Movies

Shame: sex all the time without any fun

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Michael Fassbender plays a fit, handsome guy who has a way with women, a well-paying job and a Manhattan apartment with a glorious view.  He is also a sex addict – someone who is compelled to think about sex and to have sex constantly.  His life is filled with masturbation, Internet porn, magazine porn, live sex chats, hookers and the odd quickie.   At home, at the office and out on the town.  He doesn’t seem to enjoy any of it.

For the rest of us, sex is the expression of passion and/or the satisfaction of lust.  For this guy, it is just something that he is driven to do, like some people chain smoke.  When he tells a woman that his longest relationship was four months long, you just know that it was really four days.  It’s very telling that the one time he can have sex resulting from a normal attraction, his plumbing fails him.

His sister, played by Carey Mulligan, moves in uninvited.  She is an emotional basket case, with a history of self-cutting, suicide attempts, hospitalizations and a trail of too easy sex and loser boyfriends.  For some reason not made explicit, this brother and sister are quite damaged.

Shame is a remarkable portrait of a sick, sick guy, and is centered on a brave and able performance by Fassbender.  Still this portrait is only a snapshot.  We are left wondering how he got this way and how will he navigate the rest of his life?

A Dangerous Method: “Look! There’s Keira Knightly spazzing out and writhing and grunting!”

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A Dangerous Method is David Cronenberg’s telling of how Carl Jung became first Sigmund Freud’s disciple and then his rival.  It’s an interesting story, chiefly because Jung was treating a patient who then became his lover and a psychoanalyst herself.

What keeps A Dangerous Method from being a really good movie is that Michael Fassbinder really can’t find a way to play a reserved and repressed character in a way that is really interesting (even when he has strapped Keira Knightly to the bed for a good spanking).  Fassbender isn’t bad, he just plays Jung as a stick-in-the-mud who reacts those around him.

And there’s plenty to react to.  Who knew Viggo Mortensen could be so funny as a sly Freud? Vincent Cassell is hilarious as a psychoanalyst-turned-patient who espouses having sex with many many people as possible, even one’s own patients.

And then there’s Keira Knightly, whose uninhibited performance as a patient of Jung’s has gotten much attention, some positive.  I’m not sure what she could have done differently, given that she plays a character initially afflicted with hysterical seizures and finally able to relish a heavy dose of masochistic sex.  But a viewer tends to sit and say, “Look!  There’s Keira Knightly spazzing out and writhing and grunting!”.

Still Cronenberg kept the story moving along, and it’s worth a viewing just for Viggo and Vincent (and voyeuristically for Keira).

Outrage: a hardass gangster movie for the Holidays

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If you’re looking for a hardass gangster movie with deliciously bad people doing acts of extreme violence upon each other, Outrage (Autoreiji) is the film for you.  Like any good Yakuza film, there are lots of full body tattoos and severed fingers.

But what makes Outrage stand out is the pace and stylishness of all the nastiness, as if Quentin Tarantino had made Goodfellas (only without all the extra dialogue about foot rubs and the Royale with cheese).

Director Takeshi Kitano also stars, credited as Beat Takeshi.  Takeshi, much like Charles Bronson, has the worn and rough face of a man who has seen too much disappointment and brutality.

Outrage is just filmed too brightly to qualify as a film noir, but the story has all the tragedy of a classic noir.  You’re rooting for the characters to survive, but you know that they probably won’t – and they know it, too.

There is also a crime boss so cynical and duplicitous that he puts the Sopranos to shame.

Outrage is not a great movie, but is plenty entertaining if you’re in the mood.

J. Edgar: an interesting perspective, if you can stay awake

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You’ll find director Clint Eastwood’s biopic of J. Edgar Hoover to be an interesting take on Hoover’s twisted psyche, if you can stay awake.

Leonardo DiCaprio is excellent playing Hoover over the course of 50 years.  So is Armie Hammer (who played the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network) as Hoover’s long time companion Clyde Tolson.  Judi Dench nails the role of Hoover’s nightmare mom.

Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (who won an Oscar for Milk) see Hoover as a man tortured by the expectations of his scary mother, which keep him from physically completing his lifelong love affair with Tolson.  That’s an interesting take.

Yet the movie drags.  When your protagonist is arresting celebrity gangsters, solving the Crime of the Century, persecuting left-wingers and blackmailing Presidents, your story should pop and sizzle.

The movie also suffers from distractingly bad make-up on the older Clyde Tolson and the Richard Nixon characters.

A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas: light up and lighten up for the Holidays

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Come on, you’re yearning to see our irresistible stoners in a Christmas movie.  There’s not much of a story here – just the two appealing characters and lots and lots of jokes.  The light hearted but very raunchy humor targets recreational drugs, racial stereotypes, the 3D movie fad, and lots more.

Neil Patrick Harris returns in another hilarious cameo.  And the reliably frightening Danny Trejo shows up as Harold’s menacing new father-in-law.  See my Danny Trejo and his scary friends.

You don’t need to see this movie in 3D.  I saw it in 2D and enjoyed the 3D jokes, which are apparent in 2D.

Like Crazy: romance, pure and not so simple

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If you’re looking for a pure romance, this long distance love story is unadulterated by the irony and gross-out humor so prevalent today.  The girl and guy don’t meet cute.  She has a crush and acts on it; he falls for her.  They are separated by her unwise impulse to overstay her student visa.  Now the romance is complicated – as real life relationships are.  The ending is not contrived, and provokes questions about the pair’s future.

In tracing the initial falling-love-love, writer-director Drake Doremus rescues the film technique of montage from the schmaltzy chiches produced by lazier filmmakers.

The stars, Felicity Jones and AntonYelchin, are appealing, and I look forward to seeing them again.  As expected, Jennifer Lawrence is very good in a supporting role.

This was a big hit with the audience at Sundance, and I expected that it might became a huge word-of-mouth hit.  It won’t be that successful because, ultimately, it’s a good but not great movie.  Still, it brings some much needed intelligence and authenticity to the genre.

Page Eight: top rate spy movie on TV

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PBS is featuring the excellent British spy drama Page Eight on this week’s Masterpiece Contemporary.  It’s top rate.

How do the British do this so well?  First, they cut out all of the explosions and chase scenes.  Then they get a high-brow screenwriter – here it is David Hare (The Reader, The Hours, Damage) – to write a character driven whodunit with plenty of paranoid political intrigue.  Finally, they deliver a first rate cast:  Bill Nighy, Michael Gambon, Rachel Weisz, Judy Davis, Ralph Fiennes, Ewen Bremner (Spud in Trainspotting) and Felicity Jones (starring in this week’s Like Crazy).

Page Eight is definitely worth a Tivo.  Look for it.

Coming up on TV: An Anti-war Masterpiece

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James Coburn and James Garner in THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY

Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting the 1964 The Americanization of Emily on November 11.    Set in England just before the D-Day invasion, The Americanization of Emily is a biting satire and one of the great anti-war movies. James Garner plays an admiral’s staff officer charged with locating luxury goods and willing English women for the brass.  Julie Andrews plays an English driver who has lost her husband and other male family members in the War.  She resists emotional entanglements with other servicemen whose lives may be put at risk, but falls for Garner’s “practicing coward”, a man who is under no illusions about the glory of war and is determined to stay as far from combat as possible.

Unfortunately, Garner’s boss (Melvyn Douglas) has fits of derangement and becomes obsessed with the hope that the first American killed on the beach at D-Day be from the Navy.   Accordingly, he orders Garner to lead a suicide mission to land ahead of the D-Day landing, ostensibly to film it.  Fellow officer James Coburn must guarantee Garner’s martyrdom.

It’s a brilliant screenplay from Paddy Chayefsky, who won screenwriting Oscars for Marty, The Hospital and Network.

Today, Americanization holds up as least as well as its contemporary Dr. Strangelove and much better than Failsafe.

Reportedly, both Andrews and Garner have tagged this as their favorite film.

One of the “Three Nameless Broads” bedded by the Coburn character is played by Judy Carne, later of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.

Coming up on TV: Brute Force

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On November 2, Turner Classic Movies will be airing Brute Force (1947).  This Jules Dassin noir is by far the best of the Hollywood prison dramas of the 30s and 40s.  A convict (Burt Lancaster) is taunted by a sadistic guard (Hume Cronyn) and plans an escape. It’s a pretty violent film for the 1940s, and was inspired by the 1946 Battle of Alcatraz in which three cons and two guards were killed.  Charles Bickford, Whit Bissell and Sam Levene are excellent as fellow cons.

It’s on my list of 10 Best Prison Movies.

a 79-year-old scary treat for Halloween weekend

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Director Tod Browning and his cast of FREAKS

Bad things happen at the circus.  And bad things happen in Freaks.  This is one of the most unsettling horror films, because it was filmed in 1932 with real circus freaks.  If you have teenagers jaded by today’s empty horror flicks, this will knock them for a loop.  Only 64 minutes. Available on DVD and often televised around Halloween.