A Single Man

Director: Tom Ford

Full disclosure: I did not know that Matthew Goode was in this movie before I went to see it. The first shot of him, mortified in an ice-ridden death, an outrageously and incongruously beautiful scene, was the first sign of how deeply staged this movie is. A field of white--two corpses, freshly blooded--the overturned car which frames the bottom of the shot (did they crawl out? But he's sprawled almost peacefully...) is covered with a thick layer of snow--yet snow only lightly speckles Goode's clothing and dark, lush hair. It was a magazine shot--free from the mechanics of the real world.

But what more does one expect from Tom Ford?

The plot of the film is based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood, set in 1962, a year Ford brilliantly captures in minutiae: the style of clock on the walls of George's university where he teaches English, the highly coiffed and painted women who totter around in tailored dresses, the architecture, and all the miscellaneous items stocked and assessed by George as he contemplates death. George's long-time lover (Charming, toothy Goode) has died, and he himself lives in limbo, with his only friend Charley (played by Julianne Moore with appropriate disarray) keeping an eye on him. A young student seems to play at double entendres with him; a wannabe model from Spain flirts with him over a cigarette.

These impetuses toward forgetting his lover are calls toward life: the visuals pointedly underlines and reunderlines this motif through flooding the screen with color, and then bleaching it away as George turns back toward self-destruction. After about the first half-hour of this, you get tired.

But you could never get tired of Colin Firth as the title character. So many years playing an idiot (see: Bridget Jones, What a Girl Wants, Mama Mia) has obscured the fact that Colin Firth has gained some mastery over his art. He imbues George with crumbled despair and gentle dignity, in the face of outside aggression from the woman who still has a yen for him and the boys who wish not-so-quietly to seduce him. The low point of the film was all the excruciating scenes between George and his brilliantly-toothed student, played by an awkward and inexpressive Nicholas Hoult, who seems to imagine that merely giving men bedroom eyes will suffice for chemistry. Ford would've served better to have cast that role carefully.

The themes of gay invisibility, rebirth/death, and the ever-imperative presence of materiality weave throughout the film, sometimes deftly (as in the broken sequencial cuts in the beginning), and sometimes heavy-handedly (as in the continual bleeds in and out of color saturation). Yet some of the scenes are brilliantly played, and the movie works. Even the ending, which some have complained to be disappointing, seemed natural to me (ever since that first shot, I'd been anticipating the last one).

Ford's attention to textures, close-ups, and little details serve him well because the material dwells so much on the materiality of human lives. Let's see if he can repeat a similar triumph in the future, knowing that he tailored and adapted Isherwood's novel to suit his needs as a director. At any rate, the film is, if not a classic, then certainly a loving work of art, like a tailored gown of watered silk, made to be felt.

Whip It!

Director: Drew Barrymore

This review will be very short.

It's fun. Nothing groundbreaking, mediocre in direction, but lots of fun. The tone is young: the movie features smart, spirited young women, and though the tropes/culture it digs into is easy to parody (beauty pageants, roller derby), at the same time it's full of love for the people who live these lives. Yes, there are tropes and one-dimensional side characters. Yes, Ellen Paige plays the same character over and over again. But hey, that's the good thing about Hollywood. You have some sense of knowing what you're getting. And the writing is strong and punchy.

This movie will give you a good time, & not even a problematic time at that, because it indulges in all western myths and tropes without bringing along poisonous cultural assumptions (like the drunk girl is a stupid slut, or the boy and girl must end up together in the end).

Watch it.

Julie & Julia

Director: Nora Ephron

I love Nora Ephron. I find her so funny. Her six word biography? "Secret to life--marry an Italian."

That being said, a lot of her movies just, lack something. I loved When Harry Met Sally (she was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay) and You've Got Mail was one of my favorite childhood movies... but everything else I've watched from her had an issue either with the ending or with the execution.

Point being... her female characters just aren't strong enough. (For one, after Harry Met Sally, she relied too much on the pixie cuteness of Meg Ryan, who didn't have quite the backbone I wanted in a female actress.) What I prefer, instead, is her optimistic outlook on lovers and relationships, exactly the thing that gives Julie & Julia the glimmer it needed to work. And it works, in a lopsided fashion.

Obviously Meryl Streep is a revelation (she always is). But her characterization of Julia Child can drop so quickly into caricature, if not for the moments of tender, real appreciation of actual food (real food, foodie food) and her husband. There was so much love between her and Stanley Tucci, who was a passable Paul Child... but perhaps a little too doting. His character could've stood up to more development. 

On the other side, the Julie side was barely worth it. Even Amy Adams could not give her more zest. She moaned and groaned and chirped and klutzed her way around, but none of it was endearing. Perhaps that was a problem in the script or the source material, as Amy Adams trades on being endearing. Occasionally there were moments where I felt for her--in the cubicle, trying to have a life beyond listening to tragic 9/11 stories--but more often Ephron does not treat her narcissistic neglect of her husband with any nuance that gave us compassion for her. Instead, I sided with the husband (played beautifully by Chris Messina), though he was also even less of a sketched out character than Paul Child. 

 At any rate, like many other reviewers before me, we would've preferred more Julia Child and less Julie. There was just more love for Julia's world--we see contemporary Julie the blogger go through "real" situations of disappointment from the weather and marital spats... but all seem filmed with a sardonic wink, a kind of relaxed boredom. 

Julie & Julia: worth watching, but only on DVD. Unless you're a foodie. 

Blood: The Last Vampire

Director: Chris Nahon

Now, I don't know any of the backstory behind Blood: The Last Vampire. I know the original was an anime film released in 2000, which got turned into manga, and now this live-action movie is the newest incarnation of the story of Saya and her kickassery. 

Our protagonist Saya is a half-demon, half-human slayer who dispatches small fry vampires on her way to the Boss demon, Onegin, the oldest and most powerful vamp who killed her father when she was an infant. Raised by her father's most loyal retainer, Kato, and taught to be an superhuman weapon, her one purpose in life is to avenge her father's death. 

For the first half of the movie she is sent into an American army base, disguised as a student, to find the vampires in the high school on the base. It becomes then a vehicle for American sensibilities--most of the movie is in English. Rather absurdly, she is called on in English class to say a few things about Adam and Lucifer in Frankenstein--a favorite text for high school movies, I should think. The only thing this scene did besides set up subsequent fight scenes is provide a chance for the line "God as irresponsible father figure" to arise. Given the question of God and destiny in this movie, and apparently in the original movie and manga, it's an interesting point, but too heavy-handed and obvious. There was no need to add a major character of a teenage American girl, especially as the chemistry between the two main characters, as female friends, was spotty at best. 

The merit of the movie, the only real reason a layperson should see it, is for some unbelievable action sequences where Conservation of Ninjitsu is used to spendid effect. Several times Saya is mobbed by (or throws herself into a mob of) "bloodsuckers" only to dispatch each quickly and elegantly. The visuals are consistently impressive--gorgeous lighting suffuses most scenes, which are held either under the black cover of night or in the golden sun. Whoever took care of the color saturation did a fantastic job. 

There are some CG sequences that I just had to swallow my skepticism for: particularly when the bloodsuckers showed their true demon forms, and looked like nothing so much as, well, what they were: badly rendered CG monsters. One scene involving a truck and batlike wings reminded me of a similar scene in Underworld: Evolution, and it's never good when an action movie reminds you of another action movie's derivative sequel. Likewise, the trite and obvious ending was handled unevenly (stunningly gorgeous visuals, stunningly gagworthy dialogue). Blood didn't cut any new ground here, but rehashed old themes over again. 

Still, ignore the senseless plot jumps, silly ending, and over-Americanized scenes involving the teenage daughter, and you have some fantastic entertainment fodder. I'd have to agree with my companion, who during a sequence when Saya lops off vampiric limbs, mutter/hissed, "This is so much better than Transformers!" 

Possession, A Romance

A.S. Byatt

It seems appropriate to begin my culture-blog with a review of Possession, which won the 1990 Booker Prize.

The plot is simple: Roland Michell, mediocre scholar, stumbles across an earthshaking literary find in the library--two drafts of a letter written by a long-dead, eminent Victorian poet, R.H. Ash, addressed to a woman he'd encountered at a social gathering whose eloquence compelled him. Michell then embarks on an academic search, discovering that this woman is an obscure poet of the same period, Christabel LaMotte. Together with chilly Maud Bailey, brilliant LaMotte scholar, they uncover more obscured information about the two poets that threatens to change the face of literary scholarship. 

What's fascinating about this novel is not its plot, which is relatively straightforward and rather predates some of the more contemporary novels which are structured as thrillers situated half in the current-day and half-in history. But Possession is not in any way a thriller. The most thrilling thing about it is Byatt's lush, Victorian use of language. 

Moreover, the characters are caricatures--intricate caricatures, but nonetheless lifeless. Michell is the classic passive underachiever, while Bailey is an ice queen whose continual source of angst is the inability of society to reconcile her physical beauty and her exemplary mind. The side characters are scholars, mostly, people enamored of the past and of language. Val, Michell's passive aggressive girlfriend, feels keenly her own sense of erasure and lack of self-worth. Her introduction is some of Byatt's most perceptive writing. Her female characters are the most developed, while her male characters remain mostly prone on the page, driven single-mindedly by one or two motivations. 

The title recalls "Romance" not only in the sense that this is a love story, but "Romance" in the generic sense of epic, legendary quests. LaMotte and Ash are enamored of archetypes--their poetry tastes alternately of the Romantic era (I was reminded of Keats' Lamia quite often) as well as American Transcendentalism (LaMotte's style bears heavy resemblences to Dickinson's poetry). 

Most marvelous is Possession's density. LaMotte and Ash are fictional poets, and yet Byatt inhabits their voices delicately, with precise differentiation between their mindsets and writing styles. She has literally pages of their poetry incorporated into her novel, as well as pages from the diaries of Ash's wife and LaMotte's companion. But it belies a significant weakness--in the novel's density, the pace of the story drags, and plot points seem too obvious... we are never surprised by the plot, but by the writing. It is literature to be pried into and savored, packed with nuance and graceful turns of phrase, but that pace may not suit everyone.