The Unbearable Slightness of (Being) Alone

I had been wanting to watch this remarkable Essay on what-it-means-to-be-alone-as-a-Human ever since I read Manohla Dargis' review in the Times. I finally got to see it recently, and went with my wife and two young men who were staying as guests in our house.

Sufficed to say, "The Lobster" is not for everyone, maybe even not for anyone. Although the Yorgos Lanthimos-helmed "sci fi" piece is by turns funny, tragic, head-scratching and remarkably well acted, it is in the end, almost unremittingly depressing. I am not sure whether that is more of a statement on the current state of humanity, or just the world view that the film is seeking to present.

In short, Colin Farrell plays the eponymous Lobster (the process of learning what that means is one of the joys, or horrors of the film depending on your personal reaction) a recently divorced man living in a non-specific City that looks remarkably like Belfast. Being newly single, the Lobster is forced to check in to The Hotel, where he will have a limited amount of time to find a new mate. If he does not, well, you will find out if you watch the film.

The poster, and billing would seem to imply that the amazing Rachel Weisz is Farrell's co-star throughout the film, but Weisz only appears in the late second act, and their very strange, and very sad romance starts late enough that "The Lobster" almost seems like two films. But is is one, seamlessly told and emotionally wrenching, as many critics have said. The Lobster tries very hard, but fails to find a mate, and circumvents the normal end game by meeting up with Weisz and her band of not so merry folk.

In addition to one of Farrell's best turns as an Actor, and Weisz's always great work, the stellar supporting cast just makes the dreary subject matter and potential outcome even more poignant. And, if it is possible to say, "The Lobster" has one of the most ambiguous endings since, well Chris Nolan's "Inception".

This is great stuff, folks, But not for the faint of heart.

No, this is not the David Bowie Movie

I will continue to be as random as I can in my reviews, until one of my intrepid readers (hello?) calls me out. 

So, continuing my predictable unpredictability, I present Germany's entry in the Best Foreign Film competition for the 2016 Oscars, "Labyrinth of Lies". Truth be told, this is not a complete left turn from "Sicario" and bears some genetic material in common with the first film I reviewed, the excellent documentary "The Gatekeepers".

Labyrinth is a solid legal thriller that takes as its context and source material the true story of how ordinary Germans began to be prosecuted two decades later for, well, for the Holocaust. The sheer scale and audacity of this statement should tell you what the Prosecutors had to face in trying to get justice for millions of Jews, well after that War, the closing of the Concentration Camps, even the Nuremberg "show" trials. Germany in the early 1960s, awash in beatnik culture and only just recovering from WWII was not very interested in putting Germans on trial for any crimes, let alone the crime of Murder. Weren't the good soldiers of the Reich just "acting under orders"? If you didn't join the Party, were you exempt from moral, to speak nothing of Legal prosecution?

The genius of Labyrinth is that it focuses on the "ordinary man" (and woman) on both sides of these thought-provoking questions. The film asks, who was the more Evil, the seeming puppet masters like Eichmann or Mengele, or the average Joe (or Josef) who -- willingly or not -- accepted the reality of the Final Solution and participated in the machine-like brutality that was carried out on innocent men, women and children. The further cleverness of this crisply shot and acted film is that, rather than holding up the Attorney General's office as the hero (which it was) focuses on a lowly, "greenhorn" prosecutor, who almost stumbles upon Nazis hiding in plain sight while trying to get his legal career off the ground. Whether true or not, the narrative of Johann Radmann (played well by Alexander Fehling) gradually realizing how important his pursuit is, and also how amazingly difficult it will be to bring to conclusion is the compelling dramatic center of Labyrinth.

Some critics have taken film to task for being slow, or complex. Or just dour. I disagree, but that is what "critics" get to do. And in my case, that is what amateur critics get to do.

Hero: Dark, Dirty

This is my "sometime" Movie Blog. I love two things (among others); movies, and writing. So why, I ask myself, do I not blog more frequently about movies? Part of the answer might be in the fact that I am really moved to write a blog posting when I see a movie that really, well, moves me. Such is the case with Sicario.

The title of this blog posting relates to a film I absolutely loved, Zero Dark Thirty which I blogged about when it came out. Why do I connect these two? Because the excellent thriller Sicario shares much of its DNA with that Kathryn Bigelow-helmed flim.

Sicario at first blush seems to be a straightforward thriller where the good guys/girls are after the Bad Guy: with Zero, Osama Bin Laden and with this film a fictional Mexican Drug Lord who, like Bin Laden is the epitome of pure evil. Straight out of Central Casting, really. I say "seems to be" because in neither film are the reasons the main characters are pursuing the Bad Guy as simple as they first appear. Refer to my previous post for more on Zero's complex motivations, but with Sicario part of the film's accomplishment is how deftly it layers in the various players, and motivations to make the actual reason why the Bad Guy is being pursued far from simple. In fact, in both films the Nemesis being pursued doesn't even appear, if at all, until the final reel, which adds to the mystery and, dare I say, the ambiguousness of the pursuit itself.

Another commonality with Zero, and another reason I love this film is summed up in two words: girl power. Sicario is suffused with Machismo, from the testosterone-infused law-enforcement personnel to the less anonmymous main characters -- Benicio Del Toro's very mysterious quasi-agent, Josh Brolin's even more mysterious possible CIA operative -- the entire film is like teenage video game fantasy: Grand Theft Droga if you will. Yet, there is Emily Blunt's Phoneix drug detective (or DEA agent? It is never really clear) and she is not just the moral through line of the film, but really the energy that drives it forward. Blunt's character arc is Sicario, as Jessica Chastain's was in Zero.

And what an arc it is. From the remarkable opening scene where Blunt's character has her tidy little world literally blown open, through the harrowing, tension filled middle act where (no spoilers here) you are not sure she is going to survive this Bildungsroman, to the extremely ambivalent closing scene, Blunt's character is the measuring stick by which the actions of the other characters are assayed. Brolin is absolutely sensational as an almost robotic "DoD advisor" who seems to be calling the shots, and Del Toro is tyipically great in an Oscar-worthy turn as a former Medellin cartel member who seems to be: a) helping the U.S. Government nail a really, really nasty bad guy, or 2) pursuing his own agenda.

I don't like doing plot synopses in my reviews, so I won't here. Hopefully that is enough to get you intrigued. Johan Johanssen's fabulous score provides a driving, but dark emotional context that fleshes out the film's heavy questions, and Denis Villenueve's top-notch direction ties everything together very well, as, well, Bigelow did in Zero. May I take a moment to mention that I am a card-carrrying member of the Denis Villeneuve marching and shouting society? I loved two of his previous films: the remarkable serial-killer drama/thriller, Prisoner and the mind-bending indie sci-fi film Enemy with Jake Gyllenhaal.

Sicario was nominated for a few Golden Globes, and will probably get a handful of Oscar nods: film, supporting actor (Del Toro) and cinematography. I think the great Roger Deakins could win for his deft lens-work here, but the real crime against humanity will be if Emily Blunt is over-looked a Best Actress nod. She is just amazing. Girl power, indeed.

Enjoy.

The weird, wonderful world of Wes Anderson

I still haven't quite figured out this thing about wrapping text in Blogger. Oh, well. It simply doesn't pertain to my latest obsession. Or does it?

I titled this post "The weird, wonderful world of Wes Anderson." Going back to the wrap text issue, if I really wanted to speak to Anderson's OCD-ish attention to detail -- a quality one either loves, or hates about him -- I would figure that out before posting.

Let's parse the title as a format for what I want to say.

The weird. Anderson's Limoges-like films are nothing, if not strange. Take "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou", the movie poster of which is poorly placed, above. A perhaps over-ripe Jacques Cousteau style ocean explorer finds, among other things, there is a son he did not know he had (or perhaps he did know?), goes on a quest to discover the sea creature who killed his deceased partner, falls afoul of a competing and more popular explorer memorably played by Jeff Goldblum...well, you get the drift. What is Anderson trying to get at here? Life is a journey? Secrets from our past can return to haunt us?

Probably not. In a Wes Anderson film, the journey, to use a cliche, is the reward. And oh, what a journey it is. The visual splendor, the music-box mechanism of Anderson's imagery, costume, music and much else that gives the enjoyment. One could say Anderson privileges these elements if one wanted to bring an obnoxious critical term to play. Or one could simply watch the way Anderson re-creates an almost home movie style treatment for the anecdotal clips from Zissou's many (too many?) adventure docu-dramas. This film-within-a-film construction is so lovingly hand made it is easy to forget for a moment it is not real. Or take a look at the "Team Zissou" costumes that seem to have arrived via time travel from the 1960s. This is high craft in, not just film making but art.

And this leads, finally to the World. To say each of Wes Anderson's films -- especially the last five or six -- is a completely self contained artistic "snow globe" is an understatement. This is seen no where better than in the wonderfully self-referential model of Zissou's sea-going vessel. In a scene early in Life Aquatic, the camera pans across a seemingly life-sized cut-away model of this ship, showing us the engine room, cabins, obligatory jacuzzi spa (?) and other marvelous touchs, all painstakingly rendered. It is important to remember that this is not CGI, but an actual model created by Anderson and his team, and the little people moving around are actual actors. In some respects, this self-referential model is a roadmap to the film itself, as if to say "my film is a model of something real, with real characters in it, but it also looks like something I have constructed, and I dare you to tell the difference between the two." In a Wes Anderson film, the world is so clearly constructed, that it is easy to simply enter into it and forget it is a fiction. Yet he is constantly reminding us that it is.

You either love this distinctly post-modern technique, or you hate it. I happen to love it, and have since I first saw "The Royal Tennenbaums".

I chose Life Aquatic not because it is the best of Anderson's films -- that honor is reserved, I believe for "The Grand Budapest Hotel" -- but because I think it demonstrates Anderson at his brilliant, maddening best. You never really know where the story is going, but want very much to ride along. And even if you didn't, having David Bowie songs played in Portuguese would be worth the price of admission. Or watching the rare Anderson action scene, with Bill Murray, Owen Wilson and crew racing across a decrepit resort on a random tropical isle, to Mark Mothersbaugh's goofy, wonderful score. Its like a music video, but not. Or something out of a 1970s era children's television show, like The Banana Splits.

Try it, you'll like it.

When the fog finally lift(ed)

Let's just start with the title of this fantastic P.T. Anderson take on Thomas Pynchon's novel: Inherent Vice. It is not at all a spoiler to say that "Inherent Vice" is a term of art in Marine Insurance that means the natural tendency of items being shipped to, let's say, self-destruct: chocolate melts, glass breaks, etc. If you know Pynchon, this is almost a philosophical outlook -- an ontology. Or not...

There is a range of qualities that make this film just...well...wonderful. It would take more than the space in this Blog post, and more than the average reader has the stamina to read to cover them all. So let's take a selection: the source material, the adaptation and the filmmaker. Oh, and some other stuff, like Joaquin Phoenix's note-perfect rendering of Pynchon's not-perfect stoner P.I., Doc Sportello.

Full disclosure: I am a lifelong Pynchon fan, and have been ever since I read V in college. I mean, just saying that is kind of cliche, but I haven't "grown out" of him. Hardly. I loved Vineland, and really, really loved Inherent Vice. So, when I found out one of my favorite film-makers was going where no filmmaker had gone before, and was ADAPTING a Thomas Pynchon novel, I was intrigued.

The novel Inherent Vice is a fascinating pastiche of loony-but-likeable characters (which reminds one of V), fast-rapping pop culture references and a plot that is so intricate Charles Dickens might be rolling in his grave. Pynchon has honed his craft over the years, taken the relatively compact story telling of V, the epic qualities of Gravity's Rainbow and now fashioned something that is part Elmore Leonard, part Charles Bukowski, with smatterings of William Burroughs. But all Pynchon. One particularly remarkable prose passage (from a scene not included in the film) describes the interior of a decrepit casino in Las Vegas - like a one-take scene in a...well, in a P.T. Anderson film. I'm thinking the roller disco opening in Boogie Nights, here.

Then there is the Adaptation. It is hard to say that with a straight face in this post-modern, Spike Jonez meets Nicholas Cage world, but it still matters who takes a work of real weight like this and tries to bring it to screen. Even a relatively straightforward Pynchon novel like Inherent Vice is a challenge, since his prose is so dense with pop-culture allusion. Here, Anderson is the screenwriter and director, and the material could not have been a better fit: Anderson seems to think somewhat like Pynchon does; and, the purported LA resident Pynchon is an eloquent chronicler of the region's vices and virtues.

And then there is Mister Anderson. All I can say about him is, well, you had me at Boogie Nights. Literally. Go back a few years and remember the year Boogie Nights came out. That same year we had David O Russell's stunning Three Kings, and David Fincher's equally stunning Fight Club. I shared an opinion with a number of "real" critics that that year was a watermark in American Cinema. None of these directors has let us down, and Anderson has really all along been my favorite. Perhaps in part because I spent most of my life in LA, and Anderson has chosen to make LA. itself the topic of all of his films: not just set his films in L.A. or use L.A. to represent other locations, but make films ABOUT Los Angeles. Or, about life, philosophy, culture, etc. viewed through the lens of L.A.

Inherent Vice concerns one Larry "Doc" Sportello, a pot-smoking private detective who seems not to have gotten the memo that the 60s died, and what was left was the 70s. To summarize the plot would really be futile, and really miss the point. For Pynchon (and to some extent Anderson), the narrative through-line of the story is incidental to the story-telling itself. In short, Doc is visited by an ex-girlfriend for whom he still pines, learns of the disappearance of a scum-bag L.A. real estate mogul, and, well, the rest is Pynchon. Evil corporate plots involving shadowy government agencies (with glancing references to Richard Nixon), coke-sniffing dentists, confusingly-named sanatoria, macho L.A. cops and robot-like FBI agents. You get the idea.

As mentioned, Joaquin Phoenix quite literally steals the show in Inherent Vice, with just the right amount of stoner disregard to avoid getting killed and to succeed solving the mystery. If you can say the "mystery" is ever really solved. Joining him on this jaunt is a great set of A listers: the nearly always great Josh Brolin as LAPD detective 'Bigfoot' Bjornson, Phoenix's Walk the Line co-star Reese Witherspoon as Doc's Assistant D.A./squeeze, Martin Short as the aforementioned drug-addled DDS, Benicio Del Toro in a marvelous turn as Doc's vaguely Latin attorney. The list could go on.

Joining these better-known actors is a brace of lesser-knowns and unknowns, and this is part of what gives the film its undeniable charm. Joanna Newsome plays the mysterious Sortilege, who also does the added voice-over narration. Two actors I had never heard of play the anonymous FBI agents, and perhaps that is the point. An actor we don't see a lot, Eric Roberts plays Mickey Wolfman, the a-hole about whom all the fuss is being made in the first place, and the lovely Jena Malone is Surf Sax player Coy Harlingen's abandoned wife.

As always with Anderson, the technical and other aspects of the film-making are near-perfect. As has been pointed out by critics, his warm, highly saturated lighting, combined with relatively straightforward shots and camera angles is distinctively Anderson, and suits the material well. And the material, here is not just the tapestry of characters but L.A. itself. Not the gorgeously-shot L.A. of Chinatown but the hyper-realistic L.A. of P.T. Anderson, which shows everything: the good, the bad and the ugly.

As is typical with Anderson, the music is exceptional. In fact, so good that it actually becomes part of the fabric of the film, the way Wes Anderson's intricate production design does. Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood did the main score, and sprinklings of period music, including well-placed Neil Young snippets really help complete what is an extraordinary finished product.

Inherent Vice, ironically doesn't appear to have any of its own...vice that is. The title seems to refer to the sort of entropy that seems to enthrall Pynchon -- whom many consider to have been the first true "post-modern" novelist in English -- as a way of understanding the world; the center cannot hold, but let's enjoy watching it fall apart, in a very human way.

Enjoy.

Kirk Douglas Story

I seem to be on a bit of a Kirk Douglas kick right now. At least this is the second Blog post where I have discussed the still-living titan of American acting. I promise the next post will be about a recent movie, and one not starring Michael Douglas's Dad.

I sometimes write these posts thinking, "geez, these really great films, probably most of the people who read film blogs or are members of Google Plus communities have already seen these." Maybe you have, but if you haven't you really do have to check out "Detective Story". This 1951 classic directed by the nearly never bad William Wyler is nearly perfect in its organic unspooling of a story that made the long journey from novel, to Broadway hit (starring Ralph Bellamy) to, finally, the silver screen.

Douglas has rarely been better, and he is at his finest as the eponymous New York City detective working in a room full of his peers. Douglas and company handle the riff raff that walk, lurch and even stumble through a swinging wooden gate (a great touch, by the way) into the den of investigative prowess, moral judgement and bromance-ishness that the story asserts would be a mid-Century police detectives division.

While Douglas's Detective McLeod is not the leader of these not-so-merry men -- that role is superbly taken by actor Horace McMahon as the "L.T." -- he is clearly the engine that drives them. While "Story" plays as an ensemble piece, Det. McLeod has the arc that seems to be so often required to give a film its, what...meaning? Energy? Too, even though the narrative of the film involves several inter-connected sub-plots about suspects in custody, witnesses and others, the primary story line comes to concern Douglas and his treatment of a seemingly nefarious character: a doctor who it is implied has performed unmentionable acts on women 'in trouble'. It seems McLeod and the good doctor have a history, as the saying goes, and the doctor's lawyer appears in the squadroom to meet with the L.T., to prepare for his client's willing surrender for an unnamed crime.

What is revealed is the primary, and it turns out tragic truth about how McLeod and the Doc are connected in ways McLeod is unaware. Without spoiling the plot let me say that the brave script interrogates issues of women, sex, abortion and other tough topics in a way we might not expect of the Eisenhower era. And it doesn't exactly directly address these issues, but more like clearly implies them. Nonetheless, the result is gritty, dark and no-nonsense. Not qualities one would normally associate with Wyler, I don't think.

As stated, the acting, to a person, is superb. Eleanor Parker is a revelation as Douglas's troubled wife, and co-co-star William Bendix is perfect, that is to be expected given his many, many supporting roles. It is hard, though, not to think of Bendix as a "swabbie" out of Central Casting, he played in so many WWII movies set in the Pacific, or as Gangster Number three in an overlooked B noir. Wyler's direction is transparent, letting the acting and the story surface as they need to in this type of film, and Lee Garmes's camerawork is tight, as is the fairly seamless editing, which was I think typical of this era in American filmmaking.

You have probably already seen this noir-ish gem, but if not, might I recommend Amazon Prime? I support the writers in their effort to get fair pay out of Jeff Bezos's monster, and still I love the high quality of print and transfer (this one was in HD) we always get on the Prime-ster. Enjoy...

In the Heat of the Night

This post is about digital media (Google Play), female directors that kick butt and pure film craftsmanship (craftwomanship?). [SPOILERS below]

I had an interesting discussion last year -- with the man who inspired me to start my Blog -- about Zero Dark Thirty. I said it was definitely the Best Picture of the 2013 Oscar race, and he challenged me to say why. I said it was an expertly crafted film, extremely well made. He challenged me further, implying that this was kind of a canned response, he wanted to know WHY I thought it was so good.

Here's why.

ZD30 comes on like gangbusters, and never lets up. It is a terror train of images, music and human drama hurtling toward an inevitable, though problematic, conclusion, and nothing is going to stop it from the time you leave the station with questionable 'full rendition' techniques in a terrifying opening scene, to the not-so-morally-satisfying final image of the female (!) CIA analyst standing over the corpse of Public Enemy Number One. This is my IMPRESSION of the film, how I connect to it emotionally. The true artistry of Kathryn Bigelow's masterpiece is that it accomplishes this while telling the mundane, 'cold coffee and donuts at 2 am in the morning' truth about how hard it is to actually do the heroic work all the people involved in "The Hunt for Osama bin Laden" actually had to do. And, to add to that, the mind-numbing, Kafka-esque experience of trying to get the U.S, government to actually do anything.

That is the headline story. Underneath that is a top-notch script by Mark Boal, precision casting and workmanlike acting from the whole cast. Who knew Jessica Chastain had these kind of chops, although she was quite good in Terrance Malick's "Tree of Life". It was sad, as I re-watched this excellent thriller on Google Play (more on that, below) to be reminded of how great an actor we lost last year when James Gandolfini died. But we have his scene-chewing performance as the "CIA Director" to relish, and Chastain's interchanges with the dear departed are worth the price of admission. You get a real sense of how truly difficult it is to accomplish anything in our intelligence agencies, not just because of the important checks and balances in place, but also because of the mind-numbing politics involved in making a decision.

I could go on, but my other point about ZD30 is that it is a triumph of femininity, or of woman doing purported "men's jobs" up and down the line. Bigelow has been a lone standard-bearer for a woman in a man's game (directing big budget films in the U.S.) for years, and not only does she continue to evidence a unique vision here, but she stuck to her guns when idiots in Congress questioned her patriotism in showing scenes of torture that implied we actually used it to extract information -- which it is very clear we did. One of the functions of art, and film is most definitely an art form, is to raise difficult questions, and ZD30 does that in spades. And to focus on the female CIA analyst who worked so hard -- in reality, along with maybe dozens of others -- to track down the bastard was brave, and gives the film an emotional dimension we rarely experience in American cinema.

Somewhat unrelated to my relish of this film as my delight in using Google Play as one of my new digital media services. I have been using the Music service for quite some time, but I decided to experiment with the video service. I was not disappointed. I purchased the HD version of the film, on sale, and watched it over a crappy hotel Internet connection, using my HDMI out laptop connection to hook it up to a large HD TV. Brilliant, the picture quality was exceptional, and the video player performed very well under demanding conditions.

In whatever fashion you decide to watch this excellent film, please do. HD is really the best way to experience what the filmmakers were trying to do, but even DVD with a decent upscaler will be a nice experience. Please do not watch on a Smartphone, if you can avoid it.

Happy Viewing,

- Eric