In Killing Them Softly, a low-level gangster gets two hapless losers to hold up a poker game that is protected by the mob. The mob, of course, brings in an enforcer to put things right. Perhaps Killing Them Softly would have been a great gangster movie in the 60s, before Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and David Chase raised the bar. It was a big hit at Cannes, but that crowd may not be used to watching The Sopranos.
We know what is going to happen in the plot. Fortunately, we have some excellent actors, led by Brad Pitt in a character role as the ruthless and nihilistic mob enforcer. Pitt’s enforcer brings in a trusted colleague, a hit man from New York (James Gandolfini) to help him out – but the hit man is emotionally damaged from a betrayed romance and can only focus on drinking and whoring. Richard Jenkins plays an unusually squeamish mid-level manager in the mob. Scoot McNairy (one of the “house guests” in Argo) and Ben Mendelsohn (the most psychopathic criminal in Animal Kingdom) are especially good as the doomed hold-up men.
As good as the cast is, there’s just not much here. An attempt to intertwine a thread about the 2008 economic collapse and Presidential election is a misguided device that only serves as a distraction.
Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting Anatomy of a Murder on December 9. I love this film for its great courtroom scene, for the great performances by James Stewart, George C. Scott, Ben Gazzara and Lee Remick and for its exquisite pacing. But today, I want to recommend it because of its great jazz soundtrack by none other than Duke Ellington. It’s one of the few movie soundtrack CDs that I own.
The music perfectly complements the story of a murder investigation that reveals more and more ambiguity as it proceeds. Stewart’s character relaxes by dabbling in jazz piano, and Duke himself has a cameo leading a bar band in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (of all places).
In Hitchcock, Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren star as Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock as they collaborate on making Psycho. It’s a glimpse into their relationship and their professional teamwork, both challenged by Hitchcock’s quirkiness. In a very successful device, the serial killer Ed Gein (who inspired Psycho) appears as a character visible only to Hitchcock.
Of course, Mirren and Hopkins (beneath heavy makeup) are excellent as always. Scarlett Johansson is very good as Janet Leigh, as are Danny Huston, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jessica Biel and Toni Colette in supporting roles. (The actor who plays Ed Gein, Michael Wincott, resembles Warren Oates, one of my favorite actors from 60s and 70s.)
Hitchcock is entertaining and even rises to exhilarating when Hitchcock paces the theater lobby at Psycho’s premiere, waiting for the audience to scream at the shower scene.
In Life of Pi, Ang Lee’s visually spectacular version of the Yann Martel fable, an Indian teenager is shipwrecked and must share a lifeboat for 227 days with a Bengal tiger. This is no Disney tiger – it will eat the teenager if it can. Packaged as a survivalist adventure, Life of Pi turns out to be a sage commentary on storytelling.
Over an hour of the movie is spent floating helplessly on the seas, but this part of the story doesn’t lag because of the wry humor (the tiger is named Richard Parker, for instance), the ever-present menace (said tiger) and the incredible spectacle created by Lee. Life of Pi is one of the most visually astonishing films ever. In scene after scene, we gasp at a flotilla of flying fish chased by torpedo-like tuna, a floating island filled with meerkats, nighttime views of bio-luminescent sea creatures and on and on.
And then there’s the tiger. Almost all of the tiger footage is CGI – and I never for a moment doubted that I was watching a real tiger. I saw it in 2D, but I imagine that Life of Pi might be even more magical in 3D, and one of the few 3D movies worth the premium ticket price.
Holy Motors is a wild and puzzling art film by the French director Leos Carax. A man named Oscar (the pockmarked Denis Lavant) gets into a white stretch limo driven by a reserved elderly blonde and heads to the first of his “appointments” throughout Paris. He emerges from the limo disguised as a contorted elderly beggar woman and panhandles for a while. For his next appointment, he puts on a motion capture suit and acts out a sci-fi scene that culminates in reptilian space alien sex. We see that the inside of the limo is his dressing room, and later learn that he is acting out scenes to hidden cameras for someone’s viewing pleasure. Each scene is in a different genre – sci-fi, domestic drama, absurdist, crime action and even romantic musical.
It’s up to the audience to connect the dots – and some dots are just not connectable. As confused as we are, however, we keep paying attention to try to figure it all out. Carax’s success here is that he keeps surprising us with stuff that no audience could anticipate. However, if you need a linear and comprehensible story, you will hate this movie.
I don’t think that I would enjoy the film a second time as much without the element of surprise. And some of the episodes work better than others. The motion capture and absurdist segments were riveting, and I loved Oscar leading a head-banging accordion orchestra through the nighttime streets. The deathbed melodrama didn’t work as well for me, and when Kylie Minogue’s character burst into song in the romantic musical, I gagged. I did appreciate the impressive visuals, the loving shots of Paris and the many homages to films of the past.
Spoiler Alert: To give you an idea of how wacked out Holy Motors is, here’s the synopsis of the absurdist episode. Oscar leaves the limo dressed as a filthy and demonic troll, uncovers a man-hole and descends to the sewers under the streets. He pops up in the Pere Lachaise cemetery, where the gravestones are engraved with websites. He rampages through the cemetery, eating the flowers left on the graves. He crashes a fashion shoot and bites off the fingers of the photographer’s assistant. He then licks the armpit of the supermodel (Eva Mendes), smearing it with blood, picks her up and carries her off to his lair in the sewers. There he rips off some of her gown and refashions it into a burqa. Then he sits her (burqa-clad) on a bench, takes off his own clothes and lays next to her with an erection. Wowza.
In the rewarding family dramedy Silver Linings Playbook, Bradley Cooper plays Pat, a guy who is trying to conquer his mental illness without medication, and it’s not working out well for him. Although his mom springs him from a locked psychiatric facility, he is prone to violent meltdowns. Worse, he still has the delusion that he can get back with his estranged wife; but it’s clear that his marriage and his teaching career have been irretrievably wrecked by his past behaviors (and there is the matter of restraining orders). He meets a young widow (Jennifer Lawrence) who also has enough issues to know her way around the menu of psych meds, and his life changes in ways that he can’t anticipate.
The fine filmmaker David O. Russell (The Fighter, Three Kings, Flirting with Disaster, I Heart Huckabees) invests the first half of the film is establishing the seriousness of Pat’s disorder and the impact on his family. Russell applies enough humor to keep this part bearable, but it can discomfort folks expecting a regular rom com. But this is the key to the film’s success, because he makes the illness realistic and the opposite of cute. If the plot followed the usual rom com arc and pacing, the film would be phony and insulting.
It’s difficult to describe the brilliance of Jennifer Lawrence’s performance. Her Tiffany is at once volatile, damaged and enticing. Lawrence demands the focus of the audience in every scene. She was justifiably nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for Winter’s Bone, my pick for 2010’s top movie. This performance is as least as good.
We also see Robert DeNiro playing Cooper’s father as a guy who is just as crazy as his son, but neither diagnosed or medicated. In another outstanding performance, Jacki Weaver (Oscar nod for Animal Kingdom), plays the strong and long-suffering mom who must steer her hair-trigger son and tinderbox husband away from self-inflicted disasters. John Ortiz is wonderfully appealing as Pat’s henpecked buddy.
It’s worth seeing Silver Linings Playbook for Jennifer Lawrence’s performance alone, but I recommend the film overall for its strong story, topicality and humor.
I love movies that are unintentionally hilarious – at once both undeniably bad and entertaining. Troll 2 has recently gotten some buzz as the worst movie of all time”, largely because of Best Worst Movie, a 2009 documentary about how horrible and funny Troll 2 is. It may not be the worst, but Troll 2 belongs in the conversation and has earned a place in my Bad Movie Festival.
A white bread suburban family vacations in the mountain village of Nilbog (“Goblin” spelled backwards, get it?) in which all the locals are vegetarian predator goblins who can take the form of regular humans. The goblins are able to turn humans into vegetative matter (a green slime) that the goblins can ingest.
The movie was made with very primitive production values by a non-English speaking Italian crew and a non-Italian speaking Z-list American cast. Inept acting and directing aside, the screenplay is probably the source of the most laughs. There’s the dead grandpa Seth who keeps appearing to the boy, the boy’s saving his family by urinating on the family dinner, the make out scene so “hot” that it pops popcorn and so much more. Another of the funny aspects of Troll 2 is that it is completely unrelated to the movie Troll and has no trolls in it.
Troll 2 is available on Netflix Streaming. You can see some of the finer bits of Troll 2 by doing a YouTube search for “You can’t piss on hospitality” and “Troll 2 O my God”. Here’s the trailer.
As to Best Worst Movie, it’s very entertaining. There are some squirmy scenes with cast members whose mental health issues have since worsened. The Italian director is a jerk who, although happy to bask in Troll 2‘s new found cult status, is narcissistically unwilling to acknowledge its badness. But the goodhearted goofiness of star George Hardy, a cast of good sports and Troll 2‘s cult following dominates, and Best Worst Movie is fun to watch. Best Worst Move is available on DVD.
The historical costume drama A Royal Affair begins when a teenage noblewoman is married off to a mad king. The king benefits from the companionship of a new doctor. The doctor is a man of the Enlightenment, and finds a kindred spirit in the young queen, which leads to… Amazingly enough, all this actually happened in late 18th century Denmark.
It’s a romance and tragedy of operatic depth, and, unfortunately, operatic length. It would make a gripping 90-minute film, but A Royal Affair slogs through 137 minutes. As a result the sharpness of the tragedy becomes dulled into mere grimness.
A Royal Affair is a showcase for the charismatic Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen (After the Wedding), who plays the doctor. Mikkelsen is probably best known as the James Bond villain with the tears of blood. Newcomer Mikkel Boe Folsgaard cleverly plays the mad king by focusing on his lack of impulse control and his involuntary giggle and growls.
A Royal Affair won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and is considered a contender for the Foreign Language Oscar.
A Late Quartet is a compelling character-driven drama about the individuals that make up an elite and successful classical string quartet. After twenty-five years, the cellist and leader develops Parkinson’s and must consider retirement. This development takes the lid off an array of long-simmering issues and triggers personal and interpersonal crises.
What makes A Late Quartet so gripping is the level of performance – not surprising considering the top shelf cast. Christopher Walken plays a man of uncommon dignity and stateliness, without the creepiness or even the eccentricity that his characters are usually imbued. Philip Seymour Hoffman is superb as a man who unleashes deeply buried resentments and vulnerabilities. Catherine Keener is also striking as a woman who cannot answer the question, “Do you love me?”. Mark Ivanir (who I didn’t remember from Schindler’s List and who often plays Russian gangsters) is excellent as a callous perfectionist brought literally to his knees by something he never expected. Imogen Poots (Solitary Man) also shines as the prodigy daughter who drops her youthful playfulness when it’s time to settle a score with her mother.
One more note: I relished the delightful homage to Dinner with Andre when we suddenly see Wallace Shawn holding forth in a New York restaurant.
We aren’t surprised by any of the plot points, but we are continually surprised by the reactions of the characters, so masterfully delivered by the actors.
At the moment of Abraham Lincoln’s death, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, standing at the foot of Lincoln’s bed, said “Now he belongs to the ages”. Indeed, Lincoln became immortalized as moral icon, martyr and master of language (all of which he was). But, because we didn’t see Lincoln campaign and govern on the nightly television news (or even on newsreels), there has been no popular familiarity with Lincoln in the flesh. With Lincoln, Steven Spielberg has pushed aside the marble statue and re-introduced us Lincoln the man.
The great actor Daniel Day-Lewis becomes the man Lincoln. We see him as the genius of political strategy who is always several moves ahead of the other players. We see him as the pragmatist who will do what is necessary to accomplish his goals. We see him fondly cajoling his wife but gingerly avoiding her outbursts. We see him as a complex father – grieving one son, doting to a second, distant to another. And we see Lincoln as a very funny guy – both a master communicator who tells anecdotes to make his point and a raconteur who enjoys laughing at his own bawdy stories. Day-Lewis brings all of these aspects to life in a great performance.
Besides Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, as a key Congressional leader, and James Spader, as a political fixer, get the best lines. Sally Field is perfectly cast as Mary Todd Lincoln. Bruce McGill, David Straithern, Hal Holbrook, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jared Harris (Mad Men) and Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children) are all excellent, too.
Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner chose to focus on the few months at the end of the Civil War when Lincoln was trying to get Congress to pass the 13th Amendment to ban slavery. Lincoln knew that, once the Civil War ended, his earlier Emancipation Proclamation was unlikely to withstand legal and political challenges and act to permanently ban slavery. He also gauged that passage of the 13th Amendment was only viable before the end of the war, which was within sight. His only recourse was to try to rush a successful vote over both the obstructionism of the opposing party and attempted sabotage by the Confederacy while both wings of his own party refused to join in collaboration. It’s a horse race.
So we have a political thriller – one of the best depictions of American legislative politics ever on film. Lincoln retains a team of lobbyists played by Tim Blake Nelson, John Hawkes and Spader. These guys know that appealing to the principles of the targeted Congressmen is not going to get enough votes, so they enthusiastically plunge into less high minded tactics. Spader’s character operates with unmatched gusto and is one of the highlights of the movie. Lincoln’s lawyerly parsing of a note to Congress would put Bill Clinton to shame.
All of this really happened. Lincoln, based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s absorbing Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, is utterly historically accurate. Lincoln buffs will especially appreciate small touches like Lincoln’s pet name for his wife, Stanton’s aversion to Lincoln’s endless stream of anecdotes, Thaddeus Stevens’ wig, Ben Wade’s scowl, Lincoln’s secretaries (the White House staff) sharing a bed and the never ending flood of favor-seekers outside the door of the President’s White House office. I think that Mary Lincoln is portrayed a bit too sympathetically, but that’s a tiny quibble. One more fun note: the 1860s were to male facial hair what the 1970s were to apparel – a period when everyone could make the most flamboyant fashion choices, mostly for the worse.
Lincoln is one of the year’s best films, and like Lincoln himself, timeless.
