In Search Of A Midnight Kiss

Chief among the conclusions to be drawn after watching Alex Holdridge's pleasing but uneven In Search Of A Midnight Kiss is that this is without a doubt a film filled with contradictions. Its visual style teeters between very graceful portraits of the otherwise modern and soulless Los Angeles cityscape (rundown theaters and sex shops included) and a very gritty handheld walk and talk style akin to less visually pleasing lo-fi indie cinema. Its script bounces back and forth between Swingers-esque bro bonding and mumblecore worthy soul searching. Even its actors oscillate between sad-eyed losers and perky, bouncy puppy lovers. It's hard to decide while watching the film if all of this is just a fault of craft or if its makers saw something more. Maybe a spontaneous, illogical bittersweetness in life just yearning to be captured on film. Can one character really jump so fast from distant and shivery cold to laughing and conversational? Can L.A. really look so delicate and beautiful in one scene and so shit in the next? Can one film be so romantic and yet so cynical? It turns out it can. It all can. And it is in In Search Of A Midnight Kiss.

The film opens on the very desperate and sympathetic Wilson (Scoot McNairy) being caught masturbating to photoshopped images of Min (Kathleen Luong), the live-in girlfriend of his best friend and roommate, Jacob (Brian McGuire). Lucky for him, the amused and unfazed couple seek only to cure what ails him. They suggest a Craigslist post as a last ditch attempt at finding a mate by the night's big New Year's Eve bash where Wilson hopes to procure that all-important midnight kiss of romantic myth. He gets an enthused and brash response from a stranger named Vivian (Sara Simmonds) who agrees to meet with him but informs him that she will also be meeting with several other men that day and will know within five minutes if he is to be her midnight kissee. They meet uncute at a local cafe and slowly begin the transformation from begrudgingly associated strangers to once in a lifetime lovers.

Before Sunrise comes to mind as does Before Sunset and all the look-alike films that came in-between and thereafter. Unfortunately, Holdridge's part-raunchy, part-soulful banter doesn't cast quite the same spell that those Linklater masterpieces did. But perhaps a masterpiece wasn't exactly what was on the menu with this film. What is most certainly present is a dynamic depiction of the hard to pin down chemistry between two complex individuals. Simmonds and McNairy give alternately snarky and sweet performances that open their characters up to unpredictable turns. She, the loud-mouth realist, is offended that he brings condoms to their date and objects to his imagination's treatment of Min. He, the shell-shocked misanthrope, pushes her to bravely tell off an ex boyfriend and then aids her in the dangerous quest to rescue possessions from her apartment before the psycho comes to torch the place. Their journey together is sometimes wild and fun, occasionally very romantic, and only sometimes meandering and offbeat. It's not an out of line or previously unheard of accomplishment on film. And it pales in comparison to like-minded works. Nonetheless, it's a solid little indie effort that bares many of the marks that fans of this genre know and love.

Grade: B

Trailers: The Brothers Bloom

In 2005, writer/director Rian Johnson burst onto the indie scene with the high school set crime noir homage, Brick. The flick quickly grew into a cult hit, helped establish Joseph Gordon-Levitt as one of the greatest actors of his generation, and put Johnson's career on the fast track. Now he's traveling the globe and blowing stuff up in the more highly budgeted caper film, The Brothers Bloom. From the looks of the trailer, Johnson's sharp wit and savvy genre awareness remain in tact. Best of all it looks like the film will give a quintet of commercially underused Oscar-baiters the chance to lighten up and show off their comedic skills. Academy Award winners Rachel Weisz (The Constant Gardener) and Adrien Brody (The Piano) head the cast with support from the Oscar nominated Rinko Kikuchi (Babel) and the long overdue Mark Ruffalo (Zodiac). Check out the trailer by going here.

DVD of the Week: Spaced - The Complete Series

This hilarious British comedy was a cult hit in its day and has grown ever more popular for its connection with the recent Edgar Wright homage films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Wright worked on the show, which stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (the budding franchise's principal players). The essential premise sets Pegg alongside Jessica Hynes (the two also co-wrote the series) as a down on his luck guy who takes to living with a complete stranger (Hynes) in order to secure an apartment advertised as "for young couples only." The setup seems, and probably is, convenient and cheesy. But the execution is top-notch. Much in the way Wright and Pegg's talents as pop culture satirists have served their feature films, they also influence this series which comes crammed with references to Star Wars, "Resident Evil," and other geek chic titles. It's a marathon of references, quips, and affectionate interplay with a sense of randomness and spontaneity that makes every week an unexpected and enjoyable new adventure.

The Dark Knight

Praising The Dark Knight seems almost pointless at this juncture in time. Everyone knows it’s phenomenal and nearly everyone wants to see it as soon as possible. The only thing left to do is discuss just what makes it so phenomenal and why everyone wants to see it so badly.

Chief among these reasons is the cunning performance by the late Heath Ledger. As in all his finest work, he embodies his character with such authenticity that it becomes difficult to see the actor at work behind the persona. This is ever more true in the case of the diabolical Joker, a legendary Batman villain of the utmost cruelty. With swatches of clown makeup on his face, greenish tinted hair, and two sweeping scars on either side of his “smile,” The Joker has an appearance that suggests pure insanity and blatant self-disregard. He is also marked in a way that suggests something dark and twisted in his past. The nature of his scars is never fully addressed but throughout the film he tells several disturbing variations on how he received them. While the details are blurry, the importance of them is clear. His twisted psyche has been forged by them and their source and he continues to spread that carnage by marking his victims with that same, disgusting “smile.” In this, his finest performance, Ledger gives every bit the performance you would hope and more. His Joker is sinister yet unnervingly comical. That maniacal laugh is firmly in place. But added to the mythology is an anonymous sense of jaded anarchy. He laughs in the face of death and social order, making him what people living quaint, contented lived fear most. His goal, he says, is just to make life a little bit more “interesting.“ Writer/director Chris Nolan does nothing to really explain The Joker’s origins but simply regards him as a force of nature, unstoppable and incorruptibly evil. The effect is to make Ledger’s every twitch and twinge all the more fascinating. The Joker is an enigma. He begins as such and ends as such. The closest we get to logic is Michael Caine as Batman’s trusted confidant Alfred explaining that “some men just want to watch the world burn.” Ledger also plays his cards very carefully. He could have bandied about the film as a raving, shouting, laughing hyena. It could be that simple. Instead he restrains himself enough to make you want to do nothing more than study his face, peer into his eyes, and figure out the mystery of mankind’s greatest evil. The carnage he inflicts, by far the most in any Batman film, makes you only more obsessed with his mysteries. Much like Javier Bardem’s stoic Anton Chigurh in last year’s Oscar winning No Country for Old Men he functions in the film as a symbol of the modern world’s ruthless, soulless, and dishonorable nature. Our mayhem has begotten a monster and Batman is the hero at the gate being forced to defend out perimeters.

And it really is that epic a story. Crisscrossing plots about Hong Kong money schemes, RICO cases, and the wildcard Joker make for a time crusher of a film. It could be argued that trimming it would have aided it spectacularly in terms of endurance and appeal. I could even agree with that. But it plays out something like a tapestry of stories and themes, woven very carefully. I worry that removing just one stitch in the fabric would ruin its intoxicating effect. The outcome is, of course, that The Dark Knight, is far more than a Batman film or a fan boy’s wet dream. It’s stellar filmmaking on a grand scale, the smartest pop cinema of the decade. The very nature of the “hero” as we expect it in fiction is questioned in this morally grey feature. Comic book simplicity is washed away in favor of a more grim and dire real world Gotham in which being brave and noble is not a guarantee of good fortune and high praise. In fact, as in life, it almost assures you a more difficult journey. The gap between hero and villain closes with every frame of the film, leading to a chilling and tragic finale that sets up a very rocky road ahead for Gotham’s Dark Knight.

Grade: A

Mamma Mia!

The long-running West End and Broadway musical Mamma Mia!, based on the music of Swedish pop maestros Benny and Bjorn of the world famous ABBA, makes the transition from stage to screen with great exuberance but minor ambition. Meryl Streep stars as Donna, a single mother and former front woman of Donna & The Dynamos (an ABBA-esque girl group), who settles down to raise her daughter and run a hotel on an idyllic and remote Greek island. The daughter in question, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), is due to be married and wants her father to give her away. The problem is she doesn’t know exactly who he is. She steals her mother’s 20 year-old diary and discovers the names of three potential dads: Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Harry (Colin Firth), and Bill (Stellan Skarsgard). She invites all three of them to the wedding hoping that things will work themselves out and she’ll get her wish. Meanwhile, Donna’s feeling a nostalgia resurgence in life with the return of her old friends and bandmates for the wedding (Christine Baranski and a scene-stealing Julie Walters of Harry Potter fame). Her crisis is fueled further by the arrival of her old flames who send her into a tizzy and force her to reconcile herself with her past and her choices for the future.

Mamma Mia! is undeniably good product. It bounces across the screen on a waft of raw energy and giggling girlishness. For the right crowd, it should be nothing less than ecstasy. For everyone else, it’s something approaching torture. Classic ABBA tunes arrive with unbridled giddiness and the cast of amateur singers, gushing to the brim with contagious Swedish cheer, melt and swoon as those synth chords erupt. They prance around the Greek hillside. They jet ski. They even frolic around with the hired help. What this all amounts to is nothing short of a mystery. Songs stumble into frame abruptly and exist with just as much subtlety. Nearly none of the music chosen advances the narrative (what little there is) but simply serve as a cheery soundtrack by which director Phyllida Lloyd can pace her endless stream of musical montages. Hey, it’s “Money Money Money”! Let’s show Vegas! Give me a roulette wheel! Wait? Can we superimpose Meryl Streep’s face onto the roulette wheel? We can? Awesome!

The saving grace of the film is that even when their inexperienced voices fleck and flake, the cast performs admirably and with abounding energy. They are charming to the end and because of that the film is made mostly watchable and occasionally even enjoyable. Seeing the usually dour Streep unburdened of expressive makeup and a complicated accent for a light and jubilant role is a reward in and of itself. As the sweet and sassy contemporary mom Donna she nervously belts out “Mamma Mia” at the sight of her former beaus, reunites with old gal pals for a silly rendition of “Dancing Queen,” and breathtakingly bears her soul with “The Winner Takes It All.” She benefits from having some of the strongest ABBA tracks with the most organic moments of emergence. Streep’s voice waivers occasionally in slow spots of breathless lyrical storytelling but shines when she powers through on those massive ABBA choruses. She’s joyous, and believably so, which is rare in a film where everyone is constantly hooting and hollering as if they simply cannot control the glee that ABBA brings to them. Young leading lady Amanda Seyfried, best known for her role as a ditz in Mean Girls but most renowned for performances in smaller films such as Nine Lives and the HBO series “Big Love,” does not equal Streep but glimmers with almost as much sun-tanned soulfulness. She’s a charmer here with a warmth and genuineness that makes her ridiculous character, a girl who seriously believes simply glancing upon her father will cause fireworks to descend from the skies and “Waterloo” to burst out of imaginary speakers in the clouds, an innocent sweetheart rather than a daft fool. Her voice stands ably alongside the rest of the cast and stands out at the most distinctly modern and Top 40-esque of the bunch. Her take on “I Have A Dream” seems destined to become a heart song for teen girls everywhere.

Beneath the sugary pop songs and the beautiful scenery there is most certainly….nothing. So take it or leave it. Meryl Streep and Co. make do with the material and serve up a feature more fitting of the term “fun romp” than any before. And not condescendingly so (OK, maybe a little). It’s hard to imagine anyone on set had any greater expectations. Whether or not it’s enough to make the film recommendable is subject to debate. I can’t foresee this leaping from beyond its OMG girl power ghetto and becoming something universally admired or appreciated. It exists. It is real. But it is barely even there. You can go for the glitz and the silly sing-along songs or you can skip it and see The Dark Knight instead. Either way, this is not a film likely to occupy your consciousness for very long.

Grade: C

DVD of the Week: Saving Grace - Season One

Academy Award winner Holly Hunter makes the jump to the small screen in this brazen yet mercurial drama series on TNT. From its inception, it is clear that Saving Grace aims high. But it's not until several episodes into its bumpy first season that its achievements match its ambitions. The series revolves around Grace Hanadarko (Hunter) - a tough as nails Oklahoma City police detective with explosive tendencies, a dark past involving both the Oklahoma City bombing and molestation by a Catholic priest, and a relatively universal reputation for walking on the wild side. At first Grace, a forceful personality with girlish carelessness and freewheeling sexuality, feels sandwiched into the series for the purposes of being edgy. She drinks hard, wakes up groggy, shamelessly flashes the old man next door on her way to the shower, and then reports for one of the world's toughest jobs half in the bag and without a care in the world. Yet she's a sharp detective and fearless protector. Every bit of her wrecklessness wreaks of open emotional wounds. For every foolish impulse there is a dormant darkness waiting to be uncovered. All the conflict and confusion boiling beneath her surface throws itself at you in heaps and mounds at first, only to be settled and soothed as the series progresses by writer Nancy Miller's wisening with each weekly episode and Hunter's growingly rich performance. By season's end, in the gripping finale "Taco, Tulips, Duck, and Spices," the show has boiled itself down to some of the rawest drama ever to be broadcast on American television. The journey is well worth the dalliances with melodrama and frivolity, many of which stem from its surreal premise: Grace's wicked ways have earned her a "last chance angel" named Earl (Leon Rippy), a chain-smoking beer-bellied son of a gun. At times their unconventional, undefinable relationship makes for rollicking tension but often it's the smaller moments of quiet drama such as meaninful conversations with best friend Rhetta (Laura San Giacomo) that really do the trick. In spite of any and all shortcomings, Saving Grace is an artistic bullseye that keeps you riveted as you fall madly in love with every one of its disgruntled, imperfect characters.

DVD of the Week: Stop-Loss

Director Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry) directs this intensely intimate military drama that succeeds by its nature as a personal tome rather than a preachy polemic (see Lions for Lambs). Sgt. Brandon King (the still fighting for cred Ryan Phillippe) returns from Iraq triumphantly in the eyes of his home town but personally devastated and distraught by the things he has seen at his young age. He is even more troubled to discover that in the wake of lessening troops and ongoing battle, he and some of his friends have been "stop-lossed" meaning that they will return to war despite completing their tour of duty. He sets about, at first, to reason his way out of it. Then he resorts to less savory measures of evasion. Ultimately, he is forced to face his demons and his responsibilities in a tragic, unforgiving tale of lives lost and souls broken. Channing Tatum, Abbie Cornish, and the always superb Joseph Gordon-Levitt also star.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

With the Oscar winning adult fable Pan's Labyrinth, director Guillermo del Toro demonstrated a gift for mixing intricately grotesque creatures with sharply observed human characters. With Hellboy II, the sequel to the pre-Pan's comic book flick that put del Toro on the American commercial cinema radar, he spreads his wings even further as an imaginative visual innovator but loses his grip slightly as a razor-sharp storyteller.

If The Golden Army has a flaw, it is that it is overstuffed with geniusly weird and twisted supernatural flourishes. Each character possesses perfectly realized attributes, ranging from functional physical form to believably real setbacks. The brutish lead Hellboy (Ron Perlman), though a super charged demon from hell, feels insecure and therefore files down his massive horns to meek stubs. In other words, the monsters here can be more human than the humans sometimes. It is with these rich details that the film distinguishes itself from the herd of comic book cannon fodder. Nevertheless, The Golden Army often lets its eccentricities take center stage when attention needs to be paid to the bigger picture. The narrative flow of the film is sullied and nearly crushed by the obsessive compulsive quirk of del Toro's grand and sweeping vision. The story, about an indestructible ancient militia and the vicious prince seeking to resurrect them, is utterly epic and at times del Toro has too much attention placed on the small charms of this world. Rather than hustling forward with wit and warmth along the way, he shaves off some momentum here and there to make room for all the little oddities that make Hellboy such a fun property to begin with. Alas, every now and then, good material needs to go.

What makes this a winning follow up is the delicate poetry of del Toro's imaginative alternate world. In one scene, an action scene no less, del Toro hits strides of moral ambiguity, adrenaline uplift, and quiet meditation. The evil Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) unleashes an "elemental" on the city, inciting chaos when a giant, plant-like creature the size of a sky scraper begins ravaging the streets below. Nuada prompts Hellboy, a tortured public figure and outcast, to consider the situation before he makes his move. He and his "elemental" offer a life of acceptance, but to defend the humans would mean a continued life of torment and exile. Hellboy chooses humanity, and perhaps stupidly so. The film does not affirmatively endorse our race as superiors. In killing the "elemental" the streets become bathed in its blood, fluid from its veins. Flakes of dispersed pollen drift down to the city below and land with the gentleness of snowflakes. And in this silent moment, the people below take in the beauty of the sight, bewildered by the violence that created it.

Underneath all of this visual poetry is a very practical truth: Hellboy II probably has the most beautiful and perfectly created sets, costumes, make-up, and effects of any film in this or any year. Having guided Pan's Labyrinth to a triple Oscar win for such technical categories, del Toro has more than proven himself gifted with assembling talented costumers, art directors, make-up artists, and many others with essential but often overlooked film set professions. If there is any justice he should see his team take home even more trophies this fall. Haunting creations such as a winged, many-eyed angel of death (Doug Jones, also Abe Sapien and The Chamberlain here) and the gaunt, saucer-eyed Princess Nuala (Anna Walton in elaborately conceived costume and makeup) are an essential part of what allows this feature to function with such grace and still remain, essentially an action packed adventure for the ages.

Grade: B+

Wall-E

Pixar's reign as the premiere studio for top grade animated pictures continues, and perhaps peaks, with the post-apocalyptic bittersweet comedy about a little flibbertigibbet robot named Wall-E. The droid, one of the last remaining vestiges of Earth, has been left behind to compile and compact trash. So devastating is the future world's clutter that the entire population must flee the planet and head into space. Wall-E struggles futilely to restore the depleted planet but makes little progress. He piles garbage higher and higher, to the point that the heaps begin resemble new world skyscrapers. All of this at the urging of Buy N' Large, a conglomerate so massive it operates the complete commercial landscape of the planet and, in fact, the international government. Left to their own devices, the human race devolved into thoughtless apes chugging Big Gulps and unimaginatively deteriorating the planets resources to the point of no return. Still plucky, greasy, and sweetly silly Wall-E must navigate the gross terrain. He collects trinkets and things along his way in a hope to approximate a condition of humanity. His favorite thing, it seems, is the movie musical. He waits patiently to experience the phenomenon of "hand holding" as demonstrated to him by none other than Barbra Streisand in his beloved copy of Hello, Dolly.

Wall-E's chance to find that human magic comes in the form of a no-nonsense bot named EVE who comes to Earth with a mission of her own. She appears at first to be an unwooable automaton with no sensitivities. Wall-E's initial attempts approach her lead only to her blasting him with her deadly, comically forceful laser gun. Soon enough though, the warm charm of Wall-E makes its mark on EVE and the two form a connection that will take them to the end of the universe and back again.

Wall-E replaces Finding Nemo as the crown jewel in Pixar's crown, which itself replaced Monsters Inc, which replaced the breakthrough Toy Story from years prior, and so on. The stretch of good fortune and great movie making by the studio stands unparalleled in the modern movie landscape. Not since the glory days of Disney (a parent to Pixar that remains a distant and distinctly different entity) has any one studio made such an unstoppably strong collection of runaway hits. Most impressively, Wall-E with its overtones of global crisis and the replenishing power of true, unbuyable human joy and love speaks more strongly and poetically of these current trying times than any film so far this year, and may remain the truest cinematic speaker of wisdom even once we've endured the pensive fall movie season and closed the book on 2008.

The animation here is an eye-popping yet uncartoonish style that at times renders images clearly enough to fool you into thinking you're watching a filmed feature. Live action material is seamlessly spliced into the feature as to include bits of Hello, Dolly footage and a hybridized performance of sorts by Fred Willard as the planet's final, doomed present who appears exclusively on video playback devices. For those that still consider animation to be a dirty word, there is no doubt this transcends the kiddie demo in scope, scale, and visual grandeur. It is a stunning, sweeping epic that exceeds all expectations and resurrects animation from the tiny tykes graveyard as a viable, alternative style of storytelling.

Children are, in fact, not especially courted here. The film is certainly a warm, family-minded adventure, but certain narrative elements, including a sadly forgotten Wall-E scraping and scrounging around a desolate planet in relative silence, make this film feel more like the animated equivalent of Cast Away than any sort of successor to the typical fast-paced Mouse House fun of yesteryear. It is admirably subtle and quiet, the benefit of which is the inevitable welcoming of an expanse that offers the viewer a world greater than Wall-E's little nook. As his journey takes him into the reaches of outer space the film achieves a fresh magic with just the faintest, uncheesy hint of authentic hope for a better humanity.

Grade: A