Film Review | Argo

Watch your back, Lincoln.  After Golden Globes upsets, Argo just may be the smart-money candidate for the Oscar Best Picture award....


Praise, Don’t Blame, Canada 
by Thomas Delapa

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives.

Just a couple years ago, after a cluster of bombs like Gigli and Jersey Girl, it was almost curtains for Ben Affleck’s Hollywood career. But since he's taken a bow in his new role as director starting with 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, the jeers have been disappearing. His taut, true-life espionage thriller Argo is a movie for grown-ups, and may even garner him Oscar applause.

If all you remember of the 1979-81 Iranian hostage crisis is bad news, ABC’s Nightline and Ted Koppel's hair, then Argo is just the ticket for prime-time counter-programming. This isn’t the story of the 52 Americans held hostage in the U.S. embassy by Islamic revolutionaries for over a year. Rather, Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio switch the focus to six other Americans who fled the Tehran embassy and hid out in the house of the Canadian ambassador, and their daring run for freedom.

Argo unfolds like a fact-based Mission: Impossible—and, yes, it does all sound too absurdly impossible to be true. Low-key, if thoughtfully stolid, Affleck is Tony Mendez, the CIA undercover agent who dreams up a fantastic plot that could only happen in the movies: Create new identities for the six as Canadians scouting Iranian locations for a phony Hollywood sci-fi fantasy, called Argo, and then spirit them out of the country.

It’s a screwball pitch, but Mendez’s superiors in Washington (including Bryan Cranston from TV’s Breaking Bad) reluctantly take a swing, as do a profane Hollywood producer (Alan Arkin) and a make-up artist (John Goodman), who agree to create a fake production to lend cover to the ruse. The pretext is Affleck’s cue to take a flurry of roundhouse punches at Hollywood, and even himself. (“You can teach a rhesus monkey to direct in a day,” Arkin snorts.)

Terrio’s wry, lean script (based on an 2007 Wired article by Josh Bearman) is a hairy balancing act, crossbred between Tinseltown satire and topical thriller. Affleck’s casting choices for the drama are boldly non-Hollywood, mostly unknowns who add grit to the life-and-death, documentary-like luster. Along with the shaggy hair and super-sized ‘70s glasses, you may also spy stealth jabs at Star Wars-era American escapism, standing in stark contrast to the dark times that found the U.S. empire at a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate low.

In Argo's sly “meta” metaphors, Affleck isn’t only the film's director, but acts as director of the six players who must pose as Canadians, drilling them for their roles. (Their motivation: um, to live). It will be his impossible mission to lead them through a dress rehearsal, into the airport and out of the country, negotiating a gauntlet of Iranian security agents, like Moses with a movie camera. Unlike the over-the-top special effects and superhuman feats of a Tom Cruise, Affleck and his Argo-nauts do something more improbable—dramatizing real, ordinary human beings forced to do the heroically extraordinary.

As director, Affleck also does something heroic, holding shots to organically draw out the tension and suspense. The conventional (i.e., stale) wisdom in the Hollywood action movie is for breakneck editing that holds the audience hostage, throttling them into submission. Affleck and editor William Goldenberg let the scenes play out, lending to the air of pulse-pounding realism. But Big Ben also gets bogged down in a Directing 101 trick, milking his crosscuts between parallel lines of action to juice up the pulpy intensity.

In a 2012 America seemingly desperate for a patriotic story—and in the midst of interminable Mideast turmoil—Argo reaches back into an ominous dark cloud to yank out a silver lining trimmed in red, white and blue. For Ben Affleck and company, that silver lining may also rain Oscar gold.

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10/21/12

Good Reads Often Lost in Translation to the Screen

Written on the Wind
by Thomas Delapa

It’s not a novel conclusion that great books commonly make for bad films, and that middling—or downright bad—books are more readily re-booted into good movies. 

The cinema is papered with best-sellers transformed into box-office boondoggles. For every Lord of the Rings or Gone with the Wind, there are a dozen blustery duds, whether Bonfire of the Vanities, Beloved, Breakfast of Champions, The Shipping News, the Robert Redford Great Gatsby or the Demi Moore Scarlet Letter, to name only a few. And who can forget (or remember) last year’s abysmal John Carter, an Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation that bled red ink by the buckets for Disney.

The Godfather, arguably the greatest studio picture of the modern age, was sired not by a literary classic but a mass-market Mafia potboiler. While Steven Spielberg’s watershed Jaws may have taken a bite out of  Moby Dick for inspiration, the actual pages came from the pen of Peter Benchley, not Herman Melville. Ditto, Billy Wilder’s archetypal 1944 film noir Double Indemnity paid off handsomely from the lurid prose of James M. Cain.

Hefty, reputable books are weighed down with baggage, whether based on character complexity, narrative density or unique technique. When a book is underlined as “unfilmable” in Hollywood, it usually means the end of the story for would-be adapters. Complex narration, multiple story lines or anything remotely stream-of-consciousness are a slippery slope on the screen. That means most anything by James Joyce, William Faulkner or their modernist followers. By contrast, 19th-century Jane Austen and Charles Dickens have long been go-to film favorites, both for their linear plots and singular heroes and heroines. In 2002’s wacky Adaptation, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman poked fun at the Hollywood treatment, turning Susan Orlean’s nonfiction The Orchid Thief  into a satirical "meta"-movie about the thorny problems of transplanting an acclaimed book to the screen.

Yet the bold-faced question marks that always surround highbrow novels didn’t cause 2012 filmmakers to holster their highlighters. Three major fall releases—Cloud Atlas, Life of Pi and Anna Karenina—were mapped out first on the page; none should make audiences want to pass up their library privileges.

Based on David Mitchell’s 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas is the Wachowski siblings’ (Andy and Lana, formerly Larry) lofty, fog-bound attempt to tell six intersecting stories in six time periods spanning from the 19th-century past to the post-apocalyptic (aren’t they all?) future. Despite all the Wachowskis’ Hollywood cred earned from The Matrix blockbusters, the big studios wisely passed on the project, sending the siblings and co-director Tom Tykwer globe-trotting to Germany for a reported $100 million in financing. The modern Greece of fall films, Atlas lost most audiences in its dizzying storytelling, whipsawing between far-flung ages and places and likely giving its cast, including Tom Hanks (in, yes, six roles), a historic case of motion sickness. Had the filmmakers read up first on D.W. Griffith’s legendary 1916 folly Intolerance—which tried to intertwine four different historical sagas—they might have predicted Cloud’s soggy forecast.

Oscar-winning director Ang Lee had brighter results with Life of Pi, even if his cinematic equation doesn’t add up to the strengths of Yann Martel’s 2001 prize-winning adventure tale: It’s a Kiplingesque survival story at sea, which might seem unsinkable on paper, at least in the wake of Titanic. Much of the film takes place aboard a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean, where a shipwrecked East Indian boy (Suraj Sharma), nicknamed Pi, must fend off and outsmart a ferocious feline stowaway, namely a Bengal tiger. Shot in 3-D, Pi is a yeasty concoction of realism, fantasy and rich visuals, but the drama drifts into the shallow end. Lee and screenwriter David Magee’s treatment founders in stretches, primarily because the story isn’t firmly anchored in any buoyant dialogue to speak of. 

Does anyone remember Robert Shaw’s gripping interlude in Jaws re-telling the USS Indianapolis tragedy? And at least Alfred Hitchcock in Lifeboat gave his World War II audiences a crew of chatty malcontents and a Nazi; even director Robert Zemeckis gave Tom Hanks' Robinson Crusoe-like Cast Away a volleyball to bounce lines off. But the best Lee can muster is the sight of the tiger’s hungry, hungry stare as the beast threatens to take a piece out of Pi. With scant narration, the movie lists back and forth to an adult Pi (Irrfan Khan) mundanely relating his yarn to a journalist. In 3-D, the mostly digitized cat may fool younger audiences, but in standard projection he looks as scary-real as Tony the Tiger.

Crewing again with his lithe Atonement and Pride and Prejudice star Keira Knightley, British director Joe Wright reaches higher on the literary shelf in Anna Karenina, which has been film and TV fodder countless times, including in 1935 with Greta Garbo as the doomed Russian aristocrat. In search of a fresh take, Wright and famed screenwriter/playwright Tom Stoppard boldly turn Leo Tolstoy’s 900-plus page tome into a stylized, modernist musical of sorts—but, um, without any songs. Nearly all of it takes place on and around a visible stage, with the actors weirdly maneuvering through sets and rustic backstage machinery: i.e., Brecht does Tolstoy. The idea, I guess, is that Wright and Stoppard want to shine a spotlight on social role and performance in rigid 19th-century Russia. (Plus it saved the production a ton of money not to have to shoot on authentic sets or location.) 

But what might have worked on an actual stage seems doubly artificial and jarring on film, and we search in vain for a sense of a convincing time or place that Anna, her bourgeois husband (Jude Law) and her vain lover (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) inhabit. As striking as Knightley is with those supermodel looks, she always has come across as a resolutely contemporary woman, with ungirdled body language, and seems no more suited to play the pathetic adulterous victim than Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In the end, despite the jeers or cheers, the movies will always check out the good, great and near-great books for source material. In recent weeks, U.S. theaters have unwrapped at least three more adapted classics, including the Beat bible On the Road, the musical Les Miserables and director Peter Jackson’s premier part to his super-sized Hobbit trilogy, with Bilbo, Gandalf, Gollum redux, lifted from the pages of J.R.R. Tolkien. In Hollywood and beyond, popular novels are still precious ore, if not always worth their weight in box-office gold.

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12/27/12

Film Review | Lincoln

Night at the Museum

by Thomas Delapa 

Laws and sausages, it's been said, are best not watched being made.

There’s a generous helping of the former—and a side of the latter—in Steven Spielberg’s heralded historical biopic, Lincoln. But will movie-going voters stomach a 150-minute presidential profile in courage that feels like a heavy chip off the block of Mount Rushmore?

No, Lincoln doesn’t land in theaters with a crash or a thud. It’s more like a whisper, the kind of hushed tone you’re schooled to use in museums and mausoleums. As a biography, the title itself is a misnomer of sorts, since Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner’s opus only spans a few months in early 1865, as the 16th president pokes, prods and pushes Congress to pass the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery in the U.S.

For nearly two score years, Spielberg has been synonymous with blockbuster Hollywood entertainment, alternating with his high-minded historical fare like Schindler’s List, The Color Purple and Amistad. This prestige production is even further removed from the patented Spielberg action formula. There’s nary an action scene to be found in these parts, so there’s absolutely no mistaking it for Gettysburg—not to mention Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Rather, Spielberg makes a strategic retreat to Washington, D.C., training his camera on a foray of low-key interior scenes that might as well been staged at Ford’s Theatre.

Towering (literally) above the cast in beard and stovepipe hat is lanky Daniel Day-Lewis, who’s a dead ringer for Honest Abe—with reedy voice and stoop to boot. Evidently awestruck that his star looks like he just stepped out of a penny, Spielberg constantly poses his star in pensive, heroic profile. The two-time Oscar winner shrugs off his premature bronzing in a few forceful scenes, but he generally keeps under wraps, weighed down by a long, dusty cloak of legend. Instead of freeing the slaves, Day-Lewis should have insisted on emancipating his painstaking performance style a tad.

Partially drawn from a book (Team of Rivals) by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Kushner’s script similarly gets bogged down in musty backroom political deal-making. Sensing an opening as the grisly Civil War draws to a close, Lincoln and his shrewd secretary of state, Seward (David Strathairn), hunt for votes in a raucous House of Representatives, both from their own abolitionist Republicans, led by an irascible Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), as well a handful of Democrats who might be persuaded, pressured, even bribed. Unsure of the dramatic bite of these smoke-filled shenanigans, Spielberg does his own logrolling, slipping in comic touches gilded to cornpone fiddle music.

As HBO’s fine John Adams mini-series showed, authentic American history can be truly compelling, but Spielberg and Kushner are too reverent and mythologizing, even as they go to pains to display Lincoln’s folksy, sometimes earthy wit. (Did you hear the one about Ethan Allen, George Washington and the outhouse?) The solemn tone is weighed down further by John Williams’ grandiose score, which chimes in with salutary horns better enlisted for an Arlington processional march. I may be going out on a limb here, but I do declare that the topic of slavery isn’t the hot-button issue it used to be. Spielberg, however, still seems to be fighting the Civil War, and, um, with horses and bayonets.

So you have to ask, then, why the filmmakers were so keen on running this long, lavish production up the flagpole, especially in an election year. Is it the curious resemblances to the presidency of Barack Obama, also recently re-elected and presiding over a bitterly divided Congress? While basic civil rights for African-Americans are at the heart of Lincoln’s crusade, Kushner (Angels in America) may be embedding his own topical amendments, from gender equality and racial intermarriage to gay rights.

Whatever the pertinent political motives, Lincoln makes for starchy, button-down history, more monument than movie. It may be an honest Abe, but it’s not nearly a winning one.

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11/20/12

Film Review | Samsara

Around the World in 90 Minutes

by Thomas Delapa

In Sanskrit, samsara roughly means the "ever-turning wheel of life and death." In director Ron Fricke's meditative non-verbal documentary, Samsara translates into a mute mélange of image and music that revolves from the humdrum to the stunning.

Five years in the making, Samsara is a return trip to the New-Age travelogue territory for Fricke that marked his 1992 Baraka -as well as 1983's trailblazing Koyaanisqatsi on which he was the cinematographer. In this incarnation (or perhaps reincarnation), Fricke and collaborator Mark Magidson trekked to 25 countries spanning the globe for a sensuous and spiritual spectacle, but one that will leave some audiences hunting for a thematic road map.

Fricke calls his work a "guided meditation," and the cascade of images captures a paradoxical world of dynamic contrasts: the sacred and profane, desert and mountain, city and country, rich and poor, primitive and modern. Central to both Buddhist and Hindu beliefs, "samsara" isn't exactly an heavenly concept, but rather signifies the eternal cycle of life and death, including the infernal bugaboo of human suffering.

This odyssey starts at the birth of a new day at Buddhist monastery in India, where monks painstakingly create, grain-by-grain, a mandala sand painting. Visually, Fricke and Magidson's running motif is the human eye, whether on a resplendent Chinese dancer, a statue of King Tut or on a gallery of candid subjects staring at the camera, giving off expressions that run the gamut from disquieting defiance to inviting exoticism.

Fricke's camera also takes the long view, giving us remarkable vistas of deserts, mountains and cityscapes, often captured in revealing time-lapse. A busy downtown shimmers at night, punctuated by a moving necklace of headlights, while a river of commuters rushes through the Tokyo streets in fast-motion like so many human ants. You may feel like a stranger in a strange land as you eye these human caravans and wonder in bemusement where on earth we are headed as a species.

But confused audiences may well ask, "Where in the world is Ron Fricke?" since his globe-trotting is so fast and furious that it might make your head spin. Inner-directed spectators will take to the ambiguities and apparent incongruities of Fricke's eco-montage. Others will no doubt wish for better directions. Fricke doesn't readily connect the dots or his shots, so you'll have to DIY, folks.

Still, there is much to marvel at in this trippy New Age tour, which could be looked at as an upscale update of 1961's sensational Mondo Cane. Pessimists will think that the modern world really has gone to the dogs, especially after observing the unsavory scenes from a Chinese chicken factory, where workers in pink jump suits and masks systematically kill on a scale that would be the envy of Joseph Goebbels. Fricke never fails to remind us of evolution of mechanized man, embodied in the scary spectacle of tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers marching in robotic formation. In the frankly bizarre category, the dead winner is a Ghana coffin shop, which makes it possible for one newly departed to rest in peace inside a casket customized into a giant shotgun.

Fricke aims high in this movie (it was photographed in lush widescreen 70mm), but the results are scattershot. With no script per se, only a rough scenario, he and Magidson let the images speak for themselves. They sometimes say volumes in beauty, mystery, weirdness and wonder. Other times, they barely whisper. Samsara is 90 minutes of checkered pictorial pleasure, but it's a world away from cinematic nirvana.

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9/4/12

Young Frankenstein revived at Denver's Historic Elitch Gardens Theatre

Historic Elitch Gardens Theatre "Film on Fridays" Fun Fact

Did you know that YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN utilized the very same laboratory props (we're talking serious beakers and electrodes) that Universal Studios used in its classic 1931 Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff?

So walk this way to the Historic Elitch Gardens Theatre in Denver and watch on Friday, Sept. 14, as it revives Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder's monstrously funny comedy that put a side-splitting jolt into the Hollywood horror movie. In the final film of  Elitch's electrifying summer season, Wilder is Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, reluctant inheritor of his grandfather's ungodly experiments to bring back life from the dead.

This 1974 classic also stars Teri Garr, Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle, Gene Hackman and Elitch acting alumna Cloris Leachman. Young Frankenstein is one spoof that never gets old! Rated PG. We're "Keeping it Reel" with a 35mm print.

An Elitch Theatre Advisory Board member, Ms. Leachman appeared on the Elitch stage in both 1983 and 1986 and won an Oscar for her supporting role in 1971's "The Last Picture Show." She's also won an amazing eight Emmy Awards for her TV work, more than any other performer. In "Young Frankenstein," our own last outdoor picture show of the summer, she's Frau Blucher, the mad-cap doctor's loyal housekeeper whose very name strikes fear in any nearby horse.

Lawn seating begins at 6:30 pm, with the show at dusk, preceded by live music (the Denver Soundtrack & Take That!) and theater tours. Latest Translyvanian weather report for Friday: a high of 76 and sunny.

Suggested donation $5+, with kids under 14 and members free.

Historic Elitch Theatre's "Film on Fridays" series is curated by Thomas Delapa.

4500 W. 38th Ave (at Utica), Denver, CO 80212.
Phone: 303-623-0216 (messages only)

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