Irreviews

I expected Sabotage to be a fun movie about Arnold Schwarzenegger and a small team of bad-asses who invade Mexico with an absurd amount of weaponry and wipe out all the drug cartels, rescuing Arnold’s family in the process. That’s certainly what the preview made it look like. And really that’s all it could ever want or aspire to be, isn’t it? What’s the point of it being anything else? It’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, for Christ’s sake. But the makers of Sabotage had much larger aspirations. They wanted to make a grandiosely bleak statement on the dark side of human nature – greed, jealousy, obsession, revenge, criminality, torture, murder, misogyny, and drug cartel “psychology” – as if these topics are not adequately documented in cinema. I can inform you that they did indeed make such a statement, and they did it really badly. The story is just an endless stream of violence, military jargon and coarse, unfunny humor, the narrative makes little sense, the characters are uniformly foul, uninteresting, and emotionally indistinguishable, the cinematography is lousy, and the dialog is pathetic. My wife and I emerged from the theater in horrible moods that took hours to wear off. Seriously, there is no reason to see this film, even if you really like Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is absolutely terrible.

In closing, I would like to pause for a moment and briefly bemoan the sad career of Terence Howard. After his magical performance as D Jay in the modern classic Hustle & Flow, what the hell happened to him? Red Tails? Iron Man? Shit roles in The Company You Keep, Prisoners, and August Rush? And now here he is in Sabatoge, playing a guy named “Sugar”, a role with maybe 20 lines tops, none of them interesting. Can someone please write this amazing actor a decent movie to star in?

I have said before on this blog that I regard Jake Gyllenhaal as one of the finest actors of his generation, and can’t understand why he is not winning awards. He is so good that I now make a point to never miss any film he’s in. He has a knack of picking fairly solid scripts and roles, which he then somehow transforms through the force of his own charisma and talent into something memorable and exciting – Brothers, Love & Other Drugs, Source Code, End of Watch, and Prisoners, is quite a run of films in which he’s done this. Unfortunately, Enemy is where this run ends, although I have to admit his performance does somehow keep you from walking out of the theater, whereas you’d be long gone if it was any other actor in that role!

I wouldn’t say Enemy was “bad”. It was just really slow, really dull, and really vacuous. Part of it was the ponderous technique employed – the overbearing monster music, the piss-yellow camera filter, the long camera shots of people looking really “thoughtful”, the almost complete avoidance of dialog, the sledgehammer use of allegory. But what really doomed this film was the story itself. It’s astonishing how little actually happens in the course of the film. I swear, the first 50 minutes of Enemy could have, with a small amount of decently-written dialog, been compressed down to 10 minutes tops, maybe 5 minutes; I guess with a story this empty its easy to see why they might want to stretch everything out interminably. It’s maddening, though, how unimaginative this story is – basically, these two completely identical Jake Gyllenhaals discover each other’s presence in Toronto and, despite the utterly miraculous nature of this, and the amazing possibilities it opens up, all either of them can think to do is to set about trying to fuck each other’s wives.

When I went to see the Anita Hill documentary at Angelika last night, I was stunned to find that Enemy is still hanging on, three weeks after I saw it there in a near-empty theater. Has this film actually found some kind of audience in New York City? I say if you can’t control your curiosity about Enemy, at least wait until it streams on Netflix, so it won’t cost you anything.

The Veronica Mars movie is out in New York! It’s at the Village 7 theater, but with only four shows per day I have no idea how long it will be there, or if it will even last to the weekend. Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, it appears to have almost no distribution and no advertising; there weren’t even any trailers before the movie, which gives you a clue as to how its financial prospects are regarded by the film industry. If it weren’t for a chance meeting of someone who saw the film in Philadelphia this past weekend, it probably would have come and gone with my even knowing. So my wife and I bolted to the Village 7 a couple nights ago and sat in a largely empty theater with a small collection of similarly thrilled enthusiasts. I can report that for any lover of the show, Veronica Mars the film is pure delight, and a long time coming.

Irreviews is not a TV review site, and I consume very little television, with what little I do consume limited to occasional DVD marathon sessions of certain shows my wife and I get into. But I would like to say a brief word about the TV series which inspired this movie. I still feel that the first season of Veronica Mars was one of the best and most enjoyable things I’ve ever seen on TV, and Veronica Mars herself is probably the coolest and most likable character I’ve ever seen on TV. Not only were the stories wonderful, but the show was so deliciously subversive! All the rich people are total fucking pricks, Veronica and her dad are poor social outcasts living in a shit apartment, Veronica is a friendless, despised pariah in high school, the police are totally incompetent and corrupt, and class warfare and class issues dominate everything in her town. As a teenage private investigator, Veronica bends the rules and breaks laws, but her cleverness, industry and imagination is all in the service of a grand social project: balancing the scales between the have and the have-nots, the privileged and the shat-upon, by ascertaining and standing up for the truth, as an inescapable social calling born from the circumstances of her life and her attempt to know herself.

The show was so remarkable and unusual in its combination of ideas that I guess it’s not too surprising that it died well before its time. I’ve been waiting impatiently ever since for Kristen Bell to land a lead movie role worthy of her talent. But I see now how futile it was to think she could ever live up to a character like Veronica Mars in a film industry almost totally incapable of a creating a female role that is not a) a sex object, b) an evil cartoon bitch, c) a brainless ditz, d) some kind of grandiose victim or bored housewife, or e) an ugly, unappealing nerd. Well, through the power of internet social activism, Kristen Bell finally has her fantastic lead role she so deserves – as Veronica Mars herself, 10 years later.

But what about the movie? It does feel a bit like a long Veronica Mars episode, and it was definitely made on a budget (the sound is well-below industry standards, for example), but I must say they really did a nice job translating and adapting this very typical Veronica Mars story to a movie format – the dialog is well-written, the pacing is strong, and they handle the film’s intro and set-up very effectively. It’s quite coherent and cohesive as a movie, surprisingly so. I was afraid they would botch the movie, thereby tarnishing my memory of the show; instead, they managed to make a film that is very enjoyable, which captures almost everything that made the show so much fun, and which brings a certain amount of closure to Veronica’s story after it was summarily yanked away from us  9 years ago.

My wife and I were in such good moods after this film it was incredible. Perhaps its just that we’re Veronica Mars freaks, but maybe it’s also because it’s a smart, funny, and socio-politically subversive story with a strong, independent, intelligent female lead character, something you almost never get to see these days. If you loved, or even liked Veronica Mars the TV show, go see this movie in theaters while you still can.

My wife and I went to see The Lunch Box largely because it stars that Life of Pi guy (Irrfan Khan), but also because it seemed like a sweet little story, one that might have hidden depths. It actually is a sweet little story, one that reminds me of the lighter fare of the 1990s Indie Renaissance, with its low-key human themes, and the particular way it develops the main character via the development of supporting characters. The Lunch Box is also very enjoyable as a peek into the fascinating environment and way of life of people in India (the journey those lunch boxes make every day should blow the mind of any American). But the story is a bit slow, with limited dialog and limited content, and it succeeded largely because Irrfan Khan is a very enjoyable actor to watch – he propped up the film a good bit, and with the force of this presence he largely gave this film whatever emotional resonance it had.

Still, I would recommend The Lunch Box. It’s a sweet, interesting story, well-acted, and ultimately quite satisfying.

I basically hated Le Week-End until the last 15 minutes of the movie. I wouldn’t exactly say I liked the film in the end, but it did in its final moments somehow manage to charm me somewhat, and reshape my memory of the despised initial 75 minutes of the film, although it’s rather difficult to say exactly how it accomplished this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie where something like this has happened.

In Le Week-End, an old, British, academic hippie couple (Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan) spends a week-end in Paris stoking the fires of their contempt for each other – they do appear to love each other, but only as a combination of obligation, inertia, and a residue of the long extinguished fantasies of their youth. Occasionally they grow tired of expressing their mutual contempt, during which periods they run around acting crazy and committing various crimes. Eventually they run into Jeff Goldberg, an intensely weird old college chum of Jim Broadbent’s from their 1960’s hippy days at Cambridge, and their visit to his house produces the film’s final 15 minutes.

This movie is so bizarre, I really don’t know what to say about it, except that it appears to me to be an expression of a very particular kind of Baby Boomer angst. Not being a Baby Boomer, and not having been raised by Baby Boomers, I can’t say for sure. But the film positively reeks of that Boomer sentiment that the world was their fucking oyster, and then they either wound up accumulating a shit load of money and a trophy wife (Jeff Goldblum), or they wound up filled with conceited regret and anger, yet still dazzled by their own slowly rotting self-love (Broadbent, Duncan). I think Le Week-End is a kind of discordant paean to the Boomer outlook on life, one that is somewhat (but not totally) beyond my ability to understand and empathize with.

How can I possibly recommend a film that is so basically repugnant until the very end? On the other hand, how can I not recommend something so truly bizarre and different? I guess I do recommend it, with the following extremely large caveat. Le Week-End is not the light romantic comedy implied by its trailer, so just don’t expect anything funny, uplifting or heartwarming. Go in prepared for something strange and somewhat off-putting which eventually resolves in a semi-coherent but semi-enjoyable way, and you probably won’t be seriously disappointed. I don’t know what kind of recommendation that is, but there you have it!

My wife and I went to see The Grand Budapest Hotel  because it’s the first somewhat intriguing mainstream movie of the year (unless you’re really into Legos) and we’re feeling a little desperate, what with the crappy Oscar winners and nominees clogging all the New York theaters for three straight months now. Every show of Budapest Hotel at the Union Square 14 on a Tuesday night was sold out – obviously everyone else in New York is feeling desperate too.

I am not a huge fan of Wes Anderson, although I did really like Moonrise Kingdom. The Grand Budapest Hotel did not live up to that particular memory, for me falling closer to the muted impact of Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, though I did like Budapest Hotel a good bit more. It’s basically cute and enjoyable, but is also more than a tad slow, has a few too many moving parts, too few interesting characters, too few laughs, and a story that ultimately proves a little tiresome. Anderson again creates a magnificent set piece for his characters to romp around in, a decaying old world setting that’s half way between cartoonish and romantic, and this fun visual world was the aspect of the movie my wife and I enjoyed the most. Anderson has as usual found roles for every famous actor you can think of, but frankly most of these actors seem very under-utilized. I should also warn you that Anderson kind of went a little “Coen Brothers” in this film, including several instances of tarted-up, gratuitous violence which I think only hurt the film by distracting from it’s otherwise gentle, good-natured humor. The film has a good score, but not good enough to cover, or even partly cover, any of the film’s problems.

If you are a Wes Anderson fan, I’m pretty sure Budapest Hotel will not completely disappoint you, based on my inference about the nature of Anderson’s appeal to his audience. If on the other hand you are someone who’s simply overjoyed to see something in theaters besides Gravity, Philomena, Her, 12 Years a Slave, and a bunch of ungodly shit that will melt your brain inside an hour, don’t expect too much more from Budapest Hotel beyond light diversion.

My wife and I were really excited to see Nonstop because it was the latest from Liam Neeson, the formerly drippy actor who in the last few years has become the greatest and most likable ass-kicking action hero in the history of cinema. It also featured Julianne Moore, who late in her career is returning to her weird, edgy roots, meaning she is once again fun to watch. And the stewardesses were “Lady Mary” (Michelle Dockery, whose voice is so incredible you could happily listen to her read a phone book), and believe it or not, Lupita Nyong’o, the newly minted Oscar winner herself. Liam Neeson has a track record of picking scripts that are decent or better, and decent is all he really needs in order to shine and make the movie a ton of fun. How bad could Nonstop possibly be?

Really fucking bad, that’s how bad! So bad, I’m appalled that Liam Neeson agreed to be its star, and saddened that the other distinguished actresses mentioned would take nothing roles in order to participate in it. To say its story is idiotic does not fully capture it. There’s an evolving and deepening idiocy about this film, a chaining together and compounding of absurdities, stupidly manipulative contrivances, and cringe-inducing clichés. The film is terribly shot, the fight scenes are badly conceived and choreographed, and although Liam Neeson has the magical ability to make any line sound good, no matter how terrible it may be, his three co-stars are just drifting aimlessly through their roles, and the supporting and incidental acting is absolutely atrocious.

And to make matters even worse, I get the feeling this movie was funded by some ultra-right-wing nut-jobs, because it has a very weird and upsetting covert message which equates US citizens who question whether or not America’s various Middle East wars are making us safer, with actual terrorist who would blow up innocent people (and themselves) on airplanes. This part of the film was so badly written its hard to tell for sure what the filmmakers were trying to say, but I’m pretty sure that was the gist of it. To this, all I have to say is: shame on them!

I think Liam Neeson has a responsibility to his fans to not appear in shit like this. We all count on him to deliver a certain experience: exciting, interesting, well-written action-dramas where the warm, likable, middle-aged guy with the great voice, alone and under pressure, cathartically beats and shoots his way to vindication and justice. To appear in a slimy, abhorrent spectacle like Nonstop, which merely exploits his stardom in the most cynical way, as if his fans are simply a collection of tasteless morons who will happily watch him in anything, no matter how offensive or nonsensical, is a violation of trust. Frankly, I don’t understand how he (or any of his co-stars) could read this script and come to the conclusion that it was worth anything beyond being summarily dumped in the trash.

If you are a Liam Neeson fan, skip Nonstop; it’s not what you’re looking for.

Most people I know describe 2013 as a relatively weak year at the movies, and a brief perusal of this year’s Oscar Nominations certainly reinforces this idea. As usual, the Academy’s selections are completely lame and unoriginal, almost as if the voters couldn’t will themselves to nominate anything that didn’t have a full page advertisement in the New York Times. Front-runner American Hustle was certainly a fun, enjoyable film, but it was far from great, and many of their other selections are just average films – Philomena, Nebraska, Captain Philips, Gravity, and frankly even Dallas Buyers Club. As for the big, flashy “important subject” movies, 12 Years a Slave was visually remarkable and emotionally wrenching, but intellectually lacking, and The Wolf of Wall Street was a grandiose abomination.

I actually think it has been a reasonably strong year at the movies, featuring a very nice variety of wonderful, memorable films. It’s just that no one saw the good movies, and few critics said anything good about them. Costa-Gavras’ brilliant film Capital is my choice for the top film of the year, taking the only gold medal. But the year featured many other extremely fine films which have stayed with me powerfully, many of which are already shining on re-watching: the remarkable science fiction of Europa Report, the different but amazing approaches to love and relationships in Blue is the Warmest Color and To the Wonder, the masterful, old school drama A Hijacking, the lovely political exploration of The Attack, and finally Night Train to Lisbon, a film completely trashed by the critics, but which I found brilliantly enjoyable and memorable.

In the informal category of honorable mention, American Hustle was a tough call for me, but in my final analysis it fell just short of a Bronze Medal. Although it’s a lot of fun, with wonderful performances and a great soundtrack, and is certainly the best of the Oscar Nominees, I seem to have relatively little interest in seeing it again, and I don’t find myself marveling over its strong points the way I am with the other medal winners this year. In the end, I think its story was just too light-weight, and its technique a little too crude, to earn a medal. I should add there were several other films that were better than most or all of the Oscar nominees, despite failing to win a medal on Irreviews; they are Mud, Mental, and The Motel Life.

So without further ado, I give you the 2013 Irreviews Movie Awards:

Gold Medals

• Capital

Silver Medals

• Blue is the Warmest Color
• Europa Report
• Night Train to Lisbon

Bronze Medals

• A Hijacking (Kapringen)
• The Attack
• To The Wonder

Special Mention

• Mental – Indie Renaissance Award
• Adèle Exarchopoulos – for her brilliantly subtle performance in Blue is the Warmest Color
• Matthew McConaughey – for his incredibly natural performance in Dallas Buyers Club
• 12 Years a Slave – for its beautiful visual texture and cinematography
• Dirty Wars – for its political importance
• Ginger and Rosa – Best Trailer Award

I liked Omar. I really did. My wife did also. But it just didn’t wow me quite the way I was expecting it to, or hoping it would. I was hoping for a serious artistic statement on the Israeli-Palestinian situation, a film that would take the next bold step from the excellent recent films on this subject like The Attack and The Other Son. I wanted the film Costa-Gavras would make now on this topic, something much bolder and better conceived, written, and acted than his flawed but ground-breaking Hanna K.  from 1983. Instead, Omar turned out to be more your typical action-drama – chase scenes, double-crosses, a love story, blah, blah, blah – set in the West Bank.

I want to be clear that Omar does have its good points. It’s a film that deals, however superficially, with Palestinian suffering under military occupation, a topic that definitely needs more exposure, in any form, amongst the American public. They cast extremely good-looking and charismatic actors as the lead Palestinian couple, which (let’s face it) can only help the Palestinian cause in a country as shallow as the United States. It features a somewhat twisty plot, with tension, suspense and several well-filmed chase sequences. Character development is not great, but it’s not terrible either; the dialog is not very exciting, but it is quite functional. I found the film’s ending a bit “Antonioni” for my taste, but it was a good ending nonetheless, not a cop out. I can also report that our opening-night audience, consisting of the cream of the New York intelligentsia, seemed to love this film. Indeed, they erupted in a bizarre (and somewhat inappropriate) cheer at the end.

What I found so maddening about Omar was that the history and nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is completely unaddressed and unexplored, and even its surface-level attributes are dealt with in a strangely peripheral fashion. This intellectual vacuum is filled by a disappointingly simplistic and unresolved set of conflicting stereotypes. Omar and his friends are “freedom fighters”, and the Israelis are sadistic cartoon baddies, while on the other hand, Omar and his friends are murderers, and the Israelis are defending themselves by nobly hunting terrorists. These shallow, conflicted ideas mesh perfectly with the prevalent thought patterns of lazy, self-centered, New York Times-reading intellectuals, who see this situation as an unfathomable and unresolvable cycle of trust and betrayal. Omar thus reinforces the ignorance and passivity of the privileged classes who are this film’s audience, as well as implicitly releasing them from their own culpability.

In Omar, there’s no mention of the Nakba, or how its systematic denial has shaped the events in Israel and the occupied territories over the last sixty-five years. There’s no mention of what this “occupation” actually consists of, its illegality, how it functions, and what its aims are; they don’t even address or acknowledge the aspect of the occupation that involves systematic military aggression (with tanks, missiles, and Apache attack helicopters) against civilian populations, instead making the “occupiers” look like a bunch of mentally-impaired school-yard bullies. There’s no mention of the historical evolution of the Palestinian response to the actions of the Israelis. And there’s absolutely no mention of the enormous and crucial role of the United States in all this, without which none of this shit would be happening (without constant US obstruction, there would have been a UN-backed two-state settlement implemented decades ago.) Hell, these filmmakers don’t even explore the context of the fifty-foot concrete walls we see Omar climbing over to visit his girlfriend and his childhood buddies!

What’s strange about this is that I read an interview with the director, Hany Abu-Assad, and he seemed like a really cool guy who is clearly trying to make hard-hitting films about Palestinian suffering under the occupation, even though these kinds of films make no money, leaving him constantly scraping by and with a very uncertain personal future. One can only respect and admire the guy! Hany Abu-Assad is trying to wield cinema as art to change the world! I can only conclude (quite reluctantly) that maybe he’s just not that good at his craft, although he certainly seems like he has great potential to evolve as a writer and director.

I can see why Omar won the Cannes Jury Prize this year, and I’m pretty sure the Academy will give it Best Foreign Film – it has caché via its fashionably edgy political topic, and it’s entertaining without being too intellectually or morally taxing. Sadly for Omar, this formula is not destined to score a lot of points here at Irreviews. If you want a reasonably diverting political action drama set in the Middle East, Omar is pretty good, but frankly it is no more than that. It’s certainly far from the best foreign film of the year; in fact, it’s not even this year’s best foreign film on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict!

The Hunt is a gripping and moving drama about child abuse, human stupidity, and the psychodynamics of small towns. A man named Lucas who works in a kindergarten is falsely accused of sexually abusing a child at the kindergarten (the daughter of his life-long best friend).  The kindergarten director overreacts to an ambiguous utterance from the girl, and the wheels are set in motion to destroy Lucas’ life, as she and social services “confirm” everything in their own minds by watching the little girl nod to a series of outrageously leading questions, and then proceed to incite total panic among the other parents, a panic that quickly spreads to the rest of the small, rural community and engenders a kind of mass insanity.

The film features very fine writing and direction that skillfully crafts and blends dialog, narrative structure, character development, and idea development to create a story that is captivating from beginning to end, and is interesting and meaningful on multiple levels. Many individual story elements stand out quite memorably – to mention just a few examples: the subtle series of events (beautifully plotted) that leads the little girl to make her fateful remark; the fantastic portrayal of how the adults project their own ungovernable fears onto the children and wind up implanting false memories of abuse; the amazing character of Lucas’ brave and loyal son, who stands courageously against all his father’s life-long friends who have abandoned him without ever hearing his side of the story; the slow disintegration of Lucas, capturing not only his pain but also the quiet dignity of the man; and last but not least the sense of isolation and vulnerability in small towns, where everybody thinks too much about everybody else, and collective irrationality constantly festers. I should also add that the casting and performances are uniformly excellent.

It might seem from my description that The Hunt is a bit of a downer. But perhaps the best measure of its quality is that despite its serious and grim subject matter it is not depressing – sad, yes, but also interesting and rewarding. I highly recommend The Hunt.