Tar (3/5 Stars)

Tar, written and directed by Todd Field (his first movie in over 15 years), is about a renowned conductor of symphony orchestras, Lydia Tar, played here by Cate Blanchett. It is a strange movie, not necessarily in content or tone, but in construction and point of view. 

In the wake up #MeToo, we have all heard various stories of executives that have abused their power to gain sexual favors from female subordinates. In real life, we hear these stories from the outside. We are not in the room where it happens and by default such stories have a he said/she said quality to them. A fictional movie like Tar though is not constrained to an outsider’s view. Because the writer/director has the ability to create what went on in the room, there doesn’t need to be any uncertainty involved as to what happened. The strange thing about “Tar” is that the movie is told from the inside, that is, it is told from Lydia Tar point of view, it follows her around in the privacy of her apartment and is present during confidential conversations. But even so, the scandal in question involving an allegation of abuse of an up and coming conductor, is never shown or explained in any detail. This leads to a strange viewing experience because we see Lydia Tar reacting to the outside world reacting to the vague rumors of a scandal, but we don’t actually know whether what the world thinks happened in that room is actually true or not.

This is one of those movies a certain type of movie critic loves because it allows them to interpret it however they wish (and thus show off their considerable skills in interpretation). I am not one of those critics. I am compelled to reveal that I spent a considerable amount of this movie confused as to what I was watching. The unexplained scandal is only one aspect of the confusion I had. I also had a hard time telling who it was Lydia Tar was talking to in any given scene. Near the beginning, she had a polite dinner with a character whose name I didn’t quite catch but who is played by Mark Strong. This character played by Mark Strong had some position in the orchestra but I didn’t pick up on what it was, or I did, but didn’t know what the position meant. Really, all I knew about the guy was that he must be wearing a wig because Mark Strong, the actor, is famously bald.

Not that the movie is being deliberately vague about that scene, it just isn’t all that helpful either. I have a feeling that if I knew a lot about symphony orchestras, I could probably have picked up on what they were talking about, and, in turn, its political undercurrent. I think that symphony orchestras, being bastions of elitism, are probably run in the discreet and indirect manner that shows up on the screen here. In this world, Lydia Tar, a direct and dominant personality, bullies her way through people, perhaps not realizing that what is left unsaid will find its way back to her. 

Other times, I think the movie should have helped me a little bit. I know part of this movie takes place in New York City because I know that Juliard is located there and I recognize some of the streets and buildings. But this movie also takes place in a city where most people speak German. It was not clear to me where that was and there were no scenes of travel between locations. (The movie opens with a train scene, but you can’t get to Germany from NYC by train. So…) Lydia Tar has more than one residence, that much I picked up on. I couldn’t tell you on what side of the Atlantic Ocean either one of those residences were located.

I did grasp how Lydia Tar went about seducing her charges. In one scene, she takes a young cellist out to lunch and gives her information unknown to the rest of the orchestra, that Tar is going to choose a piece of music for the upcoming performance, which includes a cellist solo. This young cellist goes out and gets a head start practicing for the solo. Then Tar tells the orchestra the news and asks the lead cellist in front of everyone whether or not they should have auditions. The lead cellist, confined by politeness, has to agree. Then Tar schedules the audition for early the next week and asks the lead cellist if that is enough time. The lead cellist, confined by politeness, has to agree. The audition itself is blind, that is the listeners cannot tell who is playing the cello behind a large partition. But one cellist is clearly better than the other, and, lo and behold, it turns out that the better one is the young cellist that Tar wants to seduce.

It is a good question here as to whether Lydia Tar has taken advantage of the young cellist. There doesn’t appear to be any objection on the young cellist’s part. What is clear is that Tar has unfairly manipulated the lead cellist and has been dishonest and disrespectful to the orchestra. What this movie might be about ultimately is not about the comeuppance due a person in power for their taking advantage of a subordinate, but how an organization fights back and expels such a person for her crimes against the whole.

Of course, if this movie was about the latter, you would think that Todd Field would show scenes of people in the orchestra plotting the downfall of Lydia Tar. But we don’t see that. The movie stays with Cate Blanchett the entire time. She seems oblivious to the machinations around her until it is already too late. I am reminded by the last quarter of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon wherein the title aristocrat is shunned by his peers but no one actually tells him that it has happened.

Overall, the way everyone scurries about outside the frame doing things for reasons they will never articulate, reminds me of all the more annoying people I know in real life. A part of me thinks Lydia Tar will be happier having nothing to do with them. She loses everything it appears, except the work and the music, and perhaps that is what really matters to someone like her. In one scene, she goes way out of her way to eloquently and publicly defend the music of Bach against the charge that he is white and male. Who knows? Maybe she is entirely innocent.

Cate Blanchett has been one of our best actresses since she played Queen Elizabeth at the age of 28. She has considerable talent as an actress and cuts a striking figure but, unlike most big name actresses, has never really been sexy. Not being known for sexiness is a boon to the aging actress, and not unlike Meryl Streep, it lends Blanchett a gravitas that will likely have her hoovering up all the best roles for women (and men, see I’m Not There) past a certain age. Meryl Streep was 57 when she played Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, a role that finally made her a bankable star to a wide audience. It is fair to say that Streep’s career has been as strong as ever for the past 20 years since she turned 50. Cate Blanchett is now 53 and I think it is very plausible that she will have a Streep-esque run in the next 20 years that will have her doing some of her best work. She’s already played a Queen. It’s only a matter of time before she plays a President. That is not to say her range is limited to power roles. She also did a great job this year playing an incompetent hairdresser in Documentary Now’s Two Hairdresser’s in Bagglyport. Blanchett can do anything.

1917 (4/5 Stars)

The technical achievements of 1917 alone are enough to warrant a viewing of this movie in a theater where one can experience in focus and isolation the high level of skill the creators exhibit. The Director of 1917 is Sam Mendes and the cinematographer is Roger Deakins. This is the fourth time they have worked collaborated. Notably, they previously worked together on James Bond’s Skyfall. What this movie attempts and largely achieves is one long broken shot, a technique first attempted by Alfred Hitchcock in the middling movie “Rope” and perfected by Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro Innaritu in the more recent movies “Gravity” and “Birdman”. “1917” efforts fall somewhere in between.

The digital revolution in filmmaking has made long shots much easier to edit and cheaper to produce. Surely it still takes much skill in creating a movie that relies so much on logistics and choreography, but, at the end of the day, when everything in movies now seems possible and comes out every week, it is just as important to ask whether any story should be shot in one take. Let’s consider for a moment exemplary uses of the technique in “Gravity” and “Birdman”.

“Gravity” is a great example of the utility of long shots, especially in action sequences. Long takes build up the you-are-there suspense to a scene, a sort of kinetic energy if you will, that makes watching them especially exciting. When done well, the audience has a perfect sense of where everyone is and how fast everything is moving. Any danger presented is more immediate more serious because there is not present the safety of editing, which too often in lesser movies bends time and space to aid the protagonist. How many times have the main characters not gotten hit by that train which is barreling down on their stalled car. “Gravity” was set in space. Its subject does not particularly lend itself to a one-shot technique, but there is no reason why it wouldn’t be appropriate. As it is an action movie, it the one-shot technique greatly enhances the overall effect of the movie.

“Birdman” is not an action movie, so it is a particularly good example of using the one-shot technique as a way to develop an appropriate subject matter. That movie was centered around a Broadway play. Plays and movies are written differently due to differences in the immediacy of the audience and the fact that movies have editing. By taking out the editing, “Birdman” allowed a movie audience to experience “play writing” in a cinematic experience.

“1917” is a movie about World War I. There is plenty of action in any war and the long takes here make those sequences in this movie more exciting. The storyline is sparse and includes a journey of two British soldiers through enemy lines with the mission to call off an assault that will certainly be ambushed and end in slaughter. We follow two Lance Corporals, Black (played by Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (played by George MacKay) as they march through no-man’s land, tunnels, fields, a burned-out city, and forest, till they get to their mission’s endpoint. They have until the next morning to stop the assault, so a time limit is set and the journey happens pretty much in real time. George MacKay has a face that belongs in the 19^th century and does a good job inhabiting the old world. There are several more prominent stars in the cast that pop up now and again in what are essentially cameos. Colin Firth is a general. Andrew Scott is a lieutenant. Mark Strong is a captain. Benedict Cumberbatch is a colonel. Everyone does a fine job.

A journey story with a time limit is good for a one take technique. But (and I realize this may be a bit unfair) is a plot about a journey with a time limit appropriate for a World War I story? After all, World War I more than any war before or since was not about going places in a hurry. What generally defined that war was that nobody went anywhere and took an exceedingly long time not to do it. World War I was about hoping a bomb didn’t land on you while you waited in the mud.

Sam Mendes has made a very good movie and he dedicates it his grandfather, a World War I veteran. Do you think his grandfather would have recognized the subject matter of this movie? Is such a mission that we see here likely to have occurred in a World War I setting? Do you think the veteran would have laughed at the sheer distance the characters make within a day? At least the mission seems to be generally futile. That at least is in the spirit of World War I.

The Imitation Game (3/5 Stars)

‘The Imitation Game’ suffers from ‘Mighty Ducks’ syndrome, a disease of storytelling born of its namesake. “The Might Ducks” is a Disney movie starring Emilio Esteves. It was a popular movie that made a lot of money and spawned several sequels, not to mention many ripoffs that seemed to change nothing but the sport i.e. The Little Giants, The Big Green. Ostensibly ‘The Mighty Ducks' is about ice hockey, but curiously the more plausible it seems (and thus more enjoyable) is inversely related to the viewer’s knowledge of ice hockey. That is to say the syndrome refers to a movie that is more effective the less the audience is familiar with its subject matter. Perhaps not coincidentally when the NHL expanded to include a team called the Mighty Ducks their home was Anaheim, California, a place that has never had and never will have ice.

“The Imitation Game,” is a biopic of Alan Turing, the British code-breaker responsible for cracking the Nazi Enigma code during World War II. I am not a code-breaking expert. However I can tell when a movie is deliberately not engaging with its subject matter because it either is not smart enough to explain it or does not believe I am smart enough to understand an explanation. If I were a code-breaking expert, and wanted to see this movie about a famous code-breaker, I would expect to be appalled by the sheer lack of attention paid to the science of breaking codes. It must have taken quite a bit of smarts and hard work to crack Enigma. The movie at least explains why it would be so hard. It is a code that has 150 million million combinations and resets every single day. Alan Turing’s great idea was to create a machine fast enough to go through the combinations in a single day. I have not the slightest clue how Turing came up with that idea or how the machine worked. Here is what the movie was concerned with instead: Turing was not very good at making friends and the people he worked with did not like his dismissive and arrogant attitude. Therefore, according to the movie, in order to break the code and win the war Turing has to draw up enough social grace to give apples to his colleagues and tell a joke about a bear in the woods. That (and not his genius) is what won over the room so they could finally work out his idea.

Anyone with some concept of how dangerous the World War going on outside will understand how petty this movie’s insistence on the importance of social drama was to the greater scheme of things. And anyone with some concept of how code-breaking machines work will be eternally frustrated with how the movie completely sidesteps any discussion of code-breaking theory. And anyone who has some respect for the intelligence of past generations will roll their eyes at the way the screenwriter has chosen to dumb down the characters in order to help what they must have assumed to be a pitifully ill informed modern audience. A good example is when the codebreakers are first presented with a stolen Enigma machine. One of the men asks why they don’t just type an intercepted radio code into it. The makers of the movie (Director Morten Tyldum, screenwriter Graham More) are under the impression that the audience does not know that Enigma is more complicated than that, so not unlike a sacrificial lamb given unto slaughter to sate the gods of idiots a real historical figure has been made to pretend he is not smart enough to know not to ask stupid questions. A little later in the same scene the head of MI:6, the British secret service, is introduced. Another poor bastard asks, “But the military only has five divisions.” No shit. The Secret Service is secret. Why would a person hired to break a top secret Nazi code be adamant about the impossibility of a secret intelligence division in the army when he is literally already apart of it? Quack, Quack, Quack!

This stupid pandering to modern sensibilities reaches the level of questionable storytelling ethics when it concerns the homosexuality of its subject Alan Turing. We all know now that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, the key word being ‘now.’ They did not know that then. Alan Turing probably did not even know that then. The way to honor the experience of real people is to show what it was like through their eyes. But here whenever a character learns of Turing’s homosexuality they not only know what it is literally, but also act as if they do not believe it is a moral choice of Turing’s. Furthermore are sympathetic to him even the policeman who, more than anybody else, has no historical reason to be. These are reactions that supposedly take place side by side in a time period where Turing would later be chemically castrated by the government for his homosexuality and eventually commit suicide. If you want to see how a movie should treat something like this, I recommend “Far From Heaven.” Or not pay attention to it at all. If you asked Alan Turing what he felt was most interesting about his character, do you suspect he would mention his homosexuality or the giant precomputer he spent day and night developing for years. How about we focus on that a little?

There is a reason to see this movie though and that is the always-superb performance by Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing. The man has made a career out of playing geniuses such as Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein and here he does another version of a very smart man. His Turing is a far less smooth and confident as his Sherlock, but the underlying intelligence is immediately apparent. Turing apparently had a stammer and Cumberbatch performs it well. So that’s good. But hold fast, and I wonder if anyone else picked up on this. Take the character that Keira Knightley plays. She gets a job as a codebreaker by filling out an extremely hard crossword in the London paper and finishing an unfinishable test before a classroom of other applicants. So she too is super duper smart. Amazingly though, she is not beset with the quirks and characteristics of a genius that Cumberbatch brings to his role. She spends a great more time on screen being a love interest/plucky feminist than being a nerd that's very good at math. What’s going on there you may ask? Or not ask. I don’t think anybody but me has.

What stops these performances from being awards worthy has more to do with the mediocre movie that they are attached to. This one has been getting awards buzz lately. I don’t agree with that. And I also think it was a rip-off of “A Beautiful Mind,” to have the breakthrough in the code-breaking take place in a bar in a scene concerned with the unspoken code of human mating habits. For fuck's sake Hollywood not everything is about sex.

 I think Mark Zuckerberg said it best when he was asked about, “The Social Network.”

“The whole framing of the movie is I’m with this girl who doesn’t exist in real life who then dumps me…and basically the whole reason for making Facebook is because I wanted to get girls or get into some social institution…It’s such a big disconnect from the way people who make movies think of what we do in Silicon Valley, building stuff. They just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.” (cue wild applause from audience of engineers)

Exactly.

John Carter of Mars (2/5 Stars)

Really expensive nonsense

“Only enormously talented people could have made "Death to Smoochy." Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience. To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence, and dream big dreams.”

-       Roger Ebert

The explanation of why "John Carter of Mars" exists is better than the movie itself. It’s director Andrew Stanton is best known as one of the great creative forces behind the golden age of Pixar. He was a cowriter for all three Toy Story movies and directed both “Finding Nemo,” and “Wall-E.” To a movie lover like me he is arguably one of the greatest living directors and I would put “Wall-E” on a list of the 100 best movies ever made. To studios he represents enormous profits, both “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo” having broken box office records for animated movies. So when Andrew Stanton came to the producers at Disney with an idea for a science fiction/comic book movie with lots of violence and exotic locations, who in their right mind would say no. They granted Stanton full access to the Disney playground. $250 million dollars later in production value and $100 million dollars later in marketing produced the movie that last week grossed only $30 million and is destined to be one of the biggest flops of the year. What went wrong? Well, for one thing, the movie isn’t any good. But how could that happen? (See above). There are two main problems both of which could have been solved by a cigar-chomping asshole producer with only dollars for eyeballs. Those people are good for something.

The first big problem is way too much faithfulness to the source material. This movie is based on more than a century old comic book series. In this book we are introduced to made up weapons, made up languages, made up peoples, made up places, made up cultural customs, made up powers, made up gods and goddesses. Everything is nothing I had ever heard of before. When a character dramatically intones that they have to find the ninth ring of iths from the gates of Barsoon before the tharks release the giant white ape and the thurns shapeshift for the red man blue man widget marraige at Helium, my reaction is like, “Huh? What?” And this sort of thing goes on for much of the movie. They keep throwing in new shit, giving no explanation or time for it to sink in, and then expecting big dramatic payoffs. A very big problem has to do with the story’s technology. People in flying warships are fighting with swords while big green men on the ground have calvary and guns. Then there are these other dudes that have the ability to shapeshift and vaporize anything within a few seconds using a blue widget thingy. I haven’t the slightest idea what that thingy is or why nobody else has it or why it was not used in the battles far more often. This movie could have been a lot shorter if the blue vaporizer thingy had not been used so sparingly. Then there is John Carter himself, a civil war veteran from Earth, transported to Mars via a little thingy, to find that his Earth muscles provide him with superior abilities on Mars’ lower gravity. Basically, he is super strong and can jump really high. But how high can he jump? The movie is very very unclear about that. At points it is just a few meters, but at other times it could very well be a football field. It is this critics opinion that for action sequences to be effective, the laws of physics must be followed, even when it is on Mars, or if they are to be bent they are bent in a clear and predictable manner (See “The Matrix.” Do not see “Matrix Reloaded” or “Matrix Revolutions.”) Otherwise nothing makes sense and the story’s momentum and suspense deflates. The suspension of disbelief gone we are merely witnessing an actor in a weird costume skipping around a room with a green screen.

That actor would be Taylor Kitsch a remarkably bad choice in casting whose responsibility for the failure of the movie is only somewhat alleviated by the even worse choice of Lynn Collins, as the Martian princess. Put these two together and you have some of the most horribly acted scenes I have seen in a long time. And you cannot merely just say that the material was arcane and stilted. Sure they are speaking about weird lore and strange happenings but that still doesn’t forgive the utter lack of excitement or range in the performances. Let’s say a horde of green Martian barbarians was descending upon you for the express purpose of killing you. Perhaps your facial expression and body language should suggest you were doing anything other than posing for the Mars version of GQ magazine. Or consider John Carter’s reaction to learning that he is on Mars for the first time. That Taylor Kitsch reminded me of a young Keanu Reeves, and that is about the worst compliment you can give an actor. One of the producers of this movie should have required that Andrew Stanton cast a well-known action star as the lead in his $250 million dollar epic. This is not simply a cynical attempt at more dollars via a better marketing platform. “John Carter of Mars,” is Stanton’s first live-action movie. He had never worked with actors before. If the director casts unknowns who do not know what they are doing, guess who has the responsibility to teach them what to do: the director. And if the director does not know how to direct actors and the actors do not know how to act, what you get is this silly drivel, made even sillier as it is being performed against a backdrop of a ridiculously expensive, intricate, and extensive amount of costume, makeup, CGI work, set design, and production value. What a colossal fuck-up this was.

I keep thinking back to that other live action foray by an acclaimed Pixar director, Brad Bird’s “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.” Whatever similar problems Bird may have had were alleviated by a familiar and franchised story that took place in present day and was anchored by Tom Cruise, who is, private weirdness aside, quite frankly one of the best actors in the business, and may very well be the best action actor. For future studio reference, the next time a great director wants to spend an extremely large amount of money on something he has never done before with a bunch of inexperienced collaborators, it might be a good idea to sign him up for two movies and make the first one a much less expensive test run.  

Sherlock Holmes (4/5 Stars) January 10, 2010

A highly intelligent thriller

Sherlock Holmes is reincarnated for the 22nd time (or so Ebert says) in the new film by Guy Ritchie (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch). This is the first Sherlock Holmes movie I’ve seen. I haven’t read any of the books either, I sort of skimmed Hound of the Baskervilles once upon a time. I have seen plenty of pictures though and had what I thought was a pretty good idea of who Holmes was all about. Let’s just say that the character has been updated with a dose of kick-ass coolness. For instance, Holmes not only peers at things with a magnifying glass in this movie, he also knows how to brawl and can beat up men twice his size by observing the pressure points in their bodies and hitting all the places. Dr. Watson, his sidekick and roommate, also packs a punch. They are played by Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law respectively. The bad guy is the dark lord of a Satanic Cult played by Mark Strong. Rachel McAdams plays Holmes ex-girlfriend/master criminal. 

The plot is completely new. It kind of had to be to incorporate Guy Ritchie’s action packed trademark style. The good thing though is that Sherlock is every bit a brilliant genius as he traditionally was. The only difference now is that he is an action hero. The only actor I can think of that can pull off this kind of dynamic is the great Robert Downey Jr. Making an action movie these days is not very hard what with the help of special effects, but you can’t fake smart. To pull off a brilliant character a movie needs a smart script and an actor who knows what it’s like to be brilliant. For example Sherlock is eccentric to the point that he is excited by very hard cases and insufferably bored by everything else. When he doesn’t have something to work on he locks himself up his apartment and lives in squalor constructing devices and experimenting on his dog. The character by its nature is anti-social, unhygienic, and obsessive. Only a guy like Downey Jr. can stay true to that type of character and still be very likable and totally badass. This part was tailor made for Downey Jr. I think he has an outside chance of an Oscar nomination. 

I really enjoyed seeing Jude Law in a good movie for a change. It’s been years. What’s cool about his role is that he doesn’t play the dumb sidekick. Dr. Watson is very smart too. The dialogue between him and Sherlock are some of the most intelligent back and forth I’ve seen in a mystery movie. Sherlock never has to explain to him that something is elementary. Dr. Watson is very capable in an investigation and not to mention in fights. By the way, I don’t know if anyone else caught it and maybe I was just seeing things but I kind of also gauged a little bit of homoerotic tension between the two. I don’t necessarily think that Dr. Watson was gay. His character is about to leave their apartment and get married. But I did get the sense that Sherlock was rather fond of Dr. Watson. Think about it. He’s very anti-social and can’t stand anybody but Dr. Watson, they were living together, and they bicker like an old married couple. Nothing is ever explicitly said, but hey it was the Victorian Era. It’s not like anybody could have admitted that sort of thing. 

Of course the one big flaw in my premise is the Rachel McAdams character, apparently the one and only woman Sherlock was ever involved with. (Not that Sherlock shows her much attention in this movie only getting close enough to kiss her on the cheek.) But you know, I didn’t really believe the whole thing anyway. Rachel is certainly gorgeous but she’s not nearly weird enough to be the girlfriend of a guy like Sherlock Holmes. Frankly she wasn’t weird enough to be a mastermind criminal. Rachel just acts and speaks to damn normal. It doesn’t work. Why? Because super smart people can’t fake normal. She should have been channeling Juno and this script should have given her better words to work with. 

The plot centers on the mysterious resurrection of a dead man. This is the Dark Lord of a Satanic Cult played by Mark Strong. Upon miraculously busting out of his grave, he commits several impossible murders, and threatens to poison Parliament with a magical gas. The game is afoot. Not only does Sherlock have to catch the guy, he also has to prove that there is no such thing as magic and sorcery. Data, data, data there is only observational fact. I must confess before the speech at the end where Sherlock explains everything, I had no idea how the Dark Lord was doing any of this stuff. That is where the movie was perhaps too smart for me. The best mystery movies are both surprising and obvious at the same time. When things are explained the best reaction should be, “Oh my God, how come I didn’t see that!” Here the explanation was simply surprising. I didn’t see any of it coming. I couldn’t have seen any of it coming. It had to do with Chemistry, and Biology, and Science stuff. I guess Sherlock Holmes is just a heck of a lot smarter than me. That’s why this movie didn’t get five stars.

Body of Lies 10/11/08

Oliver Stone once gave a wonderful insight into telling which war you were watching in a movie if you took away the title, the names, and the dates. He pointed out that you could always tell you were watching a WWII movie because the troops were always going somewhere. The GIs always had a destination. They were going to Berlin, or they were going to a guard a bridge, or they were going to do something anything. He then pointed out that you could always tell you were watching a Vietnam movie because the troops endlessly went in circles, didn't really accomplish anything, and usually ended their fights by calling in airstrikes. 
Ridley Scott's 'Body of Lies' I think will provide a blueprint for movies about the war on terrorism. By the looks of this film, and previous movies about the war on terrorism, this war isn't going to be very entertaining. A movie that is true to the war on terror, like this movie, will be very complex technically and morally, will have convoluted story lines and, for the most part, elusive enemies and far-sighted hard to reach goals. Because this movie resembles something like truth, it is sometimes hard to get through. For half the movie, the enemy isn't clearly defined and is incredibly hard to identify. Leonardo Dicaprio, a CIA agent on the ground, and Russel Crowe, his boss in D.C., go to very great lengths simply to find out what the enemy is doing. After several failures, they stage a super elaborate plot to get to a terrorist responsible for bombings in Europe. Still then the plot goes haywire. The point seems to be that no great expense in technology and good will across the ocean in D.C. will ever compare to actual ground experience and intelligence from allies in the base region. 
The ally in this region, who is continually blown off by the ultimate know nothing arrogant boss, Russell Crowe, is a Jordanian counter-terrorist minister named Mark Strong (He's Middle Eastern even if his name lies opposite). He's morally corrupt (has torture rooms) but is perhaps the only hope for an effective strategy in such a FUBAR place. (The middle east in this movie is a wasteland covered in garbage and sand being roamed by wild scurvy dogs) Unfortunately the only way it seems to get anything done is to involve innocent civilians in the process. This usually gets them killed. When the Russel Crowe character says "no one in this mess is innocent," it sounds like something he needs to constantly repeat to himself in order to sleep. When Dicaprio gets tortured near the end of this film, a part of me thought he certainly deserved it. He certainly did horrible things to get there. 
This movie is tough to watch at times, but I give it a fresh review because it is ultra competent and provides a real on-the-ground look at the war on terrorism. (I would bet the entire thing was shot in the middle east. Some of the war torn vistas seem dangerously close for any film crew) The story makes sense even though sometimes Dicaprio's character seems offset with different principles. Its hard to reconcile the renegade man who would sacrifice innocent civilians and outright challenge government authority with the guy who takes the Arab nurse out on a couple of dates. This is a character with a divergent mind. The role called for a great, maybe impossible, performance. I think Dicaprio's take on it wasn't entirely plausible. Crowe on the other hand was as good as it could be. I heard he gained fifty pounds to play this role. That I think was unnecessary. Unless the character is Oscar worthy stuff (Like Raging Bull or Monster) you really shouldn't be putting yourself through that sort of punishment. It helped the character but this movie doesn't deserve that sort of commitment.
As for Ridley Scott, he has once again proven that he is an ultra-competent director. I don't recall the last time when he did something truly significant (maybe Thelma and Louise) but in the last decade he has been building a list of good (not great) movies. (American Gangster, Kingdom of God, Black Hawk Down, Gladiator). This one certainly updates the war movie genre to current technologies and complexities. It is probably the best movie to come out about the war on terror, but, looking at the track record, that doesn't say much. Still, with the way this war is set up, an easy narrative is going to be hard to come by. 

Sunshine 08/04/07

Sunshine is one of the those movies that I wish could have given me more. Here it was teetering on the edge of something of a masterpiece. The visuals are magnificent and the characters are colorful and well drawn (and work heroically without makeup). The science is intelligent and correct. 
The big letdown is the bad guy. He's the crazed captain of Icarus I, the first spaceship that didn't make it, a man named Pinpacker I believe. He's covered with sores after being exposed to too much sun and believes that God that doomed mankind by extinguishing the sun so mankind shouldn't try to reignite it. The only problem with this is that Pinpacker is not a real character. The movie provides no explanation on why a captain would go insane and why his crew would not fight back, or how a man with such limited sanity could be put in charge of the most important mission on in the Solar System. It's somewhat unbelievable and it seems to me that he is more a plot device than an actual character. 
The makers of this movie seem to be really searcing for a plot in order to showcase the special effects, not the other way around. Therefore we get the Earth's smartest engineer making a really stupid decision so the movie can jumpstart the domino sequence of disasters. But that's not enough, because the story has written in very smart characters who can solve these huge problems. That's when the psychotic bad guy comes in handy. He makes sure that the glorious disasters keep coming and coming. 
This movie, in the superior way it was made, reminds one more of classic sci-fi movies than those stupid B-movies found late night on the Sci Fi channel. Movies like 2001:A Space Odyssey and the Alien franchise. The details are the same. The characters look smarter than sexy (even the women). They don't wear makeup and speak convincing scientific possibilities. But in A Space Odyssey it was the computer that went mad. In Alien it was a killer extra-terristrial plus an android. The movie Sunshine, unlike those classics, lacks a true villain, and I think it's mostly because the villain, this time, is a human religious fanatic. The computers, androids, and killer aliens were memorable and scary because they used logic, reason, and instinct to go around killing people. They fit into a perfect science fiction mold. Religious fanatics, bless their souls, do not fit comfortably into a science fiction movie. Keep in mind that good science fiction is based on science fact. Logic, reason, and instinct work. God on the other hand is more spiritual than anything. He does not, bless his soul, fit into the perfect science fiction fold. The crazed fanatic doesn't make any sense. It's not logical. 
No offense, but in space, in the far out future, in a solar winter, in a state of the art spaceship, commandeered by a group of specialists and scientists, God simply does not fit in. 

Syriana 12/11/05

This movie was confusing and half the time I didn't know what was going on. Only at about halfway or whatever through the movie did I get some inkling of something. I wish I had gotten more, I wish this because the subject is so interesting. Wouldn't we all want to know something more about the oil business. But this movie never stops to explain. It shows lots of places, lots of people, lots of situations. There's a story about a corporation merger, a dynastic struggle in an Arab nation, the training of a muslim jihadist, a betrayed CIA agent. I wish for once, they would pause the constant setting switches and have two people sit down and have a long talk about what's going on. But again, this never happens. Instead the characters make small talk, nods, and whispers. And that's the reasons why the movie fails. A movie may have all the materials for success, but if the audience doesn't understand what's going and why, they won't become emotionally involved. At some points in the story, I'm sure what was happening was important, but I didn't know why. I was shut out of the story, and if that's what the writer/director has in mind, then I'm not too impressed. (A shame really, it looked like a good movie)