Month: April 2014

Alright, a movie where Scarlett Johansson plays a mysterious alien who tries to see how fast she can lure men into her van must be the cat’s meow, right? She’s not shy about shedding her clothes, either. Piquing your interest, you say? Not a bad turnaround from Johansen’s role in Her, where we didn’t get to see her at all, but fell in love with her voice?

Johannson is swell in Under The Skin, Jonathan Glazer’s first film in nine years. Before you hear about the movie itself, though, how about if I told you the men she tempts to come with her into the van were not actors but men off the street who were secretly photographed with hidden cameras? They not only didn’t know they were in a movie, they didn’t recognize our Scarlet? Wow. She may be wearing a black wig, but hey, this is Scarlet Johansen here! The movie takes place in Scotland, where her clueless victims of prey with incomprehensible accents seem like the real aliens here–get it?…That, my dear reader, is probably ALL you will get in this film if you’re looking for any metaphorical or allegorical significance.

Although Under The Skin is based on a novel by Michel Faber, Glazer (Sexy Beast) strips out the back-story and essentially sends any exposition to the shredder. We do know these guys Scarlet lures routinely follow her into a mysterious house while she strips down, only to find themselves sinking into a pool of black ooze as they walk toward her. She wasn’t given an empathy transfer when transformed into her earthling body, either. Otherwise, she wouldn’t leave a crying abandoned baby on the beach while she crushes the skull of a surfer who tried to rescue the baby’s drowning parents. Scarlet comes around, though. She meets a dude stricken with “The Elephant Man” disease and actually shows empathy by complementing him on his beautiful hands. She even decides to try out this human romance thing when she meets a kind man, but finds herself with an embarrassing wardrobe malfunction, if you get what I mean. That’s about it for the “plot” here.

Not to worry, if you appreciate an intensely crafted work that weaves its eager-to-be-clever puzzle with unique special effects, an effective score by Mica Levi, and panache to spare. If, on the other hand, you’re averse to films that build their enigmas with undue deliberation and sparseness, be careful here. It’s easy to con yourself into thinking Under The Skin’s considerable mysteries yield to even greater heights of subtle wonder at film’s end. More likely, though, you may agree that the whole kit and caboodle merely turns up the ambiguity controls into Sillyland. Glazer, as in his last film, Birth, knows what he is doing in lulling us into a charmingly dread-laden alternate world that however fascinatingly meticulous in style, begs for more substance. While Under The Skin is considerably better than Birth on so many fronts, it shares with it a nagging preposterous quality that, like the film’s mesmerizing mood itself, is hard to shake.

3.0 Scarlet Johansson Picked Me Up–Ever Heard of Her? (out of 5 stars)

The highly uncommon Only Lovers Left Alive oozes atmosphere and maintains a perfect tone–down-tempo, suave, irresistible. It’s formal rigor leaves not a hair out of place. It’s three primary actors don’t merely raise the bar for vampire movies, they shatter it. Tilda Swinton nearly singes a hole in the screen, Tom Hiddleston is scary with screen presence, and Mia Wasikowska almost steals the show. The film makes any Jim Jarmusch film since Dead Man seem inadequate by comparison.

Swinton plays Eve, an all-wise immortal who lives in Tangier and gets her blood supply from John Hurt, or if you will, Christopher Marlowe. She provides a stability for her transcontinental lover, Adam, a desperately troubled, reclusive musical genius. They first greet each other on a twisted Skype exchange before Swinton decides to embark to his habitat in Detroit (night flights only, of course). Adam is holed up in a dingy apartment full of musical equipment and an unplugged refrigerator. His area of Detroit couldn’t be more remote, but he is nonetheless stalked by rock ‘n roll zombies. Back In the day, Adam, who’s got quite a temper, hung out with the likes of Lord Byron but these days he limits excursions outside of the apartment to visits to a hospital where he picks up highly pure blood from a nervous employee (Jeffrey Wright). His long musician hair tucked into a pony tail, and decked out in a surgical mask and scrubs, Adam is reminded by Wright that the stethoscope he carries is “from the 1970s and practically an antique.” His camouflaged identity survives his anachronistic error but not before he gives pause when passing a blood-stained patient.

Eve does her best to take the edge off Adam’s depression, which was intense enough before her arrival that he commissioned an obsequious hanger-on to bring him a specially-made wooden bullet to end his centuries of misery. It menacingly sits in the chamber of a revolver that Eve stumbles upon. Eve tries to impart her acquired wisdom of the ages (projected note-perfectly by Swinton) to uplift Adam. She lets Adam take her on long narrated drives through abandoned streets of Detroit with sets so barren and hollow they could be on Mars. However, any leveling out of Adam’s not-so-human condition is drastically blunted with the arrival of Eve’s notorious sister, Ava (Wasikowska).

Ava likes to take chances and continually disrupts the couple’s equilibrium with doses of vanity and immaturity. Once she arrives the movie picks up a head of steam that builds to a crescendo before an unexpected tragedy befalls Adam and Eve. A scene where she finally gets the two fuddy duddies out to a nightclub provides a hilarious jolt when the extremely secretive Adam hears his own music played over the club’s sound system.

Jarmusch, a master of deadpan since his brilliant first film, Stranger Than Paradise (1984), has constructed a feverish provocation that ironically drives its power from its restraint. Some may say his insistence in creating a cinematic world unique to his every whim and quirk smacks of self-reverential navel gazing. Rubbish! This little seriocomic tale will send your heart aflutter.

4.5 Sagacious Vampires Smitten With Solicitude (out of 5 stars)

When a director needs to mention not once but twice in the opening credits that his film is based on a true story, we might be wise to take it as a harbinger of what exaggerations lie ahead. In Walking With The Enemy, a man in Nazi-occupied Hungary actually impersonates a Nazi officer in order to save Jewish lives. In real life, Pinchas Rosenbaum impersonated a Hungarian officer of the fascist Arrow Cross. Director Mark Schmidt’s curious decision to up the ante to make him a full-blown Nazi ensures a bewildered viewer response. When Rosenbaum’s movie version, Elek Cohen (Jonas Armstrong), is hobnobbing with loose-tongued Nazi officers and one asks him the identity of his commanding officer, Cohen simply bolts and the next thing we know he miraculously appears back at his safe house. Cohen’s German must be so good and the real Nazi officers so casual about not demanding paperwork, that he is able to repeatedly save threatened Jews at gunpoint, or from being carted on the trains to a concentration camps. This despite his again running into the same Nazi officer who asked Cohen the unanswerable question.

Had Schmidt left the real story alone, he might not have conjured up memories of Hogan’s Heroes. As it is, Walking With The Enemy is a film that means well, projects much of the excruciating fear the Nazis were able to utterly instill in innocent victims, and yet falls short, veering toward the schematic at far too many turns. Cohen’s moony-eyed girlfriend (Hannah Tointon) doesn’t help things much. Cohen is lucky enough to stop her rape at the hands of two Nazi officers but incurs the wrath of her uncle (who runs the safe house) when he’s forced to bury their bodies in the building’s basement. Thus the origin of that Nazi uniform Cohen will rely on increasingly to try to ward off some of the evil.

Even the presence of Ben Kingsley as the proud and unblinking Hungarian Regent Horthy, is unable to withstand bloated plot contrivances, and dialogue that, were this not the most serious of subjects, could almost be called comical. When watching a film about Nazi horrors it would be more appropriate if uncomfortable feelings were provoked exclusively from the horrors depicted rather than from any eggs laid in their transference to the screen.

2.0 Ben Kingsleys Alert To An Unfortunately Ho-Hum History Lesson (out of 5 stars)

There comes a point in David Gordon Green’s Joe where main character Joe (an excellent Nicholas Cage) starts to act as if he might be insane. Hardly restrained up to this point, the film proceeds to take two steps forward and one step backward in terms of finesse. Green, whose sharp-focused observations ultimately fail to tamp down his film’s excesses, succeeds nonetheless in portraying a Southern rural world that feels as remote to us as would the culture of an alien planet. It’s a compelling, and equally frightening world.

Essentially a story of a surrogate dad coming to a young boy’s rescue in light of his abusive real father, Joe’s well-drawn characters compensate for a screenplay that however effective in spots, occasionally teeters over the line of the unlikely. Gary (Tye Sheridan, Mud) sticks around despite an alcoholic, shiftless dad, Wade (Gary Poulter). His equally out-of-it mom and traumatized mute sister need protection and although he’s only 15, Gary aims to give it. The family occupies (barely) a condemned shack. Gary, through his straightforward perseverance, finds work for himself and his dad when he encounters Joe out in the nearby woods.

Joe runs a crew of guys whose job is to illegally poison trees to set up a speedier destruction of the forest for lumber companies to then redevelop on the cheap. Equipped with highly poisonous herbicide (“don’t let any of it get in your eyes,” Gary is warned) and a “juice hatchet,” Gary works his way into the good graces of the much older (and exclusively African American) crew. His cantankerous dad, on a slippery slope to oblivion, messes up first day on the job. Early on Gary is willing to put up with more and more of Wade’s nonsense. But when Wade starts to beat his son and rob him of his earnings from his job, Joe gets increasingly involved. A villainous Willie (a scarred Ronnie Gene Blevins), seeking an irrational revenge on Joe, adds an additional minefield for the highly volatile Joe. “What keeps me alive is restraint,” the ex-con, temperamental Joe explains. Yet the injustices he witnesses here threaten to overwhelm him. His heart of gold ultimately finds no good solutions.

Aside from the excellent turn from Cage (his best role since Bad Lieutenant, 2009), Joe contains a unique casting coup. Joe’s work crew are (quite good) non-professional actors; casting Poulter as Wade goes one step further. Green recruited an actual homeless drifter for the role. His effective performance is rendered tragic given that Poulter died since the film wrapped–an ironic victim of an accident while drunk. The torturous Texas milieu depicted by Green not only saturates and consumes every scene of the film–it permeates outside the frame of the film as well.

3.5 Backwoods Badasses (With Barking Dogs Everywhere) (out of 5 stars)

Its blaring print advertisement quote compares Draft Day to Bull Durham and Field of Dreams. If you go in looking for a shred of either film, you’ll feel as cheated as this film’s Cleveland Browns fans feel after a pre-draft day trade. Brown’s GM Sonny Weaver Jr. (Kevin Costner) gives up three future first round picks in order to move up from the seventh pick this year to the first.

Costner almost saves the film. His usual understated cockiness and charisma try their best to divert attention from this flick’s many fumbles. He battles a meddlesome owner (Frank Langella), a brash, sarcastic coach (a curiously bland Denis Leary), and a mom (Ellen Burstyn) who shows up on draft day itself with an urn full of ashes and pressing issues. It seems Sonny felt compelled to fire his own dad as coach not long before he died. The film has plenty of these illogical strands, including a secret romance between Sonny and his salary-cap managing sidekick (Jennifer Garner). Their affair seems thrown in almost like an intentional-grounding pass.

Did I say Cleveland Browns? Yep, the ever-protective NFL has actually given the go-ahead here to use its logos. That is not as surprising as it could be since the film is bereft of even an iota of controversy concerning any of a myriad of tumultuous topics in the league lately. No concussions, felony arrests or flashing of gang-signs are to be found anywhere.

However, let us give credit where credit is due. The film does do a fairly good job of stoking us for some draft day negotiating drama–again, largely due to Costner. Not many actors could pull off making Draft Day’s improbable series of draft day moves seem credible. Watching him actually have so much fun in his aw-sucks conning of fellow GM’s (despite being shown in split screen ad nauseam) is a delight.

Then yet another reminder of how cliched this whole thing is actually runs the film out of bounds again. Chief among the culprits is a series of potential draftees who are paper-thin caricatures who ought to be penalized for roughing the viewer. And as if the film isn’s busy enough already, an insufferable intern keeps popping up with an urgent message every time Costner and Garner try to get alone for some conferencing. Director Ivan Reitman helmed Ghostbusters. Here, despite the film’s sporadic good energy, it sadly feels more like Gamebusters.

2.5 Personal Fouls Despite a Game Ball For Kevin Costner (out of 5 stars)

There hasn’t been an actor playing this “against type” since Bill Murray as FDR. In Dom Hemingway Jude Law stars as a blustery Cockney smart-ass safe-cracker with bad teeth and a few extra pounds on his gut. Law, usually solidly cerebral (the excellent Side Effects, Anna Karenina), here is big on balls and small on conventional wisdom of any sort. His mouth utters few words that wouldn’t be considered cursing. His near-suicidal fearlessness seems to possess its own private echo chamber.

Bringing to mind neither the literary giant nor the champagne of his namesake, Dom Hemingway gets out of jail after 12 years after refusing to rat on his criminal boss. Then Dom promptly scurries over to the workplace of the man who married his former wife and beats him to a pulp. Pulverizing her stepfather may not be the best way to get in the good graces of his estranged daughter, but Dom doesn’t think much about consequences.

Yet there remains something likable about Dom. Maybe it’s his crazy sense of humor or could it just be our rooting for Law as he gives a bravura performance in the face of an what starts out as an often mediocre script. Dom is always pissed off. Director and Writer Richard Shepard (The Matador) is often trying too hard to be outrageous; Law seems to be having a lot of fun keeping up. When he tells off that same very powerful man (Demian Bichir) he went to jail for, the sheer bombast of his bluntness stuns us.

As Law continues to surprise, Shepard too, surprises the viewer with a last third that sees his teetering plot suddenly solidly jelling. What could have been a maudlin turn once Law makes an extra effort at rapprochement with his daughter (Emilia Clarke, Game of Thrones), actually works thanks in no small part to a terrific performance by Law’s grandchild (Jordan A. Nash). Dom Hemingway’s scattershot playfulness finally earns its own payoff. Just when he seems a goner, Dom finds a new underworld power figure to insult and challenge. How can we not root for an underdog who, however flawed, is as certifiably crazy and brazen as this maniac?

3.5 Grumbling, Excessively Agitated Loop Jobs (out of 5 stars)

Although it’s disappointing politically that the bedeviling Donald Rumsfeld fails to emulate Robert McNamara in Errol Morris’ documentary, The Fog of War, it makes for compelling cinema in Morris’ new film The Unknown Known. Whereas McNamara gave plenty of mea culpa heft to his turn in the spotlight, Rumsfeld is instead intent on making sure the camera keeps focused on his outsized persona. The 81-year-old former Secretary of Defense seems happy to deflect, sidestep, and then finally define away the very essence of what may very well have been massive misjudgments concerning our country’s invasion of Iraq, and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Does a more complex Rumsfeld emerge from the film, or does he merely come off more entertaining? The film references thousands of memos Rumsfeld sent to employers, colleagues , and President George W. Bush, who eventually fired him after the 2006 midterms. Rumsfeld, always the consummate spinner and masterfully recalcitrant presence at his amusing press conferences, goes beyond merely justifying his often questionable actions.

Making a game out of examining definitions of everyday words and expressions, he shows no qualms about throwing up smokescreens of verbiage at every turn. Morris explores Rumsfeld’s slippery “There are things we do not know we don’t know” comment on the eve of our Iraq involvement. Rumsfeld’s only too happy to stand behind and extend the mumbo jumbo of the phrase, which seems to have justified his miscalculations over what is now generally thought to be at the very least a misreading of available intelligence concerning evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s turning to facile aphorisms (“the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” is another example) would be comical if it didn’t simultaneously feel so pathological.

Sure, Rumsfeld worked from what seem like noble intentions and from convictions established at Pearl Harbor, which he references in the film. It’s unsettling that it is still his view that he hardly made a wrong decision regarding Iraq (the farthest he goes to admitting wrong is the nebulous admission of a possible “failure of imagination.”). It should be sobering to him that the intensified anti-Americanism spurred by the Abu Ghraib debacle set back his regime-changing vision of a postwar Iraq driven by benign, Democratic influences, and that the decision to go into Iraq not only cost lives and money but sparked American public opinion to move much closer to isolationism (see Syria).

Are we to believe Rumsfeld’s true colors emerge once Morris trips him up? Although he denies the Bush Administration having claimed Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 911 attacks, Morris provides a tape of his having said precisely that. Then, after claiming he had no evidence of interrogation techniques at Guantanamo leading to bringing on on the abuses at Abu Ghraib, he clings to the same assumptions despite Morris showing him a memo that a panel had told him that very conclusion. Morris is his usual masterful documentarian. Rumsfeld continues on like a tone-deaf trooper intent on his self- preservation as much as on what may be an increasingly fragile old-school worldview. McNamara probably had no trouble sleeping after his turn in the Morris chamber. One wonders about Rummy.

4 Plopping Definitons and Word Games Every Which Way (out of 5 stars)

Ever the tricky jokester, Lars Von Trier mixes it up in his two-part opus, Nymphomaniac. The grandiloquent literary and fly fishing allusions of Nymphomaniac Part One and its hand-in-hand farcical shadings yield in Part Two to a much more somber tone. Sadomasochism rises to the fore as soon as you can say 50 Shades of Grey. Accompanied by dark underpinnings of being tortured, then subsequently herself torturing and extorting, our heroine, Joe, faces a not inconsiderable identity crisis. Von Trier seems to be daring us to hang in there when Joe (a nicely nuanced Charlotte Gainsbourg) seeks out a nasty bondage maniac (Jamie Bell) to ostensibly help her find her missing orgasm. He’s one sick, flogging, dude, if that sort of thing interests you. Then her confessor Seligman (the usually excellent Stellan Skarsgard) snaps us back to more allusions. This time it’s the schism between the Eastern and Roman church and its symbolic struggle between celebration and guilt–if you can swallow that.

While Nymphomanaic Part One tries to be funny, Part Two achieves the uneasy feat of combining a smidgen of intentional funny with the far more common unintentionally funny. Then things quickly become downright glum. A scene seemingly straight from Von Trier’s Anti-Christ reappears when Joe abandons her baby in the middle of the night to go off to her therapy of whips and ropes, only to have the child’s father, Jerome (Shia LaBeouf), unexpectedly arrive home to find the kid venturing onto an open ledge. Not long after Joe is out on the street. A meeting with a bill collector from hell (Willem Dafoe) inspires her to apply her talent for knowing men’s sexual vulnerabilities to becoming a successful collection agent. That is until a highly ridiculous coincidence thwarts her momentum. Along the way she has recruited a 15-year-old apprentice, P (Mia Goth), who will make LaBeouf’s hot-and-cold act look mild by comparison. Part I of Nymphomaniac was merely pretentious around its edges. Part Two asks an arm and a leg’s worth of suspending our bullshit detector… And I usually highly admire the intermittently genius provocateur Von Trier (Breaking The Waves, Melancholia, Dancer In The Dark, Dogville).

Von Trier has promised five-and-a-half-hour director’s cut. I doubt I’ll seek further elucidation by sitting through all of this again. While there are moments of brilliance in each part of Nymphomaniac–in Part One, Uma Thurman’s powerful scene; In Part Two, Joe’s pair of African sex partners interrupting their coitus for an hilarious argument while she looks on–this is largely a disappointing affair. I wanted to root for Joe when she walks out of a 12-step program by telling off the whole insipid group, and proudly declaring herself not a sex addict at all but a nymphomaniac, but I equally sensed the likely tragic outcome awaiting her. Von Trier can be excellent in pushing his audience in paradoxically opposite directions simultaneously. Although digressive and manipulative,

Nymphomaniac Part 2 portrays an edgy portrayal of sex addiction and its human toll. Unfortunately it also reeks of a director’s vanity supplanting a more considered approach. No one is asking Nymphomaniac to be pretty. Or sexy. Just don’t bash us over the head with pitch-black (often boring) excess. It would have helped if the film’s ending was more than a cheap trick that will have you cursing (and laughing) as you head for the exit.

3.0 Von Trier Goes Off (out of 5)