Tony Manero

The Chilean film Tony Manero flows in many directions. As a character study the lead actor (Alfredo Castro as Raúl) plays as unlikeable a guy as an impotent dancer and sometimes spontaneous killer can be. As political allegory setting the story in the late-70s in Pinochet ruled Chile makes sense and the various predicaments the characters find themselves in are fueled by living under such a dictatorship. As a bizarre comedy Tony Manero rates high because so much of the time we want to laugh only the strange proceedings are too tragic to warrant anything but stunned silence.
Tony Manero is the John Travolta character from Saturday Night Fever and Raúl spends most of his time as the only one at the movies watching Travolta's moves. Raúl heads a theatrical troupe who perform the SNF dance onstage only his sullen mood keeps the other performers on edge. Glimpses of television depict a Chile obsessed with celebrity impersonators whether it's Travolta or Chuck Norris or Julio Iglesias. Raúl himself crashes such a show dressed as Tony Manero.
Most of the film is seen though Raúl's eyes and at times the filmmaking seems fragmented. Sex scenes and violence often explode and are just as suddenly over. But when you put all the pieces of Tony Manero together at the end you find a method to the madness.

An Education

An Education not only takes place in the UK in the early 60s but it mimics the mood of English films made in that era. Think films like Darling or Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. Yet An Education has a different kind of tale in mind. To start out in the proper breezy mood the opening credits pop up while Floyd Cramer's "On the Rebound" bounces around in the background.
An Education will be remembered as the movie that thrust Carey Mulligan into the public eye even though she's been in television and films for a few years. Her lead turn as 16-year old Jenny centers on a character who wants more than a prim life like her parents. Mulligan really is the reason to see the film and I can easily see An Education's appeal extending past the art house crowd to adolescent girls eager to vicariously live through Jenny's lessons.
Jenny's mum and pop (Cara Seymour and Alfred Molina) encourage her to do well in school but also place emphasis on being a small cog in the wheel of life. A chance meeting with the obviously older David (Peter Sarsgaard) leads to an affair of the heart that makes Jenny wise beyond her years. Oddly as the film progresses you like Jenny more but David starts to become increasingly creepy.
The period evocation is top-notch and supporting players Seymour and Molina hit all the right notes as strict yet understanding parental units. Also raising the bar are Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper as upwardly mobile friends of David. Lending credence to Jenny's moral tutorial are stern scenes with teachers and administrators played by Olivia Williams (her character of Miss Stubbs aptly decribes her looks and personality) and Emma Thompson (in boo hiss mode).
An Education breathes fresh air into the romance genre. It's certainly more reality based than 500 Days of Summer, but probably not the film to ignite a new wave for British movies. An Education is playing exclusively at the River Oaks Three.

New York, I Love You

New York, I Love You is a series of vignettes relating to the Big Apple, each cast with superlative actors and directed by a cornucopia of world renown directors. Some of the same producers also worked on Paris, je t'aime, a similarly themed anthology. Only the Paris tribute told the stories one by one. New York, I Love You overlaps characters throughout the film.
The directors include Fatih Akin, Yvan Attal, Allen Hughes, Shunji Iwai, Wen Jiang, Shekhar Kapur, Joshua Marston, Mira Nair, Natalie Portman, Brett Ratner and Randall Balsmey. A credits sequence beginning the end credit roll identifies who helmed what.
The film washes over you like a warm bath. It's soothing although no one of the episodes sticks out over other episodes. New York, I Love You celebrates the feeling of smoking a cigarette in the night streets of Gotham with a stranger. Or the intensity of riding a cab when the driver wants you to vacate his vehicle. Or maybe the solitude of a lonely woman checking into a luxury hotel. The fact that the various stories enjoy a non-linear flow enhances the chance you'll once again run into a character that sparked initial interest.
Short of taking a trip to New York, this film packages the beat of that city. New York, I Love You unwinds in an exclusive engagement at the Angelika Film Center.

DVD: Samuel Fuller Film Collection

The Sam Fuller Film Collection packs seven films into a box set that examines Fuller's career as a writer then director of genre defining movies. Or as Martin Scorsese remarks, in a short commentary for one film, Fuller's style is its own genre. Films in this series include It Happened in Hollywood (1937), Adventure in Sahara (1938), Power of the Press (1943), Shockproof (1949), Scandal Sheet (1952), The Crimson Kimono (1959), and Underworld U.S.A. (1961). The latter two were directed and produced by Fuller, on the other five Fuller wrote or co-wrote the original story or script.
Four of the movies include featurettes with contemporary directors (Scorsese, Robbins, Wenders, Hanson) sounding off on Fuller. There's a load of insight that comes with watching the films in chronological order. You can see Fuller's journalist background and war experience seep into his stories.
Obviously the earlier films, mostly titles I'd never heard of, are the most transparent yet even at barely an hour they contain seeds of what will later become Fuller landmarks. It Happened in Hollywood includes a comic interlude where every major and many minor stars of 1937 make an appearance. Only the cameos are performed by lookalikes or body doubles for the stars. Then as now major actors had their stunt doubles.
Shockproof, helmed by Douglas Sirk, gives an emotional twist to a lovers on the run story by paring a parole officer with a woman parolee out of the pen after serving time for murder. Scandal Sheet features Broderick Crawford in a primal performance as a newspaper editor who's committed murder and tries to keep the facts from his top reporters. Fuller wrote the novel Scandal Sheet was based on. Later films like Crimson Kimono show a singular eye towards Japanese-American romantic relations at a time when Japan was still occupied by America and racial relations leaned unfairly against anyone or anything Asian. Viewers will take special delight in the way Fuller frames characters talking directly to the camera or offers conventions that go against the grain of pervading stereotypes.

DVD: Il Divo

Il Divo examines the life of seven-time Italian Prime minister and senator for life (since 1991) Giulio Andreotti. The most obvious thought after seeing Il Divo would be to wonder how a foreign film with so much quality and substance went undistributed (outside of L.A. and New York). Fortunately for film fans Il Divo hits the street on DVD today.
Andreotti is seen as a patient man, a calm man albeit one whose thoughts are indicated by his hand gestures. For instance if he's bored he fiddles with his ring, likewise he holds his hands together in some manner or another throughout most of the movie. The world around him flourishes with corruption.
Andreotti headed the Italian conservative Christian Democratic party during the 70s and up until the early 90s. Il Divo views Andreotti's administration as a sort of supergroup of advisors and politicians, even going to slow motion to introduce the cabinet in a cool mode or using wide angle lenses to express the distance between the elite and the people. Director Paolo Sorrentino observes events from assassinations to car wrecks to political machinations as a kind of grand opera. Certainly Andreotti's character is only on trial in the movie, not in Sorrentino's subtext. Intrigues include murder, bribery, and conspiracies involving the Vatican and the Mafia.
Il Divo is fascinating viewing regardless of whether you have a firm grasp recent Italian history. Another film critical of current Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi, Nanni Moretti's The Caiman, will also be of interest to fans of Il Divo.

Amelia

The road to good movies is paved with bad movies. Amelia (Hillary Swank a dead ringer for the original) attempts to bring big romantic sweep to the life of Amelia Earhart. A few scenes ring with authentic movie making fervor but most of the time production values hide a vacuous story.
On one hand you want a movie to be about what you think it should be about. It's not Amelia's fault that it doesn't cover the many versions of her demise. For instance, in the 60s a book was published that looked at inconsistencies in the aftermath of Earhart's disappearance at sea. The book purported that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan, on their historical 1937 airplane flight around the world, were executed by the Japanese as spies after they crash landed in an uncharted region of the Pacific Ocean.
I could go with director Mira Nair's version of events but it's too choppy, the narrative doesn't flow. Nair views Earhart as a pioneer of women's rights who eventually married publisher George Putnam (Richard Gere, very ineffective) and also had a dalliance with aviator and West Point professor Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor also underutilized). Minor characters or plot lines are introduced and lost. We meet and greet Vidal, Earhart even has a make out session with him on an elevator, but after a while he disappears just as does another character, a teen Earhart want-to-be aviatrix who competes against Earhart at airplane festivals and likewise never reappears after the first act.
One of the most annoying of Nair's concessions to anachronistic appeal has Swank/Earhart doing celebrity endorsements for various products and shooting it with the glee of a Busby Berkeley spectacle. The main story has Earhart circling the globe with Noonan while her past exploits (Atlantic flights, love affairs, meeting other famous people) are seen in flashback. After a long flight to limited recognition Amelia will best be remembered for Swank's version of a Kansas accent.