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You never know, with Gus Van Sant. What will he deliver next? Will it be, like "Elephant" (2003) or "Last Days" (2005), like a dark rumination about the unfortunate ends of life? Should we expect a refrigerated remake, in the style of "Psycho" (1998)? Or could he switch to the other extreme, in the pursuit of an encouraging tolerance, as he did in "Good Will Hunting" (1997) and "Milk" (2008)? How about a masterpiece – a film so ambitious, and packed with ingredients so improbable that no one has ever tasted something quite like that? This was the case of "My Own Private Idaho" (1991), in which a red barn crushed by a clear sky on a country road.
The Promising News, for anyone who depends on Van Sant for a dose of curiosity, The title is actually a legend that has been affixed to a drawing by cartoonist John Callahan of Portland, Oregon, who died in 2010., at the 39, age of fifty-nine. He represents a band of cowboys on horseback, while they meet an abandoned wheelchair in the desert; one of them told the line to his companions. The shadowing of humor-hard, drier than sand, and cheerful at its own darkness-owes a lot to the spirit of the artist, who was in a car accident when he was twenty-one and spent the rest of his days as a quadriplegic. In drawing after drawing, he was aiming at his condition, and those who were trying to gild it with pity; His autobiography is entitled "Does the Real John Callahan Rise?"
We now have Van Sant's biography, in which John is played by Joaquin Phoenix, with credible enthusiasm and a ginger wig unconvincing. The excitement comes with a twist: while the pre-crash John is an awkward wreck, free to move but paralyzed by alcohol, the invalid John walks around in his electric wheelchair at a such lick that you expect that he gets a speeding ticket. Sometimes the camera also flickers, staying a few steps in front of him and facing the sidewalk, just to increase the risk, and you feel that everyone in the cinema grimaces when a jerk on a sidewalk sends him on the road . The movie, stuffed with human error, recruits us for the cause of lightheartedness
The tale of these highs and lows is a structurally complex affair, almost as complex as that of "The diving bell and the butterfly "(2007), another saga with a wounded hero. Some viewers may accuse Van Sant of using his visual cunning to criticize a simple tale, but more of them, I suspect, will revel in John's rugged road. We have flashbacks, until the last day of his traveling life, where he squatted behind a parked car, one fine morning, to take a stealthy sip of tequila. We get leaps forward. We follow him through various forms of recovery – to the hospital, where he is attached to a Ferris wheel that looks like a medieval torture device, but also through a succession of AA meetings, in private homes and public rooms. And we have a bunch of cartoons, some of which are animated by moving images, like the fish that crawls on dry land, turns into a dinosaur, then a clumsy Neanderthal and finally a well-dressed man at the microphone, who says: "I would like to thank all those who allowed me to be here tonight."
Meanwhile, supportive figures glide in and out of the action. People like Annu (Rooney Mara), the Swedish physiotherapy nurse who appears to John, as an angel dressed in a blue dress, while he's pinned to the wheel, and pronounces it beautiful, a benevolent thought, but not true. They find love, fashionable, even if it seems to be a hectic presence, and it would not be a surprise to learn, late in the film, that he still had Imagined. Much more robust is Dexter (Black Jack), a boozy blowhard ("Some people tell me I look like Burt Reynolds, I do not see him") who ferries John around the city, an alcoholic trip at the end of the night . It seems like it's the frenzy of fate, and although the accident itself is never shown, we see John's VW Beetle backwards, as if it was waving its legs in the air. 39; air.
Surrealistic details arrived rather than artificial, Van Sant's show at its easiest, and languor is supported by Jonah Hill, like Donnie, a rich and sickly soul who becomes AA of John's sponsor. With his long blonde locks and his cigarette holder, leaning against the fireplace of his soft toy, Donnie is a sight to behold. "We have all lived, in our pre-sober times, a little chaotic lives," he says to the assembled company, and there is a comical, disturbing imbalance between his grace Wildean and the physical and psychological chaos he must have emerged, like everyone in the room, and that could easily bring them all back. If Hill is very moving when he's sailing around a star – Brad Pitt, in "Moneyball" (2011), Leonardo DiCaprio, in "The Wolf" on Wall Street "(2013), and now Joaquin Phoenix – this n & Is not because of any servility in his behavior, but because of a sneaky and gentle vigilance . His voice, as light as lemonade, makes him insensitive to the temptations of the great In Donnie's speech, Donnie's smile in the new film is far less distressing than John's, in which every laugh and every emphasis reads a wave of rage.
In short, "Do not worry, he does not Phoenix is betraying the ferocious desperation of a creature pacing its cage, and the film does not fear the pratfalls and embarrassments of which its character is prey, that is, that he will not be far off. he is pulling the cork from a bottle of wine with his teeth or listening to a jovial health officer who, as a result of the accident, gives advice on his sexual rebirth: "My job is to help you get the erection. That's all that matters to me. "
Why, then, does the pulse of the story falter in the second half? Mainly because Van Sant has covered so much ground in the first half, and there is not much to tell; At the hour of the hour, John receives a vision of his lost mother, who abandoned him for adoption when he was a child and who now flickers from the wall, uttering words of wisdom (" You're a good person, John "), you realize that padding has officially started, the film still has more than fifty minutes to do, and in the end it seems to have slowed down and grown into a triumphant act of therapy – Good John Hunting "I feel stimulated, magical," he says, sitting on stage in the spotlight, with an audience of friends and ex-drinkers bursting with applause. you guessed it – "I would like to thank all those who allowed me to be here tonight." It's a good thing to say, J ohn, but was not it better as a gag?
The brightest scene in Lauren Greenfield's new documentary, "Generation Wealth," arrives early. You could run it loop as a video installation over and over again, until its strange satirical bite becomes too painful to last. All we see is a young Chinese woman educated in etiquette; specifically, in the correct pronunciation of the words "Dolce e Gabbana." Is this an Italian lesson, or a part of an English course? Or. What the student needs to learn, is the dialect of a tribe. She wants to speak fluently money.
For more than two decades, Greenfield has been observing the rich in their natural habitat. His 1997 photography book, "Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood," drew the attention of careless, sun-burned, and money-hungry youngsters, and a melancholy task of the new film is to revisit a few of them old topics, and evaluate how they managed in the meantime. We are also renewing our knowledge of the Siegels, David and Jackie, whose modest little house, outside of Orlando, was inspected by Greenfield in his 2012 documentary, "The Queen of Versailles". David Siegel, who may or may not be a friend of Noam Chomsky, explains that people everywhere want to be rich or, if not, to feel rich. "And if they do not want to feel rich, then they're probably …" He pauses to consider the right word, then adds, "Dead."
The most curious passages of "Wealth Generation" are those in which the director questions his own parents and children. "Do you think I was a happy child?" She asks her mother, who answers with a laugh. Only, in the most elastic sense, to be honest, are such scenes related to the global distribution of high-level earnings, which is the nominal theme of Greenfield, and the same can be said of other interviewee? Spends his money on plastic surgery series, to the detriment of all the other facets of his being. You could argue that without the example of the hyper-rich, she would not have embarked on such a ruinous path, but, if so, you know who else belongs to this alarming movie ? Every putz who buys a Porsche can not afford. ♦
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