review | The Cutprice Guignol

September 14, 2013

Movie Marathon #9: The Bling Ring

The Bling Ring marks Sofia Coppola’s fifth venture into feature film territory, her first since the 2010 drama Somewhere. Starring Emma Watson, Katie Chang and Taissa Farmiga as members of the titular crime gang, the film draws from the true story of a privileged group of teenagers in California who routinely burgled celebrities to collect trophies and trinkets from their homes-victims included Paris Hilton and Orlando Bloom, with some scenes shot inside Hilton’s own residence.

The film is filled with Coppola’s trademark ennui-the beautiful cinematography is chock-full of long, languid shots, and that very specific sense of disaffection and mild, middle-class dissatisfaction. Coppola’s ability to capture the frustration and discontent of beautiful young women-as she displayed in her first feature, The Virgin Suicides, and later in Lost in Translation-is brought to the forefront in a very different way in The Bling Ring, with a bunch of pretty young things and their social restlessness captured to a tee. One of Coppola’s key skills is her ability to remove herself from the action, acting only as a passive observer to the increasingly mad events taking place around her-she refuses at any point to become involved in the world of the girls or their high-profile victims. Instead, she focuses on what has driven these privileged young women, on the cusp of adulthood, to steal pointless knick-knacks from their idols; less a physical or psychological need to burgle, but rather for the pseudo-fame that came from the news coverage and social interest in the case.

Kudos has to go to the actresses who inhabit the challenging roles with ease. Finding young actresses who can convincingly portray, well, anything, really, is a challenge, but Coppola hit the jackpot with the lead five. Emma Watson, in the process of throwing of the shackles of her rise to fame through Harry Potter, rightly received buckets of critical praise for her performance as the leader of the group.

However, perhaps too much emphasis was put on her character at the expense of any sort of reasonable characterisation of the other four girls, as they begin to meld together with little defining characteristics. That said, this is a film about teenagers occupying the height of vapidity; the blank stares, mundane dialogue and overwhelming sense of senselessness, though sometimes seeming put in place just to emphasise how crushingly shallow these women are, are required to truly put across how crushingly shallow these women really, truly, and utterly are.

September 13, 2013

Movie Marathon #7: Talk to Her

Pedro Almodovar makes patchy, patchy films. Volver? Genius. Atame!? Pish. The Skin I Live In? Visionary. Bad Education? Bleh. And so on. Pretty much, when he’s on, he’s on with fireworks blowing out his arse and steam coming out of his ears, and when he’s off he makes soap operas with actresses who should be doing far better things.

Luckily for me, Talk to Her is an excellent movie; flawed, yes, but driven by two excellent central performances. Tracking the relationship between the male nurse of a coma patient and the boyfriend of another patient in the same hospital, it takes on a variety of typically huge themes; sexuality, love, rape, obession, men climbing up inside giant metaphorical vaginas-your usual Almodovarian affair. But what sets it apart, at least for me, is the quiter nature of the film- although it features some ridiculous sequences and powerful scenes, it eschews his usual shrieky stlye of direction to create a mournful, very modern tragedy.

The real kudos must go to Javier Camara for his performance as Beningo, the male nurse who looks after a young female dancer stricken into a coma. He’s an awful man, in so many ways, but he’s also an innocent; there’s only a small part of him that is aware what he’s doing is inherently wrong, and he is consistently misled by emotions only he truly believes he has. He’s ambiguos and interesting, and that’s more than can be said for most of Almodovar’s straight-down-the-line creation.

The developing relationship with the gorgeous Dario Grandinetti, who winds up meeting Beningo after his girlfriend, a bullfighter, winds up in a coma after a fight turns nasty, is also beautifully handled. Grandinetti’s Marco is reiticient and as weak as Beningo in his own ways, but gradually comes round to feel sympathy and to even care for the horribly misguided nurse. It’s an odd Almodovar film in that it doesn’t focus on the women in the story-for most of the film, the key female players are in comas- but rather on the way that, even when they are not physically or mentally present, these strong, ambitious women have an untold influence over both these men’s lives.

Christ, that was pretentious.

March 3, 2013

Go the Fucking Sisterhood

It’s been an alternately entertaining and soul-crushing day. I spent nine hours writing an essay, during which I dropped the complete works of Shakespeare on my face, nearly shattered my nose in the process, shortly afterwards became the first person to use the phrase “ow ow ow ow ow ow FUCKERS”, and had far too good a time twirling around on my desk chair, eating Skittles, and trying to stem the nasal bleeding with a discarded pair of pyjama bottoms. Taste the rainbow? Taste the mixture of my own phlegm and blood, more like.

Speaking of things that have been alternately entertaining and soul-crushing, I marathoned US sitcom 2 Broke Girls today. Aside from the fact that it stars my wife, Kat Dennings (Those eyes! Those lips! Those breasts! Those child-bearing hips!), I keep coming back to this upstart show. The premise is simple; sassy waitress Max (Dennings) takes in the newly poverty-stricken Caroline Channing, a shrill blonde pencil turned shrill blonde pencil, played by almost offensively less attractive Beth Behrs, and they resolve to start a cupcake business (disappointingly, not a euphemism for Kat selling her chebs on the street). The chemistry between the two leads is undeniable; a genius match of Behr’s superb physical comedy and Denning’s grimly amusing asides about her sex, drugs and childhood (summation: it was rubbish but it’s okay because she’s hot) that more or less carries the show. The supporting characters, namely the other employees at the diner where they both work and mad Polish Sophie played by a triumphantly crass Jennifer Coolidge, spend a good three-quarters of their screentime making foul sex jokes, drinking, being pedantic and managing to be both head-scratchingly racist and moderately bearable. Finally, somebody I can relate too.

And those are the good parts done with. It was “created by” Micheal Patrick King who did Sex and the Shitty, and his “GO THE FUCKING SISTERHOOD!” stamp has been crapped indiscriminately all over the show. Now, I’m not a woman who buys into the whole “all girls together” shtick; frankly, I’m suspicious of anyone who thinks we should have some sort of instant connection and mutual respect because we both have labia. Menstruation has never nor will ever be the basis of any great friendship, as there are just as many women I’d like to shank as there are men. You get my respect by being sound, not by having breasts. Though that doesn’t hurt.

And that’s where 2 Broke Girls comes to bits. At the end of every episode, there’s a seemingly required scene where the stellar writing is undone by a presumably mad-with-power Caligula Patrick King cramming in an exchange where Dennings and Behr are essentially forced to platonically rub up on each other to justify their “friendship”. Their dynamic isn’t that of other odd-couple stylings on TV, like Chandler and Joey or another example. The couple that continues to rove into my minds eye is Basil and Sybil Fawlty; that sniping, unlikely, bitter marriage of two ambitious but stifled bastards. If they played to that dynamic, maybe it would work, but as long as they continue forcing the pair to emotionally finger each other (as if the relationship wasn’t sapphic enough) the whole thing smacks of wide-eyed innocence that it simply can’t carry off.

On a side note, wouldn’t mind a go on Jennifer Coolidge either.