Irreviews

Winter’s Bone is an example of what I would call the new indie movement. (Frozen River would be another example.) This “movement” is still just a film here and there, so I would not call it a “resurgence” of any kind, but at least these simple, high-quality little films are getting some critical recognition. Like Frozen River, Winter’s Bone shows the grim reality of life for individuals who are struggling against the odds and against the system to stay alive. It’s pretty well-written and the performances (mostly by no-name actors) are uniformly good. It’s a interesting and gripping story that really keeps you engaged throughout. The story does not transcend its material, like the best movies of the 90’s indie Renaissance, but it is still head and shoulders better than most of the dreck out there today.

I would definitely Netflix this film and check it out!

I really wanted to like Conviction, because it is about such a great, true story of love and perseverance, but the sad reality is that it is poorly written and structured, and just plain disappointing. Basically, it’s a TV movie – a mediocre one.

They totally skip over the one interesting plot-line: her journey from no high school degree to passing the Bar. We are given no details about how she got through this process or what it was like for her. All they do is show her handing in a paper late, as if to say “There! She struggled. Get it?” They don’t even try to explain huge events in her life, like when or why her marriage falls apart, or why her kids first feel unloved and want to live with their dad, and then are suddenly back with her as her biggest fans. Instead of all this juicy and interesting stuff, the film is completely focused on two other, decidedly less compelling things: 1) showing her childhood relationship with her brother, and 2) telling the story of trying to overturn her brother’s conviction.

The relationship with her brother should have been done in one fabulously written scene of dialog between Hillary Swank and Minni Driver, where she described how close they were. That’s all it needed and it would have been way more dramatically effective than all the boring and overly-long flashbacks featuring those two ugly children and a very distracting and weird performance by Karen Young. It also would have freed up on-screen time to get into her own personal journey to become a lawyer.

The problem with the story of overturning her brother’s conviction is that it simply is not very interesting. The only element of tension in the whole story is “will they find the box of evidence 16 years later?” But Tony Goldwyn plays that angle up so heavy-handedly that you know with certainty they will eventually find the box of evidence, which in turn will permit the DNA exoneration. Besides that one story element, there is nothing much to tell, except how long everything took, which is not interesting.

As a result the film falls totally flat, which prompted Tony Goldwyn to drown the audience in soft piano music, just to constantly remind everyone that this stuff is “tender” and “heart-rending,” damn it!

Be aware that they did a good job in the preview of hiding the film’s many shortcomings. They hide the weird and distracting order in which Tony Goldwyn chose to tell the story, and as a result the preview has more dramatic tension than the film. They edit the scenes to make it look like the film is largely about her personal journey of growth (again, it is not.) They hide Juliette Lewis’ frightening and repulsive teeth, which are in my book enough of a reason to skip the film entirely. They include a scene deleted from the movie where Peter Gallagher says to his assistant “This woman put herself through law school just to save her brother?!” and the assistant replies “He’s her only client.” It is great and well-delivered exchange that would have provided a little of the kind of dialog texture this film so desperately needed, so of course they decide to cut it! And the film’s best line comes across much better in the preview: when Minni Driver tells Hillary Swank “We’re gonna be friends, because we’re the only two people in class that have gone through puberty.” It’s a great line for kicking off the key relationship (or what should have been the key relationship) of the movie. But for some crazy reason, Goldwyn chose to make this exchange the first scene of the film, killing all of its impact in starting that relationship, and turning it into a throwaway line (the preview implicitly puts the line in the middle of her journey, where it belongs.) Once again, we are confronted with a classic example of a preview displaying superior dramatic craftsmanship than the movie it’s advertising.

As far as the acting, I will say that I am really am starting to like Hillary Swank and I have always liked Minni Driver, and they both do a good job, at least in the context of what they are working with. The dude playing Kenny was just okay, and the all kids were pretty poor. The incredible Melissa Leo gets a pass, because she was given nothing of substance to do in this film.

Conviction: I can’t really recommend it, unless you are in the mood to pay $13 to watch the “Sunday night movie of the week.”

My wife and I like (good) sports movies, and we like “horse movies,” so we were very excited to catch a sneak preview of Secretariat at the Union Square. Coming right on the heals of viewing The Social Network earlier that afternoon, it was such a relief to watch a film that dealt with human emotion, and had female characters with brains and dignity. Watching Diane Lane “save the farm” was just what I needed to get Mark Zuckerberg and his army of demeaned women out of my head. But really Secretariat was not very good, and in retrospect they definitely missed their chance to make a great sports movie.

They violated the first rule of sports movies: sports movies need dialog about the details of the sport! They also need to show (with a lot of detail) the training and preparation, and they need to film the sports action straight up – no slow-mo, and no fancy camera shit (the quintessential example of fancy camera shit: the final shot on goal in Bend It Like Beckham, from the perspective of the ball!) In Secretariat, there’s really no interesting stuff about the training, and the races are dumbed down to a generic tale of “good vs. evil,” which got tiresome and was unnecessary.  They do put in a little about choosing the jockey, but it comes off as a bit perfunctory. And while the race scenes could have been filmed a lot worse, they leaned too much on in-your-face CGI views of the action, which of course lessened the impact of the races considerably.

They also missed a lot of neat little things about the races themselves. They failed to point out that the Derby record still stands as well, and that he ran each fifth of a mile faster than the last, something that I think has never been duplicated at Churchill Downs. At the Preakness, they failed to adequately capture the incredible moment where Secretariat (with no prompting from his jockey) moves from last to first on the first turn, and also failed to mention the controversy over whether he actually still holds the Preakness record as well. They do an okay job with the Belmont (it’s kind of hard to screw that one up,) but they manage to ruin the climatic moment with a very bad choice of music and, you guesses it, the dreaded slow-mo.

(By the way, I recommend viewing the three races on YouTube – 4o years later, they are still very thrilling.)

The film is also really sloppy in its attempts to develop human-interest subplots. The sexism of the racing world directed at Penny Chenery was done in a clunky way. Chenery’s relationship with her daughters (together with the eldest daughter’s hippie-leanings and “Peace Pageant”) was distracting and unsatisfying. Her marriage is given a lot of screen time, but you really don’t learn or see much of interest. It all feels rather forced and overdone – all this shit could have been reduced to three really well-written scenes, freeing up time to concentrate on the main attraction.

As far as the actors go, I thought Malkovich was good as Lucien Laurin – in my opinion, he really glued the whole movie together with his performance. Diane Lane was a little flat as Penny Chenery, but it all fairness she was not working with a very good script.

Secretariat comes across very much like a made-for-TV movie, and there is nothing wrong with that. It has its heart in the right place, and is not a bad film. It just could have been so much more.

Everyone is calling The Social Network a great film because everyone is in love with Facebook and everyone is in love with the idea of child geniuses becoming billionaires. It’s all idiotic groupie behavior, just like the two women who blow Zuckerberg and his friend in the men’s room of that club. Like those ladies, the critics are also down on their knees, mouths open. Fact is, The Social Network is not a good film, and I found its content rather vile. If this is, as the critics say, a film that “defines a decade,” here’s a vote for collective amnesia.

The Social Network is first and foremost just plain boring. The whole film is about the fact that he got sued, but who really cares that he got sued? The intellectual property issue was not particularly interesting, nor was it explored in a compelling way. What he did to his friend was not particularly interesting. The outcome was certainly not interesting. And everyone is so unlikable it’s not like you’re at least pulling for someone to win!

The film flashes back and forth between multiple depositions and the actual events that preceded them. This structure basically destroyed what little dramatic tension the film might have had. It’s also is just a cop-out, an tacit admission by the filmmakers that they lack the skill and creativity to tell the story in a linear fashion. The depositions are leaned on as a kind of high-class narration. The content of the depositions is pretty dull and completely predictable; they are mainly focused on making Zuckerberg look way smarter and cooler than anyone else in the room.

As far as all the hubbub about whether or not the film is fair to Zuckerberg, it’s all a red herring. The film is definitely pro-Zuckerberg. It doesn’t matter that he’s a complete ass-wipe to everyone in his life – he has 25 billion dollars, so it’s cool. He is portrayed as the “little guy” taking down the establishment, a honor that I’m not sure he deserves. The film is very uncomplimentary to the Winklevoss twins, and as far as Zuckerberg’s friend goes the film takes the attitude “this guy was just a hanger-on, he got his millions, and he got his dick sucked by a smoking-hot, sex-crazed Asian chick with a perfectly round mouth, so he should really just fuck off and disappear.”

Compounding these problems is the fact that Facebook is a relatively insignificant invention, which makes the scenes of its creation pretty uninteresting. Zuckerberg says “I know – we should have a place to enter your dating status!” Ho hum! I can hear the howls of protest now, but really people, let’s for a moment differentiate: The internet itself is an epoch-making invention that (along with Google’s incredible search technology) changed everything. Thanks to these two things, a person’s socio-political thoughts and opinions are no longer completely shaped by the small number of people that happen to surround them on a daily basis, and by a few talking heads on the major networks. This is a significant change for the better.

Facebook? I’m not so sure. It’s basically a database where people up-load trivial personal shit about themselves. It’s never been easier to tell all your friends at once “I took a crap in the bathroom of the Louvre!” Other than that, what the fuck good is it? In the movie, someone says to Zuckerberg “that person just said ‘I’ll Facebook you’ – that’s huge!” Really? Why is that huge? Whether or not you think Facebook is eroding real social connections between people (it seems pretty obvious to me that it is, from my observations, but I suppose you could argue either way,) it is undeniable that Facebook is largely a tool of self-obsession. As far as Facebook as a social revolution, I refer you to Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent and compelling article in the Oct 4 New Yorker, which thoroughly debunks this myth. But really, with a little thought anyone would come to the same conclusion. Facebook started as a way to get laid in college. Now it’s a way for kids and yuppies to waste time. You want to truly change the world? It requires real human interaction – that’s just the way it is.

Lastly, I must say that the misogyny of this film is completely shocking and revolting and troubled me greatly. I’m not talking about Zuckerberg’s much publicized woman-ranking website. I’m talking about the fact that there is hardly a woman with a brain or a scrap of dignity anywhere in this film – the one normal girl in the film rejects him in the first scene (before he’s a billionaire, I might add,) but that hardly excuses what follows. Women in this film are objectified to the level of pornography – they are all thin, hot, dolled-up sex machines, worshiping at the alter of the brainy rich guys who run the world. It’s disgusting. There is the Harvard secret society party where insanely hot college woman are literally bused in for a sex-Bacchanalia. There’s the two Asian chicks who on their first date with Zuckerberg and his friend take them into the men’s room and suck their dicks (they know a woman’s place, damn it, and how a woman gets a real man!) There’s the thin, hot, blond Stanford chippy, ass falling out of her Stanford undies, who’s in ecstasy when she finds out “I just slept with Sean Parker!!!!” (the drug-addicted child who invented Napster.) There are the thin, sexed-up, underage co-eds stripping bare and lying down to serve as a human cocaine table for Justin Timberlake. And on and on and on. It’s unbelievable. I should add that Asian woman are, for whatever reason, particularly objectified in this movie.

The Social Network: today’s America, folks. We idolize genius tech nerds, we worship obscene wealth, and we objectify woman as fucking-machines. Very sad, and certainly nothing we need to make a movie about.

My wife and I caught up with Good Hair this past weekend and we both really enjoyed it. Despite the presence of Chris Rock, I would not say this film is laugh out loud funny, but it is very entertaining and at the same time quite interesting. I had no notion of the incredible world-wide industry built on the prevailing desire to make Black hair look and behave like non-Black hair, and I certainly had no idea what it all costs the consumer! I’m not sure what I think of it all, but it was fun learning about it. The film is paced very well and Chris Rock does a good job in his role as narrator and interviewer.

I recommend it!

This film is a stupidly manipulative, insulting and worthless piece of trash that should be avoided at all costs.

What I can’t believe is Ryan Reynolds getting involved with this. The guy is a wonderful actor – warm, good looking, good voice, great comic timing but also able to handle emotion and serious dialog. Why would he take this role? I hope he goes back to normal films – he deserves way,way better than shit like this.

I could barely breathe for a very large portion of this film.

My first reaction was disbelief that they could still make science fiction movies like this. But then I realized that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a science fiction movie as good as this. I never liked 2001 – I found it boring and really over-done. I never wanted to see Alien again, probably because it’s a rather one dimensional story, and wasn’t all that taken with it the first time. What else is there? Scanning down the top 20 Sci-Fi films as voted by IMDB is just laughable (go check it out) with the only possible exception being Blade Runner. I’ll admit that Blade Runner is a good film that I return to every now and then, but really the last 1/3 of the movie is pretty bombastic and hard to take. So I guess I would have to say Sunshine is probably the best science fiction film I’ve ever seen.

I’m not going to give anything away in this review. But I will list what I like about this film. It has a fascinating concept with multiple dramatic layers, a good, solid set-up with enough high-quality dialog to make it truly gripping, and a positively thrilling but entirely realistic chain of events. Unlike most films of this genera, they never abandon dialog as the principle dramatic anchor – this is a big reason it’s so good. It has good, solid ensemble casting and acting, and a very interesting and effective score. And the editing and visual effects are at times truly breathtaking. In this age of CGI mayhem, it has been quite a while since I’ve seen visuals put together so effectively and with such remarkable emotional content. They are beautiful, terrifying, and quite moving. At times I got deep chills of the kind I only get in the very best horror movies. They are that good.

If you missed Sunshine, Netflix it, don’t read anything about the story, and just sit down and experience it cold. You’re in for a real treat!