Laurel Canyon
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Movie Reviews of Laurel Canyon
Movie Review: A Must See
Summary: 5 Stars
I rented this movie because I am a Joni Mitchell fan, and the title just drew me in. I'm glad it did, because it turned out to be an excellent movie.Movie Review: Steamy and subtle, like the shallow end of a heated pool.
Summary: 4 Stars
Ever since I took a screenwriting class a decade ago, I have been keenly aware of opening scenes. Though the first ten minutes of a film are usually devoted to setting up everything that will follow, the first seconds will tell you quite a bit about the movie you are going to watch. Rent a movie, or go see one in the theater. Even the credits will give you an idea about what you're going to see, and that first camera shot will set the tone for your entire viewing experience in all but the worst-conceived films.Opening on a sex scene, Laurel Canyon instantly lets you know that what follows will be steamy, and it delivers indeed. This first love scene is also human, and its awkwardness and tenderness opens the space for all the characters here to be genuine.
It's Sam (Christian Bale) and Alex (Kate Beckinsale) who make the keynote nookie. He is an interning psychiatrist, and she is working on a Ph.D. in genetics. His internship will take them to Los Angeles where Alex will continue to work on her dissertation. They plan to tie the knot in summer. We are briefly introduced to Alex's unpleasant parents, upper-crusty snobs played nearly to caricature. I'm not sure why the film even includes their pish-toshing and tactless counsel. Maybe it's to contrast Alex's comfort with her parents against Sam's anxiety and embarrassment around his mom.
The plan is that Sam and Alex will stay in Sam's mom's house because she's planning to be elsewhere. As a very successful record producer, she travels a lot. But as a very successful record producer, she also smokes a lot of loopy-weed, parties constantly, and changes her plans all the time. Yes, Jane (Frances McDormand) has NOT left the house to Sam and Alex. She's there with her latest project, a British pop band, and her latest beaux, it's lead singer, Ian (Alessandro Nivola).
Put Sam, Jane, Alex, and Ian in a house together and internal motives and desires begin to create external friction. And we all know that friction creates heat, smoke, and sometimes fire. Sam proves to be straight-laced, ambitious, and uptight. He wants to get himself and Alex out of the house, but can't apartment hunt and intern at the same time. Alex, meanwhile, starts to lose interest in her dissertation for the fascinating lifestyle of the woman who knows Bowie, B.B. King, and Bruce "The Boss" personally. Sam turns house hunting over to Alex, but she turns inaction into fabricated excuses.
Ian, the Puck figure in this Midsummer Night's Dream, tempts Alex with his priapic kindness until she leaves her studies and finds her way into the recording studio, where Jane takes her under her wing and gets Alex to lose some of her inhibitions.
All this inhibition-losing gets Jane, Ian, and Alex into sexual play together that starts at heated-pool temperatures, but heads quickly toward jacuzzi on a path toward whistling tea kettle. At the same time, the chasm between Sam's coldness and Alex's willingness increases. But Sam isn't only driven away by his distaste for his mother's lifestyle. He also meets the extremely hot second-year intern, Sara (A Very Attractive Actress) and windmills on the edge of falling in love with her.
Director Lisa Cholodenko does a nice job keeping things subtle and human. That's her strength. Add to this a great performance by Frances McDormand, who I find magnetic and intriguing, and you get an engaging film overall. Ian the Rocker adds a good comic foil to Sam's tightly wound intern. These characters aren't cutouts, which is nice. We see that Sam's rigidity is often ready to break open.
But like life, Lisa's Cholodenko's portrayal is sloppy sometimes, in the meeting with Alex's parents, for example. They aren't given enough screen time to develop their icky haughtiness properly, so it's rushed into one scene and comes off looking like satire, not realism. Elsewhere, Sam is blatantly unable to put his finger on the lack of mother-love in his childhood as a cause for some of his current behavior. As a viewer, you recognize this aspect of his personality immediately, and since Sam is a training psychiatrist, you'd think he'd have an inkling, but he doesn't.
In spite of these glitches, or maybe because of them, Laurel Canyon really involves a viewer in its characters. You can get wrapped into them because there is depth there; moreover, each character is fundamentally likeable.
It is nice that Laurel Canyon does not tie up all its loose ends to deliver a typically clean, all-happy Hollywood conclusion. What would have been nice, though, would be to have had any kind of conclusion at all. Though I recognize the hipness of leaving some questions unanswered, I'd humbly request that filmmakers consider their last scenes at least as carefully as their opening scenes.
Movie Review: Can't Go Wrong With Bale and McDormand.
Summary: 4 Stars
We all go through a stage (for some it's months, others a lifetime) where everything mom or dad does just hits that annoyed bone instantly. Maybe dad has a habit of smacking his lips for no apparent reason or mom's got a habit of tossing out constant malaprops. Laurel Canyon focuses part of its energy on that dynamic with a child who is now stodgily adult and still unwilling to accept his mother for the slightly off-kilter, pot smoking bohemian she is. Along the way the character also must reconcile his desires with his fiancé's needs. While Canyon does tread some familiar territory, it does so only as a baseline for providing some interesting characters. Sam, played with scary precision by the nearly infallible Christian Bale, returns to Southern California to finish off his residency and brings along his uppity Ph.D. writing WASP fiancé, Alex. They plan to stay at his mother's home in Laurel Canyon. Jane, Sam's mother, is supposed to be at her Malibu home. Unbeknownst to Sam, Jane, feeling guilty gave an ex-lover the Malibu home. So Sam and Alex must share the home with Jane and the rock band for which Jane's producing an album.
As one would expect Jane and her rocker friends begin to change Alex. This isn't unexpected as Kate Beckinsale quickly reveals how lonely and confused about life Alex really is. Her progression in the film is only mildly interesting, though Beckinsale does try her best. Her one standout scene actually comes early in the film when she becomes rather catty with a co-worker of Sam's.
The crux of the story really rests on Sam's shoulders. In the hands of a lesser actor Sam would have been nothing more than a stiff shirt. Some hack like Tom Cruise would speak clearly and move adroitly about as if this tells everything about Sam. Bale takes Sam and makes him a tragic figure without doing anything over the top. Bale's greatest gift is his ability to register his thoughts clearly with just a move of his eyes, a twitch of the brow or a purse of his lips. We read Sam's mind in every interaction. He's not a just a conservative would-be-doctor who hates his mother. That's too simple a gross insult to the character. Little moments such as Sam's parking structure sequence involving a co-worker reveal the inner turmoil of the character in a fashion 99% of actors could never approach. He varies between interested, rejected, offended, excited, guilty and decimated so effortlessly it's like watching one of the few remaining masters of any craft display his wares for the world.
Much will be made of France McDormand's Jane. She's a great actress and really does flip so nicely between roles. Whether she's playing a hyper sports fiend in Lone Star to that [sheriff] in Fargo to her drunken whore in The Man Who Wasn't There McDormand can play any role and make you believe she is that person. Here she's an aging producer holding onto her wild youth by clinging to studly rockers, while also trying desperately to have some semblance of a normal relationship with her dejected, far more mature, confused son. It's in the moments with her lover and with Sam that the character really comes alive.
A quick nod to Alessandro Nivola is needed too. He plays Jane's new love interest, the randy bandleader Ian. Nivola gets to have fun with the role and basically play up a smarmy side he hasn't displayed thus far in his films. Hopefully he'll find himself busier after his nice turn here.
While Canyon doesn't tread new ground, mother-son battles, confused partners, people coming out of their shell, it does give us some strong characters who end up feeling real. Their jobs are irrelevant. It's how they interact and more importantly react that makes Canyon an engaging film. Sam's sudden violent outburst comes with such a rush and ferocity that it's jarring but very logical. Alex's tinkering with new experiences doesn't surprise until she begins to cross a line that's not entirely foreshadowed. It all comes together and makes sense, yet never spells everything out with the annoying clarity of most Hollywood films. There isn't a sense of "this problem is solved" so much as all of this led to a climax and now there will be fallout. What will it be? That's up to the viewer to determine.
Movie Review: Straightlace Son / Freespirit Mother
Summary: 4 Stars
Laurel Canyon is a bit of fresh air. I suppose it was supposed to be sort of a comedy. If it was, it wasn't particularly funny. What it was, was a fairly entertaining situation where a young, conservative doctor, Sam, moves to LA from Boston, where he has taken an internship as a psychologist, bringing with him his bright and beautiful fiancee, Alex, to temporarily live in his mother, Jane's, second home in Hollywood Hills. However, things do not work out well for Sam. It seems Sam's mother is there, along with an up and coming British band, using the place to try and produce their newest album and especially a radio friendly single. This, because she has given her home in Malibu to her previous husband / lover, it's not clear which.
Let's stop here a second and see what we have.
Sam, played by Christian Bale, is a rather stodgy individual who has always been perturbed by his mothers lifestyle and behavior.
Jane, Sam's Mother, Played by Frances McDormand, a record producer, is a footloose, free talking, free thinking and free loving, pot smoking, product of the seventies. Jane has a tendency treat her clients (band members) like family, by mothering them and occasionally consorting with a band member, which doesn't sit well with Sam.
Alex, Played by Kate Beckinsale, is Sam's Fiancee. She is a lovely and exceptionally smart girl, head of her class at Harvard, a product of a rich conservative household, totally sheltered from any form of depravity and fully dedicated to her studies, that is until she gets to LA.
Ian, played by Alessandro Nivola, is the bands leader and singer and has recently taken up with Jane. Ian is sixteen years Janes junior but he genuinely seems attached to Jane and out for a good time, wherever that may be.
The plot seems to be that an attractive engaged couple, Sam and Alex, move to a new area and their love gets tested by unforseen and compelling circumstances. A subplot is the acrimonious relationship between Sam and Jane, Son and mother, can it, will it be resolved.
Things get a little strained for Sam and Alex after they get there. Sam is constantly embarrassed and apologizing for his mother, while Alex is fascinated by such a freewheeling lifestyle.
Then things get a more complicated as Sam gets pursued by a very attractive second year intern, Natascha McElhone, at his work and Alex, unable to concentrate on her dissertation to complete her own doctorate, seemingly gets drawn in to this new, strange, seamy atmosphere along with it's attendant, wanton behavior.
Starring:
Frances McDormand [Fargo]
Christian Bale [American Psycho]
Kate Beckinsale [Pearl Harbor]
Alessandro Nivola [Jurassic Park III]
Natascha McElhone [Solaris]
Credits:
Director: Lisa Cholodenko
Producer: Susan A. Stover
Jeff Levy-Hinte
Jeff Levy-Hinty
Susan Strover
Screenwriter: Lisa Cholodenko
Additional Music/Songs: Sparklehorse
Cinematographer: Wally Pfister
Composer: Craig Wedren
Executive Producer: Scott Ferguson
The acting by Frances McDormand and Christian Bale was excellent as was the direction by Lisa Cholodenko. Kate Beckensale, Alessandr Nivola and Natascha McElhone all gave good performances. Overall rating 4 1/8 stars
Conclusion
Mother and Son, Jane and Sam, are polar opposites. He rejects everything she is and tries to go in the opposite direction and she is a mother hen to all but her own son, which in turn probably made Sam jealous. This love / hate relationship comes to a boil. In the meantime, Alex is almost Euphoric over her newfound freedom. Freedom to indulge a new lifestyle, to experience new and exciting things.
If or How this gets resolved, you will find out when you see the movie
Movie Review: great character movie
Summary: 4 Stars
I discovered this film as I have been going through Frances McDormand's body of work. I only began to really pay attention to her after Fargo (loved her, mostly hated the film - just not my cup of tea), and recently went completely nuts over her in "Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day." After Pettigrew, I started watching every one of her films I could get my hands on. I can't say enough about how powerful she is on the screen, and I am way at the back of a long line of admirers.
In this movie, McDormand plays Jane, a semi-famous record producer in LA, and Christian Bale plays her son, Sam. He has been at Harvard finishing medical school and gets a position at a medical institute in Los Angeles (LA). Bringing his rather sheltered East Coast girlfriend Alex (Kate Beckinsale) along, he goes to LA thinking his mother will be at her beach house so he and Alex can stay at her Laurel Canyon residence until they get set up with a place of their own.
Unfortunately for the plan, the record Jane is producing is taking longer than she thought it would, and the young couple find themselves in the midst of Jane's world of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. Needless to say, all manner of comedic and personality fireworks ensue.
This is a good character driven film, with lots of interesting, although somewhat predictable, situations as each person "goes through their changes," as a friend of mine who lived in LA used to say. The characters seemed familiar and quite real, and reminded me of more than a few people I have known. I found it all quite believable and immediately cared about the characters and the story.
There is nudity (including McDormand's sweet body), drug use, and serious swearing, so be forewarned. If that bothers you, then you probably won't like this movie. There are all manner of emotional conflicts and "cognitive dissonance" as the two worlds collide, including parent/child issues, fidelity issues, forbidden fantasy issues, and so on. It is a rich tapestry and it is all handled rather well, which is a nice change from most films, with their predictable mainstream Hollywood preaching.
Of course, I could rant on and on about McDormand, having become quite smitten of late with her and her work, but I won't bore you with that. Everyone does a great job: Alessandro Nivola as Jane's new lover and musical find, Nastacha McElhone as a resident at Sam's new workplace with designs on Sam, and the musicians, who are an actual band. The music was really played by the band, and Nivola really did the singing, which added a great deal to the realism.
The extras on the DVD, including writer/director's commentary and making-of featurette, are interesting and fun.
A great film, highly recommended.