Irreviews

Hesher is about a father and son who can’t move on after the mother is killed in a car crash. Their process is “aided” by Hesher, a violent whack-job played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who invades their lives and causes random mayhem.

This movie is just bizarre. There is much in it that makes no sense. The kid T.J. is like 9 years old, yet he appears to be going to high school; that’s fine if he was some kind of prodigy, but frankly he seemed a little retarded to me. Natalie Portman (who again proves to be a bad sign in movies) continues her strange quest to prove to the world that she is not beautiful; personally, I think she should just enjoy it and start picking films that emphasize it, rather than trying to pretend that somewhere in this world there are lonely cashiers that look like her. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a good actor, but really he just spends this entire film acting bat-shit crazy. It’s fun, but after a while a bit disconcerting, especially since the story never seems to be progressing anywhere. When they finally have to resolve everything at the very end, it’s painfully weird and inadequate, and leaves you with the feeling that father and son might have healed in the same amount of time if Hesher had never shown up at all.

I can’t really recommend this film. It’s exceedingly strange, and almost pointless.

This is a cute little film that really does not transcend its very effective trailer. There’s a lot of films with this problem lately, and I find that even if I enjoy such films I still leave the theater feeling like I got ripped off in some way. It’s not entirely fair (what if I hadn’t seen the trailer?) but it is not entirely unfair either. After all, if a film cannot develop characters, plot and dialog that makes you forget a 2 minute preview then it’s pretty much doomed as a serious artistic endeavor.

Silver Linings Playbook is about mental dysfunction. Usually films in this genera are pretty dreary. This one has a bit more life to it. But the film lacks a certain depth, and the characters are only developed enough to support the immediate needs of the plot. The ending was sweet, but fell a bit flat. It all fell a bit flat, actually.

I really have come to like Bradley Cooper, and his charisma and spontaneity carries the film. I was surprised to like Robert De Niro (an actor I’m not particularly fond of) in his crazy yet sensitive role. But Jennifer Lawrence’s acting always strikes me as a bit flat and lifeless, and she’s no different in this film. I sort of wonder how much she held the film back. I should add that it was very nice to see Julia Stiles for a few seconds, just to know that marvelous actress is still alive, even if no one has the sense or the guts to give her a staring role anymore.

Silver Linings Playbook goes down pretty well, but it’s not something I’ll be returning to, ever. Put it on your Netflix cue for a slow night.

PS – now that the Oscar nominations are out and the Golden Globes are through, I feel compelled to add a post script. This film is nominated like it’s one of the best films of the last decade. That’s absurd! Cooper is good, but he does not blow your mind! DeNiro is better than he normally is, and is kind of funny, but I don’t think he transforms the film the way Mo’Nique transformed Precious, or the way Kevin Klein transformed A Fish Called Wanda. Jacki Weaver? I think she’s a wonderful actress, but she really doesn’t do much here – they should have given her the Oscar for Aminal Kingdom, like she deserved.

And Jennifer Lawrence . . . I think she was nominated for the same reason that magazine recently declared her to be the most desirable woman in the world: forces are at work to turn this gal into a media superstar, no matter what! Seriously, compare her performance, for example, to the magnificent performance of Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Smashed (it’s a travesty Winstead was ignored this year.) Compare her performance to Zoe Kazan’s wonderful performance in Ruby Sparks. Clearly Jennifer Lawrence is at best “pretty good” in this film – she’s flat in places, always a bit stilted, her comic touch is hardly thrilling, her dancing isn’t very convincing, and her character did not lodge in my brain in any way. Hell, Greta Gerwig was better in Lola Versus, for Christ sake!

As for Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Director, each of those is more ridiculous than the last. The screenplay was pretty average. The direction was completely unremarkable. Maybe you could defend Best Picture based on its overall appeal, I’m not sure.

All I know is that people really need to retrieve their heads over this picture!!!

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a superior take on the same basic story chronicled in Melancholia, namely something is going to smash into Earth and put us all out of our misery. That does not make it a good film, of course, but unlike Melancholia it is not an insulting, post modern shit-fest. Instead, it is a nice little indie film with warm, charismatic leads and a charming, if somewhat unexciting, story about falling in love.

The strange thing about this film is that two days later I actually can’t remember very much that happened in it, so clearly this is not a film that is going to stay with you for a long time! I remember that there was a great scene where Keira talks about how great vinyl records sound compared to digitized music, and I remember thinking it had a very sweet ending. That’s about it. I do remember basically enjoying it, however, for what it’s worth.

I want to close by saying a few words about the two leads. Keira Knightly is basically marketed in the media as a sex symbol; maybe she looks good if you’re both in a concentration camp, but otherwise it strikes me as borderline absurd. But what I never hear mentioned about her is what a good actress she is. I think she is very underrated. She has an electricity, a spontaneity in her performances that many more critically acclaimed actresses (e.g. Jennifer Lawrence) should really aspire to. Steve Carell, on the other hand, is marketed as a funny man. I never found him all that funny. But what I never hear mentioned about him is how great he is as a romantic lead – in this film, Dan in Real Life, and even Crazy, Stupid, Love to a certain extent. Think how many male romantic leads fall flat because they lack warmth and you can’t connect with them emotionally – Steve Carell never has that problem. On the contrary, there is something about his particular on-screen warmth that is totally compelling in this kind of role. It was nice to see both of them playing to their strengths, together, in this film. I just wish the movie had been more interesting.

What can I say? There are way worse films you could Netflix on a slow night.

I enjoyed Lincoln, but I did not love it. It is undeniably a good topic for a film, and they wrote a good amount of fairly decent dialog for the characters. It was interesting, it was educational, and it was satisfying. I would recommend it to anyone.

My problem is that Spielberg’s heavy style, although somewhat muted here, still strongly colors the entire proceeding. You are every second painfully aware that you are watching a Hollywood movie. Climactic moments are too numerous, over-emphasized, and held for too long. The humor is too obvious and too telegraphed. Since the director is Steven Spielberg, he gets to have lots of big stars in his film, but they prove to be distracting. There is something about Tommy Lee Jones that makes me not believe him in any role he plays, and this is doubly true if he is wearing a wig (remember him in JFK?!) I also felt that he, David Strathairn, and Sally Field came across as decidedly too modern (I’m not sure if it was their performances or if they are just too strongly familiar,) and the same was true of some of the supporting casting. I did like James Spader and John Hawkes, however – they were quite convincing in their small but important roles.

Then there is Daniel Day Lewis, an actor that has always amazed me with his ability to completely disappear into any part he plays, despite his tendency to star in films I don’t like. He does it again here, giving us a Lincoln that gracefully blends most of what we know about Lincoln’s complex personality. I do wonder if he shaded his performance a bit too much in the “Noam Chomsky” direction, but I still thought he was really good. I just wish the dialog had been better – I don’t feel like they got across Lincoln as a master manipulator as well as they might have.

As for the John Williams score, nothing sucks life out of a film quite like a John Williams score. This one was less offensive than usual, or perhaps it was just less emphasized, but it still had its usual unfortunate effect.

Lincoln is far from a bad film, in fact there’s a lot to like about it. It’s worth seeing despite its problems and shortcomings.

Skyfall is a phenomenon here in NYC. Shows are sold out all over the place, even on weeknights. So even though I have never been much of a James Bond enthusiast, and having only seen a couple of the movies since Roger Moore stopped staring in them, I had to see what all the fuss was about.

Skyfall is diverting enough, if you want an evening of things getting blown up and people getting shot. But by any reasonable standard it is a lame-ass movie.  The first third features an adequate but unscintillating and improbable story idea (Bond thwarting a systematic unveiling of British secret agents embedded in terrorist organizations) which quickly gets relegated to a device setting up the much less interesting main plot: a nutty weirdo in a blonde wig who has dedicated his life to killing poor little Judi Dench. The connection between these two stories is so unimpressive that by the end it feels like you watched two different movies: a political thriller that ended right in the middle, and one of those stupid serial killer movies with a climax scene that drags on for so long you stop caring who lives and who dies.

I can’t even see how James Bond freaks would like this film. Once the main story is engaged the movie is really boring, and frankly feels endless. The “bond girls” are all weak, ineffective, and unsexy. Bond has no cool gadgets at his disposal, in fact he’s low-tech in this one. And does anybody honestly give a shit if M dies? She’s a fucking bureaucrat, if she dies they’ll just replace her with another. At least the old James Bond films featured more significant and unambiguous wrongdoing – nukes, biological warfare, crime syndicates, mass robbery – and there were always hot, sexy women who were smart and formidable. They should have stuck with that formula.

So why is Skyfall so popular? Take a look at its dominant themes: killing your boss, killing your mother, escaping from technology, eviscerating your past. There’s a lot of angry, frustrated people out there, and on some level this film is (perhaps inadvertently) tapping directly into the impotent dissatisfaction they feel about their lives. This is all well and good, I suppose, but it still does not make Skyfall a good movie.

A Separation was interesting, but it did not impress me as much as I expected given the glowing critical acclaim. The most interesting aspect of the film is the implicit class conflict, between the presumably middle class family and the decidedly lower class family they become involved with when they hire the wife to look after their aging grandfather. The middle class folk display a interesting obliviousness to the religious and economic concerns of the lower class family, and they also display a more flexible moral attitude towards lying, especially in the context of their religion. I see a parallel to the (largely hidden) class division in the United States, where God-fearing poor-folk play by the rules while the rich do whatever the fuck they want – maybe it’s a bit of a stretch, but that’s what I found myself thinking about after the film.

As far as the supposed Rashomon-like fascination of the film, I didn’t see it. To me it was pretty straightforward. The religious hang-ups of the lower class folk basically cause all the problems. Sure the middle class people are exploitative and dishonest, but the fundamental deception grows out of the inability of the lower class couple to communicate with each other, and that lack of communication appeared to me to have everything to do with their stultifying religious beliefs (which in the context of Iranian society is probably a very bold message.) Once the whole fiasco is set in motion, there follows layer upon layer of moral dilemma as various people struggle with whether or not they should lie about their role. But in the end, you get the sense that none of it was really necessary and that the lives of everybody are, if not ruined, then at least fucked up for the foreseeable future. Thus when you are finished with the film you don’t really feel fascination so much as depression.

I’m really not sure I can recommend this film. It’s a somewhat interesting portrait of Iranian life, but my overall impression of the story is that it’s a bit dreary and a bit tedious, and certainly not intellectually thrilling.

Cloud Atlas is kind of fun, in a shallow, drawn-out sort of way. Its general message of individual acts of love overcoming institutionalized violence and hatred is a good one, certainly. The film is not subtle and it is not deep. It’s not even that complicated or difficult to follow – the six parallel stories are each very simple and straightforward, and it is always very clear what time period you are in. The only complication is that you are invited to ponder the significance of the fact that all the actors provocatively appear in each time-period (heavily disguised,) coupled with a strange, inscrutable message about everyone being connected to each other, all throughout time.

I don’t really buy the idea that we are all connected to each other throughout time, but let’s set that side for the moment. What matters is the case the film made for it. I could discern relatively little connection between the characters and actions in the different segments (there is some, but it’s not very impressive) despite the fact that all the characters kept talking about it. In fact, if the same actors were not used over and over in the different segments, I don’t think anyone would give this idea a second thought. And when that futuristic chick finally gives her big speech that sets her world free, a speech which clearly seeks to put forth the film’s official philosophical stance on this matter, I must confess that nothing she said made any sense to me.

But nevertheless, Cloud Atlas is still fun for two reasons. First, most of the stories are diverting and pretty well-told, and because the film never sits long on any one segment, you almost always feel continuously connected to all six stories. I should add that I thought they maintained the pace of the parallel narratives pretty well, even though the downside of this approach is that you are eventually subjected to 90 straight minutes of denouement, which is undeniably tiring. Second, it’s surprisingly fun to watch all these actors playing multiple, very different roles throughout history – I thought it would seem like a gimmick, but somehow it didn’t.

My wife did not see the movie with me, and the first thing she wanted to know is if the Tom Hanks “cave-man” part was as hokey as it looks in the preview. The answer is no – in fact, that section was actually my favorite, and I thought Tom Hanks was really good in it. Tom Hanks is quite good in all his various roles, and I have an extremely low tolerance for Tom Hanks. It was also nice to see the wonderful Jim Broadbent get to play a variety of different leading roles, only one of which was his usual goofy type-casting. Halley Barry was pretty bad in all her parts, but not bad enough to seriously drag the movie down. Everyone else was solid, including Hugh Grant, who I’m happy to see is finally making a comeback after Sarah Jessica Parker destroyed his career three years ago.

I would recommend Cloud Atlas. Just don’t go in there thinking you’re going to come out with a bunch of deep metaphysical ideas about the human condition. This is simple, Hollywood good vs. evil stuff, with a structural twist – enjoy it for what it is.

Prometheus is a ridiculous piece of shit. It features hands-down the most disgusting movie alien ever – let’s just call it a giant, walking vagina with teeth, rope-like tentacles and a huge, thick penis that gets stuffed down people’s throats. If you are trying to work through an aversion to oral sex, don’t watch this film.

For a movie about humanity meeting its makers, Prometheus is incredibly boring. The dialog never transcends military logistical jargon, and among the largely interchangeable cast of characters there is no sense of intelectual curiosity, historical perspective, or even common sense. In fact, they act like a bunch of goof-balls who travel 14 trillion miles to participate in a frat party. I particularly liked when they get the alien head back to the ship, and Noomi Rapace is like “let’s shoot electricity into it, and see if we can blow it up!”

So if this movie has no dialog and nothing interesting to say, what does it have? Well, there’s lots of evil black slime, some of which gets ingested, there are possessed, cobra-like penis-beings that swim around and “fuck” people, there’s an axe-headed alien stick man who screams like a banshee, and Noomi Rapace gets to give birth to a three-legged squid.

Then there are the demented bodybuilders with translucent ivory skin who supposedly invented humanity. So the story goes, they did a one-eighty and decided they wanted to kill us all – fine,  I guess the movie has to be about something. But consider for a moment their bizarre and unwieldy bio-engineering plan to finish us off: living slime, attack-penises, squid impregnations, walking vaginas? What the fuck is wrong with these guys? Were they really going to bus all this shit across the galaxy and dump it on us? It’s so elaborate, so flamboyant, so impractical, and so difficult to manage and control (obviously, since they all wound up getting deep throated by the vagina monster before they could even launch their ships.)

Prometheus does have one redeeming feature, however. Those ripped-up alien dudes are perhaps the ultimate cautionary tale about the dangers of steroid use.

American democracy and Iranian democracy are more similar than you might think. Iranians are allowed to vote for their president, but a rotten bunch of officially appointed assholes (the Guardian Council) decides the candidates they get to chose from, and thus what range of political ideas will be on the table. In America, there’s a rotten group of obscenely rich assholes serving the exact same function, only less officially, controlling things via funding and manipulation of the private mass media. Have you ever wondered why Barack Obama and Mitt Romney never seriously disagree in these debates? Have you ever wondered why there is no candidate in front of you talking about how America is starting to strongly resemble a third world country, with a thin layer of unfathomably wealthy and privileged elites living in splendor, looking down on vast ocean of poor, unemployed, and underemployed people, and a rapidly disappearing “middle class” that can barely hang on to their jobs and their homes? Have you ever wondered why there is no candidate in front of you talking about the staggering growth of poverty in this country, about how government social programs are necessary and good, about why we need universal health care, about why we need massive overhaul of the predatory financial industry, about how our government should not be carrying out an international assassination program, and about the staggering and frightening problem that “Citizens United” poses to our country? Well, now you have a place to start thinking about this problem!

American ignorance of the Middle East is really disgusting, especially ignorance of our role in shaping the situation there today. Ask a typical American why Iran-Contra was important, and they will (if they even know what you’re talking about) mumble something about Oliver North and how he told a lie. You certainly won’t hear about its relation to the Iran-Iraq war, where we (the United States) were supplying both sides with arms and providing both sides with military intelligence designed to keep the conflict a bloody stalemate for as many years as possible. The result: a millon people dead and two formerly healthy countries shattered and in the iron grip of horrible, repressive fuckers.

Persepolis tells the story of the Iran-Iraq war from the perspective of average Iranians. One of its most important contributions is to make the point that Iran was (and is) populated by actual thinking, feeling people, not a bunch of lunatic savages – it’s very sad that Americans need to be told this, but they do. These people had democratically elected a leader that they liked and who was not a religious whack-job, Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1951, who set about doing really good things for their country. Our government “took him out” in 1953 and put our friend the Shah in power, who we then helped maintain iron-fisted control of a population who rightfully resented his rule. When the religious whack-jobs ousted the Shah, we backed our good buddy Saddam Hussein in attacking Iran, and we kept that senseless slaughter going for eight years.

My point, and the point of the film, is that the common people of Iran were just ordinary folks trying to live their lives amid conditions that they could do nothing about, and Persepolis shows them doing just that – making moonshine, buying contraband shit from the United States, complaining about their repressive society (both under the Shah and under the Ayatollah,) trying to stay alive and out of jail, and fruitlessly dreaming of change. But Persepolis is not purely a political diatribe. It’s a quite personal account of one woman’s experience growing up in that hell-hole. The simple animation is very effective and lovely, and her story is captivating and moving. Clearly it’s the sociopolitical context that gives the story its power, but nevertheless you do not feel lectured while watching the movie. It’s both entertaining and educational.

So see Persepolis, and start thinking for yourself about the Middle East. Maybe instead of bombing Iran in 2013, we (the United States) should stop blocking the formation of the Nuclear Weapons Free Zone in the Middle East, which Iran supports, which the population of Israel overwhelmingly supports, which basically every country in the world supports as the best way to deal with the problem of nukes in that region. It’s too bad our only choices for president are both itching for slaughter and destruction.

My wife and I went to see Smashed because we like Arron Paul (Jesse on Breaking Bad.) He’s a warm and talented actor, and the preview made it look like a promising role for him. He is good in the film, don’t get me wrong, but the preview is a little misleading. Smashed is not really a story of a couple bonding together to help themselves. It’s the story of the wife’s journey to get sober, as her husband just stays a drunk. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does limit what Arron Paul gets to do. I sincerely hope he can eventually break out of this type casting, as I think he has a lot more in him.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead gives a terrific performance as the alcoholic wife who is trying to help herself. The supporting casting is solid (Octavia Spencer is great in a small role,) and the story feels for the most part very realistic. It vividly captures a lot about the disease of alcoholism and it also captures a lot about the process of A.A.. What it does not do is transcend its story in any way – none of these characters are developed very well, and you do not become particularly attached to Winstead’s character as she makes her journey. In the end, the story is too linear and simplistic, too hung up on getting all the details of alcoholism right, to warrant ever watching again.

It’s a good movie to Netflix on a Sunday night when there’s nothing else to watch.