Moviegoer Diary: My Blueberry Nights, How to Get Ahead in Advertising

MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS

Plot in a Nutshell
A young woman, freshly dumped by her lover, heals her heartbreak by embarking on a road trip across America, taking waitressing jobs along the way and sending postcards back to the New York café owner who pines for her.

Thoughts
From the reviews that greeted the first English-language feature from Wong Kar Wai when it opened the 2007 Cannes Film Festival (and, later, when it briefly played theatres in North America), it seemed as though Wong was turning inexorably into Wim Wenders.

Wenders had followed up his greatest arthouse success, Wings of Desire, with the ambitious but somewhat impenetrable (to put it generously) science-fiction epic Until the End of the World, and Wong had done much the same thing by making 2046 right after In the Mood for Love. And now, with My Blueberry Nights, Wong had gone in search of America—and, like Wenders, seemed to have gotten hopelessly lost along the way. Would this be the first in a long line of films like The End of Violence, Million Dollar Hotel, and Don’t Come Knocking—slow-moving, stylized dramas, beautifully photographed, stuffed with well-known actors playing roles they’re desperately ill-suited for, each one more irrelevant than the one that came before it?

Well, now that I’ve actually seen My Blueberry Nights, I see that my impression was incorrect. Wong Kar Wai isn’t turning into Wim Wenders; he’s turning into Alan Rudolph. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing—I love Alan Rudolph movies, even the ones that most people think are terrible, like Trixie and Equinox. (Breakfast of Champions, on the other hand... well, let’s just pretend that one didn’t happen, okay?) I love Rudolph’s unabashed appreciation of beautiful actors, the woozy rhythms of his dialogue, the way his sense of human behaviour seems derived entirely from the covers of jazz LPs from the 1950s.

And that’s what I like about My Blueberry Nights: the way it creates a lush, stylized space to lose yourself in for 90 minutes, full of fetishistically photographed bars and diners, swollen-lipped brunette beauties, and men weighed down by inconsolable heartache—a world where love only makes people feel ten times worse than they did before... and twenty times worse when their romance ends.

I’m not surprised the Cannes audiences didn’t go for this movie: at Cannes, I imagine, everyone is looking for the next masterpiece, and an eye-roller of a film like My Blueberry Nights is just asking to get pummeled. You sure don’t have to look very hard to find flaws in this movie: Natalie Portman is not exactly convincing as a cynical, hard-bitten poker player, and Rachel Weisz’s performance as a Memphis cop’s sultry ex-wife is... well... kind of catastrophic. (Watching her try to play a drunk scene with a Southern accent is like watching an outfielder drop a fly ball and then run into the wall.)

But watched now, more than a year later, with low expectations under the right circumstances, it’s much easier to linger on the elements of the film that do satisfy: to smile at the way the security camera in Jude Law’s diner films everything not in black and white but in lush colours worthy of Christopher Doyle; to appreciate David Strathairn’s poetic performance as Weisz’s alcoholic ex-husband; to linger over Wong’s voluptuous images of vanilla ice cream melting over blueberry pies, or the shot of Norah Jones, the film’s star, asleep on the counter of Law’s diner, a few flecks of dried blood on her nostrils and a smear of ice cream at the corner of her mouth.

And you know what? Jones isn’t bad in this thing. Sure, she’s no professional, but the film doesn’t really require the services of a Liv Ullmann—just someone with an exotic face who looks good in those waitress uniforms and those 1940s-style polka-dot dresses with high heels.

Then again, I think Norah Jones’ CDs are actually pretty pleasant to listen to, so my aesthetic judgments are obviously not to be trusted.

RATING: 3.5/5


HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING

Plot in a Nutshell
Bruce Robinson’s 1989 satire about a conscience-stricken advertising executive whose personality is gradually taken over by the talking boil he’s grown on his neck.

Thoughts
I picked up this one in a used-DVD bin at my local video hut, and I’m not sure if they pulled a fast one on me. The packaging says the film is part of the Criterion Collection, but the disc itself appears to be a bare-bones MGM release of the film, with the Criterion logo conspicuously absent from the menu or the start of the film.

Wow—what a fascinating way to start talking about this film, eh? But the truth is, I was actually disappointed to realize that I had pretty much exactly the same reaction to this movie that I did 20 years ago, the first time I watched it. So either my critical acumen has not advanced one jot in two decades, or How to Get Ahead in Advertising is simply one of those movies that permits only one reaction from its audience.

I’m going to guess the latter is the case. Bruce Robinson’s screenplay isn’t so much a script as it is a loosely connected series of rants. And God knows Richard E. Grant delivers them brilliantly (especially the one that ends the film, which he begins on horseback, and then leaps from his saddle before it’s even half over and starts running across the meadow, as if the horse just wasn’t moving fast enough for him). But the film is just a little bit too much in love with the sound of its own voice—How to Get Ahead in Advertising belongs to a strain of British comedy that I’ve never warmed up to, the kind that wears its schoolboy cleverness on its sleeve, the kind that consists of abuse and arguments instead of conversation, the kind that’s more about the voice of the writer than the personalities of its characters, the kind that has nothing more on its mind that finding new ways to say the world sucks and people are stupid.

That said, I’ve got to give Robinson points for coming up with a simple but resonant premise and following it through, right to its logical conclusion. I couldn’t help but think of the scattershot satire of War, Inc. as I watched this movie, and be struck by how much John Cusack’s script suffer by comparison—especially when it comes to its wussy ending. How to Get Ahead in Advertising doesn’t back down on its own ferocity, and more power to it for that.

Plus, I love the scene where Rachel Ward (playing Grant’s wife), who has begun to suspect that her husband and the boil on his neck have somehow switched places, sneaks up to him while he’s sleeping, puts one end of a vacuum cleaner tube up to his neck, and starts speaking into the other end. For some reason, she doesn’t call her husband by name, and instead just keeps anxiously whispering, “Boil! Boil! Boil!” That bit still cracks me up.

God, I don’t think I’ve seen Rachel Ward in a movie since After Dark, My Sweet in 1990. According to the IMDb, she’s been trying her hand at directing lately, and her first feature, Beautiful Kate, is supposed to come out later this year. It’s a small movie, though, so it's probably going to need a lot of advertising.

RATING: 3/5