Movies

STEVE JOBS: THE MAN IN THE MACHINE – anything but reverential

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The first two-thirds of Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine provides us with remarkable insight into the personal life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.  We see plenty of evidence that Jobs was obsessively driven, a marketing genius, consumed by self-absorption and a nasty bully.

Gibney brings us an interview with the mother of Jobs’ first daughter (who he initially refused to acknowledge).  We also hear from their roommate (and presumably Apple’s #3 employee), who articulates the movie’s theme:

How much of an asshole do you need to be, to be successful?

There’s no question that Jobs qualifies as a jerk of singular proportions – grudgingly agreeing to $500/month in child support at the moment his wealth zoomed to $200 million.  And calculating the IPO stock awarded to his former roommate (“How about I give him zero?”).

We hear from the daughter herself (off-camera), with whom Jobs eventually kindled a relationship.  And we hear from the members of the executive team responsible for Apple’s resurgence, including the guys who brought us the iPod and iPhone.  We do not see Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak or the family from Jobs’ second marriage.

How did he get to be so driven?  There are insights in what molded him, especially his feelings about his adoption.  What made him a genius?  Not so much on that one.

In the final third of the film, Gibney piles on.  But it’s not a shock to hear about a Silicon Valley CEO enriching himself by back-dating stock options or exploiting Chinese workers. It ‘s more telling to find out Jobs reveled in parking in handicapped spaces.

There’s a major Hollywood biopic about Jobs coming out in just two weeks:  Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, starring Michael Fassbender in the titular role.

Alex Gibney is one our very, very best documentarians. He won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and he made the superb Casino Jack: The United States of Money, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God and Going Clear: The Prison of Belief.  Man in the Machine doesn’t rise to the level of those films, but it’s worthwhile to those already interested in its subject.

Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine is in theaters and also available streaming from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, and, of course, iTunes.

Movies to See Right Now

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MEET THE PATELS
MEET THE PATELS

The Matt Damon space adventure The Martian is a crowd pleaser that I’ll be writing about soon. Here are this week’s other recommendations:

  • Meet the Patels, a heartwarming crowd-pleaser – a documentary that’s funnier than most fictional comedies.
  • 99 Homes, a riveting psychological drama about the foreclosure crisis with searing performances by Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon.
  • The excellent true life crime drama Black Mass with Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton and a brilliant cast.
  • Going Clear: The Prison of Belief, documentarian Alex Gibney’s devastating expose of Scientology, originally shown on HBO and now in theaters.

This week’s Stream of the Week comes from The Movie Gourmet’s list of Overlooked Noir. The Burglar (1957) is known primarily as the movie debut of Jayne Mansfield, but it’s a fine film noir. The Burglar plays from time to time on Turner Classic Movies and is available streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, Xbox Video and Flixster.

On October 4, Turner Classic Movies airs Key Largo (1948), one of the classic film noirs and still satisfying to this day. Trapped in a claustrophobic Florida island resort by a hurricane, Humphrey Bogart has to face down sadistic mobster Edward G. Robinson. 23-year-old Lauren Bacall was at her most appealing. Claire Trevor’s heartbreaking performance as a gangster’s moll aging out of her looks is one of her best.

Movies to See Right Now

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99 HOMES
99 HOMES

Now we’re talkin’ – it’s late September and once again we have some fine movie choices in the theaters:

  • Meet the Patels, a heartwarming crowd-pleaser – a documentary that’s funnier than most fictional comedies.
  • 99 Homes, a riveting psychological drama about the foreclosure crisis with searing performances by Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon.
  • The excellent true life crime drama Black Mass with Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton and a brilliant cast.
  • Going Clear: The Prison of Belief, documentarian Alex Gibney’s devastating expose of Scientology, originally shown on HBO and now in theaters.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the hilariously dark Argentine comedy Wild Tales. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.

On September 28, Turner Classic Movies brings us that paragon of madcap comedies, Arsenic and Old Lace (1944); Cary Grant leads a cast that is perfect, right down to Jack Carson as Officer O’Hara, the new cop on the beat.

MEET THE PATELS: a documentary funnier than most comedies

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MEET THE PATELS
MEET THE PATELS

Meet the Patels is both a documentary and a comedy – and ultimately, a satisfying crowd-pleaser.  Over several years, filmmaker Geeta Patel filmed her own brother Ravi and their parents in their quest to find a wife for Ravi.  Ravi and Geeta’s parents were born in India, had a traditional arranged marriage which has resulted in decades of happiness.  Their American-born kids, of course, reject the very idea of an arranged marriage.  But Ravi finds the pull of his Indian heritage compelling enough to dump his redheaded girlfriend and try to find a nice Indian-American girl.  His parents try to help him with unbounded and unrelenting enthusiasm.

Meet the Patels is very funny – much funnier than most fictional comedies.  It’s always awkward when parents involve themselves in their child’s romantic aspirations.  That’s true here, and produces some side-splitting moments.  It helps that the Patel parents are very expressive, and downright hilarious.  The dad is so funny that I could watch him read a telephone book for 90 minutes, and the mom is herself a force of nature.

We learn that the Patels of Gujarat have adapted an entire menu of marriage opportunities to American society: a matchmaking profile system called “biodata”, matrimonial fairs, “the wedding season” and more.

Meet the Patels has its share of  cultural tourism and the clash of generations.  But is so damn appealing because it’s much more than that – it’s a completely authentic saga of family dynamics, dynamics that we’ve all experienced or at least observed.  The family members’ mutual love for each other drives family conflict and, finally, family unity.

I saw Meet the Patels at the Camera Cinema Club earlier this year, and it opens in the Bay Area tomorrow.  It’s hilarious and heart-warming.  Go see it.

 

GOING CLEAR: THE PRISON OF BELIEF: a devastating expose

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GOING CLEAR: THE PRISON OF BELIEF
GOING CLEAR: THE PRISON OF BELIEF

Going Clear: The Prison of Belief, documentarian Alex Gibney’s devastating expose of Scientology, originally shown on HBO in April, is opening theatrically tomorrow. The indictment of Scientology as dangerous cult is stunning. Gibney is sunshining an amazingly rich reservoir of source material: we hear from several former Scientologists, including the former chief spokesperson, the former top deputy to the Chairman of the Board, along with former believer director Paul Haggis and the John Travolta’s original Scientology handler.

Gibney begins by tracing the journey of Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard and reviewing the organization’s history. Now I knew about the science fiction writer Hubbard, his book Dianetics and even the E-meter. But I sure didn’t know about the Sea Org with its billion-year employment contracts, the Scientology Navy and the bizarro theology with invisible Thetans, volcanos and H-bombs. Nor had I seen the North Korea-style cult-of-personality spectacles featuring Chairman of the Board David McCavige. And I hadn’t heard about the church’s opposition to same-sex marriage.

Then come the really scary stuff. We hear from former Scientology officials who testify that they have been incarcerated in the Rehabilitation Project Force – a concentration camp on a top floor of the Scientology’s Los Angeles HQ and in what is essentially a prison camp in Florida to “re-educate” suspected heretics and backsliders. And there is testimony about the prisoners being separated from their children, who are shunted off to Cadet Org. One official offers personal testimony of his assignment to break up Nicole Kidman’s marriage to Tom Cruise and to alienate her children from her. It’s horrifying stuff. And it’s a riveting viewing experience.

Alex Gibney is one our very, very best documentarians. He won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and he made the superb Casino Jack: The United States of Money, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer and Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God. (He can’t seem to pass up a really long movie title – but Going Clear etc., came from a book title.)

If you’re asking “How can smart, able people fall into this stuff?”, then I recommend finding a film that I reviewed at Cinequest 2015 – The Center. Upon its release, The Center should become the perfect narrative fiction companion to Going Clear.

99 HOMES: desperation leads to indecency, then redemption

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Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon in 99 HOMES
Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon in 99 HOMES

The opening scene of the brilliant psychological drama 99 Homes illustrates the life-and-death stakes of our nation’s foreclosure crisis.  It’s a topical film, but 99 Homes is emotionally raw and as intense as any thriller.  Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is a working class single dad, down on his luck.  He loses his home to foreclosure and then must make a Faustian choice about supporting his family.  Can he live with his choice, and what are the consequences?

With capitalism, where there are losers, there are also winners who have bet against the losers.  Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) has built a prosperous real estate business on legitimate evictions and flips, supplemented with schemes to defraud federal home loan agencies, housing syndicates and individual homeowners.  His world view is defined in a monologue about this nation bailing out the winners, not the losers – a cynical, but perceptive, observation.

Director Ramin Bahrani is a great American indie director, with a knack for drilling into the psyches of overlooked subsets of our society – immigrants (Chop Shop, Man Push Cart, Goodbye Solo), industrial farmers (At Any Price) and now the victims and profiteers of the Mortgage Bubble.

As foreclosure inexorably approaches, Garfield’s Nash is absorbed by dread, then desperation and, finally, to panic.  His mom (Laura Dern) takes a different tack, settling firmly into denial and then erupting in hysteria.  That denial recurs again and again in 99 Homes among those about to be evicted.   These are people who have bought homes and can’t believe/grok/internalize that one day they will actually be forced out of them.  One of the strongest aspects of 99 Homes is the use of non-actors who have lived through the nightmare.   Some of the individual stories, especially one with a confused old man, are so wrenching as to be hard to watch.

This may be Andrew Garfield’ strongest cinema performance.  Dennis Nash is a decent man incentivized to do the indecent.  Garfield takes this good man through an amazing internal journey.  Nash is forced to accept the failure resulting from his attempts to do what is right, juxtaposed with the success from conduct that he finds repulsive.  Bahrani’s arty shot of the reflection of a swimming pool shimmering in a sliding glass door makes it look like Garfield is under water –  which he metaphorically is at this point in the film.

Michael Shannon, one of my very favorite actors, is superb as a guy completely committed to pursuing his own survival/prosperity strategy – no matter that it is based on ruining the lives of other humans.  Unlike Nash, Shannon’s Carver has accepted the incentives to act badly and has overcome any qualms about either moral ambiguity or even stark amorality.

Veteran television actor Tim Guinee is remarkable as homeowner Frank Green.  Laura Dern is excellent in a pivotal role.  The character actor Clancy Brown proves once again that he can grab the screen, even when he’s only visible for a minute or two.

With its searing performances by Garfield and Shannon, 99 Homes is unsparingly dark and intense until a final moment of redemption.  It opens on Friday.

BLACK MASS: psychopathy and ambition is a nasty combination

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Joel Edgerton and Johnny Depp in BLACK MASS
Joel Edgerton and Johnny Depp in BLACK MASS

The excellent crime drama Black Mass tells the true life story of how gangster James “Whitey” Bulger built his Boston Irish gang into a major crime empire under the protection of the FBI.  As if we needed an illustrative example, Bulger is proof that psychopathy and ambition is a really nasty combination.  And, as Black Mass points out with the FBI characters, even ambition alone can prove to be a vulnerability.

Here’s what really happened:  Bulger (Johnny Depp), the ruthless leader of the Winter Hill Gang in South Boston was approached by FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) for help in eradicating Boston’s Italian Mafia.   Connolly was as ambitious as Bulger, and the two men shared Southie  roots.  It was in Bulger’s interest to rid himself of the competition, and he parlayed Connolly’s career-climbing grasping into a de facto amnesty that allowed Bulger to expand his murderous enterprises throughout Boston and beyond – even to Florida jai alai and gun running to Northern Ireland.

It’s an amazing tale, and director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) tells it very well, letting Depp and Edgerton drive the story by inhabiting a pair of characters that become a toxic mixture.  With an erect swagger and some of the coldest eyes in cinema history, Johnny Depp is superb as the feral Bulger.  The trailer below includes his life lesson to a small boy around the family breakfast table that shows his world view.  When the eyes go cold, Depp’s Bulger can terrorize with a touch, a word or even just a glance.

Joel Edgerton is equally effective as the corrupted FBI agent Connolly, who uses Southie bombast and bluster to escape the snares of office politics.  Alas,  it all finally catches up to him when a new prosecutor directs fresh eyes on Boston’s crime scene.  Until recently, I’ve known Edgerton as an Australian action star (he was the the Navy Seal team leader in Zero Dark Thirty and one of the thugs in Animal Kingdom). Edgerton recently wrote, directed and stared in the excellent psychological thriller The Gift, and his performance in Black mass reinforces that he’s a very talented and versatile filmmaker.

The cast is very deep and uniformly excellent, including Julianne Nicolson, Juno Temple, Kevin Bacon, Benedict Cumberbatch, Corey Stoll (Midnight in Paris and House of Cards) and Dakota Johnson.  Besides Depp and Edgerton, three other actors popped off the screen for me:

  • Rory Cochrane plays Bulger’s partner Steve Flemmi.  Cochrane is a veteran actor whose most memorable role is probably as the pothead Slater in Dazed and Confused.  Now filled out in middle age, he plays a guy who is about half of Depp’s scenes, but says very, very little.  As they say, the best acting is reacting, and Cochrane just chews gum and observes, letting his eyes tell us what he is thinking and feeling.
  • David Harbour plays Connolly’s FBI partner, a guy who becomes entangled in a web not of his own doing.  One of the most riveting scenes in Black Mass, he becomes terrorized about, of all things, a recipe for a steak marinade.  Harbour is a reliable veteran, but this is among his very best work.
  • Peter Sarsgaard is always brilliant, and here he gets to become a tweaked out lowlife who involuntarily giggles when he thinks that getting handed a valise full of cash is a good thing when it’s not.

Black Mass is a top rate crime story very well-told.  No more and no less.

One more thing:  there is a string of up-close-and-personal murders depicted here, including two by strangulation and a host of gunshot executions.  It’s not particularly gruesome by the standards of modern crime movies, but DON’T TAKE YOUR 4-YEAR-OLD.  A couple at my screening did just that.  What are people thinking?

SICARIO: a dirty war against the narcos

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Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt in SICARIO
Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt in SICARIO

In the dark crime thriller Sicario, Emily Blunt plays a fierce and skilled FBI SWAT team leader. She’s battling Mexican narcos in Phoenix when her superiors give her the chance to “volunteer” for a mysterious anti-narco detachment with a cheerfully amoral leader (Josh Brolin). It’s unclear precisely from where, in or out of the US government, this group operates, and it includes an even more shadowy figure (Benicio Del Toro).  She’s seen a lot of bad things, but, almost immediately, she is shocked at what her new team is doing.

Sicario’s premise is that the only way to make a difference in the Drug War is to shake up drug suppliers by decapitating the major drug gangs – by any means necessary.   The good guys are fighting a Dirty War themselves.  Del Toro plays one of the most hardass movie assassins in recent cinema.

Sicario is directed by Denis Villeneuve, who also directed Incendies (my #1 movie of 2011), Enemy and Prisoners.  He has a gift for the plot-driven thriller.  While taut;y paced, the overall affect of Sicario is more brooding than frenetic, consumed by the inevitability of violence and death.

Sicario looks and sounds better than it is, having been photographed by Roger Deakins (12 Oscar nominations).  The desert borderland looks ominous as well as desolate.  And there’s a night vision scene that really pops.  The music by Jóhann Jóhannsson is unusually effective in enhancing the intense, dark and volatile mood.

I haven’t been thinking about Sicario afterwards, so it isn’t a great movie, but it’s definitively a well-made and effective crime drama.

Movies to See Right Now

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John Cusack and Elizabeth Banks in LOVE & MERCY
John Cusack and Elizabeth Banks in LOVE & MERCY

Next weekend, a couple of great choices are coming to Bay Area theaters – 99 Homes and Meet the Patels.  I’ll be writing about those next week. For THIS weekend, I suggest that you look to video with my DVD/Stream of the Week and a couple other streaming choices.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, the story of an extraordinarily gifted person’s escape from torment.  It’s on my Best Movies of 2015 – So Far.    Love & Mercy is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes and Vudu.

Joe Swanberg’s romantic comedy Digging for Fire is available for streaming from Amazon, Vudu, You Tube and Google Play.

She’s Funny That Way is just comic fluff, but it’s well-crafted fluff from master filmmaker Peter Boganovich;  it’s now available to stream from Amazon Instant Video, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Thanks again to Turner Classic Movies for playing the The Best Years of Our Lives on September 22, an exceptionally well-crafted, contemporary snapshot of post WW II American society adapting to the challenges of peacetime. Justifiably won seven Oscars. Still a great and moving film.

SHE’S FUNNY THAT WAY: comic fluff from a master

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Jennifer Aniston in SHE'S FUNNY THAT WAY
Jennifer Aniston in SHE’S FUNNY THAT WAY

The new comedy She’s Funny That Way from 75-year-old master filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich is a light-hearted diversion about the unlikely career path of an escort-turned-screen actress (Imogene Poots).  Bogdanovich is responsible for the screwball comedy masterpiece What’s Up Doc? and the grossly under-rated comedy romance They All Laughed.  So he knows knows how to choreograph mad cap moments.   There’s also an unexpected cameo at the very end, along with very funny end credits.

Along with Poots, Bogdanovich has attracted a top tier cast:  Owen Wilson, Rhys Ifans, Will Forte and Kathryn Hahn.   It’s especially welcome to see survivors of Bogdanovich’s 1970s oeuvre –  Cybill Shepherd, Tatum O’Neal and Austin Pendleton.

But the real revelation here – and the main reason to see the movie – is Jennifer Aniston’s turn as the most emotionally unhealthy therapist conceivable.  It’s written as an extreme character – absolutely no boundaries, utterly self-absorbed, dangerously resentful and completely unprofessional.  But Aniston’s performance is so full throttle that the audience delights every time her character comes on-screen.

She’s Funny That Way is just fluff, but it’s well-crafted fluff.  It’s is now available to stream from Amazon Instant Video, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.