Interstellar (4/5 Stars)

Whatever can happen, will happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Dallas Buyer's Club (4/5 Stars)

Ronald Woodruff wasn’t supposed to be the kind of guy that got AIDS. That was something homosexuals got, faggots as Ron would likely call them. He points to a fresh 1980s newspaper chronicling the death of Rock Hudson and decries the massive shame it was that Rock had access to all that Hollywood pussy and wasted the opportunity by being gay. AIDS was also something intravenous drug users got, and Ron Woodruff wasn’t that either. I mean he snorted cocaine and drank heavily and had unprotected sex with plenty of women (we are introduced to him via a threesome under the bleachers at a Texas rodeo), but none of that had anything to do with needles or homosexuality. So when Ron Woodruff passes out from a massive headache, wakes up in the hospital, and is told that he has a T-Cell count of 9 and 30 days left to live, he doesn’t believe it. “There’s nothing that can kill Ron Woodruff in 30 days,” he declares to the doctors and storms out of the hospital.

“Dallas Buyer’s Club,” directed by Jean-Marc Vallee attempts to do two things with the biographical story of Ronald Woodruff of Dallas, Texas. The first thing it does is demonstrate how his terminal illness and his subsequent business dealings with the gay community opened his eyes to society’s intolerance and indifference towards the “homosexual” AIDS epidemic and broke down his own prejudices. The second is an educational primer on the various drugs that were in the process of being approved by the FDA in response to the AIDS epidemic. One being AZT, a drug that is being championed by the FDA but the movie treats as a killer. The other drugs are the all-natural ones that Ron Woodruff starts peddling to the Dallas community. It was Ron’s unshakable belief (based not only the research he did but the anecdotal experience of taking every drug himself before selling it to anybody else) that his drugs, though they did not cure the disease (nothing could do that we learn), would be able to prolong life. They do this by merely making the body healthier in general, whereas AZT, sort of like chemotherapy, kills everything patient included. The movie does the first thing better than the second.

First things first: this year’s award in stunt acting goes to the acting team of Matthew McCounaaghey and Jared Leto, playing respectively Ronald Woodruff and Rayon, Ron’s transsexual business partner. Both have lost an incredible amount of weight for their roles. McCounaghey is perhaps more unrecognizable here being once upon a time People’s Sexiest Man Alive back when he had superfluous muscales and did nothing but dumb romantic comedies. It’s all gone now as if he has shed all the superficial romcom dumbness and what is left is the emaciated frame of a serious actor. To witness the turn in career choices that McCounaghey has accomplished over the last couple years is quite remarkable. “Dallas Buyer’s Club” is the capper. An Academy Award nomination would not be surprising. It is also a relief to witness the return of Jared Leto (Requiem from a Dream) after a five-year hiatus of pop stardom. In addition to slimming down he has put on a dress. The character Rayon apparently is not based on one real person but rather a composite of the gay community. It is an ingenious strategy concerning the age-old problem of capturing a lifetime within a two-hour frame. In this way, Ron’s changing attitude is reflected through his relationship with one particular person rather in several people and the emotional payoffs are far more effective.

I’m going to take a moment and throw in a political comment here, an indulgence I am happily allowed by writing an anonymous blog that nobody reads. “Dallas Buyer’s Club” is a great movie for the fan of Capitalism. Generally it has been said that Capitalism has no morals. But that is not necessarily true. The morals of Capitalism are honesty, equal treatment, and tolerance. A man may not like a person or a group of people, but if he is a true capitalist he will trade with that person for the right price. Racial segregation, Caste systems, exclusionary zoning, and ornerous governmental regulation: all are great enemies of Capitalism. The “Dallas Buyer’s Club” is a great example of how Capitalism transforms the prejudiced man who takes its ideals to heart. Ron Woodruff is above all else a hustler. When he sees that there is a market for unapproved Mexican drugs in Dallas, he sets out to exploit it with rational self-interest and what is born of the Dallas Buyers Club is an unambiguously good collaboration of buyers and sellers trying to help each other survive. Is it evidence that the Dallas Buyer’s Club was a good thing that helped people because Ron Woodruff was able to make money? Yes, yes it is. 

What is not dones too well is the movies’ treatment of AZT. This comes from the subtitle at the end of the movie. It states that: “A smaller dose of AZT combined with other drugs saved millions of lives.” Given the movie I just watched, that line does not make sense. I had just spent two hours watching Ron Woodruff declare that the doctors doling out AZT were murderors, a hospital administator played by Denis O’Hare (an actor that specializes in white collar sleaze) who cares more about money than good science, and a third doctor played by Jennifer Garner who is sympathetic to Woodruff’s cause and at one point is asked to resign because of it. So what is the deal with AZT? Why is the movie telling us with its last line that it works when it does not offer any evidence to suggest that from in the movie? This is the sort of detail that makes the watcher feel the need to look up on Wikipedia the true story, which I have not done yet because I wanted my confusion to be readily apparent in this review.

In cases like this, I always bring up that Oliver Stone anecdote. He was accused of propaganda and his reply was this: how can you tell that my movies are not propaganda? Because they aren’t boring. Propaganda by definition only shows one point of view, and because of that necessary lack of conflict, it is not exciting. A storyteller may have a point of view. A storyteller may have an agenda. But if that storyteller does not give the other side its full due, the story will not be exciting. “Dallas Buyer’s Club,” has this problem. By the end, we see Ron Woodruff time and again being victimized unjustly by the system for arbitrary reasons. The reasons may have been stupid for all I know, but what I do know from watching the movie is that the other side is not getting a fair shake. They are not given the chance to explain themselves. We see plenty of scenes of Jennifer Garner trying to persuade Denis O’Hare of the ineffectiveness of AZT. Instead of giving Denis the opporutunity to respond, the movie simply has him ignore Jennifer. In the end, we are left with only one side of the argument, and because of that the epitath does not make sense.

What is the truth? I’m afraid you may have to do your own research.  

Mud (3/5 Stars)

‘Mud’ is the third feature of one of the more exciting new American directors, Jeff Nichols. Nichols first came upon the scene in 2008 with “Shotgun Stories,” one of the more impressive no-budget films I have ever seen. He progressed in leaps and bounds with his second feature, “Take Shelter,” which I still consider the best movie of 2011. That movie added to Nichols repertoire the kind of special effects only achievable with a decent budget. With “Mud,” Nichols adds the presence of movie stars, something a small movie can generally only achieve when the makers have a reputation for quality work.

Two kids, Ellis and Nick, take a motorboat out to an island in the Arkansas part of the Mississippi river.  They are adventuring to check out a boat that somehow found itself in a tree. They find the boat but they also find a man named “Mud” (this is not a made up name apparently as all the other characters in the story call him that too) who is hiding out there away from the authorities. Mud (played by Matthew McConaughey asks for help and weaves a story about killing a man out of love for his woman Juniper (played by Reese Witherspoon). Ellis, whose parents are talking of divorce in the background of home scenes, decides to help Mud. Because as he explains at one points these two love each other. The kid does not do a whole lot of explaining his actions, which is accurate as he is just a kid after all and probably wouldn’t be able to articulate what he wanted to say even if he wanted too. The other adults in the story however take notice of his odd behavior and sneaking about and provide many opportunities for advice. The advice varies of course but most of it is about love and it is as helpful as basically anything you can tell a fourteen year old in vague, uncertain, and metaphorical terms (the funniest advice comes from Michael Shannon character, uncle to Nick. He uses a ceiling fan he dredged up from the Mississippi river to make his point). Some things, kids just need to figure out for themselves.

It is a good question as to what Ellis (played by Tye Sheridan) actually learns from the experiences he has in this movie other than women are unpredictable and it (maybe?) is not a good idea to fight with other guys over them.  I am going to keep from talking too much about the storyline here because there isn’t much more to the movie than the limited twists to the plot. I could talk a bit about the performances but I couldn’t really propound on the specialness of them that much. My best observation I think would be how Tye Sheridan must have a helluva right hand because he keeps landing punches in the faces of guys twice his size. It looks a little awkward because he has to reach up so high. I wouldn’t think the jabs would have much impact but they keep on doing so. I suppose I could also mention that the Mississippi river looks pretty neat.

You what this movie reminds me of? Those classic Criterion Collection European films. Ones like “The 400 Blows” and “Au Revoir Enfants.” These are movies that my book “The 1001 Movies You Need to See Before You Die” keeps telling me to see, but for the life of me I cannot understand what makes these movies great. I understand why they aren’t bad, but why would they be great? They accomplish perfectly what they set out to accomplish but in the end it is exactly what it is, not much.  

It is a sort of critical paradox that the more a movie tries to do, the more ways it can fail. I think that may be the reason why ‘Mud’ which does is a very good not so ambitious movie can score around 98% on Rotten Tomatoes while Michael Bay’s ‘Pain and Gain’ and probably Baz Luhrman’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ (I say probably because I have yet to see it, will so this weekend) are hovering around 50% even though they are very dense movies that aiming to accomplish quite a lot.

Bernie (3/5 Stars)

There is at least one thing we know for certain. Bernie Tiede shot Majorie Nugent, an eighty three year old woman in the back four times, than stuffed her lifeless corpse in a freezer where it stayed for the next nine months. Why he did it is a lot less clear, and amazingly, whether he deserves to be punished for it is also up for debate in this new “comedy” directed by Richard Linklater and starring Jack Black as the title character.

This story is based on events that took place in the small town of Carthage, Texas in the 1990s. The movie even has most of the townspeople of Carthage cast as themselves. They interact with the movie stars who are playing the principal characters and give interviews directly to the camera at other times. So this movie has a novel structure as a half documentary, half movie. It is more weird than effective though and leaves a plenty to be explained and uncovered. 

The story deserves to be on the same newspaper page as “Man bites dog.” Bernie Tiede was just the nicest guy. Everyone loved him. He was the town’s assistant funeral director. His employer describes him as the most qualified employee he had ever had. He taught sunday school. He sang in the church choir. He directed and starred in town plays. He made a habit of giving gifts to everyone he met. He even would visit widows after the funerals of their husbands and console them with flowers. One such widow was  Majorie Nugent, played here by Shirley Maclaine. In addition to being his ultimate victim, she also happened to be the richest person in town.

Majorie had no friends and had not spoken anyone in her family for years. Her sister plays herself in the movie and describes her as a hateful mean person. Bernie basically became her one and only friend. They started doing everything together, even going on trips and cruises to exotic places, (always first class.) Bernie started doing everything for her. She fired her entire household staff. At one point she rewrote her will to give everything to Bernie. Over time it became just her and Bernie in that big house of hers.

Was it romantic? Well, probably not. Bernie was a closet homosexual. The police found several videotapes of him having sex with local married men when they raided his house. Anyway, one day, for no real reason (to hear Bernie tell it), Bernie killed her. Nobody noticed for nine months. In the meantime, Bernie started giving away all of her money. He bought people cars, financed local businesses, and donated a new wing to the local church. In all, it is estimated that he spent 1 million of her money on the townspeople of Carthage. (He never really got around to paying off his own credit cards with her money though.) Finally Majorie's stockbroker became suspicious and got the police to search the house. They found her stiff corpse in a freezer in the garage. Bernie confessed. When they asked him why he never disposed of the body, he said he wanted to give her a respectable funeral someday.

The town district attorney, Danny Buck, had the case transferred to a different town because he feared Bernie wouldn’t get a fair trial. Townspeople started telling him that a local jury would never convict Bernie. “You people are aware that he confessed, you know,” a tired Danny Buck says. Bernie was convicted and is spending life in prison. He teaches four classes and does a lot of good work in the big house now. Apparently people really like him there too. 

The movie isn’t really that funny. This is mostly because it is rather tough to make a joke out of the actual murder of an elderly woman. Her not being a nice person never quite makes it okay. Bad behavior can usually be mined for laughs without any real problems, but there is a line, and this movie crosses it. 

This movie would make a fine double feature with Jim Carrey’s superior “I Love You, Phillip Morris,” another true story of a closeted homosexual from Texas that was just the nicest guy and sang in the church choir and went and stole millions of dollars. What that movie accomplishes and "Bernie" doesn’t is provide some decent motivation for the events that occurred. I thought I basically understood the Jim Carrey character. I never found out who the real "Bernie" was. Sometimes it seems like we are seeing something on the screen that couldn’t have possibly have happened the way it did. For instance, after shooting the old lady, Bernie cries over her dead body. Did that really happen? If so, how do we know exactly how he reacted? These are vague areas that cry out for a treatment usually reserved for an Errol Morris documentary, which is at least clearer about what is uncertain.

Apparently just after shooting her, Bernie went to the dress rehearsal of the town musical he was directing. Ironically it was a production of the “Music Man,” and Bernie played the lead role as the charming con artist that dupes a small town into giving him a bunch of money. Is Bernie a confidence man? The movie never takes a strong stand on this subject and the possibility is only hinted at. In fact, the only person this movie really does not seem to approve of completely is the district attorney, Danny Buck. Matthew McCounaghey plays him in caricature as a slick egotistical sensationalist. His portrayal is debatable to say the least. Bernie killed a woman. I think we could say Danny Buck was justified in prosecuting him in court over it.

An opportunity missed here is an exploration of the tragic elements of this story. This is the second movie based on a true story about closet homosexuals in Texas that end up doing terrible things. I think you can make an argument that the crimes they commit are linked to the marginalization of homosexuality in Texan society. In “I Love You, Phillip Morris,” the man’s wife bluntly asks a doctor if the gay thing and stealing is related. I would argue that it is in the sense that lying everyday to everyone about an essential part of one’s identity will probably aid a person’s ability to lie in general. What was Bernie doing accompanying little old ladies? He was a very nice man who apparently everyone liked. Did he not deserve love or marriage? Bernie’s reasons for being nice to Majorie Nugent in the first place was that he had noticed how she was so lonely. (The money was there as well but that does not seem like his entire motivation.) As a gay man in Texas, he would have probably known quite a bit about that.

Tropic Thunder 08/18/08

Earlier this year, I felt that ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ had sent an ultimatum to the rest of the comedic moviemaking world. Make a movie as fresh and funny as this first time outing by Jason Segal. The youngster had thrown down the gauntlet and one by one the veterans had trouble stepping up to the plate. Some were decent (Carell’s Get Smart, Ferrell’s Step Brothers), some were above par but still fell short (Rogen’s Pineapple Express) and some landed flat on their face (Myer’s Love Guru, Murphy’s Meet Dave.) None could match the quality (laughter and quality of story) quotient of ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall.’ That is until Ben Stiller’s ‘Tropic Thunder’ came out this week. Not only did it match the quality quotient of ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ it was also a demonstration of what can only be done by a seasoned veteran with a hell of a lot of money and connections. 
The two movies couldn’t be more different. Tropic Thunder isn’t a romantic comedy, it a biting satirical swipe at the movie industry. It is impressive the amount of new subject material that has been brought into the comedy forefront by this movie: Vietnam, Blackface, the mentally retarded, heroin withdrawls, environmental disasters. Does that sound like anything that might offend you if treated the wrong way? The incredible thing about this movie though is that all of this material is somehow okay because the joke always ends up on the door of a subject that’s perfectly fine to make fun of: Hollywood, obscene producers, method actors, pretentious directors, gung ho pyrotechnics, and crazy writers. 
Tropic Thunder is the name of an Vietnam movie that stars Ben Stiller as Tugg Speedman the action star, Robert Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus the five time Oscar winner, Jack Black as a Hollywood badboy, and Brandon T. Jackson as rapper Alpa Chino. Steve Coogan is the first time director Damian Cockburn. Up and coming character actor Danny McBride is the gung ho explosives expert. Nick Nolte, plays the crazy Vietnam Vet turned writer. Matthew McCoughnahay is Stiller’s overzealous agent. Tom Cruise, in his best role since Magnolia, plays an obscene producer. Bill Hader, who seems to be in everything nowadays, is his assistant. That leaves out a score of other parts, but you get the sense of star power here. All of these parts are juggled effortlessly. Every single person has a great scene, or a great macho line, or a great back and forth dialogue. It’s hard to tell who’s stealing the scene from who. Ben Stiller, as a director here, has produced his finest movie, maybe even the best he’s ever been in. It is simply brilliant how truly an ensemble this movie is when it consists of so many over the top characters. You’d think they’d drown each other out but instead the nuttiness of one complements directly the nuttiness of another. 
The two greatest performances are given by Tom Cruise and Robert Downey Jr. At last Cruise super focused intensity is put to comic use. His profane producer is truly frightening and hilarious at the same time. You even get to see him dance. This movie has done the impossible. It’s made the guy cool again. Robert Downey Jr. on the other hand, was already super cool. With this movie, he probably will be remembered for many many many years to come as super cool. In the best performance of the movie, he plays a method actor from Australia that becomes black in order to play the part of the African American seargent. When the entire movie goes terribly wrong, his dedication is such that he still stays in character. I got the sense while watching that everyone involved was having a ball the entire time they filmed this. To be in that same room with Cruise or Downey Jr. would have been something to behold. Robert Downey Jr. has got to be nominated for this movie. Between him, Heath Ledger, James Franco, and Tom Cruise, the supporting actor category has filled up fast this year. I’ve got a feeling that this will be the year of the comedy