Netflix Originals Marathon: Tallulah (2016)

* * *
Director: Sian Heder
Starring: Ellen Page, Allison Janney

Midway through Tallulah the eponymous character imagines the world without gravity, a sudden shift that finds everyone just floating up into the air, untethered to everything below. Having spent most of her young life drifting around the United States, and having lost whatever connection to others she once had after being abandoned as a child, she's already the definition of untethered - beholden to no one, nothing to hold her back - and yet as she describes the scene, she insists that she would grab onto something and stay connected to the earth down below. Because what is there if there isn't connection? Easily the best of the films I've watched for this marathon, Sian Heder's Tallulah is a thoughtfully told tale that manages to have compassion and understanding for even its most broken characters.

Canadian Film Review: Into the Forest (2016)

* * 1/2
Director: Patricia Rozema
Starring: Ellen Page, Evan Rachel Wood

If all technological infrastructure (which, at this point in time, is basically all infrastructure) were to fall in an instant, how long would you keep holding out hope that it will come back and life will resume as normal? A week? A month? Surely not a year and change. Honestly, even a month sounds like pushing it, no matter how naive you might be. I suppose that was at the heart of my problem with Into the Forest, an intimate portrait of the apocalypse. I can buy that one would cling to the normal and the familiar for comfort for a while, but at a certain point you have to concede, because time has passed and because you've seen first-hand how things were already coming apart after only a few days, that your old way of life is gone, so you should probably stop spending so much time rehearsing for that damn dance audition that's never going to happen and start devoting more time to figuring out your food and shelter situations.

Review: Freeheld (2015)

* *
Director: Peter Sollett
Starring: Julianne Moore, Ellen Page, Michael Shannon

Freeheld, based on the Academy Award winning documentary short film of the same name, is the sort of film that is perhaps most generously described as "well meaning." It takes on an important subject that, despite its events taking place 10 years ago, was still more than relevant at the time of its theatrical release last fall, thanks to the US Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage, and aims to be a rousing and powerful depiction of our continuing march towards equality. At times it is a rousing and powerful film. More often, though, it's a film that doesn't even actually seem all that interested in the two women who were the subject of that original documentary which makes the feature possible, and instead reduces them to being catalysts for the male characters around them to take action and bring about change and/or wrestle with their own personal feelings as they try to decide whether or not they want to be on the right side of history. Julianne Moore and Ellen Page are really good as the two women in question, but the film really gives them short shrift.

Review: To Rome with Love (2012)

* *
Director: Woody Allen
Starring: Alec Baldwin, Penelope Cruz, Roberto Benigni, Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page, Woody Allen

The problem with the current phase of Woody Allen’s career is that when you sit down to watch his latest, you never know if you’re going to get a Midnight in Paris or a Whatever Works. While To Rome with Love is nowhere near as aggressively terrible as the latter of those, it has a frustratingly half-baked feeling to it that seriously detracts from whatever genuine pleasures the film can be said to contain. Basically: great cast and great scenery, but both utterly wasted.

Review: Inception (2010)

* * * *
Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ken Watanabe

Thank God for Inception because, other than a couple of smaller movies in limited release, this has been a very uneventful summer for me, movie-wise. Fortunately Inception was worth waiting for, as it's a smart, slick movie that engages the mind as much as the eye.

The story takes place at an unspecified time in the future when technology allows for shared dreaming and shared dreaming allows thieves to break into a person's subconscious to steal information. One such thief is Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) who is attempting in the film's opening minutes to extract information from a man named Saito (Ken Watanabe). The job is unsuccessful but Saito is so impressed with Cobb's work that he offers him a new opportunity. Maurice Fisher (Pete Postlethwaite), a powerful tycoon, is on his death bed and his son, Robert (Cillian Murphy), is about the inherit his empire. Saito wants Cobb and his team to venture into Robert's unconscious and plant the idea of selling off the pieces of his father's business. Though his partner, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), insists that it can't be done, Cobb is persuaded to take the job after Saito informs him that he can pull some strings which would allow Cobb to return to the U.S., where he's currently a wanted man.

Cobb puts together a team which includes Arthur, Eames (Tom Hardy), a forger capable of assuming someone else's identity in dreams, and Ariadne (Ellen Page), the architect who will design the dreams. Since inception is more complicated than extraction, the process will involve dreams within dreams within dreams and since each dream level is more unstable than the last, the team also includes Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a chemist who can make a compound that will allow them to submerge themselves deep enough to enter the lower levels. The team goes under but almost immediately things begin to go awry. For one thing, Fischer has been trained to fight attempts at extraction and his subconscious fights back fiercely against the invaders. For another, Cobb is dragging along a lot of baggage in his own subconscious that threatens to derail the entire operation.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Inception is a labyrinth of ideas, the density of which makes this a particularly ambitious film. Using Ariadne - who is new to the process of shared dreaming - as a surrogate for the audience, Nolan methodically sets up the rules of the unconscious state in the film's first half and then plunges us into action in the second half as level upon level upon level of unconsciousness first open out of each other and then collapse in. There is the threat that the characters will go too deep, that they'll submerge themselves so far that they'll be trapped in the unconscious indefinitely or that they'll no longer be able to tell reality from the dream state. Both risks are associated with Cobb who has essentially been to the other side and come back, though the things he left behind constantly threaten to pull him back. The final scene is ambiguous and already scores of theories have been put forth as possible explanations; this is a film that is obviously inspiring a lot of discussion and thought and I think that it's worthy of all of that effort.

The film has been described as "cold" by some critics and while I agree that it's cold, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Stanley Kubrick's films are cold and his coldest - 2001: A Space Odyssey which Nolan references here - is widely considered one of the highest achievements in film history. Besides which, I think coldness is entirely appropriate given the subject. If our unconscious is home to our baser instincts and our consciousness is tempered by our humanity, doesn't it make sense that it would get colder the deep you go? Just a thought.

Other criticisms of the film are, I think, more legitimate. There is a heavy handedness in terms of the naming of characters (aside from Ariadne there's also Mal, French for "bad" and the name of Cobb's destructive projection) and aside from Cobb, none of the characters is really fleshed out (though even that isn't necessarily a criticism, depending on your theory about the film). Still, Inception is an engrossing and often challenging film that makes up for whatever weaknesses it might have through the sheer force of its many strengths. I think it's safe to say that with this film and the rebooted Batman franchise under his belt, Nolan has a blank check to do whatever crazy shit he wants for the next ten years at least.

Review: Whip It (2009)

* * *
Director: Drew Barrymore
Starring: Ellen Page, Kristen Wiig, Juliette Lewis, Drew Barrymore


… Whip it good! Pardon me, that should be Whip It is good. The directorial debut from Drew Barrymoore is a colorful and vastly enjoyable piece of Hollywood candy about a girl, her skates, and her intense desire not to get knocked on her ass. The film may not aspire to much more than entertaining its audience, but it succeeds at doing so with ease and provides a platform for some very funny ladies – Ellen Page, Barrymoore herself, Kristen Wiig, and Maeby Funke! I mean, Alia Shawcat – to show that comedy isn’t just for boys.

In a small Texas town just outside of Austin, misfit teenager Bliss Cavendar (Page) participates in beauty pageants at the insistence of her mother (Marcia Gay Harden), waitresses at the Oink Joint, and waits for something good to happen. That good thing comes in the form of a roller derby flyer that inspires her to sneak off to Austin with her best friend Pash (Shawcat), and then to try out for the derby herself. She digs out her old Barbie roller skates (suspend disbelief enough not to ask how it is that her Barbie skates still fit) and makes the cut, earning a place on the Hurl Scouts team captained by Maggie Mayhem (Wiig). The rest of the team is made up on Smashley Simpson (Barrymoore), Rosa Sparks (Eve), Bloody Holly (Zoe Bell) and the Manson Sisters (Eli Bleiler and Kristen Adolfi).

Bliss renames herself Babe Ruthless and proves to be an asset in terms of speed, though she’s lacking when it comes to aggression. The Hurl Scouts are the fifth ranked team in a five team league and have never won a single match until Bliss comes on the scene and as such her skill does not go unnoticed, particularly by Iron Maven (Juliette Lewis), the captain of the champion Holy Roller team. Bliss becomes Iron Maven’s mortal enemy and all the usual sports rivalry clichés ensue, wrapping themselves around the film and the characters like a comfortable old sweater. As a director Barrymoore doesn’t break any new ground but I think her talent can be measured by the fact that she guides the film so effortlessly through the hoops of time-worn plot points. Yes, we can see certain developments coming from miles away but the film never feels clunky and it has great energy even though the action scenes could use a bit more finesse.

I’ve seen the word “empowering” applied to this movie from certain corners and to a degree I suppose that that’s true, not because it’s about Women! Kicking! Ass! but because it’s about different kinds of female experience and identity. Bliss decries her mother’s view of the world as a stale remnant of 1950s gender norms, but her mother isn’t really the “villain” of the piece and the value that she places on things like beauty pageants isn’t really seen as wrong so much as just wrong for Bliss. Bliss’ younger sister, meanwhile, seems to love participating in pageants and at no point does their mother resemble one of those crazy, reality TV “pageant mothers;” she gets to be an actual human being with depth – amazing! At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got the roller girl ethos which combines a hyper femininity (lots of makeup, revealing clothes, monikers like “Jabba the Slut”) with what is traditionally thought of as a very masculine kind of athleticism. The film doesn’t argue that either vision of womanhood is universally right or wrong, but that one can be right for some women, the other can be right for others, while some women – like Pash - might choose neither. The film is pro-woman not because it rejects traditional ideas but because it encourages and embraces a variety of experiences and ideas about women.

Once again Page demonstrates that she’s an actress to take note of, playing a character that you might not expect to have as much dimension as she does. I’m very curious to see the way that her career shapes itself once she’s able to move from playing teenagers to playing adults. It’s funny that when the film has Bliss lie about her age so that she can play in the derby, she says that she’s 22, which we’re supposed to think is unbelievable when in reality that is Page’s actual age. At any rate, given that she seems equally at ease in films like this and Juno as well as harder edged films like Hard Candy and The Tracy Fragments, I think it's safe to say that we can expect great things from her in the years to come.

LAMBScore:

Review: Hard Candy (2005)

* * * 1/2
Director: David Slade
Starring: Ellen Page, Patrick Wilson

David Slade’s Hard Candy is an aggressive little gem of a movie that pushes itself – and the audience – to the very edge. It goes places that few films will go and does so with admirable finesse, never allowing its subject matter to overpower the film itself. It is a very carefully constructed and firmly guided film that allows its actors the freedom to explore some of the darkest reaches of human nature. It can, at times, be a difficult film to watch, but it is well worth the effort.

It opens on an online chat between Jeff (Patrick Wilson), a photographer, and Hayley (Ellen Page), a 14-year-old girl, as they make plans to meet in person. They meet over coffee and flirt – he’s confident and says the right things at the right times, she starts off guarded but becomes increasingly bold with him. They go back to his house and dance ever closer to the line. He offers her a drink, which she declines by informing him that she knows better than to accept a drink she didn’t mix herself. She’ll mix the drinks – and prove her point in the process.

When Jeff comes to, he learns of Hayley’s true intentions. She isn’t a naive little girl waiting to be taken advantage of, but rather a kind of vigilante who has been keeping tabs on Jeff and waiting for him to fall into her trap. It isn’t simply that she thinks he’s a pedophile; she also believes that he’s involved in the murder of a teenage girl. What unfolds is a brutal psychological game as Hayley diligently goes through his life, dismantling it and holding a mirror up to it to force him to see it for what it is. Later she reveals her intention to castrate him and encourages him to beg her not to. Jeff’s day only gets worse from here.

Hard Candy runs contrary to the conventions of mainstream storytelling. There are several points where you think that the film has to start pulling back and yet it never does; it just keeps charging forward into darker and darker territory. It runs at a high intensity that builds in a very effective way, starting with the dangerously calm scenes of the initial seduction, to the growing aggression of the later scenes – there is hardly a denouement; it instead ends at the peak. The film – and in particular its actors – ought to be commended for being willing to really go there, but while the plot does get to exactly where it needs to be, there are some problems with the structure of the story. The constant repetition of Jeff almost gaining the upper hand only to get knocked out once again by Hayley becomes a bit tiresome after the third or fourth time that it happens, although the battle between the characters regains some momentum by the end of the film, when there’s a greater sense that it could go either way.

Most of the film consists simply of Wilson and Page, who play off each other well in the various incarnations of their characters. Both begin the film as characters playing characters, later dropping their masks – Jeff slowly, as his carefully constructed persona is stripped away from him and Hayley more quickly, like a band-aid being ripped off. Wilson is fine in his role, particularly towards the end as he watches his entire life unravel before him, but it’s Page who really owns the film. As Hayley she holds nothing back so that you almost end up feeling sorry for Jeff at certain points. It’s another role which shows what an interesting actress she is – unlike any other actress her age that I can think of – and what potential she has to become even better as she continues to grow as an artist. Director David Slade also shows a great deal of promise, his previous work as a director of music videos apparent in the pacing and fast-cutting of the more intense scenes. It’s a high energy film that manages to maintain its momentum right up until the very end and a fascinating study of two unusual characters.

Canadian Film Review: The Tracy Fragments (2007)

* * * 1/2
Director: Bruce McDonald
Starring: Ellen Page

By virtue of its design, The Tracey Fragments is perhaps destined to be divisive. This is a challenging film; one that’s not easily accessible or easy to pin down. It isn’t until the last ten or so minutes that the story really begins to gel, at least according to any traditional understanding of narrative. In this sense, it’s a film that is perhaps best seen twice. The first viewing can be a difficult experience, but subsequent viewings tend to be much smoother.

The story (as best as I can piece it together): Tracey Berkowitz (Ellen Page) is a 15-year-old outcast and loner, picked on and humiliated at school, and tortured at home by the toxic atmosphere created by her bickering parents. The only person she seems to connect with in any positive way is her brother, Sonny, a little boy who believes that he’s a dog. After showing up at school in a skimpy outfit, her father grounds her, which doesn’t stop her from going out. Loyal dog that he is, Sonny follows her and they play fetch with a tennis ball. During their game she becomes distracted by the appearance of a boy from school that she likes, who figures into her fantasies as a rock star named Billy Zero. After Billy leaves, Tracey realizes that she’s lost Sonny. Her determination to find him leads her on a mad quest through the city and eventually to the home a drug dealer, where things go from bad to worse and she finds herself sitting on a bus wearing nothing but her underwear and a shower curtain.

There is hardly a moment when the film doesn’t call attention to itself as a film. Only rarely does a shot take up the entire screen; most often the screen is split into four shots, or one big shot with several smaller shots layered over it. These fractured shot compositions underscore the fragility of Tracey's psyche, reflecting her inner pain and confusion. It could easily be argued that the film is a little too conscious of itself, that the style is overbearing to the point of being just a bit precious. Like I said, the first viewing can be difficult and it wasn’t until it was almost over that I really started to move past the style and be involved in the story.

As Tracey, Ellen Page delivers a strong performance, one that manages to stand out where a lesser actress would have found herself steamrolled by the style and structure of the story. This is a brave performance and Page doesn't hold anything back whether Tracey is enduring cruel humiliation or momentary joy. While the success of Juno might find her typecast for a while as the endearingly sarcastic teen, she's capable of a great deal more and I hope that she's able to find roles which truly showcase the extent of her talents.

I don't know that I can say that I "enjoyed" The Tracey Fragments as such, but I certainly admire the abilities of director Bruce McDonald. A story like this one can be difficult to pull off not only because it requires a lot of work on the part of the audience, but also because it's very limiting in terms of how much story can be told. All that you see is what is in Tracey's mind and it takes a great deal of control to keep other perspectives from invading in order to fill in the blanks or bridge one vignette to another. That this movie works and is able to maintain a purity of perspective is no minor accomplishment.

Review: Juno

There doesn’t seem to be much left to say about Juno. It’s every bit as smart and funny as you’ve heard. It’s well acted, well paced, and definitely worth seeing. It is also, of all the films gunning for Best Picture this year, the one that seems most likely to be on the receiving end of backlash by the time the Oscars actually roll around, and one that is already being politicized in ways the filmmakers probably didn’t intend or anticipate.

Juno centers on 16-year-old Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) who has sex once with her friend Paulie (Michael Cera) and finds herself pregnant. Having decided to keep the baby, and found prospective adoptive parents (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), the film follows Juno through her pregnancy and her attempts to define her relationship with Paulie in light of these recent developments. Director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody present the characters very clearly, not letting any of them lapse into being stupid for the sake of a cheap joke or as a shortcut for propelling the film forward. The characters in this film – from Juno and her friends to her parents – are excellently drawn, fully fleshed in a way that characters in comedies aren’t always allowed to be. Ellen Page is the standout, but Garner, Batement, and J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney (as Juno’s father and stepmother) also give solid performances. Michael Cera is good, too, but he ought to be given that this is the same role he seems to play in everything. Hopefully as his career progresses, he’ll branch out into different kinds of characters.

The film walks a fine line. Some people will find it clever, and others will find it too clever by half, and I worry that the film might ultimately be undone by the amount of goodwill that it has already built up. After months spent hearing how good it is and how funny, I know of a few people who’ve walked out of it claiming that it isn’t that funny. The hype that it’s been building up since it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival has undoubtedly helped it find its audience, but the ensuing Juno lovefest in the media is also probably starting to turn people off or setting people’s expectations too high. This is a great movie, but it isn’t the best movie ever made. This is a great comedy, but not the best comedy ever made.

Hype is one of the reasons why I worry that this movie is a prime contender for backlash, and the other is an aspect of its subject matter. People have already begun to make note that between this film and Knocked Up, 2007 was a year with little room for the pro-choice point-of-view (which, frankly, doesn’t really make it any different from any other year. The only film I can think of in recent years that has actively explored a pro-choice argument was Citizen Ruth, which completely copped out at the end). Juno does consider having an abortion, but the time spent on this decision is brief and the film doesn’t really engage the process of her choice. With the United States going into an election year where the pro-choice/pro-life debate is already a hot button issue, and with the recent announcement of 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears' pregnancy, the excellence of the film might soon be eclipsed by the politics attached to it.

I hope that Juno rises above any problems that politics and media saturation might present, because it really is a wonderful movie. The acting is uniformly good and the story progresses in a way that is very believable, especially in terms of Juno’s relationship with Paulie. The performance by Page and the screenplay by Cody both seem to be givens for Oscar nominations, but hopefully some love with also be shown to the supporting cast, all of whom are given a moment of their own to shine.