Heat Wave.

Head over to PopMatters and read my review for My Week with Marilyn.

Sheet-y Saturday.

Where we take a look at posters for upcoming features.

Did you see how simple the posters for Martha Marcy May Marlene have been so far? Even the ones that relied on the internet code to send out a message (risky move too!) were so haunting and beautiful in a way. The efficiency of the concept is that it gets across several points: Elizabeth Olsen, all the Ms and Elizabeth Olsen again.

My Week with Marilyn debuted its first official poster and the result is so lifeless. Michelle Williams might deliver a stunning performance but in all the publicity shots and now this one sheet, she looks like a morbid morgue project. We get she's playing Marilyn but she has been looking like some sort of postmortem strange postmodernist experiment (let's see if you can play Marilyn as a mannequin!). It's strange that the marketing people at the Weinstein Co. even went with this image at all when just a few weeks ago we got one where at least Williams seemed to be alive.

How do you feel about all the Ms this week?

Glorious 39 *

Director: Stephen Poliakoff
Cast: Romola Garai, Bill Nighy, Julie Christie
Eddie Redmayne, Juno Temple, David Tennant, Charlie Cox
Jeremy Northam, Hugh Bonneville, Jenny Agutter
Christopher Lee, Corin Redgrave

If you liked Atonement but wished it had been a bit more like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, then Glorious 39 might just be the movie for you.
Set in England during the summer of 1939, it recounts the dramatic story of Anne Keyes (Garai) a wealthy film actress who discovers her family might be involved in a political plot to stop WWII.
That might not sound like a bad thing, but it is! Setting the bizarre mood for a movie that rarely knows where it's going and much less how to get there.
You see, the pro-appeasement movement in pre-Churchill England was not merely used to avoid combat but also would help maintain the status quo among the upper classes who promoted it.
Of course writer/director Poliakoff doesn't seem to care about this and instead of using these ambiguities to make a comment on the way money shapes history, simply chose to throw it all away in favor of a plot that has everyone, except Garai's character, act like Stepford wives.
This is especially sad for the older actors, especially Christie and Lee, who has to endure a scene so terrible in the end that you wonder how much they paid him to go through with it.
Surprisingly Garai survives the movie with the least harm. The camera is obviously in love with her and despite Poliakoff's intentions to turn her into someone else (look it's Keira Knightley! No wait it's Cate Blanchett!) Garai's uncommon beauty helps her deliver a performance that's magnetic and well intentioned. She tries to be Ingrid Bergman in Notorious and obviously fails, but her spirit overcomes the tragedy that is the rest of the movie.
Therefore, an amazing ensemble is utterly wasted, used to bring to life a plot that confuses with its erratic tonal shifts.
The thing with Glorious 39 is that it doesn't know if it wants to be an homage to classic films (sometimes it feels like a "count the Hitchcock references" game), a Gothic horror movie, a surrealistic psychological portrait or a parody.
It moves so aimlessly among genres and styles that you never know for sure which one to pay attention to.
But beyond genres it fails to make any sense of who the characters are, which seems impossible to understand given the actors playing them.
Even the fact that the heroine is an actress (point which is brought up by mockers and skeptics throughout) teases us with an actual intention on the director's part.
Can he be trying to mention something about history's need for drama or about the roles we play unexpectedly? Can he be drawing parallels between the work of a spy and the work of an actress?
To formulate those kinds of questions would be too kind an offering for a movie that shows us a burning pile of cats and dogs, confuses randomness with intrigue and would make G.K. Chesterton roll in his grave.

Savage Grace **

Director: Tom Kalin

Cast: Julianne Moore, Eddie Redmayne

Stephen Dillane, Hugh Dancy, Elena Anaya, Belén Rueda, Unax Ugalde

On November 11, 1972, wealthy socialite Barbara Daly Baekeland was stabbed to death by her son Antony with whom she was having an incestuous affair.

In "Savage Grace" director Tom Kalin recreates the events that led to the tragic consequences, beginning with Antony's childhood during which Barbara (Moore) and his father Brooks (the always subtly brilliant Dillane) moved from New York City to Paris where he became part of a erudite circle his mother had a love/hate relationship with.

Years later while living in Spain, Antony (played by Redmayne throughout most of the film) begins to explore his sexuality and while his mother encourages him to practice love with anyone he wants (Antony was gay), his father runs away with his mistress (Anaya) leaving the young man to look after his mother.

Aimlessly travelling from exotic locale to locale, the film has trouble finding an emotional center that makes the characters' story worth a listen.

It doesn't help that Kalin chooses a disenchanted, detached aesthetic either, capturing his characters in the very same way in which they tackle their lives; moving only by inertia amongst pastel colored settings and randomly chosen vignettes.

Narrated by Antony, the story has a hard time deciding if it wants to be about the mother, the son, the subsequent incest or if it merely wants to blame the missing paternal figure for everything.

Most of the letters read by Antony are addressed to his father and the words contain pent up anger and bitterness that Redmayne's soft spoken, ironic tone never taps into.

Kalin makes a mess out of settling over Antonioni like techniques of character/structure connection or postmodernist melodrama, but of course the one thing he can't really control is Moore who gives an extraordinary performance.

Her Barbara is a pocketful of surprises, she plays her like the woman who inspired the original Madonna/Whore complex for whom the acts in which she seems like a lunatic require no extra effort from sitting with high society friends for tea.

Moore, who has never been one for star turns, avoids chewing the scenery here as well and turns in delicious work that touches camp (listening to her screaming "little puta" to her husband's lover at an airport is chilling and satisfying) and the mysteries of human behavior (what she does after the airport incident...).

While it may seem that for the movie Barbara is nothing more than tabloid fodder, Moore dignifies her with the benefit of the doubt.

When the story begins to explore the mysteries of the sexual relationship between Antony and Barbara, Moore handles all of her scenes with a perfectly imperfect balance of motherly love and plain bizarre mental behavior.

As Barbara puts her hand over her son's crotch you will feel the discomfort and awkwardness of the moment, Moore on the other side has completely vanished.