Talking (in French) with Michel Hazanavicius & Berenice Bejo of THE ARTIST

November 4, 2014 by Chris Bunker Posted in Interviews Tagged Bérénice Bejo, Interview, Jean Dujardin, Michel Hazanavicius, OSS 117, SIFF, The Artist, The Search

The Artist was an unprecedented film. Movies don’t come in black and white anymore. And no one would think to make a silent black-and-white film in 2010.

When you chat with the brains behind the film, it makes sense. These are incredibly French, reserved folk who speak in hushed tones. I’ve spent a lot of time in France (my Grandma lives in Paris) and I’ve grown up all around their culture. For me, Paris is the Seattle of Europe: people are a little cold and abrasive, but witty and intelligent. The French tend to keep to themselves, but they’re warm at heart.

Michel Hazanavicius and Berenice Bejo started collaborating back in 2006 when she starred in Michel’s OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies alongside Jean Dujardin. Since then, they’ve made three more films together and along the way won plenty of awards for their 2011 silent black-and-white The Artist — including Oscars for Best Feature and Best Director for Michel. Both are incredibly talented, humble, quiet and fairly unflappable — Michel wasn’t impressed at all when I told him that he went to school just 20 kilometers from my Grandma’s apartment. They’re married with two kids and the fame doesn’t seem to have gotten to their heads. I got a chance to chat with them both (in French) at SIFF Cinema about their lives after the Oscars, their upcoming film The Search (a remake of the 1948 movie about war-torn Chechnya), and their filmmaking progress. Read More

Out in Theaters: THE MONUMENTS MEN

February 5, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Cate Winslet, George Clooney, Jean Dujardin, Matt Damon, Out in Theaters, Reviews, The Monuments Men

“The Monuments Men”
Directed by George Clooney
Starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Winslet, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban
Action, Biography, Drama
118 Mins
PG-13

George Clooney‘s The Monument’s Men is a monumess. A sloppily assembled patchwork of scenes, it’s a great story with no backbone that flops from event to event like a fish out of water. Without the propulsion of any kind of momentum, the tale sags, leaving us dulled to the story’s eventual important moments. With all the talent involved and Clooney behind the camera, we expect something with panache, wit and style and instead are served up this goofy slop of events thrown at the stage with all the disheveled precision of a pie-in-the-face. However intriguing the “true story” behind the film, it is apparently best left in books or relayed in insightful anecdotes as Clooney has all but snuffed the life out of what ought to be a monumental account. As Roger Ebert famously said, “Movies are not about what they are about, but how they are about it.” Here, Clooney’s how looks a lot like wingin’ it.

As mentioned above, the biggest problem holding The Monuments Men back from glory is how frumpily the series of events are organized. Scenes flow into each other like class five rapids, positively clashing and jarring any sense of time or place. Tacking a scene set in France onto one in Germany or America, we never have a foothold on where we are or when exactly anything is taking place. Clooney throws date on the screen but they will hop to another moment in time and another character whose location and significance we can only guess. Only when Clooney’s voiceover cuts through are we informed of the context of the content; a sure sign of narrative failure. When you’re tasked with explaining to the audience what they’re seeing, you know you’re taken a wrong turn off the successful storytelling highway.

So as the film crashes from one scene to another, we’re left trying to hold onto some semblence of structure and even the characters give us little to grasp onto. With the likes of Bill Murray, John Goodman, Matt Damon, Jean Dujardin and Bob Balaban assembled, one would expect stirring ensemble work but, for the most part, Clooney shies away from satisfying character development or captivating ensemble work. The only time he stops to really try and delve into characters are when they face death. What he fails to understand is that we already need to be invested at that point. You can’t kill someone off and then try and make them important posthumously. These “oh wait” moments ring a clear signal of his inability to save the unfocused screenplay from itself and a blinding sign of his desperate attempts to course correct too late in the game.

Even with all these missteps, there are a number of intriguing and poignant scenes interspersed throughout but even they come across as too clunkily set and architecturally inorganic to propel the audience into a suspended state of caring. We want to know who these characters are but we rarely do. Goodman is just kind of there, Dujardin plays up his irresistible French charm and Balaban has some nice material to work his mousey persona on but none really amount to much more than appreciators of art. When Murray is given a dramatic moment to break down in the shower, he puts in some solid work but it makes no sense in the context surrounding that moment. It’s like watching wrestling at the nail salon. It just doesn’t gel.

Where Monuments Men’s biggest disappointment is its squandered use of a killer cast. I will give credit to Cate Winslet, who will soon likely be an Academy Award winner, for her work as a Parisian art aficionado as her work is more notable than any of the gentlemen with whom she shares the screen.

And if you thought War Horse was old-fashion wait until you get a load of this. From the hokey John Williams-wannabe score (courtesy of Alexandre Desplat) to the almost played-for-laughs Nazi presence, it’s just one long page in the book of cinematic taboo. While this may have worked better in 1965, it certainly doesn’t fit 2014. Clooney has been able to manipulate time periods to his liking in the past but his attempt to do a period piece told in dated fashion works about as well as telling the Rwanda Genocide as a rom-com.

One thing is abundantly clear at this junction, Clooney’s art junkie project was certainly not moved from its original release date to “fix up the effects.” Columbia must have know they had little more than a hodgepodge of scenes and didn’t know how to piece them together. The resulting papier mâchéd clunker of a wartime dramedy is a futile effort at grasping at straws. Worse yet, it’s boring.

C-

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Out in Theaters: THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

December 24, 2013 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Jean Dujardin, Jonah Hill, Kyle Chandler, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, Out in Theaters, Reviews, The Wolf of Wall Street

“The Wolf of Wall Street”
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Jean Dujardin, Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jon Bernthal, Jon Favreau, Cristin Milioti
Biography, Comedy, Crime
180 Mins
R

Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street is a bombastic raunchfest spilling over with feverish humor and held in place by vibrant direction from Martin Scorsese and unhinged performances from its gifted cast. Sprawling and episodic, this “greed is great” epic is not only the funniest movie of the year, not only has one of the most outstanding performances in recent history, and not only is one of the most explicit films to hit the theaters under the guise of an R-rating, but, like icing on the proverbial cake, it offers a colossally poignant and timely cultural deconstruction of the financial institutions on which our country depends. And though it runs for exactly three hours, I’d watch this strung-out saga again in a second. A messy masterpiece on all fronts, The Wolf of Wall Street is a towering achievement.

We know that reality is often stranger than fiction but Scorsese’s encapsulation of the world of Jordan Belfort and his scurrying dervishes is like lifting a rock to find a thriving hive of ants equipped with Tony Montana-worthy piles of cocaine and strippers decked out in ever-fashionable neon beneath. Their iniquitous ways the stuff of adolescent male fantasies and their drug-fueled, deranged shenanigans straight from a Hunter S. Thompson memoir, Belfort is a modern day Dionysus. Taking the mantle of this larger-than-life imp of an investment banker, Leonardo DiCaprio is unholy goodness.

It’s no secret that I’m a massive fan of DiCaprio’s and a performance like this proves my continued faith in the multifarious thespian. Ranging from manic to disturbed, possessed to contemptible, his commanding performance scraps subtly for an off-the-walls buffet of theatrics. And though he never quite swallows the pill of reality, Belfort’s arc is splattered in sober doubt and drug-fueled confidence, always anchored by a megalomaniac’s grip on the destiny of those in his company. Twisting what it means to be generous, he takes from the rich and poor alike and distributes the riches amongst his legions of fanboy-like employees.

But for his however ethically corrupt he is, he’s got his own twisted sense of morality, at once misanthropic towards the world at large and a gentle guardian of his own flock of flunky stock pushers. His minions, led by a brilliantly toothy Jonah Hill, see him as the God he wants so badly to be.

Around the workplace, they call Belfort Wolfie; a nickname derived from his bullying brokering and his pick-up-the-scraps mentality. And as penny-stock pushers, Belfort and his henchmen turn scraps into millions, spinning gold from floss. Their office a carousal, Wolfie and Co.’s imperious rise to power is just too heinous to make up.

Beneath DiCaprio’s frantic and telescopic work as Belfort is a man feeding off his own energy. No matter how deluded Belfort can be, he’s a guy caught up in the moment, too high to not ride the waves of his own self-invented success. As an audience, we feed off the surge of energy too and let it drive us from scene to scene, always the intrigued voyeur.

And like a pitch-perfect backup singer, Hill’s Donnie Azoff (based on over-the-counter stock broker Danny Porush, who threatened to sue if they didn’t change his name) is the wind beneath DiCaprio’s wings. From the first time he steps onscreen, he demands our attention with his mammoth chompers and sleazy Long Island accent. He’s got sidekick so down pat that he may as well be the piggy Robin to Belfort’s wicked Batman. And no matter how brief his appearance is here, Matthew McConaughey is once again on fire. As a steadfast FBI agent, Kyle Chandler also breaks out of his comfort zone and puts in a performance worthy of such an accomplished cast.

Though lots of names have been tossed around for award recognition, Hill will assuredly be seeing his second (and here, more deserved) nomination for his work. His unique blend of drama and comedy is a staggering success and has knocked any skeptics off the fence in one fell, chompy swoop. And while DiCaprio’s performance here is a show for the ages, it may again go overlooked by the notoriously antiquated Academy. Regardless, he is the king of Hollywood and has proved it in spades with his astonishing work in Wolf.

But it’s not the performances alone that shine, as the movie flows smooth as butter. Looking at it as a whole, I wouldn’t want a single scene cut and that’s a testament to the seductive power of Scorsese’s film. With well over 500 counts of the f-bomb and enough female and male genitalia to perturb the most hip of parents, do be sure that you’re attending The Wolf of Wall Street with the right parties. This ain’t your grandma’s Scorsese.

A+

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