Irreviews

Cormac McCarthy clearly wrote The Counselor as a kind of grand poem, mentally inflating his subject to the level of Greek tragedy. The dialog has a disorienting quasi-philosophical snappiness to it that I must admit I found kind of enjoyable, at least for a while. The problem with the film is that it’s damn-near completely pointless. The only thing this film has to offer its audience is the implicit advice that one should never, ever get involved in a business deal with a Mexican drug cartel, no matter how peripherally. But isn’t this obvious to everyone at this point? Hasn’t this ground been covered a million times before?

Cormac McCarthy’s screenwriting is very clearly influenced by the Coen brothers, and follows their general template almost exactly. The first third of the movie generates a lot of excited, non-specific anticipation, with extended scenes of funny, quirky dialog, and a murky set-up that leaves a lot to the imagination. In the second third, the story starts narrowing in a way that precludes all the wishful narrative fantasies engendered by the first third, the quirky dialog is suddenly recognized to be a lot a pointless, flashy hot air, and you start fearing the worst. The last third is a depressing bloodbath that is so fucking bleak and pointless you want to kill yourself.

I should have seen it coming. In the beginning of the film, several characters try to warn Michael Fassbender that it might not be a good idea for him to get involved with this drug cartel, explaining that if anything goes wrong he might get a “bolito” thrown over his head (a piano-wine loop with a little motor, which slowly tightens the loop down to a point, severing his neck in a depressingly automated and mechanical fashion, and eventually popping his head clean off,) or his wife could get beheaded on film and that snuff film mailed to him to watch. Any normal person hearing this would just say “you’re right, let’s call it off,” but not Michael Fassbender. He’s all in. We’re never told why.

The distractingly stylized dialog and the fabulous ensemble of warm, talented actors that got involved with this piece of shit movie obscured the fact that this movie was moving inexorably toward someone dying a horrible, writhing death by “bolito,” and someone getting made into a snuff film. And sure enough, these eventualities (and the ensuing sadness) turn out to be the entire artistic focus of the film. Come to think of it, this film is worse than pointless. It sets you up to be emotionally eviscerated, on a subject that is completely meaningless to most people.

Trust me, you don’t want to watch someone die a horrible, writhing death by “bolito.” Just skip this ridiculous film – these so many other, fabulous films from this year that most people have never seen, films like Europa Report, The Attack, To The Wonder, A Hijacking (Kapringen), and Costa-Gavras’ Capital. Feast on these instead! The Counselor will give you nothing but depression and nightmares you don’t need or deserve.

Kill Your Darlings is the story of the murder that linked Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Lucien Carr, during the time they all knew each other at Columbia University. It’s also, to a small extent, about the birth of the beat poets as artists, although I found this aspect of the film quite unsatisfying. Indeed, there’s very little substance to this film in any area. Character development is superficial and a bit cartoonish, the artistic ideas bandied about are fun initially, but ultimately murky and uncompelling, the music is rather generic, and all the performances are a bit weak. After a bunch of noisy, flashy scenes with young artists declaring their desire to create something bold and new (without say what, exactly,) the film settles or devolves into a simplistic homosexual love triangle, the details of which are strangely divorced from the whole rest of the film.

I suppose Kill Your Darlings might be interesting to someone who grew up reading the beat poets, and thus had an emotional bond with them. But I can tell you as someone who knows nothing about them or their work this film did not make them seem interesting or compelling, beyond the inherent superficial likability of any collection of youthfully idealistic rebels. And the homosexual murder story was not nearly interesting enough to make up for the film’s lack of intellectual content.

I can’t really recommend Kill Your Darlings.

In Gravity and All Is Lost, the main characters struggle alone against all odds to stay alive, one in outer space, one in the middle of the ocean. Everything that can go wrong does, and eventually they reach a point where they are face to face with their own mortality. I watched these in the same day, as a “mortality double feature”, and since they were both a bit underwhelming, neither one really meriting its own review, I’ve decided to review them together.

Gravity is one of those films where they put all their effort into how things look, and no effort into anything else. Things look amazing, I can’t deny it. The astronauts float around in low Earth orbit, with consistent and dramatically beautiful backgrounds of various sections of Earth, which lull and mesmerize you with their beauty – one scene played over the night-time coastal lights of Sicily and mainland Italy was particularly memorable, lovely to behold. I wasn’t so keen on the visuals of the debris field that wreaks all the havoc on their ship – it was your typical CGI nightmare – but oh, those shots of Earth looked fab! If this film was IMAX: Low Earth Orbit, I would have been more than satisfied. But it wasn’t. Gravity had a story to tell, and therein lies the problem.

To the makers of Gravity, it’s not enough to have an instance of catastrophic misfortune and then just let the rest of the story naturally evolve from there.  No, our heroine must face and surmount every single conceivable obstacle that could be dreamed up by the scriptwriters. This naturally makes the story seem increasingly unrealistic, and eventually, just plain silly. By about half way through the filmmakers have tipped their hand so thoroughly that it becomes perfectly obvious to the viewer how the film is going to end, after which the illusion of suspense dissipates, leaving only a sequence of more and more contrived and outlandish action skits. 

As for the dialog/monologues, they were really disappointing. Neither Clooney or Bullock has anything interesting to say the entire movie. George Clooney is totally wasted in this film, his lines so poorly conceived that even delivered in his great voice they do essentially nothing for the emotional tenor of the film. Sandra Bullock (who definitely does not have a great voice) does a lot of yelling, whining and fast breathing, and the content of her lines is even worse than Clooney’s. Bullock’s big “mortal moment” felt canned and mechanical, and the lost-daughter sub-theme was a complete non-starter. 

All Is Lost is a bit more realistic than Gravity in how its story plays out, but its set-up is perplexing. You learn nothing about who this guy is or what he is doing all alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at his advanced age (Redford’s character looks every bit of 77 moving around that boat.) His sequence of misfortune is unlikely, but fairly believable – what’s less believable is how weirdly unprepared he is. His toy boat seems more appropriate for Chesapeake Bay than hanging out in the middle of the Pacific during storm season. He doesn’t appear to know how to navigate very well. He has no back-up radio, no back-up batteries, nothing is waterproofed properly, his food reserves and water reserves are inadequate, and he has no proper device for extracting fresh water from salt water. His emergency kit is a complete joke, and he opens it up like he’s never even bothered to think about what’s in it! (What he finds are five, 2oz water packs and three flairs – again: “Chesapeake Bay”). He doesn’t even have a decent flash light! And don’t even get me started on his pathetic little fishing kit, which resembles something a demented five year old would rig to catch goldfish out of a goldfish bowl. Even his damn life raft was a piece of shit, frankly.

In the end, what makes this film work (to the extent that it does) is Robert Redford himself. Years ago my wife once asked me “Is there any actor so good at his craft that you would rather watch them in a movie instead of Robert Redford?” And my answer, then and now, is a clear and resounding No! Redford is simply magical to watch – he always was. I can’t imagine anyone else pulling off this bizarre movie in which at most maybe 20 words are spoken. He carries so much emotional weight on screen that his mere presence glues your attention and carries your involvement through to the last frame. Unlike Gravity, where you’re sick of Sandra Bullock within 10 minutes, I walked out of All Is Lost thinking not so much about the film and its story, but about just how great Robert Redford still is in movies.

I don’t know what else to say about these mediocre attempts at the desperate, solo survival thing. Both of these films are diverting enough, if your hankering for mildly disconcerting entertainment where people are pushed to their limits. But you’d never, ever want to watch either of them again, and both are disappointingly limited experiences.

Wadjda struck me very much the way A Separation struck me, except I found Wadjda a lot more enjoyable. The films coming out of Muslim countries these days are a bit hard to relate to as a westerner, because they focus on the cutting edge issues of their society, issues that seem very foreign or hopelessly dated to us. So Wadjda refuses to wear her headscarf, and has an impossible dream of riding a bicycle in public (two things girls simply do not do.) She hopes with her mother that her father does not take a second wife. She wishes she could be included on her father’s family tree which hangs in her house, which is of course only men. And she opportunistically studies the Quran for the sole purpose of winning a recitation prize, with which she can buy her bicycle. These issues must be really radical for the audience they’re created for, but for us, not so much.

Nevertheless, there are themes in this movie which I found to translates well to western society. Wadjda herself represents the youthful desire to challenge social norms. She sees no reason to carry on stupid, senseless societal conventions that serve no evident purpose, and through her irreverence she inspires various others (her mother, the boy across the street) to grow and change in beautiful ways. And at the same time, the film makes the point that modern Muslim society is just as internally fucked up and conflicted as our own. All over the place there are signs that people want things to be different – rules are ignored or broken, and people are generally aware of, and seduced by, the outside world. These cracks in society give people room to dream, or at least ponder the future a bit more openly.

Wadjda is a very cute film, an interesting portrait of youthful rebelliousness and of social issues in modern Muslim society. It’s well worth a watch.

Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is a very shocking and unpleasant film to watch. It captures the horrors of slavery far more directly and luridly than any film I can think of. Watching it, one is amazed by the realization that honest and well-crafted depictions of American slave experience are so incredibly rare, especially compared to the number of honest and well-crafted holocaust films that are turned out each and every year. Put simply, 12 Years a Slave is a film that’s long overdue, one that every American should see. If it wins the Oscar, and I’m sure it will, it will be well-deserved, within the context of its likely competitors.

What impressed me the most was not the various and interminable scenes of breathtaking cruelty, but the exquisite way this film is put together. There is simply not a false note anywhere in any of the performances, with Michael Fassbender a particular standout. And the film brilliantly captures the sense of place – the look of the fields, the swampland, the plantation, and the incredible feeling of geographic isolation – without ever seeming to ram “period details” down the viewers’ throats, a rare accomplishment indeed. This is a beautifully directed film, paced extremely well, with elegant scene transitions, and featuring very realistic-sounding dialog. And the story of Solomon Northup’s ordeal is consistently exciting.

With that said, 12 Years a Slave is not the kind of film you would ever need or want to watch again, lacking qualities destined to deepen on repeated viewing. This is partly the price McQueen pays for placing so much emphasis on his “shock and awe” depiction of slavery’s horrors. But there is also a certain intellectual superficiality to this film. It’s very much a film of images, and in retrospect there was not a single idea or piece of dialog from the film that actually stuck with me. The slaves don’t say much to each other. Solomon Northup and his various masters talk a little, but its always very focused on crude realism. The white people hardly talk at all. Many would argue that this is simply part of the brilliance of the film, essential to the spell of realism it casts, and I would agree with that to a certain extent. But the downside is that it makes for a film that is not all that interesting, beyond the visceral impact of the first viewing.

There is serious talk right now that 12 Years a Slave might re-ignite racial tensions in the United States. I find this indescribably sad, but what are we to expect? McQueen is tossing out all this explosive content in what is essentially an idealess film, divorced from any historical consideration of slavery, race, capitalism and class oppression in the United States. At least films like Amistad, Amazing Grace, Lincoln and even that hackneyed mess Glory, dealt with slavery as a historical phenomenon subject to courageous social change, and a film like The Whistleblower (2011) dealing with unresolved, present-day slavery is even more artistically valuable, exploring the nature of the corporate and political power structures which perpetuate such abominations. In contrast, 12 Years a Slave is pulling out all the stops to convince us that slaves actually had it bad in 19th century America. Who’s the target audience for this film, the Klu Klux Klan?

I’d recommend seeing 12 Years a Slave for a good story, beautifully filmed and very well-told. But I must say I came away from this film a bit traumatized, strangely dazzled by its pyrotechnics, but also vaguely unsatisfied. I think a Costa-Gavras type filmmaker could have found a way (with brilliantly crafted dialog) to simultaneously say something intelligent about how the historical entanglement of slavery and American capitalism relates to subsequent race and class issues which to this day mar the sociopolitical landscape of the United States. In this way art would be used to arrive at a broader, more meaningful truth about slavery, rather than to simply recreate (albeit perfectly) the literal happenings that constituted it day-to-day. 12 Years a Slave may easily be the most emotionally wrenching film you see this year, and perhaps the most visually arresting, but on the spectrum of socially and politically conscious film art, it falls short in some critically important areas.

Captain Phillips is a very average action thriller, marginally diverting the first time through, but nothing you would ever need to watch again. The story is not uninteresting, but it has no depth at all, and translated to a movie it’s limited by several factors: the seductive centrality of Phillips himself (who is not a super-interesting character,) and the eventual resolution of the situation by military might. The latter guaranteed that the final hour of the film would be a bunch of guys with guns looking through night-vision scopes, and endless, mind-numbing military jargon spoken through radios, like “I have two greens and one red, I need three greens.” The former guaranteed a rather one-dimensional story: the crew are reduced to uninteresting and interchangeable pawns, and once Phillips is a hostage the main line of dramatic tension is surrendered, shifting to a rather tedious and drawn out “kill the bad guys” action sequence.

I also think it was a mistake to tell the story from both sides – the Americans and the Somali pirates. First of all, the Somali pirates didn’t really have much of a story! Second, the dialog between the two captains – which is decent but quite overrated, in my opinion – was not really dependent on a two-sided narrative, and it winds up evaporating just when they needed it most (when they’re stuck in the lifeboat together.) Third, they didn’t really manage to humanize the pirates with this device, something that was clearly an objective of the film – they come across like mindless mob-goons, basically. I would even go so far to say that the interaction between pirates ultimately seems a bit like filler.

I can’t review Captain Phillips without comparing it to this year’s other Somali pirate film, A Hijacking, a fantastic film that’s totally superior to Captain Phillips in every way – depth and dimensionality of story, level and consistency of dramatic tension, character development, set-up, texture, music, and any other area you can think of. A Hijacking managed to not demonize the pirates without even so much as translating them, let alone telling their story! And since there is no U.S. Navy to take over the situation (it’s a Danish ship,) the film’s narrative remains just as interesting in its final third, rather than descending into a celebration of military execution and paraphernalia.

As for Tom Hanks deserving an Oscar nomination for Captain Phillips, he really doesn’t do much in the film. It’s a solid performance, but in retrospect it seems quite unmemorable.

In short, Captain Phillips is okay for a popcorn action flick, but it’s really nothing special.

Five Dances is a really lovely little film. It’s about four modern dancers hired to learn a piece for a performance in New York City, combined with a coming-of-age story involving the main character Chip, just off the bus from Kansas. The film mostly takes place in one generic but characterful New York practice studio, where they learn the dance and get to know each other. The story is broken into six vignettes, partitioned by five short dance performances, each performed in the same practice studio, to different selections from the film’s very cool contemporary folk-indie soundtrack. The film gently lulls you, and is very pleasing to watch.

First of all, the dancing is gorgeous, and is filmed very well, mostly using well-judged stationary camerawork so you can really see the dancers do their thing. They could take this approach because unlike a film like Black Swan, the folks in this film can actually dance – their movement is so beguiling, and the five performances melded so beautifully to the folk-indie soundtrack, that your pulse heightens in anticipation of each performance sequence – that alone is quite a cinematic achievement, in my opinion.

But what surprised me about the film was not so much the dancing (which I hoped would be great,) but the way the rest of the film held together. The dialog in the film was definitely sparse, but unlike most modern indie films it did not consist of the barely-coherent stammering of normal people. Instead, this dialog was actually written quite well, and at the end of the film I was kind of amazed at how much of a sense I got of each character, given how little dialog there actually was. I think it’s because the dialog and the physical acting was co-crafted extremely well, and all the dancers actually give really strong acting performances. Clearly this film was directed beautifully.

My only quibble with the film is toward the end, when the story narrows considerably to the homosexual awakening of the main character toward the other male dancer – this is fine, of course, and was actually done really beautifully. But one consequence is that the two women, who were also interesting characters, never really blossom as such, indeed it feels like they are kind of abandoned two-thirds of the way through the story. It’s far from a deal-breaker – the story is fine as it is – but I did find myself wishing that the four characters could have been a bit more consistently featured throughout the film, just because you find yourself wanting to know more about all of them, not just the two men.

I highly recommend Five Dances. It’s at Cinema Village right now, and if you’re not in New York, be sure to Netflix it when it comes out – it should stream almost immediately.

Runner Runner is far from a great film, to be sure. The main character is not set up well nor is he developed particularly well. The whole industry of internet gambling is not explained adequately, nor is the complex system of cash payoffs that basically constitute most of the movie, which gives the film very little texture and leaves it resting entirely on simplistic plot points involving various types of betrayal or potential betrayal. Many parts of the story feel a bit strained or unbelievable. And the film leans a good bit on its narration. In the end there is a kind of mechanical feel to the movie, and little in the film truly surprises.

But it has its pluses. The character of the gangster is refreshingly understated and real, and Ben Affleck gives a very restrained, believable performance. And the film paints a nice, rather unflattering picture of the disgusting way the ultra rich operate, which is why the film is getting such bad reviews. Justin Timberlake is an actor who is slowly growing on me, and he does a nice job here, including his narration. Despite its problems, the overall story is entertaining enough, not uninteresting, and holds your attention. Both my wife and I found it enjoyable.

I’ve seen way worse films than Runner Runner this year. Give it a try, if you’re in the mood for fairly low-key and dignified gangster-type stuff.

Prisoners is a long and entertaining movie. My wife and I both enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s gripping and suspenseful. But it’s not a film I would ever need to experience again. The story is a bit two-dimensional, character development is a bit shallow, the pacing is a touch slow across the board, the dialog is serviceable but somewhat sparse and not all that interesting, and once all the surprises are finally revealed the overall story seems in retrospect a little contrived and hollow. It’s a good-in-the-moment, creepy abduction thriller – way more interesting and dignified than Silence of the Lambs, more exciting and satisfying (if less textured) than The Lovely Bones, perhaps equivalent to Gone Baby Gone, and no where near masterpieces of the genera, like Klute.

Basically, Jake Gyllenhaal is what makes Prisoners as enjoyable as it is. I don’t know why the guy is not regarded as one of the best actors of his generation, because I certainly regard him as such. I’m consistently amazed at how perfectly he gauges his delivery and his facial expressions, a talent that allows him to make the absolute most out of average or even sub-par dialog. He also has this marvelous way of channeling his on-screen charisma in very productive directions, unlike most charismatic actors who simply overwhelm their films. Most of all, he’s just plain fun to watch. His performance alone is a reason to see this film – he singlehandedly makes the story seem more textured and interesting than it actually is. Prisoners also features a lot of good supporting actors – Viola Davis, Maria Bello, Melissa Leo, Terrence Howard, Hugh Jackman, Paul Dano – who turn in very solid performances while working with mostly routine, fairly unscintillating material.

Prisoners seems to be getting crap distribution, but if it’s playing near you I would definitely recommend it. And by the standards of the Academy, I think the Oscar-talk circulating about this film is probably justified – after all, it’s a considerably better film than Blue Jasmine, which is almost certain to get a nomination. But Prisoners is not really close to receiving an award here at Irreviews. It’s a good, solid, and enjoyable crime thriller, but unfortunately not much more than that.

Thanks for Sharing is not a romantic comedy, nor would I call it a dramatic comedy, and I don’t know why it’s being described in these terms. It is a gritty, intense and humorless drama about all kinds of addiction and addictive patterns, focusing mainly on sex addiction. The various stories told are captivating, its presentation of addiction is fairly dignified, and its characters are well-drawn and well-acted (Robbins, Rufallo, Josh Gad, and Pink are all excellent; Gwyneth Paltrow is just okay.) I particularly liked the father-son relationship involving Robbins. If you are in the mood for an emotionally draining movie about addiction and people’s lives falling apart, this film would be an okay choice.

But when you step back from the technical execution of this film, you realize that it’s playing fast and loose with the idea of sex addiction. Much like that other recent film on sex addition, Shame , Thanks for Sharing presents a confusing, specious, and manipulative portrait of this malady. Benign things like masturbation, watching porn, and renting hookers are roundly condemned as the moral equivalent of committing actual criminal acts where people get hurt, or their rights get violated – groping women on subways, harassing women in the workplace, stalking women, and much worse. The film’s implication, clearly, is that masturbation and porn are “gateway,” similar to the (completely debunked) idea of gateway drugs. But we are not shown any evidence for this in the film. What we are shown is a Mark Ruffalo character whose “disease” (whacking off to porn, hitting on women, and renting hookers, to paraphrase his own words in the film) is somehow the same disease as the Josh Gad character, who is an overt sex criminal, a disease directly comparable to drug or alcohol addiction.

Clearly the Josh Gad character has a serious problem – the guy had been arrested for sexual misconduct, for heaven’s sake. But what about Mark Ruffalo? He’s not hurting his career and he’s not hurting other people. You might argue he’s hurting himself, but if he wants to spend a bunch of time jacking off to porn, or banging hookers, if that’s what he really enjoys doing, why the fuck shouldn’t he do it? And further, how are these sexual habits akin to alcohol, heroin, or methamphetamine addiction, which in contrast could very easily kill him, kill other people, or at the very least completely destroy everything in his life? Frankly, Mark Ruffalo’s problem seems closer to playing video games all the time, or being what used to be known as a “player,” out for fun and uninterested in commitment. If he decides he wants to redirect his energy, fine, but that’s not a moral issue, and it should not be blurred with activities that are truly harmful to others or to society.

Indeed, the filmmakers seem to sense this, because late in the film they try to make a case for the “gateway” theory by having Ruffalo make a booty call to an old one night stand, some young woman who wants kinky “daddy” sex, and who then (when he denies her what she wants) freaks out and tries to kill herself. It’s all very impressive during the movie, because it’s very well-acted. But the question lingers: what if Mark Ruffalo had simply called some woman who was not mentally ill and inches from a suicide attempt? What would have happened is they would have had sex screaming “daddy, daddy,” and then they would have gone about their business. However, the film’s answer to this question would undoubtedly be that anyone wanting anything but mechanical and emotionless missionary sex performed for the purpose of procreation, is in fact mentally ill, quod erat demonstratum.

And here we hit the crux of the matter. It’s no coincidence that there is a strong religious undertone to this whole film. Organized religion has always been in the business of demonizing sex as a method of control. These people in the movie pray daily for God to stop their evil sexual thoughts, and their distant, almost chimerical, goal is to eventually be able to enjoy sex the “correct” way. Rather than dealing exclusively with real problems (sexual harassment or sexual assault of women,) and rather than exploring the root causes of addiction disorders (scarcity, vulnerability, and the incredible cruelty of our society toward average people,) these filmmakers instead chose to take the opportunity to push the amorphous and stupidly moralistic premise that people are filled with the “devil’s thoughts,” and need to flagellate themselves until they “find God.” It’s all very disturbing and unhelpful in the extreme.

There may be a good movie to be made on the topic of sex addiction, but Thanks for Sharing most definitely isn’t it.