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. 

Gravity (5/5 Stars)

Gravity is why I love movies. Wow Wow Wow!

“Gravity,” the much-anticipated next feature of Director Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men, Prisoner of Azkaban, Y Tu Mama Tambien) meets expectations of goodness and powerfully surges past them into the realm of greatness. How great is this movie? I have no idea. And I don’t mean that facetiously. In many areas this movie is beyond the critique of lowly me. After all, how can I judge the technical aspects of a movie when I must admit that I have no idea how the majority of the movie was made? How did they do that? How??? Whatever the next step from Avatar was, this is it. See it in IMAX. See it in 3D. Please see it now while it is still in theaters.

The plot is very simple. Several astronauts are on a space shuttle mission to reservice the Hubble Telescope. On the space walk outside the shuttle are veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and rookie astronaut Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock). Before anything even happens, the movie is a visual marvel. The view of Earth from space is fully realized. The laws of zero gravity and angular momentum are present in such a real way it makes a mockery of almost every other movie that takes place in space. (A great example is how in regular space movies, spaceships always seem to be stationary while in orbit. In “Gravity,” everything conforms to the reality that everything is moving at a blindingly fast rate around the earth.) It is made fully clear how close to death the astronauts are even before the real danger closes in. There is no air to breath around them. The temperature fluctuates from fatally hot to fatally cold. There is no sound. As we are told in a title before the movie, Life in Space is impossible.

Then disaster does strike. And how. As they are fixing the telescope, the astronauts are informed that a Russians have shot down one of their satellites in an exercise not meant to have any effect on the American mission. Unfortunately the debris from the first explosion hits a different satellite and causes a chain reaction that sends shrapnel towards the Americans. Much worse than that is the fact that the shrapnel is going much faster than the American shuttle or the International Space Station or Chinese Space Station. What this means since nothing in space ever slows down is that after hitting the astronauts a first time, the shrapnel will be back again in 90 minutes having gone all the way around the world and back.

The shrapnel hits the American space shuttle and the Hubble telescopic causing catastrophic damage. You may have seen all the science fiction movies ever made but you have never seen anything like this. Director Alfonso Cuaron continues his career long quest to take advantage of the suspense of real time. What that means is that he likes using long takes. Very long takes. Like the entire shrapnel attack is shown in one continuous shot. I haven’t the slightest idea how this was done. All I know is that someone somewhere was doing some serious physics work in a back room somewhere because everything happens with no movie magic cheating whatsoever. The result is absolutely terrifically horrific.

A long shot needs to be used correctly for the very reason that they are so impressive. Since they require much coordination they draw attention to themselves. Because of this, there needs to be a storytelling reason to use them lest the film literate believe its presence has more to do with the indulgent whims of an egotistical director going ‘look what I can do!’ Here, however, because they are used so frequently and in such a situation where obviously almost everything in the screen is not real (it looks very real but we must know they did not shoot this in space) any obviously indulgent exercises are impossible to find. I could not tell how they did these shots or even when they began or when they ended, so instead I focused on the story, which is what a long shot in the hands of a masterful director should do. In that way the directing truly complemented the movie in the best possible way. I would be absolutely gob-smacked if someone other than Alfonso Cuaron won the Oscar for Best Directing this year. And whatever category is responsible for everything else (Cinematography or Visual Effects or Production Design?) should be locks as well.

It what is a one-man show for most of the movie is Sandra Bullock, who finds herself in the best role of already impressive career. As an incredibly human counterpoint to the absurdly calm-under-immense-pressure presence of George Clooney (an actually realistic portrayal of a veteran astronaut, the astrophysicist Neil Degrasse-Tyson assures us), she provides the audience with the much relatable panic of someone thrown out into the vastness of space all alone. To make matters worse, she is thrown out into space going head over heels in a spin and, of course, as this is space and this movie has done it’s homework, the whole spinning head over heels never stops. Holy Cow. The rest of the movie deals with Dr. Ryan Stone trying to get her shit together under the enormous pressure of imminent death. At the core of the movie is an incredibly human theme of what it means to not quit on life in the worst of circumstances. I’m not giving any more of the plot away suffice to say you may find yourself unconsciously gripping the chairs of the theater seats as if your life depended on it.

Really all that is missing from this movie is a scene at the end where Stone shows up at mission control and everyone applauds. That is the only thing I felt this movie needed by the end: Thunderous applause. 

Don Jon's Addiction (4/5 Stars)

I’ve been reading a lot of old books by old people and some new books about old people lately. Old like anything before the 20^th century old. It is a bit stunning how they articulate interpersonal relationships. Take for instance an ordinary letter between family members or between lovers. They are unabashedly incredibly romantic in language and verse. Move a little bit closer to the present day and consider a run of the mill rock and roll song from the 1950s and 1960s. They surely were not as serious as 19^th century letters but the musicians really seemed to like the person the song was about. Nowadays songs are more than likely to resemble some sort of revenge straight from the fallout of a bad breakup or yet another skirmish in an ongoing bad romance directed more toward a mass audience counting points than to the other person involved. We’ve lost something that much is for sure.

There’s probably plenty of blame to go around. For my money, I think the main difference is the far less present specter of death. Back then, people dropped like flies all the time with an astounding amount of women and children kicking the bucket from childbirth complications. Just dead people and babies everywhere. I think that’s why way they took relationships with the still living so seriously.

Compare that with today, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s writing/directing debut “Don Jon’s Addiction” is a good example, where it seems that people convinced of their ability to live long lives without any true drama are trying their best to take themselves and others as unserious as possible. This movie is now called “Don Jon” instead of the previous title “Don Jon’s Addiction” ever since the marketers got their grubby hands on it. But “Don Jon’s Addiction” is a better title. It makes it clear that this is not the raping/murdering evil lothario we’ve seen before in operas and plays. This is a modern Don Jon that unabashedly takes part in a far more benign promiscuous practice. This Don Jon likes pornography. He likes it a lot. 

Don Jon is played by the writer/director himself, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in a part that is very much against type. JGL over an already long career has proven himself adept at playing smart and cool customers (Brick, Inception, Looper). Don Jon is anything but that. The first thing you will notice is that JGL spent a bit of time in the gym for this one. He has especially bulked up around the shoulders to pull off the look of one of that guy in the club who spends his time with his buddies rating women 1-10 (a ten being a ‘dime’) and cultivating a streak of a different woman every week. Don Jon is especially adept at doing this. He looks good, has a nice pad, but most importantly acts like a complete buffoon. That last one because it is the main ingredient. One-night stands are hard things to pull off when the other person takes you seriously. JGL, the writer, seems to really get this and the movie is strongest when he pits his character up against a ‘dime’ played by Scarlett Johansson.  Both are smart people but as this is a modern relationship, the conversations consist of them taking turns trying to out stupid the other. The first date is especially a delight as it is a clever exercise in unassuming immaturity.

But do not let the characters fool you into thinking the movie itself is lightweight. “Don Jon’s Addiction,” is a movie of ideas even if its characters are not all that articulate. JGL has actual things to say about the unrealistic expectations of modern men that watch too much porn and of modern women who watch touch-feely romantic comedies, i.e. Scarlett Johansson, a grown woman, has a poster of “Titanic” in her room. It is to JGL’s credit not only that he took on an admittedly edgy subject but also that he does it in a reasonably well fashion. I had not seen this particular fight between a couple before and was not annoyed by it one bit. In this movie, I was impressed by that much.

Having said that, this is not a perfect movie, for as well as JGL captures the immaturity of modern romance, when he pivots the story towards a mature relationship with a woman, played by Julianne Moore, that Don Jon meets at night school the footing is far less sure. What was certainty in behavior turns to guesses. They are good guesses at least. For instance, the Julianne Moore character is a widow. So death will make a romance more serious, but can JGL explain why, or has he simply watched enough movies to know that the most sympathetic characters in screenwriting are widows.

More suspect is his decision to have Don Jon come from a blue collar Italian family. These scenes, involving none other than Tony Danza as a cursing football watching ball buster of a father who likes to eat spaghetti dinners in a wife beater, are played for comic relief at best. As before the inspiration seems to come less from real life than from movies that feature blue-collar Italian families. I’m thinking less “The Sopranos” and more “Saturday Night Fever.” I don’t think JGL is Italian. Of course, I don’t have a blue collar Italian family but I can say this at least; he got the Catholic Church wrong. Don Jon goes to church and confession every single week and yet at the end of the movie there is a joke with a punch line consisting of the character not knowing the local priest’s name on the other side of the screen. That’s simply not believable. It is the type of joke that would only be funny if you were not acquainted with the subject matter.

But over all, this is a good movie with enough laughs to sustain an enjoyable experience and enough technical proficiency and creativity to make the movie buff interested in what JGL could accomplish next. He was a bit uneven at times and swung for the fences a few more times than was necessary but I see plenty of potential. Anyway, it was his first time.