Movie Maven

The Last Kiss
Starring: Zach Braff, Jacinda Barrett, Rachel Bilson, Casey Affleck
Written by: Paul Haggis
Directed by: Tony Goldwyn
Official Website

Photo courtesy of Yahoo

Why is it always the man who has commitment issues?

Why does the woman always become an emotional shrew in the face of any perceived infidelity?

And why, God why, is stalker-logic (like breaking down the doors of your ex-girlfriends house, or sitting on her porch for three nights straight) considered heart-breakingly romantic?

These are just a few of the questions that plagued me throughout The Last Kiss, starring Zach Braff. Braff has been considered especially brave to play an adorable cad who loves his pregnant girlfriend (Jacinda Barrett,) but is "scared" and assuages his fears by having it off with a slutty yet naive co-ed (The OC's Rachel Bilson.) And as much as I do love Braff and his puppy-eyed vulnerability, I could not get myself into this movie. It's a cliched film in an "edgy" film's clothing; 30-year-old men are already having their mid-life crises, their eyes going all wide and fearful at the mention of marriage or buying a house. The wise old married man offers the sage advice of "Never give up hope"... even when you reasonably should. People wail and bemoan their love lives and failing marriages while Death Cab for Cutie plays gently in the background. Braff, as well as writer Paul Haggis (of Crash and Million Dollar Baby fame) and director Tony Goldwyn have been dutifully flogging their movie as "real," and "honest." But if cliches weren't true to life, they wouldn't be cliches. Their hast to be a middle ground where something "real" can be blended with something original... something like Garden State, maybe.

But the most tragic bit in this turn of events is Braff's seemingly unstoppable descent into Woody Allen-like self-absorption. It's suddenly all about Zach Braff and his music and his adorable nose. His major quandary in Last Kiss is "Hmmm, should I marry my hot girlfriend or leave her for the hot college student?" And his character is so stale and generic it becomes unclear why either woman would really want him. An adorable nose only gets you so far in life, and while Woody Allen had inexorable talent to back up his ego (at least in his heyday,) Braff's range is far more limited. And that's coming from a fan.

The film is however backed up by a decent supporting cast, including the deft Blythe Danner and Tom Wilkinson as Barrett's parents going through marital troubles. Casey Affleck is also striking as the buddy who's marriage is falling apart in the face of new parenthood, in a performance that's that's both subtle and memorable. But the biggest surprise is Bilson. I despised her on The OC and never thought much of her acting ability or emotional depth. But Bilson takes her slutty college girl beyond the stereotypes and really fleshes out a character that could have faded into the background. But even a good set of supporting roles can't save the film's inherent lack of originality. The movie plods along, helped admittedly by a fantastic soundtrack (I think Braff probably just attached his Ipod to the sound editing machine and let it roll.) And Braff and Barrett become so mind-numbingly dull after a while you don't even care if they get back together or not. I never thought a pregnant woman screaming hysterically at her cheating man could be boring, but there you go.

One of the most telling moments in Last Kiss is Danner's conversation about the nature of marriage. She tells her daughter "You think you know what goes into a 30-year marriage, but you don't have a clue. You don't have a clue." Besides being an astonishingly genuine moment of truth, it also says outright what The Last Kiss has demonstrated. The nature of relationships are mysterious, hard to quantify and nearly impossible to render artistically without seeming generic and 2-dimensional. This attempt to do it here was a valiant one. But, for the most part, Hollywood just doesn't have a clue.

The Science of Sleep (La Science des reves)
Starring: Gael Garcia Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alain Chabat
Written and directed by: Michel Gondry
Official Website

I have no idea what happened in The Science of Sleep.

I've been staring at my computer screen for 20 minutes now, trying to come up with a coherent statement about this film, and drawing a complete and utter blank. My review, I think, can't be coherent because the movie itself isn't coherent at all. Departing from the usual narrative and plotlines, Gondry decided to rock it French New Wave style, with strange and fragmented events, a distorted sense of time and complex webs of dialogue. It's a frustrating movie to watch, indeed- one after which you leave the theater quietly, your mind positively buzzing as it tries to understand what it just saw.

It's also a fascinating, colorful work of art, one which stays with you long after you brain has abandoned its struggle for basic comprehension.

It tells the story of Stephane (Bernal,) a creative young man who was raised in Mexico but has agreed to come to France after his father's death to reconnect with his mother. He obtains a soul-killing job at a calendar design office and becomes infatuated with his next-door neighbor Stephanie (Gainsbourg.) Unfortunately Stephane's highly artistic mind also has trouble deciphering dreams from reality- sometimes he's dreaming when he thinks he's awake, and sometimes he's awake when he thinks he's dreaming. He becomes more and more confused as to what is truth and what is fantasy, risking his job and his relationships as time goes on. Bernal, a rising star for the past few years since his provocative role in Y Tu Mama Tambien, is astounding to watch. He shares both the restful, calm state of dreaming as well as the frenetic pace and sudden sense of panic of a nightmare. He also is able to exude a painful vulnerability, without losing the fact that as wonderful as Stephane may be, he can also be kind of a jerk. His addled mind hurts not just himself but those around him, and neither Bernal nor Gondry shy away from that.

We are, in a sense, meant to be just as confused as Stephane, and everything in the film serves to disorient. The dialogue shifts between English, French and Spanish, causing confusion and mixed messages. It's filled with glorious dream sequences of stop-motion animation, with cellophane clouds that float in the sky, and whole cities made from clay, cardboard and papier-mache. Stephane's dreams, which start out as fantastic, grandiose illusions, begin to look more and more like his waking life. And since we are watching through Stephane's eyes, all of the people in his life, from his love Stephanie to his mother to his horny co-worker Guy become skewed and fractured, until even we don't know what is reality and what is simply Stephane's reality. It's an astute exercise in subjectivity and although the banal meaning of "what happened" in the film becomes lost, the larger meaning of how our perception dictates our experience becomes much clearer.

It's also simply a love story, lovingly rendered and melancholy. I don't know what girl broke Michel Gondry's heart, but he understands unsure, tumultuous love better than anyone I know. It has an ambiguous ending, and an unsatisfying one in many ways, but one that's true to our reality. In our world, Gondry seems to say, nothing is certain. Only in dreams is the happy ending guaranteed.

The Descent
Starring: Shauna McDonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid
Written and Directed by: Neil Marshall
Official Website

I expected stupid, drunken, and mostly likely, half-naked teenagers.

This would be the likely cast of a bloody horror film about cave creatures. Stupid, drunken, half-naked teenagers venture into dangerous cave for a stupid, drunken, half-naked good time and are promptly ripped apart by Bat Boy from the Weekly World News. This is how most would have written it. So I went to The Descent after a colleague told me it "had a few good jumps," hoping to be scared, but not expecting to be surprised.

Turns out I was both.

Because the characters in Descent are not stupid, drunken teenagers. They instead are a bunch of British women- amateur spelunkers, friends and comrades. They gather in the woods of Appalachians to bond and help one of the group through her grief over the deaths of her husband and young daughter the year before. A surprising amount of the film is taken up with character development, and all of the women become more and more nuanced and complex- a rare thing in a genre that normally reverts all of its characters to "types."

But it's when they get lost that their real characters begin to show themselves. Some of them become heroes and Ripley-like superwomen. Some of them become cowards or reckless. And when the fearsome Bat Boys make their appearance (I'm sorry, but that's just what they look like) then you really see who they are as people.

It's a gruesome movie, but the repetitive attack scenes often make the movie lose its edge and originality (yes, spewing gore, yeah, he's eating her stomach, oh look, there's another throat being ripped out, blah blah blah.) And while the Bat Boys are terrifying as they unexpectedly pounce on the women, there's only so many times you can use that move as a scare tactic before it simply becomes cliched.

There is a pretty bad-ass scene involving a pool filled with blood though.

In the end, it is just another horror flick, but it's worth a viewing simply for the fact that it used living, breathing characters with a story. It wasn't just about blood and guts, it was also about the complexities of humanity. A little bit. Mostly blood and guts, though. Let's not get carried away.

Little Miss Sunshine
Starring: Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette
Written by: Michael Arndt
Directed by: Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Faris
Official Website

Photo courtesy of cinema.com

I love this movie.

In fact, I heart it.

There's just no other way to say it.

Saying that you "heart" something is far more powerful than just saying you like it. In an obnoxious, adolescent way it's how one expresses deep abiding love and affection. You can feel it deep down in your chest, an intense relatablility and intimacy. Imagine your first crush, and writing over and over on a piece of paper I (heart) so-and-so. That giggly schoolyard infatuation.

That's the kind of love I feel for Little Miss Sunshine.

A favorite of the Sundance Film Festival, it tells the story of a highly dysfunctional family determined to get Olive, their young daughter, into the finals of the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in California. Included are father Richard (Greg Kinnear) a struggling motivational speaker, his long-suffering wife Sheryl (Toni Collette) their Nietzsche-obsessed teenaged son Dwayne (Paul Dano,) Sheryl's gay, suicidal brother Frank (Steve Carell) and Richard's heroin-addicted father (a sublime Alan Arkin.)

It's funny and strange, charming and absorbing, and sweet without being saccharine. Every moment, every shot of the film is captured perfectly. The cast is phenomenal, every last one of them. They play off of each other with impeccable timing, no one actor overshadowing the others. Indeed from Carell's inspired portrayal of Frank, the gay, suicidal Proust scholar, to twelve-year-old Abigail Breslin's wonderfully natural presence as Olive, everyone seems to be operating at their very best. It's the kind of smooth, unpretentious acting that's rarely seen anymore.

The acting and superb direction is matched by a wonderful script, with both fantastic one-liners and enchanting banter between the family members. But it's also refreshingly honest. Olive asks Frank if he likes boys and not girls. When Frank says yes, she simply says, "That's silly." No illuminating insights, no "wise beyond her years." She thinks the idea is silly and she says so.

Like a real kid would.

I wish I could speak more about the "dark humor" but I don't want to risk giving anything away. Needless to say, you'll be shocked and delighted and all that. But the interesting bit is that it's tinged with real sadness. Darkly funny things don't just happen in Little Miss Sunshine just to be shocking or edgy or whatever. They want us to feel that sadness. But they want us to laugh too.

The plot may be twisted and darkly humorous, but at the end of the day it's really a little film about the bonds of family. A group of people who've found refuge from the world with each other. The most iconic image, of course, are the members of the family pushing their yellow VW bus, which has broken down and will only run after getting a head start, and then jumping into the van after it gets going. It's hilarious, of course, watching them run after the ludicrous vehicle, especially Carell, who does the best funny sprint since Tom Cruise in, well, in every movie Tom Cruise has had to run in. But the inherent sweetness of it also comes through- they are a bunch of misfits, pushing their slightly shoddy lives up the road together, and then jumping in as a group to whatever end befalls them.

I am a girl with broad tastes in film, and there are many films, in many different genres and levels of talent that I can honestly say I liked. What can I say? I'm a flirt.

But there are very few that I heart. And I heart this movie. I'm infatuated. So go see it. I can guarantee you'll be crushing too.