The Wolf of Wall Street (**1/2)

Martin Scorsese would seem to be the ideal person to tell the story of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo de Caprio). In movies like Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The Aviator, he’s told stories of morally compromised men clawing their way to the top, often to be brought down by their enemies, or by their own flaws. Belfort, whose memoir was a basis for the film, was a New York stockbroker. Right in the opening voiceover, Belfort tells us about the drugs he takes, the prostitutes he sleeps with (five a week!), and the laws he breaks. Then we flash back to 1987, where, on his very first day of work, the younger version of Belfort (who looks the same as the older version) is taken out to lunch by his boss (Matthew McConaughey). The boss tells him two things: first, the goal is not to help clients, but to earn commissions; second, Jordan should masturbate more. Virtually every character in this movie is like this. No one pretends to have ethics, or inhibitions. Everyone curses, to the point where it seems unnatural. But the market is about to crash, and soon Belfort is out of a job.

So he settles for selling penny stocks out of an office on Long Island. An early scene has him, overdressed in a slick suit, delivering a silver-tongued stream of bullshit that leaves his motley coworkers slack-jawed, his target begging to invest, and, I think, the moviegoer quite entertained. Already, however, the rest of the story — the formation of his own brokerage, the wealth that quickly follows, the big house, the expensive car, the cheating (in every sense) — can be anticipated. As a character, Belfort is nearly fully formed. Unlike, say, Goodfellas, the plot moves quickly from struggle to excess. With a dorky-looking Jonah Hill as his equally amoral second-in-command, he trains a small army of white males to deliver similar spiels to the wealthy. Cue montages of vulgarity-laden speeches, strippers in the office, etc. Only vague threats of an FBI investigation and, one presumes, STDs, threaten conflict. The movie is also different from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, still probably the most famous movie about the financial industry, although at one point another character compares Belfort to Wall Street’s anti-hero, Gordon Gekko. Gekko, of course, is famous for the line, “Greed is good.” One gets the feeling here than Belfort has not even thought about the question. In his cinematic incarnation, he is a man of drive and desire, and nothing more.

What makes Gekko into an archetype is not simply saying it, but meaning it. We see how he justifies what others see as villainy. I think every powerful person needs such an internal justification. Without that element, this story feels empty. Certainly, Scorsese tells it with panache, and he and screenwriter Terence Winter, whose credits include numerous episodes of Boardwalk Empire and The Sopranos, give the movie a lighter, more comedic tone than I’d expected. I would almost call the movie a comedy, except that it’s three hours, and it’s not funny for three hours. (The comedic centerpiece, in which Belfort battles some vintage Quaaludes, is a ten-minute sequence that’s funny for five.) When Belfort has a worthy adversary, like the FBI agent played by Kyle Chandler, or, in a couple of scenes, his wife (Margot Robbie), it’s at its best. But, as for the rest, even if there’s no one better at depicting vulgar, misogynistic excess than Scorsese, the excess is…excessive.

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viewed 1/2/14 6:30 pm and posted 1/7/14

Diana (***1/4)

If a UK film gets a wide release across the pond, it’s as likely as not that there’s magic or the royal family involved somehow. Or is written by Richard Curtis (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually, Bean), whose About Time is opening the same weekend as Diana. The American fascination with British royalty has always escaped me, but it would have been difficult to have lived through the 1980s and '90s and not been aware of the marriage and subsequent divorce of Prince Charles and the Diana Spencer, or of the car crash that killed Diana (Naomi Watts) on August 31, 1997. The movie, based on a book by Kate Snell called Diana: Her Last Love, is about the last two years of her’s life. I assumed that it would be about her relationship with Dodi Fayed, the wealthy Egyptian who died with her. In fact, the “last love” is not Fayed, but Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews, of NBC’s Lost), a Pakistani-born surgeon she met in a London hospital. At the time, Diana had separated from Charles, but not yet divorced.

The story the movie tells is a little like a real-life Notting Hill, the Richard Curtis-penned romantic comedy in which bookstore clerk Hugh Grant romances movie star Julia Roberts. Its best-known line, “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her” could have been dialogue for Diana, who is the pursuer in the relationship. Admittedly, such dialogue would be a bit florid for this movie, which is neither comedic nor so overtly romantic. We don’t find out if the Hugh Grant character gets tired of having paparazzi follow his movie-star girlfriend, but Khan has no interest in Diana as a celebrity, or in giving up his privacy. This is the central conflict in the film.

The best thing I can say about the movie is that it also has little interest in Diana as a celebrity. The director is Oliver Hirschbiegel, who made the excellent German films The Experiment and Downfall as well as the 2007 thriller The Invasion. Thus, Diana is worth watching even if you were not especially curious about its title character. The film also handles the death with subtlety, neither showing the accident nor addressing the possible role of the paparazzi in causing it. It does show Diana as having found frequently found the press a nuisance, but also willing to use it for her own purposes, both public (in her campaign to publicize the dangers of land mines) and private. That last bit is the least flattering aspect of the film’s portrayal, but it’s one of the things that makes her a real character, not just a princess. Both Watts and Andrews are a cut above the type of actor you’d have expected to be cast were this a cheesy celebrity biopic.

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viewed  10/30/13 7:30 pm at Ritz East [PFS screening] and posted 11/2/13

Inequality for All (***1/4)

What An Inconvenient Truth was for Al Gore and global warming, this documentary by Jacob Kornbluth is for Robert Reich, labor secretary under Bill Clinton, and US income inequality. It’s similarly built around a lecture series, given by Reich to his students at University of California, Berkeley. (The movie also credits Reich’s book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, as a source.) Additional interview segments supplement the lecture, some with Reich, others with winners and losers in the new economy. And there is a little of Reich’s own story, from his early friendship with fellow Rhodes scholar Clinton to his childhood experiences being bullied because of his lack of height. Reich has incorporated his lack of stature into his act. When accepting his cabinet position, he said he had already known he was on Clinton’s “short list.”


Reich uses a plethora of statistics to show how wealth concentration has changed over time in the United States, frequently employing a suspension bridge to symbolize the changes. The peaks of the bridge represent the years 1928 and 2007, years preceding economic collapse — in each case, wealth disparities had reached new heights. He uses the statistics to correlate the current rich-get-richer trend to declines in union participation, the growth of the banking industry, and rising college tuition rates. Thus, although in his lecture he promises to challenge the assumptions of conservatives and liberals, most of his argument falls comfortably along liberal lines. Clips of Jon Stewart humorously making Reich’s points also reinforce that image.

Here the comparison with global warming is instructive. The worst effects of climate change are yet to come, so it is relatively easy to deny. But increasing income disparity over the last 30 years is nearly undeniable. Thus the argument becomes whether we should care. There is are fairness arguments in either direction, but primarily Reich is saying that income inequality is not merely unfair, but that it weakens the economy by making it more difficult for the middle class to thrive; since consumer spending is 70% of the economy, a middle class with no money to spend cannot buy the goods and services it generates. Besides Reich, the best spokesperson for this point of view is the Nick Hanauer, owner of a pillow company. Hanauer all but states that his eight-figure income is more than he deserves; he has so much that he doesn’t know what to do with it. Most of it is not use to create jobs, but invested in funds that he knows little about. Of course, those resistant to Reich’s argument might still claim that these funds create jobs indirectly, and while Reich may be correct in the long term about inequality hurting the economy — I think he is — in the short and medium term it is possible for the overall economy to grow even though those with below-median incomes get poorer. This I think the fairness argument needs to be made, too. Arguably, this is done indirectly. Hanauer and Warren Buffett, who appears briefly, are contrasted with other interviewees who are struggling to make ends meet in the new economy. Many of them work in the same kinds of jobs that were around in the 1970s, but the jobs now pay less in real dollars.

 

One thing Reich doesn’t tackle is the political movements behind these changes or the cultural landscape that may have lent public support to policies he deplores. About his onetime boss, Clinton, his take is basically, we did a lot, but not enough to reverse the long-term trends. By his own account, he was something like a broken record in bringing up the issue of inequality at every opportunity. Politics may explain why, in
that in the aftermath of the economic downturn little has been done to reverse inequality (the Affordable Care Act conceivably could help). No doubt this disappoints Reich, but his ideas have found some expression in the Occupy movement of 2011 and have at least received broader dissemination. the last third of the movie depicts the Occupy protesters and generally exhorts its audience to go forth and change things. It’s more general and less compelling than the first half of the film. But for someone who wants the facts about inequality, and Reich’s argument, in distilled form, this movie presents it clearly, and Reich is an engaging personality.

 

 

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viewed 10/16/13 7:10 at Ritz 5 and posted 10/17; revised 10/19

Love & Other Drugs (**)

This is about as disjointed as you might expect from a romantic comedy-drama adapted from a non-fiction book about a pharmaceutical rep. (This explains why the movie is set in 1996.) Jake Gyllenhaal plays the rep, Jamie. Jamie is very desirable to women, as we can tell from a series of overdone scenes of women yelling phone numbers, offering up casual threesomes, and swooning at the most obvious pick-up lines he offers. But even a young stud must make a living, and so Jamie gets a job in the glamorous world of pharmaceutical sales. After just six weeks of training, he’s a “fully qualified health care professional” assigned to convince, cajole, and sometimes bribe doctors into prescribing one depression drug versus the other. This early section of the movie is clearly the one from the book. Sleeping with the staff, as (fictional) Jamie does, or even tossing out the competitors samples, as he also does, might not be in every rep’s bag of tricks, but the sweet-talking of the receptionist, the free sports tickets, the invitations to medical conferences in Hawaii, and the parking-lot approaches to recalcitrant doctors were certainly standard practices in the 1990s. (Some of the more obvious bribery has been curtailed since then.)

But then Jamie meets Maggie (Anne Hathaway), a patient with early-onset Parkinson’s and a fear of commitment, and the movie enters romantic-comedy territory before again transitioning into a “poignant” third act. Watching this, in which the raunchiness merely seems crass, the sex scenes redundant, and the transition from comic to serious anything but fluid, makes you appreciate the gifts of Judd Apatow (Knocked Up), who juggles the same elements in a way that seems more natural and much cleverer.

The pharmaceutical industry exposé, such as it is, is oddly done. For anyone paying the slightest bit of attention, the influence of salesmanship and other non-medical considerations on doctors’ prescribing habits should be obvious, and Zwick even has Maggie taking old folks on drug-buying runs to Canada, yet at no point does anyone actually say anything bad (or good, for that matter) about the pharmaceutical industry or the health-care system of which it is a part, or suggest that any ethical issues might be raised by elevating the profit motive so high. I have the suspicion that the real-life drug company’s approval was sought in the making of the movie. (The real Jamie got fired after his book was published.)

As much as I enjoyed Hathaway’s multiple nude scenes, they put me in mind of the Deana Carter album title Did I Shave My Legs for This? I think Anne might one day write something called Did I Show My Tits for This?

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz East [PFS screening] 9/29/10 and reviewed 9/29/10 (revised 11/17/10)

Waking Sleeping Beauty (***)

The young adults who grew up on Disney films like The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, and Toy Story may not realize that there was a time when it looked like the animation studio founded by the late Walt was threatening to fade into irrelevance. Movies like The Fox and the Hound (1981) scarcely seemed on par with classics like Snow White and held little appeal outside the youngest viewers. An attempt at something darker, The Black Cauldron (1985), alienated that same demographic and lost money. This documentary unearths vintage footage from the period after that to tell the story of the Disney Animation Studio’s renaissance. In this period, the studio expanded its output, moved into the computer animation that now dominates, and released several of the most successful animated films of all time.

IMDB link

viewed 3/31/10 at Prince Music Theater [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/30/10

W. (**3/4)

Even with its subject still in office upon its release, Oliver Stone’s George Bush drama seems curiously out of time. In one of the first scenes, a reference to a 80% approval rating seems much farther away than 2003, when the scene takes place. With the president months away from leaving office, Stone has made not a political film but a biopic, like his 1995 Nixon. Richard Nixon was a complex figure who spawned his very own adjective, applied alike to his wavering conservatism, his petty paranoia, and his extra-constitutional affinities. Certainly Bush’s critics have called him Nixonian, but if it applies it is to the administration as a whole. The man himself (played by Josh Brolin) seems to lack the dimensionality that the term implies.

Or, at least, such depths haven’t been uncovered by Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser, whose credits include Stone’s Wall Street and the curiously titled Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story. In a series of flashbacks, Weiser and Stone hit the known highlights of Bush’s life—Yale frat boy with a gift for crafting nicknames of the 1960s, drunken fuck-up of the 1970s, religiously healed, newly married oil man/baseball exec of the 1980s, unexpected rising political star of the 1990s—meanwhile revisiting the run-up to the Iraq war. Hovering over all of this is Bush senior, imperious yet almost Lincolnesque as rendered by James Cromwell. Stone zippily hits all these highlights while never going much beyond the pop psychology of a 1980s telemovie. The story of a son struggling to live up to the family name, and earning the respect of a father.

The presidential scenes do a fairly good job of summarizing the Iraq debate, with Richard Dreyfuss a particularly spot-on Dick Cheney. In retrospect, these scenes underline the irresponsibility of the war planners, but I don’t think Bush’s supporters would have thought so in 2003. Even today, Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) practically comes off as a spoilsport on the Iraq war party. As for other aspects of Bush’s presidency, there is nothing at all. Bush bashers may wish for an exposé, but there are other sources for that, including the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. Instead, Stone casts this tale, like Nixon’s, as a tragedy, with Bush in the end baffled, though only in bordering-on-corny fantasy sequences, at the way things haven’t gone as planned.

The most interesting thing about Bush is not the way he sees himself, but the way others see him, and how he became the chosen vessel for the Republican party. By focusing narrowly, Stone misses a story that seems richer with possibility. Despite his historic presidency Bush himself has spawned no adjectives—those existing seem sufficient—just a noun. The term “Bushism” has given rise to a popular feature on Slate.com, a couple of books, and its own Wikipedia entry. Weiser works nearly all of the best-known ones into the script, though frequently out of the precise historical context. (For example, he has Bush ask “Is our children learning?” during his 1994 gubernatorial campaign rather than his 2000 presidential campaign.) Sometime he says them with his mouth full, so there’s some humor. And Brolin, though he doesn’t look that much like the president, does a marvelous job with his voice and his manner. He helps to make the film as entertaining as it is. Twenty years from now, this will be a perfectly good introduction to our 43rd president and what sort of person he was. For now, it seems to have no raison d'être, making this W., like its subject, something of a lame duck.

IMDB link

viewed 10/17/08 at Moorestown; reviewed 10/26/08

The Queen (***3/4)

?  Director Stephen Frears (Dirty Pretty Things, Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters), whose filmography has delved into seemingly all sides of the class divisions in Britain, depicts the top of the upper crust and how they reacted to the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Helen Mirren, whose previous role was as Elizabeth I in a TV movie, plays the titular Elizabeth II, and Michael Sheen the newly installed prime minister, Tony Blair. The script is by Peter Morgan, whose work is concurrently on view in The Last King of Scotland.

+  For the crown, the death of Diana represented an unprecedented quandary. Having divorced Prince Charles, she was no longer, technically, a royal. Nor were Elizabeth and, especially, her imperious husband Phillip, inclined to celebrate the life of someone they’d come to regard most uncharitably. Instead, they holed up in their country estate. The contrast between the young prime minister and the aging queen mirrors the gulf between the royals’ and the public’s view of the crown’s role in the age of celebrity. In other words, the people expected a gesture of grief to mirror theirs. I’ve never understood myself why an accident of birth should make someone worthy of all that attention, which put me in the odd position of relating, in this case, to the queen’s stance. Yet if I can’t say Frears made me

understand the depth of feeling engendered by the martyred princess, he does make it palpable. Mixing real footage with the fictional helps convey the genuine sadness felt by millions.

   Of course, a great deal attention will deservedly focus on Mirren, whose Elizabeth is a believable mix of the earthy (she drives her own Range Rover) and the reserved. Sheen is a pretty effective Blair, although in his earliest scene, meeting the queen, he seems such a Pee Wee Herman-esque pipsqueak that it seemed hard to believe this was a man who’d just won a landslide victory. Nonetheless, the movie winds up as a mash note to an emerging statesman, with only the queen’s comment in the epilogue alluding to Blair’s now-sullied reputation.

 - Just once or twice I thought the movie was slow as it inexorably leads toward the self-abnegation by the monarch.

= ***1/2 Not quite a political film, not quite a biographical one, this is a blend of character drama and cultural history lesson that made me interested in an episode I’d utterly ignored when it happened.

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Who Killed the Electric Car (***1/2)

-->  Filmmaker Chris Paine delves into the curious mystery behind GM’s decision to produce, then recall, its entire fleet of EV1 electric vehicles.

When I was growing up, I remember hearing a story that there actually existed a tire that would never wear out, only the tire companies had bought the rights so as to preserve their profits. This movie documents a true-life story something like that. The “killed” in the title is no hyperbole, as most of the cars in question were literally crushed between 2003 and 2005. You might be forgiven for not knowing that there had been any electric cars marketed since the internal combustion engine became the technology of choice in the 1920s. The movie mostly tells the story of the EV1, the General Motors vehicle that was designed from the ground up and represented the first entry in the potential new market. It was GM’s prototype that originally inspired California to pass since-revoked legislation requiring 10% of vehicles sold in the state to have zero emissions by 2003. Interviews with some people involved in the GM project, politicians, automotive experts, and EV1 owners (most notably Mel Gibson) form the basis of the film. What the movie lacks in innovative techniques it makes up for in the story it tells and the way it’s carefully structured as a mystery. The oil companies and recent presidential administrations come in for predictable criticism, but the more interesting question answered in the movie is why the automaker would create a car and then do so little to sell it to the public. Whoever did this killing, I came away from the movie mourning the loss.

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Jarhead (**3/4)

Based on a Gulf War memoir by ex-Marine sniper Anthony Swofford, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Jarhead reflects that it in that it feels more like a collection of memories than a single story. The beginning’s a lot like those training scenes you’ve seen in any number of war films, from Full Metal Jacket to An Officer and a Gentleman. Jamie Foxx plays the tough staff sergeant. Peter Sarsgaard is Swofford’s rifle partner, as gung-ho as Swofford is wary, though his character could have used more fleshing out. The film’s end is, but for a very brief epilogue, the war’s end. In the Gulf War, the pre-war—the buildup of troops and then the waiting—lasted much longer than the combat, and Jarhead reflects that. Although I really can’t say, it seems like an accurate portrayal of Swofford’s experience, and the life of a solider generally. However, accurately portraying boredom is not always compelling drama. Without a strong narrative thread, Jarhead is a film where your interest will wax and wane with each scene. There’s not much politics, but one of the more powerful sequences is a reminder of the stiff toll of the war (or war in general) on civilians. If the film has a central idea, it’s that the military is about engendering the will to aggression, and that different men find different ways to draw off that aggression as they await actual combat. For me, the underrated Three Kings remains the definitive Gulf War movie.

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circulated via email 11/10/05 and posted 10/9/13