The Reel World

Captain Fantastic has nothing to do with Elton John. (It turns out that’s not entirely true, because director/writer/actor Matt Ross (Big Love, Silicon Valley) found out his mother played Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy all the time, and it must have imbedded itself in his subconscious). The story in the movie starts in a very Lord of the Flies way, with camouflaged faces hidden amongst the leaves of the woods. They are children, and one of them leaps from the bush with a knife and cuts a deer’s neck. There are seven children and they all belong to Ben (Viggo Mortensen, Lord of the Rings). The oldest boy has killed the deer, and Ben baptizes him in blood and says he is now a man. This would lead one to think this is some kind of radical cult. Anything dangerous and deranged is soon dispelled. It is simply a father teaching his children survival skills. It is a father holding his family together and bonding with them and loving them and passing on knowledge. Ben’s form of home schooling is extremely rigorous and intellectual. This has been a lifestyle for a very long time. His wife has recently gotten very ill and is not with them anymore, living in the woods. Then she dies. Her father, Jack (Frank Langella, The Americans) hates Ben and says he will have Ben arrested if he comes to the funeral, but Jack’s wife, Abigail (Ann Dowd, The Leftovers, The Masters of Sex), hopes a compromise can be formed. Ben decides he won’t go to the funeral, but the children are furious and sad about this. Eventually Ben relents, and they take an old converted bus and hit the road.

The movie is absolutely beautiful. It is a celebration of both nature and a way of life that has almost disappeared. The family is like no family you are likely to know. This becomes especially apparent when they visit family members on the way. Harper (Kathryn Hahn, Transparent, Parks and Recreation), Dave (Steve Zahn, Treme, Modern Family) and their two boys are a typical American family, and they couldn’t be more different than Ben’s brood. In fact, Ben’s philosophies and methods might be considered controversial, so I won’t reveal much about them and let you discover for yourself. If you go see this film, you can decide if it’s a good family or not. Ben is mostly a very reasonable and civilized person, but it is not to say he compromises his principles in any way.

Café Society looks absolutely gorgeous. Every camera setup finds a new authentic location that suggests a time and place long ago. The lighting and cinematography by Vittorio Storaro (Last Tango in Paris, Reds, Apocalypse Now) are sumptuous and delicious. The story is novelistic like an F. Scott Fitzgerald magnum opus. Woody Allen has had a long and very productive career. He is definitely at a stage when he should have slowed down, but he doesn’t. Café Society is not Woody’s magnum opus, but it certainly feels like he is reaching for it. It has depth and complexity. It is funny at times but is generally filled with ache and regret. The film is crammed with story and beautiful moments. When one thread seems resolved, it moves on yet again to another. All of Allen’s themes drift through the conversations of the characters, but they seem to have less conviction than they ever had. There seems to be a consistent lack of solidity to these lives. It seems like things matter, but then you come to accept that they don’t. There are so many characters I can hardly begin to list them.

The main character is Bobby Dorfman (Jessie Eisenberg), and his family is central to the story. Bobby’s mother, Rose (Jeannie Berlin) tries to get him to go to Hollywood to work for Phil Stern (Steve Carell), her brother and a big-shot Hollywood agent. Another important thread to the story is that of Jessie’s brother, Ben (Corey Stoll), who is a gangster who eventually becomes the owner of a fancy night club. Café Society winds its way from New York to Hollywood and back again. The other central thread is the story of Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), who is a sweet and unpretentious girl who becomes an object of desire for more than one man. Stewart, by the way, has never been better. She radiates warmth and charisma, her smoky eyes and shy smile recalling famous Hollywood movie stars of the past. She does not play a movie star here, but a secretary without great ambitions.

Growing up one of coolest jobs I thought was out there was undercover work. Not to diminish all the threats to one’s well-being associated with that profession, but come on, who didn’t want the opportunity to reinvent themselves as someone else entirely. Undercover affords that opportunity. That said, it does not come without a cost, and that cost is explored thoroughly in The Infiltrator, a based on a true story tale about a U.S. Customs agent who infiltrates the most successful and equally dangerous drug cartel led by the one and only Pablo Escobar. An interesting little tidbit that I was unaware of before the opening credits was that this film was shot right here in the Tampa area, which provided recognizable environment and a chance to pick out familiar territory.  

The Infiltrator follows Robert Mazur (Bryan Cranston) a seasoned agent with the United States Customs Service with a talent for undercover work. After successfully completing operation, he finds himself thrown back into the mix for possibly the biggest operation he has ever every undertaken: infiltrating the money laundering operation used to clean the proceeds for the Medellin Cartel, led by Pablo Escobar.

I am somewhat angry right now. I am increasingly stunned at what is being praised in this culture. We are trapped in an era that is supposed to be enlightened but is ladled on top with layers of rotting organic material (which is a euphemism for a rather rude word). There seem to be no interest in certain things that are very important and increasingly relevant to us. There are subtleties and complexities about ourselves that we don’t understand and that is why the world is still enmeshed in violence and madness. I am talking about people who should know better. People who pontificate and tell us what we are supposed to think. Critics. Pundits. Prognosticators. I am one and I try to stand apart and formulate my own thoughts but it is difficult when you feel alone sometimes. The Free State of Jones has been called boring. It is not. It is one of the best historical films I have seen for a while. It is the best film of the year so far. 12 Years a Slave was a magnificent film and I would say The Free State of Jones is better. All sorts of modern entertainment is paraded before us, and it is all somewhat repetitive and pointless. It is mindless entertainment. I will try not to get too specific because I don’t really object to mindless entertainment. What I do object to is that when all this mindless, jaded and scattered opinion then turns its back on anything academic and well researched. Many historical films are somewhat staid and a little boring. The Free State of Jones is not one of those films. It is a war film and a film of constant conflict and battle that takes many forms. It is complex and unexpected in its story telling. It is brilliantly acted by everyone from the smallest part to the man who plays Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughy).

Knight is the central character of the film. His story is true and part of forgotten history. Forgotten history is all that history that they deliberately don’t tell us. It is an amazing, vital and important story. Knight was a fearsome fighter and a man of unbreakable will and keen intellect. He was also a poor farmer in Mississippi during the Civil War. His journey was to organize a rebellion against the confederacy. Years before Communism he created a pocket in the South that existed to band all the poor and disenfranchised together to share in a common goal. The story takes remarkable turns and I was honestly surprised how much depth, complexity and relevance was brought to the story. I will not even try to summarize it. If you like history, I cannot recommend the film highly enough. If history bores you, then you are likely a boring person. True history is full of guideposts to learn from. Our world is in turmoil because too many leaders have not learned the lessons of history.

"Stop me if you've heard this one before." 

The first thing you need to know about The Secret Lives Of Pets is that it's not terribly original. Fans of the Pixar Toy Story Franchise will find pretty much every element of this script has been lifted from one of the three Toy Story films. Of course, if you're going to lift an idea, you might as well steal from the best. Of course, there are always formulaic ideas in films, particularly animated films geared mostly toward children. And while I really did enjoy almost everything about this film, I just can't escape the fact that I've seen it all before. Sometimes that feeling got a little uncomfortably obvious. And by sometimes, I mean the entire length of the movie. Look beyond the plagiarism, and you will find the film a delightful collection of characters and circumstances that just so happened to have been ripped off from Toy Story.

If a film is highly original, that is usually a good thing. If it completely defies logic, that might be good or bad, depending. If it defies common sense and intelligence, that would be a bad thing. Swiss Army Man does all of those things. It is tantalizing with possibilities that are explored, but frustrating in execution. It is rude and unpleasant, and not in a good way. Some people will respond to its ridiculous rudeness in a positive way, like the way that most children laugh when someone farts. That is not the real problem with this movie. The real problem is a lack of inherent logic to much of what occurs. One could say that it is a result of the obvious insanity of the main character of the movie, Hank (Paul Dano). I would suggest that the filmmakers might not have fully understood what they were trying to convey. I think they were caught up in the execution and got lost along the way. The main themes of the movie are alienation, loneliness, and insanity, but our framework for judging these characters is so skewed as to make it impossible to interpret what is actually happening. Some parts are clearly psychotic delusions, but other parts just seem silly tangents by the filmmakers that seem stylistically playful for no effect whatsoever. I can say I like some of the more bizarre moments from time to time, but the effect of the film as a whole is repulsive.

I don’t disagree with the point that films like these should be encouraged, because we are at a point in modern culture that we are being smothered under tons of pablum. Swiss Army Man stands out because it is reactionary to what is going on in the modern culture. It is gross, chaotic, and strange. I welcome things that are offbeat. But in this case, I was turned off. Some of it is genuinely funny in a real way as well as being bizarre, but much of the movie drifts off into confusion. I doubt I am going to ruin anything by revealing the plot, but if I did, it wouldn’t make any sense. It starts with Hank getting ready to hang himself in the mouth of a cave on a deserted beach. Just before he kicks the bucket, he sees another human being washed up on the beach. It is Manny the corpse (Daniel Radcliff of Harry Potter fame). Manny becomes someone with whom Hank develops a very complex relationship. Often Manny demonstrates numerous useful talents, mostly revolving around his flatulence. Slowly Manny starts to show signs of life and even intelligence. Then we are not sure what is happening. Hank is also obsessed with a woman he saw on a bus once, Sarah (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). And are we actually on a deserted island, or just down the hill from Sarah’s house?

I’ve always been a fan of Tarzan; I loved the old series and the films basically because I just dug how he was this fearless character who lived in the jungles that fought the bad guys and a few wild animals as well.  As I got older that was when I discovered the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I just had a blast with all these pulp tales about the civilized Wildman and the beautiful Jane.  I even remember how excited I was about seeing Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan as a kid; even though this screen adaption bored me to tears, it was still exciting to see the character up on the screen. Now it’s 2016, and the character is swinging into action on the big screen again, and with a large budget to back it up.  The trailers had me excited; everything seemed to look how I always hoped a Tarzan movie should be. Did the film manage to meet my expectations?  Well, it came close, and the result is a film that shows how the wrong director can ruin a great story.

The casting of Alexander Skarsgard is just about as good as you can hope for in casting the role of Tarzan/ John Clayton.  It’s absolutely vital how important it is to get the physical look of the character and make it believable that he can be stealthy, as well as a brute force that can fight giant apes and crocodiles but still look the part of a British lord. Sure, many audience-goers will enjoy the numerous shirtless scenes the film offers, but it makes it all the more believable when we see the character pull off some superhero-like scenes.  When it comes to the casting of Margot Robbie as Jane, she is a knockout here.  She plays this damsel (not so) in distress in such a charming loveable way that it’s clear that by the end of summer following the release of Suicide Squad she will be the A-list actress off Hollywood.  She brings so much life to Jane that you can understand why Tarzan will do just about anything for this woman, and when they are together it’s a chemistry that has me hoping so much that we’ll get more adventures of Tarzan and Jane.

You’d have to go all the way back to 1975 when Jaws was released that a film has come out that has given us a reason to be afraid to go into the water. There have been several attempts to capture the magic that we saw in Stephen Spielberg’s classic film about a large great white shark that preyed upon the swimmers in the town of Amity.  Now that summer is upon us and the heat has us flocking to our A/C units or to the beaches, it couldn’t be a better time to unleash another killer shark film upon the masses.  I have to admit when the trailers came out for this, all I expected from it was to be a campy film that just happened to be well shot.  Instead director Jaume Collet-Serra (Run All Night & Orphan) delivers an enjoyable thriller.

Nancy (Blake Lively) is a med-student who has just about finished all her schooling but is struggling with the death of her mother from cancer.  She leaves her home and school in Texas to take a trip to Mexico to find a secluded beach her mother used to speak so fondly of.  It doesn’t take much to make a connection with Nancy and respect her choice to come to terms with the loss of her mom.  Her father, played by Brett Cullen, wants her to come back home and finish school, but Nancy is conflicted with her faith in medicine, so who can blame her for wanting to grab her bikini and do some surfing to battle her grief?

“Are you food, or are you sex?”

When it comes to director Nicolas Winding Refn, he’s a director I’m never all too sure what to expect from.  For me, Drive is one of my favorite films in the past ten years, while Only God Forgives simply bored me; despite the stunning imagery, it had nothing else going for it. His films going even further back are just as much of a mixed bag, so coming into The Neon Demon I knew better than to get my hopes up, and that I should just go ahead and let the film stand on its own, as it should. Even reading about its debut at Cannes, it was met with a mix of boos as well as applause, which was all I really needed to get interested in this film after seeing the visually impressive trailer.  At a glance it appears to be nothing more than the story of Black Swan (2010), only instead of following dancers, this is a film that thrusts the viewer into the world of modeling. Just where do I stand on this film? Well, it’s stuck with me since our screening days ago, and I’m still processing everything.

“Be the hero of your own story.”

Not the funniest addition to Kevin Hart’s reign as the king of comedy, but still a welcome sight. This time around, Hart teams with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson for Central Intelligence. I’ve been anticipating this movie since behind-the-scenes footage leaked earlier this year, and the official trailer did nothing but fuel the flames of my excitement. After watching it, I can say that despite a few predictable plot twists, I still found the overall product to be extremely funny and worthwhile.