Gangster Squad

Manifest Density
or
The War for the Soul of Los Angeles (such as it is)

Ruben Fleischer's third film (after the very good Zombieland and the excremental 30 Minutes or Less) is Gangster Squad, a Hollywoodized version of the efforts by the LAPD to take down the efforts of Mickey Cohen, the lieutenant of Bugsy Siegel's Jewish mafia, who took over Siegel's interests when the mob kingpin was murdered in 1947.

If one is looking for a history lesson, one should look elsewhere.  This is a glamorized, fictionalized version of the events set in some art-deco post-war version of Los Angeles that doesn't seem to have existed anywhere except the Warner Brothers gangster films and Brian de Palma's The Untouchables, to which this film owes a great debt.  The gangsters all wear dark clothes with long coats (the better to identify them) and are all greasy and ugly, while the police are all good-looking guys in nice suits who bend the rules a bit (with the possible exception of Chief Parker, played with a gruff somnambulance by Nick Nolte, who headed up the similar "Hat Squad" in Lee Tamahori's Mulholland Falls).*

It all feels very false, from how the gangsters rarely hit anything despite the thousands of rounds shot from tommy guns, and the Gangster Squad "hit" ratio usually fares better.  The Squad (hand-picked by the leader's wife, played by Mireille Anos, for being rough-necks and not promotion-headed top-of-their-classers) consists of boss John O'Mara (who did exist, but did not run the unit) as played by Josh Brolin, Jerry Wooters (played by Ryan Gosling), Max Kennard (Robert Patrick)—a sharpshooter, Conway Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi) a surveillance/electronics expert, as well as two PC members for the 21st century audience—Anthony Mackie (so good in The Adjustment Bureau) and Michael Peña.   Their target is Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn in a make-up that makes him look like he walked out of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy), who's reputation is movie-inflated to make him seem like he's an empire-building Al Capone, rather than the cheap hood with star connections he ultimately was.

Fleischer is more interested in flash than being true to the source.  His fights are surprisingly well-staged, one shot per flying fist, but not Bourne-edited so one can easily follow it—an early fight in an elevator borrows heavily from a similar scene in a James Bond movie but actually goes places the 007 film merely used for suspense.  Once in awhile, he'll go for a Matrix-y slo-sloo-slooo-mo effect (rather than a fleeting Peckinpah image) just to make a point of something, like cartridges flying out of a machine gun, or a Christmas ornament exploding due to gunfire, but it's just slowing things down as opposed to telling a story.  Brolin's fine, nuanced even, but Gosling's McQueen-ish hipster act is wearing a little thin, and the chemistry exhibited between he and Emma Stone from Crazy, Stupid Love is completely missing here.  Mackie, Peña, and Patrick are far more engaging probably because they don't fit the established mold. 

It's entertaining, to a certain extent, but one gets the feeling, after patterns have been set that bring to mind other films, that one is being sold a bill of goods, and we are.  

The real-life Cohen was convicted of tax evasion (not murder) in 1950, serving four years.  Upon his release, he established several businesses (the ones portrayed in the film) and was again convicted of tax evasion in 1961 and released (again) in 1972.  Cohen died in his sleep in 1976.

Gangster Squad is a Rental.

The real Mickey Cohen, photographed in 1950

The real "Gangster Squad"

* Amusingly, his driver is Officer Darryl Gates (played by Josh Pence) who would be Chief from 1978 to 1992.

The Ides of March

"'The Situation' in The Situation Room"
or
"A Little Problem with the DnC"

The bobble-head version of George Clooney is back in The Ides of March, the new film directed by...George Clooney.  You remember the bobble-head Clooney, don't you?  It was the loosey-goosey version of the actor that was popular during his "ER" days, a combination of looseness and arrogance, and it made up his persona in his early film career, before the time he decided that he'd get serious about his career after the debacle of Batman & Robin.

Well, that wobble of the head returns in Ides, adapted from the play by Beau Willimon (by Willimon, Clooney and Grant Heslov) called "Farragut North."  I've always seen that wobble as an indication that whichever character he played with it had a lack of moral rectitude, an imperfection of the spine or sensibility that disconnected the head from the rest of the persona—a flaw that lent unpredictability to what actions they'd take, a toss of the head like a toss of the coin.  And it is one of the ways that Clooney telegraphs what his Governor Mike Morris, candidate for President on the democratic ticket, might be capable of.  It keeps you guessing, whatever the words from his mouth might indicate, about the actions this man might take in his run for power.

It is tough to express surprise at the roads political films—or films about politics—might take these days.  It's all about disenchantment with the process and how power—or even the quest for it—corrupts.  It's an old saw that goes back long before Shakespeare and back to The Greeks.  And very few films—or plays—about the Court of Kings, fact or fictional,  can look clear-eyed at the process, thinking that ideals might remain intact.  Even Mr. Smith Goes to Washington deals with the innate corruption of government and pleads for a clinging to of ideals from our public servants...or even an acknowledgment that they are servants, rather than our Masters.  What was nice about things like "The West Wing" was that, despite the maneuverings, manipulations and moral morasses that went with the job, public service was declared an altruistic aspiration, a noble thing, however down and dirty things got to accomplish anything.  Most, though, like The Candidate or All the Kings Men (any version) have it as a "given" that compromise of purpose, process and principles are par for the course, that it is next to impossible to determine the true measure of a political man.  The only variable is how corrupt that man (it's usually a man, and white) can be.  Post-Watergate and The Lewinsky Affair, even a film like Absolute Power assumes, without doubt, that The President of the United States is capable of the most craven of murders.  The Ides of March doesn't swerve from that cynicism.

The film begins with Morris' Head of Communications, Stephen Myers (the ubiquitous Ryan Gosling—if his Drive performance is a "1" and Crazy, Stupid Love is a "10," in dramatics, this is is an average "5") approaching a microphone, coming slowly into focus, a process that is completed when he is at the podium—the shot will be mirrored later in the show.  He begins to slap-dashedly spew homilies about his religion, and then the speech deteriorates into babble.  Not that it is important, he is merely a stand-in, checking a microphone for his candidate at a technical rehearsal for a televised debate.  It would pass without much notice, except at the real debate, Morris uses the same lines words for words defending his lack of religion when challenged on the point.  It is clear, at that point, that Myers is Morris' surrogate, putting words in his mouth, articulating the governor's message, packaging the man to appeal to the lowest common denominator and the highest number of registered voters.  

The campaign manager is Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a jaded veteran of the political trenches, spinning, manipulating and point-man for acquiring the parties' nomination a few months down the road.  Zara is the Big Picture Packager, Myers is Dr. Details.  On the other side is campaign manager Tom Duffy, who is played by Paul Giamatti—and let me just say what a pleasure it is to see Hoffman and Giamatti, two of the best character-spinners in movies today going up against each other.  It is a match made in Political Purgatory.

Before too much gets underway, Clooney introduces another character in a shot that tracks her movements, flouncing, buffed, polished and toned, towards campaign HQ: this is Molly Stearns, intern (Evan Rachel Wood) and just the way Clooney introduces her puts you on alert that she is important to the drama, far more than her job of bringing coffee would indicate. Wood is a fine actress, and as with Down in the Valley, she's able to convey twin faces of innocence and corruption, the theme of the film at which she is the fulcrum. Already one sees where things are going, but one wonders if Clooney has the directing chops to make it fresh.

He does...kinda.  There are nice little touches of how the film seems to bifurcate into twin halves reflecting each other,* the actors make the dialog snap and there's just enough "play" in the film to keep you guessing about what is "real" or political theater. And there's one scene that's shot very simply—a tension-inducing pull-in to a black van that makes you suspect the worse (which, for some it might be) that is rather nifty.

Ultimately, though, as well as the film is presented and played, it is not telling us anything we don't already know...or fear...that hasn't been said for the last 60 years, when, post-Eisenhower and the star-struck Kennedy years, we ditched the notion that politicians are concerned with the People, rather than their prestige and perks.  The Ides of March has no spine of its own to speak of and brings us nothing new, offering no solution (not even providing dramatic satisfaction)...but merely more of the same, just like every election season.

The Ides of March is a Rental.

* Clooney did a good interview with Charlie Rose about the film—Rose has a cameo for verisimilitude, as do a few other familiar talking heads—in which he said "The first half of the film is for democrats and the second half is for republicans." Exactly right.

Drive

"Flash Over Substance"
or
“I used to produce movies in the '80′s. Kind of action films, sexy stuff…one critic called them 'European.'  I thought they were shit”

In 1987, two movies of the same type came out and they could not be any more different, despite their similarities of plot—Martin Scorsese made After Hours and John Landis made Into the Night.  Both were movies about semi-clueless day-jobbers who had to negotiate the dark unknown (to them) underbelly of their cities in the wee small hours of the morning and somehow survive to the dawn.  What made them different were the sensibilities of the directors and their neighborhoods—Scorsese's took place in brownstone New York and Landis' took place in the high-styled concrete of Los Angeles. 

It's a similar trick here, it just took 36 years to make an L.A. counter-point to Scorsese's Taxi Driver, and that film is Drive, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn in the same cold blue-and-teal gloss of a 1980's era Michael Mann film or the similar cool veneer provided Risky Business' Paul Brickman.*

Like Scorsese's film, we have a restless professional driver (Ryan Gosling), but it's L.A. so he's a stunt-driver for the movies by day, and a for-hire getaway genius at night (demonstrated by two very nicely laid out chase sequences, one at night evading the police and one chase on the open road later in the film).  He's also a garage mechanic for mentor Shannon (Bryan Cranston), who has designs on a racetrack career with his young protégé behind the wheel.

The Driver—he is a typical "Man with No Name" with no discernible past and an "iffy" future—is utterly defined by his mechanical abilities under the hood and behind the wheel.  His words are spare,** never betraying the mind that is firing on all cylinders, his eyes taking everything in, without much expression to betray his heart or motivations, much like the visual style and minimal acting employed for Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle.  But with no name and no voice-over narration to provide motivation, the audience is always just a little behind what is being presented on-screen, which pays off in a couple of nifty ways early on as the director presents him in an environment without giving any clues as to what might be going on.  For instance, that first getaway sequence at night is followed by a day shot of Gosling in a policeman's uniform.  A moment of disorientation follows (he's a cop?...but...), which is then visually resolved in a way that makes one trust one's own abilities to find the answers (and the director to provide them), if not entirely trust The Driver.  That works well over the arc of the story, which, frankly, is not that special, despite the interesting way it is delivered.

For that character development is where Drive and the classic Scorsese film merge and go different paths, to the earlier film's advantage.  The Driver becomes involved with his neighbor—she does have a name, Irene, played by Carey Mulligan—who has a husband in prison and a son she's caring for herself.  The Driver takes an interest, helps out, becomes involved in their worlds, then, just as everybody is getting comfortable—quiet, yet comfortable—the husband gets released from prison, and becomes wrapped up in some bad goings-on.  Empathizing with Irene, fearing for the boy, he volunteers to be the driver on the Standard One Last Job for Irene's husband, where things do not go smoothly, putting everybody's life in jeopardy and making The Driver a one-man revenge squad to get to the bottom of what happened and keep the family safe.

And that's where Drive left me cold.  Taxi Driver was an urban fairy tale, the product of one man's romantic fantasy that didn't fit in with the real world.  And Paul Schrader's screenplay and Scorsese's direction spelled out that Travis Bickle's image of himself as a knight aboard a checkerboard steed was just as fanciful—and deluded—as Don Quixote's.  Drive takes it all very seriously, assured that the nurturing care-giver and the bloody names-taker can be contained in one self-contained package.  Taxi Driver had the smarts and the ironic cynicism to let the world at large buy into Bickle's fantasy and myth, despite him being, in truth, a psychopath.  But, Drive's hero, with veins running anti-freeze...and let us say "unique" ways of threatening people...is swathed in eyes-wide romanticism, without the distancing projection of myth...or even humor, ironic or otherwise.  His "Man with No Name," being in action more like one of Kurosawa's samurai or Leone's gun-slingers, moves through the landscape, but without the flaws that define character, a cypher, unknowable, unapologetic, unaccountable and ultimately adrift—something more spirit than human.

A note on the violence: as in Taxi Driver, it is surprising, shocking and unmerciful, a result of Refn's stylization—he splashes the color red in the cold colors of his landscape occasionally to attract the eye of the audience and the Driver and the blood of the violence, because it clashes so much in the color scheme of the film, is doubly grisly (just think how lurid the shooting spree in Taxi Driver would be if the colors weren't destaurated in order to secure an "R," rather than an "X," rating), to the point where it elicits uncomfortable laughter, rather than gasps.

The bottom line, then, is that the film becomes out-of-step with itself, a cool silver jacket with patches of red from wearing its heart on its sleeve, unsentimentally sentimental, tears falling amidst acid rain. However cleverly distilled from its cinematic but more cynical predecessors, with its un-tarnished knight in shining chrome, Drive is a fairy tale for the phony-tough.

Drive is a Rental.

* The similarity even extends to the soundtrack, which vibrates to Euro-buzz techno with lyrics that offer on-the-nose commentary to what's happening on-screen.

** One of the funniest lines in the film (to me, anyway) has Shannon's pre-introduction to investor Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks—also in Taxi Driver—and there isn't a trace of comedy in his performance, which is quite impressive) include the phrase "Don't say anything," as if his character wouldn't, anyway.

Lip service is paid to the Fable of the Scorpion in Drive.
Orson Welles explains it all for you (from Mr. Arkadin).

Blue Valentine

"For Better or For Worse (and this is me at my worse)"
or
"...With a Hasty Word You Can't Recall."

When Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine comes out on DVD in the Spring, I wouldn't be surprised if a few June weddings got cancelled.  Not because it's such a depressing movie about marriage (it is!), but because it is so annoyingly accurate in depicting its scenes from a broken marriage.  Not broken, really, and not sinking...but definitely floundering—one of Woody Allen's "dead sharks."

It depicts 24 hours in a marriage, complete with flash-backs of the puppyish love of the participants (Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, both brave performances and both equally deserving of Oscar recognition—like love and marriage, you couldn't have one without the other*) and devoted actions that led to it.  Because that is what is so painful about watching Blue Valentine—you see both the sour and sweet of the marriage without the glacial wearing down of feelings into numb reaction that occurred in between.  The contrast between the two periods is stark, and the film jumps between them with the speed of a single edit.

He's a house painter with Peter Pan syndrome, she's a nurse who can't cure it.  They have a child who adores them both, and doesn't notice the tension in the words between the two adults.  They're not bad people and married with the best of intentions.  But, at some point, the growing between them stopped, and the euphemism for marriage—"settling down"—has a chilling ring of complacency to it.

Love is hard work, and marriage is even harder (that is, if you do it right—says Mr. Divorcee).  One cannot take the initial spark that prompted it and forget it, like a pilot light (a metaphor that Blue Valentine exploits at its ending).  It must be tended and cared for and nurtured and not taken for granted.  And that is one thing the romantic comedies of today's cinema rarely get right—they stop right at the beginning, making them a bit of a cheat and giving them all the validity of a Hallmark card.  You look at a film like Blue Valentine, so brave in its depiction of the tough love a relationship or marriage requires, and the final shot of a typical rom-com like James L. Brooks' How Do You Know—the held framing of a now abandoned bus stop indicating that the couple are now together—looks a little hollow, like a null set (as opposed to Brooks' Spanglish, which is a bit more mature in its depcition of dedication in the face of desirable and easier choices. 

One of the aspects of the film, which has hung with me for days and haunts me, is its use of delayed pay-offs.  Most films these days hammer image and soundtrack together in an obvious manner to reinforce a point in case the audience doesn't get it.  A bit insulting, actually.  Cianfrance and his writers and actors have far more faith and build a skein of rock-solid "call-backs" that, given the perspective of the whole film—The Big Picture—creates a rich tapestry of a film.  Blue Valentine, in its appropriately fractured structure, leaves things hanging, that in retrospect—a major theme of the film—connect to other incidents that shore up the situation: the song "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" snaps to the end-shot; Cindy's casual mentioning of a chance encounter in a liquor store that inexplicably sets Dean off is revealed to be an insensitive and cruel topic; and—my favorite—an odd protracted shot of Dean looking directly at the camera in a hospice corridor.

So, yes, it might discourage a couple of Darwin Award-winning marriages, but Blue Valentine is a raw, rewarding, intelligent film about maybe-not-so-intelligent choices, however right they may feel.  It might be the pomegrannette in the box of chocolates, but during this Valentine month, full of hearts and flowers and fluff on the cinema screens, it's a brave thing to say that the course of true love never runs smooth, but the path to Hell...even the one down a church-aisle...is paved with good intentions.

Blue Valentine is a Full-Price Ticket.

* Gosling was shut out of the Oscar race, which is a shame.  His performance is so seeringly on the money, taking full advantage of Gosling's callow strengths as an actor, that it makes his myopic man-child of a young husband painful to watch, while not making him entirely unsympathetic.  Tough trick to pull off, but Gosling makes it look easy.  Sometimes, Ryan Gosling is not so good.  Here, he's brilliant.

Fracture

"Fracture" (Gregory Hoblit, 2007) Gregory Hoblit has had a long career shepharding quality television work as a co-executive producer/writer/director on such shows as "Hill Street Blues," and "L.A. Law." He can be counted on to lend an air of verisimilitude to his legal films (though when he strays off-court into such films as "Hart's War," he brings no real style to the proceedings--even though there was an extended trial scene in the Bruce Willis/Colin Farrell P.O.W. film). But he does have an unerring eye for talent as his "Primal Fear" was a fine showcase for Laura Linney, Andre Braugher, and especially Edward Norton, all eclipsing star Richard Gere.

The cast for "Fracture" is just as impressive with great character actors like Fiona Shaw, David Strathairn, and Bob Gunton lending strong supporting roles. But the film is a bit too "legal procedural" for its own good. Let's see what legal cliches can we trot out:
- the cocky upstart lawyer (Ryan Gosling) begging for a come-uppence: Check
- the genius (Anthony Hopkins) using the legal system for his own ends: Check
- the distracting affair with a legal superior (Rosamund Pike) that throws "upstart" off his game: Check
- the mentor (Straithairn) who warns "upstart" every step of the way, while secretly pulling for the kid because he has such "pluck:" Check
- the legal maneuvering that twists a seemingly open-and-shut court case into a series of technicalities that derail any sense of justice: Check
- the tony upscale-silvery locations that serve as contrast (and siren call) to the "upstart's" stuffy offices of wood-panels and metal desks: Check
- the red herring revealed only at the end which casts a different light on the whole proceedings: Check

Will the clichés please stand while the judge enters the chambers?

Ultimately what it comes down to is an acting duel between old war-horse Hopkins, and "new turk" Gosling, and there it's no contest. Hopkins can do more leaning back in his chair and stretching his neck suggesting megalomania than any actor doing movies. Hopkins has bags of tricks he hasn't gotten to yet. Gosling, then, tries to match him by going the opposite route--doing too much so that his legal eagle looks jittery and scattered; Gosling's busy performance reminds one of the bizarre early work of Nicolas Cage--too much over-thinking the part, and trying too hard to get noticed, that one is distracted by the tic's in the foreground to notice any subtleties that might be working. By the ending of the film, Gosling settles down, but it comes off as too little (finally) coming too late.

Suspensions of Disbelief - "Like, yeah-HUH!"

Sacred Vessels in the Land of Addictionary.org

"Juno" is a film so dominated by its script (by Diablo Cody*) and its actors (they're all television veterans with countless man-hours before the camera) that all director Jason Reitman has to do is get out of the way-though in the transitions he routinely cuts on the 1's of the pervasively twee-rock soundtrack to maintain the air of perkiness. The kids that dominate this film about lower-middle-class families making the most of a bad situation--well, bad in the timing--are so pervasively cute and clever in their articulation and word-play that one wonders if they hail from some part of the country where the main sport is Scrabble, and instead of MySpace they all hover around "Addictionary.org." Ultimately one has to ascribe to it the same rule that one applies to Bette Davis movies where everyone always has the perfect come-back: "They have better writers than we do."

But the same troubles. Juno MacGuff starts the movie pregnant and pissed. And pissing. She's buying the home-pregnancy tests out of the box one at a time from the convenience store and using their facilities to test it. "You better pay for that pee-stick when you're done with it," says the clerk (played by "The Office's Rainn Wilson). "Don't think it's yours just because you marked it with your urine!" She gets the unholy pink "x" and starts to puzzle out how to proceed: telling parents, telling sperm-donor, what to do with said spawn, yadda yadda yadda. "Juno" skips along dealing with all these crises and quite a few more, and never slides into bathos, preaching or "after-school special" earnestness. The characters are all people for whom regrets are a waste-of-time, and are too busy doing their best to do too much navel-gazing. Well, almost all. One walks away charmed, and admiring the cleverness and the near-occasion of bravery the movie displays. And there are no bad performances. Anywhere. No actor lets this material touch the ground, whether its the stunningly decent work by vet-thesps like Alison Janney and J.K. Simmons, but also wise work by Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, and, yes, Jennifer Garner. But the big bouquet goes to Ellen Page who carries the movie on her slim shoulders and always finds a way to make the dialog sound like she's just saying it off the cuff. That's a tough trick to pull for an entire movie--an entire comic movie--this entire comic movie. Frankly, it would've been easier giving birth.

"Juno" is a pop-culture flip-remarkable "Matinee" (Whoah! Rate Big!)

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It Takes a Sex Toy to Raise a Village

Everybody likes Lars. Lars is 27, lives in the carriage-house of the family home. Keeps to himself. He goes to work, eats, attends church, chops wood.

And that's about it.

Lars is socially retarded to an alarming degree, so much so that he feels it hurts to be touched. His family worries about him. They feel guilty. They don't know what to do.

But Lars does. He's surrounded by people with relationships, so he decides to get one. But that touching thing...that's a problem.

Then one day, Bianca shows up, a mail-order girlfriend. Lars tells his brother and sister-in-law that he has a girl-friend and he'll bring her over for dinner. They're elated. Then they find they didn't need the extra setting. Bianca's a sex-doll. Fairly realistic looking, but she doesn't move. At all. Lars has to carry her, until he gets her a wheelchair. He cuts her food for her. Eats it, too.

In a case of intervention, all four go to the doctor (Patricia Clarkson, being warm but acting cold), who takes one look at Bianca and worries out loud that she needs weekly treatments for her alarmingly low blood pressure, and uses the opportunity to find out exactly what is going on with Lars. She advises that they should play along--"Bianca's in town for a reason," she says. "But, people will laugh at him!" says his harried brother, played by a note-perfect Paul Schneider. "You, too," says the doc.


It could be perverse, and if Lars actually had relations with Bianca, people wouldn't be enjoying this movie nearly so much. Nor would it be as enjoyable if the entire town didn't, for the sake of Lars, go along with the story and accept Bianca. And that acceptance happens almost immediately. Sister-in-law Karin informs her coffee klatsch friends that Bianca is anatomically correct, and one of them says, "Soooo...she's just one of the girls, then..." The pastor of the church goes along with it. Everybody does. Ev-e-ry-bo-dy. Which set off some reality alarms for me. There aren't any disaffected youth, or jerks or morons in this town? Hell, if any of the kids from "Juno" lived there, Lars would be getting the "stink-eye," at least. And in a land where every inflatable Christmas lawn ornament is at risk, Bianca has it REALLY easy.

Still, it's an enjoyable film, full of heart in the right place, and offers lots of enjoyable surprises in screenplay, performance (it's hard to believe this is the same Ryan Gosling from "Fracture") and overall tone. One wishes there was a second there where one could believe in it.

"Lars and the Real Girl" is a matinee, though my opinion is deflating.

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* Diablo Cody has such a fresh, smart way with dialog that one hasn't been as excited by a screen author's work since Zach Helm, who wrote "Stranger Than Fiction." Since Helm went on to create the lead balloon "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium," one doesn't want to be too effusive in one's praise, lest one set oneself up for disappointment.