Steve Jobs

The opening scene is riveting. The actors are mesmerizing. The dialogue is snappy, and the only let down is a treacly story about a daughter and a sappy ending. Otherwise, this is a thoroughly enjoyable glimpse into the story of a brilliant asshole. As played with focused ferocity by Michael Fassbender, who has long deserved a role of this scope, no matter how big a prick his Steve Jobs is, there is something, if not likable, rather sexy about his egotism. Perhaps it's his sharp mind, his unwavering certitude and the zippy lines he's given to utter by Aaron Sorkin.
Danny Boyle directs with verve and fluidity what is basically a series of dramatic duels: Jobs vs. Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen, great), Jobs vs. John Scully (Jeff Daniels, great), Jobs in a wonderful rapport with his right hand woman Joanna Hoffman (the excellent Kate Winslet, showing how to manage someone unmanageable). Fassbender achieves something rare: the portrait of a man who pisses icewater but has a fire within. It is a beautifully calibrated, magnetic performance that truly sustains the movie. He also does a mean Cupertino accent. Now, is this anything like the real Steve Jobs? Probably not.
Everything happens backstage before the launches of three emblematic Jobs' products: the Macintosh, Next (yep, no one remembers that one), and the iMac. This has the effect of making you feel a loving sense of nostalgia for the first time you saw one of those machines or their brilliant ad campaigns. It also makes one feel that this happened in prehistoric times. It's all very artificial and deliberately theatrical -- it is, after all, set on the stages where Jobs introduced his products. We see the conflicts behind the scenes but we never see Jobs' flawless performances.
Boyle's kinetic style makes it work. I wish there was less music competing with Sorkin's plentiful dialog. Sorkin writes like Hollywood screenwriters of yore: snappy, clever, fast lines that feel like a breeze compared to the ponderous and inane dialog that comes from most American movies these days. But you have to be very alert, or you'll miss chunks of it.
In The Social Network, Sorkin had more manageable material. He was not dealing with an icon, but with an antisocial college brat who could barely connect with his own feet, yet created a social network. The problem with the figure of Steve Jobs is that the scope both of the man and his work is much broader, hence Sorkin's focus is scattered. There is no easy metaphor here. The arc is that of a fearsome godlike creature who becomes human, and it doesn't quite work. The movie tries to cover emotional territory that feels a bit forced, stepping lightly and not very convincingly on personal issues like the fact that Jobs was adopted, and that he rejected his own daughter. This comes through like Psychology 101. We don't really get a sense of the hard work Jobs put in. We get a sense of the hard work he made others go through, but because we only see him bossing people around as he prepares to face the expectant crowds, we never get a sense of the day to day business of running Apple. The movie could also have used more of the sense of delight in the user experience that was Jobs' holy grail. We hear a lot about it, but we don't really see it. What really drove Jobs remains a mystery. Still, Sorkin's compression device is understandable in that it distills his complicated life (based on Walter Isaacson's biography) into two hours. Although artificial and limited to zipping through the most important milestones of Jobs' leadership at Apple, the movie is still buoyant.

Ex-Machina

A creepy science fiction film by screenwriter Alex Garland, Ex-Machina worries about the terrifying notion of man creating artificial intelligence capable of consciousness. This is a fear as old as time, told by storytellers in tales featuring man-made creatures from The Golem, to Frankenstein, to passive-aggressive Hal 2000.
Now Alicia Vikander plays Ava, a sultry robot who looks half human, half hardware. Oscar Isaac plays Nathan, her creator, an ornery, drunk Silicon Valley grade A asshole whose version of playing God is not only creating consciousness in a robot, but also messing with other people's heads, among other self-involved pursuits we discover later. Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson), a brilliant nerd employee, is invited to Nathan's secluded compound to perform a test on Ava to determine if she exhibits human consciousness. What follows is a satisfying brain riddle, with Caleb developing a crush on the very lovely, transparently human Ava, and Ava playing games with his poor heart and mind, while an out of control Nathan thinks he controls things.
Luckily, Garland is interested in the sterile yet febrile atmosphere that surrounds Nathan, and in the mind games robots and their makers play. He is interested in the discomfort created by the balance of power of artificial consciousness in interaction with humans, let alone the God complex that comes with it, and if indeed conscious, the almost inevitable rebellion of the created against their creator.
Slowly and delightfully, the movie turns into a quiet horror flick that hints at the disturbing possibilities of a creature like Ava unleashed into the world. She doesn't care about ruling the universe, but she has been created with only self-interest at heart. She is, after all, her father's daughter. Garland's hall of mirrors script and his poise as a director examine our capacity for invention and the uses we put to it with an unsentimental, refreshingly non-preachy eye. He is not an optimist. (I hate optimists).
If creepy sci-fi with a side of sang froid is not your cup of tea, watch this movie for the work of the three wonderful actors, and in particular for a scene where Oscar Isaac gets his groove on. A quietly controlled actor with an angelical face, he tends to play men with a cold, driven side, (A Most Violent Year, The Two Faces Of January) or rueful misanthropes (Inside Llewyn Davis). He is the best thing in the movie, although Vikander does a splendid job of acting like a robot acting like a human, never an easy feat. For a robot passing as human, she is subtly alluring. Her allure is not studied, and hence makes it possible to believe that Caleb, or any other man, would succumb to her unspoiled charms.

P.S: For a comparable acting tour de force, you can endure Ridley Scott's uneven, all over the place Alien prequel, Prometheus, in which an excellent Michael Fassbender portrays a robot who likes to imitate Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.

That's Entertainment!

No read has been more fascinating and scrumptious and has inspired more Talmudic parsing from me this year than the leaked emails from the hacking of Sony Pictures, which you can find here.
Part of the mysterious delight they bring is the frisson of schadenfreude at seeing a culture of grandiose self-delusion and out of control egos nakedly exposed and brought down to size through their own astoundingly naive and arrogant disregard for discretion.
And don't tell me that these communiqués were never meant to be public. You'd have to be either a three year old or a moron, or a Hollywood macher with delusions of untouchability to think that you can express yourself in writing so rankly without there being the possibility of a leak, accidental or malicious. Memo from David O'Selznick, this isn't.
The hack is a terrible thing, which has jeopardized Sony's employees' sensitive personal information among other bad fallout. It is also out of the realm of gonzo fiction, if, as suspected, it is orchestrated by His Craziness Kim Jong Un and his displeasure with a Sony movie starring his country, Seth Rogen and James Franco.
I am not gleeful at Sony's misfortune, yet if the executives at Sony had behaved electronically in a way that befits their standing and their salaries, we would not have been so mightily entertained, but they would have less appalling things to hide.
Consider the Kevin Hart email: A simple business negotiation. The studio wants him to promote his new movie on social media, his agent claims that he needs to be remunerated, as this was not part of the original deal. They could have had a perfectly civilized in-house discussion without resorting to calling the star "a greedy whore". Or they could call him a greedy whore all they wanted, but not in writing.
When email started being a thing, the company I worked for furnished us with a very useful set of rules. Besides the obvious plea to use civilized language, and to remember that we were representing the company and using a tool that did not belong to us, my impressionable mind never forgot the part that said not to assume that our messages could not potentially be seen by all the wrong people, let alone escape the company's or someone else's scrutiny. Just don't assume privacy of any kind. Ever. Even so, people sent embarrassing companywide emails meant for just one person. They thought they could say horrible things and no one would ever find out. As Ari Emanuel has now famously said: "Whatever"*.

This happened to Sony, but do not for a moment think that the rest of Hollywood does not comport itself this way. One only had to skim through Nikki Finke's Hollywood Deadline to be swamped by a barrage of malicious, arrogant, petty vitriol. I can imagine the armies of cyber security experts now building virtual fortresses for the rest of the studios. I can imagine executives daunted by the sheer thought of cleaning up the messages in which they excoriate the people who work for them. I wonder if executives express themselves in such a fashion in any other industry (besides perhaps the fresh hell of immature alpha male-dominated startups). I doubt it. Correction: maybe sometimes in advertising, when people don't get the company memo.

It's the best shit show on Earth.

As for the saga of Scott Rudin vs. Amy Pascal, and the Steve Jobs movie debacle, to me, this is a thing of beauty. A marvel in the annals of epistolary literature.
To this day, I do not understand what exactly created the conflict, but, and correct me if I'm wrong, it seems that Scott Rudin, an independent producer whose unpleasant reputation precedes him, was partnering with Sony to make a movie about Steve Jobs, starring Christian Bale (great), directed by David Fincher (great) and written by Aaron Sorkin (great). A golden trifecta of possible awards, a la The Social Network.
At the same time, Angelina Jolie wanted Fincher to direct her version of Cleopatra**, hence Amy Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, did something to mollify the star at the expense of the Jobs movie, which had found financing and was ready to go. No small feat, considering all the giant egos and their schedules involved.
Thanks to Scott Rudin's extremely articulate, coherent and wonderfully descriptive emails I am now firmly on Team Rudin.  I wish I were on team Amy, but her writing style is very disappointing.
Now, let's be fair. Scott Rudin has little to worry about (he ruffled the massive feathers of the entire Jolie-Pitt clan, and of producer Megan Ellison, whom he labeled as bipolar, and who took it in stride on Twitter, calling herself merely eccentric). So what? He represents only himself.
Amy Pascal, however, is beholden to her bosses, to shareholders and to the company she leads. Perhaps she writes abysmally to protect herself.
Imagine her weighing the options. On the one hand, a prestige, niche project with a bunch of expensive alpha males, which may win awards and maybe make some money; on the other, Cleopatra, an epic extravaganza with Jolie, one of the biggest stars on the planet, which could potentially make gazillions because such monstrosities play well in Guangdong and Karachi, let alone Peoria.  From what we can glean, Pascal didn't handle all those competing projects and their respective egos well.
There are other gems, like an ass-kissing email from a Sony marketing guy and a ridiculous email from an agent begging Leonardo Di Caprio to consider playing Jobs, comparing the script to Citizen Kane, and Aaron Sorkin to Paddy Chayefsky. AS IF.
Leaks of the worst powerpoints on Earth will give you a glimpse about the paralyzing, generic idiocy of marketing. Executives claiming that Michael Fassbender is not yet a star add to the picture of a "creative" industry that only correlates success with money and seems to be out of touch with reality. 
You will learn interesting facts. For instance, that David Fincher asks $45 million dollars to direct a movie. He is very gifted, but isn't this insane? Or that stars like Tom Cruise, whom Sorkin originally wanted to play Jobs, bring their own writers to rewrite projects. Why are they allowed such a thing? (This is a rhetorical question: because they make the money). From these valuable exchanges, one comes to the conclusion that movie stars have become an unmanageable "clusterduck†" of entitlement.

The most damaging leak, in terms of public opinion, is the inane, pathetic conversation between Pascal and Rudin about a list of movies that Barack Obama might like, which turn out to be all for Black people. As a joke, it is painfully unfunny, and if it's for real, what disastrous poverty of imagination, to say the least. Still, even if this is the most scandalous leak, it also happens to be the most personal. It's not about business, and it puts sharply in relief how damaging and unfair it would be if any of us were not aware that the entire world is listening to our outrageous comments uttered in private. Which is why their apologies on this one sound forced and hollow. In particular when Pascal, who started the conversation, then claims that this does not represent who she is. If your private banter does not show who you really are, what does?

Sony needs some urgent spin control. I also don't know how this woman is not on the verge of a nervous breakdown. 
It is unfortunate that this leak is causing real distress to countless people, but this doesn't make it any less fascinating as an inside look at the movie industry.

* I just love that this word is what he chooses for a greeting. 
** Why would she think that David Fincher would want to do such a thing is beyond me. 
† As Amy Pascal dixit. 

The Counselor

My friend Gina asked me if The Counselor was trashy, in the hopes that the answer was a resounding yes. To her good fortune, "trashy" is probably the perfect description for this Ridley Scott venture written by Cormac McCarthy. As movies go, trashy is not always bad. Many trashy movies are wonderful pleasures. Among my favorite middlebrow trash, I count Louis Malle's Damage and Richard Eyre's Notes On A Scandal. Then there is intellectual trash (Claire Denis' Bastards, Lars Von Trier's Antichrist), and loads of basic trashy trash.  
The Counselor aspires for high trash but it inexorably slips into lowbrow, trashy trash, albeit with a million-dollar cast. To get Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Brad Pitt and Cameron Diaz all together in one place qualifies as what in Mexico is called a major taco de ojo. An eye taco, a feast for the eyes (and decent acting).
Ridley Scott has never been a subtle or elegant director. At his best (The Duellists, Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, American Gangster, Black Hawk Down), he is a master of thrilling spectacle. At his not so good, his movies are all clunky bombast. The Counselor tries to have it both ways. The script is full of intermittently insightful philosophical musings about greed and evil and terrible human choices. What it lacks are characters with inner lives and a coherent plot. As is the case with No Country For All Men, McCarthy is more interested in expounding his thoughts about human depravity than in giving plausible, believable, realistic actions and motivations to his characters. They function only as devices to serve his morality plays. This is the reason why, as much as I enjoyed No Country For All Men, I did not believe one second of it. The same thing happens in The Counselor. The plot makes no sense.
Michael Fassbender plays the Counselor, a slick lawyer for Reiner, a sleazy, yet somehow lovable club impresario played with utter dissoluteness by Javier Bardem, who needs to stop toying with his hair. He is too much of a great actor to keep relying on ridiculous hair for his characters. It worked in No Country For Old Men and that was it.  The most reliable way to describe these two business associates is, the Counselor (like Everyman, he doesn't have a name) wears Armani suits, while Reiner is festooned with Versace and looks like a human piñata. But whereas we do get a sense of the kind of person Reiner is (a genial, sleazy nightclub owner who likes to dabble on illegal stuff on the side), it is impossible to gather who the Counselor is, why he is there, where he comes from or what makes him tick. For McCarthy, the sole answer is greed, but for the audience this might not be enough. Why is the Counselor, who drives a hugely expensive car, the court appointed lawyer for a woman festering in jail (Rosie Perez, always good and always welcome)? Does he do charity on the side? Are we really supposed to believe he is as innocent as he professes? He is always surprised at the information supplied by Westray, (Brad Pitt), a character whose role in the whole adventure is unclear, except he is there like some sort of Stetson hat and cowboy boots wearing Greek chorus to explain to the Counselor in graphic detail how very bad the Mexican drug cartel is, and what a very bad idea it is to cross them. Yet even though he knows so much, and he is so certain of his safety, he makes a mistake so simple and unbelievable, and so telegraphed to the audience, you end up rolling your eyes. The second you see a sashaying female ass encased on a pristine white minitube skirt, you know this chick is trouble, but heretofore wise Westray is oblivious. This is the kind of lazy plot turn that sinks the movie into trashy trash. The movie is plagued by them.
The plot may be convoluted and unclear, but the movie is a fetishistic eye taco, as many Ridley Scott movies are. Which is what brings up the guilty pleasures. One of the best things in the movie is Cameron Diaz and her metallic silver nail polish. You will fixate on the nail polish and its burnished perfection, as you will fixate on her asymmetrical hairdo and the way her mesmerizing black eyeliner makes her look like the leopards she adores and keeps as pets. That's the kind of maleficent lady she is, and she is extremely good and entertaining as a ruthless narcowoman called Malkina. Diaz understands the campiness of the proceedings and lets rip accordingly. Not so fortunate is Penelope Cruz, who plays the counselor's love interest, an unlikely Polyanna who is oblivious to the fact that she is surrounded by the creme de la creme of the worst of the worst. How do we know she is a pure spirit? She claims she likes to go to church. Cormac McCarthy is not a subtle writer.
I had trouble reconciling the mansion where Bardem and Diaz live in with El Paso, Texas, but you can count on Ridley Scott for over the top production design, be it slick modern spaces that ooze ill gotten wealth, or shady Mexican lawyer offices that look like they were decorated by the Spanish Inquisition. All the scenes that take place in the shady underworld of the cartel and in supposedly Juarez, looking ridiculously colonial, are as sadly flimsy and fake as Reiner's mansion looks like money. Though the action is supposed to happen in and around El Paso and Juarez, the sense of place, like the characters, feels ersatz. That Scott, who has directed several movies in Mexico, still commissions music that sounds like a Cumbia infested version of the Gypsy Kings, only adds insult to injury.
Still, you get your pleasures where you can. In this literal, heavy handed movie, where first they tell you about the violence and then they cheaply show it to you, a wonderful relief is the appearance of several character actors who totally kill. Rosie Perez is one, but also, improbably, Bruno Ganz (Hitler from Downfall), as an Amsterdam diamond dealer; John Leguizamo, nailing it as a Colombian narco and, the man who absconds with the movie, Ruben Blades, as a mysterious go-between lawyer. He has one conversation over the phone, which he delivers with a world-weariness that is about the only truthful thing in the entire film.
Here and there we are treated to McCarthy's impassioned words about greed and corruption and the inevitability of evil, and here is where, if you could take this movie seriously, you could find a vital rant about the depraved evil of the drug trade and our pathetic approach to stomping it out. But literal as it is about everything else, the movie does not make the connection between the infinite hunger for drugs here in the States, and the depraved indifference to human suffering it encourages on the people doing the drug consuming; that is, between the beheadings and other terrible depravities that the cartels unleash as a way of doing business, and the bump of coke going up somebody's nose. A pity, because it's such a waste of words and resources. Just being a dark morality play is not enough. Being so schematic, The Counselor barely rises above expensive trash.

NYFF: 12 Years A Slave

This film by Steve McQueen (Hunger, Shame) is based on the harrowing real story and book by Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free Black man from Saratoga, NY, who is kidnapped to be sold to slave owners in the South. It is McQueen's most conventional film to date, and though it is a powerful movie that retains his trademark unflinching look at intense human suffering, this time focused on slavery, there is something stilted about it. All his movies have a paradoxical tension between extreme emotional states and aesthetic distance, which works well with their intimate scope. But this is a big period epic, and you can feel the tension between the need to tell a story in a more conventional manner and McQueen's suggestive style. There is tension, for instance, between the eloquent literary, almost theatrical dialogue, which sounds faithful to Northup's narrative, and the realistic depiction of brutality.
The most astounding scene in the movie is a wordless tableau that takes place in the middle of the film and that says more about the depravity of American slavery than anything else in the movie, or anywhere, for that matter. Were it shown separately, it would be one of the greatest short films ever made. This is the kind of condensed visual metaphor that makes McQueen an exciting director, but this style is mostly sacrificed for more straightforward storytelling, and by corollary, more commercial possibilities.
The filmmakers want to make the story accessible to the widest possible audience, which is as should be. But this responsibility to garner a wide audience presents an interesting conundrum. I could not help but think of the Holocaust, because the parallels with American slavery are many and obvious, as are the parallels on how genocidal violence is depicted in film.
Slavery is the African-American Holocaust. McQueen makes sure this is branded into our consciousness by showing episode after episode of unspeakable cruelty. Sticking closely to what Solomon Northup witnessed and lived through, the experience of this film is as close as we're ever going to be to what it was like to be a slave.
Still, cinematically, the magnitude of slavery as a crime against humanity is so  unfathomable, that any attempt to dramatize it creates an obvious problem with authenticity, which is generally true of Holocaust movies as well. How, for instance, do you use music to punctuate such circumstances? Any fictional embellishment threatens to banalize the authentic depiction of historical evil. The use of well known actors becomes distracting, even if all the famous talent in this film (Paul Giamatti, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Paul Dano, Alfre Woodard) rises to the occasion. In United 93, also a movie about a historical act of human evil, director Paul Greengrass bypassed this problem by using unknown actors, giving it unquestionable verisimilitude. It worked, but nobody saw it.
This is the paradox of this film.
Perhaps this is why McQueen chose Ejiofor, a well-known British actor, but not very known here, and newcomer Lupita Nyong'o for the main slave roles. They are both very good. Solomon Northup, urbane, educated, sensitive, and appalled at his fate, learns to obey and quell his temper and dignity in order to preserve his life. He  cannot fight back, so his journey is the opposite of what we are used to from cinematic heroes: from being a well rounded, accomplished human being, he needs to do less and less in order to get out alive. His heroism relies in surviving and trying to hold on to his last shred of dignity, even when forced to collude in his own dehumanization. Chiwetel gives a very empathetic performance, but there is something about a passive hero that makes it hard to connect for the audience.
Like any other form of institutionalized sadism, slavery is shown to cast not only a dehumanizing pall on slaveowners and slaves alike, but it is encased in its own bizarre bubble; an insane parallel reality. In the dissolute character of slaveowner Epps (Michael Fassbender), corrupt madness runs like a fever. Epps is an ignorant, Bible thumping drunk; cruel, childish, arbitrary. Fassbender is very good at showing his spineless weakness. There is nothing grand about him. He is at the bottom of the human totem pole, a grotesque character, a second rate bully, clearly inferior to Northup in every way.
From the beginning, McQueen establishes that slavery was unregulated capitalism at its nadir. Although he makes clear that even those who profited from it were aware of its revolting effects, even judicious people, such as Thomas Jefferson, engaged in it. It is particularly chilling to think that Northup's descent into hell, as McQueen shows with close ups of water churning through the wheels of a river boat, was only a short journey from New York to Washington D. C.. He went to dinner one day with whom he thought were potential business partners, and woke up in a dungeon in chains. There was a legal and economic system in place that allowed this to happen, and there was nothing he could do about it.
This powerlessness sparks enormous moral outrage. The film's effect is cumulative: it lashes out at you relentlessly - as life lashed out at Northup - until its cathartic ending. This is not a wishful tale about righteous white people with good intentions. It is not fiction. It is a remarkably evenhanded and perceptive eyewitness account of slavery from a survivor. The hero is a Black man, and he engineers his own survival. In this sense, 12 Years A Slave is possibly the truest film about the topic ever made.
Yet McQueen's approach, even as he meticulously documents the most harrowing scenes of cruelty, feels somehow emotionally detached. The piling up of horrors, if utterly valid and faithful to Northup's experience, makes you brace against it. Only at the end I felt a cathartic emotional release. Perhaps this is intended to mirror Solomon Northup's own journey: in order to survive, you have to harden your heart. Unlike Steven Spielberg's Amistad, 12 Years A Slave is unadorned with human pieties. It's an endurance test that shows no mercy towards the audience.
Hopefully, 12 Years A Slave will spark a serious conversation about slavery in this country. For all of our boisterous public debate about race, very little is discussed about slavery (unless, I assume, you are stuck in history class in high school). This is perplexing, to say the least. Considering how important it is a chapter of American history, more needs to be discussed. Because even today there are economic systems in place that are not too distant from slavery: the abuse of undocumented migrant workers, private prisons that profit from the wholesale incarceration of mostly Black and Latino people. The nasty unethical, yet fully legal, exploitation of certain groups continues.

This movie put a thought in my head:
The still benighted South, home of a majority of people who think universal health insurance is communism, and who'd rather die than pay taxes for a more progressive and cohesive society, should be made to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves in America. This is not a new concept, but perhaps 12 Years A Slave will bring the idea back to the table. This movie intends to reopen an old wound. I certainly hope it does.

12 Years A Slave opens October 18.

 

Anna Karenina

Shocker: they omit one of the greatest opening sentences in the history of world literature. It's such a great line that it could have been included as a quote, before the story starts. I missed it.
At first it seems that we are in some sort of misbegotten musical, which is not what one expects to happen in any retelling of this tragic story, unless it's an opera. Joe Wright's version of Anna Karenina takes place in the physical realm of a stage. At first this conceit feels labored, distracting and inappropriate, and I was groaning with exasperation for the first 20 minutes, but once you get past all the whimsical dancing, and once this movie focuses in the great story it has to tell, it becomes quite ravishing, if not completely convincing. Screenwriter Tom Stoppard has adapted Tolstoy with verve and several great one-liners. The photography by Seamus McGarvey, the production design by Sarah Greenwood and the costumes by Jacqueline Durran are absolutely stunning, and a good reason to sit through this movie. I hated the vulgar music by Dario Marianelli, but somehow the story of this woman (Keira Knightley) is so good, and the movie is so gorgeous, that one settles into its idiosyncracies and gets carried away, that is, when one is not grimacing at some of its more salient flaws.
For starters, La Knightley is somehow fascinating to watch, although she is not much of an actress. Sometimes she is beautiful; sometimes, as when she laughs, she is not, but she holds the screen, if not with talent, with her looks and her esprit de corps. She carries herself well in costume dramas. As an actress, she is passable in that she does what the character needs to do (cry, swoon, elate), but there is no internal compass. She is just a collection of scenes. Jude Law fares much better as an understated Karenin, whom he plays as a cold, solemn bureaucrat who nevertheless is deeply hurt by his wife, whom he loves in his own prim and distant way. But the biggest problem is the casting of Count Vronksy (I was pining for Fassbender, even if he is long in the tooth). In order for Karenina's amour fou to take root, one has to believe that there is something really fetching in Vronsky, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson is not that interesting. I understand that part of the tragedy is that Vronsky is not that remarkable a man to make such terrible sacrifices for, but he should have a modicum of charisma. Taylor-Johnson is a cipher.
The main problem with this version is that it is too busy hitting the audience over the head about the theatrical rigidity of Russian social mores with the stage metaphor, (which gets old five minutes into the movie), and this takes time and space from character development. We can fill in the blanks about the characters lives', but the characters would have benefited from more attention from Joe Wright. The stage conceit serves as a shorthand to condense the different social milieus of the film without having to turn it into a miniseries. If one fears being stuck with Anna Karenina on a stage (a la Dogville), Joe Wright's swooping camera and flawless transitions between scenes allow him to keep the eye entertained, and sometimes even astonished. Technically, the movie is spectacular. It is also too long, like the book. Many times, the slow pace has to do with Wright getting carried away with the visual spectacle. At the beginning, the forced choreography seems to border on kitsch, but soon they kind of forget about it and get on with the story. The whole movie looks like a Fabergé egg, yet the most enjoyable parts are when the characters are allowed to be, and speak Tolstoy by way of Stoppard's lines. The character actors are uniformly great, (in particular Emily Watson, Matthew Macfayden and Alicia Vikander) and so it's a pity that the two tragic lovers at the center of the story are not at that level. Still, this Anna Karenina is worth seeing for sheer visual pleasure, and to revisit a great story which is more modern than this ornate version wishes it to be.

Cosmopolis

A valiant failure. It's no coincidence that no novel of Don DeLillo's has ever been adapted for the screen. One of the greatest American novelists and a master of language, DeLillo's books do not lend themselves to film easily. This did not deter David Cronenberg from adapting Cosmopolis, a novel DeLillo wrote in 2003 about Eric Packer, a young master of the universe who spends all day trapped in his limo, going to get a haircut, while the world implodes around him, in no small part thanks to his predatory bets on the markets. It is symbolism in capital letters, a dark fable about the tightening chokehold of unbridled capitalism. On paper, it may look like it can be made into a film. There is enough incident, allright. Meetings, sex, even a prostrate exam happen in the car, but then there is the question of the words. Don DeLillo writes sentences that cut like black diamonds, but he doesn't write in a language that anybody who exists in reality could ever utter. Cronenberg aims to be as faithful as possible to that sharp, terse, ironic DeLillo style, but, to do that, he would need the finest actors mankind has ever offered to say these lines without sounding like pretentious automatons. The only one to emerge triumphant in this verbose ordeal is the great Paul Giamatti, firing the words like a weapon at the very end of the film. Matthieu Amalric fares very well playing a pie throwing activist and Samantha Morton hangs by a thread as some sort of financial oracle, holding the screen with the sheer conviction of her luminosity. I would have loved to see la Swinton play the part.
The rest is a disaster, mainly because Cronenberg picked Robert Pattinson, a terrible actor, to play the leading role. He is in every frame, and he tries his best, but he is flat as a board. The character is supposed to be morally and emotionally vacant, but the actor playing him cannot be vacant himself. I don't think Pattinson knows the full import of some of the lines he utters. Not because he is stupid, but because he doesn't have the depth. Ryan Gosling would have been perfect. Alas.
Even worse is Sarah Gadon, who, to judge from her performance as Packer's wife, is a totally inexperienced and untalented actress. This makes me question Cronenberg's sanity. Do not give a role with De Lillean dialogue to someone who can't act. It will bring the movie down.
As we have said before about Michael Fassbender's wooden performance in Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, it takes a rare talent to make him act badly. The same happens here but with Juliette Binoche, an even greater actor than Fassbender, sounding wooden and fake as an art dealer. I'm starting to think that Cronenberg is just not a great director of actors. He's beginning to like very wordy literary adaptations, and his last two films seem like the life has been punched out of them by so much unwieldy dialogue. He didn't use to be this way. His movies have always exploded with messy life.
Cosmopolis is stiff but much less corseted than A Dangerous Method. Some moments of Cronenbergian pizzazz wake the audience up. The scene with Amalric is wonderful; surprising, violent and funny. So is a moment where Pattinson uses a gun. The scene with the barber (George Touliatos, excellent) has a certain power, even if most everything in this movie looks like a cheap set. I expected the look to be as polished and metallic as in Cronenberg's Crash (a pervy movie that I love), but the light is harsh, which makes the surroundings look phony (as phony as the New York of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, a similar disaster, but made with much more money).
Imagine this movie had David Fincher made it. It would have been better. It sorely needs that Alpha male gloss. On the page, DeLillo's language reads like a trillion bucks: sharp, smooth, velvety, dangerous. But the movie dies trying to bring his style to life. There is not enough sharpness; not enough precision. Yet, as terribly flawed as it is, the endeavor to bring to the screen this dark fable about the collapse of our society is somehow quixotic. You cannot but root for Cronenberg, if you manage to make it to the end.

Oscars Postmortem 2012

As always, such an anticlimax. But, the consensus in my tiny Oscar watchfest was "they were not that terrible". Given that these are the Oscars, this is like getting an A-.
First, the dresses. Undisputed best look of the night, Rooney Mara. Best dressed, she was the only one who looked like a bona fide movie star. Second place goes to a brave and elegant Gwyneth Paltrow for pulling off a spectacular white dress. The rest was a parade of high-end schmattes, as far as I'm concerned. Put them all together in a rack and you'd think you were at a formal gown sale at Bolton's. It's a bad day for glamour when Penelope Cruz looks matronly. Where is Tilda Swinton when we need her?
I like Billy Crystal, but the shtick is not getting old, it's getting prehistoric. "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: that's how my relatives are watching this show". Me and the alte cackers who comprise the Academy are suckers for borscht belt humor. The rest of the world, probably not so much.
Am I crazy, or were there not enough stars? (Never enough stars). At least they had the decency not to bother with the Taylor Lautners and Ryan Reynoldses of the world. But I sorely missed me some Fassbender, some Mortensen, some Gosling, some Swinton, some Theron, some hormone blasting eye candy.  Alas.
I am still at a loss trying to understand what the hell was that commercial for Cirque Du Soleil in the middle of the proceedings. Although we are progressing as far as stopping audience abuse with musical numbers, apparently the producers cannot bear to part with random cheesiness altogether.  Who are we getting next year, Siegfried and Roy?
Obit time was long and corny, and is it me or they always use that song? There were some bad omissions: Raul Ruiz, Pedro Armendáriz Jr, Michael Gough, Michael Sarrazin, Arthur Laurents, Harry Morgan, Nicol Williamson. Instead, there was some marketing research guy in there.
Apropos of which, I thought the focus group bit by the fabulous Best in Show troupe was very funny. Focus groups are exactly like that. This was documentary in its realism. But if Hollywood thinks focus groups are so satanically moronic, as they are, why do they keep using them? Self-serving crap.
Was I moved by stars talking about how they love movies? No, because they didn't say anything specific. And who cares what Adam Sandler's influences are?  Anybody who opens a montage with a scene from Forrest Gump deserves a special circle of hell designed exclusively for them, with that scene looped at nauseam for infinity.
Emma Stone was charming. Ben Stiller should be disinvited posthaste (what was that skin color?), and as far as I'm concerned Will Ferrell and Zack G. can do no wrong. And last year's winners talking personally to the acting nominees is borderline offensive. It's like rabbis giving eulogies at funerals of dead people they never met. Horrifying. The rest is a blur.
Now, as far as the prizes: I was flummoxed by the techie love shown to Hugo, and thought it was mostly consolation prizes to Scorsese, until I read in Deadline Hollywood Daily that Hugo, which cost over $200 million to make, (and for some incomprehensible reason this obscenity is being rewarded) employed almost every tech guy in town and they all voted for it. Which explains. Because although it uses 3D and HD and ADHD, I found the look of the movie garish and applied with a heavy hand, sort of like a Parisian strumpet with a bad case of rouge. Which brings me to the one upset of the night that made me scream in horror. I was not rooting for cinematographer Emannuel Lubezki because he's a Mexican Jewish homie, but because his work in The Tree of Life is truly awesome and ravishing. Plus, he has been nominated 5 times and never won. I really thought he had it in the bag. It went to Robert Richardson's ugly, if super complex, work in Hugo. Aargh.
I had problems with many of the nominations to begin with. I would have gladly exchanged Kevin Spacey in Margin Call and Viggo Mortensen as Freud for Christopher Plummer and Nick Nolte. I would have loved to see Ryan Gosling for Ides of March or Michael Fassbender for Shame instead of Dujardin or Clooney. I would have loved to see Kristin Wiig or Charlize Theron instead of Glenn Close (who looked like the leprechaun in the Lucky Charms cereal box) or Viola Davis (yes, I've said it. I'm tired of her virtuoso weeping). 
And except for The Artist and The Tree of Life, I don't think any of the other 10 movies deserved a best of the year award. Do Moneyball and War Horse (which I haven't seen) deserve to be there, but not Bridesmaids? With bad choices to begin with, it's hard to get worked up about this.
The only awards I really cared about were that justice be made for A Separation, and for Meryl Streep, who everybody loves to hate because they cannot conceive she is as impossibly magnificent as she is. That was the one standing ovation that had actual merit in the entire show. She is the Grande Dame of American Acting if not of All Acting Ever, so back off, haters. She also does fake humility to a t.
As we have complained before, for the Oscars to have some sort of suspense, the ceremony needs to happen at the beginning of awards season and not at the end, when the outcome is almost uniformly a foregone conclusion. Let the voters not be swayed by the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs and the Golden Chickens. Let them do their homework. This would make them more exciting.
And BTW, next year, fix the sound problems. Geez.

Oscars: Award Bathos

Baños de pureza is a phrase in Spanish that means "baths of purity" and is used to denote someone who likes to slather themselves in holiness. Methinks that this is what tends to happen at the Oscars, where the nominations run the gamut from tokenism and holier than thou sentiments, to the pedestrian, predictable and conventional. I never thought that I'd agree with critic Peter Travers from Rolling Stone, but in his fun tirade against the ghastly Oscar choices this year, the guy has a point. This year's awards, as always, smack of humorless, pious self-congratulation, which explains many of the glaring omissions as well as the inexplicable inclusions.
A movie that was widely panned by critics, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, can only be in there because it is about 9/11 and has Tom Hanks in it, like a trusted brand of tissues. Apparently, it is the worst kind of sentimental pandering, the kind of movie that everybody hates but the Academy. Yet Bridesmaids, a hugely successful movie, both artistically and commercially, gets a consolation prize for best screenplay, because God forbid they pick a comedy for best movie or best actress of the year for Kristin Wiig. But then they complain that the ratings are falling and only old, demented farts like me watch their annual train wreck of anticipated boredom. This explains the omission of Michael Fassbender's and Carey Mulligan's searing performances in Shame, because the movie is about SEX and God forbid there is the slightest intimation they would stoop to watch such a film. They, who have no qualms about massive body counts in PG-13 movies, God forbid they look at a tit or a dick. This explains why dark independent movies like Take Shelter, or Martha Marcy May Marlene are ignored. And a solid political movie like The Ides of March, which depicts the filth of politics inside two Democrat campaigns, and is just about evil, not about Good and Evil, as they like it, gets only a screenplay nod, because it portrays flawed, messy people, not heroes bathed in the light of their own halos. For that we have The Help, a terrible movie, but one that guarantees Hollywood a nice pat in their own back, even if it is covered in the kind of schmaltz that is really bad for you. The kind of dreck that pretends that without white people, black people could not have freed themselves from slavery. The Descendants is the typical movie the Academy likes. It is solid and non-threatening; doesn't offend anybody, takes place in Hawaii. Then there is War Horse, which I haven't seen, (a weepie about a horse in the war is not what drives me to the theater), and Hugo, by Martin Scorsese, which is again, well-intentioned about cinema, but not very good. Midnight in Paris is a prestige nod and the best Woody Allen has done in years of mediocre work, but is it a best film of the year? No. I bet Moneyball is a perfectly good movie, but it is about "Triumph", and has Brad Pitt in it. I suspect it is there because no one wanted to make it, and Pitt fought for it until he got his way. Hence, a best actor nod for him as well: atonement. At least they had the good sense to recognize The Artist and The Tree of Life, which are truly magnificent. This was a particularly bad year in this category.
This explains why Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Demián Bichir got nominated. Mind you, they all are great, and bring depth and humanity to thin, idealized roles, but they are there so that Hollywood can atone with these two Black women and one Latino, all playing the noble-person-of-color, for all the hundreds of other non-white actors who either are completely absent from their movies or they mostly play the gardener or the maid, the drug dealer or the pimp, or in the best of cases, a noble second banana. With these prizes, the Academy thinks they've paid their dues for multiculti inclusion.
This halo pandering comes from a multi-billion dollar industry that is craven and morally corrupt, but that likes to wish that the lofty moral sentiments of these movies will rub off on them while they crush every other film industry with their might and they flood screens all over the world with mindnumbing crap. This is an industry that is angry at Obama, and threatening to withhold donations to his campaign because he did not support SOPA or PIPA, two strongarming bills intended to protect the billions it makes, freedom of speech be damned.
Could also be that their taste is crap. That they are old and hopelessly behind the times, and they simply love bad, tepid movies that make them feel good about themselves. This is why atrocities of cheap, false sentiment like Slumdog Millionaire, Life is Beautiful, The Blind Side, and maybe this year The Help, are categorized as best movie of the year.
Here is the list of all the Oscar nominees for best movie since 1927. Have fun.

Oscars: The Good News And The Bad News

Good news is, The Tree of Life made it to the Best Picture, and so did Terrence Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Also The Artist, which is the best movie this year except for A Separation. I'm rooting for it.
The Descendants is a perfectly decent movie, but for some reason I liked it much more as I watched it than afterwards. Afterwards, it became a little meh. The Artist should win this year, but it's a toss up because these people vote with their ass most of the time. They are entirely capable of giving it to The Help.
Bad news is that a movie that most critics hated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, inexplicably made the list. There is nothing more unpalatable to me that having Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks in the same movie. I can watch them both separately no problem, but together it's overkill. Bridesmaids is the much better choice. The Help utterly sucks. But the Academy members are a bunch of sentimental old farts who want the movie business to be bathed in corn and good intentions. Midnight in Paris is the best stuff Woody Allen has done in years, but I don't think it merits a best movie nomination.  Hugo is simply not good enough to be in this list, despite its good intentions.

Good news is, A Separation, from Iran, the year's best movie, also got an original screenplay nod. This is the movie that absolutely needs to win Best Foreign Film. And if it wins original screenplay too, for which it got a surprising and well deserved nomination, all the better. I'm very happy the academy did not nominate The Skin I Live In from Almodóvar (he's his own country now), because it sucks. 
Bad news is that Footnote, an annoying, overproduced Israeli movie, made the nominations too. Lars Von Trier's Melancholia should be here. Alas, he is now persona non grata. Miss Bala from Mexico stood a chance. But this category never really represents the best of foreign cinema, except in the case of A Separation, which is truly a spectacular film.

Good news is Demián Bichir made to the best actor noms (token Hispanic, maybe?). I have not seen the movie but I hear he is great. He's always been a good actor. Terrible, unbelievable bad news is that Michael Fassbender, who gave the performance of the year in Shame, was not nominated. Somebody read these people the riot act. I would substitute him for Gary Oldman, who barely appears in his own film (sorry, Cathy!). I think this one is between Dujardin and Clooney. And if so, let it be Dujardin.

Good News is that Kenneth Branagh got his nod for playing Laurence Olivier in My Week With Marilyn. Good for Nick Nolte and Jonah Hill. Bad, incomprehensible news is that Viggo Mortensen did not get a nod for his believable, awesome Sigmund Freud in A Dangerous Method. Or Kevin Spacey in Margin Call. This category was rich with fine performances this year, and yet the Academy votes are most predictable. Where is Eddie Redmayne for My Week With Marilyn, Corey Stoller for his Hemingway in Midnight in Paris? Albert Brooks for Drive? Or Robert Forster for The Descendants? Boring.

Good news is they are all good. Good for Rooney Mara, good for Glenn Close, Aunt Meryl, etc. Bad news is that Elizabeth Olsen from Martha Marcy May Marlene should have been nominated, and Carey Mulligan as well for her work on Shame.  Also, terrible, terrible slight not to nominate the outstanding Kristin Wiig of Bridesmaids. She deserves to be here. This one is between Meryl Streep and Viola Davis.

Good news is Melissa McCarthy is in for Bridesmaids, and the rest of the category is solid. Bad news is Vanessa Redgrave, who gives the supporting performance of the year in Coriolanus, is not here (unless she counts for next year). Sissy Spacek was dead on perfect on The Help. Where is she? I'm not hazarding a bet, but Octavia Spencer is a possibility.

Good news is this is a good and worthy group. As far as I'm concerned, the two worthiest contenders are Hazanavicius and Malick, and if either one wins, I'll be ecstatic, edging towards Hazanavicius. Bad news is I'm down on Woody Allen, whose movie is very uneven. Asghar Farhadi, director of A Separation should be here as well.

Good news is go, Emmanuel Lubezki, as far as I'm concerned, absolute front runner for his astounding work in The Tree of Life. Bad news is Manuel Alberto Claro who did the cinematography for Melancholia should be here. I also loved the work of Sean Bobbitt in Shame.

Adapted screenplay I have no good news to report. I have only seen The Descendants and TTSS, and that screenplay seemed to me to be quite problematic. I'm hoping Coriolanus qualifies for next year, because it is one of the best adaptations of Shakespeare to the screen. Why is Jane Eyre not here? That was a solid adaptation. Carnage the film was so much better than Carnage the play. But Polanski is poison.
On Original Screenplay there is plenty of good news: YAY! Annie Mumolo and Kristin Wiig! Bridesmaids got a very well deserved nod, and so, surprisingly for a foreign film, did A Separation. The Artist is brilliant. Bad news is I think Margin Call is a terrible screenplay and Midnight in Paris could be better. Sean Durkin's script for Martha Marcy May Marlene was better than either one of them.

The good news is there are only 2 nominated songs! I will be happy when there are zero. Of course rooting for Brett McKenzie and his lovely Muppet song, because the bad news is the Rio one sucks.  As for the score, the good news is The Artist should win because it is the score of a movie without words and it is incredibly well done. The bad news is that I hated Alberto Iglesias' score for TTSS. Wrong choice of composer, the music sounded exactly like his last three Almodóvar movies. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross should be here for their effective work for David Fincher.
Let the griping about the Oscars begin!

And My Nominees For Best Acting Are:

Best Actor

Michael Fassbender -- Shame
Viggo Mortensen - A Dangerous Method
John C. Reilly - Carnage/Cedar Rapids
Yvan Attal -- Rapt
Eddie Redmayne -- My Week with Marilyn
Jean Dujardin -- The Artist
Ryan Gosling -- The Ides of March

Best Supporting Actor

Kevin Spacey -- Margin Call
Corey Stoller -- Midnight in Paris
Robert Forster - The Descendants
Kenneth Branagh -- My Week With Marilyn
Albert Brooks -- Drive
Brian Cox - Coriolanus

Best Actress

Carey Mulligan -- Shame
Elizabeth Olsen -- Martha Marcy May Marlene
Kirsten Wiig -- Bridesmaids
Meryl Streep -- The Iron Lady
Michelle Williams -- My Week With Marilyn

Best Supporting Actress

Vanessa Redgrave - Coriolanus
Penelope Ann Miller -- The Artist
Sissy Spacek -- The Help
Octavia Spencer -- The Help
Jessica Chastain -- The Help
Sarah Paulson -- Martha Marcy May Marlene

NYFF 2011: Shame

The fruitful collaboration between director Steve McQueen (Hunger) and actor Michael Fassbender is starting to resemble Scorsese's with De Niro. Shame, their second foray together, is also about the mortification of the flesh but for opposite reasons to Hunger. Brandon, the protagonist of Shame, is far from a religious-political martyr who sacrifices himself with fearless discipline for a cause; he is a sex addict. Handsome, successful by the New York definition (he owns his apartment and has a job), he cannot control his sexual urges. He uses sex like other people abuse drugs. He masturbates in the office, watches porn there and at home, spends probably half his salary on expensive whores, and cannot stop. As is to be expected, this man whose mind is mired in filth, is an obsessive neat freak. His world is all smooth surfaces, steely blues and grays. He looks like money and women fall for him (who wouldn't?). The promise of sex with him sounds tantalizing, but just as he is mysteriously attractive, he is disgusting. He is disgusted with himself for being disgusting, so he goes deeper into more disgust.
The opening shot of this movie is Fassbender lying naked in bed, blue sheets covering his groin, looking like a supine Christ in a renaissance painting. McQueen is a renowned visual artist and, as in Hunger, every frame of this movie is masterfully composed and some are reminiscent (or is it just me?) of classic painting motifs, like pietas and annunciations. But the controlled aesthetics are in counterpoint to visceral emotions, and as in Hunger, McQueen does not shy away from the visceral. He doesn't go for the overly graphic either. He does not confuse that kind of shock value with art, as other more pretentious auteurs do (I'm thinking Bertolucci or Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny). The shock here comes from Brandon's terrible psychic pain and his joyless debasement of his body. Fassbender gives a brave and incredible, almost silent performance as a guy who is fighting with all his being against feeling emotional pain, by compulsively, almost suicidally seeking the release of sexual pleasure, but without the intimacy of human connection. It is a miracle he can keep this perverse act of self-loathing going on for as long as he does. I guess being a white male with money helps.
A woman leaves insistent messages on Brandon's phone. He never picks up. He works at a cold and angular job, all male assholes at the top, for a garrulous married boss that tries too hard to pick up women. Brandon, in contrast, vanquishes them like flies just by deploying devastating come hither looks. He can have any woman he wants in New York (including me). So why use whores? Why watch porn? Because sex is a wonderful way to feel everything but pain. It is a wonderful way to feel debased. He is self-medicating his shame with more of the same.
Spoiler alert, plot details ahead:
One day he comes home from yet another zipless fuck, as Erica Jong would say, to find music blaring from his stereo (the song: Chic's I Want your Love). He takes a baseball bat and bursts into the bathroom, where a woman (the excellent Carey Mulligan) is taking a shower. The framing of this scene reminded me of a Giotto annunciation. She reminds him she had keys. She is an emotional wreck with a bad dye job. Probably nothing thwarts a sex addict more than an unwanted house guest; even worse, a close relative. Later, we figure out that Sissy is his sister, but this is not a "here comes the Flying Nun to set her brother straight" story. She is a mess; a cabaret singer, with traces of self-inflicted damage on her wrists. These two are extremely damaged goods, from across the river in Jersey, which appears in the distance in several scenes, (as if the brother and sister had crossed the river Styx and still could not get rid of all that pain), and prior to that, Ireland. Probably Catholics, hence even more shame. At one point she says, "we come from a bad place, but we are not bad people". This is explanation enough. McQueen is not one for the American confessional mode. The point of shame is guilt and secrecy, not spilling the beans to anyone who will listen.
In contrast to her brother, Sissy expresses her pain by singing, (meaning: by being an artist) and by wallowing in big emotions. She embraces her mistakes so hard she almost smothers them with love. But she doesn't even have a roof over her head and asks to stay with Brandon for a while. She sleeps on the couch and Brandon can hear her, over the heavy breathing of his internet porn, crying and desperately begging a boyfriend to take her back, debasing herself for love and attention: it seems to be the family way. But does he go out and comfort her? Hell, no. He is at once heartbroken and disgusted.
At a nightclub, in the presence of her brother and his boss, Mulligan, photographed in a warm, golden light, sings the most depressing, ironic cover of "New York, New York". It may be her commentary on her own failure to achieve success (although if she made it to a swanky bar that takes reservations, she can't be so shabby), or on her brother's unconvincing veneer of success. He may fool everyone else, but he doesn't fool her. He sheds a tear when he hears her sorrowful voice, but is cold and stingy with his praise. His boss, however, charms her with deserved admiration, and soon she is fooling around with him in Brandon's bed. This is like taking the last baggie on Earth away from a desperate cokehead. He is furious: it disgusts him that she slept with his boss, and he knows this is the pretext he can use to ask her to leave, but he won't admit that she took over his space and now he cannot abuse himself in peace. She comes into his bed later to patch things up, but aware of his unbearable urges, he banishes her from his bedroom. Fassbender won the acting prize in Venice and is a huge contender for the big acting awards coming up. He embodies coherently and fearlessly the extreme contradictions in Brandon's character.
Brandon, unwilling to recognize his problem, just keeps getting worse. The fact his sister is there does not clean him up; it makes him feel even dirtier. His computer at work is taken and a massive cache of hardcore porn is found in the hard drive. His boss tells him that "whoever" put it there is a sick fuck. I guess this being a boy's club, they'd rather keep Brandon, who seems to be good at his job, even though he is always late, than fire him. Brandon feigns ignorance and just walks out of the room. Still, while Sissy lives with him, he goes on a date with a co-worker (Nicole Beharie, wonderful). He makes an effort. The date scene is intimate and awkward, and the waiter, armed with the pretentious spiel of most New York restaurant waiters, keeps interrupting the flow of a painfully labored conversation, and making it worse for Brandon, who is having a hard time trying to seem normal. He really likes this woman and leaves her hanging on the first date with nary a kiss good night. Lo and behold, he controls himself. This does not last long. In the office, on a whim, he takes her to the Standard Hotel (a good example of successful product placement, for once) in the meatpacking district, for a quickie. Unsurprisingly, he can't perform with her. Worse, he treats her like he treats his whores. The answer to which is even more debasement.
McQueen knows how to handle dramatic scenes, and he is a great director of actors. The key confrontation between brother and sister is shot in close up from the back, as the siblings sit side by side on Brandon's couch. She asks him to hug her and this unleashes a torrent of hissing cruelty from him. This scene is far more wounding than if it had been shot showing the actors arguing from the front. Mulligan's extraordinary work in this movie should also be recognized come awards time. I didn't know she had it in her to be so raw.
The third act is Brandon's spiral descent into hell. On his long dark night of the soul, Brandon looks for ways to hit bottom, one of which is to have a paid threesome. The music is Glenn Gould playing Bach, what Brandon hears in his iPod to calm his battered soul. But how does a serious film portray images of sex? The originality lies in that the scene, shot in an arty way that looks like what porn would look like if it had better lighting and a good cinematographer (in this case, Sean Bobbitt, who also shot Hunger), happens to be dramatically the lowest point of Brandon's existence. In contrast to porn, which refuses to acknowledge human feelings, this extended sexual sequence is there to portray the soul of a man in torment. The scene ends with Brandon's face striving painfully for the obliteration of orgasm and becoming monstrous, deformed.
The movie ends with a terrible catharsis. It takes something much worse than what Brandon has been avoiding all along, to make him come out on the other side.
I really liked Shame, but there is something about McQueen's disciplined style that I find confounding. This movie is about extreme emotions, but something feels cold at its core.

NYFF 2011: A Dangerous Method

Any movie that boasts of Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender and Vincent Cassel in it, I don't care if it's good or bad, I'm there.  Any movie that casts them as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Otto Gross, and is directed by David Cronenberg with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton, sounds quite promising. Unfortunately, A Dangerous Method is interesting but rather lifeless, like an impressive specimen pinned to a glass case. There is a lot of telling, and little showing. This tends to happen in biopics of great historical characters, but one does not expect it to happen in a movie by David Cronenberg, a director with a healthy, perverse penchant for the messiness of life. The characters talk in big ideas, and the movie feels stiff and  antiseptic, too much inside its own brain, even it deals with human passions that defy reason.
The story is fascinating: Sabina Spielrein, a wildly hysterical Russian Jewish woman, (Keira Knightley), is committed to the Swiss mental hospital where Carl Jung is starting to use Freud's "talking cure". Hers is a textbook case of quaint hysteria: she juts her jaw out, acts up a frenzy, laughs and cries at the same time, and seems possessed by demons, because she gets sexually excited when her father beats her up. In short, a masochist. I wonder whatever happened to hysteria? Women like that today, if they exist, either fuck their demons out or they become workaholics. But poor Sabina, trapped at the turn of the 20th Century, surrounded by nothing but disapproving male authority figures, is gripped by suffering.
Jung takes a keen interest on her and helps her out, even allowing her to assist him in his experiments with free association. She turns out to be very adept at analyzing other people's psyches, including his. They have an affair. Jung is married to a very wealthy woman who keeps having his children. As played by Michael Fassbender, he is quite an iceberg. Fastidious, self-important, aloof, controlled. There is one scene that hints at Jung having big appetites, but Fassbender's performance, even in the throes of passion, seems one-dimensional. The words tell us that he thought differently, but we don't see how a prig like Jung could be such an imaginative and fertile thinker. It's hard to reconcile Fassbender's clipped characterization, no doubt based on lots of research, to the man who created the Red Book and all those fascinating theories like the collective unconscious, synchronicity, and more, which greatly expanded upon and departed from the philosophy of Freud, his mentor.
Viggo Mortensen fares much better with his portrayal of Freud. I totally believed his intelligence, his natural authority, his recognition of himself as a guru, his strong paternal aura and I even felt a Jewish heimishness, a recognizable warmth, exuding from him. He is excellent. Vincent Cassel is also charismatic as deranged Freud pupil and uncompromising hedonist Otto Gross, a dangerous seducer, who goads Jung into unleashing himself and giving in to his desire for Sabina.
This movie is about mind games being played by the people who invented a system to decode them. Freud is the father figure the lovers seek approval from and whom they fear. When Jung wants to end the affair, Sabina emotionally blackmails him by telling all to Freud and threatening to become his patient. This drives Jung crazy.
One aspect of the movie I really liked was the fastidiousness of period detail, the limpid, warm cinematography by Peter Suchitzky, the starched collars and stiff vests of the men, the virginal white lace dresses of the women. It was another time, and it took Freud and Jung to shake off those constraints and turn us into modern people.
We now live at our own turn of a century of neuroscience which has mostly abandoned Freudian psychoanalysis, even if it is still highly culturally influential. Some of his ideas today seem overly male-oriented (penis envy?), some quaint, but he changed the course of human society for the better and it is interesting to revisit his contributions in the light of what we believe now.