Film review | Moonrise Kingdom

The Emperor’s New Khakis

By Thomas Delapa

Well, at least one critic got it right.

“This summer’s sleeper hit” proclaimed Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post of director Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.

As an aside from the popcorn gallery, I’ll just say, “My kingdom for a No-Doz.”

An arid heir to recent Anderson live-action films like The Darjeeling Limited and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, this Kingdom is anything but wild. Set in 1965 (for no apparent reason) on a mythical New England island (for no apparent reason), it’s the soporific study of an runaway boy scout who teams up with a misfit girl. Imagine a kiddie Badlands or a washed-out Blue Lagoon. However you picture it, it’s no good.

After showing such sparkling promise in his 1996 Bottle Rocket debut and reaching the heights in The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson’s talent and imagination have fizzled. Sure, he’s still crafting his meticulously composed vignettes of wry Americana, but his story sense—never much more than plebian—has lately been a dud. When you’re watching a Wes Anderson movie, you keep looking around wondering if anyone else (besides his actors) is in on the joke.

Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola (scion of the Francis Coppola house) dream up “New Penzance Island,” a bucolic backwater where adults act like kids and kids act like adults. At Camp Ivanhoe, upright, uptight Scoutmaster Ward (Edward Norton) is in charge, browbeating his boys with quaint threats and exclamations like “Jiminy Cricket!” All of them get in line except one: Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), a precocious bespectacled boy in a coonskin cap who goes AWOL from his pup tent and embarks on an oddball odyssey into the wild.

But this movie deserves no merit badges, except for Pretension and Quirkiness. It’s dressed up with nowhere to go, accessorized with Anderson’s typically overstuffed tableaux, photographed in long, gratuitous dolly shots. Abetted by bloated budgets for art design, Anderson fills his frame with trinkets, doodads, graphics and decor that refer back to nothing in particular, except maybe his own airy, flea-market imagination. His and Coppola’s dialogue is equally arch, composed of non sequiturs fit for only a king of smug indie obscurity.

Sam’s journey leads to a romantic rendezvous with Suzy (Kara Hayward), his sulky, eye-shadowed queen in this L.L. Bean-flavored land of plaid and khaki. While adults in the fairy tale are sappy and tree-thick, at least Sam and Suzy are accorded a royal treatment.

Don’t be blinded by the glittery star court that Anderson has assembled—Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, and Norton, as well as frequent star Bill Murray—as they are all overshadowed by the aimless and lackluster story. While Anderson wants to give us a preppie, pipsqueak riff on Adam and Eve, his career now looks like a fool’s paradise.

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6/26/12

Film Re-view | Contempt/Le Mepris (1963)

Waiting for Godard 

by Thomas Delapa 


For those filmgoers who believe that world cinema is in desperate need of a renaissance, if not revolution, there's no better antidote than the re-release of Contempt, director Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 modernist masterwork now playing at Denver's Esquire Theatre for a limited run.

Godard, a key figure in the French New Wave that also gave us Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Alain Resnais, made Contempt (Le Mepris) four years after his breathtaking debut in Breathless. A freewheeling homage to the American gangster movie, Breathless made a star of Jean-Paul Belmondo and heralded Godard as a Picasso-like destroyer of the staid conventions of movie-making.

Relatively speaking, Contempt was Godard's first big-budget production. Based on a novel (A Ghost at Noon) by Italian author Alberto Moravia, it was financed by Carlo Ponti (Sophia Loren's husband) and shot on location in Rome and Capri. But what made it a cause celebre was the casting of Brigitte Bardot, then Europe's reigning sex goddess. "B.B." had burst (literally) upon the scene in 1956 in Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman, virtually redefining sexuality in the commercial film. With Bardot aboard, Godard hired Hollywood heavy Jack Palance, an unknown Michel Piccoli and legendary German director Fritz Lang to play himself.

Photographed on luscious widescreen color by Godard ace Raoul Coutard, Contempt is an exemplar introduction to a director who once signed his name, Jean-Luc "Cinema" Godard. It's a difficult, exhilarating film, crammed with allusions to painting, drama, music and other movies. In fact, the finished product was so upsetting to U.S. distributor Joseph E. Levine that Godard was forced to add a nude scene with Bardot, though even that was subverted by Godard the trickster.

From Moravia's novel, Godard extracted, in his words, the "story of a misunderstanding between a man and a woman." Paul (Piccoli) is French writer who's come to Rome's famed Cinecitta studios with his wife Camille (Bardot) at the request of an egomanical American producer, Prokosch (Palance). Prokosch is unhappy with the movie version of Homer's Odyssey being directed by Lang. Then in his seventies, Lang had behind him such landmarks as Metropolis and M and Hollywood hits The Big Heat and You Only Live Once. Art constantly intersects with life in Contempt; to wit, Godard himself appears as the Odyssey's assistant director.

Like his New Wave brethren--most former film critics--Godard was infatuated with the cinema's power and traditions. In the memorable opening, a camera approaches the screen as it follows an actress reading a book. At the end of the shot, the camera leaves her and turns in close-up to us. Godard never wants us to forget that camera, nor of the world it creates, "a world that responds to our desires," says the narrator, quoting the seminal French film critic Andre Bazin.

Film has given us our popular mythology, our equivalent to the Greek epics, but then Homer didn't have to deal with producers, agents and stars. To Godard, Lang acts as the conscience of film, a cultured man who labors with Sisyphean endurance to bring a faithful version of Homer to the screen. But off the set, it's Prokosch who has usurped the role of the gods. Though evidently he despised working for Godard, Palance is marvelous as a titan of venal vulgarity. "I like gods, I know how they feel," he pontificates, reading aphorisms out of a little red book.

Godard's allusions give Contempt a cultural density that's no so far from Joyce's own Ulysses or Eliot in The Waste Land. Homer's work, of course, is an epic of Ulysses' treacherous journey back to Greece after years away fighting in the Trojan War. While Homer's hero battles sea monsters and sirens on the way home, his loyal wife Penelope fends off a gaggle of suitors until his return.

In this tale of demi-gods and men, rarely can Godard's "shipwrecked victims of the modern world" live up to such noble deeds. They speak different languages and must use a translator (Giorgia Moll) in conversations. Paul is passive and cowardly, testing his wife's fidelity by allowing her to be alone with Prokosch. Bardot's Camille has the beauty of Helen, but is impulsive and enigmatic. For Godard, men and women are indeed ruled by different planets, embodied in the primal reds Bardot wears versus the cool blues of Piccoli.

A seer about contemporary gender relations, Godard pessimistically finds little common ground between the sexes. In a scene that lasts a full 30 minutes, Paul and Camille have a meandering, banal--but realistic--argument in their empty new apartment, literally going around in circles as studied by Coutard's fluid camera. Unlike the women of old, Camille isn't content to be merely an appendage to her husband's life, and this change for Paul has turned his love for her into an Achilles' heel.

But Contempt isn't merely talk. It's a gorgeous film, from the crystal blue waters off the island of Capri to Godard's meticulous compositions and Georges Delerue's ominous yet tender romantic score [which Martin Scorsese cribbed in 1995's Casino]. Godard's zeal for cinema is so intense that he visually "quotes" from a number of his favorites, such as Roberto Rossellini's Voyage in Italy and Lang's own silent Siegfried saga, thus adding complex layers of meaning to the story. When Lang tells his crew to prepare to shoot the "Cyclops scene," there's a cut to the camera, a modern one-eyed monster that's devoured many a mortal.

For a time in the heady 1960s, Godard and his daring and smart compatriots opened up the eyes and ears of a generation of hungry filmgoers. They blazed a trail into a new type of cinema that was challenging, literate and passionate. Today that trail is overgrown, ignored or trampled on by profiteers, contemptible celebrity seekers and a conspicuously less demanding public.

Ulysses made it home, but as a near 50-year-old Contempt sorely reminds us, world film today is adrift at sea.

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Originally published in Boulder Weekly 12/11/97; minor additions 4/23/12.
Contempt was released as two-disc DVD set by Criterion in 2002.

Film Review | Casino Royale (2006)

Chips and a Dip

by Thomas Delapa


When British actor Daniel Craig was first announced as the new James Bond, hardcore 007 fans went ballistic. "Bland, James Bland," they dubbed him. In his defense, Craig told Entertainment Weekly, "They hate me. They're passionate about it, but I do wish they'd reserve judgment."

Deal or no deal, judgment day has come for Craig and Casino Royale, the 21st Bond movie extravaganza. Get ready for a flush, because this blue-eyed and blond Bond has a license to bore.

In the bygone line of screen Bondage, dating back to the nonpareil Sean Connery and the rudely retired Pierce Brosnan, Craig comes up short (literally) of even George Lazenby, the Aussie actor who had only one assignment, 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The spy who gagged me, Craig is to Connery what Mini-Me is to Austin Powers' Dr. Evil.

Gambling on Craig to carry on their billion-dollar franchise, producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli chose author Ian Fleming's first entry in the phenomenally resilient Bond series. Fleming's über secret agent was a cultural product of the Cold War (and British end-of-empire blues), but the fall of the Berlin Wall has only meant that Bond's "license to kill" was upgraded to include renegade Commies, terrorists, mad media moguls and other high-value targets.

Casino Royale deals out a losing hand, starting with the astounding absence of Monty Norman's killer theme music in the opening credits. The screenwriters (including Oscar-winner Paul Haggis) pay lip service to Fleming's 1954 book, but they've modernized it by playing to U.S. audiences in the age of ESPN, not the USSR. Most of the book involves Bond's cryptic game of high-stakes baccarat. Now 007 must go mano a mano with his foe in a made-for-TV game of Texas hold 'em poker. Yee-haw, pardner.

Yet director Martin Campbell's introduction of Bond is neither as card shark nor suave, karate-chopping spy. In a set-piece befitting Jackie Chan, not Jimmy Bond, Craig acrobatically chases an anonymous bad guy through the Ugandan jungle and up and down a construction crane. Surly and jut-jawed, Craig is not a kinder and gentler Bond. According to his exasperated and expendable boss, M (Judi Dench), he's just a blunt instrument.

It's no coincidence that Bond visits a Miami "Body Worlds" exhibit as a prelude to another no-brain chase. Craig's freakish, barrel-chested physique sculpts the new Bond as a Y2K caveman of few words. Craig doesn't even get to say, "My name is Bond, James Bond." This guy would be more comfortable ordering steroids, shaken not stirred, instead of a martini.

Bond's penultimate showdown takes place at a casino in Eastern Europe, where he faces down Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelson), a tycoon of terrorism whose evildoing is signified by his bleeding eyeball. Reluctantly bonding with Bond is a dishy British treasury agent (Eva Green) who's supplying the stakes for 007 to play.

Everything is in on the table in Casino Royale's royally dull denouement, from torture and betrayal and death in Venice to Bond's handy pocket defibrillator that could bring him back to life. Campbell and the film's gambling producers shouldn't have bothered. This 007 is DOA, though odds are he'll return to die another day.

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First published in Boulder Weekly, 11/22/06

Book Review | The Story of Hollywood: An Illustrated History

Hollywood and Bust

by Thomas Delapa


In the minds of most, “Hollywood” has always been much more of a mythic idea than a real place. For nearly a century, it has been the world’s film capital—glitzy dream factory, star-studded entertainment center and sinful new Babylon all rolled and reeled into one.

Of all the thousands of books on the business, art and history of Hollywood, few have devoted more than a handful of pages to its existence as a community and, since 1910, as a four-square-mile patch of Los Angeles proper. That sparse scene dramatically changed with the 2005 publication of The Story of Hollywood: A Illustrated History, by Gregory Paul Williams. Handsome, meticulous and chock-full of facts and pictures, Williams’ sharp close-up is just the ticket for serious movie fans.

A Hollywood native, author and part-time puppeteer, Williams writes about his home town with love and nostalgia, as well as a clear, incisive eye. For anyone who has seen Hollywood’s urban decline over the past 50 years, this account will at least be a reminder of what’s been lost. Of course, Hollywood hasn’t faded out entirely in its centrality as movie Mecca, but it has shed much of its glitter. Of the legendary major studios that once famously called it home, only Paramount remains.

First claimed from Native Americans by Spain and then Mexico, the area now known as Hollywood was once dubbed Nopalera—after a cactus. Nestled against the Santa Monica Mountains in the sunny Cahuenga Valley, the land was bisected by the Camino Real, the main Spanish trail down the California coast. Soon after California made statehood in 1850, a wave of Anglo settlers from the East began moving in, edging out Mexican landowners. The Southern Pacific Railroad furthered Americanization of the valley, with farmers and ranchers sowing an array of warm-weather crops, especially lemons, figs, grapes and strawberries. Envisioned as a pricey L.A. subdivision by town wheeler-dealer Harvey Wilcox, Nopalera was renamed Hollywood (after an Illinois estate) sometime in the 1880s, with the east-west Hollywood Boulevard surfacing as the main drag.

No one could have imagined that the budding motion-picture industry would take root in these rural boondocks 3000 miles from the East Coast. The year 1907 saw the first film company go far west, joined soon after by the Biograph Company and its great silent director D.W. Griffith. Whether due to the balmy climate, picturesque locations, cheap land or great distance from New York City—and its monopolistic movie syndicates—Hollywood’s environs became America’s fertile crescent for making “flickers.”

Williams’ vivid flashback is splashed with colorful characters, good and bad, backed by a supporting cast of thousands. From the start of the film era, there existed a tension between the puritanical locals and in-migrating movie people (including the predominately Jewish studio moguls), who were treated with suspicion for their freewheeling, often scandalous ways. But with the rise in Hollywood’s wealth, property values and global fame, the locals grudgingly accommodated the new kids on the block. It was Griffith’s incendiary 1915 Civil War blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation, which signaled the ascendancy of American film, with Hollywood as its glittery new capital.

Writing with enthusiasm and simple prose, Williams crafts a narrative as high-minded, melodramatic and tawdry as any Cecil B. DeMille biblical epic. It’s tinted with rose-colored regrets, most especially for the vintage buildings—like the Vine Street Brown Derby—wantonly cut from the heart of the community over the years. Cast as the main villain is the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), a quasi-public organization formed in 1983 that burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in public money in an effort to stem the growing blight.

As several major studios began moving out towards greener L.A. pastures as early as the 1920s—like Warner Bros., to of all places, Burbank—the stars themselves began a westward trek toward swanky Beverly Hills and Bel Air. Even though the burgeoning television and (rock) music industries recharged the production scene in the 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood by the 1980s had morphed into crime-ridden “Hollyweird,” a low-concept urban disaster plot missing a superhero.



Like many a true-life saga, The Story of Hollywood lacks the happy ending that its namesake is famous for. The 21st-century ushered in an upbeat sequel of sorts, starting with the new (now-sponsorless) Kodak Theater, which in 2002 won the Oscars back home for the first time since 1960. A hip, Gen-X-fueled club scene took a bow, with some stars actually returning to reside in dodgy but historic Hollywood. Unlike so many of its grand old theaters, the Pantages (1930) is still in the spotlight, as is Grauman’s Chinese (1927) and the Egyptian (1922), the latter lovingly restored as the non-profit American Cinematheque. The original Charlie Chaplin Studios (1918) has been taken over by the Muppets.

Since its calamitous subway construction in the nineties (compounded by a 1994 earthquake), this onetime citrus grove has dusted off and moved on, and has at least tried to put the brakes on seedy decline. But with the increasing decentralization and digitization of the film industry in the age of the Internet and the indie, Hollywood’s epic run as America’s movie capital may be on its last reel.

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3/27/12

"Jesus Camp" Review: From the Archives

“Jesus Camp”

Directed by: Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady

(Magnolia Pictures)

Grade:  B+

By Steven Rosen

“Jesus Camp,” a documentary about children at an Evangelical Christian summer camp with a decidedly conservative political agenda, arrives in Cincinnati Friday with an unusual back story.

The filmmakers, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (“The Boys of Baraka”), received cooperation from a Pentecostal children’s minister, Becky Fischer, to record the goings-on at her “Kids on Fire” camp – as well as to follow three children who attend. The children, from different Missouri families, are Levi, Rachael and Tory – good, well-behaved kids.

Amazingly and too ironic to be coincidental, this camp is located in Devils Lake, North Dakota. This is a place where children learn that charismatic-style religion and conservative politics are intertwined in the eyes of their adult authority figures. They pray for a cardboard cut-out of President Bush, are warned about the witchcraft in “Harry Potter” and ghost stories, and are encouraged to get into such an intense, trancelike state while worrying about abortion that they suffer crying fits and mini-breakdowns. To Fischer, they are capable of becoming child preachers helping to recruit for her cause.

She expresses her agenda militantly and even militaristically, comparing her task to that of Palestinians (Islamic fundamentalists, presumably) using their camps to teach their children to sacrifice themselves in a war for control of the Holy Land.

With an agenda like that, one would think Fischer an immediately scary figure – like Robert Mitchum’s portrayal of a homicidal preacher in “Night of the Hunter” stalking children with “Love” tattooed on one hand and “Hate” on the other.

But because she actually is an engaging and outgoing person, as are the children and their parents, the filmmakers and their distributor Magnolia Pictures decided to open “Jesus Camp” in the red-state Heartland first. Presumably, they thought, other Evangelicals would like this portrait. Fischer, herself, is supportive of the film.

But an interesting thing happened. A Colorado Springs religious leader – Rev. Ted Haggard of the National Association of Evangelicals – blasted the movie and encouraged others not to see it. Haggard is in the film, when the three children attend a service at his huge church. He has said in the press he opposes “Jesus Camp” because it gives a distorted view of the Evangelical movement by concentrating on a fringe wing.

The film has done poorly in those Heartland locations. But in bigger cities it is attracting a far bigger and different audience. There, many see it as the latest muckraking expose – along the lines of “Fahrenheit 9/11” or “Why We Fight” – of the secretive rightwing network that has allowed a polarizing President to maintain power and push his agenda. In particular, they say, this shows how some Christian conservatives indoctrinate their kids to the point of child abuse.

Removing politics from the equation, the film might also remind those concerned about religious teaching practices of the disturbing “The Devil’s Playground” of a few years back. That showed how the Amish encourage their children to drop out of school as soon as possible…so they don’t learn anything contradictory to the faith.

Unlike “Fahrenheit” or “Why We Fight,” “Jesus Camp” isn’t a leftist essay and doesn’t have flippantly editorialist comic montages. It observes its subjects with little if any commentary or directorial intrusion, although it has an awful score that seems to want to make every scene ominous and foreboding.

Ewing and Grady’s role models here are the more traditionally straightforward, verite-style documentarians like Frederick Wiseman or the Maysles brothers, especially the latter’s portrait of door-to-door bible peddlers, “Salesman.”

They do break away from their narrative to include on-air commentary from Air America radio personality Mike Papantonio, whose show “Ring of Fire” frequently targets the conservative Christian movement. (He is an active Methodist.)

This provides a balance of sorts – it shows there’s a more mainstream Christian view of American values than what otherwise is being espoused here. But “Jesus Camp” would benefit from more background information on where charismatic Pentecostalism, Evangelical Christianity, and conservative Christianity intersect and where they diverge.  

Still, putting all that aside, it’s hard not to watch the scenes at the camp, where these kids are pushed to tears and beyond by the adults and not ask, “What in God’s name is going on?” This doesn’t look like proper religious education. And it’s heartbreaking to see sweet Rachael, for instance, wander up to strangers like a beggar seeking a handout as she clumsily tries to convert or recruit them.

It should be noted here that the parents of the children are articulate and sincere. They worry about their children in a society driven by crass pop culture and the act of violence that they consider abortion to be. And they fear that secularism may be why that culture has gotten so extreme. They home-school their children at least partly to protect them. Their aim is true. They’re practicing their freedom of religion.

Yet, as they and Fletcher and her staff express their beliefs to their young charges and to the filmmakers – pro-Creationism, abortion is murder, global warming doesn’t exist, etc. – you have to wonder: What if they’re wrong about that?

Doesn’t society have an interest in making sure the children know the full body of knowledge on a given subject? Shouldn’t kids be learning how to separate that which is provable from that which is believed on faith? And shouldn’t they be able to learn without being worked into a panic?

(This ran in Cincinnati CityBeat, 2006.)