Sundance ’08: Be Kind Rewind

January 30, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Sundance, UK
***/****starring Jack Black, Mos Def, Danny Glover, Mia Farrowwritten and directed by Michel Gondry by Alex Jackson Michel Gondry has said he always wanted to make a film like Back to the Future (i.e., a quirky, funny, big-budget movie), and I guess this is his version of it. It has science-fiction, toilet humour, a lovable man-child (à la Adam Sandler or Jerry Lewis, here played by Jack Black), slapstick, romance, and a classic storyline involving evil developers with plans to pave over the community hangout unless the heroes can stop them in time. Gondry clearly wants to break the one-hundred…

My Best Friend (2006) – DVD

January 4, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, France

Mon meilleur ami
**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Daniel Auteuil, Dany Boon, Julie Gayet, Julie Durand
screenplay by Patrice Leconte & Jérôme Tonnerre
directed by Patrice Leconte

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover François (Daniel Auteuil) is an obnoxious antiques dealer without a friend in the world. This rather extreme fact lets you know that he's about to get his comeuppance, a life lesson in the form of an opposite number who will set him straight. Enter Bruno (Dany Boon), a far-too-nice cabbie who strangely volunteers to teach François sociability. That the plot hinges on a boring odd-couple helping each other is all you need to know about My Best Friend (Mon meilleur ami), the kind of thing Rob Reiner would make if he were French. Although it gamely suppresses the more bathetic elements of the story, they're there just the same: we're supposed to feel the warm good feeling of a jerk redeemed, and to that end, the film deploys every heart-tugging mechanism in the feel-good manual. That it doesn't milk them visually is less a tribute to the restraint of director Patrice Leconte than to his skill at playing a shell game with the audience.

Atonement (2007) + The Kite Runner (2007)

December 25, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, France, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, UK, War

ATONEMENT
*½/****
starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Ian McEwan
directed by Joe Wright

THE KITE RUNNER
½*/****
starring Khalid Abdalla, Homayoun Ershadi, Shaun Toub, Saïd Taghmaoui
screenplay by David Benioff, based on the novel by Khaled Hosseini
directed by Marc Forster

Atonementby Walter Chaw No end-of-year sweepstakes would be complete without the requisite bushel of awards-baiting pabulum, rich with a nice, thick vein of glossy pandering. They're movies you're supposed to love: can't-miss, sure-fire formula flicks that bank on their sparkly casts and borrowed prestige the way blockbuster action flicks rely on special effects and the promise of mayhem. Reduce it down enough and the dreg at the bottom of the stew pot is still just making money–you don't reinvent the wheel by following a recipe, and indeed, a good 99% of movies in any given year don't boast of anything new. To say that you like something like August Rush is to say that you hate to be challenged by a film–that escapism is the first and last reason you go to the movies. Where something like Transformers wants to inspire a car- or girl-related boner, something like Atonement wants to ennoble the cineplex arthouse crowd into paroxysms of self-congratulation. It's the same feeling that compels awards bodies to vote for this stuff: mainstream passing as estimable while the real deal flies for the most part under the radar. The more assembly line chunder like Atonement and The Kite Runner gets chosen for Academy recognition, the fewer slots there are available for big studio pics that actually deliver the goods, like No Country for Old Men, The Darjeeling Limited, There Will Be Blood, and Sweeney Todd (presuming, of course, that an impressive number of remarkable studio flicks released earlier this calendar year are already lost causes).

The Night of Truth (2005) – DVD

November 27, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Burkina Faso, Drama, DVD, France

La nuit de la vérité
**½/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Naky Sy Savané, Commandant Moussa Cissé, Georgette Paré, Adama Ouédraogo
screenplay by Marc Gautron and Fanta Régina Nacro
directed by Fanta Régina Nacro

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Watching the thoroughly detestable Blood Diamond recently, I wondered what it would take to get something approaching the process of suffering in the Third World without the added distraction of stupid white people and their irrelevant angst. But it turns out there are other ways to water down the story, too: The Night of Truth (La nuit de la vérité) would apparently do away with Hollywood's fondness for outsiders looking in, yet in many ways, it has its own simplistic solutions and vague sentiments. Whatever the film's good intentions, its depiction of fictional warring peoples enjoying a shaky truce leaves out much of the important data needed to understand the original conflict. Though fitfully moving in terms of the breadth of atrocities on display, it doesn't say much more than "war bad"–which, though true, doesn't bring anyone any closer to good peace.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

October 12, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, France, Germany, UK, War

½*/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen, Samantha Morton
screenplay by William Nicholson and Michael Hirst
directed by Shekhar Kapur

Elizabeth2by Walter Chaw I don't mind historical pictures that aren't historically accurate until that historical inaccuracy–like in U-571, for instance–becomes so fucking retarded that it lowers the temperature of the room. Elizabeth: The Golden Age is just that fucking stupid. Should being dumb not be reason enough to avoid this movie, know that it's also unintentionally hilarious, appears to have had its screenplay ghost-written by Bob Dylan, and casts Catholics and Spaniards as Skeksis in some perverse re-imagining of The Dark Crystal as a psychodrama about the cherry-busting beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton, dreadfully wasted) and penile conjugation-by-double-proxy of rapscallion Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) into the hallowed womb (and womb-like cathedral interiors of this England). Cate Blanchett reprises her role from director Shekhar Kapur's first Bollywoodization of British history (he made one other, The Four Feathers, in between) as the Virgin Queen born fully-formed from the school of Arch and Tic. (I wonder if soon there'll be any actresses left who haven't played one Elizabeth or another–seems the distaff "Hamlet" proving ground of our time.) There's a Nostradamus character for whatever goddamned reason, a candlelit bath scene only because it's mandated in sub-BBC pieces of shit like this, and a thinly-veiled CIA spook, Sir Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush), who acts as Elizabeth's chief intelligence officer.

Day Night Day Night (2007) – DVD

October 3, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Thriller

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Commentary B+
starring Luisa Williams, Josh P. Weinstein, Gareth Saxe, Nyambi Nyambi
written and directed by Julia Loktev

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Somehow, Day Night Day Night proposes the logical impossibility of content-free terrorists. Normally such persons come armed to the teeth with ideological baggage (to say nothing of emotional baggage), yet writer-director Julia Loktev has decided to take one suicide bomber (Luisa Williams, billed as "The Girl"), drain her of any sort of political objective or personal motive, and just sort of follow her as she confirms everything with her superiors in a motel and moves on to her Times Square site of terror. The idea, I think, is to watch her do all sorts of mundane, quotidian things, then marvel at how they coincide with that ultimate act of violence. Perhaps inevitably, by about twenty minutes in you start to crave a little more than Williams playing with her cell phone–to yearn for a fuller understanding of her as a person. No such luck: Loktev is so committed to her minuscule hook that she empties her film of interest beyond crisp visuals, streamlined action, and tedious emptiness.

Private Fears in Public Places (2006) – DVD

September 25, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Italy

Couers
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Sabine Azéma, Isabelle Carré, Laura Morante, Claude Rich
screenplay by Jean-Michel Ribes, based on the play by Alan Ayckbourn
directed by Alain Resnais

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Some time ago, there was a contretemps in the pages of another writing venue of mine, REVERSE SHOT. The estimable Nick Pinkerton had written a rather tepid assessment of Alain Resnais’s Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs): he claimed that its inclusion in the New York Film Festival was an “obligatory slot-filling by one of the ‘Old Masters of the Sixties’ art-house.” NYFF programmer Kent Jones shot back with a dryly-hilarious note confirming such selection criteria, which enthused that the film “had exactly the lack of urgency, the unexceptionable hominess, and the scanty charm we were looking for.” The whole thing was pretty funny, but it illustrated the pitfalls of playing certain critical lines. While Pinkerton is mostly correct that Private Fears in Public Places is a disappointingly inconsequential film by someone who had previously defined styles and moved mountains, this is punishing Resnais unduly: just because you’re not making a masterpiece doesn’t mean you lack any point at all.

Why I’m Not Formally Reviewing ‘Control’

September 9, 2007Posted inAustralia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blog, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Japan, Music, TIFF, UK

Control is an authentic-feeling biopic about the late Ian Curtis, the epileptic front man for Joy Division who committed suicide–though a revisionist theory absurdly contends that he “accidentally” hung himself from the clothesline in his Manchester flat–in 1979 at the age of 23. Spoiler. Directed by music-video auteur Anton Corbijn and lensed in black-and-white and ‘scope by Martin Ruhe, the film overcomes the central miscasting of Samantha Morton as Ian’s wife Deborah (though she would’ve nailed this role in her Morvern Callar days, she’s far too long in the tooth for it now) with the near-perfect casting of Sam Riley as Curtis, Craig Parkinson as Tony Wilson, and Alexandra Maria Lara as Annik Honoré, a.k.a. The Other Woman. (Morton’s incongruous star-power is easily explained by the basis for Control‘s screenplay: Deborah Curtis’s own memoir, Touching from a Distance.) The film is admirably not a hagiography while engendering empathy for a gifted asshole more successfully than, say, Man on the Moon, and the song recreations are surprisingly persuasive, although I was a bit disappointed with how literalmindedly the music is applied at times.

TIFF ’07: Angel

August 27, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Romance, TIFF, UK
**/****starring Romola Garai, Michael Fassbender, Sam Neill, Charlotte Ramplingscreenplay by François Ozon & Martin Crimp, based on the novel by Elizabeth Taylordirected by François Ozon by Bill Chambers François Ozon is what David Bordwell might call a "polystylist," though his eclecticism has mostly yielded diminishing returns. His latest finds him suiting up for yet another genre, and although it could be considered something of a throwback to his early features Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women (if by virtue of its roots in someone else's material), he's too tony now for the vaguely subversive pastiches with which he…

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

August 2, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, France, Germany, Mystery, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, David Strathairn, Joan Allen
screenplay by Tony Gilroy and George Nolfi, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
directed by Paul Greengrass

Bourneultimatumby Walter Chaw I look at the first film in this very fine trilogy as Jason Bourne embodying Harrison Ford’s Deckard character from Blade Runner: someone with hidden potential and a certain confusion about his place in the world–and the kind of figure Matt Damon is best at portraying, as it happens. I see the second film as Bourne-as-Roy Batty: robotic, violent, inexorable, and at the end of his string, valuing life and looking to make what amends he can. This third film, The Bourne Ultimatum, directed again by Paul Greengrass and welcoming several key players (Joan Allen, Julia Stiles, Damon, screenwriter Tony Gilroy, DP Oliver Wood) back into the fold, ties both strings together: Bourne inhabiting his potential as something of an unparalleled killing machine while, simultaneously, becoming more human in his machine-like purposefulness. If there’s a feeling we’ve been here before, mark that down as the inevitable side-effect of staying just a little too long with a series that, to this point, had yet to make any missteps, minor or otherwise. Consequently this film, more than the other two, feels like a straight line: less improvisation, more inevitability, all of it leading to the moment where our hero, the merciless assassin, decides whether his training to be an instrument overrules his instinct to be a human. It can’t be a surprise anymore, so all that’s left is that it be true.

Comedy of Power (2006) – DVD

May 23, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Germany

L'Ivresse du pouvoir
**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Isabelle Huppert, François Berléand, Patrick Bruel, Robin Renucci
screenplay by Odile Barski and Claude Chabrol
directed by Claude Chabrol

Comedyofpowercapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Things were going great. Two Claude Chabrols (The Bridesmaid and Violette Nozière) had made their way into my FFC goodie bag, both of them entirely worthy entries in his oeuvre. Maybe they aren't masterpieces, but they're nonetheless solid pieces of filmmaking that don't disappoint. So when Comedy of Power (L'Ivresse du pouvoir) arrived on my doorstep, I clasped it to my chest just knowing that the third time's a charm. Alas, no. Turns out the movie is the most routine Chabrol I can remember: smug, lacking in ambiguity, and possessed of some of the feeblest writing in the director's career. It's an obvious movie by the master of misdirection, a blunt knee to the groin by someone you can usually count on to go for the throat. Even as satire, it's nothing you couldn't get any day from Jon Stewart (with twice the panache and funny to boot).

The Bridesmaid (2004) – DVD

May 22, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Italy, Romance, Thriller

La Demoiselle d'honneur
***/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras A-
starring Benoît Magimel, Laura Smet, Aurore Clément, Bernard Le Coq
screenplay by Pierre Leccia and Claude Chabrol, based on the novel by Ruth Rendell
directed by Claude Chabrol

Bridesmaidcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Comparisons of The Bridesmaid (La Demoiselle d'honneur) to Hitchcock are almost inevitable, not only because such assessments are the lazy default position of critics when referencing suspense yarns, but also because The Bridesmaid's director, Claude Chabrol, has carved out a career as the French heir apparent to the master's title. That said, the distinctions between the two filmmakers are probably more interesting than the similarities: Chabrol's overall style is considerably more relaxed than Hitchcock's, and his approach to character is finally less judgmental. Here, for instance, in lieu of assigning blame to the damaged femme fatale of the title, he notes the thrilling nature of her transgression and the unappetizing prospect of returning to normalcy after succumbing to her lethal charms. Chabrol has always put women in the driver's seat of perversity and sexual wilfulness–something Hitch never quite had either the guts or the sympathy to pull off.

Violette (1978) – DVD

May 21, 2007Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Thriller

Violette Nozière
***/**** Image C- Sound C+
starring Isabelle Huppert, Stephane Audran, Jean Carmet, Jean-François Garreaud
screenplay by Odile Barski, Herve Bromberger, Frederic Grendel, based on the novel Presses de la Cité by Jean-Marie Fitere
directed by Claude Chabrol

Violettecapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Violette Nozière (or Violette, as inexplicably shortened by some cretinous American distributor) isn't highly ranked in the canon of Claude Chabrol. Reviews range from the mildly indulgent to Leonard Maltin's assertion that "Chabrol lacks his usual directorial flair"–a strange thing to say about a man whose style is famously relaxed. While I wouldn't place it in the company of Les bonnes femmes or La femme infidèle, I would say that Violette Nozière returns Chabrol to his preoccupations with women and class with lethal accuracy. Its tale of an amoral 14-year-old who robs, sleeps around, and attempts to murder both of her parents is perceptively half-in, half-out of her desire to escape the confines of a small world and a smaller bankroll. The protagonist is completely horrible, and yet we're just as completely trapped in her point-of-view. The film's total commitment to her awful behaviour subsequently makes the audience both judge of and accomplice to Violette's terrible, terrible misdeeds.

Free Zone (2005) + The Secret Life of Words (2005) – DVDs

May 3, 2007Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Drama, France, Ireland, Israel, Road Movie, Romance, Spain

FREE ZONE
*/**** Image C- Sound B Extras F
starring Natalie Portman, Hanna Laslo, Hiam Abbass
written and directed by Amos Gitai

THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Sarah Polley, Tim Robbins, Javier Cámara, Julie Christie
written and directed by Isabel Coixet

Freezonecapby Walter Chaw The not-at-all-hamfisted allegory of an Israeli woman and a Palestinian woman trekking across the disputed land to find an American who will settle some non-specific debt, Amos Gitai's tediously strident Free Zone opens with ten minutes, uninterrupted, of Natalie Portman weeping over what we discover to be the end of a love affair. It's showy and about as subtle as a kidney-punch–ditto the conception of Portman's passive Rebecca (Portman), the American on the sidelines, a matinee-beautiful beacon who stands by as impassively as Milton's God. That said, the device of a long, car-bound road trip narrated by flashbacks of the protagonists' separate journeys to this journey is, at least for a while, intoxicating. The problem–and it's a doozy–is that Gitai's picture is so blatant an allegory that nothing any of the characters say comes free of dramatic distance or irony, making it impossible to take the film seriously as anything other than ventriloquism for Gitai's, let's face it, unsurprising politics. Nothing wrong with Wailing Wall lamentations about the state of the world, but watching someone shake a fist at a dead horse, long past the hope of resurrection, for upwards of two hours, is tiring and futile. Is there traction in proposing that the film merely mirrors the hopelessness of the Middle East conflict? I guess, but then how many people–specifically, how many people renting a film called Free Zone directed by Amos Gitai–are going to feel edified by that?

Inland Empire (2006)

April 27, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Lynch, Drama, Esoterica, France, Horror, Mystery, Poland, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Grace Zabriskie
written and directed by David Lynch

by Walter Chaw Nikki (Laura Dern) is an actress landing her dream role opposite Devon (Justin Theroux) in a film directed by the great Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons). Alas the project, “On High in Blue Tomorrows”, has a history in which a previous, doomed production ended as reality seeped into its fiction and the film’s onscreen/offscreen lovers were killed. For a moment, it seems as though David Lynch’s Inland Empire might be as straightforward as a haunted Hollywood genre exercise–but time slips, it’s suddenly the next day, and as one character says to another, you’re sitting over there. Displaced, distracted, the picture is a masterpiece that, for the patient, the active, and the curious, may be the most literal definition of “dread” captured on film. That feeling you get when Henry Spencer contemplates his feral baby in Eraserhead is the same species of disgusted, familiar fascination that infects this film like a murder of maggots.

Hot Fuzz (2007)

April 20, 2007Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, France, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton
screenplay by Edgar Wright & Simon Pegg
directed by Edgar Wright

Hotfuzzby Walter Chaw Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost return after the triumph of Shaun of the Dead with the nominal success of Hot Fuzz: the one a dead-on skewering of/homage to the zombie genre, the latter an equally-dead-on skewering of/homage to the buddy-cop genre that leads one to conclude that the zombie genre is infinitely more fulsome a target than the buddy-cop genre. Though it's clearly the product of smart guys who care about the films they lampoon, there's obviously a difference between making a movie that can stand proudly alongside George Romero's body of work and making one that could keep good company with Michael Bay's. (There's a lot of meat to be mined in a clever dissection of the zombie genre, in other words, whereas most action flicks of this type are already self-parodying exercises in excessive hetero-affirmation amidst much piece-fondling and weeping.) What works best about Hot Fuzz isn't its admirable respect for and similarly keen understanding of films like Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man and Richard Rush's fondly-remembered Freebie and the Bean, but that it, like Shaun of the Dead, functions remarkably well as an example of the genre–something of which most parodies (i.e. arbitrary garbage like Shrek) are completely incapable.

Muriel (1963) – DVD

April 16, 2007Posted in1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Italy

Muriel, or the Time of Return
Muriel ou le temps d'un retour
***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Delphine Seyrig, Jean-Pierre Kérien, Nita Klein, Jean-Baptiste Thierrée
screenplay by Jean Cayrol
directed by Alain Resnais

Murielcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Alain Resnais films are more interesting to me for their differences than for their similarities. Though you can find an oft-cited obsession with memory running through his oeuvre, the high-profile literary screenwriters with whom he chooses to collaborate tend to impose their own sensibilities. Thus Hiroshima, mon amour features Marguerite Duras' passive-aggressive desperation and Last Year at Marienbad is marked by Alain Robbe-Grillet's mathematical abstractions. Neither of those two canonical works–which are at least united by a conceptual monumentalism–looks very much like Muriel, or The Time of Return (Muriel ou le temps d'un retour) (hereafter Muriel, also its promotional title), which enlists Jean Cayrol to sketch a story of domestic dishonesty and historical trauma that's at once spatially smaller and more emotionally expansive. Here, if one isn't confronted with the ostentatious "artistry" of Resnais' more famous work (not that great artistry isn't evident), one is aware of a tangle of guilt and regret behind the brave faces. And whoever can be said to be in the driver's seat, it's an amazing film.

Color Me Kubrick (2006) + The Hoax (2007)

April 10, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, France, Isle of Man, Theatrical, UK

Colour Me Kubrick: A True…ish Story
½*/****
starring John Malkovich, Jim Davidson, Richard E. Grant, Luke Mably
screenplay by Anthony Frewin
directed by Brian W. Cook

THE HOAX
**½/****
starring Richard Gere, Alfred Molina, Marcia Gay Harden, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by William Wheeler
directed by Lasse Hallström

Colormehoaxby Walter Chaw Suffice it to say that any picture featuring a sped-up version of the "William Tell Overture" is so drunk on its own whimsy that it most likely sucks with a dedicated vigour. Case in point: Brian W. Cook's twee Color Me Kubrick, which chronicles, sort of, the life and times of impostor Alan Conway (John Malkovich) as he sashays through days of getting free drinks and the occasional hummer by telling people he's the eponymous director. Never mind that Conway doesn't appear to know the difference between Stanleys Kubrick and Kramer, or that Malkovich's portrayal of him is so offensively fey that it could be used as a fright vid at "Focus on the Family" scare revivals–Color Me Kubrick is a grand drag revue without a rudder, and because it's not particularly entertaining, it harbours no purpose great or small. Malkovich is only ever Malkovich in all his alien glory, neatly eclipsing his supporting cast, any momentum in the script or direction, and, ultimately, any pathos in Conway's sad need to be someone else. (More egregiously unexamined is everyone else's sadder need to be in the orbit of celebrity.) Unimaginatively shot and, it can't be reiterated enough, abominably written (one scene has Conway suggesting he's cast John Malkovich in 3001: A Space Odyssey, to which his dinner mate asks, "John who?"–droll, no?), the picture is mainly interesting because, after having sat on the shelf for a while, it's finally surfaced in tandem with Lasse Hallström's similarly-mothballed film about another fabulist, Clifford Irving.

Philadelphia Film Festival ’07: The Boss of It All

April 10, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Denmark, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Sweden
Direktøren for det hele***/****starring Jens Albinus, Peter Gantzler, Iben Hjejle, Fridrik Thor Fridriksonwritten and directed by Lars von Trier by Ian Pugh Presenting himself to us as an image reflected in a window, Lars von Trier literally begins The Boss of It All with an assurance that the following hundred minutes will be nothing more than a light comedy not worth "a moment's reflection." He then introduces us to pretentious, untalented actor Kristoffer (Jens Albinus), who has been hired by office worker Ravn (Peter Gantzler) to pose as the company's absentee president in delicate negotiations to merge with an Icelandic…

Ginger & Fred (1986) – DVD

February 12, 2007Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Italy, West Germany

Ginger and Fred
Ginger e Fred
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Marcello Mastroianni, Giulietta Masina, Franco Fabrizi, Friedrich von Ledebur
screenplay by Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra and Tullio Pinelli
directed by Federico Fellini

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The idea of Fellini criticizing television for its vulgarity–as he does in Ginger and Fred–is indeed a bit rich: Federico Fellini complaining of vulgarity is rather like Roberto Rossellini complaining of neo-realism. But beneath the surface of this admittedly shallow lament lies the movie's real theme, which is the displacement of artists once their chosen form is rendered obsolete. It's not too hard to see Fellini himself, high-modernist art director that he was, in his music-hall dancer protagonists, who by 1985 have been completely snowed under by seismic shifts in technology and, by extension, entertainment. Slight as the film may be, you can't help feeling a twinge of regret for not only its leads, but also the increasingly-forgotten filmmaker who pulls their strings.