A Most Wanted Man (4/5 Stars)

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

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

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

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

Rest in Peace.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (5/5 Stars)

A love poem to Civilization

There is a moment in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” that stands out to me. Our hero, M. Gustave (played by Ralph Fiennes) the concierge of the Grand Budapest Hotel has been unjustly imprisoned for the murder of his frequent hotel guest and late lover played by Tilda Swinton. His loyal lobby boy, Zero (introducing Tony Revolori) conspires to help him escape. He engages his fiancé/baker’s apprentice played by Saorise Ronan to hide metal tools in the pastries he regularly sends to his mentor. Unfortunately every gift from outside must pass the rigorous inspection of the prison, i.e. a big man with a big butcher’s knife who unceremoniously cuts up everything that comes his way. But behold when this big man with this big knife sees these pastries so elegantly crafted with grace and artistry his heart grows and melts. He cannot bear to destroy them and lets the pastries (and the escape tools) pass onto our hero. And if this one scene was all you saw you should know from experience by now that you are in a Wes Anderson movie.

‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ is another masterpiece. That makes two in a row for Wes Anderson who is absolutely flaming red hot right now. Arguably it is his best film. When I reviewed ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ I outlined Anderson’s improvements in his style over his first six movies. Namely that he had cast actors in sufficiently dramatic roles with enough stage presence to burst through his overly saturated and inevitably stifling style. Second that he had provided his film with an actual climax and not an existential sigh of an ending. Third: that he had switched from telling the stories of rich people with bullshit problems to poor people with actual problems. All of that is here in this story. We have Wes Anderson’s best villain to date, an evil Adrian Brody, intent on usurping justice, stealing his inheritance, and killing those who get in his way. He employs a hit man played by Willem Defoe. In addition almost everyone employs colorful language. This is a must in a Wes Anderson film. It shocks one out of the sublime contemplation of the art direction and refocuses attention on the characters. The climax of the story involves not only a sled race down a snowy mountain but also a shootout in the hotel. Also there is the aforementioned break out from the prison, which involves some ingenious sight gags. And the story is about the servants of a hotel, in particular a refugee lobby boy whose entire family was killed during World War I.

On On top of all of this Wes Anderson has added something extra special that has never before graced his movies. He has added reason and purpose to his overly stylized approach. In this movie it is called for from the story itself, not simply because this is a movie made by Wes Anderson. First, the story is told in several flashbacks. The movie starts off with a girl in present day reading a book by the statue of its author, a hero of the Eastern European Country she is resident. The movie moves into a flashback of the elderly author played by Tom Wilkinson who starts telling us the story of how he came upon the story as a young man. The movie flashbacks to Jude Law, the younger version of the author, who is staying at the now decript communist version of the hotel when he meets the now elderly lobby boy played by F. Murray Abraham. The two have a catered dinner in the ballroom of the hotel and F. Murray Abraham narrates his story. All throughout these several flashbacks the production design of the movie gets more and more fanciful till it becomes clear when we get to the lobby boy’s story that we are witnessing a visual game of telephone. The story is real but the telling of it has become overly stylized as it has been passed on from generation to generation. Obviously the invading force is made up of Nazis although they are not named so in the movie. And surely the Grand Budapest Hotel did not look so pink and red or so much like a minature model in real life. It’s costuming has been the work of several permutations of the same tale over the course of time.

Second and more importantly the movie has a philosophy on why such costuming is important even noble. The little niceties of civilized life, the grandeur of the lobby, the manners and rituals of a many course meal, the way the hotel staff righteously guards the privacy of their guests, all are contrasted with the barbaric cruelties presented in this time period of epic slaughter. At a particularly dark time in the story, the tale is interrupted by the serving of a dessert and a special desert wine. And it is a relief. The comforting ritual is an escape from the random slaughter of the outside world. Somewhere someone cares about your experience. That is what the ‘Grand Budapest Hotel’ means. It is a precious love poem to civilization. It is the prison guard that can’t bring himself to destroy something so beautiful.

We live in a world that so often takes the most cynical route possible because it is the easiest and perhaps the most truthful. But Wes Anderson cares about your movie going experience. He has made this extra special gem just for you as a brief escape from all the nihilistic meanness out there. This movie has love poured into every detail of the story and production.

What enormous amount of respect Wes Anderson commands in the Hollywood community now! Just take a look at this cast most of which are in very bit parts. Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, Ed Norton, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Mathieu Amalric, Harvey Keitel, Willem Defoe, Jeff Goldblum, Lea Seydoux, Tom Wilkinson, F. Murray Abraham, Jude Law, Ralph Fiennes, Saorise Ronan, and introducing Tony Revolori. Apparently most of them just wanted to hang out on the set because the atmosphere excited them. I’ve heard that Wes Anderson employs a friend chef of his who cooks a great meal for dinner for everybody in the production every night of shooting. If tickets were sold to these dinners they would be priceless.

One more thing: Tom Wilkinson’s character speaks about writing not as a solo art but as the result of merely being open to the ideas and stories of those around you. Well, Wes Anderson may deflect admiration all he wants but one thing is for certain. He can be credited with recruiting an incredible team around him. The production design of this movie was led by Adam Stockhausen (also worked on Moonrise Kingdom). The art direction was led by Stephan O. Gessler, Gerald Sullivan, and Steve Summersgill. The set decoration was led by Anna Pinnock. The costumes were made by Milena Canonero. If they aren’t remembered come Oscar time next year, it isn’t my bad taste; everybody else are uncivilized barbarians. 

John Carter of Mars (2/5 Stars)

Really expensive nonsense

“Only enormously talented people could have made "Death to Smoochy." Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience. To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence, and dream big dreams.”

-       Roger Ebert

The explanation of why "John Carter of Mars" exists is better than the movie itself. It’s director Andrew Stanton is best known as one of the great creative forces behind the golden age of Pixar. He was a cowriter for all three Toy Story movies and directed both “Finding Nemo,” and “Wall-E.” To a movie lover like me he is arguably one of the greatest living directors and I would put “Wall-E” on a list of the 100 best movies ever made. To studios he represents enormous profits, both “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo” having broken box office records for animated movies. So when Andrew Stanton came to the producers at Disney with an idea for a science fiction/comic book movie with lots of violence and exotic locations, who in their right mind would say no. They granted Stanton full access to the Disney playground. $250 million dollars later in production value and $100 million dollars later in marketing produced the movie that last week grossed only $30 million and is destined to be one of the biggest flops of the year. What went wrong? Well, for one thing, the movie isn’t any good. But how could that happen? (See above). There are two main problems both of which could have been solved by a cigar-chomping asshole producer with only dollars for eyeballs. Those people are good for something.

The first big problem is way too much faithfulness to the source material. This movie is based on more than a century old comic book series. In this book we are introduced to made up weapons, made up languages, made up peoples, made up places, made up cultural customs, made up powers, made up gods and goddesses. Everything is nothing I had ever heard of before. When a character dramatically intones that they have to find the ninth ring of iths from the gates of Barsoon before the tharks release the giant white ape and the thurns shapeshift for the red man blue man widget marraige at Helium, my reaction is like, “Huh? What?” And this sort of thing goes on for much of the movie. They keep throwing in new shit, giving no explanation or time for it to sink in, and then expecting big dramatic payoffs. A very big problem has to do with the story’s technology. People in flying warships are fighting with swords while big green men on the ground have calvary and guns. Then there are these other dudes that have the ability to shapeshift and vaporize anything within a few seconds using a blue widget thingy. I haven’t the slightest idea what that thingy is or why nobody else has it or why it was not used in the battles far more often. This movie could have been a lot shorter if the blue vaporizer thingy had not been used so sparingly. Then there is John Carter himself, a civil war veteran from Earth, transported to Mars via a little thingy, to find that his Earth muscles provide him with superior abilities on Mars’ lower gravity. Basically, he is super strong and can jump really high. But how high can he jump? The movie is very very unclear about that. At points it is just a few meters, but at other times it could very well be a football field. It is this critics opinion that for action sequences to be effective, the laws of physics must be followed, even when it is on Mars, or if they are to be bent they are bent in a clear and predictable manner (See “The Matrix.” Do not see “Matrix Reloaded” or “Matrix Revolutions.”) Otherwise nothing makes sense and the story’s momentum and suspense deflates. The suspension of disbelief gone we are merely witnessing an actor in a weird costume skipping around a room with a green screen.

That actor would be Taylor Kitsch a remarkably bad choice in casting whose responsibility for the failure of the movie is only somewhat alleviated by the even worse choice of Lynn Collins, as the Martian princess. Put these two together and you have some of the most horribly acted scenes I have seen in a long time. And you cannot merely just say that the material was arcane and stilted. Sure they are speaking about weird lore and strange happenings but that still doesn’t forgive the utter lack of excitement or range in the performances. Let’s say a horde of green Martian barbarians was descending upon you for the express purpose of killing you. Perhaps your facial expression and body language should suggest you were doing anything other than posing for the Mars version of GQ magazine. Or consider John Carter’s reaction to learning that he is on Mars for the first time. That Taylor Kitsch reminded me of a young Keanu Reeves, and that is about the worst compliment you can give an actor. One of the producers of this movie should have required that Andrew Stanton cast a well-known action star as the lead in his $250 million dollar epic. This is not simply a cynical attempt at more dollars via a better marketing platform. “John Carter of Mars,” is Stanton’s first live-action movie. He had never worked with actors before. If the director casts unknowns who do not know what they are doing, guess who has the responsibility to teach them what to do: the director. And if the director does not know how to direct actors and the actors do not know how to act, what you get is this silly drivel, made even sillier as it is being performed against a backdrop of a ridiculously expensive, intricate, and extensive amount of costume, makeup, CGI work, set design, and production value. What a colossal fuck-up this was.

I keep thinking back to that other live action foray by an acclaimed Pixar director, Brad Bird’s “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.” Whatever similar problems Bird may have had were alleviated by a familiar and franchised story that took place in present day and was anchored by Tom Cruise, who is, private weirdness aside, quite frankly one of the best actors in the business, and may very well be the best action actor. For future studio reference, the next time a great director wants to spend an extremely large amount of money on something he has never done before with a bunch of inexperienced collaborators, it might be a good idea to sign him up for two movies and make the first one a much less expensive test run.  

Fantastic Mr. Fox (3/5 Stars) December 23, 2009

How quaint.

Wes Anderson directs this stop motion animated children’s tale based on Roald Dahl’s book Fantastic Mr. Fox. It had been my belief after watching Anderson’s first films like Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums, that someday Anderson would make an American masterpiece. Three not so great movies later, this one being the best of them, I have become somewhat disheartened. Wes Anderson may have a unique vision as a director, he may be one of the best art directors out there, but all of his stories lack that certain amount of passion that sets great movies apart from ordinary ones. All of the characters, whether real-life or animated as in this film, walk and talk with great reserve and sophistication. This lends to the movies irony and dry bone wit but it also takes away from the urgency of the problems and the weight of the plot. Actors in his movies walk around like robots and talk in whispers. (The special exception is Jason Schwartzman who can deliver Anderson’s muted lines with such precise intensity that they can sound somewhat purpose-driven.) Making everyone a stop-motion puppet doesn’t really help. What does help is an adapted storyline that involves a lot of guns, bombs, and very bad men. But still, the overall movie is somewhat forgettable. 

It must not take much time and effort from Actors to do an animated film. That must be why so many big names can be attached to a single film. Here we have George Clooney as Mr. Fox, Meryl Streep as Mrs. Fox, and Jason Schwartman as Ash Mr. Fox’s son. Filling in roles that have but a few lines are Willem Defoe and Owen Wilson. Most of these actors lend little to the parts more than their names. For instance this is perhaps the first time in a long time that I saw Meryl Streep perform in a movie and thought, “wow, anyone could do this role just as well as Meryl Streep.”

The idea of stop-motion animation plays to Anderson’s strengths. He has a great knack for filling in the sides of the movie screen with a lot of little details. Here, he recreates an entire world full of mean farmers, fox-holes, and plenty of other locations. He uses the camera a lot of differently than other stop motion animators also (Basically just Tim Burton) He uses much more horizontal pans and other camera moves I don’t know the names of. It’s at least interesting to witness if you are ever aware of that sort of thing.

The music in the film is also fine. I don’t know whatever happened to Mark Mothersbaugh, the great composer for Anderson’s first three films, but wherever he is, he is being missed. Anderson has such a reserved vision that he very much needs composers that are bold, actors (like Schwartzman) who are passionate, and storylines that have a lot of action in them. Here all he has is the adapted screenplay from Dahl. Schwartzman can hardly be used to his potential because he a stop-motion doll, and the composer though okay, has a boy’s choir sing the bad guy’s theme song. Someday Anderson may get all of his ducks in a row, but this isn’t the movie and I am starting to doubt it will be his next either.

American Dreamz 04/22/06

"I don't want all these boring contestants, I want contestants that are human, and by that I mean contestants that are flawed, and by that I mean I want freaks. Real freaks."
Such is the logic of American Dreamz, that is so close to this world that it's a bit unsettling. I sometimes wonder what the reaction to Dr. Strangelove was in the early sixties. It might have been like this movie, maybe not to the same degree but yeah, like that.
Such is our day and age that things get sorta mixed around. We want to be liked, but how does one go about being liked. One thing everybody loves is sincerity, and so all the Presidents and pop stars and directors and celebrities study classes on how to be sincere. Large efforts are made to make sure there's an atmosphere of sincerity. But there's the paradox, for one can't make people believe fake sincerity, even if one is sincere which most of the people in this movie are even if they're contained in something so false as American Dreamz or an elcted office. Do you get it, how do you get people to think you're sincere without telling them you are (which is insincere). You can't act not sincere, because who would believe you're sincere then. Thus the catch-22, and the underlying invisible truth of this movie and yes of our times. 
It definitely was a surprise how this movie turned out. It really could have been a lot worse. But even though it had a plot so over-the-top, it never felt that way. Even though we had personalities that were seismic in shape (President Bush, Suicide Bomber, Any American Idol Contestant) they never felt forced. It doesn't throw jokes at your face and demand you laugh. It sits back, says trust me, and let's you come inside to share the joke. This movie was marketed as out of this world, but it's very in it. Let's take an example from Dennis Quaid's performance as President Stanton.
Now I've heard alot of jokes about George Bush being stupid, but never have I seen anything like this. For the first time ever, we emphasize and share sympathy with George Bush. Sure the guy's not perfect, but he's likable and sweet. Even Dick Cheney isn't that horrible. This is not make fun of George Bush time, it's how shall I say, someone who we wish our President could be. He's the hero of the story, and at the end there's a certain kind of redemption for his real life counterpart when President Stanton stands up, without an earpiece or script and says from his heart the best line in the movie. "I know that there are some problems in the middle east that will never never never never never be solved. and for that I am sorry." Then he shakes hands with Omer, the show tunes singing terrorist. I swear to God, I could vote for that guy. Not the real George Bush. But the Dennis Quaid charachter. Like most people, I just love sincerity.