Irreviews

My wife and I loved Moonrise Kingdom. It exceeded all expectations (in part because its trailer was horrible.) It’s a charming, clever, and heartwarming film about two despised and outcast children who find each other and cling together in love. Although its approach is somewhat abstract and strange, it never sacrifices warmth or humor, and in the end the story leave you feeling very satisfied and happy. It’s a wonderful time at the movies.

Wes Anderson stirs together the disparate elements that make up this story smoothly and confidently. He also managed to get wonderful, highly atypical performances out of a number of actors who usually are strongly typecast, Bruce Willis and Ed Norton in particular. His use of music in the film is very original and effective. Altogether a superb directorial job.

I highly recommend Moonrise Kingdom.

Side Effects is fairly intriguing for about the first half. It seems to have potential to go somewhere interesting – a film about the dangers of prescription drugs, and the big business around pushing them on patients. The dialog is not great, but it’s decent, and they did write a fair amount. Rooney Mara holds center stage well and with confidence. And the ever warm and fantastic Jude Law manages to hold the film together to a certain extent, just by being himself.

In the end, however, the film devolves into a contrived and over-complicated tale that winds up being too neat and not very believable. It takes interesting narrative possibilities and trades them in for run-of-the-mill psychosis, titillation, greed, and revenge. My wife and I walked out of the film very disappointed.

It is finally dawning on me that Steven Soderbergh is an over-rated director. As my wife pointed out after we saw Side Effects, it’s probably a good thing that he’s decided to stop making movies, as it’ll open some space for fresh new talent. Among people of a certain age and education, there is a certain social pressure that exists to see each new Steven Soderbergh film, which is strange because he’s not that good. There is no such social pressure to see a new Ang Lee film, for example. If you set aside Ocean’s Eleven, which was a can’t miss star vehicle, cast with an incredible spectrum of charismatic personalities, the rest of Soderbergh’s work strikes me as really mediocre. I remember enjoying Out of Sight at the time, but I’ve never, ever wanted to see it again. When I rewatched Erin Brockovich several years ago it struck me as extremely overrated, Traffic and Contagion were dreary and completely unremarkable, and Sex, Lies and Videotape never did anything for me. Magic Mike was a bit like Out of Sight – sort of enjoyable on one viewing, but I’ll never need to return to it.

Side Effects is getting a 3 in the Irreviews movie ratings – I sort of enjoyed it while watching it, but it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth at the end. If you share my opinion on Soderbergh, you might want to skip this one.

Magic Mike is a good film, worth seeing. But it’s nothing I would ever need to see again. It captures the world of male strippers in an interesting and entertaining way. The story, while certainly not at all deep, holds your attention and is paced quite well. Performances are good across the board. But it’s light on dialog and character development, and in certain areas it’s a little unbelievable.

One thing Steven Soderbergh is good at is capturing gritty little spontaneous-feeling scenes. Like the scene where “the kid” meets the other strippers for the first time back stage, or the sandbar party, or the police stripper scene in the sorority house – these scenes have an unusual combination of excitement and understatement that’s fun to watch. But Soderbergh has a definite downside too. His approach to movies always feels a more than little cold and clinical to me; he never cultivates warmth, even when it’s right there in front of him. In addition, although he features music montages quite a bit in his films, he really does not know how to make good use of them; they tend to be diffuse and boring, semi-abstract collages of images set to self-consciously atmospheric music. I think he has always had these problems, all the way back to Sex, Lies and Videotape, the few exceptions being films that were basically vehicles for huge, warm, charismatic stars (Ocean’s 11, Erin Brockovich.)

What kind of saves this film a little bit is Cody Horn, who plays the sister of “the kid,” and the object of Channing Tatum affections. She has a great look and voice for the role, and she’s pretty warm as well.  She interjects a bit of old-school indie heroine into the film, especially since she looks so much like a real person on screen. It’s just a shame that they didn’t write more dialog for her.

Channing Tatum is an interesting actor. I like watching his dancing (he was great in Step Up, too) and it’s fun to admire his physique as well. And he does have a certain energized charm about him, especially in his first few scenes. But I find that about half-way through his movies, I’m kind of done with him, sick of him. Magic Mike is no exception.

It’s definitely worth seeing, but if you’re anything like me it will probably leave you a little cold.

The Life of Pi is not the type of film I usually go ape shit over, but I recognize exceptional quality and substance when I see it. There were a lot of good films this year in genres I tend to prefer, but it’s very rare that you see a film that can legitimately be called profound. The Life of Pi is such a film. I won’t give away details, because I think everyone should see this film fresh. But I will say this: It’s a lovely statement on what it actually means to believe in God, and it makes a rather deep statement about the meaning and importance of art, even implicitly making the case that God and art are actually the same thing. What’s more, these statements are made with a grace and subtlety that are not often achieved in films that aspire to this level of thought. And almost as an added bonus, it contains (once you’ve seen the entire film) one of the most striking metaphors for how the concept of family functions psycho-emotionally for humans, in relation to the trials and tribulations of life. Clearly, we are in very special territory with this movie. It is for me the best film of 2012. My wife and I left the theater amazed, and marveled about it endlessly.

To say The Life of Pi is visually beautiful really misses what makes it so special. There are lots and lots of visually beautiful films out there that are also empty and boring. Like Beasts of the Southern Wild is visually beautiful – so what. But here the images are not only beautiful, they are all gorgeously integrated into a larger constellation of ideas, and in a way that is not the slightest bit pretentious. When do you ever see that in one of these “visually beautiful” films? Almost never, that’s when! They are integrated so masterfully that I only fully appreciated many of them after the film, when I was able to recall them within the context of the completed story.

But the film also works great on the level of a mere survival movie. It is very well-written – there’s not much dialog, but the narration is interesting, and the scene structure and narrative flow are really excellent. The long struggle to live in the boat is quite riveting even without the larger ideas it supports. Then there’s the tiger, “Richard Parker.” I can’t stand CGI crap, but that CGI tiger is so incredibly outstanding I spent most of the film in complete disbelief that he was not real. I’ve never seen anything like it in film, and ditto for the supporting animals, by the way. Hell, even if you just like cats and didn’t give a shit about anything else you still could find this movie enjoyable.

While I’m laying on the praise, let me also mention that this is the only 3-D film I’ve even seen that made me think 3-D might be a legitimate art form, distinct from traditional movies, instead of just a pasted-on effect to wow a jaded audience and charge more money for. It reminds me of that line in Hitchcock where Alfred and his wife are discussing what pap horror films were up to that time, and Hitchock remarks provocatively “But what if someone really good made one?” For Hitchcock, the answer was Psycho, and in this case it’s perennially underrated master director Ang Lee who takes the hackneyed gimmick of 3-D and uses it as a fundamental component of an expanded artistic vision of movies.

I urge you to make the effort to see The Life of Pi in 3-D while it is still in theaters. It’s one of those films that is not going to be quite the same on a TV. I’m definitely planning to see it again in the theater before it finally departs. It is a very special and remarkable film.

When a movie tells its story exclusively from the point of view of a six year old, it has to be somewhat limited because the child doesn’t understand anything it’s seeing, and it can’t articulate anything it’s feeling. Thus is the case with Beasts of the Southern Wild. Aside from the sometimes striking visuals of the disappearing, hardscrabble life portrayed in the movie, what is the point of this film? I’ve seen it advertised as a story of a child who goes on a journey to find her mother – that’s a laugh. The child doesn’t go anywhere until the final 10 minutes of the movie, and even then it’s not so much a journey as an absurd accident. I’ve seen it advertised as a story of love and courage – that’s also a bit of a stretch. I don’t see that the kid changes at all during the course of the film, and I would classify the rest of the people as more inert than courageous. As a portrait of these people and their dying way of life it’s kind of empty and unsatisfying because there’s almost no dialog, and the “way of life” depicted is to drink beer, eat crayfish, and drive around in gas-powered boats made out of rusted old car bodies. Then there’s the metaphor of the giant beasts, returned to again and again in the film, which I found to be bizarre and at best tenuously related to the story. In the end, I just couldn’t see anything in this film.

If Beasts of the Southern Wild had come out during the Indie Renaissance of the 1990’s, it would have been dismissed as a lower-half offering that didn’t really work except as a visual exercise. Now it is the proud owner of an absurd Oscar nomination for best film. And I honestly could not tell you what Quvenzhané Wallis’s Best Actress nomination is based on. She’s not bad, I suppose, but she’s acting like just about every other six year old I’ve ever seen in film. Are six year old characters even interesting enough to support a “great” performance? In what way is her performance better than Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s fabulous performance in Smashed, for example, which was completely ignored by the Academy? And even compared to other child performances, I’m not sure she was so great. Her face is largely expressionless, she’s not really a part of the film’s dialog, and her narration is unscintillating to say the least.

I don’t know what to tell you about this film. In the final analysis, it strikes me as a colossal bore.

My wife and I kicked off the new year with Gangster Squad, hoping it would be better than last year’s kick off movie, The Grey. Admittedly, it’s not too hard to be better than The Grey – all you need is scenes of something other than dudes running through the snow yelling “Oh Fuck! Oh Fuck!” as a bunch of wolves closes in on them, takes down rearmost guy, and rips him to pieces. But I’m happy to report that Gangster Squad cleared the hurdle with room to spare. It’s a fun movie. Not great, but fun.

I have to laugh when movies flash “inspired by true events” on the screen at the beginning, because it basically means they’re free to make up whatever shit they want to. I always thought Micky Cohen when to Alcatraz for tax evasion, and a quick check reveals that this is indeed true. Here, a vigilante squad of cops wages illegal gorilla warfare on Cohen, and eventually nails him in a much more colorful and cinematic way – whatever, I’m no stickler for slavishly sticking to anything, and I’m not super interested in how much of this vigilante story is actually true. What matters is: did they do a good job telling it?

On one level, they did. The story definitely holds your attention, mainly because the squad itself is interestingly (and believably) incompetent, which add a lot of surprising variations to the action. They even made an attempt at a set-up – when the squad is put together – and although they didn’t do it very well (rushing it, adding a bit too much ham,) it did focus the story to a certain extent. And Sean Penn is so fabulous he grounds the entire movie and makes up for some of the acting and writing shortcomings in the rest of the film – more on him later.

But on another level, I had certain issues. The gun play is overdone, and becomes tiresome by the end. I found the CGI bullshit very distracting, including the incredibly fake computer-generated landscape shots of LA. The humor is really nothing I will be longing to re-experience. The set-up, while perhaps minimally adequate, was really crap when compared to a very similar, almost identical movie experience like LA Confidential. Come to think of it, the cinematography, dialog and acting look pretty crappy compared to something like LA Confidential. I’m not saying Gangster Squad is bad – it’s an entertaining story and a fun time at the movies. But it must be pointed out that it falls way short in a lot of areas, provided you don’t limit your comparisons to current cinema.

Now for the acting. Sean Penn yet again proves (as I’m fond of saying) that he is the greatest actor of his generation, by far. He gives us a Micky Cohen that makes your blood run cold, not so much through the flamboyant quotable lines and generic mobster violence of his character, but through the rest of his performance, the subtle menacing nuance of his regular everyday speech and body language. It’s amazing that Penn could get this all across while at the same time doing the hammy hollywood shit the script called for.

As for the squad, Josh Brolin is an actor I don’t really like. But it seems to me that the less he has to say and emote, the better he comes off – think the guy he played in No Country for Old Men, that’s his sweet spot. Here he plays a rather stupid and belligerent oaf who leads the squad through various forms of mayhem, and he fits the role pretty well. Ryan Gosling is another actor I don’t really like, although he is a good looking guy to be sure. But again, here I liked him playing a conflicted playboy of sorts (with hidden depths.) The others are at worst tolerable, not too distracting. And Emma Stone is her usual, strange-looking self as the third leg of a love triangle.

I would recommend Gangster Squad, for a fun story and for Sean Penn’s performance, with the caveat that you’re going to be listening to a lot of machine guns before the night is through.

The mainstream critics panned Promised Land? Why?! It’s a really good film, with a fabulous cast, excellent writing, nicely directed by Gus Van Sant, and a really timely, important and interesting story. There’s really almost nothing to dislike about this film. I would not call it a truly great film, but it is really good, certainly one of the better films of the year, perhaps even one of the best.

The film walks an interesting line on its topic. Yes, the natural gas companies are predatory and yes people are getting hurt by fracking. But on the other hand, with no constructive or visionary leadership coming from our government, and with the savage bipartisan attacks on what little remains of our social safety net, what exactly are average people supposed to do for money, besides living hand-to-mouth by feeding each other in fast food restaurants? Matt Damon’s character, supposedly the bad guy, is (within the unfortunate context of our current society) actually making really excellent points in his discussions with the townspeople, and his lecture about the importance of “fuck-you-money” is a wonderful and somewhat shocking scene. But his naivete comes across as well, most poignantly when he confesses in frustration to Hal Holbrook that people in these little towns should just get out as fast as they can, to which Holbrook replys “where are we supposed to go?”

At the same time, it is also totally obvious that it makes no sense to simply destroy our land and drinking water through these practices,  and Promised Land gets this perspective across without ever seeming preachy or heavy-handed. It would have been nice if the film had tackled the broader picture here – namely, that pitting completely disempowered and desperate people versus billion dollar corporations (backed by the last 20 years of conservative Supreme Court decisions) is just not a good way to run a country. But I am nitpicking a bit – Promised Land is quite thought-provoking even without this broader discussion.

Matt Damon is incredible. The guy is getting like Robert Redford was in his prime – he’s so winning and so convincing on screen that he can make almost anything work beautifully. He has you actually rooting for the bad guys for most of this film. Rosemarie DeWitt, Frances McDormand and Hal Holbrook give the kind of performances that should be nominated for awards but never are. And John Krasinski is really good in the very interesting role of the environmentalist that shows up to make trouble. Incidental casting and acting is solidly good.

Damon and Krasinski wrote this, and I would say they did a really nice job. They created many memorable scenes through dialog, and developed characters very effectively. And they understand the importance of creating big, dramatic scenes, something the critics really took after them for. (I ask you: why go the the movies if nothing is dramatized, and everything is a flat reflection of the most boring and uninspirational aspects of human life?) The writing does bare the trademark attributes of Matt Damon’s writing, but that’s not a bad thing – he may not be among my twenty favorite screenwriters of all time, but he is quite good.

Ignore the critics and see Promised Land. There are at least 2 Oscar nominated movies it should have trumped in the best picture nominations race.

Hysteria is about a doctor who got a job jacking off stressed-out women in a clinical setting. When he eventually developed something like carpel tunnel servicing the insatiable needs of his patients, he invented the vibrator so they could jack themselves off. In this way he did a great service for his society, and the sanity of those in it.

I think the sexual dysfunction of American society is appalling; probably the only place worse is Iran! That old “bundling board” mentality of our founders just won’t go away, which is why all that titillating soft-porn shit on Girls is so popular. There was something to be said in this film about the realities of sexuality that would have been valuable for Americans to hear. The problem is Hysteria played it safe. It didn’t have the guts to be all about sex. Instead, it broadened into a pastiche of women’s issues, all tackled superficially.  It made itself inconsequential, and it didn’t have to be that way.

It’s not a bad film, just disappointing and a touch dull.

Barbara is a decent film – interesting, beautifully filmed, well-conceived. My problem is that I expected it to be an “escape from a communist country” film, and it’s really not. It’s a slow, careful look at life in a communist country and the somewhat conflicted appeal of the idea of possible escape to the West, and it’s a character study of Barbara, the main character. (I use “character study” loosely, because it’s hard to do a truly satisfying character study of a character that barely speaks.) Personally I find depictions of communist Europe so depressing that unless there is some subversion going on, or someone you care about is escaping, the film usually doesn’t do much for me.

I’m not sorry I saw it. It’s a nicely made little film. It just didn’t leave much of an impression, for whatever reason.

The Impossible is a mesmerizing movie. It captures the tsunami and its devastating aftermath very skillfully and effectively. Naomi Watts is good. (An Oscar nomination? I don’t quite see that.) Ewan McGregor is really good, as is the oldest child (Tom Holland.) All the supporting and incidental acting is pretty decent. It’s not a fantastically interesting or impressive story (I would never need to see this film again,) but it definitely holds your attention the first time through.

But there’s something a little weird about this film. The subtitle is “Nothing is More Powerful than the Human Spirit,” but really it should have read “Nothing is More Powerful than Dumb Luck.” There is very little human spirit on display here, at least not in a way that is explicitly emphasized. The family’s survival is remarkable, yes, but their survival is almost wholly the product of getting lucky in the flood waters and being found in time by the local population. Yes, they fought to live, so did all the people that died when the water smashed them into things, a lot of good the human spirit did those poor fuckers! There are almost no selfless acts on display here – one guy loans Ewan McGregor a cell phone, big fucking deal. The kid only reunites two people. Naomi Watts does save one kid. It’s just that I expected a convincing and moving depiction of the tragedy as a whole, and how the people involved set everything aside in the name of mutual survival. I also think that omitting how the tragedy effected the lives of the people who lived there was pretty questionable as well. I would even go so far as to suggest that there is something vaguely racist about the way the local population was portrayed.

The Impossible is really all about how lucky this one family was, which is a strange message given how many people died in the thing. Disaster movies need to have balance, there needs to be some recognition of the true nature of the disaster while you are telling stories of survival. No one wants their nose rubbed in how lucky other people were – that’s not a good story! It would be like making Titanic and focusing on some privileged dope who got lucky and made it into the first life boat, and then fell asleep as the ship went down.

Which brings us to this film’s very unfortunate coda: their insurance agent meets them wearing a smart suit, and they are whisked away in a private jet to get top medical care in Singapore. What the fuck?! The plane they were on was empty, except for them! Don’t you think there were a few other people there who wanted to get the fuck out of that hell hole, or could have used better medical attention in Singapore? What kind of fucked up message is that? I guess nothing is more powerful than being able to afford good health insurance.

But it’s okay, because Naomi Watts sheds a tear as she looks out the window of her private jet, although I suppose it’s possible it’s merely a tear of self pity.