Wolfishly Devilish: Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street.

Movie Review: The Wolf of Wall Street

Director: Martin Scorsese

Reviewed: 26 April 2014

jamesintexas rating-- ***1/2

An aerial shot from a camera that must be mounted on a helicopter swoops over the ocean about ninety minutes into the film flying towards a glorious yacht with about one hundred people dancing and swaying in unison like a choreographed musical number. The camera zooms in closer, and we see Leonardo DiCaprio as our protagonist, leading this improbable circus parade of mayhem over the strains of "Insane in the Membrane."  It is one of several breathtaking moments that occurs when Martin Scorsese returns to form, tying back the world of Goodfellas, Casino, and even The Departed as he chronicles the rise and fall of stock broker Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, an ambitious and dazzling film that features top acting, incredible editing, and a relevance to modern day headlines.  Jordan at one point helpfully tells us that what occurs at his firm is nothing comparatively. I reference Goodfellas and Casino because Scorsese focuses on the underbelly of the American Dream by examining outsiders who want in, people willing to gain money and power through the most outrageous of ways: the Lufthansa heist; building a golden city out of the desert; and manipulating stock prices to gain huge dividends. Those films along with Wolf feature the rise and fall of an American empire, a family of criminals devoted to each other until . . . well . . . things fall apart.

However, The Departed, a more recent Scorsese film, came to mind even more strongly as I watched this film. Jack Nicholson's famous monologue from the opening of the film comes to mind: "They told us we could be cops or we could be criminals.  But when you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?" And besides being a post-9-11 treatise on betrayal, The Departed examines a pairing of men (one a criminal, one a cop; both posing as the other) and how remarkably similar they are. What truly does separate good from evil? Scorsese poses this question again in The Wolf of Wall Street after stock broker-messianic leader Jordan Belfort, a man who when spit out by Wall Street returns with a vengeance by building his own firm of miscreants and ne'er-do-wells pushing penny stocks on the unsuspecting, and gullible, realizes that his wedding video has been subpoenaed by the F.B.I. Realizing that he is under investigation, Belfort invites his adversary Agent Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler) to his yacht docked in Manhattan. What happens next is perhaps the quietest and finest scene in a movie filled with look-at-me moments. Decked out in regal clothing, sipping champagne on the deck, Belfort lets Denham know that he could be of use to him both professionally and personally. He lets Denham know that he knows of his past desires to be stock broker. He tempts Denham. And the work between Chandler and DiCaprio is topnotch in the scene, as each actor plays the reversal and revelation quite well, and it does not hurt that there is a physical resemblance between them. Denham could be Belfort. The description of his sweaty Subway ride home could not be farther removed from Belfort's yacht or helicopter or private limo. The scene ends wonderfully, a harbinger of things to come, with fun coupons and thrown lobster. Things fall apart.

Rounding out this weird and depraved jungle of wild-eyed capitalists are great performances from Matthew McConaughey as an early mentor, a schlubby Spike Jonze as the Long Island broker who plants a seed in Jordan's mind, and Jonah Hill as an intensely loyal underboss with a love for excess and a connection to Steve Madden shoes. Jonah Hill is impossible to take your eyes off here as Donnie Azoff with his shiny teeth, thick glasses, and hilarious line readings. I think it might be Hill's best performance, an equal achievement to his work in Moneyball. And DiCaprio is at his finest here: physically committing to the ridiculousness of the role, pounding his chest and hitting his forehead with a microphone, bullying customers over the phone, and showing the depths of Belfort's corruption by the end. Is there any actor who could play Calvin Candie, Jay Gatsby, and Jordan Belfort all in about 18 months? Leo remains one of the most exciting actors of our time, making choices that are always interesting, even if it is trying to open a car door with his foot.

I loved the supporting cast with many familiar faces all delivering strong work. At times, the film seems to look at us and marvel at itself: See how shocking I am trying to be? But much of it works quite well, and the film may be the funniest of the year as well. At nearly three hours, the film flies by, and though simultaneously sickening and exhilarating, Scorsese's film points the camera at the audience by the end, making us implicit in our enjoyment of Jordan's excess while also very aware that getting rich quick is always on our minds. In The Departed, Leonardo DiCaprio's character quotes Nathaniel Hawthorne with "Families are always rising or falling in America," and Belfort proves adroit at both actions as well as the art of survival. And a closing shot of bedraggled Agent Denham on the subway set to a Lemonheads cover version of "Mrs. Robinson" has us looking victory in the face, in all of its shabbiness with a version of a great song that isn't nearly as good as the original: "Every way you look at it you lose."

Hang It Up: The Hangover Part III

Movie Review: The Hangover Part III

Director: Todd Phillips

Reviewed: 5 April 2014

jamesintexas rating-- Zero Stars

Sequels can have diminishing returns and in the case of The Hangover Part III, it completely destroys any fondness for these characters and their anarchic energy. Although not as intellectually sloppy as its predecessor which merely copied the first film's premise in Bangkok, The Hangover Part III is worse than the sequel because it commits the worst sin a comedy can commit.  It is simply not funny.

Everyone is back from Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and Ken Jeong to Heather Graham and Baby Carlos, but the film feels inert and stagnant. The plot involves an attempt to take Alan to rehab after an unfortunate incident with a giraffe and a highway overpass, but then it detours to connect us with John Goodman's scheming criminal enemy of Chow who recruits the Wolf Pack to do his biding. No one shines here, and the set pieces are not memorable. Every laugh rings hollow, and even the great Melissa McCarthy, a national treasure, delivers a flat performance.

I'm sure this film made quite a bit of money, and I'm sure that it was fun to make, but it just seems loveless and stale. The first film rang with laughs and absurdity, perhaps never improving upon the moment they all wake up in the hotel room after the debauched night. This film is not worthy to share its name.

Cop Land: Star Cast with Nonsensical Plotting

Movie Review: Cop Land

Director: James Mangold

Reviewed: 4 April 2014

jamesintexas rating-- **

An achievement in casting, James Mangold's Cop Land assembles a marvelous assemblage of actors, places them in the impossibly brilliant scenery overlooking Manhattan from across the river in New Jersey, and then saddles them to a moribund plot that results in sloppiness. In the film, Cop Land refers to a New Jersey town bought by NYC police officers through a special dispensation, and it serves as a sort of haven for them away from the job. The city sheriff is Freddy (Sylvester Stallone), a lovable loser type who is walked all over by everyone and is half-deaf as a result of a heroic act in his youth. When a police incident on the bridge separating New York from Cop Land results in headline-grabbing attention, Freddy begins to slowly wake up from his slumber, investigating suspicious activity, and conference with Internal Affairs officer (Robert DeNiro).

The film uses Ray Liotta, Harvey Keitel, Robert Patrick, and a cast of recognizable faces in the execution of an unwieldy story with too many strands and a terrible ending. I thought the last fifteen minutes defied so much logic that it was stunning. The idea of Cop Land is a good one; the reality is that it is a film that is really a mess.

Swagger and Bombast: Winding Refn's Bronson

Movie Review: Bronson

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Reviewed: 4 April 2014

jamesintexas rating-- ***

Thomas Hardy is an unqualified star, and as Great Britain's most notorious prisoner, the eponymous self-titled Bronson, he shines in muscular glory, sheer bravado, and complete fearlessness. For whatever faults the film may have as a whole, the lead performance cannot be faulted: Hardy stalks the screen like a tiger, ferocious and anarchic. With obvious debts to A Clockwork Orange, Winding Refn structures the film unusually with its lead character as circus ringleader, complete with strongman mustache too impeccable to be believed, addressing the audience directly as well as an imagined theater full of tuxedoed personages. I found myself swept up in its kinetic storytelling early on, and its spell did not break until Bronson finds himself trapped in a mental institution about 45 minutes into the film. Bronson's stints in prison, the result of a minor offence, result in a sort of institutional madness and pugnaciousness that result in a frothing, naked, bloody Bronson taking on all of his captors battle royale style as much as possible (resulting in eventual and excessive solitary confinement).

I enjoyed the disjointed structure of the film, the color palette used by Winding Refn, and the sneering lead performance. Where I found myself wanting more insight into the lead character's psychology as well as a greater social context. Without it, the film seems incomplete and demands further study of this real-life character. There is enough here to recommend it, but I think its ambition and losing of its way prevent it from greatness.

An American Horror Story: 12 Years a Slave

Movie Review: 12 Years a Slave

Director: Steve McQueen

Reviewed: 22 March 2014

jamesintexas rating-- ****

Solomon Northup's journey from the freedom of Saratoga Springs, NY to the degradation of slavery in 1841 Louisiana takes a Hitchcockian concept (the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time) and adapts it into a harrowing true American horror story. Solomon, a free man, found himself kidnapped and pressed into slavery, lost to his family and to the world that he knew. Director Steve McQueen masterfully constructs an enveloping, compressed tone and unforgettably naturalistic mis-en-scene, and in this film's narrowness and precision, he achieves something quite remarkable. 12 Years a Slave has a transcendent power in its performances, screenplay, and overall relentlessness. I have simply never seen a film like it.

Slavery poisons all involved in its depraved logic. There are swindlers who lie to Solomon to get him to travel to Washington D.C. for a purported traveling music show, and his trust makes him vulnerable. There are rapacious businessmen who examine slaves like animals at market, selling them to the highest bidder, swiftly separating families and forever destroying lives. There are ferocious overseers intent on squeezing backbreaking labor out of their property, reading to mete out violent responses to any perceived slight. There are masters of the planation, often times drunk with power and occasionally capable of mercy. McQueen zooms in on Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) at several moments of the film, moments that punctuate his own attempts to survive the most horrible of circumstances. These shots often focus on Ejiofor's face, conveying the pain and the turmoil of his experiences, and McQueen often lets the shot linger for thirty, forty-five, even sixty seconds. Moments like these naturally make an audience uncomfortable, desirous of a cut or release from the intensity, and McQueen has his form reflect his content and keeps us on the hook. Ejiofor is the heart of nearly every scene of this film, and this performance is his finest yet. Michael Fassbender's performance as malevolent slave owner Edwin Epps represents another dimension of that fine actor's capability: Epps is filled with self-loathing, drunken cruelty, and sordid justification for his actions, especially when called to account by Bass, a visiting laborer (Brad Pitt, in the only discordant moment of the film). Lupita Nyong'o infuses her performance as the imperiled Patsey with a haunted quality and an unnerving physicality. With very little screen time, Nyong'o makes a titanic impression.

In some ways, 12 Years a Slave is the anti-Django Unchained, last year's Oscar winning film about slavery and one man's journey to freedom. Where Tarantino infuses his film with modern touches, baroque dialogue, and explosive western-style justice, McQueen offers less bravado and more quiet work with his camera and the work going in the background of scenes. Tarantino gleefully shows the ruin of Candy Land and its oppressors, with Django riding off the victor (though he will undoubtedly be pursued). McQueen offers no catharsis or comeuppance for the guilty. He rarely zooms out to show a wider view of a scene, much less of history or the passage of time, as though we are trapped within the film, unanchored in time. But time does pass as the final scene reveals. He achieves a labyrinthine quality in this film, surprising and startling in moments by upending expectations.

Steve McQueen has made a film relevant to modern day scourge of human trafficking, calling to account those in both political and religious power, as well as completely annihilating any romanticism of this ugly, abhorrent epoch. An early shot in the film depicts a captive Solomon's outstretched hands confined by bars in a basement window, shadows hiding his face, as the camera zooms out into a crane shot to show the backdrop of the growing and yet unfinished U.S. Capitol building in Washington D.C. For our country's high-minded and noble ideals, there is an acknowledgment that needs to be given that much of what our country has was built on the backs and lives of those held in bondage. That is part of our country's legacy. Human cruelty knows no bounds as McQueen shows, and the struggle to survive and tell one's story can only help recover from but never fully undo the effects of such terrorism.

Lee Daniels' The Butler: An Ambitious, Alternate View of 20th Century American History

Movie Review: Lee Daniels' The Butler

Director: Lee Daniels

Reviewed: 10 March 2014

jamesintexas rating-- **1/2

Although I admired much about Lee Daniels' The Butler, an expansive and ambitious film that spans an unseen U.S. History from the 1920's to the modern day, the film's scope undermines its dramatic power, resulting in an assemblage of four or five strands, all incomplete but any of which would be sufficient to build a film around. Daniels has united a terrific cast and an impressive array of make-up artists, clothing stylists, and production designers to capture the Eisenhower through Reagan eras in Washington D.C., yet his film struggled to maintain a consistent rhythm with scenes that are all to brief and too many ellipses among characters.

The story builds around a young Cecil Gaines (Forrest Whitaker and several younger actors), a man from the South who witnesses the brutal murder of his father and becomes a domestic servant in that very household. Cecil takes to the role of serving, becoming the best of the best, always dedicated to a few core principles. Be invisible. Hear nothing. The room should be empty with you in it. Cecil's path leads him away from the South and to Washington D.C. in the 1950's, a marriage to Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) with two sons, and a butler position in the Eisenhower White House. The film then focuses on Cecil's service through 8 administrations and the Civil Rights Era, with his activist son Louis (David Oyelowo) often providing a counterpoint to his own more conservative positions. It is breathtaking to go from famous actors impersonating presidents to painful reenactments of Woolworth counter sit-ins, Freedom Rider bus attacks, and Black Panther Party meetings, and all of these pieces tantalize because nothing in the film is given enough room to breathe. A few sequences feature cross cutting between the world of the father (polishing silverware, preparing elegant state dinners) with the world of the son (enduring virulent abuse from racists, being thrown into jail).

Daniels has overreached in the film, but he has at least four or five potentially wonderful films inside of it. One: Cecil Gaines remains too much of a cipher because of all of the cutting away. Digging deeper into his psychology could have provided more understanding of his character. Instead, he seems symbolic more than real. Two: Cecil works with a staff at the White House of impressive actors (Cuba Gooding, Jr., Lenny Kravitz), and though the film hints at their camaraderie and outlines the necessity for wearing a facade to work in this world that gives them less pay than their white counterparts, Daniels simply glances at the friendships and the experience of working in the White House instead of digging deep.  Three: Cecil's relationship with his wife Gloria is given short shrift; their marital troubles stem somewhat from his long hours at work, but the film never gives them the scenes necessary to fully understand their relationship. Four: The world of the presidents and historical reenactments. In pursuit of realism and iconography, Daniels creates a sense of cursory history, with presidents and leaders changing on a whim, often with a television or Cecil providing the catalyst. When a president asks Cecil about his family, I'm most curious about what prompted that question. How much does the president know about his staff?  What was it about Cecil that encouraged those who wielded power to learn from him? There are too many unanswered questions like that. Five: The story of Cecil and his son (and seeing them through the prism of his lost relationship with his own murdered father) mirroring the different generations' approach to change undercuts the human element. Cecil and Louis needed more scenes together in their home and beyond. A powerful shift by a character at the end of the film would echo even more deeply with their relationship meaning more to the film.

Yet through it all, there is an undeniable power to seeing a filmmaker grasp with the Civil Rights Era through the lens of a father and son as well as take us up to the modern era with Nelson Mandela protests and the election of Barack Obama. Part of me really wanted to see the conversation that the framing device builds up the entire movie. What would Cecil tell the current president? Lee Daniels is an important voice working in film today, and although I found this film's faltering to outweigh its brilliance, that does not mean I'm not impressed with the attempt. I am excited to see what this visionary filmmaker dares to do next.

Minor Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Movie Review: The Man Who Knew Too Much

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Reviewed: 11 March 2014

jamesintexas rating-- **

I think too highly of Alfred Hitchcock to overrate The Man Who Knew Too Much. It lacks dramatic movement, logic, and slows down its pace at several moments to a near-crawl. The story takes far too long to get going, and despite a fun assassination attempt of a prime minister at a concert in Royal Albert Hall, the film hinges upon some pretty ridiculous moments. A well-timed scream. A door being unlocked. A trip down the stairs. From the master of Psycho, North By Northwest, and Vertigo, it all seems kind of light.

Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day are Benjamin and Jo McKenna, an Indiana couple vacationing in Northern Africa who uncover a conspiracy when a man dies on the street and tells them the target of an upcoming assassination attempt. At the same moment, their son is kidnapped and held as collateral to prevent them from revealing what they know to the police. The languid pace (and less than frantic behavior of the parents) detracts from the film, and it takes over forty-five minutes to get going. A few misdirections take up the next half hour, and the film really only gets going in its final two scenes. The film seems to have aged considerably, and the ending does not seem very powerful or complete. I'm eager to read more about this film and to see what I might be missing, but I just don't think that this film is in the same league as others by this director. And, I'm not sure who the title is referring to. Stewart's character?