Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

‘Man of Steel’: blockbuster marketing, puny storytelling

Tuesday, June 18, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

From a purely financial standpoint, “Man of Steel” is one of the great success stories in recent Hollywood history.

A movie trade paper suggested last week that the very expensive movie (with a budget somewhere north of $200 million) was in profit even before opening day, because of the marketing deals the producers cut with Gillette, the National Guard and other companies.

The huge global grosses last weekend were the icing on the cake — icing that seems likely to continue piling up as the Superman reboot opens in China and Russia and the other international markets.

Although Superman, as a superbaby, still arrives on Earth in Kansas (where he is adopted by the kind and childless Kents), “Man of Steel” is curiously devoid of American touchstones in this version.

The wonderful “Front Page”-style set-up in which Clark goes to work as a journalist in a thinly disguised New York City — where ace reporter Lois Lane doesn’t realize her new buddy is Superman — has been jettisoned this time around.

Instead, Lois Lane knows Superman’s identity from the get-go and with him becomes involved in a major military operation designed to defend earth from the old enemies of Superman’s family back on Krypton.

General Zod is a one-note bore in “Man of Steel,” played with utter, dull seriousness by the fine actor Michael Shannon, rather than with the campy elan Terence Stamp brought to the Richard Donner “Superman” films more than 30 years ago.

The Superman comic books, TV series, and earlier movies all had a spirit of fun surrounding the goofy premise. In the effort to “reboot” the moribund franchise, “Men of Steel” has been given the same dark, grim mood as the last three Batman pictures. The serious tone was fine for Batman who has most of his adventures at night and who is in a much grimmer comic book city than Superman’s Metropolis.

Producer Christopher Nolan and his associates appear to be embarrassed by the Superman set-up, and have made puzzling tweaks in the iconography, down to stripping Superman of his bright red briefs. Instead of the bold comic book colors that Superman cries out for, greys and blacks dominate in “Man of Steel” — even Lois Lane is forced to dress down in muted colors.

It’s hard to account for the grim tone in so much of our escapist entertainment these days, but I wish producers and directors would stop messing around with winning formulas just to prove how serious and “creative” they can be.

Categories: General

‘Death by China’: a new ‘We Will Bury You’ scenario?

Monday, June 17, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

Last week I read a piece in the new Vanity Fair that took exception to the global notion that the U.S.A. is a “dumb” country.

A.A. Gill made many good points which were, unfortunately, undercut by the illustration that suggested our national wisdom was reinforced by such cultural icons as Elvis Presley, Babe Ruth, and Marilyn Monroe.

Later that same day, I watched a DVD screener of a new documentary “Death by China” that makes a strong case that we are about as dumb as they come, because we have been committing a slow finanical suicide since Communist China was allowed to join the World Trade Organization in 2001.

The move was pushed by president Bill Clinton as a policy that would add new jobs here — as our exports flooded the Chinese market — and would aid the cause of democracy in China by connecting them with us and with the capitalist world. Neither promised result occurred.

Working from his book of the same title, filmmaker Peter Navarro paints a devastating picture of what has happened since 2001.

Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost as U.S. companies moved their plants to China. Prison and child labor and the absence of any pesky anti-pollution laws or factory safety measures make Chinese manufacturing dirt cheap in comparison with the cost of doing that business here.

Chinese currency manipulation since WTO has put the U.S. trillions of dollars in debt to that country.

Meanwhile, the militarization of China has been speeding up, according to Navarro, making them a much more likely eventual threat to us than Iran or North Korea. The fact that many U.S. military planes now have components made in China also worries the filmmaker who says we have never before gotten into such a relationship with a possible military rival.

And, of course, by doing so much business with China we are tacitly endorsing a totalitarian regime which does not allow freedom of the press and which has imprisoned millions of its dissidents. Navarro has crafted a film which doesn’t try to hide its muckraking intent, or its stance against the current imbalance in trade between the two superpowers.

“Death by China” does leave a viewer wondering if a lot of our saber-rattling directed against other countries might be a smokescreen covering up a much more dangerous situation with our Communist ally. And why are we in this dicey relationship? Because it is so financially remunerative for the U.S. multi-national corporations that do business in China.

Navarro’s bias is quite clear – he never tries to hide it — but the film is certainly, as they say, food for thought.

Categories: General

‘House of Cards’: another reason not to go to the movies

Sunday, June 16, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

The shift of adult storytelling from big Hollywood movies to TV keeps gaining momentum.

Recently in this space I wrote about Brett Martin’s wonderful, forthcoming book, “Difficult Men,” about the way that cable television caused an entertainment revolution at the turn of the century by overtaking the movie industry when it came to cutting-edge material designed for a sophisticated adult audience.

Shows such as “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” made going out to a neighborhood multiplex seem like a waste of time and money since most of the movies there have focused on the teen and twentysomething demographics for the past decade.

Now the revolution has moved beyond cable television and into the realm of Internet download services.

Last week, when I started watching the thrilling 13-hour made-for-Netflix series “House of Cards” the idea of tearing myself away from it to go to the movies to see something like “The Internship” seemed ridiculous.

“House of Cards” is a political thriller from filmmaker David Fincher (of “Fight Club” and “The Social Network” fame) loosely based on a BBC series from the 1990s.

Kevin Spacey stars as South Carolina U.S. congressman Frank Underwood who is furious to be denied his appointment as Secretary of State when a new president is elected — a president he worked very hard for as a candidate.

Underwood hides his fury but then begins plotting his revenge — against the Secretary of State appointee, the president’s chief of staff, and anyone else who gets in his way. He is greatly aided by his powerful wife, Claire (Robin Wright), who runs an environmental non-profit but isn’t above using it for very nefarious purposes.

Giving the material a delicious black comic spin is the device of allowing Underwood to deliver asides directly to the camera, taking the audience into his confidence and making us his partners in crime. Direct address to the camera by a film or TV character can be dicey, but Spacey makes these moments work like a charm.

“House of Cards” has a smart, up-to-the-minute feel similar to Fincher’s “The Social Network” — it’s exciting to see a piece of entertainment that deals with something important rather than the latest adventure of a bunch of comic book characters.

Spacey is matched by Robin Wright who has a dark, commanding presence that mind remind you of the devilish politician’s wife Angela Lansbury played in “The Manchurian Candidate.”

Fincher and his production stuff cast the project creatively, looking to the New York theater for such wonderful but under-exposed talents as Maryann Plunkett, Reed Birney and Sebastian Arcelus in key roles.

Subscribers to the Netflix streaming service got the first crack at “House of Cards” when all 13 episodes became available on Feb. 1, but I enjoyed the show last week via the Sony DVD that was released June 11. You can also now access the show via Amazon and other downloading services.

“House of Cards” is a godsend for those of us who miss the long-vanished era of contemporary political thrillers like “Seven Days in May,” “Advise and Consent” and “The Manchurian Candidate.”

Categories: General

‘A Cautionary Tail’ — an epic play in a snug space

Saturday, June 15, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

Size really doesn’t matter when it comes to theater.

The new play in the intimate downstairs space at The Flea Theater — “A Cautionary Tail” by Christoper Oscar Pena — has more physical and emotional heft than almost anything you might see on Broadway.

The venue is small but the content is huge.

Because The Flea has its own resident company of young actors — The Bats — and access to some of the most creative designers in New York, writers who work there don’t have to worry that they are creating too many characters who go too many places.

The one-room, three-or-four actor play is a cliche of the modern American theater — a form that was created out of economic necessity rather than a sudden urge for writers to deal with only a few people in one place.

When you see a revival of a classic American drama from the 1940s or 1950s — like the recent revival of the Clifford Odets play “The Big Knife” by the Roundabout Theatre — one of the first things that hits you is that there are more than three or four characters in the story. And the old-fashioned, three-act structure gives you the time to really get to know all of those people.

On paper “A Cautionary Tail” could have been a one-room, three-character piece because the central situation is the fraught relationship of two Asian-American children with their mother. Vivienne and Luke both struggle with the woman’s rigid Old World ways and her expectation that they will follow the career and personal life paths she’s laid out for them.

But Christopher Oscar Pena, and his very gifted director Benjamine Kamine, give us two longish acts that take the siblings from their school years well into adulthood, so that the struggle to establish their own personalities has an epic scope.

We’ve all seen the kids-hanging-out-one-night plays and the middle-aged-regrets plays, but Pena shows us how the problems and mistakes of youth can play out many years down the line.

He has also introduced quasi-fantasy elements, with a creepy, Faust-like insurance man who tries to make a dreams-come-true deal with both Vivienne and Luke. The mother is represented on stage as a mythical witch-like figure (played by a male).

The way that the Internet and constant cell phone communication has added to the complexity of social life also becomes an integral part of the story.

We get to meet a wide array of the two central characters’ friends and co-workers as we travel through time with them. A company of 20 multi-racial actors fills the stage with life and diversity.

As always with The Bats, the versatility and the power of the performers is dazzling (in alphabetical order, they are Alton Alburo, Barron Bass, Matt Bovee, Madeleine Bundy, Jenelle Chu, Sasha Diamond, Karen Eilbacher, Bobby Foley, Aaron Parker Fouhey, Alex J. Gould, Cleo Gray, Alex Grubbs, Marlowe Holden, Christine Lee, Evan Maltby, Bonnie Milligan, Jacquelyn Revere, Stephen Stout, and Tony Vo).

There are few theaters that would take on a project of this size, and to bring it to life with such force, so “A Cautionary Tail” should not be missed.

(The play runs through June 30. For tickets visit www.theflea.org)

Categories: General

Music, sex & espionage power delightful ‘Joy of Singing’

Friday, June 14, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

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You could go a little crazy trying to describe — or categorize — Ilan Duran Cohen’s 2008 “The Joy of Singing (Le plaisir de chanter)” (available on most download platforms and on DVD from IFC Films).

The best thing to do is just sit back and enjoy the very entertaining mix of comedy, eroticism and thrills in Cohen’s tale of a group of wildly diverse people who get together at an operatic singing class in Paris.

It turns out that nearly everyone in the class is there because of Constance (Jeanne Balibar), the widow of a murdered German industrialist who left behind a key that is vital to the transport of bomb-grade uranium to a terrorist cell.

Cohen appears to be sending up many of the conventions of international espionage thrillers (in the vein of the Jason Bourne pictures) where we often don’t care that the plot is a mess because the movies deliver so many thrills.

In the case of “The Joy of Singing,” the characters keep getting hung up on their very dysfunctional romantic and sexual relationships to the point that they seem to lose track of the spy work they are supposed to be doing.

Cohen delivers sex scenes that go way beyond anything that would be allowed in a Hollywood film — if the Motion Picture Association of America had rated the movie it would be an automatic NC-17 — but most of the time the director uses sex as one of the film’s biggest sources of humor.

Much of “The Joy of Singing” centers on Muriel (Marina Fois), a 30ish undercover agent (presumably for the French government, although the movie doesn’t devote much time to the mechanics of the intelligence group).

Muriel has drifted into a sexual relationship with her younger partner, Philipe (Lorant Deutsch) — he still calls her “Boss,” however — that makes her seriously uptight about aging and her ticking biological clock.

Fois plays Muriel in a delicious deadpan style that makes the woman both believable as a spy and hilariously funny as a neurotic lover. After Philipe breaks off with her, Muriel takes up with another young lover from her singing class — Julien (Julien Baumgartner, above).

After having some kinky — but satisfying — sex with Julien, the spy gets two shocks. The young man turns out to be a prostitute who has given her one “date” as an introductory offer but expects her to pay for his services thereafter. And Julien is also part of the uranium smuggling group (he is used by his cell as a contemporary Mata Hari with both women and men).

The whole cast is wonderful in a story made up of nothing but tricky characters. Everyone has a secret identity or is in the dark about the true identity of their partners. And most of the major characters get hooked on the singing they are expected to do in the class. It’s a terrific movie.

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Categories: General

‘Searching for Debra Winger’: still sad, still true

Thursday, June 13, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

It took me a decade to catch up with Rosanna Arquette’s 2002 documentary “Searching for Debra Winger” but the film’s downbeat take on Hollywood’s treatment of actresses still seems accurate.

Inspired by Winger’s sad and somewhat puzzling decision to back away from her movie career in the mid-1990s, Arquette wandered around for months at the turn of the century interviewing actresses about the challenges they were facing in getting roles that were worth playing.

The 90-minute documentary is too short in terms of the time it gives to more than a few dozen actresses and it includes way too much footage of Arquette spinning her wheels, but it does nail the way mainstream Hollywood films have largely sidelined women with the rise of comic book franchise pictures and action movies made for international audiences.

The film also demonstrates the way that Hollywood tends to put women over 40 out to pasture. Many of the actresses Arquette talked to were anxious about the movie opportunities they would have as they aged and a good number of them have virtually disappeared from film — Teri Garr, Theresa Russell, Kelly Lynch, Samanthis Mathis, Melanie Griffith, and on and on.

Fortunately, cable television opportunities for actresses were just starting to expand a decade ago so that fallen movie stars such as Holly Hunter and Jessica Lange have found a TV refuge now that they are no longer offered leading roles in major movies.

Interview subject Roger Ebert gets at one of the major problems faced by actresses when he talks about the rise of blockbuster films geared to teen boys who no longer seem to be interested in sex as a component in escapist fare. These sex-less narratives leave women with little to play in most of the big summer multiplex pictures.

As Ebert points out, movies were much less demographically targeted when he was a teen in the 1960s, so boys would see mainstream fare with big female stars like Audrey Hepburn and Julie Christie along with everyone else.

There were more eye candy opportunities for actresses back then, too, because action films and westerns always made room for sexpots like Raquel Welch.

The message in Arquette’s documentary is reinforced by the summer hits of recent vintage which have given their female leads very little to work with.

It was sad last summer to see Oscar winners Marion Cotillard (above) and Charlize Theron (below) stranded in their meagre and unsympathetic roles in “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Prometheus.”

Except for the 2012 Meryl Streep vehicle “Hope Springs” there wasn’t a multiplex star vehicle for an over-50 actress all last summer. “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” with Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, did crossover from arthouses to some multplexes but never received as wide a release as the Streep picture.

Things are not likely to get better in the near future with Hollywood expanding production of 3D extravaganzas designed at least in part for the huge new markets that are being developed in China and Russia.

Categories: General

‘The Purge’: somewhere Shirley Jackson is smiling

Wednesday, June 12, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

The movie business press was stunned by the performance of the new Universal horror film, “The Purge,” last weekend.

Made for around $3 million, the picture opened in the number one spot with a $36.4 million gross. Left with egg on their faces were the producers of the $58 million comedy, “The Internship,” which grossed less than half of what “The Purge” did and came in at a feeble four in the top ten.

A B-horror movie isn’t supposed to dominate the box office during the most prime of summer months at the nation’s multiplexes, but “The Purge” has earned its success the old-fashioned way by delivering the goods — it’s the first shocker worth talking about in a long time.

The film is written and directed by James DeMonaco from a deliciously simple premise. It’s the year 2022 and the U.S. government is sanctioning an annual “purge” — when local and federal law enforcement officials look the other way for 12 hours, allowing the populace to commit any crimes it desires.

For the haves, it means 12 hours of fabulous “reality” TV viewing in their heavily guarded and gated communities — i.e. watching members of the lower classes maiming and murdering each other.

DeMonaco has produced something that could be read as one of the most virulently anti-American films of recent vintage, an appalling display of the bloodlust built into the culture and a scathing critique of the way our government has more or less sanctioned a permanent (and vast) underclass warehoused in urban squalor far from the plush preserves of the 1 percent.

The plot combines elements of Shirley Jackson’s classic short story “The Lottery” (about an annual human sacrifice in a small New England village), with bits of “Straw Dogs,” “Night of the Living Dead” and a few other horror classics. But DeMonaco has blended these elements into a fresh use of a disreputable genre for social commentary.

B-moviemakers often get away with a lot more than those who work on big-budget pictures that are slowly developed and then endlessly focus-grouped so that any upsetting notions are left on the cutting room floor. “The Purge” is a rough little movie — marred by more than a couple of plotting problems — but like “Night of the Living Dead” and the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” it has surprising satirical and political elements in it.

Seeing the movie at a Manhattan multiplex over the weekend, it was quite amazing to witness this cunning, slightly-futuristic thriller work its sadistic ways on an audience.

When wealthy security expert Ethan Hawke and his wife Lena Headey and two children provide shelter in their McMansion to a black man a white mob is hunting for sport, “The Purge” gets into the sort of queasy race politics that B-movies used to exploit in the 1970s.

So few Hollywood pictures explore contemporary racism that you can feel the audience being jolted by the way this horror movie digs into the topic. DeMonaco keeps us off balance as we wonder how far he is going with the volatile material (as it turns out, he goes right to the edge of the abyss).

The casting is perfect, especially in the case of the film’s truly unsettling primary villain — the young, handsome WASP (Rhys Wakefield, above) who demands that the barricaded family turn over the “animal” they are sheltering in their house. Wakefield is beyond creepy, with his calm demeanor and lunatic grin — worthy of comparison with Richard Widmark in “Kiss of Death.”

Then, near the end of the movie, Arija Bareikis turns up in the house, as another blood-thirsty, Bible-quoting WASP, and she’s even scarier than Wakefield. People around me in the theater were crying out for her to be killed (and I can’t say that I blamed them).

“The Purge” is manipulative and more than slightly tasteless, but it is also a sensationally effective horror movie.

Categories: General

‘Control’: The Joy Division photo that launched a movie

Tuesday, June 11, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

The 2007 bio-pic, “Control,” about the short but influential life of the English band Joy Division, didn’t get much theatrical play in this country, but it is well worth seeking out on DVD.

Director Anton Corbijn became famous for the moody photographs he’s made of rock groups and musicians over the past 30 years, including many sets of photos with U2.

Corbijn took shots of Joy Division in the late 1970s and one image in particular — in which the only face visible is that of lead singer Ian Curtis — became iconic because it seemed to visualize the dark poetry of the Northern England band.

The band had a meteoric rise and fall due to Curtis’s medical and emotional problems. The singer-songwriter was diagnosed with epilepsy and when he would occasionally ignore the medication he was supposed to be taking, concerts were interrupted by his seizures (which, of course, only added to the performer’s doomed-poet aura).

As a result of photographer Corbijn’s decision to bring the story of Joy Division to the screen, “Control” is unusually interesting from a visual standpoint — each wide-screen black-and-white image is beautifully composed and characters are placed with immaculate preciseness within each shot.

Although the film is a mixed-bag in terms of drama — Ian Curtis died at the age of 23 and “Control” can only speculate about the forces that killed him — the production values are so stunning that you probably won’t mind the gaps in the narrative and the perhaps-too-enigmatic protagonist .

It might seem that the transition from still photography to directing movies is a logical step, but Corbijn’s debut with “Control” was one of the few notable forays of a lensman into movies since Bruce Weber switched from stills to filmmaking with “Broken Noses” and then “Let’s Get Lost” in quick succession in the late 1980s.

Movies have become so dominated by stars who demand a whole host of photographic concessions that it is unusual to see a film in which the images come first and the story and characters are secondary to the look of the piece. “Control” is truly a feast for the eyes.

Categories: General

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Joe's View

‘Man of Steel’: blockbuster marketing, puny storytelling

‘Death by China’: a new ‘We Will Bury You’ scenario?

‘A Cautionary Tail’ — an epic play in a snug space

Music, sex & espionage power delightful ‘Joy of Singing’

‘Searching for Debra Winger’: still sad, still true

‘The Purge’: somewhere Shirley Jackson is smiling

‘Control’: The Joy Division photo that launched a movie

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