Brandon's movie memory

A wacky new alternate-history sci-fi film from the writer of Saddest Music in the World. No, not really – it’s a new lovingly-crafted drama about repressed love from the writer of Remains of the Day. I was surprised to see Kazuo Ishiguro credited for Saddest Music – his original screenplay is unpublished, but I found a Maddin quote, calling the source a political satire, “a story about how Third World countries can survive only by losing all their dignity, or keep their dignity by panhandling in a very clever way.”

Mark One Hour Photo Romanek directs with sunlit fatalism. The kids at boarding school come to realize that they’ve been bred for organ-harvesting a la Parts: The Clonus Horror, but instead of public exposure and revolution, the most they hope to attain is a couple extra years with the clone they love before their fatal surgeries. Politically (because all sci-fi is political) it seems like an “every life has a soul” message, examining the consequence of creating life in a lab to help current humanity without considering that new life’s own worth.

Keira Knightley mostly plays the cool and collected one, but gets to try on some of the histrionics she’d perfect in A Dangerous Method. Carey Mulligan (less deadly-cute than in Drive) is so in love with Andrew Garfield (least interesting cast member of both Social Network and Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus) that for a while it seems like they’ll find a way out. Charlotte Rampling (the awful, awful mother in Melancholia) keeps the kids in place, and Sally Hawkins (same year as Submarine) fails to bring enlightenment and rip the system.

Buy from Amazon:
Never Let Me Go [Blu-ray]

This is one of my favorite things – I went back and watched it again, to be positive. Goddard (wrote Cloverfield, worked on Lost and Buffy) and producer Whedon (who is having a big month) manage to make it seem easy, blending horror and comedy, movie and meta-movie more excitingly than Scream did, forming a sort of horror-movie construction-kit. It gradually reveals its scheme while telling us why this is all necessary, and when the stock characters realize that they’re stock characters and break out of the model, they knowingly and misanthropically unleash Lovecraftian armageddon.

The Virgin: Kristen Connolly

L-R:
The Scholar: Jesse Williams of Grey’s Anatomy
The Athlete: Chris “Thor” Hemsworth
The Slut: yellow power ranger Anna Hutchison
The Fool: Fran Kranz of Whedon’s Dollhouse

Not pictured: Richard Jenkins and West Wing star Bradley Whitford push the buttons manipulating our stock characters to their doom. Brian White (IMDB specifies that he’s their 34th Brian White) is the new guy, Amy Acker (also Dollhouse) runs the chem department, and an uncredited Sigourney Weaver runs the whole show.

Writer/director Goddard:

The truth is, this movie does comment on a horror movie, but that wasn’t our goal. We wanted to comment more on who we are and what part horror plays in us as a people. If you keep that in your sights the whole time, it’s easier to find the balance, because then your movie is just becoming about commenting on the human condition and not worrying too much about, “What is this saying about the genre or the films?” It’s much more just, “What are we saying in general?” That’s the sort of thing you have to hold firm to.

Adam Scott and writer/director/producer Westfeldt are good people, good friends, but unlucky in love. Will they end up together? Of course they will, but hold on a sec. Their friends (madly-in-lust couple Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig, and more laid-back couple Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd) are having kids, and Scott and Westfeldt also want kids – everybody does! So they decide to have a kid, but as friends, since they’re not in love obviously, and share parenting duties. And they’re very good at it. Will they end up together? Of course they will, but hold just a sec, movie would only be 40 minutes long.

Scott likes Megan Fox, who doesn’t like kids because she must be some kind of sexy sociopath. And Westfeldt likes Edward Burns, who loves kids and already has a couple of ‘em. Things are getting serious, but wait a sec, weren’t Scott and Westfeldt supposed to end up together? Well, they do.

Lightly likeable movie, better than Bridesmaids, with which it shares half its cast. Our writer/producer/director/star also wrote/produced/directed/starred in Kissing Jessica Stein and Ira & Abby.

AV Club:

All three films ask intriguing questions about whether it’s really necessary to stand by familiar models of romance, and whether people are better off writing their own rules. And all three use comedy to avoid getting message-heavy, and emotional stakes to avoid being empty fluff. But Westfeldt has a tendency to go over the top, and Friends With Kids in particular has a shrill, smug edge that kills the comedy and the drama alike. …
The film’s biggest weakness is that their logic is ludicrous, and the script doesn’t justify it, except by depicting them as right at every turn. Nonsensically, and without explanation, their lack of romantic expectations for each other lets them juggle ambitious careers, busy dating lives, and parenthood with the grace and ease that’s escaped all their disintegrating friends.

Elizabeth Olsen (hot younger sister of the babies from Full House – god, I’m old) is Martha, renamed Marcy May by the charismatic leader of the commune she joins (played by janitor John Hawkes of Contagion). She leaves/escapes and stays with her older sister (Sarah Paulson of Down With Love) and the sister’s rich, impatient new husband (Hugh Dancy of Rwanda movie Beyond the Gates) at their vacation home. And almost as soon as she gets to their place, I’m thinking she was better off at the commune. She seemed more respected there – besides the rape, obviously.

The past and present come together in pieces – gradually revealing details in a natural way. But what I don’t get is Marcy’s disassociative sense of reality. Other than during her rape-initiation, I didn’t get the feeling that the girls were being drugged at the commune, nor did we get any sense of hypnotism or other psychological conditioning. I figured from the trailer that there’d be some Holy Smoke-style cult-deprogramming going on, but it seemed less like a typical religious-fervor cult than a free-love commune of young people who turn to crime when their farming plans fall through. Nice scare at the end as the unhappy family leaves their vacation house for the city, being followed by cultists – or are they really?

Amother the others in the commune: friz-haired young Sarah (Julia Garner of the illogically titled The Last Exorcism 2) and Brady Corbet (guy who has golf-course sex with the bride in Melancholia, Michael Pitt’s killer bro in the Funny Games remake). Same capable cinematographer as Tiny Furniture. Durkin made a related short called Mary Last Seen, which is on the DVD but I didn’t watch, and helped produce a couple of Antonio Campos movies.

bad option 1:

Lots of good quotes, positive and negative, in the Mubi roundup – I liked this one from K. Uhlich: “A lesser movie might hammer home the idea that the cult squashes Martha’s sense of self. This distinctive and haunting effort implies something much scarier: that there is no self to start with.”

bad option 2:

A. Tracy in Cinema Scope:

[the film's beginning: a couple commune scenes then Marcy escapes and is caught by Brady Corbet at a diner] neatly throws the viewer off balance a few times over and stakes out the film’s formalist ground: an alternation between distanced observation and intense subjectivity, milking the disorientation and perceptual shifts of the latter to cast a pall of nameless but omnipresent dread over the former. … Omitting any (organized) religious element to Patrick’s bastardized pseudo-philosophy – an immediate red flag for the Blue State audiences that will largely be the ones seeing this film – Durkin allows the horror to emerge gradually, both dramaturgically and formally. …
Despite Olson’s sensitive performance, the frission between the communally indoctrinated Martha and the yuppified Lisa rarely ascends beyond the level of easy caricature … It’s thus that, despite its well-learned manoeuvres, Martha Marcy May Marlene remains solidly within the genre territory that Haneke takes as a departure point in Les temps du loup or Cache, ultimately having little to say about its charged subjects beyond the sum of its largely well-turned effects.

Buy from Amazon:
Martha Marcy May Marlene blu-ray

Portlandia season 1 (2011)

Carrie Brownstein is funny! Who knew? Wonderful show, as long as it doesn’t interfere with Wild Flag. Highlights: anything involving mayor Kyle MacLachlan or the women’s bookstore (customers include Steve Buscemi, Aubrey Plaza and Heather Graham), housekeeper Aimee Mann and the opening theme song.

Delocated season 1 (2009)

Was prompted to watch this after hearing a Hanukkah recording in which Jon Glaser sings through a flat voice modulator. I didn’t get it. So now I do. Kinda low-key show with a single season-long story (not a sketch show) in which Jon and family are in witness protection and starring in a reality show about it. Eugene Mirman is assigned to find and murder Jon Glaser, and ends up with a reality show of his own. Mirman only manages to kill Paul Rudd in the first episode, Michael Shannon in the last, and some bystanders in between. Glaser’s relationship with his bodyguard Kevin Dorff seems more important to him than his own wife, so the marriage doesn’t last, but he meets a new girl when he opens a business where people can pay to smash things with a bat.

Steve Albini cameo:

Important Things With Demetri Martin season 1 (2009)

Things: timing, power, brains, chairs, safety, coolness, games.
Very simple-looking, but smart and hilarious show.
Jon Benjamin is a regular.

30 Rock season 5 (2010-11)

KableTown buys the network, Baldwin has a baby with Elizabeth Banks, Tina breaks up with Matt Damon, Kenneth leaves then returns, Tracy leaves then returns (and his wife gets a reality show), Jenna is in love with cross-dressing Will Forte, Will Arnett returns as Baldwin’s nemesis and Margaret Cho plays Kim Jong-Il.

It wasn’t as good as season 4.

Buy from Amazon:
Portlandia blu/DVD
Delocated DVD
Important Things DVD

“I saw that your dyslexic stripper video got like 400 hits!”

An inventively well-shot movie with mostly static camera, the opposite of the handicam mumblecore thing I’d expected. Apparently most people can’t tell one kind of movie from another, so Criterion enlisted Paul Schrader to explain exactly how this is not a mumblecore movie, and they also put writer/director/star Lena Dunham in a room to converse with Nora Ephron – an unlikely but pleasing set of extras. I liked the movie more than I expected to, and kept liking it more after it ended. A good comedy that never acts outright comedic – not overwritten, with flawed characters who are obviously not idiots, just people with real problems dealing with ordinary life.

Lena at left, with skeptical-looking friend:

P. Lopate: “Lena Dunham’s work is related to this mainstream comedy of embarrassment, but she takes it one bold step further, producing a much more subtle and sophisticated comedy of chagrin. And in Dunham’s world, there is no happy ending, only an enlightened realism.”

Looks like a Dylan album cover:

Lena plays “Aura,” back in NYC after college in Ohio, and casts her actual mom and sister as her mom and sister, which makes some of the character conversations even more awkward/hilarious if you think about it. Aura sabotages her relationship with her college-best-friend Merritt Wever (hotel girl in that short The Strange Ones) and falls back in with her NYC best-friend Jemima Kirke. She hosts an internet-famous artist (Alex Karpovsky of Beeswax) at her house, gets a restaurant job with sous-chef David Call (the older boy in The Strange Ones, “kinda American Psycho-looking”) and spends most of the movie trying to get either of them to want to have sex with her.

Lena and her sous-chef:

Anyway, I’m sure I should have watched Creative Nonfiction first, because now it’ll probably take me years to get to it, as newer, shinier movies keep coming out and screaming for attention.

Lena’s mom tells her that lightbulbs are “in the white cabinet”:

Buy from Amazon:
Tiny Furniture (Criterion blu-ray)

Just like the book, plus a bunch of good actors (hello, Jennifer Lawrence and Woody Harrelson), minus all depth or feeling, and with the worst camerawork I’ve seen in years. Ross made Pleasantville and his DP shot all the latter-day Clint Eastwood pictures, so what happened here? The soundtrack is nice, anyway.

Not an actual movie, but an admirable simulacrum. Abrams imagines a mid-80′s Spielberg adventure, complete with teenage protagonists each with a couple sympathetic personal details, aliens and intrigue (“Do not speak of this or else you and your parents will die,” says Glynn Turman, who was also the first casualty in Spielberg-produced Gremlins), likeably honest small-towners and evil shadowy government conspiracy. That’s actually the thing I liked most about the movie, watching it the same week as the politically shady Contagion. Abrams puts his unique directorial stamp on the material (just kidding – he simply floods it with lens flares).

I found a shot of the kids without lens flare:

Glynn Turman:

Kid named Joe is helping made a zombie movie with friends, who recruit his crush Alice (Elle Fanning, tiny Cate Blanchett in The Benjamin Buttons). With names like Joe, Alice and their buddy Preston, sometimes it seems like this was written as a 1940′s movie then changed at last minute. Joe’s mom died in a factory accident caused indirectly by Alice’s dad, Joe’s dad (Kyle Chandler of Katy’s football show) is the town cop, Charles (the super-8 director) has a thing for Alice – these are our token character details, the Stand By Me half of the big-budget action movie. Seems that a vindictive alien escaped from gov’t captivity when Turman drove his pickup truck onto train tracks causing an outrageously overdone crash, which throws train cars into the air like in a Transformers flick but doesn’t kill Turman or fully destroy his truck. Shadowy gov’t agent Nelec will finish the poor guy off before being dispatched by the alien, who proceeds to loot the area of all wiring, engines and other metal bits to construct a vessel home, finally turning the town water tower into a Katamari Damacy electro-magnet.

Runaway dog map:

The kid’s sentimental locket is Katamari-bound:

Buy from Amazon:
Super 8 blu/dvd

On the surface this was terrific, an expertly plotted thriller, more tensely captivating than any of the Ocean’s movies, with terrific music and excellent editing. But after giving it some thought and pitting it against Super 8, Contagion is starting to feel like slimy propaganda. The bad guy in the movie is Jude Law’s blogger, supposedly a whistleblowing, truth-seeking outsider but actually a treasonous scam-artist, eager to sell out. Government agents working for the CDC (headed by Laurence Fishburne) and some local labs (headed by Elliott Gould) are the good guys – not just good but angelic. They sacrifice themselves, working extremely hard and always putting others ahead – Fishburne gives his own dose of the long-awaited vaccine to the child of poor CDC janitor John Hawkes (because in Atlanta all our janitors are white guys), Jennier Ehle uses herself as a vaccine test subject to speed the process, and Kate Winslet dies trying to discover the virus’s source. So most of the way through the movie when some anti-government protesters appear outside the CDC, the viewer has automatic hatred for them. What sort of mindless malcontents would protest against these selfless public servants?

Heroes behind the scenes, Ehle and Martin:

Hero Fishburne with regular non-hero Hawkes:

The emotional Minnesota civilian center of the movie is Matt Damon, whose dead cheatin’ wife Gwynyth Paltrow was patient zero (as amusingly illustrated at the end of the movie). Marion Cotillard is a CDC researcher gently kidnapped in China by Chin Han, held for (fake) vaccine ransom. Bryan “Malcolm’s Dad” Cranston works for FBI I think. Demetri Martin, strangely, is Jennifer Ehle’s coworker. Soderbergh and writer Scott Burns (The Informant, Bourne Ultimatum) should’ve been hired for those 9/11 movies, or some kind of corporate response film to the Occupy movement (if anyone in power felt that Occupy required a response).

Jude Law in puffy suit:

Buy from Amazon:
Contagion blu-ray