..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

..Wilmington on DVD ..MCN Weekend

The Time
Traveler's Wife, Ponyo, Bandslam, and more ... _________________________________

The Time Traveler’s Wife (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Robert Schwentke, 2009
     
Time travel movie romances, like the locus classicus, Somewhere in Time are usually about the transience of love and desire, the bittersweet impossibility of reclaiming the past. That’s the theme of The Time Traveler’s Wife, based on Audrey Niffenegger’s novel and written by Bruce Joel Rubin of Ghost.

The two central time-crossed lovers, played by Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana, a movie couple with a genuine glow on screen, are Clare, who keeps meeting her lover in and out of time sequence, beginning when she’s a little girl in a sunny field, and Henry, who’s afflicted with fits of involuntarily time travel that send him hopping in and out of chronology -- and in an out of Clare’s life.
    
Their story is like that of the lady in love with the sailor, who can’t resist the pull of the sea, or, to get more modern, like the predicament of the wife of a big movie star who keeps zipping off to one new location after another. The ending is of course, wet handkerchief sad and wanna be redemptive -- and since Henry keeps disappearing in swatches, like a melting ice cream cone, you get clued into his vanishings and Clare‘s super-tolerance for them. And it’s obvious when we see his oldest nude body (no clothes for time travelers in this movie, which made me wish he’d taught the trick to Clare), writhing and gunshot on a floor, that we and the lovers are heading toward Tearsville.
    
I didn’t think the story made much sense, especially compared to a terrifically twisty little time travel science fiction classic like Robert Heinlein’s By Your Bootstraps or All You Zombies, or (the ultimate change the past and future tale, Ray Bradbury’s The Sound of Thunder -- and the writers are especially loose with their planted  idea that time travelers can’t change the future or the past, no matter how much they may want to  -- something that doesn’t seem to hold here for pregnancies, financial windfalls and lots of other stuff.
    
Director Robert Schwentke (Flightplan) and his crew make the move look crisp and luscious, and the audience I saw it with, had a good time, treating as a sort of  Jim Carrey high concept comedy and chuckling part of the way through. But though I cried a little at Rubin‘s Ghost -- mostly because I shared it with a dying girlfriend -- I thought the romantic luminosity of McAdams and Bana was a little wasted here. Still, if you’re a sucker for this kind of movie, you may forgive it, just as the wife keeps forgiving her time traveler, murmuring perhaps “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill" ... and hubby home from twenty years hence. But I still wish time travel movies, which scored big with Richard Matheson Somewhere in Time  would give us something a little more Heinleinish.     

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Ponyo (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
Japan-U.S.; Hayao Miyazaki, 2009
    
Hayao Miyazaki‘s devotion to old-fashioned animation, in an age of computerized cartoon virtuosity of all sorts, gives his movies a charmingly personal, beguilingly hand-crafted feel -- never more so than in his latest picture, Ponyo.
    
Another international collaboration between Miyazaki and one of the masters of the new computer animation style, John Lasseter of Pixar (who acts here as the English language co-director), it’s  a kiddie-hip wondrous fairytale about the love affair between a five year old boy named Sosuke and a magical goldfish-turned-little girl named Ponyo. Their romance -- beginning when Sosuke fishes the little gold belle from the sea and she smittenly turns human for him -- literally knocks the world‘s socks off and pulls the moon almost down to the ocean tides.
    
The inspiration, quite obviously, is Hans Christian Andersen‘s masterpiece  The Little Mermaid, which, in its original version (not the delightful but more emotionally shallow Disney feature cartoon), was one of the saddest fairytales ever told. But Disney’s version wasn’t a tearjerker and neither is Miyazaki’s. It‘s a little crayon-colored bliss-out of a kiddie movie, with an ecological subtext.
     
Of course, the world and its oceans do seem threatened for a while, and one wonders for a while, how powerful and friendly Ponyo’s ocean king dad Fujimoto really is. But, once Ponyo starts chowing down with Sosuke and his family, one feels that, in this fairytale, happily ever after wont be too much of a stretch.  
  
It’s a truly lovable film, with an immaculately childlike perspective. The drawings and animation -- simpler and more primitive and Pokemon-looking than any other recent Miyazaki film (like Spirited Away or Howl‘s Moving Castle -- almost seem to spring alive from coloring books, and the story  twists and turns to jump right out of your own private inner child right into your adult soul.
     
Ponyo and Sosuke are voiced by a couple of rocklings, Noah Cyrus (Miley‘s sister) and Frankie Jonas (of the Jonas clan), and the rest of the cast includes Tina Fey and Matt Damon as Sosuke’s parents, Liam Neeson as Fujimoto, a kind of Japanese Jupiter, Cate Blanchett as her mother, the ocean queen, and Cloris Leachman, Lily Tomlin and Betty White as three great old biddies at a nearby old folks‘ home, the Goldenish Girls of this movie.
     
Lasseter and company have done well by Ponyo, and I think the decision to redub Miyazaki for American audiences makes a lot of sense -- especially considering that the core audience, especially for this movie, is children. Let’s hope that a lot of them haven’t gotten so technically sophisticated and demanding, they can’t take a shine to this sweet little goldfish and her faithful boy pal.

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Bandslam (Two Stars)
U. S.; Todd Graff, 2009
    
Todd Graff (Camp) ties to give us a Disney-fied popteen musical orgy, with a coming of age outsider triangle romance tied in. Nice try --as nerdy music expert Will (Gaelan Connell) teams up with school rock band and prospective “Bandslam” contest competitor Glory Dogs, whose lead singer is school blondie glamour doll and ex-cheerleader Charlotte (Aly Michalka), with a waiting in the wings keyboard stylist named Sa5m (the “5” is silent), played by High School Musical” refugee Vanessa Hudgens, this film‘s idea of a maverick. The movie and the band are supposed to be smarter than the norm -- and they are -- but they’re still trapped in the same popteen formulas, even if they pull a switcheroo ending.
    
You know the moviemakers are stretching too hard here, when they have the kids rename the band, Samuel Beckett-esquely, I Can’t Go On,  I’ll Go On. And the plot line here suggests many of its “let’s put a show” progenitors from the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney Babes in Arms forward. Rock on? I’d rather be reading Samuel Beckett.    

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The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard (One-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Neil Brennan, 2009
     
Will Ferrell may be working too hard, selling too hard. This particular producer-chore for George Bush’s walking nightmare and doppleganger, is awful, awful. The usually funny Jeremy Piven, trying misguidedly to follow in the footsteps of Used Cars‘ Kurt Russell, stars as a super car dealer gun-for-hire named Don Ready, nicknamed The Goods, and hired to save James Brolin’s closeted, ailing dealership from the predatory clutches of the bank and his competitors.
     
A lot of good actors and comedians are sunk in this -- not only the miscast Piven, but Ving Rhames, Ed Helms, Jordana Spiro and Charles Napier (playing the kind of guy, who might show up at a town hall political meeting with an Uzi) and Ferrell himself, who does a skydiving scene with a non-existent parachute. That pretty much sums up the movie too, which is a clunker of clunkers. Trust me.  

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Flame and Citron (Three Stars)
Denmark; Ole Christian Madsen, 2008
   
From director/co-writer Ole Christian Madsen, this is a gripping, smart Danish World War II neo-noir anti-Nazi resistance drama, based on fact but fictionalized, about a crack assassin named Bent aka Flame (Thurl Lindhardt) and his ace driver Citron aka Jorgen (Mads Mikkelsen). There’s also a waiting wife named Bodil (Mille Hofmeyer Lehfeldt) and sex bomb spy Ketty (Stine Stengade), and a horde of shady looking characters and arrogant Nazis, all crossing and double-crossing each other.
      
The movie is often as dark and cynical as one of Jean-Pierre Melville‘s (aka Grumbach’s) resistance movies, and Jorgen Johansson‘s cinematography is ultra-bleak, as if  the lens is about to frost. The ending, jaw-droppingly, moves into Where Eagles Dare” or Peckinpah-cum-Tarantino balls-out massacre territory, which makes you wonder about the truth under the fiction, the citron under the flame. But it doesn’t matter. This movie should get right under your skin.    
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Irene in Time (Three Stars)
U.S.; Henry Jaglom, 2009

Irene in Time is the sixteenth Rainbow production (dig that crazy Orson Welles logo!) of Henry Jaglom, ex-‘70s movie rad, camarado of the B.B.S. Easy Rider gang, and the later comic cine-poet laureate of the pricey angsts and wayward romances of now bourgeois but still rebellious post-60s L. A..
      
Jaglom by now is master of a cine-dramatic style that, like Mike Leigh’s, makes heavy use of improvisation --and Irene really clicks in the way  loopy Jaglom romances like Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, Always, New Year’s Day and Last Summer in the Hamptons all did.
        
Star Tanna Frederick, Jaglom’s ferociously smiling (All About) Eve in his 2005 backstage movie tell-all Hollywood Dreams, here plays an enthusiastic but ill-dated L. A single who adored her father, meets some disappointing men, parties hard with her sympathetic gal friends, and learns a shocker about her dad, a gambler who once won a yacht in a big poker hand and named it "Irene in Time“ for her.     
       
Jaglom, whom I’ve known since I was head reviewer for L. A. Weekly,  is one filmmaker who’s just like his movies, and who can never be accused of selling out, playing studio politics or making an impersonal movie. Instead, he’s often slammed for those commonly cited indie flaws, awkwardness and self-indulgence -- though those of us who like him feel that it’s the awkwardness of life, the self-indulgence and narcissism of L. A. Itself. All the actors are good --especially Frederick and Andrea Marcovicci, and Jaglom‘s Sitting Duck comic Zack Norman has an opening anecdote about that yacht that’s a killer. All the scenes hold up just fine on re-seeing in the way that really awkward movie scenes couldn’t.
     
Sweet movie. Good cast. (Including Karen Black, Victoria Tennant, Adam Davidson, David Proval, Reni Santoni and others.) Very nice songs too, in a Carole King vein, thanks to Harriet Schock.

Read Michael Wilmington on DVDs


- Michael Wilmington
August 13, 2009

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