Kings of Pastry (Saturday, September 18, 2010) (119)

Kings of Pastry is a fun documentary by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus about the preparation and competition to become a Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (or MOF) in pastry. It is basically the highest honor a pastry chef can achieve and the competition is one of the hardest imaginable. It's a lot like the Food Network Challenge show - with gigantic wedding cakes and insane sugar constructions - but much bigger and more important. The final competition takes place over the course of three days and as it occurs only every four years, the chefs prepare for months and months for it.

The main person we follow is Jacquy Pfeiffer who runs the French Pastry School in Chicago, but is originally from Alsace. He is a very warm and charismatic guy who has spent his life working with pastry and is surrounded by MOF winners in his work (two of his colleagues have the blue, white and red collar already). We see him producing some of the most magnificent sugar and chocolate treats in his test kitchen while testing out the taste, timing and execution of his desserts. He then moves his operation to his home region in France where he works in the kitchen of an old friend just a few weeks before the competition.

We also meet young pastry chefs Philipp Rigollot and Regis Lazard two of Pfeiffer's competitors (although, I guess they're not really competitors as there is no limit to how many winners there are and each man is able to win... they're really just other chefs trying to win the title).

We see all the crazy things they have to do to win and all the stress they are under to be perfect on the three days of the challenge. We see one chef's hopes of success all but crash on the ground when his sugar sculpture creation (which stood almost five feet tall) shatters and falls apart. He begins to cry as it will not be for another four years that he could try again.

There are a bunch of rather lazy and silly things that the directors do here that I don't like. One thing is that the film opens in Paris with a pretty banal shot of the Eiffel Tower as seen from the top of the Grande Roue in the Tuileries. Not only does the shot look like it was taken on a tourist's Flip camera and is so deeply trite, but the film has almost nothing to do with Paris - the competition takes place outside of Lyon (there is some dinner that Sarkozy throws for the winners that we see at the beginning, but that's it). Are we that dumb that we can't understand "France" without seeing the "Eiffel Tower"? It's pretty annoying.

This is a sweet (no pun intended), but not brilliant movie. At most, it should be seen on DVD and not in the theater.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Town (Friday, September 17, 2010) (117)

The Town is Ben Affleck's latest Boston-based crime/action film and much like his last film, Gone Baby Gone, it is adapted from a novel by him (and a few others). Having not read the (Prince of Theives by Chuck Hogan) it is hard to say whether what is wrong with the script is Affleck's fault or if some of the problems are also in the novel. What is clear is that this is a decent film with a really bad, facile script that I've seen a million times.

Part of the problem with the film is that there are just too many parts to the story. Doug (Affleck) is a bank robber who lives in Charlestown, Boston, a neighborhood known for producing some of the most prolific thieves and criminals in the area. He and his best friend Jem (Jeremy Renner) along with a few friends have a successful operation, knocking off banks in the Boston region. At one point when a robbery goes wrong they kidnap bank manager, Claire (Rebecca Hall) only to let her go a few blocks away. Once they discover she lives around the corner from them, Doug moves in to romance her and try to find out what she saw of them during the stick up. Of course the two fall in love and begin dating.

Meanwhile the gang is being pursued by FBI agent Adam Frawley who is hot on their heels, but always comes up just short. He basically has no leads on them, but they make his job easier and easier by continuing to rob places under his nose. There are a few other sorta dumb and unnecessary plot items: Blake Lively plays Jem's sister who has had an on-again-off-again thing with Doug and has a young kid who is maybe Doug's kid, but probably isn't; Pete Postlethwaite is some sort of mob/gang boss who organizes the robberies and then hands them off to Doug; Chris Cooper plays Doug's dad who is in jail also for robbing banks.

Mostly this is just a really messy story with way too much going on. At it's core, it is pretty dull fare that is not all that interesting. Doug is hiding his identity from Claire in a pretty pitiful way - and we watch knowing that at some point the truth will come out and ruin the relationship. There is a thing with the "one last score" that Doug and Jem will run before Doug retires from his criminal life and moves to Florida where he can spend his stolen money alone. Ugh. (Oh - and sorry to ruin it, but the last score is in Fenway Park - possibly the holiest place in Boston. Nothing like being careful. What a dumb mess.)

I think the acting is pretty good throughout the film, despite the silliness of the story. Rebecca Hall is very good and pretty sympathetic. We see her getting bamboozled into her relationship with Doug and know that she's just a victim of her own situation. Affleck is also good, though his character is much more straightforwardly dull.

The film moves pretty well, but is just so recycled that it becomes frustrating. Did Doug never watch movies as a kid and see that the "one last score" is never as easy as it sounds? If he doesn't have that perspective and I do, why do I have to watch him making the same mistakes I've seen hundreds of times before in other movies and books?

Stars: 2.5 of 4

I'm Still Here (Sunday, September 12, 2010) (116)

It is important to note before I start this post that I saw this film on September 12, 2010 thinking it was a legitimate film about a man's mental and professional collapse. I didn't write about it immediately and by September 17, 2010 or so, it was clear that the film was a hoax, an art piece, a stunt. Now a week or so after that, I have to analyze the film that I viewed knowing that somehow what I saw and how I reacted were part of a bigger project. One could argue about whether or not this is fair, and I think this debate is very interesting. I think the whole process of this film is interesting, not only what we see onscreen, but the reactions to it in the press.

I'm Still Here is ostensibly a work of non-fiction directed by Casey Affleck about his friend and brother-in-law Joaquin Phoenix during 2008 and 2009 as he tried to transition from an actor to a rapper. Phoenix's life is falling apart during this time as his music career is not coming together they way he would want it to and he begins to lose his grip on normalcy, not shaving for weeks (and looking more and more rugged and homeless as a result), snorting cocaine off the asses of prostitutes, performing a terrible show in Miami and vomiting after a fight with a belligerent audience member. It was during this time that he notoriously went on the David Letterman show and had a career collapse while promoting the beautiful film Two Lovers.

The film is in fact is a pseudo-documentary where everything we see is part of a set-up and not real. Phoenix and Affleck conceived of the whole thing (though there was certainly some improvisation) and many of the most uncomfortable moments (like the Letterman thing or a weird scene where Ben Stiller tries to get Phoenix to play the buddy in his film Greenberg) are either written ahead of time or conceived of with the participation of the other people. (I clearly don't know what went into every scene and there has to be some fooling of people along the way. Phoenix's publicist clearly is not in on the joke as her reaction after the Letterman debacle is just too real; I'm not sure Diddy is in on the joke as his reactions are also too painful, uncomfortable and hilarious to be fake.)

Throughout the film as we see Phoenix fall deeper and deeper into a black hole there is a constant question of what Affleck is doing letting these terrible things happen to his friend. Why is he staying mostly behind the camera and not coming out to help his friend and lend him a hand. This might be one of the biggest tip-offs that the film is not totally what it seems. But just as you start thinking Affleck is being a cruel enabler watching his friend fall down a cliff, the last 10-or-so minutes of the film are a rather beautiful quiet sequence where Phoenix goes to Panama to visit his father. With no dialogue, this scene conveys emotion, sympathy and compassion in a way most young filmmakers are not able to do. For me this segment was so convincing that it led me directly into the "believing it" camp.

But considering it's not real, credit has to go to Phoenix for one of the best performances I've seen in awhile. He is totally disgusting physically and socially and totally believable. Throughout the piece, Phoenix is constantly defending himself from people who think he's faking it (of course he was) and he deals with this very well - as if he was really a man going through a life crisis that nobody believed was real. Affleck also does a great job of placing enough doubt in the first part of the film to make us ask the question "is this real?", as a way of doubling down the prank. I had trouble accepting that the film was a hoax as I felt Affleck did too many things that a director would only do if the story was real. I couldn't get past the fact that the film was so self-aware that it was just a fake.

Now that mainstream reviewers are aware of the hoax, many of them are very angry with the situation. I think this is an interesting lesson in how the Hollywood media machine makes "hits," and how reviewers covet their "access" to early screenings of movies. That the announcement came after basically all the major reviews had been written, but before many people in the world had seen it is interesting - and basically a big Fuck You to the reviewing establishment. There certainly were a handful of reviewers who thought the story was too weird to be true, but I would chalk those up to lucky guesses as I think there is simply not enough evidence in the film to know that for a certainly that the piece is phony. I think many reviewers now are upset that they were fooled and are letting this affect what they say about the picture rather than looking at the merits of the piece itself. Do they not think a well-executed hoax is an impressive feat?

I am also interested in what this film tells us about our media culture and our obsession with so-called "reality". Everything from Twitter and Facebook to reality TV comes down to the fact that we expect everybody to be available at all times. We don't flinch as much as we used to at a man who is clearly suffering onscreen (or convincingly playing like he is). That we can watch him do some of the most disgusting things we've ever seen onscreen (like having a friend shit on his face as a prank) is just par for the course these days. We have all become voyeurs complicit in the evisceration of a man and his career.

The title, I'm Still Here, reminds me of Todd Haynes' biopic of Bob Dylan, I'm Not There, which told his story with multiple actors playing different aspects of the musician's life and mythology. Here we get one man with multiple aspects of his character (a jerk, a frightened kid, a friend, a phony musician, an artist) and we don't know what is real and what is fiction anymore. Clearly what we see is not "real", but are there not some honest moments hidden in there somewhere?

Stars: 3 of 4

A Film Unfinished (Monday, September 6, 2010) (115)

Yael Herzonski's A Film Unfinished is an interesting film, but not something all that fabulous. It is a documentary about a Nazi propaganda film that was shot in May 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto. Herzonski shows clips from that film and then adds to it journals and first-hand accounts by some of the Jews who witnessed the filming first-hand. She then also shows survivors of the Ghetto and the camps watching the footage and reacting to it. All of these documents help to show us how the people lived and how the Nazis clearly exaggerated simple situations or staged fake ones to make a political point. This is a documentary about a documentary.

One thing we see clearly here is how desperately hungry the people in the Ghetto were and how the Nazis rather brazenly brushed past this fact. Historians over the years have known full well that this Warsaw documentary was a propaganda piece and that much of what we see was not nearly the truth. What Herzonski's research shows - and especially what the interviews with survivors show - is that even basic scenes of Jews going to a restaurant for a nice lunch were also pure fabrications. The survivors joke about how nobody went out to eat at restaurants because there was just simply no food to be found in the Ghetto. Not only that, but the interiors were much shabbier than what the Nazi's present. One man jokes about how nobody would have had a vase of flowers on a table because they would have eaten the flowers!

I always appreciate a critical analysis of the documentary form - I think it's one of the most compelling topics in film theory. The idea that a movie exists as a "non-fiction document" is an absolute red herring, allowing lousy and lazy technicians get away with all sorts of formal transgressions from outright propaganda and polemic to simply cheating with framing. All film - all art - is clearly subjective and subject to any number of outside influences. This film shows how even accepting the Nazi film as a propaganda piece doesn't mean that we fully understand the truth on the ground entirely. She shows how there are deeper levels of meaning to any single image.

As interesting as this dissection is, Herzonski's film is not really all that interesting or compelling. I think most Holocaust films play too strongly on our human emotions and reactions and I think the director sometimes lets our natural visceral reactions rule over a stronger insight. Basically, I think most films about the Holocaust are intellectually cheap and emotionally easy. The digging into the truth about the original film is lightly interesting, but it doesn't go incredibly deep with further questions. This could have been an effective doc short and I think it doesn't pull off the significance of a full feature.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Last Train Home (Monday, September 6, 2010) (114)

Last Train Home is a fascinating documentary by director Lixin Fan about the massive human migration from Chinese cities to the country side at the time of the Chinese New Year. Some 130 million people whose families live in the country commute over days and weeks from hundreds of main industrial metropolises back home to see their loved ones. The film focuses on the Zhan family and how this annual trip both affects their relationships as a unit and how it is a symptom of a greater erosion of the family structure in modern-day China, among the working class at least.

As the film opens in 2006, Changhua and Suqin Zhang are a husband and wife living in the massive production capitol of Guangzhou. They are having difficulty getting a train ticket to go back to her mother and father who are looking after their teenage daughter and preteen son, Qin and Yang. After striking out several times, they finally get two tickets to take the two-day trip back to their home in a rural part of the Sichuan Province, thousands of miles away.

Once they get back it becomes clear that there is a dramatic schism between them and their children. They never had much luck in school and left at a very early age to work in factories. Their kids are both smart and doing well in school, but there is a strong pull from the outside world and life factors to take Qin, who is now 16, out of school and send her to work in a city factory. This happens, and it basically ruins her life. She immediately is overwhelmed by the bigger world. She gets depressed and falls in with a bad group of friends. She is never happy and carries her bad attitude around with her everywhere.

At the following New Year's reunion back home, the parents can barely recognize the character of their formerly respectful, joyful daughter. They consider stepping in an changing her life again, but also know that the money she makes in her factory is drastically needed for their family. They discuss how they want to send their son Yang to work too, but now they can't because they can't let what happened to Qin happen to him.

For the Zhang family, it is a fundamental question of what is the true value of the money they get from Qin's work. Is it worthwhile if she is unhappy as a result? Is it worthwhile if it ruins their family bonds? What is the most important thing for everybody and do they even have a choice in the first place?

This is a fascinating debate and wonderful to look at next to Zhang Ke Jia's brilliant pseudo-documentary 24 City from last year. In that film the director shows how brazenly the Chinese government pushed farmers from the country to the cities and how the people responded to the change with happiness and hope. It then shows how now that some of those new cities created in the 1950s and 1960s are now dying (as new cities crop up), the people are left totally rootless. Last Train Home is a story of how people are trying to keep their connections to their native places (perhaps this is a post Cultural Revolution change in culture), but how difficult it is to stay absolutely traditional in such a difficult and modern environment.

I especially appreciate how the director doesn't really judge the bigger facts of the situation - that people are forced to move to big cities to work in sometimes substandard environments for pennies an hour. Rather he shows that taking those facts as a given, the people on the ground are faced with an impossible dilemma about the need for money, the hope for education and upward mobility and the love of tradition and history.

Most interestingly this film points out how very "here-and-now" contemporary China is both policy-wise and psychologically. There is no greater government body looking out for people's interest in China; people look out for themselves. As a result, most have to make dramatic decisions about their lives from one moment to the next, sometimes hurting themselves down the line in order to save themselves today. There is no long-term strategy for most in China and on a human level that is desperately frightening.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Machete (Sunday, September 5, 2010) (113)

Machete (co-directed by Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis) is a gonzo B-movie spoof based on a trailer for a phony movie in the middle of the Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino double feature Grindhouse from a few years ago. Machete (Danny Trejo) is a renegade Mexican Federale who runs into the powerful world of Mexican drug lord Torrez (Steven Seagal).

He escapes to Texas a few years later and is hired by a guy named Booth (Jeff Fahey) to assassinate Senator McLaughlin (Robert DeNiro) (who, it turns out, Booth works for), an anti-immigration demagogue gaining strength in the polls for the upcoming election. When the shooting goes wrong, Machete must go underground into a network of Mexican immigrants (called The Network!) to save his skin and fight back against a rising tide of anti-immigrant venom coming from McLaughlin and the renegade border sheriff Stillman (Don Johnson).

Typical of a good B-movie, he is assisted along the way by scantily clad hot women with big boobs (who are all too happy to show them). Machete not only kills people but he's a prolific fucker, bedding the head of the Network, Luz (Michelle Rodriguez), as well as the head of an I.C.E. task force, Sartana (Jessica Alba), who herself is conflicted about her position on immigration. (He also has a brief three-some thing with Booth's daughter, played by Lindsay Lohan, and wife - who are both thrilled to strip nude as well).

This is a totally fun and hilarious film to say the least. The ridiculous story seems to have more and more levels of intricacy as a way of thumbing us in the eye and keeping us focused on the immediate actions of characters rather than the bigger picture. The dialogue is full of amazingly written horrible one-liners, very self-aware of how they will be received. The main problem with the script (written by Rodriguez and his cousin Alvaro), and with the film overall, is that it is too long. Clocking in around 105 minutes, it should have been cut to closer to 90-minutes as it drags significantly in the middle third.

This is not a "smart" movie, per se, despite the rather heavy-handed pro-Mexican, pro-immigrant political text. This is a ridiculous gorefest where people are chopped apart by blades and blown up by bombs as a matter of fun. It very cleverly plays with genre conventions and constantly alludes to schlocky B-films, Blaxploitation pieces and bad crime flicks (think of Machete as a more rugged and Latin Shaft). It is not for everyone - if you don't get it, you're just not going to get it - but I think it's really enjoyable.

Stars: 3 of 4

The American (Sunday, September 5, 2010) (112)

Anton Corbijn's The American is very similar stylistically and emotionally to his 2007 piece Control. On paper the two films would seem like complete opposites. The latter is a very small biopic of the moody and suicidal Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis shot in black and white. The former is an action flick from a major studio about an assassin played by one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood.

I guess it is an achievement that Corbijn is able to put so much angst and pathos in a film that would otherwise be so superficial, but it really just comes off as a funny marriage more than anything. Guns, car chases and explosions are not a good match for such long, slow, emotional scenes we get in The American. It mostly makes us keep looking at the movie stub thinking went into the wrong multiplex theater.

George Clooney is a mysterious hit man who doesn't have much of a past that we know about. As the film opens he's in some Swedish wilderness with a hot and naked girlfriend as a gang of bad guys roll up on him and try to shoot him dead. Of course he kills them (and the girlfriend for good measure) and escapes to Rome. There he meets his boss who tells him to go to a remote mountain town to wait for further instructions.

He goes to the town and quickly begins a romantic relationship with a prostitute (who is totally appropriately businesslike with all her clients, unless they look like George Clooney, of course). He then meets a woman who has him design a special gun for her - a gun she presumably needs for a murder job she has coming up. He gets to work on the gun, continues his relationship with the hot hooker and tries to dodge the pesky Swedish gang who has followed him to Italy to finish the job they started in the snowy North.

This is a very, very slow film with much more silence than dialogue. It plays almost like an art film (like Control) than it does a summer blockbuster movie. We don't really know anything at all about Clooney or what he does. Is making guns just a side project that goes with assassinations or is that his main gig? Does he have some particular pain in his past - like a dead wife or a mistake that killed a friend? We really don't know much of anything. (And, by the way, why the film is called The American is also unclear - he is American, but so what? He's also got some tattoos and likes doing push ups and staying in shape. Why isn't it called The Gymrat?)

Clooney is seen with a butterfly tattoo on his back and clearly knows about the creatures (he actually reads a book about butterflies at some point too). This seems way too blunt for my tate - that the guy is obsessed with these creatures that metamorphosize from one thing into another and then die quickly. Do you get it? That's what he does too! Oh!

The structure of the film is also problematic as we see Clooney getting the assignment to be in this small village in Italy and then nothing happens for about an hour. At the very end there's an action sequence, but it's very late in the game. This slow pace would work much better on a movie not about crime and guns, but it doesn't work well here. I was dying for something to happen through most of the film.

I was very surprised by Corbijn's use of basically totally unnecessary nudity throughout the film - mostly with the whore (though Clooney gives a show to those who would like his rippled body). A few times we see her stripped naked waiting to screw him - entirely unneeded for the course of the story (not that I minded, but it was weird and again, more "art house" than "multiplex").

I appreciate what Corbijn was trying to do here, but I think it's the wrong fit for this story. I think a more traditional fast-paced flow would have suited this film much better. George Clooney is not Ian Curtis (for a lot of reasons) and there's no reason to make him so similar and morose.

Stars: 2 of 4