Film Freak Central

Moneyball (2011)

***½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright
screenplay by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, based on the book by Michael Lewis
directed by Bennett Miller

by Angelo Muredda Moneyball arrives after years in development hell with nearly as much baggage as the Oakland A's. A Steven Soderbergh project scrapped at the eleventh hour of pre-production and inherited by a high-pedigree team composed of Capote director Bennett Miller and scribes Steven Zaillian (the lone holdover) and Aaron Sorkin, it's as much a reinvention of the discarded film--apparently pitched as a data-saturated docudrama--as it is an adaptation of Michael Lewis's best-selling non-fiction book of the same name. No matter: Soderbergh successfully redirected his energy into Contagion, a snappy procedural lobbed to the same stats fetishists who might've warmed to his Moneyball, while Miller has delivered an affecting and deceptively conventional baseball movie that works on its own terms. Oscar-bait it might be, but Moneyball is surprisingly fresh, especially in how it shifts focus from the unexpected winners that most sports stories fawn over to a few perpetual losers who live off the wistful fumes of second-place finishes.

Veronica Guerin (2003)

*/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Gerard McSorley, Ciarán Hinds, Brenda Fricker
screenplay by Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donoghue
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw By the end of the piece, the only thing missing is John Wayne in ill-fitting Centurion garb drawling "I do believe she truly was the son of God" over the corpse of slain journalist Veronica Guerin (Cate Blanchett), so at pains is Joel Schumacher's tedious spectacle of a hagiography of Guerin to paint her as some sort of sainted martyr. Veronica Guerin is horrible, really, a passel of forced dramatic slow push-ins framing Blanchett's mannered performance (in a Princess Diana haircut, no less, to really ramp up that pathos) all of insouciantly arched eyebrows and saucy eyeballs and centered dead and soft-lit like a Giotto effigy. Much is made of Guerin's print peers looking down on her, then a closing title card offers a statistic on the number of journalists killed in the line of duty, the suggestion being that journalists are sniffy elitists who don't like someone who can't write, has no background or experience in journalism, and takes unnecessary risks with themselves and their families--and that journalists are heroes regularly martyred by their thirst for truth. You really can't have it both ways, and that lack of focus isn't ambiguity so much as confusion brought about by a mortal dose of self-righteousness.

United 93 (2006)

***½/****
starring Lewis Alsamari, JJ Johnson, Trish Gates, Polly Adams
written and directed by Paul Greengrass

by Walter Chaw I guess when you talk about a movie like Paul Greengrass's United 93, you have to talk about the propriety of the project: Whether death, fear, and suffering at its most obscene is something we should try to know or gratefully shield ourselves from. Should 9/11 already be an Oprah special and a national holiday? It's an essential question, a defining one--and on either side of the question's divide, you'll find one person who thinks we should see our soldiers' caskets draped in American flags and another who feels that seeing war casualties is somehow bad for morale or, if our fearless leaders are to be believed, somehow unpatriotic. Ignorance is as blissful now as it ever was--it's one aphorism the film honours. Another is that you reap what you sow: The belief that our civil liberties, for which we eagerly fight and die to protect on foreign soil, are the first things we seem to sacrifice in times of peril (including a vocal rabble wondering if we're "ready" for a 9/11 film), is far stickier when the proposition before us is that Islamic extremists don't like us because of that which defines us as Americans. ("They hate our freedom" is the party line.) So when our government begins to infringe on our personal freedom after a meticulously organized and coordinated terrorist attack took us completely unawares (I still recall with a shudder how then-Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice claimed that no one could have imagined it) more than four years ago, that means--more than over twenty-one hundred military dead (and counting) does--that we've already lost.

The Counterfeiters (2007) - Blu-ray Disc

Die Fälscher
***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Karl Markovics, August Diehl, Devid Striesow, Dolores Chaplin
screenplay by Stefan Ruzowitzky, based on the book by Adolf Burger
directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky

by Bryant Frazer This year's winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) is defined in equal terms by what it is and what it isn't. It is a Holocaust survivor's yarn told with a certain playfulness and no lack of moral consideration, but it is not really a concentration-camp movie; mostly, it feels like a prison caper yarn that happens to take place in Sachsenhausen. The film's weight comes from the things we know about but cannot see within the frame: those haunting images of emaciated Jews, the walking-dead stares of the prisoners consigned to the gas chambers and crematoria, the tragedy of systematic genocide.

Cadillac Records (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Adrien Brody, Jeffrey Wright, Gabrielle Union, Beyoncé Knowles
written and directed by Darnell Martin

by Bryant Frazer Curiously underdistributed on its release last December, when it opened on fewer than 700 screens across the U.S. despite a reasonably big-name cast, Cadillac Records is a labour of love that has problems but is hard to dislike. Writer-director Darnell Martin is probably too ambitious for her own good, struggling to mount not just a Muddy Waters biopic and/or the Chess Records story, but also a conflicted look at the business acumen and chicanery that attended the rapid evolution of rock-and-roll in the 1950s. While the film suffers from kitchen-sink syndrome, at its best it's an engaging piece of advocacy for the bluesmen who transformed American music.

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) + Kramer Vs. Kramer (1979) - Blu-ray Discs

MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY
****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Charles Laughton, Clark Gable, Franchot Tone, Herbert Mundin
screenplay by Talbot Jennings, Jules Furthman, Carey Wilson, based on the novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
directed by Frank Lloyd

KRAMER VS. KRAMER
****/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Jane Alexander, Justin Henry
screenplay by Robert Benton, based on the novel by Avery Corman
directed by Robert Benton

by Alex Jackson Frank Lloyd's 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty and Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer don't have much in common other than that they both won the Oscar for Best Picture and that they are both totally fucking awesome. I know it sounds weird for me to apply fanboyish hyperbole to such conventionally middlebrow fare, but I love these films in much the same way I love Star Wars or the Indiana Jones movies. One is a lavish, two-million-dollar literary adaptation starring Clark Gable and Charles Laughton; the other is a minimalist Issue Movie about divorce (apparently aiming to do for the dissolution of marriage what Gentleman's Agreement did for anti-Semitism) starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. Evidently, they represent what the Academy believed was quality cinema at the time.

Amadeus: Director's Cut (1984/2002) - [Two-Disc Special Edition] DVD + [DigiBook] Blu-ray Disc

Peter Shaffer's Amadeus: Director's Cut
***/****
DVD - Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
BD - Image B Sound A Extras A
starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Simon Callow
screenplay by Peter Shaffer, based on his play
directed by Milos Forman

by Walter Chaw Bringing the highbrow to the status-hungry middle in the same way as those "Bach's Greatest Hits" collections and the awful faux-llies of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Milos Forman's bawdy, jittery adaptation of Peter Shaffer's fanciful play "Amadeus" is not so much about Mozart as it is about genius and its burden on the mediocre. Mozart (Tom Hulce) is an adolescent boor touched by the hand of God; Emperor Joseph's (Jeffrey Jones) court composer Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) becomes obsessed and desperately jealous of Mozart's gift, leading him to the madhouse and confessions of murder. Amadeus works because of Forman's gift for the seedy (and portraying asylums--he directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, after all) and because of Abraham's deeply-felt performance.

A Beautiful Mind (2001) [The Two-Disc Awards Edition (Widescreen)] - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A-
starring Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Bettany
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the book by Sylvia Nasar
directed by Ron Howard

by Walter Chaw Mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. gained his reputation in theoretical economics and/by discerning patterns in impossibly complicated numerical models. A Beautiful Mind, a film based very loosely upon his life, likewise deals with theoretical economics (in regards to Christmas box office), but offers bland predictable patterns in place of complexity. For example, because this is DreamWorks'/Universal's Oscar tentpole, the running time falls safely in the "adult contemporary holiday respectable" range of 130-145 minutes, and it features a big name actor in a role that requires him to be some combination of mentally disabled (I Am Sam, Forrest Gump, Rain Man), insane (As Good As It Gets), or that delicate combination of the two: a genius (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester).

American Gangster (2007); I'm Not There (2007); No Country for Old Men (2007) + No Country for Old Men ['08 BD + 2-Disc Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Discs

AMERICAN GANGSTER
***/****
starring Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cuba Gooding, Jr.
screenplay by Steven Zaillian
directed by Ridley Scott

I'M NOT THERE
***½/****
starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere
screenplay by Todd Haynes & Oren Moverman
directed by Todd Haynes

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
****/****
'08 BD - Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
CE - Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly Macdonald
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Consider the moment when an overly enthusiastic police search results in the demolition of a replica dresser commissioned by Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) for the Carolina plantation he's bought to house his extended family. In one canny instant, there's the suggestion that nothing ever changes: the things we lose in time we will always lose. The image Ridley Scott provides for us as he moves the Lucas clan into their new digs is loaded and dangerous, with a group of African-Americans walking up the lush green lawn of an antebellum plantation--usurpers of a corrupt American Dream that, American Gangster posits, is still corrupt and in essentially the same way. True, there's a cartoon bogey in a New York cop (Josh Brolin) erected as the straw man for all of New York's Finest who's profiting off French Connection junk (gasp, he shoots a dog, and probably also smokes)--but the real villainy in the picture is the idea that the path to true status and achievement in the United States is on the backs of not just others, but entire groups of others.

Elite Squad - The Enemy Within (2010)

Tropa de Elite 2 - O Inimigo Agora É Outro
***/****
starring Wagner Moura, Irandhir Santos, Andre Ramiro, Milhelm Cortaz
screenplay by Bráulio Mantovani & José Padilha
directed by José Padilha

by Angelo Muredda Early in Elite Squad - The Enemy Within (hereafter The Enemy Within) José Padilha's blustery follow-up to his 2007 hit Elite Squad, deluxe cop Lt. Colonel Nascimento (Wagner Moura, Brazil's answer to Mark Ruffalo) promises to give us a history of Rio that happens to coincide with his life story. It's a tall order, but Padilha and co-screenwriter Bráulio Mantovani are ambitious and foolish enough to undertake it, returning to the favelas they brought to boot-stomping life in the first Elite Squad while shifting focus this time from drug lords to corrupt cops. No one would call their work subtle, but they strike a surprisingly watchable balance between Goodfellas-type insider confessional and incendiary political exposé, ditching the tight timeframe and local scope of the original and going for a more sprawling survey of Rio as Hell on Earth. Yet as much as The Enemy Within deserves solemn back-pats for its anaesthetized, everybody's-guilty project, it really takes off in brutally violent set-pieces that forgo neutrality. Cut loose from his earnest ambitions to tell an ambivalent political fable that clucks its tongue equally at anti-poverty activists and conservative law-and-order types, Padilha shows his directorial hand in testosterone-charged gunfights where either all the right people get shot or all the good ones go down as martyrs, and it's the hand of a vigilante sympathizer drawn to the romance of man-to-man violence. Fascist? No doubt. But as ideologically suspect apologies for rogue justice go, this one's pretty well-executed, and at times just plain more fun than the hemming and hawing of The Dark Knight.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) + Secretariat (2010) - Blu-ray Discs + Conviction (2010)

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER
**/**** Image A Sound B
starring Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones
written and directed by Woody Allen

SECRETARIAT
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Diane Lane, John Malkovich, Dylan Walsh, Scott Glenn
screenplay by Mike Rich, suggested by the book Secretariat: The Making of a Champion by William Nack
directed by Randall Wallace

CONVICTION
**/****
starring Hilary Swank, Sam Rockwell, Minnie Driver, Juliette Lewis
screenplay by Pamela Gray
directed by Tony Goldwyn

by Ian Pugh You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger represents the apotheosis of what shall now be called the New Woody Allen Average--those perfectly competent nothing movies that never rate more than two, two-and-a-half stars. I say that without a hint of sarcasm, and I say that as someone who considers Allen's work a primary influence--and as the guy who regularly defends Scoop. But I have to be honest: the New Woody Allen Average has become so predictably mediocre that I just can't take it anymore. The director's latest surrogate is another novelist, Roy (Josh Brolin), who's struggling to complete his latest book. It's putting a strain on his marriage to Sally (Naomi Watts), so he looks into the window of his pretty next-door neighbour (Freida Pinto) for romantic respite. Sally, an art curator, feels the same pressure, and casually drifts closer to her boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas). Sally's father Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) has left his wife for a prostitute (Lucy Punch), while his ex, Helena (Gemma Jones), retreats to spirituality, consulting a medium to find out where she stands in the great cosmic plan. It's a matter of "what you want" versus "what you take" in a race to see which floundering/philandering idiot can make the most tragic mistakes in the span of 90 minutes. Is it any different from Vicky Cristina Barcelona? When you break it down to its most basic components...no, not really.

Zodiac (2007) [2-Disc Director's Cut] - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards
screenplay by James Vanderbilt, based on the book by Robert Graysmith
directed by David Fincher 

by Walter Chaw The best film of its kind since All the President's Men, David Fincher's Zodiac is another very fine telephone procedural drawn from another landmark bit of investigative journalism--though more fascinatingly, it's another time capsule of a very specific era, flash-frozen and suspended in Fincher's trademark amber. Still, by the very nature of its subject matter, Zodiac deals in millennial anxieties: the un-'catchable' foe; the unknowable cipher; the futility of the best efforts of good and smart men; and the disintegration of the nuclear family smashed to pudding in a diving bell collapsed under the pressure of the sinking outside. The film is as remarkable as it is because it's about something as simple and enchanted as the human animal--not just bedraggled San Francisco detective Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), but also Zodiac's two female victims and, in a strange echo, two almost-invisible wives: Toschi's (June Raphael) and that of newspaper cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). Easy to say that actresses Raphael and Chloë Sevigny are wasted by being given nary anything to work with outside a terrified moment and a single speech, respectively; better to say that they assume the only function they can in a picture revolving around male cooperation and survival in a world that has reduced itself to the barbarous niceties of macho religions and arcane rituals. No accident that the Zodiac Killer's partiality to a medieval code is central to a key revelation.

J. Edgar (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Watts, Armie Hammer, Judi Dench
screenplay by Dustin Lance Black
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda To say that latter-day Clint Eastwood is an acquired taste seems slightly inaccurate, in that it implies a certain consistency on both the filmmaker's and the viewer's part: while even Invictus and the "Touched by an Angel" outtake Hereafter have their fans, you don't find many of them championing, say, the delirious Europop ballads that punctuate the former. ("And it's not just a game/They can't throw me away/I put all I had on the line," sings a mysterious crooner whose song is played in toto as Mandela descends his helicopter and paces the rugby field.) So let's propose instead that the master of sepia's recent output has been rather like a series of inkblots, in which perfectly smart people have seen completely different things. Some, for instance, find much to admire in the simultaneously milquetoast and monstrous Million Dollar Baby, which I've always read as Eastwood's last laugh at disability-rights activists for a failed lawsuit involving an inaccessible inn he ran years prior; others dismiss Gran Torino, his most watchable film since Unforgiven, as a rare spot of trash. All of this is to say, rather sheepishly, that I kind of liked fusty old J. Edgar, even as I recognized it as a train-wreck throughout. People have been very kind to Eastwood in this restless period, calling his choice of projects as disparate as Changeling and Letters from Iwo Jima "varied," but it's only with J. Edgar that I've understood their spirit of generosity: It's such a chameleonic grab-bag of ideas, good and bad, that some of it can't help but appeal, regardless of whether the entire thing works. (It doesn't.)

A Dangerous Method (d. David Cronenberg)

I wish David Cronenberg would direct a script of his own again. A Dangerous Method is recognizably Cronenbergian in its careful anthropology (DePalma-esque, too, in its frequent use of the split dioptre), but it's also a hit-or-miss period talkfest, identifying it as a Christopher Hampton adaptation of a Christopher Hampton play through and through. Distilling all the expected body-horror in grotesque and painful-looking contortions of her jaw, first-billed Keira Knightley does fine if exhaustingly histrionic work as Sabina Spielrein, a patient of Carl Jung's (the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender) who becomes his apprentice while in therapy. Jung corresponds with the more popular Sigmund Freud (Cronenberg muse Viggo Mortensen, ingeniously cast against type) over Sabina's case as well as his own neuroses, and Freud eventually tosses another patient Jung's way, protégé Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), whose maverick disregard for the ethics of transference and countertransference ultimately influences Jung's decision to embark on an affair with the sexually-repressed Sabina. On some level, A Dangerous Method is Cronenberg's first out-and-out comedy, and though a few of the laughs are of the historically-superior variety, more still are born of the characters using psychobabble to rationalize their every surrender to their urges. (Also funny: that Freud is never not smoking a cigar.) Which is not to say the movie is especially satirical or irreverent. Indeed, the dense debates that blossom between Jung and Freud as the former attempts to broaden the latter's horizons beyond the psychoanalytic movement reveal a passionate respect for the work of these men, if an ambivalence--to borrow a Freudian term--towards their differing points-of-view. (The split dioptre is generally employed here to keep both Jung and Freud in focus.) Unfortunately, things get a little bit repetitive and tedious, culminating in an ending that feels somewhat arbitrarily placed; as much as I love Cronenberg, I was going to suggest that this stagy material might've benefited from a showier director--but then I remembered Julien Temple's Pandaemonium. ***/****
PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations