The Accents Aren't The Only Thing That Could Do With A Touch Of Reality

When a movie includes a cast of five Academy Award winners, one nominee, a Tony Award Winner, is based on a Broadway hit, and has Rob Marshall holding the strings, what’s not to love?

Let’s begin with scene one. Guido Contini (Daniel Day Lewis) is an aptly named famous Italian filmmaker with a bad case of creative blockage. As he stares, frustrated, at his unfinished set, who should appear out of the shadows but Nicole Kidman, sashaying across the room to plant one on our scruffy hero. But that’s not all! Penelope Cruz! Kate Hudson! Judi Dench! And there’s more. Marion Cotillard! Fergie! Sophia Loren! Draping themselves languidly over pieces of faux Italian architecture all for Guido’s profligate pleasure. You’d think that such a convergence of acting talent would deserve an introduction that was a little less, well, kitschy.

Like Roxie in Rob Marshall’s 2003 film, “Chicago”, Guido’s imagination is the setting for all the musical numbers. But while Roxie was fame-hungry and star-struck, Guido has had his fill and regards the ladies of Italian cinema with an air of unimpressed gaudiness. Of course, that doesn’t stop them from dominating his fantasies. With “Chicago”, Marshall enhanced public opinion of musicals with an infusion of sex appeal. But where “Chicago” was spiked, “Nine” is drenched.

At one point in the film, a dusky prostitute named Saraghina (Fergie) performs a number about what it means to be Italian or, more specifically, an Italian man. Maybe it’s just me, but perhaps the celebration of a culture should avoid fostering stereotypes of happy-go-lucky sleaziness. Most of the choreography in the movie consists of voluptuous women in lingerie flinging sand and glitter about and crawling on hands and knees towards the camera. Judi Dench appears to be one of the few who stands (literally) above all this. But she compensates with an equally palpable and horrendous vocal performance of a song about the Follies Bergere. Or as she pronounces it, Berge-GRUH.

The best three minutes of the movie come when Kate Hudson, who plays an American Journalist, bursts into song in the jazzy and ultra-chic number, Cinema Italiano. The Latin beat and rapid lyrics united with Hudson’s surprisingly throaty and belting voice generates the spirit of the movie that “Nine” wishes it was. It is more of a music video than a musical interlude, but it’s the ideal Italian indulgence that will have you up and dancing before you can say “Uomo Romano”.

In a nutshell, “Nine” is about Guido’s many lovely ladies and how they are so much more than the superficially idyllic bombshells of his fantasies. It is about his realization that by fostering this ideal he is becoming detached from reality, from where he came from, and from who he is. This reaches its peak in Daniel Day Lewis’s emblematic vulnerability-grasping-fall-on-his-knees-screaming-in-agony scene which, despite its affluence, is not what makes him a great actor. Guido had become corrupted with the glitzy pizazz of the film industry and forgotten his true aptitude along the way. It’s movies like “Nine” that make today’s filmmakers and actors do the same.

The Woman Who Brought The Wind

Straying from my “all movies all the time” repertoire, I recently saw a play that just can’t be ignored.

Snuggled away in the rolling hills of Southern Wisconsin is the little hamlet of Mineral Point, famous for its unparalleled hospitality, independent thinkers, funky arts scene, and Cornish Pasties. Right in the middle of Mineral Point’s historic district, tucked between nineteenth century stone cottages, is the Shakerag Alley Arts Center, home of the Alley Stage. In the late summer dusk, audience members, perfumed with citronella, trooped up the rustic brick walkway to an intimate outdoor theater, the stage implanted in the base of an evocative rocky cliff. The play was “Los Vientos De Marzo”- “The Winds of March”.

I first met Lynn Werner in a writing workshop at Shakerag Alley. She was a small woman with a thick silver braid hanging down beneath an artsy head scarf, and piercing, slightly mischievous eyes. They were eyes that had seen the worst but Lynn was a poet and I suspect that helped them retain their glint. She said she hoped I could make it to a one-woman play that she was preforming at the Alley Stage in a few months.

As she made her way onto the stage that hot August night, she was accompanied by a haunting tune…

If a wind should blow, do you hear them call,

Or do you say “It is merely the wind”?

If a wind should blow, do you hear them cry,

Or do you say “It is merely the wind”?

The set was simple, just a few cardboard boxes, a stool, and a clothes rack draped with colored cloths and a birdlike ethnic mask. A vibrant salsa melody wafted over the sound system and Lynn began to dance. As she unpacked the boxes, a Coca Cola bottle, a small wooden chest, she was a free spirit tossing tissue paper in the air.

Without warning, the melancholic sound of wind cut through the salsa music like a chilly blade. Howling, it swept us back to a time when the free spirits, the salsa music, were inaudible.

It took us back to Columbia where Lynn was a filmmaker, interviewing and documenting the stories of the Columbians, the workers, the mothers, the friends, the revolutionaries, the culture whose voices were being silenced beneath a gale of governmental oppression. Through herself, Lynn conveys the resigned agony of a wife who will never see her husband again, a man in the field who battles the sun for survival, and her own vigor-infused friends fighting for their people, their country. We visit the buxom fish-selling women of the wharfs and the side of an understanding priest. We travel from the serene shade of a tree, to the sweltering expanses of sugarcane. Lynn is the documentarian, the subject, and the lens.

But it was really an autobiographical story. It was the the story of a woman who wanted to open the ears of the world to the voices of Columbia, who wanted to bring the struggle for human rights out of the darkness; but who felt guilt. She was fighting for a people, not with them. What right had she, an outsider, to try and feel the anguish, the spirit, of an entire nation? And she had left it all. Most of her films were destroyed, her friends assassinated. She had come home to safety, but she could not escape the voices of the wind.

And so, that muggy August night in quiet, peaceful Mineral Point, Lynn went back to Columbia. And using words in that vulnerably unassailable way that very few can, she took her audience with her. On a stage in Southern Wisconsin, she brought Columbia to life and in doing so reminded us that seldom is it “merely the wind”.

100 Years Of Phascination

Too often our beloved stories become so wrung with new concepts, remakes, and additions to suit the tastes of each generation, that any semblance of their original splendor becomes nothing more than a historical reminiscence. Such is not the case with “The Phantom of the Opera,” a story much bigger than its humble origins within the pages of a cheap, 1910 Gothic thriller.

It is a tale of romantic tragedy at its finest. A grotesquely disfigured musical genius is madly in love with Christine, an aspiring opera starlet. The young singer is in love with her charming beaux, Raoul, but finds herself at once enthralled and horrified by the man who gave her a first taste of sensuality. And a man with the face of a monster, who is so close to a long denied love and yet, is rejected and tormented because of his ugliness. Taking place in the Paris Opera House only heightens the melodrama.

The Phantom first appeared on the screen in 1925. Played by Lon Chaney, he was the embodiment of repulsion, his face little more than a warped scull, embedded with really nasty teeth. The film was intended to thrill, the Phantom portrayed as a predatory figure of horror. But in moments of almost pathetic, almost feline virility, Chaney manages to arouse in us a feeling of pity. However, in attempting to disturb, the film skims over the enthralling qualities that drew Christine and Leroux’s readers to the Phantom in the first place. It is undoubtedly melodramatic, but lacks passion.

In 1988, after several uneventful remakes of the film, “The Phantom of the Opera” opened on Broadway as a musical adapted by Andrew Lloyd Webber, starring Michael Crawford as the Phantom and Webber’s then wife, Sarah Brightman, as Christine. The story leapt to life as if it had been waiting for a commanding soundtrack and multi-million dollar production fee to put the wind in its sails. Crawford was mesmerizing, alluring, tender, and frightening. He requested that the costume designer make his sleeves shorter to create the illusion of elongated hands, which he moved with a haunting grace, sweeping with music, twirling a cloak, caressing Christine’s gentle body.

The show rapidly and rightfully became a cultural phenomenon. As the chandelier made it’s infamous, electrifying sweep from ceiling to stage at the end of act one, audiences literally clung onto their seats in a moment of breathless, thrilling terror. The theater was where the Phantom was born, and where he belonged.

Of course, it was only a matter of time before stage became screen once more. In 2004 Joel Schumacher’s rendition of the musical hit the cinemas. Emmy Rossum, a young ingénue not unlike Christine, played the Phantom’s love interest. Gerard Butler was cast as the Phantom of the new era: rock-star voice, Gothic Belle Époque underground bachelor pad, swarthy wardrobe, and devastatingly sexy in every way. With the advent of the stage production, every conscious woman in America was already dead gone on the dark appeal of the Phantom. Making the face beneath the mask ugly may as well have been a matter of formality.

Not bad for someone hiding from a world that hated him.

I Have A Feeling We're Not In Disneyland Anymore

Through films we can gaze into our world through a window, examine ourselves, delight ourselves, and captivate ourselves. But with animation, we can experience entirely new worlds, the stuff of which is often beyond our wildest flights of fancy (or fear).

“The Triplets of Belleville” pushes the limits of creativity. In it we are transported to the lurid land of Belleville through the travels of an elderly granny, her dog, and a trio of outdated singers on a quest to retrieve a young bicyclist, abducted by the French Mafia. It is an undoubtedly peculiar story, told almost entirely without dialogue. Perhaps that is best, as the visuals are more than capable of speaking for themselves.

In Belleville, everyone is a caricature. Even their rendition of the statue of liberty mimics one of the culture’s many misdemeanors. It is an unsettlingly foreign place filled with creepy, almost nauseating people. These are the kind of characters who are funny in a way that invokes nervous giggles rather than buoyant laughter. Everyone seems to have been steeped in cigarette smoke and melancholy and they send shivers of curious fear down the spine as they leer out at you from the alleys behind their grimy apartment buildings.

A work of satirical environmental fiction, “The Triplets of Belleville” evokes a feeling of culture shock. The bourgeoisie are represented as sinister wine snobs with grotesquely bloated wine-sniffing noses and long cigarettes clenched between fetid teeth. Their minions include a waiter who has been so accustomed to his position that he has taken to bending over backwards to gratify, literally, and a squat, mousy fellow who bears a striking resemblance to a certain renowned animator. The lowerclassmen who lurk in the dingy streets are no less unsettling.

The movie is so weirdly dark, it is almost easy to miss the humor. But it is all humor, really, from the giddy parade accordion player who holds up traffic by getting jammed between her perch atop a bus and the ceiling of a tunnel, to the triplets’ unconventional (if practical) method for getting dinner. It is comedy so pitch black we are almost afraid to laugh at it.

The film opens with a sequence poking fun at the entertainment industry and the people who enjoy it. It also gives us a look at The Triplets during their golden days and their home before they became sour with time and corruption. Not that it was Candyland to begin with. This episode is reminiscent of Americana city life, hinted at by its early Disney-esque style and greyscale-induced nostalgia of times gone by.

But things have changed. The good-looking former starlets are now musty. Their majestic stage has morphed into the corners of smoke-filled nightclubs, their voices now creaky, their instruments are everyday curiosities. As they ride off into the night, the horizon peppered with neon and garbage-bin fires, we escape from the eerie, tarnished, realm of Belleville and back into our world; a place perhaps now a little more familiar and a little more estranged.

A Good Relationship Can Survive Friendship But Not Vise Versa

There are two standard rules that apply to all romance movies: If the characters start out hating each other, they will end up loving each other. If they start out loving each other, see the inverse of rule number one. In “When Harry Met Sally,” a wrench is thrown in the gears of this cinematic romance tradition: friendship.

When we first meet Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan), they are ambitious youngsters, sharing a drive to New York where they will make their dreams reality. They have just met, Harry is a laid-back, shaggy-haired, somewhat arrogant dude and Sally is a “high-maintenance” goody-two-shoe who doesn’t like to eat in between meals. We are immediately plunged into scenario one of the “romantic movie guidelines”.

After somehow surviving the five hour car trip, Harry and Sally part ways, presumably forever… until they bump into each other in one of those coincidences that only occurs in a Nora Ephron movie. They are less than overjoyed to see one another, but continue right where they left off, discussing how male-female friendships are a thing of fiction because impure motives tend to get in the way. Consequently, they spend the next several years together in an honest-to-goodness, non-sexual friendship.

Whether in friendship or in love, the chemistry between Crystal and Ryan is utterly endearing. Even though we know they will make it together in the end, the “I love you because…” speech still gives us a charge because we have been rooting for them all along. It is the perfect movie relationship with just enough fighting to keep them real and just enough witty one-liners to keep them entertaining.

“When Harry Met Sally” is not a serious movie, but it is a brilliant one, precisely because it doesn’t take its self too seriously. It knows when it is being clichéd and it does so with a dash of subtle tongue-in-cheek humor. It knows it is predictable, so it doesn’t get too far ahead of its self. It prefers to study the mechanics of male-female relationships, it understands how they work, and it concurrently embraces them and pokes fun at them.

Romance in the movie world (and in Nora Ephron’s opus, for that matter) is a strangely familiar, yet not quite identical parallel universe. Characters always say the things we kick ourselves for not thinking of, comedy is balanced with tenderness rather than sadness, and, in split-second moments of realization, characters will run across town just to say “I love you.” Billy Crystal is huggably deadpan, if ever anyone was, and Meg Ryan actually makes ugly ‘80s clothes look good. But it is an honest and a simple movie. It stays in its comfort zone and does not aim to shatter any glass cielings. “When Harry Met Sally” knows it’s a romantic comedy and doesn’t try to be anything more than that. Unlike lesser films of the genre, it doesn’t have to.

Some Things Never Change

When we first meet “Baby Jane” she is the perfect ideal of innocence and youth. She is a child performer complete with the bouncy blond curls and an eerily realistic look-alike doll sold as a souvenir at her shows. Lurking backstage is her rather bland older sister Blanche, gazing on enviously as Jane basks in the attention. But once the curtain falls, Jane constantly reminds her family that big tempers can come in small packages.
Jump ahead several years and it’s Blanche’s (Joan Crawford) turn in the spotlight while Jane (Bette Davis) struggles to get an audience for her second-rate movies. But the tide turns once again when an accident involving a car and a wrought iron gate leaves Blanche paralyzed from the waist down. Her life from then on is spent confined in a wheelchair in her bedroom under the thumb of her condescending alcoholic sister.
Pale in comparison to Davis’s boisterous performance, Crawford opts for a more subtle resolve in her character’s demeanor. Quietly, she plays the frightened victim as she desperately attempts to break open the shell of her confined world.
In contrast, Jane, whose claustrophobia strikes deeper than the confines of a bedroom, becomes delusional as she attempts to summon the happiness of her childhood. Her makeup appears to have been applied with a putty knife, and her tangled white hair is twisted into frizzy ringlets, a throwback to her earlier years. Her haggard body is nearly always swathed in girlish lacey dresses. She moves about the house like a sloth in a rage, but in moments of nostalgia, she lapses back into the lightly tripping step of her glory days. She only finds pleasure in tormenting her sister.
Blanche is maddeningly passive in the face of her sister’s cruelty. As Jane sardonically forces her own anguish and claustrophobia on Blanche, Blanche keeps a level head and never loses her soft manner of speech. While Jane’s cruelty and anger toward her sister grow, Blanche develops a weak surrender but her discreet tenacity remains unscathed. Why does she wish to remain alive in a world where she is at the mercy of her sister’s cruel hand?
As Blanche becomes weaker and weaker and Jane becomes more and more unbalanced, the film careens into a tension-breaking plot twist. It is not startling, nor does it have any real effect on the sisters. They are so far gone, emotional impact is met with neutrality.
Blanche may be portrayed as good hearted, yet frail prey, but who is the real sadist here? Jane violently takes out her angst on her sister, but what is it that wears away at Jane’s brain taking her to the border of insanity? Where does Blanche find her strength as her sister loses her marbles one by one? What kept Jane from becoming a celebrity into adulthood? What kept the social butterfly locked in a cage? These are two sisters who fight fire with fire until they both burn themselves out.