Spoiler alert-o-meter: Less plot, more theme. Not to worry.
What? You didn't know these movie reviews were a limited time thing? Yes, I have completed my goal of writing movie reviews for a year. I didn't quite achieve one review per week, but came close. In my next post I'll do a wrap up of my findings and introduce my ideas for the next iteration/generation of this blog (as soon as I figure out what that will be).
Meanwhile, for your entertainment value: The Ides of March:
Politics is fun. Politics is for people who love this country and want to see all people do better. The betterment of humanity. Politics is not boring.
Only one of the above statements is true. Unless you’re a sadist and think politics is actually fun and you are a naïve idealist and believe our political system works as originally designed.
We all know politics is a calling for those who are ambitious, scrappy, and shrewd. But, on the plus side, politics is the most riveting realty show ever created. And it is available for consumption 24/7, in papers, online, on broadcast TV, at work, in your neighborhood, and in your family. Politics in America, for better or worse, is an inescapable fact.
The Ideas of March takes politics today and scrapes away a layer of filth so we can see the filth underneath. Not that we don’t know it’s there. But one thing we don’t always see are all the back room shenanigans, including how decisions are made and at what personal cost. The Ides of March does an admirable job of showing us the cost.
The movie stars heartthrobs of different generations. We’ve got George Clooney (who also directed) as Mike Morris, the democratic governor of Pennsylvania and presidential hopeful in the days leading up to the Ohio Democratic primary, and Ryan Gosling as Stephen Meyers, his devoted, super savvy media consultant. Morris is the frontrunner to win this primary, at least if you ask the voters of the state. This is a big primary, and he may still lose. And if he does, simple math dictates he will go on to lose the democratic nomination.
The mechanics of how this plays out include enough shady deals, misunderstandings, backstabbing, and double crosses to fill a pulp fiction novel. But Clooney isn’t trying to emulate Jim Thompson or James M. Cain, so much as ‘70s film moralists like Sidney Lumet and Alan J. Pakula. Clooney knows modern politics is the reality show we all love to hate, so he tries to bring a human face to the proceedings. He conveys well the aphorism that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and shows that politics is less about how to help people than how to get reelected. He uncovers the greed for power and the greed for money. And how you can leverage all the relationships you’ve fostered working in politics to ease into the private sector where you can make some real money.
That Clooney’s Morris is a flaming liberal is no surprise considering the character mirrors Clooney’s beliefs as well. That Morris makes missteps that eventually compromise his integrity aren’t very surprising either. But it is always a little shocking to discover that the public persona of anyone—politician, movie star, author—turns out to be the opposite of that which is projected. This is an idea the movie plays with throughout.
We see most of the action through the eyes of Gosling’s Meyer. At the start of the movie he is enchanted with Morris, believing in the same causes as his boss. But at every turn he is reminded of the true nature of politics by those around him, including Morris’s seasoned campaign manager, Paul Zara (played with nasty gusto by Philip Seymour Hoffman), who has worked on dozens of campaigns and knows exactly what must be done to win an election. Then there’s New York Times reporter Ida Horowicz (played by Marisa Tomei with a gusto that matches Hoffman’s), who will do what she needs to get a scoop about the candidates.
This wet dream of an indie-file cast is rounded out by Paul Giamatti as Tom Duffy, the campaign manager of Morris’s opponent who is playing a game Meyers may or may not be up to. Jeffrey Wright plays Thompson, a senator who has the delegates to help either candidate win the primary, but in return for his endorsement insists a cabinet position.
Then there’s Molly, an intern in the Morris campaign office. Molly is played by the young actress Evan Rachel Wood, who is something of a revelation here. Molly is a tricky part. At first you don’t understand her motivations. She sleeps with Meyer (well, considering Ryan Gosling plays Meyer, I guess I understand that motivation) but we wonder if she has an agenda. Wood has to convey naiveté, mystery, and fresh-faced idealism. Her agenda is that of an impassioned post adolescent, an innocent who gets wowed by the bright lights of celebrity and power. The series of revelations and events that befall Molly is a shame, but is only a symptom in the wider contagion of betrayal and corruption on a national campaign trail.
The refreshing part of The Ides of March is that it does not stoop to portray us-against-them politics. Clooney—who also co-wrote the screenplay with Grant Heslov, based on the play Farragut North by Beau Willimon—is not interested in the democrats vs. republicans Fox News bullshit. Party affiliation doesn’t matter, because all parties are equally corrupt be they democrat, republican, independent, or libertarian.
It’s more about how even the best political intentions and moral judgments get waylaid by the money-based political process. To say that process is worse than it’s ever been may be hyperbole. But it ain’t great, and this little nasty insider slice of modern politics just wants to remind you that our process is alive and chugging along, if not particularly well. Not that we need reminding, especially as we collectively prepare to trudge into the mud of the upcoming election year.
Caution: this preview gives away more plot points than my review:
Stats:
Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Tuesday, October 11th, $6bargain night! Viewed with Liz! Snack: I splurged with two apple donut holes from Parley Farms, and 1 apple, cut and bagged.
Coming Attractions:
Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1. Surly teens in the Pacific Northwest. Some are vampires. Some are werewolves. Many are shirtless. Some are pale. Somebody gets pregnant. All hell breaks loose.
Young Adult. The welcome return of Charlize Theron, playing a type of obnoxious, crass character that Cameron Diaz nailed earlier this year in Bad Teacher. Theron plays a young adult author returning to her hometown to bag an old crush, who happens to be married. Co-starring the always welcome Patton Oswalt. From 'Juno' writing/directing duo Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Completely superfluous version of the original. Looks about the same: story, look, characters, even accents. Why bother? I'm surprised such a visionary director as David Fincher took this on. Plus, the original wasn't that hot either. I chock it up to a lame, average story.
J. Edgar. Clint Eastwood is still churning out movies. This one stars Leonardo DiCaprio as the titular character. His aging makeup looks like a triumph, if incredibly creepy and disconcerting.
The Rum Diary. Ah, this is a movie I can get behind. Johnny Depp stars in the adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's first novel. It has a playful vibe, a beautiful look, Johnny looks swell, and so do the ladies. Something to do with a journalist covering a story on a Caribbean island. Although that plot seems secondary to the drinking and various other Hunteresque shenanigans. Luckily it does not offer the same vibe as Gilliam's misfire Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Spoiler alert-o-meter: Some thematic spoilers, but the trailer probably gives more away.
The first ten minutes of Drive are mesmerizing. In them we follow Driver, a stunt driver and mechanic by day, while he goes about his moonlighting job: driver for heists. He picks up the shady characters doing the job, drops them off at their location, waits at the wheel while watching his watch and listening to the Lakers game and the police scanner both. After his clients get back in the car he drives them away through the Los Angeles streets.
He follows the speed limit and stops at red lights. At one point he’s made but he out maneuvers the police copter. He’s still listening to the game, and makes it over to Inglewood as the game lets out. He parks in the underground lot just as thousands of fans leak out of the stadium. He walks away, wearing a Lakers cap, his clients free to mingle into the crowd.
It’s a bravura sequence, a daring move after another long summer of digitized aliens, wizards, and robots. What fourteen-year-old boy would sit still for this? Well, this fourteen-year-old boy-in-his-heart for one, who remembers the movies of Michael Mann from the eighties and nineties. Thief springs to mind, or Heat, as Driver explains to his prospective clients that he will give them a five minute window in which he is unconditionally theirs. But they are on their own in the minutes leading up to and following those five. This guy is good. This guy knows when to walk away, like any good Mann character. Like Frank, the James Caan character in Thief. Like Neil McCauley, the Robert DeNiro character in Heat.
If the thematic and stylistic elements of Drive’s opening scenes aren’t enough to persuade you that we’re watching a movie from another era, a time where the anti-hero had a code, then just wait for the titles and music. The typeface is hot pink and cursive in a way that recall many eighties movies. And the soundtrack. Contemporary pop songs that sound like refabrications of any number of pop songs that trailed through the Top Guns and Flashdances.
And that’s not all. Michael Mann, for those who might have forgotten, invented the musical montage for Miami Vice, where Crocket and/or Tubbs would cruise Miami looking fashionable and moody. Well, director Nicolas Winding Refn (Valhalla Rising, Bronson) working from a novel by James Sallis, pulls out the stops of his Mann fetish here. There are beautiful shots of the Los Angeles skyline, understated wide-frame compositions that understand aspect ratio, and character placement that all but mimic some of Mann’s framing.
Driver meets his neighbor, Irene (the eternally sixteen-looking Carey Mulligan), and her little boy, Benecio (a natural Kaden Leos). The boy is brown, the girl is white. The husband is in prison. Irene brings her car to the car repair place where Driver works. The owner, Shannon (Bryan Cranston), Driver’s boss and partner in the rest of his driving work, sees their potential and sends Driver to take the lady and her kid home. A gentle, chaste relationship develops, and Benecio falls for Driver as a surrogate dad.
Meanwhile, Shannon goes into business with two aging gangsters, Bernie Rose and Nino, played by Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman respectively, both having a damn good time playing bad. Bernie fronts money to Shannon for a car that Driver will drive on the stock car circuit.
Irene’s husband, Standard (ha), is released from prison. Standard is weary of his wife befriending the beau hunk from next door while he was incarcerated, but soon Driver is caught up helping him pull off a pawn shop heist to pay off an old debt.
The movie is, in its way, quiet up until the moment the husband walks out of the pawn shop, heading toward Driver’s getaway car. The gunfire that erupts in this scene is shocking. Not visually necessarily, but as a new loud effect on the soundtrack. From here the movie shifts from a purely Michael Mann fantasy, into a more 1990s violent revenge drama. There’s still some of that Mann brute nihilism, but the violence onscreen makes your average Mann production seem like a Disney movie.
At moments it seems Tarantino-derivative, except Drive is devoid of humor. I hate characters in movies like this that don’t carry or use a gun for ethical reasons. Here Driver refuses to use a gun. Which means what? Which means he’ll use a knife or anything else he gets his hands on. That seems to go for the aging gangsters as well. I hate knives, but here much of the violence comes at the hands of knives, boots, straight razors, hammers, and a fork. Ouch, that smarts.
The blood starts flowing moments after Driver escapes the botched heist and holes up in a motel room. Two thugs with shotguns ambush the room, and the shots ring out with a thunderous clarity. Again, shocking. And now the visuals catch up to the soundtrack. The bad guys do not make it out alive. Thankfully their deaths come hot and fast, in hairy sticky glee, via angles showing carnage from above and through doorways. I didn’t understand its purpose. Maybe to bring home to Driver just the kind of stuff he has been perpetuating but always somehow avoiding.
There’s no dwelling on the blood in Drive. But there’s plenty of it to look at, so by the time I was registering, say an impaling on the left somebody would get shot on the right. It’s a trick of seeing a movie projected on a screen; your eyes have to search out the action. Different from watching TV where you’re looking straight ahead and everything scopes out within a radius that your eyes don’t need to adjust to.
Driver has a code, and while all breaks up around him, he sticks to it. So do the aging gangsters, who are weaved into the plot in a surprising way (don’t stop to consider these plot points because they easily can become plot holes). The ending is ambiguous, and brings us back around to a Michael Mann ending. It’s on par more with Thief than Heat or Manhunter.
Ryan Gosling’s lunkhead accent, Yonkers by way of Palookaville has served him well in recent movies like Crazy, Stupid, Love and Blue Valentine, fits in well with Drive’s quiet, blue collar loner. This may be the first time Gosling’s taken a role that adds action to the mix, and he handles it well, hinting that with every move Driver makes there’s a rationale behind it. Carey Mulligan plays it quiet as well, as a woman who cannot act on her feelings, caged as she is by a situation beyond her control. She still looks about sixteen, but here it doesn’t take away from story.
Driver is a well-made and enjoyable action flick, if you don’t mind a bit of the old ultra violence.
Red band trailer:
Stats:
Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Sunday, September 18th, 11:50 am. Viewed with Amanda. Snack: Half a peanut butter Builder's Bar - the half that didn't FALL ON THE FLOOR!
Coming Attractions:
50/50. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has cancer. His buddy Seth Rogen is there to support him, and try to get him laid. Hilarity ensues. It looks funny, and heartfelt. Based on the true-life story of the movie's writer, Will Reiser, and his real-life buddy, Seth Rogen.
Abduction. Out this weekend. The actor from Twilight finds his face on a milk carton (bummer) and goes on an action packed trip to figure out who he really is. John Singleton directs this dazzling actioner.
Dream House. Freaky story of a family that moves into a new house. Soon they discover the family that lived there before was murdered. Soon Danial Craig as the father and husband starts to have visions suggesting he is the murderer and his family is actually the originally murdered family. Damn! This is full of atmosphere and dread and could either be laughable or shocking. Co-starring Rachel Weisz and Naomi Watts.
Killer Elite. Also out this weekend. Lame Jason Statham actioner co-starring Robert DeNiro and Clive Owen (how far the mighty have fallen). Not a remake of the Sam Peckinpah 70s flick.
Like Crazy. College-aged love affair between an American and a Brit. Starring Felicity Jones, Anton Yelchin, and Jennifer Lawrence.
Rum Diary. Ah, this is a movie I can get behind. Johnny Depp stars in the adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's first novel. It has a playful vibe, a beautiful look, Johnny looks swell, and so do the ladies. Something to do with a journalist covering a story on a Caribbean island. Although that plot seems secondary to the drinking and various other Hunteresque shenanigans. Luckily it does not offer the same vibe as Gilliam's misfire Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Spoiler alert-o-meter: A few spoilers ahead. As much as I'd like to give away the ending, I won't.
Love sucks. Love is like oxygen. Love is a drug. Love like wine. Love like blood. Eternal love. Put it all together and what do you get? Love that is both Crazy and Stupid. Crazy, Stupid, Love (CSL), the movie, wants it every way it can get it. It’s selfish and greedy. It’s romantic and realistic. It plays tricks but means well. It takes you to bed but makes you coffee in the morning and calls you later to see how your day’s going.
Steve Carell plays Cal, a shlubby corporate drone whose wife, Emily (Julianne Moore), sneaks off to the movies by herself when she’s not having an affair with a co-worker (Kevin Bacon). Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling plays chick magnet Jacob who falls for a pretty girl, Hannah (Emma Stone), who is the first to turn him down. At least initially. And so after they do get together he realizes she’s the first girl he wants to commit to.
What do these two disparate couples have in common? After Emily leaves Cal, he ends up at the same singles bar where Jacob plies his trade. Jacob takes pity on Cal and sees a chance to use his talents in a new way. He gives Cal a makeover by taking him clothes shopping and giving him some rules for picking up the ladies.
Carell makes a good schlub, has made a career out of it. Yet he cleans up nice, too. Part of the fun of watching Carell is his reaction to his surprising success with the ladies. CSL is like the 40-Year Old Virgin all grown up. Carell’s Cal is a good guy who married very early. His wife thinks their marriage has run its course, but he still pines for her.
The movie's most touching moments show Cal sneaking over to the house he used to live in to water the grass and trim the hedges, all the while peering longingly through the dining room window at Emily and their two kids. Julianne Moore is stuck in a thankless role of the wife who cheats. But, she’s just confused and feels her marriage has stopped offering her anything. She’s not a villain, nobody is. But she’s no saint, and nobody else is either. That’s the point. Love is all kinds of things, mostly messy, complicated, and with a horrible sense of timing.
Meanwhile, Cal’s son, Robbie (Jonah Bobo), is madly in love with his babysitter, Jessica (played with a clumsy, swanlike grace by former America’s Next Top Model contestant Analeigh Tipton), who, in turn, is in love with Cal. This is the touchiest, sloppiest type of love the movie has to offer. But CSL isn’t interested (much) in titillation, and doesn’t stray into this potentially cringy area of love – namely underage lust and inappropriate love.
How this all gets resolved is part of the fun of this movie. So, who am I to spill all the many beans? I’ll just say that there’s a kind of trick ending, a pre-ending ending that plays a card that is the trick of the movie. I don’t like tricks. If this movie were a book, and I read this penultimate scene, I would be mad at the book for withholding information from the reader. But movies, while they often pale next to their literary counterparts, can get away with these sleights of hand. Movies are often told from an omniscient perspective. And here CSL gets away with it.
What I like about the trick is that it plays out over a scene that, in any other romantic comedy, would be the final scene in which everybody makes up and goes off happy. Here, this scene devolves into chaos and happiness seems farther out of each character’s reach. It’s a wink to the audience, letting us know that it’s smart enough not to give in so easily. It then moves on to the real final scenes, where, while the bow is not wrapped so precisely or so prettily, it manages wraps a lot of the movie’s loose ends up satisfyingly.
Still, as I left the theater I was wondering how the story would have played out if this trick wasn’t played. Or had been played earlier in movie. But CSL is still a good night at the movies, and it’s nice to see a rom-com that treats its characters with some respect. The actors help a hell of a lot to make this watchable.
All the couples have chemistry together; absolutely necessary to any movie even scratching the surface of romance. Ryan Gosling plays a good lunkhead with a hot bod and an apparent heart of gold. Emma Stone turns on the charm and it seems that whoever she aims it at reciprocates with the right chemical mixture. Steve Carell and Julianne Moore are a realistic and likeable couple. You want everybody to be happy, but if getting a divorce falls under the happiness moniker, then let’s not get picky about how to define a happy ending.
Stats:
Theater location: The Island, Oak Bluffs, Thursday, August 11th, 7:00 pm. Viewed with Liz! Snack: Tire Tread Red Licorice.
Coming Attractions:
Change Up.It's already released and tanked. Nothing more to see here. Move along.
The Help. A young white woman interviews a small southern town's worth of black maids to tell their story. Feathers get ruffled. Some people hate it. Some people love it.
