Oh, Stritchy

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I first discovered Elaine Stritch on the original Broadway soundtrack to Company, the classic 1970 Stephen Sondheim musical about then-modern love in New York. The plot revolves around perennially single Bobby and his married friends; Stritch played Joanne, the oldest of the group. At the end of the second act she sings “The Ladies Who Lunch,” an ode to the rich married women who do nothing but have lunch, try on the clothes, and drink vodka stingers. She realizes during the song that she is just like them. The song is one of Sondheim’s most famous (which is saying something) and has become a gay camp classic, likely because of Stritch’s delivery: drunken, screeching, vulnerable, epic. While Stritch has never been a lady who lunches – she has worked steadily on stage and screen since 1944 – her hurricane of a personality, from hilarious to enraging and from sympathetic to outrageous, has made her both a theater and a gay icon. This is readily understandable in her astonishing autobiographical one-woman show At Liberty (which won a Tony on Broadway and an Emmy on TV), but in the wonderful new documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me, she is revealed even more, and the result both melancholy and inspiring.

The film was shot mostly in 2012, while Stritch was rehearsing for cabaret shows in New York and Detroit. She is nearing her 87th birthday and working harder than most people do in the 40s, but age, as well as diabetes, is catching up to her. She has trouble remembering her lyrics and her blood sugar keeps spiking, making her more confused and demanding interventions from her musical director, the devoted Rob Bowman. But as nerve-wracking as some of these rehearsals and pre-show dramas are, she stands in front of an audience and turns herself on. She turns a forgotten lyric into a comic bit, and her stories and banter between songs are about the troubles and annoyances of aging.

Between shows and rehearsals, at home and in the back of town cars, Stritch retells some of the tales familiar to viewers of At Liberty, but these versions are neither carefully scripted nor staged, and they become much more intimate and powerful. We hear about her love for her one husband, who died of brain cancer in the 1970s, about being a naïve virgin in New York in the 1940s, about her struggles with alcoholism. We watch her tour the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, from where she graduated, looking for a room to be named after her, and she thinks the big ones are too grand for her, one of its most famous alums. Her humility is sometimes enveloped by what appears to be narcissism, which seems to be more of a defense mechanism than personality flaw. In interviews with her co-stars and co-workers, including Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey, and the director George C. Wolfe, they are at times in awe, in love, and exasperated.

The film is directed by Chiemi Karasawa, who had only before produced documentaries, and her control of Stritch’s story is impressive. While putting together clips of old performances and news appearances takes no special skill, Karasawa’s unflinching camera during Stritch’s breakdowns, insults, triumphs, ugliness, and senior moments must have involved some intense negotiations and a strong will. I’m sure it helped that Alec Baldwin was an executive producer and Stritch herself is well aware of what emotions are powerful on screen: She describes at one point how her crying after her husband’s death was reminiscent of a great scene of tearful balling. This is Elaine Stritch, always on stage, always giving herself to her audience, and always doing it, perhaps, for herself.

Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
Directed Chiemi Karasawa
Starring Elaine Stritch, Rob Bowman, Alex Baldwin
Not Rated
Starts at Arclight La Jolla Firday, March 14

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Sex on the rocky, French beach

Apparently, one of the reasons Stranger by the Lake has been of such interest to film writers and culture bloggers is the sex. Alain Guiraudie’s extremely French sex thriller is being listed along with Blue Is the Warmest Color and Interior. Leather Bar as part of an art film trend of explicit and not always necessary sex. The criticism of this trend is that the sex doesn’t add to the story or characterization or even the mood, and while I think that’s sometimes the case (as in I Want Your Love), it certainly was not in Blue nor with Stranger by the Lake. In fact, while the sex in Stranger is titillating and sexy, it is also occasionally creepy and it always is necessary for the propulsion of the plot and the creation of authenticity. The movie does, after all, take place at a gay cruising spot, a rocky beach on a lake in rural France. The men are mostly naked and most of them go into the woods to have sex with each other – or to watch other men have sex with each other. Not showing the sex these men share would be bluntly censorious and dishonest.

And the power of lust is at the heart of Stranger by the Lake. Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), a lithe and beautiful young man, comes to the beach every day to swim and cruise men and he is infatuated with a mustachioed man named Michel (Christophe Paou) who has a particularly skillful freestyle stroke and a clingy boyfriend. Franck also comes to talk to a heavy older man named Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao), who, unlike Franck, doesn’t see himself as gay, but rather as a man who always has a women and sometimes has sex with men. Franck is confused because Henri has no interest in cruising or swimming, but Franck clearly finds value in Henri’s vague pronouncements about the ways to live correctly.

One evening, after spending the afternoon having sex with a man in the woods, Franck watches Michel and his boyfriend swimming in the lake. Then arguing. And then Michel drowning his boyfriend before calmly swimming to the shore, dressing, and driving away. Franck does nothing, and the next day, both Franck and Michel are back at the beach. Michel starts flirting with Franck, and despite some apprehension, he returns the affection and they begin to have regular trysts every afternoon. Still, Franck clearly worries that Michel will do to him what he did to his previous lover.

The strange and almost cynical morality of the characters and the ever increasing tension about Michel’s potential make what at first seems like a bland sex comedy into something much more complex, metaphorical, and even epic. One critic’s theory is based on the seeming 1980s clothes and cars; the callous way the men on the beach treat each other and their seeming death drive are Guiraudie’s commentary on the early years of AIDS. But it’s hard to know what Guiraudie is doing, whether it is an existentialist homage to Camus’s The Outside or just the story of how far lust and connection can warp a man’s moral compass. The lack of clarity in the Guiraudie’s message makes the film’s sex less hot and more disconcerting, but also, oddly, more powerful.

Guiraudie’s spare, slow-burn script and ambiguous themes are matched by his stunning and simple photography, which manage to make the simplest refractions off of the lake and the shadows thrown by tree branches into art. His cast of mostly unknowns are impeccably directed as well. Deladonchamps is both appalling and endearing, while Paou is actually sexy enough that I could imagine (if not agree with) Franck ignoring Michel’s murderousness. The discomforting nature of their relationship is much more fascinating and surprising than their sex, even though that is pretty fun to watch, too.

Stranger by the Lake
Written and Directed by Alain Guiraudie
Starring Pierre Deladonchamps, Christophe Paou, and Patrick d’Assumçao
Not Rated
Opens March 14 at Landmark Hillcrest

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The lava bomb of Pompeii

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It’s pretty easy to imagine how Pompeii got made. Some screenwriter said, “Gladiator crossed with Titanic. In 3-D.” And I can imagine that if I were a producer with a few boatloads of cash and a throbbing desire to get a few more boatloads that sort of pitch would give me a tingling, ecstatic thrill. But as so many of these things go, that pitch probably led to a bunch of screenplay rewrites, plotting by committee, an over-indulgent CGI team, and, because of either budget constraints or bad taste, some really dopey casting. And what we’ve been given – dumped in the middle of February along with a bunch of other lame movies – is a bombastic, silly movie whose best features are masked by smoke and fire.

Like Titanic (or, heck, The Passion of the Christ), the plot and ending of Pompeii are a foregone conclusion. It’s one of the most famous natural disasters in human history: In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius, on the central western coast of Italy, erupted and buried the Roman resort towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The blast shot gas and lava over 700 degrees into the towns, and around 16,000 people were killed. Over 1500 years later, the archaeological ruins were found, with molds of many of the victims created by the hardened ash that preserved much of the old city. These sites are the most visited tourist attractions in Italy, and the combination of the Roman hedonism and violent doom has made Pompeii an entrancing tale, inspiring nine feature films in the last 100 years.

This particular version focuses on star-crossed lovers from different classes: the daughter of the ruler of Pompeii and a gladiator slave from the provinces. Cassia (doe-eyed, dull Emily Browing) meets Milo, also known as the Celt (sad-eyed, one-note Kit Harrington), when the horse pulling her carriage breaks its leg as it passes a group of slaves marching to Pompeii. They have an immediate connection that strengthens over the coming days as they keeping meeting each other, usually because of or in addition to a horse. While Milo is fighting and befriending another gladiator named Atticus (Lost’s wonderful Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), Cassia’s parents (Jared Harris and Carrie-Anne Moss) are trying to persuade a visiting Roman senator to invest in infrastructure improvements for the city. However, not only did Senator Corvus (a sneering, ridiculously evil Keifer Sutherland) only come to Pompeii to pursue a very reluctant Cassia, but he was also the Roman general who had all of Milo’s family slaughtered. He’s a bad dude, and he’s certainly the worst behaved Roman before and after the mountain erupts, lobbing lava bombs onto the city being ripped open by earthquake fissures. Who will survive? Well, don’t get your hopes up for anyone.

The story does, if you’ve seen Gladiator and Titanic, lend itself to epic filmmaking, but unlike those movies, the story is not what moves the audience; the artless, obvious script is basically a vehicle for Paul W.S. Anderson’s torrid, almost absurd computerized special effects. And swordfights. The amount of painstaking detail devoted to recreating first century Roman architecture, fashion, and daily life is unfortunately subsumed by the painfully overblown volcanic catastrophe, most of which is as historically inaccurate as the art direction is correct. There were no lava bombs, and the actual tsunami was about a tenth the size as Anderson’s tidal wave. And all of this is hard to see because the 3-D filming makes the colors so muddy. The 3-D itself is pretty unnecessary, since it’s only used for throwing rocks at the audience that is already suffering through a bomb.

Pompeii
Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
Written by Janet Scott Batchler, Lee Batchler, and Michael Robert Johnson
Starring Kit Harrington, Emily Browning, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
Rated PG-13
In 3-D, but that’s some ugly 3-D
At your local multiplex

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A slushy, mushy wintry mix

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When I told another critic at the screening of Winter’s Tale that it was adapted from a novel many consider to be one of greatest of last quarter of 20th century, I was given a blank stare. As in: Really? Are you kidding me? I don’t know this factoid because I’ve read Mark Helprin’s 1983 novel, which I honestly had never heard of before I saw advertisement for the movie. (And I like to think of myself as, if not well-read, at least aware of which great books I should have read.) I found out when I googled the movie. You certainly wouldn’t get the impression the source material was all that great from the movie, which is the first wonderfully bad, entertainingly bonkers movie I’ve seen in quite some time: Cheese masquerading as profundity, amateur-hour continuity errors, and laughably odd stunt casting.

But, you ask, was it not written, directed, and produced by Akiva Goldsman, who won an Oscar for writing A Beautiful Mind and also wrote the great Cinderella Man? Well, yes. But this is a good time for you to remember that he also wrote Batman & Robin, Lost in Space, and I, Robot. He needs a good director to fix his screenplays, usually Ron Howard, and Goldsman certainly is not that director, let alone Ron Howard.

Here’s the story: In the winter of 1916 in New York City, Peter Lake (Colin Ferrell) is a talented, self-effacing thief running from the minions of Pearly Soames (scenery-chewing Russell Crowe), who at first seems to be a sociopathic mobster but turns out to be an actual demon. Just as Peter is about to escape from New York, his mysteriously intuitive white horse indicates that he should rob a mansion. He breaks in and discovers, befriends, and falls in love with the free-spirited, delightful, and consumptive Beverly Penn (Jessica Brown Findlay, best known for playing the similar and similarly doomed Lady Sybil on Downton Abby).

Pearly finds out about Beverly after going into a fugue state and drawing a picture of her in blood, and he tries to kidnap her in order to draw Peter out. But Peter saves Beverly on his white horse, which sprouts wings when they jump off a cliff. They walk along the frozen Hudson River until they reach the Penn’s country mansion, where Beverly’s father (William Hurt) almost instantaneously accepts a poor thief as his daughter’s suitor. I guess his reasoning is: She’s dying. Does it matter?

For some mystical reason, Pearly can’t leave New York City to go after Peter unless he asks permission of Lucifer. As in the Devil. Who is played by a lazy Will Smith. Since Smith shows up pretty early, this is not a spoiler, but the shock of seeing him in this already oddball movie caused the screening audience to burst out in laughter. Other totally bizarre cast members include Kevin Duran, Norm Lewis, Graham Greene (playing, really, another wise Indian), and Oscar winners Jennifer Connolly and, most absurdly, Eva Marie Saint. Saint’s character is eight in 1916 but inexplicably still alive and working as a publishing company’s CEO in 2014, when the film’s third act takes place. Peter is also still alive, but he’s the same age as he was in 1916, still making Pearly very angry, and still friends with that white horse. Because magic.

Thematically, the film is saying something about love, destiny, selflessness, miracles, and the balance between good and evil, but even if it’s clear in Helprin’s book, Goldsman turns it all into a muddle of clichéd platitudes and simplistic swooning. His use of the green screen effects are messy and error-ridden, he uses the score to announce every emotion, and his editing is so ham-fisted that he can’t even manipulate a tear during the sad-sappy death scenes. Worse, in the one scene that Russell Crowe bears his impressive chest, it’s shaved clean. I blame Goldsman for that, too.

Winter’s Tale
Written and Directed by Akiva Goldsman
Starring Colin Ferrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, and Russell Crowe
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex

 

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The greatest advertisement ever made

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The Lego Movie could be the greatest advertisement ever made. I mean in this in two ways: First, after I saw the movie, I walked immediately to Target and bought Legos, the first time I’d given myself and not a child Legos since I was a child myself. I’m sure that the sales for Legos, one of the world’s most popular toys for decades, will increase dramatically because of the film. Second, the reason people are going to run to the toy stores is not just because the movie is an effective argument for the greatness of the Legos as toys, but it’s great movie in and of itself, despite that it is based on a toy and meant, despite its story’s ironically anti-corporate themes, ultimately to sell toys.

The plot seems standard, even clichéd at first. Emmet (Chris Pratt) is a construction worker in a city that runs with clockwork precision: Everyone is perfectly regimented, efficient, and properly tasked. Everyone loves the same song “Everything is Awesome!” and the same TV show “Where’s My Pants?” and their leader President Business (Will Ferrell). The president is actually a dictator with a massive army of evil robots and nasty cops (the leader of which is voiced by Liam Neeson) at his command, and he is planning to destroy the Lego universe using a weapon called the Kragle.

There are some who want to stop the president, and they all believe prophesy that the most important, interesting, and best person ever, known as the Special, will find the Piece of Resistance, which will stop the weapon. One night after work, Emmet sees a mysterious woman at his work site and in trying to talk to her, falls down a hole and find the Piece. The woman, a black-and-blue haired ninja-like warrior, tells Emmet he is the Special, and she brings him to a council of the Master Builders, populated by Lego people who can take any collection of Lego piece and magically, with Matrix-like abilities create anything. (That this can actually be visually understood is because the animation depicts this universe entirely made up Lego pieces, from the people to the vehicles, to even clouds and smoke.) They all assume Emmet must be one, but he’s not. Nevertheless, he is expected to lead them against President Business.

As in most underdog-hero movies, the result of the quest and conflict is pretty much preordained, but writers and directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, in addition to mixing witty and sly adult-oriented jokes with kid-pleasing slapstick, which they do better than most animated films of the last several years, work on multiple thematic levels, creating a morally and ethically complex film out of what could have been a cynical advertisement. (See, for example, the Transformers, GI Joe, and Pokemon movies.) And they present us with a surprising and surprisingly moving third act that cements the film as both a morality tale and a marketing ploy.

The film sets up a battle between mindless, automated corporate capitalism and creativity, freedom, and, in a way, mysticism. Emmet discovers that the latter is vastly preferred to the former by meeting the wild and diverse Lego people from across the Lego dimensions: the Wild West, pirates, space, DC superheroes, Star Wars, and one land that is not a branded type of Lego where utterly free-form experimentation rules. The characters Emmet meets are delightfully constructed, from Morgan Freeman’s God-like Vitruvius to Will Arnett’s brilliant parody of Christian Bale’s Batman and Charlie Day’s zippy and dippy Benny, a “1980-something space guy.” All of them help Emmet realize his destiny and save the Lego universe.

The point is clear – maybe too clearly and bluntly made – that following instructions has its place, but the joy in life comes from exercising imagination, embracing diversity, and following the road less travelled. Not surprisingly, Fox News has already started trashing The Lego Movie for its politics. I guess few things scare Republicans more than children who think for themselves and don’t worship President Business.

The Lego Movie
Written and Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
Starring Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, and Will Ferrell
Rated PG
At your local multiplex

 

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