Tampilkan postingan dengan label Beauty. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Beauty. Tampilkan semua postingan

Selasa, 10 Desember 2013

Cannes Review: ‘The Great Beauty’

the great beauty

Brashly stepping up and standing beside Giovanni from Antonioni’s “La Notte” and Marcello from Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” is Jep Gambardella from Paolo Sorrentino’s “La Grand Bellezza.” Go out on the town with this bunch and you are sure to observe plenty of outrageous behavior and perhaps have a melancholy romantic entanglement. Just be sure you are in a five thousand dollar tailored-suit, or don’t bother humiliating yourself.

Translated into English the title of Sorrentino’s film means “The Great Beauty,” but, please, let’s leave it in its mother tongue. There’s not a single frame of this abundantly gorgeous film that isn’t pure Italian. Gambardella’s world-weary look back at his sweet life, eclipsed by his turning sixty-five, is a dizzying fantasia of flash and filigree, and what it lacks in direct narrative is well patched-over with frenetic and emotion-rich sequences. This movie is a sight and sound workout.

“La Grand Bellezza” is so indulgent it actually has three opening scenes – all marvelous. First, one of a series of moments unrelated to the plot in any strict way. The camera floats around a historical religious site, where Asian tourists snap photos. A man falls to the ground, perhaps victim to Stendhal Syndrome. Then black, and a scream. What follows is among the finest choreographed bacchanalia sequences I’ve laid eyes upon. At its close we meet Jep (Toni Servillo), debonair, cultured and just intellectual enough to feel great sadness at a beautiful life wasted on frivolous hedonism.

The third opening is Jep at work – he is an interviewer for culture journal and he’s watching an performance piece where a naked woman wearing makeshift hijab and Soviet flag painted on her pubis rams her head into the side of a two-thousand year old aqueduct (as a perfectly framed train crosses the background at magic hour.) During the following interview Jep reduces her to tears and exposes her as a fraud with just a few sharp remarks. He isn’t cruel, he’s just seen it all, and, most importantly, he’s unimpressed.

These episodes continue – Jep quietly strolls among Rome’s most decadent and elegant settings at a slight remove. He easily seduces a gorgeous but intellectually unstimulating women. He ditches her, uninterested in looking at her Facebook photos, announcing in voice over that, at his age, there is simply no time to do things he doesn’t want to do.

In time we learn that Jep as he is now is not quite what Jep envisioned for himself. As a young man he wrote a novel, and was involved in leftist causes and, naturally, had a pure, perfect love that got away. To Sorrentino’s credit we only catch glimpses of this through flashbacks or overheard dialogue. Not much will stop the mad rush of Jep’s study of the carnival that is modern Rome.

Along the way he meets a 12-year-old girl that’s an action painter, visits an underground plastic surgery church, sees a man who can make giraffes disappear, looks at a photographer’s lifetime of self-portraits, meets up with an old comrade/heroin junkie looking to marry off his 40 year old stripper daughter and, eventually, hosts a dinner party for a 104-year-old Mother Teresa-esque saint. This last one comes at the end and, not surprisingly, is the encounter with the most depth – though you shouldn’t worry that the movie goes all soft or anything.

The great thing about “La Grande Bellezza” is that, once you get on its wavelength, you soon recognize that if one sequence isn’t doing it for you, the next one might. At two-and-a-half hours Sorrentino offers up a maximalists’ delight. Even with the expanded running time, however, it is very difficult to know or care about many of the side characters in Jep’s life. “Wait, which one was that?” may be a common refrain among those discussing the picture afterwards.

SCORE: 7.7 / 10

Categories: Reviews

Tags: Cannes 2013, Cannes film festival, Jordan hoffman, La Grand Bellezza, Paolo sorrentino, Review, The Great Beauty

Sabtu, 10 November 2012

Re-Views: ‘American Beauty’ (1999)

Like almost every film that wins the Oscar for Best Picture, “American Beauty” was highly acclaimed, and then suffered a backlash for being too highly acclaimed. (The nerve of some movies, being praised enthusiastically!) Though the vast majority of contemporary reviews were positive — 88% at Rotten Tomatoes, with a Metacritic score of 86 out of 100 — once all the shouting was over, a sense of buyer’s remorse began to creep in.

In 2005, Premiere magazine put “American Beauty” at the top of its list of the “20 most overrated movies of all time.” (The feature is no longer online, but the list is archived here.) The New York Times’ A.O. Scott famously hates it, and mentions his disdain every chance he gets. A simple Google search for “American Beauty” overrated brings up numerous like-minded sentiments.

Now, the condescending term “overrated” makes me feel stabby: What you’re saying is that the amount YOU like the movie is the correct amount, and anyone who liked it more than you did has made an error. But I understand the sentiment. “American Beauty” won a lot of awards, yet plenty of viewers don’t think it’s that great. That’s fair. And since its director, Sam Mendes, has a certain James Bond movie coming out this week, it seemed like a good time to take another look at his first film, 13 years later.

What I said then: “This is an extraordinary film, managing to be both dreary and optimistic simultaneously…. As with all the great daydreaming milquetoast protagonists, from Willy Loman to Walter Mitty, there is some amount of hope by the end – even if that hope seems shattered by the final scene and its implications…. Not one of these characters is good, nor do any of their real selves match their facades, but several are still sympathetic and even lovable…. ‘American Beauty’ is compelling to watch, full of black humor, evocative imagery and wrenching sadness. It creates more of a mood than an actual theme or message, though even that mood is difficult to describe. You have to see it to understand that even by seeing it, you may not understand it. All you know is, you’ve just watched a movie you couldn’t take your eyes off of for a second.” Grade: A [Here's the whole review.]

Allow me to point out something about that review: it’s not very good. I was still pretty new to the whole film critic biz, and my recollection is that “American Beauty” stumped me. I knew I loved it, but I had a hard time explaining what I loved about it, or why — which, you know, is only the whole point of a movie review.

The re-viewing: 13 years later, it’s hard to watch “American Beauty” without thinking about the parodies, homages and rip-offs it inspired. That business with the floating plastic bag (which is a little precious), the rose petals, and Thomas Newman’s distinctive plink-plink musical score feel particularly dated now — not because they’re typical of movies from 1999, but because they’ve been reproduced and referenced so often since then. Screenwriter Alan Ball’s next project, HBO’s wonderful “Six Feet Under,” was cut from the same cloth, adding to the familiarity.

American BeautyI think what made it difficult to put my finger on why I liked the movie is also what turned some viewers off altogether. Its tone is constantly shifting from dark comedy to suburban drama to broad satire to middle-class tragedy. Most of the characters are two-dimensional types: the dissatisfied midlife-crisis husband who buys a sports car, the career-driven wife who has an affair, the homophobic Marine with a Southern accent, the teenage Lolita and so on. This lack of depth is fine (preferable, even) when the movie is operating as an almost farcical satire, a slick mockery of the fakeness of modern American life. But I can see how it would be problematic for viewers who find it off-putting not to be able to sympathize with anyone, especially as the story progresses and we’re drawn more deeply into the serious crises facing these shallow people.

Sometimes the shift in tone happens abruptly, leaving us uncertain how we’re supposed to react. The scene where Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) observes his son (Wes Bentley) selling drugs to Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) but misinterprets it as a gay sex liaison is straight out of a sitcom or an Austin Powers movie. It’s clearly meant to be funny. But it’s immediately followed by Fitts’s violent and shocking retaliation against his son, permanently fracturing their relationship and steering the film toward its tragic conclusion.

As viewers, we’re not comfortable with such important plot developments arising out of such a goofy scenario. We expect funny misunderstandings to have light consequences, and for heavy dramatics to have serious roots. Going against that feels wrong, like the filmmakers miscalculated somewhere. A person’s reaction to the movie might hinge on whether this strikes them as a mistake, or as an intentional subversion of expectations, perhaps a comment on how the most important moments of our lives can have their origins in triviality. Basically, it either works for you or it doesn’t.

Newman’s score plays a greater role in the film’s success than I realized. Like the movie itself, the music is ambiguous, without much melody, often upbeat even when it seems like it shouldn’t be. It isn’t unpleasant, but it doesn’t follow a traditional pattern, either. Is the jauntiness meant as mockery of these poor fools’ tragic lives, a sarcastic underscore to a dark comedy? Or is it a clue that the movie isn’t tragic at all — that finding moments of beauty and clarity, as some of the characters do, fulfills them and makes the story an optimistic one? Either interpretation is justified. That multifaceted, it-works-on-different-levels element is one more thing to admire about the movie.

Do I still love this movie? As it turns out, I do. Whether you view it as a scathing satire or a piercing drama, or some combination of the two, it’s effective at grabbing hold and not letting go. It’s compelling in an unusual way, adhering to a formula while continually refreshing itself with vivid performances and creative flourishes. Hopeful or pessimistic, bleak or beautiful, we have no reason to disown this movie. Embrace it! Even that stupid plastic bag. Grade: A-

Categories: Columns

Tags: american beauty, Eric's Re-Views, American Beauty, Sam Mendes, Kevin Spacey, Wes Bentley, Chris Cooper