They Live

Okay, I’ll say it.  I submit that John Carpenter's They Live is not a very good movie.  It’s not a disaster: it features a great premise, a tight screenplay, and a stable of solid supporting actors. 

But those laudable elements can’t help They Live conform to anything like a pattern for a good movie.  It has low production values, a cheap synth soundtrack that will put you to sleep, a simplistic political viewpoint requiring next to no thought, and a wooden lead performer.

Everyone may love star Roddy Piper in Hell Comes to Frogtown, but I didn’t buy him here.  He comes across like an amateur, desperate to remember his lines and hit his marks, and I never once believed that his character was an actual human.

Yet, They Live really does get the most out of its premise.  It features great monster design, some iconic imagery, and more than enough chuckles to keep things light as you watch TV.  I don’t know how much media you consume; even though They Live isn’t very good, however, you may want to put this one on the menu.

Trouble with the Curve

“Hey, Alex.  Whatcha watchin’?”

“Trouble with the Curve.  Clint Eastwood plays a salty old baseball scout whose eyesight is going.  Amy Adams is his daughter.  She works for an uptight law firm, has issues with her dad, and has a boyfriend who is clearly The Wrong Guy.  Justin Timberlake just showed up; he’s going to be her new love interest and win her heart from The Wrong Guy.  I’m not sure whether it’ll be before or after she works things out with Clint and quits her job at the firm.”

“Oh.  How far along are you?”

“About ten minutes.  I know where the movie’s going, but that’s ok.  A movie like this, it’s all in the execution.”

And I’m happy to report that Trouble with the Curve executes very nicely.  Featuring a supporting cast led by John Goodman and some of the best character actors in the business (Ed Lauter, George Wyner, Bob Gunton, Matthew Lillard, Robert Patrick, etc.), this by-the-numbers family drama succeeds on the basis of its unobtrusive direction, solid production values, and excellent performances.  It isn’t flashy, but it looks nice, covers the bases, and gives us an excuse to spend ninety minutes or so with a bunch of good people who are trying to do the right thing.  Heck, it even features a “roadhouse” scene in which Adams and Timberlake try to convince us that they can’t really dance.  

This film played out just as I thought it would, but it did so with satisfying professionalism.  If you’re tired of watching computer animations of demigods punching one another, you can’t go wrong with Trouble with the Curve.

Wild

Wild tells the true-ish story of  Cheryl Strayed, a troubled woman who sets out to through-hike the Pacific Crest Trail and, in a sense, wipe her personal slate clean.  It’s wonderful, not just for the effective and deft way it tells Strayed’s internal story, but for its depiction of the experience of backpacking the PCT.

As it happens, I grew up in town just off the PCT, a trail that runs all the way from California’s Mexican border to Washington’s Canada border.  Every spring, through-hikers would descend on my town, standing in line to pick up packages at the post office, hitching rides to the store, and generally catching their breath before heading on up the trail.  I, personally, have logged more miles than I can remember on the trail, both backpacking and working on maintenance projects as part of various Eagle Scout projects.  In other words, like Wings of the Navy, Wild tells a story about my personal world.

And it nails it.  When she begins her journey, Strayed has no idea what she’s doing.  She makes all the rookie mistakes: she overpacks, she fails to field-test her gear before starting out, she buys the wrong boots, and so on.  As a guy who has also made all of those rookie mistakes, the first act played (for me) like a horror movie: what disaster would this character bring upon herself next?  But slowly, across the miles and with a little help along the way, Strayed figures it out.  She sheds all the crap that isn’t doing her any good.  She learns how to take care of herself.  She finds her strength.  The film goes from horror-show to powerful character study, and before we know it we aren’t watching a movie about a woman walking in the woods, but about a woman walking out of her past.

This is powerful stuff, aided by a keen eye for technical detail, a genuine affection for the PCT and its through-hikers, and sure knowledge of what it’s about.  Wild is worth the trip.

Enough Said

Enough Said is a charming romantic comedy anchored by two engaging leads.  Julia Louis-Dreyfus turns in excellent work as the protagonist, and James Gandolfini makes for a surprisingly effective love interest.  Add to this a supporting cast that includes Toni Collette (CDNW) and Katherine Keener, and you get 90 or so minutes with interesting, complex people whom you’re happy to meet.

Louis-Dreyfus plays a remarkably affluent massage therapist, driving from appointment to appointment in her immaculate little Prius and living in the kind of nice little rancher that’s dotted across Los Angeles and Orange counties, and that goes for roughly $600k as of January, 2016.  Gandolfini plays a remarkably affluent archivist, working in a reconditioned warehouse, driving an Audi, and living in another roughly $600k home.  Keener’s a poet who somehow lives in a million dollar mission-style place in Santa Monica, and Collette’s a therapist who actually lives in the kind of home a therapist to the wealthy could conceivably afford.

But enough about the fact that everyone in this movie, apart from Collette, should be living in dumpy apartments in Torrance.  This is a fantasy – a fantasy in which working people get to live like rich people, and that’s ok.  More importantly, this is a romantic comedy, and both Louis-Dreyfus and Gandolfini do fine jobs selling both the romance and the comedy.  They play adults – a little damaged, trying to get along – who find one another.  Complications ensue, as they must, and they’re played with just the right touch.  Consequently, Enough Said delivers just what one could want from such a film.  I smiled; I got a little choked up; I didn’t want it to end.  Really, what more could one want?

Calvary

Calvary is rough going.

The film begins with an Irish priest (Brendan Gleeson) sitting in confessional.  He’s listening to a man recount his tale of having been raped by a priest at the age of seven.  Then he hears the man say that since the rapist is long dead, the man will take the life of one good priest in a week’s time.  Brendan Gleeson is the good priest.

One could go a lot of places with a story like this.  It could be a pre-murder mystery.  It could be a meditation on faith.  It could be a thriller.  This film’s approach, however, is right there in the title: Calvary.  This is The Passion of the Christ, with the scorn of an Irish village and the sting of cruel words taking the place of the scorn of Jerusalem and the sting of the lash.

You see, this is an Ireland reeling from financial meltdown and revelations of years of sexual abuse at the hands of the clergy.  The people of our priest’s little town have not only lost faith, they’ve turned actively hostile to faith, actively hostile to the church, actively hostile to our priest.

And in the middle of it all, walking his own road to Calvary, our priest struggles to maintain his own dignity, his own faith, his own love.  He’s miserable.

On one level then, we can view Calvary as an exercise in making Brendan Gleeson unhappy.  On another, however, we can see it as a story of the very toughest part of Christianity: the imperative to actively love people who may actively hate you.  As such, Calvary has much to offer the devout viewer.

But that viewer is going to have to work for it.  This is not a film for the faint of heart or faith.

Spy

I’ve been slow to climb aboard the Melissa McCarthy bandwagon.  Her performance in Bridesmaids reminded me of Chris Farley, who made a string a successful movies built around fat jokes.  Sadly, Farley was consumed with self-loathing, and the drugs to which he turned eventually killed him.  Thus, it felt cruel to go to the movies just to laugh at the fat lady.  Cruelty is not my idea of a good time.

And yet, there I was: stuck in Coach on a long flight, having already seen most of the pictures the in-flight entertainment system had to offer.  I remembered that Spy garnered good reviews, so I decided to give it a (skeptical) shot.

I laughed all the way through Spy, from the first silly gag involving bats in the CIA Comm Center through the silly gags involving various sequel ideas that played through the closing credits.  Spy is not 90 minutes of laughing at the fat lady.  It’s 90 minutes of laughing with the clever, capable woman who just happens to be a little larger than normal.  Oh, and lots of laughing at Jason Statham.  Jason Statham.  Who knew?

Here’s the setup: McCarthy is a “back room” CIA agent along the lines of Mission: Impossible’s Simon Pegg.  Like Pegg, she winds up doing field work even though nobody (including her) thinks she’s up to the task.  Like Pegg, she turns out to be awesome.

Spy, of course, plays this setup entirely for laughs.  To do so, it recruits a murderer’s row of some of the finest supporting talent working in movies today, from Jude Law to Rose Byrne to Bobby Cannavale to Morena Baccarin to Peter Sarafinowicz to Allison Janney.  And this isn’t the kind of movie in which various big name supporting actors just turn up to cash a paycheck: each of them endows his or her character with enough personality, enough life, to make every moment pop.  Even the Big Bad, while dangerous enough to present a credible threat within the context of the film, exhibits just enough silliness to put a smile on our face.

I loved this movie.  Spy is raunchy and goofy and laugh-out-loud funny from beginning to end, and it’s all that not only without demeaning its star, but with making her absolutely awesome.  Writer/Director Paul Feig nails it, and I’m now firmly aboard the Melissa McCarthy bandwagon.  I can’t wait to see what the two of them do with Ghostbusters.

Crimson Peak

Crimson Peak is marvelous, if you like that sort of thing.

That is, if you like haunted mansions.

If you like downright evil, hiss-able villains.

If you like tortured villains.

If you like virtuous, brave heroines.

If you like virtuous, brave heroes.

If you like sumptuous costuming and set design.

If you like Wuthering Heights in particular, and Brontë novels in general.

If you like House of Usher in particular, and Vincent Price movies in general.

If you like Mia Wasikowska, and Jim Beaver, and Jessica Chastain, and Tom Hiddleston, and Charlie Dunham.

If you like slow-burn horror.

If you like jump scares.

If you like movies.

If you like that sort of thing, Crimson Peak is marvelous.

Focus

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR FOCUS AHEAD.  This is a “con” movie, so these spoilers could ruin things.  Nevertheless, I don’t think I can write about the film without spoiling it.  Sorry.

Ok.  You’ve been warned.

I have three problems with Focus.  First, it’s a con movie without a long con, only shorter cons that keep the action moving.  Second, it has a romantic element that’s kind of creepy.  Third, costar Margot Robbie, while particularly attractive, is not a particularly good actress.

First, the con.  Early in the film, Smith specifically tells Robbie to misdirect, to deceive, to make the con so invisible to the mark that the mark doesn’t trip until the con man is far away.  It worked on me, because I was misdirected.  I spent the whole movie focused on Robbie, trying to sniff out her misdirections and the long con she had to be pulling on Smith.  But, alas, there was no long con.  What kind of a con movie leaves out the long con, the one in which the student outwits the master?  Or, at least, the one in which the student thinks she’s outwitted the master, only to find out she’s been the mark all along.  Alas, no.  Focus starts out a promising film about the art of the con, but ultimately it just fizzles out into another BS love story.  And there I was, staying focused for 90 minutes for no reason whatsoever.  I mean, c'mon.  It's right there in the title: the imperative Focus.  If you aren't going to follow through on your title, why bother?

Second, the romantic element.  Will Smith is too old to be playing Margot Robbie’s love interest.  His character is supposed to be completely together, but how emotionally and intellectually stunted does a guy have to be to go for someone who never saw Ghostbusters on the big screen?  This whole element of the film creeped me out, as if it were the collective wish fulfillment of a bunch of old men in the entertainment industry.

Third, Robbie has this scene in which she’s supposed to break down and cry.  She can’t quite pull this off, so she does that thing where she covers her face with her hands and just sorta heaves her shoulders up and down a few times.  I don’t care how attractive an actress is: if she isn’t willing to learn her craft, I’m not willing to spend 90 minutes watching her.

So, there you have it: no long con, no compelling love story, one poor performance in a major role.  Focus on another film.

The Best Offer

The Best Offer could as easily been entitled Geoffrey Rush is a Really Good Actor.  In the film, Rush plays an art and antiques valuator and auctioneer with a tightly controlled, distant life.  He is his work, and he is very little else.

Until, that is, he meets a girl.

Once he meets a girl, the plot kicks in.  It’s a perfectly fine, if heavy handed, tale, but the tale isn’t the draw of The Best Offer.  The draw of this film is the opportunity to watch Rush assay a particular kind of solitary gentleman, then to watch him develop this character into a three-dimensional man.  He really is breathtaking, even if the film he’s in begins to fade from memory mere days after its viewing.  I do enjoy Geoffrey Rush.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen

The Bitter Tea of General Yen is a melodrama set in 1920s China, the late warlord period in which various factions vied for power while Japan quietly built its strength across the sea.  It involves a young missionary woman, a crafty warlord, and the collision of idealism with the practical requirements of power.

A very young Barbara Stanwyck plays the idealistic missionary woman (more of a girl, really, but I don’t think Barbara Stanwyck was ever truly a girl – she was probably the savviest young woman in the second grade), and Nils Asther plays General Yen.  Either Stanwyck is miscast or I just can’t get over the impact of movies like Ball of Fire and Double Indemnity.  I just didn’t buy her idealism, and she can’t quite sell a religious speech on which the movie’s story hinges.  Asther makes a fine general, charming and ruthless, but I couldn’t help but be distracted by the fact that he was a made-up European guy surrounded by an Asian supporting cast.

Since I never bought into the female lead’s character, I never could quite suspend my disbelief and buy into the movie.  Yes, the photography was lovely, as were the sets and costumes.  If nothing else, Ms. Stanwyck was always a pleasure to watch.  But when the spell doesn’t work, we’re left with nothing but pictures and sound.  I wanted to love The Bitter Tea of General Yen, but it didn’t work for me.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation pits Tom Cruise and his pals against SPECTRE KAOS HYDRA SMERSH COBRA FOWL VILE SCORPIO – aw, jeez, guys.  “The Syndicate?”  You’re putting them up against “The Syndicate?”  I could come up with five better names for evil organizations right off the top of my head:  1. SPAWN (Special Project for Anarchy, War, and Nachos (seriously, those things are really bad for you)); 2. OUCH (Organization to Undermine Capitalist Hypocrisy); 4.  MTI (Moustache Twirlers International); 5. The Bay City Rollers.  Honestly, this stuff isn’t hard.

Fortunately, choosing a boring moniker for the villains appears to be the only serious shortcut taken by this latest entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise.  Here’s a spy fantasy with a cleverly written script, well-shot action set pieces, cool gadgets, a beautiful heroine, and movie star’s movie star Tom Cruise busting his tukkas in one incredible stunt sequence after another.  This movie has exotic locales,  gymkata, motorcycle chases, gunfights, even a hacker character pushing a big red button – I mean, it has it all.  Best of all, it has laugh-out loud humor, a wonderful sense of fun, and absolutely world-class production values.  

While it can’t boast a sequence that tops the amazing Burj Khalifa bit from Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol, this entry in the series delivers everything one could possibly hope for from this kind of film.  If you like this genre, I don’t see how you could possibly not enjoy Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation.

How to Train Your Dragon 2

Man, I just reviewed Paddington, which will probably make my yearly Top Ten.  How do you follow that?

Well, you could do worse than How to Train Your Dragon 2, a CGI action-adventure with beautiful animation, thrilling set-pieces, and touching emotional beats.

The film follows the continuing adventures of Hiccup and Toothless, a rider / dragon team, and the rest of the members of their Viking village as they seek to spread peace and love for dragonkind throughout their stylized version of Scandinavia.

Yes, there’s a villain.  And yes, there are more and bigger dragons, and yes, the stakes are (expectedly) higher in the sequel than in the original.  Ho hum.  Nevertheless, it’s all in the execution, and How to Train your Dragon 2 executes the material at the very highest level.  This is a wonderful adventure, technically awesome yet with a beating heart.

It just isn’t Paddington.  I think I should have watched a couple of episodes of Breaking Bad to cleanse my palate, because it turns out that a gentle little movie about a talking bear was one hard act to follow.

Paddington

Paddington is a carefully crafted, well intentioned, entirely adorable movie that my whole family enjoyed.  If you’re the kind of person who won’t see a kids’ movie without kids present, go make or find some and sit them down for Paddington.

Here’s the setup: Paddington is a walking, talking anthropomorphic bear who journeys from darkest Peru to modern London, there to find a family who will love him.  Upon his arrival, he meets the Browns, led by Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville (who got my wife’s attention) and Sally Hawkins (who got mine).

[A quick aside about my feelings for Sally Hawkins: I first noticed her in Happy-Go-Lucky, in which she played a willfully cheerful and optimistic woman who, even though she often exasperated those around her, raised spirits and souls through her example.  Next, I saw her in Made in Dagenham, in which she played a union organizer of uncommon wiliness and determination.  Sally Hawkins could play Hannibal Lecter, and I’d root for her to find a particularly charming Chianti.]

Mr. Brown’s not too keen on inviting a bear into his home, but Mrs. Brown overrules him and opens the door, much to the delight of their boy and horror of their girl.  What follows is a lovely story of a little bear trying to fit in, trying to find a home, and trying to elude the devilish taxidermist / commando / all-around villain Nicole Kidman.

[Another aside, this time about actors, villains, and children’s movies: You can tell a lot about an actor by how he or she approaches the role of villain in a children’s movie.  On the one hand, you look at David Cross in Alvin and the Chipmunks.  He’s clearly slumming it, holding his nose while he goes through the motions and collects the paycheck.  On the other, you admire the gold standard: Peter Dinklage in Underdog.  Dinklage understands that a serious actor can take portraying a comic villain in a children’s film seriously, hitting just the right balance of menace and harmlessness.  It is hard to do, and only the best can pull it off.]

Ms. Kidman makes for a wonderful comic villain: evil enough to give the climax real stakes, yet icily silly enough to avoid actually frightening young viewers.  She measures up to the Dinklage Standard of age-appropriate villainy, turning in her best performance since The Others.  It helps that she has the good taste to recruit, for a henchman, the wonderful Peter Capaldi (In the Loop) – another actor who absolutely nails it.

I sense a theme emerging.  Producer David Heyman lined up top talent for Paddington, from voice actors like Ben Whishaw, Imelda Staunton, and Michael Gambon, to the onscreen performers I’ve noted above.  The talent lineup, however, doesn’t stop with the cast.  Paddington the Bear, himself, is a wonder of computer animated and practical effects.  Falling somewhere between photorealistic and teddy bear, he’s like a real bear, but with the rough edges sanded down and wearing an adorable hat.  The costuming, the set design, the color palette, everything about this film is captivating, serving to create a world just real enough to keep things grounded, yet magical enough to whisk us away. 

In short, Paddington is a wonderful, wonderful film.  Bravo to director Paul King and everyone who came together to make this gem.  I loved it.

Ant-Man

Walking out of Ant-Man, my oldest engaged me in the following conversation:

“Whadja think, Dad?”

“It was fine.”

“Why didn’t you like it?”

“I did like it.  It was fine.”

“But not good.  What was wrong with it?”

“Nothing.  It was fine.”

It really was fine.  It starred Michael Douglas and Paul Rudd, both of whom are always welcome presences.  It featured solid supporting work from Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Bobby Cannavale, Judy Greer, and especially Michael Peña.  I laughed at the jokes.  I grooved to the visuals.  I lost track of time.

However, Ant-Man never entirely captured my imagination.  It set itself up as a caper movie, then paid off the caper at the end of the second act and segued into just another superhero fistfight picture.  Granted, Ant-Man has some fun with this trope by setting the fight on a toy train (the combatants are ant-sized, after all).  However, this just led me to wonder why the villain’s laser beams blow up the train set’s wooden models, as opposed to simply burning holes through them.  Were the models filled with gunpowder and gasoline?  Who makes toys like that?  And at what point were we supposed to find dog-sized (relative to the protagonist) ants charming, instead of revolting and scary?

Perhaps I’m tiring of the genre for the same reason I never got into superhero comics in the first place.  The outfits and motivations may change from title to title, but they all seem to boil down to the same thing: men in silly costumes punching one another.  I’d just as soon watch one of the better Rocky movies.

That said, the actors *are* fun to watch.  The jokes *do* land.  The visuals *are* cool.  I really did lose track of time.  Ant Man is by no means a bad movie.  It’s pleasant.  It’s fun.

I liked it.

It was fine.

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

If you enjoyed The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, I have good news for you.  The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel offers another ninety minutes with the first film’s delightful cast.  These ninety minutes are warm, they’re cozy, and they offer more than a few opportunities to wipe your eyes.

The story picks up perhaps a year after the close of the first film.  Your favorite regulars remain at the hotel, and Sonny & Sunaina are preparing for their impending marriage.  There’s a primary story involving a hoped-for acquisition of a second property and the threat of a rival for Sunaina’s affections, but the magic of The Second Exotic Marigold Hotel happens around the periphery of that story, as the hotel’s pensioners and assorted guest stars live their own small dramas.

So, the question to ask yourself is simple:  Did you enjoy spending time with Judy Dench & Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith & Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup & Diana Hardcastle, and assorted other stars familiar to those who spend a lot of time watching PBS and BBCA during The Exotic Marigold Hotel?  I did, and I thoroughly enjoyed spending another ninety minutes with them.  I look forward to The Third Exotic Marigold Hotel.

Her

Her is the kind of movie that makes me love movies.  It’s a challenging piece of science fiction, a moving drama, and a piece that illuminates the human condition.  It’s brilliant.

The film, set in a washed out, near-future Los Angeles, follows an emotionally damaged man, one reeling from divorce, as he tries to reconstruct his life.  He downloads a new, artificially intelligent, operating system on his computer.  It cares about him.  It understands him.  It sounds like Scarlett Johansson.  Of course, he falls in love.

The AI, self-named Samantha seems real.  In some ways, she is real.  But she isn’t corporeally there.  She isn’t human.  What kind of a life has this man, brilliantly portrayed by Joachim Phoenix, bought into?  What kind of connection can he sustain with a glowing screen and a voice in an earpiece?

We could see this film simply as a wry commentary on the smartphone generation, but I think it has more to say.  I think it’s a commentary on all the things that draw us from human connection: our obsessions, our hobbies, our games - whatever it is that beckons us away from those who do, or those who would, love us. 

Her, however, isn’t just vehicle for late-night navel-gazing.  It’s also a finely crafted, beautifully performed and scored drama that quietly, subtly draws us in and invests us not only in the emotional life of Mister Phoenix, but in that of Johansson’s disembodied voice.  You could plug Her into your device of choice, plug that device into your car stereo, and just listen to it on a long drive – I suspect you may have an even more moving an experience than did I, watching it on a laptop in an airport lounge.

In short, Her is a thing of beauty, not to be missed.  I want to watch it again – this time, with people.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Because I’m a good father, I sat down with my 8-year-old and showed him Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

 

Revisiting it for the first time in well over a decade, I’ve come to the conclusion that while it’s a great movie, it isn’t a particularly good movie.

It’s great in the sense of, “Having a long-term influence and presence in the public consciousness.”  Nevertheless, it has some serious problems.  There’s a voiceover which distracts us and pulls us out of the movie.  There’s an uneven performance from Edward Furlong, the preadolescent actor playing the young John Connor.  The dialogue seems functional, at best, and everything moves at such a stately pace that my young’n lost focus for much of the second act.

Nevertheless, there are some wonderful things about this film.  Robert Patrick, as the next generation Terminator sent to provide this story with an antagonist, is marvelously deadpan.  The special effects hold up today and keep us in the story.  And Arnold, well, he’s Arnold.  The guy’s a movie star for a reason, and that reason is that his magnetic screen presence raises anything he’s in.

Still, I’m glad I saw it again and I’m glad I shared it with my boy.  I wonder when he’ll be old enough for The French Connection.

The Croods; Rush; A Most Wanted Man

The Croods

The Croods is fine.  It’s pretty, it tells a nice story, and its voice cast includes personal favorites Nicholas Cage, Emma Stone, and Cloris Leachman.

That’s about all I can say for it, however.  I didn’t laugh.  I didn’t cry.  I just sorta rocked along pleasantly for an hour and half.  That ain’t bad.  It ain’t great, either.  It’s fine.  No, really.  It’s fine.

Rush

I spent the first hour or so of Rush not enjoying the movie.  Like Amadeus, the film sets up a conflict between a natural talent (Chris Hemsworth, a British Formula One driver) and a grinder (Daniel Brühl, his Austrian nemesis (the actor also appears in A Most Wanted Man, discussed below)).   Thing is, I identified with the grinder. Hemsworth’s character put my teeth on edge.

Then the movie took an unexpected turn, went in an entirely different direction than I’d expected, and made me hold my breath, tense in sympathy to the action onscreen, and hang on every twist and turn of the competitors’ races.

I feel like I started out with Days of Thunder and finished with something wonderful.  Rush is the most surprising movie I’ve seen this year. 

A Most Wanted Man

Some deaths get to you, even if you never really knew the person in question.  I still miss Phil Hartman.  I miss Philip Seymour Hoffman.

In A Most Wanted Man, Hoffman plays the Hamburg chief of a small German intelligence organization occupied with hunting terrorists.  The film, based on a John le Carré novel, occupies itself not with fast cars and gadgets, but with the nondescript, dedicated, and frequently exhausted people who actually make the intelligence community go.  Hoffman, overweight, disheveled, and brilliant, is a perfect match for this world.  His character belongs in dimly lit bars, crafting plans and making deals, and I believed in him every step of the way.

The plot?  Well, it’s a le Carré story, so it features twists and surprises and a kind of mundane weariness that feels all the more immediate because we can imagine it happening right in the next booth over.

The effect?  Well, mostly sadness.  Sadness for the characters in the story, but particular sadness for the loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of our generation’s great actors and a talent that I’m sure to miss for a long time to come.

Back to the Future

Last week, my wife and I screened Back to the Future for our three boys.  It was a fun idea.  In the film, young Marty McFly travels 30 years into the past and meets his parents when they were his age.  Back to the Future, of course, was released 30 years ago, both my wife and I saw it then, and now here we were, playing the parents, sharing it with our kids.

Call it time travel on a budget.

Seeing it again after all these years, I’ve noticed a few things that may have escaped me the first time around.  #1, Christopher Lloyd absolutely runs away with this movie, pulling faces and injecting every line with a delightful combination of zaniness and earnestness.  There is not a moment he’s onscreen when he is not the animating force of the film.  #2, Michael J. Fox is an incredibly gifted comic actor.  His Marty McFly brings to the story just the right combination of desperation, exasperation, coolness, and kindness to make him the character whom we not only root for, but whom we actively want to be.  #3, Crispin Glover is a remarkably strange person.  Even when he’s playing “cool dad” at the end of the film, there’s just not getting around how odd he is.  #4.  Biff Tannen killed Tom Wilson’s career.  The character is so evil, as opposed to comic-evil, that he seems airlifted in from another movie.  He’s not just a cartoonish thug, a foil for the good guys.  He’s a drunk driver, a rapist, a sadist, and a serious threat to the well-being of those around him.  In fact, he’s so scary that I felt compelled to stop the movie for a few minutes and show my children Wilson’s YouTube video of his “Questions” song.  Sure, they knew that Biff was only a character in a movie, but I thought they needed to see the actor cracking jokes to help them internalize the fact that it’s really just make believe (Note to Iwan Rheon, who plays Ramsay Snow on HBO’s "Game of Thrones:" you need to make some silly YouTube videos before it’s too late and nobody wants to see you in anything other than “Iwan Rheon gets his face smashed in.”).

It’s that last bit, the characterization of Biff, that actually tarnishes the film for me.  He’s just too evil for a light comedy about time travel and how one plucky suburban youth basically invented modern American pop culture.  It throws off the film’s balance, though Christopher Lloyd does everything he can to counter it with heaping helpings of manic whimsy.

But still, hey, it’s Back to the Future.  I’m still glad we showed it to our kids.  Perhaps we’ll revisit it when we show it to their kids 30 years from now.  After all, it’s the closest to time travel we’re ever going to come.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max: Fury Road is an unqualified masterpiece.  It’s the kind of movie that makes you laugh, not in scorn or even amusement, but in wonder at the filmmakers’ audacity and vision.  It’s the best new release I’ve seen this year.

Here’s the setup: Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy, and you owe it to yourself to see Locke), our supposed protagonist, is mad.  Not angry, but nuts.  Loopy.  Maintaining a tenuous grasp on reality.  He starts the movie by getting captured by post-apocalyptic tribesmen and-

Well, at this point, we cut away from him entirely.  We transfer our attention to Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron.  A war chieftan of the tribe, she leads a crack team from behind the wheel of her big-rig battle truck.  When first we meet her, we see her face.  Then, she turns and walks away from the (static) camera and into the story. 

I’ve been to the movies before.  I know what comes next.  As she walks away from the camera, her entire figure will come into view.  They camera's gaze will linger, and those who are so inclined will admire her tukkas.

But here comes the first of many of this film’s subversions of my expectations.  The camera watches her for only (maybe) three seconds, cutting at just the moment the lower edge of the screen hits her waistband.  And here’s the genius of the cut: until that moment, I hadn’t even realized that I was expecting to stare at this particular character’s backside.  I hadn’t realized that the language of film that I’ve come to “speak” has made me think of this particular kind of objectification as normal.

In that moment, Charlize Theron’s body becomes the least interesting thing about her very interesting character.  Mad Max: Fury Road humanizes her not by telling me that she's more than the sum of her parts, but by showing me through its refusal to dwell upon said parts.

Maybe twenty minutes later, after Furiosa has rescued a group of the villain’s childbearing slaves, it pulls a similar trick with one of the actresses playing an escapee.  It caught me again.  It’s the first time I’ve ever sat in a major motion picture and thought, “I’m complicit in the villain’s objectification of his captives.”

Holy smokes.  I was not expecting this in a Mad Max picture.  I just came to watch stuff blow up real good.

Don’t get me wrong: lots of stuff blows up real good.  In fact, this movie has some of the best set pieces I’ve ever seen.  But Mad Max: Fury Road has something more, something that takes it to an entirely different level of excellence.  It has an agenda, and not a B.S. “hero gives a speech, earns a slow clap, and goes home and nails the love interest” agenda.  It’s crafty, and thoughtful, and genuinely thought provoking in a way to which most “message” movies can only aspire.

All this, plus a set, prop, costume, and makeup design that’s not only a joy to behold, but surprises the audience time and again with new ideas, new angles, and new visions.  This film introduces at least five different cultures among the wastelanders, each with their own look, their own vision, their own unique identities.  From loving riffs on Star Wars' Sand People to an entire culture of stilt-walkers, this film delights time and again.

But wait – there’s more.  Mad Max: Fury Road is fun!  It has a simple, effective story; interesting and engaging characters; an excellent mix of serious and humorous beats; and a grasp of its geography and politics that never waivers and ensures the viewer never scratches his or her head in confusion.

In short, I loved Mad Max: Fury Road.  I loved everything about it.  It’s exciting, it’s dazzling, it’s complex, and it’s thought provoking.  In short, it is absolutely wonderful in every way.

I thought I was getting too old for this kind of thing, but writer/director George Miller has shown me that I was wrong.  I’m simply getting too old for mediocrity.  Mad Max: Fury Road is anything but.  What a lovely film.