OSCARS 2015

Usually I can find some type of narrative for a year in movies but 2014 proved elusive. I saw some good ones, a few great ones, but not a single one that stood out as the very best of the year. But here are a few thoughts: 

- The big action superhero blockbuster is on some level entering a level of supercompetence. I did not see one that was particularly bad this year. 

- I was inspired not only by the directiorial debut of a very young director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) but also a very old one, Clint Eastwood, who just made one of his best movies in his mid-80s (American Sniper). Both movies were pleasant surprises to me.

- 'Birdman' though not special to me in a personal sense expanded my idea of how a movie can accomplish certain things. The long shots called attention to the actors and allowed the acting to be bigger and more theatrical. Here they expanded the role of the actors sometimes to theatrical levels. What a revelation!

- Go Texas. Houston born Wes Anderson, Austin native son Richard Linklater, and the movie 'American Sniper' were all great movies with that connection. You can make it a TexMex year if you include Alejandro Innaritu. On to the awards.

There were a certain categories that I did not watch anything in. One was the short films which is not unusual. The other was the foreign language category which is unusual. It just did not happen this year. I don't know why. 

Then there a couple categories in which I only saw one film that applies. So they win automatically. Thankfully they were deserving anyway.

Best Animated Feature Film

 The Lego Movie 

I was struck by how the movie seemed to have been written by a ten-year-old, which was very appropriate and highly satisfying. Also Will Ferrell had a touching cameo at the end that summed up all that Lego stands for. This was the best commercial I saw all year.

Best Documentary
CitizenFour

Not a great documentary in art and craft but its newsworthiness makes it a very important document of our time and place.

Best Supporting Actor:

Kim Bodnia – Rosewater

Josh Brolin – Inherent Vice

Ethan Hawke – Boyhood

Mark Ruffalo – Foxcatcher
J.K. Simmons – Whiplash

Always a tough category but Josh Brolin's turn as a SAG detective with a flattop haircut of Flinstone proportions in Inherit Vice was the most memorable fictional character I saw all year. 

Best Supporting Actress:

Patricia Arquette – Boyhood

Laura Dern - Wild
Eva Green – Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Jennifer Lawrence - X-Men: Days of Future Past
Emma Stone – Birdman

Always a very shallow category. Patricia Arquette gets it for her 12 year performance in 'Boyhood. Nobody else was close. The fact that Meryl Streep was nominated again shows that (and a very apparent lack of imagination in the Academy). 

Best Use of a Song:

“I Love You All” – Frank

“Come and Get Your Love” – Guardians of the Galaxy

 “Your Fault” – Into the Woods
“Everything is Awesome” – The Lego Movie

“Caravan” – Whiplash

I thought a lot about switching up Frank and Whiplash for this one but ultimately decided that I would give the Film Editing prize to Whiplash for its ending scene whereas the song that ends 'Frank' is not only original but the first original song in forever that actually deserved an Oscar. For some reason it was not nominated for an Oscar. That was the biggest surprise for me of the year in this pathetically shallow category.

Best Original Music Score:

Birdman
The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Imitation Game

Interstellar

Really the only Original Music Score that really stood out to me was the one from "The Grand Budapest Hotel." I am thinking of making this category just "Best Soundtrack" in the future. I would have at least nominated 'Chef' if that were the case. 

Best Sound Editing and Mixing

American Sniper

Birdman
Edge of Tomorrow
Interstellar

Whiplash

It seems like I say this every year but this is a category that is very hard for me to judge while watching the movie. Given that I had the same list of movies for Editing and Mixing and because a friend of mine basically told me that the people who do editing generally do the mixing as well, I combined the categories. Why American Sniper? Well, basically because I actually noticed the Sound Editing in that movie, particularly when Chris Kyle was back in the States and getting alerted by phantom sounds of warfare. It was effective.

Best Film Editing:

American Sniper

Foxcatcher

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Whiplash

Wild

The editing in Whiplash is truly extraordinary. It transforms the energy of a low budget first feature into the work of an accomplished director with many more millions of dollars to spend. This is cut like an action film and feels that way with nothing but jazz going on. 

Best Makeup:

Foxcatcher
Guardians of the Galaxy

The Grand Budapest Hotel

I generally don't go wild over makeup for Holy Mackeral this movie had Great Makeup. I especially liked blue robot woman.

Best Costume Design:

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Guardians of the Galaxy

Inherent Vice

Yes, that Summer Blockbuster had the most awesome costumes ever too. Take a look at what Benecio Del Toro was wearing in that one scene. And yellow prison suits: Awesome. 

Best Production Design:

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Interstellar

Into the Woods

A Most Violent Year

The Zero Theorem

Truly nothing else came close to the achievement of vision that is "The Grand Budapest Hotel." You could say that the movie was named after the production design.

Best Visual Effects:

Edge of Tomorrow

Guardians of the Galaxy

Interstellar

X-Men: Days of Future Past

The Zero Theroem

There is visual effects and then there is Visual Effects that you need astrophysicists to consult with to make right. This one is for the Black Hole. 

Best Cinematography:

Birdman

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Interstellar

A Most Violent Year

Nightcrawler

Lubezski wins his second Oscar in a row and rightly deserves both. He is the master of the long shot and teaches a master class here in how they should be done and more importantly why they should be done. 

Best Original Screenplay:

Wes Anderson, Hugo Guinness - The Grand Budapest Hotel

Jon Favreau - Chef

Justin Lader - The One I Love

Alejandro Innaritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinares Jr., Armando Bo - Birdman

J.C. Chandor - A Most Violent Year

I don't think I have seen a movie with so many great vocabulary words interspersed effortlessly thoughout the entire picture. When Jeff Goldblum is perfectly cast it is because you got some delicious words for him to chew on. 

Best Adapted Screenplay:

Jason Hall - American Sniper

Paul Thomas Anderson - Inherent Vice

Jon Stewart - Rosewater

Nick Hornby - Wild

Simon Kinberg - X-Men: Days of Future Past

Paul Thomas Anderson gets this for the ingenious way he crammed so many visual jokes into a such a complex and convoluted storyline. It is a feat to behold. 

Best Actress:

Elisabeth Moss – The One I Love

Kristin Wiig – The Skeleton Twins

Julianne Moore - Still Alice

Reese Witherspoon – Wild

Jessica Chastain – A Most Violent Year

This was not a great year for the Best Actress category. It could be easily said that Julianne Moore won it because she is a great actress who had not won the award yet and you know who else would you give it to this year. Besides her performance in "Still Alice" probably reminded the voters of a performance she had twenty years ago that probably was good enough to this year. That movie was "Safe" and it too was about a degenerative disease. See that movie. 

Best Actor:

Steve Carell – Foxcatcher

Bradley Cooper – American Sniper

Michael Fassbender – Frank

Michael Keaton – Birdman

Channing Tatum – Foxcatcher

Three of these nominees (Carell, Cooper, and Keaton) had career milestones this year. I'm giving this to Carell because his role is the most against type and also because his movie 'Foxcatcher' arguably had the best acting in a movie this year. 

Best Director:

Wes Anderson – The Grand Budapest Hotel

Paul Thomas Anderson – Inherent Vice

Damien Chazelle – Whiplash

Alejandro Innaritu – Birdman

Richard Linklater – Boyhood

It just cannot be denied any longer. There is no other director like Wes Anderson and he just turned in his best work in an already very impressive two decade career. 

Best Picture:

American Sniper

Birdman

Boyhood

Chef

Foxcatcher

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Inherit Vice

A Most Violent Year

Whiplash

X-Men: Days of Future Past

The Grand Budapest Hotel was the first movie I saw in theaters in 2014 and although I felt it was unlikely that I would not see a better movie all year I also knew that it was entirely possible that I had just seen the best movie of the year. I loved this movie. It was a poem to civilization crafted with all sorts of love.

CitizenFour (4/5 Stars)

They are watching you. Well maybe not watching right this moment. But in the future, if you ever became a person of interest for whatever reason, they could go back in their files and find everything you’ve done all the way up to this point. It has all been recorded and handed over to the government surveillance through secret court orders. This is no conspiracy theory. It is a fact of the times we live in. And we know this because of a hero, ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden who provided journalists, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, in the summer of 2013 the internal classified documents of the NSA to prove it. 

“CitizenFour” recently won the Oscar for Best Documentary. This is not a particularly great documentary in terms of craft or creativity, but it is the most important in terms of sheer newsworthiness. That week in June when all the stories were leaked and Snowden came out as the whistleblower is going to be in history books. This movie shows the entire week from beginning to end all in a Hong Kong hotel room. Someone needs to put a plaque right next to door commemorating the event. I suspect it will become a cult tourist destination. It is on my list if I ever go back to Hong Kong.

To truly appreciate what Snowden did it is best to understand how he went about doing it. To do this I suggest watching Alex Gibney’s documentary “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks,” which concerns the whistleblowing of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. Those two were rank amateurs way over their heads compared to the competence and eloquence of Greenwald, Poitras, and Snowden. Unlike the Wikileaks whistleblowing which just flopped a bunch of sensitive material on the internet for all to see, Snowden took special care to make sure the documents he was revealing put nobody from the intelligence community in physical danger. It was an overview of programs not an outing of personnel. Secondly, Snowden took responsibility in a heroic way. He kept his girlfriend, family, and co-workers out of his plans. He coordinated with journalists with good reputations. And he was determined to not be anonymous like Bradley Manning. The documents were leaked in Glen Greenwald’s and Laura Poitra’s newspapers throughout the week in deliberate sequencing and then Snowden was revealed at the end. In this way the story was always about the secret surveillance, the news cycle gave utmost attention to each reveal, and just when the story was about to switch over to who was doing this and why, Snowden came out and made the mystery a moot point. It was a brilliant strategy and a true thrill to sit in that hotel room with them and watch very smart people plot the strategy for important historical things in real time. Edward Snowden comes off as good a person someone can come off as in this movie. Where he really shines is in his aptitude in discussing all the programs and the power and capabilities of the technology in them. He knows his stuff and he knows that he is tapping Leviathan on the shoulder and asking for a fight. But he has thought this through. His motives are pure. His actions are important. And the journalists he has allied with are the best in the business. Contrast that with the disturbed loose cannon that was Bradley Manning and the overconfident narcissism of Julian Assange and you have a master’s class on how to and how not to be a whistleblower. Did anyone say double feature partytime?

The subject of the NSA for anyone who has the experience of reading a Bamford book is especially taxing to the mind. It is a story of complex technology and large warehouses and confusing cryptology. It is almost impossible to stay awake during these stories without wanting to latch onto a personality. (This is generally the public’s large problem with this national security problem. One of Snowden’s main points is not in the government’s actions towards specific people [although 1.2 million people are identified as being on the ‘terrorist’ watchlist] but the capabilities that the government has set up. Imagine he says if the people in charge really wanted to do really bad things. They could very well do it quite easily. There is nowhere to hide and the checks and balances in the system are a complete joke. [The secret FISA court only denied less than 1% of all requests from the intelligence community for search warrants. That is what you call a rubberstamp.]) To that end Poitras does a rather keen thing in narrating the story in the first person when dealing with her experience with Snowden. The way she describes being put on a ‘watchlist’ for being a journalist who talked about these things is rather chilling. Unfortunately (and rather oddly) we never actually see Poitras during the documentary. Why she chose to narrate in the first person (putting herself into the story) without putting herself on the screen is an odd choice. She is missed.

Remember that Steven Spielberg movie, “Minority Report,” starring Tom Cruise. It was about a future police state that had achieved a zero murder rate by using precogs to predict murders and stop them before they happened. The movie took the stance that this type of surveillance and its effects was not worth the loss of privacy. Really? A zero murder rate? Not worth the loss of privacy. It was an odd position I thought to take. What I felt was really wrong about the future police state was that the people who were stopped from committing the crimes were still punished for them. They were warehoused in an enforced deep sleep that seemed to me to be even worse than solitary confinement. That, I felt, was the real problem. After all (and I speak to this as one who has studied city planning from a security viewpoint) surveillance really does work as a way to reduce crime. This does not necessarily mean that city streets need a police presence. (In fact, a strong police presence can actually make a street feel less safe.) But they do need “eyes on the street,” that is to say a safe street is one that is constantly populated by people in the neighborhood. A city that organizes itself to make sure that ordinary people are going about their business at all times of the day and night on that street makes a safe street. In this way I support surveillance to deter crime. The odd thing about NSA surveillance is that it is secret. How is secret surveillance a deterent to crime? It isn’t. What’s more, the way we punish criminals is also generally a secret. We have Supermax prisons in the middle of nowhere that incarcerate prisoners for very long periods of time in solitary confinement. You have to dig down deep in order to find anything about these places. That is not a deterent to crime either. Combine that with the erosion of the 4^th Amendment in the War on Drugs, idiotic minimum sentences for low-level crimes, and three strikes laws. Now take what we just learned in Ferguson, Missouri, where it was found that the local police force (looking like the fucking army with assault rifles, riot gear, and tanks) was acting like a tax collector and you start seeing the State less as an agent of law and order and more of a co-conspirantant in a business model preying on people not protecting them.

For the longest time Americans have been dangerously complicit and complacent to these happeninings because the main victims are a marginalized group of people, poor blacks. It is time to put an end to this for everybody. The present civil rights violations are not confined to race. As Snowden points out, anybody who gains power has the ability to use this against anyone. Transparent surveillance is one thing. Perhaps it would be for the best if the Internet were a public space with less anonymity. But secret surveillance is another thing entirely. Combine that with a justice system weakened consistently by forever wars, we have the largest threat to American freedom today.

Whiplash (4/5 Stars)

Good Job

I could not be more impressed by a second feature and a first real budget (still low budget but still a budget) movie. The writer is Damien Chazelle. He is my age (OMFG) and his movie is absolutely killer. It is the sort of thing that registers a new cinematic presence in the neighborhood of greatness in your mind. I am excited for future movies from this kid. Let me explain: It is not too unusual for a very young person to give a great performance or write a very good screenplay or even to direct a good movie (take Ryan Coogler’s “Fruitvale Station” from last year). It’s unusual but not unheard of unusual. But the standout great thing about “Whiplash” is not any of these things. It is the editing. And Editing like Cinematography is a technical old-man-who-knows-how-to-work-machines job. Those other jobs can lean on the crutch of great inspiration or raw talent. Editing is a craft. Editing requires discipline and experience. And the editing that one experiences in “Whiplash” is so intricate, precise, and correct that to see a 28-year-old lead a team that does it is extraordinary. We need to give this Damien Chazelle some serious money and let him do whatever the fuck he wants next time around. The kid’s got rhythm.

“Whiplash” is a low budget movie. It has a protagonist (Jazz Drummer protégé played by Miles Teller) an antagonist (his sadistic/inspiring teacher played by J.K. Simmons) and two supporting characters: his easy going father and a girlfriend. The movie takes place in a series of rooms and concert halls and some country roads. The plot concerns the protagonist’s search for greatness in jazz drumming, his attempts to impress a teacher who is ideologically opposed to ever being impressed, and his ultimate confrontation and jazz drum battle with him. Now there is that on paper but on the screen you are watching what feels like an action blockbuster. This is pulled off by a focused screenplay, two great performances by Teller and Simmons and as I mentioned before extraordinary editing.

Jazz Drumming? Who gives a shit right? I knew nothing about it before seeing this movie (except of course for the Buddy Rich tapes). Well the presentation of a thing makes a world of difference. I am reminded of watching Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz” and being turned off by the philandering reckless play director until the movie proved through choreography that he was a genius. There’s nothing like great art to diminish the distasteful eccentricities of the artist. So it is in “Whiplash.”Miles Teller really wants to be one of the greatest jazz drummers ever like Buddy Rich or Charlie Parker. His teacher mercilessly abuses him (not unlike the drill instructor in “Full Metal Jacket.”) There is yelling, slapping, throwing chairs, and sadistic mind fucking going all around. Miles practices until his hands start bleeding. He blows off his father. He breaks up with his girlfriend in order to focus more on his music. Why would Miles Teller go through this? Well fuck it’s the music. It’s great. And it fills the scenes with gorgeous suspense and hideous beauty. And the camera direction and editing seamlessly intertwine the pieces into the overall experience. The movie makes it plausible that greatness in this medium is worth experiencing terrible shit.

By making it plausible the movie opens a real discussion of whether greatness is worth destroying yourself in general. Miles has two father figures. His dad, easy going and unconditional in his love, is not particularly great at anything and requires nothing from his son. Then there is his teacher who demands and demands and demands and demands and who articulates that the most harmful words in the human language are “Good Job.” Well, is J.K. Simmons a good teacher? I have an opinion on that. I do not necessarily believe that yelling, slapping, or throwing chairs is bad leadership. I do have a problem with the manipulation and the lying. At one point in the movie the teacher confronts a student who is on-pitch with the accusation that they are off-pitch. The teacher knows that the student is on pitch. He also must know that in his strict disciplitarian camp of a classroom that the student cannot talk back or correct the teacher. And yet his excuse for his behavior when the student is dismissed is “well, he wasn’t off pitch but should have known that he wasn’t and that is worse.” So what is the point of his behavior? It is a perfect Catch-22 for the student. They will either get excoriated for differing from the teacher or get excoriated for being off pitch. There is no point is the answer. It is stupid and the teacher is a coward to only yell louder when he is called out on it. So “Full Metal Jacket” guy: all good in my book. I like him. The teacher in this movie: not so much. One kind of yelling toughens up a pupil, the other fucks with their mind. And if the teacher is not there to mold the mind, if he insists like in this movie that the perfect pupil will ultimately disregard his teaching than what is the point of the teacher at all.

Or to put it another way: What is the point of teachers when it comes to Greatness. If it can’t be taught then perhaps the best teacher is but an intelligent obstacle.

Or did I just persuade myself the other way….

American Sniper (5/5 Stars)

Early on in “American Sniper,” Chris Kyle (played by Bradley Cooper) sidles up to his future wife in a bar. She tells him to get lost. Why he asks? Because you are a Navy Seal she says, and Navy Seals are pushy, self-centered, egotistical, loud, etc. Chris takes most of this in a way that suggests he is in agreement with her assessment of how Nacy Seals are. He does however take issue with one adjective. “Self-centered,” he objects, “I would give my life for my country. How is that self-centered?”

“American Sniper” is an extraordinary character study. It shows the life of Chris Kyle who served four tours in the Iraq War and was credited with 160 confirmed kills as a sniper before coming home and being shot and killed by a fellow veteran with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. As far as war movies are concerned it belongs in that new brand of modern cinema that makes obsolete the line between a bullshit PG rated John Wayne version of war and a slow motion violin-playing Oliver Stone version of a war. It is more like the “The Hurt Locker,” another movie that showed real brutality of a battle side by side with its strange ability to seduce the fighter to keep coming back to it. Like the I.E.D. specialist in “The Hurt Locker,” Chris Kyle only owes one tour of duty but keeps volunteering for more. Once he is home with his loving wife and kids he can’t think of anything more important than going back to Iraq to finish the war.

Cinema in general is a liberal establishment and this type of behavior is unreal to most of the people in it. They look at Chris Kyle’s accomplishments (i.e. killing a record number of people) in a very unpopular war and recoil at the idea that anybody over there could be called a hero. I hope they see this movie because the fact that Chris Kyle was nicknamed “Legend” by his fellow soldiers has far less an insidious truth to it than they think. He was “Legend” because when he watched over the battlefield with his rifle, the men on the ground were never safer. (In one scene the soldiers relieving him at his post find him in position on his rifle but stinking of urine. He wouldn’t take his sight off the street for however long it would take to piss.) In other words, Kyle saved many lives of American soldiers and that is why he is considered a hero. Unfortunately those statistics are impossible to tally. Of course one could make the argument that the entire war was wrong in the first place so it does not matter that Kyle killed people to save people if nobody at all deserved to die. I think Chris Kyle had the best retort in his book, “We didn’t vote in Congress; we didn’t vote to go to war. I signed up to protect this country, I do not choose the wars.”

I submit that this movie is apolitical. Chris Kyle surely was pro-war, but this movie takes a middle ground. How the movie shrewdly pulls this off is by assigning doubts about the war to other characters in the movie. One of his fellow soldiers asks Kyle if he ever reads that Bible he carries around. Another writes a derisive poem about ‘Glory’ that is subsequently read at his own funeral. (Kyle suggests that the attitude that brought about the poem got the soldier killed but the movie itself gives the poem reverential treatment.) Kyle’s brother upon leaving Iraq after a tour tells him, “Fuck this place” as if coming there was the worst decision he ever made in his life. The multitude of viewpoints amongst the veterans in the movie is what makes this movie pro-veteran first than about any sort of politics. If there was a veteran that felt it, this movie wants to show it. Movies about controversial topics generally make their characters choose sides and then take a side as well, which usually has the effect of judging those characters that picked the wrong side. I think it is fair to say that “American Sniper” supports everyone. Clint Eastwood directed this movie. It is arguably his best movie since “Unforgiven” in 1993. It is very inspiring to see a movie with this much energy and precision made by a guy in his mid-80s. Eastwood has made good movies in the last decade (Million Dollar Baby, Gran Torino) but they generally felt like an old man who wasn’t about to make a great movie ever again made them. I was wrong.

I was also wrong about what I felt was the natural range of Bradley Coopers’ acting ability. This is arguably his best performance and a role he almost completely disappears into. If you had asked me to cast someone like Chris Kyle, Bradley Cooper would not have been my first choice. But here he gains a good amount of weight in pure muscle, grows a beard, and has a great sounding Texan accent. He pulls off two counterintuitive personality traits: Being a macho guy but not being conceited about it. That is to say he completely loses the Romantic Comedy pretty boy without completely gaining the Schwarzeneggarian action hero. The story, the performance, the very strong writing, and the clarity of the directing, elevate Chris Kyle’s life into the realm of Shakespearean tragedy. That is to say the character traits of Chris Kyle, namely his comfort with firearms and his unwavering convictions, make him great on the battlefield and at the same time provide for his downfall post-war. The last two scenes of this movie involve him jokingly pointing a revolver at his wife (perhaps the biggest do not do in the annals of gun safety) and then taking a veteran with PTSD to a shooting range because gee isn’t shooting things a fun thing to do. What is the rule for biopics: If it were completely fictional would it be any good. This movie would be great even if there were no real Chris Kyle.

There are two minor problems with the movie that I felt could have been done better. One was the treatment of Chris Kyle’s Iraqi doppelganger, an Olympic sharpshooter that plays for the other side and becomes Kyle’s main antagonist throughout the movie. I don’t believe he gets any lines and his life on the other side is unexplored. It would have been cool if we learned more about him. Also the movie’s pinnacle action sequence suffers from we may call a “Fury” problem if anyone remembers my review of that movie from last fall. The Iraqi insurgents display a stunning lack of tactics when they attack a building holding only four Americans and suffer countless casualties. That sort of thing never happens in a war and is a letdown in a movie that otherwise took the war scenes seriously. But it wasn’t that bad and didn’t wholly compromise the seriousness of the movie.

Go see “American Sniper." Bring along a sense of empathy.

A Most Violent Year (4/5 Stars)

“I have always taken the most right path”

- Abel Morales

The fate of this movie may be a prime example of the whims of zeitgeist. Just like it sometimes feels a mega hit comes out of nowhere (see “American Sniper”), so can a strong well made movie go nowhere for no particular reason. Writer/Director J.C. Chandor’s third feature “A Most Violent Year” did not make much money or garner a high number of award nominations (strikingly The National Board of Review made it their movie of the year though it should be noted that this designation happened before everyone else, including the Oscars, completely ignored the film). Perhaps though this movie should not yet be written to the dust heap. I have a feeling that the maker is so strong that we might be discovering this ‘lost’ movie ten-twenty years from now. It is further proof that Chandor is as versatile as he is competent. His first movie was ‘Margin Call’ an intricately detailed and highly expository view of high finance on the day of a stock market meltdown. His second movie was the exact opposite. He ditched all the words and wrote a nearly silent movie about one old man at sea named “All is Lost.” This time he switches direction again with a period piece about a heating oil business under attack by rising crime in 1981. It looks and feels entirely different from his first two movies except for the invisible sure hand of the director behind it. Sometimes when you see a movie you can just sense the controlled confidence of a Director with a capital ‘D.’ Alfred Hitchcock movies have this feeling. So do Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan movies. The movies of young J.C. Chandor have this feeling as well.

The story concerns an immigrant Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) and his wife Anna Morales (Jessica Chastain). Abel is on the verge of expanding his business greatly by buying a refinery for his heating oil business. He has just given a down payment of $40,000 and expects to close the deal with bank financing at the end of the month. At the same time somebody has been hijacking his trucks and selling his oil at a discounted rate to one of his competitors. At the same time the district attorney (David Oyelowo) has started an investigation into his company for complying with the standard industry practices which were generally fraudulent. His wife, who has mob connections, does the books for his company. His lawyer is played by Albert Brooks who has completed the transformation from a young neurotic comedian to an old steely dramatic actor. The man is a heavy now and fits in great with the last great character of this movie, the brooding emptied out noir scape of 1980s New York City. I did not live in NYC during this time but I’ve seen the movies that were made in the early 1980s. One in particular, Escape From New York, imagined a future where the island of Manhattan was transformed into a high security prison populated entirely by criminals. People were not very optimistic back then and you can feel it in this movie.

There is violence in “A Most Violent Year,” but it is portrayed in a way that is almost never seen in movies. Whereas an action movie generally has highly stylized set pieces that ignore many real world implications this movie dives right into the nitty gritty of real life. Take these plot points. There is a discussion as to whether the drivers in the heating oil trucks should be carrying firearms. This is a concern because if a driver shoots a gun on a crowded highway, whether in self-defense or not, it has huge legal ramifications for the company. And if the legal inquiries happen that may scare off the financing from the bank that is central to the real estate deal. I wish action movies would take a look at how J.C. Chandor has made this movie because the violence that takes place albeit with fewer explosions has far more weight and suspense ingrained in it. There is even a car chase in this movie, which simply does not feel like a regular car chase scene. It feels dangerous. For example, if they were to plow into a street cart of fruit (which does not happen but does happen in every other movie with a car chase) you can bet that the owner of said fruitcart would have a major part in the movie. 

The look of the movie is where J.C. Chandor is being his most innovative in this movie. “A Most Violent Year” follows the great cinematic tradition of period pieces that present the world of the past through the film stock of those years. If you are ever wondering why so many movies that take place pre 1960s are black and white or have at least some of the color drained out of them, well we remember those decades that way because all the movies were black and white. This is the same with the graininess of the 1970s. And here, the advent of videotape with its over saturated reds and browns gives “A Most Violent Year” its warm 1980s look. Certainly walking down the street in 1981 did not look like we see it in this movie but we remember it that way because that’s how we recorded it back then. Oh and my favorite set piece is the NYC subway completely overwritten with angry graffiti. That more than anything represents what is known as the Bad Old Days.

The acting is great. Jessica Chastain as always fits in perfectly with whatever she is doing. Oscar Isaac has the keen ability to look like someone who no longer walks around the modern world. In fact, in one of his first major roles he played a Roman Centurion (“Agora”). That sounds about right. I want to see him in a movie where he plays the antagonist in some ancient battle against Russell Crowe. It think he will do a very good job in his next movie that takes place a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away.

Oh and I was a fan of the Jews, those Orthodox Jews that inhabit South Williamsburg. Those are the guys that Abel does the real estate deal with. I used to do real estate deals with those guys too. You can just tell that anything that happens in NYC from the best to the worst, those guys are going to be relatively unaffected by it. They have their own culture and they have it for the long haul.