Hail, Caesar!

This movie is the sweetest bonbon: the Coen brothers' valentine to movies and to the old Hollywood studio system. If you are a movie lover, you'll get a huge kick out of their endlessly amusing treasury of references to different genres, movies and actors. If you are not familiar with the names Esther Williams, William Powell and Myrna Loy, Carmen Miranda or Walter Huston, you may still enjoy the trademark Coen silliness, framed by the gorgeous cinematography of Roger Deakins, the spectacular production and costume design, and the wonderful cast of thousands, which includes George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill and Ralph Fiennes, among others.
I hope the Academy waits to give Roger Deakins his long deserved Oscar for this movie. His cinematography, in 35 mm, no less, is a love letter to Hollywood films. It pays homage to every trademark Hollywood look of yore. He exquisitely and accurately recreates the sharp black and white of classic romantic comedies, the vibrant, primary Technicolor of musicals and epics, and he bathes Hollywood in a sensuous, warm and golden light, which was what made the studio moguls choose Los Angeles as the home base for their industry.
The plot, as Coen stories go, is a quirky caper about Eddie Mannix, a Hollywood studio enforcer (Josh Brolin) who has to fix everyone and everything so that the studio he works for, Capitol Pictures, functions properly. He's a straight arrow and a problem solver; and boy, is Hollywood rife with problems and people who are rarely any kind of straight. He needs to contain an Esther Williams-like star (Scarlett Johansson) whom the studio casts as an innocent and virtuous mermaid, and who is anything but. Because of casting problems, he has to turn Hobie Doyle, a country bumpkin cowboy movie star (the excellent Alden Ehrenreich) into a leading man for a Noel Coward-ish (Ralph Fiennes) drawing room comedy, except he sounds like a hick and can't act his way out of a paper bag. And then he has to contend with the fact that his hugest star (Clooney, always game for the Coens) mysteriously disappears from the set where he is shooting a movie about the appearance of Christ.
Nothing is like what the studio wants it to be, which is innocent and flawless. Only Mannix knows everybody's dirty little secrets and his job is to bury them. Everyone has a reality that needs to be transformed into wholesome fantasy, which in Hollywood, is a tall order.
That the movie starts with a looming crucifix and that Mannix happens to be a devout Catholic seems arbitrary, if not rather insane, but this is beautifully paid off, since this is a movie about faith, big stories, entertainment and the extraordinary feat of illusion that movies are, both on the screen and behind the scenes.
The zany plot involves disgruntled writers, communists, Herbert Marcuse (you heard that right), a dog, and two gossip columnists played by Tilda Swinton. It sometimes zips and it sometimes sags slightly, as it is sprinkled with cameos by movie genres.
Channing Tatum stars in a delightful tap dance number in the style of Gene Kelly's dancing extravaganzas. Scarlett Johansson dives into a gigantic pool of mermaids. Jack Huston banters with a dame in the back of a car, and Hobie Doyle goes from being an eloquently silent cowboy to the most maladroit leading man in film history.
In my favorite sequence, Mannix pays a visit to the editor of the studio, C. C. Calhoun (the one and only Frances McDormand) who is cutting a Thin Man kind of movie, in a moviola, while blithely smoking two inches away from highly flammable celluloid. The Coens lovingly render the clicking and hissing and spooling of film, spliced by her dexterous hands. They show how fragile a movie could be (and you'll find out just how dangerous). But the scene also shows in beautiful cinematic shorthand how a resourceful and embattled director (Ralph Fiennes, polishing his funny bone), and a good editor can turn a terrible actor like poor Hobie Doyle into a smoldering movie star with a few deft cuts and angles. Sheer movie magic.
Meanwhile, Mannix is being courted by the military industrial complex for an "easy" 9 to 5 job where he won't have to deal with egos and crazies all day long. He may be the ringmaster of an absurd circus but it is his circus, with his maniacs, and he can't turn away.
I kept wondering what does Jesus have to do with anything, but in the end, Hail, Caesar! is about two competing versions of faith and mythmaking: religion and the movies. If I understand this movie correctly, for the Coens, the movies are as good and as imperfect a religion as any, or even better. I'm with them.

Avengers: Age Of Ultron

A quarter of a billion dollar piece of crap. Here's my review.

Under The Skin

Jonathan Glazer (Birth, Sexy Beast) makes films that feel abstract. This one is his most enigmatic to date. Scarlett Johansson stars as a woman who prowls Edinburgh and the surrounding countryside at night looking for men. She gets them into her van and seduces them to go home with her. Then she makes them fall into a black ooze. This is a strange, poetic science fiction film that may test your patience while you wait for the long scenes to unfold or for something to happen. Long periods of her roaming around in the fog are punctuated by bursts of incident so powerful, so devastating, they quietly astound and shock.
Your patience will be amply rewarded by the realization that you are seeing things from the point of view of an alien. She is utterly outside, not only of society, but of human feeling. She also seems to be unaware of our frantic notions of time. She seems to have all the time in the world. Glazer is not interested in cutting to the chase. We are on her time frame. He wants us to see the world from the outside looking in. Under The Skin makes us notice what we all have under the skin and what we take for granted; that is, our humanity. This is not to say this movie is a sappy paean to the good in people, God forbid. It is an elegant observation of what makes us human, in all its banal, noisy, messy, complicated, matter-of-fact reality. Connection, for instance. She always looks for lone men. For some reason, she is not interested in harvesting women. The purpose of her mission is never explained. She trains her almond shaped eyes on the way humans behave, and we see ourselves, observed, doing nothing remarkable. Shopping, crossing the street, talking on the phone, coming back from a soccer game, waiting. To her, we are a noisy, incomprehensible bunch, but she has learned to ape our superficial social chitchat, always asking the men if they live alone and where they are from.
As we fidget at the slowness of the film, Glazer springs on us surprising things. She is suddenly drowned by a wave of excited women going to a disco (portrayed as a techno version of hell). On a terrifying, and quickly becoming legendary, scene with a young family on a beach, there is no suspense. Only the horrific realization that this woman has no human feeling. 
After an encounter with a remarkable man, something changes in her. I did not quite understand why or how things happened in this sequence, but the fact is that she revolts against her mission. Saying more would spoil the mystery.
If you are bored out of your wits, you can allow yourself to float under the spell of La Johansson's otherworldly presence. Dressed cheaply, wearing terrible black bangs, a bit chubby even, with or without makeup, she is a creature. Her face engulfs the screen. It is an inspired piece of casting; female seduction made flesh, and she is a good enough actress to deploy her porous sensuality without exaggeration. The scenes where she traps her prey are both beautiful, darkly funny and fodder for years of psychoanalysis, the men following her like the chant of the sirens, sinking deeper, even shrinking at the opportunity to possess her. But in the moments when she is simply lost amidst the humans she is equally present, slightly befuddled, affectless but not exactly cold. She makes you notice what it is to display the slightest feeling, and how oblivious we are to our own humanity. She seems to absorb everything she sees through her skin. It is a measured and successful performance of an alien trying to pass for human without a shred of cliché.
I loved the creepy, incantatory music by Mica Levi and Glazer's customary elegant simplicity with images. He creates moments of terrifying beauty. Every time I thought the movie was veering towards the pretentious, some astonishing image arrived to haunt me. The film is visceral, minimal, elegant and perhaps (I hope) deliberately fuzzy. It is strangely gorgeous, quietly violent, deeply disturbing, and utterly hypnotic.

Her

This is the kind of movie people love to love, because is it about "love". But it is not about any kind of actual human love that one can recognize. And not because the main relationship is between Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and Samantha, his Operating System (Scarlett Johansson: best thing in the movie, and you never even get to see her).
It's because the way Her is written makes love look and feel like an endless Hallmark card, an endless sappy, hipsterish, saccharine pop song. As far as love and relationships are concerned, it has the depth of an inflatable kiddie pool, though it seems to think itself profound. Maybe I am an old, but if this is what young people think love is like, an endless litany of interminable kvetching, as a gaping chasm of "I need" and "I miss" and "I want", we are in deep doodoo. No wonder people in this movie can't relate to other people. They think love is all about themselves.
If you want to find out about true love, go see Amour. Her is for sissies.
Despite its lovely look and enticing premise, Her is a bore. Many are the reasons:
Theodore falls in love with his computer's operating system, Samantha, which is designed to be intuitive. She is super efficient and sexy and cool. I thought she was a bit too eager, but then again she is an OS. I wish mine was as perky.  Joaquin Phoenix, in the role of a sensitive schlub, has to act all by himself, cry all by himself and be a milquetoast all by himself. As always, he delivers. It is to Phoenix's credit that he is rather transfixing even when Theodore's only trait is sensitivity. There is no trace of edginess, irony, mischief, ego, self-destruction (always so sexy) or any flaws, except clinging to an infinite wellspring of grief and ennui. 100% sensitivity in a guy is not only hard to believe, it is boring. Theodore works writing virtual personal letters for a sort of personalized Hallmark cards of the future. If he were a corporate lawyer who is sensitive on the side, that would be interesting. But there is no contrast to him. He just aches and mopes.
I have complained elsewhere about this newfangled stereotype in American films; that of the hyper-sensitive male (there is one in every Pixar movie, and many a Mumblecore). These guys are the male embodiment of wallflowers: shy, afraid of girls, too emotionally frail to function. Excuse me if I burp. Meanwhile, with the exception of Samantha, who is perfect because she aims to please, the rest of the women in the movie are just plain strange. Theodore's ex-wife, played mostly silently by Rooney Mara, who deserves better, seems to be a slightly bipolar, difficult girl. We never really understand why they divorced, since she appears mostly in silent flashback montages, like a Saint Valentine's day catalog of Kodak relationship moments: laughing on the beach, having a pillow fight, etc. Since we never really get to experience what it was like to be married to her, his grieving seems a bit over the top. There is a fun dating sequence with Olivia Wilde (a lovely actress with great comic chops) but she turns into a shrew from hell in no time and for no clear reason. Amy Adams, almost unrecognizable in a crazy hairdo, plays an old flame and now good friend. When she and Phoenix are in the same room it feels like they are in different continents. I still don't understand what their deal was all about. Apparently, in the male wallflower genre women are so mysterious as to be incomprehensible, which is another load of crock.
Writer/director Spike Jonze has lovely visual ideas, and he creates a Los Angeles of the future with actual locations and by shooting in Shanghai (where he could not get a blue sky for love or money). He comes up with some arresting, intense moments.
A love scene between Phoenix and Samantha that borders on the ridiculous, is actually bracing, sexy and erotic. When was the last time you could say that about a scene in an American film? But the rest of the movie is most decidedly not. Jonze's vision of love is immature and self-centered, as I assume is that of all those self-proclaimed sensitive guys in movies, who, like Theodore, can't seem to grow a pair. What risk is this guy taking by comfortably falling in love with a machine? Try that with a human if you want real bravery. The sketchy writing never pays off the  questions the premise raises about our codependency with virtual tools. It doesn't even know how to resolve the conundrum of Theo's and Samantha's relationship and does so in an arbitrary cop out.

Don Jon

Joseph Gordon Levitt wrote, directed and stars in this funny and smart movie that succeeds in doing what many consider impossible: a romantic comedy that guys (and girls) will like.  He is not the first to deliver a romantic comedy from the male point of view, since Judd Apatow paved the way with The 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, but he addresses the gender wars in a more blunt and raunchy way. You could say that Don Jon is Steve McQueen's Shame with yuks, since both movies deal with different manifestations of male sexual compulsion. Don Jon is specifically about a guy (Gordon Levitt, bravely channelling his inner Jersey Shore), who prefers internet porn to real pussy. The movie is brash and blunt about the depiction of women in internet porn and about this guy who can't stop jerking off to it. He and his friends rate women by their bodies and he scores plenty of women, but somehow does not get the same satisfaction that he does with his computer screen.
Enter Barbara Sugarman, the excellent Scarlett Johansson, letting rip her Jersey Princess inner self.  Johansson's sensual beauty was made for the movies and she is unafraid to be sexy and funny. She is fantastic in this film. Jon thinks he is in love with Barbara. But she, like him, is a control freak, and she pussywhips him in no time. A world champion cockteaser, she has a goal, and that is to make husband material out of Jon. He is a total douche, but there is something vulnerable and appealing, ultimately sweet about him. In a way, he is an innocent. Innocent of real love, of meaningful sex, and so naive that he thinks that the porn he watches is real sex.  The cast includes the great Tony Danza and Glenne Headly as Jon's parents and the droll Brie Larson as his sister in a deadpan tour de force. She has one line in the movie that managed to ellicit cheers from the audience. And Julianne Moore, who is as good at comedy as she is at drama.  The plot has some nice twists, whereby Jon gets an education in sensitivity and the movie is generally delightful, with Gordon Levitt, expertly navigating some touchy subjects with great charm and poise, both as the screenwriter and as the director.
But Don Jon leaves lots to think about. Movies like this and Shame have explored the personal implications of the effects of porn on men. There is self-loathing yes, and an inability to relate to women. But nobody yet seems to be addressing the cultural and societal consequences of the ubiquitous accessibility of porn and the way it is shaping the way men relate to women. Many young men, and perhaps young women, since they can access porn as easily as men, expect real sexual behavior to be modelled on porn, which is obviously a grave mistake. The movie points this out in a light and romantic way. You make objects out of people, you can't really have a relationship with them.