Michael Clayton is a that rare thing: an intelligent, fictional thriller for grownups. Like any self-respecting Thriller for Grownups, it’s relentlessly grim in tone, the chronology is fractured, and a high level of detail demands your attention. It doesn’t approach impenetrability like Syriana, but it unfortunately doesn’t engage the brain as much as a good puzzler could. Everything is spelled out for the viewer in the end, except for a few niggling logistical questions. (Such as, why would two expert assassins opt for something so messily conspicuous as a car bomb?)
Michael Clayton has all the whiff of being based on a true story, but is in fact a wholly original work from writer/director Tony Gilroy – his first film as director after a successful run of screenplays including the Jason Bourne trilogy. George Clooney carries the film with the complex, compromised title character, and Oscar winner Tilda Swinton sweats convincingly as a dying-inside corporate executioner. But in my mind the real star is Tom Wilkinson.
Now this is a musical (of sorts) I can get behind. The unnamed “Guy” (Glen Hansard, already a rock star in The Frames and a movie star from The Commitments) is a street busker, playing popular songs for pennies during the day, and saving his own passionate compositions for the empty streets at night. “Girl” (Markéta Irglová) is an immigrant from the Czech Republic, looking at an unhappy future as a single mother, in servile jobs, with no outlet for her own musical talent. Each has become stuck, but their meeting jostles each other into motion.
What a fucking great movie. That’s it; that’s my entire review. See it, and get the soundtrack.
I don’t know if the roughly 140 minute version of Southland Tales that made it to DVD is a butchered or merely abbreviated version of a masterpiece, but what I just saw is an unholy mess. I’m one of director Richard Kelly’s apologists for his divisive film Donnie Darko, which I found strangely affecting. Like Southland Tales, it was heavily edited down before release, and the abbreviated theatrical version doesn’t even make logical sense. Its emotional appeal is hard to pin down, and yet I found it hugely involving and moving. I was rooting for Kelly on his big follow-up, and even though it made the best-of-the-year lists of both The New York Times and The Village Voice, I guess I’m on the losing team now.
The opening moments recall Cloverfield and the TV series Jericho with ersatz home video footage of a nuclear attack on Texas. A long barrage of infographics, television fragments, and narration follows, outlining a tremendously involved backstory. Kelly has obviously created a huge fictional universe, the bulk of which proves superfluous to the comparatively simple story that concerns the bulk of the film that follows. Perhaps Southland Tales is the first entry in this Kellyverse, and indeed, it is comprised of four chapters (starting, no doubt modeled after Star Wars, with “Chapter 4”). But after this failure it’s hard to imagine Kelly securing the funding to complete additional chapters (at least as films; television or comics seem both more appropriate and more frugal).
Be thankful I couldn’t find a still of them making out
The ensemble cast is extraordinarily weird, featuring The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, plus a complement of little people. No less than five past and present Saturday Night Live cast members also appear: Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, John Lovitz, Nora Dunn, and Janeane Garofalo (credited but I think I only spotted her in one shot near the end). Rounding it out are Miranda Richardson, John Laroquette, Wood Harris (Avon Barksdale in The Wire), and Kelly-booster Kevin Smith. And is that the weird little French woman from The City of Lost Children? You haven’t seen a movie until you’ve seen one with Wallace Shawn and Bai Ling making out. But in a way I suppose that makes sense; they are both aliens from another planet. Different planets, maybe, but still.
Justin Timberlake shills for Budweiser (not shown)
The music is likewise eccentric: Jane’s Addiction’s punk/prog masterpiece “Three Days” figures in the dialogue as an enigmatic prophesy and as the introduction to the official movie website, and Moby does his best Vangelis impression for his original score. Justin Timberlake (filmed in separation to most of the action) serves as narrator but also stars in a bizarre musical interlude and/or Budweiser commercial and/or Iraq war commentary: “I got sold out but I’m not a soldier.” And, why not toss in pop star Mandy Moore?
The Netflix queue is, by its nature, the opposite of the instant gratification of a rental store. You add movies you think you might want to see some day, then sit back and wait for them to arrive in an order decided by computer, according to factors and algorithms outside of your control. Enough time had passed since I added Year of the Dog that I could no longer recall why. Possibly I read a good review somewhere, or maybe I was curious about the sudden reappearance of Molly Shannon (part of “my” Saturday Night Live of the mid-90s — am I right that people feel the most affection for the SNL cast of their college years?). But I feel baited and switched; this is not a drama or romantic comedy but rather a movie with an agenda.
Writer/director Mike White’s Year of the Dog is a feature-length dramatization of Janeane Garofalo’s gag “You can love your pets, but you can’t love your pets.” Not unlike Lily in Eagle Vs. Shark, Peggy (Shannon) is a gentle sweetheart, but alienated and lonely. Her relationship with brother Pier (Thomas McCarthy from The Wire Season 5) and sister-in-law Bret (Laura Dern) is distant at best, and her closest friends are oblivious workmates.
This commute’s a bitch
When she loses the unconditional love of her dog Pencil, she becomes hungry for, as she puts it, a single word to define her. On a date with Al (John C. Reilly), Peggy demonstrates a dislike of hunting, the seed from which her new fervor for an animal activist lifestyle grows. Her one word, she decides, is to be “vegan.”
Her new life teases her at first with the possibility of love with Newt (Peter Sarsgaard), but he is too much like her, or what she might become: unable to love humans nearly as much as animals. From here, the tone shifts to the disturbing, as Peggy causes her life to fall apart. Her clumsy activism costs her her job and family, and she soon descends to theft and attempted murder.
You can love your pets, but you can’t LOVE your pets
And yet, the movie appears to present her ultimate state as a happy ending of sorts. She chooses to be friendless and unloved, but has found meaning and purpose. The most important part of the movie is missing: what happens between Peggy hitting rock bottom (where she becomes unable to function in society) and her total ascendance as a self-assured being? I don’t buy the sudden switcheroo that it’s all OK because she has discovered herself.
Would real-life animal activists find Peggy and Newt amusingly exaggerated versions of themselves, or insulting stereotypes? Even as I am the owner of two rescued casts, it strikes me that choosing the love of animals over that of people is a kind of mental illness that begs for correction, not celebration.
So far, it seems this movie blog is definitive proof of the truism that criticism is cheaper than praise; it’s easier to pick apart what’s wrong with a bad or mediocre movie than it is to praise what’s good. So sitting down to write something about a really great film like Away From Her, I find myself at a loss for what to say.
Already a seasoned actor at 29, Sarah Polley proves herself a mature and sensitive writer/director on her very first outing. Although concerned with Alzheimer’s, Away From Her is thankfully not a movie “about” a disease. I felt the biopic Iris, although finely acted by no less than Kate Winslet, Judi Dench, and Jim Broadbent, fell into the trap of educating the audience about a disease more than looking at the experiences of the real-life figures whose lives were surely defined by more than Iris Murdoch’s disease.
Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent in Away From Her.
Fiona (Julie Christie) and long-time husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent) are already aware of her relatively early-onset Alzheimer’s as the movie begins, but react to its sudden progression with different degrees of preparedness. Worse, as her short term memory leaves her, memories of old traumas resurface just as it is time for her to enter an assisted living community, making an impossible situation no easier for either of them. The next time Grant sees her, she appears to have forgotten him altogether… or has she? The possibility that Grant may be reading his fears into Fiona’s behavior and lapses is one of the most powerful questions of the film.
Sarah Polley, writer/director of Away From Her.
Polley reportedly talked Julie Christie out of semi-retirement, and she deserves an Oscar for her Canadian accent alone. Christie’s long resume and Oscar nomination put her in the entertainment media’s spotlight this winter, but Gordon Pinsent is excellent as Grant, arguably the lead role. Away From Her may be a powerfully sad movie, but not one that anyone should be afraid of being bummed out by.
I’m not sure I took Taika Waititi’s Eagle vs. Shark as it may have been intended. A sort of New Zealand answer to Napoleon Dynamite, Eagle vs. Shark is the story of two misfit losers finding each other when no one else will have them. But I found one character as sympathetic as the other deplorable, while I suspect writer/director Waititi intended them to be seen as a good match, and deserving of a happy ending together.
Lily (pretty actress Loren Horsley, dressed down in frumpy clothes) may not be looking forward to any New Zealand beauty pageants, but she’s not un-cute. But being possibly the sweetest and nicest girl on the planet does not work to her advantage; awkward and over-earnest, she’s unable to say no to anybody, even when getting fired or dumped. Her only friend is her sweetheart brother, a cartoonist and world’s worst impressionist. Her favorite answer to each of life’s many disappointments is “it doesn’t matter.”
Fish or fowl?
We first meet Lily at her dead-end mall job at Meaty Bun, the sort of joint where layoffs are managed by literally pulling names from a hat (and even that is rigged). She has fallen in love with Jarrod (Jemaine Clement), a douchebag with a mullet who works at the nearby video game store. Jarrod is a true nerd: creepy and violently deranged. We learn later he is motivated by the impossible ideal of his over-achieving martyred brother (although there are family secrets to be uncovered there), and possesses an illegitimate daughter.
Jarrod and Lily have matching moles (not to be confused with the progressive rock band of the same name), and Lily is able to impress him with her natural talent at a gruesome video game. But beyond that, there is little connection beyond their shared isolation.
Pitching a tent
So I found myself rooting for something at odds with what the film presents as a happy ending: for Lily to break free of the poisonous dick Jarrod. Lily does manage at one point to say no to someone for the first time; she turns down a date with an even bigger loser than Jarrod. But despite this small sign of personal growth, her unrequited love for him is so absolute that even after he tries and fails to beat up a paraplegic, she goes on a suicide watch to protect him from his brother’s fate.
To be more positive, and to explain my three-star rating despite all the negativity above: I found Lily and her brother very endearing and the film often extremely funny. Awesome stop motion animation sequences throughout illustrate the love story through two anthropomorphized damaged apples.
The Bank Job is notable for being an at least partly “true” expose into the spectacular (and successful) robbery of Lloyds Bank in London in 1971. For whatever reason, an anonymous participant of the investigation chose to cooperate in the making of this fictionalized film rather than a book or magazine article. If even partly true, this expose would have held more weight as, say, a Vanity Fair article than a fictionalized theatrical film.
The far-reaching conspiracy story fingers the royal family, parliament, MI-5 & 6, the police, and even contemporary black power figure Michael X in a massive cover-up successfully withheld from the public for over 35 years. After being portrayed less than flatteringly in the 2006 film The Queen, the royal family is now surely even less amused with The Bank Job‘s allegations against Princess Margaret.
With its clever nonlinear structure, gruff alpha-male anti-hero (Jason Statham), and untrustworthy femme fatale (Saffron Burrows), The Bank Job seems at first a solid entry into the heist genre in the tradition of Rififi, Thief, and The Italian Job. But the tone shifts as the stakes rise, to a more serious and violent don’t-trust-anyone thriller a la the Bourne trilogy.
I’ve been a Kenneth Branagh fan ever since seeing the joyous trifle Much Ado About Nothing on a date with my first girlfriend in high school. Probably to my date’s dismay, it was also the moment I fell passionately in love with Emma Thompson. Later, I enjoyed his down and dirty Henry V, the Hitchcockian noir Dead Again, the over-the-top-and-beyond bombast of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and even met another future date at Hamlet. But As You Like It is decidedly lacking in Branagh’s proven flair for translating theatre to the medium of cinema. In the US at least, it was originally intended for theatrical release through Picturehouse, but went straight to HBO.
Having never read the play nor seen it performed, I’ll cop to having done a little cramming on Wikipedia, the 21st Century answer to Cliff’s Notes. Branagh has relocated the action from a French duchy to an enclave of expatriate Europeans in 19th century Japan, but to what advantage? There is little sense of a European community abroad in an alien land; in fact very few Asian actors appear at all, even in the background. A silently-staged ninja attack is a promising opening, but ultimately disappointing to arthouse audiences with highbrow wire-fu expectations raised after Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Rosalind & Celia’s pretty frocks
Obviously a low-budget film, As You Like It suffers in ways that similarly-priced movies made virtue. Stanley Tucci’s The Impostors, for example, made the cheap sets part of the fun, and beat Branagh by a few years to the device of an epilogue featuring an ensemble cast breaking the fourth wall by literally walking off-set and behind the camera.
Other miscellaneous disappointments:
There’s an over-reliance on long, clumsy steadycam takes, especially one fumbled shot in which Kevin Kline’s face is obscured throughout most of his delivery of the play’s most famous monologue: “All the world’s a stage…”
With a private English garden standing in for the forests of Japan, the overcast weather mutes the color palette. The most vibrant colors are the occasional blossoming tree and the pretty frocks worn by Rosalind (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Celia (Romola Garai).
Brian Blessed (a regular in Branagh’s company) doesn’t do nearly enough of his trademark shouting. Perhaps he was afraid to rupture the delicate Howard’s eardrums.
The omnipresent score is really, really bad.
And finally, As You Like It sports what must be the cheapest fake lion in cinema history; it was probably possible to stage something more convincing on the stage in Shakespeare’s day.
First, full disclosure: I work for the movie company that distributed The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. My miniscule role in marketing the film was limited to designing the official movie website, and I am under no obligation or prohibition to write this review (which happens to be positive, anyway). Any opinions expressed here are mine alone. I mostly avoid writing about movies released by my employer. I’m making a rare exception in this case because The King of Kong has been out of theaters for some time, and my personal opinion on this blog is certainly not going to have any impact on its revenue. Having just seen it again, I have a few thoughts I would like to record here.
I would hate to be an English teacher, at any level, for one reason: the countless “it’s a metaphor for life” papers I would have to grade. Probably one of the biggest cliches of kids’ essays is to pull out that refrain, e.g. “the light at the end of the dock in The Great Gatsby in a metaphor for life.” After grading a few dozen of those I just might want to start throwing things and switch to another career, like, say for example, web design.
Billy Mitchell with the ladies of Namco
That said, I’m about to commit that very grievous essay sin: if anything is a metaphor for life, it’s Donkey Kong. Let’s look at the evidence:
Donkey Kong is an intensely difficult game.
The game’s god/creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, did not supply it with a predefined ending.
The number of levels is undeclared at the outset.
Anyone with a quarter can play.
Most players die very quickly.
A very select few thrive and have their names entered into history.
How you play, not just how long you live, determines your score. In other words, you can reach the exact same point in the same level as somebody else but have a higher score.
Even the best of the best players cannot “win” the game; everyone will eventually drop dead without warning and through no gameplay fault of their own. This point has become known as the game’s “kill screen.”
That list of bullet points just about covers it; Donkey Kong is so clearly a metaphor for the human experience that the film thankfully doesn’t even bother to explicitly state its themes. Kids, let that be a lesson for all your future school essays.
The King of Kong (2007) Documentary
Directed by Seth Gordon
Shown: Steve Wiebe
The King of Kong is a very rousing film that works best to an audience; if possible, watch it with friends. From what I can gather, viewers respond to two basic things: the frankly weird subculture of professional video gaming, and the more universal story of the underdog vs. an entrenched power network. A suspicion is gaining traction that the story is too perfect, the hero Steve Wieve too all-american, and the villain Billy Mitchell too evil. The movie’s official message board (no longer online) features heated discussions including actual figures featured in the film, and documentarian Jason Scott has gone so far as to publish a passionate teardown of filmmakers’ ethics.
Personally, I wish the film had been more clear on a few points:
As you can read on the above links, Billy Mitchell’s well-timed taped submission may have seemed fishy but turned out to be genuine.
Most viewers (including myself) all ask the same question: how long does it take to play one of these “perfect” games? The movie finally discloses the answer incidentally near the end, as if the filmmakers weren’t deliberately withholding the information, but rather didn’t realize it was something viewers needed to know.
All in all, the subculture featured in the film is a truly unique bunch of people, and a great find by the filmmakers. Some of them may deserve a little mockery, but my favorite moment in the film goes to a Robert Mruczek, who describes how professional sports records are broken once in a lifetime, but he sees gaming records broken every day. And how exciting is that?
Chasing Amy is far and away Kevin Smith’s best film, and not coincidentally his most heartfelt. It’s not nothing to tell a universal guy’s story while still featuring significant and sympathetic female characters.
Yes, Chasing Amy is spectacularly profane and the characters are prone to giving extended on-the-nose speeches perfectly explicating their inner motivations, but the central theme is worthy and true: love can be a mixture of elevating another to a height to which you can’t measure up, while paradoxically needing to have them do the same to you. More literally, Holden (Ben Affleck) feels both fascinated and threatened by what he perceives as Alyssa’s (Joey Lauren Adams) more adventurous and worldly sexuality, but also needs to believe that he has power over her and has somehow tamed her.
Not one to pass up an opportunity to cite Jaws
Out of Smith’s oeuvre, the closest to Chasing Amy is Jersey Girl. But his personal meditations on fatherhood required more of his trademark raunch to offset the treacle than the PG-13 allowed. It did, however, feature the single cruelest joke I’ve ever heard: Andrew Lloyd Webber is “the second-worst thing that’s ever happened to New York City.” Zing! Nobody, not even Lloyd Webber, deserves that.
A far better writer than I has already been here and done that: please refer to Matthew Dessem’s review on The Criterion Contraption. I disagree with his obvious dislike of the film, but every point he makes against it is fair.
