The Big Short (***1/4)

This unusual adaptation of Michael Lewis’s nonfiction bestseller is about the financial industry, but really it can be thought of as a modern version of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Except, imagine that instead of everyone being unwilling to say what everyone knows, everyone has been hearing the same thing so long that almost everyone actually believes it. “It” is, in this case, that housing prices never go down, only up. Even Michael Burry (Christian Bale), the Asperger-y hedge fund manager who seems most certain that the conventional wisdom is wrong, has a slight moment of doubt. The great thing about the film is not the way it explains things like collateralized debt obligations, or shorting, using such techniques as having Margot Robbie in a bathtub explaining them. No, the great thing is the way it portrays the behavior of complex societies.

Even as you know the financial collapse of 2008 is going to happen, you can see Burry and his fellow short-sellers — traders Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), Mark Baum (Steve Carrell), Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) — having to convince themselves that everyone can be that wrong, and facing enormous pressure to follow the crowd. The film is unusual, for one thing, in that none of these characters is the star. It’s an ensemble cast in an adaptation of a book that is actually telling three separate stories that are mostly unrelated, except for the common thread that these men —and this is a very male-dominated world — are making the same bet. Vennett is the seller of the bonds Carrell wants his New York investment group to buy, but both of them stand to make a fortune from calamity, and both are having to fight their own employers — big investment banks like Morgan Stanley — in order to do it. Geller and Shipley are do-it-yourself investors from Colorado who use an ex-trader friend (Brad Pitt) to do the same thing. These are all great characters, but Carrell and Bale stand out, possibly because their characters have the strangest, strongest personalities.

The other thing about this movie is the way it reminds you of its own artificiality, as if its telling you not make the mistake most financial people did during the early 2000s, failing to think critically. The bathtub scene is just one way director Adam McKay keeps telling you that this is just a movie. In another scene, Geller and Shipley find a brochure that seems to give them the idea to bet against the housing market, only to have Vennett, who is also the narrator, tell us that it actually happened a completely different way. The point is, exactly how it happened doesn’t matter. What happened matters. I think people who don’t have a familiarity with the subject may still miss some of the finer points. They can comfort themselves with the idea that a lot of the financial experts didn’t understand it well either, which is part of why it happened. Greed is the other part, and in the debate as to which factor explains more, McKay lets the viewer decide.

IMDb link

viewed 1/24/16 1:30 pm at Roxy and posted 1/25/16

Seymour: An Introduction (***)

The title of the movie may grab J. D. Salinger fans who know it as the title of one of Salinger’s better known short stories. They’ll be disappointed to learn that, while the movie too is a character sketch, it’s of the wholly unrelated Seymour Bernstein, a successful pianist turned piano teacher and composer in New York City. This Seymour gave up the limelight for contentment, and it’s that sentiment that strikes you in Ethan Hawke’s documentary.

Hawke includes conversation with others in the film, but it’s the footage of Bernstein, nearing 80, interacting with his younger students that is most captivating. These students are advanced, already capable of playing the right notes, but if you’ve wondered what things make the difference between a very competent musician and a truly excellent one, you get some idea here. Listening to one student chop away at the keys, Bernstein notices not the student’s hands but his shoulders. Placing his own hands on those shoulders, he has the student play it again, now more relaxed. It’s these kinds of small observations, but also his manner, that must make Berstein a fine teacher. He is the opposite of the teacher in Whiplash, inspiring with calmness, confidence in the student, and even a little humor. “Not all notes can be passionate,” he say after hearing one loud performance.

But Hawke is not a piano student, and it’s not the technical skills that drew him to his subject. Both acting (notably in the partly improvised films of Richard Linklater such as Boyhood, Tape, and the Before trilogy) and in interviews, he’s struck me as someone who is maybe thinking too much, who never seems relaxed. Maybe he envies Seymour Bernstein, who strikes me as someone who is thoughtful but not overthinking; he’s gained wisdom with age and simplified the things he prefers not to think about, like where to live. (So he’s been in the same apartment his entire adult life.) Whether you are a music fan or not, he may inspire.

IMDb link

viewed 3/26/15 7:30 pm [PFS screening] and posted 3/30/15

Whiplash (***1/2)

This is kind of a sports movie in disguise. If conservatory student Andrew (Miles Teller) were a college basketball player instead of an aspiring jazz drummer, this movie might’ve made into a multiplex. And Andrew’s nemesis might’ve been someone like coach Bobby Knight, instead of the mercurial Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), who commandeers the school’s elite jazz orchestra and, like Knight, is not averse to throwing a chair.


Fletcher is warm and friendly to outsiders but uses strategic humiliation and browbeating to get his players to play better. In an early scene, a horn player gets booted for supposedly being out of tune. But he also gets Andrew to play and play until his hands bleed. Never has music seemed so physically punishing. Are such tiger-mother tactics the best way to get such results? Are they the only way? The film, an expanded version of a short by writer-director Damien Chazelle, ultimately leaves the conclusion to the viewer. Meanwhile, it’s a excellent bit of psychological and character drama with a fierce performance from Simmons, a great character actor.


IMDb link

viewed 11/13/14 7:15 at Ritz 5 and posted 11/13/14

Begin Again (***1/4)

Filmmaker John Carney seems to be specializing in a genre that may not have a name. Like his best-known film, Once, this is a musical film that is not a break-into-song musical, but that centers around music and performances that are part of the story. Rather than having musicians act in his film, as in Once, Carney has hired well-known actors. One, Keira Knightley, turns out to sing fairly well (she’s sang on a couple of soundtracks); her co-star, Mark Ruffalo, merely has to play a record-company man who hopes the budding singer-songwriter will turn his career around. Actual recording artists Cee Lo Green and Adam Levine do also act and sing in supporting roles, Levine most prominently as the boyfriend of Knightley’s character.

The reason Once worked so well (spawning an Oscar-winning song and a Tony-winning Broadway musical) was that it surrounded the songs with a naturalistic script that provided emotional context for the songs but didn’t overwhelm them. I wasn’t sure that was going to happen here. Ruffalo plays Dan, such a stereotype of a man going downhill — a scruffy-looking, cynical, drinking-too-much, negligent, divorced father driving an old beater on the streets of New York — that Carney seems to acknowledge the possibilities of cliché. “This isn’t Jerry McGuire,” his onetime record-label partner (Yasiin Bey, aka Mos Def) tells the just-fired Dan.

And, in the end, it isn’t. It’s kind of Once redux, but with a different-enough plot that it doesn’t feel like a retread. One thing the two films do have in common is a very romantic storyline anchored by an older man-younger woman pair who are musical — but not romantic — partners, though in each case there is the question of whether the one will turn into the other. And, even more strongly than in the earlier film, Carney makes the case for pop classicism. In the key early scene, after we’ve seen Knightley quietly singing with just her guitar, we see the same scene from Ruffalo’s point of view. Suddenly, the piano begins to play itself, and a violin(!) joins in, turning a passable folk song into a plausible hit song, albeit more plausible in 1974. The imaginary instrumentation borders on being corny, but it’s effective, or nearly so, in persuading the viewer that Dan might after one song be actually dying to sign up the unknown singer.


For reasons explained in the movie, Knightley is not giving her best singing effort in the scene, and she otherwise proves to have a clear, pleasant singing voice that goes along with her fine, expressive acting. While the voice is really hers, the songs attributed to her (and Levine’s character) are actually mostly co-written by Gregg Alexander and Danielle Brisebois, onetime bandmates in the New Radicals. I think at least a few of them, such as the violin-enhanced “Step You Can’t Take Back,” are good enough to catch on in the way that “Falling Slowly,” the Oscar-winning ballad from Once, did. Moreover, Begin Again is charming in the way that Once was, a feel-good film that doesn’t feel like it’s pushing your buttons. It certainly helps if you share Carney’s taste for well-crafted singer-songwriter fare, but the director once again make a compelling case for the emotional power of cinema-enhanced music, or music-enhanced cinema.

IMDb link

viewed 6/26/14 7:30 pm [PFS screening] and posted 7/1/14

Obvious Child (***1/4)

Yeah, it’s another indie comedy about creative class white folks in Manhattan/Brooklyn, but an above-average one. Yes, it’s also the “abortion comedy,” in the same sense, maybe, as Knocked Up or Juno were comedies about not having an abortion. That is, Jenny Slate’s character, a struggling comedian who likes to talk about her vagina, farts, and her personal life on stage (and off), does get pregnant and seek an abortion, but the movie is about the character, not about abortion. She has a nice dad (Richard Kind), a professor mother (Polly Draper),  straight and gay best friends, and she’s just gotten dumped by her boyfriend and stands to lose her job at a hip indie bookstore. Familiar elements, but what stands out is Slate’s performance and character. I don’t know how much she’s like the woman she plays, or to what degree the first-time director, Gillian Robespierre, crafted the script around her star, but the witty, insecure, tearful, profane, kidding personality the two have created for the character accounts for most of the movie’s appeal, though Jake Lacy as the nice guy who impregnates her properly accents the comedy with romance. In proper indie fashion, the story moves and concludes quickly.

IMDb link

viewed 8/6/14 7:20 pm at Ritz Bourse and posted 8/6/14

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (***)

James Thurber is said not to have been impressed with the 1947 version adaptation of his 1939 short story, which starred Danny Kaye. But then, the story itself is barely 2000 words in which Mitty fantasizes about being a flying ace, a brilliant surgeon, and a Navy Commander, all the while running errands with a bossy wife. It ends with Mitty facing an (imaginary) firing squad. Hardly enough plot for a short, let alone a feature. Kaye was well suited to playing Mitty, a “loveable henpecked dreamer,” as the ads for the movie put it, whereas Ben Stiller has usually brought a nervous quality to his characters. He is not a natural choice for the part then, but as the producer and director he had the luxury of casting himself. The screenplay is by Steve Conrad, who has managed to pen among the more creditable movies to feature Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness) and Nicholas Cage (The Weather Man).

Stiller gives a less-showy-than-usual performance in a character that is somewhat underwritten. The story is what most stands out. With Mitty re-created as a bachelor working for Life magazine in the computer-dating age, the only thing tying it to Thurber is the fantasy sequences. Oddly, these are the weakest aspect of the movie, clumsily integrated into the story and seemingly there to provide the special effects crew with something to to. In one, Mitty fantasizes about beating up his new boss (Adam Scott) in a mercifully short sequence that looks like an Incredible Hulk outtake. Fortunately, Stiller must have gotten bored with them too, and the second half of the film mostly ditches them as Mitty abandons his milquetoast ways in a quest to find a missing photograph that will adorn the magazine’s last print issue, meanwhile trying to get the courage to ask out a new coworker (Kristin Wiig).

The odyssey that transforms Mitty is not altogether convincing as to what the character would do (though we don’t know much about him), as to what the character could do, or as to cell-phone reception in remote places. But as the film takes a tone somewhere in the haze between fantasy, comedy, and adventure — with a little mystery thrown in — this isn’t too worrisome. Those expecting the movie to be a pure comedy may be disappointed that it isn’t funnier. But those looking for a departure from the loud fare that dominates the holiday season may well find in this a bit of Christmas cheer.

IMDb link

viewed 11/26/13 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and posted 11/26/13

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.

IMDb link

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

Inside Llewyn Davis (***1/2)

The Greenwich Village folk music in the early 1960s scene serves as the backdrop for this Coen Brothers movie. In some ways, it functions as a citified quasi-sequel to O Brother Where Art Thou, the musical travelgogue that was inspired by Homer’s Odyssey. We follow Llewyn Davis on his own odyssey (a certain character name, revealed late in the movie, seems also to allude to Homer). As played by Oscar Isaac, Davis is a none-too-successful singer-songwriter whose gentle songs and soulful eyes are at odds with a somewhat prickly personality. Asked to play something at a dinner party held by university professor and his wife (they like having a bohemian friend), he protests, “I’m not a fucking trained monkey.”

 

Davis can’t help saying what he thinks, even when he can’t afford to. Some people will not want to follow him around for two hours, either, but it’s such idiosyncrasies that make him interesting. Alongside that, the film provides a look into the folk subculture just before folks like Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary became breakout stars. Davis himself would have fit in with Dylan, although he is less acerbic and is said to be based in part on Dave van Ronk, a semi-well known figure called the Mayor of MacDougal Street. Representing the sweeter side of that sound (something like Peter, Paul, and Mary) are a duo called Jean and Jim, played by Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake. Jean also may have been impregnated by Davis. And one of the funniest segments is provided when Davis has a recording session recording a novelty song called “Please Mr. Kennedy.”

This movie didn’t immediately impress me as much as some other Coen Brothers films. It doesn’t have the offbeat humor of Fargo or The Big Lebowski, save for a couple of scenes in which John Goodman plays Davis’s loud-mouthed road-trip companion. It doesn’t have the stark suspense of True Grit or No Country for Old Men. But, a couple of months after seeing this, the character sticks with me. As for the music, most it may be on the austere side for most modern audiences. But it’s well-performed and well chosen by T-Bone Burnett (who served a similar function on O Brother). Isaac, who has sung in his own band, has an excellent voice and gives a breakout performance.

 

IMDb link

viewed 11/6/13 7:00 pm at Ritz 5 [PFS screening], posted 12/20/13; review added 1/8/14

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (**1/2)

This everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sequel comes nine years after its predecessor, so the most impressive thing about it might be that it got made with the cast members (and director Adam McKay) intact. It’s the tail end of the disco era, and the dawn of the 24-news era. Thus, rather than parodying local news and the introduction of women into the newsroom, it features Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy working for an upstart operation called GNN (Global News Network). Ron thinks 24-hour news is “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” but a paycheck’s a paycheck. Also on board are his pals: the playboy Brian (Paul Rudd), the racist/sexist Champ (David Koechner), and the simple-minded Brick (Steve Carrell). Ron’s nemesis turned spouse (Christina Applegate) is not on board, but is in the movie. They have a son.

McKay and Ferrell’s schtick is to let the jokes fly and see what sticks, with the force of the delivery sometimes compensating for half-funny lines, sometimes merely emphasizing the lame ones. “Who the hell is Julius Caesar?…I don’t follow the NBA,” is the kind of exchange that half the audience will be amused at, and half will groan at. I’m sure the people who like the movie will disagree about which lines worked and which fell flat. One thing I found incredibly tedious was an entire subplot involving Ron’s new boss, who is, somewhat implausibly, a 30ish black woman (Meagan Good). Besides creating another female role, the character seems mostly to exist to provide an excuse for lame jokes about race. Time was when plain old racist jokes were acceptable; the modern substitute is to make jokes about racists. This itself became tiresome years ago. Maybe because the movie takes place in the early 1980s (the hits-laden soundtrack keeps reminding us) it seemed somehow fresh to have a scene with Burgundy, invited by the boss to dinner, trotting out “jive talk” in an effort to seem “hip” and “down with it,” but in fact it was as painful to look at as all the quoted phrases I just used.

The original Anchorman lacked a real satirical bite but was pretty funny. This sequel, with a better satirical target, since the 24-hour news culture is still very much with us, still mostly lacks satirical bite. Burgundy is the Inspector Clouseau of the news world, spontaneously or accidentally coming up with most of the dubious innovations of the post-cable TV news world — traffic chases on camera, Fox-News-style superpatriotism, focus on celebrities, etc. But beyond that the movie doesn’t have anything to say about those developments. It is simply a silly movie.

Now, being silly is okay. Interrupting the story with the odd fantasy sequence can be fun. And if the main characters are caricatures of womanizers, jerks, and idiots, I’m okay with that, too. But then, don’t show me that for 90 minutes and then follow up with a soppy, sentimental conclusion that asks me to have a big soft spot for these people, one that has them suddenly, and unconvincingly, developing a conscience (and/or a brain). And don’t have a big climax, an overblown successor to the West-Side Story style gang fight in the original, that is much more impressive for its guest-star roster than its humor quotient.

McKay and Ferrell are not going through the motions here. Instead, it seems like they may have tried too hard. If you’re into the kind of humor in the first Anchorman, you’ll probably laugh at something or other here. I’d bet there are more punch lines per minute than in almost any other comedy in recent memory (except maybe toward the end). But I’d also bet that, for most people, a lower percentage of them land.

IMDB link

viewed 12/4/13 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and posted 12/18/13 (revised 12/26/13)

Delivery Man (***)

A lot of Hollywood remakes of non-American films change things for the worse; this remake of a Canadian film called Starbuck, which was released stateside just a few months earlier, changes the title, the actors, and the setting (Montreal to Brooklyn), but not much else, not even the writer-director. I do wonder whether it was boring for Ken Scott to remake his own movie. Virtually every scene is the same as in the original.

Once again, the story follows a happy-go-lucky meat delivery man (Vince Vaughn) whose easy-spending ways are about to catch up with him. At the same time, so are some of the 533 children, now young adults, that he fathered via sperm donations with the code name Starbuck. They’re threatening to sue to learn his identity even as his girlfriend (Cobie Smulders), having conceived with him the natural way, wants him to be just a sperm donor; she’d rather raise the child alone.

Clearly, some life changes are in order. Starbuck, aka David, doesn’t want to become an instant father to hundreds, yet can’t resist seeing what his progeny are up to. (His employment in the family business and previous allowances for incompetency allows him plenty of free time.) As in the Canadian version, this makes for a sometimes humorous, sometimes tender story. Compared to Patrick Huard’s version of Starbuck, Vaughn is a bit less scruffy, but the role of a genial screw-up suits him. (So, apparently, do scene-for-scene remakes: he played Norman Bates in the 1998 Psycho.) The lawyer/best friend character is played by Chris Pratt, who once again urges Starbuck to use an insanity defense when he’s committed no crime. Even the baffling plot points are recycled, but if you didn’t see the original version this one will be just as good, just as this partly recycled review should be just as good as my Starbuck review, if you haven’t read that.


IMDb link


viewed 11/19/13 and posted 11/19/13

Blue Jasmine (***1/2)

Another year, another Woody Allen film. Following 2012’s forgettable To Rome with Love, Allen has returned to America but found another new (for him) locale, San Francisco. Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), formerly Jeanette, formerly of Manhattan, formerly wed to a wealthy businessman (Alec Baldwin), has headed west to live with her very different sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins). When we first meet her, she’s bending the ear of her airplane seatmate in the baggage checkout area. She’s a narcissist who talks a lot, talks to herself when no one else is available, and presents numerous scenery-chewing opportunities for Blanchett, who’s in all but a few scenes. She’s often funny. Hawkins, whose breakthrough role in 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky got her a well-deserved Oscar nomination, has the less showy (and slightly smaller) role, but is a worthy counterbalance/foil for Jasmine.

Ginger herself is a mostly happy-go-lucky despite having lost money, and perhaps her ex-husband (Andrew Dice Clay), in an investment scheme facilitated by Jasmine’s former husband, whose financial machinations are depicted in several flashbacks featuring Baldwin.

Woody Allen has made a lot of films about wealthy people, and a few about working class people, but the class themes in this movie, a source of some of both the comedy and the drama, are unusual for him. Issues of class, parental favoritism and sibling rivalry are mostly under the surface, but they, and Ginger/Hawkins, are what elevate Blue Jasmine above airier trifles like Midnight in Paris. Whether or not you root for the suddenly destitute Jasmine, whose husband left her with only the sense of her own superiority, to resurrect herself, you’ll empathize with Ginger.

The male characters —notably Clay as the ex and Bobby Carnavale as Ginger’s mechanic boyfriend — are both thinner (unidimensional) and broader (less subtle), but Carnavale  provokes a couple of the bigger laughs. Another unusual feature (for Allen) is that there are actually children in the film. These are also small roles, but the deadpan/bewildered looks of Ginger’s two preteen boys as Jasmine tries to explain the virtues of electroshock therapy and the importance of tipping well are nearly worth the price of admission.

This is more than the best film Andrew Dice Clay has ever appeared in; of Allen’s, it’s easily the best since Vicky Cristina Barcelona, five films ago, more substantial than Midnight in Paris while maintaining that film’s mainstream appeal. Maybe one day he will even discover the existence of music written after the 1930s.

IMDb link

viewed 8/6/13 7:30 pm [PFS screening]; posted 8/9/13

Frances Ha (***)

“Meandering” was the word I wrote down while watching this. It refers both to the plot and to Frances (Greta Gerwig), whose last name is not Ha. As it begins, she is an apprentice dancer living with her Sophie, a best friend with whom she is so close they are “like a lesbian couple who don’t have sex anymore.” Asked to move in by her boyfriend, she breaks up with him instead. But then Sophie, having found a nicer place, moves out. In New York City, good apartments are more coveted than best friends. And so Frances, who cannot afford her own place, becomes figuratively, and then literally, unmoored, finding new friends and new places to sleep.

Frances is the creation of writer-director Noah Baumbach and Gerwig, who gets a co-writing credit. Most of Baumbach’s films feature more combative main characters; that was so in The Squid and the Whale, probably his best film, and in Greenberg, his last one, in which Gerwig played the love interest of the title character. In Damsels in Distress, she proved capable of playing a very different type of character, but her affect here seems a lot like in Greenberg, a bit awkward, gangly even. Her voice has a buttery quality, almost a mumbly undercurrent. She is not combative, but falls between sweet and offbeat. (In a running private joke, a male friend calls her “undateable” when she is at her oddest.) Sometimes, mostly toward the beginning of the movie, she is funny.

And she is in every scene, so your response to her and Frances will be your response to the movie, which is about her attempts to find her way into adulthood — or about losing a best friend. Baumbach’s movies are very talky, and that combined with the New York setting (and white, educated characters), will remind you of Woody Allen movies, but unlike Allen’s movies, the characters are almost all in their 20s and living with roommates. That the film is in black and white may be a tribute to Allen’s Manhattan, but where in that case it gave the city an air of glamour, here it seems to render the city a little drab, perhaps symbolic of a woman whose life has lost a little color.

On the whole, I favor Baumbach’s last few films, with their sharper edges. But, as always, the dialogue here sounds natural, and I liked that Frances was a mixed bag of a character, not always acting wisely or with forethought, but finding ways to get by.

IMDb link

viewed 6/10/13 7:45 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/10/13

What Maisie Knew (***1/2)

Maisie is a six-year-old girl played by six-year-old Onata Aprile, and she’s in every scene. I have no idea what the real Onata is like, but as Maisie she’s so appealing it’s a wonder her parents, who are divorcing as the movie begins, can’t get it together enough not to argue in front of her. Exactly what drove them apart is not well explained — the movie is entirely from Maisie’s point of view, and the squabbles of adults are literally above her head. A caretaker, Margo, seems much more level-headed than Maisie’s mother (Julianne Moore), a New York City-based rock singer who, while loving, uses her daughter to vent her own frustrations.

And so the father (Steve Coogan) gets custody. We don’t know his job—probably Maisie doesn’t either—but it involves traveling to Europe sometimes. Most of the plot (updated from a Henry James novel) consists of young Maisie being shuttled back and forth between parents who are alternately possessive and neglectful. Throughout, she remains open-hearted and calm, a counterbalance to the primary adults in her life. This is all established pretty early, and where the story, and Maisie, will wind up will be obvious by about the middle point, but the film still captivated me. There are a few other films meant for adult audiences but told from a young child’s view — Beasts of the Southern Wild and a French film, Ponette, come to mind — but not many.  Aprile’s performance carries the movie like that of Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts. Aprile doesn’t have to recite long voiceovers like Wallis, but her lack of affect is very like a typical child of that age, yet captivating. And that is enough.

IMDb link

viewed 6/7/13 7:10 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 6/7/13

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (**3/4)

In films such as Mississippi Masala and The Namesake, Mira Nair has frequently focused on individuals caught between two worlds or identities. Here, adapting a novel by Mohsin Hamid, she adds to that a suspense element. The main character is Changez (Riz Ahmed), a Pakistani university professor suspected of being involved in the kidnapping of an American in Lahore. But he is also a former Wall Street hotshot who specialized in trimming waste (and personnel) from struggling companies. His story is told in a series of flashbacks constructed around a conversation between Changez and a journalist (Lieve Shcreiber) after the kidnapping.

There is a mutual distrust that is not, as we learn, entirely irrational. Changez fears that he will be arrested; the journalist wonders if Changez is guilty. How did the clean-cut, America-loving Princeton student become a bearded radical? Naturally, 9/11 and its aftermath is a turning point. In a welcome change from her frothier roles, Kate Hudson plays Changez’s American love interest, an artist, and Om Puri plays his father. (Puri also played the father in My Son the Fanatic, which had a theme that somewhat echoes this.)

As a meditation on Changez’s internal conflict, this is competent. As a suspense drama, it’s pretty decent, but the fact that we don’t know if Changez is guilty is partly the result of the surface-level character depiction. His turn toward an anti-American radicalism is depicted as primarily the result of unfair treatment. But surely, there is an ideological inspiration behind such a change in this intellectually gifted man. Has he adopted a radical interpretation of Islam? (We see one scene in a mosque, and that’s about it.) Has he read Noam Chomsky? Admittedly, this is difficult turf for a film. Nair has not made the definitive film on terrorism, but merely a decent yarn with a political dimension.

IMDb link

viewed 4/29/13 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/30/13

Side Effects (***)

Steven Soderbergh’s thriller begins with the shot of blood on a kitchen floor, then flashes back three months. This lets the viewer know that the depression saga that follows will turn into more of a thriller eventually. Wait out the beginning, with Rooney Mara as the morose spouse of a Wall Street trader (Channing Tatum, star of  Soderbergh’s previous movie, Magic Mike) whose four-year insider-trading sentence is about to end and Jude Law as her pharma-peddling therapist. The first 20 minutes might outdo Silver Linings Playbook for the number of references to pyschotropic drugs, real and fake. Some other time, Soderbergh might have made an exposé of the ways in which the pharmaceutical industry encourages psychiatrists to medicate their patients. (The good doctor is being paid $50,000 as a “consultant” for enrolling patients in one study.) But this is a thriller, even if it looks like a docudrama for awhile, especially the courtroom scene, which seems dully realistic.

Written by Scott Z Burns, also credited with Soderbergh’s Contagion and The Informant, Side Effects comes to seem undeniably contrived, but increasingly watchable if you don’t mind none of the characters being especially ingratiating. Catherine Zeta-Jones seems oddly flat as another therapist, but Law’s is the primary character. He watches his life unravel after what seems to be a small error in judgment, and fights back. Thorny ethical questions, lying at the junction of medicine and law, are suggested, but not explored. Quiet suspense will have to suffice. And remember, ordinary criminals will stab you in the back, but professionals use more subtle weapons.

IMDb link

viewed 1/23/13 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening] and reviewed 1/23/13

A Late Quartet (***1/4)

At least according to this drama, a musical partnership is like a group marriage. Maintaining it for many years requires a harmony among the members as carefully attended to as a Beethoven score. A sour note from any can affect the whole. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken, Catherine Keener, and Mark Ivanir, a quartet as accomplished as their fictional counterparts, play the title characters, who are collectively called The Fugue. Their successful 25-year union is threatened first by the unavoidable, a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, but this destabilizing news indirectly allows a series of personal and professional differences to surface.

Only a few people have professional lives as important to them as their personal ones. These people have all, in some measure, placed the group before themselves. Two of them, played by Hoffman and Keener, have put the needs of the group before the daughter they share (Imogen Poots), and perhaps their own relationship. Hoffman’s character has literally played second fiddle for decades for the sake of group harmony, though he believes himself equally qualified to play either violin part. The other violinist (Ivanir) has avoided emotional entanglements in the pursuit of perfectionism. And even Walken’s character, one of the least eccentric, most sympathetic men, in his filmography, places the group above his own love of playing, wishing to bow out before his decline is noticeable.

The other theme in the movie more directly involves music. (Incidentally, while there are a few significant musical performances in the movie, including one by the singer Anne Sofie von Otter, there are not that many, perhaps due to the difficulty of syncing the actors’ movements to the soundtrack.) The first violinist wants to try playing a familiar piece without a score. The second violinist prizes perfection over spontaneity, heavily annotating his own sheet music. The movie appears to suggest that there is value in both approaches.

IMDb link

viewed 10/7/12 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/11/12

Arbitrage (***1/2)

Add Robert Miller to the pantheon of smug rich guys Richard Gere has long excelled at playing. There he is glibly explaining the financial crisis on a TV talk show, or having backseat meetings in limos, or doing a quick drop-in on his mistress’s gallery show, which he’s financed. But mostly he’s bobbing and weaving to complete the deal that will save him from the deal that even he who weathered the housing bubble could not resist, a no-risk proposition that went wrong anyway. Only selling the company can save him. None of this has much to do with arbitrage, which relates to exploiting short-term price differentials, but in this case the idea is to conjure an image of sophisticated financial chicanery.

This, the feature debut of Nicholas Jarecki, is an exploration of power and its limits in the guise of mainstream suspense at its best. One thing even the wealthy and powerful cannot avoid is the need for sleep, and it is this that causes the accident that threatens the deal, his family life, and his freedom.

IMDb link

viewed 9/27/12 7:00 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 9/27/12

Sleepwalk with Me (***)

The comedian Mike Birbiglia is perhaps best known to the several million listeners of public radio’s This American Life (including me), which helped popularize the autobiographical monologues that he had done on stage. The show’s host, Ira Glass, is a producer and cowriter of this film. The particular problem Birbiglia has, in which he sometimes acts out his dreams while still sleeping, has already been a basis for a stage show, a comedy album, and a book. It is one of the three plot pillars of Birbiglia’s film, in which the character he plays is called Matt Pandamiglio. The other two pillars are Matt/Mike’s efforts to transition from a dead-end bartending job to success as a New York-based standup, and his erstwhile eight-years-and-counting relationship with his girlfriend (Lauren Ambrose).

Of the three, the sleep disorder part may be most interesting to those who haven’t already heard about it on the radio or the stage. For those who have, getting to see the La Quinta Inn where a certain episode occurred may be a bonus, but the visuals render it unfortunate, not funny, as it is in story form. Other dreams, shown from Matt’s view as if real, are funny, though. The comic-on-the-road segments are welcome, that being relatively unexplored turf in cinema. I do suspect, however, that where Matt’s breakthrough seems to follow easily once he starts doing more personal material, Mike’s probably involved more stops and starts and hard work than is seen here.

The relationship plotline, with Matt as the commitment-phobic guy (if I can oversimplify), is the most familiar one, and the one that takes up the biggest chunk of the film’s 90 minutes. It’s not a bad portrait of a relationship that’s become merely comfortable. Matt says everyone thinks “the best thing about my life is my girlfriend,” which is a nice line. He feels pressure because his sister is getting married after a much-less-than-eight-year courtship, but still won’t move forward. Carol Kane and James Rebhorn have a few scenes as the parents; Rebhorn is funny as the well-meaning yet mildly irritating father.

Gluing these three themes are connecting segments with Mike/Matt narrating as he drives along, telling the audience to turn off cell phones and, in one case, apologizing for the stupid thing his younger self has just done on screen. “I know,” he says. “I’m in the future, too. ” This way of putting it is as least as good an example of his bewildered-by-his-own-life sensibility as we get in the movie. It’s a line from his stand-up act. If you’re not big on radio programs and podcasts, this warm comedic drama is still worth your while, and goes down as easy as Birbiglia’s puppy-dog voice and mien. But look online for the This American Life episodes that feature Birbiglia for what is still the best introduction to his brand of idiosyncratic, yet easily relatable humor. Look especially for the one about his adolescent desire to make out with a girl, a subject absent from this movie but that might well be the basis for another one.
IMDb link

viewed 9/12/12 at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/12–14/12

For a Good Time, Call… (***)

Being the story of women who start a phone-sex service, this has cheesy exploitation flick written all over it, but was a nice surprise. Actually, it resembles nothing so much as a romantic comedy about platonic friends. To be sure, there is actual romance in the story, but the main relationship is between the two women, one of whom is played by Lauren Miller, one of the two women who wrote the screenplay. The other one, Katie Anne Naylon, is the one with actual phone-sex experience, which explains both the attention to detail—the need for a second person to handle billing, for example—and the the reason the plot centers around a now-waning business.

Miller is the nice girl, and Ari Graynor the party girl she’s hated since college, but then their gay pal (Justin Long) sets them up…as roommates, and they need money, this being New York, and the apartment being surprisingly large, and so…. You expect sex jokes here, and there are, but the tone is salacious, not smutty. The callers, a couple of whom may be recognizable from other films, are the subjects of humor, as you might expect, but not the objects of ridicule. In fact, the whole thing has a good-natured sex-positive tone that I liked. An encounter with a disapproving religious conservative is one of the funnier parts of the movie. To be sure, there is no deep meaning here, and the climax, if I may use that word, is a strained parody of a real romantic comedy ending. But real comedy is here, too.

IMDb link

viewed 8/29/12 7:30 pm at Rave University 6 and reviewed 9/6/12

Lola Versus (***)

On the cusp of 30, Lola is preparing her doctoral dissertation and planning her wedding. (She’s an arty Lower Manhattan type, so it’s a destination wedding in Chiapas.) Expressive Greta Gerwig, odd, mumbly in Greenberg, oddly assertive in Damsels in Distress, gets a chance to play a sort of normal young woman. But most people only seem normal until you get to know them, and Lola doesn’t quite know herself, which is what this unromantic comedy is about. Or, more specifically, it’s about what happens when her fiancé suddenly dumps her.

Lola comes well supported with arty side characters, like the stock rom-com raunchy best friend, an actress starring in the hilariously titled Pogrom! Her other best friend (Hamish Linklater) is a guy (a singer in what sounds like a Joy Division cover band), and since he’s not gay, that gets predictably complicated. But in other ways, it’s unpredictable. What was most authentic was how breakups can be messy and not all at once. The fiancé doesn’t just go away. Her friends do go away. Lola makes mistakes and spends the movie trying to get back to normal, but in a way that’s more funny than mopey. In tone, the movie is about halfway between independent and mainstream.

IMDb link

viewed 6/12/12 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/13–19/12