In the years since she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Juno, she has worked with directors Christopher Nolan, Woody Allen and Drew Barrymore, but Touchy Feely filmmaker Lynn Shelton asked her to do something she hasn’t done since her teens working in her hometown of Halifax—improvisation.
“I had done nothing remotely like improv since Trailer Park Boys,” she says.
“It was an intriguing challenge for me because it was completely stepping out of my comfort zone. There were some scenes she had written where she’d be pushing us to improvise because that’s what she likes, and I’d be like, ‘Lynne, the scene is great. I’m not going to improve on this, believe me.’”
The movie focuses on three relatives, a massage therapist with an aversion to touch, her dentist brother and Jenny, a character Page describes as having an “incredibly quiet, self contained, deep, deep sadness and fear and unwillingness to move forward in life.”
Page breathes life into the character and says she was “completely intrigued with her journey as a person” but what really keeps her going is trying new things.
“It’s funny because after certain things happen in your career and things change and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera there is definitely a mind set that tries to get put on you about the next move,” she says.
“I get all that but what is hands down the most important thing for me is that I feel inspired and serious and passionate and continue to feel ambitious.”
With a variety of projects in the works—including the Beyond: Two Souls video game and X-Men: Days of Future Past—Page is keeping it interesting by staying varied.
“I get paid to explore all kinds of things and it always feeds you in a way that is incredible. Any job I do I try and do everything I can to grow as an actor. I love what I do so I’m always trying to get better at it, always learn more from all of the amazing people I work with. The ability to get to go to work and feel so deeply—deep sadness, deep pain, joy, anger and feel that flow through you. To get to do that as your job is pretty incredible.”
Conventional Hollywood wisdom these days has it that audiences only want to see remakes, retreads and rehashes of old ideas. This summer has seen a seemingly endless parade of movies with the number 2 in the title and films based on 80s TV shows. Some have made money some have not, but every once and a while a movie comes along that proves Hollywood wrong. Last December “Avatar” showed that audiences would flock to a movie that wasn’t based on a videogame, existing novel or television show. It broke every box office record going and yet since then there has been a stream of derivative films clogging up the multiplex. Until now. Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” is a startlingly original film.
Set in a world where technology can invade people’s dreams, “Inception” stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Dom Cobb, the leader of a corporate espionage team who specialize in stealing valuable secrets from within people’s subconscious for profit. Cobb is an international fugitive tormented by dreams of his late wife (Marion Cotillard) who sees a way out of his personal nightmare if he takes on one last job offered to him by Saito (Ken Watanabe), a powerful businessman who can arrange for Cobb to skip past immigration and get back into the United States. All Cobb has to do is perform an “inception;” plant a thought in the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) CEO of a global corporation. (One writer has called it “the Great Brain Robbery.) Cobb and his team—Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Eames (Tom Hardy), Yusuf (Dileep Rao) and Ariadne (Ellen Page), an architect who becomes Cobb’s new dream weaver—set out to implant the idea of dissolving his multibillion-dollar business into Fischer’s dreams.
“Inception” is the most innovative sci fi film to come out of Hollywood since “The Matrix” way back in 1999. It’s a movie that takes ideas very seriously—ideas drive the plot—and, as a result, takes its audience seriously. It never talks down to the crowd and in return demands viewers to pay attention. For those who do there are many rewards, and for those who aren’t willing to get drawn into the surreal story there are still many pleasures. That’s how finely crafted this movie is.
“Dark Knight” director Christopher Nolan (who also wrote the script) proves he can blow the doors off with the action—Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s MC Eischeresque gravity defying fight scene is a mind blower—and also handle the cerebral stuff.
He creates and juggles several worlds—dreams within dreams, worlds within worlds—until it becomes difficult to tell what is real and what isn’t. Each of these worlds comes complete with their own rules—five minutes in real life equals one hour in dream time, for instance—and is populated with well rounded, complex characters. The visuals are very cool—check out the streets that defy physics and curl over on top of one another—but amazing effects don’t mean much if the people interacting with them aren’t interesting. Nolan has put a great deal of effort into the look of the movie and its ideas but he never forgets the characters, who are the film’s single biggest asset.
Like the very best sci fi “Inception” is thoughtful, intelligent, audacious and humanistic. It’s also one of the year’s best films of any genre.
If you‘ve been paying attention to the Critic’s Awards lists that are coming out all over the place these days you’ve probably noticed a name you probably aren’t familiar with popping up here and there. It’s Ellen Page, a young Haligonian who in recent months has become Hollywood’s “It-Girl.” You’ve glimpsed her in X-Men 3, maybe heard the buzz out of Sundance for Hard Candy and TIFF for The Tracey Fragments, but up until now it’s been hard to put a face to the name. Juno should change all that.
Directed by Thank You For Smoking’s Jason Reitman, Juno is an screwball comedy about a pregnant sixteen year old who decides to give up her baby to a young, seemingly perfect childless couple. Reitman, working from a script by the excellently named Diablo Cody, handles the material with the ease of someone who grew up around comedy—his father is Ghostbuster’s director Ivan Reitman.
Despite the hip and impossibly witty dialogue—almost every line sounds like a punch line and is so slick it threatens to teeter over into “so hip it hurts” territory—Reitman and Page manage to ground this story, keeping it funny but also injecting a goodly amount of humanity into the proceedings. That’s a good thing because when you have, for example, a convenience store clerk (played by Rainn Wilson of The Office) watching Juno shaking her pregnancy test and saying lines like: “That ain’t no etch-a-sketch. That’s one doodle that can’t be undid, homeskillet,” there better be strong grounding or the movie could degrade into a quirky Napoleon Dynamite wannabe and little else.
The movie’s secret weapon is Page who carefully portrays the spunky Juno MacGuff not just as a smart-mouthed teen who got herself in the family way by seducing her high school crush, but as a complicated young woman who uses her wit as a wall to protect herself from the harsh realities of life.
Bouncing off Page are Brampton, Ontario’s Michael Cera, fresh off his turn in the hilarious Superbad, playing the kind of sensitive teenager not often seen on screen and great supporting work by Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney. They’re all great, but make no mistake; this is Page’s movie from top to bottom.
“The East” is a new political thriller that plays like a mix between “The Bourne Identity” and “Tailor Tinker Soldier Spy.” That is to say, it’s a tense thriller that values smarts over action.
Britt Marling stars as corporate spy Jane Owen, code name Sarah. Her latest job involves going deep undercover to infiltrate a shadowy group of eco-terrorists called The East. The collective—think real life activists Anonymous—run by the charismatic anarchist Benji (Alexander Skarsgård), is on the eve of their biggest demonstration yet, an act of sabotage that will make headlines and make a very public statement of their anti-corporate stance.
Sarah is accepted by the group, save for the truculent Izzy (Ellen Page), and begins to develop Stockholm syndrome. Or does she?
It’s a morally complex movie, with Sarah at the center of the ethical hurricane as she starts to question her role as both a spy and a would-be member of the radical group. She weighs the morality of both sides and… well, go see the movie.
“The East” deliberately paints shades of grey into the story, allowing for good and bad, evil and sympathetic characters on both sides. It may be too nuanced for folks who like their spy stories to take sides, but Sarah, as the source of the plot’s push-and-pull, is too complex a creation to play it straight. Marling brings strength and fighting spirit to Sarah in a performance that could finally make her a star.
“The East” has good performances all round—Skarsgård and Page are particularly effective—and there’s enough turns to hold interest, although the events leading up the final showdown lack credibility. Nonetheless, it’s good, thought provoking stuff that doesn’t look for easy or obvious answers.
At the center of Smart People is one of those curmudgeonly professor characters so self-absorbed, so pedantic it’s almost impossible to like him. He’s intelligent, but if there ever was a human embodiment of the saying “too smart for his own good” this is it. He pretentiously drones on and on about Victorian literature. He’s the kind of guy who says, “adopted brother,” when introducing Chuck (Thomas Haden Church), his middle-aged sibling. He’s a widower and we get the impression early on that the only person he could relate to was his late wife and with her gone he is completely socially adrift. In real life you wouldn’t want to spend one second with Lawrence Wetherhold, but as portrayed by Dennis Quaid he’s a compelling character who sets a number of storylines in motion.
He’s the patriarch of a suitably quirky family. Daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page) is an acid-tongued neo-con brainiac—think Ann Coulter only slightly less annoying—who longs for the glory days of Ronald Reagan and is obsessed with acing her SATs. Son James (Ashton Holmes) is distant—think every underwritten troubled teenage character you’ve ever seen on film—living in the shadow of his brilliant father and sister. The professor cares more for his unpublished manuscript than his kids or his students. He is shaken out of his mid-life self-pitying trance when his brother—adopted brother, that is—and a former student in the form of Dr. Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker)—who works at the least busy ER ever seen on film—enter his life.
Five minutes into Smart People you know that the characters will emerge on the other end as better people, enriched in unlikely ways from unlikely sources; it’s that kind of movie. Since there are very few surprises (although there are a couple of unusual twists) in the story it’s up to the characters to carry the show. Luckily Smart People can boast a solid cast doing good work.
At the helm is Dennis Quaid who has thrown vanity out the window to play the paunchy professor. His leading man good looks still sneak through a scraggly beard and lined face, but the cocky swagger of past roles like Remy McSwain in The Big Easy or Great Balls of Fire’s Jerry Lee Lewis has been replaced with a limping gait. It looks good on him. It’s a role where character is utmost and his world weary take on the pompous professor is spot on.
Ellen Page, the Halifax-born Hollywood “It-Girl” hands in another nice performance. Her take on Vanessa is the polar opposite of the free-spirited character she played in Juno, which earned her an Academy Award nomination this year. She’s a Young Republican of the Alex P. Keaton School, complete with portraits of Ronald Reagan on her bedroom walls. She could easily be a conservative caricature but Page digs a little deeper and gives Vanessa insecurities and weaknesses that lie just under the surface of her carefully manicured Fox News façade.
In the supporting roles Sarah Jessica Parker is solid but gets steamrolled by a scene stealing Thomas Hayden Church as Chuck the down-on-his-luck brother. Wetherhold refers to him as a “giant toddler” and he’s always grasping at some kind of get rich quick scheme, but in his own homespun way he has far more understanding of the human condition than either of his more learned relatives. It’s his light touch, reminiscent of his work in Sideways, which gives Smart People its best moments.
Smart People is a well-written film with sparkling dialogue and good actors who know how to deliver the material. Best of all it’s peppered with laughs and doesn’t try that hard to be heartwarming.
Europe has been mostly kind to Woody Allen. After years of documenting life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan the famed filmmaker decamped to the continent, beginning his European vacation in London before moving on to Barcelona and Paris. The latest city on his whistle stop tour is one of Europe’s most interesting places, and the setting for his least interesting film in years.
“To Rome with Love” may be the only mainstream comedy—maybe the only non-mainstream comedy, for that matter—to simultaneously contemplate love, fame and Ozymandias Melancholia. Allen has created a portmanteau starring Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Penelope Cruz, Judy Davis, Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig and Ellen Page as people under the thrall of life in the Eternal City.
“To Rome with Love” is well-meaning, but feels like something Allen would have written forty years ago. It’s an episodic screwball comedy with loads of characters, identity mix-ups, the comic’s trademarked highbrow references—will today’s audience get a Howard Roark joke?–and surreal situations. It has the same kind of farcical feel and references of his earlier work—look for older men paired with younger women, anxiety, comments on death and discussions on foreign film—but I think if he had written this decades ago it might have been funnier.
Allen, playing Alison Pill’s father, gives himself most of the funny lines, (“I was never a communist,” he says, “I couldn’t even share a bathroom.”), and while he manages to raise a laugh or two, the master’s touch is missing from much of the film.
Sporadic laughs dot the movie, but aren’t in abundance. The most surreal—and effective—part of the film involves Roberto Benigni as a clerk who becomes famous for being famous. It is a study on the nature, and ultimately the fickleness of fame. (K.K. are you watching?) It’s the strangest segment, but also the most charming. Benigni is just one step below his amped up walking-on-the-backs-of-chair-at-the-Oscars mode, and is a pure pleasure.
“To Rome with Love” is long on ambition and Italian scenery, but short on execution.
At age 20 Elliot Page became a star playing Juno in the film of the same name. Nominated for an Academy Award, they’d go on to make movies like Whip It and Inception, but first they took some time off.
“I studied permaculture, design and eco village development at a place called Lost Valley in Oregon with a lot of people who had the same philosophy — strictly freegan,” he says.
Freeganism, or the practice of salvaging discarded food, was just one of the things that fascinated Page during her month-long stay at the settlement.
The experience taught her to live more simply and to really think about her relationship with the planet. Her time there also prepared her for The East, a new eco-thriller co-starring Alexander Skarsgård and Britt Marling.
“On top of it being an incredibly beautifully written piece of work, there were so many ideas that I was very excited about and thinking about,” she says.
In the film she plays Izzy, a member of a shadowy group of eco-activists called The East — think a more hands-on version of real-life group Anonymous — who live by an anarchist eco code.
“We were able to talk about the experience I had and relate what that does to you as a person when you’ve been raised with this narrative given to us by the system that exists.
“Then you go experience something that completely flips everything on its head,” he says.
“That is a wild ride to go on. Then to walk back out into the world and society, you see things differently.”
It’s a way of life she thinks about daily.
“Every morning when I wake up and open my eyes I am unwillingly oppressing a lot of people and the environment to live in the privilege that I have—that we all have living in this area of the world. Not that everyone in this area of the world experiences that… and that’s a hard thing.”
“I think that is something a lot of people are dealing with right now and it is hard to know if running away to the woods and becoming a freegan is the best choice, or do we stay in the infrastructure we’ve inherited and do our best to create positive change? I don’t necessarily know the answer. Maybe I’m just being a selfish jerk.”
There’s nothing groundbreaking about Whip It, the directorial debut of American sweetheart Drew Barrymore. It’s the dance movie where the hero or heroine learns about life through ballet or hip hop. Or it’s the Spelling Bee movie where the main character learns self confidence at the Scripps National competition. In this case the back drop is the wild and wacky world of women’s Roller Derby, but the story is very familiar.
Based on the Shauna Cross novel Derby Girl Ellen Page plays Bliss Cavendar an unhappy teenager from small town Texas who suffers from adolescent ennui. She’s Juno without the pregnancy or the sharp tongue. She’s tired of beauty pageants, her over protective mother and being seventeen. When she stumbles across a flyer for a female Roller Derby league in nearby Austin she sees a way out of her mundane life. Turns out she has a natural ability as a derby demon, and an equally natural ability at attracting skinny guitar players. Soon enough, though, she realizes that skinny guitar players aren’t always the best dates and just because she’s found a new family at the roller rink she can’t throw her old family away.
The world of female roller derby is a colorful, eccentric world that should really lend itself to a rollicking big screen treatment. Unfortunately Whip It doesn’t do it justice. First time director Drew Barrymore gets some of the details right—the women all have fun, campy names like Bloody Holly, Smashly Simpson and Babe Ruthless, and play for teams with names like the Hurl Scouts—but the Roller Derby sequences don’t have the over-the-top rock ‘n’ roll feel they should have. The game scenes are too genteel by half and could have used a bit more rough and tumble energy. It is worth noting however, that the actors seem to be doing their own stunts and some of their falls look quite realistic and quite painful but it isn’t enough to make it feel like authentic down and dirty roller derby.
The feminist aspect of the story—roller derby is often associated with third wave feminism—is blunted because the game is more a plot device than the focus of the story. There is camaraderie among the women on the team and their journey is quite interesting but the film too often detours from the roller rink to Bliss’s love life or struggle with her family.
Barrymore does some good work here. She does a nice job at wordlessly showing Bliss’s alienation in the scene where she takes a bus to her roller derby audition. As she physically leaves the town she has come to hate you get the sense that in her mind she had really left years before. It’s a nicely handled bit of business as is a touching “please don‘t judge me” sequence late in the film between Bliss and her parents (Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern). There’s also some very funny moments and a show stopping performance from Eulala Scheel (Harden’s real life daughter) as Bliss’s younger sister.
But for all the well handled moments there are still the bungled derby scenes which should have added real punch to the story, but instead don’t make much of an impression. If you want to see the real deal derby check out Hell On Wheels, a documentary about the creation of the all-female roller derby league in Austin, Texas in 2001.
This weekend Drew Barrymore makes her directorial debut with Whip It, the story of a young girl who finds the antidote for her small town blues on the roller derby track.
Barrymore’s movie delves deep into the murky world of women’s roller derby, but it isn’t the sport’s first big screen treatment.
In the early 1970s UCLA student Barry Sandler saw his master’s thesis, a screenplay called Kansas City Bomber, become a Golden Globe-nominated movie starring Raquel Welch. She plays a single Mom roller-derby queen (Jodie Foster is her daughter) who has an affair with her boss and a skating showdown with a rival.
The 1970s were the height of roller derby’s popularity but the sport made a comeback early in the millennium. That return was chronicled in Hell On Wheels, a documentary about a women-only Roller Derby league in Austin, Texas.
Ain’t It Cool says this inspirational movie has “the kind of twists, drama, cat fights and compound fractures that only happen in real life.”
Maybe that explains why the roller derby is popular again. Sure, the action is wild and wooly and it has a punk rock attitude but its recent recognition has to do with the people and girl power.
Touchy Feely brings Ellen Page full circle.
