glad to be weirdly close

Since 1999’s Being John Malkovich, Charlie Kaufman has amassed a level of fame that’s rare for a screenwriter. Diablo Cody, with her slang-driven fare and stripper background is the only other recent phenom in the same league. Kaufman’s aggressively idiosyncratic, chaotic worldview has turned conventional genres on their ear – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a romantic comedy for hipsters, manic depressives, and schizophrenics alike.
It’s no surprise, then, that Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, has been so eagerly awaited. Would Kaufman’s decidedly unorthodox narrative style survive without the directorial filter of Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry? The answer is a resounding no.
Synecdoche, New York is a muddle of existential malaise and grating navel-gazing. The film follows Caden (Capote’s Philip Seymour Hoffman), a downtrodden regional theater director whose life is swiftly deteriorating. His sardonic wife (Being John Malkovich’s Catherine Keener) takes their daughter and moves to Berlin with her pot-smoking best friend (Margot at the Wedding’s Jennifer Jason Leigh). On top of this personal failure, Caden experiences a series of increasingly disgusting medical woes – graphically depicted gum surgery is the least of it. Things begin to look up when he wins a prestigious grant and decides to mount an ambitious theater project that aims to realistically depict everyday life. Housed in a gigantic New York City warehouse, the play turns into a decade-spanning behemoth, with recreations of all of the places and people in Caden’s life.
The chief problem with Synecdoche, New York, outside of its crippling ambition, is Kaufman’s refusal to fully develop any of the other characters in Caden’s life. Hoffman does an underwhelming two-dimensional tap dance of death-tinged midlife disappointment, and Kaufman’s obsession with Caden’s woes push the potentially vibrant supporting cast into the fringe.
Samantha Morton (Minority Report) makes the strongest impression as Caden’s loyal assistant Hazel, while Keener, and Dianne Wiest (Hannah and her Sisters) and Emily Watson (Punch-Drunk Love) as actresses in Caden’s production come almost as close. It’s a shame to see remaining cast, consisting of some of the best character actresses working today including Leigh, Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain), and Hope Davis (American Splendor), go to such cruel waste.
While the entire proceedings are tamped down by Kaufman’s exceedingly bleak atmospherics, composer Jon Brion, who provided memorable scores for I Heart Huckabees and Punch-Drunk Love, deserves special mention for his whimsical score.

would you like some chicken fillets?

British filmmaker Mike Leigh has never shied from portraying the gloomy side of everyday life. Secrets and Lies, his sensational, Oscar-nominated drama, explored deception and familial conflict in working class London and his Vera Drake portrayed the destruction of a struggling family at the hands of moral absolutism. So considerable surprise greets his latest, Happy-Go-Lucky, an amusing, ceaselessly funny comedy that follows a perpetually positive and cheery London schoolteacher.
We’ve all met people like Poppy (Sally Hawkins, of Leigh’s Career Girls). You know the type, cheerful no matter the circumstances, and almost giddy in the face of adversity. In life, that kind of eternal optimism can be annoying (to put it mildly), but on screen Leigh and Hawkins create Poppy as one of the most engaging comic heroines of recent memory. When her bike gets stolen, she shrugs it off and says, “That’s a shame, we were just getting to know each other.” She takes a sprained back in stride. She handles class bullies with candor. She even deftly handles a sardonic, misanthropic driving instructor (Eddie Marsan in a richly textured performance). As we see Poppy handle these increasingly intense and potentially inflammatory encounters, we realize that there’s a lot we could learn from her sunny outlook.
In addition to making Happy-Go-Lucky a winning character study, Leigh and Hawkins have also made one of the most consistently funny movies in recent memory. Hawkins’ relentlessly manic, madcap comic persona is the source of many laughs, and the film’s improvisational style resembles Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Because Leigh doesn’t work from a traditional script – he creates the story and then works with his actors to create scenes, character traits, and dialogue – every scene pops with lively, unpredictable energy.
The film rests squarely on Hawkins’ shoulders, and it’s a testament to her considerable talent and grace that Poppy’s unflappable perkiness never grates. She manages to find the humanity and vulnerability beneath Poppy’s overt enthusiasm, and constructs and authentic, endearing portrait. I can only imagine what Hollywood could have done with this story – we’d probably get Renee Zellweger, she of the squinty eyes and irritating pluck. In her hands, Poppy could easily have turned into a shrill caricature.
In this, one of the most uneven and uneventful years for film in quite a while, Happy-Go-Lucky is a high point. Along with Gus van Sant’s Paranoid Park, Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, and Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River, it’s further proof that the most interesting films being made right now are occurring outside of the studio system.

weekend update

Great weekend. Here are some highlights:

1 - I learned about a killer tax refund, which will allow me to replace my busted computer. Sweet.

2 - Hollandaise sauce can be a bitch.

3 - I rock non-verbal communication.

4 - Bellinis best mimosas.

5 - Great travel/excusion companions are crucial. Yep, I'm lucky.

copper catfish palin

I finally made it to Apple and got my computer looked at ... turns out it's the hard drive! So, keep your fingers crossed for sketchy-seeming data recovery joints in Chelsea. If it doesn't pan out, I'm having a CD-burning party, and will be hitting up random people for decade-old Rufus Wainwright albums.
The whole thing has made me cranky and has kept me from blogging. So, to keep it brief, here's my top ten list of the new things that are going on...
1. Without a computer, I haven't looked at Perez Hilton in over a month. I'm better for this.
2. I've also started writing in a real journal. It's a nice feeling.
3. I almost got through Kiss of the Spider Woman, but it was just the same thing over and over again. Now I'm onto American Pastoral and I'm totally consumed.
4. I started watching 30 Rock through Netflix, and can honestly say that Tina Fey in practice is just as good as Tina Fey in theory.
5. I'm escaping to Connecticut this weekend and I'm elated.
6. I'm also budgeting in an effort to build my savings. It's tough, but kinda fun.
7. I thought the most interesting thing about last night's debate was the decreased height of Sarah Palin's hair.
8. And I feel that I may start convulsing if she winks at me ever again.
9. I am craving the new TV on the Radio album.
10. Trader Joe's in Brooklyn has significantly improved my quality of life. My belly has never been happier!

searching for debra winger ... oh, found

When legendary American director Robert Altman died, I was afraid we would lose his trademark narrative style as well. You know what I’m talking about — tons of characters wandering through a free-flowing narrative that defies conventional standards but still manages to be simultaneously tragic, hilarious, and heart-breaking. If you’re unfamiliar, Nashville and Short Cuts are a good place to start.
There are a few filmmakers still around who embody the Altman spirit — Paul Thomas Anderson of Magnolia and There Will Be Blood chief among them. With Rachel Getting Married, we can add Jonathan Demme, who has had the most unlikely of film careers, to that list. Demme was an American maverick in the 1980s with off-beat comedies Married to the Mob and Something Wild and is best remembered for the genre-bending thriller The Silence of the Lambs. But he’s been off the A-list since (no little thanks to his ill-advised remake of Charade, the embarrassing The Truth about Charlie).
He breaks new ground with this film, which follows Kim (Anne Hathaway) a fresh-out-of-rehab addict as she endures her sister’s wedding. Demme shoots the film with mostly handheld cameras and allows his actors to fumble dialogue and talk over each other. It feels like an intimate family gathering, rife with raw emotion, authentic dysfunction, and caustic humor.
Demme lets his characters to go through the motions of a hectic wedding weekend — preparations, rehearsal dinner, ceremony, after-party — without too much interference. His camera lingers as actors roll from room to room, engage in fleeting conversation, nosh on food, and sip on drinks. Kim slips attention-grabbing one-liners at inopportune moments, which quickly catches the wrath of her sister, the titular Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). Their father (Bill Irwin) plays peacemaker, while their mother (Debra Winger) makes fleeting, bruising appearances.
Movies like this depend on great actors. It became clear that Hathaway could do more than giggle through Disney live-action and fetch Meryl Streep’s coffee when she wowed in the small, pivotal role of a hardened Texas rodeo wife in Brokeback Mountain. But nothing suggested that she could pull off the attention-starved, terminally dysfunctional Kim. She portrays this potentially unlikable character with dignity, and imbues her with authentic, relatable pain. It’s a stirring, memorable turn.
It’s to the credit of the supporting cast that Hathaway doesn’t walk away with the film. Theater veteran Irwin, who was unforgettable in the revival of "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf", is touching as Kim’s doting father and DeWitt makes a striking impression.