LOST BOHEMIA

During 'BILL CUNNINGHAM:NEW YORK' we were treated to a glimpse of the amazing studio in Carnegie Hall that was his home for some 40 old years and also we got to meet a few of the eclectic band of artists and performers that were his neighbors there. This new movie, also featuring Bill, is about all of the residents of this unique NY building as they are being unceremoniously and callously evicted from the homes that they have lived in for decades, and all in the name of ‘progress’.

When industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie had this luxurious Concert Hall built in the 1880’s he topped the building off with a whole swath of studios and apartments specifically for artists to live and work, and he established a Charter that would guarantee their right to remain there.  In the 1960’s the then owner sold the Hall to the City of New York who leased it to the non-profit Carnegie Hall Corporation and it was also added to the National Landmarks Register.  In the 1980’s the Corporation commissioned the 60-story Carnegie Hall Tower right next door, which included much needed additional backstage space and offices.  But evidently not enough and in 2004 they started to evict all the long-standing residents is that their studios could be used ‘for educational purposes’.

The final residents include the remarkable celebrity photographer Editta Sherman, then aged 96, whose phenomenal body of work was matched by her enormous sense of style.  Looking decades younger than her age, her vitality and energy light up the screen and it is impossible not to be totally mesmerized by her. Her neighbors range from acting teachers, to vocal coaches, singers, ballet dancers (one, a sprightly 85 year old ran an illegal studio on a stairwell), and even  an organist who had a full size concert organ actually in her apartment.

As the Residents lost their fights to remain, the City of New York, technically their Landlords sat tight, whilst the Corporations heavy phalanx of Lawyers effectively petitioned the Courts to literally re-interpret Andrew Carnegie’s original Charter.

The film could have used a steadier hand editing it, but that aside, this overwhelmingly sad story that witnesses such thoughtless and almost criminal destruction, makes  a compelling view.  I had a sneak preview as the theatrical release of this movie is not until the Fall, so keep an eye out for it.

P.S. A small thought.  In their 2008 Accounts the (non- profit) Corporation’s Chief Executive earned almost $1 million, and the man in charge of all the props etc earned almost $500000!

★★★★★★★★

LAST NIGHT

Michael and Joanna, a glamorous young married couple, are at a cocktail party in Manhattan when Joanna meets Laura, one of her husband’s work colleagues that he has surprisingly failed to mention is stunningly beautiful. Joanna suspects him of flirting with her (but who can blame him when the party looks so boring) and when they get back home later she starts a fight accusing him of being up to no-good.

By morning they have come to an uneasy truce just as Michael sets out to leave on a business trip with none other than Laura. After he leaves, Joanna slips out of the apartment to go grab a coffee and bumps into Alex a handsome ex-beau who she hasn’t clapped eyes on for two years and just happens to be over from Paris for the weekend and in her neighborhood (it is the movies after all).  Flash forward to later that night when Michael is struggling hard to resist the temptations of a night of joy with Laura in her hotel room, whilst Joanna is having dinner with Alex and wondering why she ever gave this French hunk up.

The next morning (no, I’m not going to spoil it and reveal the plot as there is so very little of it after all) and a confused and teary eyed Laura turns to Alex and declares ‘ There is so much going on right now’, but she is so wrong.  There simply isn’t and that’s why the well-intended first feature from novice filmmaker Massy Tadjedin fails  as nothing much really happens at all.

That aside it also has the added disadvantages of some curious casting.  Laura is played by Keira Knightly, who regular readers on my Blog will know annoys me beyond belief just by being on the screen.  In all fairness this is probably her best attempt yet at playing a romantic lead, but it still doesn’t move me.  Her screen husband is played by Aussie star Sam Worthington (who helped save the world in ‘Avatar’) and I still can’t decide if Michael his character was meant to be such a cold fish, or that’s the most convincing lover/husband he can be.  The ‘temptations’ on the other hand were prefect.  Both the voluptuous and sexy Eve Mendes as Laura and French matinee idol Guillaume Canet as Alex would have been irresistible to me (but then I can be so shallow).

If you want to be tempted, watch this one at home with your remote control in hand so you can make lighter work of it than I did.

★★★★★
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NO IMPACT MAN

Writer Colin Beavon persuaded (bullied even?) his family into forsaking many of the conveniences of modern life in their small Manhattan apartment to minimize their use of carbon-based fuels.  The experiment lasted a whole year, which seemed to start badly for Michelle Conlon his wife who appeared to reluctantly participate but did so purely as an act of loyalty to her husband.  She committed to help him re-organize all their daily routines to have the best possible environmental impact whilst he was also working equally as hard to maximize the impact of this whole enterprise.  It was very noticeably called ‘No Impact Man’ and not as it should have been ‘No Impact Family’.

As time progressed and they adapted their eating habits to encompass only locally grown products, and to dispense with basic commodities like toilet paper (always the point the Media picked up on) and electricity even, Beavon’s self-righteous attitude stretched both his wife’s patience and mine too.  He patronizingly sulked when Michelle admitted to desperately craving a fix of coffee (totally forbidden) because he considered this a personal slight for his big plan, yet he indignantly refused to even participate in a conversation when his 40 year old wife bought up the subject of having a second child which was part of her dreams and expectations.

Towards the end of the year in the second part of the movie just as I was getting quite exasperated, the mood changed and Beavons became more conciliatory and generous and his wife seemed less irritated and  even whole-hearted supporting the project.  In reality I’m not sure what the whole thing achieved beyond a great deal of media attention and celebrity to Beavons, and I think the nagging aspect in my head was that I was constantly assessing was this actually the real reason for the movie, blog and book etc. etc.  The latter was knowing titled  “No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process”

Did he have any impact?  I don’t think so.  But he did no harm too, and I guess any attempt to push this subject on to all our agendas is good, whatever the motive.


★★★★★★
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CAMERAMAN : THE LIFE AND WORK OF JACK CARDIFF

Jack Cardiff was unquestionably one of the greatest cinematographers in the history of cinema.  His extraordinary body of work started in 1935 and included such landmark masterpieces as ‘Black Narcissus’, King Vidor’s ‘War and Peace ‘, ‘The African Queen’, ‘The Red Shoes’ and some less notable movies such as ‘Rambo’ etc. and his remarkable output didn’t cease until he died in 2007 at the ripe old age of 94.

Craig McCall’s profile, some 17 years in the making, showed an unassuming self-taught man whose love of the great classic paintings were a crucial source of inspiration for his daring and innovative work. Cardiff’s creative talent at pushing way beyond the established limits of what cameras could achieve at that time and by constantly thinking out of the box, enabled a whole string of the world’s leading directors achieve more than the vision that they had hoped for. His work was one of the reasons in those early days before all the special effects labs were in existence, that filming was considered a true art form, and this documentary is peppered with esteemed filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese who were in total awe of what Jack Cardiff achieved.

In the late 1950’s Cardiff also directed some movies too, initially with very limited success, and then in 1960 his version of DH Lawrence’s ‘Sons & Lovers’ earned him a Golden Globe, plus an Oscar Nomination.  But when that avenue of work dried up, he went back to his first love of cinematography, and in 2001 he became the very first cameraman to be awarded a Honorary Oscar for his lifetime’s work.

Jack Cardiff was a rare talent.  A great anecdotal story teller, totally unpretentious and seemingly either unaware or bemused by the unequivocal sheer admiration of all his peers.  His legacy is indisputable and his incredible contribution to cinema is summed up so aptly by Mr Scorcese who said that when he wanted to go to the movies he wanted to escape realism and see something fantastical, and that’s exactly what Jack Cardiff did so brilliantly.

If you have any passion at all for movies, you will not want to miss this one.


★★★★★★★★
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POINT BLANK

This very explosive frenzied thriller will have you hooked from the opening chase through the streets of Paris, and the frenetic pace never lets up for the next 88 minutes.

Sartet, the man being chased, ends up in hospital and there is a failed attempt to murder him there and Samuel, a nurse’s assistant, saves his life. Thugs kidnap Samuel’s heavily pregnant wife Nadia as an inducement to make him help Sartet escape from hospital whilst under police guard.  It all goes horribly wrong, people get killed, and now Samuel is also on the run as a wanted fugitive too.

Two rival Police Inspectors and their teams get involved, and not all of them are  ‘good guys’, and they provide further strands to the unwinding of an intriguing plot that link Sartet to the murder of a prominent businessman.  It then becomes a matter of life of death for all of them as to who finds Sartet and Samuel first.  It has an exhilarating climax in a chaotic police station when you are never really sure who the ‘baddies’ are and will they come through in the end.

This exhilarating French movie excels on so many levels.  The casting is faultless with the rugged  North African actor Roschdy Zem (Oscar nominated ‘Days of Glory’) as Sartet, Gilles Lelouche (‘Mesrine’) as Samuel the out-of-his-depth Nurse’s Assistant, and the stunning beautiful Spanish actress Elena Araya (‘Talk To Her’, ‘Sex & Lucia’) as Nadia, and I loved the tough confident female Inspector played by Mirielle Perrier.

This is the second movie written and directed by Fred Cavaye: his 2008 debut was ‘Anything For Her’ an enormous critical and commercial success in Europe, which Hollywood immediately copied and even with the inestimable Paul Haggis at the helm still ended up as watered-down flop ‘The Next 3 Days’ starring the ubiquitous Russell Crowe.  This is a genre that the French so excel at, (there is one scene when an opera singer on T.V. is belting out the same aria from Catalina’s ‘La Wally’ that featured prominently in ‘Diva’ one of my all-time fav. French thrillers) and one  that I would not hesitate to suggest that they do much better than Hollywood.

See this original movie : don’t wait for the copy-cat version which is bound to follow soon, but be warned you will have no finger-nails left!


★★★★★★★★
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BEDWAYS

This is one very absurd quirky wee movie about the making of a no-holds barred movie that wants a young couple to make their feelings visible, and to portray love by showing full-one sex.  This is not however pornographic on any level, despite some of the very explicit scenes, and to be perfectly frank I didn’t find this German movie even the least bit erotic, but maybe something got lost in the translation.

The ‘film-director’ Nina gets the two young actors Hans & Maris into an enormous deserted Berlin apartment to rehearse her movie.  There is no script, no cameras or even any finance in place to make this whole project a reality, but none the less Hans & Maria agree to go along with the play-acting for a whole week.  As each day passes all three of them try but fail to open up to each other, and the combination of a  lack of a script and Nina’s attempts to seduce them both, confuses everyone.  Especially me.

This is one of those annoying avant-garde pieces of cinema that is so out there you feel obliged to stick with it to the bitter end, just in case it delivers just a  small part of what you think it promises.  This one didn’t : it was far to tough to fathom out, and frankly I really didn’t care to try by the end.


★★★
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THE GREEN HORNET

This damp-squid of a movie desperately trying to be funny failed miserably at being anything like a parody of a Superhero it claimed to be.  Why anyone thought that allowing ‘Superbad’ coarse-humor comic actor Seth Rogan to take on this project of bring this much loved and adapted Radio Serial to the screen and give him the title roll was a good idea, was way beyond me.  The only other person more miscast was Cameron Diaz playing the Green Hornet’s secretary/second side kick who had very little to do than just simply smile all the way through the long 110 mins.

The story is of Britt, a spoilt rich nerdy kid who grows up and inherits his father’s newspaper empire and all his billions. Totally bored and failing to do anything of note with his life so far, he teams up with Kato, one of his late father’s disgruntled servants, and together they decide to pull together what talents they have and become superheroes.  The plot of the rest of the story is very thin to say the least and just serves as a vehicle lots of fighting, shootouts car chases.  To give this relationship between the two men a contemporary touch, there are constant innuendos that this may be more than ‘bromantic’, but trust me, they are not gay at all!

There were two reasons this movie featured on my view list.  Firstly it is directed by Michel Gondry (‘Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind’ for which he won the Screenwriting Oscar) and the Villain was played by Christoph Waltz (Oscar winner for 'Inglorious Bastards’).  This was however not the best word from either of  them.

If you really want to see what this movie should have been like, then check out ‘Kick Ass’ or ‘Iron Man’.

★★★
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CINEMA VERITE

Almost 40 years ago before our TV screens were over-run with excessive trivial drivel that, without a single hint of irony, is called Reality TV, there were The Louds, ‘An American Family’.  Documentary filmmaker Craig Gilbert had seduced this seemingly near perfect nuclear family into allowing his film crew to set up cameras all around their home and just letting them film them as they get on with their normal lives. Something quite un-precedented back in 1973, that would eventually totally revolutionize television. What none of them knew then was that the marriage would disintegrate in front of them culminating with the wife telling her philandering husband to leave live in front of the whole nation.

The whole concept was totally daring esp. as the cameras followed Pat, the wife/mother, to NY where her son Lance literally became the first gay man to ever come out on television. (The scene is hilarious as Lance takes his mother to a Drag Club to point out the ‘girl’ who had proposed marriage to him and who is none other than one of Andy Warhol's stars, Candy Darling. ‘She’s a MAN!’ says a horrified Pat. “I haven’t accepted ANYTHING’ replied Lance.

The fact that the background story behind the TV Series was so fascinating makes this so very watchable … (can you imagine decades later anyone ever wanting to be interested in the making of mindless programs like ‘Keeping Up With The Kardashians’.)  And this star-studded cast included the remarkable Diane Lane in yet another outstanding (award-winning?) performance as Pat who she portrayed as a feisty, frustrated, very astute woman with a very sharp sense of humor. Tim Robbins played Bill the husband with the wandering eyes and hands, James Gandolfini was Craig Gilbert, and Thomas Dekker was Lance, a part that deserved more screen time considering the significance of his role.

In those days evidently some of the film-makers fought hard to maintain their high-minded principles when they believed that the family deserved privacy, particularly when the going got rough.  Nowadays it seems like there are no morals or limits to what happens to a family and ends up on our screens in the name of entertainment.

Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini whose previous credits include the story of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, this movie was made for HBO TV but is now available on DVD.  Worth watching if nothing else than to remind you how good TV once was.

★★★★★★★★

GUN HILL ROAD

Enrique returns home to the Bronx after a lengthy spell in Prison to discover that Angela his wife is distant to say the least, and his son Michael is now a transgender woman and known as Vanessa. None of this sits well with headstrong Enrique who views these changes as a personal threat to his masculinity and to his position as head of the household. His only way of coping means that he soon slips back into his criminal ways and almost risks losing everything.

An impressive first feature from writer/director Rashad Ernesto Green that so neatly captures a slice of life in this Latino neighborhood. And special credit to Harmony Santana who was commencing her own gender transition when she took on the role of Michael.

This is a complex family drama that sensitively tackles all their issues unflinchingly with more than tad of humor. One of my favorites from Sundance this year, it's a tough subject superbly filmed, and a real pleasure to watch.

★★★★★★★★

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TABLOID

I love crazy women, and Joyce McKinney, formerly known as ‘Little Miss Perfect’ turned out to be Madder than the Hatter. This hilarious documentary from Oscar-Winning filmmaker Errol Morris ('The Fog of War') was a sheer delight from start to finish.  When a blowzy blonde 60+ year old woman looks straight to camera in the opening scene and declares ‘ I was a very late developer, I didn’t even start dating until I was 16 years old’ then you sense that you are in for a good time, although not quite the same type Ms. McKinney evidently had.  This former ‘Miss Wyoming World’ achieved world-wide notoriety in 1977 when she abducted London based Mormon missionary 21 year old American Kirk Anderson and held him hostage manacled to a bed and used him as her sex toy for 10 days.

When charged with kidnapping she maintained to the UK Court that Kirk was in fact her fiancé and a willing participant in all the sexual acts that she described in great detail much to the pleasure of all the Tabloid press, and something she relishes in repeating on camera now.  I’m not sure what offended the Mormon Elders more, the fact that Kirk had ‘been forced to have sex’ outside of marriage, or the mere idea that Joyce had ripped off his Sacred Mormon Underwear.

Joyce sticks rigidly to her version of events even when confronted with overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  She is a very convincing fantasist, delusional, manipulative, serial attention seeker, totally obsessive and is more ‘economical with the truth’ than even my late mother!  She is both a ‘good time girl’ and a drama queen extraordinaire and every part of her hysterical (funny) past is larger than life.  Some 20 years after being blasted as the woman who raped a Mormon she was back in the headlines with the bizarre story of how she had her dead pet pit-bull terrier cloned in Korea.

It all ended badly, not that you could tell from all the new interviews with a very chirpy Joyce. The tell-all book that she consistently insisted she was penning never materialized, and the enormous trove of press cuttings and photos that detailed ‘the truth about the real Joyce’, mysteriously disappeared in a robbery.  We shall never ever know the true story of her life, BUT we get a damn good idea from this brilliantly filmed documentary.

One Tabloid Journalist who covered Ms. McKinney at close quarters over the years concisely summed her up as ‘barking mad’, and even if you are unfamiliar with this British colloquialism, you’ll so understand why this is a perfect description.

P.S. If you love movies like 'The Eyes of Tammy Faye',  'Crazy Love'  or 'Imelda', you will so love this one.  It’s high up on my list.

★★★★★★★★★
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THE TRIP

This movie really is a trip in more ways than one. British TV star and indie movie actor Steve Coogan, playing himself, is commissioned by 'The Observer Newspaper' to do a mini tour of some of the fine new restaurants that have sprouted up in unlikely parts of the North of England and to write a review of his Trip.  (It’s reputation is mainly for a deprived area that has as much fine dining as Ohio!) His very glamorous on-off girlfriend has taken time out from their relationship and trotted back to the USA, so a desperate Steve recruits his friend and fellow comic Rob Brydon (also playing himself) to be his traveling companion.  Strictly platonic as he often points out.

What occurs on this weeklong adventure aside from some excellent mouth-watering superb cordon bleu food, is two buddies verbally sparring with each other and showing off their very impressive talents of impersonation.  The result is a delightfully quirky oddball very Brit comedy/mockumentary that is as appetizing as the food they continually consume on camera.

The movie directed by the ingenious Michael Winterbottom, has been adapted from a TV series of the same name that was such a hit on British small screens last year.  Running through it is very fine and often invisible line between reality and drama, and with no writer credited on–screen, its possible that this very au natural ‘script’ was essentially the work of these two masterful and very witty improvisators simply bantering away.  The story line portrays Steve Coogan as an embittered actor who feels he has never got the parts or the accolades he deserves, and even as I write this blog, I am still unsure of how real that was meant to be of Steve Coogan, or Steve Coogan playing Steve Coogan.  Duh.

This is the 2nd Winterbottom movie that brings these funny men together, and there are many similarities between these two off-the-wall odd mockumentary films. The first movie the totally manic ‘Tristan Shandy : A Cock and Bull Story’ which was not a movie of the book (of the same name) but actually a movie about making a movie about the book, which one of the characters describes as  Tough call that one! I’m happy to confess that I really loved it, but then again I love humor that touches on the absurd. And to try and put the whole thing in prospective,  I’ll add that ‘Tristan’ won two awards, one of which was from the Istanbul Film Festival which is both  baffling and fascinating as the movie itself."a masterwork of postmodernism before there was any modernism to be post." 

If you liked ‘Tristan’ you’ll love ‘The Trip’ BUT it’s an acquired taste that will not appeal to all.  In my research I came across a critique from an American viewer who gave it 7 out of 10 even though he got none of the cultural references, or could understand the British actors  at all, BUT he loved the seven restaurants they visited.  I hope, like me, you like much more than just the food.


★★★★★★★★
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