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

..The Images & Trailer ..MCN Weekend ..Wilmington on DVD

Amelia
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, Motherhood, (Untitled) and Leon Morin, Priest

Amelia (Three Stars)
U.S.; Mira Nair, 2009
      
Amelia is an old-fashioned, over-romantic movie, but likably so.  It’s true that director Mira Nair and writers Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan don‘t spring many surprises here, while telling us the story of the famed trailblazing aviatrix Amelia Earhart -- an iconic American figure of the ‘20s and ‘30s who vanished over the Pacific while on a record-breaking, gender-smashing, ‘round-the-world flight. But I’m not sure I wanted them too.
       
Still, why not be a little happy that we can still get an adult-oriented movie like this, well and sometimes lovingly  crafted and splendidly shot (by Stuart Dryburgh), with fine performances by Hilary Swank as the spunky, expert flier Amelia, Richard Gere as her media-savvy publisher/husband George Putnam, Ewan McGregor as her fellow pilot/aviation teacher/lover Gene Vidal,  Christopher Eccleston as her hard drinking navigator Fred Noonan, Cherry Jones as New Deal first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (too brief, too brief),  and most of the rest of a glittering cast, in the same week when the studios also give us another bash-’em, slash-’em horror franchise bloodbath (Saw VI) and another teen vampire movie (Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant).  
     
It’s nice to see a big movie made for adults (Motherhood fits that bill too of course), even if Amelia is not unflawed -- and even if it’s not the instant Oscar candidate some of us might have anticipated.  
      
Nair and the writers are a little corny and predictable here, but that doesn’t ruin the movie. They give us a typical feminist historical heroine and bathe her in heroine-worship: Swank as the rangy, freckled ever-smiling Amelia, stoic yet blissed out in the skies, idol of a nation, and torn between two loves, Gere’s Putnam and McGregor’s Vidal (who is also father of young future writer and political gadfly Gore Vidal, here played as a child by William Cuddy). 
     
They also fill their movie with lyrical aerial shots, scored by Gabriel Yared, plus some spotty inspirational narration by Amelia, and lots of lush period detail. It’s not the kind of movie Martin Scorsese made out of Howard Hughes‘ life story in The Aviator. But then Amelia wasn’t a crazy figure like Hughes. And Nair’s movie is not the clunker or crash-landing, that some early reviews might lead you to expect. (Since Amelia premieres in theaters in the same week that her masterpiece Monsoon Wedding is released on a Criterion DVD, I will admit to prejudice in her favor.)
        
The movie mostly covers the years of her 1928-1937 heyday and it begins with some tense scene around Amelia’s last, doomed flight. Then, it flashes back to her Kansas girlhood, her rapt infatuation with the planes and barnstormers soaring above her cornfields, and her quick rise to the top -- thanks to glib, natty charmer and Charles Lindbergh promoter/publisher Putnam, who senses her star quality and puts her aboard a successful transatlantic flight with navigator Noonan, reaping the publicity coup of finding a “Lady Lindy.”  
        
Was Amelia primarily a creation of ballyhoo and public relations gimmickry? Some muckraking reporters thought so at the time, and the movie gives us plenty of period headlines, newsreels and backstage finagling to convey a sense of her stupendous popularity -- and the unease she herself felt at being more passenger than pilot on her grand icon-making flight.
      
Perhaps that’s what mostly bothers “Amelia‘s” critical attackers. Rather than becoming an expose, it makes Amelia into somewhat the national heroine Putnam envisioned -- conqueror of the skies, mentor to other femme fliers --  rather than cutting too far below the surface. Nair and the writers do make it clear she’s having an affair with Gore‘s papa. They just don’t show them in bed. And they do show how she becomes a New Deal heroine as well, chumming it up with Mrs. Roosevelt, and espousing progressive causes -- as opposed to the more reactionary Lindbergh, for whom Putnam expresses contempt, and who later became a main spokesman for leaving the Nazis alone and staying out of World War II.
      
Swank manages a remarkable physical resemblance to Amelia, especially catching her wide, ultra-charismatic grin. She also gets the character’s rangy athleticism. Just as Swank looked and moved like a boxer in Million Dollar Baby, she looks and moves like an aviatrix here. We can believe her as a woman at the controls, and we can also accept her as someone who doesn’t like it, but gets caught up in her own publicity. Truth to tell, I was mystified by the Busby Berkeley-style commercials that Nair staged. (Where were they shown?) But they’re nice satire anyway.
     
Gere is, once again, an appealing romantic foil, sunny and stalwart.  The director and writers don’t do much with McGregor as Vidal, and they keep dragging on Cuddy‘s little Gore as if he were preparing for a debate with a kid Norman Mailer or a tot Truman Capote. (“That’th not drawing. That’th crayons!”)  Eccleston has one good pseudo-seduction drunk scene, and he sometimes shows an unsettling facial resemblance to the Spencer Tracy of Test Pilot. The climactic Lockheed Electra sequence, with Amelia and Fred lost in clouds over the Pacific, unable to hear their ground crew’s radio, and calmly or nervously headed toward apparent disaster, is really well-done, crisp and thrilling.
     
Amelia may not be another Aviator, but it compares favorably to Billy Wilder’s underrated 1957 Lindbergh biopic, The Spirit of St. Louis,  a good, hero-worshipping but sharp movie that was not too well-reviewed, or attended, in its day either. But Spirit is still a show that, thanks to Wilder and star Jimmy Stewart, plays well today. You might almost see it as a kind of model for the spirit of Amelia.
         
Cinematic surprises and subversion are sometimes overrated. And, in the case of Amelia, I think the harsh tone of some of the earliest reviews may come from the fact that it’s an Oscar-profile kind of movie that doesn’t really look like a nominees, and that struck some of those critics as too corny or mushy. True, true. Amelia may not win large audiences, statuettes or nominations. (Swanks perhaps excepted). But Nair remains a wonderful filmmaker, just as Amelia Earhart was a wondrous fly girl. Both of them show to good advantage, and occasionally soar, here.  
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Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (Two and a Half Stars)
U. S.; Paul Weitz, 2009
       
Two teenage buddies -- popular high school guy Daren Shan (Chris Massoglia) and his black sheep chum Steve (Josh Hutcherson) -- make the mistake of attending a Cirque du Freak show, in an abandoned David Lynchian theater that you enter like a speakeasy. And they wind up communing with the undead as combatants in a war between the Cirque performers, headed by amiable vampire Crepsley (John C. Reilly, doing a fabulous job in a Vincent Price-ish role) and the evil minions of the creepy Mr. Tiny (Michael Cerveris, trying to channel both Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet). 
       
Listen, I didn’t want to see any more teen vampire movies, even if they have a good a cast as this one (Salma Hayek, Patrick Fugit, Frankie Faison, Jessica Carlson and Orlando Jones are among the freaks, and Fugit is terrific as The Snake Boy). But it nips and zips along fairly well, until the climactic magic duel, which has been done better numerous times, including the rip-roarer in The Raven between Price and Boris Karloff.
      
What irritates me about The Vampire’s Assistant though, is that the Vampire (Reilly) is so much more interesting than the Assistant (Massoglia), even though the producers, director (Paul Weitz), and writers (original author Darren Shan, Weitz and Brian Helgeland) keep pushing Darren as the star and the Darren-Steve clash as if that were their ticket to heaven. Should our screens be that teen-obsessed? Isn’t their life after high school? (When I was a kid, I went to movies to see what the adults did, and I thought most high school movies were stupid or phony. And they were. And are.) 
    
In any case, I haven’t read the any of the Cirque du Freak stories on which this movie is based and I don‘t think I will. But I guess we’re stuck with another string of sequels. In any case, kudos to Reilly for breaking so smashingly out of the slob mold.  And, if I remember right, he’s playing a 200-year-old. 
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Motherhood (Two and a Half Stars)
U. S.; Katherine Deickmann, 2009
         
Motherhood has Uma Thurman as Eliza Welsh, the beleaguered mother of two on a day when everything goes wrong. It‘s yet another somewhat whiney, self-indulgent domestic comedy-drama about the trials of living a privileged middle class life in comfortable surroundings -- in this case, the West Village of New York City, which is about as stimulating a neighborhood as you could find anywhere. 
        
Thurman, trying to get into a Meryl Streep mode (sometimes successfully)  plays Eliza as if she were crossing the ice. She’s trying desperately to write a prize-winning blog entry, on a day when her loving, supportive hubby (Anthony Andrews) is selling his old books (including an autographed first edition of a classic we‘ll leave to your imagination), a sexy delivery guy is on the threshold ready to boogie, fellow Mom Jodie Foster is being stalked by paparazzi at the local playground, best friend Sheila (Minnie Driver) feels betrayed and has only so many wisecracks, and the block and its parking spaces have been commandeered by a movie company for a shoot, probably of another movie like Motherhood.
      
Meanwhile, Eliza is trying to juggle all the balls for her young daughter’s birthday party. Eliza’s answer to all these problems -- problems? -- is, at one point, to chuck it all and drive off to New Jersey. That didn’t strike me as very mature, but then again, maybe it’s never mature to drive off to New Jersey.
      
Thurman, the erstwhile Puma Queen of Tarantino movies, is better than you’d think. And Driver is better than that. The movie, while watchable and occasionally enjoyable, annoyed me, not because I didn’t think Eliza’s problems were real, but because they seemed so trivial and here, so over-indulged. Lots of mothers have to go though a great deal more than this, and most of them, I hope, would count their blessings if they were in Eliza’s shoes. (Yes, I realize it’s a comedy, and that Deickmann is an admirer of Mike Leigh.) 
      
But motherhood is a tough job, and a good mother -- not to mention a great one -- shows a little more moxie. By the way, I also didn’t like the way the characters at one point, made a joke out of the name Edna, calling it old hat, and fit for lesbian librarians. Mind your own names, ladies.  
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(Untitled) (Two and a Half Stars)
U.S.; Jonathan Parker, 2009
     
One of the cleverest comedies I’ve seen on the contemporary art world -- not that there are all that many of them --  is (Untitled), an (untitled) work by the writer-director/writer producer team (Jonathan Parker and Catherine DiNapoli) behind the 2002 Crispin Glover film of Melville’s Bartleby. I say that despite the fact that Parker probably takes seriously much of the Chelsea gallery art phenomena at which he here pokes some lightly delicious fun -- and which I mostly find genuinely ridiculous and too-too phony-baloney.
     
Abstract expressionism? Action painting? Concept art? I tend to agree with Picasso: Art needs a subject, though the artist can then do whatever he/she wants with it. I also agree with Mel Brooks’ gabby old art movie patron watching the film short about abstract painting in The Critic: “I think it’s symbolic of….junk.” Ah, give me the Dutch masters -- and I‘m not talking cigars. If a modern equivalent of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Bosch, or Breughel applied that kind of brilliant super-real or super-fantastic style to modern or timeless subjects today, it would still be great art. Unlike most of what hangs or hung in Chelsea.    
  
(Untitled) is about an artiste named Adrian Jacobs (Adam Goldberg), an angry young composer of John Cage-ean concept music, who gets involved with the impeccably sexy, blonde, and deliriously pretentious Chelsea art gallery boss, Madeleine Gray (Marley Shelton, in one of the year’s best comic performances). Madeleine handles Adrian’s brother Josh (Eion Bailey) and his highly popular abstract corporate art (but won’t hang it in her gallery).
     
And she becomes interested in Adrian as well, despite the fact that his dissonant, crash-the piano, smash-a-glass compositions irritate hell out of even the paltry audiences that come to them, and seem to baffle his collaborators, like the blonde musician named The Clarinet (Judy Punch).  All Adrian’s music, by the way, was composed by David Lang, a composer friend of Parker‘s, and also a Pulitzer Prize winner.
   
The jokes in this movie are a bit like Woody Allen’s art gallery seduction humor, except they go on for the whole movie. There’s the concept artist who takes household items and titles and hangs them. There’s Vinnie Jones’ machismo-besotted taxidermy artist Ray Barko, a Brit sadist who uses stuffed animals and bedecks them with stuff. Parker is able to make fun of these types so successfully, because he’s not unsympathetic to this gallery world -- much more sympathetic, in fact, than I would be. 
      
For my money, Goldberg’s Adrian is too surly in the movie. But Shelton’s Madeleine is as perfect as a Vermeer mirror. (Untitled) is also stunningly photographed by Svetlana Cvenko, a cinematographer who should be on call whenever anyone wants to shoot a Chelsea gallery. Or even the Guggenheim. 
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Leon Morin, Priest (Leon Morin, Pretre) (Four Stars)
France; Jean-Pierre Melville, 1961
      
Jean-Pierre Melville is mostly known these days as a French monarch of film noir, neo-noir and World War 2 Resistance dramas. But Leon Morin, which won a Venice Grand Prize, shows another side of Melville, the highly polished and skilled William Wyleresque adaptor of French literary classics, like Vercors’ La Silence de la Mer, Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles -- and, here, Beatrice Beck’s Leon Morin, Pretre.
      
This movie, a thoroughly intelligent and brilliantly made picture in Melville’s best style and tradition, belongs to the last categories, and it’s not what we now expect from him. It’s about a handsome young priest, Leon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) whose spiritual counseling becomes all the rage among the pretty young ladies of the town, who are coping with the perils of Vichy France and the Occupation -- especially Barny (Emmanuelle Riva, of Hiroshima, Mon Amour), the initially unbelieving single mother. (Her daughter France, is played by Patricia Gozzi, who became a screen art house immortal the next year as the little girl of Sundays and Cybele.)  As Barny becomes more immersed in the priest‘s home sessions and left-wing theology, she also becomes more openly enamored of the man himself, and she veers toward crisis and poignant resolution. 
        
Melville once heard one of his films described as Bressonian; he countered by insisting that his 1949 Silence de la Mer came first, and that Bresson’s 1951 masterpiece Diary of a Country Priest was actually Melvillean. Certainly though, Leon Morin, Priest has to be called Melville’s Country Priest. And it’s different from Bresson’s, though both films share an austere black and white photographic beauty -- in Leon, thanks to the great cinematographer Henri Decae.
      
If you admire Melville’s great noir thrillers Le Samourai, Bob Le Flambeur, Deuxieme Souffle, and Le Cercle Rouge, (and you should) and especially if you love his WW2 Resistance classic Army of Shadows (and you also should) you should definitely see Leon -- very dissimilar, yet a crucial link to Melville’s psyche and his feelings about the great pivotal events of his pre-movie life, in the war and Resistance. Also, Belmondo and Riva, paradoxically, give two of their all-time sexiest performances here, which shows how erotic repression can often be. (Shown at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Center.)
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- Michael Wilmington
October 22, 2009

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