Posted on February 5, 2015 at 9:37 am
Vanity Fair has cajoled all of the top British actors into re-creating classic American movie lines, featuring everyone from Dame Judi Dench to Benedict Cumberbatch, in this adorable video series. Here’s a sample.
Posted on July 1, 2014 at 5:59 pm
B+| Lowest Recommended Age: | High School |
| Profanity: | Some strong language |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Drinking, smoking |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Some tense confrontations, slap |
| Diversity Issues: | Diverse characters |
| Date Released to Theaters: | July 2, 2014 |
| Date Released to DVD: | October 27, 2014 |
| Amazon.com ASIN: | B00M7D81FO |
“It’s delicate,” a songwriter tells a performer who has (literally) amped up her gentle ballad into a power anthem. 
The songwriter is Greta (Keira Knightly) and the performer (Maroon 5’s Adam Levine) is her ex. They were together for five years when he was struggling, but he has become successful and it went to his head.
The more important question for us is whether success has gone to the head of writer/director John Carney. Has he overly tricked out the sweet story he told so well in the bittersweet “Once,” now that he has a bigger budget and top-tier actors? Not quite. Has he repeated too much of the original? Almost. But it is still a lovely little dream of a film, an endearing date-night treat.
No one rumples better than Mark Ruffalo, and here he plays the very rumpled Dan, a once-successful record producer and co-founder of a label with the very pressed and present Saul (Yasiin Bey, aka Mos Def). We know he has had some setbacks because he wakes up in a dingy apartment (and then goes right back to bed), but he drives an elegant Jaguar. He’s unreliable. He’s a slob. He has let down everyone in his life, including his ex-wife, Miriam (Catherine Keener), his daughter Violet (Hailee Steinfeld), and his company. Worst of all, he just does not care about any of it any more, partly because he likes to feel that he is a victim and partly because he just does not want to feel anything at all.
Saul fires him (obligatory “Jerry Maguire” joke). Dan has hit bottom. And that is when he sees Greta, who has been reluctantly dragged on stage at an open mic night, and is quietly singing before an indifferent audience. In a moment of piercing beauty, Dan looks over at her and does not just hear but actually sees an arrangement come together around her, as ghostly instruments begin to, yes, delicately, fill in to support her song. She reminds him of what made him excited about music, and he tells her he wants to record her.
Like “Once,” there are scenes of people sharing music, of extemporaneous singing and composing, that light up the characters with so much shimmer it gives us goosebumps. There’s a fairy tale quality to the story. Of course they decide to forego a recording studio and made the album with hit and run session outdoors all over New York City where they run into adorable urchins who provide back-up vocals (and apparently don’t require contracts or royalties or any other pesky little legal details) and finish the tracks before they have to grab the gear and run from the cops.
I wish they had kept the original title for the film, “Can a Song Save Your Life?” It is more apt, more vivid, less safe. Carney is wonderful at evoking the joy of music, its healing powers, and the way it connects us to each other and the universe. This is a love story, not between Dan and Greta or between them and their exes but between humans and music.
Parents should know that this film has constant very strong language, drinking, smoking, and sexual references.
Family discussion: Share your “guilty pleasure” songs with your family. Why did Greta decide to release her music herself?
If you like this, try: “Once,” from the same writer/director
Posted on January 16, 2014 at 6:01 pm
There are three conclusions to draw from this reboot of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character. First, it plays like an infomercial for NSA access to, well, pretty much everything. Second, no matter how attractive the actors and how thrilling the score, there is no way to make it exciting to watch someone banging on a keyboard and staring intently at a computer screen as the “loading” indicator creeps along. Third, when spy movies run out of other ideas, they conclude that the fate of the United States and the rest of the world is not enough to hold our attention, so it must be time to kidnap the hero’s girlfriend.
Chris Pine (“Star Trek’s” Captain Kirk) takes over the role of Jack Ryan from Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and Ben Affleck to play Tom Clancy’s egghead action hero, Jack Ryan, PhD. Bringing him up to date, we see him as a student at the London School of Economics, helplessly watching the terrorist attack of 9/11 on television, then enlisting in the Marines, being shot down, saving two of his men despite the gravest of injuries, and then, in rehab to learn to walk again, meeting two people who will change his life. One is Cathy, a pretty med student (Keira Knightly, with an American accent). The other is a guy in a suit named Harper who recruits Ryan to work for the CIA, deep undercover…on Wall Street. I really liked the idea that the government would recognize the threat to national security from the too big to fail financial institutions, but it turns out that isn’t it. Ryan was sent to Wall Street to spy on the same old bad guys we always spy on, Russians, this time trying to manipulate our financial markets.
Director Kenneth Branagh’s biggest mistake was in the casting of the villain: Kenneth Branagh. We know he’s evil because he has a sleek, spare, shiny black office and he sits there grimly, listening to an ethereal aria and beating up a guy who was clumsy in giving him a shot. Branagh seems to enjoy playing bad guys — most recently in “The Wild Wild West,” “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” and “Pirate Radio.” He’s better at playing the uptight bureaucratic type (or the self-important type as he did in “My Week with Marilyn”) than the larger-than-life bad guy needed for a Bond-style film. In fairness, the screenplay, originally written as a stand-alone and then adapted for the Jack Ryan character, lacks the Tom Clancy magic that makes his stories so absorbing, the authenticity of the technological details and the depth of character. Compare this pallid Russian bad guy and his generic compatriots to the superbly crafted, complex Soviet characters in “The Hunt for Red October,” from Sean Connery’s captain to Joss Ackland’s diplomat. The other big problem is the increasing ridiculousness of the storyline. The United States has such a crackerjack team in Moscow that we can send in the espionage equivalent of magic elves to secretly remake a luxury hotel room that has been shattered in a shoot-out/fight/drowning so that in less than a couple of hours it is like new, with just a little wet grout (and of course the removal of the dead body) to show that anything had been changed. And yet, when they need to do the one thing any spy team should learn on day one, breaking into a secure location, the only one who can do it is our boy Jack, the PhD from Wall Street? Once the break-in takes place, it just gets silly, with a lot of intent people banging on keyboards and getting instant access to thousands of data sources and a series of increasingly implausible bang bang with even less plausible banter. Ryan is the increasingly implausible Swiss Army knife of superspies, equally adept at hand-to-hand combat, stunt driving, and hacking.
You’ve got to grade January releases on a curve, and by that standard, it barely passes muster. In any other month, it would be strictly wait for DVD.
Parents should know that this film includes extensive scenes of spy-style peril and violence including chases, crashes, and explosions, guns, knives, drowning, fights, and terrorism, references to painkiller dependency and abuse and alcohol abuse, and brief strong language.
Family discussion: Does this make you feel differently about how much access the government should have to private data? What qualities make a good spy?
If you like this, try: the other Jack Ryan movies, especially “The Hunt for Red October,” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Torn Curtain”
Posted on November 15, 2012 at 6:00 pm
Director Joe Wright and his favorite star, Kiera Knightley (“Pride and Prejudice,” “Atonement”) have produced a ravishing, highly theatrical version of Leo Tolstoy’s classic “Anna Karenina.” It is deeply romantic but has more focus on the social and political context than many of the previous versions of the story. It literally opens with the rise of a curtain over a grand proscenium stage, and throughout the film the story flickers from movie-style reality — not documentary but an integrated dramatic narrative — to something resembling a live production of a play or ballet. At one intensely dramatic moment, the story literally and metaphorically spills over the edge of the stage for a shocking denouement.
Anna (Knightley) is a young mother married to the stiff but not unfeeling husband Karanin (Jude Law). He cares for her but is very caught up in legislative and governance issues. When we first see her, Anna is preparing to leave her home in St. Petersburg to go to the aid of her brother, Stiva (Knightley’s “Pride and Prejudice” co-star Matthew MacFadyen) and his pregnant wife, Dolly (“Boardwalk Empire’s” Kelly Macdonald), who is devastated when she learns he has been having an affair with the governess. Anna hopes she can help the couple reconcile. And she is not unhappy about spending time in Moscow, going to parties and concerts and mingling with members of society.
There she meets the dashing officer Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson of “Kick-Ass” and “Savages”). Vronsky is a bit spoiled by a life in which everything has come easily to him — good looks, money, women. He is flirting with Dolly’s sister, an innocent young princess named Kitty (an excellent Alicia Vikander). Stiva’s close friend Levin (Domhnall Gleeson), a shy but true-hearted landowner, loves Kitty. He proposes, but, believing Vronsky will ask her to marry him, Kitty turns down Levin’s proposal. Vronsky has just been flirting with Kitty. He is drawn to Anna. She is drawn to him, and returns home to put some distance between them. He pursues her, and finally, she is overcome. Besotted by him, she is overcome in every way, breaking every rule, ignoring every convention, the freedom as heady as the romance.
Like too many lovers before her, she believes that love is enough, that the world will support her, that nothing else matters. She once counseled Dolly to rise above Stiva’s infidelity. But she does not have any sympathy for Karanin’s humiliation or any gratitude for his willingness to stand by her, even when she is pregnant with Vronsky’s child. Vronsky genuinely cares for her and does his best but he is out of his league. When Anna realizes that society has no place for her anymore, she is devastated. Tolstoy’s focus on the reunited Levin and Kitty, far from the glittering parties and gossip, contrasts the hypocrisy, artificiality, and sterility of the upper class with the authenticity and humanity of the people who work the earth and care for the sick.
Wright has a magnificent gift for images and a remarkable fluidity of camera movement (remember that bravura sustained shot on the beach in “Atonement”), all used in service of the story and characters. The camera circles as the story does, with rings of parallel but contrasting stories. Watch Anna’s costumes, elaborate, constricting at first and then simpler. In the midst of her passion for Vronsky, they both wear white, as though they are removed from the rest of the world. Later, she’s swathed in black. Watch for images of omens, and images that compare or contrast the human world and the animal world, the fake and the real. By embracing the artificiality of the form, Wright illuminates not just Anna’s anguish but Tolstoy’s vision.
Parents should know that this film includes sexual references and situations with some explicit images and suicide and a brief shot of a mutilated body. Characters drink and abuse alcohol and drugs and there are tense and unhappy confrontations.
Recommendation: Mature teens-Adults
Family discussion: Tolstoy famously begins this book by saying that all happy families are alike but each unhappy family is different in its own way. Do you agree? How does the theatricality of the setting affect the story?
If you like this, try: the other versions of the story, especially the movies with Greta Garbo and Jacqueline Bisset, and the book by Tolstoy
Posted on November 14, 2012 at 8:00 am
I spoke to one of my favorite directors, Joe Wright (“Pride and Prejudice,” “Atonement,” “Hanna”) about his sumptuous new film, “Anna Karenina,” starring Keira Knightley.
One of my favorite scenes in the film reminded me very much of one of my favorite scenes in “Pride and Prejudice,” using intricate choreography of dance and camera movement to tell the story. So tell me a little bit about how you put that together.
I really loved doing the dance in “Pride and Prejudice” and I haven’t had an opportunity to do it again and perhaps, further what I did in “Pride”—so I really took this film on as an opportunity to kind of create a ballet with words. And the dance in the ball especially, I wanted to push further than I had. With “Pride,” some things happened by accident, the moment where everyone disappears in the dance and Elizabeth and Darcy dancing by themselves was an accident. So there were lots of things that happened there that I kind of had touched upon that I wanted to return to and explore more fully. I like dance a lot and I go and see a lot of dance in London, and one of the choreographers I most admire is a guy called Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, who’s a Belgian/Moroccan choreographer. I’m a huge fan of his work, and so I asked him to come and collaborate on this movie, and really handed certain sections of the film over to him.
We had a three week rehearsal period and probably a good week of that (if not two) were spent doing physical workshops and thinking about the performance and the characters and the physical context. So all of that I found fascinating and then Labi and I worked on—well, he worked on the choreography for a long period and I’d go and visit him in Antwerp and we’d discuss. One had to be kind of telling that story. One couldn’t just kind of go off into pure formalism, it had to be at the service of the story. So I was always keeping an eye that were were telling a story, and he was coming up with his gorgeous ideas.
A lot of the music was composed prior to shooting, music that is involved in the dances but also what would be called the score, and so it allows the performers and the camera operators a sense of the rhythm, and I particularly asked Dario Marianelli, also, to reference Stravinsky and the composers who were more influenced by Eastern atonal harmonies and stuff, partly because I have a love of that music, but also to give a sense of the breadth of the nation, of something not entirely what we think of as being European.
The costumes are not just beautiful and very striking and distinctive. They help to define the characters.
You know, the first thing that Jacqueline Durran and I decided was that we weren’t particularly interested in creating historically accurate costumes. I like the silhouette of the 1870’s dresses, the big bums at the back and all of that stuff, but I didn’t like the detailing of them. They’re very fussy and prissy, lots and lots of lace and lace and lace and ribbons and all of that stuff—which I find I don’t like very much. So we took the silhouette but we also looked at, in particular, some Christian Dior dresses from the 1950s and noticed that the silhouette was very similar. So we really kind of created a style of dress that was somehow working with both of those influences. And obviously with Anna, you wanted a sense of her wealth and her sophistication. Keira is a little bit younger than Anna is described as being in the book, here, I think, 26 or 27, Anna is 28 and Anna is a mother so we wanted to kind of give her a status in the costumes as well, a little bit of age. And also this sense of—I like the kind of drapery of it, the dresses are quite draped, they feel like they could kind of almost fall off on any moment. And you also work with what an actor has got, and Keira’s got this exquisite back, and so the green dress in “Atonement” and the dresses here show off her back.
We wanted to avoid the scarlet woman so we didn’t use too much red in her costumes. She becomes more flamboyant as the affair goes on, and so do her clothes. It’s almost like she gets involved—I kind of think of Princess Betsy, Vronsky’s cousin, as being like the Kate Moss of the period. So although she’s been moving in this very kind of high society prior to her affair, it’s the society that’s almost like a political society, it’s quite a conservative society that she’s been moving in. So it’s almost like she’s been hanging out in Washington and suddenly discovers New York club scene or something. And so she becomes more kind of flamboyant and risky in her costume. So, you know…I also really love in the film what Jacqueline did with the costumes of the lower-class characters. A lot of those are influenced by quite Eastern design, sort of even as far as India, and that, to me, we did that to suggest the breadth of the country as well, of Russia at the time, so you had the Parisian influence with the high-society dresses but also the Eastern influence with some of the peasants.
I liked your more nuanced portrayal of Vronsky, who is often seen as just callous and superficial.
Vronsky’s one of the only characters in the book whose age isn’t specified, but he’s described as being a kind of boy soldier. He’s described as a kind of golden youth, and the way in which he falls in love is a very young kind of way. It’s very kind of, sort of puppy-doggish almost and reckless and open. He declares his feelings straight off. He’s never been hurt by love. And so it seemed appropriate to me to cast him younger than Anna, so that he’s, you know, 20, 21, and everything is fine until it’s not, and when Anna becomes frayed, he gets out his depth, you know? He doesn’t know how to handle this situation, it’s beyond his experience and his abilities and so he can’t really help much. Needless to say, though, he does love her, and he is honorable and he doesn’t leave her, you know? He sticks with her and personally, my opinion, he’s not having an affair with the princess. I think he probably thinks about it, but doesn’t, which is probably more honorable than not even thinking about it. And so I think he’s a good man, I just think he’s out of his depth.
The theatricality of the film is so well handled, illuminating, not distracting.
Thank you. The theater concept gave me a limitation and I find limitations quite liberating, creatively. At the end of the day, this, as much if not more than any other film, relied on the close-ups of the actor’s faces, and when you’re in close-up, it doesn’t matter where you are, you know? The background is soft focus, and you’re engaged directly with the emotions of the characters…and I think probably 50 percent of the film is told in close-ups. It feels to me like we’re in a period of new romanticism, where emotion is prized above all else. Sometimes I like to have my critical faculties engaged when I’m watching a film, and people kind of, often studios, really, think that if you take the audience out of the emotion, then that’s some great taboo that you’re not allowed to do, that they have to have their suspension of disbelief there at all times. And I’m not sure that’s true, I think that’s underestimating an audience. I think an audience enjoys something perhaps a little bit more playful.
