Half-Assed Movie Reviews

September 5, 2010:  Adaptation

I loved Adaptation (2002) when I first saw it, and I think I’ve been carefully trying to not watch it too much ever since then, so that I can avoid it deteriorating in my mind.  I suspect I’m doing the same with Being John Malkovich (1999).  Both films were written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze.

Kaufman has established himself as a screenwriter of twisted plots filled with self-loathing characters, quite likely expressing what goes on inside his head on an ongoing basis.  In 2008 he came very close to a full representation of this tormented soul with Synecdoche, New York, a multi-layered story about a theatrical writer/director building towards his magnum opus, which Kaufman directed himself.  With Adaptation, though, I think we get more specifically a look at what Kaufman goes through when he writes a movie.  To try to logically explain the story would do it a serious disservice, but it’s more or less an adaptation of a real book – The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean – about orchids and the people who are passionate about these elusive flowers.  But the movie is also largely about the process of itself being written, hence the double meaning of adaptation of flowers in nature as well as the adaptation of the book into a film.  What might plausibly have turned out to be a movie about a New York City writer and her fascination with the people who seek out orchids, becomes a movie about Charlie Kaufman trying to figure out how to adapt a movie about a New York City writer’s fascination with these people.  This comes about because of Kaufman’s realization that there isn’t enough in the book to support a feature-length narrative, so he integrates his story in order to pad it out.

Oh, but there’s more.  In the movie, Charlie’s fictional brother Donald (who also received screenwriting credit and even an Oscar nomination despite the fact that he doesn’t exist) lives with him and is also a budding screenwriter, taking a course on how to write conventional movies and experiencing success with his first screenplay, a cliché-filled action romp which uses all the obvious tricks such as car chases, split personalities and guns and murder.  Charlie struggles with his insistence on always doing things the hard way, instead of going for easy success with bankable stories and scripts.  Yet at the same time, as he struggles to come up with ideas, Charlie’s script gradually begins to deteriorate and to include all of the elements in his brother’s film, including a murderous chase through the Florida swamps where the flowers are found, and of course the split personality of the real Charlie vs. the fictional Donald.  Additionally, all of this is set against the backdrop of the filming of Being John Malkovich, another film about split or fractured personalities.

There’s a glowing cast here, and they are all clearly loving this crazy little adventure.  Supporting performances from Judy Greer as a waitress, Maggie Gyllenhaal as Donald’s girlfriend, Ron Livingston as Charlie’s agent, and Tilda Swinton as Charlie’s film producer, are brief but incisive and it’s great that such talented performers were willing to come in for such small parts.  But the main trio of actors hold this all together.  Nicolas Cage does double duty as Charlie and Donald Kaufman, bringing manic energy to Donald and despair to Charlie, both of which Cage is known to do well.  Meryl Streep is a great anchor playing writer Susan Orlean, as we see her developing the story and getting drawn into the world or orchids, as she herself develops a passion that she didn’t know she had in her, making her world of posh New York dinner parties and her relationship with her husband seem pale and empty by comparison.  But Chris Cooper, who won a well-deserved Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as the orchid enthusiast (and thief), really makes an impression with his portrayal of a raw and honest man who is almost like a plant himself, moving from one place and passion to another with no real care or memory for what came before, almost as if he were happily at the mercy of the wind and weather like the flowers he pursues.  Streep as Susan Orlean wishes she could live her life as honestly as this man who is so often judged by others based on his looks, but who conveys depth beyond imagining with his lucid insight before abruptly spitting out an unbelievably shallow or stupid comment.

I didn’t like Adaptation as much on this viewing as I had hoped I would, but as I mentioned, I suspected that might happen.  That doesn’t make it any less brilliant.  I just need to carefully ration it out over the years.

Textbook Charlie Kaufman for the uninitiated.

August 26, 2010:  Following

Every time I see a movie, as the Half-Assed Movie Reviews reader might have guessed, my brain goes off constructing a spiderweb of dozens of additional movies that I would like to see in order to understand the career stages and personal perspectives and influences of the parties involved in making the film at that tie.  Alas, since I don’t live in the movie Groundhog Day (1993), I don’t have the time to follow up on this desire and instead the web is discarded in a few days, replaced by one for the next movie I’ve seen.

On occasion, though, I do manage to at least scratch the surface.  I’ve been a fan of Christopher Nolan since I saw Memento (2001), and before going on my summer vacation this year, I made sure to see his new film, Inception.  Upon my return, I decided to watch Following (1998), an early feature written and directed by Nolan.  It’s a lean film, running only 69 minutes, about a man who falls into a habit of following people, not necessarily stalking per se, but just following them around to see what they do, like television only in real life.  When he is caught by one of the people he’s following, it immediately triggers an out-of-control sequence of events as he is drawn into the world of this man he was observing.

The rough editing and episodic structure are a bit jarring but aren’t necessarily out of place in this black and white film which doesn’t follow a linear narrative structure anyway.  I found it reminiscent of Pi (1998), the feature debut of Darren Aronofsky, another innovative writer-director who’s starting to find his rightful place in the Hollywood pecking order, having made a stir in the arthouse world with Requiem for a Dream (2000) and achieved more mainstream (if not quite commercial) success with Mickey Rourke’s big comeback The Wrestler two years ago.  Getting back to Nolan, he’s known for his departures from linear timelines, most notably with Memento but there are elements of it contained in most of his films, and in Following, we see an early example of his experimentation with the technique.

It may be symptomatic of my skepticism with these kinds of films that I spent the entire run time trying to figure out what was going on, and concluded that it was something far more convoluted than it actually was.  At the end of the film, what happened is spelled out pretty clearly, but I didn’t let myself believe it.  Reading a summary of the film online, it appeared to take the explanation at face value, so I figured I must have duped myself with this one.  I won’t spoil the film by explaining my take on it or the accepted version of the story.  I wanted to like Following, and be able to recommend it as an unknown early Christopher Nolan gem, but I don’t think I would tell anyone to bother with it unless they had already seen Memento and Inception and wanted to see the seeds of those films in the rough form of a director’s first feature.

Enlightening but unfortunately not entirely satisfying.

August 6, 2010:  Taxi Driver

I promised back in April that I would return to watching Martin Scorsese movies, having realized that in a year and a half of writing reviews, I hadn’t seen a single film from the man I sometimes proclaim to be my favourite director.  I’m finally living up to that promise, and where better to start than with one of his great films?

Taxi Driver (1976) is commonly accepted to be one of the top 10 American films of the 1970s.  It is clearly the product of a brilliant and daring filmmaking mind, and it also indelibly captures the state of the nation’s post-Vietnam psyche at the time, being in fact one of the first films to seriously explore the effects of that war on the soldiers after returning home.  As a bonus, it’s a searing portrait of the ongoing decay of New York City at the time, ironically viewed now with nostalgia by some, in comparison with the modern-day revitalization of the scummy Times Square backdrop which is so vividly depicted in the film.

There’s a surprisingly large and talented supporting cast here, but make no mistake, this is the Robert De Niro show.  De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a Vietnam veteran who has clearly been damaged by his experience abroad, though he doesn’t seem to realize it and instead aims his rage at the faults of others.  On the occasions when he acts out this anger with the state of the world, things get messy.  Rendered sleepless at nights by whatever is haunting him, he takes a job driving a taxi, which only serves to immerse him even deeper in the seedy side of society.  He fixates on saving a teenage prostitute as the way he wishes to contribute to the betterment of the world.  The destruction he wages at the climax of the film is as brutal and misdirected as anything imaginable, enhanced by the jarring tone of the coda as we discover that no punishment came of it.  An angry, violent and socially maladjusted loner is still far and away more palatable to society than a lot of the other undesirable elements walking the streets.

Getting back to the supporting cast, up and coming faces abound in Taxi Driver, most notably then-teenager Jodie Foster playing the young prostitute.  Foster’s acting chops are clearly evident even at this tender age, and it was no surprise to see her go on to win a couple of Oscars.  Harvey Keitel, who earlier worked with Scorsese and De Niro on Mean Streets (1973), has a small but intense role as Foster’s pimp.  Comedian Albert Brooks works in a political campaign office and shows signs of the neurotic and underconfident (is that a word?) character upon which he would base many of his later film roles.  Peter Boyle is almost treated as a throwaway but has a couple of good scenes as another cab driver who is known to offer good advice.  Cybill Shepherd is the closest thing there is to a co-star here, as Bickle’s love interest, and she plays smart and charming in her trademark way.  It’s unclear to me why her film career didn’t quite take off through the 1970s, though she’s found success elsewhere in the decades since.

Travis is a lonely man who sees people as being cold and distant, never realizing that he might really be the one who fits that description.  One wonders what he would think of the eventual fulfillment of his wish for a real rain to someday “come and wash all this scum off the streets”, as the Disneyfication of midtown Manhattan and Times Square in particular is such a huge shift from the New York of a few decades earlier, while beneath the surface it’s still the same in so many ways.  There’s a lot to see in Taxi Driver, and I discover new layers upon each viewing.  I think this is a result of both the fundamental philosophical questions raised, as well as the constant changing of that living, breathing city which always provides a different point of comparison to the unforgettably captured moment in time which the film provides.

Masterpiece by one of the masters.

July 18, 2010:  About Schmidt

I’ve been meaning to revisit About Schmidt (2002) for a while, but the timing was appropriate now, since my personal situation in certain ways mirrors that of the main protagonist.  I may never get to say that about another Jack Nicholson movie, unless I’m institutionalized or become the Devil.  Nicholson, playing his age (mid-sixties) for a change, is Warren Schmidt, a mousy vice president at a Nebraska insurance company who is about to retire.  He isn’t entirely sure what he plans to do once his days open up, but the few things he knows are on the horizon don’t seem to inspire him.

It’s jarring to see Nicholson, a longtime Hollywood bad boy and well known these days as a perennial front-row sunglasses-wearing audience member at the Oscars, with a paunch and a comb-over of grey hair.  His wife in the film is a plump lady of similar age, further eroding the sex-symbol image that Jack has cultivated for all these decades, even in his more age-appropriate recent films such as Something’s Gotta Give (2003).  Warren is a meek man, hen-pecked and living in a house with stagnant 1970s-era frilly decorations which he obviously didn’t have a hand in choosing.  He’s old-school, dressing up in a shirt and tie just to go out to the post office during his retirement.  He was a vice president but he’s clearly a cheapskate.  This is a sad man who never found the life he should have had.  He sponsors a foster child in Africa, writing letters regularly, which serves as a useful device to provide a voice-over but also highlights how desperate he is for connection and value in his life.

Getting back to me for a moment, there’s a scene which has stuck with me since the first time I saw this film.  Warren returns to his old office a few weeks after his retirement to visit, to check in on his successor and ask whether any questions have come up.  The energetic young executive gently brushes off Warren by saying that all is under control, further eroding Warren’s feeling of value in the world, and the knife is twisted one final time when Warren leaves and sees his carefully prepared boxes of files and transition reports stacked next to a dumpster.  Having recently left a corporate job myself, I’ve always found this scene to be a helpful reminder not to knock myself out on transition tasks, and also not to feel bad when everything runs smoothly after I’m gone, as if I was never there.  It’s just the way it works.

But this is a movie, so of course tragedy strikes and Warren finds his world upended.  He winds up back in touch with his daughter, who is about to marry a man Warren doesn’t approve of.  Dermot Mulroney is spot-on as the son-in-law to be, a compassionate man who unfortunately doesn’t have much earning potential.  Warren takes a trip in his RV to visit his daughter, and along the way he discovers some of the world he’s been missing, and finds a real emotional connection with some of the people he meets along the way, although his awkward manner gets in the way.  Meeting Mulroney’s family puts Warren way out of his comfort zone, particularly with the outgoing and flamboyant Kathy Bates as the proud mother of the groom.  However, despite being a total fish out of water, he feels valued for the first time in his memory.

I’m generally a big fan of director Alexander Payne, but About Schmidt is a bit of a misfire, and not overall as good as I remembered it being.  Bates’ energy adds a lot to this film.  The plot seems linear, but it’s actually kind of rambling and the point is not clear.  This is brave acting work by Nicholson and Bates, and some important ideas are explored, but it’s not enough to save the movie.

Good quiet film goes wrong somehow.

July 17, 2010:  Contact

Contact (1997) is, on its surface, about the struggle between science and faith, and how the two end up intertwined in the most intriguing ways.  However, it ends up also being an effective examination of loneliness and the search for connection.  Contact is fairly long, but there’s a lot packed in.  I’m going to detail the high and low points of this flawed but fascinating film, but above all from the very first time I saw it and to this day I have to applaud the way this film respects science in a way that Hollywood films rarely do.

I saw Contact upon its initial release and probably haven’t seen it more than once or maybe twice since then, but I’ve always retained the main themes of it in my mind, and I was looking forward to revisiting it, if a little apprehensive about how it has held up.  At its core, this is the story of Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster), who has been obsessed with deep space and extra-terrestrial life since she was a little girl, and is now a respected scientist who may in fact be discovering the first attempt at contact by otherworldly life forms.  The loss of her parents has left her searching the galaxy for forms of life, almost not wanting to allow herself the possibility that somehow somewhere out there, there might be a way for her to contact them.  A CGI zoom-out sequence opens the film, emphasizing the vastness of the universe, leading into a maudlin and broadly painted sequence depicting Ellie as a young child.  It pushes close to the edge of losing me, but a childhood sequence is admittedly important here and as a director it’s hard to keep from taking short cuts when you really want to move on to the main event.  Little details like push pins in a globe for shortwave radio contacts, or the empty branches of deciduous trees at an autumn funeral, speak to me of lazy filmmaking.  Mind you, director Robert Zemeckis, noted for the Back to the Future series of films and more importantly the Oscar-winning Forrest Gump just three years before this, was on a roll and didn’t need to worry too much about tightening up his films since he was pretty much writing his own ticket at that time.  Anyway, the opening sequence doesn’t detract too much from the finished product, nor do a few Gump-ish scenes with stuff like footage of then-president Bill Clinton doctored to fit into the film’s story.  I have to just chalk it up to that period for Zemeckis.

Supporting characters are established, with the compassionate rather than psychopathic version of David Morse as Ellie’s father, Matthew McConaughey as a government contact and romantic interest for her, Tom Skerritt as a competitor in Ellie’s profession, James Woods as a government higher-up, and John Hurt as an eccentric business tycoon who helps Ellie to crack the code.  Skerritt and Woods are little more than caricatures, which in my opinion seriously damages the film and at times drags it from reasoned analysis into the typical Hollywood melodrama traps.  Performances are solid all around, I just question some of the dramatic choices.  I was reminded with the dedication at the end that Contact is adapted from a novel by the at-the-time recently deceased Carl Sagan, who had a hand in the story adaptation but not the screenplay.

At its core, Contact becomes a battle between religion and science.  What constitutes “proof”, and is that even what people are looking for?  Ellie is a hard-core scientist and thinks that religion and spiritual experiences are bunk, to the point where she cannot bring herself to state a belief in God in front of a congressional panel even though she knows that’s a necessary sacrifice to her integrity in order to continue her journey on a government-sponsored mission.  She can’t bring herself to say what they want to hear, and instead needs to say what she feels is her truth.  This integrity is admirable, but it leaves her unable to connect with many people in the world, since most don’t live up to her exacting standards.  Anyway, following her trip to visit the aliens, if indeed that’s what it was, the tables are turned on her as her claims are met with disbelief because she lacks scientific proof.  It’s a profound moment and one which always wins me over because I respect the idea of this theme being flipped on its head.  The implementation of this film is seriously flawed but it always gets me on side out of sheer brute force.

Contact doesn’t take the easy way out, and ends up getting things right in the end by allowing for anyone’s interpretation of the world to be valid.  One point I struggle with is that for some reason I’ve never been able to decide whether or not the alien contact was real.  I don’t know whether that’s a deliberate approach, or another case of me missing some obvious point in the movie which would make it clear.  In this case, I’m perfectly happy to leave it as a mystery.  (Note: some Wikipedia research reveals that it’s entirely deliberate)

Science vs. faith in Hollywood form.