Friday, August 28, 2009
Don't eat the brown acid
Soulful, but not powerful
Who says the movies haven’t changed for the better?
Empirical evidence proves that movie audiences over the years do not want either of these things. No one ever talks about how memorable are the behind-the-scenes sections of “Woodstock” or “Gimme Shelter.”
The raw footage of “Soul Power” was shot 35 years ago, leaving the filmmakers with an implicit question: Should they edit it the way they would now, or should they respect the era and make it like it would have been in 1974?
Alas, they made the wrong decision.
The first half-hour of “Soul Power” is devoted exclusively to the nuts and bolts of putting together a large music festival. We see the stage builders build the stage and the sound-and-lights guy rigging the sound and lights. We see the producer having trouble hearing his walkie talkie.
Walkie-talkie problems from 35 years ago is never the most fascinating of topics. But if you can sit through all of that, at least there is some pretty great music on the other side.
The film is a document of a 1974 music festival in Kinshasa, the capital of what was then called Zaire. The festival was apparently the first time black American music stars came en masse to Africa to play alongside African performers, and much of the film is devoted to the performers congratulating themselves on the historical moment of it all. The history seems only slightly more meaningful now than the walkie-talkie problems, but the performers were certainly feeling it at the time.
And what performers they were: James Brown is featured most prominently, and if you’ve never seen him in his prime it might be worth the price of admission alone to see his three songs. B.B. King performs “The Thrill is Gone,” a song I personally believe is impossible to hear too many times.
The Spinners turn out their smooth-as-silk synchronized dancing for “One of a Kind (Love Affair)” and Bill Withers sings a powerhouse version of “Hope She’ll Be Happier,” which is unappreciated by the African crowd that is more attuned to rhythm. Unknown to me, at least, is a spectacular funk band, The Crusaders (they later had a modest hit with the familiar “Street Life”). And Celia Cruz is, as always, an irrepressible force for salsa.
For some American audiences, the African performers will be revelatory, from the godmother of African music, Miriam Makeba, singing “The Click Song” to the complex rhythms of OK Jazz, featuring Franco, and Tabu Rey and Afrisa (though one of their dancers probably should have thought about wearing underwear).
As impressive as the music is, though, it makes up no more than half of the film. Even the festival scenes are interspersed with shots of street performers (the idea is to show a connection between grass-roots African music and American superstars) or posters of scary dictator Sese Seko Mobutu.
And the still-young Muhammad Ali gets more than his share of camera time to espouse his racial politics and crowd-pleasing egotism. Ali is part of the film because the festival was originally scheduled to be part of the festivities surrounding his boxing match with George Foreman, the Rumble in the Jungle. The fight was delayed when Foreman was injured, but the music went on as scheduled.
A brilliant documentary was made about the fight, “When We Were Kings.” “Soul Power” is meant as a companion piece to that film, but it is not in the same league. The music is great, but too much of the movie isn’t music.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Mute, inglorious bastards
Monday, August 17, 2009
Post Grad, and definitely post-"The Graduate"
Without Simon & Garfunkel. Without “plastics.”
It’s like “The Graduate,” without “The Graduate.”
At the filmmakers were ambitious. They didn’t just stick with one movie. It’s also like “Little Miss Sunshine.”
The difference is that “The Graduate” and “Little Miss Sunshine” were funny. And, you know, good.
A comedy presumably aimed at teenage girls, “Post Grad” tells the story of Ryden Malby, who graduates from a tiny college (we only see a couple of dozen students at graduation) and is ready to take on the world. So convinced is she that she will be hired as an editor at a big publishing house that she rents an expensive loft in downtown L.A. But, obviously, she doesn’t get the job. Perhaps the publishers see, as we do if we look quickly enough, that her diploma says she has a bachelor of science in English. Bachelor of science. I wouldn’t hire her, either.
A couple of months later, she still doesn’t have a job, even though “I thought I’d be doing something amazing by now.” It’s kind of hard to sympathize with someone who thinks in those terms.
While not looking for jobs, Ryden spends her time ignoring the guy who loves her and occasionally pursuing the studly middle-aged Brazilian who lives across the street, except when she (and we) forget about him. And in a completely unrelated part of the film, she hangs out with her quirky family.
Oh, are they quirky! They’re professionally quirky. They’re strenuously quirky. And they’re played by such quirky actors as Michael Keaton (in the Greg Kinnear role, although he’s mostly riffing on the character he played in “Night Shift”), Jane Lynch (in the Toni Collette role) and Carol Burnett in a ghastly wig (in the Alan Arkin role).
The part of Ryden falls to the moderately appealing Alexis Bledel, who has spectacular blue eyes and a lot of freckles and spectacular blue eyes. You could spend the whole movie looking at those blue eyes, and we do, partly because director Vicky Jenson spends so much time focusing on them and partly because there is nothing else to watch.
Bledel talks quickly and animatedly to get across the idea that Ryden has spunk. Lots and lots of spunk. And in the immortal words of Lou Grant, I hate spunk.
Kelly Fremon’s humorless script is utterly formulaic and is not above looking to other movies for its jokes. And those are the best of the mediocre jokes. Too many of the worst ones involve Michael Keaton stepping in cat poop.
Leaving the theater, we kind of know how he feels.
Friday, August 14, 2009
'Time-Travel' -- honeyed and romantic
http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=297:time-travelers-wife&catid=74movie-reviews.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
'O'Horten' -- Shhhh!
“O’Horten” is a quiet film about a quiet man, filmed with quiet humor. In its entire length, there is not one single big explosion.
Ordinarily, that is to be desired. But this Norwegian export proves, for most of its length, that it is possible to be too quiet.
Bard Owe stars as a newly retired train engineer who discovers, at age 67, that it is never too late to start living. And that moment is uplifting and moving and sweet -- when it finally comes. It just takes too long to get there; or rather, too little happens before it does.
Owe stars as Odd Horten. Odd may be a perfectly normal Norwegian name, but its English meaning is not entirely inappropriate for him. He lives a life almost unnoticed, leaving his modest flat only to go out for a quiet (of course) beer, to visit his invalid mother and to drive a train from Bergen to Oslo, and then from Oslo back to Bergen.
His mother, we learn, was in her youth a ski jumper. But Odd would never do anything that dangerous, that out of the ordinary. He is a simple man with simple tastes; his chief (and possibly only) joy is his pipe.
As the film begins, Odd is about to retire. Shy and self-effacing, he is not looking forward to the inevitable retirement party (“Odd does not enjoy the limelight,” says the host), with its tributes and its humorously bizarre, train-related rituals.
Most of the rest of the movie shows Odd continuing not to enjoy life, but becoming increasingly aware that things are happening around him -- an unexpected arrest, a couple of young lovers finding what they think is privacy, a man trying to dodge a dinner party with his wife.
It is a chance encounter with a diplomat played by Espen Skjonberg that changes him, and it is certainly welcome when it comes. Too much of the rest of the film centers on such breathless questions as whether or not he will sell his boat. Not why he is thinking of selling it, just whether he will.
Owe is fine as Odd, a man in whom still waters run…still. He can’t be captivating, though, because there is so little of him. We have the sense that Odd isn’t a man who sits and thinks, he’s just a man who sits.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. It’s just a little quiet.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
'District 9' -- aliens, gore and apartheid
If it’s true that there are only six basic stories to tell, “District 9” manages to combine its familiar elements in marvelously inventive ways.
What starts out as a straightforward analogy of apartheid turns into an alien horror interspecies buddy-film action-picture mockumentary, with a Transformer.
It’s been weeks since we’ve had one of those.
A giant spaceship hovers inert and ominous over Johannesburg. Its inhabitants, more than a million of them, are malnourished and listless; they are taken down to earth and housed in a temporary camp. This temporary camp becomes a permanent slum larger than most big cities, where the aliens live in crime-ridden squalor.
The giant corporation that runs South Africa (the film is set in 2010) decides that everyone would be happier -- the humans, at least -- if the shrimplike aliens were moved to an even worse place a couple of hundred miles away to do it.
The person they put in charge of the evictions, Wikus is the wrong man for the job. He’s weak, he’s ineffectual and he has the sometimes cruel hubris assumed by people who are certain they are of a superior race. His evictions lead to harassment, bullying and more killings than are strictly necessary.
But as played by the strikingly effective newcomer Sharlto Copley, Wikus changes. The more he learns about the humans’ treatment of the shrimp-like aliens (they’re derogatorily called “prawns”), the more sympathy he has for them. The evil corporation is especially interested in the prawns’ powerful weapons, which can only be fired by prawns.
The quasi-governmental corporation turns out to be the second largest producer of arms in the world, and is willing to go to great and greatly evil lengths to master the alien technology.
Director and co-writer Neil Blomkamp has given a great deal of thought to his premise -- it’s based on a six-minute short he made a few years ago -- and his filmmaking technique. The documentary style, featuring interviews with experts, each with his own agenda, is a hugely efficient way to present complicated exposition. Most of Blomkamp’s previous work has been in visual effects, which helps make the computer-generated imagery in this film shine, from the misty, looming spaceship to the precise, fluid movement of the aliens (except when they jump).
The film isn’t always easy to watch; it has a super-high ick factor. It has blood galore, and gore, and that thing, first seen in “Private Ryan,” where exploding bodies turn to red splashes of plasma. Even though it is well done, the violence becomes repetitive, and because of this the film goes on about 10 minutes too long.
But that’s a minor quibble. With “District 9,“ even though you’ve seen it all before, you’ve never seen anything like it.