Looper

From writer/director Rian Johnson comes Looper, a time traveling mind-trip that stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a young Bruce Willis.  Not much to say about it other than that I thought it was really slow in the middle and ended with a great 20 minutes.  Even though I have heard tons of very positive things about it, I found nothing spectacular about this movie.

I haven't seen Johnson's other films, Brick (2005) and The Brothers Bloom (2008), but have heard great things about both.  Brick also stars Joseph Gordon Levitt but doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, have anything to do with time travel or ridiculous-looking digital face alteration.

Bruce Willis gives an absolutely dreadful performance and I found myself extremely distracted by Levitt's Willisian special effects makeover.  It looked horrible.  I loved the little kid's role in the story - I must say that I didn't see that coming.  I suppose it was an interesting enough plot and recommend it to any fan of science fiction.

End of Watch

"I am a consequence."

End of Watch is a movie that I've been meaning to see for quite a while now and, as I finally caught up with it yesterday on Netflix instant, it didn't disappoint.  It stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena as two L.A. cops who are filming their daily lives on patrol in the city's south side.  This film's shaky documentary style, especially at the beginning, can be brutally annoying but thankfully the director (David Ayer) interlaces steady shots to capture the riveting narrative.  The cops are filmed over a period of what seems like about 18 months and during that time, respond to some pretty unbelievable calls.  They deal regularly with south L.A.'s gang infestation and struggle to make sense of what seems to be a forlorn battle to keep drugs and guns off the streets.  I absolutely loved this movie and was especially impressed with how suspenseful and scary it was.  I consider the work that police officers do to be among the most important work in the world and this film captures it well.  Ayer, who also wrote Training Day, shows us how dynamic a cop's day can be.  At times, the job can be very boring and at other times, it can be very dangerous.  And the film illustrates that these moments are often only separated by a few fleeting seconds.

The brotherly bond that exists between Gyllenhaal and Pena is very, very special.  They made me laugh, they made me feel inspired but they also made me cry lament.  I highly recommend this film.  It will run you through a gamut of emotions.

End of Watch is currently streaming on Netflix.  If you're reading this and you haven't seen it yet, watch it soon.




The opening quote from Gyllenhaal:

I am the police, and I'm here to arrest you. You've broken the law. I did not write the law. I may disagree with the law but I will enforce it. No matter how you plead, cajole, beg or attempt to stir my sympathy. Nothing you do will stop me from placing you in a steel cage with gray bars. If you run away I will chase you. If you fight me I will fight back. If you shoot at me I will shoot back. By law I am unable to walk away. I am a consequence. I am the unpaid bill. I am fate with a badge and a gun. Behind my badge is a heart like yours. I bleed, I think, I love, and yes I can be killed. And although I am but one man, I have thousands of brothers and sisters who are the same as me. They will lay down their lives for me and I them. We stand watch together. The thin-blue-line, protecting the prey from the predators, the good from the bad. We are the police.

The Way, Way Back

As the halfway point of the year rapidly approaches, I think I may have found my front-runner for favorite movie of 2013.  The Way, Way Back is a coming of age story about a shy, introverted 14 year old boy named Duncan who is being dragged along on a summer vacation to his mother's boyfriend's beach house.  First and foremost, this movie is absolutely hilarious.  Sam Rockwell, in particular, is a comedic force.  I'm a Rockwell guy, and never have I seen him be this funny.  His delivery and charisma are among the things I enjoyed so much about last year's Seven Psychopaths, but in this film he is far funnier.  He also brings a lot of poignancy to the role, which other actors might not have been able to pull off, while still maintaining the comedic elements.  In addition to being a great comedy, The Way, Way Back brings a great array of pain and sadness, which reminded me of The Kids Are Alright and The Descendants and, of course, Little Miss Sunshine, the last of which Steve Carell and Toni Collette both star.

The teenager is beautifully played by Liam James, who you may know from his roles on the television shows The Killing and Psych.  I had never seen him before, which made his character seem even more real and more relatable.  He plays a quiet, reserved kid who is the product of recently divorced parents, which is a difficult situation made even worse by his mom dating a hard-partying middle-aged man named Trent, played vacuously by Steve Carell.  Everyone in his life seems to be distancing themselves from Duncan, including his mother, who he so obviously needs to be by his side.  Duncan's mom is being taken away from him by Trent, which causes feelings of resentment and angst.  But these aren't your everyday teenage emotions, they are compounded by Trent speaking very negatively towards Duncan, claiming that he sees the teen as a 3 on a scale from 1 to 10.  Duncan later asks, "Who says that to a person?"

Written and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (who both also wrote The Descendants with Alexander Payne), The Way, Way Back, isn't your typical coming of age tale in that Duncan doesn't really make friends with kids his own age but rather becomes close with an older man who runs a decrepit local water park.  That is where Rockwell comes in.  He delivers an absolutely hilarious performance as Owen, a free-spirited jokester who hires Duncan to work for him at the Water Wizz.  This finally gives Duncan not only a father figure to look up to but also a place where he can fit in; a place where he belongs; a place where people appreciate him and make him feel valuable.  What else does a teenager need besides to feel like an important part of something?  And that's what this movie is all about, "carving your own path," as Owen puts it.

Carell didn't impress me much in his role as the unlikeable boyfriend of Duncan's mom.  Carell is one of our most gifted funnymen, and I've even enjoyed his more dramatic work in the past (Dan in Real Life, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World), but he didn't bring enough to this role to justify him being in it.  I know the film isn't about him, necessarily, but I would have liked to see a different actor take on this role - perhaps someone who isn't quite so famously funny, like Timothy Olyphant or Kyle Chandler.

Along with Rockwell's superb comedic turn, Allison Janney, from The West Wing fame, is hilarious as a boozy neighbor who says some of the most inappropriate things you'll ever hear a mother say to her kids.  (The eye patch gag killed me)

After watching this movie, I came away feeling more willing to lend an open ear when a teenager is going through a tough time.  Rockwell's character offers this to Duncan and, in turn, ends up affecting the young man's life in dramatically positive ways.  I also come away from the film thinking how important it is for parents to place more importance on spending time with their children than spending time with their friends.  Duncan's mom and boyfriend seem to be in a perpetual state of inebriation, which causes him to feel even more alienated and abandoned from his mom.

I caught this movie with a friend of mine who is a member of Philadelphia Film Society, which is why we got to see it so far in advance of its release date, which I believe isn't until early July.  I think this is going to be a sleeper hit this year, similar to how the aforementioned Little Miss Sunshine was seven years ago.












SPOILER TERRITORY...........

• I think it would have been a MUCH more interesting story if it hadn't included a certain plot point that had to do with Steve Carell and Amanda Peet (I would have enjoyed it much better if the mom's boyfriend was just a dickhead and not a cheating dickhead)
• this would have given Duncan just enough of a reason to not like Trent without going overboard

Killing Them Softly

Even though I grew somewhat tired of being beaten over the head with the political commentary, I (somewhat) enjoyed this movie from director Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford).  Solid performances by Scoot McNairy, Ray Liotta and James Gandolfini helped to support the captain of this ship, Brad Pitt, who was incredibly restrained and economical with his performance.  I saw this two days ago and can't think of much that will stay with me for a long period of time with the exception of two scenes:

• the robbery scene, which proceeded in a way that I was not expecting at all
• it was from this scene, which occurs within the first ten minutes of the film, that I was completely invested in the story
• the slow motion beating/killing/car crash scene was pretty unique 

North by Northwest

"There is no such thing as a lie, there's only expedient exaggeration."

It is so fun to watch a classic for the first time.  Alfred Hitchcock's thriller North by Northwest is an absolute masterpiece filled with suspense and intrigue.  I loved it.  The crop dusting scene (that has no score or music) is about as famous as they come.  The final scene (spoiler alert) on Mount Rushmore is a spectacular feat in special effects cinema history.  I can't believe I found this DVD at a grocery store for $8.

This is only the second (I think?) Cary Grant movie I've ever seen (An Affair to Remember being the other) but I must say that I find him to be hypnotic.  He is a movie star in every sense of the term.  In North by Northwest, Hitchcock's blonde is played by Eva Marie Saint.  A 30-year old Martin Landau also has a big role.

I have never seen a Hitchcock that I didn't like:

• The Lady Vanishes
• Frenzy
• Vertigo
• Rear Window
• Psycho
• North by Northwest
• Dial M for Murder (easily my favorite)

The Paperboy

The 2012 movie The Paperboy is writer/director Lee Daniels follow-up to Precious, which won Mo'Nique an Oscar in 2010 for supporting actress.  I didn't care that much for Precious and didn't know that this movie was directed by Daniels until it was over.  I liked The Paperboy for its focus on style and shock rather than story.  This film is about the method and the journey rather than the destination.  I admire Daniels for the movie he made.  There were startling performances by Nicole Kidman and Matthew McConaughey.  I was creeped out by John Cusack and pleasantly surprised by both late-90s pop star Macy Gray and Zack Efron, who apparently is some teen star.

This movie has a great vintage look, with washed out tones and grainy video quality.  The soundtrack and wardrobe added to the overall grindhouse feel.  I purposely didn't read any reviews of this before I saw it, but I do recall a lot of buzz about how terrible this film is.  I don't necessarily agree.  I didn't love it and wouldn't recommend it to people who aren't all that interested in exploitation or pulpy films.  This is a movie centered around sex, racism, violence, a young man's first love and the bond between brothers (oh yeah, and alligators)  A lot of it seems unnecessary and disconnected, but I found myself engaged throughout the whole movie.  Daniels wrote the screenplay with Pete Dexter, whose novel was the basis for the film.

Two particularly memorable scenes by Kidman will polarize audiences, one which involves urinating on someone to cure jellyfish stings and the other which utilizes magical mid-air heat conduction in a prison interrogation room.

If nothing else, Seinfeld fans, see this movie for two amazing cameos by bit characters from the greatest tv sitcom of all time.

The Paperboy is currently streaming on Netflix.  It's a filthy little romp through the South Florida swamps totally worth taking.

To The Wonder

In his new film To The Wonder, if writer/director/auteur Terrence Malick were merely trying to show us that one's notion of love often leads to disappointment and confusion, it wouldn't have been much of a journey.  Rather, he uses a rather simple narrative, which is somewhat rare for Malick, to illustrate that one's notion of God can lead to the same level of perplexity.  Malick uses a painfully realistic story of a man, played with great restraint by a stoic* Ben Affleck, who falls in and out of love with two separate women, wreaking havoc in both of their lives, to drive home a bigger point about a believer's trust in God's will.  The man, whose name apparently is Neil, though I never heard anyone in the movie ever call him by that, wonders if love is something that can last forever.  He wonders if there exists a type of love that is devoid of difficult times.  As anyone over the age of 16 knows, there isn't.  You have to experience hard times in order to appreciate the good times.  Sometimes people have to experience pain and loss in order to understand what it means to believe in an almighty power.  Malick sort of shoves this parable down our throats by introducing an emotionally distressed Catholic priest, played quite well by Javier Bardem, who seeks out the poor, sick and disabled in order to figure out why God would allow such inequities to exist among his people.  He says, "all I see is destruction; ruin. Where is God?  Show yourself."  Fruitlessly, he goes in search of the healing and compassionate qualities that he has always known about God.

This is not a film about questioning the existence of God or the existence of love.  Those questions, most would agree, are easy to answer, and Malick doesn't waste our time exploring them.  It is rare to find someone on the fence about either one - I know the answer to both, with great certainty.  Instead, we get a film that questions why God and love have both the capability of such good and such pain at the same time.

The first woman we meet is a whimsical young French mother named Marina, played convincingly by Olga Kurylenko (Oblivion).  Actually, to call her whimsical might be a vast understatement.  Marina is always looking up to the sky, always playing, twirling, jumping on beds, stomping in puddles - acting like a child, even in her relationships.  At the start of the film, we see Neil and Marina falling deeply in love in and around Paris, which is shot with unending beauty by Malick.  She is in a constant state of motion, while Affleck is about as static as a human being can be while still maintaining a heart beat.  He walks slow, moves slow and talks very little.  A la Sergio Leone.

We come to find out that Marina's daughter, Tatiana, seems to see things that her mom can not.  She seems wise to the whole situation after they move to Oklahoma with Neil, telling her mom that "something's missing here."  She tells her mom that she has no friends and begins to rebel against her new family situation.  Tatiana turns out to be right, for Neil and Marina's love is fleeting.

Marina picks up and moves back to Paris, only to slip into months of deep depression after her daughter's father regains custody of Tatiana.  She calls Neil and asks if she can move back to the U.S. but is unaware that he has already found someone new.

Next up is Rachel McAdams, whose performance can best be described as minor-league, as she gets caught up in the whirlwind that surrounds Neil.  Through a death in the family, she has acquired a sprawling ranch in Oklahoma, which is falling into financial ruin.  We also find out that she lost her daughter somehow.  Neil says "I guess I came along at the right time" and quickly sweeps her off her feet.  This relationship ends just about as quickly as it started and Marina moves back to be with Neil again.

I found it interesting that Neil works for a company that drills for oil.  He is obsessed with the Earth (while Marina is obsessed with gazing to the sky).  I was reminded of Plato and Aristotle's dichotomy in Raphael's famous painting The School of Athens.  He is constantly testing the soil and the water.  People are getting sick from the oil that is contaminating their water supply.  "The tar comes right up out of the sidewalks," one resident says.  His company is literally poisoning people, just like he does to the women that he gets to fall in love with him.  He ruins their lives.

The opening ten minutes in France are breathtaking in their scope and splendor.  The story quickly moves to the United States and Oklahoma becomes the main setting, which has its own stark beauty.  Malick, who was raised in the south, is careful to show the beauty in all landscapes.  I have yet to see The New World, but I have enjoyed Malick's ability to showcase nature in all of his other films, particularly in Badlands and Days of Heaven.  He is an artist in the purest sense.  What I found so interesting was how amazing he made France look in the beginning but how dreadful he made it look when Marina was going through tough times.  It seems even a city can turn on you.

You get your typical Malickian elements:  whispered voice-overs, nature shots, wind, sun, tall grass, cerebral themes, artsy shots, anger, love, sweetness, ordinary people who are not actors, steadicam shots that follow people from low angles.  Here you also get multiple voice-over perspectives, and in three different languages.  Overall, there is very little dialogue.

This is far more than a "relationship movie."  It is much more than a film centered around a love triangle.  Malick uses that narrative drama as a vehicle to deliver his larger message.  People question their relationships with each other.  As it turns out, even priests question their relationship with God.  People yearn for something bigger.  Priests yearn for an understanding of our world.  It is worth noting that, according to Martin Sheen, Terrence Malick is one of the most deeply devout people he has ever known.

I'm not much for hyperbole and making comparisons, but I must say that I think I enjoyed this as much, if not more than any of Malick's other films, even The Tree of Life, which is one of my favorite films.  I came out of the theater thinking that it was the perfect partner with his last film - both use traditional narratives to deliver larger points.  Years down the road, when a young people are discovering Malick for the first time, I bet that they will be told to watch these two in succession, because of their similarities.  Not to mention, it is rare for Malick to jump right into a movie so quickly.  I've read that he has another movie right around the corner, which is exciting.

I need to see this again, but next time I'll see it alone, since my girlfriend claims it was the worst movie she has ever seen.  "Normal people would hate that movie," she said.  I loved it.  Perhaps I'm not normal.




*Interesting Footnote:  (I found this on a dictionary website) Stoic - A member of an originally Greek school of philosophy, founded by Zeno about 308 b.c., believing that God determined everything for the best and that virtue is sufficient for happiness. Its later Roman form advocated the calm acceptance of all occurrences as the unavoidable result of divine will or of the natural order.