Recently I offered you a look at my new top ten favorite films, and films that had dropped out from earlier versions of the list. I realized later that I meant to mention another movie, and had neglected another previous top ten entry or three, which would also somewhat mitigate the fact that my favorites are all so recent.
The first movie I'd like to mention is Warrior (2011). This was without a doubt a thunderbolt of an experience for me. I've been a fan of Tom Hardy since I first saw him in a movie, and was glad when he finally began to receive wide acclaim. This was something he did early on in the new era, and on top of that also features a breakout performance from Joe Edgerton as his brother, as they follow different paths to an unlikely confrontation in the finals of a prestigious MMA tournament. Director Gavin O'Connor, who is certainly a favorite of mine and massively underrated, pulls every bit of magic possible, and makes all of the story's twists seem utterly believable. This is a movie that's always at or near my list of all-time favorites.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) is endlessly quotable. I recently finally got older than Dennis. Kudos if you understand that.
Office Space (1999) is another cult comedy worth its weight in quotables. My most frequent reference these days remains the red stapler.
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) is my personal favorite Will Ferrell comedy. It has every moving part possible, including Amy Adams in one of her many pre-breakout supporting roles as well as Sasha Baron Cohen before people who would never get him as a thoroughly obnoxious Frenchman. There are never enough of those! And I'm from French stock!
And with three out of four movies I just listed being comedies, that's pretty much why I was happy to find something like Isle of Dogs this year. Comedy is easy. Classic comedy is hard!
Saturday, September 22, 2018
Sunday, September 16, 2018
New Top Ten All-Time Favorites
- Alexander (2004) This has sat atop my list since I originally caught it on DVD in 2005 and watched absolutely mesmerized. Colin Farrell is my favorite actor, and Oliver Stone has directed many excellent movies, and is one of the few directors with a long career I can say I've seen most of his material (the exceptions are his earliest work). The supporting cast around Farrell is superb. There's nothing I don't like about it, and I love that Stone has a lot of competing cuts out there. I've watched all of them, and they all have selling points.
- The Truman Show (1998) Before Farrell, Jim Carrey was my favorite, and this is inarguably his biggest creative statement.
- The Fall (2006) Tarsem is a visionary director years ahead of his time, and this is his masterpiece, finally released in theaters two years later. The more I think about it the more I love it.
- The Dark Knight (2008) Christopher Nolan had been on versions of this list before thanks to Memento, but he's won a permanent foothold, I think, thanks to this expansive, mythical take on modern superheroes, boosted with Heath Ledger's timely (occurring just before his tragic early death) as well as timeless take on the Joker.
- The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) Brad Pitt has long wanted to be seen as more than just a pretty face, and in Jesse James, especially as conceived by Andrew Dominik (based on a book by Ron Hansen), he found his perfect vehicle to perform the barely contained wild man he's long wanted to be.
- Isle of Dogs (2018) Rewatchability, for me, has always been key for determining my favorite movies, and this one has attained that coveted status somewhat unexpectedly. Is it premature to list it among my all-time favorites? I don't think so.
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) The Harry Potter phenomenon happened twice in short order, in book and film. To my mind this particular film entry is the perfect representation of the film series.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) A perfect adventure movie with plenty of charm around Johnny Depp's instantly iconic Jack Sparrow, better balanced than its predecessor and needing less to actually accomplish than its sequel (never mind the later efforts).
- Star Wars - Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005) The most ambitious of the whole Star Wars saga because it needed to be, having to justify shaping the prequels around how Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader, and accomplishing it in at times literally operatic fashion. Breathtakingly ahead of the curve, even when compared to contemporary efforts like Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
- Star Trek: First Contact (1996) I'm a confessed Star Trek fan, so I've not only seen all the movies and TV episodes, I generally like all of them. Not a lot of fans will say that, and too few of them appreciate the perfect Patrick Stewart vehicle that is First Contact.
- The Departed (2006) Leonardo DiCaprio delivers a hugely underrated career-best performance in this Scorsese ensemble filled-to-bursting with a terrific supporting cast. One of the reasons it's slipped for me is that Matt Damon's performance as DiCaprio's rival peaks too early.
- Gladiator (2000) My appreciation hasn't diminished so much as Ridley Scott has done stuff (Kingdom of Heaven, Exodus: Gods and Kings) of similar quality since and it's harder to justify singling this one out.
- Memento (2001) Nolan's breakthrough is still as clever as ever, and with a small but brilliant cast, but he's done bigger and better since.
- The Matrix (1999) My franchise favorites (bunched up mostly at the end of the current list) have expanded since the first in an underappreciated trilogy came out.
- Munich (2005) Nobody but me (like Scorsese and Departed) calls this Spielberg's best. And it has Eric Bana and Daniel Craig (just before Bond) in career-best mode, and a terrifically moody John Williams score...Of all the past favorites hovering just below the top ten, this one's maybe the closest of getting back in.
- Tarantino - Take your pick. For me every new movie seems to become my favorite Tarantino. Kill Bill Vol. 2, then Inglourious Basterds, then Django Unchained...Lately my appreciation of Hateful Eight has risen, and I wondered if that ought to be in the top ten. So maybe in a few years I'll have this figured out.
Saturday, August 11, 2018
Moneyball (2011)
rating: ****
the story: Billy Beane starts a revolution in baseball by putting the hard focus on stats.
the review: I was always going to watch Moneyball, but I also put it off for years. The reason for both is the same, and that's Brad Pitt. Pitt's one of the best actors working today, but his best work is retreating into the past, and I always thought Moneyball was the start of that. I mean, what does Moneyball have to say about his talent, his unique charisma? It's a movie about baseball stats!
As it turns out, plenty. It's one of those quintessential Pitt roles. It's a lot like his Jesse James (as in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, one of my all-time favorites). In fact, that's the best reason to watch it. I've got and will go into plenty of others, too, but that's the main reason, and it's the big thrust of the movie itself. It conforms real history into a showcase performance. You can't appreciate the art of filmmaking if you watch a movie like Moneyball and don't understand that. I'm not talking "showcase performance" in that Pitt makes it flashy, but that it's a role that boils down the essence of a Brad Pitt performance and gives it another context. That's a movie star. And maybe that's why Pitt doesn't get a lot of great roles these days, because the focus had shifted far away from movie stars and onto blockbuster franchises (actual and would-be). So far the closest Pitt's come to work like that is the unexpected success of World War Z (which I also got around to watching recently, and enjoyed to a lesser extent).
Billy Beane was the general manager of the Oakland Athletics during the 2002 season the movie covers. The A's were struggling to recover from the loss of three key players from a great 2001 campaign, mostly because of, well, money. In fact, Moneyball is less about baseball than it is about money. It's a Great Recession movie. It's about a small market team struggling to remain competitive against big market teams. The movie uses a graphic that explains the huge disparity between the payroll of the A's and the most successful franchise in MLB history, the New York Yankees. Basically it's about the haves and the have-nots, the 1% and the lower class. (It may be worth remembering that although athletes are paid handsomely today, more in some sports than others, and more with greater visibility, they used to do this as a side hobby back in the day, as in, for no pay. Jim Thorpe got screwed out of Olympic glory because he played baseball for money, but these guys used to struggle on this life. In other words, this isn't to note the irony of people playing baseball complaining about money. Relatively speaking, Moneyball is talking about all the players making minimum wage.)
Moneyball, in effect, is the predecessor of later movies like The Big Short (2015). In that sense it's also relevant to speak of co-writer Aaron Sorkin's involvement. It may not be known as an Aaron Sorkin project, but it's got Sorkin all over it. Above all else, Sorkin is always interested in trying to riddle out why something's happened. That's The West Wing, trying to figure out why politics remained popular despite how divisive they had become and were going to remain long after the TV series ended. That's The Social Network, trying to figure out how Facebook became so big despite its humbling origins. That's Jobs, trying to explain the rise of new technology against a backdrop of a classic cult of personality. That's even Molly's Game, trying to explain gambling being as relevant as ever. And that's Moneyball, trying to explain how the Great Recession wasn't going to change anything. The story ends with Beane failing to achieve his goal of leveling the playing field. Red Sox fans know another big market team used his tactics to succeed, and now everyone uses them, and so small market teams like the A's are right back where they started. Like any attempt to fix the economy so it works for everyone, apparently.
But you needn't worry about politics or economics to enjoy Moneyball. Like all great movies, you've got a great cast, one that continually rewards you. You've got the always-underrated Robin Wright there in another thankless supporting role. You've got Philip Seymour Hoffman in his classic Patch Adams mode, the mainstream naysayer standing in Beane's way as A's manager. You've got Jonah Hill reinventing his career as a dramatic actor, inspiring and encouraging Beane to look beyond the standard. And you've got...Chris Pratt?
In 2011, Pratt was two years into his career-making turn in the sitcom Parks & Recreation, three away from his breakout role in Guardians of the Galaxy. In Moneyball he plays one of three key small-salary players Beane scoops up to replace superstars. I can't be sure that this isn't hindsight speaking, but he easily stands out from the pack, acting-wise, and even in a small role stands out in the film, without hamming it up, as he does in Guardians. (In Parks he was cast in the John Krasinski Office role, and not unsurprisingly both have since taken the classic lovable everyman role to cinematic success.) Anyway, it's clear he stands out, that he's destined for greater things, and so it's a fun way to experience Pratt before he hit big. For all I know, Moneyball played a role in helping him get there.
As a lifelong fan of the A's, I always wanted to see the movie just on that front alone, and I wanted to know whether it acknowledged Beane's legacy with the 2004 Red Sox win in the World Series, and whether or not it referenced the "Greek God of Walks," Kevin Youkilis (items two and three? check and check). (Of course Beane usurper Theo Epstein, who helped engineer Boston's 2004 curse reversal, did it again with the Cubs after the film was released.)
The film puts a hard focus on some things and a soft one on others. It glosses over the ace pitching staff the A's had that season, all of whom were later poached (I've long called the A's the farm system of the rest of the league, which made it funny when Beane laments the same thing in the movie) by other teams. Clearly it has a narrative it wants to tell. I'm not going to quibble over stuff like that. As I said, it's really an excuse to let Pitt be Brad Pitt. I'll take that. Yeah...
the story: Billy Beane starts a revolution in baseball by putting the hard focus on stats.
the review: I was always going to watch Moneyball, but I also put it off for years. The reason for both is the same, and that's Brad Pitt. Pitt's one of the best actors working today, but his best work is retreating into the past, and I always thought Moneyball was the start of that. I mean, what does Moneyball have to say about his talent, his unique charisma? It's a movie about baseball stats!
As it turns out, plenty. It's one of those quintessential Pitt roles. It's a lot like his Jesse James (as in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, one of my all-time favorites). In fact, that's the best reason to watch it. I've got and will go into plenty of others, too, but that's the main reason, and it's the big thrust of the movie itself. It conforms real history into a showcase performance. You can't appreciate the art of filmmaking if you watch a movie like Moneyball and don't understand that. I'm not talking "showcase performance" in that Pitt makes it flashy, but that it's a role that boils down the essence of a Brad Pitt performance and gives it another context. That's a movie star. And maybe that's why Pitt doesn't get a lot of great roles these days, because the focus had shifted far away from movie stars and onto blockbuster franchises (actual and would-be). So far the closest Pitt's come to work like that is the unexpected success of World War Z (which I also got around to watching recently, and enjoyed to a lesser extent).
Billy Beane was the general manager of the Oakland Athletics during the 2002 season the movie covers. The A's were struggling to recover from the loss of three key players from a great 2001 campaign, mostly because of, well, money. In fact, Moneyball is less about baseball than it is about money. It's a Great Recession movie. It's about a small market team struggling to remain competitive against big market teams. The movie uses a graphic that explains the huge disparity between the payroll of the A's and the most successful franchise in MLB history, the New York Yankees. Basically it's about the haves and the have-nots, the 1% and the lower class. (It may be worth remembering that although athletes are paid handsomely today, more in some sports than others, and more with greater visibility, they used to do this as a side hobby back in the day, as in, for no pay. Jim Thorpe got screwed out of Olympic glory because he played baseball for money, but these guys used to struggle on this life. In other words, this isn't to note the irony of people playing baseball complaining about money. Relatively speaking, Moneyball is talking about all the players making minimum wage.)
Moneyball, in effect, is the predecessor of later movies like The Big Short (2015). In that sense it's also relevant to speak of co-writer Aaron Sorkin's involvement. It may not be known as an Aaron Sorkin project, but it's got Sorkin all over it. Above all else, Sorkin is always interested in trying to riddle out why something's happened. That's The West Wing, trying to figure out why politics remained popular despite how divisive they had become and were going to remain long after the TV series ended. That's The Social Network, trying to figure out how Facebook became so big despite its humbling origins. That's Jobs, trying to explain the rise of new technology against a backdrop of a classic cult of personality. That's even Molly's Game, trying to explain gambling being as relevant as ever. And that's Moneyball, trying to explain how the Great Recession wasn't going to change anything. The story ends with Beane failing to achieve his goal of leveling the playing field. Red Sox fans know another big market team used his tactics to succeed, and now everyone uses them, and so small market teams like the A's are right back where they started. Like any attempt to fix the economy so it works for everyone, apparently.
But you needn't worry about politics or economics to enjoy Moneyball. Like all great movies, you've got a great cast, one that continually rewards you. You've got the always-underrated Robin Wright there in another thankless supporting role. You've got Philip Seymour Hoffman in his classic Patch Adams mode, the mainstream naysayer standing in Beane's way as A's manager. You've got Jonah Hill reinventing his career as a dramatic actor, inspiring and encouraging Beane to look beyond the standard. And you've got...Chris Pratt?
In 2011, Pratt was two years into his career-making turn in the sitcom Parks & Recreation, three away from his breakout role in Guardians of the Galaxy. In Moneyball he plays one of three key small-salary players Beane scoops up to replace superstars. I can't be sure that this isn't hindsight speaking, but he easily stands out from the pack, acting-wise, and even in a small role stands out in the film, without hamming it up, as he does in Guardians. (In Parks he was cast in the John Krasinski Office role, and not unsurprisingly both have since taken the classic lovable everyman role to cinematic success.) Anyway, it's clear he stands out, that he's destined for greater things, and so it's a fun way to experience Pratt before he hit big. For all I know, Moneyball played a role in helping him get there.
As a lifelong fan of the A's, I always wanted to see the movie just on that front alone, and I wanted to know whether it acknowledged Beane's legacy with the 2004 Red Sox win in the World Series, and whether or not it referenced the "Greek God of Walks," Kevin Youkilis (items two and three? check and check). (Of course Beane usurper Theo Epstein, who helped engineer Boston's 2004 curse reversal, did it again with the Cubs after the film was released.)
The film puts a hard focus on some things and a soft one on others. It glosses over the ace pitching staff the A's had that season, all of whom were later poached (I've long called the A's the farm system of the rest of the league, which made it funny when Beane laments the same thing in the movie) by other teams. Clearly it has a narrative it wants to tell. I'm not going to quibble over stuff like that. As I said, it's really an excuse to let Pitt be Brad Pitt. I'll take that. Yeah...
Saturday, July 28, 2018
Isle of Dogs (2018)
rating: *****
the story: A corrupt politician creates a conspiracy to exile all dogs, but his adopted son mounts a campaign to rescue them.
what it's all about: The exact parallels aren't there, and they don't need to be, but Isle of Dogs might be the first great cinematic response to Trump, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum. Its plot can be seen as a response to Trump's immigration policies. But regardless of all that, it's a great film, the crowning artistic achievement of Wes Anderson's career.
Anderson has made a career of creating quirky movies. He's become increasingly ambitious over the years. 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums was his first widely-acknowledged success, but Anderson took a giant leap forward with his follow-up, 2004's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which can be interpreted as a modern, absurdist's version of Moby-Dick. 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox, a stylistic herald to Isle of Dogs, saw Anderson begin to break free entirely of conventions, while 2014's The Grand Budapest Hotel saw him emerge on a truly grand scale for the first time.
Isle of Dogs, no matter how you interpret it, even if it's only to be understood as a generic cautionary tale, is a wholly contained accomplishment, a complete vision capable of being enjoyed on multiple levels. The title itself is a nod and a wink; you can love it if all you are is a dog lover. This is an era that relishes simple pleasures, after all. You can relish it for the rich vocal cast, a true embarrassment of riches that continues Grand Budapest Hotel's most simple pleasure, all those small roles filled by well-known actors. You have Bryan Cranston, still justifiably riding the wave of his breakthrough performance in Breaking Bad, in the lead role. You have Edward Norton and Liev Schreiber just below him. You have Bill Murray, you have Jeff Goldblum, you have Scarlett Johansson, you have Bob Balaban, Greta Gerwig, Harvey Keitel. You even have Fisher Stevens! You have Courtney B. Vance as narrator!
You can appreciate it as a boy's quest movie. You can appreciate it as the rare movie omitting subtitles despite heavy usage of Japanese characters speaking Japanese. You can appreciate it for subverting the "white savior" concept, despite criticism that it plays into that concept. Gerwig voices an American schoolgirl who leads a peoples revolution against the corrupt politician, but in the end it isn't her actions that produce the happy ending, but the adopted son's, who is Japanese, and the dogs, all of whom have plenty of reasons not to work together, but do. And that's as much the message of the movie as anything else, that idea of putting aside differences that seems to have been utterly lost today.
The music is intrinsic to all this. Not just the taiko drumming. Another criticism of the movie is that it takes a white man's poor understanding of Japanese culture and assumes it's being accurate. The whole point of omitting subtitles is acknowledging the cultural divides that even the dogs represent, speaking English (dogs don't speak English). It's metaphor, people. There's nothing intrinsically Japanese about this movie, it's a creative choice, in a movie brilliantly bursting with them. Very few directors in history have made as many of them, and as many of them as well, as Wes Anderson has in Isle of Dogs. The constant drum beats, with or without taiko drums, and the anonymous indy-style songs, are incumbent of a talent who has been synthesizing the castoffs of film history for decades, and come up with a masterpiece from them.
I don't know if this is going to remain my favorite movie of 2018, but it's going to be difficult to beat.
the story: A corrupt politician creates a conspiracy to exile all dogs, but his adopted son mounts a campaign to rescue them.
what it's all about: The exact parallels aren't there, and they don't need to be, but Isle of Dogs might be the first great cinematic response to Trump, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum. Its plot can be seen as a response to Trump's immigration policies. But regardless of all that, it's a great film, the crowning artistic achievement of Wes Anderson's career.
Anderson has made a career of creating quirky movies. He's become increasingly ambitious over the years. 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums was his first widely-acknowledged success, but Anderson took a giant leap forward with his follow-up, 2004's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which can be interpreted as a modern, absurdist's version of Moby-Dick. 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox, a stylistic herald to Isle of Dogs, saw Anderson begin to break free entirely of conventions, while 2014's The Grand Budapest Hotel saw him emerge on a truly grand scale for the first time.
Isle of Dogs, no matter how you interpret it, even if it's only to be understood as a generic cautionary tale, is a wholly contained accomplishment, a complete vision capable of being enjoyed on multiple levels. The title itself is a nod and a wink; you can love it if all you are is a dog lover. This is an era that relishes simple pleasures, after all. You can relish it for the rich vocal cast, a true embarrassment of riches that continues Grand Budapest Hotel's most simple pleasure, all those small roles filled by well-known actors. You have Bryan Cranston, still justifiably riding the wave of his breakthrough performance in Breaking Bad, in the lead role. You have Edward Norton and Liev Schreiber just below him. You have Bill Murray, you have Jeff Goldblum, you have Scarlett Johansson, you have Bob Balaban, Greta Gerwig, Harvey Keitel. You even have Fisher Stevens! You have Courtney B. Vance as narrator!
You can appreciate it as a boy's quest movie. You can appreciate it as the rare movie omitting subtitles despite heavy usage of Japanese characters speaking Japanese. You can appreciate it for subverting the "white savior" concept, despite criticism that it plays into that concept. Gerwig voices an American schoolgirl who leads a peoples revolution against the corrupt politician, but in the end it isn't her actions that produce the happy ending, but the adopted son's, who is Japanese, and the dogs, all of whom have plenty of reasons not to work together, but do. And that's as much the message of the movie as anything else, that idea of putting aside differences that seems to have been utterly lost today.
The music is intrinsic to all this. Not just the taiko drumming. Another criticism of the movie is that it takes a white man's poor understanding of Japanese culture and assumes it's being accurate. The whole point of omitting subtitles is acknowledging the cultural divides that even the dogs represent, speaking English (dogs don't speak English). It's metaphor, people. There's nothing intrinsically Japanese about this movie, it's a creative choice, in a movie brilliantly bursting with them. Very few directors in history have made as many of them, and as many of them as well, as Wes Anderson has in Isle of Dogs. The constant drum beats, with or without taiko drums, and the anonymous indy-style songs, are incumbent of a talent who has been synthesizing the castoffs of film history for decades, and come up with a masterpiece from them.
I don't know if this is going to remain my favorite movie of 2018, but it's going to be difficult to beat.
Citizen Kane (1941)
rating: *****
the story: Family comes into money, boy is sent to grow up rich, spends his life disappointed with the results.
what it's all about: What to say about Citizen Kane that hasn't already been said? If it's not indeed the greatest movie ever made, it's at least the first evidence that film is a medium capable of producing great art. We live in an era, now, that alternately worships popular art and fringe art, and there's very little room to laude anything in-between. Popular art makes all the money at the box office, and fringe art wins all the awards. It's absurd. And then we have Citizen Kane. I think it would be equally doomed today as it was when William Randolph Hearst realized Orson Welles had based a large chunk of it on his life. Hearst effectively blacklisted Welles from Hollywood, as an untethered voice, and declared that art, in Hollywood, came with a price. The studios, then and again now, liked their iron grip, regardless of the results (which is not to say the results must always be construed negatively), and were happy to balk at someone like Welles, who challenged them. In the '60s a whole generation of directors came about to expand the legacy of Citizen Kane, a movement that crested in the '90s, when smaller studios realized they had power, too, in wielding such creative forces, and set about believing they were more important. But in art, it is always the artist, and the artist will always be remembered. You can push an artist to greatness, but as evidenced by The Agony and the Ecstasy, you will find yourself hard-pressed to be remembered positively for it.
Anyway, what about the movie itself? Beyond the visionary techniques? What about the story itself? What does it ultimately say? One of the most overt things about it is that Charles Foster Kane doesn't love others so much as yearns for them to love him. This is one of those things Kane subverts about the tenets of storytelling: he tells more than he shows. He's too busy showing the opulence to bother with rules. He understands that telling is showing, because it reveals the heart of the human experience, since for the subject of his movie, showing was telling, and no one wanted to look. His mother, his father, and the man who would raise Charlie didn't care about the pleasure he took from the mere act of having fun with "Rosebud." His mother is cold and distant when we see her, resigned to the decision she made, and rationalizing it by demonizing the father. She suggests that he's a physical threat to their son, but he's really an emotional one, as far as she's concerned; Charlie's dad hates the idea of his son being sent away. And Charlie himself hates it. But his rebellion is a subtle one, against the system he's meant to embrace. He becomes a newspaper publisher, and he revels in chaos. He would love the modern age.
I am absolutely saying Citizen Kane is more relevant in 2018 than possibly ever before. In the movie, Charlie straddles the 19th and 20th centuries. We forget about the plague of anarchists from that time. We can identify terrorists, and what motivates them, in the 21st, but anarchists? They assassinated a president and an archduke, and they reached the height of their powers in sparking the first world war. We gloss over these things in our rush to condemn a more obvious evil with a more obvious sin, two decades later, and yet the whole point of this movie is to address grievances when they happen, rather than shrink away from them, ignore them, deny them. This is a movie about the lies we tell ourselves, about the truths we refuse to face, and how it poisons everything around us, and yes, that have devastating consequences.
So it is not just powerful filmmaking art, but it is a powerful storytelling statement. And when the sled is finally lost for good, tossed into an inferno, the world loses its chance to understand a man who did everything in his power to gain his revenge, having lost his ability to speak for himself, and farce becomes tragedy. Charlie Kane continually loses himself, and we as voiceless observers alone are capable of redeeming him. In celebrating Citizen Kane, it's important to remember that its message is what's most important about it, and that if we want a better world, we have to know what's wrong, and how to fix it. Many people will tell you what's wrong, and like everyone trying to answer what Charlie's last words were, they're won't understand what they're talking about. Charlie died a monster. But he wasn't, really. He was just another citizen, and that's all he ever wanted to be.
the story: Family comes into money, boy is sent to grow up rich, spends his life disappointed with the results.
what it's all about: What to say about Citizen Kane that hasn't already been said? If it's not indeed the greatest movie ever made, it's at least the first evidence that film is a medium capable of producing great art. We live in an era, now, that alternately worships popular art and fringe art, and there's very little room to laude anything in-between. Popular art makes all the money at the box office, and fringe art wins all the awards. It's absurd. And then we have Citizen Kane. I think it would be equally doomed today as it was when William Randolph Hearst realized Orson Welles had based a large chunk of it on his life. Hearst effectively blacklisted Welles from Hollywood, as an untethered voice, and declared that art, in Hollywood, came with a price. The studios, then and again now, liked their iron grip, regardless of the results (which is not to say the results must always be construed negatively), and were happy to balk at someone like Welles, who challenged them. In the '60s a whole generation of directors came about to expand the legacy of Citizen Kane, a movement that crested in the '90s, when smaller studios realized they had power, too, in wielding such creative forces, and set about believing they were more important. But in art, it is always the artist, and the artist will always be remembered. You can push an artist to greatness, but as evidenced by The Agony and the Ecstasy, you will find yourself hard-pressed to be remembered positively for it.
Anyway, what about the movie itself? Beyond the visionary techniques? What about the story itself? What does it ultimately say? One of the most overt things about it is that Charles Foster Kane doesn't love others so much as yearns for them to love him. This is one of those things Kane subverts about the tenets of storytelling: he tells more than he shows. He's too busy showing the opulence to bother with rules. He understands that telling is showing, because it reveals the heart of the human experience, since for the subject of his movie, showing was telling, and no one wanted to look. His mother, his father, and the man who would raise Charlie didn't care about the pleasure he took from the mere act of having fun with "Rosebud." His mother is cold and distant when we see her, resigned to the decision she made, and rationalizing it by demonizing the father. She suggests that he's a physical threat to their son, but he's really an emotional one, as far as she's concerned; Charlie's dad hates the idea of his son being sent away. And Charlie himself hates it. But his rebellion is a subtle one, against the system he's meant to embrace. He becomes a newspaper publisher, and he revels in chaos. He would love the modern age.
I am absolutely saying Citizen Kane is more relevant in 2018 than possibly ever before. In the movie, Charlie straddles the 19th and 20th centuries. We forget about the plague of anarchists from that time. We can identify terrorists, and what motivates them, in the 21st, but anarchists? They assassinated a president and an archduke, and they reached the height of their powers in sparking the first world war. We gloss over these things in our rush to condemn a more obvious evil with a more obvious sin, two decades later, and yet the whole point of this movie is to address grievances when they happen, rather than shrink away from them, ignore them, deny them. This is a movie about the lies we tell ourselves, about the truths we refuse to face, and how it poisons everything around us, and yes, that have devastating consequences.
So it is not just powerful filmmaking art, but it is a powerful storytelling statement. And when the sled is finally lost for good, tossed into an inferno, the world loses its chance to understand a man who did everything in his power to gain his revenge, having lost his ability to speak for himself, and farce becomes tragedy. Charlie Kane continually loses himself, and we as voiceless observers alone are capable of redeeming him. In celebrating Citizen Kane, it's important to remember that its message is what's most important about it, and that if we want a better world, we have to know what's wrong, and how to fix it. Many people will tell you what's wrong, and like everyone trying to answer what Charlie's last words were, they're won't understand what they're talking about. Charlie died a monster. But he wasn't, really. He was just another citizen, and that's all he ever wanted to be.
Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Fantastic Four (2005)/Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)
rating (combined): ****
the story: Reed Richards leads a scientific mission that inadvertently gives his team superpowers; the Silver Surfer arrives on Earth as a herald of the apocalypse.
review: In hindsight the Fantastic Four duology featuring Ioan Gruffudd (Mr. Fantastic), Jessica Alba (Invisible Woman), Chris Evans (Human Torch), Michael Chiklis (Thing), and Julian McMahon (Dr. Doom) is one of the most tightly-conceived superhero movie experiences yet filmed.
In the wake of the X-Men (energized comic book fans) and Spider-Man (energized mass audiences), the Fantastic Four always had a tough few acts to follow. Where the X-Men became known for Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, Sam Raimi only ever had to contend with one hero. History has shown that if you try to focus on a number of superheroes in one movie, you really need to earn it. And Fantastic Four (2005) introduced, well, four of them, and they all compete for attention. You can kind of tell in the sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) how there was the perception that Chris Evans' Human Torch dominated the first one too much, or that maybe Michael Chiklis's Thing was too depressing. One consistent element was the relationship between Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman. They go from catching back up romantically in the first one to spending virtually the entire second one trying to get married. There's no loss of focus there. It's the most direct a second superhero movie has ever come to being a true sequel since Superman II played out the threat of General Zod and company introduced in the first one.
I can only guess the number of reasons why these movies have always been perceived as familiars. Aside from Thing, it's also depressing to think that the nominal lead, Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic), is basically the Absent-Minded Professor. The Robin Williams version of that character has virtually the same arc as Reed across his two movies in Flubber (1997). Unlike Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker (Spider-Man), Ioan Gruffudd never gets to look cool, partly because, again, Evans spends all his time in the first one making Johnny Storm (Human Torch) look as cool as possible. And Johnny is also just as clearly always a supporting role, made all the more clear in the second one, even though technically he has the most redemptive arc and gets the save the day.
I also get the sense that superhero movies viewers will never be able to admit how uncomfortable they are watching women be superheroes. Jennifer Garner, by all rights, should have become iconic after Daredevil (2003), but her solo follow-up Elektra (2005) was the flop that doomed both the character and the franchise. Halle Berry's Catwoman (2004) was a flop, too, and she was consistently deemed a weak link in her role as Storm in the X-Men movies. And despite there being ten years worth of Avengers movies now, there has still not been a single solo Black Widow movie. Yet there are plenty of high profile action movies led by women, including the Hunger Games series and Wonder Woman (2017).
So the fact that Jessica Alba has a prominent role in both movies as Susan Storm (Invisible Woman), to my mind, is no coincidence. You might try to argue that it's the nature of how she's used in the movies, but I don't buy it.
It might not help that along with Chiklis (The Commish, The Shield) and McMahon (Charmed, Nip/Tuck), Alba was previously best known in a TV show (Dark Angel), so it gives the movies a smaller feel than the superhero movies before and after it, by and large populated by known movie stars. The only one among them truly hamstrung in performance for this is McMahon, who never really earns the menace needed to sell the Doom the mere human Victor Von Doom becomes. I don't usually like manipulating voices; giving him an entirely new one might have done the trick. Laurence Fishburne is fantastic (heh) voicing the Silver Surfer in the second one.
Speaking of Rise, a lot of fan complaints for this one stem from the fact that we never actually get to see Galactus. For those who don't know, Galactus in the comics is a gigantic humanoid in purple armor. I don't know how that works in a movie. Rise instead depicts him as a menacing cloud. If anything is wrong with the concept it's that the movie dedicates all its foreshadowing of his threat to the random journeys of the Surfer around the globe. There's very little effort made to sell Armageddon. You can see, throughout both films, that the budget was mostly reserved for selling how cool the team's superpowers are, and certainly in contrast to later Avengers movies that's going to look disappointing, but the team's powers are cool, especially Human Torch and Invisible Woman's. Thing stands out so much, it's really a wonder that so little effort has ever been made to give him solo stories, in the comics. If there were solo movies for these guys, he'd be a natural lead, right along with his frenemy Johnny Storm.
Even if Doom can be disappointing, he makes for an effective, well-explained enemy, which is something a lot of superhero movies struggle to find. That's another reason these movies look better in retrospect. They have a lot going on, but they never bog down in following the journeys of each member of this strange family. They have much better defined arcs than the generalized family shenanigans of the Pixar Four, the Incredibles. And they're always going to have much more storytelling potential. There was a reboot in 2015, equally underappreciated. Tim Story directed both of these, and he's made a career directing duologies. Just, never again, superhero movies. That seems a shame.
the story: Reed Richards leads a scientific mission that inadvertently gives his team superpowers; the Silver Surfer arrives on Earth as a herald of the apocalypse.
review: In hindsight the Fantastic Four duology featuring Ioan Gruffudd (Mr. Fantastic), Jessica Alba (Invisible Woman), Chris Evans (Human Torch), Michael Chiklis (Thing), and Julian McMahon (Dr. Doom) is one of the most tightly-conceived superhero movie experiences yet filmed.
In the wake of the X-Men (energized comic book fans) and Spider-Man (energized mass audiences), the Fantastic Four always had a tough few acts to follow. Where the X-Men became known for Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, Sam Raimi only ever had to contend with one hero. History has shown that if you try to focus on a number of superheroes in one movie, you really need to earn it. And Fantastic Four (2005) introduced, well, four of them, and they all compete for attention. You can kind of tell in the sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) how there was the perception that Chris Evans' Human Torch dominated the first one too much, or that maybe Michael Chiklis's Thing was too depressing. One consistent element was the relationship between Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman. They go from catching back up romantically in the first one to spending virtually the entire second one trying to get married. There's no loss of focus there. It's the most direct a second superhero movie has ever come to being a true sequel since Superman II played out the threat of General Zod and company introduced in the first one.
I can only guess the number of reasons why these movies have always been perceived as familiars. Aside from Thing, it's also depressing to think that the nominal lead, Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic), is basically the Absent-Minded Professor. The Robin Williams version of that character has virtually the same arc as Reed across his two movies in Flubber (1997). Unlike Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker (Spider-Man), Ioan Gruffudd never gets to look cool, partly because, again, Evans spends all his time in the first one making Johnny Storm (Human Torch) look as cool as possible. And Johnny is also just as clearly always a supporting role, made all the more clear in the second one, even though technically he has the most redemptive arc and gets the save the day.
I also get the sense that superhero movies viewers will never be able to admit how uncomfortable they are watching women be superheroes. Jennifer Garner, by all rights, should have become iconic after Daredevil (2003), but her solo follow-up Elektra (2005) was the flop that doomed both the character and the franchise. Halle Berry's Catwoman (2004) was a flop, too, and she was consistently deemed a weak link in her role as Storm in the X-Men movies. And despite there being ten years worth of Avengers movies now, there has still not been a single solo Black Widow movie. Yet there are plenty of high profile action movies led by women, including the Hunger Games series and Wonder Woman (2017).
So the fact that Jessica Alba has a prominent role in both movies as Susan Storm (Invisible Woman), to my mind, is no coincidence. You might try to argue that it's the nature of how she's used in the movies, but I don't buy it.
It might not help that along with Chiklis (The Commish, The Shield) and McMahon (Charmed, Nip/Tuck), Alba was previously best known in a TV show (Dark Angel), so it gives the movies a smaller feel than the superhero movies before and after it, by and large populated by known movie stars. The only one among them truly hamstrung in performance for this is McMahon, who never really earns the menace needed to sell the Doom the mere human Victor Von Doom becomes. I don't usually like manipulating voices; giving him an entirely new one might have done the trick. Laurence Fishburne is fantastic (heh) voicing the Silver Surfer in the second one.
Speaking of Rise, a lot of fan complaints for this one stem from the fact that we never actually get to see Galactus. For those who don't know, Galactus in the comics is a gigantic humanoid in purple armor. I don't know how that works in a movie. Rise instead depicts him as a menacing cloud. If anything is wrong with the concept it's that the movie dedicates all its foreshadowing of his threat to the random journeys of the Surfer around the globe. There's very little effort made to sell Armageddon. You can see, throughout both films, that the budget was mostly reserved for selling how cool the team's superpowers are, and certainly in contrast to later Avengers movies that's going to look disappointing, but the team's powers are cool, especially Human Torch and Invisible Woman's. Thing stands out so much, it's really a wonder that so little effort has ever been made to give him solo stories, in the comics. If there were solo movies for these guys, he'd be a natural lead, right along with his frenemy Johnny Storm.
Even if Doom can be disappointing, he makes for an effective, well-explained enemy, which is something a lot of superhero movies struggle to find. That's another reason these movies look better in retrospect. They have a lot going on, but they never bog down in following the journeys of each member of this strange family. They have much better defined arcs than the generalized family shenanigans of the Pixar Four, the Incredibles. And they're always going to have much more storytelling potential. There was a reboot in 2015, equally underappreciated. Tim Story directed both of these, and he's made a career directing duologies. Just, never again, superhero movies. That seems a shame.
Thursday, June 7, 2018
American Made (2017)
rating: ****
the story: Based on a true story, an airline pilot finds himself drafted into the Iran-Contra Affair.
review: Tom Cruise was one of the biggest movie stars of the '80s and '90s. At the turn of the millennium his reputation took a big hit due to his increasingly visible affiliation with the Church of Scientology. Subsequent film projects had to compete with this reputation, and he's never been as popular since. All that being said, his career remains fascinating. He starred in Born on the Fourth of July in 1989, a drama that helped define his career. Suddenly Cruise wasn't just a hotshot playboy but someone who had something to say about the state of the country, even if he was commenting on the war in Vietnam, already fifteen years in the past by then. It wasn't until Lions for Lambs in 2007 where he offered a true follow-up. This was a movie about the increasingly toxic cultural divide that had resulted in part from the Vietnam era.
And then in 2017, he gave us American Made. Unlike his earlier efforts, this one doesn't attempt to lecture about what's right or wrong. The whole point of the movie is that Cruise's character has no idea, and never really cares, about the implications of his actions, which involve the CIA hiring him to take reconnaissance photos in Central America, and then to deliver drugs to revolutionaries in Panama, including future dictator Manuel Noriega, and finally guns to the Contras in Honduras. Director Doug Liman's whole approach to the movie draws on Cruise's charisma and recent reputation as an action star, and turns all that on its head. This is a movie to be enjoyed with irony.
Late in the film Cruise has been arrested and charged for his activities, but the sequence feels more like Jack Reacher, in the second movie Never Go Back, explaining to authorities that he's going to walk away from the situation. For a split second he has to worry about actually facing consequences, going to jail, but then he hears his sentencing as community hours. But he begins worrying about real ramifications, from something worse than a trial, expecting his car to be laced with explosives, after a car his brother-in-law has just gotten in blows up. It's really a movie that understands tone, and its message about what these events really signify doesn't need to be hammered as a result, and that's refreshing in an era where everything is delivered with as much bluntness as possible.
Domhnall Gleeson, appearing in just about everything these days and constantly changing up his persona, is Cruise's CIA handler, depicted much as CIA handlers tend to be (similar to how they're depicted in The Hunting Party, for example), but elevated thanks to Gleeson's uncanny ability to be fascinating in the most mundane ways possible (his scene-chewing snarls in Star Wars films notwithstanding). Jayma Mays plays the prosecutor who thinks she's nailed Cruise; ever since her breakthrough in Red Eye I've been waiting for something worthy to fall in her lap, and this is it. Caleb Landry Jones picks up another scene-stealing supporting role as the ill-fated brother-in-law. For me, it was fun seeing Star Trek: Enterprise standout Connor Trinneer in a small role as a young George W. Bush. His character isn't identified, but Trinneer certainly looks the part, and his scene adds a nice additional irony to the proceedings.
Given his lowered profile, Cruise can no longer count on his projects landing the way they once did. More often than not his interesting work is slipping through the cracks. It'd be a shame if American Made did.
the story: Based on a true story, an airline pilot finds himself drafted into the Iran-Contra Affair.
review: Tom Cruise was one of the biggest movie stars of the '80s and '90s. At the turn of the millennium his reputation took a big hit due to his increasingly visible affiliation with the Church of Scientology. Subsequent film projects had to compete with this reputation, and he's never been as popular since. All that being said, his career remains fascinating. He starred in Born on the Fourth of July in 1989, a drama that helped define his career. Suddenly Cruise wasn't just a hotshot playboy but someone who had something to say about the state of the country, even if he was commenting on the war in Vietnam, already fifteen years in the past by then. It wasn't until Lions for Lambs in 2007 where he offered a true follow-up. This was a movie about the increasingly toxic cultural divide that had resulted in part from the Vietnam era.
And then in 2017, he gave us American Made. Unlike his earlier efforts, this one doesn't attempt to lecture about what's right or wrong. The whole point of the movie is that Cruise's character has no idea, and never really cares, about the implications of his actions, which involve the CIA hiring him to take reconnaissance photos in Central America, and then to deliver drugs to revolutionaries in Panama, including future dictator Manuel Noriega, and finally guns to the Contras in Honduras. Director Doug Liman's whole approach to the movie draws on Cruise's charisma and recent reputation as an action star, and turns all that on its head. This is a movie to be enjoyed with irony.
Late in the film Cruise has been arrested and charged for his activities, but the sequence feels more like Jack Reacher, in the second movie Never Go Back, explaining to authorities that he's going to walk away from the situation. For a split second he has to worry about actually facing consequences, going to jail, but then he hears his sentencing as community hours. But he begins worrying about real ramifications, from something worse than a trial, expecting his car to be laced with explosives, after a car his brother-in-law has just gotten in blows up. It's really a movie that understands tone, and its message about what these events really signify doesn't need to be hammered as a result, and that's refreshing in an era where everything is delivered with as much bluntness as possible.
Domhnall Gleeson, appearing in just about everything these days and constantly changing up his persona, is Cruise's CIA handler, depicted much as CIA handlers tend to be (similar to how they're depicted in The Hunting Party, for example), but elevated thanks to Gleeson's uncanny ability to be fascinating in the most mundane ways possible (his scene-chewing snarls in Star Wars films notwithstanding). Jayma Mays plays the prosecutor who thinks she's nailed Cruise; ever since her breakthrough in Red Eye I've been waiting for something worthy to fall in her lap, and this is it. Caleb Landry Jones picks up another scene-stealing supporting role as the ill-fated brother-in-law. For me, it was fun seeing Star Trek: Enterprise standout Connor Trinneer in a small role as a young George W. Bush. His character isn't identified, but Trinneer certainly looks the part, and his scene adds a nice additional irony to the proceedings.
Given his lowered profile, Cruise can no longer count on his projects landing the way they once did. More often than not his interesting work is slipping through the cracks. It'd be a shame if American Made did.
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