"Accomplishments"In theatres: Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) are a cute couple planning their wedding when a big secret comes out that throws everything out of whack. That's The Drama, and just as one of the characters has the acknowledged power to turn drama into comedy, I thought it was a hilarious despite its heavier themes. These are two actors who have been making great choices with their careers and this is another one. Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli (Dream Scenario) allows intrusive thoughts to come through the editing and everything falls apart, or threatens to, at least. A grand nuptial fiasco that only true love could get you out of. I can't reveal the secret, but I will say that it might be triggering to some (at least, that's baked into the premise), and perhaps seem much ado about nothing for others. But I found a lot of truth revealed in its exploration, and a lot of black comedy to be had in the characters' discomfort.
At home: A couple whose marriage/relationship is getting stale finding each other again after being involved in some criminal or spy hijinks is a classic action comedy set-up. True Lies and Game Night are some of the best-loved examples. Date Night... is not. Steve Carell and Tina Fey are cute together and have the kind of "friendship marriage" some of the most solid couples I know have, but the problem is structural. Date Night hits a panicked crescendo in the first act, which feels way too soon, and proceeds to tire itself out. And despite having a big cast, everyone seems to have worked for no more than an afternoon and we rarely return to the characters introduced. The best friends are Kristen Wiig and Mark Ruffalo, but we then never see them again. The idiot criminals who got the ball rolling are James Franco and Mila Kunis, and they then never appear again. And so it goes, meeting eccentrics in a picaresque, where sometimes the couple if hapless, sometimes surprisingly competent, until the movie ends. It's not without its moments, but it falls off the high wire early.
Early Spring is a critique of the salary man (or wage slave) in post-War Japanese culture in addition to a drama about adultery, which is no doubt why Ozu goes for broke in terms of length. It loses me a little, as a result, but there's no doubt the idea of an office "prison", where you're eating lunch at your desk and not even really being allowed to finish it, is still recognizable today. What happens when you chain human beings to a desk, in between long commutes? The film more or less blames it for the affair - a co-worker in town is more accessible than one's wife in the suburbs, but that's only part of it - and for the general disintegration of society. The lead has to rid himself of so much ennui that even the affair is a pain, and he's constantly out drinking and gambling. His wife is absolutely right to complain, but this creates an infinite loop of frustration from both characters until the only possibility is a reset. Whether you see hope there or not is up to you. Ozu could have snipped out a lot of ancillary characters' scenes which only exist to give us different takes on marriage and adultery, but I think these are profitable despite my misgivings about the 145-minute run time.
Though pointedly a comedy - as per the amusing presentations on Hell by Gunnar Björnstrand, The Devil's Eye is a BERGMAN comedy, so it still stands on heady philosophical, psychological and theological ground. In this initially silly and theatrical fantasy, the Devil has a sty in his eye, and only corrupting a virgin will make it go away. So he sends Don Juan, currently suffering for his lustful sins, and his assistant Pablo back to Earth to besiege a vicar's pure daughter (as Pablo sets his sights on the vicar's melancholy wife). It's a comedy, so virtues prevail, just not in the obvious way. The dead Don Juan is struck to the core by the daughter's liveliness, and the family, tainted if not corrupted, makes changes we can hope are for the better. Is desire necessarily a gateway to sin? It seems not. Don Juan and Pablo themselves, selfish agents of Satan, are changed in way that seems a triumph for Heaven. So then, what heals the Devil's sty? There's plenty of fodder for conversation, but also a light touch and memorable fantastical events and characters. I liked it a lot.
Bresson starts his Arthurian romance Lancelot du Lac with knights gorily hacking each other to pieces before a scroll blares on about the quest for the Holy Grail, which immediately heralds the film as a neglected ür-text for the next year's Monty Python film. There's no way it't not an inspiration, even if Bresson's film is about the aftermath of that fruitless quest, where a defeated Arthur falls prey to both Lance & Gwen's cuckoldry and Mordred's treachery. It's my third Bresson film and, well, he's just not for me. While I appreciate the formal experiments - I think the idiosyncratic editing is of particular value here - the minimalist acting is a step too far. Here is a passionate romance, but it's recited by stone-faced actors as if they were reading the lines out of a Bible. And without a proper score, everyone's armor is just clickety-clacking until your mind breaks. I fell to giggling in the third act because I just couldn't take it anymore. I'm not sure that's the reaction Bresson wants from his fatalistic take on Camelot (here, just a bunch of tents), but that's what he gets. Maybe the Python boys found it similarly absurd.
Though Fatal Attraction came out in 1987, casting Michael Douglas as the white collar vessel for office space anxiety wouldn't bloom until Basic Instinct, but we happily watched his corporate characters get tortured through the 90s, usually but not exclusively, by a sexual encounter gone wrong. Disclosure falls in the middle of this trend, between the two non-sexual thrillers Falling Down and The Game. The anxiety: Getting falsely (or "falsely") accused of sexual harassment, and to expose the process, we turn it on its head by making HIM the actual victim of that harassment by Demi Moore (though his own micro-aggressions ARE addressed). The solution to the problem seems a little facile, but that's because the harassment story wasn't really the point - there's a bigger conspiracy at the Seattle tech company, and I'm surprised the stuff with the CD-ROMs is what I most remembered about the flick, given the absolutely ridiculous sci-fi elements introduced by Michael Chrichton's book. The company is working on a Metaverse reality, which is so dumb, you'll believe it's where Zuckerberg got his ideas for the doomed project, and all the computer graphics were conceived by a computer-illiterate person (let's lay it at director Barry Levinson's feet). Perhaps in 1994, audiences would have needed computer commands like "do it/kill the files", but today, it's all very silly. Roma Maffia was great as Douglas's lawyer though, they should give her a role in Law & Order or something.
I'd probably watch anything with Naomi Watts in it, but she seems ill-cast in The International, a conspiracy thriller about an international bank up to no good, including getting rid of anyone who comes close to uncovering its secrets. She's evidently meant to play a battleaxe of a lawyer prosecuting these major crimes, but doesn't sell it well. But the script doesn't really allow her to. Interpol agent Clive Owen at least seems to have a backstory supporting how driven he is to bring the financial cartel down, but she's woefully underwritten on that score, and in fact, disappears from the film in the final reel. A final reel, I should add, that ends most unsatisfactorily. Sure, it might be "realistic", but you did not set those expectations when you designed show pieces like the shoot-out at MOMA. Come on, now. Plot-driven to a fault, character work seems an afterthought, and without that crucial piece of the cinematic puzzle, the film is already fading from my memory...
The corporate world is a cutthroat environment, something that's made literal in A Shock to the System, in which Michael Caine plays an executive passed over for promotion because he's too nice, only to then have an epiphany about his own morality and start bumping off the opposition. It's a nasty little thriller that also stars as the charming Elizabeth McGovern as a romantic interest who might throw everything out of whack, an Will Patton as a would-be Columbo. The film retains the narration from the novel - Caine talking about himself in the third person - but doesn't have enough room to include the book's more ironic ending, and that's the problem for me. As is, the film is almost too cynical to bear. What it says about human nature is bad enough, but to have it close without morally satisfying the audience, well...
While I'm usually into procedural films, Andreas Fontana's Azor is at too far a remove for me to like it as much as I wanted to. I'm not a world banker, and I'm not too cognizant of what was happening in Argentina in 1980, and I feel like I'm missing most of the context as a result. If only I understood the stakes for Fabrizio Rongione's Swiss banker. He and his wife (the elegant Stépghanie Cléau), who seems to be the brains of the operation - are in a politically-unstable Argentina to replace his partner, who has gone walkabout - his reasons and his destination a mystery. At times, the film evoked Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with "Keys" for "Kurtz", but I'm not sure if it's conscious or accidental. Rongione has various meetings with the country's rich elite, a sinister accumulation that suggests what Capitalism does to nations in trouble - the universal principle at play - but as to whether we get the answers we need to unlock the mysteries and implications, I don't know. I respect Azor, but it remains opaque to me.
I remember when John Grisham adaptations felt fresh and attracted both top talent and audiences. The Client was the third hit in a row, but I daresay the last. If it works, it's because Susan Sarandon is so great as the lawyer who takes on a pre-teen client targeted by the mob, as is Tommy Lee Jones as the ruthless U.S. Attorney who would trample the boy's rights to get his conviction. The kid (Brad Renfro) is by turns admirably spunky, by others, an irritating brat, but Sarandon makes us care about him through her own empathy. Where it DOESN'T work is the villain side of things. Anthony LaPaglia is a performer I enjoy, but he lays the fake Southern accent on thick and I'm reminded of Colin Farrell in Daredevil (derogatory). A little too arch, and besides, he's hardly in it. The lawyer who commits suicide in the introduction is far scarier, and the antagonists are actually working on the right side of justice, just not in a way the young client could respect. There's a version of this story where the kid spills the beans to the FBI and the bad guys are caught, the end, and I don't think the movie works hard enough to convince us Sarandon, etc. did the right thing even if she squeezes a happier ending for her client. But what an ancillary cast, most on the cusp of stardom - Mary-Louise Parker, Bradley Whitford, William H. Macy... The great Ossie Davis steals the show as the judge, though, and I do wish there had been more courtroom stuff in this "legal drama".
I didn't realize comedy could be as dry as it is in The Art of Self-Defense, but I'm parched. An amazing take-down of the Manosphere, it has Jesse Eisenberg join a dodgy dojo after getting mugged, but finds there's a big difference between taking back control after a violent trauma, and the kind of cultish hypermasculinity preached by Alessandro Nivola's sinister sensei. Imogen Poots is the one woman living in this toxic masculine world. Everyone speaks in a deadly deadpan and states the obvious as a matter of course, probably part of the satire - let's just say I don't dip my toe into this world unless it's clipped content by my progressive sources - a mirror of the streamlined thought processes encouraged by such movements. Complexity is the enemy of compliance. I have had experience with motivational speakers, corporate aspiration, etc. enough to recognize the film as that kind of poisonous brainwashing taken to thriller extremes. I didn't drink the Kool-Aid then, and I'll never drink it, but I thought this flick was fun as balls!
In Frownland, indie director Ronald Bronstein and actor Dore Mann create a character that, I think TODAY, is more sympathetic than he was in 2007, when the general audience didn't have the diagnostic language required to figure out what was wrong with "Keith". Whether it's crippling anxiety, being on the spectrum, something else or a combination, we are more empathetic to people like him than we once were. But it IS called Frownland for a reason. He's someone people frown at. You can't even be sure how he even got the friends he does have, a collection of New York artists who likely were stuck rooming with him or working bad jobs with him at some point, but he insisted on keeping in touch, presumably. But Keith dumps his panic attacks on you, he can't express himself clearly or directly, he has facial tics and stutters, and he's socially awkward in a way that makes you immediately uncomfortable. Bronstein would later work with the Safdie Brothers and you can tell, but Frownland is likely also an inspiration for Joel Potrykus, the Duplass Brothers, and much of the anxiety cinema of the past 20 years. It has atmosphere in spades, but still lacks a proper thruline, and I'm left wanting more of the odd and inappropriate relationship between Keith and the high school girl played by Mary Bronstein (wife of Ronald, and speaking of anxiety cinema, director of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You). But like Keith, the film has trouble explaining what's going on there. It also abandons him for a sequence about his roommate - someone else to frown about - which is a lot of fun, but tonally at odds with the rest.
[1945] Brief Encounter: In a way, Noel Coward's play, and therefore David Lean's film, is a rather old-fashioned exploration of adultery, but I think that's only true of the way it's portrayed in movies and TV. Perfectly ordinary persons may today, as in 1945, experience it this way. Celia Johnson feels absolutely normal as a woman in a perfectly happy (but passionless) marriage who falls hard for a meetcute doctor, and we stay with her through her unspoken confession (and yet, is the husband so clueless?), through fairly universal feelings. If the modern eye adds anything, it's that Trevor Howard's romantic figure is now tainted by what we understand of the puller's playbook. He seems manipulative and untrustworthy, says all the right things to keep Johnson on the hook for one more date despite her crippling guilt, and we never see his own supposedly "delicate" wife. The film makes one mistake and it's presenting a scene where he's alone with a fellow doctor. It should all have been from her point of view. Otherwise, it's beautifully shot and acted, showing Lean at his, well, leanest. He doesn't need a giant canvas to shine, just a a couple of interiors and a train station.
[1946] The Stranger: It feels incredible that, in 1946, Orson Welles is already making a movie about Nazi hunters and the threat of fascism in the post-war afterglow. Not least of which because he gives himself the role of a Nazi intimately involved in the Final Solution, now integrated into small town high society with no one the wiser. And he might have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for his own paranoia. Edward G. Robinson is eminently watchable as the detective on his trail, and Loretta Young is the woman who loves the monster, but can't afford to believe in his crimes lest it break her mind and spirit (she's a little melodramatic for my tastes, but it works for the story). The Stranger is a gorgeous-looking Noir with a great play of shadows, and well used locations (the clock tower, in particular, has a great chase motif). It's a paranoid thriller you could imagine Hitchcock being very happy with, and that's one of the best compliments I could give the picture.
[1947] Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome: Between 1937 and 1947, Ralph Byrd played the comic strip detective in 8 cinematic stories, the first four serials, the last four hour-long features. Meets Gruesome is the last of these, and perhaps most interesting to audiences because Boris Karloff plays the title villain. Weirdly, other characters think he LOOKS like Boris Karloff! More meta-humor like that would have been interesting, though I suppose the fake-out where he's mistakenly brought to the morgue as a corpse is a Frankenstein riff. Karloff isn't THAT Gruesome, not as much as the mad scientist X-Ray anyway, and he's not from the comic strip (these characters wouldn't be included until 2014!), so everything seems to have been designed around the famous actor. There are a lot of fun characters (with amusing comic book names), many of them doing light comedy bits, and honestly, Dick Tracy himself is the one boring character. I would rather watch the villains (who definitely get more screen time), Anne Gwynne as the resourceful and charming Tess Truehart, or the cat loose in the bank. Still works as a gangland mystery with a pulpy sci-fi premise.
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