The King's Speech

The King's Speech

2010, Tom Hooper

A lovely movie whose settings barely matter in the face of the actors. That is The King's Speech, as you may be able to tell from reading a one-line plot blurb, is only worth watching if you want to see actors giving performances. The plot is dull, the writing trite, and the cinematography and music overwrought in the hopes of lending weight and emotion to a simple turn of tension: The first king of the civilized world totally on the airwaves has a frightening stammer.

Colin Firth surpasses an already stellar career. Geoffrey Rush is average Geoffrey Rush. Supporting cast of Helena Bonham Carter and Guy Pearce are fluid and engaging. This film is made for the physical personality of the Academy Awards. In fact, Firth and Rush are so good their chemistry outshines the romantic roles prominent in this years awards. As much as I love Marky Mark, he just can't deliver passion to my perfect Amy Adams as well as either of these men.

Otherwise, seriously, this movie just puts every effort possible into drama that simply can't be felt by a normal audience. The only blip of real energy in the film is in the last 9 minutes. In these last 9 minutes Firth delivers the speech of a generation—that given on September the 3^rd, 1939 by George the third to the entire empire going up against Hitler.

The whole bloody plot leads to this, and no where in this plot do we care. However, the Anglophile audience member will have heard this speech delivered a dozen times, and teared up each time. Thus, an actor impersonating it, with a sweet montage of empire hoipoloi tearing up, cannot help but bring a bittersweet sting to the listener's ear.

Otherwise, almost a total waste of emotional investment and 2 hours of my time.

Black Swan

Black Swan

2010, Darren Aronofsky

POSSIBLE SPOILER

The most beautifully put together show of the power of the human mind I've yet encountered. I no more regret ditching ballet when I was 6 now, than I did 3 hours ago, but I am inspired. Aronofsky has managed to seduce his audience and fill them with horror. He uses gimmicky, overly visual things we expect from him, from his repertoire, but controls himself better than usual to actually tell the story, not just splurge on gorgeous sets.

Nina Sayers, after a bunch of initial tension to set the scene of a professional ballerina's life, gets the part of a lifetime: not just the White Swan of Swan Lake, but the Black Swan too. Nina excels in the white half, but can't get it through her control-crazed mind to relax and actually take control, rather than keep herself under control. The odyssey then is Nina realizing in order to do as she's told, she has to break all the rules she thinks are already in place. At the end of the day, it's like trying to make a killer android's head explode.

And explode it shall, for how else can the marvelous Aronofsky work his trade mark surreality into the film? Dopplegangers, animal sounds from humans, talking paintings, anthropomorphism... Yet, in this instance, I feel he might actually have restrained, himself, a little too much. Most of the crazy stuff is saved for the end. Like the producers were reining him in at every scene.

Instead, he relies on filling Nina's life with wholly realistic shows of being overly immersed in a little princess' world (dozens of stuffed animals, all pink everything at home, mother's obsessive paintings of her daughter) desperately trying to take control (she continuously barricades herself in her bed or bath room).

He makes tension by keeping the tightest possible shots on Nina. He goes way overboard on setting up character through costume choice. Nina is always in white. Her rival, Lily, is always in black, and even has a giant tattoo across her back. Her ring tone for her mom is the pinnacle for Swan Lake. Her mom puts on a wind up ballerina jewelery box playing, you guessed it, the pinnacle for Swan Lake. It's this shit that pulls away from the suspension of disbelief – not the spontaneous growth of feathers on one's back.

Either because Aronofsky himself is fascinated by the gritty lives of ballerinas, or he's trying to show the duplicitous tensions therein. Either way, it works. At every possible opportunity he points out masochistic crackings, rippings, pukings. The only slow motion is in an early scene. Tight on of Nina's foot as she lands all her weight repeatedly on the point of her toes of one foot you can see the floor boards bend under the force. Later, there's a scene with the physical therapist/chiropractor. A past habit of self-abuse leads Nina's mother to strip her naked and cut Nina's nails for her. How to break in a new pair of shoes: with scissors and banging and ripping.

The overall effect is a stunning balance between grit and pure satin—the two sides Nina tries so hard to capture in her life. Ever willing to help is the ever-in-black Lily. She is the perfect opposite of Nina. She is promiscuous, always wears a ton of make up, dances with her long hair down and is crazy sure of herself. And she does help...sort of. Lily becomes a fixation of what Nina knows she needs and incorporates this into her growing psychosis.

So easy to let this one go awry, Aronofsky, or his (no kidding) 15 producers, keep it together right to the end. Dream or hallucination scenes have heavy uses of mirrors and tampering with the light. Realistic scenes don't have ambient music. Initial verification for later hallucinations are established immediately, thus the audience is sucked in immediately.

Depending on how you feel about “living fully in the moment” or achieving perfection, Nina does manage to wrestle this out of herself. Through the pressures of her rival, her mother and her director (does ballet have a special name for that?) Nina alternates her clamping with new rebellions as she slowly starts realizing what people may or may not mean by “lose yourself in the role.”

Gluing it all together is the soundtrack to Swan Lake itself. Already haunting, Aronofsky wracks a dozen lesser known strains of it through the repeated practice sessions. He abstracts strains of them and reverbs them between cuts. Not a lot. Just enough to be jarring. Oh, and blending in techno for the ecstasy scene of course. But even that has an underlying riff of Swan Lake. The soundtrack holds it all together.

Major plot hole type things. Why is Lily not chosen over Nina? Is she so much better just in Nina's obesessive head? No. It's verified by Thomas. Why does Thomas focus only on Nina's dancing when all he has to critique her is her attitude. We see three instances early on of him trying to pull out this darker, more fluid, magnetic character. It clearly isn't the steps that are her problem.

Major awesomenss: all the performances. I think, under-appreciated always is Vincent Cassel. Very subtle cuts and shifts of perspective. The exquisite layering of clothes the ballerinas wear: uggs, leg warmers, arm warmers, whatever “shrugs” are, leotards, cami tops, tights, socks, shoes, things on one leg and not the other, things on one arm and not the other, hoodies, scarves, earrings... It's a guidebook on how to look like a collage.

Overall, very very good. Not the best, not my favorite, but I've watched it 3 times in 2 days and like it more each time. Besides, this story isn't confined to ballet. It's the path of the girl's mind that matters. The steps, the dance, are just a vehicle for showing her ascension and downfall to perfect artistic expression.

Romance and Cigarettes

Romance and Cigarettes

John Turturro, 2005

The best cast film ever. It's like John Turturro, writer and director, wrote the script with the personalities of his friends in Hollywood, then got them to come down for filming. I mean, the smallest possible parts are played by Amy Sedaris and Eddie Izzard.

It's the sort of nepotism from which everybody benefits. It was truly a delight to watch a most bizarre combination of Moulin Rouge and American Splendor—the white trash musical. Where all the dysfunctional adulterers and their children in crappy ticky-tacky houses lipsynch to bad pop music.

Which description will make you think this film could be little more than tacky melodrama all on its own. Thus we come back to the cast, and add to it deft direction and succinct writing. Turturro has written the last couple months of an everyman's life and manages to express the poignancy of every day leading up to the end. Seriously difficult without drooping over into the cartoonish.

He accomplishes this by giving each character our everyman, Nick Murder (James Gandolfini), interacts with complete characterization. There are a few flat characters, but they have 5 lines between them. And, even then Gene Vincent, Frances, Fruitman, and the Policeman are positioned with such conflicting one liners to what their characters are doing, and how they are directed to play it off, that they pop.

Next tier up we have Nick and his wife Kitty (Susan Sarandon)'s daughters and neighbors. They each have the same amount of pop, but because of two or three whole scenes they are allowed to dominate.

At the top we have Nick, Kitty and Nick's mistress Tula (Kate Winslet), and man do they sizzle. Or, at least, the women do. I've never seen The Sopranos, but I don't think Gandolfini is doing much different here. Maybe yell and kill a little less, sing a little more. But he doesn't have to. That's the beauty of being an Everyman.

Sarandon, though, really pulls a new face every shot. She bounds from disgust and a caricature of hatred to flat concentration to pure mothering condescension. Winslet, accordingly, spits out the most amazing strings of hyper-sexual, cockney vulgarities while throwing her body around in a way actresses just don't do anywhere else.

And, on top of that, there's singing involved.

You get the idea that it's one of those French New Wave things, where Turturro wondered how best he could throw his own art-house weight around in the film world. But, at the same time, he only sticks in a song when, if you were the character, you would cease expressing yourself fully if you didn't sing. Your pain just would not be expressed fully without various electricians and dustmen dropping their jobs to dance around you, helping you express this new loss.

It's well done. Thanks to most of it being lip-synched, the choice of songs being common and popular, and the blocking, editing and dialogue blending the uber-real through surreal dream-like sequences into full song and dance, it feels genuine. It's genuine in a way that High School Musical would hemorrhage and Mystic River tries just so damn hard for.

Thank you John Turturro.

Psycho

Psycho

1960, Hitchcock

But, its 31 minutes in and so far, she is not dead, but I don't want Nomran Bates to kill her! He's so cute!

Yes, I know that's the point.

Who is this actor? Leigh is still alive and I can already see he's brilliant.

We all go a little mad sometimes. Norman Bates. Mother. I thought the only cliché to come out of this movie was a shower scene and killing the lead actress off early in the plot, like within 20 minutes. But, she's still alive, 44 minutes in. And I've already encountered three more cliches! It's amazing.

Here's a thing, by 1960, we had color movies pretty regularly. But Psycho is in B+W. It's for the blood, isn't it? People like Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino go to great lengths to get the color and consistency of blood correct and artistically satisfying. This is the fourth Hitchcock film I've seen to date, and unless I'm missing something, Hitchcock doesn't really do blood.

No, he does lighting and blocking and sound. Like, how clearly important this money in the newspaper is. That's what all the tension hinged on in the first part of the movie, do we continue to have it so prominently lit because that's what will bring justice to Bates?

Oh Norman Bates, you are exactly my type. Tall, awkward, obscure hobby.

If not for that slug of a mother. It's his dead mother right?

Minute 64: "It's linen day... I don't know, creepy smell!"

Best delivery of a line ever.

Yep. Dead Mother. Freaking brilliant.

Have you seen the trailers for this? The fabulous Mr. Alfred Hitchcock taking you on a tour of the Bates estate? Accompanied by the sort of quaint fuddy-duddy music you may get on an antiques road show circa the time Monty Python started making fun of them. Clearly, Hitchcock himself considered this only scary in so far as the murderer was as normal and attractive as anyone you'd find. Normal – Norman. hm. I guess we're lucky that even Mr. Rockwell was named such a subliminally ordinary name.

What makes her even more normal than normal is the supreme Victorian taint that holds over on everything Mother owned. All lace and doilies. Like the owners of Lady and later The Tramp. If I didn't think it too personal a vendetta for him, I would that Hitchcock was out disarm Walt Disney specifically of his idealistic representation of the post-Victorian stability of urbane America.

But no, it's just that Hitchcock is out to create tension and fear in the same way that Rockwell and Disney created comfort and peace by using exactly the same tools of intimacy and familiarity.

Anyway, this trailer probably holds more craft in it (like trailers today) than the movie. It contains more misinformation than a Clancy novel and more misdirection too. As The Fabulous Mr. Alfred Hitchcock walks through on his tour, he point out every room and object that was of significance in the film, from the stuffed birds and peep hole in the motel parlor, to the bedrooms and clothes in the house. Yet, with each, he immediately dismisses the ones that have true interest and dwells on the ones that are meant to lead us to the obvious conclusions.

That is, he takes more time, gives more weight to the stuffed birds and sink print of Mother, while tells us The Son's Bedroom and This Picture in the motel are uber significant, then uses the cheapest, oldest trick in the suspense book – literally “but it's not important” or “but we'll stop here, I have something better to show you”.

And right until the end (like the two hour sensations Rear Window and Notorious) Hitchcock keeps up with the road show music and his goofy composure until the tour is suddenly over and the trailer film cuts to the most famous scream in film history.

Freaking. Brilliant.

But why Hitchcock didn't let us see Bates throw his voice ever, I don't know. The only improvement I'd make – 40 years later – is to let Bates physically speak in Mother voice in the fruit cellar. The clothes are startling enough, yes, but one more shot, 3 more seconds of film, of him yabbering, would have sealed it completely.

Cowboys and Aliens

I personally have always wondered why aliens didn't strike before 1950. I figured for a long time any aliens landing/abducting prior to that would be hailed as God (hence a couple books of the Bible, see Daniel and Ezekiel). But now, this coming summer the sexy team of Jon Favreau, Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg and Sam Rockwell will bring us the most ridiculous play on words I've heard.

Yet, Cowboys and Aliens looks like it will be nothing but impressive fun.

If I am not back in the states for the premier I expect one of my bodily extension-people to do so for me.

Lisbeth Salander Will Kick Your Ass

Steig Larsson's Lisbeth Salander Series, otherwise known as The Millenium Trilogy

(2005, 2006, 2007)

The stunning trilogy best seller smash actually demanded I read all of it. It only lacks good language, and even that I'm still (after 2100 pages) debating. A) it's translated from the Swedish, so who knows how poetic it really is. B) It can be very subtly brilliant. We'll get to it later.

Kiddo drops books at any stage because they become boring or too full of holes. The fact that the first three in a row of government/police intrigue books she tried ended in less than 10 pages means whole genre is shunned to crap (excluding all Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler novels which one can read for dialogue alone and not care a whit about the plot).

That is, I only read these guys because my mother spent a significant amount shipping them to me, and I have caused too many arguments about what and is not crap literature with her.

Even so, the first 50 or so pages of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are financial intrigue bullshit and I almost tossed it. But I'm glad I did, because very shortly after that, the character Lisbeth Salander started fleshing herself out: Modern Pippi Longstocking, viking goddess. Absolutely the best actress I can think of to play Lisbeth Salander is Dani, the Suicide Girl from Californication.

She may be, and correct me if I'm wrong here, the first anti-social hacker queen to make it into popular literature. And Larsson knows how to turn the whole affair to make her magnetic – not just in saying 'she was magnetic' as almost any other thriller jockey would. She's even referred to as Pippi Longstocking in conversations with her co-protagonist Mikael Blomkvist—it makes sense. Father as King of the Cannibals to the slip-shod wardrobe.

Blonkvist ain't bad either. I hear he will be played by Daniel Craig. It fits. He's James Bond if Bond had become a gritty investigative reporter. Down to the inexplicable sexuality.

What saves him, and consequentially everything, from becoming a simple Bond cookie cutter is how he deals with that. Instead of picking up and dropping chicks willy-nilly, Blomkvist puts effort into warning them off – he's a ramblin' man and doesn't want you to cry.

This attitude in turn plugs into the attitudes every character has towards sex – not a one of them is exempt from mentioning their sexual preferences, and not once is it explicit, and NOT ONCE is it taboo. The original title for Dragon Tattoo, I gather, was Men Who Hate Women, and when everything is said and done, that is the absolute theme of the trilogy.

More than half the cast is female. Every one of them is competent, strong, intelligent, and sparsely described physically. The men with whom they interact either treat them respectfully, or are misogynistic nuts. For every misogynist there is at least one abused woman. Sometimes the abuse is extensive enough that Kiddo here had to skim through some paragraphs.

The plots, both individually for each book and over-arching, all deal with woman abuse and the good-souled people who must live with it and combat it—even in as sophisticated a country as Sweden. All intrigue and language aside, reading how women like Salander, Erika Berger, and Modig react to crazy situations is genuinely empowering. And I generally despise openly feminist stuff. The point here is not to burn a bra but to point out how counter-productive, illogical it is to treat women as inferior. In extreme cases, how down right evil and destructive it is for men to abuse them. The only point it misses out on, in Kiddo's pasteurized mind, is how equally illogical and counter productive it is for women to treat women in the same ways. But that is for another time.

And before we go too over the original word parameters here, let us look at language. The language is nothing special. No one vocabulary word stands out, no sentence is complex. Benefits of this are the quickness it affords the reader to clip through. Where it becomes interesting, and highly skilled, is how Larsson shifts point of view. The point of view shifts between characters incessently. One paragraph often has three characters thinking at once. The Iowa school of Flannery O'Connor ass kissing would condemn it out of hand, without considering just how complex it becomes, or how multi dimensional the scene becomes. It's cubist.

Eg: In the same scene in a restaurant in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Blomkvist “noticed he looked vaguely eastern European and was staring at him. Then he saw the sub-machine gun.” while Berger “sat paralyzed as he [the eastern European] raised some kind of gun and aimed it at Blomkvist.” and several minutes later Modig “saw a Swedish army model M/45 sub machine gun.” (p 452-4).

In the same scene: “instinctively [Blomkvist] threw himself at the attacker instead of crouching down or taking cover” while “Berger instinctively took cover when the second series of shots was fired.”

These are the most extreme versions of this I found, but the same tool is employed constantly to make every scene pop. A sensible person will now say “But, that makes for a repetitive book” and the reader of these books will tell you each is perfectly developed simply by what they notice within the same rooms, and how they each ask the same question that it does not matter.

What is astonishing is how perfectly the story ends. Not just how the plot concludes (which is brilliant) but how the perspective of the omniscient narrator shifts dramatically from a cast of several dozen rounded individuals to Salander. Salander, you see, is the least sociable person in the world. As soon as she is free from any obligation to interacting with this tapestry of Stockholm, she does, and therefore, so does the narrator. It's actually shocking in the abruptness.

Brilliant.

Not to mention the number of times coffee is drunk throughout.

Fringe - Pilot

Fringe – Pilot

2008, J J Abrams

If any one in this melodramatic day in age could remake The X-Files, it's J J Abrams. His flair for cliffhangers soaked in liquid crack make for one swift-paced paranormal noir. However, his obsession with starting things in flying machines almost made me get off the pony.

We all know first impressions are made within nano-seconds and humans are more judgmental than god (how else could they create such a creature) so the ever fecund well of “new ideas” Mr. Abrams sells may want to cut back on its sale of Airplane Openers and NonSequitor Animals. Also, hire Gillian Andersen to play herself since this blonde lady, however lovely her green eyes may be, is not as cool as Scully.

She has one facial expression: mulling/tense. Luckily she's offset by the Mulder of our new series played by Joshua Dawson, or something from the late 90s teen hearthrob felicity sisters... I don't know. It seems he may naturally have the same mulling/tense fixation, which I'll attribute to Abrams' lack of direction, but he does say fun, almost spontaneous things. Plus he's a magnetic genius of a ramblin' man with a closet full of goofy-sounding run ins with Iraqis and card sharks. If this were big budgeted enough, I'd call for George Cloony to play this kid, but What's His Name is almost as good. And he's boosted in eccentricity with a mad scientist of a father-sidekick.

These two are the most fun thing about the pilot. There's no doubt the idea of putting the father back in an asylum and the cute genius deserting out blonde heroine for more profitable, less complicated ventures.

Clearly, Mr. and Mrs. Mulling-Tense are going to get it on. I don't think Abrams is messing with 4 seasons and a movie's worth of time building up sexual tension though; there are already instances of female self-sacrificing and male protecting in a The Cell-like hallucination scene. Instead, I predict they'll make the beast with two backs in a particularly tense alien holding chamber then squabble in a Ross-Rachel sort of way. Periodically we'll manage a good streak of this nonsense, and really get some sweet paranormal stuff investigated, but it'll always be there.

Anyway, the hallucination is the high point of the episode. All else is bogged down in faux emotional tension between Fake Scully and her last partner (with whom she was having an illicit affair), and full on accusations of Halliburton esque corporations working on higher levels of secrecy with the federal government than it's own bureau of investigation.

Thick, thick, thick. If Abrams laid on any more we'd all be wearing virtual reality helmets and spontaneously being impregnated by aliens. I wonder if it'll take him three seasons to get to that point, like it did Chris Carter.

Ie. I will watch the rest of the first season, already downloaded onto my hardrive, but I'll be deleting the episodes as I do, to make room for Italian zombie flicks.