Author Archives: Jay

Begin Again

A music producer\label owner (Mark Ruffalo) is disillusioned and displaced and drinking himself deeper into depression when he happens upon a waif in a bar (Keira Knightley) who is used to herself and her music taking second place to her cheating-asshole-ex-boyfriend’s (Adam Levine, very fittingly).

Begin Again is Once, with a budget. There are movie stars, and pop stars, and production values. And some artifice. And less heart.

Which is not to say it’s bad. Once is just so good. Sean and I were lucky enough to catch the Broadway musical on stage in NYC and it was incredible and inspiring, an amplification of the movie. We saw it again when it was in Ottawa, at the NAC, with all 4 Assholes in attendance, so safe to say it’s near and dear to our collective heart.

This movie doesn’t really start until about 48 minutes in, which is a long time to not start. And you already don’t trust it because Mark Ruffalo’s had this “epiphany” where he envisions instruments playing themselves to back up Knightley and her lonely guitar. It’s amateurish and should be beneath everyone involved. You could practically see the strings levitating the bows as they “magically” played themselves. Sheesh.

But I admit I kind of adored the whole record-an-album-on-the-fly thing this movie had going, a fuck you to the studio sound, and even better that it was set on the actual streets of New York. Nothing gives life and energy like New York City. Of course, you’re hyper aware, watching the movie, that what you’re seeing and hearing are two different things. Knightley’s character may strive for “authenticity” but you know damn well these songs were recorded in a studio after she had months of voice lessons and that the actors are just lip-synching for the camera, and that the cab horns and kids playing stick ball (did that really happen?) are just sound effects added in. The conceit is obvious, and over-produced, and hard to forgive.

I did love that Mos Def was cast as The Man. Thank you, universe, for that. And Adam Levine sporting a beard that made him look like he wandered in from the set of TLC’s reality show “Breaking Amish” was a nice touch. Plus, the vintage Jag.

This movie profited from my low expectations. I enjoyed it more than I thought it would, and while not nearly as good, it’s at least less soul-crushing than Inside Llewyn Davis, which is the movie I’d rather you watch if you only have the stomach for one.

American Sniper

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The trailer tricked me. The trailer made me want to see this. The trailer made me think, as much as I’m over Clint Eastwood, maybe this one will win me over. Maybe this one will be different.

The first two minutes of the movie is the trailer, only worse. The trailer pares that scene down: sniper Chris Kyle sees a little boy and his mother enter a war zone and is responsible for either killing them, or letting them live, possibly to take out his fellow soldiers. He has only moments to decide. We hear his heart beat and feel the weight of the decision. In the movie? Not so much. It’s noisier, there’s more distracting us, it just doesn’t feel as clean or as pure. And if a movie makes you long for the trailer, it doesn’t exactly bode well for the remaining 2 hours and 11 minutes.

Plus there’s Bradley Cooper and his stupid fat face and his faltering Texan accent. I liked when the movie touched on the moral question, on how this guy, based on a real man (with four tours to Iraq under his belt and 160 confirmed kills), deals with taking lives, sometimes that of women and children. Even if it’s the “right” call, how do you make it feel right? I don’t think Cooper was up to the task of grappling with those emotions, and I really felt their absence. I didn’t feel like the script was up to the emotional depth that I was wanting either. Both felt lacking.

I wasn’t comfortable, am not comfortable, with the strict good guys vs bad guys presented in this movie. A sniper on the other side, doing the exact same job with the exact same weapon, with his own wife and kids at home, is a terrorist, plain and simple, while Chris gets to be the war hero. He’s the guy who’s most homesick when he’s back in America with his wife (Sienna Miller) and his eventual two kids. He’s chomping at the bit to be back in Iraq with his “flock.” His home and his family are overseas. He’s restless unless he’s among men, playing saviour. So it’s hard to believe in the film’s premise, in “Kyle’s sacrifice” because you see pretty clearly that he’s not making much of one. When he’s in the shit, he’s exactly where he wants to be and the only place he really knows how to be. Maybe his family back home is paying the price, but he doesn’t seem to care much about them and neither does the movie; they only exist as emotional fodder.

Cooper’s performance is not without its high points. I’m thinking of a particular scene in the last third of the movie when he’s again confronted with a should I or shouldn’t I scenario. His coughing relief, understated but palpable, is 2 seconds of film that every actor aims for and few ever reach. But a few shining moments strung together by Cooper between a couple of well-shot war scenes just weren’t enough. Too much hero-worship. Too much patriotism-as-religion. Eastwood gives us a pretty meaty tribute but ultimately is too respectful to dig into the reality.

Whiplash

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This movie was on fire. Both Miles Teller and JK Simmons are AMAZING but even the director (Damien Chazelle) was an unseen stand-out, somehow crafting a movie about drumming into an intensely psychotic thriller. The editing is almost violent,infusing the movie and the music with a crazy amount of energy.

Miles Teller plays a kid at an exceptional music conservatory who gets taken under the wing of a teacher (JK Simmons) so exacting that he moulds his students into better musicians, or else. And you’d better believe that threat is real. The kids in his class certainly do. Blood, sweat, and tears are all part of the visceral experience of this film.

I watched this movie wracked with tension, the kind usually reserved for a movie where the villain wields a knife, not a conductor’s baton. JK Simmons is absolutely brilliant, stunning and revolting. Each time he pulls back his hand to halt the band, it’s like he has a super power that sucks the energy out of the room. He’s like a general in front of his army. He’s erect, he’s controlling, he is bubbling rage personified.

But for me, the most fascinating thing about this movie is the way it presents such a cracked view of an abusive relationship. This man is sadistic. He doesn’t throw chairs at people’s heads just to make them play better (although he seems to believe in this motivation), he also does it because he likes. He has power, and he abuses it, and he enjoys abusing it. That’s sick, but it’s also not unusual. What’s really wrenching is that it’s not just Teller buying into it, he’s just one of three guys who are ready to be absolutely destroyed by this man, competing for his abuse, killing themselves to please an unpleasable man. They keep going back for more and it’s just so fucking despicable. And I ate it all up.

Best Line of the Night?

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Golden Globes Winners – 2015

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Best Motion Picture, Drama: Boyhood

Best Original Song: John Legend & Common for Selma

Cecille B. DeMille award: George Clooney

Best Original Score: Johann Johannson for The Theory of Everything

Best Animated Feature Film: How To Train Your Dragon 2

Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Best Screenplay: Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris & Armando Bo for Birdman

Best Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette for Boyhood

Best Foreign Language Film: Leviathan

Best Actor in a Drama: Eddie Redmayne for The Theory of Everything

Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy: Michael Keaton for Birdman

Best Actress in a Drama: Julianne Moore for Still Alice

Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy: Amy Adams for Big Eyes

Best Supporting Actor: JK Simmons for Whiplash

Thank you to everyone who followed (and favorited!) our tweets. We celebrated with the Golden Globes cocktail of choice, the sunset starlet, and plenty of champagne as well as delicious little Thimble Cakes from Cake and Shake. We weren’t always pleased with the results (let us know in the comments what categories surprised\disappointed\delighted you) but it was a great kick-off to awards season and we can’t wait for the Oscars to announce their nominations this Thursday. Stay tuned!

Top Five

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Chris Rock plays a famous comedian who’s looking to trying to break away from his cheesy movie franchise and become a ‘serious actor’ with a film about a Haitian slave rebellion. On the day it opens, the Times sends him a reporter (Rosario Dawson) for an in-depth interview, and the two spend the day together, high-tailing it around New York City, stopping in for radio interviews, shopping for his bachelor party (he’s about to wed a reality starlet, played by Gabrielle Union), and visiting friends and relatives.

The cast is packed with Chris Rock cronies and they add to this semi-autobiographical vibe that permeates the movie and really makes it a thing of beauty. It allows him to do what he does best: he gets to weave his stand-up into the plot, sometimes cracking pretty vulgar, other times surprisingly sweet, riffing on other celebrities and exploring his thoughts on fame.

He challenges the people around him to make lists – the top 5 rappers seems to repeat itself as a kind of test he administers. So now I’m asking you, what’s yours?

A Long Way Down

Still Alice

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I first discovered Lisa Genova through her excellent book, Left Neglected. Wanting to read more of her work, I came upon Still Alice, an earlier work that she actually self-published. She’s got a great handle on neurological disorders but her stories aren’t clinical. They’re very human, and almost too relatable.

Julianne Moore is Alice, a 50-year-old woman with loads on her plate: she and her husband (Alec Baldwin) are both ambitious, workhorse academics. She’s a Columbia professor who travels around giving talks on her research in the field of communication. They have three children, a son still in med school (Hunter Parrish), a daughter newly married and trying to conceive (Kate Bosworth), and a starving-artist daughter trying to make it as an actor (Kristen Stewart). It’s hard to see who’s more lost at sea when Alice is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. There’s pain for everyone as they all come to terms with losing a vibrant, strong woman who’s been a big influence on each of their lives, but of course it’s Alice’s pain we witness the most, even as her disease progresses quite quickly.

It’s hard not to make this review just about Julianne Moore because of course she’s going to make or break this movie, and she’s made it. We see her go from competent, and sharp, and slide into more watered versions, more confused versions of her former self. Her gaze changes as her disease worsens, becoming flatter, disengaged, but it never goes blank. Maybe it would be better if it did; we still see hints of Alice and so feel the chasm between her old and current selves more keenly as she struggles to know herself, remember herself, lose herself.

It’s heartbreaking, but I have to give mad props to directors Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer, who used a heck of a lot of restraint in filming this movie. The subject is pregnant with the potential to be self-pitying and cloying but it never even comes close. I still don’t Geneva’s work here is her best, nor does the script elevate it much, but it earned some tears and some thought and much admiration for a career-high performance.

Ida

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Poland’s submission for best foreign film does feel foreign, and not just because of the subtitles.

Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska) is a young girl who’s lived in an orphanage since the war. Just as she is about to take vows to become a Catholic nun, she discovers she is Jewish, and sets out with her only known living relative, aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), to find out what happened to her parents.

This film is starkly shot in black and white, with the weirdest framing I’ve ever seen. Shots are obscured by door frames. Long, static shots feature two talking heads at the very bottom of the screen while a vast emptiness dominates the rest, reminding me of a certain austerity that I guess is fitting for the 1960s Polish setting, but is jarring nonetheless.A burden on their shoulders?

There is stillness to this movie, and quite a bit of quiet. It’s stark. It’s bleak. And it may also be read as the world’s weirdest road trip movie. I didn’t really pick up on this until a minor character in the film calls them an “odd couple” and I suppose they are. It’s just that their mourning and anger sap any of the fun usually found on the open road.

The Agata who played Wanda was very good. The role itself is very good, meaty, interesting, frustrating. She is Poland, with all the guilt, the betrayal, the hurt, and the redemption that comes with it. She says more with a well-timed puff of her cigarette than with the sparse dialogue. The other Agata is less revealing. Her face is blank, often staring, often empty. It’s hard to know where this character is going, and it’s hard to attach to her. I’m trying not to fault the movie for having made me work so hard just to watch it, but it is a difficult one and I did struggle.

I suppose director Pawel Pawlikowski is asking us what to do with this history, once (re)discovered. I’m just not sure I came away with the answer.