Showing posts with label robert altman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label robert altman. Show all posts
25 October 2019
Images (1972)
17 December 2014
Still Alice
Still Alice played in Los Angeles for only one week: an Academy-qualifying run in two theatres beginning on December 5th before it is released more widely on January 16th. So I had to drive rather far to see this movie, but I was glad I did. It is an excellent film and, perhaps more importantly for my timeline:
With Still Alice, Julianne Moore is finally going to win a Best Actress Oscar.
Still Alice also contains beautiful performances by Kristen Stewart and Alec Baldwin, but the star here is Alice herself, Julianne Moore. The performance is beautiful. She is terrified and angry and defiant, and then lost and confused. It is a sensitive, humane portrayal of someone fighting to stay herself from an actress who has done consistently good work since her big break in Robert Altman's Short Cuts in 1993. It's about time Julianne Moore had a Best Actress Oscar in her hands, and her performance in Still Alice is so good that everyone is going to feel happy about giving it to her.
This film is not Oscar bait, though. I had read in certain places on the interwebs that Still Alice is a) a star vehicle or b) Oscar bait. And it is neither of those things. Instead, it is a fascinating, beautiful movie about Alzheimer's disease that is complicated by its multiple perspectives.
As the film begins, we meet Alice, a professor at Columbia who has just turned 50. She's a leader in her field and she has begun, ever so slightly, to forget things. She describes these moments of forgetting as though something has just "dropped out" when it should be there. Still Alice plays close attention to these early moments of understanding Alice's condition. We see this from Alice's perspective, and as a very educated, independent woman she explores these moments at her own pace without telling her husband what is happening. Everything is from her point of view here. At her first visit to the neurologist the camera doesn't look at him a single time. We get only Alice's face as she answers his questions and processes what he's telling her.
We stay in Alice's perspective for a long, long time. And then, in act three, as we move forward and Alice begins forgetting a lot more, the film subtly but deliberately switches from Alice's point of view to her husband's, and we see Alice's condition not as her struggle to remember things or accomplish tasks but as his struggle to cope with her condition. (He doesn't cope very well.) And then, finally, we switch to Alice's daughter's perspective as she cares for and loves her mother, even when her mother seems as though she is totally unaware of her surroundings.
The filmic switch between Alice's perspective and her husband's is one of my favorite moments in the film. Alice's Alzheimer's has progressed quite far, and the film conveys this total lack of a past by focusing very tightly on the toppings at Pinkberry. And they're beautiful: a tight, focused shot of Fruity Pebbles and then another, similar shot of a different topping. This is all Alice can focus on: the present moment. So she looks at the prettiest thing in the room – mounds of brightly colored frozen yogurt toppings – and then she focuses on the next one. There is no past or future, there is only this beautiful image in front of her, and it is what she can take in. Directing team Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland have made their best film to date. Highly recommended.
With Still Alice, Julianne Moore is finally going to win a Best Actress Oscar.
Still Alice also contains beautiful performances by Kristen Stewart and Alec Baldwin, but the star here is Alice herself, Julianne Moore. The performance is beautiful. She is terrified and angry and defiant, and then lost and confused. It is a sensitive, humane portrayal of someone fighting to stay herself from an actress who has done consistently good work since her big break in Robert Altman's Short Cuts in 1993. It's about time Julianne Moore had a Best Actress Oscar in her hands, and her performance in Still Alice is so good that everyone is going to feel happy about giving it to her.
This film is not Oscar bait, though. I had read in certain places on the interwebs that Still Alice is a) a star vehicle or b) Oscar bait. And it is neither of those things. Instead, it is a fascinating, beautiful movie about Alzheimer's disease that is complicated by its multiple perspectives.As the film begins, we meet Alice, a professor at Columbia who has just turned 50. She's a leader in her field and she has begun, ever so slightly, to forget things. She describes these moments of forgetting as though something has just "dropped out" when it should be there. Still Alice plays close attention to these early moments of understanding Alice's condition. We see this from Alice's perspective, and as a very educated, independent woman she explores these moments at her own pace without telling her husband what is happening. Everything is from her point of view here. At her first visit to the neurologist the camera doesn't look at him a single time. We get only Alice's face as she answers his questions and processes what he's telling her.
We stay in Alice's perspective for a long, long time. And then, in act three, as we move forward and Alice begins forgetting a lot more, the film subtly but deliberately switches from Alice's point of view to her husband's, and we see Alice's condition not as her struggle to remember things or accomplish tasks but as his struggle to cope with her condition. (He doesn't cope very well.) And then, finally, we switch to Alice's daughter's perspective as she cares for and loves her mother, even when her mother seems as though she is totally unaware of her surroundings.
The filmic switch between Alice's perspective and her husband's is one of my favorite moments in the film. Alice's Alzheimer's has progressed quite far, and the film conveys this total lack of a past by focusing very tightly on the toppings at Pinkberry. And they're beautiful: a tight, focused shot of Fruity Pebbles and then another, similar shot of a different topping. This is all Alice can focus on: the present moment. So she looks at the prettiest thing in the room – mounds of brightly colored frozen yogurt toppings – and then she focuses on the next one. There is no past or future, there is only this beautiful image in front of her, and it is what she can take in. Directing team Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland have made their best film to date. Highly recommended.
22 November 2006
Sad News
If you haven't heard, Robert Altman passed away last night. I am very sad about this and I'm having trouble typing out a response to how much I loved what this man was doing in cinema and how much I respected his work and his excitement, so... I thought I would leave you with this clip from last year's Academy Awards, when Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin presented Altman with (finally!) an Oscar—an honorary one, celebrating his outstanding contribution to the movies.
25 June 2006
Movie Sum-up Post
I have seen about ten movies since I last wrote about one in this space. This sucks as a movie blog. I hope no one's here for that because I'm not very good at movie-blogging as it turns out. Nevertheless, I bring you reviews (albeit, short) of the ten films I've seen this year that I haven't written about.
This afternoon: Robert Altman's very musical extravaganza A Prairie Home Companion, which is full of lovely jokes, down-home humor and the brilliant non-sequitor-filled silliness of both Altman films and Garrison Keillor's weekly radio program. There are some really fun segments of the show absent from the film, but one cannot have everything and the movie is a delight from start to finish, featuring really wonderful performances from a whole cast of greats, but especially Meryl Streep & Lily Tomlin and Woody Harrelson & John C. Reilly as two singing duos. My favorite performance in the film is from Marylouise Burke, who plays the lunch lady.
Josef von Sternberg's Morocco starring the totally fabulous Marlene Dietrich in her only Oscar-nominated performance is fairly standard fare as films go... or so I thought for the first half hour or so. The film's plot is standard, but Dietrich herself is a force with which to be reckoned. The much-talked about scene with her performing a cabaret act in a tuxedo and kissing a woman full on the lips is in Morocco and I must confess that it took me completely by surprise and I was instantly in love. The movie is only okay, but Dietrich is incredible. I'm hooked.
Sudden Fear is a later Joan Crawford vehicle starring a past-her-prime Crawford and a supposedly charismatic and charming Jack Palance (!). For me the film failed on all counts, except that it features the compelling-yet-irritating Gloria Grahame (who I grudgingly love). I don't like Joan Crawford; I've decided. I know it's, like, sacrilege, or something. ...And here's the thing: I don't think it's a rational dislike of Crawford. I think I dislike her because Bette Davis so disliked her. As one of my co-workers said, I should start to hate half of old-Hollywood if my loyalty runs so deep: Ms. Davis could've paved a street with the names of people she despised, but I really think that's it. Still it isn't rational. I love Celeste Holm and Ms. Davis loathed her, so... I have no explanation other than I think Ms. Crawford can't act for shit, doesn't particularly have nice legs (a feature with which Sudden Fear seemed obsessed) and isn't particularly pretty--by any yardstick. Sue me in gay court later.
I really liked Jason Reitman's Thank You for Smoking. I thought it was very, very funny in an offbeat, irreverent, punishing sort of way and the script is really clever. The acting is good, for the most part, with some excellent performances from Robert Duvall and Maria Bello, especially. I loved the kid, too: Cameron Bright (from the lackluster Birth). Mostly this is just a funny, funny movie. Three things, though: 1) Katie Holmes looks like a little kid. I cannot believe her in any role. I couldn't believe her as a lawyer in Batman Begins, and I didn't buy her for a second as a reporter in Thank You for Smoking. She looks like she couldn't even buy a pack of smokes if she wanted to. 2) My boy Aaron Eckhart's hair. Couldn't they have hired someone to fix it. It looked awful throughout and he tried, like, three different styles. The last thing 3) is my favorite performance in the film: Adam Brody as Rob Lowe's assistant. He plays the role perfectly, with excellent timing and an excitement I am unused to seeing.
George Cukor's Born Yesterday features the performance that beat both Bette Davis's All About Eve turn as Margo Channing and Gloria Swanson's genius turn as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. I have generally avoided Born Yesterday for this reason (more solidarity with Ms. Davis: see above). But I was mistaken. This one's a crowd pleaser. The script is wonderful and Judy Holliday is absolutely wonderful. I adored her character and fell in love with her. It's a great star turn and worthy of all its accolades.
Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle Rouge is the epitome of cool. I liked it even better than Le Samouraï. It's not quite as good as Army of Shadows, but, then, few films are. I find Melville's ideas about the prices men have to pay for the things they do slightly objectionable. I prefer Woody Allen's ideas about men (i.e. I like them to get away with things.) The films are so cool, though, that Melville has to be forgiven. Watch Le Cercle Rouge and your teeth will hurt the movie is so fucking cool. I swear to god.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a sort-of remake of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, the film on which Todd Haynes based his gorgeous Far from Heaven. Fassbinder's film is beautiful and ugly, harsh, soft, shocking, horrifying, sad and dificult all at the same time. I became connected to the characters instantly and the emotional work that Fassbinder is doing is undeniable, but his filmmaking skill is so pronounced, his language so stark and stunning and his references to Sirk so clear, that it's hard not to pay attention to the look of the film and let go of the matter of the film. To do so would be to miss so much, though. Ali is a fascinating, subtle tale with much to say about German xenophobia and fear of "the other" in general.
I'm not sure why everyone is so apeshit about Jean-Luc Godard's À Bout de Souffle (Breathless). It's good, sure, and it's cool. Maybe I'm too old. The only thing I really loved about it was the ending, which is really quiet and subtle... I think that's what I don't love about the film: I feel like it isn't doing anything very subtle, or perhaps the legacy it has left has so overwhelmed the context of the film that I can't see the forest for the trees. Maybe it's been copied so frequently and so poorly that even the original lacks luster for me.
Okay... last one:
Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential is stupid. I may have laughed a couple of times. When it is exploring the nature of art and asking us what is good and what isn't, I found the film really interesting, but all of the silliness and its ludicrous cast of characters (every single stereotype imaginable) had no charm for me. I have a lot of bad things to say about this movie: almost nothing good in fact, so I'll shut up now. Suffice to say that I didn't like the film at all. Max Minghella is a cutie, but I hope he sticks to better stuff than this in future. And I so liked Ghost World...
This afternoon: Robert Altman's very musical extravaganza A Prairie Home Companion, which is full of lovely jokes, down-home humor and the brilliant non-sequitor-filled silliness of both Altman films and Garrison Keillor's weekly radio program. There are some really fun segments of the show absent from the film, but one cannot have everything and the movie is a delight from start to finish, featuring really wonderful performances from a whole cast of greats, but especially Meryl Streep & Lily Tomlin and Woody Harrelson & John C. Reilly as two singing duos. My favorite performance in the film is from Marylouise Burke, who plays the lunch lady.
Josef von Sternberg's Morocco starring the totally fabulous Marlene Dietrich in her only Oscar-nominated performance is fairly standard fare as films go... or so I thought for the first half hour or so. The film's plot is standard, but Dietrich herself is a force with which to be reckoned. The much-talked about scene with her performing a cabaret act in a tuxedo and kissing a woman full on the lips is in Morocco and I must confess that it took me completely by surprise and I was instantly in love. The movie is only okay, but Dietrich is incredible. I'm hooked.
Sudden Fear is a later Joan Crawford vehicle starring a past-her-prime Crawford and a supposedly charismatic and charming Jack Palance (!). For me the film failed on all counts, except that it features the compelling-yet-irritating Gloria Grahame (who I grudgingly love). I don't like Joan Crawford; I've decided. I know it's, like, sacrilege, or something. ...And here's the thing: I don't think it's a rational dislike of Crawford. I think I dislike her because Bette Davis so disliked her. As one of my co-workers said, I should start to hate half of old-Hollywood if my loyalty runs so deep: Ms. Davis could've paved a street with the names of people she despised, but I really think that's it. Still it isn't rational. I love Celeste Holm and Ms. Davis loathed her, so... I have no explanation other than I think Ms. Crawford can't act for shit, doesn't particularly have nice legs (a feature with which Sudden Fear seemed obsessed) and isn't particularly pretty--by any yardstick. Sue me in gay court later.
I really liked Jason Reitman's Thank You for Smoking. I thought it was very, very funny in an offbeat, irreverent, punishing sort of way and the script is really clever. The acting is good, for the most part, with some excellent performances from Robert Duvall and Maria Bello, especially. I loved the kid, too: Cameron Bright (from the lackluster Birth). Mostly this is just a funny, funny movie. Three things, though: 1) Katie Holmes looks like a little kid. I cannot believe her in any role. I couldn't believe her as a lawyer in Batman Begins, and I didn't buy her for a second as a reporter in Thank You for Smoking. She looks like she couldn't even buy a pack of smokes if she wanted to. 2) My boy Aaron Eckhart's hair. Couldn't they have hired someone to fix it. It looked awful throughout and he tried, like, three different styles. The last thing 3) is my favorite performance in the film: Adam Brody as Rob Lowe's assistant. He plays the role perfectly, with excellent timing and an excitement I am unused to seeing.
George Cukor's Born Yesterday features the performance that beat both Bette Davis's All About Eve turn as Margo Channing and Gloria Swanson's genius turn as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. I have generally avoided Born Yesterday for this reason (more solidarity with Ms. Davis: see above). But I was mistaken. This one's a crowd pleaser. The script is wonderful and Judy Holliday is absolutely wonderful. I adored her character and fell in love with her. It's a great star turn and worthy of all its accolades.
Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle Rouge is the epitome of cool. I liked it even better than Le Samouraï. It's not quite as good as Army of Shadows, but, then, few films are. I find Melville's ideas about the prices men have to pay for the things they do slightly objectionable. I prefer Woody Allen's ideas about men (i.e. I like them to get away with things.) The films are so cool, though, that Melville has to be forgiven. Watch Le Cercle Rouge and your teeth will hurt the movie is so fucking cool. I swear to god.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a sort-of remake of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, the film on which Todd Haynes based his gorgeous Far from Heaven. Fassbinder's film is beautiful and ugly, harsh, soft, shocking, horrifying, sad and dificult all at the same time. I became connected to the characters instantly and the emotional work that Fassbinder is doing is undeniable, but his filmmaking skill is so pronounced, his language so stark and stunning and his references to Sirk so clear, that it's hard not to pay attention to the look of the film and let go of the matter of the film. To do so would be to miss so much, though. Ali is a fascinating, subtle tale with much to say about German xenophobia and fear of "the other" in general.
I'm not sure why everyone is so apeshit about Jean-Luc Godard's À Bout de Souffle (Breathless). It's good, sure, and it's cool. Maybe I'm too old. The only thing I really loved about it was the ending, which is really quiet and subtle... I think that's what I don't love about the film: I feel like it isn't doing anything very subtle, or perhaps the legacy it has left has so overwhelmed the context of the film that I can't see the forest for the trees. Maybe it's been copied so frequently and so poorly that even the original lacks luster for me.
Okay... last one:
Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential is stupid. I may have laughed a couple of times. When it is exploring the nature of art and asking us what is good and what isn't, I found the film really interesting, but all of the silliness and its ludicrous cast of characters (every single stereotype imaginable) had no charm for me. I have a lot of bad things to say about this movie: almost nothing good in fact, so I'll shut up now. Suffice to say that I didn't like the film at all. Max Minghella is a cutie, but I hope he sticks to better stuff than this in future. And I so liked Ghost World...
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