Irreviews

The first book of the Hunger Games trilogy, The Hunger Games, was a gripping and fantastically written story that the movie version more-or-less completely ruined, by dumbing it down into a Twilight-like commercial vehicle (see my review of it here.) Catching Fire, on the other hand, was a pretty mediocre and disappointing book, with a very contrived plot and poorly structured writing, which this movie version actually managed to improve upon. It might be that the story in the second book is better suited to a movie treatment, while the first would have taken a genius filmmaker to do justice to. In any event, my wife and I both enjoyed Catching Fire more than we expected to.

I didn’t realize it, but they changed writers and directors between the two films, to very positive effect. The questionable Gary Ross (Pleasantville, Seabisciut) directed the first, while Francis Lawrence (I am Legend, Water for Elephants) directed Catching Fire. Unlike Ross, Lawrence got good performances out of the entire cast; even Jennifer Lawrence, who’s threatening to become the most overrated actress in the history of Hollywood, turns in a fairly decent performance. The castings of Beetree (Jeffrey Wright,) Johanna (Jena Malone,) and Finnick (Sam Claflin) were inspired and very effective. Catching Fire also has a much better look to it than did its predecessor, and the writing is superior, both in terms of dialog and scene structure. It’s a long film, but you stay with the story remarkably well. They even managed to make the whole games sequence seem a bit less contrived and a bit more cohesive than it was in the book.

Basically, they really did a nice job with the film, and any lover of the books will enjoy seeing it.

Philomena is a nice little movie, there’s no other way to put it. It has the light feeling of a B-film, but a good B-film, an enjoyable one. It’s based on a true story that is both interesting and surprising, and although the narrative structure is not super-sophisticated and the dialog is a bit generic, the film is decently-paced, thoughtful and dignified, smartly resisting any temptation to take a maudlin approach to its angsty subject matter. Unfortunately most of the film’s humor is featured in the preview, a recent sales innovation that I am finding more and more distracting when watching movies – I definitely had a feeling of having seen the funny lines a million times before, and the way the film was advertised in New York theaters it was probably close to that. It’s hard to say how the film would have struck me if all the comic lines had not been leaked to me beforehand, completely out of context, but it’s certainly unfair to attribute any resulting staleness to the movie itself – there were a lot of cute and funny lines (and they made for a very effective preview.)

Judi Dench is adorable, there’s no denying this. She’s one of those rare actresses who is fabulous to watch no matter what they are doing, and Philomena is no exception. Steve Coogan is kind of a “house favorite” of my wife and I, for reasons I will elaborate on in my upcoming appreciation piece for The Trip. The supporting and incidental casting is solid; I thought Mare Winningham was quite good, and it is always nice to see and hear Anna Maxwell Martin in anything.

I’m not sure I would ever feel the need to see Philomena again, but it goes down well on the first pass, and is well worth checking out!

Last night I finally caught up with Oblivion on DVD. Oblivion has a pretty solid and reasonably compelling story idea, laid out in the film’s initial narration: 60 years ago, Earth was attacked by aliens who were beaten through the use of nuclear weapons but at the cost of destroying the Earth. As a result, Earth’s population is moving to Titan; Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough are a two-man team servicing attack drones protecting enormous machines that are in some way processing Earth’s water for the relocation (there are still some aliens around, making trouble.) Tom Cruise is an actor who usually picks entertaining scripts and always gives a solid performance, and this film is no exception. The story evolves in a pleasing and somewhat unexpected way, and it has a pretty satisfying and well-crafted ending.

So why didn’t I like this movie more? Although the story idea is compelling, the execution of the story is off. It feels unfocused, uninspired, even a bit superficial at times. The narrative has some cool, surprising ideas in it, but their impact is strangely muted. The set-up is adequate, but the pacing is definitely on the slow side (the film feels very long,) and the dialog is not great, both of which make the story much less gripping than it might have been – Oblivion comes across as more than a bit dull compared to great Sci-Fi films like Sunshine, or this year’s Europa Report. Making things worse is the decision to include several boring and overly-long battle scenes of people versus drones, scenes that were entirely unnecessary, and which frankly bring the pacing of the film to a complete halt. Visually, all aspects of the film look rather fake and unpleasing. The music is completely generic.

Then there’s the casting. I was surprised that cheese-master Morgan Freeman was actually pretty decent in this film, even though he looked ridiculous in the preview. But Tom Cruise comes across a little flatter and more wooden than he usually does (I think it was the lack of dialog.) And Olga Kurylenko, though nice to look at, comes across quite a bit worse than wooden or flat: I found her completely unbelievable, almost devoid of emotional resonance, and given her central role in the story, that wound up being a pretty serious problem. Andrea Riseborough (the Shadow Dancer gal) gives a solid performance, but she’s not working with much here – most of her lines are just boring, logistical jargon spoken into a radio, stuff like “Roger that, Com,” and “Request drone diversion to the area to investigate.”

I enjoyed Oblivion, but I’d never need to return to it again, and I must say that for such a cool story idea, it’s disappointing that they somehow managed to reduce its impact to a (good) summer popcorn flick.

My wife and I went to see About Time under the mistaken impression that it was a Mike Newel film. Actually, it’s a Richard Curtis film, the same guy that made the extremely manipulative yet undeniably trendsetting film Love Actually, a film I’ve never really warmed to. About Time proved to be more my style.

As I was watching About Time I felt mildly disappointed. Then later in the day I suddenly started noticing all its merits and my feeling of initial disappointment started to dissipate. I think this happened because the (very good) trailer for About Time makes copious use of alternate takes, many of which seemed superior to the takes that were actually chosen for the film. The trailer also implies a very different storyline from the one told in the film. These two things created for me a dissonance that mildly distracted me the entire movie – I think the makers of the trailer were a bit too gung-ho for their own good.

Setting aside the distracting expectations of the preview, About Time is a sweet, low-key film on love and life, not super-deep, but charming and enjoyable. This film does not manipulate you – nothing bad happens, and there’s no heavy-handed agenda being rammed down your throat. The time-travel gimmick is frequently done in somewhat clunky fashion (occasionally it’s done quite well,) but that seems less and less important as the film wears on. I think the point of the movie is that even if you could travel in time, you would quickly realize that it was a very limited boon, and I must say About Time did manage to make a fairly reasonable case for this unlikely sentiment. All the acting is good across the board, especially Bill Nighy, who between this and Marigold Hotel is starting to show an exceptional talent in warm leading roles. The music was a bit underwhelming, but it was not terrible.

I would recommend About Time. 

The Motel Life is not your average movie, nor is it your average modern indie film. It definitely made quite an impression on both my wife and me. It reminded us of the gusty old indie films of the 1990’s. It has a grittiness and griminess to it that is disarmingly pure. You are immersed in a slowly simmering stew of shit motels, dive bars, dilapidated apartments, seedy casinos, crap-ass sedans, and the cold, bleak streets of Reno, Nevada, but somehow the movie resists overwhelming you with all this. The lead and supporting roles are all well-conceived and cast wonderfully, and as an ensemble they capture with depressing verisimilitude the spectrum of broken souls that congregate in gambling towns. At the same time, the film has a certain artistic ballsiness to it, devoting large amounts of time to narrated, line-drawn animation sequences illustrating the fantastical stories the main character tells to his invalid, mentally impaired brother, to sooth his tortured psyche. As an indie film, it really is like a time machine to 1994!

There’s a peaceful quietness about this movie, as it explores the sometimes painful tension between family obligation and personal dreams without ever taking sides on the issue. The main character has been burdened with his mother’s death-bed wish that he and his brother always stay together (meaning he always be his brother’s caretaker,) a wish that he has internalized to a very unhealthy degree, and honored well into adulthood. At the same time he’s had a brief glimpse of an appealing, alternate direction in which his life could have gone (with his adored ex-girlfriend Dakota Fanning), and has been encouraged to prioritize his own life going forward (by “mentor” Kris Kristofferson). When his brother accidentally kills someone in a hit and run, the existing paradigm of his life starts to fall apart, despite his frantic efforts to cling to it in desperation. In the end, he must in some way come to terms with his feelings and with events he can do nothing about.

I think The Motel Life is well worth seeing. Unlike most modern indie films, it’s not excessively literal, and it gives the viewer a lot of space to observe and take in the significant emotional content it’s offering. It’s paced well, filmed skillfully, has interesting dialog, and the narrated, animated story sequences are really wonderful. In short, it’s a very nicely crafted story, told extremely well – definitely one of the better films I’ve seen this year.

As with most films opening at Cinema Village, The Motel Life was gone after one week. But be sure to Netflix it when it comes out.

Costa-Gavras’ Capital is an amazing film, really amazing. I saw it in theaters twice in the span of a week – I can’t remember the last time a movie struck me enough to warrant a second theater viewing. I often on this blog hold up Costa-Gavras as representing the historical ideal in the genera of sociopolitical thrillers, and it’s easy to forget he’s the one “old master” that we’re lucky enough to still have around (Pakula, Pollack, Zinnemann, Kubrick, Lumet, Rohmer – all gone now.) As Capital clearly shows, that old Costa-Gavras magic is still there. I highly encourage everyone to see this marvelous film.

Capital is an incredible psychosocial statement about the financialization of the world’s economy. It’s an artistic representation of the mental perversion which underlies the actions of the ultra rich and their elite corporate gendarmes as they pursue their chimerical but deadly goal of owning everything on earth. The lead character of CEO Marc Tourneuil (played by Gad Elmaleh) is part of these gendarmes, the highly-compensated functional layer beneath the ultra rich, essential to keeping the whole ridiculous and destructive shell game going. He’s appointed CEO of the French bank he works for, immediately finding himself under enormous pressure from all directions, and starts maneuvering to play these pressures off each other for his own material benefit: the creation of enormous off-shore accounts that he can fuck off to once his masters flush him down the toilet.

Tourneuil is a marvelous character, wonderfully multi-dimensional – an intellectual, a reformer, a pragmatist, a fantasist. Confident and paranoid at the same time, loyal and selfish at the same time, he is self-aware and conflicted on a variety of emotional planes. He’s no caricature, he’s very human, but it is the nature of our capitalist system that such humanness must dissolve and be swept away in an inexorable current of greed vouchsafed by limitless power. Marc Tourneuil undergoes not so much a transformation as a kind of warped “realization,” a debased maturation, if you will, rooted in the very academic intellectuality that gives him pause about his actions. The trajectory and complexity of his developmental arc leaves you stunned and amazed.

Despite the somewhat heavy theme of Capital, it is neither wonky nor polemical. Indeed, it’s positively gripping. The dialog is fantastic, with a deliciously subversive humor to it. The pacing is superb, and the film is replete with great characters, subplots and indelible scenes. To call out just a few of my favorites: There’s the incredible character of the supermodel Tourneuil becomes obsessed with, who with her aimless seductiveness and causal insanity is a perfect allegory for the transfixing nature of financial acquisitiveness. There’s the subplot with the retired policeman hired by Tourneuil to set up his off-shore accounts and dig up dirt on everyone he interacts with. There’s the wonderful holiday scene with his extended family – all penniless sheep asking him with subdued envy how he spends $150,000 a month – where his uncle throws the horrifying societal effect of Tourneuil’s actions in his face with dazzling brevity and effectiveness, only to be parried in equally stunning fashion.

And then there’s the final scene, which ascends to heights of social commentary that no modern filmmaker could pull off – I’m still a bit in awe that Costa-Gavras had the guts to end the film the way he did, and that he actually managed to do it in a way that did not seem manipulative or a cop-out; indeed, in retrospect it strikes me as the only reasonable ending to the film. The man is truly a master filmmaker!

I must be watching too many lame-ass American movies these days, because I had forgotten how Costa-Gavras films are like being dropped onto a moving treadmill, intellectually. In the film’s opening minutes, I remember thinking “Good heavens, I’m actually going to have to turn my brain on to watch this!” The flow of information is furious, and large numbers of characters are introduced and sketched with brutal, old-school efficiency. But it is such a joy to watch a film like this, one that does not pander to our laziness or our cynicism. It challenges us, it entertains us, it educates us, and it roils us emotionally, without seeming overly invested in any of those outcomes. It’s Golden Age film making in the grandest of traditions.

Do not miss this outstanding film! It’s still playing at the Union Square 14, if you are in New York City.

Dallas Buyers Club is a movie about social injustice and the power (and limitations) of anarchic social activism. It’s a fascinating (and true) story, well-told and featuring brilliantly acted lead roles. I’m sure Jared Leto will win Best Supporting Actor for his role as Matthew McConaughey’s transvestite business partner, because it’s just the kind of flashy role they love to give awards for. But I feel McConaughey deserves an Oscar even more – he gives a marvelous performance, in which he manages to transcend all his unfortunate tics and his overbearing persona to disappear into a wonderfully gritty and human character that you like, admire and are repulsed by in equal measures. I’ve mentioned before on this blog what an interesting actor he’s become in the last few years; Dallas Buyers Club is another remarkable step in his evolution. I should also mention that the slowly evolving and unlikely friendship between these two characters is done quite well.

I’m not sure I would ever need to see Dallas Buyers Club again, but it’s an important and rewarding film to see nonetheless. The movie’s strength lies in its immediate impact, through a very direct portrayal of the social chaos which erupted in the desperation of the early AIDS epidemic. It was a disturbing yet fascinating four-way conflict between institutional rigidity, corporate greed, sexual prejudice, and the natural human impulse toward fairness and what’s right. The buyers clubs were anarchic structures designed to get people the legal-but-unapproved drugs they needed by selling “club memberships” and then giving the drugs away free to members. Our government devised the incredibly shallow and cruel response of changing the laws until everything the clubs were doing was finally made illegal, ensuring massive profits for Big Pharma. Ron Woodroof never stopped fighting for a way to help people, travelling the world, and turning the law upside down looking for avenues to do what needed to be done. He was a modern hero in a terrible time which, due to the incredible social bigotry in the United States, has never really gotten the mainstream artistic treatment it needs or deserves.

I very highly recommend Dallas Buyers Club. It’s a really good film.

Don Jon is Joseph Gordon Levitt’s first film as a writer and a director, and he came so close to making a great film. But my wife and I both felt he lost his nerve at the critical juncture, and instead he merely succeeded in making a cute film, one that is definitely worth seeing, but not the surprising, challenging, ground-breaking film it might have been.

Don Jon is a pretty normal guy, with a job he likes, a nice house he takes care of, a strong circle of friends, and a meaningful family life and religious faith. Sexually there are two things going on: he jerks off to a lot of internet porn, and he’s a bit of a player with the women – he’s getting a lot of ass, for sure, but in his narration he admits porn does something for him that real-life sex does not. What is unspoken but right in plain sight is that the women in his life are a bunch of self-obsessed, sexually repressed airheads who are lousy in bed, and themselves not really looking for a mutual relationship or a deep erotic connection. This trend reaches its apex with the Scarlett Johansson character, who is positively frightening: a manipulative, castrating, agenda-driven, me-first woman who emotionally controls him via sex and every other avenue. And when she discovers his porn habit, she shames him terribly, implying he is twisted and sick, and laying down her law: it’s either her or the porn, and Jon must decide.

What opens up such interesting possibilities in the movie is the Julianne Moore character (who was almost completely omitted from the preview,) the plain, middle-aged hippy chick he meets in the night class Scarlett Johansson is forcing him to take. She does not have a problem with sexuality (on seeing him watching porn on his phone in class, she responds by bringing to their next class a DVD of better porn for him to try!) nor is she stuck in a manipulative, self-obsessed dream world. She’s what you might call a real woman: thoughtful, sensual, empathetic, erotic, brave and open-minded, alive on the planet. She quickly forms a very interesting and deep connection with Jon – sexually, emotionally, and psychologically – one which changes his life forever.

Everything is great up to this point in the film. If only Levitt had taken the idea through to completion, and resisted the impulse to cave to our societal fear of sex. The message of Don Jon is when he opens his heart to “pure love”, he can have boring missionary sex with Julianne Moore and it’s the greatest thing in the world, forever freeing him from his “terrible” porn habit. This is just silly and disappointing. How much more powerful it would have been if he and Moore had instead launched a relationship of rip-roaring, unselfconscious sex of all varieties, and for Jon to learn that sexuality is not the morally segmented phenomenon our society tells us it is. Perhaps his craving for sexual excitement or exhibitionism is not really aberrant, and with a partner who does not have a problem with sex it might become naturally integrated into his real life, instead of staying marginalized. He might even find himself watching less porn (who really cares if he totally gives it up?) if he has Julianne Moore riding him like a bucking bronco every night.

When we went to this film, a full two months into its run at the Union Square 14, I expected the theater to be empty; it was practically sold out. I think all these people are packing theaters for Don Jon because they secretly want a socially acceptable and morally defensible way to watch porn clips, even the half-assed fake ones used for this film. They also want to see a story where Jon gives up porn and is immediately rewarded with real-life Scarlett Johansson! When he falls for homely, pot-smoking, badly-dressed Julianne Moore, I could tell the audience was in total shock (I thought it was great, of course.) If Julianne Moore had been a sex manic, it might have caused widespread cerebral hemorrhaging. Now that I think of it, maybe its better that Levitt played it conservatively.

Escape Plan was panned by the critics, but normal people seem to like it. And they should: the movie is just plain fun, start to finish. The very entertaining story presses on without much regard for total believability or tying up technical loose-ends, but I must say the dialog is not half bad (it’s more satisfying than a lot of modern indie crap, frankly,) and the narrative is paced well and evolves in surprising ways. I have never been a fan of either leading actor, but I thought both Stallone and Schwarzenegger turned in warm and compelling performances (for Schwarzenegger, clearly the best of his career,) and they had a nice, easy chemistry together. It’s a pretty violent film, but the violence was all integrated into the story in a meaningful way. The last film of this kind that I enjoyed this much was Taken (2008.)

Let me be clear: the critics don’t like Escape Plan because deep down it’s a very subversive movie. I’m not saying it’s super deep on any of the following topics, but it manages to be anti-privatization, anti-torture, anti-unaccountability, anti-CIA, anti-off-the-grid, anti-shadow-world, anti-goodguys-in-black-masks-with-automatic-weapons, anti-greed, anti-rich-people, and anti-international-finance. That list is downright un-American! We’re supposed to be in love with all that fucking shit. This dumb little Stallone-Schwarzenegger action film actually turns out to have a lot of balls. When was the last time you heard the name “Blackwater” mentioned in a movie? Never, that’s when. Yet there it is, as a source for the insane assholes running the prison they’re stuck in. Escape Plan even contains a positive portrayal of Muslims and the Muslim religion – indeed, the Muslim guy who is their third partner in the escape is a kind, human and heroic character.

With this spectrum of unthinkable ideas floating around in Escape Plan, it’s obvious that there will never be an Escape Plan 2. But there should be. In the end, Stallone and Schwarzenegger turned out to be a really great team, and they picked quite a good script. Let’s hope they do more work together in the future.

I definitely recommend Escape Plan. It seems to be hanging on at the horrible “E-Woc” theater in Times Square – catch it while it lasts.