Fri. March 29, 2013
By Gregg Shapiro
In Theaters
Admission (Focus): It's difficult to admit, but Admission, the new rom-com starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd is a major disappointment. Neither rom nor com enough to satisfy those audience members craving one, the other or both, Admission doesn't make the grade.
Princeton (bet they're thrilled about this!) admissions officer Portia (Fey) loves her job. Maybe she loves it too much because her devotion to it results in her missing key events in her life. For example, cut-throat co-worker Corinne (Gloria Reuben) is intent on crushing her by any means necessary in the competition for the job being vacated by department head Clarence (Wallace Shawn). Her long time partner Mark (Michael Sheen in another cartoonish role), has been cheating on Portia with a she-wolf Virginia Woolf scholar. Her relationship with her self-sufficient, single mother Susannah (scene-stealer Lily Tomlin), author of the definitive feminist text The Masculine Myth, isn't much better.
When she's contacted by John (Paul Rudd), who runs a new developmental school in New Hampshire, she's finally forced to face some facts. The (limp) sexual tension between the characters aside, John is under the impression that the son Portia gave up for adoption when she got pregnant as a Dartmouth undergrad may be one of his star students. Star student may be a bit of an exaggeration because Jeremiah (Nat Wolff) doesn't have the best grades, although he did score shockingly well on some college entrance exams.
Jeremiah, an autodidact whose brain tends to go on a "walkabout," is then encouraged to apply to Princeton. This is where Admission really begins to fail. The movie's inability to decide whether it wants to be a comedy or a drama (hey, Fey turns out to be a decent dramatic actress!) is as confusing as figuring out what the trick is to getting into Princeton (hint: there is no trick). Director Paul Weitz hasn't had a hit in a while and Admission is just another negative mark on his permanent record.
At home
"A feast for the eyes," like iconic magazine editor Diana Vreeland's beloved December issues of Vogue, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel (E One/Samuel Goldwyn Company), is as untraditional a doc as its subject matter. Incorporating dialogue based on the recordings Vreeland made with the late writer George Plimpton, in her "garden in hell" NY apartment, for what would become her memoir D.V., The Eye Has to Travel gives you plenty to look at and a whole earful more.
Born in 1900 Paris during La Belle Époque, Diaghelev and Nijinsky were friends of Vreeland's parents. She saw King George V's coronation in England and summered in the Rocky Mountains where she knew Buffalo Bill. Diana's good looking, but unsympathetic mother treated her like an ugly monster. Her family settled in Manhattan when she was 10. During the roaring ‘20s, Diana who was "mad about ballet" and "only cared about dancing," wanted to make herself, "the most popular girl in the world."
In 1924 she met her husband Reed, describing it as "love at first sight." They moved to London in 1929, about which she said "the best thing about London is Paris." It was in Paris that she received her "fashion education" from Coco Chanel, among others, and operated a lingerie shop where Wallis Simpson was one of her clients. Shortly after returning to America and settling in Brewster, NY before the war Vreeland was offered a job by Carmel Snow at Harper's Bazaar writing a column titled "Why Don't You... ?" It was her first step into a career in fashion that would make her the style goddess that she became.
Credited with introducing the bikini, popularizing blue jeans, discovering Lauren (Betty) Bacall, bringing Vogue into a modern period (Vreeland loved the "youthquake" of the 1960s), designing herself so that she was an extraordinary work of art, Diana Vreeland deserved the icon status that she achieved. Always quotable, as in "the eye has to travel," "style is a way of life," "important not to be boring" and "life is artifice," Vreeland's influence can still be felt today, more than 20 years since her passing.
Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel features interviews with models including Angelica Huston, Lauren Hutton (who describes Vreeland as an "upside down original"), Marisa Berenson, Penelope Tree and Veruschka, Bob Colacello, Ingrid Sischy, Ali McGraw (who worked for Vreeland at HB), photographers Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman and David Bailey, designers Calvin Klein, Anna Sui, Givenchy, Diane Von Furstenburg, Manolo Blahnik and Oscar de la Renta, gay filmmaker Joel Schumaker, Vreeland's sons Tim and Frecky, grandson Alexander Vreeland. There are also vintage Vreeland TV interview clips with Jane Pauley, Diane Sawyer, Dick Cavett and Mike Douglas, woven into the fabric of the doc. The DVD bonus feature consists of additional interviews.
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (Sundance Selects) covers a tumultuous period in the life of Chinese artist/activist/social media savant from 2008 through 2011. The son of dissident poet Ai Qing, Weiwei has a long history of being outspoken and this doc finds him at his most unapologetic. When Weiwei takes on the 2008 Beijing Olympics, followed almost immediately by the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake, his blatant disregard for the government, in order to promote awareness of the tragedy and wrongdoing, gets him into serious trouble with the powers that be. His 81 day detention in 2011 is the culmination of his efforts and an indication of the slow process of change in China.
A thoughtfully rendered portrait of an artist as a revolutionary man, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry gets up close and personal with one of the most important artists of the 21st century. We see that Weiwei is as committed to his art (see sequence on the 2010 Sunflower Seeds exhibit from the Tate in London consisting of 100 million hand-painted "made in China" porcelain seeds) as he is to "continuing to protect freedom of expression."
From his thoughts on cats who know how to open doors to preferring to have others implement his ideas to his prolific and positive use of Twitter to his interpersonal relationships, including those with his mother, his brother, his wife Lu Qing, his followers and devotees, and his young son Ai Lu (mothered by Wang Fen) to interviews with artists, writers and curators including Chen Danqing, Hung Huang, Ethan Cohen and Evan Osnos, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is a thoroughly fascinated experience. Blu-ray special features include filmmaker commentary, deleted scenes and interviews.
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