Posts Tagged ‘music’

Charlotte for Ever

Charlotte for Ever

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

I actually didn’t even realise this was like a full length movie until I got ahold of it some time in the past year… I might’ve been more anxious/excited about finding it had I known this, but to be honest, even then I was more excited when I got hold of the “soundtrack” to the movie, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s debut CD “Lemon Incest”, which despite being strange, tacky and cheesy, I still think is oddly addictive and I’d even go so far as to say has more to recommend on it than Gainsbourg’s latest album IRM (though her album 5:55, I rush to add, is aeons above anything I’ll mention here…)

The plot, if you can call it that, is simple… Serge Gainsbourg plays an heavily alcoholic (we see him throwing up in the sink – apparently Gainsbourg genuinely doing this for the camera – and pissing blood – it’s not for the squeamish) screenwriter, sole guardian of his daughter, his wife/her mother having died in a car crash which may or may not have been caused by him. Big Gainsbourg is suicidal, Little Gainsbourg apathetic and a teenager. There are arguments, nudity, it’s all very French. That’s… about it lol.

I kinda feel compelled, even though I respect all involved in the movie, to say, it really is pretentious twaddle. But like “Lemon Incest”, there’s just something about it… and maybe it is simply that Charlotte is just such a joy to look at, clothed or not; or that Serge has that non-acting way of acting brilliantly, his face so worn down by a life truly lived. There’s pure aesthetics here that need no human hands to turn into art, and it’s something I’ll come back to likely again and again.



When You’re Strange

When You’re Strange

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

I have to admit, though I have been and for the most part remain a huge Doors fan in my time, my expectations weren’t huge for this, not least because of Mark Kermode’s quite fair knocking of the whole Doors “thing” on his BBC Five Live Friday review show. I’m one who always wants to believe there was a spiritual and poetic resonance to Jim Morrison’s life even beyond what the likes of Oliver Stone’s movie portrayed, but I find it hard to defend him all that passionately when someone like Kermode points out the reasons why it was all just a joke… and Kermode did it pretty darn well in that review of this.

The movie is not helped at all by Johnny Depp’s narration. Apparently he was brought in to simply redub the narration already in place by the film’s writer-director Tom DiCillo because first audiences found DiCillo’s reading too monotonous. Considering how disinterested Depp sounds in the final version, I dread to think how the first take was.

But to be perfectly honest, this for me is where the movie’s failings end (the silly “omg Mr Mojo Risin is an anagram of Jim Morrison” moment notwithstanding). While the fact remains that there’s little of actual information here that as a Doors fan I hadn’t known before, all the anecdotes, stories, controversies and of course the music, the footage they have gathered is almost without exception extraordinary to behold and despite the presentation and packaging we should really be grateful to see it in any form.

I also read that this was meant to be an “anti-Oliver Stone” take on The Doors story, as Stone’s ’91 movie apparently offended as many fans as it created (count me in the latter set). I have no idea what’s wrong with the Stone movie and would gladly stick it together with this and maybe one of the concert DVDs to a make a full night of Doors viewing in the future. It’d be even better if they just released the footage sans-narration on a special edition Blu-ray, though. You should find this more than worth your time if you have anything more than a passing interest in music of the time.



The Runaways

The Runaways

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

I seem to be alone on this, but it’s not been a good 5 years for Dakota Fanning fans. After the kinda-sorta farewell to her true “child” performances in the wonderful Dreamer, the killer War of the Worlds, and the kinda heartbreaking Charlotte’s Web it was then a long wait for the release of the ultimately disappointing Hounddog and mediocre The Secret Life of Bees. True Fragments and Push were good, and she was good in them, but they weren’t exactly “her” movies.

Then she signed up for the sequels to Twilight (review of New Moon to follow shortly – preview, to be honest, marginally better than the first…). She did the “all growed up” photo shoots that all young actors and singers seem to have to do now. And here we have her big “I’m not a kid anymore!” role, playing second fiddle to an actress far beneath her. Luckily, the disappointment ends right there.

I will give Kristen Stewart this: she’s way easier to watch in this than she is in the Twilight saga or, god forbid, when being interviewed or presenting awards as if on Ritalin in real life. But I remain entirely unconvinced of why people think she can act in anything she’s done since Panic Room, and it’s even a long step down from Catch that Kid in my opinion to anything she’s done in the past few years.

Dakota, however, thank goodness still has it. I knew little about the band The Runaways and Cherie Currie but I’d seen the wonderful costume/make-up job they’d done on everyone in this movie in promo pictures etc and was excited to see what looked to be a pretty authentic Seventies biopic. On the whole, it is fairly standard stuff… kinda The Doors-lite with young girls. There’s a scene where we witness the flash-writing of the hit “Cherry Bomb” in a garage that almost exactly mirrors the “Light My Fire” scene in Oliver Stone’s movie. There’s a whole underline of drugs and a final parting of the ways etc… it’s very standard stuff but Dakota rises above it. I actually watched Cherie Currie in Foxes the day after and was even more amazed by how much she nailed the real Currie (I need to update that review some day, btw, I liked it a lot more a second time around…) I’d probably watch this movie again just for her. It’s not her best by far but it really shows that even without the “precocious child” thing, she can still seriously command the screen, and I can’t wait to see what she does once Twilight is out of the way and she no longer feels the need to “prove” she’s not a kid anymore…



The Music Lovers

The Music Lovers

Monday, September 7th, 2009

I keep stopping myself since watching this and being like, “wait have I really finally seen that movie now?” because, to be honest, it didn’t really strike me the way, after years of wanting desperately to see it, I expected it to. My mum has always called this one the most awful movies she had ever seen and that, combined with its seeming hard-to-findness, had kind of given it some kind of cachet for me that maybe no film could live up to.

I’m inclined to go with one of the first IMDb reviews that came up for me when I visited its page while watching, that simply stated that it had many boring moments but many brilliant ones too. I talked to my mum since watching it and found out that I correctly guessed the exact moment which for her was the “too far” point, a moment during a final scene in a mental asylum that she described, 36 years later, almost perfectly. I can’t deny that the best images in this movie are truly that vivid and memorable but I think that fact speaks volumes more than I could guess. I think, too, the real impact of this movie for those who would react in such a way is that it genuinely begins and continues for almost a whole hour as a perfectly decent musical biography … tamer even than Milos Forman’s Amadeus. Any nauseating sensations until Ken Russell really piles on the makeup come from dizzying camerawork and editing. It’s a movie I would certainly watch again and would almost certainly benefit from a freshly scrubbed up DVD or Blu-Ray release. This was a very worn VHS copy, though I must admit when you get those long forgotten tracking lines on a movie as infamous as this it kinda adds to the experience.



Hannah Montana: The Movie

Hannah Montana: The Movie

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

If you know me, you’ll know that I came to this wanting to love it and that there was a lot I hoped for from it. I’m a big fan of Hannah Montana, but I’m no dumb blind follower (well, maybe a little … hehe); I’m aware of the kinda massive problem that lies at the very heart of the concept and the reason why a lot of people are blindly agin it. When I saw the first trailer for the movie that flatly set up the movie’s central dilemma (She’s Always Had The Best of Both Worlds. Now She Has To Pick One), I got pretty darn excited. Could a live action Disney movie based on a TV show in this decade actually do the right thing by its target audience?

The movie begins perfectly, exploding the confines of the TV screen setting up the blonde wig as a fully fledged cinematic icon and a plot point as Robbie Ray stares in deep thought at it mounted on a static wig stand as Miley battles with security outside to get into her own concert. Within the movie’s first few minutes Miley/Hannah bonks her head a few times not to mention having a coconut fall on her head and a ball thrown at her. Any fears that as Miley grows she might leave her goofy streak behind are quickly brushed aside here.

My heart sank briefly at the introduction of our villain, a tubby British tabloid pap almost as cringeworthy as Richard O’Brien’s in Spiceworld (hmm, I liked that too, incidentally :) ) but soon enough the real heart of the movie just started to get me and get me more. They sell Miley’s dilemma here almost shockingly well. It would be easy for the movie to sound as whiny as the show’s naysayers think it would be, “Oh it’s so hard being a megastar!” etc … but the real fight here is really about the wants of the masses vs. the higher needs of the few. When Hannah troops ahead into an impromptu concert at Miley’s best friend Lilly’s party because she’s not given the space to become the right person, the situation is entirely believable. You feel Lilly’s hurt off camera as you watch Hannah going through the motions, and you can see Miley’s eyes under that wig scanning the crowd torn over what to do: not just in the moment but with her whole life. All through the movie there’s a sense of pre-occupation about Miley – she’s really going through the decision of her life here.

There are lowlights, of course. The Tyra Banks shoe fight, Rico’s exploding cake, Jackson getting bitten on the butt by an alligator are among the flashes where I felt a little let down by the proceedings but I know you couldn’t really release this movie without them. Some of the slapstick stuff really had me laughing in spite of myself: the celebrity plate rack, for instance – you see it coming as gramma places Elvis in pride of place but I didn’t quite see it coming the way it ultimately does, lol.

Most of all it’s about Miley. Despite the title, there’s a lot more Miley here than there is Hannah, and I for one believe the things she’s been saying in interviews about the Miley in this movie being closer to the “real” Miley than we’ve ever seen. I say this in the best way possible, but this girl with all the gloss stripped away has a really funny face and some of the ways she twists it in this movie, combined with the time the camera spends on them (even in slow motion in parts) … they’re not the faces you generally get from a soulless megastar worth billions. They’re beautiful. It’s this goofy streak in Miley that always brings me back for more and its here, thank mercy, in spades.

Which I guess brings me to the ending which comes in two parts, neither of which I’ll entirely spoil for you because I had managed to avoid the details and I’m glad. I did not see the big moment on stage at the end coming at all here. It’s a moment I wanted to see in the movie right from the start but that I never once dreamed would actually be there. I had a lot of moments during the movie where I almost cried, but this was the moment where I really let it come. However. This is unfortunately followed by the real ending … which kind of, pretty much, actually entirely pushes the reset button TV style. I’m trying not to focus too much on this part of the ending because the rest of the movie just pleased me so much, also, I think if I think about it some more later on I might find a way to love it anyway (something to do with – the way the little girl says “Hannah is a part of you, don’t let her go,” which is something I hope the real Miley never does, ie, never speaking of it in 10 years time in an embarrassed way).

Anyway, in short, it was everything I hoped it would be and more – though some of the more was questionable. The songs are great, in fact, they’re growing on me (my first listen of the soundtrack a couple of weeks ago was a little disappointed), there’s more Lilly than I initially feared. Miley outdoes herself acting wise though the real performance I loved here was that of Margo Martindale as gramma. The director and cinematographer do a great job of keeping the screen alive right from the aforementioned wig moment onward and though there are the inevitable gags for less advanced pre-teens, they pass quickly enough as not to impact the larger experience.



Girls Rock!

Girls Rock!

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

Just to get the obvious comment out of the way first … shyeah, like I needed a movie to tell me this :-P This is a documentary I’ve been looking forward to seeing for over a year now. The short form of this review, sadly, is: plenty of girls … not a lot of rockin’. I’m trying to think if I even saw a single male face in the movie … there may have been a dubious character glimpsed in one of the older girl’s bands at home but I’m pretty sure the whole thing is XX which makes sense. I won’t get into an argument over, “what about transgenders, or just plain old equality,” because I know nobody’s allowed to even think anything like that in these situations.

But I will say I find something in creating an “anything goes” haven for girls like this with no boys allowed just as much a problem as the one it’s trying to solve. There is something about the place, too, that calls to mind a movie like Jesus Camp, like these girls are somehow being recruited to fight some kind of undeclared war. There’s a point where you realise a lot of these girls aren’t gonna live up to what the rock camp teachers want from them anymore than they are to the things society at large supposedly wants from them. Facts are inserted scatter-dash onscreen, with innocuous statistics like “70% of 11-17 year olds watch MTV” given equal weight to sadder ones like the number of girls who vomit to lose weight or have been “sexually harrassed” by classmates. And for all the desire to get these girls to break the mould and really “rock“, when they actually make anything that sounds like music (aside from the rather noisy ending where I’ll admit, some of them do kinda rock), it sounds a lot like the girl pop they claim to be trying to avoid.

Like in another documentary about kids, Mad Hot Ballroom, there’s another point where you realise the camp is probably as much for the teachers as it is for the girls; one of the camp staff even admits this to camera. In short, I think everybody’s heart is in the right place here, but I think it’d be nice if people would just focus on teaching kids the simple act of being themselves and fearless. The self-defence stuff here truly made me gag … at least until Palace made me giggle.

It’s not a bad doc, don’t get me wrong … I was just kinda disappointed by the way a place like this functions. You’d think an offbeat anti-status-quo camp for a creative medium, full of the most interesting creatures on earth, would be much more interesting … much more different. Aside from the simply adorable Palace, I’d really rather watch a double bill of Mad Hot Ballroom and Rock School / School of Rock. Then truly rock out to a Smoosh CD :)



hounddog

hounddog

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

“I can’t shake no more …”

It’s unfortunate that a movie like this encountered such difficulty in being released, because it results in the awkward situation of people “excited” to “finally” see something that really those words should never be associated with. This unfortunacy I’ve been pondering for months now while waiting. What’s more unfortunate, however, is that in the last couple of months I’d pretty much finally heard enough to know this wasn’t anything to get excited about anyway. As I wrote in my review of The Secret Life of Bees, I’ve pretty much decided that Elle is the far more talented of the Fanning sisters. And though I’d read plenty of reviews way back on its first limited showing that it was a waste of time (though Jodie Foster’s praise of Fanning’s performance was encouraging), it was the comments from people whose opinion I more fully believed would match my own lately that kind of made me give up the anticipation.

What to say but that to begin with, at least, it is even worse than all that preamble suggests … it’s seriously wobblier than Elvis’ knees. The lack of any kind of direction in the first half hour leads me to believe that the film makers fully intended audiences to come to it as “the Dakota Fanning rape movie” and therefore sit through any duration to get to that key scene, which is just … I don’t even need to say how blank that is. Aside from a laugh-out-loud lightning incident that made me start to wonder, “wait, is this a comedy now?”, literally nothing happens until the rape. Following that scene, it must be said that the movie admirably approximates the tone and theme of Terry Gilliam’s Tideland – that a surprising amount of strength and forward momentum can come from the worst mankind is capable of, especially where children are concerned – but I’m quick to point out it never comes even close to that movie.

As to Fanning … the problem is, if this role was a challenge for her it wasn’t because of any of the sexual content. It’s because she’s portraying what amounts at best to a regular kid, at worst a simpleton, for the first time in her career – whether she succeeds or not is moot, because anybody who’s followed her work so far simply won’t believe it, because all her main roles to date have been played off her precocity. To go back to Tideland, there was something about Jodelle Ferland that worked for the similar character Jeliza Rose – she has precocity and even burgeoning sexuality like Fanning, but there’s more of a sense that she’s less aware of it or something. I won’t deny that Fanning has her moments here, most particularly her longer singing scene following the rape – something that begins looking slightly ridiculous turns into something that almost makes the movie into something worthwhile. But it’s really got nothing on her past performances.

Anyway, the short version is, it wasn’t worth waiting for. Lay the absolutely awful twangly score on the top of all this and you almost have just about the worst movie I’ve looked forward to seeing in a long time, to be honest. Maybe if it weren’t for Tideland and the wait I’d be more lenient … but what can you do?



The Killing of John Lennon

The Killing of John Lennon

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

It almost pains me to report it, so much was my love for Chapter 27, but this may actually be the better of the two movies – I’d heard as much but I’d put it down to general Lindsay hatred and the fact that this one just came first.

While they’re actually both similar in far greater ways than I’d thought – even down to the Jude character played by Lindsay in 27 who I hadn’t actually realised at the time was based on a real girl, Judith Stein – this one seems to me to do a better job of at once displaying fascination for what went on in Mark David Chapman’s head through the months, days and hours leading up to that moment of madness whilst at the same time making no such podium for the man himself.

I would have to see 27 again to be more sure of this, but I know that this movie made me genuinely despise Chapman more than the other movie, even while I was intrigued by his reasoning. It seems perhaps this is why 27 was threatened with boycotts etc while this one slipped out relatively unnoticed – the star cast of the other, particularly the presence of Lindsay when she was at her worst, can’t have helped either.

I know a lot of people think both these movies should be ignored because they give the killer, “what he wanted.” It’s a toughie, I have to admit – and again, it was in this telling that I gave that feeling more thought, where I realised more: Chapman’s still alive, and Lennon is dead. The guy broke history, the world, art, in two when he pulled that trigger, like if there are parallel universes just imagine how vastly different the one is where this didn’t happen. But my conclusion is always – we can’t not talk about it. And amazingly, like I said despite my thinking 27 was an amazing piece of work, it seems that the need to talk about it is so great that there actually is room for more than one movie – even one so strikingly similar in places as this – about it.

I wouldn’t recommend watching them both in tandem or anything – it would likely be either overwhelming or confusing and in any case diminish the impact of both – but if you have any kind of interest in Lennon, “Catcher in the Rye”, the mind of an assassin, then you owe it to yourself to see both eventually. I personally find them both phenomenal, but for now for the way and degree to which it made me feel the “right” sentiment towards the killer, this one just has the edge over 27.