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.   

American Hustle (5/5 Stars)

The feel of this movie reminded me of a great Hall of Fame Rock and Roll concert. You know those concerts where they induct a great musician and all his friends get up on the stage and they play all the great songs songs and everything is great. ‘American Hustle,’ the new movie by David O. Russell feels like that. It has an incredible cast and a plot that allows every actor the opportunity to do some really throw down acting. In essence this movie is acting in that it is about people who are reinventing themselves in order to pull off scams and sting operations. The backdrop of the movie is the late 1970s ABSCAM scandal in which several members of Congress were convicted of taking bribes from an Arab sheik that in reality was an undercover FBI agent. It should be noted however that almost none of the movie is true. The names of the Congressmen are the same but all the FBI agents and con artists are fictional characters. As the movie’s opening subtitle states, “Some of this actually happened.” So expect fiction as a default not the other way around. In terms of storytelling this strategy is an unambiguous success in that it allows the actors to make very broad dramatic choices with their performances without the inherent worry that a movie inspired by real events usually has, i.e. that they are unfairly slighting real people.

The main quartet of actors involves the con artist team of Christian Bale and Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper as the FBI agent, and Jennifer Lawrence as the housewife of Christian Bale. In supporting roles are Jeremy Renner as the main target of the sting, Mayor Carmine Polito, Louis C.K. as Bradley Cooper’s long suffering supervisor, and Robert De Niro as the mobster who appears to get a cut of the deal when the original sting starts getting escalated way out of hand.

This is the third great movie of David O. Russell about redemption and reinvention. “The Fighter” was about a down and out boxer who came back as a champion. “Silver Linings Playbook” was about a manic-depressive fresh from a stint in a mental asylum trying to get his life back on track. “American Hustle” draws from both movies in terms of theme and cast. From “The Fighter” are Christian Bale and Amy Adams and from “Silver Linings Playbook” are Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Robert De Niro. Making their debut in a David O. Russel movie is Jeremey Renner and Louis C.K. It is no mistake that actors in the last two movies were nominated for Oscars (Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, and Jacki Weaver were nominated. Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, and Jennifer Lawrence won) and this movie should be no different. The only question is who gets nominated and who wins because almost every performance is worthy of it.

Christian Bale plays Irving the main con artist. For this role, Christian Bale that most humble/masochistic of actors decided to gain sixty pounds and sport an elaborate comb-over. There are very few actors in movies that would gain an ungainly amount of weight (or lose it!) to portray a fictional character. Perhaps the best thing though about his performance is his willingness to support all his fellow actors. Irving is a soft-spoken kind of guy who spends his time trying to bring everybody else in the cast back from the brink of insane shenanigans. It also helps that he has all that weight because he moves slower than everybody else.

The opposite side of the coin is the manic cocaine-addled performance of Bradley Cooper as the over-ambitious FBI agent that snags the con artists and employs them to catch bigger game. This man is all sound and fury and not so much thinking. Louis C.K. plays his long suffering supervisor and the interactions between the two are some of the funniest in the movie what with Bradley yelling and screaming and Louis C.K. doing the definitive embarrassed put upon Louis C.K. performance. At the same time however, the Bradley Cooper character of Richie Tomaso is the most tragic. I won’t give away how everything turns out but the treatment of the FBI agent says a lot about how David O. Russel probably feels about the ABSCAM scandal in general. It was a bad thing wasn’t it because after all everybody in politics in beholden to money anyway (just not in an illegal way) and what exactly is the point of entrapping people who do not have a history of criminal behavior.

Amy Adams puts in several performances as a stripper from Alburquerque who moves to New York and somehow finagles her way into a job at Cosmopolitan magazine before falling in love with Irving and becoming a British financier with royal connections in their respective scams. After the FBI catches Amy and Christian she pretends to fall in love with Bradley (or does she pretend?) in order to have just one more trick in the bag if things go south. She is playing just about everyone. It is a very bold performance by Amy Adams and perhaps the most complex character she has ever created.

Rounding out the main cast is Jennifer Lawrence, the wildcard. She plays the housewife of Irving whose reckless impulsiveness is guided by the fact that she knows nothing of what is going on. The funniest scene in the movie involves Irving bringing home a new invention, a “science oven,” as a gift from the man he is conning. He tells J-Rentz to not put any metal in it but doesn’t say why. So she puts metal in it almost immediately and microwave bursts into flames all over the house. Here’s the exact quote: “Don’t put metal in the science oven. Don’t put metal in the science oven. He’s always treating me like a fucking child. I do what I want.” BOOM!

As much of a character as anything else are the little details that inhabit the movie: Christian’s combover, Amy Adams revealing dresses, Bradley Cooper’s curlers, J-Rentz furs, Jeremey Renner singing Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah,’ Duke Ellington’s role in two characters falling in love, the thump and grind of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Good Times, Bad Times,’ a trip to the disco with Bradley and Amy, Louis’ story about ice fishing, the Mexican-American Arab sheik, a pool party in the middle of the winter, and the purity and goodness of mayor Carmine Polito and his family. Everything about this movie is exceptional. But above all, “American Hustle” cares deeply about these exciting, fun, and charming people that care deeply about what they are doing and who they want to be. They fight, they laugh, they cry, they sing, they scream, they cheat and tell the truth, and they live and fall in love. It was a wonderful experience to spend a few short hours in their company.

If anything, this will be the Best Original Screenplay of the year. Hands down. It’s great. 

Inside Llewyn Davis (4/5 Stars)

Man of Constant Sorrow

Comedian Patton Oswalt once described what made a Coen Brothers movie special: Most movies are like a small tent with a carnival barker in front of it. You pass by on the street and the barker yells, “Come see the super exciting special blankety-blank!” You pay your ticket and enter the tent. There is the blankety blank just the way the barker described it. There is nothing else in the tent. A Coen Brothers movie is like a huge warehouse. It’s got one of those large roll down metal garage door entrances. The entrance rolls up without revealing a vast space with all sorts of machines and contraptions dispersed throughout. The warehouse contains no barker, no guide, no suspiciously over-friendly attendant. Come inside or stay without, don’t care. Take a glance around or stare for hours, feel free. There is plenty of stuff inside but it’s anybody’s guess whether it is what you are looking for. Hopefully you are the curious type. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” is just like that.

If I were a carnival barker I could describe the plot in a sentence or two. It is about a week in the life of a folk singer named Llewyn Davis (played and performed by Oscar Isaac) circa the 1961 NYC Greenwich Village folk scene. He is good at his job but his job isn’t commercial. He sleeps on the couches and floors of the people he has known for a while or just met. He accidentally lets a calico cat out of one of the apartments and spends a good deal of movie time carrying it around with him. There are also a lot of folk song performances and a trip to Chicago to audition for a big time producer. At the end of the movie he is back exactly where he started having not really gotten anywhere. Not much happens really and what does happen is generally profoundly sad, like a good folk song you know.

But that is not why you want to see this movie. You want to see it because it is an exquisitely refined work of art and perhaps the best movie ever made about an unsuccessful folk singer in 1960’s Greenwich Village. It’s also the only movie I’ve ever seen about that topic, but give that a point for originality if nothing else. 

Let’s start with the music. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” is not a musical in the sense that characters burst out into singing, but it does have several songs performed in their entire length by the characters on stage or anywhere else you can fit an acoustic guitar. The most comparable movie to this one is the Coen’s earlier effort “O’ Brother Where Art Thou,” which had a wall-to-wall soundtrack of largely forgotten Old Tyme music. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” has a great soundtrack of largely forgotten Folk music. Some of these are very very good songs. My favorite has to be ‘Dink’s Song’ which is the main song of this movie as it is played as a duet in the beginning and in a solo performance at the end. Oscar Isaac performs both of the songs and Marcus Mumford of the band “Mumford and Sons” sings the other part of the duet. He does not show up in the movie because his character commits suicide sometime before the story starts. “Dink’s Song” in addition to beautifully arranged in harmony or without is also especially sad. It is about a woman who loved a man who impregnated her and left. As far as we know the song has always existed. A musician once overheard a woman (named Dink) singing it while doing laundry in a nearby river in the very early 1900s. Noone really knows if she wrote it herself. “If the song isn’t new and it never gets old, it’s a folk song,” says Llewyn Davis. All the songs were produced by the legendary T. Bone Burnett who has catalogued an impressive array of different kinds of folk songs. The Llewyn Davis character’s style is based off a folk singer named Dave Van Ronk, but there is also a ‘Peter, Paul, and Mary’ type of band headed by the supremely competent Justin Timberlake (what can’t that guy do?) who also spends a scene recording with a reluctant Llewyn Davis the annoyingly catchy “Please Mr. Kennedy.” A mariner’s song, a travelling song, and a song about death in childbirth are also included in the mix. Hard living, that is what folk songs (and let’s face it, old songs in general) are about. When the country went rich and memories of the Depression and WWII faded, they were forgotten. Now that the money is gone in our time, perhaps we will be seeing a greater revival of them.

A footnote: This will be hilarious come Oscar Time. Certainly the Academy will want to recognize this movie for its music, but as it is limited to recognizing original music, it will be surely be forced to nominate “Please Mr. Kennedy.” The joke is that it is a hokey song that the main character hates and just the type of shit that will become a hit while his soulful music goes unrecognized.

The movie looks great. It looks like someone took the album cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” and colored the entire neighborhood with it. It’s a faded color with many greens, whites, and grays. It is beautiful absolutely beautiful. The perfect landscape to go with a song like “Green, Green, Rocky Road.” Surprisingly the cinematographer for this movie is not Roger Deakins, the longtime collaborator of the Coen brothers as he was working on James Bond when this movie was made. The cinematographer here is Bruno Delbonnel. The framing of the scenes are just absolutely perfect. All the corners of the screen are filled in with the correct details. Nothing is left out and nothing is included that shouldn’t be there.

Footnote: Ironically, this movie could very well win the Oscar for Best Cinematography, which would be hilarious given that Roger Deakins has been nominated and not won so many times for his work in Coen Brothers films in the past. Now, if a Coen Brothers movie finally wins this time, he won’t be on the stage to accept it. Ho, ho, ho.

The characters in this movie are so well defined that it seems like that they existed before the movie’s camera got there and continued with their lives after the movie left. One in particular, the sister of Llewyn Davis, Joy, played by Jeanine Serralles, sounds just like my grandmother and not just in the way she speaks, but the particular words she uses. The attention to phrases is so detailed. She only has two scenes but speaks like nobody else in the movie, which makes sense because she lives in a totally different part of town from everybody else. Justin Timberlake continues to impress me. His physicality is so specific it speaks paragraphs. Take a look at his reaction to Llewyn Davis’s query during the recording session. It is about half a second but boy that says everything doesn’t it. John Goodman jumps into a car for the road trip to Chicago, knocks all of his lines out of the park and exits just as quickly. Then there is F. Murray Abraham as the producer Bud Grossman. For lovers of movies, Abraham will forever by remembered as Antonio Salieri, the jealous court composer of “Amadeus” who uses his political power to destroy the career of Mozart. And here is Salieri two hundred years later telling Llewyn Davis that his songs aren’t commercial enough. “I don’t see that much green here,” he explains matter-of-factly. Sometimes being good is just not good enough.

Footnote: Somebody should make a YouTube compilation of Coen Brother's secretaries. They always seem to find the most interesting looking people to sit at desks in little scenes. The little old lady in the agent's office is no different in this one. 

The Coen Brothers are an anomaly of filmmaking. Here are two writer/directors who always made just enough money to never ever have had to compromise with their artistic vision. Hell, even Scorsese had to make the “The Color of Money.” The Coens have never had to do that. Their good luck does not seem to be lost on them. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” is about a musician who does not want to compromise and goes broke and beaten in the process. It is an utterly uncommercial premise for a movie and if the backers get their money back any time soon it will probably be due to past goodwill connected with the Coen Brothers. But it was made and it was made well. So for all us losers out there we now not only have folk music, but this movie as well.

See You Next Tuesday (1/5 Stars)

"I used to encourage everyone I met to do art. I thought everyone should do it. I don't really do that so much anymore."
- Banksy, Exit Through the Gift Shop

Nebraska (3/5 Stars)

I’m not entirely sure what Writer Bob Nelson's and Director Alexandar Payne’s relationship with the north middle of the country is, but they sure don’t seem at all impressed with it. For example, the film is shot in black and white but this doesn’t have anything to do with a particularly dark plot or mood. Instead it seems to be a judgment on the location of the movie, the empty spaces and depressed towns between Billings, Montana and Lincoln, Nebraska. It’s like Payne didn’t think they deserved color. Nothing is going on so you might as well not try to liven it up.

“Nebraska,” is a comedy and as the comedy it is trying to be it is perfect. The little hitch is that it is attempting to satirize sparseness and boredom and even a perfect satire of such subjects will invariably move slow and contain fewer jokes than the usual comedy. We are treated several times to scenes of people drinking beer, watching TV, or both. This reviewer finds that such scenes lend an odd feeling of unaccomplishment. The characters are doing exactly what I myself am doing while watching it. 

At times though the movie rises from its slumber to deliver some really good material. My favorite involves the introduction of Woody Grant's overweight nephews, Bart and Cole to his son David, played by Will Forte. David is not the most successful man in the world and sheepishly explains that he only sells stereo equipment in Billings. The nephews don’t respond because they don’t have jobs. After an awkward pause, Woody’s brother speaks up. "Bart here did some jail time.” Such is the excitement in ‘Nebraska’ where nothing happens, everyone is unemployed and overweight, and alcoholism is rampant because, fuck it, what else is there to do. In the end though, this is what keeps ‘Nebraska’ from being a ‘must-see’ movie. That is unless you are actually from Nebraska, than I guess you would have to see it because, I guess, what other movie is set in Nebraska. Then I suspect the people in the middle of the country would hate this movie. I remember raving about "Fargo" once to someone from North Dakota only to find out that everyone there despised the movie's portrayal of their accents. This movie may work the same way, though I suspect the people who deliberately left the place for greener pastures may absolutely love it. 

The plot is set in motion when the octogenerian of the family, Woody Grant, gets it in his head that he won a million dollars in a sweepstakes competition. He can’t drive and he won’t trust public transportation so he attempts to walk to Lincoln, Nebraska where the company is located. His sons, David and Ross, played by Bob Odenkirk, try to explain to him that the newsletter is a complete scam meant to sell magazine subscriptions. “I didn’t even know they still did this,” David states. He’s right. I haven’t seen one of those ‘You may have already won a million dollar’ junk mail letters in about a decade. Nothing will dissuade Woody though from setting out time and again on foot and in bad weather. 

David finally agrees to drive Woody to Nebraska because the man is really old and doesn’t have anything else going for him. A pit stop in Woody's old hometown becomes a much longer detour. Father and son walk around and take a look at the old haunts. Everything is changed and nobody recognizes Woody. Except at the bar. People recognize Woody at the bar. Woody tells everyone in the town that he has won a million dollars and for some incredibly odd reason everybody believes him.

Here, Payne’s satire of Middle America perhaps becomes too mean. It may be a little too much to believe that everyone believes Woody’s story about winning the lottery, even after his sons try to explain that it is all just a scam, but these apparently are really desperate people living in really quiet desperation. The family descends on Woody complaining about how his alcoholism cost them money over the years and demanding that they get a share of the winnings. They won’t take any talk of a scam for an answer. Everyone really really needs the money.

The performances are great, and especially noteworthy because they represent some of the finest performances in several careers, one of which is an especially long career. That would be Bruce Dern, who at 77 years old, is in his first lead role in a good movie for the first time. His Woody Grant is a alcoholic mess of well-meaning dementia. Dern does a particularly good job of seamlessly interweaving Grant’s lucid moments in with his delusions so they really seem like they are coming from the same very old person. We learn a lot about Woody Grant in this movie and by the end you sort of hope he gets his money, not for him but for what he wants to do with it. Will Forte does a great job as well in the thankless task of the straight man holding together a cast of crazy characters. Will is mainly known for comedy, notably SNL and 30 Rock, and is yet another example of a comedian ably putting together a dramatic performance. Then there is Bob Odenkirk, who has done better things (Mr. Show, Breaking Bad) but is always a delight to see on screen in any incarnation. Final mention of the two nephews played by Tim Driscroll and Devin Ratray. They gather some of the best laughs by just sitting next to each other and grinning. It's good stuff.

I expect the Academy will love this movie way out of proportion because it is about an old white person, which coincidentally is the majority demographic of the Academy. I bet they all like it even more because it is in black and white even though there is no particular reason for it. The last movie Alexander Payne made about an old white person was “The Descendants.” That won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, which was just a really terrible thing to happen. I have the sneaking suspicion that the writing for this one will be similarly nominated. It’s good writing, but it’s not great because it can't be. There isn't the ambition that is generally needed to make the writing great. Here’s hoping that it at least won’t win anything. 

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (3/5 Stars)

There was always something about Harry Potter that I found disturbing. It was always just a little bit off. Here you had a story about an innocent unassuming boy blessed with magical powers and a supremely important mission. They were imposed on him through no actions of his own. He would assume through accident of birth a unique status greater than all in the land. At the same time the hero rejects his unwon fame. He miserates on his unlucky situation and all it means. I am just a normal run-of-the-mill boy he asserts. All I want is the simple things in life like all the good ordinary men and women. In fact, in these stories those who seek fame and fortune above the simple things are looked down upon. In many cases they are the villains. In this way the book has its cake and eats it too. It allows the reader to vicariously live in fame, fortune, and violent glory while assuring themselves that what they really want is simply good friends, family, and love. By reading a book that abdicates the responsibility for all the superficial qualities forced upon the hero the audience earns plausible deniability for their own consciences. A reader can identify with a hero that can handle the fast times but is not defined by them. Or one that can state with a straight face: I could be the greatest most famous most successful person ever but I choose to be one of the people because you know that’s what’s important in life. It works of course just as long as one ignores the insidious subtext: “Please Please Please don’t forget I could have fame, fortune, and glory if I wanted it!” Because, seriously, who would have read Harry Potter if he was just a guy who wanted friends and family. He also has to be something extra. He has to be a wizard and not just any wizard, the best one. (Full Disclosure: I don’t particularly care for Harry Potter).

There is an incredible undercurrent of narcissim in my least favorite genres of storytelling Fantasy and Science Fiction. The Hunger Games a well written, competently acted, and brilliantly produced beauty of a movie is no exception. It stars Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, the blank slate everygirl who is the best archer in the land and has two good-looking men she feels so very guilty for having to choose between. Katniss Everdeen loves her family. Particularly she is fond of her little sister the exquisitely named Primrose Everdeen. To save Primrose and not for fame and glory she volunteered for the annual Hunger Games in the first movie. The Hunger Games is a ‘Battle Royale’-esque gladiator tournament between the thirteen impoverished districts of a futuristic dystopian society that has the totalitarian Captitol city at the head of it. It is a winner-take-all competition, kill or be killed. So Katniss killed everyone (quite honorably I would say) in the first movie, gaining in the process fame and fortune, though she really did not want to because you know she is so ordinary in the ways that count.

So Hunger Games: Catching Fire starts off with the rising celebrity of Katniss Everdeen presenting a problem to the totalitarian government headed by President Snow, played by Donald Sutherland. He intends to discredit her by various means that only encourage the population to revere her in even more rebellious fashion. Because this takes place in the genre of Science Fiction/Fantasy the movie can ignore many many things. For instance, the entire oppressive government seems to be entirely comprised in only one person, President Snow. In the real world, you would need some sort of bureaucracy to oppress a people. This is generally overlooked. Secondly we can overlook the realistic notion that celebrities that gain fame through reality TV contests don’t have any political power. As far as I can tell power (if you choose to distill it down to its essential essence) comes from the ability to hire or fire people, i.e. control over jobs. Think about that definition and see where it can get you. But as this is the future, a TV celebrity can move the world. And please try to forget what the economy of the extravagant Captitol is comprised of given that it has no commercial class or trading partners. Or what it really takes to not only stoke a rebellion but also to competently carry it to realization, see Battle of Algiers. In the real world, inspiration is the least of all problems. In Hunger Games, it seems to be the only thing that’s missing. But because this takes place in some fantastical land (or a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, or on Middle Earth) we can set up a story whose plot functions can rely almost entirely on character whims for better or worse. If you wanted to do that in a realistic genre, you would have to confine all the characters to a house and make the story take place within a day. But you can have interpersonal opera on a grand scale with world changing consequences in fantasy/science fiction because once again, you can pretend that reality does not apply in this far distant land.

We can be very glad that Hunger Games: Catching Fire is not a preachy metaphor designed to make us think about the problems of everyday life. Some movies within this genre do just this and become horribly insufferable monstrosities. Instead Hunger Games is far more concerned with costumes, hair, and makeup. I suppose we will just have to get used to this as studios start paying due attention to the other half of the population. If Hunger Games is a portent of the future of blockbusters though we should be seeing much to appreciate. For instance take a look at these names: Katniss Everdeen, Primrose Everdeen, Effie Trinket, Ceasar Flickerman, Claudius Templesmith, Plutarch Heavensbee, Haymitch Abernathy. Don’t those just roll off the tongue in some perfect mosaic of sound and diction? Or take a look at the great flair in hair of the game show host Ceasar Flickerman (playbed by Stanley Tucci) and his sidekick Claudius Templesmith (Toby Jones). Or consider the Girl on Fire costumes of Katniss Everdeen and her counterpart Peeta Mellark that catch fire during a chariot parade to the delight of the crowd. Or the even more impressive bride/mockingjay costume that not only makes Jennifer Lawrence look great but is also imbued with important story revealing symbology. This is the first blockbuster I know of that gives the hero/heroine a stylist in a major role. Lenny Kravitz does the job here doling out wisdom the way Obi Wan Kenobi would tutor Luke Skywalker in swordplay. The most impressive creature in all of this superficial exuberance is the presence of Effie Trinket, a woman who changes elaborate costumes and hairdos in every single scene. She is played by Elizabeth Banks and in the most markedly superior aspect of this sequel compared to the first movie, we get some depth to the character peeking out of the ditzy cheerleader persona in a way that very surprisingly doesn’t undercut all we have previously seen from her. I haven’t seen anything else quite like her in movies. Effie Trinket is an original.  

Oh and look we have several notable new castmembers. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is the new gamemaster and a fairly competent and entertaining one as we see in the final third of the movie. And there is Jena Malone, who I have spoken good graces of before. She tends to pop her head up from indie stardom in character roles in bigger movies every now and again. She plays Johanna Mason, the warrior woman Katniss Everdeen would be if she wasn’t so like the rest of us. The movie’s third act in a new series of Hunger Games does not dissapoint and ends in a very satisfying way. I am a little interested in seeing the next one.

Here’s another curiousity. Michael Arndt co-wrote this screenplay with Simon Beaufoy (also very good). Michael once won an Oscar for writing one of my favorite movies, Little Miss Sunshine. That movie had an entirely opposite take on the world compared to these types of narcissistic tales. But since then, his career trajectory since then has been almost entirey focused on big budget sequels in the realm of fantasy science fiction (Toy Story 3, Hunger Games, Oblivion, Star Wars). Et tu, Arndt?

The Dallas Buyer's Club (4/5 Stars)

Ronald Woodruff wasn’t supposed to be the kind of guy that got AIDS. That was something homosexuals got, faggots as Ron would likely call them. He points to a fresh 1980s newspaper chronicling the death of Rock Hudson and decries the massive shame it was that Rock had access to all that Hollywood pussy and wasted the opportunity by being gay. AIDS was also something intravenous drug users got, and Ron Woodruff wasn’t that either. I mean he snorted cocaine and drank heavily and had unprotected sex with plenty of women (we are introduced to him via a threesome under the bleachers at a Texas rodeo), but none of that had anything to do with needles or homosexuality. So when Ron Woodruff passes out from a massive headache, wakes up in the hospital, and is told that he has a T-Cell count of 9 and 30 days left to live, he doesn’t believe it. “There’s nothing that can kill Ron Woodruff in 30 days,” he declares to the doctors and storms out of the hospital.

“Dallas Buyer’s Club,” directed by Jean-Marc Vallee attempts to do two things with the biographical story of Ronald Woodruff of Dallas, Texas. The first thing it does is demonstrate how his terminal illness and his subsequent business dealings with the gay community opened his eyes to society’s intolerance and indifference towards the “homosexual” AIDS epidemic and broke down his own prejudices. The second is an educational primer on the various drugs that were in the process of being approved by the FDA in response to the AIDS epidemic. One being AZT, a drug that is being championed by the FDA but the movie treats as a killer. The other drugs are the all-natural ones that Ron Woodruff starts peddling to the Dallas community. It was Ron’s unshakable belief (based not only the research he did but the anecdotal experience of taking every drug himself before selling it to anybody else) that his drugs, though they did not cure the disease (nothing could do that we learn), would be able to prolong life. They do this by merely making the body healthier in general, whereas AZT, sort of like chemotherapy, kills everything patient included. The movie does the first thing better than the second.

First things first: this year’s award in stunt acting goes to the acting team of Matthew McCounaaghey and Jared Leto, playing respectively Ronald Woodruff and Rayon, Ron’s transsexual business partner. Both have lost an incredible amount of weight for their roles. McCounaghey is perhaps more unrecognizable here being once upon a time People’s Sexiest Man Alive back when he had superfluous muscales and did nothing but dumb romantic comedies. It’s all gone now as if he has shed all the superficial romcom dumbness and what is left is the emaciated frame of a serious actor. To witness the turn in career choices that McCounaghey has accomplished over the last couple years is quite remarkable. “Dallas Buyer’s Club” is the capper. An Academy Award nomination would not be surprising. It is also a relief to witness the return of Jared Leto (Requiem from a Dream) after a five-year hiatus of pop stardom. In addition to slimming down he has put on a dress. The character Rayon apparently is not based on one real person but rather a composite of the gay community. It is an ingenious strategy concerning the age-old problem of capturing a lifetime within a two-hour frame. In this way, Ron’s changing attitude is reflected through his relationship with one particular person rather in several people and the emotional payoffs are far more effective.

I’m going to take a moment and throw in a political comment here, an indulgence I am happily allowed by writing an anonymous blog that nobody reads. “Dallas Buyer’s Club” is a great movie for the fan of Capitalism. Generally it has been said that Capitalism has no morals. But that is not necessarily true. The morals of Capitalism are honesty, equal treatment, and tolerance. A man may not like a person or a group of people, but if he is a true capitalist he will trade with that person for the right price. Racial segregation, Caste systems, exclusionary zoning, and ornerous governmental regulation: all are great enemies of Capitalism. The “Dallas Buyer’s Club” is a great example of how Capitalism transforms the prejudiced man who takes its ideals to heart. Ron Woodruff is above all else a hustler. When he sees that there is a market for unapproved Mexican drugs in Dallas, he sets out to exploit it with rational self-interest and what is born of the Dallas Buyers Club is an unambiguously good collaboration of buyers and sellers trying to help each other survive. Is it evidence that the Dallas Buyer’s Club was a good thing that helped people because Ron Woodruff was able to make money? Yes, yes it is. 

What is not dones too well is the movies’ treatment of AZT. This comes from the subtitle at the end of the movie. It states that: “A smaller dose of AZT combined with other drugs saved millions of lives.” Given the movie I just watched, that line does not make sense. I had just spent two hours watching Ron Woodruff declare that the doctors doling out AZT were murderors, a hospital administator played by Denis O’Hare (an actor that specializes in white collar sleaze) who cares more about money than good science, and a third doctor played by Jennifer Garner who is sympathetic to Woodruff’s cause and at one point is asked to resign because of it. So what is the deal with AZT? Why is the movie telling us with its last line that it works when it does not offer any evidence to suggest that from in the movie? This is the sort of detail that makes the watcher feel the need to look up on Wikipedia the true story, which I have not done yet because I wanted my confusion to be readily apparent in this review.

In cases like this, I always bring up that Oliver Stone anecdote. He was accused of propaganda and his reply was this: how can you tell that my movies are not propaganda? Because they aren’t boring. Propaganda by definition only shows one point of view, and because of that necessary lack of conflict, it is not exciting. A storyteller may have a point of view. A storyteller may have an agenda. But if that storyteller does not give the other side its full due, the story will not be exciting. “Dallas Buyer’s Club,” has this problem. By the end, we see Ron Woodruff time and again being victimized unjustly by the system for arbitrary reasons. The reasons may have been stupid for all I know, but what I do know from watching the movie is that the other side is not getting a fair shake. They are not given the chance to explain themselves. We see plenty of scenes of Jennifer Garner trying to persuade Denis O’Hare of the ineffectiveness of AZT. Instead of giving Denis the opporutunity to respond, the movie simply has him ignore Jennifer. In the end, we are left with only one side of the argument, and because of that the epitath does not make sense.

What is the truth? I’m afraid you may have to do your own research.  

12 Years a Slave (5/5 Stars)

“It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman.”

- Joseph Conrad, Hearts of Darkness

In Joseph Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness, a young British officer travels up the Congolese river to seek out a renegade Colonel named Kurtz. Africa, and this especially undeveloped part of it, was an entirely different world to the educated officer. It is a given in both the story’s authorial voice and in the character itself that the British with all their clothes and technology are superior to the hunter-gatherer savages of Africa. But as the officer contemplates the natives upon seeing them at the start of his journey he is overtaken with a strange discomfort. It isn’t a discomfort born from a sense of racism. No, on the contrary, he recognizes that there is no difference between him and the “savages.” They are obviously of the same species. And this brief acknowledgement of the native’s humanity unnerves him.   

12 Years a Slave, is the third feature by Director Steve McQueen having previously made Hunger and Shame, both collaborations with actor Michael Fassbender. Fassbender in a DVD Bonus feature once referred to McQueen as a man of great empathy. McQueen’s movies are a witness to the truth of that statement. One of the things that make 12 Years a Slave especially remarkable is its treatment of the white characters who are not portrayed as 100% nasty but are allowed brief moments like the one given to the British officer in Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness where they recognize the humanity of those they consider inferior. Apparently this is true not only of McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s autobiography 12 Years a Slave, but of the novel itself. Solomon, born a free man in New York, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, repeatedly put himself in the shoes of his slave masters in his account of the ordeal. (I have said before that Django Unchained treated its slave-owners like the Nazis in Indiana Jones. Here I would argue that 12 Years a Slave treats its slave-owners like the Nazis in Schindler’s List, particularly the Ralph Fiennes character, Amon Goeth) Counter intuitively, this does not make the slave owners look better. In fact, it makes them look far worse. In law, it would be the difference between crimes committed knowingly (like murder) as opposed to unknowingly (mere manslaughter). A character like Leonardo Dicaprio’s deluded and indulgent plantation owner in Django Unchained is not shown making moral choices. He considers only one way of doing things. Here, though, the slave-owners can sense what is morally correct if only in that Huck Finn way of feeling ‘something not quite right in the pit of my stomach.’ Then given the choice of whether or not to recognize the humanity that they sense, they choose not to do it. Their behavior comes off as especially cruel, unnatural, and evil. After all, even if they lived by the moral code of the South, Solomon Northup still deserved to be set free. All he had to do to be released was get a letter to his family back home telling them where he was so they could find him and show the local sheriff his free papers. Even in the South this was all the law needed. What stood in the way was the insidious nature of slavery; an institution that oppresses the slave but also warps the moral constitution of the master. It makes cowards of good men as well as enabling the worst impulses of the evil ones.

Is there anything that Michael Fassbender would not do for Steve McQueen? It is a relationship between actor and director that can only be rivaled by the 70s relationship between De Niro and Scorsese. These are all especially hard performances and it speaks to the enormous amount of trust that Fassbender has in McQueen that he is willing to do them. Fassbender in 12 Years a Slave is taking on one of the most notorious of slave-owners, Edwin Epps, in this role. In a world of systematic cruelty, he somehow stood out as being notably more cruel than usual. One of things that 12 Years a Slave portrays that Django Unchained conveniently sidestepped is the subject of widespread rape. (Not to say Django Unchained was not a brave movie, it just seemed that rape was one too many things to consider. And thus Dicaprio lives with his sister, not a wife.) Rape would be one thing, but as Malcolm X liked to point out, most slave-owners were married. And boy how would you feel as a wife if your husband continually raped his slaves? Could you really bring yourself to think the adultery did not count because the women your husband repeatedly raped were black? And thus is set up the most horrific love triangle in the history of cinema between Master Epps, his wife played by Sarah Paulson, and the slave he is in love with Patsy played by newcomer Lupita Nyong’o.

Patsy is perhaps one of the more remarkable slaves in the world, picking an average rate of 500 pounds of cotton a day. Most men in the field pick around 200 pounds. This among other obvious things captures the attention of Epps, who absolutely hates himself for finding her attractive. He rewards her abilities by continually raping and beating her. His wife, fully aware of his philandering, demands that Epps sell her. He will not do so. The wife, who has no power herself in this ridgidly patriarchal society, responds by making Patsy’s life even more of a living hell. Among other things, she denies her soap for cleaning, cuts her rations, and throws a bottle of hard liquor at her face from point blank range. What can Patsy do about this? Commit suicide? That literally seems to be her only and best option.   

I think it would make sense to go ahead and include 12 Years a Slave within the genre of survival movie that is being exceedingly well represented this year with such movies as Gravity, Captain Phillips, and All is Lost. McQueen’s presentation of slavery Solomon Northup's situation absolutely akin to it. There is an extraordinary scene of Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, being almost lynched by an overseer named Tibault, played by Paul Dano, after a mild disagreement. The lynching is in mid-swing when a second overseer stops Tibault not because, you know, it’s murder, but because Northup is property of a different man named Ford, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Mr. Ford is summoned to make the decision himself. Meanwhile Northup waits all day on his tippy-toes, hands still fastened behind his back, neck still hanging in the noose. In the background all the other slaves go about their business, the situation being that if anybody helped Northup they might be killed as well. Northup may as well be in the middle of the ocean like Old Man Redford or up in space like Sandra Bullock. There is no human community bound by law and order here. All is savage, brutal, and uncaring. 

“Why don’t the black people just rise up and kill the whites?” asks Dicaprio in Django Unchained. Perhaps the fate of one of the newly kidnapped slaves, played by Michael K. Williams, in an ingenious choice of casting, may illustrate the answer to that. Michael K. Williams, best known as one of the more badass characters in TV history, Omar from The Wire, brings up the idea of revolt. He is killed within the space of a couple of minutes. If Omar would last only half a scene, how do you think you would fare?