May 22
By Ray Pride
“Hysteria,” in the description of Tanya Wexler, is a hybrid comedy, like Richard Curtis sneaking a vibrator into a Merchant-Ivory production “with maybe a little Jane Austen flair in the plotting, maybe, if we’re lucky.”
Set in London 1880, “Hysteria” fashions a fanciful history of the invention of the electro-mechanical vibrator. Hugh Dancy plays an upstart young doctor, who meets London’s leading specialist in women’s medicine (Jonathan Pryce), who also has two daughters, one dutiful and demure (Felicity Jones), and the other a progressive social reformer (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Let the culture-clash comedy and romantic roundelays begin. Read the rest of this entry »
May 22
Maïwenn.
RECOMMENDED
With as much sprawl as attained ambition, Maïwenn’s “Polisse” is a busy, ragged, largely hand-held procedural mosaic following the workdays of police in the Parisian Child Protection Unit (Brigade de protection des mineurs de Paris). There’s a whiff of Sidney Lumet in the writer-director’s rapt attention to group dynamics of a police brigade, mingling vice and victims, gallows humor and stress, as well as sordid details of sexual abuse. Twining work life and personal life, stress is the order of the day, and the melodrama. Working from 150 hours of footage, the film feels rushed and headlong, for better and for worse: the form—and vivid performances—suggests an authenticity not always matched by the writing. Still, the sustained intensity impresses. Read the rest of this entry »
May 16
There are volumes yet to be written about characteristics in movies like “Canadian-ness” and “amateurishness” that would be well served to include a couple of the not-so-rare examples like “The Samaritan” in the proposal pack. Working for a second time with producer Andras Hamori (“The 51st State”), Samuel L. Jackson takes a hike to Hogtown as Foley, a conman-murderer who’s looking for a new beginning after twenty-five years in stir. Shot in an economical five weeks, co-writer-director David Weaver’s “The Samaritan” shares peculiarities of pacing and raggedness of tone that inhabit Canadian movies from low to high, and you have to ask at moments, is this just odd, piquant, or is it simply bad? Read the rest of this entry »
May 16
An art-house jaw-dropper, Canadian filmmaker Nadine Labaki’s “Where Do We Go Now?” (Et maintenant on va où?) manages to annoy and offend in almost equal measure in its many miscalculated scenes, from cultural caricature to musical numbers and back again. The opening scene, a dance tableau that seems like it could be drawn from the 1960s choreographic masterworks of Hungarian filmmaker Miklos Jancso, promises more than the Greek-myth-set-in-unnamed-Middle-Eastern-country-pssst-it’s-Lebanon ever manages to deliver. In a dusty mountain village, Muslims and Christians live side-by-side in a cute form of peace and tolerance until random slurs and misconstrued accidents lead to battle and beatings and deaths and weeping and gnashing among the very cute elders and equally cute youth. Read the rest of this entry »
May 15
RECOMMENDED
Snort-out-loud funny and offensive in every conceivable way, “The Dictator” cheerfully cons its audience into cheering on a genocidal totalitarian in his quest to deter the nascent tide of democracy in his fictional kingdom. British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s made a career out of his singular brand of “documentary” ridicule of simpletons of a right-wing, usually Southern U.S. persuasion, through fictional alter egos, Ali G, Borat and Brüno. He’s gotten a pass on borderline classist cruelty because he was so self-demeaning in the process, willing to lower himself beneath his victims’ level and, well, who doesn’t love to feel superior to those rightwing nutjobs who seem to control American discourse, right? But his shtick became all too familiar once he migrated from television to feature films, and his second go, “Brüno,” was greeted with Bronx cheers even from his basest base. Read the rest of this entry »
May 09
By Ray Pride
Even with an early image of forbidden splatter that would never make it into even a conversation about an idea of the possibility of a studio-made picture, there’s a strange calm to Bobcat Goldthwait’s fierce black comedy “God Bless America.” It’s surely the year’s only movie that evokes the highway of Capra’s “It Happened One Night,” the fulminations of “Network” and the fumes of Gaspar Noé’s “I Stand Alone.”
As Frank, an everyman figure in Syracuse, New York, thrown to the wind, Joel Murray is supremely calm. And when he speaks? He’s just a guy making sense. His life and work are falling down around him, he’s getting headaches, he’s worried about whether he may be terminally ill and everything he sees on television seems like a terrible hallucination of a world, and country, gone wrong. It’s mild compared to your everyday online comment section, but it’s rarely portrayed in contemporary movie comedies. After getting fired, Frank buys a gun and sets out to stalk celebrities, and quickly enough, an equally pissed-off teenager (Tara Lynne Barr) attaches herself to his crusade. (“Did you just kill Chloe? Awesome.”) Read the rest of this entry »
By Ray Pride
