ARossMartin Reviews

Harold and Maude (1971)

I wanted to buy it but it was too contrived

[4/10 · 6 November 2006]

I've heard about Harold and Maude from lots of friends. My wife's best friend swears by this film. We finally got around to renting it and although I really wanted to like it, I found it wearying.

It's contrived. I kept trying to imagine what it was like to be a disaffected 20-something in 1971, thinking that the milieu of the times surely contributed to people's inclination to overlook the film's glaring faults and buy its rather forced situation. It wants to be dead-pan and over-the-top at the same time. It wants to be madcap and deadly serious. But it doesn't want to ever take the risk of holding up the two main characters to any kind of standard for three-dimensional behavior.

Let's say we buy that Harold really is as morose and unhappy as his several faked suicide attempts indicate, are we ever shown any other reason other than that he has a reprehensible and insensitive parent? Are we even shown any other ways he has tried or failed to connect with others? Why should we care about this kid? What has he ever done for anyone other than a bunch of cruel pranks?

And as for Maude, why the constant hypomania about "living" and "life!" -- all the feel good thoughts about "trying new things". If that is really true to character for her, why? And if the hints at a dark past are what she's playing off of, then why the decision to end her life rather arbitrarily? We get lots of Cat Stevens in the soundtrack to tell us how to feel when the characters can't. It's pretty paint by numbers in the emotional department. Essentially, it's fairly manipulative -- like any good melodrama -- the only difference being that this has a counter-culture theme running through it.

Good for it. It's a shame it's so enamored of it's own ironic wit and cutesiness. The title characters get the "likeable" traits and the everyone else is there to make their lives seem interesting in comparison. We are given nothing of anyone's back story, nothing of their motivations. We're just supposed to think that they find each other fascinating and beautiful because no one else in the film is bearable.

I'm not buying it. Almost from the get-go, I thought Ruth Gordon's kooky old lady routine was too cute to be true. The horrible driving and stealing of cars are supposed to make her funny and lovable but they just made me feel like I was watching cheap filmmaker ploys at character. There's barely a single line of dialogue that's memorable or clever. But, more to the point, it's the lack of internal conflict that makes the whole thing seem rather cheap.

In the film's defense, I have to say I now wonder how much of the film felt clichéd and unoriginal because it's conceits had been copied so often by others. Perhaps the fascination with eccentrics that still plays out with every movie that has Shirley Maclean in it, and every other Johnny Depp movie owes a debt to this movie for paving the way. I wish I had seen it when I was younger and it was less dated. But, more than anything, I wish it had simply been better written. There's a beautiful sentiment bedded in the film, and I wish to take away from anyone's enjoyment of it.

But you have to buy it in order to enjoy it -- and there were too many forced cute moments for me to buy it.

The Tin Drum (1979)

Beautifully disturbing

[8/10 · 15 July 2006]

It's been a while since I've seen this German film but I am still struck by key images in the film and the overall tone set forth casually against a backdrop of the chaos of Nazi Germany's rise and fall.

I do wonder how much of my love for this film is owed to the Gunter Grass novel on which it's based It's a quirky slab of magic realism to be sure, like the film, but I have no idea how closely it hews to the original.

The performances are nuanced and striking in places. The cinematography is appropriately dreary and the editing crisp and unadorned. The centerpiece though, is the performance by the child actor at the core of the film. How much is owed to his voice-over narrative, I don't know, but the man growing inside of the still-grown little boy was handled just beautifully.

It's a disturbing and strangely uplifting movie at once. I recommend it -- especially for those who have seen only black and white view of World War II and the typically American view of our adversaries in German.

Rivers and Tides (2001)

Lovely subject and unremarkable film

[6/10 · 15 July 2006]

I really enjoyed learning about the artist profiled in this film and, while I admire the filmmaker's laid back approach to his subject, I often felt that there was such an even pace to the whole affair that one could take all the scenes of this film, place them in random order, and end up with basically the same film.

This is not to say that Goldsworthy's art isn't remarkable in it's own right. The painstaking process through which he constructs his installations out of found natural elements is itself beautiful and instructive. The music is inoffensive but keeps things in the same low-key arena as the other elements of the film. I wish I had seen this in the theater, though. The poetry of Goldsworthy's work and process would've resonated all that more deeply.

Spellbound (2002)

Wonderful storytelling

[7/10 · 15 July 2006]

What makes good storytelling, I think, are good characters -- compelling and complex. More and more, documentaries are relying on a good story well told by either the filmmaker (Spellbound) or the subjects (Inlaws and Outlaws).

Here, the themes are not terribly complex but they are genuine and heartfelt, owed in the main to the subjects who are all young kids competing for the National Spelling Bee Championship. Following a nicely diverse group of kids through the trials of training for the national bee and going through the various regional steps to get there, there's a compelling view of Americana -- the true Americana where the desire to succeed spans cultural and geographical boundaries I was most moved by the farm girl's family that sacrificed so much to get their daughter to the bee. You could see that fear and pride in the promise that one's children might actually do better than you.

The one storyline that seemed uneven was that of the Indian-American family from LA. Perhaps the filmmakers intended our take on the father's obsession with his son's success to be ambivalent but it didn't resonate emotionally. If there was tension there in the father/son relationship, I didn't feel it.

In any case, this is highly entertaining and completely absorbing.

Magnolia (1999)

A frustrating mess

[3/10 · 15 July 2006]

Yes, it's possible to make a film without a script, and someone should've tried with this pretentious mess. Much has been written about the performances (mostly very good), the music (excellent) and several of the vignettes and story lines of this film (some good, some very good and most silly), but the thing that hold's it together, Paul Thomas Anderson's script -- does not, in fact, hold it together.

Sprawling and lacking in any coherent unity, the film wants to be an epic, but even epics have an economy of words and characters established and contained by one grand theme. Successful epics have a storyline or backdrop of universal conflict that multiple scenarios can be played out over. The scenarios played out here just seem like exercises in ego and sophomoric displays of metaphor.

Mr. Anderson is not without his skills. The casting is sharp and the acting overall very captivating. Much of the cinematography is lovely and the tone, though uneven, often underlines the melancholy lives of most of its characters in an effective way.

But too many times the script takes us on left turns not justified by any conceivable interpretation of a believable plot: be it realistic or fantastic. Despite the fact that the film starts out with a series of voice-over vignettes meant to establish the themes of the film, the "rules" of this film never gel and PT Anderson is left to wallow in ever more high-handed manipulations of the characters' emotions and the audience's attention span.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the film, perversely, is the way Ms. Mann's music is used. In several places, the music is used somewhat in the foreground so we can follow along with the well-written ballads. But Anderson can't decide whether he wants the scenes to follow the music or vice versa. Sometimes the dialogue weaves in and out ineptly and sometimes, as in the climax, the dialogue is over the music -- thus serving neither and ruining at least the music.

I really wanted to enjoy this and, indeed, there's much that I did enjoy: Julianne Moore's and Tom Cruise (of all people's) performances, Aimee Mann's music, to name a few. But after being patient for the movie to finally connect, after slavishly giving it every chance to gel and resonate, the last third of the film spun into even more chaos and pretension. I left feeling angry at the writer for letting down the director. In this case, that they are one and the same, points entirely to a case of inflated ego run amok.

Inlaws & Outlaws (2005)

Not at all what I expected!

[10/10 · 23 February 2006]

I'm a married guy with a wife of 22 years. She dragged me to what I thought would be a "chick flick," as part of the Palm Springs Festival. I don't mean anything disparaging by that term, but I was expecting a movie that was all about hearts and flowers and happily ever after and that it would would be either sappy or preachy or both.

Far from it! In-laws/Outlaws was fresh, funny, moving and I found it engrossing. This flick is about love and, to a lesser degree, about marriage. But it just rings so TRUE. When's the last time you went to the movies and saw an HONEST portrayal of what it takes to find true love? Not Hollywood love. The real deal.

These are just stories of ordinary people, and though I'm not myself gay, I found myself nodding a lot with some of the experiences, missteps and lessons learned from what some of the gays in relationships had gone through. I saw Brokeback Mountain and "got it", I guess but it left me feeling just sad for gay people. This movie made me forget who was gay and made me feel pretty darn good to be alive.

In fact, In-laws/Outlaws was a movie that made me fall in love with my wife all over again. And it was funny, very surprisingly funny, and gripping and very satisfying. I can't remember going to a film and coming out so high and inspired. I just wanted to go out and hug the world and tell them everything's going to be okay.

Go see it if it ever makes it your way. I talked to one of the producers and I guess they'll have a DVD eventually. Either way, there's no way to describe why a simple movie like this would be so effective and entertaining. I guess it fills a long-neglected spot. It's the real deal about love.