Uxbal Cremation Barcelona: Javier Bardem plays a dying medium — no, not a newspaper — who faces a host of crises at work and home.

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by John Thomason

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful hasn’t opened in many markets yet, but America’s top critics have already begun feeding it to the sharks. Scott Tobias of the Onion’s A.V. Club deemed it “irritating and oppressive.” Justin Chang of Variety called its emotional rewards “scant.” Time Out New York decried it as a “travesty.” The always entertaining Armond White of the New York Post dubbed it “pitiful.” And in the harshest of them all, The Village Voice’s Melissa Anderson described it as “morbidly obese … elephantine with miserabilist humanism and redemption jibber-jabber.”

Ouch. Game, set, match, right? Hardly.

Narratively bulbous, emotionally uninhibited and unabashedly self-important, Iñárritu’s movies — Babel and 21 Grams among them — have always set off a dog-whistle response of irritation to critics not attuned to their wavelengths. A longtime fan of his ambitious puzzle films, I couldn’t fully support Babel, a tossed salad of unrealized ideas with enough content for four movies.

But the unwarranted crucifixion Biutiful has received from the film-critic establishment is appalling. If anything, this is the Iñárritu movie for people who don’t like Iñárritu movies. Biutiful is his most-linear feature to date, and rather than losing itself in storytelling excesses, the director reins his film in, dancing it compellingly on the border between multidimensional and overstuffed.

It helps that, for the first time in his oeuvre, Iñárritu has provided us with the anchor of a central character connecting the plot’s disparate threads. In an intense performance that belies the actor’s tradition of droopy somnambulism, Javier Bardem plays Uxbal, whose daily life in Barcelona plays out as a series of oscillating crises at work and home. We learn early on that he’s dying of a long-undiagnosed prostate cancer and, in his waning days, he tries to reconnect with his abusive, bipolar ex-wife (Maricel Alvarez), over whom he has won custody of their two children.

In his professional life, Uxbal is the point man for the importation of Chinese and Senegalese immigrants, whom he contracts to work manual labor for wages slightly above the pittance offered to them in their homelands. When a tragedy befalls his latest operation, questions about guilt and morality flood his mind.

On top of everything else, Uxbal is a medium, born with the supernatural ability to communicate with the souls of the deceased. In Hereafter, Clint Eastwood successfully milked this blessing/curse for an entire feature, but in Uxbal’s world, this phenomenon is a veritable afterthought, broached in about 10 minutes of screen time.

In the grand scheme of Iñárritu’s delicate narrative, these short interludes are vital, because encroaching death and the recognition of an afterlife are the most-resonant themes in a film bristling with ideas. The confrontation of death connects yet another affecting plot line: the cremation of Uxbal’s long-dead father, whose coffin is among many to be removed from a niche in a soon-to-be-demolished building. When Uxbal, knowing he has months to live, gazes at his father’s decaying corpse, it’s a rite of preparation and a stepping stone toward acceptance of his own incurable condition. (This is an incredibly sad movie, and those with liberal waterworks should be forewarned.)

Biutiful runs nearly 2 1/2 hours, a rapidly moving sprawl that only lags in the few scenes absent Bardem. The relationship between two gay Chinese businessmen is insufficiently explored, like a B-plot plucked from Babel’s cutting-room floor.

Most critics see the film’s end as a final, Eastwood-ian grasp for redemption. But unlike the irascible pig at the heart of Barney’s Version (also opening today), Uxbal is inherently good. Were it the reductive story of a self-destructive bastard finally redeeming his sins in his looming twilight, Biutiful might have been the disaffecting, oppressive picture its critics have already labeled it. But a genuinely good man being slammed with a violently unstable wife, a fatal disease and a series of escalating tragedies? It’s horrible, but it happens, and Iñárritu is better for not providing his character with a sad redemption song, which by now is an easy and familiar narrative ploy. Instead, he’s given us all a vessel with which to cope with life’s depressing inevitabilities.

Term of endearment: Best known for his acting work, Jeff Daniels has been writing songs for 30 years.

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by John Thomason

About 10 years ago, when Jeff Daniels decided to play music to live audiences for the first time, he was aware of the tradition he was continuing. Call it the William Shatner Syndrome, which operates under the presumption that because creative people may express talent in one field, audiences will flock to see them in any artistic pursuit. But when actors, particularly of Daniels’ generation, crossed over into the music world, the results were rarely earth-shattering. More often than not, as in Shatner’s case, they bordered on embarrassment.

Daniels’ MO is different. He has little interest in self-promotion or even making money off his music — all the proceeds from album sales go to fund his beloved Purple Rose Theatre in Michigan. Moreover, his albums don’t sound like an actor strumming a guitar. Recorded with professional musicians Brad Phillips and Dominic John Davis, his latest release, Keep It Right Here, is imbued with the timeless howl of authentic blues and the Spartan strum of back-porch folk.

After more than 50 dates since August of last year, Daniels will finally make it to South Florida Friday night with an appearance at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts’ Amaturo Theater.

I didn’t know that you wrote or performed songs until I saw the calendar listing at the Broward Center. You don’t seem like someone who always wants to promote your music or get it on the radio or on Best Buy shelves. Are you content with your music being under most people’s radars?
Yeah, it’s always something I’ve done because I’ve loved doing it. And I’m also well aware of actors who suddenly are musicians … the decades are littered with those guys. The William Shatners and the Burt Reynolds and on and on. And I just didn’t want to be that. So instead of pushing real hard, I just would play clubs and develop the playing in the show so that those who did take the chance in coming would go, “Oh, my God, it’s not what I thought it was going to be at all.” So now, I’ve been out doing this for about 10 years, and there’s a show. For those who take the chance to come see me, they’re going to walk out entertained. The guitar players will watch the guitar and go, “Wow, he can play.” That’s because it’s been 30 years of doing that on my back porch, biding my time and trying to get good at an instrument versus suddenly deciding to play three chords and run out in front of people and make money.

Your song “If William Shatner Can, I Can Too” is very funny, and it really skewers that trend of actors becoming singers.
And I wrote that 10 years ago, before the first public shows I did, because I figured, “I’ve got to have a disclaimer.” Because that’s what everybody in the room is thinking. It’s the big elephant in the room. I’m known for something else, and here I am pretending that that thing you know me for doesn’t exist. Well, yes it does, and here’s a song about it.

To his credit, Shatner has gotten better since you wrote that song, after he stopped taking himself seriously.
Yeah, and someday my dream is to have Shatner walk out and sing that song with me. But the reality of the situation is that I probably can’t afford him.

What prompted you to first start writing songs and playing guitar 30 years ago?
At the time, I didn’t know. I just did it. I moved to New York in 1976 to chase the acting career, and I bought a guitar and took it with me. As I looked back, it was all a part of living a creative life. And I knew I’d be sitting in that one-room apartment waiting for the phone to ring, and instead of going nuts or getting self-destructive, I poured it all into the guitar and writing and being creative.

I was also around a lot of playwrights in the ’70s and the ’80s. And later on with the films, I really was interested in what Woody Allen was doing when he re-wrote a scene, or Jim Brooks on Terms of Endearment. The writing process fascinated me, but if you’d ask me all the way up to the year 2000, “Are you a writer?,” I would have said, “No. I’m working at it, but no. It’s just something I do on the side. It makes me a better actor. I understand writing better. But no.” It wasn’t until I had to play publicly that I became serious about the songwriting.

Does your musical outlet allow you to be more nakedly yourself than you ever could be acting a part?
Absolutely, because it’s your material. It’s someone else’s script when you’re in a play or a movie. You’re channeling yourself to portray whatever the character’s feeling, but there is this filter called a character that allows you to go there emotionally, only with a safety net so that you know it’s not really you. [At my concerts], you take that material away and make it your material, you take the character away and walk out with just you and a guitar, and there’s a nakedness to that, that early on, it hit me like a truck. I wasn’t prepared for that at all. It wasn’t until about 30 or 40 gigs that I said, “Oh, I get it. I have to come up with a character.” Which is just me in a good mood. It’s still me, but it’s me in a good mood, and wanting to be here and have fun. And that’s the guy that walks out.

Your work as a writer in The Squid and the Whale was extraordinary, and it’s one of my favorite pictures ever.
That was an example, I thought, of a director who had a singular vision. We had one producer on it, who basically watched the money. And it was Noah [Baumbach's] vision. There weren’t notes from the studio. There weren’t 17 producers behind the camera. It was just me and Noah and Laura [Linney] and the kids standing in Brooklyn at 2 in the morning going, “How do we fix this scene?”

It felt like one of those ’70s movies, where American directors really got to be auteurs.
Yeah. And I remember when I read it, I met with Noah, and I said, “This is very funny.” And he said, “You’re the first actor who’s said that.” And I went through the script going, “That’s funny. … That’s funny. … That’s funny.” It’s painful and pathetic, but funny. That’s what I got from it — I recognized that kind of dark humor.

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I want to mention a sketch you did on Saturday Night Live in the ’90s. It was a fake movie publicity program called The Chris Elliott Show, in which Chris played your toilet scene from Dumb and Dumber over and over and over again. I was glad you were able to joke about it, but is part of you bothered by the fact that after so many great dramatic roles that you’ve played, that that’s the part, and especially the scene, that has seeped most into the pop-culture consciousness?
Nah. You can’t control that. Anything that lands is great. The cliché is true: It made people laugh. I can take pride in the fact that I can go from the toilet scene — which is not unlike stuff that Peter Sellers did for The Pink Panther — to a Squid and the Whale. I can’t make that leap unless there’s nothing from which to jump. And that would be the toilet scene in Dumb and Dumber. When I got Dumb and Dumber in 1995, I thought, “Great — only 15-year-old boys will be into it.” But the fact that it blew up and became this megahit for the ages of 7 to 70, I said, “That’s OK.” At the show, I’ll say, “Any Dumb and Dumber fans here?” And 80 percent of the audience will cheer.

If that’s all I had done or all that Hollywood would allow me to do, then it’s kind of like, “Shit, that’s what it all came to.” But there’s Gettysburg or Squid or The Purple Rose of Cairo, so that at the end, I’ll be able to go, “Wow, look at the range.”

And you probably don’t get enough artistic credit for Dumb and Dumber because it’s so lowbrow, but that toilet scene was not an easy scene to act, I’m sure.
No, and Dustin Hoffman came up to me once and couldn’t be nicer. He said, “I thought you were brilliant in Dumb and Dumber. And I’m going, “Oh, Jesus, you had to see that?” And he said, “No, really. I believed every single moment.” And when you’re going that big and that broad, that’s really hard to do.

Jeff Daniels will perform 8:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 14 at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 S.W. Fifth Ave., in Fort Lauderdale. Call 954-462-0222 or visit Browardcenter.org.

Sally Hawkins stars in Made in Dagenham.

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by John Thomason

Made in Dagenham
The great Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky) takes the lead in this studious reenactment of the 1968 Ford sewing machinist’s strike in East London, in which a small coterie of female assembly-line workers made national news by battling for pay equity — a case that made it all the way to the hallowed desk of the Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity (Miranda Richardson).

William Ivory’s screenplay takes a didactic, educational approach in which characters sometimes speak as if reciting data for historical record (“we’re the largest automaker in the world,” spouts a huffy American Ford executive played by Richard Schiff). And for a film containing strikes, suicide and domestic strife, Made in Dagenham is light on compelling drama. But the film remains an inspiring story of feminine wile and bootstrap perseverance that’s obviously on the right side of history.

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White Material
The “white material” in French director Claire Denis‘ latest provocative art-house ramble is Isabelle Huppert and her family of Caucasian colonialists, whose lives and coffee plantation in an unspecified African country are threatened by the sudden onslaught of war. Like Huppert herself, gazing past distant bombs in scorched vistas in the film’s signature image, the viewers of White Material are adrift — strangers in a strange and combustible land.

It isn’t the first time Denis has visited African soil at a precarious juncture, nor are racial and class schisms new to her oeuvre. White Material follows a Denis story curve that is conventional in its unconventionality, complete with a wandering anticlimax that resolves nothing and leaves spectators grasping for something resembling finality. But she doggedly refuses to provide an out for her characters, and the film is all the better for it. The movie’s existential dread is palpable, and buried in the director’s poetically grubby landscapes is a potent indictment of our capacity for (in)human savagery.

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by John Thomason

As far as I can remember, the word super never became a prefix for the benign designation of lobbyist until Jack Abramoff, a former B-movie producer, took over K street in the 1990s. A well-built, larger-than-life figure who famously donned Mafioso trench coats and black fedoras, Abramoff became one of the wealthiest businessmen on Capitol Hill while acting as a slick conduit between Congress and the special interest groups that paid him for access.

That is, until his elaborate house of cards came crashing down upon the lobbyist and his right-wing cronies for corrupting public officials and defrauding Indian tribes of millions of dollars. Abramoff pled guilty to three criminal felony charges, for which he served 3 1/2 years. He was released this past May and now flips pizzas for a living.

That’s only part of Abramoff’s fascinating story, which has, this past year alone, inspired two similarly titled movies. Alex Gibney’s documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money, which hit theaters last spring, is a journalistic tour de force, a veritable day-by-day account of Abramoff’s quick ascension and just-as-rapid public plummet, loaded with head-shaking data that prove just how unconscionable Abramoff’s actions were.

By all means, see the documentary before subjecting yourself to George Hickenlooper’s new biopic Casino Jack, which opens Friday, Jan. 7. Hickenlooper’s deeply unserious take on Abramoff and his many scandals is like watching Washington’s recent “Culture of Corruption” saga play out like a middling TV drama — more cliché than insight, more conjecture than truth, more Burn Notice than The West Wing. Or, in its silly embrace of over-the-top histrionics, perhaps an episode of Looney Tunes is more appropriate. Everyone is such an exaggerated caricature of himself that you forget you’re watching real people.

Kevin Spacey, to his credit, is in vintage form as Abramoff, another variation on the short-circuited, acid-tongued stuffed shirts on which he forged his career in the ’90s. Spacey plays Abramoff as a delusional, avaricious buffoon prone to petulant tantrums and imbecilic movie-star impressions. Yet beneath the bluster there’s an inherent likability to his persona, calling to mind that backhanded compliment about George W. Bush that he’s a guy “you want to have a beer with.” We entirely have Spacey to thank for this: The film only finds its pulse through his energetic presence; he charms the pants off the very snake he’s portraying. Subplots involving supporting cast members — including Barry Pepper as Abramoff’s partner-in-crime Michael Scanlon and Jon Lovitz as the bankrupt, mob-tied mattress maven Adam Kidan — crush whatever minimal momentum the film gains in its exploration of the title character.

Unlike Gibney, Hickenlooper and screenwriter Norman Snider spend a considerable amount of time on Abramoff’s personal life, especially his Orthodox Judaism. Watching the crooked lobbyist tinkle Chopin on the piano while donning a yarmulke and davening offers a different side to Abramoff than the one-dimensional bully presented by the mainstream media.

The movie falters when it strays from the script of reality and is forced to simply make up shit to justify its crime-drama leanings. We know something fishy happened when Gus Boulis, owner of the SunCruz Casino empire (here lamely rebranded “SunSail” for legal purposes), was killed in a mob hit, but even Gibney, in his exhaustive research for his documentary, couldn’t find evidence tying Abramoff or any of his companions to the murder. In his screenplay, Snider flippantly makes that connection, relying on gossip to condemn Kidan for unknowingly suggesting the “whacking” to Maury Chakin’s porcine don.

Hickenlooper may have been better off modeling a new story on the Abramoff scandal and passing the result off as satire. As it stands, the Screenwriting 101 interactions depicted in Casino Jack make the juvenile re-creations in Oliver Stone’s W. feel ripped from White House audio recordings. But even if this screechy melodrama were presented as a pure fiction, it wouldn’t pass many smell tests: It’s ridiculously staged and flat-out stupid, culminating in a limp, unwarranted apology for its titular cretin.

Contact John Thomason at jpthomason@tribune.com.

Dax Shepard stars opposite writer-director Katie Aselton in the last great mumblecore film of 2010.

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by John Thomason

This past year may be remembered as the one mumblecore — the semi-disputed subgenre of American indie film wherein awkward young hipsters stumble, fumble and mumble their way through love’s fragile foibles — grew up. Or at least graduated from the festival circuit to the multiplex, with Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg and Mark Duplass’ Cyrus channeling mumblecore style and spirit with, for the first time, bankable Hollywood stars. Cyrus, an uncomfortable black comedy about a blossoming romance stymied by the female lead’s disturbed son, was shot for just $50,000 and grossed more than $7 million. It’s not Nirvana outselling Michael Jackson in 1991, but it proves mumblecore isn’t a fly-by-night trend.

It’s likely that through Mark Duplass’ successes — he also directed the well-received Puffy Chair and Baghead, which played in limited release — his wife, actress Katie Aselton, was able to complete The Freebie, her first mumblecore feature as writer-director. With Duplass signed on as executive producer, Aselton shot the 78-minute feature in 11 days, working collaboratively with the cast from a six-page outline. The result, which opens Friday, Dec. 31 exclusively at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, doesn’t expand mumblecore’s lo-fi vocabulary, but it tells a damn fine story within the genre’s conventions.

It’s an idea that might have originated from the late French auteur Eric Rohmer in his prime. A young couple, monogamous for some time and still gooey-eyed for one another’s company, has seen their sex life dwindle to a state of seemingly comfortable obsolescence. Neither Annie (Aselton) nor Darren (Dax Shepard) can remember the last time they made love, the status of their loins reduced to sarcastic punch lines. Affection and mild discomfort commingle in an early scene where Annie dons a bikini to spice things up, a move received with awkward compliance by Darren until the couple gives up, resigning themselves to a night of crossword puzzles before bedtime.

To help them get past this hurdle, Darren proposes that each of them be granted a free evening on the town to have a one-night stand with a stranger, thereby getting the pent-up sexual frustration out of their systems and allowing them to start anew. It fits the stereotype of the seed-planting male that Darren, rather than Annie, suggests authorized philandering as a way to save monogamy, an idea that sounds patently absurd and seemingly destined to be shot down by his significant other. But Annie goes along with it, and both parties begin to prowl for a mate, with one landing an intimate, indie-folk-scored bedroom encounter and the other a dirty barroom fuck.

Or so it seems. The genius of Aselton’s narrative — spoilers may be contained herein — is that she doesn’t show the actual fornication. The results of the intended trysts are left to our own expectations and perceptions of the characters. We’re asked to take them at their words during a climactic argument, but neither sounds very convincing. The truth is smartly, deliberately murky, providing one of many angles for this interactive movie’s attendees to discuss during what should be a lively ride home from the cinema. Other themes addressed include the sustainability of a healthy but sexless relationship, the impossibility of sex without emotional involvement and a questioning of monogamy as the standard, de facto lifestyle choice for mainstream society.

Hollywood would never breach these subjects with such nuance or maturity, nor would conventional, populist moviemakers cast two lead players who look this refreshingly ordinary. By stripping the film of cinematic artifice and observing these characters — warts and all — Aselton seems to be suggesting that this easily could be you. Whether it’s seen as a cautionary tale or wish fulfillment is in the eyes of the beholder.

Contact John Thomason at jpthomason@tribune.com.

Fun with Dick and Dick: Jim Carrey (left) kisses other men in this movie, but it’s the audience that gets screwed.

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by John Thomason

I Love You Phillip Morris
Bad Santa scribes Glenn Ficarra and John Requa directed this adaptation of Steven McVicker’s book about real-life white-collar criminal Steven Russell (Jim Carrey, bringing his signature rubbery goofiness to a role that doesn’t warrant it). Russell devised elaborate schemes to break himself out of prison and worse time and time again, driven by the love of the title character (Ewan McGregor), a slow-witted, onetime cellmate.

Ping-ponging awkwardly between Catch Me if You Can-style crime adventure, gay romance and puerile comedy, this bipolar, genre-defying oddity never finds its emotional center until the very end — by which time we’ve been battered by an abundance of tacky phallic jokes aimed at audiences lower than the film’s should-be target.

Due to the movie’s somewhat graphic gay sex scenes, I Love You Phillip Morris was shelved by various distributors throughout the year leading up to its Christmas Day release. Shows how much the studios know: The unabashed gayness, agreeably taboo by mainstream Hollywood standards, is one of the film’s few commendable facets.

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Monsters
As in District 9, the “monsters” in writer-director Gareth Edwards‘ feature-film debut are humans, or more specifically imperialistic Americans, who are pillaging an alien species that just wants to live in peace. But unlike last year’s Peter Jackson-funded allegory, Edwards has neither the budget nor the intellectual heft to make his shoestring sci-fi parable sing on multiple levels.

The film is set on the U.S.-Mexico border, where tentacled creatures have taken up benign residency in the air and sea and a so-called “infection” has left much of Northern Mexico in a government quarantine. It’s in this fear-propelled milieu that jaded photojournalist Andrew (Scoot McNairy) is assigned to track down his boss’ daughter — and his own inevitable love interest — Samantha (Whitney Able), from an area hospital and bring her back to the States. Thanks to a number of convenient story blunders that bar the hero and heroine from traveling safely via ferry, Andrew and Samantha are forced to trek directly through the quarantined area, on ramshackle dinghies and through harsh forests and bombed-out villages.

Monsters inhabits the structural trappings of an exotic adventure but the sentiment of a talky, banal romance, where copious backstory takes the place of genuine character depth. There are parts of Edwards’ incomplete vision of apocalyptic pseudo-dystopia that merit guarded praise, namely the restraint the director shows when lesser filmmakers might settle for cheap scares. Monsters has a way of confounding its own expectations, and those of the monster-movie genre, much too late in the game, when purpose and distinction have already been buried under mounds of tacky clichés.

The movie will open Friday, Dec. 24 at Coral Gables Art Cinema.

Contact John Thomason at jpthomason@tribune.com.

I Am Love

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by John Thomason

Like everybody else right now, I could write a top 10 list of the best films of 2010, and if I did, it would be filled with a bunch of pretentious art-house films nobody saw, ’cause that’s how I roll. But for this feature, I’d much rather talk about piranhas chomping off the sexual organs of ’90s celebrities and which (other) films most made me want to lose my lunch in 2010. These are the most-memorable films, scenes, actors and directors of the past year in cinema, for better, worse or weird.

Best Film of the Year (so far): I Am Love
Best American Film of the Year: Winter’s Bone
Best Reason To Be a Film Lover in Miami: The Coral Gables Art Cinema
Best Reason To Be a Film Lover in Boca Raton: FAU’s Living Room Theaters
Best Theatrical Reissue: Orlando (1992)
Best Documentary: Exit Through the Gift Shop
Best Political Documentary: Inside Job
Best Remake: Let Me In
Worst Remake: I Spit on Your Grave
Best Guilty Pleasure: Burlesque
Worst Film That I Should Have Liked Much, Much More: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Most Exasperatingly Hyperbolic Film of the Year (tie): For Colored Girls and Countdown to Zero
Best Reason To Separate the Art From the Artist: Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer
Best Film About How To Lose Friends and Alienate People: The Social Network
Best Movie About Liberal Guilt: Please Give
Biggest Waste of Hollywood Talent: Valentine’s Day
Best Reason To Stick a Fork in Kevin Smith: Cop Out
Best Title of 2010: Hot Tub Time Machine
Movie That Was Most Dead on Arrival Thanks to Its Title: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Title Most Intended To Repel Male Viewers (tie): Eat Pray Love and Sex and the City 2
Most Moving Film About Moving On (tie): Toy Story 3 and The Kids Are All Right
Best Michael Shannon Supporting Role Since the Last Michael Shannon Supporting Role: The Runaways
Most Overrated Mind-fuck of 2010: Inception
Most Underrated Mind-fuck of 2010: Enter the Void
Best Film About the Afterlife: Enter the Void
Second-Best Film About the Afterlife: Hereafter
Worst Film by a Great Filmmaker: Atom Egoyan’s Chloe
Most Completely Ignored Film by a Great Filmmaker: George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead

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Best Film To Make You Rethink Your Opinion of Ben Stiller: Greenberg
Best Film To Make You Rethink Your Opinion of Jonah Hill: Cyrus
Worst Give-Everything-Away Trailer of 2010 (tie): Catfish and Conviction
Most Exploitative Climax: Remember Me
Best Operatic Italian Film Not Named I Am Love: Vincere
Best Opportunity To See Jon Lovitz Reincarnated As Paul Reubens: Life During Wartime
Best Example of Two Amazing Actors Redeeming Middling Material: Bill Murray and Robert Duvall in Get Low
Most Boring Execution of a Fun Idea: The Human Centipede
Best Straight Sex in a Lesbian Movie: The Kids Are All Right
Best Gay Sex in a Crime Movie: I Love You Phillip Morris
Best Film Co-starring Jerry O’Connell’s Dismembered Penis: Piranha 3D
Best Usage of the Phrase “I’m getting too old for this:” Piranha 3D
Worst Epitomization of the Phrase “I’m getting too old for this:” Red
Best Fictional Corporate Creep: Michael Douglas in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Worst Nonfictional Corporate Creep: Jack Abramoff, exposed in Casino Jack and the United States of Money
Best Example of a Master Filmmaker Directing Material That’s Beneath Him: Martin Scorsese, Shutter Island
Best Film Whose Simple Message is “Communism is bad:” Farewell
Worst Film Whose Simple Message is “Communism is bad:” Mao’s Last Dancer
Best Example of a Teabag, Election-year Hit Job Seen by Approximately No One (tie): I Want Your Money and An Inconvenient Tax
Best Poster Art: Wild Grass
Best Film About Nothing: The Exploding Girl
Worst Film About Nothing: Inception
Worst Example of the Globalization of Hollywood Formula: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

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Most Overexposed Actor of the Year: Zach Galifianakis
Best Film To Make You Start Writing Poetry: Howl
Saddest Example of Art Imitating Life: Solitary Man, in which Michael Douglas plays a dying man
Most Surprising Hollywood Death: director George Hickenlooper, Casino Jack
Film Most Requiring a Vomit Bag Under Each Seat: 127 Hours
Scene That Would Most Incite Vomiting if Presented in Smell-O-Vision: Rip Torn’s pants-shitting scene in Happy Tears

Contact John Thomason at jpthomason@tribune.com.

by John Thomason

The common misconception is that FAU’s new Living Room Theaters complex is so named because the experience of seeing a movie in it simulates living-room comfort. And indeed it does. The reclining leather chairs are oversize and welcoming; unlike in most theaters, they resemble first-class seating, not coach. Each of the four 48-person-occupancy auditoriums provides an intimate, home-theater-style experience, without a bad seat or obstructed view in the house.

But the all-digital indie movie theater, which recently opened to the public in a newly erected classroom building, actually draws its name from a failed business deal. In 2004, father-and-son co-owners Ernesto and Diego Rimoch wanted to make their art-house theater dreams come true in a Design District art piece called the Living Room, which is still on view in a space on North Miami Avenue and 40th Street. When that deal fell through, the Rimochs kept the name and jumped ship to Portland, Ore., where in 2006 they invested in the first Living Room Theaters.

The move back to Florida came in 2009, thanks to a $1.5 million donation from Living Room Theaters and a matching sum from the state’s Facility Enhancement Challenge Grant program. Construction on the angular building, which is centrally located near the Schmidt Center Gallery and University Theatre, began in June of last year.

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The completed facility is outstanding. While I quietly gripe about the fact that the theater can’t exhibit 35 mm film prints, most audiences won’t be able to tell the difference; the picture and sound quality represent the apex in state-of-the-art digital technology. In addition to forgoing the old standard of film projection, the owners also eschew traditional movie-nosh fare in favor of a Mediterranean-tinged gourmet menu along with wine and microbrew offerings, many of which can be delivered to your seat if you arrive 30 minutes ahead of show time.

The menu includes five salad offerings plus tapas such as lemongrass flank steak skewers, a deviled egg trio, pulled pork sliders and veggie sushi hand rolls. Scrumptious desserts and pretentious-sounding cheeses are offered on the side. The food is a little pricy, but compared to the usually separated movie-and-a-dinner experience, it’s a bargain.

It’s all part of the Rimochs’ dream of reinventing the traditional moviegoing experience, of which format quality and food are but two improvements.

“[Traditional theaters] get everything from the choice of movies to the feel of the space to the interior design to cleanliness and concessions wrong,” Rimoch told me, just a few hours before a press conference introducing the new theater to the media. “You go to multiplexes these days, and they’re playgrounds for teenagers, who are texting and playing with their phones. And the choice of movies is usually whatever action movie will appeal to that demographic. Concessions are usually limited to stale popcorn and soda, and the floors can be sticky. And it’s not inviting — when the movie’s over, they want you to leave. What I like to say is, the experience has to be meaningful.”

Well, Diego, tell us how you really feel. But seriously, Living Room Theaters is an important 21st century art-house that will contribute mightily to film culture in Palm Beach County and beyond. The theater already has begun showing movies you cannot see, or can barely see, elsewhere in the tri-county area, such as the documentary Client 9, about Eliot Spitzer; the French romantic drama Leaving, with Kristen Scott Thomas; and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The new adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s Garden of Eden will open Friday.

“I think it will be a substantial addition to the Boca Raton cultural scene,” Rimoch says.

For a full schedule of show times, visit Fau.livingroomtheaters.com.

Contact John Thomason at jpthomason@tribune.com.

It’s a miserable life: Enter the Void’s dead protagonist sees what the world is like without him.

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by John Thomason

“Everyone still here?” Robert Rosenberg, programming director at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, asked the small gathering of film critics following a recent press screening of Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void. All of us, indeed, stayed for the film’s two-and-a-half-hour duration, but Rosenberg had good reason to confirm our attendance. He will be lucky if 100 percent of his paying audience stays until the last frame, or even if they stay past the seizure-inducing opening credits.

There are controversial movies, and then there are Gaspar Noe movies, which tend to make Pedro Almodóvar’s boundary-pushing exercises in sexual provocation resemble Sesame Street plots. I Stand Alone, the debut feature from the Franco-Argentine enfant terrible, arrived in home video with a loud label advising viewers of the graphic sex and violence contained therein — a Surgeon General’s-style warning almost unheard-of for a commercially released movie. His follow-up, Irreversible, created a firestorm of controversy with its eight-minute, single-take, defiantly unwatchable rape scene of well-known actress Monica Bellucci. Irreversible also contained a death-by-fire-extinguisher revenge killing that ranks among the hardest scenes I’ve ever sat through.

But never has Noe’s nauseating MO been as probing, mature and mind-fucking extraordinary as Enter the Void. Like Irreversible, which was told in a backward-chronology narrative structure, Noe’s latest is built on a rigorous aesthetic gimmick: We see the entire film from the point of view of Oscar (first-time actor Nathaniel Brown), an American drug dealer living in Tokyo. Its constant point-of-view angle is doggedly adhered to, to the extent that the camera flickers to black with each eye blink from the character. When he inhales a dose of mind-altering dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, we see the world as he sees it: a kaleidoscopic color field seeping into the realistic environs of his shabby apartment.

When Oscar is unceremoniously — and perhaps inevitably — killed by police in an unexpected bar raid, we remain in his head, following his soul as it exits his body and spends the rest of the movie hovering, godlike, among the neon glitz of Tokyo, witnessing what the world is like without him. Oscar lived with his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta, a gangly Juliette Lewis type), a similarly tortured soul with whom he shared an unusually close bond. Various spiritual excursions trigger hairpin emotional flashbacks as Noe offers fleeting glimpses into Oscar and Linda’s back story, a traumatic upbringing that led to their foster-home separation and subsequent escape to Japan. In Tokyo, brother and sister reconnected in less than auspicious professions, with Linda stripping and Oscar dealing.

Other flashbacks reveal that Oscar’s preoccupations with breast-feeding and the sexual appetite of mothers — his own and that of a fellow drug user, whose mom begins an affair with Oscar — suggest a character fraught with Oedipal complexes. But Noe lithely sidesteps the cause-and-effect concreteness of psychoanalysis. Keeping in tune with the film’s open-ended existentialism, the director offers little for audiences to cling to: no excuses to justify our choices, no grand meanings, no comforting platitudes about the afterlife and no reasons for those left behind to even continue living. Unlike Hereafter, Clint Eastwood’s affecting but completely polarized take on life after death, this meditation on the hereafter is an anti-morality tale that might also have been called It’s a Miserable Life.

Set to a disturbing, disquieting score by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, Oscar’s mesmerizing post-mortem flight into the past, present and future is a Herculean achievement of style over substance, ultimately consuming the narrative in its pulverizing vortex. The more Oscar dives into the increasingly bloodshot void, the more his afterlife becomes a sexually explicit netherworld of nihilism, a playground of orgasmic moans and fiery phalli that may or may not end with Oscar’s mystifying, 2001: A Space Odyssey-echoing reincarnation.

Not since Derek Jarman’s monocolor experiment Blue has the cinema screen taken on such a life of its own as Noe grants it here, pulsating in color-coded avant-garde segues. Tokyo, too, appears as an experimental, computer-generated landscape, less of a physical place on a map than a motley, plastic pleasure center in the protagonist’s (and, by extension, our own) drug-addled headspace.

By the time the film has ended, we’ve taken in a number of aural assaults as well as images of bullet wounds and dead fetuses that Noe’s camera cranes toward in extreme close-ups. The disturbing images mutate into other, less-benign objects, but that doesn’t mean they contain any symbolic charge. To the contrary: As in the Dadaist art before it, looking for meaning in the film’s grand scheme is as useless as attempting to decode the sliced eyeball in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. Noe has essentially directed a massively expensive, extraordinarily photographed experimental film: a movie of beauty, macabre poetry and formal derring-do that’s more alive than 99 percent of the films you’ll see.

Enter the Void will open Thursday, Dec. 2 at Living Room Theaters at Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, and Friday, Dec. 3 at Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave.

Contact John Thomason at jpthomason@tribune.com.

Exposition schmexposition. Burlesque does not waste a minute before plunging aspiring diva Ali (Christina Aguilera) from her apparently soul-crushing employ as a waitress in Podunk, America, toward the glamour, hope and optimism of a new life in Los Angeles. Forget that we know absolutely nothing about Ali, other than this farm girl can dance: Back story is jettisoned so quickly, the future embraced so capriciously, that screenwriting guru Robert McKee would likely have a conniption during the film’s first 10 minutes. But it’s an appropriate barometer for the way the rest of the movie’s 100 minutes will play out, for better or worse — as a constant forward thrust, with no time for pause or reflection.

Before she knows it, penniless Ali is waiting tables at a once-legendary L.A. burlesque club that’s in its last throes, about to be bought out and redeveloped by Eric Dane’s one-dimensional real-estate maven. The next minute, she’s catapulted herself to the club’s leading performer, much to the surprise of proprietor Tess (Cher, whose minimal contributions to the soundtrack are vocally stunning but so narratively arbitrary that you wonder if her songs aren’t simply a contract obligation).

The Secretariat of the splashy, show-biz-set neo-musical (there’s one every holiday season), Burlesque is a hollow, pandering, predictable but enormously entertaining crowd-pleaser that, to its surprising credit, is not the unintentionally comic disaster its trailers suggest. Alan Cumming, Peter Gallagher and Stanley Tucci add class to the supporting cast, and Aguilera shows she has acting chops to match her pop-star charisma. This is a very absorbing picture, providing you don’t think about it too much.

Contact John Thomason at jpthomason@tribune.com.