Vice (a movie review post)

I wanted to see Vice as soon as I saw the trailers for it, and I'm not going to lie: That was mostly because of Sam Rockwell. Rockwell as W.? I'm in! Despite Rockwell's Oscar win last year, he tends to be pretty underrated in Hollywood. And, since we're on the subject of Rockwell, he was great. I'd say he nailed W. and was very enjoyable to watch; however, his performance pales in comparison to Bale's.

I feel compelled to point out here that I am not a Christian Bale fan. On a personal level, and I say this without ever having met the man, he seems to be an asshole. One of the flaming types. And he was a pretty crappy Batman, though that may have been more Nolan's fault than his. In fact, based on Bale's apparent level of skill, I'm going to have to say that his failing at being Bruce Wayne has to have been bad directing, because Bale is an acting genius.

People always talk about Daniel Day-Lewis and his ability to disappear into a role, which is not not true, but he has nothing on Bale, and Bale doesn't take three to four years between roles because he has to recover from being someone else. Look, knowing that Bale is playing Cheney doesn't help you to see him in his performance of Cheney. For all intents and purposes, Bale was Cheney. It was pretty amazing and, at this point from what I've seen, he deserves the Best Actor Oscar. As much as I'd rather see Bradley Cooper get it.

Then there's Adam McKay, the writer/director. Also the writer/director of The Big Short, which also starred Bale and Steve Carell. McKay's origins doing goofy comedies with Will Ferrell is evident in these more serious movies, but I think it makes them more accessible. Or maybe it doesn't. I don't know. What I do know is that I loved The Big Short. I don't think Vice is quite as good or enjoyable, but I think it's vastly more important.

So, yeah, I don't think Vice is quite Best Picture material -- though it deserves the nomination -- but it may be the most important film of last year. If you want to know how and why we got to where we are today, especially the part where Trump (#fakepresident) got elected, you can see an awful lot of that road in this movie. Now, if McKay will do a movie on Newt Gingrich, you'd be able to see the other part of that road.

Of course, that brings up the question of whether the movie is credible or not and all of the accusations that the movie has a liberal bias. I'm actually not going to get into that. For one reason, McKay closes the movie by... well, not dealing with that question exactly but, certainly, bringing it up. For another, it doesn't matter. Which is the sad thing and part of what the movie is about. The facts don't matter. Just saying the word "facts" at this point is confirming that you have a liberal bias. Like facts are some construct of liberalism while conservatives live in the real world of "truth," or whatever it is that they think of it as, where science is evil (of the Devil) and the destroyer of all that really matters. At any rate, we don't have the whole picture because so much of what Cheney did was in secret. You want to talk about emails...

Oh, no, you really don't, because the email thing was just an excuse.

One way or the other, though, if you want a peek, a tiny brief peek, behind the curtain of subterfuge, you should see this movie, whichever side of the divide you're on.

A Star Is Born (a movie review post)

Bradley Cooper may be the best actor of his (my) generation. Which is saying a lot, I know, but he's able to become a character in a way few other actors are ever able to do. Daniel Day-Lewis, but he's always been hampered by how far into a character he goes to be able to portray that character, taking him years to re-emerge after a role. And that's less about acting than it is about just becoming some other person for a time. Like a deep undercover agent.

Christian Bale has always been willing to go to whatever physical extreme for his roles, like dropping to something around 90 lbs. for his role in The Machinist, but he always just seems like Christian Bale as far as the actual acting goes.

Bradley Cooper seems like something else entirely.

Or maybe I'm just biased. I've liked Cooper since Alias. At the time (wow, that was more than 15 years ago!), I told my wife that he was going to be somebody. Not that she paid any attention to what I was saying. I mean, why should she have? The comment wasn't even worth disbelieving; it was flung out into the cosmos like a piece of rock from an asteroid collision.

Despite Cooper's burst into stardom a few years ago, it's with this movie more than any other (except, maybe, American Hustle (with Christian Bale, no less)) where Cooper really shows the full range of his skills. Sometimes, he's hard to watch on screen. It's painful.

And I'm not even talking about his adoption of Sam Elliot's voice, but wow! I've done voices, and I've done voices that have hurt and damaged my throat, and I'm beyond impressed that Cooper was able to pull off that voice for such a sustained amount of time. Oh, and fun fact: He decided on that voice before they'd actually cast Elliot as his brother, so it was sweet that they got him and amazing to hear them exchange dialogue.

But this isn't really about Cooper; it's about the movie. Which he also directed. So, yeah...

The movie is great. I haven't seen the original nor have I seen the Streisand remake of the 70s. Or, at least, I have no memory of seeing it, though it's possible I may have actually seen that as a kid, because my mom was a huge Streisand fan. All of that to say that I'm looking at this film on its own merits without any comparisons to other iterations. I really enjoyed it. It almost brought me to tears on a number of occasions but didn't quite manage to cross that line. I don't know if that's a plus or a minus.

Lady Gaga was also amazing. This isn't really her debut role as an actress or anything, but it also kind of is. I think she was perfect. And believable. What more can you ask?

I already want to see the movie again.

The Revenant (a movie review post)

A beautiful and terrible movie.

I could almost leave it at that, but I suppose it does need more explanation.

First, though:
You know, I'm not going to complain about DiCaprio getting best actor for this. I think a role like this is probably pretty tough. And I don't just mean the rigorous conditions. I mean the not being able to use your voice. There's not a lot of talking in this one. DiCaprio did a more than adequate job of carrying the movie with his facial expressions and stumbling around, much better than Redmayne did last year, at any rate. However, I think Bale would have been the better choice for The Big Short. If he'd been nominated for best actor, that is. What's up with that?

And I don't particularly like Christian Bale.

The movie is beautiful. Even in its terror, it's beautiful. The cinematography is, in a word, amazing.

But, beyond that, the movie doesn't offer much. In that way, you can take "terrible" to mean whatever you want it to. What I can say is that, at the end of the movie, I wasn't left feeling anything. Maybe that's the way Inarritu intended it, but I don't want to watch a movie and then feel nothing. My actual thought when the screen went from DiCaprio's face to the credits was, "Oh... That's it?" There was no joy, no sadness, no nothing. No catharsis. There wasn't even anything to think about as there was at the end of Birdman. It was just over.

Now, this next thing is my own bias:
People talk about this movie as if it is just a revenge tale, but that's not true. It's not even mostly true. Mostly, it's a survival tale. I tend to not like fictional survival tales. They're just... too outrageous. Once you've decided your hero is going to survive, you can do anything you want to the character and, guess what, he survives! I have a hard time with Hugh Glass surviving the trials he went through. A real Hugh Glass, that is. Still, I was willing to go along with it for a while, even the trips in the freezing water, but [SPOILER ALERT!] going over the cliff on the horse was just too much for me. Okay, so was putting gun powder in his wound and igniting it. Clever but too much.

See, if you give me something like 127 Hours, I'm good. That really happened. The things Aron Ralston did to survive were amazing, but it's amazing because it's real. Nothing Hugh Glass did to survive or that he survived was amazing, because it was all a fiction. There's nothing triumphant and nothing to cheer. Then, there's the ending...

Also, there's Tom Hardy. I have nothing good to say about Hardy. Maybe if he takes a role that's more than guttural mumbling.

The Big Short (a movie review post)

I think when you hear about a movie being made about the financial collapse of the housing market, you don't think "funny." That's certainly not what I thought. So I figured this was going to be a serious "doom and gloom" kind of movie, but I wanted to see it because it's about the guys (well, one guy, really) who saw the bubble and knew it was going to pop. You hear about the people who saw it coming, but you don't really hear about them, if you know what I mean. They get brushed off as doomsayers who just happened to be right this time but not because they were right but because they were lucky. After all, no one could have seen the coming of the collapse of the housing market, right?
Right?

Honestly, Steve Carell was enough to make me want to see it, but it's a subject I have interest in. And I like Gosling, too. I'm not a fan of Bale, but I do concede that he's a good, possibly great, actor, so I could get let his presence slide. And, um, I had actually forgotten that Brad Pitt was in it at all. I do like him, so that would have been a plus... if I had remembered.

Then the movie turned out to be a comedy! A dark comedy, granted, but a comedy nonetheless. I suppose I could have known that before going in, but I don't like to know too much about a movie before seeing it and the fact that this is a comedy in no way takes away from the movie or the subject matter. Humor may have been the best vehicle for a movie like this, in fact.

Christian Bale plays Michael Burry, the actual guy who saw the housing bubble and knew it was going to burst. I'm not going to get into all of that or what happened because you can watch the movie or do the research to find that stuff out, and you should because it's interesting and somewhat fascinating. That he saw the bubble was not "luck" or a good guess or anything like that; it was an ability to look at the data and know what it means, something most (nearly all) people are incapable of. So, yeah, of course it sounded ludicrous when he suggested that the housing market was going to collapse. Also, he was trying to make money off of it but not because he was trying to make money off of it. No, I'm not going to try to explain that. Also, Bale was incredible as Burry. Like I said, he's a good, possibly great, actor whether I like him or not.

Brad Pitt was also cast somewhat against character and, since I had forgotten that he was in the movie at all, it was halfway through or something before I even realized it was him. It was one of those "oh!" moments: Oh! That's Brad Pitt! And, well, if someone like Brad Pitt can make me not even recognize him, you have to know that it's a good performance.

Carell was playing more to character, kind of an angry Michael Scott kind of guy, but he was really good and fit the part perfectly. He's actually the guy you end up having the most connection with because he's in this investment business but really hates everything about it. He hates all of the corruption and deceit and greed but, yet, there he is. So, yeah, at first, when he and his group figure out about shorting the housing market (they'll explain that to you in the movie), it's about the money but, as he finds more out about what's going on, for him, it's really about hurting the banks. Carell is actually great in the role and makes you really feel for the character.

Speaking of the movie explaining things, that stuff is awesome. They actually stop the action of the movie to have celebrities explain concepts, like the bit with Margot Robbie in a bubble bath explaining whatever she was explaining (I don't remember what anyone explained, now, so that has nothing to do with Robbie in the bubble bath). Those bits were pretty brilliant; the one with the chef and, um, whomever was with him was probably the best one.

And, oh, yeah, Gosling is good, too, though he didn't really do anything that you wouldn't expect of Gosling, so hos performance doesn't really stand out to me. It's the kind of thing you'd expect of Ryan Reynolds, but Gosling does a lot of that kind of thing, too.

All in all a really great movie, as good as Spotlight, really, which fills me with conflict, because I want Spotlight for best picture, but The Big Short, though a different kind of film completely, is equally as good. I wouldn't want to have to pick between the two as to which one is actually the "better" movie.

Are You Being Hustled?

Some of these things actually happened.

But probably not many of them. At least not in any way close to the presentation in American Hustle. 

That doesn't stop it from being an excellent movie, though.

It's one of the few movies I've seen where I had no idea about what was coming next. At its base, it's a con movie, so you're never quite sure who's conning whom and what anyone has up his sleeve. Or under her skirt, I suppose, since the women are perpetually dressed as they are in the poster. And, then, at least a couple of the characters are at least slightly unhinged, and you never quite know which direction the story is going.

Surprisingly, the movie opens with one of those flash-forward/flashback type things that I normally hate, but they really made it work in this one. For one thing, the movie doesn't start near the climax, just at the point of the first sting operation. It's the place where we meet all of the major players, so to speak. Once the deal falls apart, we flashback with Irving Rosenfeld for a first person narration (which I also usually hate) of what brought him to that point. But what makes it interesting is that when we get to the part where he crosses paths with Sydney Prosser, she picks up the narration and, then, they have this kind of dueling narration giving us the back story, and it really works. It helps that it's not a "36 hours earlier" kind of scenario. It's the characters telling us about who they are, you know, as people, and that's what makes it work.

As interesting as the story is, though, it's the acting that makes this movie. The performances, all of them, are incredible.

Christian Bale shows us once again just what he's willing to do physically to become his character, this time putting on a bit of a paunch (which he shows off in the movie in a very unflattering way) and shaving a bald spot onto his head (also unflattering). He's what can only be described as a sleazy character, a con man, but, by the time we get back to the point in the story where it started, we have total sympathy for him. I just want to point out that I am not a Bale fan. I have respect for what he's willing to go through for a role (like in The Machinist and Rescue Dawn), and I think he's a good actor, but I don't really like him that much. That I say he was impressive in this role is, then, saying something.

Amy Adams--cute, sweet Amy Adams--shows us she's anything but as an ex-stripper trying to reinvent herself. Her boobs should probably also have received some sort of credit. Not that they ever fully appear onscreen or anything, but it's hard not to be aware of them when she's onscreen. She's like some 70s porn star or something. Or like what I think a 70s porn star must have been like. I'm not really sure. At any rate, her performance is pretty amazing, and you're never quite sure what she's up to, just that she is up to... things. It's her performance that provides a lot of the tension in the movie, because you're never really sure whose side she's on. Well, other than her own, that is.

Bradley Cooper is amazing as a somewhat overzealous FBI agent. And I'd say more about him, but I don't think I can without spoilers. I'll just say that I think Cooper has a certain intensity about him that not many actors can equal. And, according to my wife, he and Adams deliver one of the sexiest scenes she's ever seen. The amazing thing about that is that nothing happens in that scene. Well, not nothing but, you know, nothing happens: there is no loss of clothing or anything like that. But it's intense, and most of that is from him.

Jennifer Lawrence continues to show that she's more than just a pretty face. I'm not quite sure she deserved her Oscar last year (not that her performance wasn't good; it was. I've just never been convinced it was "best actress" quality), but, if she gets a best supporting Oscar for this role, it will be deserved. The scene with her and the "science oven" is almost enough all by itself to earn her the Oscar.

And, then, there's Jeremy Renner. And his hair. Because if Amy Adams boobs almost deserved a screen credit, Renner's hair certainly did. I could not take my eyes off of it. It was amazing. And, in a movie where everyone's hair was pretty amazing, that's saying something. This is the first movie I've seen him in where he shows me he can do something besides play "taciturn hero" (and, no, I haven't yet seen The Hurt Locker, but, knowing what it's about (loosely), I'm guess he plays "taciturn hero" in that one, too). He's pretty great as a New Jersey mayor in this. He's pretty great in the sense that I did not actually know he was in the movie before I was seeing the movie, and, then, I kept wondering if I was wrong and maybe that wasn't really him, so that, I think, is a pretty good performance.

Louis C.K. also fit in nicely. I don't think there was any kind of stretch for him as an actor, but he worked well with everyone else. As did Elisabeth Rohm (from Angel); I didn't recognize her at all.

The end result is a lot of compelling performances and an interesting plot. Enough so that, as I sit here writing this up, it makes me want to watch it again. Especially Jeremy Renner's hair. I don't think I've been so captivated by anyone's hair since the Dallas Cowboys won the Super Bowl back in '93 (I think) and someone (Emmitt Smith?) poured a cooler of water over Jimmy Johnson's head, and his hair didn't move. It was like he had on a plastic, hair-shaped helmet. It was fascinating.

Oh! And the cameo appearance by De Niro... the perfect touch.