Half-Assed Movie Reviews

April 19, 2010:  Greenberg

Based on the trailers, Greenberg looked like it could provide a unique perspective on people and relationships despite this being very well-trodden ground, or it could have been a complete disaster.  The quality of the story, the dialogue, and the acting would be paramount.  I believe it succeeded.

Ben Stiller plays Roger Greenberg, a man struggling with anxiety and fresh from a stint in an institution recovering from a mental breakdown.  As the film opens, we see Roger’s brother and his family preparing for a vacation, with their housekeeper/nanny Florence (played by Greta Gerwig) frantically trying to keep up with the to-do list before the trip.  She learns that Roger will be coming from New York to Los Angeles and staying at the house for a few weeks while the family is gone.  Eventually Roger and Florence meet, because of a misunderstanding about who is supposed to be taking care of the dog, and they hit it off immediately despite their age difference (she is in her twenties, he’s in his forties).

Roger and Florence take tentative steps towards a relationship, and she clearly likes him but he keeps blowing his chances, not knowing how to express himself to her without being unintentionally hurtful.  It’s surprising, frankly, that she keeps coming back as many times as she does, but maybe it’s good that people have that drive to push and work towards what they want.  The dog gets sick, so the veterinarian trips coupled with Roger’s inability to drive end up being a convenient device to bring the two back together when they aren’t getting along.

Supporting work from Rhys Ifans as Roger’s old friend (and only real friend in town), and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Roger’s old flame, both expand on the depth and history of Roger’s character.  Roger has not outgrown some of the damaging personality traits he had decades ago, but at the same time, we learn that some of his past actions were misunderstood by the people who were affected by them.  Turning to the lead performances, Greenberg is an expansion for Ben Stiller, and reminded me of Punch-Drunk Love (2002), which was a similar foray into dramatic territory for Adam Sandler and has led to more thoughtful roles for him in the years since, interspersed of course with the juvenile comedy he still loves.  And Greta Gerwig here gets her first chance to sink her teeth into a major part in a big Hollywood film which will bring her real attention.  She has been labouring away for about the past 5 years in extreme indie films (the kind of movies which cost $30,000 to make), such as Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) and Nights and Weekends (2008), and based on a quick audit of some of those films, she clearly stands head and shoulders above her co-stars to really become her characters.  I’m glad to see her successful turn here.  She’s naturalistic, not shy, and emotionally very open, and I think she is a key to helping Stiller to open up.

Greenberg was directed by Noah Baumbach, who grew up exposed to the world of film, and has gained critical acclaim with the likes of The Squid and the Whale (2005), while also more recently writing films for Wes Anderson including last year’s adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox.  His wife Jennifer Jason Leigh has story credit here as well.  I’ve always liked her, and while she’s not given much to work with here, she makes the most of her small role.  I was a bit surprised that Baumbach chose to go with a solid R-rating for Greenberg with strong language and some sex.  Those elements can add tremendously to the realism of a story, rather than working in the standard film shorthand we’ve all come to understand in which people don’t swear or get down and dirty.  So I applaud that decision.

An incisive and impressive drug trip, during which we get to know Greenberg a lot better, is surprisingly well-presented and convincing.  This leads to a believably inconclusive ending which I think is appropriate and recalls the slice of life story arcs of many films from the 1970s, which go out of their way to make the point that happily ever after doesn’t exist.  Not in a bad way, but rather that there is lots to be discovered and nothing known absolutely for sure for the entirety of life, so people need to accept that and just live their lives.  The resolution of some conflict or the reaching of some milestone in a relationship doesn’t mean that everything is now set for life, and no matter what troubles you’ve had or what mistakes you’ve made, there’s still ALWAYS the potential for good things to come your way.  That’s the point Greenberg made for me.

From quiet intensity to raging catharsis.

April 12, 2010:  Shutter Island

This whole process of reviewing all the movies I watch must be seriously screwing up my viewing habits.  How is it possible that in over a year and a half of writing, I haven’t seen a single Martin Scorsese film?

I guess it must be true.  And in order to try and get back on track, instead of writing for days and picking apart the career magnificence of Scorsese, I will instead go with a more compact review here of his new film, Shutter Island, and promise myself a viewing of something else of his very soon.

Shutter Island stars Scorsese’s current muse, Leonardo DiCaprio, as a federal marshal in 1954 Boston who is investigating the escape of a patient from a mental institution on an isolated island in the area.  Ben Kingsley, as the doctor running the institution, seems to be acting suspiciously right from the start, and as Leo delves deeper and deeper into the unconventional medical techniques utilized on the island, he becomes more and more determined to expose these horrors to the world.

I’m not going to go too far into the plot of this twisting and deceptive tale.  In summary, it’s a bit overstuffed and perhaps has one too many redundant examples of how the doctor seems to be screwing with Leo’s head, but otherwise I liked it quite a bit.  Solid supporting work from Mark Ruffalo, Max von Sydow, Patricia Clarkson, and Michelle Williams brings an effortless gravitas to the proceedings, which is the privilege of such established master filmmakers.  We’ve also got Ted Levine, the creepy Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs (1991).  Lush production design in flashbacks of Leo’s deceased wife, and harrowing recreations of his wartime experience liberating concentration camps, go hand in hand with the stylized look of the cold and wet 1950s east coast environment.  The creepy vibe relies perhaps just a bit too much on carefully placed thunder and lightning, but it is arguably appropriate considering how exposed and harsh the island is.  I’m a longtime fan of the work of cinematographer Robert Richardson, who has worked heavily with Scorsese and Oliver Stone in the past, and more recently with Quentin Tarantino.

My feeling was that the ending was ambiguous, but that also leads me to believe that I’ll read a review which confidently points out exactly what happened, with proper supporting evidence cited.  I’m OK with this ending being uncertain, and while Shutter Island is not a Scorsese masterpiece, for me it still stands head and shoulders above most of what I see these days.

A real auteur continues to experiment.

April 3, 2010:  Fight Club

I’ve mentioned before that 1999 was a great movie year for me.  American Beauty, The Matrix, Being John Malkovich, Office Space, The Sixth Sense, Ronin, and the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair all remain particular favourites of mine.  We’ll ignore Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace for the purposes of this little love-fest.  High up on that list of favourites within a very solid year is Fight Club.

Fight Club had widespread appeal to go hand in hand with widespread repulsion, and this polarizing effect on the audience is almost an extension of the very point that the film is trying to make.  The core idea is the rejection of consumerism, embracing life and feeling, and tearing everything down, no matter how raw or painful, in order to rebuild with a new attitude.  That message was perhaps a decade ahead of its time, falling on deaf ears in the late 1990s and carrying noticeably more meaning now in the midst of global recession and environmental carnage, forcing us to question the purpose and sustainability of mass consumption and overpopulation.  In Fight Club, physical hand-to-hand combat brings people from all walks of life together with a common purpose, puts them on the same level, and puts them in touch with the struggles of others.

The story focuses on a nameless protagonist (played by Edward Norton) who lives a travelling business lifestyle which was quite common at the time, hopping all over the USA all the time to investigate car crashes and determine whether or not automotive recalls are necessary.  In the course of his travels, he meets Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt), a quirky fellow who seems nevertheless to be somehow on the same wavelength as him.  Arriving home one night to find his condo destroyed by a fiery explosion, and with no friends to call since he values his travels and his IKEA possessions more than people, Norton calls Tyler Durden looking for a place to stay.  Tyler agrees on the condition that they first try to hit each other to see what it’s like, since he’s never been in a fight, so they fight in the parking lot behind a bar.  Inspired by this experience, before long they have started an exclusive “Fight Club” where men can see what it’s like to beat each other up, within the protective cocoon of a secret society with rules for the fights.  Our protagonist slowly realizes that Tyler is up to something, building an underground army with their nationwide Fight Club chapters, in order to take a big destructive swipe at consumerism and all that is wrong with society.  Oh, and of course they both vie for the affections of the same woman.

I’ve seen this film a number of times, though not at all recently, so I’ve been planning to revisit it and hoping that it would hold up.  I found that the movie on the DVD looks physically much older than it is, as if the transfer was bad or it was a particularly low-budget film.  I don’t remember noticing that before, but it doesn’t seriously detract from the experience.  Despite my being absolutely blown away upon my first viewing, the climax never really rang true for me, and I hoped this time around it would make more sense or rankle less with age, but unfortunately it hasn’t.  Fight Club remains brilliant for the first 1/3 of its run time, and still great up to the last 15-20 minutes, but it falls just short of being a masterpiece because of the ending.

I’m not sure whether it’s appropriate to reveal the twist, and I think I need to err on the side of caution here, but there must be some statute of limitations on that kind of thing.  Everyone knows the truth about Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader (revealed in 1980), and I like to think that everyone knows the secret in The Sixth Sense (revealed in 1999, the same year as Fight Club).  But it seems to me that there are probably still plenty of people who haven’t yet seen Fight Club but still might, so I don’t want it on my head if I wreck it for them.  Like any good twist, it’s right there in front of your eyes all along if you’re paying attention.

But let’s turn away from the overarching story for a moment and look at the fighting itself.  I’ve never personally been in a real fight – never punched anyone, never been punched.  Like many guys (and women as well, though the film stays away from exploring that angle), I suppose, I wonder what it’s like and kind of sort of almost wish I could find out, but don’t want to suffer the pain and possible permanent damage.  I think Fight Club totally speaks to guys like me, and that’s entirely deliberate.  But it’s more than that, more than just the physical combat.  In a half in-jest attempt to convince my wife to sit and watch the film with me (she’d seen it before so I knew I couldn’t pull the wool over her eyes), I explained to her that really, the violence is allegorical, and the allegory just happens to be expressed with actual violence.  And I do think that what these men find in fight club is more than just an outlet for physical aggression, but also a way to connect to other humans on a visceral level.

Where this fits into the career arc for director David Fincher is also fascinating, and I tend to think of it as being his early peak, possibly to be revisited.  As a director of music videos and later the troubled sequel Alien3 (1992), Fincher then stunned me with the combination of Se7en (1995) and Fight Club (1999).  Scattered in that period were also the underappreciated The Game (1997) and Panic Room (2002).  He then shifted his tone somewhat, and turned out what many consider his best film, Zodiac (2007), and the tragically muddled The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).  Some directors (William Friedkin, anyone?  Michael Cimino?) have an early peak and then never regain their glory.  The ambition clearly evident in both Fincher’s early and later works leave me with high hopes that he’ll eventually find the right combination and win Oscar gold.  He’s certainly one of the most dynamic and inventive directors currently working in Hollywood.

1999 was a tough year.  Fight Club isn’t really awards material, but I think it touched a lot of people in a way they didn’t even fully understand at the time, and it remains once of my favourites, despite an ending linked to a premise which doesn’t make sense to me.  But there’s so much more to experience and to think about in this film that some weakness in the overall story doesn’t bring it down.

The definition of a modern-day classic.

March 30, 2010:  The Runaways

Except for a very brief time around 1983-1984, I’ve always been at least a decade behind on music.  I spent most of the 1980s exposed to music from the 1960s.  I spent the 1990s learning about music from the 1980s.  I spent the early part of this past decade discovering all that I had missed in the 1990s.  You might note that somehow I missed the 1970s.  Well, not exactly, since the constantly rotating “classic rock” package of the top songs are inescapable, and I’ve made occasional efforts to immerse myself in funk and disco and punk rock with the result usually being disappointment.  But one of the areas which leaves me fascinated but also typically not too excited is hard rock.

I’ve always appreciated such music in context – blasting from the radio of a classic car on a weekend afternoon, or over an energetic sequence in a movie – but I’ve never really picked apart what I like or don’t like about it, or where it came from.  The Runaways brings us one perspective on the story of how that band fit into the development of the genre, as an intense flash in the pan themselves but also giving birth to the solo career of Joan Jett, who has been a big part of defining how women can fit right into the tough image of the rock and roll world.

Based on memoirs from Runaways lead singer Cherie Currie, the film obviously focuses on her but it is sensitive to the very different experience Jett takes from the same events which envelop the group during the band’s frenzied heyday.  Currie dives in deep and burns herself out, pressured by family obligations and rejections and eventually triggering the breakup of the band.  Jett tries to keep things grounded, insisting on keeping the focus on the music, and she is clearly the one with the determination and level-headedness to stick with this for the long run, as indeed turned out to be the case.  That’s not to say Jett doesn’t cut loose and enjoy the adventure, but she keeps herself from going physically over the edge even if she struggles at times to keep things emotionally under control.  The other members of the band are really reduced to little more than filler, as exemplified by Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat not actually having any lines of her own in the entire film.

I didn’t know much about the history of the band, or how Joan Jett fit into it all, so this was educational, although I know I should take the story with a grain of salt.  The band was assembled and trained by superstar producer Kim Fowley, then carefully matured in ever-expanding tours from the US midwest to Japan.  They get a record deal, and that’s when the money and fame and competition among the band members starts to tear things apart.  A lot of that struck me as very similar to what I’ve seen in “rock band biopic” movies before, likely because the particular personalities that tend to come together and form bands often do struggle with ego and money issues once they hit the big time.  It’s that emotional explosiveness which enables them to create great music, and few and far between are the intense bands which can stay together for a long time through that.

So, let’s examine two things.  The performances, and the point of the movie.

The performances are uniformly excellent, and that’s a big part of why this movie has been so well received.  Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie and Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett absolutely inhabit their roles, and elevate themselves clearly beyond the teenage and child-star roles and images which they’ve previously struggled to overcome.  These are career-turning performances by two young women who are already big stars, and a big part of it has to do with how they keep these girls realistic and reasonable in their portrayals.  They are emotional at times but when they blow up at one another, it’s not artificial, and it’s not just to advance the plot.  Michael Shannon is a force to behold as producer Kim Fowley, all “Bowie”d up with his makeup and crazy hair, but he makes it seem completely appropriate and his unrelenting energy spent on molding the young women to the image he has in his head drives them all insane at the start, but every one of them looks back and appreciates that work once they encounter tough situations on the road.  As I mentioned, the rest of the band is relegated mostly to the background.  I also was thrilled to see Robert Romanus in a tiny role as Jett’s guitar teacher.  Romanus is best known to me and probably to most as Mike Damone from Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), and I haven’t really seen him in anything since but he brought a particular and necessary mix of sliminess and innocence to that role.  Here, however, he’s the guy with a heart of gold that you always knew he was.  I presume the connection and the reason he’s been dug up for this little role is related to him having been in Foxes (1980) with Cherie Currie (and more notably Jodie Foster).

But what is the point of the movie?  I found myself specifically wondering this as I watched, which is usually not a good sign.  To be sure, it viscerally captures the mid-1970s rock and roll energy, and it’s hard to believe that as recently as 35 years ago, women playing electric guitars was so unthinkable.  The Runaways tells a story of a period in history, but to what end?  I’m not sure I ever figured that out, and while it’s clear enough that the time box chosen is that of the existence of the band The Runaways (roughly 1975-79), the pacing and the story arc end up feeling like the story is unfinished.  This can be chalked up to the scope of Currie’s involvement with the band, and while that’s almost an arbitrary distinction considering the continuum of people’s musical exploration, I guess that’s all we can ask of her and it’s reasonable territory for a movie.  Jett wasn’t gunning for individual stardom.  She wanted to play rock and roll and for the band to maintain its artistic integrity, and it’s clear that Cherie Currie understands and appreciates that, whether she did or not at the time, and that understanding comes through in this story and gives it a good deal of its power.

Mildly educational, viscerally energetic, tremendous performances.

March 14, 2010:  One Week

I felt a bit guilty not seeing One Week in the theatre.  I knew roughly what it was about, and the reviews were decent and it starred Joshua Jackson who is a fairly popular star (even in the US – largely due to his role in Dawson’s Creek a decade ago, as well as some of the teen-interest films which came out around that time).  But I knew it was Canadian, and Canadian films do have a tendency to have a certain look, a certain level of production value, and a certain inferiority complex.

One Week doesn’t seem to be plagued by as many of these “Canadian film” weaknesses as some are, and while I certainly didn’t see a masterpiece, the story and scenery and production were entirely competitive with smaller independent US product.  In fact, it’s a strong positive that One Week is unabashedly Canadian, reveling in the cross-country journey and familiar landmarks which are completely unknown to the vast majority of Americans, not to mention the rest of the world.

Set in Toronto, we start out as Jackson learns that he has an illness which will leave him with an unknown number of months to live.  Understandably, he freaks out but in a quiet way, pulling back from his fiancée and family and trying to figure out what to do.  Some people turn to others at these times of crisis, and others turn inward.  Jackson turns inward, deciding to buy a classic motorcycle and head out of town for a few days.  He drives west, seeing his country the way everyone knows they should see their own native land, and having a series of experiences which are frankly a bit too convenient and timely but are entirely to be expected in a movie.  Meanwhile, his fiancée begs him to come home and doesn’t understand why he has shut everyone else out of this journey of self-discovery, which he feels he must allow himself before submitting to cancer treatments which will have unknown devastating effects on him.

It’s always neat for me to see recognizable Toronto neighbourhoods in the movies, and this one being actually set in Toronto, they don’t make the usual efforts to hide streetcars and certain stores.  I can’t say I’m a big fan of the cheesy Tim Horton’s coffee cup fortune being Jackson’s inspiration to ride west, although I must admit it’s as quintessentially Canadian as you can get.  A number of the tourist landmarks he visits are familiar to me from a trip I took out west with my family a couple of years ago.

I noted that some of our protagonist’s experiences on the road didn’t seem believable.  Do you really find a nice-looking girl in the woods with a guitar who you happen to make love to later that night under the stars?  When you find a dead dog in the ditch in the middle of the prairies, does it typically belong to a philosophically-minded middle-aged woman who can give you some advice about the meaning of life?  Do you encounter a mellow guy (played by Tragically Hip front man Gord Downie) sitting outside his motel room one evening who can inspire you to think about the valuable things in life?  But thinking about it, I realized that Jackson’s character is a warm and friendly guy (I get the sense that the illness allowed him to step out of a self-imposed shell which had led to him becoming engaged to a prim and proper actuary).  He’s absolutely the kind of person who would talk with the people around him, and delve beneath the surface in a hurry.  A key point here is that he doesn’t mention his medical situation to anyone – he bonds with them on unbiased terms.  He’s finally able to allow himself to live, just after he’s found out he’s going to die.

Of course, such a story is standard Hollywood tear-jerker fare.  It’s nice to know that we here in Canada can “rise” to that level when the mood strikes, isn’t it?  But, the movie is lively and fun, and it doesn’t take the easy way out with the relationship resolution, which pushes it up a couple of notches to a recommendation from me.

One Week shows us one country.