Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for 2011

The amazing Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe

Saturday, December 31, 2011 by:Joe Meyers
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If “My Week with Marilyn” wasn’t such a slight film, Michelle Williams would probably have a lock on an Oscar for her performance as Marilyn Monroe making the long-forgotten 1957 British film “The Prince and the Showgirl.”

The film debuted at the New York Film Festival to a torrent of deserved praise for Williams, but there has been a growing backlash against “My Week With Marilyn” since then.

What makes the performance so astonishing is that the actress doesn’t try to do an impression of the 1950s icon — she doesn’t really look or sound much like Monroe — but she delivers an interpretation that is moving and funny in the way that it seems to capture the essence of the star.

On one level, Williams is overqualified for the role — in movies as diverse as “Brokeback Mountain” and “Blue Valentine,” she has proven herself to be a much more skilled and versatile screen actress than Monroe ever was. The 1950s sexpot was a great camera subject and a gifted comedienne, but it’s painful to watch her struggling to act up to the level of her co-stars in pictures like “The Misfits.”

Williams is devilishly clever in “My Week with Marilyn,” showing us both the tormented woman who wanted to be a better actress and the charismatic star who didn’t need to act to dazzle movie audiences in everything from “Niagara” to “How to Marry a Millionaire.”

Before it begins to focus on the friendship between Marilyn and a young assistant director (Eddie Redmayne), the movie is a fascinating study in styles of screen acting as Monroe clashes with her director/co-star Laurence Olivier (beautifully played by Kenneth Branagh).

Monroe and her producer partner put “The Prince and the Showgirl” together, so she was actually Olivier’s boss, but Olivier’s fame as a stage and screen great scared her to death. Olivier didn’t help matters by failing to recognize Marilyn’s limitations right from the start — when he told her flatly to “act sexy” that was probably the kiss of death on the performance by an actress who had fallen under the spell of “the Method” at The Actors Studio.

As long as the movie focuses on the culture clash between Olivier and Monroe — and the tense people around them including Marilyn’s sycophantic coach Paula Strasberg (played with real comic brio by Zoe Wanamaker) — it’s amusing and insightful on the behind-the-scenes stress of actors trying to get on the same page.

“My Week with Marilyn” starts to drift away when it deals with the assistant director’s crush on the star and their quasi-romantic adventures away from the studio. A rather tough-minded movie turns into romantic fluff and Williams gets fewer opportunities to show us her acute understanding of the woman she is playing.

‘Dragon Tattoo’: a less than lateral move by David Fincher

Friday, December 30, 2011 by:Joe Meyers
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Maybe it just isn’t a story I needed to be told three times.

Or, perhaps I expected a lot more from the visionary director of “The Social Network” and “Zodiac” and “Fight Club.”

Whatever the reason, I spent a lot of time squirming in my seat the other night during David Fincher’s version of the Stieg Larsson blockbuster thriller, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

I enjoyed the novel as a whodunit/serial killer tale with a fresh setting — Sweden — and a new take on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, in the former of a disgraced journalist and the punk/computer genius/autistic girl of the title.

Larsson filled the novel with enough interesting background material on the modern magazine world and Swedish support of the Nazis during World War II to help us forget about the many implausibilities in the plot and an almost sadistic atttention to detail in the scenes of rape and kinky sex.

A Swedish movie version of the novel was released here two years ago to considerable success on the arthouse circuit — it was a good straightforward adaptation clearly made on a low-budget but with a memorable performance by Noomi Rapace in the title role. The Swedish production company filmed the other two novels in Larsson “Girl” trilogy in quick succession in 2009 and they were released here too, with diminishing box office returns.

Why Fincher chose to do what is in effect a Hollywood remake of a very recent Swedish film is the real mystery of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

It’s a very sleek piece of work, with the sort of visual craftsmanship and pulsating soundtrack that we’ve come to expect from this great director, but the pedophile serial killer mystery at the heart of the movie is the same sort of genre material Fincher has already tackled with much more punch in “Seven” and “Zodiac.”

The Lisbeth Salander computer genius character is very well played by Rooney Mara in the new movie, but her behavior becomes less plausible the third time around. Here is a woman with the physical prowess to bring down a man who has killed many women and the technical savvy to move millions in and out of Swiss bank accounts, but who still submits to the horrendous sexual abuse of her parole officer/social worker in order to get government checks to pay her rent.

Experiencing this subplot a third time I was left with the queasy feeling that Larsson included the two rape scenes for sleazy narrative jolts (and to give us a feeling of triumphant pseudo-feminist revenge when Lisbeth finally turns the tables on her tormentor).

The major villain of the piece — a Nazi pedophile serial killer — looks more and more like a cheaply melodramatic concoction each time we meet him. And, the vast and well-equipped subterranean torture chamber he is given in the Fincher version seems preposterous on the claustrophobic island retreat occupied by all of his nasty, back-biting family members (no one caught on to this depravity — and the slew of missing girls — for more than 40 years?)

It’s no wonder this slick rehash isn’t doing well at the box office — there is really no compelling reason to see it in a theater.

‘Ghost Protocol’ puts Tom Cruise back on top in Hollywood

Wednesday, December 28, 2011 by:Joe Meyers
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Produced on the scale of a superior James Bond movie and packed with the sly, sexy humor of a 1960s caper picture, “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol” is one of the rare Hollywood “tentpole” franchise pictures that deserves its huge success.

“MI4″ delivers the sort of fast and furious, but also surprisingly sophisticated, entertainment that the manufacturers of action movies rarely produce anymore.

Tom Cruise is in peak movie star form and he was smart enough (as one of the producers of the movie) to make himself part of a great team that includes Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, and the sensational Paula Patton, who could be the sexiest and most believable woman of action to come along since Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel.

Six months ago, few movie people would have predicted that a Christmas season that included two Steven Spielberg pictures, a Cameron Crowe/Matt Damon movie, and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” would end up being dominated by a Tom Cruise star vehicle.

After the horrendous publicity he received a few years back — the Oprah couch jumping, the on-air tiff with Matt Lauer — Cruise was written by a lot of people as a hopelessly tarnished star.

Female movieogers were through with him, it was said, after the star criticized Brooke Shields for resorting to post-partum meds and when it seemed that he was acting as a Scientologist Svengali to his third wife Katie Holmes.

It became so popular to bash Cruise that the Viacom mogul Sumner Redstone pointlessly “fired” the independent producer/star in a shameless bid for positive press in the middle of one of Redstone’s own PR crises.

The bad vibes surrounding Cruise hurt his very entertaining summer of 2010 comic thriller — “Knight and Day” — which was not as well-reviewed or as well-attended as it deserved.

The star’s wonderful performance in “MI4” and the picture’s spectacular box office success puts Cruise back where he belongs — at the top of the Hollywood heap — and I can’t wait to see what he does in next summer’s musical comedy “Rock of Ages” and then as the Lee Child action hero Jack Reacher.

‘An Appetite for Murder’: a winter escape to Key West

Tuesday, December 27, 2011 by:Joe Meyers
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Roberta Isleib launches a new mystery series next Tuesday with “An Appetite for Murder” (Obsidian) about the adventures of a crime-solving restaurant critic in Key West.

The book is such a departure from Isleib’s two earlier series — one about a woman on the professional golf circuit and the other following a New Haven psychologist — that she has taken on a new pen name: Lucy Burdette.

Isleib’s appealing heroine — Hayley Snow — is a twentysomething New Jersey native who makes the mistake of falling head over heels with a handsome rogue who convinces her to pick up stakes and move to the Florida Keys.

Hayley soon finds out that her divorce lawyer beau is Mr. Wrong — she catches him with another woman and is given the heave ho. The rat puts her belongings outside and she is left to her own devices.

Fortunately, our plucky heroine has two friends in Key West — a gay analyst who offers plenty of moral support and an old college pal who allows Hayley to crash on her houseboat until she figures out where she’s going.

Since the book is labeled “A Key West Food Critic Mystery” there is no surprise in Hayley’s decision to apply for a restaurant reviewer position on a new lifestyle magazine — Key Zest — and there is little suspense waiting for the decision on her job application.

The central challenge in any “cozy” mystery is to place an amateur sleuth in a position where it is believable that he or she would feel the need to solve a murder (with the police relegated to a back-up position).

Hayley doesn’t blunder her way in to amateur sleuthing — she’s forced into the job when her ex’s new girlfriend is poisoned and the Key West cops make Hayley suspect number one.

The setting is always one of the key elements in this sort of mystery and Isleib makes full use of Key West’s funky mixture of the rich and old hippies who heard the siren call of Jimmy Buffett 35 years ago and have been living the beach resort lifestyle ever since.

Florida has long been one of the best backdrops for crime novels — from John MacDonald to Carl Hiassen — and Isleib’s sense of place and her ability to empathize with a wide strata of Key West locals and visitors bodes well for this new series.

Rent it now: taut Scandinavian mystery via Italy

Monday, December 26, 2011 by:Joe Meyers
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The great Italian actor Toni Servillo — who played the title role in “Il Divo” and was featured prominently in “Gomorra” — delivers another commanding performance in “The Girl By the Lake,” as a police detective investigating a murder in a small village.

IFC Films has just released the 2007 Italian production on DVD and it is also available on cable via IFC’s movies on demand service.

The crime is especially puzzling because the beautiful dead girl was seemingly liked by everyone in the town, and yet it is clear right from the start that she was killed by someone who knew her.

The tightly written police procedural is adapted from a novel by Norwegian crime writer Karin Fossum who has done a series of novels about the brilliant, introspective detective who is coping with the illness of his wife as well as the baffling crime.

“The Girl by the Lake” takes us into the life of the village and its various characters in a manner reminiscent of a classic Agatha Christie novel.

Detective Sanzio is not as dour as he looks at first glance — the detective knows how to get people to talk and we very quickly learn a lot about the way this small rather enclosed society works.

The movie features some remarkable supporting performances — Valeria Golina as the mother of a child the dead girl babysat for and Omero Antonutti (the father in the Taviana brothers’ classic 1977  film “Padre Padrone”) as a wheelchair-bound senior citizen totally dependent on his son, a prime suspect.

But the movie is really Servillo’s show. He is in nearly every scene and has a mysteriously mesmerizing screen presence — the man never appears to be “acting” in any of the movies I’ve seen him in and yet you can’t take your eyes off him.

Merry Christmas!

Sunday, December 25, 2011 by:Joe Meyers
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All the lonely people/Where do they all belong?

Saturday, December 24, 2011 by:Joe Meyers
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At one particularly apt point in the new Grant James Varjas play, “Accidentally, Like a Martyr,” a character looks over at the few other people seated at an East Village bar and asks the “Eleanor Rigby” question, “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?”

It’s Christmas season and while many other people have friends and family to visit with, the men in the play have nowhere else to go but this slightly rundown New York bar (modeled on The Boiler Room, which is only a few blocks from the Paradise Factory Theatre, where the play is running through Jan. 8).

Varjas’s tightly written and well-acted character study is about a group of gay men but sexuality is secondary to their feeling that life has passed them by.

The men once came to the bar looking for erotic connections, but they have become real barflies — i.e. borderline alcoholics — who come for the cheap drinks during happy hour and are long gone by the time the younger, hornier patrons show up.

The play is about a changing social scene in Manhattan where young gay men are tired of being ghetto-ized in dreary “historic” bars filled with older men waxing nostalgic about earlier eras (what novelist Brad Gooch called “The Golden Age of Promiscuity” — the years between the Stonewall riot in 1969 and the emergence of AIDS in the early 1980s).

The bar has been losing customers to a new place down the street where young straights and gays can mingle in a much more fashionable space.

And, of course, much of the real sexual action has moved out of the bars entirely and onto the Internet where faster and cheaper hook-ups are readily available without any liquor-fueled mating rituals.

“Accidentally, Like a Martyr” takes shape slowly but the characters are engagingly irritable before we get to know them, and then very moving after their hidden agendas are revealed.

Younger guys stumble in, but they are usually in the bar for brief, non-social purposes. The playwright/director gives a very vivid performance as a strung-out drug addict who owes money to nearly everyone in his life and who causes the arrival of a very scary enforcer demanding to be taken to an ATM for immediate payment.

Clifton Chadick created the quite authentic set — the small audience is seated on the other side of the mirror behind the bar, where we get a perfect view of all the action, and can study the tiniest inflections of the excellent seven-actor ensemble consisting of Varjas, Keith McDermott, Kevin Boseman, Brett Douglas, Ken Forman, Cameron Pow and Chuck Blasius.

A 1960s movie that has never lost its freshness

Thursday, December 22, 2011 by:Joe Meyers
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Jean-Luc Godard has been enjoying a huge renaissance of his 1960s films in recent years.

“Band of Outsiders” (1964) and “Contempt” (1963) and “Masculine-Feminine” (1966) have all had hit art-house revivals — especially at Godard Central, the Film Forum in Manhattan — and received deluxe DVD reissues from The Criterion Collection.

If you haven’t seen the audacious and very entertaining 1965 Godard picture “Pierrot le Fou,” check out the fantastic Criterion DVD (which I watched again the other night).

Unlike many important old films, there is nothing musty about this wild romp that subverts the whole notion of Hollywood melodrama.

Godard was a leader of the French “New Wave” of the 1960s that abandoned movie studio filming in favor of real locations — directors like Godard and Francois Truffaut took to the streets and countryside and came back with pictures that didn’t have the processed look of Hollywood.

The French filmmakers also changed notions of what constituted a movie star by using actors who overturned traditional notions of screen beauty. Jean-Paul Belmondo became a star overnight in Godard’s “Breathless” (1959) — skinny and far from movie star handsome, Belmondo nevertheless oozed athletic vigor and sex appeal, and dominated French filmmaking for the next decade.

In “Pierrot le Fou,” Belmondo has one of his best roles as Ferdinand, a wealthy, married Paris businessman who runs off with the babysitter, Marianne (Anna Karina).

The story turns into a road movie in which our charming anti-heroes kill people, perform impromptu street theater critiques of U.S. Vietnam policy, and break into brief song interludes.

Shot in wide-screen by the great cameraman Raoul Coutard, “Pierrot le Fou” is a feast for the eyes even when it is not quite clear where Godard might be going with this oddball study of adultery and escape from responsibility.

Godard keeps reminding us we’re watching a movie by repeating scenes, throwing literary quotations on the screen, and suddenly turning off the lushly romantic musical score.

Along the way, there is a much-quoted-by-film-historians cameo by veteran Hollywood B-movie director Sam Fuller in which he faces the camera and shares his hard-boiled cinema philosophy.

It is not surprising that after Robert Benton and David Newman finished the screenplay for “Bonnie & Clyde” their first choice to direct the 1967 classic was Godard.

“Pierrot le Fou” is a still-fresh intellectual romp that leaves room for almost limitless post-screening discussion. You can find the DVD on Netflix or at my favorite local video store, Media Wave in Fairfield.

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