(500) Days of Summer

(500) Days of Summer is what happens when indie films and studio films fuck and spawn a bastard child. The film works, I recommend the experience. It's just that every so often the (500) Days feels like its going to swerve into substandard territory at breakneck speed.
Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) work in the same corporate climate. He drools over her from behind his computer and professes his admiration to his work buddy McKenzie (Geoffrey Arend). Only when Tom finds himself in an elevator alone with Summer he's totally ignoring her by either pretending to be or actually so engrossed with his iTunes that he's oblivious to anything but The Smiths. She gets his attention by waving in his field of vision and mentioning that she too likes The Smiths. This is how they meet and it ain't cute.
The elevator scene mirrors the ambivalence the abounds throughout (500) Days of Summer. Tom's not the smartest card in the deck yet he's a good looking guy so it's easy to see why Summer choses him. In the elevator Tom's wearing a high end pair of earphone, as in the kind that studio engineers use, the kind I haven't seen people use since high fidelity of the 1970s. Tom's buddies McKenzie and Paul hang tight in bars drinking Bass in bottles and philosophize on their outcast state. There's always a serious side to these characters that's about to burst free but it's constantly weighed down by concessions to reality. Do we sit down with Tom and his buds and Summer and her friends and dish the goods on their life? No, but we do feature Tom in a feelgood dance number through the park where everyone starts singing and dancing with him. In case you didn't recognize the reference an animated bird lands on Tom's shoulder to remind you that this identical scene appeared in Enchanted. Where's Amy Adams when you need her?
(500) Days wants to revel in projections of movies past. Even though it's widescreen in aspect the focal length changes to a box in the center of the screen that plays out subliminal moments in black and white. If you've never seen a Truffaut or a 100 other art films this might seem original. The use of a parenthesis around the number in the title also lends credence to the fact that debut director Mark Webb wants the audience to be wowed by his use of imagery.
Getting back to the use of The Smiths in the movie (and on the soundtrack), there's more Regina Spektor in the indiginous soundtrack than Smiths. Two people meeting cute while a cool song plays in the background was done successfully this year, and that was in the movie Adventureland (The scene in question revolved around a Husker Du song.). (500) Days of Summer is not Adventureland, nor do its indie legs support the heaviosity of films like the upcoming Humpday, or even the random low budget flick du jour like In Search of a Midnight Kiss.
Yet (500) Days of Summer convinced me that the director's intentions were sincere by not being as mawkish as The Proposal or other such artificially contrived films. (500) Days walks a fine line and keeps its balance. The audience I saw the film with reacted especially loudly whenever Tom receives notification from Summer that he's now on "friend" status.

In search of Marco Ferreri

This weekend the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston unrolls Marco Ferreri's Dillinger is Dead. Screenings are at 7 on Friday and Saturday and 5 pm. on Sunday.
I've only had the chance to see a bunch of Ferreri films in the last year coinciding with several titles becoming available on DVD (through Koch Lorber Films). Even when they're not great, and they can be gratingly boring to awesomely excellent, Ferreri has a way of eliciting thoughts and ideas that will roll around your head for days after seeing a specific film. Dillinger is Dead I have never seen and if there's movie karma one day the museum will show The Last Woman, perhaps the most controversial Ferreri film ever, itself not offered theatrically or on DVD. For the purpose of this article I will use the English titles to Ferreri films but his movies usually have different Italian and French titles.
Ferreri is likened to directors like Fassbinder or Pasolini or Bunuel and some could even cull up the name of David Lynch, but in a sense that's grasping at straws to associate one director with another because they all use elements of surrealism. One thing for certain is that if there's a cutting edge theme somebody thinks has just come out chances are that Ferreri did it long ago.
For instance Steven Soderbergh uses a porn star in his latest The Girlfriend Experience but Ferreri did that parlor trick with Abigail Clayton opposite Gerard Depardieu in Bye Bye Monkey (1978).
Bye Bye Monkey starts with Depardieu getting raped by a gang of women in his theatrical troupe. The sex is graphic and the setting is not so much post apocalyptic as future shock. The indelible image of the carcass of King Kong lying on the beach in Manhattan with the twin towers of the newly built World Trade Center is simply cinema architecture supreme. Certainly nobody could have foreseen how this image would play out over 30 years later. Made on location in New York and Ferreri's first film in English Bye Bye Monkey also features Marcello Mastroianni and James Coco.
Mastroianni features prominently in Ferreri films, in fact he's as much associated with Ferreri as he is with Fellini. Mastroianni also appears as General George Custer in Don't Touch the White Woman (1974), a farcical portrait of the American West ripe with anachronisms like people in post-Civil War uniforms mingling with guys in blue jeans and college jerseys who are munching potato chips. DTTWW mixes the present with the past. We're seeing the conflict of Indians and the American army played out in an ruined industrial setting of imploding decaying buildings. Only at the end during the battle of Little Big Horn does the film actually abruptly change the setting to a Western landscape. Catherine Deneuve co-stars as do 70s era French actors Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi. All four of these virile males appear in Ferreri's best known film The Big Feast (La Grande Bouffe). Here the quartet are successful business and professional types who gather at a posh summer villa to literally eat themselves to death.
As you can see the films of Marco Ferreri aren't for the squeamish, a fact hammered home hard by Ferreri's second English language film Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981) with Ben Gazzara playing a thinly disguised Charles Bukowski. If you've think you like Bukowski influenced films such as Barfly or Factotum you haven't seen the best. Tales runs the gamut from seedy alcohol infused fantasies to sexual predatory habits to sleeping in unlocked cars to using your cheeks as a pin cushion. Ornella Muti also stars.
If Ferreri didn't make films there would be a black hole in cinema history. Looking over a list of his filmography I've seen less than half of his films, which is a good thing in the sense that there's always a chance another of his works will appear in a retrospective or DVD in some undetermined future.
The clip below is from a 1979 film by Ferreri with Robert Benigni called Chiedo Asilo.

The Hurt Locker

The opening half-reel of The Hurt Locker rivets you to your seat. The rest of the film delivers the promise of gripping action scenes mixed with war buddy bonding hinted at in the beginning. Director Kathryn Bigelow turns the faucet wide open for small scale battle scenes yet helms intimate dramatic moments with insight and an odd compassion for the characters.
If you're a big name actor in The Hurt Locker chances are you get offed as quickly as you make your screen entrance. The main cast centers on a three man bomb disposal squad in Iraq (think IED and car bombs) headed by Staff Sergeant James (Jeremy Renner) whose penchant for danger both aggravates and frightens his team members Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). Renner offers a complex turn that at first has the audience ready to side with Sanborn and frag him. Later his devil-may-care attitude and the inner satisfaction he derives from constantly risking his life in seconds-remaining fashion produces enough insight into his psyche to render him somewhat sympathetic. Renner totally envelopes this role inviting us to question our own need to, say, drive fast to make a stop light, as if that could be compared to the reckless abandon James uses around live explosives.
If you remember The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, truly an underdog film not unlike Hurt Locker, you'll recall Renner standing out among the many excellent supporting performers. Mackie and Geraghty match him for intensity even while their characters are polar opposites. If you like the wartime and bomb suspense combo a Powell and Pressburger film The Small Back Room (1949) deals with similar situations in WWII England.
Fans of Bigelow know she's capable of alarmingly good genre action films (Point Break, Near Dark) as well as darker themed perspectives (Strange Days, The Weight of Water). The plot depicts the last 40 or so days of the unit's time left in Iraq. Situation after situation escalates the tension as one bomb or series of bombs must be dealt with. The Hurt Locker is good enough to want to savor twice if only to approach the oblique ending another time with a different view.