Nine

Posted on April 27, 2010 at 8:08 am

High profile director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) has everything he needs to make his ninth movie and more. Much more. It is Italy in the early 1960’s and Guido is a glamorous celebrity, a name brand, a commodity. His production team is ready, including his close friend and adviser, costume designer Lilli (Judi Dench), his star and muse Claudia (Nicole Kidman), and his producers. He also has a devoted wife Luisa (Oscar winner Marianne Cotillard), a mistress Carla (Penelope Cruz), a mother (Sophia Loren), a pretty reporter from Vogue named Stephanie who wants more from him than an interview (Kate Hudson), and memories of the first woman to teach him about desire Saraghina (Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas).

What he does not have is a script, or even an idea of where to begin.

Which gives him something in common with director Rob Marshall (“Chicago”), because beyond the idea of a director who has too much on his mind and not enough ideas this movie does not have anything to say. Marshall has a great appreciation for female beauty and a lot of style. That’s a great reason to watch a music video but it is not really a reason to make or watch a movie.

Marshall trots out his bevy of international beauties, and each gets a musical number, some of them stunning. Fergie’s deep, rich-throated “Be Italian” and an almost-endless chorus line of tambourine-beating back-up singers, is sheer electricity. But the only one that comes close to reaching that level is Hudson, channeling her mother, Goldie Hawn, in a spangled silver mini-dress and go-go boots.

Cruz finds some sizzle in the notorious “Call from the Vatican” number, though no one can match the late Anita Morris, whose performance was considered too incendiary (and her costume too revealing) for the Tony Awards broadcast in 1982. But the musical numbers are not up to the level of “Chicago” and the lyrics in particular cannot stand up to the loving attention given to them by these actresses. At the end, it’s as empty as its subject.

Related Tags:

 

Based on a play Musical Remake
ir.gif

It’s Complicated

Posted on April 27, 2010 at 8:00 am

Forget the accents. Forget the anguish, the steely resolve, the iambic pentameter. All hail Meryl Streep for what she is best at — comedy. She spins screenplay straw into movie gold, turning yet another fungible Nancy Meyers saga about a beautiful and accomplished middle-aged woman triumphing over a womanizing man into a miracle of warmth, heart, and wisdom just from the power of sheer acting genius and being the truly and deeply glorious person that she is.

Meyers does have a talent for, in the words of one of her movie titles “What Women Want.” She knows that there is an eager audience for a story about a middle-aged woman who is so universally adored that even her ex-husband, the hound who left her for a gorgeous young woman (cue the slo-mo stroll in the midriff-revealing sarong) can’t get enough of her and admits that he was crazy to let her go. What could be more satisfying than that?

One of the wisest and most entertaining books ever written about movies is Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, where he discusses the power of movie romances that bring estranged couples back together. As beguiling as it is to think of the freshness of first falling in love and the pleasures of learning everything about one another, there is something even more deeply satisfying about the idea of falling in love with someone with whom there are no illusions, and especially having that someone fall in love with you. Anyone can fall in love with what we think we know or with someone we’ve seen at his or her best. But when it’s someone we’ve seen at his or her worst; that’s got to be love for sure.

Or, it can be something satisfying in a different way — payback.

Streep plays Jane (as in plain?), divorced for ten years from Jake (Alec Baldwin, perfecting the art of the appealing but infuriating male) finds herself in bed with him following a tipsy dinner when they are in New York together for their son’s graduation. She can’t resist the chance to feel pursued, validated, desired. The spark they once had is still there. And she would be inhuman if she did not feel a little triumphant about his preferring her to his beautiful young wife.

But there are (grown-up) children to consider. Being back together frees Jane to admit that she was not blameless in their break-up. It allows her to allow Jake to see her (literally) as she is, not as he remembers. And it opens her heart to some other possibilities, including the shy architect working on the addition to her house — including the dream kitchen to replace a kitchen already pretty darn dreamy.

Meyers, astutely profiled by Daphne Merkin in the New York Times Magazine, seems to be the only person in Hollywood today interested in and capable of connecting deeply to an audience of women who want more from a movie than frothy rom-coms or sex and shopping. Rare in the world of chick flicks, there are no trying-on-clothes montages or makeovers. Her movies feature capable women with good friends and loving families. The most preposterous fantasy in her films may not be the gorgeously decorated settings or even the swains in pursuit but the unequivocally devoted friends and especially children and even the prospective son-in-law — take another look at the way Jude Law’s little girls fall into instant love with Cameron Diaz in “The Holiday.” Like Jane in this film, who considers and then rejects the idea of a little cosmetic surgery, Meyers’ women start out fine with who they are and then get even more so.

Streep is what Meyers’ women want to be — supremely warm and nurturing (watch the way she keeps feeding everyone exquisite but apparently completely non-fattening meals), self-aware, and able with a little adorable struggle, to impose some boundaries in a very familiar way. She fills in what Meyers’s slightly calculating formula leaves out and makes this movie as guilty a pleasure as those chocolate croissants she whips up that make her date fall for her as we already have.

Related Tags:

 

Comedy Date movie Romance

Why We Love Roger — Ebertfest 2010

Posted on April 26, 2010 at 2:28 pm

I am back home but still thinking about my spectacular trip to Champaign-Urbana for Ebertfest. You can get a glimpse of it here, with Chaz Ebert (Roger’s wife) introducing me as I introduce the film, “I Capture the Castle.”

I saw six of the films selected by Roger to share with his Ebertfest community. They were old (“Man With a Movie Camera” is a silent film from 1928) and new (“Trucker” was released last year), American and international, feature and documentary, fantasy and gritty. Every one of them was in its own way soul-enlarging and I enjoyed those I was seeing for the second time as much as those that were new to me. IMG_0317.jpg
I loved the panel discussions, too, both those I participated in and those I watched. But unquestionably the best part of my experience was meeting Roger’s far-flung correspondents, bloggers from around the world — Turkey, the Philippines, Egypt, China and then Canada, South Korea, England, and Mexico — who share a appreciation for movies and for good writing about movies. They are just passionate but thoughtful fans with points of view who write well and that was enough for him to reach out to them to contribute to his website. They were all there at Ebertfest, meeting each other for the first time after becoming great friends online. They very kindly treated me like a kindred spirit and I hope to stay in touch with them.
The festival is very much the reflection of its founder, hometown hero Roger Ebert. He is so good and so prominent we sometimes forget what a superb writer he is. I was very moved by his generosity of spirit in encouraging these young critics. It is his passionate engagement not just with the movies he reviews but with the world around him that is his greatest contribution. Thanks very much to Roger, Chaz, Nate Kohn, and the astoundingly organized Mary Susan Britt. See you next year!
Melissa Merli’s outstanding Ebertfest coverage for the News-Gazette.
The webcast of the full discussion I moderated of “I Capture the Castle” is online.

Related Tags:

 

Festivals
ir.gif

The Year of Goodbyes

Posted on April 26, 2010 at 1:59 pm

The Year of Goodbyes: A true story of friendship, family and farewells is a beautiful book by Debbie Levy inspired by the “poesiealbum” kept by her mother as a little girl in pre-WWII Germany before her family escaped to the US. Levy’s book includes the translated inscriptions from the girls, her own beautiful poems interpreting the circumstances around them, and a touching, heart-breaking, and inspiring description of her journeys, physical and emotional, to discover the stories of the girls and their families. It led to a joyous reunion as her mother saw some of her old friends for the first time in 60 years.

Levy was nice enough to answer my questions about the book and her mother’s story.

What is a poesiealbum? How did it differ from American autograph books of the time or from Facebook and other social networks today?

First, let’s get this out of the way: It’s poesie, or poetry + album, or album = poetry album. Pronounced: po-eh-ZEE album.

A poesiealbum is a little book in which you have friends and relatives write verses of poetry, proverbs, other inscriptions, and drawings. My mother’s poesiealbum, featured in my book, dates from 1938. Poesiealbums were popular among European children–mostly girls–in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. I think they differ from the typical American autograph book of the time primarily in the seriousness of the endeavor. You didn’t just dash off a ditty in your friend’s poesiealbum; you might quote a few lines from Goethe. If not Goethe, you might quote or compose a similarly high-minded sentiment. You probably took your friend’s poesiealbum home overnight, so you had time to write in your best handwriting, and also, perhaps, to add a drawing or stickers known as called oblaten. (Bakers among your readers may also know an oblaten is also a type of thin cookie.)

Typical entries from my mother’s poesiealbum from 1938, translated from the German, include: “Noble is man/Helpful and good” and “Oh, take advantage of the happy hours of youth/They will not return/Once slipped away, once disappeared/Youth will never return.” By the next year, she was living in New York, where Americans wrote things like: “I love/I love/I love you so well/If I had a peanut/I’d give you the shell” and “Roses are red/coal is black/do me a favor/and sit on a tack.”

I’m not saying the European kids were smarter or more thoughtful. They just were writing in the context of the poesiealbum tradition; they were also writing in the context of their world falling apart around them–by 1938, because of the discriminatory and separatist laws and culture of the Nazi regime, my mother only had Jewish classmates and friends, and anti-Semitism was destroying the relatively comfortable, nice lives they had known.

It’s funny you should ask about how the poesiealbum tradition compares to Facebook and other social media–because I’ve been preparing presentation and interactive materials for tweens and teens who read The Year of Goodbyes that examine just that question. In some ways, I think the poesiealbum is the great-grandmother of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and all the rest–okay, if not a relation as direct as a great-grandmother, then maybe a great-great-aunt. In both social media and poesiealbums, the writings are brief. They’re personal. Both can have accompanying illustrations, or links. Of course, there are significant differences (apart from the technology): Social media are casual; poesiealbums, more formal. I find that social media are used mostly to share news; poesiealbum entries are likely to share feelings, or at least quote someone else’s sentiments. And even though the Library of Congress just announced it’s archiving Twitter forevermore–social media strike me as transitory. Think how quickly a post on Facebook is pushed to the bottom of, and then off, the screen. In contrast, poesiealbums are permanent, so long as the paper doesn’t disintegrate.

One can fairly ask–what’s the point of comparing poesiealbums and social media? The point is that I’d love my readers to think about whether there’s room in their lives to express themselves in ways that don’t get pushed off a page. Are they preserving their thoughts and feelings in a more permanent way? I’m not advocating the return of the poesiealbum! I wrote my book to tell a story about what it was like to live in a time and place of intolerance and racial hatred, not to promote a message. And yet–the way the entries in my mother’s poesiealbum connect to the goings-on in the world around her does make me want to have this conversation with tween and teen readers about how they are documenting their own lives.

When did you first see your mother’s poesiealbum and what did she tell you about it?

When I was growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s, there wasn’t much talk in our home about my mother’s childhood in Nazi Germany. If I saw the poesiealbum back then (and I don’t think I did), I certainly didn’t examine it. That happened more recently. In 1998 The Washington Post ran an article I wrote about the night my mother and her family fled Germany on a midnight train out of Hamburg headed for Paris. A couple of then-70-somethings, one in New York, one in Maryland, read the article. They happened to be my mother’s classmates from Hamburg, Germany from the 1930s. Many phone calls later, in 2000 my mother and six of her girlfriends from the Jewish School for Girls in Hamburg, Germany reunited for the first time in Silver Spring, Maryland, more than 60 years after they had all been dispersed by the rise of Nazi Germany.

My mother brought out her poesiealbum to share with her girlfriends. I was there, too, and I found myself really moved by this battered little brown book full of handwriting and drawings by 11- and 12-year-olds–many of whom did not survive the Holocaust. After I got the poesiealbum translated, I knew I wanted to use it as a jumping off point for a book about my other’s story.

What other formats did you consider for telling the story and why did you decide on blank verse?

I started writing the book as a straight prose narrative. That lasted for maybe three pages. The story seemed to have a will of its own, and practically insisted on channeling itself into the free (and blank) verse format. As you know, nearly every chapter in The Year of Goodbyes begins with one of the handwritten entries from the poesiealbum. Writing the narrative in free verse seemed to flow naturally from, and echo, the poesiealbum entries. Also, one of the things I love about poetry is how much expression can be packed into an economical package. Each word matters so much. I wanted to write my mother’s story in that way–where each word mattered, the way each friend and relative mattered to her.

The story is told in the first person–the reader is in the head of my mother as narrator. Although people, including pre-teen people like mother at the time of the story, don’t walk around talking and thinking in poetry, I do think that free verse is good at capturing something essential about the way we think and react, especially under stressful conditions. It’s urgent and attentive. It creates rhythms, and then changes the rhythms, like a heartbeat that quickens, and then calms, in the face of danger.

What can educators do to make Holocaust stories meaningful to today’s students?

I think it’s important for people of all ages, not just students, to grasp that so many of the Jews of Europe had full, rich, European lives before they were caught in the maw of Nazism. Under Nazi ideology, they were turned into aliens, but in fact their lives were woven into the fabric of their home countries. It is easy to say, “Well, why didn’t they leave before it was too late?” “Why did they stay and let this happen to them?” As if something like the Holocaust could be predicted or even imagined, as if the lives these families had in Germany and the countries overrun by Germany were compartmentalized, trivial, easy to leave behind. They were not, and I think if students don’t grasp that, then they don’t see the victims of the Holocaust as anything but victims–and they won’t see the next group that’s singled out for persecution (and, unfortunately, it seems there’s always a next group) as complete human beings, with lives and concerns that aren’t very different from their own.

You ask the question, “Does the world need another Holocaust book?” Why do people ask that? What is your answer?

I voice that question only because I think there often is this unspoken undercurrent of “oh, no, not another one,” when a book is published about this era. Sometimes it’s expressed out loud, too: Not long ago, I read a column in Gawker, the online magazine, that began, “Remember when you were in like sixth grade and your teacher asked you to read Number the Stars and you quietly thought to yourself, ‘jeez Louise, how many of these Holocaust books are there?'”

There are, after all, a lot of so-called Holocaust books. (Although keep in mind, I’m writing about life in the years before the Holocaust.) And, Nell, you’re the movie expert–you remember the discussion and writing in 2008, when four or five big films about the Holocaust were coming out of Hollywood all at once. A New York Times essayist wrote: “The number of Holocaust-related memoirs, novels, documentaries and feature films in the past decade or so seems to defy quantification, and their proliferation raises some uncomfortable questions. Why are there so many? Why now? And more queasily, could there be too many?” An essay on the blog Jewcy that took on this question was entitled: “There is No Business Like Shoah Business.”

I’ll leave the movies to you, but when it comes to books– I think readers, especially young readers, always need a fresh way to think about identity, out-group hatred, and group-think.

I think we all benefit from reading and thinking about the consequences, including the small, personal consequences, of intolerance and racial hatred. (Remember, the Nazis viewed Jews as a separate and inferior “race”–their ideology of hatred wasn’t simply religious intolerance.) And when a book shows young readers the sustaining power of friendship and laughter, in times of upheaval and sorrow–which are important elements in The Year of Goodbyes–that’s a theme that bears repeating, too.

Finally, writers generally set out to tell stories–not to impart lessons. As I see it, there are at least six million potential stories to be told of the Holocaust, and that’s only counting the Jews who were killed.

You did a lot of research to find out what happened to your mother’s classmates. What resources were most helpful? What was your biggest challenge? What were your biggest surprises?

There is no one-stop-shopping in Holocaust research. Databases maintained by Yad Vashem (the Holocaust research center and museum in Jerusalem) and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (in Washington, D.C.) are extremely useful for finding information about people who were killed in the Holocaust, and I used them both. They have their limitations, however, and sometime include incorrect information–after all, they are based on reports and testimony filed by individuals, and human error does creep in. I also consulted various books and documents that the Holocaust Museum makes available to the public, such as memorial books published by various German entities. I used an array of directories, private memoirs, interviews, and other sources to track down survivors. Internet research was invaluable in this respect.

Even today, 65 years after the liberation of Europe from Nazi conquest, information is still dribbling out about Holocaust victims. I was fortunate to have the assistance of a researcher at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C., who had access to a huge recently opened archive which had been held in Germany since the end of the war. It’s called the International Tracing Service. Even as my book was going to press, she was sending me newly discovered information about some of the people who wrote in my mother’s poesiealbum so many years ago.

The biggest challenge: Tracking down people who, liked my mother, survived their displacement from Germany. There are no memorial books or obituaries or Yad Vashem “Pages of Testimony” for them–happily. Every time I found someone–usually through some circuitous route–I celebrated.

The biggest surprise: Finding out that there is a street in Yerres, France (outside of Paris), named Rue Guy Gotthelf, after my mother’s cousin, who wrote a beautiful entry in her poesiealbum–that blew me away.

Why was it important to your mother not to change her name?

She was 12 years old when she came to this country. Although we now know how fortunate she was to have escaped her home in Hamburg, she didn’t feel that way at the time. She’d been forced to leave so much behind–home, friends, relatives, things. Why should she have to give up her name, too? So when her parents urged her to change the “foreign-sounding” Jutta to something more American–Henrietta was at the top of the preferred names list–she resisted. Strongly. It took a while for her point of view to prevail. Entries in her poesiealbum from 1939, her first year in the U.S., are addressed to “Henrietta.”

What did the women say to each other when they were reunited following publication of your article?

As I recall, there was more hugging and smiling going on than anything else!

Related Tags:

 

Books Teenagers Tweens Writers

Play the Game

Posted on April 26, 2010 at 12:00 pm

The players get played in a romantic buddy comedy with one important distinction — one of those players is the resident of an assisted living facility who gets some assistance he was not expecting when a frisky fellow resident slips him some Viagra. And that resident is played by Andy Griffith. Opie, I don’t think we’re in Mayberry any more.

Paul Campbell (“Knight Rider,” “Battlestar Galactica”) plays David, a car salesman whose standard operating procedure is spin, whether with the customers or the ladies. The one true thing in his life is his relationship with his grandfather, Joe (Griffith). David visits Joe regularly and makes sure he is well taken care of. And since David’s idea of being well taken care of includes female companionship (and more than companionship), David starts to coach his grandfather on how to get as much action from as many ladies as possible. Joe is not the quickest of studies. It has been a while since he dated. But he has one thing going for him — numbers. Most of the residents of the home are women, and it seems that almost all of them are very interested in some companionship themselves. And more than companionship. At least one of them, Edna (played by “Seinfeld’s” Liz Sheridan) is quite frisky. But we know she will not be The One because she has a funny old-lady name. Rose (“Everybody Loves Raymond’s” Doris Roberts), on the other hand, has a pretty name. And a pretty grand-daughter.

She has a pretty name, too — Julie (Marla Sokoloff of “The Practice” and “Dude, Where’s My Car?”). David tries his best maneuvers on her. But she manages to evade them and he finds himself caring about her.

It all feels thin and sit-com-y, in part because its quintet of performers are all associated with television. It slides uneasily from frothy rom-com to raunchy ew-fest, with sexual references and situations so explicit the film would have qualified for an R-rating without Griffith’s disinfectingly innocent line readings and the MPAA’s automatic assumption that geriatric sex is more comic than erotic. The plot twists are awkwardly handled. And Campbell is bland. But the film shows promise in its writer-director Marc Fienberg, whose affection for his senior citizen characters is palpable and whose commitment to making them real characters is appealing. Too often, older characters are one-dimensional, on screen just to pass along life lessons, usually involving their deaths. But even with the heightened rhythms of a broad comedy, these are vibrant, engaged, real people. Campell is bland by comparison. But Sokoloff is a find, and she makes Julie so appealing we can see how she has David wondering if he’s been playing for the wrong team.

Related Tags:

 

Comedy Romance
THE MOVIE MOM® is a registered trademark of Nell Minow. Use of the mark without express consent from Nell Minow constitutes trademark infringement and unfair competition in violation of federal and state laws. All material © Nell Minow 1995-2024, all rights reserved, and no use or republication is permitted without explicit permission. This site hosts Nell Minow’s Movie Mom® archive, with material that originally appeared on Yahoo! Movies, Beliefnet, and other sources. Much of her new material can be found at Rogerebert.com, Huffington Post, and WheretoWatch. Her books include The Movie Mom’s Guide to Family Movies and 101 Must-See Movie Moments, and she can be heard each week on radio stations across the country.

Website Designed by Max LaZebnik