TROPIC CINEMA Movie Discussion Blog

Tomboy (Brockway)

2012-01-29T11:27:00.000-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Tomboy

"Tomboy" is a quiet spark of a film that has a revolutionary chemistry all its own. Even in the company of "The Artist" and "The Descendants", it would be a mistake to pass it by. The film has verve and a power in simplicity that goes beyond the scope of its episodic narrative.It concerns a ten year old girl who is more comfortable acting boyish and considered as a boy than anything else.

The naturalistic filming recalls other films like "Leolo" and "Submarine" but this film is neither as surrealist as the former or as quirky as the latter. Rather than employ any Hollywood satire or sleights of hand, "Tomboy" just shows a section of childhood as is, without any melodramatic fussing with conflict and resolution that are so prevalent in today's films. What we see is what we get: a tomboy. The film has more in keeping with Cassavetes or Warhol's silent screen test of Edie Sedgwick for all the intensity on this girl's stoic but spaced out face.

The girl, Laure (Zoe Heran) is blonde and stern of expression. She excels at sports and has no qualms about a playful or serious brawl. Rather than come at its audience with a force-fed emotional agenda like so many other directors, Celine Sciamma simply lets the camera drift from room to room in the over-large and isolated apartment block, illustrating little pieces of Laure's life.

"Tomboy" is honest to a fault and it is not afraid to show the little monsters of fear, spontaneity and cruelty that exist in the hearts of children. The scenes of kids in a circle can be as tension filled as anything shown in a film by Lars von Trier, yet just when you feel events are going to take a dark turn, the kids including Jeanne, bring out a joke or a peal of laughter and the film turns on its heels within seconds. Regardless of the claustrophobia or whimsy presented in each scene, a darkness of prepubescent confusion and peer-pressure is not far behind. The packs of children are often silly and drunk with fear, playing Truth or Dare or they are shown as shy, timid deer in the forest, too scared to speak.

The silent and laconic monotone of Laure is contrasted by the cherubic precociousness of her sister Jeanne (Malonn Levana). At home Laure is content enough to drop her guard. She cuddles with her sister. But once set for school, Laure casts the dress aside as if it were a poison cloak. She is more Huckleberry Finn than any young girl in cinematic history. But the film is far from cute. At one point, Laure threatens her sister with sudden aggression. Childhood is a dangerous game. And it is one that switches at whim from the paranoid to the paradisical.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Tomboy (Rhoades)

2012-01-28T10:28:00.002-05:00

“Tomboy” Is

Gender Bender

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Living in Key West with our gay community, drag queens, and Fantasy Fest cross-dressing, gender is not a word that I think about. But some do.

We’ve had movies that deal with the topic – from the hilarious “Victor/Victoria” to “Boys Don’t Cry.” We even had Linda Hunt winning an Academy Award for crossing genders as an actor in “The Year of Living Dangerously.”

Now we have “Tomboy.” It’s tweaking audiences at the Tropic Cinema.

This French film tells the story of Laure, a 10-year-old girl in a Parisian neighborhood who is mistaken for a boy. Short haircut and all that. So she goes along with the misidentity, pretending to be a boy named Michaël.

No, it’s not a comedy.

New to the apartment complex, Laure is babysitting her younger sister for her very pregnant mom. She meets a new friend that she likes a lot, a girl named Jeanne. When Jeanne mistakes her for a boy, she doesn’t correct her and deliberately assumes the role – savoring her newfound status, yet growing increasingly nervous as the first day of school approaches. There she will have to acknowledge her true gender. You know it’s not going to end well.

Zoé Héran is the pint-sized actress who pulls off this switcheroo. This is her first film (not counting a couple of TV movies). She nails that testosterone thing whether playing soccer or spitting on the ground. Hilary Swank would be proud of her performance.

The girl’s 6-year-old sister is played by cute-as-a-bug Malonn Lévana. A very feminine child as contrasted with the tomboy sister.

And Jeanne Disson is cast as the friend that Laure has developed a crush on.

The storyline is almost secondary to director-writer Céline Sciamma’s tender scenes of children at play. Her effortless camerawork makes you feel like you’re a part of the group. Sometimes it feels more like a documentary than a narrative feature film.

Here it’s summertime and the kids go swimming. This provides the film a handy device for dealing with the difficulties of Laure/ Michaël’s secret. A boy’s swimsuit with a proper bulge. Going to the bathroom standing up. All those male attributes.

In case you get confused by Zoé Héran’s convincing performance, there is a fleeting “Crying Game” scene to put your questions to rest.

Sciamma has already explored the uneasy topic of children’s libidos in “Water Lilies” (original title: “La naissance des pieuvres”), her debut film. The children are younger by five years in this outing, but the answers are not any clear about the consequences of being a transgendered youth.

srhoades@aol.com

The Artist (Rhoades)

2012-01-28T10:27:00.002-05:00

“The Artist”

Sounds Out

About Silent Films

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Charlie Chaplin was a genius of the silent screen, his Little Tramp character mugging his way through some 82 films. Only 5 of them talking pictures.

His daughter Jane tells me that he lived a somewhat silent life. “My father always working and us kids having to be quiet at all times while in the house,” she recalls. “Particularly on the ground floor and first floor where over the handles of each bedroom door was a sign that read ‘Do Not Disturb.’ We couldn't speak to our parents unless they first spoke to us.”

The world of a silent film star is explored in “The Artist,” the retro movie by French director Michel Hazanavicius. This modern-day homage to the early days of Hollywood is playing at the Tropic Cinema.

What a chance for a director to take, making a black-and-white silent movie in 2011. But it works, because that period in the late ’20s and early ’30s when talkies were being introduced to moviegoers is the subject of this charming, if sometimes sad, love poem.

Comic actor Jean Dujardin (“OSS 117: Lost in Rio,” “99 Francs”) takes the lead as silent film star George Valentin, a chisel-chinned leading man who sports a pencil-thin moustache like William Powell, and has a canine sidekick who knows more tricks (like playing dead at a bang) than Asta. Opening with a film within a film, Valentin has just premiered a derring-do adventure titled “A Russian Affair” when he (literally) bumps into a wannabe actress named Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo living up to her character’s moniker). With spit curls and a big smile, Peppy makes the papers with a headline asking Who’s That Girl?

Studio boss Al Zimmer (a gruff John Goodman) is unhappy that the pretty girl’s picture has pushed a review of his big movie to page 5, so when she shows up for an audition on Valentin’s next film, he banishes her from the set – only to be overridden by Valentin who insists she have a part in Kinograph Studios’ next production called “A German Affair.”

Yep, Valentin is smitten with the young starlet, his disapproving wife (Penny Ann Miller) and loyal chauffeur (James Cromwell) notwithstanding. He gives Peppy something to make her different from other actresses, a beauty spot made with an eyebrow pencil. And when they film a dance sequence, it requires take after take because the actor is distracted by the young beauty.

You could write the script (though perhaps not as brilliantly as Hazanavicius). Peppy Miller becomes a big star as Valentin’s own star wans. Of course, the cause of the actor’s slide into obscurity is his prideful refusal to embrace that new technological breakthrough, the talkies.

Peppy’s big hit (aptly titled “The Beauty Spot”) opens the same night as Valentin’s self-financed flop. We see him walking under a sign that proclaims Lonely Star. When his palatial furnishings and gigantic framed portrait are auctioned off, a mysterious couple (Peppy’s maid and butler) buys the objets d’art. You see, Peppy has a soft spot for George Valentin too.

Does all of this sound somewhat familiar? Talkies providing the break for a young ingénue (“Singing in the Rain”). A young protégé eclipsing the major star (“A Star Is Born”). A once-famous star clinging to memories of past glories (“Sunset Boulevard”). Hazanavicius takes all these archetypical storylines and weaves them into a new fabric. And it wears well for those who love the movies.

Like another recent film (Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”), this is a paean to film history. However, “The Artist” eschews 3-D, Technicolor, and other cinematic innovations. Hazanavicius’s story is about the advent of sound so it returns to the archaic film techniques of that era.

Sound plays a key role in this silent movie. And like Mel Brooks’ “Silent Movie” where the only sound (other than music) in the entire feature is a spoken word by French mime Marcel Marceau, “The Artist” uses one scene with sound to make its point. This scene was chosen for the Unforgettable Moment Award by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.

The dialogue is displayed on cards (intertitles, they’re called) like in those early films of Chaplin and Keaton and Barrymore. The music swells throughout the film as if an orchestra were hidden in the theatre’s front-of-the-stage pit. There’s only one song on the entire soundtrack. And a key plot device is the word “Bang!” – in the end surprising the audience as if it were actually a loud noise.

Peppy hurts George Valentin’s feelings when he overhears her give an interview that labels his acting as mugging. It is. In fact, that’s the old-timey style of this entire movie, mugging its way into your heart, reminding you about the stuff dreams are made of.

Perhaps it’s a form of false nostalgia for an era before our time. (Woody Allen explained that in “Midnight In Paris.”) Nevertheless, celluloid and old nitrate prints have preserved those before-our-time movie memories for us to enjoy even today.

Jane Chaplin once told me that a lot of unseen footage by her father Charlie Chaplin is archived in Bologna, Italy. “The thing is to sort through it and decide objectively what to choose,” she says.

Director-writer Michel Hazanavicius decided to create his own silent movie footage. It’s a masterpiece, one that the London Film Critics picked as Best Film of the Year. Other critics agreed, rating it 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.

"The Artist was made as a love letter to cinema,” says Hazanavicius. “It grew out of my (and all of my cast and crew’s) admiration and respect for movies throughout history. It was inspired by the work of Hitchcock, Lang, Ford, Lubitsch, Murnau, and Wilder.”

His star Jean Dujardin won Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globe and Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival. And canine co-star Uggie won Cannes’ Palm Dog Award.

Giving his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, the 39-year-old French actor recounted how “When I was starting out they said to me, ‘You’ll never do movies. Your face is too expressive. Too big.’”

Not too expressive to mug his way through a silent movie.

This week the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced that “The Artist” as been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. And Jean Dujardin is up for Best Actor.

All without having to speak a line of dialogue.

srhoades@aol.com

La Rafle (Brockway)

2012-01-28T08:06:00.001-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

La Rafle

"La Rafle/ The Round Up" deals with the extremely heart-rending subject of French collaboration with the Nazis, during the summer months of 1942. 13,000 people were taken by force, most of them children and their mothers. Nearly all were sent to Auschwitz, under the direction of the Vischy regime. According to the film, out of the near 13,000 sent to their death, only twenty five survived.

The film does well by not trading euphemisms, but yet at the same time, it does not appear overbearing. Some of the separation scenes between mother and child, although very emotional and difficult to watch, did seem to be taken directly from "Sarah's Key", but while this might lessen the charge to some audiences, to see it again is to re-awaken the jolt and to re-affirm a visceral response to the hideous wrongness of these events. No matter how many depictions you see, you will feel it again: the disbelief combined with the lingering sadness bound with awareness, the weight of guilt.

The best parts of "La Rafle" are the segments that feature the children . Simon and Nono Zygler (Oliver Cywe and Mathieu Di Concetto, respectively) gallop about playing tricks on Nazi soldiers and steal their caps only to wear them later, complete with SS insignia. Play continues on, without reverence, without boundaries. It is the children alone who preserve the bounce of spontaneity in such horrors of war.

At times, the film is an able addition to the canon of "The Little Rascals", so resourceful and buoyant the children are in the face of such uniform evil. In one scene, Simon throws heaps of marbles down the stairs to trip the Gestapo. It works.

If the Walter Keane close ups of children's eyes seem too derivative of other scenes, the two main children will hold you firmly in this story. They have enough verve and original spin to outrun any historical demon. Playing is a necessity and the kids simply do what it takes.
Hitler ( Udo Schenk) appears as a live action Technicolor cartoon, stomping and raving. He is all boom and bluster, yet his larger than life color has a point in illustrating the contrast between arrogant loathsome slickness and human play, embodied in the children. When we see Hitler on his holiday regarding the mountains, he seems a cardboard cutout from a sinister coloring book, both frightening and silly in his often-recorded stride.

The respected Jean Reno plays a compassionate doctor, although he is a character with little to say or do. Melanie Laurent plays real life hero Annette Monod, the Protestant nurse who stayed with the Zyglers at the risk of losing her own life.

Many might have seen the breaking sadnesses of "La Rafe" before in other films, but it would be too easy to call it déjà vu here. The film's unnerving yet surreal touches of a supercilious Hitler in Super 8, set against the background of some spunky children playing against all odds, make this film more than another dark shadow-play.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Week of January 20 to January 26 (Mann)

2012-01-23T10:50:00.000-05:00

What on at the Tropic
by Phil Mann

You may not have heard of Ventura Pons, but he’s a big deal in the European film world. His eighteen feature films have been nominated for awards in film festivals from Moscow to Miami. This weekend, he’s going to be a big deal in Key West, where he will be screening and personally introducing four of his movies. It’s going to be a high point of this year’s Tropic Visiting Filmmaker Series. Sr. Pons is from Barcelona, and all his films have a quirky, humorous quality that reminds many of Pedro Almodóvar. The Village Voice has called him “a provocateur who works without a net .”

On Sunday afternoon, it’s OCAÑA, a documentary about a gay Spanish artist and cross-dresser that was originally screened at the Cannes Film Festival. The high point of the weekend, with a champagne reception, is the Sunday evening screening of MIL CRETINS (Thousand Fools), a comic mélange of characters.

Monday afternoon brings two other films. ANITA TAKES A CHANCE is the story of a movie theater employee who loses her job when the theater is torn down, but begins an affair with a construction worker who comes on the scene. This movie won Best Film and Best Actress awards at the Miami Hispanic Film Festival and at the Peñíscola Comedy Film Festival [that’s Peñíscola, Spain; a comedy film festival would be an odd thing in Pensacola, FL.) The final film AMIC/AMAT (Beloved/Friend) is about a fifty-something college professor whose life gets incredibly complicated when he discovers he has a terminal illness and decides to reveal secrets.

Sr. Pons will offer a Q & A following each screening. All films will be in Catalan or Spanish, with English subtitles.

This week also marks the opening of THE ARTIST, winner of this year’s Golden Globe for Best Comedy/Musical Award and a favorite for the big Oscar prize. In case you haven’t heard, it’s a silent, black and white film. But, as Steven Rea says in the Philadelphia Inquirer, it “feels as bold and innovative a moviegoing experience as James Cameron's bells-and-whistles Avatar did a couple of years ago. Retro becomes nuevo. Quaint becomes cool.” French actor Jean Dujardin’s portrayal of the fictional silent film star George Valentin is a perfect recapturing of the cinema style of the time. He also got the Golden Globe and is a front-runner for an Oscar.

The story is a classic story of high romance and a fallen hero, as the emergence of talkies dooms Valentin’s career. But words can’t really describe this wordless wonder.

In INTO THE ABYSS the brilliant, groundbreaking filmmaker Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man, Aquirre: The Wrath of God) digs deeply into a Texas triple murder case, exploring the minds of the killers and the psychology of capital punishment. Including lengthy interviews with the killers, like the book In Cold Blood to which it has been compared, Herzog’s work does not judge, it observes. “He simply looks. He always seems to know where to look. “ (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)

HOUSE OF PLEASURES takes place in a different kind of prison, a brothel in Belle Époque Paris. This is not a documentary, but a surreal, yet realistic, view of life in the fictional L’Apollonide -- a portrait of the women and of their clients. “A gorgeously filmed portrait of a bygone era, with painstaking attention to period detail.” (V.A. Musetto, NY Post)

With all this, I hate to treat them as an afterthought, but we’ve also got the next film in the Gotta Dance classics series. This Monday it’s BRIGADOON with Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. And on Tuesday, the Cinderella-story opera CENDRILLON from the stage of the Royal Opera in Covent Garden fills the Tropic screen and surround sound.

Into the Abyss (Brockway)

2012-01-23T10:23:00.001-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway 

Into the Abyss

Werner Herzog gives the spirit of Truman Capote a run for his money in his latest documentary, "Into the Abyss". The film is raw, remaining  both visceral and detached at once. Further, it is unapologetic and  wholeheartedly human. The documentary chiefly focuses on Michael Perry and Jason Burkett. At the time of the filming, Perry is on Death Row for the grisly murder of the Stotler family over a red Camaro in 2001.  Perry, in a series of interviews, is pale faced and wide eyed with a sloping casual gate. He is little more than a boy in attitude, although he is twenty eight years old. With his severe black-bowl haircut and his hyper rolling eyes, he is a bit slapstick in a strange eerie manner as if he is a Stooge or a psychotic Jim Carrey. You get the feeling that he wishes things were different and that he could reform himself in some way but that this is impossible.

In watching the film, I recalled Capote's "In Cold Blood"  and wondered what Truman might have felt: an eagerness, a revulsion and perhaps, an obsessional passion to get the whole story. Michael Perry is Born Again and repentant, but he feels no remorse. He asserts he did not commit the murder.

Michael Burkett his friend is sleepy-eyed and thorny, resembling an anemic panther. He also asserts his innocence and blames the murder on Perry.

Herzog interviews Burkett's father (himself in prison for drugs) who details a catalogue of drug abuse and neglect, placing the murderous kids  in a vicious cycle---a culture of unrelenting violence. And you believe it. There seems no  escape for either the murderers  or the victims family (who cannot sleep or bring themselves to have a phone due to the frequency of tragedy).

The most compelling segment in the film is the interview of Fred Allen. Tan and rugged wearing a comfortable sweater, he could pass for anyone's grandfather. Occupationally however, Allen is an executioner, responsible for strapping inmates to the death gurney and administering the final injection. Although dedicated, after over one hundred injections, Allen could not handle the strain and left his job. During the interview, he loses his composure, recalling the stoicism of a female inmate.

Everyone that Herzog interviews in Conroe Texas is either in prison themselves or is in touch with the unthinkable, specifically the act of murder. That being said the film uncovers a definite  humanness, these two monsters laugh and joke, they reflect  and yearn to have the magic to change themselves, to be another person, to turn back the clock against lethal injection. Or failing that, to turn it forward---to the afterlife.

Each frame in the film is composed like an abstract painting. For several minutes at a time, we are directly confronted with two eyes held behind a diagonal line of slanted glass or the sad brightness of a deep blue prison cell. The most terrifying moments of "Into the Abyss" are when  the camera moves in a deliberate tread to the gurney and its heavy Frankensteinian leather straps. The gurney itself is shaped like a cross, making all people on Death Row into the Anti-Christs of our age. Murder is unconscionably horrendous, but capital punishment appears equally brutal, so cold and uniform the whole routine seems, clearly not deterring execrable murders, yet offering some path to closure for the families involved.

As the camera floats into the Stotler home left as is, interrupted in the act of baking cookies, the tv is on, but all is quiet. It very well could be a scene of interior life from another planet that once sustained human life. Cookie dough is left on a sheet: the last remaining human confections. The living room itself is a stage-set.

Everyone in favor of Capital Punishment  should see this film and Herzog is to be commended for not pulling back his camera and last but not least, for suggesting that violence on both sides is an unfortunate and intimate reality that exists within our human soil.

redtv_2005@yahoo.com

House of Pleasures (Brockway)

2012-01-23T10:18:00.000-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

House of Pleasures

"House of Pleasures" is a sensual yet disturbing delight. In the voluptual sense it chronicles nothing less than the beginning of Surrealism and the fleshly Fauvists, focusing on a bordello in the 1900s and the visuals are as rich as a pomegranate jewel on Salvador Dali's velvet tie.

A domineering Madam ( Noemi Lvovsky) is in charge of a "House of Tolerance" which happens to be under the threat of violence and declining patronage. Sparks fly when the young Pauline (Iliana Zabeth) begins employment. Suddenly without warning, a bookish, anemic man starts to conduct himself in the manner of Jack the Ripper. One lady (Alice Barnole) is horribly disfigured in a manner that foretells Heath Ledger's Joker in "The Dark Knight". Iconic references aside, the scene is jolting and creepy, not for the squeamish.

It is soon clear that like Milton, we are in a opiate centrifugal whirl of a paradisiacal Heaven or a purgatorial Hell with nothing but visual ambrosia in between. Under the weight of some bright and seeping serpentine bodies, you can feel the thick clouds of opium overhead and imagine skies of cerulean blue or green absinthe sipped from pale pink lips. This film looks and sounds like the heaviness of pearls on liquid breasts put in motion. There is even a sable panther underfoot.

I have heard it said that every period film is colored by the time in which it is made. If so, this film is more gorgeous than Lady Gaga and more princely than Prince. The ladies undulate and laze about with an eerie reptilian rubescence. If you find my description to be confusing and ill-matched, "House of Pleasures" seems so as well, with an anachronistic score by R&B singer Lee Moses and The Moody Blues, but despite this futurism, everything works.

Rather than being preoccupied with melodrama and plot, this film is a velvet slice of life. The girls spend their time doing duties in the nude and chatting about pedestrian events as well as sexually explicit ways to ensnare customers. We, as sitting voyeurs are spared little. There is gore as well as riches in the commerce of lust. The sight of a weevil boring its way into a master painting is no accident. Lust has rot. And the message of "House of Pleasures" seems to be that consensual fleshy intimacy may go the way of our vanishing bookstores. Direct contact with another human may soon be an extraterrestrial event, something from our antiquated past.

I ,for one, hope not.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

The Artist (Brockway)

2012-01-20T10:00:00.000-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

The Artist

Life in Key West, as with all places, is sometimes noisy, a cacophonous goulash of sound and color. Taxis roar by followed by an infinite scatter of SUVs, while mopeds hover and buzz in and out like meddlesome mosquitoes of metal. Sometimes residents even bring out awful droning instruments known as 'leaf-blowers' in the hopes of clearing their sidewalks, but they usually succeed in merely relocating the leaves on their neighbor's sidewalk with only earaches in the air.

A welcome antidote is the black, white and silent retreat found in "The Artist", the highly acclaimed film by Michel Hazanavicius.

The film is sumptuous and beautifully made, quoting many films from "Zorro", "The Thin Man" films, "The Invisible Man" and even " The Picture of Dorian Gray" together with the lighting from Hitchcock and Billy Wilder.

Although the tame plot of a struggling Errol Flynn actor George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) failed to make me fall out of my chair with a clap of surprise,the gesture and visual rhythm of the film, held me in with pleasure, turning my blue eyes to black and a soft gray.

The best parts of "The Artist" are when it moves into darker territory: George Valentin is plagued by the mocking scourge of the new Talkie pictures and can't get a job. He is driven mad by the noise of cars and strange new voices. The film goes into dark corners and the shadows are singular and stark, quoting the best from "Lost Weekend" and Orson Welles' "A Touch of Evil".

When George looks in the window and sees an empty suit of clothes, he is a lost man. The emphasis is on the empty collar and sleeves. George Valentin, once a Douglas Fairbanks idol is now an invisible man. Berenice Bejo as Valentin's girlfriend, is charming and vivid, doing an excellent job as a Clara Bow or Claudette Colbert type. She is a literal visual confection.

The film is a technical delight with visual winks at every turn and twist.
The dog in the film, a Jack Russell, is sure to win your heart as he outdoes Asta to the tenth power.

The film is a cinephile's black and white cookie, better tasted than described. If the sugary plot echoes "The Illusionist" or the repetitive score tinkles too much in your ear, the visual sambas won't, they sneak up on you with a tickle. And rest assured, a stolen raven-like melody from Hitchcock's Maestro Bernard Hermann improves the music tremendously. At the end of "The Artist", as you move to the exit, a sudden rush makes things strange and alien. The abrupt clash of sound signals the loss of a friend.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Ventura Pons (Rhoades)

2012-01-18T09:53:00.003-05:00

Interview: Ventura Pons

Spanish Director

Includes Key West

In World Tour

By Shirrel Rhoades

Filmmaker Ventura Pons and I played telephone tag around the world. Taking his first vacation in ten years, he’d left his home in Barcelona to visit places he’d never been before: The temples in Cambodia, the lost cities in Laos, the magic mountain in Australia, a stopover in New Zealand, a long stay in French Polynesia (Tahiti, Bora Bora), a hop to Los Angeles, then onward to the glitter gulch of Las Vegas.

“It seems a joke that after 18 days of islands I look for that fake city that I don’t know yet but attracts me a lot,” he chuckles.

He’s enjoying this break in his work routine.

“On the way back to Barcelona we’re making a side trip to Key West,” he tells me from the Luxor Hotel on the Strip in Vegas. “My friends Phyllis Rose and her husband Laurent de Brunhoff (he did the children’s books about Barbar the Elephant) invited me to visit.”

While in Key West, Pons has agreed to show four of his award-winning films. Tonight and Monday the Tropic Cinema will be screening “Ocana, An Intermittent Portrait” (1978), “Mils Cretins” (2010), “Anita Takes a Chance” (2001), and “Amic/Amat” (1999). The director will be on hand to chat with the audience.

Pons’ films are noted for their use of the Catalan dialect with English subtitles. “Because it’s my language,” he explains to me in flawless English. “The same way a Danish director works in Danish.”

Born in Catalonia, an autonomous community that encompasses Barcelona, Spain, his stories are often based on Catalan customs. “You talk about the things you know,” he says. “But there must be a universal truth to be found in it.”

During his world tour Pons got a call from the Film Society at Lincoln Center, asking if it could host a special sneak preview of his next film. He’s obviously pleased. “They have been supportive of my work,” he tells me.

The Film Society at Lincoln Center has called Pons “one of Spain’s best-loved auteurs.”

Has he come up with any ideas for new films from his recent travels? “No, no,” he laughs good-naturedly. “You have to make films about things you really understand. Otherwise you’d be like an octopus in a garage.”

Stick to that which you know, is his message. “It’s very easy to fail,” he muses. “A successful film requires three ingredients – the story, the cast, and director. Everything goes together.”

Pons started off working in theater. “But I had cinema in my head,” he reminisces. “In the theater you only live once. What happens with a camera lives on.”

He recalls that first film back in 1977, a documentary called “Ocana, An Intermittent Portrait” (one of the four films being shown at the Tropic). “I took a camera and I looked for a story. I shot it in five days like an exercise. Such a small story, but the film went to Cannes.”

Today his films have been seen in more than 650 festivals as well as movie houses around the world.”

In 1985 he created his own production company and left the theater behind. He’s written and directed some 22 films. “I write my screenplays, I look for the money, I look for the actors,” he explains the process. “For me cinema is my life. And life is my cinema. I put a lot of myself inside.”

srhoades@aol.com”

[from Solares Hill]

Into the Abyss (Rhoades)

2012-01-18T09:53:00.000-05:00

Werner Herzog Takes

Us “Into the Abyss”

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

German-born director Werner Herzog Stipetić is like a grab bag, his films always a surprise. In the past he’s given us mesmerizing documentaries about recently discovered cave paintings (“Cave of Forgotten Dreams”), patched-together sci-fi outings (“The Wild Blue Yonder”), Nicolas Cage in a murky remake (“The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans”), a stylistic vampire thriller (“Nosferatu the Vampyre”), Russian superstition (“Bells from the Deep”), and his masterpiece about Spanish soldiers exploring the Amazon River in search of El Dorado (“Aguirre, the Wrath of God”). Herzog even wrote and starred in a pseudo-documentary about him looking for monsters (“Incident at Loch Ness”). And he participated in a self-explanatory short film titled “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe,” in which he pays off on a bet with filmmaker Errol Morris. He’s even made a guest appearance on TV’s “The Simpsons.”

Werner Herzog’s consider an important figure in New German Cinema, but as you can see his subjects span the globe (and even outer space).

Here he has taken a page from Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” to give us a documentary about two men convicted of a triple homicide in Texas. Appropriately titled “Into the Abyss,” the document is playing this week at the Tropic Cinema. [Starting Friday, Jan. 20]

Michael Perry and Jason Burkett committed the murders while stealing a car for a joyride. The two men blame the crimes on each other. But Perry went to the electric chair 8 days after his interviews for Herzog’s film. Burkett is serving a life sentence.

The film also introduces us to family members of the victims, prison guards, and Burkett’s wife who married him after he went to jail. Despite their only physical contact being holding hands, she proclaims that she’s pregnant with the killer’s baby.

The film’s title underwent several revisions – from “Death Row” to “Gazing Into The Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale Of Life” to “Werner Herzog’s Final Confessions.” But when he decided to spin off other death-row interviews into a television series, the title settled on “Into the Abyss.”

This nihilistic title, of course, comes from Friedrich Nietzsche who wrote: “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

With this documentary Herzog lets you gaze at monsters up close.”

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill]

Week of January 12 to January 18 (Mann)

2012-01-11T17:14:00.000-05:00

Alert! The spies are coming to town.

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY is the latest adaptation of the celebrated le Carré novel. George Smiley (Gary Oldman - The Dark Knight, Harry Potter) is a retired MI6 operative called back into service to root out a Soviet double agent who has infiltrated the British Secret Service. Directed by Tomas Alfredson, the Danish director who crafted Let The Right One In, and with supporting cast including Colin Firth and John Hurt, this is a mystery of sinister intrigue that drags us to the darkest Cold War corners of Budapest, Istanbul, London, and Paris.

"A pleasurably sly and involving puzzler — a mystery about mysteries within mysteries." (Manhola Dargis, New York Times ) “The Cold War is over, but director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) and his collaborators have brought those suspicion-fueled days to vivid life in this masterful adaptation of John le Carré's beloved 1974 spy novel.” (Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York}

MI6 is, of course, the British equivalent of our CIA, which is laid bare in the documentary THE MAN NOBODY KNEW: IN SEARCH OF MY FATHER, CIA SPYMASTER WILLIAM COLBY. He was head of the CIA during the same 1970'S era depicted in Tinker, Tailor, so it's fascinating to observe similar worlds through such different lenses. Colby’s career in intelligence included a role as CIA station chief in Saigon, but his final stint as head of the organization was marked by a reform effort and attempt to make the agency more transparent.

"Packed with knowledge of another sort. It amounts to an absorbing, sometimes appalling course in how U.S. foreign policy evolved and functioned following World War II." (Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal) “Carl Colby’s smart, fact-packed film The Man Nobody Knew operates on many levels, all riveting.” (Andy Webster, New York Times)

The director of this documentary, Colby's son Carl, will join us on Friday evening as part of the Tropic's Visiting Filmmaker Series. Your chance to get "the rest of the story. "

If all this is too heavy for you, CARNAGE may be a good alternative. Despite the threatening title, this is a comedy of manners about a conflict between two Yuppie couples over a playground incident involving their children. Director Roman Polanski shows a light touch we haven't seen before. He must have enjoyed making a film that satirizes the pretentions of conventional society, especially with an all-star cast of Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster.

"Scathing and funny and cynical about contemporary society and the hypocritical way we live now. (Rex Reed, New York Observer) “A scabrous, amusing, and thoroughly predictable exercise in exposing the animalistic underbellies of grown-ups pretending to be civilized liberals.” (David Edelstein, New York Magazine)

Or check out LE HAVRE, the new comedy-drama from famed Finnish writer/director Aki Kaurismäki, whose previous films have included such titles as I Hired A Contract Killer, and Leningrad Cowboys Go To America. This time he’s working in France, with a movie set in the nondescript English Channel port town that has containers filled with illegal African immigrants as one of its principal cargoes. When one of these unfortunate souls, a boy from Gabon named Idrissa, is hunted down by the cops, a shoeshine man named Marcel comes to his aid, and a story unfurls of a poor community’s humanity to someone ever poorer.

“A potent - and often hilarious - testament to the power of community and collective sense of duty…. one of the finest films of the year.” (Ann Hornaday, Washington Post) “Tells a good story with clear eyes and a level gaze, and it just plain makes you feel good.” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Rhoades)

2012-01-11T17:12:00.002-05:00

“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”An Intellectual Spy ThrillerReviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Back in the ’70s I managed a magazine based in London called Encounter. It had been started up by the CIA and I still saw their footprints around the office.

When I complimented the managing editor on the beautiful vase of flowers on her desk, she replied, “Yes, I bought them myself.” Then she paused to add, “It used to be part of the budget that the company bought us flowers every week. You know, the CIA took much better care of us than you do.”

Later I learned that the editor in chief was a CIA agent and the oh-so-British general manager served as liaison with Langley.

Spies among us.

That’s the subject of John le Carré’s novel “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” And now it’s been made into a movie starring Gary Oldman as Le Carré’s famous MI6 agent George Smiley. It’s playing this week at the Tropic Cinema.

Time Magazine has called Le Carré “the grand master of the modern literary thriller.” And that’s true. But not a thriller in the wham-bam non-stop action of the Bourne Identity books (and movies). More an intellectual thriller.

Here George Smiley’s called out of retirement to uncover a Soviet mole within the ranks of MI6 itself.

A plausible plot, in that Russian double agents have been known to infiltrate British Intelligence in the past – Kim Philby being the most notorious among them.

John le Carré (who is actually a former British spy named David Cornwell) remembers the time he refused to meet with Kim Philby. “I couldn’t possibly have shook his hand,’ he says. “It was drenched in blood. It would have been repulsive. Lord knows how many agents Philby betrayed.”

Philby had his own agenda for the proposed meeting. “Astonishingly, I think he hoped I might write his biography. It’s the ludicrous sort of fantasy he would have entertained.”

Instead, Cornwell takes those old memories, adds a dash of imagination, and wraps them up in a well-thought-out plot that’s beautifully written.

In “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” he tells the story of Smiley’s search for a mole within the Circus (as he calls MI6), a high-ranking agent planted by Soviet spymaster Karla. He has four suspects – codenamed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, and Poorman. These four colleagues have been swapping a KGB agent worthless information for valuable material known as Witchcraft.

Aiding Smiley is Jim Prideaux, a British agent who was shot and captured by the Soviets while trying to buy information from a greedy Hungarian general. Angry over being betrayed by the mole, Prideaux wants more than an arrest.

The story is based on the real-life Cambridge Five of the ’50s and ’60s, KGB double agents who infiltrated Britain’s SIS.

In this movie version, Gary Oldman takes on the world-weary role of George Smiley. This is a long-overdue star turn for Oldman, an often overlooked actor who exhibits “the quiet intensity and intelligence that’s needed” for a taciturn spy like Smiley.

He’s joined by Oscar-winner Colin Firth as Bill Haydon, a British agent under suspicion. And Mark Strong as Smiley’s embittered chum Prideaux.

Directed by Swedish-born Tomas Alfredson (“Let the Right One In”), this story of a British spy was financed by France’s StudioCanal. And it’s Alfredson’s first English-language film.

Le Carré himself is almost as interesting as his characters. The 80-year-old author taught at Eton before joining the British Foreign Service (1959 to 1964), first serving as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn and later as Political Consul in Hamburg. He started writing spy novels in 1961, and since then has published some twenty-two titles.

He says, “In the old days it was convenient to bill me as a spy turned writer. I was nothing of the kind. I am a writer who, when I was very young, spent a few ineffectual but extremely formative years in British Intelligence.”

He adds, “Apart from spying, I have in my time sold bath towels, got divorced, washed elephants, run away from school, decimated a flock of Welsh sheep with a twenty-five pound shell because I was too stupid to understand the gunnery officer’s instructions, taught children in a special school.”

Typically, Le Carré’s spies are everyday folk put into impossible positions. And George Smiley is his everyman. We learn that Smiley’s is not a black-and-white world. It’s one filled with shadowy moral ambiguity.

Authentic? You bet. Le Carré’s spy novels were actually required reading for the KGB.

srhoades@aol.com

Carnage (Brockway)

2012-01-11T17:12:00.001-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Carnage

I have to admit that I find Roman Polanski refreshing in our age of seemingly endless true stories and conventional dramas with their all too pat endings, neatly tied up like hot cross buns that make our soft drinks extra sweet. It is curiously comforting to me that Polanski is still working and directing, regardless of his personal pruriency. Who else but Polanski to make us a little uncomfortable and sputter on our popcorn , to delineate the devils and demons that lurk between the thin veneer of our white picket fences or underneath our Gothic Brownstone apartments in New York City? This is the oeuvre of Polanski as a poet of suspicion and group hysteria with an often comic edge and he delivers again in his latest "Carnage" based on a play by Yasmina Reza.

The first shot zeroes in on a schoolyard. Clusters of children are shown like sweatered magpies. There is hostile movement. A kid is pushed. Abruptly the kid picks up a stick and unceremoniously slaps the aggressor in the face. Time marches on without notice.
Penelope and Michael (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) are typing up a medical report detailing what happened to their son who got assaulted by the stick wielding Zachary. Zachary's parents Alan and Nancy (Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet) are positioned behind them nervous and edgy.

Penelope and Michael, seemingly having the upper hand, are all too eager to extend their graces and smooth things over. As they discuss the report between themselves, they agree to soften the harsh language even though Zachary has permanently lost two teeth during the assault. Jodie Foster's Penelope in wanting to appear the understanding peacemaker on the surface is wound up tight. And Michael is tooo diplomatic. Alan and Nancy agree to stay for cobbler. But the cobbler is mushy and frozen. The couple is perpetually on the edge of leaving. While pushing for the elevator on the edge of insult, the strange, aloof couple ends up staying.

And you haven't seen anything yet. 

You have to hand it to Polanski. Not since Linda Blair in "The Exorcist" has there been a more abruptly uncomfortable and comical vomit scene. Polanski goes even further than Woody Allen here, but the humorous lines delivered with an unabashed freedom by Reilly and Winslet will have you hooting underneath the nervousness. 

Waltz, who, in my opinion always seems in danger of being typecast since "Inglorious Basterds," does wonderfully here as the clinical and icy attorney. He is a literal cold fish, gnashing his teeth. A cell phone is even more obnoxious in this film than in real life.

Reilly is also a highlight as a charming teddy bear type with a traitorous and aggressive mean streak. When drunk, he tries anything to be liked. 

Jodie Foster is a bit hard to take near the end as a quivering mass of rage, but she was pushed to the brink after all. 

Although at first the film has a sitcom potential to be a "Saturday Night Live" comedy (i.e. Neighbors) the sharp dialogue elevates it to a dark comedy of errors. And while we may not really see anything groundbreaking here (as in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and "Boys in the Band" ) the gleeful toxicity that Waltz and Reilly bring to their roles make passive aggressiveness into something new.

The one weak spot in "Carnage" is  the hamster. The lone varmint is just a bit too cutesy, like the meddlesome squirrel in "Caddyshack". But don't let that make you queasy. "Carnage" is better to see than to explain. The film should be the unapologetic centerpiece to any dysfunctional Thanksgiving. Every object in the film from a cellphone to an art book or a bouquet of tulips, is either vibrating with menace or wilting in panic. Even the right angled apartment walls seem to jut forward in spatial rage.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Brockway)

2012-01-11T17:12:00.000-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The audience holds its breath. The projector shoots its beam of light which fills the screen, composing a rather magnificent grey afternoon in which every sound is magnified on a Budapest lane. There is a mole on the loose but who is it? So begins the highly anticipated film version of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy", a highly ambitious project with some compelling visual punctuation. But alas, this is a film that confounds me and appears to have left me in a decidedly English drizzle.

How I wish it wasn't so. And although I am not a John le Carre devotee, I can sense the spice of a film, its rhythm and pacing and I can usually grasp its footsteps. This film feels a bit too, well... grey, both in pace and in palette.

At the start, the film had me snug in my chair. An agent Prideaux (Mark Strong) is dispatched to seek out a mole in Budapest. The air is thick. Every sound is magnified from the striking of a match, the clinking of a glass, to the whimper of a baby. Strangers' eyes pivot as if strummed by a violin. A sweating waiter arrives. Prideaux turns to leave. Suddenly , he is shot in the back by the waiter. It is an opening that would throw Hitchcock back into his rotund orbit. The scene is near musical in its score of apprehension. It is a visual question mark pointing to what might be next. A sudden thrill. If only the body of the film had kept that momentum.

Gary Oldman does a fine job as George Smiley. He is unrecognizable as his usual self: heavy, taciturn, official and old.

Because of Prideaux's murder, espionage feathers are ruffled. Smiley and Prideaux are forced into damage control Smiley to retires to his grey-green flat and Prideaux ultimately resurfaces as a schoolteacher in a grey-green trailer.

There is so much back and forth and so much listening in and listening out that I admit to getting lost in the shuffle, along with dim marches upstairs and down in hushed tones. The dialogue itself appears bogged down with spy-speak (e.g, circus / witchcraft/ Karla that I became over or is it underwhelmed? Flashbacks and characters go to and fro forever. Soon, I was in the middle of a muddle. The characters too, have multiple names and this proved altogether too vexing. Should I have read the novel? Perhaps. But I doubt if it would be fair to require a prerequisite in the enjoyment of a film. However, on the side of satisfaction we have Colin Firth who shows us some smarmy charm as a agent who missteps, along with Toby Jones who looks properly formidable, obsequious and anemic.

The best parts that save this film from being a "Tinker Tailor Soldier Snooze" are the eerie qualities of menace that periodically pepper this monochrome cloak, particularly the agents' party hall. One glance at an ominous looking Santa Claus, with everyone standing in salute is all you need to know that you are in a den of wolves, reminiscent of an artwork by James Ensor or Otto Dix. Or how about the sight of an enflamed seagull roaring down a fireplace without Tippy Hedren? Or last but not least, a slain agent that is positioned like a freshly killed deer, his limbs covered by autumn leaves? These are welcome Gothic delights that brighten up long passages in grey parlor rooms.

This is where "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" succeeds.

You may call me an outlier on this outing if you wish, but I hope to emerge from this sedentary jump unscathed, to live and review another day.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Carnage (Rhoades)

2012-01-11T09:54:00.000-05:00

“Carnage” Depicts

End of Civility

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Think of it as a grown-up version of “Breakfast Club” gone awry. Two sets of parents come together (kinda like detention hall) to discuss their children who have been fighting. Their time together in this small apartment is revealing – drawing out the fears, prejudices, and pent-up anger of both families.

“Carnage” – currently playing at the Tropic Cinema – is a new film by bad boy Roman Polanski.

Himself in detention (recently under house arrest for his 1977 sex with a minor), Polanski keeps cranking them out. “The Ghost Writer” was a stylish mystery. “The Pianist” was an award-winner. “Chinatown” remains widely quoted. “Rosemary’s Baby has become a horror classic. “Knife in the Water” is studied in film schools.

Three of Polanski’s films – “Repulsion,” “Rosemary's Baby,” and “The Tenant” are known as his Apartment Trilogy. Given the cramped confines of the stagy Brooklyn apartment in “Carnage,” we may as well start calling it the Apartment Quartet.

“Carnage” may not go down as a classic, but it’s hypnotically watchable. Oscar-winners Jody Foster and Kate Winslet are the two warring mothers. John C. Riley and Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz are the angry dads. Eliot Berger and Elvis Polanski (yes, the director’s son) are the boys whose playground contretemps has caused this conference.

Does it matter whether one of the boys was “armed with a stick” or merely “carrying a stick”? Not really. This story is about the breakdown of civility, not fighting boys.

"Why are we still here?" becomes the movie’s battle cry as politeness melts like butter on a hot stove. Some audience members felt the same way.

“Carnage” is described as a black comedy. But it’s more biting than funny. Nevertheless, you’ll laugh as social mores get thrown out the window, particularly in the last ten minutes of this truncated 80-minute film.

Based on a 2006 stage play “God of Carnage” by Yasmine Reza, the film is talky. In a good way. Four talented actors going at it in a word-for-word battle. Pure theater.

No, not “Breakfast Club.” More like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

srhoades@aol.com

[from Solares Hill]

The Conquest (Brockway)

2012-01-09T09:03:00.000-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

The Conquest

The poster for Xavier Durringer's "The Conquest" looks a bit like the poster for Quentin Tarrantino's "Reservoir Dogs". This is no coincidence. "The Conquest" is the most clinically carnivorous and slyly told political biopic that I have seen in years. It chronicles Nicolas Sarkozy's rise to prominence. If you like your political biopics with a scaly, jittery edge, then this film is a must.

Not since "The Ides of March" have I seen such a soft shoe with a sinister beat.
In contrast to the above-mentioned film however, "The Conquest" has a breezy theatrical flair that is more reptilian than "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", yet more detached and paranoid than Martin Scorsese's "GoodFellas" (1990). No one is likable in this film and that is the point. Politics, no matter the nationality is a toxic swamp of veneer and subterfuge. Words and intent shift about like a malleable plastic. All is gained by posture and glare. Politics is a Pop Art strategy game and a charade of sincere faces.

Denis Podalydes plays Nicolas Sarkozy as a head-bobbing and ill-tempered shifty wise guy with a penchant for chocolate and hazelnuts. Sarkozy carries his cellphone like a scimitar and stabs the air. He moves from marbled hallway to hallway like a guilt-ridden chess piece, perpetually looking over his shoulder, as if pursued. Perhaps. Or more to the point to see who might be mocking him over his shortness. Sarkozy's rivals call him a right wing "runt" behind his back.

Short Sarkozy may be, but he has the chimerical ability to uncoil and move his body about like the pop star Johnny Hallyday. Perhaps there is something Shakespearean here: the marginalized one, driven by ambition who tries to reach his star in both the bedroom and the political media. While underneath, of course, a bruised ego respirates like a second skin.
We also see Cecilia Sarkozy (Florence Pernel). She is melancholic and eaten up, her face is a triangle of tension. No love lost here. Cecilia might as well be a stranger to the box shouldered Nicolas. There is a deliberate nudge of Lars von Trier in her character as her face is chalk white, her hair off-brown and stringy like faded bark.

Also worth mentioning is Samuel Labarthe as Sarcozy's rival Dominique de Villepin. Villepin is half hyped up android and half Sean Connery wannabe, slinking behind Sarcozy's back under the guise of a sycophantic spaceman. With his silver-white parchment pallor he also looks a touch like Warhol. Villepin seeks the dayglo silkscreen of political coverage as much as anyone else.

Although in content, "The Conquest" does not reveal anything new, but the eerie lingering drift of the camera offers a treading haunt of existentialism and comic chiaroscuro that echoes the films of Peter Greenaway. Picture a haunted man who looks a little like Joe Pesci, slipping behind a political red curtain that once contained the shape of a woman in the act of running away and you've got your film.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Getting to Know "The Man Nobody Knew" (Rhoades

2012-01-08T09:00:00.000-05:00

Getting to Know

“The Man Nobody Knew”

By Shirrel Rhoades

“My father was the ultimate gray man,” Carl Colby says, his voice sounding much closer than Mexico. He was talking to me about William Egan Colby, the spymaster who served as head of the Central Intelligence Agency from September 1973 to January 1976. His dad.

“He was invisible, the last person you’d notice at a diplomatic reception.” An intelligence gatherer.

He’s been described as someone who couldn’t easily get the attention of a waiter in a restaurant. Yet he was one of the most powerful men in the world as director of the CIA.

As a boy Carl thought his dad was a diplomat. In those earlier days the family had been stationed in Stockholm, in Rome, and in Saigon.

“One day another kid told me my father worked for the CIA. I went to my father and asked him if that were true, was he like James Bond? He leaned close with a slight crease of a smile and said, ‘Well, let’s keep that our little secret.’ We never discussed it again.”

He was a member of the club and I supported the membership.

In Rome, clergy often visited the Colby household. The CIA was working with the Vatican to help sway the elections for the Christian Democrats.

And in Saigon, the Colby family lived next door to the palace. One day it came under attack. Colby hid his son under a stairwell and went upstairs to phone Washington. “After a while I got restless and wandered upstairs and showed myself in the doorway. ‘Get down,’ my father shouted as rounds from 50-caliber machinegun ripped through the room. ‘You all right?’ he asked and I replied yes. He invited me over to the window to watch the battle raging outside. I saw a guy get shot next to the tree where I played. After a while, my father said, ‘Well, you better go downstairs, sport,’ and continued monitoring the battle for the CIA. Surprisingly, I wasn’t afraid with my father there.”

I tell Carl about my friend Elizabeth who had known his dad, used to go to Washington DC to attend parties with Colby. When she was a girl her father had been a ‘diplomat’ in Turkey and a big black Volga followed Elizabeth and her twin sister to and from school. She said they always felt safe with the Russian KGB looking after them.

Carl says his childhood was like that too. “In terms of fear, I never feared for him, never feared for myself. He was so coolheaded.”

“It was a fascinating way to grow up,” Carl observes. “How could I never have stayed awake at night worrying about him? I never thought, What happens if he doesn’t come home?”

A devote Roman Catholic, William Colby was known as “the warrior priest.” As a young soldier he’d bought a first edition of T.E. Lawrence’s autobiography at the Strand in London. It caught his imagination. “So that’s what he became,” notes his son, “the Lawrence of Arabia of every hot zone in the world.”

During World War II Colby had joined the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. Next thing you knew, he was parachuting behind enemy lines, blowing up bridges in Norway. He rose through the ranks, eventually working in concert with John F. Kennedy on a counterinsurgency leading to the 1963 coup in South Vietnam. He headed the Phoenix Program, sometimes referred to as a “death squad.” He also ran the CIA’s secret war in Laos. When asked by a young CIA recruit, “Is this going to work out?” he replied, “I dunno, probably not,” acknowledging the fatalism of their mission.

Colby eventually became director of the CIA. His brief tenure was known for its transparency and many reforms. But when the Nixon White House asked him to stonewall Congress, he couldn’t do it. He served a higher calling. His revelation about “the Family Jewels,” the Agency’s darkest secrets, capped his career. Newly appointed President Gerald Ford replaced him with one George H. W. Bush as DCI. “A sacrificial lamb,” some said, referring to the unpopularity of his CIA policy of openness.

“There’s something like an ‘invisible government’ running the show,” Carl says, the phone signal from Mexico wavering in my ear. “There are more than 200,000 people with Top Secret clearance in the Washington DC area alone.”

I joke about our call being monitored. He chuckles, noting, “There are surveillance programs that pick up key words.” And we’re saying them all as we talk about his dad’s career in the CIA.

William Colby was an affable, yet steely man. Carl describes him as “an Edwardian schoolboy,” an adventurer, an only child whose mother “gave him all the love he was ever going to need.” He didn’t show his emotions, he didn’t express how he felt about his family.

Colby led a clandestine life, his job compartmentalized from his family life. “As a spy you can’t tell your wife where you’re going. You can’t explain to your son why you missed his soccer practice. Where have you been? was never asked in my family.”

Sometimes the job became the life. “My father had been in Indonesia with his deputy Bob Myers. At the time it was the hottest zone possible, ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’ tripled. Coming home from the inspection trip, my father suggested they go out for a drink. Bob clasped him on the shoulder and said gently, ‘Bill, you’re home, go home.’”

The CIA offered a fraternity, a bonhomie. “I sometimes think I would have preferred to work for my father than be his son, as I would have been closer to him,” Carl told me wistfully.

But the son didn’t follow in the family trade. “I worked for the CIA for a summer,” he admits. “But it wasn’t my world.” For a career he became a filmmaker. His award-winning documentaries explored the art world. “Strokes of Genius” was a TV mini-series about painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. “Legends in the Light: The Photography of George Hurrell” was a portrait of the famous Hollywood lensman. He interviewed stars like Sharon Stone, Raquel Welch, Loretta Young, and Katherine Hepburn – not spies and secret warriors.

Even so, he couldn’t help asking himself who this man he’d known as his father really was. William Colby had died in 1996 under mysterious circumstance, a boating accident that had been viewed by some as a suicide. This was after leaving his family behind, starting a new life. In 1984, he had divorced his wife Barbara and married diplomat Sally Shelton-Colby.

“Suicide, I don’t think so,” Carl told me, citing a conversation with his dad two weeks before his death. “He’d been upset over his removal from the CIA, but he didn’t show it. ‘It was better for their business,’ he’d said, upper lip quivering just a bit. He was extremely good at compartmentalizing.”

Colby had “jettisoned the family,” walked away from old friends, found new friends. “‘To hell with the past,’ he’d said.”

On that last phone call his father had sounded “kind of woozy.” He had cryptically said his end would not be like in the movies. “Oh, that will never happen to me. One day I’ll be walking along a goat path on a Greek island and fall to the sea.” He fell off his canoe in the waters near his home in Rock Point, Maryland.

“Maybe he was the gray man,” mused Carl. “Maybe the family was just a cover. I started to ask myself, could the family have been a lie too.”

So he undertook making a documentary about his father.

The euphuistic title says it all: “The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby.”

Despite the personal quality of this film, Carl doesn’t appear on camera very much. “This isn’t about me,” he says as if trying to convince himself of that.

“The Man Nobody Knew” was produced by Carl Colby, with David Johnson and Grace Guggenheim, for Act 4 Entertainment. “Grace was great at turning up archival footage. I think I looked at every scrap of film showing my father.”

His producer David Johnson pushed him to go further into personal doubts. “Are you sure about this?” counseled David when they began the project. “What if you turn up something you don’t like about your father?”

Carl did. But at the same time he learned much about the murky world of espionage and the dedication of men like his father. “It’s a quiet, selfless service,” he says.

But his was a more basic quest: finding who his father really was. “It’s the oldest story in the world: Who’s Abraham?” he makes a Biblical reference. “I was afraid I was becoming him, cold remote.”

Researching the film helped him “fill in the blanks.” In the end he came away with “a grudging respect” for the father he hardly knew.

He interviewed more than 85 people, although all of them did not make it into the documentary. “I tried to be really balanced,” Carl says. “I have to grow during the course of the film. I have to be that ten-year-old boy who adores his dad. That questioning teen. In the end I have to be the adult son who asks the toughest questions.”

Producer David Johnson ruefully said to Carl, “You don’t see it. You’re really like him. Compartmentalized.”

“The Man Nobody Knew” will be shown at the Tropic Cinema on January 13. Carl Colby and David Johnson will be on hand to introduce the film, take questions from the audience afterwards.

He doesn’t consider the film pro CIA or anti CIA. Rather, it’s a portrait of a father who took on one of the toughest assignments possible, one that took precedence over family and friends. “The CIA exists so the President has an option – diplomatic protest or sending in the Marines,” explains Carl. “And the men who do this are very tough – but also very solicitous – gentlemen. My father was one of them.”

The biggest lesson Carl Colby learned from his dad? “My father was a listener. He taught me how to listen.” So bring your questions.

srhoades@aol.com

The Man Who Nobody Knew (Wanous)

2012-01-08T08:26:00.000-05:00

Documentary reveals spymaster's painful secrets

By CRAIG WANOUS

This family photo was taken in the mid-1950s. William Colby is seated; son Carl, the documentary maker, is second from the right.

'The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby.' Unrated, 104 minutes. South Florida premiere is Jan. 13 at the Tropic Cinema, 419 Eaton St., Key West.

This documentary tells the story of William Colby, master spy and one-time director of the CIA who died under mysterious circumstances in 1996. Colby spent his adult life wrapped in the cloak and dagger world of lies, spies and secrecy.

Produced and directed by Colby's son Carl, the film is a slow-moving but fascinating picture of a man who ultimately lived up to the film's title. "The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father" is also an important history lesson about a tumultuous time in 20th Century America, a time when the CIA assassinated foreign leaders, spied on American citizens and plotted government coups around the world.

Spanning his career from beginning to end, the film covers Colby's experiences in World War II, his attempts to help stamp out communism in post-war Italy, his part in the Vietnam War, his appearances before numerous hostile congressional hearings on the CIA, and finally his unusual death.

We hear much about his family life highlighted by numerous family photos. (For a 'superspy,' it's surprising to see so many pictures of him exist.) But in all the snapshots, even the ones of him surrounded by his wife and children, he has a distant look in his eyes, as if he is not really there.

These are not the usual warm and fuzzy family photos -- he seems like a man apart, a man who needs no one, not even his family.

The film features a lot of archival footage and photos, much of which has rarely been seen. And be warned, some of the scenes are quite gruesome.

We watch film of the killing of a suspected Viet Cong enemy, which helped turn U.S. public sentiment against the war. There are scenes of brutal interrogation techniques and several bodies in various stages of death and dismemberment are shown. But the scenes add to the authenticity of the documentary, giving it a gut-wrenching ring of truth.

There are countless interviews and, if it wasn't for the archival film footage and photos, all that talking could have made the film just another dull documentary. But the well-edited collection of audio and film footage, including spellbinding recordings of President Kennedy, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara discussing whether to support a coup against South Vietnam's then-president Diem, keep the film from turning into the usual talking-head documentary. But the film does have a few problems.

Director Colby's narration is stilted and not natural, and adds little to the viewer's knowledge of his father other than to show us that the son obviously didn't know his father any better than anyone else. Toward the end of the movie, Colby's ex-wife recounts how shocked she was when he asked for a divorce after nearly 40 years of marriage. But we learn nothing about his life after that.

Research shows that Colby remarried, started a profitable law practice, became a published author, and was portrayed in a video game called, what else, "Spycraft." But the film doesn't mention any of that. And although director Colby implies that his father may have taken his own life over guilt he felt about his epileptic daughter's death, he doesn't follow up on his suspicions or give us any more information.

Or was foul play involved in the mysterious boating death of Colby? We are left to wonder.

But these flaws aside, "The Man Nobody Knew" gives a history of the CIA and tells the story of a family living with a man they thought they knew but didn't. It's a rare peek into some of America's most secret intelligence operations.

Week of January 6 to January 12 (Mann)

2012-01-05T14:57:00.002-05:00

What's on at the Tropic
by Phil Mann

Our reviewers Ian and Shirrel have already covered several of this week's movies: THE DESCENDANTS, MY WEEK WITH MARILYN, and YOUNG ADULT. Check the index to the right for links to these reviews.

New this week are two interesting alternative films.

THE CONQUEST is a cinema roman a clef based on the political and personal life of the current French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, leading up to his election in 2007. It's comforting to learn that we're not the only place where election campaigns are "a merry-go-round of vanity, vulgarity and viciousness," to use Roger Ebert's description of this film. But it's also the story of his relationship with his then wife, Cecilia, who bailed on him just at the moment of his triumph, leaving the alluring Carla Bruni to step into the role. Wow, since he's a right-leaning guy, maybe he should throw his hat in the Republican ring here. He'd fit right in.

THE WHALE is thankfully free of any narrow-minded backbiting. That's because it's a documentary about a non-human -- in this case a very playful orca (killer whale). Stranded in a British Columbia fiord apart from his family pod, he sought social relations with people who came to him. Beautifully filmed, it's a "thoughtful, philosophical, political and ultimately sad documentary that ponders the impulses behind, and advisability of, intense interaction between human beings and another smart species." (Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter)

The Whale (Brockway)

2012-01-05T14:56:00.000-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

The Whale

Even though the standard and overly sentimentalized "We Bought a Zoo" is playing on the other side of the island, sometimes our tendency to anthropomorphize animals in a film, that is to attribute human qualities to them, is well founded and actually pulls us in as human spectators.
Case in point is the documentary "The Whale" directed by Susan Chisholm and Michael Parfit. The film which is produced and narrated by actor Ryan Reynolds and co-produced by Scarlett Johansson (We Bought a Zoo) is poignant and riveting, achieving a human empathy for the natural world with nothing more than the simple telling of events in a small British Columbian coastline, called Nootka Sound.

The story concerns a young killer whale, named Luna, who got lost from his pod and wandered into Nootka Sound and charmed its human residents. Luna bounces things about, follows boats and seems to crave attention. Luna waits to ensnare any human eye. He . Then he opens his mouth and the residents rub his belly like a Portuguese Water Dog. As soon as people catch sight of Luna's jet black fin, like the ungloved hand of Mickey Mouse, they are hooked. They know a playful friend is in the water. And the people who see Luna come to expect joy. In Luna's case, the normally fearsome teeth of a killer whale is transformed into Muppet felt or foam rubber.

But how long will this last? What will be the breaking point before this black masked jester becomes a Dom of a dark ocean, or a misunderstood monster? The apprehension builds going from blisses of Spielberg, to a shade of Stephen King and back again, but I am not going to spill the thrill of this story. Suffice to say that the government and the pettiness of a few do their best to worry and wear upon the randomness of natural spontaneity and rein in Luna's interspecies carnival, assuredly at first, for the protection of Luna, as well as humans.

A highlight of the film, as if Luna is not enough, are the heartfelt and direct interviews of the Mowachat/Muchalth peoples who believe that Luna is the reincarnation of their Leader Jerry Jack who passed away on the same day that Luna arrived. To them, an Orca is a supernatural creature meant to teach life lessons, to show humans the path to the spirit. To the Mowachat/Muchalth the answer is simple: leave Luna alone.

This is one documentary where government agencies actually appear comical, ill-equipped to ponder the breadth of animal intelligence and the hard to refute, physical evidence that Luna is acting out of a definite need for companionship, not cetacean instinct. The humans grow to need Luna as much as he seems to need them. The people look to Luna for a universal connection, a way of going beyond themselves.

Many, including the Mowachat/ Muchalth become deeply moved to tears and even without the safety net of tissues it is easy to see why. One look at Luna's black-masked smile and you recall the playfulness of a Zorro on a Saturday Matinee. But better yet, Luna's arrival speaks of the randomness of nature,forcing us to decide whether to accept unusual visitations with grace or greed.

Life, be it human or cetacean often has both within.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

The Conquest (Rhoades)

2012-01-05T12:28:00.000-05:00

“The Conquest”

Accurately Portrays

French President

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Biographies and biopics used to be reserved for people in history books. But the new film “The Conquest” sets out to portray French president Nicolas Sarkozy while he’s still in office.

Aside from being married to former supermodel Carla Bruni (“Midnight In Paris”), he is known as the “hyper-président” for his attempts to control both foreign and domestic policies. He’s been compared to Napoleon Bonaparte and Louis XIV by his critics.

The film focuses mainly on how Sarkozy won the 2007 elections. Replete with in-party backstabbing, media manipulation, sarcastic confrontations, and extramarital affairs. Even so, the film’s a little short on storyline.

One moviegoer groused that “the whole plot has been written from press cutouts from LeFigaro et Libération.” But others applaud the film’s close-to-reality detail: look-alike faces, manner of speaking, physical gestures, right down to Sarkozy’s personal ticks. The actors who play former president Jacques Chirac, former prime minister Dominique de Villepin, and Sarkozy are dead ringers for their real-life counterparts.

Director-writer-producer Xavier Durringer (“Chok-Dee”) doesn’t pull any punches. His film offers a no-holds-barred depiction of right-leaning Sarkozy as “a monomaniacal, power-hungry little despot.”

Yes, Sarkozy is short.

His leggy wife Carla is not central to the story, the film concentrating more on the relationship between Sarkozy and then-wife Cécilia.

“The Conquest” premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Carla Bruni, who was there to promote “Midnight in Paris,” skipped the Red Carpet, worried about the questions this scathing indictment of her hubby might encourage. Alas, being the trophy wife of le président de la République is not all champagne toasts and diplomatic receptions.

Although based on public documents and first person accounts, the film is nominally described as a work of fiction. Despite being called a “political docu-comedy,” there are not many laughs. Chalk this up to political dramas like “Frost-Nixon,” “W,” and “The Queen.”

“The Conquest” is currently playing at the Tropic Cinema.

The film’s star Denis Podalydès (“State Affairs,” “The Da Vinci Code”) could pass as the French president at a glance. He depicts Sarkozy as a shrewd hustler willing to flip-flop for the sake of a vote. A great impersonation, you might say. Or vitriolic parody. Turns out, he supported Ségolène Royal in France’s 2007 presidential campaign.

srhoades@aol.com

Week of December 30 to January 5 (Mann)

2011-12-28T12:01:00.000-05:00

What’s on at the Tropic
by Phil Mann

It’s a week mainly of holdovers: THE DESCENDANTS, MY WEEK WITH MARILYN, YOUNG ADULT, and BEING ELMO.

New this week is GAINSBOURG: A HEROIC LIFE, the life story of Serge Gainsbourg, the legendary French singer, actor, lover and chain-smoker. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, who had to flee Paris during WWII, he went on to become so revered that President Mitterand eulogized him as “our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire.”

One might call him a French Frank Sinatra in terms of his place in their culture, but his singing style had nothing of the crooner about it. Perhaps his most famous song is Je t'aime... moi non plus (I Love You… Me Neither), that he wrote and recorded during an affair with Brigitte Bardot. He subsequently re-recorded it with a new lover, the English actor-singer Janet Birkin, in a rendition famous for its heavy, allegedly orgasmic, breathing that led to its being banned in many places. (Check out this YouTube at about the 2:30 point - http://tinyurl.com/o6c59v) Actor Charlotte Gainsbourg, who has frequently graced the Tropic screens (Melancholia, Antichrist, I’m Not There) was a product of his relationship with Birkin.

The movie takes you deep into French culture, and features Gainsbourg working his charm on everyone from young music students to Bardot, played by Laetitia Casta almost as well as Michelle Williams does Marilyn Monroe. You’ll love the scene where Gainsbourg and Bardot are rehearsing a musical tribute to Bonnie and Clyde.

“He wasn't well-known in America, but French crooner and actor Serge Gainsbourg was like Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Frank Sinatra rolled into one unfiltered cigarette. His life story, which encompasses the Holocaust and hippie eras, is worthy of a documentary, but this biopic takes a different approach. It's a comedic dramatization with a looming shadow of the surreal.” (Joe Williams, St. Louis Post Dispatch)

Meanwhile, speaking of Ms. Monroe, I urge you to see My Week With Marilyn. It’s not getting the year-end hype it should, maybe it’s been poorly positioned as the story of a young man’s tryst. That’s only a small part of the film, which is really a story about filmmaking, and about Marilyn’s neurotic but charming personality. I’d rate it as one of the best of the year.

The New Year is starting off as a great one for Special Events. On Monday, January 2, the Tropic’s Classic Movie series resumes with the month-long theme Gotta Dance. The first film is a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers treat, SWING TIME, winner of the Oscar for Best Music and Best Song (“The Way You Look Tonight” by Jerome Kern & Dorothy Fields) The esteemed sponsor of the Classic Series, Ross Claiborne, will be on hand to introduce this one.

Then on Thursday, we’ll proudly welcome Director Terry George to the Carper Stage to kick off the 2012 Visiting Filmmaker Series. He’ll be screening his acclaimed HOTEL RWANDA (triple Oscar and Golden Globe nominations). Mr. George will have an open dialogue with the audience following the movies.

Gainsbourg (Brockway)

2011-12-28T12:00:00.004-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life

If the affectionate conventionally-told documentary on Kevin Clash [Being Elmo] makes you too warm and fuzzy or jaded by the color red, I suggest sauntering in to see "Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life " . The film is unapologetically "different" without any pretension or snobbery when so many "Different", "Indie" or "0ffbeat" films wear their hearts on the screen and choose quirk over content. This filmed interpretation on the French singing legend Serge Gainsbourg is free-wheeling, open, and associative with startling animation, a bit like Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Belleville) mixed with Halloween maestro Tim Burton. "Gainsbourg" is nothing less than a chiaroscuro collage on film.

The film is directed by the avant-garde graphic novelist Joann Sfar, who also wrote a novel about the composer. Sfar has the boldness of a mixed media artist for using all materials available. Puppets merge with people and landscapes spin in an out like curls of smoke from Gainsbourg's cigarette. Terry Gilliam should guard his quixotic camera. At times roles are reversed: the puppets are the people while people are puppets. The film presents an interspecies society---a world seen sideways. Anything goes.

We see Gainsbourg as a boy, smoking a cigarette and left on a Dalinian beach. He is spurned by a valentine for being "too ugly". Gainsbourg pokes his nose everywhere. He even smirkingly jeers at the Nazi soldiers that march past.

They don't know what to make of him.

He gradually develops a persona or a "mug" that is in the form of a extra tall and gaunt puppet/man which looks a bit like The Count from "Sesame Street" but his voice and philosophy is more Leonard Cohen. And, better yet, he has phosphorescent eyes.

His parents force him to play piano. He refuses. Gainsbourg (Eric Elmosnino) goes to art school and plays piano to support his painting. As an adult art teacher, Elmosnino bumbles and twitches, aping more than a bit of Woody Allen.

The narrative is less interesting than the stream of consciousness flow of animation that abruptly stems from Gainsbourg's low self esteem as well as from his gangly, thin and awkward body. Rather than be a cartoon though, Elmosnino brings slapstick to earth and his spasms have purpose. There is method even in a cabbage-head. Judgement always lied in wait for the composer. But when the lights dim he transforms like a chameleon or leopard in dark light becoming the Franc Sinatra of Cool.

Skirt-chasing Serge eventually hits the big time with overtly sexual Lolita-inspired pop tunes that were written for 1960's teen sensation France Gall (Sara Forestier). He has an affair with the voluptuous Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta) and they actually write a song together, the hit "Bonnie and Clyde".

Although the film is often brief and slighting, passing over romps in bed and far too many scenes of Gainsbourg chain-smoking, it has a flashy locomotive flavor that's hard to hate.
Just when the film gets to flighty, a black cat speaks with a telepathy that seems utterly authentic and Gainsbourg's puppet-ego enters the room with just as much dramatic bearing as a human player.

The young Lucy Gordon who sadly committed suicide in 2009 plays Gainsbourg's wife Jane Birkin. Gordon shoes a maternal whimsy in her performance. Gordon's portrayal as a maternal sprite could make any singer stop smoking. But even this wasn't enough for Gainsbourg.

For all the film's familiarities, (the nods to Pee Wee Herman, Woody Allen and Mr. Bean) the blending of animation and puppetry into the demons of alcoholism and adultery are novel and compelling able to make even the most jaded Muppeteer among us stop and look.
It is interesting to note that Gainsbourg's daughter, the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg (Melancholia) was asked to play her father in this film.

What a different "different" film that would have been.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

'Being Elmo' creator interview (Wanous)

2011-12-28T12:00:00.003-05:00

'Being Elmo' creator discusses her work of love

By CRAIG WANOUS

Courtesy McCLATCHY-TRIBUNE

Kevin Clash and Elmo attend the Kennedy Center Honors on Dec. 4 in Washington, D.C. The Kennedy Center Honors are awarded annually for lifetime achievement in the performing arts.

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey. Rated PG. One hour, 16 minutes. Playing at the Tropic Cinema, 416 Eaton St., Key West.

"Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey " is the story of Kevin Clash, the man who gives life to Elmo, one of the most popular characters on the "Sesame Street" TV program.
Directed and co-produced by New Yorker Constance Marks, the documentary -- winner of the Sundance Film Festival's 2011 Special Jury Prize for U.S. documentary -- is a touching portrait of the man behind Elmo who came from humble beginnings and, through dedication and perseverance, fulfilled his childhood dream of working with Jim Henson and the Muppets.
Marks recently took time out of her schedule to discuss the film and how it's been received.
Question: I read that filming took six years. Is that right?
Answer: It wasn't the filming so much -- it was the editing that was the real challenge.
Q: As a director, do you feel that you're more an artist or a manager? I know you wear several hats.
A: I think it's like 50 hats. There's definitely the artistic conception, then there's the managing everybody and keeping everybody happy. And then on the shoot when the door's squeaky, I'm there with the oil can. You don't have the staff and the crew you might have in a much larger production. There are lots of hats to be worn -- most of them are not pretty, not glamorous.
Q: Where did the money come from?
A: That's an area I'm not really comfortable talking about, if you don't mind. I raised some money on the outside, I borrowed some money from people but I don't really feel comfortable talking about the details of the financing.
Q: You had a lot of archival footage. How do you find old film and old TV shows like that?
A: There are people who can help you find that, and with the Internet it's really not that hard to begin to track things down. We had the new iPhone with Siri, the personal assistant. We asked her, "Where do we get so-and-so footage?" and within two seconds she gave us an answer. It was outdated but it was a good place to start. So it can be done.
Q: Who are Nancy Marks, Edwin Marks and Maria that you mention in the credits?
A: Nancy is my mom, my dad was Edwin and Maria was the Make-A-Wish child in the film, who died.
Q: That was a touching scene, with the little girl.
A: We were packing up to leave for the day. Nobody told us that this was going to be happening. We're walking out the door and it suddenly looked like something important was going to happen. If we had left one minute earlier, we would have completely missed that.
Q: Do you try to attend all of the film festivals that the movie was in?
A: We attended 95 percent of the festivals that we entered, starting at Sundance a year ago. It's really good when you're the producer and director, because they fly you out and put you up. I think if it had been a much shorter film, that might not have been the case, but most of the festivals hosted us.
Because the film went to Sundance and won an award there, we got lots of calls, lots of invitations. Otherwise, you send it out, you hear back, you go the regular route, which is what most people do, what I've usually done with short films. A few of the festivals said we'd like you submit the film. A couple of times it didn't get in, even though they wrote that letter, which I thought was odd.
Q: For Sundance, you submitted the film and they accepted it?
A: Yes, I submitted it, along with the other 10,000 people, and then I got an e-mail asking me to overnight another DVD because it was stuck and they couldn't see the end of the film. I was delighted and terrified, because we had sent them a rough cut.
We hadn't cleared any archival footage, we didn't have the music scored; there was so much yet to be done. But it was so much easier than having to do it from scratch.
Q: When your films come out, do you look at Rotten Tomatoes and other review sites?
A: Yes, and I like Rotten Tomatoes because we keep climbing. But there are people on the team who look at the box office and follow it very closely. We're doing a really respectable business but I'm less interested in following every tic. It just too nerve wracking.
Q: How badly do negative reviews affect you?
A: There have been so many positive ones that I really don't allow myself to go there. Call me crazy but I usually read them once and move on.
Q: Can you give me a hint about your next project?
A: I will as soon as I know.

[from the Keynoter - Keysnet.com]

Gainsbourg (Rhoades)

2011-12-28T12:00:00.001-05:00

“Gainsbourg” Offers

Comic Book Biopic

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Having been a comic book publisher, I’m always pleased to see this art form get recognized as more than lowbrow entertainment. It isn’t just about superheroes.

Case in point: Joann Sfar is a creator of graphic novels (what Frank Miller called “fat comic books”). Now Sfar brings one of his works to the screen, an inventive biography of French singer Serge Gainsbourg.

“Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life” is currently playing at the Tropic Cinema.

Sfar is considered one the most important artists of the new wave of Franco-Belgian comics. You can see the comic book roots in his fanciful style of filmmaking – realism blended with fantasy artwork and animation. A potato-shaped figure on a poster comes to life and chases our young hero down the streets of Paris. A long-nosed puppet version of himself steps into the story as an alter ego.

The film won the French artist-turned-director a César Award for Best Debut.

Sfar’s comics are often inspired by his Jewish heritage. And he claims to be a “fanatic” for the work of infamous singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg (who was born as Lucien Ginsburg to Russian-Jewish parents).

This film follows Gainsbourg from his boyhood in Nazi-occupied Paris (where he proudly wears his Jewish star ID) to his adulthood as a painter, jazz musician, and pop superstar in the ‘60s (where the cheeky beak-nosed musician marries or woos Juliet Greco, Brigitte Bardot, and Jane Birkin).

Eric Elmosnino (“Ribet”) won a César Award for Best Actor playing Gainsbourg in this film. Ironically, he’s mainly worked in the theater.

Anna Mouglalis (“Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky”) steps in as Bohemian singer-actress Juliette Gréco. Supermodel Laetitia Casta (“Arbitrage”) takes on the role of sex goddess Brigitte Bardot. And the late Lucy Gordon (“Spider-Man 3”) is cast as British actress Jane Birkin.

The soundtrack will bring back memories of the ‘60s. Yes, the film also won a César for Best Sound.

The songwriter’s life is described as heroic because “he lived deeply in his own imagination and did continual battle with the personal demons.”

“He was the only French singer with an attitude,” observes Joann Sfar. “When you turned on TV in France in the 1970s, he was the only guy who would refer to sex and alcohol and the meaningless life, so it was very appealing. He was the guy who makes you feel that it would be cool to be an adult.”

How accurate is this biography? “I prefer his lies to his truth, his dreams to his reality,” says Sfar. It’s easy to see why.

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill]

Week of December 23 to December 29

2011-12-20T15:07:00.000-05:00

What’s on at the Tropic
by Phil Mann

Christmas always brings “don’t-miss-film-week” to the Tropic, and this year is no different, with three great new movies.

Leading the pack is THE DESCENDANTS, a film on everyone’s top ten list and a sure bet for an Academy Award nomination. Combining the writer/director talents of Alexander Payne (Sideways, About Schmidt, Election) and the acting of George Clooney, it’s the story of Matt King, a man whose seemingly idyllic life in a Hawaiian paradise, seems to be crumbling around him. He’s wealthy, the lead heir of a haole family that has lived on the islands for generations and owns 25,000 acres of pristine beachfront land worth a small fortune. He’s got a lovely family, wife and two daughters.

But, as Matt tells us in an introductory scene, don’t think life in paradise is necessarily paradisiacal. (A message which we Key Westers can take to heart.) We quickly learn that his wife is in a coma, the result of a power boat racing accident. (More Key West!) His older daughter is acting out, and, by the way, he’s been cuckolded. While dealing with all this, he’s also got the ultimate responsibility of deciding what to do with the family’s land, caught between those who want to cash it in for big bucks, and those who want to preserve nature’s bounty. (Sound familiar?)

“A pitch-perfect movie that threads a microscopically tiny needle between high comedy and devastating drama.” (Ann Hornaday, Washington Post) “Heartwarming, tragic and, at times, hilariously funny drama.” (Gail MacDonald, Toronto Globe and Mail)

You will all want to see this movie. But I especially recommend it to Roger Bernstein of the Wisteria Island family.

The Tropic is, of course, the Key West home of the iconic Marilyn Monroe, her skirt flying up to the delight of every passing tourist who sneaks a peek under her. But this week she moves inside the theater, in the person of Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine, Brokeback Mountain) in MY WEEK WITH MARILYN. It’s a story of Beauty and the Boy, the latter being young Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne – The Yellow Handkerchief). He’s a production assistant on the set of a film that Marilyn is shooting in England with Sir Lawrence Olivier (The Prince and the Showgirl). She is newly married to Arthur Miller, who accompanies her, but then has to return to the States, leaving Colin with the estimable duty of looking after the Showgirl.

The movie is based on a true story, from a journal kept by Colin. Who knows how much of it is his wishful remembrance? But the film gives us a chance to share in the fantasy that we, too, can spend a week alone with the ultimate femme fatale. To think that she, who sought dominating males to bed (Joe Dimaggio, Arthur Miller, maybe Jack and Bobby Kennedy) still might have had a place in her heart for us.

“Michelle Williams… evokes so many Marilyns… we're probably looking at one of this year's Oscar nominees.” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times) “What an extraordinary thrill to leave a movie exhilarated instead of drained, sated instead of empty, rejuvenated instead of depressed. It's a magical experience.” (Rex Reed, New York Observer)

As great as they are, neither of these movies is really for the kids whom you’ve got to entertain over the holidays. For them, the Tropic has BEING ELMO: A Puppeteer’s Journey. Don’t be confused; this is not The Muppets movie that’s currently showing at some mainland theaters. That’s a muppet show. This is the inspiring story of Kevin Clash, the soul of Elmo, and how he got to be that way. It’s also the backstage story of the Muppets, how they are made and made to move.

“A wonderful, touching story, one that made me want to scoop up every kid I know who has a scrap of creative talent, and have them watch the film. Because Elmo's story is sweet -- but Clash's is nothing short of inspiring.” (Mike Scott, Times-Picayune)

Full info and schedules at TropicCinema.com or TCKW.info.

Being Elmo (Rhoades)

2011-12-20T15:06:00.004-05:00

“Being Elmo” Not Just

Another Muppet Movie

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Before heading “MPA – The Association of Magazine Media,” Nina Link was president of Children’s Television Workshop, the publishing arm of Sesame Street. I used to drop by to visit her, always hoping to catch a glimpse of Kermit or Miss Piggy. Never did.

One of my favorite Muppet characters was Elmo, that furry red monster who hosts “Elmo’s World,” the 15-minutes segment of TV’s Sesame Street devoted to toddlers.

Actually, Elmo is a guy named Kevin Clash. The Muppeteer (read: puppeteer) who manipulated that big red character.

A “Sesame Street” staff writer recalls Elmo’s origins: “There was this extra red puppet lying around and the cast would pick him up sometimes and try to create a personality, but nothing seemed to materialize.” Finally, in 1984, Clash took over the fuzzy plush toy and turned him into a three-and-a-half-year-old who speaks without pronouns. Elmo is now known as “baby monster.”

Under Kevin Clash’s tutelage, Elmo didn’t restrict himself to “Sesame Street.” He embarked on the talk-show circuit, appearing on “Martha Stewart Living,” “The Rosie O’Donnell Show,” “The Tony Danza Show,” Emeril Live,” and The View,” to name a few.

Our baby monster has been known to dispense advice on babysitting, as well as appearing before congress to support music education. He’s the only non-human or puppet ever to testify before the U.S. Congress.

Elmo has even starred in to movies, “Elmo in Grouchland” and “Elmo Saves Christmas.”

However, this documentary playing at the Tropic Cinema – “Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey” – is more about Muppeteer Kevin Clash than his so-called “Little Red Menace.”

Directed by Constance Marks and narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, we learn about Clash’s modest childhood as a black kid in Baltimore, his creating a puppet show on a local TV station while still a teenager, his friendship with puppeteer Kermit Love (no, not the source of Kermit the Frog’s moniker), and the fateful meeting with his idol Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets concept. And now that Henson has gone to that great puppet stage in the sky, Clash takes on the creative lead, directing and producing “Sesame Street,” as well as training new generations of puppeteers around the world.

The interviews include Frank Oz, Rosie O'Donnell, Carroll Spinney, Joan Ganz Cooney, Marty Robinson, Fran Brill, and Bill Barretta.

There’s an irony to Clash’s fame. While millions of children tune in daily to watch Elmo, Kevin isn’t recognized when he walks down the street. And though he inspired many a child to learn the alphabet or count, his workaholic lifestyle took a toll on the relationship with his daughter (mostly glossed over with a Sweet 16 party to makeup for the oversight).

Yet, there’s no question that Kevin Clash is a kind, gentle, and well-meaning man who played a major (if unrecognized) role in our growing up in front of a television set.

“Being Elmo” tickles me. Elmo will tickle you too.

srhoades@aol.com

The Descendants (Brockway)

2011-12-20T15:06:00.003-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

The Decendants

At last! Here is George Clooney in a role where he does more than model his five o clock shadow. Clooney plays Matt King. Matt is forced into being a Mr. Mom to his two young kids as his wife played silently from a hospital bed by Patricia Hastie ( in what must be one of the oddest portrayals onscreen) who is comatose from a power boat accident.

Despite the melodramatic scenes in which Matt confronts his wife in a manner that seems a bit contrived as in a many a play, Clooney shows a sincerity of loss confusion and sad weight to his role as a sketchy father, who is clearly afraid of death. The "uh- oh here- it-comes" bedside soliloquy is not that corny or off the mark, it just gave me a déjà vu feeling, recalling Tom Hanks in the claustrophobic "Castaway".

George hollers and screams, frets and paces and at such moments, I just felt a bit force-fed and manipulated. But with that said, Clooney,for the first time in his career shows original range and power and clearly expands his dramatic vocabulary.

In my opinion Amara Miller as daughter Scottie steals the show. She is mercurial, free and shows mischievous verve that the somewhat formulaic plot needs to release it from the dirge of Heavy Drama. Miller's gleeful nonchalance appears so organic and authentically wild (just as kids are) that her scenes are doubly affecting. Miller makes it seem so easy.

Also enjoyable is Nick Krause as Syd, a beach kid who has a wonderful spontaneity. Syd is part Jeff Spicoli from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" with a dash of "Beavis and Butthead". Even though at first, he seems cartoony he emerges far from a passing doodle. Syd transforms with a discovered sympathy and he is never unfunny.The seasoned actors Beau Bridges and Robert Forster as shambled cousins capably handle their roles, although to see them here is no revelation. Both offer what the story demands. You see them as they are. Just as in a play, the characters undergo peaks and valleys of transformation.

Last but not least, the islands of Hawaii are lovingly filmed with paradisiacal brilliance. The islands hover in beauty and seem to passively exist in contrast to Matt's emotional vexation. The casual ease of the Hawaiian score existentially footnotes Matt's circumstance and appears to mock his woe. Matt is definitely in for it here and he is missing his family lei. The Hawaiian shirts that his cousins wear seem foreign and strange, the garb of a tribal council from which he may be excluded from or terminally ostracized.

It doesn't matter whether or not I feel that these stories of family discontent are overused for poignancy and effect, I have a new respect for Clooney and his dramatic reach. His usual smugness and Mr. Handsome smirks have gone adrift. Through his portrayal, he has offered a new paradise of indecision and panic that I hope to see again.


Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Being Elmo (Brockway)

2011-12-20T15:06:00.002-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey

Who is that man behind the neon red fur? Few know him, but his name is Kevin Clash. He is the voice behind one of the most beloved Muppets of all time: Elmo. Kevin wasn't born in a palacial house in Muppetland. But a little row house near the Patapsco River at Turner Station, nicknamed Chocolate City.

The grass is  as dry as tumbleweed and the river is polluted. His room is sparse. Kevin becomes drawn to Saturday morning television to escape his mundane surroundings.

Kevin is aware of two things: He loves performing and has no interest in sports. One day in 1969, he sees the premiere of "Sesame Street" on PBS. By his own admission, he got right up close to the tv. At that moment Kevin knew he wanted to be a puppeteer. And better yet. He wanted to be on "Sesame Street". For Kevin, Sesame Street is an actual place, a vibrant yet elusive neighborhood  of acceptance and imagination, nothing less than Shangri-La.

So begins "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey". It is an honest and warm documentary that will give you a visceral appreciation for puppeteering as much as it will pull at your heart.

Kevin goes against the grain immediately. He cuts up his father's coat  to make his first puppet. Like a Jean-Michel Basquiat of puppets, Kevin is influenced by color and motion as much as Captain Kangaroo. Instead of playing football and zigzagging in the endzone, kevin was making zigzag stitches on his mothers sewing machine. The kids teased him for "sleeping with puppets" and being a girl.

All he wanted to do was make the seams disappear and wake up in Disneyworld. Kevin leaves paper slips with incantory wishes for The Magic Kingdom wherever he goes, but Sesame Street still  meant The Big City and his hands were nervous and ready.

The startling thing about "Being Elmo" is that the participants in the film eat, breathe and sleep as Muppets. They move within them, they are both their mothers and their twin-spirits.

We meet Jim Henson and Frank Oz, who are as legendary and as enigmatic here as Steve Jobs and Wozniak and as equally compelling. A man named Kermit Love  is here as well, white bearded and jolly, Kermit is half Santa Claus, half Dumbledore---the Zen of Muppetry, teaching Kevin how to move within his own felt.

Some of the most affecting scenes are when Kevin goes to visit children, bringing along Elmo, who is Kevin's second skin. The kids are transfixed. It is a universal event and a pop culture phenomenon as big as "Star Wars" or Michael Jackson.

Kevin Clash can't stop being Elmo, he even moves his infant daughter like  a muppet of flesh moving her arms and legs.

Rather than treating her daughter like a muppet, he is instead moving her like a puppeteer in training. It's never too early to start.

When Kevin is not Elmo, he goes about anonymous and dressed down, he slips by the New York streets without a glance. He needs Elmo but he also needs to be a father and this recognition from him as well as the reaction of the kids getting hugs from Elmo will not leave a dry eye in the house.
Through it all, Kevin keeps moving, seldom seen under the dazzle of  red neon fur, giving one hug at a time.

"Being Elmo" is a portrait of struggle without discontent. It leaps and dances in the eyes with a joyful, humanist honesty and should not be missed.
 
Write Ian at redty_2005@yahoo.com

My Week With Marilyn (Brockway)

2011-12-20T15:06:00.000-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

My Week with Marilyn

Va-va-voom! The much anticipated film "My Week with Marilyn" has arrived at The Tropic. It is a fitting affectionate biopic about the legendary star that is sure to please both passing and hardcore fans, even if it does not offer much pathos.

The film centers on the apparently tense filming of "The Prince and the Showgirl". We see Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) as an impatient control freak, vexed and almost driven to hysterics by the volatility of Marilyn, played here with compelling heart and verve by the spunky Michelle Williams. Branagh's performance almost reaches high comedy as Marilyn keeps missing her lines. As Branagh says in his role, trying to get Marilyn to comprehend her part is like "teaching Urdu to a badger". Olivier in the film is like a frustrated schoolteacher trying to keep fifth graders from distractions and it never works. His annoyance is so one-sided that it comes off as a cartoon.

Michelle Williams as Marilyn is far more interesting than Branagh. Her Marilyn is a vulnerable snow leopard trapped within the confines of a Technicolor movie screen. The horizontal lines that the screen create may as well be a cage enclosing a creature, at once animalistic and artificial, dripping with light.

In accordance with the memoir on which the film is based, a young assistant Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) becomes infatuated with the bombshell. Although he holds his own, Redmayne is a bit like Clark Kent, all nervousness with eyes agog. But then again, this is Marilyn Monroe. Her cadmium red kisses move mountains of men.

The setting of England makes for provocative viewing : The green-gray and brown interiors in the film wobble in surreal contrast to Williams' sizzling bright glare as Marilyn. She is a silver space traveller visiting a monochrome and monotone earth. The brown pints of beer seem to clash in her white-on-white palms.. The main anchor of the film is Williams alone. Through her motion and voice, Marilyn is both an all too human sprite, mercurial and spacey and a spectral siren--a living body of Pop Art. Sadly, no matter what "Marilyn" she happens to be at any given moment, flashbulbs relentlessly pop at her like grenades.

The end result of "The Prince and the Showgirl" proved tepid. The 1957 film was dealt a blow of weak reviews despite the star power of its players. All three figures, Monroe, Olivier and Clark went on to better things.

At the conclusion of "My Week with Marilyn" it is clear that England was briefly touched with a fleeting burst of color, a voluptual flare only to have things resume in uniformity once the dazzling rocket returns to her home orbit.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

The Descendants (Rhoades)

2011-12-20T15:05:00.000-05:00

“The Descendants”

Inherit Family Problems

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

A couple years ago my wife and I went to Hawaii with my family. A timeshare swap-out. As we strolled the sandy beaches, hiked lush jungle trails, surveyed pineapple plantations, and watched for whales, we learned very little of the islands’ history. Luaus and hula dances don’t count.

Turns out, these eight islands along with numerous atolls and islets were united under one ruler in 1810.

Originally there were no land titles in Hawaii. The society was feudalistic and all land belonged to the king. But that changed with the “Great Mahele” (division of lands) of 1848. By the time the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown in 1893, large tracts of land had come under the control of “men of European ancestry.”

In “The Descendents,” George Clooney plays one of these land barons. “I have inheritance issues,” he says. “I belong to one of those Hawaii families that make money off of luck and dead people.”

Descended from Hawaiian royalty and American missionaries, Matt King (Clooney) is under pressure from his cousins to sell off the ancestral land to a real estate developer. But he faces a personal trauma when his wife is injured in a boating accident, leaving him to care for his two daughters. An awkward father – “the backup parent” – King tries to reacquaint himself with his offspring but in the process discovers a secret about his wife that sends them on a trip to Kauai to figure out where their life went awry.

Billed as a comedy-drama, Alexander Payne (“Sideways”) directs this film from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings. The author expanded her prizewinning short story “The Minor War” into this major debut novel.

“Growing up in Hawaii, I did not constantly think about my Hawaiianness,” she says. “I just thought about how I was going to get beer and where I was going to go surfing….”

Having scooped up five Golden Globe nominations – Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay – “The Descendants” is playing this week at the Tropic Cinema.

Here George Clooney demonstrates his virtuosity, giving a nuanced performance as a middle-aged man in crisis that ranges from hilarious to heartbreaking. Not surprising that he’s getting a lot of Oscar buzz on top of the Golden Globes nod.

Amara Miller and Shailene Woodley play whiny 10-year-old Scottie and rebellious 17-year-old Alex. Shailene picked up her own Golden Globes nod for this on-pitch performance as a teenager being forced to grow up.

Alexander Payne counts off the other members of his cast: “Beau Bridges plays a cousin of Matt King. Matthew Lillard is a lothario. Judy Greer plays the wife of the lothario. Robert Forster is Matt King’s father-in-law. Mary Birdsong is King’s wife’s best friend. Nick Krause is a good friend to Matt’s older daughter. They’re not huge roles. Only Clooney and the girls have big parts. But they’re all important roles.”

As the film’s co-scripter (he won an Oscar for his “Sideways” screenplay), Payne seems comfortable with the topic of bewildered husbands, negligent dads, living wills, and old money at a crossroads. And his two Golden Globe nominations prove it.

As Kaui Hart Hemmings’s book explains, “Minor War” is Matt King’s nickname for the Portuguese man-of-war, a kind of stinging jellyfish. “I called them minor wars because they were like tiny soldiers with impressive weapons – the gaseous bubble, the whip-like tail, the toxic tentacles – advancing in swarms,” says the character.

But Matt King suffers his own minor war with his family. And it’s toxic. But does it have to be? Maybe not, if he can come to terns with the changes in his life.

“The Descendants” reminds you that Hawaii is more than a travel destination. It’s also a place where people live and learn.

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill]

My Week With Marilyn (Rhoades)

2011-12-20T15:04:00.000-05:00

“My Week with Marilyn”

Revisits a Movie Icon

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

I once interviewed Marilyn Monroe’s half-sister, a nice lady who worked at a college, her colleagues unaware of her famous connection. She told of her mother’s mental illness, the genes that her sister had inherited. It made Marilyn insecure, needy, subject to moodiness.

This is the MM we encounter in “My Weekend with Marilyn,” the new film playing at the Tropic Cinema. Based on the memoirs of Colin Clark, an assistant to Sir Laurence Olivier, it retells the turbulent relationship between the classically trained British actor and the American movie icon during the filming of “The Prince and the Showgirl” in 1957.

Olivier was directing the film as well as starring in it. Yes, it was a predictable clash, the autocratic director versus the actress always late to the set and not knowing her lines.

During the filming Marilyn was honeymooning with her new husband, playwright Arthur Miller. But when Miller left her alone in London to complete the film, she turned to Olivier’s 23-year-old assistant for company. Visiting his old school, sharing a kiss, skinny-dipping, introducing her to British culture, Colin helped her escape the pressures of working with Olivier.

Blonde Michelle Williams (“Brokeback Mountain,” “Blue Valentine”) transforms herself into Marilyn Monroe, a testament to both her acting skills and physical beauty. She had to gain a little weigh to add curves, pad her hips but not her bosom. She worked with a choreographer to perfect Marilyn’s hip-swaying walk.

To prep for the role Michelle “read biographies, diaries, letters, poems, and notes, pored over photographs, listened to recordings, watched movies.”

“I’d go to bed every night with a stack of books next to me,” she recalls. “And I’d fall asleep to movies of her. It was like when you were a kid and you’d put a book under your pillow hoping you’d get it by osmosis.”

Kenneth Branagh (Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”) takes on the role of Olivier, one of his real-life idols.

Eddie Redmayne (“The Other Boleyn Girl”) co-stars as Marilyn’s erstwhile friend, Colin. He acts as narrator of the piece, a star-struck Brit, a nobody (3rd Assistant Director) whose only claim to fame is the week he spent befriending Marilyn Monroe.

Dougray Scott (“Ripley’s Game”) steps in as Marilyn’s husband, playwright Arthur Miller, while Dame Judi Dench, Emma Watson, Julia Ormond, and Derek Jacobi round out the cast.

First-time director Simon Curtis filmed the movie in the same studio where “The Prince and the Showgirl” was shot. Michelle Williams even used the same dressing room as Marilyn.

Despite the English trappings and Jill Taylor’s lush period costumes, don’t expect another “The King’s Speech.” That said, it did pick up three Golden Globe nominations – Best Comedy, Best Actor, and (not surprisingly) Best Actress. The script sticks to the story, but not much happens. A nice memoir, a closer look at Marilyn, a young man’s adventure of a lifetime. But well played.

Nonetheless, the script by Adrian Hodges (based on two diaries of Colin Clark) portrays Marilyn as “lazy, a bad actress, a boyfriend-stealer, an adulteress, and a man devouring monster.” Maybe she was all of that, but her underlying vulnerability seeps through, thanks to Michelle Williams’ insightful performance.

“I do remember one moment of being all suited up as Marilyn and walking from my dressing room onto the soundstage practicing my wiggle. There were three or four men gathered around a truck, and I remember seeing that they were watching me come and feeling that they were watching me go – and for the very first time I glimpsed some idea of the pleasure I could take in that kind of attention; not their pleasure but my pleasure. And I thought, Oh, maybe Marilyn felt that when she walked down the beach.”

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill]

Week of December 16 to December 22 (Mann)

2011-12-14T12:05:00.000-05:00

What’s on at the Tropic

by Phil Mann

What happens when Mavis, a self-loathing, narcissistic, irrational, alcoholic thirty-something, decides she wants to rekindle her high school love affair? And when Buddy, the object of her obsession, is sweet, innocent, married, and with a new baby? Welcome to YOUNG ADULT, the new ~~rom-com~~ tragi-farce from the director (Jason Reitman) and writer (Diablo Cody) of the wildly popular Juno.

Because Mavis is drop-dead beautiful Charlize Theron (Monster), there is a chance that her bundle of psychoses just might turn Buddy’s head. Helping us sweat out that horrible possibility is Matt (Patton Oswald), a former classmate of Mavis and Buddy. While those two were prom queen and football king, Matt was a fat schlub, the victim of endless bullying and anti-gay beatings that left him crippled both physically and sexually… even though he isn’t and never was a homosexual. While Buddy is clueless, and Mavis is beyond clueing, Matt is wise and understanding, but hopelessly smitten with Mavis.

The title of the movie comes from the fact that Mavis has a moderately successful career writing teen romance novels. But it’s also an allusion to the fact that she’s never moved beyond her adolescent glory days, and seems to think her life is still the plot of one of her novels. She’s the kind of person who, when she learns that Buddy has a wife and baby, can only respond “I'm cool with it. I mean I've got baggage, too.”

“Young Adult bumps along with nasty swerves, middle finger proudly in the air, toward an ending blessedly free of anything warm, fuzzy, or optimistic. Now that's adult entertainment.” (Lisa Schwartzbaum, Entertainment Weekly). “A cockeyed comic triumph that flashes between bright and dark like a strobe light of the spirit.” (Joe Morgenstern, Wall St. Journal).

TAKE SHELTER also features a lead character who seems somewhat unhinged. Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) is a pipeline engineer, with a good job, a loving wife (Jessica Chastain) and a couple of great kids. He’s an attentive, caring father, especially to his six-year-old hearing-impaired daughter. But he’s overpowered by a sense of dread, a fear of an apocalyptic event that will destroy all this.

This fear manifests itself in nightmares, and then in daytime visions unseen by his co-workers. Driven by his fear, he builds an elaborate storm shelter in the backyard, jeopardizing his family finances and his job in the process. What is going on? Is he mad, or is he prophetic?

“A frightening thriller based not on special effects gimmicks but on a dread that seems quietly spreading in the land…This is masterful filmmaking.” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times). “[Director Jeff] Nichols has given audiences something genuinely thoughtful and provocative to talk about.” (Ann Hornaday, Washington Post).

The movie fare also includes holdovers of J.EDGAR and LIKE CRAZY.

The really Special Event of the week is a live show on the Carper Theater stage. Multi-talented performer Tom Judson, who had his Key West debut at the Tropic last year, returns with a new TOM JUDSON SHOW, an evening of piano, song and story in the mode of Bobby Short and Noel Coward. It’s a benefit for Aids Help. So spring for a few bucks and have a great time. That’s Saturday night at 10:00pm.

On Tuesday, the Ballet in Cinema series features THE NUTCRACKER from the Bolshoi Ballet, with matinee and evening shows. You may have seen other Nutcrackers, but the Bolshoi is the gold-standard for this Tchaikovsky classic.

Full schedules and info at TropicCinema.com or TCKW.info

[from Key West, the newspaper - www.kwtn.com]

Young Adult (Brockway)

2011-12-14T12:04:00.001-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Young Adult

High school spawns monsters. Too many things can happen. You can be bullied, made an outsider, labelled a nerd or somehow more demeaning, not labelled at all, merely forgettable.

Director Jason Reitman, the son of Ivan Reitman who directed "Ghostbusters" is well versed in cataloging our society's demons from the habit of smoking (Thank You for Smoking) to professional travellers (Up in the Air). There is an argument to be made that this is the world we live in, and like a cinematic Boccaccio, Jason Reitman is holding up a picaresque mirror and letting us peer inside, to gaze at his motley cast of ne'er do wells and see ourselves.
As a director with a family background that was the epitome of 80s pop culture made famous by Dan Ackroyd and Bill Murray, Jason Reitman is no doubt familiar with the feel-good canon of teenage comedies, the Day Glo legacies of John Hughes, Richard Donner and silly scare-meister Joe Dante. But rather than keep the tone of his predecessors, Reitman subverts. His comedy is more in keeping with "South Park", than "The Burbs" (1989)
In his latest, "Young Adult" Reitman turns his camera on one mascara-eyed monster raised to wreak havoc in a petri dish of high school hostility. The vexing trouble in question is a woman, Mavis Gary, played wondrously with heart and horror, softness and shock by none other than Charlize Theron.
From the very first moment, we know we're in for it. Mavis' room is cluttered and unkempt with soiled clothes and liquor bottles. Her ordinary condo apartment looks dirty and gray, as if left out in the rain. Mavis although pretty, is no knockout. She scratches her belly, chugs Coke and has a bloated belly.
This is a homecoming queen with her hourglass figure knocked loose and put upside down. Mavis' smile seems stitched into a frown.
She is an angry Barbie.
Semi-professionally, Mavis is a ghostwriter for Young Adult books, soon to be cancelled. One morning she gets a late email announcing the birth of her ex-boyfriend's baby. There is no ink for the printer and she uses her own spit to liquify the ink. Theron makes the act of drooling at once shocking and sad: a one time starry-eyed woman reduced to spitting to make her obsolete technology work.
Abruptly, Mavis gets the idea to hit the road and get back with her boyfriend Buddy, played to generic perfection by Patrick Wilson.
Theron's obsessive role is sneaky, subtle and refreshingly, never top-heavy. She worms her way into Buddy's life not by being wired and electric, but rather she is offhand, nonchalant and loose limbed. Mavis simply asks to hang out and catch up. We get the sense that if Buddy said no, Mavis would have gone on her way. This makes the mounting apprehension and comedy all the more arresting.
This is not to say that Mavis doesn't lose her cool. She obsessively preens and makes beauty appointments. Perfect nail polish adds glare to her appearance, but Mavis's face is often drained of color-- a dissipated snow queen Everything is half empty.
Patton Oswalt also stars as the disenfranchised Matt who although once violently beaten and cynical, has the most positive attitude of all the characters. By moving thru life and not holding any grudges and freely making fun of jealousies between the disabled, Oswalt almost steals the struggle from Theron. His wandering shifty shuffle of Matt, an average guy who became a punching bag, but still retains his wiles, has a steady understated energy.
Reitman has courage in this film. "Young Adult" is what "Bad Teacher" should have been. Rather than care about pat endings, Reitman shows real people unabashedly admitting that they don't like each other without punchlines. He makes the uncomfortable funny when so many other comedies miss out or refuse to portray people as are, complete with shades of gray. This in itself is liberating.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Take Shelter (Brockway)

2011-12-14T12:02:00.001-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Take Shelter

It's almost 2012 and given the economy, job instability, political divisiveness and global warming, I know that many doom in-the-afternoon films are in vogue and may be around for quite some time. The latest of these is "Take Shelter" directed by Indie director Jeff Nichols, known for his 2007 film "Shotgun Stories" about half brothers dealing with the death of a father.

In that film as in this one, Nichols wisely put actor Michael Shannon in the starring role.
In "Take Shelter" Shannon plays an earnest and forthright road worker who is also a husband and an affectionate dad to his hearing impaired daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart). Things are peachy keen for the first few minutes of the film and then Curtis has a series of very bizarre and visceral dreams, notable for their sudden violent impact. The dream sequences, although eerie, jolting and well rendered---including hundreds of birds that fly and drift in synchronicity creating huge black ribbons in the sky--- seem a bit like leftover cues from an M. Night Shyamalan film.

The real draw here is Michael Shannon, who portrays torment on screen so well that he recalls the immediacy of Lon Chaney Jr in "The Wolfman" and Gregory Peck in Hitchcock's "Spellbound". Shannon forms his emotion into a character on film. Time weighs on his face.

Although he is unique unto himself, Shannon shares this quality with Willem Defoe and Christopher Walken. The pain Shannon's Curtis feels is palpable and sincere, even Christ-like. As he searches the sky for doom, Curtis is like an extraterrestrial who has lost his craft. It is also worth noting that after Curtis wakes up from a "dream", numerous characters mention the current bad economy. So it is. Just as in this year's film "Contagion", external struggles are a metaphor for economic collapse. Curtis becomes a one man army.

Jessica Chastain does well as Curtis' wife Samantha. She is strong-willed, resolute and always seems to do right. She forces Curtis to face his own personal devils. Both Shannon and Chastain play their somewhat Gothic circumstances relatively straight and the film succeeds best in its mostly objective portrayal of mental illness.

This family loves one another despite their tribulations, that much is clear. Samantha and Curtis have an easy convincing chemistry.

But when the film moves into dream territory, it loses drive. The effects although doomsday accurate and foreboding are the stuff of M. Night Shyamalan's derivative daydreams. We've seen such frights before. Lars von Trier despite his cringeworthy status in being the director that you never want to invite to a party, does it ever so much better. It is far more effective to not show what we fear the most, and to turn horrible angst into a soft aria rather than a Saturday Matinee shocker.

By the end of "Take Shelter", I thought I was watching a special apocryphal edition of "The X-Files". Doomsday is fine but spare me the blackbirds, the twisting funnel clouds and the shredding lightning. After the onslaught of "The Seventh Sign", "The Reaping" , "Signs" and "2012" this particular visual vocabulary has overstayed its welcome on my calendar. This was overkill.

A damn shame. All it takes for me to be a Believer in film is a good character study.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Young Adult (Rhoades)

2011-12-14T12:02:00.000-05:00

“Young Adult” - A Case of
Arrested Development

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Through circumstances I won’t detail, back in my single days I once dated a stripper. An ecdysiast, if you want to dress it up. But it’s hard to dress up strippers.

She was a nice enough young adult who happened to make her living shedding her clothes to the tune of “A Fifth of Beethoven.” She had a fondness for classical music.

What I learned is that, thanks to her profession, she also had a slightly askew view of the world. Not so much cynical as one of arrested development. Not quite in tune with everyday society. A self-centered attitude. Bratty.

Hot Hollywood screenwriter Diablo Cody was a stripper before she hit it big with her script for the movie “Juno.” A spiky-haired blonde (née Brook Busey), she has an acerbic, tongue-in-cheek viewpoint that gives her scripts a zing. She’s known for her “sharp and sarcastic voice.”

Cody does it again with “Young Adult,” the new Charlize Theron comedy that’s currently playing at the Tropic Cinema.

Our heroine (no, protagonist is a better word) writes YA novels that appeal to teens. Mavis (played by Diablo Cody look-alike Charlize Theron) is good at her job, because she has the emotional maturity of a teenager. A Young Adult herself, even though she’s now in her late 30s.

In this time warp Mavis is mildly dissatisfied with her life, longing for – as she saw it – the glory days of high school. So leaving the Twin Cities (Diablo Cody herself used to live in Minneapolis) our girl returns to her hometown of Mercury, MN, in search of that lost youth. Or more specifically she goes with the obsessive intent of reclaiming her high school sweetheart, no matter that he’s now married with a kid.

Reason does not apply. Well, reason as you and I know it.

Mavis dolls herself up to convince old boyfriend Buddy (a bewildered Patrick Wilson) to run away with her. However, he – like the audience – thinks she’s a bit mad.

“Young Adult” has the expected bundle of clichés, but turned on their ear. Mavis is a without-a-clue city mouse who gets her comeuppance from those nice small-town folks. But not in the way you might expect. And you’ll want her, according to formula, to wind up with the right guy (i.e. not Buddy). As it turns out, she does, at least enough to satisfy the audience’s unsure expectations.

The not-quite-right other guy is Matt (Patton Oswalt), a geek who makes his own action figures and owns a collection of outdated indie-rock T-shirts. Choices aren’t big in a small town.

Charlize Theron won an Academy award for her starring turn in “Monster.” Here, she’s a different kind of monster, an unlikable Platinum princess who is spoiled, self-absorbed, and slightly out of touch with reality. It takes courage for an actress to take on these kinds of roles, characters that the audience can’t quite connect with.

Director Jason Reitman is on comfortable ground. He collaborated with Diablo Cody on “Juno.” And he gave us the masterful “Up in the Air” with George Clooney. He doesn’t flinch when presenting Mavis, a woman who has avoided the human capacity to grow and change.

Mavis seemed kinda familiar to me. In this case, a woman listening to retro music by Teenage Fanclub instead of “A Fifth of Beethoven.”

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill]

Week of December 9 to December 15 (Mann)

2011-12-10T09:48:00.000-05:00

What’s on at the Tropic
by Phil Mann

LIKE CRAZY took the top prize at Sundance last January, continuing a string of great movies in recent years (Winter’s Bone 2010, Precious 2009, Frozen River 2008). Each was nominated for an Academy Award, and each kicked off the careers of an actress – Jennifer Lawrence, Gabourey Sidibe, Melissa Leo. But this time, rather than being a tough account of people in grinding poverty and dismal circumstances, Like Crazy is an uplifting story of young love between nice middle-class people. It’s almost as if the judges had a subconscious urge to shout Hallajuhah! there is another world out there.

The story begins in California and winds up transatlantic. Jacob (Aton Yelchin, stretching his skills beyond Terminator Salvation and Star Trek) and Anna (Felicity Jones, moving beyond historical dramas like The Tempest and Northanger Abbey) meet at U.C.L.A. where he is a teaching assistant for her writing class, and she is a Brit on a student visa. Their attraction is mutual and instant, and it develops over the summer into a visa overstay, until it is dashed by the immigration service's refusal to let her return to the US after a visit back to Britain.

Can love survive a 5,000 mile separation is the theme, simple enough. But the quality of the movie is all in the execution. Because of the superb performances of this couple, and the sure-handed touch of young director Drake Doremus, it becomes “a romantic drama that makes other romantic films look obvious and calculated in comparison.” (Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle). An added bonus is Jennifer Lawrence as Jacob’s replacement girlfriend. “Like Crazy is a cinematic love potion and you leave it feeling bewitched.” (Mary Pols, Time Magazine). Academy Award Alert!

One of the strengths of the Tropic is its willingness to show fascinating films that we might never see or know about in any other way. THE MILL AND THE CROSS is a perfect example. Polish Director Lech Majewski, an artist himself, has created a cinematic depiction of a classic painting, Pieter Breugel’s The Way to Calvary. This large canvas (roughly 5’ by 4’) painted in 1564, depicts a vast panorama of Sixteenth Century life in Flanders. Because it is populated by 500 figures, a viewer at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where it is housed, might need a magnifying glass to examine them all. But Majewski takes us into the world of the painting, guided by Breugel himself (Rutger Hauer- Blade Runner), his patron (Michael York) and Mary (Charlotte Rampling). It’s an historical transformation, moving the Crucifixion to a century and a half later and to Belgium, and substituting oppressive Spanish soldiers for Romans.

The Mill and the Cross is a film of great beauty, but it’s also a lesson in history and art, from an explanation of the composition of the canvas to a depiction of the horrors of life in a world under the dominance of the Inquisition. It ’’captures the wish that some of us have had while standing in front of a great painting. What hangs before us is so striking, beautiful, strange, vast, horrifying, ethereal, lifelike - so alive - that we’re desperate to enter the other side of the canvas, to be inside the painting.” (Wesley Morris, Boston Globe).

Want something more ordinary? Don’t despair. THE RUM DIARY and J. EDGAR are held over, along with Pedro Almdovar’s THE SKIN I LIVE IN and Lars Von Trier’s MELANCHOLIA.

And the lecture series presented by the Heart Institute of the Florida Keys continues on Wednesday at 11:00am with a talk on WHAT SHOULD I EAT? Free and open to the public.

Full schedules and info at TropicCinema.com or TCKW.info

Like Crazy (Brockway)

2011-12-10T09:47:00.003-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway 

Like Crazy

Although many romantic films are well done, the romance is a genre that has been often critically maligned or overused, especially in Hollywood.  Romantic films usually involve great stretches of colorful quirky bliss followed by tangles and twists of the heart only to be topped off by a grand Hollywood ending of the two together at last. There have been countless films in this mode involving goofy moments, missed phone calls and frequent  "what do you mean?"-its in the dialogue.

Refreshingly, "Like Crazy" is not one of these. In setting and tone the film has an earthy sense of rhythm, more in keeping with the cross-cultural "Once" (2006), the punchy "Blue Valentine" or the heartfelt but melodramatic "One Day". With these three films as with "Like Crazy", there is the sense that love is a fragile element or charmed spell that can dissipate forever if shaken or bumped. 

This film stars Anton Yelchin as Jacob and Felicity Jones as Anna. Jacob and Anna are college students in L.A and that's all well and good. But Cupid's arrow goes sideways a bit in the middle. Anna is from the UK and Jacob is American. 

If you can forgive the perpetually zooming camera at times that hovers and zooms about like a debauched angel, this film is well played and genuine with not a disingenuous scene to be found. Even the buzzy camerawork finds  its  place, illustrating  the overstimulation of first love, a sensation that gives haunt and meaning to everything from the still to the scrambled. The camera even dares  to go under the sheets.

Anna is a bit preppy and devil may care while Jacob is disheveled and bohemian, but not so bohemian as to be unrealistic. He makes wooden chairs that look damn uncomfortable but that doesn't matter. He has a kind of Van Gogh aura  with a spaced out smile and looks like he's made of unspooled thread so he's not wound too tight. 

At first all is bliss. Then  reality strikes. Anna's visa runs out, which starts an avalanche of worry and a nerve knocking roller coaster of love's weep and woe.

I never thought this was possible in a so called romantic movie but the outside events that keep the lovers apart actually do seem  conspiratorial, even supernatural, akin to a film directed by Cassevetes or Polanski. The world is really out to get them. The love-spun  arguments are portrayed as they often are in real life: unpredictable, vexing and abrupt.

This is the first romance to my knowledge that deals with the pitfalls of immigration and we see the grim machinery at work here with all its sad and knotty dilemmas. Bureaucracy does not brake for Juliet. 

Drake Doremus keeps his camera rolling and we see profound  sadness in the distraught faces of Jones and Yelchin as they confront mountains of instantaneous and unheard of Catch 22s. The heartbreak in their faces reach a sparse Expressionist glare that is without any heart-bound musical lilts or tear-jerking drops on a piano. This is  life and you bring your own experiences with the film, be they wonderful or wicked, quirky or confusing. There is so much intensity of expression that I thought of Lars Von Trier. But fear not. In "Like Crazy" you have your melancholy Romeo without Rene Magritte. Events simply unfold. No surrealism necessary.

The film is masterful for letting the characters move about as they might in actual life, with a hasty abruptness of action and without the ponderousness of any exposition. Despite the determined struggles that these two contend with to break free and stay together, Jacob and Anna might just as eagerly return to their home-country loves of convenience: for Jacob, the lynx-eyed and serpentine beauty, Sam (Jennifer Lawrence) and for Anna, the earnest and anal do-gooder, Simon,  (Charlie Bewley) who resembles a sport left out of a drawing room comedy. The circumstances featuring each of these second string valentines are both sympathetic and capricious, and all too human. Your heart will leap in familiarity as much as in apprehension. 

The final courage of the film--excluding the obvious call for immigration reform--is that it reveals a disturbing truth in human nature: Love is indeed an unstable emotional chemical. Once dropped and changed, love can mutate and  allow us to become duplicitous, to ultimately reveal alternate sides of ourselves to other lovers and do so willingly.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

The Mill and the Cross (Brockway)

2011-12-10T09:47:00.002-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway  

The Mill and the Cross

Current cinema is often a Pop medium, especially when it handles subjects of art history in 1564. The rectangle of the movie screen might seem a devil's light-box to the spirits of  Van Gogh, Vermeer or Brueghel:a moving painting within a painting. Sorcery from the sky.
Such is the sensation produced by the film "The Mill and The Cross", directed by Lech Majewski.

Majewski , who was the original screenwriter for Julian Schnabel's film on Jean Michel Basquiat, possesses a painter's eye. He makes it seem as if Brueghel could just as well be a painter of flickering triptychs as much as a master painter of religious tableaux.

"The Mill and The Cross" draws you in with its deceptively simple narrative. The film is essentially conceptual. It doesn't dramatize so much as simply show the elements and the people contained within Brueghel's 1564 work " Way to Cavalry". Under Majewski's lens, peasants simply go to work each day with their horses. They eat and holler, laugh, fart, and milk cows while kids hop and scamper like mischievous  angels in a rustic cosmos. Even drunks revolve and pinwheel about. All of nature moves underfoot.

Actor Rutger Hauer plays Brueghel, his face a worn palette against  a middle gray sky.  With his huge sketchbook that seems made for a giant, he is stern and impassive, scarcely a smile crosses his face. Hauer's Brueghel is a bit like William Blake's "Urizen" or Orson Welles especially in voiceover. Mostly Hauer sketches and fusses having no need for earthly sustenance.

Michael York also appears in the film as  Nicolaes Jonghelinck, a wealthy patron in a burgundy velvet suit. York stands about and laments the state of religious persecution in 1564. And Charlotte Rampling makes a cameo in all of her usual severe intensity. Rampling is a living Brueghel.

We also see the persecution of Jesus here, his body, as in the painting, unnaturally white, a spaceman: The First Man who fell to Earth, worlds before David Bowie. The movie pairs an average man being violently beaten and tied to a wheel with the crucifixion of Jesus as if to make the two of them interchangeable. Just as in Monty Python, Majewski makes the case for a humanistic spirituality that is both subversive and heartfelt. Christ is in all of us.

Most of the characters are pressed in two dimensions. There is little dialogue and no one says much at all. For the first fifteen minutes of the film, there are no spoken words on screen, just the trudging of heavy feet on endless wooden steps. Rather than a drawback, however, this is a delight. Majewski only needs to show what   "Way to Calvary" feels like as it shifts  across the screen in 2011. This is journey of one rectangle composed of paint and quantum space as it travels from  a mill to a museum.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

The Mill and the Cross (Wanous)

2011-12-10T09:45:00.000-05:00

Film delivers visual excursion back in time

By CRAIG WANOUSKeynoter Contributor

Actors recreate Bruegel's 1564 masterpiece, 'The Procession to Calvary.'

The Mill & the Cross, Unrated, 95 min., opens Friday, Dec. 9, at the Tropic Cinema

"The Mill & the Cross," a Polish-Swedish co-production, is almost impossible to categorize and just as hard to describe. It is a slow and tedious yet beautiful film that will probably leave viewers in one of three camps; those who love the dramatic visual effects, those who love art and know the story of the painting at the film's center, and those who say "What the &%#$ was that?"

Co-written and directed by Lech Majewski, the centerpiece of the film is Pieter Bruegel's 1564 masterpiece The Procession to Calvary (sometimes called The Way to Calvary), a large, complex painting that reportedly contains more than 500 individual figures and puts Christ's crucifixion in Bruegel's contemporary 16th century Flanders.

The film borrows its title from the critically acclaimed analysis of Bruegel's painting by art critic Michael Francis Gibson, who co-wrote the screenplay. Using a combination of blue screen, location filming from central Europe and New Zealand and CGI, director Majewski gives the film an almost 3D effect, putting us right inside the painting.

The marvelous opening shot of the movie shows us the villagers as if they were models preparing to be painted, costumed and arranged by Bruegel himself. The final shot of the film zooms out and shows us the real painting hanging in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In between, the imagined real life of the villagers blends with the figures in the painting until it becomes hard to distinguish between the two.

Several themes (I can't call them storylines) run through the film and things happen that have no explanation, almost like live-action snapshots of moments in time that we see but don't understand. The red-coated Spanish are the heavies who ride in, do horrible things, and then ride off. Bruegel's wife and children go about their daily lives, oblivious to the cruelty around them. A giant windmill towers over the landscape, the meaning of which the artist explains to his patron. A young couple buys some bread for a picnic that is fatally interrupted. Musicians scamper around the village for no apparent reason. Another couple takes their treasured calf out for a stroll, pulling it along in a cart.

Only three of the actors have any real dialog. Rutger Hauer plays artist Pieter Bruegel, working on his masterpiece and explaining it to his patron, played by Michael York. Charlotte Rampling plays the model for Mary, the mother of Jesus, whose sad, frowning face never changes. There is almost no other dialog, other than some background chatter in Flemish and Spanish, which is not subtitled. The acting by Hauer, York and Rampling is adequate but not particularly noteworthy. But the costumes are absolutely amazing and don't be surprised if the name Dorota Roqueplo, the costume designer, comes up at Oscar time.

Watching this movie takes patience and a different mindset than most of today's films. There is action and violence, but we observe it as outsiders and don't get drawn in. There is comedy, but it's the humor of real life, not the slapstick or sit-com variety. There is romance and nudity, but it's brief and not explicit. All the elements to make a good film are present. But I can't really call "The Mill & the Cross" a good film. It's more like sitting in a gallery absorbing every detail of a famous masterpiece for an hour-and-a-half. Some people enjoy that, some don't.

So do I recommend "The Mill & the Cross"? Yes and no. For those who don't enjoy art galleries and museums, you may be in the third camp mentioned above and might come out of the theater wishing you could get those 95 minutes back. But for those in the first two camps, I definitely recommend the film. It is a compelling and fascinating theater experience that must be seen on the big screen. (Do not wait for the DVD!) "The Mill & the Cross" is a visually stunning work of art, on film, that takes you inside another stunning work of art, on canvas, and rewards you for your patience.

Like Crazy (Rhoades)

2011-12-07T12:31:00.000-05:00

Front Row at the Movies

“Like Crazy” is,Well, Like Crazy

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

You’d think making a movie is about as simple as Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney saying, “Hey, my dad has a barn – let’s put on a show!” That is, if you’re director Drake Doremus.

The twentysomething filmmaker did something crazy. He produced a movie titled “Like Crazy” on only $250,000. He shot it with an inexpensive Canon EOS 7D DSLR camera. And most of the dialogue was improvised by the actors.

“I had this love story that was sort of nagging at me that sort of encompassed a lot of things I was feeling that I wanted to convey. I wrote it really quick,” say Doremus.

Doremus came up with a general outline that described what was going to happen. His Austrian-born wife Desiree Pappenscheller says the film is loosely based on their romance and her immigration problems.

“Like Crazy” tells us of two college kids in Los Angeles – a design student and a British exchange student – who fall for each other. She sticks around for the summer, overstaying her student visa. When she tries to return to the States after a family visit to London, she’s “detained, denied entry, turned away, and sent back to England” by hardnosed Immigration officials.

Needless to say, this forces the two crazy kids into a long distance situation that puts a strain on their relationship. And despite all the efforts of an immigration lawyer, the ban isn’t lifted.

Hmm, that happened to my friends Al and Colleen. They solved it by getting married.
But an easy solution doesn’t make for a good movie.

“Like Crazy” – currently playing at Tropic Cinema – stars Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones as the distance-challenged couple. You’ve seen Soviet-born Anton in “Star Trek” and “Fright Night.” And British-born Felicity in TV’s “The Worst Witch” and “Cemetery Junction.”

Toss in Alex Kingston (TV’s “ER”), Charlie Bewley (“The Twilight Saga”), and Academy Award nominee Jennifer Lawrence (“Winter’s Bone”) to complete the cast.

This is Drake Doremus’s third film. “You know, I think I always wanted to make the harder romantic, more dramatic films, but I didn't really have the skill set to do it yet, so I was pursuing more, really, lighthearted movies. This was sort of like the first foray into doing it. But I always wanted to do this stuff. When I was a kid I was obsessed with, like, ‘Out of Africa,’ and ‘English Patient.’ My mom was like, ‘What is wrong with you? Why are you into these movies?' And I was like, ‘I really want to go see “The English Patient” again!’”
(Don’t panic. This 90-minute film is more than an hour shorter than “The English Patient.”)

Doremus’s romantic drama turned out to be a big hit at both Sundance and Toronto film festivals. “It has been the craziest ride,” he says. “I mean, this movie was so tiny. It was just basically like, ‘Maybe some people will see this movie. Maybe people will relate to it and maybe it will resonate.’ Then to have this reaction and for it to be now coming out is like a dream come true. This has been my dream my whole life. It is crazy. It still hasn’t sunk in yet – how special and grateful I am. It is amazing.”

Yeah, like crazy.

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill}

Week of December 2 to December 8 (Mann)

2011-11-30T09:06:00.000-05:00

What’s on at the Tropic
by Phil Mann

It’s always a treat when a new Pedro Almadóvar film comes out. Early in his career, the titles alone were enough to get your juices flowing: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990). The Key West Film Society/Tropic Cinema has presented every Almadóvar opus released since the Society’s founding in 1999. They had a great time presenting All About My Mother at a gala fund raiser at the San Carlos, inviting Monroe County’s legendary “Queen Mother,” County Commisioner Wilhelmina Harvey, as a guest of honor. Believe me, the octogenarian Harvey didn’t expect a movie about a transvestite father and a pregnant nun.

Almadóvar’s more recent titles have pulled back a little, but the subject matter is always off-beat and provocative . His new film THE SKIN I LIVE IN continues the tradition. The New York Times’ Manhola Dargis can’t decide if it’s “an existential mystery, a melodramatic thriller, a medical horror film or just a polymorphous extravaganza.”

A quick summary, without giving away the plot twists which keep you guessing. Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is a brilliant plastic surgeon who has become more a mad scientist, as he tries to develop a new technique for saving burn victims by experimenting on a human subject. The woman, named Vera Cruz (Elena Anaya), is beautiful and, by turns, dutiful and belligerent. “Part Vertigo, part Beauty and the Beast, part Bride of Frankenstein, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In is yet another casually masterful work, from a director who has barely put a foot wrong in his 30 (!) years of feature filmmaking.” (Shawn Levy, Portland Oregonian)

Also opening this week is MELANCHOLIA. the latest from the notorious filmmaker Lars Von Trier (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Antichrist). Justine (Kirsten Dunst) is an oddly affectless, anhedonic woman who is getting married on the day that a rogue planet (named Melancholia) is threatening to crash into the earth. Her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who has paid for the lavish wedding, tries to break the spell (and maybe save the Earth?).

Dunst won the Best Actress Award at Cannes, while Von Trier was drummed out of town for making obnoxious remarks. So it goes in the world of film festivals. He later apologized. But this side story has nothing to do with the movie which is beautifully filmed. Rene Rodriquez in the Miami Herald describes it well as “an intergalactic sci-fi metaphor for a psychological disorder…. a tremendously daring movie.”

The Europan opera season continues this week, with DON GIOVANNI live from La Scala in Milan. It’s the festive opening night of the Milanese opera season, with Daniel Barenboim conducting and the gorgeous Anna Netrebko as Donna Anna. You can be there for the live show Wednesday at 12:00PM EST (6:00PM in Milan). There’s also an encore broadcast in the evening.

Held over are MARY MARCY MAY MARLENE, J. EDGAR, and RUM DIARY, as the Tropic’s winter movie season move into high gear and we begin the run up to Christmas. Time to consider Tropic Gift Cards for your loved ones – ten percent discount on all cards for members. Or check out the Elves link on the Tropic’s home page. Are you naughty or nice?

Full schedules and info at TropicCinema.com or TCKW.info.

The Skin I Live In (Brockway)

2011-11-30T09:05:00.001-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

The Skin I Live in

The first time I came across a Pedro Almodovar film, I was a student at the University of Miami. Almodovar was known by both of his first and last names then, and the director seemed less of a person and more like a provocative creature, perhaps an emotion, a color, or a cinematic perfume.

I had no idea. I went into the university cinema to see "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" (1990) because I had a crush on a girlfriend who invited me, but it wasn't a "date". There was a raffle prize of a pair of handcuffs. Real ones. As it turned out, I won.

The handcuffs of hard and shiny metal were as strange and curious to me as Almodovar. I knew both involved sex but what was I going to do with a pair of handcuffs and what could I gain in watching the film? The only thing I thought about the title was that it probably involved sex and hopefully a nude scene. I remember lots of bright color, fast cutting, and some feelings of apprehension. I thought of Hitchcock and the romantic sexual cravings within my own body, but I don't remember much else.

Now decades later, a calmer version of myself has rolled in to see "The Skin I Live In", the latest film by Almodovar, but as I looked at my body, I noticed that I was still leaning a bit forwards and sideways, my right hand clenched in excitement, much the way it was in the early 90s, but I still didn't know what to expect.

Simply put, "The Skin I Live In" is a rich, Gothic feast for the eyes, fast-paced and strange, with no uneven lulls at any point. Loyal devotees of Almodovar's films will find the same lush scenery and the director's trademark use of brilliant color that never fails to make parrots fly away in envy. All the traditional cues are here but the story is laced in black right out of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Poe.

Antonio Banderas stars as Dr. Ledgard, an ultra-controlling plastic surgeon who has been grieving over the death of his wife who was horribly burned. Ledgard lives in a opulent mansion. Each day he goes to his lab and works on a project to produce "artificial skin", from a kind of adhesive nectar, as far as I can tell, made from bees and human growth cells. In one of the rooms Ledgard keeps a live-in patient, Vera, (Elena Anaya) a very attractive feline ingenue who looks strikingly like Simone Simon. She gets more beautiful as the movie goes on on, but the cat's got my tongue.

Vera, in a flesh-toned body suit is kept in confinement, doing yoga and studying the sculpture of Louise Bourgeois, whose work, with its tightly meshed and life sized sewn figures, speaks to both Vera and Dr. Ledgard.

Vera is almost always seen from the back. Almadovar's almost fetishistic reverence of Vera's vertebrae, her buttery skin and the violin curve of her hips is on par with Salvador Dali's portraits of Gala. It hardly seems coincidental that Ledgard's new skin process is actually called "Gal" after the doctor's deceased wife. But with all of the film's cold whiteness that ultimately dominates the tell-tale lushness of elegant surrealism, the artist that Almodovar seems to be echoing the most is David Cronenberg.

But he does Cronenberg one better. There is a black heart here, but it tilts and surprises with the narrative almost going full speed ahead into a subversive sun, yet this cat and mouse game with a sexual double cross never quits.
This is an Almodovar melodrama with enough twists and turns to invert a Cronenberg story of dread into a Toledo carnival. Just the sight of Elena Anaya is enough to make anyone's heart melt, be they male, female or transgendered. When the camera moves over her body it is like watching the production of white chocolate in its most liquid form. Vera's skin is as infinite and as blankly voluptuous as a Dalinian beach---bright and visually aromatic.

"The Skin I Live In" is a taut suspenseful Grand Guignol yarn that will delight the eye as well as race the heart. An Almodovar film is like seeing an acquaintance who is up to his usual obsessions, but who still remains exotic, mysterious and thrillingly unreachable.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Melancholia (Brockway)

2011-11-30T09:05:00.000-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Melancholia

Lars von Trier is the L'enfant terrible of current cinema. Few directors provoke. To get a reaction from others is to stimulate and move the mind. Such reactions ranging from delight to disgust proves that cinema, like painting, possesses antennae, transmitters and electric current. Lars von Trier is a director of motion from the subtle to the downright scary. This is no small thing. And he doesn't fail to disappoint or confuse, perhaps leaving his audiences hanging, which is why I find him a compelling director despite his appalling and odd statements about Hitler.

With his latest outing "Melancholia", you might get the feeling that von Trier sees the dark side of everything under the sun and you would probably be right.
The film, although not as visually upsetting as the very graphic "Antichrist", still can make you uncomfortable with its deep close ups of faces numb, dead or in torment. But "Melancholia" at least gives us a bit of breathing space where von Trier's last film was all constriction, German Expressionism and writhing dismemberment.

The film stars Kirsten Dunst as Justine (Marquis de Sade, anyone?). Justine is about to get married but she is a bit... well, moody to say the least. Justine seems oppressed or repressed by some strange draught upon the brain as soon as she enters the Gothic looking mansion where the reception takes place. The mansion is as important as any character in the film and it is positively creepy.

The bride and groom get stuck in a ditch and of course, arrive late. Soon tension escalates between the bride's father (Jon Hurt) and mother (Charlotte Rampling). The wedding party takes on a disquieting feeling as strong as "Macbeth" or as nerve-jangling as the Hollywood party depicted in "The Exorcist" with a whirling camera showing queasy kids unsettled in sleep as the adults menacingly insult one another in semi-whispers. No one is very likable in the film, but this is Lars von Trierworld. Every film is an emotion unto itself. And usually not a pleasant one.

Suffice to say, there is a new planet named Melancholia that seems to be listing towards earth and it is making everyone very, very high strung. Granted, you may have seen characters who mope around with unwashed hair in von Trier's films often enough and I know that Kiefer Sutherland is weak, obsessively looking into his microscope and fretting.

But hold on to your horses.

The Prologue alone is a film that stands by itself having some of the most startling imagery that you'll ever see. Lars von Trier is a Surrealist par excellence, second only to David Lynch. His stark shadows on a brilliant green golf course would make De Chirico and Magritte weep and rise again, not to mention his faces of children who look like ambivalent or evil-streaked angels fresh from the brush of Botticelli.

The natural world seems to be both living and removed in Trier's films, pulsing with a numinous intellect, not of this solar system. von Trier's inhabitants often become infantile or regress, consumed with demonic passions long spent in primordial forests half forgotten by our descendants.

However, not since Andreas Serrano's artwork has there been a man that some love to hate on a personal level,(understandably so) but who also has the ability to show nature in all its sorcery, with all the jarring juxtapositions between our worlds, both the organic and the man-made.

For cult science fiction fans, this film is nothing less than a visual rendering of J.G. Ballard's upper-class outer worldliness and his stories of doomsday beachcombers and neurotic astronauts, lost on terra firma.

"Melancholia" is an apprehensive but thoughtful film with vibrant haunting visuals that fall back to the paintings of Salvador Dali and Magritte, while at the same time offering new ways to interpret Luis Bunuel's "Un Chien Andalou" (1928). That should be reason enough to turn your frowning fear for von Trier upside down and see this film.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

The Skin I Live In (Rhoades)

2011-11-30T09:03:00.000-05:00

“The Skin I Live In”

Is Deliberately

Uncomfortable

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

My friend Dave is a retired plastic surgeon. He knows how to do butterfly stitches that don’t leave a scar, implants that change the contour of a face, and skin grafts. I hope he will go see “The Skin I Live In,” the new film by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. It’s about a plastic surgeon who turns into sort of a demented Dr. Frankenstein.

Not that Dave will identify with Dr. Robert Ledgard, the physician played by Antonio Banderas (“You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” “Puss In Boots”). But he may have some thoughts on the burn-resistant artificial skin that Dr. Ledgard has invented. It worked well on mice. Now, how about on a human being?

Well, Dr. Ledgard just happens to have one handy, a beautiful woman he’s holding captive in his palatial mansion in Toledo, Spain. Video screens hang like paintings throughout the estate allowing him to keep watch on her. She’s dressed in a full-body cat suit the color of pale skin, making her look at first glance like a classic nude odalisque canvas by Ingres.

This test subject named Vera is played by Elena Anaya (“Van Helsing,” “Sex and Lucia”). Director Almodóvar had planned to use Penelope Cruz in this role, but scheduling conflicts arose. Frequent collaborators, Almodóvar was largely responsible for transforming Cruz into a screen goddess.

Dr. Ledgard is assisted in his experiment by a loyal housekeeper (Marisa Paredes). She understands what drives the doctor. Twelve years ago his wife was horribly burned in a car crash, like a “cinder” as she describes it. That led to the wife’s suicide. So our doctor is driven to find a cure.

Or is there more to the story?

Yes, indeed. How Vera came to be locked in this bright, modernistic room is the key to the mystery. Ledgard’s daughter Norma (Blanca Suarez) and a young man named Vicente (Jan Cornet) figure into the puzzle.

Some viewers have described “The Skin I live In” as an existential mystery. Others have called it a psychosexual thriller. And still others have pegged it as a medical horror film. The New York Times termed it a polymorphous extravaganza, whatever that is.

Is it a horror film? “I myself am reluctant to label it that way,” says Pedro Almodóvar. “You have to be careful because to hardcore horror fans this will seem like a very strange movie, and I don’t want to disappoint people. But in essence, yes, it is a horror film.”

With a mad genius like Almodóvar (“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!”) you can expect a film that’s weird, dark, and sometimes funny. He became a leading light of La Movida, the pop cultural movement that blossomed in Spain during the late ’70s. Himself gay, Almodóvar’s films often present strong female characters and transsexuals. Winner in the end, Vera fits this mold.

This film is a reunion, the first collaboration between Almodóvar and his former regular cast member Banderas in 21 years.

“No one played the male characters I wrote in the 1980s better than Antonio Banderas,” says the pudgy director. “But here I didn’t want to repeat what we had done before. I wanted to drain Antonio’s face of all expression and emotion, which is difficult for an actor to do. But his disposition was exactly the same as it used to be, and he gave me the confidence to push forward.”

“The Skin I Live In” (Spanish title: “La piel que habito”) is loosely based on a story by crime novelist Thierry Jonquet called “Mygale” (meaning “Tarantula”). The film is currently playing at the Tropic Cinema.

When a colleague tells Ledgard “You’re insane!” the doctor seems to accept the diagnosis. Banderas, with his weary countenance, is no longer the happy-go-lucky nice guy that inhabits so many of his performances. Here, he allows us to burrow deep under his skin to see the darkness there.

Psychosexual thriller? Mystery? Horror film? It’s all of these. Or you could simply call it a skin flick.

srhoades@aol.com

[from Solares Hill]

Melancholia (Rhoades)

2011-11-30T09:01:00.000-05:00

“Melancholia” Aims

At Being Depressing

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Feeling low? About 1 in 10 people suffer from depression. This mood disorder is characterized by sadness, anxiety, and hopelessness.

Director Lars von Trier admits that he suffers from clinical depression. Matter of fact, that condition gave him the idea for his latest film “Melancholia.” It’s a somewhat depressing film.

However, sometimes you have a good reason to feel depressed. Despite the accolades his new film received at Cannes (and star Kirsten Dunst being named Best Actress), Von Trier made a faux pas, jokingly comparing himself to Hitler and claiming he was a Nazi in an interview.

“What can I say? I understand Hitler, but I think he did some wrong things, yes, absolutely. ... He’s not what you would call a good guy, but I understand much about him, and I sympathize with him a little bit.”

The Cannes officials didn’t share his “Danish sense of humor” and banned him from the film festival. Now Von Trier has announced he will never give another interview.

That’s enough to make you depressed.

You can see what it’s all about. “Melancholia” is currently sharing Von Trier’s anxieties with audiences at the Tropic Cinema.

His film is divided into three parts:

An Introduction tells the entire story from a cosmic viewpoint, mindful to some of Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life.” We see outer space, we see a bride, we see planets collide.

Part I is titled “Justine,” after the moody character played by Kirsten Dunst. We see her on the eve of her wedding, putting on a happy face with her new husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgård of TV’s “True Blood”) pretending to appreciate the largess of her brother-in-law (Keifer Sutherland) who footed the bill. Her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) acts as her caretaker, trying to keep her on schedule for the cake cutting and avoiding internecine warfare between their loopy father (John Hurt) and bitter mother (Charlotte Rampling). But before the night’s over Justine has lost a husband, told off her boss, and had a sexual encounter with a young guest. No one seems particularly distracted by reports that an errant planet called Melancholia is heading for Earth.

Part II is titled “Claire,” after the sister. Claire is growing more anxious that this runaway planet might collide with Earth. Her husband keeps assuring their son (Cameron Spurr) that it will by-pass them, but she isn’t so sure. The more anxiety this approaching planet causes the family, the more tranquil Justine becomes. In the end, the sisters have swapped caretaker roles, with Justine becoming the calming influence while they await disaster.

That the world comes to an end (cut to black) is no secret. Von Trier showed that in the Introduction “so the audience would not be distracted by the suspense of not knowing the resolution.”

What’s the theme of “Melancholia”? A therapist once told Von Trier that depressive people tend to act more calmly than others under heavy pressure, because they already expect bad things to happen. He developed the idea with actress Penelope Cruz, but a scheduling conflict caused her to be replaced by Kirsten Dunst.

If you find the languorous pacing and meandering storyline of “Melancholia” to be depressing (end of the world, for god’s sake), I suspect Lars von Trier will have accomplished his purpose.

srhoades@aol.com

[from Solares Hill]

Rum Diary (Rhoades)

2011-11-27T20:28:00.000-05:00

“The Rum Diary”

Is 100-Proof

Hunter S. Thompson

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Back in 1964, while working for the Florida Times Union, I started writing features where I was part of the story. I was one of the first writers to pass myself off as a high-school student and do an insider’s piece. I went flying with the world’s oldest glider pilot. I passed myself off as the world’s worst waiter. I hunted submarines with the navy. I posed as an ambulance driver.

Little did I know I was a Gonzo journalist.

Maybe predating Hunter S. Thompson.

Dr. Thompson is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of their stories.

In 1970, Thompson wrote an article entitled “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” for Scanlan’s Monthly. Journalist Bill Cardoso was the first to use the term to describe Thompson’s writing, praising the piece as a breakthrough: “This is it, this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling.”

Thompson said, “Okay, that’s what I do. Gonzo.” It was a style he would later employ in almost every literary endeavor.

Hunter S. Thompson liked hanging out in Key West. Getting zonked with his local pals, partying with Jimmy Buffet and Tom Corcoran and Lloyd Good of Sugarloaf Lodge.

A documentary filmmaker named Wayne Ewing brought him back to Key West in 1986. “The idea was to make a short, entertaining pilot to prove to the right television programmer that Dr. Hunter S. Thompson could actually host his own regular television series,” recalls Ewing. “We were going to call the show either the ‘Gonzo Tour’ or ‘Breakfast with Hunter’ – the latter being Jack Nicholson’s clever idea spoofing morning television talk shows.”

Ewing continues, “Once in Key West among his old friends – drug smugglers, drunks, and Jimmy Buffett – he was much less forthcoming. We all stayed in Hunter’s favorite Florida motel – the Sugar Loaf Lodge on Sugar Loaf Key, about 15 minutes from Key West proper. His girlfriend Maria was there, along with his secretary Deborah. A captive, one-eyed dolphin named Sugar swam endlessly in circles in the motel lagoon while we waited for Hunter to perform for the camera each day.

“After a week at the Sugar Loaf, I figured Hunter was actually in front of my camera for a total of about two hours. He never arose until well after noon, no matter what plan we made the night before, and when I went to beat on his door he would mumble that he needed to take a shower. The water would go on, and it could still be heard running when I returned a half hour later. Of course, Hunter had gone back to bed (‘I never turn on the hot water,’ he would say in defense of the ruse).”

As Ewing recalls, “The Sugar Loaf Lodge Management (who actually were rather fond of Hunter from his previous stays) threatened to kick us all out, unless one of us moved in next door to him. The loud sounds in the middle of the night – light bulbs exploding, Maria gurgling as if she were being strangled – were upsetting the guests next door who checked out complaining bitterly.”

On a boat ride, a school of dolphins began to swim alongside. “I’m back, Boys,” Hunter called out to them.

Now Hunter Thompson is back in Key West in the form of Johnny Depp, his stand-in for a new movie titled “The Rum Diary.” You can catch it at the Tropic Cinema. Not only was Depp a close friend of Thompson, he also played him in the earlier film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

“The Rum Diary” is based on Thompson’s semi-autobiographical novel. Written in 1961 when he was 22, it wasn’t published until 1998. The manuscript “bounced about seven times,” Thompson recalled. “I got the standard list of rejection letters.” It was his second novel, although the first has yet to be published. In need of money, he was “faced with the fact of having to dig out my 40-year old story” and find a publisher.

The novel (and the movie) tells of Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp), a footloose journalist who travels to Puerto Rico to write for The San Juan Star. He begins drinking too much rum and becomes obsessed with a woman named Chenault (Amber Heard).

Set in the late 1950s, it’s billed as “a tangled love story of jealousy, treachery and violent alcoholic lust among the Americans who staff the newspaper.”

Truth is, Hunter S. Thompson took a job with El Sportivo, a San Juan sports newspaper which folded soon after his arrival. He applied for a position with The San Juan Star, but editor William J. Kennedy turned him down. Nonetheless, the two men became friends and great drinking buddies. His friendship with the writers at the Star provided the inspiration for “The Rum Diary” storyline.

Director Bruce Robinson decided to write the screenplay for the film version himself. A recovering alcoholic, he had been sober for six-and-a-half years but started drinking again until he finished the script and then quit drinking again. Method writing a la Hunter Thompson?

He stayed on the wagon until they started filming in Puerto Rico. “It was 100 degrees at two in the morning and very humid,” he recalls. “Everyone's drenched in sweat. One of the prop guys goes by with a barrow-load of ice and Coronas. I said: ‘Johnny, this doesn’t mean anything.’ And reached for a Corona ... Some savage drinking took place. When I was no longer in Johnny’s environment I went back to sobriety.” Method directing?

Johnny Depp describes his performance as “No Extreme Hunter like I did in the Vegas movie. The Hunter of that film was somewhat hyped. Now I’m trying to get at the essence of the young Hunter. Everything he said was so (blank)ing funny you had to write it down.” Party on.

Finally, the party was over. Faced with health problems, Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide in 2005 at the age of 67.

Johnny Depp claims two mentors: Marlon Brando and Thompson. “Selfishly, what I miss about Hunter isn’t the Too Much Fun Club stuff,” he says. “It was his steady advice. His radar detector was spot-on. He knew instantly if he didn’t like somebody.”

Depp owns a 45-acre island in the Bahamas. He named a beach in honor of his friend Hunter: Gonzo Beach.

srhoades@aol.com

[from Solares Hill]

Toast (Rhoades)

2011-11-27T08:05:00.002-05:00

“Toast” Is Buttered

On Both Sides

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

When a fussy gay chef writes his boyhood memoirs what would you expect them to be about? Food, of course. And a cooking competition between him and his encroaching stepmother.

You see, when Nigel Slater’s mum passes away from chronic asthma, the voluptuous cleaning lady Mrs. Potter (Helen Bonham Carter) decides to cook her way into his dad’s heart – literally and figuratively. Thus, young Nigel (Freddie Highmore) enters into a competition for his dad’s affection.

An epicurean delight, “Toast” is currently playing at the Tropic Cinema.

This British TV film directed by S.J. Clarkson remains fairly true to Slater’s autobiography – and even pays him a nod with a cameo appearance as – what else? – a chef who hires the boy at the end of the film.

The film is beautifully shot, from the opening scenes that swoop along the shelves of a 1960s market to the boy’s pouring over food magazines by flashlight under the cover to the hotel kitchens of London where the boy winds up.

Along the way, Nigel and his stepmother enter into a culinary one-upmanship to win the affections of his ever-broadening dad (Ken Stott). But it’s hard to compete with stockened legs and a to-die-for lemon meringue pie.

Eventually, as in most fairytales, he muss set out on his own.

We’re not sure whether Nigel Slater’s title – “Toast” – refers to the simple bread or a haughty raising his glass to a woman who out cooked him.

srhoades@aol.com

[from Solares Hill]

Mozart's Sister (Rhoades)

2011-11-27T08:04:00.000-05:00

“Mozart’s Sister”

A Family Act

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Today’s Infant Mortality Rate in Europe is only 5.6 per 1,000 births, but it used to be much higher before modern medicine. A French drama titled “Mozart’s Sister” (original title: “Nannerl, la sœur de Mozart”) tells a fictional story about the sister of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, his only sibling to survive infancy.

Maria Anna “Nannerl” Mozart wished she’d been born a boy. Her brother got all the breaks.

You see, 14-year old Nannerl and 11-year-old Amadeus performed as a brother-sister act, she an accomplished harpsichordist and he a virtuoso pianist.

Alas, Nannerl really wanted to compose and play the violin, but her father Leopold forbade it because “this is not an instrument for a woman.” Besides, this popular duo act helped support the family.

In this re-imagining, we find that the Mozarts’ carriage breaks down while on tour in France and they’re forced to take refuge in the nearby Abbaye de Fontevraud. There Nannerl meets 13-year-old princess Louise Marie, sister of Louis, Dauphin of France. Of course, they become the best-est of friends. This leads to meeting the young Dauphin and a hint of romance, but Louise warns her away from him.

Writer-director René Féret provides us with his own family act, casting his two daughters in the lead roles – Marie as Nannerl Mozart and Lisa as Louise de France. David Moreau has the peripheral role of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Clovis Fouin appears as Le Dauphin.

Féret’s film captures the look and feel of a bygone century. You will revel in the beautiful French countryside and the marvelous chateau of Versailles. But it is Féret’s intellectual honesty in portraying how the world worked in the mid-1700s that anchors the story.

The high point of “Mozart’s Sister” is when finally Nannerl plays solo violin and leads a small orchestra performing her own composition. The film is making music this week at the Tropic Cinema. (Note that composer Marie-Jeanne Séréro does a brilliant job of creating original music for the film that sounds like what we might expect from another Mozart.)

The film posits that Mozart’s sister possessed a genius too – but because she was female, few would ever see it, nor would she be allowed to develop it. The director calls it, “The idea of a lost life.”

The world’s loss, as if she’d died at birth.

srhoades@aol.com

[from Solares Hill]

Women on the 6th Floor (Brockway)

2011-11-27T07:33:00.001-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

The Women on the Sixth Floor

If you can imagine "The Help" mixed with "Midnight in Paris" you might come up with a film titled "The Women on the Sixth Floor." This is a light and breezy outing that takes place in 1962 Paris. The film has a carnival sense of fun. Even if it seems very familiar in its easy bouncing rhythm, it makes a good tonic for counteracting the dark and troubling magic of "Martha Marcy May Marlene" that is playing next door. 

The film centers on a Stock Exec M. Joubert (Fabrice Luchini) and his strained marriage with Suzanne (Sandrine Kiberlain). Joubert is a man shaded in grey Dijon mustard. He is passive and blank, like a figure out of a Tooker painting. In his role,  Luchini is uncannily like Peter Sellers in "Being There". Even his eyes look static in routine. Suzanne is skeletal and high-strung. She is all frenzy and bone. The thing she's most concerned with is keeping a schedule. There seems no hope for Joubert. Like a comic version of Kafka's Gregor Samsa, he seems intent on making himself small. That is until the whirling and free spirited Maria (Natalia Verbeke) is hired to cook and clean. Then, as if by some elixir, Joubert becomes interested in things and something alien like color comes into his face. 

Suzanne mirrors the character of Hilly in "The Help". She doesn't like Maria, but she tolerates her and urges her to use the children's bathroom whenever possible. Suzanne is very much an elitist debuttante, almost identical to her chiffon counterparts in Jackson Mississippi, half a world away.

In short order, Joubert's whole way of thinking is changed. He yearns for the voluptual vibrance of Spain to escape the mundane one dimension of Paris depicted as flat and grey. Suzanne is cold and bony while Maria is warm and fleshy. Joubert is in love with shapes as much as he is with Spanish culture, as symbolized by the perfect hard-boiled egg that Maria serves each morning. With one strum of the flamenco, Joubert is electric and animated, rather like Gil in "Midnight in Paris". Spain is everything. 

Vale! As you can imagine the vivacious maids begin to fall for Joubert who brings them to a board meeting, with hopes that they might learn the stock market and become CEOs. Suzanne grows suspicious.

Verbeke is remarkably like a young Penelope Cruz. She is sorcerer-eyed with a vixen's smile but there is nothing devious within her. Maria doesn't want to hurt Joubert. She is more a Gypsy sprite, a cat-like catalyst that inspires.

Rather than "Midnight in Paris, the film ultimately echoes "The Illusionist" for its emphasis on askew characters in the midst of a dull setting. The maids live on a dreary, paint-peeling sixth floor but what they lack in living space, they make up for in their ebullient personalities that literally color their environment, even when the toilet is clogged or the water doesn't work.

"The Women on the Sixth Floor" may prove to be visual tapas rather than a full meal, but the sight of Natalia Verbeke's face at the film's end is enough to make Alberto Benigni run for his camera and have Penelope Cruz heading to Chinchon for good.

Sent from my iPhone

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

J. Edgar (Brockway)

2011-11-26T10:17:00.004-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway
J. Edgar

As I zoomed into The Peggy Dow with my chair in a slanted position, I knew that I might be in for it. The rectangle of motion and dreams hovered in front of me about to show another historical epic from Clint Eastwood. It seemed a given that I would feel a sense of deja vu. 

After the endless ad campaign on tv for "J. Edgar", I steeled myself for a two hour and fifteen minute character study. Someone in the theater told me that it might be a real leg cramper. Something sepia this way comes, I thought. 

But I was ready.

Happily, throughout most of "J. Edgar", I was entertained and able to forget my body. Yes, the sepia tones that Eastwood often uses in his films are here in force. Everything pictured is either gray brown or off-blue but each auteur deserves his or her trademark. 

Leonardo DiCaprio plays  J. Edgar Hoover in a very heartfelt and thankfully unmelodramatic way. He is somber,  driven, strangely poignant and resolute. The only thing  slightly ghoulish about him is the makeup. With the square chin, the wrinkles that look like cement and the jutting forehead, Dicaprio's face looks damn uncomfortable as if it weighs a ton. Curiously, it looks like a old man Halloween mask. But the angst  in DiCaprio's eyes---the contrast between young middle age and an old man---makes his performance all the more striking.

The best parts of the film are not its re-creations of history: Communist raids during the 1920s, Prohibition, The Lindbergh case or RFK, but rather Hoover alone, living with his dominant mother (Judy Dench). Eastwood does not spare us much. We see Hoover in all his masochism. This is a man who is the head of the FBI, but his mother and the scourge of being a "daffodil" or a gay man, can reduce him to jelly. 

Throughout the narrative, Hoover sees himself as imperfect. He stumbles and giggles around women. In order to compensate for his  heterosexual shortcomings, he takes on the crusade of America, against Communism, The Left  and,those that seem "different" or unpatriotic to him. Hoover was human but he was also a danger and it was eating at him from within. 
Under a more superficial lens, Hoover might seem like Dick Tracy, especially given the makeup which echoes the 1990 Warren Beatty film, but Eastwood gives us a glimpse of the full person---both the man, and the monster of ambition.


In scope and tone "J Edgar" recalls Oliver Stone's "Nixon".  In that film too, you have a similar average man, unblessed with looks who pathologically pursues what he thinks is right. Both films have an non-linear expressionist style, giving equal weight to dream and memory. The two films are bookends. Perhaps Oliver Stone shared his secret files with Eastwood.

Highlights of the film include Hoover giving his agent and almost lover, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) a slug and a kiss on the floor. The scene is Hitchcockian in intensity and just misses being taken for   foreplay. After the incident, Hoover is crushed. A G-Man without his G. And if that's not enough to bring you in, how about an Oedipal episode with Hoover putting on his mom's dress and speaking in his mom's voice, "Be strong, Edgar" Anthony Perkins would be just tickled.

Skeletons in the closet aside, I wanted to sympathize a bit with Dicaprio's Hoover, his ambition is so honest along with his shyness. Edgar wants to make the world so Right. He races to arrest criminals, only to arrive too late. 

Yet as an old man, his hatred of Civil Rights and Martin Luther King, get the better of him and he becomes ugly and a bit of a creep, especially to his friend Clyde.

The most affecting scenes despite Hoover's unsettling and distasteful views, are the moments where he encounters something emotional and sexual: when listening to a Kennedy affair he is like a drooling adolescent. At the races, with Clyde beside him as an old man, there is the regret of an intimacy unfulfilled and passed by.

"J. Edgar" is a timely collage of  an odd man behind the mask of The G-Man who wanted to right-angle the world, at all and any cost. But despite his square-edged suit and chin, you get the feeling that the only person J. Edgar Hoover wanted to be was his mother.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

J.Edgar (Rhoades)

2011-11-26T10:15:00.000-05:00

“J. Edgar” Doesn’t

Ask, Doesn’t Tell

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

My high-school buddy Lane spent his career with the FBI. He was an aide to J. Edgar Hoover himself.

He started out acting as liaison between Hoover and Bobby Kennedy. Hoover hated Kennedy, and assigning a fledgling G-Man as liaison was his way of insulting the president’s brother.

Director Clint Eastwood has made a film about the infamous director of the FBI. Titled “J. Edgar,” it stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Hoover and Armie Hammer as his sidekick Clyde Tolson.

Many in the FBI are angry that the film depicts Tolson trying to smooch his boss. Eastwood is hinting at the longtime rumor that Hoover and his assistant director were gay lovers.

“There is no basis in fact for such a portrayal of Mr. Hoover,” insists William Branon, chairman of the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation. “It would be a grave injustice and monumental distortion to proceed with such a depiction based on a completely unfounded and spurious assertion.”

Fact is, Hoover and Tolson ate lunch together every day and dinner together almost every night. They vacationed together, they took snapshots of each other, they were tight.

So I asked my old buddy Lane what he knew. He replied: “Hoover and Tolson were chauffeured, guarded, and observed daily by FBI Special Agents throughout their tenure as FBI Director and FBI Associate Director. FBI Special Agent R. Jean Gray said it best (with my emphasis in parenthesis): ‘If anything scandalous had happened (between) the FBI Director (and Tolson), it would have been known coast to coast within the (FBI) in thirty minutes.’”

Well, there goes another myth.

“J. Edgar” – currently playing at the Tropic Cinema – traces the FBI Director’s career, touching on Bruno Hauptmann and the Lindbergh kidnapping as well as his tempestuous relationship with Bobby Kennedy.

The studio publicity describes the movie: “As the face of law enforcement in America for almost 50 years, J. Edgar Hoover was feared and admired, reviled and revered. But behind closed doors, he held secrets that would have destroyed his image, his career and his life.”

Secrets?

I asked my buddy about this. He admitted that Hoover had secret files on everybody in Washington, 28 filing cabinets in all. After the FBI Director’s death, he helped Hoover’s secretary Helen W. Gandy (“Miss Gandy,” as he respectfully calls her) shred the contents of all these files.

DiCaprio makes an interesting J. Edgar Hoover. He has the acting chops for the role, but the makeup is at times unconvincing. The FBI Director’s jowly bulldog countenance proves hard to emulate.

Naomi Watts plays Miss Gandy in the film.

If there was no gay relationship with Clyde Tolson, how about any signs of romance with Miss Gandy?

“No,” says my friend Lane, wearily shaking his head as he recently sat in my Key West living room, “Hoover was married to his job.”

srhoades@aol.com[from Solares Hill]

Week of November 18 to November 24 (Mann)

2011-11-22T17:49:00.000-05:00

What’s on at the Tropic
by Phil Mann

Oh my, this week is a dream for moviegoers, but a nightmare for this columnist. Because of Thanksgiving, the movie changeover, which usually occurs on Friday, is taking place mid-week. So we’ve got one batch of films scheduled for Friday (11/18) through Tuesday (11/22), and then a separate batch starting on Wednesday (11/23).

Let’s start with Friday’s new films.

MOZART’S SISTER is like a crème brûlée, so French, so luscious, so irresistible. The sound track, which you’ll hear in the Tropic’s unrivaled acoustic environment, is richly Mozartian; the visual setting is the palace of Versailles where the movie was filmed. The garb and accoutrements, both male and female, are true to an era of excess that led to the French revolution. It almost doesn’t matter what the story is, but it happens to be a compelling and dramatic tale of Wolfgang’s older sister Nannerl. She was his idol as a child, inspiring him with her talent. But when the legendary prodigy blossomed, father Leopold relegated Nannerl to the role of harpsichord accompanist, refusing to allow her to study composition, or practice a virtuoso instrument like the violin.

Despite this, her talent was recognized by her peers at the French court, both the Dauphine and the Princess. If you notice a resemblance between Nannerl and the Princess, it’s because they are real-life sisters, the beautiful daughters of the director. “Alive with exuberantly thesped personages and awash in the joy and power of music, the picture is a stunner.” (Variety)

TOAST, as its title suggests, is one of those little treats you find at the Tropic. Based on the comic memoir of a British celebrity chef, it’s about coming of age with a father who wasn’t taken with his son’s delight in cooking and taking home ec. “Sweet and tart, airy and rich and, above all, a thoroughly irresistible confection.“ (Gary Goldstein, L.A. Times)

Joining these on Wednesday is the much talked about MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE. Just so you understand the perplexing title, Martha was the name given the central character by her family, Marcy May is the name she acquired while living in a patriarchal commune, and Marlene is the all-purpose name used by women in the commune when answering the phone.

We see M ((Elizabeth Olsen) at the commune under the powerful influence of its craggy, charismatic leader Patrick (John Hawkes – Winter’s Bone, Higher Ground), who evokes Jim Jones or Charles Manson. And we see her at her sister’s gorgeous lakeside home – a jarring juxtaposition -- where she goes to escape. What led her to the commune, and what drove her away?

Ms. Olsen is the younger sister of the famed twins, but unlike them she has taken acting seriously, studying at NYU’s prestigious Tisch School. This is a breakout role for her, portraying a woman who struggles to find herself (hence the multiple names). She’s already being touted for major awards. “The story of a scarred, scared woman - an extraordinary, mesmerizing performance from Elizabeth Olsen… a beautifully spooky film.” (Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer)

After this, you’ll be ready for something light, which the French comedy THE WOMEN ON THE 6^TH FLOOR nicely supplies. Set in the 1960’s, it’s sort of a French version of The Help, but without the edgy undertones of the Civil Rights movement, as a straitlaced French stockbroker and his wife interact with a bevy of Spanish maids who live on the servants’ floor of their apartment building.

Lots of holdovers: ANONYMOUS, MARGIN CALL, IDES OF MARCH, plus a brief run for RUM DIARY.

And a couple of very Special Events. On Sunday, it’s the ballet SLEEPING BEAUTY, shown live from the new Bolshoi at 10:00am EST (7pm in Moscow), with an encore show in the evening.

On Monday, Susan Orlean (author of The Orchid Thief), will be live on stage at the Tropic, introducing and signing her new book on RIN TIN TIN, followed by a screening of Rinty’s most famous silent film CLASH OF THE WOLVES. It’s all a benefit for the SPCA and the Tropic.

Have a great Thanksgiving.

Full schedules and info at TropicCinema.com or TCKW.info.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (Rhoades)

2011-11-22T17:48:00.000-05:00

Front Row at the Movies

“Martha Marcy

May Marlene”

Becomes Cult Classic

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

My FBI buddy was at Waco. Janet Reno didn’t follow his advice, he says.

He describes cult leader David Koresh as “a dangerous nutjob.”

Benjamin Zablocki, a professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, defines a cult as an ideological organization held together by charismatic relationships and the demand of total commitment.

An award-winning film at the Tropic – the alliteratively titled “Martha Marcy May Marlene” – gives us a picture of a cult with a charismatic leader and one of his victims.

This psychological thriller stars Elizabeth Olsen (look-alike sister of the famous Olsen Twins, Ashley and Mary-Kay) as Martha, a young woman who has returned home from an abusive cult in the Catskill Mountains. And John Hawkes (Oscar-nominated co-star of “Winter’s Bone”) as Patrick, the cult’s leader.

Martha had been missing for two years when she phones for her sister (Sarah Paulson) to come pick her up. But back home her memories return to Patrick. Increasingly paranoid, Martha becomes convinced that she’s being watched by the cult.

When asked about where she’s been, she sometimes says she was with a boyfriend but it didn’t work out. Other times she claims not to remember.

But she does. Maybe.

The film is designed to take you inside Martha’s head and keep you as on-edge as she is. It flips from the safety of her present state to memories of the communal farm and back again. We slowly begin to share her memories of group sex and abuse at the instigation of creepy Patrick. Or do we?

With its non-linear storytelling, “Martha Marcy May Marlene” doesn’t always let us know what’s real and what’s not. An unsettling approach that forces us to share Martha’s mental state.

Does she find herself feeling as trapped by the idyllic life with her sister and brother-in-law as she did with the cult?

Elizabeth Olsen’s nervous mannequin-like performance is spot-on, that of a woman pushed to the edge, not sure where to go from here (or there). A disintegration of identity as we watch.

Written and directed by neophyte Sean Durkin, “Martha Marcy May Marlene” won the Best Directing award at Sundance and was designated Un Certain Regard at Cannes. Durkin is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Film & Television.

Why a movie about cults? “I think as a child I was really afraid of groups that conformed. I’m attracted to fear. I’m attracted to movies that scare you,” says the bearded young director. “I was attracted to the world of cults and how it dealt with family and people’s different personae. When you talk to people who’ve had these sorts of experiences it’s amazing how little immediate change there is. They usually struggle for years to emerge as whole people again. Sometimes they just never do.”

Even at Waco, many of the adults and older children chose of their own free will to remain with Koresh. They belonged, they said.

srhoades@aol.com

[from Solares Hill]

Martha Marcy May Marlene (Brockway)

2011-11-22T17:47:00.003-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway


Martha Marcy May Marlene

If you found the psychological  thriller  "Black Swan" to be too fanciful, but still enjoy a genuine Polanski-patterned film then "Martha Marcy May Marlene" is a must see. The film slips with a slow intensity. The very images appear coated with a foggy emulsion as one scene blends into another along with geometric shapes and slanting shadows. Memories are not to be trusted.

Elizabeth Olsen stars as Martha, a woman that has somehow entrenched herself into a cult and has disappeared for two plus years. We are not sure why she got mixed up in the cult and it doesn't really matter. We can deduce what happened. All it took was one look at Patrick (John Hawkes) and there she went.

Patrick as the leader of the group has piercing eyes and its a given that he makes you feel as if you're the only one. He is part Manson and part generic bohemian. The most disturbing thing about Patrick is that in many scenes he is off by himself, reading, sleeping, or doing chores. Like Manson, he is the orchestrater not the participant. Insidiously, he blends in to the every day.


Although Patrick is no dramatic stretch for Hawkes who has done similar eerie outings in "Winter's Bone" and "Higher Ground", one sight of him at the guitar, performed without Gothicism or melodrama is enough to haunt you for weeks.

"Martha Marcy May Marlene" is so jolting because it is told plainly without any of the usual dramatic "oh no here he comes!" moments or sudden scares. The sight of a young girl in a white robe is just as scary as anything dreamed up by Wes Craven. 

The magnet of this film is not just Hawkes, but Elizabeth Olsen as a woman who can't make sense of the world, especially as its represented by her sister Lucy  (Sarah Paulson) and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy). Not since Mia Farrow in "Rosemary's Baby" have we seen such a young woman in heartbreak as she tries to make something horrible into an event that she can handle with a breezy smile. The sight of Olsen in the lake is nerve wracking . Despite the open water, the lake could well be a carnivorous closet. Claustrophobia abounds.

The magic of the film is that it makes it appear that Martha's sister and her career-obsessed husband are just as controlling as Martha's cult family. 

"Martha Marcy May Marlene" works  because it shows cults for what they are, rather than what Hollywood  makes them appear to be. There are no hyper-real boogeymen here or no supernatural woodsmen that are larger than life. Sadly, life itself is sometimes enough.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Women on the 6th Floor (Rhoades)

2011-11-22T17:46:00.002-05:00

“Women on 6th Floor”

Rises to the Top

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Lately, I’ve been consulting in Central America, although I don’t speak a word of Spanish. When French actor Fabrice Luchini started filming “Women on the 6th Floor” (original title: “Les femmes du 6ème étage”) he didn’t hable español either. And his Spanish co-stars didn’t speak French.

The film takes place in 1960s Paris. Jean-Louis Joubert (Luchini) is an uptight stockbroker married to a class-conscious wife (Sandrine Kiberlain). Their teenagers are off at boarding school. Life is, well, boring.

That is, until Jean-Louis falls under the spell of their two Spanish maids. Especially María Gonzalez (Natalia Verbeke), who lives with the other servants on the 6th floor of their apartment building. These women turn Jean-Louis’s life upside down.

The film suggests he’s a better man for it.

“Women on the 6th Floor” is currently playing at the Tropic Cinema.

You’ve seen 60-year-old Luchini (né Robert Luchini) in “Molière” and blonde 40-something Sandrine Kiberlain in “Alias Betty.” Dark-eyed Natalia Verbeke made her mark in “Son of the Bride” and “The Other Side of the Bed.”

Director-writer Philippe Le Guay is a professor at La Fémis (Paris). You can sense his intellectual approach to this film about matters of the heart.

Nonetheless, the flaws of our wayward stockbroker are endearing as he discovers this new world on the 6th floor populated by a gaggle of female Spanish immigrants. The bourgeois Jean-Louis learns a lesson about tolerance and embracing life as he listens to his heart rather than thinking with his pocketbook.

Le Guay and Luchini have collaborated of three films (counting this one) – “L’année Juliette,” “Le coût de la vie,” and “Les femmes du 6eme étage” – all comedies.

A point of interest, Le Guay’s family had a Spanish maid when he was a child and his father was a stockbroker. Like they say, write about what you know.

srhoades@aol.com

[from Solares Hill]

Anonymous (Rhoades)

2011-11-22T17:42:00.000-05:00

Was Shakespeare

Really “Anonymous”?

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

I had this debate with my college English lit professor: Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays?

One of the oldest questions concerning William Shakespeare is whether he wrote his works or not. The first mention that he might not have written the works attributed to him was made by the Rev. James Wilmot in 1785. Wilmot suspected that Francis Bacon was the real author.

But there are others to consider.

More than 70 candidates have been proposed. The most popular include Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford; Christopher Marlowe; Bacon; and even Queen Elizabeth I. Each has a group of followers who support that particular person as the real author of Shakespeare. De Vere’s are called Oxfordians, Bacon’s Baconians, and Marlowe’s Marlovians. Queen Elizabeth’s followers have pretty much faded away. Those who believe Shakespeare to be the true author are known as Stratfordians.

Fact is, there’s little evidence that Shakespeare wrote his works. As it happens, we have a lot more evidence indicating he didn’t write the works attributed to him.

The arguments include:

William Shaksper (sic) lacked the background and education to write such masterful plays and sonnets. His parents were probably illiterate and so were his daughters. So it’s unlikely he possessed the high degree of literacy exhibited in his plays.

It’s argued that the plays were written a highly educated man. But there’s no evidence that poor-as-a-church-mouse Will ever attended a university.

Furthermore, no portraits were painted of him during his lifetime as was typical of noted authors. And his entry in the parish death registry merely lists him as a “gent,” rather than as a playwright or actor.

Edward de Vere is generally regarded as the most likely of the bunch to be the famed author. In 1920 J. Thomas Looney was the first to propose de Vere as the writer of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. In “Shakespeare Identified” he pointed out analogies between Oxford’s poetic techniques and the Bard’s writing.

Not convinced? A friend of de Vere once referred to him as a “man whose countenance shakes spears.” And one of the Earl’s coats of arms depicts a lion shaking a broken spear. Plus, as a ward of Queen Elizabeth I, he was well educated, a patron of the theatrical arts, and held a lease on the first Blackfriars Theatre.

“Anonymous” – the new movie currently playing at the Tropic Cinema – takes on the question of authorship of Shakespeare’s works. As proposed by director Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day,” “2012”), de Vere is the true penman. Shakespeare was just a front man. And Ben Jonson was miffed at being passed over for this honor.

This is presented as history’s greatest literary scam. “We’ve been played,” posits the film’s trailers.

In this telling, aristocratic Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans) is both son and lover of Queen Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave). Believing that theaters are the work of the devil, a relative named Robert Cecil (Edward Hogg) blackmails de Vere into removing his name from all his plays, attributing them to a handy surrogate named Shakespeare (Rafe Spall), an “illiterate drunkard, notorious fool, and bit-player.” Fellow playwright Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) is privy to this subterfuge. Thus we have a conflict that sets the stage for murder, court intrigue, and the high drama of the Essex Rebellion.

Roland Emmerich admits that he never enjoyed reading Shakespeare in school, saying he picked up what he knows of Shakespeare from watching movies. So consider this his contribution to English literature.

In pressing the Oxfordian theory, Emmerich reckons “everybody in the Stratfordian side is so pissed off because we’ve called them on their lies.”

Truth is, few Shakespeare scholars and literary historians consider it likely that another person wrote Shakespeare’s plays. One problem with the de Vere theory is that he died in 1604, before 10 of Shakespeare’s plays were written. But the 17th Earl of Oxford makes good fantasy for a movie.

Wonder if my old college prof would agree?

srhoades@aol.com.
[from Solares Hill]

Toast (Brockway)

2011-11-21T10:04:00.002-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Toast

The consumption and enjoyment of food is one of the basic drives we all share. It is a crucial need and very primal. But until I saw "Toast", the recent film based on the memoir of the famous chef personality Nigel Slater, I never thought of food as a weapon of psychological warfare.
Seeing is believing. Food can be both a blessing and a curse. It can be either a harbinger of comfort wrapped in flaky pie crust, or in the wrong hands, a horror of mental and sensual anguish flayed raw and pale, arriving on any dinner plate.


Such is the duality of life: the undercooked and the burned to death from the sublime to the disgusting. "Toast" the film, illustrates both extremes and you are not likely to forget the taste of this bouncy but honest film, laced with black humor like unsweetened chocolate.

Little Nigel Slater (Oscar Kennedy) is at his wits end. Although he loves his mother very much ( Victoria Hamilton) he can't stand her cooking. She cooks solely from cans and boxes. He dreams of fresh produce like something from an exotic jungle, colorful jewels of variety and nutrition that are beyond him. 

Nigel goes to bed looking at glossy cookbooks, ogling with pleasure at standard comfort foods with a sexual intensity. The only way he can feel his mother's touch through food is by the munching of toast: the one unprocessed thing his mom prepares. Nigel describes the toast like an event. Warm, crisp and buttery, the crunch sounds like a maternal kiss or a protective hug, insulating him from the loud vitriol  of his father.

With the abrupt death of his mother, Nigel is convinced his father doesn't like him. Nigel sees the preparation of good food as a way to earn his father's respect and to battle against his father's new love interest, the flighty but domestically decisive Mrs Potter. (Helena Bonham Carter)   

The battle begins with food as the ammunition to win one father's heart.
Never have I seen the concept of food used in such a direct and unsentimental way as in this film. It is shown both as a vehicle for negative manipulation and bonding love. A lemon meringue pie is more diabolical than the apple of Eden.

There is a touch of Roald Dahl here too. Nigel, as a British schoolboy, watches from a window as Mrs. Potter cleans up his vomit as he is lactose intolerant. Nigel smiles with glee. And as he works away in his room, poring over studies for the perfect pie, might he just put in a certain something to make his father's friend just feel a little woozy? He never does, but from the look in his eye it's safe to say the wheels were turning.

Even though the British setting is Beatle-esque and seems like it could be the visual equivalent of the song "Penny Lane, the film is not sticky sweet. Children are shown as lascivious amorals who will do anything for a jug of rich cream, but their irreverent gluttony is never mean spirited. These school kids are just shown as they really are: self centered creatures who are willing to do anything for gustatory pleasure. As a young adult, Nigel (Freddie Highmore) knows cooking is his only escape from the claustrophobic home of his father.

"Toast" will stay with you long after dessert. It is smooth on the eyes and direct in its narrative, showing the power and chemistry of food upon a family's emotional well being. A towering meringue that resembles the bow of The QE2  can  either pull the family apart or unite it together, just as a new girlfriend can either be a loving stepmother or a sensual and wicked queen who overbearingly cooks with kindness.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Mozart's Sister (Brockway)

2011-11-21T09:58:00.001-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Mozart's Sister

"Mozart's Sister", the new French drama by Rene Feret focuses on Nannerl, (Marie Feret) Mozart's sister who was discouraged from the violin and kept from composing music although there is evidence that she was every bit as talented as her famous younger brother The film, subtle in tone and easy on the eyes, maintains a kind of Gothic existential edge, like something out of Thomas Hardy. But fans of period dramas will be taken by the film's  sweep and attention to detail. Subtle it may seem, but in the end a father's control is no less vicious or vexing than "Dangerous Liaisons".


Nannerl accompanies young Mozart as he is taken on tour to musical concert appointments and special commissions. They fawn over the five year old child prodigy while the older sister, can't get a word in edgewise, let alone play music or compose. She is either humored along or solidly thwarted. Nannerl is always told that the violin is not an instrument for a woman.


The father, Leopold (Marc Feret) is an ultra-controlling stage dad. Every aspect of the Mozart family is controlled. When the parents stop at an abbey to get their coach fixed, Nannerl meets the pale and secretive Louise de France (Lisa Feret) who happens to be the King's daughter. Louise is more than a bit spooky. She always seems to hover. Louise's brother, Le Dauphin (Clovis Fouin) is also a bit of a ghoul with his staring eyes. Nannerl develops an attraction to Le Dauphin but you get the feeling that she is shuttled back and forth between all kinds of crazy disfunction. All she cares about is the liberating curves of a violin; its shapeliness is an island that she cannot reach. Nor can she compose in peace.  Nannerl is often left resigned and wistful, displaced on a rock without music. She seems the only one with her sanity. The father immediately starts screaming whenever he hears Nannerl at the piano, Louise talks of the devil and Le Dauphin is prone to sudden unpredictable rages.


Mozart is only ten here and treats the violin as his whimsical magic wand that can do anything. We wish that his sister, being just as gifted had access to that magic. Sexism, puritanical religion and parental control all conspire against her, making a three armed prison.
"Mozart's Sister" doesn't have any grand flourishes but it sneaks up on you with a slow step, offering a haunt and a voice to what it must be like to live under expectation, to compromise and finally give up. 

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Rum Diary (Brockway)

2011-11-21T09:55:00.002-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway 

The Rum Diary

Hunter Thompson is a spirit that I have always felt since the early 80s. While growing up in Key West, I heard stories of the tall slender eccentric, moving spastically through space, quick with a verbal jab for any supercilious poser or smirking politician. More times than I can recall, I have heard of this madcap man, stalking about Key West and the rustic environs of the Sugarloaf Lounge, taking large, loose-limbed steps through a darkened salty interior, apparently holding court with a cigarette holder and an iconic visor.  Imaginary and fantastical, he seemed, so close but yet so far, worlds away from my wheelchair.

Now decades later, I set out to see "The Rum Diary" the new film based on an obscure novel by Thompson, which both stars and is produced by Johnny Depp. Depp has been in two previous films featuring Thompson and also became his close friend in later years.

Bumping along a slanted sidewalk on my way to The Tropic, my left leg shook in anticipation. After one film by Terry Gilliam that tried too hard (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and a conventional documentary, perhaps I would now be able to glean some new insight into the impulse of Hunter Thompson, or at least be entertained.

Sadly, my search continues.

"The Rum Diary" despite the heartfelt panache of Johnny Depp, sheds little light on Thompson, either fictionally or biographically. Both the story and its actors have no gusto in their Gonzo.
Once again we have Depp in a Thompson role as Paul Kemp, a young drifting journalist who somehow finds himself wanting to work for the San Juan Star in Puerto Rico. How Kemp got to Puerto Rico I'm not sure, and I don't think it matters much. But sure enough, here he is, blotty-eyed and slobbery, under a tropical sun. Depp speaks in the same quickened voice that  was heard in Gilliam's film albeit more softly. Say what you will about Depp as  Hunter, but he is consistent. Depp has his friend's soft and speedy rumble down to a science.

But science is not enough.

Despite some clever touches of a Hunteresque Kemp intently peering at a volume of Coleridge on the beach, eyebrows rolling, Depp is too smooth and too much of a mannequin of Thompson. He is a mere shade. As Depp walks around improbably but impeccably dressed under a brilliant and glossy landscape of San Juan without any shadows, it's hard to find any Hunter in the light, be he Bohemian or beastly. The man is missing. This is just the surface of a Vanity Fair photo shoot. Paul Kemp trots about from one bland socialite to the next nightspot, drink in hand. Such repeated imbibing does not make for entertainment, surrounded by so much bland chatter.
 The story, which should have been full of Gonzo galore is the stuff of a Sunday snooze. I can only think that Hunter may well be hollering from beyond in some wild innerspace.

Actor Aaron Eckhart arrives on the scene as a petty self centered resort developer and Kemp moves into a flophouse with an alcoholic, the dissipated journalist Moberg (Giovanni Ribisi). Despite his formidable appearance this man is an annoying bore. No one is interesting or says anything very surprising. Granted, this story was written before Thompson found his voice, but there is hardly any energy or flavor to the narrative or acting. This is only bare mojito motion that goes on longer than it should---two solid hours--- despite the fire-breathing hijinx of someone who could be Hunter. Liquor that catches fire? Or a car that speeds over a bridge? That's not Gonzo by half.

Most of the jokes are hollow chuckles: Kemp  fretting over an out of control vehicle. Kemp sitting in his sidekick's lap, attempting to drive a car down some steep walkways and crashing. It all seems forced, not all that funny and oddly un-Hunter. Kemp could have been any well dressed inebriated tourist.

Veteran actor Richard Jenkins is one surprise however, as Lotterman, the boss of The Star. Jenkins has power and punch as the man who gives a knocking to Depp's catatonic Kemp.   
I really wanted to like this film, but it makes  a weak drink. For those of you who are curious about Hunter this is a tepid charade of what could have been. I recommend Gilliam's earlier film on Thompson  or better yet, "Where the Buffalo Roam" (1980), starring Bill Murray. These two quirky films, combine in a stronger shot, showing  the real spunk of this writer who wrote as life appeared to him: pouring paragraphs with painterly sounds that were unapologetically associative and full of pharmaceutical fun.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Week of November 11 to November 17 (Mann)

2011-11-09T12:02:00.000-05:00

What’s on at the Tropic
by Phil Mann

What happens when you take a historical/intellectual puzzler and put it in the hands of a director of uber-Hollywood movies? In ANONYMOUS, Director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla, 10,000 B.C) takes on the challenge of correctly attributing Shakespeare’s works. Proceeding from an elitist assumption that no country bumpkin commoner could have possibly produced such masterpieces, Emmerich unabashedly makes the case for a high-bred fellow, the Earl of Oxford.

Okay, that claim has been debunked many times over. It’s hogwash. But who cares when we’ve got a randy Queen, brilliant costumes and a lush immersion into the world of Elizabethan England. It’s “a marvelous historical film…. a splendid experience: the dialogue, the acting, the depiction of London, the lust, jealousy and intrigue.” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)

Quite the opposite is the director of HIGHER GROUND, Vera Farmiga, who has told interviewers “I can’t do Los Angeles.” Farmiga’s breakthrough role as an actor in Up in the Air, where she played the female counterpart to George Clooney’s corporate axe man, established her as a sexy, smart and sophisticated woman. Now she has turned her talents to a cinema adaptation of Carolyn Briggs’ story of struggling with fundamentalist faith -- A Dark World: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost. It’s not an easy subject to take on, but one senses there is something in Farmiga’s background that has prepared her. She’s one of seven children, brought up in a Ukrainian enclave in New Jersey where she didn’t even speak English until age six. In addition to directing, she plays the lead character, Corrine, and her teen-aged sister Taissa plays her in flashbacks.

We follow Corrine’s journey into, and out of, an evangelical community, without judgment, and with a touch of humor. Higher Ground is “a sincerely humane examination of what it means to experience a crisis of faith. Tender, bittersweet and often gently comedic” (Jeanette Catsoulis, NPR)

Since we missed last week (Welcome Back Blue Paper!!) let me bring you up to date on the holdovers. MARGIN CALL and IDES OF MARCH examine two different, but equally sinister sides of American life.

In Margin Call it is Wall Street’s penchant for elaborate, overleveraged, gambling that masquerades as investing. With Kevin Spacey as a trader with a conscience, and Jeremy Irons as the boss without one, we get a thrilling ride in the world of high finance that is “easily the best Wall Street movie ever made.” (David Denby, New Yorker).

The subject of Ides of March is presidential political campaigning, a quadrennial, over-financed manipulation of the American public. George Clooney is the candidate who wants to be pure – dream on – and Ryan Gosling is the ambitious campaign manager who figures out how to get his way. “This taut cautionary tale explores the dark side of American politics. And leaves the viewer to wonder - if anyone's still wondering - is there a bright side? (Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer)

If you really want the bright side, catch MONEYBALL, the saga of how Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s (Brad Pitt) defied conventional baseball wisdom and lived to tell the tale.

Or show up on Sunday at 8:00pm for the ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW on the big screen, and make your own bright side. Your $20 ticket includes a free prop bag, but you’re on your own for costumes. Hosted by Frank Bradbary, it’s all for the benefit of the Tropic.

Tuesday brings the the British Royal Opera to the screen with Puccini’s TOSCA. Love, torture, political corruption, it’s all there, with a cast featuring Angela Gheorghiu, Jonas Kaufmann and Bryn Terfel, and the Royal Opera Chorus and Orchestra.

Save a future date. On Monday, November 21, author Susan Orlean will be on stage talking about her new book on Rin Tin Tin, and showing one of Rinty’s classic silent films. This reviewer caught her performance at the New York Film Festival. Top-notch.

Full info at TropicCinema.com or TCKW.info.

Higher Ground (Brockway)

2011-11-09T12:01:00.003-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Higher Ground 

I'll admit, when I went into my favorite theater space, The George, to see "Higher Ground", I thought that I might be in for a spiritual lashing. Perhaps something obsequious or cartoonish that means to be irreverent but ends up to be merely boring or self righteous as in the film "Saved!" (2004) or the  daring but uncomfortably preachy "The Tree of Life". Both extremes are perhaps the penance that I can expect to endure as I usually get the shivers from being overtly preached to, especially in cinema.  

But thankfully miracles happen and "Higher Ground" is a compelling thoughtful film that shows evangelical church members as real people and not mere ecstatic zombies going though the motions. Not since Michael Tolkin's "Rapture" (1991) has there been a film that takes on the magnetism of  faith, showing both its solidifying comforts and eerie manias. 

Vera Farmiga directs this film and stars as Corinne an idealistic believer who gets swept off her feet by Ethan, (Boyd Holbrook) a blonde Christian rock musician who is half Joel Osteen and half Jim Morrison. Ethan is no cartoon. There is authenticity here. Ethan truly wants to change the world and walk as Jesus himself did, without irony and with intention. Ethan and his friends might be thought of as "Jesus Freaks" yet their portrayals and actions are delineated as is, without ridicule or exaggeration. I have spent time in Pentecostal churches and Seventh Day Adventist Sunday school classes and have met people very much like the characters in this film. 

No matter what your personal belief or non-belief philosophy, "Higher Ground" does not judge. We see these people for who they really are: quaint, good hearted people, prone to risqué fantasy and mistakes in temper like everyone else.

Corrine is shown right away to be more of an agnostic than a believer. At one point, while having sex, she sees a wild boar. Even Evangelical Christians can be bestial. There is also a scene where she is frowned upon for checking out a library book---Lord of the Flies. Freedom of thought is frowned upon. And church crosses move past her like mystical birds of Judgement.
Nevertheless, Corrine has a baby with Ethan. Once married they go on the road and there is a crash due to Ethan's pot smoking.

The group becomes increasingly rigid and Corrine becomes increasingly alienated. Ethan, now played by Joshua Leonard, becomes older and plump, strumming the guitar only at home. Most every aspect of their life is cloaked in Evangelical thought.

Corrine becomes sexually frustrated and retreats to her friend Kathleen (Donna Murphy) for escape. Kathleen is devout but sexual: she likes the shape of a man's penis. 

Although there are a few Ally Mcbealish fantasy scenes, "Higher Ground" does not stoop to preach, pander or pontificate. This particular commune is shown with all its crinkles and hopeful crusades. This group may be well-meaning but it is prone to selfishness and rigidity just like any other group.

"Higher Ground" is  a character study. Vera Farmiga as a director shows terrific courage for lifting the veil of Christian fundamentalism, showing its idealism with irreverence , while never belittling faith. What may work for some may not work for others. Farmiga is not afraid to also delineate the  robotic patterns of thought. Her camera is at once Grand in Faith and Gothic in caution. "Higher Ground" is ultimately humanistic, arguing for an open book, be it a Bible or better yet, something else.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Anonymous (Brockway)

2011-11-09T12:00:00.000-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Anonymous

Zounds! I am beside myself. I would have thought that the silly historical conspiracies  in the mode  of Dan Brown were over, but Oh Heavens it is not so. We have a real literary teaser on our hands, with much more  twists and turns than necessary. It is at bottom, a Shakespeare soup opera of a show. But thankfully it is very well acted. 

"Anonymous" directed by the Blockbuster auteur Roland  Emmerich puts us in a very fictional version of Shakespeare's world. The camera opens on the  beat up and bruised poet  and editor Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) interrogated over the mysterious works of  Shakespeare. We are told in a prologue of the film that Shakespeare never wrote a word, that no original manuscripts were ever found, that The Bard was,  in fact, a charismatic illiterate  unable to write simple words. Really? I don't know about  you, but I had trouble suspending my disbelief.

I'm not going to spoil this Bard brouhaha of a "who-penned-it". Suffice to say, one of the main literary princes on the throne of Will is the Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans), who as a young man played by Jamie Campbell, bears a resemblance to Jack Sparrow. Both actors do good turns here. Despite the soap opera plot, Rhys Ifans is compelling  as a playwright who gets no respect. Cluttered within his mansion home that looks like Ray Bradbury's rustic workshop, he comes off as an Elizabethan Tennessee Williams, driven "mad by voices".

Rafe Spall as Will Shakespeare is entertaining as a comical and befuddled mediocre actor once you just let go. A riot he is and very fun to watch, but he may be blasphemous to Shakespeare purists. He is portrayed as quite the bathroom- humored buffoon, more Jack Black than The Bard. Keep an eye out for the mosh-pit scene, that's right. Shakespeare in a mosh pit. A must see!

Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave work well together as versions of Elizabeth I. Richardson's queen is a young succubus, while Redgrave is a bit of a lion fish Grand Domme. Both are riveting together and they each have chemistry. Previously both have worked together before as mother and daughter    on Tv's "Nip Tuck".

The main stumbling block to enjoying "Anonymous" is the narrative. The plot has more twists than a mountain road in Figueres,  Spain, touching on war, incest, authorship and royal lineages that are way too meandering to follow. The flashbacks are choppy with the cardinal sin of  many titles, putting us forward and backward in time, addling my paranoiac fears of ADD, or making me feel that I actually had it during the course of the film.  I honestly forgot the characters. The story had so many flashbacks in time that everyone looked the same after a while with nearly identical goatees.

I found myself not caring about the religious war subplot, as there was so much back and forth. I felt like saying Roland Emmerich doth protest too much.

Despite the ponderous pander of the story, the stirring often comic performances were magnetic. The story may be a tempest in a teapot  but the flamboyant charge in the acting proves to have flair and fire. The verve of Rafe Spall and Rhys Ifans may not be the souls of the age but they are the saviours  of this film.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Anonymous (Rhoades)

2011-11-09T11:22:00.000-05:00

Was Shakespeare Really “Anonymous”?

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

I had this debate with my college English lit professor: Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays?

But there are others to consider.

Fact is, there’s little evidence that Shakespeare wrote his works. As it happens, we have a lot more evidence indicating he didn’t write the works attributed to him.

The arguments include:

It’s argued that the plays were written a highly educated man. But there’s no evidence that poor-as-a-church-mouse Will ever attended a university.

This is presented as history’s greatest literary scam. “We’ve been played,” posits the film’s trailers,

In pressing the Oxfordian theory, Emmerich reckons “everybody in the Stratfordian side is so pissed off because we’ve called them on their lies.”

Wonder if my old college prof would agree?

srhoades@aol.com

[from Solares Hill}

Weekend (Brockway)

2011-11-06T08:37:00.002-05:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Weekend

"Weekend" is the insular urban story of  Russell, a young man who works as a life guard (Tom Cullen) and his one night stand at a  gay bar. Abruptly out of a stoned haze, Russell meets the bohemian and iconoclastic  Glen (Chris New). Glen doesn't have much patience for timid closeted men. At first look, it doesn't appear that Russell and Glen really like each other. Russell is pressed into embarrassment by his macho British family and Glen is all about pleasure and abandon. He could care less for the pursuits or worries of career and family. Needless to say, the next morning they barely touch.

Then Glen brings out a tape recorder presumably in a kind of "truth or dare" art installation. Although Glen is brusque, a romance ensues.

"Weekend" is essentially a film in the indie  mumblecore mode. There are no effects or stylish camera angles. Events are shown as is with no elaborations or poetic lyricism. When Russell and Glen have sex, they have sex. That's it. The lust is shown without spectacle or shyness. Glen could just as easily bolt from a room as much as kiss Russell on the cheek and he often does. We feel as though we are eavesdropping on an intimacy and cocaine is involved.

We see Russell get ready for work and arrive each day without fail. Around his straight family he is shy and taciturn, but with Glen he becomes sociable and active.

The urban Nottingham setting with its emphasis on lusty  activity in solitary windows echo the paintings of  Edward Hopper as well the David Hockney documentary, "A Bigger Splash" (1975) directed by Jack Hazan.

"Weekend" even pays tribute to Alfred Hitchcock. In one scene, during a goodbye, Russell is about to say something emotional. Suddenly a loud train overwhelms the conversation. When the train leaves, we are forced to make up for ourselves what was actually said. This is reminiscent of "North by Northwest" when the agents talk to Cary Grant under the noise of a jet engine.

"Weekend" is an introspective character study that shows that the need for the hunt is all-inclusive. The apprehension of heartbreak is a universal condition beyond the societal mazes of gay or straight.
 
Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Margin Call (Brockway)

2011-11-05T14:40:00.000-04:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Margin Call

For those that have had enough Halloween diversion and want to regenerate their fiscal anger into a rechargeable battery, there is the new film "Margin Call," which centers on the 2008 financial crisis. Most everyone in the film is a dry piece of toast, but keep in mind that you wouldn't expect these suits to be bubbling over with warmth anyway. The characters are all heart. The entire cast is likely to turn Don Rickles into Ferdinand the Bull but, after all, this really happened. It's not a cartoon.

The plot is relatively simple. Investor  Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) is working on his computer and is suddenly purged. Fear grips the third floor of the office. Dale had been working on an analysis that essentially sees catastrophe for the banking investment industry. Of all the characters, I suppose I feel the most for Mr. Dale. He's not mean spirited or manipulative. He doesn't appear to delight in others' misfortune. He is just a brainiac working in risk management who never thought the meat-eaters would be after him.

Kevin Spacey stars once again as a Brooks Brothers tailored exec, Sam Rogers.  Yes, we expect a knowing look and perhaps a little smirk that some worker bees have it coming, and that  these guys are better than the rest, being salesmen until the end. But Spacey is no generic Wall Street Looney Toon. He is both more human and more inhuman here than in some of his other roles. When people are leaving their offices in droves, we see him cry, not over his employees, but his dog.

Although the film echoes others like "Casino Jack" and "Company Men", its step by step sequential narrative and limited camera-shots recall a play filmed for the screen or some of the docudrama work of Paul Greengrass. Nothing is left for interpretation. These guys have burnt bacon in place of empathy and you know it.

Standouts in the film are Penn Badgley and Zachary Quinto as two young arrogant upstarts in the firm. Their dialogue is invariably about who makes the most money. These two are characters from Brett Easton Ellis on steroids. In a volatile  world of finance money is a the drug of choice.

There is also Jeremy Irons as the head boss John Tuld. Irons is like the Alistair Cooke of Capitalism:

"It's always been the same, they're may be more people but the percentage never changes. There are winners and there are losers."

Tuld is as close to a real life Grinch as you'll ever see on screen. As his firm downsizes, he patiently resumes dining.

Perhaps the most haunting thing about  "Margin Call" is not an image or a scene but a sound, the last remaining  sound of Sam Rogers struggling, laboriously, digging a hole with a shovel. It is a sad, hard melancholy sound of lost hope and it stays with you long after the endless portable boxes that are depicted in the film fade   away.  

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Margin Call (Rhoades)

2011-11-03T11:30:00.000-04:00

"Margin Call”

A little Too Real

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

We’ve all been impacted by the economic tsunami that hit Wall Street, a tidal wave of greed, duplicity, and financial manipulation. When I lived in New York, I knew traders who made high six-figure salaries, owned a Porsche 911, a house in the Hamptons, and a pretty trophy wife – but were afraid to leave their desk to pee for fear of missing a movement in stocks. Type A’s with twitches, ulcers, and no moral center. In many ways, they reminded me of my nerd friends playing a computer game, but here the money is real, not just goblin’s gold.

Or is it?

“Margin Call” – a new film at the Tropic – takes you inside a large investment bank (based on Lehman Brothers) during the financial crisis of 2007-2010. You’d think it was real.

This drama delivers an impressive cast for an indie production: Jeremy Irons (“Reversal of Fortune”) is head of the investment house, willing to burn his business partners to protect the firm. Kevin Spacey (“Casino Jack”) is head of trading, willing to go along with the scheme of selling off their toxic assets to unsuspecting counterparties. Simon Baker (TV’s “The Mentalist”) is a senior exec who’s in on the plan. And Demi Moore (“The Joneses”) is head of risk, soon to be offered up as a sacrificial lamb to the board. Senior trader Paul Bettany (“The Da Vinci Code”) watches as human resource teams move through the trading floor handing out pink slips. One of the casualties is Stanley Tucci (“The Devil Wears Prada”) who passes a USB drive with an unfinished project to junior exec Zachary Quinto (Spock in the “Star Trek” reboot), who discovers that the firm is overleveraged. A good trooper, Quinto calls this to his bosses’ attention.

But the nefarious CEO knew all along, his exit strategy being to sell off 93% of the worthless paper before the market can react. That means a lot of casualties, both inside and out the firm. But the CEO doesn’t care, noting that there’s “a lot of money to be made from the coming crisis.”

Hold onto your wallets.

Written and directed by newcomer J.C. Chandor, “Margin Call” was produced by Before The Door Pictures, Zachary Quinto’s production company. Yes, the same Zachary Quinto who plays the whistleblowing junior exec in this top-notch financial thriller.

srhoades@aol.com

[from Solares Hill]

Weekend (Rhoades)

2011-11-03T11:28:00.002-04:00

“Weekend” Explores

A New Relationship

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Sometimes my friend Jean Carper invites folks over to screen a new movie at her home theater, with its wall-sized screen and comfortable couches and glass-top tables where she serves a light dinner. I tell her it’s the best dinner theater in town, being it’s the perfect combination of good movie, good friends, good food – and it’s free.

Two recent movies that Jean screened for us were “Weekend” and “The Green.” Both had similar themes: gay relationships and the turmoil that they often face.

“Weekend” told of a closeted young man named Russell (Tom Cullen) who picks up a guy named Glen (Chris New) at a gay club and takes him home for a one-night stand. But what’s expected to be a brief fling has an emotion impact that reverberates beyond this weekend of personal discovery.

On the other hand, “The Green” tells of a young teacher (Jason Butler Harner) falsely accused of misconduct with a student, and the impact these charges have on his personal life, his friends, and his partner (Cheyenne Jackson). A look at a gay relationship under stress. Note a couple of good supporting roles: Julia Ormond plays the teacher’s lawyer, Illeana Douglas is his best friend.

Both films are examinations of the fragility of relationships, which just happen to be gay. But “Weekend” is a straightforward look at a first meeting, while “The Green” examines a partnership under stress.

I liked “Green” better because of this context. But “Weekend” was honest and open, an exploration of loneliness and emotions that rings true.

As it turns out, “Weekend” is currently playing at the Tropic Cinema, so you can see for yourself.

No, this “Weekend” is not the 1967 black comedy by Jon-Luc Goddard. Rather it’s an indie film written and directed by Andrew Haigh. He got his start as an apprentice editor on “Gladiator,” and then as assistant editor on “Black Hawk Down.” Working under editor Pietro Scalia on both films, he learned his craft well.

“Weekend” has won several Best Narrative Feature and Audience Awards at film festivals. I always put more stock on audience awards because that reflects how well a film is received by its viewers, rather than an evaluation by a rarified egghead jury.

While the showing of “Weekend” at the Tropic does not come with one of Jean’s delicious repasts, you can always find something good at the Judith & Stanley Zabar concession stand, which offers more than typical buttered popcorn fare. Think of it as your own “dinner theater.”

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill]

The Ides of March (Brockway)

2011-11-02T09:54:00.001-04:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

The Ides of March

George Clooney directs a Mametian political expose that  turns egotistical stomachs in "The Ides of March". The step by step narrative of ambition, power and deceit is based on a play, "Farragut North" by Beau Willimon. There have been scores of political thrillers but the starkness of detail in this latest outing, puts George Clooney in the same directorial orbit as Oliver Stone for picturing political figures caught in  moral quicksand.


Clooney plays Democratic hopeful Mike Morris. Morris is honest, a bit too honest. When we first meet him, he skirts the issue as to whether he believes in God or not. Morris's campaign poster is clearly Obamaesque. In place of HOPE it reads BELIEVE. Morris is an ultra Obama and the country is crazy for him. He is far more popular than the Ford-like  Republican hopeful, who is like a wet noodle. In fact we hardly see him.

But the first man we see on the screen is not Gorgeous George, but the enigmatic and often spacey Ryan Gosling, an actor that has turned the slippery science of sociopathology into a dramatic art form. He is often seen in shadow and as Morris's fledgling manager Stephen, Gosling creates a sad wolf-like  Macbeth. With his pale slinky looks and his askew-eyed smile, Gosling always manages to make the quality of desperation into something debonair. There is a bit of the fish in him. You can think of Stephen and many of his roles as urban eels. Whatever wardrobe Gosling is wearing always seems to transform into a sharkskin suit under his blank stare. Gosling's eerie, confronting role counteracts Clooney's five o'clock shadow smugness and Gosling's  performance is spaced-out and sparkling, some of the best work that he has ever done.

The frosty leather-gloved Stephen gets a call from his rival, Tom Duffy, played by Paul Giamatti with his usual bug-eyed amphetamine grace. Duffy wants Stephen to quit the Morris camp and join the other side. Giamatti is facile and devilishly downbeat, an eye-popping political Lucifer, waddling about in his spoiler's paradise of news screens and cigarette smoke. Giamatti doesn't fill big shoes but his cloven-minded congeniality doesn't disappoint.

Everybody is out for blood here. Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays a manic but ultimately dissipated mentor Paul. Hoffman is cynical and savage, doughy and deliberate and just what you expect.

We also see Marisa Tomei as a Times reporter who uses her compulsive badgering and appeal to get any story she wants.

Every character is authentic with depth, functioning like parts of a well oiled machine in this Shakespearean-slivered story of the dog eat dog office realm. But it is Gosling himself who carries the engine core of the story, giving the existential edge to a situation that is both selfish and lethal to the political ego. First Stephen is a squirming cypher and then a sneaky underhanded politico, but he is always razor-eyed and ravenous. If at first he is Kafka, he then becomes Caligula, he doesn't transform as much as blanch. He curls into a media-eyed Dracula of daylight who consistently makes selfishness entertaining.

The Ides of March may not carry the weight of The Bard but it has a haunt and circumstance that stays with you. The eeriness that you experience in watching will linger longer than any Halloween fright and better yet, you will ponder the film's shadows. 

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Week of October 28 through November 3 (Mann)

2011-10-30T12:29:00.000-04:00

What’s on at the Tropic
by Phil Mann

First, let’s get the bad news out of the way. The Tropic will be closed for the evening shows on Friday and all day Saturday. There’s just no competing with the frolic on the streets. You would have trouble getting to the theater if it were open. So enjoy Fantasy Fest.

If you survive, or get to the Tropic before it closes on Friday, there are a couple of treats for you.

THE WAY is a different kind of road movie, following the journey of a man (Martin Sheen) as he walks a 500 mile pilgrimage in northern Spain. Known as the Way of St. James, or El Camino de Santiago, it’s a centuries-old route. One of the Tropic’s founders, Kim Narenkivicius, made the trip a few years ago as a journey of self-discovery, so it has a personal touch for us.

As you discover watching the film, there are as many reasons to make the pilgrimage as there are pilgrims, from the traditional act of penance to a means of losing weight. For Sheen’s character, it begins as a tribute to his son, who died on the route, but turns into something much more, something inspired as much by the Wizard of Oz as by any Christian saint. Sheen bonds with three companions, who discover their brains, hearts and courage. That’s not my idea, but an observation of the writer-director Emilio Estevez (Sheen’s son in real life, who also plays his fictional son in flashbacks).

Like the original Oz story, it has comedic elements mixed with a parable. “Funny, moving, hip and transcendent all at the same time, The Way is both deeply thoughtful and enormous fun to watch.” (Ann Hornaday, Washington Post)

There’s nothing spiritual about LOVE CRIME, a French thriller about nasty double-dealing that reminds us of All About Eve. The always wonderful Kristin Scott Thomas, who can employ French or English with equal aplomb, is Christine, a French marketing executive, sure in her power over her employees, whom she manipulates like pieces on a chessboard. Especially her number one assistant Isabelle (Ludivine Sangier – Mesrine, Girl Cut in Two), who idolizes her. The carefully structured plot involves malfeasance and political infighting in their multinational corporation, which eventually spirals out to larger crimes and a surprise ending. Did you like George Clooney’s Michael Clayton? Then this should be your demi-tasse.

Speaking of Clooney, he’s back in THE IDES OF MARCH a timely political thriller. Clooney is a very straight-arrow Presidential candidate, faced with some serious moral and ethical dilemmas in a crucial primary contest. His young assistant campaign manager (Ryan Gosling) lets his ambition lead him into trouble, but when you’re as smart as he is there’s hardly anything you can’t accomplish with a little backroom deal making and backstabbing. In this business, when you’re up, you’re on your way down, and vice versa. You just never know. “A big, bruisingly funny moral fable etched in acid and Obama disillusion.” (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone)

MONEYBALL and 50/50 are held over.

On Monday the surprise treat is an Undead Are Fundead double feature. George Romero’s groundbreaking (an apt metaphor) 1968 classic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, and Ed Wood, Jr.’s 1959 PLANET 9 FROM OUTER SPACE starring Bela Lugosi. A fitting end to October’s ghoulish series.

For those of you with more refined tastes, Tuesday evening brings a performance of ADRIANA LECOUVREUR, sung in Italian from the Royal Opera in London. Expand your mind.

Full info and schedules at TropicCinema.com or TCKW.info
Comments, please, to pmann99@gmail.com

Love Crime (Brockway)

2011-10-30T12:25:00.000-04:00

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Love Crime

 "Love Crime", the new psychological thriller by Alain Corneau  is as dangerous as "Scream" or "Open Water". Ghostface is not present this time in his Munch-malevolence, nor are there any killer sharks, yet the confines of an office are just as scary as a black and white shower stall once was in the 1960s.     

Veteran actress Kristen Scott Thomas plays Christine, an icy blonde executive who applies her lipstick with a slash and enjoys teasing and belittling her young assistant  Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier). Christine is all rigidity and sarcastic gush. She even goes as far as kissing Isabelle with passion only to dress her down with sly pricks to her ego that her hair is not right or her makeup is overdone. If you want to see an Executive Domme in action, Christine is a model par excellence. The ghost of Joan Crawford bristles within.  

Isabelle  is always the put upon submissive. When we see Christine making love, Isabelle is a rigid caterpillar in bed frozen in her cocoon.  Abruptly Christine's husband Philippe (Patrick Mille) begins an affair and there are enough sparks upon sparks to rival "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" although the film is closer to "Leaving" (2010) the Camusian portrait of  marital collapse  which also highlighted Kirsten Scott Thomas' understated but lethal menace.
In one key scene, Christine makes a big show of humiliating Isabelle  during a board meeting. The percussion would make Glenn Close cringe.

It is actually Ludivine Sagnier who most resembles Glenn Close in her hallmark role in "Fatal Attraction". Step by step we see  her internalizing her hurts and wanting to become like Christine as in the classic "The Talented Mr. Ripley". Much like a character in Kafka, we see Isabelle move inexorably to a  violent conclusion. She faces each panic and setback pressed against a sharp edged corner or a blank corridor with no exit. An office cubicle is the reflected in the same light as a high security prison.

Then abruptly there is a gleam in Isabelle's catatonic stare: a tool shed becomes a refuge for deadly intent.

The lioness is born.

Isabelle's world becomes a phantasmagoria of resentment. Her  stark office environment is dispassionate and gray in tone, a bit like shots from a flat digital camera. The characters are all bugs under a microscope. 

The final transformation of Isabelle is akin to the clap of an open fist or the swish of a blinding and dominant white dress. Violence oozes from her neck like perfume and you can almost smell the predatory intent. 

"Love Crime" sneaks up on you like a hesitant mistress with a  softness in quiet deliberation and it doesn't spare the poison. 

Ludivine Sagnier like Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck before her, is a woman you should definately handle with protection, but at all cost, please don't miss her.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com