The Blog of Jason "Jayce" Olshefsky

Ali, Amber, and I went to The Cinema Theatre (957 South Clinton Ave.) to see Star Trek. As you might expect, it’s a decent movie and an innovative way to kick-start the franchise once again. Ali and I enjoyed it and I think Amber did too although she had some complaints. Anyway, they left and I stayed for the second feature: a movie I’d heard nothing about called The Brothers Bloom.

Apparently it came-and-went from The Little (240 East Ave.) and possibly corporate screens as well, all with little fanfare. Reviews have been lukewarm at best. My mood was to give it a try at the beginning, and my alternative was to meet Ali out at Lux Lounge (666 South Ave.): a not unattractive option.

Well, I figured I’d hang through the “early days” introduction: two brothers, Stephen and Bloom, had been in-and-out of foster families for quite some time when they stumbled into the notion of playing cons. I didn’t know if I was in for a kids movie but I figured I’d linger to the credits. Once the relationship was established, the film heads for 25 years in the future when the brothers are adults, and still con-men.

Ok, so it’s hooked me for 10 minutes.

Bloom doesn’t want to stick with the game after their last job, but his brother ropes him in it for one more: woo a naive heiress — Penelope — living alone in her parents’ estate. She’s a handful, though, as she has a surprisingly fierce appetite for adventure (especially considering her apparently self-imposed exile) and she’s extremely smart in a myriad of practical and philosophical fields.

Anyway, the movie runs along in a whimsical fairy-tale style. The simple surface conceals a more interesting philosophical bent: is it valuable to plan ahead? As such, the story — largely led by the plan crafted by Stephen — leads Bloom and Penelope on what should be a romantic and bond-forming adventure. But it’s only in the fringe deviations from said plan that those things actually occur. I’ve found it’s pretty much the same in life: it’s no the planned trip to Chimney Bluffs State Park (7700 Garner Rd., Wolcott) that I remember as much as it is when Lucy ran her hysterical orbits through the muddy waters along the trail. It’s the unplanned moments that make things worthwhile.

So … why plan?

And I think that’s what The Brothers Bloom is getting at. To speak in music reviewer parlance, it’s sort of Hudson Hawk meets Adaptation. meets The Adventures of Baron Munchausen: the lighthearted comedy and uneven production of the first, with the film-as-life-as-film metaphor of the second, and the attention to detail and understanding of fantasy of the third. It’s not the best movie ever, but definitely worth a visit … hang in there the few times it really lags, and just have a good time with it.

Ali and I headed to The Cinema Theatre (957 South Clinton Ave.) to see the double-feature: Atonement, and Penelope. This time, we didn’t get a chance to hang out with the cat — I guess it’s done with us.

So Atonement took me a while to get into. I had thoughts of the day swimming around and couldn’t get into it fully. I noticed that the foleying was performed louder and more stylistically than in other movies — obviously for artistic effect but, to my ear, deliberate to the point of distraction.

The story is not particularly unusual: Briony — a young girl — misinterprets the passionate love between her sister, Cecilia, and her beau Robbie as some bad thing in her sexually-budding mind. Through a lie of serendipitously important placement, she gets them separated. The World War II intensifies, and Robbie leaves to fight, able to see Cecilia only briefly.

As the emotions intensified — from the sterile complacency of the aristocratic life to the ragged edges of human existence — I became much more engaged in the film. And then was absolutely surprised to find it has a bit of a twist ending — one that looks squarely at what is real and what is not, unraveling the tapestry laid before me.

Penelope, on the other hand, was brutally terrible.

The story is that Penelope was affected by a curse of her father’s lineage such that she was born with the appearance of a pig. To break the curse, she must wed one of her own — another “blue-blood” aristocrat. Unfortunately, her appearance is so hideous that all suitors literally run away from her at first sight, never getting to know the kind person she is inside. So does she finally find her prince? Will the curse actually be broken?

Let me save you 102 minutes of your life: yes, but it’s the down-to-earth guy who actually likes her and he’s not really a blue-blood, and yes, but the curse is edited partway into the film so that it’s when she finds the one who loves her truly — and it is she that finally loves herself that breaks the curse, turning her back into regular-old Christina Ricci.

The fundamental flaw of the film is that it attempts to hit the exact middle-ground of all aspects. It’s a cartoonish fairy-tale set in realistic modern-day England. Penelope is so hideous that she drives suitors away, but she’s not bad looking at all. The chemistry between the designated couple is vaguely lukewarm — more like cooked pasta than a roaring fire. The resolution is absolutely insipid — that the curse forged in vengeance against a whole bloodline is really just a way for a girl to get through her issues and the evil witch was a big-hearted softie after all.

And then there’s the script — oy. The fundamental message is that superficially loving mothers end up smothering their children’s sense of self and must be shut the hell up. Or at least that may be on the mind of the scriptwriter. Then again, I guess if you love Everybody Loves Raymond, then — as this is the same writer — you’ll probably love this script too. And apparently so do hundreds of commentators on Internet Movie Database.  And I find that to be more disturbing than the fact that this movie got made at all.

Ali and I decided to check out the double-feature at The Cinema Theatre (957 South Clinton Ave.) The two films were Le scaphandre et le papillon(The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and Untraceable but I’ll talk about them in reverse order. Oh, and this time Ali’s lap was graced by Princess, the Cinema’s resident cat — forcing her to be paralyzed for 3 full hours.

So Untraceable is a film about how the Patriot Act is good and how brainy people in universities are the source of all truly evil enemies. See, the FBI, NSA, and law-enforcement in general are all infallible organizations: when they go after someone, that person is guilty; otherwise, they wouldn’t go after them, would they?

This is proven in the introductory sequence of the film where FBI Agent Jennifer Marsh finds someone using stolen credit cards on the Interwebs. She uses credit-card fraud techniques learned from a television commercial and deduces that it isn’t the little old lady in the house whose IP address is the source of the transactions, but rather the next-door neighbor using her wireless access point. After all, the guy has guns which means he’s a criminal.

Then a tip comes in about a website where someone’s letting a kitten die on live-fed video. But the site is [wait for it ...] untraceable. The film uses mumbo-techno speak to explain how the site is being redirected from foreign countries and stuff so it can’t be traced. Then the guy starts killing people and the mystery is on.

Well, not the real mystery, but the attempt to find who the guy is who’s doing all these mean things and why. The real mystery is how this evil, university-educated genius can transport and set up elaborate killing techniques that would make James Bond scriptwriters blush. He has access to all sorts of equipment, drugs, and chemicals that — to the average person — would be all but impossible to get, requiring lots of signatures, picture ID’s, and money. It must be that pesky university! But even if we write that off, he is also able to transport his computer rig to anywhere in the city without anyone so much as blinking. Whatever explains these magical powers is probably the same one that lets him move around victims with equal ease and invisibility.

In stark contrast, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was excellent. It’s about a guy who was perfectly healthy until a stroke rendered him completely paralyzed except for being able to move and blink his left eye. He starts out feeling trapped, depressed, and annoyed. Once a speech therapist helps him to speak by reading letters to him and blinking when she gets the right one, his imagination and memories come to the forefront and he eventually decides to complete a book contract he had. It’s an interesting movie exploring the will to live and the human need to find contentment and happiness in any situation.

I have heard reviews where people talk about it being “amazing” what this man went through, but in a way, it was more a demonstration of necessity than anything. Because of his condition, there was no way for him to kill himself — in fact, it was because of the quality of health care he received that kept him alive at all, so in a way, it wasn’t that he was unable to kill himself, but that he was unable to prevent others from keeping him alive.

See, there appears to be a level of personal happiness that is unrelated to one’s life condition. If happiness truly were tied to one’s life condition, then extremely well-off people would be constantly overjoyed and poor people would beg for brevity in their miserable existences. Clearly, though, this is not true.

But remarkably, it seems to have no limits. It’s challenging to imagine a worse fate than being completely paralyzed and kept alive irrelevant to your consent. Yet here was Jean-Dominique Bauby (the character was based on a real person) who lived that very nightmare. His personal disposition — once the trauma of the sudden, dramatic change in his life wore off — seemed to return to a level not dissimilar to himself in his past, fully ambulatory life.

Anyway, there’s sort-of a game to see how the Cinema’s double-features are related. This one is a tough one. Judging by how I personally felt, I think Untraceable was supposed to be as bad as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was good — that the latter was to cancel out the former, and you were supposed to leave the theater feeling exactly the same as when you went in. In 10 years, I invite you to recall this combination and see which still has relevance.

Ali and I — despite her living right down the street — finally visited The Cinema Theatre (957 South Clinton Ave.) for the first time in years. We saw Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street which was one of the most gruesome musicals I’ve ever seen. I was actually surprised it got an “R” rating from the MPAA — admittedly, it was free of pie-fucking and nudity altogether so I guess fountains of blood sprouting from sliced necks over and over and over again is just A-OK.

Anyhow, the movie was great — such a bitter and sympathetic view of the worst that humanity can muster. I did notice that Johnny Depp seemed outclassed in singing by his lifetime-practiced co-stars; but as a non-connoisseur of Broadway musical talent, it didn’t bother me nearly as much as others. And certainly an excellent choice for Valentine’s Day.

As an added bonus, I was a special guest of the Cinema because their cat, Princess, decided to sleep through the movie on my coat. Apparently she wanted us to see the second feature as well because Ali eventually had to bodily move her so we could get going.