CCL - Cinema, Café e Livros

quarta-feira, 6 de janeiro de 2016

Review: Jennifer Lawrence as a Modern-Day Cinderella in ‘Joy’

On paper, David O. Russell’s new film, “Joy,” looks perfectly straightforward, even square. It’s a bootstrap-capitalist fable, a tale of adversity overcome and rags exchanged for riches, a case study in success suitable for a self-improvement seminar.

But Mr. Russell likes to tell conventional stories in unconventional ways. In the chapter of his career that began with “The Fighter” (2010), he has emerged as something of a genre magician, able to make formulas and clichés disappear behind a smoke screen of artful misdirection. “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012) was an assembly-line romantic comedy tricked out with a wild paint job and a souped-up, custom-built engine. “American Hustle” (2013) was a caper movie blown up into a pop opera. “The Fighter” itself — the movie “Joy” most resembles — was a boxing picture with an irregular heartbeat and a wildly talented cast.

Like Micky Ward, the striving pug played by Mark Wahlberg in that movie, Joy Mangano (Jennifer Lawrence) finds herself thwarted and undermined by her own family. In the film’s opening scenes, her various relations nearly erase her altogether, blocking Ms. Lawrence’s quiet incandescence with ugliness and noise. The divorced mother of two young children, Joy left college when her parents split up and now contends daily with a small army of needy narcissists. Her mother, Terry (Virginia Madsen), lies in bed all day watching a soap opera (a fake one that Mr. Russell has cast with real-life soap opera stars). Rudy (Robert De Niro), Terry’s ex-husband, acts like a helpless child when he’s single and like an entitled patriarch when there’s a woman in his life. Joy also has a passive-aggressive sister (Elisabeth Rohm) and an ex-husband of her own, who is living in her basement until his singing career takes off.

All of this information is conveyed in Mr. Russell’s breathless, breakneck style. The camera never stops moving, the people never shut up, and the resulting buzz is both stimulating and enervating. There are a few bright spots and calm moments in Joy’s drab, frenetic life. Her grandmother, Mimi (Diane Ladd), believes in her (and provides benevolent voice-over narration). Joy’s ex, Tony (Édgar Ramírez), is actually a pretty nice guy and is able, like Amy Adams’s character in “The Fighter,” to be an ally against the familial back stabbers.

Just when you begin to wonder where the movie is going — Toward domestic comedy? Second-chance romance? Lurid dysfunction? — Joy has an idea. Sketching with her children’s crayons, she invents a new kind of mop, the kind that can be wrung out without touching the head. (This household convenience really exists, and the character is very loosely based on its inventor and her career.) Flush with entrepreneurial zeal, Joy borrows money from her father’s new companion (a supremely haughtyIsabella Rossellini), works out the patent and supply-chain issues, and prepares to revolutionize American floor cleaning.

It’s not so easy, of course. And if “Joy” seems to move toward a foreordained conclusion, it zigzags and covers its tracks along the way, sending its heroine on a roller-coaster ride of raised hopes and brutal disappointments and playing tricks with the audience’s expectations. What kind of spark will ignite between Joy and Neil Walker, a big shot in the world of home-shopping cable television? Since he’s played by Bradley Cooper, the answer could be anything.

But the movie, in all its mess and glory, belongs almost entirely to Ms. Lawrence. She is the kind of movie star who turns everyone else into a character actor. This is not a complaint but an acknowledgment of both her charisma and her generosity. The rest of the cast members have the freedom to be weird, awful and lovable in spite of themselves, to orbit eccentrically around her celestial presence. Mr. De Niro and Ms. Rossellini in particular seem to be having the time of their lives playing parental grotesques who might have wandered out of a Roald Dahl novel.

Isabella Rossellini, left, and Robert De Niro with Ms. Lawrence in “Joy.”CreditMerie Weismiller Wallace/20th Century Fox

And Mr. Russell gives this meat-and-potatoes parable of upward mobility, set in the early 1990s, a children’s-book quality. I don’t mean that the story is simplified, but rather that its magical, improbable and cruel elements are heavily underlined, so that Joy feels more like a princess laboring under a terrible spell than like a struggling working-class mother. The trolls, witches and ogres she must beguile and vanquish are, for the most part, her own kin. She is, like a fairy-tale hero or heroine, on a long and complicated quest, relying on spells and charms as well as her innate goodness to deliver her.

It can be argued that Ms. Lawrence is miscast, that she’s too young, too glamorous, insufficiently dented by life’s hard knocks. It can also be argued: So what? Joy’s Cinderella qualities suit her perfectly, and she has the rare ability to combine radiance with realism. Like some of the great screen goddesses of old — for some reason, Lauren Bacall seems like the best point of comparison — she seems at once impossibly magnetic and completely down to earth, regal and democratic, ordinary and perfect.

The movie struggles to keep up with her. Perfection does not lie within the scope of Mr. Russell’s chaotic methods, and “Joy” can wear you out even as it tries to lift you up. The pursuit of happiness is a lot of work.

“Joy” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). A lot of messes to clean up. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes.

Review: ‘Anomalisa’ Pairs Charlie Kaufman and Lonely Puppets

The sad and stingingly painful “Anomalisa,” a beautiful big-screen whatsit, features a throng of whiners, malcontents and depressives along with one bright soul who hasn’t let disappointment break her. They’re a funny, odd group. Some register as generically prickly, full of vinegar and spit (a few may just be tired after a day’s work); others sag, as if deflating one breath at a time under an unfathomable weight. And while some carry their burden quietly and alone, others insist on sharing it, like those people who take deep, accusatory sighs when you bump into them on the subway.

This is, in other words, the human comedy as brought to you by Charlie Kaufman. He’s best known for his dense, wily, rebuslike screenplays — including “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” — and least loved for “Synecdoche, New York” (2008), the only other feature he directed before “Anomalisa.” A delirious, brutally undersung masterwork about a tormented theater director who stars in his own self-devouring production, “Synecdoche” closes with a voice providing the ultimate stage direction: “Die.” It seemed like a portentous omen given that Mr. Kaufman subsequently seemed to disappear for the next seven years.

He didn’t; he was busy working, including on the play that became “Anomalisa.” Like that production, the movie stars an excellent David Thewlis as Michael, an author and motivational speaker who has traveled to Cincinnati to deliver a speech. He meets a woman, Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and they have an intense affair. At this point it seems like a good idea to mention that all the characters in the movie are stop-motion puppets. And that all the other roles are performed by Tom Noonan, an invaluable vocalizer who creates a supporting cast of thousands (well, dozens) through a voice that rises and lowers, barks and purrs, and builds the ominous wall of sound that opens and closes the movie, as if boxing it shut.

Mr. Kaufman has a co-director this time out, Duke Johnson, who’s a partner in the production company that turned the play into an animation. They make a seamless team. “Anomalisa” is a recognizably Kaufmanesque creation in its anarchic and mordant humor, its singular narrative beats and especially in its preoccupations (identity, authenticity, loneliness, death, love, pleasure, the usual). And this isn’t the first time that Mr. Kaufman’s work has involved puppets. The lead character in “Being John Malkovich,” directed by Spike Jonze, is an unhappy puppeteer who works with marionettes that look like him and his wife. In a surreal turn, the puppeteer finds a portal into the mind of the title character (played by Mr. Malkovich), who becomes something of a puppet pulling strings of his own.

A scene from "Anomalisa." CreditParamount Pictures

It’s complicated, as are most of Mr. Kaufman’s scripts; “Anomalisa” is more narratively and philosophically streamlined. It also clocks in at a well-timed 90 minutes, a relatively abbreviated length that fits this hermetically sealed, precariously unoxygenated world, with its doll-size scale, human avatars, fabricated environments and locked-down protagonist. The filmmakers delay Michael’s introduction, opening with a babble that rises against a black screen: Enter, the great abyss! Next up is a pale cloudy sky — it’s the most expansive image in the movie as well as the only representation of the natural world — a dreamscape that’s soon pierced by the plane taking Michael to his talk in Cincinnati.

With his sallow complexion, drooping eyes and air of exhaustion (or perhaps exasperation), Michael could be merely another business traveler. Well, except that he’s a puppet, one with strange black seams that run along his hairline, down his chin and cut temple to temple, dissecting his face into discrete quadrants. He’s also a puppet that is shortly popping a prescription pill, a moment that — with his melancholic resignation, the usual nightmare of plane travel, the droningly familiar voices that swell around him — rapidly makes Michael feel somewhat real, more recognizable than not. That’s because while “Anomalisa” is filled with uncomfortably, at times sourly humorous moments, it’s also a horror movie about the agonizing, banal surrealism of everyday life.

Mr. Kaufman’s gift for quotidian horror remains startling; he’s a whiz at minor miseries. The story progresses through a series of squirmy encounters with other characters who, despite variations in clothing and hair, all have the same eerily blank faces. Once Michael breaks free of the airport herd, most of these faces are attached to service workers of one type or another who, with degrees of friendliness and hostility masquerading as affability (or professionalism), roll out like dolls on an assembly line. One after another, with voices that Mr. Noonan distinguishes with modulations in pitch and an occasional curse, they serve Michael: the asthmatic cabdriver; the obsequious hotel clerk and bellhop; the room-service worker; the grumpy waitress.

Lisa turns out to be the exception to this manufactured nightmare (she’s the anomaly of the title), and Michael falls hard. “Your voice!” he cries out in wonder, a moment of lyricism that the filmmakers tuck in between unbuttoned clothes and an admirably uncomfortable, honest sex scene. Lisa may seem like a mess — she voluntarily enumerates her supposed failings, like someone who’s memorized other people’s criticisms of her — yet she’s glorious. And Ms. Leigh, who brings Lisa to trembling life with soft mewls of feeling, perfectly timed pauses and a poignant a cappella rendition of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” makes you see how much is at stake both for her and Michael. Whether he can hear her is one heartskippingly moving question; whether he deserves to is another.

“Anomalisa” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). A puppet penis in action.

Review: Quentin Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’ Blends Verbiage and Violence

Quentin Tarantino is a scholar of old movies with a particular antiquarian fetish for the ways they used to be made and consumed. His eighth feature, “The Hateful Eight,” was shot on film with antique lenses and is being projected at some theaters in sumptuous, wide-screen 70-millimeter Panavision.

Mr. Tarantino and his director of photography, the three-time Oscar winner Robert Richardson, revel in the tonal and compositional possibilities of the format. The dense colors and clever shifts in focus hold your attention when the dialogue starts to sputter. There is quite a lot to see and hear. Almost three hours long, “The Hateful Eight” has an overture at the beginning — a static title card accompanied by a sinister and swaggering Ennio Morricone score — and an intermission a little past the midpoint.

The movie is a western, a tale of vengeance and double-dealing set in a frontier outpost some time after the Civil War. In spite of the vast screen, the sprawling length and the larger-than-life genre archetypes, it’s a curiously small-scale entertainment. After a preliminary stagecoach ride through snow-lashed mountains, the ragged story settles into a confined space, where the main characters (a motley crew of outlaws and bounty hunters) drink coffee, warm themselves by the fire, and talk about this and that until it’s time for them to start killing one another.

In its blending of verbiage and violence, its deft manipulation of tension, its blurring of the line between slapstick and shock, and its intricate weave of allusions to obscure and canonical films of the past, “Hateful Eight” is — what’s the term I’m looking for? — a Quentin Tarantino movie. The cast is full of familiar faces from his earlier work: Kurt Russell and Zoë Bell from “Death Proof,” Michael Madsen and Tim Roth from “Reservoir Dogs,” and Samuel L. Jackson from just about everything else. The old films that Mr. Tarantino bites off and riffs on now include his own.

Though “Hateful Eight” takes place in a hermetic and familiar cinematic universe, it also, like “Inglourious Basterds” and “Django Unchained”before it, has more than just the history of cinema on its mind. It shares with those movies an impulse to imagine how the fantasy world of film genres might intersect with the cruelty of real-world history and offer a kind of belated symbolic redress. The winking and filibustering are undertaken with the serious intent of collecting make-believe payback for actual wrongs. This is an ethically tricky, artistically risky undertaking, but in Mr. Tarantino’s hands, it is never not interesting.

“Inglourious Basterds,” with an audacity that may still be underappreciated, revisited the anti-Nazi Hollywood action dramas and comedies of World War II and pushed them to an outlandish and weirdly effective conclusion, as if the Holocaust could be avenged or undone by a lost platoon of time-traveling movie stars. “Django Unchained,” more controversially but no less brazenly, turned both moonlight-and-magnolias Southern sentimentality and he-man revenge-mongering upside down, offering a vision of African-American male empowerment to rival the wildest dreams of blaxploitation. Set in the Deep South before the Civil War, it transformed the prelude to that conflict from a grinding chronicle of resistance and political agitation into a burst of righteous score-settling.

“The Hateful Eight” takes this revisionist project into a post-bellum West that has always been more mythic than real. Mid-20th-century movie westerns — from old studio oaters to Technicolor pageants to spaghetti-flavored shoot-’em-ups — typically include Civil War veterans from both the Union and Confederate sides in a state of wary reconciliation. They are preoccupied with railroads, Indians and outlaws, preferring not to speak of the recent unpleasantness. Slavery is almost never mentioned, and on rare occasions when African-American characters appear (like Pompey, John Wayne’s nearly silent companion in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”), their stories remain untold.

Mr. Tarantino rewrites this tradition by casting Mr. Jackson as Marquis Warren, who wears a blue United States Army major’s uniform and carries with him a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln. Currently employed, like so many Tarantino heroes, as a bounty hunter, Marquis is well aware that neither his service record nor his connection to the martyred president will secure his dignity or protect him from bigotry. Before long, racial epithets and threats of harm are coming his way from all directions.

In Mr. Tarantino’s world, hostility and camaraderie are close neighbors. Marquis encounters the friendly, grizzled face of John Ruth (Mr. Russell), a colleague in the business of pursuing miscreants. They have different approaches to the job, in particular the “dead or alive” part. Marquis prefers the first option, but John, known as the Hangman, believes in delivering his quarry to the proper authorities more or less intact. And so he is in the company of a live prisoner, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who takes an instant dislike to Marquis.

The three of them, along with the stagecoach driver (James Parks) and a newly appointed sheriff (Walton Goggins) seek shelter from a blizzard at a saloon known as Minnie’s Haberdashery, where they find a further collection of characters, including a retired Confederate commander (Bruce Dern) guilty of massacring black Union soldiers during the war, an itinerant hangman (Mr. Roth) and two fellows of dubious background (Mr. Madsen and Demian Bichir). Does this add up to eight? Don’t worry too much about the math. If you read the names that appear on screen just after the overture, you’ll know to expect even more company.

The timing and manner of their arrival should remain a surprise. It’s enough to note that “The Hateful Eight” is, structurally speaking, an Agatha Christie mystery — with Marquis in the Hercule Poirot role — that ends in geysers of blood. Not only spurting from gunshot wounds, but also vomited from the mouths of poisoning victims.

The violence is less a shock tactic than a sorting mechanism, a way of separating the fans from the scolds. Mr. Tarantino has made a career out of forcing critics and cinephiles to choose, knocking the ambivalent off the fence with brilliant barrages of offensive language and mayhem. So maybe I’m repeating myself: “The Hateful Eight” is a Quentin Tarantino movie. But Mr. Tarantino is also repeating himself, spinning his wheels here in a way he has rarely done before. None of his other films venture so far into tedium or manage to get in their own way so frequently.

His provocative rereading of history is overshadowed by a plot that manages to be both cumbersome and flimsy. There is some real heat — some real hate — in the confrontation between Mr. Jackson and Mr. Dern, whose acting rises above the mannered self-consciousness that Mr. Tarantino’s writing often calls forth. And the sense that the business of the Civil War remains unfinished produces a current of tension that stretches beyond the walls of Minnie’s Haberdashery into the present. Mr. Tarantino doesn’t make films that are “about race” so much as he tries to burrow into the bowels of American racism with his camera and his pen. There is no way to do that and stay clean.

Some of the film’s ugliness is therefore a sign of integrity, and of relevance. But much of it seems dumb and ill considered, as if Mr. Tarantino’s intellectual ambition and his storytelling discipline had failed him at the same time. Marquis Warren is a remarkable character — one of the boldest products of Mr. Jackson’s fruitful collaboration with Mr. Tarantino — but the movie can’t quite figure out what to do with him.

Unfortunately, it knows just what to do with Ms. Leigh’s Daisy, who enters the film with a black eye and exits it — well, I guess I’d better not reveal much more. Suffice it to say that she is the film’s scapegoat and punching bag and, above all, its excuse for its own imaginative failures. At a certain point, the n-word gives way to the b-word as the dominant hateful epithet, and “The Hateful Eight” mutates from an exploration of racial animus into an orgy of elaborately justified misogyny. The final scenes wrap up this shaggy-dog story with a nasty punch line, delivering on the promise of the film’s title. I won’t spoil it. See for yourself.

“The Hateful Eight” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). How many times do I have to say that it’s a Quentin Tarantino movie? Running time: 2 hours 48 minutes.

quarta-feira, 6 de janeiro de 2016

Review: Jennifer Lawrence as a Modern-Day Cinderella in ‘Joy’

Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Joy’

Movie Review: ‘Joy’

Review: ‘Anomalisa’ Pairs Charlie Kaufman and Lonely Puppets

Showing the Seams in ‘Anomalisa’

Movie Review: ‘Anomalisa’

Trailer: 'Anomalisa'

Review: Quentin Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’ Blends Verbiage and Violence

Movie Review: ‘The Hateful Eight’

Trailer: ‘The Hateful Eight’