Jane Campion's Bright Star

With her new film, Bright Star, Jane Campion offers a sensitively performed, visually artistic portrayal of the last years of John Keats and his love affair with Fanny Brawne that evokes the sweet agony of first love while at the same time paying tribute to the famous Romantic poet’s immortal poetry.

Ben Whishaw (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) as poet John Keats and Abbie Cornish (Stop-Loss), as Fanny Brawne, a genteel woman accomplished at designing and sewing her own clothes, earnestly portray the joys and heartbreaks of first love. You can see it in their eyes. You can see it in the way they touch each other and walk together.

After a beginning fraught with friction, their relationship becomes a youthful, playful one. They write each other romantic letters and do romantic things with folded bits of paper. In my favorite scene, they stroll hand-in-hand behind Fanny’s little sister. When the little girl is not looking, they kiss; but when she turns around, they freeze in comical positions. Like love-sick teenagers, they kiss the love letters they send and receive; they place their heads against a wall that separates their rooms. As a dreamy poet with no money, Keats is portrayed as a romantic innocent who spends his time on writing poetry and wooing Fanny. Fanny is the more practical one, and at first she resists Keats’s overtures of love, but when she gives her love to him, she gauges her happiness by the letters she receives from him, and she pines when he is gone.




Meanwhile, Paul Schneider (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) gives a compelling supporting performance as Charles Brown, Keats’s friend, a wastrel and wannabe poet who is possessive of his friend’s attention and antagonistic toward Fanny’s intrusion into Keats’s avocation as a writer. Schneider invests himself admirably in his role as a self-centered cad who is cruel toward Fanny, seeing her as a threat to Keats’s success as a writer.

Jane Campion’s camera frames Malickesque images of nature that suggest the natural beauty that pervades Romantic poetry, along with images of simple interiors, contrasting the austerity of a white, sparsely furnished room with depictions of luxuriously verdant English countryside on a sunny day. Campion lets the camera linger on images such as Keats sprawled out on a pruned treetop or Fanny and her siblings in a field of flowers. Some shots, accompanied by a hypnotic pastoral silence, convince us that we are living a moment in the early 1800s, and it is a shame Campion doesn't allow the camera to linger there a little longer. In one shot, Fanny’s little sister stops on a wooden boardwalk to touch the stiff stalks in a dense thicket of rushes – the horizontal lines of the boards contrasting with the vertical lines of the reeds. In another shot, Fanny’s bare legs lie out from under the laced hem of a white shift. A white curtain billows out from a breeze coming through the window.

There is a lot of whiteness in this film. Along with the image of the white fabrics Fanny uses for her creations, a pervading image is paper: the crisp leaves of one of Keats’s freshly printed books; scraps of paper scrawled with drafts of a poem; folded letters sealed with wax; a Valentine sent by Charles Brown in the shape of a box with a lid that opens. There are many, many letters in this story, and it made me want to go out and buy some fine, white paper, turn off my computer, and write on it with pen and black ink.








In a sense, Campion’s film tries to become one of Keats's poems. Bright Star is a cinematic tribute to Keats’s poetry and the mystery of writing as an art form. We see his words on paper. We see copies of his new volumes. Keats recites poetry. Fanny recites poetry; and, for the most part, Cornish has a knack for reciting Keats’s words with more meaning than Whishaw. Unfortunately, the film is so full of Keats’s words that it stuffs you with language but doesn't bring you in touch with it. The most touching use of Keats's poetry is brief. Keats recites a few lines of "When I have fears that I may cease to be," and then he can't finish - for obvious reasons.


Bright Star is a beautiful, well-acted, interesting, instructive film, but I often felt it wasn’t a very compelling film. Like an educational documentary, it depicts the poetry, the man, and the woman he loved, but it doesn’t necessarily make us feel close to them. There is absolutely no denying that Campion’s film is a meticulously rendered period film, but like one of Keats’s longer odes, it is full of beautiful words and images that don’t necessarily grab you and make you feel.

Jane and Katie see Fame

My daughter, Jane, loves movies and goes frequently, so the plan for her twenty-second birthday was to see a movie with Katie, her best friend from Special Olympics, and then have dinner at the Olive Garden. Jane chose Fame, a good choice.

Fame, the updated remake of the 1980 hit, is one big montage that cuts together scenes of young people singing, dancing, acting, and playing instruments during their four years at a performing arts high school in New York City. With very little dialogue or story, here are all the clichés – the bitter rapper-wannabe from the inner city; the hard-driven dancer who’s going to be the best; the classical pianist who goes against her father’s stringent control to become a hip-hop vocalist. We follow the hopes, the dreams, the ups, the downs, the successes, the failures, but it comes out all right for everyone, and the film ends with the students’ extravagant graduation performance that is a thrilling display of music and movement highlighted by some stunning slow-motion shots of perfect bodies flying across the stage.

Fame is a heart-warming, well-intended entertainment. It presents a Disney Channel-like fantasy world that shows teenagers who are beautiful or handsome, bright and talented, and if they are troubled, their troubles are solved by the end of the story. For Jane, a young woman with Down syndrome, this is exactly the kind of movie she wants to see, a perfect world that offers pure happiness, a world in which she can imagine what it might be like to be unencumbered by disability, a world she wants to revisit repeatedly.

There’s definitely a place in the world of cinema for a movie that’s a string of very familiar tropes embellished with great singing and dancing. For someone else, that special movie is a well-written, character-driven drama with intelligence and depth. For me, lately, it’s been Inglourious Basterds, a well-acted, meticulously orchestrated, suspenseful film that is a bold example of fine filmmaking.

Meanwhile, for Jane and Katie it was this free-spirited celebration of sound and motion. As the credits rolled, they impressed me with their knowledge of Disney Channel filmography, linking star Kay Panabaker with Phil of the Future and Anna Maria Perez de Tagle with Hannah Montana, and they turned to each other and said simultaneously, “I’m so seeing that again.” If a simple movie like this can bring such joy to two people, I thought, well, there’s good reason I have this passion for an artistic form of entertainment that holds a special power to delight the soul.

Grungy, Grimy Sci-Fi - Pandorum

German director Christian Alvart’s Pandorum borrows visual elements from Alien, Resident Evil, and The Descent to create the creepy carnivorous mutants and the grungy, greasy setting of the vast interior of the spacecraft Elysium (irony here) that drive this satisfyingly interesting sci-fi thriller about a Noah’s ark mission fleeing a doomed Earth for an Earth-like planet called Tannis, humanity’s last desperate hope.

Dennis Quaid, masking his minimal acting talents by glowering and barking his lines gruffly, and Ben Foster, brave but effectively scared out of his wits, play crew members who wake up from hyper-sleep nonplussed in regards to the location of the ship and the condition of the thousands of other members of the ship’s Earthling cargo. Meanwhile, German actress Antje Traue and kickass martial artist Cung Lee play two crew members who have survived in the bowels of the ship, eluding the predations of ugly, slimy carnivorous warriors who look like the cave things in The Descent but come armed like the Urakai in The Lord of the Rings. Amazing makeup in this film as characters are smeared with just about every kind of disgusting effluvium.

Although the mystery about what pandorum is disappoints in some respects, the film delivers entertaining action, suspense, and surprises, along with interesting and sometimes bizarre characters. Just the word – pandorum – suggests Pandora’s Box; unfortunately, the film does not incorporate the moral dilemma and the dark meanings of that myth. Instead, pandorum seems to suggest pandemonium – and the hellish conditions suffered by humanity aboard the Elysium certainly fit that implication.


The dark, claustrophobic atmosphere, along with the tension generated by greasy passages and hatchways, opening to who-knows-what, is enough to generate some good suspense. Unfortunately, the film has the bad habit of accompanying these scenes with overloud sound effects that turn the impacts of punches and bodies falling to lower decks into rather head-aching explosions. Yeah, he’s been punched! Yeah, he’s fallen. I get it! And here’s another gripe about an element that, in fact, weakens the suspense. Jeez, those carnivorous warrior mutants move way too fast for me! There are some chase scenes, combats, and literal cliffhangers that look suspenseful; but they certainly don’t feel as suspenseful as they could be when things move so fast in some shots that the shots look wasted and in need of being cut out. Slow it down, Herr Alvart, mein Freund; let me see what’s going on! The film’s major strength is visual; the art direction effectively depicts a nether region of black tubes, dripping passageways, and oozing bulkheads. Some of the shots of the swarming mutants border on the artistic. Alas, there’s little time to fully absorb them.

Now take a look at the poster above. What does it depict? It’s a masterful teaser. Look at it quickly and it sure seems to depict some sort of alien creature with a small head and a long, muscular leg ending in a hoof-like foot. That’s not what it is.


A side note here. Move over, Milla Jovovich. Sorry. Antje Traue is my new favorite ass-kicking female survivor! It’s amazing how sexy she is with her hair matted into dried strands, her face and cleavage smeared with grime and blood. Ah, cinema! Call it the grungy, grimy sci-fi look.

Au Revoir, Shosanna

I saw Inglourious Basterds on Sunday night with my wife. It was my fourth viewing, her first. I had no idea what she would think of it. I was happy to be seeing it again, but it was kind of sad walking down the long hallway past all the larger-screened theaters and turning the corner to Cinema 5, the small theater that can’t have more than twelve rows in it, where movies are banished when they are nearing the end of their run and will soon disappear from circulation.

So, it was au revoir to the touchingly elegiac opening rendition of “Green Leaves of Summer” followed by – “Chapter One – Once upon a time… in Nazi-occupied France” – and the cut to that stunningly simple shot of the farm house, the farmer chopping wood, the girl hanging wash, the cows. Au revoir to that long scene inside the farm house, beautifully acted by Christoph Waltz as Hans Landa and Denis Menochet as Perrier. Au revoir to the meticulously orchestrated mounting tension of this scene and the farmer’s final surrender to emotion (watch the space under his eye quiver). The tragic climax comes inexorably. Shosanna runs. Landa lowers his pistol, Au revoir, Shosanna.

But this great scene is not the only masterful set piece. I almost prefer the scene in the tavern basement where a drunken celebration and an identity game turn into threatening suspicions and an abrupt bloodbath. And the lengthy Cinema Gamaar conflagration sequence, a sequence that includes the riveting confrontation between Landa and Frau Hammersmark, followed by parallel cuts to Landa’s deal to get all four and end the war, is amazingly conceived and edited.

I’ll miss a great cast of memorable characters so wonderfully portrayed by their performers: Shosanna Dreyfus and Bridget von Hammersmark, Major Archie Hicox and Herr Stürmbahnführer Hellstrom, Aldo Raine and Hugo Stiglitz, Private Fredrick Zoller and Corporal Wilhelm Wicki.

Au Revoir to stunning cinematography: the opening shot of the farm; the overhead shot following Shosanna, all in red, rising from her makeup table and going down the hallway; the shot of Shosanna and the Nazi flag reflected in the window; the shot of the pile of nitrate film behind the screen filled with a shot of a pile of empty rifle shells.

And I dig some of those memorable foreign language lines: Au revoir, Shosanna; Attendre le crème; Dann muss ich King Kong sein!.

So long for now to bold filmmaking that knits together sharp writing, superb acting, intelligent editing, and striking cinematography that fills the screen.

Au revoir, that is, to Inglourious Basterd’s time on the big screen. That’s the only place where a film has full life. We can look forward to it on DVD, but a DVD is the ghost of a movie, albeit a friendly ghost, a ghost that keeps you company and haunts you with the thrill of first viewing, but an insubstantial ghost nonetheless.

To me, it’s a big loss when a movie I love leaves the theater and disappears into the digital world. I am so thrilled by the big-screen experience that I try to see favorite movies as often as possible in the theater before they are sent off to DVD. I saw Inglourious Basterds four times at the movies. I saw There Will Be Blood only twice completely, but I slipped into the theater a couple of times to watch major chunks a third time. I saw War of the Worlds four times; The Thin Red Line three times.

The record-breaking run of Titanic took me back to the days when a movie like The Graduate or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid could be found playing in a theater for years. I saw Titanic twice in Cape Cod theaters in December, 1997, and then once a month for four more months, for a total of six times, and it was still playing on the Cape in June. Yes, I know, Titanic has its shortcomings, but I wanted to experience the big-screen depiction of the sinking ship as often as possible before its full visual impact would be lost forever on video.

Of all the movies you’ve seen in theaters in the past twenty years, which ones have you seen the most frequently?

Oh, I forgot to tell you what my wife thought of Inglourious Basterds. “What did you think?” I asked tritely as we left the theater. “I enjoyed every minute of it,” she said.

(And a confession – I can’t wait to get my hands on the DVD!)

Two To Forget - Whiteout and Jennifer’s Body

Well, here are two to forget. Spoilers here – because these films have already been spoiled.


In Whiteout Kate Beckinsale stars as Carrie Stetko, a Federal marshal investigating a murder in an Antarctic research station threatened by an approaching whiteout blizzard and six months of darkness. The story starts out promisingly in 1957 with the crash of a Russian cargo plane carrying a coveted box full of diamonds. But this standard investigation/mystery peters out in the end, and the raw whiteout conditions and threatening darkness are only slimly used to build suspense even though the film takes some time to show us a number of splendidly framed widescreen shots of awesome expanses of ice and snow.

Worst writing: When Dr. John Fury, played by a withered Tom Skerritt, explains that he went after the diamonds because he had grown tired of his mediocre pay and being ignored in the hierarchy of assignment locations, we are witness to an example of the laziest kind of screenwriting in screenwriting history – the old I-can’t-live-on-my-pension bit.

Most enjoyable but most needless scene: When we first meet Kate’s character, she has returned to the research base from doing something on the ice. She goes to her apartment and takes off her coat. We see her bulletproof vest and her badge and we knows she’s a Federal marshal. Okay. Enough shown. Then she takes off her vest and her undershirt. Lingering shot on her shapely body in bra and panties. She strolls around the apartment. She turns the shower on. She takes off her bra and panties. She gets in the shower. Lingering shot of her naked in the steam. Is this showing the contrast between how cold she felt outside and how warm she feels now? I think not. We never saw her outside, and when she comes in, she looks warm and cozy enough – not even a frosty eyebrow. Oh, I know why this scene is in the movie!


Meanwhile, Jennifer’s Body is a shoddily made, laughably poor movie that looks like it's going to be a sardonic examination of how a high school sex bomb traps lusting jocks and eats them (not in the sexual sense) but turns into a skimpy occult shocker, when Jennifer (Megan Fox) is turned into a human flesh-eating ghoul after a sacrificial death ceremony is botched by punk rock band members lusting for fame. What ensues doesn’t even amount to standard chills and gore; what follows is a poorly directed tale of retribution.

Megan Fox as Jennifer is miscast simply because she can’t act. Amanda Seyfried fares better. She plays “Needy,” Jennifer’s supposedly less attractive (dorky glasses can’t hide those beautiful eyes from me) and less socially adroit (she has a steady boyfriend) buddy since childhood who endeavors to stop Jennifer from being such a ghoul. Sadly, the film attains its best drama in its anti-climax depicted during the closing credits by means of some artfully staged still shots showing how Needy exacts payback on the members of the rock band.

Worst editing: Jennifer and Needy are in a bar watching a punk rock band perform. Cut to flames starting up from a power cord. Cut to audience members oblivious to the starting fire. Cut to the growing flames. Cut to audience members, including Jennifer and Needy, totally not seeing the fire starting. Cut to the fire licking up the cords. Cut to the oblivious audience again! In fact, the people in the bar don't see the fire until a flaming banner lands in the middle of a table between two drinkers.

Worst direction and writing (that would be Diablo Cody's department): What follows is a fire that looks like it’s supposed to be serious and a big tragedy: bodies burst into flame and run into the parking lot. But Jennifer and Needy don’t seem to be affected. Jennifer is laughing. I almost expected the fire scene to cut back to the bar – and all this was just in someone’s mind. But it’s a real fire and you don’t know whether to laugh or take it seriously. What’s the point here? How are we supposed to take this fire?

In an example of incomprehensible direction and bad writing, Jennifer prepares to eviscerate and gnaw on her first victim, a hapless beefed-up football player who can’t believe Jennifer has revealed her breasts to him, and they’re in the woods, and they get surrounded by bunnies and raccoons and deer and foxes. It’s so weird that we don’t know whether or not it’s supposed to be funny, especially since it would have been more appropriate for Jennifer the ghoul to be scaring all the animals away.

Throw in J. K. Simmons as a science teacher with a hook in place of an amputated hand who seems to be on the verge of guffaws when he delivers his speech about the horrible loss of the students in the fire, and you have a film so poorly directed you don’t know how to react to it. The campy Ravenous (1999) is much better than this trash.

Quentin Tarantino’s Favorite “Hangout Movie”

Back in 2003 I was sitting in a dentist’s or a doctor’s waiting room and I was attracted to a copy of The New Yorker by its cover illustration showing a film shoot of a woman in a sports car driving in front of a backdrop of the Hollywood sign even though the real Hollywood sign stood on a brown ridge above the brightly painted backdrop. Ah, what clever commentary about the illusion of cinema!

Opening the magazine I was pleased to see that it was an entire issue devoted to the American film industry, and I immediately latched onto an article about Quentin Tarantino called The Movie Lover, by Larissa MacFarquhar.

At that time, I was not much of a Tarantino fan. In fact, it’s taken Inglourious Basterds to do so. But what I liked about the article was that it gave me an appreciation for Tarantino the filmmaker even though I wasn’t crazy about his films. I immediately identified with Tarantino’s cinematic obsession. When I read, Tarantino as a child was preoccupied with movies, and he was always writing, it reminded me of me! Similarly, like Tarantino, I had always been an avid viewer of films of any genre, and just like Tarantino, I loved obscure B-movies not many people had seen.

Shortly after reading the whole article (the magazine went with me when I left the dentist’s or doctor’s office), I saw Kill Bill: Vol. 1, and even though I wasn’t wild about the film, I could still be enthusiastic about Tarantino the filmmaker because the article helped me understand where he was coming from with his use of tropes adapted from other genres and his allusions to countless other films.

Anyway, the point of this post comes from this passage from the article: One of the many genres that Tarantino has made up is “hangout movies” – movies whose plot and camerawork you may admire but whose primary attraction is the characters. A hangout movie is one that you watch over and over again, just to spend time with them. Rio Bravo, one of Tarantino’s three favorite movies of all time (the two others are Taxi Driver and Blow Out) is a hangout movie.

Indeed, Rio Bravo is very much a hangout movie. Howard Hawks allows Wayne, Martin, Nelson, Brennan, and Dickinson extensive scenes in which they sit around and chat, rib each other, and bicker, thus giving the viewer time to get to know them. In my opinion, Rio Bravo spends a little too much time with character chitchat, to the detriment of the film’s tension, so it’s not one of my favorite Westerns, but if I have to hang out with characters, it’s a big plus for me if John Wayne is playing one of those characters. Thus, it’s not surprising when I say that my favorite hangout movie, according to Quentin’s definition, is John Wayne’s The Alamo - alluded to in Inglourious Basterds, coincidentally enough.

The Alamo (1960) is a film that I watch over and over again even though, admittedly, it is a flawed, cumbersome film that takes too long to get to the action. Nevertheless, I enjoy watching John Wayne as Davy Crockett in every scene. This movie was Wayne’s passion, a project that soaked up his life’s savings, and you can clearly see him living his dream as he moves through his scenes, exchanging friendly banter with Richard Widmark as Jim Bowie and striking up an unlikely alliance with Laurence Harvey as the more polished William Barrett Travis. Wayne is especially talented at remaining silent and allowing the other characters to take center stage and say their say. Watch him as he sits there unobtrusively, hardly moving; watch him closely – he’s really listening, reacting to the other characters with his eyes.


Especially in the lengthy San Antonio cantina sequence that encompasses a single night and takes up the majority of the film’s first half, it is also clear that Wayne, as director, emulated Howard Hawks’s talent for allowing his characters time to move around and interact within the world of the film. Wayne also banked on his experiences with John Ford to interject comic relief although Wayne’s comic relief is often more delightful, as it eschews Fordian silliness that goes too far. The lengthy cantina sequence, as well as numerous quiet or comic scenes during the siege, affords perhaps too much time for us to get to know the characters, but it pays off at the end. The impressive final battle is suspenseful because we’ve had lots of time to care about these characters, and we don’t want them to die.

Now that Tarantino and I have shared our favorite hangout movies, it’s your turn. What’s your favorite hangout flick?