11 - Jack the Giant Slayer - 3D (2013)

Some movies appear to have been made just to let the audience have fun. I went to see Jack the Giant Slayer without many expectations and found it an enjoyable experience.

Set in a nebulous fairytale land, Isabelle, the princess (Eleanor Tomlinson) and Jack (Nicholas Hoult) both have been raised on similar stories of the war between the giants and humans. As an adult, Isabelle wants more to her life than she finds locked up in court, so she steals off to find adventure. She ends up at Jack’s cottage seeking shelter from a storm. Jack has traded his horse for some magic beans and they sprout during the storm. The cottage is carried up on the  stalks up into the sky-world land of the giants. The film becomes a quest adventure trying to save Isabelle and later save humans from the giants.

Jack joins a team of several knights, including Sir Elmont (Ewan McGregor) and villain Roderick (a very funny Stanley Tucci) who has stolen the magical crown which makes the giants subservient to him. By the time they finally locate Isabelle, several of the team have been killed by the giants and or Roderick. Elmont ends up rolled in a puff pastry along with several pigs (pigs in a blanket, get it?). Jack finds his courage and ends up saving Isabelle.

When they try to return to earth, the giants realize the bridge to the human world is open and they set out to conquer the human world. The last part of the film is the battle between the two worlds.

The giants are a motley group of Brian Froud-type characters, funny, gross, menacing, but not really child-scary. The leader has two heads (one which looks a relative of Gollum). How Jack and the humans defeat them is a fun part of the film. The CG effects in 3D were well done.

The film was a surprisingly fun movie for me.

Jack the Giant Slayer (2013) ****

Day 71/75 - Joe Gould's Secret (2000)

I have always felt that Stanley Tucci is one of our great and undervalued American actors. In Joe Gould’s Secret (2000), which he also directed, Tucci plays Joe Mitchell, a writer for The New Yorker, who becomes fascinated with the story behind Joe Gould, Professor Sea Gull, (Ian Holm) a Greenwich Village street person, who claims to have written the Oral History of the World, a1,200,000 words long book filled with the conversations he has overheard on the streets of New York.

The film becomes a kind of love story of two very different writers.

As Mitchell introduces us to his New York, he says:

In my home town, I never felt at home. In New York, New York City, in Greenwich Village, down among the cranks, and the misfits, and the one runners, and the has-beens, and the might-have-beens, and the would-bes, and the never-wills, and the God-knows-whats, I have always felt at home. (imdb.com)

Set in the early 1940s, the film is rich with period details.  Tucci peoples his film with some of my favorite character actors—Susan Sarandon, Hope Davis, Patricia Clarkson, Celia Weston, Alice Drummond, Nell Campbell, and Steve Martin—some names you will recognize, all you should know.

As the story begins, the owner of Jefferson’s Coffee Shop defends the smelly, disheveled, homeless Gould when a cop says he’s a freak. “We’re all freaks, Mike, truth be known. We’re all freaks together.” 

Gould says of himself, “Please don’t think I’m stupid just because I’m unclean.”  

As Mitchell interviews and in some ways woos Gould, he learns of his extensive past—a Harvard grad, author, famed among the New York intellectuals. He even meets artist Alice Neel who painted Gould’s nude portrait complete with three penises. Gould attends parties and holds court in spite of his antisocial tendencies.

When Mitchell’s writing about Gould is published in The New Yorker, homeless Joe becomes a celebrity and begins getting money from admirers. A patroness even surfaces who pays for his room and board. Mitchell is warned by The New Yorker receptionist that “the story doesn’t end just because the writer has finished writing.”

At first wanting Gould’s companionship to write about, Mitchell finds Gould latching onto him as over-frequent companion. The rest of the story involves Gould, his disappointments, the search for the Oral History and the resolution of the two-Joe’s history. Gould’s secret changes all of the characters.

In one of Joe Gould’s writings he muses:

The insane person is a victim of self-deception. Yet in a measure, we all have this virtue. One is his own imaginary creation of himself. If we could see ourselves for what we really are life would be insupportable. Hence, I would judge the sanest man to be him who most firmly realizes the tragic isolation of humanity, and pursues his essential purpose calmly. (imdb.com)

Joe Gould’s Secret teaches us about the need to relate and the power of those connections—and ultimately the responsibility necessary to sustain those connections. Ian Holm and Stanley Tucci are both worth watching.

Joe Gould’s Secret (2000) **** (on Netflix streaming)

The first nine minutes of the film