The Great Gatsby – “Ol’ Sport!”

The Great Gatsby 

Directed by Baz Luhrmann, 2013

John:  I have read the book at least a half dozen times. It is my favorite. And to be honest I went to this, half-expecting a failure, or nice try, like the Robert Redford/Mia Farrow earlier adaption. This one is spectacular. And even taught me something about the book.

Spanky: Not really surprised, as you were a fan of Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, which gave me a headache. Toby Maguire proves an inspired choice as Nick Carroway and he gets us through the preliminary stuff, where Daisy and Gatsby are pretty much mannequins.

John: DiCaprio comes alive in the conflict with Tom Buchanan. I expected that from the book. And Carey Mulligan, as Daisy, is fine. What I didn’t expect was to be emotionally moved by expected lines, such as Gatsby’s introduction against a background of George Gershwin, his comments on the past, the conclusion of the movie (and the book).

Spanky: I agree. Luhrmann has a respect for the original that should be acknowledged. What he does with special effects heightens what is there, makes it cinegraphic, it doesn’t compete or take away from the Fitzgerald classic. On the contrary.

John: In fact there are two things which actually helped me with the book. First, the movie focuses on Gatsby’s obsession with the past―his desire to re-invent it in light of his new wealth. Nick thinks this an unbridled optimism and I have to admit on the surface, I thought it was what the Midwest had over the rich, East Coast―and the reason Nick (as Fitzgerald) goes back to Minnesota in the end. But through the movie I see, Gatsby is being almost as unreasonable as Buchanan. Which leaves us, where? On to “point two.”

Spanky: I have to say, as a dog, “point one” didn’t mean much. Live in the “here and now” people!

John: Luhrmann does change the story to the extent that he has Nick writing a book about this as part of his psychiatric treatment. In the original he is a narrator who appears only as a kind of bookend commentator. So my “second point” is, how does art (writing specifically, but movies too) bring about a catharsis of our feelings. If Caraway’s admiration of Gatsby has led him to seek mental help through writing in rehab, then we need to ask how the story should be accepted, by us, if not on its own terms. That is profound and doesn’t accept easy, one sentence answers. But it is what great art does. It’s what makes this book a classic. It’s what lifts this movie above the realm of entertainment.

GO, GO, GO, GO (4 GOs out of 4)

Spanky: Let me think about this some more, but on the basis of your reaction, I’d advise:

BARK, BARK, BARK (3 BARKs out of 4)

PS When John originally wrote this he was thinking of Gatsby, himself, possibly Nick Caraway, but a few days later he realized that the theme applies to all of  us. Writers really do live twice, once when they experience something, a second time when they write about it. Fitzgerald’s book allows us to internalize, personalize this message. As does the movie. That takes a certain confidence in the reader/viewer. But the payoff is the work becomes theirs, not the writer’s or the director’s. It is the genius of both the book and now the film to direct us toward that, yet let us do it. We become the artist. Or discover that we have been one all along.

The Spanish Prisoner – “Excuse Me!”

The Spanish Prisoner 

David Mamet, director/writer, 1997

John:  This is the second or third time I’ve seen this movie. About three-quarters of the way through it, I think this is one that will out-Hitchcock Hitchcock. Then it goes wrong and I remember why I was disappointed before. Mamet is a great writer and the cast is good, but…

Spanky: I know what you mean, and I think the problem has to do with our expectations which extend beyond the movie.  Steve Marin plays it straight, and we expect him to betray us (hasn’t he already done that “playing it straight.”) But its Mamet’s wife, Rebecca Pidgeon―cast as a naïve, but trusting female confident―who we can’t accept as evil.

John: All of a sudden this is another twist and turn in a movie of twists and turns, but this is one too many. She has been the central character’s, and our, one fixed point in an ever-changing perspective.

Spanky: Part of the problem is I’m sure Mamet didn’t want Pidgeon to be the heroine and Martin and Ben Gazzara, the losers. And he knew he could write clever dialogue to cover the sleight of hand. He does. But emotionally, cleverness is not enough.

John: I love the way he plays off of Chinese tourist stereotypes, but you’re right. The Campbell Scott character (he is the son of George C. Scott, by the way) is our stand-in, not knowing what to believe or who to trust, but Pedgeon seems all that is right in a confusing, greedy world. To throw her out, with the bath, is to throw the movie away too.

GO (1 GO out of 4)

Spanky: If wishing could make something better, I would have been satisfied. John you may not be Mamet, and are certainly not Steve Martin, but for once I agree.

BARK (1 BARK out of 4)

The Place Beyond the Pines – “Fathers and Sons”

The Place Beyond the Pines

Derek Cianfrance, director, 2013

John: Like with On the Road I brought a lot with me to the theater. I had just talked with my son in Green Bay and written a poem about my father who died twenty years ago. I wondered, what if anything, was passed on from generation to generation. In a way this strange movie gave me an answer.

Spanky: I know, unlike me, you had motorcycles for many years and also a few tattoos, and  even though three quarters of the way through this movie, I had no idea where it was going, I know what you mean. Ryan Gosling is killed off in the first part of the film, but his role haunts all of it. And the ending is so right.

John:  The third act starts to look like some kind of teen-aged vengance. It slows things down, and then, then we are beyond the pines.

GO, GO, GO, (3 GOs out of 4)

Spanky: I admire a movie that lets you bring your own baggage to it, and yet leave with more to think about. It is demanding of the actors, it is demanding of the audience. But that is what we value, because we have done it.

BARK, BARK, BARK (3 BARKs out of 4)

Skyfall – “Resurrection”

Skyfall, Director:  Sam Mendes, 2012

 

John: What is it like to live your life in parallel to a fictional character? Oh, often it mayb be misplaced wish fulfillment and played by different actors…, but aren’t we different people at different stages of our lives and doesn’t fantasy give us clues as to who we really are?

This is the one Bond film (and I’ve seen them all) that makes us think about him and about our lives watching him. But it doesn’t skimp on the essentials either. The title sequence is spectacular; and I challenge any 007 fan not to have chills run down your spine when our hero unearths his old Austin Martin and the theme pounds in your ears.

The payoff isn’t this film, but the new beginning it promises…all of us.

GO, GO, GO, GO (4 GOs out of 4)

Sparky: I don’t know if any of the other Bonds could have pulled this off. Craig, Judi Dench and Bardem are such fine actors, allowed by a super-thoughtful script to do just that. Sure the special effects are spectacular, but so are the settings, such as Shanghai.

And the theme of resurrection—so welcome to older guys like you, John—is also one that applies to movies. This one shows them how.

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

Match Point – “Still in the Game”

Match Point, 2005, Woody Allen, director

John: Two things stand out for me: 1) early in the movie the central character’s reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment;and, 2, the look in his eyes in the final shot. Luck has given him freedom, but he is doomed to a life of remembering. The movie doesn’t tell us this, it shows it in ways that are subtle and profound and real—Crime and Punishment. This is masterfully done from the title, to the complex plot, to the final resolution. And it is better (or at least less distracting) not having Allen, himself, in the film. Scarlet Johansen is appealing, demanding and insistent in a way that drives this story forward.

GO, GO, GO, GO (4 GOs out of 4)

Spanky: Watching the DVD I thought what a pleasure it is to be walked through London by Woody Allen at the same unhurried pace that he’s taken through Manhattan all these years. Instead of Gershwin, we have opera to accompany us, the soundtrack packed with plaintive arias. There are a few characteristic scenes: people talking while walking down the street together and encounters in an art gallery (The Tate). But, like the main character, we in the audience are hooked into little decisions that end up big ones (reminds me of Patricia Strangers on the Train Highsmith). This is one of Woody’s classics, but, unless you have severe short time memory problems, I wouldn’t watch it too close to Crimes and Misdemeanors.

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

Fargo – “Coen Brothers Masterpiece”

Fargo  – Joel Coen, director, 1996

JOHN: Dead-pan familiarity and frigid winter plus those Minnesota accents. “You betcha.” Roger Ebert said, “The movie rotates its story through satire, comedy, suspense and violence, until it emerges as one of the best films I’ve ever seen.” He then states that films like Fargo are why he loves movies. I feel that way too. I’ve seen this film at least six or seven times and it is always tense, though-provoking and fresh.

GO, GO, GO, GO (4 GOs out of 4)

SPANKY: John and I recently watched it on DVD and here are the ten things I remembered about it from before and looked forward to seeing again:

1.    Marge, with murder in the back of her squad car, driving through white snow and fog saying “And it’s such a beautiful day.”

2.    The scene where her old friend tries to get it on with the pregnant sheriff.

3.    William Macy driving out of the car lot after saying he was going to do a “lot” inventory.

4.    Body being stuffed in the wood chipper.

5.    Steve Buschemi’s wound after he’s been shot in the face.

6.    The Paul Bunyan statue.

7.    The value of the 3 cent stamp, where Marge’s husband’s drawing will appear.

8.    The two murders watching the Tonight Show after banging some prostitutes.

9.    Guys on the street talking about winter weather.

10. The intractable father pulling a gun and getting shot.

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

 

LOOPER– “Future Noir”

Looper – Rian Johnson, director, 2012

Film making is a kind of time travel, and audiences figuratively murder actors.

JOHN: This might very well be the future of film noir. The movie is set in 2044, the period of the younger Joe who opens the movie by informing us that “Time travel hasn’t been invented yet. But in 30 years it will have been.” The practice is immediately outlawed, except criminal syndicates of the future begin sending their victims back in time to 2044, where Joe and other “loopers” can blow them away without anyone knowing or caring. There is, however, one catch: In order to tie up loose ends, the crime syndicates that employ the loopers eventually require them to kill their own future selves.

The retro-futurism on display reminds me of Blade Runner, and maybe that’s what Willis brings with him to the part as the older Joe. High-tech hover bikes are rare; old-school shotguns are everywhere.

The first quarter, is over the top guns and camera movement. The next quarter has some slow, interacting scenes between Willis and Gordon-Levitt (his younger self). Then we get a segment of “The Omen” followed by a conclusion that has (and I balk at saying this) genuine shock.

I wouldn’t want to sit through this again, but it was certainly something to try to figure out on the way home.

GO, GO, GO (3 GOs out of 4)

SPANKY: I thought it was frantic, confounding and the overall effect was designed to freak out audiences of all ages. There is a crazy mixture of city and rural, plus I have to admit an incredible ending. But, really, is this where films are going or an example of where they have gone that no one wants to admit.

The best part: what it would be like for the old you to be talking to the young one. And the dilemma the film poses when comparing these two lives is not a simple one. On those grounds, I give it an extra “bark.”

But as a movie we want to experience that fulfills needs we have that life can’t satisfy, I’d agree with Bruce when in a diner talking to his younger self he says, “I don’t want to talk about time-travel shit, because if we start, we’re going to be here all day, making diagrams with straws.”

BARK, BARK, BARK (3 BARKs out of 4)

THE MASTER– “Crazy Cult”

The Master – Paul Thomas Anderson, director

” Dianetics’? I sort of like ‘The Cause’ better.”

JOHN: This is a hard one. Not because of the Scientology connection (that is marginal at best) but because of the performances of the two male stars and a plot that let’s us draw our own conclusions. Joaquin Phoenix is crazy. And I don’t mean he is acting the role of a character who is crazy. I mean he’s crazy. And a drunk…and angry. The problem is he is the outsider through which we are to glimpse the cult thing that probably got us into the theater in the first place. And Philip Seymour Hoffman reminds me of Orson Welles in his declining years, not playing a character, but trying to play himself (there is one rowdy scene of him cavorting around singing that seems right out of the early part of Citizen Kane). Yes, there’s incredible  intensity between them (one reviewer called it “the dueling Brandos), but I think you can get it all just watching a close-up of Tom Cruise’s face on Entertainment Tonight.

GO, GO, (2 GOs out of 4)

SPANKY: I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to sit through this long movie again, I forgot the ending as soon as I left the theater and Joaquin Phoenix turned into a kind of Peter Falk Colombo at the end, but…it could have been terrible, and instead proved thought-provoking. Granted the ultimate transition for the Phoenix character was the rather sentimental loss of a young girlfriend he had during the war. However, the homophobic connection with the L. Ron Hubbard character digs beneath the surface of what each man wants from the other. And the single-take interrogation sequence and other exotic processes are all the more intriguing because we, in the audience, are trying to interpret their significance to the film. How often to directors put those kind of matters in our hands? That alone is worth experiencing this.

BARK, BARK, BARK (3 BARKs out of 4)

MOONRISE KINGDOM – “Go There!”

MoonRISE Kingdom – Wes Anderson, director, 2012

JOHN: There’s a recent New Yorker review of Nathan Lane as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh that makes an interesting distinction between a performer and an actor. In this film we see the difference between actor and celebrity. It starts with a cozy, perhaps claustrophobic, interior of an old island house in which young kids are listening to a record of Benjamin Britten’s The Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra. But, in contrast this is a movie about children not playing together.

Edward Norton as the surreal boy scout leader is right, right, right. He is an actor in the defining role of his life. But a movie is also about how the audience gets caught up in it. We empathize with the young boy and girl―and the adults searching for their own Moonlight Kingdom―and recall our own dreams of what we thought life would be.

GO, GO, GO, GO (4 GOS out of 4)

SPANKY: And, John, you are probably going to say celebrities like Bruce Willis (because he treated Demi and the kids so well after she took up with that younger guy) and Francis Fargo Woman, who always seems realm, if not fallible, and Bill Murray, forever trading on his angry looser temperament, bring these identities ready-made to the movie so Wes Anderson can concentrate on the marriage of two twelve year olds. Or so we think. As the bits and pieces come together we realize, in the very last minute of the very last scene, that this is an allegory. Like a good poem, it sends us back to the beginning (and title) and we, in the audience have something to ponder beyond a movie. Stunning!

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

GET SHORTY – “Taxi to Hollywood”

Get Shorty  –  Barry Sonnenfeld, director, 1905

JOHN: There’s something about Elmore Leonard that makes you want to read rather than watch this one. Perhaps the story is overly complex–too many characters, or too quirky and a little too creative. Don’t get me wrong, I love movies about movies especially about the one I am watching and this story seems as authentic as you get, but in the end I am left asking, “What? Could you go back over that again?”

GO, GO, GO, (3 GOs out of 4)

SPANKY: You should be saying, “Look me in the eye.” like everyone else did after John Travolta’s superb performance (I think matching Pulp Fiction). Isn’t the problem, we’re too dumb to keep up. Hackman, Travolta and Taxi’s DeVito are at their best, and the twist at the end should leave us all thinking about what we see and what we get. I think Get Shorty wears its guts on its sleeve.

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