I had a chance to see Cary Fukunaga's "Jane Eyre" last night and it was lovely - eloquent, intelligent, spooky. Charlotte Brontë's century-and-a-half old classic, which is a poignant love story with a touch of Gothic mystery, has been endlessly and needlessly adapted, yet the filmmakers and the wonderful cast headlined by the two young up-and-comers breathe new life to what could have a been a deliberate, dawdling exercise.
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The casting of Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender just made too much sense to falter on screen and thankfully they're both up to the task. The former, delicate, firm, devastating and the latter a towering Mr. Rochester - both unwaveringly boorish and mysteriously charming. (Of course, Mr. Fassbender knows all about courting young English ladies, as he did so ambiguously in Andrea Arnold's "Fish Tank").
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Director Cary Fukunaga (who debuted two years ago with the stark, moving immigration tale, "Sin Nombre") has publicly stated that he intended to embrace the spookier elements of Brontë's novel, but his bigger contribution (in collaboration with Moira Buffini's adaptation) is the seamless, time-shifting narrative, which is deftly applied and rarely settles into a predictable groove.
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And the technical aspects are all first-class, from Adriano Goldman's naturally-lit interiors to Dario Marianelli's subtle, ascending score to Fukunaga's unfussy, carefully measured injections of weight, "Jane Eyre" is both classical enough to please Brontë fans and curious enough to attract new ones. [B+]
Well, it was fun while it lasted, the Preston Sturges Retrospective is over. If you read any of the entries, you have too much time on your hands, and that goes for the guy who wrote them, as well.
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Anyway, I really enjoyed watching and writing about the films, it's great motivation to plow through a director/actor/film genre that you may be feeling undernourished or uneducated about, I highly recommend it for anyone who hasn't done so - categorized viewing is the only way to go.
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For future and present reference, here are the eight films I watched, re-watched and wrote about over the past two weeks, all in one spot:
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"The Great McGinty" (1940)
"Christmas in July" (1940)
"The Lady Eve" (1941)
"Sullivan's Travels" (1942)
"The Palm Beach Story" (1942)
"The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" (1944)
"Hail the Conquering Hero" (1944)
"Unfaithfully Yours" (1948)
So I have actually seen a few films in theaters over the past week or so, believe it or not.
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First up was Jaume Collet-Serra's authorless thriller, "Unknown", which was exactly what you would expect it to be - breathless, tricky, illogical. It's basically a cheap pastiche of every European identity thriller from "Frantic" to "The Bourne Identity" yet it lacks the direction and smarts of both.
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In short, it moves and it's fun to piece together, if only fleetingly so and eventually the film's junky and uncouth demeanor envelopes the proceedings. [C]
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Next was Don Roos' "The Other Woman", which is only marginally distinguishable from the Hallmark movie of the week. IFC Films bought the rights recently and planned an early 2011 release to capitalize on the Natalie Portman coattails, but I can't imagine anyone other than 20-60 year-old women being able to stomach this hoary material.
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Dealing with her perception as a home-wrecker and a healing mother (she loses her newborn baby at just three days old), Portman's performance is tetchy, but not altogether winning. After "Rabbit Hole", which offered a stark, honest viewpoint on grieving and marital irritability, "The Other Woman" feels belated and phony. [D+]
The first of two films that Preston Sturges would make at 20th Century Fox before bowing out of the Hollywood landscape, "Unfaithfully Yours" was but a blip on the radar until recently, where it's now deservedly considered one of its invaluable creator's more skillful and ingenious originations.
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The story of a brilliant conductor (Rex Harrison) who suspects his wife (Linda Darnell) of cheating and thus plots her murder, the film re-examines the same marital insecurities and infidelities of "The Palm Beach Story," only more so on this occasion with the added conditions of excess paranoia and baleful begrudging.
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Sir Alfred de Carter is the dapper and soon to be obsessive conductor, played wonderfully by the aforementioned Harrison, who incidentally uncovers the suspicious findings of a private detective who shadowed his wife will he was away to his native England. Offended by the gesture, he destroys the revealing documents, only the hear the findings later, straight from the horse's mouth.
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The rest of the film is played out in the deranged and highly vengeful mind of Alfred as he imagines three completely different scenarios involving the confrontation of his wife's infidelity as he conducts that night's symphony concert.
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It's here, where Alfred's musical pieces become the soundtrack for his vindictive fantasies that the film's brilliance is on full display. It becomes more than just a black comedy on marital suspicion, but an example of our natural inclination to project our lives into our art. [A-]
Part two of Preston Sturges' wartime farces, "Hail the Conquering Hero" is a stealthily suggestive comedy about the demythification of good old American heroism and small-town hypocrisy - a madcap gem, and if you're asking this viewer, the crowning achievement of the Sturges pantheon.
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Eddie Bracken, who played the stammering and lovelorn Norval from "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" reunites with Sturges in one of the more befitting and enduring - albeit brief - actor/director duos in film history.
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Like a voodoo doll subjected to the wrath of his master's sadistic tricks, Bracken's characters endured the awkward tensions and morally prickly situations with a wide-eyed gaze and a m-m-mumbled dialect, and never so hilariously as in "Hail the Conquering Hero".
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A hero's son, medically discharged from the Marines and shielding the news from his mother and hometown while sipping beers on the California coastline, Woodrow Truesmith (Eddie Bracken) divulges the information to a group of Marines one evening, much to his regret.
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The Marines, led by Sgt. Heppelfinger (William DeMarest), grab poor Truesmith by the collar and drag him back to his hometown, where despite his reservations, he's thrown to the welcoming committee and thrust into the town spotlight, where they ignorantly hand him the keys to the city (and a mayoral candidate seat), unaware of his disappointingly unheroic military service.
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One can draw similarities in the way that the townspeople throw themselves at Truesmith coming home in uniform to the way that the advertising executives immediately glorify and promote the lowly desk clerk Dick Powell once they believe that he's won the tagline contest in "Christmas in July".
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Indeed, making light of the soldiers' return home and the sheepish mentality of its citizens is a risky move, but Preston Sturges is the kind of guy who understood the various inconsistencies of life, someone who would rather laugh than sneer. [A]
It is this brief sojourn in Preston Sturges' career that saw the director slip into a one-two punch of small-town wartime hysteria - the first half being the wacky, unbounded and ultimately buoyant "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek".
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In a career rife with production code red flags and taboo middle-class issues, Sturges never skirted the line of controversy like he does here.
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Trudy Kockenlocker (played by Betty Hutton) is a small-town girl who wants to give the soldiers a fine night before their sent off to war in the morning. Against her father's wishes, she organizes a cover-up with the local dweeb, Norval, (Eddie Bracken, who would team up yet again with Sturges) so she can attend the dance and see the boys off.
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In true hangover fashion, the events of the night are revealed piece-by-piece - partly because Trudy doesn't remember and partly because Sturges can't directly reveal the misdeeds of a young, drunken family girl.
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To make a very long and very convoluted story short, Trudy finally realizes that not only did she remember marrying one of the soldiers, but she's pregnant. Together, she and Norval must find a way out of this predicament, which eventually will lead them up against the law.
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It's well know that Sturges' films are like a student cramming for the exam that's twenty minutes away - dense, furious, nearly incomprehensible - but "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" is without a doubt his wildest ride.
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But wild for wild's sake would not a good movie make, for Sturges elevates the bare essentials of the material by injecting his self-referential and googly dialogue, abrasive small-town virtues gone amiss (a drunken marriage, out-of-wedlock pregnancy) and all at the expense of American soldiers on their way to the front - how's that for ya, censors?
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Now Sturges brilliantly frames the film around a certain telephone conversation (involving two townspeople speaking to two state officials, cameo appearances by Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff, reprising their roles from "The Great McGinty") in which the point is made clear that something newsworthy or revelatory is going to happen. "You won't believe it," the men claim, and we wait patiently for the unbelievable.
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Well I'm not going to spoil the ending - the eponymous miracle - but it's perhaps the wackiest final card that Sturges has ever played at the end of his films, easily the most ironic punch-line of his career. [B+]
I don't want to speak for everyone, but with the inevitability of last night's Oscar winners, an uneven, slapdash production and two hosts so unrelentingly misguided in their efforts, the show quickly took on the task of becoming insufferable.
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In a telecast primed to reap in the eagerly attainable "younger demographic" (what with the choice of hosts and all) the first presenter to take the stage was 94 year-old Kirk Douglas. Look, I love the guy - God bless him - but who thought this was a great idea?
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And then the rest of the night took on the theme of "honoring" Oscar history with black-and-white clips, a shape-shifting stage, presenters in white tuxedos. Billy Crystal even came out to honor Bob Hope in a presentation that only further emphasized what an actual Oscar host should be.
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James Franco and Anne Hathaway actually surpassed my expectations - they were far worse than I thought they'd be. From the opening parody video (thanks for the idea, Billy!) things went downhill in a hurry.
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Franco stood stone-faced and disinterested while Hathaway hollered and over-clapped at everyone she introduced and neither of them had anything funny to say. The former came out in drag and the latter belted out a song about the overly-featured Hugh Jackman spurning her for a duet and both gags did nothing but attract a swarm of crickets.
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And just when I couldn't imagine things getting worse, out trots a Brooklyn kids choir to sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" with all of the Oscar winners marching out for the crescendo, Hathaway high-fiving them as the telecast mercifully came to an end.
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In a night so sheepishly reassuring and timid, it's fitting that "The King's Speech," the warm snuggie of the ten Best Picture nominees, walked away the big winner. So you didn't like Ricky Gervais? You got your jerk-off session, Hollywood.
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