Vincent Cassel -- Public Enemy No. 1

Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 (Review)

Vincent Cassel rules again in tale of real-life French gangster
By Steven Rosen
(From Cincinnati CityBeat 11-17-10)

Part two of the lean, explosive, unsentimental French biopic of that country’s most notorious gangster of the modern era, Jacques Mesrine, has just as much rivetingly realistic, kinetically filmed excitement and great acting as part one, which is just finishing its run at the Esquire Theatre.

Public Enemy No. 1 basically covers Mesrine’s life in France in the 1970s — one of numerous bank robberies, shoot-outs with police, prison and courtroom escapes, lovemaking with beautiful women, prideful boasts to anyone who’ll listen and occasionally frightening outbursts of violent anger — that finally ends with a veritable assassination by police.

The action in the film — directed by Jean-Francois Richet from a screenplay by Abdel Raouf Dafri (with Richet) — happens furiously fast and unfolds with verite-style breathlessly tense realism in the assured hands of cinematographer Robert Gantz. There is barely time for expository transitions. But what there is time for is the amazingly alive, alert and downright magnetic performance by Vincent Cassel as the chameleon-like Mesrine.

Looking like a combination of Bruce Springsteen and Raging Bull-era Robert De Niro (including a sizable paunch as he ages), with moments of Robert Mitchum-like late-period heavy-lidded sadness alternating with a mischievous sparkle, Cassell keeps you watching every scene he’s in. And that’s every scene.

While this is not a panderingly sympathetic portrayal, it’s hard to not feel the character’s sense of loss in short, tender scenes with his daughter and dying father. Public Enemy No. 1 also has excellent supporting acting — especially Mathieu Amalrec (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) as a far more cautious criminal accomplice and Georges Wilson (who since has died) as an elderly millionaire who takes a fatalistic attitude toward his kidnapping by Mesrine. Grade: A

Remembering George Hickenlooper's "Mayor of the Sunset Strip"

From HARP Magazine
2004

“Mayor of the Sunset Strip”

By Steven Rosen


Rodney Bingenheimer is a rock ‘n’ roll Zelig. He’s also a rueful Ponce de Leon, searching for his Fountain of Youth in pop culture.

In “Mayor of the Sunset Strip,” the enormously entertaining and surprisingly poignant – revelatory, even – documentary about him by George Hickenlooper, we see the short, pixieish Bingenheimer as a stand-in for Davy Jones of The Monkees on the set of the TV series. They’re side-by-side on the set, the same build with the same circa-1960s modish features. Both are young, of course, Bingenheimer only recently has arrived in L.A. from northern California, where he was a misunderstood adolescent. (The film will be released theatrically in March.)

Thirty-five years later, Bingenheimer is still with the hot rock celebrities he has befriended – only now as a late-night weekend deejay playing whatever he wants on modern-rock station KROQ. Coldplay and No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani are among those seen with Rodney in this film.

And he still looks ageless – a tiny slip of a man dressed in casual black outfits and wearing his brown hair in a still-1960s modish, rooster-style cut with bangs. His face still has its little-boy gentleness, although a crease around the mouth now gives him a frown-like smile like the comedian Joe E. Brown.

Hickenlooper, whose fine documentary “Hearts of Darkness” was about the making of “Apocalypse Now,” has a very different subject from Francis Ford Coppola in Bingenheimer. He seems to cruise through his life passively rather than trying to shape and change it. He is a facilitator rather than an artist, but he’s always where the action is.


This film nicely separates Bingenheimer’s public and private lives, without losing sense of him as a mysterious whole. The public life is a delight – Hickenlooper extensively uses archival film and video footage as well as the subject’s own material. There’s even a taped phone call of a very young Bingenheimer trying to reach President Kennedy in the White House.

To a giddy and exhilarating rock sound track, Hickenlooper shows Bingenheimer with everyone who ever mattered musically to L.A. rock from the 1960s onward. He’s seen with Sonny & Cher, Nancy Sinatra, X, Brian Wilson, the Beatles, Bowie and his beloved groupie friends the GTOs. Many of the celebrities sit for new interviews – Bowie, Jones, Sinatra and Courtney Love are especially insightful, loving even.

And the rowdies of L.A.’s 1970s-era glam/glitter scene, where Bingenheimer ran Rodney’s English Disco and was one of the first to champion arty, theatrical British rock, are present here, too. The towering Kim Fowley is hilariously vulgar – scary, even – as he talks about all the sex he got from the young girls who went to Bingenheimer’s club.

But the film captures the other side of Bingenheimer, too. There’s a loneliness reflected in his quietude – he admits to longing for a family he doesn’t have. In some emotionally raw footage, he tries to tell a younger friend, Camille Chancery, he loves her while she sits uncomfortably by his side.

His mother has recently died, and he keeps her ashes in his crowded apartment awaiting a trip to England to spread them. Hickenlooper follows him to England, where he releases the ashes on a tour boat and silently prays.

Bingenheimer also is resentful, although he’s too polite to get angry about it, that his radio station has slotted him on a graveyard shift – Sundays midnight-3 a.m. He’s never earned much, so it’s unclear what his future will be. “It’s unbelievable somebody could be in music this long, help so many people and just be in it for the music,” a younger KROQ deejay observes of Bingenheimer.

Indeed, it is – it’s also a little painful, too. But the great music that still makes him happy, and is as much a part of this movie as he is, alleviates as much of that pain as is possible.


(George Hickenlooper died Oct. 29, 2010.)

Lebanon: Claustrophobic Israeli Film About War

By Steven Rosen
(From Cincinnati CityBeat, 9-24-10)

LEBANON
Grade: B+

Today’s war movies — like today’s wars — are a long way from The Longest Day. The Hurt Locker, Restrepo (a documentary) and now the Israeli Lebanon are claustrophobic and involved with the almost existential day-to-day survival of their soldiers, mired in tight quarters in Mideast wars where the impossibility of decisive victory seems a foregone conclusion.

Lebanon, from director Samuel Maoz and based on his own experiences during Israel’s 1982 incursion into Lebanon, ups the ante. Virtually all the action occurs either within the tight confines of an Israeli tank alone in a hostile town, or as seen from the gun sight of it. The four young soldiers are grimy, sweaty, nervous, scared, sometimes profane, sometimes philosophical, sometimes heroic and sometimes not. In this, they seem very human — which is the film’s main draw after one tires of the limited setting.

The four are Shmuel the gunner, commander Assi, ammunition loader Herzl and driver Yigal. Comparisons to Das Boot are inevitable, but the spaces here are tighter (and the action is less dynamic). Because they are played by actors working from Maoz’s script, the characters are more dramatically satisfying to watch than the real American soldiers in Restrepo, whose macho-obsessed lack of introspection wore this viewer out.

Israel is clearly haunted by that war — there’s a tough, embittered melancholy to this as well as 2008’s animated Waltz With Bashir that’s overall much more mature and weary than American movies about Iraq and Afghanistan, which still are full of posturing. But, sadly, it looks like there will be all too many opportunities for our current war films to improve.

Film Review | The Social Network

Anti-Social
by Thomas Delapa


With a friend like Mark Zuckerberg, you obviously don’t need enemies.

In The Social Network, writer Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher flip through the dirty back pages in the life of the whiz-kid billionaire Facebook founder, and it all makes for a good and juicy read, but a slick one.

Those in need of a heavy volume of dramatic irony will find it in this breezy chronicle, which shows how one lonely, brilliant misfit can make a million virtual friends and several fortunes while deleting all his real friends in his rise to the top of the Internet heap. Call it Revenge of the 'Net Nerds when Harvard undergrad Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) has the idea of a “cool” way for his fellow students to connect and form friendships online–not to mention get girls.

But along with his vision of a brave new virtual world, Zuckerberg’s own profile includes a marked like for smart-ass sarcasm, double-dealing and outright betrayal, judging by this biopic based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires. Did Zuckerberg copy his idea from two rich Harvard frat boys and then cheat his best friend Eduardo Saverin out his rightful stake in the company?

In zippy jigsaw flashbacks, Fincher and Sorkin paste together the genesis of the now-holy Facebook, but they also make the connection between Zuckerberg and the revolutionary zeitgeist mindset that places the impersonal virtual world head and shoulders over the real one. Starting with Eisenberg, Fincher’s young faces turn in impressive performances, including Justin Timberlake as Napster co-founder Sean Parker, who slithers in as Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley Mephistopheles.

As well as The Social Network works with its wit and drive, it also leaves you unsatisfied on a deeper level, not unlike Fincher’s Fight Club and his other punchy contemporary dramas. He and Sorkin are so busy turning the Facebook/Zuckerberg pages, they don’t seem to much care about what’s going on between the lines.

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Originally published in The Perpetual Post, 10/7/10

A Review of The Tenth Inning

Hits, Runs and Errors
by Thomas Delapa


The Tenth Inning of director Ken Burns’ winning PBS Baseball series felt less like a fall classic than a classic forties film noir: A foul sense of doom and gloom was ever lurking on-deck, despite the two decades of on-field drama and brilliant heroics. The lurking gloom, of course, was steroids, Major League Baseball’s crippling scandal that made the Black Sox cheaters look like bush leaguers.

Fans of the game must have been crying in their beers during Burns’ painful blow-by-blow on the rise and fall of such tarnished diamond stars as Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire and Roger Clemens. Taking up his chronicle in the early 1990s, Burns returns with his documentary instincts intact, though not the same behind-the-scenes team that made the first nine episodes so much of a hit. Lamentably gone is the seasoned narration by John Chancellor; Keith David is only average off the bench. Burns’ lineup of sportswriter commentaries was also a bit out of left field, with too much playing time given to lesser-knowns at the expense of veterans. The largely generic background music is a weak out.

In the last two decades, professional baseball has been it’s own worst enemy. A renaissance in the grand new era of urban ballparks was followed by the near-suicidal players’ strike in 1994. All-star stories like Cal Ripken’s Iron Man endurance record, the superhuman hitting feats of Ichiro Suziki and the New York Yankees’ deep-pockets resurgence are left on base while Burns ploddingly shadows baseball’s surly dark knight, Barry Bonds, in his unholy quest for all those once-sacred home run records.

An unsung refrain in this ode/dirge doubleheader is “greed, greed, greed.” Most fans, however loyal to their teams and the sport itself, blame the players in our era of multi-million free-agent contracts for banjo-hitting utility infielders. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, indeed.

As to the ugly Steroid Era (which may still be playing at ballpark near you), muted whistle-blowers like Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci have their turn at bat, sending blistering line drives in the direction of the players, the owners and MLB commissioner Bud Selig, who all happily played Three Blind Mice during the travesty. Ironically, however the baseball world cheered the 1998 McGuire/Sammy Sosa home-run race as welcome relief from the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, ultimately baseball was far worse at cleaning up its own dirty laundry. On the subject of the ever-woeful Chicago Cubs after the infamous 2003 Steven Bartman foul ball, Verducci hits this winner: “They’ve had a bad century. It’s time to rally.”

But in Boston, long-suffering Red Sox fans finally rejoiced in 2004, burying the Curse of the Bambino as their team won its first World Series in 86 years. In this bright highlight, Burns swings for the fences and gets there, wrapping up Boston’s amazing, history-making comeback against the hated Yankees, a series that miraculously turned on the few inches between Dave Roberts’ hand, a glove and a stolen second base. Like a home run disappearing in the night sky, the lyrical play-by-play comments from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and columnist Mike Barnicle lift The Tenth Inning from mere sport reportage to a poignant sweet spot deep in every true fan’s heart.

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Originally published in The Perpetual Post, 10/1/10