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Nine

Back in 1982, the Broadway musical Nine opened and won a Tony for Best Musical. An adaptation of Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical film classic 8-1/2 with a book by Arthur Kopit, music by Maury Yeston, and direction by the great Tommy Tune, the show was a perfect blending of the cerebral and heart, a slightly tongue-in-cheek exploration of the creative process, and a fond but critical look at a man whose relationships with women were based either on his adoration for his mother or his pleasant encounter with a robust prostitute when he was a mere child.

Helping spur the show on to greatness were Raul Julia as Guido Contini, the solipsistic director; Karen Akers as his wife; plus Anita Morris, Camille Saviola, and the knock-‘em-dead Liliane Montevecchi as several of the women in his life. I still recall Akers singing, with her back to the audience, “My Husband Makes Movies,” a disconsolate accounting of being subservient to an egocentric spouse. Those three minutes and 53 seconds constitute one of the most powerfully moving moments in modern musical theater. As for redheaded Morris, she became the nation’s sex siren with her performance as Guido’s mistress. Attired in a skintight, see-through lace jumpsuit, she fueled the libidos of many an American male at the time, especially after repeating her number in costume on Johnny Carson’s desk one late night.

But after watching Rob Marshall’s adaptation of the show, I wondered if my memory was playing games with me. This sumptuous film version with its cornucopia of lovely stars (Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Fergie, Nicole Kidman, and Sophia Loren) delivers on the glamour quotient but is lacking in both humor and pathos.

The problem possibly lies in Daniel Day-Lewis’s Guido. His take on the character lacks the unconscious, lovable self-mockery that both Julia and Marcello Mastroianni (in 8-1/2) brought to the part. Day-Lewis, at least after just one viewing, has concocted a depressed misogynist who loves women but not as much as he cherishes his own ability to agonize nonstop over the costs of his own celebrity. While you wanted to hug and slap his predecessors, you just want to slap Day-Lewis.

The addition of some horrendous new songs and the omission of some of the old ones don’t help either. Just listen to the Original Broadway Cast album’s finale where Cameron Johann as the child Guido sings “Getting Tall” to his older, less mature self, who has a gun in hand:

“Guido . . . Guido . . .

Scraping knees
Tying shoes
Starting school
Paying dues
Finding there’s no way we can spend a lifetime playing ball
Part of getting tall

Learning more, knowing less,
Simple words, tenderness, part of getting tall.

Guido, you’re not crazy, you’re all right.
Everyone wants everyone in sight …
But knowing you have no one if you try to have them all
Is part of tying shoes,
Part of starting school,
Part of scraping knees if we should fall
Part of getting tall.”

Numerous numbers such as this one are now in the scrapheap.

Additionally, Marshall’s constant cutting from Guido’s memories to show numbers stifles feelings. For example, in the “Be Italian” sequence, the lovable whore Saraghina (Fergie) agrees to show her wares to a group of boys for a handful of coins. The black-and-white footage of the group frolicking on a beach and then in the water is perfect, but the intercutting with showgirls singing on chairs garrotes the episode’s power.

Yet for all of its faults, Nine is filled with treats for the eye and ear, because in the end Marshall is no slouch in the talent department. Under his direction, Cruz has never been more gorgeous, Cotillard elicits empathy as the put-upon wife, Fergie surprisingly makes a believable singing hooker, and Dench, even with her wandering accents, is as grand as she always is. And Day-Lewis has worked out his body, Loren makes a most welcome return to the screen, and Kidman is able to play a major screen siren believably.

So on a scale of ten, Nine is an 8. Well, maybe an 8-1/2. – Brandon Judell

Mr. Judell is featured in Rosa von Praunheim’s forthcoming documentary New York Memories. In the spring, he’ll be teaching “The Image of the Jew in Post-World War II European Cinema” and “Gay and Lesbian Literature” at The City College of New York. He has written on film for The Village Voice, indieWire, Detour, and The Advocate, and is anthologized in Cynthia Fuchs’s Spike Lee Interviews (University Press of Mississippi).

First, let’s be clear… Avatar is much more than a film. It’s a prescribed cinematic experience. Pure effect. The greatest sideshow on Earth.

Cameron’s aim is to take our franchise-frazzled minds and plug us back in to the mainline; to conjur the wonder of those early silent-movie audiences, aghast and alarmed as a steam-train chugged from horizon to foreground.

Like Avatar’s hero, injured marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), he wants to blast away the past and see through new eyes.

Avatar is the new benchmark for escapist entertainment; the ultimate on-screen dream. More suspension of self than suspension of disbelief.

As Jake dives in and out of his split human/alien personalities, Cameron is equally urging us to leave our burdened minds and busy bodies behind – to sink into our seats and immerse in a virtual world.

In the febrile jungle of planet Pandora, it’s a thrillingly alive world of whooping devil-monkeys, scuttling super-spiders, fluttering titan-orchids and bioluminescent air-jellyfish.

The ground is patrolled by hammerheaded, Triceratops-like behemoths and saber-toothed jaguar-giants, while immense, lizard-headed mega-birds rule the air.

But Cameron keeps us connected by not pushing the otherness into hokey, adolescent alien-sketch territory. This isn’t an open-air version of the Star Wars cantina: weird for weird’s sake.

It feels equally distant and familiar. Like an advanced version of our own world; as if Cameron has run the whole of the current ecosystem through some kind of evolution extrapolation software.

And into this wild and wonderful arena… Enter Avatar Jake, a hybrid of human and Na’vi – the blue-skinned, golden-eyed, oversized indigenous people.

“A marine in an Avatar body”, snarls Stephen Lang’s feral colonel. “That’s a potent combination…”

Jake’s mission: to blend with the locals and convince them to “relocate” – away from an area rich in precious/lucrative rock deposits. To go native…

Instead, he goes rogue – after being trusted and trained by Zoe Saldana’s fiery Neytiri. Like Human Jake, she’s a warrior, and the two bond over a spectacular battle/ambush that humbles him and ennobles her.

For Jake, it’s love at first flight. As the two soar and scamper through the shimmering treetops, he revels in swapping his broken real-world form for a faster, stronger, more athletic vessel.

But, this being Cameron, there’s forbidden love. Not love struggling to reach across time (Terminator) or class (Titanic), but something far more strange and affecting: interdimensional love.

In fumbling hands, this could have badly misfired – strange and silly instead of curious and moving.

But, unlike his last film, Cameron doesn’t over-season the sentiment. He drills straight through to the emotional core: his leading man’s wrenching inner-space odyssey – from interloper to insider to outcast.

But the success of the human/Na’vi love-story thread is mostly down to Saldana. Her subtle, spiky performance is a delicious foil to Worthington’s wide-eyed neophyte. She might have played it haughty and aloof – and annoying. Instead, she makes Neytiri untameable and irresistible, brimming with spirit and soul – and making her, and the other CG characters, feel more weighted and real.

So, yes, some of the CG is a bit floaty and videogamey. But, blended with the extraordinary, retina-frying 3D design, it soon becomes the work of a joyless cynic to spot the joins.

Cameron has taken the techniques of 3D film above and beyond the standard jabbing and jutting gimmickery. Every frame is dripping with sumptuous foreground detail – swirling ambient debris, needle-sharp textural subtleties, multi-layered character nuances…

It’s a motion picture where everything seems to move. And it’s utterly captivating. A glistening banquet for the senses.

This isn’t Cameron simply taking existing technology and tweaking the application to his standard. This is the work of a master film-maker owning and reclaiming the entire concept of 3D; pushing and challenging other film-makers to keep up.

But it’s also a long way from just some sterile technical exercise. Avatar sees Cameron revisit his favourite trick: using hardware to unearth humanity. He carves out the most ambitious screen backdrop ever conceived, then uses it as a staging ground for riffs on military morality, environmental anguish, science versus nature, spirituality versus pragmatism…

And, in his hero’s story, he presents a grand illusion – offering what seems to be a theme of internal conflict and physical reawakening before unleashing a final sucker-punch reveal that’s unexpected, devastating, moving and instantly iconic…

Oh, yeah… And there’s action, too: sinew-straining, jaw-snapping beast battles; rampaging fist-fights; arcing arrow attacks; whirring gunships peppering the canopy with incendiary fire; lumbering battle-mechs pummelling the life out of Pandora with synthetic death.

All – remember – in 3D…

So, let’s be clear… Avatar is much more than a film.

It’s an audacious, awe-inspiring work of modern art that reinvents and redesigns the whole process of sitting in a darkened room staring up at a screen.

Sure, it’s taken him ten years, but Cameron has achieved no less than a rebirth of cinema.

Jackson, Spielberg, Fincher, PTA, Del Toro… Over to you…
Andy Lowe

Verdict:

Game-changing – yes. Spectacular – absolutely. Occasional dodgy dialogue and dramatic imperfections – of course. But still – wait for it… – a titanic achievement.

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By Mike Scott, The Times-Picayune

December 11, 2009, 5:00AM

Michael Clarke Duncan inspects the wait staff of his restaurant in the comedy ‘The Slammin’ Salmon.’I’m sure it was a whole lot of fun making “The Slammin’ Salmon, ” the latest anatomically fixated comedy from the Broken Lizard comedy troupe (”Super Troopers, ” “Beerfest”).

It was probably even more fun to write, a process I imagine taking place late at night around somebody’s beer-can-littered kitchen table.

Watching it, however? Meh.

Moments of light laughter fueled by Broken Lizard’s non sequitur brand of shock humor are served with a flimsy plot and even flimsier characters.

Michael Clarke Duncan horses around in ‘The Slammin’ Salmon.’ THE SLAMMIN’ SALMON 1 star, out of 4 Snapshot: A comedy, set at a five-star restaurant, about a wait staff competing to earn the most money for their employer in a single night.
What works: The occasional sophomoric laugh keeps things from completely falling apart. What doesn’t: With a thin plot and thinner characters, the Broken Lizard gang’s non sequitur, anatomically fixated humor gets old fast — at least for sober viewers. Starring: Kevin Heffernan, Jay Chandrasekhar, Michael Clarke Duncan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske, Cobie Smulders, April Bowlby. Director: Heffernan. Rating: R for pervasive language and sexual references. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Where: West Bank Palace. I suspect the filmmakers were aiming to make an “Office Space” for the wait staffs of white-tablecloth eateries, offering the same sort of workplace commiseration that 1999 movie did for cubicle workers. (And that the New Orleans-shot “Waiting” did for employees of chain restaurants in 2005.)

It’s doubtful, however, that “The Slammin’ Salmon” will achieve anything near that same cult status.

What it does offer is a wealth of faintly recognizable TV faces — that lady from “Two and a Half Men, ” the one from “How I Met Your Mother, ” the guy from “Heroes, ” that “Saturday Night Live” dude — playing waiters in a five-star restaurant owned by a retired boxer named Cleon Salmon.

When the champ finds himself on the losing end of a bet — over Japanese albino hunting, which perfectly encapsulates the nonsensical, throw-random-words-together humor at work here — he needs to raise a lot of cash, and fast. So he offers an incentive to his waiters: The one who earns the most money for the restaurant in a single night gets a $10,000 prize. The lowest money-maker, however, will get the tartar beat out of him by Salmon.

Cue the antics, as the waiters jump into action. Eventually they get around to sabotaging one another — an idea with promise but not nearly as early or as cleverly as you might hope. Instead, director Kevin Heffernan wastes time on gags, such as one involving the same split-screen technology that was cutting-edge when it was used to clone Hailey Mills in 1961’s “The Parent Trap.”

The sadistic boxer-boss is played by Michael Clarke Duncan (”The Green Mile, ” “Sin City”), who is far above this material, evidenced by his admirably earnest approach to his role. (Somebody offer this man a decent role, please.)

Early on in “The Slammin’ Salmon, ” a customer sends back a plate of undercooked fish. I can’t imagine a better metaphor for a movie that is named after a fish and that is as half-baked as this one is.

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Whew. Color me relieved. There is no need to fear death, even the most horrifying kind of murder. Be cause the afterlife is ex actly like the album cover for a 1970s progressive-rock band.

So ditch your moody blues and come sail away to the point of know return.

That’s where Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan, the scary girl from “Atonement,” who this time is merely adequate) roams the freaky fields of “the in-between” — she’s been waitlisted for heaven — while, back on Earth, pop (Mark Wahlberg) and mom (Rachel Weisz) search, respectively, for her murderer and for escape.

When her dad is smashing his collection of tiny ships in bottles, it’s reflected in Susie’s netherworld by giant distorted images of the same, as though she’s standing too close to the screen at a drive-in theater. When things are going well, she sees a symbolic tree in a hyper-green pasture that practically burns with ripeness. More dire moments mean inky swells of murderous waves. The universe is her mood ring.

It’s all a gorgeous error, a bonfire of overreach, from the (long-winded, too serious and overrated) “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson. The story, if any (the movie isn’t really a murder mystery, nor a quest for justice, nor even a guidebook to acceptance, closure and healing, although portions tread each of these paths), is carried away on a blast of imagery.

The movie is roughly as serious about death and dying as “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It uses the excruciating fact that innocents sometimes get murdered to wedge open a door to a landscape of sentimentality populated by Willy Wonka wonders.

Jackson’s commitment, though, is utter. I respect that as much as I scoff at the movie’s magic icicle and its notion that our dead loved ones are telepathically reaching out to us. I’d much rather sit through a dazzling, intrepid fever-dream than more dull cinematic tutelage on the evils of war or racism.

Susie, who at the start of the film is a 1973 teen who wants only to get kissed by the cute English guy (Reece Ritchie) at school, never makes it to her date with him — at a gazebo that becomes a totem of her post-life dreamland. Instead, middle-aged neighbor George Harvey builds an elaborate trap and lures her into it.

That scene, and Stanley Tucci’s performance as the wheedling creep, are fantastically disturbing without being explicitly violent. Tucci goes the full Hinckley with his pervy mustache, his loser’s windbreaker, his sinister spectacles and his maladjusted little laugh. Despite his stock villainy — the character simply needs to kill, that’s all there is to him — Tucci bores in like a virus. It’s Oscar-level evil, a piece of acting you won’t soon shake off.

Making an almost equal but opposite impression, Susan Sarandon plays the dead girl’s brassy grandmother, a nicotine-addled and falsely eyelashed creature who sweeps into the household as the Weisz character falls nearly catatonic with grief, neglecting her remaining children.

The movie positions the grandma as comic relief, unable to make a meal without starting a blaze and trailing a spoor of cigarette ash. But she turns out to represent the family’s best strategy for coping, a lively determination to focus (albeit ineptly) on small tasks while the larger pain slowly fades.

Jackson would have done well to explore her character more and spare us the attention he lavishes on the supernaturally infused pre-Goth girl (her look anticipates Ally Sheedy in “The Breakfast Club”) Susie thinks is kind of weird but who, naturally, functions as a psychic radio programmed to catch Susie’s vibes after she dies. If you’re going for an emotional finish as huge as eternity, try not to make me think of Whoopi Goldberg in “Ghost.”

kyle.smith@nypost.com