I Am Love Sour Grapes

Have you seen I Am Love yet? The Globe nominee is available for rental so get on that.

Director Luca Guadagnino with Marisa Berenson & Tilda Swinton

I read the following quote over at Hollywood Reporter and I found it both amusing, right-on and the kind of thing you shouldn't say out loud. Seems Luca Guadagnino, the man behind the brilliant Globe & BFCA nominated I Am Love is not happy with the treatment of his film back home in Italy. They chose another film for their entry in the annual Oscar Foreign Film race.

He says...

Italy has been a sort of strangely cruel mother to the film. I feel like Rapunzel in Tangled. They didn’t pick the film for the Oscars. I don’t think the movie is the kind that sells in Italy now, which is basically dramedies about men that are not able to grow up. Vitteloni syndrome without Fellini. This [Golden] Globe nomination is a sort of really strong warning for the Italian culture. Beware! When you don’t support what’s good ... then the image of your country goes down and down and down. They chose another movie, instead of one that was internationally well received, particularly in the U.S. But it’s all right. Right now the moment is cheer, and I’m very cheerful. It’s a great day!

Points for honesty but obviously someone's feelings got hurt along the way.

<--- Micaela Ramazzotti and Sergio Albelli, the super sexy but unstable parental figures in La Prima Cosa Bella.

For what it's worth, I recently spent time with the actual Italian Oscar submission La Prima Cosa Bella (The First Beautiful Thing) and it was good. It's a somewhat absorbing memoir story (half of it being in flashbacks) about the grown children of a dying but still ridiculously vibrant woman (Micaela Ramazzotti in youth / Stefani Sandrelli in old age) who was once a wild flighty gorgeous young thing dragging her wee children from home to home and sometimes to homelessness while falling in and out of love with their father (and other men).

You can trace the damage done in the generally strong performances and the film definitely gathers some cumulative emotional steam (the climactic act is entertaining, funny and unexpectedly endearing), but it's stretched a little thinly across numerous life episodes. And even though you "get" him, you do wish the sour grown man at its center would grow up a little bit.  B

I enjoyed it. But no, it's not a patch on I Am Love. Since Luca brought up Tangled, let's get our hair did in Italy.

The First Beautiful Thing has follicular drama of all varieties from deliciously lustrous (Micaela Ramazotti) to balding to sickbed wigs to plainly pretty to unruly to generic ... the hair, like the movie, has plentiful ups and downs.

I Am Love, on the other hand has magic locks just like Rapunzel's. Everyone's hair is epically beautiful; their golden, red, brown and pure white crowns (even the oldest characters have thick headfulls) are enough to make your arm hairs stand on end.

If there were an Oscar for hairstyling...

Should Case 39 be open or shut? Half and half for a laugh, perhaps?

Craig here, taking a look at Renée Zellweger's new cinema release. (There are a few mild spoilers contained)

Case 39 stars Zeéeeee as Emily Jenkins, a concerned social worker in a headband. She’s worried about the well being of a child. We’re more worried about her personal hair-care regime: when her hair is up, fixed in place with said headband, she’s out of danger; hair down means terror is likely afoot. Her life depends on the precarious positioning of her follicles. Make a note of the subtle differentiation as it will help guide you through the many twisty plot derivations of Christian Alvart’s new (though actually old*) horror-thriller.

Headbanded Emily Jenkins gets the titular case plopped on her desk, so she duly investigates a couple who she suspects have been mistreating their 10-year-old daughter Lillith (Jodelle Ferland). She scrambles to the couple's creepy house along with boss Ian McShane (growling an otherworldly accent as yet unidentified by literature or science), just as the parents are about to roast li’l Lill in the oven -- seriously, this scene is hilarious. Zellweger and McShane lay waste to moody-mom and bad-dad’s furniture and faces whilst rescuing the half-baked moppet. (McShane, trying out too-late for a role in The Expendables, literally dropkicks the mother into a table and indents a fridge with the father’s head - and McShane’s about 110 years-old! The Oscar for Best Supporting Sexagenarian Shit-Fit is his for the taking).

Be honest, does my hair look good like this?

Soppy ol' Emily, ditching the headband, gets to adopt Lillith and live happily... never after? ‘Cause, ah, you see, maybe there’s more to case 39 than our Zeéeeee bargained on (as we’ve only sat through half of the film's 109 minutes). Is Lillith actually as sweet and innocent as everybody initially thought? Could she be the devil with a dollhouse? If you haven’t guessed what’s happening by this point then you haven’t been paying attention to the headband theory. (Hair up = phew, safe; hair down = argh, get that spawn of Beelzebub off my property, post haste!)

Renée keeps the family dinner warm in Case 39

Emily soon forgets about cases 1 through 38 (all other kids in peril can obviously go take a jump) to do everything in her power to Get To The Bottom Of All This. There are a handful of amusing scenes along the way, and more than a few howlers peppering the plot; a fun so-bad-it's-good time’s almost to be had. If you're willing, try a few pre-movie drinks. One scene where Lillith asks a headbanded Zeéeeee if she could brush her hair had me shouting, 'Yes! For the love of God, yes! Take that headband away and brush her hair!'

Bradley Copper responds to Renée putting the Chicago soundtrack on.
and other captions.

There’s a naked Bradley Cooper as Zeéeeee's beefcake beau, who has his bath time royally ruined by a particularly pressing wasp problem; he then buzzes off halfway into the film (the script for The Hangover must have arrived.)  Although the scene where Ferland is interviewed by Cooper, and acts him and anyone else (in this scene and others) right off the screen, is genuinely creepy. Renée just puts on a tight face and stands by looking awkward. In a headband.

Renée is driven to dispair by her missing headband.

The editing may have been carried out by a drunken Edward Scissorhands, and the pace is defined by accident rather than design. Case 39 is more eventful than Joshua, but doesn’t have the daft-but-nifty twist or fun factor of Orphan - two other recent Is My Kid Satan's Spawn? genre entries. It’s so close to being a new trash gem, but, despite a grab-bag of chucklesome moments early on, it wimps out at the last minute with a wet whimper. Near the end Renée says, “You know, none of this should ever have happened!” Oh Zells Bells - you took the words right out of my mouth.

*The film was completed in 2006 but has only now seen the light of day, after an ever-shifting release date pattern that took in fifteen date changes over three countries.

Case 39 is in theaters now.