Father Geek here with a group of cool reviews from Ghostboy, check them out, they're some pretty damn good stuff...
Howdy,
Got three new reviews for you today. Now, granted, 24 Hour Party People opened up last weekend, but I figured it could use a little more exposure. The other two, 'City By The Sea' and 'Auto Focus' open this Friday and later this fall, respectively.
Let's do this in descending order of quality...
Auto Focus
A good way to make a dark film even more so is to trick the audience into thinking they're having a good time, and then suddenly turn the tables on them. Paul Schrader's 'Auto Focus,' which makes the transition from entertaining to harrowing with brilliant subtlety, is a perfect example of this trick. While watching it, you'll suddenly realize you aren't having fun anymore, and it's all downhill from there.
The movie is based on the life of Bob Crane, who rose to stardom in the sixties as the star of the TV show 'Hogan's Heroes,' and then gradually faded from the limelight, surrounded by whispers of sexual scandal. He was found murdered in a hotel room in -- ; no one was ever charged with the crime. Now, I went into this film withou ever actually having seen 'Hogan's Heroes.' I've got an idea of what it's like now, and I'm sure if I watched it, I'd find it funny; but, thanks to this film, there would definitely be a layer of sadness to it as well.
As the movie starts, Crane (played by Greg Kinnear) is happily married to Anne (Rita Wilson), with whom he has three lovely kids. He's a great guy; charming, church-going, doesn't drink, has a hit radio show. His agent lands him a starring gig on a TV pilot, which turns into 'Hogan's Heroes' and makes him famous. On set one day, he meets an electrical technician named John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), who introduces him to the brand new wonder of video technology, and invites him out for a drink at a local strip club.
The beginning of the movie looks like it was shot in the sixties; all the details, the color, even the film stock have that lovely dated look. It feels perfect, or even a little too perfect because when Crane goes to that strip club and we see the first tiny flashes of bare skin in the movie, it feels risque and out of place, and ever so slightly exciting. It's a feeling that doesn't last.
We know going in that Crane is going to cheat on his wife, but he seems so gosh darn appealing that we can't imagine him doing anything wrong. Which is the key -- he doesn't see it as wrong. His stardom attracts women, and sleeping with them just goes with the territory. He becomes addicted to sex; he and Carpetner have regular orgies with groupies and other girls they pick up in bars. Carpenter videotapes the action, and he and Crane watch it later on by themselves. At first, Crane asks him to burn the tapes, but before too long he's spending all his free time compiling the footage, editing it together into homemade porn movies and showing anyone who may or may not be interested in seeing it.
Crane's marriage fails, and so does his career, and the pep that the beginning of the film had gradually spirals downward. Schrader handles the change masterfully; the technicolor fades out, but the film doesn't necessarily get hit on the head with realism. There's a scene when Crane confronts his agent about getting more work; the way it's lit looks just like an old TV show, just like 'Hogan's Heroes,' but the camera can't sit still; it jitters and shakes, and it reminded me, uncomfortably, of the last time I'd had way too much to drink. There's another scene where he tries to have a heart to heart with his estranged teenage son, and the monologue he gives, about how people take the color orange for granted, is heartbreakingly abstract.
Dafoe is wonderful here. Carpenter is depicted primarily as a creep, but Dafoe is careful with his performance; he never goes over the top, and he gives this creep real feelings; it's suggested that he may have been a little in love with Crane, but at the same time he's sincerely hurt whenever Crane accuses him of being gay.
But no matter how great the supporting performances are, or the direction and cinematography, the film rests on the performance of Greg Kinnear. He's done solid work in the past, but nothing that would suggest the range he displays here. It's one of those great performances that you don't notice; you forget that you've seen this guy in other movies before. Interestingly, Kinnear started out much in the same way Crane did, charming his way from a TV talk show onto the big screen; his performance in this film, though, pretty much guarantees that he won't suffer the same sad slide into obscurity.
24 Hour Party People
It'd be pretty damn hard to capture the exuberance of this film in the following paragraphs; I feel like I should write the whole review as one long sentence, expostulating on all the content and style and inside jokes, not to mention the performances and the music thought not so much that of the Happy Mondays, whose tunes take up the second and admittedly less successful half of the film, as that of Joy Division, whose sad story occupies the first of the film's two acts and gives the film its emotional ground -- following trails of thoughts and trains of words in an exasperating and ultimately unsucessful attempt to capture the spirit that possesses this new film from Michael Winterbottom, '24 Hour Party People.'
Yes, it would be rather pointless. You just have to see the film, and I'll use the remainder of this review telling you why you should.
The movie is about the musical revolution that took place in Manchester in the early seventies, ignited by the Sex Pistols and followed by Iggy Pop and the aforementioned Mondays and Joy Division, who would eventually gain even more fame when they reformed as New Order during the eighties.
Fans of these groups will undoubtedly eat the film up; those less familiar with the music and the period itself are in luck, because acting as tour guide on this multi-decade trip is Tony Wilson, a real life television personality who was blown away by the first Sex Pistols show, started broadcasting performances by various punk bands on his popular TV show, and eventually starting his own record label, Factory Records, and opening Manchester's answer to Club 54, The Hacienda. Wilson is still alive and working, but he's portrayed here be British comedian Steven Coogan. He's onscreen for nearly every minute of the film, explaining things when necessary and providing snide but hilarious commentary the rest of the time.
In fact, Wilson spends much of his time speaking to the audience; this movie doesn't just break the fourth wall, it has no walls at all. Winterbottom has shot the film like the most freewheeling of documentaries, and he seamlessly encorporates real footage of the Sex Pistols, Joy Division, and of the real Tony Wilson; it's impossible to tell the real from the fake, and it's best to just give up and assume that it's all real (although some of it has been fictionalized, of course, and some of it has certainly been, shall we say, embellished).
As mentioned above, the first act is concerned with Joy Division, Wilson's first big success. Fronted by a gaunt, hauntingly-voiced young man named Ian Curtis, the band struck an immediate chord with their audience and paved the way for the industrial rock of later decades. Curtis was epileptic and chronically depressed, and the combination of these afflictions led to his sucicide, on the eve of the band's first American tour.
(Note: Joy Division is a band close to my heart, and perhaps that's part of the reason that, following Curtis' death, the film lost something; it's still good, and many of the best scenes are still to come, but when Curtis is laid to rest, a little bit of the movie's soul goes with him. There's a moment where the film pauses, in a way, to pay its respects to the singer, and in that moment the film reaches a level of greatness that it couldn't possibly live up to during the second half.)
Anyway, the rest of the story deals with the fast rise and equally fast decline of Wilson's empire, caused in equal parts by the Happy Mondays' less than stellar recording habits and Wilson's own penchant for spending massive amounts of money on things like, say, an avante garde table for his office. Drugs play a large part, too; the Hacienda at first appears to be a wild success, but it slowly becomes apparent that no one is buying drinks; they're all on ecstacy, provided by drug dealers, who of course share none of their profits with the club. It's the birth of rave culture, and the end of Wilson's heyday -- at least for the time being.
The film may be a bit too single-minded in its focus on Wilson; if you don't pay close attention (which is hard to do in such a gloriously frenetic film), you may not notice the passage of time. It also may spend too much time on possibly trivial sequences, such as the massacre of thousands of pigeons to the tune of 'Ride Of The Valkyries,' time that could be better spent in -- but what the hell, this isn't PBS special. This is an attempt to capture a feeling, a fifteen year moment in history. The Sex Pistols started a movement, and this films lives up to it. It is certainly anarchistic; it is an important film that shrugs off its own importance, a mock mockumentary. It's funnier than 'Spinal Tap,' and altogether better, because it's all true. More or less.
City By The Sea
This latest film from Michael Caton-Jones has been getting some positive advance word; this confuses me. It's not a bad film, it's just that there is absolutely nothing interesting enough in it to warrant the price of admission.
Okay, I'll take that back. Frances McDormand is in it, and as usual she's stunning. There's this little thing she does with her hand at one point, after an argument with Robert DeNiro, that makes you realize what good acting is all about. Why she wasn't given more screen time is beyond me.
James Franco is pretty good, but doesn't bring anything new to the role of a junkie-trying-to-go-straight. Same can be said for Eliza Dushku, but they're both more interesting than Robert DeNiro. Sure, maybe this role is a little better than what he's been doing lately. But it's not hard to do better than 'Showtime.' This is Travis Bickle, this is Jake LaMotta. Has his standard really dropped so low that we have to praise him for sleepwalking through yet another performance as a world-weary cop? Okay, I guess he tries to do something different at the end. But his big emotional breakdown scene, while admirable, is about as convincing as the tears he sheds in the 'Analyze That' trailer.
Michael Caton Jones has made some good movies, but he's not edgy or stylish enough to elevate this beyond its TV movie screenplay. The story, you ask? Police man's son is accused of murder, conflict ensues. That's all you need to know. This is the kind of movie that Larry King will proclaim as one of the year's best films. Which is a very clear sign that it ain't.
I'm outta here...
