The Damned United

Written at the time of the film's release.

I wouldn't say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one." — Brian Clough

There are apparently two major industries in Britain that have created rabid fans: football and Peter Morgan-Michael Sheen movies. Football we know all about. What we colonists call "soccer" is an obsession carried in the hearts and minds and livers throughout the entire rest of the world (as a matter of fact, you could probably make a connection between loving this injury-inducing sport and embracing universal health-care!).

The team of Morgan and Sheen, which started with "The Deal" and The Queen, continued with the play and film Frost/Nixon (and will continue with Sheen again playing Tony Blair in Clint Eastwood's forthcoming Hereafter*), here takes on the insular world of FC football and the storied career of Brian Clough, who took the second division Derby County Club into the first division and then the championship, and in a fit of hubris, took on the management of Leeds Utd, the club of his arch-rival Coach Don Rievie and was fired after 44 days. Here, though, the focus is not on the playing field, but the kicking and gouging going on in the mind of Clough.

The feats Clough accomplished were done with aplomb, ego, a big mouth and a vindictive drive to show up the other teams in the leagues, especially Leeds. But, that drive also gave him a tunnel vision when it came time to manage Leeds, which was done with a "new broom" approach, angering the players, the club's board and the fans who saw the team fall to its worst season in ten years after only six games. Consequently, he got the sack. As fast as his success was acquired, he fell ten times faster.

Morgan as screenwriter lets the mighty fall gently, depending on the grace that is shown, and whether the eyes are open during the trip. Idi Amin and Nixon, locked in their delusions, get no sympathy. Queen Elizabeth and Tony Blair are allowed insight as they're falling. Clough gets that insight after he hits rock-bottom, and Morgan's frequent collaborator Sheen registers every triumph in flashing teeth and every hurt in darkening bags under his eyes. Sheen, as a performer who's made a living playing performers, knows the degrees to which the face can display a false-front and genuine pain.

During an introductory press interview before taking over for Rievey, it's a cocky Clough who, with no prior knowledge, already thinks he has the team licked, with secret winks, flashing tongue and a smarmy way of laughing at his own jokes. After a dressing down from the Leeds captain, he'll maintain the same confident smirk on his face, but his eyes will dull with fear as soon as the player turns his back. If Sheen felt any disappointment in not playing the "Nixon" part of Frost/Nixon, he's compensated here for playing a personality of similar insecurities, but with an antic theatricality that the former President was never capable of. It's Sheen's show, but he's given ample opposition and support from Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, and Colm Meaney, who plays Coach Rievie with an irascible sense of entitlement.

Director Tom Hooper keeps things low-key in a BBC vid kind of way (thankfully dropping the peculiar framing that marked "John Adams"), but it isn't too long before one notices that, more and more, he's placing his Clough in ever tightening offices, hotel rooms, and locker-room corridors—an outsider trapped in his own prison of obsession and focus. One sequence is brilliantly twisted in its scope, or lack of it: as a much-needed match goes on outside, Clough stews and twitches inside his dennish office behind the stands, listening to the crowd reactions, not daring to emerge into the light to watch. Perversely, whenever a Derby goal is scored, the crowd leaps to its feet blocking out the only outside light to his office, casting him in darkness. You know that whatever Clough wins, he's lost.

* Although it would have been logical as one of the plot-points involved a London bombing, Sheen (and the character of Blair) subsequently did not appear in Hereafter.

 

**Tom Hooper has subsequently directed The King's Speech, The Danish Girl, Les Miserables and Cats. Evidently, he's still working!

Martha Marcy May Marlene

A forgotten film, but I've never forgotten it, and I doubt anyone who's seen it has forgotten it. Long before her "Scarlet Witch" days, it marked the "break out" role of Elizabeth Olsen.

 

Written at the time of the film's release.

Cult Film
or
"Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose"

Martha Marcy May Marlene has gotten a lot of press, mostly for the starring performance of the non-twin Olsen sister, Elizabeth (she really is quite good in it, her film debut), but the film has a lot to show besides being fodder for the tabloids. A slowly unfolding paranoid thriller, the first feature of writer-director Sean Durkin, you wonder exactly where it's going and where it's leading—if anywhere.

It keeps you guessing—the very same predicament of almost every character in the film. The film opens on an idyllic farm community...commune, more appropriately...in the Catskills, as the members busy themselves, mending fences, tending crops, while the children meander. Bucolic, it looks. Slightly rustic and hippieish, it feels. Then, at dinner-time, the women wait in the kitchen while the men eat...first...and they only eat when they've had their fill. Slightly odd, slightly misogynistic, but one gets the impression that it's a male-centered, maybe religious community, just the slightest sense of unease.

It's how Durkin operates. No one comes right out and says anything. Characters don't come out and say "This is this and that is that." We, the audience are allowed to observe and ponder—to notice when things turn slightly askew and, in the time-compressed world of the movies that happens fairly quickly, but at a slower pace than most mainstream movies. Like the happenstances of those of the film, things go along normally until it suddenly dawns on us—something's wrong here.

Early on, Marcy May (Elizabeth Olsen) awakens at night, and softly skulks out of the main house, where the women all sleep in one room. She goes out the front door, and we notice one of the women is awake and watching her from inside.  Marcy walks across the lawn to the street separating their farm from the woods...and then, she breaks into a run, mad, desperate and hides amidst the collapsed trunks of dead trees while the house empties of men and women who run through the woods, looking for her. It's as creepy as a zombie movie.

Eventually, she makes it to a telephone, where, crying, desperate, she calls a woman who is amazed to at the call. She hasn't heard from her for two years.  "Tell me where you are and I'll come get you right now." And soon, an SUV pulls up. A woman gets out. And Marcy May...or Martha, as the woman calls her...collapses in her arms.

It's Martha's sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson) who's found her, and who asks questions, but gets no answers. Where's Martha been? Where'd she go? Is she alright? What happened? Why didn't she try to contact her before? Martha hems and haws and says something about a cheating boyfriend, but never goes into detail. And nothing is pressed. Martha sleeps. Lucy and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) pad softly around their posh lake-house, trying to make Martha at home, but also wondering why she's acting so diffidently, cluelessly, not revealing much.

It causes a strain in Lucy and Ted's domestic bliss—they want to have a family, but a well-ordered one (good luck with that, kids!) and Martha is a square peg in their round lifestyle. What's got into her, anyway? She skinny-dips in the lake (ferchrist'ssake!) with all the neighbors around (and I'm sure there's a covenant against that!), wears the same worn jean shorts and shirt from her escape day after day, cleans incessantly, doesn't try to find a job, and seems to be constantly wrestling with the "fight-or-flight" instinct.

They don't know about the flash-backs. Durkin builds the story of Marcy May's life, while at the same time showing the breakdown of her time with her sister.  Early on, we're given the sense that there's some push me-pull you occurring: the farm has an odd, creepy malevolence to it—there's a sense of freedom there, of good leftist values, all macrobiotic and natural with shared living spaces, shared clothes and a general lack of possessiveness. It contrasts sharply with Lucy and Ted's tight-ass lifestyle, neat as a pin and dead as a door-nail. You start to compare and contrast—where would Martha (or Marcy May) be better off? Where is freedom, that is "real" freedom, to be oneself, in either world that Martha (or Marcy May) has inhabited? That's the first 30 minutes or so of the film.

 

And then, things turn ugly.

And very interesting, much to the presence of newly ubiquitous utility-character-actor John Hawkes (who has developed a habit of subtly inhabiting roles of such wide range with such economy that I'm starting to think he's in a class by himself in the acting field). As Patrick, the pater-too-familias of the commune, he projects a creepy sense of calm manipulation that as the movie goes further turns dark and menacing. It's not in the manner, but in the words, which Hawkes sells in the same calm talk, that in the worst of times turns into icy silences. Hawkes is just plain Good, whether he's playing good or bad.

I recommend this one. It's subtle, tense and troubling with no easy answers and the momentum of water circling in a drain to an inevitable conclusion (which we never see) that we know is coming. It's occasionally raw and as comforting as sandpaper. It's not for the complacent movie-goer, but it's a damn interesting film (not only in the skewering of thriller cliches but also in the subtle points its trying to make) and an even more impressive debut, not only for Ms. Olsen, but also for its writer-director.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Written at the time of the film's release...

"Tim Burton turns everything into 'Sweeney Todd,' so this should be a natural"

Ken Levine, Nov. 18 2007

 

Truer words were never spoken. Tim Burton DOES turn everything into "Sweeney Todd" so there couldn't be a better pairing of director to subject matter. Burton has supervised two of the darkest animated musicals ever made (The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Corpse Bride) and turned them both into charming, imaginative films without once sugar-coating or denying the nightmarish imagery that unearthed those ideas. His favored composer, Danny Elfman (MIA from this film), is a disciple of Bernard Herrmann, whose work was the inspiration for the music lines of Stephen Sondheim's shock-opera. Burton's "usual suspects," Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter , star and, though the major worry was whether they could carry their tunes, they both do exemplary jobs. Depp, especially, only achieves heights of performance in song, so interior is his Todd. And though Carter may not be quite as brassy so much as tremulous, she does more than hold her own with some of Sondheim's trickier tongue-twisters.

Where Burton's Sweeney Todd excels, though, is the design of the thing--from the Edward Gorey-ish 2-D titles to the Pieta-like coda, the film is a masterpiece of muted design and cinematography with a palette restricted to various shades of gray--the visual equivalent of music in minor chords.

With one exception, of course. The appearance of blood is always startling. Every murder produces a blood so red that it nearly jumps out of the screen. And Burton can't resist taking the Hammer Films one better. When Sweeney Todd takes his razors to give his customers a once-over, there is no fanciful, theatrical whip-saw and it's over. Depp goes in and saws at the neck like he's cutting a thick roast, at which point the special-effects boys take over, producing arterial geysers of blood that spray--once, hitting the camera lens--in patterns that rival the fountains at the Bellagio. 

It's over-done, and in coagulating close-up as well, but given the interior-ness of Sweeney Todd, it's about the only cathartic action in town. And the bodies really start piling up. I'm sure Sondheim was attracted to the subject matter of a swinish London so mired in nastiness, it more than figuratively begins to feed on its own, and the themes of a transformed man and his insatiable and destructive quest for vengeance was what drove Burton, but the gleefully torrential blood-shedding exposes the adolescent in Burton's tendencies--it's his darkest, grisliest film since Sleepy Hollow--and one wishes to see more of the Burton who could turn out a film like Big Fish. 

More transcendence, Tim. Less Transylvania.

Paranormal Activites

Written at the time of each film's release...

"Mic' and Kate + Legion"

Micah and Katie (Micah Sloat, Katie Featherston) are two young people in love. She wants to be a teacher, and he's a day-trader, they're "engaged to be engaged" and so they move in together. When we meet them, Micah has become engrossed with video cameras, and is documenting their lives. It's not some weird viral community experiment. Well, actually it is. Micah and Katie have another tenant. And it's keeping them awake nights.

Weird noises.

The faucets turn on (when they don't remember turning them on).

Whispers. Bumps in the night.

So, Micah has invested in video cameras to document it. We see them experiment with them, play with them—the footage is as vérité as it gets, and were it not for the fact that the two yuppies are slightly annoying in their own ways, it would be fascinating.

But the movie starts to cook in odd ways when the camera is locked down for the night and focused on the couple's bedroom. With rudimentary titles documenting the day and the particular night after filming, you tend to focus on the timer, which is used to fast-forward through the night and then stops at the time when an "event" happens. To describe what happens will spoil the thrills that Paranormal Activity provides.*

And it does provide them.** 

There's nothing new here. Director Oren Peli who conceived, financed, cast and shot the film in seven days (for a paltry $15,000.00—it made double that on its opening night...in one theater) in his home (which he got to re-decorate as a tax write-off) follows some tried and true audience manipulation that was prevalent far before similar films, like The Blair Witch Project (and, from the previews, the upcoming The Fourth Kind). Pace the thrills, and spend the rest of the time talking about them and amping up the anticipation. Wince and repeat. Accelerate. Though the film has gotten some professional once-overs that led to tightening and a new ending,*** it is essentially the same film that Peli made in 2007—strong enough to be released in its original rough-hewn condition (narrowly avoiding a more glossy remake).

The interesting thing about Paranormal Activity (other than it being so damned effective) is the way it has been released.

Check that.

It wasn't released. It escaped.

After making some limited rounds on the film festival circuit, and being passed around by Hollywood mucky-mucks—who wanted to re-film it (after all, they're in the business of generating funds for projects)—it was released in a very limited capacity, with internet options set up to generate word-of-mouth response and demand for it. For instance, when it opened in Seattle on Friday, October 10th it was playing at 2 theaters. When I saw it on October 16th, it was at ten. It appears to be alive...and it's growing.

As with any "good" horror movie, Paranormal Activity is about something else than generating goose-bumps. There has to be an underlying shared experience in our collective spines—a "polter-zeitgeist," if you will—that allows them to shiver, and where "P.A." digs in and eviscerates is in the relationship between men and women. Things start with the sorts of things that can happen when two people move in and don't know each other's habits—things get moved, or forgetfulness sets in, the usual annoyances that go with merging life-styles. And Micah and Katie react differently to the crisis: she wants to call in "experts;"**** he is skeptical and sees the poltergeistian activity as an invasion, an affront to his ego and man-hood. That he doesn't listen very well, or follow orders and only makes things worse runs with his reputation as a day-trader, a "Master of his Own Universe."

But it's not this Universe we're talking about, now. Is it?

Soon, the couple starts to bicker, and as they begin to lose more sleep, splinter apart psychologically. Their relationship is being attacked from within and, more to the point, without.

In the war between men and women, the Devil knows who'll win.

* The film so freaked out Steven Spielberg that he brought his screener DVD back in a plastic garbage bag, rather than touch it.

** I used to work at a place that was haunted (no, really). Keys would drop to the floor of their own volition. Wallets would have their contents scattered across the floor. Footsteps would be heard coming up the stairs and no one would be there when you went out to greet them. Doors shut (with no one present to shut them). There'd be gusts of wind in completely sealed off spaces (cold wind, mind you). "Things" would appear to people. There's a lot of that in Paranormal Activity. It felt vaguely familiar. The first night after seeing it I couldn't sleep, and I tend to be more alert when there are rumbling fly-overs from McChord AFB.

*** One of the concerns of the Hollywood "suits" was the number of walk-out's the movie generates (and there were a few at the screening I attended). But, they're not because people don't like the movie; they're leaving because the film scares the bee-jezes out of them.

**** One of the straight-faced humor moments is when the "Psychic" tells the couple that he probably can't help them—that they'll have to contact a demonologist. Just like doctors: "You'll have to see a specialist."

"Paramount Pictures would like to thank the family of the deceased..."

I'm surprised that Matt Reeves wasn't pegged to direct Paranormal Activity 2, considering he pulled the same cinéma vérité trick with his Cloverfield as Oren Peli did with the first PA.  Reeves might have actually done something different, as opposed to this corporate product generated to merely try and tap the success of the first. Right off the bat, the vibe for this one is different, with the Paramount honchos putting the corporate brand in the very first crawl (which is partially used for the title of this piece)—a subterfuge, anyway, as it is "only a movie" and Paramount Pictures isn't thanking anybody, they're just trying to take your money, while fulfilling their initial wish to re-make the first movie (which was made independently for $11,000) under their corporate umbrella, thus inflating the cost to $2,750,000, while, cluelessly, also hoping to duplicate the original's success. Guess what, Paramount? The Paranormal Activity's financial success depended on the negative cost being so damned low. That won't happen when you're paying gaffers, best boys, painters, assistant directors and assistants to the executive producer (all missing from the original) a sizable wage.*****

They also can't duplicate the original's artistic success, either, such as it was.  The first film took a nugget of a good idea and ran with it, employing some audience knowledge of video conceits and, like any good horror-meister, letting the audience do their dirty work, trusting that what the sweating masses in the dark will come up with will be far more horrible than what actually occurs. A couple of shock-cuts, and you leave them quivering in fear.

But Paranomal Activity 2 really doesn't do anything else than go through the same motions. Oh, there is more coverage, thanks to an in-home security system that is installed after the initial "things that go crash on vacation" incident. There is no 80 herz hum that accompanies every incident, just some indeterminate sound effects (which are re-capped—and exposed as rather cheap—in the end-credits...End Credits? That kinda destroys the illusion, too). And this one is exposed to be more or less a prequel to the original...except that the actors shared by both look quite a bit older this time when the time-frame should be the same. 

It's just one of those moments of bone-headedness on the producers'/director's parts that show all they're interested in is going through the motions and collecting the cash, even if their efforts undercut the basic spookiness of the movie. It's Corporate movie-making at its dumbest, laziest and most crass. For example, you can't have a corporate movie release without some product placement (like that recognizable bottle of Sunny Delight in the kitchen, or the dramatically worthless talk about Burger King), which goes somewhat against the grain of a "captured" video source—and gaffe-spotters will have a field-day with this one—at one point, dad cracks a sexual joke by saying "Release the Krakken!" (the line from Clash of the Titans).  That would be funny, if it wasn't a glaring mistake. That line of Liam Neeson's from the 2010 movie only became a catch-phrase this year...and the movie is supposed to be taking place...in 2006.  Oopsy!

There was no reason, other than plunder, for this movie to be made, and while one can say that the performances are decent, and it delivers enough jolts that you forget that dogs and children are the potential victims here, this is one best not attended. Bad movies and bad movie franchises should be given the same advice as demon-poltergeists: "Just ignore it and maybe it will go away..."

***** One of those Executive Producers is Akiva Goldsman, whose name seems to appear on any movie that sucks.

The Informant!

I mentioned this movie in the review of The Farewell. 

Written at the time of the film's release...


"Double Agent + Half-Wit = ???!"
or
"Greed is Good"/"Ignorance is Bliss"

A direct descendant from "This American Life,"* a screenwriter heard the story on the American Public Media radio program and thought "This would make a great movie."

Well, for the most part.

"The Informant!" is complicated—about an upper-level management director for Archer Daniels Midland, who, through a series of security concerns, becomes an FBI informant in an investigation into ADM's price-fixing practices. That director, Marc Whitacre (Matt Damon) is a normal middle-American professional, orphaned since six, who's risen in the ranks of corporate America through sheer eager-beaverness, a naive cunning, and a gambler's instinct.

He's the perfect candidate for amateur skull-duggery—objectively smart enough to stay ahead of the game and egocentric enough to buy into the glamour of the intrigue—he basks in being a star witness and is only too happy to please, lying with the lions while lying like a rug.

Director Steven Soderbergh pulls a nifty trick here taking a very complicated story and keeping the details spinning, like so many plates on sticks. Just like that Ed Sullivan Show staple, the most difficult part is building the momentum to achieve the balance and the film starts stuttering, wobbling until it finds its center. Once it does, it becomes clear that the template Soderbergh is using is from his breezy "Ocean's" movies—lots of little con's disguising the big con. There is, however, no satisfying feeling of being part of the gag—of seeing the magic happen, or as it's labelled in Christopher Nolan's magic movie 
The Prestige. One is left a bit unsatisfied that it all hinges, not on success, but on failing.

The acting is top-notch. Damon's performance slowly unravels in a series of dunce-like mis-steps and comedic ditherings and dissemblings that are sly and subtle—a whistle-blower blowing so loud so as to distract from the alarms down the street. As the FBI masters, Scott Bakula is passionately one-note as the guy who believes, while Joel McHale plays the agent who can't believe with a brilliant series of dead-pan reactions of muted horror whenever the investigation turns...complicated. At a certain point, Soderbergh starts replacing actors with comedians (Patton Oswalt, Samantha Albert, Jimmy Brogan, Bob Zany, Candy Clark, Frank Welker, both Smothers Brothers) who excel at turning conflict into comedy.

Ultimately, one is left with more questions than certainty, your footing unsure about what is true and untrue (the movie sticks scrupulously to the facts of the case) but at some point you have to look at the entire film as a con game—a caper that takes you in, making it as unscrupulous a movie as Orson Welles' F for Fake. But even more broadly, it plays fast and loose with the implicit agreement of trust between film-maker and audience.

* The Episode is 168 "The Fix Is In," although it has been repeated a few times, including the week "The Informant!" opened.

Dr. Seuss' The Lorax

Written at the time of the film's release...

Geiselling Up the Wrong Tree
or
What the Dr. Ordered (What the Patient Thneeded)

The Dr. Seuss library was getting a bad shake from the movies when they started. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (actually an expansion—and declination—of the excellent Chuck Jones Christmas special) was a live-action mess directed by Ron Howard. Then, the studio actually raised the ire of the estate (in the form of Geisel's widow, Audrey) with the live-action version of The Cat in the Hat. Then, someone had the brilliant idea of making them computer cartoons, starting with Horton Hears a Who (which did the book justice and stood out on its own as quite a good flick, being the closest representation of Seussian architecture, or lack thereof). Now, comes Suess' cautionary (and controversial) ecology tale The Lorax in the same format "from the creators of Despicable Me," Chris Renaud and his animation supervisor on that film, Kyle Balda.

And it's not bad. Despicable Me had a weird way of looking at the world all its own, and the creators have a tendency to take the "edge" off Seuss, (although preserving his architectural view of "no right angles") while still making a film that is lively, and with a comic timing that depends on the "ol' switcheroo" for laughs, not unlike a perpetual motion "Roadrunner" cartoon.

The expansion is interesting. Ted (Geissel's Christian name and voiced by Zac Efron) lives in a polluted plastic community of Thneedeville, run by a corporate overlord named O'Hare (Rob Riggle), who's a "zillionaire" from producing bottled air—a necessity since all the real trees have been cut done, owing to (and this where the book comes in) The Once-ler (voiced by Ed Helms) who used them all to make his fortune producing and selling Thneede's, which appear to be a scarf/sweater/hat contraption, which became a sensation. 

His initial tree-toppling leads to the appearance of The Lorax (cackled by Danny DeVito) who "speaks for the trees"—sarcastically, I might add—to try to set the young entrepreneur onto a more green-path when it comes to business (like that ever works without tax-breaks, cute woodsy animals be damned).

Ted, meanwhile, wants to grow a single, solitary tree for the woman of his dreams, Audrey (played by the woman of my nightmares, Taylor Swift, and despite my prejudices, she's quite good!) and the only way he can do that is to get by O'Hare, his burly security guards and escape Thneedville to find the Once-ler and let Nature take its course, Lorax or no Lorax.

It's not a bad translation of Seuss, story-wise. But one wishes that the visuals could be a little less plasticene looking, given the ecology story, which leads one to wonder if such a subject should even be rendered with pixels (and makes one cynical enough to note how much the End Title tune is auto-tuned to a semi-quaver of its unnatural life). Such thoughts should not be creeping into one's thoughts when one is watching a movie about how wonderful Nature's way is, and nature has nothing to do with it, no matter how "green" the movie declares itself to be.