Category: Film

Film: God's Pocket (2014) Directed by John Slattery

Actors’ directorial debuts tend to get snubbed – especially if the actor is a handsome man or a pretty lady. Examples abound. John Slattery’s debut which he co-scripted with Alex Metcalf is based on an eponymous novel by Pete Dexter. The film feels like drama in its first half but then its genre gets confusing as dramatic situations are resolved violently in an absurdist manner reminding of the devices of the Coen brothers (Blood Simple). The social layer of the film is still prominent but it is stylized and deviates towards the lurid with its “metonymic” settings switching between the pub, the funeral bureau, industrial sites… The problem with the confusing genre stems from the novel itself – Pete Dexter’s writing favors the sensational and the salacious over meaning and structure. “The Paperboy” (2012), also based on a novel of his, was a cinematic disaster. 
Given that, Slattery was actually able to convey more than the literary basis of his film – the picture oozes a kind of melancholic desperation which his low class characters couldn’t possibly articulate. 

Film: Boyhood (2014), Written and Directed by Richard Linklater

The film is a typical Linklater project — sensitive, over verbose, overwhelming with dialog, and laden with banality philosophical conversations. But this is how people articulate their lives and human self-insight always touches on the banal.
I loved the film and its lighthearted but also melancholic message that “growing up” is actually the content of one’s life. The main character’s parents were growing up together with their son and their life was as confused at the end as it was in the beginning. Going off to college does not put an end to Mason’s “boyhood” as he was well aware. It is just a “next step” in his life as it is in his mother’s life – only marking different stages. For the mother it is the realization that there might be less “next steps” left.

The fact that the film was shot over a period of 12 years with the same cast and we see the physical change the characters go through – the phases of “mutation” from cute, through puberty-ugly, to weird and uniquely beautiful – is crucial for the message of the film. The gradual building of one’s individuality, the formation of self, illustrated by physical change, lends truth to the film and makes acceptance of its philosophy on a visceral level.

Film: The Counselor, 2013, Directed by Ridley Scott

Cormac McCarthy, the author of the screenplay, is a graphomaniac. The proof is in works like “All the Pretty Horses”, “The Road” and finally – this film which helps highlight all the symptoms of the condition. Even a skilled director like Ridley Scott could not pull out a cogent ‘story’ not to mention some sense out of this pretentious textual mess. What do you think of this piece of wisdom: “When it comes to grief, the normal rules of wealth do not apply. Because grief transcends value. A man would give entire nations to lift grief off his heart and yet, you cannot buy anything with grief, because grief is worthless. What the …?!!! What does this mean? Nothing. It’s a strаin of the mind of a pseudo-philosopher and pseudo-writer who is desperately trying to be original…I should rest my case only after this quote but can’t help mentioning the drug lord citing the poet Antonio Machado. Not that it can’t be done, but Mr. McCarthy does it in a dumb way.

“No Country for Old Man” was a good movie only thanks to the Coen brothers who wrote the screenplay.

Film: Runner Runner, 2013, Directed by Brad Furman

After a streak of very bad movies, it was a relief to watch this one. The movie is not great, but it is skillfully written and well-acted. Its plot is a variation of “Wall Street” and “Boiler Room” – with the same main male characters in the trio – ambitions, entrepreneurial, and smart college drop-out, a mentor, a father. The details differ but the moral is the same – greed is not good. The dramatic quality of the two older films is better. The latest version is more entertaining than anything else. Some very snappy dialogue (written by Brian Koppelman and David Levien) contributes to the pleasure.

Film: "Labor Day", 2013, Directed by Jason Reitman

The film is based on some very bad novel and it is mind-boggling that Jason Reitman would try to resuscitate it. The result is so poor that at certain points, when the plot defies any logic, it turns into its own parody. Examples: mother is given her baby (whom we just saw being still-born) all dressed up and pretty?! ; father roams the pubs, baby in hands, looking for his no-good wife; convict and lonely mother mix together sugar and peaches with their bare hands in a scene, reminiscent of Ghost’s famous pottery scene…
The author of the terrible piece of “non-literature” is Daphne Joyce Maynard, the woman who became famous for being briefly involved with J.D.Salinger and tried to capitalize on that writing about his exploitation of young women, or was it the opposite, him being exploited by young women…
The sad thing here is that Jason Reitman was very desperate for a script, and that eventually he exhibited such a bad taste in choosing/writing this one. Early success, as J.D.Salinger points out, is treacherous.

TV: Happy Valley: BBC Drama Series, 2014 Directed by Euros Lyn, Sally Wainwright and Tim Fywell

The script (Sally Wainwright) has some of the ingredients of a soap opera – a child born of rape, his mother committed a suicide, the grandparents have problems accepting and raising that child, the latter exhibiting some violent tendencies. The father of the child is a brutal criminal but has a soft spot for the child, etc.
On the other hand the series’ plot revolves around an accountant, a looser-character reminiscent of the insurance salesman Lester from “Fargo.” This, and some of the dialog help distinguish the series from a soap-crime series. The directors are quite good but they could have been more thrifty with the flashbacks. The flashbacks, in their case, are just illustrations of what is going on in the character’s mind, which is always a symptom of helplessness to express a psychological process in alternative ways. In other words, the viewer should be able to deduce what is going on in the character’s mind via different, purely dramatic, subtle devices.
Good performances by Sarah Lancashire and Steve Pemberton.

Film: Chef (2014) Written and Directed by Jon Favreau

What a poor, pathetically weak script! I thought Jon Favreau was cool but with his last creation he shattered that impression .
The dialogue feels like its sole purpose is to provide linking between a series of product placements and occasionally resembles an interactive Twitter or Vine tutorial. The movie is classifiable as “comedy” only because it is NOT a drama or a tragedy but it cannot squeeze out a single laugh from a person with an average sense of humor. There is some bad acting there as well, quite understandably, since there is nothing to act.

If you want to watch a smart and entertaining foodie movie, the best so far in my opinion is “Dinner Rush” (2001), an independent feature film, written by Brian S. Kalata and Rick Shaughnessy,
and directed by Bob Giraldi.

Film: Nebraska. Director Alexander Payne, 2013

A little bit of a disappointment delivered by a favorite director… This is not “About Schmidt”…far from it. It lacks the drama, the surprise, the painful realization of a wasted life catching up shockingly with an unsuspecting Schmidt. In “Nebraska” the main character is too senile, too confused to be able to experience or sustain a drama. Actually, we don’t know if he is capable of experiencing anything. Impossible to identify with him. All the characters are predictable cliches. The black and white vision seems like a whim – carries no meaning. It oddly reminds of a Bogdanovich film without a Bogdanovich message…Bob Nelson’s script does not rise above the anecdotal. Overall – it seems like Payne took the path of least resistance and tried to do tell a story that he already knows how to tell.

Film: Inside Llewyn Davis. Coen Brothers

A very good film by the Coens and co-produced by Scott Rudin (who I don’t think has a bad film to his credit).

Loved the opening shot – a man with a guitar in the spotlight, small stage, people smoking in the audience…A nostalgic statement for the art scene of the 60s…

Oscar Isaac’s understated performance (and this coming from a theater actor!) is one of the alluring features of this film. His slightly retro look, expressive presence, facial features that could be associated with opposing qualities, somewhere between sensitivity, integrity or depravity and decay — definitely an actor with a future. Two great scenes – one, when he performs a very inspired song for a record producer who tells him “there is no money in this”; and the other, when he performs for his senile father. The camera (Bruno Delbonnel) in that latter scene is fascinating! This cinematographer is one heartbreaking story-teller.

Did Van Gogh know he was great even though he was not successful? How does an artist know if he is making great art or if he should just quit because he sucks. How does he know if he can’t even get to an audience… And he can’t get to an audience because there is always a “middle man.” There is always someone who thinks he “knows” if “there is money in it” and who decides the fate of art. Someone – who owns the pub, the stage, the label, or the studio. And, of course, there is always someone hungry – literally and metaphysically, someone desperate to make art, desperate to get on that stage, unable to quit.

Thankfully, there are artists like the Coens who can afford to make films like “Inside Llewyn Davis”.

Film: American Hustle. Directed by David O'Russel

“The Fighter” is David O’Russell’s best film so far. He has been trying hard to emulate his past success but in  vain.”Silver Linings Playbook” was a sugar coated interpretation of a not so bad debut novel by Matthew Quick. The book had more dramatic potential than the film could make use of. It threw out the drama and stayed on the level of  kitschy romance drama cliches.

“American Hustle” is another disappointment. It is not an important film, it is just another (among many) genre picture. It does not rise above the level of a con-scheme film and there are far better con films than this one. And no matter how big and powerful its PR campaign is and how many awards the film will win — this is not going to change. 
The story is contrived and the characters are contrived – hence the stress on physical disguise – the actors have nothing to play, at least they have to look different… Their performance is hinged on physical things – they are trying hard to impersonate some psychological types or to mask the lack of drama or psychological motivation using superficial trickery. They are trying to conjure up the psychological via the mechanical. In the case of Ms Lawrence it works -she is playing the trashy nagging wife cliche after all. Amy Adams’ character presence on the screen most of the time is dramatically and logically not justified. Her character’s relationship to the over-zealous FBI agent is illogical to the point of puzzling and mired in tasteless erotics. 
The film’s anti-corruption political pathos is so tired and unoriginal. 
There are films like that – all the components of good film-making are there but the aftertaste of having watched something futile and phony remains. 
The hype about “American Hustle” — inexplicable!

By the way, “The Fighter” was not co-written by D. O’Russell while for both “Silver Linings” and “American Hustle” – he co-wrote the screenplay. May be he should stop doing that.