Movies

STEVE JOBS: THE MAN IN THE MACHINE – anything but reverential

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The first two-thirds of Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine provides us with remarkable insight into the personal life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.  We see plenty of evidence that Jobs was obsessively driven, a marketing genius, consumed by self-absorption and a nasty bully.

Gibney brings us an interview with the mother of Jobs’ first daughter (who he initially refused to acknowledge).  We also hear from their roommate (and presumably Apple’s #3 employee), who articulates the movie’s theme:

How much of an asshole do you need to be, to be successful?

There’s no question that Jobs qualifies as a jerk of singular proportions – grudgingly agreeing to $500/month in child support at the moment his wealth zoomed to $200 million.  And calculating the IPO stock awarded to his former roommate (“How about I give him zero?”).

We hear from the daughter herself (off-camera), with whom Jobs eventually kindled a relationship.  And we hear from the members of the executive team responsible for Apple’s resurgence, including the guys who brought us the iPod and iPhone.  We do not see Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak or the family from Jobs’ second marriage.

How did he get to be so driven?  There are insights in what molded him, especially his feelings about his adoption.  What made him a genius?  Not so much on that one.

In the final third of the film, Gibney piles on.  But it’s not a shock to hear about a Silicon Valley CEO enriching himself by back-dating stock options or exploiting Chinese workers. It ‘s more telling to find out Jobs reveled in parking in handicapped spaces.

There’s a major Hollywood biopic about Jobs coming out in just two weeks:  Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, starring Michael Fassbender in the titular role.

Alex Gibney is one our very, very best documentarians. He won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and he made the superb Casino Jack: The United States of Money, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God and Going Clear: The Prison of Belief.  Man in the Machine doesn’t rise to the level of those films, but it’s worthwhile to those already interested in its subject.

Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine is in theaters and also available streaming from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, and, of course, iTunes.

MEET THE PATELS: a documentary funnier than most comedies

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MEET THE PATELS
MEET THE PATELS

Meet the Patels is both a documentary and a comedy – and ultimately, a satisfying crowd-pleaser.  Over several years, filmmaker Geeta Patel filmed her own brother Ravi and their parents in their quest to find a wife for Ravi.  Ravi and Geeta’s parents were born in India, had a traditional arranged marriage which has resulted in decades of happiness.  Their American-born kids, of course, reject the very idea of an arranged marriage.  But Ravi finds the pull of his Indian heritage compelling enough to dump his redheaded girlfriend and try to find a nice Indian-American girl.  His parents try to help him with unbounded and unrelenting enthusiasm.

Meet the Patels is very funny – much funnier than most fictional comedies.  It’s always awkward when parents involve themselves in their child’s romantic aspirations.  That’s true here, and produces some side-splitting moments.  It helps that the Patel parents are very expressive, and downright hilarious.  The dad is so funny that I could watch him read a telephone book for 90 minutes, and the mom is herself a force of nature.

We learn that the Patels of Gujarat have adapted an entire menu of marriage opportunities to American society: a matchmaking profile system called “biodata”, matrimonial fairs, “the wedding season” and more.

Meet the Patels has its share of  cultural tourism and the clash of generations.  But is so damn appealing because it’s much more than that – it’s a completely authentic saga of family dynamics, dynamics that we’ve all experienced or at least observed.  The family members’ mutual love for each other drives family conflict and, finally, family unity.

I saw Meet the Patels at the Camera Cinema Club earlier this year, and it opens in the Bay Area tomorrow.  It’s hilarious and heart-warming.  Go see it.

 

99 HOMES: desperation leads to indecency, then redemption

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Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon in 99 HOMES
Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon in 99 HOMES

The opening scene of the brilliant psychological drama 99 Homes illustrates the life-and-death stakes of our nation’s foreclosure crisis.  It’s a topical film, but 99 Homes is emotionally raw and as intense as any thriller.  Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is a working class single dad, down on his luck.  He loses his home to foreclosure and then must make a Faustian choice about supporting his family.  Can he live with his choice, and what are the consequences?

With capitalism, where there are losers, there are also winners who have bet against the losers.  Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) has built a prosperous real estate business on legitimate evictions and flips, supplemented with schemes to defraud federal home loan agencies, housing syndicates and individual homeowners.  His world view is defined in a monologue about this nation bailing out the winners, not the losers – a cynical, but perceptive, observation.

Director Ramin Bahrani is a great American indie director, with a knack for drilling into the psyches of overlooked subsets of our society – immigrants (Chop Shop, Man Push Cart, Goodbye Solo), industrial farmers (At Any Price) and now the victims and profiteers of the Mortgage Bubble.

As foreclosure inexorably approaches, Garfield’s Nash is absorbed by dread, then desperation and, finally, to panic.  His mom (Laura Dern) takes a different tack, settling firmly into denial and then erupting in hysteria.  That denial recurs again and again in 99 Homes among those about to be evicted.   These are people who have bought homes and can’t believe/grok/internalize that one day they will actually be forced out of them.  One of the strongest aspects of 99 Homes is the use of non-actors who have lived through the nightmare.   Some of the individual stories, especially one with a confused old man, are so wrenching as to be hard to watch.

This may be Andrew Garfield’ strongest cinema performance.  Dennis Nash is a decent man incentivized to do the indecent.  Garfield takes this good man through an amazing internal journey.  Nash is forced to accept the failure resulting from his attempts to do what is right, juxtaposed with the success from conduct that he finds repulsive.  Bahrani’s arty shot of the reflection of a swimming pool shimmering in a sliding glass door makes it look like Garfield is under water –  which he metaphorically is at this point in the film.

Michael Shannon, one of my very favorite actors, is superb as a guy completely committed to pursuing his own survival/prosperity strategy – no matter that it is based on ruining the lives of other humans.  Unlike Nash, Shannon’s Carver has accepted the incentives to act badly and has overcome any qualms about either moral ambiguity or even stark amorality.

Veteran television actor Tim Guinee is remarkable as homeowner Frank Green.  Laura Dern is excellent in a pivotal role.  The character actor Clancy Brown proves once again that he can grab the screen, even when he’s only visible for a minute or two.

With its searing performances by Garfield and Shannon, 99 Homes is unsparingly dark and intense until a final moment of redemption.  It opens on Friday.

BLACK MASS: psychopathy and ambition is a nasty combination

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Joel Edgerton and Johnny Depp in BLACK MASS
Joel Edgerton and Johnny Depp in BLACK MASS

The excellent crime drama Black Mass tells the true life story of how gangster James “Whitey” Bulger built his Boston Irish gang into a major crime empire under the protection of the FBI.  As if we needed an illustrative example, Bulger is proof that psychopathy and ambition is a really nasty combination.  And, as Black Mass points out with the FBI characters, even ambition alone can prove to be a vulnerability.

Here’s what really happened:  Bulger (Johnny Depp), the ruthless leader of the Winter Hill Gang in South Boston was approached by FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) for help in eradicating Boston’s Italian Mafia.   Connolly was as ambitious as Bulger, and the two men shared Southie  roots.  It was in Bulger’s interest to rid himself of the competition, and he parlayed Connolly’s career-climbing grasping into a de facto amnesty that allowed Bulger to expand his murderous enterprises throughout Boston and beyond – even to Florida jai alai and gun running to Northern Ireland.

It’s an amazing tale, and director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) tells it very well, letting Depp and Edgerton drive the story by inhabiting a pair of characters that become a toxic mixture.  With an erect swagger and some of the coldest eyes in cinema history, Johnny Depp is superb as the feral Bulger.  The trailer below includes his life lesson to a small boy around the family breakfast table that shows his world view.  When the eyes go cold, Depp’s Bulger can terrorize with a touch, a word or even just a glance.

Joel Edgerton is equally effective as the corrupted FBI agent Connolly, who uses Southie bombast and bluster to escape the snares of office politics.  Alas,  it all finally catches up to him when a new prosecutor directs fresh eyes on Boston’s crime scene.  Until recently, I’ve known Edgerton as an Australian action star (he was the the Navy Seal team leader in Zero Dark Thirty and one of the thugs in Animal Kingdom). Edgerton recently wrote, directed and stared in the excellent psychological thriller The Gift, and his performance in Black mass reinforces that he’s a very talented and versatile filmmaker.

The cast is very deep and uniformly excellent, including Julianne Nicolson, Juno Temple, Kevin Bacon, Benedict Cumberbatch, Corey Stoll (Midnight in Paris and House of Cards) and Dakota Johnson.  Besides Depp and Edgerton, three other actors popped off the screen for me:

  • Rory Cochrane plays Bulger’s partner Steve Flemmi.  Cochrane is a veteran actor whose most memorable role is probably as the pothead Slater in Dazed and Confused.  Now filled out in middle age, he plays a guy who is about half of Depp’s scenes, but says very, very little.  As they say, the best acting is reacting, and Cochrane just chews gum and observes, letting his eyes tell us what he is thinking and feeling.
  • David Harbour plays Connolly’s FBI partner, a guy who becomes entangled in a web not of his own doing.  One of the most riveting scenes in Black Mass, he becomes terrorized about, of all things, a recipe for a steak marinade.  Harbour is a reliable veteran, but this is among his very best work.
  • Peter Sarsgaard is always brilliant, and here he gets to become a tweaked out lowlife who involuntarily giggles when he thinks that getting handed a valise full of cash is a good thing when it’s not.

Black Mass is a top rate crime story very well-told.  No more and no less.

One more thing:  there is a string of up-close-and-personal murders depicted here, including two by strangulation and a host of gunshot executions.  It’s not particularly gruesome by the standards of modern crime movies, but DON’T TAKE YOUR 4-YEAR-OLD.  A couple at my screening did just that.  What are people thinking?

SICARIO: a dirty war against the narcos

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Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt in SICARIO
Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt in SICARIO

In the dark crime thriller Sicario, Emily Blunt plays a fierce and skilled FBI SWAT team leader. She’s battling Mexican narcos in Phoenix when her superiors give her the chance to “volunteer” for a mysterious anti-narco detachment with a cheerfully amoral leader (Josh Brolin). It’s unclear precisely from where, in or out of the US government, this group operates, and it includes an even more shadowy figure (Benicio Del Toro).  She’s seen a lot of bad things, but, almost immediately, she is shocked at what her new team is doing.

Sicario’s premise is that the only way to make a difference in the Drug War is to shake up drug suppliers by decapitating the major drug gangs – by any means necessary.   The good guys are fighting a Dirty War themselves.  Del Toro plays one of the most hardass movie assassins in recent cinema.

Sicario is directed by Denis Villeneuve, who also directed Incendies (my #1 movie of 2011), Enemy and Prisoners.  He has a gift for the plot-driven thriller.  While taut;y paced, the overall affect of Sicario is more brooding than frenetic, consumed by the inevitability of violence and death.

Sicario looks and sounds better than it is, having been photographed by Roger Deakins (12 Oscar nominations).  The desert borderland looks ominous as well as desolate.  And there’s a night vision scene that really pops.  The music by Jóhann Jóhannsson is unusually effective in enhancing the intense, dark and volatile mood.

I haven’t been thinking about Sicario afterwards, so it isn’t a great movie, but it’s definitively a well-made and effective crime drama.

SHE’S FUNNY THAT WAY: comic fluff from a master

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Jennifer Aniston in SHE'S FUNNY THAT WAY
Jennifer Aniston in SHE’S FUNNY THAT WAY

The new comedy She’s Funny That Way from 75-year-old master filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich is a light-hearted diversion about the unlikely career path of an escort-turned-screen actress (Imogene Poots).  Bogdanovich is responsible for the screwball comedy masterpiece What’s Up Doc? and the grossly under-rated comedy romance They All Laughed.  So he knows knows how to choreograph mad cap moments.   There’s also an unexpected cameo at the very end, along with very funny end credits.

Along with Poots, Bogdanovich has attracted a top tier cast:  Owen Wilson, Rhys Ifans, Will Forte and Kathryn Hahn.   It’s especially welcome to see survivors of Bogdanovich’s 1970s oeuvre –  Cybill Shepherd, Tatum O’Neal and Austin Pendleton.

But the real revelation here – and the main reason to see the movie – is Jennifer Aniston’s turn as the most emotionally unhealthy therapist conceivable.  It’s written as an extreme character – absolutely no boundaries, utterly self-absorbed, dangerously resentful and completely unprofessional.  But Aniston’s performance is so full throttle that the audience delights every time her character comes on-screen.

She’s Funny That Way is just fluff, but it’s well-crafted fluff.  It’s is now available to stream from Amazon Instant Video, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

DIGGING FOR FIRE: a couple goes wild, then looks inside

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Rosemaire DeWitt in DIGGING FOR FIRE
Rosemaire DeWitt in DIGGING FOR FIRE

The romantic comedy Digging for Fire is a reflection on that moment when two people who have loved each other have become so consumed by day-to-day child rearing that they have lost heir way as a couple.  She’s (Rosemarie DeWitt) fed up and drops the three-year-old with her parents, hoping for a wild weekend with girlfriends while he (Jake Johnson) does the taxes. Of course, he invites his guy buddies over for a bro-bacchanal. Things don’t go exactly as planned for either of them, and their separate weekends morph into adventures that challenge their marriage and trigger some self-examination.

Writer-director Joe Swanberg has a gift for creating characters that act like real people – and NOT like they know they are characters in a romantic comedy.   Swanberg created the 2013 Drinking Buddies, a film I found to be “an unusually genuine romantic comedy” and the first Mumblecore movie that I’ve ever liked.

DeWitt and Johnson are very good, and Brie Larson is outstanding as a good time girl who is more – and looking for more – than she seems.  Digging for Fire also features Anna Kendrick (against type as an uninhibited party girl) and Sam Rockwell (who has made playing an unreliable character into its own art form).  We also see almost everyone who has been in an independent film: Mike Birbiglia, Chris Messina, Melanie Lynsky, Sam Elliott, Judith Light and Jane Adams.  Orlando Bloom even drops in as a boor at a bar (albeit an upscale bar).

Two thing for sure:  Joe Swanberg’s characters are never predictable and he is definitely a romantic.  Digging for Fire is available for streaming  from Amazon, Vudu, You Tube and Google Play.

PHOENIX: riveting psychodrama, wowzer ending

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Ronald Zehfeld and nina Hoss in PHOENIX
Ronald Zehfeld and nina Hoss in PHOENIX

In the German psychological drama Phoenix, Nina Hoss plays Nelly, an Auschwitz survivor whose face has been destroyed by a Nazi gunshot; her sister has arranged for plastic surgery to reconstruct her face.  When Nelly gets her new face, we accompany her on an intense quest.

Writer-director Christian Petzhold is an economical story-teller, respectful of the audience’s intelligence.  Watching a border guard’s reaction to her disfigurement and hearing snippets from the sister and the plastic surgeon, we gradually piece together her back story.  The doctor asks what seems like a very good question – Why would a Jewish woman successfully rooted in London return to Germany in 1938?  The answer to that question involves a Woman Loving Too Much.

The sister plans to re-settle both of them in Israel, but Nelly is obsessed with finding her husband.  She does find her husband, who firmly believes that Nelly is dead.  But he notes  that the post-surgery Nelly resembles his pre-war wife, and he has a reason to have her impersonate the real Nelly.  So he has the real Nelly (who he doesn’t think IS the real Nelly) pretending to be herself.  It’s kind of a reverse version of The Return of Martin Guerre.

It’s the ultimate masquerade.  How would you feel while listening to your spouse describe you in detail to a stranger?

Nina Hoss is an uncommonly gifted actress.  Here she acts with her face fully bandaged for the first third of the film.  We ache for her Nelly’s obsessive need for her husband – and when she finally finds him, but she still doesn’t really have him.

As the husband, Ronald Zehfeld shows us the magnetism that attracts Nina, along with the brusque purposefulness that he thinks he needs to survive and flourish in the post-war Germany.

Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss collaborated on the recent film Barbara  (he won the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear for his work).  About Barbara, I wrote

“Given that’s it difficult to imagine how anyone else could have improved Barbara, I’ll be looking for Petzold’s next movie.”

Well, here it is, and it’s gripping.

The ending of the film is both surprising and satisfying.  Several people in my audience let out an audible “Wow!” at the same time.

MISTRESS AMERICA: another self-absorbed misfire

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Lola Kirke (right) with the always annoying Greta Gerwig
Lola Kirke (right) with the always annoying Greta Gerwig in MISTRESS AMERICA

In director Noah Baumbach’s failed comedy Mistress America, an insecure young college student meets her step-sister-to-be (Greta Gerwig), who turns out to be a human whirlwind, dancing on the razor’s edge between frantic excitement and chaos.  The premise of an unsure young person becoming captivated by a high energy and charismatic personality is an interesting one.  Unfortunately, the movie fizzles because of the shipwreck of a screenplay (co-written by Baumbach and Gerwig) and another aggravating performance by Gerwig.

In the first half of the film NOT ONE WORD seems genuine, like a real character would have uttered it.  Mistress America’s worst misfire is the extended screwball sequence at a house in Connecticut – the cast is just flinging the lines as if in a high school play (until a really good actor, Michael Chernus, shows up as a real character).

No actor could save this screenplay, but Greta Gerwig has the gift of making any movie worse and she does here, too.  Gerwig plays the same character in every move because she thinks it’s Cute Kooky like Annie Hall.  But she’s neither cute nor kooky – just annoying to the point of loathsomeness.  Here, her character is a goofy-clumsy social loser, but just so Smart and Wonderful that she uses words like “autodidact” and “my nemesis”.  Gerwig tries to be knowing and ironic, but she’s just cringeworthy, the most embarrassing moment coming when her character explains her own jokey “pretend rewind” gesture.

After the screening, another audience member said that Gerwig’s character is obviously not functional because of a bipolar disorder.  Well, I’ll bet that Gerwig didn’t think that her character was ill – just charmingly idiosyncratic.

The other lead is played by Lola Kirke, who is pretty engaging; I’d like to see her acting with a real script.  There’s also excellent acting by the veteran Chernus (Higher Ground, Men in Black 3, Captain Phillips, The Messenger, Love & Other Drugs).  Jasmine Cephas Jones is stuck in a one-dimensional role as a hyper-jealous girlfriend, but she pulls it off with distinction. Rebecca Henderson is excellent as the bitter woman from Gerwig’s past.

I’m not the audience for Mistress America since I avoid Baumbach and especially Gerwig; I only saw Mistress America because I went to a mystery screening. Now I haven’t liked any Baumbach movie since his initial indie hit The Squid and the Whale in 2005.  I have nothing against a naval-gazing filmmaker filling his movie with neurotic New Yorkers.  Woody Allen has made over thirty of those and seven or eight are masterpieces.  But – as sharp as Woody’s lines are crafted – you believe that this characters have thought them up on their own, not so with Baumbach.

One scene in Mistress America is inspired and true to the characters – a bitter woman confronts the clueless Gerwig character with a grudge from high school.  But that wonderful moment isn’t worth the nails-on-the-chalkboard experience of the film as a whole.  Skip Mistress America (and any upcoming Baumbach/Gerwig project, too, for that matter).

DVD/Stream of the Week: COCKFIGHTER and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP – two more unforgettable performances byWarren Oates

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Hary Dean Stanton and Warren Oates in COCKFIGHTER
Hary Dean Stanton and Warren Oates in COCKFIGHTER

Last week I wrote about the actor Warren Oates and last night’s Oatesathon on Turner Classic Movies.  I even included the 53-minute 1993 documentary Warren Oates Across the Border.  I hope that I’ve kindled (or rekindled) some interest in Oates, so here are two Warren Oates classics that TCM didn’t play last night.

They are both from cult director Monte Hellman: Two-lane Blacktop (1971) and Cockfighter (1974). There’s a Criterion Collection DVD for Two-Lane Blacktop which is available from Netflix. You can stream Cockfighter on Amazon Instant Video.  Hellman was making low-low-budget exploitation films for Roger Corman, and both of these movies are fine specimens.  In both, Oates plays a tough, bottom-feeding grasper who needs a little too much luck.

Two-lane Blacktop is a car chase/road trip movie that was a vehicle for two rock music stars, James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson.  Taylor plays a guy drifting across America and challenging drivers of other souped-up cars to races (The Driver); Wilson plays his mechanic (The Mechanic).  They pick up a comely hitchhiker played by Laurie Bird (The Girl) and challenge the Warren Oates character (G.T.O.) to a road race from New Mexico to Washington, D.C.

Two-lane Blacktop turned out to be the only feature film for both James Taylor and Dennis Wilson.  Taylor is pretty good in a very laconic role.

Laurie Bird made only three films – Two-lane Blacktop, Cockfighter and Annie Hall.  Having worked as a model, she was cast by Hellman to co-star in Two-lane Blacktop, and soon a romance blossomed between the 41-year-old Hellman and the 18-year-old Bird.  Bird also was the movie’s still photographer.  After Cockfighter,  she moved on from Hellman and became Art Garfunkle’s partner.  Before she turned 26, Laurie Bird committed suicide in the NYC apartment that she shared with Garfunkle.  In her very limited movie career, she proved to be an appealing and natural actress.

The only professional lead actor in Two-lane Blacktop was Oates. Of course, he was perfect for the role of G.T.O., a guy masking his insecurities with aggressive braggadocio.

In Cockfighter, Oates isn’t the foil, he’s the main guy.  But he’s still a low-life, a guy with a cockfighting compulsion that threatens to consume everything he has – his money, his family, his home and his sanity – as he bets more and more on his fighting chickens.  For those of us not intimately familiar with this pastime, Cockfighter is a soup-to-nuts procedural on cockfighting.  Warning:  Cockfighter contains the very definition of animal cruelty- lethal cockfights staged for the camera; (you couldn’t make this movie today).

But the whole reason to watch Cockfighter is Warren Oates’ performance as a guy with too much desperation and not enough luck.  (And Harry Dean Stanton and Laurie Bird are in the movie, too.)

Courtesy of the Criterion Collection, here’s the scene in Two-Lane Blacktop that sets up the car race.