Uber intellectual quirky

What to make of Rebecca Miller’s Maggie’s Plan (2015), currently at The Maple Theater. The film, based on a story by Karen Rinaldi, stars the one and only Greta Gerwig, who I’ll still call the “It Girl” going back to when I probably first discovered her in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress (2011) and then through movies like Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love (2012) and the inestimable lead role in Noah Baumbach’s 2012 Frances Ha. Gerwig is one of the few characters that will draw me to a movie simply because she’s in it. And she doesn’t fail here, trading on her quirky, goofily charming characters each underscored by a can’t-pigeon-hole-her intelligent independence. In this film, she’s cast as a 30-something New York college counselor, organized to a fault and seemingly knowing what she wants in life. Which is, in a word, independence – but, with a child. She doesn’t want a relationship but does want semen, and has an old friend Guy (Travis Fimmel) do the deed (but not with her). Best plans go awry when she bumps into John (Ethan Hawke) a "ficto-critical anthropologist" of the Marxian “commodity fetishism” school (a term that takes me back to college and which I thought long outmoded). He, of course, is a deep intellectual and writing a deep deep book to boot. He’s married to an even deeper - and extremely icy - Columbia professor Georgette (Julianne Moore). The two aren’t really getting along. John and Maggie fall in love, she has her baby, they get married and live happily ever after. For a few years. But it’s apparent John still can’t get over his uber intellectual former wife. Maggie doesn’t have to read tea leaves and her new plan is to break up with John and get Georgette and John back together. O-kaay. The plot is obviously meant to be quirkily humorous and it is, though I’m not sure exactly what the point is. None of the characters are particularly attractive with the big proviso of Maggie herself. (Doesn’t seem Gerwig can fail at anything.) It was disappointing one of my favorite actors Wallace Shawn had the smallest of roles. And, when it comes to Canada, the film stereotypes in a way I haven’t seen since movies from the 1950s: a lodge in remote Quebec with de rigueur animal heads and characters who get lost in a blinding snowstorm.

A simmering post-war brief romance

I attended Cineplex’s Classic Film Series movie last night at Devonshire Mall. Cineplex started the Classic series in 2010 and features four films throughout the summer (okay, since May). Last night’s was David Lean’s Brief Encounter, starring Trevor Howard and the little known Celia Johnson. It’s a terrific film, and for some reason (I otherwise never use a point system) I gave it 86 out of 100 points. Made in 1945 and shot in smoky black and white it’s a close-up study of an affair. Well, kind of. Let’s call it an infatuation or even a love story. But the story takes place over a brief period of time – about a month – and from what we are shown on the screen, no sex is involved. (Pop psych radio host Dr. Joy Browne says it's not an affair if no bodily fluids were exchanged.) It hardly matters. The attraction between Dr. Alec Harvey (Howard) and Laura Jesson (Johnson) is at once electric and passionate. They meet in a suburban railway station canteen waiting for their various trains taking them in opposite directions. Several coincidental meetings lead from one thing to another, and the story is on. The intimate close-up shots highlight the acting which is appropriately paced and, with a couple of exceptions on Johnson’s part, not overwrought. But perhaps the most poignant scene is the very final one, in contradistinction to everything that comes before. And, by the way, this must be one of the very first films summarizing post-war suburban life. You might think it’s a critique of the far flung suburbs - the terrible angst of sterile not urban living and all that - but it’s not…..The next film in Cineplex’s series is A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951) starring – what a line-up! - Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters July 10, 20 and 25. This is an in part film version of the terrific Theodore Dreiser novel An American Tragedy, and both the word and celluloid versions are scintillating…… There are only four films – disappointing! - in the series and the first was Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976), the last Raiders of The Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981) August 7, 17 and 22…..I asked Cineplex how they chose the films. “The films were all recently studio remastered have never been brought back to theatres until now, something very exciting for the fans. Availability also plays a big role. Rocky was a no-brainer since its celebrating the 40th Anniversary this year!” spokeswoman Sarah Van Lange said.

From one war zone to ... another

Dheepan, which opens Friday at the Main Art Theatre, won last year’s Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The movie, by French director Jacques Audiard, is a combination exploration of the Third World immigrant experience and a basic good versus evil drama set in a gang-infested housing project in Paris’s northeastern suburbs. The film is emotionally touching as it follows Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan) and Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), who flee the strife of the Sri Lankan civil war where Dheepan was a fighter with the Tamil Tigers, one of the combatants. The two are not married but pose as a couple along with a presumed daughter, Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby). They head to France and through connections Dheepan gets a job in a dilapidated slum. You know the story because it’s been told a hundred times, from On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) to Harry Brown (Daniel Barber, 2009), before: good people trying to live decent lives get enmeshed in gang warfare. After Sri Lanka, in other words, war of another kind, which is part of the picture’s point. So on this score the film is a little clichéd. And, frankly, I’m surprised it drew this much critical acclaim at Cannes. Sure, the Tamil immigrant experience is different but substitute Dheepan for someone who’d fought in another country and the story would be the same – just change the ethnic backdrop. Anyway, in the plot, Dheepan is hired as a caretaker and does a conscientious job. Yalini is also hired to take care of a disabled old man. Illayaal goes to school where she’s frightened of learning French and beats up on another kid. The “family’s” efforts to re-establish themselves are hindered by a gang who has taken over one of the housing blocks, essentially controlling the neighborhood. Dheepan and Yalini are reluctantly forced to deal with the thugs, eventually leading to a maelstrom. The film has a slow, plodding pace but is redeemed somewhat by the very good acting of the two leads (Jesuthasan in his youth was an actual Tamil Tiger). Jesuthasan's character’s quiet deliberateness is matched by the shy uncertainty of Srinivasan’s Yalini, both trying to find their footings in the new world. Their personal relationship, marked at turns by unfamiliarity and sometimes clumsy attempts at emotional connection, is played with effective nuance.

The sanctioning of immorality

A friend, after watching Luca Guadagnini’s A Bigger Splash (at the Landmark Main), said, “What was the point?” Well, the point is what was on the screen. It was the story itself. But her point was made. The expectation with this film is that it would somehow be deeper or more multi-layered than what it actually is. Instead, what we get is a very straightforward picture, inspired by Jacques Deray’s 1969 film La Piscine (The Swimming Pool). Don’t get me wrong. This is a very good movie. The acting is terrific and the story and plot events are absorbing. But it is in the end nothing but a crime story. Tilda Swinton as Marianne Lane is a famous rock star sidelined by a throat operation. She retreats to an Italian island with lover Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts). They are thoroughly enjoying the hedonistic contentment of their sun splashed idyll when, out of the blue, music producer Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes), with daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson) in toe, show up, quite uninvited. This throws off Marianne and Paul’s vacation but Hawkes is no stranger to them (he used to be Marianne’s lover) and so is minimally tolerated if not variously embraced. But Paul remains skeptical, and sees a ploy by Harry to ingratiate himself back with Marianne. Not that Paul himself doesn’t have thoughts about the supposed 22-year-old Penelope, who proves to be younger. The days pass among this foursome of the idyll bohemian rich. It turns out Harry has produced hits for The Rolling Stones. He’s of a type: the frenetic braggadocio music industry exec. Paul, a brilliant filmmaker, is passive and withdrawn. Penelope is cunning and Marianne is simply knowing and observant, and can hardly speak anyway. The group eats, swims, and takes day trips together including into the nearby town’s annual carnival, where Paul and Penelope beguile (there are hints of a sexual relationship since she is not his birth daughter) the locals in a karaoke duet at a local bar. The competition between Harry and Paul ramps up. Fiennes is in a role probably like you’ve never seen him, playing an A-type personality who overwhelms everyone around him. The best aspects of the film, which has got superlative reviews, are the acting and plot pacing. It’s like you're there with the characters on the Mediterranean Sea and enjoying the indulgent ride among the flora and fauna, switchback roads and sublime gastronomy. And for the most part, some prickly comments aside, this group is fun to be with. So what is the point of the picture? Is there any moral message - such as, is hedonism an end in itself, does immorality get rewarded? Hard to say. All we know is that our characters, somewhere along the way, have jumped an ethical barrier.

Relationships clawed in The Lobster

The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015), opening May 27 at the Main Art Theatre is, shall we say, unlike many a movie you’ve seen of late. Advisory: this may be difficult for some people to handle. It abounds in absurdity and at times seeming incongruity. The kind of movie, in other words, where people, exiting, may say: “Well that was different!” or “What the heck was that all about?” But it’s nice to come across a film every once in awhile that bucks conventionality, not only in its plot structure but in its themes. Colin Farrell is David, a man who was dumped by his wife. In the story, set in the near future, David is sent to a plush countryside resort which is also a kind of prison. Here, he must find a new mate in 45 days or be turned into an animal. Because, it appears, this society only accepts couples as legitimate forms of life. David meets his fellow inmates such as John C. Reilly as the Lisping Man and Rachel Weisz as the Short Sighted Woman. Ashley Jensen as the Biscuit Woman tries to seduce him but fails and attempts suicide. David has his eyes on Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia) who in turn is attracted by his emotional coldness.  Lisping Man is caught masturbating and is forced by authorities to put his hand in a hot toaster until it burns. David escapes from the asylum to a forest of renegade “Loners.” So just when you think this is a movie condemning conventional coupledom we also find that the Loners prohibit romance and have their own violent means to deal with transgressors. Not a pretty picture all around. Finally, David and his illicit paramour Short Sighted Woman (photo above) go on trips into the city where they change clothes and mingle as if they’re a normal couple. But she is set up, and gets blinded from an operation where she thought she was going to have her full sight restored. David, wanting to bond with her, threatens to take his own eyes out. Scenes of the Loners are marked by exotic animals that walk by in the background, obviously formerly people who weren’t able to find a mate and chose their preferred animal in which to be converted. David’s choice was to be a Lobster, hence the movie’s name. Meanwhile The Loners are being hunted by the hotel’s inmates who get additional days’ credit if they shoot a Loner, who in turn are universally dressed in rain ponchos (it gets wet in that forest). The Loners even carry out a small takeover of the hotel and have the hotel manager attempt to shoot his wife (with a blank gun). Hard to figure this out? Can’t get your head around it? Think of the films of Luis Buñuel or David Lynch, or other directors, like Fellini, Bergman and Wes Anderson, who brush up against the absurd. So how do you relate to a film like The Lobster? My advice: Take it as it is and linger in your thoughts upon various of the story’s moments or incidents. There are plenty of them.

Windsor's oldest film festival

The Windsor Jewish Film Festival – 14th edition – opens May 2 and runs until May 5 at Devonshire Cineplex theatres. Festival spokesman Stuart Selby says attendance last year was more than 2000, showing the event is increasingly drawing people from beyond the Jewish community, which has about 1200 individuals. “Obviously that’s where it has to grow because the Jewish community is shrinking,” the retired communications professor (University of Windsor) and Brooklyn native said. The festival features 10 films which all in some way touch on the Jewish experience. But all are accessible well beyond the Jewish community and many in fact have been screened at general film festivals throughout the world. After the admittedly larger Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF) in November this is the city’s second major film event. The Jewish festival is actually older that WIFF by two years. All the films on tap at the Jewish festival are feature length, with many over the years nominated for or winning awards including the Oscars. This year’s opening night film is Remember, directed by acclaimed Canadian film maker Atom Egoyan starring multiple Academy Award winner Christopher Plummer. The closing night film is Labyrinth of Lies (photo above). Both films touch on the Holocaust, a familiar subject at the film festival. Selby says while Holocaust films are important in depicting Jewish history the Jewish experience encompasses more than that, and this year’s festival shows a broader perspective than some previous editions. “We really try to avoid being too Holocaust-heavy and certainly try to avoid pictures of the camps and all those horrors,” he says. For example, Dough takes place in East London, pitting the last neighbourhood Jewish baker against a Muslim apprentice, for unexpected humour and complications. Deli Man (review posted here March 19, 2015) is a sometimes humorous if bittersweet look at the once ubiquitous Jewish delicatessen in North America, including in Canada. Apples in the Desert is about a young kibbutz woman who rebels against her Orthodox father. And The Dove Flyer, set in Iraq’s 1950s Jewish community, is a coming of age story of a young man growing up during an increasing climate of anti-Semitism. Natalie Portman stars in A Tale of Love and Darkness, a memoir of life in Jerusalem under the British Mandate through the country’s Independence. Tickets are $10 cash at the festival or can be purchased at the Windsor Jewish Community Centre, 519-973-1772. By the way, the festival has no connection with Detroit's upcoming Lenore Marwil Jewish Film Festival May 8 - 19 (https://www.jccdet.org/arts-culture-education/film-festival/) The Windsor festival's website is www.jewishwindsor.org.

Flawless music by a flawed man

Born to Be Blue, opening Friday at The Maple Theater, is a take on part of the life of famed trumpeter and exponent of the West Coast jazz sound Chet Baker. There’s a lot of great and seminal jazz that’s been made over the decades but Baker’s sound is among the most sublimely cool. But his career was only partly successful as a result to his own human failings, largely because of his heroin addiction. Nevertheless, like a great artist little recognized in his own time, a mythology has developed around Baker since his death in 1988. That’s because of a number of things. His music, of course, but also his physicality. His swept back hair and chiseled face made him a jazz version of James Dean or Jack Kerouac. And his failings and rough edges, including spending time in jail, add to the romantic bad boy and distressed image. In Born to Be Blue, directed by Canadian Robert Budreau (much of the picture is filmed in Sudbury), Ethan Hawke makes a rather ideal stand-in for Baker and pulls off the character quite well, particularly given all the close-up shots portraying pained expressions, mental confusion, and Baker’s semi-articulateness and even at times dumbness. The film really revolves around a central incident, where Baker was beaten and lost his ability to play the trumpet, and his subsequent attempt at a comeback. Of course drugs play a central role as Baker seeks to keep the demons at arm’s length. Carmen Ejugo (who played Coretta Scott King in Selma (Ava DuVernay, 2015)) as his lover is almost flawless in conveying warmth, caring and an ethical counterpoint to Baker’s moral weaknesses. I’m not a big fan of biopics but I don’t see too many things wrong with this one. Yes, I would have preferred the film focussed more on Baker’s overall career.  He was hugely successful in the 1950s and then in the 70s and 80s, despite his addiction. But I understand a film needs a fulcrum point to build a concise story around so what in fact was the defining event in the musician’s life is the focus here. Yes, Hawke does perform a few of the songs himself but most of the trumpet is the off-camera work of Kevin Turcotte. Seeing that there’s another jazz biopic opening in the city this weekend, Miles Ahead starring and directed by Don Cheadle, the two films would make a great themed double bill.