Fury 3/5 Stars

‘Fury’ purports to be one type of movie, does it exceedingly well, and right at the moment of truth blindsides the audience with an incredulous conclusion that has no right whatsoever to be in a movie of its type. This movie is intended to be a serious movie about a very specific place and time, the invasion of Germany in World War II by Allied tank divisions. War is hell, the movies shows. Hitler, the ultimate asshole, refuses to give up a lost cause going so far as to start conscripting German children into the army and hanging those that refuse to fight. The allied tanks roll past hanging corpses of kids with placards hung on them that read ‘Coward.’ The other children have guns and so the Allies have to kill them themselves.

As most war movies feel they sort of must do, we are introduced into one particular tank division through the eyes of a green youngster by the name of Norman (Logan Lerman).  Get it? Norman equals Normal Man. This is a cliché but not a particularly bad one. After all I don’t know anything about tank warfare or warfare in general and sort of need a character to identify with. The tank division is led by Wardaddy (Brad Pitt). He has a tight knit group of gritty comrades. Among them are Grady ‘Coon-ass’ Travis (Jon Bernthal), Trini ‘Gordo’ Garcia (Michael Pena), and Boyd ‘Bible’ Swan (a nicely non-annoying Shia Lebouf). You will get to know these guys as well as you can possibly get to know guys in war in a two hour movie, that is, pretty well. The movie, which is serious, shows them dirty, drunk, vile, prone to epithets, and perfectly willing to take advantage of desperate poverty stricken german women, which very much happened during the war, all over the place. At one point after Norman conscientiously refuses to shoot dead bodies on the ground to make sure they are dead, Wardaddy takes him over to a real life German prisoner of war and orders him to shoot him in the back. ‘I made a promise to get my men out of the war alive, and you are making it harder for me to make good on that promise,’ Wardaddy tells him matter of factly before forcibly putting the gun in Norman’s hands and making him pull the trigger. A little hardhearted? Well, no, that’s just war.

There are two excellent scenes in this movie. One is a tank battle between three crappy American tanks (and yes historically speaking they were crappy) against a superior German panzer. Watching the scene I was struck with the truth that I had never seen a tank battle in a movie before. At least I had not seen one with as much suspense and clarity of strategy as the one here. Apparently the thing about American tanks is that they weren’t built strong enough to withstand german tank fire. One direct hit and the inside of the tank would burst into flame burning everyone inside alive instantly. Those things were literal death traps.

The second excellent scene takes place immediately after the allies take a town. Wardaddy spies an occupied apartment and takes Norman in to it to explore it. Inside they find two German women (played by Anamaria Marinca and Alicia Von Rittberg) who undoubtedly are afraid that they will be raped and/or killed. Given Writer/Director David Ayer’s treatment of the first half of the movie, it is quite conceivable something along those lines may happen. It doesn’t happen and Brad Pitt instead puts the women to work making dinner from potatoes and eggs he has stashed. (This is a good deal given the fact that the German women probably haven’t had a decent meal in long time.) However, about twenty minutes through the scene the other three men show up and they are not happy that Wardaddy is having this dinner without them, and what about the women? And here we can notice a real balancing act of fine acting (and good writing) by Brad Pitt and company. Wardaddy won’t actually order his men to behave because they have been living through hell for years and will be back out there doing it again together no matter what happens in that dining room. His loyalty to his men stops him from putting two anonymous German women over his crew. But he also does not want a mean scene to occur. So he stops it essentially by declaring he is going to have a nice meal and won’t allow his boys to stop it. He provokes good behavior by example and his boys follow him because of respect not necessarily because it is the right thing to do. This is a long and complicated dinner table scene (which are not easy to shoot/edit) and it speaks much about the director’s faith in his audience’s attention span and emotional intelligence to grasp the meaning of what happens in it.

Of course, the last scene in the movie is like a nice hard slap across the face reminding the viewer that yes the director and/or producer and/or studio ultimately thinks you are a mass-market dumbass. The last scene is a John Wayne avalanche of bullshit. Think of every stupid (i.e. not serious) and false thing you’ve seen in a war movie. It is inexplicably all contained in this one final last stand battle where our heroes are prepared to commit heroic suicide against an entire foot division of S.S. soldiers. Why these particular guys we just got to know as people who very much want to live would want to commit heroicide is completely beyond me. Why there is an entire division of well-uniformed S.S. troops marching around from nowhere to somewhere is also beyond me. Why would the battle take all day and all night long? Why would the S.S. waste so many men in dumb charges? Why couldn’t they just bring that sniper guy up at the beginning before so many of them died? Why would the German stop shooting so the wounded good guys could say tearful goodbyes to each other? All of this, what is it doing in a serious movie?

Did David Ayer think that I wouldn’t be satisfied if he didn’t end his movie with a ‘Wild Bunch’ climax? If he didn’t think so, what was the point of making a serious movie about war at all? Why didn’t he just make the whole thing bullshit? I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all. There was so much good stuff here that I can’t even say the ending ruined the movie for me. It just did not feel like it was part of the same movie at all. 

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (4/5 Stars) October 1, 2010

Oliver Stone: Angry no more
In 1978 a movie came out called ‘Midnight Express.’ It told the true story of Billy Hayes, a young American who had attempted to smuggle a small amount of hashish out of Turkey in order to fund his university studies. It was a stupid thing to do and he was caught and sentenced to a draconian four years in a hellish Turkish prison. In his final year, Hayes appealed only to be resentenced to an astounding 20 more years. The laws had changed in the meantime and the Turkish Constitution had no ex post facto provision. What followed was one of the most incredible scenes I have ever seen in a movie. The Young American is given a chance to speak to the court at the end of his trial. He has apparently given his fate much thought and he speaks of justice and mercy with much eloquence and intelligence. But as he gets to the end of the speech, he can’t help himself; he also has this to say: “For a nation of pigs, it sure is funny that you don’t eat them. Christ forgave the bastards, but I cannot! I hate! I hate you! I hate your country! And I hate your people! And I fuck your sons and daughters because they’re pigs! You’re all pigs!” The world of cinema had just witnessed the debut of a great new talent. It was the writer Oliver Stone and come Oscar night he would holding a golden statuette for the first screenplay he had ever written. 


If we assume that Hatred is an emotion that arises from ignorance, than it must follow that Education has a soothing effect on such strong emotion. Correctly done, education should promote understanding, which should naturally lead to empathy and wisdom. Thus it can be assumed (and frequently witnessed) that Angry People are usually inarticulate, wild, and plainly mistaken. But every once in awhile there comes a person who can intelligently articulate such strong emotion. They have been educated. They certainly have a vague notion that anger is not the mature response. But they cannot help themselves. They have been Hurt and they Hate too much. 

Oliver Stone was raised in a conservative Republican family. His father was a stockbroker. When Vietnam broke out, Oliver didn’t wait to be drafted. He signed up for the Army because he wanted to serve his country. He completed two tours of duty in Vietnam and there something bad must have happened. From then on he was a fire-breathing liberal, he moved to New York, and he started making movies that all had a common thread in them. Almost all of them were about young men who were betrayed and/or had rejected their father figures or country (Scarface, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK) Perhaps the most formidable of all of Stone’s dastardly fathers was Gordon Gekko, the investment banker played by in an Oscar-winning role by Michael Douglas in the original Wall Street (1987). He was brilliant, ruthless, and merciless. He broke companies not because he wanted the money because he liked breaking people, dominating them and wringing out the weak. He glorified himself as the pique of evolution and justified his treatment of others as a sort of natural selection. The point of the game is to beat the other guy, right? Well, then a hostile takeover of a business that ends up in the liquidation of thousands of employees but garners the maximum possible return is not simply a means to greed; it is the point in and of itself. The more people you push around, the bigger the victory. Wall Street wasn’t about greedy people. It was about assholes. 
That sort of thing is pretty much absent in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. There aren’t any real jerks in this movie. Gekko gets out of prison, but is now against the system, not for it (He just wrote a book, Is Greed Good?). His new protégé’s, played by Shia Lebouf, main goal is to marry Gekko’s daughter and finance a green energy company. This contrasts greatly with Bud Fox in the original who wanted to be a player in the game and lusted after a glamorous gold-digger. There aren’t any real victims in this movie either. The biggest injustice is the failure of a big bank and the suicide of its CEO, played by Frank Langella. This plot point draws a close parallel to the fall of Bear Stearns in real life. But who would think of the financial collapse of 2008 and think that the biggest victim was the CEO of Bear Sterns. The original Wall Street had an ordinary victim. He was Fox’s father and Gekko got him fired in a hostile takeover. This movie never really leaves Manhattan. We don’t see any of the catastrophic results of a decade of very wrong banking practices. There is no populist rage. All we have is Gekko wisely musing about bubbles from a historical perspective. Yeah, I know about the Dutch tulips. We think its funny now sure, but we forget that it completely ruined lives back then like every other bubble has done since. (It is actually kind of amazing how many people in this movie declare that they don’t care about the money. I suspect it is really because they are all well off and don’t have to.) 
The movie does do a very good job of not dumbing anything down. We hear technical language about credit default swaps, short sales, stock rising and falling etc. Lebouf at one point even takes the time to explain his fusion energy project that captures energy from seawater (He gets it right too. I studied that in high school Academic Decathlon). Then there are several scenes that take us into the boardrooms of the Federal Reserve during the point in the crisis where the bankers stared into the abyss and finally asked the government to bail them out. These seem to be about right too, but they are distracting because they take place in a fictional movie. Descriptions of these historic moments really ought to be in a documentary. I kept wondering if they got it right. 
Of course the big question is whether prison actually had any impact on Gekko’s ruthless personality and whether this father figure, so vilified in the original, would be any different this time around. He is, more or less. The new Oliver Stone is older and wiser and his villains now are more often “mixed bags” as Gekko relates himself to at the movie’s end. I liked particularly how Stone coaxed Gekko over to the good side in ways that weren’t righteous or melodramatic. He presents the choice as a business decision with Gekko’s most important asset being time. It makes sense even if you intend on remaining a greedy bastard. If anything else, this movie should not inspire a generation of jerks like the last one did. That happens when you refuse to tell stories about those types of people.
In the last half of Stone’s career, he stopped telling stories about betrayed youth and started telling stories about tragic leaders (Nixon, Any Given Sunday, Alexander, W). Perhaps it as his way of trying to understand that which he has had a lifelong distrust of. The movies are sad and the subjects are flawed but Stone is more empathetic than judgmental of the old graying patriarchs. One movie in particular, World Trade Center, was striking for its whole-hearted patriotism. Perhaps with that movie he had finally forgiven his country. And with Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, with its wiser more sympathetic Gekko, perhaps Stone has finally forgiven his father. There very well may be a movie out there someday that portrays exactly how we felt about the financial crisis, but it won’t be made by Oliver Stone. He is angry no more. Perhaps he should start making comedies. I wonder what an Oliver Stone comedy would look like.

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.

Indiana Jones: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 06/04/08

Indiana Jones is good enough. By that I mean it doesn't do what numerous sequels have done and make you wish the movie was never made at all. This movie is mediocre true, but at least Indy doesn't suffer a harsh fate like the Bruce Willis' John McClane (Die Hard) whose wife divorces him before every sequel or Tommy Lee Jones' Agent K (Men in Black) who also gets dumped as a sacrifice to an inferior sequel. The worst perhaps was Sigourney Weaver's tragic fate between Aliens and Alien 3. At least Harrison Ford's entire family doesn't die nor is he somehow impregnated with a killer ET. Instead Indy is reunited with an old flame from the 1st movie, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), and they actually hit it off together. How sweet. 
It's also good to note that Spielberg's fun action chops are still in good form also. There are a duo of good chases sequences, a couple nice fist fights, and I especially liked the addition of man eating ants to the lexicon of snakes, bugs, and rats.
Shia LeBouf, although an actor I respect, doesn't scream action hero or greaser badass to me. I'm not sure who I would cast in his stead but I'd be surprised if there weren't a better unknown out there. Someone with a little more dangerous edge. Cate (the Great) Blanchett also leaves something to be desired as the Soviet dominatrix Dr. Irina Spalko. Try as she might I couldn't help but be reminded of that movie cliche 'the Implausibly tough girl.' Is it really believable that she can do all those physical feats with that skinny build.
Still Shia and Cate are never entirely unenjoyable. What huge flaw this movie has concerns the aliens, which in this movie take the place of earlier mystical stalwarts like God and Indian Voodoo. The problem with aliens though is that they don't come equipped with any real sense of purpose. I mean, I can understand why God hates Nazis or why a Cultish deity would desire blood sacrifice, but I don't get why aliens would especially dislike Soviets. I still don't understand how Cate actually met her fate or why the aliens would want to kill her. If Lucas and Spielberg could have given reasonable motivation to the ET's I think this movie could have been just as good as the other three. 
There is still plenty to like here though. I especially like the fifties stereotypes. The Anti-communist rally, the fight between the squares and greasers, and especially the completely unexpected involvement of a (Spoiler Alert!) nuclear blast. (Spoiler Ended) 
Almost Spielberg and Lucas Almost. They haven't killed the franchise yet by the way. They could conceivably make another one and I would probably find my way to seeing it. 

(The last movie I saw at the Odeon in Firenze)

Disturbia July 14, 2007

Disturbia is somewhat of a remake of the 1955 HItchcock classic 'Rear Window' with a climatic third act that seems inspired from 'The Silence of the Lambs.' Like Rear Window it involves a charachter, who becomes bored out of his mind and ends up spying on his neighbors and then becoming more and more suspicious of one in paticular, who seems to have murdered someone. The main differences is that the Jimmy Stewart characther is now the teenage Shia Lebeouf. It is not a broken leg that incapacitates the hero but a house arrest. And the bad guy isn't an ordinary man who commits a single murder, but an actual serial killer, who has killed before and is out there killing again.
This last difference makes the new Disturbia not just an action/drama like 'Rear Window' but more of a horror film. It isn't just suspenseful, it's scary and at the end somewhat gruesome. 
This is another fine movie that Shia Leboeuf can add to his resume. He earns breakthrough credibility I'd say. For most of the movie, it is a one man show, and that one man show is about a kid being bored. I, myself, wasn't while watching him, and this carried on for about half of the movie. Shia is great to watch, and in this movie he's proved he can carry a movie almost by himself. He does a great job of drawing a complete character into the story, making the felon he is sympathetic and understandable. There is a great scene when he is finally confronted about his spying by the girl next door, and the way it is handled makes what could have been an awkward/clumsy/creepy moment into oddly touching. Shia also has a great knack for little details. Take for instance the time when the girl comes over for the first time. She's standing in the doorway, and Shia can't look at her for more than a couple seconds. He has trouble keeping eye contact because he thinks if she catches him looking at her then he'll be caught, but then he remembers that this time he's supposed to be looking and looks back. The entire scene he can't quite make up his mind whether to actually look at her or not. Again when he's walking her back to her house, he holds out his hand as if too hold hands with her, but then takes it back before she can realize the offer has been made. The mixed and awkward feelings of being a friend with a person who's privacy has been invaded are presented without a slipup. LeBouf is one of the best young actors out there. 
I've got only one discrepancy with this movie, and it's the girl. This has mostly to do with that oddly touching scene in the middle of the film, where Shia describes the girl as doing things like reading actual books, and other interesting intelligent things. There's nothing wrong with this scene except for the fact that it doesn't describe what we've seen of the girl. From what we've seen she spends her time undressing in front of an open window, doing yoga in her room, and swimming in a small bikini. When she comes over to talk to Shia, she has a sexy disposition around her. Like a 'make the boys feel awkward' attitude, what have you. So who is she really? The intelligent interesting girl, or the neighborhood sexpot? Not that there's anything wrong with a sexpot, just if you're going to describe a girl as being somewhat intelligent or interesting there should be less gratuitous shots of her glistening ass and more scenes of her actually reading, cracking a clever joke, or I don't know, finishing a crossword puzzle. Maybe using physics to time a jump from her roof into the swimming pool on a bicycle she built with only raw materials she found in her backyard. You know something interesting.

It seems to me when someone actually makes a good horror movie, and boy is that rare, then it ceases to be a horror movie. It turns into a drama or a psychological thriller or something. I think a movie actually has to be inferior to be considered within the horror genre. I consider this movie to be more of a drama/thriller.

Transformers July 6th, 2007

First of all let me say that I know very little about that late 80s craze that was Transformers. I remember playing with a couple toys but I didn't know any of their names and I didn't watch any of the cartoons. None of this, I think, made any difference while I watched the movie. Mostly I think because the best things in this movie had nothing whatsoever to do with Transformers. Oddly enough since the movie is named Transformers I find it weird to suggest what probably would have made this a great movie instead of a good one would have been the absence of the Transformer Wars. What I'm basically saying is that instead of the whole war thing, they should have solely focused on the Romantic Comedy part and maybe renamed the movie "Shia and the Bumblebee: A story about a kid and his transformer car." Because seriously that's the best thing about this movie. Shia Lebouf trying to score Megan Fox with the help of his car.
And of course this is a weird thing to say because this movie is directed by Michael Bay, a man who has made such mindless blow-em-ups like Armageddon, Bad Boys II, Pearl Harbor, and The Island. He specializes in huge spectacles, but seriously who saw this movie said they liked the climatic battle better than the antics of LeBouf, the snarliness of Turturro, and the complete wackiness of Transformers trying to hide in a backyard. In this movie, the actual humans are more compelling than the huge special effects displays.
I'm not saying I hate all action in a movie. But there's a difference between the best computer simulated explosions money can buy and martial arts. The former is boring, the other is exhilirating. It's sort of the difference between watching a classic basketball game or a loop of guys dunking. One is instant gratification, the other is drawn out, you can see what's happening why it's happening and who it's happening too. In the end it's more memorable and more enjoyable. The problem with the action sequences in this movie is that you rarely get the entire picture. The Transformers are so huge that it's hard to ever get a real good shot of what they're doing or who they're fighting. I hardly ever knew the names of who I was watching and it was incredibly hard to see what was actually going on. Bay further compounds the problem by shaking and moving the camera alot. This not only hurts the action but also the comedy. He needs to do less. Think about the Matrix, they never did closeups during an action sequence, they wanted you to see the strategy involved. 
Still there are many strong points to this film. Shia is paticularly good at stealing the scene from gigantic robots, Megan Fox is hot, and John Tuturro, Anthony Anderson, and the parents provide solid supporting work. If you see this on DVD, skip the climatic battle. Boorrrrinnnggg. Everything else is fine.