Forest Whitaker Gump

the-butler-oprah-winfrey_612x380One of the problems with starting a movie with the words “Inspired by a true story” written on the screen is that most people will focus on “true story” and not on “inspired by.” That phrase opens Lee Daniels’ The Butler — which I will refer to as The Butler from now on both because the stupid copyright fight that forced Daniels’s name onto the film is stupid and also because the editor in me is appalled that they used Daniels’ and not Daniels’s – and it began to bother me about ten minutes into the film, when the first series of utterly absurd plot developments occurred: In 1926, on a cotton farm in Georgia, the boy who will become the butler for six presidents watches his mother (randomly Mariah Carey) dragged into a shed where she’s raped and then his father shot in the head for protesting. In some vague form of sympathy, but not guilt, the murderer’s grandmother (randomly Vanessa Redgrave) tells the boy to stop crying before informing him she’s going to teach him how to become a “house nigger.”

And I muttered in my seat, “Really? All in one hour?” Obviously, this could have happened; worse has and will happen. But it strained credibility for me. As it should have. Despite the word “true,” and the publicity story that the film is actually about the black butler who served six presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan, almost nothing in the film is true, except that a black butler served six presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan. The real man, Eugene Allen, must not have had as interesting a life as his work history might indicate, so Lee Daniels and his screenwriter Danny Strong have turned him in Cecil Gaines, who is basically the black Forrest Gump, witnessing just about every single event of the Civil Rights Movement. Unlike Forrest Gump, however, The Butler is not meant to be a fable, nor is it well directed and certainly not well written. The Butler is a nicely acted and enormously earnest movie about civil rights, honor, duty, and the value of hard work. It’s also obvious, bombastic, and, occasionally, unintentionally funny. Continue…

|    

A lady of the canyons

The-Canyons-Lindsay-Lohan-James-Deen3To say the least, it’s rare that a movie with a budget of $250,000 becomes the subject of a 7,600 words article in The New York Times Magazine. It makes a little more sense, when you know that The Canyons was directed by Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and directed American Gigolo and Affliction. More sense when you know the movie, a psychological sex thriller about LA bottom feeders, was written by Bret Easton Ellis, the gay novelist who gave us Less Than Zero and the infamous American Psycho and whose obnoxious Twitter feed sends many people into fits of rage. And they cast the troubled and troubling Lindsay Lohan and the porn superstar James Deen as their leads. Among the unsurprising revelations was that Lohan was incredibly difficult to work with; among the surprising was Schrader directed a sex scene in the nude to convince her to do the scene without clothes. When the movie was finally released in a handful of theaters and on demand, critics arrived with freshly sharpened knives. Many of the reviews have been savage, even cruel, while a few reviewers, like Variety’s Scott Foundas, gave both Lohan and the film raves. I don’t think it deserves either derision or too much applause. It’s beautifully shot, Lohan is good, but Deen isn’t, and Ellis’s screenplay is limp, lacking insight or taste. Continue…

|     

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

|    

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…

|    

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…

|