LOTS of Drinking: Part Two

I'm not sure if I can actually be smart about why I liked The Spectacular Now as much as I did, but I am going to try.

The Spectacular Now is a rather simple drama on the face of it. High-school kid Sutter is a fun-loving guy who spends most of his time drinking, partying, and cruising around town in his car instead of focusing on his future or spending time with his family accidentally wakes up on someone else's lawn after an evening of blackout-level drinking. This isn't a drama about alcoholism, so it's not like he has a rude awakening or anything, instead Sutter wakes up to the face of the relatively plain and unassuming Aimee Finecky.

They start hanging out, and since Sutter and his cute/hot girlfriend of two years have recently broken up, Sutter spends more time with Aimee. No one has ever really taken any notice of her, and she falls for Tucker hard. The whole thing is very sweet in a non-cloying, non-clichéd, non-She's-All-That kind of way.

This is a movie about high-school-age young people, so this is a coming-of-age story and a story about taking responsibility, saying no to the other adults in one's life so that one can become one's own adult. Like every film about high school, The Spectacular Now is also filled with awkward, silly decisions made by people who think they know a great deal about the world, but in fact know just as little as the rest of us.

What makes James Ponsoldt's film excellent, though, is the way that it manages to eschew most of the usual clichés of this genre, the way it demonstrates just how much fun Sutter is, and the way the director deftly follows Sutter's alcoholism in a way that allows it to make sense (there were times when I thought I wish he wouldn't drink so much, but... he's so fun when he's drinking. Oh, who cares: let him drink! I want him to keep being fun.)

Mr. Teller

And then there are the performances. Shailene Woodley, who was this close to scoring an Oscar nomination for her role in The Descendants a couple years ago is awkward and lovely: it's a gorgeously natural performance. And Miles Teller, who was the teenager who accidentally killed Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart's kid in Rabbit Hole, is unbelievably good. I found his performance to be absolutely revelatory. He is just incredible: naturally buoyant and fun, he lifts every scene with his impeccable timing, his easy flow from line to line, his beautiful way of giving away his feelings while appearing to attempt to hide everything. We understand Sutter through and through, and even though he makes mistake after mistake, treats his girlfriend like a total asshole, has a serious drinking problem, and can't figure out how to be anything resembling polite to his mother, I loved this boy. Teller is just excellent.

In any case, The Spectacular Now is just a movie about high-schoolers figuring out the world. It's not groundbreaking or life-changing, but I found it deeply moving. And in this time where most filmic ways of looking at characters are ironic or cynical or even smug, The Spectacular Now looks at its troubled central character with humanity and deep affection. I don't see that very often at the movies, and when I do, I am glad of it.

Troubled Women

This is going to be three movie reviews in one, and the films struck me as similar in some ways because of their troubled lead female characters.

I'll start with the least interesting first. Another Earth is the story of a young woman who makes a very bad decision and kills two people. She then proceeds to make many more bad decisions over the course of Another Earth's running time. Another Earth is also about this planet that is a second Earth that is somehow (this is unexplained in the film as far as I can tell) orbiting near the Earth's own orbit. The sci-fi stuff is somewhat intriguing, and also very much a retread of the grief-fantasy that forms the title of John Cameron Mitchell's film Rabbit Hole. In any case, the sci-fi stuff is not really a part of the plot hardly at all. In reality Another Earth is a two-person melodrama with the backdrop of this enormous scientific/space breakthrough that is (eventually) unrelated to the film's dramatics. There is a lot with which one could be annoyed with in this film, but I found its star Brit Marling interesting and didn't mind the movie too much.

Melancholia, Lars Von Trier's new film, also involves a planet moving toward the Earth, although this time the planet will actually crash into the Earth and (probably) destroy it. In a way, Melancholia's science fiction also takes a backseat to the film's real dramatics, but Von Trier is much, much better at personal wounds and melodrama, and Melancholia is always interesting, even when one is irritated with the film's main characters or frustrated with their private pain. One of the things I love about Melancholia is that I didn't quite understand a lot of it. I really like that. The film is deliberately obtuse at times, and there is much that feels very fleshed out for the actors and director, but which was lost on me. Fine. In a way, it seems to me that this is how sadness/grief/melancholia works, i.e. that there is much that outsiders simply cannot comprehend; there are things that don't translate, that sound trivial or stupid when put into language. (Also, I love that we are allowed to use the word melancholia here instead of the more medicalized depression.)

Melancholia also ends up being about that planet crashing into the Earth. I am not sure what all of that is supposed to mean or do, but I found it compelling. I do have a big gripe with this film, though, and that's that the soundtrack consists chiefly of the same seven-minute (or so) sequence from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Now, I don't remember the plot of T&I very well, but I don't and didn't need to know the plot to be distracted by the music, which recurs more than five times throughout. And whenever it did I was thinking What does this have to do with Tristan and Isolde? Is there going to be a suicide for love here? The film is so fundamentally not about love, that I found this music choice very confusing.

Last one, and I think I liked this one the best of the three. Martha Marcy May Marlene is about a young woman who becomes quite disturbed after living with a cult in upstate New York for two years or so. Her cult experience is disturbing, but the film also asks if what we see onscreen is real. Is this woman disturbed because of what happened to her or are we seeing what we see because she is disturbed. The film does this in a very clever way, and the storytelling here is excellent. The whole thing is interesting from the start, and Elizabeth Olsen, who plays the main character (Martha Marcy May Marlene) is superb.

Hugh Dancy and John Hawkes are also great (Hawkes is doing his usual creepy-man thing to terrific effect), but the whole ensemble is scary and very interesting. This is a psychological thriller, I guess, and it's a film that uses the (now tired) convention of questioning whether what we're watching is real in new and very smart ways. And the end of the film is perfect, asking us to rethink several other key scenes. It's a superb ending that makes this fairly good film a much better one because of its superb ending. I left the theatre a little shaken, and I have to say I've thought about this film many times since. It's stuck with me.

How to Move Forward

I am not completely sure what I was expecting from Rabbit Hole. But whatever it was, John Cameron Mitchell's film was nothing like what I expected it to be.

I have never been a fan of David Lindsay-Abaire's play Rabbit Hole (though I have loved his other stuff). And I was irritated when it won the Pulitzer Prize (that committee, it seems, has no idea what it is doing). The play felt too simple to me, too interested in itself, too preachy.
  
I should have known JCM would craft something with a totally different tone when he went to make the movie. Rabbit Hole feels like something of a departure for him after his first too films, Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus (both of which are genius).

The film of Rabbit Hole is pitch perfect. There is, quite honestly, not a false note in the whole thing, and the performances are really wonderful. Nicole Kidman and Dianne Weist and Aaron Eckhart and Miles Teller are simply lovely. And we grow to understand these people; the medium of film allows their grief to seep into the audience more slowly, so that when they do the things they do and say the things they say it all makes a sort of sense—a sense that felt to me almost like a memory.

This is all coming across in a rather incoherent manner. The movie is very sad—at one point I stopped hearing what was happening in the movie because I was crying too much—so I am not actually going to recommend Rabbit Hole to anyone. I found it very moving, and it closes with a perfect prescription for a way to keep going after tragedy.

2011's Nominees: Part 6 of 12

BLUE VALENTINE

1 Nomination:

  · Best Actress: Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain)

Director: Derek Cianfrance
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Williams, Faith Wladkya, John Doman, Mike Vogel, Carey Westbrook, Ben Shenkman

 
I liked this movie, I think, and both of the girls I saw it with liked it a lot. It is well made and emotionally affecting, sure, but... well. This is what I'll say about it: I wanted to root for their relationship, and because of the Cianfrance's management of time in the film, we all know that their marriage is not working out from the very beginning of the movie. This made it difficult for me to cheer their relationship on. I think this makes sense; I wasn't able to emotionally commit to their relationship because I was already aware that it wasn't going to end like Valentine's Day, and so – I think because of my own self-protective instincts – I didn't. The acting is great all around, and, as I said, the filmmaking is excellent.

Will Win: N/A
Might Win: N/A
My Rating: #27 out of 45

RABBIT HOLE

1 Nomination:

  · Best Actress: Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge!, The Hours)

Director: John Cameron Mitchell
Cast: Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Miles Teller, Dianne Wiest, Sandra Oh, Jon Tenney, Giancarlo Esposito

 
I am a little surprised that Kidman made this cut. I feel like this doesn't usually happen when the actor in question already has an Oscar and the Academy doesn't really like the film. I was not planning on seeing this movie, I have to admit, just because I find the Tony- and Pulitzer-prize- winning play on which it is based a little... well... boring. On the other hand, the film is by John Cameron Mitchell, who has only ever directed excellent films. There are two: Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus. Both are genius.

Will Win: N/A
Might Win: N/A
My Rating: Not Yet Rated

THE TOWN

1 Nomination:

  · Best Supporting Actor: Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)

Director: Ben Affleck
Cast: Affleck, Renner, Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Blake Lively, Slaine, Pete Postlethwaite,Chris Cooper.

 
I really liked this film – I remember being only so-so on Affleck's last film. In this one, the acting is excellent, and the script is rather surprising, but the best thing is the tension in it. There are two very well made car chases (see Salt for how to make a boring one) and three separate heist sequences. If I want anything out of a heist movie it's more heists and more car chases. Bring them on. Also, they wear nun masks to one of the bank robberies. That shit is scary. I highly recommend this; it is one of my favorites for the year.
 
Will Win: N/A
Might Win: N/A
My Rating: #12 out of 45

Wertenbaker and Two Films from Last Year

I read two more plays by Timberlake Wertenbaker today. The book (Plays One) includes five plays total:
New Anatomies is a really cool piece about a Swiss woman from history who dressed as an Arab man during the French occupation of Algeria. The cast is made up entirely of women, each of whom plays a Western man, a Western woman and an Arab man in the play. It's (obviously) about gender, but also about obsession and journeying. It's very cool.
The Grace of Mary Traverse is also about a journey and about womanhood. But this play is mostly about class in England. It's set in 1870 and it's a powerful play, filled with fascinating characters. Rather in the vein of Stephen Jeffreys' The Clink (if I remember that play correctly) and Naomi Wallace's One Flea Spare. It's brutal and messy and very interesting.
Our Country's Good is the most famous play in the book, and rightly so. I don't think I've ever read this play without crying. It's powerful and beautiful, and my undergrad (bless them) did it this Fall, though I didn't get to see it.
The Love of the Nightingale is a re-telling of the myth of Philomele, who has her tongue cut out by her brother-in-law after he rapes her. The play is quite beautiful, but perhaps I am becoming bored with adaptations of our old Greek myths, at least the ones that are set in Ancient Greece. I could direct the Hell out of this play, but it doesn't say quite as much as I would like it to.
The last play in the book is Three Birds Alighting on a Field, which I finished this afternoon. It's about the art world. High art, expensive art, selling out. I was kinda bored. It's not a subject that interests me much, though as we all know I am as susceptible to wanting to be fashionable as the next snob over. Thing is, nothing happens in this play. There's just a lot of, well, talk.

But I watched two movies yesterday that I want to talk about. Both of them were released in this country last year, and both are excellent. So:

Three Times is a film by Tiawanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien. It is really three separate films, each set in a different time period, but all three surrounding a couple played by Chang Chen and Shu Qi. The first segment "A Time for Love" was my favorite. Set in 1966, it follows a pair of very shy lovers as they meet and slowly fall in love. It's extremely cute and I found it touching without being sentimental. They're so awkward and adorable and they need each other so much! The second segment "A Time for Freedom" is set in 1911 and surrounds Taiwan and its independence from Japan. This segment is set entirely in the interior of a kind of hotel. The couple barely speaks to one another, so much so that this entire segment is a silent film, with the dialogue displayed on title cards. It's an intriguing device and the film is subtle and everything internalized, like a Merchant-Ivory film without dialogue. The third segment "A Time for Youth" is set in 2005 and concerns a triangle of characters, who interact with one another through technology. It's interesting, but the characters are rather hapless and it's not as stylistically cool as the first two segments. But I liked the film very much and moved it onto my top 25 for last year.

Shortbus is the latest film from Hedwig and the Angry Inch creator John Cameron Mitchell. Shortbus, which is unrated due to its sexually explicit conduct, is a fabulous film. It's about sex and New Yorkers and deep, difficult sadness. This movie is the best sexually explicit movie I've ever seen, and the sex is important. It's interesting. The people in Shortbus talk about sex and have sex and it looks real in the movie. They laugh and do silly things while having sex, and they talk and stop and start again. It's all so believable. The story concerns a bunch of New Yorkers thinking about sex and dealing with their sexual problems. It's funny and beautiful and accurate, and at times Shortbus is deeply moving and very powerful. I loved it. HOWEVER, there is explicit sex, both straight and gay in the film, and this movie is not for those who are bothered by the idea of sucking cock.