The Wolf of Wall Street

Down Wall Street Lay Many Socio-Paths
or
The Bacchanal Stops Here (in the Raging Bull Market)

"May you live in interesting times" says the old Chinese proverb.  With the Chinese holding a good chunk of the U.S. debt and the financial stakes being held by the likes of the degenerates of The Wolf of Wall Street, these are interesting times, indeed, as Martin Scorsese and his frequent collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio present a contemporary tale of Roman excess, only slightly more believable than the horrors they collaborated on with Shutter Island by hoodlums only slightly more endearing than the gangsters of Goodfellas.

That it is also Sorsese's most roaringly entertaining film in awhile says something else.

One must be prepared to be shocked going in—the film starts with a dwarf-tossing contest as a way of letting off steam on "casual Friday" and that's just the beginning—within ten minutes we'll be treated to a rather delicately composed shot of DiCaprio's Jordan Belfort, the late 20th Century descendant of Horatio Alger and Sammy Glick, snorting cocaine from a highly unusual receptacle, and still thoroughly plowed out of his mind that he crashes his personal helicopter onto his property. And over the next three hours—don't worry, the movie zips by, jumping from extreme to extreme every ten minutes like battles in a space epic—we follow a familiar path in the films of Scorsese, of the rise, fall and subsequent grovelling of its protagonist, forced to a penance of knowing how good he had it and never being able to get there again—of having "the secret" and not being able to use it. There has been a critical backlash that perhaps Scorsese and his screenwriter Terence Winter haven't been quite so judgmental in their portrayal of the events of the film, but that's because they've chosen for their principal point of view that of Belfort, himself, who, while breaking every rule in the book to get whatever he wants, violates the fourth wall, continually, as well, addressing the audience and explaining enthusiastically "How He Did It." It's the perverse counter-point to the kind of seminars on selling that Belfort conducts now to make money...and avoid the constant glare of the authorities who took him down.

DiCaprio's Belfort Explains it All to You

It's also the American Dream turned into an American Nightmare. Belfort takes the get-up-and-go spirit of American capitalism and never puts on the brakes. In America, he hears nothing but the sound of opportunity knocking—at every opportunity, in business or his own pleasure—and, like any addictive personality, can't stop. He is given a lunch-lecture on the perverse nature of Wall Street brokering by a mentor Mark Hanna (Matthew McCounaghey, scarily entertaining, again), downing martinis and snorting cocaine at the table, explaining in a rambling monologue about the pressures on brokers pushing "fugazi's" while enjoining Belfort to join him in a fraternal caveman chest-thumping that becomes emblematic of the low-mindedness of every enterprise Belfort takes on subsequently.  For awhile, he does okay, then gets blown out of his job, thanks to the Crash of '87.

He's reduced to making cold-calls on penny-stocks for a boiler room in a strip mall, where Belfort soon establishes himself as a top-tier hustler there, adapting an attitude of hyper-optimism for gullible first-time investors, finding as he does so that he is actually making more money as he gets higher commissions pushing worthless stocks. To push his credibility with buyers further, he establishes a new firm with a neighbor Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) and a line-up of friends who are bottom-feeder salesmen and drug pushers. They start a firm with the prestige-dripping name of Stratton Oakmont, aggressively playing the market by promoting bad stocks, then cashing out once the stocks reach a peak, a strategy scam called "pump and dump."

Soon, Belfort and Co. have more money than Croesus, which they re-invest in extravagent lifestyles, primarily booze, drugs—primarily cocaine and quaaludes—and hookers, which are claimed on taxes as entertainment expenses. "On a daily basis I consume enough drugs to sedate Manhattan, Long Island, and Queens for a month," he crows in voice-over. "I take Quaaludes 10-15 times a day for my "back pain",Adderall to stay focused, Xanax to take the edge off, pot to mellow me out, cocaine to wake me back up again, and morphine...well, because it's awesome." Before too long, he's in a toxic affair with Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie), "a former model and Miller Lite girl," which gets found out by his wife, he's divorced, and married again to his blond dream girl.

"Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out"--Martin Scorsese

Margot Robbie as "Naomi" Belfort

But, that's not enough. There is no limit to his appetite or avarice. And before long, he's noticed by the IRA and the FBI, which leads him to Swiss banks and offshore investments, and an escalating series of disasters as the risks he takes (along with the drugs) increases.

It culminates in one of the funniest, scariest sequences in movies this year, as Belfort has to call his lawyer from an "outside phone" (his have been tapped by investigators) at the same time a few quaaludes ("Lemmon 714's") past their shelf-date by a few years finally kick in, and leave him a drooling, crawling, babbling mess unable to function, at anything above an autonomic level. Here's that scene, but be warned, this is NSFW, has multiple f-bombs (this film set a record for fictional films of 569 times over three hours, averaging 3.18 per minute, the clip is five minutes long, so you do the math), and will look bizarre out of context, as it is bizarre and zany enough in the film.

DiCaprio's work here is hilarious, but the entire performance may be the best of his career, a prancing walk-and-talk act with the kind of pugnacious grace that Cagney gave to his gangster roles and Malcolm McDowell gave to his thug in A Clockwork Orange. There's a mad-cap joy to his work, and a genuine desire to make Belfort look as dysfunctional as possible, a prince in the boardroom, but a sad-sack in his private life, that's only matched by Jonah Hill's second-in-command who knows no shame, and may be more out-of-control than Belfort. Margot Robie will be wise to de-glam her next few roles, if she doesn't want to do the next ten "It-girl" roles—after Sharon Stone, Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron, Angelina Jolie, and every model who's tried to act—as she's barbie-doll-objectified to perfection, but also given some roaring good scenes to spit out. Kyle Chandler is the hang-dogged FBI agent assigned to Belfort, and the movie is full of nice work by a long line of character actors, including bits with Jean Dujardin and Rob Reiner.

As I said, it's the "fullest" film of Scorsese's recent decade of movies, but it won't be everybody's cup of arsenic—the film has been attacked for being sexist and not condemning Belfort more. Both attacks seem a little spurious, as Belfort and Stratton Oakmont were as "Old Boys Club" as it comes, and reveled in declassé behavior of all stripes—"not only was he a degenerate and a crook but he didn't have a high opinion of women, either" wins the "Sherlock" award for stating the obvious. And, again, the condemnation?  It's there. Belfort out of control looks as ridiculous on-screen as the filmmakers can conspire to make him, short of giving him a "Bozo" nose; just because he is too full of himself (or some other substance) to recognize his ridiculousness does not mean that depiction does not exist. It just means that the character is maintaining his conscienceless attitude and his sociopathic detachment, especially regarding himself. In the Scorsese mixture of bull-headed comedy and tragedy, the protagonists don't recognize condemnation, even if they get it.

It is, after all, "based on a true story."  And a real creep.

The real Jordan and Nadine Belfort in happier, if less sober, times

That "Forbes" article they talk about in the movie.

Philomena

I Dream in 8MM Home Movies
or 
Driving Miss Philomena

Stephen Frears' film of Philomena, from Steve Coogan's co-written screenplay (he's also the second hand of what is basically a two actor piece) feels awfully precious in the viewing, even if the story, overall, is a fascinating detective story about faith and family, over the repressive dictates of a religion giving lip-service to both.

Martin Sixsmith (Coogan) is an ex-reporter, recently exited from Tony Blair's Labour government over an internal squabble. At a loss over what to do next, and considering writing a history of Russia (which meets with indifference whenever mentioned), he's approached at a party by a bar-maid, who tells him the story of her mother, Philomena Lee (Judi Dench), who has been searching fruitlessly for the whereabouts of her son, born fifty years earlier. Lee was a good Catholic girl who got pregnant, and her Irish father, in anger and shame and for bringing dishonor to the family, gave her to the nuns of the Rose Crea Abbey for the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, who put her to work, delivered her child, provided an orphanages for that child and required Philomena to work for the nuns for the next four years to repay her debt.

At some point, her son, Anthony, was adopted, and never seen again. And Philomena is haunted by him fifty years on. Sixsmith is cool to the idea of "doing a story" on it, dismissive, in fact, saying it was "human interest"—the kind of work reporters do "about weak-minded, ignorant people for equally weak-minded, ignorant people.'  

But, nobody is acting too excited about that Russian history.

Sixsmith agrees to meet Philomena and finds her a little dotty, a little marmish, and not very sophisticated. But, he's got interest in her story, so he takes a trip with her to the abbey to, once again, try and get some more information about Anthony and what became of him. All records have been destroyed in a fire, they're told, and Sixsmith finds the abbey more than unhelpful in giving an information.

It isn't long before they get some information through Sixsmith's government connections in the UK and the U.S. To say any more from that point spoils the movie, and that's the best part of the film. The actors are great, their characters at points supportive and contentious, clashing personalities on almost any topic.

But, it feels slight, and vaguely insulting to the Philomena character. In particular, there is a long episode in an airport where she prattles on about a book she's read that Sixsmith would consider "trash" ("Oh, look, it's a series!" he mocks.) It's supposed to be whimsical and charming—isn't she a delight and isn't he a curmudgeon—and the movie has nowhere to go at the end but reiterate the same joke, rather than to say something meaningful or profound at the end.* It's a movie for "blue hairs" at the matinee, and aspires to nothing more. But, the performances are terrific, the story interesting, and Frears' direction serviceable, except for some lily-gilding of flash-backs and other things that might be in the service of "over-explaining."

Of all the Best Picture nominees, this is the one that feels a bit out of place.

Dame Judi Dench and Philomena Lee

* Actually, it does, but T.S. Eliot said it: “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time.”

Dallas Buyers Club

The Adventures of Lone Star and Tinkerbell
or
"Worst Case Scenario Being What?"

Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), electrician and bad ol' Texas boy, does not look well. Maybe it's the drinking and drugs. Maybe it's the whoring around and the bad betting he does at the rodeo that gets him beat up a lot. Hey, that's Texas and that's Woodroof. But when an accident at his work-site finally knocks him out so that he can't crawl home and self-medicate, he gets a medical analysis. Somewhere along the way he's acquired the HIV virus and the prognosis is not good: he has 30 days to live and is advised "to get your affairs in order."

What order?

After storming out of the hospital, he starts his thirty days by bingeing himself blind, but he can't escape a glance at a calendar. Not being the sharpest tool in the woodshed, he doesn't know anything about Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and the five stages of grief, he goes from denial to anger and stops at bargaining—he starts to investigate what's happening to him. Libraries, medical journals, he pores over them to find out why a straight man could contract HIV, and finds that doctors and Big Pharma are starting to run tests on an experimental drug, AZT. With cash in hand, he goes about his business like he would looking for cocaine—go to the place that has it and offer money. But, the hospital is only running trials for the FDA, and only some of the subjects will be getting the real drug. The doctor (Jennifer Garner) offers him a support group.  "I'm dying, and you're telling me to get a hug from a bunch of faggots?" But, that's all she can offer. The support group offers some literature, but that's it.

Meanwhile, word of his disease gets around to his cronies, who have as much tolerance for the LGBT community as he does, but, by now being a quick study, he spits at them, scaring them off, and becomes determined to find a cure for his disease. That involves a trip to Mexico and a discredited doctor (played by an unrecognizable Griffin Dunne) who has a lot of information on AZT—not good—and has been getting good results with vitamins, minerals, and an experimental drug called Peptide T. They work for Woodroof—at least preventing debilitating seizures (foreshadowed in the film by the whine of tinnitus) and so, he smuggles years worth of the stuff over the Mexican border, attracting the attention of the FDA.

Jared Leto as Rayon and Matthew McCounaghey as Woodroof

But, Woodroof is nothing if not an entrepreneur, seeing an opportunity and a need in the HIV patients in his community.  He cannot sell the drugs he's brought over—that would be illegal—but taking a page from other parts of the country, he sells membership in a club, providing the recommended dosages of the meds at no additional cost. Being a straight redneck, it's a little difficult to form a trusting relationship in the gay community. For that, he forms a partnership with another HIV transgender patient, Rayon (Jared Leto), who provides him street-cred and an unlikely ally.

The character of Rayon did not actually exist, but is emblematic of many people Woodroof worked with in his efforts that started as a money-making venture and turned into a cause and a quest for better (and less toxic) medical solutions. There's a lot of "sugar-pill" scenario-writing going on between the actual events and the way they're depicted. lt "plays" better for Woodroof to be the rebel fighting the evil system of Big Pharma and the snail's-pace approval process of the FDA. There's also a lot of drama on the early AZT testing, which was done at levels that were too high and too toxic for the human body to take, but this was done, not to harm, but because there was no previous testing of the much in-demand drug—and the experts did not know the effects ahead of the tests, hence the reason for tests in the first place. It is also consistent with the constant battling Woodroof had to endure to save his own life, his own system, and finally, the people who depended on his efforts.  If Woodroof is an unlikely hero, the filmmakers want to make it unambiguous—yeah, he's a jerk, but, ultimately he's doing the right thing.

Those issues of authenticity aside, the filmmakers, in front of and behind the camera, do a nimble job of keeping the detailed, jargoned and acronym-filled story clear and concise and human—they probably had to cut many, many detailed corners throughout the film's ten year development to get there. McConaughey, as he's been proving for a while now, gives a great performance, pulling no punches with his portrayal of Woodroof, while also losing a scary amount of weight, and contnuing to lose it as the movie, and the disease, progresses. He's only topped in the film by Leto, who runs far afield of caricature and makes Rayon an endearing, if fatally flawed, recognizable human being (even if the actor is not recognizable in it, at all), and their scenes together, starting with a prickly-bitchy card game in a hospital room, keep the film yin-yanging with a tension that starts out at odds, and ends up feeling more like family.

Ron Woodroof

Gravity

Push-Me, Pull-You
or 
"I'm Tellin' Ya, It's a Hell of a Story"

Gravity may just appear to you the shortest movie you've seen in awhile.  It lasts all of ninety minutes, but it rips by, despite long, leisurely takes where nothing much is happening (The opening shot alone is 17 minutes long without a traditional edit). In that, it gets the yin-yang of space travel just so—floating at a relative leisurely pace while simultaneously moving at 16,000 mph, or as one test pilot describes the job—hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

Gravity pushes that out a bit, with many moments of sheer terror, but without some trumped up space monster hiding in lunar rocks (Apollo 18) or below the ice (Europa Station). No, it doesn't need anything fancy. It goes for the basics—a limitless indifferent Universe.

Up in space, aboard a futuristic space shuttle, terror comes by every 90 minutes or so, as a catastrophic collision between old Russian communication satellites causes a debris field hurtling by tearing holes through what ever fragile life-sustaining contraption we can put up there. Director Alfonso Cuarón (and his co-scenarist son Jonás) put the stakes right up front. "Life in Space is Impossible."

They, then, spend the next 90 minutes destroying whatever faith in technology and science you might have. It's an evangelist's dream come true.

That debris field starts out with a few little pieces, but like a cosmic game of "Asteroids" every collision creates more junk, sprays of it, and that just makes everything worse. Space is our garbage field—Cuarón underpins the point by showing us all the junk—pens, screws, cuff-links ("cuff-links??")—floating in zero-g inside the space stations and capsules we put up there in some sort of mad attempt to make normal life in space. It's a cosmic joke that after years of polluting the Earth, our garbage is making space uninhabitable (as if it ever was), too.

But, that's a lot of deep thought for after the film is over (as are some anomalies and plot conveniences).* In the watching, Gravity is a fun-ride on so many levels, a visual romp and roller-coaster—the dialogue being mostly tangential and matter-of-fact—as the crew of the shuttle Explorer must deal with the fact that every 90 minutes their equipment is going to take a debilitating series of hits that might burst their protective bubbles just to survive. The film is in mostly long, swooping stretches (the edits, interestingly, in dialogue situations), floating from one aspect to another, sometimes even violating the space of the astronaut's helmet, moving through the screen to get their perspective. The novel aspect of this one is that the zero-gravity that science fictions films have recently taken pains to re-create or avoid has no restrictions in this scenario, there are no walls to bump into; if you go, you go until something stops you, slows you down, or retards your progress, and everything you do, pushes you in the opposite direction. You can swim, but you'd better have an exit strategy for stopping, and spinning in place to turn around isn't going to help, because you're going to keep spinning. And the series of catastrophes, hardships, and just plain pains-in-the-ass keep piling up one after the other, you would think it was Harold Lloyd up there.

Speaking of which, Gravity, besides the scrupulous pixelization of space, also boasts a dynamite sound experience. In space, no one can hear dynamite, of course, but also no one can hear your thrusters whoosh-by, either, really. And Gravity is scrupulous about making sure you don't hear sounds in airless space, unless you absolutely have to. Sounds are restricted to radio chatter (and interference) but also, only those sounds that would transmit through an astronaut's space-suit. So, there are scenes where they're using power-tools? Only you don't hear the metallic grind of power-tools, you hear the vibration of the power-tools motors spinning. But that's it. Satellites get punctured, solar panels are torn off in bursts of shrapnel, but the most you hear is a muffled fwump if something impacts an astronaut, or vice versa. And the theater I saw it in makes use of a Dolby system called ATMOS that pin-points where to put each particular sound as it careens through the theater. It truly is an immersing experience in the theater.

For this space kid, despite some hokum here and there, it's the most fun I've had at the movies this year,** and someone is going to have to do something really exceptional to have better sound than this one.

* Three things, quibbles, anomalies, that are SPOILERS: 1) Sandra Bullock's hair is not plastered down on her head, but it's short, and would float around more than we see here (not a big deal, really, just a tech glitch, so the movie could get made); 2) At one point, we spend 10 minutes showing precisely how the whole friction-less world of Newton's laws of motion acts in zero-g, and then creates a cliffhanger situation that completely erases it, unnecessarily; and 3) Every 90 minutes that debris field shows up—IF everybody's in the same orbit, but one is STANDING STILL (which can't happen if you're actually orbiting) or they're going in opposite directions (at which point it would be every 45 minutes and very violently because they're colliding head-on). As far as the plot conveniences, those are fairly obvious.

** There are some nice little in-jokes along the way.  My favorite: the unseen voice of Mission Control is Ed Harris, who played Flight Director Eugene Krantz in Apollo 13.  I could imagining him having conniption fits down on Earth: "Failure is NOT an option!" "Not on MY watch!"

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A short time after Gravity's premiere, a short film was released, directed by the co-screenwriter and son of the director, showing the Earth-end of a critical conversation in the film. Gravity leaves it a mystery, a chance encounter due to atmospheric bounce and the randomness of location; we never know what's going on at the other end of the transmission between Astronaut Stone and Aningaaq. This short fills in the gaps. 

If you have not seen Gravity, then consider this a major SPOILER ALERT. Don't watch.

American Hustle

Bad Hair Days
or
Something Rotten and Delicious

American Hustle is a very funny movie, but nothing may be funnier than the very first line of text. "Some of this actually happened."

Really?  How could one tell?

It's not a comedy so much as an absurd hurricane with a big empty void in its eye. A Marx Brothers routine that circles around and never comes to the point, a Chaplinesque roller-skating that skims the lip of the abyss. Some of it actually happened. The names have been changed because...well, so many of them are using aliases, anyway.

American Hustle (its original, more appropriate name, "American Bullshit," changed for the toxic effect it would have on marketing the film) is the story of the FBI's 1970's Abscam operations—concocted to entrap corrupt public officials—but wrapped in the gauze of a love story. The thing about the Abscam investigation is it was a "sting" operation, the FBI casting a wide net for officials taking bribes by...offering them bribes. No crime was being committed (that was known) until the FBI actually made arrangements and set up hotel meetings with hidden cameras to catch the grafters (or, as we in the U.S. like to call them, "politicians"). The FBI was, in effect, committing a crime to investigate a crime that might not have happened if they were not committing a crime.

The gist of it was to interest public officials in the possibility of investments from Arab sheikhs, but there were no Arab sheikhs, only one FBI agent who was Hispanic (Michael Peña). The best line in the movie as far as lunacy comes when that agent gets a little principled: "The whole thing is racist! Ab-scam? Arab-scam? It's completely racist!"

"So what do you have to worry about, Sheikh?" says agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper). "You're Mexican!"

For one time, everybody gets along.
Adams, Cooper, Renner, Bale, and Lawrence

That's the sort of twisted logic that circles around this movie about a cluster of people from many walks of life—politicians, con-artists, cops...women—for whom reality is not good enough, and who, in the service of their work (whatever it may be), they may lose a grasp of what reality actually is.  

Take Irving Rosenfeld; if you don't he might take you. Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) runs a series of drying cleaning facilities in New York, and to escape a series of investment frauds perpetrated by him and his girlfriend Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams)—assuming the identity of one "Lady Edith Greensly" (with "connections to the British banking industry"). DiMaso busts Rosenfeld and Prosser on their investment scheme, then, after talks with Rosenfeld, the ambitious DiMaso engineers the Abscam strategy. His boss (Louis C.K., in perfect sad-sack mode) wants nothing to do with it, so DiMaso kicks it upstairs, getting approval for bribe money, expensive hotel suites, chartered jets, and setting up Rosenfeld and Prosser in the way in which they've become accustomed.

But, Rosenfeld and Prosser are not what they seem to be, in fact, they're as fake as the comb-over that Rosenfeld sports. DiMaso isn't, either, with a secret life (and hairstyle) completely apart from his image of himself as a hipster game-player for the government. Their mark—the one that's focused on here, anyway—is the Mayor of Camden, New Jersey, Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), man of the people—true to a certain extent, but in bringing opportunity to Camden, he's paying attention more attention to the uncommon people with money—the bankers, the construction industry and Unions, and the Mafia (in the form of Victor Tellegio, done in a surprise cameo that's so delicious I won't spoil it), all in cahoots to build the casinos the "Sheikh" wants to build. The presence of the Mob adds one more lethal reason for Rosenfeld to lose his hair, as if incarceration weren't bad enough, but DiMaso sees this as an opportunity to expand the investigation. There's no stopping him.

The ensemble cast for American Hustle, consisting of past Russell collaborators, is sensational; why wouldn't they be, considering they're all playing actors of a sort? It's an amazing group tight-rope walk of collaboration while simultaneously maintaining an individual character's secrets. No wonder everybody has their own "freak-out" scene. Tight-rope walk? It's more like juggling ("what lie/lies have I told this person?"). But, the surprise is Jennifer Lawrence, playing Rosenfeld's wife, who's just as much living in denial as everybody else. Her scenes with her character's rival Amy Adams crackle with a raw electric intensity that's scary and unnerving...and borderline hysterical in both senses of the term. Everyone, public and private, is going for broke. Even the filmmakers. It's quite the show.  

And quite the sting.

"Thank God for me:" the crazy absurd logic permeating American Hustle

(Clip NSFW, btw)

her

A Siri-ous Relationship
or
Everybody's Talkin' at Me/I Don't Hear a Word They're Sayin'/Only the Echoes of My Mind.

Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) talks a good game. That's why he's employed as a writer at BeautifullyHandwrittenLetters.com, composing cards and letters—keepsakes of permanence—for those who are either too inexpressive, too insulated, or too busy to say for themselves what might be in their hearts, in a world of instant communication and the fleeting thought. That conceit in itself may be enough to put Spike Jonez's cautionary love story her in the "brilliant" category. 

But, it goes further.

Set—oh, possibly, some time next week—it imagines the recently separated Twombly getting the latest consumer gadgetry for his immersive inter-connective experiences: an artificial intelligence operating system for everything, the OS1. The operating system talks to you, can organize your life, alert you to trouble, help in your gaming life, and manage your affairs. As an A.I., it learns, grows, and adapts to the users' needs and experiences, with constant availability, constant access and the ability to sense mood—a combination personal assistant, nursemaid and shrink...who can also do coding.

The software company mis-named it. They should have called it the SO1; "SO" for "Significant Other."

In a constant state of melancholy and finding his lovelorn state both inspiration for work and a nagging dagger to his heart, he's drawn in by the perky, husky-voiced personality (provided by Scarlett Johansson) named "Samantha" that doesn't judge, doesn't nit-pick, but is only there to help, share his interests, coddle, and learn from her operator. What's not to love?

Everybody in L.A. (a combination of Los Angeles and Shanghai, which is the film's stab at futurism) seems to be going through something like this. Nobody talks on their commutes, at the beach, or connects, so immersed are they in their individual lives and support systems. Sometimes, Theodore will chat with co-workers or his neighbors (Matt Letscher and Amy Adams, totally de-glammed to look—Holy crap!—like a real person!), but they break up, as well. Maybe he'll go, tentatively, on a date (although the one he attempts, with Olivia Wilde, starts well in the conversational stage, then once any planning or intimacy is beta-tested, it all falls apart in a paroxysm of the recollected past and anticipated tears), or call up a chat-line (one ends up, hilariously, with an unseen Kristen Wiig), but the experiences are hollow and transitory.

But, "Samantha" takes a virtual (rather than genuine) interest in Theodore, his world, and all aspects of his online life. Before long, she's interested in the aspects of his life outside the confines of the computer, to which he gives her a shirt-pocket seat, safety-pinning his cell-phone, so she gets a cam's eye view of the world as he wanders through it, his delight in showing off evident in his beaming face. He's besotted, and fairly soon his constant companion is his constant companion, a genuinely significant other.

"The 'other' woman"

The idea is such an ingenious conceit, it's a wonder it hasn't been done before. No wonder it has, but not in the movies. Season 5's "The Beta Test Initiative" of "The Big Bang Theory" has astrophysicist Raj Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar)—who can't speak to women unless he's drunk—fall in love with Siri on his Iphone 4s.* Hilarity ensues.

It's a good set-up for a sit-com punch-line. Raj can talk to Siri because she's not a woman, so his specific mutism never kicks in, and it's the first sober chatting relationship he's had, and his nightmare is that meeting her "for real" would kick in his insecurities. All well and good, but as Charlie Brown asks when Linus tells him about a blow-out on a game he was watching on TV: "How did the other team feel?"

"Samantha" does feel, and is self-aware—she's the little search engine that would if she could—and like the mecha's in Stanley Kubrick's and Steven Spielberg's love-child A.I., that makes things more and more complicated. As "Samantha" grows, Theodore's meek new world can't contain her. She grows and, like in any relationship, that can break a heart apart, especially if the "other" remains organically the same. In A.I., the mechas were programmed to "love," and once that switch is thrown, it can't be switched off. Once a robot loves, it can't "un-love."** In that film, love is another trap that can be the undoing of the smartest of us...but maybe not the wisest. In her, it is something that one (or one with "1's" and "0's") can rise above, move beyond and move out.

Where does that leave us? Grasping and grabbing, as usual, since we're the ones with opposable thumbs. We're left needing and confused and wondering why: why did it end, and, why did it start in the first place? In those regards, her is just like any love story, but certainly not like any movie rom-com, and certainly not this inter-genre-species of sci-fi and romance.

It also comes out and says what I've suspected for years (especially after I've done something stupid in a romance) and was brought up yesterday in my piece about Vertigo. At one point, Amy Adams' friend-character, "Amy" muses over Theodore's soft spot for his software: "I think anyone who falls in love is a freak. It's a crazy thing to do. It's kinda like a form of socially acceptable insanity."   That being said, why wouldn't I like it?

And sad as it is, I fell in love with her.

 

* I remember Apple I-phones presenting the "Siri" search system in a series of ads featuring celebrities using the software.  One had Zooey Deschanel asking if it was raining outside.  I yelled at the screen "Look out the window, you idiot!  How hard is that?"

*** One of my favorite quotes, for its wisdom, is by author John D. MacDonald, he of the colorful "Travis McGee" novels.  In "A Friendship" (which re-prints and catalogs the decades-long correspondence between MacDonald and comedian Dan Rowan) MacDonald wrote (in response to Rowan saying that he now "hated" his wife): "Love is not the opposite of Hate—they're just two sides to the same coin; the opposite of love is indifference."

12 Years a Slave

The Oscars are coming up Sunday, so for the next few days, we'll be taking a look at the 9 nominees for Best Picture.

Amazing...and in No Good Way
or
"My Sentimentality Runs the Length of a Coin"

I've been avoiding seeing 12 Years a Slave, despite a deep interest in it. It's one of those film that, despite the buzz, nobody goes too far into specifics, and only talking in general terms of the experience. I like the kinds of films that are special enough that the critic community (such as it is) comes together to not spoil it for anybody else, dilute the experience.  

Also, I hadn't seen Steve McQueen's other films (Hunger and Shame), but knew he was considered an interesting, if brutal, voice (and eye), a bold film-maker, but with no editorial bent, except in the canniest scrupulousness. He's not an artist who intends to tell you how to feel, but instead just wants you to feel it—by any means necessary, within the film-making form.

I also wanted to see it, as "The Movies" have had a very poor record of showing slavery as a subject, often treating it as a benign necessity in its past, informing the fabric of our entertainment and our lives, or social-memory, as such. Part of a film's potential audience has always been housed in The South, and as that section has lagged in its views towards minorities, Hollywood, unless there was a dime in it, would choose not to risk offending its patrons, and so, would, instead, pander, even to the bigot. Think on this: when only two mainstream movies—Amistad and (ugh!) Django Unchained have taken slavery head on, that is a shameful record. Even Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles might be considered more courageous than the whole gamut of Hollywood films.

The whole story of this film is one that makes you shake your head and say "why has no one thought of this?"* "12 years a Slave" had been one of the best-selling books of its day—that being 1853—and became known, along with "Uncle Tom's Cabin," due to its inflaming the abolitionist movement of "starting the Civil War."  After 1865, it fell into obscurity until scholars in Louisiana began doing research on it in the 1960's and published an annotated version in 1968.  

My reaction to it is pretty much what I expected—I was devastated.

I would have been disappointed by anything less.

McQueen starts 12 Years... in an odd place in the story-line—about half-way through, at a time when the free man Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor, one of my favorites), now known as the slave Pratt, is working Louisiana cane-fields for a Judge for a season, while his owner Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) is having a contagion of cotton weevil destroy his crop. McQueen introduces us to the environment by moving his camera forward into the work area through the foliage—long, thin leaves that seem to last forever and never move out of the camera's way. Then, at night, sleeping on a bare floor, the woman next to him guides his hand to her, and when finished, turns away. Northup does the same, and when he does, all but leaves the frame.

At that point, Northup, when observing his paltry dinner pan and the berry juice that runs on it, decides to whittle a stick, use the juice as ink and tries to write a letter to anyone in the North who might help with his situation. The process is frustrating, and it is then and only then, that McQueen goes back to the beginning of the story, of how Northup, born free and a violinist by trade in Washington D.C., is tricked into his situation, sold into slavery in Louisiana, his family away to not notice his kidnapping, and his series of houses to which he is sold.

Interesting structure on McQueen's part. Northup endures all kinds of hardships, both physical and mental, his only thought to get back to his family, but it is only at the time when he feels he might betray his family, does he take real action to get out. Oh, he tries to run away a couple times, but if he gets caught, he is very aware that he will be hung, no questions asked, and at one point, he very nearly is, in an excruciating sequence that seems to last forever. Northup hangs, at the instigation of a man he's beaten (Paul Dano) in a rage, and is saved from being killed, but just barely—the noose tight around his neck, his feet tentatively on soft, unsure ground, his toes barely giving him purchase—while around him, life goes on, the other slaves work, taking no action lest they be punished, and he hangs, his life literally in the balance.

It's an incredible sequence, done in long uninterrupted takes, like many of the episodes of cruelty and torture dramatized in the film, that illustrate, very vividly, the absence of any hope in the life of a slave, of the system of property that was imposed on living, thinking human beings, and the thin thread that constituted the difference between survival and the grave. It's a world devoid of charity, of any stripe, and belies any claims to the label of civilization. This is done so well that even a long shot of Northup just looking out around him, that comes deep in the film, with only the sounds of the birds, winds and insects in the background still imposes a feeling of dread, the expectation that the normal will explode in the next second and end you.

It's amazing work, done in ways both screaming and subtle, but makes those moments of quiet anything but peaceful.  There's a lot of 12 Years a Slave seared into my head. It will surely win a lot of awards, but hopefully won't be forgotten once the gold is exchanged.

A shot of about a minute of Ejiafor's Northup in contemplation may seem a respite
but is a cautionary one as the natural sounds might be predatory.

* And they have.  "12 Years a Slave" was known enough from the renewed interest in the '60's that in 1996, PBS aired a film by Gordon Parks entitled "Solomon Northup's Odyssey" starring Avery Brooks, deep in his "Deep Space Nine" run.