The Monuments Men (2014)

The Monuments Men (2014): adapted by George Clooney and Grant Heslov from the book by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter; directed by George Clooney; starring George Clooney (Stokes), Matt Damon (Granger), Bill Murray (Campbell), Cate Blanchett (Claire), John Goodman (Garfield), Jean Dujardin (Jean-Claude), Hugh Bonneville (Donald), Bob Balaban (Savitz), and Dimitri Leonidas (Sam Epstein): 

A WWII movie so episodic that it seems as if it had been edited down from a 6-hour miniseries. The real-life concept is fascinating -- the Allies create a team to save art and literary treasures from the Nazis as World War Two draws to an end. The cast's main strength is its affability in a movie that lacks any real comedic or dramatic highs, a trait the movie shares with another George Clooney directorial effort, Leathernecks. A mild diversion, but nothing more. Lightly recommended.

Real-life Adventures on Land and Sea

The Last Waltz (1978): directed by Martin Scorsese; starring The Band (Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, and Robbie Robertson), Martin Scorsese (The Interviewer), and many other musicians and writers that include Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Neil Diamond, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Hawkins, Muddy Waters, and others: Martin Scorsese's brilliant, occasionally problematic concert movie combines live footage of The Band's last performance with a whole lotta guests (including the jarring appearance of Neil Diamond) with interview sessions with the five members of The Band.

Scorsese clearly had a man-crush on guitarist Robbie Robertson, who dominates the interviews and seems to be in almost every shot of the concert, an impressive feat for someone who never sings lead vocals. The four non-Robertson members of The Band seem fed up with Robbie at times -- and they'd reunite as a foursome sans Robertson several years after The Last Waltz. Hmm. 

You can see why Scorsese fixated on Robertson -- he's the most conventionally handsome of the group, and he's also the most loquacious. In any case, the film itself is essential viewing because of the performances of The Band, the anecdotes, and the astonishing array of guest players and vocalists. And even Neil Diamond is fine and, in the context of the movie, a reasonable choice to represent a particular type of music (Tin Pan Alley and its songwriters) on the movie's journey through an almost comprehensive list of musical influences on The Band. 

Garth Hudson and Rick Danko don't speak much. Richard Manuel and Levon Helm do get some interview time, and both -- especially the charismatic, soft-spoken Helm (aka The Only American In The Band) -- are fascinating. Highly recommended.

In the Heart of the Sea (2015): based on the non-fiction book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick; written by Charles Leavitt, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver; directed by Ron Howard; starring Chris hemsworth (Owen Chase), Benjamin Walker (Captain Pollard), Cillian Murphy (Matthew Joy), Brendan Gleason and Tom Holland (Old/Young Thomas Nickerson), Ben Whishaw (Herman Melville), and Michelle Fairley (Mrs. Nickerson): Ron Howard turns the astonishing true story of the early 19th-century Nantucket whaleship Essex's losing confrontation with a pissed-off male sperm whale into an intermittently faithful, intermittently ridiculous movie. The performances are all solid but unspectacular, hampered by the often stilted and/or dogmatic dialogue that often seems shot through with jarring linguistic anachronisms.

A frame narrative set 30 years after the Essex lost a TKO to the whale is historically ridiculous. And the movie creates a false dramatic narrative in which the Nantucket powers-that-be want to hush up the whaley cause of the Essex's sinking (in reality, they didn't) and the cannibalism in the lifeboats necessitated by being adrift at sea without food for weeks (again, no cover-up -- cannibalism was pragmatically acknowledged by sailors as something that could very well happen because of the realities of life at sea). Oh, well. History sucks! 

This is the sort of movie in which a cargo hold that should be filled with empty barrels to carry home all the whale oil is instead shown as empty throughout the movie so as to visually demonstrate how unsuccessful the whaling expedition has been. I guess in the universe of the movie, the whales bring their own barrels.

The portion of the film stretching from the Essex's departure from Nantucket to its first encounter with the angry whale is really pretty good. Unfortunately, Howard and the screenwriter veer sharply away from history after the sinking of the Essex to turn the movie into a high-toned version of Jaws: The Revenge with a bit of Castaway thrown in. Oh, well. 

The filmmakers also conflate the whale that sunk the Essex with another story about a partially white sperm whale from about the same time period dubbed Mocha Dick by whalers. Ace reporter (well, information-starved novelist) Herman Melville eats this stuff up in the completely fictional frame narrative. We also get some anachronistic environmentalist discussions. In the world of the movie, oil is discovered in Pennsylvania nine years earlier than it was in our universe. Hey, it's an alternate history movie! Lightly recommended.

Invictus (2009): adapted by Anthony Peckham from the non-fiction book by John Carlin; directed by Clint Eastwood; starring Morgan Freeman (Nelson Mandela) and Matt Damon (Francois Peinaar): Engaging sports movie about newly elected South African President Nelson Mandela's attempts to forge unity in his country with the nation's Springboks national rugby team and South Africa's 1995 hosting of the Rugby World Cup. Morgan Freeman as Mandela is excellent and convincing, and Matt Damon is Matt Damon with an Afrikaaners accent as Springboks captain Francois Peinaar. 

The movie is quite faithful to actual events. Clint Eastwood's direction is unobtrusive, and the whole thing goes down pretty smoothly as the earnest Stanley Kramer movie it would have been if it had been made in 1955. A cast of mostly unknowns does solid work in the supporting roles. Traditional and traditionalistic South African songs war with goopy, gloppy, awful Western-muzak-sounding songs on the soundtrack, to an occasionally jarring comic effect. Mandela's favoured 1875 English poem which gave the movie its title was by William Ernest Henly, by the way, though most of us think it was by Rudyard Kipling. The more you know! Recommended.

Mars Needs Brando

The Martian: adapted by Drew Goddard from the novel by Andy Weir; directed by Ridley Scott; starring Matt Damon (Astronaut/ Botanist Mark Watney), Jessica Chastain (Mission Commander/ Geologist Melissa Lewis), Jeff Daniels (NASA Director Teddy Sanders), Michael Pena (Astronaut/Pilot Major Rick Martinez), Sean Bean (Flight Director Mitch Henderson), Kate Mara (Astronaut/ System Operator Beth Johanssen), Sebastian Stan (Astronaut/ Flight Surgeon/ Biologist Dr. Chris Beck), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Mars Mission Director Vincent Kapoor), Kristen Wiig (NASA Media Relations  Director Annie Montrose), Benedict Wong (JPL Director Bruce Ng), Aksel Henie (Astronaut/ Navigator/ Chemist Dr. Alex Vogel),  and Donald Glover (JPL Astrodynamicist Rich Purnell) (2015):

Zippy paean to engineering and science and those brave, stubborn humans takes the viewer to a (mostly) realistic Mars and the astronaut played by Matt Damon who inadvertently gets marooned there. While NASA tries to figure out how to save Mission botanist Mark Watney, Watney himself must figure out how to survive on a bleak and nearly airless planet. It's a movie (and a novel) very much of its time -- if that time were 1942 and this were a short story in Astounding magazine. That's a compliment. 

As in a lot of Astounding stories, engineering and rationality and a Can-do spirit are the only things that will save the day. Well, and stubborn human camaraderie. The principals are all fine in their roles, though Kristen Wiig's character could have been played by anybody and Donald Glover's math whiz should have been played by nobody without much, much rewriting. 

The Martian can hold its head up high in what is a very small sub-genre of film -- movies not based on real events that try to accurately depict space flight as it is known at the time. And it's far better than the two most notable films in that sub-genre, Destination Moon and Marooned. Somewhere, Robert Heinlein may be smiling, especially as his great YA novel Farmer in the Sky presented its hero with some of the same exo-agricultural problems experienced by Damon's astronaut here. Space farming is exciting!

The script is breezy but detail-oriented without being facetious or technobabbly, while Ridley Scott, in a return to form, lets the visuals support the story rather than overwhelm them. The Mars of this movie is a place of stark beauty and occasional terror. The final sequence goes  one problem-to-solve too far in its approach (and replicates a fairly annoying bit of unworkable physics from Gravity), but overall this is a splendid science-fiction movie that combines a sense of wonder with an appreciation of the hard work and intelligence required to be an astronaut. It's sort of the anti-Armageddon. Highly recommended.

Listen To Me Marlon: written by Stevan Riley and Peter Ettedgui; directed by Stevan Riley (2015): Haunting documentary edits together various audio musings and recollections by Marlon Brando recorded by the actor over a period of decades. Mixed in are some staged shots, a CGI head of Brando, personal film and stills, and snippets of media reports on the enigmatic actor. Brando's childhood can't help but elicit sympathy, while his expression of self-judgment makes him an increasingly tragic figure as the documentary unfolds. I'd like the documentary to have had a bit more formalism in its presentation of events -- would it kill someone to put dates on the screen? -- but as a tone-poem about Brando, by Brando to a great extent, it's a terrific piece of pseudo-documentary. Recommended.

Orbital Revolutions

Elysium: written and directed by Neill Blomkamp; starring Matt Damon (Max), Jodie Foster (Delacourt), Sharlto Copley (Kruger) and Alice Braga (Frey) (2013): Elysium's somewhat more enjoyable a second time on a smaller screen. The implausibilities can now safely be ignored, for the most part -- you already know they're coming, and they're still ridiculous. The telegraphing and over-explaining still grate at points. Do we really need to be reminded twice about things we saw at the beginning of a 100-minute-long movie? And does every hero have to turn into Jesus Christ?

On the other hand, Neill Blomkamp possesses a rare eye: the movie looks great even when it depicts an over-crowded dystopia. And the action sequences make sense: you can follow them, and they have moments of horror and beauty within them.

Blomkamp even gets real pathos out of Matt Damon and leering menace out of Sharlto Copley, the meek hero of his first movie. Jodie Foster seems pitch-perfect as the refined defense minister of the orbital habitat that gives the movie its title: she's impeccably mannered and viciously inhuman.

With his left-wing attitudes now enshrined in two science-fiction movies (this and the superior District 13), Blomkamp needs someone in Hollywood to figure out the obvious and put him in charge of a Star Trek movie. His science-fiction-as-action-allegory approach could give us a Trek adventure more in line with the original series without sacrificing fist-fights and space-battles. Recommended.

Allegorical Alien Alcoholics

The World's End: written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg; directed by Edgar Wright; starring Simon Pegg (Gary King), Nick Frost (Andy Knightley), Martin Freeman (Oliver Chamberlain), Paddy Considine (Steven Prince), Eddie Marsan (Peter Page), Pierce Brosnan (Guy Shephard), and Rosamund Pike (Sam Chamberlain) (2013): The third film in the Cornetto Trilogy (so named for the British ice-cream treat that appears in Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and this film) is a lot of serious fun.

40-year-old alcoholic Gary King's greatest life moment was the night in June 1990 when he and his four best friends attempted the Golden Mile, a 12-pub pub crawl in their quaint English home town. Now, 23 years later, Gary wants to get the band back together so as to actually finish the crawl, which ended at pub 9. But he's a genuine toxic screw-up whose friends haven't talked to him in years. And he lives entirely in the past, still listening to the music and wearing the clothes of 1990. He's frozen in time, a Goth time traveller still decked out in dyed-black hair and a Sisters of Mercy t-shirt.

But primarily through skullduggery and guilt-tripping, he gets the crawl going. And then things go bad. Science fictiony bad. And it ends up looking like the fate of the Earth will rest on Gary's drunken shoulders, and the shoulders of his friends. All this in a small town whose main claim to fame, as a giant road sign tells us, is that it's the site of England's first roundabout (in 1909!).

The science fiction in The World's End holds up better here, in a comedy, than it does in pretty much all the 'serious' releases of the summer. It's a droll homage to science fiction British (Village of the Damned, Quatermass, and any number of Doctor Who episodes) and American (most pointedly the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but also The Day the Earth Stood Still, classic and remake). And the movie, while making something of a serious point about addiction and man-children, doesn't necessarily suggest any personal growth by the end of the picture. Or the hope of it.

As in other projects from Pegg, Edgar Wright, and Nick Frost, The World's End teems with pop-culture riffs and references, though here they're as much to the music of 1990 as they are to science fiction and comic books. It's a great, fun piece of work, and maybe the most consistent in tone of the films in the trilogy. Highly recommended.

Elysium: written and directed by Neill Blomkamp; starring Matt Damon (Max), Jodie Foster (Delacourt), Sharlto Copley (Kruger) and Alice Braga (Frey) (2013): The allegory is thick as syrup in this second project from Neill Blomkamp, whose first foray into feature-film science fiction, District 9, was a bit lighter on its metaphoric feet (though admittedly not much). It's a film that could easily have starred Charlton Heston and been released in 1972. It's exactly that sort of science-fiction film. It's Silent Running, but the plants are made of people, and the people are jerks.

That this is a heavy-handed allegory about the Haves and Have-nots short-circuits an awful lot of plausibility in the film, which looks great but just has too many ridiculous moments crafted entirely to allow the allegory to lurch towards its endlessly telegraphed conclusion. To name just one, the air defences of the giant orbital habitat of the rich that gives the movie its title consist of...a guy on the ground with a rocket launcher. Seriously? And that goofiness occurs in the first 20 minutes. Further goofiness is to come.

The acting is fine, so far as it goes -- no one's really playing a character here, so there's only so much anyone can do. Damon is Christly as action-Christ Max, and Jodie Foster is cool and sinister as the power-hungry defence minister of Elysium. Sharlto Copley, who played the mutating nebbish-hero of District 9, seems really miscast here as Elysium's kill-crazy enforcer Kruger. It doesn't help at all that much of his snarled Afrikaaner-inflected dialogue is nigh-incomprehensible. He sounds a lot of the time like an Australian with marbles in his mouth.

In any case, this is an enjoyable action-allegory that doesn't bear any scrutiny for plausibility. And I wish filmmakers would assume that we could come to believe in a hero's actions by observing those actions, rather than telling us how someone (in this case, a loveable nun) tells the child who will become the hero how he someday will become a hero who does great things. Because, you know, foreshadowing or whatever. Lightly recommended.

Popeye vs. the NSA

The Bourne Legacy: based on characters created by Robert Ludlum; written by Tony and Dan Gilroy; directed by Tony Gilroy; starring Jeremy Renner (Aaron Cross), Rachel Weisz (Dr. Marta Shearer), Edward Norton (Eric Byer), Scott Glenn (Ezra Kramer), Stacy Keach (Admiral Turso) and Joan Allen (Pam Landy) (2012): The Bourne Legacy could conceivably have been pitched as Captain America meets Three Days of the Condor. It's an enjoyable addition to the Bourne saga, and while Matt Damon is nowhere to be found, squinty-eyed Jeremy Renner, here a post-modern Popeye, convinces as another rogue super-spy on the run from the U.S. government.

Hey, forget that pitch. The super-spies of what could have been called the Bourne 2.0 program have been enhanced through genetic manipulation of brain and body. As Renner had suffered grievous brain damage as a soldier, his life will basically stop if he can't keep getting his meds -- or find a way to make the modifications permanent. It's Flowers for Algernon with car chases and parkour!

The Bourne movies are a mirror image to the James Bond movies, with the protagonists repeatedly battling their own spy agencies rather than enemies foreign and domestic. It certainly has suited our paranoid times for the last decade or so. Much of the danger in the Bourne movies arises from government agencies cleaning up their own messes, a repeatedly ruthless procedure that generally involves killing everybody expendable in a particular covert government program. Imagine if all civil servants had to face these sorts of cutbacks!

Acclaimed writer-director Tony Gilroy takes the reins here, and does a nice job of keeping a complicated plot moving. The supporting cast is solid, and Rachel Weisz is good as the geneticist Renner has to save in order to save himself before his stash runs out. Geez, it's a bit like a Cheech and Chong movie, too. Recommended.

Behind the Candelabra (2013)

Behind the Candelabra: adapted by Richard LaGravenese from the non-fiction book by Alex Thorleifson and Scott Thorson; directed by Steven Soderbergh; starring Matt Damon (Scott Thorson), Michael Douglas (Liberace), Rob Lowe (Dr. Jack Startz), Dan Aykroyd (Seymour Heller), Scott Bakula (Bob Black) and Debbie Reynolds (Frances Liberace) (2013): Enjoyable but slight HBO outing by Soderbergh which features a fairly stunning bit of acting by Michael Douglas as Liberace. Soderbergh says he couldn't get funding for this picture from movie studios because it was too gay, hence its production by HBO.

But as even I only vaguely remember Liberace as a performer, probably from The Muppet Show in the 1970's, I wonder if the studio redlight on this production was also a result of executives wondering if anyone in the younger movie-going populace would have the faintest idea who Michael Douglas was playing. Brokeback Mountain this isn't. The love story here is pretty creepy, as Liberace gets Thorson to undergo plastic surgery so as to look more like a young Liberace. Eww.

Douglas pretty much nails Liberace's voice, though the pitch is a bit lower than I remember it. Damon is perfectly adequate as Liberace's late-in-life love Scott Thorson, whose book the movie is based on. I'm not sure why Soderbergh didn't do more with lighting values, as he's done on so many other films: this seems like a movie that needs to look much more stylized, but except for a few oversaturated scenes, it's actually about as conventionally photographed and edited as a movie of the week. As the film's major intertext is Sunset Blvd., black-and-white photography might have been nice. But I think we're supposed to feel much more sympathy for Liberace than we do for Norma Desmond, and I can't say as I felt it. It's like being asked to feel sorry for a Dick Tracy villain.

Rob Lowe, though. Holy Moley! His plastic surgeon character actually looked worse than the filmmakers have Lowe made up here. He looks like he got caught in a face-stretching machine from Brazil or possibly Star Trek: Insurrection. In any case, I'd guess that Douglas is a mortal lock for a least a best acting nomination in next year's Emmys. Recommended.

The Hat Squad, The Trip, and The Napoleon of Crime

The Trip, directed by Michael Winterbottom, starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as themselves (2011): British comedians Coogan and Brydon, playing themselves, tour some haute cuisine restaurants in Northern England for a week in service to a newspaper article Coogan has been contracted to do, comedically one-upping each other all the way. This terrifically funny movie was originally a six-part BBC miniseries, edited down here for tehatrical distribution. Along with Bridesmaids, it's the funniest movie of 2011.

Coogan plays the somewhat aloof, Byronic comedian, mocking Brydon's schtick as the Rich Little of Great Britain. Brydon plays the devoted family man who seems content to entertain through comedic mimickry. Coogan is a bit of a blowhard; Brydon is a bit socially awkward. Together, they make a great comedic duo. There's even a bit of character development, though it's wisely kept muted, without the 'big' moments that would probably occur in an American film.

One of the running competitions between the two involves trying to do the best Michael Caine imitation while also explaining how one does this, and how Caine's voice has changed over the years. Others involve James Bond imitations and various bits of jazzy riffing on assorted pop culture topics.

The food -- elegantly prepared and often hilariously precious -- also supplies moments of wit and counterpoint, especially early on when Brydon gets Coogan to admit that he actually isn't much of a foodie, and that the only critical insight he can offer about a bowl of soup is that it's very tomato-y and very soupy. I wish this were longer. Highly recommended.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, written by Michele and Kieran Mulroney, based on the characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle; directed by Guy Ritchie; starring Robert Downey, Jr. (Holmes), Jude Law (Watson), Stephen Fry (Mycroft), Noomi Rapace (Simza Heron) and Jared Harris (Moriarty) (2011): Guy Ritchie's Holmes is basically a twitchy Victorian James Bond with more brain power than 007. Here, Holmes must foil a massive plot by his arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty, a respected mathematics professor and political consultant who is secretly "the Napoleon of Crime."

The plot itself isn't new to Holmes pastiches and homages: Moriarty is trying to foment a World War in 1891. Oh, and Watson is getting married. Downey and Law keep it all fairly light; Stephen Fry plays Holmes's older, smarter brother Mycroft as a more politically committed Oscar Wilde; Noomi Rapace (Lisabeth Salender in the Swedish adaptation of the Millennium trilogy) doesn't have a lot to do as the only Romany fortune-teller in history with a Swedish accent, though she does look great in a variety of hats. Weightless, escapist fun with some nice set-pieces. Recommended.


　

The Adjustment Bureau, written and directed by George Nolfi, based on the story "Adjustment Team" by Philip K. Dick; starring Matt Damon (David Norris), Emily Blunt (Elise Sellas), Anthony Mackie (Harry Mitchell), John Slattery (Richardson) and Terence Stamp (Thompson) (2011): Hollywood tends to like Philip K. Dick for the bare bones of a plot and not much else. Dick's novels and short stories don't exactly teem with people as good-looking as Matt Damon and Emily Blunt playing characters with sexy, exotic and/or world-shaking jobs. With The Adjustment Bureau, it's as if the makers of Blade Runner had changed Rick Deckard's character from a private detective to the Man Who Would Be King of All the Popes.

So the movie-makers of this extremely loose adaptation of a ten-page Dick short story called "Adjustment Team" (loose in the sense that it makes Minority Report look like a staged reading of the Dick short story it was based on) take a basic idea that isn't entirely peculiar to Dick (vaguely magical, behind-the-scenes bureaucratic types actually decide everybody's fates down to the most minor of details if necessary -- this is the Adjustment Team, whom the movie renames the Adjustment Bureau probably simply because Hollywood screenwriters will rename or rewrite anything given half a chance, and generally fuck it up while loudly declaiming how they improved the original narrative. Stephen Zaillian, I'm looking at you and about half your adaptations).

Then they add a mushy spiritual element that is decidedly not in the original story, and have Matt Damon be a US Presidential hopeful and Emily Blunt the most important modern dance person in, like, ever. But only if The Plan is followed, shepherded by the behatted army of Adjustment fellas.

None of this works at all well with Dick's recurring focus on ordinary people in extraordinary situations, often just trying to get along. Because it's Matt Damon! The powers that be want him to be President! The Chairman, ie. God, wants him to be President!!! Who needs ordinary people in a baffling world of shifting realities when Jason Bourne is available to run like crazy at the climax?

Oh, and the various members of the Adjustment Bureau wear hats. Because hats allow them to teleport from location to location. Despite the fact that the members of the Adjustment Bureau are supernatural beings of some sort. They still have to have those hats! And their precognitive powers don't work in rain or near water. Basically, they're a really incompetent Green Lantern Corps. At least a ring can't blow off your head in a stiff breeze! At least the colour yellow doesn't cover 2/3's of the Earth's surface!

Matt Damon's fate gets screwed up because the guy micro-managing that fate, Anthony Mackie (in the unfortunate role of The Saintly, Super-powered Negro), falls asleep on the job. History will apparently fall apart if Matt Damon doesn't become President of the USA. The Adjustment Bureau apparently doesn't have back-up plans. It's all one plan, baby! Much pointless running around and stuff later, everything works out fine. The End. Not recommended.