Category: Movie Reviews

Review: Mao’s Last Dancer & Artistic Freedom

By Joe Bendel. For fifty-plus years, Mainland China’s Communist government has experienced bitter factional rivalries and instituted enormously destructive campaigns for ideological purity.  While the pendulum has swung back and forth from relative stability to institutionalized insanity, it has remained an authoritarian state where artistic freedom is simply impossible.  That is why twenty year-old ballet dancer Li Cunxin defected to America in the early 1980’s.  It was a bold decision that would define Li’s bestselling memoir and Oscar-nominated director Bruce Beresford’s subsequent big-screen adaptation, Mao’s Last Dancer, which opens this Friday (8/20) in select theaters nationwide.

As a young boy, Li was slight but flexible as enough to be accepted at Madame Mao’s ballet academy.  Diligently training to build his strength, his natural talent blossomed -even in the didactic productions foisted on the academy by their ideologue patron.

Eventually Li was entrusted to study with the Houston Ballet as part of a cultural exchange program.  Primed to expect unspeakable misery, Li slowly discovers America is not as he was led to believe.  Acclimating to the new environment, he actually finds he dances better in the land of class enemies because he “feels freer.”  He also falls in love with Elizabeth Mackey, an aspiring dancer.  Then his life really starts to change.

Li indeed decides to defect, news the Chinese government does not happily receive when he ill-advisedly delivers it in-person.  In fact, they forcibly detain him in the Consulate, with the intention of whisking him out of the country against his will.  However, Li’s friends refuse to leave quietly (fortunately Texans can be an unruly lot), precipitating an international incident.

Dancer is a truly inspiring crowd-pleaser of a film, but it is not an overly-sanitized or conveniently simplistic reduction of a complex, real life story.  In fact, the guilt-wracked Li, fearing dreadful repercussions for his family, frequently quarrels with Mackey, eventually even divorcing her.  Yet, as a result, Li emerges as a flesh-and-blood human being.  We can also forgive the film for indulging in its manipulative coda, having more or less earned its triumphant freeze frame.

As wildly improbable as it might sound, much of Dancer was shot on-location in China.  Reportedly, once shooting was underway, the authorities began demanding changes to the script, but to his credit, Beresford rebuffed them.  As a result, there are indeed scenes of Madame Mao (who remains an official non-person in China), played by a truly eerie dead-ringer for the Gang of Four leader.  We also watch as Li’s mentor at the academy is purged for perceived ideological offenses, such as teaching the techniques of counter-revolutionary defectors like Nureyev and Baryshnikov.  (Granted, the film also seems to imply contemporary China may be loosening up, at least to an extent.)

Amanda Schull & Chi Cao.

Perhaps Dancer’s greatest challenge was casting credible dancers for its key leads roles.  Again, fortune smiled with the discovery of the considerable acting chops of Chi Cao (currently Principal Dancer with the Birmingham Royal Ballet) and Chengwu Guo (a member of the Australian Ballet) as the adult and teen-aged Li, respectively.  Both prove to be charismatic performers, with Chengwu making a surprisingly strong impression, even with his limited screen time.  (Hopefully, they will both be allowed to return home, despite their participation in the film.)

Dancer also boasts two Twin Peaks alumns – including Kyle MacLachlan, making the most of a small supporting role as crafty immigration attorney Charles Foster.  It is Joan Chen who really delivers the film’s emotional punch though, as Li’s spirited mother Niang.  Even thoroughly glammed down for the role, she still remains a radiant beauty.

Dancer is a well-rounded, fully satisfying bio-picture.  The product of Australian filmmakers, it refreshingly refrains from kneejerk political cheap shots, even implying then Vice President Bush played an important role securing Li’s freedom.  It also vividly captures Li’s passion for dance, which is the fundamental cause of nearly every event that unfolds in the film.  Emotionally engaging and politically astute, Dancer opens this Friday (8/20) in select theaters nationwide.

Posted on August 18th, 2010 at 11:58am.

Mad Men Season Four, Episode 4: “The Rejected”

By Jennifer Baldwin. Who are the rejected? The Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce secretaries, crying in their focus group because they can’t find husbands? Peggy, who feels irrevocably rejected by Pete after finding out that he and Trudy are going to have a child? Pete’s father-in-law, whose Clearasil account is rejected for the more lucrative Ponds Cold Cream account? Allison, Don’s secretary, who has been rejected by Don after their one night stand a couple of episodes ago?

Perhaps “the rejected” is something else, something a little less concrete but nonetheless essential. According to Dr. Faye Miller: “It turns out the hypothesis was rejected.”

And what is that hypothesis? Basically, Don’s hypothesis is that women will use Ponds cold cream on their faces in order to pamper themselves and satisfy their own desires as part of a beauty ritual. But unfortunately for Don, that’s just not how the women in the focus group responded.

“I’d recommend a strategy that links Ponds cold cream to matrimony,” Dr. Faye continues. Turns out Freddy Rumsen was right after all:  most women just want to get married and a cold cream campaign based around that will work.

The conversation between Don and Faye that follows may be the best summation of the culture wars to ever appear in a basic cable one-hour drama:

Don: “Hello 1925. I’m not going to do that. So, what are we going to tell the client?”

Faye: “I can’t change the truth.”

Don: “How do you know that’s the truth? A new idea is something they don’t know yet so of course it’s not going to come up as an option. Put my campaign on TV for a year then hold your group again and maybe it’ll show up.”

Faye: “I tried everything. I said ‘routine.’ I tried ‘ritual.’ All they care about is a husband. You were there, I’ll show you the transcripts.”

Don: “You can’t tell how people are going to behave based on how they have behaved.”

Don’s anger in this scene, of course, stems from his underlying guilt about what he has done to Allison.

But look closely at the conversation going on here: Faye is arguing that the truth is immutable, that these women want the traditional thing, but Don is arguing that people can change — if they are sold such change through advertising, media, and TV. And that, in a nutshell, is the culture war: The struggle to change human patterns of behavior through media and other channels. But the question remains: who is right, Don or Faye?

Joyce & Peggy.

Other things of note this episode:

I loved that last look of angsty goodness between Peggy and Pete as she goes off with her new bohemian artist friends and Pete shakes hands with all the suits in the office. With news that Trudy is going to have a baby, it seems the Peggy/Pete relationship hopes are at last dashed. I loved that bittersweet look of regret between them at the end of the episode, but I can’t say I’m too broken up. I’ve always been Team Trudy.

Peggy continues her transformation into Don Jr. This time she’s hanging out with a bunch of hipster artists, just as Don did with girlfriend Midge and her friends in Season One, and just like Don, she doesn’t hesitate to deflate their bohemian posturing:

Hipster Artist: “Why would I ever do that [work in advertising]?”

Peggy: “So you could get paid [duh]. To practice your art.”

Peggy likes the hipsters, but she’s not about to throw off her professional ambitions any time soon.

Second episode in a row with no Betty. Can’t say I mind. Betty’s character was destroyed for me in Season Three.

And finally, I have to confess, I have no idea what that little scene with the elderly couple and the peaches was supposed to be about. Don certainly observed them with studied intensity, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out the point of it.

And even though she wasn’t the focus of the episode, here’s a picture of Joan. Because Christina Hendricks rocks:

Posted on August 18th, 2010 at 9:36am.

The Cinema of Forgery

By David Ross. Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? (2006) is a lively little documentary about Teri Horton, a feisty, gravel-voiced grandma who embodies every red state stereotype. She purchased a large drip painting for $5 in a thrift shop in San Bernardino. Somebody naturally mentioned Jackson Pollock, of whom she had never heard, and she took it into her head that she’d purchased a lost masterpiece worth tens of millions. There ensued an epic battle as Horton pestered the skeptical and obnoxiously condescending mandarins of the art world, demanding the canonization of her painting. The whole business might have been filed under the heading “crank makes a pest of herself,” except that Horton had an ace up her sleeve: the forensic art expert Peter Paul Biro claimed to have found a fingerprint on Horton’s painting that matched a fingerprint he had lifted from Pollock’s studio. At this point the controversy becomes fascinating, as it pitches curatorial instinct against forensic evidence and raises basic questions about art authentication and even more basic questions about epistemology. The film, of course, is interested in none of this, at least not in a serious way; it unhesitatingly sides with the feisty granny against the insufferable Ivy League boors, liking the entertainment value of its own populist narrative.

Having watched the film and weighed its evidence, I was torn and confused. A fingerprint is a fingerprint. On the other hand, I’ve spent time among collectors, curators, and scholars, and I know that the aesthetic eye is not a myth; what seem like snap or arbitrary judgments are a matter of the brain instantly acting on tens of thousands of hours of looking and thinking and comparing. There really are experts in this sense. Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum, is an example. He appears in the film as the chief witness for the prosecution, calling Horton’s painting laughable and ridiculing Horton’s right even to hold an opinion on the matter, in what must be one of the most uninhibited displays of pomposity ever captured on film. But Hoving’s personality does not, as the film seems to insinuate, invalidate his judgment. Nobody should doubt that a director of the Met knows incalculably more than a former truck driver, and that this knowledge is substantive and meaningful.

Oja Kodar, in Orson Welles' "F for Fake."

Like Hoving, I had the sense that the painting was off. I am not an expert on Pollock, but I know what one is supposed to feel in the presence of a great painter’s work – a certain flood of beauty and meaning, a sense of intricacy too great to be immediately digested. I was feeling none of it. The painting seemed to lack drama, presence, rhythm. It occurred to me that if the painting struck my dull eye as dubious, it must be very dubious indeed. Could the painting have been authentic, but for some reason botched? Could Pollock’s seminal energies have been dammed by a migraine or a hangover or a tiff with the wife? Perhaps he knew the painting stunk and dispatched it to the dump or gave it to the milkman. This would explain why the painting is unsigned, and begins to explain how it wound up in a thrift store in San Bernardino. In sum, I didn’t know what to think.

The New Yorker has thankfully rescued me from my uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. In a superb piece of investigative reporting (see here), David Grann brought a different kind of skepticism to the controversy, assailing the fingerprint evidence and finding plenty in Biro’s past to raise the possibility that he is an outright charlatan. The article does not merely supplement the film, but supersedes it entirely. Skip the film – read the article.

Those who enjoy the whodunit aspect of art authentication should have a look at Hoving’s False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes (1997). Hoving’s brashness plays better on the page than it does on film, lending a humorous derision to his many anecdotes of stupidity, arrogance, and low cunning. The book is a very useful prophylactic; anybody who reads it will be cured of the fantasy of the lost masterpiece. You can take it for granted that the thing’s a fake.

O'Toole & Hepburn in "How to Steal a Million."

While on the subject of art authentication, let me note the documentary F for Fake (1973), Orson Welles’ last and least celebrated directorial effort, and by far the strangest and most problematic of his films.  It is a postmodern phantasmagoria on the theme of fakery, centered – precariously – on the activities of the Elmyr de Hory (see here), one of the premier art forgers of twentieth century, and his equally shady biographer Clifford Irving, author of a fraudulent autobiography of Howard Hughes (see here). Elmyr is a whirl of joie de vivre as he whips up Matisses and airs his laissez-faire philosophy (“I don’t feel bad for Modigliani – I feel good for me”), but the interesting question is why Welles felt drawn to his subject matter. Does the great director conceive the great forger as a fellow illusionist or as an object lesson in the temptation of shortcuts, partial mastery, pastiche? Or is the motive ironic – a commentary on the world’s tendency to muff the distinction between true art and fake art, with the implication that Welles himself has been the victim of this incompetence? Students of Welles will find much to consider in this barmy, brilliant experiment in documentary, as well as much to enjoy: particularly a lascivious segment that provides more than an eyeful of Oja Kodar, Welles’ lover for the last twenty-four years of his life and a woman clearly born to be a Bond girl.

Finally, let us not forget William Wyler’s How to Steal a Million (1966), starring Peter O’Toole and Audrey Hepburn, a heist/forgery flick that has the distinction of being the least gritty crime film ever made. If any film is made of spun-sugar and Givenchy finery, this is it. It includes several charming witticisms on the subject of forgery:

Charles Bonnet: Don’t you know that in his lifetime Van Gogh only sold one painting? While I, in loving memory of his tragic genius, have already sold two.

And:

Charles Bonnet: I doubt very much if Van Gogh himself would have gone through so much trouble.
Nicole Bonnet: He didn’t have to. He was Van Gogh!

And:

Charles Bonnet: What have I done? I’ve given the world a precious opportunity of studying and viewing the Cellini Venus.
Nicole Bonnet: Which is not by Cellini!
Charles Bonnet: Ahh, labels, labels. It’s working with the Americans that’s given you this obsession with labels and brand names.

It’s interesting that all of these films and books slip into a kind of merriment. Forgery, it seems, is very close to comedy and the carnivalesque. It makes asses of those in authority, jumbles categories, upends assumptions. The forger is very much like the court jester or the Shakesperean fool, and even those like Hoving, who have millions of dollars at stake, cannot help but smile.

Posted on August 17th, 2010 at 10:36am.

Classic Cinema Obsession: Edge of Darkness, New on DVD

By Jennifer Baldwin. Which is the higher value: Peace or Freedom? Can there be true peace without freedom? Is freedom worth dying for? Is freedom worth killing for? What are we willing to do for our freedom – not just the soldiers, sailors, and marines—but all of us, what are we willing to do?

Few movies today wrestle with these questions, probably because they’ll bring up answers that the Hollywood establishment doesn’t want to face. The independent films we champion here at LFM are different, of course. They’re not afraid to face the issue of freedom. Freedom-loving films are out there; they’re just not the mainstream movies that garner all the press.

But that wasn’t always the case. As any movie fan with a passing knowledge of Hollywood in the 1940s knows, movies about freedom and fighting tyranny were turned out half a dozen a week back in those days, all in service to the war effort and the fight against the Nazis and Imperial Japan.

Edge of Darkness is one such movie. It has a message about freedom that is essential, even for us today, in understanding the sacrifices and requirements necessary for liberty. It also has lots of guns.

Edge of Darkness is a great film if you like the following things: Piles of dead Nazis; a religious minister mowing down Germans from a bell tower; and Ann Sheridan toting a big, honking machine gun. And boy, does she tote it!

This is a movie about the importance of firearms. I can’t recall the last movie I watched that showed just how much having freedom depends on having guns. Everybody is packing in this one – from the little old ladies, to gray-haired doctor Walter Houston, to the town preacher.

Needless to say, Errol Flynn handles a gun, but it’s Ann Sheridan striking a pose for firearms and freedom that really gets the film going.

These are the pleasures of Edge of Darkness. It’s a relatively unknown gem only recently released on DVD. It’s director is the underrated Lewis Milestone, director of one of my favorite films noir, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Milestone was no stranger to war movies, either, having directed All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930. Continue reading Classic Cinema Obsession: Edge of Darkness, New on DVD

LFM Mini-Review: Stallone Targets the CIA in The Expendables

Body art as weapon of mass narcissism.

By Jason Apuzzo. THE PITCH: Stallone & Co. try to bring macho, 80s action fare back into style.  Sly leads a rag-tag band of mercenaries into action against a rogue ex-CIA officer-turned drug lord and a South American Generalissimo.  Along the way, Stallone develops feelings for the Generalissimo’s daughter, while co-star Jason Statham works out issues with his girlfriend.  Mickey Rourke supplies the tattoos.

THE SKINNY: Thoroughly mediocre, straight-to-video style action movie on steroids.  Basically a platform for Stallone’s Godzilla-scale narcissism … along with some nasty, leftist messaging about the CIA and American exploitation of Third World peoples, etc.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK:

• Making the villain of the piece an ex-CIA guy turned drug lord … who likes waterboarding women.  Sorry, but this took me completely out of the picture.  Shame on Stallone for jamming this junk into his film.  Trying to cash in with the overseas audiences, Sly?  You’re peddling an ugly stereotype of our intelligence services at a time when we can least afford it.  Our intelligence people doesn’t deserve to get thrown under the bus just to reboot your career.

• Trying to make Jet Li the comic relief in the film.  Stallone apparently confused him with Jackie Chan.

• The genuinely appalling stereotypes this film peddles about Central/South America.  Apparently everybody down there is either a druggie, a peon, a Generalissimo, or a sexy spitfire right out of a telenovela.  I guess you can get away with that stuff in a film nowadays so long as you gratuitously bash the CIA.

• The visual effects looked cheap, like something out of a Roger Corman movie.  The cheap effects give the film a straight-to-video vibe that it never quite shakes.

• Seeing Sly, Bruce Willis and Schwarzenegger together after all these years … meant exactly nothing to me, because these guys basically stand for nothing anymore other than their own careers, and their personal narcissism.  Schwarzenegger?  He’s currently presiding over the ruination of my state.  Willis?  When Live Free or Die Hard went overseas, he let the title be changed to Die Hard 4 in order not to ‘offend’ international audiences.  So watching all these ‘tough’ guys smirk and preen and chew cigars means zero to me now; besides, at this point Angelina Jolie could probably kick all their asses.

WHAT WORKS:

• I don’t know whether it’s plastic surgery or ‘roids or what – but both Stallone’s face and Mickey Rourke’s are starting to look like Paul Klee paintings.  They bulge and twist in interesting, novel directions and hold your interest.

• Statham.  The key to Statham is: he’s a handsome guy, without being pretty.  Being pretty is what ruined Van Damme.

• Due to clever editing and sound effects, I almost thought the fight scenes were good.  Jet Li was really wasted, though.

• Inheriting the Maria Conchita Alonso role from the 80s, Gisele Itié is certainly sultry.  I like the way she says ‘You Americans’ in this film.  The phrase has a kind of smoky, insolent lilt coming out of her mouth.  Too bad she gets waterboarded.

• It was good to see Dolph Lundgren again, and a great idea to have him fight Jet Li.  Poor Dolph still can’t act, though.

Body fetish: it's all about how you look.

The Expendables is basically Stallone’s victory lap, his valedictory statement on the action film.  But even though I’ve always been pro-Stallone in the past (how many of you can say you once snuck into a midnight screening of Cobra?  I can), I can’t go with him here.  I really think the only thing Stallone stands for any more is himself and his career – and his wife’s excellent skin care products, of course.

Personal narcissism was always an important subtext of Stallone’s films – you see it in the long, loving close-ups of Sly’s pecs in films like Rambo II or Rocky IV – but in The Expendables Sly turns narcissism into a creed, a kind of warped code of honor.  We learn in this film, for example, that Sly and his mercenary band will basically go anywhere and do anything for money.  Except in this case, Sly doesn’t take a job offered to him by Bruce Willis because he would then be – indirectly – working on behalf of the CIA.  [By the way, you know Bruce Willis is a villain in this film because he’s a clean-shaven white guy wearing a suit.  In current movie iconography, that reads as bad.]  Being a patsy for the CIA is apparently not cool in Sly’s world.  What is cool, instead, is doing the exact same dirty work – and risking the lives of his team – in order to rescue the Generalissimo’s hot daughter, who wouldn’t even leave with him when she had the chance.  In essence, Stallone has the opportunity to do something for his country – albeit indirectly, and perhaps on behalf of a nasty character (Willis) – but he passes up the opportunity to indulge a personal whim.

It’s too bad that’s where Stallone’s head is, nowadays.  That kind of me-first mentality keeps this film from being the men-on-a-mission classic it could be, like The Guns of Navarone or Where Eagles Dare or Ice Station Zebra.  This movie has no sense of mission whatsoever, no sense of higher purpose other than the resuscitation of a star’s career.  I don’t know what ‘The Expendables’ are fighting for, or why I should care.  All we really learn from watching this thoroughly mediocre film is that South American women are as hot as ever.

Posted on August 14th, 2010 at 1:14pm.

Mad Men Season 4, Episode 3: “The Good News”

By Jennifer Baldwin. One of the things I love about Mad Men is the tone of the show. It’s dispassionate, restrained, observant. In its first season, the show had a tendency to get a little condescending towards the era, but thankfully, show runner Matthew Weiner has managed to pull back on this tendency and just let the era “be” — he doesn’t flinch from showing the faults of these characters and their society, but he also doesn’t preach at us about how horrible these people and their world were. He just lets the world of the show play out, and it’s up to us how we judge things. Compared to other shows and movies set in the 1960s, Mad Men is one of the least preachy.

The increasingly detached, observant tone of Mad Men is what helps make it so fascinating, both as drama and as social commentary. This third episode of Season Four is no exception. The characters and their choices are given to us with very little commentary or editorializing from the writers and it’s up to us, the audience, to decide how we feel about them.

Anna and Don.

At its most basic, Mad Men is a character study. People who’ve tried just watching one episode here or there find they can’t get into the show, but that’s because it’s hard to jump in midstream when you’re watching the lives of fully developed people unfold before your eyes. It takes time to get to know someone, and the characters of Mad Men — the life blood of the show — are as multi-faceted and complex as fictional characters get. It takes time to get to know them.

This week’s episode, in fact, made me feel something I never thought I’d feel for a character I never thought I would like: Greg, Joan’s husband (a character I had previously nicknamed “Doctor McRapist Jerkface”). But somehow, just as they did with Pete over the course of the first couple of seasons, the Mad Men writers have made Dr. Greg sympathetic. When he bandages Joan’s finger after she cuts herself in the kitchen — the way he calms her down, comforts her, takes charge — it was endearing. Suddenly, a character that I couldn’t wait to leave for Vietnam so he could get killed was a character I kinda, sorta, unbelievably cared about. It was a moment that made me realize that Joan married him not just for the stability and because he was a good-looking doctor, but because he has a heart, that she saw something good in him, even though he had committed a despicable act against her (the rape scene from Season Two). It’s the kind of character moment that Mad Men excels at:  a seemingly “bad” character doing a good thing.

Lane.

Of course, that’s the whole appeal of a character like Don Draper; a character we’re fascinated by and care about, even as he does some pretty bad things. This week’s episode gave us the two sides of Don: the caring, sensitive, wounded Dick Whitman and the swinging, boozy, divorcee businessman Don Draper. When he visits Anna Draper in California and finds out she has terminal cancer (and that she hasn’t been told about it), we witness his heart breaking before our eyes.

But then Don returns to New York, takes recently-left-by-his-wife Lane Pryce under his wing, and the two go out for a night of drinking, excess, and eventually, prostitutes. Don echoes the line from last week — about the conflict between doing what we want versus doing what’s expected of us — and he encourages Lane to do what he wants and not what’s expected of him. Lane sleeps with the prostitute that Don has gotten for him; he’s chosen self over duty. Lane won’t be jetting off to England any time soon to try to repair his marriage.

And so, another thread in the fabric of a stable society is thereby cut. “Don Draper” seems to be winning out over “Dick Whitman” this season. And he’s bringing characters like Lane Pryce with him. It remains to be seen whether these two will find any lasting happiness on the path they have chosen. Welcome to 1965.

One final thought: Don and Lane really should have gone to see The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, one of my favorite films, instead of Godzilla vs. The Thing (or Gamera, or whatever Japanese monster movie that was). At least they didn’t go see It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Posted on August 11th, 2010 at 12:20pm.