"Happy Christmas": Improvised White Noise

Now Available on DVD and Blu-Ray

Improvisational filmmaking is a strange animal, as its existence defies standard critical conventions.  Stories can often feel loose and lacking in traditional narrative arcs, but that’s because the cast and crew made this film without a script and only a broad outline of plot and characters.  Dialogue often isn’t catchy, memorable, or even especially dramatic, but the trade-off is naturalistic, overlapping exchanges that seem to mirror real life, largely because the actors are being about as real as possible.  So by what metric does one measure a film like Happy Christmas when the characters, script, and direction were purposely handled without any real sense of care, and that was part of the whole point of the production?

Well, starting with what semblance of story there is, Jenny is an irresponsible 27-year-old, prone to drinking and passing out, who moves in with her brother Jeff, his wife Kelly, and their two-year-old son.  And beyond that basic premise, there isn’t so much a narrative as decently realized character moments.  Kelly wanted Jenny around to help care for the child, but upon seeing Jenny’s immature habits is concerned.  Jeff is afraid to confront his sister about her faults because he still wants to be the cool older brother.  Jenny convinces Kelly to pursue her novel-writing profession more vigorously by writing a trashy romance novel to bring in the money.  The film moves from point to point with a fluidity that resembles real life, and these people seem real and believable enough where nothing feels out of place or especially extraordinary.  This, however, is a double-edged sword, because it also means that most of the film is devoid of a central conflict, and when the film finally does find its defining moments, it doesn’t dwell and promptly ends before it meanders into incoherence.

However, improvisational films have generally had these limitations, but make up for it by being visually interesting.  Take Shortbus for example.  That was a film that combined its improvisational style with a thematic purpose and some interesting camerawork and post-production special effects for its bizarre finale.  While there is a theme of family support and growing up in Happy Christmas, the technical side of things feels lacking, rarely rising above the level of a three-camera sitcom.  There are no close-ups, no tracking shots, nothing to make the mundane suburban setting visually interesting, leaving the actors to carry the film like it was a stage production.  And while the performances are serviceable and even likeable, they aren’t really good enough to stake the whole production on.

I can recommend this film for pretty much one thing: background noise.  The prime situation for watching movie is something to have on as family members begin to arrive for the holidays, something that you can start watching while you wait, ignore as people start filtering in, and jump back in at any point without really caring what happened in between and still be mildly entertained, even while distracted by real-life banter.  However, this is not a film that works well as a complete artistic work, and while thankfully short at only eighty minutes, it is not worth the time to watch in its entirety.  A holiday classic this is not.

Huzzah obligatory holiday film review!  Let’s move on to the remainder of the year’s home video releases so we can get to awards season.  Thoughts in the comments below.

"The Congress": When Social Commentary Goes Looney Tunes

Now Available on DVD and Blu-Ray

The Congress was undoubtedly not the film I was expecting it to be, and if the disc’s box art is all you go by, you will certainly be as surprised as I was.  The film advertises itself as a sci-fi speculation on the future of cinema and the detriment this will be to artistic integrity, but instead transitions into an apocalyptic warning of the powers of mass consumerism and the substitution of mass media for the pleasures of reality.  I wouldn’t go so far to say that I think that the transition is an entirely successful one, and the film does meander into some unnecessarily abstract territory, but if you are willing to deal with an unnecessarily obtuse third act, this may be the film for you.

Our main character is a fictionalized self-portrayal of actress Robin Wright (best known for her role as Buttercup in The Princess Bride), who has left acting behind to raise her children.  However, Miramount Studios (I see what they did there…) offers her a deal for the chance to become a relevant star again by selling a digitally animated copy of herself to the studio so that they may keep making films ad infinitum with her as the face of it all.  In order to pay for treatments to her son’s chronic illness, Robin agrees.  This all takes roughly forty-five minutes to play out, and is probably the film’s strongest third, establishing Robin as a sympathetic character faced with circumstances that force her to bend to the whims of a manipulative entertainment mogul.

However, this is where the film gets weird.  Flash forward twenty years, and Robin visits the Futurological Congress, where everyone has taken a hallucinogenic drug that makes them an animated cartoon.  The visual shift is jarring to say the least, and the animation starts off as a Technicolor assault on the eyes, with bright colors and bending lines creating the cinematic equivalent to an LSD trip.  This is also where the film shows its hand, describing films as a dead medium and depicting the horror of a future where life is nothing more than escapist entertainment that entirely supplants reality.  It is sometimes painfully blunt in getting this message across, with a pivotal scene clearly paralleling Apple-style press conferences to cultish fanaticism, but it serves its purpose.

The final third of the film, though, gets even stranger, as it seemingly abandons its message in favor of using the abstract nature of its animation to the fullest extent, taking wild narrative detours that really serve no other purpose than to show us some weird shit.  One might be tempted to think that this absurdity was leading to a grander point, but unfortunately the film blew that load by the halfway point, and the rest feels all too much like padding.  Robin herself doesn’t even feel like a substantial character by the end of it all, completely consumed by the film’s attempts to use visual absurdity to convey the absurdity of mass entertainment.  The film is mostly running on fumes for the last twenty minutes, and even the creative animation cannot save it, because by that point the strangeness of it all is nothing but white noise.

That said, though, The Congress is an alright film.  It’s overlong and pretentious to be sure, but the parts that work do work decently well, and I’m willing to forgive the lackluster third act in favor of its strong opening and solid second act.  If you find the experience becomes too tiresome by the ninety minute mark, I wouldn’t blame you for wanting to shut it off, but that first ninety minutes is a decent enough film to warrant a viewing.

Can animation and live acting effectively combine to make symbolic points in cinema?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"The Hundred-Foot Journey": Overly Conventional Food Porn

Now Available on DVD and Blu-Ray

When a film is produced by Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey, you can get a pretty good idea of what you’re in for; The Hundred-Foot Journey is inspiration porn, through and through, designed so explicitly for upper-middle class middle-aged white women that it’s a marvel that the film was a theatrical release and not shown on the Hallmark channel.  Hell, even the film’s poster appeals to that sensibility by prominently displaying Helen Mirren as the film’s star, even though she is the film’s primary antagonist and tangential to the narrative focus.  However, a film’s primary demographic shouldn’t be the sole indicator of a film’s quality, and yet, this film is so steeped in formula and convention that it never becomes anything more than average.

The crux of the film’s conflict is reminiscent of the classic Montague/Capulet struggle from that old Shakespeare classic.  (I forget the name…)  A family from India moves to a French village to set up a restaurant, and ends up across the street from an acclaimed culinary establishment run by Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren).  The family establishes their restaurant with the hook that Indian cuisine will be exotic enough to entice the French palate away from the more conventional taste of Mallory’s chefs, and this starts a business war between the two restaurants.  Meanwhile, our main protagonist, wanna-be chef Hassan, begins developing a romance with Marguerite, a sous chef at Mallory’s establishment.

For the most part, the film plays along to the expected beats predictably enough, and while the performances are decent and the dialogue is well-written, there just isn’t much here that hasn’t been done before.  It is worth noting that much screentime is devoted to the mouthwatering culinary treats that are the center of this narrative universe’s desire, which is hardly surprising considering this was directed by Lasse Hallstrom of Chocolat fame.  The theme of food as a great uniter is just as prevalent here, though the romantic angle is played down in favor of a racial tolerance message.  It all works just fine, but again, it’s all very obvious and trite.

The only real problem with the film is that it suffers some third act pacing issues, dragging on for way too long in order to resolve Hassan’s character arc.  If the first two-thirds of the film had been focused on Hassan as intently, I would not have had as much of an issue with the film’s plodding pace, but by the ninety-minute point, the story’s primary conflict has been mostly resolved, and Hassan’s goals and aspirations feel more like narrative loose ends than central story elements.  It doesn’t help that the generic nature of the film’s characters makes it difficult to especially care about any of them, so when the focus shifts almost entirely to only one of them, the film feels slow and empty, populated with more unnecessary food montages to pad the film out until it’s acceptable to tie the final knot.

But when all’s said and done, The Hundred-Foot Journey isn’t a bad film, and I’m sure that it will be appealing to its primary demographic.  I’ve certainly seen worse, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s worth your time, it might just serve to fill a couple hours if you have nothing better to do.

Any food-obsessed films that you really like?  Let me know in the comments below.