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.

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

Rosewater (***)

You might not expect a comedian-turned-TV host, even the host of a news parody show, to make his directorial debut with a drama about an journalist arrested by the Iranian government. But Jon Stewart’s Daily Show played an odd, indirect role in the story of Maziar Bahari, whose memoir was adapted by Stewart. Being an American film, it’s almost all in English, though in real life, presumably, most of the speaking would have been in Farsi.

Bahari (Gael García Bernal), a Newsweek reporter covering the 2009 elections in Iran, was arrested and accused of spying. His interrogator relied partly on an interview Bahari had given to Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones in which Jones had asked, in the show’s mock serious way, if Bahari were a spy. (Modestly, Stewart doesn’t refer to the show by name.)

The film depicts Bahari’s reporting on the election and, primarily, his subsequent detention and interrogation. (For the squeamish, the violence is fairly minimal.) Though Stewart briefly shows us scenes involving the interrogator and his superior, almost all of the movie is from Bahari’s point of view, understandable given that it’s based on a memoir. This means, though, that the biggest mysteries — did the Iranians truly think Bahari was a spy, what did they expect to accomplish by holding him, and so on — remain so. Instead, the film is a window into the mind of the captive, wondering what he should or can do to save himself. Stewart uses flashbacks and imagined discussions between Bahari and his late father and sister, who had also been held captive, both to depict Bahari’s backstory and to reveal his thoughts while in solitary confinement. At the time of his captivity, the Iranian-born Bahari was based in London, where his wife was pregnant with his first child.

Stewart’s debut is an entirely credible effort, well done but without that many surprises, kind of what you might expect from a film on this subject, if not from this particular writer-director.


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viewed 11/10/14 7:00 pm at AMC Loews Cherry Hill and posted 11/10/14

The Monuments Men (**3/4)

I’ve usually enjoyed George Clooney’s acting roles, but his directorial projects (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck., Leatherheads) have mostly seemed more admirable than winsome. So it is with this one, which takes a solid subject, art treasures looted by the Nazis, and renders it more drily than I’d have hoped.

Not surprisingly, the cast is full of big names: Clooney himself plays the leader of a middle-aged band of art experts who don uniforms in order to keep the treasures out of German hands, or get them back before they’re destroyed. His recruits include Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville, Jean Dujardin, and Bob Balaban. But the best role is Cate Blanchett’s, an employee of the Nazis in occupied Paris who is happy to betray them, but also suspicious of the motives of the American (Damon) sent to enlist her assistance. Hers is by far the most complex character. Clooney has the biggest role, but his most significant function is to make a few speeches saying that art, the cornerstone of civilization, is what everyone was fighting for, so the mission is worth it. How more meaningful, I thought, it would have been to include a glimpse of the art before the war, rather than first encounter it in warehouses and similar settings, in bulk.

In terms of plot, this is a true-story version of National Treasure. In form, though, it’s mostly an old-fashioned adventure film. Put a bunch of colorful characters together, have them troupe around Europe, let fun ensue. But the tone seemed to me downbeat, yet without being especially emotional. Even when the monuments men come upon a cache of gold teeth removed from people sent to concentration camps, the moment seems perfunctory. Also present are multiple scenes in which the art men confront the enemy, or those who are potentially the enemy. I thought of Inglorious Basterds, in which similar moments crackle with tension. Of course, Clooney is a thoughtful man who is unlikely to make a truly awful movie, or an unintelligent one. Here he works with his longtime writing and producing partner, Grant Heslov, and everything is executed with competence. But little pizzazz.

IMDb link

viewed 2/12/14 7:30 at Roxy; posted 2/12/14

The Invisible Woman (**3/4)

I had great expectations for this story of Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes) and his mistress, Ellen Ternan (Felicity Jones), but found it stiff and formal. Ternan, an aspiring actress, was just 18 when she met the 45-year-old Dickens; he cast her in a play he had co-written, in Manchester. She was still living with her mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) and two sisters, while he was celebrity across the English-speaking world. It was 1857.

The film, with a script by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady, Shame) and directed by Fiennes, takes its inspiration from the book of the same name by Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin. Fiennes uses a flashback structure to contrast the 1883 Ternan, by then married and directing children in a Dickens play in seaside Margate, and the earlier version. It doesn’t help that Jones, though a fine actress, looks pretty close to the same age in both sets of scenes.

Mainly though, the relationship at the heart of the story seems relatively passionless except when the two characters are talking about his work, of which she had been a devoted reader. The film could use more establishing scenes and dialogue between the principals, more lust, and fewer pregnant pauses and lingering shots of domestic scenes. A music score might have been used more effectively to underscore the unspoken feelings. It is understandable that a young woman would be awed by a handsome, charming man whom she revered, understandable that he would be attracted to a pretty 18-year-old, but it’s not always apparent. The husband-wife relationship is clearer. Mrs. Dickens was a nice woman without an intellectual connection to her husband. I appreciated the way the film was sympathetic to all of its characters, but in some ways it makes them seem bloodless.

IMDb link

viewed 1/23/14 7:05 pm at Ritz Bourse; posted 1/23/14

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

Philomena (***3/4)

Britain may not be as class-bound as it once was, but its history gives it a comfort with the topic. At any rate, class is a subject I’ve seen explored far more often in British films than in American ones. Some of the UK’s best known filmmakers, including Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, and this film’s director, Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, Dirty Pretty Things, The Queen) touch on class themes frequently. The story here is the reverse of the one in Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, in which the main character tracks down her birth mother. Here, Philomena (Judi Dench) is trying to find the son she gave up for adoption 50 years earlier. The two films aren’t otherwise similar, except in the way they bring together women who are not sophisticated with characters who are, and who are also better off financially. That other character is journalist Martin Sixsmith, played by Steve Coogan. Coogan also co-wrote the screenplay, based on a book by Sixsmith, who really was, as portrayed here, a former BBC reporter who had been forced to resign from a government post and was thus free to research the story of an Irish woman whose child was taken from her while she toiled seven days a week in a Magdalen laundry.

Another such laundry, a place where Catholic “fallen women” provided unpaid labor, was the subject of The Magdalene Sisters (2002), a bleak but moving film. Adding odd-couple humor and a kind of modern-day detective story makes this film much less bleak, but still moving. In the course of the story, Sixsmith comes to respect Philomena. It would be accurate, but make the story seem trite, to say that she has a different kind of wisdom that he does. Better to say that the film respects both of the characters, the cynical, atheistic Sixsmith, and the open-hearted Philomena, whose faith is unshaken by her betrayal by her church. The mystery of her son’s whereabouts is solved, of course, but in a way that is dramatically satisfying, somewhat bittersweet…and not at all trite.

IMDb link

viewed 12/3/13 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 12/3/13; revised 1/24/14

12 Years a Slave (***1/2)

In human history, there are, unfortunately, many worthy contenders for superlative evilness, but the Holocaust and American slavery were at least unusual in perpetuating elaborately organized systems of cruelty that provide endless storytelling possibilities. There are more films about the Holocaust, I think, and the unwillingness of Americans to look at the ugly sides of American history may be part of that, but there have been, also, many more Holocaust survivors who were in a position to tell their stories. Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) was an educated man, a free black man with a loving wife and children in Saratoga, New York, who became a slave in 1841, and was sent to Louisiana. Later, he wrote one of the few surviving slave narratives. In effect, he had a perspective analogous to a Holocaust survivor, living a normal life one day, though discriminated against, and thrust into the control of others the next. His reaction is ours, were we thrust into a similar situation.

Northrup, then, does not represent the typical slave story. When he is, essentially, kidnapped while being mistaken for a runaway, his first reactions are to argue, to fight, and to run. Another man, taken along with him, expresses contempt for the “niggers” who have always been slaves and only wish to survive. Northrup says, “I don’t want to survive; I want to live.” Although his skills on the violin are an occasional help to him, his learning and independence are generally of no advantage. He cannot pick cotton as fast as others, and so he is punished. He cannot resist telling a cruel master (Paul Dano) that he’s made a mistake, and so he is punished. In one of the more remarkable scenes in the film, Northrup finds himself nearly hanged, with his toes just able to touch the ground. Instead of cutting to the next scene, director Steve McQueen lets the camera linger, with Northrup at the center of the frame, as white people and slaves alike go about their business.

McQueen’s last movie, Shame, told the story of a sex addict as if it were the Jesus story, but this scene is the closest this movie gets to pretentious. There’s no need to lay it on thick when depicting slavery. In its most ordinary aspects, it is still dramatic. There are several scenes of violence, enough to make the point that a slave was subject to violence at the whim of a slaveowner, and for reasons that could not always be anticipated or avoided. However, for me other scenes had an equal impact. In one, Northrup’s owner (Michael Fassbender, star of Shame and McQueen’s earlier Hunger) wakes up the slaves to have them dance and entertain him, a reminder that no part of a slave’s life, save perhaps private thoughts, was entirely his own.

In some respects, I find the slavemaster a more curious character than the slave. It’s easy to understand Northrup, especially since he has been raised as a free man. But how to explain the man who can live with people he owns, and see their humanity, and yet can still regard them as of a kind so different that he does not identify at all with their suffering or feel guilt at causing it. Of course, this was not always true. Northrup spends most of his time in captivity under the master played by Fassbender, but is first purchased by a somewhat kinder man played by Benedict Cumberbatch. This man treats Northrup with humanity, yet, as one of the women points out to him, is no more inclined to set him free, if only because it will cause him financial ruin. In this way and others, McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley are able to present different aspects of a curious, unfortunate, and fascinating chapter of American history.

IMDb link

viewed 11/3/13 3:05 pm at AMC Cherry Hill and posted 11/4/13

The Fifth Element (***)

You could be forgiven, after watching the opening sequence of this film, that you’re watching the beginning of some James Bond knockoff. But is Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), founder of WikiLeaks, James Bond or the villain of the story? Or both?

Assange burst into prominence with news that WikiLeaks had obtained the classified information, including hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables, provided by Army intelligence analyst Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning in 2010. This story begins there, but flashes back two years to Assange’s meeting at a Berlin conference with Daniel Berg (Daniel Brühl, of Rush), a German hacker who, in this version, anyway, becomes lured by Assange’s talk of righting wrongs as well as his own story, difficult childhood and all, some of which is true. Pretty soon, the two of them, with just a little help, are spreading news of assassination plots and banking law violations.

Since Berg’s book is one of the sources for the movie, it’s natural that the movie makes Berg the hero of the story, perhaps Assange’s right-hand man, perhaps the victim of his manipulations, like a battered wife. He’s the ordinary guy/audience stand-in contrasted with the charismatic Assange, whose self-satisfaction possibly covers deep self-doubt. Cumberbatch, who also plays the title role in the BBC’s modernized Sherlock series, knows something about playing smug, and he’s memorable in the role.

Director Bill Condon’s (The Twilight Saga) attempt to give this the look and feel of a techno thriller doesn’t disguise that fact that it isn’t, save perhaps in the last half hour, and most of the shots of computer screens don’t illuminate anything important about how WikiLeaks worked. I wondered how David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, the team behind The Social Network, might have approached this story.

A question the film presents, but does not address, is whether we should treat people like Assange as journalists; and, secondarily, does Wikileaks and its online cousins represent a new paradigm for information transfer that governments and organizations will need to adjust to regardless of what the law can do? These questions go beyond the story of Assange, whose ultimate fate remains unclear. The movie does a competent job of presenting that story, despite its annoyingly slick beginning. But it won’t stick with you.

IMDb link

 

viewed 10/9/13 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening]

Captain Phillips (***1/2)

IMDb link

viewed 12/1/13 5:05 at AMC Cherry Hill

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.

 

 

IMDb link

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

Beyond the Hills (***)

This drama comes from Cristian Mungiu, the Romanian who made the deservedly acclaimed 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. That film tackled the subject of illegal abortion. This one is “inspired by” nonfiction books about an incident at an Orthodox monastery. The two main characters are two young women who grew up in the same orphanage but have not seen each other for some time. Meanwhile, one, Alina (Cristina Flutur), has worked abroad, and the other, Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), has joined a strict religious order led by a bearded priest and lives an ascetic lifestyle.
 
For a time, I expected Voichita to see this patriarchal set-up for what it is and rebel. But she appears content, whereas Alina appears unhappy and needy. She hopes to resume the once-close friendship — how close is merely implied— and has little sympathy for the religious order. Neither did I, but I appreciated that Mungiu takes what appears to be a neutral approach. It may be too much to say most people will truly understand the nuns’ decision to live as they do, but the filmmaker himself does not appear to impose a strong viewpoint (though the ending, based on an actual incident, leaves less room for interpretation).

Mungiu builds his stories from the accumulation of detail, taking an almost documentary-like approach. These are fixed characters, and we see their inner lives only in watching their behavior. Only Alina, a clearly troubled young woman, exhibits a volatility, but even she does not change much in the course of the story. The tension does not hinge on revelations of secrets, but on the inexorable collision of religious and secular world views. This is a clash of civilizations writ small; slowly, it builds toward inevitable conflict. But…slowly. I admired the realism (there is no musical score) and the precision of the filmmaking while feeling impatient for the story to get where it’s going. I suspect the latter feeling will predominate in most viewers.

IMDb link

viewed 10/23/12 7:00 pm at Ritz East  [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/31/12–3/28/13

Argo (***1/2)

I always enjoy it when movies do more than one thing well. Ben Affleck’s third directorial effort (after Gone Baby Gone and The Town) is a three-for-one. In the first, shortest sequence, it is a docudrama (incorporating news footage) showing, in 1979, Iranian revolutionaries taking over the American embassy. The mass hostage-taking that followed was the year’s top foreign-policy story and, perhaps, the thing that lost Jimmy Carter re-election.

The flight, in secret, of a handful of embassy employees to the nearby Canadian embassy is a lesser-known story that makes perfect fodder for an elliptical thriller, with a rescue plan that was literally straight out of Hollywood. The satirical midsection would not be ought of place in Get Shorty. John Goodman and Alan Arkin play the colorful movie folks who helped produce the operation, the details of which are too amusing to recount.

But then Affleck, who plays the CIA operative who arranges the whole plan and sells it to his agency superiors, deftly pivots again and shows the operation in action in a most suspenseful way. He pays attention to the individual hostages, who included a married couple and one man who is heavily skeptical of the plan, which requires them to play, among other things, Canadians.

The script, while not perfectly fidelitous to history, particularly in the third act, gets some points for casting, as can be seen in the photographs of the actual hostages, looking remarkably like the actors who portray them (as does the John Goodman character). The story is based on a book by Tony Mendez, Affleck’s character, with a screenplay by Chris Terrio. It’s a fine blend of Hollywood thrills and nervous tension, with a touch of comedy.

IMDb link

viewed 11/4/2012 2:05 pm at Ritz 16 NJ; review posted 2/21/2013

Surviving Progress (**1/4)

This liberal feel-good (or feel-bad) documentary, adapted from a book by Ronald Wright, makes the case that our society is a kind of bubble that may soon burst. Specifically, Wright argues that modern humans have fallen into a “progress trap.” As with ancient hunters who became so adept at slaughtering mammoths that they killed off the source of their wealth, we have become so adept at exploiting natural resources that we are exceeding the capacity of Earth to regenerate them. He gives 1980 as the date when we began to do this on a global scale, although the film echoes people like Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, whose warnings of catastrophe began 40 years ago and proved, at least, premature. It’s not quite clear why 1980 is the key date, but perhaps it’s not coincidental that that’s when Ronald Reagan was elected. That’s also when the United States began to experience an increasing concentration of wealth that continues. The film implies, not entirely correctly, that this is a phenomenon everywhere. Economist Michael Hudson links wealth concentration to the fall of the Roman Empire and says “that’s what’s threatening to bring in the Dark Ages again.”

Only the fiercest anti-environmentalists would deny that the explosive growth in output and wasteful use of resources in the last decades brings challenges with it. But to declare, as the film does, that a phenomenon that has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in Asia since 1980s is a “failed experiment” is at best premature and overstated. Geneticist David Suzuki broadly criticize economics, which is “not a science,” for ignoring pollution and other societal costs. “Economists call these externalities…that’s nuts.” However, plenty of economists, including Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman, have written about the problems of externalities. Suzuki seems to disparage the profession for having created the very term. Repeatedly, the documentary argues by such assertion, rather than proof, wielding very little empirical data. A detour to Brazil provides some detail about deforestation, but, generally, I longed for more specificity.

To be fair, proving such a bold thesis is well beyond the purview of a feature-length documentary. Wright’s book, which I have not read, dwells more on past civilizations than our current one. Given that it’s far easier to explain the past than predict the future, perhaps the directors, Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks, should have followed that path. Alternately, they might have deeply delved into some specific areas where the negative effects of human activity are undeniable. There’s a lot of talent on hand here—the talking heads include Jane Goodall, Stephen and Hawking, and authors Robert Wright and Margaret Atwood—and building a film around any one of them might have been better than giving each a few sound bites. One participant, writer-engineer Colin Beavan, actually made his own film about his and his wife’s experiment in nonconsumption. Though based on a gimmick, Beavan’s No Impact Man: The Documentary nonetheless seriously grapples with the idea of conservation in a more concrete (and entertaining) way.

The positives of the film include some nifty time-lapse simulations and the opening and closing segments, in which gorillas trying to solve a logic problem. (This sort of ties into the idea that our brains have not evolved too far beyond that of apes, so we’re lousy at anticipating long-term consequences.) But the most worthwhile portion of the documentary is the one about solutions, which includes the expected warnings (by Beavan and others) about the need to conserve but also interviews with geneticists, notably Craig Ventner, about the possibility of generating artificial organisms to repair damage or even improve upon human physiology. Like everything else here, it’s quite speculative, but since the turf is less familiar, also fascinating.

IMDb link

viewed 5/22/12 7:20 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 5/23/12 and 5/25/12

In Darkness (***1/4)

This is yet another true, moving Holocaust story that you probably haven’t heard (though adapted from a book by Robert Marshall). It would be absurd to call the abundance of such stories a silver lining. But a tiny one might be that even as the extremeness of the Nazi movement allowed mistrust, venality, and hatred to flourish, it allowed some ordinary individuals, like Anne Frank savior Miep Gies, to achieve a measure of heroism.

The story of Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), a petty thief, bears some parallels to that of Gies, except that Socha’s motives were, at least at the start, entirely mercenary, and the Jews he hid were people with whom he had no prior relationship and felt no particular affection. However, as the resident expert on the sewer system in Lvov, a Ukrainian city mostly populated by ethnic Poles, he and his (literal) partner in crime were in a position to help (or turn in) a small group who fled underground when the Nazis removed the city’s Jewish population. The film shows just enough Nazi brutality to set up the plot. Otherwise, it concentrates on Socha and the desperate people he and his partner agree, for a price, to assist, although none of them in particular.

This is a return to form for director Agnieszka Holland, who made the great, Holocaust-themed Europa, Europa two decades ago but most recently had made the lightweight (English-language) Copying Beethoven. (Nominated for a foreign-language-film Oscar, In Darkness lost to the brilliant A Separation.) The most noteworthy story elements, even more than the threat of discovery, are the senses of squalor and deprivation in the pipes, where the rats are so numerous that children and adults alike brush them off calmly. Additionally, the necessity of living in cramped quarters made privacy nearly impossible. (Even Leopold and his wife have sex just feet from their sleeping daughter.) Tragedy reaches underground, too, yet this desperate life was a preferable fate to that of most of the Jews in Lvov, who did not survive the war.

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viewed 3/21/2012 5:30 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/21/2012

A Dangerous Method (***

It’s probably a cliché to point out that being a good therapist doesn’t necessarily bring you closer to resolving your own conflicts. Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightly)

Viggo Mortenson, hardly recognizable with his thick beard, plays his mentor, Sigmund Freud, with whom he famously spoke to for 13 hours upon their first meeting and, even more famously, fell out with later.

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We Bought a Zoo (**3/4)

It’s not often that a title so well sums up the plot. Benjamin Mee, played by Matt Damon, is a real guy who actually did buy a zoo and write a book about it, which has been adapted by Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous, Jerry McGuire) into this very drama. The real Mee was English and was living in France when he decided to buy a zoo. Crowe has unimaginatively turned Mee into an Angeleno and transplanted the zoo to Southern California. Just like the real Mee, the one here is a grieving widower with two children. One is an angry fourteen-year-old boy, the other a seven-year-old girl who spends the entire film being adorable, and it’s probably her lines, not her delivery, that makes her seem just a little too child-actorish. Elle Fanning, the second youngest female in the cast, also spends the entire movie being adorable. Probably the movie is a little too adorable. Damon and Scarlett Johansson, who plays the head zookeeper, are mostly adorable too, but their best scene is the one where they’re in conflict.

Crowe is a filmmaker who favors characters who boldly gesture—his most famous scene might be John Cusack’s holding up a boombox to woo Ione Skye in 1989’s Say Anything—but a more intimate approach may have better suited the material. (The soundtrack, featuring songs by Jónsi, is appropriately quieter, on the whole.)  Or it might be that Crowe makes everything about owning a zoo seem surprisingly unsurprising. Here’s what I learned about animals from the movie—you have to talk to them the right way. Also, someone with experience can tell when a tiger is suffering.

This is a movie with a nice feel to it, but everything feels a little too simplified. The way the movie Mee buys the place is that, having decided that moving would help him get past his grief, he goes house hunting, spots the place the first day, and decides to buy it immediately after seeing how much his daughter likes it, even before seeing the photogenic staff (including Patrick Fugit, barely recognizable from his starring role in Almost Famous) that comes with. This was easily the most transparently false scene. I guess the real story, that Mee carefully researched before buying, seemed dull or complicated, but it seems to me that with a story like this, it’s the odd details that would have made it more compelling. Instead, most of this movie is simply sweet and pleasant, a good family movie if the kids aren’t too young or too cynical.

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viewed 12/13/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 12/13/11

Moneyball (***3/4)

Numbers don’t lie, people say, but that doesn’t mean everyone will believe them. Baseball is no doubt the sport whose traditions are most bound up in statistics—batting average, home runs, RBIs, ERA and so on—but perhaps also the one whose practices are most bound up by the dictates of tradition. Michael Lewis’s 2003 bestseller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, one of the most absorbing works of nonfiction I’ve read, Lewis told the story of how an unconventional general manager, Billy Beane, used the unconventional analysis of people like Bill James to help his team, the Oakland A’s, compete with teams with much larger payrolls. Along with books like Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics, Lewis helped popularize the notion of applying economic perspectives to subjects traditionally thought outside the bounds of economics.

Like the book, this adaptation of Lewis’s book focuses on Beane (Brad Pitt), who in 2002 was facing the loss of three key players after a 102-win season in which his team had been beaten in the playoffs by a team (the New York Yankees) with triple the budget. Slightly fictionalizing the timeline, the movie has Beane then recruiting an Ivy League economist (Jonah Hill) who was working for a rival team. Applying the approach of James, who is not portrayed but is mentioned in the film, the two then go about transforming the team. Beane succeeds not so much because he is smarter than the competition, but because he is willing to try something new. Schooled in the principles of “sabremetrics,” the name coined to describe what James and his followers do, they look for players undervalued by other teams, but who can do the one thing valued above all: get on base, which leads to scoring, which leads to winning. The scouts resist like a creationist who think evolution takes away the mystery of life; to a sabremetrician, understanding the genetics of baseball game only makes its endlessly unpredictable outcomes that much more astonishing. They are, as Beane says, “card counters.”

The script, by Steve Zallian (Schindler’s List, Awakenings, American Gangster) and Aaron Sorkin (Charlie Wilson’s War, The Social Network), does a fine job of explaining the nontraditional approach, although I slightly lost track of Beane’s machinations in one scene where he slyly manipulates three fellow GMs at once. In understandably conveying lots of information, it reminded me of The Social Network. Yet compared to Sorkin’s usual work the pace is as unhurried as the ink-jet printer Beane uses in his modestly furnished office. There’s even a kind of wistfulness about him, or the version played by Pitt. As a character drama, this will appeal even to people who would, as does one character, mispronounce “Giambi,” the last name of a player Beane can’t afford. It’s both a unsentimental reminder that a professional sports player is, fundamentally, a commodity and a classic, true underdog story. Here the underdog is the outspent Beane, who had himself been a player but failed to live up to expectations. Unlike the old-school scouts and even the team manager, who talk about the value of intangibles, he knows that intangibles, unless quantifiable as runs, are a distraction. He purposely keeps his distance from the players, knowing that one day he may need to fire them. Hill, referred to as “Google Boy” by one of the old-school scouts, does a nice job of being the egghead intimidated by the jock, yet sure of his facts.


For baseball geeks, Moneyball the book is a must-read, explaining why, for example, stolen bases are overrated. But this, absorbing in a different way, made me do something the book couldn’t: become, for two hours, an Oakland A’s fan.

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viewed 10/16/11, 4:05 pm at Riverview and reviewed 10/16/11

Project Nim (***1/2)

I had heard the story of the chimpanzee Nim Chimsky. Born in 1973, he was the subject of an experiment whose ostensible purpose was to see if a chimp raised like a human child would develop basic language skills. As fascinating as that question is, the story of what happened to Nim as an individual is equally so, and certainly both stranger and, at times, disturbing. The decision to place Nim in a New York City apartment with a caretaker— a former student of the researcher living with half a dozen kids—who knew nothing about chimps and little about sign language is only the first of the odd events. She was, however, willing to treat him so like one of her own young children that she breast fed him. And yet, he would be taken from her.

There are several more stops on Nim’s odyssey, and while the jury is still out on how much language apes can acquire—a question explored more in Elizabeth Hess’s book than in this adaptation—it’s hard to come away from this movie with good feelings toward primate experimentation. Yet the tone director James Marsh takes is as even as that in his previous documentary, Man on Wire. He has the benefit of having nearly every person important to the story participating in his film, though most of the story is at a 30 year remove. This includes Herb Terrace, the researcher who oversaw Project Nim, as well as the humans who bonded with Nim. Since Nim was the subject of the scientific research, Marsh also has period footage of Nim, whose signing is helpfully translated on screen.

In the end, Nim shows himself to share many human qualities, but the film also shows that to be not entirely a flattering comparison.


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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 7/31/11

Kill the Irishman (***)

You’d think they’d run out of true-life gangster stories to tell, but they never seem to. Just last year brought the excellent two-film French saga Mesrine, which isn’t that much like this one, but begins the same way, with someone trying to kill the title character, then flashing back a couple of decades to see how it all went down. Jacques Mesrine moved around a lot, but Irish American Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson) stays in Cleveland, his hometown. His rise from poor boy growing up to longshoreman to union boss is probably the best segment of the film and depicts the mixture of characteristics (a loan shark enforcer who worries about cholesterol—in the 1960s!) that made him such a force of nature. The second half of the movie covers the turf wars and deal-making that are typical of the genre.

As good at glad-handing as ass-kicking, though there winds up being more of the latter, the well-read Greene rose on both brains and brawn, as well as “brass balls,” a phrase that inevitably comes up in the film. With a suitably imposing screen presence and booming voice, Stevenson, of HBO’s Rome, is the other reason (besides the early part) to see the movie. Greene/Stevenson is so charismatic that he overshadows supporting roles played by better-known Vincent D'Onofrio, Val Kilmer, Tony Lo Bianco, and even Christopher Walken, although Walken is always memorable.

The beginning of the story is narrated by the Kilmer character, a police detective, and it seemed like the movie was going to be almost as much about the effort to catch Greene as about Greene himself. American Gangster pulled this off such a back-and-forth structure, whereas here director/cowriter Jonathan Hensleigh does the same thing as Ben Affleck does in The Town, making the lawman much less interesting. Kilmer’s detective does pop up now and again, evolving from a dead-set adversary into one with a somewhat clichéd grudging respect for him. The story skips ahead too much for this transition to be entirely convincing, and in the same vein, neither is the ending, which tries to give the Greene a kind of nobility that doesn’t quite fit with the fighting spirit he otherwise displays.

These and other scenes—for instance, the corny one in which an Irish-born widow-next-door (Fionnula Flanagan) gives Greene a lecture about Irish pride—gave me the sense of a miniseries that had been edited down to feature length. The movie is based on Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia, by Rick Porrello, and it’s typical that the “crippled the Mafia” part is pretty much relegated to an epilogue. Undoubtedly, there was enough material in the book to create a two-part film, as with Mesrine. As it is, Hensleigh largely maintains a realism (including period news footage) that should appeal to genre fans, but it’s not a must-see.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/22/11

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?

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