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Archive for the ‘Owen WIlson’ Category

The Grand Budapest Hotel

31 Mar

The Grand Budapest Hotel – directed by Wes Anderson. Farce. 99 minutes Color 2014.

★★★★

The Story:  A fancy hotel manager and his apprentice chase and are chased around mittel-Europe after and because of their love-lives with their lady friends.

~

Wes Anderson knows the first rule of farce: face directly forward and deliver it all full-front to the audience.

He also knows the second rule: symmetry. And it’s shadow twin: asymmetry.

The third rule he does not know. Which is that the third act must not pause even for a joke. The not-pausing is the joke.

So go to this picture, and expect that something pneumatic will leave as its third act halts along. Watch it stall when Edward Norton appears. He pops in like a jack-in-a-box, which is fun, but he lacks farce-style, which is crisp, innocent, and depends upon the fixed position of the character – a position often made clear by a mustache – all actions unmotivated and revealed as physicalizations almost mechanical. Then, the scene after the prison escape dwells on itself too long. Then, the gunfight is not handled wittily. Then, does the story need that fourth prisoner to die? And how did she fall out that window anyhow?

Still, the director does understand how to transfer stage farce into film farce. He turns the camera into all the doors farce requires. His lens opens and slams shut with perfect timing. The joke lies less in what the characters are saying or doing than how and when they appear and disappear before us. The show is directed right out to us. And all the tricks are droll and appreciate our wit in enjoying them.

So go: relax and enjoy the pastry of great film farce. Jeff Goldblum as the trustee of the will, Adrien Brody as the dagger villain, Tilda Swinton as his 85 year-old aunt, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, and Bob Balaban as concierges, Willem Dafoe as the grim hit-man, Tom Wilkinson as the author old, the impeccable Harvey Keitel as a thug. The central story is introduced and framed by F. Murray Abramson and Jude Law, and the  inner and main story is carried by Ralph Fiennes and Tony Revolori, who are first-class. The settings are rich, unusual, and flabbergasteringly funny.

I don’t know what you think you are doing with your lives, but you shouldn’t be going to any other film right now but this one.

 

Marley And Me

20 Jun

Marley And Me – directed by David Frankel. Low Comedy. A journalist finds his true calling when he starts writing about his rambunctious dog. 114 minutes Color 2008. ★★★★

I don’t know why light comedians are not regarded as serious practitioners of their craft, but it is so. They give pleasure and entertainment for years and to multitudes, but Cary Grant is nominated only twice for an Oscar and never won. Solemnity magnetizes Oscars. Here we have before us two treasures of comic skill: Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston. I look at them and am filled with wonder and admiration for their craft, which in Aniston’s case is practiced with delicacy and truth. There is no one now acting who can do light drama and light comedy with the finesse of this actor. To me the skill of such an actor is unfathomable, almost unreadable. Owen Wilson is a different sort of actor, but one who operates perfectly on the same plane as Aniston and makes a good partner with her. He is much more preset in his choices and possibilities. He pitches his voice in a juvenile whine and plays a strong suit in innocence, which may annoy, but what cannot annoy is the bigness of heart that is evident in everything he does. There’s a sort of idiotic juiciness to him, too, which amounts to the sex appeal of a male whose sexuality is still to be awoken. Of course, what you can say against them both is what you can say against almost all young actors of their time, which is that they are not grown-up. He is not a man and she is not a woman. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne were always grownup, and so were the rest of the actors of their time, from 1930 to 1950. Even when young, the actress was a woman and the actor was a man. Here, Aniston is what she has always been, a gal, a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store. And Wilson is not a man but a boy, Peck’s bad boy. They have formulated themselves this way. They have lived out their youths doing this. It’s a killer course for them when they get to be over forty. And a terrible one, for actors love to act – and so they should – it’s a wonderful calling – but how will they ever play anyone who is mature? The actors of the ‘30s and ‘40s didn’t retire when they hit age 40 or 50; they didn’t have to, because they were already adults. But Aniston and Wilson, so gifted and so formulaic in their decision as to how to use their gifts and in what – they are doomed to their job. Families and marriages would be in defiance of the immaturity upon which their income depends. I wonder about them. I worry about them. And what I have to say about this picture, finally, is that Alan Arkin is very funny in it and the dog isn’t funny at all.

 

Midnight In Paris

04 Jun

Midnight In Paris – Written and directed by Woody Allen – Light Comedy. A screenwriter and his fiancée fall out over Paris, as she shops forward, and he time travels back. 100 minutes Color 2011.

* * * * *

We expect another dose of Allen’s tired concerns, but we find instead a spoonful of sugar and no medicine at all. Adrien Brody’s excruciatingly funny rendition of Salvador Dali is worth the ticket of admission. Alas, it stands virtually alone as a form of comic comment as Bunuel, Picasso, Matisse, Lautrec, Degas, Gauguin, cameo in and out with no savor comique at all. The joke of celebrity artists’ sudden appearances plays out long before they turn up, and Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein is once again out of her element in Paris. But, more than the actors, in all these cases, it is the fault of the writer Allen, whose script is flaccid and who tends to sacrifice humor to comedy and comedy to jokes – although some of the jokes admittedly are marvelous. Allen also writes the lines of his male lead for one actor and one actor only, himself, but he is not playing the part just at present, so Owen Wilson who happens to be playing it here, is at times trapped by the Allen rhythms and, through no fault of his own, cannot always adhere to a character whose rug is being pulled out from under him by the failure of the screenwriter who thinks that someone else should be as funny as Woody Allen is when, all the time, Owen Wilson is just as funny on his own and as himself as any normal light comedy film requires. Wilson is right for the part, of course, a gormeless, lecherous, shy, literarily ambition bloke, and his stentorian style of reading his lines is droll beyond measure. He carries the film, for sure, right where it belongs into our own willingly gullible hearts. He is helped in this particularly by Rachel McAdams who gets plenty of and deserved attention from the camera as the fiancée from hell, an extremely well-written part and one which she does full justice to – she’s so funny in everything she does, you’re too horrified to laugh. The other dead spot is Marion Cotillard, leaden as the leading lady in a part that requires mischief and sexual animation such as Carole Lombard had or Goldie Hawn or some Unknown Delight. But, nonetheless, the film carries itself through for us in a good old-fashioned way; it offers us a fairy tale we all have had of hobnobbing with the accomplished. It carries the dream fun through, the feckless younger son meeting all the sacred monsters in the woods of fame, while all the imps are Allen.

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Marmaduke

12 Oct

Marmaduke — directed by Tom Dey — a comedy in which a young family man finds his doggedness and a young dog finds his manhood. 99 minutes color 2010.

* * * * *

It’s fascinating to watch the great Lee Pace, he of the immemorial eyebrows, play this white bread comedy to the limit of all it’s worth and not one grimace more. This extraordinary actor, the finest actor of his generation for all I know, is completely convincing, moment by moment, in the peanut butter and jelly of the genre, including all the considerable physical comedy the part requires. He is never too much, he is never too little. So much so that it’s virtually impossible to see how really good he is. To taste and compare, watch him in Soldier’s Girl, The Fall, Infamous, in which he plays Hickock the partner of Perry Smith of the Sutter murders, and the passionate romantic lead/pianist opposite Amy Adams in Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day. Sit back and be amazed at the art of acting at its best. Pace at 6’4″ towers delightfully over William H. Macy who domineers over him as dog food boss. Macy, of course, looks like a basset, and, wonderful actor that he is, gives the film the bite required. But see how Pace embodies this impossible subjection. It’s parallel to what his own great Dane evinces until the end. The dogs all speak. Marmaduke himself speaks Owen Wilson, while the bully pooch speaks Kiefer Sutherland. Others speak others. It’s all quite nice and mindless. I believe it is a children’s movie. Probably for male children, since the principals principally are males, but I wouldn’t know. I myself am a male child and, therefore, limited in my perspective.

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