For as vast a city as New York is, most people are nonetheless somewhat familiar with its various boroughs and neighboring cities, but still, City Island, a small fishing/seaport community in the Bronx is rarely mentioned within the context of New York. Enter writer-director Raymond De Felitta to remedy such pervasive anonymity. City Island is an atypical tale of family dysfunction and secrets, including a patriarch (Andy Garcia) who aspires to be the next Marlon Brando, a matriarch who lusts after the convicted felon her husband brings home (he is a prison guard, or corrections officer as he likes to distinguish) with the hidden motive that the parolee is his son, a daughter who strips at a local dive to hide the fact that she got kicked out of school, and a son who has a fetish for feeding extremely large women. So yeah, family wise, Father of the Bride it is not.

Promotional poster for City Island

Andy Garcia as Vince Rizzo commences the film with “You asked me about my secret, my most personal secret, my secret of all secrets. Like most people, I guess I’ve got a few.” One of those secrets is taking an acting class in the city, where he meets a somewhat over the hill British actress who has yet to catch her big break. This also furnishes Alan Arkin with a memorable role as their acting teacher, Michael, a man who has clearly been at the acting game for quite some time and who gives an impassioned diatribe about the pointlessness of pauses in acting dialogue, specifically singling out Marlon Brando, incidentally Vince’s inspiration for wanting to pursue this career in the first place.

Michael throws Molly (Emily Mortimer) and Vince together in an acting exercise that involves telling each other their most personal secret. After they are given their assignment, the two strangers head over to Empire Diner (which I highly recommend going to if you happen to be in the vicinity of New York) to confess. Only Vince is the one who does most of the confessing, shocked by the recent discovery that the son he left behind twenty-four years ago, Tony Nardella (Steven Strait), has wound up in the very prison where he works. Molly counsels him on the importance of telling his wife, Joyce (Julianna Margulies), as a means to reconnect with her. But, in the meantime, she stays mum about her own secret.

Emily Mortimer as deeply troubled actress Molly

Vince partially takes Molly’s advice and brings Tony into his home as a courtesy to the memory of Tony’s mother, who Tony sums up as a “drunk whore.” All the while Vince Jr. (Ezra Miller), possibly the most demented of the family, lusts after his overweight neighbor, joining her online fetish group to gain a twenty-four hour glimpse into her kitchen while she cooks, eats, and turns a profit. Vince Jr.’s sister, Vivian (Dominik Garcia-Lorido, who looks a bit like a poor man’s Jamie Lynn Sigler), also brings a whole bag of issues home with her on “spring break,” though for her it’s just a week she is forced to give up a panty full of bills in order to keep up the ruse that she is still in college.

Behind the scenes of City Island

The potential for drama in this hotbed of subterfuge, hidden truths, and fear of disapproval is what makes City Island the latest example of what a film about a family in turmoil should look like. And, apart from the extreme suspension of disbelief that goes with accepting the idea that Vince miraculously lands a part in a Martin Scorsese movie and the opening titles that look like they were made using iMovie, this film sets a new standard for the tragicomic nature of families.

A few months back, the Aero Theater had a Rosanna Arquette double bill. I, Desperately Seeking Susan fanatic that I am, absolutely had to attend. But, to my distemper, they were showing After Hours first. Instead of enduring the first film of this brief Arquette retrospective like a good little ducky, I fucked about on the deserted sidewalks of Montana Avenue (why the fuck does Peet’s have to close at an hour that an even an octogenarian would consider early?). Out of ways to pass the time before DSS started, I finally went into the theater to see the last twenty minutes of After Hours. That’s all it took to fascinate and addict me.

Promotional poster for After Hours

I could barely concentrate through the Q&A with Rosanna Arquette (who was wearing a Love Saves the Day worthy leopard coat) or through my beloved Desperately Seeking Susan. All I could think about was the necessity of renting After Hours. When I did, mere hours later, I think my obsession augmented tenfold and left me to wonder: Why is this Scorsese film so rarely acknowledged? It seems to be known only as the art project that helped him pass the time while he waited for financing to come through for The Last Temptation of Christ. It is also a film that, while portraying New York in its usual Scorsese-like, gritty fashion, is too campy in comparison to the rest of his work. Which is probably why Tim Burton (and don’t even get me started on how much I can’t stand that he is the go-to director for camp) was originally slated to helm the directorial role. When Burton learned of Scorsese’s interest in the project, however, he modestly stepped down.

Rosanna Arquette as latent psychotic Marcy Franklin puts all the moves on Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne)

The source material for After Hours was grafted from radio personality Joe Frank’s “Lies” (the excerpt of which can be heard on panopticist.com). Screenwriter Joseph Minion extracts practically everything from this radio segment, including the bagel and cream cheese paperweights, Marcy’s weird confession about being raped for six hours by an old boyfriend, and her admission that she is married and writes her husband everyday. Luckily, the legal system was there to help Joe Frank receive a tidy settlement in exchange for remaining mum about the whole “let me steal your idea without giving you even the slightest bit of credit” thing.

Linda Fiorentino as paperweight artist Kiki Bridges

Apart from being considered an overblown homage to the visual paranoia elicited by the films of Alfred Hitchcock, After Hours is not just under appreciated for its place in Scorsese’s body of work, but for the artful and insidious implications of 80s life, centered in the oh so chic Soho area of New York, while still denotive of the  collective American work force and lifestyle at that time. For one, Paul is a word processor who has to bear the excruciating tedium of his job and help train others in the process, as in the beginning scene when he is explaining something to his trainee and then has to pretend to listen to said trainee tell him that this isn’t what he really wants to do and that someday he’ll start a magazine for writers with a kitschy sensibility. The monotony of Paul’s life is elucidated with pitch perfect clarity when he is so bored with watching TV (using a bitchin’ channel changer, I might add) that he resorts to going to a coffee shop to read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, leading to his demented romance with Marcy, a pursuit that, by the end of the night, prompts him to scream at the universe: “What do you want from me? What have I done? I’m just a word processor for Chrissakes!”

Paul Hackett: Slave to the whims of the universe

For me, the appeal of After Hours is in its guileful thematic meaning, not its dramatic illustration of downtown New York and the madness that goes with it. What After Hours reveals is something altogether different. It is hard to imagine now, but most people were not grateful to have a job in 1985. The prosperity of the country at the time left the job market rife with opportunities, keeping the sentiment of gratefulness out of the picture and catapulting the desire to just let loose to the forefront, synopsized in Paul’s single line: “I just wanted to leave my apartment, maybe meet a nice girl and now I’ve gotta die for it!?”

New York is a lovely place. In spite of being, let’s admit it, just a hair overrated, it is a city with the charm and multitudinousness of a Fritz Lang film. That being said, the creators of Paris, Je T’aime, Emmanuel Benbihy and Tristan Carne, seem determined to further their film series on cities to love with the concisely and repetitively titled New York, I Love You. Just like Paris, Je T’aime, it has a cast list that reads like a sighting at The Brown Derby (if, of course, this assortment of famous people were alive during the restaurant’s glory years) and follows the same pattern of intertwining stories to cover as much ground as possible.

Promotional poster for New York, I Love You

The film starts out comically enough, with Gus (Bradley Cooper) getting in a debate with a cab driver and another passenger (Justin Bartha, the groom and Bradley Cooper’s co-star in The Hangover) over which way they should take to get to Williamsburg. The cab driver insists Bleecker is the best, but clearly, it’s only a ploy to sit in traffic longer so he can make more money (ah, the New York cab driver is such a slimy breed). When no one can agree, the cab driver exiles both of them from his car. This opening would seem to set the tone for a light-hearted glance at living in the city of dreams (or is that what they call L.A.?), but no, shockingly, it does not, and we are led down a twisty path of pathos ultimately stating, “Do not come to New York unless you want your spirit broken and your emotions extracted.” Maybe that’s the secret intention of the film: Staving people off for the benefit of population control in New York.

Bradley Cooper as Gus, a man who spends most of his time in cabs

Where Paris, Je T’aime at least gives one a sense of being in the city, of what it might be like to live there, New York, I Love You does not bestow the city with any sort of colorful identity. It could be any grey metropolis really: Chicago, Berlin, Seattle, take your pick. Even the actors seem lost amid the banal plotlines of the script. Natalie Portman, always eager to show off a bald head, plays Rifka, a young Hassid who must be married to a man she does not really love. Mira Nair, who directed this segment and can usually be counted on for quality, turns the story into a trite forbidden romance, where Rifka knows she cannot be with Mansuhkhbai (Irrfan Khan), the Indian she negotiates prices with in the diamond trade.

Natalie Portman as Rifka, walking with the husband she doesn't really feel a spark with

Another disappointing segment is the one directed by Shunji Iwai, centering around a music composer (Orlando Bloom) and the assistant to the man he is comosing the music for (Christina Ricci). The only interesting elements of which are deferential references to John Lennon and Dostoyevsky.

A behind the scenes shot of Orlando Bloom and Christina Ricci

Amid the melancholic anecdotes are a painter who dies before he can paint the woman he considers to be his muse, a woman (Julie Christie) who must resist the urge to hurl herself from a hotel building, and an old couple (Cloris Leachman and Eli Wallach) celebrating their sixty-third anniversary. The combination makes for an altogether grim portrait of New York City living. Maybe the only truly blithe segment of the film is the one directed by Jiang Wen featuring Hayden Christensen and Rachel Bilson, and it’s really only tolerable because there are pretty people to look at.

New York: Not just for haggard, poverty stricken people

Still, there is no stopping the creative team behind the “Insert City Here, I Love You” series. Apparently, there is a Jerusalem, I Love You and a Rio, Eu Te Amo in the works. Maybe if they make something called Los Angeles, I Fucking Hate You it won’t come across nearly as cheesy.

It took about ten seconds for Steven Soderbergh to gain a foothold in the world of film with his low-budget, but meaningful and slightly perverse debut Sex, Lies, and Videotape. The themes and style of this film were seemingly forgotten by Soderbergh once he began to make the Ocean’s Eleven trilogy. But in 2002, something pulled Soderbergh back into the dark, seedy underbelly type genre when he pitched Full Frontal to Miramax (rest in peace).

Promotional poster for Full Frontal

This is not to say that Soderbergh ever really abandoned his roots in depicting subtle human decay: Traffic, The Good German, and, more recently, The Girlfriend Experience all maintained the integrity and tongue in cheek gravity that has become associated with Soderbergh’s pastiche. In all of the abovementioned, he is sardonically pointing out, “Yeah, life is absurdly unjust, but why not have George Clooney, Brad Pitt, or Matt Damon endure some sort of plight to make the human experience more palatable.”  What sets Full Frontal apart is that it is an unquestionable reconsideration of Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Soderbergh probably sold it so unabashedly that way to the Weinsteins just so he could get it made. Like Arty (played by Just Shoot Me’s Enrico Colantoni), one of the characters in the film, says, “It’s all marketplace bullshit.” 

Don't be fooled by the demure appearance: Soderbergh knows how to get shit done

The other most notable characteristic shared between Sex, Lies… and Full Frontal is the absolutely voyeuristic quality one feels in observing either film. In Sex, Lies..., the reasons for this sentiment are understandable: You’ve got James Spader (never one to pass up a role as an asshole or pervert) taping various women sharing their intensely private sexual history. But in Full Frontal, there is something more indirect about the voyeurism. The film seems to go along as any narrative normally would up until the middle, when all of the sudden the viewer is alerted to the fact that this entire film is just that–a film. None of the other events up until this point were actually real. Julia Roberts is not a reporter named Catherine, but an actress named Francesca playing her. Her interview subject, Nicholas, is not really that person either, but an actor named Calvin (played by Blair Underwood). The quagmiric character entanglements persist as the film progresses, particularly between Lee (Catherine Keener), Carl (David Hyde Pierce), and Nicholas.

Catherine Keener plays the dysfunctional, adultering wife of David Hyde Pierce in Full Frontal

While the majority of Soderbergh’s movies possess a despairing air, Full Frontal is again the bastard film child in that it sticks rather firmly to its general disconsolateness. Even some of the more obscure subplots, like Nicky Katt as Hitler in one of Arty’s plays, do not provide very much in the way of comic relief. Yet, there is one piece of dialogue that threads the entire string of misery together, making sense of it in a way. It comes from Carl, well after he’s been fired from his job at Los Angeles magazine and his dog has nearly died from overdosing on pot brownies, in the simple, but incisively written: “You just have to keep hoping that…there’s more.”

The political satire has been underground for a time, maybe as a result of fear or maybe as a result of contempt and apathy for the current state of government on any continent. But the silence of this film genre has finally been broken by Armando Iannucci‘s In The Loop.

Promotional poster for In The Loop

The non-specifics of the film are part of what makes it so accessible. No particular president and no particular prime minister is targeted because, at this point, it’s fairly safe to say that, no matter who is in office, every administration seems to have an inevitable brush with incompetency, a fact embodied by one of the leading characters in the film, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), the Secretary of State for International Development (what a bull shit title) in Britain.

Actor Peter Capaldi in a spoof of the ever so popular Obama bumper sticker

When Simon Foster makes the comment on a radio program that he feels war is “unforeseeable,” everyone starts to fucking panic. Malcolm Tucker, the chief of communications, immediately hunts Foster down to verbally lynch him for his stupidity. Obviously, saying that war is unforeseeable is a direct threat to both Britain and America’s bread and butter of an industry. Threatening peace, in a way, is almost the same as threatening poverty (for arms traders and world leaders with a stake in companies like Unocal).

Head of communications bitching out Simon Foster for being mildly retarded in his comment about war

Damage control is sought by banning Foster from any upcoming public appearances, a punishment quickly cast aside when his new assistant, Toby Wright (Chris Addison) gets him a seat at the powwow with U.S. senator Karen Clarke (Mimi Kennedy). Not realizing that he is only there as “meat in the room,” a political body to fill the space, Foster begins blabbering incoherently when personally asked by Karen Clarke whether or not he is against war in the Middle East. Foster tries, ineffectively, to give a dual answer, but only ends up looking more foolish and indecisive than ever.

Another victim of Malcolm's (left) verbal lashings is assistant to Simon Foster, Toby Wright

Feeling vulnerable and confused after the political gathering, Simon is approached by a slew of reporters outside the building, where he further backs himself into a corner by saying, “In order to obtain peace, you have to climb the mountain of conflict.” This statement is instantly interpreted to mean Foster is now in favor of a war and sends Malcolm into a berserk state of fury. Instead of sacking Foster, however, Malcolm sends him, per the request of the PM, to D.C. where he will be insignificant enough as a political figure to stay out of trouble. This, of course, is not how the plan works out as there is another senator, Karen Clarke’s rival, you might say, named Linton Barwick who wants to use Foster for his own ends to encourage a war in much the same way that Karen Clarke and Lieutenant General George Miller (James Gandolfini) wish to use him as a buttress to support their argument against going to war.

The British chief of communications and the American general go head to head

With interminable conflict and frenzied confusion on both sides of the Atlantic, it seems that, for all of the intricate deception, nothing is actually getting accomplished and no one is really getting what they want. This reality, presented so acutely on film by Iannucci, is a reality that occurs daily on the international political front. In The Loop serves as a farcical mirror to be held up to the world powers at the forefront of decision making.