Celine: Through the Eyes of the World
She: Not Right
Celine's Strange Distribution
By Cole Smithey
Presented as a "performance" rather than a documentary of her 2008-2009 "Taking Chances" world tour, "Celine: Through the Eyes of the World" is an insult to your intelligence on many levels. Television writer/director-turned-glorified-editor Stéphane Laporte spastically splices together performances of the same song from various concerts in diverse global locations like Cape Town and Dubai so that you don't get the continuity of a single Celine Dion show. Back stage shenanigans, photo-ops with foreign children, teary-eyed press conferences, and saccharine moments with her family, bodyguards, and dance crew substitute for a storyline. Perhaps the most glaring example of corporate pop music on the planet today, Celine plays to the lowest common denominator masses who have sipped from her egomaniacal Kool-Aid and are only too happy to blabber on about it.
Like an amped-up cross between Ann Coulter and Sarah Jessica Parker, the singer gesticulates and pulls faces like a circus clown as she exaggerates the literal import of every oh-so-spirit-lifting power ballad. Think of her as the anti-Sinatra. Distrustful of her abilities, Celine smothers every song with cloying histrionics tilted to make you feel like you're being force-fed a giant box of gooey chocolates with a rhinestone-encrusted funnel. There's nothing smart or natural in her performance. Even as a skilled vocal technician, here is a singer who doesn't know the first thing about phrasing or mood. Perhaps a few years with some Graham Parker records would help. I'm not kidding.
A day visit for Celine, her husband, and child to Hitler's Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin provides an opportunity for Celine to experience some deep feelings that she'll repurpose in that night's duet with a German opera singer. Whew! While in a South Africa, a visit to Nelson Mandela's former prison cell provides yet another chance for Celine--sans make-up--to pull sad faces like a vaudeville child actor seeking applause. The film also loses points for stealing part of its title from "Muhammad Ali: Through the Eyes of the World" (2001). The most satisfying moment of the film arrives in a backstage scene with Celine doing an imitation of a horse that is spot-on. Oh yes friends, we've got a "special" one here.
The irony is that Celine's overkill act might work better as an off-off-Broadway performance art piece about greed. In New York City, cinemas that charge $12.50 for films that screen several times a day, "Celine: Through the Eyes of the World" costs $15.00--because it's a "performance"--and is shown only once a day in a logic-defying schedule that switches from 7:30 at night to two-o'clock in the afternoon depending on the day. The unspoken reason is that the film is scheduled to screen only eight times at each cinema it plays for its limited week-and-a-half run to work fans into a tizzy of anticipation for her upcoming tour. The Associated Press reported recently that Celine is due to return in March of 2011 to Caesars Palace in Vegas where her new show will feature songs "incorporating the romance of classic movies."
Not Rated. 117 mins. (D) (One Star)
Posted by Cole Smithey on
February 22, 2010 in Film | Permalink
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Shutter Island
Instant Classic
Lehane Novel Sets Table for Scorsese to Soar
By Cole Smithey
For his forty-fifth film Martin Scorsese crafts a gorgeously stylized psychological thriller full of darkly lush horror that torments its obsessed protagonist. As former WWII vet and U.S. Marshal, Edward "Teddy" Daniels, Leonardo DiCaprio hits every psychological mark that Scorsese dynamically orchestrates against a vast metaphorical natural and unnatural setting. Peddocks Island in Nahant, Massachusetts stands in for "Shutter Island," a Boston Harbor land mass, circa 1954, that contains a private prison hospital for the criminally insane where a female inmate named Rachel Solondo has recently escaped from her unbroken cell. Teddy and his first-time partner U.S. Marshall Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) arrive on the fog-shrouded isle to investigate the patient's disappearance but don't receive much cooperation from the hospital's governing psychiatric doctors (played by Sir Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow). The manically obsessed Teddy suffers from terrible migraines and has walking nightmares that recall his wife's tragic death and terrible atrocities he witnessed while helping to liberate Jews from the Nazi Dachau concentration camp as a U.S. soldier. Teddy has his own private agenda to investigate the facility on informed suspicions that the doctors are performing outrageous experiments on its patients ala the Nazi's Dr. Mengale. The island's wide open and yet closed-off perimeter represents a physical corollary to the internal mystery that paralyzes Teddy with grief and confusion.
The obvious bond that has developed between Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio over the course four films ("The Gangs of New York" - 2002, "The Aviator" - 2004, and "The Departed" - 2006) presents audiences with a rare phenomenon of fulfilled potential. With the ever dependable DiCaprio as his modern-day De Niro, Scorsese is at liberty as a storyteller to dig far deeper into narrative depths than most filmmakers could ever imagine. Along with Daniel Day Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio is one of the few film actors around who goes beyond creating a character to bite and scratch at the very edges of what human identity is made up of.
"Shutter Island" is a complex mystery that exponentially folds back on itself during the third act. It is not a narrative that a novice filmmaker, no matter how talented, could execute well because of the demanding nature of the material's precarious "state of mind." Crucial to the palpable tapestry of sociological themes that Scorsese juggles is the way the director moves the camera and shifts perspectives from an icosahedron of perspectives to give the audience a sense of physical context with which to judge dangerous themes at play.
Teddy suffers from what we would term today as a severe form of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). He witnessed evidence of experiments performed on Jews in Hitler's camps, and now has information that similarly grotesque experiments are going on at Shelter Island where one inmate has vanished and another one may be unaccounted-for. A personal ghost haunts Teddy in the form of his deceased wife Dolores (Michelle Williams) who died in a fire set by a man who Teddy is trying to find.
Shot in visually opulent "widescreen," Scorsese draws on a variety of cinematic references for a psychosomatic puzzle of foreboding and suspense. Whatever faults audiences might find with Dennis Lehane's imperfect yet solid source material, Scorsese uses the convoluted narrative to create layers of stylized and historic textures. Even the color of the blood that we see so much of is an abstract confection of cinematic intentionality. In another gesture to old friends, Scorsese used Robbie Robertson to curate the film's expressive soundtrack of previously recorded material. America's most accomplished and inspired director has made yet another truly engrossing picture.
(Paramount Pictures) Rated R. 138 mins. (A-) (Four Stars)
Posted by Cole Smithey on
February 18, 2010 in Thiller | Permalink
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The Ghost Writer
Invisible Ink
Polanski's Political Thriller Evaporates
By Cole Smithey
It's a big deal when Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski release mystery thrillers in the same week. Coincidentally, "Shutter Island" and "The Ghost Writer" are both set on islands and both begin with the arrival of a boat coming directly into the frame. "The Ghost Writer" draws the short straw against Scorsese's stronger effort, but that's not to say Polanski has lost his touch. Co-written by Polanski with political journalist Robert Harris, upon whose novel the film is based, "The Ghost Writer" is full of plot holes yet still entices.
Ewan McGregor plays an unnamed English writer who takes up a surprisingly dangerous job, as a ghostwriter/autobiographer for Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), a former British prime minister accused of war crimes. Following the mysterious drowning death of his literary predecessor, McGregor's ghostwriter sets up temporary shop in his publisher's American bunker-styled beachfront home, which Lang shares with his wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) and his mistress-assistant Amelia (Kim Cattrall). Leaked information about Lang's involvement in the "extraordinary rendition" of terror suspects forces Lang to take off on a United States PR tour to stanch his public bleeding in the media. Meanwhile, the ghostwriter digs deeper into Lang's past, where disturbing secrets lie waiting. Despite Robert Harris's personal experience as a journalist once close to Tony Blair, upon whom Adam Lang is clearly modeled, the screenwriter fails to sufficiently ignite explosive plot points for Polanski to examine under his camera's steady gaze.
Because of the sluggish way he approaches his work, McGregor is never entirely believable as a journalist. Given just six hours to read a manuscript that he must retool in a month's time, he reads aloud to himself rather than speed-reading it the way an actual editor would. He's a protagonist who barely shifts attitudinal gears. Forgetting that he's being well paid to perform a task that ostensibly got the guy before him killed, he allows himself to be misdirected by such low orbiting forces as Lang's temperamental wife when the cat is away. Within the concrete and glass surfaces of the modern beach house that Polanski films with fetishistic enthusiasm, we quickly comprehend the kind of politically-charged isolation that Lang, and later his ghostwriter, experience. Lang's spacious office has a floor-to-ceiling window that offers a stunning view of a foggy beach that waits beyond the room's hermetic seal. When a news helicopter flies over, apparently for an inside look at the home's inhabitants, the audience is pulled between a comfortable kind of claustrophobia and a threatening surveillance that breaks all sense of privacy.
"The Ghost Writer" arrives at a moment when political thrillers and mysteries are about to flood cinemas. The film is an enjoyable if not satisfying experience. When the GPS system of the car that McGregor's character drives becomes a dead-end suspense device, you know you've been had. The redeeming factor is that you've been had by Polanski.
(Summit Entertainment) Rated PG-13. 128 mins. (B-) (Three Stars - out of 5/no halves)
Posted by Cole Smithey on
February 15, 2010 in Thiller | Permalink
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