Happy-Go-Lucky

In the opening scenes of Happy-Go-Lucky, the new film by Mike Leigh, Poppy (Sally Hawkins) has her bike stolen.  Instead of throwing a fit, though, she is merely sad that she never had time to say goodbye to the bike, and then carries on.

This is the basic premise of the movie: a happy, 30-year-old British woman who hasn't got a care in the world (or doesn't appear to) and lives life from day to day laughing at everything.  She takes driving lessons from a rather harsh instructor (Eddie Marsan), and yet throughout his tantrums, she continues on joking and looking at the brighter side of things.

Yet as one can guess with a story like this the character arc will inevitably lead to Poppy confronting something really serious that will break down her cheerful demeanor.  Such events are necessary to make Poppy feel like a real character, and its a great credit to Hawkins and Leigh that when this scene comes, it actually does feel genuine and gets an emotional response from the audience. 

The movie is about being happy, though, no matter what happens in your life.  Poppy demonstrates that you can't brush everything away, but you can pick yourself back up and carry on, learning what you have learned.  This movie is like Amelie (2001) because it just wants you to be happy when you watch it (Amelie did lack any dramatic scenes, but that's beside the point).  As Poppy's friend Zoe (Alexis Zegerman) says, "You can't make everyone happy."  "While there's no harm in trying, is there?" chirps back Poppy.

Synecdoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman’s new movie Synecdoche, New York was screened last night at the River East theater as part of the Chicago International Film Festival. Kaufman himself, who wrote and directed the picture, was in attendance, and a Q & A with him followed the film.

Synecdoche (pronounced Sin-eck-doe-kee) is about a theater director named Caden (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), who lives in New York and is always in fear of death, a major theme of the movie. His plan is to use an abandoned warehouse to build a life size replica of New York and have the people inhabit and play out the various lives of real people.

The movie is dreamlike, set in a surreal world where so many things don’t make sense. The movie contains some 200 scenes set in two-hour running time, and years pass like nothing, mere afterthoughts to these characters. Indeed this is both an annoying and captivating film.

The film definitely stays with you and you think about it long after it is over. I still haven’t concluded whether I liked the film or not; I go between loving it and hating it within the same minute sometimes. It’s really a force of a movie to be reckoned with, and I recommend people see it just to purely talk about the themes addressed in the movie. It’s a smart film, but one feels Kaufman, who was given final cut on this project, needed some restraints to scale it back maybe just a touch.

Kaufman’s Q & A afterwards actually helped me understand some of the obscure elements of the film, but he mostly dismissed “what does this mean” questions by saying you should interpret it the way you want it. What I thought was bold was him saying that he doesn’t care whether you like it or not, it is his vision that he has put out there for anyone who cares to see it to, and love it or hate it.

Previous scripts by Kaufman include Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002) and of course Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). He is definitely one of the best screenwriters out there in Hollywood today, and though I have some misgivings about this latest piece, I think it is definitely worth checking out, even if it is the least accessible of his movies.

D2V

A recent article today on artsjournal touched upon the realm of Direct to Video releases, movies that bypass the theaters completely and hit the home video market first and last.  Going D2V is usually seen as a sign that the movie is a failure and that the studios did not want to waste any more money distributing it.  Disney is a culprit of this many times, creating sequels to the classics in their vaults and sending them directly to video to make a quick buck (Aladdin II and III, Lady and the Tramp II, Little Mermaid II & The Prequel, Cinderella II, and on and on).

Recently, though, some filmmakers have experiment with the home video format.  Steven Soderbergh released his independent project Bubble (2005) in the theaters and simultaneously on DVD.  The theaters that exhibited the movie had the DVD on sale in the lobby, so if a patron really liked the movie, they could own it right then and there.

Really, though, I don't think much of Soderbergh's idea.  If people can enjoy the movie in their home theater systems immediately, then they will just buy the DVD for $30 and skip paying the $10 a head movie price.  And as for all the D2V movies out there, well it's a shame that they exist, but there isn't much that you can do about them.  Horror movies are another culprit of the D2V syndrome.  How do we solve this?  Stop making bad movies, but that is too simple (and too complicated) a solution.

Trouble the Water

Recently I ventured to the Landmark Century Theater to see a movie that sounded pretty good.  Trouble the Water is a documentary about Hurricane Katrina, and it's a rather fascinating one at that.  Much of the first half of the movie is footage shot by a woman who couldn't get out of the city because she couldn't afford it.  She takes her camera and films all the neighborhood people, deciding to document the before and after of this storm.

The footage of the rain pounding down, the streets and houses flooding, and eventually of these people up on their roof trying to avoid the water is amazing.  What makes it so good is that it echoes Blair Witch or more recently, Cloverfield, except that this is real, so she isn't filming herself swimming through the water.  Much of the second half is about the clean-up, and how the government did (or didn't) assist with the evacuation and aide of these people.

Mostly what the movie conveys is how fragile our everyday life is and how something unexpected can upset the balance of our lives.  This woman and her husband do return to New Orleans after attempting to live in Memphis, and this more then ever celebrates the human spirit to adapt to whatever environment they are presented.  It also brings up the issue of discrimination, though it keeps this in the background more then the foreground.  This is a great little gem that I encourage everyone to check out.