A Dark Fairy Tale: Unfolding Stoker's Mysteries.

Movie Review: Stoker

Director: Chan-wook Park

Reviewed: 12 June 2014

jamesintexas rating-- ***

I admire when a film defies expectation and convention and truly goes off into dark territory. Chan-wook Park's Stoker offers a maddeningly weird take on a familiar genre with his signature visual style and aplomb. Like in his masterpiece Oldboy, Park embraces a tactile type of filmmaking that can make your skin crawl with haunting and fleeting images of beauty and violence. A dominant motif of an elegant spider steadily traversing up a character's leg contains more menace than a thousand scary movies.

The enigmatic teen India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) struggles with her grief after her father dies, and she meets her mysterious Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) who moves in with her and her mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman). The Stoker ancestral manse is a baroque marvel with weird outdoor sculpture and endless grounds of forest, a faded but still beautiful home employing housekeepers and servants. In some ways, the story seems transposed from the 19th Century into the modern age, but the claustrophobic nature of the film means our environment for the most part is the house (with occasional jaunts to the school or to town). The house has winding staircases, double doors, a cellar with swinging, eerie light bulbs overhead, impossibly long dining room tables, and a room with a piano. Stuffed animals abound as India and her father would frequently hunt together. The mood of the film is darkly menacing with the performances being strange on the surface because of so much that is to be revealed. India sees the increasing encroachment of her Uncle Charlie on their lives, and despite warnings, she seems drawn to solving the mysteries about her in a quiet, methodical way. The film regards its characters as smart and does not give them superfluous dialogue.

Park is such a master at directing that much of the film consists of misdirection and laying the foundation for faulty judgments. Scenes have a weird propulsion; an early shot of India rolling a hard-boiled eggshell on a counter top is jarring with its sounds. Mia Wasikowska has played Jane Eyre in the past, and her near-silent performance at times propels the film. We see things unfold as she does, and I never got ahead of the story in any way. Nicole Kidman is wonderful in the supporting role as the mother, conveying a simultaneous restlessness and a ruthlessness. Matthew Goode stands up straight, smiles perfectly, and epitomizes male perfection to both mother and daughter, offering a replacement for the father. I never entirely knew how magical or mythical or fantastical the film would travel, so the journey of watching it became a series of wonderments. I like its surprises and twists, including a visually stunning end sequence, and the word weird is most appropriately used here to describe everything about this complex mystery. Who would have thought a piano-playing sequence would be one of the most exciting of the year?

2 Guns: Under-Promise, Over-Deliver.

Movie Review: 2 Guns

Director: Baltasar Kormákur

Reviewed: 10 June 2014

jamesintexas rating-- ***

Chemistry is a tricky thing to define: Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg have it in 2 Guns as Bobby and Stig, mismatched double-crossed partners who take on the world in this surprisingly fun action film. Both actors work best in quick dialogue scenes: ordering breakfast at a diner, verbally jabbing at each other in a car, or working in tandem through an earpiece with one across the street covering with a sniper rifle. Bobby is nearly always the smartest guy in the room, steps ahead of his adversaries, fully planned out for all contingencies. Stig, in contrast, seems to thrive on sheer optimism and gumption. Wahlberg plays him as an overgrown child, one who never even considers the possibility of thinks not working out. Together, they are a marvelous pair, and the actors appear to be having fun with each other and a deep cast of supporting players such as Paula Patton, Edward James Olmos, Bill Paxton, and James Marsden.

The plot involves the DEA, the Navy, the cartel, and numerous exciting chases through South Texas and Mexico. The less said, the better to fully enjoy the film. Naturally, there are many shoot-outs and chases, slow-motion sequences with raging music, as well as some particularly nasty villains. Without knowing anything about this director Kormákur or the source material (apparently, a graphic novel), I was pleasantly surprised and would be very inclined to see further adventures with Bobby and Stig based on the fun way this movie is put together and shot. Scene after scene works. In general, the film offers up a fairly world-weary, cynical take on its own genre with the American government as likely to be the bad guys as the cartel.

My esteem for this film diminished a bit in the second half when it became more conventional and less interesting. But until then, 2 Guns had me laughing, enjoying the action scenes, and admiring the cinematography. The glibness jars a bit with the violent consequences meted out to major characters, but I think the pairing of the two leads carries the day. Bottom line: This movie is flat-out fun and violent with plenty of humor that works.

The Fluidity of Bob Dylan: Todd Haynes' exciting I'm Not There.

Movie Review: I'm Not There

Director: Todd Haynes

Reviewed: 8 June 2014

jamesintexas rating-- ***1/2

Identity is not a fixed state. In addition to our lives being a series of transformations, subtle or otherwise, into different versions of ourselves, the times and scenes that we live in exist in a state of flux: fashion, politics, pop culture, and language to name a few. Life as a series of poses. Life as a constant shedding of skin. The person that I was at 25 is different than the person that I am at 35 despite a longing to be consistent. Early in I'm Not There, a thrilling riff on the idea of a biopic of Bob Dylan, his fans gasp and guffaw at the infamous plugging-in-Dylan-goes-electric moment at the Newport Folk Festival (dramatized by stylish director Todd Haynes as a violent shooting of weapons directly into the audience). Haynes positions the fans in a long horizontal line, walking away from the concert, and he tracks each person's face briefly for a direct camera aside, all critical of the performer's new style. "He's changed," laments one fan at Dylan's latest transformation from beloved folk musician into something new. "He's changed."

Besides being the cliche line of every film ever wanting to convey a character's descent, decay, or fall from his or her core values, "He's changed" as a fan's assessment of a beloved artist encapsulates a stifling of creative artistic desire, a need to pin down with a predictable, comforting label. "He's changed" denies the eternal mutability of an artist, and instead insists that nothing change. You are what you are. One is what one is. Elasticity is to be feared and reviled. Todd Haynes crafts his entire multidimensional, elliptical film around epochs in Bob Dylan's life, dramatizing each with a different performer playing him: Marcus Carl Franklin as Woody, a young African-American boy hopping box cars and playing the guitar in the late 1950's; Ben Whishaw as Arthur, the poet under interrogation from authorities; Christian Bale as the earnest performer Jack who later becomes a Christian pastor; Heath Ledger as Robbie, the movie star version of Jack and his messy love affairs; Richard Gere as Billy, the loner outlaw on the run in a mythical western town; and Cate Blanchett as Jude Quinn, the 1965 goes-electric version, all black sunglasses and wild hair, beset on all sides by interviewers and disgruntled fans. Besides being an audacious move to show so many lenses through which to view the performer, Haynes delivers modern looks at each of the musician's songs in the film, layering them in with modern day performers providing the singing voices in complement to Dylan's actual voice.

Instead of finding the secret or key of Bob Dylan in this movie, the title suggests an elusiveness and an impossibility of such a task. Of all the stories, Jude's resonates the strongest because of Blanchett's inimicable posture with the British press, the stark beauty of the black and white cinematography, the sense of whimsy in depicting Dylan encountering The Beatles and Allen Ginsberg. Other sequences have an even more lyrical and dreamlike quality such as Billy's wandering through the small town with its sad clowns, Civil War iconography, circus performers, and even a giraffe. Woody's rambling days are shot with impossibly gorgeous color, yellows of forests and leaves that nearly explode off of the screen. And the chapter of Robbie's love affair with Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) devastates with its forlorn gestures of beauty, its loving distance, and the sequences are impossibly elegiac with all the promise of Ledger

As a fan of any band or musician knows, the shifting of genre or time often seems to divide us into warring camps. I started to listen to my favorite band R.E.M. with some radio singles from Green in the early nineties before buying my first album Out of Time. The R.E.M. before that seems more mysterious to me since I dove into their music at a different point in their artistry. An earlier fan may lament the state of the songwriting that I worship. But it is the same band. Or not at all. And the artists that we love sometimes produce art that we cannot stand or make changes that we hate. I'm Not There posits the absolute necessity of Bob Dylan's shapeshifting not merely as a reaction to the press and popularity and pressures. Instead it becomes a Whitmanesque anthem, a Twentieth Century "Song of Myself" wherein the artist contains and is allowed to contain multitudes. Outlaw Billy puts it best: "I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time." Exciting in its sense of possibility, Haynes has created a stunning and audacious film, one that challenges notions of American identity through the impossibly dramatic and captivating personas of Bob Dylan. The film's reach reminds me of Cloud Atlas in its insistence on the fluidity of identity, but in general, it is an extraordinarily unique vision. I highly recommend it.

Nebraska: The Midwestern King Lear

Movie Review: Nebraska

Director: Alexander Payne

Reviewed: 2 June 2014

jamesintexas rating-- ***1/2

In Nebraska, Alexander Payne's latest film, Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), a hunched over, stubborn and possibly confused patriarch marches along the highway from Billings, Montana towards Lincoln, Nebraska clutching a sweepstakes mailer indicating his claim of a million dollars. His electronic salesman son David (Will Forte) at first dissuades his father and then joins him in his quest, much to the chagrin of Woody's sharp-tongued wife Kate (June Squibb) and David's brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk). David, aware that the journey to Lincoln is about more than just the claiming of a million dollars, escapes his own mundane life to care for his aging father and try to reconnect with him, seeing the ravages of time on his father's lined, bandaged face and depleting memory.

Shot in impossibly gorgeous black and white which gives an epic quality to the quest, the father son road trip defies expectations at nearly every turn. Cathartic emotional payoffs are undercut by Woody's fading memory: "I don't remember" he offers when asked about his life when not being openly defiant, unsentimental, or evasive about the hard truths of his past. The undercurrent of painful years swirls beneath this film with Forte's son remembering pouring out his dad's beer, Woody refusing to admit his alcoholism, and potential vipers emerging from within their family. Winning the supposed money brings out the wide-eyed fantasy of wealth from people around Woody, providing a window into the American Dream ("What are you gonna do with that money?" "Get a truck." "I'd get a boat!"). People stop him on the street to congratulate him in his hometown while others plot how to separate him from his fortune. And through it all, Woody seems to nonchalantly slough it off while steadfastly heading towards Lincoln.

I found Payne's composition of shots to be quite funny, including one high-angle shot of the entire Grant clan staring at the Bears-Lions game on television, every brother curiously craning his neck to stare at the answer to a question about driving time. Kate is as verbose as Woody is reticent, and the film comes alive every time June Squibb is in a scene. Her speeches at the local cemetery are show stoppers. Her love for Woody is complex, a mixture of invective and denigration along with soft-hearted acts of kindness and vicious defense of his character in the wake of family accusations.

The lead acting performances by Dern and Forte are very strong, and Dern's is an almost silent, brokenly regal style, taking everything in, but often not letting us to far inside of his character's mind. Forte's son constantly must reevaluate the man that he believes his father to be after learning unseen truths (or lies) about him from estranged family, old friends, and possible futures. The set-up leads to the inevitable arrival in Lincoln with a muted, understated payoff that feels right. Payne's characters are concerned about legacy and what can be bequeathed from a parent to a child. I admired the way the script plays up the competition between David and Ross but does not allow that to be the defining characteristic of their relationship. As brothers, they make a late-film decision to reclaim a part of their father's honor that ends up being quite madcap and funny.

What Payne did in his marvelous film The Descendants is represent intense family pain onscreen, and he proves adept at doing that here in Nebraska. Yet, I found myself laughing quite a bit as well as moved to tears at least twice at the end, so despite its stark style and stunning black and white imagery, the film crackles with an energy and feels remarkably lived-in. Nearly everyone in the film is older, and how rare is it to see scenes inside of family homes with older family members not reduced to simple stereotypes. A scene lingers for me of Woody returning to the farmhouse where he was raised. With its broken furniture, windows looking out to beautiful farm country, and the haunting specter of memory, Woody stands in his parents' room, perhaps for the first time, remarking, "This was my parents' room. I got whipped if they found me in here. I guess nobody's gonna whip me now." The examination of the past does not always yield hallmark card sentiments, and Woody Grant's journey is bracingly free of such sentiment, though the ending does offer up its own ideas about children and parents that some may find maudlin, but I loved it. I really recommend this film.

As stated in Shakespeare's play of parents and children King Lear, "In jest, there is truth."

The Cartography of Grief: Inside Llewyn Davis's quiet epiphany

Movie Review: Inside Llewyn Davis

Director: The Coen Brothers

Reviewed: 22 May 2014

jamesintexas rating-- ***1/2

The Coen Brothers never fail to make interesting films, but Inside Llewyn Davis challenges and demands much out of its audience with less of their trademark madcap hijinks and more introspection and melancholy. Llewyn is a haunted, less than successful musician in 1961 New York City, facing frigid temperatures and the increasing coldness of friends who has alienated. Living off of the kindness of others, Llewyn wakes up on strange couches, hustles for gigs to make money, and contemplates leaving his art all together to join the Merchant Marines. He carries the cat of friends with him, unable to return it after it ran out as he was closing the door. He bums a ride to Chicago to see a legendary producer and make his pitch. He considers his art and what it means and what it would mean to give it all up.

The structure of Inside Llewyn Davis is a riddle of sorts, playing with time, and showing the same scene more than once, revealing its protagonist to be in some sort of cosmic loop. Appropriately, the film essentially demanded that I watch it twice right away, and I was happy to oblige. Llewyn seems trapped in an impossibly cold winter, wandering and searching, moving around but never getting anywhere--an apt metaphor for the creative process and the artist hellbent on making his or her art. When a producer announces to Llewyn, "I don't see a lot of money here," I feel that heartbreaking analysis could be commenting on the Coen Brothers' films as well. I am thankful that Fargo and No Country For Old Men probably brought smaller, less commercial films like A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis to light. To have a career in the arts means some sort of acknowledgement of that statement and balancing commercialism with artistic integrity. The furious balancing involves compromising or failing.

Oscar Isaac gives a mournful quality to his performance as the self-destructive Llewyn, and it is important to see him as big-hearted and simultaneously capable of cruelty to those around him. Llewyn never reveals everything going on under his surface, but things bubble out at inopportune times, and in many cases, Isaac has to play him as unlikable. He is at his most likable are when Llewyn finds himself onstage singing, often shot in golden yellow light, moments of incandescence. These moments of brilliant performance and a soulful voice contrast with the trudging of the artist through the wet snow, stepping into a frozen puddle, ill-equipped for the vicious weather. Haven't we all been ill-prepared for moments in our lives?

The supporting performances are all first-rate: Carey Mulligan stands out as a bitter fellow musician; Justin Timberlake is effective as a cheery, commercial comrade; and John Goodman steals scenes as a jazz playing conversationalist. The film makes traveling cross country seem mind-numbing with the very sounds of the tires on the road drumming an incessant thumping on the soundtrack. The songs of the soundtrack key in on the emotional moments of the character and stand alone themselves as great fun, something the Coen Brothers have been doing for a long time. In a way, the film touches back to O Brother, Where Art Thou? with its musical interludes and love of the recording studio and process. How "Please, Mr. Kennedy" did not get nominated for Best Song is beyond me; I have been humming variations of it for over a week.

Without a lot of flash, Inside Llewyn Davis offers a portrait of the artist having to break free of his own self-destructive tendencies. Perhaps instead of being at odds with the cosmos, Llewyn is simply accountable for his own words and actions, receiving comeuppance for them in order for him to change. To watch Llewyn's epiphany, my hopeful reading of the film's last line (with a wonderful song accompanying it, swelling in the background) is to celebrate the shot of Llewyn closing the door more carefully, deflecting a past conflict back, and keeping what must stay on the other side where it belongs. I really loved this film, and it has given me much to think about.

Grandly Lighter Than Air: Wes Anderson's Hotel Movie.

Movie Review: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Director: Wes Anderson

Reviewed: 12 May 2014

jamesintexas rating-- ***1/2

The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson's new film, most closely resembles its central chocolate delicacies, prepared by Agatha (Saoirse Ronan) lighter than air, exquisitely handcrafted, meticulously prepared in a striking pink box, and piled high in the air. However, the film's ethereal qualities are grounded quite frequently by wonderful cursing and intense violence. But, to get back to the desserts. These studied pieces of confectionary move the plot forward, connecting the machinations of lobby boy Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori) and the debonair Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes, shedding the skin of Voldemort with a refined glee), the head concierge at the eponymous hotel, an imposing castle of elevators, stairways, and cavernous dining rooms. Gustave H. runs the Budapest with an imperious precision; his marches through its hallways dictating impossibly precise orders at those around him suggest an older version of Max Fischer given the keys to a greater kingdom than the mere Grover Cleveland High School. In the republic of Zubrowka, a Madame D. (Tilda Swinton, aged extensively, hair piled high with a wig, and powdered like a cake) departs the embraces of the hotel and Gustave H. leading to a scandal involving a disputed will and an expensive painting, all set against the backdrop of a brewing war.

In a way, the film is more expansive than those of Anderson's past which have confined themselves to a single family in a single city or a series of groups on an island. Here, the trains crisscross Zubrowka, as well as gondolas, motorcycles, and sleds. He reveals an elaborate underground society of hotel concierges who will stop at nothing to help a person in need in addition to menacing groups of fascists awaiting you at the border, ready to check that your papers are in order. A triple-frame story opens us into this world, contrasting the hotel's rundown 1985 days with its 1932 glory. There is a slow-chase through a museum with a marvelously violent payoff, the severe mistreatment of a feline, a malevolent monster named Jopling (Willem Dafoe) who seems to grow fangs, and a glorious jailbreak and rescue of epic proportions. The canvas here is so wonderfully large that one is left pining for more time with even very minor characters.

I think Ralph Fiennes is a revelation here, not just because he does not have to play a heavy villain as he so often does (though as the new M in the Bond films, I guess we will be entering a new phase) but instead a flawed man with impeccable charm. With his "darlings" softly inserted at the end of conversations, Fiennes wonderfully plays up Gustave's theatricality as part of a bygone era, a desire to satisfy his guests and preach to his staff during their meals. Fiennes adapts his performance to each scene, holding the core of Gustave H. despite radical changes in station. The film struggles to fully show Gustave H.'s hold over young Zero, and their relationship while obviously the core of the story faltered a bit for me. I was left a bit cold by later developments, but perhaps I need another viewing of the film. The ending has an abrupt air to it, but it may be in keeping with the world that he's portraying. The checking of papers and harsh treatment of Zero foreshadows the atrocities of fascism in World War 2, making Gustave H.'s decision late in the film even more grand and noble.

I am adding this to the middle pile of Wes Anderson films, the ones that I am happy to return to viewing again and again. Although I cannot yet anoint The Grand Budapest Hotel as worthy to stand amongst Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and last year's wonderful Moonrise Kingdom, it stands closer to those films than his misfires. Anderson creates worlds that are fun to watch actors and actresses play around inside, worlds of intricately designed boxes of impossibly fine desserts that seem both familiar and completely unique at the same time, and I bet they enjoy the anarchic, highly structured fun. The sense of joy permeates his film, but as he harshly shows, all good things must end.

Dallas Buyers Club: An Actors' Showcase.

Movie Review: Dallas Buyers Club

Director: Jean-Marc Vallee

Reviewed: 26 April 2014

jamesintexas rating-- ***

It is 1985, and electrician-rodeo rider Ron Woodson finds himself with the AIDS virus and given a short time to live. Angry and confused, Woodson fights back, circumvents the normal health care system, and his work leads to his unexpected survival. He works with sympathetic doctor Eve (Jennifer Garnder) and makes an unlikely alliance with a transgender woman named Rayon (Jared Leto) who also has AIDS to sell drugs that work to the people that need them the most. A homophobe himself, Ron struggles with his place in the world as his friends abandon him and he turns activist, traveling to Mexico for experimental drugs, studying the law and figuring out ways to work around it. Ron's quick thinking saved lives and gave hope to a population reeling from the virus and governmental inertia. Rayon's struggle, though not as front and center, proves even more compelling, struggling with family rejection and working with Ron, which is not always the easiest.

I guess I felt underwhelmed because there is not much interiority to Ron Woodson. He reads about the idea of a buyers club to share pharmaceuticals in the New York Times and makes some pretty adroit choices that save countless lives. Besides his traveling to different countries to meet with distributors and funny outfits to fool Customs, he seems very alone. There are some obvious, easy to hate villains here, one complete with Patch Adams nose, and another from the FDA who could not be more unlikable if he tried. But the weaknesses of the film do not undermine its overall power; the two performances by McConaughey and Leto are strong and deserving of accolades. I just do not know if the script gives either enough to do. Having not seen Leto act in many years, his work as Rayon is a revelation. McConaughey has Ron's swagger and physicality down as he out-thinks those around him. I'm all for a movie where the lead character out-thinks his opponents instead of using a gun. It is appalling to think about the intersection of profit and potentially life-saving drugs, but Dallas Buyers Club works best when it focuses on its people.