Tower Heist (4/5 Stars)

Beautifully orchestrated if not especially funny

What is most impressive about “Tower Heist” is the obvious superlative aspects of its production. The story takes place mainly in the Central Park West Trump Tower, herein referred only as the “Tower.” It is a beautiful building in a beautiful part of New York City and the cinematographer, not to mention, the location scouts, have milked the opportunities for all its worth. We see really gorgeous vistas of the Manhattan skyline, we witness the opulence of the tower itself and especially its spectacular penthouse apartment, and in a rather convenient move, the title “heist” takes place during the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade when all those gigantic floats of Snoopy and Kermit the Frog are making their way down the skyscraper-laden avenue. The professionalism shown by Ben Stiller and company is perhaps the tops of any comedy production team around. Notice how they have put in special care to develop the vast array of characters, from the building manager Josh Kovacs played by Ben Stiller himself, the concierge Charlie played by Casey Affleck, the doorman Lester played by Stephen Henderson, the new elevator operator enrique played by Michael Pena, the maid Odessa played by Gabourney Sidibe, etc. etc. The story sets up that this is a well-oiled team of superior service professionals and then actually puts in the effort to prove it by throwing in the requisite vocabulary, routines, and details needed to establish such a claim. The team of writers, Ted Griffin, Jeff Nathanson, Adam Cooper, and Bill Collage seem to know what they are talking about. But above all else, notice how clean and clear the editing, directing, and score is in moving the story along. Ben Stiller’s last movie “Tropic Thunder,” was especially impressive to me in the exact same way. It did something very hard in that it kept up a breakneck pace that never confused the storyline. To help accomplish this, they seamlessly edited hardcore rap into many of the scenes. In "Tower Heist," the story's action is perfectly complemented by a brilliant "heist" score composed by Cristophe Beck. I was humming the main tune as I left the theater. Beck deserves an Oscar nomination. And I would, if I felt I had more technical expertise, also claim that the editors, sound editors, and director, Brett Ratner, also should deserve some recognition. Having said that, there is something missing here that “Tropic Thunder,” one of the best movies of 2009, had that “Tower Heist” does not: consistent laughs. “Tower Heist,” is a well-made beautifully orchestrated movie but it is not especially funny.

One of the main reasons for this has to do with the actual storyline. Whereas “Tropic Thunder” dealt with ridiculous characters making a serious Vietnam movie for the purpose of baiting the Oscars, something that is far more pretentious than actually important, the heroes of this movie are hardworking honest working men who have been defrauded of all of their pension and retirement money by the penthouse billionaire Arthur Shaw, played with just the right amount of sociopathic tendencies by Alan Alda. One of the workers, Lester the doorman was just about to retire and travel the world with the 73K he had responsibly saved up during the last three decades he had been opening doors for people. It is shown that Arthur Shaw knew his ponzi scheme was going to go up in smoke in a few months when he took all of Lester's money in order to “invest” it. When the fraud is found out and the doorman learns the fate of his life savings, he attempts suicide. This is not funny. It’s more enraging than anything else, especially because of all the real world parallels involved. Such a story line is definitely effective. We love the heroes who are trying to steal their money back. We dislike with special venom the dishonest and disrespectful billionaire. We care about the outcome of this story, but we aren’t laughing all that much during it. The fate of the doorman’s pension is not a joke.

“Tropic Thunder,” had the almost uncanny ability to get laughs from every single character in the movie. Even the straight man, Jay Baruchel, was funny. Here only a few characters can be described as comic. Gabourney Sidibe, Michael Pena, and Matthew Broderick tend to say funny things from time to time. Eddie Murphy is the funniest although his part is hardly large enough to make the movie a full blown comedy especially when the two main characters, Ben Stiller and Alan Alda, don't get any laughs at all. What they are involved in is a dramatic game of life chess with rather big stakes attached to the outcome. Like I said, it is effective, but it isn’t all that funny.

Of course in the end, a heist movie, whether it is comedic or not, will always be judged by how well done the heist is. In other words, would it have worked in real life? That’s a good question here. There are a few moments when I was like, well that shouldn’t have worked that way, but overall there were enough intelligent parts of the heist (like for instance how they got Arthur Shaw out of the apartment, how they snuck into the tower, how they cased the place, how they knew where the safe was) that the few moments that are a bit ridiculous could be swept under the movie rug we call the “suspension of disbelief.” At times the direction of the movie was so clear that I was vaguely reminded of how it felt to watch "Die Hard," the landmark movie that all skyscraper thrillers should be judged by. "Tower Heist," does not rise to the heights of "Die Hard," but I will say this; I hope you are not afraid of heights. There are some moments in this movie where you will definitely be feeling the vertigo. It was sort of unrealistic how Matthew Broderick didn’t die but hey, I can forgive the movie for not killing him.

The Rum Diary (3/5 Stars)

Weak story. Needs more rum.

Before making a movie, it helps perhaps to make sure that the recurring themes that drive the storyline do not contradict and undercut each other. What we have here are two tales. One is a comedy about an alcoholic journalist (i.e. Hunters S. Thompson before he got into hard drugs) played by Johnny Depp that has just landed a shit job working for what seems to be the only newspaper in Puerto Rico. His exploits include being kicked out of a hotel for drinking 162 miniature rums from the hotel room mini bar in a week, stumbling through his workdays with a perpetual hangover, and taking a healthy dose of that magic CIA interrogation serum that later on in the sixties (this takes place in the fifties) would be known as LSD. The second story is one of heroic journalism. The young and naïve journalist played by Johnny Depp is taken on by the rich corporate executives of Union Carbide (an inspired name choice for the more or less fictional corporation here) who want him to write "journalism" that basically subs as advertising for rich land developers and plays down the detriment done by said developments to the poor indigenous population.  Apparently taken aback by the injustice done between the classes, Depp puts on the righteous journalist hat and talks about fighting back. But this journalist isn’t very effective you know because he is a complete drunk. So therein lies the problem. You have a comedy about an unapologetic drunk that isn’t very funny because we’ve introduced the serious business of class warfare and you have a drama about the plight of the poor that isn’t very dramatic because the hero of the story spends more time drunk than actually solving the problem.

It is unmistakable that Johnny Depp and the makers of this movie admire Hunter S. Thompson a great deal. The subtitles at the end of the movie claim that out of the ashes of this particular failure one of the best journalists of like ever was born (that is somewhat paraphrased but you get the idea.) I guess, maybe. I haven’t read “The Rum Diary,” but I have read Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” That book is arguably a masterpiece. A masterpiece of what is another story. A masterpiece of fiction? Sure. A masterpiece of journalism, umm...no. Thompson was a journalist in, I suppose, the loosest sense of the word. He did not care about the facts, never met a deadline, was drunk or high most of the time, and never bothered to try for objectivity. The great thing about “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” for me at least, was the audacity of it all. Here you had a story about a couple of guys that were doing massive amounts of drugs, spending vast quantities of money they didn’t have, completely destroying the property of others everywhere they went, harassing (even raping) women, openly flaunting almost every law of public decorum sometimes to the face of police officers, and most of all, getting away with it all, completely and unapologetically. It is an unflinchingly awesome story and I bet would make a great movie. Its just that every time a Thompson book becomes a film the makers (Terry Gilliam with “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Bruce Robinson with “The Rum Diary.” Both star Johnny Depp) have not been able to match the wildness of the book. In this particular film, there is way too much concern for the Puerto Ricans. Hunter S. Thompson wouldn’t give a shit about dirty disheveled children with raggedy clothing. It is true that Thompson excelled at satirizing nasty, indulgent, and overweight American consumers and there is a brief scene in this movie at a bowling alley that gets that exactly right, but just because somebody hates the ruling class doesn’t mean that they sympathize with the downtrodden. Hunter S. Thompson was a well-written sociopath, not robin hood. To portray him as the latter has the detrimental effect of dampening and diluting the trademark style that make his books such incredible reads. 

If I had the choice, I wish this movie would have spent a lot less time with the rich people (Aaron Eckhardt and his pretty wife Amber Heard) and a lot more time with the other drunk journalists. I was pleasantly surprised by a turn here by Giovanni Ribisi, as the nastiest of the nasty drunks. He is almost completely unrecognizable from his role as the insufferable corporate boss in “Avatar.” Michael Rispoli has the Dr. Gonzo role minus the law degree. Johnny Depp does a very good Hunter S. Thompson impression, but unfortunately is about 30 years to old for this particular role. The book was written by Thompson during his very first stint as a journalist. He was in his young 20s. Johnny Depp is almost 50. He looks out of place in all the job interviews, introductory rum drinking, and flirtations with Amber Heard (who is my age). It must be said that Johnny Depp looks good for his age, but he still looks his age. We young people don’t have such fat faces.

All in all, this is an okay movie. There are no bad scenes. It is well acted and well told. But apart from several inspired lines of vocabulary uttered by Johnny Depp, it is not all that memorable. It would have been stronger if they added more rum.

The Ides of March (3/5 Stars)

Coach Clooney benches his star athlete.

 I remember this coach from my youth. He taught our 8th grade basketball team. His son was the star of the team. The father seemed to go out of his way to limit the son’s playing time or to scold him for subpar performances. Nobody had a harder time on the team than the best player on it. It was almost if the father was going the extra distance to not play favorites and in the end probably hurt the team by shortchanging the best player on it. The director of the “Ides of March,” is none other than George Clooney and and Coach Clooney has cast himself in a very important role, the candidate in a presidential election. However, the movie is not so interested in the candidate. It is more interested in the Machiavellian machinations of the people behind the candidates: their chiefs of staff, played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti, and a young press secretary, played by Ryan Gosling. Now these other actors are very capable, but the story never sticks because the candidate is not put to good use. What did Machiavelli say? The Ends Justify the Means. Now, both campaigns in this story are playing dirty politics. The question should be for which candidate are the dirty tricks justified.  In other words, would Clooney the candidate make a better president than the other guy. Personally, I didn’t really care whether Clooney was elected or not. He exists in the background of the script giving stereotypical liberal platitudes and talking points. His opponent doesn't have more than a couple lines. They are both unformed characters and not up to the task of caring about. In effect, neither is worth what the other characters would do to help or harm them. Who cares what the means are if the ends aren’t justified? Coach Clooney should have given himself a bigger part.

 The story centers on the Ryan Gosling character, a young upcoming press specialist. Whether he is idealistic is not really established as he is very good at his job of saying things and at the same time not saying them. The movie is concerned not with Republicans or Democrats. It is limited only to the Democratic primary in Ohio. In this way, the movie sidesteps real political debate. Since everyone sort of agrees, the focus is on the dirty tricks that will have one candidate gain an advantage over the other. There is a senator who has about 300 pledged delegates in his pocket and is willing to sell them for a choice cabinet position. There is also shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity who want to impose Operation Chaos upon Ohio. This is a stunt that urges Republicans to vote for the inferior Democratic candidate in hopes that it will help the democrats during the real presidential election. Finally there is the Paul Giamatti character, the chief of staff for the opposing campaign, who asks young Ryan Gosling for a drink in a bar. Ryan knows he shouldn’t go but does anyway. Giamatti asks Gosling to leave the one campaign and join his. This sets off the main storyline about loyalty and idealism and all those good things that will be shattered by the time the movie ends. Of course none of this should take anyone by surprise. Who looks at politics today or anytime before and doesn’t think of men in backroom smoking cigars and hatching schemes. Well, maybe today they don’t smoke cigars anymore.

 This is all done rather competently, but lately I have found that so many of the dramatic movies I see have been sort of ruined by watching HBO. The political scenes in “The Wire,” are far more detailed and involving than what is seen here. That is the difference between a story of a campaign briefly and competently told in two hours and one brilliantly and comprehensively told in twenty. The “Ides of March” Ohio primary is chump change when compared to the Baltimore politics of “The Wire.” 

Another not so great part of “The Ides of March” is perhaps the obligatory young intern who sleeps with people she shouldn’t be sleeping with. Or is it the other way around and she is a victim. It isn’t very clear the way Evan Rachel Wood, a 24-year-old, plays the teenage character. She looks and acts much more older than she is supposed to. In fact, her relationship with the Ryan Gosling character is mainly comprised of her seducing him not the other way around. When things happen, and something rather dramatic does happen to her at the end, it doesn’t seem like something that would really happen to the strong willed and confident character we've seen for most of the movie. Not that I’m an expert on women or anything.

 Overall the movie is good enough and certainly not crap. You’ve got nice familiar faces doing well jobs with decent material. Is the movie all that memorable? Well, no. You’ve probably seen it before and wouldn’t consider storyline all that shocking or new. Is it probably better than most of everything in theaters right now? Sure, but I think that speaks more to the weakness of this years movies. “Take Shelter” was good. You should see that movie, especially for Halloween.

 

Take Shelter (5/5 Stars)

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Have you ever noticed that the easiest way to get a person to talk/confess/give up secrets in a movie is not to beat them up or threaten them? It is instead to bring into the room a loved one and threaten to hurt them instead. The scene usually goes like this.

Bad Guy: You will tell me what the secret code?

Good Guy: What are you going to do, kill me? Go ahead and do it. I’m not afraid of death.

Bad Guy: Oh I’m not that naïve. That’s why I don’t plan on killing you. I plan on killing her.

(Bad guy henchmen bring in abnormally attractive love interest bound and wailing)

Hot Girl: Don’t do it, don’t tell them the secret!

Bad Guy: I will count to three

(He points a gun at the hot girl)

Bad Guy: One….Two… (cocks pistol)

Mr. Bond: Okay okay, I’ll talk, I’ll talk!

Bad Guy: I thought you would, hahaha!

This is a cliché, but as with every cliché, it rubs up against a fundamental truth. Good people (i.e. the heroes of movies) don’t want to see the innocent get hurt. Such a concept scares them even more than themselves getting hurt or even being killed. And it is this truth that “Take Shelter” takes advantage of to great effect. Where most horror movies mine their scares from anatomical dissections, this movie simply presents an ordinary good person and imposes upon him terrible dreams of poison rain, mysterious bad men, vicious animals, and other forces that would harm, perhaps even kill, his loving family. This is a very scary movie and one of the best of the year. 

Curtis, played by Michael Shannon, has a loving family, a beautiful wife, played by Jessica Chastain, and a little daughter. He has a good job in construction. It provides him with a decent enough salary to afford a nice house, a vacation to Myrtle Beach every year, and a medical plan. And then one day Curtis has a vivid nightmare. There are gigantic storm clouds on the horizon. It starts raining a brownish kind of poison water. The family dog goes insane and attacks him. When he wakes up in horror the next morning, he can still feel the bite marks in his arm. What’s more is the sense of dread he feels in his bones. Something bad is coming.

Curtis has reason to worry. His family has had a history of mental illness. His mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was ten. She left him in the car at a supermarket and never came back. Such a thing happening to Curtis reasonably frightens the hell out of him. His family needs him. His daughter needs the medical plan. They still have loans on the house. Gas prices are through the roof. Either his dreams are portentous and a huge storm is indeed coming or he is going crazy. Curtis decides to prepare for both. He becomes obsessed with rebuilding the tornado shelter in the backyard and seeks help from a counselor about his nightmares and day delusions. There is a great scene where he walks into the counselor’s office, and calmly explains that he took the quiz in the back of their clinical magazine, and has found that he has 5 of the 12 symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. All he needs is two more to be diagnosed. Please doctor, what do I need to do to stop this before his wife, his daughter, all his friends, and the whole town figures out what is going on. He doesn’t want his wife to leave him and take his daughter. That would be a reasonable thing to do if they found out he was crazy. Curtis has so much to lose and the coming storm is threatening it all. It is hard to think of anybody conveying this more effectively than Michael Shannon does here. Shannon is not an attractive leading man. He has the height, face, and demeanor of a bouncer, elite soldier, or killer assassin character. To see this type of stoicism fall apart at the seams makes the journey that much more frightening. I’ve said before that it is rare when movies allow men to be brave because being brave requires an acknowledgement of vulnerability and that sort of thing is not considered masculine. This movie is the exception. What a brave man this Curtis is trying to be. Michael Shannon deserves an Oscar Nomination for the performance. 

This movie is the second feature of a young director named Jeff Nichols. Nichols’ first feature, Shotgun Stories, also starred Michael Shannon. It is a very good partnership. “Shotgun Stories” was an impressive movie, like most first movies of great directors, for what it accomplished with a budget of almost nothing. In “Take Shelter,” Nichols is aided with a little bit more funding and it has allowed him to add the special effects necessary for some serious storm clouds. They are threatening but never in an over the top distracting way. This movie is put together with such simplicity in theme, camera style, and plot that it is almost surprising how effective it is. Like a Hemingway novel, its effectiveness comes from the inherent truth within the frame. The fears are universal and the dread is real. We know that gas prices will never go down to what they once were. We worry about our risky home loans. We don’t want to lose our jobs. We need our health and our health care desperately. Freakish weather, due to climate change, is here to stay and only going to get worse. The sense that everything is getting worse and that times may never be as good as they once were is a palpable feeling in the air. If people one hundred years from now wanted to know what it felt like to live in 2011, they could do a lot worse then, “Take Shelter.” It is a movie of our time, told perfectly. It should be nominated for Best Picture.

Try to go and see it in a theater if you can. It should be perfect for Halloween.

Moneyball (4/5 Stars)

The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

One of the main arguments I hear batted around for keeping steroids out of sports is that it makes the game unfair. And the usual retort I always bring up to everyone’s bafflement is that sports aren’t fair anyways, so what’s the difference? And they aren’t fair. They really aren’t. One of the hardest things to do in life is to distance oneself from mass delusions and the idea that sports are somehow fair is one of the most broadly accepted and thankfully rather benign fallacies around. Genetic differences (for instance height in basketball) between opponents are not fair. And neither is a system that allows one professional sports team to have a much bigger budget than others. That difference allows the richer team an unfair advantage in attracting top talent. That is what Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics in this movie based on a true story, must come to grips with. The movie starts with the Athletics coming off one of their best seasons and subsequently losing their three best players in free agency to richer teams like the Yankees. The experienced scouts around the back-room table are talking about rebuilding the team from the ground up with old baseball knowledge and old baseball customs, the same way they did it the last time. No, No, No, Billy says, we cannot do the same thing. More importantly, we cannot do the same old thing because the Yankees are doing the same out thing. If we scout the way the Yankees scout than we will lose because the Yankees will outbid us no matter how well we scout. The game is rigged. We either find a way to play the game differently or we lose. That is Billy Beane’s problem.

How Billy attempts to solve the problem is the main focus of “Moneyball.” Billy Beane, played here by Brad Pitt, essentially disregards most or all of the advice of his experienced scouts and starts listening to a young recent economics major from Yale named Peter Brand, played here by Jonah Hill. The chubby bespectacled Peter Brand is not an athlete, but he does know math and  can use it to spot trends. He tells Beane in confidence his hunch that scouts completely overlook certain things and place way to much emphasis on others. For instance, Peter suggests that a manager’s job shouldn’t be to buy players, but to buy wins, and to buy wins he needs to buy runs. Billy Beane follows this advice. This leads to some rather unorthodox moves, one of the more outrageous things being hiring a life-long catcher to play first base because the guy has a very good getting on first base percentage. Hopefully the runs he will score will offset the plenty of mistakes he will make on defense. The scouts think Beane is crazy. The team manager Art Shaw, played here by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, goes further and refuses to follow the directions. As he explains, he wants to play the team in a way that is defendable in job interviews next October. The A’s start the season with an 11 game losing streak. Beane’s job is on the line. If things don’t turn around he may never be hired as a general manager again.

All of this is very succinctly told with brevity and humor by a great screenplay written by Steve Zaillian and rewritten by Aaron Sorkin. It is impossible to tell which lines are whose but there are several scenes that come off just as well as all those scenes between computer nerds in last year’s “The Social Network.” In fact it can be said that the movies performs much better off the baseball diamond than on it. The backroom dialogue is filled to the brim with smart dialogue that explains things as if it knows what it is talking about. When Brand takes Beane aside and shows him videos of his “hero,” a pudgy little known baseball player who happens to get more walks than anybody but Barry Bonds, we understand exactly why that player is drastically underrated. We also understand why Billy Beane would be willing to take such chances. Through flashbacks we see a young Billy Beane being talked up by scouts who thought he would be the next big thing. They flashed him a huge paycheck and told Billy to skip college and go straight into the big leagues. Billy did and didn’t turn into anything big. The scouts didn’t know what they were talking about and in one of the best scenes in the movie; an older and wiser Billy takes on an especially irate veteran scout. “You don’t know. You say you know, but you don’t,” he tells him. No more of the confidence bullshit for Billy. He is going to trust math from now on. You know, that thing they tried teaching us in school.

This movie is especially satisfying for someone of my generation because we all grew up in the golden age of bullshit sports movies. All that “Just believe in yourself,” horseshit that adults think is okay to foist upon unsuspecting children were heaped onto us in movies like “The Mighty Ducks” and its many ripoff copies. But this movie tells it like it is. Confidence, such a cherished virtue, is shown to be the most useless and overrated of all skill sets. What really counts is doing actual work, crunching numbers, and using deductive reasoning. To show this is not an easy thing for a movie to accomplish. We are after all, an emotional species. But, by and large, “Moneyball,” accomplishes this task. Unfortunately it ultimately falls short due to the same pitfalls that beset everything it is trying to debunk. The last half of the movie veers into melodrama and misplaces an ending that should have been revelatory instead of muted.

What do I mean by that? Well, for one thing, the director Bennet Miller (last movie of his was “Capote,” way back when btw) uses way too much soft focus and slow motion in the climatic scenes. The idea of statistics is to cast clarity on a muddled world. A man like Beane, who has crunched the numbers, should be seeing things more clearly (think Neo finally seeing the matrix at the end of “The Matrix”). Instead, there is a five-ten minute scene near the end of the movie about a very meaningful game in which we see Beane in the weight room, fixed on the television, hoping to all hope that things turn out well on the field. This is not correct. A man who believes in math does not hope or pray for anything. They know what the probabilities are. When so-and-so comes up to the plate they know there is a certain percentage of chance that they will either hit the ball or not. They also know that there is a certain percentage of chance that the game will be won or lost. A man of math is not surprised. They are not brought to disbelieving elation or despair by the occasional impossible miracle. They knew it was possible actually, just unlikely.  Thus, we shouldn’t have out-of-focused shots. We instead should have full-focus shots. The movie should be set in a setting of hyper-awareness. This is not done to the movie’s detriment.

Now, take for instance the ending. It speaks boatloads of the very problem Beane was up against (i.e. human intuition against mathematical reality), but does not exploit it to dramatic effect. Billy Beane ends up turning down a very high offer to manage the Boston Red Sox. Now, if he were using his own philosophy, he would probably determine that access to the Red Sox would mean a greater budget, better players, and thus a better chance to win the World Series Title. In fact, the Red Sox would win the World Series just two years later having adopted some of Billy Beane’s methodology. But Billy didn’t join the Red Sox. He turned down the offer and stayed with the A’s….and he still hasn’t won the World Series. I’m sure the decision felt right though.

Contagion (3/5 Stars)

Setting a record for the number of Oscar Winners killed in throwaway cameos.

The potential of a worldwide epidemic has been a great time-waster/audience scarer in the news for the past couple years. The virus will come from China (SARS, Birdflu) and just might be comparable to the 1917 influenza epidemic that killed about 1% of the world’s population. That was 1917, so the number of dead was only in the millions. Still, what if a virus like that came along again. Hundreds of millions might die.

“Contagion,” tells the story of such a virus in an oddly responsible way. There are no gruesome death scenes, over-dramatic wailing, or contagious zombies roaming the earth. Instead we are treated to plenty of scientists and doctors saying scientific things with patience and composure. These scientists are played by such acting heavyweights like Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslett, and Marion Cotillard. The first victim of the virus is Gwyneth Paltrow. Matt Damon plays her grieving husband. There are several other small parts played by well known actors. Jude Law plays a sensationalist blogger intent on dispensing government conspiracies. John Hawkes plays a janitor in Laurence Fishburne’s office. Jennifer Ehle and Demetri Martin are two other scientists working on the vaccine. Finally there is Bryan Cranston who plays some sort of military officer. Obviously, this is a very impressive cast. There are four Oscar winners, two Oscar nominees, and a two time Emmy winner in it. But none of this really matters except in marketing. You can put all the famous great actors on a screen and it still does not guarantee a great movie. This is especially true if the story is trying to be realistic.  

What’s the point of a Great Actor if the story does not allow for Great Acting? The Oscar winners here are supposed to be playing normal people going about exactly what they would do in this situation. This calls for understated performances, which they all do quite well. But really, it probably would have made more sense if the movie didn’t have any big name stars at all. Celebrity has a way of overshadowing underdeveloped characters. I rarely felt I was observing actual people. More often I was like, well, look that’s Kate Winslett and now she is in Chicago. Furthermore, if the movie wanted to take a realistic take on a subject that involves the entire world and a hyperlink network of characters, then perhaps the movie would have been better if it weren’t a movie. Two hours is not long enough to tell this story the way they want to tell it.  It should have been a 10-hour HBO mini-series.

The fact that the movie has such a huge scope but is only two hours long gives the story a sense of being in fast-forward most of the time. The vaccine apparently takes several months to create and distribute in the movie, but has a screen time of about 15 minutes. The great heroine of the story, Jennifer Ehle, is barely in the movie at all. Character back-story and motivation is hinted at but never developed in a satisfying way. Most of the problems set out are solved off-screen or dissipate in large jumps in time. Weirdly enough, the most dramatic conflict in the storyline is not the virus at all. It deals with the sensationalist blogger played by Jude Law who I think was selling a fake cure online. He gets arrested at the end, or maybe not. I’m not sure what was going on there in that park or even who he was talking to. It all happened so fast.

We’ve all seen catastrophe movies before. Well, remember that scene where the people are running wild in the streets and the looters raid the supermarket. That scene is in this movie too. Now, I’m sure that such a situation can be told in a realistic way that is just as exciting and dramatic as these scenes are in the best of zombie movies. But when a movie does not add anything to the set up the scene will not escape cliche. Time and details are needed for a realistic movies to be exciting. Otherwise they lack credibility. Now they obviously were pressed for time in this case, but whittling away those details makes what is left rather humdrum. Without the credibility the scene actually comes off worse than the same scene would be in a not so serious movie. You take the supermarket scene in a movie like “Zombieland.” Not only do they raid the supermarket, but they also kill zombies. Here they just raid the supermarket. It's boring.  

Having said all this, the movie is well put together considering that it is telling a story about a worldwide catastrophe in such a short running time. The director is none other than Steven Soderbergh, who was the Oscar winning director of one of the best hyperlink movies ever made, Traffic. But, really, you can just sense all the talent in the direction and the cast here going to waste. One wonders why Soderbergh decided to make this movie at all. The man is capable of great things. Why is he wasting his time with mediocre projects? Actually you can say this about Soderbergh’s career in general. Did we really need an Ocean’s 13? Come on Steven, you’re better than this.

Our Idiot Brother (4/5 Stars)

Good writing and nice people: A typical Paul Rudd comedy

The majority of comedies are about mean and obnoxious people. The idea being that gleeful and aggressive shocks of violence and rude behavior elicit laughs. And they do. Quite a lot of these movies are very funny. But every once in a while it is a pleasure to see a comedy take the opposite route and have the running joke be that the characters are too trusting, lovable, and sweet. Or in Ned’s case (played by the funniest nice guy in movies, Paul Rudd) all those characteristics to an idiotic degree.

What a good and compassionate heart Ned has. In the first scene we see him happily running a biodynamic vegetable stall at the local farmer’s market. He charges fair prices and lets little kids steal strawberries with a smile. A uniformed cop walks up to him and asks for marijuana. Ned is hesitant. The cop confides in Ned that it’s been a really rough week for him. Ned, ever so trusting and empathetic, decides to give him a bag of marijuana on the house. No, the cop insists, he wants to pay for it. Ned relents and gives a price that must be a rather large discount for that amount of marijuana. The cop pays and informs Ned that he is being arrested for selling drugs. It takes Ned awhile to realize that the nice cop had been lying to him all along.

Ned is thrown in prison for eight months and is released four months early for being “Most Cooperative Inmate” three months straight. Outside he finds that he has lost his job, his girlfriend, his place to live, and his much loved dog, Willie Nelson. The way he handles all this would make Socrates, Thoreau, and Jeffrey Lebowski very proud. He even makes dudely peace with his girlfriend’s new boyfriend, played here by the very funny T.J. Miller. He drops by his mother’s house where there are still family dinners routinely held. Around the table are his three sisters. One is Emily Mortimer, a wife and mother to an oily Steve Coogan and ten-year-old Dillon respectively. Another is Elizabeth Banks, a hard-working journalist on the verge of a career-making story. Finally there is Zooey Deschanel, a stand-up comedian currently engaged to Rashida Jones, a hipster lawyer with a must-mention sense of style. This is a very good cast. Most of them have worked together before and it has a way of showing. Elizabeth Banks was Rudd’s opposite in “Role Models” and Rashida Jones was Rudd’s opposite in “I Love You, Man.” Those movies too were very nice and funny comedies about good people. You can put this one up there with them. Good writing and nice people. I think it can be said that Paul Rudd is developing a solid reputation for these types of movies.

From there on, Ned couch surfs from home to home causing problems with his honesty and humility. Generally speaking, the problem already exists but Ned has a way of bringing them out in the open because of how his compassion and empathy (which makes him very easy to confide in) combines with his complete inability to tell a lie and childlike belief that the truth brings out the best in people. People tell him things he shouldn’t hear and he shares things to others he isn’t supposed to tell. Soon Emily’s marriage to Steve Coogan is on the rocks (as it should be because the guy is no good), Elizabeth’s career is put in danger (as it should be because her employers are telling her to do shady things), and Zooey’s relationship with Rashida is endangered (as it should be because Zooey has a bad habit of infidelity). All of this happens because of “our idiot brother.”

The first half of the movie is enjoyable but there were very few laughs. The movie did pick up steam, however, as it went along and by the end the laughs were big and numerous. The characters in general are so likable that laughing becomes a very easy reaction to indulge in. I especially liked the raid on the organic farm by Ned and Rashida Jones to steal back Willie Nelson. It goes bad almost immediately and they don’t get the dog back, but T.J. Miller is a really cool dude about the midnight trespassing and all. He even goes so far as to sort of apologize for not giving Ned the right information for when him and the girlfriend would be out of town to see a Dixie Chicks concert. “Next Thursday” apparently in Miller’s mind means every Thursday down the road that isn’t “this Thursday.” Ned kindly informs him that for future reference he should say “Next Next Thursday” if he means the Thursday after next. Sorry Dude, my bad. That’s totally okay, Dude, sorry for the trespassing. The movie did miss an opportunity in its underutilization of Zooey Deschanel though. This is an actress I have seen being truly hilarious before (The Good Girl, (500) Days of Summer). In this movie she plays a stand-up comedian. It would have been funny if she had a decent act that made people laugh or something.

Is Ned truly an idiot? The sisters treat Ned with that special kind of passive aggressive disdain women reserve for honest and humble men. Ned isn’t really an adult in their eyes. Ned tolerates this not only because he has to in that he is sleeping on their couches but also because he loves his family and understands their various problems. There is a very telling scene where Ned finally gets angry. Here is a man who was unjustly sent to prison via an act of compassion, lost his job, his home, his girlfriend, and essentially the respect and dignity in the eyes of his family. Does this make him bitter? No, he is still a good person, tries to do better, and spends much of the movie apologizing to those who are unfairly pissed off at him. What does he get angry about? He gets angry when on family night his sisters essentially ruin a game of charades. They break the rules, won’t have fun, and treat the concept of a family game as a stupid waste of time. It is easy to roll one’s eyes and claim that this is an idiotic thing to get angry about. Or one could perhaps reflect on their priorities in life.

One more thing, and I say this with but the expertise of a person who has seen an almost ridiculous amount of movies. Movies do not glamorize drugs, at least not the good ones. I have seen people drink themselves to death (Leaving Las Vegas), I have seen people ruin their lives with heroin (The Wire, Requiem for a Dream, Basketball Diaries), I have seen people make ridiculously bad decisions while on cocaine (Goodfelllas, Casino, Scarface, Boogie Nights, Bad Lieutenant). I have seen drug overdoses aplenty (Pulp Fiction, Traffic, Trainspotting, SLC Punk). Not once have I seen the movie where somebody smoked marijuana, became addicted, overdosed, or routinely went about their self-destruction. I think the worst I have seen was the case in Dave Chappelle’s Half Baked where one of the characters literally smoked himself retarded. True I have seen potheads that are lazy and stupid, but being lazy and stupid is not a crime and here is the point I want to make. We don’t need to be wasting the police’s time and the taxpayer’s money putting people like Ned behind prison bars. It has been argued that marijuana may lead to heavier drugs and more criminal behavior. You can say the same about losing your job, your girlfriend, and your home, which has a tendency to happen when someone gets thrown in prison. The problem isn’t being solved. Thank God that in this movie, Ned had a good family to fall back on. I think we must remember that there is a difference between behavior that is morally objectionable and behavior that is criminal. It can definitely be said that it would be better for the smoker or drinker to exercise prudence and refrain from intoxicants. But it must also be understood that indulging in mind-altering substances is a universal thing amongst human beings as a species. Basically every religion on the face of the planet has some kind of drug that they use in their functions or tolerate in society. It is a truth that people in general have rough weeks and look for a chance to escape every now and then. When this is made a crime, there will be a ludicrous amount of people behind bars that otherwise could be functioning productive citizens (ex. the United States of America). Drugs use is a very serious thing and those that are addictive, manipulative, and dangerous should be illegal. Marijuana is not one of those. If you would like to know exactly what it does, please read Michael Pollan’s “The Botany of Desire.” Of course, like anything else, marijuana may be abused. But that is a problem that should be dealt with by a family, a church, a support group, or a community. Using lawyers, courts, prisons, and parole officers to solve such a problem is akin to swatting flies with a baseball bat. You’re bound to cause far more damage than if you did nothing at all. 

Midnight in Paris (5/5 Stars)

How to be an intellectual without being annoying about it.

There are two men in this movie that know an awful lot about Paris. One is, Paul, played by Michael Sheen. He’s the type of guy who would interrupt a tour guide, played here by 1^st lady Carla Bruni of France, with the words, “If I’m not mistaken, Rodin’s the Thinker was influenced more by his mistress than his wife.” First of all, he does not think he is mistaken and so is already disingenuous. Second, he is a jerk for upstaging the tour guide just in order to show off. I don’t know who influenced Rodin, but if Paul is right than he needlessly embarrassed the tour guide by making such a scene. If he is wrong than he needlessly made a complete fool of himself. All present should be annoyed. Than there is Gil Pender, played by Owen Wilson. He too is an intellectual, but his smarts show not by self-aggrandizing posturing but by a knowing wonder for the town. He keeps on bugging everyone to walk with him in the rain because as he says, “Paris is so beautiful in the rain!” The great thing about Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” is that it understands so well the difference between these two ways of being a know-it-all. There is a difference between an intellectual who goes, “Wow! I can’t believe we’re in the same bar that Hemingway drank at! Hemingway was so cool and he drank so much! We’re going to have an awesome time here drinking and talking about Hemingway!” As opposed to an intellectual who lectures, “If I’m not mistaken, this is where Hemingway drank. His “Farewell to Arms” was okay but I felt in “A Moveable Feast” he was not as sure of himself. Also he drank way too much. That’s why he killed himself. You people should revere me because I am so knowledgeable about where we are.” “Midnight in Paris,” shows a vast familiarity with the 1920’s Lost Generation of Paris. It name drops excessively both from the well-known and not so well known people and places of the time and even includes quite a bit of French and Spanish, none of it in subtitles. But the movie never feels or seems pretentious. This isn’t an Honors English lecture. It is an inclusive party with old friends and one of the most enjoyable movies of the year. 

Gil Pender is a Hollywood hack screenwriter. It is good money but spiritually unfulfilling. He has a dream of moving to Paris and working on his novel because, well, all his literary heroes hung out in Paris and wrote novels. He visits Paris with his materialistic fiancé Inez, played by Rachel McAdams. There they bump into her parents on a business trip. The father refuses to enjoy Paris for political reasons. They also meet the pseudo-intellectual, Paul, who likes to label everything as romantic/surrealists/pre-new wave/etc/etc. One night, Gil chooses to leave the group and walk around Paris for no real reason but to do it. At midnight, a 1920’s car filled to the brim with flappers from the Rolling Twenties pulls up next to him. Before he knows it, Gil finds himself at a party where Cole Porter is playing the piano. A woman named Zelda starts a conversation with him. She is the wife of a guy named Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda asks Gil what he thinks of the party. The bewildered/excited out of his mind/awestruck Gil doesn’t know what to say. “I know,” Zelda says, “this place is boring. We’re going to a better party. Want to come with us?”

What a trip! Not only is Gil meeting all his heroes, but also all his heroes are exactly as he thought they would be. Even better, they like him and are interested in the novel he is working on. Ernest Hemingway won’t read it himself because he is of the firm belief that a writer will either hate another's work or be envious of it and hate it all the more. But Hemingway will show Gil the manuscript to the only editor he trusts, one Gertrude Stein, played by Kathy Bates. As Gil enters the studio of Gertrude Stein she is critiquing one of Picasso’s new paintings with Picasso present and adamantly defending himself. “Gil,” Stein asks, “what do you think of Pablo’s new work?” Imagine that. Being asked to critique Picasso to his face. Having Stein read your novel. Drinking with Hemingway. Gil Pender spends a majority of the movie in a state of ecstasy. Owen Wilson, perfectly cast even at 40 years old, conveys a perfect sense of child-like wonder. There is a great shot with Gil back in the 21^st century, wide-awake in his bed and whispering to nobody, “I saw Hemingway. Gertrude Stein is reading my novel. I’m Gil Pender. I’m from Pasadena.” What is really amazing is that this is a Woody Allen movie. Allen has done over forty movies now and there has been such a consistent strain of pessimism and nihilism in his work. That has completely evaporated here and in its stead is gorgeous scenery, great larger-than-life characters, sharp and clever dialogue, and a protagonist who couldn’t possibly be enjoying himself more than he already is.

Standing at about 90 minutes, this movie is also a great example of story efficiency. It takes about two minutes to introduce all the real-life people and their different attitudes towards Paris. It takes another five to introduce the idea of nostalgia and the cynical view that it is an erroneous romanticization of the past to assume that it was a better time than it is now (This theme comes up again ironically when one of the 1920’s artists suggests that the real golden age of Paris was in the 1890s.) The literary figures show up at all the right places in all the right times. I especially liked who Gil explains his perplexing situation as a man who spends the night in the 1920s and wakes up in 2010. He says this to some 1920s surrealists and they see nothing strange about his situation. Salvador Dali, played nicely by Adrien Brody, seems far more interested with his new favorite word “Rhinocerous!” There is also room for a budding romance between Gil and one of the art groupies named Adriana, played by Marion Cotillard. Overall the movie, like all good comedies, is not too long but contains quite a lot. It moves fast, is consistently funny, and very romantic. And don’t forget Paris. It looks as good as ever.