Week of October 24 to October 30 (Mann)

What’s On at the Tropic
by Phil Mann

Did you think the Coen brothers were going all serious on you after seeing last year’s Academy Award winning No Country For Old Men? Not to worry. Their new film BURN AFTER READING, which opens at the Tropic today, is more arch than a Gothic cathederal.

One thing the Oscar did was cement their ability to attract almost any movie star to their projects. The ensemble cast of Burn After Reading includes Brad Pitt, George Clooney Tilda Swinton, and John Malkovich among the big names, along with the ever present Frances McDormand (wife of Joel Coen).

Malkovich is a CIA analyst who gets the boot in the opening scene and spends the rest of the movie floundering about, while being bedeviled by a couple of kookie personal trainers (McDormand and Pitt, playing totally against type), a nasty wife (Swinton), a philandering G-man (Clooney) and some moronic CIA officials. It’s a thriller as befits its CIA underpinnings, with Russian agents, multiple killings and other good fun.

The current project of the Coen team is another black comedy A Serious Man, about a professor whose wife is leaving him. And then they are signed on to adapt Michael Chabon’s bizarre bestseller, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, about a fictive Jewish colony in Alaska. Talk about topical!

After reading about this, and reflecting on the rest of the Coen oeuvre, maybe I misinterpreted No Country for Old Men. Was it really a spoof?

Anyhow, there’s more fun and games this week with the French romantic comedy, A GIRL CUT IN TWO. The new Gallic femme fatale, Ludivine Sagnier (Swimming Pool, Moliere, A Secret) is a perky blonde TV weathercaster who has fallen for a famous, and famously womanizing, older writer. But she’s torn by the bold affections of a handsome, rich young man, who thinks he’s entitled to her. As Roger Ebert says, “it is comedic, in that macabre Hitchcockian way that takes a certain delight in the flaws of mankind.” It’s also a crime thriller.

Both these comedy thrillers are just the thing for a little not-to-serious break from Fantasy Fest. But if you’re really into the Halloween aspect, then the Monday Night Classic movie is the thing for you. This week it’s a revival of the original George Romero zombie film, THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Here’s a movie that could barely find a distributor when it was made in 1968, but has now been enshrined in the National Film Registry as a classic of American cinema. You know the plot: flesh eating ghouls stalk the earth, particularly a farmhouse in Pennsylvania.

Alert: The Tropic will be closed on Saturday night, so that the zombies (or is that the Tropic staff) can enjoy the Fantasy Fest parade. Check the schedule carefully for showtimes.

Full info at TropicCinema.com. Comments to pmann99@gmail.com

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

The Secret Life of Bees (Rhoades)

‘Secret Life’ Isn’t Really About Bees

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

No, “The Secret Life of Bees” is not a Discovery Channel documentary.

Nor is it a musical – despite starring Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys, and Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson.

“The Secret Life of Bees” is a honey-of-a-movie (forgive the pun) about a young girl’s search for love and belonging in the turbulent times of 1964. The film is currently playing at the Tropic Cinema.

The plot is seemingly straightforward, yet the emotions are complex: 14-year-old Lily Owens (Dakota Fanning) and her nanny (Jennifer Hudson) flee the girl’s bad dad (Paul Bettany) and take refuge in a Pepto Bismol pink house in Tiburon, South Carolina, where the beekeeping Boatwright sisters reside. Named after months of the year, the sisters offer a dramatic range: August Boatwright (Queen Latifah) is the compassionate matriarch of the family, surrounded by keep-her-distance cello-playing June (Alicia Keys) and emotionally fragile May (Sophie Okonedo).

It’s no accident that Lily lands on their doorstep. But is she really running away from her abusive father … or searching for her dead mother’s memory?

When idealistic teenager Zachary Taylor (Tristan Wilds) expresses surprise that Miss August has taken in a white girl, Lily suggests, “Maybe she didn’t notice.”

But black and white are very separate worlds in this bittersweet time capsule: President Lynden Johnson has just signed the civil rights act, yet blacks are turned away at the voting booth. Movie theaters have separate entrances for “coloreds.” And danger lurks for those who ignore racial lines.

Hard to believe this divide existed within living memory – when America soon may be celebrating its first black president.

“The Secret Life of Bees” is indeed a memory, originally told in the bestselling book by Sue Monk Kidd.

Kidd got her start as a writer when a personal essay was published in Guideposts Magazine and reprinted in Reader’s Digest. She went on to become a contributing editor for Guideposts.
Familiar territory, for I was a vice president with Reader’s Digest and my wife does promotional writing for Guideposts.

Many people asked why a white woman chose to write a book about a family of black women.
“Because I grew up surrounded by black women,” she says. “I feel they are like hidden royalty dwelling among us, and we need to rupture our old assumptions and develop the willingness to see them as they are.”

Is the story true? “I will also confess that small nuggets from my actual life did sometimes pop up and insert themselves into the story,” says Kidd. “Like the fact that bees really did live in the walls of my house when I was growing up. There was also the similarity that I, like Lily, had a nanny. But did she ever get thrown into jail? Did I break her out? Did we run away together? Of course not. The bits and pieces of my life that did manage to slip into the novel were only little springboards that helped me to leap to much larger, more vivid ideas and visions.”
Kidd adds, “Ultimately the story and the characters are not based on me and my life, but the work does reflect many of my convictions ... It is deeply affected by my particular life in the South, by my own intimacy with … the empowering bonds between women, not to mention my ideas about the transcendence of love, and what constitutes goodness.”

Think: “To Kill a Mockingbird.” With Dakota Fanning as Scout and Queen Latifah as a matriarchic Atticus Finch. There’s no courtroom drama, but the dramatic tension is palpable, especially when Miss August’s godson is taken away by bigots who object to his familiarity with Lily. And a family member decides life is just too heavy a burden to bear.

Director and screenwriter Gina Prince-Blythwood approaches it from the other end of the spectrum. An African-American filmmaker, she balances the movie’s delicate sensibilities, making sure this is not just a white woman’s view of blacks.

Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith played a key role in bring the story to the screen.
The film – like the novel – is filled with metaphor: Just as a queen rules the beehive, females dominate the Boatwright household. Miss August is the “wise head of this female hive.” And a Black Madonna statue in the living room (and featured on their jars of honey) symbolizes a universal mother figure. While the backdrop is the Civil Rights Movement, the true theme is female empowerment.

Here in the Boatwright household Lily learns more about the mother she lost, discovers what it’s like to have a family, and finds many new mother figures who love her.
Dakota Fanning effortlessly makes the transition from child star to teen ingénue, holding her own among a cast where every performance is both strong and moving.

As an aside, Dakota Fanning came close to appearing in a Key West film called “All God’s Children” – the screenplay written by former resident Talmadge Heyward. Sean Connery’s son Jason was signed to star along with Diane Ladd. Dakota’s mom wanted her to join the cast of this indie production that I was helping executive produce, but financing fell apart during preproduction. Oh well, maybe later.

As for “The Secret Lives of Bees,” this honey-filled movie may be too sweet and syrupy for hardcore action fans. But it has a message worth hearing. As Queen Latifah sums it up when talking about bees (but not really): “Every little thing wants love.”

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill]

Burn After Reading (Rhoades)

‘Burn After Reading’ Is Idiotic Spy Comedy

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

You’d think this was the casting for Oceans Fourteen or Fifteen – a movie featuring both Brad Pitt and George Clooney. But actually it’s “Burn After Reading,” the latest genre-bending outing by the omnipresent Cohen Brothers.

Directors Ethan and Joel Cohen deny they consider genres in picking their movie projects. But their filmography reads like a movie buff’s tour of Blockbuster’s shelves.

“Blood Simple” was an homage to Hitchcock suspense films. “Raising Arizona” was a slapstick comedy. “Miller’s Crossing” was a great gangster film. “Oh Brother Where Art Thou” was a modern Greek classic. “Intolerable Cruelty” was a romantic comedy. “The Man Who Wasn’t There” was a black-and-white look at film noir. “Fargo” was an award-winning crime drama. “No Country for Old Men” was an Oscar-honored neo-noir thriller.
And “Burn After Reading” – which opens today at the Tropic Cinema – is a spy story. Albeit, a funny one.

Seems a disc containing the memoirs of a CIA agent falls into the hands of two doofuses who attempt to sell it. Bad move.

The Coen Brothers have assembled a great cast here. In addition to Pitt (“Mr. And Mrs. Smith”) and Clooney (“Good Night, and Good Luck”), you’ll encounter John Malkovich (“Being John Malkovich”), Tilda Swinton (“Michael Clayton”), and Frances McDormand (“Fargo”). All of them either Oscar winners or nominees.

Malkovich takes on the role of a disgruntled CIA agent and Swinton is his soon-to-be-ex wife. Personal trainer Pitt and gym manager McDormand find the agent’s memoirs and hatch a cockamamie blackmail scheme. Clooney is an oversexed federal marshal who gets drawn into the plot because he’s both sleeping with the CIA agent’s wife and having an online affair with the gym manager.

As Joel Coen explains it, “The film is about the culture of the Central Intelligence Agency and the culture of physical fitness in Washington, D.C., and what happens when those two worlds collide.”
Clooney says, “I’m a guy that goes around killing people. It looks really fun. This will be my third idiot. The Coens call it my trilogy of idiots.”

“George loves to play idiots for us,” Ethan Coen elaborates. “We called wrap on George’s last shot and he said, ‘All right, that’s it. I’ve played my last idiot.’ So we told him it was sad that he wouldn’t be working with us anymore.”

Brad Pitt didn’t escape the idiot fate either. “I think that’s pretty safe to say, yeah, it’s a dueling idiots movie,” laughs Joel Coen.

As Pitt tells it, “I said to them, ‘I don’t know how to play this, I mean, he’s such an idiot.’ And there was a pause and then Joel goes, ‘You’ll be fine!’”

Malkovich adds, “No one in this film is very good. They’re either slightly emotionally or mentally defective. Quirky, self-aggrandizing, scheming. Nobody’s particularly bad in it, but the guy I play just has a very bad drinking problem. He’s an analyst in the CIA, fired because he has a drinking problem. It’s a good cast, funny people, everybody has a good part and kind of unexpected ones.”

Ethan and Joel Coen work so closely together they are known as “The Two Headed Director.” The brothers are one of only two collaborating director teams to ever win an Academy Award for Best Directing (the other being Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins for “West Side Story”).
And Joel is the only person ever to direct his wife in an Academy Award performance (Frances McDormand in “Fargo”).

Raised in a suburb of Minneapolis, older brother Joel saved money from mowing lawns to buy a Vivatar Super 8 camera, and together they remade movies they saw on television. Thus, Cornel Wilde’s “The Naked Prey” became “Zeimers in Zambia,” featuring a neighborhood kid named Mark Zimering in the title role and Ethan as a spear-carrying native.

Joel spent four years in the film program at NYU while Ethan got a degree in philosophy at Princeton.

Their first film together was “Blood Simple,” a suspense tale about a man hiring a shady detective to kill his wife. Filmed in Texas, my friend Karen Prince (now a ranger at Key West’s Wildlife Center) worked on the film, building sets, fetching lunch, and serving as an extra.
As she remembers the experience, “The Coens had no money, none. I’d walk across the scene wearing one shirt, then walk back wearing another shirt, so it looked like we had more people in the movie.”

Budgets are bigger these days, but the Coens haven’t changed all that much. Film crews say you get the very same answer no matter which brother you ask.

The next genre they plan to tackle? Coming up is “Hail Caesar,” a period comedy about a theater troupe that’s putting on a Shakespeare play – not to be confused with “Hamlet 2.” And despite his grumblings about idiot roles, George Clooney is set to star in this one too.

Also in the works is a spaghetti western. “We’ve written a western with a lot of violence in it,” says brother Joel. “There’s scalping and hanging ... Indians torturing people with ants, cutting their eyelids off. It’s a proper western, a real western, set in the 1870s. It’s got a scene that no one will ever forget because of one particular chicken.”

Maybe in that one Clooney will be playing the chicken instead of another idiot? That’d be a cackle.

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill]

Week of October 17 to October 23 (Phil Mann)

What’s On At The Tropic
by Phil Mann

It isn’t often that you’ll see Queen Latifah at the Tropic. But the “First Lady of Hip-Hop,” strides with gusto into the lead role in THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES. She already has one Oscar nomination, for her supporting role in the musical Chicago. But Secret Life is a very different pot of honey. Though blessed with a triumvirate of songsters -- Alicia Keys and Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson, along with Ms. Latifah -- Secret Life is not a musical, but a black-dominated drama set in South Carolina in 1964. The main white character is fourteen-year-old Dakota Fanning.

Based on the bestselling novel by Sue Monk Kidd, it’s the story of Lily (Fanning), who is running from an abusive father, accompanied by her caregiver (Hudson). She seeks out the hometown of her deceased mother, where she is taken in by the Boatwright sisters -- Latifah, Keys and Sophie Okonedo (Oscar nominee for Hotal Rwanda) -- who raise bees and, despite the time and place, dominate their landscape. Through them Lily learns the meaning of love. The civil rights issues are there, earning the novel a place on many school reading lists next to To Kill A Mockingbird, but the message about what it takes to make a family is universal.

The Oscar buzz has already started for several of the film’s cast. The director Gina Prince-Bythewood is also young and African-American, following up her Independent Spirit Award winning Love and Basketball. In interviews cast members talk about how Prince-Bythewood brought them together out of devotion to the novel, getting them to slash their salaries to make it happen. The director describes their feeling when Obama won the South Carolina primary while they were in the midst of filming in North Carolina. They realized, she says, that they “weren't just making a movie about a girl and the nurturing women who aided her,” they were "making a film about a time when the world was changing, at a time when the world is changing."

Maybe it’s time now for all of us to go see it.

Race is also at the core of the documentary, TROUBLE THE WATER. Amateur videographers Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband Scott covered Hurricane Katrina with a cheap camera bought on the street, and a sensibility bred from watching TV news shows. With this pair and their footage at the center, documentarians Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (Fahrenheit 911) have fashioned a movie that Salon.com says “captures a tale of courage, heroism and tragedy more thrilling than any Hollywood spectacle.” Some of the Wilma-esque hurricane footage will be all-to-familiar to Key Westers. The movie however is also about the aftermath and resurgence in the black Ninth Ward, making it “a powerful political argument, backed by evidence provided by the shaming indifference of the government, that to be poor and black in America is to be an exile,” according to the New York Times. It’s like “we lost our citizenship,” Ms. Roberts says.

On the Special Events calendar, Hitchcock’s NOTORIOUS is the Monday night classic. And the GLCC is conducting a free Breast Cancer Awareness Forum on Wednesday night. THE DUCHESS also continues her crowd pleasing run for those hooked on British historical drama.

It’s going to be quite a week at the Tropic.

Full details at TropicCinema.com. Comments to pmann99@gmail.com.
[from Key West, the Newspaper - www.kwtn.com]

Notorious (Rhoades)

Grant and Bergman Remain ‘Notorious’

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Alfred Hitchcock loved spy stories, in that they formed a perfect framework for his suspenseful movies. Just think about such Hitchcock classics as “Secret Agent,” “Lady on a Train,” “The 39 Steps,” “Sabotage,” “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” and “North by Northwest.”

Another was “Notorious,” the 1946 spy thriller starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that’s the next entry in Mary Sparacio’s Monday night film series at the Tropic Cinema.

Here Grant is a suave spy seducing a fragile Bergman in order to trap her Nazi-sympathizer husband. Just as in an earlier Hitchcock outing called “Suspicion,” we find Grant portraying a morally ambiguous hero. Does he love her, does he not? Is he just using her to catch bad guy Claude Rains or does he really care?

The film features a “famous kissing scene,” where Hitchcock flaunted the censors by allowing Grant and Bergman to osculate for more than the limited few seconds. A notable film history moment!

The MacGuffin (a term Hitchcock applied to whatever device set the plot in motion) in this case was uranium hidden in wine bottles. The studios were nervous about this reference to a highly sensitive war material, so he offered to change it, saying it was unimportant what motivated Grant to go after Rains. In the end, the uranium stayed in the script.

Hitch and screenwriter Ben Hecht visited Nobel Prize winner Dr. Robert Millikan to ask how to build an atomic bomb. The physicist refused to tell them, but admitted uranium was the principal ingredient and that a wine bottle could hold enough to create such a weapon.

There’s a terrific (and highly suspenseful) moment in “Notorious” in the wine cellar when we’re on the edge of our seats as Grant’s tampering with the wine bottles might be discovered. Whew!
Although Hitch never won an Oscar for his directing, he was voted “The Greatest Director of All Time” by Entertainment Weekly. However, he did win an Irving Thalberg Memorial Award at the 1967 Oscars.

Entertainment Weekly’s “100 Greatest Films of All Time” includes more films directed by Hitchcock than by any other director (four in all). “Notorious” ranked #66.

When asked why his films were so popular, his answer was: “Everybody likes to be scared.”
He also said, “I am scared easily, here is a list of my adrenaline-production: 1. Small children, 2. Policemen, 3. High places, 4. That my next movie will not be as good as the last one.”

srhoades@aol.com
[from SolaresHill.com]

Trouble the Water (Rhoades)

‘Trouble the Water’ Offers No Bridge

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Here in Key West, we’re no strangers to hurricanes. But fortunately we have a grotto to protect us. Not so lucky was New Orleans.

Survival: that’s the topic of “Trouble the Water” – a documentary about street people surviving hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. It opens today at the Tropic Cinema.

The title “Trouble the Water” is an ironic usage, for the film is as troubled by the fate of the people as by the state of the waters. And moreover it’s a commentary on the US government’s failure in protecting its marginal citizenry.

This Zietgeist release is not a slickly made film, even though directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal were producers for Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Bowling for Columbine.”
I’ve commented in recent film reviews about this YouTube Age where everybody with a camcorder or cell phone can become a filmmaker, claiming his or her Warholian 15 minutes of fame.

That’s the case here, when a wannabe rapper and her streetwise husband foolishly await hurricane Katrina’s arrival in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. What we have are home movies that have been interspersed with newsreel footage by savvy directors who know a politically engaging documentary when they come across one.

Make no mistake about what to expect: This is jerky hand-held footage. And the subjects of this documentary aren’t movie stars, but rather poor people, street corner hustlers, druggies, and other “disposable people.”

However, this obvious amateurism gives the film its sense of you-are-there verité.
Switching on her new video camera to record the approaching storm, Kimberly Rivers Roberts gives us smiling faces, laughter, and excited chatter as her Ninth Ward neighbors brace for the coming storm. Unable to leave, they are storing up food supplies, hunkering down, pulling out umbrellas as it begins to rain. Little realizing the terror and hardships that Mother Nature is about to inflict on their modest homes and their simple unpresupposing lives.

Then things go horribly bad.

Knowing what we know now, armed with hindsight, you’ll find yourself asking: Are these folks crazy, staying behind to risk life and limb in this greatest natural disaster in America’s history? But many of them didn’t see an alternative.

The film focuses on Kimberly Roberts and her husband Scott, their neighbors, local street people, hangers-on, and various lowlifes left behind to face the busted levies and rising floodwaters. For this couple, it was a lark that turned into a life-and-death struggle. For others, it became a testimony of abandonment by an uncaring government.

Yes, the film has a decided point of view. Marchers are seen carrying signs that say, “Stop the Killing of Black People.” And statistics are flashed across the screen, noting that “Most African-Americans Have Not Returned, While Most White Residents Have.”
In the end, this is a heartbreaking story.

The doc has picked up four awards so far, including the prestigious Grand Jury Prize at 2008’s Sundance Film Festival. No small feat.

“Trouble the Water” features an original musical score by Neil Davidge and Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack, as well as the music of Dr. John, Mary Mary, Citizen Cope, John Lee Hooker, TK Soul, the Free Agents Brass Band … and Black Kold Madina.

Black Kold Madina I’m told is the stage name of our videographer cum rapper Kimberly Rivers Roberts. So maybe something good can be salvaged from the devastation of the storm.

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill.com]

Week of October 10 to October 16

What’s On At The Tropic
by Phil Mann

The Duchess has it all. There’s the house, if you can call it a house when it’s bigger than a grand hotel, overcoming the era’s lack of elevators by splaying its bulk across the countryside. For the Duke of Devonshire, his seat is Chatsworth, a pile that has appeared in the 1986 film Lady Jane and in the WGBH-TV series Jane Eyre, before taking on its true role in this one. Then, there are the costumes. One of the Duchess’ dresses, which had to be made up in triplicate, used forty feet of silk for each one, all hand-decorated with gold lace. And there are the rules of society, with the men so in charge they could lawfully beat their wives… so long as they used a rod smaller than a thumb.

The film is based on a true story. When spirited seventeen-year-old Georgiana Spencer (yes, the same Spencer family that later produced Princess Di) married the Fifth Duke of Devonshire in 1874, she was off to Chatsworth, as well as to the Duke’s eight other abodes in Ireland, London and about. It must have been very comfortable for Keira Knightley playing Georgiana, because she had been to the house before as Elizabeth Bennet, when it stood in for Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice. But it wasn’t very pleasant for the real Duchess who found her husband (played by Ralph Fiennes) cold, philandering, and altogether unpleasant. He doesn’t beat her in the movie, though he probably did so in real life. But he uses and abuses, rather than loves, her as he seeks to sire a male heir. Meanwhile he adds a mistress to the household to create a long-term ménage à trois, much against her will. She cannot escape, but she can and does build a life as an icon of fashion, a campaigner in reformist Whig politics, and a devotee of the gambling tables.

The movie is more about her suppression than about the independent role she found. I would have preferred seeing more of the latter. But if British historical drama is your cuppa, The Duchess has it all.

A Secret, this week’s other new film, is also based on a true story. Athletic and handsome Maxime and Tania Grimbert, formerly Jewish Grinbergs, have more than a change of religion in their past. It is told through the eyes of their very non-athletic son François, who copes with his failure to measure-up by inventing a life, until an aunt-like family friend reveals the full truth to him. Just as much as in The Duchess, the settings and the photography recreate for us a time past, wartime and post-war France in this case. The Holocaust plays a role, but not a central one. There are no grand houses or costumes to get in the way of the action. Instead the beautifully realized central characters played by the well-known French singer Patrick Bruel (reminiscent of Yves Montand) and the stunning Cécile De France (Avenue Montaigne, L’Auberge Espanole) carry the film. Nominated for eleven César Awards (French Oscar), A Secret has special meaning for the French who are only a generation or so removed from the actual events. I can’t tell you more, but I can vouch that it is a wonderful, compelling movie for anyone interested in a very real human drama of people struggling to control their passions, while dealing with a life that has not turned out as they wished it.

Full info and schedules at TropicCinema.com. Comments to pmann99@gmail.com