OK, got some catching up to do here. Over a week ago I saw...
Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck)
This movie shouldn't work. The topic and the plot are so seeimingly riddled with clichés that every ten minutes you're sure it's going to careen wildly into melodramatic movie-of-the-week nonsense. Remarkably it never does. Instead it's an understated piece with very well drawn characters and top notch acting, and scene after scene it avoids predictibility and Hollywood phoniness.
Ryan Gosling stars as Dan Dunne, a young White teacher in an almost entirely Black middle school in New York City. He teaches his History classes in an unorthodox and energetic manner. He also coaches the girl's basketball team. They aren't terribly good, but his style is more about having fun than winning anyway. Already I'm sure you can see the few well-worn paths this movie could have taken. Will this be
Dead Poet's Society meets
Hoosiers by way of
Dangerous Minds? Emphatically not. After one of the games, Dunne retreats to the girl's bathroom after the school has been emptied so he can light up his crack pipe. In the middle of his fix he realizes he's not alone in there, and one of his students/players catches him in the act. It's Drey (Shareeka Epps), and seeing him on the floor next to the toilet as a junky she helps him get up and get himself together. Little is said about what just happened, and he drives her home. The next day he avoids her as best he can, but eventually they form a sort of odd friendship beyond teacher/student.
Drey has had to deal with the reality of drugs on the streets and her neighborhood for years by this point, and her older brother who she idolized is serving a long prison sentence for dealing. Her father is gone and her mother spends extremely long and unusual hours working as a nurse, leaving Drey to mostly fend for herself. She is a quiet and introspective girl, and having a young teacher for a mentor is a nice thing...in theory, anyway. But that he too is a user is confusing and fascinating to her. There's also a local drug dealer in the picture, Frank (Anthony Mackie), who her brother was working for when he was arrested and who the brother kept quiet about. Because of that loyalty Frank is supposed to be helping Drey and her Mom out with cash. Drey keeps clear of him for the most part, but she is drawn to the power he weilds.
Again I'm sure by this point you have ideas where the plot is going and the type of conflict that will arise when those two men in Drey's life intersect with each other. But again (and again), the movie keeps going in new directions. Expanded from a twenty-minute short film (
"Gowanus, Brooklyn"), director and co-writer Ryan Fleck manages to take all these familiar elements and make them new and his own. The low-key style helps, and there is an air of authenticity to everything that goes on. The acting, especially by the two leads, is fantastic. Gosling really burst onto the scene with a phenomenal performance in
The Believer (2001) as a young Jew who becomes a fanatical skinhead racist. Since then he's appeared in a few movies that disappointed on one or more levels, and none of them really showcased the kind of actor he can be.
Half Nelson is the kind of compelling and nuanced work that will get him on the shortlist for awards consideration and announces him as one of the best actors under thirty working today. Epps is equally as good, if not better. This is her feature debut, her only other credit coming in the short that
Half Nelson is expanded from. She has a presence and intelligence on screen that most experienced actors would kill for.
Amid the summer castoffs swirling down the multiplex drain and the bigger budget fall pictures starting to take their places,
Half Nelson is the movie to seek out.
GRADE: A-
On Thursday I saw...
The Last Kiss (Tony Goldwyn)
In direct contrast to
Half Nelson,
The Last Kiss is a clichéfest that goes dully point by obvious point through a romantic dramedy playbook from hack screenwriting 101 and flavor-of-the-month filmschool to its conclusion, which is both ridiculous and easy to see coming. It's about a young man (Zach Braff) who is in a seemingly perfect relationship but manages to screw around and screw it up for no reason other than he's scared of commitment and some strange tail entices him into infidelity. Braff is OK in the lead, and he has an inherent likeablity that carries him over some of the initial unambitious and completely formulaic coasting. But when his character starts acting like a heel he can't really pull it off. To be fair to him, the script and director give him absolutely
no help, and I don't know that many actors could have made the sudden and unearned changes in character seem plausible. The cast has some decent to great actors in it, including Jacinda Barrett who has come a long, long way from MTV's
"The Real World" and looks like she's going to make it as an actress (and seems to be in every third movie now). Some of the subplots that involve the supporting cast, like the old marriage between Barret's parents played by Blythe Danner and Tom Wilinson or Braff's friend Casey Affleck who can no longer stand his young marriage, actually hold some interest and even avoid or at least play with the tired genre trappings. Unfortunately they are only mild diversions swirling around the main love traingle with Braff, Barrett and Rachel Bilson, and there's nothing but paint-by-numbers cliché on that front. Ultimately
The Last Kiss is just crushingly average. It's too pat and uninteresting to really generate much hate but far too obvious and tired to get involved in any kind of positive way. I haven't seen the 2001 Italian movie
L' Ultimo Bacio that this one was adapted from (by Paul Haggis of all people), but I have to believe there was more of interest in that piece. Cinematic mediocrity abounds in the Americanized remake. I'd say even if you're a Zach Braff fan, stay home and watch a dozen episodes of
"Scrubs" or
Garden State another time, because there's nothing to see here.
GRADE: C
On Friday I saw...
This Film Is Not Yet Rated (Kirby Dick)
The MPAA ratings on feature films distributed in America are wildly inconsistent. Why some movies get PG-13, others Rs and then others still the dreaded NC-17 can be mysterious. If there's a logic to the system, it certainly isn't apparent. As confounding as the filmgoing public can find this arbitrary inconsistency, to a filmmaker it must be exponentially more madding. There do seem to be a couple things you can bank on in MPAA decisions: sex is just about always worse than violence, and gay sex is worse than straight sex. Because most theatre chains and newspapers won't show or advertise NC-17 films, the most adult rating is ultimately a kind of censorship as it automatically and drastically reduces the potential audience. Long overdue for review, filmmaker Kirby Dick has made a movie that examines how and why movies get the ratings that they do. He has interviews with other directors who have been effected by MPAA decisions such as Kimberly Pierce (
Boys Don't Cry), John Waters (
Pecker), Kevin Smith (
Clerks), Mary Harron (
American Psycho), Wayne Kramer (
The Cooler), Darren Aronofsky (
Requiem for a Dream) and Matt Stone (
Team America: World Police). They recount their warstories on the MPAA frontlines. Among all the other inequities and double standards, there seems to be a clear bias against the smaller independents as well. A good example of this comes from Matt Stone, who got an NC-17 for the shoestring budgeted
Orgazmo in 1997. They were told it was for an overall tone and that there were far too many instances of NC-17 level sexuality and perversion to even get into the specifics of what they were and how to alter them for an R-rating, which they were told was not something the MPAA did anyway. Two years later when he and Trey Parker submitted the
"South Park" movie, it too initially got an NC-17. BUT for that larger $21-million Paramount-funded project they were given a list in exacting detail of what had to be trimmed or altered in order to receive an R, which it eventually got.
Apart from going over these tales of injustice and disparity, Kirby also gives the history of the MPAA and the self-imposed system of the Classification and Rating Administration, which was formed voluntarily by the industry in the late 1960s as the brainchild of President Jack Valenti, a Washington insider turned Hollywood guru. One of the major problems with the ratings system is that there is zero transparency to the process. The identity of the board members and the raters is purposefully kept secret, and they are forbidden by contract to discuss their job once they leave their posts. This has made the inequity and prejudices all the more infuriating, as there's no clue as to who and how these decisions are being made, and filmmakers are not allowed to face the judge and jury to get answers or any kind of dialogue going. There
is an appeals process, which hardly any filmmaker ever wins, which is presided over by yet another secret body. There the filmmakers do get to see the panel (who's identities are still anonymous), but are forbidden from stating their case in any real way. Citing prescedent, as in these ten movies have the same content or more and received a lesser rating than mine, is absolutely forbidden. And this is where Kirby's film stops being just about talking heads and becomes an investigative piece: he hires a private detective with a mission to identify and "out" the small group of people responsible for what plays at your multiplex and under which ratings.
Through good old fashioned gumshoeing they
do discover who these people are, including the two clergy members (one Cathlolic and one Protestant) who sit on and vote with the appeals board. Some of this is very revealing and contradicts every scrap of information the MPAA has released about the rating system process and membership over the years. Two ex-members of the system even talk on camera (one openly, one with his identity hidden) and shed even more light on the process. The finale comes when Kirby submits this documentary to the MPAA for review. Ultimately Dick's film and the revelations about who makes up these boards isn't going to change anything immediately and I wish
This Film Is Not Yet Rated was more focused, as it tends to drift too often and raise issues which it doesn't go back and ever really examine. But while flawed and maybe even futile, it is still fascinating and long overdue.
GRADE: B
Saturday I saw...
Hollywoodland (Allen Coulter)
The 1959 death of actor George Reeves has been the stuff of Hollywood Babylon for decades. Ruled a suicide of a depressed out-of-work has-been, other theories have come to light over the years, including implications of the Studio production chief who's wife Reeves had been seeing for years and Reeves' own fiance.
Hollywoodland starts with the discovery of Reeves' body. For anybody who doesn't know, Reeves starred in
"The Adventures of Superman", the hit '50s television series that popularlized The Man of Steel beyond his Comic Book and low-budget Serial base. It was cancelled in 1958, and a year later George was dead of a gunshot wound to the the head in his Los Angeles home. The movie follows two tracks as we go back in time to see Reeves pre-
"Superman" and the relationships he formed along the way leading up to that last night in 1959. The parallel track has a low-rent private dick trying to piece it all together and determine if it was suicide or murder. Adrien Brody stars as that detective, Louis Simo, who once worked in a reputable agency but has struck out on his own in the wake of a scandal. He's divorced and cynical, making him maybe the perfect investigator for this incident. In the other timeline, Ben Affleck stars as George Reeves. Diane Lane plays Toni Mannix, the older married woman who takes him on as her boytoy, and Robin Tunney (
"Prison Break") is Leonore Lemmon, the younger woman Reeves falls in love with and gets engaged to. The film proposes the three likely scenarios: Lemmon killed him when she learned he'd never really marry her, Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins) had him killed for leaving his wife and making her distraught, or Reeves shot himself despondent over his life and career. From the way they are presented in the film, you do get which tableau the movie thinks most likely to be the truth, but in a way the answer to the mystery doesn't really matter and at this point we'll never know what really happened that night.
Brody is strong as the down-and-out opportunistic small-timer who keeps investigating even after he loses his client and gets the snot kicked out of him for his troubles, but in many ways this is Ben Affleck's movie, as Reeves is the center of everything. I've never thought very highly of Ben's acting skills or his choices in material, but all that actually adds to his perfomance here. Casting Affleck as an actor who isn't taken very seriously and yearns for more than the limited way he's perceived by the business and the public is a great decision. Affleck shines as Reeves, who was good looking and charming but never put it together to become a movie star, despite starting his career with
Gone with the Wind and backing into a phenomenally successful television show. Ben adds a weight and subtlty to the role I didn't think he was capable of. In addition to the parallel plotlines, there are also parallels in the characters of Reeves and Simo, and while the script hangs proably too much on this it does ultimately work as a narrative. While the look and period setting obviously owe a lot to
Chinatown and
L.A. Confidential, the movie
Hollywoodland is most like is
Wonderland (2003 - James Cox), the dramatization of the grisly Los Angeles murders that may or may not have involved porn star John Holmes. I found that film very disappointing and far short of its potential.
Hollywoodland is no masterpiece, but comes much closer to the mark in presenting its Tinseltown infamy. And while I never thought I'd find myself saying this, the real reason to see it on the big screen is for Ben Affleck's performance.
GRADE: B
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