Funny ’cause it’s true

by Diane Wild | Jul 16, 2008 | Movies

I could really annoy my friends if I sent all the someecards I’m dying to send. To quote another one, I’m “very quietly as excited for The Dark Knight as everyone else,” but …

The goddess of green

by Diane Wild | Feb 1, 2008 | Movies

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the green dress that adorned Keira Knightley in Atonement deserves an Oscar. Oh sure, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences saw fit to give the film a Costume Design nomination, but that’s not what I meant at all. That dress deserves a Best Supporting Inanimate Object (That’s Really Quite Animated) statue at least.

I don’t want the dress. I want to be the dress.

But those of you who would settle for owning it are in luck. If you have a few greenbacks to spend on the green bit of silk. From an NBC Universal media release:

An iconic piece of movie history from one of this year’s Best Picture Oscar nominees will be auctioned off to benefit Variety – The Children’s Charity of Southern California, beginning later this week.

The Clothes Off Our Back Foundation will host the online auction of the green evening dress worn by Keira Knightley in Focus Features’ Atonement, which is nominated for 7 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Costume Design.

The auction begins Friday, February 1st at the Foundation’s site www.clothesoffourback.org and ends Saturday, March 1st. Bidding will start at $1,000. The auction is for the green evening dress memorably worn during the crucial emotional and romantic sequences by Ms. Knightley as Cecilia Tallis, opposite James McAvoy as Robbie Turner, in director Joe Wright’s Atonement. Upon the film’s release, the dress quickly became one of the most influential cinematic costumes of recent years, being spotlighted on The Today Show and detailed on the covers of newspapers and magazines.

The dress being auctioned off, taken directly from the production’s archives, is one of a handful that was made specifically for Ms. Knightley to wear during filming. Multiples were fashioned because of the fragility of the dress. The dress being auctioned off was made under the supervision of, and has been authenticated by, Jacqueline Durran, who is nominated for an Academy Award for her costume design of Atonement.

Ms. Durran elaborated, “Joe Wright wanted something that would flow because Keira Knightley would have to move around in it. We picked this specific shade of green for the backless dress, and Keira was involved in the process, so it really was a collaboration.”

(The green dress wants me to remind you that smoking’s bad, kids.)

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

by Diane Wild | Jan 27, 2008 | Movies

When I was in high school, my English teacher had us read Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” and write an essay outlining how we would react to that society, a society where everyone was equal because anyone above average was artificially handicapped. Ballerinas danced with weights and face masks so they were no more graceful or beautiful than anyone else. News anchors had speech impediments. Intelligent people were equipped with a transmitter that sent sharp noises into their brains to scatter their thoughts. The title character is a 14-year-old genius and athlete who rejects his handicapping and rescues a ballerina from hers. True to bizarre Vonnegut form, though, the story doesn’t end in triumph.

Our teacher singled my essay out, not because it was superior to the rest, but because it was unique from the rest. Each of us in our International Baccalaureate class assumed we’d have the mental handicap foisted on us, and everyone but me took on the Harrison Bergeron role. Except they, of course, would be even more clever, and therefore successful in overthrowing the current regime.

I, on the other hand, assumed I could shut up and betray no outward signs of above-average-ness, thereby avoiding the attentions of the Handicapper General. I wrote that as long as I could still think, as long as I could still be me inside my own head, I’d be fine. I had no illusions, then or now, about my revolutionary prospects, and I still think many of my classmates overestimated their own.

Why I read, why I watch TV, why I go to movies, stems from that same value I place on imagination. Inside my head is where I make sense of the chaos of the world. Inside my head I lead many lives, which comes in handy when the external one disappoints. An imagination is what allows us to empathize with others and understand our world. Imagination is, to a large degree, our humanity. As long as I have that, I have everything. Or at least, I can imagine I do.

But “Harrison Bergeron” didn’t make me ponder a life devoid of everything but imagination. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly did, and the idea is unbearably suffocating and unexpectedly liberating at the same time.

Based on the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, high-living editor of the French Elle who suffered a catastrophic stroke at the age of 43, the film is a hauntingly beautiful portrait of what it means to be human.

The film opens as Bauby awakens in a hospital room stripped of the outward signs of humanity. His “locked-in syndrome” means his mind works perfectly, only it can’t communicate with his body. Paralysed from head to toe, his only window to and from the outside world is through his left eye. Our initial window into the film is exclusively through his point of view, the hazy, limited perspective of a man who can look out but can’t engage with the world around him.

The womanizing Bauby is fortunate to have some highly attractive health care practitioners surrounding him, including one who comes up with a system of communication to free him somewhat from his isolation. Eventually, he dictates his autobiography through the painstaking process of blinking yes to the correct letter when the alphabet is recited to him. Days after the book’s publication, Bauby died.

The movie avoids the sentimental rising-above-adversity cliché to which a lesser screenwriter or director might have succumbed. Ronald Harwood, who wrote the script in English based on that book, and Julian Schnabel, who brought his painterly eye to the film which he directed in French, bring moments of ebullience to a movie that, from its subject matter, should be horrifyingly depressing.

Not that it’s lacking in Kleenex moments. But this movie is more than a tear-jerker, and more than a biography of a unique man in highly unusual circumstances. It manages to also be a profound expression of our common humanity without being pretentious about it.

One of Bauby’s acquaintances, a journalist who had survived four years as a hostage in Beirut after taking Bauby’s place on a hijacked place, recounts how he managed to survive by clinging to his passions, such as his love of wine. Remember your humanity, he advises. That’s how you’ll survive.

Bauby and therefore Schnabel use the metaphor of the diving bell to describe the experience of locked-in syndrome, an impenetrable barrier that separates his body from the world around him. But Bauby’s humanity lies in his imagination and his memories, the butterfly of his metaphoric title. We catch glimpses of him as a child, as a father, as a son, as a lover, in the memories that flit through his consciousness. We also see in his imagination a flirtation with the Empress Eugenie, historic patroness of the hospital where he now resides, and melting glaciers imbued with their own metaphorical meaning.

Despite unrolling largely from the confined point of view of a man locked in his own mind, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly soars on the humour, passion, and meaning that Bauby’s painfully won words bring to the film. The film is a testament to the power of the imagination to be as revolutionary as any coup d’état.

Movies of 2007, with audio

by Diane Wild | Jan 3, 2008 | Movies

I got a last-minute request to join in on a Blogcritics Radio show this evening, looking back at the movies of 2007. You’d think that would be easy, even last minute, since I was supposed to be talking about the movies I listed in my TV and Movie Obsessions of 2007. How much preparation do you need to talk about something you’ve already written? Well, replace the “you” with “me” and the answer is … quite a lot, actually. Mock away.

I can’t voluntarily listen to myself (yes, that means editing the TV, eh? podcasts and transcribing interviews is murder) but I can guarantee some incoherence and giggling. Not because I was drunk, but because I was … talking. That’s just me. Remember the brain disconnecting from the mouth thing? Anyway, I come in at about 15 minutes in.

Someone called me a “mad Canadian” on introduction (it’s a thing … another writer on the site regularly gets called a beady-eyed Canadian) so I took the opportunity to plug a Canadian film that almost made my list: Sarah Polley’s Away From Her. I explained its bleakness was my reason for not including it in the end. It’s a powerful movie, a beautiful movie, but not an easy movie to watch, so I picked movies I purely enjoyed more. I had to (but didn’t really) do some fancy footwork to explain why I included the not-a-laugh-riot Atonement, then. Did I mention the incoherence?

I did go on to ramble a bit about Once, Juno, and Atonement, but I figure now is a good opportunity to give an honourable mention to some other movies I might have listed if I’d done a top 6 instead of a top 3 (keeping in mind the caveat that I haven’t seen nearly enough to consider a “best of” list).

Waitress was another one I considered, but it wasn’t quite weighty enough to stick with me through the year. I do seem to have a thing for the pie-makers, but Keri Russell was terrific, and Adrienne Shelley’s script and performance was heartbreaking, both on screen and for the offscreen tragedy.

The Namesake is a lovely, lush film with moments that still play in my mind months later. I had no real reason to review it – no free screener, in other words – but it compelled me to write it out, a feeling I get about few things, and I’m not even sure what it means, since I didn’t feel equally compelled to write full reviews of any of the other movies I’ve mentioned.

I can’t remember seeing a 2007 movie I didn’t somewhat enjoy, though perhaps I’m blocking them out, and of course I self-select as a movie critic can’t. I do keep negatively comparing Knocked Up to Juno, but I don’t mean to suggest that I didn’t like the earlier movie, just that I thought it was very much overpraised with very much not well written female characters — not such a big deal in certain movies, but in a movie about an unplanned pregnancy, pretty important.

I had fun with The Simpsons Movie, even though I haven’t watched the series regularly since the Paleolithic era. The Lookout was quietly intriguing. Hairspray, Stardust, all good DVD choices.

Some day I’ll write a quick post about the BlogTalkRadio thing they use for their radio shows – it has its plusses and minus for podcasty type geeks, but for now, check out the site if you’re interested (it’s not part of Blogcritics, it’s a separate service).