Critics are raving over Cate Blanchett’s performance in the new Woody Allen film, and they are absolutely justified in doing so. Cate Blanchett is Cate Blanchett, after all, and Cate Blanchett is wonderful. And yet, Blanchett may not be the biggest surprise to emerge from Woody Allen’s film. That honor more than likely belongs to British actress Sally Hawkins, whose supporting turn as Jasmine’s sister, Ginger, is simply remarkable.

Hawkins, who has already won a Golden Globe for her role in 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky, is swimming in the deep end here, eyeball-deep amidst a who’s who of Hollywood veterans. Among them: Alec Baldwin (at his smarmy best), Bobby Cannavale/Andrew “Dice” Clay (both of whom appear like bookends), and Peter Sarsgaard/Louis C.K. (both of whom lend the film its charm). All told, it’s a brilliant ensemble that actually elevates the weight and gravitas of Woody Allen’s script, which – in this case – hinges upon the lies most people tell themselves in order to keep the shame at bay, and the stunning, mortal impact that those stories have the higher up one goes.

Jasmine – it’s the plant that comes to life after the darkness settles.

PS Big ups to Juliet Taylor. Blue Jasmine is the most brilliantly-casted film of the year.

(Blue Jasmine opens in limited release today.) Continue reading →

“Every culture has its southerners – people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing, brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives – envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibited, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course. We work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do. They caution themselves as people do who know they are part of a superior culture. We mustn’t let ourselves go, mustn’t descend to the level of the … jungle, street, bush, bog, hills, outback (take your pick). For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it – then you know. The south has got you.”

Look at that logo. I mean, look at it. It looks like absolute child’s play, does it not? What with the jagged, awkward angles over smooth, well-rounded curves. It looks like it was constructed by some intern over at Warner … slapped together over smoothies in some juice bar on Rodeo. I mean, make no mistake – last weekend’s announcement was a blockbuster, to be sure … an intricately detonated smash-and-grab meant to maximize cheap buzz. Warner Brothers ran the table, absolutely captivating the audience, dispensing with competing interests, and overshadowing a veritable who’s who of A-list appearances, almost all of which occurred inside a venue called Hall H – the Valhalla of public gathering spaces, so far as DC Universe is concerned.

The moon was new and full inside, all the planets were aligned. For there were hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. And the iron, as they say, was white-fucking primed.  Continue reading →

“What happens is, like with John Sculley, John came from Pepsi Co. And they at most would change their product once every 10 years. To them a new product was, like, a new-sized bottle. So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the course of Pepsi Co.? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones who got promoted and they were the ones who ran the company. Well, for Pepsi Co. that might’ve been OK. But it turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer? So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting
to really help the customers.”

Blackfish is one of the best documentaries of the year, a significantly touching piece of rhetoric that evokes equal fits of pain, anger, sadness and empathy. A great deal of the commentary included in the film – almost all of which was provided by whale experts and ex-Sea World employees – is extremely pro-mammal, veering toward the rather obvious conclusion that these creatures were never meant to be isolated (I mean, we’re talking about killer whales here, for Christ’s sake. What further proof do you need?).

Anyway, Blackfish is not only an important documentary, it’s easily the most fascinating new release you’re likely to come across this weekend. This film makes a poignant enough argument that the current Sea World PR machine is falling all over itself in an ongoing effort to discredit the whole thing. Thematically, Blackfish strikes a familiar chord, one that we’ve heard resonate several times via pulpits and protests, newspapers and movies, political campaigns and government hearings. Namely, why in the world does profit motive always seem to trump just about every rational argument for human dignity and decency?

Sadly, I’m fairly certain we all know the answer.

(Blackfish arrives in limited release today.)  

Esteemed Writer/Director Nicolas Winding Refn would like you to know something: The strong-silent type – arguably the most identifiable of all American archetypes – was originally the expressed province of the East. Assuming Refn is to be believed, that archetype may steadily be shifting its way right back toward southern Asia … back to a place and time which never really agreed to relinquish it in the first place.

I mean, the whole thing’s a little bit confusing, sure, what with all the complex layers of sex and death and blood and gore and shades of crimson red and black. But the bottom line is this: the much-anticipated reunion between Drive‘s Ryan Gosling and Nicolas Winding Refn represents a significant letdown, to say the least. The major sticking point throughout being that there’s very little meat worth digging into here. Kristin Scott Thomas plays a nasty fucking trollop with an acid tongue, Vithaya Pansringarm plays some geriatric mystic with a jones for karaoke, and Ryan Gosling plays the dutiful son – a borderline catatonic who measures every movement and speaks in three-word snippets. The entire film is a bold and bloody and sometimes-even-baleful ball of beeswax. And I’ll have words with any varmint who says different.   

(Only God Forgives arrives in limited release and Video OnDemand today.)  Continue reading →

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(Click here for Part I. Click here for Part II.)   Continue reading →

At some point a few years back, independent studios experienced a major run on holocaust documentaries. The angles were almost always left-of-center – stock footage from the Warsaw Ghetto, previously undisclosed testimony from the Nuremberg trials, the plight of Polish gypsies during Nazi occupation. Despite the wide range, every one of these documentaries was inconceivably vile … perhaps necessarily so. If you were a full-time movie critic during that period – or even a freelance reviewer, for that matter – rarely would a month go by without one one of these films appearing on your docket.

I mean, consider for a moment the myriad reels of actual footage; of human beatings and gas showers and bloated boxcars barreling toward Auschwitz; of wanton cruelty and injustice, of bodies lying strewn about, set for loading onto wheelbarrows … set for dumping into landfills. A few months in, the nonstop rash of screenings began to feel severely draining.

In fact, draining might be the ideal descriptor for Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing – a two-hour fit of brilliance during which real-life executioners from Indonesia are tasked with producing a low-budget motion picture focused on their own atrocities. Said atrocities go far beyond the average mass murder, the sum total of them bordering upon genocide, claiming an approximated 1,000,000 victims (the overwhelming majority of whom were accused of being Communists) throughout the mid-to-late 60s.

At the center of it all was Anwar Congo, an executioner-cum-patriot who speaks of his war crimes as if they were legend. Congo likens himself to a necessary evil, a misunderstood gangster whose intentions served the greater good.

The Act of Killing‘s approach is a major gamble, to be sure. But it pays off in spades, specifically because the aging Indonesians still perceive themselves as freedom fighters;unrepentant white hats slashing through a sea of red. Meanwhile, the majority of the moviegoing public will heretofore recognize them as motion picture’s greatest foil; a low-rent cluster of ne’er-do-wells perennially wading dick-deep in the muck.

Mainstream critics are going apeshit over Oppenheimer’s documentary, which is to be expected, given the project was executive-produced by both Werner Herzog and Errol Morris. And yet, there exists a very obvious dichotomy, what with the majority of major media outlets having spent the past few days denouncing Rolling Stone‘s decision to place Boston Bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on an upcoming cover. Seems a bit hypocritical, no? Praising the release of an independent film about an executioner while condemning the portrayal of a domestic terrorist as rock star? In essence, what critics are really submitting to here is the notion that comedy equals tragedy plus time.

But I digress.

Truth be told, the digital stream I was using to watch The Act of Killing froze up about an hour and 10 minutes into the film. Try as I might, I simply could not get it to proceed beyond that point. This may very well have been the result of my constantly stopping and starting the film in order to jot down notes or revisit a specific segment. A lot of these digital streams are hard-coded to avoid any risk of piracy, and I may very well have sprung some type of firewall. The point being, I never really did get to see how Anwar Congo’s self-made Commie picture turned out. Then again, I didn’t really need to. Historically speaking, I’m pretty sure I know exactly how that godforsaken bloodbath turned out way back in the mid-60s. I harbor very little interest in watching it turn out that way again.

(The Act of Killing opens this Friday, July 19th at Landmark Cinemas in New York with plans for a national rollout to follow.)

Continue reading →

Click through for full-size gallery.

(Click here for Part I. Click here for Part III.)  Continue reading →

“People who work at counters and make you wait while they answer the telephone, privileging the customer on the phone over the one right in front of their face, the one who made the trip, got out of bed, appeared in person. People who interrupt the phone call with the person who called first to use call-waiting to take the call from the person who called second. People who get to the counter and make the person waiting at the counter wait while they talk on their cell phone. People who glance at their email when you’re in the room. People who use hand-held devices to glance at their emails while in your house. People who borrow your computer or hand-held device in order to glance at their emails. People who answer emails from people they do not know with great alacrity and full capitalization and punctuation while replying slowly and with few if any capitals or punctuation marks to the emails of their devoted friends. People who unfriend their friends while friending their unfriends. People who do not acknowledge the person. Persons who are not personal.

People who visit parties and ignore their friends, do not dance with the one that brung you. People who have more time, more munificence, more courtesy, for strangers than for their friends. Children who love their uncles and aunts more than their father and mother, their cousins more than their siblings. People who have a picture of Jesus Christ or John F. Kennedy or Abraham Lincoln on their wall, as if Jesus Christ or John F. Kennedy or Abraham Lincoln was their relative. People who use the first names of celebrities. People who shorten the names of or create nicknames for those they don’t know or barely know, in order to seem more familiar, especially in cases where people who are actually familiar with those named would never shorten their name or use a nickname. Rotisserie-baseball fans who never go to a baseball game or follow a ‘real’ team. Married people who develop crushes on waitresses or bank tellers.

Those who speak to the invisible, the remote, those not present, while disfavouring the visible, the proximate, the present. Those concerning themselves with ghosts. Clergy of all types. People who wear pictures in lockets of grandparents they never knew, even as they disdain or neglect living uncles or aunts. People who construct family trees or visit genealogical web sites but are brusque and rude to strangers on the subway. Those who adopt animals but not children. Eaters of fish but not pork.

People who concern themselves with the fate of slaves in distant capitals they have never visited and would never visit. People who read the International section before they read the Metro section, or never read the Metro section. People who read eagerly of discoveries of planets orbiting distant stars in unreachable galaxies. Anyone interested in SETI (the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence). People who watch the Oscar telecast but don’t go to movies. People who watch a telecast of celebrations in Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Lip-synchers. Karaokeists.

People who read stories about imaginary people while real people stand before them unsung and unappreciated. People who read stories and experience real emotions while finding it difficult to feel real emotions when presented with the difficulties of their living friends. Science-Fiction people. Historical re-enactors. Pen-pals. Those who fall in love remotely, projecting cherished values onto those distant from them, values that they never identify among those nearest to them. Constructors of time capsules. People who write in journals or diaries never intended to be read during their lifetimes. Anonymous authors. Anonymous donors. People who comment anonymously on the blogs of their friends. People who at parties glance over your shoulder while they speak with you, searching for a better option. Necrophiliacs.

Those studying foreign languages, especially dead languages. Students of Esperanto or Klingon. Those mourning the deaths of royalty. Those who love or hate anyone they’ve never met. Catholics drinking wine and eating wafer. Readers of secondary sources before primary sources. Archaeologists and anthropologists. Those cherishing extinct species. ’Pay It Forward’ people. Sexaholics. Doctors Without Borders. Mimes who follow people on the street.

People who use time machines to prevent the crucifixion of Jesus Christ or the Kennedy or Lincoln assassinations but would not use time machines to apologize to those they personally disregarded in fourth or fifth grade.

Lawyers for the unborn. Pro-lifers. Autograph hounds. Strangers who interfere in private arguments on the street. Fans. Ventriloquists. Ventriloquists on the radio. People who listen to podcasts while in the presence of others. Ham-radio operators. Stamp collectors, with their glue-tabs and albums, adorers of the tenuous papery whisper of what comes from afar, soaking envelopes to reclaim cancelled stamps, discarding the envelopes, ignoring the addresses, never noticing the names of the original recipients, the persons for whom the letter was intended, cherishing instead the postage.

Above all, writers.