Archive for February, 2012|Monthly archive page
The Ides Of March (2011)
The Ides Of March
★★★★☆
Directed by: George Clooney
Written by: George Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Beau Willimon
Based on the Play “Farragut North” by: Beau Willimon
A lot of political thrillers tend to descend into non-political thriller territory, sooner or later. You can tell the moment this happens whenever a gun is produced or a car chase looms imminent. It’s not bad, per se, for political thrillers to have stakes high enough for them to be spine-tinglers but politics has its own special kind of tension built-in and I think the exploitation of that facet is under-utilized.
Which may explain why I liked The Ides of March as much as I did. Because this is a movie about the game, the lifestyle, the scope of politics which uses human beings as much as ideas in a frankly chilling battle between the public good (also acting as proxy for morality) and raw acquisition of power. That both are intertwined is merely the reality, not necessarily a philosophical point whose merits or defects are worthy of merit in this context.
So we are introduced to Mike Morris (played with magnetic charisma by George Clooney), a governor in an Ohio primary trying to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for Presidential candidate. His top two aides are Paul (played with volumes of implied character by Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Stephen (played with studly swagger by Ryan Gosling). They have the candidate that ought to win: He’s got good ideas, good appeal; a good chance of defeating whatever candidate the Republicans try to throw at him. But he just needs a bit of a boost to go the rest of the way and Paul thinks a previously dropped-out Senator who holds a significant number of delegates in check could provide that winning boost if he can convince him to throw support to Morris.
While Paul is trying to woo the Senator, Morris’ campaign manager, Tom (played with an affably sinister charm by Paul Giamatti), calls Stephen to set up a meeting. It’s risky for Stephen to meet the other campaign guys; there are regulations and social conventions that limit the kind of direct contact they can have. But Stephen decides to go for it anyway. At the secret meeting, Tom offers Stephen a position on the opposing team. He says they have the Senator already sewn up and they plan to get a lot of open primary support from the Republican voters in Ohio because the GOP worries they won’t be able to take Morris in the main election. Stephen declines but leaves the meeting rattled.
Meanwhile Stephen meets a girl, Molly (played with a not-quite-convincing awkward confidence by Evan Rachel Wood), a staffer on the campaign, and begins an affair with her. But Molly has a secret that threatens the entire campaign and as the stakes ratchet up and the election gets closer, Stephen’s paranoia starts to show signs of being not misguided at all.
What works best is that this never gets into cornball shootout in a parking garage or attempt-on-someone’s-life territory. There is plenty of suspense inherent in the politics and the web of interpersonal relationships that The Ides of March doesn’t need gimmicks like knife fights or stolen nuclear launch codes. The basic plot is riveting and the acting is either quite good or absolutely top notch (Gosling and Wood, notably, hold their own enough to not stand out against wonderful performances by folks we’ve come to expect good things from like Hoffman and Giamatti). The ending is unexpected and strangely satisfying, if cynical and dark overall.
There are a handful of issues here and there: There is a lot of set-up to be done early in the movie and the script is kind of jarringly transparent about it. Stephen’s character is frustrating as a protagonist because as the noose tightens around him he begins to act inconsistently with what we’ve been led to believe about him, going from swagger to outright jerk to mystifyingly ruthless by the final credits. A more accomplished actor (like, say, Giamatti) might have sold the transition better, but I guess it was more important that Stephen be young and pretty than convincing. There are also a few minor plot hiccups—not holes really, just oversights which are noticeable to the audience but not necessarily impacting on the story. Also the chemistry between Wood and Gosling never quite hits the notes I think it was intended. Coming off a recent viewing of The Adjustment Bureau where Matt Damon and Emily Blunt show how to make onscreen magic happen, it feels a little flat.
But there is plenty to recommend The Ides of March as well. Clooney’s direction is really top shelf here, and he makes great use of silence in the film, of unheard dialogue especially, to convey messages by relying on his actors rather than on the dialogue writing. It works remarkably. There are also a ton of memorable speeches by Paul and Morris, among others.
It did strike me as funny that Clooney, as Mike Morris, looked like a genuine political candidate and, in fact, came across as ironically less rehearsed than several actual politicians in the real-life campaigns going on right now often do. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of Morris’ political ideals were mirrors of Clooney’s own and it’s always disheartening to realize that fictional politicians are more inspiring than real candidates at least 95% of the time.
Overall, I enjoyed The Ides of March quite a bit. It’s not without a few issues here and there and I’m sure diehard GOP viewers will disdain what can occasionally sound like a Democratic propaganda film, but it’s a tight thriller that doesn’t cheap out and showcases great direction and some fine acting. Sounds like everything you need for a solid bout of entertainment. Or, for that matter, politics.
from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — February 21, 2012 at 10:29AM
Drive (2011)
Drive
★★★☆☆
Directed by: Nicolas Winding Refn
Written by: Hossein Amini
Based on the Novel by: James Sallis
I get, to a certain extent, what Drive was trying to do. Or, to be more accurate, what it was trying to be. However, the problem that I have with Drive is that it thinks itself exceptionally clever in its design and is therefore often incredibly indulgent.
Drive is about a nameless guy (played with mute inconsistency by Ryan Gosling): a part time stunt man, part time mechanic, part time wheelman, aspiring race car driver. He has a certain set of skills that make him valuable to a certain set of people. We see, early on, how he operates. He’s not a stoic, unflappable kind of guy, but he’s good and that carries a body a long way. We get the sense that he’s maybe trying to find the light at the end of the tunnel, perhaps he’s trying to turn over a new leaf. Perhaps not. Perhaps the line he walks is his comfort zone.
He meets a girl, Irene, a neighbor (played with watery-eyed vagueness by Carey Mulligan), at his new apartment building. She has a son and a husband serving a prison sentence. There are sparks, but he tries to be respectful and she tries to do the right thing, in spite of her feelings. It’s complicated, but perhaps less so than Drive makes it out to be because it tries to express everything in long sequences of unbroken silence. On the periphery of this are some unsavory characters: The driver’s boss, Shannon, (played with talkative enthusiasm by Bryan Cranston), a couple of wiseguys (Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks, both doing much with small supporting parts).
Then Irene’s husband, Standard, is released from jail and he’s in trouble with some toughs he owes money to. The Driver feels protective of Irene and her son, and he has a briefly dealt with but somehow significant connection with her husband as well. He tries to help. At this point in the movie the tone shifts. There is a double-cross. People start dying. Once they start, they don’t really stop. Drive doesn’t have much to use to ratchet up the tension since it seems unwilling to directly threaten the protagonist’s motivating characters (Irene and her son) so it uses brief but often unexpected brutality to serve as a proxy. The Driver’s character starts to unravel here, because we’re so disconnected from him apart from the filter we’ve been given (through Irene), and either the director or Gosling can’t seem to really convey a sense of him.
But then, as if the filmmakers sensed this, they apparently decide to embrace it and just let him be erratic and inexplicable. The movie starts to feel smug in doing so. “Look how edgy this shit is!” is cries. But in the audience we either do that thing, “Oh yeah. I get it. I totally get it. Yes.” Or, we do the other thing: “Wait. What. No. Huh?” And in the end either response is fine because what matters most is that whether we get it (or “get it”) or not, we can’t possibly connect with him. We can’t possibly care all that much. We care through him, for Irene, for Shannon, for Standard, but he is a ghost, a screen that reflects the projections of others but has no function of his own. The signature soundtrack tune plays a couple of times through the movie, embracing this and explaining it in a very clumsy, obvious way by declaring: “A real human being / And a real hero.” So, you see, he may be a sociopath, but he’s a sociopath for the right reasons. Which is totally better. Totally.
Drive isn’t a bad movie, by any stretch. But it’s not necessarily the movie it should have been, either. I cared more about the Driver character before Irene, at which point I cared about Irene but not the Driver. The fact that both exist in the same movie made both of their stories less than they could have been, and that’s a shame.
from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — February 20, 2012 at 04:54PM
The Lorax
author: Dr. Seuss
name: Paul
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1971
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2012/02/20
shelves:
review:
In Cold Blood
author: Truman Capote
name: Paul
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at: 2012/02/19
date added: 2012/02/20
shelves: non-fiction, true-crime
review:
Works of literature that are terribly intimate seem often to demand a first person voice. Likewise, journalistic endeavors of any depth and/or breadth seem to frequently (at least in the last twenty years or so that I’ve been reading them as contemporary) involve self-reference by the writer. It creates a certain expectation, somehow. Which is why I was shocked to note that except for a few third person, oblique references to “journalists,” Truman Capote never self-inserts into his non-fiction novel.
In Cold Blood is a wide-ranging examination of the shotgun murders of the Clutter family in Kansas in 1959. Capote finds a tonal balance between authentic, authoritative reporting and suspenseful thriller pacing that really works considering the amount of detail on display. The structure bounces back and forth between the Clutters, the perpetrators (Perry Smith and Dick Hickock), and the investigative unit assigned to track down the killers which creates a genuine tension throughout, or at least up until the criminals are captured in Las Vegas. Once Smith and Hickock are in custody the book becomes a legal procedural, cataloging the questioning, the pre-trial, the courtroom drama and finally the sentencing and execution of the convicted. Capote’s lively and absorbing prose paints a landscape that draws the reader back in time and does not flinch away from trying in an organic way to illuminate the nature not only of the crime itself but of the men who committed it.
But I think where In Cold Blood is most effective is in giving more than just a sense of the anti-heroes, because In Cold Blood is about the way a crime that a newspaper might shorthand into something glib like “senseless” is really something much more complex, and much further reaching than just the most obvious victims. Capote works hard to humanize the victims, the perpetrators, the lawmen, the judicial system and even the small community that is left to cope with the aftermath. Few stones are ever unturned to try and display the scope at which two troubled young men who executed an innocent family just to leave no witnesses behind in a failed robbery operated.
What’s masterful about the way Capote handles this is that he doesn’t do so by waxing into meta-narrative or by hypothesizing in his own voice, he uses a devotional level of research and the careful orchestration of facts and opinions gathered by the many actors involved (criminal psychologists from the trial and appeals processes, community members and, most significantly, Perry and Hickock themselves) to let it rise up through the narrative naturally.
I did get a bit of the sense that the book may have been more shocking or extreme at the time of its publication. In Cold Blood doesn’t really feel like it pulls many punches but sensationalized modern media feels like it has taken the sting out of the tone of this book in the past thirty-five or forty years. A quadruple homicide/home invasion is still a dreadful tragedy but I suspect a modern writer might linger on some of the more medical details, gore and sexual elements (particularly Hickock’s predilection for younger girls represented in the central event as the Clutter’s daughter, Nancy). Even if the initial publication was unflinching in its depiction of a horrible and brutal act, I appreciated that Capote doesn’t seem ghoulish in his depiction of it which is a characteristic that modern true crime novels I’ve attempted seem to have in common.
Overall, In Cold Blood is a very thorough and spectacularly executed piece of narrative nonfiction. There is a bit of a sense of quaintness in some of the procedural and criminology aspects that even casual exposure to modern psychology and criminal justice would render a bit primitive, but its a book that lingers in memory and deserves to be read.
