New York Film Festival 2011: Wrap

The Siren is late with this New York Film Festival wrap-up, but she felt like she owed it to Carey Mulligan, if no one else.

Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011)
Once upon a time the Siren took acting classes, and one day we embarked on a story-telling exercise. The idea was for the actor to take the stage and describe an incident from his life. His classmates would then tell him which parts they didn’t believe. First up was an earnest young woman from New Jersey--we’ll call her Angie. The Siren has forgotten most particulars of Angie’s story, but it began with a great deal of Boone’s Farm wine, which Angie said she consumed because she was young and foolish and “I thought you had to be drunk to have a good time.” The story ran through some mildly embarrassing hijinks. When Angie finished, there was a short silence.

Then, loud and clear from the back of the room came the voice of a guy from Tennessee: “We-ell, first of all, I don’t believe that you don’t have to be drunk to have a good time.”

And therein we have the Siren’s obstacle with Shame. She doesn’t believe having tons of sex is this big a drag. Porn--OK, maybe, when it reaches the point where it's your whole sex life. The Siren has known people who preferred porn to a partner. They became too put off by the fact that doing it with someone else involves mess and noise and exertion and flawed bodies--not to mention pre- and post-coital conversational formalities. Rich, handsome, single Brandon (Michael Fassbender) is addicted to porn, all right, but that sure doesn’t mean he won't go out and get laid with obsessive, addictive and utterly joyless regularity.

Director Steve McQueen must know many people have the Siren’s attitude, and he responds by daring the audience to find anything in his movie erotic, up to and including his lead actor’s traffic-stopping beauty. Much of the sex and nudity is shot from pitiless angles with the kind of office-building lighting that makes even the dewiest interns look like they have a case of stomach flu. The strategy reaches its nadir with a threesome, as the lugubrious score (the movie’s worst flaw) keeps sawing away to emphasize, "This is sad, this is dreary, so whatever you do, DON'T GET TURNED ON."

What saves the film from risibility is that sex-addiction isn’t its primary theme. Rather than perversion (actually, you don’t even get to see anything that qualifies as perverted, so if that's the selling point for you, consider this the Siren’s Consumer Report)--as the Siren was saying, rather than perversion, Shame is about near-fatally damaged people. Brandon is unable to connect with a single human being in one of the world’s most crowded cities. His trauma is obvious, but never specified--a good choice, since it would take a lot to explain a man this shattered. The two best scenes in the movie, consequently, have no sex at all. Both are shot in bravura long takes that enable the actors to show a huge range of reactions to one another. The first is Brandon’s attempt at a real date with a pretty coworker. The scene becomes a death-spiral of awkwardness, Fassbender showing that his character has only a vague notion of how to socialize when neither fucking nor the immediate possibility of fucking is involved.

The second is an extended fight, shot from the back of Brandon’s couch, between him and his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan). She’s moved into his Dwell-ready apartment because her own life is also a mess. Now, you may recall that the Siren did not cotton to Mulligan in Drive. Well, here she was marvelous. She’s a perfect take on a certain kind of rootless urban girl, self-sabotaging her own desultory pursuit of a career and throwing herself at men who transparently don’t give a damn. There's a suggestion of incestuous attraction, but whatever Brandon's desires may be, at this point he does have one boundary, and Sissy is it. The feeling he has for her is as close to ordinary affection as he gets, and it’s painful to watch him provoking her into a fight, because it’s obvious why he’s doing it: She’s preventing him from pursuing his addiction.

The Siren can’t call Shame wholly successful, no way. But it has some extraordinarily accomplished acting, it's heartfelt and sometimes moving. Uneven efforts like this one can be more interesting to watch and discuss than many more coldly efficient products.



The Kid With the Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2011)
The Siren got one lovely moment out of the NYFF press conferences, when the Dardenne brothers came onstage to discuss The Kid With the Bike, the story of a friendless boy and his frantic search for belonging. Someone asked about the use of music, and one brother said they hadn’t used any before. The Kid, however, uses a short passage from the Emperor Concerto at several points, as when the title character Cyril (Thomas Doret) is falling miserably asleep. They thought of the music, said M. Dardenne, as a caress: “It’s what Cyril is missing in his life, which is love.” In that declaration is all the power of this movie. Doret has a pugnacious face that could be easily cast as the cafeteria bully, and the character is a volcanically difficult little brat, stubborn and defiant, constantly on the move, usually in the direction of trouble. But from the first moments the Dardennes show why this unlovable child desperately needs love, as he tries to contact his indifferent father, and later is deceived by a charismatic young criminal. In the world the Dardennes create, so urgent and universal is the hunger for affection that when Cyril locks his arms around a stranger, merely to prevent his minders from taking him away, it has the power to involve the stranger in the boy’s life forever. Deeply emotional, and a beautiful film.

*****

Here the Siren offers her ranking of the 15 films she saw at NYFF 2011. The top three get her very strongest endorsement; the next four are highly recommended; the next five are worthwhile, with reservations. The Siren endorses the bottom three only for those with a passion for the directors or for Marilyn Monroe.

A Separation
Le Havre
This Is Not a Film
The Kid With a Bike
Melancholia
Carnage
You Are Not I
Shame
Miss Bala
Woman With Red Hair
The Loneliest Planet
A Dangerous Method
The Turin Horse
My Week With Marilyn
We Can’t Go Home Again

New York Film Festival 2011: My Week With Marilyn

If the Siren’s attitude toward Marilyn Monroe could be graphed as a fever chart, it would have two lines. One line would represent the Siren’s opinion of Monroe’s acting, and it would show a steady, if not steep, rise. The other line would chart the Siren’s interest in the Monroe myth. It would resemble a headlong tumble down the south face of K2.

Unfortunately for the Siren’s patience with My Week With Marilyn, the new movie just screened for the press at the New York Film Festival, the myth is still what sells.

In act one, whippersnapper Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) uses his refined upper-class moxie to get a job as third assistant director on Laurence Olivier’s ill-starred directorial outing, The Prince and Showgirl. That part is palatable, as young Colin rushes about making himself indispensable, and there’s a chance for Toby Jones to utter some choice lines, including one delivered on learning of Arthur Miller’s (Dougray Scott) visa troubles: “All those pain-in-the-ass New York intellectuals are Reds.”

The second act is pretty enjoyable. That’s where Colin hangs around as Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) shoots his movie and copes with Monroe’s (Michelle Williams) bizarre work ethic, which included much dedication to the Lee Strasberg distillation of the Method and almost none to such trivia as punctuality and knowing the lines. Little fresh material is evident, except possibly a conception of Monroe’s drama coach Paula Strasberg (Zoe Wanamaker) that does not paint her as a complete gargoyle. But it’s fun, even if the score is vacuous, the camerawork never once rises above director Simon Curtis’ BBC-TV roots, and Emma Watson plays a love interest who should have been left on the cutting-room floor. The Siren certainly hopes Dame Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench) really was that charming and understanding. Branagh is hilarious, whether remarking that teaching Monroe to act is “like teaching Urdu to a badger,” or making a priceless face as he fields a call from the absent actress and says, “Colin, it’s for you.”

None of the actors look much like their real-life counterparts. Williams is Monroe-ish only around the cheekbones, and Branagh is Olivier only from the cheekbones up. Judi Dench looks like Judi Dench. Julia Ormond fares worst. She has only Vivien Leigh’s coloring, not her features, but Ormond is still a beautiful woman, and here she’s subjected to lighting and makeup that would have sent the real Leigh into one of her depressive breakdowns. It is one of the film’s strengths, though, that once the initial shock wears off, the lack of physical matching doesn’t much matter. Branagh’s speaking forcefully recalls Olivier’s Old Vic accents, and Williams’ voice blew the Siren away--fully Marilyn, yet believable, consistent and 100% free of parody.

Williams is, in fact, superb. The Siren has lost count of the actresses she’s seen playing Monroe, but Williams leaves them all in the dust. She takes the most imitated woman of all time and manages a performance that recalls every gesture and effect, while still creating a character. It’s a remarkable feat of acting, and Branagh’s work, despite his having to spend too much time musing out loud about Marilyn, is still right up there with Williams.

But what shall it profit an actor to give a good performance in a movie this trite? For any interest in My Week With Marilyn vanishes as soon as the much-vaunted week begins. That’s when we’re supposedly getting to know Marilyn the Woman. And it’s the same goddamn Marilyn we’ve all been seeing since approximately 4:26 am on Aug. 5, 1962. The wounds of her childhood abandonment and loneliness, her rotten luck in love, the pressure oh the pressure. Jesus Christ on a soundstage, you don’t need the Siren to recap any of it. She could hand her Macbook to a stranger on the Columbus Circle subway platform, ask for one paragraph on Marilyn Monroe, and those scenes are what you’d get.

So the Siren’s graph diverges more strongly now than ever. This story that purports to give us Marilyn as she was off-camera only winds up proving what the Siren has always known to be true: Monroe on camera was, and always will be, vastly more worthwhile.

New York Film Festival 2011: Trio

A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi) The Siren’s film of the festival so far. It deals with issues a good number of us will face eventually: a marriage (Leila Hatami and Peyman Moaadi) in trouble; a child (Sarina Farhadi, an absolute wonder) whose care and education must be secured; and a father deep in the clutches of Alzheimer’s. Into this mix comes an untrained care worker (Sareh Bayat) with money and husband (Shahab Hosseini) troubles of her own. Add the vagaries of the legal system, and this domestic drama takes on suspense that would do Hitchcock proud. Director Asghar Farhadi doles out information scrap by scrap through a searching, subtle camera. The focus on the ethics of lying--whom it helps, whom it hurts--and a child’s painful initiation into the world of adult deceit reminded the Siren of The Fallen Idol, one of her favorite films. The textures of life in some Middle Eastern societies reveal themselves slowly and exquisitely. The Siren was caught by glimpses of things she had observed in southern Lebanon--the many variations in the way women veil; the wide stone steps and big, screenless windows; the tight terraces and eerily quiet buildings that open onto chaotic streets. The performances are so precisely calibrated that watching Hatami cut vegetables or Moaadi open a door with a key reveals volumes about their characters. Often the Siren observes plaintively that more average moviegoers would like old movies if only they could see the right ones. She’s convinced that they would like brand-new foreign ones, too, if we could persuade them to take in something as good as A Separation.





This Is Not a Film (2010, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi). The Siren had no idea what to expect from this work, smuggled out of Iran as Jafar Panahi appeals his sentence for the crime of making films. What she got was a self-portrait of an artist who is as dryly understated and as moving as his actors. Filmed on digital with Jafar Panahi’s colleague, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, this shattering documentary shows one day for Panahi under house arrest--Fireworks Wednesday, an Iranian holiday. Panahi rattles around his apartment, discussing his appeal with his lawyer, feeding a scene-stealing lizard, making tea, and trying to describe the movie that he wants to make. As he marks the elements of a scene by laying tape on his carpet and describing the action, you see that the movie is as beautifully and exactly laid out in his mind as if he had already made it. The title This Is Not a Film is a dark joke; Panahi has been sentenced to six years in prison and banned from directing and screenwriting for 20 years. At one point Mirtahmasb is heard saying we’re “behind the scenes of Iranian filmmakers not making films." Later Panahi, his emotions getting the better of him, says “cut” and Mirtahmasb reminds him, in a gentle sally, that he can’t say that: “It’s an offense.” Panahi shows some scenes from his films on a DVD player, says that location can do the direction for him, and talks about the happy accidents that can take a scene to another level. We see several such accidents here, from a crane that sweeps within a few feet of his terrace like the sword of Damocles, to a chance encounter with a young man collecting garbage. The man tells him, just before a closing shot of heart-stopping perfection, “Mr. Panahi, please don’t come outside. They’ll see you with the camera.” Two weeks ago, it was revealed that Mirtahmasb is one of six filmmakers jailed in Iran, adding his plight to that of Panahi. The ghastly regime in Tehran wants to rob all these artists of what could be their most productive years as filmmakers. This Is Not a Film demonstrates that in doing so, they are robbing us all.





A Dangerous Method (2011, David Cronenberg) Les bon temps at the NYFF could not possibly roule forever, and on Tuesday they hit a brick wall named Keira Knightley. Not since Nicolas Cage and his adenoids damn near ruined Peggy Sue Got Married has the Siren witnessed a movie so heavily damaged by a lead performance. Knightley plays Sabina Spielrein, who at first is being treated by Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), at his Swiss clinic, for that catch-all early 20th-century diagnosis “hysteria.” Later she embarks on an affair with Jung, as he develops a mentor relationship with Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson) and all three thrash out the foundations of psychoanalysis. After the screening, director David Cronenberg talked about the near-disappearance of the hysteria diagnosis and how difficult it is nowadays to get a bead on what its manifestations were like. Well, as played by Knightley, hysteria is facial tics, jaw spasms suggesting advanced tetanus, flailing limbs, rolling and darting eyes and sudden marionette-like jerks. None of these elaborate gestures suggest mental illness; instead they suggest distractions born of a superficial performance. Even later, when supposedly cured, or least less hysterical, Knightley is--in a word seldom applied to beautiful actresses--hammy. My old friend Glenn Kenny, for the record, went on Twitter to say “OF COURSE Knightley's performance in Method is disruptive. Her sexuality is the monster in this Cronenberg monster movie.” The trouble with this diagnosis is that Knightley doesn't show sexuality, either. This movie concerns people who spent their lives proving sex is in our minds, but sex is also inextricably corporeal, as indeed is acting. And Knightley is too busy choreographing her bits of business to portray anything recognizable as female lust, let alone release. Fassbender, who was fantastic as the still center of mounting hysteria in the cellar scene in Inglorious Basterds, has a hard time demonstrating passion for Sabina. Then again, he isn’t playing opposite believable illness or desire, just their seventh-generation Xerox copies. When Jung gets a respite in the form of a scene with his wife (Sarah Gadon), or better still Mortenson’s tranquil but savagely observant Freud, the movie fulfills the promise of its plot. The scenes between Jung and Freud are the ones that show thwarted passion, as acolyte and idol form an intense bond, only to grow increasingly distrustful of one another. The script is tight and witty, and A Dangerous Method is a gorgeous film, not merely for the beauty of the settings but for the way Cronenberg’s camera seeks them out. By her last three scenes in the movie, Knightley starts reacting to the people in front of her, and she gains some fitful poignance. But by then it’s too late.

New York Film Festival 2011: Four More

["Why is the Siren writing up new films?" a few of you have asked. Have the rebels taken over the radio station? Is someone threatening to torch the Siren’s Warner Archive discs unless she cooperates? No, it is far more prosaic: The New York Film Festival is having press screenings, and they said the Siren could come, as long as she sits up straight and doesn’t spill her coffee. And the Siren thought it would be fun to run a newspaper. But nobody asked her, so she decided that writing short takes on new films also would be fun. That’s it. The Siren is still watching TCM. These capsules are not being filed by a robot Siren in a long dress.]

Melancholia (2011) This latest from Lars von Trier, or Prince Motormouth as the Siren now calls him, was unexpectedly marvelous. Divided like Gaul into three parts: a magnificently surreal flash-forward to the apocalypse that is about to hit in the form of a planet colliding with our own; a midsection showing the slow-motion cataclysm that is the wedding of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) to Michael (Alexander Skarsgard); and a finale focusing on Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), Justine’s sister, as the end approaches and the extravagantly depressed Justine drifts around uttering downers like the bad fairy at a christening. Despite its plot and preoccupations, Melancholia merits adjectives that the Siren had not previously associated with von Trier: subtle, charming, sympathetic. Some subtlety shows early, as Dunst seems like a normal, albeit disorganized bride--but small things tell us something is terribly wrong with this beauty, until (this is von Trier, after all) the party goes south in a very, very big way. The charm is largely from Kiefer Sutherland as Gainsbourg’s husband, a deeply practical man trying to cope with situations in which practicality is of no use whatever. And the sympathy comes from Gainsbourg as Claire, a caretaker personality par excellence. Justine tells Claire, with ferocious relish, that the world is evil and no one will miss it, but Claire responds to doomsday with, “Where will my child grow up?” The liveliest movie about clinical depression that the Siren can imagine, and do not mistake that for faint praise.



The Turin Horse (2011), which Bela Tarr has said will be his final film, begins with a narrated anecdote about Friedrich Nietzsche's breakdown, which was occasioned by seeing the driver of a hansom cab beat his horse. After the story is told over a black screen, the film follows the elderly driver home. He and his daughter put the horse in the stable, and for days the two endure a windstorm as savage, and as exquisitely photographed, as that in Victor Seastrom's The Wind. The drudgery of their lives is shown in relentless detail, from the daughter dressing and undressing the old man, to the way they both eat boiled potatoes with their bare hands.

It is not boring, exactly, despite the long takes that show much of this in real time and despite the resolute lack of extended dialogue. There is plenty of opportunity to think about the despair of poverty, and matters such as: The absence of beauty or ornament in the house, save a glimpse of what could be a photograph of the woman's mother. The lack of books, until a band of gypsies brings one by. How mere cleanliness must seem a dream of luxury, as the daughter rinses the dishes and her face and never uses soap. Why showing kindness to your work animals might also be a luxury. Why a horse might want to commit suicide.

In the background plays the stringed dirge that constitutes the score, as mercilessly repetitive as a music box. The score does switch off from time to time, such as when a neighboring blowhard stomps in, asks for some local hooch, says the end may be nigh and delivers a rant about the debasement of modern society. At other times you hear the wind, whose shrieks and whistles reminded the Siren of the Apaches in Stagecoach. After a second or two spent forlornly hoping some equivalent of marauding Apaches might show up, the Siren began to contemplate why she felt so unmoved by this famed director's swan song, which is so far the only Tarr she has seen.

This high-styled, proudly austere movie presents its bullet points as plainly as many a melodrama--poverty, humanity, mortality, futility. In order to find The Turin Horse great, the Siren would have to believe that Tarr's refusal to give an inch to an audience's desire for characters and a story is a virtue in itself. And/or she would have to believe that through 146 minutes of well water, boiled potatoes and a horse on hunger strike, Tarr had given her insights about people, or behavior, or our place on this earth that are as valuable as those to be had, for instance, from some passengers on a stagecoach to Lordsburg. And the Siren believes neither.



Miss Bala (2011, Gerardo Naranjo) The Siren has been seeing some NYFF films as close to cold as one gets in the digital age. All she had read about this selection from Mexico was that it concerned a beauty-pageant contestant who gets caught up with drug gangs. That sounded as though it might be a thriller. Um, no. Miss Bala is an extraordinarily bleak social drama that happens to feature suspense and a great deal of violence. Stephanie Sigman plays Laura Guerrero, whose simple goal of winning a beauty pageant drags her into the drug wars. Visually and thematically the film recalls Traffic, but the indictment of global folly is even stronger in Miss Bala, which after the first quarter-hour shows not a single moment of social order. The U.S. DEA agents, when they appear, are as brutal to Laura as anyone else. While it has the propulsive drive that comes from outrage, Miss Bala is what they call a hard sit. Events wipe out the heroine’s courage and even her personality, until she focuses on survival and nothing more. This is what swathes of Mexico have become, the film says; and this is what we’ve all signed up for.



Carnage (2011, Roman Polanski) When the Siren watches Supernanny with her husband, he often winds up muttering, “It’s about the parents, this show. It’s always about the parents.” Carnage is a supercharged Supernanny episode, in which the kids have been sent to have lunch in the trailer, while the adults expose their warts via the cut-glass complete sentences of playwright and co-screenwriter Yasmina Reza. John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster play Michael and Penelope Longstreet, the parents of a boy who just had two teeth knocked out by a stick-wielding peer. The parents of the perpetrator, Nancy and Alan Cowan (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz), visit Michael and Penelope’s boringly tasteful Brooklyn apartment to settle things in amicable fashion. How well that goes may be judged from the title. The fun--and the movie had the house rocking with laughter at many points--comes from watching four intrepid performers rage around the set like a wrecking crew sent to knock down the Actors’ Studio. The Siren was hanging on Waltz’s every smirk, and transfixed by Foster’s choice to have her character’s body language get tighter and tenser even as Penelope comes further unglued. The whole effect is highly artificial, but not stagey in the least. The Siren just read Glenn Kenny--"a potential masterclass in staging, blocking, camera angle, shot selection, shot length, pacing in terms of both rhythm of actual cutting and duration of shot”--and seconds the motion. Carnage is smart about class differences; the couples’ exchanges about careers and accomplishments are often more wounding than the open hostilities over the children. The film doesn’t offer much on the topic of parenting. But it’s clear why: The episodes that bracket Carnage tell us that children are acting in their own play. Mom and Dad may storm and stress, but they’re audience members, not directors.

New York Film Festival 2011 (Plus 1)

The Siren writes up her brief impressions of five movies she has seen so far at the New York Film Festival 2011. In the order viewed:



Woman With Red Hair (1979, Tatsumi Kumashiro). A so-called pink film; the Siren had seen some of these before but hadn't been aware that they constituted a genre, still less that this genre was what she was going to be confronted with on Day 1, Film 1 of the New York Film Festival's press screenings. You could say the Siren was ill-prepared; the last Japanese film she watched was 24 Eyes. Woman With Red Hair isn't something the Siren particularly wants to analyze at great length, or even short length, but it reminded her a bit of The Devil in Miss Jones, only with much less nudity and much better framing. The lead actress (Junko Miyashita) is gorgeous.

The Loneliest Planet (2011, Julia Loktev). Contempt Goes Backpacking. We spend a long while watching the well-scrubbed couple (Hani Furstenberg and Gael Garcia Bernal) have well-scrubbed sex, in between trekking the wild spaces of the Republic of Georgia, and we await an Event. Then the Event happens and…All right, no spoilers here, so the Siren puts it this way. Martin Amis, in his 1984 article on Brian De Palma, remarks that Body Double (which the Siren loves) "could be exploded by a telephone call." This movie explodes if one character turns to the other on one of many arduous hikes and says, "What the hell…?" Has definite rewards, like the lovely score by Richard Skelton, and some enthralling moments, like a long-distance look at the couple and their guide walking along a riverbank after the Event, and a graceful, deeply emotional shot that zooms in on Furstenberg's hair coiled at her neck. But overall, a frustrating travelogue.

You Are Not I (1981, Sara Driver). Based on a Paul Bowles short story; the film's negative was destroyed in a warehouse flood and recently restored from a print discovered in the writer's own collection. It is the pleasingly spooky tale of a woman incarcerated in an insane asylum, who uses a fiery car accident outside the asylum's gates to escape and return to her sister's house. The Siren loved the black-and-white, bare-trees-in-late-fall ambience, via Jim Jarmusch as cinematographer. Very much of its 1980s New Wave time, including the humor. "Just don't let her get excited," is the advice proffered on how to handle the patient (Suzanne Fletcher), who scarcely moves and is given to thousand-yard stares that would scare the wits out of Nurse Ratched. Didn't seem to be much of an audience favorite, but this is the Siren's kind of Halloween movie.

Le Havre (2011, Aki Kaurismaki) Marcel, a shoeshine man (André Wilms) in the port city of the title, has scant income and a devoted but ailing wife, Arletty (Kati Outinen). He winds up sheltering a Gabonese refugee boy (Blondin Miguel), with the help of a bottomless supply of kindhearted neighbors, one seriously lovable dog, and one cop (Jean-Pierre Daroussin) who says "I don't much like people," but doesn't mean it. A fairy tale about real-world problems that is blissfully unmoored to reality of any kind. Contains a Mickey-and-Judy plot twist, a shot that echoes a Susan Hayward movie (you'll know it when you see it), and a deplorable French pun. The squarest movie the Siren has seen all year, and she's including her TCM viewing here. She was crazy about it, and would have been even if the main couple weren't named Marcel and Arletty.

We Can't Go Home Again (1976, Nicholas Ray). A major restoration of the director's last film, a labor of love by his widow, Susan, and an important piece of film history. The Siren is grateful that it's available, and grateful to have seen it. She only wishes she had actually liked it. Many of the images have power, but the movie itself does not, weighed down as it is by dorm-room philosophizing and students who are painfully unnatural on screen, even though they are evidently playing variations on themselves. Ray's beautiful voice provides the narration, and the movie perks up when he's in the frame. At times it resembles an oddball, self-valorizing version of To Sir With Love, only this "Sir" is preaching psychosexual and political liberation instead of clean clothes and good manners. It's an opportunity to see a celebrated auteur wrestling his demons to the end, but in terms of cinema, the Siren got a lot more out of Born to Be Bad.


And the plus one, such as it is:



I Don't Know How She Does It (2011, Douglas McGrath). The Siren has loathed few novels to the degree that she loathed Allison Pearson's 2002 book about the problems of a hedge-fund manager trying to balance work and the demands of her husband and two kids. The character of Kate Reddy was so spoiled and abrasive that even when she voiced a complaint the Siren has made herself, the Siren's response was, "Oh, go soak your head." The good news is that Sarah Jessica Parker gives Kate some urgently needed warmth, and Aline Brosh Mckenna once again turns in a screenplay that's much better than the book it's based on (the other being The Devil Wears Prada). The bad news is that the movie is slackly plotted, offers nothing to much to look at except Christina Hendricks and Pierce Brosnan (who are wasted with prodigal carelessness), and despite the occasional wry chuckle (mostly via Olivia Munn's Momo), the film has no actual wit. The actors all deserved better, but this is probably the best job that could have been done with the source material.