Month: December 2015

Flooded with luminescence, Todd Hayne’s Carol is a rapturous example of what occurs when sumptuous cinematography and art direction meet superlative acting. Rooney Mara is absolutely devastating as Therese, a young aspiring photographer who takes on a job in a department store in the early 1950s. She meets the much older, more talkative and aristocrat-like Carol (an excellent Kate Blanchett) and the two become friends, and then more than friends.

Haynes achieves an uncanny recreation of the period. Cinematographer Ed Lachman shot the film on Super 16mm film. Their efforts produce a Film that is often eerily quiet, yet contains deep emotional detail conveyed through heightened nonverbal looks, glances, and facial gestures. The budding relationship and its evolution are oh so gently and unmistakably brought to the screen. Likewise, the era’s impossibly frustrating intolerance for the two women’s forbidden love is also clearly defined. Child custody, the nastiest of revenges, serves as the ultimate weapon against their relationship. Carol, whose one overriding trait is at first confidence, faces a disorienting challenge and a heartbreaking sacrifice.

Simultaneously, Therese, at first vulnerable and wide-open, has grown up before our eyes. She encounters shocking experiences that bring emotional complexity into her life. Mara, who won the Best Actress award for Carol at Cannes, was very good in David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but here she displays a rare screen presence. She’s the girl-next-door alright, but then her depth, awakened by Carol and then seemingly a force of its own, incrementally reveals itself. The film is based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel, The Price of Salt, which was autobiographical and originally written under a pseudonym, and adapted for the screen by Phyllis Nagy.

Haynes also directed the excellent Safe and the daring Dylan biopic I’m Not There. His Far From Heaven is similarly based in the 1950s, but its melodramatic take on the films of Douglas Sirk puts it in a different hemisphere from Carol. Yet both films display Haynes’ gift for craftsmanship. With its visual elements complimented by a haunting score by Carter Burwell, Carol is a gorgeous film yet one whose beauty goes way beyond skin deep.

I watched this film more than two months ago and certain scenes have resonated with me practically daily. The film’s closing scene is so perfect and stunning, I wanted to stay in my chair at the theater for a few hours and simply savor it. Haynes does more with less, and you get the feeling Mara and Blanchett could have been equally effective had this been a silent film. When characters stay etched in the consciousness to this extent, and when a film can achieve shots that should be made into made into stills and put into museums, I’d say you have no less than a classic film.

Oppression + Out Of This World Craftsmanship / 1950s Style…5 stars (out of 5)

Like all superb art about significant political events, The Big Short holds a mirror to human beings caught up in forces beyond their control. Highly entertaining and often comical, the film focuses on several maverick financial rocket scientists who go against the grain, trying to take the upper hand in the way they know best. Betting that the economy will collapse long before the rest of their contemporaries catch on, the geniuses here may be wacko eccentric in completely different ways, but they know how to make money.

Michael Burry (Christian Bale), the most extreme of the bunch, appears to be rather far along the Asperger spectrum. He’s also in charge of investments for a California investment firm. He often works barefoot listening to death metal, and doesn’t pay much attention to his staff. His initial investigation of the mortgage housing bubble convinces him he must bet against what had been assumed to be a rock solid bonds contrived from subprime mortgages. The idea was so foreign at the time that Burry must go to the investment banks and ask them to create a new financial entity–in essence, bond insurance.

When Mark Baum (Steve Carell playing a fictional character based on Steve Eisman) and his testosterone team at a hedge fund associated with Merrill Lynch catch on to Burry’s actions, they are persuaded to follow suit and make a big bet of their own. They are spurred by a hyperactive Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling, based on Gregg Lippmann) who himself works at Deutsche Bank and sells them the bets. Before buying, Baum’s group runs to Florida to survey the housing market close up. Mortgages there are falling off trees with brokers bragging to Baum that they do little vetting of clients. At first Baum thinks they are “confessing” when in actuality, as one of his underlings glumly informs him, they are “bragging.”

The Big Short, directed by Adam McKay (Anchorman, Talladega Nights) from the bestseller by Michael Lewis, follows Burry, Baum, Vennett and a couple of “garage hedge fund” out-of-town kids with much bemusement. The intense Baum rages against the deception and imprudence of the system and seems to hate himself for making the bet but can’t back off. He brings some conscience to the film (as does Brad Pitt as a retired-in-disgust-with-the-system trader who agrees to help the two upstarts) but it brazenly keeps an ironically gleeful tone. Celebrities (Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, Anthony Bourdain, Selma Gomez) play themselves and break the fourth wall as they intersperse the narrative with cheerful explanatory asides about credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations (CDO’s) and other Wall Street mumbo jumbo. They are terms that the big cats fired up at least in part as a smoke screen for their riverboat gambling with money from unsuspected Americans’ savings and trust funds.

You won’t recognize Melissa Leo as a beleaguered Standard & Poor analyst who makes no apologies for the rating agency’s own lack of moral fiber. She joins a cast where the performances are uniformly excellent, with Carell and Bale especially noteworthy. It’s no easy chore to portray the movie’s heroes in a manner to win over the viewer with their sheer outsider moxie. After all, morally they are no better than the corrupt system they bet against. The financial crisis of 2008 cost the American public $5 trillion. Although each of these guys made a personal fortune betting that the economy would essentially collapse, their actions pale against the bigger picture of a financial system gone berserk (and, due to regulatory inaction, one poised to allow another crisis to happen again).

Greed Turns Itself Upside Down: A Wry, Sobering Look at Wall Street’s Near-Armageddon

4.5 stars (out of 5)

It took former NFL players to start killing themselves at an alarming rate for something to finally be done about it. Suffering from the deleterious effects of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) due to repetitive, jarring physical contact, some have shot themselves in the chest rather than the head in order to allow scientists to autopsy and study their brains. The trickiest of diseases, CTE cannot be discovered until after a patient’s death. According to Concussion’s coda, 28 percent of former players will eventually suffer its brain trauma, often including schizophrenia and early-onset dementia.

Such an epidemic collides helmet-to-helmet with a football league long in denial. Peter Landesman’s new film tackles the subject from the vantage point of Bennett Omalu (Will Smith), a Nigerian-born Pittsburgh forensic pathologist who, the film claims, both discovered and gave a name to this terrible affliction. While that is apparently not a particularly accurate depiction of his contributions, Concussion suffers more from what it leaves out than what it adds to Dr. Omalu’s saga. The film’s NFL villains are more figureheads than characters. Outgoing commissioner Paul Tagliabue is barely onscreen, and his replacement, the controversial Roger Goodell (Luke Wilson) has little more than a cameo.

When Omalu begins to realize he is being vilified and falsely discredited for his findings, the NFL’s coverup is largely remote and offscreen. Not that his story is unmoving. Smith does a very good job in conveying the stinging emotional turmoil that occurs when a guy who doesn’t know the first thing about football suddenly finds himself a pariah. He wonders why kids ask him, “Why do you hate football?”

Albert Brooks helps save the day playing a mordantly mischievous boss of Omalu’s. “The NFL owns a day of the week,” he says. “The same day the church used to own.” Alec Baldwin pitches in as a former team doctor who has had enough and decides to help (and warn!) Omalu. Far too much screen time is spent on the moony, Hallmark relationship between Omalu and his wife (Gugu Mbatha Raw), a fellow African immigrant. Omalu nonetheless comes off as a principled, nice guy who actually believes in the American Dream. Early in the film it is touching that he actually talks gently to his corpses before cutting them open.

Former players march in and out of the film. One of them, former Steeler Hall-of-Famer Mike “Iron Mike” Webster (a very good David Morse) is so completely distraught from the effects of CTE he tases himself to dull the pain before suddenly dying one day while living in his pickup truck. Another, former Eagle safety Andre Waters, confronts former NFL player Dave Duerson on the street in Chicago. It seems Duerson is on the side of the league in downplaying the effects of concussions on players’ health. He offers Waters no compassion, telling him, “Take your bullshit science and go back to Africa.” SPOILER: Duerson ironically eventually develops mental trauma himself and, yep, commits suicide and leaves his brain to science.

Any Given Funday…..3.5 (out of 5) stars

Alicia Vikander (Ex-Machina) continues her prolific year as a very impressive actress and Eddie Redmayne follows up his Oscar-winning role in The Theory of Everything with The Danish Girl. Redmayne plays Einar Wegener, a landscape artist in 1926 Copenhagen, who went on to become one of the first recipients of transgender surgery. Redmayne, like the film itself, works primarily on the surface, leaving any representation of Einar’s interior self at best impressionistic and at worst, virtually blank.

Einar begins his morphing into Lili Elbe after an afternoon as a last-minute replacement model on behalf of his wife Gerda Wegener’s own artistic endeavors as a portrait artist. Once he tries on female garments, he has feelings surface that will come to dominate the rest of his life. Apart from his self-discovery and his evolving marriage, Einar must face the harshness of that time in history. He will be castigated as a schizophrenic and worse until finding a doctor who had just begun work in the previously unheard of surgery. Instead of director Todd Hooper giving Redmayne a character and a script that goes inside his dilemma, he and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon come up with a lot of exterior sheen. Much of the film’s art direction may contain gorgeous detail, but it seems mostly for naught. Redmayne is good at lingering glances, posture fluctuations, and coquettish smiles, but he does little in providing a sense of what his character is actually thinking.

If one bothers fact-checking The Danish Girl, the film’s central premise suffers greatly. The film’s focus is on Gerda’s resilience at maintaining loyalty to Einar, even as he, in effect, gradually disappears in front of her eyes. In real life, Einar and Gerda actually divorced and Gerda wasn’t around for the events portrayed in the film’s grandiose Hollywood ending, but was remarried and living in Italy. Sure, they were together 26 years (much longer than the film would have you believe) and a biopic can take liberties as needed.

Yet if The Danish Girl already seems too sanitized, an additional problem is posed by the reality that Gerda was reportedly bisexual. Her actual paintings reflected this, while those in the film focus on a G-rated Lilli. That Gerda apparently carnally enjoyed Lili even after Einar’s metamorphosis, gives food for thought that this could have been a better film had it approached its subject from an alternative direction. It also certainly renders the sheet separating Gerda and Lili’s beds depicted in this film as narratively flimsy if not an affront to Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night.

As it stands, The Danish Girl is more Gerda’s film than Lili’s. To augment her victimization, the film includes the character Hans Axgil (Matthias Schoenaerts). He’s another fiction, an invention of novelist David Ebershoff, upon whose book the film is based. Just in case the viewer misses the point, Gerda comes to eventually reject Hans despite their mutually flirtatious interest in each other so she can run back to supporting Lili. At one point Hans calls her “The Danish Girl.” If I were Lili, I’d be furious I don’t even get to own the film’s title.

Vikander’s fabulous yet unfairly must provide all the film’s inner fire…3 stars (out of 5)

The gut-wrenching, unflinching James White, the inaugural film by Josh Mond, brazenly pulls onto your jacket’s lapels with a sharp array of tight closeup shots and equally closeup feelings. In actor Christopher Abbott, Mond (producer of the excellent Martha Marcy May Marlene) has found a wonder of nature. They provide a character that utterly sticks to your craw. And if Abbott’s perplexed, iconoclastic, yet devoted James White isn’t enough for you, there’s Cynthia Nixon, in one of the year’s best performances, playing his mom, who just happens to be riddled with cancer.

About as far away from a Disease of the Week movie as can be, James White taunts you to dare offer any objections to its in-your-face, yet strangely subtle, style. Just when you think James is a shit, he comes up big, and just when he comes up big, he slides a little back into being a shit, but not all the way back, and that’s crucial. In the film’s opening scenes, he’s the last guy you would think has a shot at redemption.

Barely showing up for his estranged Dad’s shiva after an all-nighter, White promptly throws everybody out of the apartment. In another low, he shows up at a potentially important job interview disheveled and unprepared. When he’s not starting bar fights and the like, however, he’s rising up to providing his mom with deeply felt caregiving. If you insist on keeping your holiday moviegoing to the bright and sunny, you don’t know what you’re missing. Mond, who based this movie on his personal experiences, has crafted a fierce and devastating portrait of the dynamic between grief and personal growth. Its tender catharsis lingers longs after viewing.

I’m James White: I Don’t Give A Damn//I Do Care Intensely …4.5 stars (out of 5)

By now–39 years in–you’ve made up your mind on the Sylvester Stallone Rocky persona. Whether you see it as down-home, dogged, feel-good corn or self-aware bluster, his character needs little explanation. In Creed, playing a reluctant trainer, Stallone feels right at home uttering lines like “It’s you against you; he’s just in the ring,” and “Time takes everybody out; time’s undefeated.”

Lucky for Stallone, in this, the seventh Rocky film, he’s surrounded by the talented 29-year-old director Ryan Cooger (Fruitvale Station) and the up-and-coming actor Michael B. Jordan. They both bring a fresh vitality to the proceedings. The result is a crowd-pleasing entertainment that minimizes cliches and maximizes fresh scenes long on authenticity and solid film craft.

Jordan plays Adonis Johnson, the son of former heavyweight champion and Rocky franchise stalwart Apollo Creed. Although he never knew his father, who died in the ring before he was born, Adonis is hustling on the sneak as a boxer in shady below-the-border matches in Mexico. Adopted out of a foster home by his dad’s wife, Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad, looking happy to be free of Bill Cosby) Adonis must face her obstreperous commands to not pursue boxing.

He doesn’t listen to her. Instead, he heads out of Mary Anne’s plush L. A. digs and packs his bags and heads to Philly, checking into a shabby apartment. He shows up at a deserted restaurant called Adrian’s, where Rocky is owner-operator. Surprising him with precise details on his bouts with Apollo, Adonis catches The Rock off guard, but not for long. A constrained Rocky says he’s retired and not interested in becoming his trainer. That soon changes as quickly as you can say, How about a jog through the Ninth Street Market?

Cooger has a good time offering glints of Philly location color–both named (Johnny Brenda’s, Electric Factory) and unnamed (Victor Cafe, Max’s Steaks) and, of course, The Philadelphia Art Museum. Far more crucial to the film’s success is the plausibility of its main characters, and that of key supporting roles like Bianca (a very fine Tessa Thompson, Dear White People), a singer who lives downstairs from Adonis. She rises above typical boxing movie love interests. Not only do Cooger and co-screenwriter Aaron Covington write her as a flesh-and-blood actual character but Thompson portrays a rare screen presence in bringing her to life.

Oh yeah, there’s boxing here too, and it’s rather well-rendered. By the time the Bill Conti Rocky theme makes a sneaky appearance, the film will have you under its thrall as Adonis (now calling himself Creed) fights the big bully Pretty Ricky Conlan (Anthony Bellew) on his home turf in England. Although he has his own troubles to contend with, Rocky talks him through a rough patch. Bianca rushes the ring and Mary Anne, by now a converted believer, is watching on her giant screen in Tinseltown. Somehow it all seems so familiar yet so different this time around.

In This Corner, A New, Old Rocky….3.5 (out of 5) stars