“Julia”: Blame it on the alcohol

Dir. Erick Zonca
(2009, R, 145 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

Julia isn’t about alcoholism. Or a kidnapping. Or a redemption or a downfall. It’s about watching Julia Harris work. She is an alcoholic and a kidnapper, but what is fascinating about her is how from the very first minute of the film to the very last she seems to have an angle, a stubborn persistence in pursuit of a windfall, and the often delusional belief that no matter what happens she can somehow turn it around in her favor. She is venal, ruthless, and relentlessly single-minded. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

She’s played by Tilda Swinton in a blazing performance. In the opening scene we see her in her natural habitat: at a bar with a cocktail in hand. The title flashes over an image of her stumbling through with tousled hair, as if to say, this is definitively Julia: sloppy, sloshed, laughing mindlessly, then waking up the next morning in the backseat of someone else’s car. She doesn’t remember how she got there, but she can probably guess. It’s not her first blackout. They’re part of the routine.

She is not a functioning alcoholic. In the very next scene she is being fired from her job, which she got on the recommendation of her friend Mitch (Saul Rubinek), who would have given up on Julia long ago, but he’s been there and back and wants to keep her from making the same mistakes.

At first we think the film will be about her drinking. Yes, but only in part. She’s obligated to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, where she is recognized by her neighbor Elena (Kate del Castillo). Elena has a problem and asks for Julia’s help: her son is being raised by his rich grandfather, and Elena wants to kidnap the boy to raise him alone. She offers Julia money, and Julia agrees. Why Elena trusts this strange woman and why Julia goes along with it we don’t readily understand. Julia’s motivation becomes clearer when she cobbles together a plan of her own, but Elena disappears from the story for long stretches where we wonder what the screenplay has done with her.

The kidnapping goes awry, and more awry, and more awry. Julia isn’t adept at crime. She mostly makes it up as she goes along. But she’s a practiced liar. The thrill of the film is watching her, by sheer force of will, connive her way into and out of situations where she is hopelessly out of her depth. Listen to the way she invents dollar amounts while at gunpoint; even in the gravest of danger, she’s trying to get over.

The young boy is eight-year-old Tom (Aidan Gould). Does Julia have any affection for him? She pretends to. And maybe a little genuine affection seeps in despite herself. For the most part, he is whatever she can use him for: a bargaining chip, a lottery ticket, a prop for sympathy. The film is long at 145 minutes, and sags in the middle portions where Tom’s terror settles into cutesy impertinence and they begin to bond, if you can call it that. It improves again during an exhilarating third act in Mexico, where a man named Diego (Bruno Bichir) warns Julia that Tijuana isn’t a safe place for a pretty American woman. He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with.

The rise of DVD and the decline of the movie theater experience

Recently, I attended a showing of Public Enemies — not a very good film, but that was the least of its problems. I noted in my review that the picture was conspicuously underlit. And sitting several seats to my left was a man whose cell phone rang on perhaps the loudest setting available for such devices. Did he answer it? Of course he did.

I’ve got a million stories like it, though they’re usually worse. I paid good money to listen to heckling during Michael Clayton and Babel; if you go to the movies to talk back to the screen, why choose those films? The sound cut out during several minutes of Dreamgirls. Children literally tumbled through the aisle during The Others. A man seated alone shouted exclamations of “Hell yeah!” and “Oh damn!” during The Bourne Identity; for whose benefit?

The advancement of cell phone technology is a blight so pervasive it’s impractical to try to count all the interruptions. Common courtesy is no match for America’s intractable compulsion to reach out and touch or be touched at a moment’s notice, for no particular reason. The next breakthrough will be the waterproof iPhone you can take with you to the pool, the shower, and out into the pouring rain so you can post a Twitter update explaining, “Time to buy an umbrella.” Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote in her Entertainment Weekly blog, “There’s no excuse for checking your phone in a theater unless you’re expecting a birth, a death, or a kidney transplant. And death can probably wait 90 minutes.”

A jerk at the movies

The poor behavior and technical problems are either the exception or the rule, depending on where you go for movies. I used to frequent my local Whitestone Multiplex theater in the Bronx, NY, at one time my home away from home. That is the theater that produced every negative experience referenced above, save Public Enemies. I have ceased to go. Now I travel most often to Manhattan. You won’t find egregious misbehavior in art houses like the Angelika and the IFC Center — the occasional insolent blue light from a cell phone — which by their very nature attract patrons who have come to see a film, as the ones that run there cater to specialized tastes.

I enjoy such theaters and would patronize them more if I could afford them. Last winter, I attended the French drama The Class and Israel’s animated film Waltz with Bashir at Angelika and Landmark’s Sunshine Theater, respectively, and paid a combined $24.50. That’s more than $12 a movie. I bought a pair of jeans for less than that around the same time. The movies are long over, but I’m still wearing the pants.

These days I frequent the AMC theater chain. They offer morning matinees for $6 on weekends and holidays. If I recommend them, it’s only good common sense. I’ll wake up early to hop on a train for that deal. I take advantage of the elite status of New Yorkers; when a film opens in “select cities,” we’re always selected. I got a jump on early Oscar bait like Juno, There Will Be Blood, and Slumdog Millionaire at the AMC in Lincoln Square before they rolled out nationally and was among the first to be able to discuss them.

My how things have changed! I began collecting ticket stubs twelve years ago, in the hope that one day they might be worth something, or at least accrue sentimental value. But now I can use them to trace that rapid upward climb of prices. When I first saw Titanic in the Bronx on December 28, 1997, the price of a matinee was $5, flat, and that was for anything that started before 5 PM. Regular admission in Manhattan was a then-pricey $9.50. Flip through the pages and you’ll ascend, in quarter or half-dollar increments, to $8.50 for a Bronx matinee and that $12.50 price tag for a regular showing in Manhattan, which before AMC’s morning matinees had few discount tickets at all.

The prices have gone up, but the experience hasn’t improved. I’ve probably lived my entire moviegoing life amidst this decline. Twenty, thirty, forty years ago, back when the only advertisements were the coming attractions and cell phones were science fiction, was it so hard for audiences to sit during a movie and just watch it? Was there still wonder in the experience of going to the movies? Was I born too late for the golden age?

A weekend at home

I go to the theater less and less. I rent more movies on DVD than I venture out to see, delivered to my mailbox from Netflix, and I can’t say I’ve missed out on much. On the contrary, I’ve gained. For $9.72 for one month, less than the price of a single ticket in Manhattan, I can usually turn around about four films, watch their special features, re-watch them with their audio commentaries — like mini film schools on disc. Computers and televisions have advanced to the point where the advantages of a big screen are negligible, and you don’t have to worry about the jerk sitting next to you checking Facebook on his Blackberry or Blueberry or Raspberry, or whatever. In a single month’s time, for a dollar more than the price of a Public Enemies ticket, I watched Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, the true-crime documentaries Paradise Lost and Paradise Lost 2, and Robert Altman’s Nashville. The turnaround for new films from theater to disc is getting faster and faster. If I recommend Netflix or similar delivery services, it’s only good common sense.

The upshot is that the movie theater feels farther and farther away. It’s a remarkable time for the movies because they have never been more accessible or affordable, even if the city you live in has never been “selected.” I would like to be a purist. Oh how I would like to be a purist! To tell you that movies are best experienced on the big screen with a like-minded audience of cineastes waiting to be dazzled. It’s true, after all. I fell in love with the movies staring in slack-jawed wonder at Alex Proyas’s masterly Dark City. But I reaffirmed that love watching Tarsem Singh’s The Fall on a computer screen, and Sidney Lumet’s Network, and Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain, and David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels, and so on.

A great film doesn’t need extra square footage to astonish you, certainly not when you are compromised by factors out of your control. You only get one chance to see a movie for the first time; it is a sacred trust placed in strangers to respect the experience. Most do. Many don’t. Every once in a while you may be unlucky. If you are very unlucky, you will have missed your first chance to discover — to unwrap, as a gift — the sounds and images of a masterpiece. That is the true robbery. The ten bucks I’ll miss, but the experience comes once, and it’s priceless.

“District 9″: Illegal aliens

Dir. Neill Blomkamp
(2009, R, 112 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

The aliens are coming! They will kill us all! Plunder our resources! Invade our bodies! Eat our babies! Make merry sport of our women!

Or … maybe not. When aliens come to Earth in District 9, in a derelict spaceship that hovers inertly over Johannesburg, South Africa, they appear helpless and malnourished. When we bust down the doors of their ship, they don’t fight back, perhaps because they can’t. They have weapons but don’t use them. But mankind, in its reactionary fervor, responds to them with sneering mistrust. Who are they? What do they want? Why have they come here? We project our motives onto them and decide that they are hostile creatures who mean to overthrow us, so we do it to them first. They come in peace. Us … not so much.

I wrote in a recent entry about the BBC miniseries Torchwood: Children of Earth that the movies are increasingly inhospitable to idea-driven science fiction. Here is an exception. Co-written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, a former visual effects artist from South Africa, and produced by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, District 9 was produced for a relative pittance of $30 million and in its opening weekend earned $37 million. Given the bloated budgets of most summer CGI extravaganzas, the visual verve and technical elegance of this effort make one wonder where Hollywood’s money is going and why.

Sharlto Copley stars as Wikus Van Der Merwe, a mid-level bureaucrat for MNU (Multinational United), a private company placed in charge of the extraterrestrials, derisively nicknamed “prawns.” MNU isn’t a humanitarian group or relief organization. They’re weapons developers. Their solution is to isolate the aliens in District 9, a makeshift slum in the middle of Johannesburg, while they futz around with their technology.

The aliens are soon to be moved to District 10, far beyond city limits, and from what we’re told it makes District 9 look like the Hamptons. Wikus married the boss’s daughter, so he is put in charge of the evictions. The story and setting are intended to evoke Apartheid. They also recall the deportation of Jews from the ghettos to the concentration camps during the Holocaust. The alien residents are tricked, blackmailed, or strong-armed into signing their illegal eviction notices. Noticing that one alien is cleverer than the others in reading the fine print, Wikus threatens to take his son. How they deal with a nest of unhatched young is depraved and disturbing. Wikus isn’t an evil man, per se. He is ignorant and unquestioning of authority. Just following orders.

I won’t reveal more of the plot. It covers much of the same ground as Children of Earth, examining human nature at a time of uncertainty and finding us all too willing to act out of fear when faced with the unknown. How startling to see the aliens brutalized so casually, by blacks and whites alike, showing us that all human beings are united in our mistrust of the Other and our capacity for cruelty against those we don’t understand.

The film is handicapped by the thin rendering of its villains. There is a wheelchair-bound Nigerian warlord (Eugene Khumbanyiwa) who controls the black market in District 9. There is Koobus Venter (David James), an MNU mercenary who enjoys killing. Finally, there is the father-in-law (Louis Minnaar), who is quick to sell out Wikus for the company’s bottom-line. They’re stock characters, evil without giving us a meaningful idea of evil. Nowhere is a scene like Children of Earth’s secret roundtable, which showed us with gradually building horror how reasoned individuals can talk themselves into atrocity.

The second half boils over into shoot-‘em-up action, most of it heartily satisfying in its high-tech geekery — those aliens sure know their robotics! — though I wish Blomkamp had stuck closer to his themes. There is a late scene that contains the heart of the film: A human, mutated by the alien DNA, is shown with one human eye and one prawn eye, collapsing the distance between Us and Them. If we could see ourselves in the eyes of others, would we treat them the same?

“I Love You, Man”: Guy love between two guys

Dir. John Hamburg
(2009, R, 104 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

“Bromance” is a new Hollywood buzz word, signifying a close emotional bond between straight men and normalizing male-male affection while maintaining a safe hetero-detachment. In the same way “metrosexual” made the world safe for the well-groomed while simultaneously distancing itself from any hint of sexual deviation, “bromance” tells us that men can hug it out too, as long as there’s no funny business below the waist.

In that way it’s a double-edged sword, expanding the accepted definition of love while still pushing homosexuality to the margins. What makes I Love You, Man appealing is its lack of such macho posturing. It recasts the romantic comedy formula with platonic male friends, but doesn’t treat it as hyper-ironic parody. It plays it straight — so to speak.

Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) is a contented Los Angeles realtor. In the opening scene he proposes to his girlfriend Zooey (Rashida Jones), who calls her closest friends with the good news during the drive home. Peter doesn’t have anyone to call, even his younger brother Robbie (Andy Samberg), with whom he’s never forged a close bond. Peter, we learn, is more of a “girlfriend guy,” and as his wedding approaches he finds himself without a best man.

Enter Sydney Fife, played by Jason Segel, who was so lovable as the sad-sack hero of Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Here he plays a character with more confidence and less restraint — Sydney makes an inappropriate toast at an engagement party and foolishly attacks Lou Ferrigno, playing himself — but retains his endearing, arrested-development charm. He brings the repressed teenager out of Peter, who reacts to Sydney with the wide-eyed eagerness of a boy being invited to the cool kids’ table.

Despite the film’s screwball nature, the three leads are written and acted as adults. Zooey worries that her fiancé lacks a close male friend, and is warm and generous in her encouragement. Peter is awkward, but self-aware, serious about his job and good at it, and Rudd’s thoughtful performance avoids turning his quirks into condescending shtick. They have conversations that feel like people talking about their lives instead of going through the motions of plot. And Sydney, for all his bawdy free-spiritedness, is a good and loyal friend. Segel puts on a knowing grin through Peter’s nervous mumblings; he recognizes Peter’s unease and eases him.

The men have real chemistry, are affectionate, without any of the “But dude, I’m straight!” reaffirmations. The film was co-written and directed by John Hamburg without the cynicism of other male-friendship comedies like Superbad. It demonstrates a depth of sincerity wherein you can stop calling it a bromance and just call it love, man.

“Sita Sings the Blues”: If you want the rainbow, you must have the rain

Sita Sings the Blues is compelling as much for how it was made as it is for its content. Writer-director-producer-editor-animator-production designer — a moment to catch my breath — Nina Paley, an independent filmmaker working out of New York, has in her struggle to secure licensing for her film become an outspoken advocate for free-culture … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org

“Russian Ark”: A one-shot deal

Objectively, Alexandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark is a bravura feat. At 96 minutes, it unfolds in a single continuous shot — unbroken, unedited, captured in a single take. There are no second chances. At the 80-minute mark, you don’t want to be the extra who trips on his coattails … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org

“Requiem for a Dream”: Drugs, dreams, and nightmares

Requiem for a Dream is directed to within an inch of its life by Darren Aronofsky, who throws everything at the screen and hopes it sticks. Much of it does. But by sheer volume of technical craft he defeats himself. Aronofsky means to show us drug addiction from the inside out, but too often he seems merely to be showing off what he learned in film school … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org

“Public Enemies”: Cops and robbers

Dir. Michael Mann
(2009, R, 140 min)
★ ★

Directed by Michael Mann (The Insider, Collateral), Public Enemies recounts the crime spree of Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), but it’s all glossy surface, a conventional gangster saga that colors inside the lines.

Dillinger was a folk hero, so we’re told. The public admires him. They harbor him. When he’s arrested, crowds line the street to cheer him on as he’s driven away by the police. He commands a press conference when he arrives at the jail in handcuffs, boasting that he can conduct a robbery in a minute, forty seconds — “flat.” As times become desperate, there is a conversation about expanding to kidnap-and-ransom, to which Dillinger scoffs: the public doesn’t like kidnappings. He’s worried about the bad press.

But why was Dillinger such a hero? There’s an opportunity here to explore the conditions of 1930s America. A title card at the start of the film announces that it is the fourth year of the Great Depression, and after he stages a prison break in the opening scenes a poor woman in front of a derelict-looking house asks him to take her with him. But that’s about it. Missing are the details to truly evoke the widespread economic hardship of the era; the film is more interested in Dillinger the man, who travels in far richer circles than those who revere him.

Dillinger was charismatic, so we’re told. Depp, in general a very charismatic actor, isn’t as charismatic in the role as the screenplay intends. When he barges in on love interest Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, Oscar-winner for La Vie En Rose) at her job as a coat-check girl and practically bullies her into becoming his girlfriend, my first thought was, she looks smart enough to know better.

Their romance is rushed. He sees her from across the room, disarms her with his honesty by telling her matter-of-factly who he is, and shortly after sweeping her out of her coat-check booth they’re whispering sweet nothings and exchanging promises of forever. Later in the film, much of our emotional investment depends on our belief that the lovers will go to the ends of the Earth for each other, and on that level it falls short.

Pursuing the outlaw is federal agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), whose profile is high after his slaying of another infamous robber, Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum). He is appointed to lead the Dillinger task force by self-aggrandizing FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), who wants additional funding for his war on crime and hopes the apprehension of Dillinger will convince a Congressional committee. The Hoover character is drawn too broadly; Crudup is stiffly mannered in the role, a parody of arrogant officiousness. Add a pair of floppy ears and he’s Mr. Peabody from Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Public Enemies develops along the same lines as Ridley Scott’s American Gangster from 2007 — an honest investigator pursues a seemingly untouchable criminal mastermind — but Scott’s film was superior and highlights the deficiencies of Mann’s docudrama, particularly in the underdevelopment of the Purvis character, whom we learn little about other than that he is investigating Dillinger. At the end of the film we’re told Purvis’s fate — he left the FBI a year after the Dillinger case and took his own life in 1960 — which suggests a man more interesting than we’ve had a chance to meet.

At nearly two-and-a-half hours, Public Enemies is overlong, and I didn’t do a good job of keeping track of the supporting players or subplots, which include a proposed train robbery and an interstate gambling racket. It’s more troubling, I suppose, that I wasn’t interested enough to try.

Note: The film was conspicuously underlit at the showing I attended, to the point where indoor and night scenes — which is to say, most of the scenes — were often difficult to make out. I am inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to director of photography Dante Spinotti, who has been nominated twice for Oscars (L.A. Confidential, The Insider), and assume instead a problem in the projection room, but as this may have affected my experience of the film, I feel it necessary to report.