Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2012.1
- The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) — 9/10
- This movie is dedicated to Heath Ledger—he died halfway through the filming—who stars alongside Christopher Plummer as the eponymous Doctor Parnassus. Ledger was very good; Plummer was spellbinding. The remainder of Ledger’s role was filled seamlessly by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and finally Colin Farrell, who played the character in the “imaginarium” scenes, where reality was slippery anyway. It’s never possible to predict how a Terry Gilliam movie will go, but it’s always possible to point and say “that’s definitely a Gilliam movie”. Parnassum’s cart, his show, the imaginarium, every detail just screams it. The plot weaves different times and places together, shifting and mixing and matching things like old-timey carnivals and modern-day London into one scene and portraying the homeless as lost wanderers extruded into our reality by unfortunate circumstances that occurred in a much more exciting reality. Highly recommended.
- The Wolfman (2010) — 6/10
- Benicio del Toro plays the main role as the scion of a family headed by Anthony Hopkins, who lives on the Blackmoor estate. His brother was recently killed by an unknown but extremely savage animal. Was it a werewolf? Well, duh, that’s the name of the movie. It’s a point-by-point remake of the 1940s film of the same name. It’s pretty decent, but not really scary at all and the plot, though relatively predictable, is ably driven forward by Hopkins and del Toro.
- Lonely Hearts (2006) — 7/10
- Salma Hayek and Jared Leto star as the real-life lonely-hearts killers from the 19402. Hayek is clearly the out-of-control driver of homicide in the pair, though Leto is only superficially more stable. Travolta is very good (instead of the creepy, crazy, bombastic Travolta we’ve gotten used to) as is his partner Gandolfini (the other partner, played by Scott Caan is a total pain-in-the-ass). In real life, the pair were convicted of killing three people, including strangling one woman’s daughter; in the movie, they killed several more. It was a decent flick, punctuated by some good scenes with Salma Hayek, who was just ruthless. The side-story of Travolta’s life and dead wife, etc. was not very interesting or believable and Laura Dern as his love interest was wasted.
- OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d’espions (2006) (fr) — 7/10
- The original 007-spoof, starring Jean Dujardin as Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, a French spy. He thinks he’s James Bond but he’s much more Inspecteur Clouseau. It called to mind Top Secret, both in the scenery and in that it was pretty consistently funny, funnier than I remember the sequel to have been. If you like the retro-50s spy-look and tongue-in-cheek spoofing of the Ian Fleming world of spies—and you don’t mind subtitles if you don’t understand French—this is the film for you. Jean Dujardin is really good. Recommended.
- Brooklyn’s Finest (2009) — 8/10
- An excellent cast—Richard Gere, Ethan Hawke, Wesley Snipes, Don Cheadle—stars in the story of a trio of cops on the drug beat in Brooklyn. Another movie with almost no women (unless you count Ellen Barkin, who plays a ridiculous caricature of a ladder-climbing police career woman…or any of the lucky actresses who got to play the dozens of whores and playthings in the film), it was a gritty tale of undercover work, thankless police work and the tensions of the job. Looked at from a certain angle, it told a tale of tragedy and suffering, the root of which was the drug war in America. Without the drug business, there would have been no movie. It was a touch long, but still very good overall. It actually ranked up there with The Departed as far as these types of stories go.
- The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) — 8/10
- Michael Gambon plays an almost unbelievably boorish know-it-all/know-nothing restaurant owner who simply will. not. stop. talking. The restaurant and kitchen are amazingly lush and fancy and detailed and look as if they’d come from the 19th-century rather than the 20th. The arrangement of food in the kitchen looks straight out of still-life paintings. Helen Mirren plays his wife, who’s already tired of him at the beginning of the film and her thoughts quickly turn to an affair with a more cultured man, who doesn’t have a line in the film until almost an hour in. The film is shot in a very interesting way, panning back and forth along from the alley to the restaurant to the kitchen to the pantry to the lavatory, each with its own color scheme and lighting—the alley is yellow and blue, the restaurant is red, the kitchen and pantry are green and dark, the lavatory white and brightly lit. Gambon’s violent and misogynistic performance is definitely not for the faint-of-heart, though. Neither is the naked couple forced to escape in the back of a meat truck filled with rotting wares. Mirren is a long way from the Queen and Gambon quite a long way from Dumbledore in this one.
- There Will be Blood (2007) — 6/10
- Daniel Day Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, an oilman working in the early 1900s in the western part of America. The movie is ostensibly based on the book Oil! by Upton Sinclair but only the first half of the movie kinda sorta takes some parts of the plot from the book. The whole socialist struggle part that comprises 2/3 of the book is thrown by the wayside and replaced with a much stronger focus on the father rather than the son. The father, instead of a stalwart businessman who slides into piggish greed, starts off as pretty much a bastard and slides into drunkenness and violence.[1] The character of Eli (the preacher/healer) stays relatively true, but otherwise it’s a slow-moving and largely boring film. The book, alas, was much better, but it was about socialism and Paul and Bertie whereas the movie is about Daniel and Eli, with Paul sent off … somewhere … and Bertie transformed to H.W., who is deafened and exiles himself to Mexico. Not really recommended unless you’re a big fan of DDL.
- Nothing But the Truth (2008) — 8/10
- Kate Beckinsale plays the Robert Novak role and Vera Farmiga plays the Valerie Plame role in a retelling of the outing of a CIA agent with a bit of Judith Miller thrown in. Unlike Novak though—and like Miller—Beckinsale actually goes to jail for it.[2] The jail looks absolutely horrifying, reminding me of the descriptions of immigration jails in the book The Power of Love. Matt Dillon is in hardass mode, David Schwimmer is in whiner-mode (big surprise) and Alan Alda and Noah Wyle are good as Beckinsale’s legal team. I’ve never seen Kate Beckinsale with so many spoken lines and so little cable-work and killing of vampires. All in all, a very tight movie with an honest message and a really good ending. Recommended.
- Dogville (2003) — 9/10
- A truly unique film, directed by Lars von Trier, about a lonely little village in the mountains called Dogville. It stars Nicole Kidman as a young woman who comes to the town under somewhat suspicious circumstances, but is soon accepted by the townsfolk—played by various well-known actors—though under strange conditions. The set is like a stage set and extremely minimal, with buildings demarcated only by lines on the floor, some sparse furniture and only minimal walls and ceilings. The relationship between Grace and the town deteriorates as the woman become more abusive and the men start assaulting her (led by the ever-irascible Stellan Skarsgård) as they realize she is trapped and they make her a slave, refusing to even pay her wages anymore. Not only is she raped by the men, she is subsequently accused by the wives of seduction and punished. The self-righteous punishment is harder to take somehow, reminding me of the Puritans of The Scarlet Letter. The townsfolk reveal their true natures and it is ugly; they even chain her up and tie a bell to her collar so she can’t escape. Von Trier has a reputation for deviation and he does not disappoint; the ostensible protagonist is a self-serving bastard who’s deluded by his own goodness. A tough movie to watch—the first half is kind of boring, but it’s just waiting to spring the trap of the second half, which is harrowing. And then, after nearly three hours with no music whatsoever, the credits roll accompanied by David Bowie’s Young American.[3]
- Antichrist (2009) — 8/10
- At first, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover seemed somewhat out there and extreme. Then along came Dogville with its bland innocence that tips into a tale of the casual evil and brutish selfishness of man. And then there’s Von Trier’s second entry in the weird sweepstakes, a horror film starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg which tells the tale of a couple who lose their son and try to get back to some form of sanity. She takes it pretty hard and he, the therapist, tries to help, though in a very arrogant way. Things spiral out of control with hints of satanism, the brutishness of nature, sadomasochism and, once again, a big, heavy wheel getting attached to someone—this time even more uncomfortably than with an iron collar (imagine away). The animals—representations of nature—are also at their worst, not threatening but just awful, awful images. I have to say that it’s a good movie, but only for people who can appreciate a film that plumbs the absolute depths of despair. Lots of nudity but not in an alluring way[4] and definitely not a date movie.
- La Belle Noiseuse (1991) (fr) — 7/10
- The story of a budding young artist who pays a visit to his hero, who’s fallen on hard times creatively. After the young man and his enchanting accompaniment spend a long evening at dinner and visiting the old studios, it is decided that the old man will try once again to complete his masterpiece, using said accompaniment as a model. The scenery is so spot-on for the French countryside that you can almost smell the old stone, the dust. You can hear the grit from the old stones everywhere. The house is a huge old manor with towers surrounded by gardens and endless countryside. The crickets are incessant; it is high, hot summer. The studio has tables scattered throughout, each covered with the detritus of years of work. It oozes nonchalant authenticity from the simple breakfast table with bowls for coffee cups to the dusty old bottle of some bathtub cognac the men drink from in the studio. The pace is quite slow, but not agonizing, because each second is made to be important somehow. The camera lingers for long, long minutes on the sketchpad, on the canvas as the artist learns once again to create. The sound of his pen, pencil and Conté on the paper is unnerving as hell and you can feel the tedium emanating from Emmanuelle Béart—who plays the model Marianne—as she tries to hold her pose. She’s nude and the artist poses her like a doll, no sexual tension whatsoever, all business. The large drawings he makes aren’t very good, but the sketchbooks are much better. They discuss the process endlessly. She’s absolutely alluring, which is good because she’s on-screen a lot in this 4-hour–long movie, although her nudity is soon just as unremarkable for the viewer as it is for Frenhofer, the artist, who’s played pitch-perfect by Michel Piccoli. The others? Mostly moping about, with Julienne and Nicolas winning the prize in a brother-and-sister-tag-team of insufferable melancholy.[5]
- Invictus (2009) — 7/10
- Morgan Freeman in the role he was born to play—Nelson Mandela—and Matt Damon as the captain of the Springboks—the South African rugby team. Directed by Clint Eastwood, this quite typical sports movie—(spoiler alert) crappy team inspired by nation to win World Cup—is a great yarn and all the more so because it’s true. It actually happened. Some of the minor details showing the thawing of animosity between blacks and whites were surely added for effect, but for the most part, it’s true: the rugby team did travel to townships to visit with kids and teach them the game; the security detail was composed of blacks and whites; and goddamn if they didn’t actually win the world cup right there in Durban, South Africa. It was Mandela’s way of starting to heal the nation, to move on from the past, and it worked. I can see how you might be in too cynical a mood for some of the details—young black kid creeps closer to two white cops listening to the game on the radio and they all celebrate together at the end—but Eastwood shows these details rather than having characters say them, so you’d have to be in a really, really bad mood.
- You Don’t Know Jack (2010) — 9/10
- A riveting biographical film about Jack Kevorkian starring Al Pacino as Kevorkian, John Goodman as his friend Neal, Brenda Vaccaro as his sister Margo, Danny Huston as his fantastic and dedicated lawyer and friend and Susan Sarandon as Janet Good, another friend and partner and finally, patient. Kevorkian’s contribution was amazing and his logic and arguments impossible to refute without resorting to religion or some other humbug. Kevorkian is just about the only reason America isn’t completely in the dark ages vis à vis euthanasia, especially when compared to countries like the Netherlands or Switzerland. An excellent film with Pacino putting in a fantastic performance; a bit long, but the story had many chapters. The final court case illustrates very nicely how the courts are just a game to be played instead of a place to find justice. Everything’s ruled as irrelevant even for facts that are clearly relevant if one were to go by logic rather than games. The best part is when the ADs schemed to drop the assisted-suicide charge so that the family testimony can’t be used to elicit sympathy from the jury; with only the murder charge, Kevorkian can call no witnesses and has no defense. The judge is sanctimonious at best, pretending to represent justice even though it’s clear where her heart lies.[6] After reading The Innocent Man by John Grisham, I’m left with even less faith in the justice system in the States than I had; so very far from the witch trials we are not.
- Caché (2005) (fr) — 7/10
- Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil star as a couple: he a moderately famous intellectual-round-table host on television and she in publishing. One day, they receive videotapes depicting their home and other familiar places, as if they were under surveillance. Who’s sending the tapes? Why? Is there some deep secret (un caché) from their past that someone is trying to push into the open? Slow but well-paced with each scene divulging another drab (soupçon) of information about the secret. Binoche is very good, as always. And the secret? Some of the videotape sequences are quite long and you have to really be absorbed to stay with it. If you’re easily bored—or you require the closure of definitely finding out the whole and entire secret—this is probably not the film for you.
- Going the Distance (2010) — 6/10
- Justin Long and Drew Barrymore get into a relationship that turns long-distance. The first half is pretty good whereas the second kind of devolves into a bunch of tedious clichés involving a boatload of whining, mostly from Long, and insipidity, mostly from Barrymore. They so desperately want to be together that they have to figure out whether they’re going to live in New York City or San Fransisco. The cool thing is that she’s the one with a Master’s degree and a job opportunity in her career path, and he’s the one who works as a music scout for a shitty company he hates, but (at first) they decide that she will give up her job and wait tables in New York. That they even consider this option is ridiculous (and pretty sexist). The film is buoyed by two things: it’s rated R, so it’s a relationship/sex film about young adults with actual swearing, adult themes and some sex instead of a castrated PG-13 film about same. And the second thing is a pretty strong supporting cast: Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day, Jim Gaffigan and Christina Applegate in particular. Applegate has hands-down the funniest line—“Maya: statue!”—which she shouts to keep her daughter in line; the child responds by freezing in place. Sudeikis and Day are pretty good as relatively well-balanced bros and Gaffigan is good as Applegate’s disaffected husband.
- Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (2008) (fr) — 10/10
- The story of an employee of La Poste who, like all other bank employees, wants to take his family to the Riviera, mostly because his hot wife wants it (cue the sexist caricature of shallow French wife). After a few mishaps, he is instead transferred to Bergues, far in the north of France, where it’s cold and where he’ll be going alone. The wife stays with their boy in Salon because she can’t go with him; they act as if he’s going to a gulag, which is pretty hilarious. Once he goes north, his wife appreciates his sacrifice for the family and refuses to believe anything but the worst of the region and will not believe that he’s actually starting to enjoy himself up there. The locals there have a very special accent, as exemplified by Dany Boon (who was also very good in Rien à déclarer and who grew up in the North, speaking that local dialect). The outrageousness of the accent varies, but some of the older folk are nearly impossible to understand (even with subtitles). The story is relatively simple, with the manager from the south trying to help a young genial postman (Boon) move on with his life. The day they ride the postal route together—ostensibly to teach Boon how to avoid taking all the drinks offered to him on his route—is worth the price of entry. Highly recommended.
- La Pianiste (2001) (fr) — 8/10
- Another film from director Michael Haneke (he also directed Caché, above), this one starring Isabelle Huppert as a highly repressed piano teacher living with her mother (who’s an utter shrew, a relentless control-freak) and teaching at a conservatory in Paris. She has a dark side, with her passion squeezing through the cracks of her tight carapace in ways that are equal parts embarrassing, pathetic, illegal and painful. She is a ticking time bomb for all around her, including her students. Then she meets Walter, or rather, Walter pursues her. She acquiesces, but only on her own twisted terms. Little does he know that he’s fallen in love with a masochist; the part where he reads aloud her written instructions to him is really good; he’s angry but slowly realizes she is just as powerless before her desires as he is. That is, he realizes he can only have her on these terms—and that those terms aren’t even of her own choosing. She is just as trapped by them as he; that she has only desires but no experience means their encounter will be just as much of an unknown for her as him. Will either of them enjoy it? In such a carefully planned movie—carefully and lovingly shot, with careful dialogue and framing—how the hell did they think they would make a handsome, budding engineer, gifted pianist/hockey-player believable? Who does that? What is this, Buckaroo Banzai? At first it seems a story of a nearly completely unsympathetic self-destructing control-freak, but it is bigger than that: it is a story of obsession—unheeding, insatiable, destructive obsession.[7] Another film that’s not exactly for the faint-of-heart.
- Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009) (fr) — 9/10
- A strange little comedy—again starring Dany Boon—with a wonderful look and feel to it, lovingly shot…Gilliam-esque, in fact (but perhaps with even higher production quality that he usually gets … it’s a really nice-looking film, is what I’m trying to get across here). Boon stars as a man who lost his father to a mine created by one arms manufacturer and who is an innocent bystander shot by the bullet from another. After his travails, he is homeless and is taken in by les Micmacs à tire-larigot, who are a hodge-podge cadre of similarly disadvantaged folks with unique talents (i.e. what the more-ungenerous might call freaks and outcasts). Together, they start a well-planned subversive campaign to bring down both firms (the film is pretty stridently anti-armament). The tricks and plans (and gadgets and devices and machines) are exquisite and executed to perfection (the final play is awesome) and without excessive violence, as has become de rigeur in this genre. Now this is a good action movie—forget the ludicrous over-the-top crap of The Losers or other such pap—this is the real deal.[8]
- The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) — 7/10
- This film stars Brad Pitt as James and Casey Affleck as Ford and tells the story of the tail-end of James’s career and life, which ended, more or less, at the same time. Affleck plays one weird duck and the rest of the gang seems about as clever and sympathetic as Alex’s chums from The Clockword Orange (two of the more prominent ones are Jamie Renner and Sam Rockwell). James visits people and places as if he were Death itself, showing up like a ghost in the dead of night, full of menace and foreboding. The film purports to be semi-biographical and is partly told through a voice-over. The two leads are good, as almost always. This is a historical Western, not an action Western and it’s over 2½ hours long: it’s nicely filmed and interesting, but not that exciting. The shooting is depicted as a cowardly act almost gratefully set up and accepted by James himself, more an assisted suicide than an assassination. This is neither a hagiography of James nor Ford; the film is almost entirely bereft of sympathetic figures.
- Crazy Heart (2009) — 7/10
- Jeff Bridges stars as Bad Blake, a country-western music star who, at 59, is on the downhill side of his career. He continues to tour the country, playing smaller and smaller places, almost—but, not quite—crippled by a drinking problem. Bridges pretty much knocks it out of the park with this performance (he was awarded an Oscar), drawling and slurring his way through the role so believably you can’t believe he is anyone other than Bad Blake. Colin Farrell is his protegé who’s moved on to a booming career of his own and their relationship is nicely handled, with Farrel’s character actually being much nicer than the reputation he has with Bad.[9] Maggie Gyllenhall looks even younger than ever as a cub reporter for a Santa Fe paper who interviews him—well, it’s more like they interview each other. They start to build a relationship despite his raging alcoholism and chain-smoking. He makes an effort and his music—as far as I’m concerned—improves markedly; by the end, he sounds more like Leonard Cohen than his initial twangy country/western. A well-made film with a riveting performance by Bridges, but it’s quite predictable, so don’t expect any surprises in either plot or dialogue.
- 88 Minutes (2007) — 5/10
- Another movie about a party animal/alcoholic, this one a forensic psychiatrist for the FBI played by Al Pacino. Pacino’s hair is distractingly huge. He’s got big fans and big enemies and an old case is coming back to haunt him. The 88 minutes refers to the amount of time he has left to live, according to the people plaguing/hunting him one morning. It’s one of those movies where every single one of his students is attractive as are all of his coworkers and research assistants.[10] Strangely enough, at no point do you worry that he won’t solve the case—basically we’re talking Sherlock Holmes as played by a short Italian guy with a goatee (I’m pretty sure Downey Jr.‘s not Italian, otherwise that description would match him too). Some of the acting is pretty wooden, with Leelee Sobieski taking first prize there. It’s not terrible and it’s entertaining enough, especially if you like crime/mystery movies, but it was more like a well-produced made-for-TV crime drama than a full-blown theater experience.
- The Last Station (2010) — 8/10
- An amazing cast lifts this period piece set in early 1900s Russia above one’s expectations. James McAvoy plays referee/historian/amanuensis to Tolstoy and his wife, played by Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, respectively. Tolstoy is surrounded by spineless, self-righteous, seriously repressed and psychologically damaged-if-not-outright-unstable sycophants—some of them are absolutely unbearable and are typical adherents who are capable only of understanding the great man’s work on a superficial level[11]—among them his daughter and Chertkov, played by Paul Giamatti, who’s scheming to get Tolstoy to follow his own teachings and give away his copyrights to the public domain. This is a laudable goal, but the suspicion is that he has ulterior motives and the countess, of course, won’t hear of it. Mirren and Plummer are fantastic. There are similarities between the depiction of Tolstoy and that of Frenhofer the painter in La Belle Noiseuse, as genuises who are both supported by their significant others. They cannot live without them, but also distracted by them. It’s utterly laughable that this movie was rated R for the single scene between Mcavoy and Kerry Condon, which lasts seconds and is possibly the sweetest deflowering—his—that could be filmed. Rated R for that. For boobies. For two seconds. The U.S. film industry is about as puritanical as the worst of the Tolstoyans.
- Moneyball (2011) — 8/10
- Brad Pitt stars as Bill Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, and Jonah Hill as Peter Brand, who changed everything about how baseball teams are created, maintained and how a winning team can be created without superstars. They start to think in terms of buying runs rather than superstars, looking at the players as a market of players, with an emphasis on the undervalued ones. Brad Pitt is…well, he’s Brad Pitt playing his typical role, so he’s, well, awesome: the first meeting with his staff where Jonah Hill (the numbers guy) is also in attendance is absolutely wonderfully paced and executed. Once you see him in this role (based on the character from the book by Michael Lewis), you really can’t imagine who else would have played the character. Philip Seymour Hoffman is nearly unrecognizable as the coach, who has serious issues viewing the game as one of statistics rather than players. Probably one of the more interesting baseball movies I’ve ever seen. Recommended.
- Edge of Darkness (2010) — 6/10
This is how I picture script negotiations with Mel Gibson:
Director: How do you like the script, Mel?
Mel: Haven’t read it. I have a question, though.
Director: Shoot.
Mel: It’s a two-parter, actually. Is my character a former member of law-enforcement who’s now a slightly weird loner? And does my character suffer a horrific loss of his only close family member early in the film for which he can ruthlessly avenge himself throughout the film?
Director: Yes. And yes.
Mel: I have a follow-up question.
Director: Shoot.
Mel: Why not Liam Neeson?
Director: He’s too expensive.
Mel: Where do I sign?Yes, Gibson channels De Niro at one point (while beating one suspect). And has he always been so short? And what’s up with naming the hero “Craven”? The last half hour makes up for a slow start, though. Much better than 88 minutes.
- Modern Times (1936) — 7/10
- A (quasi-)silent film starring Charlie Chaplin as a worker in a state-of-the-art factory who tires of the tedium of being—quite literally—a cog in the machine and starts to cause trouble. He is arrested and sent to jail; he gets out and meets the lovely Paulette Goddard, who’s also a child of the streets. He and she go on to get jobs at a department store and so on and so forth. The film is composed of several skits: one of the best shows Chaplin rollerskating blindfolded in the department store on the fourth floor with no railing; the scene as a waiter in the cafè is also a marvel of physical comedy. The film is about hard-luck post-Depression America. It mirrors some of the stories from today: people desperately want to work and are driven to desperation to keep their heads above water. And The Man is always there to push you back under. It’s a comedy, but a dark comedy.
- The Great Dictator (1940) — 7/10
Another film—a talkie this time—starring Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard. This one’s a spoof of Germany, with Chaplin playing both a Jewish barber and the Führer himself. As the barber, he’s a soldier in the first world war who crash-lands and gets amnesia—for the next 25 years. He comes back to the ghetto to find that things have a changed a bit. As the Führer, he hams it up with his own made-up, Germanic-sounding and with English-intermingled language, the shortest phrases of which translate to paragraphs in English and vice versa. The barber eventually is swept up in a revolution, is captured and sent to a concentration camp. Some scenes bring to mind the films of Mel Brooks and the stormtroopers and other soldiers all remind me of the cowardly lion from the Wizard of Oz (actually quite a few of the scenes were reminiscent of that movie’s style). The scenes are more cohesive than in Modern Times (the shave set to Brahms’s Hungarian Dance 5 stands out). After some more misadventures, the film ends with a speech by the barber (now posing as the dictator), partially excerpted below:
“Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. […] Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men − machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! […] Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill that promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people.”- The Social Network (2011) — 5/10
- I hated everyone in this movie, except for the young lady who was Eisenberg’s girlfriend for the first five minutes of the movie. She was clever and destroyed him in that conversation. Sorkin’s dialogue has its moments and Fincher’s direction is good and Jesse Eisenberg plays a semi-autistic asshole quite well and Justin Timberlake plays a professional bullshitter quite well—bravo to both of them—but it’s not really pleasant to watch. Most of Eisenberg’s (Zuckerberg’s) outbursts felt like long-form l’esprit d’escaliers that people just like Eisenberg’s character think up for themselves when they’re feeling neglected and want to exact revenge on an unfair and inferior world with their overarching cleverness. Everybody in the Ivy League is hot and thin and fit, so they should be worshiped, I guess? It felt like I was watching a high-production-value version of Beverly Hills 90210. I have no idea what a line like “Bosnia: they have no roads but they have Facebook” is even supposed to mean. Is it supposed to make the girl who said it look ignorant? Or is it an extemporaneous comment made by the scriptwriter through a minor character? Who knows? Who cares? There are no heroes in this movie. Two offended princes of privilege met with Larry Summers[12] and I had no idea who to root for; they each got their shots in and none of it was satisfying.
[1] I think Michael Gambon wins, however, for sheer unexplained insanity. Day-Lewis’s craziness has a mean logic to it; Gambon is chaos incarnate.↩
[2] Of course, Judith Miller was arrested for being “reportedly in possession of evidence relevant to the leak investigation” (Failure to report source controversy (Wikipedia), not for actually revealing the identity of the agent. She had become more famous for having helped drum up support for the second U.S./Iraq War with nearly completely fabricated stores about weapons of mass destruction.↩
[3] The credits roll over images of Okies on the Trail of Tears, poor familes and children, older homeless people and people in prison. The song is a final twist of the knife by Von Trier because it is just ludicrously upbeat and out-of-place for this film.↩
[4] There are apparently two versions (Wikipedia) of the film, with the “catholic” version missing about four or five minutes of footage that can be found in the uncut “protestant” version. I did not feel that I missed them.↩
[5] At the end of the film, Frenhofer speaks with Nicolas and Nicolas tells him that he will always respect him, but he wouldn’t like to end up like him, as a comedy (a joke). Frenhofer looks up at him, smiles and says, “Stay just the way you are. I like you.” Absolutely lovely, in context.↩
[6] It was weird that the judge didn’t let the family testify since they were eyewitnesses to the alleged murder. It’s ludicrous that something so obvious must be explicitly stated or the witnesses are dismissed.↩
[7] (Spoiler alert) It should be noted that what Haneke depicts in this film is clumsy, amateur S&M at best: it is the stumbling of damaged souls, not the inevitable end-result of masochistic tendencies. As Dan Savage would be quick to note, neither of them had any idea what they were doing, which is why it went so horribly wrong. And neither of them thought to start slowly and work up to more complex scenarios once they knew and trusted one another. It was an utter train-wreck that happened not because she was masochistic but because she knew nothing of love and sex, indeed of normal relationships with people based on anything other than condescension or fear. I’m sure Haneke caught some flack from the S&M community for sowing more fear and rumors and misinformation.↩
[8] Spoiler alert: an explosion late in the film is wonderfully and quite humorously rendered. The same over-the-top film-making techniques but with much more style. Operation: End Game had similar pretensions to deliver a political message, but failed terribly compared to this gem.↩
[9] It looks like they both sing during the stage sequences, but Bridges’s voice is much stronger.↩
[10] I wasn’t the only one who noticed that Pacino totally copped a feel (Philosophy of Screenwriting) at one point (at 68 minutes in the version I was watching)—in a way completely unrelated to the plot because he wasn’t romantically linked with that girl at all. The old letch.↩
[11] There is an interesting point being made in this film: that the strict adherence to the guiding principles of Tolstoyism—to which the man himself never even pretended to keep—is more than a sort of religion of its own. The unrelenting siege against organized religion cannot but engender a new religion, based perhaps on sounder principles, but nonetheless anchored in an unthinking faith and a desire to eradicate the other. The writings and philosophies of the deepest thinkers will often be twisted and simplified to fit into smaller minds. Thus was it with Chertkov and daughter Sasha, who ignored the bits of Tolstoy’s philosophy that they deemed too difficult.↩
[12] Larry Summers is a real-life former president of Harvard and Secretary of the U.S. Treasury who’s real-life attribute of being a professional asshole and blowhard who’s almost eerie in his ability to get everything important wrong while still trumpeting his own brilliance, well, that attribute is depicted perfectly in the movie.↩