Enough Said

Yadda, Yadda, Yadda....
or
Ex-Men and Women: Daze of Futures Past

It's refreshing to see a rom-com where the entangled are not "zygotes in love," young puppy-lovers with their whole lives in front of them as they go walking off into the sunset, or walking along the sandy-beach, or kissing in front of fireworks while the music swells and we head for the exits.  That's about the time where the "They Lived happily Ever After" credit of "The End," sometimes with the cutesy "(?)," burns itself into the acetate, and I give a guttural chuckle while the thought of there being a sequel where everything goes to shit burns itself into my grey matter.

Most rom-coms, even the most cynical ones, are first acts, where the lessons learned and the hurdles tripped over only get us to the threshold of commitment and then leave us with the unasked question: "So, how's THAT working out?"

But, when you're dealing with adult rom-com's there's always that bittersweet quality where flirtations are recognized to be temporary sparks, and that work is involved and sometimes relationships need to be tailored like clothes as people change and grow either too comfortable or not comfortable enough.  If nothing fits, then it's time to do some spring cleaning and donate stuff to somebody else.  That's the situation with people in Enough Said, the latest film by Nicole Holofcener, who's doing her best to off-set the male-centric movie landscape in the States.  This one centers around Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) a single mother, once divorced, working as an in-home masseuse, who's dreading the departure of her daughter (Tracey Fairaway) for college, and feeling needy, probably because it's one thing to be a married "empty nester," but a single one?  Misery loves company.

That's why her meeting Albert (James Gandolfini) at a party is such a lucky break. Divorced, nebbish-y, his daughter (Eve Hewson) is also going away to college. There's no real attraction at the beginning, and there's really nothing there, but a casual date is fun, and she finds herself relaxing with him.  Her therapist-friend (Toni Collette) is supportive, as is her daughter, such as she can be.  Even one of her clients she's bonded with, Marianne (Catherine Keener), thinks it's a great idea.

It's going great...just great...great.  Yeah.  Then, she starts to notice that the things that irritated Marianne about her ex, are things that Albert does all the time.  It's not that they are particularly irritating, but...she never noticed them before, and now that she's noticing them...yeah, they are pretty irritating things.  And, considering that those things broke up Marianne's marriage to him, Eva decides that maybe she'd better fire a couple of shots across Albert's considerable bow to see if she can change him before things get any more serious.  For Albert, it starts to sour their relationship because (as he says) "it's like I'm with my ex-wife..."

This is kinda sit-commie.  A little too convenient (story-wise) that everybody should be in such proximity that they get caught up in each other's orbits (minor quibble), and you want to apply some malicious reiki to Eva's neck—if it weren't for the fact that this is a kinder, gentler version of Louis-Dreyfuss' Elaine Benes from "Seinfeld.," so wrapped up in herself that she's quite unaware that she's an emotional black hole, starting to suck the energy out of people to fulfill her needs, and is so in pursuit of "the new" that she tends to shaft the familiar (a not uncommon trait). The wonderful thing about Louis-Dreyfuss (besides being able to channel her dark side in her sleep) is how she is still able to make Eva engaging.  She has to be, for the attraction to work. And Gandolfini is superb in this, vacillating between shy comfort and wariness, constantly looking at people out of the corner of his eye as if looking at them directly will reveal too much or put his vulnerability out there to be skewered. Good cast all around and they do make the most of the material, of adults who are still in need of love and finding that available hugging arms are in increasingly short supply.  

Enough Said is a Matinee.

He talks during movies and rattles his popcorn, so I couldn't date him.
Louis-Dreyfuss and Gandofini in Enough Said.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

"Sometimes the Magic Works...."

or 

"Wanna See it Again?"

Repetition, repetition, repetition.  It is the secret to prestidigitation.  Do it over and over and over again, honing the skill, making it more fluid, perfecting the illusion, increasing the speed, so you leave the audience dazzled by the pixie dust of distraction.  Then, once perfected, you do it again and again and again in performance, producing a jaded hardening of the artistry, the audience becoming s revolving series of marks you hit over and over again.  You lose respect of the audience and the skills and the gig.  The magic goes away.

Repetition is the key to The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, too.  One of its major themes is the drudgery of performing the same tricks over and over and over again, a process that turns the titular magician (Steve Carell) into a zombie with a spray-tan, barely able to speak to his partner Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi) as they perform the umpteenth repetition of their standard Vegas act.  Not even the addition of a new assistant, Jane (Olivia Wilde) can stop the ennui, as the self-absorbed Wonderstone keeps calling her "Nicole" for some reason.  Probably because he can, she looks more like a "Nicole" than a "Jane," and he doesn't care.  At all.  So, he always calls her "Nicole."  "Jane" she immediately corrects, but he doesn't get it.

Repetition is also the key to Burt Wonderstone's comedy.  They throw out that "Nicole"/"Jane" joke a half-dozen times throughout the movie, and a good many others, too, usually to expose the shallowness and perpetual myopia of the characters as well as the flatness of their learning curves.

That flatness, that lethargy or lack of magic, is the starting point of the character arcs.  Burt is at the top of his game, successful, bored, settled into the day-to-day—the romantic encounters he engineers (if you can call them romantic) are one-night stands he pulls from the audience, provides a quick tour of his pad, a complimentary memento arranged for the evening, the signing of a non-disclosure agreement, and it all ends when he pulls a disappearing act.  Whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.  Except the magic.  It left a long time ago. 

Burt (Carell) and Anton (Buscemi)—Pure Magic

Because success isn't very funny, Burt and Anton stagnate, especially when there are newer, edgier, geekier magicians with reality shows—like the masochistic, egotistic Steve Gray (Jim Carrey) who bills himself as "the brain rapist." The owner of Bally's (James Gandolfini), where the two have performed to sell-out crowds for years, sees the attendance softening, and demands something more "street" than his regulars can provide, and so they get canned, split up, try to rebuild, crack up, and then the story can actually begin.  

As typical romantic comedies go, this one is by the numbers: Burt's career set-back is completely unprepared for, and he finds that without the safety net of Anton, and the routine of their act, that he can't start over, or reclaim his former glory, so before long he finds himself sinking to rock bottom (performing magic at an old folks home), where, by the prestidigitation of convenient screen-writing, he finds his magic mojo again in the form of Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin), mentor and Obi-Wan Kenobi-figure who critiques Burt's work and attitude ("What, magic makes you feel 80 again?" cracks Burt).  Anybody knows, if they've taken a screenwriting class, or seen any Tom Cruise movie from the '70's-'80's knows how it will run in its course (success kills your soul, there's a rival/villain, and one must have a sage elder to find the proper path), but at least the thing maintains an entertainment value throughout and right up to the end.  Thanks to the mixture of the personalities—Carell, Buscemi, Wilde, Arkin (I'll see anything with him in it), and especially Carrey, who makes the most of his small screen-time—there's always a sprinkling of surprise, a detail, a quirk to appreciate among the over-arching familiarity of it.  There's something magical about that.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is a rental.

Zero Dark Thirty

"You Know That Thing We Talked About"
or
How Are Things in Tora Bora?

Writer Mark Boal and director Katheryn Bigelow have made the two most important dramatic films about The War on Terror: the 2009 Best Picture Oscar Winner The Hurt Locker and now, Zero Dark Thirty, which covers the behind the scenes investigations to track down Usama bin Laden and the subsequent Operation Neptune Spear in Abottabad, Pakistan.

The film originally started as a feature about the carpet bombing of Tora Bora, and the field work leading to the decision and was scheduled to begin filming when the raid occurred.  Immediately, the other film was shelved, and Boal began writing this, incorporating his research from the previous work which dovetailed with the earlier effort.  It's a fascinating, troubling story of human beings waging war on an intimate level, trying to secure threads of information on a specific target, while also trying to keep track of new terror acts that might occur any time, any where.

It focuses on one woman, a CIA analyst named Maya (played by Jessica Chastain)—her IM handle is "Maya173", but "Mark Owen," the nom de plume of one of the Navy Seals participating in the raid, refers to her in his book "No Easy Day," as "Jen." Maya is book-smart, street-savvy, but must learn "the ropes," literally, of interrogation by any means necessary.  She is trained in the way of torture by Dan (Jason Clarke), who has been at this for awhile and has it down to a science—the speech "If you lie to me, I will hurt you," the loss of control, the humiliation, the physical and mental stresses, the releases from which information may come.  Dan offers to keep Maya out of it, but she demurs.  She will participate.  She will actively sweat information out of the "detainees" in the euphemisms for prisons like "CIA Black Sites."  "You are not being fulsome in your replies" she yells as she slams her hand in the interrogation table.  And when she's not participating, she's poring over other interrogations, reams of intelligence, and being a general pain in the rear to her superiors and colleagues.  For station chief Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler), the job is to walk the razor's edge of politics and prevent more terrorism—he doesn't even care about bin Laden anymore, as there are too many attacks he's trying to prevent—every attempt that gets by is a failure.

But, for Maya, bin Laden is an obsession, her white Muslim whale, and it takes a zealot to find another zealot.  She'll veer off into other investigations, particularly when some of her own are killed in an attack, but time only intensifies her resolve, almost becoming a mania, and her patient investigation is off-set by a gloves-off approach to her superiors (when asked her role in the briefing by Leon Panetta, played by James Gandolfini, she replies "I'm the m#####-f##### who found this place, sir"), almost as if her persistent pressure torture techniques are being applied up the chain.* The Obama White House dithers over action until absolute proof is obtained that bin Laden is held up at the Abottabad compound, but Maya is resolute.  When more cautionary analysts give the odds at 60%, she defiantly ups the odds to 100%—"Okay, 95%, because I know certainty freaks you guys out."  But, it's that certainty that fuels Seal Team 6 in their mission—in the videos below, she's specifically mentioned and lauded in Mark Owen's account.

It is a fascinating movie, but a draining one, starting with torture scenes and ending with a recreation of the raid as it went down, shot mostly in tense disorienting night-vision.  The character of Maya, or "Jen" or whoever she is, is a fascinating one, a portrait of obsession and the toll it bears—she's repeatedly told that she looks "terrible" throughout the movie—and when she lashes out at her superiors for their lassitude, or just plain pusillanimaty, there is a definite sense of someone unhinged—controlled, but pushed to the breaking point.  A fury waiting to unleash, she is our version of a Holy Terror, a match for her enemies, and one can't help but wish her peace...suspecting that it will never happen.

Zero Dark Thirty is a Matinee.

The FBI's notice of bin Laden's death and the Situation Room during the raid.
Bear in mind, one helicopter went down during the raid.

* There are torture scenes, but they're not commented on, and any politicizing of it is so much hot-air—one can see in the film any position they want.  It walks a very fine line, merely presenting, and if someone tries to see their point of view in it, they're merely counter-projecting.  

Where the Wild Things Are

"You Don't Need to Know Me. I'm Kind of a Downer"

Spike Jonze's adaptation (with Dave Eggers) of Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" is a one-of-a-kind visual treat—a live-action transformation of Sendak's illustrations in big furry three dimensions, amid stark landscapes of forests, sand dunes and vast beaches that a kid would want to scamper in. Anything but bucolic, it's a weird world of the psyche where young Max (Max Records) must sort out his conflicted kid-emotions of wildness and security, of independence and family, and his own way of self-sabotaging things he likes. At his age, Max is his own worst enemy, and to find his demons he journeys to a land of monsters who play out facets of his personality, trying to make them act in harmony. There's plenty of time to rumpus, but more time is spent putting the pieces back together.

Little Max is already in a world of his own. When we first see him, he's making one of his many enclosures, an igloo, that will stand in for any number of "forts" that he constructs as his own fantasy version of a house, a home—one that he can control, rather than his parents.

Or parent. Max's mom (Catherine Keener) is a working Mom, not at home much, and Big Sister has her "crowd"—Max might as well be on his own. So, when things blow up at home, he runs away to the woods, where after some dreamy slo-mo dissolves, he finds a boat and sails off (on a rather scary trip) to an island of monsters in the process of tearing apart their own homes. There's Carol, the most destructive one, and Judith and Ira, needy and neurotic, Douglas, a loyal bird, Alexander, a sensitive goat, the Bull—who stands alone—and KW, a nurturing monster. They're bickering and feuding and in disarray, but Max unites them by telling him he was a king, and soon he gives them direction, purpose, fun...and, inevitably conflict.

The work realizing the Wild Things is incredible: Jim Henson's Creature Shop has made nine foot tall creatures (although they were closer to Max's size in the book), and some expressive CGI completes the illusion of the enormously dexterous faces. The personalities are breathed into the creatures by the voice-actors playing the characters: Catherine O'Hara as Judith, Forest Whitaker as Ira, Chris Cooper as Douglas, Paul Dano as Alexander, and Lauren Ambrose as KW. But standing above them all is James Gandolfini as the conflicted Carol. Although it's just Gandolfini's voice (the creatures were played by puppeteers in the suits), he invests his entire soul in it. Indeed, no performance has depended so much on a star's wheezing nasal passages and breath patterns than anywhere outside a Yimou Zhang film.

Sendak's book only has ten sentences in it. And Eggars and Jonze have expanded it by delving deep into the psychology of the thing to examine the rending forces of having a personality and having to be dependent, of knowing enough to get you into trouble but not knowing what you don't know, or reacting without knowing why—the animal instincts of being a human child. The maturing journey that is the core of Sendak's story—of confronting your demons and making peace with them—breaks down into a series of compromises and political choices that will create the greatest good, and the film ends with one of the quietest and most compelling depictions of the give-and-take of a child-parent relationship that has ever graced the screen.

But....

But.

I can't imagine a kid sitting through this movie without feeling like he's being punished. It's a dinner of nothing but vegetables. It's a Christmas only getting clothes. A bun and no weinie. Playtime with Dr. Bruno Bettleheim (carrying a clipboard). It's something an adult thinks is good for a kid.

It's a doctoral thesis on Sendak's book put to screen. It's smart and intuitive and beautiful. The one thing it isn't is fun.

Oh, there are laughs. It's frequently amusing, in a telling kind of way. Telling doesn't do it for a kid. Ya gotta show 'em. And kids will enjoy the playing and the rumpus and the tunnels and the dirt-clods fight, but the squabbling monsters are going to put frowns on their faces and questions in their heads. As gramma used to say "It's always fun until the monsters start crying."

A kid's movie succeeds when it enchants the child and engages the parent. It's a major blunder, however, to make a children's movie that only appeals to your inner adult.

"Where the Wild Things Are" is a Matinee.

In the Loop

"You Might Have Heard Him Say it, But He Didn't Say it, and That's a Fact!"

They say you don't want to see government at work just as much as you don't want to see sausage being made. The implication is that both involve grinders and a certain amount of evisceration. And the dropping of blood, metaphorically, and in some cases, literally.

"In the Loop," the smart, funny movie version of the British comedy "In the Thick of It" manages to bludgeon home that point, but also draw parallels with the most drop-dead dysfunctional of office settings. "In the Loop" employs the same "caught on the fly" filming and editing techniques of "The Office" and they're played out by a cracker-jack group of actors who give the impression that they're ad-libbing the whole thing (led by a startlingly brilliant performance by Scotts actor Peter Capaldi*). Only it's "The Office" with a vindictive murderous glee and what, if it had gone through the Ratings Board,** would be described as "pervasive language."

It is also an episode of "Yes, Minister" on meth-amphetamines set in an abatoir, where the civil servants—the guys who never get voted out of office—run the show, and the show is the pantomime of a representative government working on the people's behalf. The lobbying people. The people in power. Those people. You know. There's enough invective in this movie to launch a thousand Uni-bombers, and most of it is hilarious—the kind of hilarity you feel guilty about laughing at. Especially if you didn't vote (not that it would do you much good).

In this expansion of the series, the British Secretary of State for International Development Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) burbles through an inoccuous press interview that an anticipated war conducted jointly by the U.S. and Britain is "unforseeable" and the Prime Minister's Director of Communications Malcolm Tucker (Capaldi) begins running interference ("I'm sweating spinal fluid here!") for Foster, the PM, and American functionaries creating damage control by causing as much destruction as possible (not too unlikely a scenario). That he does it by some of the most creative uses of the Anglo-Saxon tongue makes it hilarious, cruising through the labyrinths of power filled with ass-covering lackeys like a shark through a school of puffer-guppies—battering through so many non-functionaries "on defense" by being as offensive as possible.

This is not your father's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," or even "The West Wing"—both those political dramas assume that civil servants are servants, rather than being self-serving, doing their jobs for the public good, not seeing it as a public nuisance. Those films assume the core of public service as "Love Thy Neighbor," rather than the reality of all-knowing governments—but only in the biblical sense.

"In the Loop" is a Full-Price Ticket. See it soon before it goes away.

* Capaldi may not be familiar to American audiences, but you've seen him before—deny it all you want, but you have—maybe in "Local Hero" or even "Doctor Who." In fact, he won an Oscar for writing and directing "Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life." Also in the cast are James Gandolfini—as good as you'd expect him to be—Mimi Kennedy, the always entertaining David Rasche, and...anybody remember Anna Chlumsky..."My Girl?"

** It didn't, and so it arrives at theaters with the "NR" rating, the "nolo contendre" of the MPAA system.

The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

"If You Don't Need it, Leave it!"
or
Hip-Hopping Right off the Tracks

"The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" was a 1973 best-selling novel by John Godey that was snapped up for the movies almost immediately. The resulting 1974 film by the efficient Joseph Sargent benefited from an energetically entertaining script by Peter Stone and good performances by Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw. Stone ("1776," "Charade"), being a student of Hitchcock, understood that a good thriller is more fun if you can enjoy it, rather than identify with it, and his script bristled with a sarcastic brio that played with the rich ethnicity of New Yawk. It was filmed again for television in 1999 with Edward James Olmos and Vincent D'Onofrio that nodded to advances in technology a bit, but lacked energy and suspense.

There was no need for a further sequel, let alone one that would cost upwards of $100 million dollars—most of which seems to have gone to New York location taxes and helicopter rentals—but the Scott brothers evidently felt the need, this one directed by brother Tony in the same needlessly overt style that characterized his last few pictures. Scott's direction has always emphasized flash over substance, and here the film unnecessarily employs MTV cutting, streak shots, ramp-edits and cutesy sound design (a cranked up helicopter shot of a dawn New York skyline punctuates the sun blasting between skyscrapers with first two subway whooshes, than a horn) just to establish location.* This new version of "The Taking of Pelham 123"** is all over the top, set to a hip-hop beat, and it's only at the end that it's clear why Scott is being so aggressive with these techniques—he'll need them again to convey a sense of speed for a subway car supposedly out of control, but in the location shots looks soothingly like it would never leave the tracks.

And if Stone's 1974 screenplay is an example of subtlety, the script by Brian Helgeland (and uncredited David Koepp) is a chunk of concrete, dropping so many f-bombs that it passes for humor in a script devoid of it—one of the very first examples of dialogue is a string of them in a sentence devoid of any meaning, but is merely an example of macho puffery, representing in microcosm both the script and film. Ethnicity is also made a factor in this script, but where Stone's punctured attitudes and stereotypes, in the 2009 script ethnicity defines you and can be used against you (and yet tries to imprint the message that you can "adapt"—interesting. Mixed message, and racistly judgemental...but interesting).

The performances are credible, although I've always had problems seeing John Travolta as a bad guy (thoughtless, yes, but never deliberately malicious). Denzel Washington sinks into his role as everyman, caught in a circumstance he didn't walk to work foreseeing and doing his best to punt. James Gandolfini portrays a subway-riding mayor and the actor shrugs power. John Turturro has a smallish role as a police negotiator, and the highpoint of the film for me is a long held shot of Turturro reacting to the death of a hostage—his eyes portraying shock, and behind them simultaneously trying to pull himself out and consider his next step.

The cumulative effect is numbness and dumbness. A firefight between perps surrounded by a ring of cops turns into a multi-camera squirt-a-thon nightmare. It looks impressive, you start to wonder how none of the police shoot any of the cops opposite them. For all the attempts to update, "The Taking of Pelham 123" is a downgrade in quality, suspense and effectiveness.

Let's see, the Scott brothers managed to mess up "The Andromeda Strain," and "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three," what other 70's thriller can they destroy?***

"The Taking of Pelham 123" (2009) is, generously, a cable-watcher.

* In the "Rail Control Center," digital effects are used to make the display board more like a video game with zoomed graphics both in the display, and created for dramatic uses by cutting out little windows in the film itself.

** Criminy, even the name is simplified and spoon-fed, lest anyone not "get" it.

*** That question is already answered: Ridley Scott is shooting "Robin Hood." Interesting story: the original script, called "Nottingham," focused on the Sheriff of Nottingham, caught in a struggle between a corrupt King and anarchists with the people's support. Russell Crowe was signed to star. In the interim, the script morphed into Robin being the Sheriff of Nottingham (?), now it's back to the old traditional—and umpteenth—version of "Robin Hood," and Maid Marion are the good guys and the King and Sheriff are bad guys. We've seen it before. Again, the question is: why? Probably because Hollywood can't get enough of the delicious irony of making money on a story about a guy who "steals from the rich and gives to the poor."

It's too bad—I'd have liked to have seen "Nottingham," not another retread.