Punching the Clown (2009)

15 Friday Jul 2016

Tags

Audrey Siegel, Captain Chaotic, Comedy, Drama, Ellen Ratner, Espresso Yourself, Gregori Viens, Henry Phillips, Los Angeles, Matthew Walker, Musician, Review, Singer/songwriter, Songs, Wade Kelley

D: Gregori Viens / 90m

Cast: Henry Phillips, Ellen Ratner, Wade Kelley, Matthew Walker, Audrey Siegel, Guilford Adams, Mik Scriba, Evan Arnold, Mark Cohen

Movies about comedians and how they struggle to get noticed or challenge their audiences are few and far between. Dustin Hoffman portrayed Lenny Bruce in the succinctly titled Lenny (1974), Tom Hanks played a fictional comedian in Punchline (1988), and Robert De Niro’s role as Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (1982) is still a benchmark performance in terms of the darkness that (reputedly) lies within the heart of each and every comedian. There’s always a toll to be endured, and whether it’s rejection, disappointment, or outright failure, success – true success – is rarely found at the end of the comedian’s journey.

And so it goes with Punching the Clown (which is a line from one of Henry Phillips’s songs, and refers to something other than actually punching a clown). Having toiled long and hard travelling across America, and taken on gigs at places as diverse as coffee shops and bowling alleys, singer/songwriter Phillips lands a spot at a pizza restaurant. But his performance doesn’t go down so well, particularly with the Christian fund raisers in the audience, and he’s not even paid fully. Deciding it’s time he tried his luck in L.A., he goes to stay with his brother Matt (Walker). Matt is a struggling actor reduced to dressing up as Batman at children’s parties, but he puts Henry in touch with an agent, Ellen Pinsky (Ratner). Ellen takes a shine to Henry but needs to see his act. At a local coffee bar, Espresso Yourself, Henry takes to the stage on an open mic night, and promptly wins over the audience with his songs, which are a mix of droll observational comedy and trenchant psychopathy.

Ellen gets Henry an invite to a party being held by a record company executive but his attempt at performing backfires. However, a chance encounter with one of the guests there the next day, along with an overheard comment that is misconstrued, leads Henry to being wooed by a record company with the offer of a recording contract. While he makes up his mind, Henry continues playing at the coffee bar, and begins a very tentative relationship with one of the barmaids, Becca (Siegel). But just as Henry’s star begins to wax brightly, a further misunderstanding over the provenance of some bagels leads to accusations that he’s anti-semitic. As this misunderstanding gathers more and more acceptance, Henry finds himself losing his grip not only on the recording contract, but also his relationship with Becca, and his now regular spot at the coffee bar. As things begin to spiral out of control, Henry has to decide if staying in L.A. is still as good an idea as it seemed when he first arrived.

If you haven’t heard of Henry Phillips, don’t worry. Unless you’re familiar with the YouTube series Henry’s Kitchen, then chances are you have no more idea of who he is than you do in knowing who your partner’s seeing behind your back (this is the kind of humour Phillips brings out in his songs; nobody is saying your partner’s seeing anyone behind your back). In songs such as Gotta Get a Girlfriend and Hello Michelle, Phillips spins twisted yarn after twisted yarn as he cuts through the niceties of modern relationships and gets right to the heart of what we’re all really thinking about when it comes to love, sex, and all the selfish motivations that go with them. He’s caustic, witty, keeps just on the right side of being offensive, and has a winning stage presence that’s enhanced by his self-deprecating approach.

Punching the Clown was a labour of love for Phillips – it took around a decade to get made – and the inclusion of so much material he’d already honed by the time of the movie’s release has the effect of making his stage performances the undisputed highlights of a feature that otherwise lacks the bite needed to make Henry’s odyssey as engaging. As noted above, Phillips has a winning presence on stage, but off it he takes too much of a back seat in his own story, adopting the role of the persistent loser who never gets the respect or acknowledgment he deserves (throughout the movie his act is unfairly compared to that of another singer, Stupid Joe (Cohen), whose clarion call to audiences is, “Are you ready to get guitarded?”). It makes him an entirely sympathetic character, and someone you can root for with ease, but at the same time undercuts the drama when Henry’s “anti-semitism” begins to ruin his newfound success.

That said, there are some quite trenchant comments made about the difficult road to stardom, and the party at the record company executive’s house features a deliciously malicious sequence where each guest rebuffs another guest and is then rebuffed themselves, often with unnecessary cruelty. And when Henry finally gets to begin recording an album, he’s tasked with singing his funniest song, and then a song that’s funny from the very first line, a situation that highlights the common notion that in La La Land, taste is a concept misunderstood by many. Henry’s relationship with his agent is a sweet-natured one, and if it has a whiff of wishful thinking about it, it’s to Phillips’ credit that it’s still affecting (and benefits from a wonderful performance from Ratner, who, it should be noted, is also a White House correspondent when she’s not acting).

The movie is structured around a radio interview that Henry gives to DJ Captain Chaotic (Kelley), and while some of the scenes in the studio cause an unnecessary disruption to the narrative, Kelley’s portrayal is acerbic, disarming and damn funny. Henry’s relationship with Becca avoids some of the more predictable pitfalls but is set up to fail in such an obvious manner that it’s a little dispiriting (but Phillips makes up for this later). In the director’s chair, Viens holds it all together with a great deal of panache, the movie’s unsurprisingly low budget stretched to good use, and in conjunction with DoP Ian Campbell provides proceedings with a suitably cinema verité look that anchors the “action”. It’s all rounded off by Phillips’ songs, the true heart of the movie, and what makes it work as well as it does.

Rating: 8/10 – some narrative stumbles aside, Punching the Clown is still hugely enjoyable, though if you’re expecting it to be a laugh-a-minute comedy, you’ll be sorely disappointed; far more subtle than it may look, the movie acts as a clever, knowing, well-constructed introduction to the weird and wonderful world of Phillips’ stage persona, and on that basis, is entirely successful.

Sing Street (2016)

24 Tuesday May 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Aiden Gillen, Band, Catholic Boys School, Comedy, Drama, Drive It Like You Stole It, Dublin, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Jack Reynor, John Carney, Lucy Boynton, Review, Romance, School disco, Semi-autobiographical, Songs, Synge Street, The Riddle of the Model

D: John Carney / 106m

Cast: Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Lucy Boynton, Jack Reynor, Aiden Gillen, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Kelly Thornton, Mark McKenna, Ben Carolan, Percy Chamburuka, Conor Hamilton, Karl Rice, Ian Kenny, Don Wycherley

A semi-autobiographical account of writer/director John Carney’s upbringing in Dublin in the mid-Eighties, Sing Street may well be the most enjoyable romantic drama (with extra added music and comedy) of 2016. The creator of Once (2007) and Begin Again (2013) has fashioned a delightful, appealing movie that offers very few surprises, but does so with a great deal of affection and charm. It’s a movie that leaves you with a smile on your face and wondering what happens to all the characters once the movie’s ended (at this point, a sequel featuring the same characters wouldn’t go amiss).

Carney’s on-screen incarnation is Conor Lalor (Walsh-Peelo). Conor is fifteen and part of a family that is on the verge of falling apart. His mother (Kennedy) and father (Gillen) are constantly arguing, his older brother, Brendan (Reynor), is unemployed and hasn’t left the house in ages, while his sister, Ann (Thornton), is wrapped up in her schoolwork and upcoming exams. For Conor, life has been so far uneventful, but a change in the family fortunes means his transferring from a Jesuit school to a nearby Catholic school run by the Christian Brothers.

Conor has a middling interest in music and gets most of his knowledge from Brendan. While trying to fit in at his news school, Synge Street CBS, Conor falls foul of the resident bully, Barry (Kenny), but is befriended by Darren (Carolan) who offers his services should Conor ever need them. Conor finds a use for Darren almost straight away; as they loiter at the school gates, Conor spots a girl across the street who, according to Darren, is unapproachable. Conor crosses the street and asks the girl – whose name is Raphina (Boynton) – if she wants to be in a video his band is making. Raphina is skeptical but agrees to take part in the shoot. All Conor has to do is put together a band (with Darren as their manager), and his efforts to woo Raphina can be put into operation.

Conor’s plan gets off to a good start when Darren introduces him to Eamon (McKenna) who’s a multi-instrumentalist. From there they recruit a keyboard player, Ngig (Chamburuka), a bass player, Garry (Rice), and a drummer, Larry (Hamilton). They call themselves Sing Street after their school and record a demo version of Duran Duran’s Rio. They shoot their video, and Raphina takes part. Conor is happy with the way things are going but Brendan is less than supportive. Challenging Conor to write his own songs for the band, and to adopt their own visual image, Brendan makes it clear that being a covers band will get them nowhere. Suitably encouraged, Conor trusts in his own abilities and the songs he creates with Eamon go a long way to improving both the band’s repertoire and their performances.

Conor and Raphina grow closer but the shadow of her planned move to London hovers over their relationship like a black cloud. And while the band become more proficient, and score their first public performance at the upcoming school disco, Conor believes he’s made enough of an impression on Raphina that she won’t leave, but when she doesn’t turn up for a video shoot, Conor learns that the life of a budding pop star isn’t as easy or as fulfilling as he’d hoped.

A breath of fresh air amidst a period when so many other movies are proving to be disappointments for a myriad of reasons, Sing Street is a welcome reminder that you don’t have to have a mega-budget or a host of household names (or be a sequel) to connect with an audience and become a success (if only a modest one). From its opening scene where Conor learns he’s moving schools, and which features the first of several very funny lines from Brendan, Carney’s look back at the highs and lows experienced by a lovestruck teen is simply yet expressively told, and features a clutch of winning performances from its mostly inexperienced cast.

It’s a richly satisfying movie, exploring the trials of young love, the naïve expectations of forming a band, and grounding it all in the relationships, particularly that between Conor and Brendan. Carney has created the older brother we’d all like to have, the wise-beyond-his-years confidant and source of encouragement we can all look up to, and Reynor comes close to stealing the movie out from under his younger co-stars. But Carney’s insistence on choosing a largely non-professional cast has paid off handsomely. Walsh-Peelo is excellent as Conor, his shy, diffident nature giving way to the kind of self-confidence so few of us attain at that age. As he woos Raphina through the lyrics of his songs, the depth and tenderness of Conor’s feelings are expressed in such a poignant, heartfelt way that the viewer can’t help but root for him. (It’s also great to see the young actor adopt the various hairstyles of the pop stars he seeks to emulate; no doubt viewers of a certain age will wince in recognition of their own tonsorial decisions.)

While the temptation is to label Sing Street as a musical, and while there are enough musical interludes to maintain that temptation throughout the movie’s running time, this is really about a romance borne out of happenstance and unexpected need. As such it succeeds admirably in portraying that first early flush of attraction and the disjointed emotions that often come with it. Conor’s motives are clear and unerring: he wants the girl. But in the grand tradition of all romantic endeavours, the course of true love is not allowed to run smoothly, and Raphina’s own dreams intrude on and interfere with Conor’s. It’s all handled with a seductive precision and an eye for the undisclosed feeling that makes Conor and Raphina’s relationship all the more credible, even if it is predictable in its outcome.

With the central relationships all being handled with a deftness of touch that shows just how far Carney has come as a director since November Afternoon (1996), the movie is free to concentrate on the music. Like all the best musicals, Carney, in collaboration with Gary Clark, has composed a handful of songs that both advance the story and reveal Conor’s developing feelings for Raphina. It’s helpful too that they’re all very well-written, and two songs in particular, The Riddle of the Model and Drive It Like You Stole It, have the potential to find a life for themselves outside the confines of the movie. Make no mistake – and one very poignant ballad aside – these are lively, enjoyable, sing-along tunes that have an infectious glee about them, as if both Carney and his talented cast had decided from the start that melancholy tales of woe and unrequited love weren’t needed at all. And you know, they were right.

Rating: 8/10 – some elements are too familiar from too many other movies to go unnoticed, but Carney imbues these elements with a wistfulness and an enticement that makes Sing Street very hard to resist; with toe-tapping musical numbers and several appealing performances courtesy of its young cast, it’s a movie that deserves a wider audience than it will probably get, and any movie that features a great joke at the expense of Phil Collins can’t be all bad.

Begin Again (2013)

14 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Adam Levine, Drama, Gregg Alexander, Hailee Steinfeld, John Carney, Keira Knightley, Mark Ruffalo, Music, Record producer, Review, Romance, Singer-songwriter, Songs

D: John Carney / 104m

Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Keira Knightley, Hailee Steinfeld, Adam Levine, James Corden, Yasiin Bey, Catherine Keener, CeeLo Green

Record label executive Dan Mulligan (Ruffalo) is struggling to keep up with the changing pace of the modern music industry. Separated from his wife Miriam (Keener) and estranged from his daughter Violet (Seinfeld), Dan’s partner in the record company he co-founded, Saul (Bey) fires him. He goes on a drinking binge that sees him end up in bar where English singer-songwriter Gretta James (Knightley) is persuaded to take to the stage by her friend, Steve (Corden). The song she sings captivates Dan and he approaches Gretta with the offer of signing her.

Gretta isn’t interested in Dan’s offer because she’s planning to return to England the next day. She’s in the US because she came over with her boyfriend, Dave Kohl (Levine), when he was signed to a record label. While on a promotional jaunt, he slept with a record label executive; unhappy and discouraged, Gretta just wants to leave and put her relationship with Dave behind her. The next morning, though, she takes up Dan on his offer. This forces him to come clean about his position, but he convinces her to go with him to see Saul; Dan is sure Saul will sign her, but without a demo to give him, he passes.

Undeterred, Dan comes up with a plan to make an album of Gretta’s songs by recording them all over the city: on rooftops, subway platforms, alleyways, wherever they can. Dan assembles a team of musicians that includes Steve, while Gretta, in an attempt to reunite him with his daughter, arranges for Violet to play guitar on one of the songs. With the album completed they see Saul again but leave without a deal having been reached (Gretta wants Dan to get his job back as well as a bigger cut of the profits).

Shortly after, Gretta sees Dave accepting an award on TV and believing him to have sold out, pours out her feelings in a song she sings and leaves on his voicemail. Dave gets in touch with her and asks to meet when he’s back in New York. Greta agrees but finds that her feelings for Dan are changing from professional to personal. Unsure of which way to turn, Gretta meets Dave in the hope that she’ll be able to decide which path to take.

A fresh take on an age-old story, Begin Again belies its Svengali-like origins to give its audience a modern day interpretation that sidesteps many of its genre conventions with a knowing wink and a shrug of indifference. Working from his own script, director Carney fashions a story of two peoples’ separate roads to personal empowerment and redemption that neatly avoids the clichés inherent in such scenarios, and makes the movie feel like a breath of fresh air.

Playing around with the structure in the movie’s first half hour, Carney introduces the viewer to Dan and Gretta with a view to telling their back stories in such a way that by the time they begin to make the album they’re like old friends we’ve known for ages. We get to see Dan at his worst and Gretta at her most trusting. We see them come together and start to rely on each other as they begin to rebuild their lives. It’s in these opening scenes that Carney draws the audience in and sets up the dramatic elements that will pay off later on in the movie (but not in the way that you might expect). And he doesn’t fall into the usual traps, for example: despite the predictable nature of Gretta and Dave’s break up, it’s presented in the kind of “adult” way you rarely see in movies. It’s a relatively short scene but Carney packs it with an emotional punch that is frankly disarming (and he’s ably abetted by Knightley and Levine).

With Dan and Gretta’s relationship so well cemented the movie’s central section becomes a joyous evocation of making an album. This is Begin Again at its most winning and infectious, the sheer pleasure of making music in a live environment so evident you can’t help but tap your feet along with the songs. And thanks to the efforts of composer Gregg Alexander these are terrific songs indeed, catchy and effortlessly perceptive about life and love and the pitfalls of both. Knightley, who hadn’t sung before, is assured here, her soft, soulful voice a perfect match for the material.

Alas, the final third, with its need to wrap things up, undermines some of the good work Carney has put in. Gretta and Dan each arrive at a place that befits their individual struggles, but there’s a sense that they’ve been let down by Carney’s determination not to play it safe and to avoid the movie having a predictable ending. Even with this, his leads remain convincing throughout, handling their characters’ journeys from start to finish with skill, confidence and conviction. Ruffalo gives such an impressive performance it’s hard to take your eyes off him, while Knightley invests Gretta with a stubborn, earnest vulnerability that is mesmerising. When on screen together they spark off each other, each raising their game, each making the movie even richer. In support, Steinfeld, Keener and Corden all provide charming turns, while Levine (from Maroon 5) makes his feature debut and is very good indeed.

With its emotional content linked directly to, and expressively through, its songs, Begin Again is a musical drama that packs several unexpected punches, and if its near rags-to-riches feel has an unavoidable touch of whimsy wrapped around it, then it’s no bad thing. This is a feelgood movie, and unashamedly so.

Rating: 8/10 – guaranteed to put a smile on anyone’s face during its musical numbers, Begin Again is a lively, effervescent movie that is both delightful and poignant in equal measure; with assured turns from its two leads, it’s a movie that entertains and rewards far more than it should do given its bittersweet ending.