rapscallion

 

Sam Raimi's "Oz The Great and Powerful" is too odd and, by extension, too fascinating to be as hastily written off as it has been by the critics. Whether it's good or bad is beside the point. It's a genuine curiosity.

Here's a film in which the most affecting performance is given by a tiny stop-motion porcelain figure named China Girl - and in which the live-action actors seem like, well, porcelain figures.

The humans in "Oz" all behave as if they've been lacquered.

China Girl, by the way, is voiced by Joey King, the young star of "Ramona and Beezus" and "Crazy Stupid Love," but her visage and spunky behavior both smack of Ellen Page. In my mind, she was the inspiration.

 

The film itself is like a lot of modern movies that go through the motions of paying homage to a revered classic. It wants to both exploit and one-up the movie that inspired it, outdoing the original via modern technology while missing the essential ingredient of soul. One is aware that when Judy Garland danced down the yellow brick road in Victor Fleming's 1939 original, she was working on an actual set. Here, one senses the poor actors spent all their time in front of a blue screen.

It's called progress.

But Raimi's one true triumph in "Oz" (aside from China Girl) was the shrewd casting of James Franco as a con man trying to pass himself off as The Wizard. Franco, who I like, has always struck me as something of a charming charlatan off-screen. I'm not sure that I completely buy into the Renaissance Man persona that he's been so eagerly pitching to the media.

Consequently, in "Oz," the real-life James Franco melds seamlessly with the incorrigible Oscar Diggs, the character he's playing on-screen.

Single-handedly, the appealing Franco adds the aforementioned fascination to Raimi's splashy, sprawling but utimately soulless film.

He and China Girl.

tarnished

The curious turn taken this year by the usually stuffy, self-important Oscarcast probably warrants psychoanalysis more than critical analysis.

Perhaps weary of being unfavorably compared to the Golden Globes party, with its irresistible frissons, and cognizant of its own dwindling credibility, Oscar decided the most expedient route to the popularity it so desperately covets would be self-debasement and, to a degree, self-loathing.

Fine. Anything that produces results. The show was crude and rude, gleefully so, and it willfully pursued every -ism in the book. Fine.

The problem, however, was that none of it was remotely funny.

The 2013 Oscars was the awards-show equivalent of a conflicted, sexually ambiguous teenage boy: Am I gay? Or am I straight? Do I prefer “boobs”? (To borrow a word from the title of the man-cave song-and-dance extravaganza that set the show’s insecure tone.) Or do I prefer the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles? (Another of the show's “huh?” moments.)

The result was an Oscarcast that was more than just routinely awful. It was embarrassing and pathetic in its dazed quest for validation.

In retrospect, the most recent Golden Globes presentation, with Tine Fey and Amy Poehler, had the sophistication of a Cole Porter lyric.

cinema obscura: Massy Tadjedin's "last night" (2010)

Thanks to the language barrier and locales that are more exotic than Anywhere, U.S.A., foreign films get away with a lot.

Especially French films which (full disclosure) I love.

Who couldn't swoon over one of Eric Rohmer's talky/sexy films from the '70s?  But even Rohmer's films can seem sightly ridiculous when you stop and try to re-imagine them as - gasp - American movies.

An excellent case-in-point is Massy Tadjedin's more-than-slightly-ridiculous "Last Night," a film which suffers mightily because of its lack of subtitles.

Set largely in New York and with a curious international cast, the film stars Keira Knightley who slouches around artily pretending to be a writer and Sam Worthington (that's him below with Keira) as her rather dull corporate-type husband.  Their marriage makes no sense, except that Sam's apparently handsome income has afforded Keira a magazine-ready loft/apartment that seems to be in either SoHo or Tribeca.

Even though she shows no interest in Sam herself, Keira becomes obsessed with a possible initmate relationship he might be having with coworker Eva Mendes, who accompanies Sam on business trips - the current  one to Philadelphia.  Sam is no sooner gone and being tempted by Eva, when Keira meets her former lover, a grinning Frenchman (no less) played by Guilaume Canet (that's him above with Keira).

There's a lot of drinking and smoking and darting eyes as the newly paired-off couples each anticipate hot sex.

Given that this is something of feminist screed, it's no surprise (spoiler alert here) that prim Keira doesn't give in to Guilaume (who stops grinning and starts agonizing when he realizes he's not getting any) or that Sam behaves like a pig and has sex (twice in one night!) with Eva.

Forty years ago, with Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu in the leads, "Last Night" might have been a sophisticated art-house must.

But today, in English, it's a sorry parody.

in no particular order, and unannotated

Tim Burton's "Frankenweenie" (Disney)

Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained" (Weinstein)

Joe Wright's "Anna Karenina" (Universal/Focus)

Callie Khouri's "Nashville" (ABC)

Sam Mendes' "Skyfall" (MGM)

Stephen Chbosky's "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" (Summit)

Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" (Columbia)

Matthew McConaughey ("Bernie," "Magic Mike," "Killer Joe" & "The Paperboy")

Hiromasa Yonebayashi's "The Secret World of Arrietty"/"Kari-gurashi no Arietti" (Disney)

David O. Russell's "Silver Linings Playbook" (Weinstein)

Ben Affleck's "Argo" (Warner)

The Duplass Brothers' "Jeff, Who Lives at Home" (Paramount)

Oliver Stone's "Savages" (Universal)

Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol's "A Cat in Paris"/"Une vie de chat"(Gébéka)

Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom" (Focus)

Photos (from top) Connie Britton and Charles Esten in "Nashville," artwork for "Django Unchained" and Jason Segel in "Jess, Who Lives at Home."

the anti-musical

"Les Miz" - kinda strange for a musical

Tom Hooper’s film of the cult pop opera, “Les Misérables,” is one of those movies that’s oblivious to criticism.

It has a built-in audience, a rather sizable one, which loves it, and anyone who doesn’t love it is, well, a wretch (to borrow from and translate the production’s title), someone clearly deserving of his/her misery.

Me? I didn’t like it. Yes, it's bad, but actually, the worst thing that I can say about “Les Misérables,” whose stage productions I managed to avoid for more than two decades now, is that it’s exactly what I expected it to be – an extravaganza for tourists, at turns middle-brow and pretentious.

Also tedious, bloated and exhausting.

Given that it’s based on the imposing Victor Hugo tome, in which just about everyone suffers and then dies, it’s no surprise that this is yet another danceless musical, despite a credit to Liam Steel. Dancing would be way too joyful for the funereal mood that pervades the material here. Still, I missed that particular element. My hunch is that Hooper directed everything in "Les Miz" all by himself, handling all of it, even those many "songs," with the same dull, monotone touch.

A musical without dancing? Kinda strange for a ... musical. A musical without dancing is, well, only half a musical.

Finally, most of the buzz around "Les Miz" has to do with Hooper’s decision to have the film’s interminable list of songs – all 50 of them – sung "live," as if that was an edgy decision. But, frankly, there was no other way to film this material, given that most of the “songs” here aren’t songs at all but long stretches of sustained dialogue, set to droning music.

Hooper's only other option was to dub/loop the entire movie.

The songs in Les Miz" are, more or less, internal monologues. Its characters "sing" to themselves or directly to the audience, mostly to themselves, but rarely to other characters. They don't connect musically.

“Les Misérables,” in the end, isn’t a musical at all. It’s an anti-musical.