Overlooked Films: Still Alice

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STILL ALICE (2014)

Directed (and screenplay by) Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland

Sony Pictures, 101 minutes, PG-13

* * *

Julianne Moore won a Best Actress Academy Award for the title role of Still Alice, but there wasn't much Oscar magic in it; the film made a paltry $18.6 million in the U.S. market. Audiences did not flock to a  film about a vibrant 50-year-old Colombia professor prematurely felled by Alzheimer's disease. I ducked for a highly personal reason: my mother died of Alzheimer's and I feared that Hollywood would somehow present this faith-shaking malady with more hope and dignity than it merited. I also needed more emotional distance between my mother's death and the subject.

I am happy to report that, for the most part, this film—which is based upon Lisa Genora's best-selling 2007 novel–does a fairly honest job with Alzheimer's devastation. At several junctures, Alice is filmed as if all around her is hazy and indistinct, which accords with how I think my mother experienced things up to the moment where she didn't experience much of anything. Glatzer and Westmoreland also do a credible job of showing how families are cast into helplessness as the inevitable takes its course–in Alice's case her husband, John (Alec Baldwin), and their three children: Lydia (Kristen Stewart), Anna (Kate Bosworth), and Tom (Hunter Parrish). The directors try to provide back stories for each character, but the film is, by necessity, all about Alice. Moore is very good in the role. She's gorgeous, but not part of Hollywood's shiny wrapper/empty head crowd. Thus, she's totally believable as both a whip smart linguistics prof and as a desperate woman victim watching herself disappear piece by tiny piece. In one of the more remarkable transformations, Moore diminishes herself physically from a coiffed pulled-together Ivy Leaguer to a bedraggled lost soul–and she does so through sheer acting, not a bunch of make-up tricks. Her hollow eyes tell us all we need to know, as we watch the lights turn off.

Objectively speaking, though, Still Alice is merely a middle-of-the-road film. A good friend commented that it's a bit too obviously a Julianne Moore star turn and I find that fair commentary. Aside from Kristen Stewart–who has the chops to become this generation's Julianne Moore–no one else has much to do in the film. Frankly, the film also raises skeptical hackles. Alice is saddled with extremely rare Familial Alzheimer's. This explains her early onset Alzheimer's, but it's also convenient in that a bankable star such as Moore can play the part rather than someone who would appeal only to older viewers. This was, of course, how Genova wrote the novel upon which the movie is based, but it also means we do not see a 'typical' Alzheimer's profile.

I will give the directors a pass on this issue, but I cannot declare Still Alice the best film you can see about dementia*.  But that too can be forgiven as the competition is two genuine masterpieces: "Away From Her," Sarah Polley's stunning 2006 directorial debut–with Julie Christie every bit Moore's equal in the lead role–and Amour (2012) with the transcendent Emmanuelle Riva as a woman whose stroke leads her to descend into depression and (probably) dementia. Director Michael Haneke's Amour does something that Still Alice fails to do: ask what love (amour) means and what you would do in its name. Let's just say that Alec Baldwin is no Jean-Louis Trintignant when it comes to knowing what his wife would have wished.

Still Alice is a hard film, though if you can only stomach one movie about losing mental faculties, this one is the easiest of the lot. One can debate whether Moore's performance was Oscar worthy or simply just very good, but it's fine enough to justify watching the movie. After you do, pour yourself a stiff drink and give thanks for each day you live in which the only haze you endure is the one your sip from the glass.

Rob Weir

*No matter what Hollywood tells you, Alzheimer's, even the Familial variety, can only be definitively diagnosed posthumously. It is generally labeled via symptoms, but as long as the patient lives, the lines between Alzheimer's, severe depression, and other forms of dementia are, if I may, hazy.

    

Hannah Miller's Tough New Record One of Year's Best

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HANNAH MILLER

Hannah Miller

Sputnik Sound

* * * *

Think of the woman standing alone in a smoky bar at midnight–the one with the low-cut red dress who exudes desire and danger. If she made a record, it would sound like the latest from Hannah Miller. Miller states that she wanted to make a record without "coffeehouse-friendly songs." This one will certainly send the crystals-and-rainbows crowd running for cover! This is a very dark album. How dark? "Promise Land" is a reflection on the Chernobyl disaster, and it's not even close to being the hardest song of the bunch. "Been Around" might well be the album's theme song. Gothic organ notes spill out as she sings: "I ain't nobody's fool/I know what you're up to/It's not my first time out/I'm not new in town/I've been around." Later she intones: "Your words don't break my bones/I'm full of sticks and stones." Think she's kidding? "While you go down in flames/I play it cool/Cause I'm the one playing you/Like a fool."

Had you fill of little girl voices and frothy pop? Check out Miller's guttural, grown-up voice and tough songs. The dominant instrument on most of her songs is the bass—the chunkier and more ominous the better. The mood is somber, the pacing deliberate, the lighting set to low, and the mood dialed to no-nonsense. Her "Watchman" is a grim reaper, "Soothed" means she's come to terms with having come undone, and "You Don't Call" doesn't wallow: "You don't call any more/and that's fine." The closest she gets to sunny is "Outside In," the album's folkiest song, in which she tries to convince a lover that it's okay to get close. But she follows it with "Leaving," the album's grittiest song, one about a woman damaged by a broken and abusive family, betrayed trust, and so many disappointments that she's emotionally empty. "Go on and try to make me feel anything/What's a little leaving to a girl like me?" Yowser!  

Sound bleak? Yes, but here's the other thing: this is a seriously good album. It's filled with Chris Isaak-like reverb, amazing bass from Kevin Whitset, and loads of texturing synth, organ, keyboards, and guitar–all of which serve the songs brilliantly. Miller's voice is husky when it needs to be, vulnerable if called for, and as sharp as a knife when she needs to cut someone down to size. Miller's neither an innocent nor a shrinking violet; hers are songs for femmes fatale and revenge seekers, but also ones that demand acceptance of the music and of Ms. Miller on her terms. Call it ice and fire, sexy and sultry. Call it one of the year's smartest records. Rob Weir  

Overlooked Films: Lucy

LUCY   (2014)

Directed by Luc Besson

EuropaCorp, 89 minutes, R (graphic violence), English (and some subtitles)

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The French science fiction film Lucy did reasonably well at the U.S. box office, bringing in $43 million, but it was a smash sensation globally raking in more than ten times the North American box office. It also holds the distinction of being the first science fiction movie partially filmed using IMAX cameras, which gives it a hyper-real sheen in all the right places. The guarded enthusiasm in the United States is often explained by the fact that Lucy had only two recognizable names, Scarlett Johansson in the title role and Morgan Freeman in an expanded cameo. I'd like to suggest, though, that U.S. audiences got it right: Lucy is assuredly worth a rental, but it's far too uneven to rank as a great film.

If you like shiny surfaces and intriguing speculation, Lucy is full of both. It opens (and ends) with cells colliding and dividing and quickly cuts to a misty prehistoric dawn where a female Australopithecine is watering. As we learn, she is "Lucy," the sensational 1974 fossil find of paleontologist Donald Johanson that literally rewrote the story of human evolution. Flash to the 21^st century where another Lucy (Scarlett Johannson) is a 25-year-old student in Taipei lured by a shady boyfriend into the next leap in human evolution. He forces her to carry a briefcase into a bank and before you can say "Australopithecus" she's spirited away, witnesses murders, is sedated, and awakes to find herself as one of four individuals with bloody stitched slits in their guts. Each has one opportunity to live–become unwilling drug mules to Paris, Berlin, London, and Rome, where they will be relieved of the contents of their tummy tucks.

It's sci-fi, baby, so you know they aren't packing anything as mundane as coke or heroin. A group of unscrupulous Taiwanese scientists has synthesized the hormone pregnant women secrete to help fetal skeletons and brains develop. Ingested in small quantities, the drug opens Huxley's doors of perception and gives access to more than the 10% of the brain humans normally use. Before Lucy even boards the plane, though, something goes awry (because it is sci-fi, baby). In a very disturbing scene, Lucy is brutally beaten when she rebuffs the sexual advances of some Taiwanese thugs. A kick to the stomach ruptures the bag she is carrying—doses meant for hundreds of users. As neuroscientist professor Samuel Norman (Freeman) explains in a conference crosscut, if humans could access 20% of their brains, they could control their own bodies, objects, and others. But what would happen at 30%? 50%? 100%?

Director Luc Besson acknowledges that Lucy is a pastiche of three other films: Léon: The Professional (1994), the story of an assassin, which he wrote; the popular mind-altering film Inception (2010); and Stanley Kubrick's path-breaking 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Be warned: the violence in this film is Quentin Tarantino-like in its bloodiness and its amorality. The attack on Lucy transgresses the border between advancing the plot and misogyny—so much so that it is very tempting to stop the film. Obviously, Lucy survives, but I leave it to your judgment to determine if what follows is worth it. The film is certainly open to intense criticism on this score, as well as whether Besson's mix of violence, drugs, and the future of humanity is intriguing conceptually, but too uneven on the screen. Drug overlord Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik) pursues Lucy to Paris–where she hopes to enlist the aid of Professor Norman–and we get numerous showdowns with thugs, a car chase across Paris, and a beat-the-clock dénouement. Once again, it's probably a personal judgment call as to whether all of this is really innovative f/x, or just your run-of-the-mill chase scene dressed up in fancy clothes. Ditto the question of whether Besson has solved the mystery of Kubrick's black obelisk and written the next chapter of the space child, or whether he has merely contrived his way to 2001 Lite.

For me, there were enough fresh ideas to carry me over the creepiness threshold. I see Lucy to be a deeply flawed film, but was intrigued. I would not, however, judge anyone who turned it off a third of the way through. My only defense for (sort of) liking this film is–you guessed it—it's sci-fi, baby!   Rob Weir

Neil Gaiman Short Stories: Lots of Hit Targets and a Few Stray Bullets

TRIGGER WARNING: SHORT FICTIONS AND DISTURBANCES  (2015)

Neil Gaiman

William Morrow, 308 pages, 978-0-06-233026-0.

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Trigger warnings are those small cautionary flags thrown up to warn that some sort of content (image, speech, written word) may induce discomfort for some listeners, viewers, or readers.  They are, depending upon one’s point of view, either polite warnings, excuses to present objectionable material, or a form of censorship aimed at further infantilizing American culture. (Full disclosure: I am in camp # 3.)  It’s a perfect title for a Neil Gaiman book, as few modern writers take readers as far from their comfort zones as he.

One of the things that makes Gaiman a great writer—as opposed to pulp hacks like Stephen King—is that he knows that “disturbances” are caused as much by the imagination as by any specific action or image. Like earlier writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, his horrors often reside in dream worlds, random thoughts, imagined terrors, and mental meanderings; in essence, we fear the things that we can envision more than the unknown or unseen. In a new collection of short stories, Gaiman demonstrates another level of wisdom: the understanding that triggers are linked to more than simply raw fear­–they are highly individualized and they come in unexpected forms. Sometimes it’s an encounter with a man who might be a werewolf (“A Lunar Labyrinth”), but it might be a terror linked to faded memory  (“The Thing about Cassandra”), or even musing upon a David Bowie lyric (“The Thin White Duke").

Trigger Warning contains two dozen stories and original poems. Like all such collections, the quality varies from chapter to chapter. There is, frankly, some filler in the new book, the likes of which probably would never have seen the light of day if penned by an unknown. But when Gaiman is good, he’s very good. “The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountain” takes a familiar story—a mysterious traveler seeking a guide that will take him to a place locals claim is haunted—and uses Scotland’s Isle of Skye, a real-life dream world, as a creepy backdrop for a tale that grows more ominous by the paragraph. In “Orange,” he builds suspense through 70 out-of-context answers to an interviewer’s questions. He does something similar in “A Calendar of Tales,” which is true to its title: a dozen tales, one for each month—some of which are scary, some humorous, and others surreal. (Gaiman knows that for many people, nothing is more terrifying than a departure from that which is defined as “normal” or “real.”)

Those familiar with Gaiman’s work will recognize a few of his personal inspirations. He has written a tale of aged Sherlock Holmes (“The Case of Death and Honey”), a new Doctor Who episode (“Nothing O’ Clock”), and reworked fairy tales (Cinderella in the case of “The Sleeper and the Spindle”). He also reduxes his character Shadow from American Gods in “Black Dog”. One his more deft turns is using humor as a trigger warning, which he does to great effect in “And Weep, Like Alexander,” an offbeat tale about an odd little man whose profession is that of an Uninventor. That’s right—he uninvents things humankind creates that would simply cause more havoc than good. (Where was he when the Segway was manufactured?!) This tale is typical in that there is, in fact, nothing in the entire collection that would tempt you to sleep with the lights on. But make no mistake, triggers are repeatedly pulled.

To return to an earlier point, not every effort is a winner. As a poet, he reminds us that he’s a novelist, and a few stories simply trade on the unexplained to build bizarre scenarios that go nowhere. In “Adventure Story,” for example, he spins a tale of his father, World War II, Aztecs, and pterodactyls that is either supposed to highlight his dysfunctional family or suggest a paranormal experience, but nothing is more than mentioned within four scant pages, so who knows? A few others are something we seldom expect from Gaiman: obvious. But when Gaiman puts his finger on the trigger of the metaphorical gun that’s pointed at you, you feel the disturbance, even when it’s more frisson than fear.  Rob Weir

Newest Ellis Paul May be Best Release of the Decade

ELLIS PAUL

Chasing Beauty

Black Wolf

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Is Ellis Paul the hardest working musician in acoustic music? Damned if I've ever seen him leave anything behind in the green room. Any new Ellis Paul album is reason for celebration, but Chasing Beauty is triumphant even by his exalted standards. I do not exaggerate when I say this is was not only the album of the year for 2014, but it's quite possibly the best I've heard this decade. Paul is an American troubadour in the mold of Woody Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Johnny Cash, and Bob Dylan and he's a better singer than any of them—he of the impossibly high voice in which each syllable explodes with emotive energy.

Chasing Beauty is Paul's 19^th album and it's a true roller coaster of moods, emotions, and images. The title song embodies the album's namesake theme: the promises, open wounds, and approach/flight dance involved in chasing beauty in its various guises. Where do we find it? Some times it's in simple things—moving in close, a train ride, a cathartic roller coaster ride–themes he explores in "Take Me to a Drive-in Movie." Sometimes it's something more complex, like the American spirit in times of adversity, which he reconnoiters in "Empire State," his love letter to New York City's iconic and indomitable skyscraper. Some times it's looking back ("Plastic Soldier"); other times it's being in the moment and seeing the world through the eyes of his daughter ("Hold Me, Scold Me"). Listen hard to Ellis Paul lyrics–they are filled with poetic wonder, and some times they just dispel simple wisdom: "If you ain't got nothing that you'd die for/Tell me is your life worth living after all." Paul can be as soft as a spring breeze ("One Kiss Could Do Me In"), but he offers precious few nostrums; as he suggests in another song, sometimes roses come in cages. Paul is usually pegged as a "folk" singer, but "acoustic rock" might be a better handle. Chasing Beauty has many quiet moments, but it also a highly polished studio work that sports rolling organ notes, electric breakouts, and rock steady drumming. And, in true Ellis Paul fashion, his guitar work dazzles with virtuosity one moment and sends percussive shock waves the next. Mainly Paul just lets it all hang out and defies conventional classifications. Take a listen to his crowd-pleasing "Kick Out the Lights (Johnny Cash)" and come up with you own label, but I'm going with "masterpiece." –Rob Weir      

New Blu-ray Reason Aplenty to Rediscover My Winnipeg

MY WINNIPEG (2007/15)

Directed by Guy Maddin

Buffalo Gal Productions

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This documentary created a small stir when it first came out in 2007. Earlier this year it was re-released in Blu-ray and, if your tastes run toward the offbeat and surrealistic, it’s well worth watching—even though parts of it are now outdated.

Winnipeg, Manitoba native Guy Maddin is the director/writer/narrator/central character of what he calls a “docu-fantasia.” That’s not a bad term, though “autobiographical tone-poem” might be an even better one. The film really is about Winnipeg—sort of. Maddin is from there, but his film’s central hook is the attempt to escape. To that end, Maddin imagines himself among a car full of disreputable passengers on a rail-less train hurtling down the city streets and speeding toward the outlying districts, but never quite making it into the surrounding prairie. It is filmed in black and white (at times with deliberately scratched emulsion) and most of the outside scenes are wintry—an effect he uses to add grit, and to blur the boundaries between past and present. (By washing out detail and rendering everything in the same tones, an old photograph has the same clarity and visual value as the present.)

Maddin’s Winnipeg is one weird place and he too has, in popular parlance, “issues.”  Among the strange revelations about Manitoba’s largest city: it is among the world’s coldest cities, it was once a hotbed for spiritualism, the city used to hold an annual treasure hunt whose winner got a one-way rail ticket out of town, and it has the highest measured level of sleepwalking of any known city. The latter is so pronounced that a local ordinance gives citizens the right to possess keys to former residences in case they wander there in a sleepy stupor. If that’s not weird enough for you, consider this factoid: a 1935 winter fire at a local racetrack allegedly sent horses rushing into the Red River, where the ice trapped them and preserved them. Locals strolled through upon the frozen river to visit grotesque monuments: the frozen heads of horses pushed through the ice with their faces captured in the final throes of death.

Maddin’s film is heavy on metaphors such as sleepwalking and frozen horse heads. His most powerful is that of the “Forks,” the place where the Red and Assiniboine rivers merge. At numerous junctures he juxtaposes the Forks with a woman’s torso—both a sexual and birth allusion—and uses these to explore his considerable disagreements with his stern mother (played by Ann Savage) and his deceased father. This film could occupy a Freudian for months! The thread that holds everything together is the reoccurring question, “What if…?”

Those what ifs apply to both Maddin and to Winnipeg. In a Michael Moore-like shift, Maddin also explores changes in the city: a provincial sports hall of fame that moves more often than someone in the witness protection program, the demolition of both the downtown Eaton’s Department Store and an iconic ice hockey arena, the loss of the Winnipeg Jets NHL franchise, the impending doom of The Bay…. In this guise, Winnipeg comes off as Flint-upon-the-Prairie and it underscores Maddin’s desperation to flee. 

Ever notice how people who make films about getting out often don’t? Maddin also plays on the metaphor of Winnipeg being the geographic center of North America. (Note to US residents: Take a look at how much of Canada lies to the north of Winnipeg.) Winnipeg might be weird, but it’s also defiant, a spirit represented by its 1919 general strike. In like fashion, people there must put down pretty deep roots if they hold onto door keys in case they sleepwalk into the parlor.

Maddin’s running commentary is, by turns, poetic, irreverent, wistful, and even hopeful. Since 2007, the Bay closed, but the Jets returned. Like frozen horse heads, Winnipeg’s cycles are marked by ephemeral monumentality yet signs of struggle and life.

--  Rob Weir   

Far from the Madding Crowd Movie is Hardy on Speed

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (2015)

Directed by Thomas Vinterberg

Fox Searchlight, 129 minutes, PG-13.

* * *

Although it's literary blasphemy to admit, I have always preferred Thomas Hardy to Charles Dickens. Dickens was funnier and his stories contained more action, but I like Hardy better for the complex interior lives of his characters, and the fact that his women were more than wallpaper. Hardy's women are independent spirits full of resolve and spunk. Think of Tess Darbeyfield, Sue Bridehead (Jude the Obscure), or Eustacia Vye (Return of the Native). And how many Victorian literary heroines can compare with Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd?  Even her name was scandalous in Hardy's time. Bathsheba was an unlikely name for a 19^th century daughter given that her ancient counterpart was the Hittite woman with whom King David committed adultery and impregnated (with Solomon). David also engineered her soldier husband's death in battle when he couldn't convince him to have sex with Bathsheba. It took moxie to name a sympathetic character Bathsheba.

Hardy played with the Biblical story. A soldier, temptation, lust, and wisdom factor into  Far from the Madding Crowd, but not the ways they were recounted in the Old Testament. Biblical authorities differ on whether Bathsheba was willingly or unwillingly seduced by King David, but Bathsheba Everdene is neither temptress nor victim. Though men desire her, she longs for independence. She is intelligent, strong-willed, high-spirited, and stubborn–traits that are both blessings and curses. She is, for example, often too clever and acts impulsively on the presumption that others will know her mind as well as she.

This foregrounding is essential for evaluating the latest film version of Far from the Madding Crowd. This is the fourth full-length motion picture of Hardy's novel and it shares the strengths and shortcomings of its predecessors. Bathsheba is such an intriguing personality that one can see why directors are drawn to it. The 1967 British production with Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Peter Finch, and Terence Stamp is the most famous attempt, though the BBC's 1998 four-part series (which aired in the US on Masterpiece Theater) is probably the most successful. Locate Thomas Vinterberg's new production somewhere in the middle of the pack.

First the good news: Forget Julie Christie–Carey Mulligan is a superior Bathsheba. She plays frothy and determined equally, thus is totally believable as a woman of both superior intellect and impetuousness. Physically she is desirable without intending to be so, and a fireball of energy that burns those who get too close. We are convinced that if any woman can run her own farm in patriarchal Victorian England, it would be she. In the story, three men are ensnared by Bathsheba's magnetism: loyal shepherd Gabriel Oak (Matthew Schoenaerts), caddish soldier Francis ("Frank") Troy (Tom Sturridge), and steadfast bachelor farmer William Boldwood (Michael Sheen). Each wishes to wed and bed Bathsheba, though two of the suitors are decidedly as unwise as King David. Schoenaerts is also outstanding and plays Oak as Everdene's equal in both kind intentions and pigheadedness, as if he is the anvil to her hammer. (Did Hardy play off the Bathsheba's name—Hebrew for "daughter of the oath"–to come up with Oak?) Sheen is terrific as Boldwood, Everdene's older, socially gauche suitor. Indeed, he's so sympathetic he breaks your heart. Also praiseworthy is the musical score. This movie gets folk music right, because Vinterberg had the commonsense to hire Eliza Carthy as music advisor and include her and her band on the soundtrack.

The not-so-good: Sturridge is a wooden soldier as Troy and he's no Terence Stamp in the glamour department either. His flat demeanor is also frequently the feel of this film. It is gorgeous on the surface, but not much actually happens. To return to an earlier point, Hardy's novels are often about internal struggles and these require time–like a 460-page novel or a four-part BBC mini series–to show how characters grow and change. Try to cram this into just two hours and what we get is Far from the Madding Crowd on amphetamines. This means it's obvious from the get-go who Bathsheba should be with, and just as obvious what will end badly–even if you've never read the book. Vinterberg tries to give us the feel of 19^th century rural life, but these come off as  random snapshots disconnected from affairs of the heart and mind. 

Far from the Madding Crowd is ultimately a classic middling picture–neither great nor bad. It's certainly a pleasant enough way to pass a few hours, but it lacks the transcendence of Hardy's novel. –Rob Weir