Movie Of The Day: CLOUD ATLAS (2012).

 

If you didn’t see this movie on the big screen, you missed out.  If you missed it entirely, you fucked up.  And if you were one of those who called it “the worst movie of the year” (whoever Mary Pols at Time magazine is; stupid stupid Peter Travers) – God help you.  When this movie comes to be seen as a lost classic in a few years, you may wish you weren’t so nasty.

I won’t be gloating though.  I choose the avenue of love.  This movie encouraged me to be that way.  This movie is about a lot of things I may or may not believe in – fate, true love, reincarnation of sorts – and it made me believe – strongly – in them all.  That’s the power of love, son.  That’s the power of cinema.  And I was skeptical too.  I’ve always liked the Wachowskis but I’m not as high on THE MATRIX as so many are (although, weirdly, I liked the sequels better than most), and I haven’t seen a Tom Tykwer move that really resonated with me since RUN LOLA RUN.  Most of all, without having read David Mitchell’s original novel it was hard to tell in advance what the hell this movie was going to be about.  Answer:  It’s kinda about everything.

It’s a 19^th-century nautical drama involving slavery and other human cruelties.

It’s a period piece about the creation of classical music and an impossible romance.

It’s a 1970s political thriller about an intrepid reporter (co-starring THE THING‘s Keith David as SHAFT‘s Shaft!).

It’s a whimsical farce about an attempted escape from a nursing home.

It’s a science-fiction anime action-movie love-story.

It’s a post-apocalyptic future-tropical tribal-warfare-slash-horror-movie that turns into a campfire fable.

It’s like no other movie I’ve ever seen before, which for the record is exactly why I go to the movies:  To see things I haven’t seen before.  The performances are surprising and exhilarating, the score is clever and moving, the cinematography is colorful and absorbing, the scope is bold and ambitious.  Does it matter too much that some of the storylines are more affecting than others?  You think I care about anybody’s stupid little quibbles over some of the makeup effects?  This is a movie that shoots for the moon and more than once hits the stars.  This movie didn’t just surprise me with what it is – it surprised me about ME.  It’s sad that more people haven’t embraced it yet, but believe me, I’m happier loving this movie than you are disregarding or ignoring it.  Feel free to come over to this side anytime!

I wrote this for Daily Grindhouse and reposted it here because CLOUD ATLAS is out on DVD & Blu-Ray today. Now’s your chance to remedy the mistakes of the past…

@jonnyabomb

From The Archives: BROTHERS (2009).

BROTHERS is a movie that has kind of slipped through the cracks.  It showed up towards the end of 2009, but not in enough time for me to see it for my Best-Of list.  It’s been nominated for some awards already, but not enough to make people feel like they ought to go out and see it.  It’s got some actors who people like, but it looks like a downer.  It doesn’t look like fun.

Well yeah, it isn’t much fun.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t any good.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t even a little but important.  It sure does have the pedigree:  Jim Sheridan, the Irish director who showed his skill at creating detailed, likable characters in 2002’s IN AMERICA, directed from a script by David Benioff, the big-name Hollywood screenwriter who showed a similar skill in his script for 25^th HOUR. The trio of lead characters, played by Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, and the astounding-in-this-movie Tobey Maguire, are convincing and heartbreaking.  They’re aided by ace supporting performances by reliable actors such as Sam Shepard and Clifton Collins Jr., and by two of the best performances I’ve seen from little children since, well, IN AMERICA.  The two little girls who play Maguire’s daughters are deeply affecting. Also due for mention is Frederick Elmes, the hall of fame cinematographer who has worked with David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee, and Charlie Kaufman, who shot the movie with understatement and grace.  The movie was shot largely in New Mexico, and it shows.  This doesn’t look like L.A.  This looks like elsewhere in America, the parts of America where you find the people who actually have to fight our wars for us.

That’s what this movie did for me, by the way.  It made me think about those people, who need to be thought about.  Whatever else minor flaws keep it from being considered a quote-unquote great film, BROTHERS is expert at detailing the realities of post-traumatic stress disorder. I left BROTHERS crushed and thoroughly sad – this movie is about something that is really happening right now to people our age and younger, who are sent overseas to kill and to take bullets and to watch their fellows die, only to return home without any kind of adequate psychological counseling.

BROTHERS is a wartime movie, and that’s the real reason for its lack of box-office and cultural heat.  People just aren’t interested in seeing this kind of story at the movies.  That’s starting to bother me.  There’s a massive disconnect between the America whose sons and daughters are sent overseas to fight and die, and the other America, which I fully admit to being a part of, whose lives are affected more by the recession or any number of concerns other than the war in the Middle East.  Unless we personally know someone in the military, unless we’re the type of person who follows and cares about the news, some of us are not forced to think much about the fact that we are actually at war.  We might be unemployed and stressed about that, but we don’t have to worry about the physical safety of our friends and family, or just as much at-risk, the psychological toll of their experiences.

So instead we go to see a movie like AVATAR for a fourth or fifth time, which surely isn’t wrong, but then again, if we have that kind of free time, maybe it is somewhat wrong to ignore a movie that might make us think about something that matters.  (I’m only singling AVATAR out here because it’s become the most popular movie of all time as all of this other stuff is happening in the world.)  As I have written already elsewhere, AVATAR is fun but meaningless; it is the ultimate movie of the moment expressly because it is about escaping reality – both in the way that Jake Sully escapes his wheelchair to become a nine-foot-tall forest god, and in the way that literally the act of watching the movie in those 3-D glasses is an escape.  It’s a video game movie.  It’s a luxury.  The very fact that I can post these thoughts on the internet, and any number of AVATAR fans are free to potentially comment on the many reasons why I’m wrong, is a luxury.  We’re very lucky to be able to sit at our computers and argue over and read about escapist movies.  But just recognize that it’s a distraction, ultimately meaningless comparatively.  AVATAR isn’t about anything but coolness.  There’s a place for that, to be sure, especially for those people who actually need a little escape.  But it’s not the only movie out there.  That’s all I’m saying.

BROTHERS forced me to think about something other than my own life.  I haven’t been exactly the same since I saw it.  It somehow changed my thinking, just the tiniest bit. If that isn’t an important movie, I don’t know what is.

You can still see BROTHERS theatrically in many cities, I think.  If you have the time, give it a chance.  Don’t let me make it sound like homework – it’s not in the least bit boring.  When I call BROTHERS a good movie, that doesn’t mean “good for you” – it really means “good movie.”

 

From January 18, 2010.

 

@jonnyabomb

 

Screenings in NYC: THE LEOPARD (1963).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my money, the most beautiful woman ever to appear in movies is Claudia Cardinale.  No offense, Raquel.  It was a photo finish.

 

There are other reasons to see THE LEOPARD, the 1963 Italian historical epic directed by Luchino Visconti.  Big, important reasons, in fact.  But you’d better believe that Claudia Cardinale is the only thing I paid much of any attention to, the first time I saw the movie as a scrawny 19-year-old undergraduate.

 

In The Leopard, Cardinale plays Angelica, the fiancée of the nephew of Burt Lancaster’s lead character, Don Fabrizio, an aging Sicilian patriarch who is watching older dynasties fade and younger generations arrive with increasing arrogance and decreasing couth.  Cardinale’s character is the incarnation of that generation gap, and the focus of some scorn by the nobles in the movie.

 

Serious students of the mechanics of cinema will appreciate the craft of Visconti’s direction of THE LEOPARD – the sweeping cinematography, the ornate production design, the insanely ornate costumes.  There is a legendary central ballroom sequence, elaborately choreographed and clocking in at forty-five minutes, that in my own weird way I might compare to the gunfights in HEAT.  Maybe it’s the length. 

 

At 205 minutes in its full version (in other words: nearly three-and-a-half hours), THE LEOPARD a commitment.  Not to belabor a crude point, but it’s probably a commitment worth making for serious students of female beauty:  With only a small amount creepiness, I have to admit that, with all of the impeccable craft and historical weight of THE LEOPARD, the basic appeal of the movie hasn’t changed much for me, several years down the road.  To get a look at Claudia Cardinale on the big screen in this particular movie, 25 when this movie was made and at the peak of natural human attractiveness, is reason enough to make the trip to the theater any time it plays on one of its semi-regular revivals. 

 

For the record:  Ladies shouldn’t feel left out, either – the man-pretty Alain Delon, the Brad Pitt of his day, plays Tancredi, Cardinale’s suitor.

 

 

 

THE LEOPARD is playing tonight at 7pm at the Rubin Museum Of Art as part of their Cabaret Cinema series, in which guests present international films that speak to them.  Tony-Award-winning costume designer William Ivey Long introduces tonight’s show.  If you miss the screening, the Criterion Collection recently released an incredible Blu-Ray edition.

And for more from someone who will never win an award for his wardrobe, follow me on Twitter:  @jonnyabomb

What I Watched 7-15-2012: THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010).

 

Rewatched The Social Network today because I recently gave the new HBO show The Newsroom a shot, and wanted to remind myself that Aaron Sorkin is actually as good as people say, and not just the best bad writer in America.  (“MacKenzie McHale?”)  Maybe he needs David Fincher to shoot all his scripts.  Fincher would never allow so many ten-minute speech-heavy scenes.  Fincher knows how to edit some goddamn moving pictures.  Rarely is this so thrillingly apparent than in The Social Network.  By now this is the third or fourth time I’ve seen it.  Surprisingly, I still pretty much agree with everything I wrote on the subject, back in October of 2010.  In fact, I think it’s one of my better pieces.  See what you think.  Please do comment if you’re so inclined.

 

________________________________________

 

From the time The Social Network was announced as a film straight through until the moment I finished watching it for the first time, I couldn’t help thinking of my friend Tom from Myspace. 

 

 

Well, we used to be friends.  We’re not friends anymore.  I haven’t been to his site in months.  Neither have most people I know.  We’re all on Facebook now.  The Social Network is an entire movie about Facebook.  It briefly name-checks Myspace, and its even more prehistoric predecessor, Friendster, but that’s all the credit Tom gets. 

 

I wonder how he feels about that.  A few years ago he was at the top of the world.  He was friends with celebrities and rock stars.  He even got to cameo in Funny People with Adam Sandler!  Tom managed to get into the movies there for a second, but no one bothered to make movies about him.  Poor Tom.  How he must hate that little punk who started Facebook.  He’s apparently not the only one.

 

The Social Network is told in an interesting way:  It begins with Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) as an undergraduate at Harvard, creating the nascent website initially as a revenge move against the girl who dumped him (played by Rooney Mara).  Then the narrative fractures, fast-forwarding to two concurrent legal proceedings:  Zuckerberg getting sued by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer), who claim that he stole the idea of Facebook from them, and also by his former best friend, Eduardo Saverin (played by Andrew Garfield), who claims that Zuckerberg shut him out of what started as a joint venture.

 

Back in real life, some of the specific details of this cinematic account have been called into question.  Writer Aaron Sorkin has been accused of inventing details for dramatic effect, and director David Fincher has been accused of emphasizing certain aspects over others, or even more incorrectly (and briefly) accused of misogyny, just because this happens to be a story that features mostly male characters.  This is the occupational hazard that filmmakers face when making a movie “based on a true story,” particularly one where all of the principal figures are still alive and in full command of their own subjective memories.  At the moment of writing this, my own personal opinion is Who cares?  As long as the movie is as good as this one, the details are less important than a story well told.  Personally, I’d be proud to see a movie this good having been made using my life as inspiration, even if I were cast in a less than adoring light.   I honestly don’t think that anyone comes out of this movie looking any worse than they already present themselves publicly, except arguably the Facebook website itself.  But I’ll get to that in a moment.

 

In praising The Social Network, I’m late to the party.  There’s not much left to say that hasn’t been said in more florid prose by more prominent writers.  I will remind my longtime readers (are there any?) that I was initially measured in my faith in the possibilities of this project.  I wasn’t sure that it was the most cinema-friendly material, and I have a major disdain for co-star Justin Timberlake (as much as it is possible to have disdain for a relatively innocuous pop singer who I’ve never met.)  But I trusted in the talents of David Fincher, who is one of my favorite directors, and the reward for that trust was an unusual, compelling, and fascinating movie that directly addresses a major element of modern cultural psychology.

 

Fincher brings a dark, dingy, even ominous palette to material that any other director would surely shoot flatly and brightly.  In the opening scene, which takes place in a college bar, this directorial choice feels naturalistic – it looks more like the inside of a bar than comparable scenes in any other movie I can remember.  But then, when Zuckerberg steps outside of the bar, bunches up his GAP sweatshirt, and storms all the way across campus to his dorm, the moody (and brilliant) score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross kicks in and the look of the movie doesn’t let up, and it becomes clear that this is a college movie that doesn’t look or sound like any college movie ever made.  Fincher is working again here with Jeff Cronenweth, his cinematographer from Fight Club, and together they bring the visual subversion and darkness from that earlier work to a seemingly unlikely match of story. 

 

Aaron Sorkin is not typically a writer whose work I follow – he’s obviously an excellent writer but his characters tend to be too eloquent and hyper-articulate, and I’m an Eastwood man.  I believe that you can say more with less.  Here, however, the dichotomy between Sorkin’s verbose scripting and Fincher’s typical approach somehow yields brilliant results.  It’s like scallops wrapped in bacon at a steakhouse.  It sounds like an ill fit, but just take a taste. 

 

 

Think of the scene where Eduardo Saverin’s unbalanced but eye-catching girlfriend (played by Brenda Song) sets a fire in his room – it’s the kind of broad comedy you might typically expect in a Sorkin production, with screwball dialogue firing in all directions, but Fincher shoots it like a Japanese horror movie.  He also gets the most out of the eerie Aryanness of the Winklevoss twins, who are actually surprisingly likable in the movie, but then again think back to that scene where they’re competing in a crew race in England.  Think of the crazed, irregular speed at which Fincher shoots it, and of course, think of the hyperactive take on Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King on Reznor and Ross’s musical accompaniment.  Stanley Kubrick would have approved.

 

The cast is uniformly excellent.  Jesse Eisenberg, of course, is receiving all of the complimentary ink he deserves as the nerd-savant entrepreneur who really did change the way people interact right now.  I’ve seen Eisenberg in a bunch of movies both good and bad – Rodger Dodger, The Village, Cursed, Adventureland, Zombieland – and he’s been good in all of them.  For The Social Network, he crinkles up his eyes and brings something new – instead of an emotional openness, there’s an inscrutability . He seems like an alien in the body of a college student, trying (and failing) to figure human beings out.

 

Yet I’m not seeing nearly enough praise going the way of Rashida Jones, in the fictionalized role of an assistant to Zuckerberg’s legal counsel.  As she does in every single guy-comedy she’s been cast in over the last few years (and there have been many of them), she brings a calm, cool, cutting, sarcastic groundedness to any room full of badly-behaving dudes.  I’ve sung the praises of this lovely lady before (find some here and here and also here), but it’s not just about me and my type:  In The Social Network, Rashida Jones plays the only real adult – I don’t count all the lawyers and such – and her character brings a necessary and sobering perspective (while simultaneously demolishing those claims of the movie’s misogyny alluded to earlier), particularly at the movie’s end, where her unheeded parting advice to Zuckerberg feeds directly into that haunting final scene.

 

Andrew Garfield has been cast as the next Spider-Man, and it’s hard not to watch The Social Network through that prism.  His work here does bode well for that movie, safe to say.  He plays the loyal and supportive best friend who is iced out and betrayed, and he’s never less than likable throughout.  He really is the human heart of the movie, since Eisenberg’s character is by nature unable to provide that.  And there’s also Rooney Mara, as the girl who got away (or ran screaming) – she only has a couple scenes, but like Garfield, she brings a recognizable relatability to her role that the movie and the main character need.  (She’ll be working with Fincher again on his upcoming adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – on the basis of this evidence, it’s good casting, although no offense, I’ll always prefer her sister.)  

 

By contrast, Armie Hammer’s double-character is set up narratively as the movie’s antagonist, the stereotypical blond jock from the college movie.  Hammer does bring a creepy dual-Spader WASPishness to the role, but also has the kind of charisma that makes you see his characters’ point of view.  Max Minghella is also good as Divya Narendra, the cohort of the Winklevoss twins.  I would’ve sworn he was Indian.  Is that wrong to admit?  I have more unpopular opinions than that, such as:

 

It’s true, I can’t stand Justin Timberlake.  (In The Social Network, the ‘entertainer’ plays Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster and fast-talking opportunist who takes Zuckerberg under his shady wing.)  The main reason for that dislike is that we’re closing in on two decades where he’s been in the public eye, and I have yet to see a genuine human emotion from the guy.  To me, he represents callow and shallow over the past decade and in the year 2010.  You can call it masculine jealousy, but I’m creeped out by seeing sex-symbol status awarded to a guy whose main career inspiration has always been Michael Jackson.  He’s all “entertainer,” and that doesn’t work for me if you don’t have the music like Michael Jackson did.  It’s certainly a question of personal taste, but I don’t agree that his attempts at music (and more recently, at comedy) are remotely as good or as interesting or as knowing as his recent press would argue.  I’d still like to be proven wrong, but it hasn’t happened yet. 

 

All of that being said, however:  He’s terrific in The Social Network, and for all of the above reasons.  He’s cast perfectly for the character he’s playing, and while that may sound like a back-handed compliment, he delivers the needed effort and effect.  The way Timberlake works in the movie is the way he works in life:  Eisenberg’s character is taken in by his flash and dazzle and energy and confidence, and Garfield’s character sees right through it all and doesn’t trust it for a minute.  (Sound like someone we know?)  Late in the movie, when Timberlake is called upon to deliver a broken, emotional performance, the strain shows – but just as it should, since his character up until then was used to living without consequence and getting out of the trouble he kept finding.  When it finally catches up with him, he’s struggling to adjust.  Timberlake plays it perfectly.  My only concern is that producers, seeing how good he is in The Social Network, will decide that Justin Timberlake can carry a movie on his own.  Worse, they will mistakenly assume that he can carry an action movie.  (Can you imagine?)  But that’s an issue for the future.  In the present, Justin Timberlake is just another effective element in a fairly flawless film.

 

The last question that The Social Network raises is, “Where does it leave us with Facebook?” 

 

For one thing, I wonder how people who aren’t on Facebook will look at this movie.  Do they get it?  Do they understand why that final image is so haunting and so true?  The Social Network has everything to do with the way that, for all of its virtues, the internet has fractured and even obstructed real-life social interaction – we connect with each other even as we isolate – and Facebook is the ultimate example of that shift.  For me, Facebook is a means to an end.  It will help me bring the review you’re reading to more people than might otherwise have seen it.  On a personal level, I have been able to reconnect (or at least, to trade emails) with many people who I have known and missed over the years, and I’m thankful for that.  But that’s me emphasizing the upside.  As we all know, there’s just as much empty noise on Facebook as legitimate interaction.  Some of the same less-positive aspects of our social lives are just as present on Facebook – we’ve just moved them from the streets to the internet.  (That’s the name of my next rap album, by the way.) 

 

Is Facebook bringing us closer together, or driving us apart in some ways?  Does the fact that Facebook was invented by a young man who may or may not have the ability to maintain healthy, positive friendships in his own life bring into question the idea that his invention has anything to teach us about friendships?  Is there truth in Facebook?  Forget the truth in the circumstances of its invention – I’m talking about whether or not using Facebook can help us get closer to truth . Has Facebook really become part of our lives, or does it exist strangely separate from them?  And most importantly:  Is Tom from Myspace on Facebook?  And if he is, would he be “friends” with Mark Zuckerberg?  Or me?  (I’m only half kidding, by the way.)  These are some of the questions that The Social Network invites us to ask, and these questions are the reason why it is the movie of the moment.

 

Find me on Twitter: @jonnyabomb

Screening in NYC: MILK (2008).

 

Gus Van Sant’s Milk is screening at MoMA as part of their 10th Anniversary Salute to Focus Features.  Milk could arguably be called Van Sant’s Malcolm X, a historical drama of historical importance and a keystone work in the filmography of a fiercely original and occasionally frustrating filmmaker.  This is what I wrote about Milk in January 2009.  You can take out the reference to Prop 8 in California and swap in a reference to North Carolina’s decision to ban same-sex marriage. 

In several ways, Milk might just be the best movie of 2008.  For sure, there isn’t an award for which it’s so far collected nominations and wins that it hasn’t absolutely deserved.

Let’s start with Sean Penn:  I am a huge admirer of the man’s work, on-screen and off-screen, but seriously now – I don’t think he’s had a role in which he’s given a non-malevolent smile in decades.

In Milk, he beams.

You really do forget you’re watching Sean Penn, broody acting genius, and are persuaded that you are seeing an entirely different persona.  Penn makes us care about Harvey Milk, both in his political and his personal lives.  The entire ensemble, mostly male, mostly playing gay, is of a piece with Penn’s sympathetic portrayal.  James Franco, Diego Luna, Emile Hirsch, the great Victor Garber, and particularly Josh Brolin, as Milk’s probably-closeted, most ferocious nemesis, Dan White, all give canny and bold performances, the strongest possible support to Penn’s textured embodiment of a character very different than his own public persona.

So now Milk performs the remarkable achievements of convincing its audience of Harvey Milk’s positive legacy by helping us understand him as a person; of depicting the senseless tragedy of his assassination – without in any way making a simple monster out of the pathetic, confused Dan White; and in addition to those achievements, inspires one to march right out of the theater and join the continuing struggle against discrimination and hate of all kinds.

No one who sees Milk, other than a bigot who needs to work harder to change, will leave it wanting anything other than seeing that contemptible Proposition 8 in California repealed.  I don’t like to bring up politics in this space if I can help it, but at this point, it’s a civil rights issue.  Anyone can feel free to disagree on that, but if they manage to get into it with me, they ought to be prepared to have their argument entirely decimated.  There is no good reason why gay people should not have the same rights as any other group in America – they love and lose and live and die just the same as the rest of us do – and this movie has the power to show why.

Find me on Twitter: @jonnyabomb

 

 

 

From The Archives: GRAN TORINO (2008).

Take my words with as big a helping of salt as you choose, since I have got to be the biggest Clint Eastwood fan this side of forty.  I have found something worth remembering and studying within every entry of his directorial output, even in the ones I don’t happen to prefer, and if the man himself actually appears in said entry, so much the better.  I do believe that Gran Torino has something important to say, and – forget what you may have read – it’s not about race.  That issue factors in here, of course, but not as much as most of the  reviews seem to think.  It’s not Clint’s way to hit you over the head with ideas about race.  Instead, in Gran Torino he’s talking about America, and the national character upon which America was built, and how we later generations were given that America and how we’re beginning to forget it.  It’s about the pussification of America, and what to do about it.

The reviews I’ve seen that use the word “racist” in conjunction with Gran Torino are simply stupid.  Clint has never once made a movie endorsing racist views –  on the contrary, in fact – and he isn’t about to start now.  He’s playing a character here; don’t ever confuse the story with the storyteller.  His character, Walt Kowalski, says plenty of racist things, but even he isn’t necessarily racist.  Pussies put so much value on words that they forget that, more than anything, men are defined by their actions.  Look at the actions, not the words.  When Walt sees how his young Hmong neighbor Sue handles herself bravely in an intimidating situation, he immediately warms to her.  When he sees her brother Thao help a lady with her spilt groceries after a couple other little shits laugh her off, Walt starts to see a kid worth knowing, worth toughening, worth ultimately saving.

Race in America has become THAT complicated, and some people are nearly that complicated:  Walt hates everybody equally, his use of racist epithets are primarily a method of distinction, not judgment.  He calls Asians “zipperheads” not necessarily because he hates all Asians – he calls them “zipperheads” simply because that’s what he has always called them.  Walt is so used to disappointment, from his chubby yuppie sons and their little-shit kids, from the pussy-ass gangstas walking his streets, from the young college-boy pussies who think they have all the answers, that at this point he hates everyone he meets on sight.  When people prove his hate to be justified, he growls.  When people prove their worth, he warms to them, even if he stubbornly refuses to drop the lingo.

Gran Torino is a vintage Malpaso production, with all the class and smarts that tag has always guaranteed.  Joel Cox edits with a pleasing rhythm, cinematographer Tom Stern provides an appropriately washed-out (and later, stark) palette, Clint’s son Kyle (with Michael Stevens) provide the neat score, and the script credited to Nick Shenck works just right, with an ending that even longtime Clint fans won’t see coming.  I really hope that Clint isn’t done with acting, and if he isn’t, I hope he directs himself again – he knows how to use Clint Eastwood as an actor.  He understands the history and audience expectations that come with a Clint Eastwood film, and he knows how to subvert, parody, and/or work alongside all of that.  I haven’t seen a Clint character spit this much since The Outlaw Josey Wales, and I would guess that the reference is very much intentional.  Love it.

Find me on Twitter:  @jonnyabomb

From The Archives: CHILDREN OF MEN (2006).

#9.  Children Of Men (2006)

The year 2027. Women can no longer have babies. The youngest person in the world has just been shot down at the age of 18. The future is terrifyingly finite. That’s where Children of Men begins.

In a profound and extremely relatable (to me, anyway) performance, Clive Owen plays a man who ambles through life in a scotch-soaked haze, until his ex, now a political revolutionary — played harshly yet heartbreakingly by Julianne Moore — shows up alongside the first pregnant woman anyone has seen in years. It eventually falls to Clive to see this young lady through to safety.

If we use pure cinematic artistry as our criteria for great films, this movie is the total package. It’s amazing, it’s the kind of movie that makes me want to invent adjectives just so I can use them here. My eyes tend to gloss over most science fiction – outside of the robots and aliens, I can rarely relate to it on an emotional level.  Ironically, most science fiction leaves out the science, and keeps recognizable human beings out of the fiction.

Here is one of those fantastic exceptions to the rule. The production design of this movie (by Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland) is intricate, wide-ranging, and entirely believable as a place we all could be in twenty-odd years. The cinematography (by Emmanuel Lubezki) is subtly beautiful, informative, and invisibly brilliant. Every directorial choice (by Alfonso Cuarón) leads you to feel the immediacy, the reality, of the story. And the performances are stunning.

Clive Owen’s character has lived a life of pain, disappointment, and eventual complete detachment; he doesn’t have to raise an eyebrow for you to see that in his face. You believe in his love for Julianne Moore and for Michael Caine, as his best friend, even without particularly extended screen time for either of them, even without anyone directly saying so. This is a story about people as much as it is about ideas.

Children of Men was the best movie of its year, in my opinion.  Clearly one of the bravest and most necessary to be released by a major studio of the past dozen years.

Why? This movie is about nothing less important than the value of human life. It makes you believe in it and care about it. At this moment in history, that makes it more than just a brilliantly-crafted movie; it’s actually valuable.

This movie makes a persuasive case for keeping hope alive, in a decade where hope was in short supply.  And I’d also suggest that the choice of Jarvis Cocker’s “Running The World” as end-credits theme is one of the best matches of song-to-movie that I could possibly name.  The song brings a perfect dose of black humor to warmly cap off a movie that was pretty sparse on the humor front.

The first time I saw Children Of Men theatrically, the movie ended and the credits started rolling and “Running The World” began to play. And then something sweet happened that I thought I was imagining at first: A little kid started dancing in front of the screen, happily doing windmills.

[Note to parents: This is absolutely not the movie to show your children. It is sophisticated, disturbing, upsetting, tragic, and ambiguously uplifting at best.]

But all the same, seeing that child dance around to that particular sardonic and beautiful tune was one of the most bizarrely hopeful images I have seen.

The movie is equally so.

 

(The Koreans did not seem to get the vibe of the movie.)

From The Archives: 25TH HOUR (2002).

Continuing my list of favorite movies from the last decade, here’s

#2.  25^th Hour (2002)

This is a movie that warrants an entire essay.  One day, I’ll give it one.  In the meanwhile, my abbreviated commentary will have to do.

Personally, I’m a filmgoer who tends to generally agree with what the mainstream defines as “a great film” (Casablanca, The Godfather, Do The Right Thing), though I tend to love championing the lesser-acknowledged works that I believe to have greatness in them, and I’m more forgiving of flaws than most serious writers and thinkers seem to be.

25^th Hour is a film that plenty of very smart people I know absolutely despise but which I absolutely adore, even despite what I concede are some fairly obvious flaws.  (I felt a little validated to see it place highly on some respectable lists, including the top 50 by The Onion A.V. Club.)

As so many of Spike Lee’s films do (I’m a fan but I understand the critique), 25^th Hour admittedly lays it on thick at times, and the scene where two men have a debate with a window view of Ground Zero looming large in the background and the soundtrack blaring over it is inexcusably distracting – Spike’s objective with this directorial choice is a valid one (every other movie of that time pussied out by digitally erasing the Twin Towers or avoiding the subject altogether and he wanted to confront it head-on), but the fact remains that it does derail the actual narrative.  The scene becomes about something else than the more story-centric conversation the two men are having.

But so much else about 25^th Hour is so good – the observant, emotionally detailed, quintessentially New York script by David Benioff (which was his much-deserved ticket to a high-roller decade in Hollywood which continues today as he produces Game Of Thrones for HBO), the vibrant, scrappy cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto (the best DP of the decade, who also gave us Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel), and one of the hands-down greatest New York scores ever written by Spike’s longtime composer Terence Blanchard.  Really, this music breaks my heart every time.  It’s perfectly deployed in the movie (aside from that unfortunate Ground Zero scene), and it’s the perfect soundtrack to reside in your iPod as you walk the city streets in real life.

The cast of 25th Hour is one of the greatest ensembles assembled in the decade – Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, the brilliant & underused Barry Pepper, Brian Cox, The Wire‘s Isiah Whitlock, Rosario Dawson, the guy who plays the Russian gangster, even Tony Siragusa is a snug fit – I only wish that the late Brittany Murphy had been cast over Anna Paquin (as was originally intended), but otherwise, top to bottom, this is an impeccable match of actor to role.  Barry Pepper, in particular, impresses by conjuring a very specific kind of loyal but flawed New York asshole.  Rosario Dawson is from New York.  Barry Pepper isn’t.  Damned if you’d know it from watching the movie!

The result of all of the above is a movie that, as a New Yorker, I relate to in my soul.  I wonder, if it was a so-called perfect film, would I respond to it as strongly?  The last line of the movie, so resonant for so many reasons, still echoes in my mind.

“This all came so close to never happening.”

And a few of Rosario Dawson, just to lighten the mood…

Overlooked By Oscar: NIGHT CATCHES US (2010).

Let’s take a moment to credit some of the lesser-heralded arts of movie-making, such as production design, set dressing, and costumes.  Night Catches Us is set in Philadelphia in 1976, and looks it.  The movie feels contemporary and believable, but also convincingly forty years ago.  Let’s also compliment its cinematography – Night Catches Us has the hazy look of summer and memory.  But most of all, this is a movie of ideas.

Night Catches Us posits one of the most probing questions I’ve seen a movie bother to pose in quite some time:  What happens after history?

Most period pictures like to chronicle major moments in history at the hour of their doing.  But what happens after all of the fire and the drama, when the dust settles and the pieces need picking up?

Anthony Mackie (8 Mile, Million Dollar Baby, Notorious, The Hurt Locker) plays an ex-Black Panther who returns to the neighborhood where he and his compatriots waged a revolution, where many of them still live, and where some of them no longer do.  Some of his old Black Panther allies, most vocally represented by The Wire’s Jamie Hector (in a much more animated role than his Marlo Stanfield), as the excellently named DoRight Miller, believe that Mackie’s Marcus Washington betrayed the movement, and is no longer to be trusted.

The wonderful Kerry Washington plays the lawyer and young widow whose husband, once Mackie’s best friend, was the Panther who he was supposed to have betrayed.  Much of the movie is committed to detailing the tension and the affection between these two characters and the history between them, just as it is to the connection between Mackie’s character and Washington’s young daughter, who is curious about the recent past, and the past lives of all of these grown-ups to whom she still looks admiringly.

There are also brief but memorable turns from Wendell Pierce, as a detective who has a keen interest in the return of Marcus Washington, and Tariq Trotter, aka Black Thought from The Roots, who plays Marcus’ brother, now living a life dedicated to Islam, and not thrilled to see his brother return.  The Roots also supply the movie’s score, which is spare but very fine.  (There’s not an abundance of music in this film — those guys, the hardest-working band in show business, only have so much free time.)  The film closes with The Roots’ track “How I Got Over” (the title track from the album of the same name), and it’s a fitting conclusion – contemplative yet upbeat, positive yet still yearning, full of convinction yet still questing.

Night Catches Us is a quiet movie, which is the boldest and riskiest way to make a movie these days.  It dares to leave many questions and conflicts unresolved, yet it still manages to dwell in your memory for months after first seeing it.  It’s a story about the aftermath of the storms of history, but more than that even, it’s a story about people, what they say and what they don’t say, and how those conversations and silences can move history too.

Night Catches Us screens this weekend in New York City on Thursday through Saturday at the Maysles Cinema in Harlem. Saturday’s screening will be followed with a Q&A with the film’s director, Tanya Hamilton, and Black Panther Party Member Jamal Joseph.  Click here for more details.

 

Movie Review: HEREAFTER (2010).

You don’t have to go far on the internet to know where I stand on Clint Eastwood.  I’m as big a fan of him as a filmmaker as I am of him as an actor.  I’m interested in his take on America, his take on humanity, and in his restless creative spirit.  Clint never makes the same movie twice, not even when he was making Dirty Harry flicks.  He’s tackled the subject of death in various ways, usually from the varied perspective of those men who cause it.  But I don’t think I could have ever expected that he’d get around to making a movie about death from the perspective of those who have died.  In Hereafter, Clint takes on supernatural themes, which he hasn’t done (depending on how you look at it) since High Plains Drifter.  The results are very, very interesting.

Honestly, I’d prefer to sit with this movie for a while, to let it sink in.  It’s already been a couple weeks and I still feel like committing my thoughts to black-and-white would be rushing it.  When one of my creative heroes explores a departure in genre and subject matter, I prefer to temper my opinion and to consider it carefully.  Just look at the reception to Hereafter thus far:  The film’s release schedule was somewhat garbled, considering Clint’s longtime success record with both earning and award-getting.  And the overall critical response has been diametrically opposed – many prominent critics have called it “great” or “masterpiece” and almost as many others have called it “bad” or “boring.”  They can’t both be right, and it’s even possible that neither of them are.

For my own part, I was consistently intrigued by Hereafter, even if I wasn’t quite as emotionally engaged as I have been by so many other Eastwood projects.  It’s certainly not a movie for the impatient.  Clint crafts Hereafter with a deliberate pace; as always, he works at his own damn speed.  Clint’s never gone in on modern trends just to placate an audience; so many modern movies use handheld cameras and rapid-fire editing without even making the artistic decision – they just do it because that’s how most movies do it now.  Even Clint’s action movies have a patient, classical pacing to them – he’d rather show events at the rate that they need to unfold, rather than try to amp up an audience’s excitement with cinematic caffeination techniques.  This is one reason why people aren’t responding to Hereafter immediately – I heard some restless rustling at my screening.  There’s also a sort of squareness to Hereafter that I found to be refreshing and comforting, but obviously isn’t in step with a culture of escalating coolness.  Matt Damon’s character has an old-school stateliness and quiet dignity to him; it’s the kind of role Clint could have played several years ago.  Even when he’s being a bit of a jerk, it comes off as the irritation of a much older man:  “Look, lady…” and “Look, kid…” and those kind of things.

The story is a Babel kind of three-protagonist odyssey.  It’s about three characters and their spiritual experiences.  The first is a French journalist (Cécile de France) who nearly dies in a harrowing and spectacularly-coordinated tsunami sequence that opens the movie.  Right before she’s resuscitated, she has visions of what she knows to be an afterlife, which prove a major hurdle to re-entering her previous profession and relationships.  The second is Matt Damon’s story, as a melancholy former psychic who is constantly reminded of his ability to communicate with the recently-passed.  He keeps trying to escape it, but curious people keep pulling him back towards it.  (Turns out that having supernatural powers can really hamper your dating life.)  Finally, there’s a wee British urchin whose twin brother is killed in a car accident.  The boy is now searching for some spiritual truth that will make sense of all the senselessness.

Here’s an embarrassing admission:  My innate cluelessness made Hereafter more confusing that it was meant to be.  I didn’t read up on the movie beforehand, but I saw all the posters with Matt Damon front and center (and Cécile de France right behind him).  So once I finally saw the movie, the story structure kept cutting to the little British kid’s scenes right after scenes of Matt Damon laying down to sleep – naturally, my dumb mind made the leap that those were supposed to be flashbacks, so I spent the first half of the movie waiting for the little kid to somehow lose the accent and move to the States and gain Jay Mohr as his brother.

Maybe that’s a telling mistake, though:  Not just because he’s the most familiar actor was the Matt Damon story the most compelling of the three.  His character’s story is the one least like any we’ve seen many times before.  I liked the sweetness and the old-fashioned way that the love story with Bryce Dallas Howard’s character developed, and the natural, painful way that it fell apart due to reluctant secrets revealed.  I could relate.  In the same way, I didn’t have a problem with the abrupt beginning to the new love story in the final act, when all three stories collide, because quite frankly, I believe that things happen that way.  That’s the kind of spirituality I can ride with.

Overall, my first impression of Hereafter is that it may not be the classic that its early champions are suggesting, but it might end up proving to be more interesting than that.  It’s the work of a great director and great artist spreading his wings and attempting something new, and by the way, Clint’s simple and lovely orchestral score is maybe his best accomplishment yet in that arena.  But those people who would call Hereafter a “bad” movie?  Sorry, it isn’t that.  It obviously isn’t for them, and they may have some objectively legitimate objections to the story or its execution, but you can’t slop the “bad” brush over an entire Eastwood picture.  Clint just plain doesn’t do “bad.”  He does interesting experiments, and he does greatness.  Hereafter lies somewhere in the middle.