2013: The Year in Film: "The Counselor" Review

Cormac McCarthy is easily one of the greatest living American novelists. The Road, Blood Meridian, and No Country for Old Men top the list of his works. So getting him to write an original screenplay should be a good thing, right? Ridley Scott is undoubtedly one of the greatest living directors. 'Alien', 'Gladiator', 'Black Hawk Down' and 'Blade Runner' top the list of his best films. So getting him to direct a film written by Cormac McCarthy should be an amazing thing, right? When you throw in a cast led by Michael Fassbender, Benicio Del Toro, Brad Pitt, Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz, and a big budget, all of the ingredients are here to have a film that at the very least is quite good, right? So what makes a good movie? If you can't just throw together a great writer, a great director and a great cast and mix it up at random, does that mean there's a certain alchemy to the whole process? YES!!! OF COURSE THERE IS. Someone needs to tell 20th Century Fox this. You'll see what I mean in a bit.

So if you've ever read Cormac McCarthy, you'd understand why his writing style is potentially problematic if applied directly to screen, and why the film adaptations of his work are often pretty heavily modified. His writing is sparse and muscular, preferring to show rather than explain, and while that's something that can be extremely effective in film, in my experience film characters often need more fleshing out than their book counterparts. A character in a book can be sufficiently fleshed out by just living inside of their head, but the same technique when applied to film can make the whole enterprise feel empty. Hollow, even. So how does this translate to screen?

In "The Counselor", Michael Fassbender plays the titular character, a high-priced lawyer of some sort who finds himself mixed up with the wrong crowd. Various other "wrong crowd" characters abound. Consequences ensue.

The Good: there are some solid and tense scenes, and the film looks beautiful. Additionally, it doesn't shirk from the brutal violence that defines the drug trade, especially for the Mexican cartels. Beautiful people wearing beautiful things in beautiful places is always pretty to look at, at least. To a certain extent, I appreciate not having my hand held through the plot. It doesn't necessarily bother me that the details are sparse - the details are sparse in, say, Pulp Fiction, right? Fassbender, at least, does what he can with the material, and maybe I just have a soft spot for him, but in a world so lacking in details and exposition, all he can do is react to things that we aren't really in the loop on.



The Bad: the rest of the accomplished and surely expensive cast isn't given much to do but lounge around on couches in expensive clothes and lecture our erstwhile protagonist (who assumes that role just by virtue of his existing) with 200-level philosophy meanderings on the nature of fate, good and evil, snuff films, etc. Great actors like Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt are paraded around like clowns in preposterous outfits and give one long soliloquy after another to a guy who I'm not sure we're particularly supposed to like or care about. It's like McCarthy got REALLY pissed at how everyone praised Tarantino and decided he'd do one better. However, where Tarantino's films carry themselves with exuberant panache, McCarthy's first attempt feels at once bloated and empty, both stale and needlessly nihilistic.Neither his attempts to humor or disturb land with the effectiveness of literally dozens of cheaper and less star-studded films that I've seen. Ultimately, the plot doesn't feel sparse for narrative reasons, it feels sparse out of laziness. For every legitimately "cool" scene there are three that are boring at best, and fail at portentous with a particularly vile brand of postmodern pretension more often than not.  This is a film that references far better media and geopolitical occurrences out of hand, choosing instead to focus on college stoner-level diatribes on topics from the profane to the "profound".

So if you've been wondering if combining a great writer with a great director and a better cast = great film... your question has been answered, and that answer is an enthusiastic "NO". There are elements of a strong film here, but ultimately it feels cheap, whitewashed, needlessly flashy, and far inferior to other modern noir flicks. The unique combination of feeling simultaneously hollow and ridiculously bloated is something that's generally reserved for huge action flicks, but Scott and McCarthy seem to have brought that "After Earth" feeling to a whole new genre. So check it out if you feel like seeing some cool deaths and have already watched every single kind of good movie that you can get your hands on. Otherwise, I think you can skip this one.

4/10.

2013: The Year in Film: "Captain Phillips" Review

Tom Hanks' quasi-retirement/"producer" phase of the mid-2000's following the relative busts of "The Terminal" and "The Ladykillers" was a bit baffling to some, and it no doubt led to some amnesia among moviegoers as to how much of a powerhouse Hanks can be with the right material. Castaway/Saving Private Ryan/Apollo 13/Philadelphia Hanks was simply as good as any actor in Hollywood not named Daniel Day-Lewis. He was slowly starting to stake a legitimate claim to "greatest actor of all time"-type titles, only to more or less disappear from powerhouse stuff. Given all of that, it was easy to forget just how damn GOOD Hanks could be with the right material and with the right director. So when the ads for "Captain Phillips" directed by Paul Greengrass of 'Bourne' fame started to leak out, I slowly allowed myself to become excited for the return of one of America's screen titans to awards-worthy work.

"Captain Phillips", for those of you who don't know, is a dramatization of the harrowing ordeal of one Richard Phillips, the captain of the S.S. Alabama when she was hijacked by Somali pirates in the spring of 2009, culminating in dramatic rescue by US Navy SEALS several days later.

The Good: Hanks, obviously, is great. Understated and schluppy, his Captain Phillips is a competent but very ordinary man having a very bad day on the job. This is his finest performance since Castaway, and we're really getting vintage Hanks for this one. The film clearly takes its dedication to accuracy very seriously, and the result is a very real feeling and tense film. Aside from Hanks, the best performances are turned in by the Somali hijackers, particularly Barkhad Abdi, who plays the leader of the pirates, named Muse. It's my understanding that the hijackers were portrayed by first time actors and unknowns who were found at open auditions, and it's remarkable that their performances are so good given that we're basically seeing amateurs act across from Tom Hanks. Abdi especially deserves to have a legitimate acting career after the work he turns in here.  The film's plotting and pace are strong as well, with the 2nd half of the movie being incredibly tense, despite the fact that everyone knows exactly how the film ends. That's laudable, you guys.


The Bad: granted, some of this is due to the nature of the story being told, but aside from Hanks' Capt Phillips and Muse, there isn't a single character who's developed beyond an extremely minimal level. On the one hand, that keeps the story self-contained and adds to the tension, but on the other, it makes the world feel false, because we're basically dealing with a bunch of two dimensional fake persons and two actual characters. This is especially true of the military figures once they come into play. The US Navy is basically straight out of the commercial, with hyper-competent badasses just getting stuff done. Look, I know that that's exactly the image the US military is cultivating, but as a consumer of fiction, I'd appreciate a little depth to my stories, guys. The Navy SEALS here might as well be Terminators. They drop in, shoot people, and disappear, with our characters left to pick up the pieces.

All in all, this one is well worth watching. Hanks turns in a powerhouse performance of one man's harrowing ordeal, and personifying the hijackers was a nice and welcome touch. Ultimately, this is an incredibly tense flick that feels much shorter than its hefty runtime. There are no winners and losers when it comes to Somalia, and if this flick can spur you to do a little reading of your own, that's a definite plus.

8/10. Featuring a great central performance and some tense plotting but ultimately too hollow to reach true greatness. It certainly is great to have Tom Hanks back, and personally, I'm rooting for Abdi to have a long and lucrative career.

2013: The Year in Film: "Enough Said" Review

First, RIP James Gandolfini. I know that it's been a while at this point, one may justifiably say "too long", but the man truly was a great actor and according to all accounts, an even better guy. Even though I didn't come to 'The Sopranos' until far too late, several years after it initially aired, I can say that it's easily one of the best 2 or 3 television dramas of all time, and that Tony Soprano is just maybe the best fictional character in American history. It's crazy that as I type that, it doesn't even seem like an exaggeration. Tony was as complicated, charming, likable and infuriating as he was because of the inherent warmth and every man humanity of Mr. Gandolfini. Even though Tony was a sociopath and murderer who made his ample livelihood on the pain and exploitation of other people, through Gandolfini's portrayal, he was first and foremost a man. A husband and a father, different from the men in all of our lives only by degrees. So, farewell and rest peacefully, sir, you left us far too soon.

Given that Gandolfini's warmth and humor were often buried beneath the types of roles he was often asked to play, perhaps it's fitting that his final film would be an indie romantic comedy, then? First, as an aside, I'm really starting to sour on American "indie" comedies. They have become such an indelible trope that at this point they all just sort of blend together the way that traditional rom-coms, crappy comedies or crappy action flicks. It's like everyone watched 'Little Miss Sunshine' and 'Juno' one weekend and just decided "let's all be like that, you guys". 'Quirky' characters with nonsensical jobs? Check. Pithy, quip-filled dialogue? Check. Characters that exist for no discernible reason other than to be comic relief? Check. Catherine Keener? Check, check and check. Maybe this isn't fair and I'm painting an entire sub-genre with far too broad a brush, but I'm really starting to feel like all of these movies exist in the same universe and I'm just missing something. It feels a bit lazy and more than a little rote.

Enter: "Enough Said". Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a divorcee and single mother who works as an in-home masseuse and somehow affords a California lifestyle meets and begins to date a man she meets at a party. This man, Albert, happens to be a divorced single dad, and the ex-husband of Eva's new friend Marianne, unbeknownst to all parties involved. Romantic shenanigans ensue.

The Good: Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus have a palpable chemistry and each have an inherent likability that allows the film to rise above what may have felt like routine or even contrived plot and settings. This isn't an ambitious film, but one that's perfectly content to put together a sweet, simple little story featuring two likable actors in the kind of roles typically reserved for much younger and handsomer actors. Even with my stated "indie" fatigue that I mentioned above, I found the story surprisingly sweet and affecting, and also quite funny at times. Writer/director Nicole Holofcener has directed several episodes of the always great 'Parks and Recreation', and her sense of comedic timing shines through.



The Bad: while this film is admittedly better than I'd have thought (I basically only saw it because it was the last work of Tony Soprano), it ultimately isn't able to rise above its indie trappings. The film is, by and large, unremarkable among its ilk, and the screenplay feels like something that could have been written at any point over the last 20 years.

I'm sorry if that feels unduly harsh! Ultimately, this is a likable film featuring likable people, with some sweet moments and some surprisingly affecting ones, especially regarding parenthood and the post nuclear family. So if you're a fan of anyone involved or looking for a quick watch with 90 minutes to kill, or if you're just wondering what it's like to see Tony Soprano and Elaine Benes make out, you could do much worse.

7/10