The Immigrant review

We all came here on boats, whether they be real or metaphorical. All of us, at one time or another, have known desperation. Defeat. Hunger. Pain. They are universal human emotions everyone can relate to on some level. Some have just experienced them on higher levels. We have all had family members leave us, but how many of us were there as they were taken, violently, away? James Gray's newest film, The Immigrant, understands hopeless desperation like few other motion pictures. It tells the story of Ewa Cybulska (Marion Cottilard), an poor woman from Poland who immigrates to America with her sister. Upon arrival, Ewa's sister is stripped away from her for tuberculosis treatment. A shadowy manipulative man named Bruno picks Ewa out from the crowd. He promises help for her and her sister. The spider has caught the fly. He is a pimp, and Ewa is his next prospect. Thus begins the epic dirge that is The Immigrant. A melancholy meditation on the American dream and everything that comes with it. Gray has learned from the great filmmakers of his past. Hints of early Coppola and Elia Kazan, even Scorsese are visible here. It is easy to tell how committed he is to make a solemn and sobering film that one of the names mentioned would have made in their prime. It seems like he is trying to make The Great American Film. Something to be looked back upon in wonder. It's his stoic commitment to that that is his downfall. The film sometimes comes across as stuffy and dreadfully solemn. Luckily, it recovers quickly. There are enough moments of gorgeous imagery and terrific performances to get past the shakier parts. But when it all works, it really works. Gray uses close-ups the way David Lean used wide landscape shots of the desert in Lawrence of Arabia. Cotillard's face fills the screen and her utter weariness becomes more than apparent. Things that some less talented filmmakers would have communicated in lengthy monologues or numerous and complicated scenes Gray instead communicates in a single shot of a character's face. Joaquin Phoenix's character is possibly the most complex in the entire film ranging from wicked to remorseful and even pitiful. All of this is made known in a few simple close-ups. This all made possible by the massively talented actors working in the film. Gray loves the foggy wide shots of Ellis Island, but where he really flourishes are in the smaller and more emotional scenes. The always great Jeremy Renner gives a wonderfully understated performance and adds multitudes to these scenes. The Immigrant is a film of bold and sobering ideas. Showing the painful trek someone goes through to find a better life. Prostitution and lies are simply a price to pay for freedom. Freedom, barely visible through insomnia-puffed eyes, that seems so close yet remains always out of reach. That fiery knot in the pit of the stomach that urges to push onward. It does not always pay off. The boats sometimes have holes. Behind the facade, lies the true meaning of the American Dream. It is not pretty. America is truly a place of opportunity. The ways in which we achieve that opportunity may not be as simple and easy as one would initially think. The Immigrant, like The Godfather Part II and many of its predecessors, understands this, for better or for worse. Not it is only up to us to understand it. The flag is in tatters yet, it still rises. It still rises. 

Nightcrawler review

Blinding neon light and thick smog choke Los Angeles. People drive along the endless labyrinth of roads and interstates to get where they are going. The destination is not important. Not now. They are oblivious to the fate that has already befell them. A bump in the road, an extra drink at dinner, a reckless teenager coming home from a house party. The sparks are visible, the screaming cuts through the thick night air, the steel on the iron horse grows hot. The car flips. All they see is red covering asphalt. How did this happen? A light shines from somewhere above, they look up. Am I dying? A face. Gaunt, focused, horrifying. Whatever it is it cannot be human. It's red eyes glare down at them like two coins made of molten lead. It is the face of the devil, and it is the hour of judgement. "If you're seeing me, you're having the worst day of your life." This devil is Louis  Bloom, the main character of Dan Gilroy's debut film, Nightcrawler. A type of  cameraman who films disasters as they happen and sells the footage to television stations. He is determined and fierce. Focus like a laser beam. Bloom has the feral look and inherent loneliness of Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, but he has the sickening drive and sociopathic tendencies of Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Bloom is a hard working maniac fueled by some severely perverted ideas and a need to annihilate the competition. He's Michael Corleone with a camcorder. A malicious grim reaper stalking the streets of LA. Where there is trouble, Lou Bloom is there. With Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy has crafted a slick, cynical, and over-the-top satire that parallels films like Network. It is massively entertaining, emanating a kinetic energy that keeps a viewer totally sucked in. It's frightening and powerful. Most of the film's muscle comes from Jake Gyllenhaal's performance as the crazed protagonist. Gyllenhaal has been steadily rising as an actor in recent years, being the standout in films like End of Watch, Prisoners, Enemy, and many others. Nightcrawler may be his best yet. Hell, I would even go as far as to say he gives the very best performance of the year. Bug eyed, emaciated, and greasy, Gyllenhaal creates a palpable persona totally his own. He owns the movie like no other actor could. Nightcrawler is a very good movie in many ways, but Gyllenhaal looms over everything like some kind of freakish God, truly inhabiting the role. He is so transcendent here, it's much easier to forgot the movies flaws, which it has a few of. This is Gilroy's first movie, and you can see him occasionally struggling. As I mentioned above, Nightcrawler is a film of many influences. At times, you can see Gilroy leaning too much on them for support. There were a few scenes that seemed directly taken out of Taxi Driver and There Will Be Blood. It's hard to ignore, and does hinder the film at times. Gilroy is working with a few themes here. Media and how we as a society treat it, the bastardization of the American Dream, and greed. He does struggle to really go in depth with some of them, and the movie definitely could have benefited from some more fleshing out. Yet, I still cannot deny how crazy, entertaining, and energetic the film is. Robert Elswit does a fantastic job with the cinematography here. The movie looks great, and there are some landscape shots of LA that are downright haunting. Oscar worthy stuff. It's a wonderfully creepy tapestry of neo-noir and character study. Gilroy has made a good film here. Gyllenhaal has made a great one. Nightcrawler portrays a dark, morally ambiguous, pre-apocalyptic world of greed and evil. It is a fear-inducing world much too close to our own. And one I wouldn't mind visiting again. 

There Will Be Blood

Towards the beginning of Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 film, There Will Be Blood, there is a shot that descends from the bright sun-washed Californian desert into a dark long hole filled with oil. Below, is Daniel Plainview. This is where the movie begins, in Plainview's "heart of darkness." Daniel Plainview is not a man, not in the traditional sense at least. He is a demon, a devil, a fiery being whose origins unknown. It is not wholly unbelievable that he was simply begat by the bowels of the Earth, thrown forth in some vicious gushing of oil. Daniel Plainview cannot be a man, for he is far too ruthless to be anything other than supernatural. A god made of anger, gristle, fury, and determination. He is the ultimate personification of all of the greed and evil in America, a build up of pure corruption. Yet, one cannot help but feel a sense of respect for the character of Plainview. He is a "bad person", yes. But, he got to where he is all on his own. All of the oil wells and land and money he has procured, he has procured himself. One looks at him with the same fearful admiration they would of Adolf Hitler. A man of unconscionable evil, but he's worked hard to get all that evil. One of the greatest actors of our time, Daniel Day-Lewis, portrays the character of Plainview. With a role like this, many other actors would make the character campy. Day-Lewis makes it one of the most intense and horrifying performances I have ever seen. It is a fact that he is great here, an indisputable one at that. It is a performance so good, people often overlook the other fantastic elements of the movie. There Will Be Blood, after all, is directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. A filmmaker who I firmly believe is one of the best, if not THE best, person working in the movies today. There Will Be Blood is his masterpiece. A masterpiece, coming from a man who has made such films as Magnolia, Boogie Nights, and The Master is an extraordinary feat. The filmmaking on display in Blood is comparable to the best work of Stanley Kubrick. I do not make these claims lightly. Anderson began his career making brilliant character ensemble pieces. He frequently referenced his directing heroes, people like Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme. With Blood, he proves that he can make a film so purely his own. He also proved he is a true genius with filmmaking. I struggle to think of any other filmmaker who not only fully understands the human condition and how to write it but also how to film it. With There Will Be Blood, Anderson has cemented his name in the history books. At its very core, the film is about good versus evil. The pious preacher Eli Sunday (played by Paul Dano) up against the violent oil man, Daniel Plainview. In any other movie, good would prevail because goodness always rises above the evil. Yet, in real life that is not always the case. Eli Sunday may be a man of god, but his hands are far from clean. In the end, the most godly man does not win out, but the man who is most equipped. In some sense, There Will Be Blood is a perfect argument for Darwin's "survival of the fittest theory". The film takes place in between the years 1898 and 1927. An epic expanse of time that ends right at the edge of national disaster. The Great Depression. The events take place on the brink of a collapse. An apocalypse. At the end of the movie, Plainview (who at this point is near insanity) begins to scream "I am the Third Revelation! I am who the lord has chosen!" This line might be more than just ramblings of a man gone mad. Plainview is the harbinger of  the end. A horseman riding a steed made of oil, evil, and greed. He is the lord of his wide desert expanse. The very end of the film is the ultimate summation of Plainview's insane determination. It is the American Dream, like it or not. It does not come with a majestic waving of the flag over a bright blue sky, but with a bowling pin smashing down on a man's head. This is America. This is Daniel Plainview's America. Anderson does not point his finger at capitalism or at corruption in this country, he simply shows us it and laughs. With There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson has more or less crafted a perfect film. I have seen the movie three times now and I can say that with the utmost confidence. It is a cinematic landmark that will be remembered for a long time.

Whiplash review

Adrenaline.
Pulsing, coursing through like a river after a hurricane. It keeps going. It is in a constant state of on. There are no downbeats. You cannot take five. In or out. This is Whiplash. This is cinema. And it dares to ask "What drives a person? What makes one crack?" When someone's skull is constantly pounded, metaphorically speaking, how long before they throw their hands up and go to the head injury ward? How long before they have had enough? Even more so, why go through the torture? Is it worth it? I imagine Damien Chazelle, the director of  Whiplash, only has one answer. Yes. Whiplash tells of one man's arduous journey to be the best he can be. Bloody fingers, psychological abuse, and car crashes are not even enough to get in his way. He is an all-devouring bulldozer made of confidence and pure musical talent. A warrior of the auditorium. The first shot of the movie, we see Andrew (Miles Teller's character). We see him through a doorway at the end of a hall, he is drumming. The camera pulls in. His drumming becomes more intense. This is his story, we know this from the start. Chazelle could make this story lengthy and complicated, filling up space with flashbacks and unneeded fleshing out of things that are damn well fleshed out already. A much less talented filmmaker would buckle in some of the more intense scenes. In one of the film's many intense moments, Andrew is center stage playing the drums. One slip up and his musical career is finished. Like Andrew, Chazelle powers through. He keeps things short and too-the-point. Chazelle does not lean on cliches or try and add on more. Economical is a good word to describe it. He does what needs to be done. Whiplash is Chazelle's directorial debut, and reminded me quite a bit of different director's film debut. Reservoir Dogs, weirdly enough. Both movies are exceedingly well-written and trim out the fat. Conversations are snappy and good, but they don't add in unnecessary odds and ends to pad things out. Every scene needs to be there. It can be flashy and showy where it needs to be, but not anymore than that. The flashiest and showiest part of the film is J.K. Simmons' teacher character, Terence Fletcher. A brutal, abusive, scary monster of a man who dominates the screen like he's King Kong when onscreen. Under less adept and much shakier hands, Simmons would be overdone and completely take over the film. At times it seems like he will, but Chazelle knows what he's doing and will always bring the camera back to Teller. He knows what story he's telling, and he'll make sure he's telling it right. What Chazelle also avoids doing is making Simmons so completely evil that he becomes nothing more than a rallying point for Teller's character. A symbol he is not. The teacher is unfathomably brutal. A fireman's hose of anger and insults. Yet, he thinks what he's doing is truly right. He thinks he's a good teacher. A guy who will push his students to be the next greats. This is a man with drive and feeling beneath his skin. He's still evil, but he is more than just an angry face to root against. Hey, even Hitler had emotions. It's just whether one chooses to acknowledge that he did. Chazelle understands fully, and that's one of the many reasons Whiplash succeeds. The film is lean, exhilarating, with one of the best endings I've seen in a while. It's not perfect per se, but it's good! There are all the right cogs, gears, and buttons for a good film. All that's needed is a talented engineer to put it all into place as a fully-functioning machine. Luckily, Whiplash has a damn good engineer.  

Birdman review

Watching Birdman is equivalent to watching a plane crash. Things and people of great stature colliding in a fiery inferno of ego and madness. Like the plane itself, these people are not aware of their folly. They go on and on with their self-destructive manner, not realizing the damage being done. Yet, it does not come across as some violently sickening act of destruction. It is much more of an apocalyptic waltz. To quote Pynchon "it is not a disentanglement of, but a progressive knotting into." We are watching the fall of the Roman Empire, but from our perspective it looks like the emergence of the Persians. A phoenix rising from the ashes-fitting. The subtitle for Birdman is "The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance." A joke on both the characters of the film and the audience. In some perverted way, their is virtue to be found in the depths of ignorance. It's just not the kind anyone is looking for. At the end of the movie, the main character Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), seems to have gotten everything he has wanted throughout the film. In reality, he's actually gotten the opposite. His ignorance and bullheaded stupidity masquerading as celebrity have made him the antithesis of his goal throughout the film. In some ways, it is a very depressing film even if it does not present itself as so. It is an indictment of show business while simultaneously being a celebration of it. Doing so in a way that is not hypocritical, but admirable. These characters are self-obsessed and theatrical lost puppies who come onto the scene screaming and raving in carefully practiced speeches because they have all lost the ability to just act like regular people. Maybe they aren't regular people, but a race of space aliens who landed on Earth and used E! news, Vanity Fair, and the biography of Corey Feldman to learn how to act like people. Even the movie's most "honest" character, Riggan's screw-up drug addict daughter (Emma Stone), has her lapses into self absorption and vanity. This a film steeped in utter madness. A loud and infectiously exciting barrage of drums accompanies the movie. In Riggan Thomson's most insane stretches of being, the constant beat of drums thrums along with it. The score reflects all of the character's neurotic and constantly frightened personas. One of the most present and important characters in Birdman is the camera filming it all. The director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, has made a very bold and audacious decision to film all of the movie in a series of long takes, edited together in a way that makes it look like the entire film is in one endless shot. The main plot of the film revolves around Riggan, a washed-up actor who once played a superhero in a series of successful superhero films (very reflective Keaton in real life), who is now vying for artistic merit with a Raymond Carver short story he has adapted and will act and direct in. The method of using the constant long takes and tracking shots that Inarritu has adopted here is supposed to make it look like it is a play itself. The actors don't film one close-up and then have a smoke break, they are constantly on. This reflects the vain theatricality of the characters in the film. They live their life like they are in a play: loud, wordy, flashy, and full of dense dialogue. A directing decision that could have devolved into a tiresome gimmick is used for real artistic value here. The wonderfully awe inspiring decisions on Inarritu's part and the ace work of the actors can easily make one forget about the film's noticeable flaws. The script has some rough edges. There are a few jokes that don't quite land and there are some lines that feel incredibly mean-spirited and misguided. There are times when it seems like the screenwriter feels worried the audience won't get the message he is trying to convey and that he must continually expound upon what he's trying to say tirelessly. Those particular moments made me cringe. Yet, when stacked up next to the rest of the movie, they seemed minuscule and not even worth mentioning. My only true problem with the film was its ending, which I won't spoil for anyone. Let me just say it could have (and should have ended a few scenes earlier). Besides all that, Birdman soars higher than Superman on helium. It is a massively entertaining meditation on show business, madness, and the deformed sick elephant we all call "fame." Anyone who scoffs at the current state of Hollywood, pointing out the mind-numbing barrage of formulaic superhero pictures that gets pumped out every year, certainly isn't wrong in doing so. But you only have to look so far as to Birdman to know that there is hope for cinema yet. Do not despair common folk, Keaton has landed and he is here to help.    

The Master or The Young Man and the Sea: A Deconstruction of Paul Thomas Anderson's Exquisite Masterwork

Freddie Quell is a bird of the vast, grey, and infinite sky. He drifts through life like dust motes in a shaft of afternoon light. Women, jobs, alcohol, and people in general try to pin him down. To label him, diagnose him, explain him. Put him in the cold dank prison cell we all call a purpose. Many think they have the answers to Freddie, they know what's wrong with him. Whether it be doctors, therapists, or Philip Seymour Hoffman's charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd. Many try, but they all fail. Quell is a character like that of some elusive and far away indecipherable message. One can try and understand him, to grasp him and fit him into a peg in society, but they will fail. When Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master was released in 2012, a common criticism was that Joaquin Phoenix's character Freddie Quell did not change, evolve, or develop. He started out a confused and mumbling drunk and then stayed that way throughout the entire movie. What critics failed to realize was that Quell wasn't supposed to change. To have him develop would be completely disregarding everything the film has worked to establish. In fact, in launching this very complaint at the movie critics themselves are falling prey to the exact mistake almost every character in the film made: they tried to put Freddie under an umbrella. This is an impossible feat. He is a man so broken by the war, by life. Left with nothing to do but float drunkenly through the bottomless abyss of this here world we are all prisoner to. Freddie is the unchanging sea. Try as we might, we simply cannot chart his waters. No Captain Cook could ever penetrate through the exterior of him. Philip Seymour Hoffman's last monologue sums it all up perfectly: "Free winds and no tyranny for you, Freddie, sailor of the seas. You pay no rent, free to go where you please. Then go, go to that landless latitude and good luck. If you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you? For you'd be the first in the history of the world." Freddie is a seaman, a directionless drifter who is bound by no chains, subjugated by no master. The film opens with a beautiful shot that repeats throughout the film. The flowing vibrant blue ocean. It is breathtaking simple. It is Freddie Quell himself. At another point in the beginning of the movie, Freddie lies down next to a woman he has crafted out of sand on the beach. In what I believe is the very last shot of the film, he once again lies down next to this mysterious sand mistress in an almost identical shot. He has not changed. Held down by no bride, he chooses to lie with the alluring beauty of the sea. I've often hear people complain about this movie in that it is too confusing and has little to say. Hogwash, says I. Anderson awes us and entrances us with his visuals and complex story about cults and religion. Yet, at heart The Master is truly about one man and his quest for ultimate freedom. A man so detached and broken off from the regularity of society he can only drift among the eternal waves of the Pacific. The film takes a look at the effects of war on a single man, but doesn't do it in the same formulaic way we have all seen before.  In many ways, Freddie's inherent wanderlust has made him a better person than most of the characters in the film. He, at least, is outright with his flaws of drunkenness and laziness. He does not hide behind any veneer, nor does he make himself slave to his intricacies and downsides. Everyone else in the film chains themselves to their persona's and auras of perfection they think they have. Amy Adams character looks down on Freddie as a boozer and possible criminal, but is too cold and uppity to see her own problems. Hoffman's Lancaster Dodd is so trapped in his hubris and power trip he simple cannot realize that he shouldn't try to change Freddie, but that it's really himself that needs changing. The Master in this film is not Dodd, but Quell. A man who in having no master, has become the master himself. Master of living life the way he sees fit. Like an eagle flapping its wings, Freddie glides along the winds of pure freedom and easy living. He is a man out of place in time, for there is no real time for Freddie. He lives outside the boundaries of linear time. His time is an ocean, and he is commander of the ship sailing on its waves. The Master is a beautiful, somewhat misunderstood, masterpiece from the Kubrick of today. An austere and wondrous tone poem that looks at humanity for what we are. "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." I believe F.Scott Fitzgerald unintentionally sums up the film best.

Gone Girl review

Somewhat spoiler-ish review ahead.You have been warned.

There's a particular shot, or shots I should say, from David Fincher's newest film that has stuck with me. The first part is a flashback to when Nick and Amy Dunne (played by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike) had just met. Nothing but good intentions and a bubbly school-kid love between them. Amy leans in to kiss him, and the shot is quickly juxtaposed with Nick being examined by doctor at the police station with a tongue press. He gags on it. The juxtaposition perfectly encapsulates Nick's feelings about his marriage. The kiss to the gagging. He went from a love-stricken kid to a petrified husband with his balls held firmly by his rhymes-with-witch of a wife. One could even interpret it as a metaphor for marriage itself. It's a fairly low-key technique Fincher used, but an incredibly smart and effective one. With Gone Girl, David Fincher gets as fun and pulpy he's been since The Game and still is able to elevate his material to more than just a clever genre film. Gone Girl is based on the 2012 novel of the same name. It's a book I regretfully haven't read, I honestly don't mind. The film works perfectly fine without the flashy reveals and shocking twists, but experiencing those for the first time in clear and bloody celluloid is a devilishly wonderful pleasure of its own. Gone Girl is a man's horrible claustrophobic nightmare that quickly escalates into a psycho-sexual thriller of proportions just insane enough to work. Practically every element of this movie clicks excellently. My only real issue with it was some oddly stilted dialogue in the beginning, mainly in the flashbacks to the early relationship of Nick and Amy. The rest of the movie was terrifically written, so I wasn't exactly sure why those early beginning scenes felt so wrong. On further thought, I realized it's because it IS wrong. It shows that even from the start, the relationship between Nick and Amy Dunne is shaky at best. Their interactions aren't thoughtful or genuine. Amy is hiding behind a veneer and Nick is under her sway. Of course their dialogue is stilted, it's just a reflection of their relationship. Gillian Flynn may be writing a trashy crime picture, but damn can she do it well. It certainly doesn't hurt to have the people attached that the film does. Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike give magnificent and incendiary performances as the two main characters. Affleck has officially proved himself a terrific actor  (not that he needed to) and gives a fantastic controlled performance here. Throughout the film you can see his character being trapped in by the media and by everyone around him. Watching Affleck act you can really sense the tension and social claustrophobia that surround his character like a suffocating cosmic blanket. He gives such a great performance, that I was easily able to forget how famous he is. As great as Ben Affleck is here, Rosamund Pike is the real star here. She's always been an incredibly solid actress (ex. The World's End) but has never gotten a real chance to shine. I don't know if Gone Girl is David Fincher's masterpiece, but I think it's safe to say it is for Pike. She plays innocent, evil, manipulative, and sexy like no actress I've ever seen. The best comparison I can make is maybe Barbara Stanwyck or Eva Green. If she doesn't get an Oscar nomination, I will be shocked. Again, of course having Fincher behind the camera always helps things. This isn't his best work, but it's definitely up there. It's no Zodiac, but it doesn't need to be. Gone Girl is a different type of movie. One major complaints from Fincher detractors is that he often employs the style-over-substance technique of filmmaking. That's a remarkably off-base thing to say about his films, especially this one. Fincher uses his camera to create a tone so palpable you could cut it with a knife. You can really feel his talent oozing out of this movie. It's wonderful. The movie has loads to say about the intricacies and failings of modern marriage. It's certainly a cynical take, but a bitingly interesting one at that. Flynn also takes a satiric look at media. Imagine Natural Born Killers but a helluva lot more subtle about its satire. In my mind, Gone Girl is Blue Velvet, meets a killer-woman grindhouse picture, meets neo-noir. And it's all done so, so well. Subverting our views of modern society, and giving us a delicious murder story as cinematically filling as a thick steak. Is Gone Girl one of the year's best films? You bet.