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.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Friday, September 7, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
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.
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.
The Dead Zone - 1983 - 2 1/2 Stars
Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Martin Sheen
I am afraid my citizenship might get revoked for admitting this, but The Dead Zone is the first Cronenberg movie I have seen and even worse, I didn't really care for it. There are moments of excellence in the film, so it's not as if I have given up hope on this plucky underdog Jewish-Canadian filmmaker but I, like most people, don't like being disappointed.
The Dead Zone is an adaptation of a Steven King novel about Johnny Smith (Walken) a man who awakes from a coma with the ability to foresee other's futures when he touches them. As someone who has seen Ed Glosser Trivial Psychic too many times to count and is vaguely familiar with Cronenenberg and Steven King, I was expecting a hammy Walken performance, some good horror setpieces and a Twilight Zone type ironic twist. I got all of that, but there was a lot of brooding in between the elements that I liked, which ruined the films pacing and muddled the film's message.
The double-edged nature of supernatural powers is a common theme in science-fiction and while the quandaries faced by Johnny Smith are addressed throughout the film none are given enough screentime to give the story thematic relevance. Should Johnny Smith be playing God with his supernatural knowledge? Does he have a moral responsibility to use his power even if it causes him immense physical pain? Is sacrificing the ability to have personal relationships worth gaining the power he has?* There is lip service given to all these questions and some others (like a brief detour where Johnny Smith is a local celebrity) but most of the conversations about these questions are clunky and one-sided and all of they cannot all be answered in one 90 minute feature. Cronenberg tries to answer all of them, while having a dense plot and in the process ends up answering none of them.
Muddled themes aside there is still a lot to like about this movie: Walken doesn't just give a great hammy performance, he gives a great performance and shows real humanity and restraint throughout. Martin Sheen gives a dynamic performance as an evil, charismatic, politician and Cronenberg wisely gets wooden performances out of the rest of the cast so Walken and Sheen's energetic performances standout even more than they usually would.
After watching the movie, I read the plot summary of Stephen King's novel on Wikipedia and the film, like most adaptations diverges from source material. As I read the summary I kept thinking to myself "this could be a great movie". It's too bad that Cronenberg didn't deliver a film with a more focused thematically or narratively to take advantage of some great performances and source material.
*Most glaringly his lack of personal relationships isn't solely a function of his power, it's also a function of his coma and while there is a movie to be made about people in coma's acclimatizing to society, The Dead Zone is not that movie.
Cast: Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Martin Sheen
I am afraid my citizenship might get revoked for admitting this, but The Dead Zone is the first Cronenberg movie I have seen and even worse, I didn't really care for it. There are moments of excellence in the film, so it's not as if I have given up hope on this plucky underdog Jewish-Canadian filmmaker but I, like most people, don't like being disappointed.
The Dead Zone is an adaptation of a Steven King novel about Johnny Smith (Walken) a man who awakes from a coma with the ability to foresee other's futures when he touches them. As someone who has seen Ed Glosser Trivial Psychic too many times to count and is vaguely familiar with Cronenenberg and Steven King, I was expecting a hammy Walken performance, some good horror setpieces and a Twilight Zone type ironic twist. I got all of that, but there was a lot of brooding in between the elements that I liked, which ruined the films pacing and muddled the film's message.
The double-edged nature of supernatural powers is a common theme in science-fiction and while the quandaries faced by Johnny Smith are addressed throughout the film none are given enough screentime to give the story thematic relevance. Should Johnny Smith be playing God with his supernatural knowledge? Does he have a moral responsibility to use his power even if it causes him immense physical pain? Is sacrificing the ability to have personal relationships worth gaining the power he has?* There is lip service given to all these questions and some others (like a brief detour where Johnny Smith is a local celebrity) but most of the conversations about these questions are clunky and one-sided and all of they cannot all be answered in one 90 minute feature. Cronenberg tries to answer all of them, while having a dense plot and in the process ends up answering none of them.
Muddled themes aside there is still a lot to like about this movie: Walken doesn't just give a great hammy performance, he gives a great performance and shows real humanity and restraint throughout. Martin Sheen gives a dynamic performance as an evil, charismatic, politician and Cronenberg wisely gets wooden performances out of the rest of the cast so Walken and Sheen's energetic performances standout even more than they usually would.
After watching the movie, I read the plot summary of Stephen King's novel on Wikipedia and the film, like most adaptations diverges from source material. As I read the summary I kept thinking to myself "this could be a great movie". It's too bad that Cronenberg didn't deliver a film with a more focused thematically or narratively to take advantage of some great performances and source material.
*Most glaringly his lack of personal relationships isn't solely a function of his power, it's also a function of his coma and while there is a movie to be made about people in coma's acclimatizing to society, The Dead Zone is not that movie.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Lost in America - 1985 - 3 Stars
Director: Albert Brooks
Cast: Albert Brooks, Julie Hagerty
Albert Brooks is one of the great comic minds of his generation, whether doing stand up, performance pieces on late night shows or directing short films on SNL, he always manages to inject his projects with a unique point of view, strong comic conceits and a feeling that anything can happen. Despite his talents, I find it amazing that there was a point in history where Albert Brooks could write, direct and star in a movie and even more surprisingly that he was allowed to keep making movies after his previous projects failed commercially. It's not surprising he never had a big hit, his leading men are brash, neurotic, obnoxious and arrogant. He's Alvy Singer if Alvy actually confronted the blowhard talking about Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall. Brook's descendants include George Costanza and other popular supporting tv and film characters, but none of Brooks' progeny have had success as leading men, because spending a lot of time with them is exhausting.
Lost in America opens with a long tracking shot through David Howard's (Brooks) darkened home, as David listens to Larry King interview film critic Rex Reed. I initially thought was an interview written for the movie, but it is the audio from an episode of King's radio show. In the interview Reed talks about how he'd rather watch a comedy by himself than in a crowded theatre and that he "doesn't respond very well to mass hysteria anyways". It's a petty way for Brooks to open the movie, especially because most of his output seems to be arguing against a "get laughs at any cost" ethos and is more about subverting audience expectations and not pandering to the audience. (See his standup about opening for Richie Havens on Comedy Minus One). Some cursory googling has shown me that Brooks is taking shots at Reed for giving his earlier films poor reviews and while the opening scene provides hooks the audience it also feels childish and exploitative.
Outside of establishing an uncharacteristically strong visual style for a comedy, this opening sequence has very little bearing on the rest of the film, which is about David Howard missing out on a promotion, blowing up after missing the promotion, quitting/getting fired and deciding to sell his house to pay for an early retirement so he can travel the country with his wife (Julie Hagerty) in a Winnebago. The movie's premise opens the door for some insight on how people fall into routines and end up living boring, unsatisfying lives, as they hope each minor improvement in car/job/home quality will solve everything. Unfortunately the Howard's journey off the grid begins with a large deus ex machinas, that undermines everything the film tries to say about upper-class ennui. Choosing to enter an early retirement and leaving the rat race is not equivalent to being forced to work at Der WienerSchnitzel to pay for rent at a trailer park, but the end of the film seems to be promoting this false equivalency.
Lost in America is still the product of a unique comic mind and features some top notch comic setpieces and one off gags. The scene where Brooks gets fired cements him in a class with Bob Odenkirk and John Cleese as one of the great comedic yellers of our time. A scene featuring Gary Marshall as a Casino floorman is a real highlight and is a great piece of sketch comedy. Julie Hagerty gives an off beat performance that is very good and that somehow matches Brook's energy, however ultimately this movie is a disconnected group of funny performances and setpieces that don't build to a larger thematic point, despite its best efforts.
Cast: Albert Brooks, Julie Hagerty
Albert Brooks is one of the great comic minds of his generation, whether doing stand up, performance pieces on late night shows or directing short films on SNL, he always manages to inject his projects with a unique point of view, strong comic conceits and a feeling that anything can happen. Despite his talents, I find it amazing that there was a point in history where Albert Brooks could write, direct and star in a movie and even more surprisingly that he was allowed to keep making movies after his previous projects failed commercially. It's not surprising he never had a big hit, his leading men are brash, neurotic, obnoxious and arrogant. He's Alvy Singer if Alvy actually confronted the blowhard talking about Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall. Brook's descendants include George Costanza and other popular supporting tv and film characters, but none of Brooks' progeny have had success as leading men, because spending a lot of time with them is exhausting.
Lost in America opens with a long tracking shot through David Howard's (Brooks) darkened home, as David listens to Larry King interview film critic Rex Reed. I initially thought was an interview written for the movie, but it is the audio from an episode of King's radio show. In the interview Reed talks about how he'd rather watch a comedy by himself than in a crowded theatre and that he "doesn't respond very well to mass hysteria anyways". It's a petty way for Brooks to open the movie, especially because most of his output seems to be arguing against a "get laughs at any cost" ethos and is more about subverting audience expectations and not pandering to the audience. (See his standup about opening for Richie Havens on Comedy Minus One). Some cursory googling has shown me that Brooks is taking shots at Reed for giving his earlier films poor reviews and while the opening scene provides hooks the audience it also feels childish and exploitative.
Outside of establishing an uncharacteristically strong visual style for a comedy, this opening sequence has very little bearing on the rest of the film, which is about David Howard missing out on a promotion, blowing up after missing the promotion, quitting/getting fired and deciding to sell his house to pay for an early retirement so he can travel the country with his wife (Julie Hagerty) in a Winnebago. The movie's premise opens the door for some insight on how people fall into routines and end up living boring, unsatisfying lives, as they hope each minor improvement in car/job/home quality will solve everything. Unfortunately the Howard's journey off the grid begins with a large deus ex machinas, that undermines everything the film tries to say about upper-class ennui. Choosing to enter an early retirement and leaving the rat race is not equivalent to being forced to work at Der WienerSchnitzel to pay for rent at a trailer park, but the end of the film seems to be promoting this false equivalency.
Lost in America is still the product of a unique comic mind and features some top notch comic setpieces and one off gags. The scene where Brooks gets fired cements him in a class with Bob Odenkirk and John Cleese as one of the great comedic yellers of our time. A scene featuring Gary Marshall as a Casino floorman is a real highlight and is a great piece of sketch comedy. Julie Hagerty gives an off beat performance that is very good and that somehow matches Brook's energy, however ultimately this movie is a disconnected group of funny performances and setpieces that don't build to a larger thematic point, despite its best efforts.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Zelig - 1983 - 4 Stars
Director: Woody Allen
Cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Patrick Horgan
Zelig is a fake documentary about Leonard Zelig: The Human Chameleon. A man who has such an intense desire to be liked that he takes on the characteristics of other people in his environment, including gaining weight, growing facial hair or even changing the colour of his skin if need be. I call Zelig a "fake documentary" and not a "mockumentary" because it predates the original mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap and it shares no stylistic characteristics with Guest films or The Office style TV shows. It is not improvised and has zero talking head interviews. It is not aping fly-on-the-wall documentaries, it is aping historical documentaries. Allen and Gordon Willis impeccably recreate this genre whose primary tools are two classic stimulants: archival footage and professional narration. Casting Patrick Horgan, the voice of dozens of Sherlock Holmes audiobooks, as the narrator, gives the fake documentary authenticity and the film a straight man. Allen plays the funny man and his mannered, nervous speech plays well off Horgan's dry narration. Horgan is delivering monologues for most of the film, but Allen's writing and directing and performance consistently wring laughs out of gags in "historical" pictures, videos and songs.
It can be tough to notice because it's often cloaked in self-deprecation or perfectly-constructed jokes, but Woody Allen is very perceptive about the human condition. His self-deprecation cloaks soul-baring moments in irony, which lessens their emotional impact, but is also true to his characters. Their neuroses are not quirks, but defense mechanisms because the characters are too afraid of saying something honest and direct about themselves without being protected by a veil of cleverness. The documentary framework of Zelig might appear overly clever, but it mirrors Allen's characters; their film is full of winking ironic moments, but the story is still told in a realistic way. The structure allows Zelig to satire documentaries, news media, males roles in society and The Golden Era Hollywood, however Zelig is a minor figure and if his story were told it would probably be told in psych-textbooks and dry black and white documentaries. The commitment to imitating, but not mocking the genre grounds the movie and prevents the pervasive irony from ruining the film's sentiment.
The premise of Zelig seems so broad, like a mediocre SNL sketch, that through the first act I found it hard to believe there would be any insights on human behaviour. However I didn't really care because there are so many great one liners throughout, " I have an interesting case. I'm treating two sets of Siamese twins with split personalities. I'm getting paid by eight people." "I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. Freud felt that it should be limited to women." "The Ku Klux Klan, who saw Zelig as a Jew, that could turn himself into a Negro and an Indian, saw him as a triple threat." However as the movie progresses it turns into a poignant fable about conformity, insecurity and neurosis. If one tries to fit in too much they lose their unique humanity, if they constantly speak their mind they are boorish and obnoxious: the goal is to find the unattainable golden mean. Similarly Zelig needs to maintain a tonal balance between a legitimate insight on humanity and killer punchlines that threaten to undermine the earnestness that is earned via the original insight. Fortunately Allen's ability to maintain a tonal balance is one of his great strengths and he succeeds in making a wickedly funny, touching, reflection on neurosis and an effective love story.
Cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Patrick Horgan
Zelig is a fake documentary about Leonard Zelig: The Human Chameleon. A man who has such an intense desire to be liked that he takes on the characteristics of other people in his environment, including gaining weight, growing facial hair or even changing the colour of his skin if need be. I call Zelig a "fake documentary" and not a "mockumentary" because it predates the original mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap and it shares no stylistic characteristics with Guest films or The Office style TV shows. It is not improvised and has zero talking head interviews. It is not aping fly-on-the-wall documentaries, it is aping historical documentaries. Allen and Gordon Willis impeccably recreate this genre whose primary tools are two classic stimulants: archival footage and professional narration. Casting Patrick Horgan, the voice of dozens of Sherlock Holmes audiobooks, as the narrator, gives the fake documentary authenticity and the film a straight man. Allen plays the funny man and his mannered, nervous speech plays well off Horgan's dry narration. Horgan is delivering monologues for most of the film, but Allen's writing and directing and performance consistently wring laughs out of gags in "historical" pictures, videos and songs.
It can be tough to notice because it's often cloaked in self-deprecation or perfectly-constructed jokes, but Woody Allen is very perceptive about the human condition. His self-deprecation cloaks soul-baring moments in irony, which lessens their emotional impact, but is also true to his characters. Their neuroses are not quirks, but defense mechanisms because the characters are too afraid of saying something honest and direct about themselves without being protected by a veil of cleverness. The documentary framework of Zelig might appear overly clever, but it mirrors Allen's characters; their film is full of winking ironic moments, but the story is still told in a realistic way. The structure allows Zelig to satire documentaries, news media, males roles in society and The Golden Era Hollywood, however Zelig is a minor figure and if his story were told it would probably be told in psych-textbooks and dry black and white documentaries. The commitment to imitating, but not mocking the genre grounds the movie and prevents the pervasive irony from ruining the film's sentiment.
The premise of Zelig seems so broad, like a mediocre SNL sketch, that through the first act I found it hard to believe there would be any insights on human behaviour. However I didn't really care because there are so many great one liners throughout, " I have an interesting case. I'm treating two sets of Siamese twins with split personalities. I'm getting paid by eight people." "I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. Freud felt that it should be limited to women." "The Ku Klux Klan, who saw Zelig as a Jew, that could turn himself into a Negro and an Indian, saw him as a triple threat." However as the movie progresses it turns into a poignant fable about conformity, insecurity and neurosis. If one tries to fit in too much they lose their unique humanity, if they constantly speak their mind they are boorish and obnoxious: the goal is to find the unattainable golden mean. Similarly Zelig needs to maintain a tonal balance between a legitimate insight on humanity and killer punchlines that threaten to undermine the earnestness that is earned via the original insight. Fortunately Allen's ability to maintain a tonal balance is one of his great strengths and he succeeds in making a wickedly funny, touching, reflection on neurosis and an effective love story.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
The Dictator - 2012 - 3 Stars
Director: Larry Charles
Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anna Faris, Ben Kinglsey, Jason Mantzoukas
"It's screamingly, hysterically, laugh-through-the-next-joke, laugh-for-the-next-week funny. It's so inventive…This is a film by an original and significant comic intelligence."
"A comic put-on of awe-inspiring crudity and death-defying satire and by a long shot the funniest film of the year. It is "Jackass" with a brain and Mark Twain with full frontal male nudity."
"Wildly funny. Its best jokes approach some savage, atavistic core of cultural taboo and make the viewer wonder: Is it really possible to laugh at this? But by the time you formulate that question, it's too late: You're already laughing."
"The result is a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high-and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and that peculiarly American affliction: we're-number-one-ism."
Those who pay attention to the critical consensus and review aggregators are aware that those laudative reviews are not about The Dictator. They are about the first Larry Charles directed, Sacha Baron Cohen vehicle, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. When Borat was released I was already a huge Baron Cohen fan because of his HBO series Da Ali G Show. I was incredibly excited to see Borat, especially after it received the kind of hyperbolic praise quoted above, but I ended up underwhelmed. I never liked watching more than 2 episodes of Da Ali G Show back to back because it was too uncomfortable and Borat was 84 minutes long; almost three episodes back to back. As a result the movie felt much longer than it actually was. I don't know if this is true, but It felt like most of Borat's raves were from people unfamiliar with the TV show, the satire in the film was no more cutting than the dozens of episodes I'd seen on HBO and it was odd that what I thought was another addition to the Baron Cohen oeuvre was being called his magnum opus.
My other criticism of Borat, which sounds hypocrtitical given my praise of the TV show, was how loosely plotted it was. It was a series of set pieces back to back with loose bits of connective tissue about Borat trying to find Pamela Anderson because he saw her on Baywatch in Kazakhstan. After watching The Dictator, I realize that one of Borat's biggest strength and its most dangerous decision was its loose structure. I can't think of a single post-Borat comedy with a wide-release that was more concerned with delivering hilarious comic set pieces than servicing love interests or redeeming our hero or raising the stakes via cliches (sick parent/grandparent, house foreclosing, etc). Even when idiosyncratic comedic voices are given the opportunity to make a film, their films inevitably follow a generic structure: our hero is at point A, hits rock bottom, meets a girl, slowly climbs up to above point A to point B, falls to even lower rock bottom usually due to a plot contrivance introduced in the first act, triumphs at the end marries the girl and rises to point C where everyone is happy. Lots of mumblecore movies follow this arc, every Apatow movie follows this arc, even Pootie Tang which possesses a bizarre and unique comic voice follows this arc and The Dictator follows this arc.
"Wildly funny. Its best jokes approach some savage, atavistic core of cultural taboo and make the viewer wonder: Is it really possible to laugh at this? But by the time you formulate that question, it's too late: You're already laughing."
"The result is a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high-and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and that peculiarly American affliction: we're-number-one-ism."
Those who pay attention to the critical consensus and review aggregators are aware that those laudative reviews are not about The Dictator. They are about the first Larry Charles directed, Sacha Baron Cohen vehicle, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. When Borat was released I was already a huge Baron Cohen fan because of his HBO series Da Ali G Show. I was incredibly excited to see Borat, especially after it received the kind of hyperbolic praise quoted above, but I ended up underwhelmed. I never liked watching more than 2 episodes of Da Ali G Show back to back because it was too uncomfortable and Borat was 84 minutes long; almost three episodes back to back. As a result the movie felt much longer than it actually was. I don't know if this is true, but It felt like most of Borat's raves were from people unfamiliar with the TV show, the satire in the film was no more cutting than the dozens of episodes I'd seen on HBO and it was odd that what I thought was another addition to the Baron Cohen oeuvre was being called his magnum opus.
My other criticism of Borat, which sounds hypocrtitical given my praise of the TV show, was how loosely plotted it was. It was a series of set pieces back to back with loose bits of connective tissue about Borat trying to find Pamela Anderson because he saw her on Baywatch in Kazakhstan. After watching The Dictator, I realize that one of Borat's biggest strength and its most dangerous decision was its loose structure. I can't think of a single post-Borat comedy with a wide-release that was more concerned with delivering hilarious comic set pieces than servicing love interests or redeeming our hero or raising the stakes via cliches (sick parent/grandparent, house foreclosing, etc). Even when idiosyncratic comedic voices are given the opportunity to make a film, their films inevitably follow a generic structure: our hero is at point A, hits rock bottom, meets a girl, slowly climbs up to above point A to point B, falls to even lower rock bottom usually due to a plot contrivance introduced in the first act, triumphs at the end marries the girl and rises to point C where everyone is happy. Lots of mumblecore movies follow this arc, every Apatow movie follows this arc, even Pootie Tang which possesses a bizarre and unique comic voice follows this arc and The Dictator follows this arc.
A lot has been made about televised drama surpassing film dramas in the new millennium, I feel that argument is incorrect and reductive for reasons I may outline in a longer post, but ultimately it is because film directors have more varied perspectives and means of expressing themselves than television show runners. Not a lot has been made about television comedy surpassing, movie comedy and I feel there is a much more compelling argument to be made in favour of that because televised comedy favors idiosyncratic voices. Televised comedy allows Adam Reed or Dan Harmon or the aforementioned Pootie Tang director Louis CK a large amount of freedom; sometimes they fail spectacularly, but at least they are taking creative risks, instead of developing star vehicles for bankable actors and hoping by the end there are enough funny jokes that the movie will gain an audience.
The Dictator is a fish out of water comedy about Admiral General Hafez Aladeen, who is in New York City to give a speech to the UN, where, for plot reasons I won't get into, he is usurped by a body double and is forced to live in New York without the palatial luxuries he is accustomed to. Unlike Borat, The Dictator relies on a strong cast of supporting comic actors, such as Fred Armisen, Nasim Pedrad and Jon Glaser, but the real highlight of the movie is Jason Manzoutkas, best known for scene-stealing guest spots on Parks and Recreation and The League, who frequently gets bigger laughs in scenes where he has to go head to head with Sacha Baron Cohen.
The Dictator is a fish out of water comedy about Admiral General Hafez Aladeen, who is in New York City to give a speech to the UN, where, for plot reasons I won't get into, he is usurped by a body double and is forced to live in New York without the palatial luxuries he is accustomed to. Unlike Borat, The Dictator relies on a strong cast of supporting comic actors, such as Fred Armisen, Nasim Pedrad and Jon Glaser, but the real highlight of the movie is Jason Manzoutkas, best known for scene-stealing guest spots on Parks and Recreation and The League, who frequently gets bigger laughs in scenes where he has to go head to head with Sacha Baron Cohen.
Dictators aren't the hardest people to satire, it's not as if there are many people that are pro-tyranny. There was a time where mocking tyrants was a daring act, but not in a culture where there are Gadaffi Meme-Generators and we are 5 years removed from an SNL sketch where Adam Levine serenades Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Despite that The Dictator maintains a sharp, albeit unoriginal satirical edge throughout and is willing to mine jokes from everything in a dictator's life. There is an inspired bit of satire delivered via a clunky monologue where Aladeen compares America's corporate oligarchy to a dictatorship, but generally the strongest jokes in the film are observational jokes about the minutia of Aladeen's day to day life, which I feel must have been written by co-writers and former Seinfeld scribes Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaeffer. The broader comic setpieces including the "9/11 2" joke that has been shown in all the previews are overwritten set pieces, that require suspending your disbelief even in The Dictator's absurd universe.
While in New York Aladeen meets a feminist-socialist-hippie-brooklynite played by an enjoyable Anna Farris. The films gets some comic mileage out of Baron Cohen taking over her food co-op and making it ruin more efficiently through his dictatorial attitude, before they ... fall in love swoon. Ostensibly they are mocking, genre conventions, but they are still peddling the hoary tropes comedy audiences have become accustomed to. In Borat there was a feeling that anything could happen at any time, The Dictator shows flashes of that comic anarchy, but ultimately the packaging is so insipid that that any time you feel anything can happen you are quickly reminded that there is only one thing that can happen.
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