Weekly round-up

Hollywood antics, an expressionistic musical, Jamaican genius and family foibles

OLD-SCHOOL ABSURDITY: Un capitalisme sentimental

by MALCOLM FRASER,
MATTHEW HAYS,
MARK SLUTSKY and
CHRISTOPHER SYKES

What Just Happened?
It’s hard to know how much of the good feeling around What Just Happened? has to do with the film’s actual quality and the relief of seeing Robert De Niro making a film that isn’t utterly dreadful. Here, he plays a successful Hollywood producer, caught between studio execs, artsy directors and nut job actors (Bruce Willis has a field day playing himself).

Director Barry Levinson clearly knows this material very well indeed, showing us the innards of the vile, self-serving, egomaniacal class of people who run Tinseltown. When Hollywood turns its lens on itself the results are either sublime (Sunset Boulevard or The Player) or just plain stupid (Simone). Luckily, What Just Happened? leans towards the good rather than the bad and ugly.

SHOWBIZ SHENANIGANS: What Just Happened?

De Niro handles his character well, a flawed but somewhat sympathetic man trapped by a town soaked in mammon, someone whose dishonesty is “in his DNA,” as one of his exes puts it, not so delicately. Only those with multiple faces can possibly survive in a place like this Levinson tells us, with a wink that’s thankfully not too cloying.

Sean Penn delivers a nice little jab at himself, playing the Actor Who Likes Edgy in a film-within-a-film that manages to parody dubious Hollywood screen-testing practices and artsy Euro-auteurs at the same time. Film buffs will swoon. (MH)

Un capitalisme sentimental
Despite its clunky title, the latest from local director Olivier Asselin isn’t a dour political polemic, but an expressionistic musical laden with old-school cinematic technique and loaded with metaphors galore. In an extraordinary bit of good timing, it also has to do with a stock market crash caused by overheated investment in ridiculous products.

Set in the 1920s, it stars Lucille Fluet as Fernande, a self-described unremarkable woman who travels from Quebec to Paris in a balloon and decides to launch a career as an artist, without the benefit of any particular talent. She falls in with unscrupulous bohemian Max (Paul Ahmarani), who has connections to high society. In a Trading Places-like setup, a rich businessman (Alex Bisping) makes a bet with two fellow tycoons that he can transform Fluet into a social and financial phenomenon. He brings her to the U.S., where he begins trading shares of her on the stock market. Multiple betrayals and ruins ensue.

The film’s hyper-stylized sets, absurdist plot twists and deliberately over-the-top acting recall a less twisted Guy Maddin or a low-budget Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Like Maddin, Asselin has a thing for cinema’s early days, and evokes the style of 1920s film while adding perverse contemporary twists. As well, he pulls off whimsy without falling into the cesspool of cutesiness, a difficult balancing act indeed. Those of us who require realism and logic in a film should stay away, but those who like flights of fancy will find much to enjoy. (MF)

Made in Jamaica
The island of Jamaica may not be particularly large, or wealthy, or peaceful—it’s not really any of those things—but it is one of the most creative places on earth. The sheer amount of musical genius to pour out of the little Caribbean island—the hundreds of brilliant ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub and dancehall artists—imply that there’s something very special about the place.

ROOTS AND REGGAE:
Made in Jamaica

Jérome Laperrousaz’s Made in Jamaica is a new doc that skims the surface of Jamaica’s complex history and rich musical legacy. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: a comprehensive study of the subject matter would require at least a mini-series, let alone a 90-minute film. Laperrousaz focuses more on performers and performances than the delivery of information, and while this approach leaves the film feeling a little unfocussed, it also has its advantages.

Particularly when we’re talking about the caliber of musicians interviewed and shown performing (in staged, but enjoyable mini music videos). Legends like Bunny Wailer, Gregory Isaacs, Toots, Sly & Robbie show up, but Laperrousaz also presents a strong sampling of artists who’s fame is more recent—Capleton, Elephant Man, Lady Saw, Vybz Kartel, Bounty Killer. All are charismatic as both performers and interview subjects, and the topics they discuss range from reggae history to political violence to sexuality.

Made in Jamaica doesn’t feel like a comprehensive overview of Jamaican music and culture—far from it. But it’s a really enjoyable way to soak in some great music and get a bit of a sense of where it comes from. (MS)

Le Premier jour du reste de ta vie
Montreal’s Marc-André Grondin (C.R.A.Z.Y.) sports a nifty French accent in Le premier jour du reste de ta vie, the new coming-of-age drama directed by Parisian Rémi Bezançon.

Set in an unnamed French city, Premier jour depicts five days in the lives of a middle-class suburban family headed by taxi-driving father Robert (Jacques Gamblin) and stay-at-home mother Marie-Jeanne (Zabou Breitman). Each family member has a specific day, or chapter, in the film that’s chronologically scattered over a couple of decades, meaning the audience witnesses the family grow up.

SMALL MOMENTS: Le Premier jour du reste de ta vie

Grondin plays flaky middle-child Raphaël, a slacker who never seems to climb out from older brother Albert’s (talented newcomer Pio Marmaï) shadow. When med student Albert moves out it’s just Raphaël and little sister Fleur (Déborah François) left in the house. Marie-Jeanne is convinced the family will drift apart.

There’s cute-ish stories throughout the film, like Raphaël losing his dream girl’s number while driving down the highway, Albert removing a snow globe that a patient mistook for a butt plug and Fleur’s first blow job faux-pas. They’re tiny sketches that when properly assembled should ideally allow for Bezançon to make an interesting comment on family life. But what exactly that comment is doesn’t come across, aside from the self-evident “love-’em-before-they’re-gone.”

While it’s got a fantastic cast and soundtrack, Premier jour is too fragmented and too easy of a film for these actors to be wasted on. It’s meant to be a crowd pleaser, but I was left with a sense of déjà view. As in I’ve already seen this a dozen times before. (CS)

ALL FILMS OPEN
THIS FRIDAY, OCT. 31