"Midnight in Paris" (2011)

Dwight Dekeyser rating:  Charming, Nostalgic, Meaningful

Dear Friend,

There was something strangely familiar about Woody Allen’s new movie, Midnight in Paris.  The movie opened to stunning urban vistas and the sound of a jazz clarinet, Allen’s signature instrument.   What was different was the city itself.  It was not Allen’s urban inspiration New York but Paris.  Was this to be a remake of his 1979 romantic comedy Manhattan, starring Allen, Diane Keaton, and a precocious new talent, Mariel Hemingway?   Was this familiar opening the result of a lack of new ideas or a playful nod and a wink at an old favorite flick?  I have always loved Manhattan, so a rerun of an old formula in a different setting might not have been a terrible way to spend 94 minutes.  I was just a little sad to think the old boy might have nothing new to say.   

Manhattan was not the only Allen classic to come to mind.  The story centers on the relationship of a frustrated, young television writer, Gil (Owen Wilson) and his high-maintenance fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams).  Her family does not approve of his values and eccentricities.  He dislikes her pseudo-intellectual pretentious friends.  (Sound a bit like Annie Hall [1977] to you?)   What was most reminiscent of Allen’s oeuvre was the main character.  Gil was nothing less than a reincarnated Woody Allen in the role.  The dialogue and delivery were classic Allen.  (He did write and direct the movie, after all.)  It were as if Allen had become an invisible ventriloquist with a human dummy.  (Isn’t that what all screenwriters do?) 

The fiancée becomes sick of charming bistros and restaurants and throws herself into high-end shopping with her materialistic parents and night clubbing with her shallow companions.  Gil tires of her and escapes at night to discover a greater mistress, Paris.  (Spoiler alert!  Read the rest after you’ve seen the movie.)  Lost at night, a vintage Peugeot pulls up and invites our hero to a party for Jean Cocteau – a tip of Allen’s cap to the late French poet/artist/film director by using the same vehicle he used in his film Orphee  (1950).  (Actually, it was a Rolls-Royce, but you get the double entendre.)  The timeslip transports Gil to a party circa 1927, hosted by Cole Porter, attended by his literary heroes F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway – Mariel’s granddad.  (I must admit I was touched to see them and Zelda looking so young and gay knowing what the future held for them – alcoholism, madness, sudden death.)

There was certainly no shortage of Lost Generation luminaries in this picture.  The actors were cast to resemble the real characters:  Picasso, Matisse (too old for the period -- plus he smiled), Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Luis Brunel, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Leo Stein.  All of whom were rather pointedly identified in case we missed anyone.  The only one who apparently did not need a name tag was Josephine Baker who appeared at Bricktop’s.  The ambiance was worth the price of admission.   The ladies wore a catalogue of the Patou-inspired drop waist couture of the time, Chanel’s little black Ford, Vionnet’s handkerchief dress, Molyneux’s tiered-fringe frock.  “Charleston, Charleston… .”  (Sorry, it was my inner flapper.)  The other ladies of the street-variety with their spit-curled coiffures and dangling fags looked like they had just walked out of a Brassai photo.  It was an amusing contrast.

Gil falls in love with Picasso’s model and mistress Adriana (Marion Cottilard), a recreated Kiki de Montparnasse, who was actually Man Ray’s lover. (Kiki was so embarrassed by her lack of body hair that she actually penciled it in before modeling.)  Adriana, a dead ringer for Sylvia Sidney, along with Gil make their own foray into the past by carriage to the (early) Belle Epoque and wind up at Maxim’s for dinner and the Moulin Rouge for a little can-can where they meet Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and Degas.  She chooses to remain.  It is only then that Gil realizes the futility of worshiping the giants of the past and the importance of living and creating in the present:  L’age d’Or always precedes our own; yet the great masters are always with us.  In a strange way it was also a subtle reminder by Allen of just who the great masters of the present age are (ahem), namely himself.  Well, a little self-promotion can go a long way, I always say.  (Did I just quote myself?)

Here’s the trailer: http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi853581081/

From the vault:  Manhattan (1979).  Written and directed by Woody Allen, starring Woody Allen and Diane Keaton.  If I could save but one Woody Allen film from the flames it would be this one.  Hope you like black and white and Gershwin.  (There he goes being nostalgic again!  Unfortunately, the movie lacks the technical mastery of the great black and white era.)  Meryl Streep is cast as Woody’s ex – who knew she could play such a convincing lesbian?!

                                             

Best of luck in your movie selections.  Your faithful friend,

Dwight Dekeyser

© 2011 Dwight Dekeyser, Esq.  All rights reserved.

“POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” (2011)

Dwight Dekeyser rating: BBB

Dear Friend,

Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock alleges to “pull the curtain back” on product placement and advertising in the motion picture industry in this amusing high-octane documentary.  It is not the type of industry expose that made him famous in his documentary, Super Size Me (2004), where he chronicled the toxic effect of McDonald’s food on the human body (his own), but rather it is an exploration of the art and science of the advertising industry and its effect on the human mind.  While he does not come to the conclusion that incessant product promotion in our society has the same deleterious results as fast food, I wonder if he would not have come to that conclusion had he not been so eager to find sponsors in order to produce his film.  It is this fatal flaw that denied this documentary the impact it might have had were it free from commercial contamination.  Nonetheless, this picture does have much to commend it.

Viewing The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, was like attending an entertaining crash course on modern advertising.  (I bet even Spurlock never thought of pitching his picture to universities as course material.)  A super salesman, he relentlessly peddles his idea of product promotion within a film about product promotion to any company that will listen.  Many did not as Spurlock suffered one rejection after another from companies well aware of his reputation for investigative filmmaking.  They were not going to be the next McDonald’s.  The companies that actually allowed Spurlock to film his hilarious storyboard presentations became part of the film.  In this way, they got to be more than a sponsor, but a part of the story – an unheard of side benefit.  (Now, aren’t they sorry?)

Spurlock was forced to broaden his examination of product placement in movies to include the advertising business as a whole.  He did this by visiting advertising consultants, who gave him extensive psychological tests to determine his “brand personality” (He was found “mindful” and “playful.”)  He even had his brain scanned to record his reactivity to commercial stimulation with its concomitant release of dopamine.  (“Dopamine is addiction.”)    Then there was the holy trinity of buyer motivation.  (Fear, Craving, and you guessed it, Sex.)  We also learn that “products do not lead to contentment, but are a conduit for what we want.”  (Products are the means to the end, not the end.)  And above all else, “advertising as a concept is a means of manipulation.”  (No explanation required.)

Some of his other consultants included Noam Chomsky, who counseled the director to allow sponsors to co-opt him, if just a little; Ralph Nader, who was delighted to get a free pair of shoes in his size, no less; and the ultimate self-promoter Donald Trump, who could not understand why recording artists would not lend their music to promote his products, i.e. himself.  It is this point that I find most instructive about this documentary.  When people asked Arthur Miller what Willy Lowman sold in Death of a Salesman (1949), he would always answer “himself.”  This was exactly what Morgan Spurlock did though out the entire movie.  Spurlock was not the just the salesman, he was the product.  This was the greatest lesson I learned from this documentary – how to sell one’s self.  I certainly did not hurt that Spurlock was charming and attractive, but it was his dogged determination that made him so admirable.  He was unstoppable.  The documentary may have been focused on its promotion, but it was ultimately about its creator.  We are all our own products.  I wonder how many of us know what we’re selling.

From the vault:  Super Size Me (2004), directed by Morgan Spurlock.  Spurlock makes himself sick by eating exclusively from McDonald’s for one month.   It took his girlfriend, a vegan chef, to detox him and then turned the experience into a cookbook. (Did you know a single McDonald’s hamburger could come from as many as three different countries?  Now, you do.)

Here's the trailer:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jXReCaZ5Ts

Best of luck in your movie selections.  Your faithful friend,

Dwight Dekeyser

© 2011 Dwight Dekeyser, Esq.  All rights reserved.

"Atlas Shrugged" (2011)

Dwight Dekeyser rating: DDD

Dear Friend,

“Who is John Gault?” is the question asked repeatedly in the making of this iconic classic of Objectivism, the philosophy of  free market capitalism, also known as libertarianism by Russian-born Jewish writer Ayn Rand.  More to the point after having seen Part I of this epic saga of the same name from 1957 is who cares?  This is one of the strangest movies I have ever seen.  It was like the Night of the Living Dead (1968) meets Dynasty (1981-89).   Rich industrialists recite lines with all the passion zombies can muster in an attempt to animate this ponderous screen play from death by rationalism.  It was not that the quality of acting was lacking, it was that the dialogue was so artificial and so cerebral that scenes were devoid of any human spontaneity.  Everything that was spoken was said with such deliberation and sincerity one wonders whether this novel had been written by an alien who had encountered the inhabitants of planet Earth only once or twice.  No, this movie/book was written by someone on the outside looking in – someone not native to the language or culture, someone who made reckless assumptions about that which she did not understand, i.e., human nature and the American scene.

The movie’s dubious legitimacy as a motion picture had its roots in its inception.    The screen rights were leased to John Aglialoro, the CEO of an exercise equipment company in 1992, for a million dollars.  Aglialoro was so impressed by the novel, he was certain it could be made into a major motion picture.   With messianic fervor, he peddled his prized property all over Hollywood.  Despite five or six different scripts, no major studio would touch it.  With time running out on the lease, Aglialoro decided to make the film himself contributing another ten millions dollars of his own and enlisting the assistance of fellow Randroid Ed Snider, chairman of Comcast-Spector.  As of April 2010, this folie-a-deux dream team of novice movie moguls had no viable script, no cast, no director or anything else resembling a film crew or production company – one hundred days before the lease was to expire on June 14, 2010!  Miraculously, a film crew of 250 was assembled and the film was shot in six weeks.  This "triumph of the will" would have been complete had the movie resulted in a coherent narrative instead of a succession of ponderous scenes of awkward dialogue and uncomfortable situations leading nowhere.

Despite being a Vanity Fair release, the production values were credible.  (It is reassuring to know one can buy the trappings of a movie with enough cash in hand on short notice.)  Although, there were no Grade-A Jumbo movie stars, the actors were appealing and well-cast.  Unfortunately, there not enough eggs in the basket for them to scramble an edible omelet.  Grant Bowler (who looks and sounds like a young Cliff Robertson) and Taylor Schilling (who looks like an Americanized Catherine Deneuve) did their best to ignite a spark, but no one could have set a fire on this sinking ship.  They were as trapped as the audience on this Titanic melodrama devoid of any genuine human emotion.   It must have taken all their acting ability to recite such insipid lines with such seriousness of purpose.   A stony Miss Taggart to her brother, “I have never hurt a fly, but if you oppose me, I will destroy you.” Exit stage left.  (Oh, the drama of the corporate board room!  I knew Leona Helmsley could be tough, but nothing like this!)

There is no getting around it, the fault lies with Ayn Rand.  The novel as communicated by the movie is a message with a story as opposed to a story with a message.  If one has a message, by all means: write a thesis, an op-ed piece or a sermon.  Don’t pretend that your philosophy can be literature.  Unless some element of genuine emotion or the human condition is present, no dramatic presentation can succeed.  The promulgation of economic theory and ethical philosophy by two-dimensional characters reciting lines of dogma in unnatural settings is not art or entertainment.  It is a pretentious bore.   The message itself is ironic at best: government regulation of business will destroy industry.  Evidently, Rand was not able to conceive of the idea that it was Wall Street that was to co-opt democratically elected government by corporate lobbyists and their campaign contributions.  (See, my January 4-review of Casino Jack, 2010).  Nor was Rand able to envision this corporate corruption of the democratic process was to be enshrined by the United States Supreme Court which ruled that corporations were individuals under the First Amendment, and were therefore entitled to the same forms of free speech, i.e., campaign contributions.   Further, it was the Congressional rollback of banking and insurance regulations that precipitated the Great Recession of 2008, not government oversight.  In this picture, not only had the drama failed, but its message as well.

Here is the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W07bFa4TzM

From the vault:  The Sweet Smell of Success (1957).  Directed by Alexander Mackendrick; written by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman; starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and Susan Harrison.   Hard to believe this was released the same year as Atlas Shrugged.  No lack of drama in this film noire indictment of the newspaper business and Walter Winchell, in particular.  “It's a dirty job, but I pay clean money for it.”  How’s that for a business slogan?

Best of luck in your movie selections.  Your faithful friend,

Dwight Dekeyser

© 2011 Dwight Dekeyser, Esq.  All rights reserved. 

   

"Super" (2010)

Dwight Dekeyser rating: BCD

“Super” is not an adjective I would use to describe this movie in any capacity.  It appears to have come from the Black Swan (2010) school of film making.  This particular genre is much like a football fourth down that entails an ambitious long pass that results in an artlessly dropped ball, and ends in an amassed pile of bodies.  Like the Black Swan, Super was the steady digression of a reasonable plot that ran out of ideas and turned to raw violence and sheer depravity as a second and third act respectively.  Did I mention this was a partially animated comedy?  The emergency parachute for these free falling films appears to be activated by the slasher ripcord.  When in doubt of a safe landing employ butchery and debauchery – forms of entertainment that require no legitimate justification providing their depiction provides a new height of heinous human degradation and destruction.

What I find most disturbing about this descent-into-hell cinematography is how dishonest it is.  It is the classic bait-and-switch sales technique.  The seller advertises one product and then turns the customer to another, usually a higher priced item.  Black Swan was a ballet picture.  At the time of its release I wondered how many little girls in their pale pink tights with their pulled back hair and ballet bags would be exposed to that grim story of graphic sexuality, mental illness, and gruesome murder?   (It was rated “R – Restricted. Under 17 requires the accompanying of parent or adult.”)  (On the other hand, a cautionary tale about the professional ballet world might not have been such a bad idea.)  Super played the same trick.  It is billed as a comedy using illustrated comic book figures.  What boy would not like to see a picture about a loser who becomes a action superhero turn vigilante serial killer?  Sounds something like the old Superman to me (hence the title), but this is not the dashing George Reeves-, Christopher Reeve-leading man we have come to expect, but character actor Rainn Wilson.

Rainn Wilson is a great supporting actor.  His performances as the daffy but earnest “Arthur” in the brilliant television series Six-Feet Under (2001), and as the obsequious but scheming “Dwight” in The Office, (2005) have established him as an identifiable “type.”  (One has to be a type to be named “Dwight,” after all.)  He makes a poignant jerk – someone you love to hate and enjoy feeling superior to.  I could see Rainn finding a happy home in old Hollywood in such film noir classics as The Maltese Falcon (1941) or The Killers (1946) – a neurotic sinister heavy in a an overcoat, fedora, and dangling cigarette with an inch of ash ready to drop.  There is a wonderful pathos to the edgy rigid characters he portrays.  The prayer scene is this movie was most pathetic.

The part of Frank D’Arbo who becomes superhero The Crimson Bolt was a perfect vehicle for Wilson’s extraordinary range of emotion.  It is unfortunate that his performance was not enough to save this picture or the performance of his partner in crime “Libby” aka “Boltie” (Ellen Page), who reminded me of a particularly annoying consort of Dr. Who.   (“You’re not going to leave me, Dr. Who?  No!!!!)  I couldn’t decide whether she was a bad actress or if her character was so insipid there was nothing that could have been done with the part to make the girl credible or even likeable.  Despite my reservations about the performance, I thought her demise was gratuitous and unspeakable.  I think the devil in this production was in the concentration of power.  The film was written and directed by actor James Gunn, who also appeared (convincingly) as the devil.  At some point, a director must tell the writer, “this isn’t working,” and this film did not work on many levels.   It was the pastiche of genres lacking a single meaningful message that ultimately lead to the sinking of this ship of fools.   Comedy and brutality are not escape hatches for a pointless storyline.  The epilogue itself was a travesty of failed irony.  Saying, in effect, “I didn’t mean it” is no way to end a picture.  Super was a rocky raft with the feel of an after-school project.  No matter what cinematic devices were deployed to keep it afloat it was never meant to sail. 

P.S.  Did I mention Kevin Bacon was fabulous as Jacques, the wife-stealing drug dealer?  (Actors, I am told, draw upon their own personal experiences for inspiration.)  He was utterly convincing and perfectly repulsive.  As a supporting actor, he was fortunately spared from appearing in some of the more humiliating and frankly embarrassing scenes forced upon Wilson.  Although, I have to admit I did burst out laughing at his gruesome demise at the hands of The Crimson Bolt, as I suspect the actors did during the filming.

Here’s the trailer:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctcURFb7XE4&feature=related

From the vault:  The Maltese Falcon (1941), directed by John Huston; written by Dashiell Hammitt; staring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet.  People rave about Casablanca (1942), I know I do.  But, I prefer the Falcon.  The plot is practically incomprehensible, but who cares?  The whole movie is an acting class.  Foolish Geraldine Fitzgerald turned down the female lead because she did not want to work with an unknown director.  Mary Astor knew a good part when she saw one and tore it up.  (Can’t you just see Rainn Wilson as Elijah Cooke, Jr.’s Wilmer?  "Wilmer!")

Best of luck in your movie selections.  Your faithful friend,

Dwight Dekeyser

© Dwight Dekeyser, Esq.  All rights reserved. 

Bill Cunningham New York (2011)

Dwight Dekeyser rating:  AAA

Dear Friend,

This documentary is about the “most important man in the world,” and you have never heard of him!    What could be better?  This film is a touching biography of a lovely old man in love with his work, New York, and its people.  He’s an eighty-year-old eccentric fashion photographer who rides his bicycle through the streets of downtown Manhattan to shoot pedestrian New Yorkers in all their native splendor.   Whether they be attired in dyed fur and denim, leather and feathers or African animal prints, Bill Cunningham has captured this untamed species of sauntering sophisticates in their jungle habitat for some fifty years now.  He is a hunter with big game to shoot and the hunt is still on.  If anyone can claim to have “seen it all” it is the indomitable and irrepressible Bill Cunningham. 

Bill Cunningham has been a fashion-photojournalist for so long, he knows everyone in art, fashion, and society in New York – and they know him.  His self-effacing bonhomie and his dogged determination to document and memorialize New Yorkers and their fashion trends have won him a unique respect and admiration in the city, as he dodges death-defying traffic to get to his next photo shoot for The New York Times.  It could be a swank benefit for the New York City Ballet, Mrs. Astor’s 100^th birthday party (they’re old friends) or two black girls threatening to break his camera if he takes their picture.  (He takes the picture and smiles.)  They are all the same to him.  People either have style or they don’t.  He’s not interested in “celebrities with their free dresses.”  For someone who is not a name dropper, he has no problem naming names.  (Apparently, Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe had no style.)   He has been called the “ultimate egalitarian” in a city described by the all white-wearing writer Thomas Wolfe as being “all about status.”

There are plenty of celebrities and notable freaks of fashion in this documentary.  It is a social column in itself of the notable and the notorious.  Making appearances were society swells: the late Mrs. Vincent Astor, Mrs. Oscar de la Renta, Mr. David Rockefeller, and Dr. Henry Kissinger.  (I must have missed Nancy – she always looks great.)  Then we had the fashion professionals: editor Anna Wintour (the Devil Wears Prada herself), ex-supermodel Carmen Dell’Orefice, Met costume curator Harold Koda, and textile executive and style-icon extraordinaire Iris Apfel.  By far the most amusing people were the fashion eccentrics: “the Dandy” Patrick McDonald, ex-Nepali diplomat Shail Upadhya, drag queen Kenny Kenny (with her inspired painted-on veil), and from Paris the incomparable Anna Piaggi.  You won’t find these characters in your hometown and you won’t find their clothes there either.  These are serious stylists making serious personal statements about whom and what they are through their apparel.  Ignore them at your peril!  These people are fierce!

Bill Cunningham witnessed great change in the fashion business in the past sixty years having been a fashion writer, milliner, and lastly photographer.  When he started in the 1950s, fashion was tightly controlled industry.  Rich women who were serious about their wardrobe went to Paris twice a year to select their garments at any one of the numerous fashion houses to be personally fitted.  It was said that a single fitting at Balenciaga was like five or six fittings anywhere else.  Five or six fittings?!  Yup!  These women had time on their hands.  Fashion editor and Met costume curator Diana Vreeland once had a lingerie shop in London where women would come in for two fittings for a single slip!  A small clique of Paris couturiers, amongst them Dior, Chanel, Ricci, Balmain, Fath, Schiaparelli, and Saint Laurent, determined what fashionable women of the Western world would look like.  This meant that twice a year American designers and fashion journalists would trek to Paris to see the collections to copy the styles and promote the new looks.  As the world became more democratic in the 1960s, the street became the arbiter of fashion.   People told Paris what they were going to wear and it was up to Paris to adopt their stylish innovations.  This is where Bill Cunningham found his niche in the fashion world – by becoming the world’s greatest trend spotter, “the most important man in the world.”

What Bill Cunningham did not become was a stylist himself.  While everyone in New York knows Bill, no one seems to know anything about him.  No one seems to know where he came from, if he has a family or where he lives.  Despite covering the glamorous and powerful for years, Bill lives an ascetic almost monastic life above Carnegie Hall in an apartment with no kitchen or bathroom (that’s down the hall).  His sole piece of furniture is a make-shift cot that is lodged between tight rows of gray metal  file cabinets that contain his life’s work of photographs, negatives, and publications.  His “closet” consists of a few articles of clothing on metal hangers hung from the handles of file drawers.  All that he eats comes from fast food restaurants or cafes.  A bachelor, he has few friends, and goes to church every Sunday.  He shuns the comforts and distractions of the material world in order to pursue his art.  To call him a workaholic would be facile.  He is a completely committed artist to the exclusion of (almost) all else.  It is this approach to life that makes Bill Cunningham such a special, fascinating, and endangered species. 

     

Here’s the trailer: http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/billcunninghamnewyork/trailer.html

From the vault:  Funny Face (1957).  Directed by Stanley Donen; written by Leonard Gershe; staring Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire, and Kay Thompson.  Talk about what the fashion industry used to be!  Two of principals are supposed to be Richard Avedon, and Diana Vreeland (funny face).  Kay Thompson was the voice coach and “special friend” of Judy Garland.  This movie also has uber-super-duper models Dovima, Suzy Parker, and Sunny Hartnett.  (How much glamour can one stand?)

Best of luck in your movie selections.  Your faithful friend,

Dwight Dekeyser

© 2011 Dwight Dekeyser, Esq.  All rights reserved.    

"Limitless" (2011)

Dwight Dekeyser rating: BBA

Dear Friend,

This was a good movie that ended great!  What I liked about this movie was that it got better as it went along.  It was not like some pictures with a provocative theme or idea that floundered in search of a cogent meaningful story.   I was leery at first.  The film was narrated by the main character in the first person.  This can become very tiresome – the reflective actor commenting on his past behavior and motives when it is plain for all to see events as they transpire.  Yes, you’re an untidy, unproductive, alcoholic writer who lives in and dank, dirty, and depressing studio in New York.  (I hope this is not sounding as familiar to you as it is to me.)  In this sense, the movie started on a cliché note and developed into what I thought would be a parable about drug abuse.  (Don’t tell me this is a Nancy Reagan “just say no” campaign!)  But this movie become much more than its seemingly obvious pretext.  It was an actual original screen play.

This was a movie written by a real writer, in that, it was a story that came full circle. (N.B.: a writer writing about a writer writing about a writer.)  Its structure was not just beginning, middle, and end, but it was ultimately circular.  The story started on a cliff hanger, literally, and ended on the same ledge – bravo!  It was not the usual succession of existentialist events we have come to expect as a movie, but it was a carefully crafted fable that asked profound questions about what it takes to be a creative successful individual in a complex and confusing world of recrimination, results, and retribution. “Show me the money!”  He showed them, alright with the help of a little opaque pill, “NZT-48,” to be exact.  (Sound like AZT to you, too?)  This magical drug made this loser of a self-pitying scribe into a superman of confidence, productivity, and supernatural intelligence.  This elixir of life allowed our hero to use the alleged 80% of his brain he was not utilizing into a force majeure.  There was no circumstance or situation that he could not overcome by his sheer mental might.  Or was this “medication” just a metaphor for Dutch courage or a shot of self-confidence?

The picture is centered around a grubby young writer Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper), who is more adept at drinking beer and playing pool during the day than actually producing his purported novel.  He has a pretty plucky girlfriend Lindy (Abbie Cornish), an up-and-coming editor who dumps her ne’er-do-well writer in frustration with his dependant disposition.   Life could not get any lower for our hapless Hemingway as he is abused by his (female) book editor for no manuscript and by his (female) landlord for non-payment of rent – a trifecta of terrifying termagants, one might say.  But fate has a funny way of finding those on their last leg (so I am told) and he runs into his ex-brother-in-law, the ex-drug dealer – now pharmaceutical rep., who gives him a gift of magical medicine.  You can keep your Cialis -- I want NZT!  This drug is a combination of everything you have ever heard of: speed, ecstasy, cocaine, crystal meth, with a just a touch of LSD.   Eddie becomes productive, prodigious, precognizant, and prophetic, until the buzz wears off, and he needs to pop another pill.  His hopeless addiction leads him on an adventure that is as exhilarating as it is terrifying.  (Did I say, “just say no” to drugs?)

The movie was beautifully cast.  Bradley Cooper really carried this movie of metamorphosis and mayhem.  Limitless was about his character’s evolution from sub- to superhuman.  It was a great part well-played.  For a movie that centered on a single actor, one never tired of focusing on him throughout the picture, much in the way of Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), there was such cunning character development.  Unlike the restrained Kind Hearts, there was a lot of sex and violence in this movie.  (It is an American picture, after all.)  However, it was incidental to the story and suited the purpose of the film; it was none-the-less an entertaining aspect to the film, not its purpose.  There was a genuine chemistry between Cooper and Cornish, which kept the audience routing for their relationship.  Cooper was up to the task of facing his nemesis, the formidable Robert DeNiro, with equal aplomb.  I think you’re really going to like this movie.

Here is the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3U9RsXeJ3w

From the vault:  Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), directed by Robert Hammer, starring Dennis Price, Joan Greenwood, Alec Guinness, and Valerie Hobson.   In my opinion, this is one of the best written screenplays (by Hammer) ever.  The BBC English is pure heaven to hear.  It is chock full of British understatement and sly humor.  Sibella, “I’ve married the dullest man in London.” Louis, “In England!”  Sibella, “In Europe!”

Best of luck in your viewing selections.  Your faithful friend,

Dwight Dekeyser

© 2011 Dwight Dekeyser, Esq.  All rights reserved. 

"The Adjustment Bureau" (2011)

Dwight Dekeyser rating: BBB

Dear Friend:

Pizzicato:  DOO DOO, doo doo. DOO DOO, doo, doo.  Rod Serling: “You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead — your next stop, The Adjustment Bureau?!”  Well, they tried.  And for the most part they succeeded in trying to revive the unique genre of what I will call the “supernatural film noir” of The Twilight Zone (1959-64).   Film noir was an edgy but stylish dramatic genre filled with marginal, often desperate, characters struggling to stay alive in an unforgiving, usually criminal, world during the 1940s and 50s.  The films were generally low budget and always filmed in black and white, which I might add was not a problem for the seasoned experts of the studio system before their destruction by the antitrust division of the United States Department of Justice.  But, that’s another story.    

I (and everyone else) loved The Twilight Zone.   (The opening with music by Bernard Hermann was enough to give you the creeps for the next half hour.)  The series spanned the “utopian” Eisenhower years to the disillusioned never-to-be had last year of the Kennedy administration.  Faith in America’s unlimited future popped like a soap bubble with the Kennedy assassination.  They tried to warn us that all was not well in Levittown – those leftist Jewish intellectuals we thought we excoriated from Hollywood during the McCarthy era.  Despite all the appearance of success and security of middle America, people were unhappy in their assigned roles.  It was the rigidity of thought and behavioral codes that exploded into the counter culture of the 1960s.  But I digress.

 

The Adjustment Bureau is in many ways a comment on post 9/11/2001-America.  (I add the year because people forget.)  It is the Patriot Act gone gaa gaa.   Men in black hats (government/god agents) assume control over the fate of a young couple in an attempt to separate the two lovers for their own good, much like controlling parents might.  But these parental figures have magic powers.  The hatted-ones (and we know dangerous they can be) have plans for these two, which does not include marriage.   The failed senatorial candidate (Matt Damon) is to become president and his dancer girlfriend (Emily Blunt) is to become a great choreographer – but only if they stay apart.  Is love stronger than professional ambition and the predestination of government/god?   I found the issue posed by the movie to be a curious one: that marriage for a presidential candidate would be injurious, in fact fatal, to his candidacy.  Perhaps, the filmmakers have no knowledge of the public’s presumption of any unmarried man over the age of thirty.  But this is the supernatural, and one must suspend one’s sense of reality for the movie to succeed.

In fact, the ability of the director and screenwriter, George Norfi, to cast a spell of plausible deniability upon the audience for 106 minutes had to have been a real challenge.  The screen play was based on a short story by Philip K. Dick.  As one supernatural event followed the next, the film at times resembled a malignant Bewitched (1964-72) episode.   This is where the television format has an advantage.  The Twilight Zone was for the most part a one-act play.  It opened with a mundane premise, introduced the supernatural element which created a dilemma, and resolved the story with an ironic surprise ending – all within a thirty-minute timeslot.  There wasn’t time for the audience to appreciate the absurdity of the plot because they were so engrossed in the intensity of the drama.  To lengthen the plot for this movie, chase scenes (i.e., car/bus/bike/boat/people) were added.  To this extent it would appear, The Adjustment Bureau just might carved out a new triple genre for itself, the supernatural-film noir-action picture.   Holy Triple Threat, Batman!

I mentioned the Hollywood studio system, where the great film companies made their movies in-house by using a full-time staff of professional specialists.  The lighting directors, the costumers, the set designers, the sound and film editors all worked together for years.  They knew what the director wanted and they would pull it off.  Consequently, the movies had a unity to them and a predicable studio stamp of style and elegance.  Modern movies often lack this quality as this one did.  The production value was rough around the edges.  For a film that placed such significance on hats, I was astonished to see the cheap rumpled ones the costumer selected for the government/god agents.  For me, it was genuine distraction.  It is beyond me that a movie with a budget of $51,000,000.00 would dress main characters in cheap rumpled hats purchased from Target.  It did not help that they were ill-fitting.  This is something that would not have occurred in studio system.  When it came to hats, this movie was no Casablanca (1942).

Here’s the trailer:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H78XCiJamXc

From the vault:  Casablanca (1942), directed by Michael Curtiz; written by Julius J. Epstein, Philip Epstein, and others; starring, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Raines.  Bogart and Bergman were convinced this was going to be a monumental flop.  Studio chief Jack Warner reported co-writers and twin brothers Julius and Philip Epstein to the House Un-American Activities Committee.  Although they were never called to testify, when asked if they ever were members of a "subversive organization," they responded, "Yes. Warner Brothers.”

Best of luck in your movie selections.  Your faithful friend,

Dwight Dekeyser

© 2011 Dwight Dekeyser, Esq.  All rights reserved.