Akascribe A personal blog covering all manner of subjects

After seeing Woody Allen’s latest movie, I think the guy should be canonized.  I know that might be tough for a Jew, but Woody deserves it.

Sure, he’s made better movies, probably funnier or deeper ones.  But the film is such a delight that one can only marvel how this man can crank out approximately a film a year well into his sixth decade of film-making and still maintain this level of quality.

The plot is both deceptively simple and intellectually rich:  a frustrated screenwriter (Owen Wilson) must travel back in time to Paris of the 1920s in order to appreciate what he might have in present day.  Sort of a Lost Generation version of Groundhog Day (which I believe was also a masterpiece of philosophical comedy), the cast of characters is virtually a Who’s Who of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, including Gertrude Stein, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and of course Papa himself.

Hemingway’s scenes allow Woody to really flex his comedic chops, but he doesn’t turn the famed author into a joke or a cliché, rather he treats him with fond respect while still making us laugh.  And Corey Stoll plays the role brilliantly, perfectly capturing the writer’s combination of outsized machismo, post-war ennui and literary ambition.

Owen Wilson is cast in the ubiquitous Woody Allen role, and at first glance this might seem an odd choice.  But Wilson nails it, his peculiar Texas-by-way-of-California angst a perfect stand in for Woody’s New York neurotic.  Who knew?  It’s as if Wilson has been waiting for this role his entire career (not to denigrate his other solid work), and when he falls hard for the lovely Adriana (Marion Cotillard), we are rooting for their love to succeed despite knowing it is doomed (for temporal reasons).  It will be hard for Woody Allen to cast another actor as his cinematic doppelganger in the future (I pray he steers clear of re-casting Kenneth Branagh, a miscue if ever there was).

Above all, the film is a massive love letter to Paris, as if that enchanting city needs one.  Nevertheless, I think the Paris Tourist Bureau owes Woody at least a week in a deluxe suite at the Crillon, meals and wine included.  What Allen used to do for New York City, he does for the City of Lights in spades.  All I can say is, for me, he’s preaching to the converted.  But it’s a sermon I’m happy to hear, and see.

One has to stretch to find any quibbles.  Rachel McAdams is perhaps a bit misused as Inez, the unsupportive fiancée of Wilson’s Gil.  And the real First Lady of France, Carla Bruni, is more than a touch wooden as a museum guide, but the frisson it creates to see her in this role makes it worthwhile.  (She must have relished acting in a Woody Allen picture, since he is venerated in France as a truly great cinematic artist.)

If the message of Groundhog Day was to approach every day with a positive attitude and an open heart, then the message of Midnight in Paris is:  live life in the moment and don’t pine for an earlier, more authentic time.  For all those Woody Allen fans who wish he’d return to his earlier form, whether that was represented by Annie Hall or Crimes and Misdemeanors or The Purple Rose of Cairo, I say:  get over it and just enjoy the movie he’s making now.  And while we’re at it, let’s get in touch with the Vatican.  It’s time to anoint him as Saint Woody.

The problem with seeing a film that has received a lot of very positive reviews is obvious.  It really has to be fantastic to live up to the hype.  I won’t say Jason Reitman’s new movie, Up in the Air, fails the test but I also didn’t leave the theater captivated, as I largely had been with Reitman’s previous effort, Juno.

There’s a lot to like about the film.  For starters, the cast is wonderful, pairing George Clooney with two different women, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick, who each in their own way manage to play off Clooney very effectively.

Farmiga and Clooney, as fellow corporate road warriors, simply sizzle with sexuality, something we haven’t seen with Clooney since Steven Soderbergh cast him in Out of Sight (a remarkably underrated film) opposite Jennifer Lopez.  And a bank robber and a Fed (their characters in Soderbergh’s film) are a lot easier to make sexy than two frequent fliers comparing mileage programs.

Clooney is more of a business mentor figure to Kendrick’s character, but they each view their work and personal lives from such different perspectives that the opportunity for fireworks exists.  Kendrick is terrific as the newly minted corporate climber who realizes midway through that she has no stomach for the personal sacrifices and is too honest to pretend otherwise.

A lot of the credit goes to Clooney, whose classic good looks, debonair masculinity, and tongue in cheek self-deprecating humor haven’t been seen onscreen since Cary Grant.  I know some people don’t like him or feel that he’s always playing a version of himself, but take a look at Cary Grant’s body of work (e.g., The Philadelphia Story and North by Northwest) and tell me he wasn’t a great actor.

Clooney certainly seems to be playing a version of himself in Up in the Air, riffing off of his personal aversion to marriage, but he also makes believable his role as a professional termination specialist (his company is hired to fire employees) who lives out of a suitcase whether in some generic Ramada Inn or back “home” in Omaha.

Reitman is clearly a highly gifted writer and director.  The scenes are spare and poignant, the dialogue witty and believable.  So why doesn’t he hit a home run?

One thing that didn’t work for me was the use of actual footage of people being fired.  I’m not sure if this brainstorm came to Reitman as a way to add some verisimilitude or in an attempt to be sensitive during the current economic crisis, but it has the effect of taking us away from the dramatic story and either being preachy or distracting.  If Reitman wanted to send a message that American capitalism can hurt individuals emotionally as well as economically, I think he could have done a more subtle and effective job by focusing on the fallout to the central characters.  American Beauty, for example, portrayed the alienation of corporate life in suburbia to devastating effect by making Kevin Spacey’s character truly a tragic figure.  We get an inkling that Vera Farmiga’s character’s home life may be something like Spacey’s onscreen wife (played by Annette Benning), but this is never fleshed out in any detail in Up in the Air except to provide the plot twist that she isn’t quite the free agent Clooney’s character has hoped.  Without any moral resolution, Reitman let’s most of his characters off the hook.

Come to think of it, we got a similarly squishy ending in Juno, when the title character keeps her baby and reunites with the high school dad.  While it somewhat echoed The Graduate in providing a provocative “what now?” moment, somehow the ‘60s counterculture stakes of Elaine Robinson abandoning her pre-arranged ‘50s marriage to run off with Benjamin despite (because of?) his affair with her own mother seemed justified.  But the more I think about it, the more I wonder:  What exactly was Juno rebelling against by carrying her baby to term and keeping it?  Planned Parenthood?  Her wise-cracking father was way cool and would have loved her either way, so why mess up her life for the sake of doing the surprisingly retro-‘50s thing?

At this point I may be invoking a bit too much in terms of cinematic history, so let’s go back to Up in the Air.  For me, so much of a movie is about the script and I can’t help thinking that if Jason Reitman ever hooks up with a screenplay that is deeply worthy of his talents, something on the order of Alexander Payne’s Election, then he’s going to have a world-beater on his hands.  In the meantime, he’s making films that are still head and shoulders above the typical commercial dross to be found at the multiplex, and that isn’t anything to dismiss.

As luck would have it, I managed to convince my wife that we should expend our precious Saturday date night seeing the new Ricky Gervais film, The Invention of Lying.  I say luck, because in life timing is everything, and as I just posted, a public hoax is front and media center today.  And that ties in very nicely to the core message of the film.

A spoiler alert:  this review, by necessity, must discuss in detail the plot conceits of the movie.

I had an inkling from the SF Chronicle review that the film had a bigger agenda than just positing a world where no one knows how to lie – and Mark, the character played by Gervais, is the first person to figure out how.  This would have been amusing, sort of the inverse of the forgettable 1997 Jim Carrey flick, Liar Liar, where his character was the only one who must speak the truth.  But Gervais obviously has bigger fish to fry.  And not just on Friday during Lent.

For you see, the really big lie that Mark perpetrates is his invention of the whole Muslim-Judeo-Christian concept of the Afterlife.  Mark does this for the simple and forgivable reason that he can’t stand to see his elderly mother on her deathbed fearing the nothingness that is to come.  So Mark concocts a comforting story about a place she will go to after she dies, where she will be young and happy and be with the people she loves.  This does the trick and she dies content.  The only problem – some hospital workers have overheard and turn Mark into a kind of Messiah.  And then we’re really off to the races.  Before you can say “parting of the Red Sea,” Mark has assumed the role of a latter-day Moses, creating the notion of God (or as he calls Him, “The Man in the Sky”) and transcribing the eternal heavenly truths on two take-out pizza boxes (a particularly inspired comedic stroke on the part of Gervais).

Religious believers should be excused for not taking too much offense, because there is nothing malicious about Mark’s big lie.  All he wants is his old job back (as a screenwriter at the movie studio that churns out boring armchair recountings of history) and to get the girl, in this case Jennifer Garner.  But she’s hung up on his subpar genetic profile, more specifically that he’s fat and has a stubby nose.  What’s a poor gospel to do?

The movie is merely good – it’s no masterpiece of the genre, like Groundhog Day – but Gervais had a lot of courage to make the film he did, that both pays comedic dividends and gets his atheist point across.  What amazes me is that so little attention has been paid to the obvious message of the film, that religion is a total crock.  (Sorry, Gervais puts this much softer but that’s basically what he’s saying.)  I mean, why isn’t the Christian Right mobilizing to picket movie theatres and castigate Gervais as a godless sinner?  Is the message of the film really so subtly packaged that they’ve missed it entirely?  I guess so, but for me (a confirmed atheist since I was 6 years old) the movie was a revelation.  It’s not often you get to see a mainstream media offering poke fun at the absurdity of the Bible’s stories and get away with it.  Well, mostly.

You see, I generally admire the film reviews of Anthony Lane in the New Yorker so I was surprised, after seeing the film, to read his intensely negative review.  He seemed to take particular offense at the religious plot-line and even criticized Gervais for being off-base, since the real-life gospels “believed what they foretold, whereas Mark makes it up as he goes along.”  Now we will of course never know what John the Baptist et al really were thinking all those centuries ago, but if Lane is serious that those ancient dudes all literally believed the stories of the Old and New Testaments, including the fishes into loaves, Noah’s ark, etc., and didn’t just juice them a bit for allegorical purposes, then he is betraying his own religious naivety.  And all of this makes Lane miss the essential point, that The Invention of Lying works just fine as a piece of entertainment, even though it packs a much stronger punch.

I guess some people just can’t take a joke.

I recently saw the British movie In the Loop (with a good buddy – congratulations on fatherhood, Edwin!) and left the cinema with mixed feelings.  The film is very funny, an over-the-top send-up of politics and diplomacy that echoes the lead-up to the Iraq War.  We were literally in stitches for much of the film, especially in response to the fictional press secretary to the British Prime Minister, a foul-mouthed Glaswegian who is equal parts Nicolo Machiavelli and Lewis Black.  But every character behaves so badly, from all echelons of the British and American governments, and so hilariously, that I was left emotionally and morally drained.  One can only hope that the extreme cynicism of the satire was only remotely grounded in reality.

I suppose the humor is akin to that of Sasha Baron Cohen – it’s so painful to watch and so seemingly bereft of redemption that you feel disappointed in yourself for taking pleasure in it.  Part of an old screenwriting adage from Hollywood goes: “Comedy is hard.” That is, difficult to pull off.  But in this case, it’s hard in the other sense as well.