The Bay

Or nature's payback time. It is unfortunate that this environmental horror flick by Barry Levinson opened on the same week that Sandy ravaged the East Coast. There were exactly six people at the screening I saw (too soon?) but this movie deserves a much wider audience. It is in the vein of all those supposedly found footage screamers like the Paranormal Activity series, (same producers), but the difference is that there is a good director at the helm. You can see Barry Levinson's nimble hand in the great direction of actors and in the realistic delivery of dialogue, which is one of his trademarks. Usually these movies have wooden B-listers who can't act their way out of a paper bag. Nobody in The Bay is well known, but they are all solid character actors, and it makes a difference.
Now, I am past the point of exhaustion with the DIY camera horror flick genre, a la Blair Witch Project. Remember when one could be scared shitless without a cheapie iPhone or video camera shaking all over the place? Still, Barry Levinson uses every small camera known to man with panache, he has a sly sense of humor, and the movie, if not particularly suspenseful, is really icky. The gross out parts are fabulously gross. The Bay is an environmental horror movie, where people get horrible boils and something eats them from inside. It's enough to make everyone become an advocate for the Green Party.
How scary is it when the water you drink, bathe in and cook in is polluted with mutated organisms (courtesy of industrial agriculture, and literally, chicken shit) that eat you from the outside in? The Bay is a combination disaster and flesh eating bacteria movie. The plot (screenplay by Michael Wallach) is rather flimsy, and more could have been made about evil corporate interests in cahoots with politicians that suppress information about pollution. Although it has a couple of jumps, it delivers more atmosphere and heebie jeebies than suspense. It's the way the story is framed that blunts the panic. It is narrated by a survivor, to whom nothing really happens, which dulls the sense of urgency; the worst already happened. Even though the use of consumer cameras adds realism, it takes away scariness, because the camera never lingers long enough on anything or anyone to create a sense of menace. Too much jumping around. The equipment that records the mayhem adds an extra screen, and thus, distance, which in my view, makes it less scary. One misses the ominous gliding camera work of Kubrick or Polanski. The kind of point of view of being immersed in the action that makes your hair stand on end is sadly not present in this movie, although Levinson stages certain events off camera that are all the more disturbing for being out of sight.
The Bay is smart, as these movies go, but it could be smarter. Even though it takes place in a very small town in Maryland, it doesn't use the mass hysteria that could quickly be unleashed by twitter and the internet. The CDC and FEMA are portrayed as cumbersome, slow bureaucrats, while it would be more exciting if everybody actually freaked out and contributed to exacerbate the problem. The small community is cut off from the mainland, but we don't see how or by who. I imagine that a lot of this is due to a small budget (the reason why these films are so profitable and why they use mini cameras). Still, Levinson gets a lot of mileage out of his "found" footage. Particularly gleeful and effective are shot after shot of people splashing around, jumping in the water, swimming in the pool, (very reminiscent of the opening of Jaws), completely unaware of the poison that lurks beneath the surface. It's very American, to celebrate the 4th of July (as in Jaws) without a care in the world, oblivious to the fact that the damage we do to the Earth, even in this little All American town, is going to come back, according to this movie, to bite our tongues off.

Flight

We should have known not to have much faith in a Robert Zemeckis production. After all, this is the man who brought us Forrest Gump, a celebration of human stupidity and possibly the most insulting mainstream movie ever made. What made us think that his penchant for moralistic corn would be abated?
Flight promises to be, on the one hand, a cathartic ride on a plane nosediving out of the sky, and on the other, a movie whose main character, Captain Whip Whittaker (straight from the Dept. of Heavy Handed Character Names) is a flawed hero with a moral dilemma. We did not expect it to be a manipulative, formulaic, queasily moralistic fable, which is not the same as a moral fable. Flight is moralistic in that cheap, hypocritical Hollywood way that turns an ethical dilemma into banal plot twists which not even the most innocent pollyanna can believe. The plane action is well done, but we expected more plane disaster excitement. Once that is over, the thrill is gone.
If there are saving graces, they are provided by the actors, particularly by Denzel Washington, who delivers a suave, totally credible performance as a highly arrogant and extremely gifted pilot. His arrogance feels multidimensional, and one roots for him despite it. He is fun as long as he drinks, and Washington makes Whip appealingly flinty, suspicious of God freaks. Somehow he doesn't alienate the audience, despite the movie jerking the viewer around over two hours with his inability to stop boozing, for no good reason.
John Goodman is there to deliver comic relief, in a similar role as the one that immortalized him in The Big Lebowski. He does it beautifully. Don Cheadle, Bruce Greenwood and Melissa Leo deliver the goods, and raise the level of what otherwise would be a Lifetime special. Character actors Tamara Tunie, Brian Geraghty and Peter Gerety (always wonderful) bring up the rear in style. There is one great scene in which Whittaker goes on a bender and he needs to clean up fast. One's hopes for the movie rise, thinking that it may flee out of the worn and predictable and deliver a more ironic, jaundiced outcome. But no such luck: we are taken to a place that seems real and exciting only to be plunged again into a tired narrative of humiliating self-redemption. Whittaker cannot be a hero unless he confesses to all his sins and finally accepts he's a drunk. He has to be punished for his excesses. This is not fun. This is a movie that only the Temperance Society can cheer for. It feels like a teetotaling pamphlet from the 1950s. And it bandies God and faith around so much, but not even in an honest, straightforward way, that I thought it was underwritten by televangelists. It's a movie that should have been made under a Romney regime. It feels that fake and old fashioned.
The shoddy script by John Gatins includes an utterly unnecessary love story between Whittaker and a heroin junkie (overacted by Kelly Reilly), and many bad lines of dialogue, such as "My name is Trevor. You saved my mother's life", uttered by a 10 year-old kid. I was riveted by Denzel at all times, but my eyes were rolling so much and so fast at the pat pieties and the leaden cliches, they must have looked just like that plane, upside down.

Holy Motors

Another example of French cheesy pretentiousness (or pretentious cheesiness), which garnered inexplicably good reviews, this film by Leos Carax is a high concept bonbon. Alex, an unsmiling Denis Lavant, goes in a white limo to several appointments through Paris. In each appointment he disguises himself as a character (the makeup design is spectacular): a poor old female beggar, a businessman, a crazy imp who scares people at the Pere Lachaise cemetery. The idea is that people do not want to see their stories on screens anymore. They want them to be as real as possible, in front of their eyes. The screens keep getting smaller, so actors like Alex go from one assignment to the other creating stories. It's a nifty concept, allright, and one of the rare instances I wish Hollywood (Spielberg, Zemeckis, or even better, Spike Jonze, say) would borrow it and make a much more entertaining movie out of it.
At least the cheese would not have intellectual airs; it would have more pizzazz.
The problem is the humorless, unimaginative execution. The grandiose tackiness keeps mounting, as in a vulgar sequence where the imp kidnaps "supermodel" Eva Mendez (such a good sport, and so wasted), and brings her to a cave, showing his prosthetic erection - very distracting as you might imagine - and fashions a burqa to cover her, a mortal sin, as far as I'm concerned. But there is no rhyme nor reason for this or any other story. It's all in Carax's head: clunky, obvious, juvenile and self-important.
Some moments are meant to evoke magic. The liveliest is an "intermission" in which Lavant plays an accordion followed by a merry band of players inside a church. Nice steadicam work. The rest is not as adeptly staged. An extended sequence inside the abandoned La Samaritaine department store, featuring Kylie Minogue (!), for instance, aims for melancholy, but it's rather drab. The whole movie looks opaque and tired, not very inspired, like poor Alex.
Still, Lavant is riveting as he applies and takes off his amazing makeup jobs. He is obviously versatile. He has the body of a dancer or a circus performer, and he becomes all these characters, none of which has a sense of humor. There is an inkling of the magical, sacred work that actors do, how their work may affect their feelings, as well as ours, but the stories are mostly preposterous and not emotionally engaging. In fact, it's the random ridiculousness of the stories, and the heavy handed attempt at some sort of surrealism, that makes Holy Motors exasperating. Only for those with a high tolerance for French cheese.

Argo

It's a great story, very well told by director/protagonist Ben Affleck, based on the true story of Tony Mendez, who concocted a fake film production in order to rescue out of Iran six American embassy employees who were hiding in the house of the Canadian ambassador, at the time of the Iranian hostage crisis.
The movie starts with a lovely, powerful sequence with storyboards that remind us of that once upon a time, there was a democratically elected Iranian leader, a secular man, who decided to nationalize his country's oil industry. In no time, the US and Britain engineered a coup d'etat and in his place put the Shah Reza Pahlavi, who became a monstrous murderer, thief and torturer. It was this intervention that helped create the Islamic Revolution which deposed the Shah, who was granted asylum in the US and never extradited as his the new regime in Iran justly requested. Today we have to deal with these fundamentalist maniacs thanks to our stellar foreign relations fiascoes such as that one. Times were so different then, before our middle eastern misadventures escalated into 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan, that it was not inconceivable that producers would want to go shoot a film in Iran just as the Revolution was happening. But truth is stranger than fiction.
Affleck plays Mendez, a stonefaced agent specializing in exfiltration (getting people out of messes), who gets the idea to use a fake movie as a cover, when no other cover will hold. There is much enjoyment to be had in the casting of the great John Goodman as the make up effects artist and CIA helper John Chambers, who helps put the fake production together and the marvelous Alan Arkin as Lester Siegel, an old Hollywood shark. Re Alan Arkin all one can say is that nobody in the business lands their lines with such deadpan aplomb. Everything that comes out of his mouth has perfect, devastating timing. Everything has a delicious zing. Goodman is on screen for like five minutes and almost steals the show. But it is the handling of the material that is most interesting. There is nothing funny about the first part of the movie. The violence is palpable, the hatred of America shot in close up (stellar, unobtrusive, but exciting work by cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto), the nerves are frayed. But the moment the Hollywood plan turns up, comedy does too and one wonders if Affleck is going to be able to mesh the tones. Somehow, it works. All the actors are excellent, the jokes land well (except for one they keep repeating over and over), and the movie is very well done, the pacing exciting, the experience thrilling. Affleck is becoming a more confident director with each movie he makes. He greatly underplays plays Mendez as a dry man who is loath to betray feelings. His wooden face as he sits in a negotiation between Arkin and Richard Kind is hilarious. He betrays nothing except for a minuscule flick of recognition, perhaps awe, when Arkin mentions his friend Warren Beatty. This CIA man feels more alien in this meeting than perhaps in any other of his dangerous missions, but he too is impressed by star power. The third act is a nail-biting bit of suspense, including soaring string music (by Alexandre Desplat), just like in the movies, as if to weave the surrealism of the actual story with the fantasy of film. A bit where the fake filmmakers show some Revolutionary guards at the airport the film's storyboards and one of them literally pitches the movie to them in Farsi, with impropmtu sound effects, speaks to the power that stories, and movies, even the most farfetched and ridiculous, have to enthrall an audience. Argo ends too neatly, too happily, like in the movies. It is more of a caper with political sting than an issue movie and it errs on the side of telling a good story, even if it takes liberties, and cuts to the chase, like they do in the movies.

NYFF 2012: No

This third part of Pablo Larraín's trilogy about Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile is the most approachable and crowd pleasing of them all, if not the most rigorous. The movie that put him on the map, Tony Manero, is a carefully crafted, extremely disturbing look at a sociopathic character, played by the fantastic Alfredo Castro, who is obsessed with impersonating John Travolta at a time when his countrymen are being murdered and tortured. His second movie, Post-Mortem, also starring Castro, is also an unsavory tale about a weird man who is confronted by the ugly reality of his country as his job at the morgue becomes too busy. Throughout the trilogy, Larraín seems consumed by the idea of individual indifference in the face of tyranny.
This final installment, based on a play by Antonio Skármeta, and co-written by Pedro Peirano, the writer director of The Maid and Old Cats), follows the travails of advertising creative René Saavedra (a wonderful Gael García Bernal), as he reluctantly decides to help the Chilean opposition craft a TV campaign in order to win a referendum in the last years of that brutal regime. The US, after helping Pinochet gain power by orchestrating a coup d'etat against Salvador Allende, got qualms about the human rights abuses of Pinochet's 15-year dictatorship and pressured for a referendum, the first democratic elections to take place in that country since Pinochet took power. The movie is a fun, although rambling tour into how the opposing campaigns communicated to the Chilean people. "No" means the vote against Pinochet for another term.
Larraín, who has a penchant for stylishly ugly aesthetics, goes all the way by shooting the entire movie in low resolution video, which is what existed in those days. After a while, one gets used to the result, but everything looks hideous. However, this time he stays away from the ugly, violent grotesquerie of his other two films.
René's boss is a Pinochet sympathizer and rich bastard, played by the chamaleonlike Castro, whose agency helps the regime, because he actually supports it ideologically. It's a fun fight between two creative minds, and not necessarily between opposing ideologies, but between young and fresh, and conservative and hanging on to power by whatever means possible. René's boss likes to threaten and harass, much like the regime he represents.
Larraín gets the dynamics and milieu of advertising just right. Very much fun is watching René always use the same bullshit spiel ("Chilean society is ready for this") to sell different campaigns to different clients, regardless of the product. He is not concerned with ideology. He cares about image and fun looking spectacle and the kind of idiotic ads that somehow move a lot of product. The movie starts with an outrageous commercial for a cola called "Free", so hilariously tacky that not even an imaginative director like Larraín could have come up with it as a parody.  Larraín uses actual footage of brutally squelched demonstrations, Pinochet ads, opposition ads, and the commercials of the era and intersperses them with the story of René, in which actual leaders of the opposition movement appear, including Patricio Aylwin, the man who eventually won the election. The choice to unify the quality of the video to the actual footage pays off, even as one's eyes suffer, making the movie seem as real and in the historic moment as possible.
René fights the tendency of the opposition to sound like martyrs and recite the catalogue of horrors under Pinochet's murderous regime. He instinctively understands that even though it may all be true, people don't want to hear it. It dispirits them and makes them afraid to vote against such a well oiled repressive machine. Instead, he fights Pinochet with rainbows, young people dancing on the streets and Chileans eating baguettes at picnics (unrealistic, but it looks pretty, which is what matters). His clients feel this is offensive, but what choice do they have? Since the law is that each party has 15 minutes a night (an eternity) to present a platform, the No party allows René to do his rainbows and "We are the world" ripoffs, but they also sneak in some powerful truth telling ads. Meanwhile, on the other side, the debate hinges upon whether the Generalissimo should always appear in his medal bedecked uniform or wear civilian clothes. When they decide to poke fun at the rainbows and the happy dancing, it backfires, since as René knows, the audience hates negative reinforcement. As he sees himself losing the battle against frivolity and optimism, René's boss bitterly muses that the "Yes" campaign has too many military men, too many fat military wives, too many parades and uniforms. It is as stale and putrid as can be, as befits where it comes from.
Larrain is a great satirist and in No he lets loose and spends a lot of time going from one campaign to the other, and including a lot of fascinating original footage, but which unfortunately makes the energy of the movie flag. Still, No is a very engaging, original, smart film about a man that ends up doing something heroic for his country without really wanting to; an unlikely hero without principles, except that of doing what he knows to do best. García Bernal's stunned reaction to the results of the election, his gradual overcoming with emotion as he goes out into the streets anonymously and the enormity of what happened seeps in, is a gorgeous piece of silent acting. There is great joy at Pinochet's defeat but the movie ends in a bittersweet note as René goes back to selling bullshit, a changed man. The question is whether Chile has really changed with him.