A Most Wanted Man (4/5 Stars)

“A Most Wanted Man,’’ the last film of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, is not a spy thriller. ‘Mission Impossible’ is a spy thriller. This is an entirely different animal. It is a spy procedural. Such an explanation is necessary because the movie concept is novel. A procedural is a type of movie that drums up its suspense by curtailing to the Aristotelian ideal of making the representation as real as possible. Among other things, they are great stories for the curious type of person who wants to learn how things work. The most common procedurals are police procedurals (‘True Detective’) and journalist procedurals (‘All the President’s Men’). I do not think I have ever seen a spy procedural. Spies are generally portraryed by the likes of James Bond, Jason Bourne, and Ethan Hunt and they spend far more time seducing, fighting, and stealing secrets than anything else. In this movie we have Philip Seymour Hoffman looking tired, disheveled, and overweight, going about the real business of a spy, that is to find informants through persuasions of incentive or coercion and slowly but surely work up the ladder. “It takes a minnow to catch a barracuda. A barracuda to catch a shark,” he explains. In this movie based on a Le Carre novel and directed with patience by Anton Corbijn we see exactly how it works. Don’t expect gunfights. It lacks in that respect, but as I’ve said, it should be interesting to those curious as to how things work.

The “Most Wanted Man” in the title refers to a Muslim refugee from Russia who shows up in the port of Hamburg, Germany. He may or may not be a terrorist. The Russians say he confessed but that was during a torturous investigation so take it with a grain of salt. He has come to Hamburg for a particular reason. He stands to gain an inheritance from the man who raped and impregnated his mother when she was fifteen. The inheritance is in the millions of dollars. What this refugee, perhaps terrorist, will do with that huge windfall of cash is of most concern to the several intelligence apparati in Hamburg, especially since the most wanted man considers the money unclean and doesn’t want to keep any of it. “You have nothing,” his lawyer (played by Rachel McAdams) reminds him. “I have God,” he explains.

This is an interesting movie for an American audience because it is not our jurisdiction the story takes place in. It takes place in Hamburg and the main spy played by Hoffman is German. The Americans are on the sidelines portrayed by Robin Wright, an intelligence agent stationed in the American embassy in Berlin. Robin Wright has achieved a gender bending feat in transitioning from romantic leads in her early career (The Princess Bride, Forrest Gump) to really dark and interesting character parts that have very little to do with being a woman (House of Cards, A Most Wanted Man). She has a great knack for showing up in a scene and immediately putting on the impression that she is not only better looking and more fashionable than you are but also more effective, capable, and informed. Then there is the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman who more effectively than any actor still alive creates vivid characters for the rest of us. Of great note is his German accent in this movie, which seems less like an exercise in diction but more of a character choice. That is to say it not only denotes the character as German but it also sounds like a tired bueruacrat caught between deadly extremists on one side and the assholes in charge on the other. The most effective scenes are the ones Wright and Hoffman have with each other. Hoffman tries to explain that he knows what he is doing and then there is Wright on the other side. Sure she is polite and hears Hoffman out, but also makes it clear that she doesn’t have to. She’s American and what America wants, America gets. Hoffman brings up that point himself in relation to the most wanted man. She says something about respecting German sovereignty and not acting to capture him on her own initiative. ‘That never stopped you before,’ says Hoffman. ‘We don’t do that anymore,’ smiles Wright. The subtext being of course, ‘unless we wanted to.’ The conclusion of the movie reminded me of watching the paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s. It’s a pessimistic view of American power to say the least.

Hoffman’s death affects the experience of this movie in the same way that Heath Ledger’s death affected watching ‘The Dark Knight.’ Hoffman here looks close to death. He is wan and sickly. He chain smokes. He is more overweight than any other point in his career. His character is disgraced. He has been demoted to Hamburg from Beirut where, through no fault of his own, the Americans blew his network and lot of people who trusted him were killed. As far as swan songs go, this is decent way to go out. It is appropriate for Philip Seymour Hoffman. Both the actor and the character end in a tragedy that only by hindsight seems possible because it is so maddeningly and infuriatingly unjustifiable. It was bullshit. He got a raw deal.

Rest in Peace.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (3/5 Stars)

Rooney Mara does not look like Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth is small, skinny, and sharp. Rooney is of average height, healthy, and round all over. She lost weight for this role and somehow managed to pinch in her cheeks a little but it is not enough. Rooney is a doe-eyed babyface. Lisbeth is not. There is no getting around it.

It is hard to say why this matters so much. For some reason I am thinking of something obscure that I saw in the special features of a completely different movie. It was in “Three Kings” a movie about the first Iraq War. One of the Iraqis (Said Taghmaoui, I just looked up his name on IMDb) that played a bad guy was speaking of meeting the actor Ice Cube for the first time and how he could tell that he came from a rough neighborhood (Compton to be exact). He said he could tell by the eyes. People who have grown up in a rough neighborhood have it ingrained around their eyes. He knew that because he grew up in a rough neighborhood in Iraq. And then he said Ice Cube knew that simply by looking at him as well. Ever since I heard that I became much more interested in eyes. Does being witness to rough things over a period of time really leave its mark on the eyes? I don’t know honestly, but as a person who watches many movies I will say that there is something about the eyes that can create a certain seriousness or desperation in a character, which incidentally can convey a history of seeing rough things. Good examples are Viggo Mortenson in “Eastern Promises,” and Charlize Theron in “Monster.” And perhaps the best example is Noomi Rapace’s take on Lisbeth Salander in the original Swedish version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” Those eyes were piercing. Rooney Mara’s are not. The role has been miscast. Rooney would make more sense as a Disney princess.

This is a pity because this movie is technically better than the Swedish version. We have none other than David Fincher, one of the best American directors, at the helm here. Fincher has excelled at serial killers (Seven) and has excelled at complex subjects (The Social Network), sometimes both at the same time (Zodiac). The convoluted 40-year-old murder mystery that is the centerpiece of “The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo,” is a ready made plot for the likes of Fincher. If you have a story that requires a journalist to do a realistic investigation (i.e. painstakingly go over evidence, hit the books at the library), Fincher is the guy who can make it interesting, lend it humor, and give it momentum. Here the disgraced journalist Michael Blomvist (played by Daniel Craig) is hired to solve a family mystery that involves a close-knit family with Nazi connections. The mystery is intricate to the highest degree but Fincher’s clear direction shines through it. In fact, for the first half of the movie where the mystery plotline runs parallel and separate to the introduction of Lisbeth Salander, it is the more interesting plot to watch unfold. In the Swedish version it was the other way around. Now if only we could insert Noomi Rapace into the American version.

Not that all of Fincher’s choices seem to be entirely correct. There was something wrong with this movie that was hard to put my finger on while I was watching it. So I went back and rewatched several scenes from the original version. The plot is exactly the same of course. What is different may be as little as tweaked dialogue, different camera angles, or simply physical gestures. But it is unmistakable how the movies have different impacts precisely where it is most important: how it regards Lisbeth Salander. This is touchy subject because there are two scenes of sexual assault in the story, one being a rape. Now I suppose I could be like the MPAA and basically judge the difference between the two versions by how many seconds of nakedness were shown in each. (There is far more in the American version. It actually surprised me upon a second viewing how little is actually shown in the Swedish version. Only about a half-second. The rest is all inferred. Both distort and mute the screaming after awhile, a rather merciful thing to do for an audience.) But the more important differences take place before and after the rape.  The rapist is Lisbeth’s legal guardian, newly appointed after her old guardian had a stroke. The sexual assaults start as a form of extortion. Lisbeth won’t have access to her own money until complying. Now, in the Swedish version it only takes one meeting before the first sexual assault. In the American version, it takes a back-story and two meetings to get around to it. It seems as though the American version is trying to ease us into the sexual assault. A pointless exercise in futility it would seem to me. The biggest difference though is that the American version also adds scenes right after the assaults where Lisbeth dresses herself, goes into the next room where the rapist is waiting to give her check, takes it and leaves. The Swedish version simply cut from the assault to Lisbeth washing out her mouth and painfully walking home respectively. What is the point of these extra scenes? At my least cynical moment I will assume that the makers were attempting to make the rapist look pathetic (in the movie he seems a bit frightened and apologetic after the assault). But even so, who gives a shit? What does it matter how the rapist feels about what he has done? It is enough that the actions exist as they do in the world. Time to move onto the next scene. 

There are some styles and genres of movies where it is okay to objectify women (or rather people in general). I wrote about this in some length when I defended “Sucker Punch,” a comic book movie that came out earlier this year. But when the original title of the book the movie is from is called, “Men who Hate Women,” I think we have entered territory where any objectification at all should be barred entirely. Take a look at the movie poster above, which shows a topless Lisbeth Salandar. Is it really appropriate for the marketers of a movie about one of the most powerful symbols of sexual violence to sell their movie with the promise of sex? (You may also ask what exactly the poster means by “Evil shall with evil be expelled.” Are they insinuating that Blomvist and Salandar are evil or using evil? How so?) The Swedish version at least seemed to understand that sexual abuse is not such an easy thing to get over. The way Noomi Rapace played the character in the consensual sex scenes, and there a couple of those, was for lack of a better word, tragic. She could go through the motions but was incapable of intimacy. That makes sense considering the character’s history. The way Rooney Mara interacts with Daniel Craig in the American version would work much better in a James Bond flick. Rooney Mara would not make a bad Bond girl.

For the record, I still don’t fully understand how the epilogue heist worked in either version of this movie. Perhaps if I read the book.

Moneyball (4/5 Stars)

The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

One of the main arguments I hear batted around for keeping steroids out of sports is that it makes the game unfair. And the usual retort I always bring up to everyone’s bafflement is that sports aren’t fair anyways, so what’s the difference? And they aren’t fair. They really aren’t. One of the hardest things to do in life is to distance oneself from mass delusions and the idea that sports are somehow fair is one of the most broadly accepted and thankfully rather benign fallacies around. Genetic differences (for instance height in basketball) between opponents are not fair. And neither is a system that allows one professional sports team to have a much bigger budget than others. That difference allows the richer team an unfair advantage in attracting top talent. That is what Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics in this movie based on a true story, must come to grips with. The movie starts with the Athletics coming off one of their best seasons and subsequently losing their three best players in free agency to richer teams like the Yankees. The experienced scouts around the back-room table are talking about rebuilding the team from the ground up with old baseball knowledge and old baseball customs, the same way they did it the last time. No, No, No, Billy says, we cannot do the same thing. More importantly, we cannot do the same old thing because the Yankees are doing the same out thing. If we scout the way the Yankees scout than we will lose because the Yankees will outbid us no matter how well we scout. The game is rigged. We either find a way to play the game differently or we lose. That is Billy Beane’s problem.

How Billy attempts to solve the problem is the main focus of “Moneyball.” Billy Beane, played here by Brad Pitt, essentially disregards most or all of the advice of his experienced scouts and starts listening to a young recent economics major from Yale named Peter Brand, played here by Jonah Hill. The chubby bespectacled Peter Brand is not an athlete, but he does know math and  can use it to spot trends. He tells Beane in confidence his hunch that scouts completely overlook certain things and place way to much emphasis on others. For instance, Peter suggests that a manager’s job shouldn’t be to buy players, but to buy wins, and to buy wins he needs to buy runs. Billy Beane follows this advice. This leads to some rather unorthodox moves, one of the more outrageous things being hiring a life-long catcher to play first base because the guy has a very good getting on first base percentage. Hopefully the runs he will score will offset the plenty of mistakes he will make on defense. The scouts think Beane is crazy. The team manager Art Shaw, played here by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, goes further and refuses to follow the directions. As he explains, he wants to play the team in a way that is defendable in job interviews next October. The A’s start the season with an 11 game losing streak. Beane’s job is on the line. If things don’t turn around he may never be hired as a general manager again.

All of this is very succinctly told with brevity and humor by a great screenplay written by Steve Zaillian and rewritten by Aaron Sorkin. It is impossible to tell which lines are whose but there are several scenes that come off just as well as all those scenes between computer nerds in last year’s “The Social Network.” In fact it can be said that the movies performs much better off the baseball diamond than on it. The backroom dialogue is filled to the brim with smart dialogue that explains things as if it knows what it is talking about. When Brand takes Beane aside and shows him videos of his “hero,” a pudgy little known baseball player who happens to get more walks than anybody but Barry Bonds, we understand exactly why that player is drastically underrated. We also understand why Billy Beane would be willing to take such chances. Through flashbacks we see a young Billy Beane being talked up by scouts who thought he would be the next big thing. They flashed him a huge paycheck and told Billy to skip college and go straight into the big leagues. Billy did and didn’t turn into anything big. The scouts didn’t know what they were talking about and in one of the best scenes in the movie; an older and wiser Billy takes on an especially irate veteran scout. “You don’t know. You say you know, but you don’t,” he tells him. No more of the confidence bullshit for Billy. He is going to trust math from now on. You know, that thing they tried teaching us in school.

This movie is especially satisfying for someone of my generation because we all grew up in the golden age of bullshit sports movies. All that “Just believe in yourself,” horseshit that adults think is okay to foist upon unsuspecting children were heaped onto us in movies like “The Mighty Ducks” and its many ripoff copies. But this movie tells it like it is. Confidence, such a cherished virtue, is shown to be the most useless and overrated of all skill sets. What really counts is doing actual work, crunching numbers, and using deductive reasoning. To show this is not an easy thing for a movie to accomplish. We are after all, an emotional species. But, by and large, “Moneyball,” accomplishes this task. Unfortunately it ultimately falls short due to the same pitfalls that beset everything it is trying to debunk. The last half of the movie veers into melodrama and misplaces an ending that should have been revelatory instead of muted.

What do I mean by that? Well, for one thing, the director Bennet Miller (last movie of his was “Capote,” way back when btw) uses way too much soft focus and slow motion in the climatic scenes. The idea of statistics is to cast clarity on a muddled world. A man like Beane, who has crunched the numbers, should be seeing things more clearly (think Neo finally seeing the matrix at the end of “The Matrix”). Instead, there is a five-ten minute scene near the end of the movie about a very meaningful game in which we see Beane in the weight room, fixed on the television, hoping to all hope that things turn out well on the field. This is not correct. A man who believes in math does not hope or pray for anything. They know what the probabilities are. When so-and-so comes up to the plate they know there is a certain percentage of chance that they will either hit the ball or not. They also know that there is a certain percentage of chance that the game will be won or lost. A man of math is not surprised. They are not brought to disbelieving elation or despair by the occasional impossible miracle. They knew it was possible actually, just unlikely.  Thus, we shouldn’t have out-of-focused shots. We instead should have full-focus shots. The movie should be set in a setting of hyper-awareness. This is not done to the movie’s detriment.

Now, take for instance the ending. It speaks boatloads of the very problem Beane was up against (i.e. human intuition against mathematical reality), but does not exploit it to dramatic effect. Billy Beane ends up turning down a very high offer to manage the Boston Red Sox. Now, if he were using his own philosophy, he would probably determine that access to the Red Sox would mean a greater budget, better players, and thus a better chance to win the World Series Title. In fact, the Red Sox would win the World Series just two years later having adopted some of Billy Beane’s methodology. But Billy didn’t join the Red Sox. He turned down the offer and stayed with the A’s….and he still hasn’t won the World Series. I’m sure the decision felt right though.

New York, I Love You (1/5 Stars) November 20, 2009

A vision of a boring New York inhabited only by artists and sex fiends. How insulting.

“New York, I Love You,” is no doubt a great idea for a movie. It originated from a French movie called “Paris, je-taime,” which obviously is French for ‘Paris, I love you.’ It was a series of short films with different writers and directors all with one thing in common: every story took place in Paris. This movie transfers that idea to New York, that most able of cities. There is perhaps nothing worse in cinema than a great idea that gets treated like shit. Shit ideas treated like shit are, no doubt, also shit but at least you don’t get that tremendous feeling of being ripped off. You knew it was shit, it was shit, you got what you should have thought you would get when you paid the ticket. What’s especially terrible about this movie is that it squanders the chance to transform the great idea into a great movie. It’s a waste, and since the title ‘New York, I Love You,” is now taken and used up and tossed aside who knows when someone else will try the idea again. 

The idea to have several short films is supposedly to promote cinematic scope within a movie. For a movie about New York this is somewhat imperative since it is so diverse, multicultural, and enormous. You would never know that by watching this movie. I don’t recall more than a couple of the short films being upbeat at all. Never has New York moved so slow in a movie. The slowest story involves a retired opera singer that checks into an abandoned motel that has a crippled Shia Lebouf as a doorman/butler/whatever. They chitchat about the room, and flowers, and what not in strained accents for about ten minutes. Then Shia inexplicably commits suicide and an old dude walks in and reveals that the entire thing was dream…or not, I couldn’t really tell what was happening. There was a lot of whispering and mumbling. Anyway this story really sucked. What’s ironic is that the late Anthony Mingella, the Oscar winner that this film was also dedicated too, wrote it. Minghella, I have looked up, is not a native New Yorker. He’s not even American. He’s a Brit. And the story he wrote has absolutely nothing to do with New York (no an aside about unseen NYC noise outside the window does not count if no scene in the story takes place outside.) It makes absolutely no sense to dedicate a movie about NYC to a person who is not a New Yorker and wrote the most anti-New York story in the movie. All I can think is that he must have supplied a huge amount of the budget (not that anything in this movie suggests any budget at all.)

There are 8 million people in New York City. The professions of these people differ to an incredible degree. Where else do you have millionaires next to beggars, stock brokers next to park rangers, fashion designers next to construction crews, etc. etc. You would never know that watching this movie. The only people in this NYC, as far as this film is concerned, are struggling artists of some kind. In every single plot save one at least one character is a writer, a painter, a dancer, a composer, a videographer, an actress or something like that. I really cannot stress this enough: struggling artists are not interesting people. There has never been a more overdone idea in the history of cinema than a story about artist’s block. A story about artist’s block inevitably develops out of the narcissism of a writer with no real ideas. They can’t think of interesting to say so they write a story about how they have nothing interesting to say (banal justification of existence included). Blah blah blah, no that’s not original. Use some elbow grease, lazy. The huge shame about these kinds of stories is that the writers couldn’t look outside their little worlds to see that there are interesting people that are outside walking the streets. These interesting people do interesting things with their lives that don’t have anything to do with the entertainment business. Give me a story about politicians, or lawyers, or doctors, or scientists. Yeah I know, a writer would probably have to do some research to make a good movie about those people because what they do is far more complex and important than entertaining. In the end it would require actual work, an idea that most struggling artists abhor. Just take a look at what’s in the MOMA. 

If the characters aren’t struggling artists then they are deviants of some kind. The first story is about a pickpocket and a professor who is cheating on his wife with a student. Another is about a guy’s (Ethan Hawke) creative attempt to seduce a woman who turns out to be a prostitute (This story is actually pretty good, doesn’t save the movie though.) Then there are about three other stories where random sex with strangers occurs. Now I know I shouldn’t knock something till I’ve tried it, but I feel there should have been at least one story that tried to be romantic. None of these relationship shorts even matched the average ‘sex and the city’ episode, which I would suggest you watch instead of this movie any day. And what was with everybody in this picture smoking. New York City is not a smoking friendly city. There are probably more laws banning it here than anywhere else. And yet in this movie it is treated as the quintessential New York way to meet people. Well, at least people you can have random sex with. Maybe my non-smoking habit is why I’ve never had that chance. 

New York City has so much great stuff in it: Parades every other week, pedestrians taking back the streets from cars, the wind tunnels in Winter, the panoramic Hudson in Spring and Summer, landmarks that sneak up on you, locations you recognize immediately from your favorite movies, a depth of history, a landscape of cityscapes shaped by great people, sports, charity organizations, international intrigue, 2am pizza, theater, culture, nightlife, business, incredible penthouses, and the most polite homeless people in the world. None of that is shown in this movie. I usually never give 1-star review to any movie I’ve seen because I save such notorious designations for movies that are more than just inferior. It is for movies that I know I could have made better myself. In this case, once I get enough money to buy a camera, microphones, and film editing equipment, I will.

Beowulf 11/18/07

I don't know what Robert Zemeckis is doing here. His last two movies have been entirely motion picture capture CGI Animation. He takes actors, covers them with dots and then digitally restores them in a fantasy land. Which would be cool if the actors looked like people in the final project. Most of the people in Beowulf looks like Sims. They have all the corresponding body parts but they have more in common with robots with rubber skin than people. The technology is not yet ripe, hopefully if Zemeckis hopes to do this sort of thing again, he can finally get it right. If he can't then he should resort to the good example of 'Sin City' and just film real people in front of a green screen. Then he can have his fantasy land populated with real people not androids. I never thought a naked Angelina Jolie could be so unsexy. 
As far as action and spectacle are concerned the movie succeeds. We have a cool Grendel, Sea Monsters, and Fire Breathing Dragon. (Then again, I could say that action and spectacle succeed in any movie nowadays can't I.) I saw this in an IMAX screen although I'm not sure it was in 3-D. I don't think it was, although a few scenes hinted at it. 
They also did a good job I felt adapting the movie from the book, or ancient manuscript as it was. There was a huge makeover with Grendel's mother that draws the two sides of the story together. Most people won't like the very liberal way they fooled with the source material. Personally I didn't much like the story when they made me read it in high school. I didn't much care that they made up half of it. 
It's almost impossible to talk about performances in this movie. The technology they use to bring this movie to life can't make real people. We have a tremendous actor in Sir Anthony Hopkins, but his movements are artificial and his face can't convey true emotion. It's like the guy is wearing a full body suit, not something even the most talented can act through. 
Then we have Ray Winstone in the title role. Here the technology can get creepy. Winstone is a bit chubby in real life. In the movie he has the body of a Greek God. He's got a sick pack of abs and huge defined muscles. Apparently the only body part Ray contributed was his face. Everything else is made up. There is one exception when this stuff actually works, and that's when a charachter is doing something physically impossible. When Beowulf battles sea monsters the effects work. This I think is because we are watching fake people doing fake stuff. When Beowulf has emotional closeups the technology falters horribly. I can't take the robot seriously! I don't feel his humanity.
This too happened with Angelina Jolie. Seeing her in this movie with nothing on really didn't have the impression on me it should of had. 
And I saw John Malkovich's name in the credits but I haven't the slightest idea who he played. Where was he? I have the suspicion it was but a voiceover. I don't know.
Robert Zemeckis is one of my favorite directors and I would gladly pay to see any of his films. This one doesn't change that. I respect that he's on the cutting edge of visual effects but I sincerely hope, for his sake, that he perfects whatever he's trying to do soon. I really don't care too much about all the cool camera angles or effects this type of film provides. I just want to watch a Zemeckis film with people again.