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Bitter architect of her own uprising: WHERE’D YOU GO, BERNADETTE?

15 Thursday Aug 2019

Posted by cinepam in Reviews

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Billy Crudup, Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett, Emma Nelson, Kristen Wiig, Maria Semple, Richard Linklater, Where'd You Go Bernadette

Where’d You Go, Bernadette? A better question is why should anyone care where Bernadette goes? Richard Linklater adapts Maria Semple’s bestseller, making several changes to the novel that don’t serve either the heroine or star Cate Blanchett well. Already a portrait of a family of enormous privilege—who the hell else can afford to take (on only a month’s notice, yet) a vacation to Antarctica—it adds to it an entitled protagonist whose main character trait is pissing people off.

In a way, Bernadette Fox hews close to the template of a difficult, self-involved woman with a talent for alienating people that Blanchett established in her Oscar-winning turn in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine. But Bernadette lacks Jasmine’s vulnerability and she’s meaner. She lavishes what tenderness she has on young teen daughter Bee (Emma Nelson) and, to a lesser extent, husband Elgie (Billy Crudup). For the rest of the human population, this embittered architect (a MacArthur genius grant winner, at that) turned stay-at-home mom has nothing but scorn, lavishing particular venom and outright cruelty on her neighbor, Audrey (Kristen Wiig). It is her behavior toward Audrey that at last pushes Elgie into arranging an intervention, which inspires Bernadette to run away from her family.

All roads eventually lead to Antarctica where, at last, Bernadette’s back story and just why she is so acrimonious comes into focus. Too little, too late in terms of having any empathy for the character or caring about what becomes of her. At least the location (apparently really Greenland) is pretty. Shots of Blanchette kayaking among icebergs that open the film and recur later are gorgeous. But the satire falls flat and Bernadette never gives anyone besides her beloved Bee reason to spend time with her. –Pam GradyWHERE'D YOU GO, BERNADETTE

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Cell Block Riot: THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT

24 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by cinepam in Reviews

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Billy Crudup, Ezra Miller, Kyle Patrick Alvarez, Michael Angarano, The Stanford Prison Experiment, Tye Sheridan

Stanford Prison Experiment

The “cells” are in a basement of the Stanford University campus. The “guards” and “prisoners” are mostly hippie kids to whom participating in a psychology experiment probably sounded more interesting than a typical summer job. But overseen by a psychology professor who loses his objectivity, it spirals quickly out of control. Welcome to The Stanford Prison Experiment, Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s drama recreating the notorious 1971 event.

Billy Crudup is Dr. Philip Zimbardo, whose study is try to get at the root of abuse in prisons and the conflicts between prisoners and guards. The experiment was funded by the US Office of Naval Research and its timing couldn’t have been more apt: three weeks before the deadly Attica Prison riot. It begins with dehumanizing the prisoners. They are not to use their names, only their assigned numbers. Their uniforms are shapeless (and emasculating) shifts—a cross between a hospital gown and a dress. Their hair is partially hidden underneath stocking caps further blurring individual identity. The guards, too, lose their individuality, wearing identical khaki outfits that mimic actual uniforms and mirrored shades that make eye contact impossible.

The situation veers toward hysteria from the start. The guards make a sport out of mistreating the prisoners in their care. One, Christopher Archer (Michael Angarano), is nicknamed “John Wayne” by the prisoners, but he’s clearly seen Cool Hand Luke a few too many times and models his behavior on that movie’s cruel overseer played by Strother Martin. He makes it his mission to make the inmates’ stay in Stanford’s basement a living hell. The convicts push back, Daniel Culp/8612 (Ezra Miller), Peter Mitchell/819 (Tye Sheridan) and other prisoners rebel in various ways and sometimes react with impotent fury. Each move by prisoner or guard escalates tensions. None of it is real, but as conditions deteriorate, it’s easy to see how the individuals involved might forget that they are playing roles.

Angarano, Miller, and Sheridan are all standouts among a huge ensemble of some of the best of today’s young actors. A cast that also includes Thomas Mann, Johnny Simmons, Logan Miller, Ki Hong Lee, and Moises Arias, is an embarrassment of riches. The scenes in mock jail are gripping and chilling, but the most fascinating thing about The Stanford Prison Experiment is not the test subjects, but the man behind the curtain, Zimbardo. “John Wayne” is a kid who doesn’t know any better. What is the excuse of the man who designed the experiment for setting aside professional objectivity and becoming so personally involved? Crudup is terrific as a man who as slippery as any shady used-car salesman as he rationalizes his experiment and his own behavior. Zimbardo wants to make a statement about obedience and authority, but he crosses a line and ends up making as big a statement about ethical behavior.—Pam Grady

 

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Trailer: THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT promises unexpected results

15 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by cinepam in News

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Billy Crudup, Chris Sheffield, Ezra Miller, James Frecheville, Michael Angarano, Moises Arias, The Stanford Prison Experiment, Thomas Mann, Tye Sheridan

One of the standouts from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Alfred P. Sloane Feature Film Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award is Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s The Stanford Prison Experiment, a riveting drama based on a real-life psychological experiment. Twenty-four young men are assigned to be either prisoners or guards in a pretend jail on the Stanford University campus where play-acting and reality quickly begin to blur. Billy Crudup is the ambitious professor who designed the experiment, starring alongside a kind of supergroup of up-and-coming talent that includes Ezra Miller, Michael Angarano, Tye Sheridan, James Frecheville, Thomas Mann, Moises Arias and Chris Sheffield.

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Playful Alan Arkin skates on THIN ICE

16 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by cinepam in Interviews

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Alan Arkin, An Improvised Life, Billy Crudup, Bob Balaban, David Harbour, Greg Kinnear, Harry Belafonte, Jill Sprecher, Karen Sprecher, Lea Thompson, Little Miss Sunshine, Norman Jewison, Second City, The Russians are Coming The Russians Are Coming, Thin Ice, Thirteen Conversations about One Thing

In the dark crime comedy Thin Ice Alan Arkin plays Gorvy Hauer, an old man in possession of a valuable violin that crooked insurance agent Mickey Prohaska (Greg Kinnear) is desperate to get his mitts on. Director Jill Sprecher shot her Kenosha, Wisconsin-set film in Minnesota in the snowbound winter and the memory of that frigid location elicits a cringe and a snort of laughter from Arkin.

“That was rough,” he says. “That goes on my list of things I don’t want to do anymore. Poor Greg. Greg had it the hardest, because he had to be out on the ice in 10 degree below weather with no coat on and no long johns. He had the roughest time of anybody.”

Arkin is taking a few minutes to chat while he waits for a car that will take him to the Salt Lake City airport after a screening of the movie – then called The Convincer – at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. He worked with Sprecher and her co-writer sister Karen before on 2001’s Thirteen Conversations about One Thing and that experience was so positive that when he came on board the new movie it was not just as an actor, but as an executive producer. It is only the second time he’s that done that – the last time was in 1979 when he made The In-Laws.

“I helped with the casting to a certain extent,” he says. “I got scripts to people that Jill and Karen didn’t have access to. I felt that it gave me the right to shoot my mouth off every once in a while when I felt a scene needed work, but they didn’t have a problem with that because Jill and I had a very comfortable working relationship from before. It was enormously amicable and comfortable.”

It was also the perfect situation for Arkin, who at 77, no longer wants to tolerate the confinement of a script. He’s an actor who likes to play and Sprecher gave him the room to do that.

“I’m too improvisatory,” he says. “I need to play. I’m not happy being locked into something tightly. And it’s getting more that way. I used to be able to submit to a script word for word. I can’t find it in me to do it anymore.

“My methods are very, very spurious these days. I’m kind of a maverick, I guess” he adds. “This was basically a character I’ve been wanting to play for about 20 years. I used to think in those terms. I used to think of fun characters that I would like to play at some point or another. I looked at the script and I saw that here was a good place to play it. I said, ‘Jill, how would you feel if the character was a guy like this?’ She thought it was great. Basically a Midwestern farmer pushed farther. He has a kind of ridiculous innocence about him that was kind of fun for me – boring to the point of annoying. That kind of tickled me. And sweet – a sweet, little boring guy.”

Arkin made his screen debut in Norman Jewison’s 1966 ensemble Cold War comedy The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, garnering a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his efforts. He won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role in yet another ensemble comedy 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine, the film that also marked his first time acting opposite Kinnear. Thin Ice with a cast that includes – in addition to Arkin and Kinnear – Billy Crudup, Bob Balaban, David Harbour, and Lea Thompson is another group effort, a further enticement for Arkin to sign on to the movie.

“I think of myself as a team player. I feel like my work is worthless unless I’m working with people I can really bounce off of and get stuff from, get surprises from and throw surprises to,” he says. “That to me is the whole joy of acting. To me, the whole joy of being an actor is ensemble. I teach improvisation and that’s the emphasis I have, how to serve the entity rather than looking for your own self-aggrandizement.”

Arkin’s attitudes about humor, improvisation, ensembles, and an actor’s place within a play or movie were shaped early. In 1960, he joined the fledgling Second City troupe in Chicago. In An Improvised Life, the memoir that he published last year, Arkin wrote that he considers his time with the group to mark the real start or career. He feels that way despite the fact before he joined Second City, he was a musician and composer (he co-wrote “The Banana Boat Song,” made famous by Harry Belafonte) and had even already tasted improv in 1959 when he joined the Compass Players in St. Louis.

“If I know anything at all about comedy it’s from working at Second City,” he says. “I didn’t think I was funny at all when I got there. I had to learn. It came through working on characters. Now I don’t feel like I’m particularly funny as me, but when I put on a particular character I feel like there’s humor in that. In a nutshell, of all the myriad things I learned there, the two most important were, first, we were allowed to fail. People used to come to the theater and know that 30% of what they saw every night was not going to work, because it’s improvisatory and they knew if the first thing’s not going to work, then the next thing might be great, something they’d remember 50 years later. That was an enormous thing, the fact that we took chances every night. That was the first thing.

“The second thing was that on any given night, we would play sometimes 15 or 20 characters, sometimes in a two-minute scene, sometimes in a 15-minute scene. We were doing operas. We were doing pantomimes. We were doing every conceivable kind of theater. I got about 30 years of training in the two years that I spent there. It was a miracle. It was an extraordinary adventure.”

These days he puts that training to use on nearly every movie he makes. He’s written screenplays and directed movies and plays. He can see where scenes need work and dialogue needs tweaking. Before he signs on to a film, he talks it over with his director to make sure that he will have the leeway he needs to improvise.

“People recognize that that’s the way I work and it doesn’t seem to hurt the films adversely, so they take a deep breath and jump in with me,” he says.

“I like working with people that don’t have a big agenda, who have a certain amount of flexibility, who want to play. These days I want to have fun. If the element of play – it’s call a play, after all – isn’t in it, it’s exhausting. I’m too old to be exhausted anymore by the work.” – Pam Grady

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