Irreviews

I have long admired Timothy Spall as an actor, but I left Mr. Turner thinking “what the fuck was that shit?!” The last hour and a half of the film, he pretty much just grunts, not that he had much to say in the first hour. His JMW Turner is little more than a revolting little troll – grunting, snorting, sputtering, scowling, groping women, eating pig’s heads, and callously ignoring his family. Maybe it’s all true and maybe it isn’t, but regardless, what is the point of being dragged through this grim spectacle? Is there nothing to conclude about JMW Turner other than he was some kind of glorified ape?

Mr. Turner is not all bad, I suppose. The character of Sophia Booth, who Turner kind of lives with in his later years, is a warm and likable character, very fun to watch, brought to life by an excellent performance from the little-known Marion Bailey. And even though the film can’t be bothered to say one interesting thing about Turner’s art, the few scenes of him unorthodoxly plying his craft are pretty fun to watch. But aside from this the film is quite dull, and more than a bit depressing.

I’ve simply had it with Mike Leigh, a filmmaker who I feel has gone off the deep end, never to return. I’ve been nurturing this soft spot for him based on the magnificent Secrets and Lies and the delightful Topsy Turvy. But those films are fifteen years old now, and his recent work suggests an unhealthy preoccupation with death, decay, insanity, ugliness, and regret, a preoccupation which is not counterbalanced by anything. His films have obviously become a dumping ground for his increasingly tortured psyche. I can’t imagine who enjoys them at this point.

If you love JMW Turner’s paintings, and feel compelled to see this movie, I’m not exactly sure what to tell you. Don’t expect any insights into his art, and don’t expect any insights into his character. The man was an ape, period! There, I’ve saved you $15.

If you feel compelled to see this because you want to appreciate JMW Turner’s art, just forget it.

I find the prospect of reviewing The Imitation Game so dreary I can hardly bare it.

This movie takes the very interesting story of how the Nazi Enigma code was broken, and turns it into a tedious harangue, the sole purpose of which is to advance the bizarre and patronizing thesis that “autistic gays should be treated with respect, because they can be geniuses” (merely being human isn’t quite enough, apparently). The film advances this thesis by presenting Alan Turing as a tragic figure of near-cosmic proportions, a emotionally crippled soul suffering from homosexuality, autism, and mechanophilia, who, despite the scorn and misunderstanding of the world, as well as the the obstructionism and hatred of all his colleagues and commanding officers, managed to win World War II all by himself. There was a time when audiences and critics would not so readily swallow such insipid, manipulative crap; clearly that time has past.

The Imitation Game is in many ways a giant lie. The real Alan Turing did not suffer from Aspergers, at least not in any significant way, nor was he a friendless snob with no sense of humor. By all accounts he was a warm and friendly guy who had good relationships with his colleagues. He was gay, but was never guilty of espionage resulting from his being blackmailed on account of his sexuality, as this film claims. He was not despised by his commanding officers, nor did they actively impede him in his code-breaking work. He did not invent his “thinking machine” from scratch, all by himself; basic versions of the machine had already been invented and built by Polish cryptographers, to which Turing made substantial and important refinements – he redesigned it assuming the existence of a “crib”, or a predictable bunch of text repeated in every message (although the Polish cryptographers had already exploited this same idea to a limited extent.) There were also hundreds of these machines, hidden all over England for safety, not one lone machine named “Christopher”, bearing the entire burden of the world, and which Turing later adopts as a kind of life partner! Even Turing’s supposed suicide is in fact a moot issue, historically. And the concept of the “imitation game”, which refers to the various “Turing tests” of a machine’s ability to “think”, is in this movie warped into manifestation of Turing’s supposed mental illness!

What explains this nonsense? Clearly these filmmakers could not see any way to make a movie about code-breaking interesting, which I find quite pathetic. But why go to such ridiculous extremes in bastardizing the story and its central character? Why make Turing into a fictional monster who, Christ-like, gives himself for his fellow man? These questions defy answers, I’m afraid, and the response of the film’s director (“A lot of historical films sometimes feel like people reading a Wikipedia page to you onscreen … Our goal was to give you ‘What does Alan Turing feel like?'”) is simply insulting. They should have stuck with the Wikipedia page!

Setting aside the film’s depiction of Turing, we find the entire rest of the film little more than a shoddily assembled afterthought. It lumbers forward gracelessly, virtually every scene a stupid chiche. The dialog is atrocious, and the supporting casting and acting is painfully bad (poor Charles Dance looks humiliated by the lines he had to deliver.) As for the main performances, Benedict Cumberbatch is an actor that I really feel I should like, but just don’t. I’ll admit, he does a lot of great stammering in this film, and makes a lot of weird, unattractive faces, both of which will probably guarantee him the Oscar for Best Actor, but I can’t really say I got much of a sense of this highly fictionalized Alan Turing from his performance (other than he was “on the spectrum”, and a fucking jerk). And I can’t believe that Keira Knightley got an Oscar nomination for her performance, as it’s practically the only bad performance I’ve ever seen her give! It’s a grim, joyless performance, completely devoid of any attempt at verisimilitude. And the fact that she looks like a sexy space alien (google what Joan Clarke actually looked like) just makes matters worse.

Put simply, The Imitation Game is an abomination.

PS: Considering that the Computer Engineer Barbie book was recently pulled from shelves and its author vilified for corrupting the minds of young women, because in the story Barbie collaborates with men, what are we to make of this film’s portrayal of Joan Clarke as a glorified secretary good at crossword puzzles, who basically does nothing but serve as Alan Turing’s beard, when in fact she was an actual mathematician, recruited as a mathematician by the head of the decryption unit (not by Turing), and was a leading member who actually headed up her own group? Why isn’t The Imitation Game being pilloried for corrupting the minds of young women?!

It’s now a tradition here at Irreviews to see the Oscar-nominated animated shorts at IFC during the month before the Oscars, and to write some brief remarks about them. It’s a tradition that I’m coming to truly enjoy, despite never really liking animation. In my opinion, the short feature is the proper format for animation; full-length animation invariably descends into tired slapstick, saccharine story lines, cardboard bad guys, outlandish, over-long chase scenes, and so on, while short features tend to use the strengths of the genera in a more focused and abstract way. This realization has changed everything for me where animation is concerned. I now really like the genera, as long as it stays under 20 minutes or so!

The 2014 animated shorts are a perfect illustration of what I am talking about. Let’s begin with The Dam Keeper. I had to struggle with all my might not to start openly sobbing during this film. It’s one of the most emotionally wrenching things I seen in a long time. It isn’t just that its narrative is basically the (somewhat sad) story of my life, but everything about this film is done so beautifully it’s overwhelming – the music, the conception of the characters, the way the scenes are constructed and framed, and the visual impact of the drawings. At one point toward the end, as the sun is coming out over the town, each frame is like an exquisite impressionist painting – I’ve never seen anything like it. In terms of emotional impact, the only film I can compare it to is perhaps Malèna, in the way it reaches so deep into the primal emotions of childhood it’s difficult to process on a merely intellectual level. The Dam Keeper is simply astonishing!

I also loved Duet, which is not nominated (it should have been), but is included among the four honorable mentions. This love story is visually almost as beautiful as The Dam Keeper, although in a completely different way, featuring a mesmerizing, turbulent stream of partly-colored line sketches which morph before your eyes in lovely and very surprising ways. Emotionally it was somewhat more pedestrian (although still moving), but it’s a beautiful piece of animation. The last of the three standouts is Me and My Moulton, about three sisters dealing with their strange and sometimes disappointing parents. It’s a wonderful story, the animation is simple and effective, the narration is really well-written, and the spectrum of ideas explored is very interesting.

On the lighter side, there is Feast, about a hungry stray dog who finds a home with bachelor guy who feeds him vast amounts of junk food, at least until the guy meets a girlfriend who cleans up his diet, much to the chagrin of the dog! This was much more traditional piece of animation, but I found it really funny, and surprisingly moving in the end.

Of the remaining features, A Single Life, though very short (2 minutes), is a total scream: a women realizes that a 45 record she receives in the mail is actually a time travel device to her entire life. Bus Story is a charming and quirky story of a woman whose life ambition is to drive a school bus. Footprints is a bizarre tale of a man who witnesses the aftermath of ordinary occurrences and imagines horrifying monsters perpetrating them. The only two I did not care for were Sweet Cocoon, which was your typical “animated mayhem”, and The Bigger Picture, which although interesting visually was pointlessly bleak and depressing.

In this sadly disappointing year for movies, a year that features the most uninspiring selection of Oscar Nominees ever, I can think of no better solution then to get yourself over to IFC and take in these funny, moving, beautiful shorts, which together artistically lay waste to most of the full-length features I’ve seen this year.

I guess enough time has finally passed since the U.S. major media coordinated itself to destroy Gary Webb for his bold and courageous investigative reporting – honestly, I didn’t think a movie could ever be made on this subject, at least not by Americans. Webb was so villainized in the major media that even after he blew his brains out they could not write a kind, accurate, respectful obituary. (Here’s an excellent obituary of Webb, written by Robert Parry, the reporter who broke the Iran-Contra story and was quickly forced out of mainstream journalism as a reward.) In this year of exceptionally boring and inconsequential movies, Kill The Messenger stands out by tackling this historically important but largely forgotten story. The film feels a bit limited in its ideas, and its narrative approach is somewhat generic and a bit uneven, but it is nevertheless a very welcome film, one that is well worth seeing. Alas, it’s been out only four days in New York, and the theater at the 8:00 show at Angelica last night was almost empty.

As its title might suggest, Kill The Messenger is largely focused on (and is most successful in) its personal portrayal of Webb – what kind of guy he was and the tragedy of what happened to him and his family. Jeremy Renner is very likable and believable as Webb, and should be lauded for using his talent and celebrity in the service of such important material. But as a political statement the film unfortunately comes across as more than a tad cursory and superficial. The dialog is not very well written, and the film seems more a murky stream of hearsay happenings and unattractive people, rather than a clear and focused exploration of the many profound issues impacting the story. Its consistent use of jazzed-up music montages of grainy old TV footage (of Contra soldiers stacking money or stacking bags of coke) exacerbates this, creating an unfortunate deadening effect that somehow makes the entire political subject seem like a rather boring, technical, unsexy topic which deserves to be the historical footnote it has become.

I think where Kill The Messenger disappointed me the most was in the insufficiency of its technique (particularly its simplistic and uninspired approach to dialog), which placed huge limits on the ideas it could address in the course of the film. The film’s narrative, aside from its portrayal of Webb’s personal life, is practically telegraphic, satisfied merely with sketching outlines of the various players and happenings. Many topics deserving attention are simply rushed past – the significance of the article’s (at the time novel) distribution on the internet, which vastly increased its impact, both on the population and on the major media; its direct connection to the Iran-Contra investigation, especially that much of Webb’s evidence came from ignored facts that surfaced during Lawrence Walsh’s inquiry; the immoral and absurd line of defense from the CIA that since they had not “purposely” directed drugs into South Central Los Angeles there was no issue and no problem, and Webb’s reporting was pointless; and last but not least the incredible acts of international terrorism on the part of the United States, in its desire to destroy the democratically elected government of Nicaragua for no reason, a backdrop that casts the most profoundly tragic and damning air over the actions of the U.S. media and the fate of inner city black populations across America.

I could go on, but the point is that Gary Webb’s story, when viewed in its proper and complete historical context, is a canvas of such incredible depth and richness it is very disappointing to see it tossed-off with a mere “Polaroid” rendition. Someone like Costa Gavras was needed to make this film, someone who would not shrink away from the significant intellectual and writing challenges this material presents, and who would use the film to alter current public perception, rather than merely document the literal outlines of past happenings.

If you are not familiar with Gary Webb, Kill the Messenger is a fun way to begin learning about him and what he uncovered. It’s not a bad film. But with material this rich, it really should have been a masterpiece.

This is Where I Leave You is a film that totally rides its very specific genera – “estranged extended family reunites under one roof for a period of time, drives each other crazy, and then caves in to a superficial reconciliation”. This type of film seems to be endlessly fascinating (or at least diverting) to audiences, and has been done a million times to prove it. Even though the comedic writing is somewhat tired and uneven, This is Where I Leave You is a decently entertaining, if not terribly memorable, film.

The main (perhaps only) reason this film holds together is Jason Bateman. He might not quite be one of those actors that you can plunk down in the middle of a turd and expect him to elevate it all by himself, but he is close to being that kind of actor. He’s very fun to watch, and has a persona that viewers bond with easily; these traits distract the viewer from other shortcomings, and make his fellow cast members seem better than they actually are. Bateman basically elevates This is Where I Leave You all by himself, which is pretty remarkable given the horrifying cast of supporting players he was saddled with – Tina Fey (who I’m starting to loathe), the endlessly revolting Adam Driver, and an affected and very weird-looking Jane Fonda decked out with watermelon tits. The extremely talented Katherine Hahn has almost nothing to do in a glorified bit role, while Rose Byrne is given just enough room to show how charming she can be on-screen, but not enough for her character to make any significant impression.

If you like “family reunion” movies, you’ll probably enjoy This is Where I Leave You to some extent. Just don’t expect too much.

Irreviews has been down for almost two months, and significantly slowed for about four months, for a variety of reasons. As it stumbles back to life, it is at the suggestion of Mrs. Irreviews that I begin with brief (one sentence) summaries of all the (mostly unremarkable) summer movies that never got reviewed.

So without further ado, here was Summer 2014:

The Hundred Foot Journey

A feel-good food movie featuring Helen Miren, lots of yummy food, and Hollywood’s now-standard, idealized (almost propagandist) portrayal of Indian people; it’s a sweet, inoffensive movie about love, food and the meaning of life, guaranteed to be insipid to some, and a relief to others.

About Alex

The Big Chill, re-envisioned for Generation Y, it has some genuinely funny characters and lines that by themselves make the film almost worth seeing, but the central character of the writer is both badly written and horribly acted, and the character of Alex himself is too much of a mystery man for the story to have any hope of emotional resonance at its denouement.

What If

Nerdy Daniel Radcliffe plays the long game for fellow nerd Zoe Kazan; it’s cute, inoffensive, and has a few funny moments, but the writing is uneven and it leaves you quite emotionally flat in the end.

Cavalry

A completely bizarre but strangely fascinating movie, featuring the always-fabulous Brendan Gleeson amidst a breathtaking array of revolting supporting characters who test his Christian patience to the breaking point; the film is at times wickedly funny, at other times heartbreakingly emotional, but in the end the artistic point of the film somewhat eluded me, and I seem to remember it mainly for isolated moments of brilliance (in a movie I’m not at all sure I could sit through again.)

Very Good Girls

Written and directed by the mother of Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal (Naomi Foner, who wrote the Sidney Lumet classic Running on Empty (1988)), Very Good Girls features the electrifying Elizabeth Olsen and the pleasingly plain Dakota Fanning as two Brooklyn best friends who fall for the same mysterious young ice cream vendor, a laconic stud played by Boyd Holbrook (who is visually like a poor man’s Ryan Gosling); the film is well-written, beautifully acted, and packed with old-school nuance – it’s a high-quality B-film that you should definitely check out.

Tammy

In this her second film in a row playing a disgusting, moronic, ignorant, belligerent asshole with no dignity, no common sense, and no charm, Melissa McCarthy again articulates the popular rage in a totally unconstructive and unhelpful manner.

The Internet’s Own Boy

It’s a spectacularly good and important documentary which I intend to review once I get the opportunity to see it again.

The Master Builder

Heavy, heavy fare, from Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, on the subject of what it means to die; I’ll try to give it its own review, at some point.

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s The Trip (2011) was a unique comic masterpiece. This sequel, The Trip to Italy, is a long, tiresome, and mostly unfunny film that tarnishes your memory of the first film. It has none of the spontaneity or the lovely comic balance of the first film, it features too little Steve Coogan and too much Rob Brydon, Italy is not filmed very well, and the food scenes are done rather poorly. It’s 108 minutes, but feels like two and a half hours.

Any lover of The Trip should avoid The Trip To Italy like the plague.

A Most Wanted Man is quite an overrated movie. I’ll admit, it’s decently gripping while you’re watching it, mainly because people are constantly in danger of getting a black bag forced over their head (which guarantees a certain minimal amount of viewer interest). But its story is rather simplistic and linear, the dialog is for the most part uninteresting, the cinematography is totally unappealing, and character development is appalling bad. It’s a poorly-made film built on questionable sociopolitical ideas, and I can’t help but feeling its widespread critical acclaim is mainly because Phillip Seymour Hoffman is dead.

Compared to the hard-hitting relevance of The Constant Gardener, the intellectual content of A Most Wanted Man rings weirdly false. Its story is the dramatization of a would-be policy debate on terrorism, an internal competition between various factions of state security, and a plea for us to “come to our senses” and do things the way we used to do them during the Cold War (a George Smiley approach to terrorism, if you will). In this, John le Carré is disappointingly out of his depth. There is no honesty or understanding here about our role in creating the animosity we face in the world, much less why we create that animosity (the limitless greed and immorality of the super-rich, basically). And there’s no sentiment that perhaps we should be learning from the millions of innocent people slaughtered during the Cold War that a world of spys, torture, “disappearances”, coup d’etats, and military occupations is in fact a pretty crappy world to live in, one that we need not perpetuate and should not perpetuate.

In the now-hermetic, romanticized, “fun and games” atmosphere of the Cold War, John le Carré-type spy stories can be wonderful, although most of their appeal is probably linked to nostalgia for a less technologically oppressed era. But in our current world, spies, geopolitical violence, and feelings of us-versus-them desperately need to be replaced by respect, peace-building, true international law, and a constructive, cooperative future for humanity. There’s too much at stake and the world has become too fragile to keep fucking around, just because the obscenely rich want to exploit certain areas of the globe. A Most Wanted Man is, ultimately, a casualty of elementary moral decency, and cold, hard reality.

So the film is a dismal failure on the level of ideas, but what about its effectiveness as a simple spy tale? Well, it’s a failure there too. Not a single character besides the main character of Günther (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) commands any kind of emotional or intellectual connection of any kind; they’re just cardboard placeholders, each so generic and unworthy of mental energy that you can’t even remember any of their names once the film is over. Hoffman’s character of Günther comes across a little better, but only because you’re bludgeoned with him for the whole film, not because he’s distinctive or has anything interesting to say. The story, then, is watching these shapeless blobs being moved around a chessboard by various, equally shapeless spies. It’s nothing you’d ever want or need to watch again.

A word on the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman. For some reason, I used to run into Hoffman pretty regularly around and about New York City. He was never one of my favorite actors, but he did occasionally give performances that I really, really liked, even though they were ones that no one ever talked about (Next Stop Wonderland, Flawless, The Ides of March, and A Late Quartet). He was pretty good in A Most Wanted Man, but the film’s lack of overall quality put a definite ceiling on his performance. It’s a shame that his ultra-blessed Hollywood life was so unfulfilling to him that he had to shoot heroin to kill his pain. If drugs were decriminalized in the U.S. (as they should be), Hoffman’s addiction could have been managed medically, and he’d still be around, giving great performances. Sad.

A Most Wanted Man: It’s somewhat entertaining in the moment, but ultimately shallow and disappointing.

Magic in the Moonlight is in some ways a new low for Woody Allen, and that’s saying something! If this film had been made by some young, unknown filmmaker – like the debut film of some guy affiliated with the Sundance Institute, for example – that person would be an instant laughingstock, the film would be eviscerated by the critics (if it was even released), and he would probably never make another movie again. But because it’s Woody Allen, this trite, insipid, and shockingly boring piece of rubbish is getting amazingly forgiving reviews and is clogging theaters in New York, preventing all kinds of interesting smaller films from having much of a run, or being shown at all. Angelika still has it on three screens, as if there’s nothing else worth seeing! It pisses me off!

Why do actors and actresses continue to flock to Woody Allen in order to be humiliated in one of his movies? Is it some weird Hollywood rite of passage? The participation of Eileen Atkins and Jakki Weaver I get – at a certain age, you take any roles that come to you. But Emma Stone and Colin Firth do not have to appear in shit like this; they more or less have their pick of the crop. Why would they choose Magic in the Moonlight? The film is entirely unfunny and entirely uninteresting. The two main characters are stale, platitudinous creations. The dialog is painfully bad. The story is tedious and vacuous at the same time. The film is rife with embarrassments. It’s probably the worst film I’ve seen all year, and it’s been a terrible year for film.

Enough. I will waste no more time reviewing this wretched film.

I’ll be honest. I went to see The Purge: Anarchy because I felt like ranting about how Americans don’t have any idea what the word anarchy really means. I kind of hoped it would turn out to be a tollerable B-film, but was prepared for the worst. But it surprised me. It’s actually quite a good little B-film, one which (within the limits of its genera) has fairly interesting and sympathetic characters,  decent dialog, an intriguing and passably realistic story, a reasonably restrained visual approach to violence, and a surprising amount of (albeit heavy-handed) sociopolitical content. Plus, the word “anarchy” is never uttered once in the film, making me think that title was a tack-on, an attempt to market the film to a people (Americans) who think anarchy means a “political system” where everybody rides around on motorcycles wearing goalie masks and carrying machetes or AK47s, killing everyone they come in contact with.

In The Purge, a futuristic American government has set aside 12 hours each year when all crime is legal. The government is clearly an extreme oligarchy of super-rich fuckers, and the explicit purpose of the purge is to encourage all the poor people to slaughter each other. This annual bloodbath is supplemented by the rich (through their government), who also take advantage of the purge by sending armies into the poor areas to get rid of even more “worthless people”. There is a black revolutionary movement trying to rally people via the internet, telling them that the purge is all about making the super-rich even richer, and the poor need to rise up and turn the tables on the rich. It is within this context that four normal (i.e. poor and nonviolent) people are stuck outside on purge night, and accidentally hook up with a “sergeant” who is out participating, planning to off someone who “took something from him”. The five of them attempt to survive the night together.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie that so had it in for rich people. At one point in the movie, a black revolutionary in the heat of battle yells “Come on you rich bitches! Time to die!“, and it’s meant seriously! When was the last time you heard a line like that in a mainstream movie? And for their part, the rich people in the film have a palpable bloodlust for the poor trash, despising them to their very core. In our society, which is pathologically in love with the super-rich – their privilege, power and excess – and wedded to the notion that they “like us”, “need us” and “exist to help us”, the film’s much more accurate portrayal of rich and poor is remarkably subversive. The Purge does not follow this narrative path to any conclusion – ultimately, it’s a survival film and a character drama, not a political film – but the impact of the film’s political context is pretty remarkable.

This political context may to some seem way over-the-top. But today’s super-rich are, in a way, systematically killing off the poor; it’s just done very indirectly and obliquely. Part of it is off-shoring all our jobs, so we earn much less, have no health care, no benefits, no safety net, and can be more easily exploited by our employers. Part of it is using the “drug war” as an excuse to put all the young black men in jail (notice no rich corporate type or Hollywood star ever goes to jail for drug possession – why isn’t Robert Downey Jr. serving 20-to-life in some hell hole, and getting ass-raped?). Part of it is the endless pressure to destroy the very concept of things like medicare, medicaid, welfare, food stamps, social security, pensions, and unions. And isn’t their manipulation of our society so average people feel all alone, isolated and hostile toward one another, a kind of death for us all? Honestly, in a way I am more impressed with the implicit sociopolitical content of The Purge than I was with the explicit political content of the much more lauded A Most Wanted Man (a film which, to my mind, really missed the salient point vis-à-vis terrorism).

As a survival film, The Purge reminds me of how films of this genera used to be made in the 80’s and before – fairly low-tech, and equal parts action and character development, with a lot of dialog-based scenes. The character development is of course not super-deep, but it’s decent enough to give the film some texture, texture that makes it pleasant to watch and encourages you to bond with the protagonists and truly want them to live (think how many similar films these days feature protagonists that you couldn’t give a damn about). The film is paced well, and I must say, the performances, even from the supporting and incidental players, are quite solid.

I’m very happy I went to see The Purge: Anarchy – I never thought I’d be saying that. The night before I saw Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight, and I can tell you The Purge wound up being a way better movie: more entertaining, more interesting, and better performances! If you like survival films, or if you are interested in class politics, you should definitely check it out The Purge.