""So I go shuffling out of life, just to hide in death awhile...and anyway I never lied." -Nick Cave-
If movies are their creators' brainchildren, The Consequences of Love is a cruel older sibling to The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino's most accomplished film to date. Like Beauty, Consequences is a character study in which classically-trained actor Toni Servillo plays a man trapped inside his head. In both films, Servillo's character has a vestigial romantic interest and a growing need to escape self-imposed exile. In fact, it's to Sorrentino's credit that he immediately abandons a subplot in Consequences wherein Servillo's Titta di Girolamo reveals that he's a heroin addict.
Still, because Sorrentino finds romance in solitude, The Consequences of Love is a one-man show. And in the moment that we meet Titta, he's on the verge of a major breakthrough. After years of losing himself in his menial work as a mob accountant, Titta realizes he can't stand his own company anymore. His isolation is no longer a blessing but a burden. And despite some whimsical, romance-fed notions of escape, Titta wants to die.
I used to think of The Consequences of Love as an update of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Both stories are morbid fantasies about characters that, in a state of panic and extreme self-loathing, hope to find beauty outside themselves. More importantly, both stories are about older men that want to destroy themselves with a romantic flourish. Titta needs to believe his life makes sense, that he isn't just marking time in an Alpine hotel room. So he lies and tells himself that he has a friend halfway across the world that he's never seen, that he can steal money from his bosses. Titta doesn't need that money and knows he can't keep it. After a point, he realizes: he's going to rob the mob just because he can.
That's where Sorrentino's relatively callow interest lies: through deductive experience, Titta eventually realizes what he wants and why he wants it. Meaning: his daydream romance with Sofia (Olivia Magnani, Anna's granddaughter) teaches him that he wants to die a heroic death. So the film's title is, realistically, a feint. Titta's love for Sofia is so sublimated that she's only ever an idea to him. That chilly attitude is a uniquely Sorrentinian tic. He refuses to sentimentalize romance. Instead, he prefers romantics that don't care for material, earthy love. The same is true of the lead protagonist in The Great Beauty, and This Must Be the Place, and The Family Friend, too.
Sorrentino makes Titta's callousness an amoral fact of life. He doesn't judge him for it, but rather makes the viewer identify with that theoretically alien perspective. We see Titta's world through arresting, beguiling long takes and tracking shots that take us to parts unknown, making every other conversation, every trip down the hallway, every small action feel big. The world according to Consequences of Love is cold, momentous, still, and very beautiful." -- Simon Abrams
"ABCD: Any Body Can Dance follows the (extremely) basic structure of movies like Step Up, Honey and Save the Last Dance but injects it with the beautifully guileless energy of Bollywood masala. Anchored by a terrific performance by Prabhudeva (in a rare acting role; he's better known as an ace choreographer and director of blockbuster action movies) as a disgraced dance teacher who has to lead a ragtag group of kids from the wrong side of the tracks against the elite dance academy that cast him out, ABCD hits all the steps just right and features a jaw-dropping central dance sequence wherein Prabhudeva wins a dance-off to save his students. If the key to a good dance movie is the dancing, ABCD more than qualifies." -- Danny Bowes
"What do you do with the fundamental fact of Liberace? He was one of the most successful popular entertainers of the 20th Century — ubiquitous on TV talk shows, variety shows, including his own specials and series, touring constantly, and selling upwards of 60 million records. When he died in 1987, his net worth was estimated at $115 million. And what did he do? He played the piano. With incredible speed and dexterity, while dressed in bejeweled outfits that could weigh 100 pounds or more.
Behind the Candelabra, the HBO feature directed by Steven Soderbergh and scripted by Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King, Living Out Loud) that premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and played theatrically in Europe and Australia, understands, appreciates, sympathizes and embodies the tensions and contradictions that are the essence of Liberace’s tragic fabulousness: acute self-awareness and myopic self-deception, kitschy artifice and raw emotion, public adulation and private alienation, calculation and altruistic generosity, desire and consumption, innocence and decadence, narcissism and insecurity (which are, in fact, one and the same)... it’s all here in a giddy champagne cocktail that delivers a bubbly buzz followed, as Dean Martin famously crooned, by “a kick in the head.”
He was born Władziu Valentino Liberace, but his friends called him “Lee.” As Mr. Showmanship (Michael Douglas — outlandish without being cartoonish) gives young veterinary worker Scott Thorson (Matt Damon — never better in a much more challenging part) a tour of his Palm Springs home, he describes the decor (in an off-handedly practiced way, as if he were a guide at the Liberace Museum) as “palatial kitsch,” a humblebrag that speaks to both its over-the-top opulence and its tongue-in-cheek tackiness. But like Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu, it is an expression of its owner-occupant’s soul, his palace, his fortress, his dungeon.
What we see is a man who blazes his own path, works unbelievably hard and is fabulously skilled, performing what he called “the Reader’s Digest versions” of the lite classics repertoire, like the three minute and 17 second abridged/condensed version of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto. His core audience was old ladies who thought of him as the ideal son (or grandson) — a boy of great warmth, graciousness, charm, humor and talent who always demonstrated his abiding love for his mother. Somehow, this audience managed to accept that he was also a flagrant homosexual caricature and absolutely deny it at the same time.
It’s a dazzling achievement, and its peculiar, conflicted sensibility — a blend of camp and pathos — reminds me of Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. What starts off feeling like satire evolves into melodrama and finally achieves a surprising poignancy." -- Jim Emerson
"Room 237 has met with derision from some film critics and cinephiles, mostly because it's perceived as equating what its cast of characters do - obsessively looking for details to support their single-minded and far-fetched theories about Kubrick's The Shining - with legitimate film criticism. I don't believe this was director Rodney Ascher's intention, and he wisely neither legitimizes nor ridicules his subjects' theories. These theories - that Kubrick intended his adaptation of Stephen King's book to be a metaphor for the Holocaust or the Native American genocide, or his admission that he helped fake the Apollo 11 moon landing - are a way into exploring how a deliberately elusive work of art can inspire this sort of obsessive scrutiny and, more broadly, how a movie or any work of art we become fixated on becomes a part of us.
What I most appreciated about Room 237 (which was ineligible for the Muriels due to a brief Oscar-qualifying run in New York in December 2012) is the way Ascher assembles and juxtaposes clips not only from The Shining but Kubrick's other films as well as seemingly-unrelated movies like Lamberto Bava's Demons. It not only reminded me favorably of the '80s horror-movie doc Terror in the Aisles, it also serves as a brilliant representation of how we think about and make connections between the movies we see. At one point, I remarked to my girlfriend, "This is what the inside of my brain looks like." I was only half-serious, but I suspect (hope?) I'm not the only one who tends to assemble clip montages or video essays in his head. Ascher certainly seems to, and his film illustrates this wonderfully. The Shining is my favorite movie, so there was little chance that I wouldn't find Room 237 at least a little interesting, but it should be a lot of fun for anyone who has ever found themselves a bit lost in a movie." -- Andrew Bemis
No comments:
Post a Comment