In the documentary Young@Heart, the work is already half-done within five minutes of the picture’s first frame. A movie about a group of senior citizens (average age: 80) who tour internationally as a chorus covering rock and pop hits? Who could possibly resist such a sweet premise? Fortunately, director Stephen Walker moves the material far beyond its easy setting as a simple, feel-good romp; by the time it’s all over, audience members will be moved (to laughter and tears), enlightened and inspired. One’s enjoyment of the film can be measured by how much one might dig seeing elderly folks jamming to The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated”; one’s emotional connection to the material can be determined by how much one is floored when death comes calling to some of the members of the ensemble.
Initially, the tone is light: The first part of the film introduces us to the people who make up this Massachusetts-based choir as well as to their tough-love musical director, Bob Cilman. Cilman is trying to introduce some new tunes to the group’s play list, and it’s a Herculean task: The staggering number of “can”‘s included in the lyrics for The Pointer Sisters’ “Yes We Can Can” proves confusing, and no one can stand — or understand — Sonic Youth’s “Schizophrenia” (several of the singers admit that they prefer classical music and show tunes in their personal lives).
If remembering lyrics were all these folks had to worry about, then they’d have it pretty easy. Unfortunately, with their advanced years comes advanced ailments, and before long, some of them are having to make ever-increasing visits to the hospital to monitor heart or cancer conditions. Thus, the movie morphs from simply showing how the unifying power of music can cross all lines (including age and social class) to touching on the notion that these senior citizens, like sharks, need to constantly be moving to stay alive. That Death still makes a appearance or two while they’re pouring themselves into their songs makes our heartbreak all that more pronounced. Yet ultimately, Young@Heart is far from a bummer: Instead, it’s a tribute to this nation’s elderly, an ode to the power of the arts, and a salute to David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Jimi Hendrix and the other musicians whose songs have found new rhyme and reason thanks to these geriatric rockers.
Note: Between now and May 15, the Manor (where Young@Heart will be shown starting this Friday) is accepting canned goods that will be donated to the Second Harvest Food Bank. Anyone who brings in a canned good will be eligible to enter a drawing to win free movie tickets. For more information, call the theater at 704-334-2727.
WITH WILL FERRELL, Adam Sandler and other comedians routinely hoarding the screens in our nation’s multiplexes, here come Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to remind audiences that, like their male counterparts, girls just want to have fun. Indeed, the Cyndi Lauper hit of that name is granted its own karaoke-set scene in Baby Mama, and its inclusion is fitting in a movie that’s similarly pointed, joyous and light on its feet.
Even funnier than Forgetting Sarah Marshall (which itself is pretty damn funny), this stars Fey as Kate Holbrook, a successful businesswoman who finds out that she only has a one-in-a-million chance of getting pregnant. Wanting a child more than a man (but open to both), this news hits her hard, and she turns to an agency to provide her with a surrogate mom. She ends up getting Angie Ostrowiski (Poehler), who clearly resides several rungs down the social ladder. After Angie becomes pregnant, circumstances force her to move in with Kate, and it’s not long before Angie’s slovenly lifestyle clashes with Kate’s obsessive-compulsive behavior, and vice versa.
The plot complications arrive with clockwork precision, and it’s this rigid formula (along with a ludicrous development at the end) that prevents a fine movie from being even better. Yet judging it strictly on its comic merits, Baby Mama delivers (pun not intended, I assure you). Scripter Michael McCullers (who also directed) serves up several killer quips guaranteed to remain among the year’s freshest, and the two perfectly cast leading ladies are backed by an engaging mix of emerging talents and seasoned veterans.
Among the relative newcomers, Romany Malco is a bright presence as a straight-talking doorman, while Dax Shepard holds his own as Angie’s doofus boyfriend. Yet it’s the old pros who really shine: Sigourney Weaver is suitably smug as the head of the surrogate center, gamely being shellacked by some of the script’s best zingers. And then there’s Steven Martin, spot-on as the owner of the organic health food chain for which Kate works. Mocking New Age-y tendencies is a moldy idea long past its expiration date, yet in his portrayal of the ponytailed Barry, Martin positively makes it seem like a notion that’s never been tackled before. Whether name-dropping celebrities with delicate precision or “rewarding” Kate with five minutes of uninterrupted eye contact, Barry is a real piece of P.C. work. And with this characterization, Martin emerges as Baby Mama‘s mack daddy.
BACK IN 2004, I gave Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle 2-1/2 stars, and I’d be a hypocrite if I elected to stick with that rating. That’s because I’ve since been compelled to see the movie twice more, and what originally struck me as a fairly even mix between sharp satire and sophomore humor has proven itself to clearly be a clever comedy in which even the bawdy gags (to say nothing of the numerous non sequitors) display a certain degree of ingenuity in their conception and execution.
It’s pretty much guaranteed that Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay won’t be enjoying a similar critical ascension in the years to come. Aside from a crack involving Osama bin Laden’s beard, the gross-out gags aren’t particularly fresh, and because the satire is less subversive and more overt than before, what you see is basically what you get.
As the brash and impulsive Indian-American Kumar and the more sensible and sensitive Korean-American Harold, Kal Penn and John Cho again deserve the lion’s share of the credit for making these pictures work. They’re an engaging team, and here, the plot requires their characters to get mistaken for terrorists while on an international flight; soon, they’re being interrogated by a moronic Homeland Security honcho (Rob Corddry) who decides to send them to Guantanamo Bay to enjoy a steady diet of “cock-meat sandwiches.” But before long, the boys escape and find themselves on a cross-country odyssey that involves inbred Southerners, a “bottomless” party, dimwitted Klansmen (or is that a redundancy?) and even George W. Bush himself. And yes, Neil Patrick Harris returns, again playing himself as a sex-crazed, foul-mouthed party animal.
Kumar’s pursuit of a former college flame provides the film with more plot than its predecessor, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. And bringing back Harris was wise, but did we really need a replay of Kumar’s fantasy sequence involving an anthropomorphic bag of pot? More amusing is the dead-on parody of right-wing twits (repped by Corddry’s government agent) who question the patriotism of everyone who isn’t exactly like them (i.e. white and pseudo-Christian); these scenes aren’t exactly subtle, but they do point out the line that can barely divide satire from reality (just ask Barack “Do you believe in the American flag?” Obama).
Curiously, the movie’s portrayal of Dubya is a sympathetic one. As played by frequent Bush impersonator James Adomian, the president turns out to be a congenial, simple-minded pothead who isn’t evil, just misunderstood. Coming from Hollywood, that’s high praise indeed.
WINNER OF THIS year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Austrian release The Counterfeiters adds a fascinating spin to Holocaust cinema by forcing its Jewish protagonists to ponder their own morality during this tragic period in world history. The black and white blueprints of movies like Schindler’s List have been tossed out, replaced with one that bleeds gray.
The picture’s real-life basis rests in Operation Bernhard, a Nazi plot to print counterfeit American and British currency and flood those countries’ marketplaces, in effect crippling their economies. To carry out this scheme, the German high command assigns ambitious officer Herzog (Devid Striesow) to oversee the operation from within a concentration camp, where the finest Jewish printers and counterfeiters have been assembled in privacy to produce the fake money.
To insure their cooperation, Herzog provides these prisoners with street clothing, clean beds and decent food, thereby instilling in all of these Jews varying levels of guilt and shame (just outside their living quarters, they can hear the wails of the regular inmates, as well as the occasional gunfire signaling that someone’s life has just ended).
To ace counterfeiter Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), it’s all about survival, and he willingly obeys the Nazis as long as it keeps him alive. But to his fellow prisoner, a Communist named Adolf Burger (August Diehl), the principle matters more than anything, and he’s willing to sacrifice his own life as well as those of the other workers if it means slowing down the Germans’ grand scheme.
And therein lies the crux of the story: Should a person save himself at all costs, especially when his death would be nothing more than a symbolic gesture, or is there a point when a person has to take a stand no matter what? Writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky has taken a question not uncommon in film (Casablanca, for starters) and magnified its meaning by smacking it down in the middle of the Holocaust, where all nobility and romanticism surrounding the dilemma has been stripped and all that’s left is a hard look deep inside oneself. Ruzowitsky isn’t foolish enough to impose any answers on impossible questions, and it’s this honest if troubling stance that turns The Counterfeiters into the real deal.
THE BRAZILIAN import The Year My Parents Went On Vacation is a coming-of-age film that itself seems to have come of age about 30 years ago. Formulaic beyond even the usual dictates of the genre, it’s a draggy yarn that, despite being set in an era of upheaval, captures little of the excitement or emotion of a child’s formative years. Had Federico Fellini ever been confronted by this thing, the director of Amarcord would have eaten it alive.
Set in 1970 Brazil, the movie follows the young boy Mauro (Michel Joelsas) after he’s unceremoniously dumped onto his grandfather’s porch in a Jewish community. It seems that the leftist politics of Mauro’s parents (Eduardo Moreira and Simone Spoladore) have forced them to take it on the lam to escape the country’s oppressive regime, though they shield the truth from their son by telling him that they’re going on vacation. To his horror and fright, Mauro discovers that his grandfather has died of a heart attack roughly an hour before his arrival; luckily for him, there’s a neighbor down the hall, a religious man named Schlomo (Germano Haiut), who reluctantly provides him with food and shelter. A soccer fanatic, Mauro clings to his father’s promise that they’ll return before the World Cup championship, a vow that seems less likely to come to fruition as time passes.
The political aspects of the tale, which might have provided it with more juice, are kept vague; dominating the proceedings are the expected kid shenanigans, such as playing ball in the streets, attempting to understand grown-up rituals (Schlomo gives Mauro gefilte fish for breakfast), and trying to sneak peaks at naked women. Director and co-writer Cao Hamburger presents all of this in such a timid and sanitized manner that one would suspect childhood wasn’t a messy affair. Unfortunately for Hamburger, we’ve all been there, done that.
To see trailers of the reviewed films, go to www.theclogblog.com.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2008.
