CulturePulp.

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Ginger & Rosa'

Movie review in the Friday, March 29 Oregonian....

 

"Ginger & Rosa" is a potent little period drama from writer/director Sally Potter ("Orlando") about rebellion, fear, compromise, and the wildly inappropriate things adults can do while using their "ideals" as an excuse.

But most viscerally, it's about Potter keeping her camera tightly trained on every tiny expression by Elle Fanning, who gives a stunning performance as Ginger -- a teen put through belief-quaking emotional changes in a threadbare 1962 London.

Ginger and her wild-child best pal Rosa (Alice Englert) were born on the same day in 1945. Seventeen years later, they're casting about for identities in a world shaken by pop-culture shifts and the ever-present fear of atomic doom.

Potter does delicate work capturing the way Ginger and Rosa hover between child- and adulthood, the way they try on grown-up behavior like they're playing dress-up -- clutching teddy bears (and each other) and playing patty-cake between bouts of smoking, drinking, hitchhiking and the occasional bus-stop snog.

The teens are also rebelling in an effort to avoid the fates of their unhappy mothers. Ginger's mother (Christina Hendricks) gave up everything in a bid for domestic normalcy, but now she's fighting against the word-twisting of Ginger's father (Alessandro Nivola) -- a self-centered intellectual who behaves horribly while hiding behind his "free spirit" ideals.

Ginger -- her head full of her father's exhortations to be "an activist, not a supplicant" -- gets caught in the middle. The threat of intimate and global catastrophe tests her belief system -- even as Potter pushes closer to capture every quiver on Fanning's face.

It's not particularly subtle, especially toward the end. But it's quietly psychologically brutal -- and the solid-to-devastating performances by Fanning, Englert, Hendricks, Nivola, Annette Bening, Timothy Spall and Oliver Platt make the movie.

Potter takes a hard look at the tension between the personal and the political -- at the way you can lose yourself worrying about an imagined apocalypse while a very real one is happening to the humans you love, at the way basic human desires for freedom and love get twisted up in activism and compromise. And Potter is merciless about the harm men can do to those closest to them while those men are railing against "mindless obedience" and "the rules."
 _____

(89 min.; rated PG-13 for mature disturbing thematic material involving teen choices -- sexuality, drinking, smoking, and for language; playing in Portland at Regal Fox Tower) Grade: A-minus

'Ginger & Rosa' (The Oregonian, Friday, March 29, 2013)

From the vault

A bunch of my old cartoon characters hanging at a Milwaukie, OR coffee shop I used to frequent, 1999. Click to enlarge.

The 2013 Stumptown Comics Fest poster(s)

Above: The 2013 Stumptown Comics Fest poster, by Bill Mudron and yrs. truly (with a lettering assist by Dylan Meconis).

Below: a gorgeous black-and-white “draw-your-own” Fest-exclusive variant poster, made entirely by Bill. (Be sure to take a close look at the filigree Bill designed for the borders.)

Click either to enlarge.

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone'

Movie review in the Friday, March 15 Oregonian....

 

"The Incredible Burt Wonderstone" feels compromised on many levels. It's an intermittently funny comedy about feuding Vegas magicians that feels committee-rewritten within an inch of its life. And the movie's prevailing vibe of indecision infects Steve Carell's lead performance.

But before getting into the frustrating, potential-wasting details, it's worth noting that Jim Carrey pretty much kills it every time he shows up in his supporting role as street magician Steve Gray.

Gray is a David Blaine / Criss Angel-style performance artist who's less interested in sleights of hand and more interested in increasingly perverse feats of endurance and self-abuse -- holding his urine for days, sleeping on hot coals, letting children hit him with sticks until he vomits piñata candy -- all in the service of some vaguely defined truth-is-pain audience-shock philosophy. Carrey was more or less engineered in a lab to spout Gray's brand of nonsense, and it's great to see the actor revisit the masochistic slapstick that made him famous.

Unfortunately, the rest of "Burt Wonderstone" exists firmly in Carrey's shadow. The victims of the overshadowing include, unfortunately. Mr. Wonderstone.

Director Don Scardino and his screenwriters are more interested in stringing together gags of varying success than they are in telling a story. But in broad strokes, the movie details the falling-apart of the glitz-choked magic act of Burt (Carell) and Anton (Steve Buscemi), thanks entirely to Burt's arrogance and loss of love for the audience, stagecraft and possibly himself.

Irrelevant in the wake of Steve Gray's faux-gritty success, Burt enters a wilderness period that includes humiliation, an ambitious youngster (Olivia Wilde), and a cranky old-school mentor (Alan Arkin). Roots may be revisited, etc.

The movie has a couple of problems. First, a couple of characters feel like they were added to the script late in the development process without the screenwriters bothering to remove older characters competing for the same space. But the movie's central problem is that it's impossible to invest in the cartoony travails of Burt Wonderstone because (a) he's not just unpleasant but unpleasant and uninteresting, and (b) the normally on-the-ball Carell never quite figures out what sort of part he's playing.

For half the movie's running time, Burt is a sequined, out-of-touch idiot with hair extensions and a funny voice. For the other half (usually when bonding with poor Olivia Wilde or rediscovering the joys of magic), Burt is a more subdued, slightly smarter character with shorter hair and "heart" who speaks in something like Steve Carell's normal voice. Carell sometimes seems to be shifting between these two characters mid-scene, and it left me wondering why the man who gave us Brick Tamland and Michael Scott couldn't commit whole-hog to a single take on his role.

The larger film suffers along the same lines. The crueler spoofy jokes mostly connect -- especially anything involving Carrey or the more criminally weird magic tricks attempted by Burt and Anton -- and Arkin's always fun to watch. The broadest stuff also satirizes the tension between classic and "edgy" magicians in a way that almost feels like an idea. In its best moments, the movie approaches the mid-list success of something like the 2007 Will Ferrell vehicle "Blades of Glory." But these moments are Franken-stitched together with more earnest but less-confident material, in a way that suggests a half-finished draft full of half-used characters.
_____

(100 min., rated PG-13 for sexual content, dangerous stunts, a drug-related incident and language) Grade: C

'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' (The Oregonian, Friday, March 15, 2013)

Sabertooth Vampire Wolverine. Why not.

 

(Starting to write Season Three. More soonish.)