The Rip (4/5 Stars)

I see about fifty movies a year, which is a lot more than most people, but not nearly enough to have a firm grasp on what is happening in the art form. Take the writer/director Joe Carnahan. He has been writing and directing movies for nearly thirty years. “The Rip” a straight-to-Netflix crime thriller starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck is only the second movie of his that I have seen. The first was a Liam Neeson 2011 vehicle called “The Grey”, in which he battles wolves in the tundra. I thought that movie’s plot was sharp and the action well-delivered, but didn’t bother to look up who had written or directed it. Turns out that Joe Carnahan did both. Then Joe Carnahan did ten movies between 2011 and 2026, the names of which I don’t recognize at all (Stretch, Boss Level, Copshop, Battle Ready etc.) Now, he did “The Rip”, which I mainly saw because it was the only movie released this January that, on paper at least, vaguely appealed to me.

How I heard about it is counterintuitive too. I didn’t see a trailer or billboard of the movie. Instead Matt Damon and Ben Affleck went onto Joe Rogan’s podcast and said some interesting things about using AI in the writing context. That podcast has episodes that are like 2h-3hrs long, but they will cut out standalone 10-15 minute portions if someone decides to say something particularly interesting. Here, Matt and Ben made the prescient observation that large language models, given their source materials and what they are being trained on, tend to have mediocre outputs. This makes sense because the vast amount of human writing is mediocre and that is what the LLM’s are trying to replicate. So, it is a useful tool, yes, but you can’t rely on it to churn out superior work. In many ways, it is not designed to do that.

“The Rip” is not a typical January movie. The plot is sharply written and the action well-delivered. Matt Damon, Ben Affleck are well cast. Indeed, this is the type of movie that Roger Ebert may have championed as underrated and worth seeing in the early-nineties like One False Move or Red Rock West. But it isn’t a big movie and there are already a lot of movies about cops and drugs. The Rip does not need to be seen in a movie theater and likely would not make money there. Instead, Netflix produced and put it out in January when everyone was staying home. I’m told that like 40 million people have watched it so far. That is a good thing. When One False Move and Red Rock West came out, they struggled to get a theatrical release and people mainly saw those movies interspersed by commercials on television. And really, they needed the help of movie critics championing them to get that far. So The Rip is a well earned success. Keep that in mind when people bemoan the streaming services. For a particular type of movie, it is the correct vehicle.

If it weren’t for the pedigree of its cast, it would feel much more like an independent film. A female cop, a member of a Rip team, has just been murdered. The Rip team is being questioned by the federal bureau of investigation because the feds suspect that the team is corrupt and one of them killed her. The team is headed by Matt Damon (Lieutenant), then Ben Affleck (Detective Sergeant), then Steven Yeun (Detective), Teyana Taylor (Detective) and Catalina Moreno Sandino (Detective). These are all Oscar nominees.

The Lieutenant gets a tip from the murdered cop that there is drug money in a safe house in the neighborhood. Why she is telling him this is not explained. The Lieutenant goes about organizing his crew in an outwardly suspicious manner. He tells all of them that the tip was from a crime hotline (it isn’t) and then tells each of them a different number as to the amount that he thinks will be found (he doesn’t actually know, maybe). Then they show up and the woman living in the house decides to let them in even though they don’t have a search warrant with them. It is hinted that she might be a snitch herself (but for the good guys). Then they find $20,000,000, which is much much more than any of them thought that they could possibly find. Then it is revealed that the safe house is located at the end of a cul-de-sac on a street of empty houses. The cartel owns the whole block. Nobody is getting in and out without somehow being involved in the plot.

This is a locked room mystery thriller. There are plenty of spoilers to give and I won’t be revealing any of them. The movie does an exceptional job of staying one step ahead of the audience while also not cheating. It is the test of the quality of the movie like this (we can call it the Knives Out test), if the audience can pause the action at a particular point near the end (a good time is right after they have all gotten into the DEA truck and are being transported to the drop point), think about what they have seen, and try to figure out what is going on before everything is revealed. If that is possible, but you also have not figured it out yet and need to think about it, it is a good movie you are watching.

I didn’t pause the movie at that time. I could have (thank you Netflix), but didn’t feel like it. The reveals were satisfying and besides a few action sequences that were kind of overkill, it ended well. I just have to say this: driving a car with your left hand on the steering wheel while shooting a machine gun one handed with your right hand outside the driver’s side window is just so enormously impractical and stupid. I don’t think it should have been an otherwise smartly written movie. But then again, I guess Ben Affleck looked cool doing it.

First Man (3/5 Stars)

Can there be just one astronaut’s wife that doesn’t continually lose her shit.

First Man tells the story of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. The moon landing occurred in 1969, an event we are told was watched by 400 million people worldwide. Amazingly, this is the first biopic about Neil Armstrong that has ever been made. It comes twenty years after Apollo 13, the movie about the most disastrous Apollo mission, and even a couple of years after Hidden Figures the “untold story” about three obscure NASA mathematicians who happened to be black women. In a way, First Man’s long delay is a great illustration of the artistic community’s disconnect with science and engineering. First Man probably took so long to get made because Hollywood has no idea what makes the story interesting. Watching First Man it is clear that Hollywood still has no idea. Bless them, they understand the drama of a black woman being unable to use a “white’s only” bathroom, but a successful trip to the moon, that is uncharted territory.

It is possible to make an interesting movie that takes place in space and does justice to the people involved in the missions. Apollo 13 was a particularly good movie. The Martian also did a great job. What these movies understand is that science puzzles and engineering problems when presented with clarity and acuity can be suspenseful and interesting. First Man being based on real events that presented engineering problems, sometimes with fatal consequences, had a lot of potential to take this road. What the movie chose to focus on instead was family drama, most of it probably trumped up, and none of it deserving to be shown alongside the extraordinary historic moment the movie is supposedly celebrating.

Neil Armstrong is played by Ryan Gosling, who channels his Drive persona and does a great job in playing someone who historically was described as calm, quietly brave, and no-nonsense. I expect the real Neil would approve of the portrayal. Janet Armstrong, played by Claire Foy, can hardly keep her shit together. It would be hard for me to imagine the real Janet not being somewhat offended by her portrayal. The movie, in its misguided search for drama, decides that Janet’s fears for the safety of her husband is on the same level of importance as a mission to walk on the moon for the first time. She even goes so far as to berate her husband right before the mission about his cold emotional stability about the whole thing. I just wanted to shake her and explain, “Neil is about to WALK ON THE MOON. Your life, children, and nerves are insignificant bullshit compared to that!” There is even a segment of the movie that does a tour of the country zoning in on all the naysayers who thought the moon missions were a waste of time and money. Why is this here? I saw this movie because I was interested in Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11. I don’t care what a bunch of short-sighted idiots think.

First Man was directed by Damien Chazelle. This is his third feature behind Whiplash and La La Land. His first two movies were great movies about music and musicians. I really have no idea why he chose First Man as his next project. The direction is competent but lacks interest in the subject matter. Chazelle seems more interested in Armstrong’s dead daughter than he does about spaceflight. Surely dead daughters and fretful wives can be the subject of great films, just not great films about a man walking on the moon for the first time.

Manchester by the Sea (3/5 Stars)

Lee Chandler (played by Casey Affleck) works as a janitor in a housing project in Boston. He fixes stuff and doesn’t take shit from the tenants. His boss excoriates him for not taking shit from the tenants. Lee Chandler points out that he’s cheap, he does good work, and he knows about a bunch of illegal stuff the boss does on the side. “So do what you have to do,” he says. Lee doesn’t care if he gets fired. He goes to a local bar at night. Women try to hit on him but he doesn’t respond. He starts a fight later on that night. Lee doesn’t really have a problem with the other guy. He wants to get punched in the face.

There is tragedy in Lee’s past. As the particular nature of it is only revealed half-way through the movie, it is technically a spoiler. But given that it seems to be the premise of Lee’s character and various flashbacks point to a wife and three children that are no longer there, you can take a guess at what happened. My guess was that Lee got drunk and while driving everyone home from a party somewhere he got them all killed in a car crash. I wasn’t too far off.

“Manchester by the Sea,” is the name of the town where this tragedy took place and where the people from his past still live (or are buried). Lee doesn’t visit. And when he does its because something bad has happened, specifically his brother, Joe Chandler (played by Kyle Chandler) is in the hospital. Joe has congenital heart disease and every once in awhile collapses and is taken to the hospital. In the opening scenes of this movie, Joe collapses and dies. Lee goes to Manchester by the Sea where he sees Joe’s friends at the hospital and picks up Joe’s teenage son, Patrick (played by Lucas Hedges) from hockey practice.

At the will reading, his brother throws him a curve ball. The will says Lee Chandler will be Patrick’s guardian. This is something Joe although he knew he would die soon, did not inform Lee of because as Lee puts it, “he knows I would have never agreed to it. Being guardian to Patrick necessarily entails Lee moving back to Manchester by the Sea and trying to live with the tragedy. The story is well written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan who treats his subject with patience, care, and good humor. Casey Affleck’s performance is perfect and a scene he shares with his ex-wife, Randi, played by Michelle Williams, is one of the saddest scenes in movies. (Michelle Williams, it is fair to say, is underused in the movie but when she is on screen, she captivates).

As a slice of life or character study, “Manchester by the Sea” is as good as it gets. But its tragic centerpiece calls for something more than a glimpse into the lives of these people. Kenneth Lonergan owes us some theory on what it all means or what the next correct step is in Lee’s life. This the movie does not provide. The tragedy occurred for no particular reason and Lee’s life has no particular lesson to teach us. It’s okay for comedy to be pointless, but tragedy needs something more. Lonergan made me cry a little, he owes me that.  

 Perhaps a good idea would have been to tell two parallel stories. One for Lee and the other for Randi. After all, Randi got remarried and had another kid. How she accomplished that in the wake of the tragedy while Lee couldn’t would be interesting and instructive to see.

Carol (4/5 Stars)

I suddenly have this strong urge to smoke cigarettes and drink martinis with my girlfriend in some fancy Manhattan restaurant.  

“Carol,” directed by Todd Haynes is based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel, “The Price of Salt.” It stars Cate Blanchett as the titular character and Rooney Mara as her significant other Terese Belivet.

They meet in a Manhattan department store. Terese works at the doll store counter. Carol, Christmas shopping for her daughter, asks Terese about what dolls young girls like. Terese says she doesn’t know. As a child she liked trains. Carol orders a train instead. She leaves, “forgetting” her gloves on the counter.

If that sounds like nothing on paper, it is because it is nothing on paper. “Carol” is a movie that lies between the lines. It is a study of glances and body language, costumes, set design, and score. I can only guess that the screenplay by Phyllis Nagy either makes no sense at all or has an absurd amount of writing in parantheticals. And it works the main reason being that the actors are so wonderful to stare at.

First is Cate the Great a case study in Screen Presence. Look at the way she smokes those cigarettes. A certain captivating elegance, grace shall we say, comes to mind. Second is Rooney Mara, whom I’ve described critically before (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) but now with much appreciation as soft all over. Innocence, thoughtfully composed, are some appropriate words. They are wonderful together.

The movie excels in all ways visual. It is aided in that quest by being set in the most glamorous part of the 1950s: Christmas in New York. The costumes are wonderful, the makeup is great, and the art direction is as good as it can be. Director Todd Haynes, like in his earlier great movie Far From Heaven, takes direct inspiration from 1950s melodramas and tries to get the colors and music as close as possible. It is a worthwhile ambition.

The conflict in the story is that they are a homosexual couple in the 1950s. Carol is already married with a child and Terese has a fiancé. Some humor is found when their respective men are confused by their company but not necessarily jealous because they do not understand that they could receive competition via another woman. This subject is hardly risqué at the present time (as opposed to say when Far From Heaven came out in 2002) but it should be noted that this does not hurt the story’s overall impact. It is good enough to the point where it does not need help from political expediency. Perhaps our changing times have even changed the ending. I remember Far From Heaven ending rather tragically. This movie ends with Cate Blanchett’s knowing smile. The movie is comfort food for all lovers.

Footnote: Does one’s sexual identity affect the way an audience member connects with a movie romance? I would submit it does. And for a heterosexual man it may be the case that a lesbian romance can be more affecting than a regular romance between a man and a woman. After all, the man can intuitively grasp why each person would fall in love with the other person. I saw this movie with my girlfriend and I have a feeling I had the advantage in enjoying it. Afterwards she commented on how the score was really loud and obvious. I did not notice the score so much and have little to say about it except to praise the choice of a certain song, “You Belong to Me.”

The WOLF of WALL STREET (5/5 Stars)

Jordan Belfort and the Obscene Destruction of Wealth. 

It seems to have been completely forgotten by now but when Gordon Gekko made his ‘Greed is Good’ speech in Oliver Stone’s landmark 1987 film ‘Wall Street’ he was not waxing philosophically in a theoretical sense. He was speaking as a major stockholder of a company at a shareholders meeting. Specifically the company was Tarbell Paper and Gekko had bought up a large share of stock in order to streamline the company (sell off assets and fire unnecessary personel) and use the proceeds towards a large dividend payment. As a major stockholder he would certainly profit from such an action, but that was not the only reason Gekko put forth to justify his actions. Here is the complete speech:

[at the Teldar Paper stockholder's meeting] Well, I appreciate the opportunity you're giving me Mr. Cromwell as the single largest shareholder in Teldar Paper, to speak. Well, ladies and gentlemen we're not here to indulge in fantasy but in political and economic reality. America, America has become a second-rate power. Its trade deficit and its fiscal deficit are at nightmare proportions. Now, in the days of the free market when our country was a top industrial power, there was accountability to the stockholder. The Carnegies, the Mellons, the men that built this great industrial empire, made sure of it because it was their money at stake. Today, management has no stake in the company! All together, these men sitting up here own less than three percent of the company. And where does Mr. Cromwell put his million-dollar salary? Not in Teldar stock; he owns less than one percent. You own the company. That's right, you, the stockholder. And you are all being royally screwed over by these, these bureaucrats, with their luncheons, their hunting and fishing trips, their corporate jets and golden parachutes. Teldar Paper, Mr. Cromwell, Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can't figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I'll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents. The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I've been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.

That’s right, the company was badly run. It had thirty-three vice presidents all being paid exhorbitant amounts of money for no particular reasona at all.  In other words, the company was ripping off its investors and should have been broken up, streamlined, and made more efficient. Does anybody remember this detail? I bring it up because this speech and this movie, to the horror I bet of its fire breathing liberal writer/director, has been credited as a main inspiration for the Wall Street we have today. There is an incredible speech in the Wolf of Wall Street that I’m going to put down in its entirety. It is given by Jordan Belfort, played by Leonardo Dicaprio, the founder of a brokerage firm named Stratton Oakmont. He is inspiring his traders to misrepresent to their clients that a bad shoe company, for which Stratton Oakmont owns 80% of the shares, is a must buy. The idea is to use their clients to drive up the price and then to sell their own shares at the peak. This will of course devalue the stock that Stratton Oakmont does not own but their clients do. This is dishonest and illegal and here is the speech:

Besides the “Greed is Good” mantra I would submit that there is very little similar in these two speeches. Our culture nonetheless does not make that distinction. Either you are against Greed and against both actions or you are for it and endorse both. 

The confusion can be directly traced to Adam Smith’s landmark treatise on capitalism “The Wealth of Nations” published in 1776. It is an extraordinary book in many ways but it also contains several errors. (Errors in groudbreaking masterpieces are not such an extraordinary thing. Read any tome of Aristotle and Plato and you will notice antiquated and mistaken arguments sandwiched between the words of wisdom on a regular basis.) One of the biggest errors concerns Adam Smith’s theory on the division of labor. He compares the winter coat of a poor worker in London with the loincloth of an African King. Why, he asks, can this poor man afford better clothes than a king? The answer is that London has a developed economy that uses division of labor. The African king made his own loincloth all by himself and did not have the time or capacity to make it any better. The poor man’s coat however had been touched by thousands of men. The herders of the sheep, the shearers of the wool, the transporters of the wool, the weavers, the salespeople, et cetera et cetera. The insight is that a man can do one simple task for one job far faster than he can do all the tasks for one job. If you build a network of all these different people doing their own respective simple tasks you will be able to produce far more than you could if one person did everything by himself or herself. The vast supply of goods that this network creates drives down prices for the goods themselves, which is why the poor man in a developed economy can afford better clothes than the African king in an undeveloped economy. Adam Smith than states that rational self-interest is what made the network possible. Each participant in the network was acting in his or her own self-interest not a sense of altruism.

And here is where Smith after pages of brilliant insights makes his error. Altruism is not the foil Adam Smith should have drawn for capitalism. After all not all rational self-interest is capitalism. An arms length transaction between two parties is in the rational self-interest of both parties. But if a man beats another man up and steals his lunch money that too is in the rational self-interest of the first man. Both men are being greedy. But one of them is trading. The other is stealing. That is a huge difference. In essence, it is the difference between capitalism and piracy/communism/fascism/etc and the fact that we as a society cannot tell the difference is a huge problem. The traders in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ take this corrupted thinking to its most logical and extreme end. They think they are capitalists and point to all the money they have gained as proof that they are. But they are not capitalists and this story is not a story of capitalism. It’s about thugs and thieves and the obscene destruction of wealth implicitly approved by a society that does not yet understand certain fundamental basics of economics.

“The Wolf of Wall Street,” is the fifth collaboration between director Martin Scorsese and actor Leonardo Dicaprio. It is arguably their best. It is certainly the most outrageous, funniest, crassest, excessive, and balls to the wall crazy movie they have ever made. It might have broken the f-word record, but I know for certain that I haven’t seen so much nudity in a movie outside of pornography. And the drug use, well I don’t think there is a scene in this 3-hour movie where somebody isn’t on something. The story comes from the autobiography of Jordan Belfort, a consummate salesman in that he could sell almost anything to anyone. After a brief stint on the real Wall Street, where his boss played by Matthew McCounaghey openly snorts cocaine in an upscale restaurant and counsels him to steal from his clients and masturbate at least twice a day, Jordan opens up his own penny stock brokerage firm in Long Island. The companies he shills are almost completely worthless but Jordan has an unbeatable sales pitch. In essence what he is selling is something way too good to be true. Get rich quick with penny stocks. He tells his clients that they can make money hand over fist by sitting on the couch at home doing nothing. Give me your money and you will win the lottery essentially. Jordan drives home this point by advertising his own lifestyle as proof that he knows how to make you rich. Look at Jordan’s big house, his beautiful wife, his cars, his hookers and drugs. Don’t you want to be just like him?

This is almost as important as the sales pitch because in order to become as rich as Jordan gets, he can’t do it all by himself, he needs hundreds of sales associates with the same unscrupulous tactics he has. He says to them: scam the people on the bottom and you will become as rich and decadent as me on the top. And boy does Jordan ever lavish on the temptations on his employees and clients. Every month, they have huge parties in the office with nude marching bands and strippers. Hookers roam the office corriders on a regular basis. Cocaine and Quallude use is rampant. For Jordan’s bachelor party he flew 50 of his coworkers to Vegas, hired 100 prostitutes, and trashed an entire floor of an upscale hotel. They have an orgy on the 747 to Vegas. The entire thing cost two million dollars. A drop in the bucket for a man who brags about being upset because he only made 52 million dollars last year. You see he was three million shy of a million dollars a week. He’s that kind of rich.

Do we care that people are doing this with other people’s money? For anyone wondering why the movie is three hours long, the answers are intertwined. The movie goes on so long because nobody stops Jordan. People don’t care apparently, probably because we have this ‘Joe the Plumber’ mentality about this type of excess. In other words, we aren’t against it because one day we hope to be on top doing the same thing. It’s the American Dream we’ve seen so many times in movies this year whether it was Spring Breakers, Pain and Gain, The Great Gatsby, or American Hustle. It is amazing how much bad behavior Jordan Belfort gets away with because he is rich. Sexual Assault, Public Intoxication, and Reckless Driving Under the Influence are just a few of his crimes. At one point he idiotically pilots his 170-foot yacht into a major storm and it sinks. A plane that comes in to rescue them crashes and the three people inside die. Jordan happened to be violating a court order at the time that instructed him to stay in the country. There are no consequeces.

The performance by Leonardo Dicaprio and also by his sidekick here Donnie Azoff, played by Jonah Hill, is arguably the best of his career. It is notable in its sheer lack of vanity. One particular scene stands out. Jordan and Donnie take these very old Qualuddes that unbeknownst to them take a very long time to kick in. When they finally do Jordan is far away from home. He is paralyzed by the force of the drugs and has to crawl out of the country club, into his car, and get home. It is a tour de force comic scene and the Leonardo and Jonah’s respective Oscar nominations are duly deserved.

The directing by Martin Scorsese and editing by Thelma Schoomaker is as always especially brilliant. He uses all the tricks in his bag in this movie and then some. In plenty of ways this is the biggest movie he has ever made. Imagine that, at 77 years of age he is still making his best movies. Killer impressive.

Go see this movie and bring along a dark sense of humor.