Monday, January 31, 2011

True Grit - Oh, Glorious Dust!

review by Tony Freitas
I've never been a fan of the western genre. As a young boy, my brother ruled the roost when the parents were gone for the day,  and Saturdays often consisted of marathon length viewings of dreaded oaters on the old console. I was partial to Godzilla and other films of the nuclear mismanagement ilk, but cowboys were the order of the day, and I was at the mercy of my brother's television whims.   I don't know if my distaste for the genre was there from the beginning or developed over time, but most Saturdays were tv torture. Among those Saturday films were plenty of John Wayne flicks.  I'm sure the orignal 1968 True Grit was screened at one time or another, maybe even more than once, but I don't remember a lick of of it. Maybe I've repressed the memory. Enough of this,  I'll save it for therapy


While the trailer for True Grit 2010 is rousing and arguably one of the best of the year,  my excitement was low level. "But it's the Coen Brothers" I  kept telling myself. Well, finally I broke down and saw the damn thing.  And it is an extraordinary entertainment, even if you have an aversion to the dusty dirt and spur milieu.


The Coen Brothers have fashioned a great entertainment of the kind seldom seen these days,  while retaining their unique askew voice,  evident in every scene and every idiosyncratic characterization. There is still the meanderings and flights of fancy the Coens are partial to, but they've made a disciplined straight-forward film here... and that is not meant as a slight.


For those unfamiliar with the story, 14 year old Mattie Ross's father has been murdered by one Tom Chaney and young Mattie has taken it upon herself to seek retribution against her father's killer. Though advised otherwise, Mattie determines to hire Rooster Cogburn, a drunken, one eyed United States Deputy Marshall, to aid in her quest.  Cogburn may not be everyone's first choice, but Mattie's got a feeling and Cogburn's been described as merciless.  Then along comes Texas Ranger Labeouf, also on the tail of Chaney for a murder that preceded Mattie's father, and the pot is stirred and the Journey begins.


True Grit is an 1880s road movie, closer to Bob Hope and Bing Crosby than Zach Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr.  Horses replace cars,  and thoughtful monologues replace mindless banter (well there is banter, but not the mindless sort). There's plenty of high jinks and adventure but some restitution too.  Jeff Bridges is Bing Crosby, Matt Damon is Bob Hope and it's The Road To Redemption.  The adage "It's the journey not the destination" is never truer than here.


The films opening scene is a long one by current movie standards: Rooster Cogburn testifies in a trial against a ruthless outlaw, one in a long line of lawless men, and the defense team attacks Cogburn as a trigger-happy (somewhere between 15 and 30 killed) short-tempered throw back to an era of Western law thats day has come and gone. " These here is modern times". It's rare to see an extended scene played out like this, simply, with pages and pages of dialogue, but it sets the tone for the film. By the time Cogburn is finished testifying, you know what the man is about, and have an idea of how others perceive him as well.


Young Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross is terrific. At first I found her precocious nature off-putting, but as the film settles in,  and the hightened non-contracted dialogue flows, I finally relaxed into a different era and was completely transported.  The precociousness in fact is emblematic of the times as opposed to Hollywood inserting mature adult words into the mouths of babes for comic effect (I only have to recall that my Grandmother married at 15 and had her first child a year later).  Steinfeld is a real find. Her Mattie is tenacious, hard-headed and determined; a true match for her older alter ego Rooster Cogburn.  Her feature film debut here is auspicious, and one hopes that future career choices will go in the right direction.


Jeff Bridges' Rooster Cogburn is a humorous, sad, pathetic man.  Essentially a hired killer, he carries the burden of every rabid criminal he's every put down just below the surface of his blase' que sera sera facade (wow Spanish and French in the same sentence). Bridges speaks in a mush mouthed drawl as if he's got a half pound of Skoal in his cheek, but if you can't understand what he's saying at times, his weathered face and doleful droopy eyes convey more than words.


Matt Damon as LaBeouf is priceless. Puffed up with an ego the size of the state of Texas, he deflates with the slightest pin prick only to puff up once more before his balloon is inevitably burst again. I think of Damon's character Mark Whitacre in The Informant! so unlikable: wormy, self-loathing, and brainless. I couldn't stand the film.  The performance was irritating, though the character was fully realized. Damon's Labeouf has many of the same qualities.  But here he's loose and relaxed,  pompous and irritating; it's completely endearing and relatable. Everything the previous role was not. Away from the Clooney/ Soderbergh School of Snark as seen in the "Ocean's 11-13" films and The Informant! Damon soars and scores. He's graduated to the Coen's Finishing School For Actors and the Stetson suits him


Joel and Ethan Coen's screenplay, based on the book by Charles Portis, is a beautiful thing. Verbose and formal in all the right ways, darkly funny and compassionate, the writing falls on the ears like music. You remember the tune, but the long-forgotten lyrics seem fresh and exciting and not quite how you remember.


True Grit is also violent, and bleak sometimes.  Like the Old West probably was, I don't know, I wasn't there. The film feels authentic and the performances, heartfelt. Unlike the Coen Brother's "No Country For Old Men" where evil is seen as an unrelenting, incurable disease, there's a welcome balancing of the scales of Good and Evil.  The Coen Calvrey has come to the rescue and made a True Grit that may one day exceed the fond memories of the 1968 "classic". No need to roll over Duke.



Sunday, January 2, 2011

The Hollywood Arclight Puts a Nasty Lump in Your Holiday Stocking

The Arclight 
Smearing Lipstick On A Greedy Holiday Pig

And speaking of things turning to ash, when did the Arclight become an even more obvious money grubbing whore?  This year Arclight offers special seasonal prices. Increased prices.  Arclight's always been overly lauded and overpriced, but this holiday season the Grinchy greed for greenbacks by parent company The Decurion Corporation shines brighter than that little star over Bethlehem. The Arclight wants you to think it's a classy call girl with a pretty face, nice clothes and worldly charms; A lovely lass (albeit one you're paying for) working her way through film school who'll offer you a drink before she fucks you. But once you get inside her you discover she's nothing spectacular, she goes through the motions like all the rest. She's a back alley wallet stealin' crack whore disguised as a $2000 a night "escort".  And the thing is you could have had the one on the opposite corner for a few bucks less. Sure, maybe corner girl has a few teeth missing and the knees are worn out on her fishnet stockings, but she's grateful for the business and she knows how to treat a customer. You can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig. Arclight is a carnivorous pig that feeds on your hard earned dollars.
I went to the Arclight on Wednesday to see Blue Valentine on opening day. I hadn't been to a film at the Arclight Hollywood in over a year, but Blue Valentine was playing in limited theaters and the alternative was The Landmark across town. Slightly less, but ah, that west side traffic. I'll stay in Hollywood and save the aggravation. I have amazing powers in finding street parking, even in Hollywood, so I paralleled parked my way into two bucks of savings. But once inside The Arclight Deathstar, after I'd made my way through the holiday crush line, I came upon a little xeroxed sign (classy all the way) that explained that all movies all the time during the holiday period were $16. No matinee prices ( $14.50), no Monday through Thursday prices ($14.50), sixteen bucks all the time till January 3, 2011. Happy Holidays to you and yours.  Here's a buck fifty Christmas turd in your stocking.  Thank you and on your way out, be sure to buy a gift card.  I pay. I want to write a review and don't want to wait for Blue Valentine's general release.  I ask the pleasant cashier "What's up with that?" and he responds "I know. The corporate machine doesn't care about us".

My distaste for all things Arclight began 3 years ago with the theater's screening of The Bourne Ultimatum in the Dome in August 2007. The Arclight mission statement posits that it won't seat after 5 minutes into the screening. Bullshit. During Ultimatum, late arrivals were ushered into the theater as late as 35 minutes into the film,  a steady continual stream, and ushers made little effort to keep their voices down as tardy talky patrons waddled and shoved their way to assigned seats, many finding that their seats had been taken already. Conversation of whose seat was whose echoed through the dome that even "Ultimatum's" considerable action decibels couldn't drown out.  If Arclight stuck to their guns, these folks would have been refunded their money and asked to try a later showing. But the almighty buck wins again, and all those refunds and reissuing of tickets, isn't financially efficient. Let's go back on our word is the secret motto. It's easier and more cost effective.

Again a few months later ( still 2007)  during a weekday matinee,  I go to concessions to get a drink, but the staff of two are seated on the counter chatting and oblivious to my presence.  I dare interrupt the convo and there's a palpable irritation with my neediness. In the months between August and December there are problems with understaffed concessions and finally a repeat of the Bourne Ultimatum scenario at a Christmas evening showing of Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. I want to take Todd's straight razor and slash the throats of every load mouthed movie-goer in my radius and dump their bodies in the parking garage dumpster.  But the Arclight might see an opportunity here and serve "special" meat pies in the their mediocre cafe. "Times is hard" you know. Since Sweeney Todd I've seen only a handful of films at Hollywood Arclight and one at the Pasadena Arclight. Again lipstick on a pig; they barely bother to hide the fact that this is a former AMC (and the day I was there none of the ticket kiosks were functioning),  and now this holiday slap in the face. $1.50 may seem like a pittance, but it's underhanded avarice. Nothing on Arclight's website mentions this price bump until you get to the purchase ticket page, maybe no one will notice.

I sit in the Arclight courtyard and watch the mob of Holiday movie-goers ebb and flow. Cool people, hip, urbane, lots of pork pie hats and sunglasses on a cloudy day(the pork pie hat as of late has become a symbol of things I despise). Hey there goes Ted Shackelford, of Knotts Landing fame. He still looks good, and that dark blue coat is spiffy. There's at least one truth on the Arclight Wiki page, it is a celebrity destination (after the movie I see actor Stephen Nichols, former "Patch" of Days Of Our Lives in the lobby). ApparentlyDecurion filled in their own Wiki page. And speaking of Decurion, parent company of Arclight Cinemas, the bottom line Scrooge; just thought I would post the corporation's philosophy below:



Through our practices, we are pursuing what we call the dual bottom line: superior economic or financial return on the one hand and individual and collective development on the other. Far too often, business is a world where mediocrity and meaninglessness are the norm. Indeed, this is what the consensus culture tells us to expect. But we have come to see that business can be a place to express excellence and purpose. We have found ways to enhance business effectiveness and to realize our individual commitments.  
Our approach is to do our way into knowing. Taking the business issues we face, we lead with practices, tailored to the community in which they are introduced, and then we attempt to codify the knowledge that emerges. We begin with a hypothesis (for example, that work is meaningful, or that people are not only means but also ends in themselves, or that individuals and communities naturally develop); we then act as if the hypothesis is true; and finally we check the results of our actions. We tend to find that the results not only confirm the hypothesis, but that our actions actually cause it to be true.



Is that a load of mumbo jumbo or  what? Apparently the Arclight is tailored to the community in which it exists: A community willing to pay more for mediocrity to a company thats word vacillates based on their current financial needs and how much the market is willing to bear. Count me out. I'm going to The Vista and revisiting an era gone by where the experience of movie-going is based on the film goer in a real way, not in the plastic bells and whistles way the Arclight offers up. Oh, and Happy New Year. Thanks for reading.



Blue Valentine... Artful Porn or A Marriage Worn?

Blue Valentine - Love's Inferno Turns To Ash
review by Tony Freitas


What is the thing that ignites the flame of desire?  Is it a ukulele played in the alcove of a closed storefront? Is it a dark joke about a child going into the woods with a pedophile? And is time an inevitable killer that douses that fire?
Blue Valentine is constructed like  an episode of HGTV's "Spice Up My Kitchen" in reverse.  An ugly dysfunctional kitchen is remodeled into a contemporary thing of beauty.  In Blue Valentine a thing of beauty becomes ugly and dysfunctional. And the movie plays out much the way I prefer to watch "Spice"; I watch the 5 minute Before and the 5 minute After, but fast forward through the fifteen minutes in the middle when all the sweat and hard work takes place. Blue Valentine is the figurative last minutes in the marriage of Dean (Ryan Gossling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams). Six years has taken it's toll and husband and wife sleepwalk through the machinations of coupledom with daughter Frankie, the only relief from themselves and each other. 


Ryan Gossling's reaction to the film's NC17 rating. The decision was reversed
and Blue Valentine released with an R rating.
Then it's on to the first 5 minutes, 6 years prior, and the lovely seeds of blossoming love. Dean is sweet natured, artistic and funny (he sings and plays a ukulele for god's sake) if a little wayward. Cindy is coy and vulnerable and focused on career. Dean's attraction to Cindy is instant and consuming. His pursuit of her is the stuff that romance is made of.  There's is not just a sexual fire (because much has been made of the films graphic portrayal of sexuality), but a fire of possibility, and renewal and emotional rescue.  All those things that love can be in the beginning.  The attraction between Cindy and Dean is powerful and dangerous. Things like logic and consequence fall aside when love is this blinding. Cindy has dreams of medical school, but she just can't keep her legs together.  And we all know promiscuous young women are to be punished for being as sexual and desirous as their male counterparts. In a horror film it's an axe to the head, in Blue Valentine it's an unwanted pregnancy followed by the slow death of dashed dreams and deflated expectations. Otherwise known as marriage.

Back to the future, six years down the line.  
The things you loved become the things you hate. Potential has become lack of ambition, coy has become remote and indifferent and passion has become apathy. Settling.  
For Cindy this is unbearable. She might have been a doctor - rather than a nurse -  Dean might have been something, anything other than what he actually is: a house painter. That Dean is content to be unremarkable is unforgivable.  When the two meet, Cindy is dazzled by Dean's promise,  now all she sees is his squandered potential.  And what does Dean see? He sees the woman he met and fell in love with. But he doesn't see himself.  It's not that they have grown apart, rather, neither seems to have grown at all. But the fog of love has lifted for Cindy. 


Back and forth in time we go, the beginning and what seems to be the end.  The courtship, the rush of  new young love is tender and sweet and believable. Blue Valentine will bring you back to that first encompassing love. The one where you had your own song, and your own shorthand language. You might also have had blinders on. Then back to the ruins that is Cindy and Dean's marriage, beautiful in it's own quiet way; what is unsaid is sometimes more important that what is spoken, and a dim hopeful flicker of this husband and wife's past occasionally shines through. That they've become so dreary and faded in such a short stretch of time seems implausible. The sharp decline of Dean's hairline in 6 years is in direct proportion to the relationship. They can't be more than thirty years or so,  yet one would think that decades have passed.  


My one minor complaint with Blue Valentine is that all the marital erosion has occurred off-screen and the audience is left with the aftermath.  There's a missing link. We've gone from 60 to 0, but an important chunk in the middle - full of blood sweat and tears no doubt - is unaccounted for.  Cindy's present day detachment seems unwarranted, and Dean is such a lovable lug and attentive father, surely Cindy's the one with the problem.  It creates a sort of villain of Cindy.  In the lobby after the film I hear two variations of the same theme.  "I don't get it?  He (Dean) is like perfect... well accept for that he drinks. What's wrong with her?" And this comment is made independently by both a man and a woman.  It's unfortunate and unfair but understandable.


Film maker Derek Cianfrance has an eye for the remarkable in the mundane.  His credits as a documentary film maker have served him well here. Blue Valentine has an intimacy and integrity that made me uncomfortable at times.  There's a tension that continually casts a pall over Cindy and Dean. Whether it's who's to blame for the family's lost dog, the way daughter Frankie eats her oatmeal, or a refusal of a sexual interaction, the recriminations are rarely spoken but deeply felt by them and us. It's just like real life. No one breaks out in monologue to fill in the subtext, but the film is heavy and rich with it.


Cindy and Dean are dimensional and sympathetic due to the soul-bearing performances of the leads. Williams and Gossling are compelling actors. They disappear into Dean and Cindy's marriage completely;  any vanity these actors may have been holding on to is left behind. The appeal of  Williams and Gossling is so much more than physical.  This couple has been through the emotional wringer and it shows. I've read that the film is a combination of script and improvisation; it's a supremely successful pairing.  And that's not an easy admission as a believer in the power and sanctity of the writer's words as written. 


Near film's end I find myself wanting a mindless rom-com ending. I care about these people. They deserve a little more happiness. But it's not that kind of a film.  That's not to say that Blue Valentine is a downer. It's surprisingly funny in a real world way, and if there's no happy ending, at least there's a pearl of hope. Next time I watch "Spice Up My Kitchen" I think I'll see what happens in the middle. Magical transformations good or bad, don't exist without the in between.