The Rites of Spring

Sweet spring is your time is my time is our time / for springtime is lovetime / and viva sweet love!, e.e. cumming wrote. Who doesn't love spring? Exhibitions of color everywhere on trees, in parks; nature shining! Spring also brings blossoms to film lovers everywhere. In the United States the Tribeca Film Festival began showing its buds last week, with the announcement of many fascinating films. But it is to Europe that most of us film lovers look at this time of year for our goodies, because this is the time of year that Cannes announces its competitors. 

The retro poster for the Cannes 2014 Film Festival may be mirroring the films announced this week in competition for this coveted prize. The poster features the Italian actor Marcelo Mastroianni in Federico Fellini’s Film 8 ½, which was entered into the Cannes competition back in 1963. This year the directors up for competition include some legendary directors of old. To begin with, non-other than Jean-Luc Godard, who is 83, is among the nominees with a very modern 3D film Adieu au Langage (Farewell to Language). Judging from the trailer on YouTube, Godard continues his New Wave style, but with a very present-day feel. No aging there.

Jimmy's Hall

Not quite in the same generation, but in a similar league, two British directors are also up for competition this year: Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. Leigh, the director behind such wonderfully rich yet at the same time every-day-person oeuvres like Vera Drake, Secrets and Lies, Happy Go Lucky and Another Year is presenting his film Mr. Turner about the painter JMW Turner; hence going further back in time to 19^th century England when this –back then- controversial Romantic landscape artist lived. Ken Loach has already won the Palme for The Wind that Sakes the Barley, in 2006. This time he presents Jimmy’s Hall, which is rumored to be his last film, a movie set in 1930 Ireland that deals with James Gralton, the political activist who challenged the Catholic Church’s restriction of free speech.

Mr. Turner

Cannes darlings, Belgian directors and brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are back, which is always good news. The Dardenne brothers won the Palme d’Or for Rosetta (1999) and L’Enfant (2005), as well as best screenplay 2008 for Le Silence de Lorna and the Grand Prix 2011 for Kid with a Bike. The film they present is Two Days, One Night, starring the fabulous Marion Cotillard (Academy Award winner for La Vie en Rose) who plays a woman who has a weekend to convince her colleagues to give up their bonuses so she can keep her job.

Two Days, One Night

Canadian director, David Cronenberg (Eastern Promises, A History of Violence) takes on the topic of the culture of celebrity in Hollywood and our modern day infatuation with it in his movie Maps to The Stars. The movie includes, among others, Julianne Moore, Robert Pattison, John Cusack, Mia Wasikowska.

Maps to the Stars

Moving down in North America, two acclaimed American actors come to Cannes as directors this year. Tommy Lee Jones, who has directed three movies before this, two for television and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada in 2005, directs and acts in The Homesman, a western about a claim jumper and a pioneer woman who team up to escort three insane women from Nebraska to Iowa. His cast even includes Meryl Streep.

The Homesman

The other actor is the much younger Ryan Gosling and this is his first time behind the camera. Lost River is the name of the film for which he is participating in the Un Certain Regard section. The movie has quite an amalgam of actors; it stars Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks, young Dr. Who himself Matt Smith, and Saoirse Ronan, among others. It deals with a single mother of a troubled teen age boy and their journey into a dark underworld.

Also from the United States, New York born director Bennett Miller (Moneyball, Capote) is in competition with Foxcather. The movie stars Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffallo and deals with the story of wresting champion Mark Schultz, who won Olympic gold with his brother Dave in 1984. Dave was murdered by multimillionaire paranoid schizophrenic John Eleuthère du Pont, the founder of "Team Foxcatcher".

Jane Campion

But I’ve left the spring flowers for last. Cannes has received criticism in the past about not favoring films directed by women. This year, to begin with, Jane Campion, the New Zealand director, producer and scriptwriter (her film The Piano won the Palme d’or in 1993) will preside the Jury. Additionally, Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s is in competition with her film Still the Water; Italian director Alice Rohrwacher is participating with The Miracles; and Austrian director Jessica Hausner is participating in the Un Certain Regard section with Amour Fou.

The festival takes place from May 14-25 but its influence shapes movies and audiences for the rest of the year. Let the fun begin!

Wes Anderson Shines

Cinema is, above all, a visual art. Yes, there is the screenplay, the music, the acting, dancing or singing, but ultimately we are drawn to the images on the screen. There is probably no master of the visual art in cinema among today’s directors like Wes Anderson.

I have not written about Anderson before because sometimes it takes one movie to bring to the forefront the majesty of all of an artist’s work. In my case, it is his latest film The Grand Budapest Hotel which has done this. Like with many of his other movies, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, and, to a lesser degree, Rushmore (I’ve yet to see Bottle Rocket), it is my feeling that Wes Anderson movies are to other great drama films or comedies much what naïf art is to classical art, in more ways than one.
 

Moonrise Kingdom

To begin with, the stories in Wes Anderson’s movies are metaphors to reality. His characters are eccentric and idiosyncratic sometimes to the extreme. Some of the situations and people are silly or ridiculous to a fault. Yet, even in his comedies there is an undercurrent of darker, deeper themes. We find reality by approaching it from the bizarre.

In many of his movies, the eccentricity of the characters hides deep loneliness and alienation, which are recurrent themes in Anderson movies. This is pretty evident in The Royal Tenenbaums, especially in characters like Margot, but also in The Grand Budapest Hotel. The character of M. Gustave, played brilliantly by the great Ralph Fiennes, carries the loneliness in his expression and in the always short-lived relationships with which he has filled his world. It is no wonder that Bill Murray is an actor that has appeared in most all of Wes Anderson’s films, for who is a more deadpan comedian than Murray, who can convey more sadness and desolation with his eyes? Owen Wilson, an Anderson collaborator from the beginning, is much the same. Certainly Anderson knows how to bring out the best in these actors.
 

Bill Murray in Rushmore, Life Aquatic, Darjeeling Limited

Yet another certainty we find in Wes Anderson’s movies is that there is always someone who will come to the rescue of such loneliness. M. Moustafa, the bell boy and heir to M. Gustave in The Grand Budapest; Suzy to Sam in Moonrise Kingdom; Herman Blume and Max Fischer in Rushmore. Eventually, the characters in his films form a “family” of sorts, even if it is a clan of concierges from the different hotels of Europe.
 

The Royal Tenenbaums

So to this backdrop of eccentric characters (none more so than in The Grand Budapest), a tangled and creative story line is woven. But the final touch of genius to his films are the images. Anderson is a visual master. His shots are incredibly meticulously prepared. Each shot is a tableau, with amazingly creative set design, fascinating color schemes and tremendously precise camera movements. Wes Anderson’s obsession with symmetry has become common knowledge, yet it does not detract from how much work is put into every frame, quite the contrary.

Darjeeling Limited

All this visual mastery is never more apparent than in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Because of the time period, because of this work with sets and colors, and because in this film Wes Anderson shifts frame sizes (the movie went out to theaters with instructions on different aspect ratios), at times it feels as if we’re watching a zoetrope (those devices that produced the illusion of motion from a rapid succession of static pictures). This movie sparkles! It is hard to take one’s eyes away from the screen for an instant.

Oh how right M. Gustave is when he says, in The Grand Budapest Hotel: “You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.” Without a doubt, Wes Anderson’s movies are among these glimmers.

Hitch

I went to see Rear Window last night, during one of those “Classic Movie” showings at the local movie theatre. I have most of my favorite Hitchcock movies on disc, but nothing beats seeing one of his films on the big screen. And that’s kind of the beauty of this director’s work, because his films are so very visual and yet they are all about the interior, the person’s mind in all its terrifying complexity. His art lies in devilishly taking us into his characters’ thoughts and feelings, while weaving a suspenseful and vibrant film around them.

Alfred Hitchcock seems to be making a comeback these years, in biopics like The Girl or Hitchcock, and series inspired by his movies, like Bates Motel. He certainly is present by means of his influence on directors like Pedro Almodovar or Darren Aranofsky. This might just lure the younger generation of movie goers to his films; or maybe not, given young people’s appetite for blockbusters.

The Rope - Dial M for Murder - Marnie

Alfred Hitchcock is the anti-blockbuster director par excellence, yet his movies provide more thrill and suspense than any of the multi-million dollar, loud and flashy modern day films of this type. Many of Hitchcock’s greatest films take place in a room or similar confined space; they are all about the acting, the sets and location and his singular camera angles and movements. And they are not movies made to simply entertain, nor are they the type that take on broad social or political issues; his are movies that deal in the everyday person, in their psyche and in deep human relationships.

In Rear Window, with the first wide-screen shots of James Stewart’s face, his beautiful blue eyes, we are drawn into his feelings and thoughts and move through the movie seeing everything this voyeur sees from his room, where basically all the action takes place. Spellbound, The Rope, Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, Rebecca, Marnie and, of course, Psycho all have this common thread of the action and thrill being the protagonists’ minds and the tension between the dark and twisted mind of one of the characters as seen by the other, which is us, his audience, caught in the terrifying grip of those tangled minds.

Salvador Dali designed dream in Spellbound

Even those other famous films, the suspenseful ones that deal more in the story of the wrong person at the wrong place and time, like North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew too Much, The Birds or Notorious, strong human relationships are still at the core. 

North by Northwest

And though he dealt with the everyday man and woman, in reality the Hitchcock protagonists of the films I’ve mentioned are not really ordinary folk, unless you consider people that look and act like Cary Grant, Lawrence Olivier, James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Ingrid Bergman or Tippy Hedren ordinary. Yet he sort of made them so. He was able to draw these beautiful, yet great actors into his movies more than often; Cary Grant and James Stewart both made four films with Hitchcock, and Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman made three each.

It is well known (or rumored) that “Hitch” was sexist, quite harsh with his female actors and never gave enough credit to his wife and long-time collaborator Alma Reville. Also that he showed preference for “cool” blondes. While this may be true, if one hadn't read these rumors, we could easily think the opposite, because the female leads in Hitchcock’s films are not just beautiful, they are strong, intelligent, witty women; none of them are “housewife” like. They are not “the other” in his films, they go tête-à-tête with the male characters. In fact, in many of his films, like The Birds or Rebecca, they are the main protagonist.

Grace Kelly-Kim Novak-Tippy Hedren in Hitchcock films.

The male and female relationships in his movies, while many times very romantic, are light years away from the sorry ones we see in “rom-coms” today. They are mature relationships, these are adults, they are complex, and at the same time, they are full of humor and in no way dull. They are also not easy. Vertigo, of course, comes to mind as the most complex of all, but in Notorious or even in Rear Window, the romantic relationship between the protagonists is real and deep. These are not cliché romances.

Hitchcock directed 69 films. He considered Shadow of a Doubt his favorite. This movie, which starred Joseph Cotten, had a screenplay by Thornton Wilder and the author of the story, Gordon McDonell was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Story. This was another art of Hitchcock: to bring out the best in the writers and the actors that worked with him. Many of the most famous films of the Hollywood legends mentioned were made by Hitchcock.

It speaks volumes of Hollywood that despite his contributions to cinema, Alfred Hitchcock was never awarded a Best Director Academy Award. He was nominated five times and Rebecca won Best Picture (so the producer got the Oscar), but Hitch only got the “lifetime” kind of awards. No matter; forty-four years after he directed his last film, Family Plot, his influence is everywhere and his fine director’s eye is still on the big screen.

Leaves of Grass

Comentary on the 86th Academy Award nominees posted on The Oscars tab (in Spanish).

Sunday in Tinseltown

Sunday is the Oscars, our greatest date with illusion. We know, deep down, that the odds are not in our favor in terms of the Academy picking true works of cinematographic art, based on its eight decades-long track record. We painfully remember how Rocky was chosen over Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver; The Sting was selected over Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers; The Lord of the Rings The Return of the King defeated Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River; The King’s Speech won over Daren Aranofsky’s Black Swan and Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone; Argo beat Amour just last year! There are too many more examples to mention. But there are always those little rays of hope based on the “upsets” that keep us glued to the set on Oscar night, mentally crossing our fingers that we’ll see something like when The Hurt Locker beat Avatar in a David and Goliath-type battle.

Industry vs art is the annual clash we face at the Academy Awards ceremony. And I must say that I agree with many film critics that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should begin by sticking to five nominees for the Best Picture category, mainly because we all pretty much know that arbitrarily adding four or five more is done basically to boost movie ticket sales.

This year, in this cinephile’s humble opinion, the five films that I would have loved to have seen competing for Best Picture are (in order of preference): Nebraska, 12 Years a Slave, The Dallas Buyers Club, Inside Llewyn Davis and Fruitvale Station.

Inside Llewyn Davis / Fruitvale Station

The Coen brothers’ wonderful movie about the randomness of luck, Inside Llewyn Davis, was incomprehensively not included among the nine films nominated and neither was Ryan Coogler’s tremendously heart wrenching film, Fruitvale Station, about the real-life racist murder of Oscar Grant (see post A Day in the Life).

However, the films that made the cut this year all have something noteworthy about them that merits an Academy Award nomination, even if not for Best Picture, with the dishonorable exception of The Wolf of Wall Street (see post: Despicable Him).

Of the remaining eight films competing for Best Picture, my least favorite films are Her and Gravity. Her is probably most noteworthy for its inventive story about the future of our iWorld and that’s what has it on the list of films nominated for original screenplay (although I hope The Dallas Buyer’s Club beats it in that category). Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity has the new technology and photography that have been hailed by critics the world over, and it is nominated for cinematography, visual effects and film editing in recognition of these qualities. Best Picture it is not (see post Lost in Space). Philomena has the moving story behind it and Judy Dench’s very good acting (she would be a wonderful “upset” to Cate Blanchet!). Captain Phillips was powerful in its story and, in my opinion, Tom Hank’s best acting to date. Astoundingly, he wasn’t even included among the Best Actor nominees, while Leo Di Caprio was! American Hustle has a little bit of everything, like very good acting, a story that is captivating, but it is overall a bit too light, not “strong” in any one aspect, it sort of reminds me of The Sting.

Bruce Dern and Will Forte in Nebraska

That leaves my top three pics for Best Picture. I would be exceedingly happy if Alexander Payne’s Nebraska took home the Best Picture award (see post Small Town Folks Like all of us) or if Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave won (see post A Time of Reckoning). And, while not in the league with the former two, I would most certainly not mind if The Dallas Buyers Club won due to its phenomenal acting, for I’m pretty certain that Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto will be taking home the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor awards (see post All the Lonely People).

12 Years a Slave has won the Golden Globes, the BAFTA, AFI Movie of the Year and other awards already. American Hustle won the Screen Actors Guild award and the New York Film Critics award, among others, so they seem to have a chance at the Oscar this year. However, if industry wins on Sunday, Gravity will be taking home the Best Picture Oscar. In the chart that follows, Gravity occupies first place in box office grosses among the nine nominated films, with a whopping 268 million dollars grossed in the US alone; a far, far cry from Nebraska’s 15 million, making Alexander Payne’s beautiful film the true underdog of the night. Bruce Dern won Cannes for his acting in the film and Alexander Payne has won best director in a number of international film festivals, but Nebraska beating out Gravity would certainly be the David v Goliath of the night of illusions. Fingers crossed.

Nominated Film	Box Office Millions of $ (US)	Critics  Top 3 Oscar Pics
		Rolling Stone	Entertainment Weekly	Surviving by Film
Gravity	268	2	1
American Hustle	141	3	3
The Wolf of Wall Street	111
Captain Philips	107
12 Years a Slave	48	1	2	2
Philomena	31
Dallas Buyers Club	24			3
Her	23
Nebraska	15			1

N

Dream a Little

Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.

                  Peter Gabriel, Here Comes the Flood

Happy Valentine’s Day dreamers of the World! Film is still the great escape. Don’t forget these great romances the dream machine has churned out (with a piece of the script)! They’ll all go well with your favorite red wine tonight.

 

Pride and Prejudice

Elizabeth Bennet: After what you've done for Lydia and, I suspect, for Jane, it is I who should be making amends.

Mr. Darcy: You must know. Surely you must know it was all for you.

You are too generous to trifle with me. You spoke with my aunt last night and it has taught me to hope as I'd scarcely allowed myself before.

If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes have not changed. But one word from you will silence me forever. If, however, your feelings have changed...I would have to tell you, you have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love...I love... I love you. I never wish to be parted from you from this day on.

--So many versions of this great Jane Austen romance, but I recommend director Joe Wright’s 2005 film with Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen (above),and the great Brenda Blethyn and Donald Sutherland.

 

Notorious

Devlin: Try to sit up.

Alicia: Yes. Oh, Dev. I'm afraid... I can't make it because they gave me pills to sleep.             

Devlin: Keep awake. Keep talking.

Alicia: Yes. They didn't want the others to know about me.

Devlin: Keep talking. Go on. What happened? What happened?

Alicia: Alex found out.               

Devlin: And the others haven't?

Alicia: They'd kill him if they knew. They killed Emil.             

Devlin: Are you in pain?

Alicia: I don't know. The pills. … Say it again. It keeps me awake.

Devlin: I love you.              

--Cary Grant’s most noted romantic movie is An Affair to Remember with Deborah Kerr, but I've always felt that the intensity of the love affair is so much stronger in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, 1946, starring Grant and the amazing Ingrid Bergman (also more known for her other romantic movie Casablanca). There is love here, but also suspense in this movie about spying on Nazi’s in South America.

 

Some Kind of Wonderful

Keith: I love you. … I’m sorry, I didn't know.

Watts: You’re stupid. I always knew you were stupid.

Keith: You never told me.

Watts: You never asked.

He pulls away from him. He opens her hand and puts the diamond studs in her palm. She looks up at him with a huge smile.

Watts: I wanted these. I wanted ‘em.

Keith: They’re yours.

--Based on a John Hughes screenplay and directed by Howard Deutch this 1987 movie starts Mary Stuart Masterson, Lea Thompson and Eric Stoltz and gets the right kind of wonderful on friends that fall in love.

 

The Last of the Mohicans

Hawkeye: Will you go back to England?

Cora: I have nothing to go back for.

Long pause.

Hawkeye: Then will you stay in America?

She turns to face him.

Hawkeye: And will you be my wife?

Pause.

Cora: Yes.

They hold each other's eyes. She searches his face.

Cora: Where will we go?

Hawkeye: Winter with the Delaware, my father's cousins. And in the spring, cross the Ohio and look for land to settle with my father in a new place called Can-tuck-ee.

--Romance during the French and Indian War isn't something you’d think of as romantic, but with Daniel Day-Lewis as leading man to Madeleine Stowe, this 1992 Michael Mann movie is worth watching as much for the romance as for the story.

Strange Days

Mace: Looks like we made it, Lenny.

Lenny starts to grin.  He taps Strickland on the shoulder and signals for him to stop.  All around them people begin to shout the countdown to midnight.

CROWD: TEN!  NINE!  EIGHT!...

Lenny shouts with them.

Lenny (AND CROWD): SEVEN!  SIX!  FIVE!...

Mace grins at him and starts to chant too.

Mace:  FOUR!  THREE!  TWO!  ONE!  HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

The exultation of the moment flows through them as they lift their voice with the crowd in a great cheer. Balloons are released, confetti and streamers fly in a blizzard.  Couples grab each other and kiss passionately. Lenny sees all these people around him kissing. He and Mace look at each other.  It floods through Lenny's brain like a burst of fireworks.  Nothing ever felt more right. He grabs her and plants one on her like in the movies. She grabs his head and won't let him break even if he wanted to, which he doesn't.

--Directed by Kathryn Bigelow on a screenplay by James Cameron, this 1995 movie stars Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett as cop and former cop uncovering a police conspiracy in the not-to-distant future and falling in love in the process.

 

The Long Hot Summer

So you run, and you keep on runnin'...and you buy yourself a bus ticket and you disappear. And you change your name and you dye your hair...and maybe... just maybe...you might be safe from me.

--Directed by Martin Ritt based on stories by William Faulkner the movie stars the real life couple  Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and also  Orson Welles. Remade as a TV movie in 1985 with Don Johnson, Judy Ivy and Jason Robards, they are both good, romantic watches.

 

Silver Linings Playbook

Tiffany:  (Reading)"Dear Tiffany...

 She stops, surprised it is addressed to her.

Tiffany (Continues reading): "...I know you wrote the letter (long pause) The only way you could           meet my crazy...."

Pat: (RECITING) "...was by doing something crazy yourself. Thank you. I love you. I knew it the minute I met you. I'm sorry it took so long for me to catch up. I just got stuck. Pat." I wrote that a week ago.

Tiffany: You wrote that a week ago?

 Pat: Yes, I did.

Tiffany: You let me lie to you for a week?

Pat: I was trying to be romantic.

Tiffany: You love me?

Pat: Yeah, I do.

Tiffany: Okay.

She leans forward and kisses him, they kiss. Camera pulls away. Score comes in.

--I had to include a more recent romance, though it seems they get harder to come by in this time of dating apps -where people can be “swiped-away” as fast as flying, angry birds-, friends come “with benefits” (for the guys), and bromances  somehow seem to be stronger than romances. This 2012 movie by director David O. Russell has managed to capture romance of the old fashioned kind.

Drink up!

Philip Seymour Hoffman

When someone as talented as Philip Seymour Hoffman dies, in such a tragic way, at only 46 years of age, it makes us want to do something to express our shock and sadness. This is my way. I am truly moved by the death of a man who gave us his art and who we knew would continue to delight us with his acting, play writing and directing. I am truly saddened for his family. We all feel his loss.

As an actor he had tremendous range and a passion that made him stand out in any movie he was in, whether he was lead or not.  He was a quintessential American actor. When he was the lead, in movies such as Capote, The Master, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead or Synecdoche, New York, he was the embodiment of the character, to the last voice modulation or facial expression.

He won the Oscar in 2005 for Capote, very much deserved. But even when he wasn't holding the leading role, he stood out and it is no wonder he was nominated for so many awards in his supporting roles, such as for Doubt (2008), Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), The Savages (2007), Empire Falls (2005) or  The Ides of March (2011).

As much as I admired him in those movies, I also loved him in The Talented Mr. Ripley, in Magnolia or the Big Lebowski or Almost Famous; and I wouldn't be surprised if many people (myself included) went to see The Hunger Games: Catching Fire or Mission Impossible III in part because they knew it couldn't be a bad film because an actor of the caliber of Phillip Seymour Hoffman was in it. He was truly great as the evil Owen Davian in MI III.

There are thousands of posts, texts and feeds being written about this man today, all around the world, which is a tribute to someone who was able to contribute and share his art with so many, enriching us all in the process.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman, you will be truly missed!