NEBRASKA

Alexander Payne is either hit or miss with me.  Either his films are great – Perfect little character driven films with plenty of messiness that  still somehow lead to a satisfying conclusion or they are not – Long on look and atmosphere and great locations but without much of a plot or anything to say.

I consider ABOUT SCHMIDT (My favourite Payne film) and ELECTION to be the former while THE DESCENDANTS and SIDEWAYS (an awful film) to be the latter.

NEBRASKA falls in the middle not as consistent or interesting as AS or ELECT. but certainly much better than the other two.

What makes this a good film or better than a good film is the performances, the acting.  Bruce Dern is superb.  He understands the character he is playing not just what he thinks but how he would communicate (or not) with other people and that really makes this all character and no Dern.

I sincerely hope he wins the Oscar for best actor this year.  He deserves it not just for this but for all the great pictures he’s made.

However, there are a number of other great performances here as well.  June Squibb (who played Jack Nicholson’s wife in ABOUT SCHMIDT) plays an even louder version of that elderly nagging wife who is actually the one who kept the family together. Bob Odenkirk does an ensemble turn as the older newscaster brother.

Every Payne film has at least one totally villainous character.  Here it’s Stacy Keach and he is excellent almost stealing the film away from Dern and others.  What a solid acting career Stacy Keach has had.

If there is a weakness here, it is Will Forte.  He has no screen presence whatsoever.  I didn’t like him on SNL and I don’t like him here.  He is an absolute zero.

I am focusing on the acting because the script while working very hard to make us believe this is all real, can’t seem to shake off the Hollywood flaws of coincidence and neatness that rob real life of the “real” part.

But hey I liked the ending of this film a lot. I like the father/son relationship as it played out and I liked all the other characters.  A good film.  

   

THREE FILMS - INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, HIDE AND SEEK, COLD COMES THE NIGHT

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS is not the Coen Brothers best work nor is it their worst.  It looks great – The brothers really get the look and feel of the pre-Beatles early NYC 60’s folk scene right.  It’s an earnest film that seeks to build rapport for the characters in the audience’s eyes but in the end the characters (with the exception of a comedic long cameo by John Goodman) are unengaging and the film is inconsequential.  Pleasant but not in any way memorable.

HIDE AND SEEK

The Korean film HIDE AND SEEK starts off as a taut mystery full of foreboding and the first hour or so contains a number of genuinely creepy, memorable scenes.  It also sets up what seemed to be an interesting mystery.  However, after that it falls apart as the director seems  to have no experience how to bring a mystery/horror to a satisfying conclusion and instead shows the big reveal too early and with enough foreshadowing you’d have to be mentally disabled in some way not to get what was happening before the finale.

COLD COMES THE NIGHT

COLD COMES THE NIGHT is a bad movie but not a bad bad movie that is dull and stupid but rather a good bad movie stupid yes but so thoroughly saturated with its own badness it’s sort of entertaining.  This is a failed noir – forgettable and predictable with the stand out stinky part being Bryan Cranston’s Rocky and Bullwinkle Boris Badanov Russian accent.  It’s truly awful.  Stick with an American accent, Heisenberg! 

FOUR FILMS - GOOD OL' FREDA, RAZE, HERE COMES THE DEVIL, AMERICAN HUSTLE

GOOD OL' FREDA

No great Beatles insights but an extremely warm witness to history documentary about The Beatles secretary and fan club president, Freda Kelly.  The most interesting part was the relationship between The Beatles and their growing fan base in the early 60’s.  Lovingly chronicled, an enjoyable film.

RAZE

If you enjoy women beating the crap out of each other than this film is for you.  The fight scenes are well-choreographed, the set-up is handled well, the whole thing is paced competently leading to a satisfactory if downbeat conclusion.  The unpleasantness level is high which puts off the notion of repeat viewings.  Sherilyn Fenn has not aged well.

HERE COMES THE DEVIL

The ferocious and tense and highly imaginative first 20 minutes of this Spanish horror film unfortunately gives way to a predictable minor league PET SEMETARY storyline.  A lesser horror film.

AMERICAN HUSTLE

The phrase “style over substance” was made for this film.  Excellent care was taken with the 1970’s setting, the clothes, Christian Bale’s combover, Bradley Cooper’s beard but the end result is really a nothing film – no interesting characters, clichéd action, dull convoluted story.  Don't quite understand how their semi-fictionalized version of the ABSCAM scam figured into the overall film.  

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

There were times that I felt THE WOLF OF WALL STREET was trying to bully me into liking it as it is so full of energy and striking visual moments and high volume acting.  It is a film that makes me conflicted as far as how to review it.

Martin Scorcese is one of my favorite directors of all time if not my favorite and WOLF is visually dazzling full of wild scenes that come and go quickly as well as excellent narration that brilliantly sets up these scenes and lays on the irony thickly.  The story is told well.  Despite the almost three hour length, I was never bored.

However, it is a hollow film.  Unlike in past Scorcese films, the connection is not made between the actions and any sort of moral absolute.  An FBI agent investigating Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is introduced but is not given enough to say or do and so never really becomes the moral center.  As a result, the film feels just like decadence for the sake of decadence with no theme to tie it all together other than excess and greed.

Leonardo DiCaprio is an actor I’ve never cared for.  He just doesn’t have the acting weight or the talent to pull off challenging roles.   One of the themes running through WOLF is that the character he’s playing, the real-life Jordan Belfort, was from a working class family not from a wealthy old money family but DiCaprio, despite his heavy Brooklyn accent, looks much more like a blue blood elitist than the ambitious and self-made narrator.  Many of the secondary actors especially the always noxious Jonah Hill and an overacting Rob Reiner are extremely annoying.

In DiCaprio’s favor, he’s working from an excellent script.  In particular, the sales pep talks he gives his brokers were realistic and funny.  

The wall to wall sex, multiple orgy scenes, prostitutes, gay sex, DiCaprio with a candle in his ass along with the copious drug use (I don’t think I’ve seen drugs used as much and their use explained in such great detail as in this film) are linked to the amoral business dealings of Belfort but we need more of an explanation of the connection.  Money laundering is shown in great detail but to what end?

Still, I was never bored and, as I noted earlier, this film is so well made that I hardly noticed my complaints until it was over.  Greed isn’t just good, it’s addictive and necessary to the act of making money itself.  Okay maybe that’s the movie’s moral center.  A movie for further thought and review (which by provoking this means THE WOLF OF WALL STREET was a success).

    

THREE FILMS - THE HUMAN RACE, OPEN GRAVE, ANCHORMAN II

THE HUMAN RACE

Sort of a combination of Stephen King’s THE LONG WALK and an episode of Outer Limits with some elements of SAW.  Good characters and is suspenseful but a small budget hinders the effect of the narrative.  A bigger budget would have helped.

OPEN GRAVE

A strong opening and an intelligent handling of the momentum horror/mystery unfortunately gives way to zombie movie clichés.  Well made but it gets trapped in genre.  I did like the ending.

ANCHORMAN II

Laughed hard at the first film which is chock full of wild hilarity but this is pretty awful.  The rule of thumb here seems to be if it was funny in the first film, do it again ad nauseum x100.  By the end, I just wanted it to finish- it feels very long.  Repeating a joke doesn’t make it funnier (unless you’re Rodney Dangerfield).

      

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR

Lesbianism is hardly controversial these days and this overlong and melodramatic film pads the time between its raunchy and explicit sex scenes with lengthy periods of conversation which are meant to show through discussions of interests how its characters tick.

Adele Exarchopoulos who plays the feminine, sexually confused Adele is truly a beautiful young woman.  Lea Seydoux plays the older, more confident Emma who is comfortable with her lesbianism.

Re: Adele’s sexual confusion – One thing I did like about this movie is that it shows that sexuality is fluid, subject to change in some people (something I do believe).

Not a great film but okay, in the end more of a kitchen sink soap opera than a tale of sexual discovery.

PETER O'TOOLE RIP

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is my second favourite film of all time (next to TAXI DRIVER).  It is perhaps the best made movie I have ever seen.  At its center, in order to deliver its epic story of colonial betrayal and universal loyalty, is the acting of Peter O’Toole.  He creates an icon, becomes an icon, and has the acting chops, the spoken gravitas, to back it up.

O’Toole was the greatest actor never to win an Oscar.  His eight losses are a record.  This was more bad luck than anything else.  In particular what made O’ Toole great was his pronunciation, his diction, his enunciation.  He had one of the greatest speaking voices of any actor.

He was also a larger than life character  The blurring of the actor with his real life, the role and the man, was a key component of his embrace by pop culture and he told a great drinking story http://uk.movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-editors/peter-o-toole-80-best-drinking-stories-132719697.html

And aside from LAWRENCE another great O’Toole performance is, his sixth best actor nomination, is THE STUNT MAN....Demonic, mysterious, he keeps the audience guessing, in the palm of his hand.