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.

Jaws - 1975 - 5 Stars

Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Roy Schieder, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss

I am not quite sure how this happened, maybe I have a deep-seated fear of sharks, but I lived on planet earth for 24 without seeing Jaws. Sure, I knew about Jaws. I knew more about Jaws than some movies I had seen. I knew Roy Schieder said "You're gonna need a bigger boat", I've heard the John Williams score hundreds of times in montages, at sports games, during awards show. I knew some details of Jaws's infamous troubled production and  I knew it was the first summer blockbuster and an undeniable classic.

Despite the above knowledge, I didn't know what to expect when I actually watched Jaws. It's odd to experience art once you have seen its progeny. Many times when watching classics I find myself thinking "I understand why this is important, but it's been improved upon so much." Throughout the first half of Jaws I felt that way. The first act oscillates between first-rate shark attack set pieces and generic exposition that features clunky dialogue and overly familiar character types. Some of the latter works,  like the iconic Robert Shaw nails on the chalkboard scene and some doesn't like the intimate look at Roy Schieder's domestic life.

However once the film gets into the open water, stranding our three heroes on a boat as they hunt for a man-eater the film eliminates its clunkier elements for a propulsive action sequence that is impeccably staged, shot and acted. It's one of the longest sustained pieces of action in any film I can remember, yet it feels familar because it regularly morphs into different sub set-pieces as our characters try and out power and out smart a shark using all the tricks they have available. It's a bravura sequence that is still as thrilling as anything I have seen from dozens of films and filmmakers that have been directly influenced by Jaws. I have no idea why it took me so long to see this film, but I am glad I did and its status as a classic film is well deserved.

Life of Pi - 2012 - 4 Stars

Director: Ang Lee
Cast: Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, C.G. "Eye" Tiger

SPOILERS BELOW

Life of Pi, adapted from Yann Martel's eponymous novel begins with the framing device of  Pi, the film's protagonist, as an adult telling his life story to a Canadian journalist (Rafe Spall), early in the film Adult Pi (Irrfan Khan) tell Spall's character and by proxy the audience that his story will make them believe in God. This is a bold claim from the character, but an even bolder claim from director Ang Lee. It's such a brash proclamation that it that immediately heightened my contrarian instincts to the point that I wanted to not believe just to spite the director.

The bulk of the Khan's story is the harrowing tale of a shipwrecked Pi who must survive on a lifeboat with a tiger, hyena, zebra and orangutan. The CGI animals are beautifully designed and while I generally dislike anthropomorphic animals, these animals are dangerous and instinctual, but still have agency as characters in the story. Lee's real coup during these sequences is to generate real suspense when Pi is in peril even though the film's framing device tells that audience that Pi survives this wreck.

The film takes a while to get going and at times the first act feels like a generic Disney fable, but once Pi gets on the raft, the film is suspenseful, engaging and beautiful*. Occasionally I broke Lee's spell by asking myself stupid nitpicky questions like "Why doesn't Pi kill the man eating Tiger with his flare gun and live off tiger meat for weeks?" The film opens with a brash declaration, but what follows is an thrilling, earnest, spiritual film that didn't convince me to believe in God, but opened me up to believe the film's true message; a message about the power of storytelling and mythology and why it has been present in all of human society.

*While the CG work is magnificent, Life of Pi, a film shot largely on green screen, winning the best cinematography Oscar is bullshit.

La Haine - 1995 - 3 Stars

Director: Mathieu Kassovits
Cast: Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, Saïd Taghmaoui

SPOILERS BELOW

La Haine follows an ethnically diverse group of three French youths in and around their public housing complex the day after a riot in their neighbourhood. It has a sharp, funny screenplay, despite subtitles often stepping on punchlines and features good naturalistic performances from the three leads. The actors are able to capture the bravado of youth and the film manages to walk the thinline of showing our heroes' persecution complex even as they are being persecuted. It's a low budget film, but its lo-fi digital aesethic mainly works, except when Kassovits overcompensates by using showy camera tricks Similarly the plot, which is mainly a small coming of age story about a day in the life of friends coping with their tough life, takes a sharp turn in the last 3 minutes that feels out of place and the work of a director who wanted to make sure his film ended with a bang. The youthful lack of discipline give the film's performances and dialogue it's spark, but unfortunately end up undermining the plotting and camerawork of an otherwise excellent film.

Universal Solider: Regeneration - 2009 - 3.5 Stars

Director: John Hyams
Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Andrei Arlovski, Dolph Lundgren

A sequel to a not particularly well loved 90's Roland Emmerich Sci-Fi film, I didn't even know that Universal Soldier: Regeneration existed until I saw it mentioned on twitter by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky. In need of a testosterone fix, I threw it on yesterday and it met or surpassed all of my expectations. It is common, especially on the internet, to pine for macho 80's action films while complaining that current shoot em ups ain't what they used to be, however good action movies are still being made; they are just harder to find without the aid of survivorship bias. Hyams's second feature is a sincere throwback to the movies that turned Jean-Claude Van Damme into a superstar 25 years ago; it has a lot of practical effects, doesn't feature the tongue-in-cheek post-modernity of The Expendables and could be set during The Cold War. While all three of the leads have posses the screen presence required from them , the real star of the film is Hyams's direction and fight choreography, which is brutal, easy to follow and creative; one long take in the film's  climactic action sequence is  remarkable and a works as a companion to the winking opening of 2008's JCVD. If you have never liked a movie featuring Van-Damme or Lundgren, you will not like this film, but if you have liked anything featuring them this well-constructed, entertaining, brawny action flick is better than watching Cobra on TBS for the 18th time.

Top Ten of 2012

The Oscars are today and they have prompted me to make my compulsory top 10 of 2012 list. I have been grinding through 2012 movies the past week and there are still several movies that I'd like to see ( THE KID WITH A BIKE, BARBARA, ELENA, LIFE OF PI, HAYWIRE, etc.). All movies I've seen and had a non-festival release in 2012 are eligible for this very, very, very important list.

Honourable mentions and the top ten after the jump

A Liar's Autobiography - 2012 - 2.5 Stars

Directors: Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson, Ben Timlett
Cast: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Carol Cleveland

Monty Python's Flying Circus is one of my formative comedic influences, I remember regularly watching The Holy Grail and Parrot Sketch Not Included, a best of compilation on VHS before I turned 12. I didn't understand half the jokes, but the performances, the jokes I did understand and the frequent nudity, which in retrospect my parents probably forgot about, made the the troupe a staple of my pre-adolescence. Over time my pre-adolescent enjoyment slowly morphed into a profound comedic and intellectual respect for what I still consider to be the greatest sketch troupe of all time. So even though I know most reunion projects merely tap into fans nostalgia so they will fork over money before inevitably being disappointed, I was very excited when I saw that A Liar's Autobiography would be premiering at TIFF 2012 and it was one my most anticipated movies of the festival.

A Liar's Autobiography uses previously unheard recordings of Graham Chapman's semi-fictionalized, satirical biography, that were recorded for an unreleased an audiobook and adds new voicework from the living Pythons (minus Eric Idle) while switching between close to a dozen different styles of animation throughout the film. The animation is for the most part excellent (though I would have loved to see a section directed by Terry Gilliam) and the use of several different animation styles lends the film a marginal amount of chaos and surreallism, but everything that surrounds the animation is conventional, but the film thinks otherwise. Chapman's book satirizes vapid celebrity autobiographies and he has an interesting story to tell, but the filmmakers perspective is vastly different from Chapman's. In the film Chapman's story is being told posthumously and the film undoes most of Chapman's satire of celebrity hagiography as the directors turn their film into the type fawning biography Chapman was mocking. Chapman poked fun at overwrought deterministic narrative's about fame, but the directors are such big Python fans that they can't stop themselves from deifying Chapman as a troubled comedy god who left us mere mortals too soon.

The film opens with a story from Chapman's book about a live performance of The Oscar Wilde Sketch. The directors recreate this sketch via animation and voiceover and while the dialogue doesn't change, the timing, the energy and the performances are all slightly off. The punchlines don't land like they should and somehow most of the humour is sucked out of a brilliant piece of comedy. The film ends with the footage of John Cleese's eulogy for Graham Chapman a transcendent eulogy and one of the highlights of the film, but something the directors did not create. These two moments bookend the film and make an compelling argument that the vivacious subversive wit that made Monty Python so special cannot be recreated and reinforce how bland much of this movie is. The film is not terrible, it's breezy and entertaining, but also slight and inessential, like a really well done YouTube animation. Recently I watched most of the original Flying Circus TV series. I didn't watch the final season, a shortened season, that didn't feature John Cleese. I was told it was largely inessential and didn't think much about it, however after watching A Liar's Autobiography, a facsimile of Python  I wish I had spent my time watching that final season instead because at least it's the real thing.

9.79* - 2012 - 4 Stars

Director: Daniel Gordon
Subject: Ben Johnson's steroid scandal in the Seoul Olympics.

Canadians who consume a lot of American culture and media, like myself, very quickly develop an inferiority complex. I am irrationally excited when I see the Blue Jays, the Raptors or hockey being discussed on ESPN. It doesn't matter why we are being discussed, I am just happy that we are being talked about. To some this may seem like a case of social-media manufactured generational narcissism, but I see the same reaction from fellow Canucks of all ages; even if the discussion is just thirty seconds on PTI about Jeff Frye hitting for the cycle. So even though I was in utero when Ben Johnson set the 100m dash world record and had it taken away during the Seoul Olympics of 1988, I have a strong connection to that race; it is literally a nascent moment for my sports fandom.

9.79* is an engaging, well researched, well shot documentary that also confirms every thought my reptilian sports brain has about this race, the use of PEDs in sports and Carl Lewis's assholery. Gordon biggest coup is  interviewing all the participants in the gold medal heat and allowing them to paint a thorough picture of the track and field world in the 1980s. These men all provide a different perspective on the race: Desai Williams speaks about being Ben Johnson's teammate, Calvin Smith's effeminate drawl voices the strongest anti-PED sentiments and Robson De Silva's has a zen like view of the past as he hang glides over Rio De Janiero. The two stars of the race and the documentary are Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis and while Johnson's frankness is refreshing, Lewis's slipperiness makes him a much more intriguing character. Lewis's ambitions didn't stop at athletics and in interviews it is clear he is equal parts athlete, celebrity, politician and businessman. He is so interested in protecting himself and his brand that it seems like he is always hiding something. His Machiavellian nature makes him a charismatic heel for this documentary, especially when contrasted with Johnson's frankness, a frankness that is usually only present after someone has already been caught.

The results of the race in Seoul are common knowledge for most sports fans; Gordon recognizes this and doesn't bother hiding those results to construct dramatic tension. Instead he takes information that is public, but not common knowledge and parcels it out in such a way that he creates dramatic tension by obscuring his rhetorical point until the last act of the film when he drops the hammer in a satisfying way. Admittedly, his rhetorical point happens to defend someone who I still consider to be one of Canada's great athletes, vilifies a hated American athlete, plays into my general cynicism about how widespread PED use was and still is and vindicates all the beliefs I've held about Ben Johnson for my whole life. So while others may not share my belief that the final act of the film is brilliant payoff from the restraint shown earlier, Gordon's access and visual style, make the movie one of the most entertaining 30 for 30s and a must watch for fans of the series.

24 years later Ben Johnson's victory and scandal are both two of the biggest in Canadian sports history. It's one of the few stories in Canadian sports history that people around the world remember. Fans of dynastic teams have a wealth of experience to draw back on Yankees fans can root for the current team or be nostalgic about Bernie Williams, Reggie Jackson, Mickey Mantle, Joe Dimaggio and Babe Ruth. When you routinely root for mediocre non-public teams you must cherish the moments in the spotlight you get. In 1988 Ben Johnson had an iconic track and field performances and outperformed a legendary Olympic athlete from our biggest rival, then he tested positive for stanozolol. At least he was the lead story on ESPN for awhile.

Everyday - 2012 - 2 1/2 Stars

Director: Michael Winterbottom
Cast: Shirley Henderson, John Simm, Johnny Lynch

Michael Winterbottom's new film Everyday was commissioned by BBC Channel 4, who wanted Winterbottom to make a story about the prison system. It is the story of a mother of four and her husband who is in prison for reasons we don't know and never discover. It's shot entirely in digital, has a documentary aesethic and I assume is heavily improvised. The film has one large extra-textual conceit, it was filmed over 5 years so the children in the film could age properly throughout shooting. Bad aging makeup and multiple child actors playing the same character is something that irks me, so while I intellectually appreciated Winterbottom's choice and the producers for humouring his obsession, ultimately the payoff for this decision is nothing more than a "hey, that's kind of cool" and it only enriches the films on the margins.

The film itself is a low-key naturalistic British drama about a middle class family and a determined mother struggling to make ends meet. The title Everyday is appropriate because it tends to focus on minor day to day events for a family who's patriarch is temporarily incarcerated . Winterbottom and co-screenwriter Laurence Coriat avoid the melodramatic climaxes one would expect from a movie about a single mother with an imprisoned husband and instead focus on how one accepts and adapts to this major change on a daily basis. As with the children's aging in the film,  I enjoyed Winterbottom's intimate-micro perspective of a family on a cerebral level, but no others. Shirley Henderson gives a great performance as an overworked mother, but the low stakes throughout the movie make everything feel inconsequential; as if we were watching a collection of the well shot and edited home videos. I commend Winterbottom for trying an interesting experiment, I just wish the results were more dynamic.

Something in the Air (Après mai) - 2012 - 2 1/2 Stars

Director: Oliver Assayas
Cast: Clément Métayer, Lola Créton, Felix Armand, Carole Combes

Making autobiographical movies is a tricky proposition; the director must walk a thin line between using their experience to craft a detailed, naturalistic aesthetic and telling stories that no one else cares about. Something in the Air is a fictionalized adaption of Oliver Assayas's non-fiction essay A Post-May Adolescence. It follows Gilles, an Assayas surrogate, during the summer after his second to last year in high school as he bounces between different French socialist organizations, hippy communes and his father's work while he tries to find himself romantically, artistically and professionally.

The film has a loose, meandering structure, which is designed to mimic our hero's lack of focus as he travels from group to group. At times it's a successful series of focused vignettes, but as the revolutionary movements Gilles is associated with begin to splinter and lose power, so does the film. The film's first hour is dynamic and lively, but the second half loses that energy as the story shifts to one of what happens when youthful vivaciousness fades. The film's second half rings true thematically and historically, but it's a slog to watch the dissolution of revolutionary movement not via coup, but via waning interest and mild evolutions in maturity.

Assayas's strong authorial voice gives the film a strong sense of place, but also causes it to veer into self-indulgence. Assayas digs deep into his own record collection, which gives the film a sense of time and place beyond a generic "the 70's". The soundtrack replaces 70's staples from Sticky Fingers and Who' Next (which I doubt they could afford had they wanted to use them anyways) and replaces them with Captain Beefheart and other more eclectic musicians that Assayas has a connection with. Assayas indulging his musical taste is delightful, the conversations name checking his personal favorite political philosophers are less so. I appreciate that the high-schooler's in the film possess an intellectual surety that can only be held by teenagers. To them the choice between being Trotskyite or a Leninist is the equivalent to the choice between Communism and Fascism, but this specificity is draining during long conversations where Assayas references his favorite philosophers even as it gives the film the same detailed textures I liked about his soundtrack.

Roger Ebert ended his review of Midnight in Paris, by saying , "I'm wearying of movies that are for 'everybody' — which means, nobody in particular." I appreciate that Assayas made a movie that is for someone in particular, but as the movie dragged on it felt like I was watching friends tell a story that I wasn't present for and was littered with inside jokes I didn't get. There is someone in particular who will love this movie, but it's not me.

Frances Ha - 2012 - 4 1/4* Stars

Director: Noah Baumbach
Cast: Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Michael Zegen, Adam Driver

In a world full of formulaic mainstream comedies and formulaic indie's that are generously called comedies, Noah Baumbach's newest film Frances Ha manages to be as funny as the crude, banter heavy mainstream comedies, while having stronger character work than the multitude of indies about post-college ennui. Frances Ha is a movie about the friendship between Frances (Gerwig) and Sophie (Sumner) and how these two women-children's relationship changes as they grapple with impending maturity and responsibility. A generic premise, but one that gains traction from focusing on female friendship (this movie passes the Bechdel test with flying colours) and strong execution.

The coming of age indie is a tired genre and though Frances Ha uses some genre tropes Baumbach and Gerwig's script is so singular that it never feels derivative. Frances Ha's originality is a function of Greta Gerwig, who gives an amazing naturalistic performance; eventhough her character is chock full of eccentricities, they all feel true to life and not screenwriter created manic-pixie dream girl "look at how much of an individual I am" traits. In addition to Gerwig's great performance the screenplay economically creates well-formed characters in short amounts of screen time via specificity. Hip movies walk a thin line between referencing ephemera to create a positive association with the audience and using ephemera as a touchstone to provide information about characters. Frances Ha mainly sticks to the latter; characters aren't working on "their screenplay" they have fixed the second act to their Gremlins 3 screenplay. These details peppered throughout help world-build and contribute to the great chemistry between the ensemble cast.

Frances Ha was shot in black and white; in a post-screening Q&A Baumbach cited Manhattan; an obvious inspiration. The decision  to shoot it in black and white is not just an homage it gives Frances Ha a strong visual aesthetic that was missing from previous Baumbach films and separates it from the generic sepia-toned, digital look of a lot of coming of age indies. This aesthetic is present on the soundtrack where classic rock and music snatched from French New Wave films refreshingly replace the Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes and other cabin-dwelling, mandolin playing, indie music that are used to show melancholy, inspiration or any other emotion that one might feel in an existential crisis. Shooting in black and white and using classic rock are hardly groundbreaking decisions but it is indicative that every decision in film was purposefully made. On the surface, this is a generic coming of age story, but the direction, acting, writing are all elevated and combine to produce one of Baumbach's strongest films.

*The quarter star is to indicate I preferred this to The Squid and The Whale which I think is a 4 star movie.

Argo - 2012 - 3 Stars

Director: Ben Affleck
Cast: Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, Alan Arkin, Kyle Chandler

Once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence, thrice is a trend and after seeing Ben Affleck's latest film Argo, I think it's fair to say that Ben Affleck is a pretty damn good director who is capable of consistently making entertaining, albeit superficial Hollywood thrillers. Argo is based on the true story of a CIA agent who went undercover as a film producer scouting locations for a sci-fi film in Iran so he could smuggle American hostages back home during the Iran hostage crisis of  1980.

Argo is a competently shot film that is well-edited, especially during large suspense set pieces where the audience different people performing disparate actions in various locations in close to real time. However, while those segments are well-edited they do strain credulity as we are regularly forced to believe that people halfway across the world are coincidentally performing actions at the last second to save our ragtag group of misfits. When used sparingly yhese kinds of scenarios are classic tension builders in heist movies, but are employed so frequently throughout Argo that crowd-pleasing gears of the movie's plot start showing.

Affleck's pedigree must have helped in casting, where in addition to the names above Richard Kind, Phillip Baker Hall, Bob Gunton and other familiar character actors regularly steal scenes when given the chance to.
It's a fun caper that is already getting some undeserved Oscar buzz, because it's about an important moment in recent American history and is being publicized as a historical drama instead of a light caper. The final shots of the movie was offputting and felt like a cynical attempt to garner pathos for the hero and generate even more oscar buzz, but ultimately Argo is an entertaining two hours and a well-executed, funny, suspenseful, Hollywood thriller, something which is becoming increasingly rare.

Tabu - 2012 - 2 1/2 Stars

Director: Miguel Gomes
Cast: Teresa Madruga, Laura Soveral, Ana Moreira, Henrique Espirito Santo, Carlotto Cotta, Isabel Cardoso

There are structural elements in Tabu which must be talked about. I won't give away key plot points, but there are structural spoilers.

Tabu tells two stories; the story of three elderly women in Lisbon in 2011 and a story narrated by a man named Ventura in 2011 Lisbon. Ventura tells the story of a tryst with one of the aforementioned women and his narration is a constant presence throughout the the second half of the movie, which is titled Paradise. In Paradise Director Miguel Gomes uses many techniques to showcase the haziness of memory; some are well-worn like the use of grainy film, while others are daring, but unnecessarily restrictive; outside of the narration there is almost no audible dialogue in the second half of the film. Eventhough Gomes shows characters speaking the audience can only hear diegetic sounds and music.The decision to not use dialogue, while innovative, hampers the film because it prevents the audience from fully-rendering the main characters in Paradise.

The characters are stock-tpes; our hero is a daring rebel, handsome with long hair and a wispy mustache. The man he cuckolds is a stuffed shirt with short hair cut, a proper appearance that hides his unseemly political motivations. The woman at the center is a free-spirit tomboy who feels repressed by the men in her life. It's too bad the characters are so thinly drawn, because the mise-en-scene and sound design are impeccably constructed throughout. During the climax of the film there are two unforgettable shots, but I found myself more invested in the quality of those shots than the life changing events that befell our leads in those unforgettable shots.

Oral storytelling is a building block of civilization, but it's also an incredibly narcissistic act. It's difficult to consistently duplicate, it's slow and it's told from one perspective. The oral tradition is in many ways more about the singular power given to the storyteller, than the sense of community and history it fosters. In Tatu, Miguel Gomes plays with inherent narcissism of oral storytelling as we regularly see African servants in the periphery of our narrator's grand-tale of unrequited loved. The trials and tribulations of the servants are of actual significance, but they are sidelined so an old man can tell his story about the one that got away. While this is a savvy criticism of western culture, I don't think Gomes is trying to implicate the audience for caring about this affair at the expense of the horrors of colonialism, which makes the ironic distance achieved from the perspective he gives us even more alienating when we the film shifts back to the love story we are supposed to care about. Tabu features a Portugese cover of the Ronnette's classic Be My Baby, which is an excellent metaphor for the film. All the technical brilliance, innovation and craft is still present, but there is something off, which prevents the art from having any emotional resonance.

The Raid Redemption - 2011 - 4 1/2 Stars

Director: Gareth Evans
Cast: Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, Donny Alamsayah, Yayan Ruhian, Pierre Gruno

The Raid: Redemption follows an Indonesian SWAT team as they try to takeout a legendary crime lord who is holed up on the top floor of an apartment complex in the slums of Jakarta. Most of the apartment complex's residents are junkies, drug dealers or other criminals who will do whatever possible to protect their lawless building and its leader. If you are intrigued by this premise, you will like the movie. If you are on the fence about the premise, you should watch the first 15 minutes, if you like them, you will like the movie. If  you don't like the premise or the first 15 minutes you won't like the movie and your brain hasn't been turned to mush from playing too many video games.

The Raid has been compared to relentless video games in so many reviews that I was wary of it in the way I am often wary about arthouse fare. Do I really want to watch 90 minutes of uninterrupted asskicking / closeups of butterflies narrated by an elderly Swedish man? To my surprise Gareth Evans showed some restraint and made a well paced movie: the scenes between fights are all competently acted, drive the plot and allow the audience to catch their breath, before the electronic music kicks in and we are ready to see some more skulls bashed via Pencak Silat, an Indonesian Martial Art.

At times the movie is slightly overwhelming and feels like a Streets of Rage type video game where Axel (or whoever you chose) goes into one generic setting, get rushed by several bad guys and stays in that setting until a sufficient number of buttons have been mashed/people have been killed that he can advance to the next stage. To combat this problem Evans wisely creates a number of disparate settings within the apartment complex, which gives each fight an aesthetic that differentiates it from previous fights and gives the fighters different peripheral items to creatively murder people with. However Evans' best defense against monotony is impeccable choreography and cinematography that supersedes the occasional repetitiveness of the fight scenes.

This Sunday I was watching Breaking Bad when a couple of non-watchers entered the room and started asking questions about the show "Is that the dad from Malcom in the Middle?", "Why is the meth blue?", "His name is Heisenberg ... bad ass" and so on. At this point I excused myself for the room and wasted time until I could watch the 12:30 rerun without any distractions. I am not particularly proud of my actions, but what other people would describe as minor annoyances are horrible tragedies that prevent me from watching my show the "proper way". As I watched The Raid: Redemption, my testosterone frequently spiked to such highs that it could only be released by unintelligibly exclaiming "HOLY FUCKING SHIT WAS THAT A HAMMER?" I looked over to my friends who were also screaming unintelligibly and realized in this case I was watching the film in the proper way.