Invictus

I sneaked in, because I'll be damned if I pay to see a Clint Eastwood movie, and I want my money back. I want my time back. I want him to apologize to me for thinking that we the audience are a bunch of morons who will swallow this pompous, boring absurdity, that takes its plot from reality but has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Then, it is just a marvel of cognitive dissonance to read A.O. Scott's review. In the interest of time, will reproduce here what I wrote today in the comments section of the Times:

I fail to understand Mr. Scott's love affair (and the rest of American film critics) with the hack work of Clint Eastwood. The movie is boring, written as if by a schoolteacher talking to 7 year olds, the excellent Mr. Damon is wasted, and except for Morgan Freeman and Damon there is not one ounce of true, complex feeling in the entire thing. The dialogue is obvious and cringe inducing, the bit actors hammy and terrible, the whole thing directed with no subtlety, ugly photography, the pace excruciatingly repetitive and boring, the cheesy music, faux African and overwrought, the entire thing manages to be a disaster.
Had this same film been made by any other filmmaker, I bet Mr. Scott would be tearing it apart for the mediocre garbage it is.

I don't get it. I don't understand the blind spot, the adulation of this terrible hack.

It's Implausible

I woke up thinking about Up in The Air. The more I think about this movie, the less I like it.
But let me digress a little: I am currently attempting to write the second draft of a screenplay. It's like giving birth to a cactus. I read a couple of books; mostly they made me feel suicidal. They tell you what has to happen on page 30, on page 60 and on page 90 if you want to succeed as a screenwriter. There have to be plot points and plot turns and turns within the turns, with exacting precision, as if you were building a time bomb. One ghastly book by Syd Field holds the script of Titanic to be the gold standard in movie writing (cue me tearing my hair out in despair). The other screenwriting bible, Story, is slightly more useful but beats me if I remember anything this annoying, pretentious man commands me to do. You can get the book for $30 or take the 3 day course for $700 and they are word by word exactly the same. You tell me.
To judge from some Hollywood movies I've seen lately, screenwriters take this advice to heart. In a good movie, the turns happen organically, they shake you up emotionally, but you don't see them coming round the bend, and you can't stick a flag in them and yell PLOT POINT!
Up in the Air is a good example of a movie where you can actually pinpoint the plot turns, they are so forced.  If you suspend your disbelief for a fraction of a second, nothing that happens is believable. The more I think about it, the more I feel duped.
How come a movie like Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon has total plot, but does not feel contrived? It feels like a mystery. The characters are coherent in themselves (crazy as bats, but coherent). Or the Dardennes' L'Enfant. A young, reckless father wants to sell his baby boy for money. Extreme, but nothing that happens in this movie is not believable.
Meanwhile, stateside, the absurdities pile on, with no regard to the intelligence of the audience. Why are we so fake in America?
If you intend to see Up in the Air, I'm warning you, here comes my list of absurdities, aka major spoiler alert:
1. Clooney lives in Omaha and works for a corporation. This is a stretch, 'cause Everyman he ain't. He has been good as a dutiful worker in movies like Syriana and Michael Clayton, but there he was CIA spy and New York lawyer, not schmo from Omaha.
2. He fires people for a living. These kinds of corporations better exist in real life.
3. He is also a motivational speaker. This could be a satyrical point if the movie had bothered to set it up as such. As it is, I never understood what he motivates people about. He seems to be telling them to dispossess themselves from all their relationships. This is not believable.
4. This is a man who'd rather endure the torture of modern flying than be at home in Omaha. Granted, it's Omaha, and he flies business and gets all the preferential shortcuts, but still, the movie never mentions the unease of flying, the fear of death. I know a lot of people fly without it (how, it's beyond me) but there is something too perfect about his complacency at living in airport and hotel Genericland, which, as far as I'm concerned, is Hell. I find it hard to believe that it is not horrifying to him, even for a second. 
5. As he waits in an executive lounge, Clooney meets Vera Farmiga, another million mile traveler. I lost heart with the film in this scene. The dialogue is supposed to ricochet like Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant's in His Girl Friday, but it is actually a leaden pissing match about car rental companies and frequent flyer programs. It could be funnier if the characters were allowed to show nuance. But it seems that in American films everything is so streamlined and efficient that there is no time for gesture anymore. Everything is broad strokes (see Brothers).
5. A young tyro, played by Sarah Kendrick, is hired to streamline the firing process, by doing it via teleconference. This girl is going to change the ways of an entire company just because Jason Bateman took a shine to her. Right.
Clooney's character balks, because that means he will have to stay home. He is horrified by the inhumanity of the new process. Hence, Bateman decides that Clooney needs to show Kendrick the ropes and take her with him on his travels. This is a typical premise of romantic comedy. Fine.
6. But then she shows up at the airport with a huge, cumbersome bag, looking ridiculous. Hell, nowadays everybody and their mother, no matter how unhip, understands and enjoys (and actually has no choice, given the airline restrictions) the glories of compact roller bags. But this is a pretext for a silly scene where Clooney buys her a bag in the airport and throws her pillow and her neck pillow in the trash.
7. Kendrick gets on Clooney's case about his stubborn bachelordom. They just met. They are uneasy colleagues. Yet she butts in too much. She gets too personal, and she is supposed to be a bit of a cold fish. Doesn't make sense.
8. Clooney falls in love (yay!) with Farmiga. He starts warming up to the joys of human company. He invites her to his sister's wedding, where of course the groom gets to have cold feet the day of, and Clooney must save the day. BS.
The movie takes a spin into the redemption of Clooney in which crazy shit starts happening just because he needs to redeem himself. He writes a letter of recommendation for Kendrick and I'll be damned if I know how he knew where to send it.
9. Then, any movie that casts Sam Elliott as an American Airlines pilot has got to be kidding me. I'm never flying American again.
10. Clooney goes looking for Farmiga only to find out the awful truth, that she has been playing by the rules of the road, like a man. At first I actually liked this turn, because it really felt shocking. But thinking about it, this woman, who seemed no nonsense and honest, and never showed any intimation of being anything but solid and mature, has been lying to him the entire time and did not at any point say to him, listen pal, I have a life back in Chicago but I am lonely on the road, let's have a fabulous affair while it lasts. She is a horrible liar. Why?

The Best Movies of 2009...

...and everything in between according to moi, coming soon.

I still need to see several that are playing at my local multiplex.
In the meantime, let me tell you: the prospect of seeing certain films gives me colic like when I had junior high school math at 8 am on Monday mornings and did not want to go to school. 

1. There is always a new pompously virtuous Clint Eastwood movie that I refuse to see.  I don't think that I can bear the stoic selfrighteousness of the entire enterprise, despite the presence of Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, both of whom I like intensely. I love to hate Clint Eastwood movies. For those of you who have not been in these pages before, I believe he is the most unfairly overrated director in America.

2. Precious sounds like very hard to swallow medicine. I'm quite curious about Mo'nique and Mariah and that new girl with the fantastic name, but the movie not only sounds like it's hard going, but like it is schmaltzy hard going, in which case I may not go at all.

3. The Road. Another barrel of laughs. Even the presence of scrumptious Viggo Mortensen does not make me want to run into the theater and fret about apocalyptic cannibals in the bleak near future.

4. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. I would not ordinarily miss anything with Alan Arkin in it, but this movie, like every other Rebecca Miller movie, sounds like a pill.

5. The Last Station. Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer chewing the scenery as Mr and Mrs. Leo Tolstoy. I love her, never liked him. So sue me.
A.O hated it, Denby loved it. Sounds painful.

6. Gigante. Another bleak Uruguayan film. For the record, I am not a fan of Whiskey.
I know I should love Gigante in advance, but I don't. It will go to my Netflix list.

Where's that movie with Jeff Bridges for which he will finally get his Oscar? Is that playing somewhere already? I want to see that. Jeff Bridges I adore, love and worship.

Meanwhile, I'm doing my homework to bring you (not that you asked for it) the list of the bestest, best better, bland, and bad movies of this dismal year.

Stay tuned.

Up In The Air

 

I had high hopes for this film, since some people are touting it the best of the year.
Not even close. This is one strange film, with some right things in place and others that are just not believable, starting with George Clooney as a corporate hack from Omaha.
There is no way that this suave, glamorous man hails, lives, works or is found anywhere near Omaha. Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt; that's someone who is from Omaha. Even if Clooney is good, in his Clooneyesque familiar way, he is too slick for the job.
Vera Farmiga is very good as a fellow million miles traveler and romantic interest, and so is Anna Kendrick, as a perky, uptight corporate girl, but even though the spirit of the movie is in the right place, this being probably the only fictional film from Hollywood that actually depicts our crumbling state of affairs (joblessness, foreclosures, wars), something about it doesn't quite convince. Everything feels forced.
Some of the dialogue is meant to sound like sharp one liners, except that it's something said by people who live in a movie, not in real life. For a film about reality in America, this creates dissonance. There are some scenes with people who have just been told they are fired which feel totally authentic. The rest, not at all.
The tone of this film is hard to sustain. It's a brittle/humane salad, an uneasy mix of dark and uplifting, and frankly, unless you are Billy Wilder and his writers (or Alexander Payne, the only true heir to Wilder, as far as I'm concerned), stuff like this is hard to nail. Jason Reitman did a good job with Juno, but here the brittle part feels too forced and the uplifting part too sappy, everything too contrived.
The movie never really explains cogently why Clooney's character, being just another employee at a terrible company that makes money by firing people from other companies, is also a motivational speaker. If this is meant as satire, it doesn't feel that way.
There are some good moments, as in a sequence where the characters crash into a tech convention party in Miami, which feels as dissociated from reality as those things actually are.  And there is also a fantastic twist involving Farmiga that has Clooney suffering from role reversal. To see someone like him on the other end of the dating stick is a vindication for women everywhere, and Farmiga's character, playing by the rules of men, is tough as nails, bless her.

The Brothers Carambazov

I just saw the original Danish film Brothers on Netflix to confirm what I felt after watching the American version yesterday: it suffers, like all American remakes, from terminal stupidization. It's as if subtlety were an infectious disease to be avoided at all costs.
Suzanne Bier's film is subtle, intimate and emotionally coherent, true to actual people, not movie clichés. The rewriting and the direction of the remake are so broad and heavy handed that all that big drama simply falls flat, despite the valiant efforts of the actors, which bring a dignity and humanity to the film that the rest of the team seems to have left at the door. A story that should have been handled with delicacy and care seems to have been written and directed by a tractor, and edited by a Brontosaurus.
There is one scene in the original film, where the entire family is celebrating the birthdays of one of the girls (in both movies, the kids are spectacular).
The Danish grandparents sit there, pretending to be happy, but when the kids leave the room they just crumple into their own exhausting grief. It is a miraculous moment that in a couple of seconds tells you more about pain than any grandiose speeches. Nothing of the sort ever happens in the American version.The main problem is the writing. There are many missed opportunities to create character and nuance. Everything is a cliché. Sam Shepard is the father, a sullen, uncommunicative Vietnam Vet and war hero who drinks on the side. How many times have you seen that in a movie? 

Why oh why this American obsession with heroics? It is inane and infantile and FUCKING BORING ALREADY. I can't take it anymore.
Or take Natalie Portman, an actress I don't particularly like. She is very good in this film, and cries convincingly every time she is required to. But who is she? What's she like, other than beautiful and a total cipher? In the original, Connie Nielsen shows character 1 minute into the film. She is a no nonsense, strong woman, not a long suffering angel with no personality.
The American movie makes stupid choices. Why does Sam Shepard have a new wife, instead of the mother of the two brothers? What good does this do?
There is a stupid business with a letter, the classic cliché of someone who gets a letter and refuses to open it. How many times have you seen that in a film?
The scenes in Afghanistan are painfully bogus and mostly unnecessary. The main terrorist wears thin rimmed glasses of the latest fashion and seems to be reading in the middle of hellhole, who knows why. Evil is intelectual?
Everything is milked for cheap sentiment, but then the characters never have moments to reveal themselves with gestures, the writer prefers to have them recriminating each other by having screaming matches.  Paradoxically, the more difficult emotional nuances of the original have been toned down, because every single American needs to be a freaking boy scout. It is revolting.
The movie is shot like a Hallmark movie of the week, with both too much coverage and quick cutting to reactions, which makes it feel totally fake, and yet there's a weird rhythm to many scenes, which seem to go on for way too long. The use of music is offensive.
The entire thing is mangled, except for the poor actors.
Tobey McGuire, losing weight for Oscar night, is very impressive as the soldier brother. His character is written like a walking cliché, but he finds the truth in the horror of his war experience. He loses it, not only spectacularly, but truly, to unspeakable guilt and anguish, even if he is saddled with a ridiculous, contrived suicidal scene.
Jake Gyllenhaal just does not have enough edge as the fuck up brother. He has been better in other movies, like Jarhead or even Zodiac. He is adorable, but not right for this role. He and Tobey look the same age, which is a problem. His relationship with his brother's wife is incomprehensible and I blame the writer and the director for that, although an actor with a more independent, imaginative streak perhaps would have found more complexity in the role.
Actually, the only one bearing the brunt of the complexity is Tobey McGuire and he acquits himself with flying colors.
Watching the Danish film, i realized that besides the family drama, the movie posits that our fight against barbarism is turning us into barbarians. The fear of the West is that we are being forced to stoop down to worse than Neanderthal level (with apologies to Neanderthals). The American film is too busy trying to be marketable to make these kinds of connections. It's one redeeming virtue is that it brings out the topic of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and of the human consequences of our wars in those places. For a much more honest depiction of this, I recommend The Messenger.
And certainly, the Danish original movie, Brothers.