death-hilarious

Considering the fanatic cult following that Richard Linklater has developed with films like Waking Life, Before Sunrise/Sunset, and A Scanner Darkly, let me preface this review by saying that I'm not a Linklater devotee. If Linklater is endowed with a species of genius, I must confess complete ignorance to it. Indeed, my favorite Linklater film was School of Rock, and he has always impressed me more by the breadth of his work and his willingness to challenge the conventions of film than by any individual film. It's perhaps this maverick spirit that drew him to do a film about Orson Welles.

Me and Orson Welles, based on a novel by Robert Kaplow, tells the story of a teenager, Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), who is swept from learning about Shakespeare in the classroom to the fast paced world of the Mercury Theater on Broadway when he lands a role in Orson Welles famous 1937 production of Caesar. As Orson Welles struggles to get the production ready for the premier, Richard falls for the theater's resident hottie, a charming and ambitious aspiring actress played by Claire Daines, and finds himself growing up quickly to the realities of show business and the real world.

The movie is entirely carried by it's acting, and the actor generating the most buzz is the British born Christian McKay who plays Welles. I'm very uneasy about praising portrayals of real life figures, because it seems any time an actor plays any historical figure (from Gandhi to Capote and Idi Amin) they receive excessive attention. I think it has less to do with the "acting" involved than it has to do with the fact that most audiences feel much more comfortable passing judgment (and bestowing praise) on mimicry than actual acting. That said, McKay does a masterful job in capturing that mythical image of a young Orson Welles that all of us film geeks have in our head, from the striking resemblance in appearance to the pitch perfect intonations in his voice. Welles is charming and maddening, endearing and brutal, and always larger than life... and McKay captures it all perfectly. It's clearly a role that McKay has been mastering for a long time, as he was doing a one-man-show about Welles on Broadway before being snatched for the role in Me and Orson Welles. From the Q&A session (at the Toronto international film festival), McKay seemed intelligent and passionate about his work, and I truly hope he doesn't get pigeon-holed into spoofing Welles for his entire career.

Unfortunately the other acting foot that the movie stands on, isn't nearly as good. Zac Efron is just so pretty (and I say this as a heterosexual male) that it becomes distracting. Watching Efron act, it feels like he's trying to make women orgasm in every scene he's in, which works well in enough in the many scenes he's trying to court Claire Daines's character, but doesn't work in any other scene. Efron's acting makes it hard for the audience to emotionally connect and prevents the movie from achieving the emotional punch it might otherwise. The audience is never drawn in and they remain spectators, which, fortunately, isn't such a bad thing since the movie is so fun and nostalgically charming. Perhaps even the flighty and ethereal feeling the film gets because of it's lack of punch can be forgiven, since it's a movie about youth and growing up and so much of that involves tempestuous passions that end up being quite meaningless in retrospect.

8/10

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky

This second feature film from Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev had a lot to live up to considering how great his 2003 debut, The Return, was. I was really a bit skeptical going in because the advanced reviews had been mixed, and I really didn't know how a director who had made such brilliant use of the Russian landscape as almost a perpetually menacing character in its own right, would handle what sounded like a very indoor domestic drama. Boy was I wrong to doubt. Zvyagintsev and cinematographer Mikhail Krichman find an abundance of interesting things to shoot, from drab constantly overcast soviet-era industrial cities to old decaying farmsteads. I love the way these two frame and light almost every shot and the slow stalking way the camera pans and moves is almost deliberately predatory. I'd probably be mesmerized if these two shot nothing but landscapes and people for two hours with no plot whatsoever, which, to be fair, is what the movie feels like at times, considering how minimal and terse the typically Russian script is. The story revolves around a man (played by Konstantin Lavronenko who also starred in the Return), who moves his wife and two young children from the city to his father's old farm in the country where he expects better prospects for work. While in the country his wife reveals something that threatens to tear the family apart. Like the Return, the Banishment is about the tragic consequences of the failure of individuals to make emotional contact, communicate, and ultimately understand each other. Unfortunately the final denouement, which unravels through a few too many twists for a story this simple and sparse, is really unsatisfying because it strips all the characters of any last shred of sympathy, leaving the audience almost indifferent towards them. Still, this was so brilliantly photographed and paced that I couldn't help but enjoy every shot.