When Irish Eyes Aren't Smiling

Kisses (2008)
Director/Writer: Lance Daly
Studios: Fastnet Films
72 min.

The influence of the French New Wave, that mid-twentieth century film movement that stresses long tracking shots, minimal dialog, and nonprofessional actors, can be seen in the Irish indie Kisses, a nominee for Best Foreign Film at this year’s Independent Spirit Awards.  Having been funneled through the languid influence of more recent American directors like Terrence Malick and Sofia Coppola, the New Wave has found its way back across the pond to northern Europe—this ultra-obscure escapist flick was shot in Ireland on a shoestring budget.  Writer/director Lance Daly has crafted the Irish version of Lost in Translation: his camera glides through areas of inner-city Dublin both magical and destitute (much like Coppola’s did through Tokyo) to chronicle one day and night in the life of two ragamuffin kids who run away from their abusive families and savage households for one night of freedom.  Shane Curry and Kelly O’Neill, the two eleven-year-olds Daly discovered to play his leads, have never acted in anything before—meaning their performances are wonderfully devoid of the cutesy sentimental shtick most child actors have been trained to regurgitate for the camera.  A millennial interpretation of the century-old Joycean desire to flee, Daly’s sparse script expertly touches on Irish issues like alcoholism, poverty, and child sex abuse as experienced by his child characters.  What’s amazing is that the inclusion of these hot-button topics doesn’t stop this from being one of those beautifully supine films that just glides along like a hot summer afternoon.  Kisses is low-budget, independent film making at its absolute best. A

Domestic Disturbance

La nana (The Maid) (2009)
Director: Sebastián Silva
Writers: Sebastián Silva, Pedro Peirano
Studios: Forastero, Tiburón Filmes, Punto Guion Punto Producciones
95 min.

You won’t be able to take your eyes off of Chilean actress Catalina Saavedra as Raquel in The Maid.  Her un-showy performance as a nervous, flaky domestic who, after twenty-plus years with the same affluent family, finds herself fighting to retain her position is as ethereal as it is captivating.  Despite the good-natured family’s attempts to consider Raquel a part of their family, writer/director Sebastián Silva’s script is able to convey the constantly-palpable separation between employer and employee with ingenious subtlety: moments like family patriarch Mundo (Alejandro Goic) asking son Lucas (Agustín Silva) to close the door between Raquel working in the kitchen and the family eating in the dining room, or the awkward question of if, when the family sincerely celebrates Raquel’s birthday with a cake, she should clean the dishes when they’re done?  At the heart of the film lies the question of what place, if any, the help has in a family unit.  Yes, the four children—even the headstrong daughter Camila (Andrea García-Huidobro)—adore Raquel because she raised them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know she’s not really one of them.  Raquel’s disconnectedness from her own family—revealed through rare, curt, and pained phone conversations with her mother—is likely the root of her neuroses: she feels at home neither with her real family nor with the one she’s paid to assist. 

After the the well-meaning missus (Claudia Celedón) suggests hiring an additional maid to help Raquel out, Raquel’s neuroses turn into full-blown paranoia as she fiercely defends her ersatz home first from the demure Mercedes (Mercedes Villanueva) then from the belligerent Sonia (Anita Reeves).  But it’s not until Lucy (Mariana Loyola, in an ebullient and soulful supporting role) comes to stay that Raquel finally realizes what it means for someone to have their own life and a family separate from those she works for, separate from those to whom she can never belong.  The poignant final shot of the film, which echoes that of Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups, indicates that Raquel has left behind her desire to belong and accepted the challenge to form her own identity. A  

Fire Starter

Flickan som lekte med elden (The Girl Who Played with Fire) (2009)
Director: Daniel Alfredson
Writers: Jonas Frykberg, Stieg Larsson (novel)
Studios: Nordisk Film, Sveriges Television, Yellow Bird Films, ZDF Enterprises, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen 
129 min.

Noomi Rapace steals the show again in Fire, part two of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy on violence against women.  Alfredson (who also helms part three) takes over directing duties from Dragon Tattoo’s Oplev, preserving his grim color palate and expert pacing.  While the plot, in which Millenium magazine editors tackle a human trafficking ring, doesn’t have the claustrophobic hysteria that made part one so nail-biting (it was like something Agatha Christie would have written if she’d lived to see the computer age), Rapace has made Lisbeth Salander one of the most compelling film characters in recent memory, no easy feat considering she hardly ever talks, smiles, or willingly opens up to any other human being—not even her former lover Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) who’s trying to save her life.  This punk-rock post-feminist never panders to the fanboy crowd by being an easily classifiable comic book-lite femme fatale.  She’s trying to survive, not be a badass.  Let’s hope that rules out an inane video game adaptation. B+   

Broad Comedy

Bridesmaids (2011) 
Director: Paul Feig
Writers: Kristen Wiig, Annie Mumolo
Studios: Universal Pictures, Relativity Media, Apatow Productions
125 min.

Knocked Up, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Date Night were some of the funniest comedies of the past five years.  They also featured tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em cameos from Kristen Wiig, who currently reigns as the queen of Saturday Night Live where she brilliantly plays a plethora of rambling, muttering, neurotic, nervous-twitching characters that are at once over-the-top and endearing.  SNL has been a haven for pretty much all of the funniest unappreciated women of the past few decades: Rachel Dratch, Tina Fey, Anna Gasteyer, Janeane Garofalo, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Molly Shannon, Sarah Silverman—all of them are incredibly talented and all of them have had gut-busting bit parts in huge comedies but none of them have ever played the sole lead in a feature film (although Fey and Poehler were the two leads in 2008’s underrated Baby Mama).  But with Bridesmaids, as the song says, these women are coming out of the kitchen these bit parts and there’s something they forgot to say to you—and it involves more bathroom humor than the guys could ever imagine.  Wiig and co-writer Annie Mumolo have created a wedding movie that subverts the rom-com genre by keeping the dating life of Wiig's character (memorable boyfriends are played by Jon Hamm and Chris O'Dowd) as the B-storyline.  Her lovelife is something that can't be fixed until she can deal with her bad job, beater car, and strained relationships with other women, the latter being something the wedding is supposed to strengthen but only ends up straining.

All the women in this bridal party are fantastic: SNL-alum Maya Rudolph is the agreeable bride, Wendi McLendon-Covey (Reno 911!) is Rita the soccer mom who hates her kids and just wants to have sex with a man who’s not her husband, Ellie Kemper (The Office) is the meek, repressed Becca, and Rose Bryne (Marie Antoinette, Get Him to the Greek) is Helen, the snobby trophy wife who clearly wants to steal the title of maid of honor from Annie.  But it’s Melissa McCarthy (Gilmore Girls, Mike & Molly) who steals every scene she’s in as Megan, the stocky, extremely randy sister of the groom—for several days after seeing the film, you won’t be able to see a bathroom sink without thinking of her.

Bridesmaids has been refered to as “The Male Hangover” but, whereas The Hangover—the highest-grossing R-rated comedy ever—relied on over-the-top, wacky moments of suspended disbelief (loose tigers, Mike Tyson, and nude Korean gangsters in trunks), Bridesmaids finds its comedy in the mundane: diarrhea and the mixing of tranquilizers with scotch are all these gals need for hilarity to ensue.  The simplicity of the script seems to mock the bizarre high jinks of their male-driven peers: in an aggressive tennis match between Annie and her nemesis Helen, several direct hits to the breast mock the century-long obsession comedy films have had with male crotch shots.  But the best part about this film is, unlike every previous female-driven comedy (I’m talking about the ones anchored by Kate Hudson, or, worse, Katherine Heigl), Bridesmaids allows its protagonist to be an outright loser—a loser who, as is pointed out in a memorable scene with Megan, is a loser because of her own lack of ambition and self-esteem. B+

Second opinions:
Entertainment Weekly: "A."
USA Today: "Wiig finally has a lead role worthy of her comic talents."
Rolling Stone: "Wiig is an undisputable goddess of comedy."

Yes We Cannes

Couldn’t book a plane ticket to the Côte d'Azur in time for the 64^th Annual Cannes Film Festival (or, like me, did you not even try because you were pretty sure they cost more than $50)?  No worries.  While Bobby D., Jude Law, Uma Thurman, and the other heavyweights on this year’s jury are deliberating which film will win the coveted Palme d’Or when the festival concludes tomorrow (past winners include Taxi Driver, Apocalypse, Now, Pulp Fiction), here are five films that have generated the most buzz (and, since I’m stranded several thousand miles away from the French Riviera, the films that look good based on their easily accessible trailers!). 

The Tree of Life (U.S. Release Date: May 27, 2011 (limited))

If you’ve never seen a Terrence Malick film, you can’t credibly say you like movies.  This enigmatic director, who studied philosophy at Harvard and was a Rhodes Scholar, has only directed four films (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and The New World) in the past thirty-eight years (yes, you read that correctly)—each of them were visually stunning, were instantly memorable, and were exercises in pushing the limits of film-making beyond such constraining concepts as scripts or dialog.  After several years in editing, his fifth film has finally premiered.  The trailer features all the trademarks of the Malickian cinematic experience: deeply expository voiceovers, wistful nature shots lit only by the sun at magic hour, and... wait, what’s this?...astral screensaver shots of planets in orbit?  That last inclusion famously instigated a boos vs. cheers shouting match after its screening concluded at Cannes, but, when Tree hits the U.S. next week, I'll be first in line to choose a side.

Restless (U.S. Release Date: September 16, 2011)

Gus Van Sant snagged the Palme d’Or in 2003 for Elephant, his film about a Columbine-esque school shooting.  Restless looks like regular, run-of-the-mill, quirky indie fare, but since it stars Mia Wasikowska, current "It" indie princess (think Scarlett Johansson five years ago before she started screwing Sean Penn), it might be one to watch. 

Melancholia (U.S. Release Date: November 4, 2011)

By now, controversial Danish director Lars von Trier (winner of the Palme d’Or in 2000 for Dancer in the Dark) is known primarily for his terrible attempt to make a joke about sympathizing with Nazis at a Cannes press conference following the screening of Melancholia (Kirsten Dunst hasn’t looked this uncomfortable since she was in Elizabethtown!).  Too bad, because this trailer looks incredibly intriguing: who else but von Trier could effectively combine a wedding film with an apocalyptic-disaster film?  Early reviews say it’s a masterpiece despite von Trier being officially declared persona non grata by the festival runners.  (Sidenote: I’ve been declared persona non grata once or twice myself at Chipotle for requesting triple meat.)

La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In) (U.S. Release Date: November 18, 2011)

Dear God, WHAT is going on in this teaser-trailer?  That violin music!  That Phantom of the Opera mask!  That heinous décor!  Antonio Banderas reunites with Pedro Almodóvar, the director who made him a star twenty-five years ago in Matador, for this thriller said to be replete with grotesque sex and violence (isn't that what film festivals are for, people?).

Sleeping Beauty (no U.S. Release Date yet)

The previous four films were all directed by veteran male directors, many of whom have seen great success at Cannes before.  My final pick for buzzworthy Cannes film is by a newcomer: Sleeping Beauty is the directorial debut by Australian novelist Julia Leigh (she also wrote it).  This looks like Eyes Wide Shut meets Secret Diary of a Call Girl.  If that doesn’t sound like the best time you can possibly have at the movies, there's something wrong with you.

When Gothic Swedes Attack!

Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) (2009)

Director:  Niels Arden Oplev
Writers: Nikolaj Arcel, Rasmus Heisterberg, Stieg Larsson (novel)
Studios: Yellow Bird, Music Box Films, Alliance Films, Lumiere, GAGA
152 min.

  

It’s And Then There Were None with incest!  Actually, the original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (and the 2005 posthumous Stieg Larsson novel it’s based upon) is Män som hatar kvinnor which translates literally to Men Who Hate Women.  And they do indeed, as Swedish actress Noomi Rapace’s BAFTA-nominated performance as the brutalized and morose yet unbreakable professional hacker Lisbeth Salander is Larsson’s embodiment of his male guilt—he admits to having witnessed the gang rape of a girl at age fifteen and doing nothing to stop it, an instance which haunted him for the rest of his life.  This is why, in the film’s most cathartic scene, for Lisbeth and the audience collectively, our heroine exacts violent revenge on her sadistic parole officer Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson).  Having beaten and raped her on multiple occasions, she Tases him, ties him up, anally violates him with one of his own sex toys, and tattoos ’RAPIST’ (amongst other things) across his quivering thorax.  (If Tarantino had directed this, that scene would have been scored to Ennio Morricone music, Lisbeth’s weapon of choice would have been a samurai sword, and Michael Madsen would’ve been involved.  Actually, I’d like to see this film!)  The scene is a graphic feminist role-reversal of the phallic penetration and subsequent naming that never tries to be anything more than a moment of desperation for Lisbeth; it's something she had to do.       

And therein lies Dragon Tattoo’s best dramtic choice: we aren’t shown Lisbeth’s brutal rape and her rebutal as some kind of Lifetime Original Movie-esque construct to suggest everything is solved by this very masculine form of power assertion or, at the other end of the spectrum, to stand up and cheer when she eviscerates her rapist (as I’ll admit to doing).  Director Oplev doesn’t include rape scenes for their value as an instance of the disturbingly in vogue torture-porn that lately masequerades as ”gritty”—a word that’s been hijacked by people who like bad movies.  Instead, Lisbeth’s experiences serve as a framing device for the film’s real plot: Lisbeth has been hired by exposé journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) to help solve the mysterious disappearance of the neice of Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) off the family’s island compund forty years ago—a disappearance that, obviously, involves lots of other instances of "men who hate women."  Lisbeth utilizes her penchant for dolling out deserved retribution (oh, did I forgot to mention, she also immolated her father after he abused her mother as a child!) to support her axiom that everyone is responsible for their own actions regardless of their upbringing, a belief her partner-in-crime-and-in-bed Blomkvist doesn’t initially share.  But at its heart, Dragon Tattoo is an old-fashioned mystery/thriller with brilliant pacing and is refreshingly devoid of the obnoxious, eleventh hour Shyamalanian twist that every thriller of the past decade feels the need to utilize—you know, that twist that renders the entire first two hours of the movie worthless by revealing that the detective is actually the killer or the victim is actually a ghost who imagines the detective in his head while sitting in a Dunkin' Donuts parking lot.

 

 

Still riding high from The Social Network, David Fincher’s English version of Dragon Tattoo for Columbia, with Nyqvist doppelganger Daniel Craig and unknown Rooney Mara in the lead roles, hits theaters this Christmas.  While Hollywood’s remakes of foreign films are famously inferior, I’m optimistic: Fincher handled Biblically-based ritual serial killings a decade and a half ago with Se7en and astrologically-based ritual serial killings more recently with 2007’s Zodiac—both films triumphs of the genre.  As for the amazing Noomi Rapace, her Hollywoodization doesn’t seem so promising: she’s stuck in the next ”add a girl” role in this December’s Sherlock Holmes 2.  Lisbeth would not approve. A-

Second opinions:
Entertainment Weekly: "The film makes excellent use of the cold Scandinavian landscape to emphasize the story's gloomy loneliness."
Roger Ebert: "This is a movie about characters who have more important things to do than be characters in an action thriller."
Variety: "[A]s a whodunit rather than a noir, Girl ranks as a more-than-workmanlike Nordic crimer."