Fresh Loaf

THAT’LL TEACH ’EM: François Bégaudeau (center) as the Teacher

The Oscar-nominated French film The Class could qualify as a remedial course for audiences who believe that “inspirational teacher” films like Dangerous Minds or Stand and Deliver impart all the lessons you need about the educational system.

In The Class, teacher and award-winning novelist François Bégaudeau plays a fictionalized version of himself, a middle-school French instructor who tries to explain the imperfect subjunctive to rebellious 13- to 15-year-olds from an inner-city Parisian neighborhood. Rather than earn Hollywood-style standing ovations from his students, François faces insolent challenges and constant low-level chatter. At times he seems more like a comedian talking over hecklers on open-mic night.

Director Laurent Cantet, whose previous films include the mournful white-collar drama Time Out, restricts the action entirely to the classroom and various faculty offices, so we never glimpse the home lives of François or his students (played with impeccable realism by actual students). Instead, the classes prove to be scenes of near-constant conflict, including one outburst of violence. The audience easily sympathizes with François’ attempts to keep order and stay on message, giving The Class more real tension, in its soft-spoken way, than your average heist thriller.

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LOVE IS DA BOMB: Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman, left) and Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson)

Upon its publication in the mid-1980s, the 12-issue graphic novel Watchmen earned a reputation for being “the Citizen Kane of comic books.” That’s not just hyperbole: Both works feature multiple narrators trying to piece together an enigmatic death, although in Watchmen, the ensemble happens to be former masked heroes, sleuthing against a backdrop of impending nuclear war.

Like Orson Welles, Watchmen writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons drew on seemingly every stylistic innovation in their respective media and shot them with lightning, raising the bar for a popular but increasingly sophisticated art form.

Zack Snyder’s long-awaited film adaptation of Watchmen is not a classic worthy of Citizen Kane. Thankfully, it’s not a bomb on a par with Howard the Duck, either. It comes close to being something like A Clockwork Orange for superhero movies — a dystopian satire marked by meticulous craftsmanship and sluggish pacing, of incongruous music and horrific violence, of heavy-handed sermonizing and astonishing imagery.

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KID 'N PLAY: Azur (top) and Asmar as boys

The French fairy tale Azur and Asmar uses cutting-edge digital animation to replicate centuries-old artistic styles. For his fourth cartoon feature, awesomely named French director Michel Ocelot crafts backgrounds that evoke medieval tapestries or illuminated manuscripts. You can imagine seeing images from Azur and Asmar hanging in a museum, only the figures within them move and talk.

Like one of Scheherezade’s tales from the Arabian Nights, Azur and Asmar presents a classic storybook quest. Beginning in an unidentified European country, the film depicts two boys: blue-eyed, privileged Azur and dusky Asmar, the son of Azur’s nursemaid. Azur and Asmar grow up literally suckling at the same breast and hearing the nanny’s tales of her homeland’s mythic Djinn Fairy, a magic princess held in an impregnable prison. They become close friends, despite comically frequent arguments, until Azur’s father callously sends his son off to a distant tutor and casts out Asmar and the nursemaid.

Entranced by his nanny’s stories of the Djinn Fairy, Azur travels as an adult to Asmar’s home country, where the Muslim natives treat him as an outcast because of his blue eyes. Azur undergoes sharp reversals of fortune before reuniting with Asmar, and the two become rivals who each seek to find, free and wed the Djinn Fairy.

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BLOND AMBITION: Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix, right) eyes Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow, center).

Most of the downbeat romantic drama Two Lovers transpires in the timeless corners of Brooklyn, at mom-and-pop dry cleaners or the kind of blocky apartments where neighbors call to each other from opposite windows while jazz music plays from an unseen source. When we first notice cell phones or DVDs in Two Lovers, they almost seem like contemporary anachronisms that snuck into a period piece set a half-century ago.

Director and co-writer James Gray places Two Lovers very much in the present, but gives the film the black-and-white shadings of an old fashioned social realist script, pitched somewhere between the 1950s plays of Arthur Miller and Ernest Borgnine’s love-among-the-losers film Marty. Gray deserves credit for trying to give his class-conscious romantic triangle a grounding in character and real-world texture, and the cast clearly takes its work seriously. But Two Lovers ultimately seems stuck in a bygone decade.

In Brighton Beach, unmarried Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) lives in the clutch of his Jewish immigrant parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov). He works at his father’s dry cleaners while vacillating between his dream of being a photographer and his suicidal tendencies following his canceled wedding engagement. (more…)

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BED BUGGIN': Marcela (Ana Geislerová, left) and Jarda (Roman Luknár)

A paperback copy of a Milan Kundera novel, held in the hands of a Czech expat, briefly appears in Beauty In Trouble. It’s a fleeting moment (and easy to miss), but it’s also an important gesture of respect from director Jan Hrebejk. Like the best of Kundera’s fiction, Beauty In Trouble explores the ways that politics, history, and economics can meet in the bedrooms of Prague.

The title’s Beauty is Marcela (Ana Geislerová), a down-on-her-luck mother of two. The Trouble is her husband Jarda (Roman Luknár), an unlikable brute who’s resorted to stealing and chopping cars as a full time profession. Cynical and thick-skinned, they’re scraping by in a world diminished by the Soviet Union’s failure and a disastrous flood. When Jarda lands in jail for a stolen Volvo, Marcela gets mixed up with the car’s owner, the wealthy and intellectual Evzen Benes (Josef Abrhám).

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ACTING SHMACTING: Tommy Wiseau shows how overrated talent can be in 'The Room.'

The Room arguably qualifies as one of the worst films ever made, but I’m not sorry I saw it. I’m only sorry I witnessed its shlocky attempt at eroticism on DVD instead of with a group, like the Plaza Theatre’s upcoming screening Tues., Feb. 17 at 9:30 p.m. Barely noticed upon its original release in 2003, The Room has inspired a fanatical cult following that includes Hollywood cool kids such as Paul Rudd and David Cross. The Room invites joyous ridicule at midnight screenings like The Rocky Horror Picture Show for a new generation.

Most cult films involve loopy subject matter, such as Rocky Horror’s alien transvestite musical or Plan 9 From Outer Space’s extraterrestrial grave robbers. The Room’s plot proves utterly mundane as it follows a San Francisco love triangle between a theoretically lovable banker named Johnny (auteur Tommy Wiseau), his bored, gold-digging fiancée Lisa (Juliette Danielle), and Johnny’s best friend Mark (Greg Sestero).

The Room’s fascination comes in large part from Wiseau’s bizarre screen presence. Overly pumped up, dressed in black, and with long black tresses framing his half-closed eyes, Wiseau looks like the kind of mob henchman Jean-Claude Van Damme would kick in the face in the first reel. His slurry European accent and challenges with emotional intonation make simple statements sound otherworldly. His would-be anguished exclamation “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” has become the film’s de facto catchphrase. (Fittingly, Wiseau will appear on an upcoming episode of Adult Swim’s surreal “Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”)

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DON'T SPEAK: Andrea (Alessandro Calza, left) and Jeff (Adam Neal Smith) let their eyes do the talking.

An old commercial used to claim, “If you want to attract someone’s attention, whisper.” The indie drama Ciao seems to heed that advice in its quiet, compelling introduction. The audience reads a series of e-mail messages on a black screen interspersed between simple, enigmatic shots of one man leaving his apartment and another man going through his effects. We soon identify the two correspondents. Andrea (Alessandro Calza), an Italian graphic designer, plans to visit his chat room pal Mark in Dallas, Texas. Jeff (Adam Neal Smith), a financial planner, informs Andrea that Mark recently died in a car accident.

With no spoken dialogue, Ciao’s early moments draw us in. As we watch Jeff go about his routine, we reflect on how unexpected tragedy can lend gravity to the seemingly mundane activities of the survivors. Then, at about the nine-minute mark, the characters finally start talking out loud to each other, and Ciao becomes a lot less interesting.

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MAKIN' BANK: Clive Owen as Louis Salinger

Apart from America’s repo men, probably the only people popping champagne corks over last fall’s financial meltdown were the producers of The International. Doubtless the filmmakers wondered whether Clive Owen and Naomi Watts were big enough names to open their fair-to-middlin’ espionage-type thriller about a nefarious global bank.

Then the markets crashed and megabanks hit up the U.S. tax payers for bailout money, without curtailing their corporate fat-cat ways. With financial institutions emerging as the zeitgeist’s villains of the moment, The International’s follow-the-money suspense plot seems almost psychic. It’s like the way the Three Mile Island nuclear accident happened 12 days after the release of The China Syndrome: You can’t buy that kind of publicity.

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IN A PINCH: Michelle Williams in 'Wendy and Lucy'

In his new comedy DVD Kill the Messenger, Chris Rock remarks that people always feel sorry for dogs that belong to homeless guys. It never occurs to them to feel sorry for the homeless men. Director Kelly Reichardt’s spare drama Wendy and Lucy uses a canine companion to magnify the audience’s empathy for its drifting heroine.

Michelle Williams plays Wendy, a young woman from Indiana driving across America with a dog named Lucy and a vague plan to find work in Alaska. She keeps some cash in a money belt, but strictly rations the reserves to bankroll her trip. When her car breaks down in a former mill town in Oregon, Wendy suffers a series of misfortunes — some avoidable, some not — that emphasize the tenuousness of life on razor-thin financial margins. Even audiences with money will feel familiar pangs of nervousness while wondering whether an auto mechanic (Will Patton) will make a bank-breaking diagnosis.

Lucy’s disappearance exacerbates Wendy’s desperation, as she struggles to track down the dog while having no car, phone or place to live. Wendy’s attachment to Lucy, and her guilt over the pet’s disappearance, help cultivate our sympathies for a character who otherwise keeps an emotional remove. The script doesn’t explain how she entered such dire straits. Reichardt and Williams embrace a kind of working class American minimalism — clearly inspired by the Italian neo-realists — that keeps us from getting inside Wendy’s head in a conventional, Hollywood way. (more…)

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WONDER WOMAN: Coraline (right)

The fantastical opening credits sequence of Coraline superbly sets the stage for the eerie wonders to come. An unseen, scissor-handed figure sews and dresses a rag doll in an otherworldly environment. At one point a needle pops through the coarse fabric and JUTS RIGHT OUT AT THE AUDIENCE, in one of those amusing show-offy moments we expect from 3-D movies, but still takes us by surprise.

Coraline employs most of its 3-D effects more subtly but with seamless effectiveness. Henry Selick, who also directed Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, presents an ingenious fusion of delicate stop-motion animation and splashy 3-D gimmickry. Each style enhances the other. Coraline’s toys-in-the-attic designs seem even more tactile and solid rendered in three dimensions. The combination insistently beckons the audience into the film’s creepy yet magical places and things better than the 2-D version would. (more…)

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SKETCHY TERRITORY: Ari remembers the war.

Waltz With Bashir, Ari Folman’s surreal remembrance of Israel’s 1982 war with Lebanon, ends on the most wrenching note imaginable, yet leaving the theater offers no relief to the audience. The real world only amplifies the movie’s disheartening themes.

Folman, a filmmaker and Lebanon War veteran, uses splashy animation for his fascinating nonfiction account of the damage war inflicts on innocent civilians and victorious soldiers alike. Viewers steep in the horrors of the Lebanon War and the psychological trauma of its aftermath. But after the closing credits, current events come rushing in and we recall the fresh wounds of Israel’s recent conflict with Gaza. Waltz With Bashir offers depressing confirmation of the adage that history repeats itself, and suggests that a similar film — Waltz With Gaza, maybe — will be made a generation from now. (more…)

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GENRE: Fantasy adventure for Harry Potter fans

THE PITCH: Single dad/bibliophile Mo Folchart (Brendan Fraser) is a “silvertongue,” with the power to draw characters out of books and send real people into them. He and his daughter (Eliza Bennett) track down an obscure fantasy novel named Inkheart to find his long-lost wife, despite the interference of such “fictional” personalities as the villainous Capricorn (Andy Serkis) and the conflicted antihero Dustfinger (Paul Bettany).

MONEY SHOTS: Dustfinger’s pet ferret chases Mo. Capricorn keeps a stable with creatures such as Peter Pan’s ticking crocodile and the Wizard of Oz’s flying monkeys. Mo reads the cyclone out of Oz to cover their escape from Capricorn’s castle. A big smoke monster called the Shadow looks pretty cool (if suspiciously like Lord of the Rings’ balrog). Oscar winner Dame Helen Mirren rides a mythological beast into an action scene, which is almost worth the price of admission.

BEST LINE: “You barbaric piece of pulp fiction!” Mirren snaps at Serkis, who each give such plummy, charismatic performances, it’s as though they’ve been read from a better movie.
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MIST-TAKEN IDENTITY: James Caviezel as Kainan

GENRE: Vikings vs. aliens!

THE PITCH: Like I said, Vikings vs. aliens. Kainan (Jim Caviezel of The Passion of the Christ), a human from another planet, crashes his spaceship in Norway circa the Iron Age, and must enlist the suspicious mead swillers against a glowing, whip-tailed beastie called a Morwen.

MONEY SHOTS: The opening shot of Kainan’s spacecraft hurtling down to Earth. Kainan and alpha male Wulfric (Jack Huston) race atop upraised shields in the Viking equivalent of a “Survivor” challenge. Great monster battles, along with details like blood dripping on the tip of a spear, or the Morwen snuffing out a torch under its claw. An interplanetary flashback reveals personal stakes for the Kainan/Morwen rivalry.

BEST LINE: “I’m hunting a dragon,” Kainan tells his hostile captors when they ask why he’s in their territory. (The explanation doesn’t go over well.)

BEST WORD: Kainan uses his computer to download the Norse language into his brain, causing him to scream, vomit and utter the film’s first comprehensible word, “Fuck.” (more…)

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I’m as guilty as the next guy. Last summer critics crowned filmmaker Judd Apatow the king of big-screen comedy following his hilarious hits Knocked Up, which he wrote and directed, and Superbad, which he co-wrote and produced. I wondered whether Apatow would follow in the footsteps of the beloved Hal Ashby as a crafter of wise but raucous humanist comedies.

One year later, the sight of Apatow Productions in film credits seems more like a warning sign than a seal of approval. The rival siblings of July 25’s Step Brothers and the fugitive stoners of this Wednesday’s Pineapple Express amount to a strikingly ineffectual one-two punch. Clearly last year’s Apatow adulation set a standard that cannot or will not be met by every movie with his name on it. Apatow Productions doesn’t guarantee smart laughs in the same way that, say, Pixar does.

Apatow’s core movies comprise the clearly personal films he wrote and directed, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, plus, presumably, next year’s Funny People with Adam Sandler. Then comes an inner circle of films he co-wrote or that otherwise involve protégés from the TV show “Freaks and Geeks,” such as Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. His influence seems far more tangential on Will Ferrell’s comedies Anchorman and Talladega Nights, the success of which helped secure green lights for Apatow’s smaller-scale films.

Read the rest of this article here.

(Image by Dale Robinette)

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