Thinking Out Loud

Category: 3 Stars

Largely Ambivalent

  • The sour overpowers the sweet in About Last Night…

    The sour overpowers the sweet in About Last Night…

    Rating: 3 out of 5.

    Even though I think I have to casually give Edward Zwick’s About Last Night… only three stars here, there’s a lot to commend it. There’s no high concept or clever hook to slap on the poster: no one falls in love with their maid or the magnate destroying their small business, no one gets amnesia and falls in love with the wrong sibling from the wrong side of the tracks.

    “Get me a gin & tonic or I’ll kill you.”

    Joan (Elizabeth Perkins), About Last Night…

    As a sincere romantic dramedy built on top of a David Mamet play, About Last Night… can’t help but fight its schizophrenic nature. Mamet’s trademark macho aggression keeps piercing through, and the sourness often overpowers the sweet. Several Letterboxd reviews note that the film hasn’t aged well, and while I don’t disagree, I think it’s pretty clear that Bernie (Jim Belushi) is telegraphed as a pig, and if not a virgin, then at least a pathetically insecure liar. That the ostensibly more evolved Danny (Rob Lowe) entertains Bernie’s boasting is a sign of his naïveté, and Bernie’s bad influence is part of what causes his relationship with Debbie (Demi Moore) to fail.

    But just when you think this is a unicorn amongst donkeys — a rare non-H.E.A. — the coda in which Danny and Debbie reconcile, while still keeping everything else in their lives that led to their breakup, feels inauthentic. About Last Night… does not compare favorably to Marty (1955), where the protagonist rejects his toxic friends in favor of a healthy relationship with a woman he loves and respects.

  • The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is Terry Gilliam’s 8½

    The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is Terry Gilliam’s 8½

    If I hadn’t seen The Man Who Killed Don Quixote with my own eyes, I’d have trouble believing it exists. So Terry Gilliam has finally made his Quixote; but it might be more accurate to say that he finally made his 8½.

    In a way, Gilliam has been making this movie over and over for years. Longtime fans will recognize his longtime themes of guilt, unhealthy fantasy, escape, and delusion. His infamous, years-long struggle is cleverly written into the story. Adam Driver plays a film director reflexively hailed as a genius, but for a work so obscure that it is remarkable for it to surface in a bootleg copy — but yet somehow also so well-known that he is asked to superficially replicate it for a television commercial. I wonder if it was ever contemplated to incorporate the small amount of footage shot in 1998 with Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp, but I suspect the last thing anybody involved with this cursed project wanted was more legal issues.

    Jonathan Pryce and Terry Gilliam in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
    Terry Gilliam tempts fate, on the set of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

    I appreciate that while The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is extremely Gilliamesque in its themes, it is rarely egregiously so in its art direction. In the 1996 documentary The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys, Gilliam observed that by that point in his career, craftspeople were so aware of and influenced by his work that he found they could deliver Gilliamesque costumes, props, and sets without his input. Things escalated to the point of self-parody in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus‘ woozy digital phantasmagoria, but thankfully things here are once again mostly practical.

    Trivial perhaps, but if I may add a heartfelt complaint: a pox on Screen Media Films for authoring a blu-ray specifically designed to not remember where you stopped, and to disable the FFWD, NEXT, or MENU buttons during the trailers. I will never understand this kind of consumer hostility. Why punish the movie lovers who have paid to own or rent your film?

  • L.A. Takedown is the rough draft for Michael Mann’s masterpiece Heat

    L.A. Takedown is the rough draft for Michael Mann’s masterpiece Heat

    I finally, finally, finally had the opportunity to cross L.A. Takedown off my movie watchlist — a largely unavailable holy grail that I’ve been desperately curious to see for years.

    If director Michael Mann had not reworked this material into the masterpiece Heat, L.A. Takedown would probably be pushed so far down his IMDB or Letterboxd listings that it would get lost behind his more readily available TV work like Crime Story and Miami Vice. But for students of his work, L.A. Takedown is an incredibly fascinating relic; like reading a rough first draft of a well-known novel.

    It’s amazing to see how virtually the same material (plot, structure, character, and even exact dialogue) in the same order — including the deafening downtown LA shootout — can comprise the ingredients to both this and the polished near-perfection of Heat. There can’t be many precedents for this; maybe Alfred Hitchcock remaking his own The Man Who Knew Too Much?

    L.A. Takedown
    Director Michael Mann poses with the cast of L.A. Takedown.

    Aside from everything it shares with Heat, it’s just as interesting to consider what L.A. Takedown lacks:

    • 100% less Henry Rollins & Tone Loc, and it’s the poorer for it.
    • What I consider one of the key moments in Heat: Hanna (Al Pacino) spotting a sad woman alone in a car, and deducing that Neil (Robert De Niro) has seen the heat around the corner.
    • Acting. I know, ouch, right? The main cast is pretty blah (and hard to tell apart, to be honest), but in supporting roles: Michael Rooker! Xander Berkeley (who’s also in Heat)!
    • Another of Heat‘s unfair advantages: a killer soundtrack. But this does have the then-contemporary Jane’s Addiction live on stage, and an exclusive Billy Idol song, which isn’t too shabby for a TV movie.

    It’s also difficult to imagine a time when US TV networks would finance and produce a violent, handheld, and hard boiled movie like this — any movie at all, really, even if it was originally intended as a backdoor series pilot episode. I’m not even sure what the hook or selling point would be for a casual 1980s TV audience, but I’m sure it’s no accident that L.A. Takedown has more of a “just desserts” moralistic ending than Heat.

  • Motherless Brooklyn is a civics lesson wrapped in an actorly exercise

    Motherless Brooklyn is a civics lesson wrapped in an actorly exercise

    I understand the generally negative reception that Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn encountered, but I didn’t dislike it for two very mundane reasons:

    1. I happened to watch it in the middle of binging HBO’s Perry Mason miniseries (with which it coincidentally happens to have a great deal in common), and frankly, Motherless Brooklyn comes out on top. Perry Mason‘s unrelenting dour tone and gruesome violence could have used a dose of Motherless Brooklyn‘s lightness and humor.

    2. I recognized at least one location as being just a few blocks from my apartment. Funny how a few simple props like a vintage phone booth and some old newspapers can zap a Brooklyn street decades into the past.

    But yes, Motherless Brooklyn is not great in and of itself. Ed Norton’s performance is little more than an actorly exercise, and it’s bewildering how many other characters his character Lionel meets are so patient and understanding of his tics. Alec Baldwin’s growly performance is more The Simpsons‘ Mr. Burns than Glengarry Glen Ross. And for a movie about racist civic policies, it’s awkward for it to feature Michael K. Williams as the apparently unnamed “Trumpet Man”, a character dangerously close to magical black person cliche.

  • Interstellar is a yet another time twisty Nolan scenario

    Interstellar is a yet another time twisty Nolan scenario

    The torturously complex premise of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar requires a constant stream of exposition throughout, something I don’t recall being a problem in the director’s other time twisty scenarios like The Prestige and Inception. It’s also less emotionally urgent than either, perhaps indicating that the high-concept structure overwhelmed everything else.

    If Coop (Matthew McConaughey) — and by proxy, the audience — needs to have everything constantly explained to him (before, during, and after anything happens), maybe he’s not the right person for the job. I know, I know, he’s the pilot, and realistically each member of such a crew would have their area of expertise. But perhaps the protagonist of the film, and the one that is most lauded by humanity at the end, should have been either Murph (Jessica Chastain) or Amelia (Anne Hathaway).

    And I think maybe we were supposed to feel sentimental affection for the robots? I couldn’t even tell you how many there were.

  • Elisabeth Moss has a villain problem in The Invisible Man

    Elisabeth Moss has a villain problem in The Invisible Man

    For a movie named after the antagonist, Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man has a villain problem.

    At one point, Cecelia (Elisabeth Moss) asks an interesting question: her husband is famous and wealthy, and can have anyone — so why her? In one question, she essentially admits her longstanding insecurity at having a handsome rich man choose her for marriage, and also gets at the more pressing anxiety: why continue to fixate on her after the end of everything? Why go to such extreme lengths to torture and entrap her? Why not just let her go?

    The movie’s answer seems to simply be: because he’s crazy. He’s not exactly like the Joker in The Dark Knight, who wants to watch the world burn just for the sake of it, but more like the loony villain in Skyfall whose absurdly complex revenge scheme isn’t because he’s diabolically clever but because he’s just plain nuts.

    Here’s a free thesis idea for film theory students: compare/contrast movies about men who may or may not be going insane (Shutter Island, Shock Corridor, Jacob’s Ladder), vs. those about women (Repulsion, Unsane, Horse Girl).

    Forget about the advanced optics in the invisibility suit – the real money must be in that amazing floorboard-creaking-prevention tech, right?

  • Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die is an unaffectionate homage

    Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die is an unaffectionate homage

    I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that Jim Jarmusch would make a zombie movie, since he’s already cycled through idiosyncratic interpretations of westerns (Dead Man), vampires (Only Lovers Left Alive), samurai (Ghost Dog), and thrillers (The Limits of Control). But unlike these, The Dead Don’t Die reads as an unaffectionate (or to coin a word, disaffectionate) homage to its genre.

    Directly quoting Night of the Living Dead and Return of the Living Dead, The Dead Don’t Die initially seems to be taking a nostalgic poke at contemporary interpretations of the genre: be they the frenetic 28 Days Later rabid variety, or the mopey end-times soap opera of The Walking Dead. But Jarmusch takes the inherent nihilism of the zombie horror subgenre to its logical end: there is no “post-” after the apocalypse, and zombie movies are dumb and you’re dumb for watching them.

    Iggy Pop in The Dead Don't Die
    Iggy Pop as Coffee Zombie, with whom I think many of us can relate.

    The cast is notably diverse in race, age, and gender (at times looking like the most Jarmusch that ever Jarmusched, with just enough room for delights like Iggy Pop as Coffee Zombie, Carol Kane as Chardonnay Zombie, and Tom Waits as Hermit Bob). But while The Walking Dead has vague themes of the apocalypse being the great socioeconomic leveler, here it’s part of a cynical joke. It’s hard not to interpret the casting of Tilda Swinton as a scotswoman in samurai kitsch as an allusion to her role in the Disney/Marvel appropriation of an asian comic book character in Doctor Strange.

    Fittingly, her subplot builds to a glancing swipe at sci-fi/superhero blockbusters, with the iconic Star Wars Star Destroyer reduced to a tchotchke keychain wielded by its star Adam Driver, and then inflated back up into a dinner-plate flying saucer straight out of Plan 9 From Outer Space. Zombies and spaceships are taken seriously by millions as part of a modern mythos, but from the condescending perspective of Swinton’s woman-who-fell-to-earth, it’s all naught but “a wonderful fiction”.

  • 1917 is not the first single-take movie, but it’s one of the best

    1917 is not the first single-take movie, but it’s one of the best

    Every review or casual comment about 1917, from pan to praise, will all begin with the same undeniable fact: it’s an astounding technical achievement. While far from the first apparent single-take feature-length film, it’s certainly one of the most seamless.

    Better, the feat is partially insulated from charges of gimmickry in that the structure derives directly from the urgency of the plot. There’s an essay waiting to be written about how both Sam Mendes and Christopher Nolan approached the venerable war film genre in the 21st Century: by experimenting with structure and time.

    Claire Duburcq in 1917

    A couple things took me out of the experience:

    1. The very intrusive score. Often so overbearing that I suspected the filmmakers doubted the power of their imagery. One particular example being Schofield’s (George MacKay) mad run across the battlefield being accompanied by a pounding rock score, when surely the shells, screaming, and guns would have been more effective.
    2. Sentimental war movie cliches, most notably coming across a pretty young woman in the middle of a battlefield.
    3. Casting movie stars as the various superiors the soldiers encounter throughout the film has some deleterious effects: it’s distracting when the two leads are relative unknowns, it calls attention to an episodic structure, and it relies too much on melodramatic camera reveals (holding the lens on Mark Strong’s boot for so long seemed a bit rich).
    4. An unimaginative, unevocative title. These are not perfect analogies, but imagine if Platoon had been titled 1967, or if M*A*S*H had been 1951.
  • What makes Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds unique also sabotages it

    What makes Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds unique also sabotages it

    Although easily overlooked among the Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise filmographies, I actually rather enjoy their 2005 War of the Worlds remake.

    Unfortunately, what makes it unique also sabotages it:

    It’s practically a requirement for the alien invasion genre that the protagonist be the big hero that saves the world. Refreshingly, Cruise’s character here is just a blue-collar guy trying to survive, minute-to-minute. Trying his best, making errors of judgement, and sometimes just wearily trudging along from incident to incident along with crowds of fellow refugees. Compare and contrast with the hyper-competent expert he typically plays: the world’s premiere spy, race car driver, or fighter pilot.

    Tim Robbins, Tom Cruise, and Dakota Fanning in War of the Worlds

    Although I’ll bet Cruise probably performed much of his own stunts as usual here, the film isn’t structured around major set pieces like much of his later work. Instead of watching Cruise actually jump out of an airplane, free climb, or crash a motorcycle, here he’s mostly seen operating shipping cranes and running away from stuff.

    [spoilers for a 120 year old novel] The premise of the source material is inherently uncinematic, even if it is quoted directly in the prelude and coda by one of cinema’s greatest voices, Morgan Freeman. It’s just plain strange that no one from the creative, financial, or distribution teams insisted on reworking the material to give humanity (if not Cruise’s character himself) a more active role in defeating the aliens.

    It’s also infected with that weird ultra-grainy cinematography in vogue at the time. I blame Ridley Scott for that, most evident in Hannibal and Black Hawk Down.

  • Taika Waititi mocks the devil in Jojo Rabbit

    Taika Waititi mocks the devil in Jojo Rabbit

    Perhaps unfairly, a couple external factors negatively affected my experience of Jojo Rabbit:

    The Brooklyn Alamo Drafthouse programmed the trailer for Terrence Malick’s forthcoming A Hidden Life before Jojo Rabbit, throwing a spotlight on the “good German” trope they both share. Of course, both quiet and loud German resistance to Nazi atrocities existed, and I’m not trying to argue that there shouldn’t be any more stories about it — after all, the ne plus ultra is required viewing for all: Schindler’s List.

    Jojo Rabbit‘s darkly satirical take is undoubtedly a fresh twist, but still: the trope threatens to mute the experiences of the victims. Taika Waititi is working here in the long and noble tradition of mocking the devil, and for that I applaud him. But the contemporaneous AMC TV show Preacher also had the nerve to directly depict and poke fun at Hitler, so it’s not exactly unique.

    Scarlett Johansson in JoJo Rabbit

    The casting of Sam Rockwell as a conflicted Nazi, which inadvertently (or not?) echoes his role as a tortured racist in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri. Again, it’s not like “bad” people don’t do “good” things, but in our present era, with white supremacy re-empowered around the world, I’m disinclined to entertain the notion of an even partially-redeemed Nazi. As a climactic moment in a fiction, this particular character’s act of mercy feels designed to make audiences feel better, rather than ponder the larger problem.

    As a thought experiment: I’d rather watch a movie about the successful intervention in the life of a budding child fascist than the opposite. But I spent the entire movie distracted by these minefields rather than taking the movie on its own terms.

    So as not to only complain: Jojo Rabbit an extremely funny and well-made film, with great acting all around — including one of Scarlett Johansson‘s strongest-ever performances — so good that I wonder where she’s been all these years.