Gemini: Making LA Noir Again

Breakout starlet Heather Anderson is one of the beautiful people, whereas her assistant Jill LeBeau is one of the little people. However, LeBeau really believed her boss when she called her a friend and made vague promises to start developing projects with her. That is why LeBeau is so disappointed to find she is suspected of murdering Anderson in Aaron Katz’s Gemini (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Instead of telling the director face-to-face she will not do re-shoots for his troubled film, thereby likely dooming the project, Anderson sends LeBeau in to do her dirty work for her. She is accustomed to such duties. She also tries to run interference with the stalkerish fan who crashes their table when the furious director storms off and her boss slinks in.

Clearly, Anderson depends on LeBeau for both emotional and organizational support. Their relationship is highly ambiguous and fraught with sexual overtones. Nevertheless, LeBeau must not show any signs of jealousy or possessiveness when partying with her boss and Tracy, Anderson’s secret model lover. Technically, they are still employer and employee, whereas jealousy and possessiveness are the specialty of Anderson’s very-ex boyfriend, Devin, whose house she still lives in.

You would think there would be plenty of suspects for Columbo-like Det. Edward Ahn to pester, but the murder weapon happens to be LeBeau’s off-the-books handgun, which has her prints all over it. Quite inconveniently, she even accidentally discharged it on the morning in question.

You have to give Katz credit, because Gemini just oozes noir style. Cinematographer Andrew Reed dazzles us with nocturnal neon and the glossy, glassy reflective surfaces of the characters’ sunny daylight hours. This is a vision of LA that Curtis Hanson and Roman Polanski would appreciate. Plus, Keegan DeWitt’s jazzy synth score gives it an appropriately freshened-up, ultra-now “crime jazz” vibe.

Lola Kirke is quite compelling as LeBeau, who suddenly must confront most of the assumptions that gave her life comfort and structure. She also forges some hard to define, yet undeniably potent chemistry with Zoë Kravitz’s Anderson. Kravitz’s performance is admittedly quite aloof and guarded, but such are the character’s requirements. John Cho adds some energy as the deceptively shrewd Det. Ahn, while Nelson Franklin and Michelle Forbes conspicuously steal their scenes as the director and agent who would not be out of place in Altman’s The Player.

For the most part, Gemini is an appealingly evocative Tinsel Town noir, but as in his Portland mumblecore noir, Cold Weather, Katz still has trouble wrapping things up in a convincing manner. Of course, it is the journey into the dark heart of La La Land that matters to genre fans, not the ultimate destination. Basically, it is Chet Baker cool, which is high praise, but not Miles Davis cool. Recommended for fans of LA noir, Gemini opens this Friday (3/30) in New York, at the Angelika Film Center.

A Leading Man: Being Asian in Hollywood

Despite Hollywood’s determination to sell its soul to China, a lingering institutional insensitivity to Asian type-casting and crude stereotypical jokes persists in the industry. Jason Biggs and his tweet about Asian drivers is a case in point. Had his racial humor targeted any other demographic group, his career would likely be on life support, but in this case, Hollywood just shrugged. Soon-to-be unemployed actor GQ Qi understands the hypocrisy only too well. He has played the game better than most of his colleagues, but has little to show for it in writer-director Steven Kung’s A Leading Man (trailer here), which opens this Friday in select cities, following a well received festival run, including Dances With Films.

Qi had to fight to get the starring role in Mitch Lebowitz’s new sitcom Pu Pu Platter, but playing the cringy, subservient exchange student makes him nauseous. Lebowitz’s overbearing demeanor and insulting condescension do not help either. After Qi inevitably snaps, his longtime agent drops him. Even his formerly supportive mother cuts him off, suggesting he finally settle for a management position in the family’s Shanghai semi-conductor family. However, he has a bold plan: he will romance up-and-coming casting director Rachel Cohen.

Against her better judgment, Cohen succumbs to his charms. Unfortunately, when Lebowitz gets wind of their relationship, he fires Cohen as well. Suddenly, both Qi and Cohen are on the outs. Is their relationship real enough to withstand the financial and emotional pressures to come? If so, it will be a hard fought victory, because there is not a lot of easy sentiment or unearned feel good moments in Leading. While Kung excoriates Hollywood’s Asian stereotyping and discrimination, he clearly implies there is also a bit of karma at work in Qi’s case.

Fittingly, Jack Yang really does have leading man presence as Qi, but he is not afraid play up the Machiavellian and rather unsympathetic side of his character. It is a dark, subtly calibrated performance that gives the film real integrity, even if it pushes away sympathetic viewers. Heather Mazur plays off Yang quite nicely as the smart and down-to-earth Cohen, while executive producer Pat Tsao is a force of nature as the sort of iron-willed mother that nearly anyone can well relate to, regardless of ethnicity or nationality.

Hollywood takes in the shins throughout Leading, but to Kung’s credit, it never lets anyone off the hook. It might sound like a thematic analog to Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle, but Kung’s film is more thoughtful and dramatically complex. Despite the inconsistency of some supporting players, A Leading Man is worth a look, particularly for those who appreciate a caustic look at the movie business when it opens this Friday (9/12) in limited markets.

Norma Jean and the Brits: My Week with Marilyn

Sir Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe were on the brink of career highpoints in John Osborne’s The Entertainer and Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot, respectively. However, their chemistry was somewhat lacking in their one and only film together, The Prince and the Showgirl, tepidly received by critics and audiences alike in 1957. The behind-the-scenes story of their rocky shoot is told from the perspective of a smitten production assistant in Simon Curtis’s My Week with Marilyn (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

Though to-the-manor-born, young Colin Clark wants to make his own way in the world working in motion pictures. Refusing to take no for an answer, Clark parlays a dubious introduction into a gofer job with Olivier’s production company. Recently knighted, the great actor is planning to direct the American bombshell in a light comedic role his wife, Vivien Leigh, originated on-stage. Unfortunately, when Monroe shows up with full entourage in tow, it is quickly apparent she deeply enthralled by the method school of acting, dubious claptrap Sir Laurence has little patience for.

Despite beginning a healthy romance with Lucy, a wardrobe assistant arguably as attractive as the childlike and frequently doped-up Monroe, Clark falls hard for the famous sex symbol. While not exactly mutual, Monroe starts to rely on the solicitous young man’s emotional support. It all leads to much gossip and quite a bit of ill will on the set.

If Marilyn Monroe truly was a ragingly insecure woman who lived in a pronounced state of arrested development, then Michelle Williams plays her quite well indeed. Though she has been doggedly positioned as an Oscar contender, her Monroe seems to be a blank slate on which the other characters project their desires. Was that all there really was to her? If so, how very sad.

In welcomed contrast, the British ensemble cast, including the likes of Dame Judi Dench, Michael “Foyle” Kitchen, and Julia Ormand (as Leigh, no small part to step into either), plays it to the hilt, bandying about witticisms as if they are in The Bad and the Beautiful, as rewritten by Noel Coward.

Yet, the casting of Kenneth Branagh as Olivier is particularly inspired. Not only does Branagh have the right “classically trained” presence and flair for razor-sharp dialogue, one can see parallels of his own career in that of Sir Laurence. Earning acclaim and the not infrequent comparison to Olivier with his early Shakespearean films, Branagh’s recent career had been somewhat checkered (including a critically drubbed remake of the Olivier vehicle, Sleuth), until scoring an unlikely comeback with Thor. Regardless, he plays the iconic thespian with genuine depth and charisma.

Granted, Week is based on his memoir, but the amount of screen time devoted to Eddie Redmayne’s Clark seems wildly misspent, considering the far more interesting actors and greater larger than life figures of cinema history that are also assembled in the film. Frankly, his sad-eyed, love-struck act quickly gets rather dull. Fortunately, the seasoned veterans like Branagh, Dench, and Sir Derek Jacobi can be relied upon to supply Week periodic jolts of energy.

Curtis certainly keeps the film breezing along nicely, capturing a nice sense of the era along the way. Mostly pleasant viewing, Week features some wonderfully tasty supporting performances. It just seems to consistently focus on the two dullest people at a banquet of greatness. A case of a film whose sum of its parts is probably greater than its whole, Week opens today (11/23) in New York at the.AMC Empire and Chelsea Clearview.

Pitch Hard: Brother’s Justice

Dax Shepard thinks he’s famous. You are supposed to recognize him from films like Employee of the Month and more likely NBC’s Parenthood. However, Shepard is about to throw a curve ball to those who might be fans, giving up comedy to become a martial arts superstar. His transformative vehicle will chronicle the Justice Brothers’ fight against a vicious crystal meth-dealing biker gang, or something like that. This dubious project will be pitched many times in Brother’s Justice (trailer here), a mockumentary of the film-within-a-film’s early development, or lack thereof, which has its belated New York opening this Friday as part of a showcase of Tribeca distributed films.

Shepard picks his indulgent friend Nate Tuck to produce his proposed Brother’s Justice, securing his agreement to split all the development costs. Given the industry’s interest in the project, this will probably only involve a few trips to Starbuck’s. Yet, Shepard plugs on, trying to call in favors with the big names he knows, including the likes of Jon Favreau and Ashton Kutcher, playing themselves in guest appearances (as well as one surprise saved for the post-closing credits stinger). Tom Arnold however, has a major supporting role as himself, promising to pitch the film to his pal James Cameron, in return for a part (opinions vary as to which it should be).

Essentially, Justice is sort of a more Hollywood-centric version of Eric Schaeffer and Donal Lardner Ward’s My Life’s in Turnaround and its pseudo-sequel, while still allowing Bradley Cooper and David Koechner an opportunity to slum it up in an indie in between their Judd Apatow and Todd Phillips comedies. In fact, they are both very funny in two extended centerpiece sequences, constituting considerably more than mere cameo walk-ons.

Frankly, Shepard is not the most charismatic screen presence and I knew far more martial arts at thirteen than he ever will (which is all part of the joke). Still, he establishes some decent bromantic chemistry with Tuck, while convincing his famous friends to ham it up like nobody’s business. Arnold in particular, seemed to require little prompting in this regard. Perhaps the closest analogs to Justice are old school Burt Reynolds films, in which viewers are supposed to appreciate how much fun he and Dom DeLuise had making them. Believe it or not, that makes for a pleasant weekend afternoon Netflix streaming (where it is already available).

Throughout Justice, Shepard takes plenty of shots at Hollywood business practices, but nothing so pointed that it might jeopardize his career (real or fictional). It is not The Player, but it has some clever moments. Though interested viewers can stay at home and watch it, Justice also kicks off a weeklong run this Friday (9/9) at the Tribeca Cinemas.

Jaglom’s Queen of the Lot

Hollywood is the world’s capitol of insecurity. It is the perfect place for Maggie Chase. Do not bother talking to her about the craft of acting. She is too busy tracking her google standing. Yet, there is an outside chance she might reluctantly examine her life choices while serving a DUI house arrest in Henry Jaglom’s Queen of the Lot (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

More-or-less a sequel to Jaglom’s Hollywood Dreams, Chase (formerly Chizek) has sort-of-kind-of made it. A poor man’s Cynthia Rothrock, she is the star of the popular down-market Red Wrecker action series. However, Chase’s low self-esteem and alcohol are a bad mix. While serving her ankle-braceleted sentence in the home of her manager-partners Kaz and Caesar, Chase’s PR team makes her a tabloid sensation. She even has entrée into the glamour of old school Hollywood through her boyfriend Dov Lambert, a scion of a legendary mini-mogul. Yet, her inconvenient attraction to Dov’s younger brother Aaron, a writer and self-described failure, complicates Chase’s single-minded pursuit of her shallow goals.

As required, Tanna Frederick is convincingly needy and superficial as Chase. At times she almost rivals Sidney Falco from The Sweet Smell of Success in her cravenness, but Aaron Lambert still sees something in her worth pursuing. Indeed, ER’s Noah Wyle is the big news of Lot, bringing surprising depth and edginess to the younger brother. His scenes with Frederick bristle with uncomfortable honesty.

Once again, Jaglom assembles an intriguing supporting cast, including Zack Norman (best known as Danny DeVito’s crocodile admiring cousin in Romancing the Stone) as Kaz. Perhaps most appropriately, Peter Bogdanovich plays Pedja Sapir, a well-regarded director who has not made a film in years. (Though perfectly fine in the role, wouldn’t everyone prefer to see him making a new film of his own?)

Often sharply amusing, Lot has little of the sappiness of Irene in Time, Jaglom and Frederick’s last collaboration. Its old-fashioned jazzy soundtrack (much in the tradition of Woody Allen films) is also a considerable improvement. Presumably another of Jaglom’s scripted-and-improvised hybrids, Lot is somewhat uneven. Still, the humor is smart and consistent, while Wyle and Frederick exhibit legitimate on-screen chemistry. A considerably above average skewering of Hollywood for the hardcore indie scene, Lot opens this Friday (12/3) in New York at the Quad Cinema.

All Cowboys Wear Black Hats: Reel Injun

If Hollywood produced a single film that portrayed Native peoples with insufficient sensitivity in the past thirty years, it would be a highly isolated exception. Granted, that has not always been the case. Indeed, it is the Hollywood images of over half a century ago that still pre-occupy Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond in Reel Injun (trailer here), his politicized survey of Native Americans in Hollywood films, now screening at MoMA.

Part doc and part road movie, Diamond jumps in his “rez car” to tour the important scenes of both real life Native American history and the locations from classic movie westerns. If there is one villain in Reel, it would be director John Ford, whose acknowledged classic Stagecoach is identified as the mother-source of all the unenlightened screen stereotypes of Native peoples that followed. However, Diamond seems to make the roundabout concession that most of the revisionist westerns in the 1970’s and after are just as guilty of trafficking in racial stereotypes, simply replacing the blood-thirsty savage with the noble victim.

As a result, for much of the film, Diamond seems to fighting a straw man, countering preconceptions that have not held any cultural currency for fifty-some years. In doing so, he results to plenty of oversimplifying himself, as when he attempts to reduce John Wayne to a mere swagger. Yet, Wayne was a more accomplished actor than revisionist critics (evidently including Diamond) care to admit, particularly in his late films, like his Oscar-winning turn in True Grit and his final film, The Shootist, which is itself somewhat revisionist.

Reel is most successful when telling the story of Native actors who were able to claw out a place for themselves in old Hollywood. Ironically, in the case of both silent star Buffalo Child Long Lance and Iron Eyes Cody (famous for the “Keep America Beautiful” PSA), consideration of their careers gets caught up in questions of racial authenticity. While the tragic Long Lance was legitimately tri-racial, Cody was in fact Sicilian, but is largely accepted by the film’s authority figures for his good intentions.

There are generous interview clips with leading Native actors and filmmakers, with the best lines and greatest insights probably coming from Smoke Signals director Chris Eyre. (Twin Peaks fans will be bitterly disappointed by the absence of Michael Horse, though.) Not shy about interjecting himself into the picture, Diamond would have been better served if he had de-emphasized his road trip meta-structure and simply let his subjects talk more. In fact, some his episodes are a bit strange, as when he shows the graphically violent massacre scene from Little Big Man to a class of awfully young looking Native elementary students.

Altogether, Reel offers an okay overview of Native Peoples in Hollywood (and a few Canadian) films. While it moves along relatively briskly, it has the net effect of whetting the audience’s appetite for the superior films it discusses, including Zacharias Kunuk’s The Fast Runner, Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales, and yes absolutely Ford’s Stagecoach. It screens through Sunday (6/20) at MoMA.

Spacey Shrink

Hollywood is that strange place where cut-throat business meets New Age psycho-babble. Yet, it must be somewhat self-aware, considering how often it satirizes itself and California’s other neurotic beautiful people in films like The Player, Bowfinger, L.A. Story, and Serial. While those are all far superior films, there are at least some stirrings of life to be found in that shopworn comedic genre, as is sometimes demonstrated by Jonas Pate’s Shrink (trailer here), which opens in select cities this Friday.

Dr. Henry Carter is a respected analyst to the stars and a best-selling self-help author. He is also a complete mess, smoking marijuana like a chimney in order to cope with his wife’s recent suicide. Most of his vapid Hollywood clientele deserve a shrink on autopilot, but he temporarily snaps out of his torpor when seeing a disturbed African American high school student pro bono.

It turns out they suffer a similar grief, but self-medicate in different ways. He smokes dope, young Jemma indulges in repertory cinema. Yet, their scenes together are surprisingly well written and played scrupulously straight. Kevin Spacey never overplays the role of psychologist on the verge of a nervous breakdown, always tempering Carter’s self-destructive behavior with a sense of fundamental decency (which is refreshing). Likewise, Keke Palmer, recognizable as the lead in Akeelah and the Bee, plays another realistically smart, believably troubled teenager.

While Shrink has some unexpected insight into the grieving process, the comedic Hollywood material hardly breaks any new ground. One of Carter’s patients is a germophobic power-agent. Now imagine the most obvious gags for his character and they are probably in Shrink. Somewhat more interesting is a subplot involving an aging superstar trying to overcome his chronic philandering. One of the film’s big surprises is the unbilled appearance of a well known Hollywood star in this supporting role. Wisely, he foregoes his tiresome manic stage persona and is at least adequate in the part.

Shrink is a highly uneven film. At its best, Spacey and Palmer play off each other honestly and directly. However, at other times, it seems like a shallow, glitzy tour of the Hollywood party scene. At least cinematographer Lukas Ettlin makes it all look pretty.

Though imperfect, Shrink is a film that frankly exceeds expectations. It is most successful when it plays it straight, eschewing cynicism while trying to make real human connections. Maybe there’s some kind of self-help lesson in that. It opens in New York this Friday (7/24) at the Sunshine and Chelsea 9 theaters.

(Photo credit: Jihan Abdalla)