The Big Short - 2015 - 2 Stars

Director: Adam McKay
Cast: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt.


Spoilers for Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short and real life follow.

During the promotional cycle for The Big Short Michael Lewis was interviewed in Slate and said

“... there is no way you can take a book and make it into a great movie if you are totally respectful of the book. You have to break it and redo it. I would be bad at taking something I care about and think is great—I wouldn’t publish it if I didn’t think it was great—and bust it up. I would be wedded to my own stuff. And my presence would be a heavy hand on the process.” 

It’s heartening that Lewis voices this sentiment; the creator of source material should have a hands-off approach and adapters should be more concerned with making great art than being faithful to the original. That is why it’s disappointing that the writers and directors who Lewis has granted creative freedom to have made uninspired mediocrities.

Moneyball,  the first movie inspired by a Lewis book, is a crowd-pleasing and critically well-received sports movie that told the story of Billy Beane’s (Brad Pitt) early aughts Oakland A’s, who managed to be one of the best teams in baseball despite having one of the smallest payrolls. As a lifelong baseball fan, I bristled at some factual inaccuracies throughout the film(1), but just as I wouldn’t care if Star Wars: The Force Awakens violated the canon laid out in official novelizations, movie audiences should not care that Miller and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s narrative doesn’t hold up to journalistic scrutiny. My major problem with the movie was that its climax violated the theme of the book (and itself) to cater to genre conventions. Like all sports movies Moneyball builds to The Big Game, however Oakland’s Big Game is a regular season game against Kansas City where they extend their winning streak to 20 games, one game shy of The 1935 Cubs’ record, which they’d fail to match. Billy Beane spends 2 hours preaching process over results and the film's rousing conclusion is winning a meaningless game before falling short of a relatively meaningless goal. My ideal Moneyball movie would not end with  Billy Beane triumphantly looking at the A’s third order win total, but it would not attempt to replace the real life anti-climax with a contrived climax. One thing that makes watching live sports so compelling is that anything can happen; in the film adaptation of Moneyball only things that happen in sports movies can happen.

The Blind Side tells two parallel stories: an interesting piece of sports analysis about the evolution of the left tackle position, and a heartwarming but uncritical human interest story about the Touhy family adopting a poor African-American high schooler cum Ole Miss and NFL LT Michael Oher. The book has trouble balancing what could be viewed as a heartwarming story about the Touhy family’s generosity or could be viewed as unsavory story about Ole Miss football boosters adopting an elite football prospect as part of a successful recruiting bid. I was told that John Lee Hancock’s film doubles down on the heartstring tugging elements of the story, with no examination about the underhanded aspects of NCAA football recruiting, while painting Oher as a 6’4” 300 lb Eliza Doolittle who needs the help of a sassy white lady to reach his full potential , so I  declined to see it.

The Big Short, like many of Lewis’s business books are about iconoclasts who zigged when everyone else zagged. It follows different groups of traders who bet against the housing market when the financial sector believed a housing collapse was impossible. Lewis’s oeuvre has become synonymous with respectable oscar-fare (The Big Short is his third movie nominated for Best Picture).  Posters touted his name recognition,  “From the Author of MONEYBALL and THE BLIND SIDE” was prominently displayed, albeit in smaller font than BALE, GOSLING, PITT, CARRELL.

Though The Big Short is based on a true story all of the principal’s names, except Michael Burry (Bale) have been changed because they are composites of several people or have been whitewashed. These characters have components of several people from from Lewis’s book, but also have large chunks of director  Adam McKay. Jared Vennett  (Gosling)  and Charlie Geller (John Magaro) are millennials whose references: playing blackjack with Harry Dean Stanton, Robert Redford in All the President’s Men and Dune’s Baron Harkonnen are the references of a 47 year old Hollywood director. It’s not just the pop-culture references: the politics, morality and the outrage of The Big Short  are McKay’s, not his characters.

The fraud that led to the housing market crash of 2008 was about rich, powerful people obfuscating the truth and McKay’s anger is righteous, but his attempt to mine that anger is a patronizing screed that is obfuscating in its own ways. A stylistic flourish that has gotten a lot of attention are the fourth-wall breaking explainers where Margot Robbie, Selena Gomez and Anthony Bourdain explain financial jargon to the audience. Ignoring the accuracy of the explainers, (the Gomez one could be called The Big False Analogy)  these scenes are a microcosm of the movie. McKay doesn’t believe an audience could possibly understand one of the biggest news stories of this millennium so he enlists the only people who could help the general public make heads or tails out of the crash, celebrities. The fourth wall breaking does have some benefits, Gosling’s brio is fun and the narration that preempts the cottage industry of awards season fact checking is consistently clever, but other Vennett monologues such as an alternate history followed by a a Borat level NOT is comically inert because the misdirection would only fool someone who hasn’t read/heard/seen the news in the past 10 years.

Like Moneyball, The Big Short simplifies the technical wonkery at the heart of the story to make the narrative more palatable to a wide audience, but in the process it flattens many of the peripheral characters and glorifies the protagonists. But unlike Moneyball, McKay’s film is incompetently directed and clumsily written.The film toggles between sitcom-mockumentary level handheld camera work and straight-to-Netflix documentary style montages. A sequence in Vegas that mimics Scorsese’s frenetic visual language is as energizing as snorting baking soda, elliptical references to Mark Baum’s tragic past are as hamfisted as any Christopher Nolan’s backstory and clunky visual metaphors like an employee at a rating agency wearing comically oversized tinted glasses abound.

A criticism of Lewis’s The Big Short was that it didn’t delve deep enough into the morality of brokers makings billions by destabilizing the economy. McKay’s attempts to rectify this mistake by having conflicted heroes, but their angst doesn’t create ambiguity, it adds to their heroism. It’s not enough that they correctly predicted the future, made billions and look like Brad Pitt, they also get to look sad while delivering speeches detailing their compassion for the poor people who were swindled. Michael Lewis smartly removed the his heavy hand from the adaptation of The Big Short, next time he should also remove Adam McKay’s.

(1)(Had Moneyball been released today, I’d be tempted to publish a 10 Things Moneyball got wrong listicle: 1. Jeremy Giambi was on the 2001 A’s, he was the guy Jorge Posada tagged out at home plate in the film's opening montage.)

Grand Budapest Hotel - 2014 - 3.5 Stars

Director: Wes Anderson
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revelori, F. Murray Abraham, The Wes Anderson Repertory Players

After seeing Moonrise Kingdon I swore that I would not see Wes Anderson's followup. I harbored no ill-will towards Moonrise, but like most Anderson's films I was forced to conclude that "it wasn't for me". His movies are trifles that ping pong between preciousness and moroseness so rapidly that I've never emotionally invested in them. Even Rushmore  a film about a precocious high schooler, fell flat when I watched it as a precocious high schooler. In the past I've joked that I enjoy Anderson's film for the first hour, but by the hour mark I am yelling at him to stop playing with his dolls.* If you'll excuse the cliched metaphor his films are like the confectioneries in them, beautifully constructed, delicious, but eat more than one and you'll be reaching for a toothbrush.

As one can glean from that preamble,  I was not prepared to like Grand Budapest Hotel. GBH is Anderson at his most precious: it features three framing devices, multiple aspect ratios and takes place in a fictional country, with fictional flags and military uniforms. Most of the main action resides in the eponymous hotel that carefully constructed and full of Andersonian trinkets and tchotchkes.

Surprisingly, the film won me over; it's propulsive and engaging: I laughed out loud several times (generally the most Anderson's films can get from me is a knowing chuckle or a sly smirk). I also rolled my eyes several times, had dollhouse fatigue a couple times and didn't think the film had  much to say about dealing with loss or World War II or civility or much of anything, but I enjoyed the 100 minutes I spent with this movie, which, for me, is an unqualified rave; sometimes one needs to satiate their sweet tooth.


*It's surprising that the film of his I found most palatable is Fantastic Mr. Fox, where he is literally, playing with dolls. It's to me the only film where Anderson's style matches his content. I expect want a stop-motion  animated adaptation of a beloved children's book to be mostly sugary highs. It is a romp from start to finish and is not derailed by the cloying regrets of  well-to-do dreamers.

Inherent Vice - 2014 - NR

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Katherine Waterston, Owen Wilson

Imagine, if you will, a Frank Luntzian dystopia where every time you experience art you are also forced to record your emotions in an "Instant Reponse Focus Group". You have a dial in your hand and are continuously rating what you are viewing on a scale of quality from 0-100. Ignoring the futility of quantitatively rating art, which experience would you rather experience, one where your dial is at 50 for the entire runtime or one where you are at 0 half the time and 100 the other half?

Though the two hypothetical experiences above both average to a 5/10, I'd certainly prefer the latter. Fleeting bouts of transcendence are rarer and more valuable than sustained mediocrity and I am willing to wallow through garbage for a taste of greatness, which brings us to Inherent Vice. Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson's (apparently) faithful  adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's (apparently) inscrutable novel is shaggy dog story that is lively and energetic and beautifully photographed, except for when it's not.

Inherent Vice is a slacker noir in the tradition of The Long Goodbye and The Big Lebowski, we follow our counter-cultural gumshoe, in this case "Doc" Sportello (Joaquin) Phoenix, through a labyrinthine conspiracy that will not be solved when the final reel ends. IV's lack of narrative closure is part its genre, not a fault, but without a gripping narrative the film is dependent on its vignettes consistently working; unfortunately its digressions are scattershot and the misses undermine the film's momentum.

What makes this film so hard to grade is when hits the mark, Anderson produces true 100/100 moments. A tracking shot with Can's Vitamin C playing  over the big, bright, neon title credits, Doc and Shasta (Katherine Waterston) running in the rain while Neil Young plays in the background,  A close up of Bigfoot (Josh Brolin) fellating a chocolate covered banana, the phrase "pussy eater's special", each of these would be the best parts all but a few movies I saw last year. PTA is such a talented director that it's impossible for him to make a 150 minute movie that doesn't have several awesome scenes, but Inherent Vice's ratio of awesome : mediocre is lower than most PTA fare. It's a qualified success whose occasional brilliance make this movie a must-see, which currently translates into a number of stars that neither I nor Frank Luntz can appropriately gauge.

Pacific Rim - 2013 - 3.5 Stars

Director: Guillermo Del Toro
Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rino Kikuchi, Charlie Day

Pacific Rim, Guillermo Del Toro's first summer blockbuster, is a modern take on the 1950's Japanese monster movies. Pacific Rim is set in the 2020's where the earth is frequently under attack from giant alien sea monsters known as Kaju and humanity's best defense against the Kaju are giant mechanized robots that must be simultaneously piloted by two humans called Jaegers. Does that premise intrigue you? If yes, you will like this movie. If no, I am not sure.

Del Toro has a keen visual eye and while Pacific Rim's fights appear frenetic they are well constructed and much easier to follow than the 8 cuts per second style Michael Bay uses in the Transformers movies. A monsters fighting robots film traffics in easy spectacle, but at least Del Toro has the chops to make the spectacle worth watching.

A common critical refrain surrounding Pacific Rim is a version of "A 10 year old me would think this is the best movie of all time". This is true, but a backhanded compliment. It implies that the avatar of the reviewer's childhood wouldn't care about acting, story or writing in the same way the wise adult the 10 year old grew up into does. Pacific Rim has corny dialogue and thin characterizations, but I don't think children are appeased by the screenplay via stupidity or low expectations, I think children appreciate the earnestness of Del Toro's screenplay more than adults.

Most summer blockbusters attempt to attract an adult audience through either the snarky, double entendre laced, pop-culture laden, ratatat of the Iron Man trilogy or via solemnity masquerading as maturity as seen in Nolan's Batman films. I prefer some of those movies Pacific Rim, but it's unfortunate that blockbusters are peppered with jokes kids don't understand or full of 9/11 paranoia for a generation that remembers blockbusters recreating 9/11 better than the event itself. Pacific Rim is an engaging throwback that is too rare in the current blockbuster landscape, a 10 year old me would love it and that's because to quote The Hudsucker Proxy "it's y'know ... for kids."

The King's Speech - 2010 - 3 Stars

Director: Tom Hooper
Cast: Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter

The King's Speech is an adequate, but forgettable historical drama that is well acted and has direction that I could charitably describe as competent. If I didn't feel like indulging my extra-textual whims that sentence would be a sufficient review of The King's Speech. However, I do feel like indulging and The King's Speech won the Oscar for Best Picture, so i'd like to discuss how The King's Speech awards success affected my perception of it.

Let's get this out of the way first, The King's Speech was not the best movie of 2010. Of the other Best Picture nominees I have seen, TKS is my least favourite (I haven't seen 127 Hours or Winter's Bone) and there are many non-nominees I prefer to TKS. I am no longer surprised when the tastes of Oscar voters don't line up with mine, but the success of TKS is a pure distillation of the differences in our tastes and I found that hard to ignore as I watched the film. It  is a period piece about a historical figure with a disability. Its major theme is the power of theatre and performance and its narrative centrepiece is a minor historical event in real life, but one that that implicitly wins World War II for the allies in the film's world.

What bothers me the most about these types of films is that people assume since they are historical they are in some way educational or mature. The King's Speech is an underdog sports story with a pipe and a monocle, but those accessories don't compensate for it being formally dull or make it thematically richer.

That its major theme is the power of performance theatre makes its award success even more grating. It's self congratulatory to celebrate a movie with those themes, but even more off-putting to celebrate the acting in these films. Firth's performance is great, but it's masturbatory to congratulate a professional actor for convincingly playing someone who doesn't even have basic elocution skills. Thank you for allowing my indulgences, we can now return to our regularly scheduled review.

The King's Speech is an adequate, but forgettable historical drama that is well acted and has direction that I could charitably describe as competent.

The Mouse That Roared - 1959 - 4 Stars

Director: Jack Arnold
Cast: Peter Sellers, Jean Seberg, William Hartnell, David Kosoff

The Mouse That Roared opens with a meta-joke that feels lifted from a Zucker, Abrams, Zucker film, however it predates the ZAZ films by three decades. Therein lies the fundamental problem with The Mouse That Roared, a comparatively forgotten movie that is between Duck Soup and Dr. Strangelove on the evolutionary scale of film comedy. It is funny, but its jokes rarely produce raucous laughter because their brilliance has been dimmed from frequent use in modern comedy. Like Duck Soup it follows the travails of a fictional country and like Strangelove it features three outstanding performances by the chameleonic Peter Seller, however the similarities run deeper than those superficialities. What these movies share is an ability to deliver scathing political satire and broad vaudevillian comedy in the same film without creating a tonal imbalance.

The Mouse That Roared follows the travails of a bankrupt fictional country Fenwick, who decide the best way to get out of debt is to declare war against the US, immediately surrender and wait for the US to give money to Fenwick's post-war rebuilding effort. It's a sharp premise and one that leads to some excellent jokes about US Foreign Policy and some prescient insights about Cold War Paranoia years before The Cold War began. There is a tacked on a romantic subplot and a lame twist at the end. If this movie were released today I doubt I would be as charitable with my grade, but this was clearly a groundbreaking film when it was made and it deserves to be rewarded for that.

O.C. and Stiggs - 1985 - 1.5 Stars

Director: Robert Altman
Cast:  Daniel Jenkins, Neil Barry, Jane Curtin, Paul Dooley, Jon Cryer, Cynthia Nixon, Dennis Hopper

A director with a career prolific and varied as Robert Altman is bound to have some bombs, curiosities or plain forgetful movies. O.C and Stiggs is a combination of the three, certainly a bomb, it is mostly an inconsequential movie that possesses the vivaciousness and structure of cult comedies, but is too scatter shot to create a satisfying whole.

Technology has increased the availability of older movies and this has led to some critics re-assessing the back catalog of auteurs. One prominent re-assessment of O.C. and Stiggs I found was by Nathan Rabin in his series My Year of Flops. In his review Rabin posits that O.C. and Stiggs was a "Secret Success" because Altman snuck sly class commentary into what was on the surface a frivolous teen sex-romp. Rabin's take is a charitable one, while OC&S does have a message its satire is so leaden it feels more like Altman slyly snuck a teen comedy into a clumsy satire than the opposite. The film opens with a staple of the genre, our smart-alecky duo O.C. and Stiggs prank the household of the square Schwabs while they are distracted by their own company's ad on TV, where Randal Schwab states amongst other things doesn't tolerate "the continent of Africa". That joke is funny, but it is hardly subtle and neither is much else in the film. Altman seems to think that he can replicate the ideas of great satire by possessing the vitriol that motivates great satire, but ultimately his commentary about class warfare is about as sophisticated as his two teenage protagonists.

O.C. and Stiggs is interesting in the margins, it has to be by the fact itself that Robert Altman directed it. However Altman has directed many films that are interesting in a lot more places than the margins and I can only really recommend this film to people who are Altman completists or those that want to perform an autopsy on an interesting failure.