Hello, everyone. The end of
the year is now upon us, and because of that I’ve decided to finally stop
neglecting you all and get back to work. I know I’ve said that several times
before, but now I mean it! Really! Anyway, how about I catch up on a few
notable recent releases? No? Well too bad, you don’t have a say in the matter.
Let’s begin.
All is Lost
Dir: J.C. Chandor
Writer/director J.C. Chandor
first made a splash a few years back with Margin
Call, a dialogue-heavy drama about the hours leading up to the 2008
financial crisis. The film was praised for its screenplay, which went on to be
nominated for the Academy Award. His second feature, All is Lost, almost feels like the result of a personal challenge
to make the most polar opposite film imaginable. It is the tale of an unnamed
man (Robert Redford) lost at sea, and as such the shooting script for All is Lost was apparently just over 30 pages long. There is almost
no dialogue outside of a few cries for help, and no other characters besides
Redford. Most movies like this put a great focus on backstory and other
characters. All is Lost throws all of
this away, and it proves that you don’t need a bunch of baggage to make a great
movie. Simplicity is not the enemy.
In fact, Chandor’s film is
thrilling simply because of the absolute focus on Redford’s attempts to
survive. Only once does he truly lose his composure, because otherwise he seems
to be confident in his ability to get out of this situation alive. And the lack
of backstory only adds to the wondrous mystery of it all. We don’t know why he
is floating in the middle of the Indian Ocean in the first place, and we don’t know for whom the
opening narration is intended. We only know the predicament he is in at this
very moment, and Chandor brilliantly captures each and every step of his
quickly deteriorating struggle. If Margin
Call showed off the skills of Chandor the writer, All is Lost has allowed his director side to flex its muscles.
Grade: A-
Blue is the Warmest Color
Dir: Abdellatif Kechiche
When summarized, Abdellatif
Kechiche’s Palme d’Or winner Blue is the
Warmest Color sounds like an interminable proposition. It is ultimately
little more than a coming of age story stretched across three hours, with the
centerpiece being a relationship between a 20-something artist named Emma (Léa
Seydoux) and a younger student named Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos). The
developments of said relationship aren’t exactly shocking either, and from a
plot perspective there’s little here that hasn’t been seen before. And yet, Blue is the Warmest Color is a mostly
remarkable piece of filmmaking, and only towards the end of its epic running
time does it begin to feel long in the tooth. Kechiche isn’t making a long
movie for the sake of making a long movie, but instead telling his
coming-of-age story in such a way that focuses on every detail, conversation
and development. This enthusiasm to each moment proves to be infectious.
When discussing All is Lost above, I talked about how
throwing too many details at the audience can be a problem. That is often true,
but then there are films like Blue…,
where attention to detail is the whole raison d’être. This film starts well
before the central relationship begins, and lasts quite a bit after it ends.
The latter was a bit of an issue for me, but the former only adds to the
considerable texture of the relationship itself. He is so focused on every inch
of the screen that a lot relies on the authenticity of the performances, and
the duo of Exarchopoulos and Seydoux have put together two of the best cinematic turns of
the year. It’s a patient film that requires a patient audience, but for those
willing to buy what Kechiche is selling, it couldn’t be more rewarding.
Grade: A-
Dallas Buyers Club
Dir: Jean-Marc Valée
I am not the first person to
point out that Matthew McConaughey is on an unprecedented roll right now, and
as far as performances go, Dallas Buyers
Club may be the best of the bunch. The film itself is pure formula, albeit
mostly effective formula, but McConaughey is masterful here as Ron Woodruff, a
homophobic drug addict who discovers he has HIV and may not survive another 30
days. What happens after that is fairly obvious—would you believe Woodruff
starts to change his mind about homosexuality and become a noble white man
fighting for the rights of the oppressed?—but it’s by and large a film made to
showcase the performances. Besides McConaughey, another standout is Jared Leto
as the transsexual Rayon, which may feel a tad calculated, but he never
distracts from the business at hand. I just wish there were more surprises
here. Or any surprises, for that matter.
Grade: B
Philomena
Dir: Stephen Frears
Yet another prestige film
carried by the performances and little else, but in the case of Philomena, those performances are able
to elevate the film as a whole. In particular there is Judi Dench as the
titular character, a woman who gave birth to a son 50 years prior but never saw
him after he was given up for adoption. All this time later, she seeks the help
of disgraced journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), who decides to write a
human-interest story about Philomena’s plight. This involves a trip to
Washington, D.C., where the two of them attempt to discover the truth behind
what happened.
The best sequences of the
film are the interactions between Philomena and Martin, and the two performers
prove to have fantastic chemistry from the moment they meet. Philomena is often a very funny movie,
but it’s also a quite incisive one, illustrating how just 50 years can
completely change how Philomena’s actions are judged. At the time, she was a
social outcast forced to slave away at a convent and eventually lose her child
to some rich Americans. Nowadays, all she needs to do is look a few feet to the
left to see some sexed-up advertisement in the middle of an airport. Philomena is a fine film about coming to
terms with all that has happened in the last five decades, and perhaps
eventually finding some catharsis.
Grade: B+
Oldboy
Dir: Spike Lee
Park Chan-wook’s original Oldboy from 2003 is not a perfect film,
but it is a unique one in almost every way. Really, the film is as much about
Park’s style as it is about anything else, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone
would ever be able to replicate it in an interesting way. The ghost of the
original will always be looming in the background. That didn’t stop Americans
from trying, of course, and the 2013 remake was even able to get an impressive
group of talent together to make it a reality: it was directed by the great
Spike Lee, and it stars Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen, Samuel L. Jackson and
Sharlto Copley. But in the end, even with all these names brought into the
fold, a remake of Oldboy was always
going to be a fool’s errand.
That didn’t stop Lee and company
from finding some truly interesting ways to derail the project. It gets off to
a relatively assured start, particularly once the 20-year imprisonment of
Brolin’s Joe Doucett gets rolling. Of course, if you have a good actor, it’s
awful hard to screw that up. Once the action goes back out into the
real world, things go downhill fast. Lee’s Oldboy
is faithful to the original in almost all the wrong ways, and the ways in which it
diverges from Park’s film are equally misguided. And then there is Sharlto
Copley, who is startlingly bad here. Part of what made the original villain so
haunting is how relatively “normal” he could seem. In this film, he feels like
an alien that was teleported in from a completely different movie. All in all,
this is not the spectacular failure some are making it out to be. It’s just a
plain old failure.
Grade: C
Out of the Furnace
Dir: Scott Cooper
A good setting can go a long
way, and that is part of what elevates Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace, a standard revenge tale that takes an awful
long time to get to the revenge. In fact, the revenge itself is easily the
least interesting part of the whole ordeal, as Cooper spends a long time
painting a picture of a region where opportunities are dwindling and the only
real work is of the illegal sort. From a thematic standpoint, it almost
reminded me of Nebraska, only with
more dudes beating each other to a bloody pulp. Once the actual plot kicks off,
it was more of an unnecessary distraction than anything. I preferred the
relatively harmless misery that came before, but the misery involving guns felt
like it was going through the motions. Out
of the Furnace could have said a lot more about a town left behind by the
modern world, but instead Cooper pushed that aside in favor of something far
more familiar. It’s a very good movie for a very long time, but when the climax
finally came it didn’t feel remotely satisfying. It just felt obvious.
Grade: B
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