HELLO, DOLLY! {1969}

Cast: Barbra Streisand, Michael Crawford, Walter Matthau
Director: Gene Kelly
Screenplay: Ernest Lehman
Studio: Twentieth Century Fox
Running-time: 146 mins
Genre: Musical
Country: USA




Consider this well-found fact that this 1969 musical has gained more popularity since it was featured in Pixar's WALL-E, and has boosted its DVD sales compared to its last four decades' worth of box office gross. That says an awful lot for a film where public consciousness has been drawn towards it not because of the film itself, but through another medium. For all the loveliness and resonating sentimentality entrenched in WALL-E, where the musical's unabashed romanticism is masterfully evoked (see the great opener in the tune of Michael Crawford's "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" to an ironically bleak, visceral wasteland, and "It Only Takes A Moment" with Wall-E and Eve clinching in the rustic shack) - Hello, Dolly! is completely the opposite. Extraordinarily theatrical, cluttered, bloated, and shriekingly shallow. The primary plot involves a widower, supposedly in her menopausal phase, gallivanting around New York City and Yonkers, New York pairing lovey-dovey couples, even ill-matched ones, whilst surreptitiously slicing her way into famous Yonkers merchant Horace Vandergelder (a name that rings like cash) beyond everyone's belief, including the oblivious Vandergelder himself. Dolly Levi is not only a matchmaker by profession but essentially a conspirator, a manipulator and provider of man's illusions. Not to mention, Barbra Streisand, despite of her terrific presence, comedic gab, and soul-sweeping vocal jurisdiction (she was the warbling mega-star of the world at the time, where Julie Andrews vacated the podium for a while), is also terribly miscast, a 27-year old actress playing a fifty-something woman, making her worldly-wise put-upon wholly unconvincing and her chemistry with leading middle-aged man Walter Matthau nondescript. And the musical sequences such as "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" and the utterly bombastic and lavish scenes in the Harmonia Gardens are fun but the set-pieces are ringing with clear contrivances and unnecessary. Dolly Levi's entrance is given more social importance than even the Queen of England gets, and Harmonia Gardens end up like a stage, a restaurant porn. Okay, Louis Armstrong gets a cameo, but he only appears for five minutes as the Gardens' bandleader, and then disappears entirely. His screen presence, whilst thrilling, competes with that of Streisand. What were the studio honchos thinking, "Oh, let's get Armstrong in this, just for the hell of it."



If there's a musical that makes you think less of the musical genre, it's Hello, Dolly! Extravagant, pompous, shriekingly shallow and has a terribly miscast Streisand. No wonder why it bombed and sealed the death of musicals circa 1969.



Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

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FUNNY GIRL {1968}

Cast: Barbra Streisand, Omar Sharif
Director: William Wyler
Screenplay: Isobel Lennart
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Running-time: 151 mins
Genre: Musical/Drama
Country: USA




There are only a very few actresses in the Academy Awards history who have won for musical roles and all of them are onscreen debuts - Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins, Liza Minnelli in Cabaret and Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. Albeit Streisand technically occupied half of the 1968 podium with Katherine Hepburn in Lion in the Winter (it's the only Best Actress tie, hitherto), her musical-comedic role of Fanny Brice, a street urchin of lower East Side who turned into a vaudevillian Ziegfield star, is a rare moment for the musical genre where the movie star legitimately nails down the central character, both carrying the entire show and often at the expense of other supporting characters. It's a magnificent, limelight-stealing, show-conquering performance, and Streisand, with all her performing abilities and sheer vocal prowess, overshadows almost everything in this film, the entire cast, the costumes, the leading man and even the direction itself. She makes Omar Sharif, who plays the dashing entrepreneur-cum-gambler Nick Arnstein, look dull, turns the whole dazzling Ziegfield extravaganza a little less sparklier. It is, without a doubt, one of the best musical performances Hollywood has ever seen, rubbing elbows with Minnelli's stunning Sally Bowles in Cabaret.

But take Streisand out of Funny Girl, and we have an often laboriously melodramatic film, formulaic, straying into a conventional pattern of a low-life dreamer who is given the chance to show off her schtick and then meets the man of her dreams in the process, gets married and finds out that marriage is not as jolly as the folks in her town claim to be. So there are lots of suffering, lots of singing about suffering - but thankfully, Fanny Brice is a comic character creation, finding the humour in the most clichéd of moments and when some scenes turn into a rote path, Streisand always have the bon mots and the gift of perfect comic timing. And nothing in Streisand not to love here. She does not only sing, but she acts every song, means every line, whether it be a melodious, sentimental number "People", a goofy roller-skate gag "I'd Rather Be Blue Over You" or a showstopping belter "Don't Rain On My Parade". And director William Wyler had rightly guided her to that Oscar trophy (after all, this is a luminous director who had waltzed with forty stars into an Oscar acting win), his camera capturing Streisand's unique facial features and many of the film's eloquent camera sweeps, may it be as complex as craning vertiginously over a ballet sequence or as simply restrained as following Streisand's figure in an alley, a dramatic character entrance, to the final closing shot of her fading into black stage backdrop.



This is Streisand's central, magnificent show through and through, eclipsing anything and anyone in Funny Girl. It's a musical/comic masterstroke, elevating an otherwise formulaic film about a star's rise-and-shine, William Wyler's first and only musical in his entire formidable filmography.



Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

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A SINGLE MAN {2010}

Cast: Colin Firth, Julianna Moore, Matthew Goode, Nicholas Hoult
Director: Tom Ford
Screenplay: Tom Ford
Studio: Artina Films/Fade to Black
Running-time: 101 mins
Genre: Drama/Adaptation
Country: USA




Imagine this - in an alternate universe located somewhere between platforms of glittering catwalks and lofty billboards, anybody who occupied the high altars of fashion could easily pull silken strings and make a super-stylised art-film-fart filled with impossibly beautiful, genetic-laboratory-specified people. The result could have been an over-preening, self-conscious, self-aggrandising piece of lunkhead, tailored to fit the equally superficial industry of physical glamour. Let's face it, all the Lagerfelds, Versaces, Karans could do this, and Tom Ford is one of them. But instead of making a Warholian art-trash project, fashion designer guru Tom Ford, saviour of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, purveyor of sharp suits, golden grooming and unapologetic Vanity Fair spreads with naked Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson, crafts a solemn, sensitive film about grief and mortality, courtesy of Christopher Isherwood's novel of the same name A Single Man. Of course, this isn't without handsome people and perfectly tailored wardrobe, the film is consciously rife with it. What's remarkable in A Single Man is that there's actually profundity in its proceedings, despite of its fashion-conscious mise-en-scene and cinematography that occasionally resembles a stylish, upmarket men's aftershave advert (after its impeccably framed scenes, you'd somehow expect a perfume name would rise at the after-credits, Gorgeous Mourning by Tom Ford). Beautifully shot that it resembles a Wong Kar Wai mood-piece set in Los Angeles; the banality of daily life shot in washed-out, grey-and-tan hues as Colin Firth's grieving, homosexual English professor George Falconer tries to go through what seems to be his last day on this earthen wasteland, and then becomes vibrantly, cinematically alive when he reflects on old, happy memories with his long-time partner Jim (a good Matthew Goode). It's a wise, stylistic choice, also reminiscent to an early shades of Godard, playing with colours and using them meaningfully to represent moods and emotional temperatures. Ford, as it seems, knows his film canon.


But, of course, for a film debut, there are gaffes. Fashion commercial argument aside, there are elements in the story that appears to be some big, prurient joke. A Single Man comes very close to implying that it's perfectly alright to lose a lover in a fatal car accident, because there's always a beautiful stranger around, specifically a James Dean lookalike, hanging outside your local off-license, or a pretty-boy student in your class, ever attentive and is more interested in the lecturer rather than the lecture itself. This is mainly nitpicking, as both characters serves as George's escapism and also a reminder that life is worth living, in one way or another. Thanks, then, to Julianne Moore's brilliant recreation Charley, George's best friend, showing off her London socialite tongue, giving the film a sense of human balance. Charley is the Yang to George's Yin; impulsive, emotionally uncontrolled, unsettled divorcee, forever wasting on Gauloise and alcohol whereas George is the repressed and refined one, a man who once truly loved and then lost someone. Colin Firth, in a decade's worth of typecasting, has finally found a role that is perfectly tailored and groomed for him, embodying a man whose lament on life and shattering grief is considerably a private matter, drifting through his last day as it were an ordinary one. Firth's Englishness is an ace, a testament to human stoicism in the midst of a personal storm.



A visually accomplished, nuanced and stylish mood-piece in the shades of Wong Kar Wai and Jean-Luc Godard, and that's enough comparison which Tom Ford should be proud of. It might look swish, all glossed and groomed up, but A Single Man is no kitsch, trash stuff out from the world of fashion. It's a sombre, sensitive study of love's labour's lost, of private grief, albeit a gorgeously mounted one with an impeccable turn from Firth.




Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

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MANON DES SOURCES {1986}

Cast: Yves Montand, Emmanuelle Béart, Daniel Auteuil
Director: Claude Berri
Screenplay: Claude Berri, Gérard Brach
Producer: DD Productions
Running-time: 113 mins
Genre: Drama/Adaptation
Country: France




Part Two of the classic French rural drama conveys a slightly darker and vindictive personality compared to its other film brother, Jean de Florette. Sure, Florette has Yves Montand's aged, conniving Papet and Daniel Auteuil's irresolute Ugolin conspire to overthrow the new outsider planting crops next to their land, and has murder in the name of heritage preservation written all over its landscape, the second act Manon des Sources transforms the themes of greed and monopoly into a revenge saga and ultimately, a tragic spectacle of human culpability. Here, villain Cesar Soubeyran takes the backseat as the story allows the enchanting, free-spirited Manon, the daughter of the ill-fated Jean de Florette, unleash her beautiful vengeance on the two neighbouring crooks. While she's not busy shepherding flocks and flouncing around mountains, occasionally naked like a nymph, she's stooping into caves, blocking secret main sources of water and letting people down the hills suffer in thirst and agricultural drought. Emmanuelle Béart plays Manon sumptuously, all sun-kissed beauty and pastoral grace, but her loathing is often impulsive rather than calculating, which lessens the gravity of her revenge at the end. Autueil's Ugolin, meanwhile, a character less regarded in the first film, also takes centre stage as he becomes hopelessly captivated by Manon's charms, literally sewing her hair ribbon into his chest. His tragedy is further given more resonance when Cesar learns a bitter truth, a tragic twist of fate in his own making, that the man he once plotted to kill was his one true heir. Yves Montand's sobering, heart-wrenching performance in the final act almost overshadows everything in this film.



Some nitpicky contrivances aside, Manon des Sources stands up right alongside its film brother Jean de Florette. Berri concludes this Provençal melodrama in sumptuous fashion, with a beautiful, aggrieved shepherdess seeking retribution and an avaricious landowner facing his own tragic, self-made comeuppance.




Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

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JEAN DE FLORETTE {1986}

Cast: Yves Montand, Gerard Depardieu, Daniel Auteuil
Director: Claude Berri
Screenplay: Claude Berri, Gerard Brach
Producer: DD Productions
Running-time: 120 mins
Genre: Drama/Adaptation
Country: France




Had Claude Berri's prestige picture Jean de Florette been made earlier in the 1960's, it would have suffered an immense, irrevocable blow from French cinema's most formidable critics and would be subsequently dusted out from film books. Fortunately, in historical context, this was made and released in the 80's, the nouvelle vague had dimmed and the cinéma du papa, or the heritage cinema, had claimed its rebirth. The equivalent to the British costume drama, it consisted of a body of films adapted from literary sources, but where the quintessential British period film portrays upper-class snobbery, upstairs-and-downstairs chaos, the French heritage cinema explores the rural landscape where the class system is out of the question and centres rather on the mysteries of provincial folks. Yet this never escaped the scathing scrutiny of French critics (both the best and worst in the world), branding this as a traditionalist affair rather than going forward. In close inspection of style, the critics were right: Florette is the complete antithesis of New Wave cinema, favouring linear film narrative, beautific photography and overt melodrama. But what critics had seem to ignore was no matter how literate this kind of filmmaking was, Florette remains to be a glorious melodrama. Unfussy in its style, free from the jump-cuts and self-conscious attitudes of an auteurist effort, Berri takes his time to tell the story of human avarice amid the beautifully photographed, pastoral landscapes of Provence. The plot is fairly simple - a landowner and his nephew conspire to claim the neighbouring land owned by a city-slicker, the titular hunchback Jean de Florette, played mesmerisingly by Gérard Depardieu, by surreptitiously blocking the main water source of the land. Water, here, is the classic origin of conflict, and this dark narrative of greed and murder conspiracy just unfolds unhurriedly, to an intriguing effect it will keep you rooted. And Yves Montand is deliciously oily and conniving as the affluent, ageing farmer Cesar Soubeyran, one of his last roles before his death, and despite the film being named after Depardieu's thwarted agricultural newbie, this is Montand's film and his plot to meet his own end, which transforms into a karma backlash, as told in Part Two.



Whether you agree with the damning attack of French critics or nod along with the millions of who praised and loved this French soap-opera, there's no denying that Jean de Florette is an exquisitely photographed, lovingly portrayed elemental tale of land, water and the people that fought to possess them.




Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

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NINE {2009}

Cast: Daniel Day Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson
Director: Rob Marshall
Screenplay: Michael Tolkin, Anthony Minghella
Producer: Weinstein Company
Running-time: 1 hr 58 mins
Genre: Musical/Drama
Country: USA





The musical is a dying breed. Forget the frivolous, lightweight pretenders High School Musical, Hairspray and even the soppy Dreamgirls. We're talking about real musical bravura here, rock-solid gravitas and razzle-dazzle performances that could make our jaws drop, worthy successors of either Cabaret or Oliver!. Musical productions as grandiose and resplendent as any Gene Kelly picture or a Barbra Streisand vehicle or a Baz Lhurmann bonanza. So in attempt to perhaps resurrect the bygone age of golden musicals, the interplanetary system of Hollywood deliberately gathers an ensemble of stars with the hope to deliver some lost gravitas in the mainstream musical genre. And there is not quite an ensemble you'll ever see, as Rob Marshall, the purported Bob Fosse of this living, breathing generation, cherry-picks a sizzling hot lineup of Oscar-laden actors. Nine, a screen adaptation of the Broadway musical, which in turn is based on Frederico Fellini's masterpiece 8 ½, has a dream cast that could make a casting agent go radio ga ga.

It has Daniel Day-Lewis gurgling out notes as the anguished, existentialist Italian filmmaker Guido Contini, playing along with the female star-power panoply of Dame Judi Dench as his costume-designer-cum-confidante, Marion Cotillard his beautiful, neglected wife, Penelope Cruz his raunchy mistress, Nicole Kidman his shimmering muse, Kate Hudson his Vogue journalist fling, Fergie (of Black Eyed Peas) the local hooker of his childhood days, and Sophia Loren as his ghostly Mama. The array is formidable and surely there is enough acclaim and Oscar golden trophies between these cast that could very well sink an entire ship.

It's all very promising, only until the film itself. What seems to be a guaranteed extravaganza in supernova proportions ends up as a curiously flat and hollow affair. Despite of its gorgeous art direction and cinematography, which often shifts from black-and-white reels of Guido's childhood to the lovingly burnished 60's Italia, the intentional thematic weight of Nine feels somehow lost in translation, making Day-Lewis' Guido more of a surly, self-possessed, confused man-child eternally sucking up cigarettes rather than a middle-aged man beset with mid-life angst, sexual provocation, existentialism and artistic impediment. This is a Guido far detached from reality, and to an extent, detached from Fellini's Guido, despite of Day-Lewis' best attempt.

The ladies, meanwhile, deliver nuance with varying degrees, ranging from spectacular to playful and then just plain awful. Marion Cotillard is easily the best thing about Nine, playing the overlooked wife with poignancy and redemptive strength. Like Anouk Aimee in 8 ½, Cotillard steals the entire show, underplaying all throughout and then subsequently pulling the rug from everyone's feet, as her Luisa beautifully evokes inner marital pain, with her two big numbers "My Husband Makes Movies" and the Cabaret-esque showstopper "Take It All". Dench, with her usual deadpan wit, plays a good sidekick to Guido and pulling off a wonderful, if reverential, musical piece "Folies Bergeres", and Penelop Cruz is scintillating with her steamy, lingerie-clad "Call From the Vatican". Fergie delivers the most vocally powerful number of them all, the stomper "Be Italian". However, the rest are underused: Nicole Kidman and Kate Hudson, with the quietly luminous "Unusual Way" and the sparkling go-go girl number "Cinema Italiano" respectively, are no more than pretty decorations, and Sophia Loren is criminally utilised here like some face of a lost relic.



What promises to be a bombastic musical with a shamanic alignment of megawatt star-power ends up with barely a bang. Rob Marshall's Nine, despite of its lavish, slick production, gorgeous cinematography and art direction that oozes with 60's retro chic, is a film of misfired ambitions. Far from Fellini's original 8½, this is a mediocre, passable, if not entertaining, affair.




Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

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IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE {1946}

Cast: James Stewart, Donna Reed
Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Jo Swerling, Frank Capra
Producer: Liberty Films
Running-time: 130 mins
Genre: Drama
Country: USA





From its premise alone - a small-town do-gooder plunges into Christmas despair as tribulations heap up on him like piled snow, whilst the starry heavens wink on him and send a gentle, wingless angel to save this miserable soul - it's destined to be cloyingly sentimental stuff, one that could make film cynics huff-and-puff and reduce this to corny, mawkish wish-fulfilment. Instead, this one's made it as a "Christmas classic", one that's been running for years on television like an annual feast, beloved by both sides of the family spectrum, be it Nan, Grandad, Mum, a bit of Dad, and Child. The Dog's quite possibly seen this one, too, on a dozy post-turkey dinner. Sure, the high-school sequences in the beginning have now appeared stilted and stereotyped, but this is a film that builds one sentiment after another, that in the end, in an overtly heart-wrenching climax, it's hard not to be moved and overwhelmed by the simplicity of Frank Capra's message picture.


And it's not all sugar-coated loveliness, there are darker themes It's a Wonderful Life strays into: contemplation of suicide on a Christmas night, existentialism, economic breakdown and corporate evil, and Capra is not afraid to touch these territories. But he remains true to the values to family life and the sense of goodness, which thankfully the film does not preachify. Okay, some heavenly bodies in the galaxy above sparkle and talk like they do in a nursery puppet show, but that's a minor gripe. What's remarkable is that Capra does not intellectualise the story, conveying pure emotions from a man who desired to travel the world and live up to his dreams but is leashed on his community, a responsibility that he simply cannot shake off. The film then meddles on fantasy elements such as guardian angels and visions as everyman George Bailey is transported into a hellish netherworld where his identity is wiped out, in a sequence so rivetingly portrayed where Bailey sees the town without his existence, a morally crumbling Pottersville. It's a beautiful, stirring message of how we influence lives around us even in the smallest of ways. And come the glorious denouement, only the hardest of hearts shall be left untouched.



A genuinely redemptive film that goes beyond its pigeonholed "Christmas classic" status. Frank Capra conjures a magic trick here, a decidedly dark message-movie with a feel-good factor that is rarely delivered even from the most populist of directors today. And James Stewart has rarely been better. It will make you laugh, be fascinated and then sob into your glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.




Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

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CITIZEN KANE {1941}

Cast: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten
Director: Orson Welles
Screenplay: Orson Welles, Herman J. Mankiewicz
Producer: RKO Radio Pictures
Running-time: 144 mins
Genre: Drama/Noir/Mystery
Country: USA




Only a very privileged few could ever stand up against this perennial masterpiece, Orson Welles' much-ballyhooed 1941 vanity project Citizen Kane. There isn't any other film in mind (or you'd have to scour dusty old film libraries) that endured as much backlash and critical thrashing during its release, with its immediate box-office flop, and then amassed recognition through time, galloping like a dark horse and emerge a cinematic triumph, ever garlanded by any movie critic as "the greatest film of all-time". Ask those BFI honchos and Sight & Sound pundits, they'll give you a roll-call of how many decades this film has become a mainstay in numero uno in their top ten polls. With its almost legendary place in the canon of cinema, it has various attachments to its name almost dizzying in comparison to so-called "groundbreaking film", a moniker used very lightly today but certainly not in 1941 when the golden age of cinema was just at simmering point - Citizen Kane deployed deep-focus cinematography for future filmmakers and film scholars to chew on, gave birth to the American biopic genre, re-established the dying montage cinema, and revolutionised the film narrative, eschewing linear storytelling and opts for dazzling, anti-chronological structure that has influenced hundreds of films we see today. In other words, this is a film worthy of a post-film pub talk. From Martin Scorcese's The Aviator to Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, from David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks to Matt Groening's The Simpsons, Citizen Kane has been imitated, spoofed, paid homage to by a list that is almost boundless.


But for all its technical bravado and cinematic importance, audience throughout the years have somehow sidestepped the immensity of Kane's most vital element - storytelling in cinema. If you'd think that James Cameron's Avatar has officially revolutionised cinema, you'd have to see Citizen Kane to think twice. Avatar's purported 3D innovation pales in comparison to what Kane has achieved, marrying technicalities with narrative ingenuity, utilising collaborative techniques (cinematography, editing, sound, misé-en-scene) to dramatically enhance the story of newspaper-mogul-turned-misanthrope Charles Foster Kane. The result is a genuinely exhilarating reconstruction of this renowned man's life after his death, told through newsreels, flashbacks, detective investigation through the people that surrounded him and a series of montages so beautifully effective and allegorical. The breakfast montage, for instance. Years of marriage summarised in impeccably timed editing and intelligent scriptwriting.


And there is also the enigma of "Rosebud", Charles Kane's dying word, a deux ex machina that sets off the plot running, with detectives and journos trying to uncover the meaning of the word that might solve Kane's death. This is where Citizen Kane really soars - a story that has an infinite resonance to our modern world, a metaphorical and metaphysical comment on commercialism, monopolistic proprietorship, capital greed and envy, and ultimately, the human pursuit of wealth and power as substitution to happiness. "I don't think any word can explain a man's life," ruminates one of the journos in the film's end, rummaging through the warehouse of Xanadu, Kane's private palatial Alexandria, housing many of the world's ancient artefacts. "Anyway, it wouldn't have solved anything," he continues. They think "Rosebud" did not exist. In fact, it did, and still does in the hearts of many. All the Murdochs, Turners and Rothschilds in the world had better recheck their ambitions, as Citizen Kane satirises that kind of life, that search for material glory only to arrive in an existential point of emptiness. As we see the flames licking Kane's childhood sled named "Rosebud", there's a deeply poignant recognition that what Kane was searching for in his entire life was that sense of purity, something transient yet eternal, a paradox in a life of lost innocence.



A glorious, towering achievement in 20th century cinema. Even now, this remains the most revolutionary piece of celluloid since the dawn of the sound era, or perhaps since the invention of cinema itself. Thrillingly innovative, giddily entertaining and impeccably framed, shot, acted and directed. Orson Welles, for all his narcissism, will have you moved and converted.




Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

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