Yearly Archives: 2016

Command and Control

We Assholes were in the lovely town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire over the weekend for a film festival, but little did we know we’d be joined by a 4th on Saturday – the king of the assholes himself, Donald Trump. Don’t worry, we managed not to catch fleas or throw pies, and we did see plenty of great movies.

Command and Control was one of them, a super scary documentary about that one time in 1980 when American almost launched a nuclear weapon ON ITSELF. Well, scratch that: no “almost” about it – the bomb was in fact compromised, and it just luckily failed to obliterate humanity. This whole thing happened before I was born, when my mother was just a pixie-haired 19 year old – roughly the same age, incidentally, as the men charged with preventing the doom of civilization

Even the best-case scenario, which the military obviously deems adequate, sounds terrifying: the Titan II, a big-ass missile carrying the biggest warhead on the books, was bunkered in an underground silo manned by teenagers not skilled or disciplined enough to get a better posting. And why are we surprised that shit went down?

It was end of shift when two little words heard over the radio would change everything -“Uh oh!” – not words you want to hear when a weapon of mass destruction is at stake. Some kid used a ratchet rather than a wrench, and an 8 pound socket was dropped. Picture, for a moment, what this giant missile really looked like: from the bottom, you couldn’t even see the warhead, which was at the top, 8 stories up. The boys, working somewhere in the middle, dropped a big hunk of metal which made 1 bad bounce, tearing a chunk into the side of the missile which immediately began spurting oil. Nobody really wanted to own up to this possibly extinction-level fuck-up, so a half hour went by before anyone with any authority knew what was going on. And this being a government operation, a further 8-10 hours went by before anything was done about it. So the bottom fuel compartment was emptying quickly, which meant the top part was about to collapse in on itself at any moment, likely causing a huge-ass explosion even not counting the fact that a MOTHER FUCKING WMD WAS SITTING ON TOP!

Since I’m writing this and you’re reading this, we didn’t get wiped off the face of the earth, but the thing that saved us was dumb luck. The bile will rise in your throat watching this, knowing how close we came. The lady behind me uttered “Oh Jesus” 17 times before I lost count. But Command and Control, based on Eric Shlosser’s book of the same name, tells about that ONE time in 1980 when everything almost went black. That one time. This documentary lets us know that in fact, there have been hundreds, maybe thousands of accidents involving nuclear missiles. Every single day that some dopey American doesn’t accidentally kill us all is a miracle, and that reliance on constant miracles doesn’t exactly sit well with me. People with an awful lot of medals on their uniforms refer to the nuclear program as a “seat of the pants operation”; then-secretary of defense Harold Brown says about safety “we probably didn’t worry about it enough.” Gulp.

Today, in 2016, the U.S. still has 7000 nuclear weapons just waiting for an accident to happen. And to make matters worse, they’re threatening to elect a buffoon named Donald to hover his dumb little fingers over the big red button. So here’s the thing: accidents happen all the time. Most are covered up. American nuclear weapons have taken American life. But the bigger the accident, the more loss of life. And if there’s a big accident, there’s a mushroom cloud and ten million dead instantly. Who’s going to tell Donald to stand down, that this is “friendly fire” and not a button-pushing incident? No one. That guy will be dead. His superiors will be dead. It’ll just be Donald and his excellent decision making between us and all-out global war. Oh sweet Jesus – if this film isn’t another in a long list of compelling reasons not to vote for this guy, I don’t know what is.

Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids

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I went to a Justin Timberlake concert once, sort of. I hadn’t meant to exactly, but he and Jay-Z were touring together for their Legends of Summer tour. 173784081-600x450 They had songs in common off their respective The 20\20 Experience and Magna Carta Holy Grail albums, so it felt like a good fit to co-headline a tour that ended up playing to more than half a million fans over 14 sold-out dates in just under a month. It was a great show in Toronto’s Rogers Centre (where the Blue Jays play). Sean treated me to luxurious floor seats and I can’t think of any other show where I felt so wrapped up with love, with 53 000 happy people surrounding me. JT and Jay-Z had great chemistry and impressive collaboration, and although I hadn’t intended to see Timberlake, I was glad that I did. With great back and forth and no one-upmanship, the two ended the show on an exceptionally high but sad note: Young Forever dedicated to the memory of Trayvon Martin.

As soon as The Legends of Summer tour wrapped up, Justin embarked on a 2-year tour in support of his album. This film, directed by Jonathan Demme, is the culmination of all that hard work – the final show, January 2nd 2015 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

With only brief introductions from the supporting members of his band and stage show, the movie launches into concert mode and stays there. There’s great camera work and Demme keeps the whole piece feeling energetic and gives you front-row access so you feel like not only are you there, you’ve got terrific seats. But apart from the brief before and after footage, there’s no real interviews or behind the scenes access. And since I’m only familiar with his radio hits, there are lots of songs that I find hard to get into. So if you’ve always wanted to see JT up close and personal without emptying Sean’s wallet, here’s your chance: it’s playing on Netflix, and it’s a great concert doc. But it’s no more and no less than that.

The Free World

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Mo (Boyd Holbrook) is recently released from prison where he served hard time for a crime he didn’t commit. Reintegration to the outside world is hard on him, and the local cops are even harder. His only friend is his boss at the animal shelter (Octavia Spencer), but she is at a loss to explain to him how this outside world has so few rules that a man can beat his dog to death without consequences.

thumbnail_24895 One night he finds a woman (Elisabeth Moss) in the shelter, covered in blood. It turns out the two have a lot in common; an abusive marriage can feel an awful lot lot like jail. To keep her safe, he risks his own freedom to hide her, but his crappy apartment makes for a terrible hideout, and the two have to go on the run to stay ahead of the law. And you know what? It’s a pretty sucky world out there.

There’s a lot of comparisons to be drawn from the movie – the shelter’s cages like prison cells for bad dogs; Moss a puppy frightened of her owner. And it’s painful to admit that the ‘free world’ isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, that prisoners may be more predictable than random citizens.

Jason Lew’s screenplay is interesting because it leaves much unsaid and really forces the viewer to question what’s important. But leaving us in the dark is a bit alienating, and we don’t always engage with the characters as we should. The acting’s not the problem here, but the direction might be. The Free World sometimes feels like two different movies – strongest in the quiet parts, and tonally uneven in the more actiony sequences. I really liked how the movie started out, I liked this portrait of a man not knowing his place outside of a prison cell, not knowing who he is outside of the system, and not really being allowed the room to breathe and discover. The Free World is cynical. More cynical than a wrongly convicted born-again-Muslim who sleeps best in the confines of a closet. It’s a toughie.

Peter And The Farm

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I saw 5 movies today at the New Hampshire Film Festival – Peter And The Farm was the first, and it’s the one I can’t stop thinking about. It isn’t a perfect film; the film makers are having a little too much fun experimenting with their fancy cameras, content to show you their prowess with focus/unfocus on a brightly lit night sky. But they get top marks for subject: A+++.

Peter Dunning, farmer, is the star of the documentary. He’s like no one you’ve ever met. He’s an artist who took up farming as way to sustain his art. But farming has overwhelmed his life. He fell in love with it, put it ahead of everything else, neglecting his art, his health, his numerous wives and children, who all have left him. Now it’s just him and the farm, a derelict little operation he has grown to loathe. And the memories that haunt him. And the alcohol that soothes him.

Rarely seen without a bottle of something in his hand, Peter is a legendary story-teller with a bottomless bag of tales to tell, grateful to finally have an audience again. He performs his farm work dutifully but grudgingly, the brutal realities of farm life a lonely cautionary tale. Sean and I agreed that Peter has a philosophical soul, and that that might just be his undoing. Alone on the land, he’s got nothing but quiet hours of drudgery for thinking, thinking, and more thinking. And most of his thoughts revolve around the pointlessness of existence in general, and his life’s work specifically. The only thing that gets him through the day is fantasizing about his suicide.

Peter is an endlessly fascinating character, but he’s a real, flesh and blood man with real demons. This is a documentary, and you can never forget that the stakes are real, and that the man selling you beets at the farmer’s market this Sunday might just be thinking of going home and putting a shotgun in his mouth. The honesty is beautiful but there’s a tormented soul on display, and that’s tougher to watch than the sheep gutting and the cow gynecology. Rural Vermont looks gorgeous but you get a very real sense that this one-time utopia has now turned into a prison and Peter, one way or another, is serving a life sentence.

Masterminds

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Not everyone loved Napoleon Dynamite, but you can’t deny that it was an unprecedented success. Its director, first-timer Jared Hess, hit it out of the park, the movie absorbed into popular culture. He’s been unwilling to accept that he may be a one-hit wonder (same goes for Napoleon star Jon Heder) – the two keep making films at a dwindling rate, each more lavishly terrible than the last.

Jared Hess’s latest failure is called Masterminds, and he convinced a long list of famous names to go down in flames along with him: Zach Galifianakis as la-et-mn-ca-sneaks-masterminds-kate-mckinnon-20150426.jpg the witless driver of an armoured money truck whose terrible relationship with fiancée Kate McKinnon makes it all too easy for him to fall for coworker Kristen Wiig who manipulates him into working with her confederate, Owen Wilson, who thinks a heist is in order. Galifianakis will do all of the work under the guise of love but will receive little to no reward if Wilson has anything to do with it – he’s got contract killer Jason Sudeikis after him and only the law (Leslie Jones) has any chance of intervening.

It’s “based on a true story” which means that someone once stole money somewhere and that’s excuse enough for this atrocity. With 3\4 of the Ghostbusters assembled, there’s no denying that this is a powerhouse cast, but the trouble is they’ve been given a crumpled up tissue of a story and no one knows in which direction to sneeze. I truthfully confessed to Sean that I zach only laughed once the entire movie – and it was post-credits, in the blooper reel, not even at a joke that got edited out, but at Zach Galifianakis accidentally hitting his head on a swing set (I console myself that it made Kate McKinnon laugh too, before she checked that he was okay). Only babies laugh at people getting bonked on the head, but I had been in a comedy desert for the past hour and a half and I was parched for laughter.

It’s just shameless and lowbrow and it almost makes you feel bad for the dumb criminals it’s styled after. I have a low tolerance for stupid slapstick and this movie didn’t have a single other trick up its sleeve. Some of the scenes literally feel like an SNL sketch gone on too long, and those are the good ones. I have zero forgiveness in my heart for a movie this bad, and I’ll be expecting some dark chocolate truffles and a bottle of Dom with a heartfelt card signed by all the cast by way of apology soon. But not soon enough.

Oh hello, New Hampshire

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We’ve made no secret of the fact that the New Hampshire Film Fest is our favourite – New England this time of year is to die for, and the relaxed atmosphere makes the movie going extra nice. Some of you are here to watch along with us, but the rest of you can stay tuned for reviews and check our twitter for live updates – @AssholeMovies.

The Accountant

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What if Batman was a bean counter? Okay, that’s not exactly what The Accountant is trying to do, but it’s close, closer probably than it intended.

Ben Affleck plays Christian Wolff (not his real name: alter ego), a mild-mannered, socially awkward accountant. And when he whips his glasses off, he becomes a vigilante crime fighter. Sort of. Okay, what actually happens is he keeps his glasses on in order to “uncook” the books for various crime syndicates. Like, for the worst and dirtiest people. But if they break his moral code, he either calls in the commissioner – excuse me – treasury agent (played by JK Simmons, who will indeed play Commissioner Gordon in Affleck’s upcoming The Batman) or goes ballistic on their ass. But not crazy ballistic: he remains very cold and very calm in order to diligently murder everyone in his path. So autism becomes a super power and The Accountant is just Batman without a cowl. Although admittedly when I saw Ben Affleck marking up a window, I immediately though of the role as a little more Good Will Hunting meets Jason Bourne – Matt Damon’s territory, in other words.

In order to play autistic, Ben goes affectless and Affleckless. He turns off the charm and the smirk and the simmering rage but doesn’t quite know what he’s left with. It doesn’t help that The Accountant suffers from its own identity crisis, sometimes darting into the phone booth as an action flick b3dd1dc8b235f1a14730dc81f5cffdfba6e4eae050f66447637fa4e75242f350 complete with stalky sniper Jon Bernthal (from Daredevil, just not THAT Daredevil) as the villain, only to emerge as a drama or worse yet, a quirkie indie romance with Anna Kendrick as the Mary Jane, I mean, the damsel in distress\love interest. And if this all sounds like a lot to keep track of, don’t worry, there’s a portion in the middle that’s perfect for taking a 20 minute nap and waking up feeling like you’ve missed nothing at all.

But for all that, I enjoyed The Accountant. It’s not going to make my top 10 this year, and maybe not even my top 10 this week (that’s not a hard knock, I’m just on my way to a film festival), but it was entertaining and fun, even if Gavin O’Connor’s direction is a bit uninspired. Plus, it’s kind of great to see autism as an asset rather than a setback. Affleck manages not to overplay his cards although the story does require us to equate a neurodevelopmental disorder with superior morality – superior even to the law, which has Viola Davis’s voice ringing in my ears – what if the next Superman is an accountant?

The Adderall Diaries

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If you dial your memory reel back a few years, you may remember the controversy surrounding James Frey’s “autobiography” A Million Little Pieces. Oprah, having endorsed the book, came down particularly hard on him for fabricating many of the juiciest bits of the book.

Stephen Elliott is a lesser-known memoirist with a similar fate: one night at a reading for his book in which he details the death of his mother, his father’s abuse, the group homes and addictions, living on the streets, and ultimately his father’s death as well, his father stands up from the crowd and declares himself alive.

Hm. Okay. Elliott’s publisher and agent are not terribly impressed. Book deals crumble. His integrity’s in shambles. And so he falls down a deep dark hole called writer’s block.

Before we move on, let me just state: all of this may or may not be true of the real Stephen Elliott. Elliott’s a real guy who sold the rights to The Adderall Diaries to James Franco for a good heap of money, but has since said that the material is so altered it seems strange, and dishonest, that they still call the character by his name.

Elliott’s father did heckle him at a book reading though. And he left a nasty trail of Amazon reviews to Elliott’s books. Their relationship is certainly strained, and now matter how you slice the cake, the dude has been through some shit. Writing has helped him cope, acting as a release valve for all the hurt and anger he carries around.

When faced with a bad case of writer’s block, Elliott dealt with it by a) taking Adderall, a drug for people with ADHD and b) attending the murder trial of Hans Reiser, who used a “nerd defense” to no effect and was convicted of murdering his wife. The book is subtitled A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder, and all three are are intertwined messily in the film.

Lots of famous faces lined up to take part in The Adderall Diaries: Franco as Elliott of course; Amber Heard as his girlfriend; Cynthia Nixon as his agent; Ed Harris as his father; Christian Slater as the accused murderer. Unfortunately, the “story”, such as it were, is a jumbled mess, and you can’t make much sense of the conflicting plot lines. And James Franco just wants to swagger through it all, convinced it’s his chance to play a badass in a leather jacket when actually he’s supposed to be playing a man stunted with pain.

The film, Pamela Romanowsky’s directorial debut, neglects to make much of an impact, though it does have some interesting stuff to say about trauma’s effect on memory. But on true crime, family, forgiveness, and addiction it widely misses the mark. It’s too bad. I think there was a better film in there somewhere, between the daddy issues and the flouncy flashbacks. But it just feels ironic that a book about “retrieving memories and reordering information” gets a movie treatment that illustrates how slippery truth can be by obscuring the most basic of facts.

You can watch The Adderall Diaries on Netflix, and judge for yourself, but be warned: the only thing more subjective than truth is art.

Charlie Wilson’s War

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Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) was a Texas congressman, a jolly womanizer but otherwise fairly low-level until his good friend former beauty queen Joanne (Julia Roberts) convinces him to take time away from his hot tub shenanigans to make a little trip to help the Afghan people.

In the early 80s he visits the Pakistani president who is frustrated with inadequate American support in opposing the Soviet Union. Pakistan is flooded with Afghan refugees (a fifth of them!), but thousands of others have been slain. They send Wilson to a refugee camp and he can’t help but be moved by what he sees there. Going home a changed man in his heart, he rallies around the cause. His personal life, though is still a shambles: US Attorney Rudy Giuliani is leading an investigation against him for allegations of cocaine use.

Philip Seymour Hoffman provides brilliant support as a maverick CIA guy who is leading the covert US effort in Afghanistan. Wilson ultimately multiplies the American contribution by a hundred fold, and it becomes a huge part of the foreign policy of the time, but there aren’t exactly a lot of easy answers here and Hoffman’s crazy windmilling arms tell us a lot about the near-impossibility of his job.

Julia Roberts is of course poised as hell, the perfect choice for a controlled, smart, beautiful woman who knows what she wants, and how to manipulate men to get it. The few scenes she shares with Amy Adams, playing Wilson’s administrative assistant, are quite punchy, their rivalry crackling. Emily Blunt makes a brief appearance in her underwear as well, which means I didn’t know who Emily Blunt was back in 2007 when I would have seen this for the first time.

Tom Hanks is commanding as always, but I have to wonder whether he was the right man for the role. Some of the juiciest material of this “true story” seems to have all but disappeared, his drug use played down (have we ever seen Hanks snort cocaine?), his DUI unmentioned, and his worry about what happens when the US inevitably disengages from Afghanistan only vaguely alluded to.

The truth is, there were unintended consequences to this involvement. When Afghanistan lay in ruins, the US pulled out, washed their hands of death and destruction they had funded, and this left a vacuum for Osama bin Laden to emerge as a power player. I have read from multiple sources that Tom Hanks couldn’t deal with the 9-11 implications, so they were largely written out, with just the identifiable sound of a plane flying over Washington hinting at what was to come. The film is quite good, almost great, but I do wonder if someone else was bringing it to life, could it have maybe been a Dr. Strangelove for a new generation? I guess we’ll never know.

Doctor Strange: IMAX 3D Sneak Peek

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Last night I got to see what amounted to an extended trailer for Doctor Strange, in IMAX 3D. At one time not too long ago, 3D movies were a real draw to me. I remember dragging Jay to several 3D re-releases of movies we’d seen a million times before (but only in boring old 2D). After intensive therapy (mainly arm punches from Jay), I’m mostly over that phase.

Nowadays, I usually see movies without the dopey extra glasses, but after last night’s sneak peek I am convinced that I should see Doctor Strange in 3D, punching be damned. The visuals are trippy enough to live up to Steve Ditko’s acid trip 60s backgrounds, depicting all the crazy dimensions that Doctor Strange passed through on his adventures, and that’s a high bar!

The preview’s centrepiece was an absolutely incredible city chase sequence, with gravity changing constantly, New York City collapsing onto itself, and destruction raining down on all sides as copies of buildings collide with each other. Other scenes included nightmare dimensions full of grabby baby hands, fractal patterns expanding and contracting as Doctor Strange plummets through them, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t even begin to describe.

Marvel has done a great job of translating its characters to the screen while retaining the soul of the comic, particularly for second tier characters (with Iron Man and Guardians of the Galaxy being the best examples). Doctor Strange seems set to follow that same path and with those other movies having paved the way, seems destined to depart at least a bit from the tried and true formula that we have seen way too often.

Whether the movie actually ends up being worthwhile is yet to be determined, but with a stellar cast (including Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Mads Mikkelson), an hour of IMAX-specific footage, the report that Marvel had to adapt the visuals to make the 2D version make sense, and the amazing effects in the preview, IMAX 3D is the clear platform of choice to view Doctor Strange’s adventures when the film opens November 4th.