Irreviews

The general impression I get from the media and from friends that have seen this film is that The Master is viewed as a somewhat muddled film with great characters and performances and impressive intellectual content. It is actually a really boring, incoherent film, with extremely poor character development, very mediocre performances, and almost zero intellectual content.

Let’s begin here: Any piece of art on a topic like this should manage to say something substantive about the grander phenomenons of faddishness and guru-following that virtually define America as a society. The Master completely fails to do this. Worse than that, it can’t even adequately describe this one particular cult. Its portrayal of “The Cause” lacks any meaningful details about its philosophical underpinnings, its technical particulars, the nature of its emotional hold on its followers, or the relation of its genesis to Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s character. You get that there’s an element of past life regression stuff (to what exact end we are not told,) and that there’s also some kind of amorphous moral code that is never directly described, but beyond these pathetic cliches it’s like they just couldn’t be bothered to explain anything. Instead, they throw out all these random scenes and leave it to the audience to put it all together. It’s lazy filmmaking at its most repugnant.

There is a decent amount of dialog in the movie, but it’s not good dialog. It’s very empty dialog, some of it flashy, but most of it pretty boring. There is zero character development in the film, and the only consistent theme is a bizarre condemnation of human sexuality which is never explicitly tied to the philosophy of The Cause. With all the things The Master fails to do, it should be no surprise that the film wastes tremendous amounts of on-screen time: for example, the first half-hour of the film is Joaquin Phoenix doing odd jobs, to establish that he is a “lost soul.” This kind of crap almost makes you wish Anderson had just used a narrator – then the film could have been a half-hour shorter!

Phillip Seymour Hoffman is not the slightest bit believable as a charismatic guru. He has no magnetism of any sort – he’s ugly, he has no charisma, and he has no gravitas as an orator. In fact, the best way to describe him and his behavior in the film is “gross” and “embarrassing.” The biggest problem is that his reactions when his work is challenged are all wrong – no one would follow this guy anywhere after seeing even one instance of his clumsy emotional outbursts the second anything unscripted happens in his presence. You want to watch a movie that gets the guru personality spot-on? One that captures exactly how real gurus manipulate people and maintain control? Watch Brit Marling’s The Sound of My Voice, and then tell me how convincing Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s bumbling, oafish guru is.

The character through whom you experience “The Cause,” played by Joaquin Phoenix, is a violent, alcoholic sociopath who can barely speak. Talk about closing off dialog possibilities! Hoffman’s conversations with Phoenix are ridiculous, and the viewer instantly recognizes that the scenes of his “processing” at the hands of Hoffman are destined to devolve into a kind of grotesque comedy, and indeed they do, culminating with the extended “fuck you” shouting match between the two of them in jail. As for Joaquin Phoenix’s acting, I think more and more that he is not so much an actor as simply a weirdo. Didn’t he say he was giving up acting? Why on earth did he decide to go back on that tantalizing declaration?!

Put it all together, and there is simply no reason to watch this film.

Trouble with the Curve is one of those old-fashioned feel good movies, the kind where you know exactly what’s coming to ya. A simple, appealing plot with good guys and bad guys; minimal but interesting and well-integrated sub-plots; some light humor; a few decent, serious scenes where characters grow and connect with each other; a corny, happy ending; and big stars lighting up the screen playing sympathetic and likable characters. I have absolutely nothing against this kind of film, if it’s done well. In fact, I respect this particular genera a lot more than post modern indie downers or artistic drivel like The Master. My wife and I found Trouble with the Curve to be a very enjoyable film.

Clint Eastwood is great just being his usual on-screen self. Amy Adams is really good in a slightly different roll for her. John Goodman is good. Hell, even Justin Timberlake is pretty decent, and he definitely looks better with a beard. The supporting acting is perfectly adequate.

If you are in the mood for this kind of film, don’t heistate.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a wonderful film. It might even prove to be a great film, depending on how repeat viewings stand the test of time. It’s certainly one of the best films of year so far, one that absolutely should not be missed.

What makes Wallflower so special is the casting and performances of the three main characters. Most outstanding is the fellow playing Patrick (Ezra Miller.) From the preview, you would guess that his character is merely the “gay comic relief.” In actuality, his character is complex and very real, and his performance is captivating without feeling the slightest bit overplayed. He almost perfectly captured certain individuals right out of my own 80’s high school past, having been a wallflower myself, who like the main character found a collection of misfits to hang out with and be myself with. You almost never see this kind of flamboyant teenage character played straight – it’s refreshing and impressive.

The kid playing the lead character of Charlie (Logan Lerman) plays his emotionally complicated role with great skill and reserve. He is likable and believable, and he has enough presence to ground the role. As for Emma Watson, she is damn near perfect as the heartbreaking object of Charlie’s affection, combining radiance (she glows on-screen!) with normality and a beautifully submerged self-loathing. Her performance is really good, but it’s her dazzling presence that pushes the film over the top, because it allows the film to so effortlessly capture the emotional torment of being in love as a shy but deep wallflower-type. You just take one look at her and you get everything he is feeling, instantly!

But it’s not just the three actors, of course. The story is wonderfully told, with good dialog, a good score and soundtrack, and really nice pacing. There are some exceptionally lovely scenes in this movie, scenes I very much look forward to experiencing again the next time I watch it. My wife and I both cried several times during this film. For anyone who has felt like an outcast in life, this film speaks eloquently to the emotions of that particular plight.

I’m not sure how wide its distribution is (everyone I’ve mentioned it to outside of New York City has never heard of it,) but I very highly recommend you see it any way you can.

My wife and I caught the premier of Knuckleball! at IFC on Friday, with the filmmakers in attendance answering questions before the show. We wanted to see it because the two gals who made this also made the outstanding documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, which we absolutely loved. Although I really liked both of them, and I loved their work on Joan Rivers, I feel they kind of blew their opportunity with this particular topic.

The main problems with this film were, first, there are way too many extreme slow-motion scenes of guys pitching, guys striking out, guys hitting home runs, spinless balls floating through the air, and so on. It gets really boring. In general, the pacing of the film is rather poor, which was surprising after their fabulous pacing of Joan Rivers. Second, they featured way too many obnoxious sports announcer-types doing their grating, vacuous on-air banter. It’s highly irritating, and you walk away form the film feeling like you just watched a whole lot of ESPN. They would have been better off finding two or three baseball historians and just doing low-key interviews with them about knuckleballers. Lastly and most problematically, the documentary just didn’t have a lot of interesting content about its topic. It felt very repetitive and a bit superficial.

Personally, I think the whole thing would have worked better as a documentary about R.A. Dickey. In fact, I felt Knuckleball! was a little uncertain if it wanted to be a film about knuckleball pitchers or a film about Dickey himself, and it wound up doing neither justice. Dickey is an interesting and engaging guy who had a cool story of getting to the big leagues. He also seemed to be the only knuckleballer featured in the film who actually embraced the film’s quasi-philosophical attitude toward the pitch itself. Wakefield and the other knucklers come across as colossal bores. I would rather have heard Dickey’s story in its entirety, and let the knuckleball act as a framing metaphor of the film, instead of its literal focus.

I guess my expectations were too high for this film. Perhaps most baseball fans will enjoy Knuckleball! for what it is, but I left rather disappointed.

Kenneth Lonergan has an undeniable talent for showing people at their least attractive. Margaret is chock-full of quality scenes where people act like selfish, obnoxious, insufferable assholes, completely oblivious to their own foulness. The problem is, none of these scenes are connected to the others in any meaningful way, other than they all involve the same jerky teenage girl, played by Anna Paquin, and are at least peripherally connected to the central story of her character, which is this: she gets an innocent woman killed by distracting a New York City bus driver, and then she dedicates her life to shirking the whole thing off on the bus driver and trying to get him fired. Obviously this is not uplifting stuff we are talking about here. We are exploring the pits of human petty self-righteousness, and not in a way that is at all useful or interesting. I’m sure Lonergan thinks he is making a deep statement about the human condition, but it sure didn’t impress me. Aside from the technical satisfaction of capturing so much assholish behavior on film, this movie has nothing of any substance to offer the viewer.

Arbitrage reminds me a lot of Michael Clayton. It’s a really fun and involving movie, with a tense and interesting story, good dialog, a charismatic star giving a better-than-normal performance in the lead role, very strong supporting actors (both their casting and their performances,) and a satisfying anti-rich / anti-corporate social message. My wife and I enjoyed it immensely. For some reason, I feel compelled to compare the two movies in this review.

Michael Clayton out-shines Arbitrage in two main areas: the snappy freshness and voluminousness of the dialog (which is key to its marvelous set-up,) and the amazing presence and acting skill of Tom Wilkinson. The problem with Michael Clayton is that Tom Wilkinson dies half way through the movie, and the film’s emphasis on extended scenes of dialog starts to recede at around the same time. It’s not that Michael Clayton is not fun all the way through – it’s a blast. But in its first half the content and rhythm of the dialog and the performance of Wilkinson are so riveting and thrilling, seemly suggesting almost limitless possibilities, that once those elements fade, and the film narrows its focus to resolving its fairly straightforward main story line, there is a noticeable drop in artistic intensity and depth. Consider how unfortunately rushed and perfunctory the denouement is in Michael Clayton, or how compressed its last half hour feels. It pains me to say it, but in the final analysis that film largely squandered its marvelous set-up.

Arbitrage, on the other hand, is much more even in quality. While Michael Clayton starts fast and with great panache, only to dull in the second half, Arbitrage starts slow and gets better and better, all the way to the very end. Its dialog might not be as spectacular as the first half of Michael Clayton, but its dialog is very good nonetheless. Richard Gere transcends his normal acting-self to a much greater extent than did George Clooney. True, there is no Tom Wilkinson in Arbitrage, but it does have Brit Marling, who with this role is now approaching my pantheon of elite actresses (Jessica Chastain, Charlize Theron, Vera Farmiga, and a few others.)  In her small supporting role, she is just outstanding. I can’t say enough about how natural and effortless she is on screen, and what supremely easy emotional range she has. She takes Richard Gere’s acting to a whole other level in their incredible confrontation scene in the park, but really she makes every scene she is in special.

Arbitrage also has a more complete and realistic story arc. Where Michael Clayton was not quite believable in the end, and its flashy dialog masked a few clunky plot elements, Arbitrage seems totally and depressingly real. It’s a quite fascinating portrait of the rich and powerful, contrasting the rules they play by versus the rules we normal people abide by, and walking (with marvelous skill) the line we all feel between admiration of these pricks and revulsion at how they screw over everyone in their path in the name of money. Like Michael Clayton, Arbitrage too has spectacular individual scenes, but they are so low-key and unadorned they are almost un-movie-like, especially the ones that feature Brit Marling. And the unexpected character development of the wife (played by Susan Sarandon) really adds wonderful depth to the story as it proceeds.

Arbitrage is easily one of the best films of 2012. I will definitely be watching it again at some point. Don’t miss it!

It is very tempting (and appropriate, I think) to compare Bachelorette to Bridesmaids, as they are very similar comic exercises. I was not the biggest fan of Bridesmaids, but watching Bachelorette I can suddenly see its relative merits in a clearer light. Perhaps I was too hard on it in my earlier review? Maybe it is aging better than I thought it would?

Bachelorette has its moments, certainly. I love the fact that its central characters are all pretty horrible and mired in terminal disappointment with their lives, and I really like that it offers no excuses for this either. The main thing Bachelorette has going for it is Kirsten Dunst; as I have said many times on this blog, she is just dazzlingly fun to watch, both from her acting skill and her presence. This role is a bit limited for her (she kind of recycles a strange combination of Bring It On and Mona Lisa Smile) but she still makes the movie come alive; whatever dignity the film has comes from her performance. Ilsa Fischer has a few funny moments (mostly in the beginning of the film) and then she basically becomes quite annoying, with sporadic exceptions. The other chick (Lizzy Caplan) is good, but again these roles I’m talking about are extremely narrow exercises, even by the standards of this particular genera. The guys are all completely forgettable (including the incredibly charismatic James Marsden, unfortunately.) And Rebel Wilson’s role is really much smaller than you might imagine from the preview, not that I think she would have elevated the film much.

The thing about Bachelorette is that after a funny start that seems like it could go in a million cool directions, the humor quickly settles into two basic aveneus: raunchy sex humor and frenetic, running around cursing, “save the dress” humor. This is fine, of course, and made for a diverting evening at the movies. But in comparison, Bridesmaids is suddenly looking a little better as a comedy. Bridesmaids had several scenes where Kristen Wigg went on these comic riffs (attacking the big cookie, the airplane meltdown, the toast competition, the getting the cops attention scene) which were actually pretty funny, and her comedy was made even more effective by the expert performance of her foil (Rose Byrne.) It also featured that incredible scene after they all have lunch in the disgusting Brazilian restaurant. I would have to say that the humor in Bridesmaids, although not scintillating, was a step above the humor in Bachelorette, in funniness, in sophistication, and in variety.

Bridesmaids also had several other things going for it. It had a very sympathetic and likable male romantic lead (the policeman guy, played warmly by Chris O’Dowd.) It had a more interesting and satisfying plot progression. The bride, while not very interesting in either movie, was more of a real person in Bridesmaids. And I liked that Bridesmaids kept its sex humor above middle school level, something that Bachelorette was not completely able to do (the toast at the very end was pretty painful.)

Again, I’m not saying Bachelorette is not funny and enjoyable. I went to the movie in a terrible mood and I came out feeling better – that says something, I guess. It’s just that given a choice to rewatch Bridesmaids or Bachelorette I would pick Bridesmaids every time.

I really liked this movie.

The Art of Getting By tackles an idea that is very central to my own life experience – namely, how people who are a little bit different, who do not conform to the highly scripted and regimented expectations of our society, actually “get by,” or survive with their soul intact. The movie was advertised by implying the main character is a lazy, good-for-nothing slacker who “just gets by” with as little effort as possible, but this both misrepresents the movie and completely misses the point. He is trying to survive in the face of our stultifying education system that is designed to keep people stupid and docile and turn them into a usable member of a labor force; he “gets by” through a complete refusal to participate in this indoctrination, and this leads him both into trouble with authority, and on an interesting journey of self-discovery.

As is usually the case with dreamers like the main character, he has other ideas about what his life might be, and definite (if somewhat inchoate) opinions on the value of what he is being asked to do in school. He covers the insides of his badly written textbooks with his own exquisite artwork, yet even his art class is somehow unable to channel or develop his master passion in any useful way. School is useless to a person like him, and his parents are even more useless. But he meets a few friends who support him just enough for him to get his bearings in life.

I should point out that my somewhat adoring interpretation of this film’s theme might be over-representing its artistic profundity. This is not a deep film, and the dialog, while really excellent in some places, is a little uneven. But it is a very life-sized film – things feel very real, unglamorized, unsensationalized. It has some interesting things to say about art, the act of creation, and finding your way in life with no helpful guidance. In particular, the dialog between the main character and the struggling artist who becomes his mentor is fantastic, and the actor playing the mentor (Michael Angarano) gives a really excellent and wonderfully naturalistic performance. Through these scenes, the thought process that slowly leads to the main character’s partial liberation within society is pretty well developed and realistic. The Emma Roberts character is also intriguing; her relationship with the main character is multifaceted, both her positive and negative personality traits slowly influencing the gradual development of his approach to life. And it only helps that the film has a good and interesting score that is used very effectively.

I am not a Freddie Highmore fan, but I did like him in this film. I am an Emma Roberts fan, and as usual she gives a solidly good performance. The actors playing the teachers are a little stiff and uninspired, but the actors playing the parents and Emma Roberts’ friends are quite good.

I highly recommend The Art of Getting By. It is a fresh, interesting, and inspired little film.

The previews of this movie definitely did not do it justice. They made it look like some idiotic buddy film, or an insufferable “bucket list” piece of shit. It is actually a warm and endearing movie about the relationship between love, friendship and passion, with passion represented by the quasi-sport of birding.

Jack Black is at his best here, playing an average guy who wants to break the North American bird-sighting record, an all-consuming passion which has earned him the hatred of his father. Steve Martin is a corporate CEO who wants to leave it all behind and do the same thing. And Owen Wilson plays the obsessed record holder who is destroying his life trying to maintain his record. What is remarkable here is the emotional sensitivity of the story and screenplay, and the beautiful use of birding as a sport (the beauty and difficulty of it, the strange role of cataclysmic weather, the far-flung destinations, and the lose-knit social web of those that share this passion.) Each of the leads develops as a character on multiple fronts, and their relationship with each other and with those around them deepens. People fall in and out of love, re-assess their lives, and define friendship anew, and although it’s not super profound, it is all very believable, even a bit moving at times.

As for the sport of birding, they follow the lead of the very best sports movies in that they place a lot of emphasis on dialog explaining the intricacies of the sport, which both allows them to sustain interest in the action across the entire film, and also creates a lovely textured background on which the human dramas can then be more effectively played out. All in all, it’s a really well made film.

All three leads are excellent in their roles, and I say this as someone who can’t stand Steve Martin or Owen Wilson. This is the only time I have ever liked Owen Wilson in a movie – I would say he is legitimately good in this film. Steve Martin is quite a bit better than tolerable, which is really saying something for him. As for Jack Black, I continue to feel that he is very under-rated as an actor. He is the Gene Wilder of his generation. Consider: Gene Wilder was pretty weird too, and starred in a lot of really awful films; he also had a quirky warmth and charm that was always pleasing to watch, and had several iconic roles combining comedy, warmth, and singing. This is precisely a description of Jack Black’s career to-date. Black gives a very engaging performance in The Big Year. Rashida Jones (a favorite in our house) is, as always, adorable in a supporting role.

Just to round out the review, the pacing is very good, the soundtrack is solid and effectively used, and the credits are cool.

I highly recommend The Big Year!

The New York critics are going all “Irreviews” on this one, pulling out the big guns to obliterate this film, but it’s really not called for. Sure it’s a bad film, but it’s bad in a very conventional and boring sort of way, nothing worth getting your panties in a twist over. Although its heart was in the right place, the kid is cute, Jennifer Garner works hard, and they clearly tried to make it an endearing story, it is nevertheless completely ill-conceived and nothing in it works – this is not an infrequent occurrence in Hollywood.

My wife and I agreed that the film might have (with considerable additional effort invested) been okay had they not relied on the device of the parents’ interview as a kind of narration to tell you things that should have been handled in the dialog; this hurt the film immensely. But we then also agreed that this unfortunate device felt a bit like an add-on, almost as if they tried to tell the story straight, failed, and then filmed the interview sequences afterward and re-cut the film, in a desperate attempt to salvage it. I don’t know if this is true or not, but the important thing is that the movie feels like it could easily be true.

This film left a bad taste in my mouth. My recommendation is to avoid it. But don’t get the idea that it’s the worst film of the year, or anything like that.