Life of Pi Proves a Thought-Provoking and Majestic Cinematic Experience

In addition to an emotional wallop, Life of Pi offers a feast for the eyes
that really takes advantage of 3D effects.

One of the biggest moments of Sunday’s Oscar telecast was Ben Affleck’s vindicating win for Best Picture, particularly in lieu of the fact that he wasn’t even eligible in the director category despite raking in nearly every other director award this season.  

It’s likely that Affleck would’ve won for directing if he’d been nominated, but, since he wasn’t, Ang Lee netted his second Academy Award for Life of Pi. Regardless of Affleck’s nomination status, I believe the right guy walked away with the Best Director Oscar Sunday night.

Simply put, I thought Life of Pi, which has actually become a surprising smash hit with worldwide grosses exceeding $580 million thus far, was the best movie of 2012 (more on that in a minute). However, even for those who were cold on the film’s framing device or its late breaking twist, it would be hard to deny the directorial achievement.

Yann Martel’s award-winning novel was always going to be a tough story to translate into film, and that proved true over its decade-long development, as a varying number of directors, including M. Night Shyamalan, Alfonso Cuarón and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, continuously failed to crack the nut. Finally, Lee took hold of the story, bringing unparalleled visual scope (aided by ace Oscar-winning VFX work*) and instilling a great deal of heart to the undertaking.

*The VFX work here by Rhythm & Hues Studio is truly remarkable, and their Oscar win this week must’ve been bitter sweet, as they recently claimed bankruptcy. HitFix’s Drew McWeeny posted a very interesting op-ed concerning the future of the VFX industry that’s worth a look for those interested.  Long story short, VFX companies have become the lifeblood of modern filmmaking and yet they are struggling to stay out of the red due to the greedy studios in Hollywood.

The central narrative is actually a story within a story. The framing device involves a writer (Rafe Spall) who visits Pi Patel (Irrfan Khan), a man who has embraced all religious outlooks since youth and somehow manages to practice all of them. The writer has come to hear Pi’s story, as he has been told it is one that will make him believe in God.



Among four Oscar wins, Life of Pi netted a much deserved

trophy for cinematography.



Patel dives into a tale about growing up in India on a zoo that his father owned and operated. In an effort to escape the turbulent political atmosphere in India, Pi’s father ultimately decides to sell off the animals and move the family to Montreal, so he contracts a Japanese ship to transport his family and the animals to Canada. A disaster occurs, and the boat sinks, but the young Pi (Suraj Sharma) manages his way into a lifeboat, ultimately turning up on the shores of Mexico 227 days later.

Spoiler Alert

Those are the definite facts.  Everything else in the movie is eventually left up to interpretation. From there, Pi tells a fantastical story about being stuck on a lifeboat with a friendly orangutan, a dastardly hyena, an injured zebra, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Pi watches on in horror as the hyena kills both the zebra and orangutan before then being killed by the tiger. Somehow, Pi manages to coexist (and even bond) with Richard Parker. Eventually, the duo spends time on an intimidating carnivorous island before drifting to Mexico where Richard Parker takes off, never to be seen again.

When found, Pi is placed in a hospital where two officials from the Japanese Ministry of Travel visit him to discuss what happened at sea. After they brush off his initial story as too farfetched to be believed, he tells them another more disturbing version of the events. In this second story, Pi says he was not joined by animals in the life boat, but rather three other human survivors – his mother, the ship’s loathsome cook and an injured sailor. Worried about limited supplies, the cook kills the sailor and later eats the man. Eventually, the cook also kills Pi’s mother, causing Pi to enact revenge and murder the cook.**

**Despite casting Gérard Depardieu as the cook, Lee does not show this variation of the story. Instead, he wisely keeps the camera on Sharma as he tells the story, making it an even more powerful and devastating version of events. Sharma is great throughout the film, but the newcomer is particularly revelatory in this scene.

The writer points out the striking similarities between the tales, noting that the orangutan is Pi’s mother, the zebra is the sailor, the hyena is the cook, and Richard Parker is Pi. Pi asks the writer which story he prefers, and the writer responds by saying he prefers the story with Richard Parker, to which Pi responds “and so it goes with God.”

The story can be interpreted in many ways. The easy conclusion is that Pi, unable to face the horror of what really happened, created a fictionalized account to retain his sanity. If that is the truth, it’s still a powerful story about how this very religious man managed to deal with horror of witnessing cannibalism and the harsh reality of being a murderer. However, it’s also possible that it all did happen and Pi was just angrily telling the Japanese officials the story they wanted to hear, or, in his words, “a story they already know.”

Real or not, Richard Parker is a marvel of VFX artistry.

In the end, it doesn’t matter which story is true. The greater question is which story do you prefer – the depressing one that makes logical sense or the miraculous one that requires suspension of disbelief? In the choice between hopeless certainty and uplifting ambiguity, the writer chooses the latter (as do the Japanese officials), and so Pi’s story becomes a tale that convinces man to believe in the unbelievable. In other words, it gives reason to “go with God.”

All of this is far more eloquently and elaborately explored in a fantastic piece by Ben Kendrick over at Screen Rant. I highly recommend checking out the article, which did wonders to illuminate the film for me. Upon exiting the theater, I knew I had seen something great, but after reading Kendrick’s words, it clarified it all for me, proving I’d seen something extraordinary.

Life of Pi is a beautiful film that works on quite a number of levels. It provides boundary-pushing visual splendors, while inviting self reflection and spirited dialogue in its macro exploration of the value of faith. However, on the micro level, it also gives us a tremendously emotional story, made all the more potent by excellent performances from Khan and Sharma, soulful direction by Lee and otherworldly VFX work that turns Richard Parker into a living, breathing character. A+

Anderson and Tarantino Embrace Their Quirks to Great Effect with Moonrise Kingdom and Django Unchained

Wes Anderson (left) and Quentin Tarantino (right) are two of Hollywood's

half-dozen or so auteurs under 50.

It’s odd to say because of how vastly different their output is, but it occurred to me recently that Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino have had eerily similar career archs.

If you count the Kill Bill saga as one film, both writer/directors have made seven full-length features that have defined them as modern day auteurs with idiosyncratic approaches that countless filmmakers have unsuccessfully tried to emulate.

Both emerged with ’90s indies and gained increasing acceptance through their first three films before backlash hit in the middle of their oeuvres. Many critics and fans took issue with the likes of Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2, Death Proof, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and The Darjeeling Limited, basically inferring they were derivative “style over substance” trifles, while decrying each man for growing stagnant in their all-consuming quirks.

Interestingly, both Anderson and Tarantino reclaimed critical adoration by releasing films in 2009 and 2012 that were, in many ways, the most Andersony and Tarintinoesque movies of their careers. Somehow two filmmakers that were criticized for working within defined wheelhouses were able to rewrite the narratives around their careers by going even further down their own stylistic rabbit holes.
 
Let’s start with Anderson. For a long time, he has been criticized for his meticulously detailed almost dollhouse-like mis-en-scene, twee sensibilities, use of slow motion, and deadpan dialogue, as well as a supposedly increasing inertness and lack of emotionality. I’ve always thought these were odd criticisms – I never could grasp why people so detested the idea of a filmmaker creating his own visual identity, and always thought that Anderson did a wonderful job of crafting wonderfully emotive and cathartic moments strikingly set against artifice. 


Moonrise Kingdom features slow-mo walking. Duh.

 Nevertheless, the complaints existed, and many people had begun to tune Anderson out as a significant purveyor of American cinema. Then, somehow, the man got back into the good graces of many and landed his second Oscar nomination for The Fantastic Mr. Fox, a film brimming with deadpan quirk and featuring costumes and set design so detailed that the they are almost otherworldly (and, in fact, they are literally slavishly rendered doll clothing and dollhouses).

Anderson has followed that success with Moonrise Kingdom, a film that garnered him another Oscar nomination and that many have called the best of his career, despite the fact that it contains all of the same Anderson eccentricities and ups the twee to even higher levels.

 Although I prefer several other Anderson titles, I found Moonrise Kingdom to be a great little film, choke full of richly thematic undertones involving first love, destiny, abandonment, and the need to be, if not understood, than accepted. The film focuses on two 12-year-olds – Sam (Jared Gillman), a resourceful orphan Khaki scout, and Suzy (Kara Hayward), the mostly ignored black sheep child of two checked out lawyer parents – who decide to run away together after courting via a series of letters.

Anderson nails the uncertainly, exhilaration and sensitivity of navigating love for the first time. Sam and Suzy know what their supposed to do and awkwardly go through the romantic motions, but what really forges their bond is a refreshing and needed dose of head-on openness.

Importantly, Gillman and Hayward are inherently interesting and natural performers, and the absurdity that these kids decide to run away together on an island is part of the charm. So too is the contrasting lack of purpose present in all the adult characters (Edward Norton as a scout leader, Bruce Willis as a local sheriff, and Bill Murray and Frances McDormand as Suzy’s parents), although, other than Willis, I’d say they are largely wasted.


The chemistry between Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx is

the heart of Django Unchained.

Tarantino has operated on a larger scope than Anderson, making larger, more popular movies, while having already landed an Oscar for writing Pulp Fiction. However, backlash for his incessant concentration on ironic violence, endless bouts of verbal dexterity, use of fake brands, and employment of eye-popping angles and zooms, as well as his penchant for fawning riffs on genre movies seemed to reach a boiling point with the release of Death Proof.

And yet he reemerged in a big way three years ago when Inglorious Basterds – an alternate take on WWII that plays up the revenge-tinged violence and indulges Tarantino’s love for stylistic embellishment and long, immersive dialogue scenes – dominated at the box-office and grabbed eighth Oscar nominations (including best director and screenplay). 

This year he’s repeated the trick with Django Unchained, another genre exercise revenge story mash up. This time, the director combines spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation in an examination of slavery. Although that seems a dicey prospect, the film has become Tarantino’s highest grossing film and nabbed five Oscar nominations to boot (including another writing nod for him).

The entire film is conceived with a wink and a nudge, even more so than Inglorious Basterds, which felt more realistic in a way, despite the fact that it was rewriting known history while this story is at least probable. The film is often comedic in the way it’s shot, scripted and acted, and although it contains tracks from Ennio Morricone the legendary composer of Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy, most of the soundtrack is composed of funkified originals and classic pop tunes. 

The film focuses on Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a dentist-turned-bounty hunter who buys a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) to help him locate and take out several marks. In return Schultz offers Django his freedom and agrees to help him save his enslaved wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from Candie Land, a plantation lorded over by the maniacal Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) and run by treacherous house slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson).

Waltz steals the picture outright with a role that was likely written in direct response to his head-turning turn in Basterds. I imagine Quentin so loved Waltz’s take that he was inspired to convert the archetype into a good guy and get back in the sandbox with him. Schultz is the same type of pragmatic and dangerous charmer as Hans Landa, except he’s layered with a level of humanity and compassion that none of the hardened Americans in the piece seem to possess.

DiCaprio and Jackson also are afforded larger-than-life characters and they more than make their mark in transformative roles, despite being absent for the first two-thirds of the film. DiCaprio shows a different, more flamboyant side of his range, while Jackson manages to keep Waltz at bay for the title of greatest Tarantino collaborator based on the sheer diversity of their collaborations alone. 

By design, Foxx is given less to work with, as Django is rejiggered version of the badass of few words made famous by western luminaries like Clint Eastwood. He’s solid and projects the right amount of attitude, but it’s hard to deny that the life begins seeping out of the film once Schultz is out of the picture and Django takes center stage. A lot of that has to do with the minimal amount of investment put into his relationship with Broomhilda. She barely registers as more than a plot device, and the heart of the film is the bromance between Schultz and Django (Foxx’s delivery of expertly set up “Auf Wiedersehen” is a sweet coda to the relationship).

I greatly enjoyed the tone and pulpy aspects of Django but I felt it didn’t have half the momentum or development of Inglorious Basterds, and so it plays like a lesser version of a similar movie. That said, there’s so much to like here that it hardly matters it fails to reach such lofty heights.

Overall, I’m glad to see both Anderson and Tarantino back on top. I never understood the backlash against them, because I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want these men to make films that weren’t personal and drenched in their own eccentricities. While I admire filmmakers like Ron Howard who are almost invisible in their ability to craft diverse, four-quadrant movies with minimal overlapping distinctiveness, I don’t think we should be forcing specialists like Anderson and Tarantino to stifle their artistic identifies. To me, it’d be like forcing Picasso or Salvador Dahli to paint classical art – an utter waste of individuality and talent.

Fortunately, that’s not the case with these two great filmmakers. Moonrise Kingdom A-, Django Unchained B+

Lincoln Shines Courtesy of a Tight Script and Towering Lead Performance

Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski offers up really great
interior work, especially with the natural lighting.

I’ve been seeing movies at a fervent pace the last few weeks in an attempt to catch up on all these Oscar nominees. As a result you can expect quite a few reviews this week in the lead up to the 85^th Academy Awards. First up: Lincoln.

Lincoln has emerged as a major player in this year’s Oscar race, with a pack-leading 12 nominations. Sometimes, the lead dog ends up with a few nominations it really didn't deserve, and it would be easy to assume an Oscar-baiting film like this would do just that, but that’s not really the case here. There’s a broad spectrum of craft excellence on display in Lincoln, and all 12 nominations are immensely defendable. In fact, a strong case could be made that the film should have been nominated in the Makeup and Hairstyling category as well.

The film also has netted quite a profit, especially considering it’s a talky, two-and-a-half hour period piece. At $176 million and counting, it has nearly tripled its production budget to become the biggest domestic grosser of this year’s nine nominated films.

Director Steven Spielberg put in over a decade of work developing Lincoln, and, given the end result, it was time well spent. Many biopics falter in trying to give a general survey of the central figure’s life, but Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner wisely limit the narrative reach to the early months of 1865, focusing almost exclusively on the private and public hardships Lincoln faced in pushing the 13^th Amendment though the House of Representatives.

Other than a few quick war scenes, most of the action takes place in the White House and House of Representatives. Given this, the film could have very easily fallen into History Channel ennui, but, amazingly, Lincoln is often a riveting motion picture experience. It’s easy to imagine some people will find the film boring, but for fans of character development, dialogue, and scene construction, this is a real treat.

Much of the credit for this is owed to Tony Kushner’s ace script, which keeps things brisk and exciting, and offers an intriguing amount of shading to Lincoln, a man of great conscience whose standing as a folksy teller of parables ingratiates him to the public while also causing his chief detractors to underestimate his immense political guile.

Great character actors David Strathairn, Tim Blake
Nelson, John Hawkes, and James Spader add
expert support as vital member's of Lincoln's team.

All of these traits and more are expertly communicated in Daniel Day Lewis’s undeniably magnetic performance. When his casting was first announced, it was easy to guess a titan like Day Lewis would ride this to a record breaking third Best Actor Oscar, and the seeming inevitability of that almost soured me to the movie prematurely. However, even the most resistant viewers would be hard-pressed to deny the depth of the performance, which is not so much a portrayal as it is an inhabitance.

Day Lewis is joined by a large cast of recognizable character actors, headed up by Oscar nominees Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens and Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln. The role of “cantankerous old guy who doesn't suffer fools easily” fits Jones like a glove, but this is an especially plugged-in take on his patented archetype with some lovely undercurrents of resentment and contained compassion thrown in. Meanwhile, although Field’s Mary Todd doesn't always work for me, she totally kills it in a mid-movie tete-a-tete with Jones, while also keeping the character’s inherent hysterics admirably restrained.

Speaking of restrained, one of the most refreshing aspects of the film is how reeled in Spielberg and frequent composer John Williams are in this enterprise. Both are icons in their fields that have, at times, become victims of their stylistic leanings, but they take a low key approach here the beautifully serves the material.

Although it didn't get under my skin like my favorite films tend to do, I admire the hell out of Lincoln and am in awe of the central performance. Oh, and I learned a whole lot to boot, which is cool. Overall, the film is nearly perfect for what it is, and I expect it will hold up quite well and endure as one of the best films of 2012. A

Brave Is Lower-Tier Pixar, But That's Really Not Such a Bad Thing

The animation in this film ranks up there with the best Pixar has done.

As of late, Pixar’s taken a decent amount of slack from fans that believe they’ve lost the golden touch or sold out or maybe a combination of the two.

It’s an understandable fan reaction. For so long, it felt like the studio produced a stone cold classic each time out, and so greatness became something of an expectation. As a result, anything less than spectacular has gotten an automatic dismissal.

That was certainly the case with the original Cars, a creatively imagined and animated (if at times confounding) take on Doc Hollywood that had the misfortune of being merely good and perhaps too commercially kid approved. The fact that such a massive hit (with a plethora of continual merchandising appeal) probably afforded the company the ability to go on an incredibly ambitious, risk-taking run of Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up, is certainly overlooked by the naysayers.

Since that run, the studio has further alienated fans by green lighting a long line of sequels. So far we’ve seen Toy Story 3 (a total slam-dunk) and Cars 2 (better than many movies you’ll see in a given year, but still their worst film by a long shot), but on the docket is the upcoming Monsters University, Planes (which is actually a DisneyToon Studios joint, but as a continuation of the Cars franchise, most will look at it as Pixar), and the recently announced Finding Nemo 2.

Many fans of Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo fear the studio is sullying two classics in a greedy attempt to make money. Although I’m sure finances played a major part here, it’s hard for me to forget how expertly they turned Toy Story into a thematically rich trilogy. It’s not impossible to imagine them doing something similar with these two franchises, especially with the talent involved, so I'm withholding judgement.

No this isn't from Brave. It's concept art for the studio's

canceled film Newt.

However, even taking into account Toy Story 3’s excellence and assuming solid second outings for the Monsters and Nemo franchises, it’s no surprise a case of sequelitis is setting in amongst fans. The beautiful thing about Pixar was always their ability to keep churning out excitingly original masterpieces and now the studio is in the midst of a four-film stretch that contains three sequels (Toy Story 3, Cars 2, and Monsters University).*

*This stretch wouldn’t feel as sequel heavy if the studio hadn't canceled Newt, which revolved around the only two remaining blue-footed newts being forced together to perpetuate the species despite hating one another. Apparently, it was pulled due to similarities to Rio, which is a shame, because the premise sounded fun and the concept art was amazing (click here to see about a dozen of images).

The other film in that run is, of course, Brave, the movie I actually intend to review in this piece. Brave marks Pixar’s first fairy tale and its first film with a female protagonist, but, like Cars, it has come under fire for being a lesser Pixar entry. And it’s hard to argue that point. Once again, we’re dealing with a film that has great visuals and a good theme, but still comes across a bit lacking.

Look at the detail in that face. It's insane.

The problems with Brave are fairly obvious. It’s too preoccupied with being cute, especially in the buffoonish characterization of most of the cast. And, outside of a solid set up, the story’s pretty slight. I really appreciated the complicated mother-daughter issues in the piece, but it’s all resolved in such shockingly swift and precursory fashion. One could easily see this being Pixar’s female driven counterpoint to Finding Nemo, but it’s just a way more modest endeavor that often feels like nothing more than a grab bag of familiar trappings from other Disney movies –the need to marry off an unwilling princess in Aladdin, the “parent knows best or does he/she?” setup from Little Mermaid, the whole turning into a bear trope from Brother Bear, and so forth and so on.**

** I’m not sure if the film suffered at all due to the directorial issues that occurred during production. This was meant to be the first female-directed Pixar film, but, at some point, writer/director Brenda Chapman left the project and Pixar staffer Mark Andrews finished the job. The film feels tonally of one piece, but I would be very interested to learn more about what happened with that and how it may have affected the film.

Nevertheless, there is a boatload of things to like about the movie. For starters, it’s stunningly beautiful. The animators really embraced the challenge of creating a foggy, woodland environment, and the studio continues to impress with their artistry and attention to detail.

On top of that, Patrick Doyle’s Celtic-flavored score is top notch, and the songs are uniformly excellent. In fact, I’m still somewhat shocked neither “Learn Me Right” or “Touch the Sky” received an Oscar nomination (especially “Learn Me Right,” which would have enabled Mumford and Sons to perform on the telecast).

Meanwhile, although I wasn’t a big fan of most of the peripheral characterizations, I thought Merida’s family was pitched just right. Aided by excellent voice work by Kelly Macdonald, Merida is a worthy addition to Disney’s tradition of strong-willed princesses, and both her parents felt like living, breathing characters. And despite most of the comedy falling flat for me, I did enjoy the triplets, and appreciated the decision to keep them almost entirely silent throughout the course of the movie.

This is teaser art from the upcoming Inside the Mind, 

director Pete Docter's follow-up to Monsters Inc. and Up.

So, overall, I would say it’s far from top-tier Pixar, but a good effort nonetheless. I’m not sure demanding fans are  happy with that, but it’s not all gloom and sequels on the horizon. Pixar's upcoming slate also features a slew of original and interesting looking films focusing on dinosaurs, a little girl's mind, and Dia de los Muertos (click here to get a sneak peek at each one). 

I'd stake money another Pixar masterpiece is on the way, but until that time, I'm content to enjoy any Pixar output that comes my way. B

Despite Some Nice Moments, This is 40 Ultimately Underwhelms



Haha!

This is 40, the latest from writer-director Judd Apatow, is a relatively amiable quasi-sequel to Knocked Up. It focuses on Debbie (Leslie Mann) and Pete (Paul Rudd), the sister and brother-in-law from the hit pregnancy comedy, as they attempt to navigate the complications of marriage during a week in which they both turn 40.

Pete and Debbie were expertly-realized secondary characters in Knocked Up, and their presence upped both the comedy and drama of the movie. They adeptly added to the hilarity, but their emotions and problems were wonderfully specific and yet entirely universal, which is probably due to being pseudo-biographical (Mann is Apatow’s wife, his real-life daughters play the couples’ kids, andPete is likely a Judd surrogate). As a result of this, I was totally on board when I heard Apatow planned to further explore these characters, because I expected a personal and insightful look at what it means to be middle aged.

In some ways, the movie meets expectations. The interplay between the two leads, and the scenes depicting their relationship are largely affecting and often ring true.  There’s a real poignancy and truth to the way Apatow contrasts moments where Debbie and Pete question how they could have wound up together with euphoric moments of love and parental cooperation.

That said, while I enjoyed it and smiled most of the way through, in the end, the movie just didn’t leave much of lasting impression. There are a few reasons for that, most glaringly the bloated 135 minute running time.  Given the almost nonexistent nature of the plot (the movie just sort of meanders around until it’s time to end), that’s just too damn long. Apatow has always made surprisingly long comedies (40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up both clock in around 2 hours), but, with his last two films, he’s really developed a bad tendency to overstay his welcome by almost half-an-hour.  

When it comes to toilet time, women just don't get it.

Parts of Funny People, which ran a whopping 145 minutes, were some of the most searing work Apatow’s ever done, but the movie spent way too much time with Mann’s character and got really bogged down as a result. And here, he falls victim to the same type of problem, dedicating far too much time to fluff subplots, specifically one involving employees at Debbie’s boutique (Megan Fox, Charlyne Yi) that could’ve been entirely excised from the film, no harm done. And although they are enjoyable comedic performers, Apatow probably gives Chris O’Dowd and Jason Segel a bit too much screen time as well.

But then, on top of that, the film also features several plot points that set off the BS alarm. The title promises a somewhat universal look at the trials and tribulations of being a 40-year-old parent, but it’s all just so aggressively upper class and inane. Financial problems and daddy issues are major hurdles for the characters, and while that makes quite a bit of sense, the developments here are just downright annoying. 

Pete is struggling financially due to his fledging record company, which he foolishly stakes on risky fringe artists. As plot points go, that’s not so bad. Actually, the idea of failing at such an ambitious dream job is fertile territory, but Apatow doesn’t really do much with it and then he muddies up the situation by giving Debbie ridiculous financial issues revolving around 13K that’s gone missing at her store. She’s worried, but obviously can’t be all that concerned since she investigates it in the most innocuous way possible. 

Judd Apatow may seem somewhat nepotistic, but

all three of his ladies come off well in This is 40.

Meanwhile, Debbie has a somewhat interesting dynamic with a father (John Lithgow) who left her behind to start a new family, but then they dilute that by giving Pete daddy issues of his own. It concerns his inability to say no to a grubby father (Albert Brooks) to whom he’s loaned 80K over the last few years. Needless to say, this plot point is especially infuriating given all the other money issues these people face. It plays as overkill and makes you think “How can these people be this crazy bad and flippant with money?” 

It’s possible this stuff won’t bother most people, and they’ll be able to enjoy the quality domestic strife going on here. Rudd and Mann are both quite good, and Maude and Iris Apatow continue to be natural in front of the camera. But for me, it just didn’t jell. I think financial issues were a perfect way to go, but maybe focus on how the kids, not your dad, are sucking all your money out of you? Or jettison all the extraneous subplots and focus more on Pete’s business failings and the whole claustrophobic feeling that accompanies being a 40-year-old with responsibilities and declining health.

I don’t want to be unfair. In the end, this is a decent movie that ambles along with two likeable leads, giving them some funny people to bounce off of and some real emotions to play. I see the value in that. I just think this one misses the mark a bit. B-

Les Mis Mixes Acting and Singing, Does It the Right Way

 

The one thing I disliked most about doing musical theater in high school was the fact that people’s opinions about certain shows – especially the more popular ones – were usually so biased or so stacked in the favor of professional versions they had seen or their original Broadway cast album that our paltry pubescent performances seemed like a kindergarten play. Of course, opinions about movies can also go in a similar direction.

So, obviously, this was the first thing I thought about as I was watching Les Misérables in the theater. I’ve purposely avoided reviews of the movie not originating from top film critics because Les Misérables is one of those shows that so many people feel some sort of personal relationship with, for some reason or another. As a result, I imagine most people familiar with the show will or have had difficulty viewing the movie objectively. In other words, for a theater diehard, this movie is probably a cruel mixture of a wet dream and terrible nightmare realized.

Trying to be objective as possible,* I thought the movie was a well-conceptualized, well-cast, well-shot and well-adapted musical movie. Instead of simply taking the most beloved musical of all time by every woman a well-known musical and shooting it with a camera, director Tom Hooper makes what feels like an original movie. Of course, anybody who is remotely familiar with the show, or simply the music, will know the whole thing. However, the brilliance of what Hooper does is he makes the movie easily digestible for those not familiar with it and gives the diehards enough nostalgia to hug and enough new and interesting material to chew on.

What Hooper does for those not familiar with the show is he rearranges the order of some of the songs, changes occasional lyrics and injects some extra wording so that Les Mis newbies know exactly what the heck is going on. One example is changing around some of the lyrics so that the audience knows who General Lamarque is and why his death is important to the student rebels (it drives them to fight). Another is injecting the name of Enjolras, the rebel leader, more than it appears in the play – once or twice max, which I always thought was weird for one of the story’s most influential characters. Additionally, the movie is played as a movie, filled with beautiful cinematography and not just an opportunity to shoot singing soliloquies, which I am assuming many fans of the musical might expect.

For the Les Mis fans out there, it stays faithful to the musical in that it only eliminates two not-entirely-necessary songs in “Dog Eats Dog” and “I Saw Him Once,” only cuts the lyrical fat when it makes sense (e.g. Gavroche’s “Little People,” a song that sounds so anachronistic to the feel of the movie and the emotion of the scenes surrounding it that cutting out most of it seems like a blessing). In terms of bringing in something original, the song “Suddenly” fits in well to the tone, although its sound is a little different from the rest of the score, and helps to strengthen the audience’s understanding of where Jean Valjean is emotionally at the point in the film when he buys Cosette from the Thernadiers to raise her as his own. The movie also brings back stars from the original theater productions in smaller roles, such as Valjean-originator Colm Wilkinson as the bishop.

And, of course, my favorite part of the movie that I think helps to draw in both newbies and fans alike is the fact that (most, I assume, and not all) vocals were recorded live on set as opposed to being recorded previously and receiving the lip synch treatment. Fans can appreciate the “live,” non-produced quality of the singing while unfamiliar moviegoers can view it as a movie with calculated acting decisions and emotional heart stitched within every note. This isn’t the first musical movie to ever utilize this post-talkies, but it’s definitely the most high-profile and one that makes amazing use of it.

If this were Taylor Swift being held, the internet would have

stormed so many barricades and brought this film to its knees.

Les Misérables deserves most of the accolades it has received, and that is without even touching upon individual acting and singing performances. When the movie was in the midst of casting decisions, fans filled the internet with angry words about their thoughts on Anne Hathaway and Fantine and seemingly pubescent uproar about the possibilities of Taylor Swift and other well-know actresses possibly being cast as Eponine, the girl every woman ever high school girl thinks defines her.

However, in my humble (and probably incorrect) opinion, this movie truly benefits – in some way or another – from the casting of each of the main characters. And, yes, that includes Russell Crowe, too, angry internet people.

Although you could argue that the musical itself features an ensemble of characters, the story is essentially the story of Jean Valjean, a prisoner jailed for stealing bread for his sister’s family, who eventually breaks parole in an attempt to change his life for the good of himself and others and stop living with the anger against the world that he believes has done him wrong all these years. It his emotional journey that lays the foundation for the entire story. And it is Hugh Jackman’s ability to harness that emotion, tie that into every lyric he sings, sing it well and give the audience the opportunity to see such a distinctive, remarkable change in such an amazing character that lays the foundation for the rest of the actors’ performances.

Jackman, a Tony winner, is obviously a skilled singer and displays his range prominently. Even his rendition of “Bring Him Home,” a reflective song that serves as a pause during the action-packed battle sequences and challenges the actor to spend a lengthy amount of time in the higher registers, sounds appropriate coming from his mouth.



 

Calm down, internet. He's not that bad.



As an actor, he meets his match in Russell Crowe, who has the brooding down to a science with his characterization of Javert. Now Crowe has been getting a lot of flak for his singing in this movie. It is obvious he doesn’t have the same singing chops as most of the other actors. However, he’s not really all that bad of a singer (see here for a pretty good defense). He hits all the notes after all. The problem is he can’t hold all the notes, and he’s not on the superior level one would assume from an actor cast in the movie version of Les Misérables.Here’s why it doesn’t bother me though. I’ve heard renditions of the character where Javert’s songs are almost talk-sung. Of course, this is not really the case with the solo numbers “Stars” and “Javert’s Suicide.” All in all, Crowe did best when his singing could be blended into his excellent acting, such as during “The Confrontation.”

Anne Hathaway is adequate as Fantine – nothing out-of-this-world amazing but also pretty good at the same time. I’ve heard a few criticisms saying she doesn’t really sing “I Dreamed a Dream,” that she more breathily pants the words. A lot of that has to do with the live-on-set singing. But Hathaway is also playing a broken person, a woman whose life is being quickly destroyed as she tries to do everything she can to make sure her daughter’s life does not follow the same path. Similarly, Amanda Seyfried does well as Cosette, acting and singing well in the limited screen time she has.

No, every girl in the world. You are not Eponine. Samantha

Barks is, and she's pretty fantastic in this movie.

The female standout, in my mind, is Samantha Barks as Eponine. The smartest thing the people behind this movie did was cast her in the role that – along with possibly Fantine – was going to be the most scrutinized, a role that almost caused the internet to shut down when it was rumored that Taylor Swift might be inhabiting it. Barks brings a likable and subtle freshness that makes her friendship with Marius believable and sings with an innocent sweetness that helps the audience empathize with her and make the emotions Barks displays seem genuine.

 

Eddie Redmayne and Aaron Tveit are both very good as Marius and Enjolras, respectively. Redmayne is definitely a good singer with an operatic voice and a boyish charm. His handling of “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” is impeccable, aided by the static camera and the choice to focus on the emptiness of the café room. And the role of Enjolras is a powerful but ultimately thankless role – partially due to the lack of name recognition throughout the play – that Tveit ably powerhouses.

As the Thernadiers, Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter (or Tom Hooper or a combination of the two) made the decision to play the innkeepers in a way that mixes the lighthearted comedy of the roles with their dark ruthlessness and indifference toward humanity. What was most enjoyable was the affection the two characters showed for each other; in many renditions of the play, they are often portrayed as reluctant comrades. In the movie, they do their misdeeds literally with a wink and a nod.

Colm Wilkinson has always looked like an elderly clergyman. He's finally

won the role of his lifetime. Hugh Jackman, eat your heart out.

My favorite casting of the whole movie, though, is Colm Wilkinson, the original Jean Valjean on the West End and Broadway, as the Bishop of Digne. Wilkinson’s voice has always had an older and patriarchal tone to it. That tone worked well for Valjean all those years ago but is spot on for the bishop in this movie. Wilkinson’s acting and singing are both solid. And in both a nod to his – that is, both Wilkinson and the Bishop of Digne character – importance to the evolution of the telling of Les Misérables and a brilliant directorial decision, we see Valjean spiritually comforted by both Fantine and the bishop, instead of the Fantine-and-Eponine duo seen in the play.

A few additional notes:

• Anybody familiar with the play was probably expecting to see the rebels’ barricade as a huge mountain, as it is depicted in the musical, stationed upon a rotating stage. In this movie, however, the students have only built a small hill of furniture and various wares they have found in the neighboring buildings. I really liked this for the reality of it all. When it comes down to it, these kids were…kids, students whose opinions did not permeate beyond their own heads. They were small in number, didn’t have a huge army and didn’t have a lot of time (or engineering and architectural know-how) to build a monster of a barricade. And I thought it greatly captured that they were isolated in their attempts to revolt, ignored and left to die by the rest of the citizens.
• Accents. It’s always funny to me that whenever an English-speaking movie takes place in a foreign-language country, the base accent used is always British. Of course, Australians Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe and Irish Colm Wilkinson keep their respective accents. But Americans Anne Hathaway and Amanda Seyfried switched over to Bristish singing accents for this movie. This isn’t a criticism, but more of an amused observation.
• One thing I’ve noticed in hearing the soundtrack played during award shows or via audio clips is that one really needs to be watching the film to truly appreciate the quality of the singing. Due to the live, on-set singing, the singing isn’t as polished or produced. In a way, that might stop people from purchasing the soundtrack. But it also, in my mind, helps to bolster the quality of the acting performances and the singing, combined as they were meant to be.

*I actually was in Les Misérables in high school right when they first released the rights for schools to perform it (I was Marius). My school was one of, I believe, the first 10 schools to get the rights. As a result of the familiarity, I’ve always appreciated the show. I’ve also seen it performed on the West End and on national tour. I’ve also read (most of) the source material by Victor Hugo.

The CIA Goes Hollywood: Reviewing Argo and Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty and Argo both focus on persistent CIA operatives.

The CIA is getting some time in the limelight this awards season, as two of 2012’s nine Best Picture nominees – Argo and Zero Dark Thirty – focus specifically on real-life, Middle Eastern missions and the organizational maneuvering that went into pulling them off.

Given this, it’s hard not to compare the films, especially since both share a composer (Alexander Desplat) and editor (William Goldenberg), contain a bevy of authentic supporting performances, and feature protagonists who essentially push for a Hail Mary pass to complete their assignments.

 In Argo, director (and producer… and star) Ben Affleck details how the organization extracted six Americans from a hostile Tehran during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis by going with their “best bad plan,” which involved pretending the group was a Canadian scouting crew for a cheesy, science fiction movie called Argo.

Meanwhile, in Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, the director-writer duo examines the decade-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden in the wake of 9/11 through the eyes of Maya (Jessica Chastain), a key operative who identified Osama Bin Laden’s compound hideout and eventually succeeded in convincing her superiors to infiltrate it, despite a 60% probability that Bin Laden was actually there.

The end of both films is a foregone conclusion. Nevertheless, Affleck and Bigelow each do excellent work in amping up the tension to the point that each film is an edge-of-your-seat thriller. That said, a fair share of credit should go to Goldenberg, who is Oscar nominated for his work on both films (he shares the credit with Dylan Tchenor on Zero Dark). With this impressive one-two punch, it’s hard to imagine the four-time nominee won’t steamroll his way to his first Oscar.

Despite a lack of strong characterization, Argo emerges
as a tense nail-biter.

Beyond those factors, comparisons between the two do Argo little favors. The film has proven to be a money-making crowd pleaser, which is a tremendous feat for a film set in the Middle East, and it’s also quite good within the limited parameters it sets for itself.

Affleck continues to grow as a filmmaker, and handles the period detail, pacing and constant tonal shifts (the film manages to be equal parts somber, light-hearted, and tense) with aplomb. I also enjoyed the creative use of storyboards during the establishing epilogue, particularly once I realized how it played off the film’s climactic scene.

But, when you boil it down, Argo’s mostly a feel-good, nuts-and-bolts procedural with the added hizzah factor of “Can you believe we pulled this shit off?” There are some interesting implications around the edges about America’s global responsibility, but the film’s more or less a dramatic riff on the capper genre.

There’s also almost nothing in the way of characterization. The Hollywood stuff with Alan Arkin* and John Goodman is played broadly for laughs, and, outside of Scoot McNairy’s nonbeliever, the bulk of the trapped Americans aren’t even given one stock trait. Meanwhile, although Affleck does nice understated work in the lead role, the development of the Mendez character left me wanting more. The fact that such a brazen plan worked is fascinating, but even more interesting (conceivably) should be the man with the audacity to come up with it and then the balls to carry it out. However, except for some sparks in a scene where he shoots down the lame-brained options his CIA associates have come up with, Mendez is largely a muted enigma. Part of me is impressed that Affleck restrained from making his character overly heroic, but it just seems a missed opportunity.

* Although it was largely expected, I still can’t believe the Academy nominated Arkin for this. He’s solid, but there’s almost nothing to the role and there were a bevy of more deserving performances out there. I’m partial to Javier Bardem in Skyfall and Matthew McConaughey in Magic Mike, but there are a multitude of other great turns out there as well. I mean, hell, a strong point could be made that Arkin gives the third best supporting turn in his own film (coming in behind McNairy and Bryan Cranston as Mendez’s boss).

Zero Dark Thirty has no such problem. Even though Maya is given absolutely no background (unlike the perfunctory marital/father baggage Affleck’s Mendez gets), Chastain is utterly riveting as the strong-willed, uncompromising field agent, who remains resolutely convinced that Bin Laden is not holed away in some cave as popular opinion suggests, but rather hidden in a major city with access to comfort and technology. As she puts it, “You can't run a global network of interconnected cells from a cave.”

Despite commercials that suggest an action-packed Navy Seal story, the first two hours of the movie are all about Maya’s painstaking search. And that was almost definitely the way to go with a story like this. Since we all lived through these events, a pure “this is what happened” account would’ve been a little redundant. Instead, what they’ve done here is give us a riveting story of obsession.



Jessica Chastain's forceful lead turn elevates Zero Dark
Thirty.

Late in the film, Maya is asked, “What other cases have you done besides Bin Laden?” and she responds by saying “Nothing … I’ve done nothing else, sir.” She’s a modern day Captain Ahab, except she actually succeeds in her mission, and is forced to live in the aftermath of her completed objective. As the Navy Seal team celebrates their victory, she stands apart, silent and alone. And in a closing scene that evokes the final tone of The Hurt Locker, Maya sits by herself in a cavernous air carrier with tears flowing down her face, unable to answer the question “Where do you want to go?” We’re left with the implication that the victory is bittersweet and hollow, that this woman has been robbed of her purpose and now faces a future of uncertainty and crippling emptiness.

A great deal has been made about the torture scenes in the film, with many suggesting the film is pro torture. That, of course, is total nonsense. Yes the film shows torture, and implies a kernel of information was obtained via such methods, but it makes no overt attempt to support such practices. Instead, the film remains morally ambiguous, and, it allows the viewer a peek at the inhumanity used in an attempt to keep the world safe. Not including these scenes would be a total whitewashing of the facts, and it would’ve made the film seem like some sort of propaganda. That’s all I’ll say on the topic, but for those interested, I’d recommend reading the piece author Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down and The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden) wrote for The Atlantic.

The film orbits around Chastain’s Maya, but there are plenty of other interesting performances laced throughout as well. Jason Clarke makes a strong impression as Dan, who is shown to be an intelligent and sensitive at times, but does not shy away from getting information by any means necessary, whether it’s greasing foreign businessmen or using torture tactics like water boarding.  An interesting choice was made to have Clarke clean cut in all of his D.C. scenes and to be sporting scraggily hair and a beard when working abroad. It’s as if he puts on a new face, and maybe even jumps into an entirely different mindset, when segueing into a far more amoral role in the fight against terrorism.

Jennifer Ehle and Mark Strong also stand out in the uniformly impressive cast. Ehle projects the same authenticity, humanity and sensitivity she brought to Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, and after entering the film in a wonderfully blustery rant at the midway point, Strong brings a great deal of nuance to Maya’s stern, yet ultimately supportive boss.

Ultimately, both films are excellent additions to the thriller genre, and I’m happy they’ve been so successful, since they typify the intelligent, well-crafted mainstream films the movie business needs more of. Argo B+, Zero Dark Thirty A