Movie Bites

So many movies, so little time. Here are some mini-reviews of things I' ve seen recently:

The Measure of A Man

I recommend this small, powerful film in which the hero (the great Vincent Lindon) is a guy who loses his job and is willing to do anything to have one, until his conscience says "enough". It takes place mostly in a kind of French WalMart. Director Stephane Brizé wrests nail-biting suspense from a conversation with the guy in the unemployment bureau, from confrontations between security guys in the store and people whom they catch stealing. No swelling string section when the hero stops at nothing to do the heroic thing. Just the relentless fight of every man, every day, for dignity.

Krisha

A heroic fuck up, Krisha, the title character of this strange and powerful movie, is a larger than life walking disaster, played with ferocious, self-destructive panache by Krisha Fairchild. Director Trey Edward Shults, who wrote, directed, produced and acts as Krisha's son, uses his family members and recombines them to tell the story of a Thanksgiving dinner from hell thanks to the arrival of this middle-aged woman whom the family views with condescension and very little patience. And for good reason. She abandoned her son, she's a drunk, and she is way too long in the tooth for her aimless, needy, self-indulgent antics. Her fragility belies an almost industrial-grade energy for self-sabotage. You know that when a humongous turkey is introduced, and she is in charge of it, things are going to go very, very wrong. Shults weaves this tale with equal doses of dark humor (not that the other family members are that sane), family horror, and true heartbreak. It's all somehow wonderfully cathartic.

Miles Ahead

Don Cheadle is fantastic as Miles Davis in this quirky, invented episode in the great trumpeter's life, which Cheadle himself directed and co-wrote. While I understand Cheadle's resistance to make this a conventional biopic, and his aim to capture Davis' unruly spirit (which he nails, here and there), the plot is too silly and it conspires against Cheadle's push to show Davis's anarchic side. Still, after this year's Oscars so white brouhaha, here's a very deserving performance.

 

Green Room

Jeremy Saulnier's genre exercise in horror makes absolutely no sense and wastes an interesting premise (a touring rock band falls prey to a skinhead militia), in this tepid, arty slaughterhouse flick. There is no suspense, just dull spurts of mangled flesh. It's nicely shot and is peppered with dry humor but nothing is believable, much less the elegant Patrick Stewart, sporting his usual plummy British accent as the urbane leader of the neo-nazis.

The Invitation

A truly disquieting and unnerving movie that is undone by a mostly amateurish cast, The Invitation is a dark little tale of cultish obsession that takes place in the Hollywood Hills, a perfect little metaphor for the obsessive LA self-improvement culture. A couple is invited to dinner with old friends whom they haven't seen since a terrible loss happened. The evening turns out to be more than an innocent dinner party. Director Karyn Kusama displays a very good hand at making this evening as creepy and uncomfortable as possible. She is aided by the great John Carroll Lynch as a guest with a quietly menacing air, and by convincing performances by Logan Marshall-Green, Tammy Blanchard and Lindsay Burdge as the hippie chick from hell. It's really too bad that the rest of the photogenic cast cannot muster the chops to make it feel like they've actually known each other for years. Still, the overall icky feeling and a fantastic twist at the end make it an interesting option among horror films.

Best and Worst of 2014

I was a bit underwhelmed by movies this year. Somehow, I felt last year had more punch.
Here's my list.

Excellent
Timbuktu
Boyhood
Whiplash
Ida
Force Majeure
The Wonders
Leviathan
Two Days, One Night
Mr. Turner
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Foxcatcher
Selma
Mommy
The Babadook
Under The Skin
Obvious Child
Jodorowsky's Dune
The Unknown Known
Citizenfour
Bad Hair
The Passionate Thief  - A restoration of Mario Monicelli's classic

Very Good
Birdman
A Most Wanted Man
Locke
A Most Violent Year
Calvary
Yves Saint Laurent
Magic in the Moonlight
Venus In Fur

Good
Gone Girl
Big Eyes
The One I Love
The Two Faces Of January
Blue Ruin
Snowpiercer 
Listen Up, Phillip
Young And Beautiful
Frank
Top Five
The Trip To Italy
Eden
Pasolini
The Princess Of France
Clouds Of Sils Maria

Love Is Strange

Could Be Better
The Immigrant
The Imitation Game
The Theory of Everything
Inherent Vice
The Blue Room
Rosewater
Enemy
Into The Woods
Art and Craft
The Skeleton Twins
Beyond the Lights

Overrated
Dear White People
Guardians of the Galaxy
Saint Laurent
Nightcrawler
Only Lovers Left Alive

Morally Dubious
American Sniper

Pretentious
Jauja
Goodbye To Language

So Bad It's Good
Exodus: Gods and Kings

Bad
Interstellar
Wild
Time Out of Mind
A Master Builder
I Origins

So Bad It's Terrible
Noah

Despicable
Heaven Knows What 

Heaven Knows What: NYFF 14

This year, the New York Film Festival has shown several films about people who live on the fringe or at the brink of poverty. Each movie has a different approach to conveying economic stress and deprivation, but one thing is clear: the more filmmakers try to be realistic at the expense of telling a story, the less authentic their films. This is the paradox of dramatic writing. One would think that the more realistic the portrayal of the circumstances, the more authentic the movie; and the more stories are dramatized, the farther they drift from reality. But it is the contrary: dramatic writing with its turns, ironies, contrasts, plotted structure and fully developed, complex characters adds reality, whereas just capturing rawness by pretending to replicate the experience of poverty tends to seem ersatz. If you want to convey reality without the interference of dramatic writing, go make a documentary.
Josh and Benny Safdie's Heaven Knows What illustrates this paradox. It is based on a book by Arielle Holmes, an ex-junkie who stars in the film as Harley, a young homeless drug addict in obsessive love with an imbecile (Caleb Landry Jones). It intends to portray as realistically as possible the life of junkie kids in the streets of New York. Shot in washed out colors, a shaky camera and extreme close ups by Sean Price Williams, it is indeed harrowing, but since it denies its characters any intelligence, dignity, or emotional growth, it becomes an exercise in what I call poverty porn. Poverty porn happens when privileged auteurs go slumming with the downtrodden in the hopes of elucidating to anyone who can afford a movie ticket what it is actually like to be poor.
In Beasts of The Southern Wild, environmental poverty porn, the characters are merely mouthpieces for the politically correct pieties of the filmmakers. Slumdog Millionaire is glamorized poverty porn, wherein the filmmakers presume to imagine what the poor dream of. At least in Mumbai they dream of having money. Apparently, deep in the bayous of Louisiana, while mired in abject poverty and biblical flooding, they dream of an environmentally healthy Earth. I find this use of poor people for the filmmakers' indulgence in wishful thinking exploitative, deeply false and offensive.
Heaven Knows What is exploitative and sordid, but it harbors no wishful pieties. It aims to discomfit, to be a film maudit. The harder it tries to be authentic (using real junkies, etc) the more it is a wanton exercise in style.
I was wondering how Arielle Holmes could write a book if none of the characters, including her own, has more than five words in their vocabulary, mostly monosyllables. I would think that in order to survive in New York you have to have your wits about you. This movie does not afford its characters the most basic human skills. They bleat incessantly and are reduced to a primal state of unmitigated idiocy. A lot of smart people have fallen prey to heroin. They are not to be found in this movie. It is hard to feel any sort of empathy or compassion for characters not only so relentlessly self-destructive, but so tedious and stupid. There is only one guy, Mike, the dealer, who has entrepreneurial delusions and acts very put upon about his wheelings and dealings. The Safdies and co-writer Ronald Bronstein don't bother with giving their characters an internal life. A promising scene where Harley looks at her own Facebook page as if it came from a distant planet is the best they can do before resorting to more senseless bleating, punctuated by jarring electronic music. Taking people who live on the fringe to impose on them self-conscious stylistic flourishes seems to me the height of clueless self-absorption. What is the point of showing such stubborn emotional and intellectual squalor? This is an insufferable, pretentious film.

Obvious Child

This quietly radical romantic comedy by Gillian Robespierre presents the story of Donna Stern, a struggling stand up comedian (the wonderful Jenny Slate), who gets pregnant in a night of drunken passion. She decides to get an abortion. Because she is a comedian, she makes jokes about the most private and painful areas of her life, and abortion is included. This does not mean that she is not devastated and consumed with worry by the news, but it is not a question of morality. It is her body, her future, her reality, her choice. Period. This is what is radical: there is no judgment. There is no preaching, one way or another. She made a stupid mistake and now she has to deal with the consequences, but in a state, like New York, where abortion is safe and available to women, she doesn't have to deal with the added cruelty of abortion being illegal. A quietly powerful scene at the clinic, where she is reminded of her options, serves to remind her and us that no one takes this decision lightly.
The trailer for this movie makes it look much less funny than it is. Robespierre manages to balance the saltiness of Donna's comedy with great empathy for her plight and a charming, sweet streak of romance. The characters are endearing and the cast is uniformly wonderful. This comedy flows organically as a fully developed story, instead of a series of disconnected set pieces, and this is very welcome. Obvious Child is a mature, grounded, poignant and funny comedy about abortion, which is no mean feat.

Mud

Mud takes place in the brackish banks of a river in Arkansas and is a coming of age story about a young boy who is disabused of his chivalric notions of romantic love by a fugitive, Mud, played by Matthew McConaughey, who, praise the Lord, has stopped making unfortunate romantic comedies to become one of our very finest character actors, and one of the few American actors who can do a righteous southern accent. He is fantastic. The rest of the cast of this movie, written and directed by Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter), is equally splendid and includes Sam Shepard, Michael Shannon, Sarah Paulson, Joe Don Baker, and Reese Witherspoon. The two kids, Tye Sheridan (from The Tree Of Life) as Ellis, and Jacob Lofland as Neckbone, are beautiful and wonderful.
Even though one enjoys Mud's leisurely glide into this remote corner of America, where an almost mythical river is a hop and a skip from generic strip malls, this is one slow movie, with a very uneven pace. Many perfectly good scenes could have stayed in the cutting room and no one would have been the worse for wear.
Mud's tone swings between a coming of age story and a film noir and it never succeeds in harmonizing these two genres. I am more partial to the gothic and the dark, but Mud moves in the other direction, reassuring us that for all the threats of violence, no real harm will come to the kids. Nichols is capable of conjuring up dread and suspense, and I wish he'd hewed closer to that tenor of the story. But I loved that Ellis learns a painful lesson about romantic love and has his manhood delivered to him in one fell swoop of reality: love is a bitch.
Indeed, Magnificent Arepa pointed to a very interesting issue that eluded me as I watched the film. All the women in the movie are portrayed as deeply toxic to men. Nichols tries to balance this out with some nuance. Ellis' Mom (Sarah Paulson) and his dad do not get along and she is understandably tired of living in the boonies; Juniper, the femme fatale (Reese Witherspoon) is like a siren whose call brings nothing but trouble. It is not exactly clear why she is back to haunt Mud. Then an older girl Ellis is in love with, makes mincemeat out of him. Arepa thought the movie was downright misogynistic. I wouldn't go that far, but it certainly has a male-centric point of view.
I enjoyed Mud, even with some of its cliches (boy gets a shiner helping a damsel in distress, is rewarded with a bag of ice and a kiss in the forehead), until it comes to a disappointing resolution that arrives at a massive shoot 'em up worthy of a Hollywood extravaganza, deeply at odds with its quieter disquisitions about love and loyalty. More troubling is the fact that after the movie has established the dire consequences that Ellis faces making his very risky choices, the bullet ridden ending seems to happen, like in cartoons, or Hollywood movies, without dire consequences for anybody. Since it's the good guys who are shooting, they are given a pass for the wall to wall carpeting of bodies they leave behind. This is morally queasy, let alone juvenile, and it undermines the very premise that Mud takes such loving care (and time) to build.