Midnight Cowboy

Coming soon!

Crazy Stupid Love

  Crazy Stupid Love has an impressive ensemble cast anchored by Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore and Steve Carell.  Cal, played wonderfully by Carell, is being divorced by his wife Emily (Moore), who admits she has been cheating on him with her coworker David Lindhagen (Kevin Bacon).  The divorce is completely her idea and it sends Cal into an alcoholic tailspin, where he is approached by debauchee Jacob (Ryan Gosling) at a stylish bar.  Jacob offers, more like force-feeds, Cal advice on how to pick up women.  It is ridiculously uninteresting.
  Enter Hannah, played by Emma Stone, a twenty-something who just passed the bar exam and is ready to get out of a dead-end relationship with a nerdy loser played by Josh Groban (big shocker: Groban plays a nerdy loser).  Hannah is approached by Jacob one evening and he smoothly shoots her a line out of his bag of insanely stupid, yet effective, pick-up lines.  She wants nothing to do with him at first, but soon comes running back, begging for him to take her home.
   I loved Stone in previous films, especially Easy-A and Zombieland, and she is loveable here too.  This movie would certainly benefit if she were featured in it a bit more.  I didn't really buy into her relationship with Gosling - I felt that it was way underdeveloped.  The reason that it was not explored enough is because this movie is jam-packed with plot.  There was just too much going on for me to really grab onto even one of its hyper-layered story lines.  Marisa Tomei has a silly ten-minute performance as a dim-witted teacher.  That is two movies in a row for Tomei that I felt she was miscast (The terrible Lincoln Lawyer being the other one).  Bacon has a great face-to-face scene with Carell's son, but other than that he is underused. 
   After all of that, I will say that I liked this movie.  Carell is one of the best comedy actors alive.  In Crazy Stupid Love, he combines the silliness, sincerity, vulnerability and charm that we see in his characters in The Office, Dan in Real Life, and The 40-Year Old Virgin.  He is a very good actor with impressive range.  Gosling has showed us signs of excellence as well (Lars and the Real Girl, Blue Valentine), but plays to the stereotype here so much that I couldn't buy into it.  He reminded me of Will Smith in Hitch (which I disliked very much).  Another reason that I liked this movie is because of a magnificent twist, which I did not see coming at all.  Twists are great; we all love them, and this movie has a really good one.
  There is a meta aspect to this film.  At times, it seems to acknowledge that it is being mundanely stereotypical.  For example, when Gosling's character is asked to explain why he feels the way he does about Hannah, he says something along the lines of "are you really going to make me do this?"  I appreciate this and give the director points for realizing the campiness.

Horrible Bosses

  Horrible Bosses is a film with a vacuous, yet relatable plot about hating your boss and wanting he/she to die.  I found myself not caring that the story lacked depth because the performances were so funny.  Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis star in this new comedy from director Seth Gordon, who directed Four Christmases and the very interesting documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (a must-see doc about real-life competitions between the world's best players of the classic arcade game Donkey Kong). 
  Charlie Day, who we all love from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, plays Dale, a dental hygienist who is being sexually harassed by his boss, played by Jennifer Aniston.  Day takes over this movie from his opening scene - he is a truly funny actor with tons of charisma and screen-presence.  His character in this movie is almost exactly the same as the guy he plays in Sunny and I do wonder if he can pull off a different trick.  Bateman is really good as well, but he continues to be cast as the quasi-straight-man in these types of movies.  Sudeikis, who you know from SNL, is also quite funny here.  He is the one actor who I was not a huge fan of going in to this movie, but I was pleasantly surprised.
  So the three guys hate their bosses (Aniston, Colin Farrell and Kevin Spacey) and want to kill them.  Simple enough story.  Don't go to this movie with the expectations of being swallowed up by riveting storytelling, clever twists and meaningful character evolution - go to this movie to see three funny guys have a boatload of fun together on-screen.  This movie is probably 15 or 20 minutes too long, but the film-makers threw enough celebrity cameos our way to keep it interesting.  (Ron 'Tater Salad' White, Detective Bunk from The Wire, The Old Spice Guy, Donald Sutherland, Jamie Foxx, Bob Newhart, the mother from Modern Family, just to name a few) 
  Aniston is shockingly filthy dirty in her role as a sexually inappropriate dentist.  Foxx, who I pretty much loathe, did make me laugh a bit in his five-minute role as murder consultant Dean 'Motherfucker' Jones.  Farrell does his best 'Big Ern' McCracken impersonation (see below).  Spacey is so-so in his role as Bateman's unbearable boss.    
  Horrible Bosses is essentially The Hangover, only with funnier actors.  It is pretty obvious to compare Bateman to Bradley Cooper (Bateman is funnier, and it's not close); Day to Zach Galifianakis (Day is funnier, and it's not close); Sudeikis to Ed Helms (Helms, admittedly, wins by a landslide).  This film uses the same formula as The Hangover, but uses it more creatively and with much more gusto.  

Farrell in Horrible Bosses

Murray in Kingpin

My 5 Favorite Films Since 2000

Sorry for the 11 days between posts.  I've been busy: I spent four days backpacking the Appalachian Trail, celebrated my grandmother's 80th birthday and my niece's 4th birthday on consecutive days, and was at the beach for the last three days.  Having said that, while hiking over 42 miles on the AT, my two buddies and I passed the time with silly lists and games.  During one stretch, each of us listed our five favorite films since the year 2000.  Here is my list, in no particular order:

1. Winter's Bone
2. No Country For Old Men
3. There Will Be Blood
4. Anchorman
5. Inglorious Basterds

I am sure I am forgetting about a few movies that I really enjoyed over the last 11 years, but I am satisfied with this list at the moment.  Others that come to mind: Mystic River, The Departed, Midnight in Paris (if you haven't seen this movie yet, sprint to a movie theater right now), The Social Network (for the score more than anything), The King's Speech, The Pianist, House of Sand And Fog, Million Dollar Baby, Good Night and Good Luck, Match Point, Up in the Air and Doubt.

I am going to pick up my blog game once again.  Expect at least one movie review every day.

Taxi To The Dark Side

  Winner of the 2008 Oscar for Best Documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side tells the disturbing story of the torture policy under the Bush administration during the Second Gulf War.  This film features riveting interviews with former military "interrogators" who have since been found guilty in criminal court for the tactics they implemented in order to acquire information from POWs at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram and Abu Ghraib Prisons.  First-hand experience of the use of torturous detention strategies is provided by Moazzam Begg, a former prisoner at Gitmo and Bagram, in painful detail.
  The name of the movie centers around the story of a 22-year old Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar who was taken prisoner by American soldiers when he was escorting three passengers in Khost Province, Afghanistan.  The car was stopped at a checkpoint and the four men were taken to Bagram Prison, where they were brutally tortured.  Dilawar, who the U.S. military suspected had a hand in an attack at an Army base earlier that morning, was dead five days after arriving at Bagram.  He and the other men were victims of deplorable interrogation techniques, which included:

• sleep deprivation
• prisoners were handcuffed to the ceiling, so every time they nodded off, the pain of the handcuffs would wake them back up
• prisoners were forced to stand on a very small platform while soldiers would attach electrical wires to their fingertips and told if they stepped or fell off the platform, they would be electrocuted
• sexual abuse
• forced nudity
• forced masturbation
• blindfolds, earplugs, hoods and large mittens were used on prisoners for sensory deprivation (A Montreal psychologist said in the film that this strategy can drive a person insane in less than two days)
• blasting loud music in prisoners' holding cells for hours on end
• fear targeting
• vicious dogs were brought in and chained just inches from prisoners' faces
• snakes were used
• female interrogators were used to infuriate prisoners whose culture prevented them from respecting women who were in positions of power
• waterboarding (pouring water down a prisoner's throat to simulate a drowning sensation)
• right after 9/11, the CIA got approval to waterboard detainees
• stress positions
• prisoners were forced to stand for several days
• prisoners were hung upside down from the ceiling for many hours
• prisoners were forced to hold their arms out to their sides for long periods of time

   Led by the authority of Vice-President Dick Cheney, American troops were ordered to ignore the protocols laid out in the Geneva Conventions.  When the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Bush's bill that would allow American soldiers to hold detainees in prisons without a hearing, the administration simply helped the military establish its own "combatant status review tribunals," which essentially found a way to imprison suspects without giving them their right to an attorney, a fair trial or due process.  Congress then reiterated to the administration that soldiers must follow the Geneva treaties, which Bush agreed to as long as he could be the one who defined the phrase "outrageous acts against humans."
   When photos from Abu Ghraib Prison were released to the American public in 2004, 35 percent of U.S. citizens still approved of the use of torture, which this film attributes to the popularity of shows like 24.  Citing a specific example from this documentary, torture proponents would argue that it is acceptable to use whatever means necessary to get information from someone who knows the location of a ticking time bomb.  Opponents would argue that if authorities were actually able to catch a person who is crazy enough to plant a bomb while the bomb is still ticking (which is an incredibly unlikely scenario, outside of movies or television), he/she would probably be willing to die before giving up information on how to dismantle the explosive. 
  Taxi to the Dark Side is a sad and eye-opening documentary that sheds a lot of light on what interrogation methods Rumsfeld, Cheney and company considered invaluable in extracting information from the enemy.  Towards the end of the film, we are told that Bush signed a bill that pardoned him and his administration from any crimes surrounding war-time torture - these pardons did not extend to the soldiers in charge of executing the actual interrogations.  No officers were ever convicted in the Dilawar case, but all of the lower-ranking interrogators interviewed for this film have been relieved of their duties in the U.S. military and have been convicted for crimes committed while following orders from the men and women in charge.  

Larry Crowne

   Larry Crowne is a fun movie that is worth seeing, especially on a date.   Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts are amazing together.  I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that they have only appeared in the same movie once before (Charlie Wilson's War), so this is a special event.  Roberts plays a community-college professor who teaches a Speech class that changes the life of Larry Crowne (played by Hanks).  Crowne is a likeable, recently-divorced goofball who has just been fired from his long-time job at a store closely resembling Target, so he decides to go to college in order to start a new career. 
   Hanks is hilarious in this movie.  Roberts is loveable as usual. I won't spoil it, but the final scene is really, really clever.  Hanks co-wrote this movie, and his charm and wit are evident throughout the script. There are two enjoyable cameos by Pam Grier and George Takei that are worth noting.
   Yes, I have some issues with some of the plot points, but who cares, it is a really fun movie.  Go see it! 


(notes: The MLB All-Star game Tuesday and a vicious Soundgarden show last night have prevented me from posting as often as I would like this week.  I figured I would post about Larry Crowne before the big U2 show tonight!)

The Tree of Life

  I've put it off long enough.  Here are my comments about Terrence Malick's new movie The Tree of Life, starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn.  This film focuses on a man's difficulty in dealing with the pain of being raised by a dictatorial father in 1950s Texas.  Sean Penn plays (adult) Jack, the eldest of three boys in the O'Brien family.  Penn devotees should not get too excited about his role in this movie - he is only on screen for a total of about 15 minutes or so.  This film belongs to child actor Hunter McCracken, who plays young Jack with tones of anger, frustration and vulnerability.  Jack's younger brother dies early in the film's sequencing, but I'll get back to that in a bit.
   If you read my post about Malick's first film Badlands, you'll recall that I mentioned he has a deep adoration for nature.  During the first 45 minutes of The Tree of Life, he takes us on a visual adventure of epic magnitude.  The movie opens with a slow-moving digital image of what looks to me like a mix between a far-away galaxy and a 3-D ultrasound.  It is beautiful and mysterious.  As I've mentioned before, Malick uses close-up shots to put us right down inside what is occurring at that very instant.  During the first part of this movie, he shows us visuals of the cosmos one minute and microscopic life forms the next; dinosaurs then jellyfish; volcanoes then waves; trees then desert.  It reminded me of the Planet Earth series.  The narrative doesn't begin until 45 minutes in and I would venture to say that many film-goers will become very impatient with the visual barrage.  At one point, I was shaking my head in disbelief, waiting for something to happen - waiting for the story to actually get going.  Get on with it! 
   During these sequences, Malick peppers in his famous soft-spoken (more like whispered) voice-overs.  Much of the dialogue questions God's reasons for doing what he does.  Upon being told that her son is in God's hands now, the mother questions, "He was in God's hands the whole time, wasn't he?"  Malick raises the age-old question here about why God allows bad things happen to good people.  Jack witnessed a good friend drown in a pool at a young age and asks his father whether this boy died because he was "bad."  Although Mr. O'Brien (played by Pitt) demands that every family meal begin with a prayer, he contradicts himself by telling his boys that they have control over their own destiny and they "must not be too good" if they want to succeed in this cutthroat world.  This dichotomy is confusing to the three boys, and is one of the causes of Jack developing a large amount of hostility and resentment toward his father.
   Jack's journey throughout the film is in his attempt to find his way back to just being a kid, without all of the anger towards his difficult father.  His ire brews and develops as he finds himself desperate to figure out how to "get back to where they were" before he saw that life is painful and unfair.  Jack's father, a former military man turned engineer/inventor who currently holds over 25 patents for his creations, is very hard on the boys, demanding that they refer to him as father rather than dad.  There is verbal and physical abuse, especially when the kids interrupt or question him.  Although Malick is careful to show Mr. O'Brien being loving at times, the vast majority of the interactions between father and sons is hurtful and punitive.  The mother, on the other hand, is loved by the boys.  She is a fun-loving, warm woman who spends a lot of time playing and running around with the children, especially when "father" is away on business.  Jack wants his father dead and in one scene even asks God to kill him.  "Father, mother, always you wrestle inside me. Always you will."  Jack finds it impossible to talk to his father openly about any subject, so he often speaks to him as if he were praying to him. 
   Malick captures brotherhood very well.  The fun times that the three boys spend playing outside remind me of my childhood growing up with four brothers and a sister.  Adult Jack says that his younger brother died when he was 19.  A letter that his mother received from a courier would certainly lead one to believe that he was killed in active duty overseas.   It seems to me that rather than looking to God for spiritual guidance through this tough time of loss, the family begins to speak directly to the dead son.  Malick is telling us that the family is losing faith in God, but more importantly he is raising some thought-provoking questions about what causes people to lose their faith.  Whatever it is that you believe, most people would hopefully agree that these questions are worth exploring.  Before the young man's death, God seemed to be the answer to everything, but now nature and reason seem to explain the world. Jack struggles in adulthood with his unanswered questions about why his innocent brother had to die.  He seems to continue to reach out to his parents for support.  He fails to truly believe in any higher power, but rather does his soul-searching while speaking to his brother.
  We feel sorry for Jack as an adult because he was raised to believe that it was virtuous to be good, but he wonders why he should be good when God isn't even good.  Jack's stormy relationship with his father only caused him to become closer to his brothers, and when his younger brother died, it left Jack more lost than ever before.  As an adult, Jack pleads to the sky, "Brother, keep us. Guide us to the end of time." There are several iconic shots of Jack wandering through an open landscape, crossing through open doors, searching for himself in a confusing world. 
   The final shot, which appeared three or four times throughout the film, is of the galaxy/ultrasound image slowly changing and evolving against a black background that I mentioned at the start of this post.
   This is a difficult film to digest and I am fairly certain that I did not do a very good job at explaining it.  I desperately want to see this movie again, probably more so than I've ever wanted to see a movie a second time before in my life (even though it was well over two hours long).  As with the other Malick films I have seen, this one explores very deep existential and spiritual themes, but he seems to be digging down into these depths further and further each time he makes a film.  I enjoyed it immensely.