Tabloid (***1/2)

It happens that I saw this when, aside from the economy, the month’s two biggest news stories have been a young woman’s acquittal on charges of murdering her daughter and a British newspaper’s alleged phone hacking. The stranger-than-fiction story that unfolds here is a reminder that stories of young women, especially attractive white ones, have long captured public attention, and that British newspapers have never been shy about pursuing their own version of the truth.

The events that took Joyce McKinney from Wyoming beauty pageant contestant to English headline-war fodder took place in 1977. Her looks have faded, but she seems to be the same person whose magnificent obsession with her Mormon boyfriend (or fiancé, maybe) inadvertently turned her into a celebrity across the ocean. And Errol Morris, who has made biographical documentaries about serious things (The Fog of War) and entertaining things (Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control), provides just the right approach to telling her story. While relying heavily on his own interviews, he splashes his screen with old Hollywood footage and splashes pull quotes from his subjects across the screen in giant, old-fashioned letters. Even the background music is melodrama worthy. This approach can seem heavy-handed in a serious documentary (see Michael Moore’s work for examples, or even some of Morris’s), but underscores the humor. And, for certain, there’s more humor here than in most Hollywood comedies.

McKinney might be a tragic figure but seems to see herself more as a survivor. She certainly has a way with a phrase; she compares the unlikelihood of the accusation against her to “putting a marshmallow into a parking meter.” And she has already denounced Morris’s film as a “celluloid catastrophe,” though gently mocking is about the worst that can be said of the director’s presentation. I felt there was a sincerity to her even when I wasn’t sure I believed her version of events.

The one thing thing that hampers Morris’s storytelling is the lack of participation of key principals, either because of death or unwillingness to participate. (The only documentary I can compare this to would be Crazy Love, which tells a more complete story.) McKinney tells the bulk of the tale, and she appears to be an unreliable narrator. And yet the ambiguity that remains is also part of the appeal; the element of mystery is that which nearly all of the greatest tabloid stories have. Morris may not have resorted to illegality, and he is, McKinney’s objections notwithstanding, presumably more scrupulous than The Daily Mail about fairly portraying his subjects (his 1988 film The Thin Blue Line helped free a falsely accused prisoner), but he clearly understands the attraction of what the tabloids are selling.

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viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 7/18/11

Men Who Stare at Goats (**1/2)

Many people now know of the US Army’s secret experiments with LSD, CIA testing of “brainwashing” techniques, or even the military’s use of a Chinese manual designed to elicit false confessions as a basis for its “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Yet they may not know about its attempts to train recruits in the art of “remote viewing,” by which which they could, supposedly, use only the power of their minds to see faraway things, or even, as the title suggests, to kill goats.

Playing a reporter who accidentally stumbles upon this story, Ewan McGregor is the audience surrogate for learning about this odd use of taxpayer funds. The reporter is called Bob Wilton, presumably based on Jon Ronson, who wrote the book on which the movie is based. Little in this movie suggests that “Bob” is capable of writing a book, but the early scene in which he interviews one of the participants in these experiments has just the right tone of curious incredulity that’s called for. Cut to a few years later, and cuckolded Bob has fled to Iraq to convince himself and his soon-to-be ex of his manhood. From this point at which Bob coincidentally wanders into former operative Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), the narrative gets goofier and less convincing. Clooney himself does a pretty good job as one who has managed to get by in life by fervently believing in his own special abilities in the absence of any proof.

This comedy follows in the steps of movies like Charlie Wilson’s War or The Informant! in finding the absurdity in a serious, true story. Of course, in this case the absurdity is right on the surface, and probably the movie would have done well to underplay it a little rather than make almost every scene seem like a lark and every character a kook. The film briefly resembles Ishtar as Bob and Lyn go wandering in the desert on a mission that’s not entirely clear, but provides an excuse for buddy-comedy mishaps. Flashbacks are supposed to provide the backstory on all of the paranormal military stuff, but mostly bring in an assortment of odd characters, most notably the unlikely miliary man/new-age guru played by Jeff Bridges, a cousin to his Big Lebowski character.

It’s all sort of amusing, but never as funny as you might think, or even as informative as those other movies manage to be at the same time as being funny. As Bob goes from skeptic to sort-of believer in these strange folks, it seems as if we are supposed to both laugh at and celebrate them in their bizarre efforts to make war through peaceful means. But you don’t have to have read Ronson’s book to know that the movie has taken too many narrative shortcuts and left out too much for the movie to come off as anything but quirky fluff.

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viewed 11/18/09 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 11/19/09 and 11/23/09

Frost/Nixon (***1/4)

This movie made me think not of other political movies but of a boxing movie, like Rocky, or the underrated one director Ron Howard did before this, Cinderella Man. They were underdog stories, and this is an underdog story for political junkies. It’s not about Watergate. There’s already movies like All the President’s Men and so forth. You don’t even need to know much about Watergate, or Richard Nixon, to watch the movie, though if you don’t it’ll be less interesting. But what it’s about is how a British journalist/TV host with a lightweight reputation managed to not only snag the fist in-depth interview with a heavyweight but also land some serious blows and, arguably, a knockout punch.

Written by Peter Morgan, who adapted his own play, the film begins with David Frost (Michael Sheen) as the affable but scheming celebrity-interview specialist. (Think of a cross between Barbara Walters and Geraldo Rivera.) But of a playboy too. Frost spends half the movie trying to get enough money to buy Nixon’s cooperation. Even the interview segments are not simply a condensate of the programs that in 1977 drew a record US television audience for an interview, but rather focus on the strategies of the combatants. For Richard Nixon (Frank Langella), it was something like Muhammad Ali’s rope-a-dope—let Frost use up his time flailing away at him while he calmly, presidentially, rolled with the punches and delivered lengthy, unrevealing answers.

Besides Morgan’s cohesive screenplay, Frost/Nixon is anchored by the powerful performances of both leads. Sheen’s Frost follows the same trajectory as his Tony Blair in The Queen (also written by Morgan); he becomes a more serious person as the film goes on. Langella’s Nixon is masterful; Nixon is a man whose voice and mannerisms are easily parodied, but Langella makes him into a real person, and not simply a villain. While I have no doubt that Nixon deserved to have resigned, I was not without sympathy for him while watching this, even as a rooted for Frost to take him down. Of the supporting actors, Kevin Bacon is most notable as Nixon’s fiercely loyal aide, Jack Brennan.

Everyone knows how this ends. Nixon would spend the next twenty years continuing to attempt to resuscitate his image, Frost was knighted in 1993, and other presidents went on to abuse their power. But the lesson of the movie is, beware the journalist with something to prove. It might’ve helped Sarah Palin to watch Nixon/Frost before she agreed to talk to Katie Couric.

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viewed 12/19/08 at Ritz 5; reviewed 2/14/09

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (***1/4)

The title seems entirely too formal for a movie about a guy who made his name by hanging out with and writing about Hell’s Angels, who had his ashes shot out of a fireworks cannon out, and who, besides reinventing journalism, was best known for his fondness for guns and ability to consume prodigious quantities of alcohol. Other mind-altering substances figure into Thompson’s story. He nearly won a sheriff’s race on a pro-drug platform in his adopted home of Colorado. His reference to Edmund Muskie’s imagined addiction to ibogaine helped derail the senator’s 1972 presidential campaign. His semi-fictionalized road-trip memoir Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas amply catalogues his pharmaceutical adventures along with his take on where the American dream had ended up.

Johnny Depp, the star of the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas film version , narrates this strange man’s life, which ended with his suicide in February 2005. The latter part of the movie is the story of an inevitable decline—while the 1960s and ’70s Thompson created gonzo journalism, the blend of fact, surreality, and opinion that was the antithesis of objectivity, by the Reagan era he had become a man trying too hard to live up to his own image. Still, he wrote prescient commentary on the aftermath of 9/11 as well as a blog for ESPN, and even that last, self-inflicted gunshot can be seen as the man going out on his own terms. Telling his story are usual countercultural suspects like Tom Wolfe and Jann Wenner, whose magazine, Rolling Stone, provided Hunter Thompson’s best-known literary home; political folks like Jimmy Carter, Pat Buchanan, and George McGovern; and friends and family, notably his two wives. It is to Thompson’s credit that his ex seems to recall him mostly fondly, despite his volatile personality and womanizing. McGovern is the effective hero of the 1972 presidential-race account Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. As for Buchanan, I’m no fan of his politics, but you have to like a guy who can recall a political enemy with such apparent nostalgia. (Buchanan’s old boss, Richard Nixon, was Thompson’s foremost object of Loathing.)

Gibney, who shot this simultaneously with his Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, adopts some of Thompson’s visual style, putting quasi-psychedelic visuals behind his talking heads and incorporating footage of Thompson from earlier documentaries as well as clips of Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and 1980’s Where the Buffalo Roam, in Bill Murray played Thompson. Gibney may not have the identifiable style of an Errol Morris, or the populist flair of a Michael Moore, who among filmmakers might be best be called “gonzo,” but he has made some of the most information-packed, incisive documentaries of the last few years, including Who Killed the Electric Car? and Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room. You probably should have some interest in the 1960s counterculture, American political history, or journalism to enjoy this movie. But if so, it’s a worthwhile portrait of a man who helped change the way we look at all three.

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viewed 6/30/08 (screening at Ritz 5); reviewed 7/10/08

I'm Not There (**1/4)

I'm Not There is Todd Haynes’s self-consciously clever attempt to tackle the life, or many lives, as he puts it, of Bob Dylan. No one actor, or cinematic style, can properly capture this arguably most influential American musician of the 20th century. There is young hobo Bob, tramping it in the midwest and calling himself—this is Haynes’s conceit—Woody Guthrie, after his then-dying folk idol. That Woody is played by Marcus Carl Franklin, an eleven-year-old black boy, may strike you as a heavy-handed attempt to depict both Dylan’s identification with the downtrodden and his formative musical state. Still, the scenes are not without some rustic charm. Hobo Bob/Woody will soon become folk-hero Bob (Christian Bale), troubadour of Greenwich Village and protegé of Joan Baez, who is played by Julianne Moore and called Alice Fabian here. Bob is called Jack Rollins. Haynes does these segments like a documentary, partly in black and white, complete with ersatz re-creations of famous album covers. (The Times They Are A Changin’ becomes Time Will Tell, which, like certain other parts of the movie, is funny if you know something about Dylan, and otherwise isn’t.)

Then there is Cate Blanchett's mod Bob, alienating his folk base, swinging through a Fellini-esque vision of London, and sparring with a “square” BBC reporter played by Bruce Greenwood. This segment, or segments, since the film isn't strictly chronological, is most representative of the overall theme. Bob, now called Jude Quinn, fends off the reporter's attempts to understand him. “You want me to say what you want me to say,” he says, which might be the message for the film—Dylan is whoever the audience wants him to be. Later, he is family-man Bob (Heath Ledger), unsuccessfully married to a French artist (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and born-again Bob (Bale, again), recruited for Jesus by a girlfriend. There are two other Bobs, one appearing only in ersatz interview segments, and one in which Bob appears only in the guise of the drifter he played in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Call him Billy Bob.

Don’t know any of these Bobs? This is probably not the right starting point. There's already the documentaries Don't Look Back and No Direction Home, or Dylan’s own recent memoirs. This is both too fictionalized and too scattershot to serve as biography. Granting that that wasn’t the aim, I still didn’t think the movie spoke to me. There are some good performances, notably Blanchett, but also the young Franklin, who really sings, too, and Gainsbourg, who brings the only true emotional notes to the film. The part where Blanchett’s Bob/Jude asks a coterie of acolytes and assorted hangers on, “Am I the only one with any balls around here” may be a sly nod to the unusual casting, which works surprisingly well. And the songs are very good, of course. Some are the original recordings, while others are faithful cover versions. Some are familiar, others obscure. (A few hits, like “Tangled Up in Blue,” are missing.) But interesting songs and casting may not be enough for the average moviegoer, who may find Hayne’s film, as I did, on the dull side. Obviously a lot of craft has gone into it, but the result is more admirable than enlightening.

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reviewed 12/22/07 to 1/15/08

Lions for Lambs (**1/4)

Soldiers in Afghanistan, a student and a professor in a California college, and a journalist and a politician in DC cohabit Robert Redford’s triptych drama. Redford himself plays the professor, who in the most didactic segment spars (conversationally) with an unmotivated but bright history student. Though the screenplay is by Matthew Carnahan, the professor’s lines sound a lot like what the director himself might be saying to the audience at large. It’s a liberal’s case against cynicism. Meanwhile, reporter Meryl Streep is listening to a hawkish senator (Tom Cruise) explaining a new military strategy for Afghanistan. This is easily the best segment, and a perfect part for the naturally cocky Cruise, who got an Oscar nomination for his similarly slick huckster in Magnolia. When the reporter and her editor clash about whether the new tactic is front-page news or just more of the same seen through rose-colored glasses, you could be forgiven for thinking the topic was really Iraq. The scene wasn’t entirely authentic to me (the editor barely hears the facts before he starts arguing), but does point to the difficulty of telling when refraining from bias crosses over into refraining from all critical judgment.

There’s a third part where we actually see soldiers on the ground. It reminds us of the difference between plotting strategy and executing it, and mildly elaborates the other stories. However, when all is said and done, a lot gets said but nothing much happens. Either this movie, only 88 minutes, could have been even shorter, or it could have used some fleshing out of the characters and weakly linked plots. Like Carnahan’s other 2007 screenplay, The Kingdom, the movie is vast in ambition but modest in achievement.

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reviewed 11/9/07

A Mighty Heart (**1/4)

Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in early 2002 in Karachi, Pakistan. He had traveled there with his wife for a meeting he had set up with a supposed terrorist leader. Michael Winterbottom’s film is based on Mariane Pearl’s memoir, which concentrates on the efforts to learn what happened to him. There are only brief segments before and after this period, so we don’t get to know much about him except that he was a loving husband and was well-respected as a journalist. Most of the scenes are set in the villa where the Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie) stayed with Pakistani colleague Asra Nomani. Depicted is a frenzy of activity as Nomani, Journal colleagues, US security agents, and the Karachi police investigator coalesce to comfort Mariane, assist her efforts to track down the perpetrators, and deal with the worldwide media frenzy.

Altogether, the movie is earnest but uninvolving. Jolie gives a surprisingly solid, understated performance with what sounded to me like a decent French accent. Certainly you get a feel for the confusion that must have prevailed as the improvised team tries to piece together how the phony meeting was set up, interviews potential witnesses, and deals with false leads. But for the most part both the journalist/police team and the potential terrorists barely register as characters. (Archie Panjabi as Nomani makes somewhat of an impression.) People who want to understand more about the events behind the kidnapping should probably look elsewhere, as the real-time perspective means that much remains unclear as the film ends, even whether Daniel Pearl’s Jewish background was a factor in his fate.

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Perfect Stranger (**1/2)

? Tabloid reporter Halle Berry gets the goods on a lying senator by lying and telling him she represents a conservative group, then finds her story quashed by the powers that be. Undeterred by the setback, or journalistic ethics, she goes undercover to find out what a womanizing adman (Bruce Willis) might know about the death of a former lover.
+ The appeal here is quick pacing with a twist ending. Willis and Berry are engaging without causing you to actually care about their characters. Giovanni Ribisi is creepy but oddly compelling in the otherwise clichéd role of the computer-genius helper, who in this case palpably lusts after his partner in investigation.
- It’s easy to have a surprise ending when you don’t need to follow the contours of reality. It’s like if someone made a movie about Donald Trump where you eventually learned that he secretly spent his free time doing charity work for the poor, but hadn’t wanted to toot his own horn. Or one where Britney Spears was secretly a rocket scientist. Okay, maybe it’s not that unrealistic. There are little hints about how everything fits together, but they mostly come from mini-flashbacks rather than the behavior of the characters. This movie has some entertainment value, but it’s forgettable fluff, right down to the title, that made me wonder if Berry, having won an Oscar five years ago, is trying to assure herself of never getting nominated for another.
= **1/2 Does the admittedly surprising ending deserve praise when it seems so gimmicky? Probably, since it’s more than most Hollywood “thrillers” give us these days. But some movies, like Fracture, do that and more.

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reviewed 4/27/07

Zodiac (***1/2)

? In 1969 and into the early 1970s, someone began to kill people in and around San Francisco, beginning with a young couple in the suburb of Vallejo. Working from a screenplay by James Vanderbilt (The Rundown), director David Fincher (Panic Room, Fight Club) tones things down, stylistically, to portray the hunt for the killer, focusing most prominently on a wiry, alcoholic San Francisco Chronicle reporter (Robert Downey Jr.), two city police inspectors (Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards), and a nerdy Chronicle cartoonist, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), who would go on to write the books that inspired this movie.
+ Unlike the dozens of serial-killer movies that have come out over the past couple of decades, Zodiac is more mystery than thriller. We see the murders attributed to Zodiac shot realistically, but without sensationalism, without music. The search for the killer, not the killer himself, is the focus. Vanderbilt’s script shows the messiness of this kind of investigation, the nonlinearity, the way it can be difficult to weave everything together, and the many red herrings. Zodiac has certain particulars, notably the use of a cipher that helped him gain notoriety, but he’s not as neat and habitual as his fictional counterparts. Nor is the investigation, which involves reporters and police in multiple jurisdictions, multiple suspects, other figures like the handwriting expert played by Philip Baker Hall, and the general public. Fincher weaves all of this irregularity together in a cohesive narrative.
- It’s a function of following the facts, but the story loses a little of its edge when the time frame transitions from weeks to months and years. But, to reiterate, this is more of a detective story, even a character study, than a thriller.
= ***1/2 This detailed drama might disappoint people looking for another Se7en, Fincher’s heavily stylized, fictional serial-killer horror film. It presents Graysmith’s take on the case, never officially solved, but may also disappoint people who want a more definitive ending. At the same time, the subject matter may scare off its ideal audience, one that likes complex stories and characters with frayed edges.

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reviewed 3/8/07

Good Night, And Good Luck (**3/4)

The title was the signature line of the primary subject, CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow. Murrow (1908–1965) is a giant in the history of mass media, but one probably at best vaguely familiar to the generations too young to have seen or heard his original radio and television broadcasts, the last of which aired 45 years ago. David Strathairn’s portrayal of the cool, intellectual, chain-smoking Murrow (who died of lung cancer) is brilliant. For George Clooney, who directed, cowrote, and costars as Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly, and whose father was a TV newsman himself, Murrow is a personal hero. His movie focuses on Murrow’s See It Now shows about Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954; McCarthy himself is only seen in historical footage of both Senate hearings and his See It Now appearance that blends in with the black-and-white film. On-screen text tells us that McCarthy had been targeting alleged communist infiltration in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a fact few who see the film won’t already know. On the other hand, a lot of people won’t know about many other figures referenced in the screenplay. You don’t have to know the importance of CBS chairman William Paley in television history to follow the story, for example, but it helps.

The nearly journalistic approach Clooney takes is both the movie’s strength and its weakness. The use of historical footage and dialogue is a good move. The slightly archaic speech patterns portray a time now clearly bygone. The rigorous, methodical way in which Murrow critiques McCarthy is also clearly portrayed. His mixture of passionate advocacy and calm logic was probably not much more common then than now. The scenes with Paley (Frank Langella) are reminders that TV was always a business.

What the movie I think failed to do was make me feel the danger that McCarthy represented. By contrast, I was reminded of Martin Ritt’s 1976 film The Front. The Front, which starred Woody Allen, took on the related topic of Hollywood blacklisting and showed the effects of the “Red scare” on real people. It’s a movie I’d recommend to anyone. Clooney’s film is worthwhile for people with an existing interest in McCarthy or Morrow, but will probably come off as hopelessly dry to a multiplex audience.

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circulated via email 10/27/05 and posted 11/15/13