"Remember Me": Forget About It

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 13 March 2010 15:08

Written by Maitland McDonagh / Miss FlickChick

Directed by Allen Coulter
Written by Paul Fetters
Starring  Robert Pattinson, Pierce Brosnan, Emilie de Ravin, Chris Cooper, Lena Olin, Tate Ellington, Martha Plimpton

Veteran TV director Allen Coulter and first time screen writer Paul Fetters head down the road of good intentions, but it's viewers who wind up in a hell of overwrought melodrama with a monumental twist.

New York, 1991: On a deserted subway platform, 11-year-old Ally Craig (Caitlyn Paige Rund) watches in terror as her mother (Martha Plimpton) is first harassed and then murdered by a gang of thugs.

New York, 2001: Rumpled, moody NYU student Tyler Hawkins (Twilight's Robert Pattinson) joins his family — father Charles (Pierce Brosnan), a sleek, hot-shot lawyer; bohemian mom Diane (Lena Olin) and her easy-going current husband (Jbara); and precocious baby sister Caroline (Ruby Jerins) — for their annual visit to the grave of his older brother. Despite Diane's efforts to keep the peace, Charles manages to belittle Caroline, already a talented artist at age 11, and piss off the already disgruntled Tyler.

That night, Tyler and his aggressively annoying roommate, Aidan (Tate Ellington), go out drinking and wind up in jail after Tyler mouths off to hard ass Sergeant Neil Craig (Chris Cooper), who goes out of his way to humiliate Tyler. Soon after, Aidan discovers that Craig's daughter, Ally (Emilie de Ravin), just happens to be a fellow NYU student and comes up with the perfect revenge: Tyler should seduce Ally and then cruelly break her heart. But the beautiful, haunted souls instead fall in love.

A bumper crop of secondary angst is woven into the story of Tyler and Ally's tempestuous relationship: Eccentric Caroline is bullied by middle-school mean girls. Ally fights with her (understandably) overprotective father. Tyler has a series of increasingly fractious run-ins with his dad, whom he blames for his brother's suicide. Diane tries to heal the emotional wounds that have sundered her loved ones.

And so it goes for most of the movie's 113-minute running time: Soul-searching, emotional anguish and dramatic confrontations punctuated by little stabs at happiness. And then along comes the great big twist — read no further if you don't want to know what it is.

It's not just 2001: It's September 11, 2001, and someone just happens to be at the World Trade Center bright and early on that fateful Tuesday morning. The sight of a plane plowing into the towers is clearly meant to drive home the message that every moment is precious and every day should be lived as though it were the last. But it has exactly the opposite effect, throwing into high relief the fundamental triviality of family feuds, lovers' spats and schoolyard squabbles, and making everyone look spoiled and self-indulgent.

For more by Maitland McDonagh: MissFlickChick.com

Kevin's Digital Week 16: Wild Things Galore

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 11 March 2010 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-Ray of the Week

Where the Wild Things Are
(Warners)
Spike Jonze long wanted to bring Maurice Sendak’s children’s book Where the Wild Things Are to life, and he does—to an extent. Some sequences in Jonze’s film are as magically childlike in their simplicity as anything in Sendak’s illustrated classic. Then there’s the rest of the movie, which overstays its welcome—what Sendak sketched brilliantly as a short-lived but lasting fantasy is bludgeoned to death by Jonze early on, and soon falls apart from the repeated (and cloying) showdowns between the boy Max and the monsters he befriends. Those creatures are further undermined by the cutesy voices of various Hollywood celebrities, which are too gimmicky by half—and help arrest the story’s dramatic momentum, along with our sympathy for poor Max, played by the charming Max Records.

Visually, Where the Wild Things Are is often dazzling: on Blu-ray, the stunning contrast between the bright and the pitch-black sequences are demonstration quality. Too bad the score is an ungainly hybrid of kids’ tunes and alternative rock—Oliver Knussen’s score from his one-act opera would have worked, but I doubt that Jonze knows it exists. The extras comprise interviews with Sendak, Jonze, cast and crew.

DVD of the Week

Bitch Slap
(Fox)
With a title like that, you know what you’re getting: and you’d be mostly right. Rick Jacobson’s paean to trashy movies of yore—especially those starring B-movie queen Claudia Jennings like The Great Texas Dynamite Chase—isn’t very clever (although Jacobson thinks it is), but it does have what those movies had in spades: gorgeous women pounding the hell out of men…and each other.

Jacobson certainly has an eye for the ladies: Julia Voth, Erin Cummings and especially America Olivo are a pleasure to watch as they battle the bad guys (with the occasional cat fight thrown in for good measure) while wearing very little for no discernible reason. Bitch Slap could have been an irresistibly trashy entertainment if Jacobson wasn’t such a dull director. His fancy attempts to make this overlong movie “substantial”—slow-motion, jumbled chronology, ridiculous plot twists—fail miserably. Happily, though, with the three gals having a great time, Bitch Slap is a bloody hoot. The DVD’s lone extra is a thorough, 90-minute making-of documentary that includes on-set interviews with the filmmakers and the game cast.

"A View from the Bridge": It's Miller Time

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 09 March 2010 20:44

Written by Lucy Komisar

Written by Arthur Miller
Directed by Gregory Mosher
Starring Liev Schreiber, Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Hecht

Arthur Miller's story of the betrayal that tears apart a longshore family in Brooklyn was a metaphor for the treachery of the people who "named names" in the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s. Miller was particularly angry at director Elia Kazan, with whom he had worked. In 1956, Miller was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to identify writers he had met at one of two communist writers' meetings he had attended years before. That same year, A View From the Bridge opened on Broadway.

In this powerful revival directed by Gregory Mosher, we witness the inexorable downfall of Eddie Carbone (Liev Schreiber), a longshoreman, who forgets the sense of honor and loyalty that is the glue that holds together the hard-working Italian community in Red Hook, on the Brooklyn waterfront, where he and his wife Beatrice (Jessica Hecht) live. His self-interest is not the careerism of the film and theater people who betrayed colleagues to HUAC, but jealousy ignited by the illicit passion he feels for his niece Catherine (Scarlett Johansson).

Catherine has lived with them since the death of her mother, Beatrice's sister, but the child is now 17 and nubile. Eddie tries to keep her at home so that she can't meet young men. He says he's looking out for her. But there's something else going on. Beatrice warns Catherine that it's not proper anymore to sit on the bathtub in her slip while Eddie is shaving.

The impending crisis is ignited by the arrival of Beatrice's two cousins, illegal immigrants from Sicily, who have come to find work. Such immigrants, known as "submarines," were supported by the Italian community, which found jobs for them on the docks. Marco (Corey Stoll) is stolid and serious; he has come to earn money to support his family, particularly to buy medicine for his children.

His brother Rodolpho (Morgan Spector) is a charmer, blonde, a singer, and single. Catherine immediately falls for him. Eddie's hostility to Rodolpho reveals the depth of his obsession with his niece which keeps him from sleeping with his own wife. The lawyer, Alfieri (Michael Cristofer), advises Eddie, "Somebody had to come for her."

Schreiber, one of the best actors appearing on the stage today, exhibits a cool surface that slowly disintegrates to reveal the conflagration building below. When he picks on Rodolpho for singing and cooking and making dresses, he explains, "The guy aint right." It's Miller's way of saying "homosexual" for "communist," a ready target.

Jessica Hecht and Michael Cristofer, with strong Brooklyn accents that enforce their sense of place, of belonging to Red Hook and its culture, are brilliant in their roles. Cristofer speaks in a slow sometimes staccato voice as befits the local wise man, or perhaps oracle.

Johansson does well as the naïve Catherine, girlish and unaware of the effect she has. Spector and Solli are excellent as Rodolpho and Marco, the first light-hearted at the life possibilities before him, the other dark and troubled, weighed down by his responsibilities in Sicily.

Designer John Lee Beatty recreates the dreary world of the Carbones in their non-descript living room with  light brown walls, a round wood table and chairs, and a fake fireplace.

The bridge in the title is the Brooklyn Bridge, visible to the north, connecting Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights. In a work that Miller meant to be allegorical, it can be a bridge to and from the rest of the world. Some productions have put the waterfront and distant bridge in the set. Beatty doesn't. He creates a line of rich brown brick tenements, which represents the family's self-enclosed limited world and community.

"I want my respect," Eddie declares, but as people from the neighborhood gather around him in the final scene, he appears to have forgotten what their code for earning respect entails.

A View From the Bridge
Cort Theatre
138 West 48th Street
New York, NY
212-239-6200
Opened January 24, 2010, Closes April 4, 2010.

For more by Lucy Komisar:TheKomisarScoop.com

Photo credit: Joan Marcus