Review: Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
I’ve enjoyed Will Ferrell over the last several years in comedies such as Old School, Elf and (especially) Anchorman, but I think, like Jack Black (who intially interested me in High Fidelity and School of Rock) it’s time to maybe call it quits. It’s not you, its me. Ferrell is a likeable performer, and he has that thing important to a comic star in that you root for him even when he’s making a total horse’s ass out of himself, but that’s it. There’s no inner anything going on. It’s (more and more sporadically these days) funny, but it’s shallow, and nothing sticks. He doesn’t have that tightly coiled inner self loathing that seems to turn certain comics into wonderful actors (with the right director Robin Williams has it, and so does Jim Carrey, and so did John Candy).
And this is going to be a problem for Ferrell as he tries to do the “serious actor” bit, and it really hurts in “Stranger than Fiction”, a light, barely there to begin with Charlie Kauffmanish thingamagoo about a man, Harold Crick (sigh, played by Ferrell) who begins to hear his life narrated back to him by a successful Brtish writer (Emma Thompson), who’s planning on killing him at the end of the book (she’s known for tragedies.) The film never establishes its rules, (is Ferrell a fictional character? if so how does he talk to everyone else? Are they fiction?) so we never really understand what’s at stake. I champion ambiguity in movies, but this seems more of a case of writer laziness than any inherent dramatic necessity. Dustin Hoffman and Maggie Gyllenhaal add some life, but it’s not enough. It could have been cunning to cast Will Ferrell as a lost cipher (the sort of personality inside out that worked so well for Sandler in Punchdrunk Love), but the film doesn’t know what to do with that idea.
-Bowen
Review: Half Nelson (2006)
It’s premise has the kind of pat irony that would make for an unwatchable Lifetime or IFC late night movie (he’s an inspirational inner city teacher, and a crack addict!) but Ryan Fleck along with Anna Boden (who co-produced and co-wrote the script with him) show a sure hand, an empathy, a tangible sense of human understanding that elevates the B material into something memorable and promising. “Half Nelson” has an appealing free from three act shagginess, and many of its key scenes manage to pay off in a way, just slightly off from your expectations.
Ryan Gosling gets the show-off part, he gets to give the inspirational classroom lectures that inspire students, as well as walk around half drunk and stoned. But he resists the kind of false, humorless, “actorly” showboating that has plagued Sean Penn recently. His character, Dan Dunne, is allowed to be charismatic and funny, and the film is perceptive in acknowledging that the bruise in his personality that nurtures the drug use, is also why he’s such a good teacher. He empathaizes with his students, he shares their disenchantment with the system around them. As good as Ryan Gosling is, Shareeka Epps matches him as the student who discovers her favorite teacher is a drug addict. Epps gives a soulful performance ahead of her years, and her give and take with Gosling (which has a sexual current the film doesn’t seem to know what to do with) is the reason “Half Nelson” will stick with you.
Review: Gimme Shelter (1970)
The acclaimed Maysles brother’s film of the Rolling Stones’ last minute, ill-advised free concert in San Francisco at the Altamont Speedway in 1969, which resulted in a few deaths, and is viewed by some as one of the definitive “this is what the druggy terror, ennui, fear of the war, the government, self medicate through fucking and rocking” moments. It’s a terrific film, and like the Maysles other landmark documentaries (Grey Gardens and Salesman among them), refreshingly free of any major editorial hand.
The film plunges you in the moment, opening with a musical number from a Stones show earlier on the same tour (I think) and then showing us Mick Jagger (we’re talking the egotistical, scary to your parents sex symbol here, not the guy spoofing himself on the Simpsons 200 years later) watching himself in an early edit of the Gimme Shelter documentary, particularly footage of when the shit hits the fan between concert goers and the Hells Angels (who were the security for the event). This is probably meant to humanize Jagger a bit, to hint at a new found perspective and remorse at what happened, to dilute the questionable portrait the rest of the film paints of the rocker, but for me, its neither, Jagger’s reactions are too guarded, but that in itself, is the fascination. To the film’s credit, no one is really blamed or exonerated, the ghostly event itself is the culprit. The film is long on mood, short on actual facts, so I would recommend reading the liner notes, which flesh out the film’s multiple perspectives.
A bit of trivia, Mel Belli, a lawyer seen negotiating the Altamont concert (and clearly relishing the attention) also appears courtesy of Brian Cox in David Fincher’s ZODIAC, based on this footage, it would appear Fincher and Co. have done their homework.
Review: Zodiac (2007)
David Fincher’s new film opens with a scene perhaps designed to play upon the expectations that many may have from “the director of Seven” as the ads promoting this new film helpfully remind us. It’s Fourth of July 1969, fireworks are exploding in a night that very eerily resembles “American Graffiti” by way of David Lynch. A young couple exchange dialogue creepy in its banality, the fireworks continue to light the night, and Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” begins to play on the car stereo as the couple notices a figure following them.
The scene has a deliberately heightened pitch and reality, and is the scariest, most masterful thing in Fincher’s filmography up until this point. The scene could more cynically be described as David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick 101 (you know the A-listers rendition of the slasher kill) but its so vital, so transporting, that Fincher makes it fly, and totally his own. These initial few minutes are also completely misleading of the next 150 that follow, which bear a closer resemblance to “All the President’s Men” or the great, largely unseen Korean film “Memories of Murder” in that it details the pursuit of dedicated men for answers that best case are largely irrelevant or worst case completely unattainable. “Zodiac” is about the quest to catch a serial killer, but like these prior films its more concerned with a more elemental, existenstial pursuit: for closure, for assurance that occassionaly the good guys win outside of the movie house.
This point is underlined in a dry sequence that can be found maybe an hour and a half or so in the picture: two of the killer’s pursuers Robert Graysmith, (played by Jake Gyllenhaal in the film’s one lesser, and unfortunately largest, performance) and Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo, in a great, lived in, dialed down cop performance) meet at a movie theatre showing “Dirty Harry”, who’s villain, “The Scorpio” is clearly modeled on the Zodiac. Toschi leaves mid-way, catching air in the lobby, and Graysmith finds him later, and assures him that they get him at the end.
The third protaganist and pursuer of the Zodiac is Paul Avery, played by Robert Downey, Jr. with his usual high, flamboyant wit. Avery is a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, where Graysmith works as a cartoonist, and Tochi intersects with them while investigating one of the killings. The majority of the film is about the various dead ends and false starts the case presents. The good news is that this allows plenty of character actors to knock out some mini narratives and then split, my personal favorites being Anthony Edwards as Toschi’s partner, and John Carroll Lynch as a Zodiac suspect. The film may frustrate some viewers in its insistence on detailing seemingly EVERY missed opportunity, but its in these long passages that the film becomes something more than just “another serial killer movie”.
Zodiac is as much about the dead ends, the false starts, the bureaucratic red tape bullshit that haunts all of our lives, as it is about a sociopath. As all this becomes clearer we see that the tone of Fincher’s opening sequence was more than just an exercise in style. Larger than life, not quite of our existence, this is how these men saw the Zodiac killer: a dreadful modern myth they were cursed with just enough knowledge of to know they knew nothing. This is a great, humane film, and the first really major, timeless picture from David Fincher.
© Copyright 2007 Bowen's Cinematic.
Site Designed by Ben Markowitz.
Bowen's Cinematic is powered by WordPress | RSS
