Oscar Cleanup: LA VIE EN ROSE review

LA VIE EN ROSE
**** out of 4
Rated PG-13
Directed by Olivier Dahan

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE: Best Actress-Marion Cotillard, Best Costume Design-Marit Allen, Best Makeup-Didier Lavergne and Jan Archibald

Does anyone remember that one SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE sketch of the game show called "Ask an Old French Whore?" It had Garth Brooks in drag with a French accent and it was EVER so funny.

Is this an appropriate way to start a review about LA VIE EN ROSE, the period biopic of French torch singer Edith Piaf? No... No it's not. But I had to recall the memory of the sketch that culminated with the line "I think my whore's dead" to cheer myself up during this relentlessly sad movie.

But it is sad with purpose, as Piaf apparently never had an easy day in her life. Born of a drifter and a prostitute, she was raised in both the circus AND in brothel. She suffered a temporary blindness in childhood before she sang on the streets of Belleville for spare change. A producer tried to make a star out of her, but he died when her pimp killed him.

Wow... Johnny Cash was a PUSSY compared to this woman. And the kicker is that even though she went on to become a legend... IT GETS EVEN WORSE!

The narrative of Olivier Dahan's masterful film is fractured, going back and forth from Piaf's later life (when she is played by Oscar nominee Marion Cotillard) and her childhood where she is played by a couple of French moppets. Her childhood scenes in the brothel are quite memorable, as the hookers are beaten and "operated upon" by crazed doctors. Not to mention little Edith spends much of this early part of the film in a blindfold because she was.. Um... Blind. This leads me to believe that Piaf grew up not in France, but in Silent Hill.

Her later years are a fast moving locomotive of lovers coming and going, admirers, hangers on, not one but TWO car crashes and morphine abuse. And you know that late inning redmption that starts with rehab and ends with true love, Like Johnny Cash and Ray Charles and Dewey Cox had? Well...

What, in lesser hands, would seem like a bumper-car ride thorugh tragedy and despair becomes in the nimble grasp of French director Olivier Dahan the ultimate portrait of how and why a person needs to find solace in their art. Audiences acted, to Piaf, as confessors or kind ears. One often wonders, when we find out that our favorite singers or filmmakers or actors or what have you, how something as beautiful as their work comes out of pain and torment and loss. LA VIE EN ROSE, if nothing else, sheds a little light on that.

I first became introduced to Piaf's work, like a lot of you, during my favorite scene in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. It was before the big tank battle at the end where Adam Goldberg, Tom Sizemore and Edward Burns were sitting on the cafe steps and having Jeremy Davies translate that French song that was playing. That was Piaf.

They were struck, as I was, at her voice, which seemed to defy both age and youth, existing not as some human thing, but as pure emotion suspended in notes and half-notes. A gracefully refined funereal keen. She's popped up at the periphery of my tastes, but have never seriously thought about buying an album until now. That's the mark of a great movie, isn't it? To plunk down more money to experience an artist's work?

And Cotillard, she of the blue Clara Bow eyes, is simply brilliant as Piaf. She manages the feat of skirting just shy of ostentation, giving a big showy performance real meaning. In Cotillard's hands, Piaf's up and down life is not acted, but felt. Both mechanically and emotiuonally, her performance is sound, moving and astonishing.

And I will have this woman... Mark my words...

In a way, the great LA VIE EN ROSE came along at the right time. So when Amy Winehouse finally ends her long and inexorable march towards her own mortality, we can look at Edith Piaf and see who did it best.

Oscar Cleanup: EASTERN PROMISES review

EASTERN PROMISES

** out of 4
Rated R

Directed by David Cronenberg

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE: Best Actor-Viggo Mortenson

"I'm from Cah-Nah-Dah, but people think I'm slow, eh?"

-THE SIMPSONS

Film critics of any stripe get a bad rap for liking boring, impenetrable movies that the man on the street wouldn't shell out admission price to see; French people staring at bicycles and whatnot. But just a cursory glance at most of last year's top ten lists will put that rumor to bed... Or at least mine. Only two people put 30 DAYS OF NIGHT on their top ten lists for the year. Me and NO ONE.

But there is one guy who has turned boredom into an artform. One man among many who can take subjects like people turning into flies, screwing during car crashes and normal men going on extraordinary rampages into movies as dull as the shine on an old penny... And that man is Canadian Human Sominex Pill, David Cronenberg.

Good ol' Maple Leaf Dave insists on making films that rely on action in spite of the fact that he doesn't know how to shoot or edit it. He draws big name actors in spite of the fact that he makes them look amateurish and bland, with victims ranging from Christopher Walken to the woefully underrated Maria Bello. That THE DEAD ZONE is Cronenberg's best movie has less to do with Maple Leaf Dave, and more to do with Stephen King's outstanding source material.

But Typhoid Stevie ain't here to save EASTERN PROMISES, a tale of Russian mobsters in England that moves with the speed and grace of a molasses spill. I can just imagine Maple Leaf Dave standing behind the camera, bullwhip in hand, screaming "If any of you even THINKS about showing an emotion, IT'S BACK TO THE RACK WITH YOU!" EASTERN PROMISES clings to understatement like the stench of crazy clings to Tom Cruise.

Naomi Watts, the best actress in the world although you wouldn't know it from her work here, plays Anna. She's a midwife in London who admits a pregnant fourteen-year-old who is hemmoraging badly. They were able to save the baby, but the motrher dies, leaving behind only a diary, written in Russian. While getting it translated to find relatives the baby could go to live with, she is drawn into the world of Vory V Zakone, the Russian Mob.

They are led by Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a restaurant owner. He has a son, Kirill (Mathieu Kassovitz) to do most of his groundwork along with the family driver Nikolai, played by Viggo Mortensen's strangely prominent forehead... The rest of him is in it as well, but it's mostly forehead.

Anything else that occurs, does so at about half the speed needed to get it done. I paused the movie to get a drink and I was shocked that only a half an hour went by instead of the hour I thought had elapsed. To call EASTERN PROMISES "sedate" is like calling Roger Clemens "a little liberal with the truth." Movies about Russian gangster shouldn't resemble trips to the grocery store, where there's no excitement and no humor and no emotion and no DEPTH.

A lot of that has to do with the acting, which I will not blame on the actors. Cronenberg is either unwilling or incapable of protecting his actors, seeming to somehow flatten them. He gives them emotional scenes to play and seems to instruct them to act as though their ordering off of a menu. How he does this has eluded me for the longest time, until I saw how horrible he makes Naomi Watts look in this film. In almost every scene in the film, he makes her look like an amateur by...

-Rolling the camera, showing us Watts absolutely inert.

-Watts then has to work herself into the tone of the scene ALL OF A SUDDEN.

It makes it look as though Watts is a half a beat slow all throughout the picture. And Cronenberg does this with all his actors, awkwardly framing them, or not cutting at the right time. Give any kid in any AV club in America an A-List cast and some ritalin to slow him down some, and by God, HE WILL MAKE A DAVID CRONENBERG MOVIE!

I know that Maple Leaf Dave has entered the front ranks of the world's directors and he has an assload of followers, so I can just hear the arguments now. "Cronenberg just wants realism. Would you rather have wild overacting?"

I'd rather have SOMETHING! And if Cronenberg had the slightest bit of interest in realism, he wouldn't have had that goofy-ass fight scene. You know, the one that's getting all the attention, where Viggo fights in the sauna wearing nothing but fake tattoos? It's blocked like a WWE Triple Threat match. In every one of those, one of the three guys is knocked to the outside of the ring so the other two can fight, with the other coming in for a surprise save when you least expect it. No one--NO ONE--fights like that. And they break out these martial arts moves that absolutely NO ONE uses. There's a difference between "Russian Hitman" and "Navy SEAL."

Oddly enough, the same thing happened in A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, and no one complained there either, except for me.

And it's apparent that Maple Leaf Dave and writer Steve Knight know as much about Russia as I do, and I know jackshit. Instead of, say, showing us something we didn't know about or building an original character, they opt to trot out the two big cliches that have been in use since the height of the Cold War: They all drink Vodka (and pronounce it "wodka") and there is actually a scene where the Mueller-Stahl character cooks Borscht.

FUN FACT: In Soviet Russia, Borscht eats... Ah, nevermind.

In fact, only one person gets out of EASTERN PROMISES scott-free and that Viggo the Carpathian. In a movie where everyone is dialed back down to one, Mortenson's character is the only character where that's actually appropriate. It reminds me of what Eddie Griffin said about Gangsta Rappers. "If you're a gangster, that means you live by a code of silence. If you're a rapper, it means YOU TALK TOO GODDAMN MUCH!"

But did they HAVE to make him look like Frankenstein? No wonder he never used a gun in the movie. 'Cause FIRE BAD!

EASTERN PROMISES is straight-forward gangster boilerplate, which wouldn't be bad if there were someone who could puch it up and make it flashy and enjoyable. And I wouldn't mind a movie being this slow, as long as there was some depth or meaning. But it's the worst of both worlds, but if David Cronenberg's name is on it, armchair intellectuals come-a-runnin'.

Don't let me stop you. I'll be watching something else.

Oscar Cleanup: NO END IN SIGHT review

NO END IN SIGHT

**** out of 4

Unrated

Directed by Charles Ferguson

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE: Best Documentary Feature

The one name and face that kept floating up at me while watching the sober, Oscar nominated documentary NO END IN SIGHT is that of the one and only Britney Spears.

Yes... THAT Britney Spears.

Because for her AND for President Bush, things started out fine until a catastrophic event that led them into tailspin. After which, they made one bad decision after another until they were completely up-ended by yes-men and "handlers" in an effort to staunch the flow of idiocy and bad press. Somehow things actually get WORSE after that.

Jesus Creeping Shit. If THAT doesn't put politics into perspective, I don't know what will.

The whole tawdry public affair of the current administration and the war in Iraq is played out in NO END IN SIGHT, which is one of this year's five Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature. Note that having seen this and Michael Moore's SICKO, represents the first time in my life I have seen more than one of the nominees for that category going into the ceremony in any given year.

This is where the good news ends.

I'm not going into the details of what this movie covers or what it's about, because if you watch the news, then this... Y'know... ISN'T. But what's striking about NO END IN SIGHT is how stark raving calm it is. Not once does the film lapse into editorial invective. It states plainly that our troubles in the Middle East are due to the fact that inexperienced people--Some fresh out of college--with no foreign policy or regional experience tried to orchestrate what was supposed to be a short and violent war, and wound up getting their asses handed to them by the very people they were trying to liberate.

But of course you CAN'T have an epic fuck-up of an occupation of a foreign land without completely and willfully ignoring people who knew how to pull one of these things off right. Guys like generals, U.N. officials and ambassadors. But Charles Ferguson's film never tips its hand towards any partisan or radical proselytizing. When one of the heads of OHRA (Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistsance), General Jay Garner, was asked why advice was ignored and even ONE PAGE SUMMARIES OF BRIEFINGS went unread by the White House, he doesn't even bother to speculate. He just says...

"I don't know."

And that is the level that the entire film is pitched at. NO END IN SIGHT doesn't theorize, but presents facts and evidence at face value and the level of blame just places itself.

One of those hardest hit by his own dumbass decisions in the film is L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer. the man who was named Director of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was forced out of power. This guy had no foreign policy experience and didn't know his ass from his elbow about maintaining a volatile situation in Iraq. His decisions in 2003 led to the following...

-The wrenching of the Hussein's B'Ath party from power, and forbidding them from holding any government positions. For some, this means permanent unemployment.

-The disbanding of Iraqi military and intelligence. This MIGHT make sense in some weird and alternate universe where women use cookie dough to douche themselves... If it weren't for the fact that they let them KEEP THEIR GUNS!

-Keeping a low troop level, so when said unemployed and DEEPLY pissed off--and armed, don't forget ARMED!--former Iraqi soldiers (numbering at about half a million) wanted to raid weapons depots, there was nothing to stop them.

I bet it was with great restraint that filmmaker Ferguson didn't include footage of Bremer winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom a year and a half later.

NO END IN SIGHT consists mainly of archival footage and interviews. But these aren't whack-jobs and fringe assholes. Some of these folks held jobs deep in the Bush administration, believed in what they were doing and loved their country. But they were either fired or jumped ship when they realized with dawning horror that they were going through not a well executed military action, but the high stakes equivalent of drunken frat boys at Tulane attempting brain surgery with toothpicks and scotch tape.

These intelligent and restrained people look as though they'd be better off trying to point out the positive attributes of a shrieky rendition of I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU by a recent immigrant from Vietnam at an AMERICAN IDOL taping than to ponder what Bremer, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and that creepy little child-molester Paul Wolfowitz (all of whom declined to be interviewed for this film) were possibly thinking at those key events before the switch was thrown.

I think history will be kinder to NO END IN SIGHT than we could possibly know. So when our children's children are pawning internal organs for rent money and cat food for themselves, they'll know who to thank. But if you've missed the news and are looking for info apart from righteousness, this is the movie to watch.

But moreso, it can prove to anyone watching that once upon a time, not too long ago that you--Yes, YOU! JOHN Q. FATBODY!--could have done a better job running a war than our elected officials.

10th Anniversary FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS review

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS
**** out of 4
Rated R
Directed by Terry Gilliam

NOTE: Between the Presidential Elections and the remake of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, times are ripe for disillusionment. And disillusionment and Hunter S. Thompson go together like peanut butter and MORE peanut butter. The Good Doctor has been heavy on my mind lately, and being as it's been ten years since this movie came out and I haven't written anything in a few days, I figured why the hell not? This is the closest you're getting to a personal blog.

There are many ways you can tell a movie has had an effect on you. Sure you can quote it without pause like those pitiful MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL idiots, or you can dress up in a homemade STAR TREK red-shirt costume and proclaim your virginity to the world. But one way above all is most telling.

That you start referencing it through sheer osmosis.

That's right, when a movie is so ingrained in your psyche that it becomes part of your mannerisms, to the point where you don't even know you're doing it. So when I'm groggy from waking up in the morning, trying to make up my mind, or am generally confused, I revert to Johnny Depp's muttering Thompsonisms from Terry Gilliam's FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. Talk to Mike Watne, and he'll tell you it's true. I so deeply and wholly fell in love with this film when it came out on May 22, 1998 that I saw it five times while it was in the theater.

Or to put it more succinctly, I saw it five times in the theater... On opening weekend. Once when I got out of school on Friday (Do the math, I was fifteen), twice on Saturday and twice on Sunday.

I'm one of the precious few who read Hunter S. Thompson's book BEFORE they saw the movie, and if I had the money and all your street addresses, I would mail you each a copy. It is a classic and one of the five best uses of the English language I've ever heard or read. It's a rarity in that it's widely acknowledged and critically acclaimed, yet anyone who is open-minded and halfway cool can read it.

The movie... Not so much. It was booed at Cannes, the critics (with the notable exception of Gene Siskel) hated it and it bombed... Although it opened the same day as Roland Emmerich's GODZILLA, so that couldn't have been helped. It has developed a cult following, but only after it came out on video. If those same people saw it in a theater, the outlook would not have been rosy. Indeed, that it's a tough movie to surround yourself with is one of its better selling points.

Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro play journalist Raoul Duke and attorney Doctor Gonzo (based on Thompson himself and real-life Chicano-Rights lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta). In 1971, Duke is assigned to cover a motorcycle race in Las Vegas. So they get unlimited credit and a drug cache that would make cartel runners in Bogota envious and they go high on the hog in Sin City.

Writing about the plot of FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, the book or the movie, is an exercise in complete and utter futility. There ISN'T one. It's all about mood and culture as Duke and Gonzo go head-to-head with all the ills of The American Dream. They stumble around this vast and all-consuming capitalist enterprise still clinging to all the ideals the sixties instilled in them, while watching all those hopes assailed one by one. Gilliam reaches the ugly heart of America's hatred of its fringe, those people of every generation clinging to hope and a lifestyle that embraces that hope.

Because what the book and the film are really about, in my opinion, is the act of going out of style. Here we have two men of ideas who slowly but surely turn into monsters as they see their way of life going extinct as the world turns. They turn to drugs to keep the fun going until they become the very men they hate. Universal Studios tried to sell FEAR AND LOATHING as a comedy upon its release, and even the poser-fans will tell you it's funny as hell, but every man-jack of them is missing the point somewhat. This is one of the saddest films I've ever seen. It manifests itself in small ways, but one of the most telling scenes is where Duke and Gonzo go into a performance hall in a Casino to see Debbie Reynolds, only to find her singing SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND. They're escorted out laughing at the sight of this glitzy Vegas symbol co-opting a song that defined a generation younger than hers for sheer kitsch value. They're laughing so they don't cry. Imagine your parents singing SOULJA BOY, and see how YOU like it.

Gilliam is a master at capturing a vast and sickly bright Vegas hellhole through drug-soaked aviator shades. He humorously and often hellishly depicts a massive and thunderous drug-trip gone terribly, horribly wrong. But I think where people got mixed up and angry with the film is that all of Gilliam's effects aren't used to convey that drugs are bad. He's just seeing what Duke is seeing. I guess when drugs are being used on screen, they need a moral to go with it, and you you should never, EVER use them, right kids? REQUIEM FOR A DREAM was even harder to sit through and didn't catch half as much shit. With FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, drugs are just the means to the thematic end.

But what unifies FEAR AND LOATHING and keeps it from becoming a senseless episodic technical exercise is the performance and voice-over narration of Johnny Depp as Thompson surrogate Raoul Duke. Muttering Thompson's spare and lurid prose (being as the film is pretty much verbatim from the book), Depp maintains the illusion of interior monologue. His command is tying the whole enterprise together, bringing us into Duke's head. In a brilliant use of sound mixing as a narrative device, almost all of Duke's dialogue is dubbed in post-production, so that it's louder than all the ambient dialogue from everyone else. This makes it feel as though we're inside all the psychosis, and that it's part of a well-managed thought process that came back from the speeding rush towards the edge that's playing out on screen.

What I walk away with ten years after the initial advent of FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS is that it is the best film ever made about those nasty and wondrous Vietnam years at home. Better even that EASY RIDER, which is more of a period piece now than anything else. Moreso, it's about hopes and dreams dying unmourned on burning Nevada sands. Ideals vanish with time and age. And we can kick and scream and say they don't, little knowing that they really DO, and the kicking and screaming only speeds it along. Hope springs finite, instead of eternal.

And the future ain't what it used to be.

EPILOGUE: In spite of what you see in the film and what others may tell you, the late and great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is not just mere folktale. If you can, track down the Criterion Collection DVD issue, and he has a commentary track with producer Laila Nabulsi and Benicio Del Toro. For the rest of you... Check THIS shit out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzJW1rYAeiw