Day: May 11, 2016

I respect the scheme and intent of Christi Puiu‘s Sieranevada, which I saw last night at the Salle Debussy, but I felt constantly under-nourished throughout the 173-minute length, and I’m afraid that translates into a no-go. And I’m saying that as a genuine admirer of the Romanian cinema aesthetic — austere, raw behavior as opposed to “acting”, long takes. I wasn’t miserable as I sat there, but there’s no way I’ll sit through it again. No. Fucking. Way.

Sieranevada is about a truckload of sullen, pissed-off behavior and enough indoor cigarette smoking to send an Olympic athlete into intensive care, but there’s too little beef. I heard someone mutter “frustrating” as everyone was shuffling out; the words I had in mind were “opaque” and “somewhat draining.”

Sieranevada is a smart film with a bold approach, but it’s not going to satisfy your boilerplate American arthouse audience, I can tell you. It’s no Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days and it’s no Tuesday, Before Christmas either.

What did I actually get from it? I was reminded how great it can be to not have to deal with a large family. And I learned what a difficult thing it can be to find a parking spot in Bucharest without blocking someone or parking in someone else’s space and getting into a heated, nearly violent argument with the owner.

Basic Sieranevada message (apart from the basic one about families accelerating or intensifying the aging process and draining your soul): Don’t own a car, take public transportation.

Mostly occuring in a too-small, over-stuffed apartment in Budapest, Sieranevada is a real-time capturing of a family’s memorial gathering for a recently deceased uncle. The main character is a burly, graybeard doctor named Lary (Mimi Branescu) and Laura, his shrewish, high-strung wife (Catalina Moga) who doesn’t attend in order to hit the post office before 4 pm and then buy groceries at the local Carrefour.

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Woody Allen‘s Cafe Society is an attractively composed period dramedy (a few laughs but hardly a torrent) that plays it mild and steady and familiar. But it’s a fine Woody hit-list thing with a compelling if familiar moral undertow. There’s no way anyone who’s even half-acquainted with the Allen realm is going to be disappointed. Is it a bust-out in the vein of Midnight in Paris? No, but it’ll do until the next one comes along. It’s fine, it’s good — just don’t expect any big surprises.

Set in Los Angeles and New York over a two-year period in the mid ’30s, Cafe Society is a romantic triangle piece mixed with a hard-knocks, get-tough saga. It’s witty more than funny, but it’s really great when the laughs land. How many good laughs does it have? Not more than 20 or 25. I laughed maybe 10 or 12 times but I didn’t mind because it’s not about hah-hah but about fuck-me.

It’s a romance-gone-wrong thing that deals with sadness, moral ambiguity, disappointment. It’s too mired in hurt to be called a light-touch thing, but it does kind of glide along in a way that lets you know nothing awful or grotesque will occur.

It’s the story of Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg), a young Jewish guy who comes out to Hollywood in 1936 to ask his hotshot agent uncle (Steve Carell) for a job, and who soon falls in love with Carell’s romantically entangled secretary Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), only to gradually discover that her admitted-to relationship is not with a “journalist”, as she tells Bobby, but with fucking Uncle Phil.

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“In short, Luca Guadagnino has made something rare and disconcerting: a genuinely pagan film. It rejoices not just in nudity, male and female, but in the classical notion of figures in a landscape, and of the earth itself demanding frenzied worship. That is why Harry (Ralph Fiennes), having put on a Rolling Stones LP, begins to dance to ‘Emotional Rescue’ and then, clearly fettered by interior space, bursts out onto the rooftop and continues his display under a scorching haze. Who would have thought that an Englishman, of all people, would prove to be such a natural Dionysian?

“A Bigger Splash is fiercely unrelaxing, and impossible to ignore. You emerge from it restive and itchy, as though a movie screen could give you sunburn, and the story defies resolution. Penelope (Dakota Johnson), the youngest of the group, remains the hardest to fathom, and provides a final twist. None of the four could be described as affable. Yet they all seem dangerously alive, in their indolence as in their rutting, and even the speechless Marianne (Tilda Swinton) is able to enunciate, through gasps and gestures, the storm of her body’s needs and her heart’s complaint. The isle is full of noises, and they won’t die down.” — from Anthony Lane‘s recently-posted review of A Bigger Splash.

“To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite ‘universes’ presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.” — Watchmen author Alan Moore speaking to Slovoboooks’ Pdraig O Méaloid in January 2014 interview.