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.

Gone Girl (3/5 Stars)

This is a problem film for movie critics. I could dance around all the plot twists that I am not supposed to give away and focus on the skillful directing of David Fincher, the good performances by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, or the beautiful cinematography, seamless editing, and brooding score, etc. But that would give the reader a false sense of confidence in my opinion of the movie. The one thing I can’t talk about is the thing I’m not supposed to talk about. I have a problem with the plot itself and in the end I felt that overwhelmed the otherwise technical merits of this movie. A student of film would be satisfied to watch ‘Gone Girl’ merely for its technical education but I’m not about to recommend it to anyone.

 The stoy opens with two concurrent storylines. One is in the present and follows Nick Dunne (Ben Afflek) on the day of his 5^th Anniversary. He comes home to discover that his house has been broken into and his wife is gone. He calls the police and an investigation starts. The second storyline concerns journal entries written by his wife Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike). It starts the day they meet and portrays a good marriage until the Great Recession hit, he lost his job, she lost her trust fund, and they moved from New York City to his hometown in Missouri. She does not like it there and he knows it. In fact, he was about to ask for a divorce the day of his anniversary. Or was he? Because she says he had different plans in her journal. It is a bit of a he said she said and after she cannot be found and other things develop a media circus descends on the small town. The question from the press is thus: Did Nick Dunne kill his wife?

There is a certain guilt that goes along with seeing Ben Affleck hounded by television cameras and unscrupulous reporters that don’t seem to particularly care whether he is guilty or innocent. For those with memories that go back a decade, this sort of thing really did happen to Ben Affleck or ‘Benniffer’ to be exact, the moniker given to the celebrity pair of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. There was an unmistakably meanspirtedness to the whole proceeding. The general public had something against Ben Affleck and the press hounded him until his marriage fell apart and his career floundered. Did he deserve it? Well, he did win Oscar gold at the age of 27 that many people thought (and I include myself here) belonged almost entirely to Matt Damon (who had not paid any dues either) and then followed that up with a lot of big paychecks in bad movies and then he married arguably the hottest woman on the planet. That sort of unfairness earned him plenty of envy.

Why am I bringing this up? I bring it up because Ben Affleck in this movie is a perfect example of the power of good casting. (In fact, I have spoken about this exact topic with Ben Affleck before in my ‘Argo’ review.) It is impossible for the audience to completely block out what they know about a well-known actor when they see a movie so even though the character they are playing may be somebody completely different from whom they played before or who they are in real life, the audience will at least subconsciously project upon the character all that they know about the actor. Now there are three ways to deal with this fact when making a movie. One, you could do what Milos Forman did when he made ‘Amadeus’ and just side step the whole issue. He did not want any well-known actor to overshadow the character of Mozart or Salieri so he went and cast unknown actors. Two, you could use the audience’s preconceptions to save time. As I once heard in a director’s commentary, using a film star saves about fifteen minutes of exposition. You want a tough leader guy: cast Bruce Willis. All he has to do is show up and you know what the character is about. Thirdly, and my favorite, you can use the audience’s preconceptions not to simplify but to distract. You deliberately set up a kind of character played by a particular actor to set up an expectation of behavior. You deviate from that expectation in a believable way and boom you got a good story twist going on. Think Cameron Diaz in Vanilla Sky or Neil Patrick Harris in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. There are plenty of others as well.

Ben Affleck is the perfect casting choice for this movie. Unfortunately the plot of the story takes the 2^nd way down the casting choice road. I do not believe it is really a spoiler to tell you something that happens in the middle of the movie but here is the warning anyway: Nothing but spoilers from here on out. Nick Dunne did not kill his wife. Seriously, did any of us really think Ben Affleck was a wife killer. No, we expect him to be the hapless victim of disgraceful media frenzy. But what if he did. Now that would be a plot twist.

Okay I’m sorry. I can’t actually argue that everything past the midpoint of the movie should be changed. Let me just explain how it was not particularly good. The whole thing, and boy is it elaborate, was planned out by the wife to frame her philandering husband. It is so intricate in fact that the perpetrator needs to be a psychopath. Let’s put aside the whole feminist argument that a woman would never be capable of this sort of thing (even though to my knowledge no living woman ever has been capable of this sort of thing.) And we also can’t say that this movie is another woman-hating exercise perpetrated by the male establishment of Hollywood after all the screenplay was written by a woman (Gillian Flynn) and adapted by a best-selling book written by the same woman. Let us just ask this, does the Rosamund Pike character make sense as a psychopath? I would argue she does not. She makes a big decision about 3/4ths of the way through the movie on the basis of pure emotion. Perhaps I need to brush up on my psychopathic profiling but I don’t think that these people kill out of love all that often. The movie does not work for the same reason that other David Fincher movies sometimes don’t work. It was certainly the difference in his inferior version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The women characters in his movies tend to lack humanity. That’s a rather rough thing to level at a master director (and David Fincher certainly is that) but I think it is true. There is a void where something else should be and taking up that space is a paranoia that takes what should be a complex portrait of a woman and makes it into something that is simply heartless. Not helping is his tendency to cast supermodels in supporting roles that do not call for it. Do you have Netflix? Watch a few episodes of David Fincher’s House of Cards and compare it to how the women look in Orange is the New Black. The difference could contain a multitude of worlds.

You know who also had this trademark? Alfred Hitchcock. The gorgeous chilly blonde of Hitchcock is definitely comparable to Fincher’s dangerous and calculating beauties. To an extent this is not good casting. Why? Because if it is noticeable to the extent of cliché than the director distacts the audience from the story. That is unless the story is not all that good, then I suppose the more distractions the better. And there are plenty in this movie.