Andrea Arnold's AMERICAN HONEY--with an able cast of kids--hits Florida and elsewhere

Having enjoyed the work of British filmmaker Andrea Arnold (Red Road and Fish Tank), I looked forward to her latest movie and her first to be made here in America, AMERICAN HONEY. And for the first half of this long and rambling road trip that features a kind of very low-end Capitalism at work, I certainly did. Ms Arnold and her casting directors (Brit Lucy Pardee of Attack the Block) and Yank Jennifer Venditti (Lost River) have come up with a fine group of kids who play the group of kids that grounds the film. Each is odd and specific and real.

Ms Arnold, shown at left, has also gifted us with a beautiful and charismatic new actress named Sasha Lane (on poster, top, and two photos below) who will surely be seen again if she chooses to pursue this new career. Ms Lane has a face and body from which one does not want to remove one's eyes. And she is moment to moment so emotionally "there" that she helps fill this movie with life and meaning.

The rest of the cast includes the likes of  Shia LaBeouf (below, right) and Riley Keough (below, left) as the "leaders" of this pack of kids whose job it is to comb our country's south and southwest, selling magazine subscriptions. (Yes! This, at a time when print magazine are mostly dead and dying. But no one, neither the kids nor the would-be suckers to whom they're selling the subscriptions, ever brings up this fact.)

This is but the first of a host of believability problems the movie has. Yet so feisty and so much fun (for a time, at least) are these kids and their keepers that we let it pass. Ms Arnold's oeuvre so far would indicate that one of her favored themes is the resilience of teenagers, despite severe problems economically and with their irresponsible parents. So it is here.

This makes for some moving moments along the way, and Ms Lane is particularly adept at making us feel these without ever seeming to jerk us around. The movie and its plot, however certainly do. As writer and director, Arnold simply leaves out any logical consequences to our protagonists' behavior -- which grows more and more crazy as the movie progresses.

The filmmaker might have at least once thought to have the cops show up at one of the motels' the kids stay in and tell them to quiet down (if not haul them off to the nearest jail). These kids rob their marks of jewelry, too, but -- hey -- no problem. The most ridiculous scene arrives as LaBeouf brandishes and shoots off a gun and steals a car from some rich and, from what we can tell, rather powerfully-connected men. No problem. No consequence.

As the movie goes on and one for two hours and 43 minutes, this makes for quite a bit of blather and a near complete loss of credibility. If you buy into American Honey and stay there, you'll either have checked the logical portion of your brain at the door or will need to treat the movie as some kind of fantasy. We do get a couple of  hot sex scenes between Lane and LaBeouf (above), and a very interesting scene in which Lane attempts to play prostitute to a needy but decent oil rig worker.

There is good stuff here, intermittently, but I just can't help but wonder why Arnold didn't think out her movie with a bit more rigor and the kind of logic that would insist on a more honest and encompassing look at this entire situation. From A24 and having already opened in our major cultural centers, American Honey lands this Friday, October 14, here in South Florida in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and Boca Raton theatres. Click here then click on GET TICKETS in the upper left-hand corner to find a theater near you.

Read more »

AMERICAN HONEY, Andrea Arnold, British-American movies, Capitalism, road trips, teen movies, teenage prostitution,

Rate it :

Streaming tip -- Andrea Molaioli's THE JEWEL: Toni Servillo and Italian corporate malfeasance

I wasn't much taken with Andrea Molaioli's earlier (and award-winning) movie The Girl by the Lake, so I am happy to report that his newer film, THE JEWEL (Il Gioiellino), now available to stream via Netflix, is a keeper -- all about Italian skullduggery in the corporate sector that may remind viewers who possess a little European history of the Parmalat dairy empire scandal that rocked Italy (and much of the Western world) back in 2003. Names have certainly been changed, as well as the time frame, but there is no mistaking the resemblances to certain people, living or dead, that bounce and romp across the screen, as the ever-entitled one per cent again stiffs the rest of us 99ers -- taking a few of their own along with them in the process. (That's filmmaker Molaioli, shown below.)

The other thing that makes this movie stand-out is its central perfor-mance by one of Italy's acting greats, Toni Servillo -- who, by now, has given just about every kind of amazing performance you can think of -- Il Divo to It Was the Son to his set of twins in the recent Viva la libertà -- and this guy just keeps getting better and better. (Probably Servillo's least interesting performance is in Molaioli's own Girl by the Lake.)

The Jewel begins almost at the end of things, then flashes back to, if not their beginning, at least a good ways into when the trouble bubbled to the surface. The director's style here is flashy -- but to a point. He weaves together all the pomp and PR with the use of politicians and religion, economics and accounting, and even a looks at some of the actual products created here -- finally creating a huge carpet of deception and avarice that would not be out of place in modern Russia. (One of the characters we meet even suggests Russia as an appropriate retirement spot for the company's CEO, played with infinite savoir faire and sleaze by Remo Girone, above).

Signore Servillo, above, plays the firm's expert accountant, a man who certainly knows his way around "creative bookkeeping," but who also turns out to be among the most decent of the film's many males. His relationship with a younger and quite attractive worker, who is also the niece of the reigning titan, becomes something much more interesting than we usually get in movies of this sort, and Servillo and his co-star, Sarah Felberbaum (below) make the most of it.

Given the complications of the plot and the machinations of all sorts from all angles, Molaioli is nonetheless able to keep us -- not simply understanding what is going on but also glued to the screen by all the greed, glamor and betrayals on view.  This is heady stuff, brought to a fine boil by the writer/director and his co-scribes, Ludovica Rampoldi and Gabriele Romagnoli.

Considering the number of characters here and the several sub-plots -- all of which lead us back to the central company, Leda, and its "output" -- by the film's strangely unsettling and moving finale, we've received a nasty but salutary education in Italian business. And maybe some understanding of what happened in that Parmalat fiasco.

The Jewel, running a fast-paced 110 minutes, is available now via Netflix streaming and probably elsewhere, too.

Read more »

Andrea Molaioli, Capitalism, Il Gioiellino, Italian business practices, Italian cinema, Parmalat, THE JEWEL, Toni Servillo,

Rate it :

Marion Cotillard shines in the Dardenne brothers' ultra-progressive film, TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT

There could hardly be a better time for a movie like TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT to appear. That it was bypassed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' shortlist for this year's Best Foreign Language Film is ridiculous. But, hey, that's Hollywood. (Bring back The Blacklist, boys!) Its tale -- of an employee at a solar-energy manufacturing facility who is suddenly down-sized by her bosses via a vote taken by her co-workers on whether they will receive a large Christmas bonus in lieu of the employee's holding on to her job -- is a near-perfect look at the joys and rewards of Capitalism in the workplace. What that employee, Sandra -- a fierce and fragile performance by the wonderful Marion Cotillard (above and further below, in pink) -- decides to do about her situation makes up the heart of this unusual movie.

One of, and maybe the best of the films to come from the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (shown at right, with Jean-Pierre on the left), the movie taps into so much that the western world is experiencing today regarding employment, family, health (mental and physical) and the idea of Socialism vs Capitalism.

After the initial shock of the news abates, Sandra's husband and her best friend/co-worker urge her to demand another vote (the first one appears to have been rigged by a boss who intimated that if the crew voted to keep Sandra, another of them might be downsized). The remainder of the movie details Sandra's search for her co-workers over a weekend spent urging, cajoling, asking and hoping for their support.

If all this sounds a bit predictable, the result is anything but. Responses from the co-workers run the gamut. That bonus of one thousand Euros is nothing to sneeze at, and some of the workers need the money rather desperately. Yet each situation is different, and its result often surprising.

Among the most moving is Sandra's meeting with an employee (newcomer Timur Magomedgadzhiev, above) to whom she acted as mentor. Another, taking place in a laundromat at night, reveals as much about the situation of Sandra's co-worker as it does her own situation. Some meetings lead to anger and, in one case, violence.

Through it all Sandra's husband (played by Fabrizio Rongione, above) encourages and helps his wife along. She certainly needs this for, as we soon learn, Sandra has had a severe bout of depression, for which she was given a leave of  absence from work.  There are times throughout the movie when viewers may wonder just how capable Sandra is of actually doing her job.

It is greatly to the Dardennes credit that they don't hand us characters who fall easily or completely into heroes and villains. Best of all, they let us see and understand how Capitalism works to undermine the worth of the individual by keeping everything focused on profit, while ensuring that the workers fail to see their situation from a collective perspective.

In the process the Belgian brothers may have created a new kind of genre -- one especially appropriate for our times -- the "employment thriller." What will happen to Sandra's job takes on increasing suspense, and the outcome may surprise you. It and its movie go beyond mere good and bad, happy or unhappy endings, to confront the entire situation in a manner more subtle, thoughtful and humane.

Two Days, One Night -- from Sundance Selects/IFC Films and running a brisk 95 minutes -- opens this Wednesday, December 24, in New York City at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinema, and in Los Angeles at in the Los Angeles area at Laemmle Theaters, beginning January 9.  

Read more »

Belgian cinema, Capitalism, employment thrillers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, jobs, Socialism, the workplace, TWO DAYS ONE NIGHT,

Rate it :

Update on the BP Gulf Oil Spill in Margaret Brown's new doc, THE GREAT INVISIBLE

The publicity material for the new documentary, THE GREAT INVISIBLE, directed by Margaret Brown and detailing the results of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, tells us that this is "the first film that goes beyond the media coverage to examine the crisis in depth through the eyes of those who experienced it first-hand and were left to pick up the pieces while the world moved on." Sorry, but this is definitely not the first film to do this. It is simply the most recent to cover people who live & work in the gulf.

Back in 2012 Bryan D. Hopkins' Dirty Energy did exactly this and managed the job in even better fashion. The lesser but still worthwhile doc, The Bix Fix from Joshua and Rebecca Harrell Tickell, alerted us to what BP was not doing to clean up its mess, and what our own government was doing to camouflage what was going on. And Jennifer Baichwal and Margaret Atwood explored the post-BP mess as part of their interesting but not entirely successful doc, Payback, based on Atwood's book. So this subject has indeed been covered by intelligent and passionate movie-makers, of which Ms Brown, shown at right, is certainly another. Each filmmaker seems to have found his or her own special charac-ters to highlight. Here, they are Doug Brown (shown below, and no relation to the filmmaker, so far as I know) and Stephen Stone, two men who actually worked aboard the Deep Horizon oil rig and managed to survive the explosion and fire, along with some entitled, self-satisfied oil executives, whose conversation Brown (and we) sit in on and grow angrier by the word and minute.

Ms Brown also pays attention, as have the other filmmakers, to the kind of compensation BP has promised local residents and that does not in many cases appear to be forthcoming. We bounce back and forth from compensation meetings to interviews with Brown, Stone (shown below) and a few others, and listen in on those oil execs (shown at bottom).

Overall, there is enough information, obfuscation, and sadness here to rile us up and even occasionally empty our tear ducts. Brown does not go into much about how BP pretended to "clean up" its mess, nor about government intrusions on the media's ability to report what was happening, nor give us much info about what is happening to local sea life. The other documentaries do a much more thorough job of all this. What Brown does do -- and this is a first -- is to talk to some of the men who worked on the rig itself (including the family of one of the men who died) to get their stories -- which lay the guilt directly on BP, the rig operator TransOcean and the contractor Halliburton (yes, that last name does sound familiar...)..

What Brown has accomplished is certainly worth hearing and seeing. The gulf remains a disaster area for those unfortunate enough to work and live there; compensation is barely evident; nothing has been done by our government to insure stricter safety regulations; and many more oil rigs and drilling are now in evidence throughout the gulf. The movie will anger you all over again, as have the earlier documentaries. Oil still rules (just listen to those executives!) and its money buys all our politicians lucky enough to live in the states where oil is found. It's disgusting. But that's America -- and Capitalism -- today.

The Great Invisible, from Radius-TWC and running 92 minutes, opens this Wednesday, October 29, in New York City at the Village East Cinema and in the Los Angeles area at the Sundance Sunset Cinemas. 

Read more »

American documentaries, Big Oil, Capitalism, Margaret Brown, the BP oil spill, THE GREAT INVISIBLE,

Rate it :