Review: Zoolander 2 (2016)

* 1/2
Director: Ben Stiller
Starring: Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Penelope Cruz

As a wise man once said, "Sometimes dead is better." Sometimes, even if a movie is really funny, and even if it has gone on to become one of the defining pieces of pop culture of its era, its quotes instantly recognizable, its protagonist iconic, it's best to just leave it in that cultural moment and be happy with what you've got. Some movies are perfect just as they are, their endings the perfect cap to their stories, and even if those movies grow in popularity as the years go on, finding and expanding their audience, it's best to just let things be rather than try to recreate the magic more than a decade after the fact, when tastes have changed and the finger is no longer quite on the pulse. Anchorman is a great comedy. Anchorman: The Legend Continues? That's only okay. Zoolander is a perfectly funny movie. Zoolander 2? Hot garbage. Bad Santa better hope the third time's the charm.

Review: The Counselor (2013)

* * 1/2
Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz, Brad Pitt, Penelope Cruz

It's easy to see why Ridley Scott's The Counselor landed with such a thud (both critical and commercial) when it arrived in theaters last fall. It's an aggressively inaccessible film, savagely violent in some places, thick with talk in most places. I admire the film for its confidence; mainstream films (and given its cast and its director, The Counselor qualifies as mainstream), even the good ones, usually seem like they've been put together by committee, designed to appeal to as many people as possible, but The Counselor has the courage to be its own animal and do its own thing. It's bold, it's fascinating, and it doesn't entirely work, but when it fails it does so on its own terms and there aren't a ton of movies you can say that about.

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: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011)

* * *
Director: Rob Marshall
Starring: Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Geoffrey Rush, Ian McShane

My history with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is, admittedly, incomplete. I saw The Curse of the Black Pearl during its theatrical run and loved it. I saw Dead Man's Chest when it was out on DVD and remember almost nothing about it except that there was a sword fight that went on for, like, an hour. I never bothered to see At World's End. So what compelled me to see On Stranger Tides? I dunno. Seemed like the thing to do, I guess. Verdict: It was all right. I liked it but I don't feel terribly enthusiastic about it. Nice Judi Dench cameo, though.

Review: Broken Embraces

* * * *
Director: Pedro Almodovar
Starring: Penelope Cruz

All artists are influenced by those who came before them. Some fold these influences deep into their art while others happily celebrate it at the surface. Pedro Almodovar is of the latter school as is exuberantly and abundantly apparent in his latest film Broken Embraces. Beautiful looking and wonderfully crafted, the film is like a love letter not just to the directors whose work Almodovar admires, but to his frequent collaborator Penelope Cruz as well. With Broken Embraces taking its place alongside Talk To Her, Bad Education and Volver, Almodovar brings to a close a decade a filmmaking that any director would admire.

Like many of Almodovar’s films, this one jumps back and forth in time. The story is recounted to us by Harry Caine (Lluis Homar), a writer who, before losing his sight, was a film director by the name of Mateo Blanco. After an unsettling encounter with a man named Ray X (Ruben Ochandiano), who wants to hire Harry to write a screenplay for him, Harry tells his friend Diego (Tamar Novas) about the last time he and Ray X met. In flashbacks we meet Harry when he was still Mateo, preparing to direct a film called “Girls and Suitcases” (loosely based on Almodovar’s own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). The film is to be a departure for him, a comedy after a series of dramas, and one day Lena (Penelope Cruz) shows up at his office hoping to audition for the lead role. The audition doesn’t go well, but Mateo is drawn to Lena and gives her the part. For years she has been the mistress of Ernesto Martel (Jose Luis Gomez), who agrees to finance the film as a means of keeping tabs on Lena and ensuring that she won’t leave him. As part of his plan he dispatches his son, Ernesto Jr. (who will later become Ray X) to be his eyes on the set, ostensibly as the maker of a making-of documentary on the film.

Inevitably Mateo and Lena fall in love. Every night Ernesto watches the footage his son has shot on set, hiring a lip reader to tell him what Mateo and Lena are saying when they’re out of range. These scenes, which expose the intensity of Ernesto’s obsession with Lena, also reveal to us how thoroughly he sees her as an object rather than a person. When she walks in on him watching the latest “secret” footage of her and recites in person what she’s saying to the camera, he would rather watch her onscreen than turn around and watch her live and in the flesh. What is happening onscreen represents his worst fears but it also represents something that he can control – he can pause it, rewind it, erase it and, most important of all, it stays where it is. The images onscreen are mirages that he can make disappear at will – or so he would like to believe.

Almodovar makes allusions to several other films in this one including Belle de Jour (an alias that Lena uses is Severine, the name of the main character in Bunuel’s film) and Peeping Tom, a film about a man who videotapes his murder victims. The man with the camera in this case is Ernesto Jr., but rather than killing people as he films them, he ends up saving someone while filming them. Almodovar also borrows from Vertigo in several ways, most obviously in a shot of Mateo running down a flight of stairs and also in the naming of Lena, short for Madelena (the object of obsession in Hitchcock’s film is named Madeleine). Thematically it also has a lot in common with the earlier film in that both are about one character trying to make another into what he wants them to be. The architect in this scenario is Ernesto Sr., but Lena is not the only Madeleine figure, though she is the most obvious. He plays a similar game with his son, who is gay but finds himself enacting a pattern of compulsory heterosexuality set out by his father which leaves him miserable and full of hate for the older man. Mateo, too, is a Madeleine figure in that Ernesto Sr.’s actions serve to rob him of his identity, necessitating the permanent creation of Harry Caine as a personality rather than just an alias.

Broken Embraces marks the fourth feature film collaboration between Almodovar and Cruz and though it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Volver (which admittedly set the bar very high) it’s still one of the best films in either of their filmographies. Almodovar’s adoration of Cruz is always apparent – I don’t think she’s ever more lovingly photographed than in his films – and her best performances are the ones guided by his direction. Here he gives her a character whose identity is always shifting and she excels, cycling through Lena’s personas with ease and giving us multiple variations on a single character. Her sensuous, subtle performance is the perfect centrepiece for the story, making it easy to understand why the men in her life are so totally consumed with her. The performance is the jewel in the crown that is the film.

Review: Nine (2009)

* *
Director: Rob Marshall
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Judi Dench, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, Sophia Loren, Fergie

Oh, Nine, you disappointed me. Maybe it's my own fault because I had such high expectations for so long, but why shouldn't I have had high expectations? The cast is phenomenal, it's based on both a popular play and a classic film, and it's directed by Rob Marshall, whose feature film debut Chicago I loved (seriously, I will defend its win for Best Picture to the death). So what went wrong? Maybe it's a case of too many good things in one place, but make no mistake: something has gone terribly, terribly wrong here.

The film is an adaptation of the stage play that is itself an adaptation of Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ and follows director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he struggles to pull his next film together. Sets have been built, costumes are being made, screen tests are being performed, interviews about the impending work have been conducted; the only thing missing is a script. Contini is blocked, hindered by the failure of his most recent films and driven to distraction by the women in his life; he just can’t pull himself together long enough to find inspiration and put it down on paper.

Now, about those women: there’s his wife Luisa (Marion Cotillard), once a great actress but now just his support system; his mistress Carla (Penelope Cruz); his muse Claudia (Nicole Kidman); his confidante/wardrobe mistress Lilli (Judi Dench); his mother (Sophia Loren); and an American reporter (Kate Hudson) determined to get an exclusive, of sorts, with him. There is also Seraghina (Fergie), the local prostitute of his childhood memories who still sparks his imagination. Now, when I first saw the cast list for this film and read Day-Lewis, Cotillard, Cruz, Dench, Loren, Kidman, Hudson and Fergie, my first thought was something along the lines of, “one of these things is not like the others.” Let it be said, however, that Fergie’s brief time on screen the only time when the film really seems to come alive and her number, “Be Italian,” is the only one with any genuine fire in it (though Cruz gives it the old college try with “A Call From The Vatican”). The film’s biggest problem, ultimately, is that aside from “Be Italian,” none of the musical numbers is particularly memorable. Not a good sign for a musical.

The other problem, one which might not be so glaring if the music itself was stonger, is that the characters don't have much in the way of depth. We get to know Guido pretty well and Cotillard is given enough time to etch out a moderately distinct character (truth be told, the only resonant moments in the film are in the scenes between Day-Lewis and Cotillard), but the others are as thin as paper. In dress and manner Carla is the antithesis of Luisa - that's apparently all we need to know about her in order to understand her relationship with Guido. What is it about Claudia that inspires Guido so? What are we supposed to take away from Guido's flirtation with the sycophantic reporter? Nine depends on the audience to respond to the actors rather than the characters so that you fill in the blanks by saying, "Guido is drawn to Carla because she's Penelope Cruz; Guido is inspired by Claudia because she's Nicole Kidman; Guido flirts with the reporter because she's Kate Hudson; etc." This isn't the fault of the actors; it's because, metaphorically speaking, the film is too busy looking down at its feet and counting the steps to invest itself in the moment and create a genuine foundation for its glossy, beautiful surface. It all looks amazing but it never relaxes enough to become anything more than an assemblage of parts.

Structurally, Nine is quite similar to Chicago, with the musical numbers taking place on a stage in the imagination of the protagonist. This worked marvellously in the earlier film, but here it feels disruptive and a bit clunky. What's the difference? Roxie Hart was a spunky gal with delusions of grandeur; Guido Contini is a brooding genius who can't find happiness despite having everything available to him for the asking. Aside from the fact that Roxie is a more relatable/sympathetic character (everyone, at one point or another, has imagined being a "star" of some sort), there's also the fact that a story about wanting something has more and better energy than a story about having everything and still being unhappy. Chicago was fun and had a lot of bite to it; Nine is gloomy and kind of aimless - to be honest, there were times when I was actually quite bored with it. Like I said, it looks good (the cinematography, in particular, is gorgeous) and there are a few good moments scattered throughout (there would have to be with that much talent in front of and behind the camera), but it's ultimately a failure as a film.

Review: Elegy (2008)

* * *
Director: Isabel Coixet
Starring: Ben Kingsley, Penelope Cruz

Elegy is a meditative and thoroughly adult movie from director Isabel Coixet. Though the subject matter doesn’t necessarily break new ground – older man involved with younger woman or, to be more specific, professor involved with student – the film does give it some interesting twists. Mostly, though, this is an actors’ movie and the performances on display here make it worth a look.

The story is related to us by David (Ben Kingsley), a professor and minor literary celebrity who fears commitment and has spent his adult life jumping from fling to fling, save for a long-term (albeit sporadic) relationship with Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson), a former student. When Consuela (Penelope Cruz) enters his class, it seems to be a matter of course that they will end up in bed together – he’s been here many times, although this particular time it will be different. For one thing, he realizes that Consuela won’t just jump into bed with him, he’ll have to work for it, something which he chalks up to old fashioned/old world mentality stemming from the fact that she’s a Cuban immigrant. This old fashioned quality of hers may be nothing more than a projection on his part given later revelations regarding her sexual history, but then he spends much of their relationship projecting his desires and anxieties onto her to his own detriment.

In the battle between desire and anxiety, anxiety wins with ease. David is aware of himself as an older man, spends much of his time imagining Consuela leaving him for another and younger man and the rest of his time keeping her firmly at arm’s length. His friend, George (Dennis Hopper), himself familiar with liaisons with younger women, encourages him to simply call an end to it since it’s bound to end anyway, but David can’t bring himself to let go. Eventually, though, Consuela decides that she must and her departure marks a turning point in David’s life.

Elegy is a good movie that somehow never propels itself into greatness. The story is, for the most part, solid but there are problems. The first, say, twenty minutes are frontloaded with the kind of explanatory conversations which should be unnecessary between people who have known each other for decades. The thing I’ve always liked about movies by Robert Altman is that he never subjects his characters to the kind of conversations which exist only for the convenience of the audience. David and Carolyn have been involved for decades, she’s aware of the issues which exist between him and his son (Peter Saarsgaard), so why should he feel the need to spell things out to her? This is a minor problem; the big problem is with pacing. The film unfolds at a thoughtful pace which occasionally slows to a drag, especially towards the end which dampens the emotional impact of the film’s conclusion.

Despite these issues, Elegy is overall quite engaging, due primarily to its wealth of great performances. Clarkson, Saarsgaard and Hopper all shine in supporting roles (especially Hopper), and Kingsley is flawless as David, delivering one of his finest performances. It’s Cruz, however, who really owns the movie. At first I had some doubts about her in the role, but she brings a grace and self-confidence to Consuela which is absolutely necessary and which a younger actress might not have been able to supply. Between this film and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Cruz is having a banner year and hopefully she will continue to make interesting choices which allow her to show off different facets of her abilities.

Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

* * * 1/2
Director: Woody Allen
Starring: Scarlett Johnansson, Rebecca Hall, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz

There’s something comforting to me about those familiar white on black titles that begin every Woody Allen film. Seeing them, I know that I’m about to enter a world where the people (most of them, anyway) speak intelligently, have interesting ideas, and prove that you can be the smartest person in the world but still be a complete idiot when it comes to relationships. Sometimes – especially lately – the promise contained in those opening titles is disappointed and sometimes it is not. Vicky Cristina Barcelona is perhaps not destined to become a classic like Annie Hall or Manhattan, but I still walked out of it very happy.

Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Christina (Scarlett Johnasson) are two Americans spending the summer in Barcelona. Vicky, who is engaged, is working on her Master’s thesis about Catalan culture and Christina is more or less just along for the ride. They meet a painter named Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) who invites them to spend the weekend with him. Vicky is appalled by his forwardness, but Christina is intrigued and talks her into accepting his offer. After an evening of wine and oysters, Christina falls ill, leaving Vicky and Juan Antonio to their own devices, which results in them spending the night together. Later, after guilt has caused Vicky to retreat back into her studies, Juan Antonio and Christina pick up where they left off. Soon, however, another woman moves into the picture to disrupt the harmony of their relationship – Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), Juan Antonio’s ex-wife.

The story plays out as a series of couplings and uncouplings, simultaneous couplings and unrequited couplings. When he first encounters Vicky and Christina, Juan Antonio explains to them that life is meaningless, love fleeting, that the moment and the moment alone is worth living for. The film itself seems to follow this philosophy, as various characters find themselves dissatisfied in their relationships and flirting with the possibility of beginning new ones, only to find something lacking in these new relationships as well. If there is any one message in the film, I suppose it’s that there’s no such thing as perfect, lasting happiness, and that all things are transitory.

The performances in the film are uniformly good and reminded me of something which I often find myself thinking after seeing a Woody Allen film, which is that of all directors working today, I think he’s the most consistently great at directing women and giving them interesting characters to play. Christina is a dilettante who has adopted the role of the “free spirit” with all its inherent clichés, but ultimately doesn’t really know herself yet, and Johansson plays all these notes to perfection. Maria Elena is a tempestuous artist who perhaps plays up that tempestuousness because she’s an artist and it’s expected of her, and when Cruz enters the fray the polite energy of the film changes completely and new dimensions are given to the story. Vicky is the kind of woman who will (almost) always do exactly what is expected of her because, as she herself admits, she lacks the courage to be more like Christina. As Vicky, Hall was the biggest surprise for me – Cruz has been getting the lion’s share of the attention for the film, but Hall is just as worthy, making her character, who might simply have been the shrill stick in the mud, effortlessly relatable and likeable.

I enjoyed Vicky Cristina Barcelona a great deal, though I concede that it isn’t a masterpiece. There is a narrator who intrudes throughout to tie the details together, which has the effect of making this the cinematic equivalent of a particularly well-written summer beach read. It’s light and breezy, easily consumed and not especially challenging, but the perfect complement to a lazy summer day.