WORST OF THE DECADE— Benjamin Button

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David (Fight Club) Fincher, director, 2008

 HOOK: Would Brad Pitt grow younger without Angelina?

 LINE:  “’Do you know anything about buttons?”

 SINKER: Is this the “Forrest Gump Meaning of Life” award winner? (Also,  how can a movie review begin with four questions?)

SPANKY: Great look to this film. The gimmick of Brad Pitt (before he turned into Osama Ben Laden) growing younger, grows old fast. And it’s never clear why this reverse aging is supposed to matter to the audience (though the tacked on epigrams sure try to reach for something, …anything). What makes a ”turkey” ? More than just a bad film, it is big expectations. Brad Pitt in a meaningless role, a gimmick that has no significance, “Lifetime” music that would make an elevator wince—these are pretty much more than you need to qualify for a Big Bird. And, by the way, let’s once and for all agree not to have any more movie narratives that begin with someone dying in a hospital telling (or listening to) a story that brings us back to the opening scene for a teary climax. This format sank with the movie Titanic.

 BARK (1 BARKs out of four)

 JOHN: You may age a bit yourself watching this movie that makes 3 hours seem like 3 years. This might have made a good 15 second pitch for a film, but the execution is excruciating. If I had to use a metaphor, it would be it’s like giving birth to an eighty year old man. Oh wait a minute, that’s what this film is about. But it’s we in the audience who suffer the labor pains. The only part I liked is when Brad Pitt goes off with a few of his Jewish friends to kill Nazis whereas the scene in which a teen-aged Benjamin makes out with his now aged lover, is just plain creepy. If time could go backward a good destination might be someone’s decision whether or not to make a film that is as enjoyable as sitting on a toilet when you’re constipated (F. Scott Fitzgerald turning over in his grave; Jenifer Aniston in the other room laughing her head off).  

0 (No GOs out of four)

"Anyone seen a baby Nazi?"

 

MARRIED LIFE— ‘Til Death Do Us Part

Married Life, Ira Sach, director, 2008 

"Can you believe these prices? We should make movies about the 50's all the time."

HOOK: Does black comedy + Hitchcock-like plot = Ingmar Bergman Film?

LINE:  “’Til Death do us part.”

SINKER: Pierce Brosnan and Chris Cooper typecasting used to advantage.

JOHN: There are things I love here. The titles, the music, the 50’s cars and Rachel McAdams stellar performance. If it weren’t for Mad Men this would be a one of a kind. But the director is able to do something more with these male movie stars—play the audience with their previous roles. We immediately think Brosnan is really smarter than he is and, like James Bond, he is able to have any woman of his choosing. And Cooper, after his disturbing turn in Adaptation, is someone like Anthony Perkins after Psycho. We will never trust him again. Sach turns this type-casting against us and we find ourselves rooting for Cooper, who we are disposed to hate, and betrayed by Brosnan, who we thought would somehow be the rectifying force. The ending could have been stronger, but what a ride!

GO GO GO (3 GOs out of four)

SPANKY: I tend to agree with you on this one, John, but there are some things that looking back, don’t make much sense. For example, Patricia Clarkson (the betrayed wife) being so distraught about losing her husband when she, herself, is madly in love with someone else—a scene that intentionally misleads the audience. Her insistance that sex not love makes the best partnership (good foreshadowing of her affair but questionable considering her character). And the curious point where Brosnan is going to tell her about her husband’s affair knowing he is having one also, but doesn’t. That would have been a quick end to the film. Necessary to the plot perhaps but doesn’t really make much sense when you see it is his chance to grab the girl. I sort of liked the cleaning up after the party vignette seen through a window from outside at the finish, but the film had really ended five minutes earlier. And, I’m not sure what kind of audience this movie appeals to—disillusioned married people who are looking for a fun night out? It makes for good DVD watching though.  

BARK, BARK (2 BARKs out of four)

DID YOU KNOW: Speaking of the DVD, it offers three alternate endings. Spanky and I are glad Sach went with the one he did–otherwise we would have to say, “but the film had really ended twenty minutes earlier.”

VERTIGO— Why It’s Hitchcock’s Greatest

Hang...on!

Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, director, 1954

HOOK: The actors stink, yet we are in the hands of the master who knows plot, characters, setting don’t matter. Playing the audience does.

LINE:  “If I could just find the key…and put it together.”

SINKER: Is it the Jimmy Stewart character or Alfred Hitchcock who is reenacting some psychosis from his life?” (The answer is below.)

JOHN: The icy blonde. Cool. Distant. Aloof. Detached. Troubled. Unattainable. The male gaze, Catholic guilt and a drive toward violence or control. Scotty (as was Jeff in Rear Window) is damaged goods, reliant upon yet intimidated by women. At first Stewart seems a kind of caricature of himself, and Novak a movie prop. But then he free-falls into deep obsession and gives a harrowing performance that catches us off guard, and she, we realize too late, is supposed to be a prop. What we seek is an explanation not of the terror of heights but of projection and deceit, for this is a process in which we the audience are active participats. Rear Window introduced the subject of our voyeurism and Psycho brings it to its inevitable, horrific conclusion. This film is terrifying in what it implies. We can point at Hitchcock as mirroring his own obsession. But it is also ours. 

GO GO GO GO (4 GOs out of four)

SPANKY: I love Stewart driving down San Francisco streets parked with those great 50’s cars. The wave splashing behind him and Novak as they kiss (to the crescendo of Bernard Herman’s score). There’s the dream sequence, an early denouement to the crime so we can watch Stewart cruelly reenact it with the woman. And at the most-famous-of-all-time director gives us a little wink and a nod of a surprise—as if to say, “who are you to think a movie can give you truth that is the Truth.” It’s only on the way home that we realize this one does. The fat, short, ugly Hitch was demeaning to these women stars that were set up on a pedestal, but isn’t that what we pay money for every day. To see Britney Spears, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Lindsay Lohan publicly humiliated? Turning the tables on them is our revenge. Turning the tables on us is Hitchcock’s.

"Good evening."

BARK, BARK, BARK, BARK (4 BARKs out of four)

DID YOU KNOW: Hitchcock originally wanted Vera Miles for the female lead, but she became pregnant before the shooting began. Jimmy Stewart who was kind of an everyman before this movie, developed a bit of an edge here that fortunately followed him to the remaining roles he was to play. Hitchcock went on to brow beat Tippi Hedren (His plan to mold Hedren’s public image went so far as to carefully control her style of dressing and grooming). In interviews, Naomi Watts has stated that her character interpretation in Mulholland Drive (2001) was influenced by the look and performances of Kim Novak in Hitchcock films

THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY – What Went Wrong?

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Anthony Minghella, director, 1999 

HOOK: What if Strangers on the Train derailed? 

LINE:  “Wherever I look of Dickie I find you” 

SINKER: “She (Highsmith) was a mean, hard, cruel, unlovable, unloving person,” said acquaintance Otto Penzler. “I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly.”

JOHN: This is one of those films that half way though you realize is a masterpiece, and then when it ends you are not so sure. The good stuff includes  a gorgeous, glowing quality to the Italian settings, an imaginative musical score, plus Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow,  Cate Blanchett, James Rebhorn and a sly Philip Seymour Hoffman in career defining roles.  

But those of us familiar with Patricia Highsmith’s books might balk that this adaptation is too close to the source. One of her appeals to an audience is how she entraps us through a few seemingly unimportant choices to defending what we have become by going even further outside the rules of society. Like Dostoyevsky and Franz Kafka she gets us contemplating a morality we don’t often think about, not as an intellectual exercise but as someone caught outside its clutches trying to figure out what to do next.

GO GO GO (3 GOs out of four)

SPANKY: Let me say what I think you are heading for. It’s almost like the director said to Matt Damon, “OK what is your character’s real motivation here?” And he reaches for the homosexual card instead of the feelings any of us might have about wanting to change places with someone (like the too handsome Law) who is more sophisticated, wealthy and even has the eye of a Gwyneth Paltrow. Though Highsmith was herself a lesbian, it seems kind of a cop out for Ripley and the audience. Don’t we watch films to pretend we are someone else, often beyond the limitations of our own lives? The storyline goes to the heart of this process and to sidestep it for a simpler scapegoat we can shake a finger at is missing an opportunity to do much more. Damon is perfect as Ripley without a deeper hidden secret, just as the smirking, conceited Hoffman is the annoying obstacle we all know and Rebhorn is the over controlling parent. Sometimes less is better, Tom Ripley.

BARK, BARK, (2 BARKs out of four)

DID YOU KNOW: Highsmith graduated from Barnard College, where she had studied English composition, playwriting and the short story. Living in New York City and Mexico between 1942 and 1948, she wrote for comic book publishers. Answering an ad for “reporter/rewrite,” she arrived at the office of comic book publisher Ned Pines and landed a job working in a bullpen with four artists and three other writers, initially scripting two comic book stories a day for $55-a-week. 

The young Highsmith had an intense, complicated relationship with her mother. According to Highsmith, her mother once told her that she had tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Highsmith never resolved this love-hate relationship, which haunted her for the rest of her life, and which she fictionalized in her short story “The Terrapin,” about a young boy who stabs his mother to death. 

HE FIFTH ELEMENT, What Makes This a Movie Gem

The Fifth Element, Luc Besson (boyhood comic book fan), director, 1997  

Wild Ride

 HOOK: Every 300 years evil returns (luckily this time we have the cocky, smirking Bruce Willis as our savior). 

LINE: “Me protect you?” 

SINKER: As Mae West once said, “Too much of a good thing is, wonderful.”

 

 JOHN: This is an incomprehensible mess of a film that, for some reason, we end up loving.  I like  a sci-fi epic that begins in the past then shoe horns us into the distant future (call it the “2001 effect”). And what do we get? Bruce Willis driving a Checker air cab through a vertically challenged Blade-Runner inner-city. Maybe that’s the appeal. Our fate is in the hands of a guy who lost Demi Moore to Ashton Kutcher. Bruce 12 Monkeys Willis. But wait, there’s more. The alien morphs into a beautiful pink-haired waif (anyone who has ever seen a sci-fi horror film knows that a monster tied down in the lab means trouble–The Thing). In case that isn’t more than enough, there’s Gary Oldman as Mister Evil attracting a bunch of Chewbacca-like creatures (ala Star Wars). Perhaps that’s what’s so appealing. This is every movie ever made, but because it doesn’t take itself seriously we can laugh at our gullibility; and after some really annoying broadcast stuff in the last part, it ends with an interplanetary, opera diva and surprising  emotional punch. Did I mention it foreshadows Wall-E the The Divinci Code and 1012? Bruce, baby, you have a full cab! 

GO GO GO GO (4 GOs out of four) 

SPANKY: I’ll stick with earth, air, fire and water. Besson conceived the idea when he was 16, if that doesn’t hook you in as an adult, what will? I’m a little less enamored with this than you, John. It’s like, “Didn’t I see this movie before?” even if I didn’t. I like a sexy woman in adult diapers and strips of masking tape as much as the rest of you, but you humans have elected enough feeble-minded presidents to prove stupidity isn’t all that cute. Dazzling pyrotechnics aside, I see this as a kind of an outrageous, period cult film that makes us glad we’ve moved on. PS Isn’t it about time the cat-obsessed Willis moved on too? 

BARK, BARK, (2 BARKs out of four) 

WHAT MAKES THIS A MOVIE GEM?

Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis, director, 1993

 HOOK: A trip into the romantic comedy Twilight Zone.

 LINE:  She: Do you ever have déjà vu? 

                 He: Didn’t you just ask me that?

SINKER: Seize the day!

SPANKY: Weird how the only guests on TV are plugging movies. Whatever happened to books, plays, magazines, even other TV programs? Then you go to the theater and the seats are empty. My take is that we want it to work. More than any other media movies can make us part of the process. The fact that most don’t or that we are so critical even of those that do, shows we want and need at least some of them to succeed. In a way they are like the story of Groundhog Day, recycling plots of movies that work. And once in a while, through this repetition we grasp something that changes our lives. Let’s face it, we start out not wanting the smarmy Bill Murray character to get the girl (Andie MacDowell, a symbol of some higher plane). We don’t like him because we don’t like ourselves. Given a life free of consequences we would also be reckless, depressed, suicidal, drunken, dishonest, etc., etc. But by the end of the movie we are cheering him on and looking at the missed opportunity of our own rather repetitive lives as well.

 BARK, BARK, BARK, BARK (4 BARKs out of four)

 JOHN: I agree, Spanky, we leave the movie changed. And this is a clever fable about movie-making as well. Actors endure endless retakes of the same scene, trying to keep it fresh. And our lives too, like the weatherman Phil’s are repetitious, with the tiniest variations of pleasures and annoyances. And yet, we can make something out of this. “Today is the first day of the rest of our lives” (Arrrggg, I never thought I would ever say that). Most movies are escapism, this one ends up being just the opposite, like Dickens’ Scrooge or A Wonderful Life. The fact that it does this without making a big deal of it, let’s us assume ownership of our own transformation. Brilliant, quirky, wildly original Groundhog Day says, “Make the most of your time on earth.” And by God, that is what we come away from it determined to do. 

GO GO GO GO (4 GOs out of four) 

A SERIOUS MAN

A Serious Man, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 2009

shrink-wrap for the soul

HOOK: Is the cat in the house, dead or alive?

 LINE:  “Even though you can’t ever figure anything out, you will be responsible for it on the midterm.”

 SINKER: How can someone ‘who hasn’t done anything’ be blamed for everything? A Book of Job treat with a razor hidden in it. 

JOHN: As our friend Bob (at Coffeespew) points out the new suburbs of the fifties and sixties are old territory for authors like John Updike. So why do the Coen brothers revisit them (other than the fact that this is where they grew up in one around Minneapolis)? I think there’s a broader question concerned with the difference between comedy and drama—a line they’ve crossed with mixed results in the past. In drama we in the audience want to identify with the protagonist, feel that what is happening to him is happening to us. We are curious and relieved (even if things turn out badly, “It is only a movie.”). Comedy requires more distance. We recognize the situations but want to laugh at the characters, not ourselves. Whether or not the Coens relate to the Larry Gopnik character (superbly played by newcomer Michael Stuhlbarg in a career launching performance), we don’t, even if the fact that this involves his Jewishness makes it a bit of an uncomfortable laugh. The genius of this film is that it doesn’t stay in the mid sixties. The last moments, like impending doom, roll out at us today. I found the movie funny, at times stereotyped and slow, but ultimately a masterpiece that leaves you gasping.

GO GO GO GO (4 GOs out of four) 

SPANKY: The fact that you have to do all this rationalizing, John, seems to me to indicate that the film isn’t making it on its own terms (like Fargo). We can debate great films, like those of Bergman and Fellini, all night, but whether or not we do they stand as great films. This one has some magical moments: the sequence with the young rabbi, the tale of the message on the teeth of the Jewish dentist’s client, Sly Abelman—beautifully played by Fred Melamed—even the dark, sub-titled prologue. And I agree, the shift of vantage point from the father to his son toward the end gives the conclusion knock-out power. But it also seems to me the movie has to work a little harder than it should have to. And we in the audience do too. Plus the two-dimensional, hair-washing daughter, the Jewish lawyers, the Nazi-like neighbors and the desperate housewife next door…com’on. This may be much better than their other recent movies, but the Coen boys are still a long way from home.

BARK, BARK (2 BARKs out of four)

 

Michael Stuhlbarg, Fred Melamed, Richard Kind, Aaron Wolf, Sari Wagner, Jessica McManus, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen,  Sari Lennick , A Serious Man, Fargo, Comedy, Drama, Coen Brothers, No Country For Old Men, Man Who Wasn’t There, Woody Allen

THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT

The Draughtsman’s Contract, Peter Greenaway, Director, 1982

"Hold Still!"

 HOOK: Sex, Drama & Rococo Droll

LINE:  “Draw what you see, not what you know.”

SINKER: Fastidious meets facetious. An impish sneer that later hardens into a death- mask grimace. 

JOHN: In a static 17^th Century world where men and women wear brocade robes and white-wigs tall as wedding cakes, a “cocky” artist is contracted by the woman of an estate and her daughter to do a series of drawings while the husband/father is out of town in exchange for money and sexual favors. The husband ends up dead and the pictures contain clues for the audience to figure out who did it. So far so good, but I couldn’t. One critic suggests viewing the film many times, but I’m afraid that’s too much for me also. Let’s just leave it at this: The Draughtsman’s Contract is a masterpiece beyond most people’s grasp.

GO GO GO (3 GOs out of four) 

SPANKY: My favorite part is the nude guy painted silver who poses as statues in different scenes. What the hell! And the jaunty Michael Nyman’s score based on motifs lifted from Purcell makes you feel at any moment this will turn into Tom Jones. But it doesn’t. Nor does it make any more or less sense than anything humans ever do. The film’s visual composition is plush and the script dizzyingly crammed with wit, conceit, insult, allusion, innuendo and equivocation. There’s sex, snotty people and flamboyant costumes. What more could you want.

“TWO PAWS Up” (4 BARKs out of four)

 

The Informant!

The Informant! Steven Soderbergh, Director, 2009

 

HOOK: Tired of special effects movies and Jenifer Aniston, bet you’d enjoy a comedy about corporate price fixing. 

"Can you hear me now!"

 LINE:  “I’m Agent 0014 because I’m twice as smart as James Bond.” 

SINKER: The tip-off is the exclamation point at the end of the title.  

JOHN: There’s something appealing about the nervous, awkward, optimistic, delusional, rambling-voice-over kind of guy Damon plays (even about the Decatur, Illinois setting) that makes you not only like him, but fearful for the mess we think he’s getting into. He’s in charge of a lysine-manufacturing operation bleeding money. He tells his bosses that a mole is sabotaging the operation and that a confidential source will reveal all for ten million dollars. They call in the FBI. Soon the Damon character, Whitacre, is wowing them with allegations that ADM is involved with massive price-fixing. Hardly your regular Saturday night plot. Then something strange happens. If you saw the previews, as I have on a couple of occasions, you come prepared to believe Whitacre, but, as it turns out, that’s a mistake. And in making it you will not be alone in. As Whitacre plays the others, Soderbergh plays us. And I have to admit, I bought it hook, line and sinker.  

GO GO GO GO (4 GOs out of four) 

SPANKY: Damon is terrific and the rest of the cast is too. No one looks Hollywood. There’s an expression we have here in Wisconsin that I think might be apt for Whitacre. He’s a “country slicker.” Yet as endearing as he ends up being, there are some interesting points made along the way about price-fixing, the legal morass many investigations must find themselves in and, finally, about what kind of a person making millions would turn whistle-blower. Soderbergh casts comedians in many of the film’s key roles—especially attorneys, both for and against Whitacre; which exerts a reductive effect on the seriousness and substance of Whitacre’s legal battles. Damon’s non-sequitur voice over observations are priceless, and provide semi-conscious clues when looking back on the film that give us those, ”Why didn’t I see that?” moments. Maybe a little too much so. After all this is an indictment of a system—economic, legal and political—that endorses or rewards deception. We can laugh, but shouldn’t we also be worried? Who is being self-delusional now?   

“TWO PAWS Up” (3 BARKs out of four)

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds – WHAT WENT WRONG?

The Inglourious Basterd

Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino – Director, 2009

HOOK: What if the Jews were the Nazis and the Nazis were the Jews, then how would we feel?

LINE:  “I want my scalps!” 

SINKER: We caught the friend who drove us there, Bob Wake, in the men’s room after the show trying to burn down the theater.

JOHN: In this over-the-top revenge fantasy Tarantino continues his ability to build scenes through dialogue that at first catch you off guard and then take on issues below the surface that inevitably end in violent bloodshed. This whole movie is made of scenes like that which lead to what? Collosal violent, bloodshed. There is no sense of character development nor any surprising revelation. In a sense he takes the genre (period war film) for face value and plays it for all it’s worth. Perhaps in doing that this bad boy of cinema gives audiences and himself exactly what they want (killing Nazis). I realized a few minutes into the film that any discussion of rewriting history or the question of portraying Jews as avengers, was beside the point. In some ways this is better than his gangster movies (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs) because it seems like it will play on our preconceived values and gives us a fresh take on the context of our lives. But that only carries us so far — about two-thirds of the movie. But then we want more, not simply more of the same, but more.

GO, GO, GO (3 GOs out of four)

SPANKY: It’s not just self-indulgence (though that’s a downside of director as writer), Tarantino misses a wonderful opportunity. This film is as much about movies as it is about WWII, maybe more. How they reflect reality /or let us escape from it. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) is an entertaining, insightful villain, but it’s the Melanie Laurent character, Shoshanna, who is the soul of the movie. She is out for vengeance but beneath her cold resolve beats the heart of a terrified child. As she lies dying and her theater is burning, she should be imagining the ending we see (of dying Nazi leaders), instead of the fictionalizing romp T-Man (as ballsy as he is) presents. Think Fellini, Bergman and Truffaut. It could have been a symbolic comment on the creative process that allows us, not only to survive, but to be great. True, the Brad Pitt finale would have had to be curtailed, but by this time we’re sick of his over-acted character anyway. What could have been profound, is simply noisy, and only to do with us at the movies. We leave the theater, the same people we were when we came in. As Nick Caraway says at the end of the Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  Maybe Bob Wake had the right idea after all.  

“ONE PAW Up” (1 BARK out of four)