Steady Diet of Film

#028 The Private Lives of Pippa Lee w/ Cathy de la Cruz

This week I am joined once again by Cathy de la Cruz to discuss Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. First we dispense with some of the "men have mid-life crisis movies like this, but ladies have mid-life crisis like THIS" tomfoolery, then discuss the irony that Pippa with its all-star ensemble is the most obscure film we've enjoyed all year. We close out the discussion by having a knock down drag out fight (not really) about Robin Wright Penn's acting abilities before Cathy waxes ecstatic about Keanu Reeves's chest tattoos and we determine whether Jean Luc Godard would appreciate the film. Enjoy!

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Best Films of 2009

Best Documentaries
The Beaches of Agnes (Varda, France)
Collapse (Smith, USA)
The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi (Olds, USA)
Food, Inc. (Kenner, USA)
Good Hair (Stilson, USA) (pictured)
La Danse (Wiseman, USA)
Oblivion (Honigmann, Peru)
Rip! A Remix Manifesto (Gaylor, Canada)
Tyson (Toback, USA)
Zombie Girl (Marshall and Johnson, USA)

Best undistributed docs: Cooking History, Shadow Billionaire, Bloody Mondays Strawberry Pies.



Best Narratives
A Serious Man (Coens, USA)
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Herzog, USA)
Hunger (McQueen, Ireland)
Hurt Locker (Bigelow, USA)
Hump Day (Shelton, USA)
Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino, USA)
The Messenger (Moverman, USA)
Moon (Jones, UK)
Pontypool (McDonald, Canada) (pictured)
Snijeg/Snow (Begic, Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Also enjoyed: The Orphan, Il Divo, Whip It, Drag Me to Hell, Police Adjective.

Discoveries of 2009, not from 2009: Larisa Shepitko's Wings (1966) and Ascent (1977) released by Criterion's Eclipse series, both undeniable masterpieces, totally unknown to me before this year.  

Review: Nine

In Nine, Daniel Day Lewis stars as Guido Cantino (is it me, or does that name qualify as a mild hate crime?), a flamboyant Italian film-maker whose next movie (his ninth) has been pre-destined by his handlers and studio to not only be a masterpiece but restore his entire country's sense of pride and dignity. Italia is set to begin shooting in a week with a massive budget and hundreds of craftspeople hard at work but Guido has yet to write a single word of the script or even come up with a concept. Attempting to break his writer's block, Cantino wiles away his time with the many (many, many) beautiful women in his life including his mother, staff, wife, mistress, muse, fans and a prostitute.

Nine was adapted from Maury Yeston's Broadway musical which was loosely based on the classic Frederico Fellini film 8 1/2. But similar to Werner Herzog's (ironically, rather Fellini-esque) re-make of Abel Ferrera's Bad Lieutenant earlier this year, you're better off having little knowledge of the inspirational material. It's better to just accept Nine on its own merits.

The film boast an other-wordly assemblage of actresses and female performers but bad staging, boxy cinematography and leaden songs flatten out much of their natural charisma. Penelope Cruz is the only one who escapes the least scathed as mistress Carla, a role that allows Cruz's delicate balance of playful and pained to be fully displayed. A mostly wordless Mamma Cantino is played by the legendary Sophia Loren. Kate Hudson is a free-wheeling, sexual libertine who's arrived in Italy to write about Italia for an American fashion magazine. Dame Judi Dench plays Lilli, Cantino's long-time costumer, who shows up only occasionally to deliver a load of exposition and a quick zinger. Fergie (of the Black Eyed Peas) appears as a prostitute, who (in flashbacks) teaches the young Guido about the art of pleasing women. She's also the only one with a memorable song and the ability to keep her hair out of her mouth while performing. Marion Cotillard feels like she's in another movie entirely, creating real compassion for Guido's jilted wife Luisa. Mrs. Cantino gave up her own career to be engulfed by the life and influence of her husband.. only to discover a new mistress behind every door. Nicole Kidman plays Claudia, Guido's golden muse and go-to starlet. Her presence is felt but she only really arrives at the end of the film to deliver some hard truths to Guido.

In a scene rich with potential, Guido and Claudia flee the paparazzi in his adorable Italian sports car then immediately get into a passive-aggressive argument. She eggs him on for details about the script, he flares up in anger, saying, "No one cares about my script, they come to see you. They're more interested in the way you turn your head then anything I have to say!" This is such a missed opportunity to use Kidman to provide some insight (or just fun) as a woman whose personal life has been dominated by tabloid coverage but still managed to emerge as a respected actress. Instead, Claudia meekly confesses her love for Guido (guh) then in an abrupt turn tells him the reason he can no longer write is because he is devoid of any real human feeling. Now, having burned through his charm, he's been revealed as an empty hull of a man and saunters off-screen.

Up to this point, Guido has been able to convince himself of his own greatness. Carla's character is extremely inviting to Guido. (Indeed, Cruz and Lewis's phone sex scene is one of the more memorable sequences in the film.) Yet he's turned off when she confesses that she spends every waking hour psychologically imprinting herself to understand him. Kate Hudson's go-go dancing journalist professes to be a huge fan of his work, but can only discuss the style of clothing his characters wear. Lilli ruthlessly teases him that directing is a fool's errand, and he can't even do that right. But it's long-time collaborator Claudia's rejection that ultimately convinces him he's finished.

The film's technical flaws would be easier to forgive if not for the glaring mis-casting of Daniel Day Lewis as Guido Cantino. What moviegoers admire about Lewis is that he chooses outlandish, larger-than-life roles and then commits completely to pouring himself into the necessary (if maniacal) mold. He's an excellent technician who can hit his psychological marks but Lewis doesn't generate enough of his own creative impulses to ever be believed as an auteur whose every whim must be indulged. Nor does he possess any natural charisma or sex appeal to help us understand why all of these women suffer so much abuse at his hands. Watching Lewis in nearly every frame of Nine is akin to watching an auto mechanic try to figure skate.

These issues notwithstanding, Nine is not without its charms or wisdom. Last week Manola Darghis wrote a scathing editorial on institutional sexism currently present in the film industry. In a particularly great passage Darghis focuses on what little evidence is required for men to be considered creative geniuses. All they have to do is show a little potential early on and then surround themselves with people who tell them they're great. This theme resonates in Nine, as we're never made to believe Guido's talents warrant the lavish attention and resources being heaped upon him or tremendously invested in his comeback.

Nine will not be a satisfying experience to people who find it via its Fellini connection. Absent is the intoxicating empowerment of watching the world (chiefly, women and their bodies) through Fellini's worshipful lens. Or the rich pleasure of his troubled yet charming playboys. But it's a tour de force for some cinema's most exciting women that may prove to have more cultural significance a few years removed from our current state of celebrity obsession.

#027 A Single Man w/ Cathy de la Cruz

 

This week I am delighted to be joined by film-maker and former Show Me Your Title co-host Cathy de la Cruz to discuss Tom Ford's directorial debut A Single Man. We discuss the need for gay Americana in popular culture, why Erin loves any film that reminds her of Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" and Cathy's secret insight into what Ron Howard thought of the film. Enjoy!

Spoiler alert, this review contains major plot details.

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Review: Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman

Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman is an utterly affable look at the life of the now-deceased photographer whose depictions of Southern California modernist architecture made a hippy artistic movement into a lasting cultural phenomenon. Schulman (an active participant in the documentary but passed away before it was released) hooked up with Richard Neutra, John Lautner and Frank Gehry at a time when Los Angeles itself was in a state of re-creation and upheaval. The film provides a glimpse into the rarefied world of modernist architecture and the people who mortgage themselves to the teeth trying to protect it.

Though the bulk of the work depicted in his photographs are private residences, Schulman's complicated relationship with higher education provides the documentary's framework. As a young man he attended seven years of college without completing a degree, when universities appeared in his work he often showed them as imposing institutions but (in a closing scene that has become quite cliche in non-fiction storytelling) by the end of the film Schulman is presented with an honorary doctorate. The film also delights in using animated sequences to illustrate the creation, influence and clashes in the history of modern design starting in the early 1900s all the way to the present. These scenes demonstrate that an appreciation for the fine art is a living thing -- agnostic to where (or why, or if) the viewer attended school.

 

Because of the advanced age of so many of the subjects, most of the people available as experts are the children, assistants, devotees and students of these men who are, understandably, uncritical. And while not every documentary needs to be an expose to be interesting, a few interesting nuggets go by with nary a follow-up question. Several references are made to Schulman being strongly favored by his mother over his four siblings growing up. At this late stage in his life one wonders how that impacted his artistic growth and/or his own parenting practices (his daughter contributes a great deal of doting, if content-less commentary). We also hear several sideways comments about Schulman clashing with his frequent collaborator Richard Neutra but no further explanation on how that affected their work process over time.

There are also a few celebrity enthusiasts interviewed including actress Kelly Lynch, who happily discusses how much she loves her Neutra-designed home -- even as she and her husband admit in the same breath that much of the space is impractical and rarely used. Fashion designer and film-maker Tom Ford delights in providing a cultural context for understanding how this work was conceived in a time of equal discovery (landing on the moon!) and uncertainty (Cuban missile crisis!) It goes unmentioned in Visual Acoustics (probably due to the timing of the productions), but Ford used a John Lautner-designed home for his recent film A Single Man. Filling out the celebrity involvement, actor Dustin Hoffman provides the film's narration.

Director Eric Bricker has created a comprehensive document of something we're not frequently invited to consider, the natural beauty of Los Angeles (as interpreted through the creation of lavish homes). As we sit in the aftermath of a recently collapsed housing market, that's left an uncertain economy and thousands of abandoned McMansions in its wake, Visual Acoustics provides a pleasant psychic sabbatical to a time when enormous amounts of wealth were being thrown into home construction and it created something with a lasting legacy and infinite imagination.

Visual Acoustics is playing in select cities. In Portland at the Living Room Theaters.


RIYL: Objectified, The Kid Stays in the Picture, Los Angeles Plays Itself, No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos, Herb & Dorothy, My Kid Could Paint That.

"The Runaways" trailer now online!

Okay, I promise Steady Diet of Film is not becoming a blog that updates you every time a new piece of marketing is made available.. unless movie studios start making it a habit to release biopics about artists that were formative influences in my life. Unlikely!

Floria Sigismondi's long-awaited telling of the life and times of the 70s all-girl rock'n'roll band The Runaways has finally finished shooting and will hit theaters March 19th 2010. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, this is kind of like Avatar for cool chicks.

Many purists have complained about the casting of Dakota Fanning (Coraline, War of the Worlds) as the deeply troubled lead singer Cherie Currie and Kristin Stewart (Twilight, Adventureland) as uber-dyke, rock legend Joan Jett. But Fanning and Stewart are exceptionally talented, age-appropriate and their bankability is what got The Runaways out of turn-around hell. Plus, I'm excited for all the little girls who have grown up watching these actresses to have their minds blown the way mine was when I first saw Satisfaction (hopefully The Runaways will age a bit better than my introduction to the Rolling Stones and Debbie Harry has).

The Runaways' real life manager Kim Fowley is allegedly also involved with the project. Can we assume then that the film will de-emphasize the child rapist elements of his life? The casting of go-to weirdo Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road, Shotgun Stories) points to 'no' but only time will tell. Enjoy the trailer!

#026 Up in the Air w/ Aaron Tuller

This week I discuss Jason Reitman's Up in the Air with Aaron Tuller, whose world travels have made him an expert on all things related to the logistics and lifestyle of constantly being in the air.

We both easily enjoyed this romantic yet bleak film and toggle between Aaron's knowledge of the rarefied world of VIP luxury travel and our shared antipathy for seeing women consistently bear the responsibility for failed relationships in romantic movies. Enjoy!

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Review: The Horse Boy

When we meet the Isaacsons, they are a family at the end of their rope. The limits of their patience have been battered by son Rowan's autism, they've exhausted every treatment offered by Western medicine and are still left with a child who at the age of four is not potty trained, can barely speak and is almost constantly in a state of violent tantrum. Inspired by the nearly miraculous effect training with horses has on Rowan, they pack up for Mongolia to pursue shamanic healing rituals offered in far-flung provinces by reindeer herders.

Michel O. Scott's directorial debut The Horse Boy (which screened at film festivals under the name Over the Hills and Far Away) tries very hard to keep the focus on Rowan's incremental progress. But the thrill-seeking New Age parents, father Rupert, an Austin-based journalist, and mother Kristin, a professor of psychology, naturally draw more attention to themselves by virtue of being able to articulate the enormous guilt and frustration around their experiences parenting a severely Autistic child. And while their suffering is nearly palpable, they're unable to explain why they think this expedition is going to make a bit of difference.

While we see the disappointment and exasperation on the Isaacsons' weary faces, we never see how this has impacted their relationships with each other or extended family or their careers. As such, the spectacle of a wealthy, attractive, outdoorsy couple being physically and psychologically tormented by Mongolian shamans (the rituals the child endures are far less harrowing) is somewhat mockable. Particularly when the couple complains loudly that Mongolia is not as exotic as they'd hoped or when Rupert congratulates Kristin on having 'such a great sense of humor' when she is informed that the spirit of her schizophrenic grandmother is haunting her child's soul and as a result she must wash her vagina as part of the ritual. It's about this time one begins to hope the descendants of Genghis Khan will make an appearance. The douching ritual, and so many other TMI moments in this story, are left onscreen--though thankfully with some dignified pixelation.

Woven into the Isaacsons' story is a collection of talking head interviews with scientists and Autism researchers who elaborate on the confusion that surrounds the disorder. The film's editor Rita K. Sanders has an excellent flair for conveying the chaos within the world of Autism--despite the fact millions of people are considered to be somewhere on the Autism spectrum, there are no universally agreed upon causes, symptoms or diagnostic methods. It's through these talking heads we gain a better understanding for why pursuing costly, experimental treatments (that can have many bizarre side effects) can feel like a never ending crap shoot for parents. The reality is that parents feel cruel for trying and damned for not trying. Early on, the Isaacsons talk about the host of creams, diets, exercise regiments and a morning cocktail of hardcore anti-viral drugs--all with intermittent improvements.

The Horse Boy is extremely effective as a travelogue. The inner steppes of Mongolia and its natural wildlife (reindeer, it turns out, look nothing like their Christmas jingle depictions!) have rarely been captured by western documentary crews. This vast, majestic beauty does not escape Scott's lens.

Still, there is something missing from Horse Boy as a document of a family driven to the brink and enduring a harrowing experiment. It goes unmentioned that the trip is financed through a million dollar advance on a book deal secured by Mr. Isaacson. This might help explain why Mrs. Isaacson is rarely invited to contribute more than blithe agreements with anything her husband says and why he is positioned as an authority on shamanic rituals and constantly congratulated for discovering the therapeutic benefits of Rowan's horse training. And even though Jenny McCartney, the dating game show hostess that became an icon of superficiality in the 1990's pop culture, has been able to re-invent herself as a poster mom for families dealing with Autism, one can imagine most families still feel like it's them against the world as they try to navigate their situation.

But this lack of disclosure infuses Horse Boy with undeniable measure of both smugness and self-consciousness. The Isaacsons' (especially Rupert, who provides the voiceover narration for the film) need to be depicted as endlessly patient saints who can drop everything and travel to Mongolia, not because of their wealth or need for adventure and attention, but because they just care so much about their beleaguered son is going to be a tough one for average parents of Autistic children to identify with and even less appealing to those not impacted by the disease.


RIYL: Hear and Now, Sound and Fury, Reel Paradise.

The Horse Boy is playing in select cities. In Portland at the Hollywood Theatre.

50 Best Documentaries of the Aughts

Even though I mocked the (still technically incorrect!) way we're all measuring decades, I am powerless to the siren call of the listicle. I know I'm going against the grain with the purists by not ranking them, but once the list was winnowed down from hundreds of great films to just fifty it started to feel petty. However in the interest of reading pleasure I instead broke them down by their thematic elements.

This proved to be daunting in a different way. I'm always loathe to champion films that are inherently undistributable due to copyright strictures but I couldn't deny the pleasure of watching legendary film editor Walter Murch discuss his process and philosophy in Murch or Thom Anderson's Los Angeles Plays Itself, a must for understanding how setting impacts storytelling choices.

Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke also felt tough to categorize. His decision to make a comprehensive documentary about the impacts and responses to Hurricane Katrina immediately following his massive commercial success with Inside Man felt activist in nature. But a decade from now his event-centric film will likely feel as though it belongs under the Historical/Political heading.

And once the dust settled even I was surprised that each of my nature- and adventure- picks revolved around Antarctica. Must be the Shackleton spirit in me. As always, all favorites are subjective, I would love to hear which films you thought were great this decade.

Enjoy!

ACTIVISM
Blue Vinyl (Gold and Helfand, 2002, USA)
The English Surgeon (Smith, 2007, UK) (pictured)
Shut Up and Sing (Kopple, 2006, USA)
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Lee, 2006, USA)

ART
The Beaches of Agnes (Varda, 2008, France)
Los Angeles Plays Itself (Andersen, 2003, USA)
Murch (Ichioka and Ichioka, 2008, USA)
The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (Fiennes, 2006, UK)
Rivers and Tides (Riedelsheimer, 2001, Germany) (pictured)
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (Harlan, 2001, USA)
True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia (Baichwal, 2002, Canada)

CHARACTER
Forbidden Lie$ (Broinowski, 2007, Australia)
The Gleaners and I (Varda, 2002, France) (pictured)
Girl 27 (Stenn, 2007, USA)
Grizzly Man (Herzog, 2005, USA)
Protagonist (Yu, 2007, USA)
Shadow Billionaire (Spraic, 2009, USA)
Tyson (Toback, 2008, USA)

EXPLORATION//NATURE
Encounters at the End of the World (2007, Herzog, USA) (pictured)
Ice People (Aghion, 2008, France/USA)
Winged Migration (Perrin, Cluzaud and Debats, 2001, France)

FAMILY//PERSONAL
51 Birch Street (Block, 2005, USA) (pictured)
Of Time and the City (Davies, 2008, UK)
Tarnation (Caouette, 2003, USA)
Zombie Girl (Johnson, Marshall and Mauck, 2009, USA)

HISTORICAL

Cooking History (Kerekes, 2009, Slovakia) (pictured)

Orange Revolution (York, 2007, USA)

The Staircase

 (de Lestrade, 2003, USA)

GLOBALIZATION

Dust
 (Bitomsky, 2007, Germany)
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Gibney, 2005, USA)

FLOW: For Love of Water (Salina, 2008, USA)

King Corn (Woolf, 2007, USA)

Life and Debt (Black, 2001, USA)

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) (Kohn, 2007, USA)

Manufactured Landscapes
 (Baichwal, 2006, Canada)
Merchants of Cool
 (Goodman, 2001, USA)
Mondovino (Nossiter, 2004, Argentina) (pictured)
Oblivion (Honigmann, 2008, Netherlands)

Our Brand is Crisis
 (Boynton, 2005, USA)
Rip! A Remix Manifesto
 (Gaylor, 2009, Canada)
Up the Yangtze

 (Chang, 2007, Canada)

SPORTS

The Heart of the Game

 (Serrill, 2005, USA)  (pictured)

WAR

Control Room (Noujaim, 2004, USA)

Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi (Olds, 2009, USA)

The Fog of War (Morris, 2003, USA)

Iraq in Fragments (Longley, 2006, USA)

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (Kennedy, 2007, USA) (pictured)

No End in Sight (Ferguson, 2007, USA)

Taxi to the Dark Side (Gibney, 2007, USA)

Waltz with Bashir (Folman, 2008, Israel)

#025 Avatar w/ Mendi Menefee

This week I am delighted to be joined by animator (and science fiction aficionado) Mendi Menefee to discuss Avatar, a film being saddled with the responsibility of single-handedly saving animation, theater exhibition and the career of director James Cameron (The Abyss, Titanic, Terminator 2). We talk about the irony of making a war movie for a sum of money that could have end worldwide poverty, how Gen X film-makers seem to be obsessed with re-writing their high school experiences while Baby Boomer directors just want to re-write Star Wars and the sacrilegious moments of comedy. Mendi then explains some of the science fiction influences while I wax poetic about childhood franchises I would like to see this animation technique applied to. Enjoy!

SPOILER WARNING: this podcast contains major plot details. 

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Show Notes:

• Ann Powers' piece on Lady Gaga.