vip in the city

La Misma Luna

Our film tonight was Patricia Riggen’s feature debut, Under the Same Moon (La Misma Luna)… it’s unclear to me why the English title adds the preposition. The press materials prominently note that the film premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival where it received a standing ovation. On the strength of that audience buzz, Fox Searchlight and The Weinstein Company purchased the rights for $5 million, making it the second largest sale at the festival that year.

Under the Same Moon is the story of a young boy (Adrian Alonso) making a perilous journey across the U.S./Mexico border to be reunited with his mother (Kate del Castillo), who is working as a maid in Los Angeles. The film also features brief cameos by America Ferrara of ABC’s Ugly Betty and Grammy Award-winning Mexican band Los Tigres del Norte.

I was reminded of another film set against the thorny backdrop of illegal immigration: Gregory Nava’s excellent El Norte, which I first watched in Sra. Slavin’s sophomore Spanish class. There, it was a brother and sister fleeing war-torn Guatemala for a “better” life in California (“Take me! I’m a strong pair of arms!”); Under the Same Moon broadcasts similar messages about the plight of undocumented Mexican workers struggling to survive in the United States.

The main focus, though, is about the love between mother and son. Despite an all-too-predictable trajectory and deliberately heart-tugging melodrama, this film managed a few surprisingly effective emotional moments, thanks in large part to Alonso’s performance as Carlitos. The 14-year old Mexico City-born actor (who plays a 9-year old, believably) is familiar to American movie goers for his role as Antonio Banderas’ precocious son in 2005’s The Legend of Zorro.

Reviews have been mixed: The New York Times dismissed the film for its mawkishness and lazy caricatures (“It has bad white people, hard-working brown people and morally ambivalent people of mixed race.“); The Washington Post praised the film for its “affecting story, indelible characters, urgent topical relevance and superbly calibrated sentimentality.”

The post-screening discussion was with William Wolf (left, in the photo above), author and former film critic for Canada’s Cue Magazine, New York magazine, Gannet newspapers and the New York Observer, and current member of New York Film Critics Online, an organization of 26 Internet film critics based in New York City. Wolf was charmed by Under the Same Moon… and though I’m probably one of those he describes who “rebel against manipulation,” darned if I didn’t get a little misty-eyed at the ending, too.

Tags: films, Times Square, Town Hall

Love and the Tudors

This Monday our film seminar series screened a somewhat more mainstream feature than usual: Sony Pictures’ The Other Boleyn Girl, based on Philippa Gregory‘s bestselling novel of the same name.

The Other Boleyn Girl draws its inspiration from the rise and fall of the two Boleyn sisters Mary and Anne (played by Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman, respectively), rivals for the attentions of King Henry VIII (who, continuing the onscreen tradition of hunky Henry Tudors, is portrayed by Eric Bana). The young women are portrayed like opposites: sweet blonde, scheming brunette. In their world, nubile female flesh is leveraged for financial and political favor; the girls are quite literally pimped out to the king by their father and uncle. Anne, of course, eventually wiles her way into becoming queen to the already married king, and loses her head to ambition.

The film is intended as a tale of sexual intrigue and family betrayals, set against the backdrop of the King of England’s break with the Catholic Church — an act with far-reaching consequences for the course of modern English history. Ideal for those who want a little eye candy with their history and, as very little is known of the real-life Mary Boleyn, who aren’t overly concerned with factual details. Screenwriter Peter Morgan, acclaimed for his work on The Last King of Scotland and The Queen, stumbles a bit this time out, glossing over the huge historical impact of the king’s divorce (and subsequent founding of The Church of England) and almost entirely loses inspirational steam once Anne takes her place on the throne.

More free love (banners) in Times Square. Marian Bantjes, Canadian designer, artist, illustrator and typographer. Remember Saks’ 2007 “Want It!” campaign?:

Chip Wass, New York-based award-winning illustrator and designer:

A week later, a small bomb would be set off steps from here, in front of the military recruitment center in Times Square.

Tags: bomb, graphic design, Love, Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Times Square

The Duchess of Langeais

My Town Hall Feature Film Seminar Series began in earnest this week. For the next three months, I’ll be in Times Square every other Monday night — a frequency which I used to describe as “bi-weekly.” Until rather recently, I thought that “bi-weekly” was synonymous with “fortnightly” — which it is — but Merriam-Webster lists a primary definition of “occurring twice a week.” So yes, the two definitions vary by a factor of four, and technically, “bi-weekly” could mean the same as “bi-monthly.” Gee, you think this ever causes any confusion?

Tonight’s film was Jacques Rivette‘s The Duchess of Langeais (Ne Touchez pas la Hache) — an adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s novella, La Duchesse de Langeais. (The English title of the French film keeps the author’s original title, while the French “Don’t Touch the Axe” is culled from an ominous anecdote in the film.) The much-admired Antoinette de Langeais (chanteuse/actrice Jeanne Balibar), a married aristocrat with an oft-absent husband, is bored by her lavish, but empty Restoration-era Parisian lifestyle. She meets a Napoleonic war hero, the dashing General Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu — yes, son of Gérard) — and the two begin an intense, but unconsummated flirtation, during which the duchess tantalizingly retains the upper hand to the endless frustration of de Montriveau – an imposing man clearly used to getting his way. Eventually, however, both control and power shift to de Montriveau and the story evolves into a tale of obsessive passion between two ill-starred, stubbornly unyielding — and thus frustrated – partners plunged into the alienating, often degrading, depths of love.

Afterwards, we sat through one of our more erudite post-film discussions, featuring guest Godfrey Cheshire (left), the director and New York-based film critic. I learned more in this single night about Rivette and the Nouvelle Vague (the French cinema movement, that is, not the musical collective) than in all my years of watching movies. Then again, the man behind such films as Céline and Julie Go Boating, Va Savoir and La Belle Noiseuse is generally considered the most experimental, and therefore the least screened, of his renowned colleagues Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, and François Truffaut. It may have something to do with Rivette’s deliberately challenging films and penchant for length; one of the director’s earlier masterpieces, Out 1, is another Balzac adaptation that infamously stretches well over twelve hours long — 743 minutes, to be precise. That’s almost 9 Cloverfields! Sacrebleu!

Tags: Godfrey Cheshire, Scott Siegel, Times Square, Town Hall