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Twitch - Ever see a film that is so sweet that it passes beyond your instrinsic gag reflex and makes you love it despite any misgivings from the brain? From sheer force of screen presence and chemistry Martin Landau and (positively radiant) Ellen Burstyn, they manage to hold the film on the rails and stabilize it amongst young director Nik Fackler‘s need to inject jittery gimmickry into the narrative. It is perhaps one of the first films about December-December romance that will appeal to the younger set (well if there were any way to get them to see it). It is as if Fackler decided to make his own Away From Her through the editing rhythms of Darren Aronofsky‘s Requiem for a Dream. Where Sarah Polly had the prose of Alice Munroe as a starting point and captured her story in a straightforward manner, Fackler aims for M. Night Shyamalan, which slightly hurts and cheapens the film in the final act. This film could have been an honest contended for annual Christmas viewing ritual along the lines of It’s A Wonderful Life (which unsurprisingly is watched at one point in the film) or A Christmas Story until the rushed final moments, nevertheless, it is Still quite Lovely.
Lovely, Still follows Robert Malone, a man of advanced years that is so lonely, he meticulously and deliberately wraps a single Christmas present: From Robert to Robert. The opening camera starts on the street of a town in holiday lights that is a modern spin of a Norman Rockwell scene. A panorama of lighted Christmas purity, before stalking into Roberts tidy bachelor home. The only thing amiss are ghostly stains are on the wall where pictures have been removed, as if his life is unfinished somehow. Robert gets up to go to work in the morning, closeups of Martin Landau flossing and brushing his teeth are revealing and interesting and somehow give insight to the warm, yet lonely man that Robert is. On his way out the door he sees a new family moving in next door, he lingers at the scene, but doesn’t wave back to the cheery movers. At work, where he bags groceries, he has an amusingly parental relationship with his boss, a goofy David Brent type (for fans of BBC’s The Office), who quaintly believes in an Amway styled cook-book scheme to the point where he actually tries to sell Robert on it. Robert politely and delicately declines and wanders on home, alone… [Full Story]
