In the TIFF entry Cairo Time, a magazine editor played by Patricia Clarkson finds herself in Gaza falling for a man who isn’t her husband.
It’s a romantic drama about self discovery and just the kind of role we’ve come accustomed to seeing Clarkson play — serious and complicated.
Her best known work has a weight to it that seems to come naturally to her. Perhaps it is her deep voice or the fact that she’s never really played the ingénue, but I always associate Clarkson with capitol “S” serious films. According to her, I’ve got it all wrong.
“I think most people see me as much darker, more serious and possessing a certain gravitas, when I’m really quite insane,” says the New Orleans born actress.
She chalks up her onscreen image to — what else? — acting. “I go where I need to go. If I need to look glamorous or spiffy or young, or battling cancer, or a drugged-out hippie type, it hopefully will be projected in my face. That’s the beauty of acting. It’s not about hair and makeup; it’s about being malleable.”
That pliability has paid off handsomely in many of her lesser known films.
In High Art, Clarkson plays Greta, a forgotten actress who once starred in Fassbinder films. She’s a drug addict so far gone she actually falls asleep during sex. It’s a colourful, theatrical performance, but Clarkson carefully avoids the clichés of playing a junkie.
On a happier note is Simply Irresistible, a screwball romantic comedy in the vein of 1930s musicals. In this charming film, Clarkson plays Lois, a wisecracking secretary.
“If you need anything call me,” she says to her boss, “although I don’t know how to do anything except buy clothes.” She’s a decidedly earthbound character in this fantasy about a chef whose guardian angel gives her a gift that turns her food into the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Darker than Simply Irresistible is the creepy horror film Wendigo. Promoted as a cross between The Shining and Deliverance, it plays with classic horror conventions — city folks in the country pitted against psycho rednecks and the supernatural — but does so in a unique and compelling way. As usual Clarkson shines as the NYC mother thrown into a situation she doesn’t understand.
These, and her other 40 plus film credits, prove that Patricia Clarkson is as versatile as she is malleable.
Next to Johnny “Take This Job and Shove It” Paycheck, director Mike Judge may be the closest thing we have to a patron saint of crappy jobs.
His 1999 movie Office Space — about company workers who rebel against their miserly boss — was recently ranked number one in a poll of best workplace comedies ever, and this weekend his film Extract details life inside a factory.
He’s the man who made wearing “37 piece of flair” on a restaurant uniform synonymous with the worst of minimum wage life. For anyone who’s ever had a job they hated — and who hasn’t? — Mike Judge is the go-to movie guy.
When he put the words “I don’t like my job, and I do’’t think I’m gonna go anymore,” into Ron Livingston’s mouth in Office Space, he was voicing a thought that has raced through all our minds at least once.
The only cinematic workplace worse than the ones Judge has conjured up has to be the real estate office in Glengarry Glen Ross. The story is simple. It shows two days in the lives of four salesmen, two of whom will be fired by week’s end if their sales aren’t high enough.
Fighting for their lives the four main salesmen — Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, Al Pacino and Alan Arkin — redefine ruthlessness. Long John Silver wasn’t as cutthroat as these guys and the language they use would give any HR department a collective coronary. The vernacular was so rough during production the actors referred to the film as Death of a F*&@in’ Salesman.
A bit more genteel, language wise at least, is 1980’s Nine to Five. In our era of flexi-time hours the name is a bit of an anachronism, but 8:15 to 4:30 just doesn’t have the same ring. This story of sexual harassment, the glass ceiling that faced working women and a “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” boss spawned not only a hit single, but also a television show and a hit Broadway show.
Hollywood’s use of the workplace as a setting is a no brainer; there’s interaction between diverse characters, which means plenty of conflict and it’s something we can all relate to.
Everyone at one time or another has had a job they hated, but perhaps the real reason we watch these movies and others like Clerks and Modern Times is that no matter what your job, someone, on film at least, has it worse than you.
The video store isn’t just a place to rent the latest DVDs. Hidden among the shelves are dozens of time capsules from another age.
Want to know what made Americans laugh in the 1920s? Rent The Gold Rush. How about a look at life in postwar Italy? Check out Open City. These shelves offer row upon row of living history; moving images that bring history to life.
Perhaps no decade has been as documented on film as the 1960s. From failed attempts to present the counter culture(Skidoo and Valley of the Dolls) to more zeitgeist grabbing entries(Woodstock and Zabriskie Point) and newer films that try to capture the spirit of the make-love-not-war decade (this weekend’s Taking Woodstock) the films of and about the ‘60s paint a portrait of a decade of change.
Jack Nicholson claims to have watched Head, a psychedelic movie he helped write and produce, and starring The Monkees, “Like, 158 times.” Seen through modern eyes it’s hard to imagine multiple viewings of this strange movie, but there is a certain crazy charm to it.
More a stream-of-consciousness rant than an actual movie, Head is jammed full of musical numbers, film satires and references to ‘60s hot button topics like Vietnam and eastern religions.
As a movie it’s kind of a frustrating experience — Wikipedia says “even fans tend to disagree whether the film is a landmark of surreal, innovative filmmaking or simply a fascinating mess” — but it does capture the anarchic spirit of its time.
Jack Nicholson contributed to many counter culture films, most notably Easy Rider, but his script for the The Trip is a little known gem of druggie propaganda. Directed by Roger Corman (who dropped acid along with stars Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda to prepare for filming) it’s a snapshot of the frontier of the drug culture of the 1960s.
Fonda stars as a bored television director who drops acid and spends the balance of the movie hallucinating. An orange becomes “the sun in my hands, man!” before the trip turns sour and he is threatened by a chair. It’s a madcap film featuring a strange sex scene with optical effects projected onto writhing bodies and loads of “groovy” dialogue.
If you weren’t there, or were there and can’t remember, these films offer a glimpse into the wild world of the 1960s.
Quentin Tarantino doesn’t care if you like him or his movies.
“My films are unabashedly about myself and you’re either going to like them or go against them,” he says, “but that’s OK because I like me.”
Tarantino’s films — Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2, to name a few — sharply polarize people. For every person who gets all aquiver at the prospect of a new picture from the Reservoir Dogs director, there’s another who thinks his movies are too long, too self-indulgent and too derivative.
Despite those criticisms, fair or not, there can be no argument that of all the brand name directors working today Tarantino is the most audacious. His films are a singular vision and this weekend’s Inglourious Basterds is no exception.
His films are unapologetically bloody, in-your-face talky and ripe with larger-than-life characters, and perhaps it’s those qualities that rub certain people the wrong way.
He refuses to play it safe and take the Michael Bay road churning out Hasbro movies. He’s told interviewers he would die to make his movies perfect, and I believe him, but I’m a fan.
Not all critics are. Writer Ryan Gilbey said Death Proof represented “a sort of embarrassment of riches, only without the riches,” and more recently the Guardian called Inglourious Basterds “an armor-plated turkey.” Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, but I think the Tarantino hecklers miss the point.
Tarantino is a provocateur who excels when he doesn’t play nice with the audience. Unlike the vast majority of films at the local bijou, his films demand something from an audience; they demand to be noticed and argued about over coffee (or something stronger) afterward. Many films fade quickly from memory, but, like them or not, Tarantino’s don’t.
When he’s at his best—Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds — the movies are transformative cinematic experiences, but even when he’s not in top form — say, Death Proof — his work is, as critic Peter Bradshaw said, “more interesting than the successes of dullards and middleweights churning out Identikit films by the truckload.”
Tarantino’s films aren’t for everyone, but it’s undeniable that he takes movies seriously.
So seriously in fact, that the heroine in Inglourious Basterds is a cinema owner who literally uses film to bring down the Third Reich. I love that.
Say what you will, you can never accuse Tarantino of being boring.
I’d bet everyone has considered the idea of going back in time to fix a wrong or reconnect with a lost love. Of course, time travel doesn’t exist, but you wouldn’t know that from popular culture.
Cher wanted to turn back time and “take back those words that hurt you,” and on television Star Trek’s characters crossed time zones more often than a pilot’s Timex.
Time travel plays a role on the big screen as well and not just in hardcore sci-fi. This weekend’s The Time Traveler’s Wife is a science fiction romance, but the love story is foremost, the sci-fi second. Believe it or not, it’s not the only one. They’re not just motion pictures; call them emotion pictures.
In Kate & Leopold, Hugh Jackman plays a 19th century man who discovers a wormhole into 21st century New York, and also the heart of the very modern Meg Ryan. It’s a romance, but plays up on the whole fish-out-of-water situation as Leopold must try and come to grips with modern day customs.
“Are you suggesting, madam, that there exists a law compelling a gentleman to lay hold of canine bowel movements?”
Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married was played for laughs by stars Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage, but the underlying message is profound. Turner plays the title character, a 43-year-old woman on the brink of divorce from Charlie, her childhood sweetheart.
After fainting at her high school reunion, she awakens to find herself flung back in time; she’s returned to high school, but this time around she has a world of perspective under her belt.
“I am a grown woman with a lifetime of experience that you can’t understand,” she tells Charlie.
The humour in this underrated classic springs from real emotions. Roger Ebert summed it up when he described the time-bending first kiss between Peggy Sue and her future ex-husband.
“Imagine kissing someone for the first time,” he wrote, “after you have already kissed him or her for the last time.”
Such is the twisty-turny logic of time travel romance. Logic, however, really has no place in these stories.
The yearning to revisit the past is a romantic quest, a feeling based on emotional sentiment that defies reason.
As sci-fi writer George Alec Effinger wrote in The Bird of Time, “The past… is the home of romance.”
John Hughes wrote many lines that, in light of his untimely passing last Thursday at age 59, take on heightened meaning. Perhaps the most memorable comes from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. “Life moves pretty fast,” says Ferris. “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
By all reports Mr. Hughes did his best to “stop and look around,” virtually retiring from public life in 1991 to spend more time with his wife of 39 years on their Wisconsin farm.
Although his last film as a director was 16 years ago his influence can still be felt today. Before Hughes, teen characters on film had only a passing resemblance to the real thing. There were the sanitized Disney kids, the goofy Beach Party crowd (who weren’t actually teens at all!) or the juvenile delinquents, bad girls or hot rodders of the ’50s and ’60s.
Those movies were often a lot of fun, but none had the resonance of the teen life presented by Hughes.
His films like Sixteen Candles and Breakfast Club took teens seriously and didn’t talk down to or exploit them. He understood that while many adults didn’t take teen problems seriously, teens did. He knew having no date to the prom, or worse, the wrong date, could be devastating to the teen psyche and handled situations like that in a way that had never before been seen on film. Without Hughes and that sensitivity we might not have movies like Tadpole, 13 or Twilight which treat teens realistically (well, except for that whole existence of vampires thing).
Ben Stein, who rose to fame as the deadpan teacher in Ferris Bueller, recognized the impact Hughes made. “He was the poet of the youth of America in the post war period,” he said, adding “he was to them what Shakespeare was to the Elizabethan age.”
The Food Network has a corner on small screen cuisine. Bobby Flay and Paula Dean simmer, sauté and sizzle twenty-four hours a day, bringing restaurant style cooking to the home chef.
Food plays a role on the big screen as well. Who could forget The Godfather’s “leave the gun, take the cannoli” scene or Annie Hall’s clumsy attempt to cook a lobster? But there’s food in movies and then there’s movies — like this weekend’s Julie & Julia — that make you want to eat something more delicious than a bucket of buttery popcorn from the concession stand.
Jane Austen was on to something when she wrote, “Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness.” Everybody loves pie and never have baked goods been as appetizing as they are in Waitress, the last film from director Adrienne Shelly.
Keri Russell plays Jenna, a world weary, pregnant waitress in the Deep South.
She’s also a “pie genius” with a knack for creating imaginative pastries. Mix in a handsome stranger, some gorgeous shots of the pies and you have all the fixin’s for a mouth watering romantic comedy.
On the more savoury side is Tampopo, a film advertised as “the first Japanese noodle western.”
In short (its plot splinters into many directions) the movie is about Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) a widowed noodle chef, who, along with truck driver Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki) searches for noodle perfection.
Many films, like Babette’s Feast and Like Water for Chocolate, feature food as a metaphoric central theme but none are as loving or as loopy as the singular vision of Tampopo.
The greatest food movie of all time, however, stars Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub as brothers and failing restaurateurs who pin their hopes of success on one special customer who will get them the notice they so deserve.
Big Night is pitch perfect from its portrayal of kitchen life to the very real relationship between the two brothers, but it is the presentation of the food that is so appetizing.
One critic said the movie’s food photography “is so good it’s hard to resist the temptation to reach into the screen and grab a mouthful.” Amen to that. One glimpse of the movie’s amazing Timpano di Maccheroni al Ragu and you’ll want to run, not walk to the closest Italian restaurant.
To paraphrase the legendary chef Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep in Julie& Julia), “Bon appetit and happy movie watching!”
This is turning into a banner year for family friendly aliens. Recently, Reese Witherspoon and a team of misfit monsters successfully saved our planet from a gang of G-rated extraterrestrials in Monsters vs Aliens and in Race to Witch Mountain a cab driver learned that not all space invaders are “little green people with antennas.”
Later this year the cute and cuddly animated aliens of Planet 51 will be invaded by an astronaut from Earth and in this weekend’s Aliens in the Attic a group of kids protects their vacation home from creatures from outer space.
E.T.s in kids’ entertainment are nothing new. The futuristic animated utopia of the Jetsons, featuring aliens galore, originally ran on Saturday morning television in the early ’60s, but has since been spun off into comics, games, a short-lived 1980s TV series, television movies and a 1990 feature film imaginatively called Jetsons: The Movie.
Around the same time The Jetsons were on the small screen, a movie The Monster Times called “the worst science fiction flick ever, bar none” was entering theatres. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, released in 1964, is a no-budget wonder which ping-pongs from so-bad-it’s-good right back to bad again. Cinematically it may be the biggest Christmas turkey ever, but its crazy story, about Martians kidnapping Santa so their little green kids can get some presents just like human children, is a guilty pleasure.
The ’70s and ’80s were a particularly fertile time for kiddie “take me to your leader” movies. Of course there were the original three Star Wars movies, E.T. (and the shameless E.T. rip-off Mac and Me) but looking past Lucas and Spielberg reveals other, not as well-known alien movies for the rugrats.
Invaders from Mars, from Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper, sees a teenage hero (actress Karen Black’s real life son Hunter Carson) enlist the help of a school nurse (played by his mother) and the Marines to prevent aliens from assuming human form and taking over his hometown.
Finally, also worth a look is Explorers, a 1985 kid’s flick starring Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix as BFFs whose dream of intergalactic travel comes true when they build a homemade spaceship, complete with a Tilt-a-Whirl cockpit. It was the feature film debut for both Hawke and Phoenix and while it isn’t groundbreaking sci-fi, it’s a fun film for the whole family.
Popular culture has frequently paid homage to the lowly rodent. Remember Muskrat Love, Captain & Tennille’s ode to arvicoline amour?
“Rubbin’ her toes,” they sang, “Muzzle to muzzle, anything goes.” The rodentia rock roundup doesn’t stop there, though.
The Chipmunks had a chart topper with Witch Doctor, Frank Zappa named not one but two albums — Weasels Ripped My Flesh and Hot Rats — after little furry creatures, and even Michael Jackson rode to the top of the charts on a rat’s back with the tune Ben, possibly the only love song to a rat ever released.
Rodents certainly have left their mark on the pop charts and in movie theatres. This weekend G-Force hopes to do for guinea pigs what March of the Penguins did for tuxedo clad furry birds.
G-Force is just the latest in a long line of movies with rodents in featured roles. Who could forget Mr. Gopher, the burrowing terror from Caddyshack? (Did you know the movie’s gopher “voice” is made up of the same dolphin sound effects used on Flipper?)
Or Rizzo the Rat, the streetwise New Jersey puppet from The Muppets Take Manhattan and possibly the only kid’s character named for Enrico (Ratso) Rizzo, a character in the X-rated Midnight Cowboy.
Those fuzzy actors, along with Despereaux Tilling, Fievel Mousekewitz and the gang from Once Upon a Forest have sold loads of tickets, but likely none would have made much of an impression if not for the pioneering work of the world’s most famous rodent, Mickey Mouse. Created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, Mickey is one of the most recognizable movie stars in the world. He’s an Oscar winner with 175 movies, shorts and videogames on his CV; and was the first cartoon character to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Mickey’s fame endures, but why? “We felt that the public, and especially the children, like animals that are cute and little,” said Walt Disney. “When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human.”
