Tag Archives: jake gyllenhaal

Southpaw

Jake Gyllenhaal plays a boxer who hits a very hard bottom. He’s at the top of the game when the film begins, but when his head and his heart aren’t in it, he very quickly loses everything he has. He barely notices losing the cars, blinks lazily as the contents of his home are removed for auction, tries to be philosophical about the foreclosure of his multi-million dollar home, and contributes in the banishment of friends, and it’s only when they take his daughter that he breaks. His daughter is removed by child services from his custody and is sent to live in the very same system that he grew up in, and suddenly he realizes that he has to mobilize to win her back.

He turns to grizzled, reluctant trainer Tick Wills (Forest Whitaker) for help. As a boxer, Billy Hope has spent his life defending punches with is face, but that’s not enough to face down the current competition (who may also be the instrument of his undoing). Tick teaches him a more patient and thoughtful way to fight, which – lo and behold – turns out to be a great metaphor for life too.

I thought Gyllenhaal was fantastic. His performance was all meat and muscle. But the script was limp. Matt and I punched lots of holes into the story while sitting in the parking lot while Sean bought dog food, but it wasn’t just that the writing was too loose, it was also riddled with sports cliché. And we’ve already seen that movie, the boxing match as redemption. Kurt Sutter (of Sons of Anarchy fame) has nothing new to add, and director Antoine Fuqua seems to have a pretty light touch, unless they were literally going for Most Tragedies Inexplicably Overcome.

So while I believed Gyllenhaal, I wasn’t convinced by the script. It keeps pounding us relentlessly with heaps of depressing shit and it’s hard to earn any modicum of triumph after such an onslaught. It’s gritty as fuck but then it chickens out. And just looking at Gyllenhaal, how committed he is to this role, how hard he’s trying, you feel bad that everyone’s let him down and this just never gets to be the movie it maybe could have been. Sean felt that the boxing bits were pretty extraordinary, and it showed how Jake had worked his little buns off to get into such tough fighting shape (although noticeably fought right-handed save for one notable left-handed uppercut, says Sean, who was really irked by that the movie would be called Southpaw, which literally means a left-handed boxer, and then not pay attention to which hand is the dominant fighting hand. I myself did not notice such a thing because I’m sports-deficient).

I think it’s worth a rental just to watch Gyllenhaal, who is definitely on fire and making bold, interesting choices in his career. But the truth is I’d rather watch him any day in creepy Nightcrawler than watch this movie, with its bevy of eye injuries (and you may remember I’m a strict eye-phobe, which means I only watched about 40% of this movie since every time his eye bleeds, my vision goes blurry) and the physical and emotional blunt force trauma that’s just so goddamned brutal to watch.

Workplace Movies

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Thursday Movie Picks, sponsored as ever by Wandering Through the Shelves, is brought to us this week by the letter W – for movies set in the workplace.

Matt

Office gossip can be addictive. Most people wind up spending most of their time talking about work when they spend time with their colleagues outside the office. Actually, three of the Assholes work in the same place and- when we’re not arguing about movies we’re often reminiscing (or ranting) about work. Even people who claim to hate their job tend to find the comedy and drama of any workday pretty interesting. All you need to do is capture that environment in a relatable way and you’ve got a pretty good movie.

The Apartment (1960)- This has been one of my most significant Blind Spots until this week and it was worth the wait. Jack Lemmon plays an accountant at a big firm who’s just trying to get noticed. Once his superiors find out that he has a modest but nice apartment conveniently located on the Upper West Side, he becomes their go-to guy as they start borrowing his key so they can discreetly cheat on their wives. Director Billy Wilder has a lot to say about the compromises people make in the name of ambition and manages to make a movie that is still funny after all these years while he’s saying it. Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine are as charming as can be too.

Office Space (1999)- Turning an animated short into a live action feature-length film could have been a disaster but Beavis and Butt-head creator Mike Judge turned any old boring day into the office into one of the funniest comedies of the 90s. Re-watching it this week, I laughed loudest when Gary Cole’s Bill Lumbergh- in an effort to pacify the troops- announces that Friday will be Hawaiian Shirt Day. Around our office, they charge us two dollars to wear jeans on Friday. I couldn’t help feeling bad for poor old Milton though.

Margin Call (2011)- Yet another movie that I’m thankful to Wanderer for giving me an excuse to finally check out this week. Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, Jeremy Irons, and Kevin Spacey (making my list two weeks in a row) play investment bankers who see the writing on the wall leading up to the 2008 Financial crisis and sit around wondering what to do about it. Director J. C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year) knows how to set the mood and the performances are all stellar.

Jay

Up In The Air – Poor Ryan Bingham is so afraid of real life that he’s made sure his job keeps him in constant motion. His office may be at a cruising altitude of 32 000 feet but he spends a lot of time visiting other people’s workplaces to tell them they’re no longer employed. This is such a tough job that cash-strapped businesses are still willing to pay big bucks during a recession for him to do it in their place. He sees offices at their very worst, smells the fear and senses the instability, and is the receptacle for sometimes 20 years’ worth of pain and frustration. Our identities can be so wrapped up in our work, and in many ways, Ryan (George Clooney) is the prime example of this. Director Jason Reitman bravely tackles those creeping workplace notions of downsizing and obsolescence and asks some tough questions of the aging American workforce.

The Social Network – I love how you see the growth of the company here, the “offices” originally in a Harvard dorm room, and then graduating quite quickly to the impressive work space that was eventually needed. The movie recounts a very modern invention (hello, Facebook) but its workplace themes are as old as the first profession – loyalty, jealousy, theft, power, the complicated ownership of ideas. Whether friends or enemies, friended or unfriended, colleagues or competition, this project is always work, and everybody wants to get paid.

Brokeback Mountain – The classic office romance. They meet by the photocopier, lock eyes over the on, thwater cooler, exchange business cards in the elevator…or, you know, not. Don’t you wish your office looked like this? The scenery is breathtaking but make no mistake: these two cowboys meet at work, doing a job that’s not altogether welcoming to “their kind.” When their boss gets an inkling of what’s going on, the work dries up and the two spend the rest of their lives stealing secret moments and steeling themselves with memories of the best job they ever had.

Bonus pick: Monsters, Inc. Sully and Mike are about as close as two colleagues can be. Mike is the more ambitious of the two, but it’s Sully’s talent and skill that make them so successful. The workplace is originally competitive, and tinged with the fear of contamination (they do bio-hazardous work with children). It may be a cartoon about fuzzy monsters, but any joke about paperwork in triplicate is likely to land huge with adult audiences.

Sean:

Since Matt took Office Space and Jay took Up in the Air, I am sticking to familiar territory and making my section an all-lawyer-movie workplace bonanza!

Philadelphia – a great movie about a lawyer getting kicked out of his workplace, and then going to his other workplace, the court, to try to make things right. Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington absolutely own this movie. I actually did not see this until last year and I should have seen it way sooner, because it’s excellent.

A Few Good Men – I saw this in theatres, I owned it on VHS, I own it on DVD, and one of my roommates in university recited the “You can’t handle the truth!” speech every time he had more than three drinks. And I could watch it again tomorrow. There are so many good lines and so many good characters in here that it remains enjoyable to this day. And again there are a few workplaces in here, namely the courts and the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

The Firm – Tom Cruise is probably the best lawyer ever, at least if you go by his on-screen performances. He almost got Dawson and Downey freed and in the Firm he somehow outmaneuvers a whole team of crooked lawyers and the mob while still adhering to his strict ethical code. Plus he does a lot of really fast running in the Firm which is always the best part of any Tom Cruise performance. This movie feels really long, because it is, but it’s still a good watch.

Anyone had an office love? Office hook up? Office BFFs?

Accidental Love

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Fellow movie buff Dan over at Dan the Man’s Movie Reviews wrote a tepid (at best) piece about a film he’d watched recently called Accidental Love.

Dan didn’t much care for it, and I respect his opinion, but felt compelled to see it anyway. Isn’t it funny how we do that? I wrote a review on a terrible movie called Freeway, but because it’s Reese Witherspoon doing the terrible, that review managed to garner someone else into watching it. So, that being said, I knew because Dan told me, that this would be a bad movie, and it was. But I still watched it, and here’s why:

a) David O. Russell directed it. Now, if you know me, you may realize that this is not normally a selling point for me. Silver Linings Playbook did nothing for me; American Hustle did even less. But I did love The Fighter and I hearted I Heart Huckabees. But sometimes even David O. Russell hates David O. Russell movies, such is the case with Accidental Love. This movie has been collecting dust on the shelves since 2008. Russell removed himself from the project in 2010. Somebody has just decided to release it, so it bears the “director is embarrassed” pseudonym Stephen Greene. Russell normally excels at satire. It’s the heart of Huckabees. So I imagine he saw the potential for a hell of a political satire in the script, but let me assure you, it never pops in this movie. It never works, not even for a second.

b) The cast. Jessica Biel doesn’t have any bank with me, but James Marsden does, and so does Jake Gyllenhaal after his brilliant turn in Nightcrawler. I most possibly most impressed with Catherine Keener, whom I love but seems to be typecast as these blowsy, hippie types, but gets to play a conservative astronaut-turned-congresswoman complete with bucket hair and power suits in this one and does a really, really good job. But then the cast had to walk out on filming because the producers failed to show they had enough money to actually pay them, and even worse, pay the below-the-line crew members.

c) The satire. It’s easy enough to poke fun at the health care system in America; it pretty much lampoons itself. Why then does the whole thing fail to gel? If principal photography was never really completed, you can understand why a movie might not meet its potential. But they’ve cobbled together a beginning, a middle, and an end, and at no point does it feel like you’re watching something smart or funny or worthy. This movie may have been plagued with production difficulty, but it was also plagued with pure suckage. If Kirstie Alley lands more laughs than Tracey Morgan, ABORT! Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. And do not stick in Peewee Herman as straight man just to see if anyone notices. Kristin Gore is credited for her screenplay – as in, daughter of Tipper and Al, a family not known for their comedic stylings, but alas, she has written for Futurama and she’s got politics in her blood, so how can we forgive her for so completely missing the boat?

So, Dan was right, as we knew all along he would be. But sometimes you have to roll around in the slop just to enjoy the bath afterward. Amiright?

NightCrawler

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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom shows that you don’t have to be a journalist or a photographer to make it in the news business, you just have to have a nose for blood and a really strong stomach. In fact, tracking down the goriest, most gruesome deaths and crimes (especially those committed in rich neighbourhoods and against white people) seems a perfect fit for an enterprising but morally vacant soul such as Bloom, and thanks to a partnership with ratings-whore Nina (Rene Russo), he’s encouraged not only to continue, but to blur the line between finding and creating mayhem to “report.”

Gyllenhaal is gaunt, like a hungry animal prowling the night, his unblinking stare reminding me of Donnie Darko’s. He gives an increasingly chilling performance, cold but needy. You can never quite get a handle on just how intelligent this guy is. He studies the internet voraciously and comes off sounding like a wikipedia page, but the one thing you can’t learn online is feelings, and those are in short supply. Watching footage of a brutally murdered family, Lou has a self-satisfied smirk on his face, and Nina is practically salivating. These are not good people. There isn’t even a question of privacy, or of going too far. There is no too far.

Lou is pretty much irredeemable, as far as I can tell, unlike any other character I’ve seen on screen this year. It will give you the willies. First-time director Dan Gilroy will have you watching this movie with dread; with no ethics or scruples, anything can and may happen. Lou’s a dirty scavenger at best, and an unapologetic predator at what he would consider his best. Morality doesn’t factor in, which makes for a fascinating if disturbing character study of a man, who as near as I can tell, is void of any character to study.