This bit of sour grapes is unseemly and written in what can only be called a snit fit. The result are grandiose claims that are supported only fairly pedestrian and hastily stated opinions. Kois operates from the assumption that "Boyhood" is a masterpiece, certified, no questions asked. It's not a masterpiece, as it lags and lumbers and and is at times near narcoleptic torpor as it goes on and on to create a saga about the small things that otherwise ordinary citizens confront over a period of time. It is, or course, daring, at times engaging, but never enthralling, in my view. It is an admirable piece of work, but awards should not be awarded merely because film makers were adventurous; the point of the Oscars , we are told, is to celebrate and make note of the best of what was written, filmed, acted, directed, scored, edited from the previous year. Movies that achieved their ambitions. "Apocalypse Now" was an absolute mess of a film, a beautiful mess in many ways, but a train wreck for coherence and sequencing. It was a horribly botched narrative, a string of grand standing scenes. I've watched it many times over the intervening years and enjoyed it, but over time I think the Academy used good judgement in denying it a Best Picture Oscar. I think it suffices to say that the film makers of 'Birdman" had solid ideas of their concept and created the means with which the layered meta-narrative can be brought to the screen. There is a control of the material and an elegant, innovative execution of ideas that "Boyhood" did not have, and "Apocalpyse Now" as well. What we had last night was that rare Oscar instance, the rewarding of high quality work. Kois can disagree with the decision, but using his platform to claim that this was the worst decision in the last twenty years of Oscar ceremonies just makes him sound hysterical, silly, trivial in his insight. This gives me no reason to read him again. As a public service, I reprint my initial review of "Birdman" below (also, I am too lazy to write about this film again).
This film is a about as meta-textual as it gets, concerning a actor named Riggan who, best known for portraying the cartoon super hero Birdman in three live action films, is attempting a comeback on broadway with a stage adaptation of a collection of Raymond Carver short stories, 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love".
The first inside joke, of course, is that star Michael Keaton was the first Batman in two Tim Burton versions of the DC icon, who had the oft circulated take away line "I'm Batman" when the Dark Knight introduces himself to the Gotham crime element. Keaton's character in this new film has a mind that is subdivided with conflict, a string of unresolved issues that force him to hallucinate greatly, not the least of which is a voice that rasps only to him "YOU'RE BIRDMAN", and which harshly chastises him for abandoning the super hero for the delusion that he could become part of the New York arts crowd. That's all a bunch of shit, the voice insists, and intrudes on the actor's private moments with more berating and demands that he give up this broadway charade and reclaim his one true calling , the man who is the definitive Birdman. The film, though, is quite a bit more than that, as it brings around a provocative stream of old associations, like an estranged daughter, an estranged daughter he's only recently reconciled with (if imperfectly), acting rivals , all of whom , between hallucinations, have wonderfully nuanced confrontations with Riggan and with each other on the irony latent in the countless attempts we make to rid ourselves of masks and present our true selves to things that matter most , such as marriage, rearing children, authentically gratifying work, only to realize that even the true self presented as evidence of no disguise is itself a mask, a disguise.
The conflicted Riggan is jerked about emotionally and has several instances where the hallucinations, the warring desires, take over and the film is transformed into yet another space, a surreal terrain of tall buildings, floating, spectacles that then dissipate as the conflicted hero emerges from his melodrama and attempts to finish what he's begun, the afore said adaptation for the screen. A fine cast of characters abound here, and a superlative roster of actors to bring their quirks and vulnerabilities to the screen; Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts are sublime and each of them have solidly written, deftly directed roles.
The mailman drops his parcels and falls to his knees in the middle of the street as a light comes through the clouds and makes the commotions of the city radiate gold tones like the frozen poses of ancient photographs found under the stairs of every parent’s house that aging children have to close. You see the mailman on his knees and wonder why he’s praying, hardly aware of the increase in light or the music that blares all the big band music of trumpets and saxophones that disguise the grind of passing cars, it’s such a shame that religious fanatics are hired to deliver the mail, you think, so much depends on what comes through the System, envelopes full of what’s owed and what’s not covered by any plan that can be written down; you run the water in the sink, you wonder where did the clouds go? There is no rain anywhere, says the radio announcer, and the light is tremendous all over the globe, there is not a dark corner in any corner or nook on the earth, And then the radio gives out to static, and the TV releases itself to snow, the music in the street is very loud and swinging hard to the left and the right and then right down the middle as all the notes scurry brilliantly through the hedges and up the driveways, into the homes with each reed instrument improvising disembodied melodies that form their own sheet music, That is a very loud set of speakers in that passing car, you think. and the radio announcer cuts through the music and says something you hear as that millions of people all over the world have just vanished in lain site under bright light and big bang music, gone in a wisp and puff of smoke, You look at your watch and note that it’s time for lunch, the clouds have fallen over the city again, the sky darkens, the shapes of the neighborhood take on their deep hues again, saddened with history, dense in dumb witness to what never ends, You stop, look out the window; you turn off the water you ran, in the middle of the street, by itself, flat on the cement, The mailman’s bag and his clothes, topped by his hat, kissed by a cool breeze.
Sam Andrews , the lead guitarist for Big Brother and the Holding Company and the only musician to come up with an instrumental equivalent to the scorched leather vocals of lead singer Janis Joplin, has died at the age of 73. His passing warrants a mention and brief appreciation of the sound he made on the frets. Andrews was not the greatest guitarist in the world, but he was part
of that Bay Area tradition where folkies had dropped their acoustic
guitars and picked up the electric ones, creating a style of
improvisation that was jarring, jagged, atonal, ham-handed, an organic
fusion of styles based in the blues but owing much to Indian classical
raga music. As with much of what typified the Sixties counter culture,
these young bohemians drew from the music the liked and listened to;
some had formal training, others did not, but there is a strong scent
of do-it-yourself in the over all style of Bay Area guitar soloing that
made it at once identifiable . Andrews was definitely one of the most
visceral of the players on the scene. Others like Hendrix, Clapton,
Winter were smoother, faster, more graceful in their execution, but the
likes of Andrews, John Cipollina (Quickseilver Messenger Service), Jorma Kaukonen(Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna), Barry Meltzer (Country Joe and the Fish) and
Leigh Stephens (Blue Cheer, the Destruction Derby version of a psychedelic band) had a distinct genius for delivering pulverizing ,
strident solos that veered toward a naive avant-gard niche. It was
energy and it was intense and , though often clumsy, it was powerful. I
spent hours listening to this stuff, loving every note of their
splintering cascades. His introductory solo to Big Brother and the Holding Company's version of Richard Roger's song 'Summertime" fairy much illustrates what I'm describing, which is say that it resembles a freak occurrence in the natural world, blind fury fused with a barely mastered vocabulary of the blues and other folk forms further amplified by technology that can only make what is fed to it a snarling, sparking fury, an air horn in the good hear, a cherry bomb in your pants.Clive Davis, legendary former head of Columbia Records where Big Brother was signed, wrote in his memoir that he played the band's version of the classic song for Rogers, who , Davis writes, was angry beyond consolation and stormed incensed from the office, vowing never to wrote another song. Best review ever, I think. Derek Baily and Robert Fripp would both have tea in the same room and smirk oddly while this solo played, I imagine. What would make those two smile even more widely is the fire bombing Andrews commits during his solo during Big Brother's version of Big Mama Thorton's "Ball and Chain." While Joplin effectively deconstructs the blues into a series of yowls and hungry, rasping gales, Andrews doesn't so much play guitar as much as force to make sounds heard only, til that instance , on the outer boundaries of sanity and bad taste. Terrible beauty.
Friday, February 6, 2015
SHADOWS IN THE NIGHT -- Bob Dylan
The so called Great American Song Book was a body of material written
specifically for singers who had better than average singing voices. One
needed to not only be able to "carry a tune", but have a
pleasant/intriguing/personable/tonally expressive quality to their
singing that would make the blend of singer and song a memorable one, or
at least one that entertained. Bob Dylan, from this stand point, is an
awful singer; his genius as a vocalist was constructed on the fact that
he blended his influences--rock and roll, blues, country, old timey
folk--and wrote his own songs. He created the opposite effect than the
ones regarding TGASB, which was rather than melodically nuanced songs
being joined with musically suave vocalists, Dylan's mirror image was
that of a ruffian, a street visionary, a man with shamanistic qualities
who was in touch with the wild spirit of poetry, especially the
surrealist sort, and sought to capture his visions in a neo-primitive
format. Smartly simple song structures and Dylan's bracing nasal sneer
made it clear that he didn't carry his tunes as forced them on you.
He
couldn't sing well, but he could dramatize. So we have this paradox with
"Shadows in the Night", a bad singer from a technical viewpoint taking
on songs that, from a technical stand point, are sophisticated to the
extent that expectations demand a vocalist who can actually hit the
notes correctly and do something stylish with them. The result here is
an awful , painful album to listen to. It's that simple. I am sure there
are subtly argued defenses of what's been done here. I don't buy the
apologies. I think less of what's been accomplished with this record and
more of what's been committed, as in sin, a crime, a horrible insult to
the brain. It's one thing for rock and pop singers noted for singing styles that even the most uninterested among our company can admit to having tuneful voices to attempt the classic songs of Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney, or a Tony Bennett. It's been interesting, if not always rewarding, to hear vocalists as diverse in approach and grit as Linda Ronstadt (good) to Rod Stewart (awful) to Pat Benatar (middling) try and wrap the gritty edge of their usual approach to a song around the sumptuous curves and segues of songs that beguiled radio and ballroom audiences in World War 2. It's become a career stunt for old rock and rollers to dig into the vaults and revive the songs their parents were listening to , something that no longer intrigues.
Dylan's approach might have been interesting had he done this album quite a long time ago, when the raggedness of his singing still had a bit of a range and Dylan was capable of remaining in pitch; one thinks that Dylan of the Seventies and the Eighties, with a voice that was more versatile than people like myself have admitted, could take the classic songs and truly and surely redefine their melodic and thematic essence. Dylan was not a great singer but he had genius as a vocalist, the same fleeting skill one regards Mick Jagger's work with. He could cajole, announce, exclaim, insinuate, and fashion an effective, reedy croon to dramatize, characterize a lyric. But that is not to be and one can only sigh over what might have been had Dylan attempted a project like this when he still had the equipment to make it credible. One can only wonder, and one is better off not suffering his dead, toneless rasp here.
Sometime back in the Seventies, Dick
Cavett introduced the late Rod McKuen on his show by quoting a critic's left handed
compliment regarding the writer's work, "The world's most understood
poet."That was not intended as praise , and anyone in the business of writing what's regard as serious poetry , whether a runny-nosed Beat or a hardened Modernist , would take a the description of their work being accessible as an accolade. Poetry in the 20th century had become increasingly odd and without noticable rules, a development that marked the work of many a genius poet at the time,but the facts is that fewer people read poetry as consumers of printed books, and fewer still seemed to understand what the new scribes were going on about.
And so, poetry became the new scripture and critics, in a sense , became the new priesthood, discoursing on texts that allow no conventional entry point in terms that were equally cryptic. McKuen dared to be direct , simple in language, easily understood, trafficking much of his writing career in maudlin , mawkish, garish sentimentality. It worked, to be sure, as he went off to conquer the publishing world, motion pictures, the music industry. It worked and he built a huge audience that did not read poetry nor had the slightest idea of of the medium's standards of quality might happen to be on any given day. He made a lot of money and in the making of his millions, he inspired young people, like myself, to become a writer myself. To be clear, it was a chorus of writers that got my fancy and stirred in me the desire to string words together and indulge in metaphor, not just the recently deceased McKuen. But McKuen was in the gallery of faces that had my attention . My tastes simply matured beyond what he was capable of writing about. Honestly, I had a man crush on him,so to speak, as a sensitive mid teen
desiring to express great things myself--he
was part of the collective of Dylan, Ginsberg, Eliot and Paul Simon
that made me want to say things that were significant in ways a reader
wouldn't expect.
McKuen did have a knack for slinging words--his much
anthologized poem "Camera" is good at the plain-speak verse later
adopted by the ever accessible likes of Billy Collins. The poem,
though, was clean and lacking the sentimentalism that made McKuen a
standing joke and, eventually, an overripe expression of every
unconsidered emotion. I
should clarify that I went the middle period Dylan/TS Eliot route in
poetry and came to prefer a more surreal and harder edge verse. The
change , of course, came around when I had some genuine emotional
upheavals and realized that experiencing , processing and recollecting
such events in the process of forming a real personality trying to
engage he world wasn't as simple as McKuen's McPoems would have us
think. Though I harbor a soft spot for him, I think his "poetry", such
as it was, was indefensible on any grounds as verse. It scratched those
places before you had an itch. I hate to seem harsh, but his writing was
slick and it was awful. Now and again he could write a few lines that
were acceptable because they weren't dripping with the goo of his
onerously bathetic persona, but he'd soon enough lard up his line
breaks with a defiantly defeatist attitude ---lost again at love, ah
sigggghhhh)--and would have us believe that he spent decades turning up
his collar and walking the San Francisco water front in the rain and
fog, looking for bar to nurse his pain at. Though he was an influence on
me as a writer, I consider his writing everything that's wrong with the
idea of expression for its own sake.
_______________________ I'm not as interested in feeling sympathy for the character or having an emotional stake in their success as I am in whether the film makers keep me interested in how the activities and motivations converge to a satisfying end. Or at least one that makes sense in unexpected ways; to varying degrees both Nabokov and Updike accomplish this in their stronger novels--"Pale Fire", the "Rabbit" quartet, respectively-- and the inspection of how witless self-regarding imbeciles custom design their machinery of their own destruction is a difficult and rare hallmark for the truly subversive comedy. Coen brothers Joel and Ethan understand the need for the distance from the goings on of the chronic stupidity in "Burn After Reading" so that that their only agenda is imagine what echos in the deepest recess of any of these people's minds while they compound their ignoble fates with layers of strip-mall hubris. What the Coens do with unlikeable characters seeking their own glory isn't an easy thing to accomplish--Brian DePalma managed to turn Tom Wolf's crotchety (albeit readable) novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities" into a loose, baggy monster of a film (to paraphrase Henry James)that demonstrated no flair for comic rhythm. Had the Coens been in charge of that novel, we'd most likely be praising them as we had for their work in "No Country for Old Men", making note of their sharp eye for damning detail and skewed dialogue, and their effective use of an attentive if disengaged tone.
Robert Christgau said it back in 1969, reviewing his album "OUTRAGEOUS":
"....Fowley is such a gargantuan shuck that he ought to be preserved in a time capsule. .."
That line has stuck with me and characterized Fowley for decades and now it comes full circle where we have an opportunity examine how the Sixties counter culture produced marginal sorts who were happy to have a niche somewhere in the music greatness others, and those like Charlie Manson who wanted to change to change the world into a larger version of their insane selves. It was a crap shoot either way, and lucky for us Fowley wasn't as crazy as he pretended to be. It's always been my impression that Kim Fowley preferred you spoke about him in the past tense when you were in his presence, the closest and quickest thing he can have to his desire was to eaves drop on his own funeral.
Only a fool too fast of tongue of slow to truth would argue that Fowley didn't have some kind of observable genius in the happenstance of his life. He was an Ezra Pond sort his era, someone with a smattering of talent themselves who had a more acute instinct for the large talent of others . It can be a tedious thing to hash through a again, but it bears repeating that Fowley's greatest masterpiece was creating a series of performance oriented personas, all of the extreme, gaudy, tacky, neurotic and, rather desperate in their attempts to equal the art being produced by artists he was attracted too. Fowley was someone who,like thousands of others at the time, were trying to berserk themselves into genius who, despite hard work and an unblinking commitment to the mask he was wearing,never convinced anyone that there was anything there but an egocentricity that was oddly ingratiating Fowley , I suspect, knew that we were onto his game from the get go and let it remain as such. Fowley was someone who wanted to leave his mark on history and didn't quite much care what damage to his reputation he suffered in doing so. It wasn't damage at, I think he'd have explained to us, since this was a reputation he was reputation he was creating in place of one that didn't exist in the first place. What he wanted was to be known, to be creative, to be a part of the throng at the higher creative plain. He wanted to leave his mark on history, not change it, not destroy it, not change to course of things to come. His desire was to be in the perennial now of whatever was intense at the musical time and space and to have a sufficient version of his cover story to accompany. He man who lived his life in the present tense. What is remarkable is that he remained in the game as long as he did. Fowley was a fake, which was the source of authenticity. He decided to "act as if..." and never stopped acting.I regard Fowley's whole life as being something like Kafka's Hunger Artist; the man who refuses to eat draws a crowed around him and it's that artist's job to keep the crowd distracted while maintaining his cover. Fowley kept the mask on but remained an approachable anomaly . No easy thing to do.
Now is the time of year when we are glutted with lists extolling the best and worst happenstances of the year gone by and there is, after one or two lists of verbal fireworks in the form of inapt metaphors, inept similes, and indiscreet opinions about the personal lives of actors, directors and writers one has never met, it all becomes a persistent noise in the background, like the sprinkler system the spurts on through the day and into the night at the house next door. All the opinions about best and worst movies, spoken at a pitch that nears hysteria and utter, complete, incalculable irrational .
Pretty much everyone has a the same views on the same films, and the best any of us can do is play around with the wording, scramble the choices as to what column they fall into, yay or nay, perhaps do something "daring" by including what we, who collectively regard ourselves individuals with refined tastes and idiosyncratic smarts, select an obscure movie that very few of one's tent-pole addicted brethren would have recognized. In that last instance, a fine argued case for a movie no one you know personally has seen leaves with the duty to over explain the films context , style , and of breaking the news that there are people in capes, no super powers, no destruction of a major American city.
Trust me, I have tried that ploy, I have tried to enlighten the masses with my peculiar selections for the latest and greatest films to be made and released in the 365 days now behind us. It's a grim lesson. Well, not grim, just depressing in a minor key: no knew what I was talking about, nor cared. But the joy of these lists is that it is a grand excuse to hear yourself write , construct absurdly long sentences and make like a dime store Mencken and toss a bit of snark to the rubes and rubettes who are just passing by the soda fountain.
In any case, my best films of 2014:
1.NIGHTCRAWLER: I've already sung praises and lavished ham-fisted metaphors enough on this film, but it bears repeating that Nightcrawler is one of those debut films from a newly minted director, in this case seasoned screenwriter Dan Gilroy, where everything a solid,tense, noirish thriller ought to do. Gilroy has assembled a crackerjack cast and proceeds with a tale of a marginal character , a petty thief with disturbingly skewed frame of mind, who stumbles onto the world of "nightcrawlers", the freelance videographers who respond to police calls and film the worst of what happens in a city like Los Angeles after dark; murders, car crashes, fires, assorted human tragedy.
The film resembles, in theme, Martin Scorsese's masterpiece Taxi Driver, but this film is wholly his own and Gilroy establishes his own personality on this thriller. Los Angeles is seen mostly at night, a tarnished jewel glistening in the distance as we view it from the dank, shadowy vantages of service alleys, side streets rolling down dry, cottage dotted hills, the rooftops of slum neighborhoods. The camera placements and the editing are sublime; Michael Mann, himself a master of interpreting L.A. after dark, would find much to admire in this vision. Jake Gyllenhaal as Louis Bloom, the titular nightcrawler, has a field day with his twitchy character who speaks and reacts in phrases and ways that make you think of someone who hasn't a center of being but is rather playing a role for the moment that will be sustained until it stops working, a moment after which anything can happen. Nightcrawler kept me rapt. A fine thriller, wonderfully done, splendidly acted.
2.BIRDMAN: This film is a about as meta-textual as it gets, concerning a actor named Riggan who, best known for portraying the cartoon super hero Birdman in three live action films, is attempting a comeback on broadway with a stage adaptation of a collection of Raymond Carver short stories, 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love". The first inside joke, of course, is that star Michael Keaton was the first Batman in two Tim Burton versions of the DC icon, who had the oft circulated take away line "I'm Batman" when the Dark Knight introduces himself to the Gotham crime element. Keaton's character in this new film has a mind that is subdivided with conflict, a string of unresolved issues that force him to hallucinate greatly, not the least of which is a voice that rasps only to him "YOU'RE BIRDMAN", and which harshly chastises him for abandoning the super hero for the delusion that he could become part of the New York arts crowd. That's all a bunch of shit, the voice insists, and intrudes on the actor's private moments with more berating and demands that he give up this broadway charade and reclaim his one true calling , the man who is the definitive Birdman. The film, though, is quite a bit more than that, as it brings around a provocative stream of old associations, like an estranged daughter, an estranged daughter he's only recently reconciled with (if imperfectly), acting rivals , all of whom , between hallucinations, have wonderfully nuanced confrontations with Riggan and with each other on the irony latent in the countless attempts we make to rid ourselves of masks and present our true selves to things that matter most , such as marriage, rearing children, authentically gratifying work, only to realize that even the true self presented as evidence of no disguise is itself a mask, a disguise. The conflicted Riggan is jerked about emotionally and has several instances where the hallucinations, the warring desires, take over and the film is transformed into yet another space, a surreal terrain of tall buildings, floating, spectacles that then dissipate as the conflicted hero emerges from his melodrama and attempts to finish what he's begun, the afore said adaptation for the screen. A fine cast of characters abound here, and a superlative roster of actors to bring their quirks and vulnerabilities to the screen; Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts are sublime and each of them have solidly written, deftly directed roles.
3.GONE GIRL: "Gone Girl", for all the intimidating hype, is a terrific piece of work, deftly, skillfully, subtly directed by the increasingly estimable David Fincher ("Fight Club", "Zodiac", "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"). Without going into plot detail and risk spoiling the film for others, lets say here that this is an intricate thriller, a murder mystery or sorts, a black comedy, a tale that evolves from a sort of "Peyton Place" situation of inane passion and betrayals but begins to morph into a taut, edgy thriller and into a dark, bleak comedy. As I said, this is a tale with lots of detail and surprises, but Fincher has a master's control of the material--use of flashbacks and shifting from points of view add texture and bring you in further into this seductive drama-comedy. We do not lose our place anywhere in the telling.
4.FINDING FOR VIVIAN MAIER: I saw this film and was thoroughly engrossed. Vivian Maier is such an enigma that she may well inspire continued speculation as to her personality and motivations as her renown grows.She was a housekeeper by trade, someone born in the United States yet feined a foreign accent and fictionalized her background, a woman without an observable social life of her own, an intensely private person who worked for several employers for several years a piece but about whom they couldn't recollect much at all. She was, though, a superbly gifted photographer who had a camera always at the ready where ever she went, taking a picture with an old, conspicuous camera when ever an image, a face, a spontaneous arrangement of objects presented themselves to her. She was a master of the art, as the film reveals in a generous representation of her photography.
The mystery of Vivian Maier unfolds with the discovery of literally thousands of undeveloped rolls of her photos at an estate sale; the purchaser of the photos processes some rolls and is flabbergasted as to the high quality of the work. Who took these photos? Why are so many rolls left undeveloped and nearly lost forever? Who is Vivian Maier and what compelled to live a life as a house servant when she had talent that equaled, on her own terms, the best work of photographers of great fame and praise.
This is a fascinating film, a discovery and appreciation of previously unknown master of photography, but also a mystery story. More is revealed about Maier, but the more we learn about her, the more questions we are inspired to ask. Her black and white photography are simply stunning and really do, as the experts in the film insist, match up with the best photographers of the period. It's an engrossing documentary on a fascinating subject.
5.GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL:Wes Anderson's deadpan absurdity works again. If you're an Anderson, you get the humor and the genre mashups the director brings to the screen: there is something quaint , lovely but a bit frayed into the worlds he to let his imagination move into for a period, while we're laughing at the off- kilter rhythms of the laugh lines and admiring his remarkable sense of art design, there's a sinister world lurking underneath the universe of his whimsical creations.
John Wick
6.JOHN WICK: A terse and true addition to the "payback's a bitch" genre, Kennau Reeves as the titular character, a hit man who has retired from his trade and is in a state of grieving over his dead wife until he is, well, fucked with by the son of the State side Russian mob. We know what happens next, with John Wick digging up the tools of his trade, the idea being like that of "Shane" where the former gun fighter takes his guns out of the saddle bag, and prepares a one man assault against a massive crime organization. It's been done to death, seemingly , premise that is the mark of a straight to video Steven Segal film, but co-directors Chad Stahlski and David Leitch keep this film tightly reined in, efficiently introducing a couple of new ideas here and there, but mostly sticking close to the idea that makes the genre so compelling, that the bad guys, despite their advantage in numbers and fire power, are going to pay for the sins they've committed with their lives. To cut to to the chase, this film works because it's a stylish and unapologetic shoot-em-up; the close quarters gun fights here are enthralling and show a strong influence of Hong Kong martial arts films. As with the exquisite movements in the combat scenes in the Christopher Bale science fiction thriller "Equilibrium", we have a fine illusion here that gun play can , like sword play , be artful, suggestive of dance. It's nonsense , of course, but there is something to be admired with the aesthetic the film makers brought to this violent enterprise and how well they pulled it off. Reeves, rest assured, has his Disney robot mannerisms put to good use here.
7.CAPTAIN AMERICA:WINTER SOLDIER: I am just a bit tired of the Mavel Universe, but Captain America continues to be a fun project. In this case, the bastards at Hydra turn out to be everywhere and the Captain finds himself neck deep in the dark world of conspiracy and secret agendas. This is one property I hope Marvel doesn't lard up with too much noise from the rest of the MCU. The Captain needs movies that can stand apart from the confusion that is already ruining what was once a font of good fun.
8.LIVE, DIE, REPEAT (EDGE OF TOMORROW): Really, this movie should have been a hit, an inspired take on the eternal-recurrence theme of "Groundhog's Day" ; instead dealing with a romantic comedy as the motivation for the activity to follow, we have an alien invasion and the fate of the Earth dependent on the exits and re-entrances on one precise and critical moment in time. Bad title, terrible re-titling, poor marketing, all of which is a shame considering that was the best science fiction movie of the year and was artfully efficient in all departments: taut, well acted, sweetly edited, all elements, from exposition to special effects, in line with enhancing the excitement.
Nightcrawler, the directorial debut of screenwriter Dan Gilroy , is akin to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver in it's close observance of titular characters of no observable depth of integrated personality who improvise their world views and philosophies on the fly. The shred goal of the men in both of these films is that they are at the frayed ends of the society they live, seeking either to have it fit and serve their erstwhile agendas or disrupt, disturb and injure in some fashion that comes with a warning. In Taxi Driver
Robert DeNiro plays a sociopath who transfers his feelings of impotence
and inadequacies onto the oppressive demands of the consumer culture;
driving a cab through New York at night, he roams among the hookers,
pimps, drug dealers who he finds disgusting and nurses an
attraction-repulsion with those he perceives as rich and powerful , a
class he wishes to both be a part of and wishes to destroy as well.
Feeling that he's been dealt the rawest hand possible by powers on high,
he vaguely plots to make something happen, something that would both
change the way things are and define him as someone to be noticed and
respected. In the course of Taxi Driver, effectively maneuvered
by director Scorsese , Travis Bickle, DeNiro's emotionally unassimilated
character, morphs from a sad and comic figure to someone who becomes
menacing; the feeling that something will eventually , sooner than
later, go wrong with this scenario is unavoidable.
Nightcrawler is
another cool, restrained, artful study of a marginal personality
attempting with their self-invented methods to define himself in a world
that knows him not. Jake Gyllenhaal is a petty thief named Louis
Bloom who hustles his way into the world of being a free lance news
videographer, the sort of dude who waits in his car ,listens to a police
scanner awaiting the announcement of a bloody auto accident, a robbery,
a murder, plane crash and then responds so that he can film it and
sell the morbid footage to a local news channel. Gyllenhaal has, like
DeNiro, a sort of charisma that he oozes and applies effectively in the
role, a wide smile, wide, attentive eyes and a patter borrowed from
self-help books and on line encyclopedias. This a beautifully shot
movie, a grand picture of Los Angeles after dark, with sharply drawn
contrasts; the color scheme is gorgeously dark and makes the city's
nocturnal side, shot from hill tops, side streets, alley ways and four
ways stops, glisten even still like a display of expensive diamonds.
Gyllenhaal's character is, to be sure, a sociopath, someone of no real
concerns for the world other than his ability to negotiate a better
position for himself; as the character rises in his new profession of
filming the bloodiest events after hours , we witness him manipulate,
twist, apply his creepily persuasive talk to gain his way. He displays a
mastery of his character that is unnerving to see unfold, where
different situations we see him learning how to coax responses he
prefers to come from people, going from botched negotiations when trying
to get a price he wants for stolen metal material , to getting low
balled on a price when he sells his bike to a pawnbroker.
He
learns from his mistakes by obsessively analyzing the words he chose in
those situations and scours the internet courses to study research about
human behavior and taking business classes where he appears most
impressed by the lessons that instruct him in strong, goal oriented
business language. His life becomes dedicated to a business plan that he
has adopted as a philosophy and perhaps a substitute for a moral
compass; when confronted with objections , protests and criticisms of
his rationale and activities and results of plans that hadn't gone well,
Gyllenhaal responds with a firm, calm response that is denial couched
in the rhetoric of mass market motivational books.
The effects
are frequently comic , as the character baffles and bamboozles others,
but there is a sense of thing culminating in an oncoming catastrophe.
Gilroy, directing his own script, has a the right touch for establishing
the growing sense of unease; even as the story accelerates and the
danger becomes more intensely presented, the film is steady in the
pacing; there is the sense that your watching an accident about to
happen and there is nothing you can do to stop it. A large part of the
horror is when he we realize that we are watching a man who is without
compunction, remorse, or any sense of moral right or wrong. He is a
monster, a real monster, with no agenda other than achieving his ends.
This is a fine motion picture, wonderfully filmed, acted, edited. One
looks forward to more movies from Dan Gilroy.
Joe
Cocker had a voice that was rust and whiskey through and through, a
soulful rasp and a bellicose roar that could make a songwriter's lyric
seem to surrender a greater hurt, a greater passion, a more profound ache than mere definitions and vocaliizations, now matter how ardent, would
usually reveail. There was something nearly cartoonish in his take
on the blues-shouter tradition, the area of gospel-informed geniuses
Ray Charles, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin came from and changed the
way pop singers regarded singing.
Where his influences had mastered
their technique and honed their emotions to suit the timbre, pitch and
range of their voices, and learned the subtle art of varying the use of
the shout, the rasp, the corrosive croon, the melismatic technique of
stretching words and even elongating syllables within words to suggest
the tonal groans, cries and whispers of a human voice connected to
unambiguous pain and joy, Cocker tossed much of that out the window when
he came to the microphone and let loose a hard, blistering , sustained
rage ; his voice was like one large gun aimed at a wall of hard
experience, each bunker busting shell intended to blow it all to hell.
He wasn't going to tell you about his experiences, he seemed intent to
make you live them .
It was raw, unnerving, exhilerating, unsullied in
it's prickly graininess even when he did the most treacly material. In
his his best moments, his bracing presentation of self was a thing of
wonder that stayed in your memory a lifetime.
In discussing the collapse of plot, coherence, and inspiration on the last legs of the HBO newsroom drama The Newroom ,Slate magazine asks the question if creator and principle writer Aaron Sorkin forgot how to write a television drama . After recounting structural and themetic problems with his post West-Wing work , their answer is "yes". I prefer to think that Sorkin hasn't forgotten what he did so well on the acclaimed Sports Night and WW so much as he doesn't care. He certainly hasn't forgotten how to write , as his writing on the superb motion pictures Charlie Wilson's War and The Social Network showed he could create his self-styled "sound of intelligence" with the pacing, phrasing and character development that makes his hyperactive dialogue believable and occasionally exhilarating. His was the smart, snappy, quick witted conversation that combined book smarts and a trained ear for the idiomatic expression, a gift Sorkin in his best writing shares with , say, Emore Leonard and David Mamet; there was verbal fireworks that left you dazzled and quoting favorite bits days later. Sorkin retains the skill to make the facts sexy, dynamic, the grounds for dialogue that sometimes brilliant in the way it becomes a tone poem of intellectual awareness and petty chatter. It seems, though, the writer needs matters that he cannot change, IE history, to keep his tendency toward nuclear effusion in check.
Both those films, though, were based on actual events and people and although it's obvious that Sorkin took liberties with the historical accounts he was restrained by vetted fact; his plot outline was presented to him . What he demonstrated was a wonderful knack to dramatize, enhance recent events and social trends. For television, though, his sense of plotting is herky-jerky and the dialogue, especially on show premised on a work situation that should have been ideal for imagined smart talk, a newsroom, came off as a sort of cold virtuosity an uninspired musician resorts to in the belief that how fast one plays (or in Sorkin's case, how fast one talks) is a measure of genius and artistic grit. It isn't. There isn't any conversation, so called, in 'The Newsroom" that I found memorable or worth quoting days later. As has been pointed out, the effortless command of facts, figures, the arts, history, statistics and the general ability to sound like a chipmunk while punching out a Foghorn Leghorn quality of eloquence made you aware of how impatient , angry and unrealistically confrontational the characters were; there was serious blockage happening that only a gruesome disaster could resolve.
