Ms. Smarty Pants Know It All

You don’t have to love, or even like Joan Rivers, to appreciate this documentary. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work covers the work aspects of Joan Rivers’s 75th year.

That’s right. She’s 75 and the drive and ambition that you’ll see in this piece will put the most energetic of 20-something entrepreneurs to shame. In fact, her absolute need to work is the through-line of the film. I can’t help but think that the movie will speak especially well to today’s job-uncertain audiences.

Joan Rivers knows she has image issues. She knows she’s considered over-the-hill in the show biz world. But she also knows that she’s not done. And she knows who she is and what she’s not.

That kind of awareness, warts and all, is imminently watchable. Even when she hurts herself, she doesn’t shy away from what is.

A repetitive message can be tiring, but Joan Rivers herself is always being interesting and doing interesting things here. The filmmakers did a good job at not showing extended sections of her play, the stand-up sets, the TV specials, etc. We know her work, and these elements can feel overly self-serving. Instead, we mostly see the preparations before and the consequences after. I found this a compelling approach.

I’ve had my own fluxuating opinions of Joan Rivers over the years. But she’s always had that ability to elicit genuine, and sometimes surprised, laughs out of me. She’s aware that she doesn’t have many of the natural qualities that one would associate with entertainment successes. She knows that she’s had to work, perhaps harder than most, for what she gets. This documentary shows all that and that elicits genuine, and not really all that surprising, respect out of me.

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Are you using Google+? I’m not and here’s a click through if you want to find out why.

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After hearing about The Red Shoes for years and years, especially during the Oscar run of The Black Swan, I have finally seen the movie. And it is as impressive as its reputation would lead you to believe.

In many ways, The Red Shoes is too simplistic for today’s audiences. A young, ambitious dancer gets her shot within the top-notch ballet company run by the uncompromising master Boris Lermontov. While on her rise, she meets a similarly talented young composer and falls in love. Love or art? Love and art. The ending is not hard to guess.

But in so many other more important ways, The Red Shoes is sophisticated beyond the capabilities of modern mass audiences. First, the movie-making is incredible. The colors and settings of the film are gorgeous to look at. It often dares to frame scenes in very interesting, yet composed, ways.

During Vicki Page (our young ballerina) and Lermontov’s first meeting, she’s practically cheek-to-cheek with a candelabra in the frame and yet… it works. The 15-minute “The Red Shoes” ballet sequence is mesmerizing. It surpasses “The American in Paris” and “Singing in the Rain” sections because, while it is artistically and technically (for what was possible at the time) worthy, it also contributes so much to the movie itself.

The ballet sequence does allow for the audience to understand the parallel structure of the movie but that’s very minor. The more important aspect is that it shows, from the dancer’s point of view, what happens within a performance. We see the dance from Vicki’s experience, not from the audience’s. For non-artists watching a movie about the artistic drive, this is important.

The second way that this movie is sophisticated is that the characters are ones we don’t see much of anymore. As a comparison, everyone in Black Swan is pretty straight forward. You know what they want. The Red Shoe’s artists may seem understandable within the context of the film, but your film club will have a ball discussing what everyone’s interpretations of the characters are.

Dancer Moira Shearer famously turned the movie down for a year before finally consenting to take on Vicki Page. She was worth the wait. It is hard for me to think of anyone else being able to pull it off. Without her, without the right Vicki, the movie wouldn’t have worked.

But it is Anton Walbrook‘s Lermontov that will stick in your mind. I have my own thoughts about the character, and, I imagine, so will you. But Walbrook plays Lermontov with fire and chill and passion and cruelty but still keeps him a mystery. Lermontov is a man that engages but does not want to be known. Walbrook brings that along, not only with the characters within the film, but with us too. Spending time with him is definitely worth your while.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list: 256

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