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Home Cinema
by
Leonard Heldreth
Running the genres
This month’s films cover a variety of genres—comedy about love, bio-pic, vampire film and one of the best action movies about war in a long time.
(500) Days of Summer
First-time director Marc Webb has created a film that is marketed as a romantic comedy, but it doesn’t fit what American audiences expect in that genre. Although a comedy about young love, his film is more subtle, less blatant, more European and less condescending. Oh, and the boy doesn’t get the girl.
I’m not deliberately spoiling the viewer’s anticipation—the time-sequence is spliced and diced in such a way that the ending is revealed almost as soon as the film begins. The pleasure of the film is discovering just how matters started one way and ended up another. The structure of 500 days lets the director jump back and forth in time (“Day 465,” “Day 34,” etc.) without totally losing the viewer.
Much of the film’s charm comes from its two leads. Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a skinny young man with a distinctive voice and an attractive smile—he’s cute. He has a degree in architecture, but creates ideas and writes verses for a greeting card company; he seems to have trouble deciding just how temporary the greeting card job will be. Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel) is a very attractive young woman who becomes employed at the card company as the assistant to Tom’s boss; that’s essentially all the audience learns about her. She’s also cute, and the duo share a love of the band The Smiths and other interests, but they also have some disagreements, e.g., she thinks Ringo Starr is the greatest Beatle.
The film, as the title indicates, follows the couple for more than a year as they are attracted to each other, have a relationship, lose the relationship (she doesn’t want anything permanent), and go their separate ways, with one brief meeting near the end in which they share some insights. At the beginning, Tom believes in true love, a need for commitment and shared responsibility in a relationship he hopes will be long-term and lead to marriage. She admits she doesn’t believe in falling in love, wants to remain uncommitted, and wants to see how, day by day, the relationship develops—if it does. By the end of the film, each has learned neither has all the answers.
After Summer leaves him, Tom is miserable as only a young man can be who has been dumped by the person he loves. But he survives, and the last scene in the film would be entirely over the top if it had not been so carefully prepared for; as a result of this preparation, it closes the film like a cash register drawer slamming shut with the money inside. Also, there’s a great scene where the film morphs briefly into a musical, with Tom dancing down the street. Solid acting in the supporting parts are provided by Tom’s friends (Matthew Gray Gubler and Geoffrey Arend) and his little sister (Chloë Grace Moretz), who seems too wise for her age.
The director and his photographer manage to add a fresh touch to many of the settings and scenes that could have been cliché. Tom has a favorite place to sit in Los Angeles, and the crew makes that scene and much of the city look as if it hadn’t been photographed a thousand times before; the place seems almost as fresh as the story that is set in it.
(500) Days of Summer is not a profound film about the agonies of unrequited love; rather it’s a film that takes its subject seriously, but understands most people survive such episodes, and these characters are too sensible not to be in that majority. It’s a film to relax into, enjoy and remember all the mistakes, serious or otherwise, that you’ve made in love.
Julie and Julia
As the title suggests, Nora Ephron’s film is divided into two parts. The “Julie” part is about Julie Powell, a young woman who works in a boring office and is less successful professionally than many of her friends. To create some interest in her life, she decides to cook her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, all 524 recipes, in a year, i.e., 365 days. Further, she will write a blog about her experiences. The resulting effort produces a degree of notoriety for Julie and a publishing contract for her book, from which Ephron takes the title of her movie.
The second part of the title refers to Julia Child, author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, The French Chef, and various other cookbooks, as well as host of several TV series, including The French Chef. It’s hard to imagine anyone who doesn’t recognize Julia Child’s name, books and iconic voice; her influence on American culture has been immense and extends far beyond just people interested in French cooking. Her kitchen has been replicated in the Smithsonian Museum.
In this two-part structure, the Julia part so far outweighs the Julie part that keeping the two yoked together and running in tandem is difficult. Does anyone really care whether Julie gets through all the recipes, more or less successfully, in the year to meet the goal she has set in order to have something to do? Certainly not I.
Further, Julie Powell, a self-described “bitch,” is played by Amy Adams, a cute, perky, generally effective actress who does her best here to bring life to a generally uninteresting part. But Julia is played by Meryl Streep, who is to acting what Julia Child is to cooking, and, to crown it, gives one of her most convincing performances, capturing not only the gestures, iconic voice and movements of Child, but her ebullience, grit and wicked sense of humor. For her performance Streep won a Golden Globe and at least nominations in almost every major acting competition.
Further, most of Julie’s part of the film is set in New York City, not far from the destruction of the World Trade Center, and most of Julia’s part is set in Paris in the ’40s and ’50s—take your choice of which is most interesting.
The Streep/Child part of the film just overwhelms the Adams/Powell part, and there’s not much the director can do about it. Then, Paul Child is played by the fine actor Stanley Tucci (who played a supporting role in Streep’s The Devil Wears Prada), and he and Streep make the Childs one of the more interesting happy marriages on screen. Last, to administer the finishing touch, there’s Jane Lynch in the small but hilarious part of Julia’s tall sister, Dorothy, whose chances at marriage seem even smaller than her sister’s were.
None of the Julie part is offensive—Adams and Chris Messina (as Eric Powell) do their best—there just isn’t much with which to work. So, put up with the Julie part to see the Julia part. The advantage of this structure is that there are plenty of opportunities to wander out to the kitchen and see whether there might be a souffle waiting idly around to be eaten, or perhaps some vegetables to stir into a tasty pasta sauce, or a few eggs and half a dozen mushrooms for Julia’s famous scrambled eggs. Bon appetite.
Thirst
Korean director Park Chan-wook won the Cannes Jury Prize this year with his dark, funny, surrealistic, gory film about a Catholic priest who is infected with vampirism through a bad transfusion but fights against his thirst for blood as well as the sexual urges that go with it.
Park Chan-wook won the grand prize at Cannes some years ago for Old Boy, his masterly portrayal of the limits and consequences of revenge. Old Boy is the middle and most impressive of his “revenge trilogy,” which includes Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance. Like Thirst, the trilogy is as full of violence and extreme passions as Renaissance drama, especially the tragedies of John Ford.
Sang-hyun, played by top Korean actor Song Kang-ho, wants to help people, so he volunteers for a medical experiment at what seems to be a colony of people with infectious diseases, like leprosy. Sang-hyun catches the disease and dies from it, but miraculously comes back to life and is hailed as a miracle worker. His recovery, however, comes from his receiving tainted blood that turns him into a vampire after his death. Wearing bandages that protect him from the sun, he becomes a symbol of the sacrificial priest and inspires cult following.
Sang-hyun drinks blood from a comatose friend in the hospital, but finds that other desires are exaggerated by the vampire taint, and soon he is having an affair with Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), the wife of a boyhood friend, who lives with her husband and his mother, Madame Ra (Kim Hae-sook).
Eventually, she persuades him to turn her into a vampire. While he has qualms about killing for blood, she, not believing in religion, has no moral problems with satisfying her blood lust. Using her feminine wiles to attract men, she easily overpowers them and often opens their jugular veins with a pair of sewing scissors from her days as a seamstress.
The film has some macabre humor. After Tae-ju becomes a vampire with supernatural strength, she almost gives herself away. Friends are visiting one evening, when she wants to put her mother-in-law to bed. For a minute, she forgets herself and simply picks up the recliner with the older woman in it and walks down the hall. Other moments of black humor relieve the tension.
Park Chan-wook likes surrealistic scenes, and in addition to shots of the vampires jumping from house to house, he creates scenes in which the murdered husband comes back to haunt Tae-ju and Sang-hyun, grinning and dripping water all over the house while carrying the stone that Sang-hyun used to sink him to the bottom of the lake.
Both the emotions of the actors and the gore go over the top now and then, but Thirst is the best vampire film since the Swedish Let the Right One In, both of which are very adult films. It’s somewhat dismaying that the two best vampire films of recent years are subtitled, while U.S. audiences have to listen to the adolescent angst of the “Moon” series.
The Hurt Locker
Formerly married to James Cameron (Avatar), Kathryn Bigelow is an independent director who has created interesting, original films, including Near Dark and Strange Days, but they have generally not been enormous hits. The Hurt Locker may be different.
This film about a bomb demolition team in Iraq focuses on individuals, their experiences in combat, and their relationships to each other. As a result, they take on an individuality, often missing from recent war stories. The film is extremely tense from beginning to end, but avoids big battles and attempts at epic sweep that often undercut individual stories or reduce soldiers to stereotypes.
Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) is the bomb demolition specialist, Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) is the leader and driver, and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) provides cover and does what needs to be done. Bigelow chose the men partly because they were not well-known actors, a fact which increases the suspense because they could die at any minute; then she casts actors such as Guy Pearce (Memento) and Ralph Fiennes (The Reader, In Bruges, the Harry Potter films) in minor roles to complete the confusion.
James is the brains of the operation, a demolition specialist so good he has defused more than 800 bombs. He also takes reckless chances, sometimes ignores the safety of his colleagues, and gets high on adrenaline while carrying out his mission. He’s the best, he knows it and he gets a real charge out of doing something better than anyone, especially when operating in a life-and-death situation.
Sanborn is the educated professional. He goes by the book. His goals are to survive, do his job and go home as soon as his rotation is up. In the States, a woman waits for him to marry her and have children, and after seeing the daily carnage in the streets and deserts of Iraq, he’s now ready to do that—he wants a son.
The youngest of the group is Specialist Owen Eldridge. Uncertain who has the right answers in the survival game, he alternates between admiring Sanborn and James, in a role that recalls the young soldier in Platoon.
The nature of the squad’s activities require the film to be episodic, and the director and screenwriter manage to keep audience attention riveted on the screen without necessarily ratcheting up the suspense higher and higher.
Instead, each bomb threat is a different scenario, even when it seems nearly the same as an earlier one. In one scene, a wire leads to a knot from which six bomb-wires lead away like a lethal star. In another, James must defuse a car with a trunk so full of explosives its springs nearly touch the ground.
In another scene, in a change of pace, the squad is pinned down in the desert by snipers and has to defend itself until darkness brings some respite. Perhaps the most poignant narrative thread is the relationship between James and a young Iraqi boy he buys videos from and plays soccer with, and his inability to find out what has happened to the boy.
The Hurt Locker is totally riveting, and I would agree with many reviewers who are calling it the best action film of the year. It has won some major awards and received some Oscar nominations.
—Leonard G. Heldreth
—Leonard G. Heldreth
Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores. Reviews of earlier films cited can be found at www.mmnow.com
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