by ·Comments Off on Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011, Sean Durkin)

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.

by ·Comments Off on Portlandia and other television

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.

by ·Comments Off on Tiny Furniture (2010, Lena Dunham)

“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”:

by ·Comments Off on The Hunger Games (2012, Gary Ross)

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.

by ·Comments Off on Super 8 (2011, JJ Abrams)

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:

by ·Comments Off on Contagion (2011, Steven Soderbergh)

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:

by ·Comments Off on Wanderlust (2012, David Wain)

Happily this was more Role Models than The Ten, a conventional-looking comedy full of State alumni and good writing. Only the second Jennifer Aniston movie I’ve seen (and unfortunately the first wasn’t Leprechaun). She and State/Wain regular Paul Rudd are a married couple who flee New York for Atlanta and stay with Rudd’s asshole brother Ken Marino and his drunk wife, then end up at a commune. Aniston hooks up with sellout Justin Theroux, while Rudd can’t manage to score with Malin Akerman, but since it’s a comedy, the married couple pulls through.

As per Role Models and Wet Hot American Summer, the movie freely uses hacky old plot points (slimy land developers are trying to tear down the commune) and messes with them (the commune would be safe if Alan Alda, hilarious as the only remaining member of the commune’s original founders, could remember where he put the deed). I enjoyed all the background cameos by Craig Wedren, Joe Lo Truglio as a nudist winemaker, overenthusiastic Kerri Kenney, Todd Barry as Rudd’s coworker in the city, and David/Michael/Michael as TV commentators.

Katy liked it too, pointed out that the title is off-base.

by ·Comments Off on A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi)

Red-haired Simin wants to leave Iran for unspecified (possibly so this movie would not get banned) reasons and take her 11-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the director’s daughter), but Simin’s husband Nader won’t leave, has to take care of his senile father. So she wants a divorce to carry out her plan without him.

Intrigue: the new maid Razieh is doing a shitty job watching Nader’s father. When he comes home and sees dad on the floor, tied to the bed and barely breathing, he shoves her out the door – then she and her husband Hodjat sue him for causing her miscarriage. Razieh and Hodjat aren’t a completely unsympathetic couple. He keeps pointing out that he’s less educated than Nader, and has anger issues, so doesn’t stand a chance in legal debate. But his wife turns out to be lying – she was hit by a car while chasing Nader’s escaped father, which caused her miscarriage. Nader isn’t a mean guy, keeps offering a settlement, but Razieh is trying to paint him as a criminal. After the whole ugly court battle is settled, the divorce is still on, and Termeh has to choose which parent she’ll live with, cue the credits.

Good drama, and interesting look at the Iranian legal system (their interrogator is Babak Karimi, an editor who worked on Tickets and Secret Ballot).

by ·Comments Off on The Guard (2011, John Michael McDonagh)

Another Brendan Gleeson action/comedy written/directed by a man named McDonagh – but this isn’t the guy who made In Bruges, it’s his brother. You see how that could be confusing.

There’s a serial killer on the loose, perhaps, and Gleeson is the local cop on the scene. Or it’s a drug crew faking the serial-killer thing to throw people off their scent. A young cop disappears and his wife is bugging Gleeson to find him. And FBI agent Don Cheadle (his character is from Atlanta, yay) shows up but finds his fancy training is no match for Gleeson’s down-homey knowledge and instincts. Also, Gleeson is a huge racist and thief, but that’s all played for laughs.

Our mismatched team takes on the druggies (incl. Liam Cunningham, priest in the super long-shot of Hunger, and Mark Strong, dude who lives in a trailer for most of Tinker Tailor) by themselves at the end. Gleeson blows up. Or he swims away with a half-billion in cash, depending who you believe. Anyway, it’s a diverting-enough picture, but my favorite bit was an excerpt from The Shout, which Gleeson sits at home watching between murders.