I Have To Murder And Dismember A Crustacean.

Meryl Streep is a strange beast. My father loves her, he thinks anything he touches is golden. He does like watching films, but he is particularly picky and it is almost impossible to pick what he will like, but you put Meryl Streep in anything and he'll go off and watch it. I think she is a very good actress, but a lot of her more recent output makes me think of Katherine Hepburn's comment about her, about seeing the cogs behind her eyes working (to paraphrase the great Ms Hepburn.) There are, of course, fantastic exceptions. I loved her in Adaptation, and I thought her turn in The Devil Wears Prada was genius. And I've loved her in many, many movies over the years. I've probably seen her in more movies than any other actresses, which may have to do with the fact that she is, incredibly, always working. Enormous respect does have to be bestowed on her, love her or hate her, for the fact that, at 61, she is not only still a big movie star, but a huge box office draw. Sure, she very rarely headlines a film entirely on her own, and many of her roles put her opposite younger stars with significant appeal, but she's always at the top of the list. Her films manage to bring in an incredible crossover audience. I mean, according to Box Office Mojo, she has had three $100mil+ films in the last five years, with this film, Julie & Julia, getting damn close (and giving her another Oscar nomination.) There aren't many actresses full stop who can achieve that, and none that I can think of at her age. In fact, the only actress I can think of who might have more box office clout than Streep at this point is Sandra Bullock, and even then, I think a lot of people kind of go into Bullock films thinking they're going to be average, and possibly being surprised, whereas no one goes into a Streep film excepting anything less than great. I was reading, I think over at The Film Experience, some very early 2010 Oscar predictions, where they had her down as a Best Actress contender even though she is not slated to appear in any films this year, simply because she's Meryl Streep - and I don't think it's too farfetched. 

Moving on. Julie & Julia. The film is based, ostensibly, on the blog and subsequent book of one Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a young woman who, in the early days of the internet, started a blog chronicling her attempts to cook all 500 odd recipes in the iconic Julia Childs' (Streep) Mastering The Art Of French Cooking in 365 days. The blog turned into a bit of a sensation, and Powell then published the book based on the experience. Rom-com queen took up the challenge of turning the exercise into a film, merging and paralleling the travails of Powell with those of Childs. Running Childs' move with her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci), a diplomat, to his post in Paris alongside the drudgery of Powell's life with husband Eric (Chris Messina) and her challenge to herself, Ephron works them into a nice little single narrative thread. 


Childs finds herself in Paris, loving the food, but unable to find a French cookbook in English. She takes up one class to find it entirely remedial, and so enrols herself in a course for professionals, initially being scorned before setting her stubborn mind to it, practicing like buggery, and proving herself entirely capable. With a couple of friends she sets up a school, and after a while the three decide to write a book. Initially struggling to find a publisher, she eventually scores a deal back in the States, and the book is still printed to this day.


Powell is working in a cubicle in post-9/11 New York, fielding calls from people looking for compensation. The job is heartbreaking, not least for all of the tears and emotions she deals with on a day to day basis. Plus, her friends are all super-successful, and she has all but abandoned her hopes to become a writer. Craving inspiration after she and Eric move from Brooklyn to Queens (if my memory serves me correctly), she sets about writing about her attempts to cook all of these recipes, some of which are very complex, whilst still working and trying to keep her marriage stable. As the year progresses she finds herself followed by more and more people on the internet, and becomes quite a public phenomenon, leading to said book deal.


Streep does a good job of trying to step into Childs quite large shoes (she was 6'2 in real life, whereas Streep is 5'6), but I don't think she quite gets there. She seems a little awkward, and is a little too larger-than-life for me to really get into and feel her character. On the other hand, I really liked Adams as the younger, modern, more vulnerable Powell. She struggles through all of the issues related to trying to maintain her goal and her job and her life and her marriage, and as the year progresses she finds the mere task of finishing the project more of a motivation than a specific desire to actually cook the food. (I think I can relate to her a little with this project...)


The venerable Tucci plays opposite Streep again fantastically - he is seemingly bemused by Childs' dreams, but entirely supportive in a reasonably distant way, and at the same time the tones of fear at his own collapsing career come through enough to keep us in the loop without overpowering the primary narrative intent. Similarly Messina supports Adams' character well as the suffering husband who can see the end in sight but still thinks his suffering too great when confronted by the exhausted hysteria of his troubled wife.


Ephron knows what she is doing with a film like this, and she does it well. The laughs are there, the tears are there, she manipulates her audience without it ever really feeling like she is manipulating you. She's talented, especially with good material, and here she proves it. Her script also shines, deliberately overlapping lines and sentiments between the two chronologically removed stories to hit her point home, but doing it well so it never felt hamfisted or cloying.


That being said, it is just a nice film (scored wonderfully by someone named Alexandre Desplat - never heard of him.) It's not a great film, it's not one I'd watch again, probably, simply because once is enough. There's nothing really drawing me back to it. The characters were nice, the performances were good, it looked good, it flowed well, but there was no shazam. It never kicked me in the guts. Which is perfectly fine for a romantic comedy. They can't all have the heft of Notting Hill. See it for some light entertainment, but don't expect it to rock your world. 3.5 stars.

I Modified This Tube Sock.

Bit of a hiatus, but I went on a mini-break to Copenhagen, which turned into a much longer stay thanks to a certain Icelandic volcano spreading ash everywhere and causing a bit of a European airspace shutdown - you may have heard something about it. That's all right, trains and ferries saved the day.

Now, that doesn't mean I'm still not well behind. I am. I watched Fantastic Mr Fox a while ago, and I'm a little rusty on it because of that. But I know I liked it. I didn't love it, but I liked it. I think the vocal talent was very, very charismatic (with George Clooney doing his thing, and Meryl Streep showing that even without her physical presence, her comic timing is terrific.) I think it looked really cool - I loved the stop-motion, cute little characters and the production design of the whole thing. It didn't quite grab me, but it was a nice little romp. Jason Schwartzmann was hilariously petulant, Willem Dafoe was brilliantly disguised, Eric Chase Anderson held well against far more experienced cast, Bill Murray and Jarvis Cocker worked, Owen Wilson just made me think of Owen Wilson, and I'm not a huge Owen Wilson fan so...


Alexandre Desplat (who? Who's he? Oh, him) did great things with the score, unsurprisingly. It's really a pity he doesn't score more films than he does. What? He did seven scores for 2009 films? Lazy. He's scored five films I've seen in the last six months? Work harder, man!


Look, I'm not going to knock Wes Anderson, really. He at least goes for what he wants to do. You can feel his style, whether you love it or hate it. As I think I mentioned here, I liked his Life Aquatic, but from what I've seen of the rest of his work I'm a little ho-hum. But you do know what you're getting, and you must admit that that has things going for it. Still... 3.5 stars.

This Is This. This Ain't Something Else. This Is This.

Crikey (good morning, Australia!), talk about taking a tumble. How do you go from a five time Oscar winning film to what was derided as an enormous flop that pretty much brought down a studio? I don't know, but the answer probably lies somewhere within Michael Cimino's brain.

Don't worry, I'm not going to talk about Heaven's Gate, his tragic opus - I haven't seen it, though there is a part of me that wants to. So I will eventually. But today we're here to talk about The Deer Hunter, his masterpiece, as it were. I must say, one of my favourite parts of watching films from, oh, probably about the 1960s to the 1980s is watching the opening credits to see where the stars of today appear. Like Dennis Hopper popping us as 'thug' or whatever it was in Rebel Without A Cause. Or here in The Deer Hunter, where Meryl Streep is listed after John Cazale and John Savage (who?) in the opening credits, after the title. Well, I guess this was only her first Oscar nomination out of the 235128475134 she has received, and only for Supporting, so... 

Robert De Niro takes the lead in this Vietnam War drama, playing Michael, leader of sorts among his friends. These friends include Stan (Cazale), Steven (Savage) and Nick (Christopher Walken.) They're a small town group of friends, steel workers preparing for Steven's marriage, their heading off to the war, and the hunting trip they're embarking on that evening. Shortly the boys find themselves in the midst of the brutal war, held captive, dropped in rivers, mentally and physically tortured - everything you have heard about the war. In fact, I'm sure it's nothing compared to what you have heard, but it's vicious nonetheless. Steven loses both of his legs and ends up in a military hospital back in the US, barely coping and keeping away from his wife; Nick goes mental and remains in Saigon, playing Russian Roulette for money, which he sends to Steven in hospital; Michael is the only one who seems relatively unscathed, though the trauma of what has happened to his friends and his promise not to leave Vietnam without Nick haunt him into returning, where he finds Nick seriously deranged, wracked with guilt and a complete sense of loss brought about by his conviction that he was the only one of his friends to survive. 

It's a long and haunting film, with much of it set in and after the Vietnam war, which doesn't make for easy viewing. The performances are uniformly terrific. De Niro holds his cards close to his chest but plays them at the perfect moment. Walken especially is incredibly haunting, his happy-go-lucky fun-filled character turning so severely to something so remote and removed so very convincingly. He deserved his Oscar for this film. Streep, as Nick's girlfriend kept completely in the dark as to what has happened to him, is terrific in an early role, quite small, torn between her love for her fiancee and the comfort of Michael's arms.

The script, by Deric Washburn with a bunch of others on story duty, is studied and measured, perfectly paced and pitched along the way. Cimino gives the film plenty of room to breath, allowing for a harrowing journey through the psychology of the characters and an insight into the devastating effects of war on those it spits out at the other end. A fairly typical score from Stanley Myers is worked into brilliant sound design to work your emotions in a standard but effective way. It all combines to a solid three hours of hard-going but worthwhile cinema. 5 stars.

Respect The Delicate Ecology Of Your Delusions.

What a great line.

I mentioned very recently that I am greatly affected by the length of films. That I have a short attention span and I can often struggle to sit through longer films. This was in relation to La Dolce Vita. I also mentioned that I had recently watched Angels In America, the five and a half hour HBO miniseries from 2003 (which I'm counting as two films for the purposes of my 365 day challenge. Bite me.) I brought that up because I actually watched the first five and a half hours in one sitting, only stopping because it was getting quite late, I was quite tired and I had to be awake early the next day to run errands and prepare for my imminent Icelandic departure. I didn't want to stop watching, and I almost kept going regardless, to hell with sensibility. But in the end logic prevailed.

Angels In America must have one of the best casts assembled for a television event in recent memory. Count 'em. Meryl Streep. Emma Thompson. Al Pacino. Patrick Wilson. Mary-Louise Parker. Justin Kirk. Jeffrey Wright. Ben Shenkman. James Cromwell. Michael Gambon. And directed by Mike Nichols (The Graudate, Silkwood, Closer - many others.)

Based on the play, Angels In America takes place in the early and deadliest days of the AIDS crisis in America, in the mid-1980s. Prior Walter (Kirk) has the most screen time, I guess making him the lead. In a relationship with Louis (Shenkman) for four and half years, he is now quickly dying of AIDS (well, AIDS-related illnesses, but let's keep it simple.) Louis can't handle it and abandons him, leaving him to his suffering and delusions - and possibly a visit from an angel (Emma Thompson, in one of her various roles in the production.)

Meanwhile, Roy Cohn (Pacino) is a high-flying lawyer also dying of AIDS - or liver cancer as he'd prefer it to be known publicly. He is alone because he has nobody in his life - he has pushed everyone aside. He is a hard-arsed son of a bitch who has pissed off so many people - though he has managed to remain within the affections of closeted Mormon Joe (Wilson), whom Roy has taken under his wing, presumably hoping to get a little rumpy-pumpy out of it. Joe is naive, and struggling with a wife, Harper (Parker), who is addicted to valium and suffers from her own delusions. He takes long walks through Central Park, watching the men have sex in the trees but too afraid to participate - for now. Eventually, with Harper's mind and his marriage disintegrating, he enters into a relationship with the guilty and devastated Louis - his first gay encounter. (Following? There's more.)

Binding these stories together are Belize (Wright, reprising his award-winning turn in the original Broadway production), who is Prior's best friend and nurse to Roy. A strange, disgusted respect brews for Roy, while his anger for Louis shows through loud and proud - like everything else about him. He looks after Prior when Louis runs off, and is involved in the eventual hunting down of Joe by Prior - Belize knows Joe through Joe's visits to Roy in hospital whilst Belize is taking care. In addition, Joe's mother Hannah (Streep) has come to New York from Salt Lake City after Joe calls her at 4am, drunk and in Central Park, to come out to her. She is there to take care of Harper and Joe, despite the fact that Joe has run off to be with Louis, but ends up in a confrontation with Prior that sees her taking him to hospital and experiencing another of his visits from the Angel of America (that's Thompson, for those not keeping up.)

It's an extraordinarily interlinked and finely woven tapestry of screen production. I always find modern representations of the AIDS crisis important (especially ones so well received as this one) as I think current generations don't truly understand the gravity of the disease and how ravaging it really is. Like Holding The Man (the stage play and the book), it is an entertaining and thought-provoking look at what really happened back then, when people didn't really know what was going on, when there was so much fear about what the syndrome was all about, when the stigma attached to homosexuality was still so strong. Philadephia may have brought that out into the open a little more back in the mid-90s, but it is always well worth being reminded.

And reminded how. This is an incredible almost-six hours of television marvel. Streep, Wright, Thompson, Shenkman and Kirk all play multiple roles (apparently in much the same way as in the stage productions), and do it brilliantly. It is overly melodramatic. It is overly stylised. But it is all entirely perfect. Every detail included in the production fit, because for the most part we're not dealing with reality. We're dealing with visions and delusions and insanity a lot of the time. We're dealing with prophets and messengers. We're dealing with heaven and earth. We're crossing faiths, races, genders, sexualities. It is so finely twined, but perfectly understandably so. It's easy to understand (a lot easier than I'm sure my run-down above was) but never simplistic. It tackles issues that needs to be tackled head on. I can only imagine what the reception for the play was back in the early 90s, when the crisis was still going strong.

But the film doesn't really preach, in so many words. Its themes and morals are definitely worn on its sleeve, but it's more about the people and the stories and their arcs and what they go through individually and together. It is entirely human, even as it delves into the supernatural. Even the angels are flawed. Hope and salvation doesn't, here, come from above, but is reliant on the deeds of those on the ground - who are for the most part reluctant, wanting just to go on as they were without causing trouble.

It's beautiful and amazing. That's all I have to say. I could watch it again and again. I can't recommend it highly enough. See it. See it all. 5 stars.