Archive for category: Reviews

A very adult thriller from Hollywood – bravo, Ben Affleck! The danger was real and historical, yet there weren’t any conventional bad guys: the Iranians were shown to have full justification, in their minds if not ours, for their actions. The hostages were presented as unglamorous everyday people – in fact, their appearances uncannily matched their real-life counterparts. Washington bureaucrats were the other big obstacle, but their decisions, however cruel for these individuals, made sense in the larger picture. Affleck’s filming techniques and the intercutting with contemporary news reports added substantially to the realism, if recent events in Benghazi hadn’t already driven this home.
Then there was the comic relief: it would have been hard to believe the John Goodman/Alan Arkin sideshow if the Hollywood scenario hadn’t had a substantial basis in fact. Regardless, it was wonderful: I totally relax whenever Goodman is on the screen, and every one of Arkin’s zingers was hilarious. The slapstick of “Argo” melded with the suspense in Tehran to form a remarkably seamless and well-rounded whole. Holding it all together was Affleck, underplaying behind a beard. Why his character would take on this assignment was never explained, which was just as well for I probably wouldn’t have bought any explanation. The point is, he did it, and we could cry with pleasure because he did.
I do have quibbles: the airport scenes at the end larded on too many cliffhangers. Would the tickets come through, would the producers get to the ringing phone, would the rebels get to the control tower, would the racing Jeeps catch the taxiing plane? The realism that had been built up seemed to be tossed aside to manufacture even more intense suspense. By that point, though, the stakes were high enough, and I wish we could have been treated like adults for a few minutes more.

The Star Tribune called this a “must-see for serious film lovers and a challenge for everyone else” – and here I thought all along that I was a serious film lover. For me, this was one pointless scene after another: the ‘Master’ rides a motorcycle on the desert salt flats – to what end? the ‘Master’ is arrested for owing money(!) – but money is never mentioned again; the Disciple beats a critic to a pulp (or kills him?) – but the police don’t seem to notice. Nothing seems to string together; it’s all, “here is another scene.” Joaquin Phoenix is amazing as a drunken psychotic, to be sure, but I don’t relate to, or particularly enjoy watching, drunken psychotics. The other half of the relationship – and if the movie is about anything, it is about this relationship – is an unconvincing Philip Seymour Hoffman, more teddy bear than charismatic cult leader. The one interesting character is the wife, played with icy steel by Amy Adams, but it is not her movie.

It is very hard to make a convincing movie about corporate malfeasance or corruption. There are so many checks and balances and audits and committees. Richard Gere’s story in this Wall Streeter seem as implausible as Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s bike-riding in Premium Rush. One, of course, is reminded of Bernie Madoff and Tom Petters, but I’m not sure I’d believe a truthful movie about their lives to be believable either. Another problem with Arbitrage was that the numbers simply didn’t add up: the deal to sell his company to Graydon Carter wasn’t going to resolve the situation. One knew, from early on, that Gere’s character was screwed, and the main goal of the movie seemed to be painting a portrait of a mogul in decline. It was pleasant fun so far as it went, but that wasn’t very far.

For the first 15 minutes they take off their clothes, for the rest of the film they bare their souls. The conceit and the dialogue are very ’60s French, and I only caught on slowly that Quebec, not Marseille, was the location of the dingy apartment. I can’t say that anything profound or enlightening emerged from this one-night stand, but the movie’s effort at intimacy was hard-fought and honest. Mostly it was the simple beauty of Katherine DeLean that made our time spent together enjoyable.

One of those lucky documentaries that ran into a bigger story than the filmmaker could have anticipated – not that the largest house in America, the original story, wasn’t big. Instead, Lauren Greenfield wound up with a microcosm of the U.S. financial meltdown of 2008-09. Easy credit fueled David Siegel’s time-share empire and then brought it tumbling down. The shell of “Versailles” remained as a symbol of the housing bust that is still with us, years later. The movie’s miracle is that it manages to tell this story without moralizing: there are no villains onscreen (or heroes either, for that matter). Jackie, the titular queen, is clueless and tawdry, but not unsympathetic. She is never arrogant and doesn’t go around blaming others or feeling sorry for herself. We are left, mostly, with mouths agape, that there are people like this, that this is what our country has come to, and that a filmmaker could have been so close, watching this story unfold.