Written and Directed by Anders Thomas Jensen

Starring Ulrich Thomsen, Mads Mikkelsen

Metro Cinema; Sat, May 3 & Mon, May 5 (7pm); 

Sun, May 4, Tue, May 6 & Thu, May 8 (9pm)

SS

www.imdb.com/title/tt0418455/
adamsapplesthemovie.net/
 

BRIAN GIBSON / brian@vueweekly.com
 

Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen has written dozens of screenplays for others’ films—including two from Dogme 95, that once cutting-edge, now past-its-prime aesthetic where handheld cameras pulled the viewer into emotionally raw, character-driven dramas. Dogme descendants still have some bite, as in Andrea Arnold’s grief-stained Red Road (based on characters created by Jensen and Lone Scherfig). In Jensen’s hands, though, trauma, angst and conflict become the stuff of comedy.
 

So, in Adam’s Apples, Jensen drops a man whose mother died in childbirth, father raped him and wife killed herself after their son was diagnosed with cerebral palsy; a neo-Nazi who beats up a priest; a pregnant woman who carelessly falls off the wagon. This is the comic-film equivalent of splattering paint on the wall to hope for a Pollock.
 

Jensen is working with slightly more sophisticated ideas here than in his cannibalism-comedy The Green Butchers, at least, but Adam’s Apples, ripping its plot from the Book of Job, is still too high-minded a gloss on plain old dumb-and-dumber comedy to work.
 

The simpleton here is Ivan Fjeldsted (Mads Mikkelsen), a priest in deep denial—he’s the one with the psychiatrist’s list of issues. He takes in newly released prisoners, and his latest is Adam Pedersen (Ulrich Thomsen, of Thomas Vinterberg’s superb Dogme #1, The Celebration), whom Ivan decides will bake a pie with the apples from the churchyard tree. The difficulty with Jensen’s simpletons is that theirs is not an intriguing narrowness or even idiocy—they’re just stupidly out-of-touch with reality. And what’s the point of grounding Ivan’s seemingly comic denial—turning the other cheek has become, for him, turning a blind eye—in so many dark realities? The result is a muddled tone, as when we’re told that Ivan’s father “fucked those kids black and blue”: that line doesn’t strike any note—heavy, light or tragicomic—worth hearing again.
 

As the skinhead tries to destroy the holy man’s endless, cheery tolerance—think Breaking The Waves meets Dumb and Dumber—the dialogue can be too expository, just to push plot points along. There are some nuances here and there, and a big flop of a tennis player is at least one comfortably odd character. Some mildly funny moments show how good intentions and cheerful forbearance underpin the worst sins, as with Ivan’s assuaging of a dying Nazi. 
 

But this is also a film that asks us to have a pretty high tolerance of easy stereotypes—including its cheap and loose view of women—and most of its comedy comes because you’re not sure what else to do but laugh. When the plot’s ironic reversal kicks in, the film turns semi-serious and gets, if anything, a little bit boring (not that the incessant score isn’t trying to distract us). There’s enough time for a truly repulsive anti-Asian joke, then the fool’s parable is rounded off with a moral or, rather, flattened out into a kind of shrugging, “Why not be happy?” pop song sunniness. Mind you, if we were expecting profundity from a movie that pretends not to be using a casually terrorizing Arab’s Danish-as-a-second-language for laughs, we’d be fooling ourselves even more than the grin-and-bear-the-terrible Ivan.

 

Sun, May 4 (2 pm); Metro Cinema

Waking Life: www.imdb.com/title/tt0243017/
A Scanner Darkly: www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/

 

JOSEF BRAUN / josef@vueweekly.com
 

The films in Metro’s Richard Linklater double feature this Sunday are linked most obviously by their striking visual tack, the use of animation software that enables the director to shoot live-action images and then translate those images into their strange, graphically revised double, painting over top of the source material with a computerized brush. Movies have always been, in part, a response to technological innovation. Great movies have frequently been a thoughtful, dynamic response to technological innovation. While we may differ about the greatness of either of these films, Linklater’s use of computer animation is itself arguably ingenious.
 

Waking Life (2001) finds its hero wandering through a series of dreams from which he seems unable to wake. These dreams, which become more cryptic as he passes through them, are inhabited by people—intellectuals, mystics, nut jobs, comedians, pranksters and passersby—with stuff on their minds, their ontological discussions supplying the film’s intriguing, charismatic narrative shape: if our hero can pin down the nature of reality, will he be better equipped to re-enter it? The fluidity of this story of being lost in dream is realized with beguiling fullness in the animated imagery, which shifts continuously from realism to unbound fantasy. The objects and people possess a rare presence. Their movement reveals weight and experience, even as they seem to be enjoying a playful negotiation with gravity. Waking Life is partly about the anxiety of transcendence, and, with much aid from the Tosca Tango Orchestra’s score, it offers us an intoxicating, nervy thrill of slowly, slipperily, taking flight.
 

“Dream is destiny,” says the little girl in the prologue to Waking Life—and what writer can boast more credence to such a statement than the late, legendary SF writer Philip K Dick? Dreams literally dictated the shape of more than a few Dick creations. Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly (’05) is easily the most faithful Dick adaptation so far, and its animated strategies are an integral part of this. The story of a psychologically fragmented detective investigating himself, it eloquently renders a divided mind living an increasingly phantasmagoric existence, and functions as a deft response to the novels’ central challenge to anyone who wants to visualize it, the detective’s “scramble suit,” an ever-shifting hologram that disguises the wearer. Seriously locked in the circuitry of Dick’s own schizophrenic paranoia, it should be said that the story has a lot more talk and less action than is to the taste of the typical SF movie-lover, but the pay off is a haunting, resonant and eerily accurate portrayal of a man hopelessly entangled in a culture obsessed with ever-more covert forms of mind control. 
 

 

 

EDEN MUNRO / eden@vueweekly.com
 

When 92-year-old Eileen Hall steps to centre stage of a concert hall in Northampton, Massachusetts, with a choir of senior citizens standing in rows behind her, a guitar kicks in with the distinctive chord riff that marks the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” and she shouts out the song’s lyrics in a slightly awkward, half-sung vocal. It’s a moment of dualities—there’s something charming about the moment as Hall throws herself into the performance, but at the same time it’s accompanied by a nagging feeling of discomfort: is the audience, on screen and off, laughing at her tilted delivery?
 

This is the question that arises out of Young@Heart, Stephen Walker’s documentary on the preparations by the Young@Heart chorus—a group that began in 1982 with a membership drawn from an elderly housing project—as it gears up for a one-night only hometown concert. As gimmicky as the idea of this aged, rock ‘n’ roll choir might initially seem, there’s a distinct point of reference in today’s musical landscape when one considers that many of the earliest rock ‘n’ roll musicians are nearing or in their golden years—the Rolling Stones being perhaps the most obvious, with guitarist Keith Richards routinely saying to audiences, “It’s good to see you,” before jokingly adding that, at his age, “It’s good to see anybody.” That sort of approach—a sort of gallows humour, with time hanging overhead as the executioner—runs strong throughout Young@Heart, with the choir routinely making light of their age.  
 

While the Young@Heart chorus is by no means a group with a lifetime of professional experience behind it, there is little doubt that the members know their parts. In fact, Walker ramps up the film’s tension by taking the focus off of this fact, restricting the majority of the footage to the choir working out a few new songs for the big concert. It’s an effective strategy, putting the audience’s gaze directly onto the choir’s struggle to reinterpret Sonic Youth’s “Schizophrenia” and James Brown’s “I Feel Good” in a style that the members are comfortable with.
 

Ultimately, Young@Heart dispels any uncomfortable notions that the chorus is simply a freak show-like source of amusement for audiences by paying attention to the connection that the singers have with each other and with their audience whenever they are performing. 
 

Remarkably, what happens throughout the film as the members make light of their ages through the various songs—the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” and David Bowie’s “Golden Years” among them—is the choir takes the music and imbues each piece with values that diverge from what the songwriters may have intended, but which mean so much more to the singers as they take possession of the songs through their unique interpretations. By the end of the documentary, there’s a real sense that time itself is the real antagonist for this group—the film is more than a simple feelgood tribute, with the chorus encountering real losses along the way—and it’s difficult not to find oneself cheering them on and believing in them every difficult step along the way to the concert, and beyond. 

 

 

 

 

JONATHAN BUSCH / jonathan@vueweekly.com

In an interview with the Village Voice last week, Baby Mama star Amy Poehler regards the topic of Christopher Hitchens’ essay, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” as a “lazy headline” and, perhaps, a conclusion that’s quite easy to jump to regarding the frequent exclusion of women from popular comedy. Hitchens’ article admires actual funny women like Poehler and her co-star Tina Fey, but regards them as figures that command such power that it emasculates and therefore alienates their male counterparts. But such an argument, or at least a journalist’s touting of it, might justifiably roll the eyes of a female comic as the gender card eats up her time on stage to do what any other comic would come to do—make us laugh. So, like Juno, the toast of pregnancy comedies that ushers in the appeal of a film like Baby Mama, a feminist reading is invited merely by the presence of talented and interesting performers with vaginas. But the audience can turn that into whichever kind of party they choose.
 

Kate (Fey) and Angie (Poehler) are opposite sides of the same reproductive coin. Organic market chain VP Kate wants a baby and can’t have one, whereas unemployed vagabond Angie can and knows how badly some women would like to. Through an agency headed by a phenomenally fertile matron (Sigourney Weaver) that provides surrogate mothers for barren women, Kate nabs the opportunity to make a baby in somebody else’s body. But Angie, who chooses Kate based on her “sunset-y” aura, couldn’t create more of a conflict as she abruptly moves into Kate’s life, stealing her bedroom and most of her sanity. But Kate has her eyes on the prize of motherhood, and learns to adopt Angie into her home, all the while keeping the nature of their relationship a secret from her new suitor Rob (Greg Kinnear). But it turns out Angie has a secret of her own, and her friendly affection for Kate makes it only harder to tell the truth.
 

In Austin Powers co-writer Michael McCuller’s directorial debut, Fey and Poehler are in their strongest element since their golden days of sharing SNL’s Weekend Update. Their friendship, or at the very least, the effortless spark as a result of their combined sense of vulgar humour, is revelatory as it plays upon issues surrounding social economics and western consumption, far more interesting than debating if a women can properly deliver a joke.
 

 

 

OMAR MOUALLEM / omar@vueweekly.com

Man, oh, man, the things Hollywood filmmakers will do to milk a happy ending. In the case of Deception, they were willing to drag an okay movie into a pit of absurdity all because the conclusion they already had—one that, although still far-fetched, was at least equalized with the rest of the film—didn't involve the good guy winning on every level.
 

Ewan McGregor plays Jonathan McQuarry, a bookish accountant who strikes a friendship with hot shot attorney Wyatt Bose (Hugh Jackman) during an audit. The movie then spends 25 minutes establishing their friendship in overwrought, slightly romantic scenes usually reserved for Nora Ephron’s movies. After they accidentally   switch cell phones (one of many contrivances the script must make to set the events in motion), McQuarry starts getting phone calls from women asking one question, “Are you free tonight?”
 

Masquerading as Bose, McQuarry meets these dates. He can do this because these women, and Bose too, are part of an elite sex list of the top one per cent income earners, who never exchange names and never discuss work. This anonymity cracks after he meets a woman he knows only as S (Michelle Williams). When S goes missing after an assault, McQuarry wonders whether outsiders or insiders were behind it.

The answer is obvious. Unlike reality, there are no coincidences in Deception, and you would be deceived if you thought there were. But all its ridiculousness aside, the middle chunk does manage to deliver on sexiness and cheap thrills. In fact, it starts to redeem itself for the molasses-like first act. And then the conclusion hits and all its redeemable qualities are forgotten.