The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

Felix Herngren, known for his Swedish Simpsons-like television show, delivers a madcap darkish comedy in "The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared." This film was a huge hit in Sweden surpassed only by the "Dragon Tattoo" trilogy.

In a kind of picaresque format Allan (Robert Gustafsson) a centurion on his birthday, decides to flee a nursing home and just start walking.

A criminal at a station, Gaddan (Jens Hulton) tells him to hold on to a suitcase and not to let go.

Allan doesn't.

Thru the course of the film we learn that due to Allan's obsession for explosives he was sent to a racist doctor who castrated him. Allan still wanted to eviscerate things and people with dynamite.

The opening sequences are quite funny with Allan wondering in a deadpan way why "everyone is screaming at him." Gustafsson has a terrific deadpan delivery in nonchalantly facing the absurdist anger of those around him, mainly a biker gang that is rendered useless by rage.

But there are flashbacks that play like anemic "Forrest Gump" scenes that are far too silly to be funny, including a drunk Harry S. Truman who looks nothing like the real person, an "idiot" Einstein brother (really?) and a vulgar Reagan who says "tear down this wall."

Huh.

It is the strength of Allan's deadpan matter of factness that makes the funny bits stand out. The juice of the comic bits are not that this guy is a hundred but that he is so non-committal and passive. When a kingpin, Pim, (the vividly white and scary Alan Ford) is fuming with rage, Allan simply replies, "he really wants to kill a lot of people." Such bits are masterful, but then the flashbacks occur with historical figures meant to be campy and clever but who just veer into kiddie  silliness. A bumbling crazy haired Einstein brother in a repetitive "Who's on First" routine rings ridiculous and too far fetched.

The ending too goes into a circle and seems all too formulaic, pre-packaged into a feel-good style that we have seen before from the teen films of Robert Zemeckis to Chris Columbus.

The main thrust of "The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared" with its uber-hostile thugs in a cat and mouse chase is zany and satisfying. This by itself would have been   enough. The added flashbacks however,  turn the best of the oddness into a cheap and simplistic cartoon that panders and talks down to its audience (as if we should be toddlers) despite it taking a century to unfold.

Write Ian at ianfree1@yahoo.com

Salt of the Earth (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Salt of the Earth

The uncompromising Wim Wenders offers a portrait of Sebastiao Salgado in "Salt of the Earth" about the eccentric photographer. The film, a memoir of Salgado's travels, both mental and physical, is just as much his film as it is Wenders'.

Salgado is a restless explorer, not just of other cultures and lands but also the human heart.

While studying economics in Paris, Salgado receives a gift of a camera from his wife, Lelia. From that point on, Salgado becomes a clicking juggernaut, capturing everything.

After traveling to Africa for the World Bank photography consumes him.  

He became first known for his work highlighting workers in Brazil, toiling on a huge mountain, mining for the possibility of gold. Those photographs reminiscent of Dante's Inferno, pushed Salgado closer to notoriety.  Talking Heads guitarist Jerry Harrison chose the splendid image for a jacket cover on his solo album Casual Gods. Showing the immense panorama of man rippling in tension, the figures can be seen both as tiny titans wrestling with incredible weight and insects rolling and roiling in combat against a great ashen fire.

Salgado's perspective has an immediate power, giving a direct reflection as if an extraterrestrial was given a lens to show a far-away planet. In Oaxaca, a resident tells Salgado that he was sent back in time by Christ himself to report back to Heaven. Indeed, many of Salgado's works seem to feature men coated in silver, in some ways resembling starry laments and in others, harbingers of hell-fire and apocalypse. Whatever the subject, from flowered infants sleeping in their tiny coffins and men shellacked in oil resembling pestilential astronauts, or even a monitor on the rocks of Galapagos whose scaly paw looks like the hand of a lost knight without his chalice,  one can immediately recognize a Salgado work as an otherworldly valentine to a far-away planet, that is, in actuality, our melancholy Earth.

This memoir in film is numbing, beautiful and very hard to watch with its shots of corpses, frozen and still, transformed in death to become tiny alien mummies, or doll-like vessels that grimace in Death.

After many of these images, Salgado became ill. As he says, his soul became sick.

In recent years, Salgado has worked on ecology, both in his life and his art as two degrees in the same orbit. In documenting a kind of netherworld of our own suffering, he has moved back in time to show us what nirvanas we can yet achieve, given proper thought.

Above all else, as a photographer and explorer, of both the heart and the head of the animal Man, Sebastiao Salgado is a surrealist. In his spaced out, yet haunting and confrontational portraits, this one man pulls back our terrestrial curtain to reveal, as Paul Eluard once said "the hidden world that exists within this one".

The final trick of "Salt of the Earth" is that director Wim Wenders becomes so absorbed into the lens of Sebastiao Salgado as to become indistinguishable from his subject. Voila!

Write Ian at ianfree1@yahoo.com

Clouds of Sils Maria (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Clouds of Sils Maria

Some films fly in the face of convention and become character studies filled with nervous tension. Instead of highlighting action and consequence, these films illustrate pathos through speech. Desire, fear and paranoia are frequent themes. Over past years at the Tropic, the offbeat films "Force Majuere", and "Locke" were some excellent examples.

And "Clouds of Sils Maria," directed by Oliver Assayas, can now be added to this singular but splendid group, for those of us that like our mysteries many sided.

Juliette Binoche is Maria Enders, an iconic actress who is losing her punch, coasting a bit on past roles. She yearns to do something unexpected and daring. Maria takes a trip to Zurich to accept an award in honor of her friend and director Wilhelm Melchior. The director tells her that he wishes to make a sequel of her early groundbreaking theatrical hit titled "Maloja Snake," made when Maria was young, with her playing the seducer now twenty years later. Suddenly, Melchior, who was terminally ill, dies of a presumed heart attack.

Maria is at a loss. She is soon approached by a young enfant terrible director, perhaps in the mode of Lars von Trier, who wants to try the sequel with Maria now in the role of the aging victim rather than the evil seductress.

Enders is shaky and uncertain but tentatively agrees, thinking that it will be a tribute to her late friend.

The amorally scandalous young actress Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz)  is set to co-star as Ender's  tormentor and unrequited love.

The main pull of the film becomes Maria's anxiety poised against her own ultra-confident and jaded assistant, Valentine (Kristen Stewart) who jabs at Maria about her age and past accomplishments.

Each day the the two go on mountain hikes to exhausting locations where they stop and rehearse the play's key scenes. Under Valentine's judgmental gaze no amount of effort is ever quite good enough.


Maria begins to wither.

These discords are further enhanced by the landscape itself which feels saturated by an odd sort of supernaturalism that has an eerie yet passive quality.

Who or what is the primary threat in this film? Is it Maria? Valentine? Jo-Ann? The earth of Sils Maria or all of these elements. Much in the way of a novel in motion, the film merely presents segments of conversation and incident and we are left to draw our own conclusions. Events unfold without any intentional meaning or import and no one person is likely to interpret the film in the same way, very much, I imagine, like an individual life. While there are no overt trembling moments, there is more than a bit of disturbance. One imagines Maria Enders going in the direction of Carole from "Repulsion".

But rather than go the route of a mainstream thriller, "Clouds of Sils Maria" is quite unsettling enough in its illustration of one existence fraught with biting serpents that become both real and imaginary at once.

Write Ian at ianfree1@yahoo.com

Welcome to Me (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Welcome to Me

With "Welcome to Me" helmed by Shira Piven, Kristen Wiig (SNL, Bridesmaids) takes a dark cue from Jim Carrey ala "The Truman Show" in her role as Alice, a fanciful but disturbingly narcissistic fan of talk shows and Oprah Winfrey.

Alice, a former employee of an animal shelter is a shut in, who struggles with emotional instability. Her apartment is filled with dusty VHS tapes of Oprah dispensing bright wisdom.

One day she stops her medication and buys tons of lottery tickets. Over pudding she watches and waits. Then it happens.

Alice wins.

Instead of jumping up and down in ecstasy. She decides right then and there to change her life.

She moves to Vegas and visits a health salesman who runs a show highlighting magic algae.

Alice has a strangely distant but spontaneous way of remarking on things that hooks the producer Rich (James Marsden) more because of her oddness than from meaning or importance.

A little encouragement goes a long way.

Alice buys her own talk show. The producer is forced to humor the weird, young woman.

In a fine performance, Wiig does well in portraying the off-putting rants and quirks of Alice. She is not a bad person, but for lack of a better word she is a bit vague, clumsy and grating in her obvious foolery. She yells screams and dopily twirls about the room. Alice doesn't seem to have a center. For reasons that are hard to fathom she mispronounces commonly used words like "carbohydrates" and "neuter".

In her total and complete otherworldliness, Kirsten Wiig is a bit like the singular Andy Kaufman at times. Watchable and bizarre as she is, she falls on the floor an awful lot in sexual gyrations, seemingly for no reason and speaks about menstruation, child abuse and stolen makeup. Her dialogue is so sudden and rife with non-sequiturs that it becomes hard to make sense of it all.

Stranger still, there is a long bit about on-air dog castrations that is queasy and  difficult to laugh about.

There have been other Alice-like roles. Jim Carrey has done several curious and far out performances highlighting insular personalities like the inwardly tortured Joel Barish in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and the abstract Truman Burbank in "The Truman Show," who was also obsessive. There was Robert De Niro's Rupert Pupkin in Scorsese's "The King of Comedy." And who can forget the iconic portrayal of Chauncey Gardiner as delivered by Peter Sellers in "Being There." These characters all had dysfunction and comedy at their core but also an added depth and variation, vital to keep us watching, however outrageous the events.

In this film, however, all of Alice's sobbing and caterwauling evolves into silly noise with little logic or heart. I didn't laugh once.

As unfunny and flat as the film plays , Kristen Wiig deserves some spooky praise in her portrayal of such an odd bird.

The acting talents of Tim Robbins and Jennifer Jason Leigh appear as a psychiatrist and a network head respectively, albeit in stock performances. Leigh is haggard and Robbins is passive.

While it is at first compelling that Alice Klieg is spacey and out of touch, there is scarcely little novelty in Wiig's performance aside from being egocentric and crazed. From TV mania to her badly burned boobs and some on-camera neutering of dogs, it doesn't seem to mean all that much. Unfortunately, one will get more yucks to the stomach than any belly laughs.

As a method acting exercise, Alice Klieg is of interest, but as a character driven feature, "Welcome to Me" is all silliness and hurry offering little invitation for laughs.

Write Ian at ianfree1@yahoo.com

Week of May 29 - June 4 (Rhoades)

Tropic Overview
 

Tropic Cinema Blends New Films With Worthy Holdovers

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Film Critic, Cooke Communications

New films keep coming out faster than we can see some already in theaters. Tropic does an admirable job of blending new with already-there fare.

New this week is “Welcome to Me,” a great tribute to narcissism. Kristen Wiig plays Alice, a wacky woman who wins the lottery and uses the money to buy her own TV talk show, imagining herself an Oprah-like personality. Chicago Sun-Times observes, “It's a tricky business playing someone who is

mentally ill and perhaps should be confined for observation, especially in a dark comedy. Wiig manages to make Alice funny as hell, endearing, sad, and sometimes a little frightening.” And Globe and Mail adds that it’s “an unsettling comedy, and I mean that in the best possible way.”

“The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared” is a Swedish comedy about, well, a hundred-year-old man who skips out on his birthday party and runs off with a suitcase of ill-gotten money. As Variety puts it, “Like a cross between Forrest Gump and a Jonathan Winters character, this Swedish centenarian bumbles his way through international events.” And SSG Syndicate calls it “irreverent and filled with slapstick … an absurdist comic fable.”

Nominated for an Academy Award, “Clouds of Sils Maria” gives us Maria (Juliette Binoche), an actress at the peak of her career who is asked to perform a revival of the play that made her famous

some twenty years earlier. But is she being humiliated by this role-switching maneuver? Sky Movies says, “Binoche is reliably good but it’s Kristen Stewart who genuinely surprises, delivering a sexually-charged portrait of a girl who’s youthfully vulnerable at one moment and a whipsmart mobile-phone juggling fixer the next.” And Guardian notes, “It’s mature, complex and talky -- Bergmanesque.”

Moving to Tropic Screens is “The Age of Adaline,” a strange tale about a woman (Blake Lively) who does not age. Daily Telegraph calls it “a quaintly disarming fairy tale.” And Times says, “This magical-realist meditation on mortality is untroubled by logic….”

Holding over is “Far From Madding Crowd,” a steamy version of Thomas Hardy’s novel about a country heiress who loves unwisely.  Salt Lake Tribune says, “Carey Mulligan breathes life into Bathsheba, in a performance that highlights the character's passion without treating her like a flighty, immature girl.” And Minneapolis Star Tribune tells us, “It’s beautifully old and atmospheric without feeling dated.”

Still proving it’s worth, “Woman in Gold” holds over too. Here a woman (Dame Helen Mirren) sues the Austrian government for the return of a painting stolen by the Nazis. The Mercury describes it as “one of those films that might not challenge you too much with an artful story, but still appeals on some deeper emotional level.” And Sydney Morning News sums up: “It’s an underdog story tailor-made for the movies, devoid of surprises but touching all the same.”

Almost like a wedding with something old, something new, something etc.

srhoades@aol.com

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (Rhoades)

Front Row at the Movies

“The 100-Year-Old Man” Takes a Walkabout Through History

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Take a deep breath and say the lengthy title of this Swedish comedy out loud and you’ll have its plot synopsis: “The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared.”

Based on a same-named book by Jonas Jonasson, this is the story of a hundraåringen (Swedish for a century-old man) who has a series of misadventures after skipping out of his retirement home rather than face the humdrum of his 100^th birthday party.

Did I mention he finds a suitcase filled with money and gets chased by both the police and a gang of drug dealers? And that lots of people get killed?

Along the way we get a glimpse of his implausible life. He has dined with Harry S Truman, partied with Stalin, helped Oppenheimer invent the atomic bomb, and hung out with Einstein’s not-so-smart twin brother.

 

Think: Forrest Gump.

 

Written and directed by Felix Herngren, this is essentially a road movie. With lots of explosions. Lots of black humor. Colorful, over-the-top characters. And it’s knee-slapping funny.

 

“The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared” is currently showing at the Tropic Cinema.

 

Interestingly, the mumbling old centenarian is played by a 50-year-old actor (Robert Gustafsson, known as “the funniest man in Sweden”). It took a lot of makeup to age him. All told, Gustafsson estimates that he spent the equivalent of three full weeks getting his prosthetics and old-age makeup applied during the filming.

 

But the question remains, what sets a 100-year-old man off on such a madcap journey? Is he simply blundering through life? Is he a metaphor for Sweden’s history of neutrality? Does he always go wandering when life gets too boring? Or is our Grump-y old man simply telling us that it’s never too late to start over…?

srhoades@aol.com

 

 

The Age of Adaline (Rhoades)

Front Row at the Movies

“The Age of Adaline” Stops the Clocks

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

I just celebrated a birthday (don’t ask), but I’m not as old as the eponymous title character in “The Age of Adaline.” Adaline Bowman is 107.

People say I look younger than my actual chronology, but Adaline has me beat there too. She’s stuck at the age of 29.

 

Unlike Benjamin Button who aged backward or Dorian Gray whose youth depended on a spooky painting, our girl Adaline (played by Blake Lively) does not change her age at all. Having died in

frigid water when her automobile ran off the road, and being revived a la Frankenstein by a lightning strike, she is cursed with perpetual youth.

Before you protest that this doesn’t sound so bad, think about what it would mean as your loved ones grow old and die while you remain wrinkle-free. C’mon, you know you’d be upset.

 

Yes, this is a problem movie vampires share, eternity without growing older. But Adaline isn’t a fanged bloodsucker; merely a freak of nature.

 

Forced to go on the run when the FBI shows interest in her condition, Adaline faces numerous social challenges. How do you explain to a cop who pulls you over that you really are the 40-year-old woman on your driver’s license when you look so young? How do you convince an old beau (Harrison Ford) that you’re the “daughter” of the woman he once loved? How do you deal with your own daughter (Ellen Burstyn) when she becomes older than you? How do you deal with a new love (Michiel Huisman) when you’re pretty sure you’ll outlive him and all his Trivial-Pursuit-playing friends?

 

This is a problem even Dear Abby couldn’t solve. But screenwriters J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz manage to solve it with a little help from director Lee Toland Krieger.

 

This time-out-of-joint movie is a nice way to waste 112 minutes if you’ve got the time to spare.

 

srhoades@aol.com