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Danny Collins (2015)

Rated R

danny-collins

Big Indie Pictures

Danny Collins isn’t as famous as Al Pacino, who plays the fictional aging rock singer in this film, but Danny’s type of fame will do well enough. He’s recognized nearly everywhere he goes, not just by long-time fans but also youths familiar with his celebrity.

In the BloghouseBefore he was a celebrity living off his name and long-ago hit songs, he was a talented singer/songwriter. So talented, in fact, a circa ’70s interview he did for a Rolling Stone-like periodical caught the attention of John Lennon.

It transpires that Lennon was moved by the interview and wrote an admiring and encouraging letter that included Lennon’s phone number. The skittish Danny, who was eager for success but apprehensive of stardom, could have benefitted from such a letter. Alas, through couldn’t-believe-it-if-it-weren’t-based-on-true-events circumstances, Danny wouldn’t receive the letter for more than 40 years. By the time it’s gifted to him by his steadfast manager (the great Christopher Plummer) he’s going through the motions of fame. Trophy girlfriend, fair-weather friends, casual drugs, expensive gated home and sports cars. He slogs through his performances as best he can, singing songs he’s long since tired of, resigned that he is more celebrity than singer.

The letter blasts him free of absorbing thoughts that he’s in the final throes of his life, sending him on a new trajectory. He packs up, dumps the girlfriend and sets off on a quest to find the life he should have had, and tie up some loose ends.

Up to this point the film has moved briskly and Pacino keeps Danny engaging, no doubt. When Danny checks into a rinky-dink New Jersey hotel to get back to writing the songs that Lennon-endorsed Danny Collins was supposed to have written years back, Danny’s likeable personality really comes into focus. In quick order he charms the hotel valet (Josh Peck), the young concierge, and more intentionally the hotel manager (a wonderfully low-key Annette Bening).

The loose ends involve wriggling himself into the life of his adult estranged son. The son (Bobby Cannavale) has a wife (Jennifer Garner) and daughter and no intention of having a relationship with his long-absent father. Danny’s well-written introduction to the family (Garner shines) effectively sets the stage for the first father-son encounter.

The film’s not so much about the plot, but there are key twists I will not spoil. And it’s not even about whether Danny will succeed in writing and singing this comeback song, though Pacino makes us root for him.

Cannavale, Garner, Bening and Plummer are all wonderfully realized character and each has at least one well-written scene that allows them to shine. This is one of those movies where you don’t mind spending time with any of the characters because they’re all interesting and say interesting things. But it’s all held together by grandmaster Pacino who knows this character inside and out. I like that Danny’s smart (he’s often taking notes) and is remarkable at reading people and assessing situations. The flashy-but-outdated clothes, hair style and cheesy songs don’t keep us from seeing what a good heart the man has, or what a warm-hearted, humorous film this is.

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Quik Flix Hit

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The Rover (2014)
Rated R

The Rover (2013) l-r: GUY PEARCE AND ROBERT PATTINSON,

Porchlight Films

In some dystopian future, 10 years after the “collapse,” a man (Guy Pearce) sits in his car on a deserted Australian highway. As flies buzz around him and he stares into nothing as the sun beats down on his shaggy, haggard form, we notice the shot is held for quite a while. So long, in fact, we begin to wonder if the reel is stuck. The soundtrack punctuates the silence with atonal chords that seem louder than usual.

The BloghouseThese things—the lingering shot, the abrasive sound—establish not simply tone, but theme. You’re going to be subjected to both for the rest of the film.

Pearce eventually gets out of the car and walks across dusty, sun-scorched road and into some kind of makeshift store. Its proprietors are silent, worn men and boys who can hardly be bothered by  Pearce’s presence.

While he’s in the place, a carful of panicked thieves wreck nearby and steal Pearce’s car as a substitute. The rest of the film concerns Pearce’s pursuit of the thieves.

This is a strange, uncomfortable film that repeatedly uproots expectations. The more we learn about Pearce the less we like him; it’s probably for the best that he’s hardly defined. We know he’s handy with a gun and he doesn’t blink at shocking violence. He just wants his car back.

Aside from deliberately held shots and grating ambient score, David Michôd’s film builds a creepy undertone by presenting women as scarce, while shirtless boys hover in the corners of many scenes.

Pearce is united with the abandoned brother (Robert Pattinson of the Twilight series) of one of the thieves. He’s a “half wit” who can’t decide if he wants to reunite with his brother or kill him.

Pearce brings his dependable intensity to the proceedings. He’s so hard externally we don’t know what to make of his character when he sheds tears. Pattinson, nearly unrecognizable and intriguing with his mumbling accent and vacant stare,  with this film and Cosmopolis (2013) firmly establishes capabilities beyond playing a brooding, glistening vampire.

The film is bleak and humorless, offering a convincing pull into its atmosphere. There’s a powerful scene of Pearce detailing the fate of his wife. And another in which a young girl becomes a causal victim of violence.

But you’ll wonder how, despite so much violence, death and a short runtime that it still feels like you’ve lived hours drifting in this dusty, dirty, sweaty, sticky off-beat film. I wanted to take a shower afterward.

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Quik Flix Hit

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Video review

Upstream Color (2013)

Rated PG-13

upstream

erbp

What a delicate film this is.

To be sure, weighty and absurd ideas are stacked upon each other, scene by scene, but underneath is a foundation so delicate you wonder how it can support this film. And yet it does.

The BloghouseOK, here we go: Women pick blue flowers growing near a great tree on a riverbank. A shady fellow buys these flowers and harvests grub worms from the soil of the plants. A chemical is extracted from the worms to create a potent drug that, depending on how you use it, can place you in synchronicity with the environment, can link your mind with that of another person who’s also on the drug, or can be wielded as an instrument of mind control.

The opening segments befuddle and intrigue as we observe—with sparse dialogue and music—the man as he worm-drugs a woman named Kris, takes her back to her own home and through mind control (and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden) encourages her to empty her bank accounts and give up personal belongings. He keeps her in this fugue, compliant state (for days? weeks?) while he bleeds her dry. Finally he packs up and leaves. Kris slowly comes back to what was once her reality starved, bruised, confused, jobless, penniless, shattered. Her world no longer makes sense, her mind and emotions are altered in a way that encourages viewers to acknowledge that reality can sometimes be a fragile, fleeting idea.

Just as we’re wrapping our minds around this segment, we’re introduced to a musician/pig farmer, credited as The Sampler, who calls Kris to him using his sound-recording devices like a pied piper. The Sampler removes a now much-larger worm from Kris and implants it into one of his pigs. From time to time the man tosses piglets into the river, which then float downstream to our tree from the beginning, where the piglets rot, freeing the worms from within, which become nutrients for the magic flowers the women come to pick.

Got that? We’re witnessing a life cycle, which Kris and many other unwitting victims—and their corresponding pigs!—are now a part of.

Another such victim is Jeff, who is drawn to Kris, perhaps because his pig couples with Kris’ pig back on the farm. They are two mind-scattered peas in a pod who can’t even discern whose memory is whose, even as they piece together the riddle of their lives, and fall in love.

You think I’ve told you too much of the plot; I think I’ve done you a favor. It took three viewings to piece this much together, as the story is told out of sequence, in fragments and largely with only sound and subtle cutting between related images, as dialogue is kept to a minimum. (The last 20 minutes, all the way to the credits, are dialogue-free.)

I think the director (Shane Carruth, whose debut microbudget, mind-frying time-travel flick Primer set the indie world on fire in 2004) wants to immerse the viewer in a sonic, wispy-image experience that approximates Kris and Jeff’s shattered and reforming mindsets. And maybe this approximates our truest selves: how we are merely a collection of our selective memories, which we figuratively hold tightly in our hands like a bunch of cards. This movie is about what happens when someone or something swats those cards to the ground and we have to pick them up again. I think that’s the foundation of this film.

I don’t know if I understood everything going on here, but this I know: I worked up quite a bit of empathy for Kris and Jeff’s plight and was deeply moved as I reflected that emotions and motives are still powerful even when untethered from the sanity of everyday life. By the finale, I found myself very satisfied by an ending that isn’t really as happy as it seems, once you think about it.

For days after I saw this it swam in my mind like a magical worm upending my notions of a conventional narrative love story.

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Quik Flix Hit

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Cloud Atlas (2012)

Rated R

 

It’s hard to write something short about a movie so long. Three hours of mind-bending, audacious, off-the-map filmmaking.

Here’s the lowdown on the basics: The movie was codirected by the Wachowski siblings (The Matrix trilogy) and German filmmaker Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, Perfume). It was adapted from an equally complex, enigmatic novel by David Mitchell. The film details six interlocking, yet time-spanning, stories. Ten of the main actors—including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant and Jim Broadbent—play multiple roles (as few as three each, as many as six), which cast them as different races, genders, even synthetic creatures.

A theme of connectedness and reincarnation binds the stories—lovers who face tragedy in one life, might find happiness together in another; sins and hopes of the past ripple through time and sometimes switch places, depending on the era.

While I didn’t follow all of it (no one’s walking out of this with a clear understanding of everything—at least not in a first viewing) I did follow enough to keep me engaged in each of the stories and their characters. For a film with so much going on, I was surprised by how much it cares for its characters. I was left with questions, of course, but felt I got the overall plot and ideas behind each story, even with the constant cutting between them.

I think people who love time-jumping puzzle-plot movies will see this repeatedly, and likely catch something new each time. I think people who don’t like to work too hard in the theater will still say they walked away with favorite scenes vividly recalled because of the beautiful human moments or the striking visuals.

Something’s going on with this film. The directors are reaching to redefine filmmaking, I think. Do they succeed? Time will tell. This movie will be studied and talk about, dismissed and touted as groundbreaking. It’s as if the filmmakers were trying—within theses six mini-films—to encapsulate the whole of human existence, purpose and emotion. It’s trying to document the histories of how we love and create with passion, how we are as cruel as we are forgiving, how we move through time and space while changing those things and ourselves as we go.

This ambitious film might not do well out of the gate (it demands attention and thought), but my guess is, over time, it’s going to be regarded as something of a milestone.

See it | Skip it

Side note: Several Asian characters are portrayed by non-Asians actors, which is in keeping with the film’s reincarnation theme that involves actors in multiple roles, but I wonder if it won’t be seen as offensive, particularly since some of the makeup effects could be seen as playing to stereotypes. 

 

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