I watch a lot of movies, but rarely has a film so surprised me, made me (metaphorically) bite my nails and make me bounce on the seat with cries of joy, outrage, disgust and verbal wonder (i.e.: “WTF?!”).
A post-Ken Loach killer social drama? Portrait of a Serial Assassin Assassinated By Religious Fellas in White Cricket Jumpers, Wicker Man Style? Bonkers Roadkill Revisited? I think this kind of small, mean-spirited, uncompromising film can only come out of “no budget subsidy schemes” (I think that was the word used in the end titles), and is all the evidence needed to cry out for the continuation of such schemes. A young (I think, actually for all I know he could be 105) film maker lets it all out, processes the terrible all the terribleness of humanity into one piece of aggression: killers that want to be cool, but are just unhealthily crazy. Assassination victims that seem to have deserved what they get. Politicians that rule the world by way of secret tribalism (I kid you not). Mobster bosses that look like aged and surgically modified versions of Christopher Walken. And all this fun starts out like a British social drama about the dude who just cannot support his family anymore and gets nasty over the failure. Two great actors at the heart as the charming killer team, some nice support through the wifes. In the end, all the charm is in vain, of course.
Despite the average American white male believing otherwise, baseball is an exotic niche sports to most of the world’s population. Easy enough to be understood, making a movie about it or before the background of it is bold, as sports movies have a hard time with the best of sports – even more so with a sports where 70 per cent of the time is spent on spitting and grabbing your own crotch.
This is a cool-hearted, slickly designed, constrained thriller that oozes peril while never spelling it out. Nobody runs around frantically, nobody chases an alpha monkey, nobody has any chance of reaching a breaking moment of curing the disease that breaks out and threatens to kill a considerable share of the world’s population. Hence no real showdown, no just-in-time delivery of the saving antibodies or serum or whatever it is these films usually deliver three seconds before viral apocalypse. Instead, people are doing their jobs, developing vaccines, trying them out, developing distribution plans, keeping people from killing each other, analyzing what happened and whether anybody is guilty, blaming it on the government, cheating their way into slightly better immunization than they are eligible. It is a perfectly plausible scenario, and more frightening than the gospel according to “Breakout”. With an odd combination of mostly really good, often really strange actors (Lawrence Fishburne, Jude Law…) , with real families attached to the key researchers in particular, with fear balancing determination to get that thing fixed, “Contagion”creates an atmosphere of high tension, and keeps it up without shouting at the audience. An arthouse disaster movie that has more in common with Michael Winterbottom’s science fiction ventures than with the genre of virus outbreak action thrillers, it is to me one of Soderbergh’s best movies of the decade. Excellent writing, too, e.g. upon stumbling across the virus lab talk: “Should I call someone?” – “Call everyone!” or somebody scoffing at Jude Law, the conspiracy theory blogger: “Blogging is not writing, it’s graffiti with punctuation”. Well spoken!
Almodovar has never been alien to sexual possessiveness and obsession. It seems a lot of his sexual motifs had to converge towards a crazy scientist movie – and here it is. Frankenstein rises, and after two hours I even realized he looks like an aged and slim Antonio Banderas, because it’s him – seems I have not seen him in a long time.
I have been frequently scolding myself for giving new Woody Allen movies yet another chance, despite knowing better. This peaked in outright self-hatred for exposing myself to the decrepit old man fantasy brain-turd about what cardboard cut-out young Europeans do with their spare time that was “The Lobotomy of Christina in Barcelona”. I promised to myself: never again! And yet here I am, falling victim to the critics’ community that claimed – again – that Allen is back to form and that “Midnight in Paris” was worth giving him another chance.
There are only problems with the 2011 remake of “The Thing” (yes, I know they say it’s a prequel, but seriously…):
The “behind the scenes of politics thriller” is a good genre, especially if spruced up with a bit of sex and crime. George Clooney’s latest directorial effort takes the genre a bit further into the contemplative, semi-arthouse realm, he shifts the workplace values of the political staff, loyalty in particular, to center stage. When the spotlights are turned on to illuminate these, what we see is terrible. Loyalty is a the only currency that counts, says Philip Seymor Hoffmann’s character, the head campaign manager for Clooney’s Senator-come-President. He does not know that Ryan Gosling’s character will believe this, but take it at face value: currencies can be traded, swapped, bet on. Gosling is forced into situations, but decides his way out of them by learning from the best, the most ruthless heads of both the Democrat’s and the Republican’s campaign. He is maneuvered by the Republican counterpart (Paul Giamatti) into a lose-lose situation, he stumbles across a dangerous episode in the candidate’s life – and he (and Clooney the director and script co-author) manages to twist both wires into one fuse.
An atmospheric piece about the mechanics behind the collapse of the financial markets. The authors do not try to explain the world of finance to an audience that would not be interested in that. What they are trying – successfully – is to tell the story of a bunch of characters experiencing a very long night on the job. Only the best of them (that means “best at their job”, not “the best people”, maybe quite the contrary ) manage to take this to be just another day in the office.
