Outrage

By Moira Sullivan

Takeshi Kitano, Japanese actor turned director, otherwise known as Beat Takeshi, brings us what he is best at – yakuza or Japanese organized crime films with all their blood and gore. Outrage was part of last year’s Cannes Film Festival’s official selection.

In what can be seen as a Japanese Reservoir Dogs, rival bosses with hidden body tattoos take turns at offing each other to impress the head family.  It seems like every second someone has their face bashed in, or their mouth worked on in the dentist office without Novocain. Takeshi Kitano is a deadpan actor that barely needs to move but instills fear with his cunning style. His motley face is enough to conjure up impending doom, along with the coiled snake energy of some of the other bosses in this film.

 Outrage is predictable but with enough gore to make any yakuza enthusiast satisfied. This is the kind of film that is screened late at night or dead in the middle of winter at film festivals when vicious violence seems to light up the screen and bring the spectator into a secret world of intrigue and cloak and dagger vengeance.

Takeshi Kitano returns with this yakuza tale after a decade absence from the genre. People missed him, and he’s back. He is known for serving up violence with impressive timing—but even after a 10-year vacation. It’s just a manner of who gets sliced and diced first. It is actually Kitano’s goal to make us feel pain.

The yakuza of this film hails back to the time when the bosses tried to control bars and pubs, but Kitano figures that today’s yakuza would be interested in an extortion and revenge scene in information technology.

Outrage gives us our fair share of knife plunging, gun firing adrenalin, all in a cool slick style.  It’s just a movie but Kitano makes you squirm every time there is an impending violent transaction between the bosses. There is no rest until the 90 minute ordeal is over.

© 2011 - Moira Sulliva - Air Date: 12/7/11 Movie Magazine International

The Skin I Live In

By Moira Sullivan

*SPOILERS*

Vera Cruz: Larger than Life

The Skin I Live In is Pedro Almodóvar’s latest freaky venture into dressing and undressing women. This time his cross dressing fetish involves Male to Female gender reassignment –forced reassignment as punishment for the attempted rape and later suicide of a surgeon's daughter.

There is much to be admired in the art direction of this film - in a sinister way: the Petri dishes that grow skin from fresh animal blood, the surgical gowns and dressings, and other accouterments of the operating room, and another room - a room where a young woman is kept prisoner who can not look out but is gazed upon - who uses mascara to create a living diary with tiny writing and small images, and fashions Louise Bourgeois creations of tattered torn up doll carcasses.

The glass wall that separates surgeon from patient is enlarged like a wide screen cinema. A remote camera is projected into the kitchen where the surgeons mother Marilia (Marisa Paredes) monitors the young woman’s activity and sends up food to her on a dumb waiter. 

All pieces of this story are shot in inverted order in different time sequences and this is clever work.  A young man who works in a woman’s clothing store - in keeping with Amodóvar’s fetish of course - Vicente (Jan Cornet) is kidnapped by the Frankenstein type surgeon Dr Robert Ledgard, played by Antonio Banderas. It is strange to have to point this out but in this case, gender reassignment takes on the form of a Frankenstein experiment. Not the Mary Shelley Frankenstein but the evil doers of the Boris Karloff lot. What can be worse than waking up with a woman’s body when you adore your body as a man? This puts The Skin I Live In on par with the Almodovar's controversial film Talk to Me about an orderly who rapes a young girl in a coma and brings her back to life and awakens her. Only in this case the relatives of the victim do not thank the perpetrator as they did the young ballet student raped by the orderly in Talk to Her. 

Vicente’s mother and friends are worried sick about his disappearance. In this case, the perpetrator played by a side of Banderas we have not met previously eventually allows himself to be seduced by Vera Cruz with huge glassy doll eyes played by the talented (Elena Anaya).

Almodóvar was worried that Talk to Her would not do well in America, and it needs to be said that it is not sure this one will fare well here either. Ever since its introduction at Cannes in May, The Skin I Live in has gotten more than minor criticism. The ironical and comical melodramas of Almodóvar’s previous work do not show any signs of life in The Skin I Live In. It is a somber and uncomfortable story but intriguing in a perfectly bizarre sense.

Almodovar ‘s penchant for ladies clothing, jewelry handbags, makeup, and wardrobe are all all on display and the product tie in for this film must have paid for it.

© 2011 - Moira Sullivan - Air Date: 11/3/11
Movie Magazine International

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life

By Moira Sullivan

  Serge Gainsbourg (Eric Elmosnino) with Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta)

The late French singer songwriter Serge Gainsbourg has received a renaissance of tributes in French culture since his death in 1991.  His life was cut short due to drug and alcohol addiction but that did not interfere with the love affair he had with the French people.The premise of Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life seems to rest on his origins in a poor Jewish family in Nazi occupied Paris where his father forced him to play the piano.

Young Serge suffered from an inferiority complex and as the story goes he developed an alter ego that made him more dashing and debonair than he felt inside. He cannot be considered handsome but he had outstanding charisma and charm that endeared him to primarily women, but he also served as a hero to men because of that success. As far as I can see this is why he is deserving of the title of the film. 

Joann Sfar who made a graphic novel that concentrates on this alter ego directs the film. Obviously, this helped Serge survive who quickly became an accomplished songwriter and made several women famous with his lyrics such as Juliette Greco and Brigitte Bardot. 

The insertion of animation in the live action film from the graphic novel does not take the narrative to a higher level, but it does force us to take into account the fragility of Serge throughout the film. His arrogance and disregard for his wife Jane Birkin included a string of affairs and irresponsibility, such as allowing his daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg in a room with a loaded gun in his possession. It is also controversial that he made a duet with Charlotte that many consider disturbing entitled "Lemon Incest". The frequency of incidents with women that were not positive include raw remarks made on the air to Whitney Houston on French TV and the erotic lyrics he wrote for Bob Marley’s wife Rita that infuriated the Jamaican musician. 

When Serge was younger, his charm and bad boy image pushed him to fame but as his career imploded with scandals,his sex addiction became more obvious. There are many legends about Serge Gainsbourg that the film takes up and Joann Sfar keeps the story pitched at the musician’s luck with women, as do many biographical accounts. Ironically, the actress who plays Jane Birkin, British actress Lucy Gordon, committed suicide before the release of the film.

© 2011 - Moira Sullivan- Air Date: 10/26/11
Movie Magazine International

The Women on the 6th Floor

By Moira Sullivan

 

The Spanish maids : Carmen Maura, second from right and Natalia Verberke, far right

The Women on the 6th Floor (Les femmes du 6ème étage, France 2010) was part of this year’s out of competition selection at the Berlin Film Festival and opens in San Francisco this week. Directed by Philippe Le Guay, the film is partly autobiographical inspired by his family’s Spanish maid, Lourdes. In this film on the sixth floor of a stockbroker’s family house live several Spanish maids who serve affluent French households. The setting is Paris in 1982.

Jean-Louis Joubert played by Fabrice Luchini lives a predictable life with his wife Sandra (Sandrine Kiberlain) who has her toenails painted, her dresses fitted and enjoys tea with other French housewives. The maid of the family for 25 years quits but actually is just let go when Joubert’s mother dies, and a young Spanish woman is employed in the household to serve Mrs. Joubert. As might be expected Mr. Joubert is smitten by not only Maria but also all the Spanish maids upstairs. He seems to take a genuine interest in their livelihood, such as having their plumbing fixed, and drives them to mass in the countryside.

The film clearly stakes its claim in revealing the stuffiness of the French upper class and its bourgeois lifestyle. The Joubert kids go to boarding school and there seems little room for the passion of life. The Women on the 6th floor is clearly stereotypical where the Spanish women provide the spice to the French bland diet and for that reason the plot is something that must be endured. One wonders what the director’s real life experience was. 

Several powerful actresses make up the ensemble of Spanish maids:  Spanish actresses Carmen Maura (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Volver), as Conception and Lola Duenas as Carmen and Argentinean actress Natalia Verbeke who plays Maria. The class differences between the servants and the owners are transparent, lacking any real subtleties in this commercial French narrative. Carmen sells papers for workers’ rights in the town square and has to educate Mr Joubert on the atrocities of Franco who murdered her two parents.   

Having one benevolent Frenchman cater to the Spanish women is the major superficiality of the film, especially since Mr. Joubert not only owns the home but also lays real claims to Maria. His sense of entitlement includes moving upstairs with all the maids when his marriage goes sour. It is fatiguing to see Fabrice Luchini once again as an aging middle age man falling for younger women. It is hard to imagine Maria with Mr. Joubert or as the center of attention with the enamored Spanish maids. Still the film had definite charm and nice touches which saves it from the script’s lack of ambition.

© 2011 - Moira Sullivan - Air Date: 10/26/11 Movie Magazine International

My Afternoons with Margueritte

By Moira Sullivan 

Gérard Depardieu and Gisèle Casadesus

My Afternoons with Margueritte stars French actor Gérard Depardieu, who plays Germain Chazes, a man with a scarred childhood. Because of his weight problem, he has been teased and ridiculed all his life in the provincial French village where he was raised by a single mother. Despite these emotional setbacks he has a beautiful young girlfriend played by Sophie Guillemin – somewhat unrealistic because he is twice her age, yet twice his age is a kindly, elderly woman whom he truly enjoys conversations with – Margueritte, played by the 96 year old veteran French actress Gisèle Casadesus. Margueritte is a well-read scientist and she opens doors to this illiterate adult man who has been the butt of jokes all his life. He lives in a trailer in the garden behind the house where he grew up with his mother. The emphasis on the film is the friendship that develops between Germain and Margueritte -  not your usual on screen relationship, and for that reason the film has a warm feel.

The film flashbacks to painful experiences the young Germain endures by a snotty teacher, but there are also scenes of humiliation with his mother who also is vicious in her insults. But when she has a boyfriend who hits both her and Germain she is quick to set him straight to not hit her boy, and stabs the boyfriend’s thighs with a pitchfork, who goes limping away. Later Germain is able to make sense of his mean mother and learns to love her. But his biggest attachment is to Margueritte, who is going blind and is kept in an expensive nursing home by her relatives. The contact is mutual especially when tough decisions have to be made when Margueritte is moved to Belgium by her family.

The film is directed by veteran French director Jean Becker who is known for his handcrafted films with charm about memorable meetings in life, such as The Children of the Marshland  from 1994 set during WW1 where a young officer stumbles upon a cottage owned by a 92 year old man.

 

© 2011 - Moira Sullivan - Air Date: 09/21/11 Movie Magazine International

Griff the Invisible

Maeve Dermody and Ryan Kwanten

It is unusual to see Ryan Kwanten in a role other than Jason Stackhouse in True Blood but its only fair to him as an actor that we let go of the typecasting a bit to see him not only in films with different characters, but in his own country. I understand that Kwanten must want to expand and show his acting abilities. His most recent projects in filmography, which you can count on your finger during the last decade, features him date in two Australian films. In Red Hill, he plays a policeman in a small town who stumbles on to some bad guys with a sordid past. In Griff the Invisible, he plays a nerdy office worker who likes to dress up in a rubber suit and fight crime. 

The character is the complete opposite of Jason Stackhouse, of course. Griff the Invisible evokes the character Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) in Kick Ass who also dreams of being a superhero. However, the dark, brown haired Ryan seems to be swallowed up in this film, and not because we are used to seeing him in a completely different light. Do you know that he is going to play the serial murderer Charles Manson in an upcoming film slated for next year, The Family? 

Griff the Invisible may have packed the house at the Toronto Film Festival where it had its international debut last September, and no doubt it will attract the same Jason Stackhouse fans here in San Francisco. The problem with the film directed by Leon Ford is the slow pace with a script that seems to go nowhere and though the director really, tries that are only moments of screen entertainment, Most of the office scenes in the film fall flat. One of Griff's friends is Tim (Patrick Brammall) who is attracted to the young scientist Melody (Maeve Dermody). The director will have us believe that like-minded nerds attract one another and so it is just a matter of time until Griff and Melody lock horns. But just as Griff refuses to betray his childhood friend Hoyt in True Blood and act out his attraction to Jessica, he is equally loyal to Tim. Melody fantasizes about Griff and says things like ”You be the rhythm and I’ll be the beat” but Griff sticks to his agenda of rejecting her advances - at least initially. His rubber suit empowers him to a certain degree and he is seen beating up the street thug bad guys. In real life, however, he is unable to pull off his daredevil stunts and he beaten up by co-workers on the street. Maeve Dermody fairs better as Melody who eventually makes her intentions perfectly clear to Tim and Griff - a  good actress. 

The film is billed as a romantic comedy but there is little chemistry between Melody and Griff, even if we are led to believe that the charge between the two of them is so powerful that light bulbs explode or doors melt when they are near. Maybe the film loses something in translation as a popular Aussie film. There is a hollowness that seems almost artistic but Griff the Invisible is just too transparent.

© 2011 - Moira Sullivan - Air Date: 8/17/11 Movie Magazine International

One Day

By Moira Sullivan

Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway

Lone Scherfig’s One Day is a film that spans 20 years involving two young people who are first friends and then brief lovers and then friends and then lovers and finally spouses. Anne Hathaway plays Emma Morley, a young college student who sees herself as a wallflower when in truth she is dynamic, funny and brilliant. She hooks up with the playful Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess) who goes for all the cute girls that are nowhere close to the charm and depth of Emma. Emma indeed is Dexter’s best friend and she always wants more than he is capable of. In the novel by the same name written by David Nicholls, part of the antagonism between the two is based on class differences. Emma seems reconciled to the fact that she never will make enough money and will have to settle on men that are far less exciting than Dexter. 

Blue Blooded Dexter could have anything he wants but decides against his mother's wishes played by Patricia Clarkson to do something useful. Instead, he goes on an airhead TV show, which works fine while he is young, but in time he is too old to play the part and his life starts to unravel. His good fortune turns into personal disaster. But there is always Emma he can rely on, and they manage to stay in touch through the years. Whereas the physical changes that Emma goes through seem upbeat, Dexter’s changes have a lot to do with gaining or losing hair. Indeed the couple makes a splendid pair, but we can only admire them as spectators. Of course, much is there in the book that the film is based on and one suspects this when there is more to the story than meets the eye.

A film based on a novel is a special breed and yet we have no right to demand that a film be faithful to the original source to be a superior product. Witness the Potter films that never seemed to disappoint fans, but The Golden Compass angered others so that there was only one film made based on the novels of Phillip Pullman. It is hard to make a film that spans two decades, so cars, hairstyles, music and fashion speak the loudest.

Danish director Lone Scherfig who made An Education (2009) has taken on another English property and shows with skill how to tell a moving story with just the right touches. And Anne Hathaway shows once against what a talented actress she is and she pretty much steals every scene she is in.

© 2011 - Moira Sullivan - 8/18/11
Movie Magazine International

Attack the Block

By Moira Sullivan

Attack the Block screened in June at the Another Hole in the Head Film Festival in San Francisco.  It was a good venue for it, due to its oddball quaintness. In addition, the film was at Comic-Con last month.  Who would have thought that a pack of teens roaming around South London would be in for so much drama after mugging a woman and taking her cell phone? The gang is mostly black, and they all live in the hood of Wyndam Towers. After the holdup, a meteor falls from the sky and hits a VW bug. As Moses (John Boyega), the oldest boy of the pack goes to investigate he is suddenly attacked by a wild creature, which turns out to be an alien. He shoots it dead. From there, a cascade of black furry aliens begin descending to earth. They kill two cops and follow Moses and company around. 

Back in their hood, Biggz (Simon Howard) is chomped on by one of the hairballs, and soon after they run into the girl they mugged, Sam (Jodie Whittaker). They are surprised to see her in their building and claim they never would have mugged her if they knew she lived in the same block. This doesn’t wash with her, but there isn’t time to negotiate this, as the black creatures with luminous green teeth are chomping at the bit and scaling Wyndam Towers like cockroaches.  

Attack the Block, is an intriguing film because it shows how closely connected the gang is and how finely tuned they are with the survival of the pack. There are other characters that flesh out the story such as a corpulent marijuana dealer played by Nick Frost and one of his main customers, the young Brewis (Luke Steadaway). Brewis is able to make sense of the nature of the invasion, despite being in a constant stupor. 

The gang has not escaped the eye of the local young women, including Dimples (Page Mead). These girls are annoyed with how juvenile the gang is but still are ready to standby and lend a hand to the defense plan.This is a bizarre tale about an epidemic that has psychic origins, a visit from outer space that puts into motion a survival plan in which the hood gets closer, cleaner, and wiser. The South London dialect is easy enough to follow with a riveting sound track including a tune by director Joe Cornish.

Attack the Block is also insightful for it shows how quickly the blame is put on the young black teens for the gruesome deaths in the hood and how they fight against this racial profiling in order to save their neighborhood.

© 2011 - Moira Sullivan - Air Date: 08/03/11
Movie Magazine International

Medea, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Italy 1969).

By Moira Sullivan

Maria Callas as Medea.

Medea by Pier Paolo Pasolini was made in 1969. The scenography was done is by Dante Ferretti, and it was his first movie. And I mention this because he Ferretti not only did the scenography for a few other Pasolini films, but also for Interview with a Vampire, Shutter Island, Sweeney Todd and The Aviator. For the last two films he received Oscars.

To see Medea is a rare treat, because of the art direction but also because of the direction and script by the late director Pasolini. It stars one of his long-term friends Maria Callas as Medea, who is just brilliant.  Nothing is usual in a Pasolini film from the quaint costumes, which consist of elaborate costumes with jewelry and intricate cloth,  to the special way he tells stories.  The film was shot in Italy, Syria and Turkey.

The story begins with a centaur (played by the late French actor Laurent Terzieff) who speaks to a young boy at age 5, 13 and as a young man. He is not his father or mother, says the centaur in his final speech before he sends the boy named Jason on his way, played by Giuseppe Gentile.

“All is sacred,. There is nothing natural in Nature, my lad, remember that!”  The speech is an allegory for modern life in which contact with our mythical roots is vanishing. But for this Pasolini gives no credit to any higher power “In fact, there is no god!” says the centaur. He is told to go to a distant land where which has been usurped by his uncle King Kresus.He sends him on a mission to recover the Golden Fleece. It is in the possession of Medea, a sorceress who he convinces to come with him and marry him, after she kills her brother. Her land is one where human sacrifices are used to improve the crops. On return, he tells his uncle that the Fleece is worthless in his land. 


Medea turns out to be too old fashioned for Jason who is soon betrothed to the King’s daughter. Medea’s handmaidens implore her to use her magic to take revenge on Jason, and she kills their two children, his new wife and her father the king.  Though this should come as no surprise to Jason since this is the way of her land and the way of Medea. 

There is nothing subtle about the film. It is crude and powerful.  The story is shown rather than told, and the longest spoken dialogue is that of the centaur. 

© 2011 - Moira Sullivan- Air Date: 06/10/11
Movie Magazine International

MERRY GO ROUND, Jacques Rivette (France 1981).

By Moira Sullivan 

Joe Dallesandro and Maria Schneider at dinner.

Merry Go Round by Jacques Rivette is a film that uses the instrument of the camera and editing to create a mystical thriller. In this film we see the young Maria Schneider as she actually looked in real life without the artificial clothing and makeup she is known for in Last Tango in Paris. Maria is a tiny, thin woman, with lots of wavy brown hair, dressed in jeans, t-shirts and moccasins, the kind with fringe on the sides from the 70’s. Schneider picked her leading man for the film, Joe Dallesandro, who reported that Maria in real life was his friend. But according to Jacques Rivette, the relationship between the two on the set became increasingly hostile. 

Merry Go Round has a short scene with the present French Minister of Culture and Communication Frederic Mitterrand who plays a courier. Later Mitterrand would present Schneider with an outstanding tribute when she was inducted in the Order of Arts and Letters (Ordre des Arts et Lettres) six months before her death this February. 

The totally improvisational story has a loosely constructed plot about how Leó, played by Maria and Ben (Dallesandro) meet in a hotel—a rendezvous pre- arranged by Leó’s sister Elisabeth (Danièle Gegauff) who never shows up. To the story is that Leó and Elizabeth’s father has died and four million dollars of his estate is unaccounted for. Now and then throughout the film there are cutaways to a sax player and bassist playing improvisational music. Leó and Ben then wander through the French countryside looking for Elisabeth and the missing money.  Ben tries to seduce Leó but she is immune. So there is no romance between the two. Instead they find an abandoned house and eat a lot of gourmet canned goods from the absent owner. They assemble the goods on a long dinner table. The dinner party is one of the most visually stunning scenes of the film where the two actors both at opposite ends of the table with a huge candelabrum in the center, peering at one another. 

In the course of the film an unknown woman pursues Ben through the forest, not to mention a knight in shining armor. Later we see Ben trying to shoot at the women on sand dunes. The woman at first looks like Leo with shorter hair. Elisabeth is kidnapped then rescued by Leo and later shot. It is not clear what happens to the money or if the father is actually dead.  The entire premise of the films is to dispense with the conventional use of plot, yet there is a random pattern that you can’t help trying to assemble as a spectator. 

Maria and Dallesandro totally steal the film and the rest of the cast serve as distractions of little substance. If Maria Schneider had had her way Merry Go Round would have been the kind of film she would have liked as her first to give her a softer start in art cinema.

© 2011 - Moira Sullivan - Air Date: 06/10/11
Movie Magazine International