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.