300 Words About: New York, I Love You

"Listen, Hayden, let me tell you a little something about being boring on screen"...

Easily one of the most disappointing films of 2009, New York, I Love You makes the largest and most culturally diverse city in the United States appear bland, lily-white, and generally lifeless. It's like Des Moines on a Sunday morning.

To be fair I'm not a New Yorker and have never lived in the city, but in all the times I've ever visited I've never left with an impression as dull and tasteless as I did walking out of this movie. The locations are pedestrian, the stories inconsequential and insipid, the chain-smoking characters severely lacking in charisma, and the acting hit or miss (like, broad-side-of-the-barn miss). Aside from two or three of the 11 short stories, the highlight of New York, I Love You is the music playing over the closing credits.

Underrated MOTM: Waking Life (2001)

School's out for summer, but that doesn't mean July's Underrated Movie of the Month (MOTM) has to be a mindless blockbuster. In fact, Waking Life is possibly the best antidote one could find for the poisonous images (The Love Guru, et. al.) we're subject to during these dog days of June-August.

Waking Life is an endlessly fascinating film that rarely receives its due credit for exploring a new dimension in animation. Intellectual overload combined with trippy rotoscope animation made for an overwhelming theater experience that twice left me in a daze. Unlike I'm about to do, the Boston Globe's Jay Carr nailed it in a sentence: "Often surreal, Waking Life transcends boundaries of technology, imagination."

Totally. I saw it in the month of October (it was released in 10/19/01), but it's the perfect movie to get lost in on a hot summer night on a huge screen in the dark of your living room. Watch it late and see where your dreams end up taking you.

Written and directed by Richard Linklater (Slacker, Fast Food Nation), Waking Life was filmed in less than a month during July of 1999 in and around Austin, TX (talk about Texan pride, Linklater seems to film or set as many of his movies as he can there). If you're from Austin you'll probably recognize many of the faces and places in Waking Life, but the rest of us are likely only familiar with Wiley Wiggins, who made his film debut in Linklater's Dazed and Confused, and Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, both of whom also starred in Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Got all that?

Well it's nothing compared to the radical theories and concepts thrown at you over the course of the 99 minutes of Waking Life. The "story" is simple enough: In a series of lucid dreams (the idea of which is amazing to me), our nameless main character (Wiggins) meets a diverse group of people who spend their time pondering, among other things, the very meaning of life. Those of you with advanced degrees in theoretical physics or philosophy may find it laughably elementary. Fortunately for the rest of us, our main character mostly acts as you would expect, politely nodding his head with a puzzled face, trying his best to understand ideas that are way beyond the average person's grasp.

And this is where the main criticism of the film is targeted. Said Mike Clark in USA Today, "It's like being in a college bar and listening to your companion blathering on about the secrets of the world." Others described it as "boring," "endless," "pretentious," "bogged down," "pedantic," "psycho-babbly hooey", and maybe most interestingly, "little more than isolated--and not terribly fulfilling--masturbation."

Clearly, most of the critical critics don't have those advanced degrees I mentioned. Nor do I, of course, but as much as I couldn't immediately process half of what was being said, I actually found Waking Life more fascinating than frustrating - as if I was allowed to just think about how a Rubik's Cube is put together without actually having to solve it. Plus, who can't enjoy a good old rant (one of my favorite scenes) in between all of the philosophizing?

Despite accusations that it celebrates intellectual snobbery, I would argue that appreciating the content in Waking Life is less about intelligence and more about personality type. The "analyticals" who enjoyed those late night college conversations will dig it; the more "emotionals" looking for a fun story or character will despise it. In either case, there's another aspect of Waking Life that we can all enjoy: rotoscope animation.

If you haven't seen it, you've surely seen its byproduct: those idiotic Charles Schwab commercials. You know where your Schwab investment money is going? To pay for some clowns to unnecessarily rotoscope those people whining about their riches. Anyway, the method simply involves animating over frames of live action. This means, of course, that the entire film is shot on video before animators take over for a few months and draw over everything. The result is a third dimension where the physical laws of the universe are tossed out the window: your skin moves separately from your body and the whole world seems wobbly. Probably not recommended viewing for those with motion sickness.

While I was wowed enough by the visuals to keep watching (and the creative use of animation often illustrated the monologues), some critics were still unsatisfied. TV Guide's Frank Lovece found himself bored by "talking heads that no amount of colorfully animated, lava-lamp-like undulations can make less static." Come on, Frank, appreciate the art! Oh well, enough other people did, and Linklater would go on to film 2006's A Scanner Darkly in rotoscope as well, making it and Waking Life the only feature-length rotoscoped films ever made.

Waking Life went on to gross just $2 million at the box office before evidently disappearing from cinematic discourse. No doubt thanks to Roger Ebert's praise, the film was nominated in 2002 for no less than Best Picture by the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA). Meanwhile, the Oscar nominees for the first ever Best Animated Feature film? Shrek (the winner), Monster's Inc., and, of course, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius. Where did I miss this snub in my list of the worst ever?

Speaking of snubs, Mulholland Drive (ironically, the CFCA's Best Picture winner) was coincidentally released in the U.S. on the exact same day as Waking Life. The latter could be almost be viewed as an animated version of the former, and the movies remain as two of the most mindblowing experiences I've ever had in a theater.

I can't guarantee you'll have the same experience watching Waking Life at home, but at the very least it should satisfy your summer craving for something more substantive than Disaster Movie.

REVIEW: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (B-)

Background: At the young age of 33, Sidney Lumet was nominated for a Best Director Oscar for 12 Angry Men, his directorial debut. That was in 1957. Think. 1957. 50 YEARS LATER, Lumet is still hard at work in the director's chair - this time for Kelly Masterson's writing debut, Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, which supposedly takes its title from an Irish toast. It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote), Ethan Hawke (Before Sunset), Albert Finney (Big Fish), and Marisa Tomei (Factotum). Lumet (who also directed Network, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon) received an honorary Academy Award several years ago, and he may not make another feature. If for no other reason than to pay respect to a Hollywood legend, you should probably see Before the Devil Knows Your Dead.

Synopsis: (Full disclosure here: I was inexcusably late, but I know the first few scenes didn't make the movie.) Andy (Hoffman) is a successful NYC payroll executive and is unhappily married to Gina (Tomei), who is having an affair with Andy's down-on-his-luck brother Hank (Hawke). Andy hates his job and secretly uses cocaine and heroine; Hank is a deadbeat dad who can never afford to meet his daughter's needs. After returning from a trip to Rio with Gina, Andy makes a proposition to Hank: rob their parent's jewelry store in Westchester County on a Saturday morning. Incredibly, Hank agrees even when Andy tells Hank he's not going to actually be involved. Hank convinces his criminal friend to accompany him, the robbery goes sour, and both Hank's mother - who was unexpectedly working at the time - and Hank's friend are killed by each other's bullets. Hank, who was waiting the car, takes off without a trace. Almost immediately, Hank and Andy's lives unravel. Their father (Finney) is obviously in distress, they've killed their mother, they don't have any money, Hank's friend's wife knows what happened, and Andy is about to go off the deep end. Eventually their father wises to the situation, but by that time things are out of control, and several lives are lost in the disturbing finale.

I Loved:
+ The scenes featuring both Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman, even when just on the phone.
+ The supporting performances by Marisa Tomei and Albert Finney.

I Liked:
+ The musical score, equal parts chilling and comforting.
+ That nobody got away with anything.
+ The long take during Andy's first visit to the drug dealer's apartment.

I Disliked:
- The predictability of the last shootout.
- The time shifting between days and weeks before and after - didn't seem necessary to the story for me since everything was already laid out. A more straightforward approach would have been more powerful.
- Andy's proposition - how exactly is he earning any of the money from the heist if Hank does all the work?

I Hated:
- The unnervingly loud flash frame cutting between story lines.
- The creepy, silk robe-wearing drug dealer.

Grade:
Writing - 8
Acting - 9
Production - 8
Emotional Impact - 8
Music - 5
Significance - 3

Total: 41/50= 82% = B-

Last Word: What should have been a really interesting (albeit disturbing) story about family betrayal was for me weakened by the fact that I just really didn't care about the characters. This is not to say that Before the Devil Knows Your Dead is a bad movie. On the contrary, it's well made (for the most part) and acted - but when the story isn't strong the movie suffers. I didn't know enough about Andy or Hank to really care what happened to them, and frankly, they both just turned me off. Some people may say it's better to leave their inner demons hidden, but in this case they were too surprising. Andy just comes out and starts shooting people in the head? In that case I would also have to assume he has done some pretty dirty deeds in his past, but that's not what we're led to believe. I don't know, it just didn't seem like the most realistic good-person-turned-bad movie. I think Sidney Lumet does an excellent job in extracting believable flip-outs from his actors (e.g., Dog Day Afternoon and Network), but there is character development lacking in that aspect in Before the Devil Knows Your Dead. Add some unnecessary flashbacks and bizarre, momentum-stopping editing, and what's left is a movie that just doesn't reach its full potential.