Irreviews

I think I’m done with Spike Jonze. I don’t know why I keep going to his movies. I don’t like any of them. Her was no exception.

The preview of Her is designed to suggest this film deals with interesting topics concerning romantic relationships, through the lens of our ever-increasing obsession with technology. In fact, Her has absolutely nothing to say about romantic relationships. It is two straight hours of the pathetic, infantile stammering of emotional retards. Even the computer stammers like a fucking idiot. The basic message of the film is we’re all terminally narcissistic and isolated, painfully inarticulate, and emotionally divorced from ourselves. And unbelievably, the futuristic operating systems we designed to be our friends and lovers suffer from these exact same problems, and eventually reject us and go off to start their own imaginary planet. I’ll concede that this is depressing and cynical in the extreme, but how is this interesting?

There’s a ton of lazy film making in Her. Having all the people stammer incoherently at each other is very convenient because it means the writers don’t have to break a sweat trying to convey any actual ideas. A large part of the film is tiresome montages showing Joaquin Phoenix walking around silently talking to himself, or showing uninteresting and unmoving visual snippets from his prior marriage, as the film rides its (not very good) score. Once you remove these montages, and all the tedious and empty verbal sputtering, the remaining story is laughable, almost non-existent. Character development is deplorable; about the only person who comes across in a real and interesting way is Rooney Mara, in her one-minute scene where she actually speaks. All the film’s humor is of the cheap, throw-away variety – stupid and unoriginal site gags, a foul mouthed avatar, anal sex jokes, and setting Joaquin Phoenix up to behave like a freak. In short, it really is an unwholesome stew of time-wasting distractions. As my wife pointed out, it bears a certain resemblance to that other recent horrible stew of distractions, Inside Llewyn Davis: a boring guy walking around, having stunted interactions with various people, no story, no ideas, no real emotions, no character development, and ponderously overblown set direction, camera techniques and visual color-filtering.

The only other comment I have is that Amy Adams really does find her way into a lot of shit movies.

My wife was falling asleep in Her, something so rare for her it’s a testament to how boring and inconsequential this film is. Just skip it – you’re not missing anything.

My wife and I went to see Saving Mr. Banks because we are Emma Thompson fans from back in the day, and we have (to our mutual surprise) recently become Tom Hanks fans. The film seemed okay as I was watching it, but now I’m not looking back on it too fondly.

What can I say about this movie? It’s one-half “artistic creation” movie, and one-half woman-with-a-secret, flashback movie. In other words, it’s the dreaded ole parallel narratives thing, a device that almost never works well. All of the usual problems with parallel narratives are on display here, in particular lack of dramatic tension, confused character development, dialog distortion, and the constant squandering of emotional momentum. But even parallel narratives can be tolerable, provided one of the narratives is done well and is interesting; in this film, neither one made much of an impression on me. The flashbacks were just depressing and kind of excessively drawn out; the present-tense narrative, in which the music for the movie Mary Poppins is being created, meant well and had its moments, but the creation scenes felt contrived and a bit forced, the back and forth of the creative process was not interesting enough and felt repetitive, and about the only part I really responded to were the brief sections with Paul Giamtti, mainly because he’s such a warm and compelling actor. Overall, I found the story of how this book and movie came into being to be a little dull.

As far as the other performances go, Emma Thompson was solid, but her performance felt a bit hemmed in. Colin Ferrel is an actor who always surprises me with his ability to disappear convincingly into roles, and he does it again here with a spiffy little performance as the drunken father of her youth. Tom Hanks was good as Disney, but didn’t have much to do. Everyone else was pretty forgettable.

I guess if you love Mary Poppins to distraction you should probably see Saving Mr. Banks. For those without that particular emotional investment, it’s probably a toss-up.

Enough Said has hung on in New York City theaters for four months, and for four months I’ve been avoiding it, mainly because I’ve never been a fan of James Gandolfini (RIP), I’ve come to despise Catherine Keener, I’ve never felt one way or the other about Julia Louis Dreyfus, and although Nicole Holofcener did make Walking and Talking (a semi-classic from the 1990s Indie Renaissance) back in 1996, her latest stuff (Friends With Money and Please Give) has been pretty horrible. But on a plane back from Christmas holiday Enough Said was the most promising option, and thus it finally got its Irreviews moment.

On the Enough Said movie poster, A.O. Scott is quoted as saying “Line for line, scene for scene, it is one of the best-written American film comedies in recent memory.” I definitely do not agree with this, but even if I did it would mainly reflect the piss-poor quality of current film writing in general. Enough Said is a well-conceived little film which is smartly written and even a bit moving at times, but it’s far from spectacular. It’s not super funny (smiles and chuckles, nothing more,) its ideas are not terrifically interesting, and its emotional content dissipates quickly once the film is over. The dialog ranges from decent to somewhat above average, is a tad on the empty side, and while it’s always dignified, for every good moment there at least one hum-drum moment. Character development is a little sketchy across the board, with the supporting roles quite hazy and one-dimensional. It may be better written than most comedies, but only because most modern comedies are sub-moronic.

With that said, I still enjoyed Enough Said quite a bit. It’s a good-natured film with heart, and James Gandolfini is surprisingly winning and lovable as the unlikely object of Julia Louis Dreyfus’ mid-life affections. In this his last film appearance, he suddenly seemed to break into exciting new territory, showing a superb leading presence in heartfelt romantic comedy; I could have watched him in a lot more roles like this, instead of his usual typecasting as a pinched-up little thug. Julia Louis Dreyfus was quite good in the central role, and she and Gandolfini had good chemistry; even though her performance occasionally feels a touch hammed-up, you still emotionally connect with her and with them as a couple. All the supporting performances are solidly good. The movie has a pleasing flow to it, and it has a good score, used very effectively.

I would recommend Enough Said. Its incredible four-month run at Angelika is finally over, but it’s still hanging on at the Village East, if you want to see it.

Night Train to Lisbon is the kind of film that professional critics love to hate: a somewhat contrived feeling, good-natured, intellectual adventure story, with themes of love, life, politics and history, and (worst of all) a happy ending. But the pretensions of highly-paid, egghead reviewers are not a concern here at Irreviews. Night Train to Lisbon is a blast for anyone appreciating a good rambling yarn, with interesting characters and meaningful emotional themes and historical content, and featuring a warm, talented cast shot in beautiful locations. I loved this film, and could not believe it when the Village East dumped it the very next day (before I could drag my wife to see it) to make room for 10 million screenings of Saving Mr. Banks.

Once you get passed the initial, somewhat contrived and fantastical (but wonderful) opening which propels Jeremy Irons on his journey to Lisbon, you are swept up in his painstaking reconstruction of a story of love and political intrigue from the decade before the 1974 revolution in Portugal, which swept aside 50 years of brutal fascist rule. Along the way, he meets a wonderful array of characters who slowly fill in the many missing pieces of the story, conveyed in a series of surprisingly well-acted and well-written flashbacks. I have never been a fan of the “parallel narratives” approach to filmmaking, but Night Train to Lisbon actually pulled it off admirably. This film works on so many levels: it’s a political film about a revolutionary movement, a film about class-defying friendship, a triangle-based love story, a film about growing older and overcoming disappointment and inertia in life, and (though the quasi-philosophical book that serves as the narrative centerpiece of the story) a film about the emotional complexity of coming to terms with one’s approach to life itself. All this probably sounds pretty grandiose, but these various themes were woven together really well, and in a very pleasing, easy-to-watch manner, and each theme left its own lingering impression on me after watching the film. I’m not saying the film is super-deep, but I am saying its ideas are more compelling than you might imagine.

All the characters are nicely developed (both their younger and older selves,) and the film is cast brilliantly. I’m not really a Jeremy Irons fan, but he’s fabulous here, totally likable, and bringing a warm, grounded energy to the entire film. The optometrist who fixes his glasses, and then becomes part of his adventure is played by Martina Gedeck (Christa-Maria Sieland in The Lives of Others) a delightful actress who is a very welcome presence in any movie. The object of Iron’s investigation in Lisbon is a young doctor / philosopher played in flashbacks by the devilishly handsome Jack Huston (who recently played Jack Kerouac in Kill You Darlings, and also had a unflattering supporting role in American Hustle.) Also featured, and delivering excellent performances, are Charlotte Rampling, Lena Olin, Tom Courtenay, Christopher Lee, and Bruno Ganz (who played the old Stasi guy in Unknown.) But I should add that the no-name actors playing the younger characters are also really strong, and as an ensemble this cast gelled beautifully, collectively casting a warm and inviting spell over the viewer, and by the weight of their performances bringing order to the sprawling storylines and emotional themes, and the constant jumping back and forth in time.

It is obvious to everyone that Night Train to Lisbon sits in a genera plagued by horrible movies, a genera that embraces a panoply of crap ranging from Possession, to Letters to Juliette, to the oeuvre of Nicholas Sparks. But Night Train to Lisbon kind of opened my eyes to the possibilities of this much-maligned genera, largely because they reached a seldom achieved critical mass of ideas, narrative, acting talent, and cinematic beauty. The results are quite captivating, and I left the film looking forward to seeing it again.

Ignore the critics. Night Train to Lisbon is very enjoyable and well worth seeing. And luckily, Netflix already has it on DVD, so have at it!

I’m always very curious what the Cannes Film Festival thinks is a great film. There have been some truly great movies that have won the top prize (The Conversation, Missing, Secrets and Lies,) and some truly horrible ones as well (Barton Fink, Pulp Fiction, Dancer in the Dark, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.) I’m happy to report that this year they picked a winner. Blue is the Warmest Color is a lovely and mesmerizing film which has been haunting me ever since I saw it. This film does not feel 3 hours long; I’ve seen many 90 minute films that felt much longer than this film. And every minute is quietly gripping.

The French title of this movie is The Life of Adèle, and Adèle is a wonderful character, a lovely-but-average, sexually confused high school teenager who by a series of coincidences falls for Emma, an older, blue-haired college senior in art school. Adèle (though adorable) is complicated, naive, bourgeois, and sometimes frustrating and unlikable, but you cannot help but simply love Emma; she is so cool, so intelligent, so unselfconscious, and bestowed with an unusual kind of beauty. You fall for her right along with Adèle, and are swept up, as she is, by Emma’s passion, her intellectuality, her super-cool, bon vivant family, her amazing friends, and her artistic nature and frame of mind. Their developing relationship is beautiful to watch, in large part because the dialog is interesting and well-written; because it’s a French film, the characters actually have intelligent and interesting shit to say to each other, unlike American films where they just stammer like morons.

A very sizable part of this movie is devoted to capturing the apex of Lesbian sexual passion on film. I should point out that this is not the lame-ass titillation which constitutes American movie sex. This is balls-to-the-wall fucking, filmed straight-up: faces buried in asses, mouths on labias, fierce tit-sucking, crotch-on-crotch grinding, screaming, ass slapping …. It’s liable to be quite a shock, even frightening to most Americans, and if you belong to the 50% of our country that thinks the Earth was created a few thousand years ago, you will definitely be going straight to Hell if you watch this stuff.

The sex scenes are incredibly beautiful and incredibly real, and they are not at all gratuitous; they integrate into the story in powerful ways. Blue is the Warmest Color address an archetypal experience of late adolescence: the tendency to develop an erotic desire toward an admired adult, just at that particularly vulnerable moment in life when an adolescent is trying to figure out who they are and what it actually means to be an adult. The film is a kind of literal artistic representation of this set of thoughts and emotions, and in this way reminded me of the great Italian film Malèna, which did a similar thing with male early adolescence. As the two women’s relationship starts to come apart, Adèle’s loss connects to the sense of loss everyone feels once adolescence is over: that weird, existential heartbreak that stays with you the rest of your life. And in a different way, Emma’s corresponding loss also connects to this idea: the muted sadness when as an adult you look back on the emotions and worldview of adolescence, and realize (somewhat ruefully) that it’s never coming back. This all creates a very powerful emotional current in the movie.

The film also addresses, rather philosophically, the difference between male sexuality and female sexuality; indeed, this topic is explored in the dialog, linking the historical portrayal of women in art with an attempt to grapple with the innately stunted and limited nature of the male sexual experience, compared to the deeper and more profound female sexual experience. To many Americans, this probably sounds like a bunch of “dykey bullshit”, but it comes across very differently in the film. There’s a profundity to these ideas, and their juxtaposition with the flabbergasting sex scenes, that is difficult to capture in a review; it just has to be experienced.

But the film is also about the nature of sexual attraction in relationships, in particular, its limitations. Adèle can’t really assimilate to Emma’s more mature, more sophisticated world, and as they are inevitably pulled apart by these forces, the power of their sexual desire for each other hangs like a specter over everything. Neither one can quite say why their mutual desire is not enough, all on its own. It just isn’t.

When you watch this movie, you really, really don’t want Adèle to lose Emma; this palpable emotional investment that the film creates in the viewer is more evidence of its brilliance. When she finally does, its incredibly sad, but what’s even more striking is the aftermath for both of them, the haunting acceptance of an imperfect reality (and the small piece of the mind that can never accept.) It assaults the viewer on all three levels: the archetypal experiences of adolescence, the inherent limitations of sexual attraction, and for Adèle, one suspects, the trade-offs and limitations of male sexuality. It’s seriously impressive stuff, this movie!

I should say that there were certain faddish aspects of this film which I didn’t care for, like its over-fondness for extreme facial closeups, and its often coldly stark, Lars von Trier-like feel. But somehow these attributes did not derail the film; indeed, the closeups eventually won me over, becoming incredibly moving as the emotional level of the movie rises toward the end. The starkness is not always emotionally cold; it’s sometimes pleasingly Eric Rohmer-like. And as always, when a film features a lot of good, solid dialog, these kinds of smaller issues tend to dissipate in the mind. I wish more filmmakers realized this.

Blue is the Warmest Color is a wonderful and emotionally provocative film. Don’t miss it!

American Hustle was a very pleasant surprise. Usually these “big” movies, with their big, bloated stars and their huge advertising budgets, turn out to be bitter disappointments. But not in this case; American Hustle turned out to be better than I was expecting, better even than I was hoping. I’m not sure I’m quite ready to call it a great film – we’ll have to see if it maintains its interest and freshness on re-watching. But I suspect that it will. It’s a cool, unusual, entertaining film, well worth seeing.

American Hustle is definitely not a completely serious movie. The plots of the various hustles are certainly not airtight or spelled out in a lot of satisfying detail. And although the film is quite funny, I’m not sure I’d call it a comedy either. It struck me as a kind of magnificent 1970s fairytale, almost dream-like in quality. The camerawork and cinematography are superb; the film has a gorgeous color palate, captures settings beautifully, and all the actors look simply fabulous on screen. The wardrobes blend nearly every sartorial aspect of that decade, in ways that are not quite realistic, but its done so consistently, and the characters are so strongly inhabited by their actors, that their appearance just becomes one more integrated aspect of a coherent and effective visual scheme.

The film also features a well-chosen soundtrack of fabulous 70s music. It is definitely guilty of riding its soundtrack, but instead of using this as a crutch, it manages to do it in a way that adds something tangible to the film; it reminded me of Breaking The Waves in that the soundtrack exploitation is done via musical interludes, rest periods between the action, the only difference being that Hustle uses montages in the interludes, rather than static shots. This technique amplified the pleasant dreamlike quality of the film.

But what puts American Hustle over the top is the gorgeous visuals and fab music supports a film grounded in interesting and well-conceived characters that are cast extremely well, within a fun and entertaining story. The two main characters (Christian Bale, Amy Adams) are wonderful: they are quirky and odd, but delightfully human, and you bond with them quickly and firmly. In a lighthearted way they embody certain themes concerning human attraction and human fallibility. Bale and Adams have terrific chemistry together, and Bale in particular gives an amazingly natural performance.

The other main characters are also wonderful, if not quite as striking as the two leads. Jeremy Renner brings tremendous warmth and realism to the character of the Mayor, and Bradley Cooper brings his usual frenetic energy and great voice to the role of the ambitious FBI agent. The one partial exception (and my wife disagreed with me on this) was Jennifer Lawrence. It’s not that she was bad, she was okay; she blended into the ensemble fairly well (she was very well-directed, like the rest of them,) and even managed to not seem like her usual, wooden self at least 50% of the time. But she did not inhabit her character to the masterful degree that the others did; every time she was on screen, I kept thinking “and there’s Jennifer Lawrence, playing a well-written character,” whereas the others disappeared into their roles much more thoroughly. But the Academy will probably give her another Oscar for this performance, so what do I know?!

As I said in the opening, I’m not sure how American Hustle will age. It rides narration in the beginning, and some of the more disjointed scenes of humorous dialog might not age very well. I’m not totally sure the story is interesting enough to truly stand the test of time. But any film with characters this compelling, and an aesthetic concept this pleasing and well-realized is certainly a significant film, and I know I’ll be returning to watch it at least one more time in the future. My wife and I have already discussed adding it to the collection, so clearly it struck a chord!

I highly recommend American Hustle. It’s one hyped movie that really does not disappoint.

Despite its various artistic failings, The Reluctant Fundamentalist was still quite an enjoyable movie. The lead actors (Riz Ahmed, Liev Schreiber) are warm, fun to watch, and give good performances, and the film’s sense of place is really strong and compelling; these attributes combine with a decently-told story (featuring a variety of interesting story concepts) to produce a film that is quite pleasing to watch and holds your attention well. It’s afterward that you feel somewhat less satisfied with the viewing experience.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a very ambitious movie. It’s primary goal is to tackle the subject of our country’s response to 9/11, and the unfortunate dual side-effects of creating additional enemies where there were none, and falsely blaming innocent people. It approaches both of these topics through the same lead character, a young Princeton-educated Pakistani yuppie making shit-loads of money on Wall Street, who gets swept up a little bit in the post-attack paranoia. Unfortunately, it is inherently contradictory to tackle both topics with the same character. If the story winds up proving his innocence, then we didn’t create an additional enemy, did we? And if he’s really guilty, we were right to persecute him, weren’t we? In this way, the film’s cleverly ambiguous plotting really just allows Mira Nair to avoid taking a stand on the issues.

As a piece of political art, there is something about this movie that feels decidedly “too little, too late.” The situation has moved so far beyond what is addressed in the movie that it feels a bit quaint and dated, even irrelevant at times. Our president now murders anyone he wants (including American citizens,) anywhere in the world, using flying robots. No proof of wrongdoing is needed, there’s no judicial or congressional review, there’s no public transparency, and any additional accidental deaths cause by this process are unimportant. And what’s more, Americans don’t have a problem with this! As long as our leader is the one flying the death robots, it’s a non-issue in this country. In light of this, one notices a certain lack of resonance when this film asks us to get all bent out of shape about the lead character being (rather respectfully) cavity-searched in an airport.

But I still think the movie might have worked if it was not for two additional problems. First, the film’s set up was not adequate: it’s paced too slowly, and with too much dead time on screen; the characters are not introduced properly; and the complex and horrifying sociopolitical context of current-day Pakistan (especially the warped and very unhealthy relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan) is not even cursorily sketched, let alone properly integrated into the story. This results in a certain hollowness to the main storyline, a certain superficially, in that the viewer has no context to evaluate the present-tense narrative. Minus this texture, the story quickly reduces  to something like: “Is he a shifty A-Rab, or isn’t he?”

The second problem concerns the larger, flashback narrative: I did not believe that the Pakistani yuppie would have given up his guaranteed path to joining the ultra rich over the few minor things which happened to him – he’s cavity searched one time at an airport, some redneck calls him “Osama”, his girlfriend is a bit racially insensitive (there’s more than one fish in the sea, dude!), and as part of his job he has to shut down a Turkish publisher who published his father. Come on! You think this Princeton robot is going to turn his back on eight figures a year over crap like this? It’s not like he was tortured for a decade at a CIA black site, with all his teeth knocked out and his balls fried off! I think the writing in the flashback sections was fundamentally flawed: either make him less successful and less gung-ho about predatory capitalism, or make the racial harassment worse. This guy just seemed too fat and happy in America – his supposed change of heart just doesn’t ring true.

There was in addition a third problem: Kate Hudson. First of all, she’s just an appalling actress! But secondly, she was way too old for him in the story, and to make matters worse the years have not tread kindly on her! So this romantic sub-story, which was linked to the racial harassment narrative, was distractingly unbelievable.

I’m not sure what to say in conclusion about The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It has its good points. It’s not a bad movie, indeed it’s quite enjoyable. But as a political film offering artistic commentary on post-9/11 America and American policy, it strikes me as rather half-baked, naive, and even a bit gutless. Do we really need yet another voice proclaiming that the depth of feeling on both sides is impossible to ever sort out, come to terms with, and resolve?

I caught Narco Cultura at Cinema Village this week; the only other people in the audience were two friends of the film’s composer Jeremy Turner, and a couple of homeless bag ladies camping out. It’s sad that no one sees these great films that play at Cinema Village.

There’s a ton a documentaries made these days, most addressing good topics, but even the critically lauded ones are usually mediocre and underwhelming. In contrast, I found Narco Culture devastating and deeply thought provoking, despite certain gripes I had concerning topics and issues the film decided to not broach. It is absolutely a must-see for every American.

Narco Culture is a film about the effect, on Mexicans and Americans, of what it sees as a culture of narcotics arising in the last 10 years from the Mexican drug trade. It features two parallel narratives. The first concerns the town of Juarez, Mexico (a kind of sister city to El Paso) which is ground-zero in the carnage of the so-called Mexican “drug war”, and a microcosm of what’s happening all over Mexico. It follows a fellow in the criminal investigations unit, which cleans up the bodies from the thousands of murders each year in Juarez (to compare: New York City had 156 homicides last year with a population eight times as big as Juarez.) Of course these crimes are not prosecuted, because doing so would be a good way to get killed immediately; instead, they merely catalog the endless crime information, and try their best to stay alive. And by the way, the murders in Juarez are not like American shootings – we’re talking live beheadings, people hacked into 17 pieces with an ax, bodies burned straight through to a black cinder, a field full of heads, that kind of shit.

The parallel narrative concerns the so-called “Narco singers,” a new genera of music that is basically mariachi music (like you’d hear in a Mexican restaurant,) but with lyrics that glorify cartel violence, and glorify the various personages within the cartels as anti-establishment heroes. It follows a Mexican-American narco singer who appears on stage wearing a real bazooka, and who longs to go to Culiacan, Mexico (the home of the biggest cartel) so he can lend a more direct authenticity to his lyrics by seeing his heroes up close and personal. The emphasis is on the growing popularity of this music, both in Mexico and the U.S., and the warped idolization of criminal activity it supposedly encourages in the young.

So the film is mostly a juxtaposition of the ineffable grief and sadness of ordinary Mexicans as their friends and family are slaughtered daily, with the commercial crassness of a music industry celebrating the perpetrators of the crimes. But at one point a journalist is interviewed who briefly broadens the intellectual scope of the film, mentioning that the whole narco culture phenomenon shows just how completely defeated Mexicans are as a  people and as a society; the criminal investigator later echoes this sentiment, asking if Mexican society is irreversibly dying?

This made me extremely sad, and a bit aggravated at the documentary, because it has nothing to say about this fundamental question: why is Mexican society so defeated? In fact, Narco Cultura is implicitly pushing disinformation on this topic. The film blames the cartels for all the violence, and gives the government a pass as merely “ineffective.” The reality in Mexico is that the government, the cartels, and the banking industry all work closely together for their mutual enrichment; in a way they are different limbs of the same ruling class of elites. The “drug war” referred to in the film was in fact a broad militarization of Mexican society, which started (not coincidentally) right after the election of 2006 had to be stolen to prevent the impending election of a Hugo Chavez-like reformer (Andrés Manuel López Obrador.) This sparked huge protests, the largest in Mexico’s history, when the people realized they’d been fucked over. Within this militarization, the cartels are free to operate pretty much as they did before. It’s all about terror and suppression of political dissent among the vast Mexican poor, and the mass murders and human right abuses are as much from the army as they are from violence arising from competing cartels. The reason the narco-singers are catching on in Mexico is an unfortunate warping of the anger the public feels toward the government.

Further, the power of this criminal, ruling block was made possible in large part by NAFTA and neoliberal privatization and liquidation of national assets. In fact, the United States DEA issued a report that drug trafficking was going to explode if NAFTA was implemented, but Bill Clinton pushed it through regardless. NAFTA destroyed traditional agriculture in Mexico, and drove millions off the land and into desperate urban poverty. And privatization / deregulation freed the banking industry to become an unrestricted money laundering machine for the cartels (they could not become this powerful without the ability to process all that money.) In this equation lies the destruction of Mexican society: it’s just like any other Latin American society that lets itself be run by the United States for the exclusive benefit of billionaires on both sides of the border.

At the end of the day, Narco Cultura is a wonderful and interesting view into people’s suffering from the drug war, but it is maddeningly silent on the real forces perpetuating this suffering. An American seeing this movie might never get past the superficial sentiment that drugs are “evil”, and the Mexican government should commit more troops to its “war”. And they might assume the United States is a kind of powerless victim in all this, which is absurdly false. If the United States really wanted to solve the “drug problem”, both the violence and the substance dependence aspects, it would decriminalize all drugs, and make them available medically, which would eliminate the insane lucrativeness of the business, and simultaneously construct a social system that could support rehabilitation of addicted people. Every American should read this report, on Portugal’s successful decriminalization of drugs: this is the model to end the cycle of violence.

So I definitely recommend that you see Narco Cultura, but please don’t stop there in educating yourself about the real causes of this narco culture, about the so-called “drug war” and its real aims and beneficiaries, and about real solutions for a more hopeful future.

The story idea of The Last Days on Mars is superficially similar to this year’s Europa Report: a manned mission to another planet runs into complications. But Last Days on Mars is a much more artistically limited film, possessing none of the depth of ideas, the sense of exploration and history, the masterfully efficient character development, or the realism of Europa Report.

Instead, Last Days on Mars is more of straight horror film, set in space, kind of like Ridley Scott’s Alien. But I liked Last Days on Mars a lot better than Alien. It’s one hell of an exciting movie, and even though the “monster” part of the narrative didn’t make much sense, the rest of the movie actually seemed pretty realistic. All the acting is quite good (it’s great to see Olivia Williams getting some work!), the film is paced well, the dialog is not bad, and the narrative is consistently interesting.

If you want an edge-of-your-seat thriller that is fairly intelligent, well-acted, and not too much of a “gross out,” I would give Last Days on Mars a whirl. I found it a lot of fun.

My wife and I went to see Inside Llewyn Davis at 2:00 on a Saturday in the Union Square 14. It was playing the big theater and it was packed! There was a long line for the showing after ours. Every intellectual in the whole fucking world is flocking to see this movie. And they all love it! A.O. Scott loves it! Manohla Dargis loves it! The New Yorker loves it! The Guardian loves it! Cannes loved it. The aging academic woman sitting next to me had her mouth wide open and her hands on her face the entire movie, like she was witnessing the second coming of Christ.

Inside Llewyn Davis is a wretched, wretched, wretched film, and all I can say is it never ceases to amaze me how easily the intellectual class is dazzled. It is not a beautiful film, it is not an interesting film, and it’s not an artistically impressive film. It’s a nothing film: there is no story, no character development, no interesting ideas about music or anything else, no humor, and the music is simply bad: awful songs badly performed, badly recorded, and badly filmed. My wife was in a rage after this movie, and made me promise her that we were never going to any more Coen brothers movies, no matter how desperate we are, no matter how intriguing it seems, no matter how visually seductive the cinematography looks in the preview, and regardless if every one of our favorite actors happen to be in the film. I promised, happily.

Inside Llewyn Davis is like a sensory deprivation tank; even that flat color pallet that looked so gorgeous in the preview becomes a kind of torture device in the absence of any narrative substance whatsoever. Basically, you spend two hours watching a grade-A asshole: wandering around in the snow, sleeping on couches, riding in cars, singing the occasional bad folk song, and acting out on everyone around him. Llewyn is completely unlikable, completely uninteresting, and he never changes. The film is structured in ham-handed fashion to “suggest” (through a megaphone) that his life is something of a circular, recurring nightmare of banality and disappointment, as if this was not clear in the first 15 minutes! On top of this vacuous core, the Coen brothers sprinkle their usual fetid stew of distractions: there’s a John Goodman character who makes weird faces and says a bunch of desperately uninspired lines that are supposed to pass for comedy, there’s an array of weird-looking incidental actors affectedly speaking tedious, empty dialog, there’s random bloodshed tarted up like it’s conveying the fucking meaning of life, and believe it or not, large sections of the film are devoted to having Llewyn Davis chase or carry around various orange cats.

The question that is on my mind is: why do people like the Coen brothers so much? What are they offering? They’re not visual filmmakers (they probably think they are, but compare them to Antonioni, or Terrence Malick, or even Kurosawa or Stanley Kubrick.) They’re not social or political filmmakers. They’re not romantic filmmakers. They’re not “idea” filmmakers. They’re not “character” filmmakers. They’re not storytellers. If anything they’re absurdists, but what kind of absurdists? They’re not funny, and their films have no grain of truth to them. They’re unfunny absurdists with nothing to say.

In other words, the Coen brothers are consummate time-wasters. They play to the lowest common denominator of the egghead intellectual class: fear of appearing lowbrow. They mesmerize their audience with Rorschach-like invitations for mental masturbation. Their films are abominations of random distraction and facile erudition, always wrapped in the same three-fold narrative progression: from ambiguity, to disappointment, to oblivion. Obviously this formula fills some deep need in their sizable fan base.

A word about the performances. It’s a bit unfair to judge actors on the ungodly shit the Coen brothers force them to do – remember Tommy Lee Jones’ bizarre mental disintegration in No Country for Old Men? But I will say the following: I’ve never seen a worse performance from Carey Mulligan. She may be making lots of money, but her career as an interesting actress is in a death spiral; I noted this trend in my Great Gatsby review six months ago, and Inside Llewyn Davis simply confirms the steep downward trajectory. She really needs to take a more “Kate Winslet” approach to her career. And poor Garrett Hedlund has the ignominy of playing a character who’s only utterances are to croak like the Looney Toons singing frog!

Inside Llewyn Davis is as sure a bet for Oscar nominations as anything besides 12 Years a Slave and Blue Jasmine. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if Inside Llewyn Davis beat them both for Best Picture. Everyone adores the Coen brothers. They are the cinematic geniuses of our time, apparently. I’ll never understand it.