All (Mediocre) Things

I’m going to come clean with my bias towards Ryan Gosling. I’ve been down with this kid since he was Young Hercules back in the day. I saw The Notebook twice in theaters and cried both times. Gosling put both Half Nelson and Lars and the Real Girl on his back. He is definitely a franchise player. His choices in roles are always interesting.

Anyway what I’m trying to say is I love me some Ryan Gosling. I took my girlfriend to see All Good Things last Thursday and we were both excited.

Too bad the movie was garbage. It really seemed unnecessary. I’ll give you the synopsis.

This is based on true events.

Gosling is Robert Durst, a rich prince in a New York City real estate empire. He meets and falls for Kathie, played by Kirsten Dunst. Behind the veil of luxury in their marriage, there are drugs and violent episodes. Kathie goes missing in the 1980’s and is never found.

See, this is a Dateline episode. You already know the husband killed his wife. Why did the producer feel the need to dramatize this into a full 90 minute feature? It certainly wasn’t for the sake of thought-provoking character development.

One minute Robert is charming in a dripping wet tuxedo or at his health foods store in Vermont, the next he is killing dogs and dressing in drag. The jumps seemed too far-fetched to me. Anyway why should we care? Dunst is effective enough as Kathie, but the script doesn’t give her much to do but look anxious. Gosling is wasted on this story.

He is also made to look ridiculous in horrible make-up in order for him to play Robert in old age. This is a lame technique Hollywood uses that always fails. I say cast older actors to play older characters. I really didn’t need to see Gosling in a whack wig piece and dress ensemble either.

In the end, All Good Things gets a D+. The story was really weak and would have worked better as a documentary with real people commentating, experts on the case, documents, photography and audio. Gosling was conned into doing this. Check him out in Blue Valentine he was better there.

Ryan get back in the lab and show these people what’s up.

I Love You Phillip Morris

Jim Carrey is still a star after all these years. His facial expressions and physical comedy are on point in every frame of I Love You Phillip Morris, the life story of Steven Russell, the spectacularly gay conman that according to the film is currently serving a life sentence in a Texas prison.

Steven’s back story takes up about the first thirty minutes of the film. First we find out that he was a hospital parking lot and paper bag full of cash adoption baby. From there, we see him as the perfect husband and police officer in the 1970’s (he takes shots of milk with cookie chasers.) There is a hilarious quick jump from him sticking his tongue down his wife’s throat at a house party to him having dirty gay sex with a Christian Bale doppelganger.

A car accident makes him reevaluate the course of his life as he tells the paramedics loading him into the ambulance, “I’m going to be a fag!” Steven’s next move is Miami, twin Chihuahuas and a Latino boyfriend named Jimmy. In order to live “high on the gay hog,” Steven has to commit scams and frauds. He is sent to prison after a series of comical escape attempts.

This is the end of the back story and the beginning of the love story at the center of the film. In prison Steven meets the love of his life, Phillip Morris, played by a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Ewan McGregor. Watching Jim Carrey smoothly spit game at coy and bashful Ewan McGregor is hilarious (I keep using that word.)

The Steven character is epic. There is a sequence in the film where he is in his yellow prison outfit giving a tour of the prison to his new cell-mate. He explains how prison runs on a d--- sucking economy. Not surprisingly, Steven thrives in this economy. He arranges intricate note-passing networks, gourmet meals, and hits on other prisoners at whim.

He thrives in everything he does, as he scams his way into the Chief Financial Officer position at a company and institutes a massive HMO scam.

The filmmaker is in on every one of Steven’s scams and surprises the viewer at every turn. I know I got fooled by the story several times. This is definitely a good thing.

Again, Jim Carrey did his thing. His sex scenes are gross in a slapstick/funny/sweet way. His body language in his dim-lit cell tenderly kissing Phillip is very indicative of someone in love. Ewan McGregor is also convincing as the femme housewife. You can feel the giddiness in both characters in the scene where Phillip is released from prison.

The film tries to convince the viewer that it is based on a true story. I don’t really want to look it up because I don’t want to be fooled again. True or not, it is thoughtful and funny. I give it an A-.

Last Train Home

One of the first sequences in Last Train Home is a wide shot of a massive crowd. I can’t compare what all of those people looked like, huddled together. The thousands in this shot aren’t having a good time. They are waiting in line, a fraction of the 130 million Chinese factory workers trying to find a way home to the countryside for the holidays.

The documentary follows two out of millions, the married couple Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin. The cameras have intimate access to the couple and follow them throughout the course of several years. We see them at their jobs at the sewing machines (where they work side by side,) in their bedroom, inside the train cars they take and at family reunions back home.

This film is amazing. I don’t remember ever before watching footage of the daily lives of Chinese factory workers. China is becoming a super power rivaling the United States, and they are doing so on the backs of these peasant workers.

The amazing thing is how similar the human experience is regardless of country. We all have marriage in common, children, work and old age. In China there is protein deficiency and babies crawling around factory floors, but life is sh---y for the working class everywhere.

The natural sound in the film sounds beautiful through the Living Room speakers, from rain falling from a roof and chirping insects at night in the countryside to the sounds of the factory and the crowds on the train. The sound is rich and adds another layer to the story.

Another sound captured is the constant drone of the mother lecturing her daughter. Parents are the same everywhere.

The climax includes my personal pick for fight of the year for 2011. The two putting dukes up are 110 lb Zhang Changhua and his 110 lb daughter Zhang Qin. I really relate to this Qin girl she was just standing up for herself. She knows that you can’t trust shifty a—people talking that “do as I say, not as I do” mess.

This girl is so gangster, that after she is done throwing down with her dad she breaks the fourth wall of cinema, looks at the camera and screams, “You wanted to film the real me? This is the real me!”

There are many other priceless sequences. One is a funny rave scene involving electronic music, go-go dancers, and a club full of sweaty kids. Qin’s grandma gets a lot of camera time too and effectively steals the show. She is tiny and wrinkled and raises the children and works the farm and prescribes bitter melons for pimples and mosquitoes don’t bite her because according to her, “she is a hard-working woman.” She is my pick for grandma of the year.

This movie is getting a lot of early nods from me. It’s that good. I give it an A+.

A Crazy White Woman

Africa is a ridiculous continent. One of the coolest books I ever read, the Poisonwood Bible, is set in the Belgium Congo. The white family in the book experienced famine, killer ants, black mambas, and deadly diseases. They also witnessed regime change, militias, war refugees, and foreigners exploiting the land with diamond and rubber mines. This stuff seems to happen in Africa all the time. I am all about traveling and adventure, but Africa scares the f--- out of me.

In White Material, Africa is at its most ridiculous. French forces are leaving an un-named African country. Rebel militias are roaming the countryside. The radio calls for anarchy. Child soldiers take up machetes, rifles, and berets. White people are burned alive in their mansions.

At the center of the story is a white woman, actress Isabelle Hubbert, who refuses to leave her coffee plantation. This woman, Maria, is about the craziest woman I have seen on screen in a long time. Everybody tells her to run to the border. The French army, her African workers, the mayor, her husband, nobody can get through to her. She wants to harvest her coffee.

The racial tension is thick on the plantation. Maria has to tolerate her husband (Highlander's Christoper Lambert) Andre's black mistress and mulatto son. While she runs the plantation, Andre negotiates for protection behind her back.

Alone, Maria attempts to survive while the world around her crumbles. Her workers desert her and she is terrorized by thugs that she recognizes by name when she travels to the village. She puts herself in greater danger by granting refuge to a rebel leader on her land. A severed goat’s head appears in a bag of coffee.

The cinematography in this film is amazing. It was shot on location in the western African country of Cameroon. There are shots of misty green mountains and dense forests. One of the most powerful sequences includes a full-frontal shot of a man’s penis. I don’t want to make it a habit of seeing those things in my movies, but in this case, it fits well with the horror of the scene.

The acting is great. Writer/Director Claire Denis focuses on Huppert for intense close-ups revealing Maria’s fire and determination. Thin, Huppert is shot lifting bags, driving tractors, and holding on for her life on the back of a moving truck. Her physicality is made heroic by her circumstances and her size, not to mention her gender.

Social themes are explored throughout the film but never fully explained. Everything is revealed slowly, if at all. There is a sparse quality to the writing that is very effective. A complicated history seems to weigh on all the members of Maria’s family but the war outside the plantation prevents the film from getting too caught up with it.

The ending is violent and abrupt, and hints at the continuation of bloodshed.

White Material gets a B+. I especially enjoyed the location shots. The story was powerful and Huppert was engaging as Maria. The film was challenging to take in, and dark in its conclusion.

These dark images from Africa need to be seen. This is how people live. Very scary.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Andres.

I like watching films. I don't watch them for escape, I just like being moved by them. I also like to learn new things through movies. I like relating with characters so much that it feels like I am watching myself or someone I love on-screen. I cry when those characters die. I like documentaries, foreign, and independent films.

So, yeah, I like movies. I’ll be watching a lot of them at Florida Atlantic University’s new Living Room Theaters. I’ll be drinking microbrews, munching on Paninis and catching art house films.

The Living Room Theaters are a private/public partnership between FAU and Living Room Theaters Inc. The complex has four screens, each with 50 seats. It also has a European-style café serving food, wine and beer. I like everything about the Living Room. It seems small and cool enough to succeed.

The movies are shown through digitizing technology that eliminates the need for traditional celluloid film, which is costly to produce and to distribute. Through this digital technology, the theater will be able to run the newest foreign and independent films.

The Living Room is open seven days a week, with show times beginning at 4pm. FAU’s film studies program will have access to the screens each day before 4pm. Prices are $9.50 for regular adults and $6.50 for students. I’ll be taking advantage of the $5 special on Mondays and Tuesdays.

I caught my first film Thursday night. The seats were comfortable, the screen was large and the sound was great. I’ll be reviewing the movie White Material in my next post.

*Note – I am not a filmmaker or film student. I am a Journalism major. In reviewing movies, I hope to be the missing link between Roger Ebert from the Chicago Sun Times and Omar the Gangsta Entertainment Reporter from Slam Online.