The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, R)

Wes Anderson is a bit of an unusual filmmaker to me.  I’ve enjoyed all the films of his I’ve seen, and I appreciate the originality and technical artistry, but I find them a little hard to connect to emotionally.  While I always like them, I never love them; they don’t really stay with me afterword.  So, I don’t love The Grand Budapest Hotel, but it’s a very well-made movie, and I honestly liked it a lot.

This film comes to us through the eyes of Zero, the new lobby boy at the Grand Budapest Hotel.  Under the eccentric but detailed tutelage of concierge M. Gustave, Zero navigates the hospitality business of pre-war Europe, but of course, it’s not going to be that simple.  When Gustave is remember in the will of a wealthy regular who’s died, he gets embroiled in an ugly conspiracy, and Zero is behind his mentor every step of the way.  There are fastidiously hand-decorated cakes, clandestine meetings in confessionals, and creepy enforcers played by Willem Dafoe – all good things in my book.

As can be expected with Wes Anderson, the art direction is impeccable.  The mise-en-scène is peppered with delightful touches throughout, every color feels deliberate, and a prison break has hardly ever been so whimsically staged.  Much of the direction and action has a stylized intentionality about it, with very consciously-synchronized head tilts and line delivery that’s often purposefully flat but somehow doesn’t feel less genuine.  Though the plot itself is a little busy (we jump through several layers of stories within stories before we get to the main narrative,) it holds together fairly well, and the extremely likable duo of Gustave and Zero help to hold our interest even when things get muddled.

The cast is fit to bursting with acting pedigree.  Ralph Fiennes plays Gustave with gently absurd panache, Tilda Swinton is almost unrecognizable as the rich dead aristo, and Adrien Brody and Willem Dafoe work well together as a pair of baddies.  The film also employs, with varying degrees of screentime, Jeff Goldblum, Edward Norton, Mathieu Amalric (who I’ve not seen since he played Jean-Dominique in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,) Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Bob Balaban, Saorise Ronan (young Briony in Atonement,) Tom Wilkinson, Jude Law, Harvel Keitel, and Jason Schwartzman.  Phew!  I’m not familiar with Tony Revolori, who plays Zero, but he’s excellent – sharp, sweet, and unflappable.

Five best picture nominees in, and I still haven’t found a clear standout.  Selma is, for my money, probably the best I’ve seen so far, but since it has so few total nominations, I don’t think it’s likely to win.  There’s no obvious frontrunner for me, and I don’t really have a sentimental favorite that I love best even though it’ll never take home the trophy (as often happens with me.)    I don’t know – there’s been a lot that’s good, and even very good, but so far, nothing exceptional.

Warnings

Swearing, some sexual content, and violence (including some cartoonish graphic bits.)

Top Five Songs: Bring It On

I love the scores for Next to Normal and In the Heights, so it’s a no-brainer that I’d love Tom Kitt and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tag-team effort in Bring It On.  I’m not the least self-conscious about my delight with this based-on-a-movie cheerleading musical, because the music is just that good.  Here are my favorites.

“What I Was Born to Do” – This showcase for Campbell opens the show with energy and spirit.  The chorus, with its mantra “These Truman girls / Are superhuman girls,” is ridiculously catchy, and I love the cheer introductions in the middle.  Right away, we see that Campbell is a cheerleader because she loves it, not because of stereotypical high-school-movie pecking order reasons, which gives us a better idea of what kind of show we’re about to see.

Best line:  “We got one shot that we work all year for - / We got more balls than the team we cheer for.”

“Do Your Own Thing” – Lin-Manuel Miranda has such a talent for scene songs that establish settings and characters, move the plot forward, have insane hooks, and boast clever lyrics all at the same time.  This song, in which Campbell starts her apprehensive first day at Jackson High, is a stellar example of this.

Best line:  “Step one to become invisible: / Books up – de-accentuate the physical, / Head down – use only your peripheral. / Stick with me; we’ll be indivisible.”

“We Ain’t No Cheerleaders” – I’m so in love with the groove of this song.  Danielle leads us with strut and stagger, and she’s backed well by Nautica and La Cienega.  The dance crew wasn’t around for “What I Was Born to Do,” so their idea of cheerleaders is the teen movie stereotype, and they clarify their roles in this number that sizzles with attitude.

Best line:  “You can call your therapist / And complain, ‘Those girls ain’t right,’ / ‘Cause every day / We get haters / Who say they can take us. / Okay, baby - / If that helps you sleep at night.”

“It’s All Happening” – Another fantastic scene song.  As Campbell and Danielle try to recruit kids for their squad, I like the way they paint a picture for their potential converts.  They offer a wide assortment of motives, everything from fame/a chance to show off, to representing their neighborhood and proving what they can do to the rich white kids of the other schools. 

Best line:  “What – are y’all scared? / Y’all think cheerin’ is feminine? / Then I’m a feminist swimmin’ in / Women, gentlemen!”

“Cross the Line” – This isn’t even a song performed in the show – it’s the backing track to Jackson’s competition routine.  Still, I adore it.  It has such lovely themes of bravery and risk-taking, and I like that it focuses more on self-victory than on trophies.  Plus, the melody is gorgeous; I especially love the final, triumphant chorus that comes in after the bridge.

Best line:  “I wanna fall just to feel alive. / I feel like following me tonight.”

Boyhood (2014, R)

If you know anything about this best picture nominee, you know its central gimmick:  it was short over the course of 12 years, with its leading boy/man growing up on camera.  Thanks to the strength of young Ellar Coltrane’s performance, the gimmick mostly feels earned, and although it’s way too long, the film is pretty enjoyable.

I’ve seen Boyhood described as a series of 12 short films about growing up, and that’s fairly accurate.  There isn’t a real solid through-line, and so we instead peer in on young Mason’s life at different stages.  Some of the plot threads, like Mason’s up-and-down relationship with his father or his mother’s tumultuous second marriage, are more compelling than others, like Mason’s slightly aimless coming-of-age. 

In general, the film accomplishes a nice sense of universal specificity in the early years – much feels familiar, but we also get a clear sense of who Mason is and what his life is like.  His squabbles with his older sister are maddeningly genuine, and I like the thoughtful details of his pastimes and childhood woes.  With contentiously divorced parents and a parade of “drunken asshole” stand-in father figures, he has his share of major troubles, but the movie additionally captures the way small battles loom large in young lives; an unflattering haircut is a serious episode in Mason’s childhood, and even though we know it’s small potatoes compared to his other problems, it really feels serious when we see Mason’s reaction to it.  The first part of the film is also peppered with amusing bits of nostalgia that would have been contemporary at the time of shooting.  Things like Gameboys and Harry Potter midnight (book!) premieres serve as mini time capsules.

As Mason reaches adolescence, the movie starts to feel more like a generic coming-of-age story.  It loses a lot of its particularity – mild teen rebellion, tentative romance, and end-of-high-school uncertainty are all well-polished old chestnuts – and, more than that, it just isn’t as interesting.  I swear the second half of the film features no fewer than four “It’s time to buckle down and think about your future” speeches from adult men in Mason’s life.  So, not just generic for its type, but repetitive within itself, and, given that the movie exceeds two-and-a-half hours, it gets to be a bit much.

Ellar Coltrane as Mason is effectively engaging throughout, but even he starts to feel kind of listless of the later segments of the movie.  Still, he displays a nice, understated talent, and even though it’s more apparent in the early sections, he remains the best reason to soldier on in the second half.  Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette bring an earnest quality to the somewhat archetypal roles of Mason’s parents and Lorelai Linklater (writer/director Richard Linklater’s daughter) is pitch-perfect as Mason’s mouthy, eternally-unimpressed sister.

Warnings

Lots of swearing, smoking/drinking/drug use, and a little sexual content.

Miscellaneous Buster Keaton TV Roles

After falling pretty significantly out of the public eye after his time with MGM, Buster Keaton enjoyed a delightful revival in the ‘50s and ‘60s, greatly facilitated by television.  A number of his classic silent works thought lost had been recovered, and many were shown on TV.  This helped those who’d forgotten Buster to remember his comic genius and a new generation to discover it, and this renewed interest led to lots of work for Buster in the relatively new medium.

Buster’s TV work takes several forms.  The most basic of these late career roles are simply guest spots on assorted shows.  Some of it could have been played by anyone – for instance, he features in a nice but schmaltzy Christmas episode of The Donna Reed Show as a kindly custodian who’s been quietly arranging the children’s ward Christmas party for years.  Nothing about the role screams “Buster Keaton,” but I’m guessing the Keaton renaissance made his character that much more endearing to audiences.  Other stuff, while not explicitly Buster-related, feel more specifically down his alley.  He has a brief role on Burke’s Law, a crime procedural, and his one scene involves a fun silent gimmick:  his character is being questioned by the titular Detective Burke, but he has laryngitis, so he acts out all his answers charades-style.  It’s silly but a lot of fun.  And then there’s “Once Upon a Time,” an episode of The Twilight Zone built around Buster.  The story features Buster as a man who accidently time travels from 1890 to the 1960s – the nineteenth-century portions are shot like a silent movie, complete with intertitles, jaunty piano music, and sight gags.  Buster does plenty of physical comedy, including a fantastic recreation of the “missing trousers” bit from the Arbuckle-Keaton short The Garage.

In this era, there were a lot of “Saturday play” type shows featuring one-shot dramas and comedies (similar to Masterpiece today, but less British.)  Buster got in on his share of these as well.  Again, his casting was sometimes very deliberate.  In “The Silent Partner,” shown on Screen Directors Playhouse, he plays a once-beloved, now-forgotten comic of silent cinema.  I’ve of two minds about the program.  On one hand, it clearly has a lot of affection for Buster’s character and feels a bit like a love story to the early pioneers of Hollywood.  On the other, the fake clips of old comedy classics are kind of terrible, more a cynical idea of what silent movies were like instead of a true homage to talented filmmakers like Buster.  Rheingold Theatre’s “The Awakening” is another interesting TV piece, in that it’s one of the only purely dramatic roles Buster played in his career.  Based on a Gogol story, it tells of a man (Buster) whose eyes are opened to the injustice of his dystopian society after the theft of his hard-earned overcoat.  It’s neat to see him in a drama; comedy was definitely the right place for him, but he’s not bad at all.

Most significantly, Buster starred in, not one, but two TV shows in the ‘50s, The Buster Keaton Show and Life with Buster Keaton.  Both are light, amusing sitcoms chock full of physical comedy and sight gags.  Neither has much plot beyond the basic premise of Buster as a hapless sporting-goods clerk/amateur theatre director, and any scenario largely exists to give him an excuse to clown around in classic Buster fashion.  They’re not up there with his golden-era stuff, of course, but they’re pretty funny, especially considering the quick turnaround on TV at the time compared to the more thorough work he put into his silent shorts and features.  He resurrects some old gags, like the boxing training session from Battling Butler, and comes up with a lot of new stuff as well – one of my favorites is a doomed taffy-pulling session that’s a riot, pure Buster all the way.

Some More Thoughts on Twelve and Clara

With any luck, the relationship between the Doctor and Clara in series 9 will be significantly different than the one we got last season.  The Christmas special gave me hope of a near-total reset, which, honestly, would be such a relief that I wouldn’t mind the retcon.  In short, my fingers are crossed that this post will be obsolete in nine months or so, but in the meantime, here are some further ponderings about Twelve and Clara’s uneasy dynamic.

During series 8’s business about Twelve being a “darker” Doctor, with Clara saying she doesn’t know who he is anymore and can’t bring herself to call him a good man (yep, still bitter,) I was reminded of Mr. Beaver’s description of Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia:  “Who said anything about safe?  ‘Course he isn’t safe.  But he’s good.”  It struck me that the Doctor is much the same.  Despite his sometimes loudly-touted nonviolence stance, he’s done hard things over his many lives.  He’s lied, manipulated, and, when necessary, killed.  It’s not for nothing that the Daleks call him the Oncoming Storm, and those who run with him are often in danger.  However, as Ten tells Donna at Pompeii, he has to make the impossible decisions, or people will die.  The way Twelve puts it, even when your only choices are bad, “you still have to choose.”

The thing is, there are many moments in series 8 where “unsafe” keeps Clara from seeing “good.”  An even stronger literary parallel, for me, comes in J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, when Zooey takes Franny to task for her perception of Jesus (honestly, I’m not trying to make the Doctor into a Christ figure – it’s just a good fit for what I think is going on here.)  In the book, Zooey reminds Franny of a childhood episode in which she decided she was done with Jesus on the grounds that He 1) threw the money-changers out of the temple and 2) said, “Are ye not much better than [the fowls of the air]?”  He points out that Franny prefers someone like St. Francis, someone with a “consistently winning personality” who preaches to the birds and never gets his hands dirty.  Franny wanted – expected – Jesus to be a St. Francis, a “sticky, adorable, divine personage” who never did anything that made her uncomfortable, and when He didn’t match those expectations, she turned away from Him.  Zooey, however, understands that Jesus was better than the cozy, safe persona that people tend to set up for Him, and no one should want a Jesus “the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament.”

In series 8, I think Clara spends a lot of time in Franny’s place.  She has this image in her head of what the Doctor ought to be, and when his new regeneration doesn’t conform to that ideal, she can no longer see him as “her” Doctor.  Even though Eleven isn’t “safe” either – he spends most of his time with Clara lying to her about why he wants them traveling together – Clara sees his good and gives tremendously of herself in order to keep him in the world.  With gruff, unsentimental Twelve, though, she focuses, not on the people he protects, but on the niceties he ignores, the machinations he works, and the apparent callousness he adopts.  She doesn’t see the way he allows his hearts to be stained so that others can be saved; in “Deep Breath,” the Doctor tells the Half-Face Man, “I do not expect to reach the Promised Land,” and it’s because of the morally compromised things he’s done for Clara and those like her.  That may not be endearing, but it’s admirable, and it’s why it kills me when the Doctor does something not on the up-and-up and Clara gapes at his seeming ruthlessness.  She doesn’t want to see the Doctor’s demons.  She expects him to stop monsters while remaining cuddly and virtuous, and in doing so, she’s missing out on the much more complex, compelling Doctor she actually has.