Capsule Reviews - Movie Theater Edition

Hey, I’m back, with a blog post, even! And not one about how I haven’t blogged in a while! No, instead, since I’ve been going to the movies a lot lately, I decided to round up the last four films I’ve seen and review them in capsule form. By way of getting back on the horse, kind of thing. Some of these are probably out of theaters by now, but I really don’t give a shit.

Sinister (d. Scott Derrickson) - This horror film seems to be the Insidious of 2012, and this is not at all something to be proud of. Like Insidious, I was rooked into going to see it by lots of talk about it being a surprisingly effective piece of work, and I left thinking that there are a lot of people with depressingly low standards for their horror movies. It stars Ethan Hawke as a true crime writer who's on the scent of something big -- several families murdered in their homes over the span of a decades, and in each case everyone in the family was killed, except one child from each, who have all disappeared. Renting a home that once belonged to the most recent victims, and is therefore also a crime scene (all of this unbeknownst to his wife, played by Juliet Rylance), Hawke finds a box of home movies in the attic. These are all home movies taken by the murderer, and each one reveals some ghostly thrash metal guy lurking around the premises at the time of the deaths. All of this is a good enough premise, and I actually liked Hawke's performance well enough (along with Fred Dalton Thompsons' brief appearance as a sheriff, his was the only performance I did like). But Sinister is mostly idiotic. Attempts to show Hawke thinking hard about the facts of these cases settle on showing him pinning photographs of the victims to a board, and writing in his notebook things like "Who killed you???" and "Where is Stephanie???" If not for these notes, he might go off track and start trying to figure out if the company that made the camera is still in business. Beyond that, you have a twist that can only really be one thing, because -- and this is a spoiler, sort of -- somebody had to take the home movies, and if it wasn't the guy from Korn, then, well... Derrickson and co-screenwriter C. Robert Cargill try to gussy it all up with a cameo by Vincent D'Onofrio as an expert on ritual murder, who kindly lays out the ancient mythology that ties the murders together, all of which, by the end, means precisely fuck-all. Add to all this Derrickson's fumbling, half-stupid (only half, because he must do as he's been taught) use of horror movie music stings, including a final one that is legitimately insulting, and I'm left thinking that horror movies with vaguely but meaninglessly creepy titles that too many people give a pass to are about to actually become a whole thing that I'll have to learn to put up with.

Argo (d. Ben Affleck) - So I guess this is what Affleck's doing now, and I have to say I'm not against it. I'm a pretty big fan of his directorial debut, the Dennis Lehane adaptation Gone Baby Gone, to the point that I think it's really underrated, you guys, and was at least halfway on board with his follow up, another crime thriller called The Town. If I take issue with how Affleck, in that case, adapted Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves (mainly I have trouble with a bank robber writing a letter about how we all have to pay for what we've done while kicking back on a beach in Florida), I do so while acknowledging that Affleck's filmmaking chops are genuine. Now, with Argo, he's making the kind of film that a director makes to prove to everyone that he's no longer new at this -- he's established. This time, he has a true story to work from, about a CIA agent named Tony Mendez (Affleck) who, in 1980, has been tasked with coming up with, and executing, a plan to safely extract six American diplomats who managed to avoid becoming hostages when the US Embassy in Iran was taken over only to wind up in a limbo situation that could possibly prove more dangerous. The plan Mendez hit on was sort of loony tunes: set up a fake film production for a science fiction film called Argo, complete with script, real Hollywood professionals (Alan Arkin as the producer, John Goodman as the make-up guy), and get the six diplomats out by going to Iran, making everyone believe this was a real movie, and then basically folding the diplomats into the production and getting the fuck out of there. And it's good stuff. The opening, which depicts the fall of the embassy, is extremely well done, and Affleck does a good job at playing up, but never overplaying, the comedy that is unavoidable in situation like this. Arkin, it shouldn't at this point surprise you to learn, walks away with the film in those scenes.

It ain't perfect. The ending, which of course milks for the greatest suspense possible the extraction of the diplomats, is a bit silly in the way Affleck piles on the obstacles. Two or three could have been left out with no problem, especially the ones you can tell never actually happened, such as Arkin and Goodman needing to get to their office so they can answer a very important phone call and being held up by a PA who's frankly too big for his britches, if you want the honest truth. Also handicapping things is Affleck himself. His performance as Mendez is probably the worst, or anyway least successful in the film. I know Affleck is a not-untalented actor, but he plays Mendez as a man with no muscles in his face and a throat condition that renders his voice incapable of inflection. Because I do know that Affleck is better than this, the question then becomes "Why?" and I have to figure, in keeping with certain ideas illustrated throughout the film, the thinking was that Mendez was just a guy doing his job. He wasn't a movie hero, in other words, and Affleck -- correctly, I'd say -- finds the truth of people like him to be more heroic. It's just that I imagine the real Mendez looks and talks like a person. But never mind -- it may be Argo's biggest flaw, but it's almost thoroughly overshadowed by an otherwise slick and entertaining thriller.

Seven Psychopaths (dr. Martin McDonagh) - I have, let us say, some pretty significant ideological differences with Martin McDonagh, the successful playwright and writer-director of the films In Bruges from 2008 and now Seven Psychopaths. It is to the credit of one or the other of us (I'll say me, because I've had a rough day and could use the boost) that I've so far been able to get past them and appreciate the truly original and even moving mayhem of his film work. And Seven Psychopaths is even almost trying to make me dislike it, just in terms of plot. I don't know what it is about wacky hitmen stories that are believed to be too outrageous once cute dogs are added to the mix, but it's a shortcut-to-lunacy I'm about done with. Yet McDonagh makes it work, or makes it not not work. Seven Psychopaths stars Colin Farrell as Martin (this name is significant) as a Hollywood screenwriter struggling to get moving on a film he's writing called Seven Psychopaths. As the film sets this up, it's also setting up the concept of seven psychopaths, both real and maybe not real, maybe fictional -- the first one, "Psychopath No. 1," is a masked figure we meet in the first scene as he kills two Mafia hitmen played by Michael Stuhlbarg and Michael Pitt. These two things converge once one of the numbered psychopaths, mob hothead Charlie (Woody Harrelson) enters the picture, trying to find his beloved dog which has been stolen by Martin's crazy friend Billy (a hilarious Sam Rockwell), as part of a dognapping operation that involves his weird friend Hans (Christopher Walken) bringing missing pets back to their owners and collecting hefty rewards, these pet owners being Beverly Hills-type pet owners, which Hans will then use to pay for his wife's (Linda Bright Clay) cancer treatment. And yes, I know, but McDonagh is the master of some weird kind of alchemy that allows such nonsense to work. Not only is the film entertainingly bloody, and very funny, and not only is it great to see Christopher Walken play one of the three leads and be allowed to go all Christopher Walken up in this business, and not only is Harrleson wonderful, as is Tom Waits (he's another one of the psychopaths, one with a particularly strange backstory), but this whole thing actually turns out to be a not very subtle but nonetheless entirely engaging examination of these kinds of movies. Violent movies, revenge movies, to be specific. And more interestingly still is the realization that for all its gooniness, Seven Psychopaths is actually an extremely personal film, made by a man known for writing plays and movies like this, and wondering, finally, what the hell he's been doing with his life.

Flight (d. Robert Zemeckis) - The single best moment in Robert Zemeckis's new film Flight comes at the end of the plane crash sequence that sets the film's real plot in motion. The pilot, Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) is, we know by now, a drunk, a drunk who has just been drinking and even sleeping off last night while his co-pilot (Brian Geraghty) takes the wheel. But when the plane begins to come apart during its descent, Whip snaps to, barking out instructions to his co-pilot and one of the attendants (Tamara Tunie), in an attempt to land the plane in a field. His plan is a crazy one and it pretty much works, but there's a moment when Whip can't do anything else, and the plane's mechanics have all shut down, and everything goes quiet. This massive aircraft is dropping into a field in complete silence, and it's very eerie, almost beautiful. Once that's over with, however...

Flight is not otherwise bereft of good moments. It's an intriguing story, too, a nicely ambiguous one about who is to blame for this crash, which, while successful in relative terms, nevertheless did take the lives of six people, including a flight attendant (Nadine Velazquez) with whom Whip had been partying the night before. We know Washington's character is completely fucked up as a person, but nothing he did seems to have caused the plane to malfunction. But routine toxicology tests still reveal what he's been up to, and his guilt, his duplicity, and his eventual full-on scumbaggery can be pretty fascinating. Any scene Washington shares with Bruce Greenwood as his friend and union rep, and/or Don Cheadle as his attorney, are pretty much bound to be gripping on some level, just by virtue of the acting talent on display. But Flight is still a terrible mess, sometimes shockingly clumsy, sometimes shockingly thoughtless. An entire subplot involving Kelly Reilly as an ex-junkie exists only so someone can walk in on a drunk or blacked-out Washington and be disappointed in him. Worse, the use of songs, from "Gimme Shelter" to "Feelin' Alright" to "Under the Bridge" to "Sympathy for the Devil" (played first when we meet John Goodman's character, Washington's likable pusher (Whip's into cocaine, also)) is almost perversely literal. If the Rolling Stones had ever recorded a song called "Flying a Passenger Jet While Drunk," Zemeckis would have been all over that.

And while it’s bracing to see the lead character in an expensive studio film played by a major star as a complete piece of dogshit (and it's also interesting to see two men, the ones played by Cheadle and Greenwood, pursuing an immoral goal, but not as villains, rather as guys doing their jobs), it would have been nice if Zemeckis could have followed through. To be clear, I don’t so much mind the redemption we get, as such, and in fact I like what he and screenwriter John Gatins pulled from their back pocket by way of a catalyst for this redemption. But minutes before Whip’s conscience gets the better of him, we saw this man not only at the very nadir of his selfish and debauched existence (signaled, by the way, with some slow motion and, would you believe it, a horror movie music sting, except in this case the monster is vodka), we’d seen him rewarded for it with further debauchery. Nothing could stop or change him, which is precisely what he’d been angling for this whole time. But then, nope, changed my mind, I feel bad now. I’ve heard some complain that the depiction of Whip’s alcoholism is over the top, but he’s not shown doing anything that a real person who’d achieved that ranking in alcoholism wouldn’t do. The problem is that it would appear that Zemeckis has very little sense for this kind of thing – not in real life, because what do I know, but as a filmmaker. I feel like the whiplash of going from A Christmas Carol to Flight actually ended up on film somehow.