Irresitible (3/5 Stars)

At a small-town city council meeting in the tiny town of Deerlaken, Wisconsin, the Mayor and city counsel are voting to impose a voter identification law. In walks Jack Hastings, played by Chris Cooper, who objects to the I.D. law. He makes a reference to what appears to be a latino couple in the back of the room, references high-minded democratic ideals and some tenets of Christianity and leaves. This is all caught on camera and posted to YouTube.

The video is shown to a Democratic political advisor named Gary Zimmer, played by Steve Carell, who absolutely loves it. It is almost too good to be true. Here is a white middle-aged man, veteran, and farmer, from a swing-state no less, that is taking a pro-immigration stance using the symbolic authority (founding fathers and the bible) of Republicans. Gary carpetbags his way to Deerlaken with the intent to finance the candidacy of Jack Hastings for Mayor of Deerlaken on the Democratic ticket. He wants to make a big national deal about this tiny mayoral race in rural Wisconsin.

Jack Hastings, along with his daughter Diana Hastings, played by MacKenzie Davis, allow Gary to serve as campaign manager to the upcoming campaign. Deerlaken has major problems. Its economic base was centered on a military base that has since closed, throwing many local companies out of business. The population of Deerlaken has collapsed from 15,000 people to just 5,000. With problems like that, an astute observer may wonder why the locals would care about national immigration policy.

Gary Zimmer does not connect those dots. And he knows he does not have to meet his ultimate goal. With his connections, money, and election apparatus behind him, he knows that he can simply outspend the other side to victory. The mayoral race does not really matter to national politics, but because of the immigration issue, the location of Deerlaken, and the identity of Jack Hastings, it will make a great story for the national news cycle. A Democrat wins in this rural town with Democratic sound-bytes for the first time in fifty or so years. When the Republicans catch wind of what is happening, they send down Faith Brewster, played by Rose Byrne, to dramatically up the spending game. Gary loves this because it means even more time and money are going to be spent on this symbolic election. Even if Jack Hastings loses, the Democrats would still win because they would have been able to beat expectations.

This is Jon Stewarts’ second feature film as a writer/director following Rosewater. We all know him from his fifteen years at the The Daily Show, an excellent fake news broadcast on Comedy Central. There is a twist to the story which he springs in the final twenty minutes. I hesitate to discuss a twist, but I will because I believe if the movie had not concealed the twist, it might have made for a more effective and funnier movie.

As it is, the movie follows Gary Zimmer around as if he is the main character. But he is not the main character, and he makes a poor main character while the movie allows him to take on that role. The main character is Deerlaken and the people in it. The Youtube video was fabricated and the election is a scam. The people of Deerlaken, helped by an astute understanding of campaign finance laws, know that if their town’s local election can catch the attention of the national media, their local economy will be the recipients of a vast amount of unfiltered unaccountable cash. The town intends to use this sorely needed cash to rebuild the local infrastructure, stimulate the local economy, and do other things that actually matter (as opposed to a purely symbolic national immigration debate).

But you will not know this for the first 90 minutes of “Irresistible” and the marketing campaign for it has gone even further in pulling another bait-and-switch on the expectations of the audience. Jon Stewarts’ fan base is urban and liberal, which is why the marketing is presenting a political comedy between the idealistic democratic strategist Gary Zimmer and a nihilistic republican strategist named Faith Brewster, played by Rose Byrne. But Faith Brewster is not a main character of this story and the movie is not really about a tussle between Democrats and Republicans. Faith shows up, finds Gary’s scheming mostly boring, and does not pretend, like Gary, to patronize the locals. She is here to shower money on the local economy and remind the people that Gary doesn’t actually care about them. She doesn’t care about them either, but her straightforward unashamed manner is less annoying.

Jon Stewart does not actually have much to say about the Republican party here, which makes sense if his purpose is to enlighten and inform those in his audience, his audience being mainly urban and liberal. All his criticism focuses on Gary Zimmer, the out-of-touch liberal elitist, who likes to describe the rural white residents of Deerlaken, Wisconsin as small-minded to the intelligentsia at NYC dinner party fundraisers. It is the urban elitist who ultimately gets outmaneuvered by the small-minded rural folk. I admire Jon Stewart’s willingness to not preach to the choir. That man has got some big ol’ matza balls on him.

As a director, Jon Stewart is still a little happy-go-lucky with his camera. He has some distracting camera angles and shots here where a more straightforward and simple style would have been appropriate. He has an eye casting though. I always appreciate when Will Sasso, from MadTV way back when, shows up in any movie to play anybody. “Irresistible” is not all that funny in the first half. However, as things become clearer, it picks up more and more laughs as it gains speed through the midway point.

The movie ends with a conversation with Trevor Potter, the lawyer brought on screen in many Daily Show and Colbert Report segments to talk about the ridiculous of campaign finance laws. Jon Stewart asks, could a town actually do this? Could they raise all this outside money, funnel it into Super Pacs, and then spend that money on local issues instead of advertising for an election? Yes, Trevor Potter, states. There are no rules for Super Pacs. You can raise any amount of money for them, ostensibly for the purpose of influencing an election, but spend that money however you want. Jon Stewart, wisely suggests, that more people should abuse the law and use the enormous amount of money circulating through our election ecosystem to actually help local communities. I feel like that idea may have had the comic potential of the accounting scheme in “The Producers”, which as you know, was laid out very clearly in that movie’s first scene. I wonder what this movie would have been like if Jon Stewart had led with his great idea.

Vice (3/5 Stars)

Not that it is wise to suppose that Dick Cheney cares, but I bet he never suspected at the time when he was at the height of his power, that the little known writer currently working at Saturday Night Live producing Bear City skits would go on to make the definitive biopic of him. That is the problem with being an under-the-radar bearaucrat with little to no personality. Nobody talks about you, until one person does and that person becomes the only storyteller around.

The writer and director of Vice is Adam McKay, better known for his work directing Will Ferrel comedies such as Anchorman, Talldega Nights, and Step-Brothers. Will Ferrell is still doing that type of shtick. For the time being, Adam McKay seems to have moved on to more serious entertainment. His first venture into this genre, The Big Short, was one of the best movies of the year. Vice is in the same vein. It takes a complicated subject, the life and politics of hugely influential if not particularly known man, Richard Cheney, and tries its best to explain the significance of his policies and politics. The Big Short had an easier time at it. That movie's subject matter was complicated to, but the movie (and the book as well) adroitly got all the major points across by inserting them into the stories of several sympathetic well-rounded characters. Vice lacks a sympathetic well-rounded character. We learn alot about Dick Cheney but not so much about what makes him click. We learn much about what he did but not much about why he thought it was the right thing to do. Perhaps it would be hard for a writer-director such as Adam McKay to really understand someone so politically opposite. I have seen it done before though. I thought Oliver Stone did a particularly good job with Richard Nixon in Nixon. I mean, the movie makes a big deal about Dick Cheney's pursuit of power, but what is power without purpose. Did he actually want anything besides it? I'm not sure this movie found the answer to that question.

The most chilling thing about Cheney is that there might be less to him than you would think. I watched Errol Morris' documentary interview of Donald Rumsfeld and was absolutely taken aback by the utter lack of seriousness and self-introspection in Donald Rumsfeld. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney go back a long way, Cheney basically learning the ropes of Washington from Rumsfeld. Was Dick Cheney like Donald Rumsfeld? Can he really be explained by a scene in the beginning of Vice in which a hungover and bruised Cheney is read the riot act by his wife and told that if he does not make something of himself she will leave him. To gain power to keep his wife, is that the sum total of this man's ambitions. What a scary thought.

Adam McKay does not seem to agree. I think McKay's politics are provoking him to seek some more nefarious answer to that question. So the movie makes much more sense in its first half when Cheney is an underdog more defined by a simple pursuit of power than in the second half when Cheney gains power and pursues many of his controversial policies like war and torture. McKay hasn't achieved insight into Cheney motivations, but he is assuming that something more is there. Maybe, maybe not.

The performance in Vice are damn near perfect. Christian Bale may seem a not obvious choice to play Dick Cheney until you see him onscreen for five seconds and you realize its the perfect casting choice. As a matter of course, he seems to have gained like fifty pounds to do this role. All in a days work for this man. This is a much better version of Dick Cheney than we briefly saw Richard Dreyfuss give in W.The most perfect choice of casting though belongs to Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld. That is some uncanny shit. I remember being unnerved while watching the real Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known. I felt the same thing here and think it a stroke of genius to use Steve Carell, an actor who has played famously empty characters before like Brick the Weatherman, to portray Rummy.

Like any half-way decent movie that portrays well-known people, the viewer gets a kick out of who got cast to play whom. Tyler Perry plays Colin Powell. Sam Rockwell plays George W. Bush. Amy Adams plays Lynne Cheney. George W. Bush, bless his big dumb heart, doesn't seem to know what he is doing half the time and is under the unfortunate impression that Rumsfeld and Cheney do.

I like political movies with a point of view. Not only does Adam McKay have a point of view, he is brilliantly angry about it. This movie and The Big Short reminded me of the best movies of Oliver Stone. They take chances, they are vibrant, and they are passionate about the subject matter. Sometimes this really works like when Dick and Lynne Cheney speak Shakespeare. Other times not so. Vice has a narrator who is not really introduced and might not be a portrait of the actual person he is supposed to be. (Noticeably, he narrates this story in a wearied manner, not unlike the narrator in last years War Machine. Is this how Afghanistan and Iraq are to be remembered? As sad slogs.) We do not know who this man is until he gets run over by a car and Dick Cheney as organ donee, receives his heart. The movie argues that Dick Cheney slighted the dead man by referring to his donor heart as "his new heart." I get what the movie is getting at, but heart problems don't seem to be a fair thing for which to criticize someone.

I found Vice to be frequently funny. That does not mean the movie has jokes. This relates more to the skill of the writer/director who consistently finds ways to present information in a clever and efficient manner. I am a big fan of Adam McKay. I look forward to whatever he does next.

Battle of the Sexes (4/5 Stars)

Putting the Show back in Chauvinism

The show was so good it is hard to believe that it was actually true. “The Battle of the Sexes,” a tennis match played in 1973 between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King plays like a professional wrestling match. In one corner is the heel, the ex-champion Bobby Riggs, a boastful, clownish, male chauvinist. In the other corner is Billie Jean King, young, serious, the greatest female tennis player in the country. Bobby believes that he can beat at his age, 55, any woman who has the guts to challenge him. His reasoning: men are better than women. The match became so hyped that it ultimately was played in a football stadium and 50 million people watched it on television. Like professional wrestling, it had a man one could love to hate and a woman everyone wanted to win.

Except that this wasn’t a professional wrestling match. The outcome that would delight the world, good guys win, bad guys lose, was not predetermined. The prize money was a million dollars and Bobby Riggs, a compulsive gambler, had bet $15,000 of his own money on himself. There would be no throwing of the fight and the fact that Bobby had previously soundly beat the next best female tennis player, Margaret Court, in what was termed the Mother’s Day massacre, had put a real suspense onto the outcome of the match. The match was exciting. And in this movie, the feeling is fully captured.

To Billie Jean King, the significance of the match was very serious. She had turned down Bobby several times before Margaret’s defeat, made it essential that she take the match in order to prove that women’s tennis wasn’t a joke. At the time, she was lobbying for equal pay in tournaments between men and women. Her reasoning: the men and women sell the same amount of tickets, why are they paid differently. To Bobby, the significance of the match seems less serious and more of a ploy to be paid more money. Bobby knows that by trolling the women’s lib movement he could generate interest in the match. Whether he actually hates women is an open question, but on a certain level it doesn’t matter. He does not take the women’s lib movement serious. As he comments in one scene: the women don’t deserve to be paid as much as the men because they can’t beat the men in a match-up. In fact, he says, “I’m being paid less to play on the men’s senior circuit than the women are making in their regular circuit. If I can beat the top women, its unfair to me to be paid less than them.”

It strikes me that I’m talking far more about the plot than usual. Well, that speaks to the power of the story. It is a fantastic battle between two very strong characters. Steve Carell is the perfect actor to portray the clownish Bobby Riggs and Emma Stone is perfect as Billie Jean King. In fact, I think this is the fullest character Emma Stone has ever played and is her best performance. Sarah Silverman and Bill Pullman pull their weight in supporting roles.

The movie thankfully pays a lot of time and attention to the match itself. It is well directed by Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Davis (directors of “Little Miss Sunshine”) and written by Simon Beaufoy (“Slumdog Millionaire”). This is a good movie. I really liked it.

The Big Short (5/5 Stars)

This movie is an achievement on several fronts. First it achieves clarity in its subject. Second it achieves humor throughout. Third it has a strong moral. It takes considerable skill to do this given that the subject, the secondary mortgage market, is complicated and obscure and I can only hope my review is organized well enough to capture everything that needs to be praised.

The story comes from Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book, “The Big Short.” That book tells three completely separate stories about who profited from the subprime meltdown that cratered the global economy in 2008. Given that almost nobody figured out (or wanted to figure out) that everything was terrible before it was, the people that did are very interesting outsiders. The movie was adapted by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay. It was directed by Adam McKay.

One is Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale), an ex-brain surgeon hedge fund manager, who did something nobody else did. He read the underlying mortgage bonds. He spent a couple weeks doing so while barefoot in his office listening to deafness-inducing death metal. Then he did an extraordinarily audacious thing. In 2005, he invested 100 million dollars of his client’s money (against their wishes) in a financial instrument he requested the banks invent that bet against these bonds. It was a ballsy move given his own calculations had the bonds failing in the second quarter of 2007. How the movie treats this character is illuminating. They could have easily gone down the Benedict Cumberbatch route of making him arrogant and dismissive of all the ordinary people of the world. But as Michael Burry points out to his angry clients, “I don’t know how to be sarcastic. I can’t tell a joke. I know numbers.” He corresponds with the incredulous bankers he works with in a humble unassuming way. Everybody is either making fun of him or angry with him for the next couple years.

Second is Mark Baum (Steve Carell). We are introduced to him in an anger management support group. A troubled man is talking about how the world makes him angry. Mark Baum walks in late and immediately starts talking about himself. He is angry with Wall Street bankers and all the big guys beating up the small people. He casually pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down completely oblivious to the fact that he has interrupted the meeting. Then his phone rings. “I have to take this,” he remarks and leaves the room to take the call. Fucking Brilliant. The man is an asshole, but given that he hates Wall Street and spends the entire movie railing against corruption and fraud, he is our asshole. He has a team of angry people working for him including Danny Moses (Rafe Spall), Porter Collins (Hamish Linklater), and my favorite Vinnie Daniel (Jeremy Strong). This quartet form an angry hedge fund that is propositioned by an oily banker named Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling). Vennett has heard of Michael Burry’s bet and wants to sell somebody else the same thing. Unfortunately nobody wants in on this bet. Except the Baum hedge fund guys who don’t trust bankers. There is a lot of yelling amongst these guys, most of it hilarious. And that is a very important thing as what Vennett is explaining to Baum and (also to us) is the secondary mortgage market, which is an absurdly obfuscated and complicated thing. The movie pulls out all the stops and breaks a lot of rules in order to explain how it works. Jared Vennett, the chief explainer, also serves as the movie’s narrator. At other times people just turn to the camera and make it a little clearer to the audience what exactly is happening on the screen. Then at other other times the movie employs Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, Selena Gomez at a blackjack table, and Anthony Bourdain making a Monday morning stew of old fish to explain the different tranches of a Collateralized Debt Obligation. It also helps that McKay sometimes substitutes for different financial terms the word “dogshit,” as in “these loans are dogshit,” as opposed to “non-performing." All of this saves a lot of time, which as McKay should know and amply demonstrates is the friend of comedy.

Third is the twenty-something partnership of Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Witrock). They specialize in betting that bad things will happen (natural disasters and the like) given the theory that most people do not plan on terrible things to happen to them. They are introduced (about 45 minutes into the film) in a very endearing way. They want to go work for JP Morgan and have an interview that does not get past the lobby of the building. An intern (or at least a very young associate) meets them downstairs and points out that they have one billion (or something) less money than it takes to get an ISDA (described as the ticket to get to the big boys table). They feel stupid and rejected. So let us do a tally. We have our bullied nerd, our asshole, and our young nobody underdogs.

There is one more character but I’m going to intterupt my own review to talk about the ingenious way Adam McKay brings all of these characters together. They never meet each other, but they know about each other. Jared hears about Michael Burry’s bet at an afterwork bar. Charlie and Jamie pick up Jared’s prospectus in the lobby of JP Morgan. Except that is not how it happened. We see this happen but then Jared turns to the camera at the afterwork bar and tells us that he does not hang out with these people. He has fashion friends. Actually, Charlie tells us, he did not pick up the prospectus in the lobby. He heard it through a friend and Jamie found out about some other not very cinematic way. This is halfway brilliant by Adam McKay. First, how these characters hear about the other deals is not important to the story. In many nonfiction adaptations moviemakers do this sort of efficient blurring of the truth all the time. It saves time for the audience, this is understood, so it does not take away from anything for the characters to turn to us and let us know that we are seeing a movie convention. But only that would not be brilliant. It is brilliant because McKay takes this convention and admission and turns it into a setup for one of the greatest, hilarious, and cathartic payoffs in the movie. During a seminar Mark Baum interrupts a speaker on a stage (not during a Q and A session) with a question. The speaker answers and Mark interrupts him again to contradict him angrily. Then Mark’s phone rings, he answers it, announces to everyone that he has to take this and leaves the room. Then Jared, who is also in the room, turns to the camera and states, “That actually happened. Mark did that.” This joke would not have been possible if McKay had not been breaking the rules all the while. He needed to break the rules in order to tell the story efficiently. What makes this movie’s screenplay brilliant is how he uses all the broken rules (that are rules generally because they are distracting and take the audience out of the story) to do things that bring home jokes and cathartic points. The techniques that break the rules do not distract, they reinforce and make scenes better. Adam McKay and Charles Randolph deserve the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

So Charlie and Jamie are rejected but they have a trick card. They have befriended an ex-banker in their hometown named Ben Rickart (Brad Pitt with a beartd). Underscoring how bullshit the system is, this guy uses his connections with a big bank to get the necessary ISDA that they would not have been able to get based on their underlying merit.

So now everything is set up and explained and the rest of the movie is payoff. It is generally funny up until a point and then the movie hits us with several very moral scenes. My favorite (and there are plenty to pick from) comes at a point where Charlie and Jamie make several great bets and are very excited about it. They are dancing in the lobby of a Las Vegas convention center and Ben Rickart angrily tells them to stop. “Do you realize what you just did? You bet against the U.S. economy. If it turns out well for you it hurts everybody else. One tick upward in the unemployment rate is a hundred thousand people out of work. This is what I hate about banking. It takes human beings and turns them into numbers in a spreadsheet. Just don’t fucking dance.”

There are several moments like this in the movie and they all work very well. It may come as some surprise that this is the first dramatic movie Adam McKay has ever made. He is known for the best of the Will Ferrell comedies (Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step-Brothers, and The Other Guys). It is fun now to watch other movie critic revise what they think of the guy now that he has made a truly great movie that is not a comedy. (Not me. I have always thought Talladega Nights was a perfect movie). I hope McKay makes other movies that are not completely comedies. He obviously cares deeply about people and has the skill and talent to take complicated problems and break them down in digestible parts. He also has a comedic director's skill in caricature. This comes into play most readily in his satirical treatment of secondary characters. I especially love how the woman at the ratings agency (a fine Melissa Leo) has come back from an eye exam and is wearing thick sunglasses. And the coup de grace has to be the SEC girl who is in Vegas at the secondary mortgage market convention with the sole purpose of shacking up with a guy with Goldman Sachs in order to get on the ground floor of that bank once her couple years at the agency are up.

I have studied this subject quite a bit and have only this to add. Everything this movie shows about the banking industry is correct and their angry attitude is entirely called for. Having said that, it does not follow that the homeowners (who this movie does not hold under their satirical light) are entirely blameless. Many took out loans for houses they could not afford. Some people took out two or three mortgages and a line of credit on their property. These people deserved to lose their homes. I bring this up not to contradict this movie but to impress upon the reader that one does not need to take sides between ordinary people and banks in this crisis. It is entirely possible and I would posit that it is completely true that everybody is guilty and the true injustice is not that ordinary people suffered but that the big banks and the people who worked for them did not. Of course if one had to decide who is guiltier, it would tip towards the banks. After all, they were professionals who told everyone that they knew what they were doing.

One of my favorite scenes is when Charlie and Jamie sneak into Lehman Brothers after it has collapsed. And they walk around the deserted trading floor with its infantile Red Bull can pyramids. It was not how Charlie imagined it would be. “What did you expect?” asks Jamie. Charlie reflects a moment before adding, “I thought adults worked here.”

Foxcatcher (4/5 Stars)

The general rule for movies based on true stories is not how closely they follow the facts. That is the job of journalism. No, the general rule is whether the movie would be any good if it were completely fictional. And this strange and sad story of the richest convicted murderor in history, John Dupont, and his relationship with the U.S. Greco-Roman wrestling team, particularly the Olympic champion brothers Mark and David Schultz, does not need to actually be true to be effective. It is fully realized within itself. I suspect the most egregious violation of the true story may be the movie’s condensed time span, which makes it look like all the events took place within a couple of years (take a look at Dave Schulz’s ungrowing kids). Actually the real events took place over a decade, but I feel the makers (Director Bennet Miller et al.) made the right decision in glossing over that. It gives the psychological underpinnings of the tragedy more momentum. This is a very good if hard to watch movie. Hard to watch in the correct way, that is. I will elaborate on that phrase a bit later.

This is a great character study with a trio of great performances by some unlikely actors. Not that we did not know that Steve Carell and Channing Tatum could act. We saw some glimmers of that in Little Miss Sunshine for Carell and a trio of Soderberg movies for Tatum. But we have Oscar worthy transformation happening in Foxcatcher and I suspect most of the critical conversation around this movie will focus intently on just how good are these performances.

Let’s start with the Olympic wrestling brothers Schultz, Mark and David, played by Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo respectively. The most impressive thing right out of the gate is the spot on physicality of the Greco-Roman wrestling practices and matches. I took a year of wrestling in high school so I was looking to see if they got it right. They did and you know how you could tell? There is this great introduction to the brothers as they spar in a practice room. The shot is unbroken and lasts at least a minute or two. By the end of the shot both Channing and Mark are breathing heavily. That’s Greco Roman wrestling for you. It is the most quickly exhausting sport ever invented. Imagine what it would have been like to shoot take after take of any of these scenes. Here Channing is doing some extra overtime heavy lifting. (Mark has no match scenes). Physical performances are generally unnoticed as good acting. For instance, using Channing Tatum’s own career, I don’t recall any critics that praised his dancing in Magic Mike as skillful acting. Well I do and Tatum’s performance here is one of those performances I believe the vast majority of actors in the business would not be able to do. And the physicality of Channing really does matter because the character is extremely introverted and inarticulate. The background of Mark Schultz is one of isolation and alienation. His father left when he was two years old. He moved around the country constantly. He then followed his older brother into wrestling and may have excelled at it dramatically but the sport happens to be unpopular, unwatched, and not even paid. We are introduced to this gold medal winner collecting a $20 check for talking to a grade school classroom of kids about the Olympics. He has to tell the principal to make the check out to Mark Schultz, not Dave Schultz, because Dave is sick and Mark is substituting for him. “We both won gold,” Mark lamely explains. Mark goes back to his one room apartment where he eats Ramen alone.

And then the phone rings and we are introduced to Steve Carell’s version of eccentric millionaire John Dupont. John Dupont happens to be a fan of Greco-Roman wrestling. And since he inherited his millions and has no job, he has taken it upon himself to be the head coach of United States Wrestling. He is neither a wrestler nor a coach but he has a lot of money and is more than willing to pay top dollar for the nation’s best wrestlers. He phrases his desires in patriotic terms. This is good for America. I am a great man of vision. We need to take this country back. Mark Schultz, so obviously marginalized by society, becomes a true believer of sorts. Yes, he will move there and together they will put together a great wrestling team, the best in the world.

John Dupont’s childhood was disturbingly odd. His father left him at two years old. His mother raised him (along with a retinue of servants) at the gigantic Foxcatcher estate. His only friend was a kid his mother paid to hang out with him. John’s mother raises horses. Greco-Roman wrestling has to be the exact opposite sport from equestrian. That should explain quite a bit right there about their relationship. In one telling scene, John’s mother comes over to the gym to watch a practice. Normally John Dupont would just watch the practices, but here he calls all the world-class wrestlers over into a circle and proceeds to teach them Wrestling 101, that is until his mother leaves the room.

Steve Carell’s performance is hard to watch, much like it is hard to be around a person who obviously has no idea how to interact socially with other human beings. Not only has Dupont been isolated from most other living beings all his life his situation is compounded by never having encountered anyone on a level playing basis. He is automatically in charge due to the fact that he is the employer of everyone in the room. The result is a grotesque caricature of a human, someone whose personality feels like you are watching a train wreck in slow motion. Mix in the drugs, alcohol, and guns that Dupont has regular access to and the result is tragedy that in retrospect seems painfully obvious. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the story is that Mark and John get along for at least the first couple of years. They are utterly lost people being lost together.

The one sane person is Dave Schultz (played by Mark Ruffalo). Unlike his brother, he got married and had kids once he became an adult. That probably did a lot in making him a regular person. He goes to work for John Dupont to after a couple of years, the money being too good to turn down. But the heart of this story is how he finagles for his brother a way out of the damaging influence of Dupont. Mark, looking for a father figure, is pshycologically stricken when the man he has chosen starts abusing him in various ways. The most dramatic result of this is a scene that reminded me of Robert De Niro’s performance in Raging Bull, arguably the greatest acting performance ever. You will know what I mean. And then Dave Schultz comes in the room and puts his brother back together the only way a truly centered and empathetic person can. It’s kind of beautiful and John Dupont never truly gets Mark back. John Dupont once again loses his only friend in the world. Everyone deserves a nomination. That’s one for Carell, Tatum, and Ruffalo. This is the best-acted movie of the year so far.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

“Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues,” the sequel to the 2004 movie “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” may serve as an insightful comparison for those interested in charting the career evolution of the long partnership of Actor Will Ferrell and Director Adam McKay. The two have certainly changed in the almost decade since the original movie came out. Someone in Clown College could totally write a thesis about the transformation. No, not me, I don’t have the credentials or motivation suited to such a task. Oh, all right I’ll do it.

Back in the way back day when dinosaurs ruled the world and the Mayans had not yet arrived on their galactic starships, there were two Saturday Night Live alumni named Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. Their SNL colleagues, obsessive, neurotic, and urbane New Yorkers, all of them I tell you, incessantly wrote about the trivial and not so pleasant pleasantries of daily life of people who live close or at least nearby people. But not these two for they hailed (or at least Ferrel) from a land of strip malls, culdesacs, and an almost ludicrous amount of grass fields, I mean really. It was known as “The Bubble,” for legend has it nobody from the outside ever came in and anyone from the inside who ever wanted to ‘do something’ had to leave the city limits, generally in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic, a feat few ever accomplished, at least on a regular basis. But to Ferrel it was merely called Irvine, California. Out from “The Bubble” came a new kind of comedian, the Ferrel Man Child: loud, brash, and wholly absurd. But above all other lowly adjectives, the Ferrel Man Child was defined by his overconfidence. He was a man not challenged in any meaningful way by society or civilization and walked this great land like a King: that is with a deluded sense of self-importance and entitlement.

The Ferrel Man Child was first seen in the realms of cinemadom in “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” as a local anchorman in sunny 1970s San Diego. It was ripe territory for the Ferrel Man Child. The employment allowed his character to take all the credit for an entire bureaurcracy and think he deserved it too. He had a grand mustache at a time when that sort of thing was without shame. And he had a news team of enablers. Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) was the man on the street. Champ Kind (David Koechner) was sports. And who could forget dear Brick Tamlin (Steve Carell) on weather. Turns out, the man was retarded, but nobody knew for years because doing weather in San Diego takes no brains at all. It’s Sunny! Everyday!

But Hark! What’s this?!?!? Out of nowhere and not taking notes or bringing coffee was a woman, a female reporter named Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate). The original movie relied heavily on one Ferrel Man Child joke in particular: that is making Christina Applegate look as uncomfortable as possible. Ten Years later, the Legend Continues, and even though there is still plenty of deluded male chauvinism still around, the themes are an entirely different animal, like say a sneaky snake instead of a giant panda, that sort of metaphor. Starting around 2010, after one great movie about NASCAR (Talladega Nights) and one okay movie about forty-something men living with their parents (Step-Brothers) the Ferrel Man Child reinvented himself in that grand old country of satire, lampooning Wall Street (The Other Guys) and Politics (The Campaign).  

It should be said that the choice of a sequel for ‘Anchorman’ by Team Ferrel/McKay is not simply a ‘get-the-gang-back-together-for-another-paycheck’ kind of job. They chose this sequel because even though the original movie was not a satire there lay in the promise of a sequel, the good territory for it. After all, it is a decade after the 70s (that means it’s the 80s) and although dinosaurs no longer roam the Earth, there is this new thing called 24 hour NEWS. This too is ripe territory for the Ferrel Man Child. Turns out everything that is stupid and petty about the 24 News Networks is Ron Burgundy’s fault. While enjoying a breakfast buffet in the New York Headquarters of his new workplace, Ron has an idea to get more ratings. “How about instead of telling people what they need to know, we just tell them what they want to hear?” What an idea! Cut to lots of patriotic talk about how great America is, a ridiculous amount of flashy graphics, highlight reels of only home runs and touchdowns (Whammy!) and sticking Brick Tamlin outside in the middle of a hurricane. They also have the idea of using police car chases as Breaking News. Ron has the great idea of speculating on air as to who is being chased and why when he has no real information to go on. The ratings for the 24-hour news network go through the roof.

For those who liked the first movie there are plenty of sequel jokes, that is jokes that are just like the ones in the first movie but bigger. So Ron recites even more absurds warmup phrases before airtime, plays his Jazz Flute in bigger fashion, and has an even bigger newsman brawl with even more famous celebrities in cameos. That’s great as long as there is plenty of fresh material and there is plenty of fresh material, but my personal problem with it is that I happen to be regular viewer of “The Daily Show with John Stewart.” That show skewers the 24-hour news networks on a regular basis so the jokes that are supposedly fresh for Team Ferrell/McKay is actually stuff I am already familiar with. I bet though that those who don’t watch “The Daily Show” on a regular basis will find all the 24-hour news network satire on the money.

My favorite part of the movie is neither a sequel joke nor a 24 Hour news satiric piece. For me that would be the inclusion of the great Kristin Wiig as a love interest for Brick Tamlin. It’s a match made in comedy heaven. She is as big an idiot as he is if which seems impossible but hey that’s how you know that they are meant for each other. It is a little dismaying though to see Wiig in this role at all. After the critical and commercial success of ‘Bridesmaids,’ I bet that she would finally become a movie star with her own annual string of movies. Somehow though Melissa McCarthy became the breakout star of that movie and Kristin Wiig has once more been relegated to supporting roles in the movies of inferior comedians. (I don’t include Ferrell/McKay in that group. I would say they are equals in comedy). This is idiotic and makes the capitalist in me a little sad. There is plenty of money to be made on the Kristin Wiig ticket and the studios are refusing to make it due to what has to be a sexist lack of imagination. 

The weakest part of the movie deals with a series of racial jokes. Ron Burgundy’s new boss at the station is a black woman. This unfortunately is as far as her character development goes as much of the scenes she is in don’t go further than Ron’s bewilderment as to what a black woman is doing in the room. Inexplicably she likes him enough to start dating him and eventually brings him home to her classy Upper East Side African American family. Ron spends his time at the table loudly talking jive, in order to instill racial harmony you see. The black people don’t do much of anything other than gasp in shock and anger. There is something that doesn’t quite work about this scene and it is kind of been milling around humor for a while now. Let’s say you had two white guys making racial jokes about ghetto blacks. That would not be okay, right? But for some reason this is okay here because of the presence of well-dressed and educated middle class blacks looking offended. Who is the joke on here? Is it on Ron Burgundy who can’t tell that the people at the table are not the type of people he thinks they are? Or is it on the black people at the table who are made to be nothing but insulted and uncomfortable? And what does it actually say? I think it says that Burgundy is deluded because these particular black people are not poor and uneducated and thus would not be speaking jive. But it also sidesteps any recognition that there are indeed black people who are underpriviledged, in poverty, and live in violence who do speak jive. This would be especially true in 1980s NYC, which had some of the most dangerous and dilapidated ghettos in the country at that time.

How about if this were the scene? The black woman takes Ron Burgundy back to a family dinner in a scary ghetto, but Ron Burgundy mistakes the family for a version of The Jeffersons. He makes idiotic references to moving on up to the East Side and doesn’t seem to notice that people are underemployed, come from terrible schools, and that brother 15-Year-Old Keenan was shot last week in an escalating series of gang violence. Ron can even start singing the theme song at one point and declare the virtues of Reagan Era trickle-down-economics. Edgy Satire, right? And it should make everybody not just black people uncomfortable to see it. Anyway that’s just a thought. Otherwise all the other jokes in this comedy land pretty well and I look forward to the next comedy by Team Ferrel/McKay.   

The Way, Way Back (3/5 Stars)

I am going to say something rather mean a little bit later. So watch for that.

“The Way, Way Back” was inspired by an experience of Jim Rash, one half of the writing/directing team behind the movie (the other writer/director is Nat Faxon). When he was a youngster of 14 his family spent a summer at his stepfather’s beach house. On the way there his stepfather told him to rate himself between a 1 and a 10. Little Jim answered 6 thinking it was a safe number. His stepfather disagreed and said he was more like a 3 and that he should use the summer as an opportunity to get that number up. What a dick thing to say and apparently this entire movie is a sort of cinematic revenge against Jim Rash’s stepfather. The main character Duncan (Liam James) is a youngster of 14 who is insulted by his stepfather in exactly the same way in the first scene of the movie. Now I will say the mean thing. Based on the movie I saw, I think Duncan is about a 3 too.

There is an impressive cast in this movie. Steve Carell and Toni Collete play Duncan’s parents. Next-door is the hard-drinking town gossip, Allison Janney and her conveniently attractive teenage daughter played by AnnaSophia Robb. Rob Corddry and Amanda Peet hang around as friends of friends. And right down the road is a water park staffed by Sam Rockwell, Maya Rudolph, Jim Rash, and Nat Faxon. This is as good a cast that anyone can have for a comedy. But Steve Carell and Rob Corddry, seasoned comedians, are not really given a chance to tell jokes. Sam Rockwell, an actor who can’t be uninteresting, could be giving a seminar on why scenes of dialogue don’t work when only one person is trying. Maya Rudolph continues her lengthy movie streak of severely unwritten roles. And AnnaSophia Robb perhaps has the hardest job of all but I will get to that later. The main problem is that the character Duncan is in every scene. And Duncan is a truly sad and boring presence. He has no interests or hobbies. He has nothing to say. He is a truly pathetic dancer. His situation with his father and especially the first scene engenders him a great deal of sympathy, but as a movie character this can only go so far. At some point he has to prove himself on the merits of his character. Instead the movie situates the kid in the midst of cool people that have no particular reason to hang out with him and have him win certain battles that can come off as contrived. It’s like watching a youth soccer league give a trophy for “Most Improved” to the worst player on the last place team. It is an exercise in self-esteem generation with no concern of whether it is deserved.

I want to make a point of comparison here so it doesn’t seem like I’m just bashing pale emo kids. In 2008 a movie called “Role Models” came out. It starred Paul Rudd as a man that was sentenced to 100 hours of community service as a Big Brother. He gets a kid named Augie, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse. Augie is a pale nerdy emo kid with a stepfather and a mother that think he is a loser. So it is basically the same sort of story. However in “Role Models” Augie is given a hobby. He enthusiastically participates in a real life medieval role-playing game named LAIRE. He has made his cape and costume. He is practicing his sword moves. He knows so much about it that it is successfully demonstrated that he is involved in something very fun and interesting. So by the end of the movie when Paul Rudd gets mad at Augie’s parents and says he would be “psyched” to have a kid like Augie, the scene really works. It is not an exercise in self-esteem inflation. Augie really is a great kid. “The Way, Way Back” merely has a series of characters, mainly his stepfather and a series of girls that are unnecessarily mean to Duncan. But merely having some characters being mean to another character does not make the latter likable. It makes the latter pitiable.

Which takes us back to the impossible job of AnnaSophia Robb, the hot girl next door, who is tasked with finding some reason any reason for being the romantic interest in this story. I pity her perhaps the most. I think it was a very good thing that the writers decided to make her sullen and boring too because if a vibrant enjoyable girl fell in love with Duncan I think I would actually be annoyed to the point of anger. Once, just once, I want to see a movie about a teenage loser that does not somehow get the most beautiful girl in town to fawn all over him. I know Jim Rash did not get any action when he was 14. Why did he decide to write such this girl of cliché into his story?

There is also a problem with much of the humor in the story, which is generally mean. This usually would not be a problem but it is in this case given Duncan’s main personality trait as a kid being unnecessarily picked on. Let’s take a scene that the creators apparently found so funny that they put it in every single movie trailer. At the largest water slide in the park an attendant played by middle aged Nat Faxon is in charge of spacing out the kids going the slide. He likes to play a joke in which he deliberately makes teenage girls wait to start for an inordinately long time so he can ogle them in their bikinis. Duncan gets a job at the water park and later on he pulls the exact same prank. If the whole thing about this movie is that it is uncool for people to be unnecessarily mean to Duncan, why is Duncan presented as cool when he is being unnecessarily mean to other people. In fact, there is a character (played by Jim Rash) in here whose sole purpose is to be mercilessly made fun of by the entire water park staff. This is admittedly consistently funny because Jim Rash is consistently funny but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hypocritical, a concept of which this movie seems to be completely unaware. Guess what? That is bad writing and I am going to double down on what I said about the writing team of Nat Faxon and Jim Rash in my review of “The Descendants.” They are not particularly good at what they do. I don’t care if they just won an Oscar for it.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (2/5 Stars)

Uninspired is probably the best word for this movie. It was directed by Don Scardino a name you probably do not recognize. This is his first movie although according to IMDB he has done quite a lot of work directing all sorts of Television series, 30 Rock most notably.  His style is barely noticeable and I won’t mention him anymore in this review. The movie has four writers. They include Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Chad Kultgen, Tyler Mitchell. I would not be surprised if there were even more writers than that as the movie has the feel of something put together by committee and by that it is overly broad story within a fill-in-the-blank structure and devoid of uniqueness or creativity. Here, I am going to describe the story very briefly: It is about the redemption of a once successful traditional Vegas magician, Steve Carell, who has fallen on hard times because of his egomania and the appearance of a new type of stuntman magician, a la David Blaine. The magician with the help of his beautiful assistant reconnects with his childhood inspiration and stages a comeback. There is a contest at the end where he out-magics the competition. The End.

Does that sound familiar to you? Well, it should. It is a marketing pitch for a movie you have already seen before, perhaps something starring Will Ferrell and concerning sports. I bet this movie was green-lit for production before it was even written.  The studio got a room of writers together, gave them that paragraph pitch, and ordered a PG-13 script written. The result is a movie that very much feels like it did not need to be made and in a way wasn’t made by anybody in particular. It’s nobody’s movie.

I think the telling clue here is the lack of any decent magic in the movie. None. The best tricks we see are some sleight of hand that barely conceal the fact that Steve Carell and Alan Arkin, his childhood inspiration and now ex-magician, did not even bother to learn sleight of hand in preparation for their roles. There are easy cuts that allow one to recognize it is not their hands much like the way one can tell people in movies hardly ever really play the piano. The movie has a cop out reason for this and that has to do with Burt Wonderstone, Carell, and his partner Anton Marvelton, played by Steve Buscemi, being worn out has been magicians that have not changed their act in ten years. Yeah, but even ten years ago they must have had a decent trick in order to get famous in the first place. You would think we would see something of interest at some point. It never happens.

Now consider the character of Burt Wonderstone himself. His main personality trait is being bored. He takes very little joy in his work, has lost all feelings of brotherhood for his long-time partner, and goes through the routine of seducing groupies as if it is something he feels his status requires even if he does not particularly enjoy it. Truly this is Steve Carell’s least inspired character so far. I would like to draw your attention to one particular failed joke. Burt Wonderstone has been fired from his big Vegas job because his act is terrible and has been informed by his agent that he has no money because he has made nothing but terrible choices. So he is now broke and living in a motel. His assistant, played by Olivia Wilde, comes over to check up on him out of the niceness of her heart. As they are talking, she mentions her own aspirations of becoming a magician in her own right. Burt thinks this notion is silly. Why she asks. “Because,” he states, “you are a woman.” Now true this is misogynistic, but it is also lazy and stupid and those qualities are what I really want to talk about. There is no particular reason for Burt Wonderstone to be misogynistic. I have never heard of a glass ceiling in the world of magic. This isn’t like Will Ferrell’s “Anchorman” where the story was about a news team boy’s club being invaded by a female news anchor. In this movie, it just seems to be there because this movie’s story structure is based off other casually misogynistic movies and so a casually misogynistic main character was just another box on the checklist. Nobody bothered to ask whether the character or plot required Burt Wonderstone to not respect women or put in any sort of effort to make the joke anything more than simply a demeaning comment about women in general. You can, I argue, make fun of a woman. I’m not saying you should not do that, but the joke should have some logical connection to the woman who is the object of ridicule. That brings us to another inexplicable problem.

This is a comedy and like so many other comedies has not hired a comedian for the main female role. The assistant is played by Olivia Wilde, who is not funny. At all. Does not even try. What is she doing in this movie? All she does is look like Olivia Wilde, sit there passively as Burt Wonderstone insults her, and make out with him at the end. Would it kill the makers to cast a comedian who could adlib a couple funny lines where the all male writers were limited in their imagination as to what a woman character could say? It would have been really easy. For instance they hired the very funny Gillian Jacobs from the TV show “Community” for a bit part in this movie. In that bit part she got more laughs than Wilde did in the entire movie. Let’s say 1 to 0. Why on earth couldn’t she be cast as the assistant? I mean she isn’t a supermodel like Olivia Wilde, but she sure isn’t ugly either. Did nobody think about this possibility?

To be fair, there is one thing that transcends the rote nature of this movie and that is the performance of Jim Carrey as the David Blaine-ish magician named Steve Gray. Steve Gray is not really a magician as much as he is a performer of ridiculous acts of self-immolation. In one particular trick he doesn’t go to the bathroom for a straight week. That was pretty funny. Jim Carrey, now 50 years old, and no longer a box office draw (i.e. without studios developing entire movies devoted to his unique brand of comedy) has done the smart thing and started showing up in digital shorts, hosting Saturday Night Live, and taking supporting roles that allow him to still put in superior work. I mean he could be doing the Eddie Murphy thing and keep insisting on being the lead role in inferior movies, each one worse than the one before. This movie isn’t that good but Jim does turn his fifteen minutes of screen time into consistent laughs. I think what we really need is a movie based on or just with the cast of “In Living Color.” That would be something else. 

Dinner for Schmucks (3/5 Stars) September 9, 2010

What a freak show.
Dinner for Schmucks stars Paul Rudd as an up-and-coming midlevel executive at some sort of financial business. He is in line for a promotion. The catch is that he has to take part in a dinner party where the various invitees, all top level executives in the company, compete as to who can bring the biggest idiot along as a guest. Rudd serendipitously happens upon Barry, played by Steve Carell. Barry’s hobby is taxidermy and he specializes in scavenging mice road-kill and inserting them in the place of humans in intricate dioramas of artistic masterpieces, or as he calls them “mousterpieces.” What an idiot, Rudd thinks, and decides to take him to the party. Now you may be thinking: inviting people to dinner party just to make fun of them. Isn’t that a bit mean? Yes it is, and the movie agrees. So there is a strange dichotomy here. We are presented with a freak show and than asked to empathize with the freaks and dislike the people who laugh at them. As a consequence the movie isn’t as funny as it should be because it suggests that we would be assholes if we thought it was. This movie was based on a French film called, “The Dinner Party.” I heard that one was much meaner than this one. It was probably funnier too. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be nice and funny at the same time. May I suggest a way that this movie could have done exactly that? First though I feel I have to discuss what exactly makes us laugh. 



These aren’t my ideas. They are Freud’s and they come from a book aptly titled “Jokes and their Relationship to the Subconscious.” Very good book, I suggest it if you take being funny seriously. I will try to briefly summarize. There are mainly three things that make us laugh. They are Economy, Misdirection, and Aggression. 

I’ll skip the first two. What mainly concerns us here is Aggression, or Schadenfreude, the pleasure we get from other people’s misery. We all have aggressive natural instincts. Your boss may be a nice guy, but his pain is easy to laugh at because deep down you are unhappy that you have to take orders from anybody. To some degree we all want autonomy. There doesn’t even have to be an “actual joke” associated with it. If there is a person you feel routinely bullies you and then one day somebody else stands up to them or simply says, “Fuck that guy” behind his back, you would probably feel visceral pleasure and laugh. It is an outlet for the aggression you would normally act upon on if you weren’t suppressing it to say keep your job. The same goes for sex. When a guy calls a woman a slut (or construction dudes catcall) the words are an outlet for sexual aggression. The problem isn’t necessarily that the woman is being sexually active as much as who she’s not being sexually active with, namely the guy who is insulting her. The holy triumvirate of comedy is Religion, Sex, and Politics. Why? Because God, the Government, and Women (or Men) are the main players in the world who are limiting your natural inclination to do whatever the fuck you want. 

The problem with this movie is that Barry is completely harmless. There’s absolutely no reason why you would feel intimidated by him. He controls nothing. He doesn’t get the women. He’s a fantastic artist but certainly not somebody you would find yourself in competition with. If he’s funny at all in this movie, it’s because Steve Carell has him say funny things along the levels of Economy or Misdirection. He doesn’t even make you feel guilty for existing. (I bring this up because I’m sure we’ve all heard people rant about homeless people or other unpopular but completely powerless groups. I fear sometimes that people are so hostile because the insulter feels that the simple presence of societal decay on the streets impugns all of society and declares us all guilty. Thus the resentment.) Barry is clueless but not pitiable. He likes his art and is very good at it. Normal people may ostracize him but he is happy in his mind. Thus his solitude is blest and makes it almost impossible to make fun of him. Really, you would have to have some sort of grudge against happy harmless people. (i.e. you would have to be a total asshole.) 

Because of this it is perhaps a not so good thing that the movie spends so much time on Barry. It would be better if we spent more time with the odious company executives. They are the type of huge arrogant jerks we all know too well. Two of them are played by Ron Livingstone (Office Space) and Larry Wilmore (The Daily Show). Certainly they are capable of more comedy than what we see here. 

The executives should have at least gotten as much character development as the only truly villainous person in the story. That character is Thermen, played by Zach Galifinakis. Thermen works at the IRS (Booo!), stole Barry’s wife (Boo!! Hiss!!), and controls Barry via mind control (Boo- wait what?) Oh what a jerk. Zach’s presence marks the funniest scenes in the movie. It’s a visceral pleasure watching Barry take him down in the climax. There is no reason why the executives couldn’t have been made as ugly as Thermen. You don’t have to give them weird hobbies. Watch or read “American Psycho.” That’s how you go about making fun of rich, good-looking people. 

Steve Carell is still pretty funny here but most of the jokes seem to come from non-sequitors and throw-away lines. Here is an example of a particularly good exchange he has with Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) who plays a psychotic modern artist as they sit and overlook a goat ranch:

Clement: Have you ever spent five months living with a herd of goats as one of them?
Barry: No
Clement: That surprises me. The thing about a goat is, it never denies itself what it wants.
Barry: A goat eat'll anything. It could probably eat a bike. 
Clement: A goat could eat itself, it was driven to it. I'm just a goat halfway through eating itself.
Barry: Just to be clear, what exactly are we talking about?
Clement: Everything.

Most of the humor in this movie is like that. Paul Rudd essentially plays a straight character. He also has a girlfriend who isn’t funny at all and an assistant, played by very funny Kristen Schall, who is sorely underused. Then there is a psychotic ex-girlfriend who is just too weird to be funny. People need a reason, no matter how tenuous, to be truly crazy. Perhaps they should have made her a religious zeolot on a mission from God, or addicted to LSD, or just a diagnosed schizophrenic. Then she would have made sense and probably would have been funnier. I can’t say I completely recommend this movie, but I am still interested in seeing the French version. So take that for what it’s worth.

p.s. If you go to an AMC movie theater before noon, the movie costs $6. It’s like 1998 student prices all over again!