Have you seen I Am Love yet? The Globe nominee is available for rental so get on that.
Director Luca Guadagnino with Marisa Berenson & Tilda Swinton
I read the following quote over at Hollywood Reporter and I found it both amusing, right-on and the kind of thing you shouldn't say out loud. Seems Luca Guadagnino, the man behind the brilliant Globe & BFCA nominatedI Am Love is not happy with the treatment of his film back home in Italy. They chose another film for their entry in the annual Oscar Foreign Film race.
He says...
Italy has been a sort of strangely cruel mother to the film. I feel like Rapunzel in Tangled. They didn’t pick the film for the Oscars. I don’t think the movie is the kind that sells in Italy now, which is basically dramedies about men that are not able to grow up. Vitteloni syndrome without Fellini. This [Golden] Globe nomination is a sort of really strong warning for the Italian culture. Beware! When you don’t support what’s good ... then the image of your country goes down and down and down. They chose another movie, instead of one that was internationally well received, particularly in the U.S. But it’s all right. Right now the moment is cheer, and I’m very cheerful. It’s a great day!
Points for honesty but obviously someone's feelings got hurt along the way.
<--- Micaela Ramazzotti and Sergio Albelli, the super sexy but unstable parental figures in La Prima Cosa Bella.
For what it's worth, I recently spent time with the actual Italian Oscar submission La Prima Cosa Bella (The First Beautiful Thing) and it was good. It's a somewhat absorbing memoir story (half of it being in flashbacks) about the grown children of a dying but still ridiculously vibrant woman (Micaela Ramazzotti in youth / Stefani Sandrelli in old age) who was once a wild flighty gorgeous young thing dragging her wee children from home to home and sometimes to homelessness while falling in and out of love with their father (and other men).
You can trace the damage done in the generally strong performances and the film definitely gathers some cumulative emotional steam (the climactic act is entertaining, funny and unexpectedly endearing), but it's stretched a little thinly across numerous life episodes. And even though you "get" him, you do wish the sour grown man at its center would grow up a little bit. B
I enjoyed it. But no, it's not a patch on I Am Love. Since Luca brought up Tangled, let's get our hair did in Italy.
The First Beautiful Thing has follicular drama of all varieties from deliciously lustrous (Micaela Ramazotti) to balding to sickbed wigs to plainly pretty to unruly to generic ... the hair, like the movie, has plentiful ups and downs.
I Am Love, on the other hand has magic locks just like Rapunzel's. Everyone's hair is epically beautiful; their golden, red, brown and pure white crowns (even the oldest characters have thick headfulls) are enough to make your arm hairs stand on end.
Craig here, taking a look at Renée Zellweger's new cinema release. (There are a few mild spoilers contained)
Case 39 stars Zeéeeee as Emily Jenkins, a concerned social worker in a headband. She’s worried about the well being of a child. We’re more worried about her personal hair-care regime: when her hair is up, fixed in place with said headband, she’s out of danger; hair down means terror is likely afoot. Her life depends on the precarious positioning of her follicles. Make a note of the subtle differentiation as it will help guide you through the many twisty plot derivations of Christian Alvart’s new (though actually old*) horror-thriller.
Headbanded Emily Jenkins gets the titular case plopped on her desk, so she duly investigates a couple who she suspects have been mistreating their 10-year-old daughter Lillith (Jodelle Ferland). She scrambles to the couple's creepy house along with boss Ian McShane (growling an otherworldly accent as yet unidentified by literature or science), just as the parents are about to roast li’l Lill in the oven -- seriously, this scene is hilarious. Zellweger and McShane lay waste to moody-mom and bad-dad’s furniture and faces whilst rescuing the half-baked moppet. (McShane, trying out too-late for a role in The Expendables, literally dropkicks the mother into a table and indents a fridge with the father’s head - and McShane’s about 110 years-old! The Oscar for Best Supporting Sexagenarian Shit-Fit is his for the taking).
Be honest, does my hair look good like this?
Soppy ol' Emily, ditching the headband, gets to adopt Lillith and live happily... never after? ‘Cause, ah, you see, maybe there’s more to case 39 than our Zeéeeee bargained on (as we’ve only sat through half of the film's 109 minutes). Is Lillith actually as sweet and innocent as everybody initially thought? Could she be the devil with a dollhouse? If you haven’t guessed what’s happening by this point then you haven’t been paying attention to the headband theory. (Hair up = phew, safe; hair down = argh, get that spawn of Beelzebub off my property, post haste!)
Renée keeps the family dinner warm in Case 39
Emily soon forgets about cases 1 through 38 (all other kids in peril can obviously go take a jump) to do everything in her power to Get To The Bottom Of All This. There are a handful of amusing scenes along the way, and more than a few howlers peppering the plot; a fun so-bad-it's-good time’s almost to be had. If you're willing, try a few pre-movie drinks. One scene where Lillith asks a headbanded Zeéeeee if she could brush her hair had me shouting, 'Yes! For the love of God, yes! Take that headband away and brush her hair!'
Bradley Copper responds to Renée putting the Chicago soundtrack on. and other captions.
There’s a naked Bradley Cooper as Zeéeeee's beefcake beau, who has his bath time royally ruined by a particularly pressing wasp problem; he then buzzes off halfway into the film (the script for The Hangover must have arrived.) Although the scene where Ferland is interviewed by Cooper, and acts him and anyone else (in this scene and others) right off the screen, is genuinely creepy. Renée just puts on a tight face and stands by looking awkward. In a headband.
Renée is driven to dispair by her missing headband.
The editing may have been carried out by a drunken Edward Scissorhands, and the pace is defined by accident rather than design. Case 39 is more eventful than Joshua, but doesn’t have the daft-but-nifty twist or fun factor of Orphan - two other recent Is My Kid Satan's Spawn? genre entries. It’s so close to being a new trash gem, but, despite a grab-bag of chucklesome moments early on, it wimps out at the last minute with a wet whimper. Near the end Renée says, “You know, none of this should ever have happened!” Oh Zells Bells - you took the words right out of my mouth.
*The film was completed in 2006 but has only now seen the light of day, after an ever-shifting release date pattern that took in fifteen date changes over three countries.
Unnghhwhaa? I thought Rapunzel i.e. Tangled was going to be a YES for me from day one. But...
Teaser trailers are supposed to excite you. Unless they've changed the def' in Websters, this is not what I'd personally describe as "excitement". This is no tease, but a bully. But let's break down the reaction anyway to our traditional yes, no, maybe so trailer feelings.
I've been waiting my whole life for Disney to take on the Rapunzel story. In fact, when I was a kid and reading books on animation and wanting to be an animator myself, this is the fairy tale I fixated on as something they hadn't done and why was that and could I please do it myself? Plus, it is a musical and Alan Menken is sometimes brilliant (even if they did make the bizarro choice to do the songs with a 60s flavor).
How bad could this movie really be?
I don't wanna know the answer to that question.
I mean... "This is the best day ever!"??? Ghastly! Doesn't this take place in ye olde medieval times and isn't Rapunzel a shut in? Shouldn't it be easier to imagine her as Sleeping Beauty's BFF rather than a member of Bratz. Anyway, both Rapunzel and her prince charming type, refashioned here as a thief, seem to be enrolled in that infamous late 90s/ early 00s school for bratty self-aware animation where characters do "funny" antics while random rock songs play or make anachronistic jokes & pop culture references that have utterly no connection to the time period or the material. This school's dread curriculum first entered Disney product with Aladdin and by the time of Hercules and Tarzan, all the classic textbooks had been replaced. I began to realize that nothing was ever going to feel as pure and magical and, well, mature, as Beauty & The Beast again. Shrek (not from Disney) was the star pupil of this Satanic School's teachings. I HATE SHREK. So I transferred out as quickly as I could and put all my hopes and future dreams in the hands of Pixar and imported Mizayakis.
But sometimes I miss classic Disney fairytales so this is not the best day ever.
On the other hand... if I hadn't been wanting to see Rapunzel onscreen since I was a wee thing constantly brushing and braiding my big sister's long tresses, ! I know! maybe I'd find this cute? I mean cute like Flynn Rider and his porn name who you know'll start showing up in those lustful Disney fan-fantasies soon enough. If I see it when I'm feeling exceptionally generous, might it be [gasp] fun? We don't see Mother Gothel (the villain) in this teaser but Donna Murphy is providing her voice. Donna Murphy is amazement, trust. Can there at least be an excellent song for her? A "Poor Unfortunate Souls" level classic?
Help me out here with your ownyes, no and maybe sos. Tell me I worry too much. *
Madonna was once both adored and reviled as "The Great Appropriator" so I suppose it's only fair that Lady Gaga borrows from her. When I first heard "Alejandro" I kept thinking 'Oh, Ok. Gaga has to have her own "La Isla Bonita," too.' And then she went and collaborated with frequent Madonna iconographer Steven Klein for the music video.
So even though Klein is shamelessly borrowing from his own past work here, the wonderful thing about Gaga is that, like her spiritual pop empress predecessor, she's her own artist, too. This makes the appropriation palatable as well as fun... until crazed fans start giving her credit for everything. [But that's another funny subject matter entirely.] I mean even Madonna didn't invent the chameleon approach to pop stardom, though her fans, like Gagas, also tried to give her credit for it at the time.
Doesn't that "what on earth will they wear/look like next?" thing go directly back to Bowie? Or is it earlier than that. Paging pop historians???
Blond helmet bobs and flare pants forevah!
So mark my words. Someday soon -- let's say within the next 3 years -- Gaga is going to have her Madonna "Live to Tell" moment wherein she totally shocks the world, not with a new provocative look but by showing up with a demure, classic one. It'll get everyone talking as much as any diet coke can hair rollers ever did.
The Madonna / Steven Klein collaboration from 2003 One might call the stylings Gaga-esque but for the year in question
So, my point is this: Clumsy homage/ripoff like the kind that Christina Aguilera does in "Not Myself Tonight" when she plagiarizes both Madonna and Gaga *shudder* is not fun at all and should be looked down upon. But riffing on the work of others in a new context or with a fresh twist is totally fun and what many great artists do.
We see this in feature films all the time, too. Both of the best shots in Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces are arguably inspired by other work: There's that white sheet shrouded sex scene (Margritte) and that moving emotional climax with the hands caressing the static image (which I'm hearing is a Godard reference... but it totally works in the Almodóvarian context). A couple weeks ago we chatted briefly about the various A grade riffs on Ingmar Bergman's Persona (Lynch's Mulholland Dr and Altman's Three Women). And everyone knows that the wildly popular Quentin Tarantino is all about referencing other movies. But whether or not we recognize the references --I often don't with Tarantino since the genres he loves most are weak spots for me -- great artists reference past work only in the service of making their own fresh visions.
The only real issue with doing this is when the new artist acts as if it's completely and 100% their invention. Which is why it was a shame that Beyonce's otherwise awesome and awesomely ubiquitous "Single Ladies" video didn't have a "thank you Bob Fosse" attached to it, for example.
Madonna & Gaga. They're both "tops"
So, I can't help but think about Madonna the entire way through"Alejandro" maybe because of the Catholic imagery. I see "Alejandro" like so: Madonna's men in cone bras helping hot blond divas masturbate (Like a Virgin, Blonde Ambition Tour), women topping men suggestively in dance choreography (Express Yourself, Blonde Ambition Tour) and catholic girls obsessing over funerals and death in snowy black and white ("Oh Father") plus a couple choreographed bits from "Human Nature" and "Express Yourself" all get tossed into the Gaga/Klein blender and come out the other end as an angry military puree. Here the woman isn'ttopping men with a flirtatious feminism but actually appears to be penetrating them rather more subversively like a man would. And instead of just obsessing at the coffin and weeping for her dead loved one, the girl is actually leading the funereal procession. And the cone bras become guns. Bang Bang.
I'm not sure I've ever fully registered the sheer amount of aggression in Gaga's art before. But after the mass murder of "Telephone", the crispy end-gag in "Bad Romance" and the poisoned Skarsgaard in "Paparazzi," and this, it's abundantly clear. Suddenly those silly rumors about Tarantino wanting to work with her that sprung up when she used Kill Bill imagery for "Telephone" make more popcultural sense. Gaga is out for blood!
Unfortunately this new video is too effortfully mounted and grave to be half as fun as her previous outings and it also feels more derivative. Will she ever top the exquisite aesthetic control, hilarious sight gags and awesome choreography of "Bad Romance"? That said, even though I'm unmoved by this new work, I really love Lady Gaga and remain thrilled that someone is taking the music video format so very seriously again and has the fanbase to back up that particular passion. It had been a long while since each music video premiere felt so "NEW SHORT FILM!" headline worthy.
Three final errant thoughts...
On a shallow film referencing note, can I just say that I absolutely hate beautiful men with perfect bodies. It's entirely unfair that anyone can stay "hot like Mexico" while sporting Moe's Three Stooges 'do. Entirely unfair.
How much do you love that lyric "you know that I love you, boy | hot like Mexico"? Well, I love it more than you do. Genius.
