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A hobby is a hobby.

Early in Lone Scherfig's An Education, Jenny is seen reading a copy of Albert Camus's existentialist tome, The Outsider, while sitting with her classmates in an English cafe. In a way, this is everything you need to know about Jenny, a 16-year-old Twickenham schoolgirl. She’s a bit of an outsider herself. Not that she doesn’t have friends or even the attention of the boys in her class. It’s that she’s better than all of it. She’s a big fish in a small pond. Her ambitions to attend Oxford are to experience the finer things in life. She wants to listen to good music, eat at good restaurants, watch French movies, discuss--obviously--existentialist novels. But to her father, a post-secondary education is simply the most practical alternative in the event she doesn’t find a husband to support her. When David, an older, richer, more worldly man drives up to her at the bus stop on a cold, rainy English afternoon, she finds her way to a bigger pond.

The story of a thirty-something seducing a 16-year-old in pre-hippie London may sound more like a TV movie-of-the-week, but An Education is smarter and more subtle. At its surface (and what a slick, shiny surface it is), the film tracks Jenny and David's courtship and the whirlwind of opportunity it creates for her to live a world outside the doldrums of her Twickenham existence. Through David, she gets to experience her ambitions first-hand, bouncing from art auctions to jazz clubs to fancy restaurants to a visit to Oxford. Instead of listening to French records in her bedroom or watching French movies at the cinema, she actually gets to visit Paris.

But underneath it, An Education explores what it means to be complicit in the lifestyle you choose (or choose to turn your back on). Complicity seems to be the oft-overlooked component of the perpetually dissatisfied. Our lives, despite the certain presence of unchangeable social, economic, and physiological factors, are of our own making. It may or may not turn out as planned but we all have some sort of hand in creating and changing it. When Jenny decides to overlook some seedier aspects of what David does for a living or contemplates not attending Oxford at all, they are life-defining moments of her own choosing. When Jenny's parents allow their daughter to date a wealthy man more than twice her age, they are complicit in whatever the resulting fallout may be.

At the center of the film is of course Jenny, in a performance by Carey Mulligan that will almost certainly earn her an Oscar nomination. It's one that requires her to display quite a range--from idealistic to cynical; from poised to wide-eyed and back again. In so many movies these days, we are required to laugh at the characters. We look down on them for their stupidity or ignorance and, in many cases, these films want us to find these traits acceptable or even endearing. It is rare and refreshing to see a character as intellectually present as Jenny, one who--despite her obvious youth and naïveté--just sort of gets it all:

JENNY
I’m still trying to work out what
makes good things good. It’s
hard, isn’t it?

DANNY
The thing is, Jenny, you know,
without necessarily being able to
explain why. You’ve got taste.
That’s not even half the
battle. That’s the whole war.

It means never having to say you're sorry.

There's a scene in Marc Webb's (500) Days of Summer in which Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) attends a house party thrown by Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel) and we see in split screen the difference between his expectations of what will happen at the party (which, more accurately, are his desires) and the reality of it.

Intermittently during Nicholas Jasenovec's faux documentary, Paper Heart, elderly couples recall the stories of when they fell in love or how they first met à la When Harry Met Sally. But instead of simply talking heads, Charlyne Yi, the film's protagonist/subject, recreates these scenes with paper cutout puppets and landscapes.

(500) Days of Summer and Paper Heart are two distinctly different films. The former foregrounds its own artifice, with its broken narrative and fantasy sequences. The latter, while ultimately a pretty thinly-veiled ruse, keeps up the pretense of being a documentary. But in their own way (as in the two episodes above, for example), they find mutual ground, arriving at a similar point about the uniquely nebulous idea of love--or, should I say, LOVE.

In Paper Heart, Charlyne Yi--comedienne and all-around goofy gal--isn't so much in search of love in the same way many of us are. Instead she is looking for some kind, any kind, of definition for love and then whether or not any of that can apply to her. When she meets Michael Cera (Superbad, Juno), the quirkiest of couples emerges and the question of whether true love is in the cards for her is put to the test. In (500) Days of Summer, the question of true love is never in doubt for Tom. True love is the destiny of all, most certainly him. So when Summer floats into his orbit, it's a fait accompli--the two will spend the rest of their lives together. Well, at least he thinks so.

Their stylistic differences aside, on some level these characters are interchangeable. Tom could have easily been wooing Charlyne instead of Summer; and Summer would have been just as reticent to engage in anything serious with Michael as she was with Tom. It is the classic inversion of the gender stereotype--the hopelessly romantic male and the wild, cynical female he attempts to tame. And as both films are essentially false constructs, they point to a fundamental aspect of love--especially to that of love in the movies. Love isn't so much an actual thing, even a feeling, inasmuch as it is itself a construct, no more than an idea that people create in their heads. Like film itself, it's a mere projection. Any number of Summer Finns could have waltzed into Tom Hansen's life and the story would have played out similarly. When Michael enters Charlyne's world, it isn't really their emotional status at stake, it's the movie's. The premise of the film asks whether love has a place in Charlyne's world, not if Michael does.

I'm beginning to think that this is the ultimate fallacy of love. The marginally humble opinion of this writer is that one of the major reasons love tends to fail is that people are unwilling to recognize the large distance between expectation and reality.  At their core, both films are significantly more hopeful than this cynical (realistic?) stance, but the inclusion of the episode in (500) Days above or the reenactments in Paper Heart make them more fully engaged with the nuance of adult relationships than most of their mainstream counterparts and, resultingly (or maybe unwittingly), more critical of it.  Oh, and they're hilariously funny.  What else do you want from a romantic comedy?

I leave tear stains on the ground.

When Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, one of the oddest chapters in modern popular culture ended nearly as abruptly as it burst onto the scene. In the weeks and months prior to his now controversial passing, Jackson was working on a massive concert tour called "This Is It." The director of the series of concerts was Kenny Ortega and, culled from the significant amount of backstage footage, he also directed the behind-the-scenes look, Michael Jackson's This Is It.

The film isn't at all about Michael Jackson the man. None of his childhood, his personal demons, the controversies, the scandals are in this film. It isn't the biography of a life or even a career. Rarely in the past 15-20 years has the name Michael Jackson been mentioned purely in terms of his artistry. Instead, through his own actions and our own need for salacious headlines, we tend to bury the lead. But in This Is It, that's all pushed aside and we see the musician and performer, the talent that first put him under the spotlight.

I'm a big fan of these sort of inside looks. Whether it be a movie, the recording of an album, the story behind a great novel, or the production of a concert, there's something I find immeasurably satisfying by having the curtain pulled back and observing how art is created. I love listening to early demos of my favorite songs, or hearing the outtakes of studio sessions of my favorite albums, or watching a DVD with the director's commentary playing.

In a roundabout way, it's like a distant cousin to criticism, except it's traveling in the opposite direction, heading towards each other. Criticism, at its core, is really a type of deconstruction. It takes the work apart and tries to make sense of it. Things like the Beach Boys' Pet Sessions, and The Beatles Anthology series, and "Project Greenlight", are what I would call pre-constructions. It shows what goes on before the work is complete, the false starts, the misguided rewrites, the trial-and-error. And the final product is where the two streams meet in the middle, or from where they depart.

Ortega is to be commended for how he assembled the footage in the film. As a doc, it's episodic, yet thoroughly focused. There's very little filler here, not much in the way of extraneous material. It's simply about the work that goes into putting on a show of this proportion. "That's why we rehearse," Jackson says a couple of times in the movie as they perfect the show.

But beyond the filmmaking technique, a documentary is only as strong as its subject and Jackson is the drive behind all of it. What's apparent after stripping away all of the controversy is that he still had it as a performer. He sounds as good as he ever has and it's riveting to see someone maneuver in such a focused manner. In a way, it's better than the concert could've been. Here we don't get to see all the bloated effects and pyrotechnics. What's left is a portrait of a performer as lean as the man himself. And that's the way he should be remembered.






The vocal-only track of probably my favorite Jackson song.

Happy days are here again.

From the "Thank God somebody came to their senses" file, the Chicago Sun-Times reports that A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips, film critics for the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, respectively, will replace the two Bens (Lyons and Mankiewicz), after their one-season experiment as hosts of "At the Movies", the movie-review show originated by Roger Ebert and the late Gene Siskel.

After a couple of episodes of the Bens' version of "At the Movies", it was clear to me that the show that had as much to do with my love of movies as anything else had turned into a joke and apparently the execs at Disney-ABC only needed a season to see things the same way. (I'm sure the infinitesimal ratings had something to do with it too.) Read my full diatribe on the initial hiring of the Bens here.

But why did it take a disastrous season for anybody to realize this was and would be the case? After Mr. Ebert lost his ability to speak, both Scott and Phillips (who, by the way, are in my opinion two of the very best mainstream film critics this country has to offer) filled in and co-hosted with Richard Roeper. And both were as articulate and insightful on camera as they have been in print.

Now I realize a syndicated television show reviewing movies isn't going to win a large Nielsen share, but when (legitimately or not) there seems to be a constant lament about the death of film criticism or the dwindling relevance of film critics, this feels like something more than a minor victory.

And now for something completely different.

The NBA Finals have come to Orlando for the first time since 1995 and only the second time ever. The city is dressed in blue and white and Orlando, a city I often criticize, has rallied around a cause in ways I've never seen. What slightly irks me is that this surge of pride for its home team, the swarm of #12 jerseys littered across town, is just happening now. Where is this city during the lean years? Where were they when they won 21 games in '04? Were they wondering if the team would draft Emeka Okafor with the #1 pick instead of Dwight Howard?

The Magic are the only Orlando team in any of the major professional sports and sometimes I feel as if this city doesn't realize they exist. Maybe Orlando just isn't a sports city, but neither is Green Bay, who also has only one professional team, yet their city shuts down every Sunday during the fall and winter for their beloved Packers. Granted, that team has a tradition we don't have yet, but traditions start somewhere and ours should start here and start now.

However, as I said recently to a friend, I'll take this fair weather fandom as long as my team is winning. And to my next point, it illustrates how much sports has this ability to galvanize a city, a community, a family. There's a scene in City Slickers when Helen Slater's character asks Daniel Stern's about why he loves baseball so much. He says that even when he was 18 and couldn't communicate with his father, they could still talk about baseball. I'm not 18 and I can talk to my dad about a lot of things, but 9 times out of 10, the first thing we talk about when we meet is sports. It's part of the fabric of a relationship between a father and a son, or between friends, or among a community.

In my most immediate circle of friends, I'm really the only sports fan and I think they often wonder why I care so much about it. This is why. When people who having nothing in common, when a city that seems to have no actual direction can come together to support and rally around their local team, then it becomes bigger than the game itself. It may be fleeting--in fact it often is--but it's better than nothing.

A little catch up...

I've been sick here for about a week and have yet to visit the brand new downtown Orlando theater, the Plaza Cinema Cafe.  So far it seems as if the buzz has been mixed.  My parents and sisters went and, while they liked it, weren't particularly blown away.  I'm sure the less-than-stellar lineup didn't help.

I was able to sneak away to the Enzian to see the slightly redundantly-titled Anvil! The Story of Anvil.  The documentary documents (see what I did there) the once-famous metal band whose name I'll spare you in reiterating and their attempts at a comeback.  Anvil is essentially two men, it's guitarist and lead singer, Steve "Lips" Ludlow, and his drummer and oldest friend Robb Reiner.  If, to my knowledge, he is of no relation to This is Spinal Tap director Rob Reiner, this film is certainly a kindred spirit to that earlier mockumentary.  But beyond the tongue-and-cheek tone to much of it, the film is carried by how earnestly and honestly Lips and Reiner approach their work and their friendship.  It's difficult not to smile all through the movie and hope that these two crazy kids work it out.

This weekend I will attempt to finally visit the Plaza Cinema Cafe as well as see the premiere of the new Jim Jarmusch film, The Limits of Control, over at the Enzian.

Over the past week, I watched another altogether different documentary, Spike Lee's latest release on ESPN, Kobe Doin' Work.  What separates this one from other sports docs, especially ones you often see on ESPN or other sports networks, is how focused and in-depth it is. 

 The smartest thing about the film is not that it just follows Kobe during one game day or that it gets unlimited access to the court and the lockers, but that Kobe himself provides a running commentary while we watch him doin' work.  It's as enlightening a look into what a great athlete really does during a game as anything I've ever seen.  And even as a die-hard basketball fan (and sports in general), I learned a great deal about him and the sport.

Too bad for his Lakers, my Magic are going to win the Finals!!!

(I'm watching Game 1 right now and already feel like I'm going to eat those words.)

Not exactly the happiest place on earth; or, don't eat the corndogs.

The coming-of-age movie has been a fruitful genre for directors and Hollywood has certainly gone to that well more than its fair share of times. Traditionally, our protagonist is either going through puberty or is in high school. He often has trouble dealing with girls, his parents, and often bullies. (As a corollary, it's more-often-than-not a he instead of a she--but that discussion is for another day.) As the Judd Apatow fraternity has dominated recent American film comedy, the current crop of coming-of-age films has its adolescent/teenagers projected onto fully-grown, adult males. Like their much younger counterparts, these men are in many ways emotionally stunted and still need hand-holding, either by other, more experienced men, or by their smarter, more secure female partners.

But what of the in-betweeners? What happens when the teenager graduates to adulthood and realizes he still doesn't have a clue? Well, if your James Brennan, and it's 1987, and you just graduated college, and it turns out your dad got laid off and can't pay for your graduate school at Columbia, you search for a summer job. But the comparative lit major who "read[s] poetry for fun... sometimes" can't find a job. "I'm not even qualified for manual labor," he laments. So the only place left for him to go is the local amusement park, Adventureland.

Adventureland--the park and the movie--are populated with your standard cast of characters in a story of this type. There's the awkward lead, the a-little-too-nerdy sidekick, the older, more-experienced male figure, the hottie, and the girl he pines for. It also has your typical schtick--the crotch punching, kids puking, pot humor, etc. Yet Adventureland is grounded in a reality that is often atypical in the coming-of-age film. It's sloppier in the way these things tend to actually happen in real life.

A close friend of mine wrote on her blog:

There are people out in the world who do not realize they are already part of the world. I don't like how at graduations people always say you will be going forward into the "real world". I don't know about you but I have been living in the real world the whole time.

She's right; and what Adventureland also gets right is then when you're preoccupied with starting your life, you slowly begin to realize that it's happening right before you and you better damn well sure take advantage of that. Or as a much better writer than either one of us put it, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

And while the Apatow hero is a man-child who is really too immature to make sense of what is going on around him, James has his head pretty squarely on his shoulders. He can engage in childish activities for sure (there's a decent amount of pot smoking on the job for one), but he's fairly secure enough in who he is that he doesn't need the hand-holding. He's a 22-year-old virgin, not a 40-year-old one and that makes a difference.

One of the other criticisms often levied on the Apatow-produced films is that the overgrown boys that populate them always end up with these smart, beautiful women who are generally out of their league. It's a criticism with which I don't fully agree, yet it's a point-of-view I can understand. Here, and despite his minor social awkwardness, you never feel that James couldn't end up with his work crush, Em, or get a date with the park beauty, Lisa P.

Thus, Adventureland drifts away from the sort of slacker/loser comedies into which many of these films cross over and it evolves into a more sincere (and damn funny) exploration of a time in a young person's life when he realizes that while some doors close, others will open at the same time. Or as a fellow I once knew put it, "Life is a roller coaster, just make sure you have a bag to throw up in along the way." I never really liked that guy.

Adventureland (Greg Mottola, 107 m)

These are things I think about when I'm bored.

Notes on a mashup:

Explore the evolution of media through the transition from radio to TV via the music of the bands Television, Radiohead, and TV on the Radio.

But will they have parking?

Downtown Orlando will finally get a full-fledged movie theater later this month, when the Plaza Cinema Cafe opens to the public on May 29. It's the first downtown cinema of any kind in The City Beautiful since the Downtown Media Arts Center (DMAC) closed its doors a couple of years ago.

From May 25-27, the theater will also have a pre-opening celebration during which they will give away five "Golden Tickets" a la Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, one of the six films that will play before the theater's official opening. The winners of these tickets will receive a behind-the-scenes tour of the new place as well as, more importantly, free movies for a year. The pre-opening lineup and the others listed after its official opening seems to be a decent mix of classics, smaller indie/arty films, and more mainstream blockbusters.

The locus of any serious attempt at bringing independent and foreign cinema to the area has for years been in the Winter Park/Maitland area, mainly the Enzian Theater, the host of the Florida Film Festival. But downtown Orlando has recently made a push to become a hub for arts and culture and this, along with the relatively young Orlando Film Festival (which the theater will supposedly begin hosting next year) is a pretty significant step forward, at least in terms of movies.

One of the questions it begs is will this mark the beginning of a shift from Winter Park to downtown Orlando as the center for alternative cinema in Central Florida? Or instead will it cater to a more mainstream crowd and only play the standard fare at the rest of the multiplexes? Winter Park still has Full Sail University and the Regal at Winter Park Village consistently includes foreign and independent movies year-round. But the growing Orlando Hispanic Film Festival has made Premiere Cinemas (the closest movie theater to downtown) it's main venue and conducts other screenings and educational seminars at the Orlando Public Library just a couple of blocks away from the new Plaza Cinema Cafe.

I don't think I have the answer to it, nor do I think it has to be an either/or. I can't imagine ever not wanting to go to the Enzian or attend FFF, but I adore the idea of having the potential to go see a smaller movie at a theater right in my backyard. Ultimately, it will be a comment on the city and the community whether a downtown cinema can survive or be another one of those failed Central Florida projects. My fingers are crossed.

--------------

Info courtesy of:

http://www.orlandoslice.com/page/get-your-golden-ticket-to-the

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_arts_letter/2009/05/downtown-movie-theater-has-a-preopening-party.html#more

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_movies_blog/2009/04/plaza-cinema-cafethe-opening-week-details.html