen name of Solomon Rabinowitz, was not, as the film implies, the first author to write popular fiction in Yiddish, but he was the most successful, elevating the often scorned “people’s language” of Eastern European Jews into a serious language of literature.

The film does what it can, using archival photographs, narration, academic talking heads and John Zorn music, to dramatize the life of the prolific author. But the story encounters two problems of translation. One is the difficulty of translating a life of letters into a movie – detailed analyses of the stories’ plots, as well as hammy readings by actors Peter Riegert and Rachel Dratch, create the unwelcome feeling of a classroom lecture. The other is that Aleichem’s stories translate poorly; the chief pleasure of his writing is its unbelievable linguistic invention. That is why his stories are remembered less for their biting wit than as gently humorous nostalgia pieces, personified by Topol yi-di-deedling “If I Were a Rich Man” (based on Aleichem’s “If I Were Rothschild”).

The film traces Aleichem’s tumultuous biography and the decline of Eastern European Jewish life, drawing parallels between his experiences and those of his characters. Born in a Ukrainian shtetl in 1859 to a prosperous merchant, he received, unlike most Jews, a secular Russian education. He married a wealthy landowner’s daughter, moved to Kiev and published articles in Hebrew and Russian before deciding to write in Yiddish and founding a Yiddish literary journal. He inhabited two worlds: that of the modern capitalist investor (like his hapless fortune-seeker Menákhem-Méndl) and the shtetl dweller (the Tevye stories). Pogroms and financial reversals sent him to America and Switzerland, and he succumbed to tuberculosis in 1915. Embraced as “the Jewish Mark Twain,” Aleichem had achieved worldwide acclaim; his funeral drew 100,000 mourners.

In his will, Sholem Aleichem directed family and friends to recite one of his stories (“one of the very merry ones”). He wrote, “Let my name be recalled with laughter, or not at all.” Although it can’t fully convey the tone and cadence of Aleichem’s prose, the film expresses the enduring humanity of his writing. It’s a fitting tribute to this sometimes underrated literary master, recalling him with laughter and affection.

Originally published in Cleveland Scene.

The Rum Diary

2011-10-28T07:41:00.000-07:00

“The book is hopeless,” wrote Hunter S. Thompson to Alfred Kazin in 1961 of his semi-autobiographical novel The Rum Diary, which went unpublished until 1998. Even so, the multitalented Bruce Robinson’s zesty adaptation, with Hunter protégé Johnny Depp as journalist Paul Kemp, is by miles the best Thompson adaptation to hit the screen.

Kemp, a hard-drinking but idealistic newspaperman, lands at a failing San Juan daily, surrounded by a cynical editor (Richard Jenkins), greedy capitalists (including Aaron Eckhart) bent on exploiting Puerto Rico’s riches, eccentric, boozy colleagues (Michael Rispoli and Giovanni Ribisi) and an unattainable beauty (Amber Heard). The picaresque plot, involving Kemp’s narrow escape from shilling for shady developers and a jail sentence, is secondary to the impeccable design and cinematography reflecting San Juan’s “schizoid society” (squalid apartments juxtaposed with pristine beaches and gleaming ’50s cars), ebullient acting and Robinson’s script, which crackles with Thompsonian wit.

Most of the energy is expended in the first hour, after which the drinking, hallucinogens and cock fights become repetitive and Depp’s initially impressive Thompson imitation recedes, yet there’s enough to savor here that it hardly matters; the film so well captures Thompson’s spirit that you have the sense he would have approved. – Pamela Zoslov

Originally published in Cleveland Scene.

The Last Mountain

2011-09-20T05:45:00.000-07:00

By Pamela Zoslov

In his book about the hard life of coal miners in the industrial north of England, The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell wrote, “Our civilization…is founded on coal…the machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make the machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world, the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil.”

Bill Haney’s passionate documentary, The Last Mountain, about the fight to protect the mountains and towns of Appalachia from the depredations of the coal industry, echoes this idea. “I don’t think people understand where electricity comes from,” says one person involved in the struggle. “They think it’s an entitlement.” Few people see the dirty, dangerous and destructive processes of coal mining, except when a major mining disaster places it in the media spotlight, but just about everything in modern life – including writing this article and watching a documentary film, depends on the electric power it produces. The movie notes that almost half of the electricity produced in the U.S. comes from the burning of coal, and 36% of that coal comes from the mountains of Appalachia.

The film chronicles the battle over Coal River Mountain, in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia, where residents and environmental activists are struggling to stop Big Coal corporations – in particular the notorious Massey Energy and its now-retired CEO, Don Blankenship – from continuing the practice of mountaintop removal mining, which involves dynamiting the mountain’s top off to mine the coal within. Mountaintop removal mining, aside from the damage it inflicts on the landscape and those who love it, poisons the air and water with lead, arsenic and selenium, promotes cancer deaths and spreads pollution to other states. “You feel like you’re under attack, two or three ties a day” one resident says of the massive explosions.

Mountaintop removal, according to the film, has destroyed 500 Appalachian mountains, decimated a million acres of forest and buried 2,000 miles of streams. Massey, which does more mountaintop removal mining than any other U.S. company, committed more than 60,000 environmental violations, according to the EPA. Coal baron Blankenship, shown in the film heading a red-white-and-blue anti-union rally, makes a perfect villain for the film, which chronicles his long history of union-busting and brazenly defying environmental and safety regulations. Blankenship came before Congress after the massive 2009 explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in Kentucky killed 29 miners.

The Last Mountain vividly illustrates the human toll of coal production. Maria Gunnoe, a native of a valley in Boone County, West Virginia, who comes from a family of coal miners, became an environmental activist after her property was nearly drowned after mining blasts removing a ridge above her ancestral home. Jennifer Hall-Massey, of Pretnter, West Virginia, recounts the wrenching loss of her 29-year-old brother and five close neighbors to brain tumors. Their deaths have been linked to well water contaminated with lead, manganese and barium from coal sludge injected by coal companies. Chuck Nelson, a longtime coal miner, was spurred to take on West Virginia governor Joe Manchin – a valued “friend of coal”– when he learned his granddaughter and her schoolmates were falling ill from breathing coal dust from a nearby silo through their grade school’s ventilation system. “Gramps,” his granddaughter told him, “these coal mines are making us kids sick.”

The movement to stop mountaintop removal mining has a powerful advocate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the attorney and environmental activist whose lifelong commitment to protecting the planet is rooted in a childhood love of nature and a legacy inherited from his father, who fought stip mining. As a young boy, RFK Jr. lobbied his uncle, President John Kennedy, for stronger environmental laws. In the film, Kennedy speaks passionately and eloquently about the basis of environmental law in the Roman Justinian Code, which defined environmental rights – to the air, the flowing water and the sea – as basic human rights. “It was God who made these mountains, and Don Blankenship who is taking them down.”

Although the film is not about Kennedy, as a side note it’s interesting to think about America’s most famous family and its members’ multigenerational commitment to public service. “I never thought I’d have a Kennedy in my house,” marvels an elderly West Virginian, one of the last holdouts in a town nearly decimated by coal mining. Miners and others opposed to the environmentalists’ crusade are less awed by Kennedy’s presence, shouting at him to go home.

As Kennedy engages in a coffee-shop debate with Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, the two men appear to occupy different universes. Kennedy speaks in broad, philosophical terms about protecting the planet, while Raney takes a practical line, arguing that the industry does everything it can to protect the environment while also safeguarding jobs and “making electricity for you.” Blankenship and his cronies demonize protesters as “environmental extremists,” and indeed mountaintop removal has inspired some extreme acts of non-violent protest. Grandmothers and grandfathers allow themselves to be hauled off to jail; one group of activists staged a tree-sit that for nine days halted blasting on Coal River.

As with all evils in today’s political landscape, the root of it is money. The powerful coal industry lobby has helped put many a coal-friendly politician in office, most notably George W. Bush, whose environmental policies – including gutting key sections of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, reducing EPA enforcement and approving mountaintop removal -- were a gifts to the coal and oil industries. (For his part, Barack Obama has touted the promise of “clean coal,” an aspirational industry slogan that one environmental attorney likened to “a healthy cigarette”).

Kennedy describes the political issue with ringing rhetoric: “We are living in a science-fiction nightmare where children are gasping for breath on bad-air days because somebody gave money to a politician. And my children, and the kids of millions of other Americans, can no longer go fishing and eat their catch, because somebody gave money to a politician.” The Appalachian mountains, Kennedy says, “the birthplace of American democracy, the landscapes where Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone roamed, the source of our values, our virtues, our character as a people – are being cut to the ground so somebody can make money.”

What does the movie propose as an alternative to ruinous, toxic coal, a commodity on which so much of modern life depends? The final segment is devoted to the promise of wind farming, and it makes a strong case for the economic viability of this clean, renewable energy source.

What Orwell wrote in 1937 still applies to the dirty business of coal mining, whether from underground mines or mountaintop blasting. “On the whole we are never aware of it. We all know that ‘we must have coal,’ but we seldom or never remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but Istill need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental-effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. It is just 'coal' — something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have to pay for it.”

Moneyball

2011-09-20T05:39:00.000-07:00

This low-key, somewhat downbeat film, based on Michael Lewis’ book about Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s pioneering effort to build a winning team using statistical analysis, or sabermetrics, was fraught with directorial, casting, script and studio changes.

But, like the A’s, it emerges unexpectedly competitive, an engrossing view of the deals and clashing ideals of America’s pastime. Frustrated by losing to the deep-pocket Yankees, Beane (Brad Pitt) steals Yale-bred economics whiz Peter Brand (based on Paul DePodesta and superbly played by Jonah Hill) from the Cleveland Indians to help him draft a bargain-basement championship team.

The ragtag team’s initial losses baffle fans and alienate Oakland personnel, but eventually the A’s pull off a record-breaking 20-game winning streak. The emphasis is less on exciting on-field action than on the tensions and triumphs of back-office dealing. Flashbacks to Beane’s early career, when he passed up a Stanford scholarship to play for the Mets, suggest that his interest in statistical prediction is based on his own failure to live up to his early promise. The movie addresses an ongoing debate about this most stat-obsessed of games: is baseball about numbers, or about people? The answer seems to be that it is both. – Pamela Zoslov

Straw Dogs

2011-09-20T05:34:00.000-07:00

It’s a good thing the famously embattled Sam Peckinpah is not alive to witness Rod Lurie’s wholly unnecessary remake of his 1971 Straw Dogs. It is not so much a remake as a desecration, stripped of Peckinpah’s literary themes and wallowing in redneck stereotypes. Peckinpah’s artfully choreographed violence, considered alarming in 1971, is transformed for the benumbed post-Saw audience into standard horror-film shock.

Peckinpah’s mathematician, David (James Marsden) is in this incarnation a screenwriter, married to comely actress Amy (Kate Bosworth), and the Cornwall village where the couple retreat becomes the most odious Southern backwater this side of Deliverance, populated by gun-toting primitives, including Amy’s ex-boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgard), who covet Amy and detest David and his effete, Jaguar-driving Hollywood ways. Setting aside the film’s many absurdities (among them a ridiculously handsome half-wit and James Woods as a belligerent coach), whereas Peckinpah explored the conflict between science and religion and the irrelevancy of intellectualism in a primitive world, Lurie’s theme is tritely political, centering on the divide between liberals and God-and-guns Southern rustics.

In thrall to the thing he is defiling, ex-critic Lurie faithfully apes the original – the hanged cat, the rape, the apocalyptic bloodbath – but without style, artistry or significance. Pamela Zoslov

Crazy, Stupid Love

2011-08-19T15:43:00.000-07:00

The trouble with Crazy, Stupid, Love. (aside from its title’s eccentric punctuation) is that there is so much of it. Though the romantic comedy, starring Steve Carell as a recently separated man, clocks in at a hair under two hours, watching it feels like a particularly long, meandering and aimless trip.

You can’t really fault the casting, which assembles stellar performers like Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, except to raise the obligatory objection to the leading-man status of Steve Carell, who doesn’t have the charisma casting directors seem to think he does, and whose character in this movie is not very sympathetic, though the audience is asked to sympathize with him nonetheless. Nor are the production values at fault, except for a particularly insistent pop soundtrack. The main culprit, as with most of today’s movies, is the script, which includes far too many stories, with jarring shifts of tone and lapses of coherence and taste. There are enough story threads in the movie to make up an entire season of a TV series, and the screenwriter ties them together in the clumsiest way imaginable.

The central story is about the breakup of the 25-year marriage of high school sweethearts Cal and Emily (Carell and Moore) when Emily announces she has slept with a co-worker and wants a divorce. Cal’s response is stony silence, followed by a sudden leap from the couple’s moving Volvo. Cal moves out of the family home, leaving behind his heartbroken children and moving into a bachelor pad. He spends his nights drinking at a cocktail lounge that seems to have been imported from an earlier, pre-AIDS decade, when singles’ bars were commonplace. Cal sits at the bar sipping his vodka and cranberry juice and loudly lamenting his wife’s unfaithfulness.

His pathetic display catches the attention of Jacob (Gosling), a slick young roué similarly imported from another era, who decides (à la Hitch or The Pickup Artist and probably a few movies I’ve never heard of) to take Cal under his tutelage and show him the manly art of seducing women. He throws Cal’s New Balance sneakers over a railing (“Are you in a fraternity?”), outfits him in a slick new wardrobe, and allows Cal to watch and learn as he seduces a different comely lady every night, using lines and techniques that would get him laughed out of a real singles’ bar.

Cal proves a willing pupil, eventually stumbling his way into a night of passion with a sexy teacher (Marisa Tomei), which opens the floodgates to his new avocation of womanizing (one wonders when he has time for his job). At the same time, Cal wants desperately to get back together with Emily, whose one degree of separation from Kevin Bacon, who plays the co-worker she cheated with, is proving to be less interesting than she thought. (Furthermore, Bacon is too much a movie star to convince as a nerdy accountant; maybe he should have swapped parts with Carell.)

When the movie promises to be about the education and re-education of a “pickup artist,” it is fairly witty and entertaining. But the movie wants to be too many things – a bittersweet divorce drama, a young adults’ love story (when Jacob falls in love with a young woman played by Emma Stone), an adolescents’ love story (when Cal’s son pursues an obsessive crush on the family babysitter, who in turn has an unhealthy crush on Cal).

A separate storyline involving recent law school graduate Hannah (Stone) and her romantic travails seems completely irrelevant, until the last act, where it’s tied in by way of an unconvincing coincidence, one of several in the movie.

It is as if, rather than two directors, the movie had two writers (if both housed in the person of Fogelman). Alongside many scenes of wit, taste and sensitivity (the jokey, affectionate conversations between Cal and Emily, the friendly intimacy between Hannah and Jacob), there are questionable lapses, such as young Robbie’s middle-school grade graduation speech — a rambling and irrelevant lament about how love stinks — and an inappropriate “graduation gift” he receives from babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton) that the movie presents as cute, but that would in real life get her arrested for corrupting a minor.

The Help

2011-08-19T15:40:00.000-07:00

The movie version of Kathryn Stockett’s debut novel, The Help, avoids one of the book’s main problems: Stockett’s inartful use of dialect in depicting the first-person narratives of black maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s. To some readers’ dismay, the book is rife with “Law have mercys” and “Don’t you go sassing this white lady like you done the other.” Unless you are William Faulkner or Truman Capote or Flannery O’Connor, Southern black dialect is probably a thing you should avoid.

The movie, however, adapted and directed by Tate Taylor, places the dialogue in the mouths of some fine actresses, and the effect is much more natural than Stockett’s clunky prose on the page. The film gets more directly to the heart of the story, which is about the uncomfortable and often dangerous pre-civil rights relations between the races, focusing especially on the black women who cook, clean and raise the children of white women who treat them like chattel -- and sometimes like disease-carrying aliens.

Some of the maids have raised generations of children, whose children grow up to be just like them – heirs to a corrupt system of white privilege and de facto slavery. Stockett, a native of Jackson, based the book on her own childhood experiences of being largely raised by a kindly and supportive black maid.

In the story, Stockett’s stand-in is Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan (Emma Stone, an inspired casting choice but not the least Southern), a recent college graduate with ambitions to be a novelist. She lands a job at a daily newspaper answering housekeeping questions, a subject that leads her to consult with the various maids employed by her “society” friends.

Skeeter has a special affinity for “the help”; her childhood confidante and comforter was her family’s maid, Constantine (the redoubtable Cicely Tyson), who left the family’s employ while Skeeter was away at school. Skeeter’s childhood chum Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), the meanest white lady in town, tries to enlist Skeeter in a repulsive campaign to pass a law requiring maids to use outhouses rather than sully the bathrooms of their white employers. Skeeter will have none of it.

Skeeter interests a New York editor (Mary Steenburgen) in a book written from the perspective of black maids, and enlists the reluctant Aibileen (Viola Davis), the feisty Minny (Octavia Spencer) and a dozen other maids to tell their stories of their lives and their work in the service of white people, a truth-telling endeavor that is dangerous in early-‘60s Mississippi – the state condemned for its racist cruelty in songs by Phil Ochs and Nina Simone (“Mississippi Goddam”). The film effectively surrounds the personal stories with socio-historical context; we see police harassment of black people, maids accused of stealing, and a group of black household servants solemnly watching the news of the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, prompting Skeeter’s mother (Allison Janney) to angrily turn off the television (“Don’t encourage them!”). Skeeter’s research acquaints her with some of the more absurd segregationist legislation on the books; Minny teaches her daughter, who was forced to quit school and work as a maid, to set the coffee down when serving it to the white people, because “your hands can never touch.”

The movie’s emotional center is Hackett’s sympathy for the unique relationships between black women and the white children they raise, a circumstance still prevalent today. One of Skeeter’s first questions of Aibileen is, “How does it feel to raise white people’s children while your own children are being looked after by someone else?” (Studs Terkel’s books offer African American women’s real-life narratives about this experience.) The movie is at its best when dramatizing these emotional bonds: Abileen teaching her charge, a chubby, neglected toddler she calls Baby Girl, the empowering mantra: “You is kind, you is smart, you is important,” and the little girl crying piteously when Aibileen – her “real” mama -- is banished from the house. Equally agonizing is Skeeter’s discovery of the reason Constantine left her mother’s employ, an act of thoughtless bigotry that can never be rectified.

While it attains great emotional heights, Stockett’s storytelling also plumbs the depths of taste. As the aforementioned toilet story suggests, the author has an unfortunate predilection for bathroom themes, not all of which make it into the movie. Here, from the book, is one maid’s perspective on “Gone With the Wind”: “If I’d played Mammy, I’d of told Scarlett to stick those green draperies up her white little pooper. Make her own damn man-catching dress.” It’s emblematic of the author’s style that the movie’s climax (spoiler alert) involves an act of revenge using a pie baked with human feces, a plot device that is more psychotic than humorous, and does nothing to enhance the dignity of the characters.

The movie bears the hallmark of its Disney origins, with a slick faux period style reminiscent of a TV miniseries. In attempting to squeeze an entire novel into a film – even at the numbing length of 137 minutes – some plot elements and characters (like Hilly’s mother, played by Sissy Spacek) are merely sketched in. Others are caricatures, like Hilly, who can’t be just a racist but must also be an absolute monster, a tendency to exaggerate that afflicts many movies about race made by white people (see also The Color Purple and Precious). While the movie has a superb cast and contains many deeply moving scenes, these qualities are undermined by cartoonishness and Stockett’s inexplicable latrine fixation.

Bad Teacher

2011-07-19T08:18:00.000-07:00

As if to fill the void in summer raunch left by the disappointing Hangover sequel, Bad Teacher, directed by Jake Kasdan, brings us Cameron Diaz as the sleaziest middle-school teacher in the history of education.

There is a certain wicked pleasure in beholding Diaz’s unregenerate misanthrope, whose character is mildly reminiscent of Billy Bob Thornton’s Bad Santa in its twisting of traditional expectations. How, and why, did this woman ever become a teacher? The character, Elizabeth Halsey, edging over the hill but still gorgeous, stalks the corridors of the Illinois school where she scarcely works, wearing five-inch slides and tight skirts, hung over from booze and bonging, dozing while she feeds her students – whose names she can’t be bothered to learn -- a pedagogical diet of school-themed movies (Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me). She is crass, profane and callous to other people who aren’t wealthy, eligible men. Her plans to leave her hated job for marriage are foiled when her opera-obsessed fiancé dumps her after his mother discovers she’s spent tens of thousands of his dollars.

The engagement ended, and Elizabeth demoted from a Mercedes Benz to a cheap compact car, she angrily returns to the school for another year, determined to continue her indifferent teaching until she finds a rich guy to take care of her. Her sole problem, she determines, is that her breasts are too small, so she does everything she can to scrounge money for a breast job (it’s illustrative of the movie’s style that she saves the money in a jar labeled “NEW TITS”).

The schemes include accepting bribes from ambitious parents for “supplies” and “special tutoring,” pocketing the proceeds from a seventh-grade car wash – enhanced by her appearance in MTV-model halter and shorts, which drives men and boys mad and sends police cruisers a-crashing. She also sets her sights on nerdy but well-born substitute teacher Scott (Justin Timberlake, a former Diaz paramour, for those who follow such things). Like many things in this movie, Timberlake’s character is a little underdeveloped, but he has a great moment performing a hilariously bad love song he penned with the movie’s writers, Gene Stupinsky and Lee Eisenberg.

Elizabeth’s rival for Scott’s affections, as well as for a lucrative teacher’s bonus for student performance on a statewide test, is the hyper-cheerful, amusingly named Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch). With the promise of a $7,500 check, Elizabeth transforms herself into the world’s most demanding teacher, catechizing students on To Kill a Mockingbird by throwing gym balls at their faces when they give the wrong answers. While scheming to outwit Amy and win Scott and the cash bonus, Elizabeth manipulates her introverted, overweight colleague Lynn (Phyllis Smith) and rebuffs the attentions of gym teacher Russell (Jason Segel), the only person in the school who’s wise to her ways and likes her anyway. Segel, familiar from Judd Apatow’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall and I Love You Man, brings a welcome touch of affable, Apatovian sardonicism, like when he gently suggests Elizabeth might be better suited to another profession: “Like, any other job in the entire world.”

In a scene that represents wish fulfillment for many a teacher, Elizabeth marks her browbeaten students’ papers in large red letters: “Stupid,” and “Are you fucking kidding me?” The Bad Teacher script earns higher marks, though it does suffers from a certain lack of cohesion and consistency. Ideas and characters are introduced, like the family of a sensitive, poetic student (including Molly Shannon as his mom), that serve no discernible purpose, and the humor is sporadic and not always of the highest quality. But it does have a shaggy, dark tone that is very appealing during the superhero-cum-cartoon summer season, a well-chosen soundtrack (Judas Priest aptly captures Elizabeth’s attitude), and Diaz, whose zesty performance gives the finger to the mindless Web chatter about her being “past it” (at 38!).

(Originally posted at Cleveland Movie Blog.)

Jumping the Broom

2011-05-17T10:12:00.000-07:00

By Pamela Zoslov

Having reviewed my share of ethnic wedding comedies – including, memorably, one about the clash between a Latino family and an African American family that featured a priapic goat running around trying to mate with guests – I cannot fail to commend Jumping the Broom for its taste and humanity.

Few new wineskins are available for the old wine of matrimonial farce, whose basic premise has future in-laws converging for a wedding and clashing comedically, but director Salim Akil (TV’s The Game, Girlfriends) handles Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibbs’ thoughtful screenplay with poise and a fine visual sense. Whereas too many comedies made for African American audiences resort to over-the-top slapstick, Jumping the Broom manages to weave cultural, historical, linguistic, economic and religious issues into an otherwise commonplace formula.

The betrothed couple “meet cute” after pretty Sabrina (Paula Patton) knocks over Jason (Laz Alonso) with her car. Sabrina, a successful lawyer, has made a bargain with God: she will stop sleeping with inappropriate men if He sends along her soulmate, so she believes Jason is the answer to her prayers. Sabrina’s job offer in China prompts Jason to hastily propose, and a wedding is scheduled at her parents’ sprawling estate on Martha’s Vineyard, a chunk of realty that rivals the Kennedy compound, complete with traditional, Kennedyesque touch football games.

Sabrina, whose character aptly shares the name of Audrey Hepburn’s pampered princess in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina, has lived a privileged life of top schools, servants and swimming pools. Her parents, the Watsons (Brian Stokes Mitchell and Angela Bassett) drink Bellinis and sprinkle their conversation with casual French. Their wealthy idyll is not all it seems, of course; implications of infidelity, financial problems and long-buried family secrets loom over their genteel paradise.

The appearance of Jason’s widowed mother, Pam, played by the reliably divine Loretta Devine, suggests some promising contrast to the dull, denatured universe of the wealthy Watsons, though the comedic potential of her character is not fully realized. Pam, a feisty Brooklyn postal clerk, has anger management issues, and her future daughter-in-law’s eager attempts to befriend her only irritate her (“She sent me a text message! Strike one!”). With her best friend (Tasha Smith), brother-in-law (the ubiquitous and amusing Mike Epps) and Jason’s friends, Pam alights at the estate for the wedding, already loaded for bear. Manipulative and possessive, Pam complains about everything from the cold shrimp (“It’s supposed to be cold, Ma,” explains her exasperated son) to the couple’s unwillingness to perform the family tradition of “jumping the broom,” a nod to the marriage ritual of slave days. (It turns out that the Watsons’ progenitors, unlike the Taylors’, were not slaves, but slave owners).

When Pam become privy to the scandalous Watson family secret, she can’t help but blurt out the long-buried truth, nearly derailing the wedding. With this development, the movie takes an unfortunate turn from light culture-clash comedy to Peyton Place melodrama, and yet the interactions and relationships are sensitively written and acted, making the movie more absorbing than you might expect. It’s regrettable that Pam, who reads her Bible to justify her hateful actions, is made so villainous, since Devine is the funniest member of the cast. Besides, Pam’s resentment of her son’s snobbish future in-laws is somewhat justified. They are a colossal bore.

As written, the engaged couple are a fairly bland pair, but the friends and family members who orbit around them are variously interesting: fortyish Tasha, with her long braids and sanguine demeanor, contemplating whether to give a pint-sized 20-year-old admirer a tumble; haughty maid of honor Blythe (Megan Goode), finding herself attracted to the Chef (exotically handsome Gary Dourdan), a man completely different from her usual, affluent beaus; Jason’s cousin Malcolm (DeRay Davis), hurt because his envy of Jason has cost him an invitation to be best man; Sabrina’s free-living Aunt Geneva (Valerie Pettiford), embarrassing the bride’s mother by singing a sultry “Sexual Healing” at the rehearsal dinner. A formula comedy-drama it may be, but one with some genuinely affecting moments, punctuated at the end by the plaintive tenor of the late Curtis Mayfield.

It’s not as though the outcome of the story is ever in doubt, but the pathway, threaded with ideas about class divisions, marital commitment, family loyalty, friendship, and the meaning of prayer and forgiveness, is a fairly rewarding one.

Something Borrowed

2011-05-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

By Pamela Zoslov

One of my favorite childhood pastimes was playing a board game called “Barbie, Queen of the Prom.” The object was to get to the prom first, with the prettiest dress and the handsomest date. We girls would roll the dice to win one of four boyfriends, the most desirable of whom was Ken, a perfect, chiseled WASP of a fellow, on whose arm we would presumably spark the envy of all the other girls. Honestly, readers, this game and its questionable values messed me up for years.

I was reminded of this while watching Something Borrowed, a romantic comedy in which two women compete for the love of a man named Dex, played by the impossibly good-looking Colin Egglesfield, late of Melrose Place and All My Children. Aside from being a nice guy who will lend a law school classmate his only pen, Dex’s chief virtue is his underwear-model handsomeness. He is also alarmingly passive, an object tossed about by two women and his parents, a helpless cork bobbing about in a sea of other people’s desires.

The movie is directed by Luke Greenfield and based on a best-selling novel by Emily Giffin, one of those lightweight, pink-covered books popularly classified as “chick lit.” It is clearly aimed at women who came of age in the ’80s, sprinkled as it is with references to such cultural talismans as Who’s The Boss and Growing Pains. The novel is narrated by Rachel, an associate at a New York law firm associate who is turning 30 and still single (gasp!). After her surprise birthday party, Rachel winds up drunkenly sleeping with her best friend’s fiancé, the aforementioned Dex, for whom she has harbored a secret crush since they were law school classmates. Like a girl playing the Barbie game, Rachel never believed she could win anyone as handsome as Dex, so she fixed him up with her prettier, flirtier best friend, Darcy. As it happens, Dex has been in love with Rachel for years. (In the Barbie game, Rachel would have ended up with the redheaded, freckle-faced nerd named Poindexter.)

The movie version of this story emphasizes its shallowest elements – the romance, the bridal gowns, the Chanel handbags, the shoes, the weekends in the Hamptons, the girls’ dance duet to Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It,” and the drinking (lots of drinking). The book, though far from great literature, contains some insight about the problems of young urban professionals. Here is the book’s Rachel, lamenting her unrewarding job: “I work excruciating hours for a mean-spirited, anal-retentive partner, doing mostly tedious tasks, and that sort of hatred for what you do for a living begins to chip away at you.” Movie Rachel (Ginnifer Goodwin) disposes of this with a single line (“I hate my job”). Book Darcy has a glamorous PR job; movie Darcy (Kate Hudson) seems to do little but shop. (The movie’s conception of NYU law school is also a bit strange; a flashback to a law school class has Rachel and Dex’s torts professor discussing tortious interference, pronouncing it “tor-tee-ous,” as though lecturing on land-dwelling reptiles. Were I Rachel, I might look into Columbia.)

None of these details would matter if the movie were funnier, but Jennie Snyder’s wit-challenged screenplay leaves the capable cast, which also includes John Krasinski as Ethan, Rachel’s confidante and secret admirer and Steve Howey as Marcus, a goofy womanizer who pursues both Rachel and Darcy, reciting lines that are supposed to be amusing but aren’t. It doesn’t help that the leading characters are so lacking in charisma. Goodwin, something of a specialist in lovelorn single-girl roles (He’s Just Not That Into You), is mannered and annoying, and Hudson’s Darcy is a shallow, self-centered vulgarian, making it hard to fathom why Rachel loves her so much and why Dex ever wanted to marry her (and further, why his uptight millionaire parents are so fond of her). The romantic triangle, which troubles the waters during an entire summer of weekends in the Hamptons, is resolved in a way that is all too convenient, so no one needs to bother about the moral implications.

The success of a romantic comedy depends largely on good writing and likeable characters, whose fate the audience needs to care about. This entry falls short in both areas, with flaccid pacing that makes it seem even longer than its 110-minute running time. It is not without its virtues, including pretty people and New York settings to look at, glowing cinematography by Charles Minsky, and a pop soundtrack designed to appeal to young women whose tastes were formed in the ’80s. These are the women who presumably have read Giffin’s book and will try to drag reluctant boyfriends to the movie. A warning to those young gentlemen: a post-credits scene promises a sequel, probably based on Giffin’s Something Blue.

Everything Must Go

2011-05-17T09:56:00.000-07:00

By Pamela Zoslov

Writer-director Dan Rush has taken a short story by Raymond Carver, the influential minimalist author, and created a lovely, mournful little film about an alcoholic on a downward spiral. Though not the first Carver film adaptation, or even the first adaptation of “Why Don’t You Dance?” (an Australian short was called Everything Goes), it may be the most expansive treatment a seven-page story has ever received. The story serves as a skeleton upon which Rush drapes a thoughtfully written, fully realized drama.

Will Ferrell, a non-intuitive casting choice, again demonstrates his capability for dramatic acting as Nick, a salesman who is fired for chronic alcoholism and arrives home to find his wife gone, locks changed and all his possessions — from his ski machine to his father’s LP collection — on the lawn. Camped outside on his recliner and chugging endless Pabst cans, Nick enlists the help of Kenny (Christopher Jordan Wallace), a neglected neighborhood kid, in conducting the yard sale of his life.

Although many things happen – Nick teaches Kenny salesmanship and baseball, befriends a pregnant neighbor (Rebecca Hall) and reconnects with a high school admirer (Laura Dern) – the film remains quiet and relatively static, staying true to Carver’s brevity and theme of lonely alcoholic desperation.

Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune

2011-04-13T06:24:00.000-07:00

Fate is cruel to those who tell the truth. There are few better illustrations of this than the short life of Phil Ochs, the folk singer — he preferred “topical singer” — whose incisive songs, sung in his plangent tenor, are indelible anthems to the tumultuous ‘60s and early ’70s: the JFK assassination (“Crucifixion”), the Civil Rights movement (“The Ballad of Medgar Evars,” “Here’s to the State of Mississippi”) Vietnam (“I Ain’t Marching Anymore” “Draft Dodger Rag”), the lies of Lyndon Johnson (“We Seek No Wider War”), the hypocrisy of liberals (“Love Me, I’m a Liberal”). Disillusioned by the failure of his ideals to change the world, drinking heavily and suffering from bipolar disorder, Ochs hanged himself at his sister’s home in Far Rockaway, New York, on April 9, 1976. He was 35.

Unlike Bob Dylan, with whom Ochs had a friendly but rather heartbreaking rivalry (he desperately wanted Dylan’s approval), the brilliant and prophetic Ochs is remembered, except by leftists and diehard folkies, as a musical footnote. “It must have been hard to be Marlowe in the time of Shakespeare,” remarked director Kenneth Bowser at a screening of his new documentary, Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune. But while Dylan’s music was more wide-ranging, it was the activist Ochs who was the genuine heir to Woody Guthrie, a crown Dylan coveted as he sat at the ailing Guthrie’s hospital bedside. Bowser’s film, an expert collage of archival footage, photographs, music and interviews with friends, contemporaries and family members, will bring renewed recognition to Ochs, who was sometimes described as “Tom Paine with a guitar.” (Paine, too, died alone in obscurity in New York.)

Through interviews with people like Peter Yarrow, Van Dyke Parks, Billy Bragg, Tom Hayden, singer Judy Henske, Pete Seeger, the late Abbie Hoffman, and Ochs’ former wife, brother, sister and daughter, a biographical portrait emerges of a young man, born in Texas who took refuge from family problems in music — not folk music, which he would discover later, but country artists like Lefty Frizell — and the movies, idolizing heroic Americans and imagining himself, throughout his life, the hero of his own movie.

At Ohio State University, his roommate introduced him to left-wing politics and the Weavers, and Phil devoted himself to writing songs, singing and playing guitar, moving to New York City to join other musicians who believed they could make a difference. The songs, based on the headlines of the day, poured out of him, forthright, honest, ironic and idealistic. He was singing songs against the Vietnam War as early as 1962, years before most Americans were even aware of the burgeoning conflict.

His songs illuminated hard truths; unlike those of Peter Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio, they couldn’t be sung holding hands and sitting around a campfire, which is a likely reason the fame he craved eluded him. Unlike Dylan’s more obscurant songs, like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Ochs’ songs got directly to the heart of the matter, with insights into issues that remain unchanged today, like the corporate interests that drive the wars that are sold as defending freedom. “Now the labor leader’s screamin’/When they close the missile plants/United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore/Call it Peace or call it Treason/Call it Love or call it Reason/But I ain’t marchin’ anymore/No, I ain’t marchin’ anymore.” He didn’t just write songs about the issues he cared about; he was committed to change, and performed at countless benefits, routinely passing up a paid gig to play at a labor rally for miners.

Though he sang of events of the day, he was no mere singing journalist; he was capable of a soaring poeticism. Listen to the haunting “The Highwayman,” based on Alfred Noyes’ narrative poem, the lovely “Changes,” or “When I’m Gone,” so sad in retrospect, about a man’s determination to go on living (“Won’t see the golden of the sun when I’m gone/Can’t be singing louder than the guns when I’m gone/“So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here”). That his songs are as relevant today as when he wrote them is evident in Jello Biafra’s statement that he scarcely had to change the lyrics for the Dead Kennedys’ 1980 cover of “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” As the President talks of sending CIA “analysts” into Libya as part of its latest bombing adventure, we realize how little things have changed since Ochs sang “But the boy in the swamp didn’t care that he was killed by advisers/So please be reassured, we seek no wider war.”

After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Phil, like many other activists, lost his way. “He stopped looking outward, and then he got sick,” says one friend, and a family history of manic depressive illness caught up with him. The “manic” side may have fueled his incredibly prolific songwriting, while the bottom end left him in a black fog, isolated and, at the end of his days, living with his sister, watching endless television and playing cards.

After Ochs’ death, it was discovered that the FBI had kept a nearly 500-page file on his activities. Ochs, often misspelled “Oakes” in Hoover’s files, was considered “potentially dangerous,” as are all public truth-tellers. This film suggests that negative responses to Ochs weren’t limited to the government; its lens reveals a surprising negativity, as friends recall the less flattering elements of the famously funny, smart Ochs’ personality: his ambition (“He really, really, really wanted to be famous,” says singer Judy Henske), his “ridiculousness” (never explained, as Ochs seems anything but ridiculous) and, of course, the “arrogance, drunkenness and recklessness” of his later years, which began with his ill-conceived onstage appearance in an Elvis-style gold-lamé suit (it was meant ironically, but elicited audience jeers) and included aimless travels to Haiti, Chile and Africa, where street robbers attacked him and strangled him, permanently damaging his vocal cords (Ochs, paranoid but not without reason, suspected CIA involvement). His friends were at a loss about what to do with Ochs, who was unraveling, wildly wandering, getting arrested.

The film suffers from certain omissions and oddities. The talking-heads approach, much favored by this director (who has made documentaries about movie directors Frank Capra, Preston Sturges and others), makes for elliptical narration and the elision of certain details, such as the ending of Ochs’ marriage. You might also question the inclusion of certain commentators (Christopher Hitchens?) and the absence of others (where is Ochs’ friend Tom Paxton, and his moving song of remembrance, “Phil”?) For all the talk, we come away feeling we never really got to know Phil Ochs. Nevertheless, it is a necessary and worthy tribute to the visionary Ochs, who would have preferred to be famous in life rather than in death.

Arthur Redux

2011-04-13T06:20:00.000-07:00

By Pamela Zoslov

British comedian Russell Brand is known for his history of debauchery, chronicled in his memoir My Booky Wook. Having parlayed his dissolute persona into roles Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek, Brand was a natural choice for a remake of the 1981 Dudley Moore hit Arthur, about a drunken libertine who is forced to change his lifestyle to avoid losing his inheritance. Setting aside whether a remake was necessary at all, a surprising level of creativity has gone into this remodel, directed by Jason Winer.

Rather than recasting Hobson, John Gielgud’s acerbic valet, the movie’s Hobson choice is the estimable Helen Mirren as manchild Arthur’s tart but loyal nanny, and the affection between them is touchingly conveyed in Peter Baynham’s script. In another smart departure, the ineffably charming Greta Gerwig (Greenberg) plays the quirky, working-class love interest of Arthur, whose tycoon mother (Geraldine James) is forcing him to marry a rapacious heiress (Jennifer Garner). The screenplay is nimble, with a good deal of Brand’s characteristic verbal wit, so it’s easy to forgive the sappy Hollywood-pop soundtrack, broad physical humor, and the fact that unlike the short and cuddly Dudley, Brand’s angular dishevelment makes him a rather unlikely object of affection.

Review: Win Win

2011-04-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

By Pamela Zoslov

In his excellent films The Station Agent, the Visitor and Up (for which he wrote the story), director, actor and screenwriter Thomas McCarthy displayed a flair for the finely detailed character study of a loner whose life is changed by the unexpected appearance of an outsider. McCarthy applies the theme to the story of a family man in Win Win, an enjoyable, if imperfect small comedy set in McCarthy’s native New Jersey.

The story centers on Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), an attorney with a struggling practice and a family he’s having trouble supporting. His practice focuses on helping the elderly, and when he learns that his kind but increasingly confused client Leo (Burt Young) needs a legal guardian -- a post that pays a $1,500 monthly commission – Mike has himself appointed. Though he tells the court he’ll respect Leo’s wish to stay in his own house, he stashes the old man in a home for the aged and pockets the extra cash.

Things get complicated when Kyle (newcomer Alex Shaffer), a taciturn teenager with bleached-blond hair, shows up at his grandfather Leo’s doorstep. Mike and his wife, Jackie (the superb Amy Ryan, of Gone Baby Gone) take in the boy, initially labeled “Eminem” by the wary Jackie, integrate him into their family and enroll him in high school. Mike, who along with his CPA officemate Vigo (Jeffrey Tambor) moonlights as a high school wrestling coach, discover that in his native Ohio, Kyle was a championship wrestler (shades of The Blind Side or, in this case, The Blond Side; Shaffer is, in real life, a state champion high school wrestler). Kyle helps the foundering team win matches, and begins warming to life with the Flahertys, until his abusive mom (Melanie Lynskey) appears, fresh out of rehab and seeking her estranged son and father (or more precisely, her father’s money). Her return exposes Mike’s subterfuge, angering the unsuspecting Jackie and enraging Kyle, who had grown to trust him.

The movie suffers a little from “writer-director syndrome,” whereby director Thomas McCarthy is too faithful to the words of writer Thomas McCarthy, and fails to rein in his excesses. The movie is heavy on plot, but is never quite certain whether it’s a domestic comedy, a drama or a high-school sports movie. It also devotes a lot of screen time to characters of only marginal relevance, such as Mike’s friend Terry, though he’s played so vividly by Bobby Canaveral that he’s not unwelcome. A number of story elements strain credulity: Mike’s fraud upon the court and breach of duty seem to carry no major consequences (attention, New Jersey bar association), and Kyle’s violent behavior suggest more serious problems than a change of venue could resolve.

But the movie’s plot is not the main attraction of this earnest, well made film. McCarthy etches the characters with finely observed detail: Mike, under stress, habitually buying a pack of cigarettes, extracting one and tossing the rest of the pack away; Jackie, explaining to Kyle her “Jersey Girl” devotion to Jon Bon Jovi, down to her proudly displayed “JBJ” ankle tattoo; Kyle, quietly encouraging an awkward teammate to compete in a match. Giamatti is wonderfully naturalistic, far more persuasive as this beleaguered character than he was in the misbegotten Barney’s Version. Mike is misguided but essentially well-meaning -- much like this film, which, though flawed, has a lot to offer.

[Also posted at the Cleveland Movie Blog.]

Review: A Woman Like That

2011-04-08T10:23:00.000-07:00

The 17^th-century Italian Early Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1652) has been embraced in recent years by a raft of novelists, filmmakers, playwrights and art historians who have pressed her into service as a feminist heroine. The first female painter to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence, Artemesia overcame numerous obstacles – including a rape by her tutor, which led to an infamous trial – and painted bold, Caravaggio-like canvases of strong women in Biblical and mythological settings, like Judith Beheading Holofernes, which depicts the Biblical decapitation in a bold and bloody manner unusual for its time. Her life story – what is known of it, as much of the biographical data is lost – has for many years inflamed feminine imaginations and inspired two novels, several plays by Sally Clark, elements of the Wendy Wasserstein play The Heidi Chronicles, and a 1997 film, Artemesia.

The story of Artemesia, who under her artist father’s tutelage began painting at 17, seems to have caused Ellen Weissbrod, an experienced documentary filmmaker (Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones), to completely take leave of her senses. Weissbrod’s Artemesia obsession, which began when she read about the artist, has resulted in A Woman Like That, a film that tries to parallel Weissbrod’s own experience, as a vaguely unsatisfied, insecure woman approaching 50, with that of Artemesia, who lived 400 years before her. In Weissbrod’s mind, their lives are so comparable that “What would Artemesia do?” is a useful mantra for everyday guidance. Pedaling her bicycle around town, Weissbrod muses about her I-Am-Woman determination to make a film about Artemesia. “I’m finally getting it together. I’m ready to go. I’m making it happen.” (She calls to mind Andrea Martin’s Libby Wolfson character on SCTV, with her play “"I'm Takin' My Own Head, Screwing it On Right, and No Guy's Gonna Tell Me it Ain't.”)

What she makes happen is less a film about Artemesia Gentileschi, painter, than a rather embarrassing diary about Ellen, filmmaker — a hodgepodge of shaky undercover camera work (after a St. Louis art museum, perhaps forewarned about Weissbrod, forbids her to film an exhibition of Artemesia’s paintings), travel footage of Italy, disorganized biographical nuggets from art historians, four-way split screen effects, home movies of Weissbrod as a child, dramatic readings of Artemesia’s letters that resemble nothing so much as a community-theater production of for colored girls, and costumed re-creations of the settings of Artemesia’s paintings by high school students in Paducah, Kentucky (seriously!).

Throughout the film, Weissbrod highlights phrases from Artemesia’s letters or spoken by the commentators that she considers useful in her personal journey of self-development, rendering them in graphic lettering in the style of an Infomercial or corporate recruitment video. From these selected phrases, Weissbrod extracts a manifesto for her life. “Artemesia wouldn’t take no for an answer. I’ve gotta find a way to be a woman like that.”

Actually, very little is known about what kind of woman Artemesia was, apart from the character projected on her by latter-day admirers. Her surviving letters, mostly routine business correspondence to commission clients and benefactors, suggest that she was acutely aware of the disadvantages she faced as an artist because of her sex, and her forthright testimony at the rape trial of Tassi, her attacker (some say seducer) suggests that she was nobody’s fool. Another life lesson for Weissbrod. “I would kill to write letters like Artemesia,” she gushes with adolescent enthusiasm.

The film devotes a lot of time to the rape case, which has been widely discussed and dramatized, chiefly because it’s the most thoroughly documented episode in Artemesia’s life (the trial transcripts, in crumbling ancient books, can be paged through by historians and obsessed American filmmakers). Following its lengthy disquisition on the rape, complete with dramatic readings of Artemesia’s explicit trial testimony, the film claims that Artemesia’s life was not defined by the rape. The rape is, however, what defines Artemesia’s legend. A chorus of voices, including several women filmed on the street, praise Artemesia for her “pluck,” her “courage,” her “guts.” The encomiums suggest, disturbingly, that some people derive a peculiar gratification from Artemesia’s graphic account of grabbing her attacker’s penis and yanking so hard it tore the flesh.

While there is some discussion of the qualities of Artemesia’s paintings (the only negative note being sounded by a man who pronounces it “second-rate Caravaggio”), Artemesia’s oeuvre, while undeniably accomplished, is not overwhelmingly exceptional for its time, save for the fact that it was created by a woman and depicts violence and female nudity forthrightly. “The real story is her painting,” says one art historian, but it seems that the legend of Artemesia is based less on her work — how many people today are genuinely excited by Baroque painting? -- than on the indelible symbol of castration in Artemesia’s life and paintings of vengeful women beheading their attackers. This film, and the latter-day legend of Artemesia, prompt the question of whether it’s the vicarious fantasy of physical violence — interpreted as “strength” and “heroism” — that really inspires her legion of contemporary admirers.

Also posted at the Cleveland Movie Blog.

Random Oscar Predictions

2011-02-23T07:39:00.000-08:00

In 1970, critic John Simon wrote, “If the Oscars, the annual awards of the Motion Picture Academy, were taken simply as an excuse for Bob Hope to crack his occasionally funny jokes, and for the denizens of Hollywood to show off their expensively tacky gowns and toupees, there might be nothing seriously objectionable about the event. The unfortunate thing is that in some, admittedly shrinking, circles, these awards are still believed to have something to do with artistic merit. Despite the disappointment and disgust many of them have been eliciting — when not resulting in mere raucous laughter — the notion persists that there is a connection between the Oscars and achievement, though perhaps invisible to the naked eye.”

And this was in 1970, when movies of quality were still being made, and the Academy Award nominees were pretty solid things like Five Easy Pieces and M*A*S*H (though to be fair, junk like Airport and Love Story was also nominated). Regarding awards shows, comedian George Carlin wrote in his posthumously published memoir, “Most awards shows are just an excuse for a television show. Showbiz congratulating you but also congratulating itself for being so relevant and important and having the good judgment to pick the best.”

The distinction between artistic merit and commercial spectacle was long ago dissolved, and so everyone must get in on the fun of rooting for their favorite movies (only in Oscar-speak are they called “motion pictures”), directors, actors and actresses to win Oscar statuettes. In today’s media world, you must also concern yourself, evidently, with what every actress is wearing on the “red carpet,” because, god knows, there are few more pressing and important matters in today’s world. Oh no she didn’t wear that dress! What’s with that hair? There are times when a fixation on trivia seems almost criminal.

If you don’t care about the Oscars’ effrontery to art, or just relish, as I do, a good betting opportunity, then picking the Oscar winners can be enjoyable. With those querulous caveats, here are some desultory thoughts and predictions on some of the categories this year.

Best Picture

Wow, ten nominees! Who knew there were that many “great” pictures in 2010? I did not see Inception (sci-fi, ugh) or Toy Story 3 (animation, don’t care) and Danny Boyle's 127 Hours (also known as “A Farewell To Arm” because of the onscreen amputation). About my reluctance to see the latter, I quote Stuart Klawans in The Nation: "127 Hours is a stunt movie, just like Jackass 3D. Both take stunts as their subject matter and were made as stunts in themselves. An evocative word, that. Nobody is sure of its etymology, but people speculate that it comes from the German Stunde, meaning an hour or a lesson. If I had to choose between stunts, I'd say I learned more from my time with the jackasses."

The fight really is between the favorite (or shall we say favourite), The King’s Speech, which has Oscar winner written all over it (British, middlebrow, royalist, congratulates its audience on its good taste, Colin Firth, whom everyone likes), and The Social Network, a slick television-style movie that got many people very excited for reasons that elude me entirely. There are many things one could say about Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg – look at how social media is changing the world! Perhaps the least interesting thing about Facebook is the story of how Zuckerberg may or may not have stolen the idea from a pair of patrician, crew-rowing twins at Harvard (both of which – twins and Harvard – were faked by David Fincher’s annoyingly “clever” special effects). The risible Golden Globes gave the award to The Social Network, because its target audience is younger than the comparatively senescent Academy Awards.

My money, if I had any, would be on the staid, respectable, “classy” The King’s Speech for the gold. And that would at least be a triumph for low-budget films, having cost a modest $15 million to make and earning over $201 million.

Actor in a Leading Role

Not much suspense here; this will go to Colin Firth for his portrayal of the reluctant, stammering King George VI. It was a fine performance, though the drama going on in the background – the constitutional crisis that led to Edward VIII’s abdication – seemed a lot more interesting than the king’s speech lessons.

All of the nominees seem to have done creditable work, though does anyone think Jeff Bridges would win a second year in a row, or that Jesse Eisenberg was all that outstanding in the aforementioned Mark Zuckerbeg’s School Days”? Javier Bardem was affecting in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s extremely long Biutiful, and as I said, sorry, folks, I could not force myself, without compensation, to watch James Franco cut off his arm in 127 Hours. Sue me.

Actress in a Leading Role

To paraphrase another John Simon observation, whenever a pretty actress shows emotion onscreen, she is said to be engaging in “great acting.”

That is the case with Natalie Portman, a serviceable young actress who whispers and trembles her way through Darren Aronofsky’s horror show Black Swan, which is set in screenwriter Mark Heyman’s puerile idea of the world of professional ballet. (It is no more about the ballet than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is about the meat industry.) Adding to the hype is the fact that Portman participates with another “hot” actress, Mila Kunis, in some fairly vivid lesbian-vampire-horror sex in this movie. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of Michelle Williams in the overpraised, overwrought low-budgeter Blue Valentine, which features a lot of over-the-top emoting and some fairly frank sex scenes.

Of the nominated performances, I liked Nicole Kidman’s quietly sensitive bereaved mother in the well made but largely ignored Rabbit Hole. She has virtually no chance of winning. Jennifer Lawrence, the young woman in backwoods meth country in Winter’s Bone is an interesting nominee, as is the appealing Annette Bening in the likeable lesbian-themed comedy The Kids Are All Right – who may be due for Oscar recognition -- but the energy, or what has annoyingly come to be called “buzz,” is all around Portman (unfortunately).

Actor in a Supporting Role

Looking at this list, it appears to me that the contest is between Geoffrey Rush in The King’s Speech Impediment and Christian Bale in The Fighter. Rush did win as Best Actor for Shine in 1997, and since Firth is winning as Best Actor for the same film, the likely winner is Bale (who really was good in The Fighter).

Actress in a Supporting Role

Experienced betters are putting their money on Melissa Leo in The Fighter for her crazed, over-the-top mom-boxing manager. The performance was a little excessive – I liked Leo better in Frozen River a few years ago – but certainly the most vivid of the bunch. How about young Hailee Steinfeld for her fine, stoic Mattie Ross in True Grit – a leading role nominated in this category to make her more competitive? The two performances are polar opposites in style, so it will be interesting to see who wins. Leo is the favorite, but I think Steinfeld has a good chance.

Best Direction

The Coen Brothers, nominated for True Grit, are beloved by the Academy, but aren't due to win again; perhaps Hailee Sternfeld will win the only major award for that movie. The battle, it seems, is between Tom Hooper for The King's Speech and David Fincher for The Social Network. Since Speech is all but a lock for Best Picture, it's likely that Best Director will go to Fincher, though I personally could never forgive him for his bloated adaptation of one of my favorite short stories, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. As for The Social Network, its alleged brilliance eludes me. I'm an avid user of social networking (friend me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter!), but in my view -- which has been roundly criticized -- the trivial subject matter and slick Aaron Sorkin screenplay had a distinct "made for television" flavor. It is likely, however, to win the Adapted Screenplay award.

A word about Mike Leigh's Another Year, a beautiful film that I hope will win for Original Screenplay, though David Seidler's The King's Speech is hard to beat. It's also possible that Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg will win for The Kids Are All Right. Original screenplay seems to be a category where comedies can safely be recognized.

In other words, and this applies to all of the awards — I really have no idea.

Dilemma: Tall Fat Guy or Short Fat Guy?

2011-01-18T10:49:00.000-08:00

Ron Howard is a competent commercial director whose work might be best distinguished by its lack of a distinction, or discernible point of view. His movies appear to wander the map, encompassing masculine adventures like Backdraft and Apollo 13, family comedies like Parenthood, and literary adaptations like The Da Vinci Code, A Beautiful Mind and Frost/Nixon. (Did I just call Dan Brown "literary"?)

With The Dilemma, the erstwhile Opie takes on the buddy comedy, well-trod ground more than adequately covered by hipper directors like Judd Apatow. The first problem with the movie, evident from the trailer, is that the two lead actors aren’t sufficiently different in manner and appearance. You have a tall, chunky, unprepossessing guy (Vince Vaughn) paired with a short, chunkier, unprepossessing guy (Kevin James), and when they’re seated, it’s sometimes hard to tell them apart. Their pretty, dark-haired partners, played by Jennifer Connelly and Winona Ryder, are also rather interchangeable.

Upon this foundation of ill-considered casting is built a very conventional story, not as clever even as a single episode of Friends. The movie’s high concept is this: Ronny Valentine (Vaughn), a heartfully named Chicago car-design firm entrepreneur, spots Geneva (Ryder), the wife of his best friend and business partner Nick (James), canoodling with a tattooed young punker. Ronny, a fast-talking liar but overall good guy, spends the rest of the movie agonizing about whether to tell the sensitive, ulcer-prone Nick about his wife’s perfidy and risk a high-stakes deal the two friends are working on.

Their project, absurdly enough, is developing an electric motor for vintage Chrysler muscle cars that will sound as loud and throaty as an internal combustion engine — much like the Marx Za-Zooom Sound of Power Motor did for kids’ bikes in the ’60s. Ronny wins over the hearts and wallets of Chrysler executives — including a consultant played by Queen Latifah in yet another useless, ill-defined role — with a presentation that begins: “Electric cars are gay.” The movie exerts similar effort denying its own homoeroticism, trotting out multiple symbols of exaggerated masculinity, like muscle cars and professional hockey. At least Apatow’s “bromance” I Love You, Man poked fun at hyper-masculine male-bonding by having Paul Rudd’s character care more about making desserts and snuggling with his girlfriend than going out drinking with guys.

Ronny confronts Geneva, with whom he has some fleeting romantic history, and she responds by spitting vituperative threats. By concealing his problem and lying about the bizarre scrapes he gets into as a result of his painful knowledge, 40-year-old bachelor Ronny risks his own deepening relationship with his girlfriend Beth (Connelly), who thinks Ronny, a reformed gambler, has returned to his betting ways. After Ronny makes an embarrassing public toast (movie comedy cliché #144) at her parents’ swanky 40th anniversary party, Beth arranges an intervention for him (are people still doing that or, for that matter, buying Chryslers?).

The movie’s banal premise is hardly sufficient meat to fortify a two-hour movie, and the screenwriter, the well-regarded Allan Loeb, seems to have exhausted his creative energy after the introductory scenes, which establish the two couples’ jokey friendship, with Vaughn providing his trademark glib, wide-ranging monologues. As happens with so many Hollywood productions when they run out of ideas, things take a turn for the ridiculous. Ronny seems to descend into a kind of madness, following Ronny to an Asian massage parlor and stalking the faithless Geneva, even climbing onto a balcony to photograph her sex tryst and getting into a stupendously violent fight with her lover (Channing Tatum), the uproariously named Zip. And yet the movie doesn’t explore this madness, excusing Ronny’s behavior, no matter how psychotic, as understandable in the name of defending the holy institution of Male Friendship.

When a movie jumps the tracks as this one does, one’s mind naturally wanders to other topics, such as, how would this material play in the hands of a more artistic director? Woody Allen could make a fine movie about the problems that arise between two couples when a wife’s adultery is discovered, and it would never involve, as this movie does, anyone being pummeled, punched, threatened with a flaming homemade blowtorch, or two fat men writhing in loving friendship on the ice at a pro hockey game. A French filmmaker could take the same premise and create a soufflé farce that might eventually have Ronny realize that it’s Nick he loves, not Beth, and that’s why he’s dragged his feet in proposing marriage. Sacredieu!

The waste of good professional resources on this half-baked material is a shame. This is a very slick-looking production, with clever production design and impressive cinematography by Salvatore Totino with an emphasis on beautifully framed, gleaming night shots. Too bad the material doesn’t rise to the same level of artistry

(Review originally published on the Cleveland Movie Blog. Bookmark it!)

Twangin' With Gwynnie

2011-01-18T10:44:00.000-08:00

By Pamela Zoslov

Sometimes a single scene in a movie provides a clue to what’s wrong with the movie as a whole. In Country Strong, a country-music melodrama in which Gwyneth Paltrow plays a superstar country singer attempting a comeback after an alcohol-fueled collapse, it’s a small jewel of a scene in which the singer, Kelly Canter, visits a cancer-stricken boy in his classroom as part of a public-relations effort with the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Paltrow’s gentle interaction with the star-struck child (Gabe Sipos), who’s bald from chemotherapy and wearing a little cowboy hat – is so touching, natural and sincere that it makes the histrionics of the rest of the movie seem irrelevant. If you do not grow a little teary as Kelly plays the boy a sweet song named for him (“Travis, May I Have This Dance?”) and dances him around the room, then you are made of sterner stuff than I.

The power of this scene suggests that Paltrow is miscast – willfully so — as a country-music star, as she was as an Englishwoman (Shakespeare in Love), a genius mathematician (Proof) and poet Sylvia Plath (Sylvia). One of the only roles for which Paltrow, with her inflexibly beautiful, patrician Faberge egg looks, seemed suitably cast was as the troubled daughter of a rich, eccentric family (The Royal Tenenbaums). However skillful her acting (and she does some superb work in Country Strong) and her carefully coached country-style singing, it’s hard to escape the impression that the beautiful blond post-debutante is slumming. Never was there a country star who looked like this – something you could not say about the plainer-looking Sissy Spacek as the hardscrabble Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter. Paltrow’s singing is serviceably good, but it lacks the distinctiveness that makes for country music greatness. How did this woman, we might well wonder, become a superstar?

We first encounter Kelly Canter in rehab, where she’s having a casual affair with Beau (Garrett Hedlund), a scruffy young part-time orderly and aspiring singer/songwriter. Her husband and manager, James (country star Tim McGraw), comes to collect Kelly before she’s fully rehabilitated, so she can embark on a big comeback tour, which will bring her back to Dallas, the site of a scandalous drunken onstage incident that caused her to miscarry their baby. So gentle is this damaged woman that she rescues a baby quail, which she carries around in a wooden cigar box. What caused Kelly’s breakdown is never clear, except that the burdens of stardom have taken their toll. “Love and fame can’t live in the same place,” the preternaturally wise Beau tells Kelly, a bit of wisdom belied every day by people who manage to be famous and loved (including, for example, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill).

James invites Beau to join the tour, along with ambitious, petite ex-beauty queen Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester), who has her heavily made-up eye on a career as a country-pop superstar A rather predictable backstage soap opera unfolds, with All About Eve jealousies, drunken relapses, romantic entanglements, punches to the face, and a plethora of creditable country songs, many performed by the budding duo of Beau and Chiles, whose burgeoning romance, in contrast to her own troubled marriage, adds to Kelly’s sadness. Although she can still get it together for one big, spectacular performance (with rather ridiculous choreography that has her prancing about in very short skirts), Kelly, like Margo Channing in All About Eve , knows she’s finished. In a late scene, she provides the rising star Chiles with a list of advice managing her career – passing the torch, and saying farewell not just to stardom, but to everything. If this were real life, and not a corny show-business melodrama, it would be obvious that Kelly could remake her career along the lines suggested by her lovely scene with little Travis – go back to basics, record a bluegrass album, make records for children, or teach music.

It is this movie’s misfortune that the star is a better actress than singer, and the supporting cast (McGraw, Hedlund and Meester) are all better singers than actors (and McGraw, the cast's only famous singer, doesn't sing a note). Still, even with its clichés and improbabilities (how do they mount those lavish tour productions with no rehearsal?), the movie has a good heart, a healthy dose of original music, and an affecting performance by Paltrow. It's not a good movie -- you knew that going in -- but if a movie can overcome my aversion to two things – modern country music and Gwyneth Paltrow — it must have something going for it.

Originally published on the Cleveland Movie Blog.

Obligatory Year-End List

2011-01-05T06:53:00.000-08:00

By Pamela Zoslov

I may as well confess, I never liked “Best” lists. My critical Sharpie is happier when analyzing and finding fault with things than with praising them, a job that’s better left to those of sunnier disposition. I'm a little more like Alice Roosevelt Longworth ("If you haven't anything nice to say about anyone, come sit by me.") And, of course, I didn’t see every movie released in 2010, avoiding stuff I’m not interested in, like sci-fi and animation, and missing films I dearly wanted to see, like The Tillman Story. Some things that make my list are movies I know are flawed (like Love and Other Drugs), and others that don’t are prestige films that were lauded beyond their worth (like The Social Network). I know that some of my bests will appear on other critics' worsts, and some of my worsts (Black Swan) are on their best lists. I’m obviously partial to documentaries and dramas about serious issues (though I also like romantic comedies that other people despise).

With those caveats, here are the movies I remember most fondly from this year.

1. Inside Job Charles Ferguson, who in No End in Sight exposed failures in the Iraq occupation (but not, alas, its mendacious justification), this year made an important documentary that dissected, in minute detail and with cathartic outrage, the reckless and villainous greed behind the global financial meltdown.

2. Life During Wartime The long periods between films by the misanthropic genius Todd Solondz are sadly bereft, but this year, Solondz followed up his 1998 masterpiece, Happiness, with a superbly mournful melodrama about the same dysfunctional family, entirely recast. (Paul Reubens, aka Pee-wee Herman, an underrated dramatic actor, is particularly affecting as the sad ghost of a man who committed suicide). The recasting is not surprising from a director who once had his lead characters played by different actors within a single film (Palindromes).

3. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work One of the rare films I wished would run longer, Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg’s profile of the 77-year-old comedienne revealed a smart, vulnerable and endearingly self-aware woman and performer who lives obsessively for her work. The movie me want to spend time hanging out with Joan.

4. Fair Game In a coup of perfect casting, Naomi Watts played Valerie Plame in Doug Liman’s penetrating drama about the covert CIA agent outed by Bush administration officials in retaliation for the exposure by husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn, also excellent) of Bush’s lies to justify the invasion of Iraq.

5. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer Alex Gibney, who chronicled U.S. torture practices in Taxi to the Darkside, turned his attention to the downfall of the brilliant, disgraced ex-NY governor, examining the machinations of powerful enemies, alongside reckless hubris, that brought down the onetime “Sheriff of Wall Street.” The sections delving into the demimonde of high-end prostitution were squirm-inducing, but it scarcely detracted from the film’s fascinating character study of the complex but admirably candid Spitzer, and revelations about politics and power in New York state and the U.S.

6. Catfish Call it the anti-Social Network; Catfish was a refreshing antipode to that overpraised bore about Mark Zuckerberg’s college days. Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost’s cyber-styled documentary about a young man’s journey to find the seemingly irresistible young woman he met on Facebook, is an absorbing study of the seductions and deceptions of social networking.It's not a big, life-changing movie, but it was compelling in its own right.

7. The Fighter Christian Bale, who lost weight to the point of gauntness for the part, is superb in David O. Russell’s raw, roistering biopic about welterweight boxing champ Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), whose career was sidetracked by the machinations and missteps of his manager-mom (a vivid Melissa Leo) and brother/trainer Dicky (Bale), a fighter who once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard and later succumbed, for a time, to crack addiction and crime.

8. True Grit Rare is the year when a Coen brothers movie doesn’t make my year-end list, and this year the siblings presented a lyrical adaptation of Charles Portis’ Western about a 13-year-old girl (Hailee Steinfeld) who enlists the services of a hard-drinking U.S. Marshal (Jeff Bridges) to avenge the death of her father at the hands of a drunken rogue (Josh Brolin). The movie demonstrated of the sublime harmony of the Coens’ team — Joel and Ethan’s writing and direction, Roger Deakins’ stunning cinematography and Carter Burwell’s subtle, note-perfect scoring -- and a needed literary corrective to the 1969 True Grit, which turned Portis’ story about a tough, determined girl into a boisterous romp about John Wayne.

9. The King’s Speech Tom Hooper’s lovely film starring Colin Firth as King George VI and Geoffrey Rush as the Australian actor-turned-speech therapist who helped him overcome a career-crippling speech defect was a beautifully appointed two-hander, exceptionally well acted by both stars. Though I would have preferred to have watched the roiling constitutional crisis taking place mostly offstage than on Bertie's speech therapy, this was a nicely carved cameo brooch. If Firth, who humanized this reluctant monarch, does not win the Best Actor Oscar, I will eat my pack of commemorative Kings and Queens of England playing cards.

10. Love and Other Drugs Reviled by some critics, Ed Zwick’s movie about a reprobate pharmaceutical salesman who falls for a Parkinson’s patient (Anne Hathaway), was no masterpiece, but it was clever, funny and unexpectedly touching. It earns a place on this list for subversively disguising its devastating critique of Big Pharma as a sexy romantic tragicomedy.

Worst of 2010

To paraphrase Tolstoy, every bad movie is bad in its own way. Some movies are just inherently and unsurprisingly bad: Little Fockers, for example. Others are bad in proportion to their pretensions to quality: Black Swan, the year’s worst “good” movie. Some bad movies I have probably blotted out from memory, but here is a lineup of the guilty parties whose effluvium lingers.

A Bucket of Syrup It was a good year for fans of novelist Nicholas Sparks, with two adaptations of his godawful books. The worst was The Last Song, a sticky tearjerker that highlighted the nonexistent acting skills of pop singer Miley Cyrus, and the sticky Dear John, which squandered the considerable skills of director Lasse Hallstrom and some actual actors.

Comedy Crud Bad romantic comedies will always be with us, but a couple that really pushed the boundaries of badness this year were Garry Marshall’s wretched ensemble thing Valentine’s Day, which not only inflicted Ashton Kutcher on us, but ran about as long as The Sorrow and the Pity; and You Again, which teamed Sigourney Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis as rival moms in a numbingly moronic slapstick romp. But for awfulness in comedy, few movies surpass Grown-Ups, in which Adam Sandler and his aging pals taxed our endurance with a flabby, grimly unfunny middle-aged reunion farce that tried to wrest laughs out of pee-in-the-pool jokes and other puerile plop. And god help any children exposed to Marmaduke, an atrocious live-action family comedy allegedly based on the famous panel comic, with Owen Wilson voicing the surfboard-riding Great Dane. So bad it hardly qualified as a movie.

A Lamentation of Swans Tchaikovsky had a rough time of it in life, dying of either cholera or suicide or suicidal cholera, but thankfully he’s not alive to see his music hijacked by Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s masturbatory fantasy focusing on – allegedly – the world of ballet. The movie, basically Carrie in a tutu, was a psychosexual farrago so putrescent it has to be seen to be believed. Why this generates swoons rather than laughs (the New York Times' A.O. Scott was captivated by it) is beyond understanding. Different strokes for different folks.

More Suicide Than Rainbow: For Colored Girls

2010-11-26T06:15:00.001-08:00

The original of a review that was published recently.

Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls is a melodramatic adaptation of a classic play

By Pamela Zoslov

For Colored Girls represents a marriage of two very different traditions: the downtown feminism of Ntozage Shange’s influential 1975 play for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, and the “chitlin’ circuit” box-office bait of Tyler Perry, the successful playwright, movie director and portrayer of Madea, his saucy, amply padded matriarchal alter ego. Shange’s play, or “choreopoem,” as she called it, is a blend of poetry, music and drama performed by seven women identified only by the colors they wear (“Lady in Red,” “Lady in Blue,” etc.). Through vernacular poetic monologues, the women explore issues including domestic abuse, love, rape, abortion, spirituality and black revolutionary history. When it was announced that Perry would direct the movie version, there was widespread worry: how would Perry, the director Spike Lee denounced for perpetuating negative racial stereotypes (“coonery and buffoonery”), realize this serious, important work? Would Madea be in it? Would he call it “Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls”?

Perry did neither of those things, but his adaptation is still uneven. Colored Girls has ample star wattage, with a cast that includes Janet Jackson, Loretta Devine, Thandie Newton, Whoopi Goldberg and Phylicia Rashad. The characters are given names, and the abstract structure has been given a concrete narrative, shifting the focus from sisterhood to soap opera. It also introduces men into the scenario, in ways that are none too flattering. Perry’s roundelay of stories follows an increasingly familiar formula of demonizing black men. If the abusive males in The Color Purple and the overpraised Precious weren’t repellent enough, consider the depraved lineup in For Colored Girls: philanderers, abusers, rapists, husbands who give their wives HIV, fathers who murder their children. America elected its first black president, but at the movies, images of black men are increasingly retrograde. While the same stories were told retrospectively by the women in the stage play, acting them out literally on the screen makes them seem more vulgar than poetic.

The movie often wallows in misery — of the male-generated variety — lingering on a brutal rape (crosscut with scenes from an opera) and, based on one of Shange’s poems, the dangling of two children from a fifth-floor window by their demented father. Though beautifully acted and photographed, For Colored Girls is hampered by the fact that what was richly moving in the oral storytelling tradition becomes over-the-top melodrama on the screen.

Where the movie does succeed is in preserving the music of Shange’s poetry, weaving her monologues skillfully into the narrative and eliciting stirring recitations by the actresses. Phylicia Rashad, as Gilda, manager of the tenement building where several of the women live, delivers a particularly haunting, quietly melodious reading. And yet for every savory subtlety, there’s some regrettable burlesque, as with Whoopi Goldberg’s character, a white-turbaned religious fanatic who pours oil on her daughter’s head and exhorts passersby to “Repent! Repent!” Ultimately, the movie soars only when Shange’s poetry is center stage, calling into question the wisdom of “opening up” the play for the big screen.

Love and Other Drugs: Pissing Off Big Pharma

2010-11-24T07:55:00.000-08:00

Rarely does a movie pack as much into 113 minutes as this exceptional romantic “dramedy” by Edward Zwick (thirtysomething).

Directors often stumble when trying to balance comedy and drama (consider Judd Apatow’s limp Funny People), but Zwick and co-writers Marshall Herskovitz and Charles Randolph make it work, while also providing an acrid satire of the pharmaceutical industry.

The movie, set in the 1990s, is partly based on Jamie Reidy’s memoir of his stint as a Pfizer salesman, with a love story appended to it. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jamie, a glib womanizer and chronic failure who gets by on his seductive charm. After losing his electronics-salesman gig for screwing the boss' girlfriend, he enlists as a pharmaceutical rep, a lucrative job whose slippery ethics are a good match for his personality. The movie details the sleazy sales tactics used to push Pfizer’s pills — primarily Zoloft, which is competing fruitlessly against Eli Lilly's Prozac — such as seducing eager medical receptionists and pimping for horny physicians like Dr. Knight (Hank Azaria).

Jamie relentlessly pursues Dr. Knight's patient Maggie (Anne Hathaway), a clever, beautiful artist with pre-Raphaelite curls and early-onset Parkinson’s disease, and the pair — both averse to commitment — begin a libidinous affair, with ample onscreen nudity. Jamie’s career rockets when Pfizer launches its magical moneymaker, Viagra, but he’s blindsided by his love and concern for Maggie.

So entertaining is this sardonic romp that the sadness arising from Maggie’s illness delivers an unexpected wallop. Though the movie meanders a bit, it brims with sharp lines and good performances. The movie gets bonus points for pissing off Big Pharma: asked for its reaction to the movie, a Pfizer spokesperson sniffed in the Wall Street Journal: “The sales practices portrayed…do not conform to our policies and procedures.”

A version of this appears in Cleveland Scene.

Fair Game: The Spy Left Out in the Cold

2010-11-19T09:09:00.000-08:00

Fair Game dramatizes the Valerie Plame affair and the lies that led to war

By Pamela Zoslov

If truth is the first casualty of war, the second must be the truth-tellers. Consider Julian Assange, the internationally hounded founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, and Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, the subjects of Doug Liman’s sharply observed drama Fair Game.

The movie is based on the memoirs of Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador who wrote a famous New York Times Op-Ed in 2003 disputing the manipulated intelligence cited by the Bush administration as a pretext for invading Iraq, and Plame, a CIA officer whose career ended when her covert identity was revealed by conservative columnist Robert Novak, evidently in retaliation for her husband’s outspokenness (Karl Rove reportedly said Plame was “fair game.”)

Although the Wilsons – the attractive, blond Valerie, once imagined by Maureen Dowd as Marvel Comics super-heroine “Valerie Flame,” and Joe, an éminence grise with a salt-and-pepper mane and wire spectacles, are natural subjects for a movie spy thriller (like an older Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, stars of Liman’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith), the film wouldn’t succeed if it weren’t about something bigger: lies, propaganda, war, abuse of power, and the hijacking of democracy.

The casting could not be more perfect. Naomi Watts not only resembles Plame physically, but is credible and affecting as the gutsy covert operative who wears multiple identities in her often dangerous work — romanticized for the movie, but compelling — including that of a businesswoman, the disguise she wears in her daily life as a wife and mother in a prosperous Washington, D.C. suburb. Sean Penn seems to not so much impersonate Wilson as channel him, in a nuanced performance that reminds us of how fine an actor he is. The movie’s Wilson is principled, arrogant, a bit of a blowhard, and his self-righteous but understandable bluster places his wife in jeopardy.

As part of her work in non-proliferation, Plame is asked to recommend her husband, a former ambassador with expertise in African nations, for a trip to Niger to research whether Saddam Hussein bought weapons-grade yellowcake uranium. Wilson’s report concludes that no such purchase was made, and he’s incensed when the now-infamous “16 words” — claiming Hussein sought “significant quantities of uranium from Africa” — make their way into Bush’s State of the Union address. Wilson fires off his Times article, which reverberates in the White House, where Scooter Libby (David Andrews) and Rove, surely acting on behalf of Vice President Dick Cheney, seek to discredit him by leaking his wife’s identity to Novak.

Following her exposure, Plame is subjected to death threats, and Wilson is denounced by the cable-news noise machine as a flake, hack, liar and traitor. Jez and John Henry Butterworth’s excellent screenplay doesn’t overlook the dire human consequences of Plame’s blown cover – a group of Iraqi scientists she promised to smuggle out of Iraq are left stranded and in jeopardy. The Wilsons’ marriage falters, and Plame takes refuge with her mother and father (Sam Shepard), a retired Air Force colonel.

Soon the affair known as “Plamegate” erupts, and Libby – “the fall guy,” according to the movie’s Wilson -- is convicted of obstruction of justice and other charges and sentenced to prison before his sentence is commuted by Bush. The Wilsons, today still denounced by many on the right, left D.C. for a new life in Santa Fe. They survived the ordeal, spoke out and wrote books, but the same can’t be said of the other victims of the mendacious invasion — the uncounted thousands of dead Iraqis, victims of gruesome torture, brutal home raids, random shooting and indiscriminate bombing. The public’s memory is short, but as the ongoing, terrible revelations attest, history will not forget.

Into the Hollywood Abyss: You Again

2010-09-27T06:44:00.000-07:00

The notion, stated by the lead character in You Again, that “who you are in high school determines who you are for the rest of your life” is hardly a new one in Hollywood-land, but seldom has it been as clumsily dramatized as in this woeful comedy about teen rivalries revived among multiple generations of a California family. We encounter Marni Olsen (Kristin Bell) in a video of her awkward ’90s self, with oversized glasses and acne, being bullied by a cabal of cheerleaders chanting Queen’s “We Are The Champions” as they shove poor Marni out of the school.

Now a young adult, Marni has triumphed by becoming a pretty, successful PR executive in L.A.. Traveling home for her brother’s wedding, she learns his fiancée is Joanna (Odette Yustman), Marni’s erstwhile chief tormentor, who has wormed her way into Marni’s family’s hearts. Through a series of mirthless mishaps, Marni is restored to her bad-skinned, bespectacled high school self, laboring desperately—in appallingly implausible ways that include excavating a buried time capsule—to stop the wedding. Joanna’s glamorous Aunt Ramona (Sigourney Weaver) sashays in, reigniting her ill-defined ’70s-vintage rivalry with Marni’s mom (Jamie Lee Curtis).

The pairing of Weaver and Curtis is the movie’s big draw, but with Moe Jelline’s witless screenplay, Andy Fickman’s feckless direction, indifferent performances by the supporting cast, and some remarkably bad camera work, it’s a rickety vehicle indeed for these veteran actresses. Betty White, still riding the crest of renewed popularity, provides the sole laugh near the end, where she's reunited momentarily with an old co-star, but it’s a dreadfully long haul getting there. — Pamela Zoslov

Originally published in Cleveland Scene.

Hawthorne in Her Side: Easy A

2010-09-18T06:47:00.000-07:00

Easy A

“John Hughes did not write my life,” laments Olive Penderghast, a high school student longing to be Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles rather than the scandalous harlot of Ojai, California’s senior high school in Will Gluck’s Easy A. The sentiment, part of a webcast Olive is making, characterizes this very “meta” movie, which winks at the conventions of movies— the 1980s teen wet dreams of John Hughes and Cameron Crowe, and film adaptations of The Scarlet Letter, a 1926 silent version with Lillian Gish and a “freely adapted” version with Demi Moore, in which Moore spoke with an inexplicable English accent. Olive’s English teacher (Thomas Haden Church), opening a discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel with an improvised rap, mocks himself for being a clichéd hip English teacher, “just like in every bad movie you’ve ever seen.”

Bert Royal’s irony-laden script has clever, straight-laced Olive acquiring her “filthy skank” reputation by accident. She invents an imaginary boyfriend and fake-confesses to her best friend Rhiannon (Aly Michalka) that she lost her virginity to him. The “admission” is overheard by the school’s Jesus-freak-in-chief, Marianne (Amanda Bynes).

Rumors of Olive’s loose ways spread like a text-message virus. Olive cements her bad-girl reputation by agreeing to let her friend Brandon (Dan Byrd), who Olive describes as a “Kinsey 6 homosexual,” pretend he had sex with her so he can dodge the daily beatings he’s getting for being gay. Unwilling to do anything “half-assed,” Olive stages a fake raucous bedroom grunt-fest meant to be overheard by a house party of slavering classmates.

Soon Olive is being approached by all manner of nerds, fat boys and outcasts who want help acquiring an instant studly reputation. They begin offering her store gift cards (one hapless fellow can muster only a 20-percent-off coupon for Bed, Bath & Beyond) in return for the status-enhancing right to brag about having sex with her.

Suddenly awash in gift cards and condemnation (the Jesus-freak students pray for her and mount a picket line), virginal Olive decides to embrace her inner Hester Prynne. Whereas in real life high school girls have committed suicide as a result of such scorn, Olive cuts up her conservative wardrobe and starts wearing sexy improvised bustiers, each adorned with a huge red letter ‘A.’ She struts down the school hallways, turning teenage (or twentysomething playing teenage) heads.

These rather outlandish plot machinations are made quite tolerable by the witty writing—toned down considerably from the original script to avoid an “Easy R” rating—and a winning lead performance by 22-year-old Stone, whose sultry voice and oversized eyes make her an eminently appealing heroine. The supporting cast, too, is superb: Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as Olive’s tolerant, jokey parents, Malcolm McDowell as the beleaguered school principal, and Lisa Kudrow as the guidance counselor who’s a bit of a scarlet woman herself.

This is a movie best appreciated for its texture rather than its silly plot, but as with all comedies, attention must eventually be paid to the story. Combating the calumny of her classmates, Olive realizes she would really rather be romanced by someone like John Cusack in Say Anything, and sets her sights on the object of her girlhood crush, Todd (Penn Badgely), who stays nobly above the gossipy fray. She also muses that life should feature the kind of nonsensical musical number that climaxed Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and so the movie obliges, providing her with a steamy show-stopper that gets her escorted off the gym floor. As if to underscore how much the world has changed since John Hughes’ heyday, Olive’s dance number is also a commercial for her free confessional webcast. -- Pamela Zoslov

Originally published in the Cleveland Scene, www.clevescene.com.

Robert Schimmel, 1950-2010

2010-09-05T15:53:00.000-07:00

It was sad to learn of the death September 3 of comedian Robert Schimmel, 60, after a car accident. This is an interview I did with him in 2002, a conversation that I found very moving.

Death Takes a Holiday

Robert Schimmel, a “comedian’s comedian,” talks about sex, success and surviving cancer.

By Pamela Zoslov

Think of it as a cosmic joke— God having a bit of fun. A guy’s at the cusp of a brilliant career, and he finds out he has less than a year to live. It happened to Robert Schimmel, the comedian. And, this being God’s joke, the timing was perfect. It was 2000, and Schimmel was living every standup comic’s dream. He had toiled for two decades on the yuk-club circuit, won numerous comedy awards, had his own HBO special. He wasn’t yet a household name, but he was generating buzz as a “comedian’s comedian,” a smart, no-holds-barred performer whose straight talk about sex, relationships and matters scatological endeared him to Conan O’Brien and Howard Stern, who made him a frequent (and brilliant) guest on their shows. Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno and Jimmie Walker are fans, and Jerry Lewis, asked to name his favorite comedian, said “Robert Schimmel.”

So what happens? Schimmel gets within millimeters of comedy’s brass ring: his own TV series. Fox wants to star Schimmel in a sitcom, and they shoot a pilot. It gets picked up for 13 episodes. And then he gets the diagnosis: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a deadly cancer of the lymphatic system. The kind of cancer that killed Jacqueline Onassis. He has a year, at best. “Everything had to go on hold,” Schimmel says on the phone from L.A. — the sitcom, his tour. He endures a series of chemotherapy treatments, and now cautiously celebrates 17 months of remission. In the hospital, needle I his arm, he had a lot of time to think about life, death and comedy. “I found humor in what I was going through,” he recalls. “It’s hard to take if you don’t find humor. If you really think about what it is you’re going through and how terrifying and hopeless it could be, it would be hard to recover from. So I never dwell on the negative.”

If he wanted to dwell on the negative, Schimmel has a hell of lot of material. His life has been a litany of death, disease and disaster, enough to give Job (a guy who never got his own sitcom) a run for his shekels. Born in the Bronx 52 years ago, Schimmel is the son of Holocaust survivors. His 11-year-old son, Derek, died of cancer. At 48, Schimmel had a heart attack. His wife suffered a nervous collapse, and the couple separated after 23 years.

Even his comedy debut was marked by disaster. In 1981, he was selling stereos in Scottsdale, Arizona, when he went to L.A. and killed at open-mike night at the Improv. The club gave him an open invitation to perform anytime, so he quit his job and moved his family to L.A. He drove up to the club and found it bordered up and smoldering from a fire the night before.

But Schimmel figured if his parents could survive concentration camps, he could learn not to be bitter. After his diagnosis, Schimmel says, “I had a decision to make. I could feel sorry for myself, say that life sucks — I have good reason to say that life sucks. But life doesn’t suck. As shitty as it can be sometimes, life is still worth living. In a way, being raised by Holocaust survivors influenced his comedy. “I’m the butt of all my jokes, which makes me the victim — which is what they were. I learned a long time ago that you get a bigger laugh when you’re making fun of yourself.”

He certainly has no patience with those who blame God. “Every time something happens, the insurance companies say ‘It’s an act of God,’ he muses. He gets the blame. When I go to the Pearly Gates, I want to be standing behind an insurance agent, and I want to hear God say to him, ‘Wait a minute: didn’t you blame me for that fire in Malibu in 1993?”

Like Lenny Bruce, Schimmel exposes what he considers to be the truth about men — that they’re all perverts who will have sex with anyone or anything, and who foolishly expect their women to perform like porn queens. Their fixation on physical perfection strikes Schimmel as absurd. “You’re always looking for something you’re never going to find. Nothing is perfect. Well, there is something perfect: real love is perfect. Then none of those things — sex, size, performance — none of it means anything.”

He is also realistic about success. Having your own sitcom is supposed to be every comedian’s dream, but it doesn’t mean that much to Schimmel now. “You do a sitcom, you’re there for 12, 13 hours a day, five days a week. You could be a household name, like Ray Romano or Jerry Seinfeld, but you can get stuck in a rut. It means a lot to me to be live in front of an audience, because I’m happy to be alive. A lot of those sitcom guys, you never see them live. Being super-big doesn’t mean that much to me.” If financial success did mean a lot to Schimmel, he says, he wouldn’t have chosen to do such risqué comedy. “I think I’ve done okay for somebody that isn’t really mainstream, but this is me, and that’s what I love doing. I only want to do stuff onstage that’s me. I don’t want to go out there and recite.”

What does mean a lot to Schimmel is helping other people with cancer. Listening to comedy and music helped Schimmel get through chemotherapy, so he is asking fans to bring new or used comedy and music CDs or audio books to the Improv, which he will donate, along with CD players, to local cancer treatment centers.

Comedians always complain about life on the road —Steve Martin once said it was like rock and roll without the chicks — but Schimmel relishes it. “I just finished 14 weeks on the road. I live for it. I can’t imagine not doing it, like I can’t imagine not breathing. I used to dream about it, so I still get goose bumps when I hear the emcee announce my name.

“Knowing you can make people forget about their problems for a little while — no matter if you’re a middle-aged, balding, pudgy Jewish guy that people wouldn’t give a second look at walking down the street. For that one hour, you’re Matt Damon and Brad Pitt.”

But don’t women always say they like a guy with a sense of humor? “Women say it’s number one,” he replies thoughtfully. “Guys usually think the dick is number one, and the sense of humor is number two.”

Going the Distance: Separation Anxiety

2010-09-05T07:12:00.000-07:00

Barrymore and her boytoy are bicoastal lovers in Going the Distance

By Pamela Zoslov

The lengthy running time (102 minutes) of Going the Distance, a romantic comedy starring Drew Barrymore and her current boyfriend, Justin Long, coupled with its wearily predictable ending, allows the viewer ample time to think about the relentless demands of commercial moviemaking. In this case, a gifted documentary filmmaker, Nanette Burstein, whose portraits of young boxers (On the Ropes) and high school students (American Teen) were noteworthy for their emotional realism, is given the difficult task of making something new and different from the formulaic story of a couple separated by miles and trying to make a long-distance relationship work. With first-time screenwriter Geoff LaTulippe, Burstein tries mightily to bring some believability to the story — witty, improvisational-style dialogue, an acknowledgement of the sagging recessionary job market — only to be largely defeated by the necessary clichés of the Hollywood rom-com.

One necessary evil is the casting. Barrymore, never quite as talented or charming as her family legacy implies, looks a bit haggard for the ingénue role she’s playing, and Long has a long way to go before being considered leading-man material. Barrymore and Long, despite being a real-life couple, generate little charisma or erotic heat. Barrymore plays Erin, a clever 31-year-old graduate student who is a superannuated intern for a mythical New York newspaper, the “New York Sentinel.” She meets Garrett (Long), an indie record-company employee freshly dumped by his girlfriend, and they bond over shared interests in circa-1980s music and vintage arcade video games. Their budding romance is narrated with the help of a montage of New York romantic cavorting, in which Burstein resurrects split-screen techniques that hark back to Pillow Talk. Six weeks into this romantic idyll, Erin must return to California to finish school (Stanford, no less), leaving Garrett to his goofy pals Dan (Charlie Day) and Box (Jason Sudeikis) and his unrealistic music-industry job.

Another necessary evil is plot mechanics, which require a labored exposition of the challenges of Erin and Garrett’s separation, handled with frequent phone calls, texts, split-screen guffaws over a sneezing-panda YouTube video, sexual jealousy, comically failed phone sex, and occasional sex-charged reunions. Since the couple are less interesting than the supporting characters — the funny Sudeikis and Day, and lovely Christina Applegate (Married With Children) as Erin’s sister, who’s saddled with the sole unfunny trait of being a hygiene freak — our emotional investment in the couple’s eventual success is limited.

The relationship reaches a crisis point when Erin, attempting the quixotic feat of obtaining a full-time job as a newspaper reporter, receives an offer from a major paper that will keep her on the West Coast, leaving Garrett to sulk petulantly in his dumpy Manhattan apartment and consider seeking solace with a pretty co-worker (Kelli Garner). Burstein and LaTulippe’s efforts to bring realism to the rom-com is again subverted: with one hand the movie acknowledges that newspapers are going the way of the buggy whip, and with the other performs a bit of movie magic as dated as the 1980s-style music of the bands the couple enjoy.

Overlong and meandering, the movie has trouble maintaining a consistent tone. Naturalistic scenes reside uncomfortably beside slapstick sequences — Garrett dodging wild spray at a fake-tan salon, Erin and Garrett caught screwing on her sister’s dining-room table. And yet, with all its problems, the movie has an appealing texture. The jokey, sub-Judd Apatow banter, unusually frank sexual dialogue (feisty Erin lamenting the problems of men dawdling while performing oral sex, or screaming “Suck my dick!” drunkenly at an angry biker in a bar), strong supporting cast and general amiability liberate the movie somewhat from its genre-dictated confines.

Originally published in Cleveland Scene.

Artful Dodger

2010-06-21T07:20:00.000-07:00

The pseudonymous British street artist Banksy, who is known for such prankish works as a life-size replica of a Guantanamo prisoner chained to a fence at Disneyland, paradisical scenes painted on the Palestinian side of the West Bank partition, a “murdered” phone booth, and ten-pound notes with Princess Diana’s face replacing the Queen’s, is the putative director of Exit Through The Gift Shop, an alleged documentary about street art.

The film, which focuses on an eccentric French-born clothing seller-turned-filmmaker named Thierry Guetta, raises provocative questions about authenticity, art marketing, and the nature of reality itself. Is it a documentary about Guetta, who in the course of the narrative becomes a successful Pop artist called “Mr. Brainwash”? Was it really directed by Banksy, who appears in it with his face in shadow? Does Mr. Brainwash actually exist? And, for that matter, does Banksy? The film is a masterpiece of misdirection. Actor Rhys Ifans’ narration claims the film was originally intended to be Guetta’s documentary about street artists including Banksy, whose identity has sparked much speculation (he’s said to be from South Gloucestershire, and his name may or may not be Robert or Robin Banks).

Guetta, a puckish fellow in a fedora and Chester Arthur mustache, talks about his obsession with videotaping every moment of his life. He is drawn, through a graffiti-artist cousin, into the exciting, subversive world of street art, filming artists like Shepard Fairey (of Obama “HOPE” fame) plastering their art on buildings and bridges, in dark of night and one step ahead of the police.

Guetta gains access to Banksy by claiming he’s making a documentary, but Banksy soon realizes Guetta is no filmmaker. He takes over the documentary project and urges Guetta to “make some art.” Guetta transforms himself, seemingly overnight, into Mr. Brainwash and mounts a massive gallery show featuring pieces brazenly derivative of Andy Warhol, among others.

If Mr. Brainwash and the documentary are a hoax — and it’s hard to see how it can be otherwise, despite Banksy’s ardent protestations — it’s a fairly extensive one. The LA Weekly credulously covered the Mr. Brainwash exhibit, and his pieces have supposedly sold for five-figure sums. Even if Guetta’s story were true, it’s not nearly as interesting as Banksy and the other street artists. The film is at its best when focusing on the artists and their inspiration and methods. Whether or not Banksy wielded the camera, Exit Through the Gift Shop is of a piece with his art: clever, ephemeral and a little maddening, sparking interesting ideas while deftly eluding our ultimate grasp.

This appeared in the Cleveland Scene.

Sex and Sand: Summer Movies 2010

2010-05-27T14:51:00.000-07:00

Hollywood is still reeling from the nightmare that was 2009, a year that brought a screenwriters’ strike and a global recession, calamities that not even a sweet $2.7 billion in worldwide Avatar receipts could remedy. Production companies and studios were shuttered, jobs, budgets and salaries were slashed

There’s an upside to the belt-tightening: filmmakers have been forced to be more creative with less cash. That means that summer, traditionally the season of effects-laden blockbusters, this year is leaner, more varied and slightly more gender-balanced. There are the usual sequels, superheroes and remakes, but fewer of them. Studios have learned from the success of Sex and the City and Julie and Julia that women buy tickets, too, and so there are more of the romantic comedies often dismissed as “chick flicks”: Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love, Drew Barrymore in Going the Distance, and Jennifer Aniston in The Switch.

The lineup also includes lots of cost-saving genre hybrids: action-comedies like Scott Pilgrim vs.the World and The Expendables, and action-romances like Knight and Day with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, and Killers, with Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher. Of course 3-D, that high-tech excuse for raising ticket prices, gets a workout with Shrek Forever After, Toy Story 3D and Step Up 3D.

Hollywood’s summer starts in early May, and Iron Man 2, Robin Hood and Shrek have already hit theaters. But the season’s still young, and lots of cinematic thrills await

Advance tickets for Sex and the City 2 (May 27) have already outsold current releases like Kick Ass. There’s been loads of speculation about the plot, but let’s be real: Sarah Jessica Parker and castmates could recite the 1,017-page health care bill, but as long as they’re wearing Patricia Field’s outlandish costumes, women will storm the theater. Carrie, still married to Big (and still calling him that, for some reason), travels with her friends to Abu Dhabi, where the ladies ride camels and have romantic adventures

In the “movies based on video games with world-destroying sandstorms” category, we have Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (May 28), in which a rogue prince (Jake Gyllenhaal) teams up with a gorgeous princess (Gemma Arterton) to save the world from villain Ben Kingsley. If you have ever read the “Marmaduke” comic feature and thought, “The only thing that would make this funnier is if that giant dog could talk,” then the live-action family comedy Marmaduke (June 4) is your movie. The Great Dane not only speaks (in Owen Wilson’s voice), he surfs, dances and frets about his looks.

In the action-romance Killers (June 4), Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher as a hastily married couple on the run from hired assassins. One of the season’s more promising buddy comedies, Get Him to the Greek (June 4), has outrageous British comedian Russell Brand reprising his role as Aldous Snow, the obnoxious rock star from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Jonah Hill plays a record company intern enlisted to accompany Snow to a concert at L.A.’s Greek Theater.

I pity the critic who succumbs to lame “I pity the fool” jokes in previewing The A-Team (June 11), which updates the popular ’80s TV show’s Vietnam vets to Iraq vets and boasts an impressive cast including Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson in the role originated by Mr. T. If that doesn’t satisfy your ‘80s jones, maybe The Karate Kid (June 11), a remake of the 1984 Ralph Macchio movie, will. Jada Pinkett and Will Smith’s son, Jaden Smith, plays the kid, whose mom moves him from Detroit to Beijing, where he’s bullied until he learns karate from maintenance man Mr. Han (the great Jackie Chan), a secret kung fu master. What kid couldn’t relate?

Summer’s most bankable sequel, Toy Story 3D (June 18) follows its predecessor by 11 years; it was delayed by the near-divorce of Disney and Pixar, which have since reconciled. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen return to voice Woody and Buzz, who are abused by toddlers in a daycare center, from which the toys plot an escape. The endless geek debate — DC or Marvel? — heats up as DC counters Marvel’s surefire hit Iron Man 2 with Jonah Hex (June 18), a live-action adaptation of the DC comic about a scarred Confederate bounty hunter (Josh Brolin) who must stop a terrorist.

Jay and Mark Duplass’s improv-style comedy Cyrus (June 18) offers John C. Reilly (Step Brothers) as a divorced loser who hooks up with beautiful Molly (Marisa Tomei), who has a large, possessive grown son (Jonah Hill). Tom Cruise’s zany turn in Tropic Thunder established the idea that Cruise can do comedy, and he’s paired with Cameron Diaz in the action comedy Knight and Day (June 25). Cruise plays a secret agent who is saddled with a blind date (Diaz) after she sees him wipe out a planeload of people. The midlife-crisis comedy Grown Ups (June 25) breaks out the pee-in-the-pool jokes, with Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, Rob Schneider and Kevin James as high-school buddies who reunite 30 years later.

The third installment in the wildly successful Twilight series, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (June 30) finds Bella (Kristen Stewart) beset by the usual problems facing high school seniors: whether to choose love with vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) or friendship with his werewolf rival, Jacob (Taylor Lautner). Will the live-action fantasy-adventure The Last Airbender (July 2) mark the hoped-for redemption of M. Night Shyamalan after several recent flops? The visually arresting movie, with postproduction 3D, is adapted from a Nickelodeon cartoon series about a boy trying to stop a war among the four elements.

Universal’s summer animation entry is the 3D Despicable Me (July 9), which sounds like a Cold War rejoinder to Disney/Pixar’s Up. Steve Carell provides the voice of Gru, a curmudgeonly Russian supervillain whose plan to steal the moon is complicated when a trio of orphaned girls choose him as a potential Dad. Predators (July 9), sequel to the 1987 Predator, is the quintessence of the summer movie, with killer aliens, death squads and other seasonal pleasures.

Adrien Brody plays a mercenary who leads a group of elite warriors in a fight against killer extraterrestrials. Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan brings his noir action style to Inception (July 16), with Leonardo DiCaprio as an agent who can enter businessmen’s minds and sell their secrets. Jerry Bruckheimer unveils Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (July 16), which is not another re-release of that dancing-broomsticks cartoon, but a live-action adventure comedy starring Nicolas Cage stars as a shaggy-haired wizard who enlists an NYU physics student (Jay Baruchel) in his battle against rival Alfred Molina.

Pete Townsend is nowhere in sight in The Kids Are All Right (July 23), a winsome comedy starring Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as a lesbian couple whose artificially conceived teenagers seek out their donor dad (Mark Ruffalo.) The prize for Best French-to-Yiddish Translation goes to Dinner for Schmucks, a remake of the 1998 French farce The Dinner Game, in which a group of men hold a weekly dinner party to which each must bring a pathetic loser. The movie stars irresistible Paul Rudd as a rising exec and funny Steve Carell as his “idiot.” The girls of summer triumph again: Angelina Jolie replaced Tom Cruise as the lead in the action thriller Salt (July 23). She plays a CIA superagent who goes on the lam to prove she isn’t a Russian agent.

Step Up 3D (August 6), third installment in the street-dancing franchise, focuses on a group of dancers who compete in a breakdancing showdown. Middle Men August 6), based on a true story, revisits the ’90s dot-com bubble, with Luke Wilson as a businessman who gets rich via Internet porn. Mark Wahlberg teams up with Will Ferrell in the buddy-cop comedy The Other Guys, in which the inept pair try unsuccessfully to emulate tough cops Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson.

The female-friendly season continues as Julia Roberts brings her toothy grin to Eat Pray Love (August 13), based on the Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir about her global travels in search of fulfillment, a book people either adore or deplore for its rampant narcissism (one Amazon customer titled her review “Eat Pray Shove (It).”). Javier Bardem plays the Brazilian with whom Gilbert finds “Love,” after all the eating and praying.

And, after all that estrogen, a little steroid action: The Expendables (August 13), an action thriller about a group of mercenaries hired to overthrow a South American dictator, with an old-school cast: Sylvester Stallone (who also directed and co-wrote), Arnold “Governator” Schwarzenegger, Dolph Ludgren, Steve Austin, Bruce Willis and Mickey Rourke.

In the wake of Kick Ass, other comics about ordinary kids are getting screen treatment:: Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (August 13) becomes a movie starring Michael Cera as a bassist who must defeat his new girlfriend’s seven evil ex-boyfriends in order to win her heart. Jennifer Aniston is a single mom in the romantic comedy The Switch (August 20), in which her friend (Jason Bateman) discovers he’s the real father of her artificially inseminated baby. The low-key Get Low (August 20) features veteran actors Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek and Bill Murray in a Depression-era drama about a Tennessee hermit who holds his own funeral while still alive. Documentarian Nanette Burstein (American Teen) makes her fiction debut with Going the Distance (August 27) an R-rated romp about a couple (Drew Barrymore and Justin Long) coping with a long-distance relationship.

In homage to Jaws, the summer movie that has a lot to answer for, every summer must have something like Piranha 3-D (August 27), with postproduction 3D. The title says it all.

Labor Day weekend seems appropriate for Robert Rodriguez’s Machete (September 3), the feature made from his fake Grindhouse trailer. Danny Trejo plays revenge-seeking Mexican ex-Federale and Robert De Niro as a nativist senator who calls Mexican immigrants “cucarachas.”

A different version of this appears in Cleveland Scene.

Enfant Terrible

2010-05-17T07:30:00.000-07:00

“A SOILED BABY, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty,” said Mark Twain. Beloved as they are, babies are not always adorable or even interesting — they are notoriously poor conversationalists, they don’t smoke, and they seldom give useful stock tips.

Nonetheless, French producer Alain Chabat thought it would be a wonderful idea to make a documentary capturing the first year of life of four babies in different parts of the world, with music, no commentary and minimal dialogue — a sort of wildlife movie about human infancy. “I felt it could be an emotional experience,” Chabat says. “I dreamt of a movie theater audience that would applaud because a baby would stand on their own two feet.” Chabat enlisted Thomas Balmès to direct the movie, which, like its subjects, is alternately endearing, surprising, lovely and maddening. Its most interesting element, the ethnographic comparisons of child-raising practices and culture in Africa, Japan, Mongolia and the U.S., is left largely unexplored, leaving the audience, like an underfed baby, hungry for more.

Digitally shot over a period of two years, followed by another two years of editing, the movie follows four families from the woman’s late pregnancy through their babies’ first year (three of the babies are girls because the “casting” was unpredictable.) The audience is introduced to Ponijaio of Namibia, Africa, Bayar of Mongolia, Hattie of San Francisco, and Mari of Tokyo. Although the babies are doing the things universal to child development — being groomed, crawling, fussing, laughing, harassing surprisingly tolerant pets and being harassed by older siblings, they are doing these things in vastly different settings, and therein lies the movie’s sole interest.

Babies’ beautiful cinematography caresses the plains of Namibia, where little Ponijaio’s mother and eldest daughter, in loincloths and elaborately braided hair, are members of the Himba tribe. The men are off camera somewhere, raising cattle, while the women look after the children in a loving and refreshingly laissez-faire way. The film shows rituals like the shaving of the baby’s head with a sharp knife and washing him with a mixture of red earth pigment and oil that are not explained. Indeed, at times during this mostly word-free movie, you long for the BBC-style announcer to intone, “To clean the dust out of the babies’ eyes, without traveling by donkey or walking for hours to fetch water, the Himba mother uses her own saliva.” It would also be interesting to read subtitles for their lively-sounding native language.

Although Chabot claims the film makes no judgments about any of the families, there are certain implications in the editing. Following the very natural childbirths of Asian and African babies, we meet the American baby in a hospital setting, where newborn Hattie was being monitored for a breathing problem. The parents are almost comically “New Age,” with their parenting books, hot tub and Native American chanting circle. The film emphasizes the noisy chaos of Tokyo, underscoring the point by showing Mari crying amid a group of other daycare babies, a book titled “Where Is My Mommy?” under on the floor nearby. But all the babies are equally cute, sweet, mischievous and loved.

The idea is a lovely one, but unenhanced footage of babies cannot be considered a theatrical event. Even over its short 79-minute running time, the movie becomes as tiresome as your neighbor’s home movies. Midway through, audiences not besotted with the babyness of it all will relate to little Mari, who grows bored with her toys and pitches a solitary fit, lying on her back and kicking her tiny legs in utter frustration.

Originally published in Cleveland Scene, www.clevescene.com.

Life's A Beach And Then You Die

2010-04-06T09:49:00.000-07:00

By Pamela Zoslov

The Last Song represents a collision between two of the more synthetic entities in American popular culture: Nicholas Sparks novels and Disney’s Hannah Montana franchise star Miley Cyrus. It’s hard to say which is worse, Sparks’ predictably sappy, emotionally manipulative writing or the flat, charmless pout that passes for Cyrus’s acting.

Sparks’ winning sentimental formula is by now well known, and at this point in his successful career, he merely rearranges the elements in increasingly random ways. The Windswept Beachfront House. The Regrettable Divorce. The Lovers from Different Worlds. A Packet of Unread Letters. An Amazing Act of Self-Sacrifice. A Lingering But Impossibly Beautiful Death by Cancer. If The Last Song seems even more slipshod than previous Sparks adaptations, it may be because it was commissioned expressly as a star vehicle for Cyrus, then turned into a “novelization.” Co-written by Jeff Van Wie and directed by Julie Anne Robinson, the movie is so unfocused it makes this year’s earlier Sparks adaptation, Dear John, look like Shakespeare.

The story is about a rebellious New York teen named Ronnie (Cyrus) whose mom (Kelly Preston) brings her and her weepy little brother (Bobby Coleman) to spend the summer with Dad (Greg Kinnear) at his Windswept Beachfront House in Tybee Island, Georgia. Dad has little to do but tinker at making a stained-glass window for a church that burned down under suspicious circumstances. Under Dad’s tutelage, Ronnie was a piano prodigy at 5, but since the Regrettable Divorce, she hasn’t played a note. Nonetheless, she has been accepted into Juilliard without even having to audition.

Dressed in black and wearing combat boots on the beach, sullen Ronnie meets Will (real-life boyfriend Liam Hemsworth), a handsome, WASPy volleyball player who takes an inexplicable shine to her, to the chagrin of his rich, uptight mom. Will volunteers at the aquarium, where he takes Ronnie swimming in the fish tanks. Through Will’s transformative love, Ronnie opens her heart, rescues some baby sea turtles, plays some bad New Age piano music, wears a frilly dress to Will’s sister’s fancy wedding, and grows closer to her dad, just in time for….well, I shan’t spoil the rest for you.

Usually there is some redeeming quality in a Sparks movie — nice coastal scenery, Lasse Hallström’s excellent direction in Dear John. In this case it’s Greg Kinnear, who brings a pleasant sincerity to the part of the father. It takes real acting skill to be able to recite with conviction pseudo-profound Sparksian bromides like, “Love is fragile, and we’re not always its best caretakers.”

The movie may raise lumps in the throat among those susceptible, but its appeal is probably limited to young Miley Cyrus fans and diehard devotees of Nicholas Sparks.

The Bounty Hunter

2010-03-25T09:06:00.000-07:00

She hasn’t starred in a good movie since, oh, The Good Girl in 2002. So why is Jennifer Aniston Hollywood’s second highest-paid actress (just behind romantic rival Angelina Jolie)?

You might ponder this during the dull spots in her latest, The Bounty Hunter. I think it’s because despite her Architectural Digest house and compulsively sculpted face, she has an appealing regular-girl charm, amply in evidence in this shambling screwball comedy directed by Andy Tennant.

Aniston plays New York Daily News reporter Nicole Hurley, the kind of journalist found in no newsroom on earth, pursuing hot leads while wearing skin-tight miniskirts and six-inch spike heels. Arrested after a police scuffle, Nicole jumps bail to follow a lead on a murder case. Her ex-husband Milo (Gerard Butler), an ex-cop turned bounty hunter, gets the job of apprehending her. They set off on an acrimonious road trip through Atlantic City that involves Milo locking Nicole into a car trunk, vengeful bookies gunning for Milo, murderous tattoo artists gunning for Nicole, and Milo and Nicole fighting, flirting and contemplating a reunion.

The plot gears grind a little sluggishly, and few sparks are generated between Aniston and Butler, a Scot whose American accent makes him sound like he’s from nowhere. Yet like Aniston, the movie has a redeeming amiability. Sarah Thorp’s screenplay furnishes some laughs, and the zesty supporting cast includes Christine Baranski as Nicole’s mom, a bawdy casino singer, Jason Sudeikis as the nerdy reporter in love with Nicole, and Cathy Moriarty as a ruthless bookie.

Humanity of the Moment

2010-03-08T07:40:00.001-08:00

Click here for more photographs of the human landscape by Pamela Zoslov.

Cop Out

2010-02-26T04:48:00.000-08:00

(Note: I see this movie garnered an abysmal 13% on Rotten Tomatoes. I thought it was pretty darn funny.)

Former indie director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) didn’t write the screenplay for this cop-buddy action comedy starring Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan as hapless NYPD cops; it was written by Robb and Mark Cullen. But you would never know it: the movie is landscaped with Smith’s brand of laid-back, affectionately profane male banter.

Remarkably, in his first foray into this well-worn genre, Smith achieves what many have failed to do: blend action successfully with comedy. Even the most tired cop-movie tropes (the police captain exasperated with the team’s unorthodox methods, the divorced cop dealing with his ex-wife) feel refreshed here. Willis is veteran cop Jimmy Monroe, whose childlike partner, Paul Hodges (Tracy Morgan) is prone to giving Jimmy sentimental anniversary cards and intimidating suspects by reciting dialogue, badly, from famous cop movies. Paul worries about his wife (Rashida Jones) cheating on him, while Jimmy frets about how to pay for his daughter’s wedding. Jimmy’s plan to sell a valuable baseball card is foiled when obnoxious robber Dave (Seann William Scott, very funny) steals it, leading Jimmy and Paul into an underworld of violent Mexican drug dealers.

The action plot is beside the point; the comic byplay is the heart of the movie, which, like most of Smith’s films — and unlike most action movies — is funny, humane and rather sweet.

This appeared originally in Cleveland Scene.

Happy Tears

2010-02-20T05:38:00.000-08:00

The Parent Trap

Two sisters deal with their dad’s dementia in Happy Tears

By Pamela Zoslov

There’s a scene in Happy Tears in which Jackson (Christian Camargo), an art dealer who is going insane, cuts himself, and the spurting blood decorates the canvas of an abstract painting. The scene is a metaphor for the movie, which was written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, son of famed Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein pére bleeds his personal history onto the canvas of this strange, often hilarious film about two sisters dealing with the dementia of their aging dad, Joe (Rip Torn as a randy hell-raiser even closer to reality than we imagined before his recent arrest for armed, drunken after-hours banking).

Named after one of Roy Lichtenstein’s most famous paintings, Happy Tears is informed by Mitchell’s experience, revealed in a Huffington Post interview, as a young man watching his mother lose her mind. (He would come home to find her drunk, sitting with her pet monkey on her shoulder.) He paints himself not only as Jackson, the dealer burdened with the task of managing his famous father’s legacy, but also as Jayne, Jackson’s pampered wife, who resorts to cheerful fantasy rather than face unpleasant realities.

Jayne, played magnificently by Parker Posey, indulges in $2,200 boots and clings to the heroic legends told by guitar-strumming old Joe, who boasts that he could have been a famous singer, has buried treasure in his backyard, and isn’t losing control of his mind and bowels. Her earthier sister Laura (Demi Moore), shoulders the dirty work of cleaning up Joe’s backside and tolerating his lady friend, Shelly (a brilliantly feral Ellen Barkin), a grifter in spike heels posing as a nurse.

Called back from California to the gritty Pittsburgh family home, Jayne drifts in and out of hallucinatory states to escape the realities of Dad’s dementia, Jackson’s fragmenting psyche and her continued infertility, while Laura, a pragmatic environmentalist in peasant blouses, tries to drag her into the real world, where Dad was a philanderer who cheated on “Mommy” for years.

Lichtenstein, whose previous film was the bizarre Teeth, which made literal the “vagina dentata” myth, ornaments this oddly touching family drama with audacious flights of fantasy: a shoe salesman transformed into a giant, predatory bird, Jackson bouncing off padded walls, a crazy backyard treasure hunt. These absurdist sequences, carried off with film-school flamboyance, will not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those who favor smaller, offbeat movies, Happy Tears is a dream movie, graced by a dream cast.

Photography Blog Announcement

2010-02-18T11:22:00.000-08:00

My photographs can now be seen at Humanity of the Moment.

Valentine's Day, the movie

2010-02-15T13:26:00.000-08:00

Never has the importance of opening weekend been more obvious than with the release of this one-day holiday movie, whose success hinges on the idea that women will drag their romance-challenged menfolk to a V-Day comedy. (Pretty clever marketing strategy, at that).

The movie, directed by 75-year-old Garry Marshall (Happy Days, Pretty Woman), is a labored, wheezing affair, with an all-star cast more populous than It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. The idea is a roundelay of relationship stories set in L.A., but there are so many plots, interchangeable actors (Topher Grace and Ashton Kutcher? The two Jessicas, Alba and Biel?) and people in half-written parts (Queen Latifah as a sports agent, Taylor Swift as a lovestruck cheerleader, beautiful Jessica Biel as, unbelievably, a wallflower) that the result is eye-crossing confusion rather than amusement.

The few more or less fully developed stories have Jennifer Garner as a schoolteacher in love with a caddish doctor (Patrick Dempsey), while her dopey florist pal (Kutcher) secretly yearns for her, and Anne Hathaway as a phone-sex worker whose naughty career repels her straitlaced suitor (Grace). (The “phone sex” conceit, which has Hathaway imitating a Southern belle and other characters, gives you an idea of how dated and tired this movie’s tropes are). Hector Elizondo and Shirley MacLaine show up as long-married grandparents spatting over a long-ago affair, and Julia Roberts plays an Army captain who bonds with Bradley Cooper aboard an airplane. Katherine Fugate’s script furnishes too many situations and too few laughs, though I'll give the movie half a point for the unexpected gay twist in a macho character's story.

(A shorter version of this appeared in Cleveland Scene.)

Shoeshine

2010-01-07T07:56:00.000-08:00

A Downtown Winter's Day

2010-01-07T07:50:00.000-08:00

Senior Sexytime

2009-12-29T16:19:00.000-08:00

Writer-director Nancy Meyers specializes in the postmenopausal romantic comedy, in which a fiftyish woman, living in a gorgeous home, revives her flagging sexuality via an awkward liaison with an inappropriate man. In Something’s Gotta Give, Diane Keaton’s uptight authoress succumbed to the charms of Jack Nicholson’s potbellied Lothario, who learned — as all men must in Meyers’ movies — that older women are better than those young things they’ve been chasing. The signature Meyers moment is one of profound sexual embarrassment, as when houseguest Nicholson accidentally walks in on Keaton naked.

Meyer’s latest, It’s Complicated, follows the basic outline but is subtler and more successful. Meyers takes the autumn-romance template, casts it with top talent, soft-pedals the slapstick, and creates a popular audience-pleasing “sex-with-your-ex” romp. Meryl Streep is Jane, divorced for ten years, which she’s spent rebuilding her life, opening a bakery, and planning an addition to her beautiful house (see above). Her nest now empty, Jane confides to her obligatory girlfriend circle (Mary Kay Place, Rita Wilson, Alexandra Wentworth) that she hasn’t dated in years. On a New York trip for her son’s graduation, she has drunken sex with her once-loathed ex, philandering Jake (Alec Baldwin), now married to Agness (Lake Bell), a petulant, fertility-obsessed shrew who insists Jake help raise her bratty tot.

Jane and Jake start an affair, and Jake falls “back in love” with Jane, pining for the family he left behind. Jane glows, then frets, feeling naughty and excited, until she realizes that “other woman” is not a suitable role for her, especially when a real suitor, architect Adam (Steve Martin), is waiting in the wings. (The “Meyers moment” occurs when Jake sends his paunchy naked image via webcam to the wrong person.) Superb casting and a solid script make the movie a considerable improvement over Meyers’ previous efforts. Streep, freed of the requirement to impersonate a nun or Julia Child, is natural and winning. Baldwin, playing an ox-like narcissist, has an endearing vulnerability. Martin is funny and touching in the stock nice-guy role, and John Krasinski has some amusingly awkward moments as Jane’s future son-in-law, who accidentally becomes privy to the affair.

Shermlock Shomes

2009-12-28T16:16:00.001-08:00

One can almost imagine Guy Ritchie as a lad in Hatfield, Hertfordshire England, crouched under the bedclothes reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and thinking, Oh, how I wish Holmes was like Batman, swinging about and smashing the evil-doers!

Ritchie may not have actually had that boyhood wish — his new action-packed Sherlock Holmes was written by others (Michael Robert Johnson and Anthony Peckham) — but he has lent his directing talents to a Holmes that casts Robert Downey Jr. as the cerebral Victorian sleuth, reimagined as a surly, bare-knuckle-brawling bounder. Setting aside the heresy against the sacred Holmes canon, casting Downey was this misbegotten movie’s first mistake. The excellent Downey did intensive research for the role and wields a passable British accent, but he’s too young and contemporary-looking to be a credible Holmes. The next error was rendering insignificant Holmes’ friend and chronicler, Dr. Watson (Jude Law), who spends most of his screen time complaining about Holmes’ violin playing, pistol shooting and experimenting on Watson’s bulldog (the movie’s most charming actor).

The film serves up a mixed stew of hoary Holmesiana, featuring the evil Dr. Moriarty and Holmes’ female nemesis, Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams, dreadful). The plot is some folderol about an occult society whose leader, Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), survives the hangman’s noose and has a plan for (what else?) world domination. Pursuing the case, Holmes and Watson participate in a series of imaginatively staged fight sequences.

Maybe Ritchie and company should be praised for taking Holmes out of the parlour, but really, Holmes should be charming rather than rude, and if he’s going to be an action hero, he might at least be a genteel one. Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Smoking Barrel, Snatch) has a good feel for the English underclass, and the few lively segments are those featuring its denizens (a pipe-smoking gypsy woman, a grizzled boat captain, a crowd at a pit fight improbably featuring a bare-chested Holmes). Overlong and a little unappetizing, this Holmes is unlikely to endear itself either to Holmesians or discriminating action-movie fans (if there is such a creature).

Nevertheless, Ritchie is busily at work on a sequel. Sir Arthur, please telephone your office.

Barbershop

2009-12-07T07:18:00.000-08:00

Barber Shop, Chester Avenue, downtown Cleveland, featuring master stylists Tay and Mafioso. Some Cleveland Cavs players get their haircuts here.

The Lancer Destroyed By Fire

2009-12-07T06:32:00.000-08:00

The Lancer, a landmark Cleveland restaurant and gathering place for the city's black elite, was destroyed by fire early Sunday morning, December 6. The restaurant opened in 1960.

Owner George Dixon says the cause is unknown but "suspicious." He plans to rebuild.

UPDATE: Dixon plans to relocate temporarily to another location while the Lancer is rebuilt.

Father Knows Least

2009-12-04T07:50:00.000-08:00

Everybody’s Fine belongs to the “Old Man Road Trip” movie tradition, in which a retiree, played by an aging A-list actor, embarks on a sentimental, transformative journey. Jack Nicholson has made two, About Schmidt and The Bucket List. This season, it’s 66-year-old Robert De Niro in Everybody’s Fine, directed by Kirk Jones (Waking Ned Devine).

The melancholy movie is based on Giuseppe Tornatore’s Stanno tutti bene, which starred Marcello Mastroianni as a retired Sicilian bureaucrat. Just as dinner at one of Italy’s finest restaurants can’t be replicated by eating at the Olive Garden, the bittersweet enchantment of an Italian film suffers when filtered through the conventions of a Hollywood holiday movie.

De Niro plays Frank, a widower retired after 30 years manufacturing coatings for telephone wires. While Frank prepares for a reunion with his grown children, they each call to say they can’t make it. Impulsively, Frank boards a train to pay surprise visits to his children scattered across the country. Onboard, he shows off a photo of his successful brood: David the artist, Amy the ad executive (Kate Beckinsale), Robert the renowned orchestra conductor (Sam Rockwell), and Rosie the Las Vegas dancer (Drew Barrymore).

On his first stop, New York, Frank finds David missing from his rundown tenement apartment. He heads to Chicago, where Amy, a gorgeous ad executive, is hiding the truth about her marriage and other things. In the Northwest, Frank discovers Robert isn’t an orchestra conductor but a percussionist (though why that’s a bad thing is unclear). Rosie, living in an expensive Vegas apartment, is conducting an elaborate charade as well.

Phone conversations, set against a landscape of telephone lines echoing Frank’s career, reveal that David’s in trouble, and the siblings have agreed not to tell Dad. For years, they confided in their mom, who assured Dad they were all “fine,” because they considered him a demanding taskmaster.

There’s pathos in the kids’ lying to the old man, revealed to him in a dream sequence in which they appear as the children they once were, a magical-realist device better suited to the movie’s Italian progenitor. There are poignant scenes, as when lost David “appears” at his ailing father’s bedside, but generally the movie clicks along on a predictable track, punctuated by a series of sappy pop songs. Secrets are revealed, relationships are healed, all in time to trim the tree.

Mastroianni was touching as the bewildered pensioner in thick eyeglasses telling his dead wife's gravestone that the children are “all fine.” De Niro goes through the same motions, but to far less stirring effect. Maybe because he’s played so many tough guys, or maybe because his goofy expressions cue laughter, not tears, he seems miscast in sentimental roles.

(A different version appeared in the Cleveland Scene.)

Farmer's Market, Saturday Morning

2009-11-19T07:06:00.000-08:00

East 55th St., Cleveland

2009-11-19T06:56:00.000-08:00

Car window capture.

On the Road With Mickey D

2009-11-17T11:30:00.001-08:00

Say what you will about McDonald's, it's the long-distance traveler's friend. It also gives you the opportunity to consider the shifting landscapes and populations as you cross state lines. Below, images from a long, exhausting trek from Ohio to Florida.

Early morning shift, Saturday.

Bus Stop

2009-11-16T07:22:00.001-08:00

Sunday in Canton, Ohio

2009-11-16T06:02:00.000-08:00

Storefront church, downtown Canton. "These are my grandchildren."

Luncthtime, Burger King.

Proprietor, Towne Manor Motel. "People take pictures of that sign all the time."

Happy Family

2009-11-15T07:50:00.000-08:00

A Rags to Britches Story

2009-11-03T06:32:00.000-08:00

Movies have long been a source of fashion inspiration, but movies about clothing design generally don’t wear well. They tend toward the fanciful (the 1956 Funny Face) or the farcical (The Devil Wears Prada, Sex and the City), assaulting the eyes with ridiculous getups pretending to be haute couture.

Unlike the fashion movies that focus on spectacle, Coco Before Chanel, an attractive French biopic about the early years of legendary designer Coco Chanel, is about the origins of style. Writer-director Anne Fontaine’s screenplay illustrates the way Chanel’s hardscrabble early life — she was raised in an orphanage after the death of her mother — informed her practical, accessible fashion ideas. Rejecting the tight corsets, puffy gowns and feathered hats favored in the early 1900s, she pioneered sleek, sophisticated, comfortable clothes: trousers, little black dresses, and her legendary boxy, collarless suit, enhanced by ropes of chains and faux pearls. The clothes were scandalously simple in an era of luxury and excess, and today seem as modern and modish as the day they were created.

Coco, born Gabrielle Chanel in 1883 and taught to sew by nuns in the orphanage, is played by all-purpose gamine Audrey Tautou, who wears an expression of feral determination, with a smile seen only once, when she catches her first glimpse of the sea. Gabrielle acquires her nickname from a popular song about a lost dog that she sang in clubs in Vichy and Moulins (though Chanel, with wry self-awareness, said ‘Coco’ was short for cocotte, the French word for “kept woman.”) After her sister and singing partner Adrienne (Marie Gillain) runs off to Paris with an aristocratic paramour, Coco shows up uninvited at the country estate of her sometime lover, wealthy playboy Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde), who keeps her as a closet concubine, mostly hidden away from his rich friends.

She confounds Balsan with her insistence on restyling his clothes into fetching, man-styled women’s riding outfits. She becomes a designer when Balsan’s actress lover (Emanuelle Devos) notices her cleverness with clothes and enlists her to design her hats and costumes.

Though Chanel had many lovers, she never married, and in the movie, Coco has little use for love, observing that “a woman in love is like a begging dog.” Love does find her briefly, when handsome Englishman Arthur “Boy” Capel (Alessandro Nivola), romances her and breaks her heart, though it quickly recovers when he offers to finance her design business.

Except for a silly scene at the end, in which the mature Chanel oversees a cascade of runway models, the movie doesn’t cover Chanel’s famous years, let alone her notoriety when she was suspected of being a Nazi collaborateur because of an affair with a German officer. Some viewers may wonder why the early life of Coco Chanel should interest them at all. If you're not the kind of person who is dying to learn where Chanel got the idea for horizontal-striped tunics (fisherman she observed at the seashore) or the inspiration for her pioneering use of jersey (Boy’s polo shirts), this is not your movie. For dedicated followers of fashion, it's an interesting, nicely nuanced biography with exquisite, desirable clothes and settings.

Dream Weavers

2009-10-22T07:39:00.000-07:00

In his autobiography, Malcolm X recalled the first time he had his hair chemically straightened with a caustic lye-based solution. “The comb felt as if it was raking my skin off. My eyes watered, my nose was running. I couldn’t stand it any longer; I bolted to the washbasin.” For Malcolm, the wearing of a “conk” — as the chemical process was then known — became a symbol of black self-degradation.

Comedian Chris Rock takes a lighter view of the issue of African-American hair in the documentary Good Hair, which Rock produced and co-wrote with a team including director Jeff Stilson. Rock’s premise is captivating. One day, one of his young daughters asked, “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?”

Weaving together interviews with actresses, models, scientists, stylists, salon patrons, hair-product manufacturers and, amusingly, the Rev. Al Sharpton (who says he modeled his unique look on James Brown), Rock explores the idea that naturally kinky African hair is culturally undesirable, showing the lengths to which black women (and some men) will go to achieve straight, smooth, European-style tresses — “good hair.” Skin-corroding chemicals, labor-intensive hair extensions, entire days and thousands of dollars spent at the salon. When Tyra Banks appeared on her talk show with her “real” hair, it was a step toward exposing what is behind the smooth-haired looks of famous black women. This movie is another.

Rock is an amusing explorer as he examines the components of this mad pursuit of smooth hair. He enlists a scientist to demonstrate, by dissolving an aluminum soda can, the corrosiveness of sodium hydroxide, which is the chemical basis of hair straightener (“nap antidote,” one woman calls it). He travels to India, where he discovers the source of the human hair used in the expensive “weaves” worn by black women: impoverished, devout Hindus, who sacrifice their smooth locks in a head-shaving ritual at the Hindu temple, which then sells the shorn hair. Rock follows the hair as it travels to Los Angeles, where it is more profitable to its traders than gold.

The movie glosses over the socio-cultural implications of hair straightening, preferring to focus on comedy, as when Rock delightedly prods some black barber-shop customers to discuss the problems of having sex with women who wear don’t-touch weaves ("Go for the titties!") It misses a good opportunity to examine the tyranny of “white” beauty standards, and wastes considerable time focusing on a flashy hair-styling competition in Atlanta, in the style of cable reality shows (the movie was produced by HBO).

But Chris Rock isn’t Malcolm X (or even Spike Lee), so it's best not to lament what's not here. The movie is best appreciated for what it is: a highly entertaining look at a seldom-explored cultural phenomenon.

Father Knows Mess

2009-10-16T12:32:00.000-07:00

It’s funny how the movies will change a person. Consider Simon Carr, a political columnist for Britain’s The Independent, whom former Prime Minister Tony Blair once called “the most vicious sketch writer working in Britain today.” (A sketch writer is a kind of Parliamentary verbal cartoonist.)

Yet it’s not his scabrous political opinions that bring Carr to the screen, but a touching memoir he wrote about his life as a widowed father raising his young son and older boy from a previous marriage. The book, with the Thin Lizzyish title The Boys are Back in Town, is a sort of wry parenting manual for the hopelessly messy. It is the inspiration of the lovely film The Boys are Back, directed by Australian Scott Hicks (Shine). Through cinematic alchemy, the paunchy, balding Carr has been transformed into impossibly handsome Clive Owen, who plays Joe Warr, an English sportswriter living in Australia.

Joe’s beloved ex-equestrian wife (Laura Fraser) dies of cancer, leaving Joe alone to raise 6-year-old Artie (Nicolas McAnulty). Overwhelmed by his unaccustomed responsibilities and Artie’s inconsolable grief, Joe determines to say “yes” to every childish request, no matter how silly or inconvenient, and to approach housekeeping with casual indifference. Let Artie steer the truck? Yes! Can he put on wet clothes directly from the clothesline? Why not?

The increasingly disheveled all-male household is expanded when Joe’s adolescent son, Harry (George MacKay), who lives in England with Joe’s ex-wife, joins them, bringing along a case of culture shock and unresolved feelings of paternal abandonment.

The movie is achingly sad at times, and in lesser hands might have been a mawkish mess. But there is exceptional talent at work here. Allan Cubitt’s screenplay preserves much of Carr’s real-life dialogue and is subtle enough to make events like the occasional reappearance of Joe’s dead wife seem completely natural. Owen’s taciturn demeanor is well suited to a man trying to keep his emotions under control, McAnulty is cheekily adorable without being cloying, and MacKay is persuasive as conflicted prep-schooler Harry. Scott Gray’s rhythmic editing is remarkably effective, and cinematographer Greig Fraser, who also made Jane Campion's Bright Star so pretty, paints the Australian countryside with a lively, luminous palette.

Tropic Blunder

2009-10-14T13:23:00.000-07:00

It’s axiomatic that an exotic tropical setting will not save a bad movie.

In Couples Retreat, written by the Swingers team of Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, the best moments come before its four couples arrive at their island paradise. Hyper-organized Jason and Cynthia (Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell), troubled by infertility, persuade their friends, via an amusing Power Point presentation, to join them at Eden West, a partnership-renewal retreat. The other couples — Joey and Lucy (Favreau and Kristin Davis), Dave and Ronnie (Vaughn and Malin Akerman) and divorced Shane (Faizon Love) and 20-year-old girlfriend Trudy (Kali Hawk) — are compelled to participate in therapy and absurd activities like swimming in shark-infested waters and yoga that involves a hunky instructor dry-humping the ladies. The high point in lowness is the scene in which Favreau tries to connive a masseuse into giving him "full release." Embarrassing!

What might have been an amusing domestic comedy or sharp satire of marriage-therapy schemes disintegrates into a scattershot collection of unfunny, unsexy sex jokes and curiously stale references (Fabio, Chewbacca, Mr. Belvedere) by a largely charisma-free cast. Vaughn and Favreau reverse their Swingers roles, with Vaughn playing the nice, devoted husband who, in one of the funny male-banter scenes that are the movie’s saving grace, warns Favreau’s horny Joey that if he keeps chasing tail, he’ll end up eating alone at Applebee’s. A mildly funny jape, but hardly worth the price of admission, or the two hours or so you'll never retrieve.

Lie Defector

2009-10-06T08:33:00.000-07:00

The winning comedy The Invention of Lying, directed, co-written by and starring Ricky Gervais (Ghost Town, Britain’s The Office), imagines a world in which falsehood doesn’t exist and everyone always tells the truth. They don’t know how to do otherwise: in this alternate universe, lies, fiction, irony, imagination and even social niceties are unknown. Daily life is a harsh landscape of unfiltered admissions (“I loathed almost every moment I worked for you”), and rude insults (“You’re fat and have a snub nose”). Advertising is limited to true, mundane assertions (“Coke: It’s Very Famous. Pepsi, When They Don't Have Coke.”) It's a terribly depressing world, this world without lies.

The movie hilariously illustrates the pitfalls of such congenital truthiness in the opening scenes, in which pudgy Mark Bellison (Gervais) calls on pretty Anna (Jennifer Garner) for a blind date. She bluntly states her disappointment in his looks; a waiter serves their cocktails saying, “I had a little sip of this.” When Mark, a screenwriter for a company that makes boring historical documentaries – the only kind of movies that exist in this truthy universe, like “The History of the Fork” and Mark’s downfall, “The Black Plague” -- is fired because his true stories are too -- well, true. He's about to be evicted from his apartment, and in desperation has a sudden impulse to lie in order to get extra money from his bank. As the world’s only man who can lie, Mark decides to use his newfound power to get rich and win Anna, who likes money quite a lot but still finds him insufficiently handsome (not a good “genetic match” for creating the attractive children she requires).

The movie ventures into religious satire as Mark is called upon to comfort his dying mother and “invents” a story about paradise in the afterlife. This makes him an accidental new messiah, a phenomenon that culminates in his delivering a kind of Sermon on the Mount with delivery-pizza boxes as tablets. The movie is sprinkled with droll lines, marvelous visual gags (a nursing home’s with a sign reading “A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People”), mild Pythonesque routines and amusing small roles for Tina Fey, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jonah Hill and Jason Bateman.

Although the movie doesn’t know quite what to do with its good premise and sags considerably after its brilliant opening, it’s still a thoughtful, original and funny movie that blends English humor and American romantic comedy in a refreshing way. Of course most people I know will hate it, but I liked it quite a lot.

The Lesser Barrymore

2009-10-06T07:43:00.000-07:00

Drew Barrymore makes her directing debut with this girl-power action comedy, a sort of Kansas City Bomber meets Juno. The movie is based on Shauna Cross’s clever young-adult novel Derby Girl, in which Bliss, a 17-year-old bored with her small-town Texas life and beauty pageant-obsessed mother, secretly joins a women’s roller-derby team in Austin.

The premise has abundant appeal, especially for adolescent girls, and with Juno star Ellen Page, a 22-year-old actress blessed with convincing teenage looks, a relentless retro-rock soundtrack and lots of derby action, the movie should have been irresistible. But it's a flabby affair, with a weak script unhelped by inexperienced direction. Cross, a former derby skater, adapted her own book, yet strangely, much of its wit was lost in translation. Page's acting is fine, but her pretty, slender looks make her a wildly unlikely derby champ (Juliette Lewis, as Bliss's hard-bitten rival, is more persuasive), and emphasize the silliness of the notion of bone-breaking roller derby as a self-empowerment strategy for teen girls. You're not supposed to side with her disapproving parents (Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern), but you do: you worry about their cute teenage daughter getting permanently maimed in a ridiculous "sport." Neither are you persuaded that this sardonic, combat-boot-wearing girl would last for one moment on the beauty pageant circuit, no matter how vigorous her mom's machinations.

The team Bliss skates with is called the Hurl Scouts, and they compete in short little Girl Scout uniforms: the soft-porn element of roller derby is mostly unexplored but is never far from awareness. Like the underdog Hurl Scouts, Whip It rallies briefly in the stretch with some strong scenes in which Bliss makes amends to her deceived mom (helped by the fact that Marcia Gay Harden brings so much dimension to the part) and betrayed best girlfriend Pash (Alia Shawkat). The unevenness suggests that had Barrymore focused less on music, makeup and mayhem and more on real storytelling, the movie could have been a resounding success. As it is, many will enjoy it for the spectacle, and the hell with the story.

Between Pity and Scorn

2009-09-21T08:28:00.000-07:00

Do you ever feel sorry for inanimate objects? I do. I have suffered from this inconvenient tendency since childhood. Poor forgotten teddy bear, nobody loves him anymore. Poor old streetlamp, so lonely. Aw, look at the cheap little toys. Some nice grandma will buy these for her grandchildren, with joy and expectation, and they will hate them. These days I feel much sadder for suffering animals and people than I do for things, but sometimes I feel sorry for movies, the ones that mean well and have good qualities but are horribly trampled by critics. I even found Ishtar pretty funny, the more so because it was famously reviled. It is pure contrarianism, the same that makes me hate with extra zest an overpraised faux-independent snarkfest like Juno.

As Barack Obama would say, let’s be clear: it’s not the movies themselves I feel sorry for but the people behind them, who put so much hope, work and money into a new release. With an epic failure like Heaven’s Gate, the schadenfreude is deserved; with a smaller movie with imperfections, I sometimes want to say “good try!”

Lately, my childhood pity affliction has flared up something awful, and I feel compelled to defend unjustly maligned movies. A few years ago, I was laughed at by the host of a radio show where I was on a movie-critic panel. I said something about having sort of liked Swing Vote, the Kevin Costner movie that critics had abjured in unison. Having read a local newspaper reviewer’s enraged review, my friend and I decided to see it and perform what we now call a “rescue job.” We found the little movie about a down-and-out man who improbably becomes the lone deciding vote in a presidential election a gentle, likeable comedy, a kind of minor-league Preston Sturges fable. Nothing spectacular, and surely not Oscar fodder, if you care about that crap, but what had this modest movie done to provoke so much scorn?

The radio host snorted into the microphone. “No, really. Swing Vote?” He hadn’t seen the movie, but...Kevin Costner! Waterworld Kevin Costner. I was never asked back to sit on the panel. I don’t know if there was any connection between my embarrassing admission and my ouster, but clearly I wasn't the right type.

Recently my friend and I did a rescue job on the Sandra Bullock movie All About Steve. My friend didn’t know that it had been crushed to bits by reviewers, and when I told him, he was mystified. The movie, which stars Bullock as a socially awkward, super-smart crossword-puzzle constructor who becomes insanely obsessed with a news cameraman she met on a blind date, was a pleasant little fable, with many charms and flaws. It resides in the same neighborhood as quirky-protagonist movies like Lars and the Real Girl or the overlooked Wristcutters, movies I like because they play like celluloid short stories.

So what was it that made the critics hate All About Steve so vehemently? Is it because they expect something more slick and commercial from Bullock, who also produced this cinematic white elephant? Is it because she looks strange in the movie, with blonded hair, orangey-tanned skin, micro-miniskirts and unfortunate cosmetic surgery that betrays her age? Is it because they dislike smart women? The odd look is integral to the character, an introvert who lives with her parents, converses with her hamster and engages in a nonstop monologue about definitions, puzzles and an encyclopedic collection of facts. She's the kind of character who tends not to win friends, either in the movies or in real life.

I guess I am attracted to movies about unpopular, misunderstood misfits. It is the story of my life.

Florida Flea Market

2009-09-11T14:48:00.000-07:00

Harmonica Man

2009-09-07T12:54:00.001-07:00

Flea Market, Oldsmar, Florida.

Water Workers Strike

2009-07-27T04:37:00.000-07:00

Picketers outside the Baldwin Filtration Plant on Fairhill Road. Ninety Cleveland water plant workers went on strike July 17 after failing to reach a new contract agreement with the city. The union is seeking a retroactive 2 percent pay raise going back to 2007.

Mayor Frank Jackson called the demands unreasonable. Union President Frank Madonia says other city workers have received the same raise. (Photograph by Pamela Zoslov)

It ain’t quite this simple, so I better explain
Just why you got to ride on the union train;
‘Cause if you wait for the boss to raise your pay,
We’ll all be waiting till Judgment Day;
We’ll all he buried -- gone to Heaven --
Saint Peter’ll be the straw boss then.

-- excerpt, "Talking Union Blues" by Millard Lampell, Lee Hayes and Pete Seeger

A Bouquet for Obama

2009-07-24T05:00:00.000-07:00

Having waited in the rain for President Obama's motorcade, a woman is overwhelmed after catching a glimpse of the President's limousine.

Shaker Heights, Ohio, July 23, 2009.

Who Is This "Barry Serento"

2009-07-23T15:22:00.001-07:00

And why do they want him to go home?

Protesters awaiting a visit by President Obama, July 23, Shaker Heights, Ohio.

UPDATE: Hooray, the hilarious website Wonkette has posted the above picture! Thanks, Wonkette.

Square to Square

2009-07-21T05:02:00.000-07:00

Midsummer Days' Dreams

2009-07-18T07:01:00.000-07:00

A Passion Ploy

2009-07-17T06:02:00.001-07:00

Before Neda, the young woman who bled to death before the world’s eyes during post-election protests in Iran, there was Soraya, a 35-year-old mother of seven who was stoned to death on trumped-up adultery charges in 1980s Iran, during the reign of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Soraya’s supposedly true story was told in French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam’s novel The Stoning of Soraya M.

The book has been adapted into an unrelievedly grim movie by Cyrus Nowrasteh, who wrote the screenplay with his wife. James Caviezel plays Sahebjam, whose car breaks down, conveniently, in a remote Iranian village, where the desperate, chador-draped Zahra (Shohreh Aghdashloo), tells him about the killing the previous day of her niece, Soraya (Mozhan Marnò). Soraya's terrible story then unfolds in flashback.

Soraya is married to the abusive Ali (Navid Negahban), a corrupt prison guard who wants to divorce Soraya so he can marry a 14-year-old girl. Although polygamy is allowed under Sharia law, Ali hopes to avoid supporting Soraya financially. When Soraya takes a job housekeeping for a local widower, Ali seizes the opportunity to accuse her of adultery, a crime punishable by death. Complicit in the scheme are the village’s corrupt mullah and mayor, who subvert Sharia jurisprudence to justify murder. Dressed in angelic white, brave Soraya meets her awful fate -- stoning by an angry mob that includes, incredibly, her husband, her father and her young sons. Although the movie is set in the Islamic world, Soraya is depicted as the perfect Christian martyr. After she has been battered to a bloody pulp, the evil husband notices there is still movement in her eye. "The bitch lives!" he shouts, exhorting the crowd to finish the job. Clearly this is a movie designed to inflame the emotions.

The timing of the movie's release, while neoconservative hawks continue to beat the drums for military intervention in Iran, raises suspicion that it is a skillful piece of anti-Muslim propaganda. Its producers are the folks who brought you similar religioso-sadistic thrills in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (Caviezel was Passion’s bloody Jesus), and Nowrasteh’s résumé includes a TV miniseries that twisted history to blame Clinton for 9/11. The movie has been embraced as proof of Islam’s inhumanity by Watergate crook-turned-evangelical-Christian Chuck Colson, who provides links to "ministry resources based on the film." Colson writes: "This is barbarism. And it's the result of a belief system that ignores the humanity of every person. This is why Christians, who believe in the sanctity of every human life created in the image of God" -- unlike those heathenic Muslims -- "must fight and keep fighting for the rights of women like Soraya." Amnesty International, the human rights group, has denounced the movie as sensationalism, writing on the Huffington Post: "Aside from the numerous inaccuracies and implausibilities, the climax of the film -- a bloody and prolonged stoning scene with villagers pelting the victim -- is so sensationalized that the audience response is likely to be disgust and revulsion at Iranians themselves, who are portrayed as primitive and blood-thirsty savages."

There can be little doubt that The Stoning of Soraya M. has a crypto-political purpose, and a not very subtle one at that. It should be approached with the utmost skepticism.

Shorter version at www.clevescene.com.

Dusk to Dawn

2009-07-11T08:13:00.000-07:00

On the Square

2009-07-08T06:32:00.000-07:00

Horns 'n' Things concert, Shaker Square, July 4.

At Least They Don't Call Her a "Cougar"

2009-07-07T06:43:00.000-07:00

After devouring Colette’s 1920 novel Chéri, André Gide sent the authoress a breathless note. “What intelligence, what mastery, what understanding of those least admitted secrets of the flesh!” Proust was also a fan.

If you have not read the novel, or its sequel, The Last of Chéri, and saw only the new Stephen Frears adaptation, you might wonder what the fuss was about. The film is exquisitely produced, like all of Frears’ films (The Queen, Dirty Pretty Things), but the novel has lost much of its spirit and charm in the translation. Set in 1912 Paris, Chéri is the story of Léa de Lonval (Michelle Pfeiffer), a retired courtesan who takes up with beautiful, spoiled playboy Fred (Rupert Friend), 19, nicknamed “Chéri” by Léa, whom he calls “Nounoune.” Their affair lasts six years, until Chéri’s mother, mercenary ex-courtesan Madame Peloux (heartily played by Kathy Bates), marries him off to the wealthy young Edmée (Felicity Jones).

Both Léa, who worries about her fading beauty, and Chéri, who cares little for anyone but himself, realize too late that theirs was a genuine, if impossible love. (Interestingly, Colette, at 42, later seduced her 16-year-old stepson, a case of life imitating art.) The movie’s Belle Epoque settings are lovely: art nouveau furnishings, ravishing costumes, enhanced by Darius Khondji’s fine cinematography. But it’s hard to look past the casting of Pfeiffer, possibly the last actress you would think of for a French courtesan. Pfeiffer emotes valiantly, but her slender California beauty and disturbingly unlined forehead do not suggest a voluptuous, aging concubine, or a Frenchwoman of any kind (though Frears also cast her as one in Dangerous Liaisons). Friend, on the other hand, is perfectly cast as the narcissistic Chéri.

Screenwriter Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Atonement) preserves much of the book’s arch dialogue and adds a healthy dose of eroticism, but without the benefit of Colette’s ironic narration, the story seems trivial and unsympathetic. The movie, while aesthetically charming, does not demonstrate why this story is worth telling, much less why Colette said she had “never written anything as moral.”

Independence Day

2009-07-05T07:55:00.001-07:00

Curb Your Expectations

2009-07-01T04:50:00.000-07:00

As an actor, Larry David is a great comedy writer. His blunt, declamatory line readings on Curb Your Enthusiasm make you appreciate how well Jason Alexander channeled David’s neuroses on Seinfeld. Surprisingly, David is a pretty serviceable Woody Allen surrogate in Allen’s latest, Whatever Works, which finds Allen on New York home turf after a string of movies set in England and Spain. Casting about for a new movie, Allen dusted off and updated a script he wrote in the’70s for Zero Mostel.

The great Zero is long dead, so we have David as Boris Yellnikov, the misanthropic ex-physicist who rants against everything from religion to love and dismisses most human beings as “incompetent morons” and “inchworms.” “The basic teachings of Jesus and Karl Marx — all great ideas with one fatal flaw,” he declaims. “The fallacious notion that people are fundamentally decent.” The persona is as familiar as a cranky old friend, and while Woody is still best at inhabiting it, David is far from the worst fit — that honor would go to Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity, hands down.

The story is a sporadically funny farce centering on Boris, a divorced hermit who walks with a limp after a failed suicide attempt (he hit a canopy after jumping out a window) and spends his days waxing philosophical with his friends (Michael McKean, Adam Brooks, Lyle Kanouse) and teaching chess to children, which provides the opportunity for funny scenes of Boris verbally abusing the kids.

One night Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood), a pretty teenage runaway from the South, appears at the doorstep of his dismal apartment. Boris, who has given up even on sex, is reluctant to take her in, but schools her in his obsessions and attitudes, which she adopts with precision. He marries the girl, and her honeyed optimism has a tonic effect on him. The farce cranks up when Melodie’s mother, Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) arrives, her Bible Belt faith providing a target for Boris’ unending derision. Manhattan is seductive to Marietta, who transforms herself into a bohemian artiste. Her estranged husband (Ed Begley Jr.), comes looking for her and finds a new identity in the big city as well. As always with Allen’s romances, the young woman tires of her cranky, neurotic older mate, and a series of un-couplings and re-couplings occur. The redemptive finale, reminiscent of Hannah and Her Sisters, is unexpectedly uplifting.

We could quibble for days over Allen’s recurrent themes of older males romancing inappropriately young females (a scene in which Boris sits with the camisole-clad girl watching Fred Astaire on TV is iconic), and admittedly it’s a strange fixation in art and in life. Some people still have not forgiven him for what they perceive as his sins, but his attitude is reasonably expressed by the movie’s title.

(A shorter version of this appeared on the Cleveland Scene website.)

Suburban Fair

2009-06-29T07:46:00.000-07:00

Track Meet

2009-06-24T06:23:00.000-07:00

Sexual Congress

2009-06-18T06:48:00.000-07:00

The gayest town in America, according to Outrage, the new documentary by Kirby Dick, is not San Francisco, or New York, or even Fire Island. It’s Washington, D.C., the “most gay, most closeted place” in the U.S. Among the movie’s many revelations is that Capitol Hill is “packed with gay staffers.” Gay men, presumably because they have fewer family obligations, work around the clock to keep the nation’s capital running on time. (Dick previously directed This Film Is Not Yet Rated, an exploration of the movie ratings system.)

Outrage is about "outing" — the public exposure of the secret gay lives of public figures — and, and about rage, the deep well of anger among gay activists at the hypocrisy and betrayal of the closet. The film is a gutsy piece of advocacy, boldly detailing the private peccadilloes of closeted politicians, most of whom are prominent “family values” Republicans.

Most of the politicians are well practiced in deflecting and denying rumors about their sexuality, often waving them off by saying, "When you're in the public eye, people say things about you." (Yes, yes, people will talk and all that.) “I am not gay, I don’t do those kinds of things,” protests Larry Craig, the toe-tapping Idaho Republican senator after being arrested for soliciting an undercover officer in a Minneapolis airport restroom. For all we know he truly believes he isn't, despite the movie’s ample and rather tawdry evidence of Craig’s subterranean sex life. Outrage is unapologetically prurient. A leather-jacketed man recites the explicit details of his liaison with Craig, who picked him up at a gay club. After sex, Craig stuffed a $20 bill in the man’s pocket and growled, “Remember, you never saw me.” (Evidently, twenty bucks doesn’t buy everlasting silence.)

Among those interviewed are Michelangelo Signorile, the former OutWeek gossip columnist who launched the “outing” trend in the 1980s with exposés of closeted media and entertainment figures, including a famous postmortem outing of billionaire Malcolm Forbes; former New Jersey governor James McGreevey, who resigned after admitting an affair with an adviser, and who now lives happily with a male partner; McGreevey's wronged wife, who claims her husband ruined her life; openly gay Democratic members of Congress Barney Frank and Tammy Baldwin; various bloggers and print journalists working to expose gay politicians like Florida Governor and future presidential hopeful Charlie Crist, who conveniently married a woman shortly before John McCain chose his vice presidential candidate; and ACT UP activist Larry Kramer, who calls living in the closet “collusion with genocide.”

The exposing of private sexual behavior is an uncomfortable and unsavory business, fraught with difficult ethical questions. Years ago, when I was editing news stories, I argued, mostly unsuccessfully, to prevent publication of a gossipy, and in my opinion irrelevant item about a local politician who was spotted at a gay club. But Outrage makes a strong case for transparency, arguing that when it comes to the law and human rights, the private is public, the personal political. The issue isn’t homosexuality, but hypocrisy; the closeted legislators under scrutiny are those with solid records of voting “No” on such issues AIDS funding, same-sex marriage, hate crime legislation and gays in the military. Barney Frank, who came out after 15 years in office, articulately explains why openness is essential to good policy: “People who make the laws should be subject to the laws.” Those who aren't, Frank says, tend to make harsh laws.

So why do these men, like the Roy Cohns before them, attack in public what they do in private? Denial, self-hatred, and an inclination, described in the film by a psychologist, to align oneself with aggressors. Signorile describes this well-known behavior as “bashing other gay people to prove they’re not gay.”

Outrage contains many sensational revelations, some of them completely gratuitous (was it really necessary to target Shep Smith, the one relatively moderate anchor on Fox News?). Sensationalism aside, the film is a well-argued, searing exploration of the pernicious effects, both personal and political, of the closet. It also raises the curtain on something we have long suspected: that politics and media are a façade, a pageant played out for public consumption. As one interviewee says, “Politics is like a Broadway show. Everything is scripted.”

Whatever you think about the practice of "outing," this is something you must remember, always.

Shorter version: Cleveland Scene.