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A True Siren: Illeana Douglas

December 17, 2015 in Book Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, Past Matters

Illeana Douglas may be best known for her work in such edgy fare as “The Larry Sanders Show” and  Allison Anders’s “Grace of My Heart” but she also is a true scion of Old Hollywood. Her grandfather was the multiple Oscar-winning actor Melvyn Douglas and she has counted among her friends such film luminaries as Marlon Brando and Martin Scorsese, with whom she had a relationship for ten years. Now she’s penned a memoir, I Blame Dennis Hopper: And Other Stories From a Life Lived In and Out of the Movies, that doubles as a series of profiles of some key Tinseltown figures.

LISA ROSMAN: Tell us about the title. “I Blame Dennis Hopper.” It’s so promising!

ILLEANA DOUGLAS: Well, it’s the running gag in my life. My parents saw “Easy Rider” and were so affected that they started a commune and began living off the land. As I grew up, I realized that not only did that movie directly change my life but it changed so many lives across America. Not just young people’s. Middle class, middle-aged people’s, too. To me, that’s the power of film. Later on, I got to meet Dennis Hopper and I said, “Thanks for ruining my life. You ruined a lot of people’s lives.” He was like, “Sorry.” It’s very sad he passed away because this was something I really wanted to explore in a documentary. He was talking about freedom, man, and a lot of people resonated with that. Continue Reading →

Powerfully Useful: ‘The Big Short’

December 14, 2015 in Book Matters, Country Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

If you had told me a year ago that the most powerfully useful American film of 2015 would be brought to us by the man who helmed “Talladega Nights,” I would have told you to fix your damn time machine. Yet it is absolutely true that Adam McKay, the goofball extraordinaire who gave us such national treasures as “Anchorman,” has directed and co-written “The Big Short,” the adaptation of Michael Lewis’s 2010 nonfiction bestseller about the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market. What’s that, you say? Put simply, McKay has crafted the definitive movie about the 2008 worldwide economic meltdown that stemmed from the bursting of the American housing bubble – and he’s done so with rigorous detail and more than a spoonful of his slapstick sugar.

Sugar is the operative term here, and even as we’re gobbling it up, we’re made aware that this is exactly how our country got itself in such a financial black hole in the first place. Start with the eye candy that is Ryan Gosling, who plays Jared Vennett, the Slick Rick narrator doubling as a banker whose alpha-douchery actually outstrips that of his colleagues. He’s been lucky enough to notice the seemingly insane-in-the-membrane investments of financial idiot-savant Michael Burry (Christian Bale), who’s prone to blasting death rock while crunching numbers and rubbing his smelly, naked feet. After sifting through the kazillions of individual mortgages that make up the securities underwriting so much of the banking industry, Burry has decided to bet against the housing market by investing more than a billion dollars of his clients’ money into credit default swaps. Scratching your head yet? Just wait, there’s more. Vennett ropes in mega-misanthropic hedge funder Mark Baum (a wild-eyed Steve Carell), and the two go into the credit-default-swap business, as does the pee-wee investment team of Charles Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), who enlist former banker Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt, who also co-produces), a New Age-y Cassandra, to help them play in the big leagues. Continue Reading →

Nothing Rosy About ‘The Lady in the Van’

December 9, 2015 in Book Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

Set in mid-century London, “The Lady in the Van” douses us with sweeping orchestration – all tooting clarinets that sound twee as only clarinets can sound. But while “twee” could have been the operative term across the board in this period drama starring Dame Maggie Smith, audiences expecting a “Best Exotic Marigold” homage to the Endearing Habits of Elders will not be sated. This is an adaptation of Alan Bennett’s eponymous memoir and subsequent stage production, and the essayist and playwright (who also serves as screenwriter here) has a long-established habit of buttering us up with metaphorical tea and crumpets only to lay in stark realities about human intimacy and obfuscation.

Bennett has not one but two stand-ins here, both played by Alex Jennings. “Writing is talking to oneself,” he informs us early on, and so he divides into a “writing self” and a “living self,” the latter lacking the dark acuity of the former. (They share a predilection for sweater vests and bowties.) It’s a dissociation that Mary Shepherd (Smith), the titular lady in the van, seizes upon while feigning a very useful balminess. A mysterious homeless woman who first encamped on Bennett’s Camden Town block in the mid-1970s, Miss Shepherd (as he unfailingly calls her) spends her time praying, selling pencils, decorating her “crushed mimosa”-painted vehicle with pictures of the Queen, and deflecting the efforts of nouveau-riche locals to assuage their liberal guilt. “No thank you,” she airily tells one woman who offers her a home-baked dessert. “Pears repeat on me.” Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy