Allied

Allied is a term you don’t hear very often these days. While there are plenty of allies, or alliances, it is quite likely that when you hear the term ‘allied’ you will most likely think of a moving van company, or your thoughts will stray back to the WWII era.

Which is exactly where director Robert Zemeckis and screenplay author Stephen Knight have taken us in the brand new film Allied. The film has Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard as the leads. Pitt plays a Canadian called Max Vatan who is on loan to the British Royal Air Force, and Cotillard is a Frenchwoman called Marianne Beauséjour, who is in the French Resistance to be accurate.

We find both of them in Casablanca. Morocco, a then French colony under the control of the occupying Germans. It is 1942. Pitt, as Vatan,

parachutes in, landing in the desert, while Cotillard, is already up and running, as a smart and desirable member of the Casablanca high society. Which said another way means that she is hobnobbing with the German High Command in Morocco.

Vatan is picked up on a road that leads back to Casablanca. He’s given a suitcase which is filled with all the requisites – you know – passport, Letters of transit, cash, and of course weapons. His driver gives Vatan the intel just as he’s about to be dropped off at the tres chic nightclub, called The Rivoli,  in Casablanca.  Your wife will be in a purple dress. Look for the hummingbird.

And there she is. You can see the hummingbird’s wing at the bottom of the photo above. This is exactly what Vatan saw. Max is going to be passed off as Marianne’s husband who after many months in Paris is now able to join his wife in Casablanca.

So the tale is now in motion. There’s some concerns about Vatan’s French accent, (in the film he’s Canadian after all, but his ‘wife’ thinks he sounds like he’s from Quebec rather than Paris) and some other hurdles will come their way – but hopefully, they will be able to complete their assignment which is to assassinate the German ambassador.

Now that seems a fine set up for the movie. But the problem is that this part is only the first half of the movie. There’s a second half and almost all of that takes place in London and the some suburbs called Hampstead and Hampstead Heath.

While the first half is about the mission it is also about Pitt and Cotillard’s characters a) getting to know one another, 2) getting to care for each other, and 3) falling in love. It’s near perfection. Every box has been checked and every mark was hit. Exotic location = Yes. Spies and espionage – Yes. Action – Of course. And the love-story part.

Pitt and Cotillard get to wear the most beautiful clothes imaginable. Pitt? You’d never know he is 50 in real years. In the film he doesn’t look a day over 38.  I’ve been a fan of Cotillard for some time, and in this film they certainly didn’t skimp on her costumes. Breathtaking is a word that comes to mind.

The Immigrant (2014)

From the trailer, The Immigrant, simply clicked in my mind. My own grandparents had long ago arrived at Ellis Island, as did Ewa and Magda, but likely earlier. The music of the trailer had a hypnotic beat or syncopation to it that would be the tambourine, and it was almost ethereal hearing it again and again . And I knew, just from the trailer, that I would not miss seeing this film.

The story was clearly foretold in the trailer, so I knew what was coming. But now, having seen the film, I feel the trailer now seems much grander than the film I watched.

Essentially, this film is a three character piece, with assorted immigration officials, bar patrons, men who wanted to purchase Ewa’s ‘time’, cops, and Ewa’s fellow girls at the bar/theater/pleasure house where she worked.

Can you help me…?

Ewa is played by Marion Cotillard, and she is mesmerizing despite the fact that script pushes her into a corner labeled ‘victim’ and doesn’t let her stray very far from it.

Rust and Bone

Rust and Bone – is it an English pub? Or maybe an interior design firm? Last guess; a few things that have been discovered in a long abandoned house which might be haunted? Actually ‘none of the above‘ is the best guess. Rust and Bone is a French/Belgian film that opened last May in Europe and just this past November here in the USA. Its French title is De rouille et d’os . Heard of it?

This is not just any film. It was nominated for 2 Golden Globes which have come and gone. Still pending are two BAFTA awards which are the British Oscars. The categories: Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actress. More locally, Marion Cotillard has already won the 2012 Hollywood Film Festival Award for Actress of the Year.

In case you have forgotten, Cotillard has appeared in Contagion, Inception, Midnight in Paris, The Dark Knight Rises, and Public Enemies. That’s in addition to having walked off with the Oscar for Best Actress in 2008 for La vie en Rose. In this film, directed by Jacques Audiard, Cotillard playing off her co-star Matthias Schoenaerts, is spectacular.

Audiard is no stranger to my pages. I’ve done reviews on two of his other films including The Beat My Heart Skipped (2005), and Read My Lips (2001). What can you draw from all of the facts above? Right. Audiard is at the forefront of French cinema.

This film, Rust and Bone, won’t need a lot of words from me. I can provide you with all you’ll need to know – just from the trailer.

Cotillard plays Stephanie who lives with a guy she doesn’t love, and she trains and performs with Orcas (Killer Whales) for a living in Antibes, in the south of France.

Matthias Schoenaerts plays Ali. Ali is a down-on-his-luck roughneck. He lacks sensitivity, culture, empathy – you name it he lacks it. That would also include money. He does have a five year old son called Sam. Ali and Sam are so broke they have to scavenge for food unfinished and abandoned by other travelers on the long train ride down to the south of France, where he will live (temporarily) with his married sister while he looks for work.

Contagion

After seeing Contagion today, I thought long and hard about the peanuts sitting in a bowl on the bar next to my drink. This new film directed by Steven Soderbergh, and written by Scott Z. Burns is described as an action thriller centered on the threat posed by a deadly virus and a team of doctors contracted by the CDC (Center for Disease Control) to deal with the outbreak. If you think that this film might remind you of the 1995 film called Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, Renee Russo, and  Morgan Freeman – you’d be correct.

I think the term action thriller is a little misleading. There’s not really a lot of action and it isn’t really a thrill ride either. What it really is a horror story that could become true tomorrow or at any other time in the future. Only in this horror story, the monsters aren’t visible.

In fact, there already have been plagues, and diseases that have spread rapidly. The horror is that it can come at any time, and in anyplace on the globe. That is what is so frightening.

The film tells us that an average person touches their own face 2 or 3 times a minute all day. That’s 2-3 thousand times a day. Every day. The film tells us that every day contacts with other people like shaking hands, picking up a glass, handling a door knob, or a pole on a subway train or a bus, or even handing someone a file, or money, or a credit card then receiving it back might result in the transmittal of a disease.

Gwyneth Paltro as Beth Emhoff calling a friend in Chicago. She's just got off the plane from HK.

The film opens at Day 2. Someone we know (the actress – not the character) has contracted the disease. She’s unaware – but we know. Part of the reason is that this film’s title is Contagion, and she looks and acts sick, and the other reason we know is that the blasted trailer told us as much. This is Beth Emhoff played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Within a few minutes of film time, she’s weakened, collapsed, rushed to a hospital, then dies.

Midnight in Paris

Midnight In Paris quietly arrived in Sarasota today at the Burns Court Cinema, a small film venue that books mostly indies, art, and an occasional foreign film. This was very fortunate for me, as this film, directed and written by Woody Allen, wasn’t booked at either of Sarasota’s big film chain multiplexes. The hall in which I watched the film was indeed small – 10 rows of four seats on each side of a center aisle. Your basic 80-seater.

As for Paris,  I’ve been there three times. I’ve walked its streets like a true boulevardier. I’ve stretched a thimbleful of coffee into a few hours of people watching on the sidewalk cafe at the Deux Magots on the Left Bank, and I’ve even been aboard one of those glass enclosed tour boats (Bateaux-mouches) that slowly make their way up and down the Seine River for a romantic dinner cruise with my main squeeze at the time. In short, Paris, the city of lights, is a very romantic city, especially the Rue Cler neighborhood that I usually stay in. As Ernest Hemingway once said,

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

While Woody’s Midnight In Paris might not qualify as a feast for either the palate or the senses, it is certainly worthy of being called a delightful and delicious cinematic pastry.

I wrote the above intro to this review before I actually saw the film. Little did I know the Woody would use the same Hemingway quote mere minutes into this film. Then again, I didn’t know that Hemingway himself would be  a character portrayed by an actor in the film either.

I’ve decided to give this review a secondary title and I’ll call it Woody’s Wish List. Since Woody has more years behind him than he does in front of him, it is altogether natural to look back toward’s one younger days. Or to wish for something that never happened. Our personal memories always to seem to have a glow to them that we didn’t quite see when we lived through those times. But even further back from our own lived in memories are the times we’ve only dreamt about or read about in a book.

Public Enemies

Tell Billie for me. Bye, Bye Blackbird…”

So ended gangster John Dillinger‘s life. According to Special Agent Winstone, Dillinger uttered those words with his dying breaths and asked the agent who shot him (one of a several FBI agents who had a hand in gunning him down) to pass them on to Billie Frechette. The fact that this, the closing scene of the Michael Mann film, Public Enemies (2009), was totally fictional shouldn’t bother you as a viewer, After all, that was an elegant tear that fell from Billie’s eye. Billie, of course, was portrayed by Marion Cotillard.

Mann has fashioned a gangster film wrapped inside of a love story. Here, the gangster is neither demonized or glamorized. For certain, Johnny Depp’s Dillinger is not a heroic character. He may be mythic in the sense that in real life, Dillinger took on the G-Men, when the country was in dire shape. But that is different from heroic.

The Michael Mann / Johnny Depp take on Dillinger was that he was fearless. He didn’t fear confrontation with the FBI. Nor did he expect to be turned down by Cotillard’s Billie, which she did at first.

When Billie protested that she wasn’t going to run off with a man she barely knew, Dillinger laid out all his cards as well as a brief summary of his life so far …

I was raised on a farm in Moooresville, Indiana. My mama ran out on us when I was three, my daddy beat the hell out of me cause he didn’t know no better way to raise me. I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey, and you… what else you need to know?

So Dillinger and friends robbed banks, just like Bonnie and  Clyde.