~Gone Baby Gone

Gone Baby Gone

Film Review
October 18, 2007 by JAN ALBERT

GONE BABY GONE is a darkly entertaining ride into the bowels of the human psyche that will confound you to declare who the good guys and bad guys are at the finish line.

Been a while since a film made me feel like picking up a book, but GONE BABY GONE is a great adaptation of the terse crime thrillers I used to devour like candy. It is a hardboiled but poetic page-turner of a movie.

Ben Affleck’s directorial debut (he also co-wrote the script with Aaron Stockard based on Dennis Lehane’s novel) is set in his old stomping grounds – South Boston – and is an ode to “the people who started out in the cracks and then fell through.” The neighborhood and its residents run deep in his blood and Affleck revels in the faces and places where a little girl has gone missing and the press and the police are trying to outdo each other in a frenzy of self-righteous fury. Every location is crammed with detail and extras cast right off the streets and bar stools of Dorchester, which keeps your eyes wide open.

To make it even more personal, Affleck bet his whole hand and cast his little brother, Casey Affleck, in the lead as Patrick Kenzie, a private detective brought onto the case with his partner/lover Angie Gennaro by the child’s aunt. Slight of stature, but not of ability, Casey Affleck has quietly (the opposite of Ben’s acting career!) been making his name as a character actor in flicks like Oceans Eleven, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Gus Van Sant’s Gerry. As the star of GONE BABY GONE, Casey Affleck makes you root for this baby-faced but smart, tough, sensitive, and stubborn PI, refusing to give up even when it becomes obvious that the truth is rotten to the core and threatens to tear his own life apart.

Affleck steps up to the front of the screen here against some real star power like Ed Harris (scarily great as a very tightly wound cop) and Morgan Freeman and doesn’t let them steal the scene.
He also holds his own with a score of brilliant character actors he comes across in the course of the investigation—most notably Amy Madigan, Titus Welliver, and Edi Gathegi.

Amy Ryan (who had a recurring role on the TV series, THE WIRE and is also featured as Ethan Hawke’s former wife in Sidney Lumet’s BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD this season) does steal her share of scenes! She gives a star-making performance as the little girl’s druggie, careless mom. Ryan is a force of nature as a woman the audience may disapprove of but cannot just hate despite it all. She makes her a person of spunk and humor, as well as fear and guilt. So far for me, Amy Ryan and Hal Holbrook (Into the Wild) are the ones to beat for best supporting actress and actor of 2007.

Ben Affleck doesn’t yet have the fluid chops to slay the audience with the action sequences, but when he sticks to advancing the story through Kenzie and Gennaro’s (Michelle Monaghan) facing off against the many colorful characters, he’s on solid ground. I’ve seen a lot of fine films lately; Michael Clayton, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, The Darjeeling Express and I must say GONE BABY GONE is the one I cannot shake. Go see it so Hollywood brings more of Patrick and Angela’s series of adventures to the screen and Ben Affleck gets to direct another movie real soon.

P.S. Now that I am deep into Dennis Lehane’s novel, I can see what a great job Ben Affleck did of capturing its essence. Here’s one great passage that had me nodding my head in admiration:

“ When a child disappears, the space she’d occupied is immediately filled with dozens of people. And these people – relatives, friends, police officers, reporters from both TV and print – create a lot of energy and noise, a sense of communal intensity, of fierce, shared dedication to a task.
But amid all that noise, nothing is louder than the silence of the missing child. It’s a silence that’s two and a half to three feet tall, and you feel it at your hip and hear it rising from the floorboards, shouting to you from the corners and crevices and the emotionless face of a doll left on the floor by the bed. It’s a silence that’s different from the ones at funerals and wakes. The silence of the dead carries with it a sense of finality; it’s a silence you know you must get used to. But the silence of a missing child is not something you want to get used to; you refuse to accept it, and so it screams at you.
The silence of the dead says goodbye. The silence of a missing child says, Find me.”
From GONE BABY GONE by Dennis Lehane. Copyright 1998, Harpers paperback, pg. 24.

CHECK !! OUT MORE STILL PHOTOS & THE TRAILER, AMONG OTHER GREAT OFFERINGS – ON THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE:
www.gonebabygone-themovie.com




~Into The Wild

Into The Wild-poster

Into The Wild

INTO THE WILD/opens FRIDAY, SEPT 21/2007

Film Review
September 21, 2007 by JAN ALBERT

Every once in a rare while you connect with a film in a profound way. INTO THE WILD, written and directed by Sean Penn, hit me right between the eyes.

It’s a highly compressed coming of age story – a true one, based on the book of the same name by Jon Krakauer, about a kid who graduates college with honors, then out of the blue, completely rejects his family’s and society’s offerings, donates his life savings to charity, and leaves home without a word. He hits the road with the ultimate goal of disappearing into the wild to “try to get his soul free” (as Joni Mitchell put it).

Chris McCandless kept a journal of his experiences along the way – the books he read, the day jobs he held, the people he met, the plants he ate, and they provided the trail for Krakauer to retrace. Penn originally tried to make this film a decade ago, shortly after the book came out. He met with the family a number of times to seek permission to film their son’s story. The day of the final negotiation he got a call from Chris’s mother. She said she had had a dream that she interpreted as meaning her son did not want a film made about his life and death. Penn replied that if he didn’t believe in dreams he wouldn’t be making movies, but if they ever changed their minds – “In a week, 8 months, or even 10 years, to please call me because I will never stop wanting to make this movie.” Ten years later, they called.

The wait was worth it. This is the best film Sean Penn has ever made. I’m not quite sure why it hit me so hard – I was never interested enough in the story to read the book — but there were several times tears came to my eyes and to my utter amazement, I wasn’t sure I would be able to stop crying. (After all the movies I’ve seen over the past 30 years, I remain always hopeful but have become a fairly hard-hearted viewer!)

Penn draws piercing performances from everyone in his superb cast – Catherine Keener, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Vince Vaughan, Kristen Stewart, Hal Holbrook, and Emile Hirsch all bring their best game and Penn has given each one of them moments that stick in my mind. But I think his greatest achievement here is to involve you in a story with an end that so many people already know and to deliver a tension-filled experience that keeps you wondering what will happen next and even has moments of humor.
The storytelling, both visually and editorially, is riveting; going back and forth to Chris’s childhood at home and his adventures enroute to the end of the road in the Alaska wilderness. In addition to the stark beauty of the American landscape, Penn references the journal of Alexander Supertramp (as Chris renamed himself) and the post cards he sent new friends he made. Seeing his handwriting up on the screen is a very effective device for putting us right inside his head.

Penn is also to be commended for approaching human frailties and moments of kindness with drama, but also real subtlety. None of the characters are completely black or white. We feel for the McCandless parents Chris rejected so completely. While their physical fights and the war of words they carried on throughout his childhood probably propelled him to avoid and mistrust human relationships whenever possible, we see that they are only human, not bad people per se. William Hurt (playing Chris’s father) has a wordless scene towards the end, which is absolutely devastating.

Chris himself is no saint. In the beginning, he is portrayed as a kind of an arrogant kid, a zealot who listens to no one and believes he knows it all before he’s even experienced life. We see him gradually responding to the coworkers and fellow travelers he meets on the way to Alaska — a joyful big brother figure, a young girl who worships him, a hippie couple who adopt him for a time, and even a substitute grandfather (simply a beautiful performance by Hal Holbrook).

But the film rests squarely on the shoulders of Emile Hirsch who rises to the occasion, climbs the mountain and carries this film. He made me come to care for this foolhardy, wounded boy who put his faith and found his greatest joy in the beauty and harsh force of nature. As he tests himself against primal forces (ultimately more unforgiving and unpredictable than us human beings), experiencing the agony and ecstasy of the path he’s chosen, he grows and cracks open. Chris’s heartbreaking innocence and purity of character, his great quest, and the heartbreaking fact that he realized how much we need each other so late in the game moved me deeply.

That’s a revelation many of us live a lot longer without ever reaching. Bravo Sean Penn for turning a short but full life into a great film with not a minute wasted.

see: the official website




~Forever/Rouben Mamoulian Festival & John Turturro’s: Romance & Cigarettes

FOREVER at the Film Forum until Sept 25th 2007
ROUBEN MAMOULIAN FESTIVAL ends Sept 18th
JOHN TURTURRO’S ROMANCE & CIGARETTES – ongoing

forever

Film Review
September 17, 2007 by JAN ALBERT

FOREVER IS A FILM EVERY ARTIST SHOULD SEE.

As a 20-year old on my first trip to Paris, I made the pilgrimage to Pere Lachaise to place a rose on the grave of one of my heroes, the French author, Colette, so I was kind of interested in traveling down to the Film Forum to see FOREVER. It was a wonderful surprise.

Heddy Honigmann has turned what could have been a straightforward documentary about the score of celebrities buried at this famous cemetery (final resting place for everyone from Chopin to Jim Morrison) into a poetic testament to the power of art to reach out and inspire people centuries after its creation.

Honigmann keeps her distance; first watching the kinds of people who come from around the world to pay their respects to the likes of Edith Piaf, Marcel Proust, screen pioneer Georges Meliies, Maria Callas, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. She lingers on a ladybug creeping up a beautifully carved mausoleum, a pen left on a novelist’s grave (“so he can carry on writing in the next world,” the caretaker figures), acclimating us to the rhythm of family members watering plants with Evian bottles and bon jouring the other regulars. Gradually, she begins to approach individuals who catch her eye and it becomes apparent that they share a passionate connection with those laid to rest here, whether they actually knew them personally or not.

We meet Yoshino Kimura, a young pianist about to make her debut who waits her turn for a moment alone with Chopin. By the end of the film we know surely that the great composer has touched her soul, as she delivers an exquisite performance of one of his Nocturnes. Another frequent visitor explains the influence Modigliani’s moody portraits have had on his own expression of the human spirit. Turns out he is an artist of a whole different sort; an embalmer. We observe him apply his artistry to the face of a beautiful young woman as he speaks eloquently about the relationship between the living and the dead.

An Iranian cab driver tries to stays in touch with his roots by spending time with his countryman, novelist, Sadgh Hedayat, who is buried at Pere Lachaise. He hesitantly quotes from the author’s book, ‘The Blind Owl’, and says he believes he would understand why he left home. Two blind film buffs visit the graves of Yves Montand and Simone Signoret (buried side by side), then go home to rewatch Diabolique with great relish.

Then, there’s the young Asian man struggling to convey in English all that ‘A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’ has meant to him. Honigmann says he should just tell her in his own language. He unleashes a torrent of words, which the filmmaker elects to leave untranslated, allowing the guy’s urgent expression to say it all. Another quirky but elegant choice the director makes is to never directly tour Jim Morrison’s gravesite. We do see the hoards troop by as a Frenchwoman visiting her husband’s grave comments that “we will never be lonely” with The Doors front man as a close neighbor. FOREVER contains the discovery of an unknown folksinger and the revelation of an epic love story ended by a bee sting. This beautiful film – as much about the living as it is about the dead – will be touching people long after we are gone.

see the trailer:http://www.filmforum.org/films/forevertrailer.html

Mamoulian # 1
FREDRIC MARCH & ANNA STEN in We Live Again, 1934, ROUBEN MAMOULIAN: THE GOLDEN AGE Of BROADWAY & HOLLYWOOD/FILM FORUM SEPT 7-18, 2007. (12 DAY FESTIVAL)

mamoulian # 2

ROUBEN MAMOULIAN – 12 DAY FESTIVAL – SEPT 7-18, 2007 – FILM FORUM

You may just as well take up residence at the Film Forum and check out the ROUBEN MAMOULIAN FESTIVAL in Theater One and John Turturro’s baroque musical, ROMANCE & CIGARETTES in Theater Two. Mamoulian was an extremely stylish and elegant director. He made just 16 films, most of them pure movie ecstasy, so try to see them all! There were musicals with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald (Love Me Tonight), one of Greta Garbo’s most iconic dramas (Queen Christina), a horror classic (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), which won Frederic March his Oscar), and the very first Technicolor classic (Becky Sharp). He worked with Martha Graham, George Gershwin and Alfred Lunt in the theater before going Hollywood. He believed in achieving his vision as a director not by behaving as a tyrant but by “winning them over with love, so the work becomes a romance.” What actor could resist that?

ROUBEN MAMOULIAN FESTIVAL – SCHEDULE

Romance
image: POSTER/ROMANCE & CIGARETTES

Gandolfini/Romance & Cigarettes
JAMES GANDOLFINI in ROMANCE & CIGARETTES

JOHN TURTURRO’S: ROMANCE & CIGARETTES

John Turturro’s musical, ROMANCE & CIGARETTES, is kind of out there, but in a good way. Seems like the whole neighborhood’s in on the conquest wrecking Nick Murder’s marriage, with dancing firemen putting out the blaze in the heart of the Queens construction worker (played by a soulful James Gandolfini), as he lip synchs to “Lonely is the man without love.” There are about a dozen full scale production numbers done to classic songs, in virtually every genre from gospel to rock, bolstered by inventive and very amusing choreography by Tricia Brouk.

Bobby Carnavale, Christopher Walken, Aida Turturro, Steve Buscemi and Eddie Izzard all have molto buono moments, but no one is fouler-mouthed or more wild and wanton than the utterly fabulous Kate Winslett, who looks like she’s having a blast playing a slutty temptress in a red dress with an over the top Cockney accent. Her post coital dance is worth the price of admission alone. That girl may be British but she definitely knows how to shake her booty!

A complete success? No, but, quite a spectacle. Personally, I think this flick would definitely loosen things up on a first date.

see the trailer: ROMANCE & CIGARETTES

www.filmforum.org




~Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) & Love for Sale

Film Review
August 22, 2007 by JAN ALBERT

It’s the end of summer and if you’re ready for something a little more challenging than TRANSFORMERS, here are two startling new films from Brazil that will take your mind off how f-ed up our nation is.

Manda Bala  1

Manda Bala
IMAGES: COURTESY MANDA BALA (SEND A BULLET)


MANDA BALA (SEND A BULLET)
Jason Kohn’s first film won the Grand Jury documentary prize at Sundance this year. It takes you far from the beautiful beaches of Rio and exotic revelry of Carnival depicted in tourist ads and plunges you into the fear and horror that has come to define daily life in Brazil’s largest city. Sao Paulo is a city (the third largest in the world) where the least fortunate citizens regularly emerge from the slums to exact revenge on the corrupt politicians and wealthy industrialists who make their fortunes off the backs of the poor by kidnapping their wives and children and demanding enormous ransoms for their return. As the film’s tag line puts it: “When the rich steal from the poor the poor steal the rich.”
Kohn and his crew spent 5 years assembling an amazing cast of characters to depict Sao Paolo’s surreal food chain: the former head of the nation’s Senate who has been convicted of stealing millions from a government program meant to improve life in Brazil’s most remote Amazon villages but was nonetheless reelected by those districts. The wealthy manager of an industrial frog farm set up to launder the money stolen from the government program. A kidnapper who supports his family of 10 by abducting rich teenagers and cutting off their ears to urge their parents to pay ransom demands… a plastic surgeon that has become famous for inventing a cosmetic approach to replace the ears of kidnap victims…. A successful businessman who lives in constant fear of being kidnapped and so has spent vast sums to armor his bulletproof car and learn defensive driving techniques – a big business sparked into life to respond to the kidnap culture, along with the sale of private helicopters so the super rich can take off from the roofs of their penthouses and avoid street traffic, and microchipping, which enables tracking in the advent of a kidnapping.

Most unforgettable is the young woman nabbed outside a nightclub who describes how a young kidnapper practically passed out while cutting through the cartilage of her ear and how Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Birds, was playing on TV while they performed this butchery. That night, she dreamed that birds were picking at her ear. YIKES! I dare Wes Craven to equal that horror scene or the image of small kids playing in the slums, acting out kidnappings and stick-ups, instead of playing soccer.

Jason Kohn is a protégée of Errol Morris, whose imaginative touch has stretched the boundary of documentary filmmaking. Kohn has a gift for intrepid reporting, ambush tactics (like a sly young Mike Wallace!) when necessary, and vivid imagery. If the scenes of frog farm produce digesting each other to symbolize the revolting way human beings feed off each other are a trifle heavy handed, you won’t be forgetting them anytime soon either.

Manda Bala, which opens Friday, August 17th at The Angelica Theater, got me so interested in life in Brazil, that I went over to the Film Forum to check out LOVE FOR SALE, a haunting drama about a vibrant young woman who heads for Sao Paulo to seek her fortune, then slinks back to Iguatu, the desert wasteland that is her hometown.

LOVE FOR SALE
HERMILDA GUEDES as Hermila (foreground) and GEORGINA CASTRO (background) as her friend Georgina, as seen in LOVE FOR SALE.
PHOTO CREDIT: STRAND RELEASING

I didn’t see Karim Ainouz’s first film, Madame Sata, which Film Forum premiered in 2003, but if there’s any justice in this world, this film will definitely launch the career of a major new director. With a complete economy of images and a minimum of dialogue, we get the whole picture within the first few frames. We meet Hermila in a home movie, carefree, radiantly happy, and in love. Then we cut to a close up of the still beautiful but somewhat drawn girl bumping along a dusty road on a crowded bus. The camera slides over to reveal a baby in her lap.

Hermila’s Aunt Maria and grandmother take her and her infant son in and a temporary situation becomes permanent after several weeks of public humiliation as the whole town watches her calling again and again from the only public phone and waiting in vain at the gas station for her 20-year-old husband to join her from Sao Paulo.

Using a combination of non professionals and theater actors in the main roles, Ainouz and his wonderful cinematographer, Walter Carvalho, capture the details of life in “nowheresville Northeastern Brazil” perfectly—Hermila leaning against the open fridge at her granny’s house to cool off, sucking on a piece of ice. The truck stop, the open air market, the sidewalk restaurant, the guys blowing up dust on the main drag with their scooters, and the disco. The camera loves Hermila Guedes, the beautiful lead actress, who is deeply affecting as she grimly washes cars, pumps gas, cleans motel rooms and goes back to the kind but passive loser she thought she had left behind as ancient history. We watch her growing more wan and bitterer everyday until she challenges her life sentence and plots her escape from Iguatu with an enterprising plan that shocks the whole town.

I loved LOVE FOR SALE. Go see it. You will too.

www.angelikafilmcenter.com

www.filmforum.org




~Tekkonkinkreet

tekkonkinkreet #1

MoMA TEkkkonkinkreet

Film Review
April 20, 2007 by JAN ALBERT

TEKKONKINKREET :

More than 10 years ago, Michael Arias read Taiyo Matsumoto’s cult-classic graphic novel, ‘Tekkonkinkreet’. Ever since, he’s dreamed of bringing it to life on the screen. Tekkonkinkreet is a play on the Japanese words for concrete, iron & muscle and the title is meant to symbolize the destructive power those elements have on the world of the imagination. This time, the world of imagination definitely triumphs. After 40 months in production at Tokyo’s Studio 4ËšC, Arias (who has lived in Japan for over 15 years), has created a beautiful story that combines cutting edge computer generated imagery with classic hand drawn character animation. It’s an intensely ambitious work of art that will feed your soul.

We are immediately plunged into a dizzying chase through “Treasure Town”, a futuristic city as densely imagined as (and deeply influenced by) anything in Blade Runner. We catch wonderful details on the smallest of street signs, even ashtrays, as two street kids, named Kuro (“Black”) and Shiro (“White”), lead a gang of boys trying to muscle in on their turf on a merry chase through underground tunnels and up into the air.

Kuro and Shiro live in an abandoned car and look out for each other as brothers. The only adults in their world are Yazuka gangsters who accept them as part of the firmament and a kind old street beggar who occasionally shares the public bathhouse. Making sure White, the smaller of the two, is properly dressed and fed, keeps Black focused and gives him a family to care about. For his part, White, a simple being, full of sunlight, keeps Black connected to the innocent child inside and tempers his anger at having to grow up way before his time.
Together, they’ve managed to adapt to this world that’s constantly shifting and changing around them in a resourceful and even, joyous manner. Then an evil real-estate developer (backed by extra terrestrial robots no less) starts to rip Treasure Town down around them.

Arias keeps the heart rending story that captured his imagination a decade ago at the center and surrounds it with a combination of CGI and beautifully hand drawn characters. Even the bad guys stand out; wonderfully quirky, world weary, hopeful, greedy, evil individuals with back stories and a growth curve. When some of these evildoers bite the dust, we are a little sorry to lose them. The lavish attention to detail will make viewers want to see the film again to catch all the goodies cramming every frame. Arias and his team took hundreds of photos of old world bathhouses, markets, abandoned amusement parks, and decaying street signs and sound designer Mitch Osias collected raw material in both New York and Tokyo to inspire the patina of Treasure Town. The icing on the cake is a great original score by the electronic music group, PLAID.

After Kuro and Shiro save each other’s lives countless times, they are finally, brutally separated and Shiro must battle the darkness within himself on a hellish black star in outer space. Curiously, this apocalyptic scene was the only section that fell a little flat for me — I think I may have been on sensory overload by the time we reached that point in the story– still, that’s a very small quibble about a film that I can’t wait to see again.

TEKKONKINKREET is the first film Arias has actually directed but he’s had a fascinating journey to this point. He taught himself programming and math and computer graphics for the most part; creating special effects for films like The Abyss, Total Recall and The Matrix, designing film titles and sequences for David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee and the Coen Bros., helping visual effects pioneer Doug Trumbull develop the Back to the Future ride at Universal Theme Park, inventing and patenting “Toon Shaders,” a software, which helped lend 3-D computer graphics the look of traditional 2-D animation in Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning Princess Mononoke and Dreamworks’ The Road to El Dorado, and collaborating with the Wachowski Bros. on Animatrix, an anime extension of the first great Matrix film.

And now, he has become the first foreign born director to helm a feature length anime film in Japan — a story as sweet and hopeful and dark and compelling as any Grimm’s fairy tale.

For more background on Tekkonkinkreet and Michael Arias, check out:

http://search.japantimes.co.jp – there’s a great photo of MICHAEL ARIAS here !

www.ozoux.com/eclectic/archive/2006/04/26/tekkon-kinkreet-trailer

www.tekkon.net/site.html

Michael Arias will introduce Tekkonkinkreet at The Museum of Modern Art on Thursday, April 25th at 8:30.
The film runs at MOMA through Monday, April 30th. For more information, call 212-708-9400
or www. moma.org

OTHER ARTLOVERS POSTS/TEKKONKINKREET:

~PHOTO: TAIYO MATSUMOTO, MICHAEL ARIAS, and ANTHONY WEINTRAUB

~PHOTO: MICHAEL ARIAS at MoMA SCREENING

~PHOTO: MICHAEL ARIAS ARRIVES AT MoMA SCREENING

~HOMEPAGE ARCHIVE/THE BOMB/ARTLOVERS




~The Hoax

the hoax

Film Review
April 16, 2007 by JAN ALBERT

TRUTH, JUSTICE & THE AMERICAN WAY AT THE MOVIES:

THE HOAX is a pretty good film that has a couple of great things going for it – A/ a great story and B/ a great performance by Richard Gere – yes, Richard Gere.
It’s about, as Al Franken might put it, LIES and the LYING LIARS who tell them. As it turns out, in this case, they’re not really such bad people – just wannabes reaching for their slice of the American Dream. It’s 1971, the dawn of the Watergate era, and far worse manipulators of the truth—the ones running our country and our corporations – will soon emerge.

The story, a true one, is the stuff of legend. Clifford Irving, a journeyman writer, frustrated by his inability to get major publishers to take him seriously as an A-list novelist, concocts a fantastic story they can’t ignore, and almost pulls off one of the most audacious cons of the 20th century. Although Irving’s only major book up to this point was called, FAKE!, which chronicled the career of the notorious art forger, Elmyr de Hory, (which might have given some people pause for thought), he somehow convinced McGraw Hill, the same publishing company that wouldn’t give him the time of day before, that world famous billionaire recluse, Howard Hughes, has anointed him as his biographer and authorized Irving to sell his memoirs. Soon, he is cashing checks for a million dollars and has got Life Magazine panting for serialized rights.

The film follows Irving as he pulls his best friend, a brilliant researcher, and his own wife, into the scam. It’s exhilarating to watch as this handsome charmer makes stuff up out of thin air and people he has always longed to impress buy it, hook, line and sinker. It becomes increasingly harrowing as the high stakes game spins way out of control, the players betray each other, and Irving can no longer keep track of his lies. Director Lasse Halstrom and screenwriter William Wheeler hint at manipulation by players way larger than these three, such as President Richard Nixon, and Howard Hughes himself (who hasn’t been seen in public for decades), emerging for just long enough to pull strings that will put millions more into his own bank account and send Irving and company to prison.

Details of this paranoid period, which sowed the seeds for our current reality of fake news, made up memoirs, and lies upon lies upon lies from our leaders — are skillfully layered throughout. Gere gets tremendous support from Alfred Molina and Marcia Gay Harden, but it’s really his show and he’s tremendously convincing. Gere goes deep within and way beyond the cocky sex appeal that’s been his stock in trade in the movies since he personified the “American Gigolo”. He brings real pathos to this entertaining guy who believes he “couldda been a contender” – a man simultaneously full of himself and hating himself. Richard Gere has always been a pleasure to spend an hour and a half with in the dark – if you catch my drift — but this time the complex man he caught on celluloid isn’t so easy to shake.




~Breach

new BREACH still

Film Review
April 16, 2007 by JAN ALBERT

BREACH is another true story of deceit, hidden lives and thwarted glory. Chris Cooper (Oscar winner for his supporting performance as an orchid thief in Adaptation and totally deserving of more awards for his performance here) is absolutely chilling as Robert Hanssen, the master spy who sold American secrets to the Soviets for 30 years and engineered the greatest security breach in US history before the Feds finally managed to out him in 2001.

Hanssen is no easy charmer like the Clifford Irving character in The Hoax. He is a middle of the road civil servant, a holier than thou, church going dude with a crucifix in his office and a dagger in his heart from having been passed over for promotion for so many years. He’ll teach them to pass over a genius. And so he becomes the worm burrowed deep in the shiny apple, eating away at the FBI’s computer networks, giving up American agents, and somehow justifying his choice as a necessary tough love lesson for a system that has become so blind to its own failings.

The film begins as a small team (led by the always stellar Laura Linney) gathers evidence to try to bring Hanssen down. Eric O’Neill, an FBI rookie from a deeply religious family is sent in to gain Hanssen’s confidence, posing as his new office clerk. Portrayed by a really solid Ryan Phillippe, the neophyte is alternately appalled and admiring as Hanssen intones the pillars that his FBI career should rest upon; “Faith, Family and Country.”

Most of the action in BREACH is small. There are no mind-blowing car chases but director Billy Ray has crafted a truly nail biting thriller (Ray’s first film, SHATTERED GLASS, was another great tale of escalating deceit set in a newsroom. RENT IT!).
In fact, I’ll pay him the ultimate compliment: There were moments where the tension in BREACH was reminiscent of an Alfred Hitchcock classic. I genuinely feared for Ryan Phillippe’s well being at several points!

Two fascinating side bars: Socialite Nina Van Pallandt, Clifford Irving’s mistress and one of the people who betrayed his Howard Hughes scam to the authorities, ended up as a minor movie star in the after glare of the scandal, appearing with young Richard Gere in American Gigolo in 1980, and Eric ONeill, the real life character Ryan Phillippe portrays in BREACH, resigned his promising FBI career shortly after Hanssen’s arrest. He had seen enough!

check out the trailer:
www.breachmovie.net




~BEST of 2006

Film Review
January 12, 2007 by JAN ALBERT

JAN ALBERT’S BEST OF 2006

Little Miss Sunshine

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE – for breaking the long movie draught of 2006. This was the first beginning-to-end GOOD movie I saw all last year – quirky, beautifully cast, and laugh out loud funny. Not to oversell this small joy but it’s a great ride. I loved Alan Arkin as grandpa and the rest of the family is pretty great too.

Thank You For Smoking

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING – satire is a hard form to pull off. This one flicks off the ashes and strikes it just right. It’s politically sharp, well-observed and extremely witty. Aaron Eckhart has to be one of the handsomest guys ever to grace celluloid and makes the perfect villain/hero out of an all too plausible cigarette lobbyist. Rob Lowe is hysterical as a Hollywood dealmaker and a pre-Tom Cruise Katie Holmes is wicked as what passes for a working journalist these days.

Dreamgirls

DREAMGIRLS – The first movies I ever saw on the BIG SCREEN were when my father brought me into Manhattan for a double feature of Brigadoon and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, an introduction to the movie musical that had me from “the mist of May is in the gloaming.” I am a sucker for great movie musicals and director/writer Bill Condon has created one just as magical in its way as Carousel and West Side Story. There are kickass costumes, dynamic editing, and a great story – a thinly veiled look at the birth and heyday of the Supremes and Motown. The first rate cast makes the most of a pretty good score and superstars Beyonce Knowles and Jamie Foxx take a graceful backseat to simply outstanding supporting performances from Eddie Murphy (in a perfectly-timed tip of the hat to the Godfather of Soul) and Jennifer Hudson.

half nelson

HALF NELSON – Hey, it can’t all be sunshine and lollipops! So far as I’m concerned, this small film contained the performance of the year – Ryan Gosling as a crack addict who somehow still manages to function as an inspiring high school teacher. Absolutely mesmerizing to watch, I could not catch Gosling acting-I just believed and felt for the person he created so completely. The film overall struck me as a little naïve but first-time director Ryan Fleck and screenwriter Anna Boden are to be commended for getting such a complex human being up on the screen – a self destructive man who nonetheless is a good guy with valuable stuff to offer.

iwo jima

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA – We should all take inspiration from the ambitious work Clint Eastwood is turning out in his 70’s! In 2006, he gave us two films exploring the horrific WWII battle of Iwo Jima – one from the American POV and one from the Japanese side. I found Flags of Our Fathers a great idea (following the soldiers who raised the US flag on Iwo Jima back home for an orchestrated PR tour through the States to raise $ for the war machine) executed with a sledgehammer. It slams you over the head with its relentless bloodshed and brutal message, but I haven’t been able to get the way subtler LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA out of my mind. Despite the fact that the film is in Japanese and requires reading sub titles, I connected with all four main characters and their moments of truth. The stunning cinematography gives the film an otherworldly look of a washed out Hell on Earth, and the script structure, with flashbacks taking us back to the world these guys inhabited before fate brought them together on this God forsaken rock, scuttling like rats in a maze of underground tunnels, adds a depth and humanity that was missing in FOOF.
Maybe, it’s because the American story portrays the men literally as interchangeable cogs in the machine, (although Adam Beach stands out as a Native American GI trotted out for the big show) whereas Ken Watanabe and a few in his company emerge as noble individuals fighting a futile battle in the name of their government. Whatever the reason, I believe this film about man’s greatest folly will ultimately join LE GRANDE ILLUSION in the annals of classic anti-war films.

hollywoodland

HOLLYWOODLAND – Catch up with this one on video. It came and went pretty quickly, but I thought it was a great little noir mystery that casts a spell and pulls you into the shady circumstances surrounding a childhood TV hero’s death. Rooted in the real life reporting of actor George Reeves death in 1959, it is nonetheless an act of imagination that keeps you wondering whether SUPERMAN jumped or was pushed. Adrien Brody has fun as a slimy low rent gumshoe and Ben Affleck’s own experience getting ground up in the glare of Hollywood’s star making machinery undoubtedly informs his extremely moving performance as a celebrity stranded by his own success.

borat

BORAT – Horrible, vulgar, stupid/ hysterical, terrifying, brilliant. The idiot alter ego of Sacha Baron Cohen takes a road trip through the U.S. and exposes way, way more than you want to know about your fellow Americans. Not “very nice” but REALLY, you don’t want to miss it.

new-the queen

THE QUEEN – We all want to know how the other half lives and this film provides a really provocative look behind the palace doors during the stressful days following Princess Diana’s fatal car crash. Peter Morgan based his political and poetic screenplay on copious research and interviews, then took a leap of the imagination that transforms this film into something beyond documentary. His take on how Queen Elizabeth painfully transcends a lifetime of privilege and protocol to come to terms with a new prime minister, Tony Blair, and the public rage of her previously loving royal subjects is really eye opening. Helen Mirren inhabits Her Majesty in the same way Ryan Gosling takes on his character in Half Nelson (see above) and rightfully deserves to be crowned Best Actress at the Oscars this year.

the departed-new


THE DEPARTED
– My all around most satisfying movie going experience of the year. A Shakespearean face off between good and evil and the twisted grey areas that lurk around both, set in Boston’s criminal underworld. Matt Damon and Leo DiCaprio are well matched adversaries; both great to watch, and all the supporting players, including Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Vera Farmiga, and especially Mark Wahlberg, have a blast with screenwriter William Monahan’s take no prisoners dialogue. The fact that the usually awesome Jack Nicholson is way over the top was annoying but not fatal. This is the kind of drama and great repartee I go to the movies for and Martin Scorsese, without a doubt one of the greatest film directors of the last century (I guess you can guess who my “best director” vote is going to), really knows how to serve it up.

prarie home companion


A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION
– I am not a fan of the gentle, folksy radio show this film is based on, but I adored the movie. It has all the hallmarks director Robert Altman was known for; overlapping dialogue from a huge cast of characters, fabulous long takes and fluid camera movement, and multiple points of view that create a unique chance for the audience to spy on a singular environment, in this case the behind the scenes and onstage doings involved in the very last live broadcast of a beloved institution, The Prairie Home Companion radio show. There is little to no dramatic tension, but somehow that doesn’t matter. Altman’s direction is so confident, so relaxed and loosey goosey, you just settle in and enjoy the sights and sounds. All the actors, including a radiant Meryl Streep, the divine Lilly Tomlin, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, Virginia Madsen, Kevin Kline, Maya Rudolf, et al, look like they are having fun and their bonhomie is contagious. Altman even makes a movie star out of PHC host, Garrison Keillor, who is charmingly bemused by it all. The intimations of mortality that hang around the edges of this going away party are doubly touching in light of Altman’s recent passing. Whether an angel in a white trench coat appeared to guide the great director to a heaven where he can kibitz with the likes of George Cukor, John Cassavetes, Billy Wilder and Akira Kurosawa we will never know, but he certainly went out on a high note.

HERE are some other movies I really liked in 2006:

LITTLE CHILDREN: This very literary, yet impressively cinematic adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s novel focuses on the special insanity induced by living in suburbia, where folks move “for the good of their children.”
While her husband is away at work during the day and pursuing his new passion for internet pornography at night, a bored mom with a Masters degree (Kate Winslet – absolutely wonderful as always) and a confused former High School football hero, (Patrick Wilson) left behind to take care of his son as his wife’s career in the big city takes off, drift into an affair. Meanwhile their community becomes obsessed by the presence of a pedophile (a searing performance by former child star, Jackie Earle Hayley, that feels so real it is actually painful to watch) who has been released into the custody of his long suffering but loving mother. The ties that bind parent and child and the profound ambiguity many women feel about being “good mothers” are frankly explored in this challenging film that will reward repeated viewings. In fact, I can’t wait to see it again. Todd Field is definitely a director to watch.

CHILDREN OF MEN & INSIDE MAN: a futuristic paranoid thriller full of atmosphere and an ingenious bank heist, both anchored by the terrific CLIVE OWEN.

BLOOD DIAMOND: A rousing, old fashioned, action-adventure story with a new age conscience. Set in contemporary Africa, Leonardo DiCaprio gives his all as a hardened player with a heart of gold, dodging machetes on the trail of the big diamond that will transform his life. Leo really comes into his own as a great romantic leading man in the grand tradition here and delivers a wonderfully satisfying performance that breaks your heart a little.

CASINO ROYALE: Bond is blonde and Daniel Craig does the series proud. Director Martin Campbell throws in everything but the kitchen sink — there are 2 or 3 action sequences too many and you can see some of the plot turns coming from a mile off, but there are lots of fun moments and the opening chase scene is a doozy – worth the price of admission alone.

marie antoinette


MARIE ANTOINETTE
: I thought Kirsten Dunst was endearing as the teenage queen bored out of her gourd and that Sofia Coppola really got her dilemma – a husband who didn’t want to have sex, a kingdom full of hateful gossips, and scads of money to burn on clothes and cake. She was clueless about the troubles in Paris and just trying to keep her head above water at Versailles. The storytelling was kind of clunky, but you really can’t fault the eye-popping visual treatment. I loved the Monolo Blahnik music video right in the middle!

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA: A well done Hollywood comedy with an audacious star performance by Meryl Streep as a tough dame running a NYC Fashion bible like Vogue. Emily Blunt also makes a splash as her bitchy assistant.

INFAMOUS
: Timing is everything and Douglas McGrath’s Truman Capote film came second – just a year after Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-winning performance, so it has been unjustly ignored. It is stylish, very smart, sobering, and a triumph in its own right. Toby Jones also does great things with the incomparable Tru and it’s fun to compare the telling of the same story in the two films. McGrath’s emphasis on how this artist sold his soul to the devil is haunting.

BOBBY: I wasn’t looking forward to seeing a film about Bobby Kennedy’s assassination but that isn’t what this film is about and so, it took me by surprise. Emilio Estevez has made a movie full of heart about a day in the life of the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. – the day when Kennedy won the 1968 California primary. Estevez has a great touch with actors and there are many wonderful cameos from Sharon Stone as the hotel hairdresser, Helen Hunt as an insecure trophy wife, Laurence Fishburne and Freddy Rodriguez as chef and busboy, Lindsay Lohan as a teen marrying a classmate against her parent’s wishes to help keep him out of Vietnam, and Ashton Kutcher as a dealer turning two young campaign workers on to their first LSD trip. Estevez is clearly fascinated by the palpable feeling of hope for the future Kennedy awoke in this wide variety of Americans and the film left me hoping for a return of that kind of feeling for the future of our nation.

VENUS &
MISS POTTER: Two lovely small surprises came at the very end of 2006. VENUS is the sentimental tale of an old ladies man and his last love, a crude, working class lass. Peter O’Toole is now in his 70’s, but looks at least 10 years older, due, one would hope, to a life of enjoying himself 24/7. He still holds the screen with the same one of a kind charisma he exuded as a dazzlingly handsome young star on the rise. He has a bunch of fine scenes with an old chum, played by Leslie Philipps and some good moments with Vanessa Redgrave, as his ex wife. O’Toole has an amazing voice but as with all great screen actors, he never needs to talk to get your attention, his face says it all and no one has ever had a face like this old pro.

MISS POTTER is also a very sentimental but rathuh special film done with impeccable taste. This one is about Beatrix Potter, the creator of Peter Rabbit and many other enchanting children’s books. It performs the great balancing act of hovering just above treacly, but never quite touching it. It is a small story (like Potter’s beautiful little books) but it sneaks up on you. Renee Zellweger has the wonderful talent of believing and trusting in her characters and truly investing herself in them. Her rapport with Ewan McGregor is what screen chemistry between co-stars is supposed to be all about.

babel

And last but not least, that brings us to BABEL. Many moments from this very ambitious film stick in my head like still photographs — two young brothers playing with a gun on a desolate mountaintop in Morocco, an anguished American (Brad Pitt) alpha male trying to keep his temper and save his wife’s life via long distance telephone, a Mexican nanny (outstanding performance by Adrianna Barraza!) playing substitute mamma to two blonde children, wandering desparately through the desert separating Mexico and the U.S. with one of them in her arms, a deaf Japanese teenager searching for love and recognition, wandering through a disco with blaring music she cannot hear — they are all trying to make a connection.
I really admired Alejandro Gonzallez Inarritu’s first film, Amores Perros, detested 21 Grams and am on the fence about this one. Inarritu and his screenwriter, Guillermo Arriga, are also struggling to make a connection between all these disparate human beings and it felt a little forced. I got it, I got it — we are not so different from each other as we may believe.
The camerawork is absolutely unforgettable and this film deserves your time. Let me know what you think.

I look forward to catching up with the ones I missed, like L’Enfant, The Fountain, Sherrybaby & The Death of Monsieur Levascou and letting you know about the ones to come in 2007 – next up: LOOK OUT FOR PHILIP HAAS’S THE SITUATION.

(Contact JAN ALBERT at ophelia@angel.net)