Movie City Indie

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LOOK: Superbad and the red-band trailer

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June 09, 2007

Once: Singular sensation (2007, ****)

JUST BECAUSE EVERY MOVIE REVIEWER IN AMERICA is calling Once something like the greatest music movie of this generation and the best thing since two pints of Guinness on a sleepy Dublin Sunday is no reason not to listen to me as I grab you by the collar and tell you listen, listen to these songs, embrace this movie, because this muss of twigs and straw and strings and pixels and chords can break your heart like a four-minute-fifty second pop song you will never get out of your head.

Once is slightly, just a bit more than nothing at all, yet it is one of the rare movies where any recollection of the simplest gesture, smile, or catch of voice in it have made me stupid-teary since I first saw it (twice) at Sundance. The grave, tender secret of this tiny picture is, simply, its simplicity, its sketchy but efficient form filled with the grandest of longings.

In John Carney’s limber long-player, several songs suggest a life, a small, wonderful world consisting of a few Dublin haunts where an unnamed street corner performer, or “busker,” (Glen Hansard) and an unnamed younger woman (Markéta Irglová) with a winsome command of English, meet, tease, learn, but mostly with eyes wide open develop a mature relationship deepened by the dance of several songs, including the gorgeous “Slowly Falling,” which the extremely affable and charming pair convincingly “compose” in front of us in an early scene.

In standard narrative terms, Once is the slightest of artifacts, and yet it is filled a quiet integrity and charm and it offers lessons in how simply a tale can be told. Shot in two weeks in unprepossessingly grungy Mini-DV, it is a grand, effortless Irish musical povera (shot in two weeks for aboutu 100,000 euro), written and directed by Carney, who was for several years in the fine band, The Frames, with star-composer Glen Hansard. (An NPR commentator memorably dubbed Hansard “a longtime master of sublimely melodramatic sad-bastard music.”) Carney work some very sophisticated insights about the representation of music on film and also how one walks, talks, lives, breathes, stumbles, fumbles, triumphs, while trying to fashion any form of art. Layers peel away, their preconceptions of each other (and ours of them) fall away, and Hansard’s music, as urgent and lovely as ever, grows in collaboration with someone who turns out not only to be a classical pianist, but a good lyricist and a fine singer. The film’s clarity about the happenstance of fruitful collaboration is rare. (In the real world, Hansard and Irglová had already written and performed together.)

There’s a whiff of the succinct bittersweetness of David Lean’s Brief Encounter, a sing-a-long (in Hansard’s own gaff) hints at James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead,” and the place of the young Czech woman in contemporary Ireland suggests the change in the Irish mindset after the “Celtic Tiger,” or vast economic boom that began in the 1990s. But that is not text, those are smart, lovely undercurrents: text in the tale is moments, moments such as the look on The Guy’s face when he catches the disappointment on the Girl’s face after a clumsy, presumptuous pass.

Like with a song, each listener invests a different measure of heart and hopes in this boy-meets-girl perplex, the pair birth a song, they bond beyond romance that’s the clothesline for their ample charm. There’s nothing oblique, only merely suggestive, like lyrics. Songs are omnipresent in movies, filmmakers are constantly plying the power of music.

But the portrayal of music hardly ever works on screen. Why? Do you have a CD player, an iPod? You swim and surface in a sea of song by day and night. You walk the walk, hope in your head, song in your ears, going slowly deaf perhaps, but the narrative of your waking consciousness is scored, and you would not give that up for the world. You walk through this movie, not once, but every sunny hopeful moment you listen to music, shuffling faster toward the horizon line.

Even essential French film theorist Andre Bazin would likely have embraced this small wonder: he believed the long take and documentary-style elements suggested a greater truth than editing. You, dear reader, could have made this movie. (Carney told me that Once should look like anyone’s home videos posted to YouTube.)

The music under the final scenes is a reprise of a song called “When Your Mind’s Made Up.” We’ve heard it before. We’ve been there. We’re here. It packs an immense wallop: this is how pop works; this is how songs happen in our lives. It is a man’s voice, then a woman’s voice, in harmony, where the singers (and listeners) can but smile. This is the look (and sound) of love—heartfelt, unabashed, and ultimately at farthest remove from the saccharine that is sentimentality.

Kurt Vonnegut famously remarked that music was proof of the existence of God. Once, to me, is proof of the potential of movies, and proof of love and friendship and creative bonds, of more life in the time that we have, in a life that can grow beyond boundaries. Once adds 200 locations on June 8. [
Ray Pride. Photo (c) 2007 Ray Pride.]

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June 07, 2007

Ocean's Thirteen (2007, ***)

I’D BEEN STUCK ON HOW TO WRITE ABOUT OCEAN’S THIRTEEN, which I had a lot of fun watching, and after after tossing a third, fucked draft, I scanned some movie-related blogs while digging up links, all solipsistic and self-aggrandizing in uncommon extreme, and I happened upon some late-era Andrew Sarris; same difference. (The king of the block self-quote would have made a fine, self-involved blogger if he’d been born to a different era.) I hated everything I’d been reading but then I wrote in a hurry, deadline dash like a trained newspaperman, and wound up pretty much content with everything I wrote except the word I. (Did you ever break out in a satirical rash?) Plus I’d meant to open a piece with the word “and” for at least 72 hours. So after a screening double-feature of Lajos Koltai’s Evening and Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart, I managed to finish the task. (Yi-yi-I.) But…

And I don’t even like soufflé.

Steven Soderbergh’s all-American guilt complex must have kicked in like mad after the reception of Ocean’s Twelve, a movie that seemed more a calculated insult to audiences worldwide than a worthy diversion.

Honestly, I felt so bruised by the second of the Soderbergh-Clooney-Pitt capers that I can’t summon up a single clear memory of a moment of it. (I do remember seeing it while suffused with Dr. Pepper.) At the time, I wrote, “Dandelion fluff, cat dander, motes of dust: all these minor irritants have more substance than the dashed-off insult that is Ocean’s Twelve.” While Steven Soderbergh’s my-friends-are-so-hip-they-float Ocean’s Eleven makes an ideal companion on a transatlantic flight if you’re jacked up on antihistamines, the weightless, worthless spectacle of Ocean’s Twelve, pointlessly criss-crossing a few grainy patches of Europe, is little more than a vision of a dozen or more millionaires jacking off in a loose circle.” (Imagine how I felt. )

While there’s no real narrative tension in the new installment, it’s delightful in almost every frame and each particular. These characters are hoods, rogues, cads, and mean to some people who don’t really deserve it, but it’s all in the service of getting back at Willy Bank (Al Pacino), a macher who’s shoved their mentor, Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould, whose mensch-tastic comic timing remains sterling at the age of 68) out of his percentage of Vegas’ latest mega-casino. Pacino: “I don’t need the labor pains! I just WANT the BABY!” The name of Pacino’s character is typical of the lightly brassy in-jokery in this edition: The notorious bank robber Willie Sutton was the one who answered, “Why do you rob banks?” with a reply of supernal logic: “Because that’s where the money is.” Thus: Willy Bank. (Pacino gets a few of his patent street-mongrel moments to howl and growl, and he’s man-tanned to the patina of a fine chocolate Lab.)

Really, Ocean’s Thirteen had me beaming from the opening credits, where the current Warner Bros. presentation credit, which is kind of dull, was monkeyed with in a way that’s both retro and now-retro, lightly jazzy, easy on the eyes. That animation draws on a similar marzipan palette to cameraman “Peter Andrews”’ (Soderbergh) visual style and Philip Messina's production design, filled with terrific oblong compositions, heavy on acute lines slashing across the frame in landscapes and hotel corridors, and deeply hued blues and reds and yellows and greens. There are other clever design strokes that work without footnotes, such as The Bank's twirling towers that yearn to the sky being a patent cop of Santiago Calatrava's odd apartment building in Malmo, Sweden, the HSB Turning Torso.

The plot is absurd and complications pile upon complications, to the point of creating a backup plan that involves a man-made earthquake effected by a manyton drill that dug the French side of the Chunnel. But it’s toothsome throughout. Herewith: Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and the gang go for their priciest, diciest heist after his double-cross of Reuben lands him in a hospital bed after a heart attack. Enter: Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, who throughout keep tongues thoroughly in dimpled cheeks and have a certain amount of fun with their public and personal profiles. Plus: Ellen Barkin vamping as Bank’s second-in-charge; Casey Affleck and Scott Caan, who wind up fomenting a labor strike at a Mexican maquiladora dice factory, fueled by Zapata tequila (named after the revolutionary, a comic foreshadowing of Soderbergh’s upcoming pair of pictures about Che Guevara). David Paymer gets some mileage as a painfully distressed undercover hotel-rater for the “Five Diamonds” status that Bank has earned for earlier elephants, and Carl Reiner plays a hi-ho cheerio chap whom the staff are fooled into believing is the actual reviewer while Ocean’s men do many painful things to Paymer.

Another in-joke: the ding-a-ling that 85-year-old Reiner’s Saul Bloom confects, Kensington Chubb, boasts an exceptionally tall and strange curly white quiff atop his head that makes him a dead ringer to 84-year-old Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone, with whom Soderbergh has likely had run-ins with in the egregious stall-outs at Paramount Pictures of his repeated attempts to make a film of “Confederacy of Dunces.” Soderbergh in-japed Redstone before: (An early working title of Full Frontal was “How To Survive a Hotel Room Fire,” a seeming reference to a notorious incident in the life of the long-lived mogul. A second attempt at naming that mulligatawny was “The Art of Negotiating a Turn,” which seems to apply as well to the man’s myriad moves in an eclectic career.

Ocean’s Thirteen demonstrates tremendous directorial command, and I still await every Soderbergh movie with intense expectation. (And I still remember the times he’s told me I’m a jerk for liking The Underneath, which is the movie that sent him into the push-me-pull-you pattern of his career.) Afterwards, I didn’t feel full from this larky malarkey, but I didn’t feel stuffed, I felt just right: Soderbergh + Co., including screenwriters Brian Koppelman and David Levien (Rounders) have captured their own cavalier, rico-suave, effortless tone with these “analog players in a digital world” that matches at least our false memories of how cool it must have been to be around Sinatra and that bunch before they kicked your fucking teeth in. I’m smiling, I’m smiling! ”Ocean’s Thirteen opens Friday at over 3,150 locations.] [Ray Pride.]

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June 04, 2007

Indie returns Wednesday [really!]

[Photo © 2007 Ray Pride.]

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