LuciaJoyce Reviews

Obvious Child (2014)

Hilarious, heartfelt

[9/10 · 18 June 2014]

Such a gentle, tender, heartwarming movie, about New Yorker Donna Stern (not a girl, but not yet a woman, cue Britney), who's in her late 20's, just broken up with, working in a bookstore during the day and doing stand-up at night. Jenny Slate invests her with surprising tenderness and pathos, making her a full, rounded character, regarding the world with trust and suspicion (watch that scene with David Cross as she watches him clumsily make move after move), trying to make the right decisions and correct the bad ones and sometimes failing, just trying to be true (which she, sometimes helplessly, can't help but be during her stand-up, hurting those close to her, but reaching something close to the purity of art). She's never a caricature, which is to the credit of Slate and writer/director Gillian Robespierre.

And then she gets Knocked Up. Which the film treats with respect and adult understanding, unlike "Knocked Up," which can't even mention the word "abortion." This is by far the most refreshing part of "Obvious Child" -- the characters never devolve into rom-com conventions, and their actions seems derived from an understanding of how real people interact.

And somehow Slate and Robespierre manage to make the whole thing funny, which just seems magical and miraculous.

Gaby Hoffmann deserves a shout-out as well, as the roommate/best friend.

Go see it on a first date (I did!), it'll really open up the conversation during dinner!

Jersey Boys (2014)

I loved it

[8/10 · 17 June 2014]

*Possible spoilers, though nothing in-depth*

I had seen the musical in London (ooh la la) and loved it then too, so I was hoping (sort of) for a straight adaptation of the play, even though I was a bit hesitant about what a musical from Clint Eastwood would be like. I mean, I've seen Paint Your Wagon.

So for those of you who, like me, may have been both hoping and dreading a musical adaptation: relax. Eastwood, wisely it turns out, eschews all the belting and hoofing and relegates the musical numbers to naturalistic rehearsals and recording sessions. What he retains from the play works, for the most part, particularly the bit of having the film being narrated to the camera by one character to the next -- something I remember from other movies by one of Jersey Boys writers, Marshall Brickman, who used a similar device in "Lovesick" and "Annie Hall."

The cast is a knockout, especially Christopher Walken (who shows a tiny glimpse of the dynamite dancing chops he had in "Pennies From Heaven"), Vincent Piazza as the hotheaded Tommy DeVito, Erich Bergen as Bob Gaudio, the quiet genius, and John Lloyd Young's Frankie Valli. Young seems preternaturally, well, young, which gives the latter scenes of an older Valli some theatricality -- but then you check out Frankie Valli now and you realize, that guy has not aged. And neither has Eastwood: at 84 years old, he's delivered a fleet, fun entertaining biopic with great songs (though it seems like hours before a really great Four Seasons song actually shows up) and great performances.

I'll definitely see this one again when it comes out in wide release, and next time I'm bringing my mom.

Varmints (2008)

better than what the other reviewers say

[9/10 · 22 February 2009]

I liked this short. Yes, its overall message was simplistic. It's essentially the same sort of pro-ecological message presented in some of Hayao Miyazaki's films (NAUSICAA, SPIRITED AWAY, PRINCESS MONONOKE), and yet nobody's off slagging Miyazaki for being so sentimentally-minded and prelapsarian. Part of why some may find this short so revolting is because the animals who populate the film are so darn cute, and a lot of its emotion is wrought upon how much that cuteness is defiled. All of these are valid criticisms of this film: the manipulativeness of its animal characters, the simplicity of its message. And yet these are all bound up in images of such imaginative weirdness, accompanied by a magnificent musical score (by the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, whom I adore), that I think the thrill and the thrall I felt at the end of the film overwhelmed all my cynical misgivings. VARMINTS deserves the BAFTAS nominations it's garnered for best animated short and best score, and I am now looking eagerly for the book!

You Kill Me (2007)

not too terrible

[6/10 · 20 June 2007]

Ben Kingsley reprises some of the gangster cool but none of the cockney fury of his gangster from "Sexy Beast" in the lead role of Frank Falenczyk, a supposedly Polish-American hit-man for a Polish-American gangland family/snowplow concern, though for the life of me Frank speaks as if he's got an Irish accent (and he's called "Francis" for much of the movie, mucking up my ethnic stereotypes). Dealing with his deadly, deadening job in the career-wise nowheresville of Buffalo NY is difficult, so Francis drowns his boredom in alcohol, which dulls his efficacy hit-man-wise. He's sent by his boss (Philip Baker Hall) to sunny San Francisco, where -- sponsored by an understanding tollbooth guard (Luke Wilson) in an insanely tolerant AA meeting, and getting involved with an even more insanely supporting beautiful woman (Tea Leone, who's made a fortune from these kinds of roles), Francis decides to dry out, straighten up, and become the best darned hit-man he can possibly be.

A lot of this movie will seem familiar to fans of the SOPRANOS, and will seem, in comparison to that greatest of TV shows, remarkably frivolous. (It doesn't help that Sir Ben Kingsley killed, so magisterially, in the Sopranos episode in which he appeared.) Director John Dahl (Red Rock West, The Last Seduction, The Great Raid) seems overwhelmed by the deliberately indie quirkiness of the script; he gains momentum, although only briefly, during the one big action sequence. Luke Wilson underplays his role so unmemorably, it's seems strange that he's credited at all: he could have been, for all intents and purposes, a cameo.

What elevates this movie are Kingsley and Leone. Kingsley seems weirdly detached from what seems intended to be a comedic role; he's so amazingly expressive, and a few wry moments are made from close-ups of his face alone. And Tea Leone (who co-produced) is a fascinating actress. Her timing's quirky and yet never unnatural; her character is never more than two-dimensional, but the viewer can never be quite sure exactly which two dimensions are being inhabited at any time. Whenever she's on the screen, even in the predictable third act, you're not quite sure where she's coming from, where she's been, where she's going. The movie would have been much more interesting if it centered itself on her.

Steps (1987)

Steps

[8/10 · 21 August 2006]

I saw this short on "Alive From Off Center" way back in the day. Using then-cutting edge compositing and chroma key effects, Rybczynski shows a tour guide with his group (in colour) wandering through the famous (black and white) "Odessa Steps" sequence from Eisenstein's Battleship Potyemkin. The sarcastic climax comes at the famousest bit, when the mother is shot and her baby carriage rolls down the steps: the tourists ooze from every corner of Eisenstein's enraged frames, pointing and cooing at the blood, taking photographs of the calamity with their flashbulb cameras.

A brilliant, intriguing ten minutes, on the warping and woofing of memory through technology, on the capitalist exploitation of revolutionary rhetoric, on the transformation of the iconic into kitsch, and even on the played-out-ness of the "Odessa Steps" sequence (Brian de Palma and Terry Gilliam had only just stolen it, for example, for "The Untouchables" and "Brazil").

Not Reconciled (1965)

Not Reconciled

[5/10 · 19 August 2006]

The day my film professor was going to screen this film in class, he tried his best to prepare us. It's based on Heinrich Böll's novel "Billiards At Half Past Eight," he said; not that if you'd read the novel that'll help you, because whatever plot there is in the film is at best elided, and at most ignored. Straub and Huillet are disdainful, if not contemptuous, of "enjoyment" in narrative, he said: they take Brechtian audience alienation techniques to such an extreme that they very well alienate the audience entirely, or look for an audience of extraterrestials. This is an important and provocative film. Prepare to be challenged, he said, and dimmed the lights and started up the projector.

For twenty minutes we watched images on black and white film. Conversations were verbose and it was difficult to follow what was being said (which, granted, is easy to do in German). The scenes didn't seem to follow any kind of order. I didn't understand a thing.

At the reel change my professor raised the lights. Um, he said. There's been a mistake. I actually just showed you reel two. And they didn't ship us reel one. He threw his hands up in the air and said, But oh well. That's pretty much what watching a Straub and Huillet movie's like!

Red Psalm (1972)

memorable

[7/10 · 14 July 2006]

I saw this three times on the same evening as a teenager at UC Santa Cruz, which claimed at the time (this was before DVDs) to have the only existing print in the United States; this is almost 20 years ago now, but I still remember being -- if not exactly entranced, at least lulled, by Jancsó's restless, dancing camera, and the underground pulse of menace that pushed and shaped the actors' dancing. It takes place on a great plain or meadow, I think; and there's a cast of what seems to be a hundred dancers, dancing in the circle-dances not unlike the end of Bertolucci's "Last Tango In Paris," Communism and film form all one. The shots are long and languid, like Bela Tarr: there's something like 17 edits in the entire 90 minute film. And the last image is still seared on my mind's eye: a beautiful woman slits her palm with a knife, holds it to her breast, and then faces the camera, showing us her wound: instead of blood, a red scarf is tied around her hand, a banner that combined with her defiant pose speaks revolution, the red psalm of the title.

My Dinner with Andre (1981)

interpretation of the last lines of the conversation

[8/10 · 1 July 2006]

I like ImagoDei's interpretation of the last lines, though I have this faint feeling I don't really understand what s/he's saying.

Which is as of a piece with Andre's conversation, to me, a lot of which went over my head tonight (I saw the movie for the first time just 10 minutes ago) and yet left me terribly moved -- possibly like Wally Shawn's character.

The way I took the last lines -- my $.02 -- was merely how I took much of what Andre was saying: not the precise import or meaning of what he said (boy, does he talk fast) but rather the overall tone of dread and the fear of death he evinced. Everything scares him: everything reminds him of the Holocaust, of autopsy and burial, of the prisons we erect to imprison ourselves within, of direct and friendly fascism - in short, of the machines and machinations Western culture and society have emplaced to contain and impeach our fear of death.

What I took away from the movie was a sense that these were two highly self-involved individuals (not that I'm condemning self-involvement by any means: it's the American way). Whereas Andre looks more and more outside the realm of the ordinary to find, as Wally describes it, "moments of pure being" that will annihilate or ameliorate his fear of disappearing, Wally retreats more into the quotidian and finds security and comfort in the past memories he finds there. Andre believes in fate, implacability, messages from beyond borne by UFOs; and the last lines of his conversation, I think, reflect his sense that nothing remains, not even the eternal love of a wife, a son.

The conversation ends there, at least the conversation between Andre and Wally; but not the movie, nor the conversation between Wally and us. The last last thing I took away from the movie is Wally, splurging on a taxi and looking out at the city of his birth in awe and wonder. He is retreating from Andre and Andre's thanatophilea by removing himself into his past, the past of taxi cabs and buying suits with his (incredibly rich) father (could anyone forget, as I couldn't watching this, that Wallace Shawn is the son of William Shawn, the founder of the New Yorker?); he is being driven away into nostalgia. The very last line of the movie, after all, tells us that Wally will repeat the entire conversation yet again to his girlfriend, of his dinner with Andre.

What I'd like to know is what people thought of that waiter. He had a kind of doom and gloom look about him, didn't he? And why did he look at Wally so pointedly?

Pictures (1983– )

A sweet memory

[9/10 · 30 May 2005]

I can't comment helpfully on this title, but will do so nevertheless. I was 7 years old when this miniseries was shown Sunday mornings on PBS's "Masterpiece Theatre," right after "Zoom!" and "Viva Allegre!" Since there were no cartoons on the air (this being the early Reagen years, and 24-hour cartoon channels an utter pipe dream), I started watching this just to keep watching TV; and then fell in love with the story. I don't remember the story, 25 years later: something about the British movie industry in the '20s, and a charming flapper played by an actress resembling the young Emily Lloyd who charmingly and unflappingly achieves success in said industry. I still remember the theme song, though; and if this ever shows up again on the air, I'll watch it again with great affection.