Experiments fail

The-place-beyond-the-pinesI miss the days when movies occasionally had long weird names like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?and To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar. The long name certainly didn’t indicate excellence, but rather a quirky nature; this was not meant to be a mainstream movie.

Those usually have short names that are easy to remember, like Gladiator and The Notebook and Lincoln. The differentiation isn’t always true, but when you see a title like The Place Beyond the Pines nowadays, you know it’s going to be artsy. And I like artsy, and I like weird, and I like experimental. But the thing about experimental movies is that experiments are done to see if something works. The Place Beyond the Pines, despite writer-director Derek Cianfrance’s Herculean efforts at creating country noir and Ryan Gosling’s smolder, doesn’t work. Continue…

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I feel dirty now

springbreakers_02I saw Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine’s perverse exploitation art film, with five bears and a couple hundred teen-agers who thought they were seeing a Tarentino-fied Where the Boys Are. That said, I doubt any of those kids have ever heard of Where the Boys Are, the 1960 film starring George Hamilton and Yvette Mimieux, but they definitely know the genre: college girls go to Florida on spring break and hilarity ensues. It’s not the kids’ fault they were wrong. The trailer for Spring Breakers makes it seem to exist in that somewhat beloved genre, just with added guns and a sleazy white rapper played by James Franco. The gays I went to see Spring Breakers with knew that they were going to see something else; we knew that Harmony Korine wrote Kids and wrote and directed Gummo, two of the most perversely exploitative art films of the 1990s. We were actually hoping to be horrified by the wrongness of the movie, and the kids in theater were simply surprised by how horrifying, pornographic, disturbing, and weirdly funny Spring Breakers is. To say that the movie is bad is true, but that’s too straightforward. It’s too effective – too deliberately funny, titillating, and discomfiting – to be just be bad. It’s also a little bit brilliant. Continue…

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Yeah, they’re crude. Get it?

the-croods-post1The night before the screening of The Croods, the marvelous animated film about a caveman family overcoming their fear of the world, a friend of mine said, “It’s just going to be a bunch of old jokes stolen from The Flintstones.” I can definitely understand that fear, and I don’t think I could be paid to watch an episode of that show or, shudder, either of the live action films from the 1990s. But the only similarities between The Flintstones and The Croods are the cavemen and a few, small jokes about paleo versions of contemporary appliances. Unlike The Flintstones, which is about a very typical mid-century modern family that happens to live in the Stone Age, The Croods is actually about cavemen: They live in a cave, they’re always hungry, and they’re terrified of everything. Continue…

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Yossi, without Jagger

Oz Zehavi and Ohad Knoller in YOSSI 2In 2002, Eytan Fox gave the world Yossi & Jagger, a beautiful, sexy, and deeply moving love story about two Israeli soldiers; it was the Hebrew Brokeback Mountain, and it came out four years before Ang Lee’s now-classic. Ten years later, Fox decided to do something usually only seen on fan fiction sites. He made a sequel. And like Ryan’s Story, the ill-advised follow-up to the classic Love Story, Yossi was a bad idea, coasting on the memory and good will of the much better, much more powerful previous film. Yossi, which follows one-half of the couple a decade later as he tries to break free of his broken, cloistered heart is not actually bad. As the titular character, Ohad Knoller, who has become somewhat of a bear, is too mopey, but when he lets himself feel again, it’s hard not to be moved. As his new love interest, a young, extroverted, and very out solider named Tom, Oz Zehavi is no Yehuda Levi, who played Jagger, but Zehavi is magnetic and eager, the perfect antidote to Yossi’s depression. Fox has made better movies, but the sensitivity and subtlety of his direction makes this small, slight movie surprisingly rich.

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