Yet another teen-ager saving the world

Divergent-Tattoos

The similarities between The Divergent Trilogy and The Hunger Games trilogy are impossible to ignore, so let’s get them out of the way. Both are about preternaturally capable teen-aged girls who help lead rebellions in dystopian futures, and both have been turned into big budget tent-pole movies with starry casts and critics-anointed leads. The Hunger Games has Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence playing warrior and heroic symbol Katniss Everdeen, while Golden Globe-nominee Shailene Woodley plays Tris, a brilliant and brave girl who diverges from the strict eugenic caste system, in Divergent. In both, there’s romance with a hunky fellow, a heaping dose of political intrigue, and some cool technology on which a lot of the plot points hinge. Both have training montages, big action scenes, lamentable deaths of good people, and some nasty villains. The Hunger Games books have a more complex and believable mythology, however, and both of the movies are better than Divergent is – which is not to say that I wasn’t entertained.

In the world of Divergent, everyone who has survived a horrible, global war now lives in Chicago, which is surrounded by a massive wall and where the population has been divided into five factions: Abnegation, who are selfless civil servants; Amity, who the peaceful, hippy famers; Candor, who are honest lawyers; Dauntless, who are the brave soldiers and police officers; and Erudite, who are the scholars and intellectuals. At age 16, you are given a hallucinogenic aptitude test that tells you which faction you should join, and 95% end up in the faction of their parents, either because the test told them so or they choose to remain. But you must join a faction; the Factionless become homeless and live on the street. There are those for whom the test doesn’t work. They show abilities and behaviors that indicate multiple factions. They are “divergent,” and their existence threatens social order. Usually, once they are discovered, they’re killed.

Beatrice (Woodley) was born into Abnegation, of which her father (Tony Goldwyn) is a leader and her mother (Ashley Judd) a dutiful supporter. When Beatrice and her brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) go for their test, the tester (Maggie Q) nervously tells Beatrice she is divergent but must never tell anyone. At the choosing ceremony, everyone expects Beatrice and her brother to go to Abnegation, but she chooses Dauntless and her brother goes to Erudite, which is run by a coldly scheming Jeanine (Kate Winslet). Beatrice leaves with the others from Dauntless, who like to run everywhere, climb things, and jump without knowing if they’ll survive. She renames herself Tris, befriends other initiates (including Zoe Kravitz as Cristina), and while training, makes an enemy of her dastardly trainer Eric (Jai Courtney) while falling in love with her other trainer, the serious and smoldering Four (Theo James). Meanwhile, Jeanine is up to something, conspiring with Dauntless’s leaders to overthrow Abnegation’s rule.

Woodley is a spectacularly gifted actress (if not as charismatic as Jennifer Lawrence) and she makes the movie better than it should be. Her chemistry with James is the best thing in the film, and her righteous indignation and almost foolish courage are great propellers of the mostly character driven plot. Nevertheless, despite showing great talent in other movies and TV shows, Judd, Goldwyn, Kravitz, Q, and Courtney give off little heat. And Winslet, one of the world’s great actresses, says evil things but just doesn’t have the temperament to chew the scenery the way a sci-fi villain needs to. Most of the faults in the film are in overly schematic story, but director Neil Burger provides little urgency and even less grit. In the moment of Tris’s greatest tragedy, I was impressed with Woodley, but I didn’t feel the emotions I was supposed to feel. The film keeps your attention and has enjoyable, if clichéd, scenes and sequences. But you may forget about it after you leave the theater.

Divergent
Directed by Neil Burger
Written by Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor
Starring Shailene Woodley, Theo James, and Kate Winslet
Rated PG-13

 

|       

Nostalgia and intrigue at the Grand Budapest Hotel

I struggled to start writing this review because I wanted to communicate as powerfully, as effectively as possible how much I loved Wes Anderson’s eighth feature film The Grand Budapest Hotel. Luckily, I don’t have the same degree of difficulty when I write a review as Wes Anderson has when he makes a movie. He can’t start with a character – or himself – saying, “I am making a bittersweet comedy about love and honor.” However, Anderson does do something similar: He begins in the near present day with a writer (Tom Wilkinson) describing how he found the story he’s about to tell. It’s a common misperception, he tells us, that writers are constantly creating new characters, new scenes, new plots. Rather, when you become a writer of some note, people tell you their stories.

Suddenly, it’s 1965, and the writer is now played by Jude Law, and he’s spending a vacation in the Grand Budapest Hotel, a once sparkling and ornate playground of the rich and famous of the fictional nation of Zubrowka in Eastern Europe, now a mostly deserted, very Sovietly decorated shell of its former self. It is there, while soaking in the dilapidated baths, where he meets to hotel’s mysterious, aging owner, Mr. Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), who proceeds to tell the writer over dinner how he came to own the hotel, and we’re transported back to 1932.

The hotel is now in its heyday, packed with suited dignitaries and their bejeweled wives, and the regimented staff is legion; over all of it presides the hotel’s slightly foppish and nearly over-competent concierge M. Gustave, played by a miraculous, David Niven-inspired Ralph Fiennes. Gustave is not only devoted to his hotel, but also to the numerous lonely older women who frequent it, and his favorite is Madame Desgoffe-und-Taxis (Tilda Swinton), an 84-year-old countess who adores Gustave. As she leaves the hotel, she is convinced she will never return, and Gustave assures her she will. She asks him to light a candle at the nearby cathedral, and after she leaves, he tells the closest lobby boy to do it.

This boy is Zero (Tony Revolori), who has just started work at the hotel. Gustave takes the boy under his wing, training him like a stern, loving uncle. When the countess dies, Zero accompanies Gustave to the reading of the will, when it turns out Gustave will inherit a priceless paining, Boy With Apple. The countess’s dastardly son Dmitri (Adrian Brody) is livid, demands that this never happen, but with Zero’s encouragement and help, Gustave steals the painting and returns to the hotel.

Dmitri decides to frame Gustave for the countess’s murder, and the rest of the film follows Gustave through prison, escape, and, as he and Zero try to clear Gustave’s name, travels around Zubrowka, chased by the army and its leader Henckels (Ed Norton) as well as Dmitri’s violent stooge Jopling (Willem Dafoe). Along the way, they’re helped by numerous minor characters including Zero’s girlfriend (Saoirse Ronan), Gustave’s cellmates (including one played by Harvey Keitel), the countess’s butler (Mathieu Amalric), and a network of concierges (Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, and Bob Balaban). As with every Anderson character, the actors are directed to such mannered behaviors as to be almost abstracted; they archly speak as if they have hopped out of a Roald Dahl or JD Salinger story, and they move like gorgeously drawn cartoon characters, sharply and exaggerated, influenced by slapstick and mime.

The result is the opposite of natural or subtle, but Anderson’s direction, of actors and art and photography, communicates the themes and emotions – the sadness of nostalgia and growing up, the power of loyalty and courage – with something approaching grace. It’s hard to say whether The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson’s best movie, but it may be his first truly adult film, despite it being, at its heart, about a teen-aged boy.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Written and Directed by Wes Anderson
Starring Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, F. Murray Abraham
Inexplicably rated R

|    

Oh, Stritchy

MCDELST EC003

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

|      

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

|       

The lava bomb of Pompeii

pompeii-movie-poster-2

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

|