Inside Llewyn Davis (4/5 Stars)

Man of Constant Sorrow

Comedian Patton Oswalt once described what made a Coen Brothers movie special: Most movies are like a small tent with a carnival barker in front of it. You pass by on the street and the barker yells, “Come see the super exciting special blankety-blank!” You pay your ticket and enter the tent. There is the blankety blank just the way the barker described it. There is nothing else in the tent. A Coen Brothers movie is like a huge warehouse. It’s got one of those large roll down metal garage door entrances. The entrance rolls up without revealing a vast space with all sorts of machines and contraptions dispersed throughout. The warehouse contains no barker, no guide, no suspiciously over-friendly attendant. Come inside or stay without, don’t care. Take a glance around or stare for hours, feel free. There is plenty of stuff inside but it’s anybody’s guess whether it is what you are looking for. Hopefully you are the curious type. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” is just like that.

If I were a carnival barker I could describe the plot in a sentence or two. It is about a week in the life of a folk singer named Llewyn Davis (played and performed by Oscar Isaac) circa the 1961 NYC Greenwich Village folk scene. He is good at his job but his job isn’t commercial. He sleeps on the couches and floors of the people he has known for a while or just met. He accidentally lets a calico cat out of one of the apartments and spends a good deal of movie time carrying it around with him. There are also a lot of folk song performances and a trip to Chicago to audition for a big time producer. At the end of the movie he is back exactly where he started having not really gotten anywhere. Not much happens really and what does happen is generally profoundly sad, like a good folk song you know.

But that is not why you want to see this movie. You want to see it because it is an exquisitely refined work of art and perhaps the best movie ever made about an unsuccessful folk singer in 1960’s Greenwich Village. It’s also the only movie I’ve ever seen about that topic, but give that a point for originality if nothing else. 

Let’s start with the music. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” is not a musical in the sense that characters burst out into singing, but it does have several songs performed in their entire length by the characters on stage or anywhere else you can fit an acoustic guitar. The most comparable movie to this one is the Coen’s earlier effort “O’ Brother Where Art Thou,” which had a wall-to-wall soundtrack of largely forgotten Old Tyme music. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” has a great soundtrack of largely forgotten Folk music. Some of these are very very good songs. My favorite has to be ‘Dink’s Song’ which is the main song of this movie as it is played as a duet in the beginning and in a solo performance at the end. Oscar Isaac performs both of the songs and Marcus Mumford of the band “Mumford and Sons” sings the other part of the duet. He does not show up in the movie because his character commits suicide sometime before the story starts. “Dink’s Song” in addition to beautifully arranged in harmony or without is also especially sad. It is about a woman who loved a man who impregnated her and left. As far as we know the song has always existed. A musician once overheard a woman (named Dink) singing it while doing laundry in a nearby river in the very early 1900s. Noone really knows if she wrote it herself. “If the song isn’t new and it never gets old, it’s a folk song,” says Llewyn Davis. All the songs were produced by the legendary T. Bone Burnett who has catalogued an impressive array of different kinds of folk songs. The Llewyn Davis character’s style is based off a folk singer named Dave Van Ronk, but there is also a ‘Peter, Paul, and Mary’ type of band headed by the supremely competent Justin Timberlake (what can’t that guy do?) who also spends a scene recording with a reluctant Llewyn Davis the annoyingly catchy “Please Mr. Kennedy.” A mariner’s song, a travelling song, and a song about death in childbirth are also included in the mix. Hard living, that is what folk songs (and let’s face it, old songs in general) are about. When the country went rich and memories of the Depression and WWII faded, they were forgotten. Now that the money is gone in our time, perhaps we will be seeing a greater revival of them.

A footnote: This will be hilarious come Oscar Time. Certainly the Academy will want to recognize this movie for its music, but as it is limited to recognizing original music, it will be surely be forced to nominate “Please Mr. Kennedy.” The joke is that it is a hokey song that the main character hates and just the type of shit that will become a hit while his soulful music goes unrecognized.

The movie looks great. It looks like someone took the album cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” and colored the entire neighborhood with it. It’s a faded color with many greens, whites, and grays. It is beautiful absolutely beautiful. The perfect landscape to go with a song like “Green, Green, Rocky Road.” Surprisingly the cinematographer for this movie is not Roger Deakins, the longtime collaborator of the Coen brothers as he was working on James Bond when this movie was made. The cinematographer here is Bruno Delbonnel. The framing of the scenes are just absolutely perfect. All the corners of the screen are filled in with the correct details. Nothing is left out and nothing is included that shouldn’t be there.

Footnote: Ironically, this movie could very well win the Oscar for Best Cinematography, which would be hilarious given that Roger Deakins has been nominated and not won so many times for his work in Coen Brothers films in the past. Now, if a Coen Brothers movie finally wins this time, he won’t be on the stage to accept it. Ho, ho, ho.

The characters in this movie are so well defined that it seems like that they existed before the movie’s camera got there and continued with their lives after the movie left. One in particular, the sister of Llewyn Davis, Joy, played by Jeanine Serralles, sounds just like my grandmother and not just in the way she speaks, but the particular words she uses. The attention to phrases is so detailed. She only has two scenes but speaks like nobody else in the movie, which makes sense because she lives in a totally different part of town from everybody else. Justin Timberlake continues to impress me. His physicality is so specific it speaks paragraphs. Take a look at his reaction to Llewyn Davis’s query during the recording session. It is about half a second but boy that says everything doesn’t it. John Goodman jumps into a car for the road trip to Chicago, knocks all of his lines out of the park and exits just as quickly. Then there is F. Murray Abraham as the producer Bud Grossman. For lovers of movies, Abraham will forever by remembered as Antonio Salieri, the jealous court composer of “Amadeus” who uses his political power to destroy the career of Mozart. And here is Salieri two hundred years later telling Llewyn Davis that his songs aren’t commercial enough. “I don’t see that much green here,” he explains matter-of-factly. Sometimes being good is just not good enough.

Footnote: Somebody should make a YouTube compilation of Coen Brother's secretaries. They always seem to find the most interesting looking people to sit at desks in little scenes. The little old lady in the agent's office is no different in this one. 

The Coen Brothers are an anomaly of filmmaking. Here are two writer/directors who always made just enough money to never ever have had to compromise with their artistic vision. Hell, even Scorsese had to make the “The Color of Money.” The Coens have never had to do that. Their good luck does not seem to be lost on them. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” is about a musician who does not want to compromise and goes broke and beaten in the process. It is an utterly uncommercial premise for a movie and if the backers get their money back any time soon it will probably be due to past goodwill connected with the Coen Brothers. But it was made and it was made well. So for all us losers out there we now not only have folk music, but this movie as well.

See You Next Tuesday (1/5 Stars)

"I used to encourage everyone I met to do art. I thought everyone should do it. I don't really do that so much anymore."
- Banksy, Exit Through the Gift Shop

Nebraska (3/5 Stars)

I’m not entirely sure what Writer Bob Nelson's and Director Alexandar Payne’s relationship with the north middle of the country is, but they sure don’t seem at all impressed with it. For example, the film is shot in black and white but this doesn’t have anything to do with a particularly dark plot or mood. Instead it seems to be a judgment on the location of the movie, the empty spaces and depressed towns between Billings, Montana and Lincoln, Nebraska. It’s like Payne didn’t think they deserved color. Nothing is going on so you might as well not try to liven it up.

“Nebraska,” is a comedy and as the comedy it is trying to be it is perfect. The little hitch is that it is attempting to satirize sparseness and boredom and even a perfect satire of such subjects will invariably move slow and contain fewer jokes than the usual comedy. We are treated several times to scenes of people drinking beer, watching TV, or both. This reviewer finds that such scenes lend an odd feeling of unaccomplishment. The characters are doing exactly what I myself am doing while watching it. 

At times though the movie rises from its slumber to deliver some really good material. My favorite involves the introduction of Woody Grant's overweight nephews, Bart and Cole to his son David, played by Will Forte. David is not the most successful man in the world and sheepishly explains that he only sells stereo equipment in Billings. The nephews don’t respond because they don’t have jobs. After an awkward pause, Woody’s brother speaks up. "Bart here did some jail time.” Such is the excitement in ‘Nebraska’ where nothing happens, everyone is unemployed and overweight, and alcoholism is rampant because, fuck it, what else is there to do. In the end though, this is what keeps ‘Nebraska’ from being a ‘must-see’ movie. That is unless you are actually from Nebraska, than I guess you would have to see it because, I guess, what other movie is set in Nebraska. Then I suspect the people in the middle of the country would hate this movie. I remember raving about "Fargo" once to someone from North Dakota only to find out that everyone there despised the movie's portrayal of their accents. This movie may work the same way, though I suspect the people who deliberately left the place for greener pastures may absolutely love it. 

The plot is set in motion when the octogenerian of the family, Woody Grant, gets it in his head that he won a million dollars in a sweepstakes competition. He can’t drive and he won’t trust public transportation so he attempts to walk to Lincoln, Nebraska where the company is located. His sons, David and Ross, played by Bob Odenkirk, try to explain to him that the newsletter is a complete scam meant to sell magazine subscriptions. “I didn’t even know they still did this,” David states. He’s right. I haven’t seen one of those ‘You may have already won a million dollar’ junk mail letters in about a decade. Nothing will dissuade Woody though from setting out time and again on foot and in bad weather. 

David finally agrees to drive Woody to Nebraska because the man is really old and doesn’t have anything else going for him. A pit stop in Woody's old hometown becomes a much longer detour. Father and son walk around and take a look at the old haunts. Everything is changed and nobody recognizes Woody. Except at the bar. People recognize Woody at the bar. Woody tells everyone in the town that he has won a million dollars and for some incredibly odd reason everybody believes him.

Here, Payne’s satire of Middle America perhaps becomes too mean. It may be a little too much to believe that everyone believes Woody’s story about winning the lottery, even after his sons try to explain that it is all just a scam, but these apparently are really desperate people living in really quiet desperation. The family descends on Woody complaining about how his alcoholism cost them money over the years and demanding that they get a share of the winnings. They won’t take any talk of a scam for an answer. Everyone really really needs the money.

The performances are great, and especially noteworthy because they represent some of the finest performances in several careers, one of which is an especially long career. That would be Bruce Dern, who at 77 years old, is in his first lead role in a good movie for the first time. His Woody Grant is a alcoholic mess of well-meaning dementia. Dern does a particularly good job of seamlessly interweaving Grant’s lucid moments in with his delusions so they really seem like they are coming from the same very old person. We learn a lot about Woody Grant in this movie and by the end you sort of hope he gets his money, not for him but for what he wants to do with it. Will Forte does a great job as well in the thankless task of the straight man holding together a cast of crazy characters. Will is mainly known for comedy, notably SNL and 30 Rock, and is yet another example of a comedian ably putting together a dramatic performance. Then there is Bob Odenkirk, who has done better things (Mr. Show, Breaking Bad) but is always a delight to see on screen in any incarnation. Final mention of the two nephews played by Tim Driscroll and Devin Ratray. They gather some of the best laughs by just sitting next to each other and grinning. It's good stuff.

I expect the Academy will love this movie way out of proportion because it is about an old white person, which coincidentally is the majority demographic of the Academy. I bet they all like it even more because it is in black and white even though there is no particular reason for it. The last movie Alexander Payne made about an old white person was “The Descendants.” That won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, which was just a really terrible thing to happen. I have the sneaking suspicion that the writing for this one will be similarly nominated. It’s good writing, but it’s not great because it can't be. There isn't the ambition that is generally needed to make the writing great. Here’s hoping that it at least won’t win anything. 

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (3/5 Stars)

There was always something about Harry Potter that I found disturbing. It was always just a little bit off. Here you had a story about an innocent unassuming boy blessed with magical powers and a supremely important mission. They were imposed on him through no actions of his own. He would assume through accident of birth a unique status greater than all in the land. At the same time the hero rejects his unwon fame. He miserates on his unlucky situation and all it means. I am just a normal run-of-the-mill boy he asserts. All I want is the simple things in life like all the good ordinary men and women. In fact, in these stories those who seek fame and fortune above the simple things are looked down upon. In many cases they are the villains. In this way the book has its cake and eats it too. It allows the reader to vicariously live in fame, fortune, and violent glory while assuring themselves that what they really want is simply good friends, family, and love. By reading a book that abdicates the responsibility for all the superficial qualities forced upon the hero the audience earns plausible deniability for their own consciences. A reader can identify with a hero that can handle the fast times but is not defined by them. Or one that can state with a straight face: I could be the greatest most famous most successful person ever but I choose to be one of the people because you know that’s what’s important in life. It works of course just as long as one ignores the insidious subtext: “Please Please Please don’t forget I could have fame, fortune, and glory if I wanted it!” Because, seriously, who would have read Harry Potter if he was just a guy who wanted friends and family. He also has to be something extra. He has to be a wizard and not just any wizard, the best one. (Full Disclosure: I don’t particularly care for Harry Potter).

There is an incredible undercurrent of narcissim in my least favorite genres of storytelling Fantasy and Science Fiction. The Hunger Games a well written, competently acted, and brilliantly produced beauty of a movie is no exception. It stars Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, the blank slate everygirl who is the best archer in the land and has two good-looking men she feels so very guilty for having to choose between. Katniss Everdeen loves her family. Particularly she is fond of her little sister the exquisitely named Primrose Everdeen. To save Primrose and not for fame and glory she volunteered for the annual Hunger Games in the first movie. The Hunger Games is a ‘Battle Royale’-esque gladiator tournament between the thirteen impoverished districts of a futuristic dystopian society that has the totalitarian Captitol city at the head of it. It is a winner-take-all competition, kill or be killed. So Katniss killed everyone (quite honorably I would say) in the first movie, gaining in the process fame and fortune, though she really did not want to because you know she is so ordinary in the ways that count.

So Hunger Games: Catching Fire starts off with the rising celebrity of Katniss Everdeen presenting a problem to the totalitarian government headed by President Snow, played by Donald Sutherland. He intends to discredit her by various means that only encourage the population to revere her in even more rebellious fashion. Because this takes place in the genre of Science Fiction/Fantasy the movie can ignore many many things. For instance, the entire oppressive government seems to be entirely comprised in only one person, President Snow. In the real world, you would need some sort of bureaucracy to oppress a people. This is generally overlooked. Secondly we can overlook the realistic notion that celebrities that gain fame through reality TV contests don’t have any political power. As far as I can tell power (if you choose to distill it down to its essential essence) comes from the ability to hire or fire people, i.e. control over jobs. Think about that definition and see where it can get you. But as this is the future, a TV celebrity can move the world. And please try to forget what the economy of the extravagant Captitol is comprised of given that it has no commercial class or trading partners. Or what it really takes to not only stoke a rebellion but also to competently carry it to realization, see Battle of Algiers. In the real world, inspiration is the least of all problems. In Hunger Games, it seems to be the only thing that’s missing. But because this takes place in some fantastical land (or a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, or on Middle Earth) we can set up a story whose plot functions can rely almost entirely on character whims for better or worse. If you wanted to do that in a realistic genre, you would have to confine all the characters to a house and make the story take place within a day. But you can have interpersonal opera on a grand scale with world changing consequences in fantasy/science fiction because once again, you can pretend that reality does not apply in this far distant land.

We can be very glad that Hunger Games: Catching Fire is not a preachy metaphor designed to make us think about the problems of everyday life. Some movies within this genre do just this and become horribly insufferable monstrosities. Instead Hunger Games is far more concerned with costumes, hair, and makeup. I suppose we will just have to get used to this as studios start paying due attention to the other half of the population. If Hunger Games is a portent of the future of blockbusters though we should be seeing much to appreciate. For instance take a look at these names: Katniss Everdeen, Primrose Everdeen, Effie Trinket, Ceasar Flickerman, Claudius Templesmith, Plutarch Heavensbee, Haymitch Abernathy. Don’t those just roll off the tongue in some perfect mosaic of sound and diction? Or take a look at the great flair in hair of the game show host Ceasar Flickerman (playbed by Stanley Tucci) and his sidekick Claudius Templesmith (Toby Jones). Or consider the Girl on Fire costumes of Katniss Everdeen and her counterpart Peeta Mellark that catch fire during a chariot parade to the delight of the crowd. Or the even more impressive bride/mockingjay costume that not only makes Jennifer Lawrence look great but is also imbued with important story revealing symbology. This is the first blockbuster I know of that gives the hero/heroine a stylist in a major role. Lenny Kravitz does the job here doling out wisdom the way Obi Wan Kenobi would tutor Luke Skywalker in swordplay. The most impressive creature in all of this superficial exuberance is the presence of Effie Trinket, a woman who changes elaborate costumes and hairdos in every single scene. She is played by Elizabeth Banks and in the most markedly superior aspect of this sequel compared to the first movie, we get some depth to the character peeking out of the ditzy cheerleader persona in a way that very surprisingly doesn’t undercut all we have previously seen from her. I haven’t seen anything else quite like her in movies. Effie Trinket is an original.  

Oh and look we have several notable new castmembers. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is the new gamemaster and a fairly competent and entertaining one as we see in the final third of the movie. And there is Jena Malone, who I have spoken good graces of before. She tends to pop her head up from indie stardom in character roles in bigger movies every now and again. She plays Johanna Mason, the warrior woman Katniss Everdeen would be if she wasn’t so like the rest of us. The movie’s third act in a new series of Hunger Games does not dissapoint and ends in a very satisfying way. I am a little interested in seeing the next one.

Here’s another curiousity. Michael Arndt co-wrote this screenplay with Simon Beaufoy (also very good). Michael once won an Oscar for writing one of my favorite movies, Little Miss Sunshine. That movie had an entirely opposite take on the world compared to these types of narcissistic tales. But since then, his career trajectory since then has been almost entirey focused on big budget sequels in the realm of fantasy science fiction (Toy Story 3, Hunger Games, Oblivion, Star Wars). Et tu, Arndt?

The Dallas Buyer's Club (4/5 Stars)

Ronald Woodruff wasn’t supposed to be the kind of guy that got AIDS. That was something homosexuals got, faggots as Ron would likely call them. He points to a fresh 1980s newspaper chronicling the death of Rock Hudson and decries the massive shame it was that Rock had access to all that Hollywood pussy and wasted the opportunity by being gay. AIDS was also something intravenous drug users got, and Ron Woodruff wasn’t that either. I mean he snorted cocaine and drank heavily and had unprotected sex with plenty of women (we are introduced to him via a threesome under the bleachers at a Texas rodeo), but none of that had anything to do with needles or homosexuality. So when Ron Woodruff passes out from a massive headache, wakes up in the hospital, and is told that he has a T-Cell count of 9 and 30 days left to live, he doesn’t believe it. “There’s nothing that can kill Ron Woodruff in 30 days,” he declares to the doctors and storms out of the hospital.

“Dallas Buyer’s Club,” directed by Jean-Marc Vallee attempts to do two things with the biographical story of Ronald Woodruff of Dallas, Texas. The first thing it does is demonstrate how his terminal illness and his subsequent business dealings with the gay community opened his eyes to society’s intolerance and indifference towards the “homosexual” AIDS epidemic and broke down his own prejudices. The second is an educational primer on the various drugs that were in the process of being approved by the FDA in response to the AIDS epidemic. One being AZT, a drug that is being championed by the FDA but the movie treats as a killer. The other drugs are the all-natural ones that Ron Woodruff starts peddling to the Dallas community. It was Ron’s unshakable belief (based not only the research he did but the anecdotal experience of taking every drug himself before selling it to anybody else) that his drugs, though they did not cure the disease (nothing could do that we learn), would be able to prolong life. They do this by merely making the body healthier in general, whereas AZT, sort of like chemotherapy, kills everything patient included. The movie does the first thing better than the second.

First things first: this year’s award in stunt acting goes to the acting team of Matthew McCounaaghey and Jared Leto, playing respectively Ronald Woodruff and Rayon, Ron’s transsexual business partner. Both have lost an incredible amount of weight for their roles. McCounaghey is perhaps more unrecognizable here being once upon a time People’s Sexiest Man Alive back when he had superfluous muscales and did nothing but dumb romantic comedies. It’s all gone now as if he has shed all the superficial romcom dumbness and what is left is the emaciated frame of a serious actor. To witness the turn in career choices that McCounaghey has accomplished over the last couple years is quite remarkable. “Dallas Buyer’s Club” is the capper. An Academy Award nomination would not be surprising. It is also a relief to witness the return of Jared Leto (Requiem from a Dream) after a five-year hiatus of pop stardom. In addition to slimming down he has put on a dress. The character Rayon apparently is not based on one real person but rather a composite of the gay community. It is an ingenious strategy concerning the age-old problem of capturing a lifetime within a two-hour frame. In this way, Ron’s changing attitude is reflected through his relationship with one particular person rather in several people and the emotional payoffs are far more effective.

I’m going to take a moment and throw in a political comment here, an indulgence I am happily allowed by writing an anonymous blog that nobody reads. “Dallas Buyer’s Club” is a great movie for the fan of Capitalism. Generally it has been said that Capitalism has no morals. But that is not necessarily true. The morals of Capitalism are honesty, equal treatment, and tolerance. A man may not like a person or a group of people, but if he is a true capitalist he will trade with that person for the right price. Racial segregation, Caste systems, exclusionary zoning, and ornerous governmental regulation: all are great enemies of Capitalism. The “Dallas Buyer’s Club” is a great example of how Capitalism transforms the prejudiced man who takes its ideals to heart. Ron Woodruff is above all else a hustler. When he sees that there is a market for unapproved Mexican drugs in Dallas, he sets out to exploit it with rational self-interest and what is born of the Dallas Buyers Club is an unambiguously good collaboration of buyers and sellers trying to help each other survive. Is it evidence that the Dallas Buyer’s Club was a good thing that helped people because Ron Woodruff was able to make money? Yes, yes it is. 

What is not dones too well is the movies’ treatment of AZT. This comes from the subtitle at the end of the movie. It states that: “A smaller dose of AZT combined with other drugs saved millions of lives.” Given the movie I just watched, that line does not make sense. I had just spent two hours watching Ron Woodruff declare that the doctors doling out AZT were murderors, a hospital administator played by Denis O’Hare (an actor that specializes in white collar sleaze) who cares more about money than good science, and a third doctor played by Jennifer Garner who is sympathetic to Woodruff’s cause and at one point is asked to resign because of it. So what is the deal with AZT? Why is the movie telling us with its last line that it works when it does not offer any evidence to suggest that from in the movie? This is the sort of detail that makes the watcher feel the need to look up on Wikipedia the true story, which I have not done yet because I wanted my confusion to be readily apparent in this review.

In cases like this, I always bring up that Oliver Stone anecdote. He was accused of propaganda and his reply was this: how can you tell that my movies are not propaganda? Because they aren’t boring. Propaganda by definition only shows one point of view, and because of that necessary lack of conflict, it is not exciting. A storyteller may have a point of view. A storyteller may have an agenda. But if that storyteller does not give the other side its full due, the story will not be exciting. “Dallas Buyer’s Club,” has this problem. By the end, we see Ron Woodruff time and again being victimized unjustly by the system for arbitrary reasons. The reasons may have been stupid for all I know, but what I do know from watching the movie is that the other side is not getting a fair shake. They are not given the chance to explain themselves. We see plenty of scenes of Jennifer Garner trying to persuade Denis O’Hare of the ineffectiveness of AZT. Instead of giving Denis the opporutunity to respond, the movie simply has him ignore Jennifer. In the end, we are left with only one side of the argument, and because of that the epitath does not make sense.

What is the truth? I’m afraid you may have to do your own research.  

12 Years a Slave (5/5 Stars)

“It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman.”

- Joseph Conrad, Hearts of Darkness

In Joseph Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness, a young British officer travels up the Congolese river to seek out a renegade Colonel named Kurtz. Africa, and this especially undeveloped part of it, was an entirely different world to the educated officer. It is a given in both the story’s authorial voice and in the character itself that the British with all their clothes and technology are superior to the hunter-gatherer savages of Africa. But as the officer contemplates the natives upon seeing them at the start of his journey he is overtaken with a strange discomfort. It isn’t a discomfort born from a sense of racism. No, on the contrary, he recognizes that there is no difference between him and the “savages.” They are obviously of the same species. And this brief acknowledgement of the native’s humanity unnerves him.   

12 Years a Slave, is the third feature by Director Steve McQueen having previously made Hunger and Shame, both collaborations with actor Michael Fassbender. Fassbender in a DVD Bonus feature once referred to McQueen as a man of great empathy. McQueen’s movies are a witness to the truth of that statement. One of the things that make 12 Years a Slave especially remarkable is its treatment of the white characters who are not portrayed as 100% nasty but are allowed brief moments like the one given to the British officer in Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness where they recognize the humanity of those they consider inferior. Apparently this is true not only of McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s autobiography 12 Years a Slave, but of the novel itself. Solomon, born a free man in New York, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, repeatedly put himself in the shoes of his slave masters in his account of the ordeal. (I have said before that Django Unchained treated its slave-owners like the Nazis in Indiana Jones. Here I would argue that 12 Years a Slave treats its slave-owners like the Nazis in Schindler’s List, particularly the Ralph Fiennes character, Amon Goeth) Counter intuitively, this does not make the slave owners look better. In fact, it makes them look far worse. In law, it would be the difference between crimes committed knowingly (like murder) as opposed to unknowingly (mere manslaughter). A character like Leonardo Dicaprio’s deluded and indulgent plantation owner in Django Unchained is not shown making moral choices. He considers only one way of doing things. Here, though, the slave-owners can sense what is morally correct if only in that Huck Finn way of feeling ‘something not quite right in the pit of my stomach.’ Then given the choice of whether or not to recognize the humanity that they sense, they choose not to do it. Their behavior comes off as especially cruel, unnatural, and evil. After all, even if they lived by the moral code of the South, Solomon Northup still deserved to be set free. All he had to do to be released was get a letter to his family back home telling them where he was so they could find him and show the local sheriff his free papers. Even in the South this was all the law needed. What stood in the way was the insidious nature of slavery; an institution that oppresses the slave but also warps the moral constitution of the master. It makes cowards of good men as well as enabling the worst impulses of the evil ones.

Is there anything that Michael Fassbender would not do for Steve McQueen? It is a relationship between actor and director that can only be rivaled by the 70s relationship between De Niro and Scorsese. These are all especially hard performances and it speaks to the enormous amount of trust that Fassbender has in McQueen that he is willing to do them. Fassbender in 12 Years a Slave is taking on one of the most notorious of slave-owners, Edwin Epps, in this role. In a world of systematic cruelty, he somehow stood out as being notably more cruel than usual. One of things that 12 Years a Slave portrays that Django Unchained conveniently sidestepped is the subject of widespread rape. (Not to say Django Unchained was not a brave movie, it just seemed that rape was one too many things to consider. And thus Dicaprio lives with his sister, not a wife.) Rape would be one thing, but as Malcolm X liked to point out, most slave-owners were married. And boy how would you feel as a wife if your husband continually raped his slaves? Could you really bring yourself to think the adultery did not count because the women your husband repeatedly raped were black? And thus is set up the most horrific love triangle in the history of cinema between Master Epps, his wife played by Sarah Paulson, and the slave he is in love with Patsy played by newcomer Lupita Nyong’o.

Patsy is perhaps one of the more remarkable slaves in the world, picking an average rate of 500 pounds of cotton a day. Most men in the field pick around 200 pounds. This among other obvious things captures the attention of Epps, who absolutely hates himself for finding her attractive. He rewards her abilities by continually raping and beating her. His wife, fully aware of his philandering, demands that Epps sell her. He will not do so. The wife, who has no power herself in this ridgidly patriarchal society, responds by making Patsy’s life even more of a living hell. Among other things, she denies her soap for cleaning, cuts her rations, and throws a bottle of hard liquor at her face from point blank range. What can Patsy do about this? Commit suicide? That literally seems to be her only and best option.   

I think it would make sense to go ahead and include 12 Years a Slave within the genre of survival movie that is being exceedingly well represented this year with such movies as Gravity, Captain Phillips, and All is Lost. McQueen’s presentation of slavery Solomon Northup's situation absolutely akin to it. There is an extraordinary scene of Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, being almost lynched by an overseer named Tibault, played by Paul Dano, after a mild disagreement. The lynching is in mid-swing when a second overseer stops Tibault not because, you know, it’s murder, but because Northup is property of a different man named Ford, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Mr. Ford is summoned to make the decision himself. Meanwhile Northup waits all day on his tippy-toes, hands still fastened behind his back, neck still hanging in the noose. In the background all the other slaves go about their business, the situation being that if anybody helped Northup they might be killed as well. Northup may as well be in the middle of the ocean like Old Man Redford or up in space like Sandra Bullock. There is no human community bound by law and order here. All is savage, brutal, and uncaring. 

“Why don’t the black people just rise up and kill the whites?” asks Dicaprio in Django Unchained. Perhaps the fate of one of the newly kidnapped slaves, played by Michael K. Williams, in an ingenious choice of casting, may illustrate the answer to that. Michael K. Williams, best known as one of the more badass characters in TV history, Omar from The Wire, brings up the idea of revolt. He is killed within the space of a couple of minutes. If Omar would last only half a scene, how do you think you would fare? 

All is Lost (3/5 Stars)

Old Man Redford and the Sea

Talk about doing something completely different. Writer/Director J.C. Chandor’s last movie (and also his first feature) was Margin Call, a movie whose brilliance shown through how efficiently and succinctly an absolute ton of exposition could be told almost entirely through dialogue. That movie took place during one climatic night at a big bank where all the different players came together and decided to rip off all their clients and business associates in order to save their own hides. By the end you knew who everyone was, what their function at the bank was, where they came from, and quite a bit about the secondary market of residential home mortgage loans. At the same time, the plot never stalled and the suspense of the main storyline never abated. It was a true achievement in writing netting Chandor his first Oscar Nomination for Original Screenplay.

Contrast that with All is Lost, which has only one character who doesn’t speak at all, unless you count SOS calls, mumbled grunts, and one loud frustrated epithet. Robert Redford plays the man and from now on I will refer to the man as Old Man Redford because the movie does not bother to give him a name. Casting is almost everything in a movie such as this because the writer, at least as a master of dialogue, has essentially written himself out of the story and given the task of making sure what needs to be conveyed is conveyed by the actor. And here Old Man Redford steps up very well with such precision in facial expressions and physical movements that at times it can seem that you are reading Old Man Redford’s mind. One thing that this movie has in common with Margin Call is how effectively information is conveyed (even though it is conveyed in completely opposite ways). It is the sort of display that garners tremendous confidence in the storytelling skills of the director. I look forward to anything Chandor does in the future.

I can’t give anyway any of the plot because so much of the movie is simply procedural storytelling. What you can know is that a shipping container rams into Old Man Redford’s sailboat in the middle of the night causing a big hole in the side and ruining his radio and phone. The rest of the movie he deals with this problem. Given that the enjoyment of the movie comes from witnessing how he deals with it, this will be a rather short vague review. What can be said though is that Old Man Redford, currently 77 years old, should be the talk of all his AARP meetings.

A lot of people are giving Oscar talk for Redford, which may or may not be warranted. I say he’s on the line here. This is the type of performance that I think can be fairly argued is one of those that garners praise because it happened at all, not because it was a great performance. It’s the age that makes it impressive. Old Man Redford is really old. He should not be out in the middle of the Indian Ocean dealing with storm surges. I wonder if anyone on the set was concerned for his mortality during the shooting of the movie. Is that a fair thing to judge a performance on? I mean if a middle-aged actor put on a bunch of old man makeup for the same role and got everything correct, would we think it was just a good of a performance? Or are we giving Old Man Redford more credit because what he is doing is more than ordinary for someone his age.  

There is one other thing that is stopping this very good but small movie from being great and that is competition. Specifically Gravity and Captain Phillips, two very good movies with very much the same themes that came out in the same month. I expect All is Lost to be overshadowed a bit by those two. It should be. The other movies are better. 

Captain Phillips (4/5 Stars)

David v. Goliath except Goliath is the good guy and wins.

“Captain Phillips” the new movie by Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Ultimatum) starts with a conversation between Captain Phillips, played by Tom Hanks, and his wife, played briefly by Catherine Keener, in the car on the way to the airport. They are long married couple with adult children and they have a solemn conversation about how the world is changing fast and how life is not the same for their kids like it was for them. “A man could keep his head down and do his job and he would become a captain in ten years when I started,” says Phillips, “but not anymore.” Life is more complicated and these parents worry about their kids.

In true Greengrass style, this understated conversation that could realistically happen between any married couple with kids foreshadows the incredibly empathetic treatment of the pirating of the Maersk Alabama in 2009 by four Somali pirates. It is a terrifying ordeal for the unarmed American crew that was hijacked by the assault rifle wielding pirates and Greengrass shows in his strict procedural style what was truly suspenseful and dangerous about it. At the same time though, Greengrass does not ignore that the huge container ship was taken over by kids (all the pirates were between 16-18) way way over their heads. The battle of wits between the pirates and Captain Phillips is interlaced at times with a truly paternalistic feel. The kids have picked a fight with Goliath, are supremely unmatched in the long run, and will probably not make it out of the situation alive. Captain Phillips in-between moments of tricking the uncoordinated and untrained pirates with his much larger experience and far better training (along with the training of his crew also well represented in terms of heroism) gives advice to the Somalis, one in particular, a boy named Muse. He tells them several times what the best way to escape alive is almost as if he is giving advice to his own unruly children. Children, that in a far more extreme way than Phillip’s children, are living in a fast changing world (the Somali coast main economy of fishing has been trawled away by richer larger nations) where desperate crazy acts (Muse is commanded to pirate ships by armed warlords) is the difference between a bare-bones type of survival (Muse lives in a small hut with a dirt floor) and, I don’t, maybe starvation and death.  

The unfairness of the fight is demonstrated in particular by the casting of the actors. In a very tense screenplay, the American is played by two-time Oscar Winner Tom Hanks, veteran of such other realistic thrillers like Apollo 13 and Castaway. Muse is played by Barkhad Abdi in his very first movie role. Barkhad is at once frightening and pitiful to behold. Like the pirates who boarded the ship he looks like he is in a daily struggle to eat a decent meal before the day ends. He is rail thin and emaciated. One particular detail the movie contains is that the pirates left on their mission without packing food, something that was apparently routine even though they usually travelled several hundred miles off the coast. What they have instead is khat, a mild narcotic plant that suppresses appetite. Barkhad also has the gaunt eyes of a desperate man. The kind of eyes you really don’t want to see from a person waving a gun at you. Barkhad Abdi though way overmatched on paper meets Tom Hanks scene for scene. And if Tom Hanks does well enough for a Best Actor Oscar nomination (which I believe he does) than Barkhad Abdi does well enough for a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

Real life provides a dramatic ending to this story that Greengrass pulls off most thrillingly. Half way through Captain Phillips gets pulled into the lifeboat with the Somali pirates as they make their escape from the ship. It is a fool’s errand because the lifeboat goes really slow and the Somali piloting it doesn’t really know how to steer. They also won’t open up the hatch to allow air to circulate because Phillips suggested it and they don’t want to be tricked again. Captain Phillips and the four increasingly desperate and starved pirates spend so much time getting very slowly that there is enough time for a third of the US Navy and Seal Team Six to show up for the party. The last third of the movie is like a sequel to Zero Dark Thirty. Seal Team Six executes with extreme professionalism an operation in a very risky situation with incredible and effective precision. The Somalis just get absolutely stomped.

“Captain Phillips” is a very American movie. By that I mean that Paul Greengrass handling of the story is an expression of what makes the American movie superior (as opposed to say a Soviet or Chinese movie). The Somali’s may have been far out-matched by American military might, but Greengrass gives them equal treatment as characters in his story. He provides their background and explores their motivations. How easily the pirates could have been just a bunch of dumb bad guys in a piece of “us v. them” propaganda that did nothing more than demonstrate US military superiority. But Greengrass is a true American. He has respect for the underdog, that distinctly American storytelling trait.

Machete Kills (3/5 Stars)

Back from the Dead with an Unexpectedly Entertaining Third Act

Writer/Director Robert Rodriguez is back with Danny Trejo as Machete, the ex-CIA, ex-FBI, ex-DEA, ex-federale turned illegal immigrant day laborer turned outlaw turned ICE agent. The character Machete by definition works better in two-minute trailers rather than two-hour movies. His main characteristics are looking like Danny Trejo (best described by one critic as, “a man who had a staring contest with the sun and won”) never dying and killing people. He had his start in a fake movie trailer accompanying Rodriguez’s zombie masterpiece “Planet Terror.” (I’m basically the only one who calls that movie a masterpiece and am trying to spread the word). Machete is a man of few words and, given Danny Trejo’s impending old age, works better when he stands still and glares and less when he actually fights people. In the end, what makes, “Machete Kills” ultimately worth seeing is a few other characters namely Michelle Rodriguez’s “She” (pronounced like “Che” of Guevera fame) and the new bad/crazy guy Mel Gibson. Unfortunately the entrances of these two characters come in the movie’s third act. Before that the movie slogs a bit in the territory of so-bad-it’s-bad before ultimately triumphing in a satisfying so-bad-it’s-good ending.

The badness of the first two acts of “Machete Kills” needs a detour into an education in the Grindhouse genre in order to fully explain. For those unacquainted a “Grindhouse” movie are B movies that promise sex and violence and nothing else. By definition these movies can’t be great in the classic sense (say ‘Citizen Kane’) but they can succeed, and some succeed spectacularly, in never being boring. Robert Rodriguez, that very underrated American treasure of a director, specializes in elevating this type of movie from B-level trash into high art (Sin City, Planet Terror). But just because they are not good in the classic sense does not mean that they automatically find themselves within the so-bad-it’s-good genre. Rodriguez doesn’t make bad movies per se. He makes good Grindhouse movies. Let’s use some of Rodriguez’s previous work as the gold standard of this type of movie we can give some guidelines to further elaborate on this tricky area of cinema. 

First the action and plot must move fast. The Grindhouse format is especially conducive to this in that plot holes are usually present. However in a good Grindhouse picture the plot hole should resemble a short cut that propels the story forward faster than it normally would in a regular picture. A great example is the ‘Missing Reel’ in Planet Terror that lands the audience in the middle of a battle thereby skipping the needless part of the enemy actually showing up to the fight. Also given that the plot does not need to make perfect sense, it might as well be sensational. “Machete Kills” involves drug cartels in jungle castles and a nuclear bomb aimed at Washington D.C. That is good so far. Unfortunately “Machete Kills” clocks in at around two hours. There is too much here and later I will give an example of what to cut. These movies really should be no more than 90 minutes.

Second, the action does not have to be realistic but it does have to be novel. In other words, it doesn’t matter how many people die or how gory it is just as long as the way they die is surprising and dare I say, clever. This is basically what makes a great Grindhouse movie fun to watch. The creative love that is put into the violence evidences something more in the maker than simply sadism. This detail is also what separates a great Grindhouse movie (like Raimi’s Evil Dead series) from the torture porn genre (Saw series). In a way that makes “Machete Kills” different from “Machete” is that there is a sizably less amount of cleverness that goes into the action sequences. In “Machete Kills” there are far too many scenes where opposing forces show up across open spaces and fire machine guns at each other. By too many scenes I basically mean more than one. There was only one in “Machete,” and it worked fantastically by itself. I suspect that because this is a sequel Rodriguez may have felt that he had to start off where he left off and started with machine guns instead of going back to the workable formula in “Planet Terror” and “Machete” of hand-to-hand combat than melee weapons than guns and than finally a big ass gun battle. “Machete” has good gags (I especially liked how Machete how defused a bomb in midair while riding it) but went on autopilot a few too many times.

Third a great Grindhouse movie has to like its women characters. By “like” I don’t mean that they have to do nice things or dress conservatively. What I mean is that there has to be more to them than just skimpy clothing and a bad attitude. Or to put it another way: it has to be a role that the actress playing it would obviously enjoy playing or at least find challenging in a professional sense. This is a particularly important guideline given the immense amount of Grindhouse and horror movies that employ their women characters to do nothing but scream and die in terrible ways. Rodriguez in general does well by his actresses, not an easy thing to do given the thin line he is walking in this genre. (Again take a look at Rose McGowan in “Planet Terror”). In “Machete Kills” I think he does well by Lady Gaga and Michelle Rodriguez who have memorable/badass fight scene. He does okay by Amber Heard who could have had more to do. But one character is not treated well and that is the sadistic bordello madame played by Sofia Vergara from TV’s Modern Family. She tries to kill Machete with her Double Ds, a type of machine gun that doubles as a bra (try not to think about where the ammo comes from). The problem is not the Double Ds. The problem is that there really is not much to the character besides that. She has no good lines and is routinely frustrated in not so clever ways in battle. Rodriguez should have just cut the whole subplot. It didn’t work and without it the movie would be the correct length.

In the “Machete” series Rodriguez has done something that is not really necessary according to my made up guidelines but is ultimately interesting to watch and that is his stunt casting. Rodriguez goes out of his way to employ actors/actresses who are unemployable due to career ending scandals. In the first movie he cast Lindsay Lohan (multiple arrests for disorderly conduct) and Steven Seagall (famously awful actor in terrible movies). In this movie we are treated to Charlie Sheen as Carlos Esteves (“Winning!”) and Mel Gibson (stuff I’m not about to write here). Unlike Lindsay and Seagall, Carlos and Mel are actually good actors and they do remarkably well playing the President of the United Stated and Crazy Bad Guy named Voz respectively. Truly Rodriguez is a kindhearted man who is always willing to give the fallen from grace a second chance to redeem themselves in movies that contain ridiculous amounts of violence and bad taste. 

There must be something to say about Rodriguez’s political consciousness. It is present in the ‘Machete’ movies even if they are just throwaway motivations for characters than actual lucid political arguments about illegal immigration and drug war policy. Still it makes an admirer wonder what Rodriguez could do if he actually attempted to make a serious movie about these topics. I’m sure he could do it. I’m also sure he would do it only if he really really wanted to do it. I can’t think of another director who seems to make movies purely for his own enjoyment and the enjoyment of his family (an example is the Spy Kids franchise. Rodriguez is the only filmmaker I know of that would make a feature length film based on the story idea of his five-year-old child.) He seems to be completely divorced from the type of greed that would induce him to make his films more mainstream or the type of awards acclaim that would make him choose more conventional subjects for his art. I like this guy a lot.  

For those of you with keen eyes you may also spy the Crazy Babysitter Twins and Rodriguez’s actual doctor (who looks like he’s lost a good deal of weight). They don’t have much to say in this movie though they were part of the group of characters taken into space on Crazy Bad Guy’s rocket ship in anticipation of the next movie. The title of that one is “Machete Kills Again…IN SPACE.” And yes I am very interested in seeing that as well.