Chronicle
Review by Two Jews On Film
“Tearing Apart Their Marriage One Film At A Time”

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THE GOSPEL OF FLUKE
Big Miracle
Review by M.V. Moorhead/Less Hat, Moorhead

Last week, in The Grey, humans lost in the Alaskan wilderness were turned into wolf chow. This week, in Big Miracle, humans struggle to save three whales trapped under the Alaskan ice. If you got all your information from the movies, you might conclude that humans were the put-upon species in the Alaskan ecosystem.

Veterans of the late ‘80s may recall that Big Miracle is based on a true story, at least in its broad outlines. In October of 1988, news media began to fret about a trio of California gray whales at Point Barrow, Alaska, one a juvenile, who had waited too long to begin migrating south and were separated from open water by several miles of ice; they had only a small hole through which they could surface to breathe.

Various groups pooled their resources to cut a path to safety for the enormous mammals, and the heightened media coverage broadened and intensified the effort. It was a highly improbable coalition — Reagan administration officials, oil company officials, the Alaska National Guard, the Soviet Navy, local Eskimos, and Greenpeace, among others. It’s almost unthinkable that equivalent groups would set aside their differences in today’s climate, for anything, let alone a mission this quixotic.

Directed by Ken Kwapis from a script by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, Big Miracle shapes the material something in the manner of, say, a broad-canvas Preston Sturges comedy, with lots of eccentric types bouncing off each other. The central character is an Anchorage-based TV reporter (John Krasinski) who longs to make the big time but is stuck sending human-interest dispatches from Barrow. His ex-girlfriend (Drew Barrymore) is the frazzled Greenpeace operative, and Kristen Bell is the cute reporter from LA who shows up to distract him.

The cast is high-powered — it includes Ted Danson as the oil company honcho, Dermot Mulroney as the National Guard pilot, Vinessa Shaw as the White House rep, Tim Blake Nelson as a cetologist, and Rob Riggle and James LeGros as stereotypical Minnesotans who ride to the rescue. Kathy Baker, Stephen Root and John Michael Higgins also contribute amusing bits.

I liked Big Miracle a good deal more than I expected to. It’s unabashedly a sentimental family film, with warmhearted performances, but it isn’t dumb, and it neither soft-soaps the sad side of the material nor milks it for pathos. In short, it doesn’t pander. Kwapis and the screenwriters fully embrace the whale-sized irony at the heart of the story: That everybody was there for the free PR.

This was obvious in the case of the Reagan and oil industry folks, who were trying to soften appalling environmental records, but it was just as true of Greenpeace, who acknowledged that the plight of the whales, though heartbreaking, was natural; humans weren’t to blame. Even the Eskimos, who were sanctioned whale-hunters, were hoping to improve their image to outsiders.

The movie is by no stretch a satire, however. What keeps it from cynicism is the suggestion that whatever their motives, when these people looked down the long-jawed faces of the whales, with their sweet, somehow pessimistic frowns, all that mattered was setting them free.

This leads, however, to another irony of human psychology upon which the film touches only briefly — Barrymore’s character summarizes it in a TV interview. Of course humans are more likely to feel compassion for animals that we find cute or beautiful, but I think that large animals fall into this category as well.

I was once walking with my then-boss along a wide tract of desert in North Phoenix long since paved over — and he spotted the nest of a large bird, a hawk or other raptor, at the top of a tall tree. The area was due to be cleared for construction, and my boss seemed really upset at the probable fate of the nest’s residents. He anxiously asked me if I thought that the birds would be moved.

I felt so bad for him that I almost made up some fake agency in charge of relocating large birds, but instead I pointed out that most trees have small birds’ nests, and no trouble is taken about moving them. This didn’t seem to bother him especially.

This incident came back to me after I saw Big Miracle, which from its title on suggests that when it comes to interspecies empathy, size does matter.

M.V. Moorhead is a frequent Jabcat On Movies contributor whose work has also appeared in publications ranging from the New Times weeklies to USA Today to Weird Tales. His e-novel, “Super Eight Days” (no relation to the film “Super 8″) is available from Amazon Kindle.

Big Miracle
Review by Two Jews On Film
“Tearing Apart Their Marriage One Film At A Time”

Watch all Two Jews On Film reviews on Jabcat.

Still crazy after all these years
Crazy Horse
Review by Ed Rampell

It’s doubly ironic from a schoolboy-ish point of view that the latest documentary by venerable filmmaker Frederick Wiseman is called Crazy Horse, since his first doc was titled Titicut Follies, which was shot at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts in 1967. Of course, the follies in Crazy Horse are quite different from those of the madmen in Titicut, as the new work is about the world famous Parisian striptease club of that name.

Film historian David Thomson has described Wiseman’s nonfiction films as “hand-held eavesdropping records of actuality,” and there’s plenty of that cinematic surveillance in Crazy Horse. The octogenarian documentarian was given wide access to the nightclub for 10 weeks, and even allowed to go where no man has gone before: Inside the strippers’ dressing and undressing rooms, which is usually strictly off-limits to males. Over the course of his coverage Wiseman shot plenty of backstage material, offstage meetings, rehearsals, costume (or lack of) fittings, makeup sessions, and the like, as choreographer Philippe Decoufle prepares for the new show “Desirs.”

Crazy Horse may appeal to voyeurs who desire to ogle females of a certain type jiggling about, but curiously, although a few of the dance routines are mildly arousing, this doc is mostly quite non-erotic. First of all, it is not true that the women are entirely naked; they all wear what looks like a pirate’s eye patch over their genitalia, and not a pubic hair, let alone labia, is to be glimpsed in this entire two hour-plus film. (And believe me, I looked – for purely journalistic purposes, but of course, in my endeavor to better serve you, dear reader.) In addition to these pubic patches, all of the strippers look almost exactly alike, and this is by design. The women are carefully selected to meet the “aesthetic” measurements prescribed by Alain Bernardin, who established the cabaret in 1951.

The women are almost all Caucasian (although from a variety of European nations) with the same body types. So viewers hoping to behold the wonderful world of women in all of their glorious varieties, ethnicities and shapes are bound to be disappointed. At one of the club’s weekly auditions, a tranny tryout is rejected on the grounds that employing transvestites, transsexuals, etc., is against Crazy Horse’s rather conservative code. On the other hand, this orthodoxy doesn’t rule out a dance number that arguably borders on sexual harassment. (The recent case of alleged rape of a hotel maid by IMF big wig Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a Frenchman, shined a light onFrance’s different attitudes towards harassment in comparison to stricter U.S. standards.)

Onscreen there are interviews with costumers, choreographers and the artistic director, Ali Mahdavi, who is obviously sexually obsessed with Crazy Horse. Mahdavi appears to be gay, and it’s bizarre to think that a gay male is in a position of power in order to co-create and co-present the supposed image of female sexuality. (This could explain those pesky pubic patches.) Lest you think this is a homophobic remark, let me quickly add that the same thing also applies visa versa: It would likewise be strange for straights to determine what is meant to be sexy to and for gays. The result of this process is icons like Rock Hudson, celluloid stereotypes of heterosexual “virility,” who are, in reality, homosexual offscreen. All of this causes lots of confusion and ambivalence for people finding and seeking their own sexual identities.

In any case, audience reactions are barely touched upon in Crazy Horse, and none of the strippers are ever interviewed. And why would they be? The audiences who have flocked to the Paris’ “nude chic” club for the past 60 years are going for the “girls’” bodies, not their brains. They are just pieces of flesh, tits and assess meant to titillate and amuse audiences. In one scene where they watch the missteps a video of a male ballet dancer they come across as being silly and vapid, if not stupid.

But I for one would have been interested in finding out more about these women: Why do they strip? Is it for the money? If so, how much do they make? Are they working their way through medical school to become neurosurgeons? Where do they come from? Is this a way to escape the grinding poverty of post-socialistEastern Europe? What are their sex lives like? Are they exhibitionists? Do the nearly nude rehearsals and performances turn them on? (We’re told that touching during the all-female dance routines makes them uncomfortable.)

But the film, apparently like the club, is unconcerned with the women’s minds. And perhaps this is the sly point that Wiseman is wisely making in this behind the scenes look at yet another institution and its power relationships, in the maestro’s 37^th documentary. Wiseman remains the filmic fool who goes where angels fear to tread and dance.

BLAME IT ON BRIO
Lula, The Son Of Brazil
Review by Ed Rampell

In the past few years a slew of biopics about recent European rightwing leaders have been released, including The Conquest (about Nicolas Sarkozy’s rise to France’s presidency), The Iron Lady (with Meryl Streep as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher), The Queen (about Queen Elizabeth and Britain’s sellout and war monger, Prime Minister Tony Blair), Il Divo (about Italy’s Christian Democrat senator for life and Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti), as well as Il Caimano, which lampoons Italy’s buffoonish Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Now there’s a feature to cheer for about one of the good guys, as Fabio Barreto’s Lula, Son of Brazil joins Clint Eastwood’s ode to Nelson Mandela, Invictus, as a biopic about a left-leaning leader.

This stylish, stirring, poignant picture follows Luis Inacio Lula da Silva from his birth and humble origins in Brazilian hinterlands to his migration to the urban squalor of São Paolo’s favelas. Lula is real salt of the Earth, a man of the people, who during his childhood was a shoeshine boy and fruit peddler. His father is a ne’er-do-well who deserts the family, although his mother, Dona Lindu (Gloria Pires) is a loving, nurturing, encouraging pillar of strength. Several actors portray Lula from childhood to adulthood, and newcomer Rui Ricardo Diaz incarnates the grownup metal worker as he rises in the ranks of the trade union movement that challenges the factory bosses and Brazil’s military dictatorship. Like Mandela, Lula becomes a political prisoner (albeit for a far shorter time than his South African counterpart) who eventually became head of state.

Along the way, Lula endures personal tragedy and loss, as well as public struggles against the military regime. Sequences of factory strikes, occupations, rallies, demonstrations and government crackdowns are shot with cinematic verve and gusto by Gustavo Hadba, and reminded me of 1969’s Z, the Costa-Gavras classic about the Greek colonels’ coup that won the Best Foreign Film Oscar. However, Barreto and his cinematographer Hadba also have keen eyes for filmically rendered, often exquisite close-ups that bring viewers into the drama.

It is this balance of the political and the personal, in terms of film form and content, that makes Lula so gripping. The private family and romantic elements are organically linked to the mass drama – just as they are in real life, too. Like the moving father-son relationship in A Better Life, the mother-son relationship between Lula and Lindu is extremely touching, and of course emphasizes how parenting is the most important job in the world. This is one of the best silver screen depictions of a mother-son relationship set against a social backdrop since V.I. Pudovkin’s 1926 Soviet revolutionary silent masterpiece Mother, based on Maxim Gorky’s novel.

The acting has a Neo-Realist flavor to it in the sense that a working class milieu is truthfully depicted, although most of the lead parts are played by professional actors. Rui Ricardo Diaz, an unknown, had theatre training; this turn in the title role of an epic is his first film role. In addition to Diaz and Gloria Pires, Cleo Pires as Lula’s first wife Lurdes and Sostenes Vidal as Ziza, the brother who is to the left of Lula, also excel. Cleo is the real life daughter of Gloria Pires, a telenovela star who also acted in 1995’s O Quatrilho, an Oscar nominated drama directed by Barreto.

Politically, Lula, Son of Brazil depicts its proletarian protagonist as an honest trade union militant who repeatedly asserts that he is not “a communist.” Lula was more or less a social democrat, and the successful Workers Party candidate for president in post-dictatorship Brazil ruled the country in that way. While he was part of the Bolivarian trend of left-leaning South American leaders portrayed in 2010’s great Oliver Stone documentary South of the Border, he is clearly not as radical as his counterparts in Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela. However, after serving two terms in office he reportedly reduced poverty, left Brazil better off than he’d found it before becoming president, remained immensely popular, and handed the presidency off to a democratically elected woman and former guerrilla, Workers Party candidate Dilma Rousseff.

The movie’s final credits become propagandistic, with a hagiography of Lula consisting of titles telling boasting about his achievements and photos of him meeting with various world leaders. The transition from fiction to factual is jarring, and also strange, because the rest of the biopic has a far greater ring of truth. But this is a mere quibble; otherwise, Lula is a marvelous motion picture experience about a man and a movement that shook South America’s largest nation to its core. If you happen to love great movies, don’t miss Lula, Son of Brazil.

Original Title: Lula, o Filho do Brasil

The Grey
Review by Two Jews On Film
“Tearing Apart Their Marriage One Film At A Time”

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Man On A Ledge
Review by Two Jews On Film
“Tearing Apart Their Marriage One Film At A Time”

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NEW YORK STATE OF MIND
Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close
Review by M.V. Moorhead/Less Hat, Moorhead

Despite the title, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a mostly quiet movie, and for quite a while it keeps its emotional distance, too. The central character, Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), the son of a Manhattan jeweler (Tom Hanks), speaks in a direct, declarative manner, even when, a couple of times, he raises his tone in anger.

He has plenty to be angry about. Oskar’s very smart and imaginative but obsessive, phobic, possibly Aspergers-afflicted. None of this gets any better after 9/11, on the morning of which his father is at a business meeting more than a hundred flights up in the World Trade Center. This, presumably, is the reference of the title—how New Yorkers perceived the attacks. The loss leaves Oskar even more confused and secretive, and opens a gulf between him and his gentle, shattered mother (Sandra Bullock).

Oskar’s Dad would send him on fanciful “reconnaissance missions” in Central Park, designed in part to force him to interact with other people, in search of artifacts of a mythical “Sixth Borough” of New York City. About a year after what Oskar refers to as “The Worst Day,” the boy is snooping in his Dad’s closet, and he finds a key in a small envelope with the word “Black” written on it.

Taking this as a posthumous reconnaissance mission, this strange, wounded kid ventures out into his strange, wounded city. He starts spending his Saturdays pestering people named Black throughout the Five Boroughs, sure that if he can find the lock that this key fits, it will reveal a message from his father. Really, of course, he just wants to keep his connection to his beloved departed parent alive.

I must admit that it took a while for me to respond to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The film is directed with precision by Steven Daldry and beautifully shot by Chris Menges, and it features another lovely, urgent score by Alexander Desplat. There’s no shortage of fine acting, either. But for almost the first half, the script, by Eric Roth from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, seems precious and self-consciously whimsical.

It’s also a particularly single-minded exercise in that relentlessly pursued theme in the American narrative tradition, the Search for the Father. For all the excellence of young Horn’s performance, when the supposedly sweet-natured and sensitive Oskar ignores, even exacerbates his mother’s sufferings, it becomes hard to like him, fairly or not.

But about midpoint, a character enters the story known only as The Renter, who lives with Oskar’s grandmother (Zoe Caldwell) and can’t or won’t speak. He and Oskar take to each other, and he starts to accompany him on his Saturday quests, conversing only through cryptic scribbles in his notebook, or through the words “Yes” and “No” written in the palms of his hands.

The Renter is played by the great Max Von Sydow, and the odd, somber rapport that he and Horn find in their scenes together makes the movie start to click. It might be too much to say that Von Sydow, with his alert, wary face, saves the movie single-handedly. But he’s a big part of its salvation, and he does it without ever speaking a word.

By its final stretch, when the mystery of the key was finally solved, and Oskar’s own terrible secret was cathartically revealed, I was fully drawn into the movie. Oskar’s flailing reaction to the tragedy becomes a proxy for his city’s, and his country’s, and if what he learns about himself and his neighbors is extremely heartbreaking, it’s also incredibly uplifting.

M.V. Moorhead is a frequent Jabcat On Movies contributor whose work has also appeared in publications ranging from the New Times weeklies to USA Today to Weird Tales. His e-novel, “Super Eight Days” (no relation to the film “Super 8″) is available from Amazon Kindle.

We Need To Talk About Kevin
Review by Two Jews On Film
“Tearing Apart Their Marriage One Film At A Time”

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Coronation of a sexy citizen above suspicion.
Miss Bala
Review by Ed Rampell

Stylish cinematography, deft direction and edgy storylines characterize the New Mexican Cinema spearheaded by creative forces such as actors Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, who, appropriately, share producing credits for this wave’s latest release north of the border, Miss Bala, Mexico’s official Oscar entry. Mexico’s drug wars – which have reportedly claimed up to 50,000 lives in the past few years — are providing grist for movie mills, from this crime noir directed and co-written by Gerardo Naranja to Oliver Stone’s upcoming Savages.

In Miss Bala Laura Guerreo (stunning Sonora-born Stephanie Sigman) is a typical 23-year-old senorita in Tijuana who has nothing to do with crime and decides to enter the Miss Baja beauty pageant. This leads to her unintentionally becoming ensnared in extremely violent gang warfare that pits the ironically named La Estrella (“The Star”) gangsters against the DEA, the Federales and more, with the hapless, helpless Laura caught in the crossfire.

During her ordeal, which includes bombings, trafficking, kidnapping and gunplay galore, the terrified Laura is often curiously passive. At times it seems as if this innocent bystander doesn’t act on opportunities to escape, take the money and run, resist rape, etc. Maybe Laura fears that resistance is futile and means certain death? Perhaps Laura and her inner paralysis symbolizes the law abiding Mexican masses who are caught up in this criminal tidal wave, overwhelmed and unsure as to what to do and how to react?

Throughout the trials and tribulations they visit upon her, rather amazingly, gang chief Lino Valdez (Noe Hernandez) and his fellow gangbangers protect the embattled Laura. They also override the rejection of her beauty contest application, paving the way for the lovely Laura to compete. Why? There’s a method to their madness, which in the interests of avoiding plot spoilers your mum’s-the-word reviewer won’t reveal here. However, suffice it to say that the title of the film, Miss Bala – which translates into English as “Miss Bullet” – seems to ironically comment on the Miss Baja beauty pageant, and perhaps on the state of beleaguered Mexico’s tourism industry. (Although I must say that I visited the Riviera Maya near Cancun last year and saw no signs of the drug wars in that part of the country.)

In addition to Ms. Sigman’s bewildered, perplexed, put upon performance and sensuous presence as a senorita in peril, what I enjoyed most about Miss Bala is its scintillating cinematography. Mátyás Erdély’s camera frequently moves, evoking what is the essence of motion pictures, moving pictures, movies: Movement at 24 frames per second. However, this director of photography’s camerawork is never frenetic, nor is Miss Bala’s violence mindlessly gratuitous, unlike the cinematography and violence in, say, The Adventures of Tintin. I suspect that Steven Spielberg completely pummeled all of the charm out of Herge’s comic strip, just as he vandalized James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan with another overblown, pointless production in 1991. For a fraction of Mr. Spielberg’s budget, Senor Naranja has created a far superior action flick minus 3D imagery, which captures a moment in time when much of a nation is at war with itself, fuelled by drugs and their buyers in El Norte.

Miss Bala is one of the best, most exciting crime pictures I’ve seen since last year’s Congo-set Viva Riva! Mexico’s cinema has become so hot that even gringo Will Ferrell is getting into the act, starring in the forthcoming genre spoof Casa de mi Padre – with, but of course, the protean Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna. The Mexican cinema has come a long way since Wallace Beery starred as Pancho in the 1934 Hollywood-made, Mexico-shot Viva Villa! which recently played on a double bill at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with the Paul Muni, Bette Davis 1939 classic Juarez, and were presented by Hispanic film historian Luis Reyes. Viva Mexico’s film revolution!