Month In Review: May 2012

May was a little slower month for me, movie-wise, mostly due to a short trip we made to NYC for my best friend's wedding. Nevertheless, I saw a few terrific movies as well as a couple of duds.

Damien Chazelle's Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench was a well-regarded movie among its festival circuit run a few years ago and, finally catching up on it, I can see why. It's shot on 16mm film in glorious black and white, with its handheld, vérité style drawing many comparisons to Cassavettes or the more recent mumblecore movement. The one (very significant) twist is that Guy and Madeline is also a musical. All the songs are original and some numbers succeed more than others, especially an early one that takes place in a nondescript building that starts out as a fun jazz jam then turns into a audience participation dance from room to room. (Here's a truncated clip.)

I've already written about Joss Whedon's megalodon of a movie, The Avengers, a couple of weeks ago, so I won't go into it much more here. But perhaps more interesting than the movie itself was the brief feud it caused between one of its stars, Samuel L. Jackson, and A.O. Scott, New York Times film critic. Scott--who is not only one of the best film critics around, but also a Pulitzer Prize-nominated one--gave the movie a lukewarm review, eliciting the movie star's fury and prompting him to summon his many minions to assemble and lobby, I suppose, for his dismissal. It was a peculiar "off with his head" moment from a multimillionaire über-star whose movie will make him many more millions regardless of one person's review.

Additionally, there was this tasty nugget of the-geek-shall-inherit-the-earth vitriol, "Fans Who Attack Critics of 'The Avengers' Completely Miss the Point of 'The Avengers,'" from Criticwire. Apparently, it isn't just Jackson upset at the rare (Rotten Tomatoes still has a 93% rating for the movie as of this writing) negative review of the movie, but the fanboys who will lace misogyny towards female critics that do the same.

Critics--with whom I align myself, if not in a professional or even talent-wise sense, then certainly in spirit--are often given the elitist tag. And Hollywood movies, especially summer blockbuster ones, are populist. But if the makers of these movies and their target audience can't stand even the slightest dissenting opinion and launch ad hominem attacks at those who have them, then it's really the former who are elitist.

A better Whedon summer movie, for my money, is The Cabin in the Woods, a movie he co-scripted with the film's director, Drew Goddard. It has the same verbal wit that I liked in The Avengers, but where that earlier movie fell into the familiar trappings of its genre, The Cabin in the Woods purposely and overtly subverts them. It's not a perfect film by any means--it goes off the rails at certain points--but it's a smart and ambitious one.

Probably the best movie I saw last month was Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress, the director's first movie since 1998. Like his debut, Metropolitan (the only of Stillman's I'd seen until now), Damsels is a comedy of manners, perhaps even more so. Greta Gerwig's Violet is the leader of a trio who run a suicide prevention center at their preppy northeastern college. One of the joys of her character is that she is completely mannered and proper, yet at the same time thoroughly filterless. Her id, ego, and super-ego all live on the surface and she's as original a character as I've seen in awhile. It's a funny and charming film and it has me hoping Stillman doesn't take over a decade again for his next one.

Dark Shadows is the 131st movie (I think) Johnny Depp and Tim Burton have filmed together. It's funny, but not maybe not funny enough. It's weird to me that a lot of movies that are remade from older television shows are actually comedies or, moreover, parodies of those shows--even if those originals weren't comedies themselves. Most of the comedy here comes from the fact that vampire Barnabas Collins (Depp) awakens in the 1970s after being asleep/trapped for 200 years. Some of it works, but it's thin.

The Dardenne brothers' new film, The Kid with a Bike, was the other great movie I saw last month. It's delicately observed and challenges the viewer to root for a pretty mean kid. He's mean for a reason of course and when he meets a single woman who essentially adopts him, the movie refuses to hit the familiar tropes of the loner kid and the single adult, each teaching one another about life. Instead the movie takes its own course, and continually forced me to think about how I would react in every escalating situation.

As I said, we took a trip to NYC this month as well and after a long day of walking around the city, Marnie and I felt like watching an on-demand movie from the hotel. When we found out that the newer releases were between $15-20 (WTF, Brooklyn Sheraton?), we decided to look at the discounted $4.99 movies and landed on, yes, Footloose. Craig Brewer's remake of the 80s hit essentially brought nothing new to the proceedings, save for a couple of nice gyrating moments from Julianne Hough. Funny that Brewer would choose make such a tepid movie after movies like Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan, ones that--despite how you may feel about them--are not only full of good music, but provocative. The more familiar songs from the original movie's soundtrack are also remade here and, like the new movie itself, feel like nothing more than karaoke versions of their predecessors. (Miles Teller though does give a pretty funny performance as the countriest and bumpkiniest of country bumpkins, Willard.)

My Dinner With Andre, a movie that, after a brief prologue, is essentially one long restaurant conversation between actor Wallace Shawn and theater director/actor Andre Gregory. The back and forth between the pragmatic Shawn and the more idealistic (and kind of pedantic) Gregory may sound like it would be a slog to endure, but it is anything but.

If I were to write another TV sidebar here, I would mention that Community did a spoof/homage of My Dinner With Andre in season 2's episode "Critical Film Studies" or that creator Dan Harmon's dismissal from the show puts into serious doubt just what type of show it will be for its next (and likely last) season. But I'm not, so I won't.

 

Instead, this month I want to mention a couple of things I've been listening to--a podcast sidebar. For the past couple of years now, I've been slowly getting more and more into listening to podcasts ever since I discovered the Slate Culture Gabfest (and then a few months later, the Filmspotting podcast). But this past month, I've fallen in love with two others I have just discovered. The first is NPR's Ask Me Another, a brand new live trivia podcast. Unlike most trivia nights I've been attended at bars, which consists mainly of merely, "Hey, what's the answer to this question?" Ask Me Another comes up with much more creative and inventive games for their contestants to play, such as an etiquette test from the 60s and a round called "Breakfast Cereal Haiku." Some games are musical and all are quite funny.

The other one is the more established Radiolab, a science podcast. However it's not a dry, textbook-like radio show, but one that takes a broad topic, like "Race" or "Mortality" or "Cities" and funnels them down and contextualizes them through human stories. The last episode, "Colors," was damn near transcendent.

June looks like a typically busy summer movie month, so hopefully I'll have more to write about then!