Category: reviews

I’m feeling ramble-y about this movie. Be warned.

People often use the term “arc” as a metaphor for the changes a character in a story goes through. Writers, mostly. And I’ve always pictured said arcs as a parabola, starting at one point, going up, up, up, peaking, then dropping down. Think the shape of the St. Louis Gateway Arch.

Watching “Up in the Air” reminded me that not all arcs go up.

Am I being ironic and cute? The title of the movie describes, after all, someone flying high over ground, looking down on all the rest of us. The “flyover states”. George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a seasoned traveller who feels most at home when he’s in an airport or on a plane. He travels from place to place across the country and fires people for a living. This is the kind of soulless profit-driven job that has become a familiar starting point for emotional change in our movies. 60 years ago it was the traveling salesman who epitomized empty work; now we see lobbyists, contractors, day traders; they work for the minor corporations that serve the externalized needs of the major corporations, and actual human lives are just currency to them. Clooney’s charm made me feel uneasy about identifying with such a corporatist; I almost felt sorry for him, even before the story, and Bingham’s arc, began.

Bingham’s tidy, process-driven wandering is interrupted when a young, eager kid, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick, who manages to embody the inner turmoil and exterior calm of many a corporate drone with just a tight purse of her lip or almost imperceptible roll of her eyes) comes up with the idea to use video conferencing to fire people and save traveling costs. This means the end of Bingham’s massive accrual of frequent flyer miles, and right as he’s about to reach his nearly meaningless goal: ten million “points” as a reward for his “loyalty” to a legal contract.

Of course, his “loyalty” has been paid with other people’s money, his expense account at the company, and not out of his own savings; Bingham is just a feeding tube through which passes abstracted value from one non-person to the next. And to earn those points, all he’s had to do is be the bearer of bad news and sit with each actual flesh-and-blood person while they break down, burst into anger, plead for another chance, pretended this isn’t happening, and, rarely, simply accept that their services are no longer required. His constant exposure to human emotion has made him sympathetic enough to realize that abstracting it even further with a computer screen may well be the breaking point. Or so it seems to me. Maybe Clooney’s charm won me over? After all, Bingham had a selfish reason to continue facing down his fellow corporate workers; his pointless goal of “loyalty” which will earn him status as one of only seven people to earn that many points.

This movie resonates with my growing passion against corporate institutions. Can you tell? I could deconstruct this movie for days, I think. And there may be some of you who find that interesting. But it’s also a movie, telling a story. And even though the director, Jason Reitman, is not a newbie director (he directed “Juno” and wrote and directed “Thank You For Smoking”, among others – that last one also about corporatist politics, though played as satire rather than straight drama, as in “Up in the Air”), he made some odd (to me) choices.

When I originally saw the trailer for this movie, it featured Clooney, as Bingham, giving a motivational speech. Here, let me show you it:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m-Da8Tz4_E&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]

The monologue, with the sparse piano over it, and the flash of images, set a tone. Somber, serious, contrasting Clooney’s charisma with the sociopathic message of the words. To me it felt like a confession in a downtown bar on a weeknight, spoken over a drink or two – enough to get a buzz but not enough to really let go.

In the early part of the movie, when we first hear Bingham give this speech (he gives it, or a variation, three times by my memory throughout the course of the film), the music is much more upbeat. It’s a subtle difference but I noticed the change. It felt wrong, sitcom-like. The mood was off. I wondered if I had been tricked by the trailer and my man-crush on George Clooney into the wrong kind of movie.

When Bingham meets his female counterpart, frequent flyer Alex Goran (Vera Farmgia), spellbindingly beautiful and confident, a terrific match – again, with the tone-deaf music.

When Bingham flies back to the home office and has a meeting with his boss, and his boss is Jason Bateman, again I felt the tone was off. I love Bateman, but I love him for his comedic timing and snarky anger, which jarred, just a little, with what I hoped to be the intent of this movie. I felt a bit betrayed, and hoped that this wasn’t a comedy in the conventional, and classical, sense. I hoped for a deeper meaning and more mature tone to emerge.

Emerge it did, in the final half. Perhaps Reitman was aiming for contrast; I think I would have preferred a more consistent tone. This is a dark story, a classical tragedy, and, eventually, it arrived there.

I loved and laughed nearly every scene in “Pirate Radio” (released as “The Boat That Rocked” in the UK).

I adore the plot line of a rag-tag group of rock and roll rebels challenging the stifled, stiff-uppper-lip British officials.

I want a copy (legal or not) of every song on the soundtrack. The soundtrack contains 36 of the over 60 songs from the actual movie. That’s a good start.

And the movie left me wanting more. Mainly, how did Quentin (Bill Nighy) come to own and operate the boat/radio station? He seemed an unlikely entrepreneur. Was he the station manager, the captain, the owner, or some combination of all three?

But in the end, it was just a cute little comedy that plays very well on my internal anti-authoritarianism.

Still, I can’t imagine it being 3 hours long, as Wikipedia claims. Glad they edited it down for US release. But I’d probably watch every deleted scene if I buy the DVD.

There may be spoilers in this review.

At about 45 minutes in to “The Box” I was pretty sure I could see the ending.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially for a suspense/horror flick. As the master of the genre, Hitchcock, explained, suspense is built when the audience knows something’s going to happen but the characters don’t.

The question is, is the journey there a satisfying one? Does the end make sense for these characters?

Well, I thought so. Mostly. I didn’t entirely feel that the punishment fit the crime, but… OK.

But some of the odd turns and plot points seemed superfluous. Mars? The wedding? The creepy student? Waiting through all that made the movie a bit tedious. Just a tad.

Hearing Ewan McGregor ask, innocently and warily, about Jedi, is a wonderful bit of self-referential humor.

And it nicely sums up “Men Who Stare at Goats”.

These aren’t real Jedi that Bob Wilton (McGregor) are finding out about, but members of a secret group within the United States Army, who are practicing and honing their psychic warrior skills, like instant complete awareness of their surroundings (Level 1), intuition (Level 2), and invisibility (Level 3). George Clooney as Lyn Cassady, doing his most earnest, deadpan reading, patiently explains all this to Wilton, on a road trip from Kuwait into Iraq during the early stages of Iraq War 2. It isn’t until later that we learn about Level 4, the ability to stop a goat’s (or other living animal’s) heart simply by staring at it.

The tales are told in flashback, as Cassady describes how a New Age guru, Bill Django (played by Jeff Bridges), a loving, peaceful kind of warrior, passing out daisies and smiling beatifically, becomes a force for good within our military, giving training exercises in dance and handing out psychedelic drugs to unleash the soldiers’ inner children. All of which is a response to spy reports that the Soviets are working on developing their own Jedi, which they started in response to false reports that we were working on it. Which explains why it all needs to be kept secret; can’t have the Soviets finding out that the project they falsely learned we were developing was in fact, not a secret.

The serpent in this new camo-colored Garden of Eden is Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey, who makes a great Dark Sider), a former sci-fi writer who tries, but just can’t seem to get all this crazy empathy stuff, and who works to undermine the unit. It’s he who introduces Level 4 – which causes Cassady to balk.

Every time Clooney tries to explain psychic warfare to McGregor, he appears oblivious to the fact that he’s wrapping a bit of magic around a balls-out crazy physical attack; the way he talks about getting into an enemies’ mind to dissuade him from attacking, before giving the punch-line of stabbing the enemy in the neck with a pen to create a fountain of blood. Uh, wouldn’t the stabbing part be the effective part? Clooney tacks that on almost as an afterthought.

And McGregor, playing an emasculated and cuckolded reporter for a small-town paper, buys into it all. Eventually. He wants redemption for losing his wife to his boss. And given Clooney’s charm, I very much could see someone overlooking the crazy to see the message underneath.

But then, I’m one of those crazy dirty fucking hippies who hate war in the first place. Of course, I’d buy it all.

But I’m not going to leap into a fight without even a knife, trusting in the Force to guide me though. That’s just nuts.

Carol, the angry almost-leader of the Wild Things, has taken his King, Max, on a tour of all the things Max is King. Carol has shown Max the forests, the deserts, the beaches, and up into the mountains.

Hidden up in the mountains, in a cave, is a miniature mountain range; each mountain a tall, pointy, white-capped sculpture of twigs. Hidden in the twig-mountains are small clay replicas of the Wild Things.

The dream logic is impeccable – of course there are tiny mountains hidden in the larger mountains. Carol is a Wild Thing, a monster, anarchic, free in a terrifying sense. But of course he has spent some of his creative energy to craft and control a tiny world that’s a lot like the larger one he can’t control.

And in a moment of vulnerability, he has taken his King to see his handiwork.

Max, of course, is a human boy, who has donned his wolf suit and run away from home. Max’s mom is overwhelmed with work that she has to bring home, and is now dating a “friend” since Max’s dad is absent. Max loves his mom and needs her attention more than ever, but he doesn’t have the experience or language to know why, exactly.

So Max ran away, and sailed the wide ocean, and found where the Wild Things are.

The Wild Things are pure id – raw need, and rage when their needs are denied. And Carol is the second-most dangerous one of them all (the first being the bull-like Wild Thing who almost never speaks, just groans and chuffles and looms). But showing off his twig-mountain sculpture to Max, he bares a sensitive soul.

“Do you know that feeling,” Carol says, “where your teeth are all falling out? And they start to fall out faster and faster?”

Aha, I thought, hearing that. It’s explicitly a dream. Almost too explicit. But the pull of the images on screen, and the connections I made to the feelings invoked by the Wild Things’ monstrous visages, and surreal dialogue and their dysfunctional, wounded, bipolar interactions, entranced me.

I’m more prone to dreaming that my teeth are rubber and I’m unable to chew. Or that I have wads and wads of chewing gum that is stuck to my teeth, and I pull and pull but there’s more and more, filling up my mouth and threatening my ability to breath. But I’ve had the tooth-falling-out dream, too.

And I have the strong feeling that tonight, again, I am going to visit the same place that Spike Jonze, Dave Eggers, and Maurice Sendak have pulled their words and images from.

Maybe I’ll learn something tonight, like it appears Max did.

Watching Michael Moore’s latest effort, Capitalism: A Love Story, at least two things occurred to me, at two different points in the narrative.

First, while watching Moore ask the question, “Is capitalism evil?” of successively higher officials in the Catholic Church gave me a strong sense of disorientation. Really, Michael? You’re basing part of your argument against the excesses of capitalism on the opinion of one of the most staggeringly wealthy institutions on the planet?

The Age of Enlightenment caused a shift in power and money from the church, particularly the church allied with government in the form of inherited rule. Capitalism was one of the economic ideas that grew out of the elevation of reason and intellect that was the Enlightenment, so it could be argued that capitalism reduced the Catholic Church’s power and shifted it to business and government.

And yet the Catholic Church is still vastly wealthy; after several Google searches I can’t find a decent estimate of the total wealth hoarded by the Pope and all his minions across the globe. Surely the many fabulous palaces and works of art in Vatican City alone are priceless heirlooms of human history. Would members of such a institution, which has stockpiled uncounted riches for century upon century in spite of its founders’ admonishments to give away all wealth, view capitalism and its ideal of hard work making one wealthy, as evil? Probably so. No shit, Sherlock, as they say.

And for Mr. Moore to use Catholic priests as mouthpieces for his movie to label as evil the economic system that dethroned the Church just invites consideration of what, exactly, on a moral scale, the Church would be. The Church uses its vast wealth to protect it’s clergy from taxes as well as from legal justice (which is the least satisfying form of justice) against accusations of pedophilia and abuse of authority. Oh, and sure, to a degree, the Church does some good work, too, though I’m far too lazy a blogger to go looking for examples. I think the millennia of greed, warfare and injustice would wipe out any good works they may have done.

My laughter at the parade of clergy on the screen was surely not what Mr. Moore intended. To be fair, I was already in agreement with the filmmaker on the morality of capitalism as it has been practiced for the last 100 years or so; I just thought his method of arguing the point was tone-deaf.

Speaking of justice brings me to my second point, where social justice – which is the best kind of justice – makes its appearance in the movie. Moore mentions that our country’s Constitution does not specify capitalism as an economic system, and that leads him to an observation that I have found to be true: for all the love of democracy we have in this country, there is damned little democracy in our workplaces. The standard business is run as a dictatorship. Where workers and employees have any power at all, they have it amongst themselves in the form of electing representatives to negotiate with the exalted rulers known as Management.

But Moore goes one step further, and shows examples of businesses in America that are run democratically: co-ops. He shows a bakery in California whose name I am far too lazy to search for that is set up where every employee is a part owner, and everyone, from the CEO on down, has one full vote in the operation of the business. And Moore claims that this bakery makes money, and lots of it, to stark contrast with titans of industry like Enron, Worldcomm, General Motors, Lehman Brothers, the list goes on and on.

The employees at this business can vote out the management if they wish. In a flash, as soon as they’d mentioned that, I realized just how differently a business would be run if management had to submit to a vote of their subordinates.

And in a second flash, I knew what was wrong with government.

What reason can anyone give for not running government agencies and bureaus like a democracy? If Democracy is held to such a high ideal in our country, and the topic of many many beautiful speeches by impassioned elected officials and unelected business tycoons alike, then why are we not running our government agencies like a freakin’ democracy?

Businesses can be run any way the owners want, so I’ll leave them out of the question for now. There are still folk who would prefer to just follow a king and not have any personal responsibility or power. But government? Why isn’t the City of Portland, or Multnomah County, or the State of Oregon, or even the Federal Government itself, staffed and organized on the principle of “One person, one vote”?

If it’s good enough for the country as a whole, why isn’t it good enough for everything?

I’d really like to know. And now, finally, I have a life goal to work towards.

Aw, crab, another movie seen and no review has been written.

I caught a 4:40 PM showing of Whip It yesterday after work. It’s Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, and she has a small role in it as a crazy roller derby chick. There’s a lot of crazy roller derby chicks in it, since the movie is about roller derby and finding a family and doing your own thing and the beauty myth.

It’s a great movie and I loved to see the empowerment message aimed at the female segment of our population, in the form of Ellen Page sneaking off to join a crazy roller derby team and abandoning her best friend to get busted for underage drinking, because, hey why not?

But the most surprising part of the movie for me was discovering that Kristen Wiig, who is known for her one-note deadpan passive-aggressive bit parts, is actually pretty hot when she smiles. Also, she very much reminds me of my favorite stripper, Sharai, especially in the scene where Maggie Mayhem (Wiig’s character in the movie) shows up to practice wearing a long muu-muu; I’ve seen Sharai show up to work wearing something very similar, before she goes up the stairs to Dancer Heaven and comes back all stripperfied.

I saw Zombieland over the weekend; I owe myself and y’all a review, since I promised myself I would make a note of every movie I see in a theater. It’s one of my major topics.

But since I haven’t yet completed a review of The Informant!, which I saw earlier in the week, I’m a bit behind.

So I’ll make a note of them, and move on.

I also took a train up to Seattle to catch the very last Mariners game of the season. The tickets were Kevin’s, and our seats were in section 194, high above center field. I took many pictures and a few videos, and will post them when I get a chance to see if there’s anything in there anyone other than Kevin or I would want to see.

Oh, and the Mariners won, 4-3, against the Texas Rangers. Turned out to be a beautiful day for a ballgame!

Oh, and don’t google shiskaberries unless you’re ready for the horrible truth to be revealed to you.

After seeing the first trailer for Inglourious Basterds, and learning that Quentin Tarantino’s next flick would be a World War II movie, I could not wait to see it.

I’ll admit it up front; I’m a huge fan of Tarantino’s work. The more seemingly-pointless dialogue, the more senseless bloody violence, the more homage and in-jokes, the better.

But here and there, little hints seeped in. I saw the headline of IO9’s review, but did not read the body, and saw the phrase “alternate history”, for example. Well, sure. That makes sense. Any movie is going to be fictionalized. So I had some hint that maybe things wouldn’t turn out the way they did in our timeline.

And the satirical article in The Onion, headlined “Next Tarantino Movie An Homage To Beloved Tarantino Movies Of Director’s Youth”, followed by a rant from a co-worker who had seen the movie about how every Tarantino pastiche was on display in Inglourious Basterds, gave me another hint. “48 minutes of two people talking while sitting at a table!” he said. “They don’t leave!”

That was all I knew. Oh, wait, one more thing; several folk on Twitter told me to go see this movie.

Saturday I finally did. The short version is, I enjoyed it very much. The long version, mild spoilers included, begins now.

And it was, indeed, a Tarantino movie. There wasn’t one single 48 minute long scene of people sitting at a table, however. There were, by my hazy memory, 5 or 6 scenes that were people sitting around a table and talking about something other than the obvious topic. And in each of those scenes, the tension is incredible, because the audience knows something that not everyone at the table knows. The cumulative effect of scene after scene after scene of this, though, is a ridiculous (but enjoyable, to me) self-awareness that this is, in fact, a Quentin Tarantino movie.

The action, when it comes, is heightened by all the tension created through dialogue, and all the more so because it’s often so matter-of-fact to the characters – casually cutting scalps from Nazi soldiers’ heads while discussing something else entirely, for example.

And even though Brad Pitt is shown, prominently, in the trailer, hamming it up with his chaw-filled mouth and his goofy Tennessee accent, this movie is not about Lt. Aldo Raines at all. It’s about Shoshanna Dreyfus, a Jewish girl who tries to hide from the Nazis in occupied France and operates a movie theater. Yeah, Quentin loves old movie theaters, so how perfect is it that so much of the film is set in one?

Except for a few background-fillling-in flashbacks, though, the story is told in a straight linear fashion, which is not a Tarantino cliché at all. Instead of jumping around, as he’s done in so many other movies, this one is a direct line from past to present. Perhaps he focused on the “table dialogue” so much to counter the fact of such a simple story?

Who knows?

I loved it. Not as much as Kill Bill: Vol 1 and Kill Bill: Vol 1, mind you, and not as much as Pulp Fiction… but still, I loved it.

I can’t really tell you why I didn’t like 500 Days of Summer without giving away the ending. I mean, probably. So there may be spoilers in this review. In fact, I may, at one point, tell you how it ends, describe the scene to you. But without context, you may draw the wrong conclusion about what I’m describing; you won’t know for sure unless you read the whole review, spending as much time as I want to spend writing this out, only to find that you’re wrong.

If I did that to you, would you enjoy it, think that it was a surprise and a delight, worth the time? Or would you feel cheated, forced to focus on something, an event or character that ultimately proved to be nothing more than a distraction, a cipher?

And what would you think of me for having done all that? I may seem clever and charming; or I may seem mean spirited. It all depends.

There are categories of jokes like that. They’re called “shaggy dog stories”. If you don’t want to click the link, a shaggy dog story is one in which the narrator tells a long, involved story with lots of repetition and digressions, all to distract you from the horrible anti-climactic ending or, worse, the awful pun that has nothing to do with the story you’ve been made to listen to.

Some people find shaggy dog stories funny. Those people are usually the ones telling the story, or people who enjoy telling them. Often, the reaction to hearing a shaggy dog story is not laughter, but a groan, for having fallen for the setup and not seeing the punchline coming. The listener groans because they’ve been had.

Likewise, at the end of “500 Days of Summer” I felt like I’ve been had, like I’ve been made to sit through scene after scene that almost promised me character development, that gave me tantalizing glimpses of the possibility of Summer’s (played by Zooey Deschanel) having some kind of inner life or rational motivation for doing all the things that Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) saw her doing to him.

Sadly, no.

Very little reason is given for Summer doing the things she is shown doing in the movie. And, worse, several times she’s shown doing the same thing in different scenes, but the second time is given different context, so the meaning of her actions are changed. There are times when this writing technique is clever and used to good affect, but trust me, this movie is not Rashômon and the director is not Kurosawa.

In fact, Summer is not a real person; the character only exists to give the needy, clingy and lack-witted Tom something against which to run the gamut of emotions from ecstasy to despair. She is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl without even the semblance of a mind or life of her own.

Worse, with all the post-modern flashbacks and scenes with more than one interpretation and fourth-wall-breaking dance numbers, the writers chose to use a freakin’ narrator. Narrators that are not identified as one of the characters in the film generally imply an omniscient viewpoint; but of course, nothing is to be trusted in this movie. Is the narrator up front? Are we to believe his descriptions of things? To the writers’ credit, they have the narrator tell us at the beginning that this is a boy-meets-girl story, but it is not a love story. To their detriment, however, they also tell us that Summer is special and amazing, without giving us much more to go on than Zooey Deschanel’s impenetrable charm and giant soulful eyes to validate that.

Seeing Summer’s hand, complete with wedding ring, resting on Tom’s hand on a park bench means nothing without context. Hearing her say things like “I’m not looking for a relationship right now” and then randomly kissing Tom in the copy room at work is the kind of story self-absorbed and emotionally-fragile men tell, not the kind of thing real living breathing women do. Tom’s view of Summer is distorted by the writers’ lack of imagination; it feels very hateful. I have no doubt that there are lots of men who will tell me that they, too, have known women like this; the “seduction community” is almost entirely made up of boys with exactly that take on women. But I am sure that the opposing stories, from the feminine side, would talk about stalk-y, grasping boys with bottomless pits of need to be filled. Or not filled.

My want for a believable set of characters, likewise, remains unfilled by this movie. But I kinda knew that going in.

This movie is Not Recommended.