A movie about losers? As if.

I really wish I could get behind "Perks of Being a Wallflower" but in the end it's a preteen feelgood movie and not much more, and I should maybe just leave it at that. The movie covers really familiar ground: kid newly arrived in school feels at first like an outcast but gradually makes friends (primarily among other outcasts) and eventually proves his mettle - usually though some form of physical combat. We've seen it in among others My Bodyguard and History of Violence, each with its own variants. The goal, ultimately, is to be the touchstone feel-good movie of the decade, a la Clueless, as one good example. Perks falls short on many levels: like all, it has a bit of a twist, in this case the newly arrived outcast is actually a returning student who'd spent (part of?) the previous school year in some kind of psychiatric unit - we learn more about this in the big payoff at the end of the movie. So among other issues: the new kid, Charlie, a high-school freshman, is not just ignored on his first day in the new high school but picked on and bullied - I know there are mean kids at every school, but there's no way that he would enter as a pariah. He would clearly have had some friends and acquaintances from the past, and other kids would probably just ignore him. But, OK, it's a movie - and it doesn't take long for him to approach a cutup from his shop class, and then to meet the guy's stepsister, Sam - Emma Watson, terribly miscast. Charlie is immediately welcomed into Sam's crowd - which should probably be the end of the movie, he's found his friends - but they keep stressing that these kids are the misfits. As they said in Clueless: As if. Emma Watson is not a misfit loser, nor are any of the others - this is a Disney, sanitized idea of the social outsiders. (To see a much more powerful and realistic version of a similar theme, check out the recent Pariah.) There are many other missteps and misjudgments throughout - a few of note: Charlie's brother plays football for Penn State? Wouldn't this be a dominant theme in the family - going off to games, etc., and Charlie doesn't measure up, etc. - but it's barely mentioned. Charlie suddenly becomes tough enough to take on four varsity football players who are hitting his friend? Not likely outside of the world of superpowers. Perks also plays on the very familiar theme of the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Nerd: almost every writer (maybe not Paul Auster) has felt like an outsider, an observer rather than a participant (see Tonio Kroger), but it's a very tired theme here: the English teacher giving Charlie books and saying that someday he might write one himself. Nothing in the movie is evidence of that; the book Charlie should read, aside from the trite and obvious classics that his teacher hands him, would be The Idiot - Charlie's best and most endearing quality, like Prince Myshkin's, is his inability to say anything but the truth, which gets him into trouble in many ways. I don't mean to make the movie sound worse than it is - it's diverting and charming in a bland, vanilla way (the lack of diversity in Charlie's high school is quite astonishing), but at bottom, despite brush with social issues (homosexuality, child abuse) lite, it's a movie for kids, many of whom will spot it as a phony.

Almodovar's obsessions

Pedro Almodovar has written and directed some great movies but his latest, "The Skin I Live In" is not one of them. Like many Almodovar works, it's complex, kinky, edgy, pushing the boundaries of the probable, interested in gender and power, garishly colorful, brightly contemporary. Unlike his good and great films, it is so weird and extreme in its premises as to be impossible to buy into other than as some kind of allegory or parable. And even then, its characters are so unlikable and their behavior so depraved and reprehensible that we have no way to approach this movie - there's no one we believe in or care about and by the end, before the end, actually, I just couldn't take any more and had to bail out. Almodovar in recent films has become increasingly interested in powerful women and in the power of women working in consort - that's great - but also, more disturbingly, in this sense that men, heterosexual men anyway, are brutal and cruel, and this movie is a paradigm of that. The main character, a plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas) invents an artificial skin that will help burn victims. Sounds good - but in order to create this skin he holds a woman subject captive for many years, the subject of his ghoulish experiments. This is beyond the pale on so many levels - medically, morally, criminally. Over the course of the movie we learn that (spoilers here) this "woman" is a young man who raped the doc's daughter; in vengeance the doc captured and tortured him and then transgendered him - and now he and the doc have fallen in love. In other words, the doctor is extremely sick and disturbed - but Almodovar doesn't play it as such. The doc is actually a tender lover, compared with every other male we come across in this film - sex between man and woman is brutal rape and exploitation, in the world of this movie. Worse, women, so powerful in other Almodovar films, are suicidal and psychologically frail, dependent on men to rescue them - and then what? Sometimes artists reach a point in their careers where they push their themes to such an extreme that they become parodies of themselves: great art is about the interaction of an artist's vision with the world in which we live, not about exalting the artist's vision above the world of nature, of human relationships, of the interior life of the characters. This is recognizably an Almodovar film, but nothing in the film is recognizable as the world in which we live. He's a great enough director that he can produce whatever films he wants, but he's become ensnared in his own obsessions.

Forever? Never.

From the first scene, "Celeste and Jesse Forever" is pretty much insufferable - this unbearable cute and cloying couple driving through the streets of Los Angeles and acting not like real people but like a screenwriters bizarre idea of how a couple ought to act - and it gets worse from there, as we learn in the second long scene, as the title couple goof around in some sort of expensive LA restaurant that in fact they are an ex-couple - they're divorced but they're still best friends. Their dinner partners bolt from the table because they find this behavior "too fucking weird" (they almost shout this out, which no normal civilized person would do in any public space) - and that's about when I felt like bolting, too. There is nothing you can believe about either character or their relationship or their behavior. The movie is trying so hard to be a contemporary version of Annie Hall or Harry Met Sally - couple that everyone else knows is perfect but they just can't see it or make it work. Well, ultimately, there are a few twists on this theme and a bit of a surprise at the conclusion (as reported to me by M, I couldn't make it beyond the one-hour mark) - but many unbearable trope along the way: the one-night nostalgic hookup with regrets (on her part) the next a.m., many bad dates at many highly expensive hangouts (and then she has a great date at an underground dive dancing bar), his date with a vapid young woman during which he does nothing but pine for the true love of his life, the get-tired riff on putting together Ikea furniture, shall I go on? She, Celeste, has an apparent job as a "trend spotter," and who wouldn't want to do that? - just mouth off on where you see the culture to be heading. As M pointed out, she can spot trends in the culture but not in her own life. It would have been great if that had been a real theme that the movie developed - let's see her perspicacity at work, for example - but it doesn't; also, might have worked if we'd begun earlier - seen C & J getting married, or married, then breaking up, then moving onward. Anyway, a little fluff of a film - not harmful or anything, but no more real or substantial than a snowball in Beverly Hills.

Quirky Wes Anderson

You have to have a really high tolerance for quirkiness and whimsy to be a big fan of Wes Anderson's films; I don't, and therefore I'm not - but "Moonrise Kingdom" is more appealing than his other films - it's actually one of the few films aimed at a wide audience - a PG-13 film clearly hoping to draw in a preteen audience - that isn't condescending to kids, that might actually appeal to kids, and that isn't a gross-out slapstick pseudo comedy. It's actually a very sweet story about two misfit kids, boy and girl, who met almost by chance, start a secret correspondence, and then run off together, confounding most of the adults around them - they take off for the woods - a version of the pastoral - and eventually are caught but manage to maintain their friendship and fledgling love despite the obstacles. Echoes here of many adolescent escapes: notably Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but also As You Like It, Night of the Hunter, many others. What makes this film distinctive - and that will be a plus for some and a minus for others - is Anderson's unique cinematic vocabulary: nothing is actually believable about the relationship between the two or the mechanism of their escape and hiding. Just to cite one example, they seem to have enough materials with them to set up an entire wilderness campsite with tent and cooking gear and all sorts of equipment - and he's carrying just a small backpack and she's carrying a suitcase filled with books! OK, but we're not meant to actually believe in this plot - just to take each scene, each segment, at its face value. The scout camp, with Ed Norton as the scoutmaster, is odd, both lots of fun like PeeWee's funhouse, filled with weird gadgets and contraptions, and oppressive, with Norton as a martinet (though he softens over the course of the film) - not sure how to relate to that. Similarly, the home the girl escapes from - just hard to understand: her siblings totally improbably gather around a portable record player each morning to listen to Britten (year, right); the parents - Bill Murray and F. MacDormand - are crass fools, and lawyers to boot! Other than Bruce Willis as the island cop, adults are there to be loathed: who wouldn't want to run away? A more thoughtful movie would include some nuance and even some sympathy for the parents left behind, but Moonrise is all about broad strokes with bright colors, not about nuances and shading. Anderson is truly a "child" of J.D. Salinger - a world of impossibly precocious, overly sensitive, largely abandoned kids at the mercy of insufferable adults. We know where our sympathies are meant to lie - and Moonrise to me is more successful than some of his other works because the two kids are appealing and vulnerable, not troubled and snarky.

The price of sushi: $300 a plate!

As I (and no doubt others) have noted before, a good subject does not make for a good documentary. Case in point = D. Gelb's (?) "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." There are many really cool things you'll see and learn from this 82-minute documentary: It's about an 85-year-old master sushi chef who runs a restaurant with 10 seats at a counter, in a Tokyo subway station, and it's considered the best (and most expensive) sushi restaurant in the world - $300 a plate, reservations months in advance, no menu to choose from, meal of 20 pieces of sushi - and Michelin 3-star rating, the only sushi restaurant in the world at that level I think. How can this be? That's a great question - and to that extent, the film does provide answers: we see how much time and care and attention to detail goes into every element of the prep, from selection of fish at market to time-consuming even tedious preparation (massaging the octupus for 50 minutes, warming each seaweed wrapping individually over a gas flame, special high-pressure technique for cooking the rice, and so on) to exquisite skill at slicing the fish and preparing each item individually by hand, to ridiculously high standards _ Jiro continually tasting fish throughout the day and rejecting many. So that much, plus the long apprenticeships and the complex teamwork, is interesting to see - especially scenes at the fish market. But a good, let alone a great, documentary needs some sort of collision of forces and some kind of narrative arc - in other words, it has to appropriate some of the elements of narrative cinema - and that's where Jiro Dreams comes up short: the filmmakers try really hard to build up a few themes, for example, the tension between father and older son, who's now 50 and still hasn't been able to run his own restaurant; Jiro's sense of abandonment by his own alcoholic father - but the material and tension just is not there, or in any case the filmmakers are unable to elicit much interior strife from the reticent chef and his staff. The result - the film feels long an overly long video promo, and it could probably have been much better as a half-hour TV special. Its methods are kind of old-fashioned, especially when seen against some of the more edgy contemporary documentaries like Sweetgrass, e.g., in that it uses lots of interviews for context, intrusive editing (such as fast-forwards), and a pushy score mostly by Philip Glass (with some Mozart concerto 21, making the cliched point that a meal is like a symphony). The film is definitely worth seeing for those interested in the topic, but as a piece of documentary filmmaking it's limited.

36 hours in the death of a Wall Street firm: Margin Call

"Margin Call" from 2011 (?) is a very good movie that fell a little below the radar, probably because of its relatively low budget and sparing use of star actors, but that fulfills its ambitions very well: a strong, seemingly quite accurate, inside look at the tensions in a major (unnamed, but seemingly based on Lehman Bros) Wall Street firm that, over a span of 36 hours, learns that its losses from investments in crappy mortgages for credit swaps will wipe out all of the capital of the firm, sending the economy into a fatal tailspin. The movie does not explore the meltdown - that was done pretty well in the TV movie Too Big to Fail - but instead looks at the efforts of one firm to save its life by dumping all its weak assets as quickly as possible before the street realizes that this is an act of desperation and what they're buying has almost no value. The strengths of this movie - written and directed by someone named Chanda? - are: very tight plot, great sense of the Wall Street ethics or lack thereof, excellent opening sequence that show how the corporate world coldly fires fine employees (think of Up in the Air - or of the sad situation we have seen this week at the beloved Providence Journal), a good dark atmosphere as a crew pulls together over the course of a sleepless night to develop a plan, technical information conveyed in a simple and straightforward way (the CEO wisely asks one of the underlings to speak in plain English, faux-naively claiming he's not smart enough to understand the jargon), smart development of a dilemma that the main characters must face - sell bad assets gradually and smartly with the idea that the firm must maintain relations over the long haul or dump everything right away, even though the firm will have poisoned its relations with the street. CEO (well played by Jeremy Irons) makes a bold decision: sell it all. As he notes, he's paid to make just a few decisions, such as this one. Biggest strength: Kevin Spacey, head of trading desk, who changes and evolves over the course of the movie and ultimately has to make a decision - go along with the boss or get out - and to face the consequences. Movie does not take the obvious path. (Spacey was really nasty once of one of my best friends, but I have to say he improves every movie he's in.) Weaknesses are few, but the two young risk-management guys don't really come clear as characters and are almost expendable to the plot. Film should have been on more best-of lists, but perhaps by 2011 people had their fill of this dark topic.

Not disappointed in the end of Season 1 of The Killing

Lot of spoilers to come so don't read this if you haven't seen the first season of "The Killing," an excellent series that was worthy competition to the slightly more upscale and broader in scope thriller Homeland in competition for this year's awards. Both were deserving - and make of this what you will but both are based on original series from Europe. Since when did America begin importing pop culture? Many have noted that the final episode of The Killing was a disappointment in that at the end of Season 1 we still don't know who killed Rosie. I disagree - I don't think we need to have the same expectations for closure in a series that we have in a traditional detective novel of segment of episodic TV. The season ended with the sense of completion of a full arc of the story - the arrest of mayoral candidate on the murder charge - but it should have been obvious to most viewers that his arrest does not resolve all of the unanswered questions and open problems. So at the very end there's that surprising twist: Det. Holder, Det Linden's partner, appears to be a crooked cop - faking evidence, on someone's behalf, to pin the crime on the yuppie mayoral candidate. Of course, I'm sure that's not what it seems, either, and we'll learn much more about Holder - whom all of us, including Linden, were beginning to like, thanks in large part to the unusual episode 11 that pulled both of them away from the murder investigation and built their friendship, as Linden searches for her son who's been cutting school. Marielle Enos as Linden is the heart and soul of The Killing, just perfect for the part of the tough, smart, stubborn, emotionally troubled detective. Among the elements left loose at the end of season 1: why would Holder fake evidence in the investigation and on whose behalf? why would the candidate get so involved with a prostitution ring, and did he in fact have Rosie in a campaign car on the night she was killed? Why does he come home soaking wet - what's his explanation? If he didn't kill Rosie, who did and why? What's with Rosie's mother - why was she so uninvolved with Rosie? And Rosie's aunt - is there more to her than meets the eye? She actually drew her young niece into a prostitution ring? Why on earth? We know very little about the death of the candidate's wife. What's the story there? Is there anything to Rosie's father's ties to the mob, or is that just a red herring. What about family friend Belco - the last scene shows him shooting the candidate (echoes of many political assassination attempts in the U.S., as well as All the King's Men) - he obviously fails, but is he involved with Rosie in any way? Is there more that the teacher can tell us if he recovers from his coma? These are just some of the questions - and it's to the great credit of the plot that almost every element seems credible, part of a fairly typical, though high-profile, murder investigation in an American city.

The Killing v Homeland: Two great, but very different, series

Finished episode 9 (of 13) of the excellent series "The Killing," and it still completely holds our interest: I love the simple structure, each episode a single day in a 13-day investigation of a murder - no flashbacks, and much (though not all) scene from the main detective, Sarah Linden's (?) point of view. The story, you'd expect, is full of false leads and even red herrings, but they are very well worked in: they don't seem like a screenwriter's attempt to keep the story moving (as in, for example, the popular but to me idiotic The Usual Suspects and many other movies of that ilk); the twists and turns are exactly what a detective would deal with in a complex murder investigation. This is also one of the few murder mysteries to get the scope and mood of the operations down right: it really feels like the kind of crime and investigation, against the background of a mayoral election and neighborhood racial tensions, that would and does take place regularly in every mid-sized to larger city (Seattle, in this case). As M. points out, this series actually carries a message to viewers, which is: don't jump to conclusions. The detectives, particularly one of them, are pushing against the edges, eager to make an arrest before they have all the facts in hand, and, in episode 9, this leads to some dire consequences. In a very plausible way, as the plot unfolds, we see that our first impressions may be way off the mark and the seemingly guilty may be innocent - but finding out who is actually guilty proves to be extremely elusive, which is what makes this series work. The actress in the lead is terrific as well. The theme of terrorism and of American Muslim communities becomes important at about episode 7 or 8 - this has become a real trope of mysteries and thrillers these days, and seems to echo some of the same notes played in the equally strong Homeland - but the two series are vastly different in mood and in context: Homeland, on the surface, is about a vast conspiracy to destroy the U.S. government, and, in fulfilling this end, becomes a story about people and their emotions and flaws and weaknesses; The Killing, on the surface, is a story about the murder of a young girl who was otherwise a completely ordinary high-school kid, and, in fulfilling this end, becomes a story about the conflicts and forces and hatreds pulling apart American society.

Who dunnit?: My prediction, after 4 episodes of The Killing

Very much enjoying Season 1 of "The Killing" 4 (of 13) episodes in; it's adapted from a Danish series, and I kept waiting and hoping that the original would show up on netflix, but I guess it never will - we'll have to settle for the U.S. remake, which is pretty good in its own right, though I wonder about the Seattle setting - can we really accept Seattle as a hotbed of corrupt municipal politics? In any case, the mayoral race is one of many strands in this inriguing plot, about the murder of a high-school girl and the attempt of a detective who's about to leave the force and move to California, remarry, and start a new life (day after day, she's never quite able to leave) and her partner, in waiting to take over her post, who looks like a slacker but shows surprising interrogation skills, especially in his forte, undercover drug work (to say he looks the part puts it mildly). The many strands include the dead girl's working-class parents, of whom the mom, M. thinks, has a back story to tell; the wealthy and gentrified reform candidate for mayor in whose car trunk the dead girl was found, various slacker friends from high school, a teacher who may be getting a little too close to his students, any number of people who'd want to put the mayoral challenger in a bad light, including possibly double-dealing campaign workers and the mayor himself, and other less likely suspects. The plot is very tight, mostly credible (though as in almost every detective movie or book, clues fall just a little too easily into their hands, in order the move the story along), and I really like the austere structure - the Danish influence maybe? - of having each episode cover a single day in a sequence of 13. Just for the record, I'll predict right now the murderer (though from what I've read there may not be a clear answer at end of Season 1): I think it's the bullying dad of Ames, the rich kid who'd had a brief fling with the dead girl: we know he's cruel and physical (the girl was brutalized before death), he could have known the girl through his son, and there are a number of unanswered questions around him: why wasn't he present at his son's interrogation? why no reference to a wife or partner? I don't, however, know how he could have come into possession of the candidate's car.