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Watchmen (2009)
Full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. So is Watchmen: a historic landmark in narcissist film-making
Watchmen opening sequence is something truly memorable: a series of dioramas animated by actors in flesh and bone which, to the sound of The Times They Are A-Changin', by Bob Dylan, narrates the ascension and decline of a group of individuals that, in the 40's, for fun and also due to conviction, invented personas and costumes to team up to fight crime - and then, in the passing of years and transformations that occurred in the United States, began to be identified as a fascist pseudo police, and finally, ended becoming illegal by the government of Richard Nixon (which, in this parallel universe, never resigned and has been elected to presidency for the fifth time). The images are both at the same time beautiful and melancholic, which, underlined by Dylan's song, evoke one of the most vertiginous aspects of American life: the euphoria of the peak and the humiliation of the fall into disgrace. These, however, are the few emotions that Watchmen is capable of provoking in its almost 3 hours lenght. And, every time some sense begins to emerge, the coincidence repeats itself: some iconic and meaning loaded music is monitoring the scene. Which, in other words, means to say that Watchmen doesn't have much inside of it. Directed by Zack Snyder, of 300, he is the cinematographic equivalent of a narcissist: a creature so involved with itself and so full of its own beauty that it doesn't occur to it that it isn't enough only to exist, but that it is also necessary to try to reach the people that are convened to appreciate it.
Released in the 80's by Dave Gibons and Alan Moore (which, as in V for Vendetta, demanded by a matter of principle for his name to not appear at the movie credits), the Watchmen graphic novel is considered the gold standard of the genre, the comics that all other comics aspire to be. As always in Moore's work, it carries a political subtext that is at the same time naive and fierce in its disposal to report the infinite variants of the intoxication that power provides. But Watchmen has something more: a delicate and even compassionate understanding of the uneasiness of the soul that having or losing this power leads to. His characters illustrate it in several ways - from the sexual impotence of the Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), and the obsession for vengeance of Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) to the increasing distance of the superpowerfull Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) puts between himself and humanity and to the venality of the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), whose assassination starts the plot.
Zack Snyder follows really close both the situations described by Moore and the sadness of the protagonists. What he can't do is express it: in his own effort in translating the images that could only happen in cinema and in no other visual means. Snyder surrounds the emotion center of the story with so much noise and fury that he overshadows it completely. So, strong actors like Patrick Wilson and Billy Crudup become small and out of scale in this gigantic tableau; and, when violence breaks out, it doesn't transmit the ferocity - it looks like it is only there for free and it is almost pornographic, as some sort of knock on the head that serves to draw the audience out of the induced apathy by the excess of plot and lack of what to communicate with it. Therefore, Watchmen seems like destined to become a landmark: a landmark in both its gorgeous visual concept and language, and as of the sterility in which a certain strand of American cinema is going through. As Dr. Manhattan, this is a movie immensely powerful and impressive - and can barely remember what is like to be a human being.
Kinky Boots (2005)
Eccentric Comedy
In a small town in England, a very old male shoe factory is about to close doors forever. Before, however, the heir of the business tries a last resource: finding an unexplored market niche. The case, of shoes and boots for drag queens, with feminine design and scandalous heels, but structure strong enough to support a well grown man. Simpatic as usually are the British comedies about eccentricities, this one counts with an unquestionable advantage:: Chiwetel Eljiofor, an excellent actor that recently participated in the cast of Inside Man and Children of Man, and here shines as the drag queen that takes the front of the enterprise.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)
Aroma of Success; Perfume is a faithful and genius adaptation of the best seller
One of the biggest editorials success of the 80's, the romance Perfume, of the German Patrick Süskind, sold 15 million copies all over the world and was so commented that, to a certain degree, it wasn't even more necessary to read the book to know what it was about: of the fictitious Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in the most stinking redoubt of the dirty Paris of the eighteenth century; and destined to be the most surprising of all parfumeurs. As it describes the author, the uncommon olfactory sense of Grenouille allowed him to distinguish, and memorize, smells so elusive as of stone and glass. But he properly was born private of any personal odor - and, therefore, according to his criteria, unprovided of identity. So, the search of the protagonist for an essence that mimics the one of the human beings confuses itself with his obsession to capture the greatest of all scents, that ends up being, in a move not exactly creative, of a virgin. Or better, of certain virgins, whom Grenouille starts to murder to steal their emanations. Ignoring his literary limitations, the fact is that Süskind ran into one of those irresistible formulas: a singular character, intrigues with surprising twists and, as support, the minute description of a France full of effluvia and the process in which it fixes and combines with the fragrances of nature. The curious is that a best-seller such as this took two decades long to earn a cinematographic adaptation. For the book admirers, however, the wait compensates. Perfume - The Story of a Murderer is a faithful adaptation - and genius too, in the way as it supplies a sense of olfacto, something cinema is incapable of stimulate.
Sünkind hold to himself the rights of the book for years because wanted it to go to Stanley Kubrick or Milos Forman. None of the two had any interest, the author got tired of waiting and, after all, sold the material to the also German Bernd Eichinger (producer of The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich) which, in turn, handed to the director Tom Tykwer. An excellent choice, however, as the modern way showed in Run, Lola, Run, Tykwer is a film maker of classic inclination. He organizes a clear narrative that goes through several years and locations, reserving his aces under the sleeves to win the particular challenges of Perfume. Tykwer evokes the aromas, good and bad, of the story in the most simplest way: with detailed and exuberant images of the objects that emits the scents. The imagination of the viewer does the rest. Other tricks of the directors takes more time to understand - such as the choice of the British freshman Ben Whishaw for the main role. It is an inert character, and Whishaw takes one hour long of film to surpass this obstacle. When he does, however, it is with such a brilliant and criterious attention, that stops the climatic sequence, of a huge public orgy, from sliding and turning ridiculous. Perfume, at last, is a fair translation of the book of origin: it doesn't come to be big, but it has enough originality to survive - and very well - as entertainment.
Babel (2006)
Nobody is understood: even the director Alejandro Iñárritu and his scriptwriter, that makes of Babel a festival of exaggerations
A moroccan shepherd sells his rifle to a neighbor; the sons of the neighbor, in charge of whitening coyotes, instead of it aim for fun at a bus full of tourists; a bullet hits an American woman that was travelling with her husband, leaving her to death in the middle of the desert propitiating an international crisis. In an improbable accumulation of coincidences, this episode will have repercussions at the border of Mexico, where a babysitter loses two children also in the middle of a desert, and in Tokyo, where a deaf teenager girl dives into isolation. "Accumulation" and "improbable" are the two words that really matter in Babel., the movie of the Mexican Alejandro González Iñárritu. As in his previous works, Amores Perros and 21 Grams, the director deals here with fortuitous events that triggers tragedies and establish connections with distant lives. But in Babel the arrangements sounds particularly arbitrary and forced. "My friend Herbert was rude to his mother last spring, and, some time later, Mt. St. Helens erupted", wrote the critic David Denby, in a perfected summary in The New Yorker magazine, irony of the nonsense of the fatal interrelations in Babel.
The curious is how much the parts of Babel are worth more than its sum. The stretch of the husband (Brad Pitt, in a good performance) that tries to save his wounded wife (Cate Blanchet) in a moroccan village, while a few hundred meters from there the shepherd owner of the rifle tries to save his children from the persecution, could make an entire film, and better than this. The same could be said about the baby-sitter (the superb Adriana Barraza) that, as she is stood-up by her bosses, carries with her from California to Mexico the two kids whom she takes care of, in order to attend to her son's marriage, and evaluates badly the sense of responsibility of her nephew and driver (Gael García Bernal). Or the plot of the Japanese deaf girl (Rinko Kikushi) that lost the mother, doesn't manage to communicate with the father and searches for any male close contact in a desperate, and disastrous way. Connected, however, these stories become simple pieces in the great plan of Iñárritu: to demonstrate that no one in the world understand each other, and therefore everyone makes mistakes to each other - except for the own director, that comprehends all and thus can illuminate the audience. Smells like arrogance. (And, as in the case of Crash, last year's winner, smells too like Oscar.)
It is a disappointment that a movie full of excellent performances and so well done parks on this arrangement. Part of the reason might be in a fight that has been dragging on between Iñárritu and his until here inseparable collaborator, Guillermo Arriaga. The newspaper The Los Angeles Times inquired that the director forbade Arriaga of following him to the Festival of Cannes this year, because him claimed to him part (a big part, by the way) of the applauses of the movies made with his partner. It is in this context that must be understood, for example, the declaration of Iñárritu to the press in Rio De Janeiro, during a recent visit that i happened to watch in television: "I didn't make any concessions in this picture. I have the luck, since Amores Pierros, of not having to change any word in my movies. The responsibility is mine, since the idea to the last screen" said him. This rivalry between director and scriptwriter for the post of true author helps to explain the exaggerations of Babel - and creates an irony almost poetic. In fact, this is a world that nobody understands each other.
Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
A Taste to Acquire: In Stranger than Fiction, Will Ferrell after all shows what he came for
In 1995, in his first season in Saturday Night Live, Will Ferrel was voted by the public the worst comedian of the history of the show. Seven years later, when he left the post, was elected by popular vote as the best name of all that has passed through the series, taking off the race competitors like John Belushi and Steve Martin. There is two possible explanations for this discrepancy, and one doesn't exclude the other: Ferrel is a taste you acquire; and he is capable of adapting, improving and learning. In Stranger than Fiction, the validity of the second hypothesis is specially evident. For the first time, Ferrel shows himself less as a comic and more as an actor. In the film directed by Marc Forster, of Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland, he interprets Harold Crick, a blank tax inspector that, in the lack of any clearer meaning in life, replaces it by numbers and method. Harold brushes his teeth 36 times on the vertical, and others 36 times on the horizontal. Chronometers by the seconds the time he has to be at the bus stop, and makes on his tie a simple Windsor knot, because the double knot would consume a whole other minute of his day. The reason that his habits becomes so transparent to him and for the audience is that, in a certain moment, Harold starts to hear a voice inside his head - a woman's voice, British, that narrates every one of his gestures with style, and better choice of words, that he would not be capable of using.
With the help of a literature professor (Dustin Hoffman), Harold discovers that he became the character of a romance that is being written by Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson). In serious existential and creative crisis, the novelist fight to finish her work the way she is known of - by killing the protagonist. Harold, naturally, wants to convince Kay to change the ending. And the movie, written with considerable astuteness and sweetness by scriptwriter Zach Helm, has to show why she should, or not, change her masterpiece to hinder the premature ending of a so insignificant man. The way out of this dead end is above all in the performance of Ferrell, that gives to his usual persona, of the fool who does not know that he is fool (his imitation of George W. Bush is quite famous), a whole new dramatic sense: of even the people which you're used to disdain can hold unsupicious moves of greatness. What goes for the character, and also for his actor.
Blood Diamond (2006)
For a Good Cause: Blood Diamond, with Leonardo DiCaprio, exposes the suffering that the illegal stones buys in Africa
Blood Diamond is a fast-paced thriller and a vigorous entertainment. And it is also a movie with a declared mission: to instruct the audience of the suffering that the diamond reservations imposes or imposed to the African countries that possesses them. The called "conflit diamonds" are rough stones panned in regions dominated by guerrillas. Extracted almost always by slave work, they are delivered through subterfuges to the classifieds of London and Antuerpia, and them dispatched to the regular trading in all the world. They finance, at this moment, the killing spree at the Ivory Coast. At Serra Leoa, the chosen scenario by director Edward Zwick for Blood Diamond, the United Revolutionary Front (URF) used the illegal gems to pay for more then one decade of violence, between 1991 and 2002. Many countries in the continent live legitimately of their diamonds - as Angola and Serra Leoa really, since they left civil war. But, where they fall on the hands of guerrillas, the stones buy by loads the typical disgraces of the continent: violence, hunger, corruption and the expulsion of entire populations from the coveted zones.
It would be even possible to suspect opportunism here, since movies such as Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener and even this same Blood Diamond make of Africa the cause of the moment for Hollywood. But Zwick's thriller conjugates what is best in this formula of entertainment with conscience. Leonardo DiCaprio, in another excellent performance, is Danny Archer, citizen of Zimbabue (that he calls for the colonial name of Rodesia), ex-soldier of the south African elite and actual weapons dealer for guerrilla fighters - a professional option nothing of uncommon for white africans with his qualifications. It is 1999, year which the civil war in Serra Leoa accomplished a state of paroxysm, and it isn't fiction the mere joke portrayed on the film, in which the guerrilla fighters puts entire villagers in line and, with machete on hand, makes them extend their arms and ask if they prefer "short sleeve" or "long sleeve". By chance, the road of Danny will cross with one of these civilians: Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounson), fisherman that lost a son to the guerrilla and was directed to a gold panning. Solomon finds, and hides, a fabulous pink diamond. But the rumors about the stone starts to spread, attracting the attention of Danny and Maddy (Jennifer Connely), a journalist that sees on the mercenary a chance for a story about the complicity of the diamond industry with the illegal mining. Danny, Solomon and Maddy are figures that have much more in common with the world of celluloid - but, thanks to a competent script, they act as if they were on the real world, using one another to accomplish their diversed goals.
With this marriage of adventure, drama and, off course, romance, Edward Zwick makes a movie far superior to The Last Samurai and The Siege. There is no action missing in Blood Diamond. And there is no missing as well clarity in the manner which the film brushes the crudity of life in a volatile Africa, with its guerrilla boys, the white soldiers without legitimate function, the peregrination over the refugee camps, the devastation of the city and field. Signs that Blood Diamond touches on a sensible area is that the diamond industry crafted a campaign of public relations to boast the efficiency of the called Kimberley Process - system that obligates the signed governments to detail the trajectory of every stone, since the pan of origin. Even Nelson Mandela, the uncontested moral authority of Africa, manifested preoccupation about the effects of the movie. An indiscriminate boycotting to the diamonds of the country, he defended, would ruin the economies that has in the legitimate extraction their largest source of income, such as South Africa, Botsuana and Namibia. According to the industry, since 2003 the Kimberly Process reduced from 4% total to 1% the circulation of "conflict diamonds". In a market of 60 billions dollars, which means that, for each year, there is still left 600 million dollars to buy violence with in Africa. It is for these that, very appropriately, Blood Diamond intends to call attention for.
Casino Royale (2006)
The name is blond. James Blond.
Aggressive, bulky and almost ugly, Daniel Craig doesn't correspond to what people expect of 007. And that is great. Yes, he is blond and has ears like fan, but can take care of the job.
Since Tim Burton elected Michael Keaton to be his Batman it wasn't seem so much bile spilling due to a choice of an actor for a specific role. Announced by the producer Barbara Broccoli, in October of 2005, as the sixth James Bond, the English Daniel Craig went through the five months of filming under a hail of criticism and ridicule, orchestrated by the extremely ferocious British tabloids and by the fan blogs on the internet. Craig is blond, while Bond is dark-haired; with 1,80m, it is too short for the role (his predecessors stayed between 1,85m and 1,89m); has fan ears, his face is squared and flattened, and he is not beautiful enough; his dramatic credits are disproportionate to the character, like Timothy Dalton, the most annoying of the Bonds. And mainly, it was said, Craig lacks the smoothness - the primordial attribute of the spy, as defined by the books of 0writer Ian Flemming and the 20 previous movies of the series. All truth. And you can't say that everything is absolutely irrelevant because, as the film itself demonstrates, these supposedly defects of Craig are, in great measure, the triumphs of this new incarnation of the secret agent.
Written in 1953, Cassino Royale is the book which Ian Fleming introduced 007. Until today, it was filmed only once, as a parody, with Peter Sellers in the role of the spy. When Barbara Broccoli (that inherited the series of her father, the legendary Albert "Cubby" Broccoli) conquered the rights of the tittle in 2001, after a long judicial fight, decided that it was the ideal opportunity to reformulate the character. Pierce Brosnan was filming his fourth and last adventure in the role of the agent and, even so, 007 A New Day To Die was about to become the biggest commercial success of the series, it was already giving unequivocal signs of exhaustion. A market research done a bit earlier revealed that, between the franchises of action and adventure, the one of 007 was the one that least attracted the younger audience, and the popularity of the games based on it wasn't going to revert the statistics on its own. Besides all, there was a need to shake up the creative fatigue that came attacking the character. Where, after two years of searches and tests with two hundreds actors in three continents, it got to the aggressive and bulky Daniel Craig, that starts the movie earning his license to kill and, subsequently, being surprised to the pleasure that it provides. James Bond, here, doesn't lack the intimacy with the subtleties of international espionage. He just doesn't know it yet.
His hunt for the villain Le Chiffre ("The Enigma"), banker of terrorists and freedom fighters all over the world, will work as an intensive course on the subject - as well as his extracurricular activities with Vesper Lynd (Eva Green, of Kingdom of Heaven), in charge by the British Intelligence to sign, or not, the checks that 007 leaves where he passes by. "I am the money" presents Vesper to the spy. "Worth every penny", replies Bond with a greedy eye, in one of those double entenders that are his signature. It won't be this, however, the tone of Cassino Royale, that also dismisses his special devices, reduces the contingent of voluptuous women and runs with pleasure over items that used to be considered necessary. This new Bond doesn't give a crap over the trifling details of a dry martini and is not rare that he prefers to use his fists over the Walther pistol (not any other 007, by the way, spilled as much blood as Craig). Also the villain he fights has no plans of world domination - his business, more convincing, is the profit - and even Vesper can't be appropriately considered a Bondgirl, since Eva Green have too much class and not enough curves to fit the pattern. From the explosive scenes of action to the sequences of seduction, what Bond reveals here is a predatory nature that Sean Connery, the canonic 007, could only suggest at his time. For the first time the franchise approaches a latent question of the character: what kind of man is this that, with or without license to kill, lives to murder? The answer to this questions goes for the next episodes - and it is hard to think of a better hook than this for a Cassino Royale sequel.
El laberinto del fauno (2006)
The Beauty of Horror: in the extraordinary Fauno's Labyrinth, a little girl enters the underground of imagination - and finds the key to defeat fascism
Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, 42 years-old, says he has gone through most of the years of his life trying to recover from his first ten - spent in the company of his fanatic religious grandmother (that advocated also the physical punishment of the body) and of other monstrous creatures (these taken from his imagination). May Del Toro forgive egoism: it is done here votes so that he will never be able frighten his ghosts, which served as raw material for several interesting movies, such as Chronos, The Devil's Backbone and Hellboy, and now a work truly extraordinary. In El Labirinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth), little girl Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), age eleven, is taken to the inside of the wolf's den: an advanced post of the army of Francisco Franco, to the north of Spain, where an assassin captain (Sergi López, exhaling threat) tries to crush focuses of republican resistance. The captain just married Ofelia's mother and already produced on her an heir. What is inside her mother is, to Ofelia, a mystery. It can be someone like her - an innocent - or then somebody like her stepfather.
Surrounded by fear and brutality, the girl finds an exit. Enters a labyrinth, at the back of the property, and then sees herself into an underground world, staged in colors and details so vivid that, since the beginning, it's what appears to be more real. There, an ancient fauno informs Ofelia that she is the princess of this kingdom. If she fulfills three tasks, she can return to it. The tasks follows the classic rules of fairy tales, with frogs, mystical doors, keys and prohibitions - such as to never, never, taste any food when you're inside a magical dimension. (Rule that Ofelia, by the way, breaks, awakening a pale man, with his eyes on the palm of his hands, at the same place of the stigmas of Christ.) Del Toro knows the conventions of fairy tales inside out and back and forth, and return to then their traditional sense: the codes that serves at the same time to simplify and codify the great fears of existence. With the ownership of them, Ofelia manages to handle with the crushing reality that surrounds her. More: she manages to dominate it. Del Toro knows that fascism doesn't have any worse enemy than pureness and imagination - "the most disobedient of the qualities", as defined by the director in interview to the press. Ofelia possesses both, and because of them will become a formidable adversary to her stepfather.
The Labyrinth is one of the rare cases in which the narrative and the metaphor not only live well together but multiply each other's effects. The imaginative world of Ofelia is powerful on itself, because Del Toro believes in the symbols he is using and the force they hold. And it is equally efficient as representation of the unique century Spain has gone through. Ofelia steals the just-been born brother and allows, thus, that he grows up without knowing the ominous name of his father. It is the Spain of resistance giving birth to the uneasy and creative Spain that resurged from the subterranean with the end of the franquist dictatorship. More than anything else, however, the Labyrinth is a promise - of an original director, that gives indications of holding so many other magnificent movies inside himself.
Crank (2006)
The Genuine Product: how the English Jason Statham built to himself a career as an action hero
Jason Statham has a skull in the shape of a missile, a sort of flattened boxer nose and an accent sharp as a knife, acquired by right of origin from East End, the proletarian region of London. Once he was part of the olympic jump team. But was also a peddler, and has sold every kind of contraband, from perfume to knick-knack, in a board around the corner. His father earns his everyday bread by singing in one of those resorts of the Canary Islands in which the British middle class crowds during the summer, and where the now mature female audience demonstrate appreciation by throwing their pants to the stage. When he got a role (exactly one as peddler) in Lock, Stock and Two Smocking Barrels, the first movie of Guy Ritchie (that would become Madonna's husband), Statham was going through another one of his phases of professional diversification, as a model of a grife whose the executives that pointed him to the director obviously had no idea what they were doing: the only genuine action hero of the moment, elevated to the post not by fabrication of some producer, but because the audience saw on him a genuine product - and also different, capable of being a brute but not truculent.
This, let's say, subtility, besides the sense of humor, are the virtues that the actor demonstrated in the two movies of the series The Transporter (there is a third in negotiation) and in Crank. In the adventure directed by the first timers Mark Neveldine and Bryan Taylor, the compact Statham is Chev Chelios, a killer that has to maintain his adrenalin level under a constant peak, in order to slow down the effects of a poison. Chelios knows that his chances of survival are minimal, but he doesn't want to go without taking his enemy with him. From them on it goes all kind of barbarity over the street of Los Angeles, including a much public sex scene. In any moment Statham tries to make his character a guy with qualities that can redeem him (dispite being a bit too attentious to his girlfriend, the very likable Amy Smart). He is what he is. In the case of Statham, this means to have the intelligence to put in the rightful perspective this very overvalued heading - the one of the action hero - and build to himself the career that Vin Diesel wanted, but couldn't make it.
A Good Year (2006)
Thus is easy. Russel Crowe learns to be happy at the Provence. Off course.
In A Good Year, Russel Crowe is Max, a voracious operator of the financier market of London and, as he inherits a property from his uncle at the Provence, automatically thinks how many millions its sale is going to earn him. And there he goes then, to the south of France, blindly thinking that he is totally going to power own the local villagers with his hands behind his back. It is obvious that the opposite happens. From tripping to tripping, Max learn to calculate the incalculable value of romance, of loyalty, of the nothing-to-do and the mysteries of grape growing. And, 'presto', until the end of the movie one more urban monster will have acquired human form under the sun of the Mediterranean - which is a recurring fantasy of the always wet English, such as the ex-advertising executive Peter Mayle, that wrote the book adapted by his countryman Ridley Scott. Forgot to mention that, to usufruct his provincial village, followed by a vineyard of unique quality and of 'de rigueur' beauty, Max isn't obliged to give up his equally attractive bank account. Of which becomes hard to explain why he has to take so many hits to the head until he can evolve to such state of nirvana. On the other hand, it becomes easy to understand why Scott and Crowe untune so much. It is their sound trying to swallow their cynicism.
Children of Men (2006)
The End of Times: In Children of Men, humanity confronts with its slow and absolute extinction
The most elegant and studious British crime authors, P.D. James, 86 years-old, is also the one that knows best the subject which she writes about: married to a doctor that came back schizophrenic from World War II, she felt obliged to become the supplier of the family by initiating a career as public server that would culminate, in the 70's, with a high post in the criminal division of the Interior Ministery - from which got her to deal with criminal authorities from all over the country, and to recruit criminal pathologists for the British forense medicine labs. It was one hell of an experience, and P.D. James made use of it not only in elaborated (and pessimists) thriller books but also in a story which, at first glance, is a strange body in her curriculum - the science fiction Children of Men, where the human race is predestined to disappear not in a sudden way, due to a cataclysm, but little by little, because of an eruption of infertility that has been going for years. With the romance, the writer puts in focus a commonly peripheral question of all apocalyptic fiction: how men and women would behave in the day-by-day, and what moral choices they would make, if they knew that there is nobody left to inherit their world? That is also the idea that Mexican film maker Alfonso Cuarón keeps firmly centralized in his adaptation of the book to the big screen.
Before anything else, it is necessary to say that the brazillian title inverts the meaning of the path the film walks on. (I say brazillian title because that's where i came from, and where i watched the movie as well) It takes place in 2027, and since 2009 there isn't a registration of any birth on the planet. The youngest human being just has been murdered for refusing to sign an autograph - and the last ones that were born are treated like gods and act like "assholes", according to the definition of the bureaucrat Theodore Falon (Clive Owen). Faron lives in England, one of the few countries that still resist in some way. The rest has already turned into vinegar, and the British borders live pursued by multitudes of immigrants. When these swell, the more grows the number of policemen and the control of the State. What the movie of Cuarón transmits better is the futility of these efforts. Without a biological tomorrow, there isn't a way and neither a why to contain the material and spiritual disintegration. Here it is, then, the paradox that treats on both book and movie: it is the most primitive of all impulses - of the continuity of the specie - that lies the reason for all civilization. There goes as well the title, which paraphrases the 90th psalm: "And the Lord said: 'Come back sons of Adam, to the dust which you left'" (something like that). Against all his beliefs (or lack of them), however, the bureaucrat Faron gets involved with a rogue group that located something that no one imagined possible - a pregnant woman. It is a miracle so huge as any other in the Scriptures. But this new Eve, black and illegal immigrant, is a political triumph for anyone that puts their hand on her. Despite the notable nimbleness of Cuarón (also known for And Your Mother Too and the third Harry Potter) as a narrator and visual creator, Children of Men imposes a first obstacle to the viewer: it is necessary to buy its premise in one go. Surpassed this barrier, it becomes one of the most intriguing movies, that doesn't get tired of exploring an unsolved dilemma: there is nothing that the human being isn't capable of corrupting, and nothing that he isn't capable of saving as well.
The Illusionist (2006)
Norton in his best
Edward Norton sometimes makes mistakes (such as in Red Dragon). But, when he does choose right, does it with intelligence and criterion unmatched by the actors of his generation. In The Illusionist, he plays the magician Eisenheim, that haunts the Viena of 1900 with his poetical and mysterious tricks - which awakes not only the diffidence of the prince heir (Rufus Sewell) but also the passion of his probable promised (Jessica Biel) with whom Eisenheim had a romantic past. Norton opposes his rational performance to the more expansive style of Paul Giammati, as the police officer whose curiosity is like an itch. The result is a movie extremely well resolved, with a preoccupation that, maybe because of bad luck, has been off the current fashion these days: to tell a story right.
Brick (2005)
Noir School
In his first big work, director Rian Jonhson had the most original idea: applicate the rules of noir to the environment of an American school. The execution of the idea is impeccable, of the copied dialogues from the golden age of the genre, the 30's and 40's, to the choice of the cast, lead by Joseph Gordon-Levitt - that started in the series 3rd Rock from the Sun and had revealed to be a surprising actor. He interprets Brendan, a solitary teenager that, such as one of those cynical and tired private detectives, investigates the murder of his ex-girlfriend and tangles himself into the criminal high school underworld, in a small town of California.
Happy Feet (2006)
The Dance of the Emperor: in the excellent Happy Feet, a group of penguins rejects a youngling that can't sing - only tap dance
The Australian George Miller produces little (only nine of long length) and directs even less (only seven movies since 1979). But, when he does any of the two, uses to show what he came for. Such as in Mad Max, that invented the post-apocalyptic adventure, and Babe: Pig in the City, one of the best kid movies ever made. Now, after almost five years of insane hard work, Miller repeats the feat: Happy Feet is an absolutely original cartoon - a musical and comedy that evolves into epic and tragedy, in an animation of extraordinary beauty. (By the way, also original for going into production before the March of the Penguins documentary.) Miller starts from real data - that each penguin emperor develops a distinct "voice". In his movie, sing well (from Queen and Prince to Frank Sinatra) is the pride of the emperors, and the reason which Mumble is born already as a pariah: his singing is direful. He only knows how to express himself by tap dancing, something that the emperors never heard about and immediately reject. Organized in a puritan and conformist society, they think that shaking the hips, or even only the feet, is a profanity.
Happy Feet starts, so, as a classic story - of the rejected puppy -, in a background that remembers the first times of the rock, when the United States went through scandals with the white kids that adhered to the black tradition of the rhythm. From them on it follows on the heroic journey of Mumble, that will get him to know a small community of Latin penguins of Adelia, to hear the prophecies of a group of fatalists sea-elephants and, finally, to discover that the scarcity of food, that the ancients attributes to his birth, is in truth a result of the actions of beings that moves in colossal floating devices, that captures an infinite amount of fish. Sort of like Ulysses, Mumble will see himself stuck in a deserted island (actualy an aquarium), and then will undertake a return not only triumphal, but also revealing.
As Mumble's horizons extends, grows also the ambition of the movie - until it becomes truly huge, as in the image of the fishermen in the mist or in the sequence where the emperor faces the attack of two whales. First time in cartoons, the director took to Happy Feet his capacity to conceive entire living worlds. To the example of the nuclear desert of Mad Max or the rural perfection of Babe, his Antarctica is at the same time realist and impregnated of amazement. What multiplies this effect, however, is the counterpoint with the intimacy and detail of how the characters are portrayed - the "puppy factor" that no commercial cartoon can (or want) to live without.
Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
Classic comedy, showing the life of a nerd. Simple and genius,
Interpreted by the unknown John Heder, who turned into comic sensation to the American public, the main character is a loser: he is ugly, doesn't have any friends, except for Peter (Efren Ramirez), the only Latin of the school -, lives with his grandmother and his almost-stupid brother and hangs with an uncle who was imprisoned in some point of the 80's and is still more stupid than him is. There is, off course, a bit of perversity in the film of director Jared Hess (that recently returned to the "losers" theme with Nacho Libre). It can really be said that he walks on the wire of the razor blade, between solidarity and ridicule with his protagonists. But there is no doubt that this is one of most well-done movies of this recent tradition of American cinema.
The Prestige (2006)
Cinema Homage
In London at the turn of the XIXth century to the XXth, two young magicians compete to unmask their respective tricks - first moved by revenge, since one attributes to the other the death of his woman, and after by the simple spirit of rivalry, which nothing is capable of pacifying. The trick of the movie: both protagonists have careers as superheroes. Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and Christian Bale as Batman. What interests most the English director Christopher Nolan (of Amnesia and Batman Begins), however, is the difference of what you see and what you think you have seen - which is, in a certain way, a homage to cinema itself. Besides the great directing, it still has great performances by both Michael Caine and David Bowie.
V for Vendetta (2005)
V for Vanity, for Veracity, for Vicious, for Void, for Vulgar
With V for Vendetta, the Wachowski brothers illustrate the presumptuous vanity, the lack of veracity, vicious, void-ly vague and vulgar ignorance that pop culture cultivates about the "system".
In one of the oldest James Bond films, at the end of the 70's, there is a delicious scene for the south American audience (there is resentment in this because i'm brazillian): 007 entered with his motor boat an Amazon river and, out of the blue, came out by the Iguaçu falls, at the border with Argentina. Except for the fun, it is like that as well that works out the reasoning of V for Vendetta - the starting point has no connections with the finishing line, and the path covered from one to the other is a mystery. Example: the masked V (Hugo Weaving), in solitary and secret fight against the totalitarian regime that dominates 2020's England, teach his pupil Evey (Natalie Portman) that men don't need buildings, but ideas. Where the hack, concludes him in a imaginary jump even more acrobatic then James Bond's boat, that blowing up the Parliament to smithereens will certainly make his ideas reach the mind of his fellow contemporaries? It is not even worth spending time and space arguing about a film with no manners where the hero is a terrorist carrying explosives. What calls attention in V for Vendetta are its stubborn ignorance and non-reflected affiliation to the thought of that the "system", whichever is, is corrupt and harmful.
Even more curious then V's logic, for example, is the person he imitates in clothes and mask: Guy Fawkes, a catholic that, in 1605, planned to decimate the protestant aristocracy by blowing up the Chamber of the Lords. Fawkes was discovered at the basement of the Parliament with 36 powder barrels and was hanged for it, providing to the English a joke similar to the threshing of Judas Iscariotes. Every 5th of November, date called Powder Conspiracy, Fawkes dolls are hanged and burned and fireworks pop up all over England. What, in 2006 or 2020, that somebody thinks Fawkes as an inspiring figure is intriguing. Four hundred years ago, the Parliament building was a symbol of absolutism. Today, in contrary, it represents another kind of "system", - the constitutionalism, and in one of the most successful versions. It is hard too to imagine that, in 2400, similarly 400 years from now, Americans will have fun as well threshing figures of Osama bin Laden. If Fawkes fits for the joke is because he didn't have the competence of his Saudi counterpart to commit mass murder. But well he tried. Great antidote his example could be, so, against the regime of permanent crisis instituted by the dictator and "big brother" Adam Sutler (a choice that the producers must have found the epitome of irony, interpreted by John Hurt, exactly the same protagonist and victim of the Big Brother in 1984).
The brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski, of Matrix, wrote and produced V for Vendetta (the direction was given to a subordinate of them, a certain James McTeigue), and answer for the most of the nonsense seen on screen. The idea didn't come from them though, but from the English graphic novel artist Alan Moore, an idol of the genre (that, by the way, demanded to not have any mention of his name on the credits of the film). Moore and illustrator David Lloyd started to publish the V for Vendetta series at the first mandate of Margaret Thatcher and finished at the third and last therm of the prime-minister. The V for Vendetta comics overflows the violence and violation feeling that a good amount of the British people had while crossing the thatcherist deconstruction - and breaths as well a little bit from the obscure. Certainly nobody would call Thatcher a sweet, but what she did wasn't concentrate the power of the State, but dried it, and stimulated the English (even with her peculiar cruelty) to take care of their own lives. The more the citizen depends financially on the State or from the decision-making point of view, the more s/he will be subject to kiss the hand that feeds it. Economical liberty is, thus, a requirement for other kind and more valued freedoms, such as political, social and of customs. The trick is, until today, the only environment that it flourished was the capitalist. And, even due to a culture matter and decades of marxism fantasy, is more common to see in capitalism a "system" destined to create and spread injustice then of a regulated system, in manners some time spontaneous, by mutual advantages and dependency. The pop culture - and V for Vendetta is a legitimate unit of it - prefers to assume that the system is all bad; if interested in a debate, it will maybe come to the uncomfortable verification that it doesn't have any alternatives to consider (bomb the Parliament or assassinate prime-ministers are not alternatives).
Happilly, not all States are like so impetuous to discussion, and some of them, even the English and the Scandinavian, developed efficient instruments to minimize the injustices that, yes, are of capitalist nature. And happily as well that not all film makers that approach this subject live so satisfied in their own ignorance like the Wachowski brothers. Removing some simplifications, films like Wall Street, The Constant Gardener, Syrianna, The Informer or even Robocop offers sagacious and pertinent opinions about the world they came from. One thing, however, they have in common with V for Vendetta: all of them, the good and the bad ones, were made the way the producers wanted them to be made, without the interference of States or governments. It is to try to repeat the same feat in Cuba or China to understand, at first hand, what really is to live under a totalitarian regime.
Just my two cents
The Departed (2006)
The ExceptionalFellas: finally the Scorcese/DiCaprio partnership lives up to all expectations
When the fellowship between Scorcese and DiCaprio seemed to be on way to confirm it as a shot on water, here they come up with The Departed. Gone are the unsuccessful historical themes of Gangs of New York and The Aviator, in which the director seemed so comfortable as a crasher in a party, and comes back the universe of organized crime, that he dominates perfectly; vanishes the catalysts leads, and brings up the original and more balanced division of forces between the characters; above all, there isn't here that desperate need for approval - of the Academy, his pairs, of the industry and the public - that were present in his two previous projects with his favourite actor. Scorcese is back to his comfort zone. Which, in his case, means the return to the extreme emotions and the cinema of high combustion of Goodfellas and Casino, that until this new enterprise were considered the last big moments of his curriculum.
Adapted such and which of Infernal Affairs, a Hong Kong crime movie, The Departed treats on the opposing trajectories, but symmetrical, of Billy Costigan (DiCaprio) and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon). Both have family connections with the Boston Irish mafia, and both distinguish themselves as cadets in the police academy. Colin, however, is there by orders of Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), the godfather of the local banditry, with the purpose of making a career in the law and therefore facilitate the business of his organization. Billy, whose father apparently was the only honest man in the family, is recruited for the inverse task: commit a crime, get kicked out of the police force and forge his passage to the other side of the balcony, captivating next to Costello. For his protection, only two of his superiors, interpreted by Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg, know his true identity. And, the more the two plans, Billy's and Colin's, uncurl themselves, the clearer it gets to both organizations (the criminal and the police) that they have a rat in the house - and the more it intensifies the hunt for them.
As an example of another icon of the new yorker cinema, Woody Allen, which in Match Point gained new breath when transposing his habitual themes to London, Scorcese appears rejuvenated in this change to Boston. In contrary to Allen, however, that went to film in England because it was there that the money for it came from, the unexpected decision of Scorcese served to at least one good practical reason. A plot such as of The Departed would stumble on innumerable logical obstacles if taken place into the rigid hierarchy of the Italian families of the New York mafia. Now the style more, let's say, personalized - and, therefore, highly inflammable - of the irishans of Boston fits perfectly to this story of two voluble agents, that act based on improvisation and in the shortest elapsed time of action and reaction, with no information to map beforehand a path to walk on. Billy and Collin are thus, more then anything, actors, and their different dramatic styles - calculated and good-tempered in the case of Collin, that is climbing up in meteoric speed in politics, defensive and reactive in the case of Billy, the dude that joined the gang last - are the keypoints of the film.
Another indication that Scorcese appears to be back to his good times is this: the way that the characters exists here in full form, and not as counterfeits as in Gangs of New York. The dialogues of The Departed are torrents of obscenities and insults - but torrents meticulously modulated according to the temper of the person that pronounces them, specially brilliant in the case of Mark Wahlberg (no, this is not a typo). In other times, Scorcese would have chosen other heavy metal actors used to impose themselves by their weight in the scenes, such as his old favourites Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci. Here, starting with Jack Nicholson, first time with the director, all the cast is lighter and agile - and in all of it, from one point to the other, the interpretations are exceptional. Even so, there is no doubt that this is a Leonardo DiCaprio movie. Apathic in Gangs of New York and dislocated in The Aviator, he here reencounters his plummet (and, no less important, his ability to involve the audience) in a role much harder then the previous two. His Billy Conaghan is burdened by simultaneous wishes of survival and self-destruction, and by fantasies of failure and victory in impossible circumstances. And is, above all, very young and very lonely, in what finally appears to be a good use of the personal repertory of the actor.
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
A uncontrolled train: is what looks like the Hoover family in the comedy Little Miss Sunshine, an exception to the sameness of the independent cinema
There isn't in Little Miss Sunshine no character that, with a variation here and there, hasn't frequented so many other American independent movies. Check in here the inefficacious father, the stressed mother, the rebelled son, the suicidal uncle, the grandfather that lost the reins - those abbreviated figures which the filmmakers of the genre had stipulated to express that something smells bad in the American dream. Or, more precisely, that it became a nightmare, and the personal and familiar misalignment is the only possible consequence for a society that as each day passes sees itself even more divided between "winners" and "losers", with the last not knowing how to transpose the abyss that separates them from the first. What is really surprising in this comedy is the way, however, that it transforms in strong points this elements that should be its weakness. Right from the start, a plate of resistance of the genre - the classic family dinner scene - demonstrates, first, that these typical roles were delivered to actors capable of making them exceptional; and, second, that the couple of directors formed by Jonathan Daylon and Valerie Paris have an uncommon sense of timing and detail. While the Hoovers swallow with lemon soda the fried chicken bought in a snack bar, their reunion at the table slowly takes the shape of a derailed train: the youngest daughter wants to know why the uncle tried to kill himself, and, in the discussion that forms about the most appropriated answer, it is almost possible to hear the noise of the iron of this derailed train twisting itself.
The girl, without wanting, continues in the function of pivot of discords. Interpreted by Abigail Breslin, of Signs, with no trace of prematurity, Olivia has craze for infantile beauty contests. Because of a desistance, she is called to compete in a match in California. The father (Greg Kinnear) that tries but doesn't manage to set up a self-help program of his creation, is at the eaves of the bankruptcy and doesn't have money to pay for aerial tickets. The mother (Toni Collete) refuses to leave behind her suicidal brother (Steve Carell), the son that has stopped talking for months (Paul Dano) or the vitiated in heroin and in pornography father-in-law (Alan Arkin), since it is obvious that none of the three is apt to give assistance to the other two. The solution is to travel all together in an old Kombi, crossing states under the heat and mutually annoying one another. The trip is extremely bad and the arrival to the destination, even worse: with her little belly, her homemade fantasy and the shameful choreography that the grandfather taught her, Olivia, so far star of only innocent regional events, contrasts in every possible manner with the spooky precocious prostitutes convoked for the national competition.
As is of custom, this choke has an instructive effect on the family. What isn't of custom, and even more instructive, is that the couple of directors does not attribute to the conflict divergence of values. Even so on the basis they seem to be divided between the superficial, the incredules and the resigned, the Hoovers have much more cohesion then what it is assumed, and what disaggregates them is so only the fact of reacting to the situation in different ways (even so unanimously desperate), their accelerated sideslip in route to poverty and what they imagine that is then the end of all and any perspective of future. (The clue to this, by the way, is in their last name, an ironic tribute to Herbert Hoover, American president during the Great Depression of the 30's.) What Little Miss Sunshine wants, however, is not to relativize the impact of financial ruin on a family. It is only to remember that much of what haunts the Americans today is fruit of their own imagination.
Hoodwinked! (2005)
Everything suggests this is a cartoon made for kids. Big mistake.
The title, the advertisement and the quantity of kids in the movie theaters suggests that the cartoon of the Cory and Todd Edward brothers is a movie made for a younger audience. Big mistake. When Little Red Riding Hood, her grandmother, the bad wolf and a goofy woodsman are arrested in a hut in the forest, a police investigations reveals surprises that will give a totally new meaning to the plot of the fairy tale. Sort of crossing over of Law & Order with Rashomon - the classic of Akira Kurosawa in which each character gives its own version of the same story -, this new Little Red Riding Hood is witty and has a infallible pop hunch, which makes its 81 minutes seems even more shorter then it looks.
Hard Candy (2005)
Little Red Riding Hood Revenge: distressing and original, Hard Candy turns upside down a scenery of child abuse
In the unusual Hard Candy, Hayley, 14 years-old, exchanges spicy messages by the internet with Jeff, a 32 year-old photographer. One thing leads to another, and the two fix a meeting in neutral and respectful territory - a café. Hayley is small and fragile, but surprisingly articulated for her age. Jeff maintains himself on the limit in between caution and the flirt. After being reluctant for a bit, ends up agreeing to take the girl to see his home. There, serves orange juice for the guest, but doesn't stop her from adding vodka to the drink. Says that the young girl pictures spread over the walls are strictly professional, but even so lets Hayley start stripping in front of the camera. And nothing that follows from there is what you would expect. Director David Slade and writer Brian Nelson turns upside down this suggestive scenery of pedophilia, puts it inside out, shake it a little bit more, and, in two hours of provocation and tension uninterrupted, places the expectator face-to-face with all the most darker emotions associated with precocious sexualization.
Hayley, then, is a Little Red Riding Hood with a rage for revenge, and is more on the control of the situation then you could possibly guess. It is her that adds a drug to the photographer's drink, and not the other way around. When he wakes up, tied to a chair, finds out that the girl is convinced that, somewhere in the house, he is hiding child pornography - and, therefore, occulting his own perversion. The panic that Jeff is submitted to culminates in a long and distressing scene, involving a bistoury, that provoked extreme reactions in the male audience during the exhibition of Hard Candy in the Sundance Festival (with no doubt, aggravated by the intrepid performances of Ellen Page and Patrick Wilson). "Innumerable movies shows a man threatening a woman with knife, and they never awaken this kind of response. If a woman threatens a man, however, the testosterone boils", ponders the director. There is much more then this in stake, however, between Hayley and Jeff. At certain point, it becomes impossible to distinguish here who is the victim, from a psychological prism, and who is the executioner. What is right is, even if you're right in your suspicion, the protagonist will leave the experience transformed into something you wouldn't want for a teenager, as much as it is not wished to her to be target of abuse. What happens, as in Mystic River of Clint Eastwood, is a terrifying demonstration of the cycles of violence that is produced by pedophilia.
The Producers (2005)
From the first row: huge success on Broadway, The Producers turns into a good movie
In 1968, when director and comedian Mel Brooks launched Springtime for Hitler at the movie theaters, all that he got was a minuscule group of impetuous fans - and a fiasco at the box office. In 2001, when the musical The Producers, adapted from the movie, inaugurated, it became immediately one of the most thundering success in the history of Broadway - supported, mainly, by the individual talents of Mathew Broderick and Nathan Lane. It was natural, therefore, that Brooks and director/choreography expert Susan Stroman wanted to amplify the public beyond the more restrict circuit of the theater. Then, the film The Producers (2005). Who hadn't the opportunity to watch the play when it was being staged in New York, and after, London, can now figure out why so much noise for the simple price of a movie ticket (the extremely disputed tickets for the theater could go up until 400 dollars in the hands of an outside seller). That is the spirit of the film, also directed by Stroman: transpose to the screen, with the minimum necessary of visual adaptations, that what was seen at Broadway and in the West End in London. Is a modest proposal, but honest - and if the ticket office retrieves a little bit more then the 45 million dollars investment, is probable that the idea becomes a custom.
The Producers treats of how, in the 50's, the broke theater producer Max Bialystock (Lane) unites with the accountant Leo Bloom (Broderick), a wuss that is afraid of everything, in a plan apparently infallible: raise a fortune to make the worst possible play, in order to close it on the first night. This way, the money won't be retrieved to the investors (a troop of old ladies that Bialystock seduces in exchange of checks and that, in a ballet with rands-boys, responds for one of the good moments of the film). Meanwhile, the pair will pocket almost the double of the amount that is hidden in the fraudulent accounting. Bialystock and Loom believe that their wishes has been fulfilled when they run into the play Springtime for Hitler, written by the amateur - and completely idiot - Franz Liebkind (Will Farrel) to demonstrate that the dictator was one cool guy. The next step is to find an incompetent director and terrible actors: there is no way an experience like this could fail. The double, however, are surprised by the reception of their play. Because of an unexpected event, the Hitler that arrives the stage is unequivocally gay, and the public loves the idea to see the nazi portrayed as a diva. With a success on pocket, then, Bialystock and Loom will have to come up with a way to escape jail.
As in the theaters, the story has a hesitating beginning. But when it hooks, The Producers becomes really fun. Much of the merit is owed to the sensational Nathan Lane, that has an infallible timing and calibrates to perfection the very difficult performance transition from theater to film (of Broderick, unfortunately, can't be said the same). In the right proportions, there is also to be distinguished Uma Thurman, that continues on her good phase in the role of Ulla, the monumental Swedish secretary of the two. Who doesn't depend on subtitles in different languages to keep track of the plot earns a bonus: the irreverent text of Brooks, riddled of politically incorrect jokes - but not offensive. Real badness he reserves to Hitler - that deserved this and a lot more.
Where the Truth Lies (2005)
Naked Truth
In the movies of the Egyptian Atom Egoyan, such as the Sweet Hereafter, tragedies of immense repercussions seems to start from casual acts - a sideslip on the ice, a hitchhiking. What he suggests, however, is that his characters were already walking inevitably towards these events. Where the Truth Lies (2005) follows this same principle. In 1972, a reporter (Alison Lohman) interviewed two comedians (Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth) that fifteen years before broke up a partnership of success, for reasons that might or not involve the lady that worked for the hotel found dead in the room of the pair. The director establish the gens of suspense to the of the melodrama, coming up to a strong film (in all the senses), that deserves more attention then what it got in the movie theaters.
The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
An infernal actress: Meryl Streep is the best (but not the only) reason to watch the poisonous The Devil Wars Prada
In the ultra-rarefied environment of the big-world and prêt-à-porter for the rich, there is a consensus that few people rule more than the London native Anna Wintour, publisher of the American magazine Vogue. With an wave of the head or a plait of the lips she makes and unmakes entire careers, imposes or bury collections and infuses happiness or sadness in the soul of a co-worker. It consists that Anna doesn't just chooses the place that she herself will occupy in the auditorium of the great parades; it is said that she chooses where her disaffections will sit, so they won't see or be seen by her. To incarnate such formidable personality is not a task for anyone. Actually, David Frankle, the director of The Devil Wears Prada (2006) found the only person capable of doing it - Meryl Streep walks by the corridors of the fictitious Runway magazine like Catherine the Great on way to her crown ceremony and fusillades subordinates with the unpleasantness of a hard line soviet director. Meryl is a delight: an actress with no rival that puts everything she knows to service a character which no one has guts to rival against.
The film is an adaptation of the homonym best-seller, written with a lot of humor and clear spirit of rematch by an Anna Wintour ex-assistant, Lauren Weisberger. The book, tells of how a recently graduated journalist, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), change her ideals for a job as a punching bag for the publisher of Runaway - and also for a closet worthy to contemplate at least the lighter modalities of faustian pacts. Every morning, her boss, baptized in the original version as Miranda Priestly, enters the office and pours the purse and coat over the head of the assistant, because is too prepotent to deliver it properly on the hands of the girl. For months, calls Andy for the name of her other assistant, Emily, because judges that she hasn't conquered yet the right for a separate identity. And, day after day, tortures all around her with censorship delivered in a tone of voice almost unheardable. Lauren swears that Miranda is not a mirror of her ex-boss, but is her invention. Not that anybody believes on it. Miranda, is true, has a silhouette of a woman, and not an X-ray (like the writer Tom Wolfe described the extremely thin new yorkers girls of the superior stratus), and her hair is white-silver, instead of the dark hair of Anna. But the proof that the fashion world knows that Miranda is Anna is on the several "griffes" that didn't want to collaborate with the dressing of the film, fearful from reprisals from the Vogue.
Meryl and the venom of the plot are not the only right hits of The Devil Wears Prada. In general, movies about the world of fashion portrays their integrant as idiotic people and triflers, that only thinks in superfluous things when there are so much serious things going on on the planet - is the case, for example, of Prêt-à=Poter of Robert Altman. This condescension is absent in this film: David Frinkel knows that people like Anna Wintour, John Galliano or Karl Lagerfield, despite the exotic visual pose, are executives that makes decisions with global ramifications and have corporate responsibilities in the order of billions of dollars. People, at last, that in each clothes, footwear or accessory that wear have to signalize your specific form of power and extension of your net of influences. To see this environment portrayed in this form is refreshing. And the clothes, in fact, are to kill for.
Friends with Money (2006)
Friends with Problems
What the friends of the title has more of, actually, are problems. Jane (Frances McDormand) design clothes that are a success, but is on a uninterrupted burst of rage. Christine (Katherine Keeler) started to realize something that everyone else already knew: she is married to a troll. Franny (Joan Cusack), the wealthier of them, appears to be happy with her conjugal relation - since that it is not payed much attention to her empty routine. And, proving that the lack of money also don't bring happiness, Olivia (Jennifer Aniston), that from teacher passed to maid, lives a radical soul crisis. Director Nicole Holofcener sees this little tragedies with humor. But, sensibly, don't make a comedy out of them.