Night Moves (3/5 Stars)

I would have a hard time explaining why I go to Kelly Reichartdt movies. There is a reason you can only see them in New York City (a few select others) and then maybe only in one theater. They are tiny movies. The pace is slow. The plot bare-boned. The direction is simplistic. This may remind you of other low budget auteurs. Perhaps the dudes in the French Wave, or Ingrid Bergman, or an early David Lynch film. But I hate those other guys. Why did I pay a ticket to see Kelly Reichardt?

I think it might be because Kelly Reichardt lacks pretension. There is very little that is abstract about her movies. Her movies are small not because they are metaphors about larger things. They are small because the subjects are small and Kelly is interested in small things and that’s it. Her best movie, Wendy and Lucy, is about a woman and a dog that takes place over a couple of days as her car breaks down and she tries to get it fixed. The remarkable thing about it is the combination of how specific it is about its subject combined with how little it seems the movie wants you to feel a specific emotion toward the subject. Kelly Reichardt seems to be a competent enough director to make bigger movies that have more to say but her scope stays restrained and her purpose ambiguous to the point where her art achieves a sort of rarefied quality to it. These are serious dramas, sometimes about life and death issues, but they are handled in the complete opposite of a heavy-handed manner.  I always feel especially comfortable watching a Kelly Reichardt film.

“Night Moves,” concerns the simple plans of three environmental terrorists in Oregon, played by Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard. Jesse and Dakota live on separate organic farms. Peter is a contact Jesse has that used to be a marine and lives in the woods. He can make a bomb that will blow up a little dam. It won’t really matter because there are 10 other dams on the river but it seems to them that something must be done and blowing up this little dam may just get people talking about I don’t know taking down the others. The movie concerns itself the most with Jesse Eisenberg who probably at the beginning thinks he is in charge of this operation. But little by little his idea of being in charge becomes more and more marginalized to the point he seems to be acting randomly by the end. And maybe the point is that this would be world changer was just acting randomly the entire time, lashing out more in chaotic frustration as opposed to purposeful planning. I don’t know. Kelly refuses to lecture me. I won’t give away what exactly happens other than to say that true to form Kelly has the bomb explode offscreen midway through and throws a rather unexpected wrench into the ending.

Jesse Eisenberg’s performance is at once granularly specific and mostly opaque. It’s not that he doesn’t have feelings and thoughts. He just has nobody to speak about them with. More ambiguous is the characters of Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard. Their most dramatic moments are kept offscreen for the benefit of profoundly confusing Jesse’s idea of what was his life’s narrative. At one point he stands in the woods staring at his trembling hands. Boy, wouldn’t you like to know what he is thinking.

What was it all about? Is this really how these terrible things happen? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zombieland (4/5 Stars) October 23, 2009

It’s the Zombie Apocalypse and Jesse Eisenberg still can’t get laid. 

Zombie movies really don’t have much leeway in terms of originality. There like the opposite of a superhero movie or a James Bond flick. A lot of what makes those distinguishable from each other would be a new villain with an ingenious way to take over the world. In Zombie movies the enemies are always the same. They are zombies. And by Zombie rules, how they plan to take over the world never changes: They will relentlessly stalk you and eat your brains. So what sets some zombie movies apart from other zombie movies usually has more to do with style than substance. Some are social commentary, some are thrillers, some try for laughs. But putting aside genre differentiations all of them have one thing in common: They are incredibly predictable. This can be boring (I am Legend) or this can be comforting (Shaun of the Dead). Like I said, it usually depends on the story teller and how they use the rules. 

In this movie, the rules are used for comedic purposes. The zombies are oafish and stupid. And they move just slow enough that the heroes can be clever in how to dispatch them. Woody Harrelson is perfectly cast as Tallahassee, a gung-ho zombie killer. Here's an exchange that describes him perfectly

Jesse Eisenberg: You're one of those guys that constantly have to top everybody, aren't you?
Woody: No, I once knew a guy who was better at it than I am.

It’s hard to keep count of all the weapons he kills zombies with (banjo, shotgun, car door, machine gun, garden shears, etc.) because he never uses the same weapon twice. But to say the primary purpose of this movie is to create clever ways to kill zombies is selling it short. The movie has another more difficult subplot than survival in zombieland and that is this movie’s mission to somehow get Jesse Eisenberg laid. And if you thought that would be a relatively easy thing to do what with the near extinction of the human species, then you probably haven’t seen a movie starring Jesse Eisenberg.

Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland) is like the poor man’s Michael Cera (Superbad, Juno). He’s oppressively neurotic, awkward, and paranoid. But unlike a Michael Cera character that seems to be at least reacting to strenuous outside forces, Eisenberg gives off the sense that these attributes are inherent. He starts off awkward and perhaps because his he senses how pathetic he is, all his actions seem like he’s consistently apologizing for being such a loser. In this movie he is a self described loner who before the zombies took over, spent all his time playing Warcraft and drinking Code Red Mountain Dew. He calls the pretty girl down the hall “406" because that’s the number of her apartment and he hasn’t bothered to introduce himself. Like I said, surviving zombies isn’t the most difficult plot problem this movie has set out to overcome. 

I wouldn’t have been surprised if the idea for this movie started off with Eisenberg’s problem and that the writers came up with zombies because they couldn’t think of any other way to solve it. After meeting up with Tallahassee, Jesse happens upon two sisters who haven’t been zombified yet. One (Emma Stone from Superbad) happens to be just about his age. What's even more convenient is that the gung-ho Tallahassee is more interested in Hostess Twinkies than women. So that means there is absolutely no competition. He’s the last man on Earth and she is the last women. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be enough. Emma Stone ditches him several times and even steals his guns and his car.

But this movie is just getting started. Emma Stone somehow forgets several cardinal zombie rules while at an amusement park and her and her kid sister (Abigail Breslin) become hopeless damsels in distress. Jesse and Tallahassee come to the rescue in a gorey carnival zombie killing climax! Now he’s got to happen, I mean, he just totally saved her life. Please tell me he at least gets to first base. I’m not giving it away. You’ll just have to watch and find out. 

There’s a certain romance to zombie movies that all the best ones key in on and that is our endless fascination with apocalypses. There is an ironic joy in being completely free of restrictions from your job, your family, or your civilization. In Zombieland there are no authority figures. The characters smash up an Indian casino for fun and play golf inside Bill Murray’s abandoned mansion. They need a car so they just take an abandoned yellow hummer they find in the middle of the street. No strings attached, the owner is dead and the car works fine. I get the sense that this would be a very fun movie to work on. To think when I was Abigail Breslin’s age I was in goddamn grade school. I think at that age I would have rather been in Zombieland. 

Overall I felt the movie was probably funny. I say it that way because I saw it on Thursday Night at 10:00 pm and I was practically the only person in the theater. I laughed out loud several times but didn’t hear anybody else titter. It’s hard to gauge a comedy completely alone. At least I thought it was funny. Although, there was some unneeded sentimentality in it. Sure its realistic that people would be a depressed upon remembering the death of family members, but come on, this is a zombie movie. If you dwell realistically on these things, it could become kind of depressing and boring (see that clunker I am Legend, god that movie sucked).

Note: there is a fine cameo by Bill Murray in which he plays himself. He exits perhaps too soon when he is killed in perhaps the stupidest possible way to die in a zombie movie.

Adventureland (3/5 Stars) April 5, 2009

Warning: This movie is not a comedy. The trailers have been lying to you. It does not even really try for laughs. Instead it is a serious coming of age tale that only contains some muted comic characters, the best of which are the dynamic duo of Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, who are probably best known for their large part in the resurgence of Saturday Night Live. They play a husband and wife who are the owners of the title carnival. Bless their hearts, they really are trying, but no matter how good these two are, it is hopeless. The movie itself seems adamantly opposed to helping them make us laugh. This is a slow, soulful, and angst-driven movie. The main character makes a mix-tape of bummer songs for the girl at one point. We get to hear some of it. The tone of this movie is decidedly anti-comedic. 
Surely every one of us believes that there is a good movie somewhere in the story of our first loves. Greg Mottola the writer/director of this movie (previously the director of SuperBad) has decided to make that movie. So we get to see what is probably very close to Mottola’s own experience in the early eighties. The kid, played by Jesse Eisenberg, has his plans to backpack through Europe vanish when his parent’s financing falls through. Because he majored in Comparative Literature he can’t get a real job and goes to work at Adventureland, which is such a horrible place that the owners don’t even check his resume before hiring him. I worked at such a place for two summers myself (selling tickets at the Orange County Fair) and I can definitely say that Mottola really gets the entire feel of the place down. Everyone views his or her very presence at the fair as some failure in and of itself. As Martin Starr, the kid’s best friend, points out in response to the intolerable conditions of the place, “We are doing the work of pathetic brain-dead morons.” Everyone wanders around like souls in Purgatory, shaky hopes of better futures in their eyes. When ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ is played for the zillionth time through the park speakers they are haunted by the specter that maybe this is what the rest of their life will be like. 
The difference between the Orange County Fair and Adventureland is the presence of hot and single girls at the latter. Life is better in the movies I suppose, even when that movie is an honest telling of a virgin working the rip-off games at the local fair. Here we have Kristen Stewart who has just become big because of Twilight. (She’s actually been working for a while. I first noticed her in 2002’s Panic Room, when she played the diabetic daughter of Jodie Foster. Back then, one of my friends said that she would probably grow up hot. We all called him a pervert but, my God, was he right.) Kristen Stewart is one of the best young actresses out there right now. Unlike most actresses, she knows the difference between intense and sexy and is willing to portray a good amount of intelligence in her characters. She reminds me of Juliette Lewis, who had all these great roles in the early nineties (Natural Born Killers, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape). Unfortunately she wasn’t good looking enough to have a real career. I don’t think that’s going to hinder Kristen though. 
Jesse Eisenberg honestly kind of annoyed me a little. Is it possible for the ‘nice guy’ in any movie to not constantly awkwardly stutter? I know he’s a virgin, but he’s also a college graduate. The guy isn’t a teenager. He’s buying drinks in bars. Certainly he should have at least learned how to hide the awkwardness by now. It’s really just one of those things. Why does Kristen Stewart like the guy? 
Overall the movie is a failure as a comedy, but a good enough first-love story. It's not a must see. I bet it holds a very dear place in Greg Mottola’s heart though.