MOVIE A DAY BLOG

The Legend of 1900

Sun, 20 May 2012 17:30:39 -0400

Movie a Day Blog finally caught up with Giuseppe Tornatore’s THE LEGEND OF 1900 (1998), an interesting failure that shows the difficult of transplanting one national culture to another. Even though the story tries to be quintessentially American with jazz trumpeter Pruitt Taylor Vince recounting the story of a legendary jazz pianist, played oddly by Tim Roth, the feeling is never quite right. It could be because Italian director Tornatore, famous for his Oscar-winning CINEMA PARADISO (1988) is working in English for the first time, and also co-wrote the screenplay with another Italian, Alessandro Baricco. The performances, the dialogue, the attempts at humor and camaraderie, always seem slightly out of whack, as if a novel were badly translated. The tone tries to approximate a watery magical realism, as we are told to believe that Roth is abandoned on an elegant 1920s cruise ship as a child, raised by Bill Nunn as ship engine worker, and then never leaves, spending his entire life going back and forth across the Atlantic, dazzling the passengers with his piano playing. Roth, who literally tries for a mid-Atlantic accent but keeps sounding annoyingly British, never ages, is always elegant dressed (where do those clothes come from?), and does a great job of miming his tinkling of the ivories. The music is the best part of THE LEGEND OF 1900, especially when Clarence Williams III shows up to show off as jazz giant Jelly Roll Morton. The piano-playing duel he has with Roth is the film’s highlight. Tornatore is much given to the over-dramatic under these unrealistic circumstances, and he is not helped by the one-note performances by Vince and Roth, whose characters never vary from the beginning of their relationship to the end, a super melodramatic finale. Still, the visual look of the film is stunning, the model work is first-rate, and THE LEGEND OF 1900 is great to look at, even if it feels like a bit of an endurance test. Like Roth, we can’t seem to get off the boat either.

The Fiances

Fri, 18 May 2012 10:23:26 -0400

Movie a Day Blog prefers the Italian title of this neo-realist drama, I FIDANZATI, because it sounds more fitting for the black and white mood of the film. Written and directed in 1963 by the Italian master Ermanno Olmi, this story of star-crossed lovers is stark and often bleak, but still emotionally affecting and moving. Carlo Cabrini is a steel worker of some specialized kind who is given a promotion and a job opportunity at a giant plant in Sicily. It means leaving behind his girlfriend Anna Canzi, who must also be his betrothed, given the movie’s title, but they seem none too happy together to begin with. Olmi uses a local dance to illustrate all the tensions between the couple, with real townspeople populating the scene. The same is true in Sicily, where the insular closed local society leaves Cabrini alone and lost in his memories whenever he’s not working. Through his flashbacks, we are filled in on backstory of Cabrini and Canzi’s relationship, and we see the love that once flourished. But neither partner is much into talking – THE FIANCÉS has no dialogue for long sections of the film, yet the pacing never lags, and the film comes in at a lean 77 minutes, with few moments wasted. The longer he is away, the more Cabrini’s love for Canzi grows, even though he is barley faithful and aching for companionship in inhospitable Sicily. We spend less time with Canzi, who remains a more remote character since the film’s central focus is on Cabrini’s inarticulate working man, with the face of a proud boxer. By quietly observing the details of industrial and social life in Italy in the early 1960s, Olmi succeeds in creating a rich portrait of two lives and one love, separated by time and space, but hopeful of a successful reconciliation. One of the nice surprises in THE FIANCÉS is its unexpected ending – Olmi has no compunctions about leaving us as life often does, undecided and unclear about what outcomes will ultimately result.

The Dictator

Thu, 17 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Movie a Day Blog will never accuse Sacha Baron Cohen of subtlety, and THE DICTATOR demonstrates why. A compendium of silly character and situational gags, THE DICTATOR follows Baron Cohen as he plays a Middle Eastern (North African, actually) strongman with a formidable beard, a peerless ego and a penchant for inappropriate utterances. Baron Cohen is not only having fun with ethnic and religious stereotypes, he is trying to ape one of the most trenchant political satires of all times, Charlie Chaplin’s masterful THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940). He doesn’t come close to the classic comedian’s grace and wit, but he does offer 83 minutes of relatively diverting comedy, with some of the best humor coming in throw-away moments. After threatening to build nuclear weapons, Admiral General Aladeen (Baron Cohen) journeys to New York to address the United Nations, but everything goes wrong for him, as so often happens to Americans who journey to New York. He is replaced by an idiotic stooge masterminded by courtier Ben Kingsley, as a poorly conceived character who wants to bring democracy to Aladeen’s kingdom of Wadiya (saying the country’s name aloud gives you some idea of the level of humor involved here). A perky Anna Faris is present to provide Baron Cohen with the reality of political correctness in America, giving him a whole new set of targets to mock and ridicule. The remarkable thing about Baron Cohen is that he absolutely never breaks character, leading one to believe he might actually be an effective dramatic actor. Aladeen is his most developed persona to date, since he has to undergo dramatic and comedic changes in this “fish out of water” story that make him more complex than Baron Cohen’s earlier Borat, Bruno and Ali G characters. It also helps that Baron Cohen looks genuinely foreign – when he’s striding down a Manhattan sidewalk in a parody of Jon Voight’s stroll in MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969), he doesn’t fit in with the people around him. There is a more pointed and smart satire in Baron Cohen’s future, even if THE DICTATOR isn’t it. Personally, I would love to see him take on the American electoral process – Sacha Baron Cohen for President, anyone?

Two-Lane Blacktop

Tue, 7 Feb 2012 17:06:39 -0500

Movie a Day Blog finds director Monte Hellman to be one of the unsung heroes of 1970s cinema, as evidenced by his existential gem, TWO LANE BLACKTOP (1971). Basically just a car race across the American landscape of four decades ago, TWO LANE BLACKTOP features all of Hellman’s trademark devices: nonprofessional actors, an often stationary camera, and close-in emotion rendered non-verbally. This film ages much better than its countercultural counterpart, EASY RIDER (1969), but both films revel in the freedom of the road that America’s interstate highway system has offered. The two trained actors in the film, Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton, are also pitch perfect in their appearances, with Oates, a frequent Hellman collaborator, named after his car and known just as GTO. His adversaries are singer/songwriter James Taylor as The Driver, and Dennis Wilson of Beach Boys fame as The Mechanic. Along the way they pick up The Girl, and along with Oates, that’s your basic cast. One of the most impressive accomplishments of TWO LANE BLACKTOP is the ability of Hellman and his uncredited cinematographer Gregory Sandor (who really shot the film) to make the car interior scenes realistic, cramped and sweaty. Using the same photographic techniques as Joseph H. Lewis and Nicholas Ray had pioneered in the 1940s and ‘50s, Hellman gets up close and personal in the confines of the hero car, a pumped up 1955 Chevy that was custom built for the film and also existed in two other forms, a matching car for the interior dialogue scenes that was surrounded by camera mounts so that Sandor could shoot from multiple directions inside the car; and a stunt car outfitted with roll bars for the racing scenes. The verisimilitude is palpable, and it allows Hellman to really communicate the rhythm of the road. There are long sections with no dialogue, just America passing by on the side of the never-ending road. There are weird encounters with hitchhikers and competitors, including a looney and gay Stanton (he had no idea that he was playing a homosexual when he agreed to the part script unseen and was not happy with the circumstance). Neither Taylor nor Wilson was a professional actor – neither for that matter was Laurie Bird, who played The Girl. Hellman liked the honesty and spontaneity of their performances, and bit by bit, he achieves his goal of an existential road movie that starts nowhere, ends nowhere and doesn’t accomplish a whole lot in the process of getting there. Try getting that film made at a studio these days.

The Muppets

Sat, 4 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Movie a Day Blog has fond memories of watching “The Muppet Show” with assorted children and never tiring of the wit, snap and polish of the puppet presentations. Then the Muppets kind of fell out of favor, their feature film outings becoming more grotesque and desperate (does anyone remember THE MUPPETS TAKE MANHATTAN (1983) ?). Thankfully, the newest incarnation, simply titled THE MUPPETS (2011) restores all the good vibes that the Muppets used to provide, and more. Genuinely witty despite its formulaic structure, THE MUPPETS posit a world in which the troupe has split up into individual has-beens. Fozzie Bear is working in low-rent comedy lounges with a group called the Moopets, Kermit is ensconced in a very weird mansion, and Miss Piggy works for a French fashion magazine. They are reunited by Muppet aficionados Jason Segal and Amy Adams and their little Muppet buddy Walter to save the old Muppet studios from destruction at the hands of baddie Chris Cooper, chewing the scenery and loving it. Segal, who also co-wrote the screenplay, has the proper disingenuous quality that makes the whole preposterous idea float, and Adams turns in her usual professional turn as a song-and-dance maven. The biggest stroke of genius was to bring in James Bobin who co-created and directed the HBO Series FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS, and who in turn hired one of the co-stars of that show, Brett McKenzie, to write the clever and bouncy songs. Bobin brings a strange and vivid energy to the proceedings, and the script by Segal and Nicholas Stoller never lets up on the visual and verbal jokes. There are a bunch of cameo appearances from everyone from Alan Arkin to Emily Blunt, and good support from Rashida Jones as a network executive willing to take a chance on the reunion. But the real stars are the Muppeteers, who remind us why these characters captured our imagination and love in the first place. The advances in puppetry have made the Muppets even more engaging and impressive, and THE MUPPETS delivers exactly what it promises: amusement and entertainment for all ages. These days, that’s a true rarity.