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No Fairy Tailspin Here: ‘Cinderella’

March 13, 2015 in Film Matters, Reviews

Call me a curmudgeon but I prefer my fairy tales pure. Recent action-hero pics like “Jack the Giant Slayer” and “Snow White and the Huntsman” have proved bloated bores. And though the feminist revisionism of such vehicles as “Malificent,” “Frozen,” and “Ever After” may be admirable, it’s like slapping Band-Aids over these regressive myths’ tumors. Better to let fairy tales be fairy tales — and follow up with our children afterward lest they confuse them for reality.

“Cinderella,” Disney’s latest live-action offering, is back to basics in the best of ways. Written by Chris Weitz (“About a Boy”) and directed by Kenneth Branagh as if it were a studio movie made in Hollywood’s Golden Age, it contains no winks at the grownups nor any pop culture references to hip the joint up. (A preceding “Frozen” short provides both.) In fact, this update on the 1950 animated classic seems to target tweens; its slow-moving grace and emphasis on morality and love rather than magic and musical numbers did not sit well with the small kids in the screening I attended. (The rest of us may watch in peace.) Continue Reading →

The Tricks and Treats of ‘Cymbeline’

March 12, 2015 in Film Matters, Reviews, Theater Matters

“Cymbeline” may be the red-headed stepchild of Shakespeare’s plays. Theoretically, it’s got it all: a scheming queen, beheadings, mistaken identities, battlefields, magic potions, a girl passing as a boy. But with a labyrinthine plot, unaccommodating verse, and oddbot allusions to the Bard’s earlier works, it defies categorization, let alone easy analysis. Who but a director like Michael Almereyda – best known for his modish, moody 2000 adaptation of “Hamlet” starring Ethan Hawke – would dare tackle such fare?

I’m glad he did. Shakespearean adaptations are a dime a dozen but most are “as inspired by the play by William Shakespeare” affairs like “10 Things I Hate About You” or Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” (though the former is a solid 1990s Heath Ledger vehicle). Movies that really honor the playwright’s spirit are rarer birds, and with a languid playfulness, Almereyda has made exactly that. He also has shown us that “Cymbeline” is a play whose time has come again.

Like Almereyda’s “Hamlet,” this film is set in modern times but preserves an unusual amount of Shakespeare’s original speech. It is a study in sly casting, too. With his unhappily darting eyes and small shoulders squared in a leather jacket, Ed Harris is perfect as Cymbeline, the king of a motorcycle gang – as is Milla Jovovich as his second wife, a queen so cruelly beautiful that her tiara doesn’t even seem ironic. (More than any actress of her generation, Jovovich has always seemed born to play cruelly beautiful middle-aged women.) With saucer eyes and the smoothest of skin, Gossip Boy Penn Badgley plays the skate-boarding Posthumous, Cymbeline’s favorite disciple until he falls for Imogene (Dakota Johnson), the biker king’s daughter. Though lovely in a new-millennial-doll sort of way, she widens her eyes and mealy-mouths her dialogue as if nothing more could be required of a third-generation scion of Hollywood sirens (her mother is Melanie Griffith; her grandmother, the swoony Tippi Hedren). Such reacting rather than acting works here, though, as she mostly serves as the object around which all the real action rotates. Continue Reading →

Bohemians & Flappers, O My!

March 9, 2015 in Book Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters

Anthology films are so underrated. The best ones are celebrations of form and concept, as they focus on pure theme rather than the conventions of more traditional features. Even the worst ones have something to offer, though, especially if multiple directors have contributed their work. Take 1989’s “New York Stories.” Frances Ford Coppola and Woody Allen may have contributed self-indulgent shorts but Martin Scorsese’s offering, “Life Lessons,” provided such an epic glimpse into obsession, the artistic process, and the male ego that it singlehandedly merited the price of admission.

In general, New York-based anthology films may be the finest example of the genre; at any given moment, so many different worlds and eras coexist on the same tiny island that they’re bound to generate compelling fodder. An adaptation of Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells, a collection of Manhattan-based Vanity Fair pieces written between 1913-1936, may be just what the doctor ordered, then. The glamour of that time is almost unparalleled, and matching the right directors to the various essays, poems, and profiles of this book would be like shooting fish in a barrel. We’d be bound to score at least once. Continue Reading →

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