The Trip

The Trip, directed by Michael Winterbottom, and starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as themselves, has a foolproof structure.  The structure is  based on a BBC tv series in which the two characters take a restaurant tour of northern England.  Each episode features a new location.  Originally suggested by Steve's girlfriend, who has since backed off such a romantic journey, the trip takes the two men into and out of luxurious accommodations,  gorgeous scenery, and tantalizing versions of sauteed scallops.

We learn how close the men are by how well they accommodate each other through bouts of talkativeness, recitations of Wordsworth, singing, and imitations of actors, mostly British, which are hilarious.

It's a road movie, a buddy movie, a food movie, and  a story about family and loneliness.  I am so grateful not to have to see a Judd  Apatow movie in order to have a belly laugh!

Cedar Rapids

 

We watched the movie, Cedar Rapids, at a 1 o'clock show in a theater where we were the only two there.  I guess the movie is at the end of its run.  How delicious to see a movie on a Thursday afternoon when everyone else is at work.  Another man sat in the back, who turned out to be one of the staff.  When the lights went down, he announced that the show would now begin, and we should enjoy ourselves, and then he left.  This is not usually how movies start at big chain theatres.

The main character, named Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), is a rube, simple,  naive,  a boy in man's clothing.  He has never left his home town of Brown Falls, Wisconsin, so when he is called on by the head of his insurance office to attend a convention in Cedar Rapids, which is a big town for this guy, he is so green he deosn't know that everyone, even him, has to go through security check, even when the security check guy is someone he knows very well.  

Once in Cedar Rapids, the blowhard, played by John C. Reilly, the hip woman, played by Anne Heche, and the stolid roomate, played by Isaiah Whitlock, give our hero  a little seasoning.   Alia Shawcat, who played Maebe on Arrested Development, does a fine turn as a hooker.  All the women, including Sigourney Weaver who bravely allows the camera to show her age, hold their own in this male id-centered comedy.  The comedy comes and goes, but at heart, the film is  a coming of age story for the sweet insurance salesman. It gives honest businessmen everywhere a reason to cheer. 

Howl

Howl with James Franco

The movie begins with a recitation of the poem as it might have been delivered in a dark subterranean coffee shop in San Francisco in 1955, shortly after it was written.  James Franco wears the thick black horn rimmed glasses, the white t shirt under the buttoned down white shirt, just the way that Ginsberg wore these things.  Franco’s voice takes on that raspy incantatory drone  that was Ginsberg’s performance persona.  The voice, and the juicy words that run on and on return us to 1955 – but do these lines speak to us now as they did in 1955?  Perhaps we do not need them now as we did then.

James Franco

The opening titles show glimpses of the animation to come.  Armies of men carry identical brief cases, wear identical hats, march across an unknown grey city.  Photographs of Ginsberg and Orlovsky, his lifelong partner, actual photographs, look a bit scruffier than the cleaned up actors who play their counterparts.  The cold war is represented by missiles pointing ominously toward us the viewers.   In this context, the beat poets were railing against conformity, against war, against restrictions of all kinds.

Franco plays Ginsberg especially well when he is full of longing.  He speaks to an unseen interviewer (the script comes almost entirely from transcripts, interviews, and the poetry itself) about his journey from a young poet wannabe in the shadow of his straight traditional poet father.  His sexuality he hid from his parents.  He was put in an insane asylum when he was 21 ostensibly because of his homosexuality, and was released when he agreed to become straight.  After two years of working in advertising and rejecting his true nature, his therapist encouraged him to do what he wanted, and the rest is history.

Allen Ginsberg

The animations in the movie are distracting.  The images of star bursts that denote orgasms, the explicit sexual couplings, detract from the power of the words.  But this is a movie. I can see why the filmmakers thought so much time with just the words-- staring at the screen, listening to Franco recite, might be boring without some action.  

 How gratifying to hear a poet's words treated with the seriousness of a love affair, or a war, or a heist, or some other common subjects of movies.  I remember when the movie came out about Sylvia Plath.  They had everything in that movie except the poetry.  This movie has the poetry front and center and I am grateful.

The Good, The Bad, The Weird

The Good, The Bad, The Weird takes a spaghetti western, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly and sets it in Manchuria during World War II when the Japanese have occupied Korea, and perhaps bandits would want to get an ancient Chinese dynasty's treasure to fuel a nationalist movement.   Or is the movie just an excuse to use horses again in a way that is bound to be thrilling as they are seen galloping across a huge expanse of horizon in the desert?

There are three main characters, a man who seems to be a doofus (be careful about your preconceived stereotypes), a psychopath, and a handsome cowboy who can shoot with a rifle while riding a horse at top speed.

The most interesting thing to me about this movie is the strain of nationalism running through it, though the stunts are amazing and the action is good when it doesn't go on too long.  The three main actors are captivating.  I know it isn't a great movie, but I have been hearing about Korean movies and this is my first brush with one.  I find its joy in the cinematography.