Elizabeth Pena Tribute

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Veteran actor Elizabeth Pena passed away last week at the unfortunately early age of 55. Older listeners will probably remember her roles in films like La Bamba and Jacob’s Ladder while younger listeners would recognize her as Gloria’s mother on the TV show Modern Family or as the husky, exotic voice of Mirage in Pixar’s The Incredibles. Pena worked steadily over the last thirty five years, working on all kinds of projects - big Hollywood blockbusters, sitcoms, animation, and even a Lifetime made-for-tv movie called Suburban Madness. She easily moved back and forth between film and television, comedy and drama. Whatever role she played, Pena always managed to simultaneously exude both steely intelligence and emotional vulnerability. It’s a unique combination that not a lot of actors can successfully convey, but it was always present in Pena’s work. 

 

Nowhere is this more true than in John Sayles’ 1996 film Lone Star. The film stars Chris Cooper
as Sam Deeds, the sheriff of a small Texas border town and son of local legend Sheriff Buddy Deeds played in flashbacks by a young Matthew McConaughey. In many ways, Sam Deeds is a typical Western hero. He works to bring law and order to the community but isn’t sure he wants to stick around and be part of what he saves.

The story centers around Sam’s investigation of a skeleton discovered in the desert outside of town. It turns out the bones belong to Charlie Wade, the violent, corrupt sheriff who preceded Buddy Deeds back in the sixties. Everyone thought Wade had taken some extortion money and fled to Mexico, but he clearly didn’t make it that far. Sam Deeds spends the movie trying to figure out who put the bullets in Charlie Wade and what his father Buddy had to do with the murder.

Elizabeth Pena plays Pilar, a local school teacher and Sam’s high school love. In flashbacks we see that neither Buddy nor Pilar’s mother approved of the two of them dating and put a swift, forceful end to their relationship. As adults, the two of them tentatively move toward rekindling their romance. Pena, as ever, is smart, watchful, and nobody’s fool. She doesn’t play Pilar as a helpless girlfriend or just as an accessory for her male counterpart. On the contrary, she’s is a fleshed-out human being who stands on equal footing with Sam and every other character in the movie. In a recent interview, director John Sayles pointed out that Pena was so successful in the role because her combination of intelligence and sensuality was utterly believable. As viewers, we believe that this is a woman Sam Deeds would be in love with for a couple of decades.  

 

Besides the great performances (including a wonderfully off-kilter cameo by Frances McDormand as Sam’s ex-wife, Bunny), Lone Star is a brilliant example of what makes movies movies. There are some scene transitions involving really smart staging and editing that could only happen on film. You could never achieve the same effect on stage or in a novel. I don’t want to ruin any of the pleasure for you by describing it too much, but as the story shifts back and forth between the past of Buddy Deeds and Charlie Wade and the present of Sam and Pilar, the way Sayles manages to move the film across decades while clearly showing the connectedness of the past and present is so cool and smart, it’s worth seeing the movie just for that.

As fans memorialize Elizabeth Pena, I hope they remember her work in Lone Star. Even though she was hardly an A-list household name, her work was always high quality and worth seeking out. Lone Star is available on DVD. It’s not a fast-paced movie, but it is great and I highly recommend it.

This review was originally broadcast on Q90.1, Delta College Public Radio. Learn more about the station at www.deltabroadcasting.org

In A World

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I enjoy doing Take Five on Film for a lot of reasons. I love movies and it gives me a good reason to make time for new releases and obscure favorites on a regular basis. I got to take over from my friend Ryan Wilson and try to continue on the fine work he did on the show for five years. But also, I enjoy it because I
love radio. Ever since I was a kid I have thought there was something very powerful about a disembodied voice speaking to me through the car radio or the stereo at home. People on the radio have always been celebrities to me – from the time a local DJ visited my 5^th grade classroom for career day to the vaguely unhealthy crush I had on Fresh Air’s Terry Gross in the 90s. This appreciation of disembodied voices also extends to actors who do voice work for commercials, cartoons, and movie trailers. In my family, it’s a contest to see who can identify the actor voicing the latest ad for Chrysler or Carl’s Junior or who plays the animated bat in Anastasia.

Because of my affection for both movies and disembodied voices, I particularly loved this month’s movie you might have missed, the small independent comedy In a World. It was written and directed by Lake Bell, a model and actress who is best known for goofy-sidekick or girlfriend roles in forgettable movies like Over Her Dead Body and What Happens in Vegas. 

Despite her involvement in those sorry projects, Bell is a razor sharp writer and a canny director too. She raised the funds, gathered a group of her good friends to be the cast and crew, and managed to make a smart, funny, romantic movie that explores a little-known corner of the movie making industry – voiceover work for movie trailers.

The movie takes its name from the iconic trailers of the 80s and 90s voiced by Don LaFontaine. You may think, Don who? But trust me, Google him and you'll realize you know who I’m talking about.

The film is about Carol Solomon, a vocal coach in Los Angeles who is the daughter of a LaFontaine-esque movie trailer voiceover artist. She essentially stumbles into voiceover work and ends up competing with her dad and his chosen (idiotic) successor to be the voice of a new Hunger Games-esque series. Whoever gets the job will get the honor of reviving LaFontaine's well-known catchphrase (you guessed it), "In a world..."

The film is a funny character study, a clever satire of Hollywood insiderism, and a charming romance. There's a subplot with Carol's sister and brother-in-law that is resolved far too quickly and a couple of characters that appear and never really develop beyond their immediate plot purpose, but the overall success of
the movie makes those problems pretty easy to overlook.

As a character, Carol is smart, funny, and utterly human while managing to avoid so many of the garbagy cliches this film might have featured had it starred Katherine Heigl, Rachel McAdams, or Kate Hudson in a younger day. Carol is not uptight nor is she an airhead. She's not a driven careerist who has no time for
love nor is she a lovelorn romantic who just can't catch a break. She's a daughter, a sister, a friend, and a professional rather than some cardboard cut-out of a woman who can’t do anything except talk about her love life.

Strangely, because I wasn't busy being distracted by romcom cliches, I had far more time to laugh and enjoy myself. The romance between Carol and one-time comedy it-boy Demetri Martin is charming and fun without being twee or obnoxious.

Perhaps the film’s greatest strength besides Bell’s charisma and the avoidance of obvious cliché is how apparent it is that the cast had a great time making the film. The obviously improved scenes between Carol’s friends at the recording studio made me giggle because the actors are so clearly good friends trying to make
each other giggle.

The film knowingly plays on the power of the disembodied voice while simultaneously skewering the egos of those voices. In a world where I get to be on the radio talking about movies, I appreciate that a lot. In A World is now out on DVD and is a movie you might have missed.  

 This review was originally broadcast on Q90.1, Delta College Public Radio. Learn more about the station at www.deltabroadcasting.org.

Gone Girl

 Director David Fincher traffics in darkness. Whether it’s in his films Seven, Fight Club, Panic Room, or The Social Network, his movies are always interested in what goes on in the shadows both visually and thematically. Visually speaking, Fincher always achieves a hazy, dim look to his films. Whatever light we do see in a scene is usually antiseptic and white or lurid and yellow, like a streetlamp you don’t want to be caught under. As beautifully composed as Fincher’s shots are, they are never warm or welcoming to look at. He manages to make the brightest sunlit scene appear shadowy, as though daylight is fighting a losing battle with the imminent darkness.  

Thematically, Fincher only makes films about the dark corners of the human heart, the depths people sink to in moments of extremity. Extreme greed, violence, lust, obsession, and insanity are engines of the stories he tells. It’s no accident that Fincher’s last film, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, was marketed as “the feel-bad movie of the year.” He’s not interested in films about redemption.

This brings us to Fincher’s latest film, Gone Girl, the adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel. It’s the story of Nick and Amy Dunne, a once happy couple that has become spectacularly dysfunctional. On the day of their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick, played by Ben Affleck, comes home to discover overturned furniture, broken glass, and his wife missing. Police scrutiny quickly turns to him as all signs point to the likelihood that the frustrated, dissatisfied husband killed his wife and tried to make it look like a kidnapping. Affleck plays Dunne with a kind of crumpled arrogance and simmering unhappiness and we’re perfectly willing to buy the possibility that he might just be guilty. 

Amy, as played by British actor Rosamund Pike, is beautiful, brilliant, and unpredictable. We learn (or think we learn) about her courtship and early marriage to Nick through a series of narrated diary entries and flashbacks that contrast with the media firestorm that builds up around Nick as the search for his wife intensifies.

Now, it’s a thriller and there are plenty of plot twists that I’m not going to spoil here. If you’ve read the book, you already know how it ends, and If you haven’t, I’m not going to be the one to ruin it for you.

I will say it is a profoundly dark film. It is the story of unpleasant people doing unpleasant things. As I tried to decide what I thought it about it all, I finally figured out a way to interpret the film. Rather than thinking of it simply as a contemporary thriller, I understood it better when I began to think of it as an example of film noir.

 When we think of film noir, we envision black and white movies from the 40s and 50s that featured private eyes in trench coats and fedoras, guns, tough talk, and dangerous beautiful dames. Noirs always had morally ambiguous protagonists. We never know if the hero is actually heroic or just out for himself. They always had a femme fatale – a dangerous, calculating, sexually powerful woman who was willing to do whatever it took to get what she wanted. They were often shocking in their depictions of both overt sexuality and brutal violence. And true noirs never had a happy ending.

Gone Girl fits the bill perfectly. Besides the presence of color, the only non-traditional noir element of the film is the setting – classic noirs are set in the city, their dark, rain slick streets representing the twisty, confusing corners of the human heart. Gone Girl is set almost entirely in the suburbs – and for the 21^st century, that’s probably an appropriate change. I would argue as much alienation, dislocation, and dysfuntion happens in the burbs these days as anywhere else, - maybe more -  and the pleasant clapboard McMansions of the Dunne’s neighborhood can easily be read as symbolic of the pleasant exterior that hides the darkness inside.

Gone Girl is a fantastic example of how these old Hollywood tropes can be updated in ways that are compelling and vital rather than nostalgic and cute. As smart as it is in that way, it’s not a film I’d want to see again. It’s too graphic and rough for a softie like me. I like my films leavened with a little redemption, even if it’s very little.  I can respect Gone Girl for the well-crafted work that it is but not want to stare into that dark room again.

The Boxtrolls

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I have kids that range in age from 14 to 5, so I see more than my fair share of movies directed at the middle school, grade school, preschool set, especially cartoons. You know how Netflix gives you recommendations based on the movies that get watched the most on your account? Well, even though it’s my account, thanks to my kids, almost all the recommendations I receive involve talking animals, pink dream houses, or Powerpuff Girls. Having watched as many kids’ movies as I have, the one thing I know for sure is that, like just about everything else people produce in this world, there’s a wide spectrum of quality available out there.

There are the soaring, life-changing, gut busting pieces of art that send you out of the theater excited and dizzy with beauty and entertainment. (Most of Pixar’s body of work falls under this category along with The Iron Giant, The Triplets of Belleville, The Thief and the Cobbler, and some others.)

Then there are the cynical, rushed, only designed to make a few bucks in the summer, ready-made for McDonald’s happy meal movies that send you out the theater feeling a little ripped off that you will never get that 88 minutes or 9 dollars back. I don’t want to offend anybody by name-checking their kid’s favorite movie, but I know that you know what I’m talking about.

But there’s also the middle ground – animated films that have high quality aspects to them but never really congeal into something great that moves kids and adults alike. It’s this middle category into which this week’s movie, The Boxtrolls, falls.

The movie is a fairy tale about a young boy named Eggs who is raised by the friendly, lumpish trolls who live under the city of Cheesebridge. The Cheesebridgians think the trolls are evil, baby-stealing monsters while in reality they’re harmless trash pickers who just happened to be green and have glowing yellow eyes. Of course, the conflict comes when the above-grounders hire a grotesque exterminator to get rid of the supposed menace below, and young Eggs uses his dual citizenship to try and save the only family he’s ever known.

 The film was produced with stop-motion animation and was made by the same company that made the equally elaborate Coraline and Paranorman. Every set, every stitch of costuming, and every gesture or blink of each character is painstakingly created by hand. Animators spend months and months moving small puppets bit by bit and photographing it as they go. It’s a remarkably labor-intensive way to produce a movie and the filmmaker’s care and attention to design really shows. In fact, it’s in the production design that the movie is strongest – it’s beautiful to look at in an idiosyncratic kind of way. The city of Cheesebridge towers pendulously above the landscape, the troll’s underground cavern is both clever and lovely, and the giant, mechanical troll snatching machine that’s part of the film’s climax is a steampunk fan’s dream.

But the characters, while well-designed and certainly well voiced by actors like Ben Kingsley, Elle Fanning, Nick Frost, and Tracy Morgan, don’t really rise above their generic place-holder status. I was never swept up into the narrative or felt for the characters the way I did in, say Ratatouie or The Incredibles. The filmmakers seem to have paid more attention to the monumental task of creating and animating an entire physical world from scratch than they did to creating characters that go beyond generic expectations.

This is not to say it’s a bad film. It’s not at all. It’s just not a great one. Kids will like it, and as a parent, you probably won’t mind sitting through it too. One warning though, for very young kids, there are a few moments that skirt the edge of a bit too scary. Archibald Snatcher, the head boxtroll exterminator, is extremely allergic to cheese, but because eating cheese is what the upper-class people do – he eats it anyway. His grotesque Jekyll and Hyde reactions to the tiniest taste are hilarious and a marvel of animation but they are also pretty intense for little kids, so beware.

This review was originally broadcast on Q90.1, Delta College Public Radio. Learn more about the station at www.deltabroadcasting.org.