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..Wilmington on DVD ..MCN Weekend

Whatever Works,The Proposal, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3... and more
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Whatever Works  (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S.; Woody Allen, 2009
    
Twenty years ago, actor-writer-director Woody Allen -- and his new film Crimes and Misdemeanors -- were celebrated in the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times, with an editorial genuflection  (a front page package of essays by three theologians discussing Allen’s fillum and its moral issues) that you might think more suitable for the recent, prestige-drenched winner of a Nobel Prize.
         
How are the Times-made-mighty fallen. Or pratfallen.  Now, in Allen‘s latest movie Whatever Works, the Nobel Prize is used as a running gag. The film’s main character Boris Yellnikov (who isn’t played by Woody, but by Wood-alike Larry David) -- a misbegotten soul whose oddball romance with Mississippi-born homeless gal Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood) is the main plot --  keeps being described as string physics specialist who “almost won the Nobel Prize.”
     
I didn’t really buy the idea that this pop culture-fluent wisecracker, who sounds suspiciously like Woody, was a star physicist. And he didn’t convince me that he was up for the Nobel Prize any more than I thought Alan Rickman (as another, much less amusing smartass misanthrope) was a Nobel winner in the ridiculous kidnap thriller Nobel Son. But I did buy David as the best Woody-surrogate ever: an utterly disenchanted New Yorker with a bad, funny mouth, who loves Fred Astaire and Beethoven, always sings “Happy Birthday“ in the toilet, dismisses the children whom he teaches chess as “cretins,” and obviously suffers from extreme anaerobia. (That’s the condition of disaffection from happiness, and also the original title of Annie Hall.)
   
In the movie, Boris leaves his upscale life and wife after a failed suicide attempt, relocates himself as a Chinatown dropout scraping along teaching kids chess, and spends some talking to the audience, like Alvy Singer in Annie Hall. (Here, the other characters sometimes hear him and think he’s nuts.) Finally, he finds Melody on his doorstep. Charming but lightly learned, she‘s his perfect opposite number, a mix of Holly Golightly, Liza Doolittle, Iris from Taxi Driver, and Daisy Mae Yokum.
    
And soon, she‘s dragged some more transplanted Mississippians to Manhattan: her seemingly straight-arrow, Christian-rightwing parents Marietta and John (played wittily by Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley, Jr.). Naughty Marietta becomes an avant garde photographer living in a ménage a trois (with two of Boris’ buddies) and homophobic NRA gun-lover John discovers he‘s been a secret Paul Lynde all along.
      
Melody herself blossoms under Boris’ bilious tutelage, and eventually she finds a younger suitor (Henry Cavill as the absurdly good-looking actor, Randy James), setting up a New Years Eve ending that suggested to me an irresistible lower-rent, alternative-lifestyle variation on the happy climax on one of Allen‘s best-loved movies, Hannah and Her Sisters. Just to prove he isn’t a softie, Allen, through David, takes a shot at that other crowd-pleaser, It’s a Wonderful Life just before the end -- without naming the movie. (Or hitting it.)   
    
Who cares? I liked Whatever Works. It was funny. Whatever has been damned by some for not giving us anything new, but that strikes me as ageism disguised as a love of innovation or novelty. Critics who keep demanding that moviemakers blaze new trails: Aren’t they a little like the Woody of their nightmares, forever chasing younger women and fresh affairs?  What’s wrong with redoing your specialty? Many of the best movies -- or books or paintings or pieces of music -- are hardly novel. They don’t break off in new directions, as much as they re-explore and refine old ones.
     
That’s what Whatever Works does. It reimagines and rescales the terrain Allen already gave us in Manhattan, Hannah, Annie Hall, Broadway Danny Rose, Deconstructing Harry and Husbands and Wives. And you know something? We should be happy that it does. What should we expect from an artist in his 70s? We should be glad that he’s still working, still writing and directing, still prolific, still dreaming up one-liners and even still having romantic fantasies, even if they’re not complete with fantasy roles for himself any more.
      
Film history is packed with examples of later works by major filmmakers that were wrongly downgraded at first and later evaluated upwards -- and some of them are by Woody Allen, including Husbands and Wives and Sweet and Lowdown. And though it bothers me that Allen doesn’t appear (or even narrate) on screen any more -- imagine the reviews he would have gotten if he‘d dared to play Boris, a limping, foul mouthed geezer who gets hitched to a teen dream vixen -- it doesn’t really damage this movie. David delivers Allen‘s nastiest, funniest lines as if he’d made them up. Besides, according to Variety, Allen actually wrote this part, over three decades ago, not for himself but for Zero Mostel (who would have been terrific in it.)
    
As for Evan Rachel Wood, she pushed her dramatic intensity into a comic mold very successfully,  suggesting sweetness, ignorance and mental and emotional liveliness, while performing the interesting romantic fantasy function of suggesting both the Mariel Hemingway and (later)  Diane Keaton characters in Manhattan. She‘s both the faithful innocent and later the faithless semi-sophisticate. Or, to embroider the Pygmalion metaphor, she may be a Mariel whom Boris, perhaps unwisely, educates into a  Diane. (Would Keaton have been Zero‘s costar back in the ‘70s?) It’s a fine, raunchy performance,  though, at the start, she flails and flaps her hands around a little too much, and too calculatedly. Clarkson, meanwhile, does a painfully funny job as Marietta, a know-it-all dame irritating and obnoxious, as well as funny, with all the unbraked destructiveness of a truly naïve artist.    
     
However much we would have liked to hear Mostel -- or Allen -- read these lines, David cracks Woody’s verbal whips with merciless relish. The sarcastic writer-guru of Seinfeld and the actor-writer-guru of Curb Your Enthusiasm may never have convinced me he was a physicist, and maybe, he should have been a  novelist or filmmaker or TV writer instead. But David gets his laughs and Allen even gives him a poignant Chaplinesque close-up when Boris discovers (Spoiler alert for the rest of this graph and the one after it) that Melody is going to leave him.
     
For me though, the movie would have worked better if melody didn’t end up with Randy James -- an unlikable character for all his looks -- but instead left Randy afterwards for a younger, Woodier type.  Anyway, I couldn’t help suspecting that Boris, was being partly punished by a too easy acceptance of all those Woodyphobes who have expressed such distaste for watching the older Allen, or Allen surrogates, cavort with younger women. This move suggests that Allen is paying the piper, at least on screen. But, of course, Whatever Works is only a movie. And, for me, it works. 
      
Still, I would like to see him acting in a movie again. What about Woody as a combination of Henny Youngman and King Lear? Or Woody as an elder Groucho Marx type, estranged from his brothers (including Gene Wilder as Harpo)? Woody as a Manhattan Don Quixote, lost in L. A., with Seth Rogen as Sancho Panza? Woody as a Philip Roth type accused of plagiarizing a lost manuscript by Norman Mailer (played by Al Pacino) and Gore Vidal (played by Frank Langella). Woody as the Old Man and the Sea -- obsessed with killing the Macy’s Parade Snoopy balloon.  Woody as…Oh Hell, I don’t know, whatever works.  
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The Proposal (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S.; Anne Fletcher, 2009
     
Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds made a shiny, spiffy romantic comedy couple in The Proposal, which, despite  a merely ordinary mismatched couple green card sham-marriage script, by Peter Ciarelli, has been very well directed by Anne Fletcher (27 Dresses), an ex-choreographer with a personality and comic grace.
      
Bullock hasn’t been that hit-visible for much of the decade. But she has a proper star turn here, she looks great and she really seduces the screen, as a beautiful but self-absorbed, ball-breaking Manhattan book editor named Margaret Tate, who discovers that she’s about to be deported back to Canada because of a paperwork snafu, and enlists her male secretary, Andrew Paxton (Ryan Reynolds in one of his umpteen recent performances) -- who hates her (or thinks he does) -- as a temporary husband.
    
Back the feuding couple go to Andy’s hometown, Sitka, Alaska, to hobnob with Andrew‘s lovably rich family -- including sweet mama Mary Steenburgen, pushy business dad Craig T. Nelson and foxy grandma Betty White (shoplifting scene after scene). There, Ms. Tate discovers that she and Andrew are simpatico in the nude, and that life can be beautiful, and funny, even if you’re being harassed by an immigration agent named Gilbertson and your governor is Sarah Palin.
     
This is the kind of unapologetically clichéd script that could have tripped up many another director. But Fletcher has a deft touch and an eye for movement and personality, and her actors, especially Bullock and Reynolds, are mostly as charming and funny as they can be. Reynolds has instant affability, even when he’s playing a little mean (which he isn’t here), and Bullock is a real doll, even when she’s playing mean as hell (which here, she is). Next time out, I hope Fletcher has a better script, but she‘s proven she doesn’t always need one.


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The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
 U. S.; Tony Scott, 2009

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3  rewires one of the most flavorful and zingy New York City thrillers of the ‘70s -- the street-smart, pedal-down action movie, based on a John Godey novel, about a hijacked subway train on the Lexington line and the rumpled streetwise transit cop (played by Walter Matthau), battling the ice-cold commando crook (Robert Shaw) who’s holding the passengers for a million dollar ransom -- and turns that not-so-guilty old pleasure into something faster and sleeker but less delicious. It's less cool, more mechanical, and at the end, more off-the-tracks absurd.
       
Entertaining though. To their credit, the people who made this new Pelham  -- including Denzel Washington and John Travolta, cast in the hero and villain roles -- seem to like the old movie. This new gang also seems to recognize that it was character and NYC atmosphere, more than out of control subway chases and high-tech razzmatazz, that made that movie so memorable.
     
So director Tony Scott (Spy Game), writer Brian Helgeland (L. A. Confidential) and the cast supply us with characters here: led by Washington as low-key good-guy, yet under-a-cloud train dispatcher Walter Garber (named, obviously, for Walt Matthau’s Zach Garber) and  Travolta, giggling and screaming away as Ryder, a Wall street thief/ex-con, with a Fu Manchu mustache and tattoos, a greed-is-good psycho who’s calling the hijack shots between tantrums.
      
Backing them up are John Turturro as a smart cop, Michael Rispoli as a stupid transit supervisor, Luis Guzman as a disgraced motorman helping Ryder, and James Gandolfini as a horny NYC mayor with a Rudy Giuliani complex. (At least it wasn’t Ed Koch.) All of them, plus Helgeland‘s occasionally tangy lines, are what lift this Pelham above the techno-ruck of most big action wannabe blockbusters, including most of Tony Scott‘s. (Name me a sillier flyboy movie than Top Gun, even if it did inspire a good dirty-minded Quentin Tarantino monologue.)  
    
Except for sheer glossy action technique, the new Pelham is way lesser than its predecessor in most respects. But if Scott’s shot at Coney Island does get a bit nutty at the end, well, so did the 1974 “Pelham.“ In fact, the whole damned premise is ludicrous. A subway car  held hostage by a gang of rough-trade-looking bad guys who demand one million bucks (or ten million smackers in this case) in an hour? Give me a break. It didn’t make that much sense in 1974 either. But what was remarkable about that movie, and to a lesser extent this one, is that you ended up buying it anyway, because you liked the cast and the ride.
     
So, after a while, it isn’t all that necessary to link Godey’s wild-ass Manhattan madness plot up to the real world, but (if you want to have a good time, instead of carping about the rape of verisimilitude) to just concentrate instead on how the characters are navigated through the chases and clichés.  Washington and Travolta are fun to watch throughout, even when Travolta is at his looniest, and the last train to logic has gone totally off the rails.
     
Did I say Sargent’s Pelham was flavorful?  Well, if the first movie tasted like a Katz Deli hot pastrami or salami on rye, or an old Original Ray’s pizza slice washed down with an Orange Julius, this one goes down more like more expensive delicatessen, with a Dr. Browns’ diet Black Cherry, that you’re too rushed to finish. It still tastes good, even if you’d rather be at Katz’s, digging the “Send a salami to your boy in the Army” signs.
     
One thing that’s really wrong with this new move is the way it turns at the end into a Metropolitan Transit Authority version of Top Gun, with Washington’s Garber suddenly morphed into a wholly unlikely action hero, racing all around the subway grid, popping up though manholes in time to spot Ryder’s getaway, and then chasing him all over the bridge for a last man-to-man facedown.
     
No. Way. None of this is necessary, no matter what the marketing department guys thought. Walter is heroic enough, just putting himself in danger in the end -- and it’s better to have the actual cop here doing the action movie heavy lifting, rather than having to figure out where a subway train dispatcher picked up all those unlikely martial skills and track star speed.
    
As a matter of fact, good as Turturro is (as usual), it would have been better for this Pelham to have a lead cop more like Matthau’s Zach Garber: salty, streetwise and a smart aleck. And by the way, no matter how hot and heavy the action movie riffs or the volatile chemistry between D. W. and J. T., there’s nothing in this movie anywhere near as  wonderful as the last moment of the 1974 show: the sardonic freeze frame of Matthau giving one of the crooks, one of his “oh yeah, buddy?“ sucking-a-sour-pickle looks.  That Whiplash Willie Gingrich once-over was worth a  ten million dollar ransom -- or a least a pre-inflation one million dollar windfall -- all by itself.   

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Of Time and the City (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
U. K.; Terence Davies, 2008
      
Bravo! The mournfully brilliant British independent filmmaker Terence Davies returns to Liverpool, the place of his birth and growing up -- and the setting of his graceful, wounding autobiographical family portrait Distant Voices, Still Lives -- for a movie that is poetic documentary, dark memoir, melancholy ballad, sex-haunted travelogue and subtle, lyrical classical and pop-music-drenched eulogy all at once.
    
Of Time is non-dramatic, composed almost entirely of shots of Liverpool past and present, accompanied by ironic, despairing or elegiac narration, written and spoken by Davies. The director’s somewhat John Gielgud-ish, actorish voice envelops those photographic/cinematographic images -- black-and-white or color, culled from archives or newly shot -- with a Shakespearean lamentation, burdened or charged by memory, flayed by desires both physical and spiritual.
       
Davies also laces those recollections with scraps of poetry or literature (Shelley‘s “Ozymandias,“ one of my favorites), snips of the social and cultural history of the ’40s through the ’70s (Queen Elizabeth’s girlish coronation), old songs or classical pieces (Kern, Hammerstein and Peggy Lee’s “The Folks Who Live on the Hill,” The Hollies’ “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”), and classical pieces (Brahms’ “Lullabye,” Liszt’s “Consolation No. 3 in D Flat Major,” Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony). All mesh together to evoke his Liverpool dreamscape, this reverie-soaked photo-album of his smoky, ocean-lapped, working-class urban port homeland.
     
Stretching back to the immediate post-war years, as the battered district tries to struggle back to normality, through the ‘50s of Davies’ movie-haunted childhood (the first film he saw, memorably, was “Singin’ in the Rain,“ which he loved on sight), through the seedy, sweaty pro wrestling matches and immaculate Catholic church confessionals that tormented his adolescence with sexual longing and guilt, through the ’60s live heyday of his fellow Liverpudlians, the Beatles (the rock ‘n roll-hating Davies lived across from the Fab Four’s pop den/showcase the Cavern during their quick rise to local fame, yet never caught their act), to the ’70s and to sunny shots of Liverpool today, Of Time and the City is, in every precious minute of its passing, Davies’ loving but sad picture of his time and his city. (Chicago Gene Siskel Center)

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24 City (Four Stars)
China; Jia Zhang-Ke, 2008
    
China’s Jia Zhang-ke, one of the world‘s great filmmakers (if neglected by the mass public), takes us to an old munitions plant, Factory 420, that’s been operating since the Korean War, but is now due to be mostly razed to make way for a huge new condominium complex, to be called 24 City. That new condo Ville will displace Factory 420’s 30,000 workers for 3 million plus square feet of ritzy living space, and thousands of trendy condo residents.
    
Was it worth it? The movie gives us interviews with nine Factory 420 workers -- five real ones and four dramatized, fictional characters played by well-known movie actors. All of them usher us back to the past, when Factory 420 was first a buzzing Marxist weapons plant, and practically a private city unto itself, and later a steadily failing, dying industry that laid off workers and slowly atrophied.
    
The stories told us, both by the real workers and the fictitious ones (whose tales are composites from other real interviews), are, as usually with Jia, bittersweet, deeply humane, a bit elliptical and freighted with sad irony. These people worked hard, lived together and took some small pride and happiness in their world, and now that world is about to vanish: gutted, stripped and collapsing into rubble. Part of it falls and dies right before our eyes.
     
The four actors impersonating 420 workers or family include the very famous Joan Chen (The Last Emperor), who plays here a beautiful but unhappy woman named Gu Minhua-- once a young girl whom everybody at the factory called “Little Flower,” after the Chinese movie actress who became a superstar in the 1978 hit Little Flower: young Joan Chen. Her love life wrecked by a jealous scandal-monger, who pretended she wrote him love letters, and perhaps by her own high expectations (she rejects, from embarrassment, one suitor who raised himself up from poverty, with 420‘s“Little Flower” as his lifelong ideal), she is now a lonely woman in her 50s. Another young woman, Sun Na (played by Jia regular  Zhao Tao) is a daughter of workers who now drives a beetle and earns her living buying fashionable clothes for wealthy wives, and cries when she thinks of her parents’ labors. Among the real workers are a proud line workers, and a foreman suffering from senility.
    
Why did Jia use actors mixed with real people? Well, not to hoodwink his audience -- especially the Chinese audience, who probably would have recognized some of the actors immediately. Most likely, he sees this mix of truth and fiction as the best way to tell this particular story, which is all based on fact. He  casts a spell as he shows us the people and the passage from one world into another.
     
What are his social/political sympathies here?  They strike me as neither completely with nor against the worlds of the old weapon mill, or the new condo “paradise,” but instead with the people who lived or will live in both, and who had or will have their lives twisted and bent by the social forces around them, whether Mao or Mercedes Benz. Does it matter that part of the movie was financed by 24 City and its corporation? No more than it ultimately matters that Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story was backed by Standard Oil.
       
Jia has become the kind of critical darling that Krzysztof Kieslowski or Fassbinder or Godard or Antonioni or Bergman used to be, and he deserves it. Like Kieslowski, Loach and the Dardenne brothers, he powerfully melds documentary and drama, truth and fiction, and nowhere more potently than here. He’s an artist who masterfully gives us whole worlds and the people who live in them. In Mandarin Chinese, with English subtitles.

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- Michael Wilmington
June 11, 2009

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