I am a Sex Addict

When I sat down to watch this movie, all I knew was that it had an intriguing title and it was something that my exquisitely film-literate friend Jeff was going to watch. It's a hybrid documentary, a mixture of voice-over and reenactments about the filmmaker Caveh Zahedi's struggles to true to be himself, be honest with the women he loves, and manage his insatiable desire for prostitutes.

The first thing you'll notice about this movie is that Caveh Zahedi, unlike most people one sees in sex scenes on film, is pretty gross. His eyes are buggy. He's skinny and weird and his body language is pretty desperate. He looks like a sex addict. You know immediately that what you are watching is pretty real - and that's what makes its mixture of derision and defense of his behavior so entertaining and interesting. He is asking us to mock him, but we also know that he is him; the filmmaker is not superior to his pathetic subject; he IS that pathetic subject.

Highly recommended. I laughed, I cringed, I did the "don't go in there!" horror movie routine. How often are movies both hilarious and strangely erotic? Plus it is a master class in making a low-budget into a benefit rather than a handicap. Zahedi goes on priceless (and short) digressions throughout the film, explaining the various filmmaking choices he had to make, in the same neurotic tone in which he explains why he had to have just one more prostitute. You will love him and you will be very glad that you/ your daughter/ your friend/ your mother is not the woman he is marrying at the end.

True Confessions

This movie, a kind of behind-the-scenes look at the machinations and repercussions of the Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles in 1948, stars Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall, two of my and everyone's all-time favorites, and was written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. So why is it so bad?

Briefly, the movie is not about the investigation or the crime - it is about two brothers caught on either side of it, one an ambitious monsignor who has been raising money for the church (DeNiro) by working with Jack Amsterdam, the dirty boss of Los Angeles, and one a corrupt LAPD detective who used to be in Jack Amsterdam's pocket and no longer is (Du Vall). The bad brother ends up ruining the good brother when he takes down a bad man. It's a wonderful irony and one that could have made a great movie but the problem is this: the movie centers around the investigation of a crime but doesn't depict it, so the moments of suspense fall flat because we don't have enough context to be able to do the guessing and double-guessing that make thrillers thrilling. The movie is like a long piece of New Journalism about a murder, made for an audience that wasn't reading the details in the dailies. After it was over, I wanted to google the details of the Black Dahlia murder.

I want to blame someone other than Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne for the screenplay. And in the general Culture of Creative Irresponsibility of Studio Pictures (perhaps the subject of another post in the future), it is always an option to assume that the screenwriter wrote something brilliant that was then diced up and reshaped into something not brilliant, but it is also true that the list of bad movies written by great prose writers and awesome couples is long - and whatever the reasons, I think this movie belongs on that list. As Didion-Dunne screenwriting collaborations so, I prefer Up Close and Personal.

How Do You Know, Written and Directed by James L. Brooks

Come on, it was pretty good!

This movie got horrid reviews. I don't normally like to read reviews until after I've seen a movie (and I guess I assume other people are the same, since I give away everything that happens in the movies I review here), but even I had read several snarky comments like "this movie lost its purpose along with the question mark," before I watched it. I think I even read that exact claim in a few places, so I'm not attributing it.

As all who know me know, I love romantic comedies, and I refuse to let go of hope for contemporary romantic comedies the way that some of my friends have. I can get incensed and rather emotional if I think that people are being snobby against romantic comedies, or unfairly privileging "better" genres of movies. But I still have standards. Of course I don't mind coincidences or situational misunderstandings, the cornerstone of the medium, but I can't stand movies that revolve around premises that feel emotionally fake. To highlight one of the most appalling of offerings: why exactly does one need to learn to lose a guy in ten days?

"How Do You Know" is an eccentric romantic comedy and one that could probably only have been made by an auteur of the genre because it basically has no hook. There's no essential misunderstanding that launches the plot, and the only coincidence to speak of (the fact that two characters share the same luxury DC apartment building, and its doorman) is hardly central. If, after the movie was over, the female lead was to describe to one of her friends how she met the man she ended up with, it would not sound remarkable - it would not automatically sound like the kind of thing that should be turned into a romantic comedy.

Lisa, played by Reese Witherspoon, is a professional softball player who gets cut from the national team that has defined her life and has to begin to face a life post-sports. She feels lost and decides to pursue a relationship that she knows is never going to be really serious with Matty, a goofy professional baseball star, played by Owen Wilson, who sleeps with so many women he has a supply closet full of team sweatshirts to temper their walks of shame. Around the same time, she meets George, played by Paul Rudd. He too has just been evicted from his life as a corporate who-knows-what, since he is now the subject of a federal investigation, for having done he-literally-doesn't-know-what. They have an awkward conversation before either of them knows that professional doom is on the way, and once he gets his bad news, he calls her and asks her out in an effort to distract himself. So desperate is he for distraction that he becomes obsessed with her. She likes him too, but she is distracting herself from her own doom by trying to make her relationship with Matty work. Then some other things happen and finally they get together. And unlike so many cloying studio romantic comedies, it's actually fun to watch!

The movie has flaws. There are some real comic misses, jokes that were so bad I felt myself almost laughing at them just out of pity because I liked the movie, and I found Reese Witherspoon tightly wound and kind of unlikable - there's almost something ugly about her cute little face. But Paul Rudd really committed to the role of the hapless bambi suitor who is actually right for the girl, and in the scene where he finally wins her heart by giving her play dough, I was rooting for him all the way. I agree with the New York Times pan that the single best moment in the movie may have been the declaration of love that George's secretary and best friend Annie receives from her boyfriend, Al (Kathryn Hahn and Lenny Venito), though the worst scene in the movie was the moment immediately following that one, when they try to recreate the moment because George forgot to click "record" on the video camera (I considered not liking the movie anymore for about 30 seconds right around then).

A small taste of how quietly bizarre this movie is: when George is making his final play for Lisa, we know that if she loves him back, George's father, played by a rascally Jack Nicholson, will have to go to jail for the rest of his life. So even though we want them to get together, we also kind of don't want it to work out. As they kiss happily in a bus stop, George knows this fact, and so does his father who - taking advantage of that one coincidence - sees them kissing from the vantage point of his balcony. He smiles to himself, happy to see his son in love. And then, remembering, he stops smiling. This movie isn't good enough to pull this off as a deep moment about the dark side behind every happy moment, but... come on, this movie was pretty good.

A Mention: "Career Girls" directed by Mike Leigh

In light of the review I wrote yesterday of "Another Year," I would like to mention another Mike Leigh movie that I saw recently and that I think is just about a perfect film: "Career Girls."

The movie takes place over a weekend when two college friends get together, not having seen each other in six years. It's also punctuated by flashbacks of the two of them in college, which really can't be described because they are so amazing. I'll only say this: the performances from the college days were so extreme that at first I honestly wasn't sure if I was supposed to assume that they were at a college for the mentally impaired, and it took me several scenes to come around to understanding that Katrin Cartlidge's character was NOT supposed to be a speed freak, since everything in my body was telling me that people not on drugs don't act like that. Ten minutes in though, I bought it. To me, that ten minute feeling that something must be very, very wrong with an actor is an good indication that a transcendent performance is about to unfold; I remember feeling the same way when I saw Mary Louise Parker play the lead in "Proof" in 2000: there must be something wrong with that girl; why is she playing the role like that? I gotta get out of here, think people will notice if I leave the theater? Well, I still remember that performance and I don't think I'll forget Katrin Cartlidge's performance as Hannah either. Lynda Steadman is also wonderful as Hannah's shy protege-turned-best-friend, Annie.

The flashbacks are all the most arresting and fantastic because the two characters look and behave completely different six years later. Not only that, but - a huge relief to those of us in the five-year-reunion moment of life! - they are a thousand times hotter, saner, and possibly even happier.

Their reunion adventures have them pretending to be rich and looking at real estate, and running into three of the main characters from their shared college past: the roommate they both ditched in order to move in together; a guy they both liked who eventually dumped both of them; an oddball who was living on their couch for a term and developed a crush on Annie that Hannah encouraged, but which never developed into anything. This last run-in, and the subsequent flashback that illuminates it, is what makes the movie not only a poignant and hilarious meditation on friendship and time, but also a deeply sad inquiry into the fact that reminiscing, however poignant or hilarious it may be, is a privilege to which only those who have survived the past are entitled.

I should also mention that Katrin Cartlidge's performance as the grown up Hannah is actually even superior to her performance as the mad child Hannah. With her beautiful horse-ish features and tall languid figure, she has all the arch charisma of Kristen Scott Thomas with considerably more edge. As an adult, she has come to know herself and the sources of her anger, and she no longer throws herself against the world with the shoulder-thrashing meanness she did as a young woman, but when she tells Annie with perfect frankness what her failings and troubles continue to be, one certainly doesn't have any false assurances that her future is resolved. These two performances together paint a portrait of a complicated and lovable person as real as any I can remember.

There's also something fascinating about watching this movie 13 years after it came out. With just enough time having past for the movie to be safely no-longer-contemporary, I had a sense watching it that the present moment in the film was just as calcified in the past as the film's past was. Hannah and Annie would be in their mid-40's now, nearly as far away from their reunion weekend now as they are from college. And actually, Katrin Cartlidge is dead, from a sudden illness when she was 41. Their time in college as well as the present-moment of the film, the weekend in London, are like all moments: presents destined to become pasts. And they are also like all filmed moments: rescued from the wreckage of time by the camera lens.

I wonder if I would have felt that quite as strongly if I had seen the movie in 1997 when it came out. (I did see my first Mike Leigh movie, "Secrets & Lies," in 1996 in the theater with my mom, so I very well might have - but didn't.) I was 14, so probably not! Though I did have a melancholy streak... Who knows. Who knows about any of it, man.

Film Review: Another Year

Gerri: Ruth Sheen

Tom: Jim Broadbent

Mary: Lesley Manville

Joe: Oliver Maltman

Katie: Katrina Fernandez

Ronnie: David Bradley

Last night I did something I almost never do and may not have done since I stopped watching VHS tapes: I watched the second half of a movie because I had not watched it all the way through the first time. The movie was Mike Leigh's "Another Year," and while many factors contributed to my having turned it off at an hour and 8 minutes last Friday, a prominent one was that I just needed a break from the misery. I have an artist friend who refuses to watch dramas of any kind, and I had a little bit of sympathy for that position during the movie.

"Another Year" tracks a year in the lives of a couple, Tom and Gerri, their thirty-year-old son Joe, and Gerri's divorced friend Mary. Other characters come into the film throughout, each of whose life seems to exist somewhere between Tom and Gerri's blissful contentment and Mary's lonely life of unmet needs. When we first meet Gerri, we see her in her professional capacity as a therapist. She is speaking to an abject woman (Imelda Staunton from Vera Drake), attempting to counsel her out of a depression that has left her sleepless for a year. Gerri, her face a buck-toothed question mark of a smile, asks this woman to remember the happiest moment of her life. To me, this seemed like a cruel question, and one rather out of touch with the reality of despair. As a viewer, I couldn't answer the question myself and any answers I could come up with seemed in themselves reasons to be sad (two weeks in a summer I spent years ago; a moment of achievement that pointed toward the certainty of a future that wasn't certain; another such moment). We next see Gerri in a similar dynamic with her old friend and colleague Mary. Mary is a mess, though when we first meet her, she is a relatively cheerful mess. She is one of those incredibly vulnerable people one meets in life whose crippling lack of self-awareness ensures that she can never solve her problems. She is lovable when we meet her and Gerri, who is clearly indulging her, again feels smugly superior. At that point, my expectations became set that this would a movie about the how the happy Gerri is actually a knot of rage, and soon she will come apart and Mary, at least honest with her unhappiness, will emerge victorious.

This never happens. Instead, as the movie goes on, in the excruciating real-life manner in which Mike Leigh's movies do, the dark and miserable reality of Mary's life becomes increasingly sad and hard to take. She is never going to be the hero of this tale. She is the Blanche Dubois of this universe, and hope as I might that one of the men who wander into the story will become the man who can rescue from her self, she remains evermore and ever less-sustainably dependent not on the kindness of strangers, but on a crumb from its cake: the indulgence of friends. In the film's most excruciating sequence, Mary arrives for a date at Tom and Gerri's, only to be surprised by their son Joe and his new girlfriend, Katie. Mary has a crush on Joe, whom she has known since he was ten. Mary was clearly once a very attractive woman and part of her attraction to Joe seems to be nostalgia for an earlier time in their lives together, when he probably had an adolescent crush on her. By the time he brings Katie home, nothing remains of that crush. It's at this moment that we realize how truly out of control Mary really is - that there is nothing funny about her situation at all. Joe's girlfriend Katie, like Joe himself, is affable to the point of nausea (note: do I just hate the mores of the British Middle Class?), but as we watch Mary sulk and seethe in the presence of her competition, and opine about the many traumas she and her car have suffered recently, it is clear that even Katie is a far more eligible option than poor Mary.

In previous scenes with Mary, I felt myself consciously trying not to identify with Gerri and Tom's outlook on the scene, but it was here, at the dining room table with Joe, Katie, Gerri and Tom, that I finally could not help taking glances at Gerri across the table. Gerri was her most likable in the scene that immediately followed this one, where she and Tom discussed Mary's horrible behavior and when Gerri said that it was "very upsetting," I believed her, and saw that she was a really good person, not just a person pretending to be a really good person.

I wonder if this movie doesn't serve as a kind of Rorschach test to determine one's attitude towards winners and losers. I am sure there are people I know who identified and sympathized with Gerri from beginning until end, but after everything, and maybe because of the mesmerizing performance of Lesley Manville, my alliances never really changed.

I was still rooting for Mary until the very end, when Ronnie, Tom's just-widowed brother turns up as a last desperate romantic possibility. Even as the last final shot lingered on her sad face, and I knew that it was the last shot of the movie, I still found myself hoping against hope that there would be some kind of Woody Allen-esque coda, where we would see that Mary ended up running away with Ronnie to Majorca, where she once worked as a cocktail waitress, and suddenly discovering happiness in middle age. I've never watched a movie that has made me feel more emphatically that the key to happiness in life is simply having someone to be with. Especially in the last shot, as we watch Mary's sad face, listening to Tom's happy story of the seven months that he and Gerri spent traveling the world when they were young and newly in love, I had the sense that what Mary doesn't have in her life is exactly what Mike Leigh and we the audience are giving her at that very moment: we are bearing witness. It seems like so little, but for those who don't have it, it can be everything.

Sex and the City 2

Okay, yes of course it's bad. Something doesn't get the kind of reviews it's gotten without being really fucking bad. The first one was bad; this one is bad. It's still not entirely clear why that has to be the case, but it seems to be a fact at this point that Sex and the City movies are bad.

So how bad is it? And is there still a redemptive reason to go shell out $12 to see it?

It's so bad that you talk to your friend throughout the whole showing, somewhere between speech, laugh and wail:

"Why! Why!"

"I expected more of Miranda!"

"This plotline is so desperate!"

"Just wait, now it's going to get even worse"

"Does she really not know anything about relationships?"

"Oh carrie."

"That line's so bad she can barely say it!"

You bury your head in your hand and laugh, not at the jokes but at the shame.

It's so bad that when the fabulous fashion and the opulent wealth fill the screen, all you can think about is carbon footprints. "It's obscene," you cry into your friend's shoulder. "They're already rich! Why do they want moooore?"

It's so bad that when Samantha cries out "Lawrence of my labia!" about a hot Danish architect and gamely throws herself on to her friends in girlish longing, for the first time in the movie you have an inkling of why the gals are in Abu Dhabi: because Michael Patrick King thought of that line first and wondered how he could use it.

It's so bad that when Carrie gets upset about a caricature drawing of herself that accompanies a bad review of her new book in the New Yorker, the image of a woman with crisscrossed tape over her mouth is only offensive until you remember the movie you are watching and agree with the reviewer that perhaps Carrie should consider not speaking anymore.

And yet...and yet...it's still kinda fun!

What the Sex and the City movies have become is a sort of girly version of Startrek. When Carrie goes on an idiotic date with Mr. Big, she wear a dress patterned with the New York Times typeface and a woman in the orchestra level of the theater -- I was in the Mezzanine at Lincoln Square -- screamed out "I love that dress!" A little murmur went through the crowd: "wait, which episode was that dress from?" “I remember that episode!”

At one point, which I dare not give away lest I spoil the moment for some other intrepid movie-goer, something happens that we all thought was a bad idea and spontaneously, everyone hissed! I was right there with them. Screaming, booing and hissing! Girl you didn't! I wouldn’t have been surprised if popcorn and junior mints were thrown. It was phenomenal.

And then later, at the comic climax of the movie, when things take a turn so lurid and outrageous that I genuinely cracked up, everyone in the audience was howling and cheering!

The audience didn't laugh at the bad jokes. They landed like giant pancakes in a swimming pool. The audience didn't coo over the insane wealth or the false notes. But everyone was there to have a good time. The movie is such a mess, especially in the insane second half, that the theater felt like going into the kitchen at a wild party. "Look at those people out there!" the strangers were saying to each other, leaning up against the fridge. "What the hell is going on."

At one crucial (and totally cliched, but actually well-written, which made it rare) moment, when Miranda and Charlotte have a drink just the two of them and confess that certain things about motherhood aren't perfect, there was a sense that we were all at that bar with them, taking long sips of our martinis in order to be able to face the mad and chaotic debris of what was once a beloved series.

It’s the kind of movie you discuss while standing outside on the street afterwards, with friends and with strangers. So what if you’re rehashing just how outrageously bad it was and whether there were any good parts, and whether anything at all could be salvaged from the whole depraved thing? It was stimulating and it was fun.

Why do we go to the movies anymore, when we can watch anything at home? We go for the shared experience of the theater. At least that's why I go. And SATC2 was totally worth the $12 for what I'm sure will be my most hilarious theatrical experience of the summer.

Just please go with someone so you can talk through the whole thing.

That Face by Polly Stenham

That Face, the British play which opened last night from the Manhattan Theater Club, is about a dysfunctional family. Mom is an alcoholic and also probably insane. Dad is gone, in Asia with his new family. And the two teenaged children have to deal with the situation. Henry, the older of the two, is his mother's caretaker and companion, while Mia is a boarding school rebel.

I saw the play twice, once at its invited dress rehearsal and once last night at opening night. The first time, I was impressed with the the theatricality of the play, even as I felt that the reason I was aware of its theatricality, as separate simply from it, was because it was somewhat contrived. The play opens on a scene during which an unconscious girl sits in the middle of the stage, bound and gagged, as her boarding school housemates argue about how best to torture her. It creates a good deal of suspense and I noted that, impressed. Likewise, I noted the way that the pseudo-incestuous relationship between Henry and his mother created uncomfortable suspense that propelled the play forward. In a scene in a hospital, the constant threat that someone might come in and find our characters in a compromised position created suspense; I noted it. In the final scene, a huge dramatic blowout among the four characters in the first time they have shared a room in years, Henry is dressed in his mother's nightgown, his mother's jewelry and his mother's make-up. "You look ridiculous," remarks his father in the middle of the drama and he does. And it's a shrewd move on to the part of the playwright. But the first time I saw it, I didn't feel much because I basically felt like I could see through to the bones of the thing. It hadn't come alive yet.

Last night, I felt much differently. Last night, as I watched the show, three weeks more rehearsed and with the intermission removed, I was much less aware of the devices and much more aware of the emotions and the real drama. This time around, it seemed much less a story of extremes pumped for their dramatic value and much more a universal story. When the final scene unfolded and everyone was in misery, I had the sense that it was every divorce I was watching unfold. The children blaming themselves and their parents; the mother needing too much; the father wanting too little.

It was an interesting lesson in scheduling. In the future, I will think twice about going to a play when it's in previews.

NOTE: I wrote this before the largely poor reviews came out. I wonder when the reviewers went. They must have gone in previews, but I wonder whether it was closer to the Invited Dress or to Opening Night.