*SOME SPOILERS*
This movie isn’t so much a story about Edith Piaf, it was hardly a movie in any conventional sense of the word. It was more of a meditation, a remembering. If you can imagine one of the greatest singers of all time on her death bed, crippled, virtually alone and suddenly remembering everything from her life, just as Charles Foster Kane’s tragic life was given to us, only it comes without an interviewer or narration and it is revealed to us in starts and fits, jumping around wildly, seeing everything without a filter, all the goods and the bads, the rights and wrongs. Like a song it is alive, it flows and tells. “La Vie en Rose” is Edith Piaf’s soul bared naked before the audience.
And it’s a soul you don’t necessarily fall in love with, but to talk further about that I feel I must talk about the shining center. It seems to be the “in thing” to say right now “Marrion Cotillard is brilliant, but the movie isn’t as good.” It’s true Marrion Cotillard is beyond brilliant as Edith Piaf, as an actor, without hesitation and every moment she bares her own soul, and makes almost every performance I can think of look pale in comparison. With a single look her doe-like eyes that peer upward, mouth curled in a meek smile, her teeth jutting out slightly, she breaks your heart. She embodies everything about Piaf, at every age…from a brash and raucous 20-year old singing in bars that can barely survive, to a boisterously obnoxious diva at the height of her career (the type of person you would notice from your own dinner table and be annoyed with), to a withering 47-year-old with liver cancer who had lost more than her fair share, all you ever see is Piaf, all you ever hear is Piaf. It is only fitting to cast someone as passionately involved in their character as Piaf was in her music. I was astonished to see a picture of Cotillard in the new issue of Fade In, she looks absolutely nothing like the character she plays. Without her performance the film itself would not thrive as it does.
pottery we happened upon an exhibit by someone I had never heard of, DAN FLAVIN. Flavin was an artist that created a lot of his work in the 50s, 60s and 70s, but he didn’t work with brushes or clay, he worked with fluorescent lights of various colors. I would consider his work strictly modern, and at first the idea was almost laughable to my friend and I, especially with some of his simpler formations. Oh, how clever that he took a white fluorescent light and put it at an angle against a wall! But as you walked through the exhibit, they became more visually complex and quite beautiful to look at. Long hallways were placed here and there and halfway down the hall was a wall made of green fluorescents facing the person and facing away yellow f
luorescents. Another room had some blood red lights positioned creatively in the corner. It’s really hard to describe something simple without making it seem silly. We walked down a long hall of blue fluorescents that were placed along the walls and ceiling in opposing formations and I became dizzy. From the side of the hall with the yellows halfway down, we finally saw the true brilliance of the way it was all set up. The pink on the other side dissolved against the far white wall into an almost purple, then two of the previous rooms in the distance were segmented by colors, blue and green. I almost started drooling. One of the rooms had a long wall of green squares that came to about waist height and cut you off from the other half of the long room. It was quite resplendent (I’ve been wanting to use that word for a long time.)
“Dumbledore’s Army” is the name of the illegal gathering of students that Harry Potter leads in this 5th installment of the popular book turned movie series, and with “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”, like Harry growing up and learning to take control of his destiny, the filmmakers have made a stunning leap away from the kiddie-friendly adventures of the earlier films and have positioned this film as the most mature, frightening and perhaps best of the series thus far. Because of the heavier nature of the film, it’s easy to not take for granted that Voldemort is a true villain, and that in facing such a villain there are real consequences. It smartly picks up with the consequences of the previous chapter The Goblet of Fire, but I’ll get to that.
Delving into the realms of parental paranoia Joshua creates an interesting psychological vortex. It’s not so much that the boy of the title feels unloved or forgotten about, but that he feels he shouldn’t be loved “just because”. And the film plays and toys with that idea, creating one solid layer on top of another, until we have a nice lasagna of psychology to chew on afterward. Is it enough for a parent to just “love” their children? Does little Joshua really hate his baby sister? At what point does Joshua start to turn for the worse? These are questions the writer/director doesn’t feel are necessary to answer or maybe they don’t need to be. The fact that there are unanswered questions or plot holes in the end isn’t what hurts this movie. The movie falters because it doesn’t know how much of one thing it wants to be. 
