"Hable con ella" (Talk to Her) - Emily Stephens

After reading the review for "Broken Embraces," I couldn't resist writing about my personal favorite of Almodovar's films. It's over ten years old, and wasn't widely released state-side, but it's still on Netflix (I checked). "Hable con ella" (Talk to Her) is a powerful exploration of gender, sex, blame, and innocence in the style of Almodovar's other work. I first watched this as part of a class on Hispanic gender issues, and fell in love with the number of questions Almodovar likes to raise - but not answer. By offering his audience this intense study of four intertwined lives with such an open-ended denouement, the director challenges us to form our own conclusions.

Marco is a travel journalist who becomes enthralled with Lydia when he sees a disasterous interview on TV. It soon becomes clear that he is attracted primarily because of the demons in her life.
Lydia is a mess of emotions underneath her masculine exterior. As a torera (matador, bullfighter), she bucks (no pun intended) all expectations of the Spanish woman. Bullfighting is perhaps the most historically masculine profession in Spain's history-hinging heavily on the phallic symbolism of the espadas (swords) and the act of piercing or penetrating the bull.
Benigno (literally 'benign') is a nurse with probable mental retardation. While it is never explicit, Benigno's childlike behavior and inability to relate to women hint at a moderate handicap.
Alicia is the ballerina Benigno cares for. She was hit by a car before the film starts and is now in a vegetative coma. Benigno dotes upon Alicia, soon becoming infatuated and mistaking his obsession for love.

The film opens upon Marco and Benigno both alone at the ballet. Benigno describes the dance in detail to Alicia, believing her able to understand because of her passion for ballet.
Marco later views an interview in which the host attacks Lydia about her romantic past with a fellow torero 'El nino de Valencia.' Intrigued, he talks his boss into letting him interview Lydia himself. When it becomes clear to her, however, that he's interested in her past as well rather than her bullfighting, she refuses. A relationship between the two arises when Marco kills a snake for her. (Phallic symbolism anyone?)
After a decent stint as a couple, Lydia tries to speak with Marco about her emotional state, but runs out of time before her next fight. Her troubles rob her of focus to the point where the bullfight goes awry, and she ends up in a coma. Lydia is transported to the same long-term hospital where Benigno cares for Lydia.
The action rises from this point, but watch in particular for Benigno's off-screen climax influenced by the silent film he watches.

The two 'couples' with similar situations inhabit opposite ends of Almodovar's gender spectrum. The exploration of societal expectations of these four characters is what makes Almodovar the commentator he is. Watch for his use of symbolism and audience expectations to throw a loop into the story.

While Hable con ella is not for the faint-of-heart, it's an intelligent, realistic take on the human condition. My personal favorite of Almodovar's films, I can (and have) watch it time after time and come away with yet another previously-unseen grain of wisdom.

Broken Embraces - By Rich Hot

Dudes, Penelope Cruz is the reason God created movies. Pedro Almodovar has figured this out and is going to spend the rest of his movie-making life harnessing her arresting, on-screen bad-ass-ness. I'm certain he wants to marry and divorce her just as Godard did with all his female leads.

In Broken Embraces, Almodovar has made four movies. Harry's story, told in flashback, is the forerunning story. He is a famous movie director. The flashback story beings with us watching Harry, now blind, 'seeing with his hands' all over the hot girl that has just helped him cross the street. Moments later the second movie begins with a young vengeful, up-and-comer pitching a documentary he has made to Harry. He denies the protagonist documentarian but recognizes the voice of the doc-kid and the flashback begins taking us into the third movie of a kid filming Harry for a 'DVD-making-of-the-movie-extra-bit'. The kid has been commissioned by the lead character's (in Harry's movie)(Penelope Cruz) millionaire husband. The fourth movie, however, Harry making the movie with Cruz as the lead is where I stopped getting confused and started enjoying what was happening.

In this movie, I made the simple connection of Harry as Pedro Almodovar and Cruz as Cruz in 'All About My Mother' and 'Volver'. This made the movie cooler for me because up until this point this movie was un-like his other movies and therefore not enjoyable, yet. I like Almodovar's movies because of Cruz and because of how he uses the camera in a really original way. There is one scene that is impossible for me to describe but Roger Ebert can:

"Look at Almodovar's command of framing here. There's one unbroken shot so "illogical" it may even slip past you. There's urgent action on a sofa in the foreground and then a character stands and moves to the right, talking, and dawdles slightly and then moves to the left, and now we see for the first time the next room completely open to this one, and there is a young man seated at a table.

What? He must have been there all along, yet the foreground action took no notice of him, the camera didn't establish him, and now no acknowledgement is made of his incongruous presence.

I think this shot may be about the ability of camera placement and film editing to dictate absolutely what is and is not in a scene. I'm sure it also has meaning in terms of the characters, but I don't know what. It shows Almodovar saying he'll do things just for the hell of it and manage to keep a straight face."

The point is, that Almodovar takes really cool stories and films them in the coolest way he can think of doing it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it is annoying but the point is that he isn't 'doing what will win awards' but he is just doing cool crap. For instance, when the millionaire husband is watching voyeur footage shot by his son, the kid-documentarian, of the affiar between Cruz and Harry unfolding. We are watching the millionaire watch a movie that was made while a movie was being made. The audio of the voyeur flick is actually Cruz sitting behind her adulterated husband saying what we see her saying on the millionaire's screen. We aren't sure if she is really in the room or if a movie within a movie within a movie is playing in her husaband's head. This was cool.

Broken Embraces is one of the cooler movies I have seen in a while. Cool.

Article on Avatar's impact

This is interesting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/movies/20avatar.html?em

Cinema Paradiso - a Greg Collins and Paul Allen joint

Roger Ebert laments me watching DVDs on my computer screen when he says this about Cinema Paradiso,

Yet anyone who loves movies is likely to love "Cinema Paradiso," and there is one scene where the projectionist finds that he can reflect the movie out of the window in his booth and out across the town square so that the images can float on a wall, there in the night above the heads of the people. I saw a similar thing happen one night in Venice in 1972 when they showed Chaplin's "City Lights" in the Piazza San Marco to more than 10,000 people, and it was then I realized the same thing this movie argues: Yes, it is tragic that the big screen has been replaced by the little one. But the real shame is that the big screens did not grow even bigger, grow so vast they were finally on the same scale as the movies they were reflecting.

It seems that 3-D movies are here to stay. High Definition lost out to BluRay but 3-D is not going to meet the same fate. As Buck Snodgrass makes clear, Avatar was made to be a '3-D' movie, not just a movie. I re-watched Cinema Paradiso after seeing Avatar in an effort to re-live an era of film I never actually lived.

The story is told in flashback. It begins with famous film director Jacques Perrin being notified that a close friend, his mentor, the man who made films his life, the projectionist in Perrin's home village has passed away. Salvatore, Perrin's real/childhood name, is a young kid lacking a 'home' who finds his home in the classic, early hollywood melodramas shown at the local cinema. He annoys Alfredo (the projectionist) enough to earn a spot alongside the wise old man learning the ins and outs of projecting 'for the people'. Salvatore, by way of director Guiseppe Tournatore's predictable but fun story-telling, shares his aches and pains of adolescence with us. Highlights of his childhood are when Salvatore seems to fail the most. He misses out on the girl, he burns down the cinema, and he leaves only to never come back. The sympathy with which one views this movie is as dense as the 'shout-outs' made to classic films. My effort to re-live these classic movies comes only from a desire to lean over to the person next to me when a classic is being shown in Cinema Paradiso and say, 'dude, that is one of the best movies ever'. The irony of this is that only then would I be a huge film-tool, as if I'm not already one now.

At any rate, anyone who loves movies for the escape that they are, you get the opportunity to share this love with characters that love movies more than you. The scenes in the cinema with people yelling, smoking, drinking, breast-feeding and being awesome, makes me think that watching movies in silence as white people do now is causing us to miss out. Much how I feel white congregations miss out on God on a weekly basis. That is to say though, people talking or chompin popcorn or sticking their clumsy paws into sour-patch-kid wrappers drives me nuts. Also great is the scene R. Ebert refers to in which Alfredo sticks it to the man and projects the kissing scene on the piazza walls for the whole village to see. Sticking it to the man is always awesome in movies.

Cinema Paradiso was re-released on DVD in full length, a full 51 minutes longer than the original 1988 release. I have not seen the short version but I can't imagine doing without the 51 pertinent minutes. I'm all for long movies (Alexander being the exception).

This is a really fun movie that everyone needs to see. Guaranteed movie enjoyment.

Avatar - By Buck Snodgrass

Dorothy’s dress went from grey to blue, and it—along with her socks, the sky, and some evil monkeys—never went grey again. Although Wizard of Oz was neither the first color movie nor the last black and white, I always imagined as a kid what audiences must have felt seeing color splash across the movie screen for the first time. Or—to put it in the negative—to see black and white for the last.

Last week I finally found out.

I took off my hip new 3-D specs, pushed my jaw back up, and tried to figure out what had happened. First of all, I realized that Avatar is a 3-D entity, in the sense that every element of the film—plot, characters, cinematography, even soundtrack—was designed not for a movie but a 3-D movie ( a new concept despite the blundering Scrooges and Bloody Valentines). Some movie houses are showingAvatar in 2-D, which is a concept akin to watching a Tarantino movie in a silent film theatre. Sure you see Samuel L look cool and shoot people, but you miss all of the cold-blooded shit he says to a motherfucker before he pops a cap in their ass. In 2-D, everything that makesAvatar great would be lost.

So, Buck, what makes this movie great? The answer: Pandora. Not satisfied with merely mapping the internet music genome, this monicker is now synonymous with the planet that defines theAvatar movie-watching experience. Everyone that I’ve talked to about this movie (myself, Andrew, and Sadie) has said the same thing: I didn’t want to leave Pandora. Beautiful colors, complex and diverse topography, noble inhabitants, and an Edenesque sense of untouched purity, create a place that really does make you think twice before taking of the 3-D glasses. When I left the theatre, real-world colors were dull and the Oxford Mall landscape felt undeniably second-rate.

In essence, Pandora provides a microcosm for the whole Avatar project: total immersion in a fictional work.Avatar places viewers within the frame, making them honorary inhabitants of Pandora and complicit in Jake’s journey. The journey, by the way, is a lot of fun, as we watch Jake go from a physically challenged marine working for a souless corporation/government/U.S. foreign policy to a Na’avi warrior saving a planet that you really, trully know and care about. It has all of the thrills, chills, and spills that you expect from an action movie, along with a Dances with Wolves plotline that enables you to concentrate less on characters and more on the complex and engaging world of Pandora. While Avatar’s success hinges on a plot that allows your attention to wonder from characters/story to Pandora’s wonders, it does raise questions about how 3-D movies will affect the way movies are made:

Will filmmaking shift from the storyteller to the visual artist? Will character-driven dramas take a backseat to stories that better fit the 3-D mold? And, alarmingly, what will Jerry Bruckheimer do with the pandora’s box (yes!) opened by Avatar’s success?

While some argue that Avatar may be a flash in the pan because of the cost-prohibitive nature of 3-D movies, I believe that studios will do whatever it takes to capitalize on Cameron’s success and, in doing so, make 3-D movies mainstream. More than likely this will be a good thing: action, sci-fi and other certain kinds of movies will become better, while traditional (and much cheaper) character/story driven movies will retain their priviledged place in cinema. And yet, there is part of me that, despite my love for Avatar, feels apprehensive about a now inevitable shift in filmmaking.

For better or for worse, Dorothy’s dress will never go grey again.

The Wrestler - Rob Culpepper

I picked up The Wrestler, which I had heard was award-worthy, at a Redbox. If you don't know what a Redbox is, it's a modern movie dispenser you find at various stores. This one was at a Wal-mart in Vestavia Hills, AL for those of you who know where that is. I was thinking that Redboxes are a kind of working man's Netflix, but now that I think about this one being located in Vestavia and not in Leeds, AL, I'm not so sure. Well, that aside-

The Wrestler is a great film for a couple of reasons.

1) Mickey Roarke. I don't know why people in Hollywood hate Mickey Roarke or why movie-watchers love him so much. Maybe because he doesn't give sh*t about anything, really. People talk about Roarke the way they talk about Daniel Day-Lewis. The words Outsider and Loner are too weak. Misanthrope is too nuanced. Bad ass is too general. Somewhere among those terms is where both of them lie. I guess what I love about Roarke is that he's a solid actor who has worked hard for years. Sometimes he gets good parts, sometimes he doesn't. Some of his movies do well, others don't. He's really particular and demanding in the way of good artists. I bet he's hard to work with. But what he turns out in terms of acting is, in many cases including this one, very good. Also, he has an amazing face. Roarke was Aronofsky's first choice for the film. The studio wanted Nic Cage. Aronofsky hired Roarke so the studio didn't give him much of a budget. Roarke worked for no pay on the movie and turned in a performance that, finally, got him some critical attention.

2) 16mm film. Nobody shoots on 16mm film anymore. I heard recently that the NFL still does (which is so cool). But nobody else does. It used to be the medium of film students and poor filmmakers. 16mm is a lot cheaper than 35mm. It also has a grainer look because of how it's resized onto 35mm film. I think the choice of using 16mm film adds (or rather, makes) the look of the movie. That's a gutsy decision if you're a Hollywood director.

3) 35 Days. That's what they scheduled for shooting. They actually finished in something like 41 or 42. Most films these days take a lot longer to make. Gone are the early days when a film was shot in 2 weeks. Some films now take 6 months to shoot. This film seems to have an immediacy about it. You get the sense that a lot of the action was done in a take or two. This adds a lot to the rawness of the whole story. It's not polished and that makes it work so much better.

4)The Story. It's simple, which is hard to do. In most Hollywood movies the plot is primary and everything else supports that, including the characters. The Wrestler is just the opposite. Yeah, things happen that get you from the beginning to the end, but mostly it just follows this grizzled, has-been wrestler around as he tries to cope with aging: he tries to fix his relationship with his daughter, he tries to work a dead-end job, he tries to quit wrestling. If you were in a middle literature class you'd have the words to describe the conflict in the story: man vs. himself, man vs. the world, man vs. death, man vs. wrestler. That makes it accessible to anybody. One thing I would be curious to hear is how this movie did in Europe, because in so many ways, from setting to characterization, it's a really American movie.

I should also mention that Marisa Tomei is great. She plays a stripper whose better days are gone. Between her character and Roarke's you get a really good conversation about values and what really matters. And even though they and their issues are very 'blue collar,' the questions they wrestle with (sorry) are universal and worth thinking on.

The Wrestler is a Must See. You can tell it was a labor of love, not made to make money or to win awards, but just to tell a good story. But, like most things in which producing good art is prime, this film did it all. You can find it where I turned it in at the Vestavia Hills Wal-mart Redbox, and probably other places too.

Up in the Air

So tons of jokers are claiming this is going to wipe up some golden globes and academy awards. I think it will. At some point, however, I need to spend some time researching who the academy really is (I do know that Tom Sherak is the current president. He decided which movies FOX would produce for like 40 years or something crazy. Tom Hanks is president elect, I think) because I often kind of agree with them but most of the time do not. And what is lame, is that I will netflix academy award winning movies like it's my job. Recently, while watching some Justin.tv streams, I found a stream that only plays imdb + 7.6. This was revolutionary for me. I mean I always check the ratings movies have on imdb and rottentomatoes. I most often agree with the ratings although sometimes I'll use the ratings just to know what kind of movie I am about to see. It's like going to an indie theater as opposed to an AMC. What is more, whenever I am judging how the public is judging something, I have to take into account that the public is the reason every movie has a love story. Would I be able to find good movies without golden globes, academy awards, Roger Ebert, rottentomatoes and imdb? I think maybe for a few years I could as most theaters already have a 'type'. But maybe if we did away with all the judging we would lose our criteria for a good movie and people would start to make movies on a whole other level. At any rate, I would not give Up in the Air any awards, other than an award titled, "you did a really good job of making a movie that is going to win golden globes and academy awards." With all this crap said, I hope this blog is good for a community of people to get some ideas on how friends and foes are judging and thinking about some movies. I would like to congratulate all of us for being awesome in this way. With all that said, I love oscar parties and I'm all for recognizing artists for making awesome stuff.

The Brothers Bloom - Robert Culpepper (Must See)

Everybody loves a Con movie. Matchstick Men, Catch Me If You Can, The Score, The Italian Job: there are tons of films about a thief (usually he's just out of 'the business') who is so good he can escape the steel jaws of justice and manage to turn them on his opponent--usually a high-strung law-man or a former accomplice. As a genre, con movies (and I'm not talking about Con Air) are completely predictable. Except, of course, that you don't know how the con is going to be pulled and how the good guys (somehow we always side with these criminals) will get the money/the girl/away. Con movies are riddled with clues. Watching a con movie a second time may seem like a good idea, but it will never be as satisfying as the first time. It's knowing the trick before the magician finishes with the cards.

The Brothers Bloom is a different kind of con movie. It's really about stories: cons as stories rather than crimes. Sort of a revisionist approach to ripping people off, which I can get behind.

It was written and directed by Rian Johnson, who wrote/directed the award winning indie film Brick (also a Must See) and it follows with a similar realistically-unrealistic style. By that I mean that it could happen, but a lot of the movie is stylized and fantastic. It's hard to explain except to say that it begins with two boys, the Brothers Bloom, dressed to the nines in three-piece suits and hats, and bouncing from foster home to foster home. We see their first story (con) and get the line that drives the rest of the movie: in a good con everyone gets exactly what they want.

Stephen is played by Mark Ruffalo (good), Bloom is played by Adrien Brody (also good), and the 'mark' (a con term I learned from the movie) is the very wealthy Penelope, played by Rachel Weisz (great). There are a few explosions, some gun shots involving fake blood, a humorous sex scene, a chase or two (depending on how you define chase), Russian mobsters, a semi-priceless artifact, and a lot of humor. And, of course, the twist you should have seen coming, but didn't.

Beyond those common elements, the movie deftly incorporates a healthy amount of philosophy, as in this quote that has stuck with me since I watched it:

"There's no such thing as an unwritten life- just a badly written one."