Who over there keeps requesting songs from “The Wiz”? Seriously, for the last time, that costume was itchy and I’m not doing it.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Sitting in the screening room, nearly breathless with anticipation, I waited for the lights to drop, the camera to roll and the music of the legendary “King of Pop” to fill the room. With that singular focus in mind, this concert film-cum-documentary fit the bill like a shiny sequined glove. Yet when you look beyond the harmonies and continually catchy beats, This is It fails to really capture much more and didn’t deliver the true experience many people are likely to be hoping for in terms of Michael Jackson’s final words.
This is It chronicles the final rehearsals for Michael’s massive and seemingly impressive last tour. If the level of performance and showmanship hinted at throughout the film was any indication of what the actual full concert experience would have been like, Mr. Jackson would have certainly cemented his place (if there was still any real doubt) as one of the best entertainers of all time. From a 3D movie experience built into “Thriller” to the iconographic dance routines brought back once more in “Beat It”, “The Way You Make Me Feel” and other #1 hit songs, the concert was set to amaze audiences with flashes of the new with blasts from the past.
The main downside of the project is that the footage, according to the opening preface, was commissioned by Michael for his personal archives. This was never really meant for widescreen audiences and in that respect wasn’t shot that way. It is tossed together as a montage of Michael’s greatest hits with a few CGI cutaways showing what things would have looked like if he had made it to the opening night of the tour. What is lacking from this is a real sense of who Michael was. On screen he is detailed as a generous, but strict perfectionist and loved and respected by everyone on the project alongside him, yet there is really no sense of what this tour meant to him and what it was like to get back on the stage again after so many years in relative seclusion. Again, that is not the fault of the director as much as it is a integral problem with why the footage was even shot in the first place.
There is a certain nagging voice in the mass consciousness wondering what the actual reason was for putting the movie together in the first place. Was this to give Michael’s fans one last look into what the King’s final bow would have looked like? Was this an attempt by the tour promoter to recoup some of the millions spent in preparation for this incredibly expensive spectacle? Was it pressure from Joe Jackson, Michael’s father, in an effort to keep himself viable in an industry he is largely shut out of? It’s hard to dig through the statements and actions on all sides and figure out the truth because they are all saying something different, but either way, the film itself proved two things: First, Michael was a consummate performer who at the amazing age of fifty could still move and sing and was prepared to deliver one hell of a final tour, and second, we will never truly know who he was underneath the shine and sparkles.
The End of the Page Recommendation: If you are one of the millions who enjoyed his music, this is entertaining just to hear those songs one more time from the man himself. Yet if you are looking for a deeper look beyond the legend and into the real person, this remains unfulfilling and nothing more than a concert film.
Posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago at 2:37 pm. Add a comment
“Didn’t you kill tons of Nazi’s and go crazy in your last film?”
“Yep, I’ve got what film people refer to as “range”.”
Rating: 4 out of 10
Anytime you step into the world of “based on true events” or choosing to fictionalize a story set inside a real life moment in time, you had better be ready to defend your choices. Real life moments mean real people lived them, maybe not the exact ones being portrayed on screen, but close facsimiles and they love nothing more than relating how many details you got wrong when trying to recreate the feelings and nostalgia from way back when. A great number of movies that fall into this category are saved by the sheer amount of years between now and then, thereby eliminating their detractors, but choosing anything that took place from the 1920s onward and you will likely find someone spinning a tale in direct opposition to your own. And how can you dismiss it? They were there! The danger gets exponentially bigger when you choose something the size of Woodstock, where over one-and-a-half million people descended on this small town to bear witness to the musical representation of peace, love and the new generation in America. It was something parents screamed and railed to keep their kids from going to, yet those kids grew up to tell and retell their own children about why they went and the magic they experienced at one of the greatest music festivals of all time. Many movies have tried to capture the emotional content of Woodstock and no one seemed primed to do it better than the master of mood and emotion, Ang Lee.
Taking Woodstock tells a small story inside of an extremely large moment. Elliot Tiber is the dutiful son, living in the big city, but sending all his money home to his parents and their dilapidated motel. Year after year he returns in the summer to help bring in the meager amount of tourist business, but this particular summer, while on the verge of bankruptcy, Elliot hears of a music festival in desperate need of a location to land. On the run from town after town of narrow minded and fearful locals, the hippie festival known as Woodstock needed a new home and Elliot saw a flower-powered flashlight dancing at the end of his lifelong tunnel.
Ang Lee said in an interview he wanted to tell this story because he was tired and drained by the emotionally heavy subjects he tackled in his recent films, like Brokeback Mountain and Lust, Caution. Lee wanted something happy, full of hope and felt the need to remind us how over a million people came together in overwhelmingly terrible conditions and lived together for three days without a single instance of violence reported. There was an aura over the crowd, a group connection which connected and combined the hearts and minds of those in attendance. Yet he made very clear that this was not a documentary about the music, since those have been done before. This was solely about the people and the effect the concert had on them.
With that intention in mind Lee pulled together a wide swatch of personal storylines, beginning with Tiber, but radiating outwards to include his parents, the locals, old semi-acquaintances from his youth, a politically radical theatre troupe living in his barn, and just to top it all off, a cross dressing ex-marine-cum-personal security officer. Many, but not all, of these were intensely interesting characters and situations, but Lee’s failure was trying to include all in one film. Any of these alone could have been enough to give breadth and emotional focus to Woodstock and the effect it had on that one person, but all together it dragged the film down and created a tangled web of people with no real conclusion or specific journey.
[Minor SPOILER below. And even though it sounds major, it plays out as minor]
In one example where Lee made things overcomplicated is with the main character, Elliot Tiber, where he not only had to deal with his parents odd personalities, their failing motel and the overwhelming stress brought on by trying to host Woodstock, it turns out he was also trying to hide his homosexuality. Something as large as this should have been explored more and brought to the forefront of who Tiber was, but it ended up just another unfinished element in an increasingly congested landscape of characters.
[SPOILER over. Continue reading unafraid.]
With the issues inherent in the script, I found it hard for the actors to really reach their full potential inside these roles. Demetri Martin, someone I think is single-handedly pushing the forefront of comedy, gave a decent performance, resting comfortably in his inherent awkwardness, but he didn’t grow with the character and failed to end the movie a believably stronger person than when he began. Emile Hirsch, one of the strongest actors in his age range, also portrayed a nice mixture of pain and longing from the vantage point of someone only recently returning from the Vietnam war. Unfortunately he also suffered from never truly being explored and remained only a tertiary character on the sidelines of the story. The one person able to actually break through the haze of character cross-pollination was Liev Schreiber, who actually got one of the most odd and at first seemingly insignificant characters in the film, Vilma, the cross dressing ex-marine. Schreiber became the voice of reason, the old wise man/woman inside this drug-induced wonderland of freaks and flower children. He also seemed to pull through because he was the only person who had a real sense of self and a solid belief in what they wanted out of life. Understandably you can’t have the main character like that because there would be no drama, no conflict, no confusion, but it was a welcome relief to have at least one person on a clear path through the wilderness of the Sixties.
The last thing I want to mention is Elliot’s parents: An old world couple which originally played nicely against his modern-sixties lifestyle in the big city and the commonplace fear of the oncoming hippie generation. While the father gets a small arc and gains some much needed perspective on the world, the mother not only fails to learn any type of lesson throughout the film, but remains an irredeemably negative influence on Elliot. Both actors, Henry Goodman (dad) and Imelda Staunton (mom), play their parts quite well, but the failure to allow them to amount to anything holds back any true appreciation.
The End of the Page recommendation: I still remain a fan of Ang Lee and feel he is a master at creating mood and environment, but here he proves that those elements become moot without a compelling and satisfying story to pull it all together. For those looking for a feel-good movie about the effects of a generation of music, try Almost Famous or Velvet Goldmine.
Posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago at 7:25 am. Add a comment
Big greetings to all the readers out there. You might have been a little troubled and possibly emotionally scarred by the disruption in service yesterday, so for that I humbly apologize. I’ve been working on a new blog design over the past couple months and it finally reached the point where I needed to turn it all on and see it work in action. There were a few bumps in the road along the way, but everything seems to be in place now. There will be more design changes to come, but hopefully they will not interrupt service at all.
Thanks as always for reading and please feel free to leave comments on the posts, share them using the new cool “Share This” widget and keep coming on back! In the coming months you will see some new voices, new topics and an expansion on where this whole project is going. If you have any interest in writing for The End of the Page or maybe just a suggestion on the blog itself, leave me a comment or send an e-mail.
Posted 1 year, 2 months ago at 2:53 pm. Add a comment
Taking the ordinary and introducing it to the out-of-the-ordinary. That’s what Thomas McCarthy said about his films and their underlying stories. Actually, he probably put it a little more eloquently, but you catch the drift. This is indeed the core of nearly all filmmaking and good storytelling. It brings out the eternal question; What happens when the normal world is shifted, knocked askew by any number of forces and how will the people of that world react? Will they run? Will they freeze? Most importantly of all, what would we do in their shoes? Now before you apply these new questions to such deep and powerful films like Beerfest and Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo, let’s start out with something a bit clearer.
The Visitor tells the story of Walter Vale, an economy professor listlessly wandering through his days pretending to be busy so he can negate any chance for human contact since the loss of his wife. He reluctantly makes a trip to New York for a conference and finds a young couple illegally renting his apartment in the city. Being a decent person, he allows them to stay while they look for a new place, but in return he gets much more than new roommates, he finds the doorway to a life which has been passing him by.
Thomas McCarthy creates a wonderfully simple and beautifully timeless world for us so we can bear witness to one of the great abilities in human nature, love. You can break almost any story down into a love story, but The Visitor is one dealing with numerous types of love in one tale. There is the love of music, shown when Tarek, the young man living in William’s apartment, teaches William about the African drum. Through this new musical outlet, William grows not only as a drummer, but as a person as well, allowing himself to open up to the world walking by him and becoming a participant instead of an invisible observer. There is the love of a young couple, shown by Tarek and Zainab, his girlfriend. They are both living in the country under constant fear of deportation, ignorant retaliation and learning to do what they can to get by, but their love for each other keeps them together and puts smiles onto their faces in even the darkest of moments. There is also the love of a mother for her son, shown through the brave journey of Mouna, Tarek’s mother who travels to New York after five days of not being able to reach her son on his cell phone. Sure, that could sound a touch paranoid, but it was the reality this family was living in which made her so concerned. Lastly, just to top off the love-fest, this also tells the story of love coming again to those who have closed themselves off to the idea. No matter what the circumstances, no matter how long it has been, love can always breach those defenses and wake up the heart once more. All these different versions of love are delicately woven together and paired up with a powerful political sentiment around our broken immigration policies and treatment of illegals. Coming off heavy handed is dangerous when dealing with these themes, so subtlety is the name of the game here and McCarthy handles it with the same skill and honesty he showed us before in The Station Agent. As a writer/director his record is incredibly strong, so I recommend keeping an eye out for anything bearing his name.
As with most small stories like this one, much of the weight and success falls on the shoulders of the actors and their ability to deliver realistic, believable and truthful performances. Casting becomes a type of “make-or-break” decision for the project and Thomas McCarthy came well prepared to the table. He had Richard Jenkins in mind for Walter Vale from nearly the beginning and stuck with him even after Richard told him that he would love to play the character, but the movie would most likely never get made with him as the lead. Richard wasn’t saying this out of any type of martyr complex, but he has been a character actor for a great many years without a starring role and he knew his name would not carry much weight on the playbill, yet even with that fact staring him in the face, Thomas stuck to his guns and fought for Richard. After winning all necessary battles, Richard walked into the role with such amazing depth and sensitivity garnering him incredible buzz and murmurs of Academy nominations. If he doesn’t reach the heights of the golden statue this time, he shouldn’t be too heartbroken because I have no doubt a number of the independent awards and smaller organizations are going to give notice and heap praise. There were such small and nuanced details to every moment he portrayed, it was impossible not to feel for him during this journey. From platonic caring to romantic longing, Richard proved once and for all he is a lead actor and one to be learned from. Also involved from near the inception of the story was Hiam Abbass, who played Tarek’s mother, Mouna Khalil. She really fit perfectly with the style and grace of Jenkin’s performance, showing a quiet, reserved, yet insurmountable strength which propelled her character to do absolutely anything to be there for her son. As for the young couple, Haaz Sleiman played Tarek and Danai Jekesai Gurira played Zainab. Both were quite good and held up the incredible level of commitment and quality already being displayed in the film. Haaz boldly followed his ark of being hopeful and optimistic about life in America to barely contained rage over his mistreatment from ignorance and fear. Danai displayed the other side of being a foreigner in this country, the side where they try as best as they can to keep to themselves and not interfere or be noticed for fear of being deported. Her struggle displays one of the true tragedies of the story, where the yellow brick road leading many immigrants to our shores and streets ends on cracked pavement and broken promises.
Recommendation: The Visitor is an amazing film which really brings out the depth of feeling we yearn for from independent cinema. It has had a long and slow burn on the film circuit and at this time can already be found on DVD, so do yourself a favor and buy, rent or borrow this movie as soon as you get the chance. If you’re lucky, the story of Walter Vale might even inspire you to continue on your own journey, wherever it may lead.
Someone told us playing in this tunnel would be “avant-garde”. What a bastard.
Every now and again you are pointed towards something which will shift your day, your mood, maybe your whole life, in a whole new direction. It would be a little presumptuous of me to say this band from Brighton in the UK will do all those things, but I feel safe saying they will at least catch you smiling without knowing it, maybe even reminiscing about another feeling lost so long ago. Either way, there’ll be an affect.
Passenger is a five piece band led by Mike Rosenberg and they slide into the pop/rock scene with a slightly different take on things. The melodies are sweet and the sound is earnest, but if you were to read the lyrics all on their own, you might think something wicked this way comes. The most notable track for the switch hit off their upcoming album, Wicked Man’s Rest, is “Walk You Home”, a upbeat diddy beginning in the world of puppy love and office crushes and ending deep in the shadows and high in the trees of stalkers and obsession. It actually took me a couple listens before I stopped bopping my head to the music and heard the lyric, “I’m the boy with restraining orders”. Can’t say that line pops up a lot in the love songs I usually listen to. Moving forward to a more straight forward track about loneliness and separation, there is “Table for One”, a beautiful ballad which paints not only a simple visual picture, but also an audio landscape to sweep the listener up into its arms. Then, just so we don’t leave out the other side of love affairs, the angry and angst ridden one, there’s “Do What You Like”, a song about letting yourself be played time and time again in the endless hope of winning in the end.
Each of the tracks mentioned above, plus all the others featured on their MySpace page and Official site, have a wonderful sense of purpose, a truth and honesty about feelings and emotions which we often don’t talk about openly. Adding an important extra touch is the humor and levity covering the songs and keeping them from becoming too heavy or melodramatic. Passenger achieves emo-pop power without the black nail polish, eyeliner and social morays.
For those people living in the LA area, Passenger is playing on 8/11 at the Hotel Cafe in downtown Hollywood. It’s a great venue, which I’ve been lucky enough to see them play at once before, and I can think of few better ways to spend a Monday night. Start your work week off right with some happy/sad/clever/infectious live music!
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Posted 1 year, 11 months ago at 12:41 pm. Add a comment
1 – As much as I hate the what has become of the Star Wars franchise and also for what it did to my childhood (listen people, you will never, ever be original or humourous when you say, “You’re name is Luke? He He…I am your father. Ha hahaha get it? Like in the movie with that muppet dude?”), I still have to throw some love out there to the creators of this post from College Humor. This is actually all in the films themselves, but it’s played in the subtext. Just read between the lines and you’ll see it.
2 – The thickness of one’s skin is only truly dependent on the sharpness of the barb.
3 – Have you ever thought to yourself you wanted your PC to be more musical, more tonally impressive? Maybe the real fact is you have never really listened to it correctly. Try it again after watching this video of a musical jam made out of only Windows 98 and XP sounds, I think you’ll hear a distinct difference. [via College Humor]
5 – Leave it to the fanatics to find something a way to turn the upcoming animated Horton Hears a Who! into a protest piece. Pro-Life rallies sprung up at the premier because they latched onto the moral of the story, “A person is a person, no matter how small.” and are using it as an anti-abortion catch phrase. I’m a Pro-Choice person myself, but if someone can bring me proof that at the very moment of conception the cluster of DNA and cells becomes a furry accountant with a penchant for rhyme, that’s when I make the switch. [via Starpulse]
6 – As if there was a role I wouldn’t be happy to see Johnny Depp play, now he is on the lookout for screenwriters who can create a worthwhile story about Salvador Dali. When this film gets made I am only going to be truly happy if Depp plays through a whole scene while it virtually melts around him. [via Starpulse]
7 – I was going to post up the first trailer for Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder, but it was so unimpressive that I decided this other trailer for Zombie Strippers was more valuable to your day. Your welcome. [via FilmDrunk]
8 – There will always be a time when certain things need to be updated, evidently the Catholic Church thinks that time is now and they are planning an overhaul to the seven deadly sins. It seems we as a society have found new and improved ways to offend the almighty and the Church wants to make sure that we are appropriately covered for all our hell-bound needs. [via CNN]
10 – There are a handful of new photos from the upcoming Dark Knight flick. Here is my favorite from the bunch. My personal caption would be, “Do you ever get that feeling like someone is watching you?” [via ComingSoon]
Posted 2 years, 4 months ago at 10:56 am. 1 comment
Who over there keeps requesting songs from “The Wiz”? Seriously, for the last time, that costume was itchy and I’m not doing it.
“Didn’t you kill tons of Nazi’s and go crazy in your last film?”
Conquering is fun!
[via 
DandyID
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