Irreviews

This film seems better while you are watching it; afterward, as I thought about it, I was more and more distracted by the film’s shortcomings. In the end, I’m kind of sorry I saw it. It is depressing, superficial, ambiguous, needlessly slow, and has a fucking crappy, gutless ending.

Martha Marcy did confirm for me my suspicion that films making use of parallel narratives (past / present) are inherently limited in quality. The problem is this structural approach takes away too much dialog. Consider this film: the parallel narrative means that Martha never has to actually tell her sister anything, but this makes the parts with her sister kind of dull, as you just sit around waiting for her to do another outrageous thing in front of her sister’s husband. The parallel narrative also eliminates any kind of set-up for the film – because everything has to evolve out of this dual structure, you are necessarily just plunked down in the middle of the story, much like The Debt (another film limited by the use of past / present parallel narratives.) Some people might really like this approach to films, but I don’t.

The main part of the story, her time in the commune, is done pretty well on the surface, but none of the characters are developed very deeply, or rather at all, including Martha. Basically, what the film has going for it is that it captures very effectively the creepy atmosphere of the camp and the nighttime excursions, and the general affect of the camp’s population. But that’s it. You never really bond, or develop any kind of substantive feeling toward any of these people. As a result, you take away very little from this film besides the surface creepiness (which doesn’t go very far.)

I thought Elizabeth Olsen was pretty good as Martha, despite the relative lack of things for her to say (that’s not her fault, after all.) Hugh Dancy is a personal favorite of mine, and he is really good in this supporting role, although I wish he would get more role where he gets to play someone nice. The chick playing the sister is just okay. Then there is “Teardrop,” the guy from Winter’s Bone, John Hawkes. He seems to be making a good little career out of playing these filthy, crazy wackjobs in gritty, depressing indie films. He’s good in this movie, although I must say I was not totally sold on the aspect of the cult where women surrendered to him so eagerly and dramatically – I think they needed to write more dialog to pull that off.

Martha Marcy May Marlene: at the end of the day, it is unfortunately pretty mediocre.

Limitless is a “narration movie,” by which I mean a movie that relies on narration to tell the viewer almost everything that is going on, all the way through the film. I usually hate this kind of film, but occasionally this technique can work pretty well. Memento is an example of a movie where it worked really well. Limitless is not nearly at that level, but basically the story is interesting enough and varied enough, and the narration is done well enough, that it didn’t bother me too much.

Limitless has a good story idea (what are the ramifications of a drug that gives people access to 100% of their brain’s power), that they managed to translate into fun, interesting story that hangs together quite well. To compare it to similar movies, I enjoyed it more way more than The Adjustment Bureau, and it is light-years better than Inception. Bradley Cooper (an actor that I really never thought much about) turns in a really solid and engaging performance. I even liked De Niro’s performance (I normally can’t stand him.) I really like Abby Cornish, but she has very little to do in this film.

However, this film does involve a gangster, and as anyone who reads this blog will know, there is little I despise more in movies than gangsters. They are so boring and so ugly and so foul and above all so predictable. Maybe if someone somewhere took the time to create a gangster that didn’t look and act just like a gangster is supposed to look and act, then maybe, but that day will probably never come. When the gangster appears in this film, I cringed. The first words out of his mouth: “If you don’t pay me back, I slit you at the waste (he’s Russian, of course), peal your skin up over your head, and tie it in a knot.” Jesus Christ, of course he had to say that!

But I will say that this gangster is not featured all that much in the film, and by the end of the movie the gangster almost became interesting … almost. He winds up having a bit more style than your typical movie gangster, and actually managed to surprise me a bit at the end. Don’t get me wrong, he was still foul, spouting off hateful, supremely violent lines directed at Bradley Cooper, but he was , let’s say, tolerably interesting by the end of the movie. I don’t say this lightly. He may be the only movie gangster that I was not instantly and permanently revulsed by.

My wife and I Netflixed this because it appeared in the highbrow/lowbrow grid at the back of New York magazine as an under-rated movie. I would agree with their assessment, and their placement of the film on the grid. I recommend it!

Moneyball is a great book and a great story. This frightfully dumbed-down movie version is okay at best. I didn’t hate the film, I suppose, but I do think it is very sad that no one could think of a better way to bring the book to the big screen.

Here’s the problem in a nut-shell. They needed to write a lot of dialog to make this story work, and they obviously didn’t want to do that. So instead they completely distort the story to turn it into a semi-farce, implying that Beane is pulling this whole scheme out of his ass on a whim, and that everyone he works with is completely against him and considers him totally insane, and even though his team winds up winning a lot of games the movie leaves it somewhat ambiguous whether or not Beane’s “crazy shit” was at all responsible.

But this ruins everything wonderful about the book, and it was so unnecessary. The point of the book is that baseball has always suffered from institutional ridgity of thought, rooted in historical prejudices. Starting in the early 80’s, people outside of baseball started putting baseball on a firm footing mathematically, discovering many fallacies that were needlessly dominating the thinking of baseball scouts and executives, and they offered this information to the baseball community (repeatedly) but baseball turned a deaf ear to them.

So instead they released this information to the general public, the mathematical footing of the game subsequently broadened and deepened significantly, and soon there were a good number of non-baseball folks who were much more knowledgebale about how the game really works then the people running the game. That’s how people like Paul DePodesta (played as a differently named character by Jonah Hill) came to be floating around, to be discovered by Beane. They didn’t just fall out of the sky. All this shit was on pretty solid ground by the time Beane (in part because of his peculiar personal experience playing the game) recognized it all and systematically enacted baseball’s first team development program making use of all this knowledge.

Now, isn’t that a much more interesting movie than the Hollywood farce they served up? Let’s consider concretely how exactly this ruins the movie.They leave out Beane’s experience with Lenny Dykstra, the one critical narrative element from his past, which was at least sub-consciously the genesis of Beane’s whole idea (namely, that short, ugly, ignored players that were obsessed with and skilled at certain key elements of the game might make the best players.) They leave out the baseball draft, one of the best chapters in the book, because as they recast the story it makes no sense for Beane to be drafting all these misfits so confidently. They miss out on all the great scenes of how Beane had to fool or trick other GMs into trading with him because they were all totally spooked that he was going to pick their pockets as he had already done so many times before – hard to have this in the film if he’s pulling it all out of his ass. They miss out on how the coaching staff was for the most part with him, not opposed to him, and thus you never see the fabulous story of how the first base coach, through single-minded enthusiasm, actually cajoles that guy Hatteberg into becoming a decent defensive first baseman. You miss out on how Beane would play the timing of the season to pick-up decent players cheap right before the trade deadline, this being the reason that the A’s were always lousy in the first part of the season (the film makes it look like his scheme is “failing” in the early season, when in fact it is basically what is expected from past seasons.) There’s a lot more they miss out on, too – the book is packed with great narrative stuff!

Hell, you don’t even get to enjoy the simplest mathematics of the story – why base-stealing is bad, why bunting is bad, why walking is good and why it was thought to be bad or at least neutral in the past, what numbers they looked at to find undervalued pitchers, and in general the whole idea of looking at team outcomes over an entire season to discover what is really making a difference and what isn’t. All this stuff is pretty easy to explain (I successfully explained it in plain English to my wife in about 5 minutes, who then immediately wanted to read the book) but you do have to write dialog to make it happen.

Instead of taking the time to tell this wonderful and fascinating story correctly, however, they fill their screen time with the following: many cringe-inducing scenes between Beane and his daughter (not part of the book at all,) scenes of Beane driving around in his pickup truck, many excruciatingly slow, slow-motion shots of people striking out and dropping fly balls, lame “bonding” scenes between Pitt and Jonah Hill, tons of really atrocious and boring flashbacks that could have been summarized in 3 minutes of well-written dialog, and last but not least the revolting “believe in yourself, Billy!” ending between Pitt and Hill, where you find out why the filmmakers cut out the terrific Jeremy Brown story earlier in the film: so they could waste him as “comic relief” in this scene! Cut out all this shit, and you basically would have had time to include most the great stuff I mentioned above. Why are filmmakers so damn lazy!?

As for performances, Brad Pitt was pretty decent as Beane, because he  looks a lot like him, is good at playing a hothead, and is great at doing scenes on the phone.  I wanted to be open-minded about Jonah Hill’s presence in this film, but at the end of the day he is just a boring, nondescript little blob that contributes nothing to any film he is in. Watching him acting in roles that could have gone to other people is like taking a placebo when you know it’s a placebo – it doesn’t work. The only interesting thing about Jonah Hill is the question: why in God’s name is he starting to get all these roles? Who decided that he was a hot quantity?! Good Lord!

Moneyball: They squandered a great story and took the (very) easy way out. It’s a shame.

Margin Call might not be a great movie, but it is a solidly good film that I will probably watch again at some point. In an exceptionally weak year for movies, it is easily one of the best things I’ve seen this year.

The thing I enjoyed the most about this film is the way it depicted the various levels of greed and insensitivity that exist within the financial corporate state, 5 levels altogether – from the “lowly,” $250K per year intern (played pretty well by that Gossip Girl dude) who does nothing and is completely obsessed with what everyone above him is making, to the $2.5MM per year “drugs & whores” middle manager, to his boss, to the beautiful young sharks (Simon Baker, Demi Moore) near the top who live in another world, to the CEO himself (played pretty damn well by ole’ Jeremy Irons.) The portraits of these various layers are interesting and very believable – they are not presenting caricatures, it’s all very low-key and honest. The real star is Paul Bettany, playing the $2.5MM per year middle manager, who turns in another incredible performance. He plays a complete a-hole, but you still like him and are fascinated by him. This guy is one of the best actors going, in my book.

My only criticism of this movie is that its pacing is just a tad sluggish and the dialog is just a little sparse. Neither of these is a deal-breaker – the film is still gripping and entertaining all the same – but they could have easily crammed more good stuff in there if they wanted to. Also, Simon Baker’s character was not developed enough; you never really know what makes that guy tick. But all the others are developed pretty well.

It’s a really good movie. I highly recommend it!

The critics panned this movie because it is so charming, earnest and good-natured they didn’t know what to make of it. It blew their fuses. They’re used to praising shit like The Social Network. Their minds are jello at this point.

First off, Paul Rudd is so incredibly natural and engaging on-screen he simply wipes away most small problems in script and pacing – it can’t be taught. Put anyone else in this role and the film is in trouble, but put Rudd in there and it all works, almost despite itself. The guy is nothing short of amazing. Second, the supporting cast is terrific. Rashida Jones and Kathryn Hahn have worked with Rudd before and have great chemistry with him, Emily Mortimer is wonderful in almost anything she gets involved in, Elizabeth Banks is fun, and even Zooey is almost decent in this film, propped up by more talented and charismatic actors on all sides. I’m not a big Steve Coogan fan, but his role is pretty limited.

Our Idiot Brother does not come together comically, it must be said. But as a heart-warming story of a really likeable, honest and simple guy getting callously passed around by his three self-centered sisters, Our Idiot Brother really works. I found the story charming and felt very satisfied when I walked out of the theater.

Ignore the ridiculous critics – give Our Idiot Brother a chance!

The Ides of March is a decent film, but I doubt I would ever feel the desire to experience it again. The story is very linear and it’s all right there on the surface – no character development, no story depth, no subplots, no subtext. The film is basically a two-hour version of the (very good) preview. But that does not mean it’s not worth seeing.

The real stars of The Ides of March are Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti, especially Paul Giamatti. They both give really wonderful, understated performances that glue the simplistic story together and create a partial illusion of texture and depth. They also, through their warmth and naturalness provide a decent counterbalance to Ryan Gosling’s robotic acting.

Speaking of which, I think the industry has decided that Ryan Gosling is the next young Al Pacino. In a way it’s true, because Al Pacino is and always has been (if you are honest about it) pretty frigging robotic and predictable. Gosling looks great, but that’s about it. His Tim Duncan “big eyes” expression is probably the most pathetic piece of acting I’ve seen from a big-name lead in quite a while. Gosling has one gear, yet he is getting roles that are all over the emotional map. Why does everyone think this guy is so great? Frankly, Ryan Reynolds would have been much better in this role.

The critics are complaining that they should have written more dialog (sounds like they’ve been reading Irreviews, doesn’t it – since when do they give a flying fuck if people talk to each other in movies?) but the fact is that the dialog is actually fairly decent, meaning I’ve heard a lot worse. There are at least three pretty well-written and fairly extended scenes involving Gosling and one of Hoffman, Clooney, or Giamatti. And the more incidental dialog was decent enough as well. The actual problems with the film are Gosling, the horrible music, the very uneven pacing, and as already stated the story itself just is not that interesting.

The Ides of March is a perfectly fine little Fall diversion, nothing more.

Warrior has great fight scenes! Gavin O’Connor is a marvelous director with a real flair for capturing action. The fight scenes in Warrior absolutely put to shame the CGI-laden, sped-up, craptastic “fighting” found in the action films of the last decade. And as far as the fighting in recent “fight movies” goes, I can tell you that Cinderella Man and The Fighter look positively feeble compared to the action in Warrior. When you are through watching this movie, you will feel like you have been fighting in the tournament! I felt like I needed a massage afterword, I found the whole experience so intense.

So the fighting is good. Really good! What about the rest of the movie? Well frankly, it’s a bit grim and a bit unbelievable. O’Conner’s characters are not big talkers, which is probably pretty realistic given that they are cage-fighters, but watching them grunt and mope around does not help frame the story coherently. Tommy is a stone-cold sociopath. His brother is a desperate man, fighting to keep his house. They are both complete nobodies yet they somehow get into “Sparta”, this big, world-wide prize fighting tournament. They both enter it on these completely grandiose missions. It all feels a bit slapped together. No time is spent on their training. No time is spent on explaining why Tommy is so weird. They make a point that both brothers hate the father, but they never go any deeper than the surface. Let’s face it, all the effort in making Warrior was focused on capturing mixed martial arts fighting on film.

Rather than go on and on about the problems with the story, let’s just consider one example: How on earth does the physics teacher do so well in the tournament? (It’s clear from the preview that he makes it to the final, so I’m not giving anything away.) This is completely unexplained. You are left with the following hypothesis: it is a combination of 1) the father having trained him (as a teenager) really, really well as a wrestler, and 2) the fact that he had a really great and innovative trainer to help him prepare for this event, and 3) he has tremendous heart because he is fighting for his family. I would argue that 3) is a bit over-rated, given his opponents have spent their entire lives training to physically decimate people. You might think 1) was compelling, but I believe that the big Russian he fights was supposed to be a Olympic gold-medal wrestler, and he outweighed the physics teacher by about 100 lbs, so it’s tough to believe that the physics teacher’s wrestling prowess got him through. As for his trainer, this might have been an okay storyline if it was done well, but we are not shown anything compelling about his training, except hearing the refrains “breathe!” and “Beethoven!” over and over. Okay, fine, “Beethoven”, I get it – the guy remained calm and was intelligent in the ring.  But I still don’t believe that he would not have gotten his head ripped off by that big Russian. So you might be thrilled watching the fight scenes, but in the end you can’t escape the feeling that you have not watched anything remotely connected to reality.

See Warrior if you want to marvel at a stunning craftsmanship of fight scenes. Just don’t expect to take to much else away from this film.

And as a final note, I wish Gavin O’Conner would return to making films more like his masterpiece, Tumbleweeds. Along these lines, I remember seeing on IMDB a couple of years ago that he had a film in pre-production with the storyline of a Harvard student who drops out or flunks out, and winds up going on the road with this father’s punk rock band. Now that’s a film I would love to see! Unfortunately it is no longer listed on IMDB at all, so I assume it fell through. Dear Gavin: please, please make this film somehow! We have enough ridiculously violent films to choose from these days.

Contagion is a propaganda film, designed to sell the following ideas

1. you should trust the government
2. you should not trust bloggers and others on the internet
3. unions are evil
4. China is evil
5. Chinese people are evil
6. the rich and powerful will take care of you in the end – they really care about you, even if they don’t look like it.
7. “conspiracy theorists” are actually in league with evil bankers to exploit you for their own benefit.
8. people should trust high-tech science over natural health remedies.
9. If you cheat on you husband, God will smite you down
10. If anything like the outbreak in this film ever happens, it won’t be that bad and everything will be okay in the end.

I don’t know how Soderberg and all these big-name actors got involved with this piece of trash. As dramatic art the film is a complete failure. It feels like a corporate-industrial film as it shows us all this scientific gadgetry and mumbo-jumbo as CDC studies the disease, devises a response, and works with the military to save us. I’m sure all the science was very accurate and well-researched, and I’m sure all those gun-toting soldiers look exactly like they would in real life, but dramatically the film is frightfully boring, almost like an educational film that might have been shown in high schools in the 1980s.

The human stories that decorate this central theme are ridiculous. Matt Damon is the guy who is immune – he sits in his house with his daughter the whole time, and they don’t even talk. Marion Cottilard’s only job is to “look really beautiful” so you’ll hate the Chinese people that kidnap her. Poor Kate Winslet is a loveless, emotionally disconnected functionary who croaks early and ignominiously. The story between Fishburn and the janitor was positively saccharine. At least Gwyneth Paltrow gets to make that “scary face” (see the preview or the movie poster if you don’t know what I’m talking about) while she is dying, but beyond that she’s just a cardboard placeholder, a person in a bunch of pictures that other people look at.

Plus, the story the film is selling to us just feels wrong, incomplete, as if it is intended to manipulate us. To give just one example, if this kind of disease ever took off our beloved financial markets would completely collapse, all over the world, as the super-rich who own 99% of the world liquidate their assets and depart for their private islands – not a peep about that one in this happy little film.

After taking in this bilge on opening night at the Union Square theater, my wife and I spent a long time trying to figure out what the deal was with this film, and how Soderberg (who after all made Erin Brockavich) would ever wind up responsible. We speculated that perhaps it was intended to be anti-Tea Party in some way, because if you have to point to one psycho-emotional theme in Contagion and say “this was the emotional core of the story,” it would have to be the plot involving the internet blogger who is telling everyone not to trust the government, and accusing the government and Big Pharma of suppressing evidence of a natural remedy to the disease. If this was its intention it failed epically, because the guy they got to play the internet blogger, Jude Law, is a fabulous actor who is also incredibly warm and likable, and he absolutely steals the show. Even after they unveil the completely unbelievable plot twist that this little nobody living in a garret in San Francisco is actively working with international hedge funds to corner the market on forsythia (puhleeze!) while he simultaneously misleads his millions of gullible readers by lying that the extract cured him of the disease, he is still emotionally compelling and believable and is still the only one you really like! They even gave him a crooked front tooth, just to make sure we all understand that this guy is “pure evil” – didn’t work, you still like him.

Contagion has a really good preview – don’t be taken in by it like I was. It makes the film look a lot like a better version of 28 Days Later, when in fact it can’t hold a candle to Danny Boyle’s dark and amazing film on the same basic topic. When you watch 28 Days Later, you are completely gripped with the human drama that unfolds as the disease spreads and society collapses. When you watch Contagion, you feel like you are being lectured to about how the government will save you and protect you from anything, if only you will stop reading the internet and stop thinking for yourself.

The only way anything positive can come of this film is if it succeeds in resurrecting Jennifer Ehle’s career. I’m sorry the only way she can get a role more significant than playing the three-line, pathetic, dying wife of some evil, murdering cop is by playing the geek scientist that saves us all in this stupidly manipulative film. But if it means that people will cast this elegant and magnificent actress in better material from this point on, then Contagion will have actually contributed something positive to human society.

Colombiana is a solid, entertaining action film. It’s no nowhere near as good as Taken, which it is often compared to because they share the same director. There was something so real and unmanipulative about Taken, and this straightforwardness made it one of the most thrilling and satisfying “one man army” movies I’ve ever seen. Colombiana, on the other hand, is more like your standard “super-warrior” kind of film. Much of it is outrageous and very hard to believe, they make very little effort in the way of explaining anything, and I thought Zoe Saldana was just okay in the lead role (I really like her as an actress, just not in this kind of role.) I thought the sped-up fighting looked rather bad, not anywhere near as bad as Hanna, but still distractingly bad. I don’t understand why the first big instance of sped-up fighting (Bourne) still looks better than all the examples that followed – shouldn’t it be the other way around? Why are we moving backward?

Don’t get me wrong, I actually enjoyed this film. I enjoyed it more than The Debt, which I saw the day before. But I would never watch it again, and I didn’t really take anything away from the film.