Magical Thinking

Now You See Me: written by Ed Solomon, Boaz Yachin, and Edward Ricourt; directed by Louis Leterrier; starring Jesse Eisenberg (J. Daniel Atlas), Mark Ruffalo (Dylan Rhodes), Woody Harrelson (Merritt McKinney), Isla Fisher (Henley Reeves), Dave Franco (Jack Wilder), Melanie Laurent (Alma Dray), Morgan Freeman (Thaddeus Bradley), and Michael Caine (Arthur Tressler) (2013):

Surprisingly enjoyable heist film involving four magicians of the prestigitation variety, a possibly imaginary secret society, the FBI, Interpol, and two unpleasant old men played by Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine. Harrelson, Eisenberg, Fisher, and Franco play the Four Horsemen, a new Vegas act that becomes (in)famous by design as they seemingly pull off an impossible bank heist in France while performing on-stage in Vegas. And then things get more complicated.

The actors are all perfectly fine, and Eisenberg's performance here, as a super-arrogant nerd, suggests that Lex Luthor may be fine in his hands. Morgan Freeman's debunking character doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense -- I know of a lot of people who debunk psychics and faith healers in the media, but none who debunk magicians. So the movie takes place in a somewhat odd alternate universe. Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent are charming as the pursuing FBI and Interpol agents, respectively.

Do all the twists and turns make sense? No, not exactly, but in a heist film that's also a magical puzzle-box (more Sleuth than The Prestige, though it does share some attributes with the fine Edward Norton/Paul Giamatti vehicle The Illusionist), these problems are almost inevitable. One just has to assume a level of hyper-competence and luck that the heroes of straightforward action movies are habitually accorded. Recommended.

Zodiac (2007)

Zodiac (The Director's Cut): adapted by James Vanderbilt from the non-fiction book by Robert Graysmith; directed by David Fincher; starring Jake Gyllenhaal (Robert Graysmith), Mark Ruffalo (Inspector David Toschi), Anthony Edwards (Inspector William Armstrong), Robert Downey Jr. (Paul Avery), Chloe Sevigny (Melanie), Brian Cox (Melvin Belli), Elias Koteas (Sgt. Jack Mulanax), Dermot Mulroney (Captain Marty Lee), John Carroll Lynch ( Arthur Leigh Allen) and Donal Logue (Captain Ken Narlow) (2007): What I consider to be director David Fincher's finest film, and one of the ten best American movies of the last ten years, is a crime procedural about the hunt for the Zodiac, a San Francisco-area serial killer of the late 1960's and early 1970's. In its calculated retro-look, Zodiac is both an homage and an addition to the ranks of great 1970's docudramas that include The French Connection, Serpico, and All the President's Men.

Mirroring the investigation, the film's pace is slow and deliberate. As the movie only shows Zodiac crimes for which there were witnesses, the first known Zodiac killing is discussed but never shown. And what we are shown of the killings is horrifying but not gratuitous. There's far more gore in an average episode of CSI. Or Dirty Harry, for that matter, itself based partially on the Zodiac killings.

This is a film to be savoured and mulled over. Fincher gets fine performances from his entire cast, though I think Mark Ruffalo -- as (real) Inspector Dave Toschi, gives both the best and the most period-accurate performance. Ruffalo looks like a 70's actor in this film, a slightly more conventionally handsome Gene Hackman. Everyone else is good as well, with Jake Gyllenhaal, as the editorial cartoonist-turned-amateur-sleuth Robert Graysmith, playing the straight-arrow heart of the movie (it's his book that the film is based on).

The opening scene, set to Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man", is one of the most striking set-pieces I've seen in any film. And Donovan's daughter, Ione Skye, has an uncredited cameo later in the film. Weird stuff. The Zodiac too is weird: a mixture of the malign and the banal and the lucky, the killer is accurately portrayed as a windbag who craves media attention. His interactions with celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli (played with smarmy, self-satisfied gusto by Brian Cox, the first movie Hannibal Lecter) look like rehearsals for every ridiculous Nancy Grace and Geraldo Rivera moment of the past 20 years. Belli even appeared in an episode of the original Star Trek, "And the Children Shall Lead", as evil alien angel Gorgon!

Whatever and whoever he was, there's nothing Luciferian about Zodiac, nothing of Hannibal Lecter. John Carroll Lynch (Marge's husband in Fargo) nails his few scenes as the prime suspect in the case, an angry white guy with a really awful trailer full of awful stuff.

The Director's Cut DVD also gives the viewer about three hours of new documentary material on the Zodiac investigation, much of it shot and edited in the style of Errol Morris. This, too, is riveting stuff, and the filmmakers play fair: the documentary material raises doubts about the film's conclusion as to who the Zodiac really was. Highly recommended.

Lesbian Witches! That is hot!

The Kids are All Right, written by Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg, directed by Lisa Cholodenko, starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson (2010): Bening was nominated and Moore should have been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for this film, a surprisingly jolly trip through an eventful three months in the life of an 'alternative' family.

Bening and Moore play a suburban California lesbian couple with two children, the boy 15 and the girl 18 and about to leave for college. The boy becomes curious about the sperm donor -- the same man for both children, with Bening being the biological mother of the girl and Moore the boy. His sister gets in contact with him. He's Mark Ruffalo, playing a sort of hipster Zorba figure with committment issues. Things go swimmingly. Then they don't.

The movie's constructed so as to stress the similarities between 'alternative' and 'normal' couples -- Bening and Moore fight and make up, Moore feels underappreciated as the house-mother part of the pair, Bening is a control freak who's a bit too arrogant about her social class (she's a doctor) and her work ethic (she's never home). The other characters in the film have issues of their own, and people are realistically mean and judgmental at the worst possible times.

Ruffalo is groovy but dangerously casual about his interaction with his 'new family' -- which is to say, he's a bit of a bull in a china shop, though there's lots of blame to go around (sketched deftly and touched on in passing is the underlying contempt both Moore and Bening feel for anything resembling the physically labouring 'class,' though Moore's character hides her upper-middle-class prejudice much better than Bening's Nick.

The whole thing is surprisingly funny, and Wasikowska (Alice in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland) gives a nicely modulated performance as a girl who's starting to chafe at parental controls perhaps a few years later than most teenagers chafe at them. My only real quarrel with the movie is that it doesn't really have an ending. It just sorta ends. I suppose there's always room for a sequel. Highly recommended.