DVD Review: The Best Offer (2013)

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In Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Tornatore’s Oscar-winning crossover hit Cinema Paradiso, an old film projectionist forms an unlikely friendship with a budding movie buff while bonding over the illicit frames of onscreen romance that had been censored and left on the cutting room floor by the Catholic Church.

And although he's never managed to duplicate its success, in Tornatore’s subsequent pictures the subjects may have changed but the themes established by Paradiso of lonely outsiders who are brought together as much out of appreciation for their eccentricities as they are by their (near voyeuristic) devotion to various artistic fields remain.

The eponymous Malena, for example was placed on a pedestal as though she were a bronze statue versus a flesh and blood human being by the young boys coming-of-sexual-age in that film. And in The Legend of 1900, Tim Roth’s grown man-child turned piano prodigy refuses to leave the only life he’s ever known aboard an ocean liner. Throughout his oeuvre, Tornatore’s characters are as liberated as they are imprisoned by their artistic obsessions.

Yet even though this idea has been touched on repeatedly in his filmography, he’s never combined that particular thematic double-edged sword with as much deliberate mystery as he does in his latest David di Donatello award-winning thriller The Best Offer.

And like the aforementioned double-edged sword that inevitably ensnares his characters, his latest film is intentionally filled with duplicitous duality from the double-meanings of lines and names that will reverberate later to the Paradiso like mentor/protégé centric set-up of its two main characters whom we discover are just one in a number of double-teaming sets of two that appear throughout the film.

A Hitchcockian take on David Fincher’s The Game as set in the world of art and antiquities where an item’s worth is established by the two part process of appraisal and auctioneering (as executed by Geoffrey Rush’s ethically questionable Virgil Oldman), The Best Offer has all of the unmistakable aesthetic and eccentric hallmarks of a Tornatore production.

And this is especially evident given the way Offer establishes the overwhelming sense of loneliness that haunts Virgil in the film’s earliest frames, which Tornatore builds off of as the work continues to create a pattern wherein – aside from a few scenes that are set at a pub, restaurant or the auction house – the screen is populated by one to three characters at most.

But going even further, the filmmaker ensures that even when Virgil shares the screen with a roomful of people (in scenes few and far between), the cinematographer’s lens is primarily fixated on only one to two individuals regardless in order to deepen the sense of voyeurism that pervades among the art-obsessed collectors and characters on and off the job.

A psychological thriller with Tornatore’s unique fingerprints on display from start to finish, The Best Offer is heightened by yet another incredible score from his frequent musical collaborator, legendary composer Ennio Morricone.

Once again serving up an idealized female that’s presented as an artistic stand-in and is therefore coveted (and allegorically appraised) much like a painting, this time Tornatore employs a much more knowing wink to the audience in a Gothic-tinged May/December romance than he utilized in the slightly exploitative Malena.

Admittedly if you’ve seen more than a handful of mysteries before then it’s fairly easy to see the inevitable twist coming at least 20 minutes into the 131 minute movie.

Nonetheless this puzzle is pieced together with such sophistication and intricate craftsmanship by Tornatore that it’s a delight to watch the picture we’re initially presented be deconstructed before we then go back and reconstruct it ourselves after the end credits roll as I found myself still thinking about the intricate assemblage of clues and layers the next day.

From the overly longwinded and joyless late segment that was famously removed by Harvey Weinstein in the (surprisingly superior) shorter, American cut of Cinema Paradiso and beyond, endings have never been Tornatore’s strong suit. And unfortunately, Offer suffers from the same curse as well in a strange juxtaposition of shots near the film’s close that reeks of a continuity error or reshot and quickly recut ending.

While it’s jarring enough to make you wonder if writer/director Tornatore had originally imagined a much darker fate for one of his lead characters (as one appears to age in reverse over an indiscriminate period of time and two very different locations), fortunately because he had displayed such a firm grasp on everything else up until that point, we’re able to shrug it off.

Righting itself before the final scene, the flawed montage is as easily overlooked as the realization that we saw the ultimate plot twist and character reveal coming right from the start.

The type of work where the less you know about it going in the better, at the same time, you'll find that the more you know about the filmography of Tornatore and the passions that seem to obsess the writer/director as well as his characters, the better able you’ll be to accept his latest mysterious Offer.

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Movie Review: Crossing Over (2009)

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Although I believe I only attempted quilt-making once in my life, a major lesson was learned in the process. Namely-- and despite my love of color and pattern and big and bold-- in order for everything to go together and complement each other, the designs must work in tandem as a whole.

In other words, you can't have one extremely decorative or flowery piece of fabric right next to an old beat up denim patch next to something that looks like one of those horrible reject ties given to American dads on Father's Day. There has to be a sense of harmony or fluidity as one piece of fabric melds into another and if you stare at it long enough, all you see is one ornate tapestry that draws your attention to it in its entirety rather than wanting to pick it apart piece by piece.

It's about this time I'm sure you're wondering, “What on Earth does this have to do with the new film from Wayne Kramer?” And honestly, the answer is “Everything.”

In fact, all it takes is one glimpse at the poster for Crossing Over, which follows up Kramer’s terrific indie The Cooler (starring William H. Macy and Maria Bello) which illustrates the ways that Los Angeles freeways and highways interconnect in a color scheme reminiscent of the American flag.

Of course, first you must move your eyes away from the obligatory “talent shot” at the top of the poster that shows some of the highlights in the ensemble cast headed up by a nice, understated Harrison Ford (as well as Ashley Judd, Ray Liotta, and Jim Sturgess in supporting roles) which seems overly photo-shopped into his ornate decoration below. Underneath the star power, we're presented with decorative red and white roads that-- upon first glance-- look like yarn, piping, or cords and you get a sense that that Kramer was using the idea of weaving and/or thread-work in what he aspired to be a cinematic collage.

It only takes a few moments after the film begins to immediately grasp the works that influenced Kramer which by now have echoed throughout every single film review for Crossing Over thus far-- namely it's an amalgam of Babel, Traffic, Short Cuts, What's Cooking?, Crash, and countless other multi-layered character pieces that introduce us to more than a dozen individuals whose lives intersect in a variety of ways over the course of its running time. Likewise, I’d also hazard to throw Fast Food Nation, Maria Full of Grace, Amores Perros, House of Sand and Fog, 21 Grams, and ESL into the politically volatile patchwork that takes a look at all sides of the immigration issue in the United States of America in present day.

Initially slated to run at roughly 2 1/2 hours before reportedly The Weinstein Company insisted upon roughly a half an hour of cuts (including the willing Sean Penn who bowed out of the film for political reasons of his own), the finished work seems as though it's full of jarring stops and starts that give us as much whiplash as you'd face on a Los Angeles freeway.

Moving uneasily between characters-- the film suffers when it spends an inadequate amount of time on the stories that really hit us as in the case of Towelhead star Summer Bishil’s turn as a Bangladeshi devout Muslim teenager whose speech about wanting to understand the 9/11 hijackers is reported by her principal to the office of Homeland Security and she's threatened with deportation. Yet instead of investigating that further, Kramer cuts away to endless subplots involving characters who soon begin to feel like stereotypes.

Those who are shortchanged the most and should’ve been left on the cutting room floor altogether involve a few including a Korean teenager who gets mixed up with a bad crowd just days away from his Naturalization ceremony (shades of early ‘90s South Central dramas like Menace II Society and Boyz in the Hood, anyone?) and the un-involving struggle of a young Australian actress (the otherwise talented Alice Eve) who arrives illegally in Los Angeles seeking fame and fortune only to prostitute herself for a green card.

Spending a ridiculous amount of time exploiting Eve with so many topless shots, it feels a little like a Cinemax late night movie; although most men won't complain-- sadly, it dawned on me after the film ended that only one female adult character and one minor female in the entire movie gets a happy ending.

But, forgive me as I digress and we'll move back to Eve's Claire who first wins and then loses our sympathy in an uneven handling of the cliched situation Kramer dwells far too often on, involving her decision to become a virtual sexual slave to the unspeakably sleazy and married immigration applications adjudicator Cole Frankel (Ray Liotta).

While Cole is the film’s devil, it’s his wife Denise (Ashley Judd) who is the film’s angel as a human rights crusading immigration defense attorney who fights to protect the very people her husband willingly exploits.

The film’s central storyline follows Harrison Ford’s Max Brogan-- an agent employed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement-- who witnesses firsthand the number of holes in the system, realizing that nothing is as simple as it appears every evening on Lou Dobbs' presentation of the issue as there’s good and bad every which way he turns.

When he becomes personally invested in the life in one illegal immigrant—a young mother (Alice Braga) who begs him to check up on her young son—Brogan begins calling in sick, testing out his Spanish, and trying to help make just one story end happily by returning the boy to his home in Mexico.

Of course, we know that the situations that drive people across the border are ridiculously complex and while Kramer gets bonus points for taking an unusual look at the immigration problem by trying to show it from every ethnicity (including one rather amusing subplot featuring 21 and Across the Universe’s Jim Sturgess as a British atheist who tries to pass himself off as a super devout Jew to gain a green card and hopefully a music career), ultimately he tears his own audacious quilt apart.

While not a complete failure and you’re definitely invested in the timely subject of the film-- unfortunately, as soon as we begin to feel a connection with one character, Kramer moves on. It's a work that's riddled with an over-abundance of speech-making—most ridiculously in a contrived and overly flowery confrontation during a store robbery at the end that sounds like a political campaign advertisement. And by hitting us on the head so hard instead of sewing things in gently, we're also left dazed by the overwhelming aftermath of too many loose threads that probably were ripped apart in the hasty editing process to meet studio distribution demands which cheats the final outcome for a subplot involving Brogan’s Iranian-American partner (Cliff Curtis).

Losing you in an uneasy, grainy, and awkward sea of distractions, you’re left with the realization of how much potential the film squandered in its excessive need to be big and bold. Ultimately, although the heart was in the right place for Kramer’s personal film he made as an American immigrant himself-- essentially Crossing Over is the type of quilt you’ll end up putting in the closet. For, in the times you do try to bring it out, you're faced with the harsh realization that no matter how many colors and designs are in it, instead of complimenting your furniture in a way so that things start to look new, you’re disappointed by the inevitable realization that what it mostly does is clash-- by offering nothing beneficial or interesting to a situation we face every single day in these United States.

New Article: Across the Universe

Revisit the Beatlemania of the 60's with Film Intuition's newest entry to the Articles Page:

"All You Need Is Love." Across the Universe: Julie Taymor & The Beatles--Featuring more than 20 video clips, 50 photographs and Beatles research, this 8 page article serves as a comprehensive multimedia viewer's guide to Julie Taymor's under-appreciated masterpiece. *contains spoilers*

Enjoy!

21

Director:
Robert Luketic

Although I’m not one for gambling, blackjack is the type of game that can even make someone like me-- who earned her one and only grade of D in Math 90 and fulfilled her baccalaureate math requirement by knitting a scarf and writing a physics paper on string theory-- feel like a mathematical wizard. One only needs to count to 21 after all and if you can handle basic addition, you can play the game, but after hearing about the group of math geniuses from M.I.T. “Who Took Vegas for Millions” in the subtitle of Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction work Bringing Down the House, I realized that mastery of the game is best left to the experts and those who no doubt have never heard of math at the 90 level. While I didn’t have the opportunity to read Mezrich’s popular book, (caught up as I was in learning to knit), I received a crash course in the events in Hollywood's big screen adaptation called 21 directed by Robert Luketic.

The film stars up-and-coming talent Jim Sturgess (a.k.a. the dreamy lad from Across the Universe) as M.I.T. senior Ben Campbell who excels in his studies and extracurricular technology activities with his two best friends. Until he meets Professor Rosa (Kevin Spacey who also served as a producer on the film) Ben’s only experience with gambling is hoping for a long-shot full ride scholarship to cover the $300,000.00 price-tag of Harvard Medical School and feeling an attraction for his beautiful and far less socially awkward classmate Jill Taylor (Kate Bosworth). That all changes when he’s granted access to a group he mistakes for a math club as Rosa coaches his brightest students including Bosworth, Aaron Yoo, Liza Lapira, and Jacob Pitts in the legal yet morally gray and incessantly frowned upon skill of counting cards in blackjack to take advantage of the game’s weakness which is that it can be beaten by the chosen few prodigies with the skills and time.

Employing a system of gestures and innocuous words that double for the table's count when it heats up or cools down, the team travels to Las Vegas on weekends where the nerdy kids become high rollers in casinos, suites and nightclubs. Dividing itself in half, the group consists of those who play the minimum and signal (mostly the women who unquestioningly abide by Rosa’s sexism) and the two “big players,” including Pitts’ Fisher who has begun to grow an ego and the newest participant Ben who, after initially turning down the opportunity, lets his hormones do the talking when Taylor pays him a visit at his after school job where he’s been granted a promotion to $8.00 an hour.

Although Mezrich’s book took place in the 90’s, Luketic’s film which is loosely based on the source material in a script by Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb is set in present day where the hangers-on from the criminal traditions of old Vegas are finding themselves exceedingly pushed out by computer technology along with the sort of Disney World for adults that sin city has become. To this end, the film introduces Cole Williams, played by a fierce Laurence Fishburne as a security expert who uses his own card counting skill to catch scheming gamblers and finds his attention being drawn to the new casino wiz kid, Ben Campbell, playing under an assumed name who is beginning to find he’s changing with each successive win.

As scripted, the likable but bland Campbell is easily dominated by the more involving characters and I found myself wanting to know more about the females who play for a professor who tells Campbell “I don’t trust the girls." More specifically, in the case of Bosworth’s Taylor, her character's own heartbreaking experiences with the game were begging to be explored in greater detail, if only to inject a bit more emotion into this tale of logic driven, left brain geniuses.

While there are some major plot contrivances and dubious twists near the end of 21, it’s such a high energy and fascinating film which admirably makes intellect (instead of gambling) seductive that we’re willing to forgive a few instances of disbelief especially in the character of Spacey who seems a bit hard to believe, yet because it’s Spacey delivering these lines with crisp precision, we’re riveted all the way.