Rust and Bone is an intelligent drama about a complicated woman and an uncomplicated man. She (Marion Cotillard) takes pride and enjoyment from her high profile job and lives with a boyfriend, but she is dissatisfied. A shocking and disabling accident turns her dissatisfaction into despair.
He (Matthias Schoenaerts of Bullhead) is amiable, carnal and matter-of-fact. He wouldn’t recognize a plan or a deep thought if it smacked him on the temple. For him, stress can lead to violent outbursts, which are especially scary because he is a downscale prizefighter.
The two people form a bond, and therein lies the drama. They engage each other in differing paces at different depths, often doing the same thing for separate reasons.
Director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) makes excellent choices throughout, especially with very effective moments of silence and near-silence, which work to emphasize dramatic events more effectively than would swelling strings.
There are also non-stock secondary characters. One is the boxer’s shady friend whose eyes never meet another’s gaze, yet dart about, never missing anything. Another is the boxer’s sister who stands for a French working class struggling with the increasingly multinational economy.
Key plot plots may sound corny in isolation, but everything in this movie works well together. It’s an intelligent, solid and worthwhile drama.
A controversy has erupted relating to Zero Dark Thirty and its depiction of torture used by American intelligence forces in the War On Terror. Critics of the movie assert that 1) the movie incorrectly shows that interrogations under torture helped track down Bin Laden and/or 2) the movie favors this application of torture. Astoundingly, much of the criticism came before the release of the film and from people who had not seen it.
It is historical fact that, during the George W. Bush administration, American intelligence forces used “harsh interrogation techniques” on detainees, some of which (including waterboarding) constitute torture. It is also well-established that torture is not an effective means of interrogation. You can check with last month’s report by the Senate Intelligence committee (reported here) and these intelligence experts interviewed on NPR (and also here).
In my view, the torture used in these interrogations violated US and international law. I also take the word of interrogation experts that torture is not effective because it does not produce reliable intelligence. To end the torture, subjects will eventually say anything that they think that the interrogator wants to hear – whether true or timely or useful or not. These experts say that more useful information is gained – without torture – by using skilled non-coercive interrogation techniques.
[SPOILER ALERT – the next few paragraphs contain key plot points. If you haven’t seen the movie, you can skip to the last paragraph for my conclusion.]
So does Zero Dark Thirty incorrectly show that interrogations under torture helped track down Bin Laden? The first hour of Zero Dark Thirty depicts the first years of the War On Terror, including several instances of interrogation with torture (which undeniably happened). In the movie, one of the pieces of information secured through such an interrogation is a nickname for one of Bin Laden’s couriers – but this tidbit does not pay off. But years go by without anyone capitalizing (or even verifying this lead). Most of the intelligence agents even believe information from another detainee that the courier is dead. In fact, years elapse and new leads come and go after the torture of detainees has ended.
Only in the ninth year of the man hunt, do the intelligence agents begin to close in by combining an overlooked tip on the courier’s family name, wiretapping the courier’s mother’s home phone, triangulating his cell phone calls (my favorite scenes in Zero Dark Thirty), putting a tail on the courier and satellite and drone surveillance of the compound. Even with this, only the Jessica Chastain character rates more than a 60% probability on Bin Laden’s location. All of this happens long after Zero Dark Thirty has shown the last of the torture – and after showing presidential candidate Obama pledging to end the practice when elected President.
Now, of course, non-critical thinkers in the audience may see torture at the beginning and the successful raid on Bin Laden at the end, and incorrectly connect the dots but, in my opinion the filmmakers cannot be held responsible for the lazy thinkers in the audience. I conclude that Zero Dark Thirty does not show that the use of torture helped to locate Bin Laden.
And does Zero Dark Thirty favor the use of torture? The torture scenes are realistic, and they are uncomfortable for the audience; they are not gratuitous. In contrast, in the Dirty Harry movies, the audience roots for Harry when he shoots the bad guy in the kneecap to get information. In Zero Dark Thirty, the filmmakers do not frame the scenes so the audience gets a kick out of the torture – even though the folks being tortured are the most despicable people on earth. I have no problem with the filmmakers showing the use of torture – it did happen and it illustrates that, in the 9/11 aftermath, the American government would go to any means to get the terrorists. Just because the filmmakers show stomach-turning torture does not mean that they endorse it. I conclude that Zero Dark Thirty does not favor the use of torture.
Finally, I am very disappointed that many commentators and political leaders that I generally agree with jumped into the fray before they saw Zero Dark Thirty. These are the same folks who, along with me, would not hesitate to ridicule the criticism of a film (e.g., The Last Temptation of Christ) by right wingers who hadn’t seen it. In this case, their criticism of Zero Dark Thirty was both unfounded and unfair.
Zero Dark Thirty is director Kathryn Bigelow’s inspired telling of the hunt for Bin Laden. Bigelow, who won the directorial Oscar for The Hurt Locker, once again demonstrates an uncommon ability to enthrall. She chose to tell the story of the frustrating, wearying and dangerous ten-year man hunt, not just the exciting raid in Abbottabad.
We should all be grateful that this movie was made with Bigelow’s directorial choices. She is content to invest half of her screen time on false leads and wasted efforts – and makes them utterly gripping. She neither lingers on the violence nor shies away from it. In a scene where a CIA operative is looking for a man talking on a cell phone, the camera pulls back to reveal that he is on a chaotic Pakistani street with hundreds of men on cell phones – perfectly conveying the needle-in-a-haystack aspect of the search. As the Navy Seal team returns from the successful raid, the music is deeply thoughtful and reflective, not the triumphalist anthem that many directors would have used.
Zero Dark Thirty contains realistic and non-gratuitous depictions of war, terrorism and torture. The movie is, to my sensibilities, not too uncomfortable for most viewers. (Tomorrow I will comment on the torture controversy surrounding this movie.)
Jessica Chastain brilliantly plays the CIA analyst who doggedly and passionately pursues an unlikely lead that finally pays off after a ten-year grind. I’ve already rhapsodized several times about Chastain’s sudden emergence as perhaps our best current screen actress. She is profoundly gifted and can do anything. Let’s just say that, as good as Zero Dark Thirty is, she carries it.
The rest of the fine cast includes Jason Clarke (Lawless), Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom), Jennifer Ehle (The Ides of March, The King’s Speech), Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights), Fares Fares (Safe House), Jeremy Strong (The Guard), Mark Duplass and James Gandolfini.
Seth Rogen and Michele Williams in TAKE THIS WALTZ
What are 2012’s most overlooked films? Take This Waltz, Elena and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia are on some Top Ten lists, including mine, but they still haven’t gotten the buzz that they deserve. These are three of the very best films of the year. I wish that more women, especially, would experience writer-director Sarah Polley’s work and Michele Williams’ performance in Take This Waltz. Anatolia is admittedly not for everyone, but I think that future film historians may rate it as a masterpiece.
The thriller Deadfall was solid, but got lost among the big Holiday movies. And the brilliantly original satire King Kelly, which I saw on VOD, wasn’t released in any theaters that I know of.
In Quentin Tarantino’s pulpy Django Unchained, a bounty hunter(Christolph Waltz, the Jew-hunting Nazi colonel in Inglorious Basterds) and a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) hunt down slave holders and slave merchants and dispatch them in increasingly creative and cinematic fashion. The plot gives them each a credible motivation to do so, but this movie is really just a revenge fantasy aimed at American slavery.
Let’s not short the revenge film genre, which includes many top drawer movies – Winchester 73, The Searchers, Carrie, Gladiator, even The Virgin Spring and Zero Dark Thirty. (If it’s a really good revenge film, people tend not to identify it as a revenge film.) But Tarantino is never squeamish about the enjoyability of genre films, and Django Unchained is gloriously pedal-to-the-metal exploitation.
Waltz and Foxx are very good. The most fun performance is by Tarantino fave Samuel L. Jackson as the malevolent house slave who uses his wiles to advance the causes of his dim masters and of slavery.
Django Unchained – from its title on – is a love letter to the spaghetti Western genre. We have a title song that could have come from the Italian Ringo movies, lots of Ennio Morricone-like music and even the first movie Django himself (Franco Nero). The titles are blazing red, and some of the locations (as in the Italian movies shot in Spain) are hilariously inappropriate (California oak grasslands for Mississippi, some rocky California desert for East Texas and a random sequence in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, apparently just because Tarantino wanted to show some bison). For spaghetti Western aficionados like myself, it’s a lot of fun.
There’s a lot of violence, including an especially gory final shootout that would have unsettled Sam Peckinpah. One thing for sure – it’s a lot of movie for your money.
Let’s get this out of the way first – having neither seen nor desired to see the Broadway musical Les Miserables, I am not the target audience for this movie. I don’t care for melodramas – and Les Mis is two melodramas in one – the story of the saintly Jean Valjean being chased for decades by the monomaniacal Javert and a romance between two kids. So I was mostly bored. If, however, you love Les Mis, you’ll probably enjoy this long, long, lavish all-star effort from director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech, The Damned United, John Adams).
The cast is mostly excellent. Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Eddie Redmayne (My Week with Marilyn), Amanda Seyfried, Samantha Barks and Aaron Tveit are all excellent singers and give outstanding performances. Redmayne is exceptional. Sasha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter are very funny in the comic roles (the highlight of the movie for lowbrow me). The other lead is Russell Crowe, who really can’t match the singing ability of the other actors, which is a distraction.
Hooper has made the costumes and make-up very realistic for the filthy and scabby period. This, for me, was jarring when juxtaposed against the artificiality of the characters breaking into song and some very cheesy CGI sets.
Now here’s one of my pet peeves – movies that should be over but linger like an unwanted guest. Here, both of the plot threads (the chase and the romance) are resolved, yet the movie goes on for three more songs, including a death scene and the stirring finale. Aaaack.
Save the Date is an utterly unremarkable romantic comedy – and has nothing in common with the smart rom coms that I’m writing about today. A young woman is barely ready to commit to moving in with her smitten boyfriend when he poisons the romance with an unwelcome public marriage proposal. Then she meets her soul mate. There is no reason for her to stay with the boyfriend or to spurn the new guy, hence there is no credible conflict in the story.
It is a waste of its star, Lizzy Caplan, who is quite good in a broader comedy 3,2,1…Frankie Go Boom from earlier this year. If you must see a romantic comedy this weekend, rent Ruby Sparks or The Five-Year Engagement.
In the refreshing satire King Kelly, a girl strips for her webcam and aspires to become a sex website mogul. Her monomaniacal brattiness leads to a series of bad decisions that drive her to leave her parents’ suburban Long Island home for a madcap series of adventures, which are all recorded on a cell phone.
That the entire movie is shot on a cell phone is more than a novelty here – it enhances the urgency and chaos of the rip-roaring escapades as well as satirizing our current post-it-on-Facebook-while-it’s-happening culture.
The nuclear core of King Kelly is the main character of Kelly, brought alive in a full throttle performance by Louisa Krause. Besides taking teen self absorption and selfishness to an unsurpassed level, Kelly combines it with astonishingly misplaced moral superiority and entitlement. [And how do kids get to be so entitled these days? Are there concierge suites in kindergarten where a child doesn’t need to wait her turn?] King Kelly‘s genius is that the Kelly’s brattiness is not just unappealing, but so over-the-top as to be very, very funny.
King Kelly also satirizes our reality TV world where people are no longer capable of being embarrassed by any behavior on their part.
It’s original, funny and moves fast. I saw King Kelly on YouTube VOD.
FDR was our first charismatic celebrity President in the era of radio and newsreels, a man who dominated his tumultuous times and who lived among a fascinating collection of characters. It’s hard to imagine his life as boring, but it sure is in Hyde Park on Hudson. Bill Murray is FDR and Lara Linney is his distant cousin and one of his mistresses. It’s set mostly during the weekend that FDR entertained the King and Queen of England at his country home. The problem is that the woman that Linney plays was a no-drama wallflower, and that the royal visit, while interesting, was a footnote to the history of the era. The source material for Hyde Park on Hudson would have made a mildly entertaining one-hour segment on Masterpiece Theater – it’s not worth a visit to the theater.
In The Impossible, a family goes on a beach holiday in Thailand where a tsunami strikes and separates the parents (Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor) from each other. Rescue operations after a massive natural disaster in a third word country are predictably chaotic. The story is about each of the parents finding their kids, losing them, finding them again and looking for the other parent. It is based on a true story.
If you enjoy watching human suffering, especially with children in peril (think Trauma:Life in the E.R.) and heartwarming reunifications, you may enjoy this movie. That’s really all there is here. It’s competently acted, but it’s just a standard kids-in-danger disaster movie. The tsunami scenes are very good, but I did not find them as compelling as Clint Eastwood’s in Hereafter.
Oddly, Naomi Watts has garnered Best Actress nominations from the Screen Actors Guild and the Golden Globes for this picture. These seem more reflective of her fine body of work (Mulholland Dr., 21 Grams, Fair Game) than of her performance here, where she does a good job essentially playing a pinata.
I was very disappointed in The Impossible because director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez had combined for 2007’s The Orphanage, one of the best ghost movies I’ve ever seen. But, The Impossible is at its core disaster movie, and it fails to rise above its genre.
