The Fighter (4/5 Stars)

About Mickey who can't get a word in.

Director David O. Russell’s new boxing drama is about the real life Mickey Ward’s fall and comeback to the World Welterweight Championship. But to say it is about Mickey, played by Mark Wahlberg, is to assume something else. It is also about his family: his brother Dickie, his mother and his five sisters. Mickey may as well be synonymous with them as he can hardly ever get a word in whenever they are around. Mickey may be in the ring but he isn’t in charge. Several times he even says, “Dickie taught me everything I know,’ or “I won that fight because Dickie told me what to do.” The problem is that his family is telling him the wrong things to do, like say fight a guy twenty pounds heavier than he is with absolutely no preparation. And then there’s the fact that Dickie is a crackhead and that his sisters really don’t do anything but sit around the house, smoke cigarettes, and agree with their mother no matter how obviously wrong she is. Mickey’s future success depends on ditching his blood and finding other smarter people to tell him what to do. Is this movie anti-family or just the least pro-family movie you’ve seen in a long while? There’s a good topic for discussion after the film. A Gold Star to anyone who has balls enough to take their family to see this one.

The most impressive thing about this movie is that it is full of great performances. Leading the pack is Christian Bale as Dickie Ward, the motor-mouthed, crack-addicted, sparring partner and older brother of Mickey. The effect is almost immediate. The first frame shows Christian sitting on the couch talking very fast and his eyes nearly bugging out of his emaciated frame. I couldn’t believe it. Christian did it again. He completely transformed his body to play a role. For those who unaware, Christian has been putting on and taking off weight for the last ten years as if his body was made of Play-Doh. Take a look at his perfect body in “American Psycho,” which turned into thinnest man outside of a concentration camp in “The Machinist” which turned into the muscled action star in “Batman Begins” which turned into the starving prisoner of war in “Rescue Dawn” which once again turned into an action star in “The Dark Knight,” and is now the skinny shriveled figure of a crack addict in “The Fighter.” To think all he could have been looking like Patrick Bateman (“You can always be thinner, look better.”) all this time. The man has no ego at all. He is pure dedication and self-discipline. His poster and movies should be passed out as inspirational devices in all WeightWatchers. As far as his performance goes in this movie, it is perfect. Dickie looks and talks like he’s on crack and all his self-aggrandized tales of the past and deluded plans for the future pretty much steals every scene. He is being followed by a documentary crew, which he thinks is making a movie about his comeback. In reality they are documenting the perils of crack addiction. Dickie doesn’t get that until about halfway through watching the HBO special. In many ways, Christian is playing against type in this movie. He usually has the role of the boring straight character that holds together a movie like say Batman as opposed to the Joker, or the non-showy magician in “The Prestige,” or Patrick Bateman who isn’t even there. Here he proves that he can play the wild part and yet in perfect Bale style he still does a great job of helping everyone else give great performances as well.

Playing against Dickie for control over Mickey is the new girlfriend, played by Amy Adams, who is also playing against type in one of her best performances. You may remember her as the naive nurse in “Catch Me if You Can,” or the Disney Princess in “Enchanted,” or the timid nun in “Doubt.” Here, she is a hard and fierce barmaid who can hold her own against a very large and loud family. There is an unbelievable scene where the mom, played by Melissa Leo (who I didn’t even recognize until I saw the credits), and the five sisters pack into a four-door sedan and take a trip across town to confront Adams. Then they all yell at each other on the porch while poor Mickey stands around looking like he might have something to say if he could possibly get a word in.  

Every now and then you watch a movie with what is called, “Culture Shock.” This is when you are presented with something that seems real but is so foreign and weird you can hardly believe that real people would be doing it. That happened several times while I watched this movie, but one scene really stood out. One of the main problems with the girlfriend as far as the family is concerned is that she went to college. Now the girlfriend actually never finished college, but to the family that is still enough to condemn her into a snobbish elite that shouldn’t be taken seriously. Specifically they call her an “MTV skank.” Like I said, that sort of thing for me goes beyond merely insulting or absurd and into something like disbelief or confusion. It’s just so out there I don’t know what to think. I actually hesitated writing this review because so much of the movie took place in an alternate universe where people are like that. But hey, that is what watching movies is all about. Perhaps now if I were to be called something worse than an “MTV skank,” for actually finishing college, I wouldn’t be caught completely speechless. Maybe.

The movie takes place in the 1990s. Biopics are becoming pretty recent for someone my age. We also seem to be getting into the era where a movie in a theater is not the first, but the second or third time a story is told. In this movie Director Russell does a very good job of dodging all the other camera crews in the story, first the HBO documentary and then the highly televised boxing matches. The world is becoming such a documented place that we are now watching cameras watching cameras. Who knows where the road goes?

p.s. Now that I think about it, here is the retort. I’ll quote Jack Nicholson in “The Departed” after Leonardo Dicaprio has just finished saying that school is done, out. His exact words: “Maybe someday you’ll grow the fuck up.”

TRON: Legacy (3/5 Stars)

If Sam doesn’t care why should I?

Tron is above all other things a visually stunning movie. The artists behind this movie have created an entire new universe stacked with digital skyscrapers, innovative sports arenas, and fantastical vehicles. Clearly, a lot of love, thought, and money went into the design of this movie. The huge problem is that nobody in the movie notices it. The characters walk around nonplussed and unimpressed with their surroundings and that unenthusiasm trickles right through to the audience. If the people in the story don’t care, why should we?

TRON: Legacy has been put in the hands of a first time director named Joseph Kosinski. It brings back Kevin Flynn, played by Jeff Bridges, from the original movie (which I haven’t seen) and also introduces his son Sam Flynn, played by Garrett Hedlund. The story setup is thus: Kevin Flynn is a game designer working on something big that will change everything about technology, philosophy, and theology. It will ‘change the world,’ he tells his nine year old son as leaves the house to make the latest breakthrough at the office. He never comes back. Twenty-one years later, Sam Flynn is all grown up and living the life of the down-to-earth very rich. His apartment is made out of storage containers but is located on the riverfront and has an awesome view. He also has really cool gadgets and a great bike but this is balanced out by having a cute dog. And even though he apparently doesn’t have a job nor has worked a day in his life, that doesn’t mean he’s not smart or ambitious. He’s just not a fan of the big bad corporate men who have taken over his father’s company. So he’s biding his time till I don’t know, he steps into his father’s shoes and “changes the world,” or something.

That is until his godfather gets a page from his father Kevin, asking him to go down to the shop. So after the usual protest that he doesn’t want to, he goes to the office, quickly finds the secret passageway behind the TRON video game, accidentally activates a computer thingamajig, and is warped/digitally rendered into the confines of an infinite universe contained in a computer chip. The universe is bathed in a cool digital blue, everything seems to run on tracks, and you kind of have to see it to sort of get it (see above trailer). Almost immediately he is picked up by this weird “m” shaped ship full of dangerous red robots. They take him straight to a sports arena where he is forced to duel to the death other robots with Killer Frisbees. 

Sam takes all of this remarkably in stride. I wouldn’t say Garrett is a bad actor because he is not much different than your ordinary absurdly stoic male action star. Extraordinary things only slightly perturb him from time to time. (If the above had happened to me, my reaction would be probably be along the lines of: “OMG What the Hell Is Going ON? What is this Place! Don’t kill me! AAHHH!!!” or something like that.) And yes he has never seen a Killer Frisbee before but that doesn’t mean he isn’t confident that he is better at the sport than robots supposedly programmed to know what they are doing.

After several games, which look like they should be much more dangerous than they actually are, Sam is rescued by a beautiful mystery girl, played by Olivia Wilde, who takes him “off the grid” to his long-lost father’s secret lair. There he meets his Dad for the first time in twenty years and is mercifully allowed by the writers of the movie to have a single tear run down his cheek. They don’t have much to say to each other though. Over a dinner of weird digital food filled with awkward pauses, the father finally asks, “I would guess that you have many questions?” To which Sam responds, “I only have one.” And then I finally had to laugh because the situation had gotten too absurd. Here’s a list of questions that I would have asked: Ahem, What the fuck is this place? How did you build it? How long did it take you to build it? What did you use to build it with? Who designed all of it? Who was the weird evil guy that looked like you? Why have you aged and he hasn’t? How does a stick turn into a motorcycle? Why can’t the motorcycles go ‘off the grid?’ What would happen to if I met with a Killer Frisbee? Do these robots have feelings or personalities? How did they get those personalities? And of course the most glaringly obvious question of all: Who the hell is the girl sitting at this table eating dinner with us? Earlier she had taken Sam on a tour of the lair and showed him the library. She especially likes Jules Verne. Okay, so she just saved your life, is smoking hot, AND she reads books. Now would be the perfect time to ask if she’s a robot. The question Sam asks instead is, “Why didn’t you come home that night?” That’s an okay question I guess, but seriously, is that really the only one? This kid is severely lacking in the area of imagination.

Some of those questions are eventually answered but only until the movie’s second half, and that is where things slow down considerably. Or that they ramp up. Or both in the sense that the movie’s stakes ramp up, but are so off-the-wall that it bored me considerably. In this movie, we are presented with an evil twin villain named CLUE who at one point goes so far as to hold a Nazi-style mass rally. What exactly is he planning to do? Invade the real world and take it over maybe, although how is never explained. Should anyone be worried? Given CLUE’s utter incompetence in using his army of baddies to stop three good guys, not really. Let me make a little contrast here. Last week I saw “Jackass 3D.” In that movie there was a segment called “TeeBall” where Ryan Dunn hits a TeeBall stand that then twirls around and strikes Steve-O in the balls. That segment was more effective than most of the drama in “TRON.” I can definitively say that I know what getting hit in the balls is all about. I haven’t a clue what’s going on here. My point is that it is better to have a villain that does little things that make sense than one who does big things in some vague pseudo-alarming way. If you’re going to make an epic about genocide and world domination, you better know enough about the subject to allow the audience to take it seriously. Otherwise it’s exactly what it is: Hollow and Absurd. And if the movie is like that, all those quiet melodramatic scenes where the actors talk seriously about their feelings just don’t work and take forever. What this movie should have done is gotten rid of the whole “Hitler” thing and just had the stakes tied to the games in the arena. Have a tournament or something with the ultimate prize being a father-son-hot girl ticket home to reality. The heavy drama would be gone, the action would still be packed, and the story would much more effective because it made sense.

This movie looks like it cost a hell of a lot of money to make. There’s nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong however in putting little to no effort into the dialogue or the characters. Jeff Bridges seems to be improvising lines from the Big Lebowski. Garret Hedlund is blank slate. Olivia Wilde looks great but doesn’t do much else. CLUE is creeping around the uncanny valley. The only actor that seems to be enjoying himself is Michael Sheen. I was tempted to wonder why a robot would be British and gay but overall I’m just glad he was there. Too bad he’s the last character introduced and the first one killed off.  And for some reason Cillian Murphy, one of the most accomplished actors of the cast, was hired for only one scene. Perhaps thirty years from now somebody will finally get this story right.

Jackass 3D (4/5 Stars)

Oh HAHAHA Aw-F***! OMG Eww Gross!

Okay well, where the hell do we start with this? I guess in light of the extreme courage/stupidity that went into the making of this movie and I suppose in solidarity with the cast members who risked their lives for my shits and giggles the least I can do is put aside all notions of snobbery and be honest about how I reacted to this movie. I laughed hard and loud. I was grossed out and had to shield my eyes from the screen. I groaned and gasped so routinely and unexpectedly that I sometimes surprised myself by how loud I was being (everyone else in the theater was loud too, so it was okay.) I had been grinning so much that my mouth actually hurt when I left the theater. If it wasn’t for several scenes so disgusting I couldn’t possibly recommend watching them to anyone, I would enthusiastically suggest this movie to anybody I wouldn’t ask for a job or go on a date with.

“Jackass 3D,” is a documentary about a bunch of idiots named Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Bam Margera, Ryan Dunn, Jason ‘Wee Man’ Acuna, Preston Lacy, Chris Pontius, Ehren McGhehey, and Dave England. It is directed by Jeff Tremaine. ‘Jackass’ started as a TV show on MTV in 2000. The pilot episode featured Knoxville being tasered, maced, and then donning a bulletproof vest and shooting himself in the chest. Ten years later, he and his friends (now in their thirties) are still doing really dumb and dangerous things, except now they have a huge budget and the best cameras available.

One of the main reasons why comedy isn’t as respected as drama is because it is very hard to do comedy on a pedestal. Laughing at somebody is much easier if you feel superior to them. Now this doesn’t mean you have to be stupid to be a good clown, but the best and smartest clowns are masters of perfecting that paradoxical act of being smart and creative while at the same time looking really stupid. In other words some of the best comedy plays as a “joke on accident.” The teller never gives away the fact that they know they are manipulating the audience into laughter. This allows the joke to be unique and creative while preserving the audience’s sense of superiority. And hilarity ensues.

I remarked earlier that I laughed often and hard at a vast majority of the movie. Let us pretend for a moment that the makers didn’t fall assbackward into accidentally telling good jokes over and over again. (And at the same time let us also pretend that I am not a bonehead who will laugh at anything). Now that were pretending, perhaps a closer look at ‘Jackass’ is called for. Warning: the following will not be funny.

The most effective thing about ‘Jackass’ (and where it succeeds where so many other action/comedies fail) is the extreme Clarity and Brevity of what is happening on the screen. The pranks and stunts are explained thoroughly and never hang around long enough for the laughs to die down. Plenty of action movies nowadays involve stunts and spectacles that are full of huge special effects but are not effective because they are hard to follow and understand. Other times producers and directors keep in long scenes simply because they spent so much money on them even when they don't work. Here, when a stunt is to be performed a brief title or a sentence of explanation will describe what exactly will happen (Knoxville in roller skates in the path of stampeding Buffalo) and what is at stake (Knoxville’s health, well-being, and dignity). Reveals that develop levels to a particular joke (like the jet plane or the little person fight) come quickly, unexpectedly, but still logically. The fact that it is a documentary keeps everything in suspense. We understand what is about to happen but not how it will turn out. All of this is achieved in merely seconds. And as soon as people are done getting hurt, or saying or doing something funny or off-the-wall, the movie goes straight into something else. No time is wasted. Perhaps the main reason “Jackass” doesn’t have the usual problems of special effects driven action scenes is because the stuntmen getting hurt are in charge of the movie. They want to get the most out of their bruises and that means making it clear how they got them. Incidentally that also makes it funnier.

Because this is a documentary, it would be weird to applaud the acting of “Jackass.” But again another reason why plenty of action/comedies are ineffective is because the acting isn’t realistic. A huge explosion should really freak somebody out but usually doesn’t. Here, the cast gets scared on a regular basis. A good example is when Dave England tries to pin a tail on a real donkey. He gets kicked in the shin, tries again, and actually starts shaking as he inches his way up. The guy is terrified. And when a cast member in “Jackass” gets hurt, they really get hurt. One stunt involved an NFL kicker named Josh Brown kicking a football in the face of Preston Lacy. He kicks the ball and it hits Preston right in the face. Preston then drops to the ground and writhes in very real pain. In this way, “Jackass” is an incredibly cathartic experience. Because the terror and pain is so real, the audience vicariously feels it. Like I said, the entire theater was groaning and gasping the entire time. Now usually this wouldn’t be funny because it is mean to laugh at somebody who just got hurt. But the ingenious thing about Jackass is that it provides a laugh track composed of all the other cast members who aren’t taking part in the stunt. As soon as somebody gets it really good, Johnny Knoxville will lead a hearty group laugh. The fact that every cast member takes their turn laughing at all the other stunts makes it okay for the audience to join in. The guilt we would usually feel is erased by the knowledge that each cast member is complicit in delighting in all the other cast member’s pain. So in a way they deserve it. This is comedic misdirection in the classic sense. A situation that would normally be frightening or scary is made okay by the fact that the stuntman, though injured, is not “seriously” injured, emphasis on the word “seriously.” We have anticipated real terror. Everything has turned out fine. The subsequent relief gives us visceral pleasure causing us to laugh loudly.

Of course, some of the stuff that goes on here really is freak show, disgusting stuff. (There is a running gag that involves a cameraman named Lance throwing up in the midst of several stunt.) I sort of suggest seeing this on DVD and fast-forwarding the parts where it is obvious things will get really bad. I had to cover my eyes during some scenes, like the ‘cup of sweat’ gag. But there is quite a lot to admire here and if I were in charge of an action/comedy I would look to this movie for tips. It is physical comedy at its most effective. Now, imagine if you had an actual story behind some of this stuff. Wouldn't that be powerful indeed. 

The King's Speech (4/5 Stars)

A model of courage

As it is pointed out by King George VI, played by Colin Firth, a modern monarch has no real power. They can’t declare war or raise taxes or write laws. But they are kept on as figureheads because when the king speaks, the people believe that he speaks for them. “But I can’t sp…speak,” he stammers. The King of England has a speech impediment that routinely humiliates him whenever he must make a public speech, which is often. Meanwhile on the other side Europe is Adolf Hitler, the very most of which can be said about him is that he was a very good public speaker.

The Director of this splendid historical drama is none other than Tom Hooper, the man behind the incredible HBO John Adams mini-series (something every American student should be shown in school). Some directors you are thankful exist. Tom Hooper is one of them. He not only tells good stories. He is also keeping alive our heritage and history. And he does it in a way that is engaging and easily accessible. The people in his movies, though royalty, don’t seem to be acting as if they are aware of their place in history. They act like real people in their own time period. They are even given throwaway lines that assert personal fears that we know in our time period they shouldn’t be worried about. For example King George asserts that the English royalty should be worried about being done away with. He names the Czar in Russia and Cousin Wilhelm in Germany as examples. It is a reasonable fear but only at that time and in that place. It takes a writer/director who is unafraid of historical accuracy and has faith in the audience’s sense of empathy to allow his main character to say something obviously wrong. Someone who is aware of the faults of history (not those who say look upon the Founding Fathers or the writers of the Bible as omniscient gods) will smile when certain events and characters are brought up in this movie, their human foibles in full view. (Case in point: We get to meet Neville Chamberlain who talks a little about his misperceptions about Hitler.) We are also presented with another old friend from history books, a Sir Winston Churchill, played by Timothy Spall, always with cigar and drink in hand. This is a great character that surely deserves his own great movie. But that doesn’t mean Tom Hooper is afraid to use him in a supporting role, milling around the background of certain scenes and giving choice quotes from time to time. Hooper gets away with this because he knows enough about the historical period to know when or where he can make Churchill show up and still be accurate. Who knows what anybody actually said? In the end it really doesn’t matter because the audience should know that it is literally impossible to tell a personal story of a historical person and be totally factual. The most any historical biopic can do is get all the details of the period right and make what the characters say and do as plausible as possible through tons of research. This is what Hooper routinely does.

Nobody nowadays can remember this, but King George (or “Bertie” as he was called by his family) wasn’t the big royal story during the 1930s. People were much more interested in his older brother Prince Edward, played by Guy Pearce, and his romance with Wallis Simpson, the woman he would abdicate the throne for in order to marry. Now that was a huge thing. Sometimes though it takes 80 years to realize who was indeed the more interesting person. Edward is the perfect foil for Bertie. He is selfish, uninterested in his duty, and oblivious to the great need of his people for a strong leader in dire times. On first blush it may not seem obvious why King George is a courageous person for giving wartime speeches to the nation while fighting a stammer. But this movie makes clear that he really didn’t have to do it. He could have been like his brother. He could have abdicated the throne. He could have refused to make the speeches. He could have simply not cared. I can only imagine what the people of England felt when they heard those wartime speeches knowing full well that all the pauses were mainly due to the king’s herculean effort to get the words out straight and true. It must be hard for a king, with all his wealth and prestige, to show solidarity with a suffering people. Standing in front of a national audience doing the thing you hate and fear the most is perhaps as close as a monarch can get.

A cynical person would look upon Colin Firth’s performance as “Oscar Bait.” And they would be right. There is nothing the Academy likes better than physical impediments, except of course royalty. This role has both. But that doesn’t mean Firth is undeserving. He really gets the whole thing down perfectly, (and I learned quite a lot about speech impediments in the meantime.) Most of the movie takes place in the office of the speech therapist, Lionel Logue, played cheerfully by Geoffrey Rush. He is an unconventional therapist who insists that he and the king be on a first name basis and that the therapy shouldn’t simply be mechanical. This is awkward because one of them is royalty. But really there is no choice. Bertie has already been to every other speech therapist. Joining them several times or waiting out in the lobby drinking tea is the Queen, played by that woman of unique beauty Helena Bonham Carter. She does a good job too. They all do a good job.

p.s. This movie is Rated R. It should be rated G. The reason it is R is because Bertie doesn’t stammer when he curses and under doctor’s orders he is told that when he feels his mouth clogging, he should curse as loud as he can. (Only in the privacy of the office of course.) So there is one scene where he shouts, “Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, shit, bugger, Fuck!” And that is why the movie is R. If there is any movie that makes certain the idiocy of an objective rating system it is, “The King’s Speech,” a noble story about perseverance and duty, which I would argue is fit even for kindergartners.  As a student of law I understand the point of an objective system. It is only fair to put movie-makers on notice as to what exactly constitutes an “R” rating. Two “Fucks” is an R. Everybody knows that. But this standard ignores the most important thing that parents should be considering and that is the context of the story and more importantly whether the movie is any good. These are matters of taste and though any freedom of speech loving person would be aghast at the idea of somebody rating something via such a judgmental prism as “good taste,” I would argue that if the rating system doesn’t consider taste than it is completely pointless and we shouldn’t have it at all. The way it is now, we make no distinction over how the objectionable content is shown or told. Thus, the blood and gore of responsible redemptive movies like “Saving Private Ryan,” or “The Passion of the Christ,” is equal to the most disgusting sadistic torture porn like “Saw I-VII." Nor does an objective standard actually prohibit objectionable content from creeping in anyways. Many comedies make it a mission to find a way to say the naughty things they want to say without actually saying it. Just take a look at the movie “Little Fockers.” The title is a joke and the punch line is “Fuck.” But the movie is PG-13 even though it couldn’t be more obvious. Besides the movie is terrible. Why are we telling parents that this is better than, “The King’s Speech”?

I Love You, Phillip Morris (4/5 Stars)

A beautiful lie.

Mozart’s K. 492: No.20 Duet: Sull’aria from The Marriage of Figaro holds a special place in prison movies. You may remember it from ‘The Shawshank Redemption.’ It’s the song that Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) subversively played on the prison PA system, which pissed the warden off some and landed him in solitary for a month. Red (Morgan Freeman) commented in his voiceover that he hadn’t the slightest idea what the Italian women were singing about but liked to think it was something too beautiful to express in words. It is a very beautiful song. One of the most sublime pieces of music Mozart ever composed. It also happens to be a lie. In the Opera, the two women are writing a trick letter in which one of them pretends to profess love in order to set a trap that will catch the other’s philandering husband in the act of adultery. The song is played in its entirety at the end of “I Love You, Phillip Morris,” a love story about a compulsive liar and scam artist Steven Russell (played by Jim Carrey) and the man he “falls in love with” during a stint in prison, Phillip Morris (played by Ewan McGregor). I put that in quotes because it is impossible to tell whether Steven Russell means it. He has no code, no honor, and no qualms about looking somebody straight in the eye and lying about the most ridiculous things. But he also does incredibly romantic things. Things that you would think only a person crazy in love or simply crazy would do. So I don’t know, maybe Red had the right idea when he never tried to translate the words to that Aria.

Steven Russell apparently is a real person who right now is in a Texas penitentiary serving a 144-year sentence in solitary confinement. It’s an unprecedented sentence for a nonviolent offender. How one gets such a sentence is a pretty unbelievable story. It’s best to start at the beginning. When Steven was eleven his parents revealed to him that they weren’t his parents. Steven was adopted. (It was a very weird case of adoption. Steven was a middle child. His real parents kept the first and third kid.) Right about that time, Steven also realized he was gay. But he didn’t let anyone know because he lived in Texas. He married a very Christian woman (Leslie Mann), became a police officer, and did such kinda-gay-but-not-if-your-a-Christian things as enthusiastically play the church organ at Sunday Mass. On the side he had numerous illicit and secret affairs with other “not gay” Texan men. Then one day as he was driving home a truck blindsided him, totaling his car and nearly killing him. As the paramedics carted him away, he loudly vowed that he was going to live life the way he wanted from now on. “I’m going to be a faggot!” he declared, “I’m going to really fag it up!” At the hospital he promptly tells his stunned wife that he’s gay and divorces her.

That’s when the stealing starts. Steven Russell moves to Florida in order to realize his dream of being the most stereotypical gay man ever. Flashy cars, clothes, boyfriends. He does it all. Money is no object and none of it is his. He’s stealing from his company, purposely slipping-and-falling in grocery stores, taking nose dives down escalators and suing businesses for his pain and suffering. He gets caught and is arrested. His wife shows up and asks his current boyfriend, “The gay thing and stealing, are they connected?” She is rightly treated to a disdainful response, but I will surmise that they are, at least in the sense that being forced to lie your entire life about something so essential to your identity could probably aid your ability to lie in general or simply be enough to convince a person that God, Family, and Country are bullshit and life should be lived accordingly. Throw in an uncanny ability to survive fatal car wrecks and several suicide attempts, and you can see start to see how a person as brash and reckless as Steven Russell might be possible.

There are some roles that only Jim Carrey can play and this is one of them. Jim Carrey isn’t how you say, a “natural” performer. He’s very much an Act. So is Steven Russell. The nerve of the guy is incredible. He escapes from prison not once but several times. A couple times the first thing he does outside is to buy a suit, go right back to the prison, and impersonate the lawyer of Phillip Morris in an attempt to bust him out of jail as well. (It works at least once.) Other things he does: Lie his way into being hired as the CFO of a corporation and stealing millions, Practicing law without a license, selling bad tomatoes, insurance fraud, credit card fraud, fake tans etc. etc. etc. He also keeps getting caught. Over and over again. At some point the ordinary person would get a hint and cut their losses. But Steven Russell isn’t normal. His Plan B when lying doesn’t work is to commit suicide. He does that several times. Waking up in a hospital not dead becomes a running joke in the movie. This really happened.

And then there’s the love story, which the movie treats as real and sincere, as it might have been although there really is no way to tell. Russell falls in love at first sight when he sees Morris in the prison library. Soon he is sneaking letters and chocolates to Morris (who is diabetic but its the thought that counts) via the prison smuggling system and finally he cons his way into actually getting transferred into Phillip’s cell. There’s a screecher down the hall who likes to yell all night long. Steven pays to have him beat up. Phillip remarks that it is “the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.” Happy Days ensue inside and then outside the prison where Russell's subsequent cons are largely perpetrated for the "purpose" of providing Phillip with an extravagant lifestyle. Phillip is largely ignorant of where the money is coming from because Russell lies to him about that too. Most of the humor in the story is situational. The Writer-Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa are the same writing team behind the BillyBob Thornton movie “Bad Santa” (and, inexplicably, the kid’s movie, “Cats & Dogs.”) Taboo subjects and people behaving badly are not avoided but mined for laughs and cringes. For example it is clearly explained to a new prisoner that to get anything in prison you have to pay for it or you can suck a dick. Nobody in this movie treats this conversation as anything but normal. There is also a scene of loud gay sex, just in case you were wondering. 

If none of the above bothers you, this movie could be quite enjoyable. The story is pretty amazing just in itself. The best parts are the various ways Russell manages to escape from prison. I won’t give away exactly how he does this suffice to say that it takes quite a lot of balls and just as much brilliance. There is a main drawback to this movie though and that is Russell himself. You can’t take the love story seriously because the guy is so unreal. Plenty of the scenes feel strangely empty when it is clear the makers want all those gushy romantic feelings to take over. Or maybe that’s just me being a heterosexual.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2/5 Stars)

A tepid lukewarm anticlimax

Wow, talk about a disappointment. The third film in the Millennium trilogy plays less like a thriller than as a scam. There isn’t an independent movie here. Well, actually there could have been. You could plausibly take the movies, “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” cut out all the repetitive exposition and superfluous plot points and combine the rest into a superior movie. But instead we have a story that takes twice as long as it should to tell. Why? Perhaps it was because they knew a person like me who loved the first movie, aka a sucker, would on principle go and see every movie in the series. (It may have also mattered that the author is dead and thus can’t write an unlimited amount of sequels. They may be trying to squeeze the most profit out of a limited supply.)

If you saw the first two movies then you basically know what happens in this movie. Not much new is introduced. As in the second movie, the journalist Mikael Blomvist, played a third time by Michael Nyquvist, is writing an expose on a secret cabal called “The Section.” They are involved in communist defection, sex trafficking, really bad stuff like that. Quite a lot of time is spent on him going around and telling people what the story is about and when he plans to publish. The story is retold several times. Meanwhile our heroine Lisbeth Salandar, played again by Noomi Rapace, is in the hospital healing from several bullet wounds. The main set piece of the movie is her trial for the attempted murder of her father. All of the evidence presented at the trial is taken directly from the previous two movies. It is a pretty clear case of self-defense and there is little suspense as to the outcome of it. The prosecution has a flimsy argument (Lisbeth is crazy), which it repeats endlessly. I think you hear it about four times by the time the movie is over.  

The first two movies did a very good job of being thrillers. The plots were always very procedural but they still managed to insert realistic action sequences and fights at appropriate intervals. Would it surprise you to know that there is but one action sequence in this entire movie, that it is not very long, and it is perhaps the least exciting action sequence in the entire series? I mean what the hell is that all about. Has the director, Daniel Alfredson, forgotten the genre he is working in?

The worst thing of course is even though the plot of this movie is wafer-thin it still had room for action. Alfredson simply chose not to shoot any of it. Everything is told in the passive voice. For example, Blomvist apartment is broken into and documents are stolen. Instead of showing the break-in as it is happening (action!), we are shown Blomvist talking to a security guard about the break-in (passive voice). Then there is the character of Niederman, the huge baddie/Lisbeth’s half-brother from the second movie. Several times in this movie the plot calls for him to steal cars, break into homes, and kill people. Do we see that happen? No, we see Niederman sitting and watching TV in somebody’s home as the camera slowly zooms out to reveal a dead guy in the background. If you can believe it, one of the biggest threats in this movie is a couple of anonymous email that are sent to the journalists and say insidious things like, “Are you afraid of the dark?” Talk about lukewarm scares. Really, it kind of surprises me that this movie is rated R. Almost nothing happens.

The first movie had this very dangerous edge to it that made watching it a really visceral thrilling experience. That feeling is basically nonexistent here. There is a scene where Salandar walks down a hallway in full gothic battle regalia, piercings, and Mohawk. It looks cool but such badassness feels out of place in such a tepid movie. In fact, the whole character of Lisbeth Salandar has been reduced to what is essentially a supporting role. She spends the whole time in a hospital and then a courtroom. Her character is not the type that speaks much, so when she is also not physically doing anything, well, not very much happens. True, Noomi Rapace is one of the few actresses who can still be interesting while just sitting there, but that isn’t nearly enough to carry what is supposed to be a thriller. It should be noted that the Mr. Lazy, Daniel Alfredson, was not the director for the first film. That director was a guy named Niels Arden Oplev. I don’t know why they didn’t pick him to direct the entire trilogy but whoever made that decision really screwed up royally.  

You know who could do a much better job with this story? David Fincher, that’s who. His version starring Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig comes out next year. Just in time too, I still haven’t gotten enough of Lisbeth Salandar. Let’s remind the Swedes what a badass movie looks like. 

Fair Game (3/5 Stars)

Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be about WMD’s?

On January 2003, President George W. Bush gave his State of the Union address. That speech contained these sixteen words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” One man, former ambassador to Niger Joe Wilson, found those words rather disconcerting. Why? Because he had been sent on a fact-finding mission to Niger and had concluded that the supposed sale of yellowcake uranium was nonexistent. He told the administration exactly that. But here it was presented as fact in the President’s biggest speech of the year. A big speech made even more important because it presented the administration’s case for the Iraq war. He called the State Department and they confirmed that when the President said Africa, he was talking about the supposed sale in Niger.

But this movie isn’t about that. It’s about what happened after Joe Wilson decided to call out the White House by writing a NY Times Op-Ed piece titled, “What I didn’t find in Africa.” The administration responded by doing a rather curious thing. They revealed in a national newspaper that Joe’s wife, Valerie, was a covert CIA operative. This movie is about her job and how she lost it, the media circus around it, and how it almost destroyed her marriage. The movie claims that the whole Valerie Plame debate was simply a diversionary tactic that distracted everybody from the real topic: why the administration felt that there was enough evidence to state in the biggest speech of the year that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Africa. In a way the administration has succeeded even in this very friendly pro-Wilson/Plame movie. We get hints as to why the administration did what they did, but it is never clearly stated. In the second half of the movie, that part of the story is all but lost. The focus becomes the marriage. We have become distracted.

In a way I am being unfair. Since this is a story based on real events and real people, it would probably not be entirely ethical to have an actor play a character named Karl Rove and have him saying, “I did this because…” If the makers of the movie don’t know, they certainly shouldn’t put words into the mouths of real people. But then again, this is a movie and the makers are telling a story. When judging a movie based on fact, one of the best questions a reviewer should ask is this: Would this still be a good movie if it were entirely fictional? If you can’t make it work, you should probably be making a documentary. (Or at the very least you should have one character ask another, “Why are they doing this?” and then the other can say, “I don’t know.”)

Case in point, one of the best scenes in the movie is when Scooter Libby, aide to the Vice President, visits the Central Intelligence Agency and interviews one-by-one the CIA agents working on nonproliferation about some aluminum tubes. One CIA agent believes that they were being used to build nuclear fuel centrifuges. All of the other CIA agents have doubts because these tubes are the wrong size, type, and haven’t been used in any nuclear fuel reactor since 1952. But of course, they aren’t certain and they shouldn’t be. It’s not like the CIA has omniscient intelligence. Libby brings up the fact that in the First Gulf War Saddam Hussein actually was working on weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs, and the CIA knew absolutely nothing about it. (For a comprehensive list of other things the CIA didn’t know or got wrong, go and read the book Legacy of Ashes.)  What Libby wants is the one agent who thinks the tubes are real evidence. As long as nobody else in the agency can tell him with 100% certainty that Hussein isn’t up to anything, he doesn’t care what he or she says. (95% isn’t good enough). Remember that line from ‘In the Loop,’ “In the land of ignorance, the man with one fact is king.”

Did that scene actually happen exactly as scripted and shot? I haven’t the slightest clue. But it is one of the best scenes because it explained the motivation of the antagonists in the story. That never happens again. We never get to know why the administration put the words in the speech or why they thought outing Valerie was a good idea. In the second half of the movie, we are shown quite a lot of talking heads on cable news bad-mouthing the Wilsons. But who are those people? Why are they saying those things? Did the administration tell them to do it? How does that work? It really isn’t enough to simply say that a smear is going on. What are the mechanics of a smear? Better yet, how do you tell if it is working? Who won this battle? What is the end result of a bunch of pundits yelling at each other on TV? The marriage survived, Libby was convicted, and a movie made. Are Joe and Valerie victors? Better yet, should we care? Because after all, isn’t the real issue WMD’s? My favorite scene in the movie takes place at a dinner party while Valerie is still a CIA operative currently working on the aluminum tubes thing. The other people at the table start up a really ignorant discussion about them, repeating all the stupid things they heard on TV. And there is Valerie sitting silently unable to discuss them in any way. Why? Because it would blow her cover to let on that she knows more than anybody at the table. Does it ever seem to you like the loudest most morally certain people around rarely know what they’re talking about?   

The movie ends with what is unfortunately becoming a movie cliché. The old “call to action.” Joe Wilson gives a speech to a classroom and implores the young people to go out there, become involved, and “do something about it.” I have passively heard this before and usually nodded my head but I will finally admit that I don’t really know what he means. Does he want me to vote Democrat or what? Should I become the annoying person at the dinner party? Should I think for myself by reading books other people recommend? Should I stop watching “Real Housewives” and get a life (i.e. do anything else)? Only one of these questions can I answer with real certainty. I prefer the way the documentary “The Cove” went about its call to action: Simply send a text message to sign a petition. Now that’s something I can do.

One more complaint: Doug Liman’s directing. He uses a hand-held camera for almost all of the shots. Bad decision. A hand-held camera tends to be shaky, unclear, and consistently out of focus in long shots. This can be annoying and distracting. There are times when a hand-held camera is called for. A documentary type film like, “JFK,” is a masterful example of that. The shaky camera in that movie works because the story itself is mysterious and unclear. A shaky camera works best as an admission from the director that the audience shouldn’t know exactly what is happening. The shakier the cam: the more uncertain the events. (This is also the reason why the History Channel uses blurred shaky cameras as well. They don’t know exactly what went on.) In this movie, Liman seems to be making the mistake that a shaky cam actually makes the movie feel more realistic and thus convincing. It doesn’t. It does the opposite. When a director wants to persuade the audience of his version of the facts, he should keep the damn camera still. Quite frankly, it also happens to be the professional thing to do. One of the first things they teach you in Broadcasting 101 is how to use a tri-pod. Come on people, this isn’t rocket science.

127 Hours (5/5 Stars)

A fatal mistake and plenty of time to think about it.

Life moves fast for most of us and it can sometimes be hard to find a decent amount of time for self-reflection. A chance to slow down, take stock of your life, and learn from your mistakes might just be a blessing in disguise. Some people find that a stint in prison is just what they needed. Aron Ralston has just found himself in such a situation as well. He is in the midst of a life-changing experience, if only he can survive it.

I suppose most people walking into the theater will already know the true story of Aron Ralston, an engineer who was hiking in the Arizona desert when a falling boulder pinned his arm against a canyon wall. Unable to lift the boulder and not having told anybody where he was, he was trapped and helpless for 127 hours. And then he decided to cut off his arm and hike back without it. So he did. This is that story.

“127 Hours,” was directed by Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting) and stars James Franco in what is basically a one-man show. The story itself is very limited (Franco unable to move for a long time) but the way it is told is fresh and energetic. Danny Boyle does his usual incredibly innovative editing and camera techniques. My favorite sequence is when Boyle starts at Franco and takes the camera on a fast forward pace through the canyon back to his car and zooms in on the full bottle of Gatorade resting very peacefully in the back. It would be a good idea to bring some water to this movie. You will feel thirsty. James Franco does an incredible job as well. You should go to this movie just to see the look on his face the first couple of seconds after the boulder pins his shoulder. It’s all right there. His life is flashing before his eyes. He will probably get nominated for this role. I never saw “Buried” with Ryan Reynolds, but I would think that these two movies ought to be seen together. Then you can debate who gives the better performance. (By the way, James Franco is one of my heroes. The guy already had a successful career but went back to graduate school at Columbia to get a Masters of Fine Arts. Why? For fun. He’s now working on a P.H.D. in English at Yale. What a cool guy.)

At its most basic level, “127 Hours” is a procedural movie. It treats the dilemma of being stuck between a rock and a hard place not as melodrama but as a problem to be solved. It helps that the real Aron Ralston was an engineer because it allowed his character to be very ingenious about his predicament. He constructs a pulley system, he tries his best to get warm at night, he rations his water, and after awhile he starts to wonder what is the best way to go about cutting off his arm. It also helps that he has brought along his video camera because that way he can explain to us exactly what his plans are. At one point he logically states why he knows that he will be dead before anyone finds him and what, from an engineering standpoint, he will need to get the boulder off his arm. At one point I was reminded of that great scene in “Apollo 13,” when the rocket scientists are asked to figure out how to get a square box in a circular cylinder only using socks and other things in the capsule. This movie is exceedingly interesting from an intellectual point of view. If you are an engineer, you probably will love it.

Then there are those scenes where Franco dwells on all the mistakes he’s made. He forgot his Swiss Army Knife, he didn’t return his mom’s phone call, he didn’t tell the guy at his work where he was going. Then he has even more time to think. He regrets a break up with a girl who said she loved him on a magical night. He apologizes to everyone about everything on the video recorder. He hallucinates and sees his family and friends sitting on a couch and staring at him so very far close and yet so very far away. There’s nothing quite like having a near-death experience to really clear the mind.

It’s true that there is a grisly scene where Franco cuts through his arm, and yes it is graphic and painful to watch. But there is a huge difference between watching this and watching something like “Saw,” or other gruesome horror movies. When you watch “Saw” you really don’t want to see limbs getting hacked off and that’s why it should scare you when it happens (or you do and then I suppose you’d like this movie just for that scene). But in this movie, by the time Franco gets around to cutting off his arm, you want him to do it. I know by that point I was like, “Fuck the arm. Get the hell out of there.” I really doubt Ralston misses it as well. He’s probably just happy to be alive. We all should be.

Inside Job (5/5 Stars)

Witches, witches, all of them witches!

The above quote is from Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, a movie about a woman whose fiancé sold her womb to a coven of witches next door and had her impregnated by Satan himself. She says the line once she finally figures out that everyone, not just the neighbors, are in on it. Another couple of lines that ran through my head while watching through this documentary are from another Polanski movie, “Chinatown.” The main character, a private detective, finally figures out who is behind a murder and an even bigger crime, a complex water-working scheme that will rip-off the entire city of Los Angeles (based on a real crime). He asks the main bad guy who is already a very wealthy man:

“Let me ask you something, how much are you worth? Over ten million?”

“Oh Yes.”

“Why are you doing it? What can you buy that you can’t already afford? How much better can you eat?”

“Oh the Future Mr. Gittes, the Future!”

It is appropriate that I would think of Roman Polanski movies when I watched, “Inside Job.” Nobody has been a clearer witness to evil than Polanski (Holcaust, Helter Skelter) and this movie is one of the clearest portraits of evil I have ever seen (Right in the running with the documentary ‘Deliver Us From Evil’). It should be nearly impossible for this movie to not win the Oscar for best documentary of the year.

The Writer/Director is Charles Ferguson (No End in Sight) who could rightly be described as the Anti-Michael Moore. This documentary is not set up as a story about Charles Ferguson. He spends the entire movie off-screen and can only be heard asking questions in order to provide context for the answers of the interviewees. There are no grandstanding confrontations or “Look At Me” stunts. Instead there is an astounding amount research and knowledge, which is presented in a clear and comprehensive manner by a narrator (not Ferguson but Matt Damon). There are also no attempts at comedy although the audience which I sat with laughed in complete disbelief and astonishment at some points as brazen callousness and corruption oozed from the lips of people who should have known better than to take an interview with somebody who had done their homework. 

As with all reviews about documentaries it is impossible to try to summarize the plot in a review. The entirety of the movie consists of the explaining of the apocalyptic financial catastrophe of 2008. Ferguson has done a masterful job of limiting his explanation to two hours. It would be folly for me to list everything in two pages. But here’s a taste of what the movie has to offer:

Criminal activity is rampant in the financial sector and big banks have been convicted and fined for millions of dollars for, among other things, financing Iran’s nuclear program and laundering Mexican drug money. It is so common that bankers are allowed write off lawyer’s fees as ordinary business expenses. (That last sentence is not in the movie. I learned it in my Federal Income Tax for the Individual class)

Leverage is the ratio of the amount of debt compared to assets (Your Money!) in a bank. When a bank takes on more and more debt, it is more and more at risk of not being able to pay back creditors. The result is bankruptcy (Losing all your Money!). When deregulation allowed leverage caps to be raised, the banks did exactly that: They incurred a lot more debt without adding any more assets. Technically you do this because you would be investing the money in other companies. But no, instead the banks did this so they could pay their employees huge bonuses, all the while endangering the company and Your Money! When the banks inevitably collapsed all Your Money was lost. The officers had already been paid and didn’t lose any money at all. For lack of a better word, this is called stealing.

The securitized mortgage market is an incredible thing to behold. Joe Bob goes to a mortgage broker, a guy in a suit behind a desk. Joe Bob wants a house and asks the suit which loan is the best type for him. The suit gives him the worst mortgage possible, something with high interest rates and completely unsuitable for his income range. He does this for two reasons: One he makes more money with a high interest rate and Two: he has no risk if the loan fails. The mortgage broker gives the promissory rate to a bank. The bank has no risk because it passes the mortgage off to an investment bank. The investment bank takes the loan, couples it with several other thousand bad loans into a CDO. It gets its friends in the credit rating companies (which it pays big bucks) to give it an investment rating and sells it to a shell company, usually a LLC, which investors can invest in. A credit rating company gives it a grade from AAA (highest rating) to C. If it gets at least an AA rating, then IRA and 401ks, perhaps even Joe Bob’s retirement fund can invest in the CDO. The investment bank and the credit rating companies have no risk if the CDO fails. All the risk is with the LLC and its investors, aka Joe Bob and his retirement savings. Everyone along the chain gets paid while fobbing off all the risks. The economy goes into recession; Joe Bob loses his job, his house, and his retirement fund. The Banks get bailed out (with taxpayer money, so some of it is Joe Bob’s) so they can keep giving more loans and keep the economy from slipping into a full-blown depression. The bankers are not fired or convicted and continue to pay themselves exorbitant salaries.

But it doesn’t stop there. Do you know what a credit default swap is? A CDO and their investors can get insurance just in case that Joe Bob won’t be able to pay his mortgage (Usually from somebody like AIG). But did you know that credit default swaps allow other people to also take out an insurance policy on the same CDO. So it is very possible that Joe Bob’s mortgage has been insured not once by his CDO but 50 times by 50 different people. If you were the investment bank that handled his loan, you may have inside knowledge that Joe Bob probably won’t be able to pay back the loan. So instead of informing people of the danger and risk, you take out several insurance policies on the CDO. Once Joe Bob fails to pay the high interest rates and subsequently defaults, loses his house and his retirement fund, you get paid even more. This is exactly what Goldman Sachs did. The financial system had been so deregulated that it was legal. All it took was a complete lack of conscience and a pit of evil where a heart should be.

But what on earth could one person do with millions upon millions of bonuses and executive pay? How about hookers and cocaine? Some of the more amazing interviews involve a Wall Street Madame who tells of $1,000 a night escorts and a Wall Street therapist that tells of excessive use of cocaine by the traders. They say it was rampant and went straight to the top. It sure would make sense to me considering the other types things they were doing. If you’re going to hell, you might as well go whole hog.

And then Ferguson targets other people you wouldn’t think of targeting: Academia. He points out that some of the people in charge of deregulation now head the business schools of Columbia and Harvard. These are some of the best interviews of the movie. Apparently the professors weren’t expecting Ferguson to talk about financial conflicts of interest. One, Glenn Hubbard, gets really mad when Ferguson brings up the fact that Hubbard was paid $130,000 to write favorably about Iceland’s deregulation policies (which quickly collapsed that economy within 8 years) and declined to disclose his paycheck in the article. Here’s another somewhat paraphrased quote with the guy from Harvard.

Ferguson: If a doctor received 80% of his income from a drug he was promoting, wouldn’t that be a conflict of interest.

Harvard: Yes

Ferguson: How is this any different?

Harvard: It’s different in that…um….um….umm…um

(And then the audience and I let out an exasperated nervous disbelieving incredulous bale of laughter.)

This movie is extraordinary. Don’t let anyone tell you that the catastrophe was unpredictable or that the financial schemes are too complicated to understand. You can understand it and so did the bankers. That’s how they made so much money. And if there is one moral I can impart on you, it is that nothing has changed so you might as well become informed real quick. Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of the credit ratings agencies that testified before Congress and testified that their ratings were simply “opinions” for which they shouldn’t be held responsible. Allow me to interpret: That’s a polite way of saying, “It’s your own damn fault for trusting scumbags like us.” So take heed reader. There are evil people in the world and they are out for all they can steal. Act accordingly. 

The Social Network (5/5 Stars) October 6, 2010

I’ll be your friend, Mark Zuckerberg.
Well, here we are with what we call a paradox. I have given this movie five stars and I will swear that it is a “must see” movie. But at the same time, I have completely failed to come away with the impression Aaron Sorkin the writer and David Fincher the director, surely wanted to make. I didn’t know anything about Mark Zuckerberg before I watched this movie (I love Facebook, but that’s about it), but I left it with admiration and sympathy for him. Zuckerberg is my type of guy. I would love to have a beer with him any day. 

That’s a paradox because this movie wants to make Zuckerberg out to be an asshole. That’s how it starts and that’s how it ends. And although it does an incredibly good job of describing how and why Facebook works (and why it is arguably a work of genius), it is also very preoccupied with the several lawsuits that Zuckerberg withstood in the early years of his great success. One of the best things about this movie is that it dramatizes the depositions of such lawsuits. Since depositions are recorded and everything occurs under Oath there is no reason to believe that any of the dialogue in them is made up. That means Mark and everybody else actually said everything that he says in this movie. It must have been an event to be in those rooms. No doubt, Aaron Sorkin, a master of smart sharp dialogue (The American President, The West Wing) was inspired to write this movie after seeing them.

Mark Zuckerberg (portrayed here by Jesse Eisengard in a way that reminded me of Robert Downey Jr.’s take on Sherlock Holmes) is a Harvard student with great intellectual potential. He also happens to be young and stupid. One thing he is exceptionally good at is programming code for computers. One thing he is exceptionally poor at is communicating with other people. He may start off discussing a great idea but he either talks too fast, assumes to much, or is oblivious to the notion that the subject may not be interesting to the other person (like say the amount of geniuses in China). The other person gets annoyed. Zuckerberg gets frustrated. The other person becomes dismissive and Zuckerberg gets defensive. He may even say something that is mean. Not just mean but mean and effective in the way only intelligent insults can be. The girl, played by Rooney Mara walks out because he is an asshole. And he is in a way, but only in that innocent way the highly intelligent but socially ignorant can be when they know enough to be sure that they are smarter than most people (at one or several particular things) but are still ignorant of how other people will logically react when that fact is brought up. Zuckerberg doesn’t think the girl is stupid, he thinks she’s being stupid. If he can understand what he means why on earth can’t she? And why does she get so mad when he corrects her? He’s only doing it because she’s so insistent on being wrong all the time! Why, it’s enough to make one run home, get drunk, and blog about how much of a bitch she is. Which, by the way, is exactly how this movie starts. The date is completely fictional by the way but the makers are out to make a big ironic point about Mark Zuckerberg right from the start. That this guy, the creator of Facebook, the biggest social network in the world, was incapable of making friends. Oh well, neither was Michelangelo when he was painting the Sistine Chapel. 

So, what exactly are the crimes of Mark Zuckerberg that would make people want to hate him so. Well first of all there is FaceMash, a program devised by Zuckerberg that allowed the students at Harvard to compare the female students at the university to each other. Using an algorithm, the women are given a hotness rating. It’s invasive (he hacked into several houses on campus and stole the pictures), misogynistic (no men are compared), and wildly popular (It gets about 22,000 hits before it crashes the Harvard servers). In defense of Mark Zuckerberg I make three points. One, the website didn’t start anything mean that was new. We all compare people all the time whether in private just thinking about it or in public while gossiping with our friends. What Zuckerberg did was just make it much more convenient. Two, assuming arguendo that it is a misogynistic thing to compare women to each other, than Zuckerberg is guilty. But guys in general have done far worse than that before and always seem to find women who can conveniently forgive them of it. The difference is that Mark is a brilliant programmer, so when he enacted his immature revenge quite a lot of people saw it. The amount of people, not what he did, is what made it so bad. Third, although the movie doesn’t show it, I really doubt that it was only guys using Facemash. You don’t get 22,000 hits solely from dudes. Women were using it to. Don’t tell me they don’t compare as much as everybody else does. 

The second crime is the alleged stealing of the “idea” of Facebook. Now this lawsuit was complete bullshit. Mark was originally approached by a trio of well-connected Harvard students. They wanted Mark to be the programmer of their dating website, The Harvard Connection. In other words, they wanted Mark to do all of the work. It was never made clear in the movie just what these others kids would do for the site. When Mark went ahead and made his own site, they didn’t take their great idea and make a site of their own (even though they had the idea months before Mark had it), all they wanted to do was sue him. If I can make an analogy, lets say that somebody had the idea to sculpt a large statute of the biblical David, but didn't have the skill or drive to do it. So they enlist Michelangelo to do it for them. Then Michelangelo actually sculpts the damn thing, but at the end refuses to say he had any help. This somebody then claims credit saying that the idea was stolen. This is bullshit because it completely ignores the fact that the trio were incapable of ever manifesting their idea into an actual website. How infuriating. During the depositions, Mark makes a big deal of pointing out that Facebook contains completely original coding (Presumably because if Mark thought the other website was worth a damn, he wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of inventing his own.) At another point he stops in the middle of the deposition and comments that it is raining outside. The high price lawyer of his adversaries asks Mark whether he deserves his full attention. Mark responds:
“You have a part of my attention – the minimum amount needed. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook where my employees and I are doing things no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually and creatively capable of doing. Did I adequately answer your condescending question?” (Did I mention how much I like this guy?)
Unfortunately as it is pointed out to him at the end of the movie, the average jury knows nothing about computer programming and coding or what actually goes into creating a website. But they do know an arrogant prick when they see one. An associate played by Rashida Jones explains to Mark that she can get a jury to hate him within 10 minutes. The crew cut douchebags walk away with a 65 million dollar settlement. 

The third crime and most serious crime is Mark’s falling out with his best friend and co-founder of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin. Eduardo was Mark’s roommate and the original CFO of the company. Well, sort of. He donated $1,000 of his own money and was given the job of being the business end of the entire affair. Unfortunately, although he had the best of intentions, he didn’t really seem to know what he was doing. So when Sean Parker, the mogul behind Napster played by Justin Timberlake, shows up to impart the wisdom he had already learned from the big things he had done, Mark agrees with basically everything he says. I kept thinking of the old Henry Adams saying, “A friend in power, is a friend lost.” Eduardo, because he fails to grasp exactly what facebook means and what it can mean, (let’s also not forget that he doesn’t know anything about computers or programming) is left behind and eventually forced out of the company (It is unclear exactly how involved Zuckerberg was in this). Some of the best scenes in the movie again take place in the deposition room, where the feuding best friends trade barbs that are more tinged with heartbreak than they are with anger. It is said that this settlement was for an undisclosed amount. Perhaps it was settled amicably. 

Is it fair to make a “warts-and-all” biopic about somebody who is only twenty-six years old? I can remember a time when Bill Gates was considered part devil. Now he is regarded as a saint. Who knows what we will think of Zuckerberg ten years from now. After all, he did just give 100 million dollars to charity. I have always found people like Mark Zuckerberg fascinating. They rise and fall on a trait that allows them to excel in one area and at the same time limits them in others. Jesse Eisenberg’s performance suggests a hint of Asperger’s in Zuckerberg. He is a man of intense focus and work ethic. This is great for his art and business, but when he uses that type of energy in a social relationship it becomes exhausting to talk to him. But having said that, here’s a good question to ask as you watch this movie: Which one of these characters should a guy like Mark have “connected” with? The movie shows quite a lot of elite parties. Most characters do sex and stimulants and not much else. Elite Clubs put prospective members through weird and arbitrary hazings. A kid at a lecture doesn’t realize it was Bill Gates leading it. Is it really Mark’s problem that he can’t connect with these people? This is a particularly good question concerning the women who inhabit this picture. They exist mainly in groupie form. They inhabit the background of shots mainly getting drunk or high while the programmers (almost exclusively men) work in the foreground. They bring guys into public bathrooms for blowjobs on the first date. There’s a particularly telling scene when Mark is laying out a strategy for expanding facebook and the two women in the room ask if they can help. Mark flatly tells them “No” presumably because they know absolutely nothing about computers. Contrast all of the above people to Mark who spends his time being creative, working his ass off, and building his business. Sure he has a friend in Sean Parker who is a partier, but when Sean is arrested with cocaine and underage women, do you know where Mark is? He’s still in the office working his ass off. Perhaps we should stop focusing on what’s wrong with Mark. He just needs to meet somebody as cool as him. Someone like Melinda Gates for instance. In the meantime, he can definitely hang out with me. 

The Social Network is one of the year’s best films. It is a movie made by geniuses (Fincher and Sorkin) about a genius. It should definitely get Oscar nods for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing, and perhaps acting nods for Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake depending on how thick the field is. It is exceedingly interesting to watch. At times I couldn’t help but lean forward in my seat to be further engrossed in the story. At other times I was laughing and applauding while everyone else in the theater was completely silent. Above all it is the best-edited movie of the year. It moves seamlessly across several storylines with minimal confusion and great dramatic effect. It is the best David Fincher movie since “Fight Club” and the first time I enjoyed a Jesse Eisenberg performance. As for Justin Timberlake, I think it is fair to say that he has officially graduated from being a commodity crafted by marketers and sold to unsuspecting teens. He has become a legitimate actor and is evident by his willingness to take small parts in interesting movies as opposed to large parts in really dumb ones. One more thing, remember that girl in the first scene. That’s Rooney Mara and she has been cast as the next Lisbeth Salandar in Fincher’s upcoming version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” I can sort of see that. Knock on Wood.

Let Me In (4/5 Stars) October 6, 2010

“I must be gone and live or stay and die. Love, Abby” 
That’s a quote from Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ a play that a twelve-year-old boy named Owen is studying at his school. It is used though by Abby in a post-it left by Owen’s bedside after a chaste night the two spent together. But it isn’t simply a sentimental romantic line. It literally is true. If Abby stayed with Owen until the dawn, the light of the sun would cause her flesh to catch fire and she would be burnt to a crisp, dead. Abby is a vampire. She’s also twelve, but she has been twelve for a very long time. 




“Let Me In” is a remake of a haunting Swedish horror movie titled, “Let the Right One In.” (see previous review). Watching this movie made me proud to be an American. We did it. Go USA. ‘Let Me In’ is on the same par and arguably even a little better than the original. The writer/director Matt Reeves has done an admirable job of keeping all that was great about the first movie especially its tone, atmosphere, and deliberate pacing. But he has also added many little details here and there that round out the character of Owen, makes clearer the relationship between Abby and her “father,” and creates much more effective scenes of violence. On top of that, we have two great performances by Chloe Moretz (500) Days of Summer) and Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Road). But let me be clear. I don’t recommend watching “Let Me In,” instead of “Let the Right One In.” I recommend you see them both. They are especially interesting from a craft perspective. Effective storytellers need not always agree on exactly how to tell a story. The differences between these two movies are not better or worse. They are simply a matter of taste. The story itself is worthy of multiple interpretations. Just like Shakespeare. I wouldn’t mind seeing another remake of this movie. 

Poor Owen. He lives in suburban nowhere and it is the midst of winter. His parents are going through a divorce and spend all of their time arguing with each other on the phone. The class bully and his buddies have singled him out for ritual punishment. He has no friends. When he isn’t at school and in a state of perpetual terror, he is at home completely alone and bored out of his mind. He spends his free time binging on “Now and Later” candy and acting out revenge fantasies in the mirror. And then Abby moves in next door. She shows up one day in the empty and dreary courtyard where Owen usually sits alone. This is an Event. It’s not exactly love at first. It’s more like Robinson Crusoe finding Friday. She is another kid his “age,” seemingly the only other one in the entire apartment complex. And she is quiet and she is sad. Just like Owen. Perhaps they could be friends. 

I remarked in my review of “Let the Right One In,” that the story reminded me of Hitchcock in that it keeps the audience in a state of moral twilight. Watching this movie, you can’t tell if what you are hoping will happen is the right thing to be hoping for. Owen as a character couldn’t be more sympathetic. You can’t help but feel for the kid. Abby, by definition, is a mass murderer. But strangely, because she is Owen's only friend, she is also sympathetic simply by association. In one scene, Owen asks Abby if she will go steady with him. I heard several people in the theater audibly sigh as if they were watching the cutest scene in the world. But pay attention to the implications and take notice of your feelings when you watch this. Sure, it’s nice that Owen has fallen in love, but is it a good thing for him to fall in love with a vampire who needs blood to live? The single best scene in the movie (which isn’t in the original) comes shortly after Owen realizes that not only is Abby a vampire but that her “father” was his age when he first met her. Owen calls up his own father and asks him, “Do you think there is such a thing as evil? Can people be evil?” His father is distracted and less than helpful but take notice of what Owen is really asking: Can the only person in the world who is kind to me be completely bad? Would you be able to forgive a killer if they were your only friend? What about the last scene? Is it mass murder? Is it an act of kindness? Could it possibly be both? How do you feel about what happened? How should you feel about it? 

The A-list for children movie stars is a very short list. Child Actors are understandably notorious for not being incredibly reliable or professional. So, a child who proves that they can carry a movie is special indeed. Here, both Chloe and Kodi have proven they are very capable of pulling off challenging roles. (This romance is iconic. I wouldn’t mind having the picture shown above as a wall poster.) Every casting director who has a difficult part for a child will surely notice them. In fact, Chloe has been cast as the lead in Martin Scorsese’s next movie. Welcome to the A-List.