Irreviews

Over the Fourth of July holiday, my wife and I went to three “summer blockbuster” movies which seemed somewhat entertaining at the time, but which are now filling me with dread at the prospect of actually having to review them. So I’ve decided to do a joint review, as none of them really warrant their own post.

These films are simply different varieties of summer brain rot. You have your zombie movie (World War Z,) your girls cursing and acting crude movie (The Heat,) and your big stars cursing and acting juvenile in zany circumstances movie (This is the End.) Each of these films has certain things going for it. World War Z had decent (not great) episodicness, Brad Pitt is a pretty warm and engaging actor, the family was cast well, and even though the story didn’t really hold water it was not obviously and insultingly contrived. Compared to similar film like 28 Days, it falls well short, but it is still reasonably gripping and worth seeing if you like that kind of movie.

The Heat has that thing that almost all Sandra Bullock movies have: an earnest and well-meant subplot involving women who are outcasts in some sense, due to appearance, personality, maladroitness, or what have you. It also has a reasonably well-developed friendship between her and Melissa McCarthy. Is it laugh-out-loud funny? I didn’t think so, but it certainly had amusing moments, and our fellow audience of beach vacationers clearly found it quite funny. If you have a problem with cursing, you won’t like this film. But if you have a problem with cursing you are probably not reading my blog!

This is the End can be described as Defending Your Life meets Superbad meets The Hangover. If you like the people in it (and you better, because they’re playing themselves) then you might get a kick out of this movie. I don’t particularly like anyone in it (the exception is Emma Watson, but she’s barely in the film,) so it mostly felt like a very strong narcotic, guaranteed to kill just enough brain cells to completely obliterate everything that happened to you in the prior 24 hours. I would prescribe it for moderate to serious wage-slave exasperation – consult your doctor before using; side effects include fatigue, mental sluggishness, and nightmares involving Michael Cera.

In Time is one of those little B-films that takes you totally by surprise and winds up being way better than you ever expected, way better than most A-films manage to be with their gigantic budgets, coiffed superstars, and exalted directors. It reminded me of my reaction to the movie Gone, another great little B-film (also staring Amanda Seyfried, who is obviously quite good at picking scripts) that was way better than it should have been.

A lot of sci-fi films attempt to create huge, sprawling metaphors for the state of our current society – The Matrix, Avatar, and Cloud Atlas spring to mind, though there are many others. But I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a metaphorical representation of our society quite as clever and apt as the one in In Time, in which a person’s literal “time alive” has become the one and only currency in society, logged on computers in people’s forearms, most of it hoarded in vaults by elite sectors of the population, and the little remaining time spread among billions, who fight and scrape all their miserable lives for additional days and weeks of life.

This story edifice is so ingenious that you are overwhelmed by the parallels to modern society. Just the literal representation of “living day-to-day” has a remarkable impact. The rich casually gamble thousands of years of people’s lives in single poker games, and manipulate markets to keep the vast rest of society in a clenched state of desperation. The superfluous population (i.e. everyone but the elite sectors who own everything) are kept in separate geographic zones by an intricate system of global financial laws, enforced by militarized units called “time keepers.” These time keepers were my favorite part of the story; they completely identify with the ultra rich who employ them, even though they are only fed time-alive in small increments throughout each day, constantly keeping them mere hours from death like the very people they police so visciously (time keepers don’t operate in the elite sectors, of course.)

This device of the “time keepers” perfectly captures the way the small, bureaucratic middle layer of American society – middle management grunts at financial institutions and in the media, functionaries at spy agencies like the NSA and CIA, engineers within the military industrial complex, upper echelons of the military, and the U.S. prison industry – falsely associate with their elite masters, even though they are only marginally better off than the superfluous rabble they are paid to kill, defraud, arrest and imprison. I’ve never seen this aspect of society tackled in such a direct and gusty way.

The eventual theme of In Time is how to rectify the widespread abject misery caused by socio-economic polarization and extreme concentration of wealth. Its answer is essentially radical redistribution of wealth. This of course is at present a violently unpopular idea in the United States, where the poor cling like leaches to the ridiculous idea that they might one day join the ultra-rich, own their own island, collect Ferraris, buy a submarine with gold faucets, and travel around in a private jet to their luxury homes all over the world. In Time does miss this one aspect of the problem – the poor don’t long for economic fairness, the poor long to become flithy rich, so they can start shitting on everybody else. But this does not change the fact that normal people should be thinking about how (and why) to reverse, or at least slow down, the ever-accelerating concentration of wealth on our society.

I can only assume that In Time was a flop because it made people in our society uncomfortable. Most sci-fi allegories can be easily dismissed. In Time is different – its theme and its message are a little too in-your-face and a little to spot-on to allow an emotionally asleep audience to remain asleep while watching the film. I highly recommend this provocative and interesting little sleeper!

Dirty Wars is a remarkable documentary, made by a mainstream journalist (Jeremy Scahill) who is swimming against the overwhelming tide and actually doing his job: working to expose Americans to truths they should care about and should do something about. It’s a must-see for every American citizen.

Dirty Wars is a very life-size and watchable documentary, a slowly unfolding story of journalistic courage and determination, written and paced very well. Scahill’s journey started with his routine activities as a war-reporter, tracking down secret nighttime strikes in Afghanistan that citizens were talking about but the U.S. military was denying. Through this, he discovered JSOC (a secret elite military unit reporting directly to the President himself) long before they became a household name after the bin Laden strike. And as he dug deeper, eventually shifting focus to Yemin, he gradually uncovered a pattern of U.S. military action unheard of in history: indiscriminate drone murder, spread across 70 countries (most of whom are neutral or allies,) and creating more hatred of the United States than ever existed 10 years ago. In the end, it’s about how the United States redefined warfare in the last 10 years, and an invitation to ponder the wisdom of these decisions, both morally and selfishly (i.e. is it making is safer or putting us more at risk?)

Dirty Wars might not be the cheeriest topic, but the issues it tackles are critically important for the future of the world and the place of the United States in that world. I can’t imagine it’s getting much distribution, but if you get a chance, go see it, and if you don’t be sure to Netflix it when it comes out.

I can’t really believe how bad Little White Lies was. It’s from the guy who made the (perhaps accidental) masterpiece Tell No One. It had those two great guys from Tell No One, plus Marion Cotillard (who could object to her in a movie?) and the “French George Clooney.” It had a soundtrack of terrific old American pop music. It had a sort-of beautiful location. And like a lot of the shit out of France these days, it was directly inspired by retro Hollywood.

And yet it totally sucks in every conceivable way. The set up is abominable – it took me half the movie to figure out who everyone was, and to determine that no one was a blood relative of anyone else. (I’m still not sure that old oyster guy was not Lugo’s dad.) The characters are completely foul and unlikable, to the last, and to the very end. All those charismatic and attractive actors are completely wasted in this film – you can’t even enjoy looking at them because everything out of their mouths is so puerile and insensitive. The story is shallow and incoherent, and with a few scattered exceptions, completely unfunny. And the movie rides its soundtrack shamelessly, a soundtrack way too good to be wasted on dreck like this. Even worse, it frequently overrides and obliterates dialog scenes with blaring music, in a lame attempt at stimulating some emotion in the viewer. (I ask you: Why do the French insist on mimicking the worst filmmaking techniques of Hollywood?)

Even if you like some of the stuff coming out of this new French Hollywood, I would recommend that you skip Little White Lies. It’s a total waste of time.

My wife and I saw The Bling Ring in a double feature with Dirty Wars. It was a shocking experience, the two films defining absolute extremes of the current American experience, in almost every conceivable way. Actually, I highly recommend you try this double feature for yourselves, with Dirty Wars going first. It’s a horrifying juxtaposition of concepts, guaranteed to get you thinking.

The Bling Ring is based on a true story of money-and-fashion-obsessed LA teenagers who went around robbing the homes of major Hollywood film stars, models, and socialites. Sofia Coppola is great at creating memorable atmospheres; in The Bling Ring, it’s one of vacuous teenage materialistic narcissism, in the suburbs bordering the Hollywood hills. She blends in large and unflattering doses of “The Secret,” making The Bling Ring this year’s second major film based on real events to link positive thinking and “law of attraction” empowerment with major criminal acts. I think we should all be very grateful to her for this service to society.

At the same time, Coppola’s approach sacrifices a certain connection to reality that might have proved useful in the movie. The robberies (according to the Vanity Fair article) were much more frantic and surgical than depicted in the film. They were cramming shit into suit cases as fast as they could, running to their car with them to unload, then running back to cram in another load, and repeating. In contrast, the movie portrays these teens like whacked-out serial killers, drunk on the illusion of their own power. They wander around the houses slowly and causally, taking an item here, and item there, acting almost indifferent, like they are passing judgement on all they survey. In this way they come across as exceptionally sociopathic, where in reality they were probably only run-of-the-mill sociopathic.

A similar distortion is applied to the way they targeted these houses. In the movie, they pick a house almost as a bored afterthought, and just kind of wander in the same night, almost like they think they’re Gods. The article, however, makes it sound like they cased these houses a little more carefully – studying maps to see where to leave the car and how to get near the house with minimal exposure, and doing drive-by casing of the houses before storming them.

It also was not simply a case of bored little rich white girls, living in a protected bubble. One was an illegal Mexican immigrant. Lee and Prugo got started with traditional small-time theft, and if they did not live minutes from star’s houses it’s reasonable to assume it would have stayed that way. The Alexis Neiers character (Emma Watson) was much more human than depicted in the film – she was kicked out of her house for smoking OxyContin, and was a major drug addict during the whole period. What is the value of erasing the humanity of these teens? Does it help us understand their behavior to depict them as narcissistic robots? Is their behavior even important to understand?

The Bling Ring is fun and all that, but I’m not sure it amounts to a whole lot. You know something’s gone terribly wrong when the film’s main achievement is that has created a new group of exquisitely dressed and accoutred young starlets who would be the natural targets of the next group of fashion stalker criminals – couldn’t they have all worn jeans to the Cannes Film Festival, just to give us all a break from this shit?

The Big Picture is not your average movie. It’s surprising, thought-provoking, it creeps up on you. It’s kind of haunting. I liked it.

The film is about a lawyer who abandoned his artistic ambitions long ago, and instead started a family. He suddenly finds his life falling apart in various ways, and by a strange sequence of events is presented with an opportunity to change his identity, leave his current life behind, and actually pursue his long-lost artistic dreams. It sounds corny when you just blurt it out, but in the story it all comes across quite realistically and emotionally true, and the narrative possesses a pleasing spontaneity (difficult to achieve in films) that keeps things fresh. He takes the plunge, and that’s where things really get interesting.

The French title of this movie is The Man Who Wanted To Live His Life, which is a much more appropriate and accurate (if less “sexy”) title. It hints at the deeper side of this film, which involves the main character’s repeated confrontation with this sentiment, in completely different contexts. It’s this aspect of the film that sticks with you. Most movies I see are gone for me in about 10 minutes. This film I’m still thinking about days afterward, noticing aspects I had not picked up on. I should add that the lead actor (Romain Duris) is really good in his very complex role.

I’m going to leave it at that. Netflix this one – it’s a really nice change of pace.

The Good: If you like Vince Vaughn’s shtick (I certainly do,) this movie has plenty of Vince Vaughn performing his schick. Is it good enough to warrant seeing this movie? I’m not sure. If you like Owen Wilson’s shtick, this movie has some of that too.

Also, I was happy to see Dylan O’Brien in another movie. I remember my wife and I having a nice chat with his grandmother in a near-empty screening of his last movie – a very underrated Jon Kasdan film called The First Time – which we all agreed did not get the distribution or the critical recognition it deserved. Here Dylan’s landed a good supporting role in a major summer blockbuster, and again gives a solid, River Phoenix-inspired performance. Good for him!

That’s about it for the good.

The Bad: The film’s story is contrived and strained in the extreme, and frequently made me cringe. Its humor often feels forced and unoriginal, although it was occasionally good for a (muted) laugh. Its theme of washed-up, middle-aged people daring to dream didn’t really work – the film did not feel realistic, nor was it a successful parody – it inhabits a strange netherworld between the two. I left the theater very underwhelmed by it all.

The Ugly: This movie feels like a two-hour advertisement for Google. The staff of Google is clearly portrayed as smarter than and morally superior to everyone else on the planet, and their corporate mission of “connecting people to information” and “making people’s lives easier” is rammed down the viewer’s throat, as are the free food and the nap pods (both of which I personally find a little creepy.) If this is the price we all had to pay for having this film shot on Google’s campus, they should have just faked it.

Google is a corporation pursuing bottom-line profit. They’ve done some cool things, and they’ve done some very uncool things. They’ve demonstrated ingenuity and resourcefulness in dominating the problem of searching the internet. They’ve shown no ingenuity or resourcefulness in resisting or overcoming the centralization of this function, which naturally creates a comprehensive data summary about every person, and which in turn renders people completely vulnerable to whoever pays for, or demands, access to that data. They’ve shown no interest in privacy-by-design technologies for the highly personal information entrusted to them by people, even though it is well within their technical power to do so. Instead, they do exactly the opposite: they’re in the spy business to make billions, and their beautifully organized and linked data would make the Stasi drool, as would Facebook’s. People are not worried about this kind of thing, but they should be.

And just to further question this lilly-white image of Google, don’t forget Google (like Facebook) enthusiastically participated in the U.S. government’s coordinated (and shameful) attack on WikiLeaks. Or how Google (again, like Facebook) freely cooperates with the NSA to hand over everyone’s personal data for data dredging – they say they only do it “when legally required to do so,” but they know full well that by our government’s secret interpretation of article 215 of the Patriot Act, that is any time the government wants, for any reason whatsoever. Google could use their incredible power to fight this in some way, or at least bring it to the public’s attention, but they don’t – they just say “yes sir,” and hand the shit over. Why? Well, they’re all about connecting people to information, after all.

We Americans are already way too in love with corporations and unaccountable tyrannies, and have become way too sarcastic and dismissive of democracy and individual rights. This film’s message, which is basically “good people get to have a great life, because they get into good corporations which fill the world with love” is just about the most disgusting and unhelpful message these filmmakers could possibly be sending out as artists.

I’m rather sorry I saw this film.

I enjoyed this movie a lot more than I thought I would. It’s a sweet, low-key “love” story, with a style that reminds me a little of 90’s indie films. The main focus of the story is the relationship between men, women, marriage, and religious tradition within the Israeli Hasidic community. The film is pretty well-written, and the traditions and issues are handled skillfully, with good pacing, and were quite interesting to an outsider like me. They also use music quite effectively in the film.

But I should also point out that Fill The Void is helped enormously by the casting of leads who are way better looking than everyone else in the film – the guy is like a Hasidic approximation of Antonio Banderas and the girl looks like a young Jennifer Connelly (back when she was a slightly plump teenager doing modeling work.) For this reason, you very much enjoy watching them, and you even bond with them to some degree, despite rather minimal dialog between them. It’s also occasionally distracting, because you start to wonder what this  girl’s problem is, turning down this sexy, sensual dude who positively lays waste to every other guy in her life, including the dweeb she originally wanted to marry. For his part, he comes around a little quicker, but to me he never seems quite happy enough to be marrying a young Jennifer Connelly.

I can’t imagine this film is getting much distribution, but I do recommend it.

Now You See Me starts out okay, for maybe the first third. Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson are fun to watch in their flashy roles. Mark Ruffalo is always a welcome quantity in any film. The first robbery is fun, and Morgan Freeman’s character (the magic debunker) brings a nice, unexpected layer of dramatic complexity. All the way up to the police interrogation, it’s pretty good. You know it’s probably going to spin off into oblivion at any moment, but you are still basking in the idea that the film might actually turn out to be way better than you were expecting.

And then, of course, it spins off into total oblivion. By the end of the film, they do manage to pull almost everything together, but only just barely, and even then none of it made any sense to me.

If you want brain-fry some week night when your job has reduced you to emotional rubble, Now You See Me is just what the doctor ordered.