Paper Heart is a cute little story about CharlyneYi’s search across America for the meaning of love and more importantly, true love. All the ideas we have about love are ideological and inspired by films and books. Love in reality isn’t really like that, or is it? Filmed in a documentary style, it’s really a mockumentary but still a quirky and enjoyable film. Paper Heart won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance in 2009.
Charlyne and team travel across America from Las Vegas wedding chapels, to animals expressing love and interviewing couples in love. While searching for an answer, Charlyne falls in love with Michael Cera without even realising it. Each moment Charlyne and Michael spends together is filmed as part of the process of falling in love. Michael adores Charlyne but she doesn’t openly state that she’s in love with him, quite the opposite actually.
Be prepared to recognise a lot of small-time actors from other films, it’s like watch the cameos. See how many actor guys you can spot.
Even though it’s filmed in a mockumentary style, it makes you think about the question, ‘Just what is true love?’.
Verdict: A sweet little movie.
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Written by: CharlyneYi and Nicholas Jasenovec.
Starring: CharlyneYi, Micheal Cera and Nicholas Jasenovec.
Being a confirmed Kristen Scott Thomas cheerleader, I’d clap if she portrayed a turnip wrapped in plastic. Luckily in Partir (in English, Leaving), she’s in altogether more MILFy territory. Beware, spoilers ahead!
Scott Thomas is Suzanne, a well-heeled but bored housewife living in the South of France who takes a shine to Sergi López’s Ivan, an occasional worker that comes to help sort out her office conversion as she sets about reclaiming her career as a reflexologist outside the home. Her husband Samuel (Attal) is a successful doctor from a family of patriachal doctors. And that’s where plot tilts from.
Despite being a part of the tennis-playing, antique-buying, local politics-loving society by marriage, Suzanne is an outsider. Born in England and meeting Samuel as a young au pair, her submersion in French society is aided first by her career and then her children. We meet her as her awakening begins aided by Ivan’s Spanish charm.
Scott Thomas plays our heroine sensitively, at times with aplomb swinging from rare moments of levity to meatier tragedy. In stark contrast, the men in the film seem half-sketched. López’s Ivan is an ex-con but we never find out more about his criminal past. Ivan’s relationship with his ex-wife and daughter is similarly underdeveloped. Samuel too, is half-explored. He’s a happy doctor in society, but the vengeful husband at home. At times, the emotional thrust of Scott Thomas’ nuanced performance is lost as she reacts to flat male stereotypes.
While ostensibly a human story, Partir is more a social commentary on the inequalities of modern French society. The film could be retitled Belonging fittingly. Ivan’s story is the story of many immigrants living nomadic lives in the black economy. Even Suzanne, the show wife of a French doctor finds herself on the fringes of society, deciding that she doesn’t belong there and sets out to find her place in the world to tragic consequences. One gets the feeling at the end, that she’s making the same mistakes she made before, as her heart rules her head.
Interesting film with a sweet performance by Scott Thomas
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Starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Sergi López, Yvan Attal
Salt is one of the next big blockbuster movies coming out. Originally Tom Cruise was to play the main character but dropped out of the film in favour of Knight and Day. This led to the entire script being rewritten to accomodate a female main character, a change from usual spy flicks with macho dudes duking it out.
Angelina Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a CIA agent questioning a Russian defector called Vassily Orlov. He unveils a plot to kill the President by a covert Russian spy. Turning to leave Orlov reveals the name of the assassin to be Evelyn Salt. She flees from the CIA building, chased by fellow colleagues. Motivated to find the truth, Salt strives to evade the CIA and prove her innocence and obviously avoid killing the President.
I suspect Orlov’s appearance is orchestrated to manipulate Salt’s survival instincts so that the mission will be successful. It seems to be one of those situations when you try to avoid doing everything in your power to stop something happening, it just happens anyway because of your choices.
Perhaps it’ll be a happy-clappy affair where everything sorts itself out in the end.
Director: Phillip Noyce.
Written: Kurt Wimmer.
Starring: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Director Christopher Nolan has outdone himself on this occasion. Clever and insightful, Inception will be engraved as a film to remember from 2010. There’s references to Cobol Engineering, so why not glance at the prequel comic to Inception. Spoilers ahead!
DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, and is an ‘extractor’, a mercenary who works to steal secrets from people’s subconscious minds. This ability makes him a valuable commodity in the corporate business world. Cobb and his team must do the reverse and implant an idea to benefit Saito (Ken Watanabe) and his business ventures. If Cobb can pull off this one last job with his team, he’ll able to return home to his family. They must convince Robert Fischer (Cillain Murphy) to break up his fathers business empire by creating a dream within a dream within a dream. Three levels of dreams will allow them to dive deeper into the subconscious. These dreams are working in tandem with each other, actions in one dream will have a knock-on effect on the others.
The cinematography and special effects are superb, especially the fight scene with Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and it’s one of the highlights of Inception. (Gordon-Levitt is a great highlight as far as I’m concerned.)
Similar to Nolan’s other blockbuster The Dark Knight, Inception’s plot slightly unravelled near the conclusion. It could have been much tighter but it’s understandable as all is revealed. At times you can get confused with the terminology if you haven’t been paying attention, so concentrate!
I’ll be buying Inception when it comes out in DVD and I’ll be expecting a sequel soon.
Verdict: Decent flick with great performances and special effects.
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Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Cillan Murphy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine, Ken Watanabe and Marion Cotillard.
Howl is about a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in the late fifties. The basis of the movie is a real-life obscenity trial about the poem Howl and it can be found here. Unfortunately Allen Ginsberg passed away in 1997. Below is a new release trailer and the film is ear-marked for a late September release.
This film stars James Franco and John Hamm, what more could us ladies ask for?
Written and directed: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman.
Starring: James Franco, John Hamm, Mary-Louise Parker and Jeff Daniels.
Paprika is an anime about diving into dreams and is based on a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui. Released in 2006 and directed by Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers) and produced by Madhouse Studios. Paprika is an industry benchmark of animation and production values for feature length anime.
Paprika’s plot is based on an experimental device called the DC Mini and this snazzy piece of tech allows scientists delve into another person’s dreams. Atsuko Chiba works for the company that created the DC Mini and her alter-ego is ‘Paprika’. She uses the technology illegally outside the company to test its effectiveness on volunteers. One of the DC Mini’s is stolen from the company and it’s suspected to be an inside job. Atsuko must search reality for clues and as Paprika dive into dreams to try and prevent more victims.
But what happens when reality and dreams fuse together?
Verdict: You’ll need to watch it a few times to understand it.
With a career encapsulating both DC and Marvel comic book revamps, Frank Miller’s work has been a constant source of inspiration for the very same whenever they were in need of a tweak here or there. Yet despite his large body of independent work, it took a considerable time before Hollywood began mining this back catalogue to rejuvenate an industry racked with sequels and remakes.
Now with so many adaptations to choose from, we can see exactly why.
Using a series of intertwined vignettes including ninja prostitutes, crooked cops and yes, even a Yellow Bastard, Miller seeks to illustrate universal themes, a fact that never comes to fruition. A cast including Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke and Clive Owen’s atrocious American accent, this Robert Rodriguez helmed piece comes across as one large inside joke, one the audience is not privy to. It lacks any sense of irony or even basic humanity.
Stereotypes and hyperbole are often employed to deftly force us to confront the fundamental ills within society but done so with the greatest care, not with abject and remorseless violence. The Noir style of filming, although beautiful is an entirely empty, vapid experience, so heavily digitized that the genuine sentiment necessary is even further removed.
In such a setting, any examination of justice or even the most basic concepts of good and evil are lost amongst the superfluous content, allowing misogyny, homophobia and a worrying preoccupation for male anatomy to reign supreme.
Story is perhaps the greatest casualty of the film’s shortcomings however, with each vignette so rushed and heavily edited in real content, no character development is possible let alone a cohesive narrative.
One can argue that it is a true and concise adaptation of Miller’s work but even if such is the case, it makes an inevitable case against any more of its kind in the future.
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Starring: Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Benicio del Toro, Brittany Murphy
Written: Frank Miller
Directed: Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez & Quentin Tarantino
“When I met him, he said he was a writer. He held everything he ever wrote against his chest”
And lo, we’re ushered into the mysterious life of Tetro in Francis Ford Coppola’s first script since the dream ticket of Hackman and The Conversation in ’74. Coming off the bat of Coppola’s Youth With Youth,
Shot primarily in black and white, the film opens with wide-eyed cruise-line waiter Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich) on leave and a mission to meet his long-lost brother Tetro (Vincent Gallo) who’s living as a reclusive writer in Buenos Aires. Bennie may believe his journey has ended on finding Tetro, but the former’s fraught break with the rest of the family serves as a diving board into the rest of the movie.
Coppola dares us to hate Tetro from the very start. By the time he twists the tale, we really can’t feel for Tetro. His bitterness has filled every inch of the screen and beyond. Y tu mamá también’s Maribel Verdú provides much needed softness and humanity to the story as Tetro’s girlfriend Miranda, but her messiah complex to save Tetro from himself never seems fully-formed. We don’t care for Tetro, we can’t see what keeps Miranda loving him or makes Bennie travel to meet him.
Moving from the performances to the pacing and direction, Tetro is a sloppy affair. The actors over-improvise in scenes. That yields us two possibilities – either the director has thrown out the script for large swathes of the movie or the scriptwriter has drawn a big empty box on the page saying, ‘insert dialogue here’. As both scriptwriter and director Coppola is holding the can, there’s nowhere for him to escape.
The decision to film the movie in black and white is genius, though. Mihai Malaimare’s framing of the scenes is soulful and exquisite. I’ll excuse him the pair of Calvin Klein-esque inserts of slow-mo and hyperemotion – the drive to Patagonia and the microphone ring – as blips in beautifully-shot film.
For as pretty as the movie looks and the flecks of humanity it highlights, at the end of the day, Tetro is a grim and thankless affair. Like the robotic doll ballet we are subjected in flashbacks, Coppola understands his themes and the signature trappings of his substantial body of work but the finished article is mechanical and too astute to feel heartfelt. The film felt like a composite wax work of his extensive CV. Contrast this to Ehrenreich’s performance, where he poises himself like a young DiCaprio (yes, Leo is only 35, I know!) comfortable with chewing and being chewed on.
Tetro doesn’t dazzle, for Coppola completists only.
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Starring: Vincent Gallo, Alden Ehrenreich, Maribel Verdú and Silvia Pérez.
In this rollicking round of film Johnny Depp plays 17th Century poet John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester alongside actor John Malkovich as King Charles II. This point is history is known as the Restoration, debauchery and excess is a common-place occurrence. It’s almost the reverse of all perceived goodness of upper class gentlemen.
The movie is a documentary of the life of John Wilmot and maps his eventual demise through alcoholism, syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases. It’s easy to say that John Wilmott is an anti-hero, but really he’s not so easily labelled. He’s not a rogue, he’s simply a villain that lives to excess. He’s raunchy, drunk, cowardly and capricious but wickedly talented with prose.
As with many artistic creations, their true value was discovered after the artist died. You can find one of his famous works called “The Imperfect Enjoyment“. In the underlying context, the man blames the woman for the fact that he cannot perform. Hmm…
Overall, a passable movie even for rampant Johnny Depp fan. It helps when you’ve studied Wilmot’s works but even then it’s likely to hit the DVD player once every couple of years.
Your mind is the scene of the crime. It’s directed by Christopher Nolan who is also responsible for The Dark Knight, if that doesn’t make him credibile I don’t know what will. Inception stars Leonardo DiCapro, Ellen Page (Juno), Marion Cotillard (La Vie En Rose) and Cillan Murphy.
Leonardo plays Dom Cobb who is a specialist thief in subconscious security. His job to steal secrets from the dreams of others. Cobb’s last chance at redemption is to pull off ‘one last job’ but instead of stealing secrets, he and his team have do the reverse and implant an idea. Ariadne played by Ellen Page seems to be a new recruit being trained by Cobb.
There’s probably a whole lot more but I don’t want to ruin it with spoilers until I see it. I’m looking forward to all the special effects and I’ll have a full report about Inception on July 16th.
