Not quite an April Fool's joke, this imitation '70s road-sploitation flick is more arty anti-movie than spoof
Yeah, "Rubber" is, to some degree, an imitation 1970s exploitation film about a killer tire who makes people's heads explode, after the fashion of the early David Cronenberg movie "Scanners." But despite what you may have been told on the Internet, it isn't quite a knee-slappin' romp and a high-spirited cultural pastiche, with lots of ho-ho-ho and hee-hee-hee. OK, we do see our vulcanized antihero rolling down a desert back road to the strains of the '70s smooth-soul hit "Just Don't Want to Be Lonely" (someone will want to know this: It's the Blue Magic version, not the higher-charting single from the Main Ingredient). That's pretty funny, but it comes with more edge than you'd expect. Perhaps that results from the scenes in which characters in the movie try to poison the audience, try to convince other characters that the story is a ridiculous fiction, or break the fourth wall to deliver lectures about the meaninglessness of cinema -- lectures that are themselves meaningless. Yeesh!
Yes, "Rubber" has "art up the butt," in the immortal phrase of a long-ago ex-girlfriend of mine. French director Quentin Dupieux is borrowing themes and tropes from '70s American cinema to make something that's more like a Godardian anti-movie than a laff-filled spoof. It's got actors, ranging from New York theater stalwart Stephen Spinella (as the lecture-delivering highway patrolman) to longtime action-movie villain Wings Hauser (as a crusty cuss in a wheelchair), and an episodic plot about the tire's lustful pursuit of a hot chick (Roxane Mesquida) in a convertible. But mostly it's got a barely tolerable level of metaness: an opening scene that resembles a conceptual art installation, circa 1983; a bickering audience who watch the killer-tire move around the desert through binoculars (and who are first starved and then poisoned by the filmmakers); and a nerdy, hostile intermediary (Jack Plotnick) who is neither a member of the cast nor the audience and reports to an unseen overlord.
It's almost impossible to criticize "Rubber," because Dupieux has inoculated himself against all possible complaints. I mean, arguably somebody should have told him that Americans say "vacation" instead of "holiday" and "garbage" instead of "rubbish." But on the other hand, the sloppy dialogue might be part of the self-undermining project, like the peeling patches on the cop uniforms or Spinella's sporadic attempts to convince the other actors to bail on the whole enterprise and go home. Whatever way you look at it, "Rubber" certainly isn't the same-old, same-old. It might be more fun to talk about, or describe to your friends, than to sit through, but on the most basic level it has fulfilled its aesthetic goals: It will irritate many and delight a few.
"Rubber" is now playing in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Austin, Texas. It opens April 8 in Seattle; April 9 in Santa Cruz, Calif.; April 15 in Dallas, Portland, Ore., and Washington; April 22 in Columbia, Mo.; April 29 in Albuquerque, N.M., Boston, Denver, Detroit, Fort Collins, Colo., Nashville, Springfield, Mo., and Tucson, Ariz.; and May 6 in Asheville, N.C., Houston, Ithaca, N.Y., Kansas City, Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Columbus, Ohio, with other cities to follow. It's also available on-demand from many cable and satellite providers.
"In a Better World": Oscar-winning odyssey of Euro-guilt
Susanne Bier's "In a Better World" is pretty, and wonderfully acted -- but it's more preachy than it is profound
I kept waiting for the admirable Danish director Susanne Bier's Oscar-winning film, "In a Better World," to move beyond ominous atmosphere, handsome production values and a hefty dose of northern European guilt. To my taste it never really does, and the connections Bier and screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen (also her collaborator on "Brothers" and "After the Wedding" ) try to draw between unrelated acts of cruelty in different parts of the world feel too schematic and intellectual. Still, there's an awful lot to look at in "In a Better World," whose spectacular widescreen images go from the North Sea coast of Denmark to the plains of East Africa, and Bier, as always, gets maximum results from her ensemble of first-rate Danish and Swedish actors.
We begin with Anton (Mikael Persbrandt, who will play Beorn in Peter Jackson's upcoming "Hobbit" movies), a Swedish doctor working at an African refugee camp. He begins to see something especially bad, even for that context: Among his ordinary patients, who suffer from malaria and malnutrition and other disorders of poverty, pregnant women are showing up near death from gruesome machete wounds, reportedly inflicted by a local militia leader called "the Big Man." In another, apparently unrelated storyline, a boy of 11 or so named Christian (William Jøhnk Juels Nielsen), moves in with his affluent but distant Danish father, Claus (Ulrich Thomsen), after his mother's death in England. Virtually seething with not-so-submerged aggression against his dad and the entire world, Christian decides to wreak vengeance on his new school's dominant bully, whose customary target is a small, awkward kid named Elias (Markus Rygaard).
As we eventually learn when Anton comes back from Africa to deal with the implosion of his marriage to frazzled, blond Marianne (the extraordinary Trine Dyrholm), Elias is their son. The two boys get in big trouble after beating the bully half to death with a bicycle pump, but not quite enough trouble. Christian hasn't worked all the Trenchcoat Mafia angst out of his system, and when the duo see Anton humiliated and attacked by a local working-class dad (Kim Bodnia) after a playground misunderstanding, Christian begins researching pipe-bomb manufacture on the Internet. Bier gets pretty good mileage out of the excellent acting and the powerful, overarching sense that something really bad is about to happen, as if the chaos and cruelty of post-colonial Africa were about to flow backward up the karma canal to infect the social-democratic calm of provincial Denmark.
Obviously this year's academy voters felt differently, but I see the film's moral odyssey from Africa to Europe and back again as a pseudo-profound, butterfly-effect dramatic convenience rather than a fully convincing insight. In a carefully orchestrated series of climaxes, Anton will face both the Big Man and the local thug again, and almost every character in the film -- Anton, Elias, Marianne and finally the damaged and dangerous Christian -- will commit first a criminal act of betrayal and then one of heroic self-sacrifice. We're supposed to prefer the latter, of course, but understand that the two are connected and that those of us who live in so-called civilized privilege are no less atavistic at heart than people who kill each other every day in places we'd rather not think about. Thing is, I agree with all of that, and I passionately admire the tradition of Bergman-esque social drama Bier is accessing here. But somehow the combination is too self-conscious; it's like going to someone's house for dinner and having them lecture you about all the local, organic ingredients they used, rather than just letting you eat.
A pair of 60ish French screen legends -- one in sweat pants, the other enormous -- reunite for '70s farce "Potiche"
"Potiche" unites French screen legends Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu in a peculiar love-and-politics farce under the guidance of chameleonic director François Ozon, with results that are somewhere between delightful and disconcerting. If you know Ozon's work, there's nothing especially surprising about that. Best known to American viewers for the sexy thriller "Swimming Pool" and the doleful character study "Under the Sand," both with Charlotte Rampling, Ozon apparently delights in making every possible kind of movie, often several at the same time.
Here he adds a few ironic twists to a hoary 1970s stage farce, casting Deneuve as Suzanne Pujol, a trophy wife ("potiche," or knickknack) who winds up in control of the company owned by her nefarious but incompetent husband, played by comedy veteran Fabrice Luchini. Across town, burly Communist politician Maurice Babin (Depardieu) plots a proletarian insurrection against the Pujol umbrella-making empire -- but nobody except Maurice and Suzanne know about the buried passion in their past, or the unfinished business between them. Add bright colors, ludicrous period fashions and décor (the telephone handset cover! The tea cozy!), a scary neocon daughter (Judith Godrèche), a flamboyantly gay but closeted son (Jérémie Rénier) and a secretary with alarming bat-wing hair (Karin Viard) and it all adds up to an acrid pastiche that's often very funny but runs a little long.
As for the two leads, they have appeared together or separately in a high proportion of the greatest French films ever made. (I believe their first movie together was François Truffaut's "The Last Metro" in 1980.) Much of the edge in "Potiche" comes from the fact that they aren't quite who they used to be (and we're not either). Deneuve at 67 can still play women much younger than she is; Suzanne is probably meant to be in her mid-50s. She has transitioned to grande-dame status gracefully, and despite her legendary looks has never been vain about her roles. Here she wears a succession of silly outfits and a poofy hairdo meant to suggest the spoiled provincial bourgeoisie, and pulls it off with dignity. Time has actually been less kind to the 62-year-old Depardieu, who continues to work feverishly but does not look well. Never exactly svelte, he has gained an immense amount of weight since he appeared with Deneuve in André Téchiné's 2004 "Changing Times" ; when we first saw Depardieu on-screen as Maurice, a ripple of unease went through the audience at the screening I attended. (Purportedly he has lost more than 40 pounds since making this film, and one can only hope some long-range plan is in view.)
Still, the director knows what we're here for, and partway through this arch and brittle farce Deneuve and the big fella step almost effortlessly through a sweet, silly and totally irresistible disco number, during a brief encounter at the shady nightclub Suzanne's husband never takes her to. Politics and gender may make Maurice and Suzanne historical adversaries -- Ozon tacks on a slightly forced p.c. conclusion about women's entry into political life -- but they'll always have the Bee Gees.
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