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Review: Jim Jarmusch finds true romance in ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

17 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by cinepam in Reviews

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Anton Yelchin, Jim Jarmusch, John Hurt, Mia Wasikowska, Only Lovers Left Alive, Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston

"only lovers left alive"Beneath Jim Jarmusch’s cool, hipster veneer beats the heart of a romantic and he proves it with Only Lovers Left Alive, a paean to the constancy of love wrapped in the tale of a vampire couple, soul mates for centuries. Horror nibbles at the edges for the ethereal twosome played by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, but what resonates in this gorgeously photographed, often darkly funny drama is their unconditional devotion to one another.

Jarmusch says he took inspiration for this tale from Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve. Somehow from that congenial author’s fables about the biblical first humans, he glimpsed these ultimate outsiders. And while they may be bloodless, undead creatures, they also may be the warmest in the filmmaker’s universe. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) is a morose, reclusive rock musician, living among a huge vinyl record collection and a pile of vintage guitars in the ruins of Detroit. The more exuberant Eve (Tilda Swinton) resides in luxury in a beautifully appointed, book-filled home in Tangier. Though separated by geography, these opposites are as one.

Adam and Eve are also living in a dangerous time for their kind. Their food source, human blood, is no longer reliable. What runs through the zombies’ (as Adam derisively refers to mankind) veins is too often tainted. Eve has a reliable supply of the good stuff from the couple’s friend, playwright Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt). Adam’s connection is a doctor (Jeffrey Wright). But when Adam and Eve come together again in Detroit, a reunion they celebrate with a night out clubbing with Eve’s wild child sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) and Adam’s human friend Ian (Anton Yelchin), their well-ordered lives fall apart, and along with it their connections. The couple is soon on the run and thirsty, very thirsty.

That need to feed prompts fear, but also soul searching for these creatures of the night. Is it time, at last, to reclaim their mortality? Ava calls them snobs, and they are. Scrounging for blood is at odds with the sophisticated images they present to the world. Death as an option would satisfy their vanity. Shuffling off the immortal coil together would be one last grand romantic gesture. It’s something to consider, anyway, on a long night in Tangier.

There is a lot of beauty in Only Lovers Left Alive, starting with the ravishing leads and Yorick Le Saux’s shimmering cinematography. Even Detroit’s desolation looks alluring in the film’s evocative nightscapes. More than its pretty stars and beautiful photography, it is Adam and Eve’s enduring passion that makes this Jarmusch’s most appealing film in years. The vampire trappings, the deadpan humor and the dangerous situation that threatens them are almost beside the point. One gets the feeling that if Adam and Eve’s hearts could still beat, upon seeing each other, they would beat a little faster – even after hundreds of years. –Pam Grady

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Review: Wes Anderson evokes a lost era in the magnificent GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

14 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by cinepam in Reviews

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Bill Murray, F. Murray Abraham, Jason Schwartzman, Jude Law, Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Tilda Swinton, Tony Revolori, Wes Anderson

Fiennes_RevoloriPastry looms large in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, the product of Mendl’s, the most sublime bakery of all in the kingdom of Zubrowka, its treats packaged in pretty pink boxes. In a way, those baked goods stand as symbols of the whole movie: absolutely gorgeous, irresistible and completely delicious. Set in two opposing eras—the opulent years between the two world wars and the drabness of the Cold War—The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson’s most ambitious work to date, evident in his attention to every detail.  It is hilarious, but also a film of great heart as he once more visits the relationship between a father and a son.

Or a faux father and a son, as the case may be.  Like Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore,   Grand Budapest Hotel concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and his new lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori) are not related. Yet, once the older man takes the teenager under his wing, it doesn’t take long for that relationship to develop.  It seems unlikely at the outset. M. Gustave is an excellent concierge, always willing to provide extra service to his guests—particularly the elderly ladies—but he is also  vain, imperious and shallow. If he barely noticed Zero at all, it would be unsurprising. Instead, he responds to the boy’s loyalty, respect and work ethic. By the time, aged Madame D. (Tilda Swinton) dies, earning M. Gustave the enmity of her vicious son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) when she remembers the concierge in her will, M. Gustave and Zero share a solid bond. Nothing can break it, not Dmitri’s machinations, separation or even a fascist invasion.

It is the elderly Zero (F. Murray Abraham), the 1960s-era owner of the Grand Budapest—now long gone to seed—who tells the story to a curious guest, a writer (Jude Law). In the old man’s memories, his youth is almost a fairy tale. Certainly, Zubrowka resembles someplace out of a fable, its luxury exaggerated, the hotel exterior and the mountains surrounding it made of miniatures. At key points, Anderson turns to Fantastic Mr. Fox-style animation. Adam Stockhausen’s (Moonrise Kingdom) production design is exquisite. Anderson’s films are always jewels, but The Grand Budapest Hotel is the most glittering one of them all.

A huge ensemble populates Zubrowka, including Murray, Schwartzman, Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe, Léa Seydoux, Mathieu Amalric, Saorise Ronan and Edward Norton, yet it is an intimate comedy, focused on Fiennes and Revolori. The movie is a gift to Fiennes, an actor whose looks and manner have stood him well in such films as Quiz Show, The English Patient, The End of the Affair and his own recent The Invisible Woman. He was built for period pieces and The Grand Budapest Hotel hits his sweet spot.

Anderson’s love for classic films is evident throughout The Grand Budapest Hotel. Somewhere Ernst Lubitsch is smiling. But in evoking a lost era, Anderson does not pay mere homage, he instead applies his unique humor and sensibility to that time.  What emerges is something magnificent. In fact, it’s pretty grand, this Grand Budapest Hotel. –Pam Grady

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Ezra Miller needs to talk about KEVIN

24 Thursday May 2012

Posted by cinepam in Interviews

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Ezra Miller, John C. Reilly, Lynne Ramsay, Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin

In Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, playing the profoundly disturbed son of Eva (Tilda Swinton) and Franklin (John C. Reilly), Ezra Miller delivers a stunning performance. Kevin is a duplicitous boy, feigning easygoing normalcy for his dad, but baring his true self – a malicious, rage-filled soul – to his horrified mother. For the 19-year-old who only made his big-screen debut four years ago in Antonio Campos’ Afterschool, it is a career high to date, earning him a British Independent Film Awards nomination for Best Supporting Actor. What is most striking about the young actor during a January phone call is the enthusiasm and warmth that blasts through the phone, a marked contrast to the role he so thoroughly inhabited. It is a performance not many have seen yet – the film earned under $2 million at the American box office in a limited release – but that should change now that We Need to Talk About Kevin is available on demand and coming out on DVD on May 29.

Q: How do you get into a character like this, who is so angry and so self-contained?

A: You know there’s a lot in this movie that has to do with memory. Almost the whole movie is told through the hindsight perspective of Eva. For me, the formation of the character came in a similar fashion, where obviously what composes a human being will largely be the experiences of his life before the point that we meet him. In this movie we see really sort of the highlights in Eva’s memory from Kevin’s conception. For me, it was about sort of internalizing those memories and making those memories my own, elaborating on those memories and finding the way the track of this person’s life, in combination with just who he innately was, led him to feel so much rage and aggression and hostility.

A lot of that process is simply sitting and thinking and reminiscing on a lifetime that truly was not my own, was this invented lifetime and finding the way that that forms everything from the way that Kevin moves to the way he talks to the way he looks at his mother.

Q: John C. Reilly has talked about how the story is told through Eva’s eyes and since she is not necessarily a reliable narrator, it skewed the way he played the father. Did you feel that way as well?

A: It was absolutely a matter of at certain times addressing the fact that I was playing a dream figure or a formation of someone’s memory, particularly a memory at a time in her life when she is under the weight of extreme emotions, as sort of polarizing her reminiscence of who Kevin was at various times. I would say polarization would be the most prominent factor when someone’s looking back at this experience that they – because of the nature of an event, you associate all the details with the centerpiece of that event. Perhaps at times his malice is exaggerated in her hindsight. Those were certainly considerations the whole way through except for a single scene that I personally believe to be in real time and actual.

Q: How did this come to you? Was it just another script coming through your agent or was this something you knew about and actively pursued?

A: Oh yes! Initially, it came through an agent just like any other script does, in an email. But I read it and it sort of consumed me. It became instantaneously my most passionate pursuit. I’ve truly never wanted anything more. I vehemently chased this film. I went in and auditioned for it with a casting director. Then I met Lynne the second time I went in. I was very excited about it. I spent a bizarre majority of my time considering the way to approach this character, not knowing we were almost two years away from when the film would actually be made.

The film disappeared for a while, to my absolutely horror. I was pretty consistently annoying my agent when he was trying to show me other wonderful options and things that could be great and fun. I would say, “Yes, sure, cool, whatever. What’s going on with We Need to Talk About Kevin? What’s happening with that?” It vanished for a little while, as a lot of films at that time did – it was around the time of the economic crisis. Several months later it re-emerged and I was ecstatic and then put myself back on the intense regimen of spending most of my day considering how to properly approach this character.

Q: Was the audition process still going on at this point?

A: Yes. I met Lynne for a second time and then for a third time with her companion and co-writer Rory [Kinnear] and then after that, there was a chemistry read with Tilda. So now tensions are heightening and I’m sort of starting to become a nervous wreck in all other aspects of my life. I’m walking around subway platforms terrifying people, because I’m in character. I think when I was going to that chemistry read with Tilda someone actually got out of their seat on the subway platform and moved to the other end of the platform just because I’d been giving them the Kevin stare. Then after the chemistry read, I waited two weeks, just chewing every available part of my body. Any part of my body that my mouth could reach, I would chew incessantly.

Q: Was the chemistry test the end of the auditions?

A: I got a call from Lynne and she just had this specific thing that she really wanted to do. She wanted to see the last scene, because we’d been doing all these other scenes from the film and there’s an extreme difference in that last scene. There’s something new. We see a mask drop, we see a performance slip, Kevin’s performance. That’s really a key factor of that character, that pretty much all of the time that we see him, he is performing. So to see that change, to see that sort of glimpse through the facade, it was essential for Lynne to see.

She told me to come on Saturday and she meant Sunday. I came on Saturday and was waiting in the lobby and she had already left the building, but fortunately, she had forgotten her cell phone, so she came back and saw me there. “Oh my God, I’ve made such a mistake! Oh no, I’m so sorry! Why don’t you just come and have a drink with us?” I was not at the time old enough to drink. I’m still not old enough to drink by technical New York City/United States law, but I came and sat with them in this pub near the place where they were staying and we talked for about four hours about the movie and about the scene we were going to do the next day and the character. I really think that was sort of an invaluable accident. I think we were able to truly connect and understand that we felt and saw many of the same things for this film. So we said goodbye and I came back the next day. We did the scene and by the end of the scene, everybody was crying.

I still had to wait for another two weeks. At this point, most of my my body was down to bone. Then she cast me, so it was fortunate that I chewed myself down to bone, because then I had to lose 20 pounds to be the malnourished Kevin. That’s sort of the epic saga in its entirety.

Q: Lynne has said that one of the things that impressed her about you is that you were not intimidated by Tilda Swinton. Was that true from that first chemistry read or did that just fall away as you got to know her?

A: (Laughs) I wouldn’t say I wasn’t intimidated by Tilda Swinton. That seems like the highest form of hyperbole, but certainly when I entered that chemistry read, I was for the most part sort of within the mind frame of the character. When I met Tilda, obviously I stepped out of the mental initiative of that character and met Tilda, but still in sort of my emotional core was carrying this hatred, disgust and resentment. I think that sort of masked the true emotion, which was absolute admiration and a feeling of laudation toward Tilda, who has been one of my heroes in this art form for a long time. I think it was a convenient deception. It just sort of turned out that way. – Pam Grady

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