2013: The Year in Film: "The Wolf of Wall Street" Review

Late? YOU BET.

Let's talk The Wolf of Wall Street, guys, as this one caused quite the stir upon its release.  First: Martin Scorsese is an absolute legend of the silver screen. The guy is 71 years old, has been releasing meaningful, crucial films for more than 4 decades now. Taxi Driver is 40 years old! Most filmmakers who were releasing classics in the 70's are either dead or have long ceased to be relevant in a creative sense. As Spielberg has long passed into bloated sentimentality and Coppola has faded into irrelevance, Scorsese is releasing kinetic, controversial, mad cap romps that display the confrontational irreverence of a man 40 years his junior. In Wolf, he's re-teamed with his new De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, for the 5th time now.

Wolf of Wall Street, titled after a memoir of the same name, follows a young stockbroker named Jordan Belfort as he seeks to break into the big time by any means necessary.  Through hubris, greed, innovative practices, and an uncompromising desire to do whatever it takes for success, Belfort builds an empire from nothing, exploiting, stealing, breaking the law and abusing whoever gets in his path all the way.

The Good: the enthusiasm of all involved in this production is infectious. The film is kinetic, engaging, and almost manic in its unyielding nihilism in the service of the true American religion: the almighty dollar.  Everyone is having so much fun that at times its tough to remember that what they are doing is despicable, giving financial scammers the same treatment afforded to mobsters in Scorsese's classic Goodfellas.  DiCaprio's performance is infectious, as he imbibes the persona of the sleazy Belfort. Jonah Hill is electric as his friend and business partner, Donnie Azoff, and I quite enjoyed Jon Bernthal's depiction of sleazy drug dealer/sometimes associate Brad. Matthew McConaughey is in this film for roughly 15 minutes, and steals every damn one of them.  The film is often funny, just as often revolting, and electric from front to back. It's a three hour film that has more uses of the F-word and its derivatives than any film in history, and I couldn't take my eyes off the screen.



The Bad: if anything, everyone is having so damn much fun that it's easy to lose sight of the deeper message, and that's what led to the bulk of the criticism of the film on its release. In this way, it's also not unlike Goodfellas.  The sex and drug use and good times are relentless and occasionally gratuitous, and I can see how that would be distracting and/or disturbing for more squeamish tastes.

Ultimately, this film is a joy to watch, but ultimately more important for what it represents: a time-capsule type view of a corrupt institution and the kind of people who inhabit this world, who also happen to be the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet.  To me, my biggest takeaway was that Belfort and Co., despite their scumbaggery, aren't even that big time. They were dealing in hundreds of millions in a circle where billionaires are oddly common. (Yet another similarity with Goodfellas)  In the end, this film becomes the white collar Goodfellas, and one that will stick around for decades, so that we can (hopefully!) look back on the outlandish decadence of the height of Wall Street's power with disbelief after we, as a society, have brought the financial industry to some measure of reasonable control. If Wolf of Wall Street seems unbelievable, it's because the wealth and power of Wall Street truly is unbelievable.

A fun flick that ultimately has a lot to say about the power structures and incentives of our society, and ultimately paints an unflattering view of the role of greed and material wealth in America today. I kind of loved it, but I'll acknowledge that it's not for everyone.

8.5/10.

2012: The Year in Film: "The Great Gatsby" Review

  "The Great American Novel" is the sort of nebulous term that causes AP English students and college freshman to start doodling while professors ramble. It's also likely to be discussed over coffee by the kind of people who take pictures with fake mustaches. At any rate, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" has as good a claim to the title as any, and quite frankly, a much better claim than most. It's the sort of Zeitgesit-catching prose and subtlety heavy work that makes translation to screen difficult, despite its many cinematic scenes and qualities. Francis Ford Coppola wrote the 1974 version starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow that ultimately feels incredibly dull and falls short (largely due to a lack of chemistry between the leads - Redford was supposedly so engrossed with the Watergate story that he spent every spare moment in his trailer and neglected his work). Enter: Baz Luhrmann?? The crazy Australian famous for making seizure-inducing bombastic flicks with all the subtlety and social commentary of Gallagher smashing a watermelon? Okay? Lurhmann, famous for the 90's high school angst clownfest Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rougue! (yes, there's an "!" in the title - you can tell his flicks are "edgy" by the titles!), and competitor for "worst movie I've ever seen" Australia, is tasked with bringing Fitzgerald's devastating take-down of American opulence, arrogance and greed. Let's just say that's a strange choice.

Say what you will about the choice of director, but he managed to assemble a great cast. Leonardo DiCaprio (Leo!) as the titular Gatsby, Joel Edgerton and Casey Mulligan as Tom and Daisy Buchanan, Jason Clarke, Isla Fisher and... Tobey Maguire as Fitzgerald cipher Nick Carraway. (Ok, good except for the last part) Gatsby, of course, follows recent college grad Nick Carraway (a poor but socially connected Midwesterner) as he moves among the new and old money social set of Jazz-Age New York and Long Island. The novel features scenes of decadent parties, dingy speakeasies, and a city alive with energy.


The Good: This flick looks spectacular. Plain and simply, Luhrmann does not disappoint when it comes to the glittering city, the opulent scenes at Gatsby's mansion are dizzying and the film is enveloped in a sort of otherworldly majesty. The acting is strong, particularly from DiCaprio, who is at his movie-star finest here. It's kind of fascinating to see just how dashing he is, considering he's spent most of his career trying to make himself look like a regular guy. Minor blog "boys" Jason Clarke and Joel Edgerton turn in solid efforts as well.  As expected, Luhrmann does a great job in capturing what was so intoxicating about the Jazz Age as New York rose to prominence as maybe the most important city on the planet.

The Mediocre: Carey Mulligan, whom I've always liked (watch "An Education", seriously. Thank me later), simply isn't up to the task of pulling off Daisy Buchanan and matching Leo step for step. Despite Luhrmann's best efforts to glam her up, you're never buying that she's this dynamo of reckless sexual energy and spontaneity who men want to be with and women want to be. That's not entirely her fault, I don't know if there's an actress under 35 capable of playing that part, which is why I listed it under "mediocre", but it really takes away from what Luhrman is trying to do.

The Bad: Tobey freaking Maguire is a bottom 6 actor on the planet. How he manages to finagle his way from big budget flick to big budget flick I'll never know. (Is he a secret Coppola too?) More than once during the flick I thought to myself "What is the dopey version of Peter Parker doing on West Egg?" before I realized that Tobey just can't act and just constantly wears a look on his face more befitting non-sentient creatures. His attempts to literally embody "wide-eyed wonder" are an embarrassment. I understand that the role itself is little more than a cipher for Fitzgerald's voice, but Maguire manages to imbibe it with absolutely zero charm and even less personality. A complete and utter empty shell of a character who dopes around from scene to scene without the faintest glimpse at any inner life of his own or the merest spark of intelligence. Plot/theme wise, we get an important glimpse into Baz Luhrmann's mind here. Fitzgerald's work is an important and rather scathing critique of material wealth, greed, status and the corrupting nature of it all. Luhrmann apparently read the book and decided it was a touching tome on star-crossed lovers amidst fabulous settings. The love story in the book is, by and large, merely a plot device. Efforts at the end to rescue the lessons and theme of the book fall short of the grandiose treatment given to the very things the book sought to condemn and which deserve extra condemnation today. Oh, and while I don't have an issue with anachronistic song choices, in and of themselves (let's be real, no one wants to see a  Baz Luhrmann 1920's flick featuring only Cole Porter songs and the ragtime), the song choices used here (Jay-Z and Watch the Throne by and large..) are just TOO on the nose. Featuring a rapper rapping about "balling" while showing rich people being decadent is about as subtle as playing "Free Bird" or "White Rabbit" while someone is using drugs. There are THOUSANDS of songs in this world, hire a hipster to mix it up some, Baz.

Ultimately, this is a flick that looks great and features a core performance of a true movie star at the top of his game. If it were just a tragic love story about rich people in the Jazz Age (and didn't star Tobey Maguire) this would be a legitimately kind of good movie. As it is, this is The Great freaking Gatsby, and I question whichever studio head put Baz and his fever dreams in charge of it. A shame it falls short, because there was a good movie somewhere in here. A Great Gatsby adaptation should be an awards favorite, not stuck between Iron Man 3 and Star Trek 2 as a studio money grab looking for the mom dollars.

5/10.

2012: The Year in Film: "Django Unchained" Review

As I saw this one on New Years' Eve, this will be the last entrant in the "2012: The Year in Film" series, and we'll move on to 2013. Another year older, hopefully wiser, etc., etc., something like that. Some of you may not know me that well. If you don't, I'm sorry, but if you do, you probably know that I'm an unabashed Quentin Tarantino fanboy. I had a giant Pulp Fiction poster in my room for years, continue to have a Reservoir Dogs poster, and credit Pulp Fiction with being the movie that made me start loving movies. I think that's a common choice among movie buffs ages 25-35. With that being said, it's been extremely interesting over the last decade to see Tarantino transition from being a rebellious young upstart to being a respected elder statesman of sorts. His reputation and prestige have allowed him to do basically anything he wants over the last decade, and the results have been diverse, controversial and always interesting. He's delivered a nearly 5 hour two-part revenge opus in which the main character's name isn't even revealed until the 2nd film and an alternate history in which Jews kill the Nazi leadership in France, both of which few, if any, filmmakers could get made, let alone doit well, and he follows that up with a similar alternate history flick featuring slavery in the American south.

Much in the same way that "Inglourious Basterds" is at once an homage and an update to the classic World War 2 films of the 50's and 60's, "Django Unchained" is a spaghetti Western with a Tarantino twist. The film focuses on Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave who has recently been sold after an escape attempt, and a German bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), who needs Django because he's able to identify the Brittle Brothers, slave overseers with a hefty price on their heads.  Schultz and Django hit it off and Django shows surprising aptitude at bounty hunting, so they decide to partner up and in exchange Schultz will help Django rescue his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington).  The duo finally track down Hilde at a notorious plantation called Candyland, run by one Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) and try to put together a plan to secure her freedom.

Tarantino's films have a tendency to feel fragmented, split into separate scenes or chapters that can be uneven and give his films a disjointed feel.  Unlike Inglourious Basterds and several of his other films, Django has a cohesive narrative and feels like something that another director could have made narrative-wise.

The Good: This is an impressive film.  It's nearly 3 hours long but manages to never feel unnecessarily long, which is a feat in and of itself nowadays.  It features Tarantino's trademark dialogue in spades, and there simply isn't another filmmaker alive who takes as much joy in the interaction of his characters that he does. It's brutal, it's often funny, it's simply a joy to watch.   Tarantino doesn't shy away at all from the possibly sensitive nature of his subject, and honestly, that's a good thing.  A revenge fantasy doesn't deserve kid gloves.  Visually it's great and manages at once to feel like the classic westerns of the 60's and 70's while being something distinct and wholly new.  The cast is great.  Waltz (we should all thank Tarantino for bringing him to America) simply owns every scene that he's in, bringing different, European sensibilities to the antebellum south and really owning the juicy dialogue he's given.  DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson really revel in their roles as villains, really bringing the charm and managing to be both charismatic and evil in the way that all great movie villains are. Foxx is strong as well, while his character isn't given the same wealth of material as Waltz and DiCaprio are, his character has a great heroes' arc, and really develops over the film's 2.75 hours. 

The Bad: There isn't too much bad, or even negative, at all. There are some scenes that are hard to watch, but let's be honest, chattel slavery in general wasn't hard to watch. It's become common on the internet to criticize Tarantino's gratuitous use of time appropriate racial epithets and shocking brutality, but to me it really isn't all that different, thematically and tone-wise than Inglourious Basterds. The way that was a Holocaust/WW2 revenge fantasy, this is a slave revenge fantasy. Plain and simple. People are cruel and say awful things, because let's be honest, when you own a human being like they are a piece of livestock, you probably aren't very nice to that livestock. My $.02.

In all, there are some hilarious scenes (a scene with hooded southerners seeking revenge is particularly funny), and Django and Dr. Schultz carve a trail of bodies across the south and west that's simply a lot of fun. The dialogue is outstanding, and Tarantino has really added one of his best films to his filmography. If you're a Tarantino fan, a fan of Westerns, or even a fan of movies, go see this one. It's one of the top 3 or 4 flicks of the year and just might be Tarantino's best since Pulp Fiction. 9/10

2011: The Year in Film: "J. Edgar" Review

It's fascinating to me how much of what makes up our world is due to historical happenstance, the influence of a particular man (or woman) or set of circumstances that happened to be in a certain place at a certain time. So much of our society and its rules and institutions seems to have been fated or inevitable, when in fact it's the result of a determined person or lucky coincidence that happened to have the foresight or good fortune to rise to an occasion or exploit an opening. One of the individuals who had an outsized impact on American society, our worldview and our institutions over the past century was longtime (we're talking 40+ years) FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. In fact, I'd be prepared to make an argument that he's one of the 10 or so people MOST responsible for shaping what we, as a nation and society are today. So, needless to say, a flick about his life starring one of the best actors working today, in Leonardo DiCaprio by one of the most important directors working, in Clint Eastwood, becomes a must-see.

This film has gotten mixed reviews.. most recognize its achievement while finding the narrative lacking. Most of all, I respect its ambition. I question whether another director could get a project like this green-lit. It's not quite a biopic, not quite a history of the FBI and not quite a historical drama a la say "The King's Speech". What it is, most of all, it seems to me, is a study of who Hoover WAS, why he was important, and what that means to us today. Through the lens of important events in his life and important events in the history of the FBI, we evaluate the rise and fall of an American icon and institution, a strange little man who built a monolith from scratch and whose legacy continues to resonate today. The film is framed as Hoover dictates a book to various FBI agents and outlines the start of his career, focusing on crucial points, like the Lindbergh baby case, the war on crime and the red scares of the early 1920s and the 1950s. The narrative skips from the past to the 1960's, where Hoover as an old man, has private files on every important person in the country and is, some say, the most powerful man in the nation. The narrative is extremely effective at points - doing a great job attempting to explain what made Hoover tick, for example, and fails at others - for instance, the story surrounding Hoover's illegal surveillance in the 1960's is less clear.

A flick like this is dependent entirely on the cast. It takes place in backrooms and offices and without actors capable of carrying the load, would completely collapse under its own weight. DiCaprio is great as J. Edgar. Simply great. He brings the perfect mix of eccentricity, paranoia, confidence and unease to a complicated, strange and yet powerful man. Judi Dench is great as well as Hoover's domineering mother, who had an undue influence on her son for the entirety of her life. Armie Hammer (who played the Winklevii in the Social Network..) is great as Hoover's #2 man, confidant, lifelong companion, probable lover and conscience, Clyde Tolson. Naomi Watts is more than adequate as Hoover's other lifelong companion, his personal secretary and keeper of his files, Helen Gandy. This flick is completely full of "those guys".. as basically every character is a man, and an Eastwood film attracts known actors. (For example - Jeffrey Donovan, the star of "Burn Notice", plays Robert Kennedy)



In showing, rather than telling and preaching, this film puts the right twist on Hoover's outsized legend. Everyone knows he was rumored to wear women's clothing, but this film doesn't focus on his strange personal habits, his modernization of law enforcement or his mistakes, focusing instead on what made the man tick, in an effort to understand what made the FBI what it is today. I appreciate that ambition.. and while that effort wasn't perfectly executed, the effort to document the meteoric rise and degeneration into paranoia of an icon is the sort of effort that just isn't made too often in Hollywood. For that, I applaud everyone involved, as Hoover's is a story that needs telling, particularly in our modern age of an omnipotent Federal government. This man is responsible for Federal Law Enforcement (FBI, DEA, ATF, you name it) as we know it, and his sweeping vision and ambition is responsible in large part for so many things.

Is the film perfect? No. But it is well-acted, often tragic and surprisingly touching in parts, and there's a lot more that works than there is that doesn't. So come for the acting, stay for the commentary on who we are and how we got here. If there's one outsized criticism from me, it's that the lighting in the film is HORRIBLE - it's not black and white, but every scene seems to take place at dusk/twilight, even when the scenes are in the middle of the day. It's rather distracting.

With that being said, this film does a lot more right than it does wrong - and the ambition alone is enough to add a point. 8/10.