Review: 'Adult Beginners'
Opening at the ArcLight Hollywood this Friday is Adult Beginners, an adult-aimed comedy about struggling thirty-somethings trying to embrace and make sense of newfound adult living. It's light-hearted fare and an easy watch that will effortlessly entertain young audiences with its humor and heart. Just don't go into it expecting it to add anything new to the genre.
The film stars Nick Kroll as Jake, a young jerky entrepreneur seen living the good life in a swanky Manhattan pad, celebrating the launch of his promising new tech company that is set to make him and all his donor friends rich. That is, until he learns of a defect in the device that leads to the folding of his up-start, sinking his along with all of his friends' investments, and deeming the last three years of his life a waste and forcing him to reevaluate a new life plan.
With no other options, Jake leaves New York to temporarily move in with his estranged and very pregnant sister Justine (Rose Byrne), brother-in-law (Bobby Cannavale) and three-year-old nephew. As a Big City transplant in the small-town suburbs, Jake prolongs his stay, becoming their "manny," looking after the kid with the hopes of grounding himself and figuring out next step. At this point, the movie leans into the comic hijinks of seeing Jake's self-centered sleaze-ball so hilariously taking care of the kid ensuing in the sort of generalities of a kid being looked after by a bigger kid that you might expect.
Adult Beginners works fine in the gimmicky laughs of Kroll as Jake so ineptly skilled at taking care of a kid. He wheels the kid to the park in a suitcase-as-stroller and hits on the single mothers. It's all fine, quippy banter, but the movie is more or less saved by its complimenting and balanced out other half, the more warm and honest reflections and admissions of young married and family life, which Jake is forced to confront with his sister, as well as with her and her husband's rocky moments.
If you decide to take the plunge with Adult Beginners, just know that you won't be leaving the shallow end – but you might end up still having a little fun anyways.
There are whiffs of the Apatow-styled man-child hero that is forced to grow up in an age of stunted maturity epidemic that has grown to define the generation, but there is more of a connection to the 2011 feature Jeff Who Lives at Home and the HBO series Togetherness, both of which were made by the film's producers, Jay and Mark Duplass (Duplass Brothers Productions. It's a watered down version of this Duplassian comedy, as half-laughs are given the same treatment as its dramatics, involving the expecting of children, infidelity, and commitment to family, that makes the film a very lukewarm experience comparatively.
Kroll and friends work as a strong, three-piece dynamic, in a film that certainly needed each of its leads to be able to navigate the waters between playfully humorous and seriously relatable to earn this film's keep. Kroll as Jake dials in his slacker charms that make his character's story, about his ignoring of his sister and ailing mother while he was off making his dreams come true, that much more effective. Cameos by familiar-faced comedians Joel McHale and Jane Krakowski add a further touch of comedic do-gooding.
Applaudable strides are given to Kroll who pushes himself here in more dramatic moments than he has in any other opportunity. For fans of the comedian's signature Alt-style comedic stylings, they'll only be treated to the film's opening sequence: a fake commercial ad for his company "Minndsi," in which he's able to use the weird format to best serve his signature "Tim and Eric" chops, however briefly.
In the end, Adult Beginners isn't exactly proof of what a terrific low-budget festival-style film is, but what one inspired by those is. Its simultaneous meandering and heavy-handedness could come off more dissuading to others, such as its forced title into the story: "Adult Beginners," as it turns out, is a swimming class for the age-pushing crowd ("Get your feet wet!" is on the brochure and an almost eye-rolling metaphor), and wouldn't you know – Jake and Justine were both never taught how to swim. Suffice it to say, the film's emotional climax centers around embracing family by reconciling differences, and jumping into the pool.
If you decide to take the plunge with Adult Beginners, just know that you won't be leaving the shallow end – but you might end up still having a little fun anyways.
Adult Beginners is Rated R for language and some drug use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSDKkMS78H0
Review: 'True Story'
As a by-product of evolving cultural shifts in American media consumption and reality-as-entertainment fixings, pop culture is currently having its obsession with real-life mysteries as main-stage pageantry. More specifically, this country-wide fascination takes the more perverse interest of real-life, unsolved American mysteries, centering around the horrific and gruesome acts of serial killing.
True Story, opening this weekend, is the latest of these hair-raising whodunits. The real life tale of Christian Longo, on the FBI's Most Wanted list for murdering his wife and three children in Oregon, and afterwards hiding out using the identity of former disgraced New York Times writer Michael Finkel, who himself would later write a non-fiction book about these events, is the source material of the movie.
The elusive celebrity-meta questioner James Franco plays "Chris" Longo, in what could've been a real winner of actor and character transfusion: insert a detached media-savvy question mark with a possible smirky secret to tell to play a character of similar make-up, and have the artful A-lister run with it. But Franco's half-commitments are insufferable, who offers only his most unimaginative stoner-shelled exterior to this character that needed to have the suspense of a waiting serpent's sting to make this an interesting story. It doesn't and therefore, it's not.
True Story is the story of Longo's relationship with Finkel, who, after using Finkel's name as an alias, decides to give him the exclusive on his side of the story, and proving his innocence. It's not so much a movie that wishes to provoke its viewer with real circumstantial evidence that points to heart-pounding conclusions, but rather a strung along bait and switch in which the movie, the whole time, teases the audience into wondering if he's a fake or a phony, and it's not nearly as half as interesting as one might expect it to be.
True Story won't offer the sort of deliciously pulp-thrills of a more dialed in mystery/thriller, and leaves it stranded in ambiguously uncommitted territory.
The film's most interesting viewpoint hinges on Finkel himself, who's seen to have a more self-satisfying reason for taking part in the journalistic opportunity of a lifetime. After fabricating characters tied to a human-aid story in Africa, Finkel is let go from the Times, and his writing career is given the kiss of death. He relocates to Oregon to with his girlfriend Jill (Felicity Jones), whereupon he learns of Longo's arrest and his stolen identity, which jumpstarts the focus of the film: Finkel and Longo meeting, and proceeding to build a trust and relationship surrounding each of them fulfilling the other's baser emotional needs.
This leads to what should have been the most excitable part of the movie, the character of Finkel. A man whose previous sins as a publicly shamed liar could drive a more ambiguously feverish hunt of, is Finkel pursuing the mysterious Longo for journalism, or for a more consuming obsession that need to find redemption in proving someone's innocence in a media landscape obsession and consumption with learning all about a potential serial killer who claims his innocence.
For the most part, Jonah Hill, as Finkel, is up to this challenge, turning in another dramatic effort that should add quite nicely to the thesp's serious career. Hill comes in and maintains a nice guy touch, and appropriately shifts between a strategic and cautious investigator and impressionable sucker that wades too deep into a concocted reality that, as the film would have it, satisfy Finkel's own fulfillments.
It's Rupert Goold, first-time feature film director, who compartmentalizes the thing into underserved instances and diluted sequences, and, therefore, misses the movie's larger mark. Most impressively, Goold leverages dead town landscapes that best served Bennet Miller's Foxcatcher (and before that, Miller's Capote). Snowy-blanketed plains offer a chilling and icy winter calm that frames the movie in an eerie isolated existence, but uninspired shooting during Finkel and Longo's scenes, in the jail cell and courtroom offer meager, ultimately monotonous and unaffecting watching.
Goold's further reluctance to throw in some more obvious Longo threat and string along the idea that he might just be a wrongfully accused guy deflates all senses of urgency. Add this to a story that isn't structured to penetrate through any real discovery and all that's left is a movie about two wandering egos searching for self-redemption in truth, that strays into too much wandering.
True Story won't offer the sort of deliciously pulp-thrills of a more dialed in mystery/thriller, and leaves it stranded in ambiguously uncommitted territory. It's with a sly wink that Franco should lure any unsuspecting viewer into this half-film, and if you've seen his and Hill's party-bromance hijinks in This Is The End, it'll take you a while to get past the absurdity that both would even attempt to star in such a serious project as this.
True Story opens this Friday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_NiP_bqlns
Review: 'Lost River'
Hearing the things one might have heard already about Ryan Gosling's directorial debut, you might think this movie was a lot worse than it really is. It's not – not entirely, at least. The problem is is that it's pretty much exactly what it sets out to be: an artfully made, topsy-turvy fever dream with a certain amount of packed in prestige to illicit mild curiosity. Unfortunately, it's spun a little too profound for its own good, ultimately suffering from its hearty helpings of nonsensical narrative subversion, in which it is unlikely audiences will return for a second trip to Lost River.
River won't stand as an experience akin to a descent into madness, for that would require a sort of penetrating beyond its surface-chic layers. But for an art film so oddly uncompromising, it has a real depth of decoration in its pops of purples and greens and reds (Oh my!), prompting this reviewer to think that a somewhat decent amount of money must have been put into this thing.
Let's not forget, as to what might be the most logical (possible) explanation for this stupefying passion project of sizable proportion. After Gosling offered his Blockbuster hunk-services to Warner Bros. for both of their big screen genre pics – 2011's Crazy, Stupid, Love and 2013's whiff-noir bit Gangster Squad – the director (and writer) might have cashed in his favor chips with the major studio here to help make his experimental wish pic (Two for them, one for me? Warner Bros. is handling U.S. distribution). And what should have been the pushback from the top brass? Letting 2011's PEOPLE's Sexiest Man Alive runner-up go nuts with a camera should have offered some sort of stitched-in safety net in marketing the movie – right?
The reviewer should return to stating, that this is speculative thinking.
In any event, River is a very odd movie, and for reasons that extend to it being not so bad. It trades its narrative substance for all-hands-on-deck camera flair, much like 2009's Enter the Void and 2012's Spring Breakers, both of which were cinematography products of Benoît Debie, who is also responsible for the visuals here (fans of those films should have a clearer idea as to the priorities that are being taken here in terms of artful impress.
This fantasy plunge offers a stylish experience that's worth investing a little curiosity into.
Every second of the film is an exercise in style and frame-cramming, perhaps with more than a bite of borrowed self-seriousness from the stuff of Gosling's trusted director Nicolas Winding Refn could concoct. Certainly, audiences familiar with Refn's 2013 Only God Forgives should expect similar aesthetics and an even less coherent story (with perhaps just as many weird-ass full-length karaoke breaks, which River does not fail to produce here).
Premiering at 2014's Cannes Film Festival to post-film credit-rolling boos, River is Gosling's Malick-meets-Lynchian fable of a family, living in the fictitious abandoned city of 'Lost River' (actually the slums of Detroit), trying to make ends meet. Single mother Billy (Christina Hendricks) tries to stop a skeevy creditor (Ben Mendelsohn) from taking away their shabby dump of a house, while her son Bones (Iain De Caestecker) attempts to steal copper from the presiding airhead gangster-in-power Bully (Matt Smith) and reverse a curse that flooded an underwater city with the help of googley-eyed Rat (Saoirse Ronan). This is also a movie where characters are named Bones, Bully, and Rat.
Supposedly there are socio-political and anti-misogynist undertones to River, but probably as much as Gosling's internet- 'Hey Girl' memes could be. What could be seen as a commentary of forcing the average American family out of their homes while making strong, single women carry the brunt comes undone when Billy, in an effort to make some extra coin, takes a dive into Dave's (Menhelsohn) secret burlesque-freakshow that features women getting play-stabbed and play-blood-squirted on, including the director's partner Eva Mendes as Cat, the sideshow's main act. The film introduces these sorts of things that attempt to keep the stakes in the ground, but the ground shifts every minute in River so as to fail to leave any significant point of reference to it.
What prevails throughout are the director's inspirations, whose altar's he worships at unapologetically here. The handheld camera tracking somewhat grounds the thing in Terrence Malick-like modern realism, while the paranoia and alt-reality schizophrenia drives the film's David Lynch-like fantasy elements. It's not the most disorienting of experiences, which, in fact, makes it harder to pull a solid takeaway of afterwards; while River will be endlessly frustrating to the viewer looking for logic and sense in their dreamlands, it could be inspired watching for the viewer attuned to impressively hip shooting, and original spaced-out music by Johnny Jewel (Bronson).
So, apparently this is Ryan Gosling, the director. Perhaps a little darker than what some might have thought, or perhaps he's just wide-eyed and all-consuming in his guilty pleasures of inspirations. For the most part, River works as the stuff of a guy letting off his most oddball creative fumes in his after hours rather than a statement type of calling card looking to switch sides behind the camera entirely. It should no doubt find its place nestled in comfy Netflix-streaming, where it might be a little easier to guffaw over the ludicrousness so willingly on display here; but, not for naught, this fantasy plunge offers a stylish experience that's worth investing a little curiosity into.
Lost River is in select theaters and on VOD this Friday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8ngDiG9V8w
Review: 'White God'
In White God, Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó tells a thrilling and heartbreaking modern-day parable about the oppressions endured by lower-class people at the hands of those with power within society. The lower class people here in Mundruczó's daring and bold film just happens to be non-human, real-life dogs – around two-hundred and fifty of which were involved in making this incredible genre-experiment of a film.
The winner of last year's Cannes Award winner of the Un Certain Regard (an award given to films with various types of "original and different" visions and styles that work to seek international recognition), White God is nothing short of jaw-dropping in its ambition and ultimately realized vision. In Hungarian with English subtitles, the film transcends its European region to connect its message of politically and socially marginalized cultures to a universal level.
White God follows two youthful and innocent characters whose early first-hand experiences with injustice leads to full character changes into disillusioned and battle-hardened learners of the sometimes cruel real-world. First-time actor and thirteen year old Zsófia Psotta stars as Lili, a girl who is sent to live with her divorced father Daniel (Sándor Zsótéro) but brings her dog, (and the film's second star) Hagen, a mixed-breed that is seen as an inconvenience to everyone except his loyal young owner. So when Daniels's apartment manager learns of the dog and tells him of the state's tax that must be paid for owning mixed-breeds, his frustrations give way to his doing away with Hagen, depositing him out of their car on the side of the road as a helpless Lili is left to watch Hagen grow out of sight, confused, abandoned, and alone.
At this point, the rest of the film brilliantly unfolds in cutting between Lili and Hagen in parallel-path narratives which track their journeys as they each struggle to navigate through their new and uncertain worlds. Lili, at first only slightly angstful, slowly shades into an authority-defying little anarchist in her own right, shown unbending to the wills of her father or band teacher's hypocrisies, while continuing to search for Hagen. Hagen, meanwhile, is seen learning to live on the streets, struggling to cross streets with the zooming oncoming traffic, but soon enough encountering a pack of other canines in the city's back alleys. These full, wordless sequences make this reviewer wonder how the on-set animal training and editing were combined to create these incredible scenes, some of the film's most effective parts.
The sometimes painful events showing Hagen's dog training and turn from innocent to aggressor stand out as the director's statement on social unrest–that the indignities of the minority can only endure for so long before boiling over into revenge-like upheaval.
The film makes its statement in the events that come in its second act, as Hagen is shown subjected to the life of a stray within a society that fails to aid, making for continually saddening and sickening watching but entirely powerful. He is caught by a homeless man and sold to a dog-fighting trainer, who submits the dog to such despicable acts as beatings and other tortures to invoke his more beastial and primal anger. These painful-to-watch events ultimately leads to Hagen, now teeth baring and snarling, finally revolting along with a city's worth of canine comrades, in a third act that best resembles Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and the city-takeover stylings of The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, where the film moves from social commentary to a type of exploitive-horror.
White Dog's emotional moments and truths here are heart-breaking in their display, as Mundruczó never shies away from showing the brutalities that Hagen endures at the hand of the more evil pawns of empowered society, the "white gods" that hold the power over those without any. The sometimes painful events showing Hagen's dog training and turn from innocent to aggressor stand out as the director's statement on social unrest–that the indignities of the minority can only endure for so long before boiling over into revenge-like upheaval.
Perhaps the film's weaker, or rather, less stimulating component is its familiar structure outside of the draw of featuring live dogs to tell the story. But there is so much fire and kinetic friction from the very start that it's fully rewarding when the dogs break free charging through the abandoned streets of Hamburg, terrorizing pedestrians and taking revenge on the film's earlier antagonists. Here, though, things resolve a bit too easy, in final sequence that could have invoked even further boundary-pushing; though the entire journey of grueling emotional highs and lows will still leave audiences stunned.
White God should be considered essential viewing; past its excitement and successful gimmick of following a real dog's life, the social issues, while still hitting familiar notes, realizes an empathy in us all that makes its point: until we can live together in society, things might get a little rough.
White God opens in Los Angeles at the Nuart Theatre this weekend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIGz2kyo26U
Review: 'She's Lost Control'
In She's Lost Control, writer and director Anja Marquardt's feature film debut, she tackles the taboo of therapy by way of sexual intimacy. Where 2012's The Sessions showed the surrogate experience as one of uplifting redemption, Control chooses to show a dark, chilly take.
Our film's surrogate is Ronah (Brooke Bloom), self-assured and making her way in living in New York as a type of therapist, who works with patients with intimacy issues by physically involving her clients, including Johnny (Marc Menchaca), whose sessions push Ronah to her breaking point. The film taps into the dark mood and manifestations of these patient's darker sides, ultimately making for a film that's cold, locked down, lifeless in its composition and catharsis. Viewers expecting to see a more salacious take in its portrayal of sexual healing will be disappointed with this bleak mood-piece. The fact that it's all so despondent and out of reach only distances the experience from the viewer.
It's a slow burn of our psychological need for connection, and how those things can unravel when they're out of our control.
2011's Steve McQueen-made Shame also confronted American sex head on, showing the all-out unravel of one man's addiction can show. Where we've seen sex further mainstreamed in this year's erotica blockbuster 50 Shades of Grey, there's no shortage of viewpoints that filmmakers are exploring when talking about sex. Here, Marquardt's take on it is one that is unfulfilled, where emotional isolation consumes these people to stop them from the physical act itself.
The best part of She's Lost Control are in its careful constructions and observations of people, how our best intentions can succumb to larger, more natural and out-of-our-hands events that can doom us entirely. The harder parts to sit through are in the denial of offering more connecting pieces to the audience, making for a closed-off experience. It's a slow burn of our psychological need for connection, and how those things can unravel when they're out of our control.
She's Lost Control opens today in limited release.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aud_ljZrPU
Review: 'The Salt of the Earth'
"The Salt of the Earth" refers to the person or group of persons that best represent a larger part of humanity. Renowned photographer Sebastiáo Salgado knows a thing or two about these types of people, having traveled to the ends of the Earth to photograph globally removed peoples of all cultures, all experiencing unique walks of life outside of mainstream, civilized living.
It would all be so beautiful, if the centuries-spanning images he captured weren't so tragic in their harrowing truths, of these peoples' oppressive, devastating lives.
From film directors and photographers Wim Wenders and Salgado's son Juliano Ribeiro, The Salt of the Earth is both a biography of a masterful humanist photographer and look at the artist's life work, who provides commentary for his career's collection of heartbreaking photographs that arrest the viewer in its universal and emotional magnificence.
The Salt of the Earth mixes beautiful stills with narrative commentary (in French, with English subtitles) of an interviewed Sebastian, as well as footage taken by Juliano from his last photographic travel in the jungles of Africa. The film bursts with colors in the wild jungle, but is predominantly an experience of black and white still-image brilliance of previous exhibitions' stark, confronting images.
Audiences going into this film should prepare themselves for a meditative watch; the best experience will be for the viewer to give themselves completely over to this viewing experience so as to allow the power and message to move them.
The celebrated Salgado's youth and early adulthood begins the film, showing his early life, marrying his wife and collaborator, Lélia Wanick Salgado, and birthing a son, before pursuing a life of travel and photography, leading his fascinations and curiosities across continents to which we next see his career's work. While the thought of watching a mere slideshow may deter some viewers, the images themselves are not home movie quality. Audiences going into this film should prepare themselves for a meditative watch; the best experience will be for the viewer to give themselves completely over to this viewing experience so as to allow the power and message to move them.
Salgado, a humanist photographer, found his subject in his career, in the cultures of people and an ever-changing humanity. These people were all either tribes, native of the land outside of civilized society, or pursuant to oppressive hardship, surviving disastrous health, political, and violent forces that show humanity's collapse in morality.
At a solid 109 minutes long, the film shows each of Salgado's major photo exhibitions, mostly showing the farthest outreach of the industrialized world. Salgado talks about and shows his work, from which he captured on the most intimate, personal, and incredible of risks. Staying with people while documenting international conflicts, starvation, and exodus, there is enough shock and awe in each image that it is almost painful to watch. Yet this is the overwhelming power of the film, in showing the unsettling and jarring reality that exists and affects the rest of the human race.
It's no surprise then, to finally hear Salgado talk of humanity with disgust, and distaste, of which the film and his work ring out cynically with.
It's also no surprise, then, to see the photographer move to another area of study to explore–that of nature itself. The end of the film shows Salgado's work moving to that of beautiful landscapes, along with recently re-grown jungles of Brazil that his family single-handedly begun farming again. After witnessing such atrocities and horrors throughout one's life, there is a quiet understanding that would lead any person to understand moving away from humans altogether.
Official selections of the 2014 Cannes and Telluride Film Festivals, as well as last year's Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature, The Salt of the Earth is an incredible entry into humanitarian efforts and awareness, as well as an artistic celebration of Salgado and his life's uncompromising achievements. While the film will require a certain dutiful discipline to endure, the film will show that, while life and its people are far from pretty, the human spirit that is realized in light of that, can be a stunning sort of beautiful.
The Salt of the Earth is in theaters this Friday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMb7eWaBVvQ
Review: 'Danny Collins'
Why does Al Pacino need redemption?
After starring as a drug-addled thespian of the theater at the end of his artistic rope in January’s Philip Roth adaptation, The Humbling, Pacino returns to the land of spaced-out celebrity in need of an ego adjustment in Danny Collins–the sunnier, happier, late-in-life comedy version of the former that’s all contrived, hot air strutting.
The movie, about an aged yet still kicking’ rock star who, upon receiving a decades-long delayed letter from John Lennon to the younger pop crooner about following his artistic ambitions, and subsequently stepping out of the spotlight, is all groans. It's the kind of movie that fills Pacino "the actor's" ego twice-over with its gymnastic pandering, while attempting to deliver something that rings with emotional substance. Fortunately its feel-good nature never stalls out completely with its talented accompaniment of actors as their bubbly best, leaving charisma to spare throughout.
The movie's first title card disclaimer prepares the audience for its uncommitted seriousness and fun times ahead, reading: "The following is based on a true story, a little bit." So the part about a rockstar receiving a letter from Lennon having lived the remainder of his unfulfilled life in the lap of luxury is true; the rest is simply dressed up showboating, and about as much as you can handle.
The film opens in 1971, when a younger Collins is being interviewed by a Rolling Stone reporter (Nick Offerman) about his hit first album. Young Collins' meek and unsure demeanor shows that his earliest self was founded on a center of artistic striving–so when we cut to forty years later, a more salt-than-peppered Collins, adorned in half-buttoned silk shirts and Keith Richards-esque scarves, sitting lost and loaded after another hit show at the Greek Theater, yet looking forlorn in existential pity, is supposed to come off as validating to his life's current state.
It is indeed a sad thing when a rockstar can't churn out the hits for which they became so famous for, or reinvent themselves into a person with anything new to say or prove.
This leads to a lackluster surprise party that leads to his manager and long time pal Frank Grubman (a very enjoyable Christopher Plummer) gifting Collins with Lennon's 30 year old handwritten letter, who sizes up the party and his life one last time before leaving it all behind to live in a New Jersey hotel off the interstate. He gravitates towards soulful songwriting at a grand piano in his room, and also kind of just slums it with the hotel employees, while trying to reconnect with his never-met son, who's daughter has ADHD and who himself is dying from cancer. The film cycles through these peripheral matters at hand with the same self-serving toying–Collins' charming the hotel's manager (Annette Bening), plunking away at notes and lyrics to a new somber yet honest ballad, to taking his granddaughter and family to a new specialized private school, and his son Tom (Bobby Cannavale) to a doctor's appointment.
It's not that Pacino as Collins is bad in an aggressively distasteful way. He actually slips into his oh-so-charming celebrity with the most comfortable ease, letting his charisma drive the engine of the movie ever-forward. But when the film round out to featuring Collins' sulks and sofa-slumping for emotional turns, the result is too hammy. There's no rock bottom here, or spiritual bottom even, as it just trades between Collins enjoying his cultural worship and tour bus and other moments where he’s a little more down on his time, resulting in superficial blandness that leaves us eye-rolling a few times too many.
These self-pitying moments are supposed to make us feel sorry for him in his newly set upon career when his now middle-aged audience wants to hear his hit songs from yesteryear, to which the performer finds disappointed acceptance. It is indeed a sad thing when a rockstar can't churn out the hits for which they became so famous for, or reinvent themselves into a person with anything new to say or prove.
'Danny Collins' opens in Los Angeles today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AndERTFMYd4
Review: 'Seymour: An Introduction'
Young hands hover over the tiniest gap of air above the weighted keys of a grand piano; softly, a fine, classical piece takes audible shape to fill a silent and small New York University theater space, where Conservatory students and Professionals alike are present for this Master class. The heartrending romance in the music is lovely, entirely beautiful, and is stopped.
Seymour Bernstein has a note for his student.
Where today's success-driven culture is measured in madness-driven metrics for total perfection, where new-age Tiger Mom whiplash-parenting is accompanied with seeing the big-screen wallopings laden out by the likes of J.K. Simmons' salivating drill sergeant of a music teacher in Whiplash, Seymour Bernstein offers a different sort of strive for perfection–a spiritual one.
It's this distinctness that separates himself from other teachers, musicians, and really, the new American society altogether. It's this distinctness that inspired actor Ethan Hawke enough to direct a feature-length documentary (also the actor's first attempt at directing a feature-length documentary), acknowledging, "I never set out to make a documentary. I met Seymour Bernstein at a dinner party and found myself completely hypnotized...There are profound lessons inside Seymour's piano teachings that are relevant to how we approach our daily lives. His simplicty has much to offer." Founded by a consuming sort of curiosity over this man's life and mind, in the aptly titled, Seymour: An Introduction.
Of course, Bernstein himself was once an internationally acclaimed concert pianist prodigy, a handful of onscreen news clippings and reels circa 1930 and '40 are enough to educate the common viewer who might not be as verse with their classical music history. A broad-stroked biography of the musician's career might be enough for a kind of documentary, or at least one day's worth of syllabus in Music History 101, but beyond his wondrous talents as a preeminent musician, Bernstein spins his intrigue and mythos further to our head-cocked confusion, as we learn that he retired from concerts, effectively, as a public performer altogether, and at the height of his career.
Like all things, such as stopping the beautiful music on this day's class to make this singular note to his student, he did it quietly, gracefully; humbly, but purposefully.
It's a reverential homage of a movie to Hawke's existential questioning, and whose every scene provides more clarity into the insight that either the answer is plainly obvious or that there is no real question there to ask at all.
What sort of event would have to happen, then, for a renowned pianist to retire at the ripe old age of 50? What self-tortured anguish must he have experienced to give up what would be assumed to be his life's calling, the thing that one would think all serious musicians aspire to get to and hang on for dear life when you get there? For Seymour Bernstein, he merely decided that he would give up performing to teach his students and himself about music, happiness and the power of detaching satisfaction from success.
It's as simple as that.
It's this fascination, beyond artistic and more personal, that drove Hawke to make this film, to shine the light this way. We see a couple of moments in the film where he accompanies Seymour in frame to express his insecurities about his own artistic struggles, all but asking him to answer what is the meaning of life (but for a thespian, asking what personal fulfillment is by way of creating art is practically asking the same thing). It's a reverential homage of a movie to Hawke's existential questioning, and whose every scene provides more clarity into the insight that either the answer is plainly obvious or that there is no real question to ask at all.
We see all angles of Seymour's life; mostly capturing the sophisticate in his New York single bedroom apartment of nearly all his adult life, dim lights illuminating old pink-painted walls and the collection of knick-knacks over everything, where he conducts personal and private lessons with young students. He also makes his tea and folds out his bedroom's couch into his bed when he is ready to sleep. When interviewed, Seymour talks into the camera when remembering his musical past, his time spent in Europe during the War, crying when he remembers the thought of lifeless, scattered bodies. Instruments with no music to come out.
This singularly charming man, displaced in this hustling and bustling express lane-living of a culture, proves so fascinating to watch throughout the film's hour and a half minute run time, because he's clearly tuned sharper to the intrinsics of living life itself than are the rest of us. Tuned sharper to the emotional importance and component of the musician's work for which his legend is revered–a lesson that not only hitting the piano's keys, but the practice of tuning the mind to illicit the honest emotions of the heart and its song, being perhaps the most important type of mastering. This, then, is expressed in the physical transference of weight and pressure to hit the piano's pockets to play the notes just so, expressing the song's truest emotional essence.
Seymour, who would sound wizardly if not for the feeling that his always cheery voice could giggle into youthful exuberance at any moment, tells his young apprentice this as the rest of this Master class listens just as intently on–that these notes on the charts are not just notes to be played, but felt. He's strange for noticing this abstract insight, and only strange because it's so singularly obvious that he is in fact, correct.
Seymour has his student begin again, at the song's introduction. An introduction, like all things, should be truthful, and played just right.
'Seymour: An Introduction' opens in Los Angeles at The Landmark this Friday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhtIcP6AdHo