Stan & Ollie (***)

This is a nice movie about apparently nice men doing nice things. Stan and Ollie, better known as Laurel and Hardy, were the premier Hollywood comedy team of the 1930s and early 1940s. (Abbott and Costello followed them.) Steve Coogan plays Stan Laurel, the British half of the team and writer of most of their material. Hardy, the larger and American half of the team, is played by an unrecognizable John C. Reilly with a giant assist from the makeup department. They and he are quite convincing.

The first part of the movie is set in 1937, which helps establish the backstory—a key contract dispute, Ollie’s courtship of his third wife (Shirley Henderson), the kind of movies they made—but the rest is set in 1953. They’ve agreed to a tour of the British Isles, hoping to persuade a London mogul to finance a Robin Hood spoof Laurel is working on. Slow attendance and lesser accommodations await them, but they re-create the old magic for the fans. I heard Reilly say in an interview that only on this trip did the two men really get to know each other. I saw only a mild suggestion that they had not already known each other well. Perhaps this point comes across more in the book on which the film is based. What is clear is the mutual respect and the familiarity of the relationship.

Resentments from the past, Hardy’s declining health, and the uncertain status of the film project provide controversies, but nothing here is apt to agitate the blood. The arrival of the two wives barely stirs the pot, although their contrasting styles is funny. Still, the knowledge that these men were at the end of their career and past the peak of their popularity, while still carrying on more than 25 years into their partnership, provides a feeling of both warmth and melancholy. The old comedy routines, lovingly excerpted by Coogan and Reilly, probably seem less funny 65 years later, but almost everything about the movie is warm and likeable.

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viewed 2019-01-19 at Ritz 5 and posted 2019-01-21

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

Big Eyes (***1/2)

Tim Burton is the distinctive director of heavily art-directed films like Edward Scissorhands, Alice in Wonderland, and Sweeney Todd, but sometimes (Mars Attacks!, Corpse Bride) his kinetic/frenetic style can overwhelm substance. However, here he’s collaborated again with the writing team (Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski) responsible for Ed Wood, one of his best films. Both of them are about real people whose careers began in the 1950s, though Margaret Keane (Amy Adams), unlike Wood, is one of Burton’s most conventional lead characters. Only her paintings, and her story, were unconventional.

A divorcée struggling to make a living in beatnik-era San Francisco, Margaret met Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), also an aspiring artist, and within a few years her paintings, most featuring children with oversized eyes, were widely seen and bringing in thousands of dollars. Only everyone thought that Walter painted them. His eventual unmasking is both funny and cathartic, making a satisfying ending that happens to also be a true story.


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viewed 1/7/15 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 1/8/15

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 Theory of Everything (***1/4)

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This movie is probably slightly better if you don’t know about Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne). For those who do, the story should seem familiar. Covering roughly 25 years, it can only sketch in broad outline Hawking’s major life events — the diagnosis (ALS), the dissertation (on black holes), the debilitation, and the devilishly difficult bestselling book (A Brief History of Time) that made him a household name. Perhaps less familiar will be the love story that director James Marsh focuses on. The movie is in fact based on Jane Hawking’s book.

It’s a story that truly begins after a typical romantic story ends. The scenes in which Stephen, a doctoral student at Cambridge with some unexplained physical lapses, courts Jane (Felicity Jones) are charming — Stephen’s offbeat posture, sly wit, and (later-useful) economy of expression are already apparent — but a prelude. It’s one thing to pledge fidelity to a sick man and another to become the sole caregiver for an invalid who almost literally cannot lift a finger to help around the house.

In all long-term arrangements, the romantic must make room for the domestic. This is that ordinary story, combined with the extraordinary intelligence of Hawking and the fact that time, Hawking’s special area of interest, is not his friend. His speech increasingly slurring, his movements increasingly limited, he yet defies the survival odds. It’s thus an inspirational story that, nonetheless, suggests at once the horror of such a disease and the magnitude of the gift Jane gave him. Marsh, gently eliding over the decades, doesn’t peer deep into the souls of his characters but movingly portrays the way their relationship changes with time, perhaps not as expected. The actors are very good, with Redmayne utterly convincing in evoking the entire range of Hawking’s physical decline, then using his eyebrows to convey emotion and thought. Those interested in more than the barest outline of Hawking’s ideas will want to turn to his books, or Errol Morris’s documentary version of A Brief History of Time, but this is a fine general-interest drama that avoid the clichés of disease movies.

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viewed 11/5/14 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 11/6/14

Pride (2014) ***1/4

In theory, a good story is a good story, and whether it really happened shouldn’t affect whether it’s a good movie. But if you’d thought first-time screenwriter Stephen Beresford had simply invented a tale about a group of gay-rights activists who, all on their own, decided to raise money for striking rural miners, it’d have seemed rather unlikely and strange. The 1984 National Union of Mineworkers strike is well-remembered in Britain and were a marker of the changes that came to the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  But this Pride, which shares its title with a 2007 film about a Philadelphia swim team, is more likely to remind you of working-class underdog stories like The Full Monty and Billy Elliot than of a more overtly political film.

Beresford and director Matthew Warchus stick to the personal, showing the unlikely path by which a small group of London-based activists wound up in an out-of-the-way town in Wales. At first, it seems like the main character might be young, closeted Joe (George MacKay), but the other characters, especially loud-and-proud Mark (Ben Schnetzer), and spiky-haired Steph, the sole lesbian (Faye Marsay), get about equal attention. Despite plenty of humorous moments, the accent is on the personalities, not fish-out-of-water stereotypes. The men and women of the town exhibit the range of reactions you might expect, from deep hostility to unmitigated gratitude toward their unexpected benefactors. The ubiquitous Bill Nighy stands out as a man who seems deeply uncomfortable with all of this, yet remains unfailingly polite.

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viewed 8/29/14 10 am at Ritz 5; posted 10/9/14

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.

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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.

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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.

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

Saving Mr. Banks (***1/4)

The name Disney conjures up beloved images for children everywhere, and for many of their parents. Yet the terms Disneyfication and Disneyization) are generally pejoratives, used, as  Wikipedia puts it, to “describe the processes of stripping a real place or event of its original character and repackaging it in a sanitized format. References to anything negative are removed, and the facts are watered down with the intent of making the subject more pleasant and easily grasped.” This usage post-dates the death of Walt Disney himself, and so would not have been used by P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson). But surely the words describe what she feared would be done to her Mary Poppins novels, which Disney (Tom Hanks) was keen to adapt into a musical.

As played by Thompson, Travers is the embodiment of the term “no-nonsense,” or possibly rude. In an early scene, Travers tells her London solicitor that she does not like being treated like a “neonate,” and Thompson is among the actresses who can most credibly utter such a phrase. However, the solicitor points out that her royalty checks may not be enough to maintain her comfortable home, and so, against instinct, she agrees to work with Disney, who had pursued the rights to her work for two decades. So anxious is he to make the movie that she is allowed script approval, providing her with a gigantic bargaining chip. In a boon to her future biographer, she insists on recording her sessions with screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and songwriting brothers Robert and Richard Sherman (B.J. Novak, Jason Schwartzman).

Battles over matters great (would the film be a musical?) and small (would the titular Mr. Banks character have a mustache?) provide the drama, and some comedy. For the pathos, interspersed with the 1961 Hollywood sequences are several sequences set in 1906–1907 Australia, with Colin Farrell as the doting father of the future author. Left out is virtually everything in between. I’m not crazy about facile links between adult behavior and indelible childhood circumstances. The script seems to imply that adult Mrs. Travers can’t abide the sight of pears simply because she associates them with an unpleasant memory over 50 years earlier, which seems false to me, but to its credit it’s usually less heavy-handed. Still, the most entertaining sequences are the ones that pit the proper Mrs. Travers (a running thread is the her annoyance at being called “Pamela”) against Disney, the writers, her gregarious driver (Paul Giamatti), and the occasional airline employee.

It’s perhaps ironic that what Travers feared would happen to her greatest character would happen to her as well. In reality, though indeed a spinster, she was a woman of many enthusiasms beyond tea, the only one she appears to admit to in this film. What art owes to history is another debate, and knowing that Travers adopted a twin (refusing to take his brother), a fact obliquely referenced in the film, does not alter its quality one way or the other. However, a film about a curmudgeon who finally succumbs to the charms of a cartoon mouse is a different film than one about a complicated woman who so rues her Hollywood experience that she never allows a sequel. Saving Mr. Banks is the first kind of film, but makes enough nods to being the second type that it does not seem sickly sweet. To paraphrase a song made famous by the film, it merely provides a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

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viewed 12/24/13 7:30 pm at Roxy; posted 12/26/13

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.

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

Kill Your Darlings (***)

Daniel Radcliffe has already played a number of non-Harry Potter roles, and his role as beat poet Allen Ginsberg should further assure that he won’t be typecast. I quickly forgot about wizards as I watched him essay the role of the Jewish, Paterson, New Jersey-reared Ginsberg, off to Columbia University to discover his literary talents and his rebellious side. There, during the war years, he meets Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), an impetus for both the creative and destructive impulses. And, possibly, a murderer. The killing in question may be known to those who know about Ginsberg (and, if you don’t, I suspect you won’t be seeking out this film) and is revealed at the start of the film, though not the victim, or the reason.

The first half of the film is jazzy, like beat poetry. In one scene, Carr and Ginsberg seem to magically stop time in a club. Director John Krokidas employs a lot of montage scenes to suggest the magical haze that enveloped the two young men. In some scenes, William Burroughs (Ben Foster) appears, weird and druggy, years before his own infamous involvement in a killing. Later, they hang out with a new friend named Jack who’s at Columbia on a football scholarship. This of course turns out to be Jack Kerouac, who’s been at sea but not, as yet, on the road. They pull pranks. They invent a new artistic movement (called “new vision” the term “beat” yet to be coined) before producing any significant work. Young Allen learns of the older man (Michael C. Hall) who has been pursuing Carr, and discovers his own sexuality. Late in the film, Ginsberg calls Carr a “phony,” but that was my own impression immediately. So I found him an annoying, pretentious character—no fault of DeHaan—and was happy when the film reached the more heavily plotted stage in which there is betrayal, heartbreak, and the killing. Allen has to decide whether to help his friend, who’s been arrested.

This well-acted drama is for those curious about the birth of a movement, or for those who like to be reminded that the men (women being bit players in this movie) who create the future were once unformed young persons playing at being adults.

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viewed 11/13/13 7:25 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 11/13/13 and revised 11/14/13

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.

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

Diana (***1/4)

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Captain Phillips (***1/2)

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

Rush (***1/2)

This Ron Howard-directed auto-racing drama shares its title with a movie about drug use, and the meaning is parallel. Racing a car at 170 mph, trying to maneuver past other cars, provides (I suppose) a similar high, a similar level of danger, with an added element of fear. In Cinderella Man, Howard elevated a conventional sports story by infusing the film with a sense of time (the Depression) and place. In this case, the settings are multiple and interchangeable, Formula One race tracks on four continents, so competition is the glue that holds the film together. British James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Austrian Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) began their careers around the same time (the early 1970s) and shared posh backgrounds that they had rebelled against. Hunt was an impulsive playboy, whereas Lauda was a shrewdly calculating loner whose appearance earned him the nickname “rat.” But they shared an ambition that made them natural rivals.

In reality, the two were friendly off the track and roomed together at one point. Here, their relationship ranges between antipathy and grudging admiration. Nonetheless, Howard uses a mutual antagonism effectively to bring out these divergent personalities. Hemsworth’s Hunt seems to be less complicated; if you imagine “English playboy race-car driver/badboy” you can conjure up most of the character. The Austrian is more difficult. Peter Morgan’s screenplay uses narration by the Lauda character as a framing device, suggesting a future in which Lauda has gained perspective, but I’m not sure what it is. (Morgan previously collaborated with Howard on Frost/Nixon, a film that artfully depicted a different kind of competition between a playboy and a dour antagonist.) Alexandra Maria Lara plays Lauda’s first wife; we can tell more about what she feels for him than the reverse. None of that is Brühl’s fault, though. He’s excellent, completely different than in the German-language roles in which I’ve seen him before. And Morgan’s dialogue is smart.

The movie concentrates most on the 1976 F1 season, which contained enough drama that here is where one might suspect some screenwriting embellishment. But in this area it turns out to be quite accurate. The racing scenes do a great job of providing a sense of danger —curiously, with few if any shots from the driver’s point of view — and less of a job of emphasizing the nature of the skills of the performers. Unlike in boxing, it’s hard to tell the competitors apart. But if Rush is not quite as moving a sports film as Cinderella Man, that’s no disgrace. Even if you don’t see the appeal of auto racing as a sport, and I don’t, this is a winner.

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viewed 9/19/13 7:30 at Ritz 5; posted 9/26/13

       

Jobs (***)

The late Steve Jobs was a classic rags-to-riches success story, an avatar of the tech revolution, and a peculiar, particular individual. This helped make Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography a fascinating read and a runaway bestseller, and it makes him a good film character. This biopic begins with a graying Jobs (Ashton Kutcher) introducing the product, the iPod, that assured that Apple Computer would remain an important company in the new century. However, the rest of the film is set earlier, with Jobs as the scrappy underdog. Director Joshua Michael Stern skips over his childhood and how Jobs’s father’s inspired his interest in technology (and the epiphany he had at age 12 when he realized he was smarter than his old man), or how he met Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. Instead, it begins in 1974. The 1960s were over, but Jobs turned on, tuned in (to Dylan, especially), and dropped out of Reed College while continuing to audit courses he liked, such as one in typography that helped inspired his love of good design.

In nearly every respect, Jobs is a biopic that Jobs would find quite flattering. Even his tantrums seem in service of creating a better product, and ditto his early attempts to deny the paternity of his out-of-wedlock daughter. You can almost hear him saying How can I change the future of personal computing if I have to deal with a kid? And you’ll sort of agree. Likewise, it’s impossible to see Jobs’s foes at Apple — primarily Board Chairman Arthur Rock (J. K. Simmons) and 1980s CEO John Scully (Mathew Modine) — as anything but folks who just don’t get it. Jobs’s later success makes it difficult not to agree with that view, but Isaacson suggests that Jobs’s immaturity had some role in his eventual fallout with the board and makes it at least possible to question his choices. The financial success of Microsoft makes it clear that, as a business model, there was another path rather than the high-control, perfectionist model Jobs espoused. However, the film does bring across that financial success, while important, was not what drove him.

As a longtime Mac user, I may be biased, but despite the somewhat two-dimensional portrait of its subject, the Apple story is a good story. (Other aspects of Job’s life, like his role in starting Pixar Animation Studios, are not mentioned, or de-emphasized.) The film has the chronology about right, Kutcher is made to look uncannily like Jobs and, though I have not seen Jobs on film that much, he seemed to have his mannerisms down pat. (Josh Gad seemed well case as Wozniak.) Kutcher has a cockiness about him that works in the part. Aaron Sorkin is reportedly working on a film adaptation of Isaacson’s book, and there’s an obvious parallel between the forceful personalities of Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, subject of the Sorkin-penned The Social Network. I expect Sorkin’s version of the story to better highlight Job’s difficult side, or present his story with more complexity. I expect it to have quicker pacing and more snappy dialogue; this one’s most memorable line for me came when Jobs threatens Bill Gates on the phone after learning that Microsoft planned to release an operating system — Windows — that imitated many features of the Mac interface. Like the products Jobs created, Jobs has most of the rough edges smoothed out, but is handsome to look at.

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viewed 8/14/13 at AMC Cherry Hill [PFS screening] and posted 8/17/13

Fruitvale Station (***1/4)

I’m never sure whether knowing that a story in a movie is true should change my evaluation of it. And it is true that Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan) was shot by a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer on New Year’s Day, 2009. That scene begins the movie, but this isn’t a docudrama; it summarizes the aftermath of the shooting (trial, riots, protests) in an on-screen crawl at the end. Most of the story takes place in the preceding 24 hours and tells not of a killing, but of a 22-year-old Oakland man in transition. He is a loving father to a four-year-old girl, whose mother (Melonie Diaz) he has thoughts of marrying, and a loving son to his mother (Octavia Spencer), whom he thoughtfully texts on her birthday. But he’s also cheated on her and sold drugs. The new year will be a chance to make a start, but it is chance that puts him in harm’s way.

A movie about a character trying to change can seem trite if the character succeeds. The movie can make it seem too easy. An unhappy ending can seem fatalistic. If the ending here were fiction, it might seem melodramatic. Race and class are an obvious subtext to the killing, and certainly were central to how it was perceived, but the movie doesn’t make any direct statement about that. Instead, it’s structured in the way a mystery might be. What saves the ending from seeming like too much is not that it is true, but the way the events in the movie lead to Grant’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the solid characterization by the writer-director, Ryan Coogler, making his feature debut.

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viewed 9/4 7:20 pm at Ritz Bourse

Augustine (**3/4)

Perhaps a companion piece to A Dangerous Method, the 2011 drama about Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, this focuses on Jean-Martin Charcot (Vincent Lindon), the French neurologist who was a mentor to Freud. But that was later on; this movie depicts his earlier work with female “hysterics.” Actually, it almost exclusively focuses on his work with one female patient. Augustine (Soko), a 19-year-old maid, is taken to Charcot’s clinic at the start of the film and quickly becomes a kind of star patient, suffering as she does from dramatic seizures that can be reproduced under hypnosis, as well as minor paralyses. the doctor pokes her, prods her, and uses her as the main attraction in his lectures.

The movie, a first feature by its writer-director, Alice Winocour, and Lindon do a good job portraying Charcot as an exemplar of the imperious doctor as authority figure a century before anyone spoke of “patient-centered” care. It does a decent job portraying his patient, who develops a symbiotic relationship with her doctor in which he is savior, denier, father figure, and perhaps more. It does hardly any job at all placing Charcot into the patheon of medical pioneers, not even bothering with the usual typed epilogue typically found at the end of biographical movies. Although making it clear that some thought Charcot to be a quack, on the strength of the movie it’s hard to tell whether he’s a good scientist, and impossible to tell whether he helps his patients. Besides Augustine, the others are portrayed only briefly, mostly in interview segments meant to illuminate the variety of mysterious ailments that fell under the “hysteria” rubric. The only other significant character in the movie is Charcot’s wife (and perhaps his pet monkey).

This movie generally held my interest, but Charcot was too aloof a character (and Augustine not complex enough) to have pulled me in emotionally, and the lack of a broader historical perspective on this medical pioneer, or on the hysteria phenomenon of the 1800s, was frustrating.

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viewed 6/27/13 7:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 6/27/13