Everybody Wants Some!! (3/5 Stars)

In 1995, Director Richard Linklater came out with a movie called “Before Sunrise.” In this movie, a guy (played by Ethan Hawke) traveling through Europe asks a woman (Julie Delpy) who is traveling to Paris to get off the train with him in Vienna. His plane leaves the next morning and he does not have money for a room. Would she be interested in just roaming the city with him walking and talking for a night? She thinks about it and then gets off the train and they spend the night walking and talking.

Bullshit, right? Like on three levels. First level, what woman would get off a train with a complete stranger in a city where she knows nobody? That’s potentially dangerous and most women wouldn’t do it. Second level, what guy would propose this sincerely? Wouldn’t a normal guy assume that a normal woman would be creeped out by the proposal and consider it impolite to ask. Or would he not assume that the prospect of walking and talking (not even going to a bar or dinner because he has no money) would not be appetizing to a normal woman. Third reason, assuming they got off the train and spent the night together, who is actually interesting enough to carry on a decent conversation for at least ten hours straight. Who are these people?

Well, at least one of them was Richard Linklater. The movie is based off an experience he had during a trip from New York to Austin. He spent one entirely platonic night in Philadelphia with a woman just walking and talking before he left at sunrise. There are a lot of better directors working today than Richard Linklater but I seriously doubt any of them are as cool a person as he seems to be and if I could choose to strike up a conversation with any one of my favorite directors at a party I figure the best one ought to be Linklater. I can’t imagine him running out of interesting things to say.

“Everybody Wants Some!!” is another one of his movies like “Boyhood” and “Before Sunrise” that would be preposterous in its main characters “coolness” if it weren’t admittedly autobiographical. That is, if the main character here “Jake,” was supposed to be some normal guy, I wouldn’t believe it, but if Linklater says it is based on him, well, he did make “Waking Life,” so I guess it’s possible for a college baseball player to be this cool.

Jake (played by Blake Jenner) has just showed up to his college house. He’s not in the dorms as a Freshman because he has a scholarship to pitch for the very popular baseball team and with that scholarship comes the free housing off-campus (very cool). He is good looking (also cool) like every other guy in the all star baseball house (hot friends, add that to the cool) and at the baseball house party that night (parties are cool), he gets laid almost immediately (I told you he was cool).  

But this movie isn’t entirely about that. If it were, than Jake would be in danger of being a douchebag. But he’s not. He’s Richard Linklater. So in this baseball house are a lot of distinct personalities that are fun to hang out with and get to know. Jake, it turns out, is a sincere listener who essentially gets along with everyone and everyone gets along with him. The other pitcher is a wise fellow (curiously beyond his years really) who is great at casually philosophizing and smoking pot. The other guys are competitive but it would be weird if they weren’t, after all, this is an all-star sports team. And like most jocks I’ve known, they care quite a bit about winning but are as forgiving of slights made in competition. Case in point: there is another pitcher who is crazy unlikable and everyone teases him but it is unmistakable that they do not ostracize him from the team. (Actually in my experience getting along with jocks is easier than getting along with any other social group. Just show up, give 100%, and don’t complain. That’s really all there is to it.)

Another guy Jake spends a lot of time listening to is Finnegan (played by Glen Powell). His philosophy to life is illuminating. At the baseball house party the other players implore Jake to listen in on how Finnegan explains his playing style to a couple ladies. Now how a baseball player explains his playing style is code to explaining how he has sex. (It is assumed that the girls know this. I mean are they really at the baseball players house party to talk sports?) Anyway Finnegan explains that he doesn’t have the best bat, not that much of a heavy hitter, but he is a true team player, is smart on the field, and ready to help his mates out in a pinch. Classic curveball. Nice touch.  

Finnegan and Jake go to several parties over the weekend. The first is at a disco. The second is at a Country-Western bar. Then they help throw the baseball house party. Then they go to a punk rave. And finally Jake gets invited to a theater student’s party by leaving flowers and a poem on her door. He brings Finnegan and the other baseball players as well. Finnegan dresses up as a person who would fit in at all of these and instructs Jake to do as well. Jake asks at the punk rave, “aren’t we posers?” “No,” Finnegan explains, “it doesn’t count if you are doing it to hit on girls.” An eloquent philosophy and the way he practices it discounts the creepiness that other guys would not get away with. That is to say there might be a difference between changing your appearance and personality to trick a woman and take advantage of her and changing your appearance and personality because you are hoping to please a woman who would like you that way. Or at least the movie would like to think there is a difference. Or maybe this loophole only applies to Linklater who is much cooler than the rest of us.

The difference seems to be sincerity and given the types of movies Linklater has made for the last quarter century it should be fair to say that he treats people sincerely (sometimes to a fault, see “Slacker”). Perhaps we should at least take heart that at least once that attitude helped a guy get laid routinely. That is to say this nice guy never finished last. He wasn’t racing of course, that’s the whole point. But if he was racing, he wouldn’t have finished last. Not that he cared or we should either, but you know what I’m trying to say.

Boyhood (3/5 Stars)

Another curiousity from Richard Linklater

The story within the movie ‘Boyhood’ is inextricably linked to the story of its making. The project was started in 2002 when director Richard Linklater cast the six-year-old Ellar Coltrane. He shot a few scenes of him opposite a fictional movie family: sister Lorelei Linklater (Richard’s daughter) and divocrced parents Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke. And then Richard waited two years old til Ellar was eight and he shot a few more scenes. He came back two years later and did it again. The movie was finally finished last year when Ellar turned eighteen.

So this movie is a curiosity that comes appropriately from Richard Linklater, Cinematic Laureate of Austin, Texas, and auteur of such quirky movies such as Slacker, Before Sunrise, Waking Life, and A Scanner Darkly. Boyhood takes it's rightful place besides though films. It is intensely interested in the people, the places they inhabit, and the ideas that they share. The most interesting thing about 'Boyood' is that it does not merely reflect the journey of Ellar Coltrane. Sure we see him literally grow before our eyes from a shy introspective boy to a curious almost philosophical teenager, but we also see the journey of his sister who grows up right alongside of him. And we see the journey of his mother who goes through several marriages, gets her master’s degree, gains at least thirty pounds and becomes less or more comfortable with how things have turned out. Perhaps most strikingly is the journey of the father, played by Ethan Hawke, who starts off as a friendly but impossibly irresponsible, chain-smoking, and fast-car-driving presence in Ellar's life. By the time the twelve years pass, however, he has a new wife and kid who make him go to church and drive a mini-van. The irony does not escape him and he treats the changes with good humor. He did not see them coming and neither did we but these things happen.

This movie is hailed as completely unique but that is not entirely the case. Something that closely resembles this type of story has already been done and is actually still happening. That would be the 7up Series of documentaries that started in 1964 when a BBC TV crew interviewed several seven-year-old kids and then came back every seven years since to reinterview them. The last one came out last year. It was titled 56 up. So far all the kids are still live. The documentary series is extraordinary in that it captures the march of time in a way transient movies can't quite capture no how much makeup they apply. More than any other movie or documentary I have ever watched, I became invested in the characters in the 7up series. In fact, at some point I no longer cared whether any of the new installments had any conflict or dramatic events in them. I sort of just wanted everyone to live carefree unstressful lives for as long a time as possible. 

This kind of feeling is almost captured in ‘Boyhood.’ The main difference is the fact that ‘Boyhood’ is a fictional conglomeration of what a normal childhood might be. The one thing the 7up Series routinely ignored and for good reasons is the complete absence of cultural/time related references. The interviewers asked the subjects about their lives. They didn’t ask them about what new music they were listening to or what they felt about the Prime Minister or the war the world was currently engaged in. In contrast, ‘Boyhood’ sometimes feels like an early version of a soon to be coming out VH1 TV Show called “I love the 2000s.” It starts off with Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’ a big hit in 2002 and every couple of scenes you have some other song from the recent past like Lady Gaga or Gotye. Ethan Hawke is into the politics and talks in various scenes about Bush v. Kerry and Obama v. McCain. This is not all that interesting stuff and at some points ‘Boyhood’ feels less like a story about a person and more of a nostalgia tour of the last decade. Not all the time though. There is an especially good scene where Ethan Hawke brings up Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old pregnant daughter, Bristol. He does this to segway into a talk about sex and contraception with his kids. That happens to be a far more interesting topic for him to explore than what he thinks of the Republican Party.

This is the odd movie, which is not so great because the movie is too brief. It is an epic story within the confines of a feature length film. Weirdly, the story may be hurt because it wasn’t exactly planned before they started shooting any of it. It is epic in scope but limited in reach and tone. The boy only has a few scenes at each age. Sometimes drama happens but the character does not make any dramatic choices about them. I remember being weird, angry, and utterly bored at times as a kid. Ellar Coltrane does not have these qualities. He comes off as almost ridiculously mature, chill, and cool for his age, especially given the series of alcoholic step-fathers he experiences. I don’t know, maybe that actually was the experience of most people and I’m the outlier. It would not surprise me. ‘Boyhood’ ends on a very slacker and chill Linklater note. The 18 year old talks about the oddness of the saying ‘Carpe Diem’ which is ‘Seize the Moment’ loosely translated. He reflects on it and muses that it seems that life is more like the opposite way around. That the Moment more often than not Seizes You because aren’t we always in the Moment? I mean think about it man. I think that may be true for this kid and perhaps for most people but I don't know, I couldn’t relate. 

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.

A Scanner Darkly 10/25/06

The only thing that saves this movie is that it's never boring. And for that we have two things in general to thank. One: the animation and direction of Richard Linklater that is completely different than anything I have ever seen. It's apparently a technique in which he shoots actual live footage, and then he animates it through something called rotoscoping. This works especially well in a movie about drug addiction because it allows hallucinations to appear on the screen and seem totally within this movie's realm of reality. The second reason is the strong performances of several supporting characters. Most notably Robert Downey Jr. who's eccentric character plays like he knows he's in a cartoon. Through quiet eccentricities he steals every scene he's in. In scenes when his character is shooting the spit with Woody Harrelson the drama is doubled and usually quite funny. I would love to watch a movie about this character. Unfortunately the movie isn't about him, or even needs his character. 
The real story in this movie is about a narc/drug addict named Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves). This story also is somewhat exciting. I say somewhat because in truth I don't really know. I feel it could have been exciting if the movie hadn't ended after the second act. Here we have Bob Arctor brought into rehabilitation on a mission he knows nothing about. He's supposed to prove that the rehab programmers are the ones who are dealing the drugs. He finds the drugs in a middle of a cornfield, he still under the influence partly and he doesn't have much cognitive power but we sense that he knows what they are. He puts a flower in his sock with the intention of bringing it back to his friends at the main compound. Then the movie ends. I don't have a problem with what's in the movie, I have a problem with what could have been in the movie. I have a feeling that there could have been a kickass third act to this movie, where Arctor meets Barrister (Downey Jr.) in the prison, they hatch a plan to elaborately escape. There's an animated chase scene or fight scene (Something I bet would be totally awesome) and then you know the great twist or enlightening conclusion or whatever. That's what I would have done.
Of course can I give a movie a bad grade because I liked it so much I wished it were longer. I honestly don't think that would be kosher. So there the paradox. They gave me only the first two acts of a what would have been a great three act story.