By Ray Pride

Monday afternoon is cold and rainy in Chicago and it’s cold and rainy in Austin, Texas, “a rarity,” Bob Byington, writer-director of “Harmony and Me” tells me.

“I’ve put the Pixies on for our chat,” he types from Texas; Syd Barrett sings “Dark Globe” in the café where I stare out onto the avenue. Byington’s latest smart comedy of discomfort, his third feature, “Harmony and Me,” which benefited from development at the Sundance Institute, debuted in the spring at New Directions New Films in New York City to strong reviews. Austin thirtysomething Harmony (Justin Rice from Bishop Allen) works in an office and feels the pangs of a recent dumping by his girlfriend, Jessica (co-producer Kristen Tucker). Harmony is obsessed. No one wants to hear it. His pain and anger move toward making a song. Along the way, Byington’s wry comic precision and crisp characterization is matched by a gift for laidback yet kaleidoscopic, naturalistic performances getting from actors and non-pros alike.

Byington is self-distributing, opening for a week at Siskel, and was on a panel at the Austin Film Festival on Sunday about comedy writing. Is that your area of perceived expertise? I ask. “Yes, but I have no training and little expertise. I look at someone like Woody Allen who wrote jokes for ten years before he made his first movie. But he was unavailable, I think.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Eccentric without ever becoming unduly whimsical, Sophie Barthes’ surrealism-lite “Cold Souls” (which she tenders a co-film-by with cinematographer-partner-soul mate Andrij Parekh) pirouettes within the same school as Charlie Kaufman’s dance floor. Paul Giamatti plays blocked actor Paul Giamatti, who’s having agonies over his role in a production of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” much to the chagrin of his fellow actors, the play’s director Michael Tucker and wife Emily Watson. An article in the New Yorker leads Giamatti to one Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn), who specializes in “soul storage” from an office on Roosevelt Island. There are clever, understated visual touches throughout—Giamatti’s journeys to-and-from on the red tram that rises above the river at 59th Street toward the soul storage unit suggests the confinement of consciousness inside the body; the final image is an alarmingly wistful going-out-of-focus shot that suggests a watercolor Rothko—even when the parallel tales of Giamatti’s tortures and a “mule” (Dina Korzun) who transports souls within herself for Russian soul-traffickers becomes a little complicated. Read the rest of this entry »

Or, “doesn’t work” as the case may be. Waxworks filmmaking of intermittent animatronic voltage, Woody Allen’s fortieth feature, “Whatever Works,” is reportedly a long-shelved script he’d written for the late Zero Mostel back in the era of “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan.” “The Meanest Man in the World,” it was called. Allen’s claimed in the past not to have castoffs; there are few clues to the present day, although a line of voice-over does invoke President Obama. It’s another February-December romance in which the overbearing Manhattan motormouth and egotist Boris Yellnikoff takes in chicken-fried runaway Melodie St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood, who finds music in her character where Allen has provided little or none), whom he dubs a “sub-mental baton twirler” but eventually takes into his bed and marries. Larry David handles the mouthpiece chores here, reciting garrulous harrumphs of abuse directly to the camera; the prolix bursts, studded with calls to bring down the “sub-mental inchworms” and “pygmies” of society, do indeed sound like a first draft from oh-so-long ago, and the self-realization clichés in store do sound very, very 1970s. With Patricia Clarkson as Melodie’s mother, who discovers her inner artist, and Ed Begley, Jr. as Melodie’s father, who discovers his inner gay man. Nuance does not abound. With Michael McKean. 92m. (Ray Pride)

By Ray Pride

Forgive me for paying homage to perhaps the single corniest lede I have ever read to a film review, which was of “Days of Thunder,” but which I’m appropriating:

Vroom-vroom. Gentlemen, it’s time to start your engines for “Gran Torino.”

Holy Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award! “Grand Torino” is a dark comedy, an engaged anecdote about class and race, a stripped-down example of palooka art, and Clint Eastwood, at 78, has made a modest yet almost radical entertainment. It’s a gleeful astonishment.

Eastwood’s always been a simple shooter, letting cameras roll on rehearsals and calling it a keeper. The results can be striking or strange, as in the work of another veteran filmmaker, Woody Allen. Sometimes the effect of working quickly is a movie with graceful notes like “Vicky Christina Barcelona,” and sometimes it’s hollow bunkum like “Cassandra’s Dream.” And even in a well-regarded movie like “Match Point,” performances seem otherworldly strange, especially in how the actors seem almost never to engage with each other. A fascinating effect, but an intentional one? I’d like to think of Eastwood as one of the most conscious of filmmakers, even if he’s known for picking up a script and shooting as-is.

Stories of John Ford only shooting enough footage to make a scene, just barely, and in some shots breaking established visual grammar, such as characters moving in the “wrong” screen direction, tampering with seamless, invisible style; or “crossing the axis,” that is, making the difference between the angles of two shots either overly broad or acute so that a mild formal hiccup might occur. Why? Because he could and because he was John Ford.

In “Gran Torino,” Walt Kowalski is a Detroit retiree, a Korean War veteran, now a widower. A large American flag graces the front of the house. He’s a walking definition of “politically incorrect.” From his first scowl and squint of eagle eye standing at the front of a church before his wife’s casket, in which he audibly grrrowls like a cartoon back-alley cur, I was giddy as a girl child. Well, whatever… as Walt tends to say.

A widower who doesn’t like his children, Walt’s cast aside. They’re inattentive, grasping drips. He doesn’t care for his wife’s religion. He’s a 78-year-old man in a no-longer Polish neighborhood with ghosts and with new faces, largely Hmong. Still, he has moments of autumnal rest: on his porch, popping a PBR, admiring the Gran Torino in the drive at sunset, murmuring to his faithful, elderly golden dog, “Ainnnt-she-sweet.” Full stop.

Lives collide after teenage neighbor Thao (Bee Vang) is pressured by a gang to steal Walt’s treasure. But an unlikely savior lives within. Eastwood adopts a growl for Walt that’s not quite a Christian Bale maw of cracked glass, but to actually hear “What th’ hell is this? Get. Off. My. Lawnnnn” from behind his bolt-action weapon. “I useta stack fucks like you five-feet-high in Korea and use ya for sandbags” is the coldest racially insensitive line I’ve heard from an older actor since Rip Torn turned to a female, Asian-American executive on an episode of “The Larry Sanders Show” and inquired, “Didn’t I kill you in Korea?” Eastwood’s after more than the gag: not a half-an-hour in, the unvarnished man is revealed. Flawed. Casually racist. Unregenerate. Dirty Archie (Bunker). Who will he be ninety minutes from now? “Get off my lawn.” (He’s got the verbals about “dagos” and Jews, too.) “Hard-nosed Polack sonofabitch,” his barber (John Carroll Lynch in a nice turn) happily calls after him. “See you in three weeks, prick.” “Not if I see you first, dipshit.”

Pared-down images abound. For instance, when Walt enters the garage where his car’s threatened, rifle on his shoulder, Eastwood places the camera behind himself, the cowl of the overhead light dancing above his head and shivering a fall of decades of dust on his hair and shoulders. Simple. Epic. Dust to dust and all that.

There’s no tincture of Park City earnestness. If Eastwood weren’t on to making his next two features, “Gran Torino” would have been a virtuous opening night film for Sundance 2009. But I don’t know what younger filmmaker would be suited for this mix. What’s on show is an old man’s art. Old. Man. Clipped, stripped, frontal, not in the least sclerotic. Call it impatient precision. And there is tenderness, a streak of kindliness in his performance as a bigot who warms to humanity, like an American Vittorio De Sica film. (Critic David Ehrenstein is reminded of “Umberto D.”)

It’s an “if-you-have-but-eyes-to-see” movie: if you sense the genuine, glorious strengths of “Gran Torino,” you can appreciate its idiosyncratic carborundum grace. If not, you’ll be asking your date, “And WTF was that ending?”

What does it mean to be an old man, alone, with a gun? The decline of masculinity? Masculinity in crisis? The slow dying of the light? “Gran Torino”? Well, whatever… It’s a beaut.

“Gran Torino” opens Friday.

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“Let Them Chirp Awhile,” NYU grad Johnathan Blitstein’s Lower East Side-set mini-indie has an aspiration that’s foiled a few filmmakers over the years: to capture the romantic roundelays of smarties in the city, to get tart talk into play without falling into mannerism or smugness. That would be… making a retread of Woody Allen’s movies, y’know, the funny ones? That’s a pitfall the filmmakers have to fear, yet Blitstein is pretty fearless in portraying the elemental ridiculousness of his comic caricatures while providing sufficient plot to keep an able, well-chosen cast from shuffling or mumbling through their shortcomings. A key, underplayed line: “I can’t even concentrate when you’re not talking to me.” Crass behavior ensues, to often engaging result. With Justin Rice (from Andrew Bujalski’s “Mutual Appreciation”), Brendan Sexton III, Laura Breckenridge, Zach Galligan and the fetchingly named Pepper Binkley. The location work is sweet, especially since the film was shot on 35mm stock. Among the film’s festival honors: Best Feature, East Lansing Film Festival. 91m. (Ray Pride)

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“Vicky Scarlett Christina Rebecca Penelope Javier Barcelona” is one of the more endearing pile-ups emanating from Woody Allen’s assembly line of late. Like much of his output since “Husbands and Wives”(1992), and certainly since production and budgetary constraints have restricted his ability to make substantial reshoots, “Vicky Christina Barcelona” seems like a series of interesting accidents rather than focused, purposeful filmmaking. Written, Allen says, to fulfill a fat bolso of cash proffered by Spanish producers, the movie is about as flat—and as sunny—as any film by Almodovar’s customary cinematographer, Javier Aguirresarobe, could be. Two American women in their 20s go on an adventure in Barcelona. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is about to marry a New York moneyman, embodied with loathsome zeal by Chris Messina. Christina (Scarlett Johansson) is the neurotic female Allen’s always fixating on. An older friend (Patricia Clarkson) takes the women around town, and at an art gallery, they glimpse Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a wanton Lothario who’s still in love with his troubled, mercurial wife Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz). Extended dialogues about banal romantic complications and the implications of commitment, shot like dispirited bouts of table tennis, are later leavened by the knock-down-drag-outs between Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, deflated somewhat by a dozen or more times Bardem is guided to say “Speak English!” when Cruz’s inflammatory performance is at its most Anna Magnani-ish when she’s flinging her native tongue. There’s also an incessant narration by a male narrator, as in a novel, “Little Children” or “Frontline” that’s not as aggravating as it might be with less eye candy in the compositions and settings. As in most recent Allen, the performances flirt with incoherence, with each actor bringing their skills to an ill-measured whole. A lingering whiff of misogyny hangs over the proceedings as well: it is possible to lovingly enact shallow dialogue. There are a few slow burns by Johansson that delight, and Hall manages to bring her own likeable presence, and by turns, Allen himself and Mia Farrow, into her performance of a diffident woman of privilege. The ending would be glorious in another movie: a chilling moment of Chabrolesque finality applied to adult lives that have only just begun. 98m. (Ray Pride)

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Australian director Scott Hicks made a smashing debut with “Shine” (1996), but his other work, such as “Snow Falling on Cedars” (1999), has suffered from dramatic inertia atop his accomplished pictorialism. Hicks’ cute-in-the-kitchen “No Reservations” (2007) was scored by Philip Glass, and their working relationship allowed for this procedure-driven doc, “Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts”; reportedly he was also given, from 2005 on, a year-and-a-half of access to Glass. Old friend Chuck Close, whose monumental portrait of a younger Glass is one of the artist’s most iconic works, is among the interviewees, including Ravi Shankar, directors like Martin Scorsese and Errol Morris, who only just made a film without Glass’ signature sound. “Philip does existential dread better than anyone,” Morris says in cheery observation. Woody Allen also consented to Hicks’ presence in his editing room for “Cassandra’s Dream.” There are brief glimpses of the 70-year-old composer’s life not behind the computer, including a confession by his much younger wife that does not surprise. ” Get up early and work all day. That’s the only rule,” Glass says. Hicks’ film demonstrates the results of that ethos. (Ray Pride)

By Ray Pride

There’s a style of filmmaking, at once concrete yet elusive, that draws me in: Antonioni, certainly, who conveyed attitudes and behavior through architecture that surrounds less-than-articulate characters, and Rohmer, whose confections of conversation in fact mask intensely structured storytelling schemes.

The relatively young Korean director Hong Sang-soo, who studied at the School of the Art Institute, is one of the younger directors whose characters’ seemingly diffident or reckless behavior is in fact only an apparition of normalcy or the everyday. A male character may be unkind to the women he longs for (in virtually every Sang-soo film) or may linger in drink when confounded (cogito ergo soju, if you will), yet choices of editing rhythms, framing of locations and exchanges of glances are always so artfully arrayed it could leave the wrong audience confused. Yet there are subtleties galore, and he’s a master of the telling, mysterious image.

With “Woman on the Beach,” a title that sounds like it could hark back either to Jean Renoir or to Eric Rohmer, Sang-soo covers familiar ground as he continues to lovingly triangulate desire in lower case with explosions of frustration. Surely the 47-year-old director psychoanalyzing himself sans self-awareness (or self-wariness) in these repeated patterns and patterning that has been a strength of his little-known work, an output of eight features between 1996 and 2008, from his debut, “The Day A Pig Fell Into a Well” (an unexplained title that Sang-soo years later claimed was taken from a John Cheever short story), the only older title not available on DVD in the U.S., and which does not reveal its narrative shape until the very, very last shot, which it does with shocking symmetry and grace. Other Western notes are reflected in his films and titles, including 2000′s “ Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,” referring to Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors”; and 2004′s “Woman is the Future of Man,” brilliantly encapsulating that film’s protagonist’s protracted romanticism while also taking its title from radical-surrealist Louis Aragon’s poem.

There is something simple and irascible in Sang-soo’s fixations: ornery, he here turns to a plentitude of everydayness, of platinum-numbskulled repetitive behavior, ingrained narratives or innate desire and ill-proportioned mortification. Yet, unlike Woody Allen, his male characters are shown up for their self-regard, their overweening sense of entitlement, their romantic knavery that wishes to be chivalry but usually is a mirror of their own self-absorption. His central figure on the “Beach” is a film director whose career is stalled. Could he go from Rohmeresque Sang-soo-style films to accomplished action pictures like Bong Jun-hoo’s “The Host”? Hardly likely; there’s a woman in the picture. Suffering writers’ block, director Joong-rae (Kim Seung-woo) convinces his production designer Chang-wook (Kim Tae-woo) to take a trip to the west coast of the country. Chang-wook had made separate plans with his girlfriend Moon-sook (Ko Hyun-joung), and decides to bring her along. Confusion and passion erupt, with Chang-wook and Moon-sook having their own mutual appreciation society on the side. Resemblances to “Jules and Jim” shift after Joong-rae returns to Seoul and brings another woman to the resort to rediscover the romance he’d had with Moon-sook… who just happens to turn up. Sometimes a screenplay writes itself…

Sang-soo had this to say in a director’s statement: “I relied on the actual environment provided by Shinduri Beach, where I spent each day writing and filming. I worked hard to discover all that I wasn’t convinced about but wanted to express, and then to render them tangible. Repetition is a great framework and basis for filmmaking. On the other hand, if repetition is part of a person’s behavior, we can take that as an indication of obsession. I wanted to see through repetition, but also to reduce repetition.”

But, to repeat, this schematic-sounding work is all done with unassuming grace and self-deprecating humor. I recently worked my way through the DVD set of Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales,” and marveled at the screenwriting skill, the dramatic force, underlying the waves of words, concrete yet transparent at once. Rohmer and Sang-soo accomplish similar yet parallel goals, capturing behavior in a narrative studded with misgivings, misunderstanding and musing, offering amusing self-critiques through his director-protagonist’s behavior. Yet, as he told an interviewer for Cinema Scope, “People around me gave advice, telling me that if you changed his profession, you’d grow more by exploring people different than yourself, but I didn’t listen… When I choose a character’s profession, it intrinsically forms expectations about what he can and cannot do.” Viewers who know Sang-soo’s work know what he can do, and can see what he’ll be able to do in the future, increasingly finding a way to incorporate his female characters into the cockeyed diagrams he makes of the world of desire.

“Woman on the Beach” opens Friday at Siskel.