Before Midnight

Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke carry on a fifteen-minute conversation among many. This one was all in one take.

**** out of ****

I got to watch one of my favorite romantic couples in cinema history, have it out in Before Midnight, bringing their eighteen-year relationship close to an end.

For those unfamiliar, since 1995, actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have collaborated with director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused) in films about Jesse and Celine, two lovers who talk. Each film is a conversation-based drama.

In Before Sunrise, the two meet on a train in Austria and hit it off so well, they decide to spend the rest of the night walking around Vienna, only to go their separate ways at the end. In Before Sunset the two catch up with one another in Paris, sharing life stories and their struggle into adulthood. Now, in Before Midnight, they seem to have stuck together, have twin daughters, are vacationing in Greece and have the difficulties of a relationship on which to reflect.

Except for the British Up documentaries, I have never seen another cinematic series of this kind. These are two characters - fictional, yes - who are very real to me. With all three as writers, Linklater and the two actors are fearless in the realistic direction they take these two as they age.

The dialogue of Celine and Jesse is perfectly engaging to me. It’s not for everyone. We all go to the movies for different reasons. I feel grateful that these artists felt it necessary to bring these characters back to the big screen, even when there's no big audience eagerly awaiting.

This Is The End

Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, James Franco and Craig Robinson as themselves in This Is The End

***1/2 out of ****

 

The destruction obsession in movies of late makes This Is The End a perfectly timed release. I’m amazed at how fun it was to see a movie go all the way with the apocalypse… for laughs.

While actor Seth Rogen and his friend Evan Goldberg have been screenwriting for years with films like Superbad and Pineapple Express, This Is The End is the first one the two have directed. Conceptually, it’s like the kind of idea that a bunch of writers might cook up while getting drunk together, knowing that no studio will go for it. While it took a dozen studio title cards for this movie to get started, this crazy idea for a movie actually happened. They made an R-rated comedy about Rogen and other showbiz friends (as themselves) facing the biblical rapture and being left behind.

The idea is so absurd, that no amount of morbid imagery and horrific violence can separate you from its hilarity. It only enhances the self-deprecating idea that movie stars don’t deserve to go to heaven. The foul–mouthed banter amongst Rogen, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill and the shameless Danny McBride, is constant and brilliant. I laughed myself silly.

Man of Steel

Henry Cavill as Superman

*1/2 out of ****

I don’t know if I’m a true Superman fan, but I love the 1978 Richard Donner movie, which set high standards for making a superhero movie. In my opinion, that film, flawed as it may be, went unmatched in the genre for decades. I might say Donner’s epic angle on comic book materiel was genius. Then, it may have been Christopher Reeve's perfect performance as the man of steel. In the end, the most winning element of that film was the John Williams score, which still brings joy to my heart.

So here comes a serious, de-saturated, Hans Zimmer-scored Superman movie. While the Dark Knight influence seems wrong to impose on Superman, I keep an open mind and go in with neutral expectations. 

Man of Steel was like making a new friend who seems really cool at first –but eventually gets drunk and starts breaking things. The opening segment featuring the Planet Krypton is the most lavish mythical costume drama you’ve ever seen, showing off director Zack Snyder’s knack for rich stylized visuals. Then there’s Clark Kent’s early life on Earth, told in a non-linear form, with execution meeting the realism standards of producer Christopher Nolan. This retelling of the origin story is quite interesting but never really takes off. It aims to be simple but seems a little jammed, especially when Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is introduced too early. Henry Cavill is a great-looking Superman, but seems to be missing something in terms of direction. These problems were tolerable given the strong tone of the film, but I wasn’t prepared for how loud and dumb it would eventually become.

When General Zod (Michael Shannon -of course) goes head to head with Superman, the final forty-five minutes of the movie consist of computer-animated figures slamming up against one another and skyscrapers that crumble and fall –all while the real and virtual cameras capture the action in that well-worn shaky style (I really miss the smooth well-composed slow-motion shots Snyder is so notoriously known for).

Is destroying a city a requirement for all big budget action movies? It’s as if they’re all trying to top one another. Superman is all about stopping the bad guy from killing lots of people. Are we supposed to assume there was no one inside or below the buildings being leveled? Where’s the drama in Zod threatening a family near the end of the film when he’s already killed thousands of families off-screen by this point? I hated the last third of Man of Steel so much, I don’t care about anything admirably creative in the first two thirds.

It's not that mass-destruction in the movies offends me. What does offend me is treating it like an action movie element that has no consequences. 

As always, here's a great spoiler discussion from Red Letter Media

Frances Ha

Greta Gerwig is Frances

**1/2 out of **** 

 

Frances Ha is a new film co-written and directed by Noah Baumbach. His creative partner/girlfriend, Greta Gerwig, co-wrote and stars in it. Her title character is a New York girl in her late-twenties, who is growing self-conscious in her lack of development towards adulthood. She lives check-to-check from a job assisting a dance studio and deeply relies on the company of friends, particularly Sophie (Mickey Sumner -Sting’s daughter), to get her by.

Frances and Sophie love one another deeply as best friends. So much so, that in an early scene, Frances lets her relationship with a good boyfriend go down the toilet, when asked to move in with him. She turns him down, not wanting to part with Sophie. Shortly after, Sophie surprises Frances by moving out when offered a place that fits her needs. What follows are the eventful and uneventful choices by Frances to fill this new void in her life.

I find Gerwig to be charming -even when she’s playing someone as obnoxiously featherheaded as Frances. She is a particular type of adorable young woman that I have seen in real life but rarely in the movies. She definitely carries this film.

Noah Baumbach usually challenges his audience with characters who are hard to like. If he writes from what he knows, then he knows a lot of privileged people who damage one another and use their immense education to rationalize their selfishness. Does he like these characters?

When I saw his first film, The Squid and the Whale, I felt like what I saw, was a Wes Anderson film set in reality. I think that he creates flawed characters normally put in the detached context of quirky comedy, but he can’t bring himself to be quirky enough. He senses something real about them and feels obligated to keep them real. The results are still funny but sad.

This brings me to address his visual style, or lack thereof. There is something about how his low-contrast and rather plain-looking imagery that doesn’t aim to impress. This movie in particular, is shot in black and white. Baumbach clearly doesn’t want a defined style that might distract us from the substance. While I am normally excited to see any movie shot in black and white nowadays, this isn’t the kind I would call beautiful. It looks more like a student film shot in the nineties but it serves its purpose. Black and white cinema will always lead the audience to focus on the shape of things, particularly faces. This movie is always studying the face of Frances as she deals with rejection and confusion while hiding it under her giddy demeanor.

The movie, like its lead character, changes gears a lot and sometimes feels like it’s forgetting itself. Though I really liked a segment of the film when she visits her parents in Sacramento and the movie suddenly goes into montage-mode showing a return to a place of ease and comfort.

I suppose Frances Ha is a good movie but it didn’t really speak to me. I can’t hold anything against it for that. The movie is about the struggle to grow up, which I’ve dealt with and still do. Baumbach usually aims to create flawed hypocritical characters but dares us to see ourselves in them. Other auteurs do this as well. Woody Allen makes his characters more fun. Whit Stillman makes his more intelligent. In the end, most of theses artists tend to alienate your average moviegoer. Working with Gerwig, Baumbach has made a less bitter movie than his usual fare (Margot at the Wedding being the most difficult) and gets a little closer to achieving that identification he wants us to feel.

Renoir

Michel Bouquet and Christa Theret in Renoir

**1/2 out of **** 

Renoir is a possibly misleading title. Our audience surrogate for the film, is the young woman, Andrée, who was the final muse and model to the famous painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and then a lover to his son Jean Renoir, who would go on to be a great early filmmaker (A part of history only mentioned in the film’s epilogue). The movie takes place near the end of the painter’s life, so I assume we are supposed to focus on him. It’s just that the movie mostly doesn’t.

Giles Bourdos' Renoir is a film that creates a cinematic atmosphere that contains everything it takes to seduce me: Lush cinematography, pleasant music, a beautiful setting and a gorgeous female who often appears nude. It is such a shame that after this seduction I found myself bored by a disappointingly superficial story. I was so in love with how this movie looked that I wanted it to be more interesting. It just… wasn’t.

The movie is set during World War I next to the French Riviera as Andrée (Christa Theret) arrives at Renoir’s estate to pose for the artist. She is rudely greeted by his adolescent son (Thomas Doret) -who is fixated with death. His story seems like an intended subplot, but it barely develops. When she meets “the boss” (Michel Bouquet), as he is called, she is surprised to see a wheelchair-bound arthritis ridden old man who admires her as an object at first-sight. The young woman fancies herself as an artist as well, with mild experience in acting, singing and dancing. She is strong-headed with a temper, which the painter admires as well.

Later, Renoir’s older son, Jean (Vincent Rottiers), arrives home from the war to heal from an injury while eager to return to the front. A romance quickly blossoms between Jean and Andrée.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir displays the suffering of an artist falling apart from old age who feels no sense of purpose without his painting. Jean is given a similar emphasis as a man tortured with a sense of obligation to the war and also feels little purpose with anything else. He has an interest in film. Andrée, who doesn’t understand her purpose on the estate at all, continues to serve the ailing painter and will influence Jean to pursue the art he will eventually master.

The movie does an excellent job when showing the artist at work, stroking away at what looks like a convincing original from the father of impressionism. There’s a clever part when the camera slowly pans past a close-up of his blurry painting to the female subjects behind the canvas but keeps them out of focus. Is this to imply his weak eye sight, his sense of impressionism, or both?

Most of the film, however, concerns itself in an emotional conflict between Jean and Andrée and it slowly stretches the movie very thin. The old man’s reliance on the inspiration Andrée provides, is established in such a shallow way at the beginning of the film and doesn’t get much deeper. Other films have gotten away with a lack of development, but I felt as though this one, through editing and pretentious dialogue, was cuing me to pay attention to its dull story.

A while back, I was discussing the state of movies with a fellow film buff. He said to me that a movie’s quality is all about the screenplay. I immediately disagreed. I said that a movie could thrive on the strength of any element in its foundation and achieve greatness. Great writing does not always guarantee a great movie. What I said then, I still believe now… But boy, I had no idea then, how endangered good screenwriting was.

It feels very rare to go to the movies now, and see something that has anything close to the writing quality I can expect from an average episode of Breaking Bad or Mad Men. Good writing has shifted to television while movies still possess the kind of imagery, which takes too much time for a rushed television shoot to accomplish. Bringing a Hollywood issue up while talking about a French film may seem irrelevant, but I have to consider that this movie made me feel the same way I do about the current climate of American movies. I should also consider that this is a foreign film an American company saw fit to give decent distribution here. I will note, however, that this film has a grand and pure time-honored aesthetic through its cinematography that reminds me of Vittorio Storaro's work.

I believe that some directors like Terrence Malick, possess the ability to abandon conventional narrative, found in writing, and allow the emotion of imagery and music to dominate the experience of a film. My problem with Renoir, is that it succeeds in creating a place and time, but refuses to let the beauty of that creation guide the film. It’s distracted by a story of the characters it fails to define.