Carefree

Mavens:

Probably our last get-together until the fall was last night's sneak preview of Chéri, starring Michelle Pfeiffer. I say probably, because who knows when access to another sneak preview could come along. Or a film like the Girlfriend Experience, which absolutely commands our animated discussion. Fortunately movies don't take the summer off. In the meantime, I will be posting blogs, when interesting movies come along.

We're getting lots of inquiries about the future of my-pov.ca, mebbe becuz of the sneak previews, so send all curious mavens our way, and we'll get out info to them.

However, I could not wish you all a carefree summer without referring to this immortal clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pw0XRAuO0w) celebrating Fred Astaire, golf and summertime, from the RKO movie, Carefree (1938) with music by Irving Berlin.

So stay tuned. We'll be right back with a bigger better movie club in the fall.

The Girlfriend Experience

We've been anticipating this Soderbergh movie since Ché, Stephen Soderbergh's first venture into the hi-tech camera Red. Here's his second, as with Ché, cast with mostly amateur actors, a mostly-improvised script, shot very quickly, and using mostly natural light. Like Godard, Soderbergh pushes the envelope of acceptability each time out.

The Girlfriend Experience opens at the AMC on June 26th, after my-pov.ca is in summer hiatus. Enjoy!

Here's J Paul Higgins' review:

***
A fascinating, occasionally infuriating, wonderfully written film. Quite short at 77 minutes, I was riveted; the somewhat abrupt ending left me wanting more. Probably not for everyone however.

The director (Steven Soderbergh) employs sometimes exasperating devices to keep the audience off balance. The chronological sequence is scrambled. The compelling sound track rarely seems appropriate to what’s on the screen, with frenetic drum music over quiet shopping scenes, bass heavy “danger” music at strangest times. (Check out the street drummer Shakerleg in the trailer!) Filmed on a portable high definition video camera, occasionally deliberately shaky, the editing between scenes is often quite abrupt.

The story centers on Chelsea, a high priced escort and her live-in boyfriend Chris, a personal trainer, both very ambitious and finding business slowing down in October 2008 as the economy falters. The story cuts back and forth between the two as they struggle with business challenges (positioning, promotion, prospective business partners, website design, media reviews). Their clients, high-powered business men, blather on about business challenges during the economic downturn, offer investment advice. Careful viewers can obtain quite a decent MBA education from this film.

Chelsea is played by Sasha Grey who, at 21, is a very successful porn star. The Girlfriend Experience is her first mainstream role. Pretty of course with a spectacular body, she doesn’t seem that attractive at first. And her professional reserve and endless business discussions hardly spice things up. But then she grabs you with her eyes, a tweak of her brow, a twist of her mouth, an artful body pose in lingerie ... Ahem. Let’s just say she is quite believable in the role. Despite her professional background, this is not at all an explicit film; there are occasional brief glimpses of nudity and frank discussion, but nothing more.

Chelsea struggles with her relationship with clients. Is it essentially mercantile? Or closer to friendship? Where are boundaries and does setting them not destroy the illusion the client is paying for? How does her Sasha Grey's relationship with clients differ from that with her boyfriend? The writers and director lay out the dilemmas clearly but with subtlety. And I, as a sometime business coach to personal trainers and alternative health practitioners, found The Girlfriend Experience to be absolutely fascinating.

j paul higgins

L'heure d'été (Summer Hours)

Ah! Blessed Serendipity! Two luminous unsentimental French films in three bountiful weeks (first One Day, You'll Understand with Jeanne Moreau, now Summer Hours with glam blonde, Juliette Binoche), both family stories, pivoted around a grande dame dowager, willfully preserving secrets of her personal past while disposing of the treasured clutter of bric-a-brac, forever an intricate part of her existence: paintings, tea-sets, ceramics.

I'm a big fan of Olivier Assayas' sensibility (a former reviewer for Les Cahiers due Cinéma). To the NYT, Assayas observed: We don’t want to know what we’re going to do with the cupboard that was in our mother’s living room. We don’t want to deal with the album of family pictures in the chest of drawers.... One day you become owner of those pictures, and you have no idea who these people were, but they are handed to you as somehow precious. Once you start turning the pages, he added, you get lost in the void of that unreachable past.

Yes, that unreachable past.

Because L'heure d'éte, like One Day, You'll Understand, is very French, the players all behave like civilized adults, talking (and listening) in full sentences, providing astute observations on their own circumstances. As John McKay pointed out last week during our post-O'Horten discussion, democracy is an precious value for movie goers. We can all make up our own minds what is going on. And once again here, Summer Hours, like Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, we the audience are viscerally invited in to bear silent witness to intimate family events as they unfold. It's a movie more about characters who inhabit this movie than events that happen to them. Note in that regard, the extraordinary camera work of Eric Gautier, his curious lens becoming our unobtrusive eyes, observing the exquisite decor, the courteous response, the sideways glance.

Summer Hours is also very much a meditation about Art that comes out of real lives: what is beauty and why we surround our lives with beautiful stuff. What the dowager adores, her kids seem prepared to dispose of, her grandkids resent losing. In the closing credits, we discover that Assayas, instead of making movie prop furniture, painting and ceramics, has borrowed the genuine articles from the great museums of Paris. Assaya's initial concept was to explore how art comes from real life and ends up in a museum, he said, as if in a zoo or a mausoleum, and how ultimately that changes the very nature of art.

Ah! French movies! You just gotta love 'em!



















The heirs: glorious Juliette Binoche, flanked by Jérémie Renier and Charles Berling

Whatever Works/Chéri

June 25th, 7 p.m. at the AMC

Mavens:

Thanx again to Brigitte Tanguay of Equinoxe Films, I have an either/or proposition for you. As a post-St-Jean Baptiste celebration, we have 50 tickets for two sneak premieres: either Stephen Frear's Chéri, or Woody Allen's Whatever Works, starring Larry David. I have seen neither, so have no feel for either of them. But sneaks are always great fun. Both, given the names attached, promise to be mainstream entertainment fare. So the first 50 rsvps, gets the ducats. Let me know which movie you prefer. If we have extras, I'll alert you to the possibilities of bringing a friend:

Whatever works sounds vaguely like Woody Allen from the recent creepy Woody Allen period: Larry David (one of my favorite funny guys) plays an aging curmudgeon who loves Fred Astaire, classical music and views the universe with disdain. (Does this plotline sound familiar?) And, oh yeah, the creepy bald guy is once again fall-down irresistible to some gorgeous young thing (Evan Rachel Wood). Variety observed:

Though stuffed with witty one-liners and wondrously convoluted tirades, this far-fetched, deliberately artificial game of musical chairs -- in which mismatched characters encircle, attract and repel each other -- feels forced, often losing itself in excess verbiage. Still, the David/Allen hybrid makes for a fascinating beast, of interest to acolytes of both comedians...

Chéri reunites the director (Frears), writer (Christopher Hampton) and star (Pfeiffer) of Dangerous Liaisons for another lavishly costumed exploration of French sexual naughtiness and aristocratic ennui during La Belle Epoque, this time, with a short story by Colette (Gigi) - romance between an experienced aging courtesan and a spoiled brat. Stephen Frears is one of those transatlantic British directors, who first came to prominence with the TV movie, My Beautiful Launderette. He is now best known in North America for period costume dramas like Cheri: Dangerous Liaisons, Mary Reilly.

Box Office magazine gave it ****:

The 50-year-old Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend make a credible pairing, with the young man adopting almost feminine wiles in his machinations with the opposite sex.....Hampton’s lines, many of which come directly from Colette, are a joy to hear—barbed and acerbic witticisms that speak volumes such as Bates’s delicious putdown of Lea when she notes that “when the skin is a little less firm, it holds perfume so much better.” Frears himself provides the linking narration that he delivered with equal wit and wisdom. It is all beautifully costumed and set—items that should not be taken for granted—and the supporting cast more than pass muster, especially Harriet Walter and Frances Tomelty.

O'Horten

Oh! stands for both odd and Odd, the first name of Horten, a pipe-smoking Norwegian train engineer on the point of retirement after 42 years, riding the straight and narrow. Odd is an odd choice for a movie central character, given movies rarely feature retired characters, despite the fact, retired are among the most avid of movie goers. Moreover Odd's plot arc, trading in one identity (hermetic Scandanavian life-style) for another (bewildered golden ager, liberated with much too much time on his hands), is a future shock ego-crusher. Odd, fortunately, seems to have little ego.

So Odd Horten, in retirement, has no clue where to start living the rest of his life, since he has no friends, no hobbies, no colleagues. Director, Bent Hamer (Do all Norwegian names pun in English?) clearly has an affectionate absurdist take on Odd's life and times. Odd gets stuck in the oddest of situations: in the bedroom of a young boy; on an airport runway, smoking his pipe; in a pool with skinny dipping kids. And his new life discovers a cadence all its own, open to whatever whimsy wends his way. Surreal eccentrics pop up, disporting funky charms: his Alzheimer mom, once a ski-jumping champion; a psychic diplomat able to drive his Citroen blindfolded through icy streets of Oslo; an executive sliding down icy Oslo hill on his briefcase.

So O'Horten is a road movie of sorts - as Odd travels into his future. John Candy and Steve Martin (back when he was hilarious) collaborated on Planes, Trains and Automobiles 20 years ago. Bent Hamer goes further with all manner of idiosyncratic Norwegian conveyances, Odd travels on streetcars, buses, sailboats and finally ski jumps! And as a consequence, we get to look around glorious Norway - something no movie within memory has ever offered. (Unsurprisingly, Norway looks like Northern Alberta). And O'Horten feels like Jacques Tati, or those bittersweet deadpan Czech movies that Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel and Jan Kadar snuck out to the West in 1960s.

Oh! in this case, also stands for original, off-beat and Buster Keaton odd.

Every Little Step

Every Little Step, a fascinating and deeply moving evocation of a long ago time (the mid 1970s) - both documentary and musical - seemed dubious as a my-pov.ca candidate. Not that I have anything against musicals (nor documentaries), but going in, in my mind, a Star Search/American Idol survival of the fittest 'reality show' did not seem exactly my cup of tea. I was wrong (again). Every Little Step performers are the polar opposite of dorky amateurs chasing after fame and fortune on TV reality shows. Broadway hoofers - low-pay, intense self-confidence, unbelievable athleticism - are a spectacular species of entertainer. Every Little Step explores exactly what dancers will do for love.The original Chorus Line was a mix of Show biz (cattle calls, workshops, callbacks) and 1970s real life (gay-rights, sexual revolutions, group therapy). And Richard Attenborough's stagey 1985 Chorus Line captured much of the energy of the original show.

The Broadway Musical, as a genre, only lasted from say, the 1927 Kern/Hammerstein Showboat through the early sixties. Then, was done in by the Rock n' Roll revolution, the Brit Invasion (Cats, Les Miz) and Uncle Walt's Magic Kingdom. Broadway is now but a tourist's low-rent Las Vegas with a serious identity crisis. I won't go on. However, in the Broadway Musical twilight (1975), choreographer Michael Bennett and producer Joe Papp, produced Chorus Line, premised on anonymous chorus line, being the real Broadway stars. Hundreds of dancers from across the world descended on the Great White Way, each auditioning for one of 22 prized roles in the chorus of this show.

Alas, those heady times - Broadway musicals and devil-may-care sexual fecklessness are long gone. Every Little Step mirrors Broadway reality, introducing us to the behind-the-scenes chorus kids, telling us their life stories as they audition for parts that are real-life versions of a show that itself features the original cast's life stories. A house of mirrors, then. This doc traces the audition process of the 2006 Broadway revival of Chorus Line as three thousand dancers (lined up in the rain) are whittled down through a Darwinian survival of the fittest to 17. Every Little Step honours the original Michael Bennett vision. It celebrates Marvin Hamlisch's songs. So bring your box of Kleenex, this is a heartbreak and vulnerability weeper. Dancers clearly love their work more than most entertainers. They get paid a pittance, their chance of being cast is minimal, they require Olympian athleticism

Every Little Step is combination documentary/musical. And it, like the anonymous hoofer-gypsies it features - alas!- won't last long. Nevertheless, this is a sublime feel-good treat, engrossing and intense.

peter