Tag Archives: Romance

Capsules

CAPSULE: THIS IS ME… NOW (2024)

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This Is Me… Now streams exclusively on Amazon Prime.

DIRECTED BY: Dave Meyers

FEATURING:

PLOT: “The Artist” searches for a soul mate while discussing her past with her therapist as the Zodiacal pantheon oversees her difficulties.

Still from This Is me... Now: A Love Story (2024)
This Is Me… Now: A Love Story (2024)

COMMENTS: Having little experience with Jennifer Lopez until watching this film, her, now, is all I have to work with. Fortunately for J-Lo, and director Dave Meyers, I’m a sucker for vanity projects, music videos, and random experiences. This Is Me… Now dances energetically atop a certain floor of competence, jerkily zapping with defiance, then (jerkily) tilting into romantic melancholy. Ladies and germs, what we have here is a semi-operatic music video feature, likely to please any fan of the artiste behind the songs and dances.

For those not particularly interested in Ms. Lopez or her music, there are still a cache of fun little flourishes to keep you amused over the hour-long experience. The biggest rests amongst the stars—whence comes all life, light, and hope, as might be declared by none other than Neil DeGrasse Tyson, onscreen here as the Zodiacal sign of Taurus. No less impressive is , leading the team of star signs—proving she’s as fun and full as ever. (I’ll leave it you to check out the celebrity checklist for the other astrological persona, but it is a motley and… star-studded bunch.) , ever his woman’s fellow, dons a ridiculous hairpiece and a brash schmuckery as a nebulously right-wing TV personality. And I am told that Fat Joe is something of a heavy hitter, and his performance as Jennifer’s therapist makes me curious to explore his career further.

Perhaps more than any other film which has crossed my plate, This Is Me… Now plays to its audience; it is a loving gift from the singer-celebrity (evidenced in particular by her own personal outlay of some twenty million dollars to get it off the ground). From the opening steam-punk dystopian heart factory metaphor power ballad (gotta keep feeding petals into the core, lest that heart becomes broken), to the decent-to-impressive late era MTV-style set pieces (quirky-jerky dance routines featuring dozens), right through the closing maneuvers, This Is Me… Now delivers J-Lo on her own terms, and that was good (enough) for me.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Please allow me to introduce you to the shiny and ambitious and strange and ludicrous and trippy and occasionally fantastic ‘This Is Me … Now.'”–Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE DARK SIDE OF THE HEART [EL LADO OSCURO DEL CORAZÓN] (1992)

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DIRECTED BY: Eliseo Subiela

FEATURING: Darío Grandinetti, Sandra Ballesteros, Nacha Guevara, André Mélançon, Jean Pierre Reguerraz

PLOT: Poet Oliverio meanders through life, verbally jousting with the angel of death while searching for the perfect woman, whom he may have found in a practical-minded prostitute.

Still from "The Dark Side of the Heart" (1992)

COMMENTS: Oliverio has a standard pickup line, one he busts out for women at the bar and women he’s already lured into the sack alike: he can take or leave any woman, regardless of their physical attributes, but the only one who really interests him is the one who can fly. He’s quite serious about it, and we even see the fate of those who come up short in that regard: a plummet into the abyss via a trapdoor built into his bed.

Suffice to say, this live-action Tinder line isn’t paying off the way he’d like, although it’s hard to pity Oli for his disappointing romantic escapades. He would seem to be living the dream version of a poet’s life, generating product at the drop of a hat and able to turn his words into income whenever the need arises. He wanders the streets reciting poems to commuters stuck in traffic, who readily hand over their cash. He pays for thick steaks at a street café with romantic odes, which the cook promptly uses to win a wife. And of course, he can lure any woman into his sheets, even though they all disappoint him in the end. How on earth is the poor bastard going to get out of this pickle?

Of course, Oli’s profession is carefully chosen, because this poet’s tale is being told poetically. We shouldn’t question how he manages to survive from day to day, because this is the story of his crisis of the soul. The fact that his late mother speaks to him in the form of a cow, or that he trades barbs with Death herself (who is trying to find him a steady job in the classifieds), is only literal in the metaphorical sense. It’s not fantasy or even magical realism. This is a poet’s view of the world, where feelings are made manifest because they’re just that strong.

It’s a credit to Subiela’s direction and Grandinetti’s deft performance that this doesn’t come across as highly obnoxious. Oli is arrogant, to be sure, but he’s a perfectionist whose dedication to poetic ideals results in a high standard for happiness. He can throw away his art on commissions for which he has no passion, but his commitment to himself is absolute. This makes him the perfect foil for Ana, the sex worker from Montevideo for whom he falls. With pain in her past and responsibilities in her present, she draws a very clear line between love and sex. The movie’s focus on Oli shortchanges her point of view somewhat, but their chemistry is so strong that we feel her influence on him even when she’s not onscreen. It’s a peculiar sort of charm where the boy treats other women better as a result of not getting the girl (played out in a genuinely enchanting scene where he romances a blind woman and makes the extraordinary decision not to give her the Wile E. Coyote treatment at the end).   

El Lado Oscuro del Corazón demands a certain tolerance because of the way its fantastical notions are presented in such a grounded manner, and it sometimes thinks that the main character himself is more interesting than his idealistic pursuits. When it gets the mix right, though, it earns its magic, which is probably why it’s the rare surrealistic meditation on love to merit a sequel. Not everyone loves poetry, but when you hear the right poem, you’re likely to want another.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Moving effortlessly between the familiar and the surreal, this wildly imaginative, erotic, irreverently funny film seems to have the flexibility for almost everything from the sublime to the ridiculous.”–Hal Hinson, Washington Post (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Dreamer, who explains that the film “is weird because of its particular way of being poetic and to some extent poetic because it is weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

The Dark Side of the Heart

The Dark Side of the Heart
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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: Francis Ford Coppola

FEATURING: Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz, André M. Hennicke, Alexandra Pirici

PLOT: In 1938 Bucharest, 70-year-old Dominic Matei is struck by lightning, becomes decades younger and develops psychic powers.

Still from Youth without Youth (2007)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Every now and then, Francis Ford Coppola gets to make a movie his way, unconstrained by the demands of capitalism or the limitations of collaboration. Think of the studio-destroying One From the Heart, the self-indulgently autobiographical Tucker: The Man and His Dream, or the demented epic Apocalypse Now. With big ideas, gloriously pretentious dialogue, radical shifts in tone, and a determination to Speak His Truth, Youth Without Youth is cut from a similar cloth: pure Coppola, raw and unfiltered.

COMMENTS: Francis Ford Coppola is currently in post-production on what he says will be the capstone to his career, a final epic called Megalopolis. He has cashed in his winemaking fortune to produce the film with a nine-figure budget and own it outright. He enlisted an all-star cast to bring his script, which has been camera-ready for years, to life. Beyond the vaguest of plot descriptions, little is yet known about the work that could be the great filmmaker’s final cinematic statement. But I have some suspicions about what to expect from Megalopolis. Because, you see, I’ve watched Youth Without Youth.

After the old-style credits with sweeping theme, we meet Dominic, who is old, hopeless, and suicidal. His book about the origin of human language will never be finished, his dreams are plagued by memories of Laura, the woman who pushed him away because he gave more attention to his intellectual passions than to her, and the world is rushing towards cataclysm. It’s pure happenstance that a final trip back to Bucharest leads to his fateful encounter with a bolt of lightning. (Some wild dialogue suggests divine intervention, but Coppola’s not down for anything as mundane as that.)

Once he’s hospitalized, it takes a while to get back to Dominic, because the movie is intensely interested in the accident itself: the strange process of re-growth, complete with new teeth. The snarky hospital attendants. The tedium of confirming his true identity and crafting a new one. That’s part of Youth Without Youth’s methodology. It’s not metaphorical, symbolic, or satirical. Coppola really is interested in the fundamentals of what would happen to this guy who was hit by lightning and made 30 years younger.

Roughly halfway through the film, Youth Without Youth begins to resemble nothing so much as a superhero origin story, with Dominic using his powers to escape the Nazis’ designs on the ability to extend life. It’s almost comically literal; we suspect a woman staying at the clinic might have ulterior motives once we see that she has a Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH (2007) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: WILL-O’-THE-WISP (2022)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Mauro da Costa, André Cabral

PLOT: Concerned about the environment, the prince of Portugal chooses to become a volunteer fireman and falls in love with a co-worker.

Still from Will-o'-the-wisp (2022)

COMMENTS: There was a 1974 softcore sex spoof called 2069: A Sex Odyssey. Pretty hilarious title, huh? Will-o’-the-Wisp opens on almost the same joke, conspicuously setting its flash-forward prologue in 2069. This is not a promising opening for a supposedly serious art film.

A lot of the insubstantial Will-o’-the-Wisp comes off exactly as on-the-nose as that opening joke. Among the film’s incompatible parts is a general dedication to environmentalism (which motivates its protagonist to semi-abdicate his royal commission to volunteer as a firefighter). We know of Alfredo’s convictions because he interrupts family dinner to read Greta Thunberg’s 2019 U.N. speech off his phone, speaking directly to the camera. So when it comes time for a sex scene, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that it goes unambiguously explicit. The film contains a lot of hoses, and some actual hosing, but almost no firefighting—although Rodrigues shows, in a CPR-training scene, that he is perfectly capable of conveying eroticism indirectly. The finale features a singer substituting the word “falo” (phallus) for “fado” (folk song) in her dirge. Subtlety isn’t always a virtue, but with a project as wispy as this—even at 67 minutes, its plot feels stretched-out—a little could have gone a long way.

Will-o’-the-Wisp flits as lightly over its surrealism as it does every other element (with the exception of male full-frontal nudity, which, honestly, is the film’s major theme and raison d’être). Muscly, nude firemen re-enact various classical paintings (humorously), and the final funeral scene is suitably strange, with a pair of female mourners played by gossipy, ambiguously-gendered ladies. Perhaps most notably, the film is proffered as a “musical fantasia,” with pauses in the action for song-and-dances. The slim runtime only accomodates three numbers, however: an a capella ode to trees sung by schoolchildren, the closing funeral fado, and the centerpiece, an athletically choreographed fireman’s techno-ballet where the protagonist gets spun around like one of those twirling signs by his future lover.

The musical element makes Will-o’-the-Wisp resemble the queer absurdity of Rodrigues’ To Die Like a Man (2009) more than the ambitious surrealism of his Ornithologist. Wisp lacks the emotional heft of that 2009 effort, however, because it doesn’t spend enough time developing Alfredo and Alfonso’s characters into much more than romantic pawns playing their assigned roles. This phantasm of a film feels dashed-off, an under-budgeted pandemic-era project made to keep busy while waiting for something bigger to come down the pike. That said, other critics were more forgiving: 97% positive on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of publication, in fact. One would presume Wisp would also play well with a niche gay art-house audience, while lacking crossover potential. (I will point out that gay-friendly art-house patrons are the only ones likely to pick it for a screening, however; and, returning to the Tomatoes numbers, the paltry 32% audience score suggests that even they weren’t impressed. I suppose this is more of a critics’ movie: other critics, that is.)

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…hilarious and yet still heartfelt, extremely weird but wonderful…”–Lee Jutton, Film Inquiry (festival screening)