Beats, Rhymes & Life:The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest (Sunday, July 31, 2011) (62)

Actor Michael Rapaport directs Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, a documentary about the history of the hip hop group and their current struggles to stay together. It's a documentary with a similar feeling to Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, that is not only about the biographical look at the band, but also an evaluation of a beef between two leaders that they're having a hard time settling.

Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, the two MCs of the group were childhood best friends, but always had a different view of their craft. For Tip it was always a serious job that demanded the most accurate attention. His passion has always laid in finding amazing music to sample on each track and knowing exactly how the layers of sounds would would perfectly together. For Phife (aka, the Funky Diabetic), he was always more interested in amazing rhymes and the more poetic aspects of the art. This always worked well for them, as they made six albums in about 12 years, including The Low End Theory, one of the best rap/hip hop albums of all time.

By the late 1990s, however, they were fighting more and more and seemed less interested in keeping the group together. They had already lost one of the original members, Jarobi, who seemed to be less into the touring thing than the others, and their DJ, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, seemed to not be interested in fighting the two titans he worked with. The band melted away, but they remained friendly. Sort of.

Phife was always upset that Tip became known as the "leader" of the band and didn't like how he would run things; Tip didn't like that Phife was never as serious about the work as he felt it necessary to be. When they got together for a reunion in 2008 at the Rock the Bells show (to help Phife pay for medical issues relating to his juvenile diabetes), they ended up fighting constantly and not speaking to one another by the end.

Rapaport talks to most of the important rappers whose styles either were influenced by Tribe or developed at the same time. Interviews include members of De La Soul, The Jungle Brothers, Monie Love, Prince Paul, Common, Questlove, Black Thought and Pharrell Williams, to say nothing of appearances by Mary J. Blige, Busta Rhymes and Mos Def. They all talk about how important Tribe's music was to them. Common has what is probably the most important comment that they all had access to the old vinyl that Tribe found their beats and samples from, but Tribe were the first guys to actually listen to those albums and use them.

Rapaport, as passionate as he clearly is about Tribe, is not a great documentarian and the film loses some power with a very sloppy style and inconsistent pace. There are some frustrating transitions and at least two albums (of the six they released) are barely discussed at all.

This is a good documentary from the point of view of telling a story of a band and getting a generally good understanding about their history. Unfortunately the issue of Phife and Tip not liking one another is not really dug into very deeply. Rapaport presents the fight they're having in it's basic terms, but doesn't really get deep into why they are fighting (unlike how Berlinger and Sinofsky handled a similar event in Some Kind of Monster). This is not a very deep movie, but it does have great music... which Rapaport can't take credit for, of course.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Another Earth (Sunday, July 31, 2011) (61)

As Another Earth opens, the young Rhoda (co-writer Brit Marling) is partying in her Connecticut town before she goes off to college at M.I.T. She drives home and hears on the radio that a new planet has entered the solar system and is now visible with the naked eye. Transfixed by this tiny blue dot in the night sky, she does not pay attention to where she's driving and crashes head-on into another car with young family inside.

When Rhoda gets out of jail (a four-year stint for manslaughter), she seems to be a changed person. Sober now in every sense, she realizes that she was reckless as she tries to re-start her life in a much more modest way. During the the four years that have passed, that blue dot in the sky has come closer and closer to Earth and scientists have studied it and have come to understand it as an Earth clone, Earth II, which seems to have the exact the same land masses, cities and people that we have on our planet. That is to say there is a likelihood that each person has a double on Earth II.

What is wonderful about Another Earth is that while this very challenging string-theory-multiple-Earths story line is going on, what we experience from scene to scene is really just a very down-to-earth tale of Rhoda coming to terms with killing two people and trying to make right with the man who survived the accident, John (William Mapother). In order to do this, she becomes his house cleaner, trying desperately to help him through his depression and trying to find the right moment to reveal her identity to him. It is clear that such an existential change as Earth II affects everyone in dramatic ways, but this is much more of a melancholy drama than it is a sci-fi movie (the way Moon, District 9 or 2001: A Space Odyssey are really just dramas set in a sci-fi genre).

I really like the moody, gray-green look to the film. That it takes place in winter, gives everything a cold and wet look, which is very important to creating an interesting atmosphere. We're constantly reminded of how mediocre life is for most and the outside world works as a nice objective correlative for the internal struggles of both Rhoda and John.

As the film moves along, there's a lovely idea that Earth II represents a mulligan, a do-over, for people on Earth (I). Clearly Rhoda and John are in need of such a do-over, though as much in an existential sense as a literal one. This is a lovely device, if a bit heavy-handed. (In fact it's perhaps that it's so unapologetically heavy-handed that it works so well. Co-writer/director Mike Cahill and Marling never flinch from the inherent silliness of the story and never stop to answer questions, like "won't this new Earth crash into our Earth?" Nobody ever blinks about this construction and it works because it's so earnest.)

Marling is really amazing in this movie, particularly for a new actress I've never seen in any major role before. OK, first, she's objectively beautiful, sorta a grown-up looking Jennifer Lawrence or blond Jessica Chastain. But she brings with that a self-effacing honesty and an elemental naturalness that's refreshing and particularly rare for actors of her age. She feels like a mumblecore star with a legitimate script and real makeup. Rhoda is ashamed of what she did and feels obliged to suffer now that she's out of jail and "free," but also is a bit of a mouthy 22-year-0ld whose first-instinct sometimes is to talk back.

Sadly the third act of this film is a complete mess, filled with sentimental, romantic garbage that feels contrary to the real dark story of angst and self-torture (although I'm sure it puts butts in seats, as they say). This sequence is much more typical of what you would expect from a Hollywood production than an independent one (though it's hard to begrudge the filmmakers for wanting to be able to sell their movie, I guess). I should say my favorite directing moment happens here, when an aleatory pants pulling gives a glimpse of unplanned reality. Sometimes the best moments in movies are unscripted.

This film really is good, even if the last 20 minutes are annoying. I like the way it's a movie about the effects of science, but not really about the science itself. I think as an atmosphere piece it is very effective and indelible. I look forward to seeing more of Brit Marling and more from Mike Cahill. Clearly they're talented and know how to do the things they do.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Devil's Double (Saturday, July 30, 2011) (60)

The Devil's Double, directed by Lee Tamahori, tells the story of Latif Yahia, an Iraqi man who became Uday Hussein's body double in the years just before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The story does not get into the interesting stuff you would want it to get into like doppelgangers, doubles and loss of identity. It is basically an action movie with lots of tits and ass and no interesting narrative.

It seems that Latif knew Uday from some level of school, though it's not clear exactly when (maybe elementary school). At any rate the moment he returns from the battlefield of the Iran-Iraq war around 1989, he is called to meet with Uday, Saddam's oldest son. Latif and Uday look alike because they're both played by Dominic Cooper (just like Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap!). Latif is reluctant to become the double because he's not a Ba'athist and worries for his safety. He ends up taking the job and getting some plastic surgery to make him look more like his boss.

As he does stand-in appearances fro Uday, he meets all sorts of business and political contacts as well as hundreds of bikini-clad hot women. It seems that Uday's main squeeze is a prostitute named Sarrab, played by the magnificent Ludivine Sagnier (OK - she might not really be a prostitute as she really only works for Uday, but he does give her a lot of money for sex and there is a suggestion that she was a prostitute at some point in her life). Over time, Latif realizes that Uday is a psychopath who enjoys murder and chaos as much as fast cars and expensive champagne. Latif has to figure out a way to get out if his situation without dying.

The film has no particular flow, and we mostly just see a list of events from the period around 1989 through early 1991. There is no sense that the story moves in any particular way. Uday is always outrageous and turns up the craziness when he throws big parties: In one party he makes his guests, male and female, strip down naked and dance (sadly Sagnier does not join them); at anther party he literally guts one of his father's lackeys with a hunting knife for speaking back to him.

The most frustrating thing is how terrible basically all of the decorative aspects of the film, from the makeup and hair to the sets and decor look totally fake, as if they were being presented on afternoon television. The film opens with Latif riding in a car to Uday's palace and the rear-projection landscape that passes is laughable. Every close-up we see is terrible because all we can concentrate on is the caked-on makeup and prosthetic or teeth on Cooper. Even the furniture in Uday's palace looks fake and cheap.

It's really terrible that there couldn't have been a slightly deeper level to this story (even if it might have touched the line of cliche). There's no reason why we couldn't have learned about the psychology of Latif as he becomes a double for a monster (for the devil). Was he ever excited by the violence and power himself? Did he really not enjoy the whores and money that came with his job? Latif is so clean and Good and Uday is so dirty and Bad that the film becomes more of a comic book tale than a real interesting narrative. It's really just long and tedious... and even Sangier can't save it.

Stars: .5 of 4

American Grindhouse (Tuesday, July 26, 2011) (59)

American Grindhouse is a fun documentary about the history of exploitation flicks and B-movies, featuring interviews with contemporary directors who were either influenced by those pictures or merely grew up in their heyday. Made by Elijah Drenner, the movie shows rather soberly this wild and limitless group of movies.

We see how early filmmakers experimented with sex and violence, until the Hollywood Production Code forced such pictures out of the mainstream and into alternate theaters. Then we see how over time, these movies became more and more popular with a public eager to see skin and/or blood, until Hollywood pictures themselves started emulating these depraved or gonzo films.

There are dozens of interviews with film histories, Hollywood directors (John Landis and Joe Dante probably the two best known of this group) and grindhouse directors, now as old men. There are fantastic clips from some of the most terrible films, including Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS and Blood Orgy of the She Devils. There's a wink with everything we see, as it is all so crappy, it's hard to take very seriously in any context other than a sociological appraisal of the culture at that moment.

One very interesting thing is to see how close some of these films are to experimental films by artists such as Stan Brakhage, Bruce Connor and Jack Smith. It's clear that these filmmakers looked to grindhouse fare for inspiration, and this really underlines how bizarre and unconventional such films were (like pregnancy movies or the psychedelic bloody orgy movies).

John Landis probably has the best line of the documentary, saying that The Passion of the Christ is the best grindhouse film of recent years. It is indeed - great because it's terrible and offensive.

Stars: 3 of 4

Brighton Rock (Monday, July 25, 2011) (58)

Rowan Joffe's Brighton Rock is an adaptation of a novel by Graham Greene (which he also adapted into a screenplay for a film by the same name in 1947). As is typical of Greene, the film deals with the underbelly of society and with Catholicism. This is a generally good reexamination of the book with a slightly simplified structure that focuses more on the central characters and relationships (also typical of Greene).

Pinkie (Sam Riley) is a young thug rising up the power ladder of the Brighton underworld in the early 1960s (the book was originally set in the 1930s). He seems to have absolutely no ties to society, no family or friends and no ability to trust anyone of his mobby cohorts. He is, however, a Catholic, at least in name, though he seems oblivious to sin or any sort of real religious practice. He's a total wild card who might strike out violent at any moment.

As the film opens, he witnesses the murder of his gang boss and mentor by a rival gang and decides to kill the assailant. When he does this, a naïve young woman, Rose (Andrea Riseborough), sees him and he decides the only way to protect himself and his gang is to get her to fall in love with him to make sure she won't tell the cops what she saw. As the two start spending time together, Rose's boss in her tea house, Ida (Hellen Miren), begins to understand that Pinkie is dangerous for Rose, though she can't convince her to dump him.

As all the mob action is going on, there's a war between the Mods and the Greasers, with a totally over-the-top Vespa-riding sequence ripped out of Quadrophenia (or The Young Girls of Rochefort). Though this really doesn't relate well to the greater story, it does allow for more gang violence and looks pretty cool.

Almost everything we see in Brighton is dirty and ugly. There's a scrappy quality to both Rose and Pinkie, her hair is always disheveled and never looks washed, his room in his boarding house and the apartment she lives in with her parents are totally falling apart and filthy. Its hard not to notice that Britain was in the middle of very tough economic times during this era. Meanwhile, Joffe does a great job, though of showing how Pinkie and his gang live in squalor, while the rival gang boss, Colleoni (Andy Serkis) lives in the posh environment of a fancy, sleek hotel.

There is a constant sense that Pinkie is dangerous and unbridled by "societal norms". He cuts people and takes power without any sense of decency or morals. He speaks to Rose about his Catholicism (though much less then he does in the book) and how it's the only thing that makes sense to him, the only thing that he finds reliable. It's never totally clear, however if he's doing this to sell himself to her (and her family) or if he really believes it.

He seems to be like the character of the Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, where he's got religion figured out to use it for his dark ends. I can imagine Pinkie explaining that he'll be forgiven for his sins when he dies, but in the meantime, he will keep killing. Sadly, he never seems self-aware or deep enough to have such an interesting thought.

The acting throughout the film is fantastic, most notably Riley and Riseborough. They both seem like kids who are in love. She has no self-confidence and understandably things that Pinkie is the best she can get; he's conniving in the short run and thinks he can out-maneuver anyone who comes his way. They're a great pair, filled with young angst and a bit cheeky that they know what they're doing is wrong.

Joffe really does bungle the ending here, drawing it out to a silly 15 minutes, when it could end in one and then giving us a sad and disconnected idea of Rose's victimhood. I wish he had ended it about four times before he did (or rearranged the kicker into a different part of the script). Really the whole second half of the film (after the Mods and Rockers riot) is a forgettable mess, though it still looks good and has some redeeming elements.

Joffe does admirable job directing this film, using really great editing to give a constant sense of violence lying just below a peaceful surface and updating the film noir model. His real problems here are in his script (well, his adapted script), where characters are underwritten and scenes are misplaced in the narrative or unnecessary altogether.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Myth of the American Sleepover (Sunday, July 24, 2011) (57)

Summer nights are really long in Southeast Michigan. At least that's what we learn from David Robert Mitchell's The Myth of the American Sleepover. We certainly never know what exactly the myth is, though it seems to have something to do with kids hooking up or making out or something. Somehow the kids are able to fit a year's worth of searching for love into several hours of darkness. Oh, and also, there are no adults and no black people in suburban Detroit.

The story follows four teenagers (well, three teenagers and a kid who's probably about 21 or so) as they drive, walk and bike around their pristine mid-'90s suburban town looking for very specific people to hook up or make friends with. The first is Maggie (Claire Sloma) who is a bit of an alterna-chick (with a few piercings on her face) going into her freshman year of high school (actually, she might be a rising sophomore... It's confusing which kids are in what year because they all do the same things). She lusts after a guy she sees at the public pool as well as another guy who cuts grass around town.

Then there's Rob (Marlon Morton), also a freshman, who sees some blond girl at the supermarket and spends the rest of the night searching for her at the two slumber parties and several other house parties there are. Then there's Claudia (the very fetching Amanda Bauer) who is new to the school, but somehow already hooked up with the high school stud guy (I guess it doesn't hurt that she's cute, blond and skinny... ah, high school). She's invited to one of the parties, not knowing her new beau and the hostess have a history.

Finally there's Scott (Brett Jacobsen), who is going to be a senior in college, but unsure of his direction (The Not-Yet-Graduate, I guess) and decides it would be a great idea to track down twin sisters he had a thing for (four years earlier) in high school who are that night at a freshman orientation "sleepover" at the University of Michigan.

Many of these stories crisscross, where one guy will go to a girls' sleepover to look for someone and then leave to go to another party where he'll bump into another one of the characters. This seems to be set in the 1990s, so they don't have fancy things like mobile phones, let alone Facebook or iPhones. There's actually an interesting sweetness to the analogue nature of the evening, where the kids actually have to meet and talk to people and go to find others if they want to... although, this is all possibly a bit precious and a bit too soon for such nostalgia.

I feel like Mitchell spends so much time setting up his suburbia uber alles that he ignores the fact that we still need to connect to these characters on levels beyond just that we might have had similar experiences in high school. I like that most of the kids are looking to just "hook up" or "kiss" others (and not have sex with them) because that's all you really want when you're 14 or 15. But those desires aren't very deep or very interesting. I feel like every character is just a bunch of nerves and a list of personality traits, but not really fully developed. When Claudia discovers the true story of her boyfriend's past, she move fast to avenge the past, but we never really see very far inside her, what her own history is with guys, what she's thinking about starting at a new school or how she found her boyfriend over the summer.

Scott is more a comic book kid than any naturalistic character. His trek from the suburbs to Ann Arbor to seek out the twin cuties feels rash and unrealistic. Its banal romanticism should have more motivation than it does, and we're left saying, "what the hell is he doing? This would never work." (There is a clever, if shallow, homage to Godard's Band of Outsiders running in an upper floor of UM's Angell Hall... Go Blue!)

This film is a first work and it does show some promise in small moments. There is some very clever, snappy dialogue ("menage a twins") and a few wonderful moments (such as the scene in slow-mo of the kids filing into their respective parties like ants as a song by Beirut plays on the sound track), but the film really only ever rises to a be a collection of short stories that are all a bit too emotionally simplistic and rely too much on our nostalgia for our own childhoods. Sentimentality has never really worked for me, and neither have the lily white suburbs.

Stars: 2 of 4

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 - 3D (a.k.a. HP7P2-3D) (Sunday, July 17, 2011) (56)

So here we are. We've reached the end of the Harry Potter movies. The seven books, having been stretched out to eight films and nearly 20 hours of screen time and are now totally over forever (until J.K. Rowling writes a new book that is turned into a new movie). It's one of biggest, longest, most profitable film franchises ever. It's also a lot of fun. (If you haven't seen any of these movies, or none since the first, ignore the rest of this post as you will be bored miserably, I'm sure.)

HP7P2-3D is basically the second half, or really the last third, of the seventh and last Harry Potter book. It begins with a running start with the Harry, Ron and Hermione trio on the hunt for more of Voldemort's horcruxes (small things into which he injected parts of his soul to make it harder for him to be killed). They go to Gringott's to get one of them, and then realize one of the last ones is back in Hogwart's, from which they have been truants for the whole school year (no comment on how in a book about seven years at a school, they only spend about six there, with the last one a year of non-lesson-based Evil Lord-fighting. But J.K.R. wants kids to stay in school, or something).

When they get to Hogwart's they find the school in dark lock-down, now run by Snape, where the professors teach the kids all sorts of terrible magic to inflict pain on others. There are Death Eaters all about and all sorts of people in black leather (hot, if you're into that sorta thing). Harry gets a little help from his friends (students and teachers) in Dumbledore's Army and what's left of the Order of the Phoenix. They fight a massive knock down, drag-out fight with the bad guys before Harry's final one-on-one with Voldemort.

I think the movie smooths over some rough patches that I never liked in the book, particularly with Snape. I always felt like the 'Snape is a good guy' thing that we're told near the end was a bit too hard to swallow in the book. Here, however, director David Yates and writer Steve Kloves do a wonderful job of showing how Snape was always massively conflicted about Harry, about his eternal love for Harry's mom, Lilly, and his deep hatred for Harry's dad, who was probably a total douchebag who deserved to be killed by dark magic. The last 20 minutes of the film are particularly wonderful. The epilogue especially always felt forced and precious, but here feels totally natural and necessary. It's a lovely ending to a great epic story.

What I particularly like about this last film is how it brings in traditional themes from human existence and classical art: the idea of one person doing something alone versus someone working with their friends and allies to get a job done. It is very reminiscent to me of the classic story from Hollywood lore that after seeing Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (a story about a marshal who can't get help and is forced to defeat a bad guy singlehandedly), Howard Hawks decided to make Rio Bravo (a story about a sheriff who gets all the help he needs from his friends to defeat the bad guys) in response.

Voldemort is Marshal Will Kane and Harry Potter is Sheriff John T. Chance. We are constantly reminded here about how Voldemort (né Tom Riddle) is one of the greatest wizards ever, for better or worse, and how Harry is really only an average wizard who excels at making friends and having them help him. (There is even an suggestion, posited by Snape, that Harry is a proud prima dona and somewhat of a talentless jerk.) When Harry goes searching for the missing horcruxes, he does find a few on his own, but also needs help from his associates to find the others. Meanwhile, Harry is told that Voldemort found all of them on his own. I guess the idea that this Lincolnian leadership style is more effective, at least less demagogic and less evil.

I'm also very interested in the revisionist look at Snape as a reluctant collaborator. In this film, he's Maréchal Pétain, a stooge put in a position of power and told to stay quiet while terrible things happen inside his domain (the school). Unlike the general understanding of Pétain, however, Snape is hiding the fact that he's really on the side of good and not evil. Was Pétain trying to work against the Nazis and destroy the Reich from the inside? It's a very hard sell.

(Of course, we shouldn't forget that Snape did witness lots of evil things happen at Hogwarts and his Death-Eater days and it's hard to forgive him for those things. I don't care that Colin Powell didn't believe in the testimony he gave at the UN Security Council in 2003, he said it and it sent us to war and thousands of people to their death. He should have resigned if he was so morally torn. I won't forgive him now.)

The 3D worked really well in this film, probably better than I can remember in any Hollywood picture where I've seen it used. Some of the scenes play very well with the depth of focus and the disorienting quality of the enhanced image, like Gringott's sequence at the beginning. In other scenes, where there is little action, the 3D is used gently to simply show us how basic things recede into space. I would hope in years to come, directors use 3D more in this way than they do with some movies where it seems that dumb tricks are inserted into every shot to make sure we know we're seeing it in 3D and make sure we feel like we're getting our money's worth (we never get our money's worth as it's still way too expensive).

As with the last film, there is no need to see this movie if you haven't seen all the other ones, and particularly if you haven't seen the first part of this one. It is, however, very solid, much more interesting than I would have expected and a lot of fun from a sheer entertainment point of view.

Stars: 3 of 4