filM noIrSERY LOVES COMPANY: Reviews of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans, The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day and The Missing Person

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day is the ultimate revenge fantasy. No, not the story in the movie, but the movie itself. After having been used badly by Harvey Weinstein (to put it mildly and so the rumors go), Troy Duffy (the writer/ director of both Boondock Saints films) basically told Harvey to go fuck himself. Out of the ashes that he found himself in, Troy, the phoenix, managed to make a film (the first Saints) that became a cult favorite and has now managed to write the sequel. Which means that he has basically told Harvey to go fuck himself twice and gotten away with it (or so the rumors go). I can’t say that The Boondock Saints I or II is my cup of tea, but I found a certain fascination in watching both of them. The writing is clever in both, but perhaps even more so in the sequel. There are some wonderful set pieces where Julie Benz, playing an FBI agent, reconstructs events leading up to the crime scene. And overall, there is something exciting about Duffy’s approach to storytelling structure. But for me, from a directing standpoint, everything was a bit too much, from the accents to the acting to the way everything was directed in a very frenetic, in your face manner. It’s as if Duffy was trying to out Tarrentino Tarrentino, which he might have a chance in doing as a writer, but so far, doesn’t show any real signs of being able to do it as a director. There is also something intriguuing about Duffy’s moral theology by way of the Catholic church (it’s certainly brave of him; very few writers, at least in the U.S., would be so open about it). At the same time, there’s something deeply disturbing about the dénouement where the Catholic Church is set up as the ultimate arbiter of good and evil, a sort of modern day Inquisition (and we all know how well that went over the last time that happened). What might be really interesting is getting get Duffy and Dan Brown in the same room and letting them duke it out; what a match that might be.

As surrealistic as Boondocks II, but much more level headed in approach to directing (if such a thing can be believed), is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans. I call it whack. Whatever else it may be, this film by director Werner Herzog and the screenwriter William Finkelstein is definitely whack. Nicholas Cage plays a New Orleans police detective who rescues a criminal during Katrina and injures his back, causing him to become a drug addict. And whatever else you can say about Cage, he goes there, he really goes there. Wearing one shoulder higher than the other as if he were playing Richard III, eyes growing increasingly darker and skin constantly paler, he eventually begins to resemble Klaus Kinski in Herzog’s version of Nosferatu. Cage doesn’t just stop at nothing to play this character, his character also stops at nothing to solve a homicide of a family that got caught up in a drug war. There are three basic plots going on here: the homicide; Cage’s problems with drug addiction and a gambling debt; and his relationships with his recovering alcoholic father, his step-mother (who only drinks beer, so isn’t an alcoholic) and his drug addicted prostitute girlfriend. Though I lost some of the plot strands here and there on the homicide investigation, all the stories had me on the edge of my seat. And while Finkelstein’s film noir plot, full of fun and clever twists and turns, goes on its gleeful way, Herzog throws it all into a somewhat surrealistic pot and stirs frantically; somehow the two styles not just work together, they complement each other. It has been well cast, not just in the leads, but in the smaller roles where such people as Val Kilmer, Brad Dourif, Michael Shannon, Shawn Hatosy (what a great face), and Jennifer Coolidge (in probably her greatest performance, playing against type as Cage’s step mother) show up (an excellent primer on how to cast supporting roles, in fact). The city is overcast and depressing, even when it’s sunny, and it’s filled with alligators and iguanas even when they aren’t really there (you have to see the movie). There is no real moral to the story, except perhaps that life does not come equipped with morals. In fact, every time you think Finkelstein is going to wrap things up in a typical Hollywood character arc way, he sabotages it and takes you down a different path. Is the movie any good? I don’t know. All I know is that I don’t care, that I had a great time and that it is definitely whack.

The Missing Person is more a throwback to the olden days of film noir, with a boozing, alcoholic PI caught up in a web of intrigue with lots of twist and turns. The mood is the strongest aspect of this film and it alone almost holds your interest in and of itself (most of the scenes take place at night or in dark, shadowy rooms—the cinematography is from the Gordon Willis school of The Godfather—and even the daylight scenes seem a bit dark even when it isn’t). But the story never quite holds together. Michael Shannon plays the PI, a self-destructive wino with a tragic past (and it is tragic, the revelation revolving around 9/11 is very moving). He is hired through a friend to trail someone on a train from New York to L.A., but is not told the whole story (are private eyes ever told the whole story). He ends up being used as all self-destructive, boozing PI’s with a tragic past are. Shannon’s character is a puzzlement. At times he’s rather brilliant at what he does. At other times, he seems like the biggest idiot in the business, but more at the convenience of the writer (Noah Buschel, who also directed) than because this dichotomy is an organic part of his personality. Much of the story doesn’t make a lot of sense; people don’t always act as logically as they should; and the ending is more head scratching than satisfying. But there is something oddly intriguing about it at the same time.

A SERIOUS MAN AND AN EVEN MORE SERIOUS MAN: Reviews of A Serious Man and Collapse

In the Old Testament he was called Job. In Joel and Ethan Coen’s new movie, he’s called Larry Gopnik (played with an expertly sad hilarity by Michael Stuhlbarg). Gopnik’s travails are not quite as travailic as Job’s (Job’s kids die, as do his servants; he loses his land; he loses his wife; he ends up covered in boils; and his friends torment him when they try to help him). Gopnik’s problems are more common to the common Joe (or common Job): his wife wants a divorce; his kids pay more attention to the TV than to him (except when they want the TV antenna fiddled with); his brother won’t move out; he might not get tenure. And if not a righteous man like Job, Gopnik is a good enough one, a serious one. So when these bad things pile up, it doesn’t seem any more right on God’s part than what happened to Job. The screenplay is funny and biting with a wonderful prologue about a possible dybbuk visiting a Russian shtetl in the old country. It’s the sort of existential scream type of screenplay that I love: what is the meaning to life if God acts in a meaningless way? And in the same way that Job is visited by three friends, Gopnik seeks out the help of three rabbis, none of whom can give him the answer he needs (keep a look out for Simon Helbert who plays Wolowitz on The Big Bang Theory). The main issue I have is the ending, which I found a bit puzzling. In the Bible, God visits Job in a whirlwind and reads him the riot act, telling him that since God created the heavens, earth and even Job himself, Job has no right to challenge God about anything. Job accepts this and afterwards is rewarded with health; his wife back; twice as many kids; twice as many servants; and twice as much wealth. But the Coen brothers end their film just as the whirlwind approaches and just as Gopnik gets his boils (here, it’s lung cancer). Because of this, the Coen brother’s film has an even darker message than Job. In the Bible life is sort of a meaningless back and forth between good and bad fortune; for the Coen brothers, it’s just one plain sick joke with a punchline that’s suppose to be funny because it isn’t. For the Coen brothers, unlike the writer of Job, when life gets bad, it just gets worse.

The movie Collapse is one long interview with Michael Ruppert, who is described as a conspiracy nut, though in this film he talks about very few conspiracies. That’s actually what makes Ruppert so scary; he doesn’t blame the state of the world on a secret cabal of people who are driving our world into the ground—that would be too easy. He blames it on a whole host of issues that have gotten away from mankind as a whole. It’s one thing to solve our problems by getting rid of a group of people; it’s another thing to change the whole paradigm of mankind. Ruppert is more a doomsday prophet than a conspiracy theorist and it’s hard to argue with any of his theories; one can certainly disagree with bits of them here and there, but all in all, the future doesn’t bode well for mankind. His main theory revolves around the idea of peek oil—that we’ve reached the most oil possible and that now it’s only a matter of less and less until we run out of it, and since everything (plastics, agriculture, energy) depends on it, what is going to happen when we have no more? It’s a fascinating movie. One can’t look away, sort of like watching a slow train wreck, which is a somewhat apt metaphor here. It’s by Chris Smith, the same person who did American Movie, about another obsessed person, though that someone was intent on finishing a B horror movie. Perhaps Roland Emmerich should take note; no matter how scary 2012 is with all its special effects; it’s hard to believe it could possibly be any scarier than this one person.

GOOD HELP IS HARD TO FIND: Reviews of The Maid and The House of the Devil

I love dark comedies, which means I loved two-thirds of the Maid. It's actually two movies in one. The first half (the dark part, the part I luuuuved) is about a middle aged maid, played in delightfully mean spirited fashion by Catalina Saavedra, who after twenty years on the job starts having dizzy spells and finds the work not as easy as it once was. The family decides to hire a helper. They have no ulterior motives here; the new maid it not there to replace Raquel, but to make things easier for this good and faithful servant. But Raquel, with her large dark eyes and that constant look of a deer caught in headlights, doesn’t see it that way. To her, a new worker in the house is not just merely a prelude to being replaced (though that would be bad enough), but a helper would take way Raquel’s existential purpose in life. So she fights back. She treats any new addition with contempt (scrubbing a bathroom clean after they use it and, most amusingly, locking them out of the house). She also does something that is all too typically human in her effort to retain her position: she starts alienating all her supporters (including complaining to the mother that her son is masturbating into the bed sheets). This is all wicked fun and wickedly funny. But then something happened. The writer and director (Sebastian Silva) changes horses in midstream, goes all gooey on us, and replaces this delightful darkness with a self help primer as Raquel meets her match in a maid who actually helps Reqauel realize herself as a human being. This part is all done in very realistic fashion as opposed to the off kilter approach of the earlier scenes and would make any book store self help guru proud. But it’s a disconcerting change. I was never quite certain whether to take it all seriously. It kept reminding me of Alfred Hitchcock who said that if he did Cinderella, people would expect to find a corpse in the carriage. Here, based on the first part of the movie, I kept expecting one more turn of the screw, like the ending to Claude Chabrol’s La Ceremone where the maid kills her employers with the help of a friend. But here everyone stayed life affirmingly and somewhat dully alive.

For me, House of the Devil was everything Drag Me to Hell should have been, but wasn’t (you remember Drag Me to Hell; it’s that movie in which a witch is omnipotent in all areas except the one most convenient for the author—she can’t make her mortgage payments). Whereas Drag Me to Hell is all jump and go boo, The House of the Devil is based more on mood and suspense and a slow build up to a terrifying ending. It’s like Val Lewton, but in color. It takes place in the 1990’s, before cell phones (it’s so odd seeing someone using a pay phone and having trouble making contact with someone) and concerns a college student, played very well by Jocelin Donahue, who needs money for a first month’s rent so she can get an apartment and move out of the dorm room she shares with her messy and promiscuous roommate. What she needs is under the table money and so she answers an ad for a baby sitter. It takes some doing to make contact with the man who put up the ad, but she does and after her BFF drives her out to the middle of nowhere (past a cemetery no less) and they meet the somewhat creepy, yet not quite creepy enough to send up enough red flags, couple played almost but not quite creepily by Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov. Jocelin takes the job when the money becomes too high to refuse. Alone in the house, things start getting scary in the way that a house starts getting scary whenever we’re alone there. And then she finds out what she was really hired for. The scenes in the house where she starts out scaring herself pretty much rank with such classic scenes as Jane Randolph walking to a bus stop or going swimming in a dark pool area in Cat People or Dana Andrews walking down a hotel hallway and hearing odd noises in Curse of the Demon. The script, by director Ti West, does have one problem: it jumps suddenly from the second part to the final third and almost seems to leave out a few scenes. This jump is so abrupt, we don’t fully find out exactly what the eclipse of the moon had to do with anything and the surprise ending’s a little off (and just when did our heroine have sex). But it’s still a fun, scary good time in the theater.

THERE’LL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND: Reviews of Endgame, The Damned United and Pirate Radio

I first saw Endgame on Masterpiece Theatre Contemporary and was then surprised to see it turn up at a movie theater near you, though it’s certainly good enough to play there. The basic set up is quite fascinating: it’s the 1980’s and apartheid is still in full swing in South Africa. This means that businesses, especially those run by other countries, aren’t doing well due to the country being unsettled (you know, riots, strikes, unrest, those sorts of annoying things). Into the midst of this steps one of those mid-level bureaucrats that England seems to be fascinated with as of late (see Children of Earth, District 9, In the Loop), this time played by Johnny Lee Miller, who works for a major mining company. He has a possible, though decidedly out of the box, solution for his company’s troubles: end apartheid. Who’d a thunk it? The company goes along with him and he sets up secret (or so he thinks) meetings in England between leaders of anti-apartheid groups (most notably one played by Chiwetel Ejiofer) and sympathetic white minority liberals (most notably one played by William Hurt). Meanwhile, President Botha tries to sabotage everything by manipulating imprisoned Nelson Mandella, who won’t be manipulated. It’s a crackerjack piece of historical entertainment excellently written, as only the English often can, by Paula Milne. Though the acting is first rate across the board, perhaps Johnny Lee Miller is the most impressive. Normally this actor radiates an incredible tension and intensity that can make one uncomfortable; here he plays a character that is suppose to blend into the background and he does it by…blending into the background.

The Damned United is a sports movie about a person who has to lose before he can win. The moral of the story is painfully formulaic and insultingly obvious—the execution is anything but. Michael Sheen is again the lead in a movie written by Peter Morgan (they also worked together on The Queen, Frost/Nixon and the Deal—why don’t they get married already). He plays Brian Clough, a soccer (excuse me, football) coach who eventually lead England to two world victories. One would think that would be what the film was about. It’s not. It’s about how Clough had to humiliate himself and lose again and again in order to become a better person so that he could eventually lead England to two world victories. Clough’s downfall before victory begins years earlier with a slight by fellow coach Don Revie, played by Colm Meany, who refuses to have a post game drink with him and cuts him upon entering a stadium. Of such slights are great dramas built. Clough eventually becomes such a great coach he is offered to take over Revie’s first ranked team—and then Clough proceeds to alienate everyone he knows and lose game after game after game. When he comes to accept what a mess he’s made of his life and agrees to get down on his knees and beg forgiveness from Timothy Spall, who plays his assistant, he is forgiven by one and all and eventually works his way back up the ladder (but only in an epilogue printed on the screen at the end). The acting is first rate (keep a look out for Stephen Graham who played Baby Face Nelson in Public Enemies), the story fascinating, the script tight and to the point. Those who aren’t into sports movies, you will be relieved to know you actually see very little football played.

Pirate Radio is a great idea that never really comes together. It’s also based on a true incident (can’t English filmmakers come up with fictional stories anymore). It’s the 1960’s and rock and roll is banned from English radio. So a group of D.J.’s take up residence on a ship in the Atlantic and broadcast from there. Though the script was written by the normally enjoyable Richard Curtis (who also directed and previously wrote and directed Love, Actually), this one only works in fits and starts. It’s not always easy to say why. It might have helped if the story had more cleanly focused on the central character, James (played by Charlie Rowe, who also played Annette Bening’s son in Being Julia where he, well, his character, also lost his virginity as he does here), a teenager sent to live on the ship with his godfather (whom he’s never met) played by Bill Nighy. It’s through James’s eyes that the audience is suppose to experience the story, but this through line is a bit wobbly, made more so every time the story cuts to the government trying to put a stop to these off shore shenanigans. While Charlie’s story is done in a more realistic, though still somewhat stylized style, this second part of the movie has characters played (rather well) by Kenneth Branagh and Jack Davenport (this movie’s mid-level bureaucrat) in a contrasting upper class twit as seen on Monty Python style and feels more distracting than central to the story. In addition, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, one of our finest actors, seems out of place amongst all these Englishmen; again his acting style seems so different than the slightly caricatured actors around him, that the whole thing just gets more wobbly (it might also be that he really doesn’t have that much to do or a real reason for being in the story). Only Bill Nighy, who has the most imaginative line readings of almost anyone working today, rises above the material. The story ends with both a parody of Titanic and Dunkirk; possibly good ideas, though they don’t quite work either. I’m sure the whole thing seemed like a good idea at the time, but it just doesn’t really make it.

MR. WRITE AND MR. RIGHT—Reviews of Blue Tooth Virgin and Mr. Right

Blue Tooth Virgin is one of those films that celebrates dialogue and talking heads in movies. Many people would consider this a reason not to see it. They would be wrong. I first saw Blue Tooth Virgin at the Hollywood Film Festival in 2008 and it’s a delightful gem. The topic may seem too esoteric; it’s about an L.A. screenwriter who gives his latest opus to a friend for feedback and the friend doesn’t like it—hilarity and dramatic conflict ensue. I have a friend who sent me a review that basically stated that if you weren’t in the industry, you probably wouldn’t enjoy it. I said that is like saying you couldn’t enjoy the Three Sisters unless you were Russian. The director (Russell Brown who also wrote) does impressive work in such small locations and the script’s a pip. But it does have one flaw: the author is never clear enough as to whether the writer has actually written something good or not. The screenwriter bristles at his friend’s inability to understand key turning points in his script. The screenwriter then goes to a script consultant who basically gives him the same feedback. So is the writer misunderstood, but more talented than his friend who writes formulaic crap, or is he just a screenwriter who can’t take criticism? The author of the movie seems to want it both ways, which throws everything off balance. But it’s still well worth seeing.

The reviews to Mr. Right suggest it’s about a woman who only dates men who turn out to be gay. It’s not. Not even close. Not even in the same universe. It’s a character study of a group of gay friends and their changing romantic relationships with an occasional scene about the woman friend thrown in at random moments for some unclear reason. The real movie, the gay relationship ensemble dramedy, is perfectly all right (no pun intended), though it takes no chances, has no real edge, and pretty much resembles every other gay (or straight) relationship ensemble dramedy you’ve ever seen before, i.e., you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll kiss ten bucks goodbye. Written by David Morris (who also directed along with Jacqui Morris), the author’s big targets are modern art, DIY shows and small theater (the last most amusingly and convincingly). The most interesting through line revolves around a rugby player whose little girl keeps sabotaging his attempts to start a new relationship. The least convincing is a DIY producer who finds his own relationship in trouble when the kept boyfriend of a friend comes after him; he actually decides to give up his dream of traveling to be with this shallow, fallow creature.