Movie Review: Blue Jasmine

Jasmine (Cate Blanchette), unwell.

    The success of Blue Jasmine begins and ends with Cate Blanchette.  As Jasmine, a widowed former socialite who finds herself having to leave her plush Manhatten penthouse to bunk with her working class sister in San Francisco, Blanchette is terrific.  Jasmine is fractured, cultured, and completely out of her element.  Deprived of her wealth and forced to do things like work for a living and learn how to open an internet browser, her rambling monologues about how much she enjoyed her former life begin as hilarious and quickly cross into sad and uncomfortable.  Blanchette plays the character with all of her contradictions fully intact, and gives the film a powerful, memorable center.

    Not that she deserves all of the credit.  Director/writer Woody Allen is having one of his hit years.  It’s popular to disparage Allen for not being as good as he was in the 70s and 80s, and when one considers that he used to produce great stuff like Manhatten and The Purple Rose of Cairo and Crimes and Misdemeanors on a regular basis, you can see where the instinct comes from.  But even as Allen’s output has become more scattershot in recent years, he’s still making quality movies, from Match Point to Vicky Cristina Barcelona to Midnight in Paris.  Blue Jasmine is another one, and it’s one of the meatiest he’s made in recent memory.

    Allen’s movies tend to take place in a privileged bubble.  The characters are generally wealthy, and clever, and are afforded neurosis less affluent people don’t really have the time for.  Blue Jasmine represents the first time in a while that Allen has engaged very directly with the world of today, with a story that almost seems ripped right from the headlines.  Before her trip out west, Jasmine was married to Hal (Alec Baldwin), a Bernie Madoff-esque industrialist who was carted off to jail after it’s discovered that he made his vast wealth by way of an elaborate ponzie scheme.  Jasmine knew what was going on, or didn’t, depending on when you ask her, but whatever she knew it’s clear she was enjoying her material wealth too much to speak up.

    Rooting the plot so firmly in our reality gives the movie a weight that much of Allen’s recent output, even the good stuff like the charmingly fantastical Midnight in Paris, does not have.  Blue Jasmine can easily be seen as a satire of America’s much-discussed 1%, fallen from their high places following the financial collapse of 2008.  And it has the wit to follow-through, showing Jasmine, in flashback, doing everything she can to deny knowledge of her husband’s business.  That stuff is beyond her understanding, she claims- she’d rather go shopping on Park Avenue.

    And yet Jasmine is more than a symbol of pampered obliviousness.  She’s a person, and she is cracking up.  Many lead characters in Allen’s movies are neurotic and worrisome, starting with Allen himself, but Jasmine’s problems go well beyond that.  The break from her old life was so sudden and severe that she is constantly on the edge of a nervous breakdown, replaying old conversations from better days in her head when the reality of her new, workaday life begins to encroach on her.  These interludes can be extremely funny, as when Jasmine glowers glassy-eyed at her young nephews from across a corner booth in a diner and free-associates about mixing her medications.  But they’re also frightening, because we sense that she could crack wide open at any moment and not be okay ever again.

    We’re kept teetering on that edge because the script is substantial, the directing earnest, and Cate Blanchette is so very, very good in this role.  She’s both our point of entry and point of exit from the movie, and it knows she’s good enough to carry it to completion.

A-

American Audiences Won't Stand for Female Action Leads, Claims Guy

The Red Reaper, reaping.

Indiewire posted an interesting piece that looks at the difficulties faced by a fantasy movie called Legend of the Red Reaper as director/actor/writer/all-around badass Tara Cardinal shopped it around to various studios. Legendary Pictures, the studio responsible for pulpy stuff like 300 and Pacific Rim, would seem like a good fit for the project, but they rejected it because, as an executive made clear in an e-mail to Cardinal: A) the script is kinda confusing, B) there's too much fantasy in the market right now, and C) the main character is a lady, with lady parts.

Far be it for me to second-guess the opinion of a practiced film executive, and to be fair the trailer for the eventually completed film has a my-first-epic-fantasy-movie sheen to it, but it's a little ridiculous to reject a movie because it has a female lead. This is a post-Ripley world we're living in, the age of Katmiss, and it's long since been shown that female ass-kickers can pack fans in the seats. I may have to see this admittedly trashy-looking movie out of spite now.

If Superman Applied to the Daley Planet Today

Some time ago, venerated news magazine The Onion ran a story on how the most unrealistic part of the Superman universe, which, in case you've forgotten, revolves around a man who can fly through the air so fast he can reserve the rotation of the planet, is that the Daily Planet newspaper where Clark Kent works is economically healthy. Not to be outdone, Twitter user James Grebey uploaded a polite rejection letter penned by Daily Planet editor Perry White schooling Clark Kent on his job options in an age where print media is dead or dying. Between this, the sub-par performance of Man of Steel at the box office, and the fact that I caught a few moments of Superman 3 while channel-flipping this weekend, and it seems America's longest-serving superhero cannot get a break.

Learn Filmmaking From David Lynch, The David Lynch Way

David Lynch, the experimental filmmaker responsible for hit television show Twin Peaks, modern movie classics like Mulholland Drive, and lobbying for Laura Dern to get an Oscar by sitting on the side of the street with a cow, has joined forces with the Maharishi School of Management to create the David Lynch MA in Film Program, where students will be able to make movies, get feedback from David Lynch on their work, and "transcend and experience that unbounded ocean of pure consciousness, which is unbounded intelligence, creativity, happiness, love, energy, power and peace."  Neat.

It's not too surprising that Lynch, long interested in the benefits of transcendental meditation, would attach himself to a school like the Maharishi School of Management, which is located in tiny Fairfield, Iowa and appears to have a lot of courses dedicated to freeing your minds and eating organic food and such.  With idiosyncratic talents like Lynch increasingly choosing to follow alternative paths apart from Hollywood, it may only be a matter of time before the American film industry migrates to the midwest.

But probably not.  Good on Lynch for continuing to blaze new trails for himself.  It must come pretty naturally to him at this point.

Game of Thrones Season 3 FX Reel Reveals Transience of Television Industry, Life Itself

Special effects studio SpinVFX, the people behind HBO's little-known critical darling Game of Thrones, has released a crisply edited montage of special effects shots from the ever-more visually sumptuous show.  Even in this day in age, when we should by rights expect simple over-the-shoulder shots in romantic comedies to be the product of millions of dollars worth of green screen work, I'm still surprised by how often I don't realize I'm looking at something not there.  I mean, I didn't think the producers built a 500-feet-tall wall for the actors to climb, but it never occurred to me that shots of, say, Arya looking over a river to the Twins had been digitally altered, although it certainly should have.

They include some shots of the Red Wedding, too, which doesn't look to have been digitally enhanced, just to rub that one in some more.

House Hunters

On Tuesday, I watched an episode of House Hunters.  I’ve actually watched several, and almost always enjoy them.  The show is weightless and without import, the television equivalent of diet soda or elevator music, but I watch it and I like it.  A lot, even.  This I confess to you.

I’m not exactly alone, either.  House Hunters, long the flagship series of the House and Garden Network, has been on for thirteen years and produced over 500 episodes and a small fleet of spin-offs.  The show is somewhat unique among reality television series in that it has no host- there’s no Ty Pennington or Gordon Ramsay to pull us from episode to episode, just the prospect of a new person or pair of persons on a quest to find the perfect home.  It’s simple and cheap and may not even be real, but I’ve watched it more than I care to admit, and if it’s on I’ll probably watch it again.  Why?

House Hunters works because it’s relatable.  Take last Tuesday’s episode, the series’ 1084th.  It follows Jonathan and Jenny, a newly married couple living in Atlanta, as they struggle to move out of Jenny’s parent’s basement and into a house of their own.  Jonathan and Jenny are not trying to be the last man standing on a desert island or belt their way to a recording contract.  They’re looking at real estate, comparing square footages and shelf space and roach populations to decide where they’ll hang out for the next few years.  Jonathan is kinda pudgy and Jenny is a brunette- they’re very nearly real people, and we can recognize ourselves in their situation.

House Hunters works because it isn’t relatable at all.   We don’t know what Jonathan and Jenny do for a living, but we know their budget caps out at 300k, and we know that they turn down delightful looking houses because, in one case, the hardwood floors aren’t dark enough, and in another because the toilet doesn’t have its own space apart from the rest of the bathroom.  They throw around words like ‘craftsman-style’ and ‘traditional’ as if they’re architectural terms of art with meanings understood only by them, and at one point bemoan the kitchen of house number three, which unlike my kitchen is not confined to one wall of a living room, as too small.   ‘Just who do these people think they are?’ we ask ourselves.  ‘Tools,’ we answer ourselves, and we feel good.

The show, in short, works for many of the same reasons so much of reality television works, by playing on the eternal tug of war between sympathy and schadenfreude.  We want Jonathan and Jenny to find their happiness, and then we want them to choke on it, just a little bit.  And then there’s the packaging.  Each episode of House Hunters is wrapped up into a discrete, unobtrusive, half-hour box.  You can miss one, two, thirty-eight episodes and pick right up with the nice couple from Delaware or the odd single girl from Nebraksa without missing a beat.  The lack of connective tissue between episodes provides it with a fungible kind of freedom- the structure can be, and has been, endlessly replicated with only small changes and still retain its basic allure.  This wouldn’t be true if the show made more demands of its audience, if it required them to do more than absentmindedly judge whether Jonathan and Jenny made the right choice to sacrifice, say, more square footage for a smaller mortgage, but it doesn’t.  It lets audiences make the fun, easy choices involved with house-hunting and spares them the hard ones, engaging the outer parts of the brains and allowing the rest to slip into a soft sweet torpor.

And that’s why House Hunters is a show I feel like I need to justify enjoying, but that’s also why I’ll watch it again.  And probably again.  And again.  I wonder if it’s on now.

New Ender's Game Trailer Flashy, Probably Homophobic In Some Way

I mean, who is Harrison Ford implying that Ender will save mankind from?  Actually, the trailer looks pretty nifty, if prosaic.  The special effects are crisp, the opera rock rousing, and Harrison Ford's world-weary glower as affecting as ever it was.  Still, it's hard to remember a time when Ender's Game author Orson Scott Card was known for being a pioneering science fiction author rather than a prodigious homophobe.  Time will tell if the Ender's Game movie adaptation, out in November, will fail at the box office because of the backlash against Card's opinions or because big-budget action flicks aren't doing so well lately.