Steady Diet of Film

Review: The Messenger

2009-12-04T08:53:00-08:00

Having been raised in a military family, whenever I watch films about service people I have a list to tick off of irritating improbabilities and blatant failures of fact-checking. It's how I imagine a sports fan feels watching any movie where exciting things happen in the last five minutes of a game; or how a doctor might feel when watching medical shows where trachetomies are performed with pencils. Due to the pace, scale and number of people involved with making movies these distractions are inevitable. The best we can hope for is that story and characters will draw us in and distract us from our checklists of grievances.

In Oren Moverman's directorial debut The Messenger, Ben Foster (3:10 to Yuma, "Six Feet Under") plays Army Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery, returning from Iraq having narrowly survived an IED attack. With a few months left on his contract he's re-assigned to partner with Captain Tony Stone (played by Woody Harrelson, carving out quite a niche for himself this year as the delightful, patriotic nut here and last month in 2012) on mortality notification services. They drive up and down the New Jersey turnpike, at all hours of the day and night, informing the next of kin of fallen soldiers -- racing against the clock to ensure people don't receive the terrible information from the cable news channels or Drudge Report. Montgomery becomes involved in an intense (but platonic) relationship with Olivia, one of the widows he's recently visited played by Samantha Morton (Synecdoche, New York; Minority Report; Control).

Montgomery feels responsible for the death of one of his buddies. Stone's whole identity is wrapped up in being an Army officer but he's made painfully aware of the smallness of his sacrifice next to that of the next of kin he informs each day. And Olivia's husband was a lousy father and partner,leaving her with terrible relief at his death. Their interactions are punctuated by the (appropriately) high-pitched scenes of fathers, mothers and wives being informed that their loved ones won't be coming home.

The film brilliantly captures people thrown into the isolated universe of grief, and the immense indifference they feel from the world that surrounds them. We see a kid utterly bored when given a dead soldier's flag, a police officer giving a sanctimonious lecture about speeding and an Army recruiter working in the the mall as a young widow nearby shops for a suit to bury her husband in. And, always, people gawking. . .their faces searching for just the right platitude to extract themselves from uncomfortable situations.

The most visceral example of this happens when a do-gooder, trying to maintain the festive mood of a party, limply toasts "Love or hate this war, WE SUPPORT YOU!" directed at someone having a public, emotional flame out. It's a statement that's been uttered a million times over the last seven years. When uttered here, it invites us to experience how hollow it feels when used as a brush off.

But there is also a wonderful sense of momentum with each character. Everyone in this story is in a terrible, lonely place and working through it in honest, messy ways. Moverman, a veteran of the Israeli army, is committed to showing the hypocrisy in how civilians treat military work. Celebrating their sacrifices with loud, expensive ceremonies while abandoning those experiencing psychic death. Or as in Hollywood's pet obsession with PTSD, depicting them as bloodthirsty monsters (thanks but no thanks American Beauty, Stop-Loss, Brothers, etc. But enjoy your awards).

Many of The Messenger's elements don't gel together well in the way directors' first efforts rarely do: the dialogue is occasionally wooden, the handheld camerawork can get a little precious at times and there are the aforementioned logic blunders about military culture -- but the places The Messenger succeeds are where most films -- particularly films about the Iraq war -- dare not even tread.

RIYL: Hurt Locker, Full Battle Rattle, Lioness, Ask Not.

The Messenger is playing in select cities, in Portland at Regal Fox Tower.

Catching up with Susanne Bier

2009-12-04T07:25:00-08:00

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to see Jim Sheridan's Brothers this week. But when I was co-hosting the Show Me Your Titles podcast, Cathy and I dedicated a full episode to Danish film-maker Susanne Bier.

Bier's tremendous body of work includes critical darling After the Wedding, Dogme 95 effort Open Hearts and Brødre, the original version of the film Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman star in this weekend.

Review: Everybody's Fine

2009-12-01T10:25:28-08:00

In Everybody's Fine, director Kirk Jones (Nanny McPhee, Waking Ned) re-makes legendary Italian film-maker Giuseppe Tornatore's (Cinema Paradiso, Legend of 1900) Sicilian melodrama by the same name. The original version, still owned by the once legendary indie film powerhouse Miramax, is no longer available due to executive shuffling and corporate buyouts. Here Robert De Niro plays Frank, a recent widow whose four children disappoint him by dropping out of their first get-together since their mother passed away just a few months prior. Frank senses something is up, packs a bag and boards a train to check-in with his brood. But we quickly learn that it's not hectic work schedules or indifference keeping the adult children from visiting their father. It's a genial conspiracy, cooked up to protect him from knowing that oldest son David has been arrested for drug possession in Mexico and cannot be reached.

Upon Frank's visits, the children frantically make calls back and forth, keeping up the lie and hustling him onto a succession of trains and buses to keep him out of communication as they try to figure out how to help David. In their brief time together Frank is able to see the fissures in their supposedly happy lives. Daughter Amy's (Kate Beckinsale) husband has left her and her teenage son is not handling the split well. Son Robert (Sam Rockwell) has been lying about his professional success and comes up with a shabby reason to shunt his father off to the next sibling. Rosie (Drew Barrymore) is lying or unsure about too many things to enumerate here. And David's absence creates a deafening silence that, try as they might, the siblings cannot fill with nervous small talk or evasive maneuvers. Instead of having the inevitable confrontation come in the form of one shrill scene, Jones lets Frank provide intrusive Dad-advice for long enough that we temporarily believe everybody might be fine. Eventually, Frank's unexpressed worries consume him and--in a delightfully bizarre fever dream--he angrily confronts his children, as young adolescents, demanding that they all go back in time to when he could still exert some control over their affairs. It's brilliantly effective and provides a visual flourish we rarely see in the family dramedy field.

What works so well in Frank's story is that we see a character struggling with the realization that, by his generational and cultural standards, he's done everything he was supposed to do. He's only made aware of how far he's fallen short once total crisis erupts and he's unable to right the course his loved ones are on. It's devastating on its face but is also a theme that transcends this film's story and could resonate to a lot of people struggling in our current economic climate.

Jones maintains a masterful sense of tone here. The story deals with death, resentment, emotional and physical frailty, while allowing everyone to enjoy the little jokes life hands us in the midst of tragedy. The film's genuine moments of humor and levity never come at anyone's expense, not even the people being selfish or bratty, which adds to our experience of being part of the family instead of distanced observers.

De Niro is a revelation here. How delightful that an actor we've been studiously watching for thirty (plus) years is doing something he (or anyone of his ilk) has never done before. His performance is completely lacking in vanity. Frank has a believable emotional transformation without resorting to wailing monologues or facial prostheses. It hearkens back to all the tales we hear about De Niro and Martin Scorsese spending hours poring over scripts, nailing down each note in each scene down to perfection and then translating that fire and precision to the screen.

The look of the film also cannot escape comment. How many times have we seen movies set in immaculately maintained suburban homes, hyper-modern luxury condos, or austere advertising agencies? Cinematographer Henry Braham makes each of these well-tread locales, and every detail in Everybody's Fine, seem glow from within.

As holiday family fare goes, there are certainly cheerier options. But Everybody's Fine is an old-fashioned weepie in the best sense of the word: articulating the anguish of people out of touch with their emotions and allowing us a glimpse into their gentle evolution.

Everybody's Fine opens everywhere December 4th.

Review: Terminator Salvation

2009-12-01T10:07:38-08:00

Terminator: Salvation (T4)

Rating (out of 5): ****

Even if you don't enjoy large, garish action films, you have to have a certain respect for the Terminator franchise. Created in 1984, it was predicated on the notion that computers (which were utterly foreign contraptions to most people at the time) would someday collect enough data on humanity to recognize us as a threat, become self-aware and eventually try to extinguish us all. Even considering today's audience (people who spend hours a day happily pouring personal data into computers for the brief rewards of convenience, comfort and internet fame), the series has managed to keep itself relevant enough to warrant big name talent and hundred million dollar production budgets.

For those of us who do enjoy large, garish action films, read on: Terminator: Salvation (henceforth T4) director McG fulfills the promise of Terminator 2, one of the greatest action films of all time. He demonstrates genuine respect for the somewhat nutty mythology of the series, while also making a noble attempt to incorporate the American mythology of ordinary people who survive--often only by chance--devastating circumstances just long enough to face inhumane evil with unlimited resources. What McG may lack in intellectual heft, he more than makes up for in effort, and in references to Apocalypse Now and Children of Men.
Read the rest of my review at Greencine.

Review: Kobe Doin' Work

2009-11-30T09:53:25-08:00

Produced for ESPN and now available on dvd, Kobe Doin' Work trained 30 cameras on NBA superstar Kobe Bryant for the course of a full game, with commentary provided on the final cut by Bryant. The game, pitting the Lakers against their longtime rivals the San Antonio Spurs, would eventually lead to Bryant's first Most Valuable Player award. After a screening of soccer documentary Zidane at the Cannes film festival, legendary film-maker (and Knicks fan) Spike Lee decided a basketball version was immediately necessitated. Since Lee's dabblings in documentary film (When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Four Little Girls) has produced even more incendiary work than the provocative narrative films (Do the Right Thing, 25th Hour, Bamboozled) that cemented his reputation as a film raconteur, news of his involvement in the non-fiction form is always cause for excitement for those of us who like to see the pot stirred. While it's not an entirely fair comparison to draw, Bryant's checkered past, my complete lack of interest in professional sports and the long shadow cast by Tyson (James Toback's brilliant documentary on boxer Mike Tyson), one can't help but feel a little short-changed by such a straightforward sports procedural.

The enthusiasm and nearly scientific analysis in Bryant's commentary does convey a few interesting nuggets to even the most hardened professional sports hater. Despite these players and teams bringing in millions of dollars, their locker room looks like one in which high school players would congregate in. Many Lakers players have learned conversational Italian and Serbian to accommodate team members who struggle with English. Bryant's incredible graciousness towards the abilities of his competitors is downright gentlemanly. Otherwise, even Lee's interjections on the commentary track only serve to add more details about the actual process of the actual game.

On a recent panel at the Starz Denver Film Festival about believability in documentary film, film-maker AJ Schnack (in a discussion about Michael Moore) brought up the strange stratosphere that celebrity film-makers inhabit. In addition to garnering their projects an exponentially higher amount of publicity, they also regularly gain access to people and stories who might otherwise be considered too private to divulge. Chris Rock's participation in Good Hair is an excellent recent example of how this influence can lead to light being shed on difficult, personal subject matter and Bill Maher's Religulous being an equally strong example of how not to spend one's fame capital.

It's unlikely that a person who's recently been through a very public sexual assault trial would partipcate in any kind of documentary film project, even one with the modest aspirations of Kobe Doin' Work, if not for the credibility brought to the project by Lee. While viewers will walk away certainly knowing a bit more about shooting from the triangle, one might also wonder whatever happened to that raconteur of yore.

DVD extras include: an introduction by Spike Lee, deleted scenes, photo montage, music video for "Levitate" by Bruce Hornsby, a behind the scenes featurette and several audio options to watch the full game.

See also: September Issue, Murderball, Hoop Dreams, Bigger Stronger Faster, The Heart of the Game, Gunnin for That #1 Spot.

Review: Crude

2009-11-27T06:10:00-08:00

Joe Berlinger's (Paradise Lost, Some Kind of Monster, Brother's Keeper) seventh film Crude follows the class-action lawsuit filed by a small group of Ecuadorians residing in the Amazon rainforest, they go after Chevron for massive industrial pollution that has driven entire tribes of native people out of their homeland. The litigation is spearheaded by Pablo Fajardo, a young man who grew up in one of the affected villages. Just three years out of law school, he's been put in charge of the fate of his people's customs, land and safety. Assisting him is brash US attorney Steven Donziger and advocacy group Amazon Watch. Filling out the story is a merry-go-round of oil corporation attorneys and scientists. As is the case in so much of Latin America's biography, rampant government corruption is a recurring character.

A more literal version of modern David and Goliath couldn't be imagined. Understandably, oil giant Chevron (who merged with Texaco in 2001, halfway through the film's story) is not terribly threatened by a little bad publicity because really, what are a few dead Amazonian babies when the United States' entire economy rests on your product? Yet Chevron-Texaco deploys an army of attorneys who spend years tying the case up in different jurisdictions, muddying the waters of scientific research and burying judges under reams of briefs (and bribes).

Essentially, this battle comes down to a constant and often irrational public relations campaign. Chevron-Texaco attorneys accuse Fajardo of getting wealthy off of the cause, although we later see he lives in windowless shack with his mother. Donziger becomes frighteningly intense when coaching non-English speakers on how to maximize heartstring-pulling pronouncements at a shareholders meeting. Somehow, Texaco-funded scientists manage to keep straight faces when they declare the Amazonian people's insidious cancer clusters are caused by lack of hygiene.
But the nuclear option is triggered when Vanity Fair features a spread on the photogenic Fajardo and his equally photogenic cause. This coverage garners the attention of newly elected president Rafael Correa (a young, smart candidate recently swept into office by a massive wave of popularity) and Trudie Styler (aka Mrs. Sting). Fajardo's world quickly changes when he is invited to attend Sting's Earth concert, bringing him international attention. We eventually see Jimmy Smits bestowing CNN's Hero Award on him.

Berlinger stands back and lets us be swept up in (and eventually become mildly terrified by) the garish thrall of the celebrity stampede. But he does not allow the Police's "SOS" (introduced by Cameron Diaz and dedicated by Sting from the stage, natch) to let us us off so easily. While the media coverage undoubtedly influenced Chevron-Texaco being (spoiler alert) found in violation of all charges by inspectors, we are made painfully aware that these companies will never pay a dime to the people who watched their children vomit blood and die excruciating deaths. And they only moved out of the area once the wells ran dry, utterly indifferent to how many customs, languages and people are squelched in the process.

Crude plays like the documentary companion piece to Henri-Georges Clouzot's film 1953 Wages of Fear (though probably shares more in common with William Friedkin's 1977 re-make Sorcerer). The contrast of industrial greed clashing against the unceasing beauty of the natural world had me waiting in odd earnestness to see a washed out bridge or quicksand wipe out the interlopers. We want to cheer for nature to defend itself. Berlinger shows us the sad and gruesome reality is far more determined by wealth and power.

RIYL: Carmen Meets Borat, Oblivion, Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi, Our Brand is Crisis, End of Suburbia, Terror's Advocate.
Crude is playing in select cities. In Portland at Hollywood Theater and Cinema 21. Available on dvd February 23, 2010.

See also:

"60 Minutes" segment on the Ecuadorian class action lawsuit.

Joe Berlinger interviewed on KUCI's FilmSchool. [~~mp3 direct link~~]

CORRECTION: Sorry all, I didn't realize by linking to KUCI's podcast it would show up in our iTunes feed. We're not affiliated with the FilmSchool podcast, though we find it very fun and informative.

#023 Fantastic Mr. Fox w/ Phoebe Owens

2009-11-25T09:43:50-08:00

This week I'm joined by Phoebe Owens (puppet fabricator for Coraline, producer) to take a closer look at Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox. First we discuss the delicate balance between being an audacious auteur and just being overly-indulgent. We then talk about how the film fits into A.O. Scott's recent piece about the recent uptick in movies where adults delight in infantilizing themselves, the Promethean studio effort to spin the "Anderson directed this film via e-mail" scandal, why Anderson needs to leave France for the good of cinema (which includes several inappropriate Roman Polanski jokes, you've been warned) and how William Dafoe can get along with anyone. Enjoy!

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Phoebe writes more about the film at her site SuperPhoebe.

Review: End of the Line

2009-11-23T23:44:41-08:00

Produced by ecological advocacy group Ocean Now, End of the Line examines the environmental and economic crises created by the industrialization of fishing. Specifically, how international regulations have been corrupted, skirted and flat out ignored. The near extinction of bluefin tuna has only made it chicer among the London sushi set. The financial impact on communities that thrived on small, locally-controlled fishing is severe, as technological developments now require fewer workers to capture a higher quantity of sealife. Ultimately, the environmental impact of disrupting underwater ecosystems is high and dire.

Having made the benignly non-credible Unknown White Male in 2005, Rupert Murray is a good choice for a work-for-hire film. Based on Charles Clover's book by the same title, the film moves briskly and blessedly relies very little on graphic images of animals being gutted to make its points.

Since the film begins with a stated objective, one can't help but receive the statistics and panicked tone with some suspicion. But the flip side to documentaries financed through advocacy groups is that in 9 out of 10 cases they have much better funding than investigative pieces would. And because every famous person needs a cause, these films easily attract celebrity involvement in voice-overs and promotion, often making them more appealing to a broader audience. Let's all note the critical, commercial and awards circuit success of this year's dolphin-killer expose The Cove. In End of the Line, Ted Danson takes up the cause.

Those fundraising dollars show up beautifully on screen here. The film boasts some of the most breathtaking underwater cinematography since the BBC series "Blue Planet". Murray also effectively uses animated sequences to convey the enormous scale of fishing vessels raking the ocean floor.

End of the Line gracefully sidesteps one of the most common pratfalls ecology- and animal rights-focused documentaries fall into by aligning itself early on with the people working on the lowest rungs of the fishing industry. It opens by showing the devastating effect industrialization had on the cod fishing industry in Newfoundland in the mid-1980s.

Matthew Galkin's I Am An Animal: the Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA, being a recent study in what not to do in these circumstances. It never ceases to baffle how organizations with a clear, well-defined social agenda cannot be bothered to build affinity groups with that little known conglomerate known as humanity. It not only undercuts their recruiting efforts, it calls into question the film-maker's and organization's most basic intellectual function to try to cast workers earning minimum wage in horrifically dangerous work as bloodthirsty butchers getting wealthy from animal abuse.

The film's populist sensibilities ultimately make it quite pleasing. Instead of focusing on what everyone is doing incorrectly, it (politely) skewers hyper-consuming yuppies by showing the devastating effects of an endless quest for eccentricity and Omega-3 fats. As a result, those of us who are ordinary (meaning, we don't dine at Nobu on a regular occasion) feel quite superior. How about them apples?

RIYL: Collapse, FLOW: For Love of Water, Sharkwater, An Inconvenient Truth.

End of the Line is playing in select cities around the US. In Portland at the Living Room Theaters.

Review: The Road

2009-11-20T10:01:25-08:00

It seems a bit precious to talk about how studio politics can muck up a well-intentioned film but there is really no other framework to discuss John Hillcoat's The Road. After testing horribly with key demographics, Dimension Films shelved the film for over a year. After much public acrimony, recriminations, forced re-shoots and re-edits, the film emerges with a slightly cheerier ending than originally intended and an Oscar-baiting release strategy of doling out the film at prestigious film festivals (Venice, Telluride, Toronto) with a late November theatrical release date.

The Road, based on Cormac McCathy's novel, centers on a father and son (Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee, billed only as "The Man" and "The Boy") after an unexplained catastrophe has left the world a bleak, lawless place. The few remaining survivors constantly struggle for food while remaining in hiding from roving gangs of cannibal rapists. As the film starts, the Pair Without a Name (or much in the way of camping skills) are slowly making their way by foot to the coast to head South for warmer climates.

The film is clearly made with tremendous talent and skill (there may not be a better looking film this year) but passions that have been watered down by too many special interest groups. The first half feels stretched to the point of nonsense by too many opposing elements: a director clearly fond of the source material (and his previous film The Proposition proved he's well-suited to the themes of doomed familial responsibility), a terrible actor trying to win an Oscar (please do not reward yet another bout of blacked out teeth and life-endangering weight loss in the name of awards, Academy) and a studio trying to make a feel-good movie about the end of the world.

But the lack of a strong hand to guide this relentlessly bleak subject matter ultimately condemns The Road's fate. Without any meaningful subtext or a compelling backstory, the novel's vignette-style plays like an endless loop of innocent curiosity. Which leads to heinous child endangerment, then to a narrow escape and a pat morality lesson delivered by The Man and The Boy, who offer teary-eyed pledges to "always be the good guys". For a film about the animalistic nature of man, where the threat of child rape lingers constantly, the lack of male frontal nudity feels like a real copout.

And speaking of uneven, the film is filled to the brim with shameless product placement. It goes to show that in our celebrity-obsessed culture, a famous person holding a can of soda as a lifeline to man's diminished promises will sell, regardless of the backdrop. Equally problematic is the reliance on flashbacks to The Man's period of normalcy. The constant reminder of amber-tinted days when he and his wife (played by Charlize Theron) were courting, home childbirthing and eventually making a suicide pacts makes The Road feel like the most tedious break up movie ever made.
All of which brings us to the abysmal, cinematic void that is Viggo Mortenson. Right now, Mortenson is best known in the public realim for (a.) being taken to court for unpaid child support soon after the Lord of the Rings franchise left him a millionaire several times over and (b.) self-publishing his poetry. For my money, these are equally repulsive character traits and do not lend themselves well to open-ended stories where so little content is being provided that the viewer is forced to project their own understanding of his internal struggle for goodness.

Essentially, we're left with a film that has gummed the source material with too much hokum to appeal to the literary set, too much moral rhapsodizing to keep horror fans from getting bored and too much cannibalism and child rape for Academy Award believers. While watching the film I was reminded several times of Lynne Littman's Testament, a masterpiece of the Family Apocalypse canon. Littman showed the drudgery of daily existence when life is expunged of modern appliances and hope -- replete with horrible things happening to children. However, with that film the horror and dread is experienced by the viewer. The Road makes us feel like helpless passengers on a journey of soul-sucking despair with no larger purpose other than too many people sat in too many meetings.

#022 The Twilight Saga: New Moon w/ Nancy Dickison

2009-11-19T14:05:26-08:00

This week I am joined by pal and Twilight superfan Nancy Dickison to discuss Chris Weitz's The Twilight Saga: New Moon, which we perhaps all too appropriately discuss while baking cookies. We get into why changes made to the Twilight story are not as offensive to fans as other franchises, Team Hardwicke vs. Team Weitz, and how the intensity of the Edward/Bella makeout scenes are essential to one's enjoyment.
Enjoy!

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I participated in a roundtable discussion at Women in Hollywood on the Twilight phenomenon.