Destroyed by her own pretensions

Blue-Jasmine_cateI’m not sure why Woody Allen decided to set Blue Jasmine in San Francisco. He can turn a city into a main character of his films; from Manhattan to Vicki Cristina Barcelona to Midnight in Paris. But in Blue Jasmine, the city is neither lovingly shot nor does it really have a role to play other than as place for Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) to escape to after her life and her mind fall apart. It could have been Portland or San Diego or Skokie. And I always wonder how someone can set a story in San Francisco and not even make a casual reference to gay people. Or black people. The only Asian in Blue Jasmine plays a New York lawyer with one line who is passingly referred to as a “dragon lady.” But Woody Allen has never had a wide view of the world; in his more than 40 films, he has depicted an extremely small segment of American society, usually wealthy and upper middle class white people with profoundly neurotic interior lives. And he does this with unparalleled insight and humor and with some of the most interesting female characters in film history. In Blue Jasmine, he has provided Blanchett, arguably the greatest actress of her generation, her greatest role, a woman destroyed by her own pretensions.

Jasmine isn’t even her name; she was named Jeanette by the parents who adopted her and her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins). In college, she renamed herself after the night-blooming flower to seem more interesting. She did something right, with her name and with the person she wanted to be seen as. She met Hal (Alex Baldwin) on Martha’s Vineyard when she was still in college, and she dropped out to marry him. He was New York financial mover and shaker, and when we meet Jasmine, it is after Hal has been arrested for massive fraud, after they lost their millions and their houses. Jasmine has moved to San Francisco to start anew, but also because her sister, a grocery store cashier, has agreed to take her in.

Ginger has two pudgy kids, a gruff ex-husband (Andrew Dice Clay, no joke), a loud-mouthed mechanic boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale), and walk-up in the Mission (that no one working as a cashier could ever afford, but that’s neither here nor there). Jasmine is appalled that her life has come to this, and she has a hard time not expressing it, either in her affected Diane Sawyer accent or with her anxious frowns, or with a Stoli martini, or multiple doses of Xanax. She thinks she will be able to find her way back into the fold of the moneyed and powerful, and when she meets the perfect man (Peter Saarsgard), a diplomat with inexplicably large amounts of her money, she lies through her teeth to get him. Her denial is breathtaking, sometimes funny, but ultimately tragic.

Blue Jasmine is not the witty, literate romp of Midnight in Paris or the love-sex comedy of Vicki Christina Barcelona. Its comedy is in the nervous discomfort of class warfare, the clueless vapidity of the rich and capitalistic. It is Allen shredding New York’s myopic cruelty, both for our amusement and as guilt-free schadenfreude. We giggle, but Jasmine herself is not a comic character, and the lives both she and Ginger lead are not comic. Blanchett’s Jasmine is both reprehensible and sympathetic, while Hawkins’ Ginger is sweet, understanding, and as comfortable in her own skin and her lot in life as Jasmine is not with her own. Blanchett is so good and so flashy in her excellence that it’s easy to not notice how good Hawkins is, too. And it’s also easy not to notice how great, how sly and smart and scathing, Allen’s screenplay is. Despite Allen’s underuse of San Francisco, Blue Jasmine is yet another triumph for him. However, Blanchett is the one who will win the Oscar.

Blue Jasmine
Written and Directed by Woody Allen
Starring Cate Blanchett, Sally Hawkins, and Alex Baldwin
Rated PG-13

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Snikt!

Hugh-Jackman-Body-WolverineWhen I was reading comics as a teen-ager, I was one of the few readers who did not claim that Wolverine was his favorite member of the X-Men. I found him a somewhat shallow construction, gruff and violent, with a mostly golden heart. The adamantium-clawed, cigar-chomping Canadian seemed obvious to me, the kind of character that a marketing expert would devise for teen-aged boys. However, as he became more popular, Marvel Comics’ writers gave his back story much more depth, he was made much conflicted and complicated. And then Hugh Jackman was cast to play him in the first X-Men movie. Jackman, a terrific actor, turned Wolverine into an emotionally vulnerable, fiercely charismatic action hero.

Unfortunately, his first spin-off movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine was, to say the least, underwhelming. Despite Jackman’s charm and allure, the movie was bombastic, silly, and artless. When Marvel announced that Darren Aronofsky, who gave us the avant garde classics Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, would direct the sequel, I was thrilled. Then Aronofsky was replaced by James Mangold, and while he’s good – he directed Walk the Line and 3:10 To Yuma, which are both excellent – he is not a visual visionary like Aronofsky. Still, Mangold’s film, The Wolverine, is a great leap forward for the franchise, which has yet to reach its potential. Continue…

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Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant

fruitvale-station-michael-b-jordanAs I sat down to write my review of Fruitvale Station, hundreds of people were marching past my building, drumming, cheering, and chanting, among other things, “Justice for Trayvon.” They could have just as easily been chanting, “Justice for Oscar.” Fruitvale Station is the story of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old black man from Hayward who was killed by a white police officer while being held at a BART station in the early morning of New Year’s Day, 2009. The police officer claimed it was an accident, and he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter; both the killing and the light sentence he received led to both protests and riots in Oakland.

Continue…

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No way. Way.

The-Way-Way-Back-imageLast year, when Nat Faxon and Jim Rash accepted the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay with Alexander Payner for The Descendants, a bunch of people watching the show said, “Wait, those guys?” Faxon is a dopey-faced blond who has appeared in countless TV sitcoms and B-movies, and bald and awkward Rash plays the hapless Dean Pelton in the cult NBC comedy Community. They weren’t just hammy bit actors, it seems; they could also write. Either that, or they were just edited by the great Payne. Now that their first feature, written and directed only by them, is out and it’s clear Faxon and Rash are not accidental Oscar winners. The Way, Way Back, a coming-of-age comedy set in a summer beach town and its local water park, is one of the best movies of the year: funny, moving, a crowd-pleasing anecdote to the bombastic action films dominating the theaters this summer. Continue…

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Please, queer the movies

superman_gayb1For the last few weeks, I have been passing movie theaters advertising Before Midnight, the third in the series of talky romances starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. I’ve heard that it’s fantastic, the best of the three; and the other two are considered minor classics. But I didn’t go. I am so sick of having to wait three or four years between serviceable, let alone good, movies about gay relationships, and I am also sick of never seeing gay characters, plots, or even subplots in Hollywood features, just punch-lines or sight gags (like half the jokes in This Is the End) or blink-and-you-miss-it Easter eggs (like Catwoman’s line-less, barely there girlfriend in The Dark Knight Rises). TV has a long way to go, too, but there are rich, interesting LGBT characters everywhere on the small screen, on the networks and on cable. But Hollywood seems terrified of queerness in the movies, and I don’t know why. Continue…

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