Movies

DVD of the Week: The Day of the Jackal

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My DVD of the Week is The Day of the Jackal (1973), like The American, the tale of an international master assassin – only fact-based and even better.  In Day of the Jackal, French security forces are tipped off to a plot to assassinate President DeGaulle and they eventually figure out where and when the assassination will be attempted.  But they don’t know who they are looking for or what he looks like.  Without computers or cell phones, they must track down the unknown assassin in time.

Edward Fox is excellent as the resourceful and meticulously professional killer.  So is Michael Lonsdale as the creative yet methodical cop leading the manhunt.  But the real star is director Fred Zinnemann (High Noon, From Here to Eternity, A Man for All Seasons).  As he showed in High Noon, Zinnemann knows how to tell a story and build tension, and the ending in Day of the Jackal is thrilling.

The Day of the Jackal has nothing to do with Carlos the Jackal of The Sundance Channel’s Carlos.

For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.

Carlos

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I haven’t seen it yet, but Cannes audiences loved this 5-hour biopic of the 70s terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and the film was bought by IFC and Sundance Channel.  The Sundance Channel is broadcasting it in three parts, this Monday through Wednesday, October 11-13.  Set your TiVos.

Many see this as a star-making breakthrough for its Venezuelan star Edgar Ramirez.

Howl

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Howl‘s filmmakers made a risky choice that pays off and a safe choice that doesn’t.  The risky choice is to make the film about a poem, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, not a conventional biopic of Ginsberg or a courtroom drama about the famous obscenity trial.  This is risky because poetry is not embraced by the mass audience; in our culture, poetry makes opera look like NASCAR in terms of popularity.  Yet the movie is at its strongest in the segments where James Franco’s Ginsberg reads from Howl.  The poem Howl – with its pain, rage, alienation and rebellion – is the best part of the movie Howl.   Snippets of Ginsberg’s life and the trial are placed about to give context to the poem.

The unfortunately safe choice is using animation to interpret the poem.  The poem evokes powerful imagery in the minds of the audience.  Here, the animation is very literal, so we see – and are distracted by – the images instead of thinking them up ourselves.  Maybe the filmmakers didn’t think that the audience would accept the unadorned reading of a poem.  Howl is a long poem, but the filmmakers do an effective job in delivering it to us in segments.  The language of the poem is not a shocking today as it was in the 50s, but definitely gets your attention.

Franco is great.  Jeff Daniels has a small juicy part, but David Straithern, Jon Hamm, Mary-Louise Parker, Bob Balaban, Treat Williams and Allesandro Nivona don’t have much to do.

The writer-directors here are Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, who made the Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk., which is one of the great documentaries and one of the great political films.

Upcoming on TV: Hail! The Conquering Hero

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Eddie Bracken surrounded by his new Marine pals in Hail! The Conquering Hero

 

Don’t miss this brilliantly funny movie.  It’s one of Preston Sturges’ less well known great comedies.  Eddie Bracken plays a would-be soldier discharged for hay fever – but his hometown mistakenly thinks that he is being sent home a war hero.  Hilarity ensues.  All the funnier when you realize that this film was made in 1944 amid our nation’s most culturally patriotic period.  It will be broadcast on TCM on October 10th.

Baby boomers will also appreciate crusty William Demarest (the crusty housekeeper in TV’s My Three Sons) as the crusty Marine Sarge.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

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Michael Shannon in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

In My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, Werner Herzog explores why an actor would re-enact a theatrical scene for real and kill his mother with the sword that he had been using for a prop.  The short answer is because he was crazier than shit.  This is based on an actual event.  The generally intense and often creepy Michael Shannon plays the murderer, who has suffered a schizophrenic breakdown and is decompensating by the minute.  The audience wants to tell his fiance (Chloe Sevigny) to run, not walk, away from him.  His craziness is so immediately apparent, that there’s really no arc to the film, as we watch flashbacks from the prior year.

Shannon, who is now seen as the revenue agent in HBO’s fine Boardwalk Empire, is very scary.  Incidentally, the movie belongs to that very small subgenre of films where Williem Dafoe (here the cop) does not play the creepiest character.  Dafoe is also out-creeped by Brad Dourif, whose role apparently exists to show that entire family is crazy (like Arsenic and Old Lace).

I would rather recommend a great Michael Shannon performance in a much better film, Shotgun Stories.

The film had an extremely limited theatrical release early this year, but was not widely distributed.  Available now on DVD.

DVD of the Week: Barbarians at the Gate

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The Social Network reminded me of another classic send up of contemporary business history:  Barbarians at the Gate.     Barbarians is the story of late 1980s corporate excess centered on the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.  James Garner, Fred Thompson and Jonathan Pryce star as the duelling CEOs bouncing between corporate jets, boardrooms and must-be-seen-at charity galas with their egos and trophy wives.  Barbarians at the Gate was originally broadcast on HBO and is available from Netflix.

A great movie on TV you haven't seen

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The Earrings of Madame de… (1953):   This is one of the great movies that you have NOT seen, having just been released on DVD in 2009.  Max Ophuls directed what is perhaps the most visually evocative romance ever in black and white. It’s worth seeing for the ballroom scene alone.  The shallow and privileged wife of a stick-in-the-mud general takes a lover, but the earrings she pawned reveal the affair and consequences ensue. Great Italian director Vittorio De Sica plays the impossibly handsome lover.   TCM 10/6

The Social Network

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The best and most entertaining movie of the Fall tells the birth story of Facebook, and may win Oscars for director David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing, Charlie Wilson’s War).  It’s a riveting tale of college sophomores that are brilliant, ambitious, immature, self-absorbed and disloyal – and about to become zillionaires.

Let’s reflect on Sorkin’s challenge here; he is writing a screenplay about nerdy guys writing computer code and making it fast-paced, understandable, funny and even gripping.  To compound his challenge, all of the main characters but one are extremely obnoxious, yet he makes us care about what happens to them.

Yet the most compelling aspect of the film is Jesse Eisenberg’s performance as Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg.  Eisenberg’s Zuckerman has few social skills, less social aptitude and exactly one friend, yet creates a framework for other people to share scores and even hundreds of “friends”.  Eisenberg carries the film with an especially intense performance of an emotionally remote character.   Eisenberg has been underrated despite strong performances in Adventureland, Zombieland and Solitary Man.  Here, it is impossible to think of another actor who could so vividly create this Zuckerman.

This is a uniformly well-acted movie.  Justin Timberlake is terrific as Napster infant terrible Sean Parker.  Armie Hammer is outstanding as both of the Winklevoss twins, the entitled, preppie wunderkinden.  Rooney Mara nails her scenes as Zuckerberg’s soon-to-be ex-girlfriend. Douglas Urbanski (usually a producer) does a viciously hilarious impersonation of former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers.

One more thing:  Fincher and Sorkin know how to end a movie.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

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This is Woody Allen’s latest comedy about romantic entanglements and human self-delusion. It is mid-level Woody – not as good as his recent Vicky Christina Barcelona or Match Point, but not completely unwatchable like some of his other recent work.  To save you 90 minutes of your life and ten bucks:  the character who comforts herself with ridiculously fatuous superstition ends up happier than those who are grounded in scientifically valid reality.  Naomi Watts, Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin and Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire) all do their best with the material.

Another thing that ticks me off about Wall Street

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There is a modest SPOILER in this post.

After thinking so more about Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (and getting more annoyed), I have updated my first assessment of the movie.

The screenplay keeps raising the issue of moral hazard (whether to bail out people from the consequences of risks that they knew they were taking). Yet, at the end, the two flawed main characters each get exactly what they wanted at the beginning of the film despite making risky or evil choices throughout. The movie’s payoff (things turn out OK no matter how badly or foolishly you behaved) is exactly opposite of the movie’s sermonette.

Pretty lame, Oliver Stone.