DVDs for V-Day: Love/Hate Stories

I swear I'm not here to piss on love stories.

In all honesty, I have much love for more than a few well-known wistful weepies (see: the Brokeback Mountain still kicking around my bedroom wall). But, to build on an idea dreamed up by a possible plagiarist of an Englishman, I think love is much more interesting (not to mention real) when its either sprung from, or becomes remains steeped in, some form of highly repressed hate. And no, it's not because I'm perpetually single. (Although, I'm sure it helps.)

This Valentine's Day let's buck the happily ever afters and those til-death-do-us-part paramours, and celebrate the anti-romances we can't help but love.


4) WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

When I was in high school, I read the Edward Albee play which this 1966 film based on. Immediately, I compared it to my then-favourite movie, American Beauty. Looking back now, I admit there are some similarities between the two  - American dreams indefinitely deferred, fully grown couples acting like children towards one another - but this is much more heartbreaking. While American Beauty takes moments to grace our cheeks with rose petals and smidgens of helpless hope, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? laps up the irksomeness, focusing solely on an awkward dinner party between jaggedly jaded, long-married man and wife, George and Martha (real-life doomed duo, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor), and their clueless newlywed guests. Martha's words are so cutting towards her husband at times, her tongue ought to fly off.


3) BLUE VALENTINE

This 2010 drama was almost completely ignored come awards season due to its adverse effect on audiences, who apparently wanted to see Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling cuddle and make like Mr. and Mrs. Smith (no, not the Angelina/Brad kind) for two hours. What they got instead was something groundbreaking - an up close and too personal (both in script and suggestive shooting) exploration of a relationship that never really was and thus, never really can be, through the eyes of two, equally unremarkable characters. What they got was far too many people's harsh truth.


2) REVOLUTIONARY ROAD 

Before this film, an adaptation of the Richard Yates novel of the same name, was released, it was touted as the much-awaited Jack and Rose reunion we had been waiting for since '97. But unlike Titanic, which brought a fresh-faced Leo DiCaprio and a fire-haired Kate Winslet together through the bow of a boat and the belts of Celine Dion, Revolutionary Road doesn't even try for a happy, heaven-set ending.  Every aspect of this 1950s suburbia-set drama - the bleak coloured clothes, the slow-progressing storyline, and DiCaprio and Winslet's brilliantly vacant, Oscar-deserving (but not nominated) performances - is depressing. But then again, so were plenty of marriages back then, when divorce was a fate worse than death.


1) SID AND NANCY

This one takes the poisoned chocolate cake simply because its doomed subjects - who led destructive, drug- and dagger-addled side-by-side lives until one of them died in a hotel bathroom - were real. The 1986 biopic documents the way-highs and skin-crawling lows of the infamously short-lived romance between Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his peroxide-happy girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.

Vicious and Spungen's journey was a dirty, sex, suicide pact and syringe-filled one, a fact that is not only admitted in this film, but embraced with reckless artistic abandon. Director Alex Webb brings out an unmatched (unless you count this), brutally infected rawness in his stars, Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb, making much of the movie, which is made up mostly of long-winded verbal and physical fights followed by rabid love-making, near-unbearable to watch. But there's also macabre beauty to all of it, like when Oldman takes to an empty, florescent light-covered stage to sing Vicious cover of "My Way" to his barbed wire crowned babe, or the bloody pair embrace in what will become one of their death beds.

Emily's Top 10 of '10: Part 2

5. 127 Hours

I saw Danny Boyle's latest heart-yanking film on an especially special evening at TIFF, attended by both it's star (James Franco) and it's inspiration (adventure enthusiast and Between a Rock and Hard Place author, Aron Ralston). After the screening the mega-moving one-man-show, in which Franco (as Ralston) amputates his own arm after having spent an excruciating 127 hours with it lodged under a rogue boulder, Ralston (and his hook hand) came on stage all bright and teary-eyed. He was just so grateful to see his true triumph of the human spirit come alive on screen for the world, and most importantly, his family to see. As he told the still-recovering audience (the fainting rumours are true!), he was blown away by Boyle and Franco's hyperactive and hallucinogenic treatment of his story, as it managed remain loyal to his reality even when delving into fits of hysterical fantasy. I couldn't have said it better myself.

4. Blue Valentine

This dark, depressing love story is not for the faint and or fantastical of heart. This film, which was nearly unfairly slapped with a NC-17 rating (America's version of R), is rough, raw and ridiculously real, to the point that sometimes, you feel as though you're Rear Windowing in on your loud, obviously unhappy neighbours. Blue Valentine takes us on a tour through the shards of a never-really-true romance, which starts as an unhappy accident and ends in unsolvable screaming match. Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling pour their hearts and bodies (the duo totally transform in the later sections) into playing the couple in question (Cindy and Dean), giving us what may be the most genuine representation of modern love - and loss - I've ever seen.

3. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

I still can't believe this movie wasn't a huge hit. It's 100 times better than Tron, Iron Man 2 and every other big budget action flick that came out this year. It's not a remake (although it is based on a series of graphic novels). It's not a mindless star vehicle (although Mikey Cera does get some sweet mega-closeups!). It's a true original - with some perfectly timed homages (Mortal Kombat! Seinfeld!) thrown in. Featuring a kick ass (not to be confused with Kick-Ass, which didn't quite live up to its name) plot - Toronto-based hipster 20-something has to defeat his new girl's seven evil exes - awesomely awkward dialogue, video game visuals and an insanely addictive soundtrack, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World has future unironic indie kid favourite written all over it. And it knows it.

2. Toy Story 3

This June, Woody, Buzz and the toy friends we've grown to love for over a decade rode back into Tinseltown for one last cinematic play date. And I don't know about you, but I'm searching for tissues. While the first two films in the animated series were undoubtedly superb, this installment was even better as it took us through most devastating moment of any toy's life: being put away in storage by their once-dedicated owner (in this case, Andy).  For my generation, who grew with the courageous cowboy and the sometimes-Spanish space cadet and kind of consider them our own, the bittersweet story hit so close to home it still hurts. 

1. The Social Network

A deliciously zeitgeist-y story, based on the controversial back story behind the most addictive website, ever? A wicked smart cast fronted by the next generation of hot nerds, Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield - and former Model Behaviour star and triple threat, Justin Timberlake? A talky, intelligent, Gilmore Girls speed script by West Wing scribe, Aaron Sorkin? What's not to 'like'? If this doesn't win Best Picture, I'm going to de-friend the Academy for at least a week.

ALSO AWESOME: The Other Guys, The King's Speech, Black Swan, Inception, Tangled, Shutter Island, Youth in Revolt 

*All photos from allmoviephoto.com

TIFF 2010: Blue Valentine

 

 Photo: Daemonstv.com (Davi Russo)

(Making up is hard to do.)

Starring Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling and Faith Wladyka. Directed by Derek Cianfrance. 113 minutes.

Early in Blue Valentine, the Pat Benatar ballad “We Belong" comes on Michelle Williams' character's radio. At the time, I brushed the choice off as inconsequential and random, just another kitschy background track - the movie equivalent of muzak. As the story progressed, however, its lyrics haunted me.

In that song, Ms. Benatar says that while she and her lover "belong" together, more than often she finds herself crying alone because he "cuts [her] feelings to the bone." She doesn't want to leave him ("really") because she's "invested too much time" but she's not sure her love is still there. "Have we become a habit?" she asks under the thundering late 80s beat. "Or do we distort the facts?"

Those two questions, while never technically posed on screen, are the essence of the broken love story told in Blue Valentine. Cindy (Michelle Williams) isn't in love with Dean (Ryan Gosling) when they meet at her grandmother's funeral home (he's working at a mover, she's visiting). In fact, she's not even in like. But when her other boyfriend flakes out on her, and her life plan starts to crumble into irreparable pieces, she falls into his arms, hoping that his unrequited love might turn into something more. Something semi-meaningful.

In a romantic comedy, Cindy would grow to find Dean charming and they would get married and live happily ever after in a perfectly affordable bungalow. But this isn't a romantic comedy. In fact, it isn't even a romance. It's a tale of like-for-the-wrong-reasons, marry-because-you're-desperate and hate-because-you-never-really-loved. And it’s harshly beautiful.

Blue Valentine looks and feels like a great 80s indie song, with its succulent, shady cinematography and pre-90s grunge costumes, but it’s not. As Cindy reveals in a random presidential-naming sing-song (which includes Bush and Clinton), it’s meant to be modern. And with its Grizzly Bear soundtrack and late 20-something cast, it sort of is. But it deals with an issue that’s not so new, except the movies.

From the moment we see Dean and Cindy quarrel over their daughter's oatmeal in the opening, we know we're not in for a happy ending. What we don't know is how they got to this breaking point. Like tragically cynical, chain-smoking cousin of (500) Days of Summer, Blue Valentine gets to the bruised heart of its couple's story by alternating between snapshots of mumbled memories and present-day problems.

One minute the not-so-happy couple are tired and weathered-looking, arguing over a lost dog and checking into a sleazy, sex motel. The next they’re fresh-faced and almost-hopeful, running down empty streets and sharing secret talents. The pieces are jagged, and don’t seem to fit together at first, but over time, they form a complex candid of every hopeless romantic’s greatest fear: a love that never was, and never will be.

Gosling and Williams will smash your heart as the forever-quarrelling lovers and focus of this 12-years-in-the-making (seriously, studios were afraid of it) feature. We’ve seen them pour their souls into devastatingly gritty roles before – they both have gotten Oscar noms (for Half Nelson and Brokeback Mountain, respectively) – but this is a whole other level of heartbreak.

In the wrong hands, Cindy and Dean could become a melodramatic farce, an insincere portrait of a situation that is far too common, but more than often ignored. But with these two, they seem so real, it’s uncomfortable (their one-sided, non-rape sex scene will make your skin crawl). If love is, as Ms. Benatar says, a battlefield, they are landmines. Prepare for the aftershock. A-