The Muppets

Alrighty, here we go. The Muppets. Bottom line. Absolutely back to the spirit of the classic Muppet movies and the television show. If you have any lingering affection for these creatures at all, you will enjoy it. I have a couple of quibbles, but the joy here is far too large to be undone.

There. If you plan to see it, that's all you need. Read nothing. Watch no clips. Just let the joy wash over you, then come back. You know, if you want. No one's making you, jeez!

And now, if you've seen it already, here's a closer look.



You know the story. Even if you'd never seen a trailer or read anything else about it, you could have guessed without much difficulty. The Muppet Studios in LA are about to be torn down by an evil oil magnate unless the Muppets can raise the $10 million needed to keep it. So they decide to put on a show - a telethon to raise the money. It all starts, however, with a man named Gary and his muppet brother Walter.

Walter is the Muppets' biggest fan. He grew up watching the show and the movies, and Kermit and the gang were his refuge when the world wasn't so kind to him. It's not easy bein' felt, yo. So when Walter gets a chance to go on a trip to Hollywood and visit the old Muppet Studio, it's the greatest day of his life. What he doesn't know until he gets there is that the studio has fallen on hard times. No one is there now except an old guide giving $5 tours, almost all the attractions are closed, and everything is in a serious state of disrepair and disuse. He sneaks into Kermit's old office and overhears a plan to turn the studios into a Muppet Museum, but that's just a cover. The greasy Tex Richman plans to tear everything down and dig for oil.

Walter is deeply upset - he screams for like five minutes - and he's determined to Do Something. He and Gary, along with Gary's lady friend Mary, find Kermit's house (or mansion, rather) and give him the bad news. Kermit is saddened but doesn't really know what can be done. He sings The Most Heartbreaking Song in the History of Time ("Pictures in My Head"), whose title I can't even type without tearing up. If you have ever had people who were once incredibly important to you and who you couldn't imagine drifting away from, only to find that eventually that's exactly what happens, this song was designed to make you cry like a crying crier who cries. I thought the transition into this song was a little weird and abrupt, but forgot all about it when the song started. Definitely the best of the new songs.

Kermit thinks it'll be impossible to get the gang back together, but Walter tells him he should at least try. So they hit the road (and eventually travel by map LOL) and track everyone down. Along the way, the usual Muppet story absurdities crop up - e.g., Gonzo and Scooter are doing pretty dang well, so couldn't they afford to pony up some money and at least put a dent in that $10 million? Who cares - we're going to put on a show, dangit! When they've gotten everyone back but Miss Piggy, Kermit shows a strange reluctance to go and find her.

And here's where the movie hit the biggest snag for me. I have always been a huge Kermit/Piggy fan. You might say they were the first couple I ever "shipped," and their romance has always been one of my favorite parts of the show and the movies. A love so powerful it transcended not only species but animal grouping, it was always fraught with conflict (mainly, I think, because she expended so much more energy on their relationship than he did). But it was just ... meant to be, you know? I'm fine with them having drifted apart, and I appreciate that they were genuinely trying to explore their relationship and make it feel real and textured. But the way the two characters are written here is just weird and doesn't feel like them at all. It's like it was written by someone who doesn't quite get what made them tick - like a Harmonian trying to write Ron/Hermione. Well, not quite that bad, but it just felt off, and that was kind of disappointing. I did mostly love the scene where they're walking the streets of Paris - she in a beret and he in a turtleneck, like they tripped and fell into a Jean-Luc Godard film. But again, the writing is not quite there. Perhaps it would have been a bit better if we'd seen flashbacks to what drove them apart instead of all the telling. I don't know. Minor quibble, I guess, but it felt major because it had to do with my favorite aspect of the movies/show.

BUUUUT, back to the good stuff. Kermit and the gang manage to get two hours of broadcast time for their telethon, even though everyone has told them they're not relevant and no one cares about them anymore. But they need a celebrity host, and no matter how many eighties stars Kermit calls (the only people in his Rolodex) no one is interested. They get desperate and decide to try and plead with Tex Richman, but he does an awesomely bad rap number about how that's not going to happen, and to top it off, he's not only going to take the theater, he's going to take the brand name and all the character names and start his own muppet show, with edgier muppets - to cater to the more cynical world they all now live in.

But hope is not lost, and in typical Muppet fashion, everything comes together at the last minute. I loved that the theater was empty at first, but that it filled up over the course of the two hours as people realized how much the Muppets had meant to them over the years. What I loved more was that people in my audience started singing along with the songs. Notably, the theme song ("It's time to play the music! It's time to light the lights!") and the One, the Only, don't pretend you don't know it's the Ultimate Heart-Tugger "The Rainbow Connection." If I thought I'd cried all my tears at "Pictures in My Head," I was so wrong. There are some wildly funny musical moments, too, such as the barber shop quartet singing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl also has a cameo early in the film) and and Camilla and the chicken chorus doing CeeLo's ... I guess it would be "Cluck You." ;-)

I loved the message in the end, which, like all messages in Muppet movies, is pretty standard stuff but good to hear anyway. And the moment at the end, when Kermit opens the theater door, genuinely took me by surprise. And of course brought back ALL THE CREYS.

There are some excellent cameos, most of which I won't spoil, but - hey, you're not supposed to be reading this until you've seen it anyway! My favorite is Emily Blunt, giving a nod to her Devil Wears Prada character as Miss Piggy's assistant. Oh, and HELLO THERE, MICKEY ROONEY! He was a muppet before there were Muppets, don't you think? Loved all the throwbacks to old Muppet numbers (great use of "Mahna Mahna") and covers of famous songs, and I liked most of the new songs, too. I already mentioned "Pictures in My Head" and the lolarious Tex Richman Rap, but there's also "Me Party," which in addition to being a great disco sendup, is like the story of my life - pretty much every day is a Me Party. :P And there's a great Serious Character-Building Song called "Man or Muppet" (Jim Parsons, FTW!).

It's not perfect, even for a Muppet movie, but it's close enough. It's good to know that the world hasn't gone so far into the cynical that the Muppets can't bring us back to a place where genuine sweetness trumps trash and hipster ironic commentary.

The Descendants

Alexander Payne hasn't made a feature film since 2004's Sideways, which many consider his best (though About Schmidt gets the crown, as far as moi is concerned). And while his latest film, The Descendants, doesn't quite rise (though it comes close) to the excellence of either of those films - again, as far as moi is concerned - it is probably the likeliest of his films to date to get some serious Oscar ground, especially as regards its star, George Clooney.


The Descendants

You know the basic story if you've seen the trailer. George Clooney plays Matt King, a lawyer in Hawaii, and Matt's wife Elizabeth is in a coma after a boating accident. Oh yeah, and she was also cheating on him - a fact he doesn't learn until after it's too late to confront her about it. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to tell you this, because we learn it very early on - Elizabeth is not going to come out of her coma, and according to the instructions set down in her will, the doctors can only care for her in that state for a short while. So it's time for Matt to get in touch with family and friends and begin a long and painful goodbye. And the knowledge that she'd been having an affair makes it all the more excruciating. Add into this mix Matt and Elizabeth's two daughters, 17 year old Alex and 10 year old Scottie. Alex, played by the remarkable Shailene Woodley, is a wild child, frequently indulging in booze and older men, but she's actually surprisingly pulled together considering all this. Scottie is out of control in her own way, often getting into trouble for her smart (and occasionally foul) mouth.

Matt is, at first glance, the stereotypical "too busy to emotionally connect" male, but Clooney's portrayal and the writing of the character win you over very quickly. I particularly love his line about thinking a parent with means should give their children enough money to do something, but not enough for them to do nothing. This is significant to the B story, because Matt is the trustee for his family's ancestral land (his family's line traces back to Kamehameha I, hence the movie's title) - one of the increasingly few untouched bits of paradise in the state. He's under pressure from not only his family but the entire state of Hawaii to do the right thing with the land. The family wants to sell, because the sale will make them a lot of money and it's an incredibly complicated process to keep the land. Most of the rest of the state think it would unconscionable to sell. The family wants to somewhat compromise by taking the option that, while paying less than other bids, will at least keep the money in Hawaii. But Matt's more immediate family matters understandably overshadow this decision for most of the film.

The movie itself is nothing incredibly new. It reminded me a bit of Terms of Endearment in the way it handled family comedy/drama and hospital bedside tragedy. It doesn't weave the comedy and drama together as successfully as it might have. In fact, it feels like the second act is almost a different movie entirely, bringing the levity that the first and third acts make necessary. The movie has some really extraordinary moments of emotional frankness. That's partly the writing - I especially love the moment where Matt has an extended scene of yelling and cursing at his comatose wife for her infidelity before chastising his daughter for doing the same thing later. But where the movie really shines is in the superb performances, pretty much across the board.

Shailene Woodley is fantastic as the older daughter, Alex. Her reaction to hearing the news about her mother is absolutely heart-shattering and her chemistry with her screen dad, Clooney, makes some of the movie's greatest moments. Amara Miller, as Scottie, is your typical movie kid for a lot of the film, but she gets some great moments, especially toward the end. I don't think I need to tell those of you who know me well how much the whole situation of most of this movie affected me, and I don't think any moment in this movie broke me more than when they break the news to Scottie, much later in the film. Judy Greer, I'm glad to see, has finally broken out of the "quirky/evil best friend in a rom-com" hell and gotten to do some great things lately, and her role as the wife of the Other Man is really wonderful, especially her final scene. Beau Bridges plays a character that MUST have been a straight-up homage to his brother's most memorable character, The Dude. And Robert Forster is rather amazing in the couple of scenes he's in, playing Matt's father-in-law. And I kind of loved Nick Krause as Alex's hilarious stoner boyfriend. He brought humor where it was desperately needed, but even he has a serious side.

But the star of the show, and not just in billing terms, is George Clooney. I was intrigued before seeing this by the idea of him playing a husband and father, as Clooney has eschewed anything resembling that lifestyle in his own personal life. This is the kind of character you've seen dozens of actors play in other movies. Another director, fifteen years ago, would have cast Tom Hanks. Sixty or seventy years ago, it would have been Jimmy Stewart. It certainly wouldn't have been Clark Cable or Cary Grant, the easiest parallels for Clooney that come to my mind. We've just never seen him play this kind of character. He's not the warmest or most successful of fathers in the beginning, but there's a real connection with his kids and a desire to do what his wife would have wanted, even though she doesn't particularly deserve it except in a "she's dying, cut her some slack" kind of way, that makes him a sort of hero over the course of the movie. And when he makes his big decision at the end of the film, and there are people who object strongly (and with a lot of passive aggression, I might add), I wanted to badly to jump into the screen and tell them to [BADWORD] off, because in that two hours of storytelling, this character gained my trust and I felt that whatever decision he made, after the journey he'd been on, was going to be the right one.

It's not perfect, but I loved loved loved this movie. I'm not sure I could see it again soon, because hoo boy is it emotional, but I highly recommend it. It's rated R, but it's barely an R (for language and, I'm almost positive, nothing else). It's getting serious buzz as an Oscar frontrunner, but I have a feeling that may disappear next week when The Artist steals everyone's hearts.

50/50

I hate tear-jerker movies. Oh, occasionally I'll be in the mood for one, but I always hate myself afterward. Nearly every tear-jerker that has ever been made is a revolting piece of manipulation. You're not crying because you're feeling something; you're crying because the music cues and the sentimental dialogue are telling you you're *supposed* to be feeling something. You're one of Pavlov's dogs, essentially.

50/50, however, is a tear-jerker that I absolutely love. I make no apologies for the blubbering I did during this movie, because every bit of it was earned through clever writing, solid storytelling and characterization, and incredible acting.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Adam, a guy who takes excellent care of himself and never takes chances with his body. He doesn't smoke, he doesn't do drugs, he runs regularly, and he doesn't even cross the street without permission from the crosswalk light. He works hard at his job and is supportive of his girlfriend Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard). He's been having some pain in his back and night sweats, so he goes to the doctor. Guess what? He's got a rare form of cancer, and it's in such a position near his spine that they'd rather not operate unless they have no choice.

What follows is how he and the people around him deal with this situation. His girlfriend vows to take care of him, but she's not terribly good at it. His mother is like any mother would be, but she's perhaps a little more smothering than average because she's also having to deal with her husband's Alzheimer's. As one character puts it later, she has a husband who can't talk to her and a son who won't talk to her. Adam's best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen) is supporting but occasionally takes advantage of his friend's misfortune for his own gain (though not really in a deplorable way). Into the mix comes Katherine (Anna Kendrick), Adam's assigned therapist who is actually younger than he is and still a little awkward in her connection to her patients (of which Adam is only the third).

The movie is best categorized as a comedy, and there are a lot of laughs (many of them rather crude), but everything in this movie feels absolutely real. There's a great scene where Adam is going in for his first chemotherapy session and looks around him at all the other cancer patients, clearly thinking "Is this going to be me?". His scenes with two fellow patients he does his chemo with are a highlight as well, and when one of them dies, it's an absolute heartbreak. There's no cloying setup to prepare you for it either; it's just out-of-the-blue, the way death almost always is. The most crushing scene by far, though, is when Adam is about to go in for a procedure and starts to realize he may not live through it. I don't know that I've ever wanted to step into a movie screen and hug a character harder than I did here.

This is a seriously fantastic movie. Near perfect, actually. Some viewers might be put off by the language, I suppose, but there are few movies nowadays that are more genuine about topics that turn lesser movies into fake, weepy schmaltz.

A Single Man

The first I heard of this film was in the summer, when its star, Colin Firth, won the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival. Awards pundits immediately placed him at the forefront of the Oscar discussion and this was called the role of his career so far. I have long been a fan of his, but admittedly most of my favorite roles of his were in the mold of what is probably still his most iconic performance, Fitzwilliam Darcy in the phenomenal 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice.

And, as far as it might be from Darcy (and Jack/Earnest Worthing, Jamie Bennett, and that other Darcy), I still think George Falconer, the eponymous single man of this film, is in somewhat the same mold. Stuffy on the surface and quick to disdain, but deeply passionate underneath, with an irresistibly sexy intelligence. Roles with that quality are what Colin Firth was made for, and he plays them exceedingly well. So when something like George Falconer came along, it must have been an enormous treat for Firth - a character with some familiarity, but with much more depth and layers and conflict than he'd ever been asked to attempt.

In A Single Man, directorial debut of fashion designer Tom Ford, George Falconer is just trying to get through the day. A day he has decided is going to be his last. Eight months previously, his partner of sixteen years, Jim (played by the perennially beautiful Matthew Goode), was killed in a car crash. In one of several flashbacks, we see George get the call from one of Jim's cousins (Jim's parents will not acknowledge George). George accepts the news without a great deal of obvious emotion, but even through his shocked blank stare we can see how gutted he is at finding out that the memorial service is going to be "family only." And thus begins eight months of hell for George, who has lost the person who he loved most on earth but cannot openly grieve. This is set in the early 1960s, by the way, just before the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We see George go through his daily details - waking up (which he says now physically hurts most mornings), getting immaculately dressed and polished, greeting his housekeeper, going to his job (he's a college professor). But something comes alive in him during one of his lectures, one of several faint glimmers of life throughout what he still intends to be his last day alive. We also see, through the film's flashbacks, George's life with Jim - how they met, a conversation on the beach, a boring night at home. He makes plans for later in the evening to visit an old friend, Charlotte (Julianne Moore), a woman he slept with a few times when they were young and who is his closest confidante. And he has a couple of encounters, one with a hustler and one with a student, that might have been romantic in other circumstances, but Jim is still too much in his heart.

This is just a downright gorgeous and powerful movie. There's a note of the obvious with one of the visual flairs that Ford uses - when George is feeling dead and blank inside, the film is washed out and colorless (without being straight B&W), and when he starts to feel more alive and connected with what's around him, there's a gradual infusion of color, almost as if the film is blushing. It's a little unnecessary, as if Ford doesn't quite trust his actor to express that feeling adequately, but it's hard to call it a flaw when it creates such a lovely contrast.

A Single Man is a gorgeous film with a brilliant performance at its center. Colin Firth has truly never been better. Just a wonderful heartbreak of a movie.

BNAT 11 - [VINTAGE] The Red Shoes

Next was the first BNAT film that I'd ever truly seen before (not counting last year's Metropolis because I'd never seen that version). First off, I knew darn well we were not seeing Nine in this slot because 8 1/2 was way too obvious a clue from the fake list. I was thrilled to be seeing this properly on the big screen, because it is, without doubt, one of the most (if not THE most) stunningly beautiful films ever committed to celluloid, and there is nothing in the digital canon, no matter how artistically rendered, that can even begin to compare.


The Red Shoes

"The Ballet of The Red Shoes" is from a fairy tale by Hans Andersen. It is the story of a young girl who is devoured with an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of Red Shoes. She gets the shoes and goes to the dance. For a time, all goes well and she is very happy. At the end of the evening she is tired and wants to go home, but the Red Shoes are not tired. In fact, the Red Shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the street, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forests, through night and day. Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the Red Shoes go on.

The above is spoken by the ballet director in the film and has some differences from the actual Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale on which the film and the film's ballet is based. However, it is a perfect encapsulation of the story of the film.

The film opens with the debut of a new ballet, but instead of seeing well-to-do patrons filling up the orchestra level seats, we find ourselves at the entrance to the cheap seats, where dozens of students plow through the door, looking forward to hearing the work of their professor, who has written the score for this new ballet. They couldn't care less about the dancing. Indeed, instead of seeing any part of the ballet, we see the students' faces as they listen to the music. Things turn sour when one of the students, Julian Craster, realizes that the composer has stolen several bits of the score from work that Craster submitted to him as a student. Later, at a party, the ballet director deftly avoids attempts by a patroness to show off her talented ballerina niece, Victoria Page, as the party's entertainment (and, one supposes, an impromptu audition for the director's legendary ballet company).

The director, Boris Lermontov, subsequently and separately meets and is impressed by both Julian and Vicky. He gives Julian a job as coach of the orchestra and Vicky a background spot in the company. Neither of them make much of an impression beyond that at first. But it is not long before Julian is writing an original score for the Red Shoes ballet and Vicky is dancing the lead role. The two of them eventually fall in love and marry, much to the dismay of Lermontov, who is obsessed with Vicky and with making her into a great dancer.

The ballet of The Red Shoes itself, which is presented in its apparent entirety, is naturally the centerpiece of the film. It is, like the rest of the film, unutterably gorgeous and it is part fantasy as opposed to simply a straight stage performance. I could be completely wrong about this, but I do think that this was possibly the first (perhaps just one of the first) of many films to use a ballet sequence to underscore the themes and emotions of the story. You see this element in An American in Paris, Singin' In the Rain, and Oklahoma!, as well as probably many others I'm not listing. And above all else, the ballet of The Red Shoes retells the story of the film, in which a woman is consumed by dancing, to the neglect of all other matters in her life. And Vicky's story, much like the girl's in the fairy tale, ends in tragedy because of the red shoes.

I cannot overstate how lovely this film is visually. The casting of Moira Shearer was the jewel in the crown, not only because she was a fantastic dancer, but because she had the reddest hair you've ever seen. Not ginger, red, almost as red as her shoes in the film.

This is a film that you might pass over in disinterest on first glance, seeing the ballet shoes on the cover. However, it is so much more than a ballet movie. It is about creation and dedication to art. One of my favorite moments in the film is when Julian meets with Lermontov after having written a petulant letter about his score having been stolen. Lermontov is sympathetic, but tells Julian "It is worth remembering, that it is much more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from." Indeed.

***********

After this film, we got a surprise visit from three of the guys from Broken Lizard, and there was a throwdown for a chug-off between them and the Ain't It Cool News guys. Tim and a female BNAT-er joined the Broken Lizard guys to even things out, and they issued a proper schooling to AICN. There was much argument over whose abysmal beer-chugging abilities cost AICN the crown and Broken Lizard left us to go to one of the other theaters where their new movie The Slammin' Salmon was screening.

BNAT 11 - [PREMIERE] The Lovely Bones

Before our next film, we saw a trailer that was both very fitting and wildly inappropriate. For a movie called The Rape Killer - or as the voice-over guy said it, "The RRRape Killer." There was also a PSA, dubbed in Spanish and featuring a quite young Ricky Schroeder, about child abuse which showed, among other things, a kid whose parent had purposely burned his hand and was coaching him not to tell anyone. Nice.


The Lovely Bones

I shouldn't have been surprised to see this at BNAT, but the fact that it was released already (albeit only in NY and LA) threw me off. Of course, as Harry reasoned, anyone coming from either of those cities would have spent the only day it had been out so far traveling to Austin anyway. This was the fifth BNAT film by perennial BNAT favorite Peter Jackson. I have not read Alice Sebold's novel, but apparently the film takes a great deal of liberty, so let's get that out of the way first. It's based on the novel, but make no mistake, this is Jackson's vision.

We meet Susie Salmon (like the fish) at age 14, which will be her age for eternity. She lives a fairly normal suburban life in the 1970s. Her mother (Rachel Weisz) is a free-spirit who loves books. Her father (Mark Wahlberg) is a kind, simple guy who likes to build ships in a bottle. She has a younger sister and brother, and ever since her parents got her one of those classic 110 cameras (which must have been fairly new at the time) she's becoming quite a photographer. Her grandmother (Susan Sarandon) visits occasionally and is quite possibly a bad influence on her grandchildren. There's a strange guy who lives near her, George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), but she doesn't think much about him. Most importantly, there is a beautiful boy at her school who writes poems and is unaccountably interested in her (unaccountably from Susie's perspective, that is), and even makes a date with her. A date which she will never be able to keep.

Susie is on her way home from school, later than most days because she has stayed for a film club. She's crossing an open field and is approached by George. He lures her into a little below-ground grotto he's built, supposedly for the kids in the neighborhood. She's very impressed by it, but as she's running late she gets up to go and he stops her, using what I feel is an especially disgusting tactic in child abuse - acting as a parental figure and giving advice or admonition that a child has been conditioned to accept, because it's coming from an adult. It may be simple, but his telling her to "be polite" sent a chill down my spine. Thankfully, we are spared what actually happens to Susie, but there is no doubt as to what he generally did to her.

The rest of the movie is difficult to explain and it would be pointless for me to do so to any great extent, I think. Susie is no longer alive, but not yet where she ultimately will be. She has a sort of connection to her family from the beyond, especially her father, who it seems can sort of hear her and is almost guided by her feelings. Her little brother also seems to know much more than he should about what is happening to her after her death. I'm not sure why the studio has been selling this as a thriller. It's more of a study on grief, from both sides of the "veil," as it were. There is no mystery about who killed Susie. We know from near the beginning who it is. The film deals instead with Susie's attempts to move on to the next world and her family's struggle to move on in their own world without her in it.

I have problems with fictional versions of the afterlife, especially when stories portray people who have died and are watching their loved ones from the beyond. Aside from it clashing with my biblical beliefs, I just don't feel that watching my loved ones suffer on Earth after I'm gone is any kind of heaven at all. For this reason, I was very apprehensive about the afterlife element and what appeared to be Susie keeping tabs on her family after her death. It works here because the connection to her family is a symptom of her not being able to move on to heaven. Not being able to let go and let them move on is what ultimately holds her back. And I suspect the family's reluctance to let go of her is also part of why she takes so long to let go of them.

The film didn't go where I expected it to, and that's a good thing. I kind of loved that you get the satisfaction of the truth coming out, and you also get the satisfaction of seeing the murderer pay a karmic price for his crime. But they're not really connected. I especially loved that it didn't go the revenge route. You do, however, get the sense that in addition to letting go of her earthly life, Susie can't really have peace until there's some kind of justice about her murder.

I also loved the shout-outs. AICN's Quint made an appearance as an extra in a bookstore scene and Peter Jackson made a cameo as well as a guy buying a movie camera. There was also a lingering shot over a display of Tolkien books in the bookstore. Heh.

Wonderful, beautiful film. It's probably not for everyone, and I think parents will find it especially difficult, but well worth a look.

Precious

First thing's first. Not everyone is going to respond to this film, and those that do will respond differently. Some will hate it (as some already do) just as some people will love it. If you are a black person who believes that this film perpetuates racial stereotypes, you are more than entitled to that opinion, and I am certainly not going to be presumptuous enough to tell anyone how to feel about it. This film will hit a lot of people hard, in perhaps many different ways. In my opinion, that is one of the things that makes it art. And ultimately, I do believe that the majority of the people who see it - and it's going to be a widely seen movie, I firmly believe - will be moved by it, hurt by it, and want to wrap their arms around it in a great big bear hug.


Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire

You could say that the decks are stacked against Claireece Precious Jones, the eponymous protagonist of (and I'm only going to do this full title once) Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire. You could also spit in the direction of someone dying of thirst and not be that much more inadequate or insulting than using such a cliche about her situation. Precious lives a hell that not many people on earth will ever know, and her life is such a horror show that it simply defies overstatement. The author Sapphire based her novel Push on several girls she encountered while teaching, and I wish I could say it surprises me that any real person could possibly have such an atrocious lot in life. I know better than to be that naive.

Precious is sixteen years old. She lives with her mother Mary and, on the rare occasion he's there, Mary's boyfriend Carl, who is also Precious's father. She is a dark-skinned black girl, which even today, even among other black people, carries a stigma. She is obese, well over 300 pounds, and is frequently mocked and even attacked for it. Mary is an astonishingly cruel and abusive parent, something we learn when she very first appears on screen, but her cruelty and abuse are not even the worst of her crimes against her daughter. Because in addition to jaw-dropping extended verbal abuse and physical abuse, she has betrayed her only daughter by staying silent and failing to even try to protect her from her father's sexual abuse. At the film's climax, we learn the horrifying truth about how this began - and how long ago it began - but it's shocking enough to know early on that her father has raped her repeatedly and that she is now pregnant by him for the second time. She is still in junior high - not dumb (she's quite good at math), but she still cannot read or write - but she is kicked out because of her pregnancy. If all this seems like too much to bear, it is, and occasionally Precious has to take herself to a happier place - another reality where she is famous and beautiful and people love her. And yet, perhaps because any real dreams and hopes have been both literally and figuratively beaten out of her, these fantasies are somewhat empty.

Thankfully, we don't have to go far in the movie before the first faint light of hope comes knocking on Precious's door. Her guidance counselor at the junior high school has recommended her to a special alternative school. Mary hears of this and is ready to smash that hope out of her before it has time to take root. And she does, in possibly the most stunning display of verbal cruelty that I have ever witnessed (you've only seen dramatically edited portions of it in the trailers).



Mary is played by comedienne Mo'Nique, and I know what you're thinking, but my God you have no idea what this woman is capable of as an actor. I've heard people comparing this character to Hannibal Lecter, and while that kind of makes me giggle, there's some truth to that. You know how, in Silence of the Lambs, Clarice is walking down the corridor and all those inmates are leering and saying profanities to her, and she gets to Lecter's cell and he's all still and calm, and that stillness is scarier than all that other overt insanity? I thought of that in Mary's first scene. In the beginning, she's very still and quiet. In fact, you can barely decipher what she's saying to Precious. But you can feel the rage boiling. I swear, I've never seen anyone do something as small as smoke a cigarette and infuse it with so much hatred. But unlike Hannibal Lecter, who you're kind of waiting for and halfway rooting for to break free and go crazy, you're not quite prepared for what happens with Mary. Often, when a villain finally lets loose, it's kind of anti-climactic, because the threat of what they could do if set free is more frightening than actually seeing it. Not so with Mary. She quietly, but angrily, exhorts Precious to "get rid of that white bitch" at the door, and after the counselor leaves and Precious has a few moments to think maybe she's not worthless after all, Mary throws a frying pan at her head and knocks her unconscious. After which she splashes water in Precious's face so that she can be conscious while Mary unleashes an extended barrage of taunts and insults the likes of which you have never seen. It just goes on and on and on, and eventually Mary runs out of material and starts repeating stuff because she hasn't spent all her rage yet and needs to keep hurting Precious. And when Precious commits one small act of defiance, Mary runs up the stairs and off camera to do to her daughter even worse things that the movie, which has just put us through quite a bit already, finally can't bear to show us.

As bad as all this may seem, Precious at least knows that one person is on her side. When she goes to the alternative school, called Each One Teach One, she is intimidated by the long list of paperwork that the receptionist (played by Sherri Shepherd) tells her is required. But fortunately, the counselor who recommended her has already sent everything required from the school, so she can start right away. The first thing she has to do is take some tests, which she hates, because she thinks tests make people think she's "got no brain," but soon enough she's in her class with Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), and she's got one more person on her side. And she finds another ally in Ms. Weiss (de-glammed, and she's more than happy to tell everyone that, Mariah Carey), a social worker. Both these women clearly see a lot of troubled girls in their jobs, and it shows on their faces, but even they are stunned by Precious's straits.

Sapphire said no to a lot of people who wanted to make her book into a film, because she was afraid they would make a Stand and Deliver type film, where it minimized Precious's pain and instead focused on the teacher or social worker who helped her out of it. And it's very likely that in the hands of another filmmaker, that's what the movie would have been - teacher/social worker meets troubled kid, determines to pull her through and help her find a future. You'd have the obligatory visit-the-home scene, where the noble heroine confronts the abusive parent, but that would only be a brief and, I dare say, condescending, glimpse at the reality this child has to live in every moment of her life, not just when a filmmaker decides it's the prefect moment to wring some tears from the audience. This film instead is that child's journey, and we're with her at every moment.



Which brings me to Precious, and the remarkable first-time actress who plays her. Gabourey Sidibe (she goes by "Gabby," because people have such a hard time pronouncing her name) was not an actress (she had a background role in a play in college) and didn't want to be one. Her mother is a singer in the Times Sqaure subway station, and she makes pretty good money, but Gabby knew she wouldn't be able to do that forever, and she was afraid of getting into acting, wanting a more safe career with benefits and a 401k instead. A friend bugged her about going to the audition, and she went through a couple of days of auditions and call-backs before meeting with director Lee Daniels and officially being cast. Before you see this movie, I recommend going to YouTube and doing a search with her name and watching some of her interviews, because the contrast between the bubbly, outgoing, talkative, and utterly joyous Gabby and the closed, bitter, beaten down, defeated Precious could not be more dramatic. Could. Not. Everything from the way she carries herself to the way she talks bespeaks a transformation we've lost the ability to expect from most actresses with much, much longer acting pedigrees. I'm bracing myself for the inevitable jackasses who will make hay of her weight, as they did with Jennifer Hudson a few years ago, and I wouldn't dare argue with someone who might be genuinely concerned about her health, but it's beyond refreshing to see someone so diametrically opposed to the Hollywood physical ideal poised to become a movie star.

She's in some good company with this movie. Besides the astounding performance by Mo'Nique, Paula Patton turns in a pretty stellar performance too as Precious's teacher. She's sadly been overlooked in a lot of reviews, and while I understand focusing on Gabby and Mo'Nique, I think the love could be spread a bit. Lenny Kravitz has a nice small role as a nurse at the hospital where Precious has her baby, and I have a soft spot for Xosha Roquemore who plays Joanne ("fluorescent beige"). Mariah Carey, though admittedly unrecognizable, is okay, but not great.

I feel I should tell anyone reading this, spoilers be damned, that Precious does eventually get away from her monster of a mother. I'm afraid that if people don't know that going in they may give up on the movie before things start to turn around for Precious. Don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean a happy ending. There's still some trials for Precious, but the biggest of her problems is out of her life in the end.

Speaking of the end, and I won't get spoilery here, but this is where Mo'Nique makes it clear that if she is not in the Supporting Actress race, it will be the biggest snub in recent memory (as will a snub for Gabby, in my opinion). It's impressive enough up to this point that she plays such a convincing and terrifying monster. But in her final scene, she shines a light on this woman's demons (and probably only a part of them) that is absolutely devastating to watch. I suspect that, other than Mo'Nique's performance in this scene being by far the most compelling thing to put a camera on, Daniels couldn't shoot much of the other actors even if he wanted to because they were probably a big sobbing hot mess just like everyone watching this in the theater. It isn't just rage and jealousy that drives Mary; she's clearly a sick woman. And I don't mean that in a dismissive way - she's literally mentally ill. And as she breaks down in front of the social worker, you can't help feeling a kind of horrified sympathy for her, even as she reveals the depths of depravity in the sexual abuse that Precious suffered and is confronted with her own inaction.

As hard as all this is to watch, there are light moments. Precious manages to have a sense of humor, at least when things aren't quite so hellish for her. And some of Lee Daniels' stylistic touches have a dash of humor as well, such as a sequence where Precious and Mary see an Italian film while Mary flips the channels on television. And maybe not everyone reacted the way I did, but I couldn't help laughing when Precious has a daydream about her "light-skinned boyfriend" and we see his skin sparkle.

Finally - and I don't want this to sound like the film has any kind of political agenda at all, because I don't believe it does - I was struck by the important role that government programs played in pulling Precious out of the abyss she was born into. There are an awful lot of well-off people who think that everyone can have what they have if they only work hard enough. There's a Latin word for that, and I believe it's pronounced "bullshit." Precious never chose to be born into the life she had, nor do the real life people who have circumstances very like hers. I thank God that we live in a country that, for now, still believes it has a duty to help people like that. And I'm more than happy to give up some of my own hard-earned money so that our government can give these people the relief - not a free ride, relief - that they desperately require.

One more note - I've heard many people say they can't wait to see this movie, and I can only say that with an almost unheard of intake average of $100,000 per screen this past weekend, they are not going to wait long to unleash this on the rest of America. I don't know if it will move you the way it moved me, but I'd say it's definitely worth seeing for yourself.