Archive for year: 2009

Hysterically funny, at least the half I was able to catch. It was paced like a sitcom, and the performances were uniformly over-the-top, but the whole fit seamlessly together, like fingers in a glove. An especially deft and novel leitmotif was the role of 20-somethings, pulling and being hit by levers in the power corridors of Washington and London. The story of how British “intel” facilitated America’s rush into a nameless war might have seemed absurd had not every event in the movie echoed reality as we now know it. An inside source on WMD called “Iceman”? Not half as ridiculous as the CIA’s reliance on “Screwball.” The media’s fixation on a crumbling garden wall while war is being plotted? Try the “beer summit,” while health-care overhaul is left to dry.

I had never heard of the “naïve” artist Seraphine de Senlis, but discovering at movie’s end that she was a real person explained in large part why this film was so dramatically inert. To take but one example, Wilhelm Uhde had to flee Senlis at the outset of World War I because that actually happened, not because it moved the plot in any particular direction. The lead role was undoubtedly well acted, but that didn’t make her enjoyable to watch – and why was there a nude scene? Just to show that the film was French (or Belgian)? Uhde himself was extremely boring, and the use of name-dropping (Picasso, Rousseau) to attach importance to what we were witnessing was off-putting instead. Everything the director tried was overly obvious, and none of it worked.

It’s funny how a movie that starts with such an extraordinarily mundane, realistic view of New York City, not to mention such a depressing view of the human condition, ends up in a total fantasy – everybody happy, everybody fulfilled, and everybody together on that most depressing night of all, New Year’s Eve. But that’s not nearly as funny as the exchanges between Larry David, playing the jaded Woody Allen character, and Evan Rachel Wood, playing the dumb blonde cheerleader from Louisiana. I can’t remember a first half-hour of a movie that I’ve enjoyed so much, or jokes that had me laughing out loud a day later. In the process of having things work out to the perfect ending we spectate Woody’s wet dream that redneck, gun-toting, Bible-waving Southerners are not just dumb but are actually repressed swingers and homosexuals, which gives the movie a feel-good final act but wipes out any possible heft it might otherwise possess. Which makes it sort of like the early Woody Allen films, which is not at all bad.

As a collection of gags, it had its high points and low points, and the best high points were pretty low, as well.  Most of the art, if it can be so called, devolved from the mixing of the different personality types. In its favor, you didn’t have to wonder how these three, or four if you count the missing groom, could have been best buds, because one was only there as the bride’s brother. Of course, you did wonder how he could have been that bride’s brother. Oh, well. And as is often the case, the setup, latent with novelty and expectations, was five times better than the movie’s second half, when the ridiculous had to be explained and resolved.

A rich farrago of witty repartee, courtesy, I suppose, of Noel Coward’s original script. The American living by her wits, and considerable beauty, plopped in the middle of the decaying English aristocracy is, by now, a well-worn, time-honored conceit, but nonetheless open to japes and gibes, the latter most expertly delivered by Kristin Scott Thomas. Jessica Biel and someone named Ben Barnes played the short-term romantic couple – she, the veteran of love; he, the naïve romantic – but it was Colin Firth lurking in the background who, we always suspected, would steal the show. Unless, that is, one counts the proper but tippling butler – a symbol, perhaps? – who gets the last, and best, line.