Birdman (5/5 Stars)

Or: The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance

When Roger Ebert came upon a long shot in a movie he applied the Goodfellas standard to it. This standard referred to Martin Scorsese’s famous shot of Henry Hill taking out his girlfriend to the local nightclub. The shot starts with Hill handing his car keys to the valet and then taking his girl past the long line outside the club into a backdoor through the kitchen (he slips several guys $20 each) and into the main club area where the proprietor brings out a special table just for him and plants it in the front right next to the band. Hill sits down and his friends at the next table buy him a bottle of wine. The shot ends at 3 minutes 13 seconds. Subsequent filmmakers, inspired by Goodfellas, attempted such long shots of their own and Ebert was continually dismayed by what he saw. The copycats got the technicalities correct but missed the point. What made the long shot in Goodfellas great was not that it took a lot of skill and coordination to pull it off (it did), but that it was the correct way to tell the story. Scorsese was relating to the audience how Henry Hill’s position in the mafia opened doors to him that were closed to regular people. The best way to show that would be how quickly he could get a seat in a crowded at the Copacabana in real time. Add on that the song that played over the entire shot, The Crystal’s “Then He Kissed Me,” and the audience also gets a great idea of how his girlfriend felt about the whole thing, i.e. she was super impressed by it. The long shot in Goodfellas is not a showoffy ‘look what I can do with a camera’ conceit. It is the story. That is what makes a long shot great or not great. After all if just making the shooting process as hard as possible were what made it great, then Hitchcock’s “Rope” is the king of long shots (the entire 90 minute movie only has four takes). But it isn’t and you don't really need to see “Rope.” Hitchcock was just playing around with his camera to see if he could do it. There was no reason that movie needed to be told that way.

Which brings us to Director Alejandro Innaritu and Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s “Birdman,” which is not unlike Rope. I mention the cinematographer because he happens to be the best in the business. He works with Terrance Malick (Tree of Life and To the Wonder) and Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men and Gravity) and this is not the first time he has worked in incredibly long shots. In other movies though the long shots generally concerned action scenes. (The point of long shots in action scenes is to give a more realistic ‘you are there!’ momentum to what is happening on the screen. If you have ever seen ‘Children of Men’ and ‘Gravity’ you will know what I mean.) But ‘Birdman’ is not an action movie. It is a story about Riggan Thompson a washed up movie star who was last culturally relevant a quarter century ago when he played the very popular comic book character ‘Birdman.’ He enjoyed great success as ‘Birdman’ but soon became unable to do anything else. When he refused to do “Birdman 4,” his career went down the tubes. Now he is staging an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” on Broadway. He is desperately trying to become a serious artist again and is fighting against the widespread notion that he is a cartoon character and can’t be anything else.

Now why does this need to be shot in one continuous long shot (It is and it is very technically impressive but nevermind let’s apply the Goodfellas standard). Well, the surprise answer is something I have never seen a long shot in a movie ever accomplish. Surprisingly the way the long shots in this movie are used, they actually take the focus off of what the director is doing and allow the audience to focus much more on the actors. It is really kind of exhilarating. Wactching ‘Birdman,’ a movie about people putting on a play, actually feels like a play. It is even written like a play. By that I mean that characters provide through dialogue much more exposition than usual and at other times go into emotional monologues and speeches at length the way that is generally impossible in movie time. You may have noticed that a three hour play basically feels the same length as a two-hour movie. The whole ‘being there’ aspect of a play elongates the audience’s patience whereas movies generally need to move much faster. But here, because of the extraordinarily skilfull camera of Lubezki, the momentum of the long take gives the actors far more leeway for dramatic performances. And boy, do the cast in the movie rise to the occasion. There is some serious throw down acting in this movie and it occurs all the way through it.

Anchoring the movie as Riggan Thomas is none other than Michael Keaton who if you remember him at all you probably remember him as the Tim Burton era Batman. The role is so perfectly tailored to Keaton’s life (his career did have a downturn after he stopped being Batman) that it provokes the question of whether the movie was inspired by him. Probably not but he is the perfect casting decision on paper and it turns out as well in practice. It is a great performance and should be a cinch for an Oscar nomination. Certainly nobody this year has done “more” acting in a movie. Playing against him as his main antagonist (among many) is Edward Norton as one of those crazy method ‘actors’ that throw fits when they drink water instead of gin in a scene when they are supposed to be drinking f*cking gin. Then there is Zach Galifinakis as Riggan’s best friend, agent, and producer. Zach plays the sane one in this movie, a choice that reminded me of the casting of Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The movie is crazy, so why not cast a crazy comedian as the serious one. It works. I liked it. Rounding out the cast is Naomi Watts (a long time actress and newcomer to Broadway), Emma Stone (who has huge eyes), Andrea Riseborough, and Amy Ryan (divorcee of Riggan). All of them do good jobs even if they don’t get the really big moments like for instance running through Times Square in only underwear with a marching band in the distance. Someone does that, won’t tell you who.

‘Birdman’ is a seamless auditory and visual experience. There is an element of magic in the movie that is not fully explained but after awhile does not really need to be. It feels correct and is fairly understood as an extension of the scene’s emotional tone. There are plenty of details that lend to the overall otherworldliness of the movie. A couple of great ones cherry picked from the movie include the fog machines, the Christmas lights at the liquor store, a Japanese critic, and a certain quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth at precisely the right time. Birdman is a must see movie. It is one of the best of the year and should at least net Lubezki’s 2^nd Oscar in as many years.

Foxcatcher (4/5 Stars)

The general rule for movies based on true stories is not how closely they follow the facts. That is the job of journalism. No, the general rule is whether the movie would be any good if it were completely fictional. And this strange and sad story of the richest convicted murderor in history, John Dupont, and his relationship with the U.S. Greco-Roman wrestling team, particularly the Olympic champion brothers Mark and David Schultz, does not need to actually be true to be effective. It is fully realized within itself. I suspect the most egregious violation of the true story may be the movie’s condensed time span, which makes it look like all the events took place within a couple of years (take a look at Dave Schulz’s ungrowing kids). Actually the real events took place over a decade, but I feel the makers (Director Bennet Miller et al.) made the right decision in glossing over that. It gives the psychological underpinnings of the tragedy more momentum. This is a very good if hard to watch movie. Hard to watch in the correct way, that is. I will elaborate on that phrase a bit later.

This is a great character study with a trio of great performances by some unlikely actors. Not that we did not know that Steve Carell and Channing Tatum could act. We saw some glimmers of that in Little Miss Sunshine for Carell and a trio of Soderberg movies for Tatum. But we have Oscar worthy transformation happening in Foxcatcher and I suspect most of the critical conversation around this movie will focus intently on just how good are these performances.

Let’s start with the Olympic wrestling brothers Schultz, Mark and David, played by Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo respectively. The most impressive thing right out of the gate is the spot on physicality of the Greco-Roman wrestling practices and matches. I took a year of wrestling in high school so I was looking to see if they got it right. They did and you know how you could tell? There is this great introduction to the brothers as they spar in a practice room. The shot is unbroken and lasts at least a minute or two. By the end of the shot both Channing and Mark are breathing heavily. That’s Greco Roman wrestling for you. It is the most quickly exhausting sport ever invented. Imagine what it would have been like to shoot take after take of any of these scenes. Here Channing is doing some extra overtime heavy lifting. (Mark has no match scenes). Physical performances are generally unnoticed as good acting. For instance, using Channing Tatum’s own career, I don’t recall any critics that praised his dancing in Magic Mike as skillful acting. Well I do and Tatum’s performance here is one of those performances I believe the vast majority of actors in the business would not be able to do. And the physicality of Channing really does matter because the character is extremely introverted and inarticulate. The background of Mark Schultz is one of isolation and alienation. His father left when he was two years old. He moved around the country constantly. He then followed his older brother into wrestling and may have excelled at it dramatically but the sport happens to be unpopular, unwatched, and not even paid. We are introduced to this gold medal winner collecting a $20 check for talking to a grade school classroom of kids about the Olympics. He has to tell the principal to make the check out to Mark Schultz, not Dave Schultz, because Dave is sick and Mark is substituting for him. “We both won gold,” Mark lamely explains. Mark goes back to his one room apartment where he eats Ramen alone.

And then the phone rings and we are introduced to Steve Carell’s version of eccentric millionaire John Dupont. John Dupont happens to be a fan of Greco-Roman wrestling. And since he inherited his millions and has no job, he has taken it upon himself to be the head coach of United States Wrestling. He is neither a wrestler nor a coach but he has a lot of money and is more than willing to pay top dollar for the nation’s best wrestlers. He phrases his desires in patriotic terms. This is good for America. I am a great man of vision. We need to take this country back. Mark Schultz, so obviously marginalized by society, becomes a true believer of sorts. Yes, he will move there and together they will put together a great wrestling team, the best in the world.

John Dupont’s childhood was disturbingly odd. His father left him at two years old. His mother raised him (along with a retinue of servants) at the gigantic Foxcatcher estate. His only friend was a kid his mother paid to hang out with him. John’s mother raises horses. Greco-Roman wrestling has to be the exact opposite sport from equestrian. That should explain quite a bit right there about their relationship. In one telling scene, John’s mother comes over to the gym to watch a practice. Normally John Dupont would just watch the practices, but here he calls all the world-class wrestlers over into a circle and proceeds to teach them Wrestling 101, that is until his mother leaves the room.

Steve Carell’s performance is hard to watch, much like it is hard to be around a person who obviously has no idea how to interact socially with other human beings. Not only has Dupont been isolated from most other living beings all his life his situation is compounded by never having encountered anyone on a level playing basis. He is automatically in charge due to the fact that he is the employer of everyone in the room. The result is a grotesque caricature of a human, someone whose personality feels like you are watching a train wreck in slow motion. Mix in the drugs, alcohol, and guns that Dupont has regular access to and the result is tragedy that in retrospect seems painfully obvious. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the story is that Mark and John get along for at least the first couple of years. They are utterly lost people being lost together.

The one sane person is Dave Schultz (played by Mark Ruffalo). Unlike his brother, he got married and had kids once he became an adult. That probably did a lot in making him a regular person. He goes to work for John Dupont to after a couple of years, the money being too good to turn down. But the heart of this story is how he finagles for his brother a way out of the damaging influence of Dupont. Mark, looking for a father figure, is pshycologically stricken when the man he has chosen starts abusing him in various ways. The most dramatic result of this is a scene that reminded me of Robert De Niro’s performance in Raging Bull, arguably the greatest acting performance ever. You will know what I mean. And then Dave Schultz comes in the room and puts his brother back together the only way a truly centered and empathetic person can. It’s kind of beautiful and John Dupont never truly gets Mark back. John Dupont once again loses his only friend in the world. Everyone deserves a nomination. That’s one for Carell, Tatum, and Ruffalo. This is the best-acted movie of the year so far.

Interstellar (4/5 Stars)

Whatever can happen, will happen.

Young Murphy Cooper (Mackenzie Foy) asks her father (Matthew McConaughey) why she was named after something bad. Her father replies that Murphy’s Law is not necessarily pessimistic. All it means is that (given enough time) anything that can happen will happen. The pessimistic side of this looks at chaotic unforgiving nature and all the ways it can and will disrupt the best plans of mice and men. But look at it in another light. For instance, if you believed that humans could adapt to anything, well then, given enough time our species should be able to solve any problem that the universe throws at it. Of course, the supposition that must be true is that human beings actually could someday evolve to be capable of anything, even going so far as to say master space and time. That is a wildly optimistic notion and it is surprising to come from writer Jonathan Nolan and director Christopher Nolan particularly since their non-Batman movies have been great explorations of self-delusion (memory in Memento, magic in The Prestige, dreams in Inception). But here it is, and it is a good thing the Nolan’s are in charge of this project because I’m not sure anybody else could have made it. It is perhaps the most expensive and epic intellectual exercise since Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and only the Nolan’s have the box office clout to finance a movie like this. Try to see it in the theater because it is not going make any sense on a small screen.

The movie starts with humans on Earth confronted with the extinction of their species. It takes place about fifty years from now. Old Man Cooper (played by John Lithgow) talks of how when he was a kid it seemed like everyday something new would be invented. Imagine that, six billion people all wanting it all at the same time. But something happened in nature. There is this dust storm blight that kills vegetation. The only crop that can grow now is corn. The blight feeds on all the Nitrogen in the atmosphere and every year it creates more Nitrogen, which only makes the blight even stronger. Population has dropped. Technology has stuttered. Pretty soon humanity won’t even be able to grow corn and then everyone will die.

The last ditch effort of humanity is a secret NASA mission led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) to send a spaceship through a wormhole that has just been discovered near Saturn to a distant galaxy where hopefully there is another planet that can sustain human life. Matthew McConaughey, a retired pilot, is chosen for the job. So is Professor Brand’s daughter, Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway), two other guys, and a couple of sentient robots named TARS and KASE. TARS has a humor setting in his A.I. and provides comic relief.

It is a very long journey and one of the most interesting conceits of this story is its portrayal of Einstein’s theory of relativity. One facet of this theory is that as one approaches the speed of light, the slower time goes for the mover. Another is that proximity to a black hole also slows down time for the mover. At one point in the movie a trip to a planet near a black hole that takes merely hours takes many years on Earth. And suddenly Murph Cooper is no longer played by the ten-year-old Mackenzie Foy but by the thirty-something Jessica Chastain. (It should be noted how remarkably similar Mackenzie and Jessica look like each other). I saw a great meme with a picture of Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar that harked back to his first movie, Dazed and Confused, where he uttered the memorable line, “You know what I like about high school girls. Each year I get older but they stay the same age.” Of course this meme changed it a little bit. Now it reads, “You know what I like about my children. Each year they get older, but I stay the same age.”

Then there is a cameo by a well-known actor that I hesitate the mention because none of the advertisment material apparently wanted me to know about before he shows up quite unexpectedly. It is a great turn by that unnamed person. Matthew McConaughey continues his bewildering streak of very good movies. The same can be said for Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. And of course, it looks very impressive, the Black Hole and Wormhole especially. 

I don’t think I can say anymore without ruining some of the surprises. It is worth seeing, that is all. 

Rosewater (4/5 Stars)

The hook of this story was all so irresistible. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the many award winning fake news show on Comedy Central, sent a correspondent named Jason Jones to Iran on the even of the 2009 Iranian elections. While there he interviewed a British-Iranian journalist named Maziar Bahari who tried to convince Jason, comedically dressed as a spy, that Iranians were not evil and that Americans and Iranians had plenty in common. I remember seeing that segment in 2009. And then shit went down in Iran. Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, rigged the elections and the following street protests went viral. Several months later we find out that Maziar Bahari was jailed without due process after the elections. He was accused of being a spy and provoking civil disorder through the Western media. What was some of the evidence against him? Well, the Daily Show segment that showed him talking to Jason Jones dressed up as a spy. Maziar wrote a book about it titled, “Then They Came for Me.” Jon Stewart offered to help to make it a movie, tried to get other people to do it, and then after finding that people in Hollywood were busy, decided to just write and direct it himself. After almost thirty years in the business, this is Stewart’s directorial debut.

But of course Jon Stewart has enough sense to know this story is not about The Daily Show. That may be the hook and Jason Jones does show up to play himself for about a minute, but this is a story about Maziar Bahari and Iran. The Daily Show’s importance to this story is not exaggerated. It may even be diminished by Stewart’s ever-humble view of his show’s popularity and influence. He is as ever the opposite of the arrogant self-important culture warrior of Fox News, Bill O’Reilly.

This is a very interesting movie; avant-garde is almost a perfect word for it. I hesitate to use that word because you probably are going to start thinking of black and white French movies, but let me explain. It has a very simple photographic style. The palette of the movie is not unlike a Paul Greengrass movie (Bloody Sunday, United 93, Bourne Ultimatum) so it has a true documentary style feel to its movement and an almost non-existent directorial style. The acting also is simple and direct. Lastly the production value does not add anything more than what you would see in real life. But at the same time it makes rather extraordinary choices in digital effects. For instance, during the 2009 election demonstrations, the movie employs digital twitter art to show that the streets are alive with social media. At another time as Maziar Bahari (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) walks down the street, the storefront windows start showing memories from his past concurrently with an explanatory voiceover. These are odd show-offy effects movements that have been seemingly dropped out of the sky in what is otherwise a very non show-offy movie. The same goes for the editing style of the movie, which freely employs flashbacks and jump cuts. I’m not saying it did not work because I don’t think they were too disruptive to the tone but they were at least a little. Then again, at other times the avant-garde choices really do work. For instance, in solitary confinement Maziar has several imaginary talks with his father and sister who were also imprisoned for political activism in their time. So John just goes ahead and puts real actors in the jail cell with Maziar and has them talk like they are really there. At another point he decides to play Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love,” in the jail cell like it is really there. That was sublime. All of this is the effect of having a person who doesn’t really know how to make movies (but really knows how to communicate with an audience in the medium) be at the helm for the first time. The decisions make sense but they also feel like they were dropped from space. This is an odd little movie.

But what ultimately makes the movie worth seeing is the humor and empathy it employs towards its subject, several months of solitary imprisonment and interrogation that borders on torture. You would not think it by looking at it but the title of the movie is a joke. It refers to the cologne that Maziar’s interrogator always wore. Apparently this middle-aged somewhat portly balding tough guy thought he should smell like a rose all the time. Little details like this fill the movie. The start itself owes a bit to Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial.’ That is, Maziar (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) is woken from his sleep by several men including Rosewater (played by Kim Bodnia) and is taken off to prison with no warning or explanation. There is no due process of law. He gets no phone call or lawyer. They make it clear that they will not let him go unless he confesses that he acted in concert with foreign spies. Now here is where Jon Stewart and Maziar Bahari make it interesting. Where a normal movie would treat the character of the interrogator as a one dimensional zeolot of Iranian ideology, this movie treats Rosewater as simply a bureaucrat who is just doing his job. In one scene we see him call his wife to let her know when he is getting home. In another he hopes for a promotion if he gets Maziar to confess. In another great scene, Rosewater’s boss comes into the room to show him how to interrogate this particular type of prisoner. Maziar, an educated professional, is a bit above Rosewater’s pay grade. He usually beats up uneducated poor people. Here Rosewater is directed to get a confession by using his head and not his fists. Maziar needs to get on TV and admit his guilty without any obvious signs of torture. Rosewater is not really up to the task and it is kind of sad actually. Especially in a couple funny scenes where Maziar takes advantage of Rosewater’s obviously repressed sexuality. This is a great performance by Kim Bodnia and I hope he is gets an Oscar nomination out of it.

At the same time though, the character of Maziar is taken out of the culture war as well. In one great scene he has a discussion with his father who was imprisoned and tortured by the Shah in the 1950s because he was a devout communist. His father does not want his son to admit guilt and to stay strong. Maziar retorts that he has a wife that is pregnant with his child. Would he deprive them of a husband and father for an ideology? Wasn’t his father’s imprisonment and torture based on the Soviet system of imprisonment and torture? What loyalty does Maziar have to any ideology when almost all of them are headed by total assholes that imprison and torture people? This is a sentiment I’m sure bares influence from Jon Stewart whose show on Comedy Central is guided by the strong insight that although the national dialogue may be controlled by the yelling and shouting of unnecessarily provocative pundits and ideologues, the vast majority of people are preoccupied with their own lives and shit, are willing to cooperate and compromise with those they have differences with to make daily life easier, and share a general hope that the idiots in charge don’t fuck up their lives too much. And Maziar probably agrees with that too. Hey that’s another thing we may have in common with Iranians. 

Fury 3/5 Stars

‘Fury’ purports to be one type of movie, does it exceedingly well, and right at the moment of truth blindsides the audience with an incredulous conclusion that has no right whatsoever to be in a movie of its type. This movie is intended to be a serious movie about a very specific place and time, the invasion of Germany in World War II by Allied tank divisions. War is hell, the movies shows. Hitler, the ultimate asshole, refuses to give up a lost cause going so far as to start conscripting German children into the army and hanging those that refuse to fight. The allied tanks roll past hanging corpses of kids with placards hung on them that read ‘Coward.’ The other children have guns and so the Allies have to kill them themselves.

As most war movies feel they sort of must do, we are introduced into one particular tank division through the eyes of a green youngster by the name of Norman (Logan Lerman).  Get it? Norman equals Normal Man. This is a cliché but not a particularly bad one. After all I don’t know anything about tank warfare or warfare in general and sort of need a character to identify with. The tank division is led by Wardaddy (Brad Pitt). He has a tight knit group of gritty comrades. Among them are Grady ‘Coon-ass’ Travis (Jon Bernthal), Trini ‘Gordo’ Garcia (Michael Pena), and Boyd ‘Bible’ Swan (a nicely non-annoying Shia Lebouf). You will get to know these guys as well as you can possibly get to know guys in war in a two hour movie, that is, pretty well. The movie, which is serious, shows them dirty, drunk, vile, prone to epithets, and perfectly willing to take advantage of desperate poverty stricken german women, which very much happened during the war, all over the place. At one point after Norman conscientiously refuses to shoot dead bodies on the ground to make sure they are dead, Wardaddy takes him over to a real life German prisoner of war and orders him to shoot him in the back. ‘I made a promise to get my men out of the war alive, and you are making it harder for me to make good on that promise,’ Wardaddy tells him matter of factly before forcibly putting the gun in Norman’s hands and making him pull the trigger. A little hardhearted? Well, no, that’s just war.

There are two excellent scenes in this movie. One is a tank battle between three crappy American tanks (and yes historically speaking they were crappy) against a superior German panzer. Watching the scene I was struck with the truth that I had never seen a tank battle in a movie before. At least I had not seen one with as much suspense and clarity of strategy as the one here. Apparently the thing about American tanks is that they weren’t built strong enough to withstand german tank fire. One direct hit and the inside of the tank would burst into flame burning everyone inside alive instantly. Those things were literal death traps.

The second excellent scene takes place immediately after the allies take a town. Wardaddy spies an occupied apartment and takes Norman in to it to explore it. Inside they find two German women (played by Anamaria Marinca and Alicia Von Rittberg) who undoubtedly are afraid that they will be raped and/or killed. Given Writer/Director David Ayer’s treatment of the first half of the movie, it is quite conceivable something along those lines may happen. It doesn’t happen and Brad Pitt instead puts the women to work making dinner from potatoes and eggs he has stashed. (This is a good deal given the fact that the German women probably haven’t had a decent meal in long time.) However, about twenty minutes through the scene the other three men show up and they are not happy that Wardaddy is having this dinner without them, and what about the women? And here we can notice a real balancing act of fine acting (and good writing) by Brad Pitt and company. Wardaddy won’t actually order his men to behave because they have been living through hell for years and will be back out there doing it again together no matter what happens in that dining room. His loyalty to his men stops him from putting two anonymous German women over his crew. But he also does not want a mean scene to occur. So he stops it essentially by declaring he is going to have a nice meal and won’t allow his boys to stop it. He provokes good behavior by example and his boys follow him because of respect not necessarily because it is the right thing to do. This is a long and complicated dinner table scene (which are not easy to shoot/edit) and it speaks much about the director’s faith in his audience’s attention span and emotional intelligence to grasp the meaning of what happens in it.

Of course, the last scene in the movie is like a nice hard slap across the face reminding the viewer that yes the director and/or producer and/or studio ultimately thinks you are a mass-market dumbass. The last scene is a John Wayne avalanche of bullshit. Think of every stupid (i.e. not serious) and false thing you’ve seen in a war movie. It is inexplicably all contained in this one final last stand battle where our heroes are prepared to commit heroic suicide against an entire foot division of S.S. soldiers. Why these particular guys we just got to know as people who very much want to live would want to commit heroicide is completely beyond me. Why there is an entire division of well-uniformed S.S. troops marching around from nowhere to somewhere is also beyond me. Why would the battle take all day and all night long? Why would the S.S. waste so many men in dumb charges? Why couldn’t they just bring that sniper guy up at the beginning before so many of them died? Why would the German stop shooting so the wounded good guys could say tearful goodbyes to each other? All of this, what is it doing in a serious movie?

Did David Ayer think that I wouldn’t be satisfied if he didn’t end his movie with a ‘Wild Bunch’ climax? If he didn’t think so, what was the point of making a serious movie about war at all? Why didn’t he just make the whole thing bullshit? I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all. There was so much good stuff here that I can’t even say the ending ruined the movie for me. It just did not feel like it was part of the same movie at all. 

The Skeleton Twins (3/5 Stars)

‘The Skeleton Twins,’ is a perfect example of great performances elevating the original source material. By itself, the screenplay could be considered as a merely a drama about estranged twins with an inclination towards suicide, but the casting of two of the most talented comedians in movies, Bill Hader and Kristin Wiig, in the starring roles turns the drama into a bittersweet mix of humor and pathos. Laughs are mined out of every crevice in the scenery imaginable and a few big ones seem to be concocted by pure improvisation on the movie set. Who gets credit for what is always up for grabs as movies do not contain footnotes as to who came up with what when, but I think it is fair to assume that the movie two best scenes, the one’s taking place in the dentist office and then the lip sync dance are cast innovations. Even if they were transcribed word for word in the script, the performances are what make it.

What makes them pop and sizzle so is not merely the stand alone power of the likes of Kristin Wiig (who I have raved about before) or Bill Hader (who I will rave about in a moment) but the combination of them together in the same scene. Hader and Wiig both got their start together on Saturday Night Live during what was arguably the best years of that show. The platonic chemistry and comic timing that was perfected there has been transplanted flawlessly here. Do they come off as twins? Well, they look nothing alike, but they sure act like they are.

The drama in the story comes from several places. Their dad committed suicide when they were fourteen. Their mother is selfish in a severely deluded sort of way. Bill moved to Los Angeles to be an actor but failed continually for a decade before trying to commit suicide. He moves back to New York to live with his sister for the time being (they have not spoken in ten years but I’m not going to say why). She is engaged but is too screwed up to take advantage of her good luck in a partner (Luke Wilson, being goofy, endearing, and an all around naive good guy). You may say that she has an overdeveloped sense of guilt and is too busy punishing herself to be a truly good person (again I’m not telling you why.) The last subplot has to do with Bill being a homosexual. When he gets back to his New York small town he spies a former lover (who is significantly older) working in a bookstore and decides to say hi. It is not cool that he does this. (I’m not saying anything less vague about that either).

Generally I do not like watching movies about the trials and tribulations of actors. There a few too many of these movies out there and they all seem to glaze over the fact that the job is a predictably impossible thing to achieve. Predictably impossible things aren’t tragic things. You don’t get sad when somebody really wants to win the lottery and doesn’t succeed. But here I forgave Bill Hader for his character. It is a superb acting job. The character is gay but isn’t in your face flamboyant about it. It is a subtle performance that sneaks under your attention. By the end, I just stopped thinking of Bill Hader as anything but automatically gay. And I wasn’t thinking of his character Stefon on SNL either. As far as I know Bill Hader has not done a dramatic role in a movie before. This is his first and it is another great example of comedians being more than able to perform drama capably. They do not get awards for being funny but all the evidence suggests that a good comedic performance is harder than a dramatic performance given how well comedians do drama and how not so well drama people do comedy.

I had one little note for the subplot (that I won’t tell you about) between Bill Hader and Ty Burrell. I felt that the story would have made more sense if it had taken place at least ten years ago or at least in a place that was more conservative than New York. What happened in the character’s past will always be controversial, but how much of a scandal would any present relationship be in 2014. I expect the screenplay for this movie was written at least several years ago. Times have changed very fast indeed. 

Gone Girl (3/5 Stars)

This is a problem film for movie critics. I could dance around all the plot twists that I am not supposed to give away and focus on the skillful directing of David Fincher, the good performances by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, or the beautiful cinematography, seamless editing, and brooding score, etc. But that would give the reader a false sense of confidence in my opinion of the movie. The one thing I can’t talk about is the thing I’m not supposed to talk about. I have a problem with the plot itself and in the end I felt that overwhelmed the otherwise technical merits of this movie. A student of film would be satisfied to watch ‘Gone Girl’ merely for its technical education but I’m not about to recommend it to anyone.

 The stoy opens with two concurrent storylines. One is in the present and follows Nick Dunne (Ben Afflek) on the day of his 5^th Anniversary. He comes home to discover that his house has been broken into and his wife is gone. He calls the police and an investigation starts. The second storyline concerns journal entries written by his wife Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike). It starts the day they meet and portrays a good marriage until the Great Recession hit, he lost his job, she lost her trust fund, and they moved from New York City to his hometown in Missouri. She does not like it there and he knows it. In fact, he was about to ask for a divorce the day of his anniversary. Or was he? Because she says he had different plans in her journal. It is a bit of a he said she said and after she cannot be found and other things develop a media circus descends on the small town. The question from the press is thus: Did Nick Dunne kill his wife?

There is a certain guilt that goes along with seeing Ben Affleck hounded by television cameras and unscrupulous reporters that don’t seem to particularly care whether he is guilty or innocent. For those with memories that go back a decade, this sort of thing really did happen to Ben Affleck or ‘Benniffer’ to be exact, the moniker given to the celebrity pair of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. There was an unmistakably meanspirtedness to the whole proceeding. The general public had something against Ben Affleck and the press hounded him until his marriage fell apart and his career floundered. Did he deserve it? Well, he did win Oscar gold at the age of 27 that many people thought (and I include myself here) belonged almost entirely to Matt Damon (who had not paid any dues either) and then followed that up with a lot of big paychecks in bad movies and then he married arguably the hottest woman on the planet. That sort of unfairness earned him plenty of envy.

Why am I bringing this up? I bring it up because Ben Affleck in this movie is a perfect example of the power of good casting. (In fact, I have spoken about this exact topic with Ben Affleck before in my ‘Argo’ review.) It is impossible for the audience to completely block out what they know about a well-known actor when they see a movie so even though the character they are playing may be somebody completely different from whom they played before or who they are in real life, the audience will at least subconsciously project upon the character all that they know about the actor. Now there are three ways to deal with this fact when making a movie. One, you could do what Milos Forman did when he made ‘Amadeus’ and just side step the whole issue. He did not want any well-known actor to overshadow the character of Mozart or Salieri so he went and cast unknown actors. Two, you could use the audience’s preconceptions to save time. As I once heard in a director’s commentary, using a film star saves about fifteen minutes of exposition. You want a tough leader guy: cast Bruce Willis. All he has to do is show up and you know what the character is about. Thirdly, and my favorite, you can use the audience’s preconceptions not to simplify but to distract. You deliberately set up a kind of character played by a particular actor to set up an expectation of behavior. You deviate from that expectation in a believable way and boom you got a good story twist going on. Think Cameron Diaz in Vanilla Sky or Neil Patrick Harris in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. There are plenty of others as well.

Ben Affleck is the perfect casting choice for this movie. Unfortunately the plot of the story takes the 2^nd way down the casting choice road. I do not believe it is really a spoiler to tell you something that happens in the middle of the movie but here is the warning anyway: Nothing but spoilers from here on out. Nick Dunne did not kill his wife. Seriously, did any of us really think Ben Affleck was a wife killer. No, we expect him to be the hapless victim of disgraceful media frenzy. But what if he did. Now that would be a plot twist.

Okay I’m sorry. I can’t actually argue that everything past the midpoint of the movie should be changed. Let me just explain how it was not particularly good. The whole thing, and boy is it elaborate, was planned out by the wife to frame her philandering husband. It is so intricate in fact that the perpetrator needs to be a psychopath. Let’s put aside the whole feminist argument that a woman would never be capable of this sort of thing (even though to my knowledge no living woman ever has been capable of this sort of thing.) And we also can’t say that this movie is another woman-hating exercise perpetrated by the male establishment of Hollywood after all the screenplay was written by a woman (Gillian Flynn) and adapted by a best-selling book written by the same woman. Let us just ask this, does the Rosamund Pike character make sense as a psychopath? I would argue she does not. She makes a big decision about 3/4ths of the way through the movie on the basis of pure emotion. Perhaps I need to brush up on my psychopathic profiling but I don’t think that these people kill out of love all that often. The movie does not work for the same reason that other David Fincher movies sometimes don’t work. It was certainly the difference in his inferior version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The women characters in his movies tend to lack humanity. That’s a rather rough thing to level at a master director (and David Fincher certainly is that) but I think it is true. There is a void where something else should be and taking up that space is a paranoia that takes what should be a complex portrait of a woman and makes it into something that is simply heartless. Not helping is his tendency to cast supermodels in supporting roles that do not call for it. Do you have Netflix? Watch a few episodes of David Fincher’s House of Cards and compare it to how the women look in Orange is the New Black. The difference could contain a multitude of worlds.

You know who also had this trademark? Alfred Hitchcock. The gorgeous chilly blonde of Hitchcock is definitely comparable to Fincher’s dangerous and calculating beauties. To an extent this is not good casting. Why? Because if it is noticeable to the extent of cliché than the director distacts the audience from the story. That is unless the story is not all that good, then I suppose the more distractions the better. And there are plenty in this movie. 

The Zero Theorem (2/5 Stars)

‘The Zero Theorem,’ is a much bigger movie in its advertisements. The production design provided by the endlessly inventive mind of its director, Terry Gilliam, after being crammed into a two minute commercial gives off the impression of a visual epic on the scale of his previous works Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Manchusen, and most recently The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnussus. In actuality much of the movie takes place within the main room of a decaying cathedral now inhabited by a recluse named Qohen Loeth (Christoph Waltz). There are a few other set pieces like a workplace and a street and a virtual reality beach, but other than that the locations are quite limited. It is a rather dramatic exercise in how to get as many visually inventive designs within the smallest amount of budget possible. Terry Gilliam is at the forefront of stretching the digital buck to its breaking point.

Unfortunately besides the production design, “The Zero Theorem” is not a particularly enjoyable film and given the absurdity of the production design in relation to the main metaphor of the film, it cannot be considered a good film either.

The film is supposedly set in a futuristic dystopia that mixes the cynicism of Blade Runner with the color palette of Speed Racer. It is a weird futuristic dystopia in that the technology is new and unfamiliar but also far worse than what we currently have today. Everything is way more complicated and far more annoying to use than it has to be. Take the computer/video game console that Qohen Loeth works on at his job. Not only does he have to manually pedal the thing with his feet, but the controller he uses looks like the worst idea Nintendo ever had went and ate all their other controllers. The good people at Apple who have dedicated their lives to making technology non–threatening for the general public should look on this movie with a sense of horror.

Gilliam did something similar to this in Brazil when he used warped technology (airducts to be exact) to actively demonstrate the oppression of a totalitarian government. But ‘The Zero Theorem’ is not a totalitarian dystopia but a consumerist dystopia run by a business named ‘Management.’ It is not at all clear why this business would want to actively oppress its customers with a terrible user experience. For all of this movie’s preachiness about the diminishment of the individual in a corporatized landscape, the most culpable villain here is problem Gilliam himself. He is the one that came up with all these profoundly annoying contraptions and he has a long history of treating human beings as cannon fodder for whims and jokes (see Monty Python).

His main character in this movie is especially pathetic. Played hairless and socially castrated by Christoph Waltz. What he wants is to be a recluse sitting next to a phone in his cathedral where someday he may get a call that will explain to him the meaning of his life. (Movies that dwell on the meaning of life generally give unsatisfactory answers and this one does not disappoint in its disappointment. Management has an answer to why they have assigned Qohen to work on the Zero Theorem, a theory that proves that there is no meaning of life, but again the production design of the movie argues against that explanation.) Qohen refers to himself in the royal first person and claims he is dying. It is a metaphor to be sure, but the metaphor is so obvious that it swallows up the viewer’s ability to think it deep. It is just there and might as well not be because the movie is not persuasive in its arguments.

A lot of things are here that might not as well be. Qohen attends a party with a host that is dressed in a fat tiger costume. There is no particular reason for the fat tiger costume. It is just another in a long list of visual gags that make the viewer titter in a ‘hey what is that doing there?’ vibe but in context are meaningless artistic choices. The character might have well been dressed up as a walrus or a unicorn or not dressed up at all. It does not lend anything to the story. Critics complain all the time about the arbitrariness of huge blockbusters but then give leeway to smaller independent films like this. Well, in my opinion the standards should apply to both. What we see on the screen should not merely be whimsical indulgences? They need to add or complement what the story is about. If this were a bigger film it would be bad. Being a small independent film does not make it any less bad.

There also must be noted that there is a female character (played by Melanie Thierry) that has the sad and far too common fate of having to somehow someway fall in love with an utterly unattractive and much older man. I suppose when you are in charge of a movie’s budget, one of the perks is that you can hire women willing to portray this sort of thing. The honest thing to do though is to make the character mainly interested in money too. 

The One I Love (4/5 Stars)

It is impossible to write about this movie without revealing the twist so hinted and hyped in the online movie trailers. This is because the twist is revealed in the first twenty minutes of the movie. So it's not so much of a twist as it is a premise. I figure that makes it fair game in my blog. The premise of the movie is such: A couple, Ethan and Sophie (played by Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss) are seeing a marriage counselor (played by Ted Danson). After a few sessions that do not seem to break new grounds of understanding between the couple, the counselor suggests a weekend trip to a retreat.

The retreat is a villa in an orange grove. There is a swimming pool and a guesthouse. The guesthouse already has people in it. Specifically the people in the guesthouse are Ethan and Sophie. For clarity’s sake, let us refer to them as Fake Ethan and Fake Sophie. They look, talk, and sort of act like the real Ethan and Sophie. But they only show up in the house when only one of either Ethan or Sophie steps inside. So if Real Ethan is inside, Fake Sophie shows up. If Real Sophie is inside, Fake Ethan shows up.

Who are these Twilight Zone people? That is actually up to interpretation, as the movie does not fully explain how they are formed or what their purpose is or even if they can be entirely trusted with the information they supply about themselves. What makes them interesting is that Fake Ethan seems to be a more fun, more exciting, more laid back version of Real Ethan. Fake Sophie pins her hair back and would rather not argue, two things that Real Sophie does not do.

This movie, directed by Charlie McDowell and written by Justin Lader, is what I would call a five star three star movie. It is done perfectly but within the scope of a very small movie. Almost the entirety of the movie takes place within the confines of this one retreat location. There are basically only two actors (Duplass and Moss play themselves twice over) and the action in the story is talking: Lots of talking about people and relationships. This is done very well. It is not entirely an easy thing to keep a story moving along smoothly and unpredictably when the budget and locations and characters are confined as such. I give kudos to newcomers McDowell and Lader on their very good first movie. Mark Duplass is becoming exceptionally good at making and producing these very low budget movies.

I had the pleasure of being apart of the Nitehawk Five Dollar Film Club for this movie and last Saturday we had a fun group discussion about the movie. Before the movie I wondered whether the discussion would go the way of a certain scene in the movie. At one point Real Ethan is obsessed with understanding how the guesthouse works. Real Sophie tells him to stop ruining it. Remember that magic show you took us to and couldn’t stop explaining how all the tricks worked. You completely ruined it! Well, would this Film Club focus the discussion on how the Guest House worked or would it talk about the relationships between the characters (i.e. the marriage counseling)?

Here was my theory on the movie: It is revealed that an incident of infidelity on Real Ethan’s part led to the marriage counseling. The couple cannot get past it. Fake Ethan, the funnier more exciting (more untrustworthy) Ethan, is Ethan in the past at the time he committed the infidelity. Fake Sophie is a version of Real Sophie in the future where in she accepts the fact that Real Ethan has changed from the unfaithful exciting guy into a faithful more boring guy. Who leaves and who stays at the end plays off of these unsaid descriptions and the guesthouse is revealed to actually work as marriage counseling. What makes this movie so strange is that the character arc of growth takes place before the film begins. At the start, Ethan is already changed. What makes this movie stranger is that it takes the guy’s side in the relationship battle. Generally a romantic comedy is about an immature man that matures and the woman just waits out the transformation. Here the problem is that the man has matured but the woman is still in love with the immature version of him. She does not understand that the aspects of Ethan’s personality that made him fun and exciting also made him prone to infidelity. She wants Ethan to be faithful but not boring as well. I can’t tell you how the story ends (another twist!) but whether she makes it out of the retreat is really up for debate. I think it was at least ambiguous.

Nobody at the film club agreed with me. They were overly concerned as to what made the guest house work. Who was Ted Danson? Are they aliens or robots? Did Elisabeth Moss really grow up in Scientology? Et cetera.

I’m being a little mean to the film club. It was a fun discussion, but I feel I did the majority of talking about the relationships during the two hours. Then I had to duck out early because of a basketball game.

Well, what do you think? Go see the movie for yourself and bring along the significant other. There is a lot to talk about here provided you are willing to talk about it. Maybe you should just break up instead.