Viceis the comic biopic of Dick Cheney by writer-director Adam McKay (The Big Short). Cheney is played by a physically transformed and unrecognizable Christian Bale.
McKay’s take is that Cheney’s driving motivation and genius is the accumulation and exercise of power – to whatever end and by whatever means. McKay also sees Cheney as a mediocre slacker molded and fueled by Lynne Cheney (Amy Adams), whose own ambitions were limited in the 1960s by her gender. So, this is a tale of ruthless grasping along the lines of Macbeth or House of Cards, only mostly non-fiction.
McKay drops in the horrifying real impacts of Cheney’s exercise of power, but this is mostly a very funny movie. Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney’s mentor in power-grabbing, and George W. Bush, Cheney’s stooge, are played for laughs in very broad performances by Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell. McKay also tosses in a funny faux ending and has Dick and Lynne, in bed for the night, erupt in Shakespearean dialogue. Jesse Plemons plays a fictional Everyman narrator.
Bale’s performance is extraordinary, and goes well beyond the impeccable impersonation, down to every Cheney mannerism – stoneface, sneer and grunt. Adams is excellent as his Lady Macbeth. So is the rest of the fine cast, especially Alsion Pil as lesbian daughter Mary, Tyler Perry as Colin Powell and Shea Whigham as Lynne Cheney’s probably murderous father.
Vice is pretty good history, biography from a sharp point of view and a damn entertaining movie.
Michael Shannon, the only reason to see NOCTURNAL ANIMALS
In the would-be-thriller-but-really-squirmer Nocturnal Animals, Amy Adams plays a young woman who becomes infatuated with the romance of being with a starving artist, the sensitive Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal). After the romance wears off, she dumps him for a higher testosterone model, the striving businessman Hutton (Armie Hammer). Twenty years later, she has become a successful art dealer with all the trappings of an affluent life, buy plunges into a midlife crisis. At this moment, Edward finally gets a novel published and sends her an advance copy. Shocked to see that it is dedicated to her, she starts reading it and becomes engrosses, which is exactly what Edward has intended.
Nocturnal Animals is the braiding of three plot threads: the story of the doomed romance between the young Susan and Edward, Susan’s current melodrama with Hutton and a reenactment of the plot of Edward’s novel. The novel’s story takes up most of the screen time. It’s a garden variety, but particularly grim, revenge story, with a man (also played by Gyllenhaal) whose family is high jacked in desolate West Texas by a crew of sadistic lowlifes with the very worst intentions. If you’ve ever seen a crime movie, you know what is going to happen to the guy’s wife and daughter. After an excruciatingly long menace-and-dread segment, Gyllenhaal escapes and stumbles into the potential for revenge, guided by the local detective (Michael Shannon).
If you’ve survived the squirming caused by the unremittingly and gratuitously uncomfortable kidnapping sequence, you’re in for a treat with Michael Shannon’s performance, which is really the only reason to see Nocturnal Animals. Shannon doesn’t make any unnecessary movements, which focuses us his piercing and unblinking eyes, which make clear that he is a particularly dangerous man. And, we learn, even more dangerous because he is a man without anything to lose.
Actually, though, Laura Linney is also superb as Susan’s mom, unrecognizable underneath a formidable Dina Merill bouffant. Linney actually gets the one sure thing LOL laugh line in the movie. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is also devastatingly despicable as the most sadistic and loathsome of the thugs. Adams, Gyllenhaal and Hammer are all fine, too.
This is the second movie from director Tom Ford, the fashion designer; it’s nothing at all like the his A Single Man, with its exploration of loneliness, grief and identity repression. Ford’s background in fashion probably informs some jokiness in Susan’s world of overly precious art dealers and silly avant garde “art”. But other than that, there really isn’t any humor to leaven the unpleasantness of the Gyllenhaal story.
The reason that Susan’s dumping of Edward is supposed to be so scarring is overblown, and I’m finding it has become an all too easy screenwriting device. (We’ve come a long way since Alfie in 1966.)
I should note that I think that I do GET this movie, with its layers of revenge and its comments on art. I just don’t think that the payoff is there. Nocturnal Animals will make for a solid $3.99 video rental so you can fast forward until you see Michael Shannon on the screen.
In Arrival, Amy Adams plays a linguistics professor at a Midwestern college who is drifting, having not recovered emotionally from the death of her child and the failure of her marriage. When space aliens come to earth (!) with very unclear intentions, she is deployed to figure out how to communicate with them.
Now if aliens (meaning living creatures in the universe who are not us) ever DO visit earth, I guarantee that we will be surprised at their appearance. I can’t imagine what they will look like, but they won’t look like the ones in The Day the Earth Stood Still, E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Here, Arrival hits a home run. These aliens don’t look how we would expect, they don’t sound like we would expect and they don’t communicate like we would expect.
More central to the story, the aliens don’t think like we do. For them, time is not linear, which adds the mystic element that defines Arrival. Will our linguist learn how to communicate with these advanced beings who don’t seem to have language as we understand it? Will she connect with beings that think in different (additional?) dimensions?
Arrival is directed by Denis Villaneuve, who made Incendies, rated at the #1 slot on my Best Movies of 2011, as well as the thrillers Prisoners, Enemy and Sicario. His skill at thrillers pays off in the scenes with the aliens, when we are constantly on the edges of our seats. The people are actually going INTO the alien spacecraft? Holy Moley!
I loved Amy Adams in Arrival, as I tend to do in everything she does. Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker and Michael Stuhlbarg are also solid. The Wife pointed out that Renner succeeds in an unusual movie role – a hotshot with a healthy ego who recognizes that someone else has the better idea and becomes collaborative. But Arrival is about the story, not the performances.
Arrival is real science fiction. So many so-called “sci-fi” movies are really just war movies, revenge dramas, survival tales or Westerns that are set in the future or in space. Fortunately, we have recently had some truly thoughtful sci-fi including I Origins, Her and, now, Arrival.
Every viewer will be transfixed by the first 80% of Arrival. How you feel about the finale depends on whether you buy into the disconnected-from-linear-time aspect or you just get confused, like I did.
Now here’s an amazing true story: those ubiquitous but creepy images of waifs with exaggerated eyes were created by painter Margaret Keane, but the credit for them – and income from them – were taken by her con man husband Walter Keane. In the entertaining Big Eyes, the couple is played by Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz.
Adams’ performance is perfectly tuned, so we can understand how Margaret could be charmed and bullied into such a disadvantageous situation. Waltz does a good job in the first two-thirds of the movie, when he depicts Walter’s charm and chutzpah; but his performance in the final third of the movie seems very broad. Big Eyes also features especially fun supporting turns by Danny Huston and Terence Stamp.
Big Eyes does a good job of illustrating the overt sexism of the pre-Women’s Lib 1950s. And the serious issue of domination and control in a relationship lurks in the background. But Big Eyes has been distilled down to a simplistic Good Gal/Bad Guy story.
Denizens of the San Francisco Bay Area will enjoy the familiar Bay Area locations, especially the recreation of North Beach in the Beat Era and Woodside in the Sunset Magazine 1960s.
Bottom line: Big Eyes is a satisfying audience-pleaser, but not a movie I’ll be thinking about tomorrow.
Why is American Hustle so gloriously entertaining? It’s certainly successful as a con man movie, as a 70s period piece and as a fast-paced (sometimes almost screwball) comedy. But I think the key is that writer-director David O. Russell develops such compelling characters – lots of them – and they’re so endearingly wacky, we just need to see what happens next. That’s the recipe he used in last year’s triumph Silver Linings Playbook (and in his under-appreciated 1996 Flirting with Disaster).
American Hustle opens with the wonderfully sly disclaimer “Some of this actually happened”, and then we see Christian Bale assembling the worst comb-over in cinematic history – and we’re hooked. The story follows the arc of the real-life Abscam scandal with the FBI forcing con artists to sting elected officials in an outlandish bribery-by-phony-sheik scheme. Bale plays an unattractive yet magnetic con man. Amy Adams is his tough and sexy partner. Bradley Cooper is their hyper-ambitious FBI handler.
As we would expect, Bale, Adams and Cooper are all fun to watch with this material. But Russell ‘s cast is very deep – the secondary and tertiary characters are just as fun. Jennifer Lawrence is a force of nature as Bale’s estranged wife, who takes passive aggressiveness to an entirely unforeseen level. Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) almost steals the picture as an extremely sympathetic and good-hearted local pol who doesn’t see what’s coming. And Louis C.K. is hilarious as Cooper’s put-upon boss; as he did so successfully in Blue Jasmine, C.K. plays the character completely straight and lets the material generate the laughs; many comedians make the mistake of trying to act funny in movie comedies, but C.K. has a real gift for the lethal dead pan.
American Hustle plants us firmly in the late 1970s with an especially evocative score and very fun costumes and hair. Besides Bale’s comb-over, we enjoy the tightly permed curls of Adams and Cooper, along with Lawrence’s Jersey updo. And Adams and Lawrence sport an unceasing series of dresses with severely plunging necklines.
Funny and gripping at the same time, with scads of movie stars at their very best, American Hustle is a surefire good time at the movies. American Hustle is now available on DVD frpm Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Why is American Hustle so gloriously entertaining? It’s certainly successful as a con man movie, as a 70s period piece and as a fast-paced (sometimes almost screwball) comedy. But I think the key is that writer-director David O. Russell develops such compelling characters – lots of them – and they’re so endearingly wacky, we just need to see what happens next. That’s the recipe he used in last year’s triumph Silver Linings Playbook (and in his under-appreciated 1996 Flirting with Disaster).
American Hustle opens with the wonderfully sly disclaimer “Some of this actually happened”, and then we see Christian Bale assembling the worst comb-over in cinematic history – and we’re hooked. The story follows the arc of the real-life Abscam scandal with the FBI forcing con artists to sting elected officials in an outlandish bribery-by-phony-sheik scheme. Bale plays an unattractive yet magnetic con man. Amy Adams is his tough and sexy partner. Bradley Cooper is their hyper-ambitious FBI handler.
As we would expect, Bale, Adams and Cooper are all fun to watch with this material. But Russell ‘s cast is very deep – the secondary and tertiary characters are just as fun. Jennifer Lawrence is a force of nature as Bale’s estranged wife, who takes passive aggressiveness to an entirely unforeseen level. Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) almost steals the picture as an extremely sympathetic and good-hearted local pol who doesn’t see what’s coming. And Louis C.K. is hilarious as Cooper’s put-upon boss; as he did so successfully in Blue Jasmine, C.K. plays the character completely straight and lets the material generate the laughs; many comedians make the mistake of trying to act funny in movie comedies, but C.K. has a real gift for the lethal dead pan.
American Hustle plants us firmly in the late 1970s with an especially evocative score and very fun costumes and hair. Besides Bale’s comb-over, we enjoy the tightly permed curls of Adams and Cooper, along with Lawrence’s Jersey updo. And Adams and Lawrence sport an unceasing series of dresses with severely plunging necklines.
Funny and gripping at the same time, with scads of movie stars at their very best, American Hustle is a surefire good time at the movies.
This ultimately unsatisfying film is a visual masterpiece with an extraordinary performance by Joaquin Phoenix. It’s also a brilliant depiction of alcoholism. But the story fizzles out like a spent Roman candle. With all of its achievements, it’s hard for me to imagine The Master pleasing more than the narrowest audience.
The story is about an emotionally troubled WW II vet (Joaquin Phoenix) who drifts through post-war America, leaving social carnage in his wake. His only success is in making moonshine out of available ingredients ranging from torpedo fuel to paint thinner. He happens upon the charismatic and manipulative author of a new path for seekers (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and the two men forge a bond. The leader enjoys the drifter’s moonshine and, when he needs a thug, harnesses the younger man’s rage. The drifter finds someone who seems to care about him, who offers a place and a sense of belonging.
Phoenix’s performance as Freddie Quell is one of the best of the century. Phoenix took some risks with the physicality of the performance, employing a hunch and a scowl that could have been too much, but instead help create a flawless performance. Freddie can stand quietly at the back of a room filled with people and fidget just enough so you absolutely know that he’s trouble.
Freddie is a damaged soul who self-medicates with alcohol. Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of his compulsion to drink and the inevitably unhappy (and sometimes lethal) consequences makes for one of the best ever movie portraits of an alcoholic.
(Two scenes of Freddie’s experience at a military hospital for battle traumatized vets are lifted directly from the brilliant John Huston documentary Let There Be Light, which I have written about and which you can watch for free on-line.)
Philip Seymour Hoffman is superb as the charismatic charlatan. Amy Adams and the rest of the cast give uniformly excellent performances.
Every single shot has been carefully composed, framed and photographed in especially beautiful 65 mm. The story takes place in the early 1950s, and every period detail is perfect. You could use any 100 shots from this film and make one glorious coffee table book.
The Master has been perhaps the years most awaited movie for two reasons. First, the Philip Seymour Hoffman character is inspired by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of controversial and ever litigious Scientology. But the movie is really the story of the young transient (Phoenix’s character), and the cult created by Hoffman’s character is merely the setting.
Second, it was written and directed by acclaimed filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson (Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood). Since the fun and accessible Boogie Nights, Anderson has been specializing in critically anointed films that are not that audience-friendly. This time, Anderson has done his best job of directing, but the movie fails because his screenplay peters out.
I would happily invest two hours and 17 minutes into a good story that looks this good and is about a character this compelling. In the first half of the movie, I was on the edge of my seat, wondering “What will Freddie do next and what will happen to him?”. Unfortunately, the last half of the film takes Freddie a few thousand miles with very little dramatic payoff. So, like a boat inexpertly tied to the dock, the movie drifts in and out and bangs against the pilings. This could have been a masterpiece, but you need a good story to make one of those.
There isn’t a surprising moment in Trouble with the Curve, but as predictable as it is, the fine performances and the setting in an often obscure part of the baseball world combine to make it an enjoyable time at the movies.
It’s a story about a dad-daughter relationship. The dad (Clint Eastwood) is a crusty geezer whose failing eyesight threatens his job as a Major League Baseball scout. The daughter (Amy Adams) is an overachieving, workaholic lawyer who is unsatisfied with a relationship that her dad keeps as superficial as possible. They are improbably forced together on a road trip.
Now you know that she is going to run the pool table at the hick roadhouse. You know that the unlikely kid will turn out to be the real MLB prospect. You know that the geezer’s insight will be proven right in the end. And you know that the daughter will find closeness with the dad and a new boyfriend along the way. As I said, there are no surprises.
Nevertheless, Eastwood and Adams are just perfect in their roles. Eastwood’s graveside monologue and song are particularly moving. Justin Timberlake and John Goodman are excellent, too. Matthew Lillard is dead on perfect as a frat boy turned know it all baseball exec.
And then there’s the baseball setting. The movie had me with the gaggle of elderly scouts traipsing through South Carolina from one high school baseball field to another, breaking each others’ balls at dive bars every night. The Wife, who does not lapse into baseball reverie, didn’t enjoy it as much.
The Fighter is an excellent drama, starring Mark Wahlberg as a boxer trying to succeed despite his crack addict brother (Christian Bale) and his powerful, trashy mom (Melissa Leo). As one would expect, Bale nails the flashier role of the addict, deluding himself about both past glories and his importance to his family. Leo is almost unrecognized under her teased hair, and is accompanied by a hilarious Greek Chorus of adult daughters, each trashier than the last.
The boxing scenes are very well done, and Wahlberg matches Stallone and Swank in making us believe that he is, indeed, a boxer. See my list of 10 Best Boxing Movies.
